We at Pitchfork close out the year with our annual review of the year's 50 best albums. A few notes: Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago -- issued in 2008 on Jagjaguwar to well-deserved acclaim-- would have likely placed high on our list, but the self-released version of the record appeared in our 2007 edition. Also, three years after Robyn's self-titled-- and at the time self-released-- album made our year-end countdown it finally got a U.S. release this year. Both of those records were deemed ineligible this time around. Our staffers' individual top 25s can be found here.
Enjoy the holiday season! Daily news, reviews, and features resume Monday, January 5, 2009.
50: Ponytail
Ice Cream Spiritual
[WeAreFree]
From the fist few seconds of "Beg Waves", the opening track on the sophomore album from Baltimore spazz-rockers Ponytail, you know something's up: You can feel the song gathering itself together-- the guitars rev and the drums roll and vocalist Molly Siegel clears her throat-- and there's a sense that an enormous amount of energy is about to be unleashed. The record that follows delivers on this early promise, as Ponytail combine surf guitar riffs, shredding harmonized leads, gitty-up rhythms, and the one-of-a-kind Siegel howling above it all, her "lyrics" seemingly written using a strange alphabet that consists only of exclamation points. The weird thing is how inclusive and welcoming it all sounds, as you find yourself wishing you could be sweating and screeching and thrashing in the studio along with them. --David Bevan
49: Crystal Stilts
Alight of Night
[Slumberland]
These Brooklynites highlight the difference between being derivative and having good taste. With record collections clearly crammed with Phil Spector-produced singles, Jesus and Mary Chain albums, Black Tambourine rarities, Velvet Underground boxed sets, and every version of Unknown Pleasures ever released, Crystal Stilts synthesize a sound that owes obvious debts but works on its own terms. It's not all doom and gloom, either: Despite all the ghostly reverb, there are bouncy melodies lurking amidst the murk, as shimmering tambourines, hints of surf guitar, and Wall of Sound orchestrations provide hints of innocence and levity. Sure, their band is hard to keep straight thanks to the current onslaught of similarly titled groups (in 2008, "crystal" was the new "wolf"). But with tracks as good as "Prismatic Room" and "Shattered Shine", Crystal Stilts is a name worth remembering. --Rebecca Raber
48: High Places
High Places
[Thrill Jockey]
On their self-titled debut, High Places subtly combine the more abstract meanderings of their earlier recordings with a more song-oriented approach. The interplay between vocalist Mary Pearson's endearingly metallic-toned melodies and Rob Barber's lush percussive collages is somewhere between minimal dance music-- particularly on "Gold Coin" and "A Field Guide"-- and shadowy meditations on ambient music. Despite the duo's ambitious blending of genres, the colorful, charismatic High Places remains unique and focused, naturally absorbing a rich array of influences and ultimately thriving on the impulses behind them. --Mia Clarke
47: The Tallest Man on Earth
Shallow Grave
[Gravitation]
We still don't know a whole lot about the Tallest Man on Earth, just a few bullet points from his résumé: Name: Kristian Matsson. Home: Sweden. Experience: former frontman for some band called the Montezumas. Releases: a strange, superb EP in 2006 and this year's full-length debut, Shallow Grave. The latter is a bewitching collection of Spartan folk songs that drew comparisons to Bob Dylan but sound more like Dock Boggs. Tallest Man's unforthcoming nature bolsters his out-of-time music, which sounds like it could have been recorded at any time in the past 40 years. If his standoffishness preserves the mystery, then his ragged croak and fingerpicking style lend gravity to his dreamlike imagery ("I'm gonna force the Serengeti to disappear inside my eyes") and his thoughts about death and the oblivion that follow. --Stephen M. Deusner
46: Beach House
Devotion
[Carpark]
Beach House's self-titled debut got a long way on decayed atmosphere-- drum machines sounded like dot-matrix printers, organs bled out into the tracks like slit writs into bathwater. On Devotion, they sweep away a lot of the cobwebs, and the crisper production spotlights Victoria Legrand's husky croon and clears a path into the album's thematic depths: Beach House was simply lovelorn, Devotion is, as its title hints, a sharp study of dedication. "Your wish is my command," Legrand moans on "Wedding Bell"-- there's a thin line between loving commitment and unhealthy addiction, which she repeatedly crosses. On "All the Years", Legrand provides a subtler image-- she's sitting on a rock, waiting for a key. We get the sense she'll be waiting for a long time. --Brian Howe
45: Lykke Li
Youth Novels
[LL/Atlantic]
Ask her if she's in love, ask her about the last time she cried, and Lykke Li will answer you honestly. But it's hard to know who she is on Youth Novels, because every song is about closed hearts and open legs; about crying over someone yet enjoying having someone to cry over; being a little bit in love, but too shy shy shy to say anything. Lykke Li is confident in herself, but still a bit unsure of exactly who she is-- which is to say, she's like a lot of young adults. Unlike a lot of young adults, however, Li expertly uses melodies, desires, and just a few drum beats to try and express what she's feeling, and she invites us to follow along as she sorts through it all. --Jessica Suarez
__44: Marnie Stern
*This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It a**nd That Is That
- [Kill Rock Stars]__
Marnie Stern's biography is crucial to her music, because it so thoroughly threads through her discography: Self-taught, she was moved by hearing something transcendent and powerful in music that she worked for years to try to do it better. Her method: wrenching thousands of gleaming, screaming moments from her guitar and constructing radiant towers of sound from them. But the key to getting This is It… is not to focus on the virtuosic playing, but to back up a bit and let the sound-- and Stern's high-school pep-rally vocals-- shove you into the ring against your will, and pummel you. You'll come out bruised, but stronger for it. --Eric Harvey
__43: Shearwater
Rook
[Matador]
__
In a better world, the epic-yearning Rook is as big as Coldplay's latest and Jonathan Meiberg-- choirboy-faced, angel-voiced Austin ornithologist-- is a rock star; the reality, however, is that Shearwater are still struggling to escape the shadow of former member Will Sheff and his band Okkervil River. While Sheff is rooted in folk, Meiberg's straddles the uneasy ground between experimental noise and hazy AM radio. In the end, pop hooks, overemoted sentiments, and intricate arrangements usually triumph, though-- especially when "South Col"'s brief feedback yields to the shimmer and swell of album centerpiece "The Snow Leopard". --Amy Granzin
__42: Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Lie Down in the Light
[Drag City]
__
Consistency might be an admirable-- even enviable-- habit, but it doesn't always generate a ton of chatter. On Lie Down in the Light, Will Oldham continued his underappreciated, two-decade tenure as the patron saint of indie-folk, but few people seemed to recognize that this was one of his finest records. A little bit perverted ("So Everyone" is awfully fun to sing, mooney-eyed, to your intended, until you realize it's a plea for public fellatio), a little bit country (an ensemble of Nashville session players shuffle though), and a little bit unexpected (see the odd squall of woodwinds on "Other's Gain", or the clarinet in "For Every Field There's a Mole"), Lie Down in the Light is a collection of deeply felt and deeply sung love songs. --Amanda Petrusich
__41: David Byrne and Brian Eno
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
[self-released]
__
David Byrne has spent most of his career banging against the clear but impermeable window that separates him from normalcy; Brian Eno's spent his setting up barriers between himself (and his collaborators) and received ideas. Unsurprisingly, they make great collaborators, and their first pairing in a quarter-century is as different from their earlier ones as, say, More Songs About Buildings and Food is from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The organizing principle, they've both noted, was to make something like a secular gospel record-- simple and devotional-- which they did, more or less, although their innate weirdness became part of its landscape too. (Byrne's idea of a heartwarming homily is "Home will infect whatever you do.") If Everything That Happens mostly lacks the stylish, vernacular musicianship of their best records, it's got some of the best songwriting from Byrne in a long time, partly because of the strictures Eno's placed on him, and partly because of the intimations of mortality that turn up all over the album-- it's smarter about the passage of time than anything he's written since "Once in a Lifetime". --Douglas Wolk
40: The Very Best
__ * Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit are t*he Very Best
[Ghettopop/Green Owl]__
We live in a world where poor countries export tons of food to wealthy countries, who then send tons of food back to poor countries via relief efforts. Despite such absurdities, Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and European production team Radioclit highlight the upside of globalization. They probably intended their collaborative moniker as an artistic boast, but it has a dual meaning-- this optimistic mixtape represents international culture at its very best. Its pan-global hodgepodge integrates musical products of Africa, France, England, the United States, and points outlying without a trace of tourism. So the album is emblematic of a trend, that as we collectively learn to regard ourselves as global citizens, the stigma of cultural appropriation becomes increasingly obsolete. But none of that would matter if the music wasn't so strong. Mwamwaya's ebullient singing is a triumph in its own right, and The Very Best's tacit hope for global society-- that its interconnectivity can triumph over its fractures-- is icing on the cake. --Brian Howe
39: Times New Viking
Rip It Off
[Matador]
Times New Viking make noise-pop but Rip It Off never forgets the "pop" side of the equation. It has some of the group's sweetest songs ("Drop-Out", "Another Day") next to some of its biggest riffs ("Teen Drama", "Relevant: Now") and most indelible choruses ("My Head", "The Wait"). The unconverted may regard the record's caustic EQ levels as a challenge, but plenty of others can hear where they're cribbing from and the love with which they soil the source material. In the end, Rip It Off isn't as hard to enjoy as some (this writer included) have made it out to be: "Faces on Fire" should have been the soundtrack to more people's summers, and if you hear Beth Murphy singing "let's do something that hasn't been done yet," and read it cynically, that may not be the band's fault. --Jason Crock
38: The Bug
London Zoo
[Ninja Tune]
While Burial captured imaginations with his sparse, mysterious, and isolation-evoking Untrue last year, this year the best dubstep tended to swing the pendulum back towards the immense, the dense, and the sometimes confrontational. Few albums personified this shift as boldly as Kevin Martin's third album as the Bug. Here he took two of the best dubstep singles of 2007-- "Poison Dart" and "Skeng"-- and surrounded them with a front-to-back tour de force of dub bass. Martin never met a bassline he couldn't turn into a subwoofer-annihilating force of nature, but his beats are put together with such meticulous detail that nothing truly gets suffocated, and the moments when the rhythm pauses to let that force dissipate are all the more breathtaking for it. As instrumentals, these tracks would be heavy enough; with a diverse group of ragga and dancehall MCs and singers to give it a voice-- Warrior Queen, Flow Dan, Tippa Irie, a supremely pissed-off Spaceape-- it's a landmark in futurist dancehall. --Nate Patrin
37: Grouper
Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
[Type]
Grouper is Portland, Oregon's Liz Harris, drenched in so much reverb that she sounds almost intangible-- like a voice calling up from the bottom of the ocean. On Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, Harris' third full record as Grouper, a few meager shafts of light are finally allowed to penetrate the mix: A gently strumming acoustic guitar reappears regularly, and Harris' words are, for the first time, occasionally discernible. These tiny hints of accessibility are just enough to deepen the music's essential mysteriousness, to make us feel tantalizingly close to Harris before she's gone again, the echoes of her breathy coo humming in our ear. --Jayson Greene
36: Wale
The Mixtape About Nothing
[self-released]
D.C. rapper releases a mixtape based around "Seinfeld", complete with clips from the show and an appearance, midway through, from fucking Elaine Benes. And no, Adult Swim has nothing to do with it. Wale, on the cusp of breaking out for a few years now, translates the sitcom's nihilism of minor differences to his own idea of hip-hop culture. The kid can rap his ass off, as we learn on the joyous, seemingly never-ending freestyle over "Roc Boys" (on which he thanks his "connects": "MySpace, Facebook, don't forget MapQuest"), or this example of self-effacing braggadocio, from "The Crazy": "I ain't sayin' that I'm Nasir, I'm just sayin' rap's dead when I'm not here." Sure, he can (and does) milk a gimmick, but the real truth here comes from his scathing clarion call to "post-Napster" rap fans on "The Perfect Plan" ("some say rap is dead...buy an album."), and "The Kramer", which segues from a clip of Michael Richards' onstage racist outburst to an insightful treatise on the unintended circulation of the n-word. --Eric Harvey
35: Girl Talk
Feed the Animals
[Illegal Art]
Confirmation that Greg Gillis really does think like a pop star: Feed the Animals tries again and again to repeat his "greatest hit," that magical Biggie/Elton John collision from Night Ripper. It never works quite as well, but the attempts are a rush. Though every track has a couple of grin-making highpoints, what really makes me love Feed the Animals aren't any of the specific mash-ups, it's the record's Utopian vision. This time out Girl Talk's sources lean far more to the mainstream-- alternative touchpoints are swapped out for wedding-disco classics. The result is a grand and delightful romp around the notion that everything in the pop charts might actually be part of some whole, or at least on kissing terms at one of Gillis' parties. The loss of pop's shared center has been a critical trope for close to four decades-- Girl Talk is a parallel-world navigator, dreaming of what might have been if that center had held. --Tom Ewing
34: Arthur Russell
Love Is Overtaking Me
[Audika]
If this collection of singer-songwritery demos and work tapes spanning close to 20 years were all the recorded evidence that existed of Arthur Russell's strange and wonderful career, he'd still probably be a cult item. The guy was one of the greatest New York musicians of his era, and the fact that he cared more about making recordings than polishing and releasing them means Audika's ongoing series of archival releases is a public service. Most of this material sounds like it would've been hopelessly unfashionable or alien in the context of its time, but it sounds amazing in 2008. The documentary Wild Combination details the clashing impulses of Russell's art-- his devotion to the avant-garde and his longing for the pop spotlight, his intensely eccentric sonic vernacular and his desire to make what his friend Allen Ginsberg called "Buddhist bubblegum"-- and a lot of its power comes from that friction. It doesn't hurt that he had an astonishing sense of melody and wrote lyrics that pierce straight to the heart: "I Couldn't Say It to Your Face" and "Hey! How Does Everybody Know" sound like standards straight out of the box. --Douglas Wolk
33: Frightened Rabbit
Midnight Organ Fight
[Fat Cat]
Frightened Rabbit shelved the coy, meta-commenting variety pack of their debut Sing the Greys for a sophomore LP of unabashed, unambiguous anthems about girls. In retrospect, artiness didn't do much for the Hutchison brothers' talents-- guitarist/vocalist Scott's impatient, perpetually aggrieved yelps, drummer Grant's muscular booming and bashing. But a fleshed-out band and improved studio work allowed the winsome Glaswegians to take their raw, vulnerable perspective on modern romance to its logical sonic conclusion. Scott's assertion "This is the last song I write about you," in "I Feel Better", is heralded by trumpets and cascading harmonies-- arrangements so ludicrous they only underline the poignancy of the singer's self-delusion. And gold-standard loud/soft dynamics and shifting tempos dramatize the band's quest to reconcile idealism with pragmatism. A year ago, I predicted modest indie-world success (in all its diminished expectations) for these guys; I really underestimated them. --Amy Granzin
32: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
[Mute UK/Anti-]
Nick Cave has long mined the Bible for both horror and hope, but in his later years he's increasingly been looking to the good book for humor as well. Sleaze, spirituality, and snarl rule Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, but that's not as surprising as how easy he makes it all sound. Indeed, now topping 50, Cave-- pushed, prodded, pulled, and propped up by his ever-reliable Bad Seeds-- comes across more alive than the album's titular zombie, brought back from the dead to wander the streets of America, lost, confused, frustrated, and ultimately left for dead all over again. Cave spends much of the rest of the apocalyptic record howling of rampant violence, perverse injustice, and pervasive unease, imploring heavenward like he imagines poor Lazarus would to demand his maker explain the fucked-up world in which we live. --Joshua Klein
31: Fennesz
Black Sea
[Touch]
Devotion to Christian Fennesz can be frustrating: Three years passed between the Austrian electronicist's landmark Endless Summer and 2004's relatively underwhelming Venice. After another long wait, we got this year's Black Sea, a sublime return to form. Indefatigably patient and subtle, Fenensz makes motions through tiny gestures; as a result, his treatments of acoustic and electric guitars bear a human warmth and narrative weight that much electronic music misses. At its best, Black Sea feels like a victory, the would-be score to slow-motion scenes of violence and victory. But unlike many actual film scores, Black Sea rarely feels blindly sentimental or vacuous. Instead, Fennesz builds thriving microcosms by and of his own rich textures. Moving pictures would just be redundant. --Grayson Currin
30: Los Campesinos!
Hold on Now, Youngster...
[Wichita/Arts & Crafts]
Head Campesino! Gareth sounds like he doesn't have the time, patience, or wherewithal to edit. He doesn't sing as much as he spews his twentysomething blog entries while the other Campesinos ape Pavement and dare you to keep up-- their quicksilver angst updates as often as your Facebook status. Take "Knee Deep at ATP", a tale of indie-rock betrayal on England's southern coast. A festival at a shit motel leads to a grammatically sound letter, which leads to an overexposed photo, which leads to sand falling from insoles, which leads to a crushing realization. But then, just as Gareth seems like he's about to break down into a pile of his own K Records 7"'s, the song builds, bulks up, and sprints to the finish. There's something triumphant in post-elitist indie rock sad-sackdom that defies hyphenates. This band will not tire until they break down exactly what that something is. They're off to a great start. --Ryan Dombal
29: The Hold Steady
Stay Positive
[Vagrant]
Four albums in, they still come off like what they are: Uber-literate punk-rock corndog lifers ransacking classic-rock radio for every dizzily joyous trick they can find. (Guitarist Tad Kubler broke the double-neck barrier years ago.) And, just like on 2006's Boys and Girls in Americ a, they're finding new ways to come off as a band, not just as a vehicle for Craig Finn's deranged honk and Flannery-O'Connor-huffing-glue rants. Boys and Girls had the megaton sing-along choruses, but on this one the tricks feel even more internalized. "Sequestered in Memphis" has the incendiary blurting garage-rock Farfisa. "Both Crosses" comes slathered in acoustic-Zeppelin drama. And "Lord, I'm Discouraged" follows up one of Finn's saddest-ever lines with the sort of guitar solo Slash used to play outside rickety desert churches. Stay Positive is the Hold Steady's getting-old album, but it's not about nostalgia: It's about holding onto your ideals and energy when the kids at the shows are having kids of their own. --Tom Breihan
28: Flying Lotus
Los Angeles
[Warp]
It says something about the depth and cohesiveness of Steven Ellison's deconstructed hip-hop opus Los Angeles that, unlike most other entries on this list, it has no clear standout. In fact, it's almost impossible to choose one favorite song. Like the melting black rubber that adorns its cover, the record's pieces twist and mutate, colliding or bleeding into one another in intricate patterns that are best absorbed in the wider context of the whole LP. Alongside the crackling beats that recall the great J Dilla, FlyLo conceals his complex rhythms in low-key, sometimes gentle arrangements that can lull the listener into a blunted haze. Take a sober listen and you'll discover a forward-thinking producer who, like Aphex Twin before him, uses disassembled and reformatted digital elements to create some seriously next-level shit. And the album's three subsequent L.A. EPs find him looking even further ahead, putting his transformative spin on other genres such as dubstep. If this really is the future of hip-hop, we're in pretty good hands. --Joe Colly
27: Max Tundra
Parallax Error Beheads You
[Domino]
In a year when eternal punchline Chinese Democracy finally arrived, another long-awaited album was met with equal fervor by a much smaller, more bespectacled fanbase. Flying under the radar since 2002's spectacular Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, Ben Jacobs spent six years caressing every single knot out of this vertiginous opus, creating a pop masterpiece tailor made for laptop-shackled music junkies. However, that's not to say Parallax Error Beheads You isn't fun, catchy, or energetic. While you still need a road map to navigate the dizzying song structures, Jacobs sounds a hundred times more confident as a pop vocalist here, diffusing the cerebral instrumentation with nutty lyrics referencing iPods, Google image searches, and his boyish quest for a significant other. High-concept? Definitely. But there's a warm heart inside this digital labyrinth. --Adam Moerder
26: Atlas Sound
Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
[Kranky]
The first CD as Atlas Sound by Deerhunter lead singer Bradford Cox inhabits a bedroom a world away from the bipolar psych-outs of Cryptograms, let alone the messy four-track sketches of Atlas Sound's prior vinyl releases. This one's for the sleepyheads: Cox combines Velvet Underground's unwholesome reveries and Kraftwerk's pretty side to 1990s dream-pop, the Field's glistening loops, and Panda Bear's sun-kissed introspection. Unrequited love fills some of the album's more traditional pop songs, such as the fatal attraction of "River Card"; so does Cox's long history with hospitals, whether on the emotionally drained "Recent Bedroom" or chiming metamorphosis-wish "Quarantined". As an album-length dream, Let the Blind can be bliss (the "Love in This Club" strobes on "Ready Set Glow") or nightmare (the small horror of "Small Horror"), but the arrangements vary: an African-tinged guitar loop on "Cold As Ice", a steady electronic pulse on "Winter Vacation", music boxes, Zimbabwean mbira, glockenspiel. All those toys, and it still feels like a lonely place. --Marc Hogan
25: Titus Andronicus
The Airing of Grievances
[Troubleman Unlimited]
By now you might have thought there was nothing new to say about spending your twenties in New Jersey overeducated and underwhelmed, but caring about what you think is pretty low on Titus Andronicus' priority list. Armed with toilet-bowl production and the type of instrumental bombast typically used to signify inspiration, hope, or empathy, TA instead celebrated the Sisyphean nature of modern existence. But no matter how simple and fist-pumping their slogans were-- "fuck you!" "your life is over!" "one mistake is all that it takes!"-- the nine tantrums of The Airing of Grievances were instantly catchy, intensely personal, and often hilarious. Few bands sounded more pissed off than Titus Andronicus in 2008, and even fewer sounded like they were having more fun. --Ian Cohen
24: Gang Gang Dance
Saint Dymphna
[The Social Registry]
Warped wind instruments, clattering percussion, woozy My Bloody Valentine guitar, trance-like synth arpeggios, a reggaeton beat, hints of grime and dubstep, and singer Liz Bougatsos' transfixing Siouxsie Sioux-like vocals, caught permanently between squeal, drawl, and coo: Gang Gang Dance painstakingly assemble these and many more sounds without distinction between the modern and the antiquated, the populist and the peculiar. What makes it work is that the group never conforms its sounds to some reductionist vision of cross-cultural collision. Instead, they let disparate ideas find their organic own ways to grow together. Gang Gang Dance are a rare group: one whose impossibly broad tastes result in music every bit as good as their record collections. --Tim Finney
23: Hot Chip
Made in the Dark
[Astralwerks]
Injustice: A band writes a tear-jearker electro-soul song using professional wrestling as a metaphor for both relationships and early-childhood nostalgia and they get stuck with a February release date. Almost a year on, the timing still feels right: Listen to "Made in the Dark" as you shop for holiday presents to remind yourself of all that is frustrating, sweet, and bizarre about your relationships. Save the too-soft ballads (like "Looking for a Lot of Love" and the title track) for first snows and the gnarly rockers ("Shake a Fist", "One Pure Thought") for when the ice gets all compacted and gritty. And since everyone buys themselves a little something while shopping anyway, listen to "Wrestlers" when you're visiting home and you catch a moment alone. "It's me vs. me vs. me vs. me vs. me vs. me vs me…". --Andrew Gaerig
22: Santogold
Santogold
[Downtown]
Santogold's cover features an unflattering image of Santi White vomiting gold dust. Clearly, this woman does not give a fuck. After all, what has she got to lose? She's an over-30 industry veteran, wears outlandish clothes that don't show skin, and is as likely to coo a sticky pop hook as growl a dancehall put-down. Not an easy sell. If the whole superstar thing doesn't work out, she can always go back to writing songs for Ashlee Simpson. So for her debut album, the Brooklyn-via-Philly dynamo gets a little help from shit-hot beatmakers Diplo and Switch to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Pretty much all of it does: the icy hot new wave of "L.E.S. Artistes", the itchy, menacing hip-hop of "Creator" and "Unstoppable", the light and fluffy "Lights Out" and "I'm a Lady". "Shove It" kicks so hard, Kanye West sampled it for a Jay-Z track. With a sound this fresh and now, of course these songs were licensed to high heaven, becoming the de facto soundtrack to 2008 in beer- and car-commercials. In this day and age, could we expect anything less? --Amy Phillips
21: Kanye West
808s and Heartbreak
[Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam]
I feel sorry for Kanye West even though I shouldn't feel sorry for Kanye West. This is a man who regularly blogs about phallic light fixtures whose price tag dwarfs my annual salary. Who regards his immense homes, fast cars, and first-class status as nothing more than symbols of bottomless isolation. Who turns the enthusiastic screams of a Singapore audience into a chorus of blood-curdling madness. On paper, 808s & Heartbreak reads like the musings of a grown-up Richie Rich: spoiled, caustic, and hopelessly unaware of his own ridiculousness.
But thanks to an imperfect, mechanized singing voice and beats piped in from the universe's loneliest planet, West turns woe-is-me into woe-is-us. He beat emo at its own game. Whether sounding like a decrepit despot clinging to power on "Amazing", lamenting post-breakup angst on "Love Lockdown", or lashing out at his ex's terrible jokes over haughty strings on "RoboCop", the pop star shows he can be as self-obsessed, confused, and petty as the rest of us. (I'm surprised there's not a song written in drunk text vernacular.) And, on "Street Lights", he reaches a glass-eyed resolution: "Life's just not fair," he mumbles, giving meaning to meaningless. --Ryan Dombal
20: Fuck Buttons
Street Horrrsing
[ATP]
It's always fun when an album comes along to fill a need you didn't even know you had. "Wouldn't it be sweet if an album took the prickly psych damage of Black Dice but made it work in the context of epic rock, so that it had the cathartic build of early Mogwai?" Why, yes-- yes it would: Enter Bristol two-piece Fuck Buttons. Their most obvious gift is to use harsh sounds in service of something more conventionally musical. Ten years ago, noise music was understood to be an endurance test. It was Merzbow and Masonna, all bondage and bleeding ears and bad vibes. But Fuck Buttons showed how the visceral power of noise can be bent into a dramatic arc that takes you places. Season the churning distortion with some tinkly piano clusters, keep things quiet and pretty until they're loud and mean: Street Horrrsing is what happens when you give equal weight to every extreme. --Mark Richardson
19: The Walkmen
You & Me
[Gigantic]
You & Me wasn't so much a return to form as it was a reassurance: Even if you didn't love their last couple of records, this album breathes air back into the Walkmen's sound like the wind moving sparks to flame. After floundering while exploring the relatively forgotten corners of Bob Dylan or Harry Nilsson's catalog, the Walkmen now sound just as comfortable fitting on something traditional and unassuming ("Four Provinces", "I Lost You") as the late-night bob-and-weave that's worked for them in the past (the irrepressible "In the New Year", the even-better "The Blue Route"). Whatever winding route the band had to take, on record or elsewhere, to get back to sounding like themselves again, You & Me was worth the journey. --Jason Crock
18: The Mae Shi
HLLLYH
[Team Shi]
Left to their own devices after the demise of 5RC, the Mae Shi calmed down enough to make the most gloriously hyper indie rock album of 2008. HLLLYH offers simple, anthemic tunes that up the band's caffeinated giddiness, but the album is still pretty sprawling, filled with frantic Casio beats, unruly noise breaks, ridiculous climaxes, and an 11-minute mash-up of the entire album stuck right in the middle. This infectious mess is tied together by super-enthusiastic, all-together-now singing, used not for harmony or texture, but to make the band's messages louder and more delirious. Lots of those messages are religious-- maybe even evangelical-- but can you blame the Mae Shi for thinking they've seen the light? On HLLLYH, they're definitely speaking in irresistible tongues. --Marc Masters
17: Fucked Up
The Chemistry of Common Life
[Matador]
Like their spiritual ancestors on the 1980s SST Records roster, Fucked Up understand that hardcore is not a means to codify punk rock's parameters, but to blow them wide open. In fact, the Toronto group's progression up to this point closely mirrors that of Hüsker Dü. If Hidden World was Fucked Up's Zen Arcade, The Chemistry of Common Life is their New Day Rising, harnessing its predecessor's psychedelicized sprawl into laser-focused ferocity. But unlike Bob Mould or Grant Hart, Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham (aka Pink Eyes) isn't going to start singing ballads anytime soon. While his band's triple-guitar attack grows evermore grandiose and the Floydian interludes become even more pronounced, Abraham's guttural growl remains wholly unaffected, and when the songs call for harmonies or pop choruses, he farms them out to guests ranging from Brooklyn garage gals the Vivian Girls to Canadian emo pin-up Dallas Green. Back in 2004, Fucked Up released a split-single featuring a cover shot of a 1930s Nazi rally. At the time, it seemed like the sort of crassly provocative gesture you'd expect from a contrarian punk band; aesthetically, it proved to be a harbinger of what was to come: With The Chemistry of Common Life, Fucked Up project extreme ugliness and aggression through a wide-screened Riefenstahlian lens. --Stuart Berman
16: Vivian Girls
Vivian Girls
[Mauled by Tigers/In the Red]
Perhaps most impressive about Vivian Girls' 22-minute debut is how familiar and vital it sounds after only a few months of listening. Credit goes to the band's ace formula: combine the fairly simple components of 1960s girl-group vocals, fuzzy garage rock, and touches of shoegaze; then filter the result through a life listening to Nirvana and Wipers. As such, the record's two finest tracks-- chugging barnburner "Tell the World" and the shambling doo-wop ballad "Where Do You Run To"-- seemed to have been unearthed rather than just recorded. The brightest (and most deserving) stars of this year's welcome noise-pop revival, Vivian Girls stood at the fore of a quasi-movement that saw a return to relevance for the Slumberland imprint and found aesthetic cousins Times New Viking, Crystal Stilts, and Sic Alps forcing melody through self-constructed haze. But Vivian Girls has that and so much more: Ten killer tracks without an ounce of fat on them, detached odes to love lost and found, absurd catchiness, and three rad chicks rocking out with the canon on their side. --Joe Colly
15: Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
[Last Gang]
Crystal Castles aren't exactly easy to like. Thanks to being on the wrong side of a pair of fair use controversies this year, they can seem like artists who willfully misread the long-outmoded tenants of punk as justification for their own entitlement. Moreover their live show has to be one of the most shambolic experiences going; if 45 minutes of Alice Glass's bratty squeals and painfully self-aware tantrums over top of otherwise great songs is your idea of a good time, donate some emo genes, cause you're in surplus. And yet…this record. The bastard child of the Knife's Silent Shout and Simian Mobile Disco's Attack Decay Sustain Release, it fused together the spangliest portions of electronic music's nascent 8-bit scene with vinegary attitude, dirty basslines, and some of the freshest programming work this side of Max Tundra. "Courtship Dating"! "Untrust Us"! "Air War"! For pretty much a whole year, this goddamned thing was tough to deny, even when it felt like the people who made it weren't. --Mark Pytlik
14: Air France
No Way Down
[Something in Construction]
The music of Sweden's Air France is pure fantasy, but it's not necessarily escape, and it actually seems to benefit from being approached with a bit of cynicism. Their sound is unapologetically warm and pretty, with tropical beats, smeared harmonies, peppy tempos, and lots of "sweeteners" like strings and bongo fills borrowed from other songs. But then there's an undercurrent of longing, often triggered by sampled voices (usually kids, presumably from TV shows and old movies), which somehow manages to transform skepticism into plain old sadness. You start to lament: Why can't life be all teenage dreams and frolics on the shore and fake marimba and heavily reverbed 1980s keyboards? Simple pop tunes, inspired by the likes of Saint Etienne and delivered with a currently fashionable Balearic lilt, wind up leading to a complex knot of feelings. The UK version of No Way Down augments the six songs of the 2008 original with four more from 2007's fantastic On Trade Winds, and having all 10 tracks together in one place turns out to be the way to go: When you listen to one of the EPs on its own, you feel like the strange little beach party is just getting started. --Mark Richardson
13: Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
[Motown]
On her latest album, this honey-voiced Earth Mother goes down to the well and comes back pissed-off, knives-out, long-winded, half-stoned-- it's a sign of the times. But if you can't hear past the protest funk, ankh worship, cosmology, 1970s-rooted Afrocentrism, dusty grooves, and other superficial signs that this is a retro album, consider the coda to "Twinkle", where a robotic voice recites Howard Beale's televised breakdown from the 1976 film Network and only needs to change "TV" to "flat-screen" and "toaster" to "microwave oven" to modernize it for our terrified hearts and minds. In March, Erykah Badu told Blender that "time is for white people." I think she was making a joke, but whatever helps her take the longview is fine by me. --Mike Powell
12: Lindstrøm
Where You Go I Go Too
[Smalltown Supersound]
The scruffy Norwegian Hans-Peter Lindstrøm might still be better known for his collaborations with Prins Thomas, but he has on his own produced perhaps the most audacious musical statement of 2008. Inspired by the multistage epics from electronic music's past, Where You Go I Go Too nevertheless can't be explained away as a genre experiment. The centerpiece is the titanic, half-hour title track, where heroic Moog swaths meet beachy Balearic techno. The shortest of the three tracks, "Grand Ideas", might have sprung from new age composer Jean Michel Jarre's laser harp in 1981, but it would also kill on a contemporary dance floor. Throughout, Where You Go displays patience as it celebrates electronic music's origins in a way far deeper than Lindstrøm's previous disco throwbacks ever could. --Mike Orme
11: Lil Wayne
Tha Carter III
[Cash Money/Universal]
The morning Tha Carter III's mind-boggling, first-week sales figures went public, 50 Cent called New York City hip-hop station Hot 97, reporting that the album's success had him "confused." Of course 50 was confused. Rap stars are supposed to carry themselves in a certain manner: Cool, imperturbable, in control. Back when he was racking up his own mind-boggling sales figures, 50 followed that blueprint. But here's Lil Wayne, in thrall to chaos and digression and his own appetites, chasing whatever idea might cross his syrup-addled synapses. He cackles pure non-sequitur on "A Milli", he tells brimstone gutbucket blues stories on "Playing With Fire", he rhymes "yeast infection" with "geese erection" on "Dr. Carter". The beats, mirroring their host, veer off in crazy directions: late-1990s NYC Casio thunder on "You Ain't Got Nuthin", opulent chopped-up soul on "Let the Beat Build", evil circus midgets on "La La". Nothing coheres, and even less makes sense. And still, against the odds, the whole sprawling mess resonates as pop with all the joy and immediacy that term ideally implies. End result: The biggest-selling album of 2008, in any genre. We're confused too, but in a good way. --Tom Breihan
10: DJ/rupture
Uproot
[The Agriculture]
When DJ/rupture, aka Jace Clayton, released his brilliant pan-global mix Uproot, he also made available the companion album Uproot: The Ingredients, an unedited collection of the mix's source material. This was a generous move, and a bold one, for it risks allowing the listener backstage to watch the master alchemist at work. Fortunately, Uproot: The Ingredients does more than simply confirm that Clayton owns a well-used passport and an impeccable set of ears; it also provides fresh insight into his distinctive and powerful musical vision.
Clayton recognizes global bass culture to be a complex system of interlocking burrows, and on Uproot he revels in exploring as many hidden passageways as possible. Starting primarily with dubstep and ragga sources, Uproot branches outward to reconcile such far-flung pieces as Filastine's jittery "Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)" and Ekkehard Ehlers' elegiac "Plays John Cassavetes". And, particularly after hearing The Ingredients, it is a marvel to witness how intuitively Clayton allows the mix's various rhythms and displaced vocals to linger and echo back on one another, as if his only role is to expose all those secret links and shared roots that have been buried in plain sight all along. --Matthew Murphy
09: Hercules and Love Affair
Hercules and Love Affair
[DFA/Mute]
You've read it all over: 2008 was a big year for disco. And sure, plenty of decent dance fare over the past year or two copped to an ambivalent glamour and scratched a four-to-the-floor itch. But no one else managed to connect with a greater public than Andrew Butler's Hercules and Love Affair. It didn't hurt that he had Antony Hegarty behind the mic on the record or that the towering Nomi stole the spotlight in shows across the States and Europe. But mainly it was the songs that did it: Co-produced by DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, Butler's tunes laid out a kind of alternate history of pop music, where the marginalized, forgotten talents of the late 1980s and early 90s were still at work on ideas for the decade about to break. Recreating the music you love is never an easy thing; to do it in a way that so viscerally evokes the lost era that inspired it is even harder. Whatever might be said of NYC dance culture in 2008, Hercules and Love Affair dreamed it like no other. --Philip Sherburne
08: M83
Saturdays=Youth
[Mute]
The cover of Saturdays=Youth features a composite of stock characters from films released in M83's Anthony Gonzalez early childhood-- so there appears to be a disconnect between the album's source image and his liner-note claim that it's a tribute to his wild teenage years. But Saturdays is every bit as much about a time frame as a frame of mind, and what makes Gonzalez' fourth LP his finest is how the former is rendered with honesty instead of irony and the latter with positivity instead of angst. Forget the shoegaze tag M83 is too often pinned with-- the irrepressible hormones of prom years are almost rendered in spectral, skyward tones on twin peaks "Kim & Jessie" and "We Own the Sky". On the whole, Saturdays is a pristine, inhabitable universe whose emotions can match the enormity of its sonics, penetrable any time you wish to see the movies of your dreams with Gonzalez's cast of irrepressible day trippers. --Ian Cohen
07: Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend
[XL]
This record was officially released in January, but at this point it seems like we've had it-- and the hot-fuss backlash that accompanied it-- for years. Sure, VW's songs got a lot of praise quickly-- these things happen in the internet age, usually to far less deserving bands. They dress like the early Talking Heads or Wes Anderson characters, but few people display righteous anger toward the early Talking Heads or Wes Anderson characters. They went to an Ivy League school but is that actually a negative anywhere outside a Sarah Palin rally?
OK, there's a whiff of them being just your little brother's music-- more listenable than capital-I important-- but actually getting pissy over the existence of VW seems about as reasonable as getting out the torches and pitchforks over, say, a (superior version of) Squeeze or Madness or Supergrass. In a time when other populist groups like Spoon, Arcade Fire, and the Hold Steady-- potential radio staples at certain points in rock history-- have commercial ceilings somewhere between "an appearance on 'SNL'" and "gold record," I can't find myself rooting against Vampire Weekend's relative success. At the end of the day, all they've done is craft an album of crisp, endlessly replayable guitar pop songs with expressive, detail-heavy lyrics and charming music that serves as a welcome antidote to today's more overly compressed sounds. How dare they. --Scott Plagenhoef
06: TV on the Radio
Dear Science
[4AD/Interscope]
When much of the critical conversation this year focused on Brooklyn's nü-primitivism coldly capitalizing on globalism, TVOTR proved that the borough can give us so much more than Keffiyeh scarves. TVOTR mixed Princely falsettos and handclaps rooted in African-American churches with dissonant washes of feedback and sounds cribbed from "I Wanna Be Sedated"; hell, "Family Tree" references slavery and lynching while copping its aristocratic aural style from Coldplay. Lest we forget that the group is still a bunch of boho weirdoes, though, there's the unapologetically strange video for "Golden Age": with its brass-aided angelic chorus emerging triumphantly from the robotic funk of the verses, it was the closest thing 2008 pop had to Rapture. On that note, one last sigh of relief that "Golden" in December isn't a sad curio of a nation afraid to embrace difference on November 4, but instead stands as a bona fide fucking anthem going forward. --Eric Harvey
05: Deerhunter
Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
[Kranky]
While iPod ads and Hollywood films based around Bishop Allen shows reinforce the idea that there's little difference between mainstream and indie rock, this year, a tale of two redheads redrew the lines in the sand. When Axl Rose found out GN'R's Chinese Democracy leaked, he tried to get his most over-eager fan thrown in jail. But when Deerhunter's Bradford Cox found out his band's third album, Microcastle, was making the P2P rounds some four months before its October street date, his band went about preparing a completely new bonus album, Weird Era Cont., to reward those who waited for a retail release. (Alas, it too would leak early.) While Microcastle cornerstones like the autobahn-bound "Nothing Ever Happened" and the atomic doo-wop of "Twilight at Carbon Lake" suggest Deerhunter are undergoing a Flaming Lips-like evolution into stately, psych-pop dignitaries, Weird Era Cont. charts a parallel course where Deerhunter break down and mess around with the raw materials-- the lo-fi garage-disco of "Operations", the shoegaze overdrive of "Vox Celeste", the looped-feedback drones of "Weird Era"-- that comprise Microcastle's magnificent whole. And yet with the closing "Cavalry Scars II_Aux Out"-- a 10-minute psych-raga reconstruction of a 90-second Microcastle interlude-- this supplementary album achieves a majesty all its own. --Stuart Berman
04: Cut Copy
In Ghost Colours
[Modular/Interscope]
There was a surprisingly feast-or-famine reaction this year to Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, an album that on one hand should be a go-to indie dance/pop/rhythm release (see "Hearts on Fire", "Lights and Music") and on the other is actually closer in spirit to a flat-out gorgeous and uplifting pop record ("Out There on the Ice", "So Haunted", and "Unforgettable Season"). Our reviewer Mark Pytlik simply yet accurately called In Ghost "a hard record not to love," yet it also had the sense all year of an LP bubbling just under the surface. A corrective, then, that would improve most year-end lists and give In Ghost Colours the profile it deserves: "Time to Pretend" excepted, replace all appearances of "MGMT" with "Cut Copy."
At the risk of overloading on navel-gazing, Cut Copy's Pitchfork Music Festival appearance was an accidental metaphor then for the group's year. With the band late from the airport, curiosity seekers, casual observers, and the uninitiated slowly peeled away from the crowd, preferring main stage act Spoon or an early end to the weekend; those who stuck around bottled the tension and anticipation and transformed it into ecstasy when the group finally performed an electrifying three-song set. It was clear that, for many (including yours truly), this was the album of 2008; still ready for its close-up, it's possible that for even more people it will be their album of 2009. --Scott Plagenhoef
03: No Age
Nouns
[Sub Pop]
Los Angeles is the least interesting thing about No Age, but it's still the easiest place to start. Harder to put into words is the way Randy Randall and Dean Spunt pack ear-splitting guitar textures, raucous punk energy, and even some memorable little tunes into their first proper album, Nouns. Those same basic ingredients were already present on last year's Weirdo Rippers, a compilation of non-album tracks, but they're more fully integrated this time around, the songs occupying the perfect intersection of grit and accessibility. The first song we heard from the album, "Sleeper Hold", still blends those elements best, with fist-pumping choruses, screeching feedback, and a credo that all punk parvenus should have to get carved on their foreheads from now on: "With passion it's true." No Age have, by all accounts, established a thriving underground community at the Smell, but for the vast majority of human beings who don't live in a Southern California, their legacy will be Nouns. --Marc Hogan
02: Portishead
Third
[Island]
Musically, no dominant trend or theme emerged in 2008, so it makes a perverse kind of sense that one of its best records came from a band left for dead that emerged out of nowhere with a fragmented take on itself. When Third was originally announced, the prevailing consensus seemed to be that folks were: 1) Happy to have Portishead back, and 2) Skeptical about how their formula would translate in 2008. Turns out, Portishead had long ago shed their skin. Instead of anything resembling noirish, sample-heavy trip-hop, the trio returned with a palette of songs that spanned prettified acoustic folk to gnarly industrial to eerie electronic ballads.
Their decade-long attitudinal shift was most dramatically articulated, though, in their production style; where the trio's previous full-lengths were tidy, neatly assembled affairs, the songs on Third -- from the chippy musicianship on opener "Silence" to the Joy Division homage "We Carry On"-- sounded roughshod and bedraggled. Elsewhere, they diversified: The shimmering "Hunter" recalled Broadcast at their ghostliest, "Small"s foggy psychedelia belied a love for early 70s Krautrock, and the ukulele-led "Deep Water" wouldn't have been out of place on a Feist record. Meanwhile, the stuttering cacophony of "Machine Gun" and devastating "The Rip" were two of the tracks of the year. The sound of a band choosing decay over craft, no album leapt out the speakers quite like Third. --Mark Pytlik
01: Fleet Foxes
Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
[Sub Pop]
Listing Fleet Foxes' debut LP and EP may be awkward, but just feels right. They're like two sides of a coin, and equally express the band's mastery of its music, a catchall Americana that takes a wide slice of our popular music's spectrum and pulls it through a reverse prism to create a gorgeous and focused sound of the band's own. The threads of Brian Wilson's intricate coastal pop, Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, Grateful Dead jams, and other influences are masterfully synthesized in the band's harmonies and simply orchestrated but constantly shifting instrumental arrangements.
The Sun Giant EP introduces the band to the world with a just plain pretty a cappella harmony passage that lays their pastoral tendencies bare, while later on the disc "Mykonos" and "English House" show us their muscle and easy way with loose song structures. The lyrics are non-narrative but vivid nonetheless. See the way the Fleet Foxes refrain "and Michael you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in summertime" plunges you into the stunning guitar-and-voice counterpoint that blows "White Winter Hymnal" wide open. Lead singer Robin Pecknold has a strong, clear voice and knows when to let fly with a drawn-out, impassioned bellow and when to withdraw into the shelter of his bandmates' harmonies. The group shares his sense of dynamics, and Fleet Foxes flows like a river, wild and free but logical, filling what needs to be filled and moving on. --Joe Tangari
Pitchfork closes 2008 with a look at each of our writers' favorite albums of the year. To construct our consensus staff list, we used a combination of the following lists-- with most writers listing 50 records-- and, as we've done each of the past two years, a points allocation system similar to Pazz and Jop.
