10 Great 2008 Debut Albums

A crew of fresh-faced boys hiding under wide-brimmed hats and flowering beards, Fleet Foxes are country-psych Seattleites smitten with the simple pleasures of harmonic singing. The quintet's four-part harmonies evoke the familial, farmland idyll; in which clans wile away summer nights on porches, and winter eves round fires, by caroling in communion. Suitably enough, their Sub Pop-issued, self-titled LP is alive with tales of the family: Robin Pecknold's cracked, Neil Young-ish tenor pacing songs in which blood runs thicker than water. Fittingly, the record's ostensible lovesong, “Blue Ridge Mountains,” openly shows its heart lays close to home: “Sean, don't get careless/I'm sure it'll be fine/I love you, I love you/Oh, brother of mine.”

Though the UK press hyped them (to death) as this year's Franz Ferdinand/Klaxons, Foals hardly resemble some oversold dance-rockers du jour. Rather than recycling Gang Of Four riffs, these pals-of-Battles cite “insects” and “Basic Channel German techno” as guitar-heroes. Foals' six-strings work like dot paintings: tapping out single staccato notes until they form recognizable shapes. Produced by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Antidotes shows his influence —highly-detailed multitracking, stabs of Antibalas brass, Katrina Ford guest caterwauling— without submitting to it. Foals, essentially, ‘party up’ math-rock, dressing its nerdy complexity —polyrhythmic percussion, polymetric guitars— in dancing shoes and shouty sloganeering.

Once “the black guy playing the pink Flying V” in insipid nu-metal-gone-nu-rave novelty-act Test Icicles, Devonte Hynes' evolution into Lightspeed Champion was most unexpected. Bunkering down with the Bright Eyes family in Omaha, the London hipster authored a grand, rich, countrified singer-songwriter record. The only carryover from his old gig is the abuse of irony: Hynes penning orchestral ballads with names like “Devil Tricks For A Bitch,” and sweetly singing things like “this is going all to s**t” and “we kiss and I’m sick in your mouth.” The irony isn’t juvenile, this time, but perfectly-pitched: the incongruousness between lyrics and music embodying the natural culture-clash of a hip-hop-lovin’ Scotsman playing country-and-western.

In the discofied dreams of Andrew Butler, the “gay utopia” of 1970s New York’s Paradise Garage lives on. A fan of, um, the Ancient Greeks, Butler records as Hercules and Love Affair, and this eponymous album enshrines him as the heir to the fallen angel of disco-as-art, Arthur Russell. Though helped by members of !!! and LCD Soundsystem, Butler's no punk-funker; his tonally authentic, totally unironic productions drawing from Giorgio Moroder and Jean-Marc Cerrone as sweeping strings, muted trumpets, and echo effects are ladled over compressed drumbeats and elastic basslines. Roping in an array of gender-bending singers —Antony, Nomi, Kim Ann Foxman— Butler is both paying heed to NYC's queer history and searching for his very own utopia.

All babyfaced cheeks and keening, little-girl voice, Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson —Lykke Li to you and me— is a 22-year-old Swede playing up a pop-poppet’s persona to surreptitiously scuff modern pop's gleaming artifice. Roping in Bjorn Yttling (of Peter Bjorn and John/Yttling Jazz) and an array of actual instruments (percussion, piano, harpsichord, celeste, theremin, flute, kazoo), Zachrisson eschews rote dancefloor fantasies for aching, acoustic takes on tortured adolescence. Though misdiagnosed as successor to starlets like Robyn and Kylie, Lykke Li is far less just a 'face,' far more her own woman: stellar, singalong songs like “I'm Good, I'm Gone” and “Dance. Dance. Dance” rolling off her own pen, not some pop-song production-line.

Lykke Li's touring buddies are a married couple from Gothenburg who've reduced music to its bare, elemental essentials: rhythm and voice. With husband on drums and wife on the mic, the nattily-named Wildbirds & Peacedrums fashion intensely expressive songforms from their skeletal set-up. Drawing from post-punk, torchsongs, gospel hymnals, and oral folk tradition, their debut W&P LP plays like a series of devotionals. Mariam Wallentin shows not just the requisite robust pipes required for gospel singing, but significant vocal dexterity, jumping from soul-stirring to punk screeching with ease. Rather than turning her voice heavenward, Wallentin directs it to her beau at the back of stage; forsaking God in favor of a more tangible love.

A tiny Canary Islander oft clad in lurid red pants, Pablo Díaz-Reixa makes like a one-man Avalanches, cutting up a smattering of samples into overflowing outpourings of utter joy. Pulling from a library of Brazilian, Spanish, and North African records, Díaz-Reixa funnels cascading torrents of polyrhythmic percussion into manic, rave-friendly shrines to repetition. Where much modern dancefloor production is pure reductionism, El Guincho is all about maximalism. As Díaz-Reixa slathers on layer after layer of scratchy beat-loops, he's seemingly in search of a state of sensorial overload; a heightened delirium in which the body naturally responds with convulsive, propulsive dance. Few records truly deserve to be called 'tribal.' This is one.

The striking artwork of Casey Dienel's first White Hinterland turn —which, if I was cobbling together an album-covers of the year list, would reside somewhere near the top— shows a clan of hyenas feasting from the bloodied carcass of a fallen zebra. In Dienel's piano-driven song-cycle, which draws from folk traditions of battlefield balladry, this image symbolizes the treatment of the felled soldier; where those who rush to canonize these wasted 'war heroes' are invariably parasitic, using noble casualties to incite their warring cause. On “Napoleon at Waterloo,” Dienel undermines the powers-that-be; her disdain redolent as she captures the cowed mentality of those hapless grunts destined to death by the hand of misguided military command.

A dandyish Californian fop who is attempting to be, simultaneously, both man and myth, Jeremy Jay is a young man out to author his own persona —his own life— from scratch. On a debut disc dubbed, by Jay's label K Records, “a statement of fact and fiction,” Jay goes to great lengths to portray himself as an anachronistic, out-of-time, renaissance-man type figure. Beneath Jay's coiffed façade, however, is the heart of a true songwriter. Though the retrophonic, reverb-drenched production plays it one part Phil Spector, two parts Martin Hannett, Jay's songs are, in contrast, painfully sincere. Sounding like Buddy Holly by way of Jonathan Richman, the young crooner lays his heart on the line on every cut.

Leaving New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, violinst Osa Atoe and drummer Adee Roberson settled nestled in the bosom of Portland's punk-rock scene. Joined by bassist Cassia Gammill, they forged New Bloods under the influence of original post-punk dames like Kleenex, Au Pairs, and The Raincoats. The band build a brittle take on queer-punk from scattershot drums, stumbling bass, and scraping violin; the absence of guitar creating a perfect, democratic balance where each instrument is equal in importance. Vocally, they follow the same tack: the trio singing staggered rounds that stumble over each other. Taking emotional cues from Atoe's versatile violin, New Bloods can be either beautiful or bratty, and sometimes both at once.