25. Motion City Soundtrack - My Dinosaur Life
Early in the year, Motion City Soundtrack released their fourth studio album, My Dinosaur Life, an absurdly catchy collection of upbeat pop-punk tunes with a snarky (if somewhat geeky) sense of humor that should cement them as the latter-day wearers of the crown discarded by blink-182 (their reunion notwithstanding. they haven't made any new songs yet, and until I hear the new album my comment stands. Besides, Angels and Airwaves? Seriously?).
Lyrically, the album covers a lot of ground while mostly remaining all about girls (not that there's anything wrong with that). A relationship gone awry is compared to the destruction of Krypton ("Her Words Destroyed My Planet"), a b-horror movie of the sort certain of my friends enjoy ("Pulp Fiction"), and refers elsewhere to Ocarina of Time ("@!#?@!") and Busta Rhymes ("Stand Too Close," a song which, if it weren't catchy enough, features handclaps!), and rambles about his neuroses ("Hysteria"), and all the while, the band pumps out shining, driving punk that would make +44 jealous (Yeah. I went there).
24. Murder by Death - Good Morning, Magpie
Murder by Death's fifth album is a picture of a band embracing the Americana sound that was always hiding behind the corner, both lyrically and sonically. Bourbon and whiskey flow all over the album (As seen in the first two tracks, "Kentucky Bourbon," a charming little drinking song, and "As Long as There Is Whiskey In the World"), there's a whistling solo in "You Don't Miss Twice (When You're Shaving With a Knife)," which happens to be my second favorite title parenthetical of the year, and old fashioned bluegrass stomp on "Yes." If I were giving it an award (other than place #24, a tremendous award in and of itself), I would give it the "Album Most Like Something Mark Twain Would Have Listened To, Had There Been Electric Guitars And Such" award. What Beirut is French bordellos circa 1900, MbD is to Missouri circa 1870.
23. Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea
Brian Eno returns this year with another collection of ambient music tracks. While not the "inventor" of ambient music, Eno is certainly the reason anyone knows what it is and so this album is an interesting look at what the innovator has been creating of late. Sadly, nothing in this collection measures quite up to the... well, "intense" is certainly the wrong word, but close enough, the intensity, the impact if you will, of his earlier work (particularly Music for Airports), the pieces are well-crafted and interesting, and rewarding to repeat listens.
22. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky
Perhaps the doomiest album on the list this year (there's a reason I say perhaps, but we'll come to that later) is My Father Will Lead Me Up A Rope to the Sky, the latest offering from Swans, a band that has apparently been making music since the early 80s (aside from a 13 year hiatus) and about whose history I know practically nothing. Some words come to mind when thinking of this album: "bleak," "despair," and "torment" among them. But make no mistake, this is not black metal or doom rock, despite how it may come off initially. There's a certain country twang in this metal, yes, and some thick, sludgy, apocalyptic drums. The first song ("No Words/No Thoughts") begins with four minutes of post-rockesque intro before Michael Gira slurs into singing, with church bells throughout. Just to give you a taste, there's a delightful song (is that a didgeridoo?) co-sung by Gira's 3 year old daughter titled "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" and elsewhere, Gira imagines collecting every liar on Earth into a pyre and setting them alight ("Reeling the Liars In"). My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky is a difficult record to categorize beyond a sense of despair, of overwhelming bleakness, comprised of country sludge-rock and interludes that sound less like post-rock than like the end of the world. Also, it's amazing.
21. MGMT - Congratulations
MGMT's sophomore album makes the leap from "followers of Of Montreal" to fully-fledged psychedelic-pop makers in the tradition of Pink Floyd. Instead of doing the expected or the simple and making a follow-up composed of singles like "Time to Pretend," the lads made a complex psychedelia album with enough flourish, skill, and panache to indicate that the future will only bring better things. "I Found a Whistle" is the sort of innocent, playful pop song to which I refer, and it leads into the (mostly) stunning "Siberian Breaks," which, at 12:10, still manages to be cohesive and indeed, hold the two halves of the album together. The album flows and peaks and troughs right when you'd want just like any good drug trip should, and that makes it wonderful, and the joy that MGMT squeeze from their instruments is evident in every note.
