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.