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9th of December 2009 22:16
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8th of December 2009 12:18
You can say all you want about the 00s, but music has never been more vital or alive than in the past ten years. The doors that were opened in the 90s escaped onto the internet and into tiny venues all over the world and produced genreless music, music alive and changeable in a free exchange of ideas and t-shirts. We can forget about tv-pop, we can even forget about pop-indie. Sure, any movies made about the 00s are going to feature Flaming Lips, Arcade Fire and the Killers on their mix tapes -- that's because those bands already feel dated. What we're really going to remember are the young innovators. There's a lot to remember but these are a few of the songs that came into my head immediately. What are yours? TV on the Radio - Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes - Young Liars No one embodied the Brooklyn scene of the mid-00s as much as TVotR. This is black people doing white music better and smarter than white people. Sometime after this album they gave into Abercrombie & Fitch ads and the pressures of stardom and the later albums sound like self-parodies. But for a while there they could do no wrong. "Mr. Grieves" is probably the most memorable song off the EP but I like "Young Liars" most for its message. It captures a freedom which is the whole reason we listen to independent music. Dirty Projectors - The Getty Address - Time Birthed Spilled Blood Dirty Projectors - Rise Above - What I See Dave Longstreth's protean band has changed at least four times since it started, so I want to remember two phases: the middle, epic phase where he wrote a rock opera about Don Henley, and the later phase when his ambition collapsed on itself to produce some of the most interesting, complex pop out there. The Dears - Missiles - Crisis I & II Unabashedly Pop, heir to the Smiths, Murray and his wife spent most of the 00s chasing success and popularity unsuccessfully. Gang of Losers was the culmination of this yearning, a big loud album that put off most of their fans with its pop pretentions. That's what I liked most about it, though -- it was an artificial album about artificiality, and ultimately it knew it was a failure and wanted you to love it anyway. What followed was a return to the personal and the true, an album full of quietness and anxiety, Missiles. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House - On a Neck, on a Spit Plenty of bands did tribal-ish folk after Grizzly Bear, but none quite captured so well the darkness at the heart of the campfire. The Sleepy Jackson - Lovers - Good Dancers This song's still one of the best good times. Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds - Arctic Circle One can't really say enough good about Owen Pallett. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender - Sprout & the Bean No one quite does smart & cute like Joanna. This is a girl who, when confronted with too many comments about her voice, said that she never thought people were going to listen to her voice, that she always thought of it as sort of a conduit for her words, something you have to listen past. Ys is probably the most ambitious album I listened to this decade, but Milk-Eyed Mender is probably more memorable. And shorter. Okkervil River - Dont Fall in Love with Everyone you See - Westfall Will Sheff changed what a folk song could be about. Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther - Head Home Van Occupanther was a subtle, quiet album that grew on on you over time. But when it got in you it got in deep, like old memories. I guess it really is an album of memories. Snapshots and feelings, pictures you have to piece together. Parenthetical Girls - Entanglements - A Song for Ellie Greenwich This might be my favorite song of the decade. The 60s throwbacks, the Bacharach allusions, the ever-so-slightly subversive lyrics, it's a song about songwriting and as well as about the larger romance explored in Entanglements (which is a sort of song about singing about what you cant sing about).
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3rd of December 2009 12:09
     
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27th of November 2009 19:40
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22nd of November 2009 15:27
 
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