Best Albums of 2008

Because the "editor" of another blog I occasionally contribute to left my list out, I'm slapping mine down here and waving it in all your faces (all two of you faithful whiskey followers, one of which is myself) because I want someone out there to be able to read it, since I toiled and agonized over it. I recall waking up at 2am because I thought of something I just had to say about one of the albums. Crazy? Probably.


My Favorite Albums of 2008:

10. Re-release of Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair.

I dismissed this album as a teenager and in dredging it up from the past in this anniversary year I realized that this was a time capsule of songs that only now are age-appropriate. Phair’s biting, unapologetic lyrics scream and claw for attention, respect and affection in a sausage-dominated world.

9. We Brave Bee Stings and All, Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down.

Little. Yellow. Edie Brickell-like. Better.

8. Keep reading.

7. Midnight Organ Fight, Frightened Rabbit.

In May, these guys upstaged headliners Oxford Collapse at the Empty Bottle as the opening act. The crowd cleared to an embarrassingly near empty before Oxford Collapse came on. In subsequent shows the billing got reversed. Talk about an ego check. All night long lead singer Scott Hutchison’s flannel clung uncomfortably to his drenched bod and I could see a long string of saliva connecting his lips to the mike from my distant position by the bar. You may call it a disgusting overrun of bodily fluids. I call it passion.

6. The Stand-Ins, Okkervil River

5. Keep reading…

4. Re-Arrange Us, Mates of State

3. You & Me, The Walkmen.

2. Oracular Spectacular, MGMT (Digital release in 2007 *)

This album made too big a splash this year to be left off any list. Time is one giant continuum anyway and years are just arbitrary markers invented by humans in order for civilization to function, right? So please don’t burn me on a technicality. This album plain rocked and I will forever associate it with the summer of 2008

1. Visiter, the Dodos.

The Dodos had me at “Fools” and by the time I got to “the Season” it was downright abusive. In trying to get our arms around a band we often draw comparisons as a way to somehow get a handle of the music. Anchor it to something familiar and we suddenly know what to do with it. I haven’t been able to do that with the Dodos. I simply can’t tie them down and tame them. They are unnerving when they scream, refreshing for their ingenuity, and irresistibly rhythmic. Over and over I have found myself drawn to this album when I can’t find a taste for anything else in my music collection. That wily index finger always loops its way back to Visiter on my iPod. This one was a cupcake.

* I would also try to sneak in Rogue Wave’s 2007 Asleep at Heaven’s Gate and Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam for the same reason as my MGMT pick, but I won’t push it. It takes the general public and myself a little while to warm up to and possibly go ape-shit over an album. By the time festival season hits often it’s the previous year’s albums that become the anthems for this summer. So I find it hard to completely fail to mention some of the best music I heard this year purely for the fact that the official release date was in the previous calendar year. It’s an interesting lag time phenomenon. Maybe that lag time shortens the more guru your indie rock status becomes. As a rockologist you will have such refined and discriminating taste that you will identify a great album upon first listen! So I concede that I’m a novice and my list, well frankly, is a little retarded. With that in mind, please feel free to guess which yearling phantom albums made numbers 5 and 8.