78. No Age - Nouns (2008)

No Age's big breakout record jettisons pretty much everything that was interesting about them and puts in its place a somewhat generic, Sebadoh-ish 90s indie rock. Everything is fuzzy and tinny and loud, and while the songs are catchy enough while they're on there's nothing close to the previous record's "Every Artist Needs a Tragedy" or "Neck Escaper". "Things I Did When I Was Dead" is the one track that combines No Age's punk and ambient tendencies effectively, but the rest is just the same old catchy punk rock. The drums sound like a drum machine and the lo-fi-ness, rather than opening up any new creative avenues, just seems to hem the band in--the songwriting isn't good enough to make a virtue of the style, like Pavement's was, and the poor quality recording just sounds like an affectation and not something that really means much of anything. Pavement had the good sense to foreground the bass in their early records, which was interesting in such a lo-fi record; this is just fuzzy guitar and desultory vocals.

MY RATING: 4.8

No Age - "Teen Creeps"

111. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (2008)

It's so satisfying when a group with an interesting sound but less-than-interesting ways of implementing it gets their act together and finds the perfect style and subject matter for their music. Jose Gonzalez' idea to meld his super-emotional electronic noise washes with John Hughes movie soundtrack-esque melodies and song structures was one of the most genius conceptual moves of the entire decade; a specific time in music is evoked so perfectly that it practically induces flashbacks. And, most importantly, this music evokes the 80s without copying it: the songs might be a little retrograde, sure, derivative of stuff by Single Minds and Richard Marx and (most obviously) Peter Schilling, but M83's style itself is wholly futuristic. The album is perfectly tuned and sequenced: "Kim and Jessie" is basically opening credits music, gigantic chords and longing, longing, longing. The word "emo" gets thrown around a lot, and if you could somehow remove all its negative associations this kind of music is what would be left: huge, pastel-colored blasts of synth coupled with lyrics that make absolutely no logical sense but make perfect emotional sense--just like the music. Most of these songs build up to apocalyptic climaxes of electronic noise and Morgan Kibby's alien vocals, and it works. You get chills down your spine. The final track, being little more than 12 minutes of the exact same keyboard line over and over, is a little disappointing, but if you treat it like closing credits music (i.e. feel free to ignore it, walk out) it works. Just play "You, Appearing" again, and if the hair on your neck doesn't go up, I don't know what's wrong with you. A huge, huge, huge improvement on  this band's previous two records.

MY RATING: 9.2

M83 -  "Skin of the Night"

132. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair (2008)

First of all, I don't know whose idea it was to get vibrato-y torch singer Antony Hegarty to sing on a disco track, but give him lots of money right now because that idea was genius. That song, "Blind", along with the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers", is probably the high point of the entire 00s "dance-punk" thing, with "Blind" being closer to dance, and "Lovers" being closer to punk. So, what about the album that surrounds it? Most of it is the same sort of updated 70s disco, with an occasional nod to 90s dance ("You Belong"). In my opinion it's a little early to start canonizing this record; it seems like the setup for an even better follow-up. Too much of the second half is slow electronica stuff that does nothing original, and what it does do it does boringly. A notable exception is "Easy", which brings in Antony to sing gorgeous lyrics over a chilly, almost Knife-ish backing. It's truly one of the great underrated tracks of the decade, and it's in danger of getting lost within the album's more flashy moments. Overall it sounds like the kind of record the Rapture would have made had they not tried to out-Strokes the Strokes. There's always a danger of this kind of overly nostalgic music making you think: well, if I like this so much, why don't I just listen to the original stuff? Aside from "Blind" and "Easy", two songs that almost by themselves make this purchase-worthy, I don't know how well this record is able to answer that question.

MY RATING: 6.9


Hercules and Love Affair - "Blind"

133. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (2008)

Be warned--this album is dense. It wasn't until well into my fifth listen when I was able to start to unpack it, to understand it, and I'm still not sure whether what you get is worth all that time you have to put into it. Certain tracks ("The Healer" in particular--listen to that cymbal sound!) create a mood that to the best of my knowledge little other funk/R&B has been able to do, while other tracks ("That Hump"; "Twinkle") are just generic slinky R&B. It's all about the groove here, and the album cover itself sets this record up as a throwback to the great funk protest records of the 70s, like The Payback and Superfly. Certainly this isn't as good as either of those, but it is remarkable how little "modern" production intrudes on the dense mood. The opening track isn't able to transcend its impression as a blacksploitation music pastiche, but "The Cell" fares much better, the groove produced within so powerful that Badu is able to drop out the music entirely for an entire minute near the end of the track, leaving nothing but a single repetitive chant, and the track doesn't lose one bit of its power and the effect doesn't seem like showboating. So what we've got here, in the end, is an incredibly ambitious funk record, and I'm inclined to give the album more points for its sheer ambition (even though the album would be outstripped, both conceptually and musically, by Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid two years later). Funk records of this overall quality don't come around often, so just ignore the weak stuff and focus on what's good.

MY RATING: 7.8

Erykah Badu - "The Healer"

140. TV on the Radio - Dear Science (2008)

For their fourth record TV on the Radio decided to drop a lot of their indie-rock associations and go in a more R&B/funk inspired direction. While lead vocalist Tunde Adebimpe is more than suited to such a stylistic change (and he's the only member of the band that comes out of this record still looking good--his vocals are uniformly great throughout), the band backing him up decidedly is not, and this record just ends up being an experiment that doesn't work. The first problem is the production--it's way, way too thin to be a "proper" funk record. Where's the bass? What's the deal with these processed, weak-ass drums? "Golden Age" is one of the ugliest-sounding things I've ever heard, a hideous "funky" thing that sounds like five different bands all playing at once (Actually, that description makes the song sound more interesting than it actually is). "Family Tree" is a maudlin, keyboard-drenched ballad, "Shout Me Out" is too minimalistic for its own good, and "Lover's Day", compared to the music made by actual funk groups, is laughable. Only "DLZ" works, and unsurprisingly it's the track on the album that hews closest to the style found on Return to Cookie Mountain. I respect what the band is trying to do here, and certainly this isn't a lazy or boring record at all, but the production choices are uniformly awful and it's hard to listen to this incredibly talented group laboring away at a style that just doesn't suit them at all. Worth a listen, but overall a real disappointment.

MY RATING: 5.9

TV on the Radio - "Love Dog"

161. Air France - No Way Down (2008)

Or: there was once a band that sounded like Air, and they were from France (well, actually Sweden), so they called themselves Air France. That should tell you all you need to know about the number of original ideas this album contains. What the hell is this? Why is this here? How is this different from anything? Alright: Air France's debut is a series of mid-length pastoral tracks and pretty 80s-y synths and samples of crickets and children's voices, all of it designed to support that "pastoral" atmosphere. It's not bad, exactly, but there's absolutely nothing here that hasn't been done a million times before in a more interesting fashion. Like, say, by Air! Air France is what Air would sound like if they had no taste and listened to nothing but Wyndham Hill records and believed in the healing power of natural crystals. It's insufferable. What can be said for it is that it does create a distinct atmosphere, but that atmosphere is dull and uninteresting and minus any variation--everything comes at you at the exact same "pretty", "wistful" level and never changes, like a Michael Bay movie that, through its endless assault of ACTION, paradoxically becomes boring. There are moments of beauty here, but they're so repetitive and over-the-top that they quickly become boring. It's not actively offensive in its badness like Camera Obscura, but this is pretty bad.

MY RATING: 2.3

Air France - "Collapsing At Your Doorstep"

163. DJ/rupture - Uproot (2008)

This is a mix record in the style of Michael Mayer's Immer series, except this time the focus is on dubstep and electronic reggae rather than minimalist German techno and microhouse. The album has the benefit of being better sequenced than Mayer's series; the unexpected introduction of Ekkehard Ehlers' orchestral pieces in the middle of the mix gives the album an emotional heft these kind of mix records don't usually have. The problem is how repetitive the album is, or, more accurately, to what minimal purpose such repetition is put. Repetition in dance and techno music usually works by creating an atmosphere of hypnosis where the track seems to be changing even though it isn't, where the brain kind of tricks itself into thinking that the next time the melody rolls around, things will be different. What happens here is even though the album is 23 tracks long the ones that would work in repetition are too short to have any effect, and the ones that would work in atmosphere are too short to create one. After a strong beginning the album becomes a depressing series of downtuned beats, a weaker version of the kind of stuff Tricky was doing thirteen years earlier, and that Burial had already bested in 2007 with his masterful Untrue, probably the greatest electronic record of the decade. This one had the bad luck to appear a year later, and it can't help but suffer from the comparison. At its best it is effectively atmospheric and the interpolation of "Brooklyn Anthem" adds a nice moment of aggression that works, but this thing basically needed to be twenty minutes shorter or twenty minutes longer.

MY RATING: 6.0

ConQuest - "Mirage"; Team Shadatek - "Brooklyn Anthem (Acapella)"