A Handful of Favorites from 2008

I listened to far too little 2008-music in 2008 to make a decent judgment about the year as a whole, or to even pretend to be able to construct a numerical rank. Nevertheless, here is a little selection of the year's bits and pieces that brought me lasting joy:

Hercules and Love Affair - S/T

Inventive, emotive, urbane dance music: a marvel of a modern disco-pop album, bathed in warm, organic retro textures ("Hercules Theme", "Athene", "Raise Me Up"). The album is at times playful, at times dew-eyed and reserved (compare the wounded croon of opener "Time Will" to mischievous, kitchen-sink closer "True False/Fake Real"). Some songs even deftly split the difference (the undeniable yet vulnerable strut of "Raise Me Up"). But what gives this album lasting life is the sharp melodic sense at work in each precision horn burst, each delicate keyboard twinkle, each taut, octave-hopping bassline. Album highlight "Hercules Theme" is particularly packed with these details; "Iris" with its lovely, looping thumb piano-like keyboard melody and distant background flute-like harmonies is the album's emotional core. Perhaps the album I gave the most time to in 2008.



Air France - No Way Down EP

Irrepressibly wistful, exuberant breeze-pop. Like the Avalanches, they assemble patchwork sonic landscapes from pop detritus, but Air France's music seems more compositionally focused, and more honed for maximum emotional impact. This is wide-open, unabashed, open-hearted pop music, unafraid to make broad gestures; but despite the liberal use of sweeping orchestration and super-stuffed feel, the album remains approachable and intimate because each arrangement feels definitively handcrafted, like a homemade scrapbook of memory and joy. The sepia-toned album cover, a boy, his kite, sunlight bleeding through and over all, could not be more apropos: these are miniature anthems and arias of childlike yearning and rhapsodic bliss.


Osborne - "16th Stage"
Over the course of eight serene minutes, Osborne methodically unspools layer after layer of gossamer melody: that endearingly jumbled keyboard riff; that mumbling vocal sample pulsing along to the heart-like backbeat; that fluttering butterfly-synth line dancing over it all... A plaintive bedroom-dance beauty so unassuming, I didn't notice it shuffle shyly into my heart and steal it away.

Women - "Black Rice"
I wrote about this song in an earlier post; an undeniable vocal melody skips and leaps over murky, lumbering-zombie sort of psychedelic funeral dirge. Hypnotic and pleasantly off-kilter, like a dream of sitting down to a wonderful meal with old friends whose faces you simply cannot place.

Vampire Weekend - "Walcott"
The reverb-heavy pound of the piano, the softly glowing guitar line, the shimmering cymbal hits combine to serendipitous effect: "Walcott" surges like a series of frozen waterfalls thawing in the sunlight, a cascade of icy shards and glittering, frosty mist, all building to one last climactic, breathtaking plunge.

M83 - "Kim and Jessie"
Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" re-imagined as theme music for sentimental French superheroes. That massive, massive, majestic earthquake of a chorus, all megaton drums and jetstream synths and guitar peals arcing across the sky obliterates all thought, leaving only shimmering rapture in its wake.