Top 20 Albums of 2005

After scouring through my music collection of the past 12 months and organising them into a coherent structure after much re-arranging, I present to you the top 20 albums of 2005.

#1 - Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

Illinoise is Sufjan Stevens’ second offering in his attempt to record an album for all 50 American states. Taken as a whole, the album sounds like a stage musical history of Illinois, sung with enthusiasm, and full of flourish and energy and a cast of characters that include the Blackhawk tribe, Abraham Lincoln, Al Capone, steelworkers and small-town heroes. Perhaps most surprisingly, considering its depths of knowledge and research, most of the album was recorded by Stevens in Queens, New York. But to its credit, Illinoise is always accessible, and never academic--if he can tackle such diverse topics within the course of just one album, then Stevens is just the musician to attempt the remaining 48 states.





#2 - The Decemberists - Picaresque

The Decemberists' third full-length release takes the fanciful lyrical subjects and defiantly non-rock musical and infuses them with muscular and electric sound. The combination provides singer/songwriter Colin Meloy and crew with their first true masterpiece, an album that not only fulfils, but exceeds, the promise of their earlier records. Meloy's pet obsessions with historical romance and the sea get their due, culminating in the nearly nine-minute suite "The Mariner's Revenge Song," but the true highlights, however, are the sarcastically jaunty Kinks-like shuffle "The Sporting Life," a first-person tale of dishonour on the playing fields set to the record's most insidiously catchy tune, and the churning opener, "The Infanta," where Meloy's linguistic over-achievements mesh surprisingly well with Chris Walla's assertive, harder-edged production.



#3 - Prefuse 73 - Surrounded by Silence

Surrounded By Silence should have been re-titled Bedroom Producer Gone Wild. What’s not to adore about laptop sound alchemist Prefuse 73 (Scott Herren), who, like RJD2 and Diplo, crafts rare soundscapes that Bjork fans, backpack rap dukes and Pluto natives adore. Unlike Vocal Studies, where there appeared to be some cohesive links between tracks, Prefuse goes a bit collabo crazy here, with over a dozen multi-genre guest vocalists and emcee’s. when Herren sticks to what he does best, that is, building brilliant found sound collages, and digitizing any thing he can get his hands on, the results are gorgeous; "Expressing Views Is Obviously Illegal" carries that distinctly Prefuse-esque boom bip, as does "Pagina Dos" with it’s seductive banjo playing parts. A stimulating listen.




#4 - M83 - Before The Dawn Heals Us

This is effectively a solo work, Anthony Gonzalez having split from his long time collaborator and friend Nicholas Fromageu, but rather than forcing him to curb his ambitions and look within it seems to have expanded his horizons and now it seems he's stretching as far as he can, trying to lay his hands on all those vistas in his head. Employing choirs, muscular live drum tracks, huge banks of swirling guitars and interweaving between pure instrumentals and vocal pieces some of this music is Wagnerian in its scope and apocalyptic ambience.
Some will label this album pompous and overbearing and it is, but it's also capable of creating a glowing shroud of sound amidst a milky way of emotion. I can understand why the City scape on the cover because with Before the Dawn Can Heal Us Gonzalez has created gaudy neon lit wondrous edifice of his own. And that s stunningly beautiful too.



#5 - Death Cab For Cutie - Plans

Plans is a shockingly beautiful and mature album from a group that itself is still maturing. Death Cab for Cutie is that rare band that aren’t afraid to tackle the big thought, to wrestle with the complex, never black and white realities of human interaction. From its soaring beginning to its somber end, ‘Plans’ is the sound of growing up, of gaining friends and losing them, of realising, perhaps for the first time, the weight and consequences of every decision we make, of every heart we touch. It is an album about growing old that can grow old with us.







#6 - Jaga Jazzist - What We Must

I can't say whether or not Norwegian pop fans are smarter than their American counterparts, but Jaga Jazzist's commercial success in their native Norway suggests that they at least have sturdier attention spans. It's difficult to imagine a wordless fjord of post-rock, jazz fusion, ambient electronica, and outlying points cracking the hook-happy American charts, but that's just what the influential dectet's 2002 sophomore album The Stix did upon its release in Norway. Only Coldplay and Queens of the Stone Age separated it from the top slot.
Those of you who like your instrumental music to be fractured and shrouded might prefer the aforementioned Shining and write off Jaga as boring; the rest should find ample rewards in What We Must's effortless sonority and memorable arrangements. And if you're like me, you're dreaming of a gigantic antenna powerful enough to pick up radio signals from Norway.


#7 - British Sea Power - Open Season

Brighton's British Sea Power are a band that perhaps shouldn't exist in the 21st Century, but a listen to their fine second album Open Season ought to be enough to convince you that it's a good thing they do. BSP are antiquated in sound as in style – mid-'80s in empathy with post-punk-touchstones Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. It's a keen sense of the theatrical and the absurd, however, that ensures tracks like "It Ended On An Oily Stage" and "To Get To Sleep" are anything but museum pieces: frontman Yan overcomes his slightly limited range by investing every utterance with Box Of Delights wonder, imploring the listener to "drape yourself in greenery/become part of the scenery" on 'North Hanging Rock'. That's rock'n'roll the British Sea Power way: live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.


#8 - Lou Barlow - Emoh

After numerous releases with Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh, and The Folk Implosion, 'Emoh' is the first proper solo album release from Lou Barlow. Recorded in various studios including Lambchop producer Mark Nevers', the album sees Barlow update the lo-fi sound he is known for giving it a fuller, lusher sound. Largely acoustic, but swathed in cellos, electronic hums and drum machine rattles, this is partly a return to the heart-breakingly sweet ballads of Sebadoh's masterpiece 'Harmacy', whilst still acknowleging the luscious indie-tronica of later Folk Implosion. Opener 'Holding Back The Year' sets the tone perfectly; a guitar strums beautifully whilst Lou's typically honeyed vocal melts your heart all over again. If you've ever loved anything by Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh, Folk Implosion or Sentridoh, or even if you've never heard of them, this is a must. Acoustic indie-pop simply doesn't get better than this.



#9 - Laurs Veirs - Year of Meteors

With her band The Tortured Souls, singer/songwriter/guitar player Laura Veirs recorded her new record, Year of Meteors, in Seattle in February of this year. She calls the album "a road record", drawing inspiration from being in constant motion for much of 2004, touring in support of the critically acclaimed Carbon Glacier.
Produced by Tortured Soul band member, Tucker Martine, Year of Meteors' lyrics include dream-like images of sky and sea, punctuated by guitar bursts, handclaps and melodic keyboards and strings. She has a relaxed and freeflowing style completely all of her own. Sometimes verging on the melancholy, sometimes on the quirky, sometimes on the inspirational but always simple, fresh and straight forward songwriting.





#10 - Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene Ltd

Expectations are a bitch. After Broken Social Scene stumbled out of the incestuous Toronto alt-rock scene with Feel Good Lost-- a postrumental refrigerator-hum stiff of a debut-- few would have guessed this group of scruffed-up bohos had a veritable classic lurking in their collective consciousness. Looser and slightly kinkier, Broken Social Scene indulges in the pop eccentricities and keen melodic ears of more than a dozen Canadians who take willful pride in their ability to lock together into one solid unit and make good on the sum of their unique individual talents. This album has enough ideas to keep a lesser band productive for years. The song ecstatically encapsulates Broken Social Scene's heightened ambitions and flawed Icarus journeys, conflating into a bold, brash love-in infatuated with its own bumps and bruises.



#11 - Jack Johnson - In Between Dreams

For a man who gets his biggest kicks surfing the waves and strumming his guitar on a lonely beach in native Hawaii, singer-songwriter Jack Johnson has carved out quite a remarkable career on the mainland. His 2003 album, On and On, went platinum on the back of hit single "The Horizon Has Been Defeated." The follow-up, meanwhile, seems destined to shine even brighter. The drifting chords and soft voice are still in place, only now Johnson's instinct for melody has sharpened alongside his ability to self-edit. These small concessions make third album, In Between Dreams, his most conspicuous, particularly on tracks like the three-minute relationship drama, "Sitting, Waiting, Wishing," and "Breakdown," a song he originally recorded for Handsome Boy Modeling School's White People album remade here to reveal its full stripped-down loveliness. Imagine all the coconuts it will buy.



#12 - Wilderness - Wilderness

Wilderness deploy spacial, dream-like atmospheres and ominous ethereality over cymbals that shimmer and splash against tom-heavy drum patterns. Brooding, artstruck guitars ring out from the depths, echoing the swirling neo-psych of Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. Rising, falling, and lifting again, Johnson's silvery howl rides the band's iridescent, rainswept instrumentation like a cresting tide, obscuring lyrics that alternate between abstract expressionism and fatalistic, anti-political rhetoric. On cursory listens, many listeners could find the album beautifully lush. As these songs begin to settle in deeper, his vocal topography unexpectedly yields tons of melody where there initially may have seemed to be very little. If Wilderness aren't quite kings of the mountain yet, it might just be that few others have yet traversed their fertile domain.



#13 - Bell Orchestre - Recording A Tape the Colour of the Light

Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light is everything instrumental post-rock should be and nothing it shouldn't: it sounds live but hardly loud and is brimming with sound but uncrowded. Renouncing formulaic bombast, Bell Orchestre dazzles by finesse, not force. Call it blank slate music-- oceans of negative space awaiting colonization-by-imagination. The music combines a driving rhythm section with strings and horns. Bell Orchestre gallops across rich, rustic landscapes. Like Lumen or Explosions in the Sky, it's all a bit fantastical, but the band goes easy on the symbolistic dalliances. Bell Orchestre is all about freeing our neural pathways, not directing them. Recording is designed to underwhelm. It rewards repeat listens and nurtures those lulled by its intoxicating spumes. Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.



#14 - Foo Fighters - In Your Honor

Having publicly declared In Your Honor, the Foo Fighters' fifth full-length since their start in 1995, the Physical Graffiti of the band's oeuvre-- hence, the Foos' definitive artistic statement-- frontman Dave Grohl understands the sudden need for gravity. The two-disc In Your Honor is Grohl at his most pensive, purposefully distanced from his all-American prankster persona, attempting to build a legacy that extends beyond the shadows of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. In Your Honor is Dave Grohl claiming ground. Disc One features loads of thundering guitars and manic drum breakdowns, classic Foo structures (brash verse, anthemic chorus) and aggressively contemplative lyrics. Disc Two is a surprisingly eclectic success. The Foo Fighters are strong, neat, and clean. So we wonder: Can a steady, hard-working everydude from northern Virginia make transcendent art? Sure. Does Dave Grohl? Sometimes.



#15 - Hood - Outside Closer

Outside Closer is the followup to Hoods previous release Cold House, an album of electronic/indie/abstract hip hop fusion and the album that did kid-A better than kid-A. Closer outside follows in a simillar vein and while the electronic/indie fusion is still the main order of the day Closer outside takes a step away from the microscopic glitch beats of cold house and has a more organic feel. Despite not having the presence of the abstract rapping mentalists clouddead this time around the production has an almost hip-hop feel to it. The beats this time are more reminiscent of Four Tets choppy acoustic sounding style with glitchy, scratchy electronica gives way to lush strings then come the fragile guitars and vocals before cold houses final secret weapon a of rapidfire gibberings courtesy of clouddead is unleashed, there has been nothing quite like it before or since and simply has to be heard to be believed.



#16 - Patrick Wolf - Wind in the Wires

Patrick Wolf began to dabble in recording at age 11, recording violin, junky analog organs, and homemade theremin on his four-track. At 16, he left England to form the raucous Mason Crimineaux in France and won over Capitol K, who would release Wolf's solo debut, the bombastic, uncontained electro-folk grab bag Lycanthropy, in 2003. Wind in the Wires, which boils off the excesses of his debut and simmers in elegant pools of glitchy beats, found sound collages, crackling electrical sounds, and gothic shadows. But to focus only on the broader traits is to miss what makes Wind in the Wires so outstanding: Wolf festoons his songs with strange, understated details that ratchet them toward the mysterious.






#17 - Bonnie Prince and Matt Sweeney - Superwolf

Superwolf, a new collaboration with guitar freelancer Matt Sweeney, sees Oldham at his squirrely best, squeaking out his finest songs since 1999's I See a Darkness. Superwolf marks Oldham's first official partnership with Sweeney, whose credits include a predictably brief stint axe-grinding in Billy Corgan's Zwan. Oldham has always been uniquely capable of making colossal leaps in tone between breaths, and from track to track Superwolf nobly maintains that practice, drifting gracefully from classic-rock stomps to whispery dirges. Oldham's quivering pipes and Sweeney's fragile guitar coalescing into a soft, droning, and tremendously pretty whole. Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine. Oldham and Sweeney mew coquettishly, stroking their guitars, cawing bizarre stories about love, death, and body parts: theirs is a rancid and beautiful landscape.


#18 - MF Doom & Dangermouse - Dangerdoom

If you listen to Doom, you expect the ludicrous, and The Mouse and the Mask is his most ludicrous to date. Possibly in reaction to the rampant comedy skits on rap records in the last decade, Doom and Danger go all out, calling in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force to help craft the best funhouse hip-hop since De La Soul Is Dead. Danger Mouse displays a deft hand on the sequencer and a taste for whimsical soundtrack samples. Doom loves themes, as he's shown on Mmm... Food and his King Geedorah project, but never has the concept of an album had him sounding quite this chipper.Danger Doom won't change your life. It's not as revealing as Doom's other work, and Danger Mouse's big, Technicolor productions here are a little too trivial to be immortal. But for what it attempts-- which is basically a comedy record with no-joke skills-- it exceeds expectations.


#19 - Minotaur Shock - Maritime

'Maritime' take a naval theme as its core imagery but despite a few moments of kitsch and whimsy, is not overwealmingly gimmicky. Rather, it is an album of textures and incricate melodies, drawn out of an pallette of electro-style synths and some live instrumentation. Things are quieter on the second half of the album, and take more patience, but almost all the tracks evolve into something quite subtly special. In a genre of music that is often overearnest and esoteric, this is highly accessible but no less complex.







#20 - Caribou - The Milk of Human Kindness

The Milk of Human Kindness sounds once again like an album from a band without a past, a band ready to take risks and go where the music needs to go. The contrast between The Milk of Human Kindness and Up in Flames is certainly less pronounced than the jump from the debut, but the feel here-- clearer arrangements and better songs, both more expansive and comparatively sober-- is new to composer Dan Snaith. Where Up in Flames referenced spiraling psychedelia, this record is more controlled, carefully choosing its moments and arranging peaks for maximum impact. They've been digging into the past to find the best bits and combining the new ways, reinforcing the idea, suggested at on earlier Manitoba material, that his particular genius is curatorial rather than strictly inventive. However he does it, he's created another thrilling, excellent record.



Well folks, I hope that you'll heed some of these reviews and make some of these fine records part of your collection. See you next year for another Top 20.

Coming Soon: Top 20 Movies of 2005!