 |
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Jim Connelly's
Favorite Recordings Of 2006
Monday, January 15, 2007
Jesse Steichen's Favorite Recordings Of 2006
Friday, January 12, 2007
Bill Bentley's Favorite Recordings Of 2006
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Tom Ridge's Favorite Recordings Of 2006
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Lee Templeton's Favorite Recordings Of 2006
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Anthony Carew's 13 Fave Albums Of 2006
Monday, March 27, 2006
SXSW 2006: Finding Some Hope In Austin
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Letter From New Orleans
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Jennifer Przybylski's Fave Albums of 2005
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Music For Dwindling Days: Max Schaefer's Fave Recordings Of 2005
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Sean Fennessey's 'Best-Of' 2005
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Lori Miller Barrett's Fave Albums Of 2005
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Lee Templeton's Favorite Recordings of 2005
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Michael Lach - Old Soul Songs For A New World Order
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Found In Translation — Emme Stone's Year In Music 2005
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
Dave Allen's 'Best-Of' 2005
Monday, January 2, 2006
Steve Gozdecki's Favorite Albums Of 2005
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Johnny Walker Black's Top 10 Of 2005
Monday, December 19, 2005
Neal Block's Favorite Recordings Of 2005
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Jenny Tatone's Year In Review
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Dave Renard's Fave Recordings Of 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
Jennifer Kelly's Fave Recordings Of 2005
Thursday, December 8, 2005
Tom Ridge's Favorite Recordings Of 2005
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Ben Gook's Beloved Albums Of 2005
Monday, December 5, 2005
Anthony Carew's Fave Albums Of 2005
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Prince, Spoon And The Magic Of The Dead Stop
Monday, September 12, 2005
The Truth About America
Monday, September 5, 2005
Tryin' To Wash Us Away
Monday, August 1, 2005
A Psyche-Folk Heat Wave In Western Massachusetts
Monday, July 18, 2005
Soggy But Happy At Glastonbury 2005
Monday, April 4, 2005
The SXSW Experience, Part 3: All Together Now
Friday, April 1, 2005
The SXSW Experience, Part 2: Dr. Dog's Happy Chords
Thursday, March 31, 2005
The SXSW Experience, Part 1: Waiting, Waiting And More Waiting
Friday, March 25, 2005
Final Day At SXSW's Charnel House
Monday, March 21, 2005
Day Three At SXSW
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Day Two In SXSW's Hall Of Mirrors
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Report #1: SXSW 2005 And Its Hall Of Mirrors
Monday, February 14, 2005
Matt Landry's Fave Recordings Of 2004
Wednesday, February 2, 2005
David Howie's 'Moments' From The Year 2004
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Lori Miller Barrett's Fave Recordings Of 2004
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Noah Bonaparte's Fave Recordings Of 2004
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Kevin John's Fave Albums Of 2004
Friday, January 14, 2005
Music For Those Nights: Max Schaefer's Fave Recordings Of 2004
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Dave Renard's Fave Recordings Of 2004
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Neal Block's Top Ten Of 2004
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Jenny Tatone's Fave Albums Of 2004
Monday, January 10, 2005
Wayne Robins' Top Ten Of 2004
Friday, January 7, 2005
Brian Orloff's Fave Albums Of 2004
Thursday, January 6, 2005
Johnny Walker (Black)'s Top 10 Of 2004
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Jennifer Przybylski's Fave Albums (And Book) Of 2004
Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Mark Mordue's Fave Albums Of 2004
Monday, January 3, 2005
Lee Templeton's Fave Recordings Of 2004
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Monday, December 5, 2005
Anthony Carew's Fave Albums Of 2005
Neumu's Michael Goldberg writes: Once again, here at Neumu, we've been thinking long and hard about all the groovy music released during the past year. And there were a lot of great recordings. For the next few weeks we'll be running best-of lists. Today, we offer up Neumu Senior Writer Anthony Carew's fave albums of 2005. Dig it!
1. Frida Hyvönen, Until Death Comes (Licking Fingers): Pounding at her
piano with a fearsome fierceness, frocked-up Frida comes caroling out
of the Cold Swedish Winter with a set of songwriteresque songs so on
fire she's cooking like Joni Mitchell in '71. The debutante dishes up a
disarming disc of toe-tapping tunes trading in uncomfortable truths,
none of it better than the jaw-dropping "Once I Was a Serene Teenaged
Child," a with-a-bullet entrant in the little ongoing sweepstakes we
call One of the Best Songs Ever Written.
2. Camille, Le Fil (Virgin): For her second-time-around, the French
chanteuse concocts a cockeyed compact-digital concept-record that
out-Björks Björk: a single tone — or "thread" — resounding throughout
the entirety of a 15-track/36-minute suite fashioned almost entirely from
mouth sounds. The resulting record is one of the most expressive,
experimental commercial-pop albums in recent musical memory.
3. Mara Carlyle, The Lovely (Accidental): Lovely doesn't quite come
close to capturing the illuminative glow glowing from Carlyle's
whole-soul soul-music, which pirouettes through evocations of Schumann
and Mozart as her cold-driven-snow voice — closely-mic'd for breath,
saliva, and unsticking lips in that favored Herbert fashion — voices
physical/tactual/sensual sentiments through its purified purity.
4. Antony & the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now (Secretly Canadian): Now, the
warbling songbird sings transgender torchsongs of transgression,
transformation, and taking wing, the pianoman's peerless pageantry so
utterly Classical in its ridiculously-beautiful beauty that you quickly
forget the Leather Pants guest list (Lou, Boy, Rufus, etc.) and learn to
love it for all its lumps.
5. Nedelle, From the Lion's Mouth (Kill Rock Stars): Nedelle, Nedelle,
hot as hell, doing it and doing it and doing it well; the San Franciscan
songsmith's second solo longplayer lets her sugary-sweet singing
lovingly deliver lyrical laments to dead dogs and exuberant odes to
summer, both.
6. Thee Silver Mt.Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band, Horses in
the Sky (Constellation): The only epic-Canadian-orchestral-rockband
truly worthy of your love and devotion have an artistic arc that
continues to head upward, unchecked; their latest/greatest Symphony for
the 21st Century touching on familiar themes — love, love of animals,
dead pets, the military-industrial complex, gentrification, community,
mercy, hope — as it touches some sort of God in the space b'tween its
(many) members.
7. Celebration, Celebration (4AD): If the snail's-pace-played funereal
blues of Love Life laid you down to sleep, Celebration pray the lord
you've got those happy feet, the stripped-down — drums, hand-percussion,
organ — three-piece dancing on your grave as Katrina Ford spits out/up
eerie secrets dredged from deep down b'neath her bloodied teeth, run
rough through her ragged throat.
8. Diane Cluck, Oh Vanille/Ova Nil (Important): The noble New Yorker's
least-careerist career officially gets official with this pressed-up,
bar-coded compact disc; her fourth album finds her lusty strums and
literary lyrics sharpened to a well-honed weapon, gear like "The
Turnaround Road" tangles of chords and words to truly treasure.
9. Josephine Foster, Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You (Locust) : With
a strum and a hum, the opera-school dropout drops the acid-folk frolickry of
The
Supposed and embraces a bit a little bit brittle, setting her sinuous
singing and old-timey imagery to lonely-as-a-cloud accompaniments of
autoharp, ukulele, sitar, geetar, etc.
10. Roisin Murphy, Ruby Blue (Echo): Whilst Herbie goes bananas
building the tiniest worried symphonies outta radio-static, tinkling
music-boxes, and glowing keytone, the Moloko vocalist nestles amidst the
productional "softness" and sings sentimental song-authoring sentiments
like "Last night I think I dreamt a beautiful song/ And when I woke the
birds had flown/ And it was gone".
11. Jens Lekman, At the Department of Forgotten Songs and Oh You're So
Silent Jens (Secretly Canadian): Cleaning out his compositional closet,
Sweden's 15th Sexiest Man shows that one cat's trash can be his
listenership's treasure-trove; previously unreleased/unloved numbers
like "Pretty Shoes" and "The Wrong Hands" are pop-songs that most
melodicists would murder their mother to author.
12. Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die (Tailem Bend): OK,
so,
I'm actually, y'know, on this record, but, forgetting my
member-of-a-20-something-chorus backing-vox (and the conflicting
interests that go with): Melbourne's most manic octet shoot for the
stars on their second shot, setting off the fireworks and letting off
the happiness as they stumble, eyes on the sky, into a most joyous,
genre-straddling jamboree.
13. Why?, Elephant Eyelash (Anticon): In one self-conscious swoop,
Why?
goes from being Yoni Wolf to being Yoni Wolf's band. This semantic
delineation is only important in the fact that his "emo hip-hop" poetry has
never seemed as mighty as it does amidst all the Wilsonic
piano/theremin/harmonies of this here gear.
14. Common, Be (Geffen): Common Sense comes quantifiably correct on a
concise, considered, conflicted, contradictory disc whose skit-free
brevity seems like so much tonic for the dude who did the production
herein (some cat called Kanye).
15. M.I.A., Arular (XL): This much-awaited bill of prizefighting
punched-up-drum-machine protest-pop didn't get any better than the
singles that preceded it, but when those're "Sunshowers" and "Galang,"
what more could a girl — brown skin/ West Londoner/ educated/ refugee,
huh — really hope for?
16. Gang Gang Dance, God's Money (The Social Registry): As the Gang amp
up a cobbled-together concoction of cacky sounds into hypnotic,
hot-footed dance jams, the hippy caterwauls of high-heel-tottering Liz
Bougatsos pilot this Jefferson Airplane into stylized blue skies so
bloodied and blue in their bloody blues.
17. Blood Brothers, Crimes (V2): The Cypress Hill of screechy
post-apocalyptic post-hardcore harangue the American polity with a
pock-marked portrait of a decaying nation sinking slowly into its
sewers; the gear's lyric-sheet reads more poetic than any other disc's
did this here year.
18. Dirty Projectors, The Getty Address (Western Vinyl): For those
neither possessing a playbill nor playing along at home, Dave
Longstreth, as Dirty Projectors, plays Don Henley, on a peyote
piligrimage that pirouettes through the ragged remnants of American
History, he/Henley treading on sacred soil as the racket's truncated
Orchestral samples, women's choir, off-the-note croon(er)ing, and
fidgety geektronic circuiteering cook up the kookiest of
concept records.
19. Nikaidoh Kazumi, Nika US Tour 2003 (Compare Notes): Wandering down
the American West Coast on a Mount Eerie tour, the singularly unique
Japanese lass projects her wailing voice from on mountaintops, on
beaches, on riverbank rocks, and on stage; this lovingly packaged
box-set gives up three thematic discs — live recordings, ad-hoc improv
with P.W. Elverum, video-montaged tour diary — illustrating her peculiar
genius.
20. Islaja, Palaa Aurinkoon (Fonal): Finland's ice-cold countryside
b'came an unlikely musical hotbed in the ought-five; Islaja's second
album — a set of droning, thrumming, spiritualist ballads beamed from an
alien brain — was the pick of a Fonal litter that littered the longplaying
landscape with freaked-out free-folk as far as the ear could hear.
Special Bonus 2004 Sleeper: The Organ, Grab That Gun (Mint) :
On first
blush, this Female Interpol stand-and-deliver a sexless set of cold-war
pop parading familiar reference points — Blondie, The Cure, Echo — with
a strange, strained sense of seriousness. Yet, repeated exposure over
prolonged periods finds the reticent melodies starting to soak through
your skin, such slow-bleeding showing a full-blooded band obsessed with
the idealist idea of being A Band; "Basement Band Song" an understated
anthem of small-town teenaged tedium and earnest rock-dreams that speaks
solely of such.
| | |
