Destroyer's Top 10 albums of 2003
Actually, my man,
Keith came up with 40 but due to lack of space (ahem...); I just feature the top 10. If you want the rest,
e-Mail Destroyer for the rest of the list. Hmmm, his list got me thinking that I have omitted out some pretty good albums in my own. Haha, no matter, I'd come up with something soon to rectify that.
10
Arab Strap
Monday At The Hug & Pint [Matador]
For the sake of sordid tastes, Arab Strap records continue to be a beacon of dysfunctional integrity. Right off the bat, Monday At The Hug & Pint bears the familiar stench of some barfly’s dirty laundry: which could only mean that this new record is, gratefully,
Aidan Moffat at his denuded best. He and
Malcolm Middleton has been numbly flogging their old bag of dirty tricks over five albums now, and here Moffat lecherous come-ons take on the edge of deflated resignation – our voyeuristic pervert/bum finally admitting that he is tired of sex, albeit not half convincingly judging from tracks like Act Of War and The Shy Retirer. Monday At The Hug & Pint is a different sort of
Arab Strap record, marked by greater variety but it’s still vintage smut all the way. And what are guest musicians, those Saddle Creek kids
Mike Mogis and
Conor Oberst, doing in this dang bar? Hapless, drunken adults only! Don’t these kids know better, that there are few more corruptible influences than a pair of lewd, kilt-wearing, alcoholic Scotsmen?
09
Super Furry Animals
Phantom Power [XL]
Like the
Flaming Lips, the
Super Furry Animals is one band that has the chutzpah to meet any audience on its own terms, no matter it means inviting
Paul McCartney to come munch on vegetables or cutting an entire record sung in their native language. In some respects, the latest from these Welsh oddballs comes off as being rather tame by comparisons. Phantom Power is the
Super Furry Animals employing the freedom of their pop lexicon to make miniature protest art – that is, if art still means something and is supposed to challenge and reveal truths about what’s going on. And when what’s going on are war mongering and grimy carnages, it is only fair that these loaded cartoon metaphors and psychic tortoise references that Gruff Rhys creates are easily more sensible than any given head of state and their freedom fries. Phantom Power is a multidimensional knockout, a promissory song cycle of social commentary and hope for peace that’s sagacious beyond its technicolors.
08
Broken Social Scene
You Forget It In People [Arts & Craft]
With a jangle blast of indie rock riffs and a tangle of rebellion poses, this starry alliance of musicians from the burgeoning Canadian underground music scene (bands like
KC Accidental,
Do Make Say Think,
the Metrics) shot their way into indie fame with these exciting anthems for neurotic adolescents high on speed lights. And all praises garnered are pretty much deserved as You Forget It In People is perhaps the most invigorating call to arms since
Mogwai's 1999 album Come On Die Young. With its memorable songwriting, diverse influences (from shoegazing to post rock) and Salinger-esque song titles,
Broken Social Scene is a hundred percent good clean fun, frothy indie rock played with gusto, imagination and alacrity – and by the record’s close, you shall know their velocity.
07
Calexico
Feast Of Wire [Quarterstick]
The harsh desert geography and melting pop cultures impose their unique imprints on the music community of Tucson, Arizona.
Calexico are no exceptions. Telling their border stories with conviction and vivid imageries,
Joey Burns and
John Convertino chronicles the untold hardships of a migrant diaspora and lament the corpses bled white under the Tucson sun. Their third record Feast Of Wire is their most ambitious, its musical tentacles stretching from traditional mariachi orchestration to odes paid to 70s’ classic rock frequencies.
Calexico are the choice jukebox for some truly adventurous, progressive listening.
06
Gilliam Welch
Soul Journey [Acony]
Like a prematurely aged country girl freewheeling across the rural farmlands,
Gillian Welch set her pristine singing and textured songwriting in sun-kissed optimism on her fourth album, Soul Journey. The natural warmth and sensual quality of the settings also allow Welch to write, quite perhaps for the first time and with exposed nerves, about some of her own life experiences. The country yodel No One Knows My Name laments, without bitterness, the circumstances that led her blood parents to give their infant up for adoption, while the arrangement of the traditional I Had A Good Mother And Father pays tribute to her foster parents. Still it’s her storytelling voice that holds a bleakness and renders even hotrodding numbers like Wrecking Ball with a fair sense of gravitas and sorrow. Like 2001’s Time (The Revelator), the fertile songwriting partnership between
Welch and
David Rawlings again comes into full fruition here and their synchrony is truly a folk treasure to behold in these times, the sound of kindred musicians rising above the saddest blues.
05
Yo La Tengo
Summer Sun [Matador]
Forget about the noisy guitar jams and caffeinated pop fix of yore.
Yo La Tengo circa the 21st century are, in two words, simply sublime. As with their previous career milestone And Then Nothing Turns Itself Inside Out (2000), the soft-grained pop found on here again affirms that atmospheric quakes and cosmic jazz scales are now very much an integral part of their new game plan. With these mellow tunes of spiraling sophistication, Summer Sun paints the fuzzy picture of a band intent on expanding their pool for fresh sounds and other paisley aural delights. It never hurts to when improvising collaborators like
Daniel Carter and
Sabir Mateen fit so effortlessly well into the
Yo La Tengo template.
04
Clientele
The Violet Hour [Merge]
After gaining attention with a slate of superlative EPs, the
Clientele’s proper debut album is a hazy cinema of the trio’s hushed velvet aesthetics and sonic slow burns. With
Galaxie 500 and
Belle And Sebastian being obvious precursors to the band, the songs on The Violet Hour capture the wispy essence of many forgotten moments spent lazing about in a funk. The porcelain
Clientele sound is smoky, malleable, evocative of melancholy and sometimes plain vulnerable, with
Alasdair McLean's accented tenor adding to their quintessential Englishness. Whispery like an eavesdropped mystery, the high and lonesome voices on The Violet Hour carry unguarded revelations.
03
Radiohead
Hail To The Thief [Parlophone]
The twin-pronged Kid A/Amnesiac assault on rock left rawhide wounds on its unsuspecting victims, eating up its bastion mounds, then taunting their bludgeoned remains with a snickering ‘rock and roll, it’s just nostalgia’ screed. But of course, there could not have been a clean severance of ties. Hail To The Thief is the logical aftermath, the lucider atlas for the reconstruction. Kicking back into gear the guitar machinery they have underutilized of late,
Radiohead now operates at where machine electronics walk safely into the arms of their poster-art pursuits. And if this corpus of rockist crowd pleasers (and singles There There and Go To sleep are certified anthems) is too much to bear for some, there is always
Thom Yorke's politicized rants to see through a fresh vanguard round of
Bush baiting. Forging a career of creative tenacity on the count of six albums,
Radiohead proven to be survivors outside of Yorke’s iron lungs.
02
Wrens
The Meadowlands [Absolutely Kosher]
Not to take anything away from the
Wrens, the appearance of The Meadowlands is almost entirely for selfish reasons. Every once in a while, a contemporary record comes along that sounds incredulously real and alike to your own life experiences. For me,
Wilco’s Summer Teeth and the
Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I were records like that, and this year I can add The Meadowlands to the list. The
Wrens’ third album finally released after a lapse of seven years from 1996’s Secaucus, these are songs played through swallowed pride and abandoned dreams, an autobiography of major label mishaps (“I can’t tell a hit from hell”), personal disappointments (“I can’t believe what life’s done to me”) and stalled romances. It’s the story of four regular guys who didn’t knew how to succeed (“Cause I’m caught/ I can’t type, I can’t temp/ I’m way past college”) or forgot to make the road trip to ‘the middle’ like their peers, and how the years in between leave behind a trail of regrets of what should have been a brilliant career (“I turned my back on more than you can imagine, and I sleep just fine”). With lyrics as confounding and poignant as a Hal Hartley film, The Meadowlands is a valiant evocation of ordinary lives supposedly wasted in their New Jersey suburbs (“A year in the Meadowlands/ Bored and rural poor at 35, right?”), and yet leaving a glimmer of satisfaction and wistful reminder that every bleak moment, every hard fought struggle and every relationship disaster (“Ex-girl collection, why?/ Is that all that you got?/ It’s just how some men mark time”) can be so beautiful.
01
Rufus Wainwright
Want [Dreamworks]
When a rude awakening – the proverbial fall from decadent grace – literally brought
Rufus Wainwright to his knees and plunged him into depression, he wrote his way out of his troubles and as a result birthed this insurmountable tower of songs that made up the 30 songs on these Want records. Fighting his personal demons with pain, these new songs are graced with
Wainwright’s standard lustrous grasp of Broadway melodies and a sobering tone in the delivery that’s perhaps not as typical. If there is an emotional ambivalence that has always been hinted on his previous work,
Wainwright’s lyrical complexity takes on a whole new expressive level here, with operatic songs that finger on feelings that arc from loss and bafflement to a bewildering sense of elation mixed with an acceptance of defeat. Navigating through this turmoil and self discovery,
Wainwright never loses sight of the ambitious songwriting vision that allows him to stand shoulders above among his generation of baroque songwriters. And Want is his tour de force, an album of miraculous feats all well earned.
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