A sweeping, at-times operatic rock album stuffed with songs about growing up with some dirt on your cheek, being a 20-something and being a mess. Drugs, New Jersey, the shore, lost love; all of it rolled up into nine tracks that vacillate between frenetic ("XR") and patient ("Laramie"). Much like Carrie & Lowell at No. 6, the key ingredient to LOSE is its lyrics, a collection of words nothing short of brilliant and possessing all the colors of the palette with which LOSE is painted.
Standing in contrast to the pained perfection of an album like Veckatimest - wholly different sounds aside - LOSE often comes across as totally organic, Joseph D'Agostino's voice anything but angelic and the tracks often sounding like they're rips of the best live performance of a song rather than a studio cut. D'Agostino's nasal delivery - like a grown-up Jordan Pundik - slips effortlessly between vocal fry and falsetto ("Chambers"), and can go from wail ("XR") to lullaby ("Child Bride") in a matter of moments. Matt Whipple's bass playing is terrific; the best riffs can be found supporting "Place Names" and the outro to "2 Hip Soul," the album's closer.
A large part of LOSE's appeal is in the confluence of deft storytelling and uniquely anthemic rock leanings, a stadium-ready group of songs that punish as easily as they can enlighten. It's subtle intelligence, masked in hard-nosed rock. Be sure you read beyond this book's table of contents.
4. The Antlers - Hospice (2009)
Of every album I've ever listened to, none so regularly moves me in a haunted, ghostly way as this, a concept album billed as the story of a hospice worker and terminally ill patient, their ensuing romance and the patient's eventual death. It's long been debated whether this album is autobiographical - Peter Silberman himself won't really disclose - but it's always felt like an allegorical album to me. There's so much symbolism in Silberman's pulverizing, falsetto delivery that could only be fueled by personal experience.
At least, that's what I draw from the experience of listening to this album, and it's a big reason why I value it so highly.Like some of the other albums in its immediate company on this list, Hospice is a story marked by grief and loss, but it also details the struggle to salvage whatever's left in such unique detail that I always find myself struck but just how these songs manage to both keep the hospice metaphor alive and never to seem to drift into camp or corniness. Really, it's just the opposite. The whole demeanor of the album makes you feel like you're in the phosphorescent-lit hallway of some caretaking facility with light blue walls and that one light bank that won't stop flickering; another example of decay and the failure of upkeep that plays into the album's larger themes.
As before, I can't recommend enough reading the lyrics along with the music. Silberman's voice can go between being so hushed and so ethereal that words can be lost on a casual listen, and this album won't hit home in the periphery. It's a cover-to-cover capital-A Album with a couple of single-type exceptions that even lose some of their own luster out of the album's run-of-play.
Those singles, though, do still stand out. "Sylvia" crashes out of the droning haze with a cry that comes as close to camp as the album dares - "Sylvia, get your head out of the oven," an obvious reference to Sylvia Plath commingling with Silberman's plea for his patient to stop self-damaging - while "Bear" coos a dark lullaby that could read like a recalling of a pre-hospice abortion. "Two," which follows "Bear" after a spectral vocal interlude from Sharon Van Etten - who's playing "Sylvia" in this album's case - builds upon a simple guitar pattern that sounds almost plastic or toy-like into an emotional convocation with drums and brass and more instrumentation than on any other song on the album. It's the album's catharsis, of sorts: Silberman at his most pained and finally at his wit's end, doing to his best to try, one last time, to reconcile the rift between himself and the "patient" with understanding.
It fails, and the following track, "Shiva," finds the roles reversed: Silberman has assumed the role of the infirmed, his efforts in vain. "Wake," a nine-minute reflection on just what got us into this mess in the first place, ends with something resembling optimism, and that feeling is like the first breath drawn after surfacing from being underwater. Letting people in is still okay, he says; not every war can be won, he says, and that's not your fault.
This was an album that reached me even before one of my own personal experiences brought it closer to the vest. It wasn't an exact match to whatever it is, exactly, Silberman went through. I'm sure of that. But progressing from an unexplainable sadness during a relationship at its end, coupled with the actions of the other half in the postmortem, made me feel like I understood this album more than I ever had before. Chances are, if you've made it this far in life, you can probably find a connecting experience of your own; Hospice is a deeply personal album that the listener can still make their own.
3. Beach House - Bloom (2012)
In contrast to the heaviness and emotional intensity comprising most of the rest of my top 10, we have this palette cleanser. Bloom is an incredibly immersive emotional experience in its own right, but its highs are rooted in beauty rather than in the exploration of our depths. At least, that's how it sounds. There's some trepidation in the lyrics, but they're delivered so airily and effervescently that you'd hardly know it.
Every track on this album can have the "dreamy" label applied without second thought. The arrangements Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally put forth are shimmering and lucid, each one somehow just as beautiful as the next. And there's a constant undercurrent throughout the album, something implicit and understated that ties all of these tracks together in a thematic way, none feeling like it's ever gone too far afield. It could be the gentle transitions between tracks, nearly one linked by a thread of droning note that rarely lets the album go to zero.
Where Bloom also stands in contrast to these other highly-regarded albums is that it's just as rewarding on a casual listen as it is with focused intent; you can let yourself coast down a lazy river with this as your soundtrack, fall asleep and let it steer your dreams. No part of these songs ever feels invasive, every note seemingly coated in an analgesic that soothes your aches and eases your tensions. Even the seemingly strange choice of adding a hidden track after seven minutes of silence on closing track "Irene" feels like it fits right in, in the end. Every track is a standout in its own right, but I've always had a particular fondness for tracks eight and nine, "Wishes" and "On the Sea," their swoops and swells always sounding the most captivating to me, even toward the end of a listen.
For anyone seeking something that's just pure ear candy, it's hard to go wrong with this album. Get on that inner tube and float.
2. Japandroids - Celebration Rock (2012)
Celebration Rock begins with the sound of fireworks, ends with the sound of fireworks, and in between features eight tracks made of the kind of euphoria that only watching fireworks as a 9-year-old can provide. It makes no bones about enjoying every goddamn second of being alive; about driving down the interstate with every window down and your head in the wind; about flipping the world the bird as you base jump from the top of the Empire State Building in a neon jumpsuit.
No other album perfectly manages the delicate balance between sounds and lyrics that are as straightforward as this and the dangers of being too campy. This is the big-budget summer popcorn blockbuster that gets your adrenaline rushing and heart pounding without making about sweeping statements about the world at large or the human condition. Even its weakest moment - a cover of Gun Club's "For the Love of Ivy" - still manages to be a bit of raucous fun.
You could make this argument for a handful of the eight tracks, but for my money, no single song on Celebration Rock encapsulates this feeling of Life And Living It like "Fire's Highway," a truly wonderful and magnificently sweaty piece of rah-rah, fist-pumping exuberance. You are contractually obligated to feel better in some way after listening to it. It is Celebration Rock in microcosmic form, its sound and message converging to form this piece of bombast you just kind of need now and then, y'know?
Filled with quotable lines and enough "ohh-ohs" to fill a box of Cheerios, there's more energy here than you could ever hope to hear in a single album, its loudness a turbo charge for your soul.
1. The National - Boxer (2007)
The greatest album of the last 10 years is a tough nut to crack. The successor to a 2004 album, Alligator, that many had already labeled a "grower," Boxer is a collection of songs about aging, the changes in thought and behavior that come along with, and the malaise of trying to realize just what it means to be an adult of a certain age; it is the darkness on the edge of town.
Boxer turns 10 years old this year. I had it with me every year of my 20s, and now I take it with me into my 30s, but it feels no more or less relevant with the passing of time. The crazy thing about this album is that, despite its mature themes and esoteric deliveries, it always felt accessible even to my college-aged mind. Back then, it spoke to some sort of as-yet-unattained future, a world that awaited off campus. In the early 2010s, it was my anchor to better times as I struggled to find my foothold in an unforgiving job climate and on unsteady personal ground. It was my gateway to The National's earlier catalog, an even gruffer trio of albums that helped lay the foundation for what would become their masterwork. I've been able to hold it close for 10 years because it's never felt unfamiliar, never too distant to ever feel unrelatable.
Boxer will not click on your first listen. Its true treasure is every new nuance you discover as you grow along with it, whether a clever turn of phrase by Matt Berninger you may have missed on first listen, or a chord change, or an ever-renewing sense of marvel and the exacting precision of Bryan Devendorf's drumming. The layers and complexities of this music - both in lyrics and composition - only serve to deepen the album's rewards on further listens. Hell, you're basically dared to get a steady grip on the dueling time signatures right from the start on "Fake Empire."
There are themes and plots to these tracks, and even a callback to earlier material on "Slow Show," but enough ambiguity remains in the messages that this album can become whatever you want it to be. "Brainy" can either be a song about a stalker or someone motivated to be better; "Start A War" can either be the end of a relationship or the point at which it's saved; "Guest Room," one of the most underrated cuts in the band's entire library, is about the complexities of relationship interaction, or as Berninger himself even puts it:
"[It represents] those awkward intimate moments where you have those really stupid, ugly things that you do in a relationship when you get fed up with each other or whatever. You do things that are just ridiculous, but then you eventually let each other off the hook."Boxer is an album about growing up by musicians who have already done it once. It's reflective and critical, but never damning. It's both self-effacing and self-assured, a sort of confidence that - true to form - really only comes with time and experience, and it will live on in me, no matter how old I get.
