By Elliot Boswell
1968: The Beatles released "The White Album." 1978: Blondie released "Parallel Lines." 1988: Pixies released "Surfer Rosa." 1998: Outkast released "Aquemini." Aaaaand...for 2008? The Beacon's Elliot Boswell pontificates.
1. Lil' Wayne:
"Tha Carter III"
After 2007, an annus mirabilis which saw Weezy F. Baby crank out a staggering 77 new tracks, (about one cut every five days, on average), he's wisely pared his output down to a concise(ish) album. The best thing about Wayne has always been his uninhibited delight to indulge in all wordplay, any pun, any boast, no matter how ridiculous - "Tell your friends like Fritos, I'm tryin' to lay," "I'm rare like Mr. Clean with hair," really? - and as a result, he's sometimes difficult to take seriously, but oh-so-easy to enjoy. Thankfully, the songs on "III" aren't all gunning for the top spot on the charts, a trend in rap music that gives all creative power to producers instead of the artists themselves. "Dr. Carter" is one such cut, showcasing inspired lyrical gems like, "But I'm a doctor, they don't understand my writing" that might be lost amidst another bombastic hook. Greetings from Planet Weezy indeed.
2. Plush: "Fed"
"My creation has drowned me," Liam Hayes, the architect behind Plush, sings on the opening track of this remarkable record, and over the course of the next 14 songs, we begin to see what he means. "Fed," released in 2002 in Japan, but until last year was unable to find an American label willing to pick up its exorbitant tab, sounds alternately like Fleetwood Mac, vaudeville ragtime, a more playful Jeff Buckley, or Burt Bacharach's work with Dusty Springfield. But throughout is Hayes the vocalist, Hayes the guitarist, and above all, Hayes the composer: his affinity for blue-eyed soul would be nothing without the musical DNA he embeds in the heart of each song. In this respect, he subverts the tradition that Springfield and others founded 40-plus years ago by imbuing a traditionally carefree form with an updated anxiety. (Example: the first song is titled "Whose Blues" and the tenth is "Whose Blues Anyway.") "It's my time," Hayes sings on the second track, but he must recognize that this offering, the best of the Anxious Chamber Pop canon, is probably (and sadly) destined to be one of the Great Lost Records.
3. TV On The Radio:
"Dear Science"
Not nearly as experimental as many listeners would like to believe, this Brooklyn quintet follows up 2006's mostly brilliant "Return to Cookie Mountain" with more funk, soul, and sandblasted production. Tunde Adebimpe's apocalyptic spouting veers into melodrama sometimes ("I'm scared to death I'm livin' a life not worth dying for" from the otherwise extraordinary "Red Dress") or plain cheapness ("Mary and David smoke dung in the trenches" from the mostly tedious "Crying") but for the most part, the sheer urgency of his vocals renders it compelling. TVOTR's great gift, like Radiohead before it, remains its ability to marry avant-garde inclinations with decent pop songwriting sensibilities. And as "Village Voice" critic Robert Christgau said, they're still quite black in a relatively vanilla indie-rock world.
4. Vampire Weekend:
"Vampire Weekend"
Like their "saviors of music" predecessors, Arctic Monkeys, they have a funny name, sport a frontman with keenly-honed observational songwriting skills, and seem to have found a well-suited musical medium through which to channel their strengths. The big difference between the two? Whereas the Monkeys' Alex Turner never had to justify his scintillating accounts of life-on-the-margins, late-night run-ins with bouncers, clubs, and girls, Vampire's Ezra Koenigs has to prove that his subjects of choice - Ivy League education and summers on the Cape - are really worth our listening. I'm all for writing about what you know, but it's a dangerous pitfall when all you know is Madras shirts and yachting clubs. Sometimes I fear that his lyrical eye, for all its limpidity, isn't satirical enough. Lines like "Lobster's claw is sharp as knives" certainly help his cause, but most of the time he manages to keep things just light enough that we sense he's not taking it too seriously, or else undercutting himself with all the appropriate irony of a self-conscious white boy. (Example: "First the window, then it's to the wall/Little Jon - he always tells the truth.") The music itself was aptly described as "Graceland-y". At times a little too crisp; that is, too immaculate, but the best debut of the year.
5. Cut Copy:
"In Ghost Colours"
I've never really responded favorably to the electropop genre, so the fact that I keep coming back to this particular record is certainly proof of something. "In Ghost Colours" is a giddy collage of lights and sounds that pays improbable sonic homage to Fountains of Wayne ("Unforgettable Season"), the late '90s Golden Age of Boy Bands ("Hearts On Fire"), and shades of Congolese soukous (the closing track, "Eternity One Night Only"). Like many of its musical peers, "In Ghost Colors" is better enjoyed physically than cerebrally, but that's pretty much all I know to say.
Honorable Mention:
Ryan Adams and the
Cardinals: "Cardinology"
Everyone's favorite frustratingly-brilliant-but-visionless loose cannon seems to have matured. Anchored with the muscular tunecraft of the backing group, The Cardinals, Adams runs the gamut from snaking R&B ("Fix It") to Gram Parsons (the delicate "Evergreen") to Oasis ("Magick"), avoiding (for the most part) the maudlin tendencies that plague his previous work. And there is a casual, thought-out beauty to a lyric like, "I like the dresses, the shoes, and the clothes/ And everything, you know, that goes with lovin' a girl, I suppose" from "Crossed-Out Name." This self-knowing use of a cliché in order to acknowledge its persisting truthfulness - as novelist Zadie Smith put it, ("The song, in this case wants you to know that it knows you know it knows" - fails to jive with Adams' carefully constructed "enfant terrible" reputation, but is a sign that maybe, just maybe, he didn't go ahead and release a first draft again. In hands of a gifted editor, the nature of his oeuvre will someday lend itself magnificently to a greatest hits collection.
