THE Album List of 2005

Right, so Christmas severely dented my blogging. December the 18th - wow, that seems a long time ago. Anyway, a very fine Christmas and New Year was had, thanks for asking.

I have been looking forward to getting back into my blogging, mainly because 2005 was the first year that I could put together a serious list of my top 10 albums. I've been thinking about it a lot, and it's definitely the rightest list of albums I've seen all year, thus I feel justified in calling it THE Album List of 2005.

So, without further ado, my top 10 original recordings released in the UK in 2005.

10. Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise


We start with the album I had most difficulty placing - over the past couple of weeks I've been thinking about this list it has been at number 2 right down to off the chart. Even now, I feel it unfair to pin it down at number 10 and I find it hard to believe, until I read the rest of the list, that I'm saying that there are 9 better albums this year. At times this album has annoyed me with it's "film music" interludes, the way it can pass me by and its length. But then on another day I'm amazed by its invention and how well it all hangs together and I don't want it to end. Thankfully, I'm beginning to always find myself in the latter.


9. Devendra Banhart - Cripple Crow


Wow, only two albums in and we've covered 44 tracks and have 2 and half hours of music. That's value. I had no idea who DB (as I'll take liberty of calling him) was until a chance encounter on a magazine CD. Like Sufjan, it always seems inventive, grabbing styles and incorporating them into the root folksy sound. However, the thing that strikes me most about the album is how much fun it is. It's the sound of a guy enjoying himself and his music, and it's freaking infective. This album makes me grin incessantly. And bob and jiggle. Basically it makes me look like an idiot. And I don't care.


8. Josh Rouse - Nashville


A bit like a Ben Kweller, but older and wiser, Josh Rouse has produced an album that I think of as being just, well, gorgeous. Like the greatest album ever (a prize to anyone who guesses it) Nashville takes in the break-up of a marriage, as well as a kind of ode to the city of the title, and this results in songs full of wistfulness and emotions, but only in the very best of ways. At times acoustic and downbeat, at others rythmic and unashamedly pop, in the way that pop can be so lush and layered, the album links into one big ball of musical accomplishment whilst always being honest and never prosaic or dreary.


7. Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft


Aah, the Furries. One of a handful of bands that have stuck with me since my early days of music listening, and one which rarely lets me down. Like their previous album (and most probably my album of 2003) "Phantom Power", I initially dismissed "Love Kraft" as being overly polished. However, I knew better this time, and soon I was realising how strong a songwriting group SFA have become. Lyrically they are always interesting and reasuringly wierd, whilst sounding musically rich and lush and full of ideas. Which for a band on their 7th album (or so) is something to admire and rejoice in.


6. Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better


It's ridiculous, I know, but I was kind of worried for Franz. I really liked the first album, and seeing them live at the tail-end of 2004 made for a memorable birthday. However I could picture the reviews for their second album - more of the same, not as good as the first. I had readied myself for disappointment when I stuck the new album in the CD player.

32 seconds later I couldn't remember what I'd been worried about.

Opening track "The Fallen" said to me "Why did you doubt us? We're Franz and we're going to freaking enjoy ourselves". Hoorah!

After the relief of knowing that the album wasn't a dud, further listens have revealed a great album that holds together SO well, something that it has over the first. It actually shows a development, and in this modern world of super debuts follwed by crushing sophomore efforts, that's something to be glad for.


5. The National - Alligator


Given a couple more weeks, I reckon this album could be in the top 3 - but then I look at the top 3 and I'm not so sure. Either way, it is undeniable that this is a very strong album. Initial listens bring to mind Interpol, but perhaps less dense. Further plays reveal poetic, bleak lyrics that are delivered in the only way possible - a Nick Cave/Ian Curtis growl, but maybe more melodic. The music supplies excellent support, and develops over subsequent listens as something brilliantly subtle and intertwined, with strings, guitars and piano reflecting the frustation held by the lyrics, sometimes resolving gently, and at others boiling over.

Stylus magazine wrote in a review that "If Chris Martin wrote songs and made records as if he were the bully and not the kid getting his lunch money stolen, Coldplay would sound like The National." The National aren't like Coldplay at all, but I like the idea of the National stealing Chris Martin's money, fans and popular adoration, before giving him a darn good wedgie and pushing him in the girl's toilets.

4. The Features - Exhibit A


The glory of having a brother who is capable of discovering great bands that I would not usually have ever come across, and then perservering with playing the album at me until it finally won me over. Lee (and Mani), I thank you.

Why it took me so long to get the Features, I'm not quite sure. Listening to the album now, it is so immediate - it has that beautiful quality of having songs that I am convinced I've heard before. To describe it, because I'm not sure how many people know about them, I guess the Features fall into the Weezer/Fountains of Wayne camp, but not at all "Geeky", and much more influenced by the Kinks and the Who of the British Invasion. Each track is a perfect exponent of its type, with handclaps and drum breaks and crunching guitars and yelps all in the right places, whilst at no time seeming anything less than fresh and exhuberent. Superb.


3. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary


"Boom. Ch. Boom-Ch-Boom-Ch"

And so starts the best opening album track of the year. I honestly believe I could have had the first 37 seconds of this track and I would have been happy. It's just so damned good - it demands you listen to it.

In some ways, liking the first track so much made it difficult for me to get into the rest of the album. I waited a couple of months between collecting a few of MP3s from the web and actually buying the album, and with Arcade Fire links etc., I built it up into something that it couldn't fulfil. However, once I approached it anew, casting aside the hype I'd managed to collect, I realised that it is as good as I could have hoped for, with the kind of powerful songs that I'm a real sucker for. The links with Arcade Fire arise from the delivery of the song, the franticism of delivering the lyric with real feeling, so that although you may be not so sure that you know the words, you sure as dammit understand them.

Musically, there isn't that much of a link with the Arcade Fire, with Modest Mouse providing the indeniable main influence. This is by no means detrimental, but rather shows how music can be inspired by a source, but take it somewhere different and equally interesting.

However, I think that perhaps Wolf Parade, talking with Win Butler and Issac Brock, should have the final say, taken from the album's press release:

"And so together the four of them [Wolf Parade] made sweet nonsensical music that sounded like a bullfight, only where the bull is a gorilla and the matador is a robot precariously holding a baby and all the spectators are eagles and whales with laser beams fore eyes and everybody cries when the gorilla dies."

And you know what that does, in a very, very drunken and weird way, sum up the album for me. Or perhaps not.


2. Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning


Thank you Devon County Council for Crediton library. The music section has introduced me to bands that I would never have bothered with, or maybe even come across. Currently I'm listening to the Editors thanks to their loaning system. Other stuff I've had access to for a single golden nugget have included Sigor Ros, Mars Volta, Ed Harcourt and Fog (some of which I loved - Mr Harcourt - others that were, er, poor - Mr Fog). However, the greatest discovery was Conor Oberst, or his incarnation as Bright Eyes for this excellent recording.

Lyrically, I love this album. I like the fact that they're not always perfect or original, but coupled with his delivery they just seem so God damned honest. At times they may seem so simple as to be ridiculous, but, for me, they are about as spot on a commentary on what's going on around us as anyone's got.

I read in a year review that if only the music was as strong as the lyrics. Couldn't disagree more. This year I have begun on the slippery slope that is Country music. I've embraced Johnny Cash and Gram Parsons. It is the country tinge that I found in this album that made me enjoy it so much. It adds to the lyrics and can drive them along, or wallows with them, slipping between despair and some form of hope. The teaming with Emmylou Harris is great and the album superbly switches gears between the melancholic plodding of "Lua" and the unstoppable chug of "Another Travellin' Song". Any other year, it would have been top. However...


1. Arcade Fire - Funeral


One album alone stood head and shoulders above everything else this year. I'll entertain arguments about the other positionings in this list, but there is No Doubt that the Arcade Fire produced the album of the year. It's a fact.

I'm not going to bother reviewing it, or saying what it is that I like about the album so much because I think that a lot has been said about it already, and to try and distill the album into elements that describe why I liked it so much would take something away from it for me. Suffice to say that it was the first album for a long while that really excited me from the first piano chords of "Neighbourhood #1" to the last strum of "In the Backseat". I became a devoted fan of a band again, something I haven't been since... well, a while ago. I enjoyed copying it for friends and trying to appear nonchalant at their opinions. I revelled in the good reviews - scowled at those anything less than adoring.

That has passed now, but my opinion of the album remains. In a year of great music, much of what I've loved about the rest of the top ten I find in this album - emotion, musical brilliance, superb songwriting, honesty, power, etc. etc. The perfect example of my musical tastes, and I guess in a personal top 10, there's no getting better than that.


And so there we have it: my top ten. Apologies if at times I gushed, talked rubbish or succumed to hyperbole, (I aimed for all three) but I found that that was what the music of 2005 did to me. And it felt good.

Category:Music