Second Thoughts

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2005 Albums (11-15)

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15. Architecture in Helsinki - In Case We Die

It took me a long time to unpack Architecture in Helsinki, but the coolness of their name kept me on. Being unfamiliar with them before this album, I first went through Fingers Crossed in order to establish some kind of trajectory. But eventually the repeated playing of “Do the Whirlwind” by people I was living with drew me inexorably towards this childish, frenetic, quick-witted knot of an album. That song will never cease to amaze me with its ability to contain sadness and happiness together in one place, to a rhythm and melody you can dance to. I still like Fingers Crossed a bit better, but it wasn’t released this year, was it? In Case We Die remains unparalleled in pure imagination--an exciting, strange, experimental ride.

14. Caribou - The Milk of Human Kindness
This album exists, start to finish, without a reference point. It is a world unto itself, untethered and also unconcerned with what is expected of a normal album. A good balance between electronic and organic, it balances samples with the occasional vocal piece by the man behind the curtain. To put it simply, this is the album I often put on when I needed to think and was tired of listening to The Books. When Brian Eno first began to make “ambient” music, his goal was to create a space in which to think, or something along those lines. This isn’t an ambient album, but it manages to introduce somewhat more traditional song structures and pop elements without them infringing on the holy emptiness of your usual ambient stuff. That’s the best way I can explain it. It’s immensely creative.

13. The Decemberists - Picaresque
I listened to this album probably ten times before I began to learn the stories of the characters in the songs. Musically, it’s adventurous and macabre, very folky, and, compared with lots of bands on this list, mostly straightforward. Lyrically, this is an outstanding, fascinating album. The Decemberists, certainly, are very literary and the creative writing major in me responds to that. In spite of the fact that all the lyrics are impersonal in that they aren’t about the lead singer’s emotional life, I feel remarkably akin to the members of this band, more so probably than most on this list. Even though telling stories isn’t straightforwardly personal, there’s an honesty that can’t be sidestepped in doing it: it’s easy to write ambiguous lyrics, but stories have to be honest to work well. They have their own rules. So I think that the this album resonates with me because of that.

12. Animal Collective - Feels
Sung Tongs absolutely blew me out of the water and I have consistently listened to it since I found it via Pitchfork’s best of 2000-2004. Every song was intricate and subconscious and fascinating, a symphony and a cacophony all at once, calm and busy at the same time, full of unsettling abstractness and highly reminiscent of being a child. At the time it was their closest venture at obeying typical song structures and an aesthetic that had any relation to pop music. This their latest goes even further towards the traditional idea of a rock song, rather than their tendency to escape into landscapes of sound. To be honest, I’m still trying to appreciate it, and I don’t like it as much as Sung Tongs. I read a review somewhere that said that, though it wasn’t as formally interesting as Sung Tongs, it was nonetheless a great album. And that’s exactly right. Sung Tongs was all over the place, using pop structures only enough to blow their tops off into something more fascinating, using instruments and gorgeous vocal harmonies. This is more straightforward, though in the context of Animal Collective that doesn’t hold its usual meaning. I really like this album. It feels apart of a collective unconscious. “In a house so cozy, word are spoken. Let’s take our shoes off and unwind.”

11. Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
This album is a pitchperfect mess that I keep trying to put back together, but can’t. Every hook is hidden under confusion and off-beatness and insensible production, as if the band is doing its best to be frustratingly non-commercial. Sure, they’re an art rock band, I guess. So it’s their job. Well it’s become my job to lie down inside this album and hope in vain to relive their creative process. The problem is that half their creativity lies in covering up their creative process, making them some kind of postmodern. In one sense they’ve covered their tracks and done their best to give the sense that this album just got spat out; in another they have made clear that this is a shambling mess and they make no apologies. This album doesn’t have the wow moments that You Forgot it in People had, but I am amazed by it as a whole nonetheless. It’s wonderful that albums are out there that sound like this, that are impossible to digest at once, that are so crisscrossed and yet together that they take months to understand. Even if there’s nothing to understand at the end. It’s the process of it.

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Published Tuesday, December 13, 2005 | E-mail this post

38 Comments

Michael

10:51 PM

well, as we get closer to the top everyone's starting to overlap me more. and there are a couple albums no one has mentioned that must be in everyone's top 10.

Blake

9:13 AM

True--or those albums were left out altogether. The window for albums to appear keeps getting smaller, and it means that somebody either really liked an album, or left it off altogether.

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