Kieran's Pretentious Crap: Favourite Albums/Songs of the Decade #50-41

I love music. I compulsively make lists that noone actually cares about. So, in a way this was inevitable.

Albums

50. The Electric Lady - Janelle Monae

Janelle Monae stormed to critical and commercial success with the funkadelic Archandroid, but The Electric Lady has a more even, bluesier feel to it. One issue with Archandroid was that it was so pristinely ornate that it was difficult to actually connect with. Something to appreciate rather than enjoy. Electric Lady is superior. The tidy production remains but it’s cosier, more affecting, intimate. The diversity is impressive, from the showboating prologue of ‘Givin Them What They Love,’ to the fluttery club-banger ‘Dance Apocalyptic,’ or the love ballad ‘Primetime,’ but nothing is as splendid as Monae’s impassioned wail.

49. Sit Down, Man - Das Racist

Not only a great name, but a great group. The duo are another product of this decade’s ‘intellectual rap’ movement (CC: Childish Gambino & Logic), typified by their idiosyncratic production, academic allusions, pervasion of irony and wry humour, but most significantly an on-point social consciousness. There are funny stories about girlfriends and families, a pensive statement on rap as entertainment or lecture, and elegies to childhood, love, loss, and above all else, their reverence of rap. The money and fame’s good and all, but it’s all about the flow, really. My favourite joke; ‘they call me Dwight Schrute the way I eat beats.’

48. The Constant One - Iron Chic

There isn’t really a coherent theme to The Constant One, it’s rather just a series of separate empowering Punk-Pop bangers. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The riffs are positively furious, the lyrics unapologetically mawkish; the jibber about ‘burning free’ and ‘running endlessly,’ and the tone is fairly singular. It’s fifty minutes of undiluted frenzy, a homage to the sentiment of not giving a fuck and not giving in. It’s daft, naïve and there’s no subtlety whatsoever, but whoever said there needed to be? It is earnest, and upbeat, and it works so well. Honestly, it should probably be a lot higher.

47. Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes

It doesn’t quite live up to their eponymous debut, but man can they write harmonies. The weaving of guitars and Garfunkely sighing voices is as handsome as ever. And in usual form for Fleet Foxes the silences are just as pretty as the compositions, an effective dissonance which pitches hubris into vacuum. There’s a resonating sadness to Helplessness Blues, particularly on the title track and album monolith ‘The Shrine/An Argument’. It’s not so much an issue of life and death as living and dying; the turgid difficulty of the processes rather than the fear of the ideas. There’s a sense of disharmonious fragmentation, and an inevitable ending and conclusion, perhaps foreshadowing the band’s current hiatus.

46. The Monitor - Titus Andronicus

It opens with splendour, a song which charters one fresh-eyed, poetry-driven, rock-loving idealist’s entire journey from New Jersey towards paradise, and his ironically pathetic failure. But hey, he had a good time. It also features Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen references. In the same line. It’s one of my favourite openings to an album, a celebration of music’s power to inspire and of the ecstasies of doing what you want. Not so much nihilistic as philanthropically decadent, Titus Andronicus invite you to let go and not care. With titles such as ‘Titus Andronicus Forever,’ they clearly believe that immortality lies in the moment.

45. Sir Lucious - Big Boi

Want some controversy? Big Boi’s my favourite one from Outkast. Sorry, but he is. Just listen to Sir Lucious. It’s everything poppy Rap should be. It’s funny yet frank, instantaneous yet lasting, excitedly eccentric yet ridiculously catchy. From the bombastic ‘Daddy Fat Sex’ to the grandstanding finale of ‘Back Up Plan’, the record shudders with a confidence indicative of a master at his peak. Big Boi knows exactly what he’s doing, and when it comes to ‘Shutterbug’? Oh, it has the hook. And I mean THE hook. The entire song is a work of arrogant genius, but the nerve to foreground that ‘bubububum’ tempo is too much.

44. Lonerism - Tame Impala

Probably the closest thing we have to a sonic trip. This stonery, psychedelic, jungle of luridness is mesmerising. It captures you in its trance of introspection and feverish reflection, with all the frenetic synths, twangy guitars and overdubbed drums you can imagine. It sounds great, but it’s also deeply moving. A profession of isolation, and complete, well, loneliness. Whether its manifestation is transfigured in the anthemic ‘Apocalypse Dreams,’ punk-thudder ‘Elephant’, or emotional centrepiece ‘Why Won’t They Talk To Me?’ a direct collage to the listener of the helplessness of alienation, loneliness penetrates Lonerism.

43. Habits & Contradictions - Schoolboy Q

Schoolboy Q rose with Kendrick’s West-Coast Black Hippy crew, and as such is expectedly monopolised by sultry, exquisite production and a weed-clouded style. The drums are sagging and congealed, literally everything else; groans with an embittered resignation. So yeh, it’s a viciously pessimistic listen, reminiscent of Method Man and Mobb Deep at their murkiest. It’s never upsetting though, all this gloom serves to immerse you into a surprisingly complex psyche. Schoolboy expresses a desire to present intellectualism, but is constrained by addiction to cliché vices of money and bitches; hence, you know, the contradictions. One of the best rappers to emerge from the decade.

42. Kaleidoscope Dream - Miguel

It’s an album very explicitly about sex and only sex, but its very staging is ridiculously seductive so there you go. Miguel is actually very likeable, his carnal entreaties are tinged with genuine affection and passion, and his voice is both angelic enough to elevate his pleas as fantasy, yet everyman enough to ground these fantasies as plausible. Take opener ‘Adorn’ for example, it’s like every pop love song that’s been released for the past twenty years, yet it’s somehow more. More endowed, more urgent, more zealous. This translates to the rest of the album; the attestedly vulgar ‘Pussy is Mine,’ is an ironic poem of sexual frustration and hurt, and it’s bloody hard-hitting.

41. Here and Nowhere Else - Cloud Nothings

I really, really love Cloud Nothings. Attack on Memory was an ardent defence of the opportunity to ‘Stay Useless,’ an avowal of the uncertainty and stress of post-college (just what do I do know?) that’s becoming frighteningly relevant for myself. A capitalist society determines that we decide what we do for the rest of our lives right now. Here and Nowhere Else is Baldi’s counter-argument, that happiness and self-contentment cannot be dictated by socio-economic responsibilities. You can still be a white-collar cog and rebel. There’s a thunderous, infectious optimism that shatters, climaxing with my favourite song of 2014, the invariably ceaseless ‘I’m Not Part of Me.’