Top 20 Albums of 2008

After casting Of Montreal as glam-fisted shrine to personal reinvention with the sprawling, dawning, deliriously brilliant Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Kevin Barnes' 9th OM LP finds the flamboyant frontman making like the Elephant 6 answer to Prince. As the band refine their wonky tweelectro-funk licks and melt songs one into the next, Barnes trades in a wanton, lurid, randy theatricality, singing spectacularly ridiculous things like “when we get together/it's always hot magic,” “I took her standing in the kitchen/ass against the sink,” “you only like him because he's sexually appealing,” and “I wanna turn you on/I wanna make you come.” In the normally-sexless realm of indie-pop, hearing such sung aloud seems near pornographic.

English electro geek Ben Jacobs spent six years beavering away at his third record; fashioning hyperactive, high-speed pop-songs —that sound somewhat like Frank Zappa programming an early-’80s Atari— in a labour-intensive, neuroses-courting manner. But, as manic as the music may get, Parallax Error Beheads You isn't a work of simple ridiculousness. Singing in a pitch-shifted, Prince-groping falsetto, Jacobs —confessedly obsessed with the idea he'd die before the disc was finished— laces his lyrical comedy with thematic mortality (“nothing happens when you die/you don’t leave your body or fly off into the sky”). Surviving the six-year-ordeal, Jacobs has come out clutching a marriage of musical lunacy and lyrical poignancy worth the wait.

Born Ruffians' short, sharp, spastic songs sound exactly like Modest Mouse circa The Fruit That Ate Itself: post-Pavement guitar klang, sharp-teeth’d hick balladry, hip-hop-ish hard-cadence/hype-chorus/beat-boxin’ vox. Frontman Luke LaLonde suitably gets his Isaac Brock on: all herky-jerky rhythms and an adenoidal whine he sometimes slurs into mock drawl. That derivative nature reads bad in print, but plays well on disc. The raw recording, amped-up energy, joyous exuberance, and lack of self-consciousness the Toronto trio ride on their debut album —especially three minute crankers like “Badonkadonkey” and “Hedonistic Me”— serves as a salty antidote to Modest Mouse's sad decline into bloated, flaccid festival behemoth.

Super-exuberant, violin-wielding Welsh twee-pop jamboree Los Campesinos! might be the only band on this countdown who actually sing about the human need to put things into numbered rundowns: “My Year in Lists”' frenetic 109 seconds dedicated to beginning the new year by writing down your Top 5 Resolutions. For the exclamatory co-ed septet, their pledges for 2008 might've gone: 1) Release two albums in the space of eight months. 2) Encourage fey wallflowers to let loose with out-of-control dance moves. 3) Take No Age and Times New Viking on tour with you. 4) Create a body of funny, sad, sarcastic, endlessly-quotable lyrics riddled with indie-pop pop-cultural references. 5) Unleash a debut disc that's one of the ought-eight's best.

Ra Ra Riot's orchestrally-rich, perpetually peppy indie-pop betrays both the band's black back-story and frontman Wesley Miles' poetic ambitions. Drawing from wordsmiths like e.e. cummings and Virginia Woolf, Miles maps human emotion onto the snowy New England landscape, and plots humanity's fraught awareness of their own mortality amidst the natural cycle of decay/death/rebirth. Given that original Ra Ra Riot drummer John Pike drowned in Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts in 2007, there's a sense of sadness in every word, adding layers of darkness and depth to RRR's jaunty indie jams. And the learned, librarian nature of Miles' inspirations makes Ra Ra Riot the coolest combo to flaunt scholastic aptitude this side of their pals Vampire Weekend.

Speaking of... over the past two years, these ultra-preppy, fresh-faced, polo-shirt-and-boat-shoe-sporting New Yorkers have accrued ridiculous amounts of hype and almost as much backlash. Yet, it's hard to doubt the quality of their first-up, self-titled album, which has unexpectedly proved to be enduringly endearing since its January release. Blessed with the light, whimsical, belletristic, Ivy League airs of a Wes Anderson movie, the VW LP creates an indie-pop pedagogue's paradise; Ezra Koenig's simple lyrics forever dancing across the courtyards and lawns of prestigious North-East academies. Musically, the quartet pretty blatantly mine Paul Simon's Graceland for licks, but even that doesn't dint the good-time goodness of this teflon set.

The ‘She’ may be cutiepie actress Zooey Deschanel, but She & Him aren't some slumming actor's vanity project. Teaming with prewar-blues-lovin', forever-mumblin' songsmith M.Ward ('Him,' indeed), Deschanel has made a warm, syrupy, sweetly record of top-shelf, jukebox-friendly, softly-country pop. Whilst Deschanel warbles like Patsy Cline, Ward apes Phil Spector: borrowing the bewig'd gun-wielder's neo-Wagnerian wall-of-sound bombast for the reverb-drenched “I Was Made For You,” which multi-tracks Deschanel into a one-woman Crystals, and the showstopping torchsong “Sentimental Heart.” The latter opens Volume One in resplendent, orchestral grandeur, and offers immediate reassurance: Deschanel can clearly write a tune, and carry one, too.

As far as authentic, psych-revivalist, wood-dwelling shamanists go, Festival don't pass muster. They are, rather, a 'pop' take on freak-folk: less interested in staging pantomimed pagan rituals than reveling in the simplicities of sweet melody and rich harmony. The first Festival record finds sisters Lindsay and Alexis Powell —aided by brothers Jamin and Jake Orrall, former members of Tennesseean teen-rock troupe Be Your Own Pet— doing plenty of zither thrumming, percussion rattling, and kalimba plunking, but such brittle instrumentage is used as contrasting color. Though their instruments be folkie, the sisters summon such only to serve the glories of good old-fashioned singalong pop-songs; their voices forever ringing clear and true.

Justin Vernon's Bon Iver back-story is romantic as stand-alone anecdote —guy, heartbroken, holes up in his dad's cabin-in-the-woods, spends a Wisconsin winter chopping wood by day, playing his blues away by night— but it'd be just a well-spun yarn if not for the album that came out of it. And For Emma, Forever Ago, a stone-cold classic break-up album, makes it the stuff of modern-day myth. Snowbound and suffering, Vernon plays his spartan set of lovelorned laments with such delicacy and reverence they seem like spirituals. And though it's earnt its rep as some lo-fi outing, Vernon shows a suspiciously-sophisticated production touch; the many layers of “For Emma” spinning an intricate, multi-timbral web of brassy heartache.

It's rare when a formal, studious approach breeds better musical results than a ragged, intuitive one; yet Sam Amidon's mannered, stoic, prosaic All is Well goes far beyond the limits of freak-folk's adoptive, ad-hoc primitivism. Interpreting ten traditional folksongs, Amidon sings them in a croaky baritone bordering on monotone. His voice contrasts, sometimes violently, with Nico Muhly's musically dexterous, sonically complex, avant-gardist exercises in orchestral ambition. Whilst that might read as, at best, an interesting experiment, the results are the exact opposite: this restraint somehow summoning savage emotional outbursts from ambushed listeners. Amidon and Muhly's talents were then wed together oncemore on the amazing #10 album...