Favorite Albums of the Decade: 30-21

Day 3 of my favorite albums of the decade is here, with the final 30 coming in the next three days. Before we start that, a recap of the list so far (you can see 50 through 41 here and 40 through 31 here):

50. Andrew WK - I Get Wet
49. The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike
48. Stars - Set Yourself on Fire
47. Badly Drawn Boy - About a Boy Soundtrack
46. Explosions in the Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
45. M.I.A. - Kala
44. of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
43. Hot Hot Heat - Elevator
42. The Stills - Without Feathers
41. Cake - Comfort Eagle
40. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
39. The Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder
38. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale
37. The 88 - Over and Over
36. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
35. Muse - Absolution
34. Cursive - The Ugly Organ
33. Spoon - Gimme Fiction
32. Phantom Planet - The Guest
31. Air - Talkie Walkie

30. Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground - Self Titled (2008)

Recommended Track: Simon Courage Flees the Coop

Why I Love It: Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground rose from the ashes from my once upon a time favorite band Gatsby's American Dream, as it was fronted by one time Gatsby's bassist Kirk Huffman and also featured keyboardist Kyle O'Quinn, yet it did not feature really any of the technical rock brilliance that made Gatsby's such a great band. This band was an entirely different animal, channeling Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band and psychedelia into modern day indie rock to create a sound that was altogether unique and original in its own right. Their self titled debut featured a dense and beautiful instrumental sound (it better, given the fact they have roughly 1/5th the population of Washington state in their band) and Huffman's smooth vocals, and it blew me away. It maintains itself as one of the most obscure of gems from this decade, but I think one day they'll find their audience outside of the Pacific Northwest.


29. Gorillaz - Self Titled (2001)

Recommended Track: Slow Country

Why I Love It: This album reminds me of driving around in high school with my best friends, being alternately entertained by their more popular songs such as "Clint Eastwood" or "19-2000" while marveling in the creepy cool of "M1A1" or the monstrous relaxation powers of "Slow Country." This album could easily have been just a gimmick (it's a band fronted four cartoon characters!), but heavily featured on this album is all of Damon Albarn's musical prowess and Dan the Automator's incredible production. Individually, their powers would assure a project success. Together? They make something special, as this album clearly demonstrated.


28. Passion Pit - Manners (2009)

Recommended Track: The Reeling

Why I Love It: This album only came out this year, but any album that cause me to immediately text my friend and say "it's like they made this album specifically for me!" has to be a strong contender for one of my favorite albums. This album is all soaring vocals, delicious synth, clap along beats, and unforgettable hooks, and really, that's about as good of a recipe for "David music" that you could possibly come up with. Perpetually exciting, energetic, and dance party inducing, this album is assured a place in my rotation well into the next decade.


27. Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

Recommended Track: Everything In Its Right Place

Why I Love It: After seeing massive success with The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead effectively abandoned their more straightforward rock sound to adopt the sound of the future. More keyboards, more electronic production, more post-modern glances at what the future of music could be like. Before this album, no one had so successfully adopted this type of production and such intense focus on textures and depth of sound, and it is something that has obviously affected many artists since. Even without the pioneer nature of this album, this is one that is filled with every bit of the Radiohead songwriting talent that we'd come to expect, and in many ways surpassed even OK Computer as Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and the rest clearly were not fearful to adventure as far as their sound could take them on this album. Completely brilliant, and a great marker for where music was going to go in the decade that followed it.

Bonus points for "Everything in its Right Place" being one of the single coolest performances of any song I've ever seen live. When I saw them, they closed their encore with it and it ended up being Jonny Greenwood with a series of pedals remixing the song live with all of the instruments looped through and controlled by him. Brilliant.


26. Beirut - Gulag Orkestar (2006)

Recommended Track: Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)

Why I Love It: Zach Condon is a talent that is about as surprising as you can find. Here is this 20 year old kid from Albequerque who releases an indie rock album positively buried in Balkan musical influences in which he plays anything you can think of: guitar, accordion, trumpet, mandolin, ukulele...everything. This kid is just massively talented. Not only that, but he is blessed with one of the most unique voices in music today and a nearly unparalleled songwriting ability. This was his stunning first release and it is as filled with sweeping emotions that you would expect from someone of his age. The fact that he managed to imbue it with such genuine feeling and such a unique sound really solidifies him as one of the most exciting young talents in music today.


25. Rilo Kiley - The Execution of All Things (2002)

Recommended Track: My Slumbering Heart

Why I Love It: "You don't like girls!" my mom says hysterically. We're talking about music and how I'm not a big fan of female lead singers, but her phrasing leaves something to desire. It turns out that I actually like both girls (in general) and girls (lead singer varieties). Especially when it comes to Jenny Lewis, the lead singer of Rilo Kiley, who combines with guitarist and occasional singer Blake Sennett to form one of the best songwriting duos in music (as long as it isn't on Under the Blacklight). This album finds them at their best, pairing occasionally dark subject matters with atypically sunny presentation, as they brilliantly hide the lyrical weight in jangly guitars and simple and beautiful melodies created by Lewis. Not bad from the kids from Troop Beverly Hills and Salute Your Shorts.


24. Portugal. The Man - The Satanic Satanists (2009)

Recommended Track: The Home

Why I Love It: Portugal. The Man automatically get bonus points for being from Alaska, but really, that doesn't matter when it comes to this album. While previous albums featured elements of brilliance but ultimately fell off because a few tracks that were a bit weaker or because they simply did not stand up to the test of time as well, this one combined all of the strengths of their first three albums and removed the negatives. It's as if John Gourley and his brethren made a pros and cons list of their sound and simply crossed off the cons. This album highlights Gourley's beautiful vocals, which occasionally touch on falsetto but never egregiously so. They do this by focusing their sound more towards a pop influenced version of their funk groove sound, targeting melody and rhythm over their more surprising sound of the past.

Some would say it's less challenging than their older albums, I'd say it is similar to what Animal Collective did with Merriweather Post Pavilion: the distillation of their sound to focus on the elements that work the best. After many spins of this album, it's hard to argue that their decision was the wrong one.


23. The Thermals - Now We Can See (2009)

Recommended Track: How We Fade

Why I Love It: The Thermals have long been a band that I've enjoyed but never one where I ever sat down with an album, listened to it all the way through and thought "man, I loved every second of that." Well, that is until this album, in which we found them tightening up their sound a bit and focusing more on production and songwriting. Tying into a theme that Hutch himself described as "The Thermals Guide to Better Dying" (or at least I coerced him into that one), this album packs their typical lyrical power into an album full of tracks that rival the power of personal favorite "Returning from the Fold" (from their album The Body, The Blood, The Machine). It's like a greatest hits all on one new album from of the Pacific Northwest's best bands.


22. The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

Recommended Track: In the Morning of the Magicians

Why I Love It: The Flaming Lips are really a magical band. There are not a lot of other ways to describe them, as their sound is so unique and uplifting and spiritual in ways that typical phrasing does not describe them that well. This album finds Wayne Coyne and the rest harnessing their sound into their most infectious and often beautiful album yet, creating the theme song of Oklahoma and my life simultaneously. This album is almost the musical manifestation of John Michael Higgins character on Community tonight, as if with every passing track Coyne is telling us to live life to its fullest. When I'm listening to this album, I don't really see any reason why that isn't possible.


21. The Killers - Hot Fuss (2004)

Recommended Track: All These Things That I've Done

Why I Love It: The Killers?! What are they doing here?! I must have made a mistake! Okay, maybe I didn't. Under the bravado, before the terrible follow up albums, and even if you say they're unoriginal and deriviative, I will say this: they write some damn catchy tunes. This album was entrenched in my CD player for quite some time and still is an album that can get me to effortlessly sing along to in no time flat. Sure, they may be all of the negative things you think they are, but it is impossible to deny that this album is infectious beyond words and possibly the single best popular album to be released this decade.

Concerts are my favorite things

So, as I said in the title, concerts are pretty much my favorite things. I'm a huge fan of music as it is a big part of most every aspect of my life. I never write without it, never work without it, and the majority of my free time activities involve it - yet I can't play a note on nearly anything? Odd. Growing up in Alaska though, I never had a lot of opportunity to see a lot of shows. The first show I ever went to was MC Hammer (with Boyz 2 Men opening, the 6 year old in you fellow 23/24 olds just dropped their jaws in envy - don't deny it), and the majority of other events I went to rarely expanded outside of shows my parents saw such as Reba McEntire or Neil Diamond (with the latter being one of the best performers I've ever seen).

In one of my last years in Anchorage before I went to school, I caught the Offspring with Millencolin opening, and I was instantly hooked. I LOVED the concert experience. It was so invigorating, and I was enraptured with hearing a favorite band playing all of their songs, and I had discovered a new band to follow by seeing their opener. It was an eye opener and a half, and soon after moving to college I quickly started seeing shows.

Starting with the unparalleled genius of Andrew WK at a small club in Spokane, Washington, I managed to see 140+ bands after that show in October/November of 2002 until now. Not a crazy amount for many, but for a kid that grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and went to school at the University of Idaho, it was plenty. Bands seen ranged from musical giants like Radiohead and the Wu Tang Clan, to bands that took giant leaps over the time period such as Death Cab for Cutie and the Shins, to emo/punk/screamo stars early in their career like My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday, to the stars of festivals such as Bumbershoot in Seattle and the Warped Tour at the Gorge (for a full list of bands I've seen, see here)

As I changed, my concert going habits changed, going from "always up front" to my current state of "up front for pictures, but then I'm outta there," and I went from going to shows with big groups of friends to quite often flying solo. It didn't matter. I loved it all.

The point is, I'm not done yet. Just because I'm in Anchorage again does not mean my aspirations to see great live music has changed. With the current slate of upcoming music in Anchorage, it hardly has to. However, there are many bands that I really, really would like to see at some point, which is the point of this exercise.

Below, I have a breakdown of the top 10 bands I'd like to see, with a little snippet of why I want to see them more than the rest. They're of course revealed Rick Dees style, from 10 to 1.



10. Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is a pretty unique artist. He for the most part records all of his albums by himself, but due to the orchestral nature of the albums and the rather large sound he creates, it is obviously impossible for him to perform them live. Without help, that is. The man is simply one of the best artists making music today, and even though I know it'd be tough for his traveling band to recreate his extremely complex sound, I still would love to see him live, if only to see the cheerleader bits and dance sequences in between songs, as he and his bands often perform at his shows.

See above to watch Sufjan perform his track "Casmir Pulaski Day" off Illinois.



9. Incubus (But only before they released Light Grenades and A Crow Left of the Murder)

Incubus is a very perplexing band to me. S.C.I.E.N.C.E. is one of my all time favorite albums, and with two of their albums (Make Yourself and Morning View) they have one of my favorite three album samples of any band. Yet I cannot stand their two most recent ones or their debut. So Incubus places on my list, with one caveat: they only play music off those three that I love. Very unlikely I'm sure, but at the very least it'd be worth it to see them once and chance that they're feeling saucy that evening.

See above for them performing their track "Vitamin" off of S.C.I.E.N.C.E.



8. Beastie Boys

These guys were my favorite band for quite some time, and they still are one of my all time favorites. They've fallen off in my book over the last couple albums, but I love brushing off my Sounds of Science greatest hits album every once in a while and just throwing down 50 straight Beasties tracks. I missed an opportunity to see them (TWICE) last year at Sasquatch, and I'm sure it would have been a blast, but it wasn't meant to be - yet. The reason they are this low considering my love for them is frankly, rap translates poorly live. It's not who they are, it's what they perform.

See above for the Beasties performing "Ch-Check It Out" off recent album To the 5 Boroughs on David Letterman.



7. Anathallo

Based off sheer volume of performers, Anathallo should win with seven total members cramming on stage. This band made my favorite album of 2006 and one of my favorite albums ever with Floating World. They're not very well known, but those who know them love them and those who've seen them live rave about them, as they are very interactive and a ton of fun to see live. Never had the opportunity to see them, but I cross my fingers every day that they'll be added to Sasquatch.

See above for the band performing "Dokkoise House" from Floating World.



6. Eels

Eels are a "band" that only features one permanent member: Mark Oliver Everett, also known as "E." This band has been one of my favorites for a long time, as they've released only good albums throughout the history of this band. They never stick with one simple style, and they always challenge themselves to try something new. I've heard mixed things about them live, but I love them enough that I simply have to see them at least once. Plus, anyone who has an original piece of art from Y the Last Man in his bathroom is cool in my book (E does).

See above for them performing "In the Yard, Behind the Church."



5. the Strokes

The Strokes are unusual band. They're one of the biggest "hype" bands of the 00's, but they've managed to continuously expand their sound throughout their career, growing more polished and arguably improving with every new release. Even though due to familiarity, classic debut Is this It maintains its status as my favorite, I love all three albums whole heartedly. For this reason, and for the fact that I think there would be a decent chance lead singer Julian Casablancas may fall asleep on stage, they are number five with a bullet.

See above to see the band perform "Reptilia" off album Room on Fire.

4. The Flaming Lips

This band is supposed to be about as much fun as any band around live, and you know what? I'm seeing them in May, closing out the Sasquatch festival in massive amounts of style with their special U.F.O. show. I cannot wait!

This band is one of the strangest around, and assuredly their live show will match. The good news is, their live show is a spectacle and they are supposed to sound perfect, so what more could you ask for out of a performance?

See above for them performing "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots."

3. Rage Against the Machine

The band that put on one of the greatest shows I've ever seen (on DVD, I'm a cheater) is back together, and I would absolutely love to see them live before they break up again (as they assuredly will). This band is one of the tightest groups live, and their sound and energy are hard for anyone else in the world to match. I'm envious of anyone who has seen them.

See above for them performing "Testify" at Coachella 2007.




2. Sigur Ros

Ironically enough, the first place I ever saw or heard of this band was live, with the Icelandic band performing track "Svefn-g-englar" live on HBO's old concert series Reverb. As I watched the lead singer sing and play his guitar with a violin bow, I knew immediately that this was the most beautiful music I had (or maybe ever would) hear. They are really 1b, but someone had to finish second and the first band could not be overtaken.

See above for the band performing "Hoppipolla" off album Takk....

1. Muse

Maybe the most powerful rock band in the world today, Muse makes some of the most epic and driving and hauntingly beautiful songs you will likely ever hear. The mere fact that they do it with just three members is even more incredible, and lead singer Matthew Bellamy may be the single most talented frontman of any band around today. All four of their albums are pretty much genius, but it was Absolution that really made me stand up and take notice. Interestingly enough, they just released a live album titled H.A.A.R.P.and the votes are in - it's one of the best live album/DVD combos out there. Color me not shocked in anyway.

See above for the band performing "Blackout" from Absolution.

Sasquatch is go!

Erik is in. I'm in. Kim is contemplating.

The 2008 Sasquatch Music Festival is a go.

The lineup is already an A- lineup without the comedy tent announced or other artists yet to be revealed (big rumors: Vampire Weekend (please god, let them be announced), MGMT, the Fall of Troy, and the Helio Sequence), so I feel as if I would be making a big mistake to not go. Erik deciding to go clinches it. Kim possibly going is icing on an already delicious cake.

All I know is, the Festival being closed out by the Flaming Lips at the Gorge...man oh man. It's going to be something.