If you, like me, found the National’s High Violet falling just short of the band’s past classics, you might have skipped this year’s one-offs: “Think You Can Wait,” from the film Win Win; and “Exile Vilify,” recorded for the video game Portal 2. But they’re worth tracking down. “Exile Vilify,” the better of the two, improves on HV with a sardonic piano melody and a swelling string section — the sort of Boxer-ish arrangement that was stripped back on their more recent effort. “Think You Can Wait” is more in line with HV and its towering sadness: “I was drifting, crying,” Matt Berninger sings to open the song, but the music’s meticulous slow build (and the Sharon Van Etten guest vocal) rewards careful listening. Get both tracks on your digital outlet of choice (I bought ‘em on Amazon).
As fans of Christmas and Sufjan Stevens well know, the singer records an EP of holiday-themed music ever year. The first five volumes were released as a box set; the sixth, done with the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner as well as the Arcade Fire’s Richard Parry, remains in the Sufjan archives. Per Consequence of Sound, the Dessners finally shared a pair of the EP’s eight songs on BBC6 recently — the whole set’s great (you’ll have to take my word for it) but here’s one they played on-air.
Since I’ve already made my feelings about rankings, best-ofs and lists in general clear, here are a few things you need to know about 2010: For those of us nerdy and foolhardy enough to keep up with Internet indie culture, there were more “relevant” albums to listen to than ever before. Thanks to a blogosphere in which any band with an MP3 can find someone to like them (and in which I caught a lot of shit for saying a few bands sucked without paragraphs of justification ), I spent nearly as much time investigating bullshit trends as I did attempting to listen to albums that were actually good. Making matters worse was the embarrassing coincidence of indie heroes from the Arcade Fire to James Mercer’s Broken Bells to Broken Social Scene to the Hold Steady — the Hold Steady! — making the most average, unexciting albums possible. And finally, while release dates have been a joke since Kid A leaked a decade ago, in 2010, a number of bands decided to start dropping albums on Bandcamp or Topspin or whatever whenever they damn well felt like it — which is great and progressive but also means I was stumbling into really good new records (Mighty Clouds! Summer Fiction!) days before putting this thing together. (it is also presumably the reason why the Dirty Projectors/Bjork mini-album did not blow everyone’s minds.)
All that said: If you like music, every year is a good year for music, and I’m happy to have sorted through a considerable amount of witch house, garage fuzz and indie R&B (pro tip: coming from Minneapolis does not make you Prince) to arrive at this very worthy top 50. One more word on rankings: this list is basically tallied by “How much do I want to listen to this album again when it is not actually on?,” a measure that skews toward three-minute pop songs and away from Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom ‘s occasionally brilliant self-indulgence marathons. Sorry, folks. O.K., enough preamble: here we go. Read the rest of this entry »
In the five years or so I’ve been doing this, I can’t remember a better year for songs. I actually spent most of Saturday ordering a top 100, went a little crazy and decided nobody needed me to rank seven hours of tracks. So here’s a top 50. Every single one of these tracks is incredible, and yes, even Ke$ha. For the record, I allowed two songs per band in a few special cases because not including both Sally Seltmann jams would be a lie (though I did cut two Best Coast songs). Also, No. 51 is Lady Gaga (“Telephone”) and if Nicki Minaj had done all the verses on “Monster,” it’d be No. 1 (but you already knew that). Have at it: Read the rest of this entry »
From the expanded version of The National‘s High Violet (out Nov. 22) comes “Terrible Love (Alternate Version)” and a video that’s equal parts late ’90s-copping and tour documenting. In case you were wondering what a victory lap looks like, this is a very, very deserving band taking one.
Flickr user Starbright31 has a pretty epic set of shots from The National’s show at the Wiltern last night. Click here to see ‘em. Missed the boat on this one myself — tight press list plus I saw the band at the venue on the Boxer tour, so I took a pass. Probably a mistake, huh? They’re headlining again tonight, if you’re looking for Silver Lake Jubilee alternatives.
The National’s High Violet presents a protagonist whose world has darkened in the face of the spotlight. The Cincinnati upstarts-turned-Brooklyn scene kings’ narratives have gone inversely bleak as the group’s popularity rises to previously unfathomable heights: a nationwide Google ad, the front page of the New York Times’ website, a YouTube webcast co-directed by Dont Look Back’s D.A. Pennebaker; these are the kinds of things that change lives — and can twist great songwriters into bad ones. Yet, High Violet is not a record that dwells on success.
On 2005’s Alligator, the band’s breakthrough release (and my favorite album of the past decade), singer Matthew Berninger presented a persona that thrived on disaster. “I’m a festival/I’m a parade” he sang on “All The Wine,” positing himself with self-mocking hyperbole as a hubristic anti-hero even as he acknowledged the demons lurking below his high-wire exploits. Boxer showcased that character evolving, even as the band’s constant touring and slow-building critical acclaim raised the album’s stakes. Berninger’s once-raging baritone was toned down, wrapped in chamber arrangements and turned suddenly adult and aware, admitting a desire to “stop thinking of my dick” rather than “ballerina ’round a coffee table, cock in hand.” “Mistaken For Strangers” best captured the band’s growing pains, with a lumbering, laborious chorus tangled up in “the unmagnificent lives of adults” even as Berninger metaphorically instructed himself to “fill yourself with quarters”; like a videogame, lit up and started fresh, perhaps, or a parking meter, doomed to a two-hour limit. The curled-up imagery of his lyrics is less so on High Violet, an album that embraces more straightforward misery. Read the rest of this entry »
As fans of Christmas and Sufjan Stevens well know, the singer records an EP of holiday-themed music ever year. The first five volumes were released as a box set; the sixth, done with the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner as well as the Arcade Fire’s Richard Parry, remains in the Sufjan archives. Per 
