5. The Tallest Man on Earth - Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird
I saw Kristian play this fall in dc, and it was such a genuine, funny, and heartfelt experience. His voice is pure, raw, and sandpapery. I love the way he phrases his lyrics with strange syllable breaks, one minute he's whispering and the next he's screaming. Beautiful and simple, a man and his guitar.
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4. Bruce Springsteen - The Promise
This year was (and still is) the year of Bruce for me. I went through a lot of his albums and I fell in love with everything, Nebraska, Born to Run, Born in the USA, Darkness on the Edge of Town... I love the promise because you hear a lot more of the old girl group and pop sound in it. You can also hear how young Bruce is. Songs like "Ain't Good Enough for You" and "Save My Love" are just bundles of goodness. Others like "Because the Night" are passionate burners.
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3. MGMT - Congratulations
I can say that this was probably the album to I listened to the most this year. I have respect for MGMT, they were incredibly fearless and they made an album that is a departure and a creative progression, abandoning many of the sounds that got them famous. I love how genre bending the album is, at varying points it feels like the beach boys, a haunted house tv show intro, and seventies grooves. Lyrically the album is also very smart, it feels like image painting, strange flashes of pictures in the brain.
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2. The National - High Violet
This album was so incredibly powerful. The sheer grandiose gloom of it. It was one of those albums that couldn't help conjure up images in your head. Grey winter days, rainy late night diners, smoking cigarettes out in the cold, "Manhattan valleys of the dead"... Matt Berninger's voice is so striking, just the wounded, matter of fact way in which he says something. This album definitely changed me.
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1. The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
This album was also completely and utterly life altering. I love how the album functions as a whole, with every listen there is always some new thought or strain to pick up on. I love how words that are screamed in one song are then whispered in another. In "Month of May" Win cries "First they built the road/ Then they built the town/ That's why we're still driving around" and it sounds like a battle cry, a flag waving call to arms. The very same words are cooed in "Wasted Hours" and they sound much more resigned and unadorned, a mere sad fact of suburban development. The concept of the suburbs is something that is very near and dear to me, having live in one my whole youth. They're like a second womb: beautiful, cramped, strangely romantic, distorted and nostalgic. Eventually you leave them, born into an entire world full of bohemianism, cities, sin, power, wonder.
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