Tag: Father John Misty

The Best Albums of the 2010s

Arcade Fire, Japandroids, The National and St. Vincent make up some of my 10 favorites of the decade

I liked a lot of music before this decade, but the 2010s was the decade I actually started listening to it. This was the decade I developed a taste and really drilled down on what I liked. In the 2010s I saw just under 200 concerts (I have a running list). The previous decade I could count on two hands the number of shows I’d seen. This was the decade I got an iPod Classic, and I’ve made sure that device outlived when Apple ultimately discontinued it.

Though on many top 10 lists I’ve seen, some don’t even have a single rock record on them. Music is diverse and distinctive in a way movies and TV are less so. And maybe in the next decade I’ll be able to expand my horizons to genres I only dabbled with this decade.

So you’ll forgive me for not listing each of the most important pop, rap, country and metal stars of recent memory. You don’t need to come to me to read about why Kendrick Lamar is so great. Rather, these are the 50 albums and artists (I only picked one album per artist/band) that meant the most to me this decade, the ones that constantly soundtracked my life these last 10 years.

Continue reading “The Best Albums of the 2010s”

The Best Albums of 2018

“I’m so glad I came but I can’t wait to leave,” St. Vincent sings on “Slow Disco.” In two different remixed versions of her ghostly, neon-tinged anthem originally heard on last year’s “Masseduction,” she reveals both the rousing elation and haunting melancholy of the same line. My favorite version though is this year’s “Fast Slow Disco,” along with the accompanying music video. Annie Clark moshes among a rambunctious, sweaty mass of burly men dressed in leather and bondage in a gay club. She conveys a liberating celebration while acknowledging how fleeting the sensation can be. “Don’t it beat a slow dance to death?”

This is one of the songs that spoke to me the most this year, along with the arresting contrast of party rhythms and aggressive beats in the explosively topical “This is America” by Childish Gambino, and the enormous, rising wave when I heard Lady Gaga belt out “Shallow” in “A Star is Born.”

But “Fast Slow Disco” in particular made me think of my own concert going and listening this year. I still can’t think of a better feeling than hearing great music at a live show, but I’ve started to notice some of my fatigue. I listened to less new music this year, and I’m starting to be more selective in what concerts I spend my time and money. It could just be this year in music, in which the most important albums of the year were far more divided among critics, and the culture gravitated toward these often meme-worthy tracks and videos more so than a single artist or album.

Or it could be a sign of how my listening might look going forward. So this year, you’ll find a lot of my old favorites, all organized alphabetically, with the exception of my one big new discovery this year.  Continue reading “The Best Albums of 2018”

The Best Albums of 2017

First, a few words about Arcade Fire.

I never thought the day would come that I would be ashamed to like this band. 2017 in music proved that possibly only Beyoncé is sacred. Anything that you liked yesterday could just as well be fodder for infinite Internet memes today and tomorrow. If you’re not saying or doing something important right now, do you even still matter? Just ask Taylor Swift.

With their fifth album “Everything Now,” Arcade Fire sought to satirize and critique that Internet culture. And where Father John Misty succeeded and generated the right kind of controversy, Arcade Fire’s album rollout was hindered by a marketing campaign in which the band issued phony reviews and literal fake news. At one point they halted the sale of “Everything Now” fidget spinners because they had their own fidget spinners to sell. And every Internet gimmick that in one artist’s hand would be genius in another would be U2 dumping “Songs of Innocence” on your iPhone.

Arcade Fire may have been good once, but they’re now in the same cultural doghouse as U2, Coldplay and even Nickelback, undisputed fair game for whatever labels and jokes you want to assign. I don’t know whether Arcade Fire was ever “cool.” Hipsters certainly do not like them anymore. But “Everything Now” was an excuse for all the haters to come out of the woodwork. “This band has been bad since “The Suburbs!” And they’ve always been overrated!”

The problem is that the music itself didn’t rise above the online reaction and marketing rollout. “Everything Now” is their worst album, and on the whole, it’s not especially good. The lethargic reggae beat of “Chemistry,” the arrhythmia that is “Peter Pan,” the generic punk and country of both “Infinite Content” tracks: this is the worst stretch this band has ever recorded. And yet as I’ve sat with this album more, it’s grown on me. Songs like “Put Your Money On Me” and “We Don’t Deserve Love” are dreamy earworms that linger in your mind, but they’re not the soaring rock anthems that have traditionally served as Arcade Fire album finales. The title track and “Creature Comfort” are two of the best singles of the year, the first an upbeat indie dance jingle with melancholy lyrics about media saturation, and the second a violent track with a club beat and a message about suicide.

So it pains me when I have to pretend as though I’m wrong to call Arcade Fire my favorite band, as though they belong to some other cultural entity that isn’t woke to what’s actually good. Arcade Fire were great before, and they can be great again, but it doesn’t mean they’re worth ignoring now.

As for what I most enjoyed in music this year, I’m not a good enough judge of what’s fashionable to know whether any or all of these artists are actually cool or important, but I refuse to be ashamed about any of them. These are the Best Albums of 2017.  Continue reading “The Best Albums of 2017”