2008: The Year in Music

Although our music tastes are not nearly as thorough or eclectic as, say, Jerry Grit (whom we consider a kind of indie rock mentor, and who began his own year-long music project here), we’ll do our best to offer a varied list of the Eleven Best Albums of 2008 (and our eleven favorite songs).*

First, a quick note on methodology: Erin, Ben and guest critic Bevin Beers all agreed on our eleven favorite albums of 2008, then individually ranked them (numerically, from favorite [1] to least favorite [11]). Scores are included alongside each review. Ben has lodged an official protest because

THE HOLD STEADY, Stay Positive only gets an “honorable mention” with a score of 26. Erin and Bevin both ranked it 11th, while Ben ranked it 4th. We’ve already had a pro/con on this album, and it nearly ripped our marriage apart. Let’s just go straight to the list.

 

10. FLEET FOXES, Fleet Foxes [24].  It was love at first listen when we heard “White Winter Hymnal.” The first (though least impressive, beard-wise) of four great bearded artists to appear on our list. 

9. VAMPIRE WEEKEND, Vampire Weekend [20].  We are sure to endure the wrath of Mr. Grit himself** for loving this album as much as we do, but our hips just can’t stop shaking to “Cape Cod (Kwassa Kwassa)” or “A-Punk.” Listening to this album again last week after it spent months on the shelf, we’re convinced it’ll hold up well. 

8. CALEXICO, Carried To Dust [19].  It’d be a stretch to say that if Cormac McCarthy wrote music instead of books it’d sound something like Calexico (albiet it with a (slightly) sunnier outlook on life). But they definitely reside in the same geographical terrain. Would Anton Chigurh have Calexico on his iPod? Or would he listen to acid jazz? Probably acid jazz.

7. BECK, Modern Guilt [19].  Danger Mouse jumped on board to produce this one. His beard gets no points, but we dig the hair. Ben is dealing with his Beck inferiority complex better now, thank you.

6. TV ON THE RADIO, Dear Science [18].  Ben’s number one did not fare as well with the Beers sisters. Everyone else – Rolling Stone, Spin and Entertainment Weekly – is anointing Dear Science best of the year. It’s the first TVOTR album that really clicks for us. “Golden Age,” “Halfway Home” and “Lover’s Day” have all received ample airplay on the Vore car stereo. The second of the four great bearded albums of the year.

5. SIGUR ROS, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust [17].  As close as Sigur Ros will get to releasing a radio-friendly Top 40 album. Right out of the gate, “Gobbledigook” sets a poppy tone while “Inni mer syngur vitleysingur” is a tiny masterpiece that bursts open with a joyful horn explosion. The later half of the album sags, but the first five songs more than make up for it.

4. DR. DOG, Fate [16].  Bevin’s favorite album of the year scored decently with the Vores. The second best thing to come out of Philadelphia (after “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”). 

3. BON IVER, For Emma, Forever Ago [12].  Bon Iver [a k a, Justin Vernon] pulled an Andrew Bird/Ray Lamontagne and wrote this album at a remote cabin in rural Wisconsin (with only a DVD of Northern Exposure as escape). The runner-up for beards (and cats)!

2. THAO, We Brave Bee Stings And All [11].  Erin’s favorite album of the year. We have Mr. Bescak to thank for introducing us, although Matthew Leathers*** claims he told Ben about it a long time ago. And Ms. Nguyen graced Cincinnati with her presence this year! Yet another reason to love Ohio.

1. BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY, Lay Down In The Light [8].  The only album to score in the single digits, Lay Down in the Light was no one’s top pick but it scored no lower than three on any list. Was the difference the beard? It is the most impressive of all. And Mr. Oldham’s talents are not limited to the musical realm. Thinking about just how much we played this album this year, we’re comfortable endorsing it at number one. And three of its songs made our favorites list below.

 

MOST DISAPPOINTING ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

MY MORNING JACKET, Evil Urges.  We’ve heard MMJ is great live. We’ve heard this album praised by friends whose tastes we greatly respect. Craig Finn of The Hold Steady told Rolling Stone it was his favorite album of the year. But we just don’t get it. “Highly Suspicious” doesn’t get us excited, it just makes us want to skip to the next song. And why is Jim James writing love songs to a librarian? O-ver-rate-ded (clap clap clapclapclap).

STEREOLAB, Chemical Chords.  We incurred Mr. Grit’s wrath for not liking this album. We know Stereolab are stalwarts. We’re big fans of Sound-Dust. It’s just that this was background music that didn’t have the decency to just fade into the background. Seriously, we’re selling this to the highest bidder.

WOLF PARADE, At Mount Zoomer.  Both Mr. Bescak and Mr. Leathers have made the case that this album grows on you with each listen. And it’s not a bad album. But it doesn’t belong in the same breath as Apologies to the Queen Mary — which we’ll listen to twenty times for every one spin AMZ gets.

 

FAVORITE SONGS OF THE YEAR

“Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It),” Beyonce. If you have not already watched this video, 19,510,835 people have beaten you to it. But someone living in a cave has not. You can still get there first.

“Fated to Pretend,” MGMT.  Here’s a little experiment you can try sometime: Get on the highway and start this song while driving 55 mph. Scientists predict that by the end of it, you will be going 93 mph and have a grin stretching from ear-to-ear. Out of curiosity: Just how many drugs do you think were consumed in the making of this video?

“White Winter Hymnal,” Fleet Foxes.  Insanely catchy and beautiful harmonies in the round. 

“Army of Ancients,” Dr. Dog.  We found no good videos of this song on them there World Wide Webs, so just go buy the album. You’ll also be treated to “Uncovering the Old,” which is no slouch either.

“Walls,” Beck.  No cool video here either, but you can at least listen to the song here.

“Slowness,” Calexico.  And yet another without video. But it’s pretty, trust us.

“Magick,” Ryan Adams & The Cardinals.  The quality’s not great, but these hooks cannot be contained by poor video and sound quality.

“Easy Does It,” “So Everyone” and “I’ll Be Glad,” Bonnie “Prince” Billy.  Every song on this album is well worth a listen, but these three stand out. We found a funky version of “Easy Does It” on YouTube, but it might scare the faint of heart. We will merely link to it with this disclaimer: We prefer listening to BPB rather than watching him. (There’s a big difference.)

“Golden Age,” TV on the Radio.  Is that a chicken playing bass?

(Now, if you haven’t seen it, go watch their Letterman appearance playing “Wolf Like Me.”)

 

Merry Christmas! Best & Worst of Movies coming Friday. Or Saturday! Depending on how much eggnog we consume.

 

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* = As with any proper music list, this one goes to eleven.

** = We suspect Mr. Grit would concur with Mike Breen’s assessment of VW in Cincinnati’s alt-weekly CityBeat: “The ‘big album of the year that I just don’t get.’ I hear people say it’s like Paul Simon’s Graceland mixed with Indie Pop. And I always say, ‘That sounds like the music that will be playing if I ever blow my head off with a shotgun.’”

*** = Speaking of Matthew Leathers, his Top 10 music list is here.****

**** = And let’s not forget that Mark Hoobler has already posted his Best of 2008 here.

2008: The Year in Books

Books, more than music, TV or movies, are especially disserviced by Top Ten lists. Let’s compare them to movies. Your typical movie runs around two hours. Your typical book generally demands two to three times that time investment, longer if you’re attempting something like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and shorter if you’re reading Dr. Seuss or just happen to read at a blistering pace. And there are so many books. Yes, there are so many movies too. But it seems to us that it’s much easier to narrow TV shows or movies down to a shortlist than it is to corral the Top Ten Books of the Year.

We suspect many would disagree with us on this. Think of all the new music that comes out every year. How on earth do we narrow that down to the ten best? Rolling Stone engages in a particularly ludicrous exercise of ranking the Top 100 songs of the year. There may be a case for the single catchiest, most emblematic song of any given year. But after the top two or three, what differentiates song #12 from, say, #63? Or #91? What makes “Spaceman” by The Killers sixteen spots more superior than “Aly, Walk With Me” by The Raveonettes? (And RS abides by the polite notion that no band should occupy more than one spot on that list, a democratic but critically limiting gesture.)

This is all standard nose-turning at the commodification of art into tidy boxes with grades or number values attached to them. But let’s face it, we love Top Ten Lists. They’re punchy! They’re controversial! They’re conversation starters! So here we go. (We promise not to do this throat-clearing for every post this week.)

We refuse to rank these books in any order, though we have grouped them thematically and singled one out as the best. Without further ado, here are the Ten Best Books released in 2008 that we found the time to read.

 

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, Steven Millhauser.  The weakest of our four collections, Dangerous Laughter has been earning such praise mainly as a sort of literary Lifetime Achievement Award for Millhauser. All of his standard themes — adolescence, the extremes of obsession, the strange fantastical realms of imagination cozying up to reality — show up in thirteen stories that read like spooky, sometimes comic parables. (Millhauser wrote the short story that was the basis for The Illusionist, if that gives you a frame of reference.) The first story in this collection, “Cat ‘n’ Mouse,” is a literary treatment of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. The cat and mouse become heroic, tragic figures locked in an epic contest of wills. It sets the stage for all that follows, with “A Room in the Attic” and “The Wizard of West Orange” being the standouts. While we heartily recommend this collection, we especially recommend Millhauser’s very first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, a parody biography of an 11-year-old as written by his best friend that is one of the richest, funniest and most terrifying books about childhood we’ve ever read. If you’re in the mood for something shorter, this essay that Millhauser wrote for the New York Times Book Review in October is also an excellent introduction.

OLIVE KITTERIDGE, Elizabeth Strout.  Strout is a master of the rituals and routines of small town lives, and these stories, set in Maine and revolving around the central figure of retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge, are rich with spiritual drama. These people love and hurt one another. Sometimes they forgive and reconcile, many times they do not. What Strout does so well is locate the humanity of her characters even as she strips them to the bone and lays them bare on the page, skeletons and all. Olive is among the orneriest and least likable figures in recent fiction, which is part of her charm. She’ll remind you of at least one of your relatives. Melancholy looms over each of these stories (the best of which is “Security”), but if you see Olive through to the end you’ll be rewarded with that rare quality only the best short stories deliver: a genuine epiphany that requires no sleight of hand.

OUR STORY BEGINS, Tobias Wolff.  Most of the stories in Our Story Begins are collected from previous editions, but they remind you of Wolff’s mastery of the form. Reading them a second, third and fourth time, you’ll be startled by the hints and suggestions of all the other stories taking place on the margins of the page. “Flyboys” is ostensibly about three boys building an airplane, but underneath that there’s a shifting allegiance of friendship as well as a prickly portrayal of class tension. While the new stories here aren’t as dazzling as his earlier stuff, they are sturdy, well-crafted stories that showcase Wolff’s skill at pinpointing how the choices people make illuminate the depths of their character, leading to self-discoveries that usually happen a moment too late.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Jhumpa Lahiri.  We really hate the cover, and that’s the only thing going against the best short story collection of the year. Lahiri is firmly grounded in the mundane of everyday relationships, particularly between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, or brothers and sisters. Her stories are simple and straightforward, and unlike Millhauser they pull no punches. Which is why it’s so startling to reach the end of them and feel genuinely transported by something revelatory that has just transpired on the page. The three linked stories that end the collection start slow but build to a harrowing crescendo, touching down in recent history by weaving one of the characters into a profound natural tragedy. Whether this collection is better than her first, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies, is purely an academic argument. You should read them both.

 

NON-FICTION

We’ll recommend only one book here, as we dabble very little in non-fiction or generally stick to current events-related titles that typically age poorly. That said…

THE DARK SIDE, Jane Mayer  …is an exception to the rule, a timely work of investigative journalism that translates well to book form and should remain relevant for years to come. It is also a thoroughly depressing read. Mayer traces the evolution of America’s policies on torture and detainment in the wake of 9/11 as our government sought to balance the need to prevent another such attack with the mission to uphold American ideals of civil rights and justice for all. Mayer’s account is even-handed but appropriately critical: she makes no straw men, but she also drives to the heart of who authorized and shaped policies which effectively endorsed torture. Not a light read, but a provocative, thoroughly researched one. It will take a toll on you.

To lighten things up before we get to the final five fiction picks, let’s have a brief interlude with …

 

THE FUNNIEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ZOMBIE HAIKU, Ryan Mecum.  Few books capture the existential angst of zombie existence better than Ryan Mecum’s Zombie Haiku. His meter is both Keatsian and bone-chilling. You will laugh. You will cry. You will lock your doors and take temporary solace in the fact zombies have difficulties with doorknobs. If you have not already introduced yourself to this zombie masterpiece (and even if you have), do yourself a favor and watch this:

GRANDMA’S DEAD: BREAKING BAD NEWS WITH BABY ANIMALS, Amanda McCall & Ben Schwartz.  We’ve all had to share bad news before. But how do you tastefully convey the sentiment which says, “You’re my least favorite child?” Or, “Recycling won’t help?” It’s a tricky two-step. Thankfully we have baby animals to help us do it. This book is handily equipped with tear-away postcards that you can mail to your friends. 

GET YOUR WAR ON, David Rees.  The most profane and outrageous strip of the past six years, Get Your War On made the jump to an animated comic this year at 236.com. It was also collected in this single volume. It is extremely offensive. It is also hilarious. 

STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE, Christian Lander.  Adapted from the blog of the same name, SWPL skewers a certain type of liberal-minded, “Wire”-loving, NPR-listening, “Arrested Development”-watching, indie rock-enthusing white subculture. Or, the Vores.

Now, on with the Top Ten.

 

NOVELS

NETHERLAND, Joseph O’Neill.  If you would have told us that we’d fall for a book about cricket this year, we would not have believed you. But we did. And Netherland was probably our most enjoyable read of the year. It is a book which makes you aware of the pleasure of just reading it (without doing so in a distracting or pleading way). Many books have tried to capture New York post-9/11. Netherland is not a perfect book, but it almost perfectly succeeds in just that task.

THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE, David Wroblewski.  A big, sprawling yarn roughly based on Hamlet starring a mute boy and set on a dog-breeding farm in Wisconsin. Not your typical formula for a bestseller (aside from the dog part), but The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, some fifteen years in the making, is superior popular fiction. You may have heard that Oprah recommends it too. (We’re coming around on Oprah ever since she got Cormac McCarthy to go on TV.)

LUSH LIFE, Richard Price.  Like a season of “The Wire” compressed into 464 pages. Set in the rapidly changing Lower East Side, Lush Life starts with a murder (an accident? premeditated?) and accelerates into a multi-layered, sociologically-complex thriller on class, race, justice and forgiveness. Everyone says Price writes the best dialogue out there, and we find no reason to disagree. 

(While we’re at it, who is Walter Kirn sleeping with at the New York Times Book Review that he gets to review all the best books and do such a hack job on them? His hack job on Lush Life [summary: "I'm secretly incredibly jealous that I didn't write this book myself but watch me write a tough, gritty, street-smart review that only glancingly addresses the book I'm supposed to be reviewing"] was surpassed only by his hack jobs on Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close [summary: "I'm secretly incredibly jealous that I didn't write this book myself nor am a young prodigy like Mr. Foer but I can sure take the punk down a notch or two with a snarky review"] and especially How Fiction Works [summary: "I'm secretly incredibly jealous of the esteemed critic  James Wood and I wish he would die. Therefore accept my gift of a steaming heap of sophomoric condescension"]. Stop. Giving. This. Man. Reviews. Or just assign him to James Patterson “books.” (We scare quote “books” because no one has invented the term for “paint-by-numbers-using-words” yet. Give us your suggestions!) This way Kirn would still collect a regular paycheck six or seven times a year but do no further harm.)

(Glad we got that off our chest.)

HOME, Marilynne Robinson. Home was not as rewarding as Gilead, but it’s Marilynne Robinson. She’s written three books in twenty-eight years. If she writes a book, it makes the Top Ten list.

Last but certainly not least,

2666, Roberto Bolaño.  How do you separate Bolaño’s masterwork from all the hype surrounding it? How can a dense, sometimes confounding 898-page novel separated into five parts which may or may not add up to a greater whole really deserve all the superlatives being thrown its way? Being as prone to hype as we are (and given the fact no less than six of our friends are reading this and having giddy conversations about its potential even in part one), the only way to find out was to start reading it and plunge our way through the occasional four-page-long sentence or bizarre dream sequence or tangential, Borges-esque surrealism. We’ll admit right now that we haven’t quite finished yet (we’re still in part four), which may strike some as preposterous that we’d still include it on a Best Of list. We promise a full review in the new year. But like Netherland in a quite different fashion, 2666 (a reference to the apocalypse? To the time lapse between the Garden of Eden and Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt?) is about the journey, and it’s a reading experience unlike any we’ve had in a long time. For this reason, and for the book’s open defiance of categorization or closure (what Henry Hitchings calls Bolaño’s “enthusiasm for misdirection”), we jump on the hype bandwagon and endorse it as the Best Book of the Year. 

(If you are still of the mindset that we sacrificed whatever credibility we may have had as literary critics by endorsing a book we haven’t even finished yet, we have only one question: Have you never written a paper on a book that you did not read in its entirety? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. That said, should we encounter something so awful in the last part of 2666 that would make us regret our endorsement, we will retract its Book of the Year status and retroactively award it to Netherland. You will know if this happens.)

 

HONORABLE MENTION

THE BRIEF, WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, Junot Diaz.  Why just an honorable mention for last year’s Pulitzer winner? Well, it technically came out in 2007, but we finally took the advice of friends who said the book demanded our attention. Talking about it just now, we can’t believe we both read this just seven months ago in the spring. It feels like four years ago and it feels like last week. You know what we mean?

 

THE YEAR’S WORST

We didn’t have to endure many stinkers this year, but one stood out: 

WHAT WAS LOST, Catherine O’Flynn.  There are few genres which make us cringe more than “literary mystery.” Why must genre fiction always aspire to “literary” standards? Michael Chabon has done much to tear down these silly categorizations, but still they persist. For us, the worst example of this recent fashionable trend was Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, an insufferable little book which succeeded neither as literary novel nor mystery yet garnered both critical acclaim and commercial success. (Stephen King was typically hyperbolic about it. In all fairness, Case Histories may have suffered from the Rebound Syndrome, since we read it immediately after the exceptional On Beauty by Zadie Smith.) In the vein of Case Histories, Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost tries to be a commentary on urban and societal change while telling the story of a missing girl who may or may not have resurfaced twenty years later. Yawn. We felt compelled to finish it to say we did. Now we feel compelled to tell you it was bad. Our work here is done.

Tomorrow: The Best & Worst of TV!

Paste *Has* Become a Terrible Magazine

We couldn’t agree more with Eric Bescak’s assessment* of how far Paste has fallen (though we might disagree with his verdict on some of the year’s top albums). Erin introduced Ben to Paste in 2002 when the magazine first launched. Granted, the layout was terrible, but the writers had a bead on the kind of music that wasn’t getting the attention it deserved from the sell-out Rolling Stone, the increasingly tepid Entertainment Weekly (now the People/USA Today of entertainment magazines), or from magazines like Spin, No Depression and Magnet, which were either hit-or-miss or too niche-oriented for our tastes. Paste also included a CD sampler of new and up-and-coming artists, and you could reliably expect to find a handful of good tracks on there. We eventually became subscribers until the flame went out after a year or two. Now it’s slandering Cormac McCarthy and using phrases like “out-of-vogue unkempt mops of hair.”

If this seems harsh, it may be because we really thought Paste had promise. The tagline was “signs of life in music, film and culture,” and the magazine initially delivered on championing those signs. Now that independent spirit is gone and it’s just championing glossy mediocrity. Perhaps it’d be fairer to say “Paste has become an irrelevant magazine,” but irrelevance is its own form of terribleness.

While we’re engaging in a bit of media criticism, kudos to Mark Hoobler for spotting numerous factual errors in the New York Times 2009 Almanac. A bit startling coming from the supposed Newspaper of Record.

 

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* = Eric has gone on record taking issue with our own efforts at music criticism, so perhaps he thinks we should currently be writing for Paste. We wanted to clarify so that readers do not confuse our endorsement of his opinion as his endorsement of ours.

Friday Recommends: Bookninja.com

We couldn’t think of a better bookend to a week of awful album covers than Bookninja.com’s recent contest which asked readers to reimagine popular novels by redesigning their covers. The winners are posted here. Just to give you a taste, here is the top vote-getter Ingrid Paulson reimagining Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

If you don’t immediately find this hilarious, it may help to know that The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son that is as bleak and desolate as the day is long. But the comedic moment has probably passed us by.

Here are a few more for good measure, starting with Ben’s personal favorite:

design by Beth Martin

design by Greg Erskine

 

design by Carlton Wilson

 

Meanwhile, the British paper The Guardian jumped on this and held its own contest. The results are not quite as funny or aesthetically pleasing, but there are a few hits (particularly this one for The Brothers Karamazov). 

There’s lots of other good stuff on bookninja.com too (the “about” page advertises the site as “an orgy of literary fun”), particularly if you’re: 1) book-obsessed, 2) interested in the book industry, or 3) Canadian. Or if you just prefer things spelled incorrectly, like “humour” and “neighbours.”

The Happening

Most people would agree that M Night Shyamalan’s best movie was one of his earliest (The Sixth Sense), and that every movie since has been progressively worse. (We were partial to The Village, flaws and all.) Where exactly The Happening ranks on the scale is a matter of debate, but we don’t recommend you having it.

The movie begins with an idyllic tableau of Central Park: dog-walkers, joggers, bench-sitters, all blissfully unaware of the sinister breeze in the canopy of trees above them. Suddenly a bench-sitter removes her hair pin and stabs herself in the neck. Cut to a construction site, where four workers sharing a crude joke witness a fellow employee crash to the ground. Another body falls, then another, and soon it’s raining men. (The picture of these men stepping off the girders into a free fall, with its echoes of 9/11, is the creepiest scene in the movie.)

What’s going on here? The premise might have been intriguing on paper. And by moving into R-rated territory, Shyamalan gets a little extra juice out of some grisly deaths, with results ranging from effective (one death involves a lawnmower) to unintentionally comical (a zookeeper meandering into the lion’s den). But mostly this film is a stinker.

If you really need a lyrically apocalyptic fix, read The Road. Or, if you hate books, wait until November.

Both The Happening and the upcoming film version of The Road do beg the question: Why does the end of the world happen in Pennsylvania?

And memo to aspiring actors/actresses who want to appear in an upcoming Shyamalan movie: 1) Practice making your eyes look extremely big in the mirror (like Zooey).

 

 

2) Stand in place for long periods of time, gazing fearfully into the distance.

 

 

3) Even better, do this in large groups.

 

 

Congratulations! You’ve just been cast in his next film. But we won’t be watching it, unless you pay us.