Kieran's Pretentious Crap: Favourite Songs and Albums of the Decade #10-1

Albums

10. This is Happening - LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem’s farewell album is enriching, piercingly genuine, and inescapably sad. From the grooving purge of ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ to the resolutely confident, pertinently titled closer ‘Home,’ there’s a pervasion of ending, of the realisation of outgrowth. James Murphy and his human soundsystem came late to the party as international Popstars, and their overwhelming popularity frightened them. They appeal to millions because they’re countercultural with a brain. They rage against both the machine and hipster twee but realise they do so in vain, and that’s okay. In the end it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re content with yourself. It’s a comforting thought, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to have fun. They go out with a euphoric bang, with all the funkadelic synthesisers and infectious beats they can muster. They’re my second favourite band for a reason.

9. Channel Orange - Frank Ocean

When you hear the acclaim ‘genius singer-songwriter’, you’d be forgiven for picturing a scruffy, chain-smoking folk singer rather than a weedy, introverted R&B idiosyncrat. But Frank Ocean is a genius singer-songwriter, and this is coming from an initial sceptic. Dwelling under the attention-drawing Hipster-Hop behemoth that is Odd Future, Ocean’s sensitivity, humanity and talent could flourish in stark contrast with his groupmates. Following on from his terrific debut, Nostalgia Ultra, Channel Orange is an opus of human emotion and social critique. As ambitious as it is, both thematically and musically, it’s Ocean’s personal direction, his endearing modesty, which really hits home. Robert Christgau summarises this elegant restraint better than I ever could; ‘when he's the sole composer Ocean resists making a show of himself—resists the dope hook, the smart tempo, the transcendent falsetto itself.’ It’s the humbling easiness of his meditation which vindicates him.

8. Bon Iver, Bon Iver - Bon Iver

Okay, Justin Vernon didn’t cathartically confine himself to self-imposed isolation in some backwater cabin with a guitar, a pen, some paper, and presumably a fuck-ton of soup, but I think Bon Iver is even better than For Emma. Vernon expanded the project by inviting in external parties, but while horns and steel drums are introduced, the record can’t be reduced to some pigeon-holing music industry cliché such as ‘natural progression’ or ‘sideways move’. As critic Josh Jackson agreeably observes, ‘it retains the beautiful melancholy of For Emma, but in nearly every way, it’s just more.’ As the title itself intimates, it’s exactly the same, only it isn’t. For this is still Vernon’s voice; the thunderous brass on ‘Perth’ or breezy horns on ‘Beth/Rest’ supplement his echoey waver and hazy guitar. Forgetting comparisons to previous work, Bon Iver, Bon Iver triumphs as an incandescently forlorn poem, illuminated in flowery synths, cryptic, moving lyrics, and the most gorgeous harmonies you’ll hear this decade.

7. On The Impossible Past - The Menzingers

My favourite Punk album of the decade, Greg Barnett’s lyrical pattern follows the Americana-glossed storytelling of Brian Fallon and The Gaslight Anthem. But boy do they surpass it. I mean sure, there’s still anecdotes about sitting glumly in Philadelphia bars, sobbing over break-ups, and dancing like you don’t care, but there’s also the ominous stench of mortality and excruciating reminiscence which drenches everything. Whether it’s the jaw-dropping confessional ‘The Obituaries’-‘Cause I've cursed my lonely memory with picture-perfect imagery’-or the impudent shrug of ‘I Can’t Seem To Tell’-‘Remember the days when I had a conscience? Yeh me neither’-it’s a gut-wrenchingly earnest work of admission. Death envelops the album, especially in its assessment of memory; its illusoriness, its deceptive falsehoods, and its aura of future possibility. It’s music of yearning nostalgia and bitter remembrance, of hope and despair; a lyrical masterpiece, handsomely augmented by aggressively emphatic riffs and soul-raising choruses.

6. Southeastern - Jason Isbell

What makes Southeastern a great album? At the time I made my end-of-year list even, my favourite album of 2013? Is it the effectually sparse chordwork? Jason Isbell’s graceful yet quietly booming vocals? It might be, but it’s probably his conceit. For in each of his songs, Isbell adopts the persona of a different, incredibly flawed American male, and opens up their humanity. He plays an ex wife-beating alcoholic on ‘Live Oak,’ and a womaniser-turned-carer for a dying woman on the incredible ‘Elephant.’ After exposing the fragility of human relationships, existence and our arbitrary concepts of morality, he concludes with a scathing indictment of first world problems on ‘Relatively Easy,’ asserting that, essentially, we’re worried about the wrong stuff. It’s soothing, tranquil, cold, jagged, tender, and indispensable. It’s simply one of the best Folk records in a long, long time.

5. The Greatest Generation - The Wonder Years

I never had an Emo phase. I had an 80s phase instead. I thought My Chemical Romance and 30 Seconds to Mars and Paramore and all that undulated stud-belted angst was a bit silly. It’s only been in last two or three years I’ve realised that there’s good and bad Emo in the same way there’s good and bad British Indie; there’s a Wonder Years and Brand New for each MCR and 30STM in the same way there’s a Bloc Party or Los Campesinos for every The Enemy. Underneath the indubitably catchy riffs and driving one-liners of Pop-Punk is a uniquely introverted, nostalgic, almost solipsistic voice. Some of the best lyricists working today deal in the oft-vilified realm of Emo, and possibly the best of all is The Wonder Years’s Dan Campbell. It’s tried-and-tested territory; invocations of heartbreak during teenage summers, confrontations with mortality in suburbs, but Campbell’s flair with turn-of-phrase reveals a conflicted disposition which both demonises and glorifies our ‘generation,’ and stresses the consequence of our adolescent upbringing. Will we be the ones to destroy our world or save it? Campbell doesn’t have answers, but he’s determined to find them in his, and our, past. The Greatest Generation is ultimately about the most Emoey of things; that interminable, desperate search for an identity. Campbell flirts with the frontier of the personal, national and humanist identity, and their expected paradoxes, and that’s why it’s so amazing. It’s about everything and absolutely nothing. One of the greatest Pop-Punk albums of all-time; fuck it, it’s my favourite.

4. My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West

While it’s not quite my favourite album of the past five years, in my honest opinion, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of the greatest artistic statements of the decade so far. It is, essentially, Kanye’s pathological megalith, appropriating him as a singular extreme of the human condition – pride, insecurity, and the dangers of self-reflection. MBDTF depicts Kanye at his most alien and relatable, a living personification of postmodernism’s headache, self-veneration, and complicitly self-destruction; the emptiness of the dream of corporate Eden. With all this heady subject matter, the most amazing thing is that Kanye appears entirely self-aware, entirely transparent. Every track offers something different. The hostile, toxic ‘Monster’ (dat verse from Nicki tho), the exhausted anxiety which props up the album’s opening and ending in ‘Who Will Survive In America’ and ‘Lost In The World’; Justin Vernon’s ethereal wail the impeccable companion in relaying this loneliness. In the indomitable, rumbling, intricate centrepiece, the brilliant ‘Runaway’, Kanye breaks down and builds himself up again arbitrated by the simplest, blandest piano chord. It’s the best song he’s ever recorded. MBDTF works as a thrilling, moving, terrifying essay on the inextricability of self-worship and self-loathing.

3. Benji - Sun Kil Moon

I know it’s been out for less than a year, but Benji is one of my most treasured albums. A series of wistfully told excerpts from Mark Kozalek’s weary, loosely fatalistic autobiography, accrue in one vividly sprawling canvas of the inaccessibility of life. I’m not sure whether it’s the elegant simplicity of the melodies, the sighing expectancy of Kozalek’s growl, or the neutrality of the lyrics, but it touches me in ways the vast majority of music can’t realise. Crackling with childhood nostalgia and a near-overbearing sense of mortality, Benji’s existential haughtiness is tempered by moving devotions to family and friends, and genuinely funny and profound recollections about fame (‘Ben’s my Friend’) and sex (‘Dogs’). The impassivity of the words is disarming at first, but it implores a resounding universality; in Kozalek’s stories we find ourselves and our own thoughts and emotions and passions and fears and sorrows and joys.

2. Celebration Rock - Japandroids

Celebration Rock is a fairly non-sequiturial album name; I mean sure, it’s triumphant in a carefree, belligerently philanthropic sort of way, but this celebration is more defiantly, spiritedly decadent, than just flippantly decadent. ‘Mortally Urgent Celebration Rock’ would be a more appropriate title. Japandroids aren’t focussed on Japandroids, and all its synonyms of 30s mid-life crisis, anymore. Nah, now they’re obsessed with that most gargantuan ubiquity of living, as well or as shittily as you possibly want. Brian King implores that how you live is irrelevant to actually living. My favourite song is LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends because it captures perfectly the transubstantiation of friendship, experience and situational ephemerality, the best of active living. This is an entire tracklist of that. Celebration Rock, with its irreconcilable guitars, translucent drums and unapologetically Punk-Pop ‘Woah Oh Ohs’ roars living with a resonant, air-punching clarity.

1. Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City - Kendrick Lamar

Section.80 defines flawed masterpiece, a rambling mess invaded by frequent flexes of utter genius. Good Kid M.A.A.D. City is more rapt and lucid, a tightly woven narrative simmering with ideas and emotions held together by Kendrick’s intensive musicality. His flow and production is predictably immaculate, so we’ll move on from that. The autobiography is one of the most common subsidiaries of the ‘Concept Album,’ with Pink Floyd’s groundbreaking The Wall still holding rank as its definitive ideal. Somehow Good Kid feels more personal than even The Wall, more deep-rooted. The very title explicates the record’s central dichotomy; the ‘good kid’ struggling in the ‘M.A.A.D. City’. The frayed portrait of gang existence on ‘M.A.A.D. City’ and ‘The Art of Peer Pressure’ illustrate a fragile boy desperately trying to survive in violent conditions. It’s powerfully inventive, the transition in ‘M.A.A.D. City’ announced by the ‘WAKE YO’ PUNK ASS UP’ soundbite a microcosm of Kendrick’s terrible epiphany. Conversely, the album is peppered with familial warmth, humour and affection, whether it’s a voicemail with his uncle yelling at him about a Dominos pizza or his mum warbling a genuinely heart-warming plea to be better. Sure he raps about pussy on ‘Sherane,’ but only to convey teenage Kendrick’s self-conscious, perturbed sexuality. Sure he raps about having bags of dolla on ‘Swimming Pools,’ but only to express his anxiety over how extreme opulence will corrupt him. ‘Backseat Freestyle’ is ripping the absolute piss out of the Rap culture teenage Kendrick adulated. That it’s a banger with the sultriest of beats is a bonus. In ‘Real’ he croons that ‘none of that shit made me real.’ True that. It’s a celebration of the power of family, music and self-empowerment, and a devastating subversion of the frivolity of New-School Rap. Not only my favourite album of the decade so far, but my favourite Hip-Hop album of all-time.