I'm going to go out there on the limb of bloggerdom and just say it: 2009 is so better than 2008. I don't remember ever in the history of me charting a course of the best albums of the year (started back in 1998) that by the halftime show already being stacked up with so many quality albums in where I might just have a three-way tie for first. OK, that's a lie - the classic line-up of Guided by Voices couldn't reunite and put out their best album ever in an attempt to top out what is #1 so far. No, I'm not going to give away the high order just yet. Instead, we let the alphabet take precedent as we look back at Part 1 of the Best Albums of 2009 .... so far.
It's pure coincidental that the first album mention was the first to make its impact on me this year. It was a record that 10 years from now I'll still be able to point my finger on the moment I first heard it. After frantically searching the internets, this Staten Island-based quartet's first album was blasting through my Macbook. For a month straight it was all I heard. And now it's everything else the indie world is listening to and more will soon be joining the pack. After a glowing Pitchfork review, the band is playing festivals and hitting the road with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart this fall. Their star is on the rise.
I know of at least one person, a former co-worker, who gave me shit for mentioning this one because it's a compilation, but damnit if it isn't a good one. You get Feist dueting with Grizzly Bear ("Service Bell,") you get Feist dueting with Ben Gibbard ("Train Song"). You get Yo La Tengo committing to tape one of their obscure covers ("Gentle Hour,") and you get new music from every other hot commodity on the indie scene (Spoon, The National, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver.) It's like some great Time Life comp or what have you that was advertised in the 70s for the indie generation, something like a Nuggets compilation except not because these aren't a bunch of one hit wonders, but rather an established sect of bands getting together for a cause. Hopefully the Red Hot organization has another good comp or three in them.
E had a lot riding on this one for me - he had to follow up the winner of my Album of the Year 2005, the double-opus Blinking Lights & Other Revelations. Since then he occupied the time of myself and the other Eels fans with three grueling tours, penning his memoirs, and putting out a best-of and double-disc set of rarities. So when it came time to finally make a new studio record, he brought the beard back to reivisit the "Dog Faced Boy" of 2001's Souljacker. It's an album that sonically is a gritty sounding Shootenanny: bluesy 60s guitars covered in static and lo-fi aesthetics. Everything's cranked up to 10, there's next to no overdubs unless hums and hisses of feedback count. It a song-cycle based on longing and desire, things E has always written about, but not so much from the third person.
Foreign Born / Person To Person / Secretly Canadian
This album, the second from the California natives, gets almost a daily spin here at the SIS HQ. If you love the French Kicks, you'll love this, maybe even more then that Brooklyn trio. Person comes off as the album Swimming is not: it's bright and sunny and the guitars shimmer, all the instruments coalesce and co-exist in perfect symmetry. There's not a bunch of jangly guitars bogged down by an organic production and darkness, they beam like the sun. "Vacationing People" is a strong contender for one the year's finest tunes, while the album ties itself together with other songs like "Can't Keep Time," "Blood Oranges" and "Can't Keep Time" keeping it in check.
I remember writing the Can't Stop Spinning column/letter of love back in February and the second it was done, I was sad it was available for all to read. Months later when the album finally came out and we all helped it get to #8 on Billboard (I bought the CD and the LP and tickets to three shows,) I still was finding new things I loved in and out about this record. A year after debuting it to the world, "Two Weeks" holds up as one of the strongest songs of the year, but it's not just an album about songs it's about the building blocks that make the songs. The lush arrangements on the grand "Ready, Able" and the perfect harmonies of "All We Ask" and the epic angels and demons allusions of Daniel Rossen vs. the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in "I Live With You" are just a few of its perfections making it a strong contender for not just Album of the Year, but Album of the Decade, if not, my lifetime.
There hasn't been any band like Eels that have been an important part of my life since entering it at the turn of the century. Sure, "Novocaine For The Soul" was a song I requested a lot on my local radio station in my early teens, but it was earlier this decade when Souljacker was released, and E dawned the cover with a grizzly beard that gave the unabomber a run for his money. At the same time, I obtained my copy of their epic Electro-Shock Blues, an album to this day that still holds the specialist of places in my heart. It has always been my go to in times of endless grief and sadness with the few deaths I've had to implore the last few years, and it always will be: "Dead of Winter" being the cornerstone of ultimate loss.
With those two albums, I could always see myself in E's lyrics. And a few months ago, I was given my copy of his latest, Hombre Lobo, and the beard from the Souljacker days hath returneth, along with my pension for living vicariously though his pain. Subtitled 12 Songs of Desire, E has decided to live through the character of the Dog Faced Boy that Souljacker's lead song is about, down to that gnarly beard. The songs are rough, brash and loud at times; chunky guitars and overmastering fill the speakers during the rocous "Tremendous Dynamite" and the opening "Prizefighter". And facing off are the songs that follow; in a near album-length loud/quiet/loud dynamic from song to song, the first half follows this sequence to a T. After the prize is the quiet and wanting "The Look You Give That Guy," before the gritty bastard child of anything off of 2005's Blinking Lights & Other Revelations' "Lilac Breeze" finds E with a rather humorous tongue when he states 'Birds do it / Bees do it / I wanna do it / The Only thing we to do is get down to it.'
And after the bombast of "Dynamite" comes the mournful "The Longing." Right up there with "Winter" in the Saddest Eels Song category, E woefully strums his guitar as he tries to just move on, to get her out of his head, to detach her venom and poison that has seeped in to his brain. He hasn't sounded this frail and desperate, whether he's singing as a charcter or as himself, since Electro-Shock; especially in the way he delivers to us what he misses: "Her smell, her touch / Her Smile, her laugh."
No two Eels records are ever the same really, but to compare it sonically to anything before this, you could say Lobo is a dirtier, and grittier sounding Shootenanny. Catchy straightforward guitar licks and other rhythms are covered in dirt, stomped out like our protaganist's heart has been on a song like "What's A Fella Gotta Do". "All The Beautiful Things" is the furthest this album gets from the sound achieved on the other 11 tracks with a cleaner sound as E is aware of how he is great and how she knows he is great, yet she won't accept him just yet.
Blinking Lights was named Album of the Year by me in 2005. Whether Hombre Lobo will take the cake this year remains to be seen, but what can be seen is that E has once again made an album that his fans will love and appreciate, as he branches out in to making a record unlike Blinking Lights, and another dozen songs that I will forever and always be able to identify myself with.
So the other week we got the word that the new Eelsalbum, is in the can. I am excited. I'm sure I mentioned it before but, yeah, no pressure to follow up 2005's Album of the Year of course not. Since then, our first taste came in the form of "Fresh Blood" and moody near trance-dance number with a phat beat and some keys.
Last week came news of Tremendous Dynamite: Making Hombre Lobo, a 30-minute documentary that shows a very bearded E and his collection of Eels this time around (Koool G Murder? Al? The Chet are you in there??) making the record that now bares the subtitle 12 Songs of Desire. The trailer for Dynamite was unleashed yesterday showing not only the band tracking the titular track, but also shows E finding his dog Bobby Jr. in a compromising position.
Fresh on the heels of last week's release of the Essential Eels best of and Useless Trinkets rarities set, Eelshave announced U.S. dates for their upcoming An Evening With Eels tour. Starting a mere three days after the European dates wrap in Paris, E and the rest of the recent live incarnation (or is he going solo? No one knows) will start in Philadelphia and go up the coast, west through Canada, and then back down and west through the rest of the states, heading home to California to wrap things up. The band will also, as always, kick things off with a warm up show at the Galaxy Theater before the European tour on Valentine's Day. This coming from a band who has a song called "I'm Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart." How fitting.
In other E news, I'm certain I also mentioned last week that his book, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, was published in the UK where it has already heralded the bestseller title before it. My copy came in the mail yesterday, and I really haven't wanted to put it down. Early on, it shows E's days of junior high and high school, his first interaction with women, and rather interesting incidents that has adolescent E having two court cases in one day. And another very interesting tale about this time he was caught in the bushes, I won't give that away, though. If you don't feel like buying it via Amazon UK, it will be published in the U.S. this fall.
A Not-So-Useless Tour: 02/14 Santa Ana, CA @ Galaxy Theater 03/28 Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church 03/29 Washington, DC @ Sixth & I Historic Synagogue 03/31 Boston, MA @ Somerville Theatre 04/01 New York, NY @ Highline Ballroom 04/02 New York, NY @ Highline Ballroom 04/04 Toronto, ONT @ The Mod 04/05 Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre 04/06 Chicago, IL @ Park West 04/07 Minneapolis, MN @ Pantages Theatre 04/09 Boulder, CO @ Fox Theatre 04/11 Seattle, WA @ Showbox Theatre 04/13 Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom 04/14 San Francisco, CA @ Palace Of Fine Arts 04/16 Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey Theater
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Dark Was The Night / 4AD
