Best Albums of the Year: 5-1

5. Kanye West - Late Registration
People used to make albums like this all the time. They'd make a bunch of really great songs, make videos for some, attend MTV award shows, win awards, and laugh their way to the bank. Great bands used to do this. So in a year when the music sites I looked at were concerned that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were totally overhyped because people were talking about them so much their album had sold 20,000 copies, when I couldn't even tell you what the Billboard top ten looked like let alone say if I've ever heard of any of the people, it was great to understand at least one mainstream act. Sure it suffers playing it front to back, but that's missing the point. This is a singles album if there ever was one. And taken one at a time it's stunning feat. "Heart em Say", "Touch the Sky", "Gold Digger", "Drive Slow", "Diamonds From Sierra Leone", "Addiction", "We Major", and "Gone". Yes, the skits suck, the song with Brandy is crap, but has any album tried for so much and been so consistanly good this year? And he even says literate things once in a while.

4. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
I found this album in the middle of the summer when I was still living in Indianapolis and waiting for something to happen. I was happy, living with my girlfriend, drinking with friends, riding my girls bike around town. But I always knew I'd be leaving for something different, for New York, for a life unknown. And then I found these crazy guys from Brooklyn who made a pop-speckled indie-rock where every song was great and made me think of what was to come. And they seemed to egg me on, letting me know what I could expect. How could I deny some band that made a song like "In This Home on Ice" which was so obviously tailored personally for me? My Bloody Valetine guitars? The beat from 1979? Vocalist that sounds like David Bowie? You bet. It even has a great bridge. That I still can't discern a thing the man says probably has added to their mystique for me. They seem so effortless, yet so completley in control.

3. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
I didn't understand Wolf Parade until I saw them in concert. Blake and I had convinced ourselves that we had to see this band, because we liked the album and they were getting a lot of press and we hadn't really seen many bands this year. I was expecting a beer in hand, hanging out in the middle watching the kids have their fun. Then we walk in, see no one there, and walk straight to the front, realize we are very early, and stake out the best spot in the house. I had convinced myself that I was over rock n roll, being really for the young, and something to look back on fondly when I was still in college. After moshing to my third Strokes concert in as many years, meeting them backstage, shaking Julian's hand, and generally hanging out with them, I figured nothing was ever going to be the same. I had reached the pinnacle. But then I realized that Wolf Parade had two lead singers, that they were both good, and that they competed on stage, trying to out-do the other one. And it was stunning. Afterwards, I was able to hear that battle on and I fell in love with how on edge the entire album felt, how every moment was ready to spill over unto another song. Like CYHSY, this album is empty of filler, but unlike those smiling folks of Brooklyn, this beast has a dangerous edge. I am not dead to rock n roll any longer.

2. Bright Eyes - I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
It's not something I'm bragging about, but most of my friends are fairly liberal. I'm not sure if something predisposed to people who like great music, who are generally nice, or those that are just poor, but most of my friends share my beliefs. The war was wrong. Bush is incompetent. I only know three people in the armed services, all of them did not have any experience in Iraq. Two of them I went to high school with, and the other is a friend of my girlfriend's. I haven't talked to any of them in a year. The only person I know to have died in Iraq was a guy that I played football with in elementary school before he moved away. His name was Eric Hillenburg and we were friends. Here is what the paper said:
Lance Corporal Eric Hillenburg, 21, Indianapolis. Shot to death two days before Christmas during the Fallujah campaign. Two other members of his unit were also killed. His father is pastor of Hope Baptist Church just north of Ben Davis High School.

This war does not affect me in the slightest bit outside the deep political debates I have with other like minded people over pints of beer. The thought that we are at war is almost absurd for me to comprehend as I walk to work in Manhattan where the largest terrorist attack in North America occurred just four years ago and where they expect horribly bad things to happen at any second.

Here is my rationale while in the subway: White people are not going to blow me up. Black people aren't going to blow me up. All people who speak Spanish are cool. If there is a baby in the carriage I am good. Large boxes are fine if a sweaty man who doesn't speak english is carrying it. All women are fine. Rants about Jesus are fine. All Jewish people are fine. People with backpacks and cameras are just tourists as long as they look lost. People with ipods obviously love life. That includes all game modules. That leaves about one person every couple of days that I see, which really isn't that bad. I'm usually too tired to care. Really, I am unaffected.

I never really listened to Bright Eyes until this album came out. It wasn't that I didn't like what they did, I just hadn't listened. So when Austin continued to play them over and over in his room and on his guitar, I decided to give it a shot. And I liked it. He sort of had that Ryan-Adams thing going on. Hell, he even had Emmylou Harris. But everything changed when I moved to New York. Suddenly all of the lyrics started to make sense. In "Train Under Water" I could visualize the L Train that goes from the village in Manhattan, under the East River, to Brooklyn. I've taken that train, it is a whole foot wider in the middle than the 6, which is what I'm stuck on most of the time.

Something makes sense in the village. It really does. I want to live there so badly because nothing matters in the outside world. You can survive there, read news about there, and live in a world outside the public conciousness. There are no wars in the village. Republicans sure as hell don't go there unless they are on tour buses. And that's what I want. I want to forget the war. I want to forget the economy. I want to forget about the Mid-west hicks of my youth, the obsession with money, the 2.5 kids in surburbia going to soccer games, and eating macdonalds. But I don't live there. While I share the same island, I am far away. But I can listen to this album and feel it.

The most profound line I've heard this year occurs 3:31 into "Landlocked Blues". "We made love on the living room floor/with noise in the background from a televised war." Nothing has so accurately described the repulsion to violence, the complete disconnection from reality, and the only way we have of coping. If there was an album that best described this year, it would have to be this one.

1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise
So Bright Eyes best describes the year, Kanye has the best singles, Wolf Parade reaffirmed my love of rock, and CYHSY were just great. So what is left? I don't really know. This is such an understated triumph, such an easy album to completely forget about, that sometimes I just had to listen to it and remember why. Beacuse there is nothing quite like this album. And believe me, I've been searching for it. From the earliest moments of my childhood I expressed an interest to leave the Mid-West, to move to the big city and out of a town that had smaller population than the very small college I attended. And nothing had made any sense. All the bands I was listening to were talking about things I didn't fully understand, and didn't experience on a daily basis. All the authors I read had left the mid-west. And here comes Sufjan talking about sexually confusing bible studies and about feeling helplessness staring at roads that stretch on into the horizon, away from home and eventually to two different coasts.
I needed this album more than any of the rest of these albums, that's why. That's why I listened to this album more than any album this year, why it is the album of my summer, of my fall and of the past month. It has identified a part of myself I didn't fully understand and was searching for. It's the piano in "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL", it's the high falsetto in "John Wayne Gacy", and all of the marvelous "Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step Mother!" Never has an album sounded so Mid-West, so humble yet expansive. So grounded and exhaultent at the same time.