The Worst Albums of 2005

I like writing about music I like, but writing about music I don't like is so much fun that I can't really resist the chance to write about the very worst of 2005. Here we go:

Bright Eyes - Digital Ash in a Digital Urn - Here's what I wrote about this one back in February: "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is probably the worst electro-pop album ever recorded. In fact, it is to that genre what Kenny G is to jazz, what Avril Lavigne is to rock. Kraftwerk probably heard this album and wanted to cry and/or kill themselves, asking themselves, 'This is what we worked so hard to accomplish? We paved the way for some emo hack to rape our legacy with the lamest synth-pop this side of the Postal Service album?'"

Pretty harsh, but I'm sticking with it.

Weezer - Make Believe - Writing about how bad Weezer have gotten is almost redundant at this point, but still, Make Believe is appallingly bad, even by their recent standards. "Beverly Hills" is the bizarro-world "El Scorcho," there are the mandatory and embarrassing retro synth-pop tracks, a whole bunch of mind-numbing generic power pop songs that Rivers Cuomo probably writes by accident while he sleeps, and for Christ's sake, there's a song called "We Are All on Drugs." Yikes.

CocoRosie - Noah's Ark - A brief (but by no means complete) list of things that are probably more pleasant to listen to for 50 minutes than Noah's Ark:

- A duet between Celine Dion and a guy scratching his nails across a chalkboard.
- Fighting cats (this happens pretty frequently between the neighborhood strays where I live, so I have to include it... I saw a cat the other day without a right eye).
- Britney Spears' childbirth.
- A lecture by Tom Cruise on the merits of Scientology.
- Lil Jon in the bathroom after an extra large bowl of chili.

What kind of music is this? It sounds like two 8 year old girls who found a cassette recorder in their parents' attic and decided to bang on some musical instruments they found and "sing" along with it.

The Mars Volta - Frances the Mute - Keep in mind that I'm not opposed to prog-rock by default. I enjoy me some Jethro Tull and the first King Crimson record and all that stuff. I even liked the first Mars Volta album, until I saw them play it live. But this isn't just bad because it's prog-rock. It's bad because it flies completely in the face of good taste, common sense, and human dignity. I'll even let artists get away with being unspeakably pretentious if they have the goods to back it up (Radiohead, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, most Sigur Ros), but this is just ridiculous. This is getting toward Dream Theater territory, but at least Dream Theater had the chops to play all that wanky stuff. It's simply an hour of squealing noise and incomprehensible caterwauling (although I don't know why anybody would want to comprehend it anyway).

That's all I've got for this year. Hope you enjoyed it.

Tom's 2005 Music Review starts now...

As promised a couple hours ago, here's the first part of my 2005 music review:

Tom's Favorite Songs of 2005

(In no particular)

Gorillaz - "Feel Good, Inc." - I was as surprised as anybody that the Gorillaz somehow got it together for a second album, and guess what? They're still better than Blur (Damon Albarn's day job), and they've still got that "ominous yet insanely infectious" thing down pat.

Doves - "Black and White Town" - Can we finally stop lumping these guys in with Coldplay just because they're Brits who play guitar-based pop? If The Last Broadcast didn't already do it, this song proves once and for all that Doves are infinitely better with a pop melody and infinitely more creative in their accompaniment for it.

Fischerspooner - "Just Let Go" - Every time I hear Fischerspooner I could swear that they're from some Scandinavian country, and that their music emerged from the ultra-chic dance clubs that we Americans don't even know about. They don't make this list just because they're actually from New York, but they do make it because "Just Let Go" is probably the best dance-pop song I heard this year. Good enough that I might actually dance if it came on in a club!

Royksopp - "Circuit Breaker" - Now here is the hip Scandinavian electro-pop duo. Their second album wasn't particularly great, but "Circuit Breaker" was easily the stand out track. Put this one on my "dance songs I would actually dance to" mix CD too.

Of Montreal - "Death of a Shade of a Hue" - I've always preferred Of Montreal in their more esoteric moments than in their straightforward rock/pop moments, and this one is certainly the oddest sounding on The Sunlandic Twins. The moody string section, the unconventional chord structures, and the offbeat programmed drums may not make a nice piece of ear candy like some of the rest of that album, but it's by far the most interesting to me.

Paul McCartney - "Jenny Wren" - I am still in shock over how good this song is. A solo McCartney tune that's introspective and dark, and not smarmy and ridiculous? With a melody that would fit in seamlessly between "Yesterday" and "Blackbird"? Is it too hasty to say that this is the best song of Paul's entire solo career?

Coldplay - "Fix You" - A great song on an average album, this one really has more in common with the Polyphonic Spree or even Bruce Springsteen than any previous Coldplay tunes, soaring to heights of bombast attainable only with a major label budget and an unhindered desire to save the world with a single song. Like any good Bruce song worth its salt, it's utterly ridiculous, and it's so good that it doesn't even matter.

Espers - "Black is the Color" - Espers continue the sound of their first album with this rendition of a traditional folk song. Haunting and beautiful in equal parts, it achieves the perfect balance that made their self-titled album so wonderful to listen to. Give me these guys over Devendra Banhart any day. I can't wait to see what they have in store for next year.

Architecture in Helsinki - "It'5!" - Possibly the best pure pop song of the year, from the bouncing melody and the jubilantly shouted chorus right down to the "ooooooooh sha la la la" background vocals. Sugary sweet.

Super Furry Animals - "Zoom!" - If this list is in no particular order, this one is still #1 by a huge margin. Possibly the most perfect example of how to make a seven minute song out of a single chord progression that I've ever heard. Each listen reveals new depths in instrumentation, new unheard vocal parts. In their long career, the Super Furry Animals have never recorded anything so majestic.

Back with a vengeance!

This post serves a dual purpose: first, to let everybody know I'm not dead, and second, to announce that there will be lots of stuff coming soon. Everybody who's read this knows I like to talk about music, and the end of the year provides a great opportunity to do so. So I will be repeating last year's experiment (although that was at a different site) and doing a list of my favorite 10 albums of 2005, one per day, conveniently started on the 22nd so that it can end on the last day of 2005.

While I'm preparing that, you can look forward to a couple other smaller lists over the next couple days, such as best individual songs (because there are always a few great songs on mediocre albums), albums I hated, and albums I liked that didn't quite make the top 10.

You may be surprised, you may not, you may want to check out something you hadn't heard before, and you may think I'm a complete idiot. Either way, stay tuned if you're so inclined...

Groovy, baby.

No genre of music walks the line between greatness and stupidity as often and as gracefully as psychedelic music, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the artwork that often accompanies the albums. Some of it is great, some of it is terrible, and all of it is pretty ridiculous on some level. So without judging the merits of the music contained within these records, here are the 10 albums I feel most embody the precarious balance between mind-expanding mysticism and silly cliches found in most psychedelic music. I still don't know what exactly that is, but usually some combination of garish color, barely legible text, and deliberate non-sequiturs which may or may not symbolize something will do. Without further adieu:

Tom's Top Ten Most Psychedelic Album Covers:

1. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - I said I wouldn't judge this based on the music, and I'm sticking by that. But the famous cover to this album is great for some of the exact same reasons that the Beatles were great: it takes a previously existing aesthetic and solidifies it, redefines it, and makes it 1,000 times better than it ever was before all at the same time.
2. The Incredible String Band - 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion - Night and day, alpha and omega, yin and yang, the entire earth at the center, and... yup, there's an onion at the bottom.
3. The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle - Note that I didn't misspell "odyssey," the Zombies did. I have to think that sales of any fabric with a paisley pattern shot up about 1000% in England during the late 1960s.
4. The Dukes of Stratosphear - 25 O'Clock - For those not in the know, the Dukes of Stratosphear were actually XTC in disguise, so this isn't so much the genuine article as an homage of sorts, with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight and far lower levels of LSD. Like all good parodies (and like the music contained within), it's done with no small amount of affection and sincerity.
5. Cream - Disraeli Gears - Of all the records from the late 60's on this list, none were more obviously meant to be viewed not on a 5" CD cover (that obviously being nonexistent at the time), but a 12" LP cover, mainly due to the fact that there is as much crap crammed onto that as can possibly fit without needing a microscope to see them all. I want to say "everything but the kitchen sink," but I'm sure the kitchen sink is somewhere on there. To think that Eric Clapton, faux-blues-traditionalist, was a mere couple years in the past (and a couple years in the future) when this was made...
6. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - Part One - I really can't make heads or tails of this one. Were they trying to suggest that their album was recorded inside a giant kidney?
7. The Strawberry Alarm Clock - Wake Up... It's Tomorrow - These guys single-handedly ruined this entire genre for everybody. In a post-"Incense and Peppermints" world, how could anybody possibly take the idea of psychedelia seriously? Everything about the Strawberry Alarm Clock embodies some cliche or stereotype about psychedelic music. This garish nightmare of a cover must have been a sight to behold in full LP size.
8. XTC - Oranges and Lemons - XTC have the distinction of making this list twice, with two different names. Again, this is more of a knowing wink than the real deal, but still, how could I not include an album cover that has a guitar with a horn on the end that's spewing out bubbles? Or something like that. The other guitar appears to have a headstock that turns into a rocket ship.
9. Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star - I have this one in its original 12" LP format, and I have to hold it at arm's length to look at it. Notice that Todd's left eye is surrounded by an ear... and also that it is bleeding. I think. This is 60s psychedelia filtered through a 70s coke binge.
10. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold As Love - Nobody in the late 60s was as brazen with their faux-Indian-mysticism as the Experience were here.

Honorable mentions:
Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn - Part 2 of the paisley revolution.
Donovan - Sunshine Superman - The perfect embodiment of Donovan's foppish and oh-so-British version of psychedelic folk-pop. I'm just mad about Saffron...
The Beach Boys - Friends - In the late 60s after Brian Wilson crashed and burned with the failure of Smile, the Beach Boys apparently decided to get together in Brian's room, smoke a whole bunch of pot, and talk about how much they like each other. And this album popped out. It's actually pretty good.

So that's that. Feel free to suggest examples I may have missed.

No Love lost between cousin Mike and Brian

News from the world of music doesn't usually make me mad. My reactions range from sadness (when Elliott Smith died) to mild annoyance (when the Beta Band broke up, for instance) to exasperation (anything involving Eminem), but rarely do I feel genuinely angry.

That changed yesterday when I found out that Mike Love is suing Brian Wilson over Wilson's Smile album.

I won't even pretend to look at this from an objective viewpoint. I hate Mike Love. He's selfish, he cares about nothing except money, he undermined his cousin Brian's confidence and mental health at the worst possible time (more on that in a minute), and he's so insecure about his baldness that he hasn't appeared in public without a hat for 40 years and counting. And as much as I hate Mike Love, that's how much I love Brian Wilson, the genius behind everything good the Beach Boys ever did, the mastermind, the architect, the brilliant songwriter who easily ranks as one of the best America has ever produced. He's fought through decades of addiction, depression, and a criminally manipulative doctor to make one of the most unlikely comebacks in the history of rock music, culminating with the completion of his long-lost masterpiece, the intended 1967 follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile.

One of the main reasons for my anti-Love, pro-Wilson bias lies at the heart of this lawsuit: Mike Love is the single biggest reason Smile was never finished in the first place. He vehemently made his feelings known: that he had no idea what the album was about, that he wanted the Beach Boys to go back to making simple surfing songs, and that he considered Smile to be "Brian's ego music." There are many other contributing factors to Brian's abandonment of Smile, but the fact that his own relative and bandmate was attempting (successfully) to undermine the entire thing was probably the single biggest factor in deep-sixing it.

Of course, now that it's finally been finished, and released to near-universal acclaim, Love is naturally unhappy about it. Love, or his attorney, or both, are saying, without any trace of irony, that Brian promoted Smile in a manner that "shamelessly misappropriated Mike Love's songs, likeness and the Beach Boys trademark, as well as the Smile album itself." Never mind that Love wanted nothing to do with Smile when he had his chance back in the late 60's, or that he co-wrote exactly one (1) song that ended up on the album (that would be his lyrical contribution to "Good Vibrations," which ended up being dropped for Tony Asher's original lyrics for Smile anyway), or that the only reason Smile was released under the name "Brian Wilson" and not "The Beach Boys" is because Mike Love himself sued for exclusive use of the name (and won for reasons I can't even begin to fathom). I have no clue how Love's "likeness" is being misappropriated here. The only mentions of his name I can think of throughout the entire blitz of promotion and media coverage over the past two years have been along the lines of "Fellow Beach Boy Mike Love was extremely critical of Smile," and that's not slander, that's a fact.

So Mike Love wants re-imbursement for "millions of dollars in illicit profits," and meanwhile Brian Wilson raised $210,000 for Hurricane Katrina relief, and made 500 personal phone calls to fans who donated $100 or more (donations he also matched). Clearly Brian's the bad guy there. I don't know why I'm so surprised by this, but to me, it's more proof that Mike Love is a petty man with no class, no shame, and apparently no brain underneath that big bald dome of his.

A Fiery Furnaces Family Reunion

The Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir is the type of album that inadvertently shows how far I'm willing to go to try to accept an artist on their own terms. I personally think it's great, but it seems perfectly logical to me that some people aren't exactly gung ho about a concept album documenting the life of a band's grandmother, told largely through spoken word. I can imagine some people are really, for lack of a better termed, weirded out by hearing the wavering voice of an old woman recalling Depression-Era Chicago over a tack piano backdrop, especially coming from a band that was, once upon a time, all the way back in 2003, the epitome of a hip underground New York band.

We knew from last year's Blueberry Boat that the Fiery Furnaces were no ordinary post-punk/garage/alternative/whatever band, but Rehearsing My Choir is a whole new depth of weirdness. If the closest reference point for Blueberry Boat was the Who (a comparison I've never really found apt, except for the fact that the Furnaces were churning out distant descendants of "Rael," which I guess was the whole point), Rehearsing My Choir is somewhere between Gilbert & Sullivan and Philip Glass, and it's every bit as strange as that sounds.

As mentioned before, it's a concept album and collaboration between the brother and sister who make up the Furnaces, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, and their grandmother, Olga Sarantos. Most of the dialogue (and it's certainly better classified as "dialogue" than "lyrics") is spoken, and any overarching plot is almost indecipherable in the meandering free-associative nature of the songs, like a Faulkner novel set to music and spanning over half a century. The Philip Glass influence comes from the nonlinear narrative, the spoken words over repetitive (dare I say minimalist?) background, and the repeated out-of-context phrases thrown in for good measure ("Faster hammers! Faster hammers!"). It really isn't too far away from Einstein on the Beach. The Gilbert & Sullivan comes from the strangely vaudevillian nature of a lot of it, with something resembling an opera on top of it, and all that aforementioned tack piano.

So why do I think it's great? As a rule, I'll admit I give extra points for weirdness, and this is as weird as pop music comes lately. But it's also strangely entrancing. Once I managed to lose myself in the songs a little, I realized how intricately tied together the whole thing is, despite the apparent lack of focus. It's deceptively well put together, and it's so odd to try to take in all at once that I didn't even notice all of the interconnected musical themes until the third or fourth listen. There are no hooks or singalong melodies to speak of, but it's strangely catchy nonetheless.

As a whole, Rehearsing My Choir is inferior to Blueberry Boat, but the Fiery Furnaces, even when they're not at the top of their game, are that rare group who make me excited about the possibilities of pop music, which is one of the best compliments I can pay to anybody. I can't wait to hear what they have in store for next year.

Glaciers, geysers, and other Icelandic cliches

Let's clear some things up about Sigur Ros right now: Their "Scandinavian mystic elf" schtick is completely transparent. Their singer has laid down, to the best of my recollection, a grand total of maybe three different vocal parts (three is generous, considering that there was roughly one on their last album). They're too pretentious for words (this should be plain to see, considering that their last album was titled ( ) and was sung in a supposedly invented language). Every single one of their albums is about twice as long as it needs to be.

And yet... I love them!

I'll admit I fell for the whole ( ) gimmick hook, line, and sinker when it first came out. I loved its predecessor, Agaetis Byrjun, and was literally counting down the days until its release, and as a testament to my fandom I'd just paid almost $50 for a ticket to see them, and the ticket wasn't even here in Philly. It was in New York, which meant driving three hours each way, and paying another $20 to park. If I'd known they'd play Philly the next spring, I might have reconsidered. And when I got ( ), the idea of releasing an album of pop songs with no titles and no actual lyrics seemed like the greatest thing ever. The fact that I couldn't tell "Hopelandic" from their usual Icelandic lyrics anyway made little difference.

But I seem to have soured on them over the last couple years. The main reason for that is that I stopped looking at them through my rose-colored glasses that allowed me to overlook all of their ridiculousness and the flaws I listed earlier. The result? It's probably been a good year and a half since I had them on, and even then it was probably the Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do EP that resulted from their collaboration with Merce Cunningham and Radiohead. So here I am, listening to their first album since ( ), Takk..., having just recently passed up an opportunity to see their amazing live show for a third time, and how do I feel?

Pretty good.

I can't quite put my finger on it, and I've never been able to, but, like Boards of Canada, the best Sigur Ros moments are mind-blowingly amazing for reasons that are unknown to most people. I have no idea if they're just amazingly talented and passionate, or formulaic and manipulative, but whatever they've been doing for the past six years or so, it's worked, and it still does.

One thing is for sure: these guys know their way around a dramatic climax, and, like everything else they've done, Takk... is packed to the brim with them. Some are certainly more effective than others ("Milano" comes to mind, as does "Saeglopur"), and those moments are worthy of the best of Agaetis Byrjun, but overall, it's merely ok. Frankly, the whole thing is starting to get old. I get the feeling I'm supposed to hear "Svo Hljott" as a dramatic climax to the entire album, but by the time I get there, I've heard it already. About eight times, by that point.

The real joys for me are the unexpected moments, the moments that display a hint of creativity and subtlety. Hear that horn section in "Se Lest"? That is what brings the smile to my face. It's strinkingly reminiscent of Agaetis Byrjun's "Staralfur," which has a similar passage with horns and strings that ranks as not only my favorite moment in the entire Sigur Ros catalog, but one of my favorite moments in any song, ever. The first time I heard that part in "Staralfur" I was dumbstruck with awe. It sounded like the band suddenly stepped into a time warp and decided to march down the aisle of a cathedral to Handel's arrangement of their own song. It was indescribably wonderful.

But do you see where I've ended up? I started off talking about their new album, and the best I could manage was a smiling reminiscence of one of their older ones. And that just about sums up Takk... It's not bad, but I hardly envision myself ever needing to hear it too often when it sounds so similar to something that's so much better.

Short note: all of the Icelandic accents and written oddities have been Anglified for the purpose of this post, because Blogger does not seem to take kindly to non-English symbols. So if you cringe at Agaetis Byrjun written without all its accents and whatnot, I apologize.