Top 20 Albums of 2008

As well as an ongoing relationship with Sam Amidon, Philip Glass protégé Nico Muhly has worked with Will Oldham, Antony, Björk, and the evil geniuses of demented “kids show” Wonder Showzen. Though schooled in Glassian minimalism, Muhly's approach to sound reminds me, moreso, of Matthew Barney's approach to image. Drawing on folksong, myth, black-metal, and Ancient Roman-esque excess, Muhly fashions fashionable, esoteric, nakedly-ambitious 'movements' that allow for both specific artist's meaning and listener interpretation. Harnessing a pop-Stockhausen approach, Mothertongue's clamorous, calamitous compositions are “exploded” folksongs, their cut-up syllables undermining the ability of language to communicate with clarity and/or fidelity.

On her genius-like 2005 LP Le Fil, Camille was like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Dressing her radical, high-concept song-cycle —which built a suite of songs from layers of vocal/bodily sounds, then strung them together by a single, unbroken, album-long drone— in flirty-chanteuse threads, Camille duped half-a-million Frenchmen into buying her renegade experiment. Her bilingual follow-up, Music Hole, ditches that singularity for a series of ridiculous costume-changes; Camille crooning, coughing, and beatboxing through a set of ever-shifting style(s). The disc's oddest moment comes with the high-camp “Money Note,” where Camille cooks up a hilarious, mutant-disco anthem that mocks the multi-octave vocal hysteria of Mariahfied power-balladry.

After a quarter-century of ragged, red-raw music, Carla Bozulich's ever-shifting musical career can be charted not as ebbs and flows, but grand, tidal, heaving shifts. Though Bozulich's more 'together' records —like the Geraldine Fibbers' 1995 rock-opera Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home, or her conceptual Willie Nelson reimagining, Red Headed Stranger, in 2003— have been her most acclaimed, to me Carla B. seems most vital when she's at her most unhinged. A decade after Scarnella's free-form funereal séance delved deep into the shadows, Bozulich's first Evangelista set ventures back to that spectral, lunatic fringe. Made in league with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Hello, Voyager is an album utterly unafraid of its own darkness.

Early in their hyper-prolific, discographically-scattered career, Los Angelino 'tropical punks' Abe Vigoda sounded like the archetypal band-on-the-brink-of-collapse: instruments colliding in tenuously-assembled songs in which differing parts barely coexisted. The quartet's third LP —issued on the No Age-helmed Post Present Medium imprint— turns that notion on its ear: the initial, bristling sense of supposed chaos slowly giving way to reveal a band in total command of their splattered jams. All snaky guitar lines, caterwauling vocals, and rarely-restrained sense of joy, Skeleton oft trips into the red, but even when Abe Vigoda really get rollicking, it feels like you're in safe hands; able to enjoy the thrills without fear of the spills.

Yoni Wolf's been swingin' for these bleachers for years: the limber songsmith eyeing the green, green grass on the other side of that left-field fence, where his tangled-up marriage of indie-pop strum, tweelectro blip, and articulated neuroses could frolic freely. This time, he's finally hit it out of the park. The fourth Why? album is a grand poetry slam of slacker-pop jams; Wolf —in his half-rapped, half-sung, wholly-Jewish wordplay— ably hitting lyrical clean-up. For Reds-cap-clad Why? fans screaming in the cheap seats, quoting Alopecia can easily become a national pastime; my favorite line/s going something like “you're a beautiful and violent word/with the skinny neck/of a Chinese bird/in a fading ancient painting.“

To listeners, PAS/CAL may sound like Frankensteinian indie-pop scientists: electrifyingly, brain-zappingly stitching together the genre-juggling glamour-puss-ing of Of Montreal, the phrase-turning vocal dexterity of Phoenix, and the densely-referential lyricism of Destroyer. In reality, this preening indie-pop co-op is likely just obsessed with old Steely Dan records. Finally issuing their first-ever LP after five years' worth of EPs, Casimer Pascal's motley Motown crew summon the hedonistic spirit of early '70s studio excess, slathering hysterical falsetto and baroque piano and fuzztone lead-breaks into a set of singalong songs crammed with an overabundance of words. It adds up to an album that seems both slight and mighty at once.

On her self-titled El Perro del Mar debut, Gothenburg's Sarah Assbring made an album contrasting joyous music with joyless lyrics; dressing wall-of-sound pop symphonies in depressed confessions like “I’m sad all day long/and at night I think about/being sad all day long.” Her second EPDM LP flips that script: matching minimalist hymnals of sad, eerie organ chords to lyrics overflowing with buoyant, bountiful, beautiful positivity. Repeating her song's titles —“Happiness Won Me Over,” “Glory To The World,” “Do Not Despair”— like affirmations, Assbring has built a holy shrine to the glories of feeling good. Her songs aren't exercises in mindless optimism, but precious, tender, solemn celebrations of newfound, hard-won happiness.

It seems impossible that the singer-songwriter could, in 2008, be completely redefined, but Frida Hyvönen's second LP-proper does just that. Silence is Wild finds the six-foot-tall Swede forsaking 'straight' songform, relinquishing the reassuring familiarity of verse/chorus in favor of a naked, narrative-driven form whose self-evident subjects amount to an exhausting study of their author. Even when songs seem anecdotal —the playful “Dirty Dancing” a heated confession, the astonishing “December” a mundane tale of a morning at the abortion clinic— Hyvönen remains unafraid of true poetry, settling on words that, at first listen, seem awkward and jarring. This makes for a disc that manages to remain unexpected and unsettling with every listen.

On their third longplayer, Portland's Parenthetical Girls have gone wholly orchestral, fashioning a fruity set of densely-scored, elaborately-layered mini-symphonies drawing from folk like Raymond Scott, Scott Walker, and Burt Bacharach. The songs zip about with the jaunty jollity of a distant era, their devil-may-care accelerando bursts pirouetting with the kind of gay abandon usually reserved for exuberant musicals. Forever running counter to the orchestrated schmaltz is frontman Zac Pennington: his fruity, gender-confused crooning; his thesaurus-leafing lyrics; his perpetual lyrical attraction to the bodily and the grotesque. Wedding such words to woofing woodwinds and zinging strings, Entanglements is an inspired marriage.

Once known as First Nation, this year these three New Yorker dames renamed themselves Rings. They hoped it'd be a totem for their spiritual beliefs, of all matter existing in an unending, circular cycle. Like the universe itself(!), Black Habit initially feels like pure chaos: massed fragments of drums, piano, and voice dowsed in echo, then phased in-and-out of a spiraling, limitless space. Yet, with every subsequent spin, recognizable shapes appear; sounds that once seemed serendipitous starting to feel far too fated, too mystical, too meaningful to be random acts of chance. Rare are the records that remind you of how it feels to actually, actively exist. Impossible are those that, somehow, seem to embody that experience.