THE TOP ALBUMS OF THE 2010'S
Welcome to The Top Albums Of The 2010's. I have fourteen-ish albums selected for this list, ranging in release from Novemeber 17, 2009 (too late to qualify for the last list) and October 12, 2018 (spoilers, I guess).
Let me take you through the process: I nominated 24 albums, listened to them all, then put only the ones on the list that I felt were worthy of "Best Of The Decade". No arbitrary Top 20 or the like; if it fell short, it fell short. But when it came about that I had fourteen, I started to waver a bit on that. I dug out an album I didn't want on the countdown for...reasons, and gave it another spin.
One of my next blogs after this one will be a dive into why, despite being good enough to land somewhere between 10 and 12 on this list, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is not something I'd care to revisit again. (I already have 1,200 words I was gonna include here, but this is already long enough.)
So we have fourteen. And we start off with...something that technically isn't an album, but I think it's pretty neat, so may I present to you:
Everything in this mix feels like a diagetic snippet of someone's life, every sound a whisp of a building block that makes up their world translated into electronic harmony. There's cat's purs, the rattle of bicycle wheels, the sound of spoons against saucers...and that's just the closer. One song flips the Skype dial tone into a melancholic lament at the end of a relationship, the only word uttered in the song being "Goodbye". (The only intelligible word on the album, in fact.)
Whether or not this counts as an album (being that it's a collection of ten loose YouTube tracks they'd dropped up to that point), with this group of songs In Love With A Ghost really impressed me and made me feel warm and at home in their sonic environment.
Hey, I like my own band, okay? If I'm making a list based on my own opinions, I'm gonna be honest. I love the music I make. This isn't about quality, this isn't about whether I'm better than, say, Kendrick Lamar (who came close to making this list with To Pimp A Butterfly), but if I'm being honest I bump this a lot more and feel more of a connection to it. (Also TPAB has a bloat problem the great songs don't quite overcome; you know it's true.)
I'm not gonna defend this pick either because it throws objectivity out the window and empties its bladder on the defenestrated. I love playing these songs, I love listening to them, and there will be a supreme dearth of good hard rock albums going forward, so why the fuck not?
(This came out before The Night Howls, so my point still stands.)
Mutoid Man never lets up for a second. They sound like they're out for blood with every note they play. Yet they have a knack for interesting melody with vocals and leads that makes them so much more than your average thrash or stoner band. Songs like "Surveilance" and "Thousand Mile Stare" go so goddam hard. Like, I can't really say anything intelligible or critic-y about this album to make you go listen to it, so go listen to it. This shit SLAMS!
I can remember one really cold morning, single digits farenheit, when I put this CD on in the car and the vibe of "Legendary Iron Hood" just hit me. The sound of the song is steam coming out a sewer grate; it's waiting for the heater to kick in while you sit huddled in the driver's seat because you're too cold/tired this early in the morning to go scrape the windows and this dude's voice is a soft blanket that lets you know the outside is there but gives a bit of warmth in return.
Open Mike Eagle's musical aesthetic is ambience, but not used in a literal sense like In Love With A Ghost. He uses synthesizers and samples to remind you of things with music rather than building his world up with Earthly sounds and field recordings. And the warmth of that doesn't stop with the soundscapes: the lyrics paint intimate portraits of a life colored equally by imaginative methods of escapism and the brutal realities it's trying to escape from.
A recurring theme of the album is life in the Chicago projects, which leads to the conclusion where the brick body is torn down because after fifty five years the people in charge realized it was a bad idea to gather marginalized people in one place while keeping them poor. The perfect conditions for breeding crime: take all hope away from a populace, make them so desperate they need to cheat just to stay in the capitalist game, then put them in close proximity so all they have to take from is each other. Of course when they tear the buildings down and act like the problem's solved now, they forget that they just made thousands of desperate, desolated people homeless on top of everything else. And they never think about it again.
"That's the sound of them tearing my body down....to the ground..." Projects or not, this was the only home most of these people ever knew and now their entire world has been razed to rubble.
But that's just the setting of the album. The characters have their quirks ("Legendary Iron Hood", "TLDR (Smithing)"), their problems ("No Selling"), their aspirations ("Daydreaming In The Projects"), their hopes against hope ("Happy Wasteland Day"), they make the best of bad situations ("95 Radios"). (Also, special shoutout to the lyric "Flyin' fucks is thrown at rolling donuts" from "Hymnal", because dude. What more can I say?) The people are still real and still intensely human. That's what this art is painting a picture of.
Tosin Abasi is the best guitar player out there today. I've always loved intense displays of virtuosity backed by unstoppable groove, and this album has it in spades, plus adds in the heaviness of eight-stringed guitar. Dust with electronics to taste, and you've built an aesthetic that seems laser-targeted for 2011 Nick. (Actually, Nick from about 2000-2014, but the point is they did it so well it still holds up!)
There's two songs on this one I straight didn't remember existed. Then there's another two songs I'd conflated together, thinking they were one song. Re-listening to Running From A Gamble, I realize I don't think I've spun this in its entirety since 2012.
How does any of this happen? How does this album still qualify for the top ten of the decade if I haven't listened to it in eight years? Easy. The songs that I have kept in rotation are fucking killer. There's a reason this album had more entries in the Top 100 Songs Of The Decade than any other, and that's because they're fucking amazing. But I'll admit, the phenomenal cuts on here kind of carry it.
The intro is what it is, "Queen Of Hearts" is a damn fine song, "Modern Waste" and "Look Both Ways" both made the list, "Never Look Back" I can't pick out of a lineup and still can't hum you a bar (though songs go into my head in pretty much perfect detail after a few listens), "Nothing's In The Flowers" grew on me over time, "Death Of Communication" is one of the best songs ever made, "King Of Dreams" and "Gorgeous/Grotesque" are the ones I got conflated and are both pretty slow, but good separately? Given the collection of songs, this was bound to happen, I guess, but I dunno. "Syrup" is the other one I don't remember. I think it starts with a bass line and drums. Maybe throw that inbetween the previous two and it would flow better? Eh. "Tallulah" did pretty well on the Top 100, "Won't Go Quietly" made the top 20, and "After Thought" is fine, but it's also a really fitting title.
As an album, Running From A Gamble is a hot mess that has a few misfires, but nothing outright bad. Because the good songs are so stratospheric, it carries the rest of the floppy, leaden bits over the line and lands inside the top 10. (See also: My pick for Album Of The Decade, 00's Edition: Kenna's New Sacred Cow. There's an album with potholes, but holy shit were they more than made up for.)
Retroactively, I'm making this my best album of 2016. At the time, I didn't like anything enough to make it number one and I didn't hear this until February 2017. I fucked up.
The Impossible Kid is chock full of verbose verses, stompy beats that convey claustrophobia, introversion and anxiety, yet Aesop's delivery of cool, sarcastic braggadocio over the top is a nice portrait of someone who's lived with these conditions for their whole lives and doesn't really find them noteworthy anymore, just tiresome (hard same over here!). "Rings" gets more true every year as I find the desire to exercise my creative muscles waning more and more (why do you think it took me a month to write this dreck?). "Kirby" is a great ode to his cat. I love "Shrunk" because it breaks down how every artist feels unique and so cryptic (as a coping mechanism, though they think that's what makes them special, makes them "them" (it isn't)), and the secretary, having heard it all before, just shrugs it off and has him take a seat. (I still haven't looked up what a susurrus is (I guess it's a murmuring sound).)
I like every song on this, the lyrics are all sharp and smart, the beats all slap and it crafts mood super well.
The third part of a four part series (released concurrently with part four, Ghost, a new age record that is the complete opposite of this one), the idea behind Deconstruction is figuring out the meaning of life, finding out what you want out of it, then figuring out the journey's more important than the destination , freaking out and not being able to handle the pressure of realizing you have to make your own meaning, and winding up with your hands around the throat of the worst parts of yourself once you finally corner them, only stopping when you realize you're the one who can't breathe.
The moral of the story is that even the worst parts of yourself are still you and you can't destroy them without destroying yourself, so you have to learn to coexist with them instead. This is conveyed to us through nine lengthy slabs of "impenetrable technicality" (a phrase Townsend used about his band Strapping Young Lad's Alien), and it gets pretty intense.
It starts subtle, comforting even, but the brutality creeps in with perhaps the most meaningful crossfade I've ever heard in "Praise The Lowered", shattering any hope of peace and bringing aggression to bear. By track three (15 minutes in), "Juular" has Dirk Verbeuren being a banana and everything is threatening to go off the rails (just like in the video). Then we get an eleven minute song that starts with Meshuggah riffs and ends with kumbaya shit, a six minute Gojira song that I could take or leave, then a sixteen and a half minute song about the futility of trying to save the world as an individual, the arrogance of humanity (singular and plural) and trying to implement said salvation by attempting to gain acceptance into the intergalactic community. (It's that kind of record.) The title track has the devil tempting the narrator with the secrets of the universe, and all he has to do is eat the cheeseburger of forbidden knowledge, but the narrator is a vegetarian so the devil's plans are foiled! It's as long and as rambling as this paragraph, yet somehow works so beautifully, slams so hard and has such insights into the human condition I can't help but love this amazing, bloated, kinda flawed yet singularly unique record that pulls no punches and goes for everything.
What happens if you give someone with drive, creative potential and a ton of wild but disparate ideas a budget to match their ambition and they wind up doing all of everything they've ever wanted to do as an artist because they know they'll probably never get this chance again? Thankfully this was a hit and Janelle Monae has been able to keep doing that for over a decade now, but holy crap did she go for it on this one.
First of all, the album is designed as two separate suites, with repeating themes and an ongoing storyline (continued from her 2008 EP Metropolis: The Chase Suite, and continued in her 2013 follow-up The Electric Lady, with a hint that there would be two more to wrap up the story in the future). There are two overtures built into the album and I love the orchestration on them both. From there, things move fast: a funky but muted dance number setting the scene of dystopia and those that would rebel, then a swingy number with a hint of doo-wop flavor , then flipping a Michael Jackson sample into something heartachingly exquisite, venting feelings of love and fear but coalescing on the theme I keep coming back to in these times we need it the most: beauty in the face of darkness.
It slows with the love theme "Sir Greendown", but then amps back up with "Cold War", using the drums from Outkast's "B.O.B." (the album's produced by Big Boi). Then the single "Tightrope" is a dance song that sounds sorta throwbacky, "Neon Gumbo" is a backwards interlude that actually sounds pretty good reversed but like a waste of time as presented; maybe it's supposed to be a hidden transmission from the rebels to the listener. "O Maker" is a beautiful, pastoral number about trying to believe in the face of the hurt of the world, "Come Alive" is a demented monster mash thing that doesn't care if it's corny or not, it just goes for it and "Mushrooms & Roses" is psychedelic and stretched out.
The back half of the album (Suite III) is a lot darker, with a more mournful tone. "Make The Bus" (feat. Of Montreal) is the only real misfire; easily my least favorite Janelle Monae song, since it's basically an Of Montreal song that snuck its way onto this album (and it's not very good at all). But holy crap the closer "BabopbyeYa" brings the house down with an eight and a half minute, cabaret style retro-futurist theater number that I cannot accurately describe.
This album is all over the place and it's not necessarily designed to be consumed in one sitting, but it is everything it tries to be and then some. When it succeeds it breaks through the dimensional barrier and finds new art impossible in this one, when it fails it still does really well.
What's notable about the Phenomenal Handclap Band is how unremarkable they seem. They don't really do anything outwardly noteworthy as far as flash, style or composition; even the lyrics are only above average. But holy fucking hell does it strike a chord with me when you put it all together. Something about the "just there enough" delivery makes the material cut through the veneer of indie trope and become something emotionally resonant. I'm usually not sure what the song's about, but I feeeel it, y'know?
Songs like "The Written Word", "The Unknown Faces At Father James Park", "Form & Control", "Shake", "Give", "Afterglow" and "Winter Falls" were all strong contenders for the Songs of the Decade list, and the rest from this album would've at least been in the top 600. (I had a top 500 I widdled down over three months to what I got, so that's a lot higher praise than it seems).
Every song on this is a 3.5 out of 5 and up. Some of them are 6's and 7's. There are things I could nitpick about the presentation and flow as an album, but as a collection of songs, this is it.
I was really worried for a second I'd have to put an album from 2009 at number one because hoo boy was this tough to beat.
This was my first real taste of Devin Townsend. I had Ki from earlier that year, and I really liked it, but even at the time that one felt like a preamble; a warmup leading to bigger things about to come. I saw a video of Devin cutting vocals in his house and he wasn't even wearing headphones; he was just singing into an open mic with the speakers blaring. Even in 2009 I knew enough that you weren't supposed to do that, so I had to know how this madman's escapades turned out.
The song in question was "Supercrush!" and the rest is history.
This album walks the finest of lines between pop rock and hard metal. The addition of Anneke van Giersbergen's voice makes everything it touches soar. This album goes to the top and stays there, but never goes to 11. Unlike Deconstruction that follows it, Addicted has no blast beats, no death growls (though there's plenty of screaming). He takes it as far as it can go without burying the needle, staying in this goldilocks zone of songcraft and sensibility.
And it's bloody fantastic.
What...the hell...do I say about this album? If you've never experienced mashups before, this is going to fuck your brain. Actually, this is gonna fuck your brain no matter what level of mashups you be on. That's kinda the point.
So, what is this album?
A non-zero part of why this album hits so hard for me is nostalgia. It's ironic because the pop hits of the 90's were all things I was desperately trying to avoid and thought I was too cool for. Now I reach for them because a) I'm not trying to be an iconoclastic stick in the mud anymore and b) I barely recognize the world anymore and any bit of familiarity is comforting.
But the piece du resistance is "T.I.M.E.": A mashup of Hans Zimmer's "Time" and The Village People's Y.M.C.A. By taking the kitchy disco out of the background and putting in this swelling EPIC theme, the lyrics of Y.M.C.A. are recontextualized in such an unexpected way that they reveal an emotional core you didn't know was there. We're always too busy dancing and having a good time to realize that this song is about the narrator trying to pick someone who's destitute up off the ground and reassure them that the world hasn't ended. Let's face it: if you have to stay at the YMCA, if that's what up looks like, things haven't been going great. Strip away the party music, and you have a hand in the darkness, reaching out to help.
This is the moment I realized memes could be art. It might have been intended as a joke; the incongruity theory of humor says that if you put two incongruous things together, especially in an unexpected manor, humor may ensue. That may have been the intent, but the outcome is this deadly serious soul gaze that tests you to your very core. It's absolutely astonishing.
So yeah. "Mouth Moods" is a spectacle to behold. If you haven't experienced it, I cannot recommend it enough.
[Addendum: I sang "Mouth Pressure" at karaoke once. It wasn't easy, since the lyrics on screen didn't quite rotate fast enough for the song, but I knew "All Star" well enough to sing it over the top of "Under Pressure" with minimal prompting. One of the most fun karaoke experiences I ever had.]
Of all the albums I have encountered in my travels...Her's was the most...
...Human.
Listening to these entries to make this list, I knew from track two or three that this was number one and it wasn't even close. I knew listening to Mouth Moods right after this that it was number two and that wasn't even close. The distance between the rest of the list and Mouth Moods is as certain as the distance between it and Rainbow.
This is not an album for everybody, to be sure. But there's certainly a bit of everything on it: Acoustic ballads, pop rock, dance music, retro Motown-ish things, fuck yeah anthems of empowerment, harrowing torch songs about recovering from abuse, chamber pop, country, even a children's song in a way. And all of it is Kesha as she really is. Not the studio creation of the producer that literally violated her.
At the beginning of the decade, Kesha was one of my least favorite artists in music. I could not stand songs like "Tik Tok" and "BlahBlahBlah" (still can't handle that last one). But with Rainbow, I feel like it's a real human being expressing their desires and experiences through their art, and as a bonus the songs are well made and/or fun to listen to.
That seems like a low bar, but think about how many albums actually meet it. How many acts fall into genre tropes and get buried behind a veneer of marketing? How many times do people change their style to fit the times? How many times do they refuse to change to retain a fanbase? How often does the business of music get in the way of the art? It's far more often than you think. This is pure. Kesha knew the label wasn't behind her because they were set to force her work with the rapist again if not for a giant PR backlash. So she made the songs she wanted to make, and it's my favorite album of the last ten years.
I haven't listened to her follow-up yet, High Road, because I've been taking a deliberate break from new music, so I don't know where she goes from here. I do know it's the last album under that contract, so things may be getting more exciting in the future. But even if she never makes another album, it doesn't matter because Rainbow is out there. And it's real.
So, finally, at long last, my year end lists are done. I started working on them at the end of July and here it is, three hours from St. Patrick's Day. Counting the future blog about Kanye (I may or may not finish), I have well over 19,000 words for my trouble. Are they any good? You be the judge. I don't know if that's even important. The point of doing these is to celebrate and reflect on a thing I love most in this world: Music. It's my jam.
I hope you found something out of all this you can jam to yourself. I like to share. Stay safe out there, and keep the music in you wherever you go.
Peace.
Let me take you through the process: I nominated 24 albums, listened to them all, then put only the ones on the list that I felt were worthy of "Best Of The Decade". No arbitrary Top 20 or the like; if it fell short, it fell short. But when it came about that I had fourteen, I started to waver a bit on that. I dug out an album I didn't want on the countdown for...reasons, and gave it another spin.
One of my next blogs after this one will be a dive into why, despite being good enough to land somewhere between 10 and 12 on this list, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is not something I'd care to revisit again. (I already have 1,200 words I was gonna include here, but this is already long enough.)
So we have fourteen. And we start off with...something that technically isn't an album, but I think it's pretty neat, so may I present to you:
Everything in this mix feels like a diagetic snippet of someone's life, every sound a whisp of a building block that makes up their world translated into electronic harmony. There's cat's purs, the rattle of bicycle wheels, the sound of spoons against saucers...and that's just the closer. One song flips the Skype dial tone into a melancholic lament at the end of a relationship, the only word uttered in the song being "Goodbye". (The only intelligible word on the album, in fact.)
Whether or not this counts as an album (being that it's a collection of ten loose YouTube tracks they'd dropped up to that point), with this group of songs In Love With A Ghost really impressed me and made me feel warm and at home in their sonic environment.
Hey, I like my own band, okay? If I'm making a list based on my own opinions, I'm gonna be honest. I love the music I make. This isn't about quality, this isn't about whether I'm better than, say, Kendrick Lamar (who came close to making this list with To Pimp A Butterfly), but if I'm being honest I bump this a lot more and feel more of a connection to it. (Also TPAB has a bloat problem the great songs don't quite overcome; you know it's true.)
I'm not gonna defend this pick either because it throws objectivity out the window and empties its bladder on the defenestrated. I love playing these songs, I love listening to them, and there will be a supreme dearth of good hard rock albums going forward, so why the fuck not?
(This came out before The Night Howls, so my point still stands.)
Mutoid Man never lets up for a second. They sound like they're out for blood with every note they play. Yet they have a knack for interesting melody with vocals and leads that makes them so much more than your average thrash or stoner band. Songs like "Surveilance" and "Thousand Mile Stare" go so goddam hard. Like, I can't really say anything intelligible or critic-y about this album to make you go listen to it, so go listen to it. This shit SLAMS!
I can remember one really cold morning, single digits farenheit, when I put this CD on in the car and the vibe of "Legendary Iron Hood" just hit me. The sound of the song is steam coming out a sewer grate; it's waiting for the heater to kick in while you sit huddled in the driver's seat because you're too cold/tired this early in the morning to go scrape the windows and this dude's voice is a soft blanket that lets you know the outside is there but gives a bit of warmth in return.
Open Mike Eagle's musical aesthetic is ambience, but not used in a literal sense like In Love With A Ghost. He uses synthesizers and samples to remind you of things with music rather than building his world up with Earthly sounds and field recordings. And the warmth of that doesn't stop with the soundscapes: the lyrics paint intimate portraits of a life colored equally by imaginative methods of escapism and the brutal realities it's trying to escape from.
A recurring theme of the album is life in the Chicago projects, which leads to the conclusion where the brick body is torn down because after fifty five years the people in charge realized it was a bad idea to gather marginalized people in one place while keeping them poor. The perfect conditions for breeding crime: take all hope away from a populace, make them so desperate they need to cheat just to stay in the capitalist game, then put them in close proximity so all they have to take from is each other. Of course when they tear the buildings down and act like the problem's solved now, they forget that they just made thousands of desperate, desolated people homeless on top of everything else. And they never think about it again.
"That's the sound of them tearing my body down....to the ground..." Projects or not, this was the only home most of these people ever knew and now their entire world has been razed to rubble.
But that's just the setting of the album. The characters have their quirks ("Legendary Iron Hood", "TLDR (Smithing)"), their problems ("No Selling"), their aspirations ("Daydreaming In The Projects"), their hopes against hope ("Happy Wasteland Day"), they make the best of bad situations ("95 Radios"). (Also, special shoutout to the lyric "Flyin' fucks is thrown at rolling donuts" from "Hymnal", because dude. What more can I say?) The people are still real and still intensely human. That's what this art is painting a picture of.
Tosin Abasi is the best guitar player out there today. I've always loved intense displays of virtuosity backed by unstoppable groove, and this album has it in spades, plus adds in the heaviness of eight-stringed guitar. Dust with electronics to taste, and you've built an aesthetic that seems laser-targeted for 2011 Nick. (Actually, Nick from about 2000-2014, but the point is they did it so well it still holds up!)
There's two songs on this one I straight didn't remember existed. Then there's another two songs I'd conflated together, thinking they were one song. Re-listening to Running From A Gamble, I realize I don't think I've spun this in its entirety since 2012.
How does any of this happen? How does this album still qualify for the top ten of the decade if I haven't listened to it in eight years? Easy. The songs that I have kept in rotation are fucking killer. There's a reason this album had more entries in the Top 100 Songs Of The Decade than any other, and that's because they're fucking amazing. But I'll admit, the phenomenal cuts on here kind of carry it.
The intro is what it is, "Queen Of Hearts" is a damn fine song, "Modern Waste" and "Look Both Ways" both made the list, "Never Look Back" I can't pick out of a lineup and still can't hum you a bar (though songs go into my head in pretty much perfect detail after a few listens), "Nothing's In The Flowers" grew on me over time, "Death Of Communication" is one of the best songs ever made, "King Of Dreams" and "Gorgeous/Grotesque" are the ones I got conflated and are both pretty slow, but good separately? Given the collection of songs, this was bound to happen, I guess, but I dunno. "Syrup" is the other one I don't remember. I think it starts with a bass line and drums. Maybe throw that inbetween the previous two and it would flow better? Eh. "Tallulah" did pretty well on the Top 100, "Won't Go Quietly" made the top 20, and "After Thought" is fine, but it's also a really fitting title.
As an album, Running From A Gamble is a hot mess that has a few misfires, but nothing outright bad. Because the good songs are so stratospheric, it carries the rest of the floppy, leaden bits over the line and lands inside the top 10. (See also: My pick for Album Of The Decade, 00's Edition: Kenna's New Sacred Cow. There's an album with potholes, but holy shit were they more than made up for.)
The Impossible Kid is chock full of verbose verses, stompy beats that convey claustrophobia, introversion and anxiety, yet Aesop's delivery of cool, sarcastic braggadocio over the top is a nice portrait of someone who's lived with these conditions for their whole lives and doesn't really find them noteworthy anymore, just tiresome (hard same over here!). "Rings" gets more true every year as I find the desire to exercise my creative muscles waning more and more (why do you think it took me a month to write this dreck?). "Kirby" is a great ode to his cat. I love "Shrunk" because it breaks down how every artist feels unique and so cryptic (as a coping mechanism, though they think that's what makes them special, makes them "them" (it isn't)), and the secretary, having heard it all before, just shrugs it off and has him take a seat. (I still haven't looked up what a susurrus is (I guess it's a murmuring sound).)
I like every song on this, the lyrics are all sharp and smart, the beats all slap and it crafts mood super well.
The third part of a four part series (released concurrently with part four, Ghost, a new age record that is the complete opposite of this one), the idea behind Deconstruction is figuring out the meaning of life, finding out what you want out of it, then figuring out the journey's more important than the destination , freaking out and not being able to handle the pressure of realizing you have to make your own meaning, and winding up with your hands around the throat of the worst parts of yourself once you finally corner them, only stopping when you realize you're the one who can't breathe.
The moral of the story is that even the worst parts of yourself are still you and you can't destroy them without destroying yourself, so you have to learn to coexist with them instead. This is conveyed to us through nine lengthy slabs of "impenetrable technicality" (a phrase Townsend used about his band Strapping Young Lad's Alien), and it gets pretty intense.
It starts subtle, comforting even, but the brutality creeps in with perhaps the most meaningful crossfade I've ever heard in "Praise The Lowered", shattering any hope of peace and bringing aggression to bear. By track three (15 minutes in), "Juular" has Dirk Verbeuren being a banana and everything is threatening to go off the rails (just like in the video). Then we get an eleven minute song that starts with Meshuggah riffs and ends with kumbaya shit, a six minute Gojira song that I could take or leave, then a sixteen and a half minute song about the futility of trying to save the world as an individual, the arrogance of humanity (singular and plural) and trying to implement said salvation by attempting to gain acceptance into the intergalactic community. (It's that kind of record.) The title track has the devil tempting the narrator with the secrets of the universe, and all he has to do is eat the cheeseburger of forbidden knowledge, but the narrator is a vegetarian so the devil's plans are foiled! It's as long and as rambling as this paragraph, yet somehow works so beautifully, slams so hard and has such insights into the human condition I can't help but love this amazing, bloated, kinda flawed yet singularly unique record that pulls no punches and goes for everything.
What happens if you give someone with drive, creative potential and a ton of wild but disparate ideas a budget to match their ambition and they wind up doing all of everything they've ever wanted to do as an artist because they know they'll probably never get this chance again? Thankfully this was a hit and Janelle Monae has been able to keep doing that for over a decade now, but holy crap did she go for it on this one.
First of all, the album is designed as two separate suites, with repeating themes and an ongoing storyline (continued from her 2008 EP Metropolis: The Chase Suite, and continued in her 2013 follow-up The Electric Lady, with a hint that there would be two more to wrap up the story in the future). There are two overtures built into the album and I love the orchestration on them both. From there, things move fast: a funky but muted dance number setting the scene of dystopia and those that would rebel, then a swingy number with a hint of doo-wop flavor , then flipping a Michael Jackson sample into something heartachingly exquisite, venting feelings of love and fear but coalescing on the theme I keep coming back to in these times we need it the most: beauty in the face of darkness.
It slows with the love theme "Sir Greendown", but then amps back up with "Cold War", using the drums from Outkast's "B.O.B." (the album's produced by Big Boi). Then the single "Tightrope" is a dance song that sounds sorta throwbacky, "Neon Gumbo" is a backwards interlude that actually sounds pretty good reversed but like a waste of time as presented; maybe it's supposed to be a hidden transmission from the rebels to the listener. "O Maker" is a beautiful, pastoral number about trying to believe in the face of the hurt of the world, "Come Alive" is a demented monster mash thing that doesn't care if it's corny or not, it just goes for it and "Mushrooms & Roses" is psychedelic and stretched out.
The back half of the album (Suite III) is a lot darker, with a more mournful tone. "Make The Bus" (feat. Of Montreal) is the only real misfire; easily my least favorite Janelle Monae song, since it's basically an Of Montreal song that snuck its way onto this album (and it's not very good at all). But holy crap the closer "BabopbyeYa" brings the house down with an eight and a half minute, cabaret style retro-futurist theater number that I cannot accurately describe.
This album is all over the place and it's not necessarily designed to be consumed in one sitting, but it is everything it tries to be and then some. When it succeeds it breaks through the dimensional barrier and finds new art impossible in this one, when it fails it still does really well.
Songs like "The Written Word", "The Unknown Faces At Father James Park", "Form & Control", "Shake", "Give", "Afterglow" and "Winter Falls" were all strong contenders for the Songs of the Decade list, and the rest from this album would've at least been in the top 600. (I had a top 500 I widdled down over three months to what I got, so that's a lot higher praise than it seems).
Every song on this is a 3.5 out of 5 and up. Some of them are 6's and 7's. There are things I could nitpick about the presentation and flow as an album, but as a collection of songs, this is it.
I was really worried for a second I'd have to put an album from 2009 at number one because hoo boy was this tough to beat.
This was my first real taste of Devin Townsend. I had Ki from earlier that year, and I really liked it, but even at the time that one felt like a preamble; a warmup leading to bigger things about to come. I saw a video of Devin cutting vocals in his house and he wasn't even wearing headphones; he was just singing into an open mic with the speakers blaring. Even in 2009 I knew enough that you weren't supposed to do that, so I had to know how this madman's escapades turned out.
The song in question was "Supercrush!" and the rest is history.
This album walks the finest of lines between pop rock and hard metal. The addition of Anneke van Giersbergen's voice makes everything it touches soar. This album goes to the top and stays there, but never goes to 11. Unlike Deconstruction that follows it, Addicted has no blast beats, no death growls (though there's plenty of screaming). He takes it as far as it can go without burying the needle, staying in this goldilocks zone of songcraft and sensibility.
And it's bloody fantastic.
What...the hell...do I say about this album? If you've never experienced mashups before, this is going to fuck your brain. Actually, this is gonna fuck your brain no matter what level of mashups you be on. That's kinda the point.
- Neil Cicierega is the reason Smash Mouth is all over the internet.
- He's responsible for Brodyquest.
- He's responsible for "The Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny".
- He's responsible for Potter Puppet Pals.
- His style got ripped off in 2004 by Quizno's Subs by the "Eat Quiznos Suuubs"...thing.
- He's kind of secretly responsible for like a third of internet culture or something.
So, what is this album?
- Dozens of opening lines from pop songs in one three minute song
- A quirky 70's instrumental with a manipulated Drowning Pool vocal to fit it
- Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" with the vocal of AC/DC's "Back In Black"
- The Proclaimers mashed up with a QVC ad for a computer with 300 megabytes of hard drive space
- A mashup of Mambo No 5 and Revolution No 9
- Dear Prudence and Walk The Dinosaur
- Tim "The Toolman" Taylor, Disturbed, Korn, Mungo Jerry and a dozen other pop culture references in under four minutes
- Smash Mouth's "All Star" over "Under Pressure"
- Songs that are mashups of themselves where the lyrics have been twisted around to make new sentences that sound absurd.
A non-zero part of why this album hits so hard for me is nostalgia. It's ironic because the pop hits of the 90's were all things I was desperately trying to avoid and thought I was too cool for. Now I reach for them because a) I'm not trying to be an iconoclastic stick in the mud anymore and b) I barely recognize the world anymore and any bit of familiarity is comforting.
But the piece du resistance is "T.I.M.E.": A mashup of Hans Zimmer's "Time" and The Village People's Y.M.C.A. By taking the kitchy disco out of the background and putting in this swelling EPIC theme, the lyrics of Y.M.C.A. are recontextualized in such an unexpected way that they reveal an emotional core you didn't know was there. We're always too busy dancing and having a good time to realize that this song is about the narrator trying to pick someone who's destitute up off the ground and reassure them that the world hasn't ended. Let's face it: if you have to stay at the YMCA, if that's what up looks like, things haven't been going great. Strip away the party music, and you have a hand in the darkness, reaching out to help.
This is the moment I realized memes could be art. It might have been intended as a joke; the incongruity theory of humor says that if you put two incongruous things together, especially in an unexpected manor, humor may ensue. That may have been the intent, but the outcome is this deadly serious soul gaze that tests you to your very core. It's absolutely astonishing.
So yeah. "Mouth Moods" is a spectacle to behold. If you haven't experienced it, I cannot recommend it enough.
[Addendum: I sang "Mouth Pressure" at karaoke once. It wasn't easy, since the lyrics on screen didn't quite rotate fast enough for the song, but I knew "All Star" well enough to sing it over the top of "Under Pressure" with minimal prompting. One of the most fun karaoke experiences I ever had.]
Of all the albums I have encountered in my travels...Her's was the most...
...Human.
Listening to these entries to make this list, I knew from track two or three that this was number one and it wasn't even close. I knew listening to Mouth Moods right after this that it was number two and that wasn't even close. The distance between the rest of the list and Mouth Moods is as certain as the distance between it and Rainbow.
This is not an album for everybody, to be sure. But there's certainly a bit of everything on it: Acoustic ballads, pop rock, dance music, retro Motown-ish things, fuck yeah anthems of empowerment, harrowing torch songs about recovering from abuse, chamber pop, country, even a children's song in a way. And all of it is Kesha as she really is. Not the studio creation of the producer that literally violated her.
At the beginning of the decade, Kesha was one of my least favorite artists in music. I could not stand songs like "Tik Tok" and "BlahBlahBlah" (still can't handle that last one). But with Rainbow, I feel like it's a real human being expressing their desires and experiences through their art, and as a bonus the songs are well made and/or fun to listen to.
That seems like a low bar, but think about how many albums actually meet it. How many acts fall into genre tropes and get buried behind a veneer of marketing? How many times do people change their style to fit the times? How many times do they refuse to change to retain a fanbase? How often does the business of music get in the way of the art? It's far more often than you think. This is pure. Kesha knew the label wasn't behind her because they were set to force her work with the rapist again if not for a giant PR backlash. So she made the songs she wanted to make, and it's my favorite album of the last ten years.
I haven't listened to her follow-up yet, High Road, because I've been taking a deliberate break from new music, so I don't know where she goes from here. I do know it's the last album under that contract, so things may be getting more exciting in the future. But even if she never makes another album, it doesn't matter because Rainbow is out there. And it's real.
So, finally, at long last, my year end lists are done. I started working on them at the end of July and here it is, three hours from St. Patrick's Day. Counting the future blog about Kanye (I may or may not finish), I have well over 19,000 words for my trouble. Are they any good? You be the judge. I don't know if that's even important. The point of doing these is to celebrate and reflect on a thing I love most in this world: Music. It's my jam.
I hope you found something out of all this you can jam to yourself. I like to share. Stay safe out there, and keep the music in you wherever you go.
Peace.
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