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Top 10 Albums I Bought This Year (That Didn't Come out This Year).


To go along with my Top 10 Albums of 2004 list (which is coming soon!), I decided it'd be interesting to put together a list of my other favourite purchases of the year - the CDs I bought this year that didn't come out in 2004, but were so great I just had to give them their own feature. I bought a lot of CDs this past year, and I've gone through them and figured out which ten I think are the most worth your hard earned dollars. So, without further ado...


10 The Mountain Goats Nine Black Poppies (1995)

I'll probably remember 2004 largely as being the year I finally discovered The Mountain Goats. I bought 2002's Tallahasse, this year's exceptional We Shall All Be Healed and at the time of writing, have another 3 albums on their way in the mail. I also bought Nine Black Poppies, the band's debut. Feeling like either a small album or a large EP, there's 9 tracks here, all clocking in at 3 minutes or less. It's the very definition of lo-fi, with all the songs having been recorded directly into a boombox stereo, with no studio production whatsoever. Once you can get past the very raw sound (which can be a challenge) there's a fantastic album hidden within. John Darnielle displays his jarringly rapid strumming and charismatic vocals (that would later become his trademark) to great effect here, with the catchy guitarwork of "Cubs in Five" and "I Know You've Come to Take My Toys Away" being amongst his best work. The album ends with my personal favourite, "Lonesome Suprise", a duet performed with a friend of the band over the phone!


9 Walt Mink El Producto (1996)

Walt Mink aren't partiularly creative or innovative - they play by-the-numbers, energeticpop/rock, with a slight punky edge. It's the sort of music that makes up a large portion of commercial radio fodder, and it's usually very uninspiring, with little to differentiate one group from another. Walt Mink are different though, simply because they do what they do better than almost anyone else. From the rapid fire opening of "Stood Up" I was completely hooked, and the rest of the album showed the group to be versatile, while always sticking to their strengths, making for an album that is both straightforward and ridiculously catchy. It's quite amazing that the group never became mainstream stars, having signed to a major label shortly before the skate-rock craze (one they could have slotted neatly into, lending it some much needed credibility), accompanied by heavy touring and strong promotion. The public just never caught on, and a group that could potentially have been one of the biggest and best in mainstream rock had broken up before the end of the decade.


8 Iron and Wine The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002)

This year saw the release of Our Endless Numbered Days, Sam Beam's second album. Along with that release I also picked up The Creek Drank the Cradle, his sparse, intimate debut. Most of the songs are made up of little more than gently plucked acoustic guitar, accompanied by Beam's disarmingly angelic voice. Such a level of minimalism works perfectly, because Beam's folky style is made all the more inviting by the album's total modesty. There's not a cliched string section or overbearing crescendo in sight, just Beam's brilliant songcraft, which will draw you into its beauty and hold onto you until the album's conclusion. Just listen to the sorrowful verses and uplifting chorus of "Weary Memory" and the gentle storytelling of "Upward Over the Mountain" and you'll see exac tly what I mean.


7 Jeremy Barnes A Hawk and a Hacksaw (2002)

A Hawk and a Hacksaw sounds like nothing I've heard before. Jeremy Barnes' (drummer from Neutral Milk Hotel) tiny masterpiece sounds like a cartoonish, miniature trashcan orchestra, running amok in a small West-European town full of strange characters and bustling marketplaces. Such a claim sounds ridiculous, and probably wasn't even intended, but that's the image that has come bursting to life for myself and everyone I've played this CD to. Barnes' songs are overflowing with energy and creativity, making for an exuberant mini-opera that's an absolute joy to hear. I'd say that it should come with an accompanying animated video clip, but it's too much fun picturing what might be going on to warrant such delicious audio mayhem.


6 Funkstorung Appetite For Disctruction (1996)

Funkstorung deconstruct music, and then put it back together out of order and loaded with snappy beats, making it sound completely fresh and new. Sounding like an exploration of all the influences of modern electronica and hip-hop, Appetite For Disctruction is clever, highly original and addictive as hell. The German duo run through glitch, trip-hop, straight techno, hip-hop, soul and cacophonous noise experiments over the course of the album, with an allowance of one or two tracks per sub-genre, grouped together to give the album a neat, almost chaptered flow. There are a handful of guest appearances within, most notably from gravelly voiced rapper Triple H and delicate singer Carin. Personal favourites include the clicks and cuts of opener "Test", the brilliant choppy voice samples of hip-hop track "Grammy Winners" and the gentle grace of "Red Shirt, White Shoes."


5 Neutral Milk Hotel On Avery Island (1996)

On Avery Island was initially a very hard album to like. "Song Against Sex" was utterly irresistable from first listen, but the rest of the album proved to be a little disappointing, after the near-religious experience of listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. There's no doubt that this is the worse album of the two, but once you manage to remove that fact from your mind, and stop making comparisons between them, On Avery Island reveals itself to be a really great album, with a batch of subtle highlights hidden within. In addition to "Song Against Sex", my personal favourites include the somber "Three Peaches" and the chilling to gorgeous duality of "Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone." It'll never measure up to its Godlike younger brother, but is still a fantastic album on its own merits.


4 Bright Eyes Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Conor Oberst is incredibly pretentious, but listening to Lifted makes that point seem almost completely irrelevent. How can you dislike music for it's pretentious tone, when it's been written by a 21 year old with songwriting skill far beyond his years? Oberst's songs are full of youthful angst, but he never seems to be complaining or reaching for attention, just venting his frustrations with the state of the world and the various difficulties a person faces throughout life. Conor's lyrics are often awkward yet beautiful, giving an incredibly honest feeling to the album, that makes it's negative tone forgivable, with enough uplifting high points to give it a recurring feeling of redemption and gratitude for what we have. When Conor sings about losing the girl to another man, he sounds aggravated yet sorry for what they both have in store, as "He'll make war on who you were before, and claim all that has spoiled in your heart." The final track, "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and Be Loved)" is quite simply the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful song I've heard all year. Conor's frustration and disillusionment reach incredible heights, with scathing shots taken at the government, family, commercialism, education, war and American idealism, all in the (fictional?) story of a suicide attempt. The closing to that track, where the narrator wakes in a hospital bed and apologises to his father for being so selfish, only to be told he is loved regardless of his actions, is one of the most touching moments I've ever heard on any album.


3 The Books The Lemon of Pink (2003)

There's an irresistable, celebratory tone about The Lemon of Pink, that makes it such an easy album to fall in love with. The Books manage to make the album sweetly sentimental, while never even approaching cliche. Samples of laughter, warm folk melodies, twanging banjos, chuckle-inducing voice snippets and a multi-cultural cast make for the most life-affirming recording I've heard in quite some time. All that, and it also manages to sound almost completely unique. The sound collaging technique employed throughout the album lends something new to both folk music and experimental electronica - two genres that were never particularly likely to collide, and certainly not this successfully.


2 My Bloody Valentine Loveless (1991)

Thankfully there's only one really big, obvious admission to being way behind the times in this list, and that's Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. I'd heard bits and pieces of the group's music before, but only really discovered the band properly this year. There's something downright gorgeous about the texture of the music here. I've talked before about the "looking out at a wall of sound from a cosy interior where I'm right in the middle of the band" feeling that I get from this album, and it's a feeling that still sends shivers up my spine. MBV play beautiful, well written pop/rock songs, and then absolutely drown them in distortion, drone and feedback, resulting in a blend of etherial, shoegazing dream-pop, constantly swimming through swirly audio syrup. It's exquisite, and if you haven't heard it already, you really need to.


1 The Olivia Tremor Control Black Foliage (1999)

It's a little ironic that The Olivia Tremor Control's second album would be the one to blow me away, given that I spent around two years obsessing over getting their first release, giving Black Foliage barely a second thought the whole time. Feeling just as conceptually epic in scope as their debut, it ties together as a whole pretty much perfectly. There's around 15 or so of those fantastically addictive 60s-style psych-pop tracks, all brilliantly written, with beautiful touches of Beatlesesque Eastern influences and Beach Boys vocal harmonies, reimagined into something that is distinctly the group's own sound. These songs are then bridged by interludes of bizzare sound experimentation and eccentric mini-songs. The way the tracks bleed together makes for an awe-inspiring complete package, with a seemless flow throughout. Listening to the entire album in one sitting is a fantastic experience (especially for the first time), making it far and away my favourite purchase of the past year.