Best Music Of 2011: The Leftovers

This is awkward. It's been six months since I abandoned my "best of the decade" countdown with less than a quarter of it done. Sorry about that. I got distracted by how lazy I am. Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" was going to be the #1 album, for those of you seeking closure.

I read an article once about how the internet is destroying the critic industry. With everyone blogging, youtubing, twittering and... friendstering their every opinion, the voices of actual critics get overwhelmed by the nonsensical din of teenagers' important opinions on My Little Pony and dubstep. In a society that's already more splintered and divided than a middle school dance floor, this is threatening to make the idea of critical consensus a quaint notion from a simpler era.

Anyway, it's the end of the year, which means it's time for me to make things worse by tossing my own opinions into the churning maelstrom. Like the rest of the amateur critics out there, I don't expect to be taken seriously or even agreed with. In the end, I just want to make a mark, a statement, something that says "I was here. I mattered. And I thought that Bon Iver record was a bit overrated."

And now to the point! As tradition dictates, before the best album list, here are ten great songs from albums that didn't make it. The full list will be up sometime this week, and you can hold me to it this time. (Please don't hold me to it. I'll probably forget.)

blink-182 - "Heart's All Gone"

After almost a decade of watching Tom DeLonge try to save the world by waving his arms while dancing, I was a bit apprehensive about the idea of a new blink-182 album. But, awkward Tom lyrics about God aside, Neighborhoods was a pretty tight album. "Heart's All Gone" is the best song, but it's less a song and more like a time machine designed to take you back to 1997. It sounds exactly like a Dude Ranch b-side, which means it makes me feel like I'm 15 again. And by that I mean it makes me want to run around like an idiot and slam into people. Ah, youth.

Childish Gambino - "Freaks And Geeks"

What do you do when you've already accomplished way more than most people ever will? What do you do after you've starred on a brilliant TV show, won an Emmy for writing and developed a successful stand up career? If you're Donald Glover, you strap on a Lil Wayne beat and make sure the world knows exactly how big your dick is. It's catchy, ridiculous, stupid and brilliant at the same time. It'll give you the weirdest boner.

Destroyer - "Suicide Demo For Kara Walker

This song is like floating gently on a cloud with a guy who's improvising a poem about race and gender relations in America. It also sounds a lot like Steely Dan/Michael McDonald yacht rock, complete with flutes and tasteful horn arrangements. It manages to make "dated" sounds seem fresh and original, and it was a perfect soundtrack for last winter's slow thaw.

Dropkick Murphys - Peg O' My Heart

The Dropkick Murphys have covered enough traditional Irish songs to turn a dozen wakes into fist fights, but there's something special about this one. The band sounds as energized as ever and their excitement is completely infectious. Plus, Bruce Springsteen shows up to sing a few verses. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Kurt Vile - "Jesus Fever"

"Jesus Fever" is a song that can make me happy one day and give me the creeps the next. The crisp guitar sounds like the first crisp day of autumn feels, but Kurt Vile's Velvet Underground-mumble gets more and more haunting by the line as he repeats "I'm already gone." It's like getting a hug from a ghost.

Panda Bear - "Surfer's Hymn"

"Surfer's Hymn" doesn't hide its Beach Boys influence - it's called "Surfer's Hymn," for fuck's sake. But it looks past their pop sensibilities and ends up sounding like the distilled essence of a good vibration. On headphones, it becomes a soundscape of crashing waves and sunsets, with singer Noah Lennox's voice sounding almost holy. This is Brian Wilson's "teenage symphony to God" updated for a generation that needs this kind of musical optimism more than ever.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - "Heart In Your Heartbreak"

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart (which is a terrible name for such a good band) went added some Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine to their tool kit this year and pretty much erased the "lo" from their lo-fi sound. The transition could have been messy, but they brought their a-game and made a pretty great set of songs. This one is probably the best pop song of the year.

R.E.M. - "We All Go Back To Where We Belong"

This one's going to be long. First some background - six months ago, R.E.M. were one of my favorite bands. Then they announced their break-up in September and I decided to listen to all their albums chronologically. Then, somehow, I didn't listen to a single other artist for a month and a half. At one point I listened to their "Murmur" album fourteen times in one day. When I finally came out of my R.E.M. bender, not only had they become my favorite band, they were my favorite-favorite band ever. No other band has ever resonated with me quite this much, spoken to me on quite this deep a level. My musical tastes shift around constantly, but I have a feeling this one might stick for a long time.

So, a couple months after the band announced they were retiring, they put a cap on thirty years and fifteen albums with this song, their final single. And it's pretty much perfect. They're not trying to recapture any past glories here - there's no hint of shiny '80s guitar jangling or somber '90s mandolin strum to be found here. Instead, it sounds like a group of people looking back on a lifetime of making great art and feeling content. And yeah, the first time I heard it, the "is this really what you want?" lyric made me cry great big manly tears. You know when a great closing song always makes you want to start the album again? This one always gets me reaching for 1982's "Chronic Town" EP to hear everything one more time.

Rise Against - "Satellite"

Rise Against and I aren't as close as we used to be. Back around the time "Siren Song Of The Counter Culture" came out, I counted them among my favorite bands. Then the crowds got bigger, the stage got further away, and they released an album ("Appeal To Reason") that's been waiting three years now to start growing on me. Their latest, "Endgame" is a slight improvement, but still doesn't quite reach the heights of their early work. Except this song. When the album came out early in the year, "Satellite" seemed like a standout track not just on the album but in the band's career. Now, after a year full of Americans waking up and beginning to stand up and speak out against our society's injustices, the song sounds like a generational anthem.

Thurston Moore - "Circulation"

I swear this year was trying to kill me. Less than a month after R.E.M. called it a day, Sonic Youth basically announced that they were coming to an end. In other words, as of this fall, music sucks. Even if we can't have the full band, at least singer Thurston Moore's acoustic album kicked ass earlier in the year. This isn't the kind of solo acoustic album where the singer tones it down and delivers a bunch of relaxing, easy-going songs. The album can be as intense and experimental as Sonic Youth's best was, and it strikes the best balance between tense and melodic on "Circulation," which sounds like a brilliant lost track from "Daydream Nation."

Best Albums of the 2000s: #17

17. The Decemberists - Picaresque (2005)

"And I am a writer, a writer of fictions..."

Being a music lover is like eating at Taco Bell, only without the intestinal hazards. You can be happily eating your five-layer burrito and suddenly realize, "Hey, this is really similar to the Taco Supreme I had yesterday, and the Gordita Cagarse I had the day before..." And then you look at the menu and realize that everything is made of the same shit rolled a different way. You get the same feeling when you realize that most music is just a Mad Lib that says "I feel _______," usually with love or hate filling in the blank. Suddenly every love song you hear is a Gordita Crunch and every fuck-you song is a Macho Burrito and you're shitting in your pants, wishing there was a better way.

When I start feeling this way, you know what helps? A nine-minute song about a man who avenges his mother's death by following her killer around the world and finally murdering him while they both starve in the belly of a giant whale. You definitely don't get that shit at Taco Bell. You can't even get that at Del Taco, and they even have cheeseburgers. The only place to go for that is The Decemberists, and with that I'm probably going to drop this food metaphor because I no longer understand it.

Picaresque, according to wikipedia, means "a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class." That's a better description that I could give for this album's collection of strange characters and wildly original songs. It almost feels more like a collection of short stories than an album. For example, check out "The Bagman's Gambit," a story of espionage and forbidden love in Cold War-era Washington that eventually descends into a mess of discordant strings that recalls a shadowy take on The Beatles' "A Day In The Life."

Skip ahead a few tracks and you're in a whole other world. "On The Bus Mall" is a gorgeous rain-swept ballad about two young lovers who run away only to find themselves drawn into the world of prostitution to stay alive. The lyrics avoid being overly sentimental by focusing on the emotions of its protagonists, trying to stay strong in the face of incredible adversity. It's a feeling anyone can relate to, even those of us who have managed to avoid selling our bodies for money so far. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the song is hauntingly beautiful, with a melody that draws us in even as the story it supports becomes bleaker with every line.

The album only steps away from its storytelling formula once, for the spirited and downright poppy "16 Military Wives." While most of the album's songs take place at some point in the past, this one plants its feet firmly in the present (or, you know, 2005) by taking on the Iraq war, primarily the asleep-at-the-wheel media that allowed it to happen. The song makes its points without becoming preachy or dating itself with specifics. Its story of cannibal kings, doomed company men and grieving widows could apply to any previous war and any of the ones still to come. The band does this while framing the song with their most effortlessly catchy tune yet.

And then there's "The Mariner's Revenge Song," the epic tale of adventure, betrayal, revenge and being eaten alive by giant whales. Singer Colin Melloy tells the story over almost nine minutes of sea shanty, punctuated by Rachel Blumberg's haunted choruses, where her ghostly voice urges our hero on in his quest for revenge. Also, when the band performs this live, they sometimes use giant cardboard cut-outs of ships and whales, so there's that too.

What makes Picaresque a great album instead of merely a collection of great songs, is the way common themes wind their way through stories that may seem a world apart. The most prominent theme here is "expectations vs. reality." The injured high school football star of "The Sporting Life" watches his future fade before his eyes in much the same way as those naive teenage runaways did. The star-crossed lovers of "We Both Go Down Together" end up jumping from the cliffs of Dover in a possibly-mutual suicide, and it echoes the doomed romance between spies and government workers in "The Bagman's Gambit." Without these threads, the album could feel directionless, but it all ties together as a coherent whole, even as the songs refuse to stay in one place for too long.

Picaresque isn't a "background music" kind of album. It rewards close attention, and investing in the stories and characters can really pay off. Spend too much time with it and other music can start to sound unoriginal and uninspired. Why listen to yet another "why won't that person come back?" song when you can come to this world of victorian ghosts, disgraced football heroes and street urchins, where you literally have no idea where the next song might take you? It's like walking out of a Taco Bell and discovering that there's a whole world out there.

Best Albums of the 2000s: #18

#18. The Streets - Original Pirate Material (2002)

"Around here we say 'birds' not 'bitches'"

They say you should always write about what you know. That's why I choose to write about music instead of say, holding a job or dressing myself. Mike Skinner, a.k.a. The Streets, knows about drinking beer, smoking weed, going to clubs, being on the dole, and all the other petty details of being young, poor, bored and British. Listening to Original Pirate Material is like taking a walk in his shoes, only if he's only walking to the corner store for a pack of fags.

British music has a history of doing what Americans have already done, but better. Think of how The Beatles conquered American rock and roll, only to shape it in their own image and send it off in a hundred new directions. Or, a decade later, when countless bands took the punk banner from The Ramones and ran towards darker and stranger territory. The Streets made intelligent, personal and vibrant hip-hop at a time when the genre in America was entering a decade-long free fall that still hasn't hit bottom yet. To see just how wide the gap in originality is, check out "Let's Push Things Forward," a bouncy, Specials-influenced track buoyed by a jaunty upbeat rhythm and a ska-influenced bassline that grounds the song in a state that's completely its own.

"The Irony Of It All" is the album's most instantly memorable track, a debate between an alcoholic lout named Terry and a timid stoner named Tim, both of whom are played by Skinner, complete with a theme for each character - an abrasive bass-heavy beat for Terry and an airy looping piano riff for Tim. Over three and a half hilarious minutes, the two go back and forth about the merits of one's drug of choice versus the others', with Terry working himself into a drunken rage while Tim calmly picks the chicken pieces out of his pizza and plays video games all night. It's a well-stated message, pointing out the arbitrary nature of modern drug policy while never losing its sense of humor.

"The Irony Of It All" isn't quite the most fun song on the album - that honor goes to "Don't Mug Yourself," a great track that finds Skinner and his friends discussing how long he should wait before calling the girl he met the night before. The infectious rhythm and bassline make it one of those songs you can't hear without bobbing your head and moving to the beat. And that ending, when the song falls apart and everyone starts laughing, is one of the album's best moments.

If the album were nothing but jokey songs and ska-flavored upstrokes, it'd be one hell of a fun listen but probably not enough to be the 18th best album of the last eleven years. As the album progresses, Skinner works himself into a more reflective mood that peaks on his best song, the hazy and nostalgic "Weak Become Heroes." Over a looped piano that sounds like an echo of a thousand half-remembered parties, he looks back on his younger years in the UK club scene, remembering the way a roomful of strangers could feel like friends, and the way they would inevitably turn back to strangers the next morning.

The song's best moment - no, the album's best moment - comes at about 3:20, when the piano drops out for a few bars and Mike reflects on how much older he's gotten in seemingly an instant. It's a familiar feeling for anyone - even if you're like me and wouldn't go to a rave unless you were forced at gunpoint, everyone has had that moment where suddenly everything's changed and you can't put your finger or when or how it happened.

Before I'm done, we have to talk about that album cover, right? Go back up and look at that thing again. Original Pirate Material begins and ends with that imposing block of cheap apartments. (Flats?) You can easily imagine all the album's characters just out of sight in those lit up windows. The violent football fan of "Geezers Need Excitement" is plotting to cause trouble somewhere in there. The dole-squatters of "Same Old Thing" and the brokenhearted romantic of "It's Too Late" no doubt share this space too. You can even imagine Terry and Tim having their back-and-forth through the thin walls. Nothing ever changes for these characters - none of these songs are about life-changing epiphanies or high drama. Life just keeps going on the way it always does. In a decade when hip-hop traded most of its soul and nuance for dance tracks and autotune, Original Pirate Material is the genre at its most honest and conversational.

Best Albums of the 2000s: #19

#19. Against Me! - Reinventing Axl Rose (2002)

"If it doesn't matter now/Then it never really did/And without this, we might as well be dead"

Apparently when Axl Rose heard about the title of this album, he was so upset that he made a voodoo doll of Against Me! singer Tom Gabel as a way of getting weird, cartoonish revenge. Whether that voodoo doll is to blame for the diminishing returns of Against Me!'s next four albums is impossible to say, but all the voodoo sorcery the guy who wrote "Paradise City" can muster will never take away from the fact that Reinventing Axl Rose is a punk rock masterpiece.

I was sixteen when I heard this album for the first time, which means it hit me like a train hits a hobo. It was something completely new to me - it was pissed-off, ragged, messy and undeniably punk, but with a distinct folk undertone and lyrics that turn angry political diatribes into heartfelt, personal affirmations. Of course, that makes Reinventing sound like a dry, serious record, which it's not. This album is FUN. "Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious" is a stand-out sing along song on an album literally full of them. It's a thoughtful song about consumerism and the price it takes on our interactions with each other, but it never lets its weighty themes get in the way of the infectious rhythm that begs to be clapped along to.

Too many punk bands just set their political beliefs to music and call it a day. This can result in some exciting and revolutionary music, but the shelf life is short. There are about a million punk songs about Ronald Reagan that may still sound good but were long ago made irrelevant. Against Me! would fall for this two albums later when they built a chorus around "Condoleeza, what are we gonna do now?" But here on their first album, they blend the political with the personal in a way that renders the distinction meaningless. Take "Walking Is Still Honest," which has an anti-religion chorus worthy of classic Bad Religion, but bases it from the perspective of a non-faithful father debating giving his kids the easy answers of religion to comfort them.

The album's best moments are complete opposites. "Baby, I'm an Anarchist" is, for better or worse, a career-defining moment for the band, presenting their radical politics with a winking sense of humor and a a gentle folk melody that gets periodically shattered by a phlegmy scream. Too many fans have taken the song seriously and used it to accuse the band of selling out when they jumped to a major label a few years later, but looking back it's obvious the song is a joke, and a great one too. It's not a political song or even an anarchist song - it's a love song, sung by a broken hearted protester who just wishes he had someone to smash windows with.

And then there's "Pints of Guinness Are Strong." It opens the album and stops me dead in my tracks every single time I hear it. A fast folk melody that would sound at home on a Flogging Molly record masks what is undoubtedly the saddest punk song of all time. It's a story about a loving marriage ended too soon by alcoholism and tragedy, with a chorus that finds the narrator pondering the same end as he drinks "until the memory of the last work week will be gone forever." This is a song that can make a basement full of drunken, bearded punk rockers cry.

About halfway through Reinventing, Tom Gabel nails the feeling of a great punk show better than anyone I've ever heard when he sings "Given the chance I'd stay in this chorus forever/Where everything ugly in this world is sadly beautiful." There will always be people who feel disillusioned and outcast by the world around them, and hopefully there will always be records and bands like this one to bring those people together. Reinventing Axl Rose looks at a broken and sad world and says that the only option is to grab a guitar and some friends and "Scream Until You're Coughing Up Blood."

Best Albums of the 2000s - #20

#20. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005)

"The hourglass spills its sand/If only to punish you/For listening too long to one song"

I feel like I got old way too quickly. Not in the sense that the cruel world has crushed my fragile, youthful dreams, although that certainly doesn't help matters. I feel prematurely old because society has changed a ridiculous amount since I was a kid. The faster technology advances, the faster we become dinosaurs. Remember when you couldn't leave the house if you were waiting for a phone call? Remember when if you didn't know something, you had to go to a library to look it up? Remember trying to download porn on a dial-up connection? If you tell young people about this today, it'll sound like you're saying you used to walk a mile uphill through the snow to masturbate.

I miss albums the most. Growing up, I loved the feeling of ripping the plastic off a new album, sitting down with my headphones and absorbing it all. These days, listeners generally download one or two songs that they already know they like, and discard the rest. These people are doing themselves a disservice, and they're probably stupid. My favorite thing about music as a kid was the way an album's initial highlights might fade a bit by the fourth or fifth listen, and songs that didn't register at first might become your favorites once you tuned into what made them great. I'd hate for this experience to fade away, only to be experienced by gross music nerds hanging out in basements talking about things like "dynamic range compression."

Before I start sounding like I'm launching a moral crusade against iPods, I'll admit I'm guilty of the pick-and-choose. When I first heard The New Pornographers' amazing Twin Cinema, it took almost a month to get past track four. That's because track four is "The Bleeding Heart Show," an amazing tour-de-force slow-build pop song that's one of the best songs of the decade and possibly of all time.

I could talk for a week about how much I love this song, but I'll limit myself to a paragraph. You should probably listen to it first, or else this paragraph will be even more boring than the ones that came before. The song opens with a plaintive tone that sounds weary and resigned. It's a complete departure from the Pornographers' usual energetic power-pop, but singer A.C. Newman's delivery sells it completely. The song begins to expand its sound at about 1:15, but it doesn't quite become transcendent until 2:08, when Neko Case's beautiful "ooohs" come in sounding like sunlight breaking through the clouds. Once the "hey-la" chorus comes in, there's no way you're not smiling, unless you dislike happiness.

I listened to "Bleeding Heart Show" about a hundred times before I went back to tracks one through three, or onward to the ten songs following it. Once I did, I realized how badly I'd been missing out. Nothing quite tops "Bleeding Heart Show," but the entire album is pretty damned amazing. Check out "Sing Me Spanish Techno," where the band busts out a tune so effortlessly catchy that it instantly feels like it's been one of your favorite songs for years.

The New Pornographers have at least three singers, and they all get a chance to kick some ass. Dan Bejar (also from the fantastic indie band Destroyer) shows off with "Jackie, Dressed In Cobras," probably his best song ever. The drums in the intro bring to mind The Who at their most anthemic, but the song takes a left turn and becomes a furiously insistent pop song, gaining momentum and picking up speed as it goes. When Bejar sings about the "train devouring the land," the backing music paints the picture perfectly.

Neko, deservedly everyone's favorite Pornographer, takes the lead on two songs, the bouncy "Bones of an Idol," and the beautiful "These Are The Fables," a gentle, acoustic-based ballad that betrays Neko's alt-country roots. "Fables" uses a slow-build technique similar to "Bleeding Heart Show," but where "Bleeding Heart" eventually opened up into an ecstatic chorus, "Fables" stays downcast - even when the beat finally steps up around 2:38, the song never escapes its sweet, melancholy beginnings.

Twin cinemas, the iconic double-marquee theaters the title track cebelrates, went out of fashion a long time ago, replaced by the monolithic 24-screen megaplexes that drove the old theaters out of business much in the same way that chain record stores used to drive the independent places away. Of course, soon enough high speed internet came along and devoured them both along with the music industry. The back cover of Twin Cinema shows an old projector sitting next to a crate full of records, as if to say that both mediums are on their way out. What are we losing in our quest for convenience?

P.S. - Here's David Cross!

The Top 20 Records of the 00's - An Intro/Excuse

Decades are strange things. They are, of course, completely arbitrary ways of defining the passage of time, with no real bearing on the events and culture they represent. And yet, the wisdom of hindsight seems to lend each one a distinct personality of its own. It's easy now to look back at the '70s as the decade when punk battled disco, and the nation's interior decor was drenched in a flood of brown and burnt sienna, or the '80s as the age when synthesizers and Prince roamed the earth.

But the present tense - that's trickier. I say present tense because in a sense, we're all still living in the last decade. The calendar may say 2011, but pop culturally, we haven't moved far from 2008 yet. This is how it usually goes - the first two years of the '90s were racked by the day-glo aftershocks of the '80s until Nirvana chased hair metal and synthesizers away. The early '00s were the '90s Part II (Congrats on best selling record of 2000, NSync!), but all that changed when BUSH DID 911. Until whatever cultural or societal change washes away the Autotune and Saw sequels, it's hard to predict just what form the last ten years will take.

That's why I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone being described as the "voice of our generation." Generations rarely get to choose their own voices - the people who come after do that for them. Our kids may reject our Radiohead and Wilco records and decide that, say, Hoobastank were the great musical innovators of our time. And we can shake our canes and write angry letters to the editor, but in the end, we're pretty much powerless to define our own legacies. Which is all a roundabout way of explaining why my "Best albums of the 2000s" list is about a year and three months late. Expect the first review later this week.