Sound off | page 1, 2, 3
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Amanda Nowinski
1. Roots Manuva, "Brand New Second Hand" (Ninjatune)
2. Baby Namboos, "Ancoats 2 Zambia" (Durban Poison/Palm Pictures)
3. Breakbeat Era/Roni Size, "Ultra Obscene" (XL/1500/A&M):
4. Various Artists "Warp Records 10+1, 10+2, 10+3" (Matador)
5. Various Artists, "Geology: A Subjective History of Planet E, Volume One" (Planet E)
6. DJ Krush, "Kakusei" (Red Ink)
7. Mos Def, "Black on Both Sides" (Priority/Rawkus)
8. Dubtribe Sound System, "Bryant Street" (BMG/Jive/Novus)
9. Carl Craig's Innerzone Orchestra, "Programmed" (Astralwerks)
10. Various Artists, "Om Lounge 2" (Om)
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Seth Mnookin
1. Tom Waits, live at the Paramount Theatre, Austin, Texas
I went to this year's South by Southwest music conference as a fan, not a critic. As such, I waited in line at 9 a.m. to snag tickets to the Waits show, one of his first of the decade. I've never been so happy to wake up early on a Saturday.
2. Matthew Shipp Duo with William Parker, "DNA" (Thirsty Ear) and Matthew Shipp Trio, Live at Tonic, New York
William Parker is the most exciting bass player to emerge from New York's free jazz scene, and Shipp, a slight, wonkish pianist, somehow manages to make cluster-filled, Cecil Taylor-style attacks sound sexy. Together, on "DNA," the duo is mindbending in their innate musicality and remarkable emotional depth. Live, they somehow manage to be even more breathtaking.
3. Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band, "The Mountain" (E Squared)
Texas misanthrope Earle and the Del McCoury Band team up for an album of "high risk, low tech" bluegrass. Earle says that means one mike and no shit. A sort of tribute album to bluegrass founder Bill Monroe -- McCoury was one of Monroe's original Bluegrass Boys -- but so much more than a straight homage could ever be.
4. The Flaming Lips, "The Soft Bulletin" (Warner Bros.)
The Monkees meet David Bowie's "Memory of a Free Festival" and Pink Floyd's "Animals." Brilliant and bombastic, ambitious and delicious.
5. Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" (Merge Records)
Remember in high school, when you first had a really wicked crush and then found a song that described it perfectly, and so you walked around for days listening to the song on your Walkman, amazed the whole time that some rock star had read your mind? Well there are at least two dozen of those songs here.
6. Built to Spill, "Keep It Like a Secret" (Warner Bros.)
Doug Martsch could single-handedly make guitar wanking respectable again. With a voice that sounds like a bashful Neil Young, a guitar-style that makes noodling sound focused and fiery and pop songs that wouldn't sound out of place on classic rock radio, Martsch's Built to Spill is one of bands of my year -- and of my decade.
7. Tony Furtado & Dirk Powell, "Tony Furtado & Dirk Powell" (Rounder)
Tony Furtado is best known as a once-prodigal banjoist. Dirk Powell is an Americana musician steeped in Appalachian and Cajun music. Here they team up and for an album of duos (with a couple of trios and a solo or two thrown in for good measure), mixing up slide guitar, banjo, Dobro, piano and accordion. The result is calmly stunning, like waking up on Sunday mornings with the sun in your eyes.
8. Steve Bernstein, "Diaspora Soul" (Tzadik)
Not your grandmother's Passover music. Lounge Lizard Steve Bernstein offers the year's best selection from John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture album series. Working off an Afro-Cuban, Gulf Coast groove, Bernstein takes well-traveled stones like "Manishtana" and "Shalom Bimramov" and creates airy, spacious gems, with bongos, clave, postizo drums and Wurlitzer electric piano laying the groundwork for Bernstein's trumpet work; a quartet of saxophonists also assists. Cantorical transcriptions never sounded so much like Latin pianist Eddie Palmieri.
9. Mahmoud Ahmed, "Almaz" and "Eri Mela Mela" ("Ethiopiques, Volume 6-7") (Buda Musique)
Delicious, grease-filled Ethiopian R&B.
10. Reissues: Meat Puppets, "II" (Rykodisc) and John Fahey, "Best of the Vanguard Years" (Vanguard)
Careful listeners would have noted that Nirvana covered three excellent songs from "II" on "MTV Unplugged." The rest of "II" is just as good, and the seven new tracks make the original record seem like side one.
The Fahey collection, combining tracks from the cult acoustic guitarist's "The Yellow Princess" and "Requia and Other Compositions for Guitar Solo" is not the best Fahey album, but it is the best Fahey album released this year.
Also rans: Johnny Cash, "Live at Folsom Prison" (Columbia/Legacy); Ibrahim Ferrer, "Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer" (Nonesuch); Bela Fleck and the All-Star Bluegrass Band, live at Town Hall, New York; Kool Keith, "Black Elvis/Lost in Space" (Red Ink); Sleater-Kinney, "The Hot Rock" (Kill Rock Stars).
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Gavin McNett
Bryan Ferry, "As Time Goes By" (Virgin)
The smoky ambiance says the night is thick around us, but Ferry's rumpled composure reminds us that we're only on reprieve between two harsh mornings-after. Dignified and compelling. Still, while Ferry's casual treatment of these pop standards might seem authentic these days, they wouldn't have cut any ice back in the '30s. For that, we need jazz singer Diana Krall, whose poised performances on "When I Look In Your Eyes" (Impulse) would've made a sensation of her.
Amber, "Amber" (Tommy Boy)
That "Sexual (Li Da Di)" song has a great chorus. There's a certain Europop playfulness to the vocals -- a sort of thing that's often radically overdone, as with the nerve-wracking Vengaboys -- that's tempered perfectly by a smooth European reserve. Still, the hipster contingent seems to shrug it all off as amped-up MOR, while dance purists prefer the wacked-out remixes.
Everything But the Girl, "Temperamental" (Atlantic)
To be realistic about it, amped-up MOR trailing a wake of wacked-out remixes.
Anything Box, "Elektrodelica" (Jarrett Records)
Anything Box scored a medium-grade dance hit a number of years ago with "Living in Oblivion." Now they sound like Kraftwerk doing "Pet Sounds." The apotheosis of synthpop -- lush, intricate, organic and tuneful.
Backyard Babies, "Total 13" (Scooch Pooch Records)
Ferocious Swedish punk from possibly the best heavy rock act in the world. "Total 13" isn't their most astounding release (their 1997 EP was a serious thing indeed), but it's the only full-length album that's available domestically. Sweden is, at this point, the rock 'n' roll capital of the world -- and I've been trying to write something about that for years now, but nobody ever believes me.
Denmark, for its part, is good for Sorten Muld, whose "Mark II" (Northside) vamps up old Scandinavian ballads with electronic beat science. The vocals are a bit chilly for folk, the production a bit weak for the disco floor (it's closer to Dead Can Dance than to dance music proper), but its lack of function somehow makes it all the more engaging. It's like a sketch of a perfect art-pop record: It leaves you wishing you could see it in color.
The Church, "Box Of Birds"; "Magician Among The Spirits" (Thirsty Ear); "Under The Milky Way" (BMG/Buddha)
Cover albums can be a wonderful tonic for a fraying aesthetic. On theirs, Australian quartet the Church's versions of Ultravox's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's "The Faith Healer" show us a great rock band -- perhaps the last great all-around rock band -- in the prime of their musicianship and the nadir of their popular appeal. "Magician Among the Spirits," released in an edition of about three copies in 1996, and re-released with some small fanfare this year, shows us a songwriting ensemble that's painted itself into a fairly tight corner. The title track is a slightly drum 'n' bassy rewrite of "Terra Nova Cain," but with a grandiloquent sweep. Ultimately, it all seems rather forced. But nobody in the world can duplicate that unique musky, dust-blown feel that's become their signature. A good sampling of their stuff, from the early Rickenbackers-and-paisley period through their mature phase, is now available on the third record.
Clash, "From Here To Eternity" (Epic)
"Long-awaited," I guess is the term. No news here, but if you've experienced the live Clash chiefly on muffly bootleg, and in piecemeal fashion in the film "Rude Boy," there's something to be said for closure.
Also:
Tindersticks, "Simple Pleasure" (Island), Various Artists "Skins 'n' Pins" (GMM Records); Beth Orton, "Central Reservation" (Arista); Ebba Grön, "Box Set" (Simply for the fact that a box set exists for the greatest Swedish punk band) (Label unknown); XTC, "Apple Venus Vol. 1" (TVT).
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Michelle Goldberg
Ani DiFranco, "To the Teeth" (Righteous Babe)
The constant deluge of soulless, mediocre albums, each adorned with all kinds of hype, is enough to make one temporarily forget what it is to really love an album. More than any other album this year, "To the Teeth" reminded me how a new record can jolt you out of a rut and reframe your whole life. DiFranco's an expert at melding the personal and political, and here she proves equally brilliant at fusing folk, hip-hop, funk and jazz. But it's the lyrics that are truly devastating. If an anti-choice president is elected in November, I bet we'll be playing "Hello Birmingham" on the barricades.
Dot Allison, "Afterglow" (Arista)
The former lead singer of the band One Dove, Allison's "Afterglow" is like the angel child of Portishead and Hooverphonic. Her gossamer lullabies are a womblike sonic refuge from everything harsh and discordant in life.
Le Tigre, "Le Tigre" (Mr. Lady)
Because Kathleen Hanna is even more punk rock now that she's making dance music, because the band namechecks Gertrude Stein and way-underground video artist Valie Export, and because "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes," is the smartest dissection of the gender wars all year.
Macy Gray, On How Life Is" (Epic)
She's Lauryn Hill without the God complex, making music that's empowering and empathetic. "I've Committed Murder" is the most delicious celebration of economic-justice homicide since "9 to 5."
Luscious Jackson, "Electric Honey" (Grand Royal)
Like Bust magazine, Luscious Jackson always manages to be both comforting and fabulous -- the band makes regular-girl life seem glamorous and exhilarating. It's a cliché, but if my 1999 was a movie, "Nervous Breakthrough" would be the title track.
Breakbeat Era, "Ultra Obscene" (Interscope)
At a time when drum 'n' bass has become dystopian Muzak, a cheap signifier of urban edginess and grit used to sell Volkswagens, Breakbeat Era recaptured jungle's old insurgence. Roni Size's latest project features the fierce, raw vocals of Bristol diva Lennie Laws right up front. Sounding like a plague victim screaming from inside quarantine, she hisses and screams the words to songs like "Rancid" and "Our Disease," creating apocalyptic funk that will never be used to move units. Breakbeat Era situates drum 'n' bass where it began, on the side of chaos, not complacency.
Kristin Hersh, "Sky Motel" (4AD)
The album where Kristin Hersh started going sane, "Sky Motel" is full of tension and drama where once there was only indie Ophelia release. Hersh's best work since the Muses "The Real Ramona," "Sky Motel" is also her most technically complex, aglow with feedback cascades, pulsing drum loops and sampled nature sounds that suggest a vast, empty night.
Bryan Ferry, "As Time Goes By" (Virgin)
I don't care if Greil Marcus thinks Ferry's gorgeous album of '30s standards is the most boring record of the year -- I think it's the sexiest. An antidote to the sophomoric brutality, simpering sentimentality and hollow, self-referential irony that's choking the life out of pop, it has the soigné crooner seeming more vulnerable than he ever has.
Various Artists, "'Best Laid Plans'" Soundtrack (Virgin)
Didn't see the movie, but the score by Scottish composer Craig Armstrong -- a frequent Massive Attack collaborator who combines orchestral string arrangements with ominous trip-hop beats -- is haunting. If Armstrong worked on better films, he'd be known as the Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann of his generation. Also, in addition to music by Mazzy Star, Gomez, Patsy Cline and Massive Attack themselves, "Best Laid Plans" features a devastating new song by Neneh Cherry.
Blur, "13" (Virgin)
Combing the structures of electronic music and the lyrical passion that is rock's greatest trump, "13" was a huge leap for the boys once content to catalogue the social structures of Merry Old England. "Bugman" is like early Iggy Pop as remixed by DJ Spooky. If rock has a future, this is it.
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