Favorite Albums of 2005

Plenty of great music blogs do terrific Year-End wrap up features that I always enjoy pouring over. It's a great way to find out about music from the year that I missed, because I don't really check in with music websites every day, so stuff is always getting past me.

For example, I had never heard the Sun Kil Moon album Tiny Cities, made up entirely of Modest Mouse covers. It's really terrific. Who knows? If I had heard it a few months earlier...might have made it on to the 2005 Best-of List.

So, anyway, before I let you know my favorite music of the year, allow me to heartily recommend a few great and far more informative mp3-oriented blogs. They have been invaluable all year as resources for new and overlooked music.

Gorilla Vs. Bear
My Old Kentucky Blog
Stereogum
Fluxblog

Okay, on to the list.

10. Beck, Guero

While I really like Guero as a collection of songs, I'm not sure I like what it seems to indicate about Beck's career, or even his state of mind. For the first time in his career, he's back-sliding. Guero reteams Beck with his Odelay collaborators The Dust Brothers and together they produce an album that's clearly designed to recall that classic 90's album. This stuff still sounds great - I mean, Odelay is fondly remembered for a reason. But even some of the highlights - the bouncy-sounding but morbid "Girl" or "Go It Alone" - feel stagnant, like Beck fiddling around with his old sound instead of blazing new trails as he did in Sea Change or the criminally underrated Midnite Vultures.

BEST TRACK: "Girl"

9. Dangerdoom, The Mouse and the Mask

Last year, MF Doom's collaboration with producer Madlib, Madvillainy, claimed the #5 spot on my Best of the Year List. This year, ol' Metal Fingers is back, this time bringing Grey Album mastermind DJ Danger Mouse along for the ride. Once again, Doom's rhymes are nothing short of brilliant, easily among the most amusingly smart on any hip hop album I heard this year. Oh, and did I mention that the entire album has a cartoon-theme, features the voices of beloved Cartoon Newtork "Adult Swim" characters like Space Ghost, Master Shake, Brak and Harvey Birdman, AND features a sly reference to Homestar Runner?

BEST TRACK: "Space Ho's"

8. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah


One of a crop of recent bands that sound a lot like The Talking Heads (along with Canadian mad geniuses The Arcade Fire), Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (CYHSY for short) produced one of the year's most disarming, strange, funny and catchy albums. After an opening calliope jam (seriously...), the band gets right down to business, blazing through 10 guitar rock anthems. An assured, extremely consistant debut album.


BEST TRACK: "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth"


7. Bloc Party, Silent Alarm

But as all-around impressive a splash as CYHSY made in 2005, the year's real discovery was this Brit-rock outfit. Silent Alarm manages to cop a lot of 80's new wave British rock kind of sounds and yet produce an album that sounds exciting and fresh. And it doesn't just stand up to repeat listens - hooky wonders like "Like Eating Glass" and "Helicopter" (the album's first two tracks) demand multiple plays.

BEST TRACK: "Banquet"

6. The Eels, Blinking Lights and Other Phenomenon

Mr. E's latest is a beast - a 2 disc, nearly 2-hour opus with the type of extended motifs and character development generally reserved for novellas. It's also easily The Eels' most engaging, ambitious and earnest collection of songs to date. These are songs that range in style and tone from exuberant radio-friendly pop ("Sweet Lil' Thing") to Lennon-esque sour-tongued ballads ("I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart") to straight-forward, head-bobbing indie rock ("Old Shit/New Shit"). Sure, there are some songs that sound like the old Eels, but gone is the tongue-in-cheek gallows humor of Electro-Shock Blues and the numbed pretension of Souljacker in favor of more direct emotion, more subtle lyricism and more buoyant, heartfelt music.

BEST TRACKS: "Suicide Life" from Disc 1, "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" from Disc 2

5. Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene

When I heard this album initially, I liked it. But it was only after seeing BSS live at the Henry Fonda Theater that I realized what phenomenal, lush and rewarding songs the Canadian supergroup had really come up with. I think there's just so much going on in the production - so many dynamic layers of sound - it's just hard to make out the songs when you first hear them. But after a few listens, everything becomes more organized, and The Scene's inspired follow-up to their breakout hit You Forgot It In People starts to make sense.

BEST TRACK: "Windsurfing Nation," which features a cameo from Feist, whose 2005 song "Mushaboom" has received a lot of play in my mp3 player this week.

4. Decemberists, Picaresque

The Decemberists remind me of the early Coen Brothers, back in the Blood Simple-Raising Arizona-Miller's Crossing days. Relative newcomers who work a lot, releasing a ton of quirky and innovative material of uniformly outstanding quality. And like the Coen Brothers, singer/songwriter Colin Meloy has a fondness for historical detail and baroque, theatrical flourishes. The Decemberists' third proper LP continues their trend of composing multi-instrumental historical rock narratives. Sea Chanties about vengeful privateers ("The Mariner's Revenge Song"), romantic ballads about spies ("The Bagman's Gambit"), indie pop about gay hustlers ("At the Bus Mall") and memories of humiliation on the ball field ("The Sporting Life"). There are, however, some movements towards making the band's sound more contemporary and personal. Meloy's vocals have never been more wrenching or honest than on "The Engine Driver," and the closing ballad "Of Angels and Angles" is as simple as it is haunting. Some find Meloy's nasally vocals irritating, but I think he's got one of the most expressive, eccentric voices in contemporary music, and one of the greatest gifts as a lyricist.

BEST TRACK: "The Engine Driver"

3. Spoon, Gimme Fiction

This Spoon album is so good, it forced me to re-evaluate my opinion on the entire band Spoon. My roommate Nathan has been a fervent supporter of theirs for a while now, and though I had enjoyed the album Kill the Moonlight to a certain extend (particularly the single "Jonathan Fisk"), it had never really grabbed me, nor had it inspired me to obtain more Spoon albums. But Gimme Fiction has an immediacy that I hadn't heard in Spoon's music before. I have since seen them live, and re-listened to Girls Can Tell, A Series of Sneaks and Kill the Moonlight extensively, and I have come to realize that Spoon is just an exceptionally talented band, the solid indie rock songwriting and fluid vocals of Britt Daniel backed by one of the tightest drummers in rock, Jim Eno. Having said all that, I still think Gimme Fiction is their best album. The first three songs on here are an unstoppable powerhouse of rockitude. My favorite section of any album all year. There are a few off moments here or there, but you barely even recall the off patches...you remember the highlights.

BEST TRACK: "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine"

2. New Pornographers, Twin Cinemas

A few years ago, The New Pornos released their gob-smackingly brilliant power-pop debut, Mass Romantic. It's an album that was so infectious, some have theorized the CIA released it into the white community to keep us docile and controllable. They followed it up with The Electric Version, a so-so collection of songs with a few stand-out tracks that sounded like a B-level retread of Mass Romantic. A sophomore slump, I hoped, that would be redeemed by album #3. And when I first heard Twin Cinemas...I thought The New Pornographers were over. I can admit it...My first impression was completely and totally idiotic and wrong.

It's just that this is the biggest, most ambitious music these guys have ever made by far. I was straining to hear fun little 3-minute pop songs, and was missing the expansive rock epic right in front of me. The new songs are still fun and catchy, but they're also occasionally dissonant, they're more resonant, they're a little louder and messier. These are the best songs primary Carl Newman has yet written, sometime songwriter Dan Bejar also contributes the best song he's ever written for the group ("Jackie Dressed in Cobras") and the whole band (particularly vocalist Neko Case) has never sounded better.

BEST TRACK: "Sing Me Spanish Techno"

1. Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine (Bootleg version)

It sucks that the Best Album of 2005 has to have a weird little notation like that. If you don't know the whole story, here's the short short short version...Fiona and producer Jon Brion turned in this version of the album, the one I'm calling Album of the Year, to the record company, which didn't feel like releasing it in that form. So they brought in a new producer who remade a lot of the tracks, accentuating the vocals, getting rid of some of Brion's more obvious flourishes and adding in some back-up vocals.

It's not that I think the final, released version of the album is bad. If it had been the only version I had heard, it surely would have still made the Top 10. Probably the Top 5. Because there aren't a lot of Fiona Apple albums (this is only the third one ever), and they are always good, because she's a talented singer and songwriter.

But the Jon Brion version was something more than just a good collection of sharp, powerful rock songs, well-sung. It was the most far-reaching, baroque, experimental pop masterpiece I have heard in a long time. Stacatto bursts of sound enhanced the rumble in Apple's voice and strings bounced around the edges of the tracks adding tension and energy. The finished, retouched version trades in a lot of this vitality and spontaneity in favor of Apple's more familiar style.

Both albums feature similar playlists of great new songs and are worthy of a listen. But the unreleased versions are, to my mind, far superior and just plain old more interesting, and if you have a favorite Peer-to-Peer file sharing program, it should not be terribly difficult to find there.

BEST TRACK: "Oh Sailor"

And Now, 10 Honorable Mentions

Paul McCartney, Chaos and Creation in the Garden
The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
Louis XIV, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept
Broadcast, Tender Buttons
British Sea Power, Open Season
Gorillaz, Demon Days
Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better
Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die
Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
The Pernice Brothers, Discover a Lovelier You

And Now, The Best Band Name of the Year

Let's Get Out of This Terrible Sandwich Shop