Tag: The National

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.

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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”

Mistaken for Strangers

Tom Berninger’s unusual rock-doc is hardly about The National at all but more about his own behind the scenes antics and volatile personality.

I first saw and discovered The National on their “High Violet” tour opening for Arcade Fire. Their music was deep, mournful, abstract and quietly intense (before becoming loudly intense), and you might suspect that Matt Berninger and company are really just brooding basket cases of emotion and darkness.

But at that show Berninger paused after a particularly riotous number and threw jellybeans into the audience. “Be sure to pick those up,” he said, “They each have a new MP3 track in them… by The Flaming Lips.” You don’t quite realize that they’re funny, quirky, aloof and more like their Midwestern selves than whatever you expect of a rock star.

The new rock-doc “Mistaken for Strangers” sheds light into this side of The National, but it does so by profiling the even bigger goofball behind the scenes, Director and Matt’s brother Tom Berninger. Though he resembles his tall, lanky and hipster brother Matt, Tom is shorter, fatter and has longer hair, and he could very well be portrayed in a movie by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

He’s made an oddball, meta and awkwardly funny documentary not unlike his own goofy personality. “Mistaken for Strangers” has more to do with Tom than the band itself, and in that way it gives us a more heartwarming portrait of The National than concert footage alone ever could.

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The Best Albums of 2013

Late last January I started working a full time job. I drive a half hour to and back from work each day, I get home late, some nights I go out and others I stay in and try and do nothing at all.

That schedule often does not include watching a movie each night. Suffice it to say, keeping pace with my new and old movie watching was a struggle this year, be it staying up late nights or making the long hike downtown to see obscure art films. Being a cinephile can be hard.

Being a music buff however can be easy. Those drives and those slow moments at work amount to a lot of hours, and the ability to access just about any music has never been easier. I DID listen to music every day this year, and as a result the process of writing my year end Top 10 list was as intensive as I know my upcoming film list will be.

The additional beauty about music is that even in a bad year, there is SO MUCH of it to discover. Music doesn’t operate in the bullshit summer and winter release cycles that film does, so there is not only an album worth streaming each and every week but likely one of these same bands coming through town on a cheap, $20 ticket. Throw in a six buck beer and you have yourself an evening.

2013 was thankfully a great year for music. Those who avoided the controversy of Kanye and Miley and Daft Punk and Arcade Fire were still treated to a plethora of debuts, dream reunions and follow-ups that those in the film and TV industries would relish.

No one is writing think pieces declaring music in a golden age, but no one is declaring it dying either (except maybe David Byrne).

So while I’m still not a music writer, I’m no longer a film guy who dabbles in rock. Music is now my other “thing,” and despite how populist, rockist or in poor critical taste my list turns out, I look forward to doing this every year.

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