Best Music 2004

Harper’s Top 40 of 2004 – God kept me living, and music kept me alive one more year.  Smells like silver-haired spirit.

 

 

1.    P.J. Harvey – Uh Huh Her

Bile is both sexy and timeless.  Head banging is the same gesture as nodding out, only with a little more overt anger and purpose.  Probably a quirky choice for number one, but after all the nu-folk and ambient cerebral electronics and sappy vegan rock and Ibiza- pop in my music this year, I needed red meat and PJ  always has delivered the raw flesh.  Thank you PJ, thank you rock and roll.  Pour that fucking salt of the earth in my natal wound. “Mommy put your needle down.”

 

2.    Animal Collective – Sung Tongs

Short sweet and sour songs.  Sometimes throwaway sketches, lazy or ephemeral ideas for music. Psychic placeholders.  Vocals as calm and friendly as your favorite vacation.  On the beach after the destruction of commercial music… ambitious post-apocalypse beach boys with secret strains of Nino Rota.  La Dolce Vita as Baghdad glows in suicidal bomb light and the Dow flatlines.

 

3.    The Arcade – Funeral

Kitchen rock.  A compendium of pop skills-sets.  You name the favorite, and you’ll hear it  “quoted” within three tracks.  A dash of Bowie and a splash of Pavement., though just using the language they grew up with…refreshingly unassuming while being derivative .  A brilliant work, irresistible, cagey, classic pop sensibilities and drive.  I lose interest 2/3 of the way through every song.  Astonishingly promising music that teases and turns itself off like an iron left on.  So gifted at re-creating the past of my favorite music, the songs tire me.  A spectacular debut.  A pot begging to be watched .

 

4.    Blithe Sons – Arm of the Starfish

Analog ambient.  Californian as Mendocino fog.  Heads bent over guitars, shoe-gazing in reverence more than method.  Strumming to synchronize your pulse.  Continually and earnestly seeking some kind of recognizable musical structure mostly without success.  Repetitive to no purpose.  Playable late at night or in crises… sonic laudanum conjured in the Eternal VW bus once again stalled in the underpass.  I smell sage.

 

5.    Dungen – Ta Det Lugnt

Scandanavian psychedelic and unkempt.  Lots of layers for varied weather.  Everytime you listen you hear a wholly different kind of music being put on.  Adolescent and stoned, collegiate and studious, obsessed and inevitable.  I sense  I am probably lucky I can’t understand Swedish, the mystery of the singer’s stories are best left there.  Best  tribute to the adenoids ever.  I don’t know whether it is a soundtrack to a silly  Roger Corman goth horror flick or Danzig’s garage tapes or re-discovered studio masters to a long lost Arthur Lee trip to and in Oslo.   

 

6.    Wilco – A Ghost is Born

I had a measurably adverse reaction at first… seemed a little wimpy, and baroque for one of my favorite bands of all time.  Saw it performed live and it straightened out for me.  Too clever by half, though with a redeeming the love of what’s left of rock and roll.    Handshake drugs all gone.  The ashtray still has tales to tell though.  Still cigarette smoke hanging in the drapes.

 

7.    Sufjan Stevens – Seven Swans

Art songs.  Who can follow the lieder?  Wish he had a bit more of a sense of humor, but his stark voice is a sharpening edge, his lyrics are Big Picture serious, and I think he probably really does pray to Jehovah-God on a daily basis.  Emo Dylan…. The smooth folk ilsounds of the 21^st century. God bless his abstemious little heart of darkness.  Count the bible verses.  Count your blessings in any and all cases.  Maybe seven? Burning offerings, silly boy.

 

8.    Califone – Heron King Blues

Rootsy brew of danceable, trance-like folk rock.  Make-out music with bittersweet banjos greasing the seductive wheels.  An aural salve treated with clanging sounds collected from dives into Nashville’s dumpster or Kid A.  Corn-pone dreamy lap pop with Blonde-on-Blonde era vocals.  Calculated and calming.  Drum circles on coastal bluffs, drive back in the brand new truck.  World music for the busy residents of the Potomac, Portland, and Jackson Hole. I smell Patagonia.

 

9.    Sonic Youth – Sonic Nurse

Not only back in form, but now they’ve outlasted all those they influenced to sound again unique and important.  Real rock art.  Their best since the 80’s.

 

10. Riot on an Empty Street – Kings of Convenience

Absurdly spot-on knock-offs, maybe even channeling, of Simon and Garfunkel by barely post-adolescent Norwegian wunderkind.  Production sparkly clean and a love for pop music so deep that it overwhelms the necessary irony that this kind of sublime pap inescapably invokes. 

 

11. Lanterna – Highways

The work I played more often than any this year.  I let it repeat in the car for weeks at a time. Embarrassingly Starbucks-compilation aromatherapy or soundtrack for a road movie placed in the New Mexico high desert.  The Edge –clone noodles heroically with the scent of pinon.  Peaceful dinner music for the marriage supper of the lamb held in redwood forests and santa fe nouvelle cafes.  I can’t help being who I am.  Can you? High volume or low, the malleable feast my days have become.  Why does this supple pretty music ready my heart?  For what?

 

12. Junior Boys – Last Exit

I wonder when I started liking dance music, when it started sounding like Eno?  Chilly lap-pop for the après-club, crisply spacious, the classic combination of enervation and tense need.  These boys werk their kraft with little sense of humor which actually means the joke doesn’t stale.  They’re Canadian but sing in a faux-german accent the way Mick sings in a faux –Mississippi drawl, with similar intent and to similar good effect.

 

 

13. Karate – Pockets

The only thing I liked this year that could be compared to Steely Dan.  Jazzy music with a voice of a singer who swings in the syncopated swing of someone’s misspent youth.  Young hippie girls spinning on the summer lawns, boys with muttonchops bopping their heads with hands in their pockets.  Jamming to the smell of armpits, patchouli, and an afternoon cocktail in Sausalito.  Seventh chord prophecy for the very, very young.  Let’s trade partners and solos.  Includes an homage to Pennsylvania and a caution about credit card debt.

 

14. Architecture in Helsinki – Fingers Crossed

A little goes a long way and this Aussie group enamored of Europop hedges on twee.  Fortunately this is more a list of possible pop ideas than pop songs with cuts lasting  not more than 90 seconds. Chill tubas and retro-marimbas cover the Claudine Longet vocals with simple ease.

 

15. Blue Nile – High

In the tradition.  High rock culture in the progressive-Scottish style that never disappoints.  The third release in the last 25 years by the greatest unknown band in Brit-pop history.  Classic sounding just a bit dusty, if this were only 1987….

                    

16. Sun Kil Moon – Ghosts of the Great Highway

Mark Koselek is a better songwriter than just about anyone and dips deep into a singer-songwriter tradition of broken-hearted troubadours (Hank Williams, Jackson Browne, Jeff Tweedy).  One of the most beautiful voices in american pop.  Value-added Neil Young crunchy power chording.  Hmmm, why isn’t this better.

 

17. Savath and Savalas – Apro’pt

SF DJ type moves to Barcelona.  Mature southern-euro-pop results with a dash of  Buckley’s grace.  Sexy woman can sing anything and soothing castellano self-assurance is good for late nights and wine bars.  OK, I admit, I’d love a month in Ibiza, is that so wrong?  I smell hash and brie.

 

18. Interpol – Antics

Urbane and energetic and very, very white.  Strummy guitars, style, and 80’s sonic structure, they deserve to be the rock stars they pose as.

 

19. Hayden – Elk Lake Serenade

Earnest nu-folk Americana (as only Canadians can do).  Pedal-steel emo. Waltzes and harmonicas.  Lost loves and the smell of vegan cookies baking (although there is a lyric that references creme brulee).

 

20. A.C. Newman – Slow Wonder

Seamless, faultless pop music, with polished up Nuggets from the garages of Van Nuys (1969),  Boston (1981), Seattle (1997).  Wins the Grad Student of Pop Music.  Comfort food. 

 

21. The Delays – Faded Seaside Glamor

22. Tres Cosas – Juana Molina

23. Erlend Oye – D.J. Kicks

24. Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News

25. Fennesz – Venice

26. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Abbatoir Blues

27. Futureheads – Futureheads

28. !!! – Louden up  Now

29. Pinback – Summer in Abbaddon

30. Xiu xiu – Fabulous Muscles

31. Kinski - Don’t Climb on and Take the Holy Water – Kinski

32. The Libertines – The Libertines

33. The Walkmen – bows and Arrows

34. cLOUDDEAD – Ten

35. Los Lobos - Ride

36. Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes - TV On The Radio

37. When it Falls – Zero 7

38. Guided by Voices – Half Smiles of the Decomposed

39. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Virthulegu forsetar

40. Max Richter – The Blue notebooks

41. Snow Patrol – Final Straw