This started with what I thought was a good idea:
Compile a list of critics’ favorite albums of 2004, giving
equal weight to amateur and professional reviewers.
I scoured the web and found a Best of 2004 bounty.
Rolling
Stone, Time
Magazine, USA
Today and some
guy named Cody all got their say, along with over forty
other online lists.
Originally,
I planned to look at just a handful of sites, but I lack
self control when it comes to this sort of thing.
What should have been a quick project spiraled out of hand
and took more time than I’m willing to admit, even to myself.
The biggest problem was that, while I’d initially planned
to stick to Top 10 lists, I let some Top 25’s worm their
way into my computations, then some Top 40’s, a few Top
60’s and, alas, Top 100’s. My spreadsheet became cumbersome,
with numbers everywhere; point totals reached the thousands.
Normalizing Cody’s Top 20 list with Large
Hearted Boy’s Top 24 and All
Music Guide’s Top 100 is not difficult, but it isn’t
the standard way to spend New Year’s Day, either.
From
the start, I planned to provide a little synopsis of the
critics’ reviews of each album, but this was a nearly impossible
task because music critics—professional and amateur alike—are
a cryptic lot, especially if you can’t discern the difference
between neo-folk, neo-psych and neo-garage. For me
it was particularly tough to wade through the reviews because
I’ve lost touch with popular music—thus my inspiration to
compile this list. As far as I recall, I didn’t even
listen to enough albums this year to fill out a Top 10 list.
For what it’s worth, here are my Top 6:
6.
Badly Drawn Boy, One Plus One is One – I bought
this for my wife. She liked it, but only enough
to listen to it twice before we misplaced it.
5.
Handsome Boy Modeling School, White People –
The first Handsome Boy album, So…How’s Your Girl,
is one of my favorite hip hop albums of recent years,
but this album failed to make a full rotation at a recent
dinner party that I attended. I accidentally left
it at the party, so I haven’t been able to give it a second
listen. Losing albums seems to be my major failing
as a music critic.
4.
Mos Def, The New Danger – I was really looking
forward to hearing “Close Edge,” the song
Mos Def performed freestyle on Chappelle’s Show.
Alas, this album suffered the exact same fate as White
People.
3.
k d lang, Songs of the 49th Parallel – I bought
this because a) my wife likes k d lang and now so do I,
b) I like Canada, c) I was going to write a music review
of this album for Babblog, but after further consideration
I concluded that the first draft of my review lacked zest.
Here it is in a nutshell: the album is plenty pretty.
2.
The Finn Brothers, Everyone is Here – A friend
bought this for my wife; she really likes it and hasn’t
lost it. The album is nice.
1.
Norah Jones, Feels Like Home – I bought this
for my wife. It’s nice, particularly the duet with
Dolly Parton.
As
you can see, my credentials as a music reviewer are dubious,
which is why I’ve canvassed the experts—Rolling Stone,
Cody, et al. Here are their collective Best Albums
of 2004, with my two cents thrown in:
19.
The Fiery Furnace, Blueberry Boat (984 points)
– After reading a few reviews on this album and listening
to a few excerpts, I don’t have the foggiest notion what
it is about. I know that it features siblings, Matt
and Eleanor Friedberger, and some songs make references
to pirates and blueberries, but that’s it.
18.
Devendra Banhart, Rejoicing in the Hands (1036)
– This is a neo-folk album with gleefully naïve lyrics.
Once critic likens him to Dylan.
17.
TV on the Radio, Desperate Youths, Bloodthirsty Babes
(1052) – Described as “wild, unpredictable and strangely
hypnotic.” It sounds like the type of music my friend
Jeff W. used to listen to when he’d sit on his bed and
stare at the wall. After the completion of this
sort of album, he’d emerge from his room—smoke trailing—and
say to nobody in particular, “That blew my mind.”
Incidentally, Jeff W. once co-wrote a song with the lyric,
“It’s like blood on the sun!”
16.
Dizzee Rascal, Showtime (1075) – With the exception
of Kanye West, the critics in the Best of 2004 music polls
tend to prefer British hip hop to the current American
output. One reviewer was so fired up by the album
that he announced to all: “IM PROUD TO BE BRITTISH!!”
[sic] Another critic named Fimoculous
weighed in with, “There’s something about Dizzee Rascal
that reminds me of playing Tetris. Must. Fit.
Blocks. In. Holes.” Fimoculous ranked
it #6, so he must like Tetris. I do not. I
fear the Tetris dreams and waking up in a cold sweat with
little blocks floating before my eyes.
15.
Interpol, Antics (1111) – Compared to Joy Division
and Duran Duran.
14.
Madvillain, Madvillainy (1147) – Hip hop aimed
at people who prefer the Three Feet High and Rising vein
of violence-free rap; this is heavy on the intergalactic
funk. Three critics thought this was the best album
of the year.
13.
Sufjan Steven, Seven Swans (1159) – Twelve pretty
songs about heartbreak. Contains Christianity, subtle
gay themes and banjos. Reminds some reviewers of
a man named Dylan.
12.
U2, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (1191) –
U2’s eleventh album. Enough said.
11.
Elliot Smith, from a basement on the hill (1409)
– A sad posthumous album, described as “pretty as a smog
sunset and as cracked as the Liberty Bell.”
10.
Wilco, A Ghost is Born (1451) – The critics that
loved this album praised it with a mixture of seemingly
incompatible terms like “foggy,” “brilliance,” “immensely
frustrating” and “satisfying.” Peter Gammons, the
Hall of Fame Major League Baseball journalist who’s strayed
into the music critic business, raves about this album.
(By the way, last year Gammons released a compilation
of music that he thinks is “cool.”)
9.
Joanna Newsome, Milk-Eyed Mender (1485) – This
is the album that Pippi Longstockings would have released
if she’d grown up in Northern California and played the
harp. Perhaps not coincidentally, Newsome is playing
a couple of upcoming shows at San Francisco’s Swedish
American Hall.
8.
Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News
(1527) – The critics have surprisingly little to say about
this album. In fact, this album did exceedingly
well in polls by critics who preferred not to write little
blurbs about each album on their list. Those that
did describe it tended to complain that some of the songs
on the album got too much airplay.
7.
Brian Wilson, Smile (1535) – This truck load
of pretty melodies played well with the critics who were
around when Wilson started this album over thirty years
ago.
6.
Green Day, American Idiot (1549) – This album
inspired many of the critics to use the term “punk opera.”
5.
The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come for Free (1589)
– British hip hop/garage about lower middle class life
in England, delivered in an accent the Americans don’t
hear very often. One critic compares this album
to the poetry of Homer, presumably because devotees to
The Streets relate the lyrics to a myriad of troubles
in their own lives. If you are looking for an album
that will take you a long while to decipher, this is the
one for 2004.
4.
Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose (1670) – Jack White
produced this album, which helps to account for its high
placement on this list. I venture that this album
will please both fans of Jack White and Loretta Lynn.
3.
Franz
Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand (1727) – One reviewer
describes this as “guitar heavy post-pop.” A handy
tip for the aspiring critic: If you can’t think
of a good descriptive term for something, just pick a
term and throw a “post-” or “neo-” in front
of it. Handy tip #2: If you’re trying to describe
a term that already has a “post-” in it, it is perfectly
reasonable to add another. You should stop at two
“post-”’s, however. Anything more than two
is plain silly. Handy tip for the aspiring critic
#3: You can escape from nearly any argument with
the phrase, “That’s just too post- post-.” Combine
it with a roll of the eyes.
2.
The Arcade Fire, Funeral (2177) – As you can
see from the point total, there was a significant gap
between the top two choices and the rest of the field,
although it’s possible that their high ranking is a result
of an inordinate number of Canadians in my survey, as
The Arcade Fire hails from Montreal. I like the
New
Yorker’s description of the album best:
“…reminiscent of Echo and the Bunnymen, if they had been
popular during the Depression.” I have no idea what
this means, but it’s a good line; if you are an Echo and
the Bunnymen fan who’s read some Steinbeck, maybe you
can explain it to me.
1.
Kanye West, The College Dropout (2246) – This
was the American hip hop album that the rock critics loved;
five out of the 40-odd lists that I read rated it as the
top album of the year. Many Grammys likely to follow.
I’d
also like to mention that one reviewer ranked Dio’s
Master of the Moon as the 92nd best album of 2004.
I haven’t heard it, but I can assure you that if you purchase
92 albums released in 2004, one of them should be Master
of the Moon.
Here
are a few more notable Best of 2004 lists:
Prefix
Magazine
Pitchfork
Media
The
Onion
Stereo
Gum
Tiny
Mix Tapes
Geek
Ent
Mr.
Lewis can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.
Copyright
© 2005 by Jeff Lewis |
