Fuel/Friends favorites of 2008

Another year packed with music has come and gone. Music is a language I can't create myself but it does me good to know that every hour someone out there is humming a snippet of a melody, returning to their seat at the bar with a head full of lyrics that just occurred to them, or tapping out a drumbeat on their leg in the car. People everywhere are trying to get it right, to get the music out just so they can be. I am glad that they do.

2008 was full of fantastic (and varied) music from all corners of the world for me. I sometimes feel overwhelmed with the quantity of music and the subjectivity that swirls around the ones that make it vs. the ones that no one ever hears. I wish I'd had more hours to listen to (and properly digest) more songs this year. As it is, these are ten albums (plus two EPs plus one carryover from last year) that affected me on a gut level in the past twelve months. These are the ones I listened to over and over, that knocked the wind out of me and made me glad I have ears.

These aren't "the best." These are just my favorites.


FUEL/FRIENDS FAVORITES OF 2008

Lucky
Nada Surf (Barsuk)
I've been surprised by the intensity with which I've listened to this album in 2008. I guess it's tapping into the introspective moments of my year as it pertains to "grown-up life," which Caws sings is like "eating speed or flying a plane -- it's too bright." The album cover hints perfectly at the feel of the music; the moment where it's still warm from the sun but the gorgeous pinpricks of light are starting to shine through. I talked today about the cascades of glory on this album, a blazing meteor from this band that's been around so long. I saw Matthew Caws perform solo last night and he said, "We feel blessed to have a second story," (post-mid-Nineties buzz band). "It's the story we always wanted anyways." I've listened to this album a hundred times this year and it still affects me deeply, makes it okay to be fragile -- and to be on a vector up.
[original review, interview]

Beautiful Beat - Nada Surf


Midnight Organ Fight
Frightened Rabbit (Fat Cat)
Coming from Scotland with their hearts held out for the offering, these two brothers plus two bandmates have crafted an album that is not for the fainthearted, but excellent for the honest. Over gorgeous melodies and with a thick and wrenching Scottish brogue, Frightened Rabbit guttingly dissect the moments of bravery and moments of weakness that go with a relationship ending. Peter Katis (The National) produced this lilting, rocking piece of perfection -- unflinching in its intimacy.
[original review, interview]

Backwards Walk - Frightened Rabbit


For Emma Forever Ago
Bon Iver (Jagjaguwar)
I didn't know when I started 2008 just how much I would need this album. Justin Vernon recorded this achingly vulnerable album in the Wisconsin woods in the dead of cold winter as he recovered from a breakup. The name he adopted means "good winter" in French, and I think the name fits the music as well as that ice-encrusted window on the cover. In winter, things move a little slower, but with more crisply defined edges, and the first time I heard this something was scraped loose inside of me. His music is wrapped in a thin skin but a current thrums powerfully under the surface. This is an album that I am unable to shake.
[watch: still one of the most perfect things I've seen this year]

Skinny Love - Bon Iver


Stay Positive
The Hold Steady (Vagrant)
I think the thing that gets me with the Hold Steady, this year or any past year when they've released an album, is that they are unabashed in their belief in rock and roll. Craig Finn is a modern day prophet who flails and explodes with the force of the catharsis of these fantastic sounding songs that they must get out. The lyrics trace some of the most intelligent, evocative stories you'll hear with characters I feel I know by now (they might as well be breathing). This is an immense album, with the pounding piano that crashes across the songs and the brass instruments slicing through. Gorgeously grand and subversively hopeful.
[original review]

Constructive Summer - The Hold Steady


The '59 Sound
The Gaslight Anthem (Side One Dummy)
If the Hold Steady filter their love for Springsteen through a lens of kids raised on punk and The Replacements, Jersey's Gaslight Anthem play with an urgency and passion of a pre-Born to Run Bruce, young and hungry. Lead singer Brian Fallon grew up in a home four blocks from E Street, and this band is crafting songs that hold up as well when howled out ragged as they do stripped down to their bare acoustic bones. There's a wisdom and sometimes a resignation beyond their years.

Great Expectations - The Gaslight Anthem


Ode To Sunshine
Delta Spirit (Rounder)
Delta Spirit was formed in San Diego when lead singer Matt Vasquez was busking loudly by the train tracks and he met with Brandon Young at two in the morning. The honesty and sloppiness that bleeds through at 2am is captured well on this authentic album with a vintage feel. It basks in the warmth of the surf guitars, the singalongs and handclaps and banging on trashcan lids, the tinkly last-call piano over glasses clattering.
[original review]

Trashcan - Delta Spirit


Dual Hawks
Centro-Matic/South San Gabriel (Misra)
The cinematic desert beauty and chugging fuzz-rock found side-by-side on this dual album swooped in late in the year to win me over. I saw an acoustic video of Will Johnson, who helms both bands, performing "I, The Kite," from an album I'd passed over too quickly the first time around. Both bands are Will's and explore different dimensions of his music -- Centro-matic electric like the heat in the air even as the Texas August sun has just begun to rise, whereas the more muted, spacious South San Gabriel has tones of evening and fireflies. This album was written and recorded fast and pure in a handful of days in the studio, and has a feeling of distilled essentials.

Counting The Scars - Centro-Matic


Oh! Mighty Engine
Neil Halstead (Brushfire Records)
Taking six long years from his last solo release Sleeping On Roads, influential British musician Neil Halstead (Slowdive) comes quietly back with a humble album of acoustic folk melodies that rewards the listener for their patience. This is a slow grower for me, and I find that more hues in the songs are revealed to me the longer I sit with it -- a task I am eminently willing to take on. Halstead sings about trying to get the colors right, and with these unassuming tunes I think he does.

Paint A Face - Neil Halstead


The Great Collapse
Everything Absent or Distorted (self-released)
This Denver collective does things full tilt. They play with seemingly all the instruments they can find, in order to squeeze the earnest beauty out of every melody and every rhythm. They fearlessly meld incisive lyrics with a resilient hope, like on "Aquariums": "We are aquariums -- left outside, but we hold life and a bright light in our glass walls." With eight official members (and up to 15 on stage) EAOD is a joy to watch, and that joy transmits onto this smart album of sweeping scope. Amidst banjos and casio keyboards, trumpets and pots and pans, this band is ready for a larger stage. Literally.
[original review]

A form to accommodate the mess - Everything Absent and Distorted


Little Joy
Little Joy (Rough Trade)
It's as simple as this: Little Joy just makes me happy. Their thirty-minute debut album is short and occasionally rough, it's kitschy and danceable with Brazilian influences. I like the quiet Technicolor flicker of songs like the Portuguese "Evaporar" as much as the jerky fun of "How To Hang A Warhol," and all the shades in between. Binki Shapiro's vocal contributions on this album are especially charming, as she croons out of my stereo like an old-time Victrola.
[original review]

No One's Better Sake - Little Joy


HONORARY TOPS (should have been on last year's damn list):

In Rainbows (physical release)
Radiohead
Because I was overwhelmed and ignorant at the end of 2007, and didn't give this my undivided attention until someone sat me down in a darkened room and made me really, really listen to it.

And come on Heather. Come on.

Last Flowers To The Hospital (bonus track) - Radiohead



BONUS: FAVORITE EPs

Second Gleam EP
The Avett Brothers (Ramseur Records)
Scaling back from their potently explosive live show of punk bluegrass, the Avetts showed again this year that they can also craft devastatingly simple ballads relying solely on acoustic guitar, strings, and their pure voices that blend and compete as only brothers can. [original review]

Murder In The City - The Avett Brothers


The Confiscation EP, A Musical Novella
Samantha Crain (Ramseur Records)
Also from the excellent Ramseur label, 22-year-old Oklahoman Samantha Crain has Choctaw Indian roots and a dusky earnestness to her alto voice. The five songs here tell a cohesive story (a musical novella indeed) with shimmering, unvarnished truth.
[original review]

In Smithereens, The Search For Affinity - Samantha Crain



LISTEN: Once again this year, I'll be appearing on NPR's World Cafe with David Dye on January 1st to talk about stuff from this list! We have a lot of fun. You should listen (online, or via your local station that carries the show), and tell your mom to listen too. I know mine will be.


[top image credit tim!]

The great collapse of Everything Absent and Distorted

The end of last year was a nightmare for me of long hours in hospital rooms, soundtracked by the beeping and whooshing of intimidating machines under a sickly halogen buzz. As I confronted very real fears and my absolute inability to do anything other than hold a warm, dry hand and sing the occasional song, I lacked the words to express how that feels.

Everything Absent or Distorted is a band of wonderful guys from Denver whose new release The Great Collapse incisively explores some of these themes that gnaw in your head during long hours of waiting. In the starkly-perfectly titled song "A Form To Accommodate The Mess," lyrics ponder all that a hospital room has seen over the years, and the cycles that hold us all together. Over a slowly-building cadence that grows like a tsunami, the words question why the stench of sickness is the same as the smell of medicine and healing. "We are born gasping for air," the song notes, "and we die gasping for air. One, two, three deep breaths -- the end and the beginning." It's hit me rough and potent.

A form to accommodate the mess - Everything Absent and Distorted

Through EAOD's gorgeously vibrant multi-instrumental music (that sounds "more at home in Montreal than Denver") this album is helping to define something to accommodate a mess and a chaos that befalls me lately. During the recording process of this album, band members faced massive situations like a dad dying, a baby being born prematurely, a marriage beginning -- the true grit that makes up life. Life's ups and downs are all there, reflected in the incisive, poetic lyrics.

Like an Arcade Fire collective, all eight band members cohere through a symphony of instruments ranging from "violin, cello, bowed double bass, guitars, glockenspiel, casio keyboards circa 1985, alesis synthesizers, bass, drums, trumpet, trombone, banjo, piano, pots and pans, trains, and fences." And just in case eight is in fact not enough, they're also joined on the album by members of Denver bands DeVotchKa, Bela Karoli, and Cat-A-Tac.

I've been privileged to see EAOD a few times live (and will again this Saturday at their record release show at The Gothic) and it's one of the most pure-hearted rock 'n' roll bacchanalias you will see. They convulse and thrash and jump and fall over each other, but they close their eyes and they sing with their whole hearts and therein lies a gorgeous glimpse of the role music plays to them and their audience. As another song on the album says, this feels like "featherbeds in a bomb shelter, trying to find some sleep." For me, The Great Collapse is a bit of comfort during the shelling.


Both EOAD albums were recorded, financed, produced, mixed, manufactured, distributed by the band with their own limited funds. As member John Kuker says:

"We barely make enough money in a year’s worth of shows just to make a record – we then go in debt to put it out – and slowly try to recoup some of the funds. We’re a part of the so-called Needlepoint Records family with Rabbit is a Sphere, Thank God for Astronauts and Cat-A-Tac, as we thought an Elephant 6 type deal could be fun.

But at the end of the day, of course all the label/money stuff doesn’t matter at all to us. Of course this project will end up costing us tons more money than we could ever make and we don’t care. We put our blood, sweat, tears, and dollars into this because it’s about all that matters to us.

We never set out to get signed or tour the world. We just all had to make some art in order to be. To be."

As they also said in a recent interview, and what must be keeping this fantastic album vibrating and resonating within my chest, is that "anything meaningful in this world, musical or non-musical, is bound to take a great collapse."


GO: Everything Absent or Distorted album release party at The Gothic Theatre, Saturday, December 6th at 9pm for a mere eight dollars.

LISTEN: Most of the new album is streaming at their Myspace, and you can buy it here.


[band photos from my Monolith Saturday set]

Sensational sounds coming out of Denver right now

I return from the warm and open arms of the Denver Post Underground Music Showcase this weekend with an invigorated and genuine excitement about the music that is being made in this fine state. I heard some incredible stuff. Even if you live nowhere near Denver, take a listen to what my weekend was like because there are acts that I feel could be nationally noteworthy right now out of the Denver scene.

The festival was a screaming success on the sweltering hot streets. Even after going to about a jillion large-scale music festivals, I've never yet been to one that was so cohesive, well-constructed, and uniquely local. The model for this weekend should be recreated at cities around the world who don't already have something like this in place. As they say, "because your life needs a soundtrack, and because your life is richer and more rewarding when that soundtrack reflects where you live."


Just a few of the most vivid Fuel/Friends highlights of the weekend:

Young Coyotes at Indy Ink. The buzz on the street after this trio performed with no mics in a small independent print shop was deafening. Tipped by some as having the potential to be the next huge band out of Denver, the Young Coyotes were everything I'd hoped for and more, with their ferocious primal drum backbone (two guys playing), chimey melodies, and shout-out-loud vocals that made my blood pulse hot and happy. I was singing this song for the rest of the day:

When I Was In The Fire - Young Coyotes


Chain Gang of 1974 at the Rule Gallery of Contemporary and Modern Art. In a starkly cool setting, this duo transformed the room into a dance party where our biggest concern became trying not fall into the artwork. I've never danced in a gallery before, but this stuff was absolutely irresistible. The drummer from Young Coyotes reprised his awesomeness for this set too. Make sure to catch them at Monolith.

The Dirt - The Chain Gang of 1974


Hearts of Palm at the Hi-Dive. I was struck by how passionate and vocal a following this collective has, obviously due to how enthusiastically they give back to us all. The Hi-Dive was humid and electric, echoing along with everyone singing at the top of their lungs, "We have no water here and everybody knows it!!" That may have been the first time I'd seen a local band with that degree of communal singalong support. They played most, if not all, of their newest free EP and blew us all away.

No Water - Hearts of Palm


Everything Absent Or Distorted (plus friends) at the CarToys outdoor stage. Although it was a bit of bad news for my friends trying to coordinate this fest, the cops were called on the noise levels for the outdoor stage shortly before the Everything Absent Or Distorted collective came on with some additional members. But maybe it's not really a party until someone calls the cops. EAOD played their widescreen, angular indie rock, those fluid melodies mixed with an on-edge sensibility. They then tantalized this cover-loving girl with a handful of great ones, including early Arcade Fire (a sound not too far removed from their own) and "Glad Girls" by Guided by Voices.

The Exit Parade - Everything Absent Or Distorted


Aaron Collins @ Rock The Cradle. A boutique that hawks Johnny Cash onesies, retro board games and Nine Inch Nails lullaby cover CDs, Rock The Cradle caters to the hip parent crowd. One of the first shows I saw on Friday afternoon was Machine Gun Blues' Aaron Collins performing (clothed, so as not to scare the younguns) a melodic and charming solo set. His unselfconscious use of repeated words to underscore a kind of vocal percussion, along with his elegant and shimmering keyboard melodies made me hope that he continues in this vein even if Machine Gun Blues is almost defunct.


Rachael Pollard and friends at the Kabal Rug Kilm. Speaking of Nine Inch Nails covers, a highly unlikely one ("Down In It" done like a 1930s flapper?!) popped up at the most gorgeously cool venue of the weekend. This loft-like Persian rug gallery was temporarily converted into a singer-songwriter stage for solo artists and some fantastic collaborations, such as this one with Pollard, Gregory Alan Isakov and Julie Davis from Bela Karoli. While we lounged around on stacks of $35,000 rugs (don't spill that beer), a steady stream of Colorado musicians plucked, strung, and hummed their lovely songs. It all took on a near-mystical air in that setting. The festival did an exceptional job of lining up original groupings of artists collaborating with those from other bands, which lent a great spirit of local pride and the making of something unique together.

Crazy For You - Rachael Pollard (charming little song)


Stop Making Sense flickering on a brick wall. Very late Saturday night, you could hear David Byrne's voice ringing up and down the boulevard from the parking lot of an otherwise dark bank, forgotten at that hour of fiscal irresponsibility. The folks at the Denver Film Society arranged a guerilla screening of the Jonathan Demme classic, and it was simply beautiful. Until the sprinklers came on, and then everyone just moved back and it was still beautiful, just wet.

Burning Down The House (Stop Making Sense live version) - Talking Heads


Everyone who played in the South Broadway Christian Church. This was another gorgeous venue staffed by incredibly cheerful and kind church members. I almost expected a covered-dish potluck. The acoustics were crystalline, the surroundings divine. Using the church was a great idea, and I hear God totally didn't even mind.


Sputnik Motown brunch and the Velvet Elvis pancake breakfast. A good festival loves you from the time you arrive until the time you leave, especially when you are at your most vulnerable. When the morning comes with its dreadfully bright light, you need a greasy breakfast -- and you don't want to have to work for it. Both days we ate like royalty, first at Sputnik with the DJ spinning a vast and amazingly impressive collection of Motown 7" records, and then Sunday at 3 Kings with a live Elvis cover band, bottomless mimosas, and fresh-made pancakes from a little griddle behind the bar. O, that I could have my breakfasts soundtracked every morning by "Hunka Hunka Burnin Love" and "Hound Dog." [pic via]

And as is always the case, there were dozens of bands I didn't get a chance to see, and some I'll be featuring in greater depth at a later date (many are playing the Meadowlark Fest Aug 21-23). Whew! I'm exhausted.

Let's do it again next weekend.


VISUALS: All my pics with some commentary here and here, and ahh, look at all the *lovely* people!