It's December 15 ...

... and that's too close to the winter solstice for my liking. There's too much snow piling up outside my door. There's also the matter of my

TOP 20 ALBUMS OF 2005


Silly preamble: This quality of music on this list obliterates that of my 2004 list. Even in that post from one year ago, I was complaining about having an uncomfortably high ambivalence about that list. This year's top three (and perhaps as many as the top six) are all better than last year's number one, Xiu Xiu's "Fabulous Muscles", although I should say that I still stand behind the amazing quality of that album and continue to listen to it regularly (a lot more so than anything else on the 2004 list, which is exactly how it should be, right?).

In most years, I find myself buried under a mountain of new music in October/November. I dig myself out from under that pile and try to absorb as much music as possible in a massive rush to put together these year-end lists by my self-imposed deadline. This year, the rush happened at the start of the year and I was struggling to keep up. The summer was quiet, as usual, and the fall seemed to crawl along without too many musical bombshells being dropped. At least that's what it felt like to me. Then the year-end chin-stroking began, and the general mood was one of disappointment -- this wasn't such a great year for music, they said. Nah, the calendar was front-loaded and memories fade, said I, noting that eight out of the twenty albums here were released (or leaked, same difference for me) during the first three months of the year.

I hate making overly general "This was the year of [X]" statements, but I'll throw out a bone by mentioning that there were very few disappointments for me this year. Established, 10/20/30+ year-old acts (Depeche Mode, New Order, Saint Etienne, John Cale, Madonna) made great records that comfortably slot in next to their best work. Bands that I had been lukewarm about in the past blew me away with the best music of their careers (Animal Collective, Caribou, Sigur Rós). Kelly Clarkson had a classic single. Ciara had a handful of them. "Trapped In the Closet" was damn enjoyable, and so was the album it came from. I was finally sold on the magic of Superpitcher and Jacques Lu Cont remixes. Yep, I was pretty happy this year.

(Can Con note: just two out of twenty this year, which is the least amount of Canadian representation I've had since 2000. I'm certainly not down on Canadian music these days, so I'll chalk it up to stiffer competition.)

(Decision-making note: my top two album basically blew away the rest (this happens almost every year), but trying to break the tie between them might have been the toughest bout of year-end hair-splitting I've ever done. I'll probably swap their positions in my mind about 238 times during 2006, but for now, the tiebreaker is simple: one of them is making me smile a lot more than the other these days.)

20a. Madonna, "Confessions On a Dancefloor". It starts like gangbusters with the spectacular "Hung Up" and the equally outstanding "Get Together". Once the cooldown phase begins in the second half, it fizzles faster than a lit match in a snowstorm, culminating (so to speak) with a perfunctory/sorry attempt at schaffel. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a Verve Release (in a year where there weren't many of them).

20. Roots Manuva, "Awfully Deep". He manages to imbibe his beats with a cavernous, thumping quality that you just don't hear with other artists, but what do you expect from (arguably) hip-hop's biggest Basic Channel fan?

Yes, I just copped out. Sorry.

19. Xiu Xiu, "La Foret". Stepping back from the more immediate, poppier sound of "Fabulous Muscles", this more improvisational album felt like a different kind of pain entirely -- less crafted, more reckless.

18. Six By Seven, "Left Luggage at the Peveril Hotel". The world completely forgot about them, they slinked off to make a fourth album that nobody knew about (I believe "4" was an internet release only), and the only fanfare surrounding their fifth album was the squint-and-you-still-missed-it news about the band breaking up just before it was released. Don't miss these Spacemen 3 rave-ups ("Waiting For you Now"), and the cathartic-like-open-heart-surgery epic "Here Comes the Sun".

17. Caribou, "The Milk of Human Kindness". It's a significant improvement on the much-heralded "Up In Flames" by virtue (in large part) of its amazing diversity. It effortlessly spans psych-folk, motorik, and noise, while packing the whole thing into a joyous and perfectly brief 40 minutes.

16. New Order, "Waiting For the Sirens' Call". "Krafty" is their strongest single since "Regret", and its chorus virtually screams "I was made for opening summer festival shows." The album's more retro (= more dance, less rock) style pleased many fans who were none too thrilled with "Get Ready", and even the campier moments ("Jetstream", anyone?) hardly dampened anyone's enthusiasm for it (unlike "Working Overtime". And "Jetstream" is amazing, ffs). It's not a return to form ("Get Ready" served that purpose), but it is a return to *a* form, I suppose.

15. Sunn O))), "Black One". More drones to drift off to death with. With bonus cackling. From a casket.

14. t.A.T.u, "Dangerous and Moving". Inevitably, it will be about the Big Two. "Dangerous and Moving" smokes the similarly bombastic "Not Gonna Get Us" (both songs feel designed for driving at, er, 200 kph, don't they?). "All About Us" can't seriously mount a challenge to "All the Things She Said", although it certainly aims BIG, with ultraviolent (and sexy) video, and Wagnerian arrangements. But once you get past the Big Two Singles, the rest is anything but filler (unlike the comparatively drab "200 KPH In the Wrong Lane").

13. Billy Corgan, "The Future Embrace". Billy's dream wasn't to rock out. He always wore his influence on his sleeve, talked about Boston and Queen when everyone else was rambling on about punk, but most people just played up the grungetastic Billy vs Kurt angle. Billy loved Stevie Nicks and Depeche Mode, so Smashing Pumpkins covered them both, made an album seeped in 90's electronica and 80's synth music, and the world shook its head in confusion. The final Smashing Pumpkins album was a facade, I felt as though they were pretending that the previous three or four years had never happened. "Look, it's the original lineup! We rock again!" Next thing you knew, they'd imploded, surprising nobody. "Adore" may be spectacular in parts, but it is a) far too long, b) far too rock. Billy Corgan corrected things on both counts with "The Future Embrace". Forgetting that he was once in a grunge band, he covered his live setup in enough silver paint to film a Flock of Seagulls video. Sonically, he set the controls straight for the DM of "Everything Counts" and "Get the Balance Right", made his goth album, and covered every song in layers of shoegaze-y guitar (those FX are icing on the cake and they MAKE the album).

12. Audion, "Suckfish". Minimalism is hot. I still can't believe it, but it is. Other than the Modernist (whose records project squeaky smiley family friendly fun and couldn't be more different than what Matthew Dear is doing here), who has instilled this much unadulterated fun into minimal grooves? Every track is filled with thick, electrohouse crunch. It's a sexy, sleazy (dig the song titles too) dancefloor romp, now someone should find Peaches and stop her before she tries to steal every last one of these beats.

11. The Warlocks, "Surgery". Now they need to become a full-on girl group.

10. Ellen Allien, "Thrills". Dirtier and greasier than the too slick, too Kompakt-esque "Berlinette", Ellen Allien's records retreated from glamourous nightclubs and tapped into the sound of an underground hideout choked with dry ice smoke and ominous, dark blue spotlights.

9. The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band, "Horses in the Sky". The last album was an instrumental album with singing thrown on top, but this one is a singing album with instruments thrown on top (and sometimes they didn't bother with instruments at all, e.g. "Hang On To Each Other"). Huge difference. Throw your head back and sing.

8. Broadcast, "Tender Buttons". After years of wondering why Broadcast seemed like such a good band in theory, yet made such boring records, they delivered this. It's the album that Stereolab should have made after (or arguably before) "Cobra and Phases Group", a full-on funky motorik pop groove record stuffed with three-minute gems.

7. Jesu, "Jesu". Doom, buried under walls of guitars, too long by at least 15 minutes, frequently devastating, DOOM, kill yr speakers, play me loud, DOOM.

6. Low, "The Great Destroyer". Their "loudest" album to date is also their best. "When I Go Deaf" is like nothing else in the Low canon, they're abusing their distortion pedals while screaming their heads off and coming completely unglued. Sadly, the recurring themes of retreating/giving up/retiring took on new poignancy in light of Alan Sparhawk's annus horribilis. But to me it feels that throughout the entire album, the defeatist attitude is wrestling with catharsis and healing (swooning harmonies can make you feel that way), with even a bit of swagger ("Monkey") mixed in.

5. Rhythm and Sound, "See Mi Yah". Yeah, it took me six months to wash those 24 hours out of my system, but once the cleansing stage was over, I immersed myself in ONE MONSTER RIDDIM all over again ...

4. Animal Collective, "Feels". This record saved me a lot of time this year. You see, sometimes an album is so good that it eliminates the need to listen to anything else remotely like it. After doing somersaults over "Feels", I no longer felt the need to endure Broken Social Scene's self titled release. "Feels" has all of the kitchen sink theatrics and infinitely better tunes. BSS's album, to its detriment, comes off like an exercise in studio wizardry first, and a bunch of songs second. Let's see how many production tricks we can fit into one hour! "Feels" is so *alive*, with its propulsive table-banging rhythms and gutshots of reverb stoking the record from start to finish. From the hazy strumming of (MBV's) "I Need No Trust" sound-a-like "Flesh Canoe" to the tribal wailing of shouldabeenfifteenminuteslongANDthealbumopener "Banshee Beat", it's a crystallization of Animal Collective's talents.

It certainly made the middle third of Caribou's "Milk of Human Kindness" feel a lot duller too.

3. Depeche Mode, "Playing the Angel". "A Pain That I'm Used To", "John the Revelator", and "Suffer Well" constitute the best 1-2-3 opening punch on any Depeche Mode album other than "Music For the Masses".

2. M83, "Before the Dawn Heals Us". "Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts" tried to faithfully recreate "Loveless" with synths. Afterward, M83 wanted to attempt the same with "Isn't Anything", with one caveat: they hadn't *heard* "Isn't Anything" in fifteen years and tried to reconstruct it from memory. Oh, and the reason they hadn't heard it in fifteen years was because they lived in a cave since 1990 and weren't around to hear lo-fi slacker indie explode in the 90's (plz ignore the nonsensical timeline vis-a-vis xeroxing "Loveless" on their last album). So they ended up plastering their memories onto music which remained fresh in their mind: Loverboy. What's with the weepy instrumental interludes? ... or the appearance of aching balladry the likes of which Kevin Shields wouldn't attempt until "Moon Song"? Gorgeous from start to finish.

1. Sigur Rós, "Takk...". Why? Because it's a fairy tale. They no longer sound like mist rising from a crack in a glacier -- those records weren't so great anyway. They've reeled in the massive sprawl of "{}" and made their pop album. They've packed it with piano-led hooks and a series of heart-stopping crescendos. "Sé Lest" is filled with childlike wonder, coasting over Disneyland, soaring over rolling hills, eavesdropping on oom-pah-pah bands playing for a modest group of ten spectators all dressed in their Sunday best. The second half is downright dour, hitting a glorious low point in the final minutes of "Andvari", as the ghostly strings draw out the despair not unlike the final moments Gavin Bryars' maudlin "Sinking of the Titanic". Sighing. Sighing. It's hard to write about this without coming off like a twee indie fuck. What I just wrote is probably indistinguishable from a description of a shit Múm album. Damn.