My Five Year Plan

It’s getting tougher to put together this list every year.

When we’re young, we latch onto music as a means of defining ourselves - adolescence is a scary time, and being able to say “I listen to The Strokes/Cephalic Carnage/Aphex Twin” places you within certain social and even political context. Music serves as a mechanism by which we define who we are when we’re growing up, who our friends are, how we interact with those around us.

As we begin to grow older - and breaking away from college is a major point of departure here - we find ourselves more confident with certain ideas about how we’ve defined ourselves to the world and less in need of seeking out new music to identify ourselves by.

I like listening to music. I like sharing music with people. I like listmaking, but I don’t like what I’ve done the past few years as far as listmaking - anhedonically evaluating dozens of albums dispassionately and assembling a list of 25 that, through some process of woebegone ‘evaluation’ I deem more indicative of myself and how I want to project myself to others.

Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone. The Decline of British Sea Power. Mississauga Goddam. Join Me in the Park. Futuresex/Lovesounds. I do enjoy these records, but I see now that these choices were at least in part political - they helped to define my context in a world where I felt afraid of being unable to define myself. And maybe if listmaking has become less interesting to me recently, it’s because I feel less of a need to define myself - indeed, a need to define myself less - by the media I consume. My explanation for so many of the albums I like is some ineffable ‘importance’ or ‘relevance’ to certain definitions I’ve created for myself, but as I’ve moved away from college, being able to place some sort of qualification on things I like seems more and more petty and less and less interesting.

So I’m trying something different this year.

I’m still producing a Top 25 list, but instead of thinking about the way an album has defined or reflected my experience or my knowledge of whatever ideas it’s driving at, I’m trying to evaluate these records solely on the most self-evident but hardest to place criteria:

How Much Did I Enjoy Listening to Them?

So here’s my Top 25.

25. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Song: “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”

You’d never know it from the last two years of listmaking, but I actually love indie guitar rock. Give me a crunchy lead, a well-appointed bassline, and a strong melody and I’ll probably listen to any dork in a graphic tee. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of bands that know how to do indie guitar rock well these days - Spoon, thankfully, is one of the ones that still do. I’ve liked Spoon for a while, love Girls Can Tell, enjoy Kill the Moonlight and Gimme Fiction alright. This is their best one since Girls Can Tell, though. There’s a consistency to the songcraft that’s greater than their last two albums, and more importantly, there’s an incredible spontaneity to the production - it sounds raw and half-assed and energetic in all the right ways. And it was a big hit. So. Good for Spoon.

24. Au Revoir Simone - The Bird of Music
Song: “A Violent Yet Flammable World”

I listened to this album a lot in January and February - it’s not very good, really. Kinda middling indie girl-pop, all plinky keyboards and overly earnest vocals. But I love middling indie girl-pop! And this is a pretty decent example of why I love it. The chirpy repetitive organ on “Fallen Snow” and the the Be My Baby drums on “A Violent Yet Flammable World” and the handclappy, drum machined-to-hell “Dark Halls.” Really, those three songs are why I like this album. There’s a lot of filler. But those songs are good enough to lift this to my #24 album of the year. So. Those songs must be pretty good.

23. Burial - Untrue
Song: “Archangel”

I don’t presume to be able to tell you anything about ‘dubstep’ as a genre. I don’t listen to it, I can’t dance to it, and for the most part, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to relate to the anonymous attic-dwelling Londoners who produce it. But I do, at least in this case - there’s an intimacy to this record that I’m really startled by. In press notes, Burial claims that he wanted to capture the secret music of the girls (and boys) next door. If this is in some way reflective of the British psyche right now, we need to airlift St. John’s Wort to them. But not until Burial can produce a half-dozen more reverb-and-cough syrup masterpieces.

22. Islaja - Ulual Yyy
Song: “Pete P”

Islaja is a promise. Islaja slowly, surely moves toward a moment when she’s going to hit one out of the park, but she hasn’t done it quite yet. This is her third album, and in the faux-Bjork track I’ve included as a sample, she comes closest. But she’s hard to pin down - Islaja isn’t interested in things traditional to western popular musics like rhythm, structure, and repetition. There’s too much willful pissantery here to be great, too much daring exceptionalism, but then you hear something like “Pete P” or “Varjokuvastin” or the startling sine-wave drone of “Suru Ei” and you feel as though you’re connecting with some greater force ready to emerge.

21. Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles - Diamonds in the Dark
Song: “The Day We Met”

Sarah Borges (pronounced Bor-Jess, not Bor-haze) is a country singer from Boston who does Reigning Sound and Tom Waits covers. So, alright, there you go - how can this be anything but really good? Borges fashions a rocking, spirited honkytonk sound that’s making her one of the popular staples of the Boston music scene, and Diamonds in the Dark is a terrific record of her talents as a performer - her ability to shift between vocal registers easily, her confident songwriting and her band’s willful flouting of country convention. Most endearing - those sudden, forceful glottal stops that characterize so much of her vocal delivery. Given that exactly no one gave this any reviews in the popular press, we’ll put this in our category of ‘Underheard and Underrated.’

Check in for part two tomorrow!