Shinedown sound and look like they’re straight out of a hypothetical 3 Doors Down or Lifehouse biopic where the production company refused to pony up for the bands’ likeness or actual 3 Doors Down/Lifehouse songs. They are the Nickleback version of Still Water, but for like a VH1 original movie.
The My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy paradox defeated my attempts at albums of the decade. I just couldn't figure out how to rank an album that I thought was the album of the decade for a good portion of the decade, even though I now only rarely feel the urge to listen to it. Maybe I'm just getting lazy with age, but the decade is both too long ago and too recent that it even defeated my love of lists.
But not all lists.
1. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
2. FKA twigs - Magdalene
3. Nilüfer Yanya - Miss Universe
4. Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising
5. Mannequin Pussy - Patience
6. Jay Som - Anak Ko
7. Angel Olsen - All Mirrors
8. Tyler, the Creator - Igor
9. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
10. Jamila Woods - Legacy! Legacy!
11. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Ghosteen
12. black midi - Schlagenheim
13. Big Thief - U.F.O.F.
14. Stef Chura - Midnight
15. Alex G - House of Sugar
Most convincing rap debut since
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Having bad takes and catty internet fights is one thing. Hell, it has transformed bloc into a beloved cult figure and friend of Josh Tillman. You and the inthedeadoftheknight went meta with it though. If this comment is an O. Henry story, you guys went full David Foster Wallace footnote. The Bottom Five in Shut Up Dude this week is gonna be like the Pale Fire of internet comment sections.
I'm so old that I remember when Kid A and Amnesiac were the go-two reference for two albums released within 12 months of each other.
But it's worth noting that the Beach House and Radiohead albums were assembled from the same recording session. Two Hands was recorded in a separate session in a different studio. Judging from the advance singles, and well the fact that they decided it was worth the effort to do it, I'm thinking that these two albums are going to be much more distinct.
Well, you want the year-end stuff to have space on its own, but yeah, I thought it was early too. But I looked back, and their end-of-the-decade stuff came out in August in 2009, so who knows?
Well, they usually do, but this one didn't.
Compare this list with the list from the last decade. The 200 Best Albums of the 2000s featured only 3 albums from 2009 and 12 albums from 2008. This current list has 9 albums from this year, and (a frankly absurd) 26 albums from 2018.
Given the inherent limitations of these end-of-the-decade lists where you're comparing stuff that has been with us for years with stuff that came out a few months ago, I'd say a more nostalgia-centered list is a more valuable encapsulation of the decade, but that's a matter of preference. But I think Pitchfork's editors actively compensated to avoid that this year, and it produced a list that is inconsistent and lacks coherence.
I love them, but at the same time decade lists that are published within the decade are pretty close to worthless. Putting aside the willing suspension of subjectivity that goes into any of these things, it's just flat-out impossible to compare albums that I've listened to dozens of times over the better part of a decade with shit that just came out two months ago.
Spotify put the "Masterpiece" single on my Discovery playlist at some point early in 2016 and I was immediately hooked. That single was the only thing on their artist page, and their monthly listeners were in the low three digits. I mean, I didn't actually do any advance scouting, but when I really enjoyed their follow-up singles and their full-length debut, I enjoyed that sense of being on the ground floor of something special that all music snobs get.
However, that sense of excitement faded when they started promoting Capacity. Not to say it's a bad album, but what appealed to me about them was that they seemed unafraid to make sparkling, effervescent indie rock which has become an increasingly rare thing. Capacity and Lenker's solo album seemed much more focused on confessional, hushed-voiced acoustic folk, which isn't exactly a dying art form. So it's not just that they were making music I personally found non-compelling, it seemed like they were forsaking a career path that was directly in my wheelhouse.
This year, I kinda came to terms with U.F.O.F. and realized that if I stopped focusing on their failure to produce the kind of music they had previously released, I could appreciate their current output for being very good, for what it was. And sometimes, I guess, when you make mature decisions and encounter art on its own merits the gods smile on you, because Big Thief dropped "Not" and decided to remind us that they could kick ass. Couldn't be more excited for this record.
Oooh, actually gonna have to disagree on “Oblivion.” I was immediately hooked into it from the second I heard it and ended up buying Visions the night it came out. And that was before I embraced my inner poptimist (the exception being Robyn actually). I still don’t think of Visions as a pop album though. I think it immediately appealed to me even back then because it’s the closest thing we have to a Silent Shout for this decade.
God damn it, you guys are making me focus on how totally right Pads is on the day that Pitchfork conceded that Golden Hour was their album of the year last year. If you guys don’t knock it off, I might end up having to say nice things about Paramore before the weeks over.
Look, we all know that arguing about lists is silly. But it's a lovable kind of silly.
But Be the Cowboy being the 6th 2018 album on their decade list not 10 months after Pitchfork labelled it the best album of 2018 kinda exposes the business.
I mean, Transference isn't bad at all, but considering that Pitchfork gave Ga x5 an 8.5 and They Want My Soul an 8.6, the 7.8 that Transference got seems pretty fair to me. And that's not even getting into Gimme Fiction getting a 7.9.
Oh, I know Koz has been around for awhile. But Benji is, in terms of style and substance, a pretty stark departure from his Red House Painters stuff and even the early Sun Kil Moon stuff. As much as I'm down on Benji, it is arguably the one indie guitar album that came out this decade that didn't sound like anything that came out before it. I mean, it was certainly greeted with more excitement than Among the Leaves or Admiral Fell Promises was. But if you follow up something that's new and exciting with increasingly worse derivatives of the original you riks turning new and exciting into self-obsessed and banal.
Remember how Jeremy Lin was the biggest story in sports for a few weeks in 2012. But then the Knicks travelled to Miami to play the Big Three Heat and Wade and LeBron collectively ate him alive? Lin who was averaging 23 points and 9 assists, ended up going 1-11 for 8 points with only 3 assists compared to 8 turnovers.
Basically, Benji was Linsanity, and basically every time Koz has released new music (or generally opened his mouth) since then has been the equivalent of that Heat game.
I know that editorial staffs change, and Pitchfork has really seemingly given up any aspirations of critical consistency. But Pitchfork told us that Be the Cowboy was the best album of 2018 ten months ago. Now, it's the 64th best album of the decade, which is 6th highest ranking album that came out last year. Other consistency-related things of note:
- Rihanna's Anti has had a hell of a journey, going from a 7.7 on it's initial review, to the 17th best album of 2016 at the end of the year to the 12th best album of the decade. I probably need to revisit, but that's pretty crazy for what I thought of as a good, not great, pop album with a ton of filler.
- On Pitchfork's premature list of best albums of the first half of the decade, Tame Impala's Lonerism was #7. It's #130 on the end-of-the-decade list.
The album is way better than the narrative wanted it to be, and not everybody has adjusted. I still can't get over how I somehow found myself pleasantly surprised that I was enjoying a new Sleater-Kinney record, but that's the internet for you.
On the other hand, the narrative turned out to be pretty right about the Chance record.
The first four Ramones records are perfect. End of the Century is an interesting, if flawed, experiment. And the early 80s records (everything up to Too Tough to Die) are all pretty great, but they all suffer by comparison to the literally perfect work that came before it.
The trouble with Fugazi and Sleater Kinney (two bands that I adore) is that they are awfully niche. I mean, the Ramones aren't much better, but at least a large portion of Americans who aren't music snobs have at least heard of the Ramones. That's not the case with Fugazi and SK.
This is the joke I came here to make and it bums me out that you beat me to it and that people actually are taking it seriously. Between this being hidden and someone that-guying Beans' list of the Great American rock bands by pointing out that Japandroids were Canadian (the other two choices were the Rolling Stones and Thin Lizzy), this site's commentariat really needs stop taking themselves so seriously.
Make Stereogum's comment section irreverent again.
I'd be with you normally, but even though I only got to it a few months after it came out, I think Warm is the best collection of Tweedy songs since Sky Blue Sky. I enjoyed it enough to allow me to be probably semi-disappointed by this album.
I haven't heard it either. It's not something I'm proud of, I just have instinctually rejected all things associated with Billy Ray Cyrus since 1992. Like, I didn't listen to a Miley Cyrus song until she
I want to make an argument for Magic, but I'm not sure if I've listened to that full album this decade, and I may be letting my continued affection for "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" color my overall memories of that album.
Jesus Christ. It's fucking stage banter. Semi-rehearsed, simulated, one-sided chit-chat that creates a false sense of intimacy between a performer and an audience. But sure, the way to convince the MAGA crowd of the error of their ways is fucking septuagenarian stage banter.
(Also, your second paragraph, as you somewhat predicted, is not true. I wouldn't make too much of it, but someone taking the time required to summon and share their kvetching about the insufficient wokeness of a band's stage banter while being too lazy to do a basic fucking google search before subjecting the public to their poorly informed and inaccurate takes is basically what's wrong with this country in a nutshell.)
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