A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #6 - The Archandroid

Janelle Monae is ridiculously beautiful. An angelic face with a voice to match. In the show I saw her at, her movements were smooth and calculated. She is always in control, and owns the spotlight. The album she released this year reflects that control and beauty, almost to a fault. But there is no denying the ambition. If The ArchAndroid is a taste of what's to come, she will be a star among stars.

For now, though, we'll settle for an extremely complex genre-stuffing album. Classical intros? Check. Psychedelic trip-outs? Yep. ATL crunk? Uh huh. Honestly, it would be faster to name the pop influences that don't show up than to name the ones that do. It can almost be overwhelming. You gotta really listen to this album. Passive background noise this ain't. But the consequence of this celestial jukebox style that surrounds a strange Asmovian robot love story is Janelle the woman is distant. It doesn't make this record bad, obviously. But it makes me want more of her.
One moment that bucks this trend is at the end of "Say You'll Go" where Janelle vamps over a simple piano as she sings a simple lullaby to her lover. Very powerful stuff. And because of the it's sci-fi surroundings, it's that much more powerful.
Since this album is Suite 2 & 3 of a larger story, it ends kind of like Empire Strikes Back. You know you've experienced something special, but wanting closure. What the hell happens next? I'm looking forward to Janelle's next step. She has the chops to put her in the pantheon of great R&B freakout artists like Prince and Sly Stone. But she has to remove the facade and open up about real emotions. Until then, this is one amazing album from someone so young.

A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #7 - Crazy For You

Of the wave of west coast dreamy surfer pop bands to bubble up this year, Best Coast is the most perfectly named. They were the best. I'll try not to waste words with this review since there isn't a wasted note in this compact confessional.

Much like last year's breakout debut by The XX, Crazy For You is a bedroom confessional. It's just done by a girl who grew up on Pet Sounds over a guy who grew up on Joy Division.

And Bethany Constantino is the star here. Her voice pulls from country crooners like Cline and Lynn, but a little rougher from the bong smoke. Her diary is filled with plenty of hearts over i-s and plenty of millennial self-doubt. By the end, you just wanna hold her hand.

To name best songs just doesn't make sense on this album. They are pretty much interchangeable, and all like-able. But the sum of their parts makes something surprisingly special for those days you harken back to young lust.

A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #8 - ODDBLOOD

I was lucky enough to see Yeasayer twice this year. Once at Lollapalooza, and once at Austin City Limits. Both shows were in the mid afternoon, which for some strange reason worked perfectly. Who knew Indian-infused psychedelic dance rock would sound so good in the sunlight? I think it's because you can't hide in the daytime behind theatrics. Either you have the songs or not. On ODDBLOOD, Yeasayer have the songs.
Let's skip first track 'The Children', which has the distinction of being the worst song on a good album all year. It removes all the best things about this group (soaring vocals, great melodies) and leaves just a mess of distorted noise. I didn't like this album for months after the first listen because of the spray this skunk left. Luckily, I kept coming back to it because the rest of the album is wonderful.
The first song to grab me was 'O.N.E.'. It quickly became my go-to song to crank up with the top down driving home for work. A truly cathartic experience of adrenaline in musical form. Then, I heard 'Madder Red' live for the first time. With waves of harmonies flowing over me and pulsing bass shaking my core, I was lifted to another level of musical awareness.
I know it sounds new-agey. But there is a beautiful mystical side to this album. It has some notable flaws where experimentation goes a little too far. In the end, those spots are just uncomfortable yoga poses on your way to enlightenment.

A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #9 - Body Talk Pt. 1

Are women dressed like futuristic robots that sexy? It seemed like all major dance-pop fembots thought so in 2010. Out of all of them, the tongue and cheek space age delivery of Robyn was the only one that showed a fun side that fit with the progressive clicks and hisses. Out of her 352 (or 4) releases just this year, the Body Talk Pt. 1 actually works the best as an album.

It's more of a long EP, which works perfectly for dance pop. Lady Gaga made the template with The Fame Monster last year, and Robyn nailed it. With only 8 songs (plus a throw-away remix) there's zero fat. Just great dance tracks that play to the heart as much as the feet.

Plus, the sequencing is perfect. All the songs are on the final Body Talk release, along with the other solid songs from BT2&3. But they are in a weird order that just doesn't work for me. It could be because I played the first one so much long before the final installment came out. I think more than that, there's just more songs that are similar enough that water down the good cuts on the long version. Plus, not having "Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do" as the opener is travesty. That song was meant to bat leadoff for a pop song murderer's row.

I also prefer the stripped back version of Dancing On My Own. It's a little more deep and a little less top 40. Also, the acoustic "Hang With Me" really lets you hear what a wondrous instrument Robyn has.

Of the first 6 dance tracks, "None Of Dim" sounds like a true revolutionary call to the dance floor. A lot of this album is about release, but this one is about escape. Put it on, and runaway with the beat. Don't worry about getting lost. Robyn will be your guide.

A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #10 - King Of The Beach

Wavves second album is a celebration youthful folly, man, that straddles the line between serious commentary and pile of shit kind of like a long, rambling, run-on sentence that has it's moments of introspection but can't be taken seriously because the author is was so fucking high when they started down the rabbit hole that they don't know which way is up.

It's got noise, jingles, dopy titles, druggie paranoia and somehow at its core there's superb songwriting that brings out a sincerity not found in a lot of up and coming acts. Nathan Williams has some chops, and he's doing his best early Green Day impression all the way to the bank. Will he end up doing 40 nights of Broadway like Billie Joe in his 40s? Well, right now it'd be hard to bet he'll even make it alive to next year. For now, I'll enjoy the great surf punk on "King Of The Beach" and the exuberance on "Take On The World". This record may be the Jackass of 2010, but it sure is fun to watch it kick some of the overly serious records in the balls.

A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #11 - This Is Happening

The latest from LCD Soundsystem suffers from it's own set of extremely high expectations. Coming into the year, there wasn't a record with more anticipation than this one to me. After all, Sound Of Silver was so fucking good, it ended up in my top five albums if last decade, and was consistantly the source for my personal soundtrack for the past few years. It worked so well since the songs had depth, but were also so damn catchy. Could James Murphy pull off that mastery again?

The right answer is yes. This is happening is an exceptional album. From the buildup on opener "Dance Yourself Clean" to epic closer "Home", the album is crafted to make you think, emote, and of corse dance. But unfortunately the last album was so ridiculous that even this excellent shot couldn't reach those stellar heights. For example, if you put track 1 from each album against each other, then the two track twos against each other, etc, etc, This Is Happening would get trounced.

Don't think for a minute that I don't see the irony in my comments above. Murphy addresses it directly in the wonderfully funny "You Wanted A Hit". He basically bitch slaps hipsters like me for their criticism of his work. And deservedly so.

Bottom line is an average LCD album is better than most, and this one is better than average. That's why it made The Baker's Dozen.

BTW - The pic is from their show in Dallas. One of my favorites of the year. Only way it would have been better is if it wasn't on a school night. The show had lots of disco ball, and lots of cowbell. Win-Win.

A Baker's Dozen for 2010 #12 - Broken Bells

Broken Bells - S/T

When I first got into alternative music in the early 90s, I liked bands like Pearl Jam and Counting Crows (don't judge), but I really fell in love with the alternative dance sound of Depeche Mode and Erasure. The songs I liked the most were the ones that incorporated both synths and the organic sounds of acoustic guitar. To this day, "A Little Respect" and Electronic's "Get The Message" still count as favorites. For some reason, that sound is rarely used today. So as soon as the first track of Broken Bells debut kicked in, I had a huge nostalgia rush back to those synth-pop favorites.

More than that, this album is the best production Danger Mouse has done to date. It continues his signature sound, but takes it in more interesting places than the Gnarls Barkley or even his Beck production could go. The secret weapon is James Mercer's guitar. He takes the brainy pop of The Shins, and places it comfortably into a cocoon of 50s filtered synths. It's not the deepest album, which works. These master craftsmen keep the melancholy light and fun. Seriousness would have weighted it down and made it less powerful of an experience.

A Baker's Dozen For 2010 - #13

This is the first my posts about The 13 best albums of the year. Of all the good music this year, I feel only these baker's dozen deserve in-depth analysis. So with that, here we go...

Heaven Is Whenever - The Hold Steady

It's been easy to call Hold Steady albums epic in the past. The first thing you feel from the opening song of Heaven Is Whenever is this album will be a little different. Sure, their signature best-bar-band sound is in tact. But the best songs on this album like "Sweet Part Of The City" and "The Weekenders" have a subtle touch. When I saw them live this summer, it actually helped their set out tremendously. Now they have a handful of classic slow burners to pepper in between all the beer swigging favorites. It created a nice ebb and flow they were missing before.

I especially love "We Can Get Together". A song about the mystical moments created with music flowing from vinyl to needle to speaker to the space between us? It's music geek porn. It works so well because Craig Finn is an obvious music geek himself. He clearly knows the feeling when a track 'don't sound that simple any more'. It could be because you learn about the guys who wrote the song, or it could be you taking the track and adding it to your own life's soundtrack. No matter the reason, to true music masochists those songs do become our heaven.

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