Critical reception is a funny thing. Critics are obsessed with listing and relisting their favorite albums; thus an album, though it of course remains static once released (ignoring reissues with bonus tracks as a generally malignant phenomenon), in some critics’ ears will “get better” over time. This might be called “the fine wine syndrome.” And no album has benefited more from this than Aeroplane.When it first came out, Pitchfork gave it merely 8.7. (For some perspective, let’s recall that they instantly anointed …And You Will Know Us by Our Trail of Dead, Source Tags and Codes a 10.0. Good call?! guys...) But when the Aeroplane reissue dropped in 2005, what do you know, the review was upgraded to a 10.0. And no one had a problem with this. And that was just.
It was like when those Joy Division reissues came out. If Pitchfork had given them anything less than a 10.0, their reading audience would have been very angry. No doubt, if Pitchfork had existed in 1979, they would have given Unknown Pleasures an 8.5 and Closer a 9.0. My backlash against their Trail of Dead review demonstrates the wisdom of this kind of skepticism about contemporary records.
With this as backdrop, I thought I’d "manifest" my ten favorite records released since 1998. Some of them will have begun to experience the "fine wine syndrome” while others remain relatively obscure, and others are just obvious. But like all would be internet music scribes, I treasure hierarchy and worship at the temple of order. Here is my list:
10. Little Wings, Magic Wand: We'll start the list off with the album that has perhaps the most Aeroplane-like intensity in its lyrics. Kyle Field is a great visual artist, but I would also argue he is a tremendous Whitmanian poet of the first order, and this album, particularly the songs "So What" and "Everybody," is his masterpiece.
9. Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica: This is the album where all of the great Isaac Brock stuff we liked from the 90s coalesced into something larger, something "universal" in a rather literal way in terms of the album's themes. It's a great record and it has aged very well; and the stuff they've done subsequently, while 'bigger' on a commercial scale, is also pretty good, which in itself is impressive.
8. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House: This album is great because it has such life and lightness simultaneously matched with density and darkness. The Rossen/Droste songwriting team is dynamic and dialectical; you have two divergent sensibilities merged both via instrumentation and Chris Taylor's excellent recording techniques, which itself is like a third song-writer. The group has a sound that is distinctive and definitive of an aesthetic all its own. For that, we are all thankful. Grizzly Bear are themselves the embodiment of taste in our modern era.
7. Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender: On a pure songwriting and instrumentation level, this album is one of the most miraculous debuts of all time. People have problems with the voice, and some tell me her music is "too intense" but I find these objections extraneous. The core of the music is so pure, so brilliantly structured and clean in its embodiment of a generously human spirit, that one cannot help but listen long and deeply to these songs.
6. Sigur Ros, Ágætis Byrjun This album has become a cliche of itself, but I still remember the first time I heard it on my car stereo right after it came out--it was and is unbelievably moving. There are layers here, and the use of reverb is paradigm-altering good. Though they have continued down an at times too similar road, this record continues to shimmer with resplendent substance.
5. Radiohead, In Rainbows: This album was announced and released in record time. A true surprise. its pricing structure (which yielded more profits than their last album before the record was physically released) gave the album an immense press boost.
Also the music was so clean, so incredibly awesome both in classic RH song structures and unbelievably great contemporary productions; it was better than we had any reason to expect it could possibly be, and in being so, it changed everyone's expectations of what is now possible.
4. Dirty Projectors, The Getty Address: This albums is an under-appreciated masterpiece. It combines the best elements of the Guided by Voices influenced lo-fi (that is suddenly popular again) with the best of the electronic artists to come along, both in hip-hop and in rock. The use of orchestral sounds and choruses layered on top of this fundamentally transgressive rhythmic core is what makes this record such a world changer. If you haven't heard it, or have only heard the group's other more recent (and also brilliant) records Rise Above and Bitte, Orca, give this one a whirl; it will blow your mind. It is the contemporary reinvention of opera, post-hip-hop and post-Bjork.
3. The Microphones, The Glow Pt. 2: If I had to pick a music recording grouped as an "album" that was somehow equivalent to Wordsworth's "Poems in Two Volumes" of 1807, I would be hard-pressed to select an album other than this one by Phil Elverum as The Microphones. He blends textures of emotion into environmental textures. It is wonderful to hear.
2. Bjork, Vespertine: A record that continued the work of broadening our awareness--and in doing so destroyed all of our preconceptions of what might follow. If you don't dig this record, I don't know what to say. It is without a doubt miraculously imprinting.
1. Radiohead, Kid A: This album is perhaps the best sounding record ever. The melding of rock and dance impulses works in a way that is different than say, New Order or Depeche Mode. It has a folkloric element, as though Radiohead were our Stravinsky among the village ravers. And through this sensitiveity it succeeds in fusing two major traditions in English popular music into a stunning and dark whole. Kid A was a game changer, and probably the best album since Aeroplane.
Okay, so there we have it, my first effort at such a compendium. This will be updated.
