2008 Albums of the Year

And now for Part Three of the 2008-Year-End-Smash-'Em-Up-Rally-Blowout-Party: our favorite albums of the year, but this time with less consensus! Still more smashing-up and blowing-out to be had tomorrow...



Beach House - Devotion (Carpark)

Full disclosure: I spent most of the year buried in the past. I investigated Slash Records’ early roster and became enamored of Fear and X. I huddled in bed listening to Colossal Youth and Nebraska. When I emerged from my early-eighties cocoon, it was to revisit Pavement – I didn’t see the need to venture past 1999.

Now, I heard a lot from 2008, but only a few records stuck. Of those, it was the woozy dream-pop of Beach House’s Devotion that hit hardest. For months, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have followed me—we’ve walked with as much ease on balmy June pre-dawns as on frigid December eves. And after that time, I am still enraptured with her voice, and his staccato snaps and clicks, and the way the organ wraps me in that sweet, sweet narco-haze.

Runners-up
Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08
Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams
Portishead - Third

- Adam Rux



The Hold Steady - Stay Positive (Vagrant)

The Hold Steady is not a band you feel ambivalent about, and this one’s not going to change any minds. If you weren't turned off by Craig Finn’s beat poetry shout alouds before, it won’t bother you this time. Likewise, a bunch of studio polish isn't about to make his style any easier on the ears. The narrative is ever so slightly less direct and some of the hedonism has gotten older, wiser and lamer, but that’s nuance: kids are still getting drunk and touching each other or wishing they could, getting older and straying from Christ only to come back broken, and looking back at their vanished youth with a hangover and no regrets. I dig that stuff mostly because of Finn’s particularly solid rhetoric and partly because it’s rock ‘n roll. Which puts me in the same camp as the rest of the staff here - the camp where current music trends are ugly pastiche, as shallow as a Wikipedia entry and just as devoid of experience. So it's nice to hear someone say he was educated by Iggy Pop and The Clash and some punk bands I've never heard before. And it's not all talk: They’ve found the stones to stick the piano in the backseat where it belongs this time around and Tad Kubler mashes his way to some well-deserved spotlight. 2008, from my vantage inside it, looks like a big year for backslides and I mean to lavish sizable praise on Stay Positive when I say it’s a step forward.

Runners-up
Bun B - II Trill
Lil' Wayne - Tha Carter III
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
The Walkmen - You & Me

- Kiernan Maletsky



Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08 (Matador)

Yes, it's technically a singles compilation. We're going to ignore that.

After turning down a shot in the majors and opting instead to crash the home of the mid-priced classic, Jay Lindsey set out on a six-month run of seven-inch releases that culminated in an aptly-titled collection back in October and a five-star review from this here publication. Packed with the As and Bs and a sweet little Clean rip-off that's oddly (and tellingly) a major standout, the finished product stands as the most important musical document of the year, tracing its roots to all the right places and representing the best of what will survive history's editorship when the bloated, rotting corpse of the neu-folk/psych/disco/narco/electro vogue is finally shown to its cold, inevitable grave. Rock and roll.

Runners-up
Evangelicals - The Evening Descends
The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
Why? - Alopecia

- Zach Noland



Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)

Bless its little hype-driven heart, 2008 really tried to push some indefensible garbass on our mushy and malleable minds. Musical progress is a tricky devil, and I think we’re still in the feeling-out process of finding something we can all agree it’s acceptable to like. But, come on, Cut Copy is terrible. Mash-ups, throw-away mixtapes, “Blind” for SotY (too soon?) - this is where we’re headed? Fleet Foxes is, at times, as derivative as it gets, which is why it’s something that all these trends are not: defensible. Go back and look at my top 20 of last year and accept my apologies up front. It’s a mishmash of records that could only have been released in the year they were, and I don’t listen to any of them a year later. Like my compatriot Mr. Rux, this was a year for me to hit the wayback machine, and they told me I could only bring one album with me and Fleet Foxes was it. This is not a choice made by process of elimination. For me, this record has spanned two continents and 110-degree seasonal temperature variations, sounds dreadful on the busted speakers of my ’02 Neon but gets played more than any other, sparked the review that drives all Phoenix-area traffic to this website, and contains the most earnest, goose-pimplin’ musical highs in years. You’ve studied to it, you’ve fallen asleep to it, you’ve made love in a Spokane-area cabin to it: Ladies and gentlemen, your album of the year. Long live that which has already lived for a while.

Runners-up
Ruby Suns - Sea Lion
Evangelicals - The Evening Descends
TV on the Radio - Dear Science
Grand Salvo - Death

- Michael Ziman