Best Music 2002

1. Notwist – NeonGolden

Oboe and pizzicato, achingly beautiful melodies, silly thin nasal vocals, music for both heartbreaks and dinner parties.  Post-cold war chamber pop.  Minor chord commercial music.  Catchy melancholy. Atmospheric though without big spaces.  Electronic and crisp but very close to the ear.  Sometimes sounding like vintage Beck doing Cure covers.  In fact, in my humble opinion, if Beck wanted to lose irony, this is the music he should be making, not the lugubrious and sluggish Sea Change.  This is dance-ready.  Neue New Wave.  I mean,  cocktail lounge banjo played by aging German club kids? Who could resist.  Songs full of cool yearning.  Strongest tunes of the year.  Melody uber alles.

 

2. Spoon – Kill the Moonlight

Minimalist rock, because little else is needed.  Richly allusive without being ironic.  The songs sound extremely familiar on first listening, perhaps like they are covering classic rock.  But on more listening, the anxious composition surfaces, and while the memory is of a guitar researcher, this is really keyboard-based.  Maybe their genius is best known in the arrangements.  They are unlike any other archival rocker, because they sound frank and direct with nary a dash of preciousness. 

 

3. The Books – Thought For Food

For serious and serious-minded music lovers.  Sound collages, voice samples, treated sound, lots of acoustic guitar and strings.  Every now and then a bit of southern folk or even bluegrass sneaks through the found sounds, electronic clicks and echoes, and voices of characters from chilling short stories (dialogue from French films translated into American argot).  More performance piece than rock and roll, but cute and saucy as much as dark and spacey.  I’ve listened to this 100 times and it never sounds familiar, never sounds safe, and is always beautiful.  A soundtrack for the Zen of futility.  Lieder for crackers.  Silencio.

 

4. Wilco - Yankee Foxtrot Hotel

Tweedy’s voice and lyrics and melodies are better than ever and worth the hype and drama of how this was released.  But the production was thin and baroque and garbled the songs.  It wanted to be OK Computer or Kid A, and I wanted a fat guitar sound to match the rough and ready heart beating strongly under the mushiness.

 

5. Flaming Lips – Yoshimi

Lovely and silly.  Unless something happens, I can’t imagine buying another Flaming Lips CD… but this is a fine apotheosis for the dreamy and pressured pop songs that only they seem to pull off.  Tender lovesongs about fighting Japanese robots.  They have animated their vision into rock history and into irrelevance.

 

6. Yume Bitsu – Golden Vessel of Sound

From the roots of Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, and other prog-art bands that none of these Portland, Oregon youngsters ever heard of, blossoms a jazzy, psychedelic sound of the New West.  Tortoise less pinch-faced.  Ringing electric guitars steamed in dreamy folk improvisations. Lots of air in this music, food for great breathing.  Maybe mystical is the new noise for the rapidly disappointing new millennium…after all.

 

7. Hayden – skyscraper national park

Simple and baked sounds.  Organic (analog clarity) and nutritious.  Neil Young shoulda written these songs.  Canadian and sad.  Big Sky travels and bong-bound afternoons both invoked.  Warmly appealing vocal over slowly moving folk-rock.  Depresso-core.

 

8. Elvis Costello – When I was cruel

With the grace of Serge Gainsbourg, the invention of Burt Bacharrach, and the, well the cleverness of Elvis Costello, this surprised with a return to form.  A couple of these songs can sit with the best he’s ever written without embarrassment.  His voice intact.  His angst could teach Beck’s melancholy a think or two.  Smart music direct from his heart to your gut.

 

9. Radio 4 – Gotham

Yep, it sure sounds like Gang of Four.  Yep, I sure liked Gang o’.  Yes, nobody else is political like this.  Yep, you can dance to it.  Yep, the sound is straight with no treatment.  Yep.

 

10. Elbow – Asleep in the Back

It was either this, or South, or Doves or Cranes.  This wins for me because its Brit-rock melancholy has a dash of jazz (Simple Minds with a touch of Traffic).  And doesn’t sound in any sense retro.  Indie in intent if pop-folk in product. 

 

11. Songs:ohia – Didn’t it rain

An intense earnestness that Low might want to match.  Improvisational in design and it does feel lose and “authentically” live and underproduced.  Simple sounds and rootsy arrangements… saved from alt. country-folk bird-brained stupor by dark and foreboding melodies and sad and emotional vocals.  Bitter more than sweet, but rich music that holds up well under multiple listenings.

 

12. Bright Eyes – Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil

Ok, he’s annoying and too young to be this good.  Ok, he could be the next Ryan Adams and I could hate him within a year.  Yes, the Dylan comparisons are trite.  The lo-fi quality of some of the cuts paired with the too-forced (calculated?) rough angry vocals make some of this truly unlistenable.  But every now and then the quality of the shape of the songs, the brilliant arrangements, the quality of lyrics and the hunger in the voice make you think, this could be a very, very important talent.  Or merely an American Gomez, not a bad thing either.  Heartland indie rock with heart.

 

13. Arktica – Or you could just go through

Less is the new more.  Minimal and cool, but with the necessary acoustic and vocal touches to make it new and not dated ambient.  In fact it is the vocals and songwrting, always rising out of easy soundscapes that make it sound human and current.  No one knows this band and I don’t have a clue as to why they sold single digits of this brilliant, likeable slo-core music.

 

14. Peter Gabriel – Up

The only reason it isn’t higher is that this is music ignored by the zeitgeist.  Although beautiful, his world’s music sounds a little locked in time, but then so does Stravinsky.  But if the arrangement is embedded and known (bedded down for the very long night), the voice and design of lyrics and artfulness of the songs cycle is classic Gabriel.  Which means it is rich in affect, chock full of profound and authentic emotion.  This is St. Peter’s Time Out of Mind.  The passing of time, the ineluctable rewards of growing up.

 

15. Interpol – Turn on the Bright Lights

Deliciously murky and dark music.  Retro-angst.  Beautifully produced, with incisively calculated allusions to various classic British sounds like Joy Division of My Bloody Valentine.  But these gazes are at career moves more than shoes.  Very New York in its cold ambition.  Sonic guitar of the Edge school, though slowed down enough to fit into a Tom Verlaine solo.  Pushy textures but with the song-writing chops to back it all up.

 

16. Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

Pushing the ambient electronic language to ever more soundtracked adventures in sound.  They don’t let their facility with created sound to mitigate their wealth of ideas.  It may be pretty music, but it is smart.  It may be comforting and mature, but is also wise.

 

17. Trail of Dead – Source Tags and Codes

A big and soaring sound that lost power with every listening.  At first, it sounded like the return of Big Country or Husker Du.  Dynamic and recognizable rock.  Punkish by turns, in fact this could be arena rock.  Bics up high.  Put your pipes in the air like you just don’t care.  Ambitious slacker music.  Tex-brit rock and roll.  Melody was the new black of the year, and this disc had lots of it (and sounded at times like the new Foo Fighters).  Part of the lowered shelf life was production values and choices.  They are supposed to be powerful live… this sounds like that’s probably true.  Gloomy, anxious and stately music.   Dignified excess.

 

18. Keith Fullerton Whitman – Playthroughs

White noise, clicks and buzzes, humming and ambient.  Both colder than Boards of Canada and  more emotional.  Strongly affecting for what sounds like a blender slowly breaking down.

 

19. David Grubbs – Ricketts and Scurvy

Chamber rock. Modulated and thoughtful.  Post-rock as art song, though with a stripped down instrumentation, and outré by melody and lyric more than texture or arrangement.  Tasty guitar playing.  Morning music, if the morning is calm, serious, and adult.  I always found his voice appealing, and here his singing seems better than ever.

 

20. Shalabi Effect – The Trial of St. Orange

Montreal exo-music theorists.  Broad and compositional.  Sometimes difficult to parse out the intent of the layers of mostly acoustic noise.  Sometimes spacious and graceful.  Perpetuating the serious intent of post-rockers like the first Tortoise with a sense on scraped-off newness.  Music for depression or delirium or deep thought.

 

The rest:

 

21. 1 Giant Leap
22. Joseph Arthur – Redemption’s Son
23. Low – Trust
24. Aluminm Group - Happyness
25. Sigor Ros – ( )
26. The Walkmen – Everyone who liked me is dead
27. +/-
28.  Foo Fighters – One by One
29. Guided by Voices
30. Pedro the Lion –  Control
31. Reindeer Section – Son of Evil Reindeer
32. DJ Shadow – Private Press
33. Bruce Sprinsteen – The Rising
34. Jim O’Rourke – Insignificance
35. p:ano – When It’s Dark It’s Summer
36. South
37. Luna – Romantica
38. Jim Vanderslice – Adventures of a Fourtracker
39. Cranes
40. Desaparecidos – Read Music Speak Spanish
41. Desert City Soundtrack – Contents of Distraction
42. Beth Orton – Day Breaker
43. Doves – The Last Broadcast
44. L’Altra – In the Afternoon
45. Future Sound of London – Isness
46. Frank Black and the Catholics - Devil's Workshop
47. Clinic – Walking with Thee
48. my morning jacket, chocolate and ice
49. Corner Shop – Handcream for a Generation
50. Godspeed You! Black Emperor-Yanqui U.X.O.

 

 

Das Lied von der Ehrde - Olga the recent refugee from Bohemia leaned over my crib while my parents were away in Aruba... she, damaged soul that she was with the mountainous rackovskies and cooked-cabbage breath, reached down to do the uncle ernie fiddle as she did her imitation of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, she had dressed as a man for the occasion. Indelible. To this day I shift uncomfortably anytime I hear anything even close to a minor key adagio.

Dunkel ist Das Leben, ist Der Tod!