ILM is counting down its Top 50 tracks and albums. The list is tabulated from the votes of about 70 people, each of whom submitted up to a Top 20 in each category. A lot of people are burned out on year-end listmaking (even me), but that's because every list starts looking the same as the others after a while. But the ILM results have coughed up some nice surprises thus far, and I always love a good countdown.
Even though some of them were adapted from my year-end post on this blog, I will repost the blurbs I wrote for the poll. What can I say, my rewrites are always better!
(as of this writing, only two of them have appeared on the actual poll thus far)
Sigur Ros, "Takk...". Here I sit, going through the motions of another failed attempt to describe Sigur Ros' "Takk..." without having the finished product turn out like a description of a shit Mum album written by a twee indie fuck. What's the point of writing about how "Se Lest" feels like a soaring, Peter Pan-like excursion over a twinkling Disneyland when I can't stand the way those words look on paper? Why write about how "Heysatan"'s four minutes serve as an exhausted, extended sigh that help the album tail off into nothingness better than any final chord could? There is no point.
M83, "Before the Dawn Heals Us". When M83 became Anthony Gonzalez's solo project, his band's life as a synthtastic "Loveless" clone came crashing to a halt. Setting the controls to "epic" for nearly every track, they broadened their template to include heart-crushing ballads ("Safe" might have been the saddest song I heard in 2005), sweeping, cinematic instrumentals ("Moonchild"); as well as surging, pseudo-shoegazer rock ("Don't Save Us From the Flames", "Teen Angst"). What's more, "A Guitar and a Heart" is the best song Loverboy ever made.
Depeche Mode, "Playing the Angel". It's a comeback only in the sense that few would have expected them to re-peak twenty-five years into their turbulent career. The album's surprises include tracks such as "I Want It All" and "Nothing's Impossible", both of which were penned by new DM songwriter Dave Gahan and brooded like the "Black Celebration" sequel that was never recorded.
Polmo Polpo, "Kiss Me Again and Again". Anecdote. February 2003. The fifth anniversary of Wavelength, a popular weekly indie showcase in Toronto, remains semi-legendary to this day. Before the gig started, I spent a healthy chunk of time trying to explain the genius of local act Polmo Polpo to a few unsuspecting friends. It was difficult to communicate the sound of Wolfgang Voigt-inflected minimal techno with string samples and shoegaze-y guitar to people who had never heard anything remotely similar to it. In the end, Polmo Polpo threw the entire club for a loop by playing but one track (as per his norm) -- a head-nodding twenty-minute disco-funk number with no apparent beginning or end. I felt like the boy who cried wolf. The legendary part came immediately after, as five hundred brains were fried by a scorching set from prog metallers Rockets Red Glare.
Two years later, Polmo Polpo decided to release that Arthur Russell cover after all. Rockets Red Glare have long since imploded. Meanwhile, at a gig this past summer, a spectacular live version of "Kiss Me Again and Again" (lasting more than thirty minutes) convinced me that Polmo Polpo and I both needed to grow into the song a little bit.
Animal Collective, "Feels". Compared to the sleepy backwoods folk of earlier releases (that's a putdown only if you want it to be), "Feels" teems with adrenaline-fueled life. I still feel strongly about my post-"Sung Tongs" assertion that the ideal Animal Collective album contains only three minute pop songs and twelve minute drone pieces. In that sense, they could have improved the album by roughly doubling the lengths of "Turns Into Something", "Banshee Beat", and "The Purple Bottle", but admittedly, my heart's not in these complaints about near-perfection.
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"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People", by The Legendary K.O. has popped up on some people's year-end lists. I obviously understand why someone would prefer it to Kanye's "Golddigger" (I think am one of those people), but I have trouble understanding why someone would rank it near the top of their singles list. It's lyrically sharp, but nothing extraordinary, and there probably isn't enough politically-motivated music being made these days (I certainly can't argue with the importance of the cause). Nevertheless, I wonder how many people are ranking more due to hatred of George Bush than their love of the song. How many of them would have ranked *any* cleverly-written novelty tune that took a shot at the US Prez, just because they were itching to make a list-motivated statement? How many of them didn't like "Goldigger" that much to begin with? Wouldn't it had to have been a near-lock for these people's lists to fully justify including The Legendary K.O. instead?
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