Contrasting Pitchfork's top ten of 05, 04, and 03 with the consensus picks for 06 is real exciting to me. I love a lot of the music from many of these top tens. I own probably more than half the albums. But these albums are cool. The two best albums out of this year, St. Elsewhere and Return to Cookie Mountain are two of the wierdest, and at times goofiest funk-fests to come around. Throw in Hot Chip, Joanna Newsome, and the Knife and there's something refreshing about this year to me. Gnarls Barkly, Newsome, and TVOTR are all doing quite well commercially too. Right now on Amazon they are all in the top 75 for albums sales, months after their albums came out. Amazon isn't exactly mass society, but it is a much bigger pond than Pitchfork, Sterogum, Gorrila vs Bear, etc.
Posted by matt at January 7, 2007 2:40 PM | TrackBackhi mymatt,
glad you will be posting again. now i can read the writing voice you use when you write to moe than one person. ;-)
i have an aesthetic suggestion. the blue and red used on the title of your blog creates some major visual vibration that is a bit hard on the eyes. unless you have a purpose in the visual vibation, a light blue background would fix the aesthetic noise.
Posted by: brae at January 7, 2007 7:06 PMI'll give you Return to Cookie Mountain, but St. Elsewhere over Silent Shout. Convince me.
Posted by: will at January 8, 2007 1:28 AMI haven't listened to Silent Shout all the way through, mainly just the singles. So I can't comment on it as a whole. There is a harshness to the songs that I've heard that doesn't resonate as strongly with me.
As I think about it more, the reason these albums are my two is that they blur the dualism that has run through American pop music. On one hand we have music made by white people, and on the other music made by black people. That's been the story for a long time. Both these outfits make music that isn't clearly made by any particular people.
Posted by: matt at January 8, 2007 9:17 AM