Wow .. OK, so this is WAY overdue. I’m usually pretty good and get this sucker posted at least during my xmas / New Year’s break. I slacked this year – I don’t even
have a good excuse. But I figured, if there was a good day on which to post it
late, the very last day of January would be it.

Anyhow, no need for a long-winded pre-amble. Here’s the list. Please share yours as well!

Sean’s Top 10 Albums of 2008

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

What can I write about these guys that the pros haven’t written already?  This album made just about every critic’s top spot – or at least their top 10. And everything I love about it – the pristine vocal harmonies, the organic instrumentation, the way they draw from folk, country and (for lack of a better word) hippie aesthetics without totally
succumbing to jam band foolishness or sounding like the soundtrack to some baby
boomer’s extended granola freakout  -- is everything I love about it. I think what hit me most though (besides just the sheer, unimpeachable quality of the songwriting and arrangements) was the way they proved that a band can be totally sincere without going Emo or concocting something totally overwrought.

2. The Walkmen - Me & You

Not the critical darling, but definitely my personal favorite record of the year. I didn’t stick it at #1 because it won’t have the same pop culture legs that the Fleet Foxes record will, but nine times out of ten, I’m more in the mood to listen to this than to that.

While The Walkmen have crafted some of the best single rock songs of the ‘00s (check: The Rat, Little House of Savages, We’ve Been Had, ....Louisiana....), it wasn’t until You & Me that the New York-based group turned out an album that was solid from beginning to end. Frontman Hamilton Leithhauser has finally found his voice’s sweet spot, somewhere between whisky-soaked hipster bar croon and emotionally shredded wail, while the rest of the band has turned down the treble a bit to mute the abrasiveness of their instrumentation and add some more refined textures. These guys were once jagged sheet metal and sligshots; now they’re all polished mahogany and well-worn leather couches. To accomplish that transition without sacrificing an ounce of artistic integrity is a staggering feat.

The result: a polished richness emerges from the band’s minimalist arrangements, giving Leithuaser’s vocals a solid emotional punch. A romantic, celebratory record that still belongs in dimly lit bar jukeboxes, this was one for the ages. And “In The New Year” became my personal Obama anthem. We won by a landslide, indeed.

3. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

The most overplayed indie rock record of the year was, almost impossibly, one of the best. And whooda thunk it? I mean, this is a concept record about a vampire named Walcott summering on Cape Cod. It's built primarily around Afrobeat instrumentation and rhythms, but crafted by a bunch of well-heeled Ivy Leaguers. The term “cultural tourism” was just about invented to describe Vampire Weekend. Somehow, though, it works – probably because the songs are just plain great.

More than that, though - credit is due to the band’s refusal to apologize for its approach. They simply go for it, playing those bouncy Soweto beats balls out in cable knit sweaters and boat shoes. No dissertations on Femi Kuti or the legitimacy of appropriation in a post-post-post modern era … just a shrug and a, “But what about those dudes?” finger pointed at Peter Gabriel and David Byrne.

Also, an emerging theme: much like the Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend recorded big chunks of this album on home equipment. Think about it: two of the year’s best
records, by anyone’s account, made by guys laying down tracks in their living rooms, making music they love with their friends.

4. Black Keys - Attack & Release

Not just an awesome rock / soul / blues album, but a great story here to boot: raw bluesy duo based in one of America’s failing rust belt cities (Akron, OH) teams up with wunderkind producer (Dangermouse) to write music for an Ike Turner comeback record. Legendary rocker / spouse abuser dies during the process … so the Keys & the Mouse shift gears and make the record anyway. In that sense, dying may be the third greatest thing Turner ever did for music (right after "Rocket 88" and, in his own Paleolithic way, introducing the world to Tina Turner).  This is what blues in the 00s should sound like: forceful, raw, not afraid to boogey, not afraid to wail in distress.

5. Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

With his latest album, Trent Reznor definitely proves that he’s at his best when he’s at his broadest, playing to the cheap seats and not the purists. He has honed his ability to create pop hooks behind piercing, industrial / rock arrangements into a lethal weapon, amply demonstrated by tracks like “Demon Seed” and “Echoplex,” some of the most compelling and accessible songs in his catalog.  Combine that with his newfound tendency to work leaner and meaner (less studio labor, more focus on writing what his incredibly tight live band can reproduce on stage) and you’ve got a recipe for a killer record – which The Slip is. It may actually be his finest work since his defining artistic statement, The Downward Spiral, with one crucial difference: you can actually listen to this one over and over and over again without feeling the weight of a decadent culture in decline pressing down on you.

Of course, the quality of the record was – much like Radiohead’s In Rainbows – lost in the story surrounding the manner of its release. Reznor gave this one away, for free, as a high quality digital download from the NIN website. You can still get it free, in fact, despite the fact that he’s since released it on CD (with an accompanying DVD of the band playing the songs live), and racked up solid physical sales.  Reznor even released the music under a Creative Commons license – unheard of for a major act like NIN – giving fans the right to share, remix and tinker with the songs at will, provided they don’t profit from the work.

Without a label backing him up – or chaining him down, Reznor is free to continue experimenting like this, and shows every indication of doing so. As long as the music is as good as the stuff on The Slip, I’m pretty sure the outcome will always be success.

6. Santogold – Santogold

In 2008, Santi White actually delivered on the promise that her peer M.I.A. made, but
couldn’t, ultimately fulfill. Working with Diplo, the same DJ who helped create M.I.A.’s sonic palate, Santogold delivered a record of songs that obscured (but did not jettison) the agitprop sentiments, and pumped up the quotient of urban pop and hip-hop from both her native Philly and adopted Brooklyn. Results? You’re going to listen to Santi’s “L.E.S. Artistes” and “Lights Out” waaaaaaayyyyy more frequently than M.I.A.’s “Bird Flu” or “Boyz.”

Really, though, the effect of this record is not to diminish M.I.A. – with whose raw power we’re all still reckoning -- but to move White (who backed up the former on her first record) into her own spotlight. A clumsy analogy? Santogold is the Sinn Fein to M.I.A.’s I.R.A.

That said, listen to Santi White’s recordings on their own merits. If the aforementioned tracks don’t move you, surely fist pumpers like “Shove It” and “Unstoppable” will. Then, by all means, catch her live – she is a polished and commanding presence on stage. And you’ll be hunting down your own purple and gold track suits as soon as you fall under her spell.

7. Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement

First off: best album cover of 2008.

In some senses, the LSP is a rock cliché – the leftfield side project from a band member whose group struggling to expand its repertoire before it wears out its overenthusiastic welcome (the UK music press heaps adulation on newbs almost as quickly as it relegates them to pop’s dustbin).  Sure. OK. But should the Arctic Monkeys never make another record, Alex Turner could devote himself to this band full time and not miss a beat.

The Age of the Understatement plays like so many rich full-length fantasies: a purely aural Bond movie; a lost memoir from swinging London in the 60s; the soundtrack to a long and decadent affair, sultry and, ultimately, heart-shredding. It feels almost wrong to listen to this album without a martini and a cigarette close by. Big strings, pulsing spaghetti Western rhythms, lavishly described vignettes, and unrestrained Sheffield accents, totally essential.

In 30 years, when your kids are pilfering your music collection, this will be the thing that makes them suspect that, at one point in your life, you were a debonair motherfucker.

8. My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges

With each successive album, MMJ pushes out further from the jam band / alt.country pigeonhole into which critics and fans seem resigned to place them. Evil Urges finds them in deep space, figuratively.  Some key elements are still in place to prove
that the foundation remains solid: Jim James’s sweet, soulful howl; devastating guitar work; expert songwriting.  What’s new: James pushes a Prince fetish front and center on songs like “Highly Suspicious” and the title track, and envelopes tracks like “Smokin’ From Shootin’” and “Touch My I’m Going To Scream Pt. 2” in blankets of deceptively simple atmospherics (who knew an Ominchord could be so friggin’ heavy).

All of this would sound like a mere exercise in critic dodging if the band didn’t deliver the goods on every track, making even their wildest stylistic experiments sound totally authentic and heartfelt. It all sounds a little offputting at first – but you can’t escape these songs. Like the best albums, Evil Urges pulls you back again and again, nudging you to listen a little deeper. 

The victory here, then: this ends up not being a great My Morning Jacket record; it ends up being a great record period. 

9. TV on the Radio - Dear Science

Another NYC band that realized that abrasiveness does not always equate to authenticity, TVOTR dropped some of the tactics it once used to deliberately turn would-be fans away and took another tack: reaching out. And really, that wasn’t such a tough move. It mostly just meant less nasally whining vocals and slightly more conventional time signatures / tempos – so, more “Wolf Like Me,” (which rocked) less “I Was a Lover” (which couldn’t get out of its own damn way).  Throw in some guest
spots from the Anitbalas horn section and wam-bam, you’ve got the best record of your short career.

And here too we have the defining document of those last few months of pre-Obama American distress: the hopeful longing for better times in “Halfway Home;” the fear, in “DLZ,” that those times might never come; the submission to the carnal here and now on “Lover’s Day.”

You can almost feel the band refreshing fivethirtyeight.com and obsessing over polling
results, in between worrying about the detonation of the financial markets (surely more than backdrop, given the band’s physical, if not psychic, proximity to Wall Street) and fretting about newfound successes (personal, professional) in a world that, daily, seems to crumble beneath everyone’s feet. How does one express happiness even as the term is being redefined for at least a generation?  Apparently, one listens to Dear Science.  

10. The Duke Spirit – Neptune 

There is nothing historically significant about The Duke Spirit. They’re really just a solid bluesy British alt.rock band whose singer boasts a killer set of pipes and a slightly unconventional voice.

Still … on Neptune, The Duke Spirit does its job better than any of its peers. Every seemingly straightforward song has a booster, whether it's the taffy-like guitar textures, the reference points in Motown hits (there’s a shit ton of Funk Brother adulation here) and Phil Spector girl groups, or just Liela Moss’s dusty vocal delivery, that elevates it above the expected or the merely competent. Hopeful songs in minor keys, a female singer who can exude confidence without lazily leaning on crassness, a work ethic that manifests itself in endless touring and brutal live chops … there’s a lot to admire about The Duke Spirit. Also: “The Step and the Walk” is an instant classic.

So yeah ... I realize I haven't blogged in several months, and I STILL owe everyone recaps on the wedding and the honeymoon. I'll get to 'em, I promise. In the meantime, this was too good not to post. Maybe you've seen it referenced a million times already ... but if not, take a minute to watch ... then share.