Top Ten Albums of 2008
At oregonblondie's urging, I’ve shoved aside my protests of "But I don’t know anything about music!" to bring you my top 10 albums of 2008. I’d love to upload these songs for you guys, but unfortunately, I don’t own any of them. I use Ruckus, which legally provides free music to college students at the cost of being unable to download them onto a device/upload them/etc. So instead, I’ve provided links to the videos on YouTube (some of them, actually, not videos at all) so you can hear a few of the songs and see if you think it’s worth it. And remember: music is always better when listened to LOUD. :D
Another important note: I didn’t actually listen to all that many complete albums this year, apparently. I tend to just go by the singles - those are usually the best songs, anyway. So it was kind of hard to get ten that I really liked. Which is why some of these might seem random.
10. Zox: Line in the Sand
Zox is a Rhode Island band with a fairly huge local following that is starting to hit it moderately big (in other words, you’ve never heard of them, but enough people have that these Brown grads aren’t using their fancy expensive educations). They put on a great live show, just over-the-top full of energy, lots of fun. Interestingly, the band is named after the drummer, John Zox. It’s harmless, high-energy alt-rock music that’s just a great lot of fun to dance to, and I kind of understand where all the fanatical Rhode Island Zox followers are coming from (at least, I understand why they go to all the shows!). Also, they use violin, which I always approve of.
Check out: Line in the Sand and Goodnight
9. Jason Mraz: We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things.
I...was kind of disappointed by this album, actually. It’s a very good album, very pretty and sweet, and "I’m Yours" is just absolutely lovely. But I miss the old Jason Mraz, of "Wordplay" and "The Remedy" and the absolute ridiculousness of the video for You and I Both. He was brilliant and creative and utterly original and a HUGE DORK, and I loved him for it. And that’s why this album is ranked so low: it’s very pretty and polished, easily melodic, with a few very cool jazzy touches, and I’d love it if I didn’t know him better, but I do. Jason Mraz, you’ve become, in your own words, an "unoriginal dum-dum". Bring back the wordplay! You can do both! Just look at On Love, in Sadness! (I still love you, I swear. That’s why I’m so upset. In fact, I kind of have a huge crush on you. Shh, don’t tell John Krasinski - he’ll get jealous.)
Check out: I’m Yours and Make It Mine
8. Ludo: You’re Awful, I Love You
Ludo is my best friend Julie’s new favorite band, and I kind of love them too. They’re so deliciously campy, dorky and ridiculous and clever. The album as a whole isn’t fantastic, but there are some brilliant songs on it, and I basically just love them for being so high-school-drama-club-who-sing-a-capella-on-the-side (so, basically, half of Brown’s theatre department, and we all adore them, so). Their harmonizing is brilliant, and that’s something you almost never see now. Even better, they don’t take themselves seriously at all, and that makes this album pure campy fun.
Check out: Love Me Dead and Love Me Dead: Toothbrushing and Lake Pontchartrain (sorry about that video - best quality sound I could find)
7. MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
MGMT is pretty popular over here, which makes a lot of sense. They’re also pretty popular at home, which makes less sense, except that they’re also a really good band. The album itself is pretty bland, inoffensive trance-rock, something I wouldn’t have thought about if it hadn’t yielded three pretty spectacular singles. And by "pretty spectacular", I mean "three of my top 20 songs of the year". So I had to acknowledge that somehow! And a note: the only video I actually like is "Electric Feel", but that one’s pretty awesome, if also mildly racist. It’s also apparently exactly like northern California. But anyway, the others kind of sacrifice quality for trippiness, while "Electric Feel" combines them to make something that’s actually really cool.
Check out: Time to Pretend and Electric Feel and Kids
6. Fall Out Boy: Folie à Deux
Yeah, I know. Look, guys, I said I know. But this is really a very good album. I’ve placed Panic higher because that was such a departure from what they’ve done before while this stays within the same sound, but I think this is actually better, taken on its own. It’s catchy, cohesive, melodically rich, and lyrically interesting, and I had a really hard time picking specific tracks for you to check out because each one has something memorable and original. But mostly, Patrick Stump’s voice is fucking gorgeous. Really listen to him. He’s clear, quick, and rich without being throaty, and his timbre is perfect. Really, the best part of this album is that it’s the perfect showcase for his voice, more so than anything’s been in the past. (Fucking gorgeous, guys, and I don’t say that lightly.)
Check out: Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes (which I’d make the next single, if it were up to me) and Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet and What a Catch, Donnie (because it includes, to great effect, lines from their previous hits)
5. Panic at the Disco: Pretty. Odd.
To be honest, I thought this album was pretty boring, with very few stand-out songs, even though the album title describes it pretty damn well: it's pretty and odd. But I was proud of the band for making it, so it goes on here. It’s different. They kind of sound like a rockier Beatles knock-off (most evident during the 30 seconds at the end of "Nine in the Afternoon" that were cut from the radio edit), but as oregonblondie put it, that’s better than a Fall Out Boy clone, and more importantly, the change and the synthesis of everything they’ve been says something wonderful about them: it says that they can grow, that maybe, for their next album, they’ll be something utterly original. And I’m all for that. Also, "That Green Gentleman" is a flat-out brilliant song that had 8 or so snobbish alt-rock radio staffers belting the lyrics into each others’ faces at 3 AM and collapsing with satisfaction at the end. No matter what they do next, that will always be my favorite Panic song. It wouldn’t be enough to make the album on its own, but for these boys, with what the album signifies, it is. (Also: Brendan Urie is like Patrick Stump in that he has a fucking gorgeous voice. Sorry for all the swearing, but honestly, that’s the only way it expresses itself in my head. It’s also capitalized and punctuated: "Fucking. Gorgeous. Voice.")
Check out: That Green Gentleman and Nine in the Afternoon
4. Death Cab for Cutie: Narrow Stairs
I really don’t want to trust this band’s name. Every time I see it, I cringe a little. But there’s no denying that the music is really good. I read an article that described them as the perfect blend of marketability and true self-vision and artistic independence, and this is quite true. “Narrow Stairs” is just elegant and lovely, sweet melodies with a few old-fashioned hooks and the occasional surprise touch of rock, most visible when they play live: we had them for the first show of our Summer Concert Series, and they were just excellent, musically intense even on the lighter songs. The album is a little toned down from that, but it’s a little more elegant. They've done an excellent job taking rather depressing lyrics and making them cheery and optimistic (see "No Sunlight"). And I am unexpectedly charmed by the short "You Can Do Better Than Me".
Check out: I Will Possess Your Heart (the full eight and a half minutes, guys, because it is infinitely better than the radio edit, a surprising feat for four minutes of repetitive instrumentals; also, watch for Notre Dame at 2:04 and subsequent shots!) and Cath…
3. Janelle Monae: Metropolis: The Chase Suite
Guys, this is a concept album about androids. And it’s brilliant. Janelle Monae is the girl with the crazy hair in the Gap Christmas commercials (also, see my icon!) and she’s pretty frickin’ adorable, to be perfectly honest. And she’s got a lovely rich melodic voice and hardcore tap skills. And, with the exception of the last two songs on the album (not part of the concept, and I don’t really like them, to be honest), this album is melodically and thematically unified with beautifully original hooks for each song. I can see why this didn’t become hugely popular (did I mention it’s a concept album about androids?), but it deserved to be. My only problem is that it’s a little short at 7 songs, and since the first is a spoken introduction and I don’t really count the last two, that’s 4 songs. But they’re four fantastic songs.
Check out: Many Moons and Sincerely, Jane
2. The Killers: Day & Age
Before this album, all I knew about the Killers came from their singles. So this album was a new experience for me and it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I’ve talked a little about it before, and I still think it’s great. I also still think that "Human" is heavy-handed in the way I would’ve loved when I was a stupidly romantic 12-year-old but think is a little too obvious now at a pragmatically romantic 20, but that doesn’t really matter. This album hits one of my most important criteria for a good album: it’s cohesive without sounding all the same. (Not THE most important, because if it’s cohesive but sounds terrible, I don’t care.) They use a lot of the same chords and themes throughout all the songs, but I can always distinguish one song from another, even on shuffle. This is epic in miniature, rock with a touch of the ethereal, unusual and not radio-ready but easy on the ears all the same. Great album.
Check out: Losing Touch and Spaceman and This Is Your Life and The World We Live In
1. Coldplay: Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends (Bonus: Prospekt’s March EP)
Yeah, you knew this was coming. My epic love for this album and its accompanying EP are well-documented here, and I still love it, and I still think this is hands-down the best album of the year. It may be my favorite album of all time. It’s just, God. Epic, epic, epic. Like Day & Age, it’s also thematically unified but with distinct songs, but the whole thing is just so much more intense. And! Apparently this is the year of successfully trying new things, because Coldplay tried something new, something they’d never done before: they wrote actual rock music with unusual instruments! They wrote mythology, not love songs! They took a risk, and it paid off in a BIG way! This album, this is The Dark Knight of music: hugely hyped, huge expectations, but so epic and yet so finely-tuned that it exceeded all of them. I just want to hug it. If you check out one thing on this list, make it this album, even if you don’t like Coldplay. Especially if you don’t like Coldplay. This is just genius. (And, again, hate all the videos but "Lost!", which I adore for its brilliant cinematography.)
Check out: Viva La Vida and Lost! and Violet Hill (which was the single where I first said, "This is gonna be different. This is gonna be good.")
Bonus EP: Rainy Day and Lovers in Japan (the better half of a two-part song from the real album) and Life in Technicolor ii (a song off the original, but with lyrics added; I like it both ways)
And there you have them. Let me know what you think!
Next, I kind of want to do my Top 10 Music Videos of 2008. Of course, it may not be possible: so many! I do not have time for this, but it’s so much more fun than writing papers. Damn.
Another important note: I didn’t actually listen to all that many complete albums this year, apparently. I tend to just go by the singles - those are usually the best songs, anyway. So it was kind of hard to get ten that I really liked. Which is why some of these might seem random.
10. Zox: Line in the Sand
Zox is a Rhode Island band with a fairly huge local following that is starting to hit it moderately big (in other words, you’ve never heard of them, but enough people have that these Brown grads aren’t using their fancy expensive educations). They put on a great live show, just over-the-top full of energy, lots of fun. Interestingly, the band is named after the drummer, John Zox. It’s harmless, high-energy alt-rock music that’s just a great lot of fun to dance to, and I kind of understand where all the fanatical Rhode Island Zox followers are coming from (at least, I understand why they go to all the shows!). Also, they use violin, which I always approve of.
Check out: Line in the Sand and Goodnight
9. Jason Mraz: We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things.
I...was kind of disappointed by this album, actually. It’s a very good album, very pretty and sweet, and "I’m Yours" is just absolutely lovely. But I miss the old Jason Mraz, of "Wordplay" and "The Remedy" and the absolute ridiculousness of the video for You and I Both. He was brilliant and creative and utterly original and a HUGE DORK, and I loved him for it. And that’s why this album is ranked so low: it’s very pretty and polished, easily melodic, with a few very cool jazzy touches, and I’d love it if I didn’t know him better, but I do. Jason Mraz, you’ve become, in your own words, an "unoriginal dum-dum". Bring back the wordplay! You can do both! Just look at On Love, in Sadness! (I still love you, I swear. That’s why I’m so upset. In fact, I kind of have a huge crush on you. Shh, don’t tell John Krasinski - he’ll get jealous.)
Check out: I’m Yours and Make It Mine
8. Ludo: You’re Awful, I Love You
Ludo is my best friend Julie’s new favorite band, and I kind of love them too. They’re so deliciously campy, dorky and ridiculous and clever. The album as a whole isn’t fantastic, but there are some brilliant songs on it, and I basically just love them for being so high-school-drama-club-who-sing-a-capella-on-the-side (so, basically, half of Brown’s theatre department, and we all adore them, so). Their harmonizing is brilliant, and that’s something you almost never see now. Even better, they don’t take themselves seriously at all, and that makes this album pure campy fun.
Check out: Love Me Dead and Love Me Dead: Toothbrushing and Lake Pontchartrain (sorry about that video - best quality sound I could find)
7. MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
MGMT is pretty popular over here, which makes a lot of sense. They’re also pretty popular at home, which makes less sense, except that they’re also a really good band. The album itself is pretty bland, inoffensive trance-rock, something I wouldn’t have thought about if it hadn’t yielded three pretty spectacular singles. And by "pretty spectacular", I mean "three of my top 20 songs of the year". So I had to acknowledge that somehow! And a note: the only video I actually like is "Electric Feel", but that one’s pretty awesome, if also mildly racist. It’s also apparently exactly like northern California. But anyway, the others kind of sacrifice quality for trippiness, while "Electric Feel" combines them to make something that’s actually really cool.
Check out: Time to Pretend and Electric Feel and Kids
6. Fall Out Boy: Folie à Deux
Yeah, I know. Look, guys, I said I know. But this is really a very good album. I’ve placed Panic higher because that was such a departure from what they’ve done before while this stays within the same sound, but I think this is actually better, taken on its own. It’s catchy, cohesive, melodically rich, and lyrically interesting, and I had a really hard time picking specific tracks for you to check out because each one has something memorable and original. But mostly, Patrick Stump’s voice is fucking gorgeous. Really listen to him. He’s clear, quick, and rich without being throaty, and his timbre is perfect. Really, the best part of this album is that it’s the perfect showcase for his voice, more so than anything’s been in the past. (Fucking gorgeous, guys, and I don’t say that lightly.)
Check out: Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes (which I’d make the next single, if it were up to me) and Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet and What a Catch, Donnie (because it includes, to great effect, lines from their previous hits)
5. Panic at the Disco: Pretty. Odd.
To be honest, I thought this album was pretty boring, with very few stand-out songs, even though the album title describes it pretty damn well: it's pretty and odd. But I was proud of the band for making it, so it goes on here. It’s different. They kind of sound like a rockier Beatles knock-off (most evident during the 30 seconds at the end of "Nine in the Afternoon" that were cut from the radio edit), but as oregonblondie put it, that’s better than a Fall Out Boy clone, and more importantly, the change and the synthesis of everything they’ve been says something wonderful about them: it says that they can grow, that maybe, for their next album, they’ll be something utterly original. And I’m all for that. Also, "That Green Gentleman" is a flat-out brilliant song that had 8 or so snobbish alt-rock radio staffers belting the lyrics into each others’ faces at 3 AM and collapsing with satisfaction at the end. No matter what they do next, that will always be my favorite Panic song. It wouldn’t be enough to make the album on its own, but for these boys, with what the album signifies, it is. (Also: Brendan Urie is like Patrick Stump in that he has a fucking gorgeous voice. Sorry for all the swearing, but honestly, that’s the only way it expresses itself in my head. It’s also capitalized and punctuated: "Fucking. Gorgeous. Voice.")
Check out: That Green Gentleman and Nine in the Afternoon
4. Death Cab for Cutie: Narrow Stairs
I really don’t want to trust this band’s name. Every time I see it, I cringe a little. But there’s no denying that the music is really good. I read an article that described them as the perfect blend of marketability and true self-vision and artistic independence, and this is quite true. “Narrow Stairs” is just elegant and lovely, sweet melodies with a few old-fashioned hooks and the occasional surprise touch of rock, most visible when they play live: we had them for the first show of our Summer Concert Series, and they were just excellent, musically intense even on the lighter songs. The album is a little toned down from that, but it’s a little more elegant. They've done an excellent job taking rather depressing lyrics and making them cheery and optimistic (see "No Sunlight"). And I am unexpectedly charmed by the short "You Can Do Better Than Me".
Check out: I Will Possess Your Heart (the full eight and a half minutes, guys, because it is infinitely better than the radio edit, a surprising feat for four minutes of repetitive instrumentals; also, watch for Notre Dame at 2:04 and subsequent shots!) and Cath…
3. Janelle Monae: Metropolis: The Chase Suite
Guys, this is a concept album about androids. And it’s brilliant. Janelle Monae is the girl with the crazy hair in the Gap Christmas commercials (also, see my icon!) and she’s pretty frickin’ adorable, to be perfectly honest. And she’s got a lovely rich melodic voice and hardcore tap skills. And, with the exception of the last two songs on the album (not part of the concept, and I don’t really like them, to be honest), this album is melodically and thematically unified with beautifully original hooks for each song. I can see why this didn’t become hugely popular (did I mention it’s a concept album about androids?), but it deserved to be. My only problem is that it’s a little short at 7 songs, and since the first is a spoken introduction and I don’t really count the last two, that’s 4 songs. But they’re four fantastic songs.
Check out: Many Moons and Sincerely, Jane
2. The Killers: Day & Age
Before this album, all I knew about the Killers came from their singles. So this album was a new experience for me and it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I’ve talked a little about it before, and I still think it’s great. I also still think that "Human" is heavy-handed in the way I would’ve loved when I was a stupidly romantic 12-year-old but think is a little too obvious now at a pragmatically romantic 20, but that doesn’t really matter. This album hits one of my most important criteria for a good album: it’s cohesive without sounding all the same. (Not THE most important, because if it’s cohesive but sounds terrible, I don’t care.) They use a lot of the same chords and themes throughout all the songs, but I can always distinguish one song from another, even on shuffle. This is epic in miniature, rock with a touch of the ethereal, unusual and not radio-ready but easy on the ears all the same. Great album.
Check out: Losing Touch and Spaceman and This Is Your Life and The World We Live In
1. Coldplay: Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends (Bonus: Prospekt’s March EP)
Yeah, you knew this was coming. My epic love for this album and its accompanying EP are well-documented here, and I still love it, and I still think this is hands-down the best album of the year. It may be my favorite album of all time. It’s just, God. Epic, epic, epic. Like Day & Age, it’s also thematically unified but with distinct songs, but the whole thing is just so much more intense. And! Apparently this is the year of successfully trying new things, because Coldplay tried something new, something they’d never done before: they wrote actual rock music with unusual instruments! They wrote mythology, not love songs! They took a risk, and it paid off in a BIG way! This album, this is The Dark Knight of music: hugely hyped, huge expectations, but so epic and yet so finely-tuned that it exceeded all of them. I just want to hug it. If you check out one thing on this list, make it this album, even if you don’t like Coldplay. Especially if you don’t like Coldplay. This is just genius. (And, again, hate all the videos but "Lost!", which I adore for its brilliant cinematography.)
Check out: Viva La Vida and Lost! and Violet Hill (which was the single where I first said, "This is gonna be different. This is gonna be good.")
Bonus EP: Rainy Day and Lovers in Japan (the better half of a two-part song from the real album) and Life in Technicolor ii (a song off the original, but with lyrics added; I like it both ways)
And there you have them. Let me know what you think!
Next, I kind of want to do my Top 10 Music Videos of 2008. Of course, it may not be possible: so many! I do not have time for this, but it’s so much more fun than writing papers. Damn.