Popular With Me, 2008: My favorite albums
Kevin Bronson on
6
The Top 10
1. M83, Saturdays=Youth” (Mute)
2. The Whigs, “Mission Control” (ATO)
3. The Futureheads, “This Is Not the World” (Nul Records)
4. Friendly Fires, “Friendly Fires” (Beggars/XL)
5. Cut Copy, “In Ghost Colours” (Modular)
6. Portishead, “Third” (Island)
7. MGMT, “Oracular Spectacular” (Columbia)
8. Mercury Rev, “Snowflake Midnight” (Yep Roc)
9. The Duke Spirit, “Neptune” (Shangri-La)
10. Lightspeed Champion, “Falling Off the Lavender Bridge” (Domino)
The next 10
11. The Helio Sequence, “Keep Your Eyes Ahead”
12. Darker My Love, “2”
13. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”
14. Lykke Li, “Youth Novels”
15. The Fireman, “Electric Arguments”
16. British Sea Power, “Do You Like Rock Music?”
17. Neon Neon, “Stainless Style”
18. TV on the Radio, “Dear Science”
19. Headlights, “Some Racing, Some Stopping”
20. Frightened Rabbit, “The Midnight Organ Fight”
Eight sentences about my favorite albums of 2008:
1) I lost my job this year, and damned near my mind, so I might end up looking at this list years from now and feeling like I did last week when I gazed back on 1993’s list and saw “God Shuffled His Feet.”
2) The Bon Iver album actually came out in 2007, and I agonized then over whether to put it in my Top 10, so here it is just so everybody feels better: Bon Iver, “For Emma, Forever Ago”
3) Don’t make me listen to Vampire Weekend ever again.
4) Or Guns N’ Roses.
5) Lists are inane and subject to whims and barometric pressure, but I still caught the contagion in 1992 after a friend gave me his best-of-the-year mixtape, a cassette that I still play to this day although I’ve tired of Soul Asylum.
6) Most relevant 1992 song to me after hearing this year’s parade of folkies: the Cracker anthem, “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now).”
7) I said this last year and I think it applies to 2008 too — I doubt any of these albums will make my best-of-the-decade Top 10.
8) Thanks for reading, and comment away.
Great picks, Kevin. You were not lying when you said m83 would end up at, or near the top of your list. I agree with your Cut Copy and MGMT picks as well, and a bit surprised by your Futureheads pick, but then again, I have yet to hear it in full.
I am completely in agreement with your number 20 pick of Frightened Rabbit…although I feel it’d be a bit higher on my list. I’m glad someone else knows they exist…that was a sparsely populated show at the Echoplex a couple months ago.
Nice list!
what can i say about this list…. mmm mmm mmm mmm. can’t totally agree with MGMT though. i saw (booked) them open for of montreal in 2006 and they weren’t very good/interesting. maybe now that they have a backing band instead of an ipod.
We have ‘overlap’, my friend, but for some reason I can’t get through more than a few bars of Cut Copy without Duran Duran popping in to my head, and after that happens, ‘In Ghost Colours’ is all over for me.
Sad to see you are in the grips of the MGMT affliction. Well I guess it could have been worse, you could have put Does it Offend You? Yeah? on your list, then it would have been over.
But more forcefully, it is inexcusable that you didn’t put Sigur Ros in your list, not even within the top 20, un-friggin-believable. If I were Santa, I’d leave a greenhouse culprit in your stocking.