This is what you’ve all been waiting for, right?
THE GOOD: Nos. 50-41 would have made an awesome alternate-universe top 10, what with Marnie Stern, Ponytail, High Places, and Beach House all being within. Alas.
THE BAD: I will not quibble with the No. 1 choice and the reasons for its placement being wholly attributed to its comforting throwback nature (”The threads of Brian Wilson’s intricate coastal pop, Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, Grateful Dead jams, and other influences are masterfully synthesized in the band’s harmonies and simply orchestrated but constantly shifting instrumental arrangements”… “pastoral tendencies”); instead, I will just chalk its absurdly high placement up to “yet another reason why this year needs to be put out to pasture ASAP.”
THE WHAAA? Those who “follow” Pitchfork as a hobby probably won’t be surprised by any of the picks for the top 10—the fake ‘Fork top 10 posted by the NME earlier this week, which was reportedly based off the site’s highest-numbered reviews of the year, had a remarkable overlap with the real one. It even got No Age’s No. 3 ranking right! (The only album from the proposed top 10 that didn’t make the real one: Fucked Up’s The Chemistry Of Common Life, which came in at No. 17.)
1. Fleet Foxes, Sun Giant EP / Fleet Foxes
2. Portishead, Third
3. No Age, Nouns
4. Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours
5. Deerhunter, Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
6. TV On The Radio, Dear Science
7. Vampire Weekend
8. M83, Saturdays = Youth
9. Hercules & Love Affair
10. DJ/rupture, Uproot
11. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
12. Lindstrøm, Where You Go I Go Too
13. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part I: Fourth World War
14. Air France, No Way Down
15. Crystal Castles
16. Vivian Girls
17. Fucked Up, The Chemistry Of Common Life
18. The Mae Shi, HLLYH
19. The Walkmen, You & Me
20. Fuck Buttons, Street Horrrsing
21. Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak
22. Santogold
23. Hot Chip, Made In The Dark
24. Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna
25. Titus Andronicus, The Airing Of Grievances
(26-50 are at the link.)
The 50 Best Albums Of 2008 [Pitchfork]
@RaptorAvatar: Please, please explain the appeal of Titus Andronicus — I dj’d a show with them earlier in the year and wanted to DIE. They were so miserably, woefully bad.
i can understand why music fans like the fleet foxes and i don’t really have any grudge with them as musicians. they’re just doing their thing.
but from a music critic perspective, the whole phenomenon boggles my mind. i mean, p4k basically admits to its own critical laziness with their summary of the album. comfortable throwback 60’s pop with not an ounce of effort required. that’s fine if you’re spin or rolling stone. but i think what pisses me and a lot of other people off about p4k is their self-importance as the standard bearers of progressive underground music.
i think the whole site atrophied into this mush a long while ago.
“their Disco-ness above their house-ness.”
i don’t think this is as clever as it thinks it’s being.
No alarms & no surprises.
I check out Pitchfork all the time, and one thing that bothers me is how you’ll see what album they’re about to go nuts over from months away. I don’t know exactly why that irks me, but it does. It’s like they cheerlead and hype up something, so much so that if you didn’t know better you’d think the band had already released said album. But no, after 6-7 write ups, some forkcasts, etc, then the album drops and *shocking* it’s the best thing ever! Two that come to mind are Deerhunter and Animal Collective.
@the rich girls are weeping: Being in my 30s, I’m familiar with the brittle sounds of the 80s, and I love it. Production and mastering from mid-80s, unremastered CDs is soothing compared to the digital clipping that appears throughout S=Y.
@the rich girls are weeping: PS back, thanks for the link. I think they did everything right up until the mastering, then gave it to somebody and said “make it loud for people’s iPods.”
@anumberofnames: Oh, blah. I knew the way I worded my comment came off a little dismissive w/r/t age and experience, I should have fixed it, my apologies. Now, of course, I have to listen to the album again to give my definitive opinion on the mastering, but I shall be very cross with both of you if I notice clipping that I’d tuned out previously! (;
@anumberofnames: you know, now that i think about it … it uh, IS kind of excessively loud in bits. perhaps the way to solve this problem is to buy the vinyl version — that is, if they mixed down to analog especially for that purpose and didn’t press the digitally-mastered version. if not, the wax will sound even more assy.
@the rich girls are weeping: I just think of them as a really epic punk band (in one interview, they say they were going for Minor Threat+Neutral Milk Hotel, which is a pretty good approximation of how it hits me). I guess I’m also predisposed to muddy + heartfelt + rocking out. However, I can see where they might be kind of woeful live if you aren’t already a fan of what they do and aren’t kind of already attuned to the songs (the two times I’ve seen them, the singer sometimes drops pitch and just bellows/does the official Conor Oberst emotive drunkmumble, which kind of sabatoges the melodic engine of the songs). “Upon Viewing Bruegel’s ‘Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus’” is probably my favorite song of theirs on a musical level. The second bridge gives me chills. (Although the band-titled one has a bratty energy that kind of makes me giddy every time I hear it.) There’s also a bunch of personal stuff where they were just there at the right place and time for me, so that’s probably part of it. OK, fanboy ramble over.
@MayhemintheHood: It’s more like “Hey dad, thanks for allowing us to play with your Commodore-64 and Dungeons & Dragons set!”
Like, sure, there are non-IR releases on the list, but their inclusion’s only utility is in telling you what pfork types approve of in their dalliances with other genres. Which is fine.
@marc h.: I didn’t mean it to be clever at all, I just couldn’t think quickly think of a less clumsy way to phrase it. I mean simply that, though Nate correctly points out that there’s a good amount of house sound on that record, the “Blind” blurb in the singles list uses H&LA as part of its odd “disco had a good year, house and techno had a bad year” thesis.
@RaptorAvatar: To me, all the things you love just came off as sloppy and amateurish, and ultimately totally disrespectful of the crowd. If you can’t bring it live, I’m so not interested. Which is not to say that I don’t appreciate a good heartfelt show that ends in shambles (anyone who remembers old Okkervil River shows, or almost any Wrens show knows what I’m talking about…) Mostly, TA struck me as a bunch of assholey beardos who thought it would be really funny to have a band. Then again, what do I know? They were good enough to sign to XL, the one blight in the Beggars stable of labels. Then again, it’s almost a given that if I have a blinding hatred of an act, they almost inevitably end up on XL. Ha!
@the rich girls are weeping: I agree with everything you’ve said about Titus Androniucus. They’re so banal, and yet so in love with themselves; it’s not a good look at all.
Re: H&LA- I think the disco moments on H&LA are some of the finer moments on the record, which is maybe the focus the Pitchfork writers want to take? It’s an excellent album overall but for Pitchfork to lavish the praise on it that it has some of its weaknesses have to be elided.
Is Cut Copy backlash on its way? I’m a little shocked by the high placing of In Ghost Colours- it’s fun, I guess, but at the same time it’s nothing amazing. Dan Whitford is kind of cute though I guess.
I’m surprised Crystal Castles and Santogold made it onto the list at all, considering Pitchfork’s almost aggressive middling review of the Santogold album (7.1, which for an artist as hyped up as Santogold was almost as bad as the 6.8 they gave MGMT). And I wish someone- anyone- had been as much of a fan of the Goldfrapp record as I was. But I’m not dissatisfied with the list- Made in the Dark aside (that record bites, my God, what are people ON?).
@Nunya B: Thx, sometimes I wonder if it’s just me when incredibly — as you say — banal bands become popular. I can’t help it if I have impossibly high standards!
That being said, I sure loved that Goldfrapp record a whole lot. And I was really annoyed with people who haterated on it because it wasn’t Black Cherry/Supernature redux, and completely refused to give it the time of day because you couldn’t dance to/remix it.
Not a usual commenter, but someone has to defend the Fleet Foxes record. 08 wasn’t a year that saw much in the way of groundbreaking, forward-thinking music. (Two exceptions being Portishead and Gang Gang Dance, both of which I’m happy to see place as high as they did.) Pretty much everyone found a niche and stuck to their genre guns.
Yeah, Fleet Foxes aren’t breaking from any of the obvious touchstones (CSNY, The Beach Boys, the Band). But they are quite skilled, and have a hell of a collection of songs to launch with, which is the most crucial point. “Drops In The River”, “White Winter Hymnal”, “He Doesn’t Know Why”, “Mykonos”, and “Oliver James”, at least, are such marvels of heartfelt, well-paced songwriting they should be standards. They don’t hit immediately on the first pass, but they stick with you; after a year of listening, I feel like they’ve been around forever.
@the rich girls are weeping: Every time I would listen to S=Y, I’d follow it with a listen to Roxy Music’s Avalon, the unremastered CD that I bought in the mid-90s. Obviously, Avalon is a completely different thing but the mastering itself is so smooth, I could turn the CD up as loud as I wanted and wouldn’t feel any of the pain I’d feel from listening to S=Y at very low volume.
I have this fantasy that in the future CDs will come with certificates to download iPod-friendly rips, but the CDs themselves will be mastered at ear-friendly volumes.
@macieg: ah, gotcha, sorry. just thinking that if i were writing an H&LA blurb, part of the POINT of that album is that “house” was just another word for “disco” so why not unite the two?
if the issue is that people aren’t talking about H&LA for being electronic-based, well, plenty of “disco” was electronic-based, too, as is plenty of other stuff on this list (cut copy, crystal castles, etc. etc.). so it’s not really the most relevant aspect of the album, to me.
you’re right though that more cerebral stuff like Move D & Benjamin Brunn and Patrice Baumel and Shed didn’t get up there, which is definitely something i could see a person arguing about.
anyway, rambling, sorry!
Did someone really have to drag CSNY into this?
@marc h.: Haha, I know it’s hard to believe in a comment thread about P-fork but I wasn’t complaining about the list, just trying to explain to Nate why I didn’t think Herc, in this context, was a “token house or techno pick”.
That Shed album is indeed awesome, btw.
@soundbitesnyc: @Cam/ron: Cut Copy was my #1, so I like its high placement. I kind of wonder what album you people listened to! The one I heard was wall-to-wall.
@Maciej: Fair enough. I’m sort of a dance music geek (amongst other, supposedly incompatible geekeries like indie rap and dubstep — and holy shit, did dubstep have a pretty good year or what), and I didn’t hear too much attrition or entropy in house music this year, though maybe part of that was informed by all the stuff I found with the phrase “Aeroplane Remix” attached. That, and I went on a Discodust bender for a few months and found plenty to like, electro-scuzzy and balearic as a lot of it was.
Also, lack of danceability has little to do with my disappointment over Seventh Tree — I would’ve liked it a lot more if it had material that was as engagingly weird and vocally gripping as “Pilots” or “Lovely Head” or some of the other choice pre-electro Felt Mountain material. (And “A&E” got remixed anyways.) Still, I ain’t gonna begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it, at least not in retrospect.
@Nunya B: As the giver of that 7.1 to Santogold, I’m glad it made it onto the list. The stuff I disliked at the time of reviewing stopped annoying me so much, and the stuff I liked stayed good. Obviously other staffers liked it well enough too.
i thought i didn’t like crystal castles, until i actually listened to it a few times. i think it’s a fun album, but then i know next to nothing about electronic music.
I’m firmly entrenched in the “fuck Pitchfork because they’re annoying, elitist douchebags who listen to nothing but indie rock [unless absolutely required- Kanye, Weezy, etc.] and think they’re important because Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s first album sold 30,000 copies” camp, and this top 25 certainly won’t change my mind. I refuse to look at 26-50, because I refuse to give them a click to their web site.
@Freakytrigger: animated .gif of jon stewart fanning himself with flashing “Oh my God” text.
@Nunya B: I’m sorry. I love Made in the Dark so hard it’s a little scary.
Without piggybacking on Stereogum’s post-mortem (heaven forbid), I really agree with p’fork’s analysis of Vampire Weekend. I settled on a different quote than the stereogum did, however:
At the end of the day, all they’ve done is craft an album of crisp, endlessly replayable guitar pop songs with expressive, detail-heavy lyrics and charming music that serves as a welcome antidote to today’s more overly compressed sounds. How dare they.
I agree completely about the “comforting throwback nature” of groups like Fleet Foxes. Someone who was describing another record compared it to a Civil War re-enactment, and that’s how I feel about bands like FF and Blitzen Trapper, who are aping The Band.
I like the list, personally. I think it’s solid, despite choices I wouldn’t have made.
@kicking222: How many of those 25 records do you think are “indie rock”?
I assume the absence of Bon Iver is due to the fact that the album was on last year’s list (as a self-release). Since practically every other major publication has the album on their ‘08 list, I’d say that should be considered a feather in the cap for Pitchfork.
I think it’s just a shame that so many other sites and publications basically cut and pasted this list, hit shuffle and — TA-DA! — critically-approved year end list! It’s lazy as hell: there really were some solid records this year. That’s not to say I don’t like a lot of those records, I do, but it’s just this xenophobia is killing me.
I’ll give it another go, but from my previous experiences, that No Age record is terrible.
Fleet Foxes is a pretty safe but unexciting choice, for a online magazine that claims to be the flag bearer of underground music. Happy to so the ridiculous backlash against Vampire Weekend is ceasing and for the high placement of Portishead, No Age and the Erykah Badu albums.
And thank god there is no Gaslight Anthem.
@AL: who says ‘knowing’ about XYZ genre is a prerequisite for liking something.
@John P Strohm: Yes, they called that out at the beginning of their list.
And, hey, at least there is no MGMT on the list!
@2ironic4u: Ugh, does that mean I’m supposed to actually read the WORDS? I just like to look at the pretty pictures.
No token techno or house this year.
@Maciej: Hercules and What Affair? Lindstrwho?
Things white people like?
I kid, I kid…
@sofatruck: ehh, i meant more in the sense of having an informed critical opinion, as opposed to just liking/disliking something. i don’t understand all the negativity directed toward the album in the comments, but maybe it’s because they know something i don’t, like that what CC is doing has been done before, but better. or that it’s extremely easy to do so long as you have wealthy parents willing to buy you a mac book. etc.
(and i don’t mean to imply that cultivated critical opinions necessarily exist on a higher plane than basic likes/dislikes. i personally enjoy the CC album, and if gaining knowledge about the genre means losing that pleasure i get from listening to it, i’m not sure that’s a positive outcome.)
@natepatrin: Yeah, I dunno tho, I mean, Hercules & Love Affair obvs has a bunch of house tracks on it, but (and this still has a lot to do that godawful “Blind” blurb on the singles list), Pfork is definitely trying to emphasize their Disco-ness above their house-ness.
Again, yr obviously right in that it’s largely a house record, but I think the context on that list (plus it’s DFA status, plus having Antony on it), make it something different than past years’ token electronic dance picks (the Field, Villalobos, Ellen Allien, etc).
Lindstrom I prolly wouldn’t call either house or techno at all, but that’s a different discussion.
Also, I should specify that I’m not necessarily complaining at this point that this indie publication doesn’t have more token genre picks, juss sayin’.
I’m really happy to see the mae shi place so high. That album was so unappreciated compared to what it deserved
I suddenly feel completely out-of-touch with music this year. Cut Copy? No Age? Air France? I’ve heard a lot of that stuff here and there, and none of it hasn’t left any impression on me whatsoever, positive or negative. Just a big void of vaguely aggressive electronicy rocky whatever. And Fleet Foxes… I don’t know. God bless’em, I guess, but it just seems like a bit of a put-on.
Funny, though, that #’s 41-43 are 3 of my top 5. I guess I’m not completely out of the loop. (Speaking of #42… I don’t think I’ve seen Bonnie Prince Billy on any other list this year, but I thought his new album was fantastic. I wonder if the ’surprise’ nature of its release made it lose some valuable pre-release hype).
I’m impressed by the high placement of the DJ/rupture album and the Hercules S/T likewise. Hopefully that’ll attract more public attention to those records. The Cut Copy album was a letdown and the Crystal Castles record was a novelty more than anything else (plus nu-school 8-bit music became old two years ago). Other than that, PFM has one of this year’s better lists.
Also, great to see Max Tundra at 27. Awesome album, a great case of being equal parts fun, musical, smart, and insane.
Why did all the indie kids want to be bored out of their skulls this year? Fleet Foxes, Crystal Castles. . . is heroin back and no one told me?
@2ironic4u MGMT came out last year — digitally — in October, which is when they reviewed it and gave it a 6.8
Cut Copy seems extraordinarily high on the list, and though I’m a huge Hot Chip fan, Made in the Dark is not that good. The Metronomy record crushes both of them.
@John P Strohm: So that’s why there’s no Bon Iver! His exclusion was the only surprising thing about this list.
The #1 seed is pretty and all, but they sound so much like My Morning Jacket to me, and MMJ got “there” first. I think “Mykonos” should have been the real single, even though I don’t think it actually made it to the album.
@Dick Laurent is dead.: that’s MY punchline, baby!