Bring Warm Socks; or, 2004 in Review

Contrary to popular belief, the role of iconoclast is not necessarily a rewarding one. Of course, every critic has their eccentricities, but looking at PopMatters‘ “Best Of” list this year, I was struck by the fact that our site’s list was, in places, almost perversely at odds with my own.

Sure, we have a few things in common. I liked Interpol’s Antics quite a bit, as well as TV on the Radio, Green Day and Madvillain. But the rest of my list might as well have been from the planet Mars in relation to the majority of the site. Furthermore, it would be one thing if my top picks were undiscovered gems, but as a matter of fact my top two picks were aggressively panned by PopMatters‘ own review staff.

But it’s OK, I’m not bitter. Honest.

Perhaps I’m overstating. That’s a very real possibility. But the fact remains that looking over these lists has made me feel quietly alienated. In some respects, I feel almost like an old curmudgeon, because a great deal of the new music I hear, even critically acclaimed stuff, sounds like crap. On the other hand, the music I really like and am consistently excited about is also consistently ignored, and not just by PopMatters, but by just about every other critical or review-based outlet you can imagine.

It’s sad to me not because I want to be popular or to have my tastes codified by the masses, but because I think that if something I like is good, I think that it’s a shame if more people aren’t enjoying it as well. I’m not one of those snobs who resents when my favorite artist blows up big: rather, I relish the opportunity for artists to have a chance to share their music with a wider audience. I am certainly not one who shares the opinion that the Replacements lost it the moment they signed with Warner Brothers. (I believe, rather, that they recorded their strongest material for Warners, as Tim slightly edges out Let It Be in my book — but then, I’m weird like that.)

So that’s where I’m coming from. More than anything, I’d like to think that someone, somewhere, might be paying attention to these silly lists and might take the opportunity to hear something they wouldn’t have otherwise heard. I almost feel guilty about putting Green Day and Interpol on my list, because these were both very big albums this year, and chances are that if you’ve come to Popmatters you already know about both. But then again, both Antics and American Idiot are extraordinary albums, and their slots on my list are well earned.

Before we get to the actual list, however, I’d like to look at a few albums that didn’t make my list, for various reasons.

First, let me say something to Bjork: I’m sorry, but I’m just not feeling it anymore. You couldn’t have found a bigger Bjork fan after 2001’s Vespertine, but I have to say that even after many listens, Medulla (original PopMatters review) just isn’t very good. In fact, as much as I hate to say it, it’s kinda silly. I know there was obviously a lot of work put into it, but hearing all those people make all those weird farting noises with their mouths and throats while expecting me to keep a straight face is simply to much to ask. It’s weird for the sake of weird, and it doesn’t do much for me at all. It rather seems like an elaborate joke, to be honest.

The Streets’ Mike Skinner seems to have stumbled with A Grand Don’t Come For Free (original PopMatters review), (or maybe I’m the only one who thinks so). At least, while his storytelling prowess has increased, his ability to write catchy hooks to wraps around that keen storytelling seems to have taken a major hit since 2002’s Original Pirate Material.

I have tried to give Modest Mouse (original PopMatters review) an honest listen, but I can’t seem to get past the fact that the singer sounds like he’s drunk and has about as much business fronting a rock band as I do. I’d never even heard of The Arcade Fire (original PopMatters review) before I saw them on our list. Are they Emo or something? And Kanye West? (original PopMatters review) Sorry, I can’t help but think that he seems horribly overrated, because I am just not very impressed.

I very briefly considered giving Franz Ferdinand’s debut (original PopMatters review) a place on my list, but I quickly thought better of it. Not that I didn’t enjoy the album — I did — but I hardly think it’s that good. Nothing sets off my B.S. detector more than an overhyped debut album, and while there were some good tracks on their disc, the critical heat started to seem a bit fatuous sometime around early fall. Call me back when their sophomore effort drops: then we’ll see if these guys have any real fire in their bellies.

There were a number of albums that just managed to miss the cut on my list. I really, really liked the new Le Tigre album, This Island (original PopMatters review). I will admit that This Island took a few listens to “get”. It doesn’t, perhaps, have the same easy hooks of their past material. It is undoubtedly a more sophisticated album, however, and it is no less enjoyable for this fact. Le Tigre are undoubtedly the best hybrid of punk and electronic music currently going, at least since Atari Teenage Riot faded into the ether following the death of Carl Crack. You can’t listen to their dead-on cover of the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited” without cracking a grin: it’s just not possible.

Speaking of albums that took a while to appreciate, it took me half the damn year to get around to appreciating Felix Da Housecat’s Devin Dazzle and the Neon Fever (no PopMatters review available). At first I wasn’t really interested because the last thing I wanted to hear back in the summer months was another tired Electroclash retread. But after a few months I went back to it and realized that there was a lot more going on than I had initially perceived. Now I see the album as a figurative sequel to the RZA’s underrated 1998 concept album Bobby Digital, complete with bizarre, dense arrangements and off-kilter song-structures. Felix perpetrates the same kind of deconstructionist assault on retro-electro music as the RZA did to 90s hip-hop excess. I don’t think anyone really appreciated the album when it dropped last summer, but I have come to see it for what it is: a glittering neon peyote button.

Ulrich Schnauss’ A Strangely Isolated Place (original PopMatters review)came out of nowhere to surprise and delight all, including me. Kid 606 dropped a follow-up to last year’s Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You mega-opus, Who Still Kill Sound? (original PopMatters review), that was every bit as feverishly brilliant as it’s predecessor. And the stalwart DFA production team dropped their second label compilation (original PopMatters review), which is pound-for-pound the best anthology released this year by anyone, anywhere.

I felt really bad about dropping Fatboy Slim’s masterful Palookaville (original PopMatters review) from my list, because it really is a great album. Take my word for it: go read my review and give the album a try. If I had had 11 spaces on the list, it would have been #11. Unfortunately, Fatboy Slim just isn’t very well regarded, at least in these here United States, and it doesn’t look like that is about to change anytime soon, this excellent album notwithstanding.

And now, without further ado,

The List:

10. Green Day – American Idiot (Warner Bros.)
I already wrote at length about the album in my PopMatters review (which you can find here), but it bears repeating that this album had no right to be this good. | buy in the PopShop

9. Emperor X – Tectonic Membrane / Thin Strip on an Endless Platform (Discos Mariscos)
I am not usually a fan of lo-fi recordings. Sure, I understand the concept behind the aesthetic, but in a day and age where it has never been easier for amateur and small professional artists to make pristinely professional-sounding recordings, it seems like kind of a cop-out, sort-of a primitivist security-blanket type impulse. I’ve never cared that much for Pavement. It never made any sense to me why Malkmus and Co. didn’t just do another cut to get all the kinks out of their sound. Sure, I can appreciate the songwriting, but I wish they would make it easier on their listeners.

Emperor X is about as lo-fi as you can get. He’s also as shockingly good a songwriter as you will encounter this year, pulling from influences both unsurprising in a lo-fi artist (the aforementioned Pavement, Guided by Voices) and radical (early Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mack). There’s a strong pop sensibility that keeps the album from wandering into the realms of navel-gazing crap.

I have heard rumors that as good as this album is, next year’s follow-up is even better. If that is indeed the case, there is every possibility that 2005 will be the year that Emperor X breaks through. Listening to this album, there is no doubt in my mind that he certainly has the talent to do just that. (original PopMatters review)

8. Diplo – Florida (Big Dada)
I do believe it counts as a minor miracle that this album managed to make it onto the PopMatters Top 100, even in the nether regions of the list. Which is not to say that I would even have heard the album if PopMatters hadn’t sent it to me to review. Thankfully, though, I did hear it, because it is one of the best instrumental hip-hop albums I’ve heard in a long time.

As I put it in my PopMatters review of the album: “Diplo has crafted one of the year’s best debut albums, an ambitious ode to the art and craft of sampling. Although the dominant note in his work is a melancholy one, Diplo retains a firm grasp of the emotional subtleties of such willfully anachronistic music. The crackle of a well-aged sample and the mournful vibrato of a distant organ playing in the darkness can’t help but conjure up sweetly despondent imagery. There are secrets waiting in the dark swamps of Florida, lost and found in the muck and grime of a hidden past.” | buy in the PopShop

7. M83 – Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (Mute)
I do realize that this was technically released in 2003, but it was only released in the United States earlier this year. Suffice it to say that regardless of what year it was released, it is one of the most beautiful discs I’ve heard in quite some time. It crackles your synapses and gives you a wallop right between your ears, so that the effect is not unlike a thousand suns exploding in your brain. A triumphantly gorgeous piece of work.

6. Tim Deluxe – The Little Ginger Club Kid (Underwater)
Here’s another record you might not even know exists. Also released in the UK in 2003, it lagged a few months before hitting the States in March. This is the kind of dance record they don’t seem to make anymore: nothing but catchy house single after catchy house single, great tracks piling up one on top of another until the whole thing leaves you breathless and rather blissfully exhausted. Just listen to “Less Talk, More Action!”, featuring the playfully seductive vocal work of Terra Deva, or the trance-lite “Choose Something Like a Star”, which is undoubtedly the best dance single ever to sample Robert Frost — probably the only one, at that. Tim Deluxe has carved himself a niche among those few brave souls who dare to believe that dance music should actually be fun. If you’ve ever enjoyed a Basement Jaxx or X-Press 2 record, then this is a disc that needs to be on your shelf.

5. Interpol – Antics (Matador)
As cool as Turn on the Bright Lights was in places, and as archly sophisticated as the group seemed, there was still something missing: namely, actual songs. That shortcoming has been remedied on their breakout sophomore release, as the group has crafted a set of endlessly hummable tracks that manage to stick to the inside of your head despite their melancholy subject matter and tone. (original PopMatters review) | buy in the PopShop

Madvillain – Madvillainy (Stones Throw)
I’ll stand by what I originally said in my PopMatters review of this album back in the summer:

“Madvillainy is a jewel-encrusted treasure of an album. It’s only 45 minutes long but there’s more than enough here to please the most jaded audiophile. You can spend hours poring over the lyric sheet and attempting to grok Doom’s infinitely dense verbiage, or you can ignore the words and just groove to the endlessly pleasing thrill of the skewered analog that pops and hisses throughout the album like a living, breathing organism…. Every sound can be appropriated, and any word you can imagine can be rhymed. As in the general world of electronic music, the specific genre of hip-hop is based on the principles of sonic malleability. MF Doom and Madlib have every intention of stretching this malleability as far as it will go.” | buy in the PopShop

3. TV on the Radio – Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (Touch & Go)
Every once in a great while, something comes along that knocks you off your socks and restores your faith in the healing power of rock and roll. Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes is just such an album, a dynamically different and radically invigorating shot of intellectual rigor into a moribund rock scene. I am not usually one to get carried away by promising debuts. I am much more impressed by a confident sophomore album (see Antics) than a possibly-fluke superstar debut. But the talent on display here shows every indicator of being one for the ages, so much so that against my better judgement I find myself enthralled.

Now, this album is not without its flaws: it’s maybe a little flabby in places, and maybe the songwriting is less than perfectly honed in others. It seems at times that the group is too dependent on the ability of its unique textures to carry the incipient songcraft. But when it clicks, as on “Staring At The Sun”, it clicks hard. Hopefully, TV on the Radio will be around for a long time, and this will prove to be merely the first in a long line of eclectic and revelatory albums. They’ve already proven they have the chops to top it with the release of this fall’s New Health Rock EP, which somehow managed to distill DY,BB’s ambition into the space of a three-minute-and-change rock & roll anthem. I wouldn’t have guessed for the life of me that the Next Big Thing would be electronic rock & roll with punk guitar and barbershop vocals, but there you go. The best part is, as good as DY,BB is, the future looks even brighter. (original PopMatters review) | buy in the PopShop

2. Miss Kittin – I.Com (Astralwerks)
You could be forgiven if you had dismissed Miss Kittin — known to her mother as Caroline Hervé — as a gimmick. Certainly, when she first appeared on the scene at the turn of the century, dressed in a vinyl nurse-costume and breathing sweet nothings over tracks by producers such as Felix da Housecat, Goldenboy and the Hacker, it was tempting to do just that. But just when it seemed like she was on her way to becoming a one-trick pony, she quit doing the breathy-voice thing. She stopped wearing the nurse outfit. She started touring and in very short order built herself an international reputation as one of the most skilled and eclectic DJs to hit the scene in quite some time. And just in case you didn’t get the hint that she was trying to put the sex-kitten phase of her career behind her, she also shaved her head. Electronic music as a whole is at something of a low-ebb in terms of domestic popularity, but not in quality. I.Com is sexy and dramatic, melancholy and hilarious, but most of all it’s catchy: an album chock full of star turns from a perennial collaborator. Whether she realized it or not, Miss Kittin came along right when techno music needed her most, an avenging angel of lustful wrath, a surprising feminist icon for a notoriously sexist genre. I have a feeling she will find it much more difficult to hide behind collaborators from here on in. (original PopMatters review) | buy in the PopShop

1. Einstürzende Neubauten – Pepetuum Mobile (Mute)
I had the sincere pleasure of seeing these guys in Boston earlier this year. The biggest surprise, for me, was how warm and charismatic a stage presence Blixa Bargeld turned out to be, regaling the audience with stories of horrendous Chicago layovers and the joys of sharing a rehearsal space with the Stone Temple Pilots. Unfortunately, he also very strongly implied that due to a combination of the political climate and the economic realities for an international band, this would probably be their last stateside jaunt.

Which would be a shame. EN are about as close to elder statesmen as you get in the rather violent world of industrial / electronic music. They’ve been around for long enough that they’ve impacted and influenced just about everything, while still remaining rigorously sui generis. From their early days as dirty punks, to the invention of industrial, on through the incubation of modern electronic music and their recent tenure as masters of experimental pop, they have been at the forefront of musical advancement for 25 years.

You can’t truly appreciate the band until you’ve seen them live. On record you can certainly enjoy their music, and the endless invention and novelty that they bring to the pursuit of creating constantly new sounds. But live, you can see and hear and appreciate the amazing intricacy of what they do, the way they blend and shift strange contradictory sounds into entirely new shapes.

Perpetuum Mobile is perhaps not as good as 2000’s Silence Is Sexy, but if that is so, that is only because Silence Is Sexy is an absolutely brilliant career peak. It’s still better than just about anything else released this year (I’ll hedge my bets because I haven’t heard every CD printed this year and I’d be lying if I said I had).

At a period when most of their peers from the first-generation of industrial music are compiling massive retrospective box-sets, Einstürzende Neubauten are producing some of the best music of their career. The initial punk energy which originally inspired them to bang on bits of scrap metal for percussive effect back in the late ’70s has subsided into a more sophisticated appreciation for the melodic possibilities of strange percussion. Their songwriting acumen has certainly kept pace with their instrumental prowess, and their ability to conjure moods simultaneously epic and intimate while maintaining a uniquely Teutonic sense of melancholy is simply breathtaking. They are, without a doubt, the greatest German-speaking band in the world today — their only rivals for the crown being the infinitely mordant Rammstein. Suffice it to say that singer/lead songwriter Bargeld’s decision to step away from his part-time position as lead guitarist for Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds has yielded rich profits for his primary group. (original PopMatters review)

The music that still excites me, more than anything else in the year 2004, is electronic music. While the rest of the world may have moved on to other things, to my way of looking the most exciting, interesting, innovative and groundbreaking pieces of music being recorded in the pop realm are being done so under the broad auspices of this genre.

Even ostensible rock acts like Interpol and Franz Ferdinand are influenced by an aggressive rhythmic awareness that would be impossible without an acceptance of the percussive possibilities opened up by the maturation of electronic dance music. It’s been a long damn time since the disco backlash, and thankfully we’ve finally got to the point where mainstream rock acts can be informed by dance music without inviting snickers of derision (see U2’s Pop, the Stones’ “Emotional Rescue”).

Electronic music isn’t just a genre, it’s an idiom, a methodology and philosophy that is permeating the entire spectrum of pop. From Destiny’s Child to Usher, Radiohead to Wilco, some of today’s biggest and most acclaimed pop and rock acts are creating sounds in ways that would have been unthinkably bizarre just 10 short years ago. Eminem can say “nobody listens to techno” all he wants, but the fact is that everybody listens to techno these days, or at least anyone who actually owns an Eminem album. A track like “Just Lose It” can trace its lineage to Detroit as much as the Bronx… and while we’re on the subject it’s also worth pointing out that the origins of hip-hop and dance music are also inextricably intertwined.

Most people may have moved on, but electronic music is still the reason I’m a critic in the first place. 2005 looks like its going to be a banner year. We’ve got new albums from the Chemical Brothers and Nine Inch Nails already in the chute for the first quarter. A new disc from Death In Vegas is still waiting to be released domestically. There will be any number of surprises — if 2004 actually saw the release of new albums from the Prodigy, UNKLE and the Handsome Boy Modeling School, I’d say just about anything is possible in 2005. Rock and hip-hop continue to march their way through the years with an increasingly moribund inevitability, but electronic music retains its ability to surprise and delight, even after all these years. | buy in the PopShop