2005 Retrospectrola
by Marc Hirsh

This year’s list is the result of a power vacuum. With so many of my old reliables – Aimee Mann, The New Pornographers, Liz Phair, Ivy, Michael Penn, Sleater freakin’ Kinney – letting me down in one way or another, the upstarts scrambled for position and clawed their way into my consciousness. The result is yet another truncated list (three years running!) with only two holdouts from previous years’ lists, a handful of folks who surprised me when I was tempted to write them off for good and one newbie. What am I to conclude from this? That my tastes are in flux? That I’m becoming cranky and bitter at precisely the moment in my professional writing career that I should be more open and enthusiastic? That my traditional favorite artists have legitimately lost the spark that initially drew me to them and are now simply going through the motions? I’m just going to go with “These are seven albums that I dug like crazy this year” and leave it at that.

1) Spoon, Gimme Fiction (Merge).  2002’s Kill The Moonlight saw Spoon futzing with arrangements like mad studio rats eviscerating their own creations. Gimme Fiction takes what they learned from that labwork and finds practical applications for their findings. As befits a band that whittled itself back down to a two-piece while generating a palpable sense of physical space, the album was simultaneously more expansive and tighter than previous outings. Singer/guitarist Britt Daniel widened Spoon’s scope on songs like the relentlessly circular “My Mathematical Mind” and the Beatles-’66 propulsion of “Sister Jack,” while drummer Jim Eno was the hidden star of the whole shebang, locking onto the beat of each song and not wavering an inch even when it must have been torturous to avoid the temptation of throwing in just a teensy bit of flash. The result was the most surprising groove-centered album in recent memory, and even though the start of the brilliant opener “The Beast And Dragon, Adored” (which fuses Daniel’s melodic alchemy and oblique, expressionistic lyrics to Eno’s measured thump) is nothing more than an impossibly sustained and resonant piano chord, it sounds for all the world like taking a hammer to a giant bell and letting it peal out for everyone to hear.

2) Various, Veronica Mars Original Television Soundtrack (Nettwerk). Sure, I’m a fan of the show, enough for me to proceed more or less directly from the doctor’s office where I was being treated for a freshly broken toe (dodgeball accident, and no, I’m not kidding) to a line where I stood, cane in hand, for two hours straight for the privilege of spending approximately one minute getting autographs and photos with each member of the cast this past April. But in a way, familiarity with the show is a distraction that turns the soundtrack into a concept album that it has no pretenses of being. So strong that it forced me to reevaluate material by Cotton Mather, Ivy, Delays and 46bliss from albums that had previously slipped past my eardrums without making much of an impression, it’s simply a collection of songs varied enough (from the bratty girl-punk of the Faders’ “No Sleep Tonight” to the acoustic balladry of the Format’s “On Your Porch,” with electronica, Britpop and psychedelia in between) to prevent ear fatigue while still holding together well enough to complement and build on one another. There’s a definite beginning, middle and end; rare enough for any album, it’s practically unheard-of for multi-artist samplers, even good ones. You’d be lucky if the next mix CD you receive is half as good.

3) The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday (Frenchkiss). That sound you hear in songs like the roaring “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night” and the oddly touching go-to-hell of “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” is Craig Finn listening to Born To Run and saying, “I accept your challenge.” Springsteen wins, of course. But it’s about fucking time somebody else got into the goddamned game. Bonus points for invoking Kate Bush. Maximum bonus points for meaning it.

4) Eisley, Room Noises (Reprise). “Where I live,” sang Tanya Donnelly back in 1995, “there’s a lady who walks everywhere on her hands/She don’t trust where her feet want to take her.” Room Noises is the sound of four siblings and a pal finding that town on a map and moving in. Building handsomely not only on the promise of EPs like Laughing City and Marvelous Things but on the legacy of Belly that not even Donnelly seems interested in furthering, Eisley showed that it could sustain its dreamlike beauty of a world filled with pixie dust over the course of a full-length album, the band’s first. Sisters Stacy and Sherri Dupree twist their voices around each other as the music tilts ever so slightly on its axis, skewed but untroubled and filled with moments of impossible gorgeousness. “One day, ah-ah-I slowly floated away,” begins the song with the same title, and by then, it’s no surprise to see them escaping gravity.

5) Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better (Domino). Finally writing some songs to go with their hooks, the impeccably dressed Scots burn right out of the gate with “Fallen” and follow it with the magnificently sleazy “Do You Want To” (the video for which actually amps up the sleaze factor, if you can believe it) before coming up with a handful of genuinely affecting slower numbers like “Walk Away” and “Eleanor Put Your Boots On.” If their first album had been this good, then they would have lived up to their hype. As it is, by my count, they’re one behind. It starts stronger than it ends, but it ends stronger than they left off last time. That’s good enough for me.

6) M.I.A., Arular (XL). She’s a Sri Lankan rapper based in the United Kingdom performing in a style created in the United States by descendents of Africans who got her first major public exposure through an ad for a Japanese automobile company. Welcome to the new global economy.

7) OK Go, Oh No (Capitol). In light of Matthew Sweet’s peculiar lack of mojo over the last half-decade, OK Go’s sophomore album is all the more welcome. The Chicago band roughs up the guitar, throws in some dance beats both fervid (“A Million Ways,” as hot a disco tune as the Clash’s “The Magnificent Seven”) and creamy (“Oh Lately It’s So Quiet,” which is like Prince singing over the groove from T. Rex’s “Mambo Sun”) and spits out riffs on the Stones, the Cars and what, with less of a political edge but just as close an eye on the ladies, they used to call “power pop” at the start of the ’70s. Closing track “The House Wins” is one of the year’s best songs, not to mention the most relentlessly pessimistic, not to mention the most top-to-bottom, dead-on accurate.

Widows and orphans:

1) Stephanie D’Abruzzo and Kate Monster, “There’s A Fine, Fine Line,” live at the Golden Theatre in New York City, November 20, 2005 (matinee). In the annals of Broadway, there’s probably no more conceptually jarring moment than this: smack dab in the middle of a Sesame Street for rudderless twentysomethings that has songs called “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet Is For Porn” (that are nonetheless far smarter and more perceptive than their titles might suggest), a puppet who has just paid the price for making herself vulnerable steps forward in one of the purest expressions of the crushing disappointment that’s the flipside of romantic optimism ever to grace the boards, or anywhere. The fact that writers Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, director Jason Moore and performer D’Abruzzo looked their subject and their material straight in the eye without flinching and let Kate Monster be neither sarcastic nor profane but simply, unapologetically hurt is precisely why Avenue Q is brilliant and moving and not simply a cheap one-joke har-har. The cast album, containing an equally heartrending and almost certainly identical version of this song, came out two years ago. But I saw this performance this year.

2) Kelly Clarkson, “Since U Been Gone.” Technically released on last year’s Breakaway, “Since U Been Gone” hit this year. And hit. And hit. By now, everyone from squeeing teenagers to jaded indie rockers knows why. Max Martin, you magnificent bastard, I salute you.

3) Jessica Sierra, “The Boys Are Back In Town” (live on American Idol, March 8, 2005). There’s no theme, just one last-ditch effort for the singers to make it to the finals. A young woman who has gotten to this point with absolutely no support from the show steps onstage to perform a hard country version of an ultra-obscure Busboys song from the soundtrack to 48 Hrs., as though this is really going to be her ticket to the top twelve. And she had it nailed before she even got to the song proper, throwing around her whiskey-soaked rasp with a confidence and professionalism that belied her 19 years (the unfettered, go-for-broke joy in her performance sure fit, though). She lasted another three weeks. Nothing else in the entire season even came close. You’ll hear from her again.

4) Sleater-Kinney, “Entertain.” The Woods was a noisy, unfocused affair that I am just now, fitfully and against my will, figuring out how to like, but it’s too late for me to consider it anything other than their worst album since Call The Doctor. “Entertain,” which I’ve loved ever since I started hearing it at their shows over the past three years, showed how my favorite band currently existing in the world today could have absorbed the desired changes and forged ahead. And I’m pretty sure that my disappointment in the band’s new direction is precisely what the lyrics are about.

5) Nada Surf, “Always Love.” “Hate will get you every time.” If you let it.

6) Annie, “Chewing Gum.” Your frothy electrodance confection for the year. She ain’t Kylie Minogue, but on the strength of this song, she doesn’t have to be.

7) The Waifs, “Bridal Train” (studio version). The scene, for those unfamiliar with Australian social history, is a transcontinental rail voyage undertaken by countless women who had, in the heat of the second World War, wed American servicemen briefly stationed in their country and who were now on their way to the States, their husbands and their destinies. The Waifs, led by two second-generation products of such a union, paint a picture of this impossibly romantic notion with a delicacy that underlines the latter part of that qualifier while conveniently ignoring the former. I get misty every time I hear it, and it could very well be for either part of the equation. I can’t see how it can possibly work out. But I’m so astonished by the gesture that I desperately hope I’m wrong.

8) The White Stripes, “Instinct Blues.” A heavy warped blues that appeared to be the only song on Get Behind Me Satan that didn’t sound like a grotesquely self-indulgent dare from Jack White to his audience. Cole Porter covered this ground first, and he was wittier and even sexier. But “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love)” didn’t have the audacity to punch you in the stomach six times in a row.

9) Amy Rigby, “I Don’t Wanna Talk About Love No More.” She sort of has to, though. The rest of us will just get it wrong.

10) Fiona Apple, “Extraordinary Machine.” Listening to the unreleased Jon Brion version of her album confirmed to me both that the Mike Elizondo version that actually made it onto the shelves was inferior and that it was destined to be a noble disappointment either way. The Brion-produced title track, where she tells her critics that she can take every shot they fire her way while a demented orchestra whips her into a playful frenzy, was on both versions. Everybody wins.

There’s no true Better Late Than Never pick this year, but I will say this: in this year when I couldn’t keep from stumbling across Bruce Springsteen imitators good (The Hold Steady! Michael Stanley’s “My Town”! The Constantines, sort of!), bad (two and a half hours with Bon Jovi!) and otherwise (Marah), it seems fitting that it was the original who shone the brightest in the first (seriously?) remastered version of Born To Run (Columbia, 1975). Included as a part of the 2 DVD/1 CD Born To Run boxed set, it was paired with a feature-length documentary about the album and the full star-making 1975 Hammersmith Odeon concert (which, if I understand my timelines properly, changed not only Springsteen’s life but also Peter Gabriel’s). How this album made it through two decades on compact disc without being remastered is a mystery, but that makes the cleanup an actual event, rather than the latest in an endless series of repackagings. I can’t even remotely lie to you and say that I hadn’t heard Born To Run before now. But I can certainly tell you when I first fell in love with the immediacy of “Thunder Road” and “She’s The One,” I never imagined that I would still be peeling away at them 15 years later. It still sounds like the soundtrack to a summer that I always wished I had.

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