Pretentious Music 2008

As usual, I've procrastinated writing this post for so long that it really doesn't matter at this point, but after taking the first month of 2009 to digest the musical offerings of the previous year and pretending like I was actually paying attention to current trends, I've decided to begrudgingly put together my list of my favorite songs and albums of 2008.

Now I say begrudgingly because I really didn't feel like there was much in the way of current music that qualified as "relevant" or "listenable", which I realize is the thing people say when they become too busy or old to give a shit what the folks at Pitchfork are fawning over this week, but I really think that this year it's just a statement of fact. And maybe it's because reading the business section of any newspaper in the last year was pretty much like watching the last 15 minutes of The Empire Strikes Back every day, or maybe it's because 2008 was the fist year in recent memory that American democracy (ironically) didn't seem like a miserable failure, but it's become increasingly difficult to argue for the importance of my own legally questionable mp3 collection. Nevertheless, here goes. . .


ALBUMS:

Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark

While most bands these days seem to struggle to put out two singles and half an hour of filler every three years, these guys have been filling up the full 80 minutes of their albums with quality material at least every two years for the past decade - and this album is my favorite so far. They've toned down the redneckiness of their sound slightly, but kept the gritty slice-of-life stories of people on the margins of the American South. Like their previous albums, the depressing nature of their subject matter would make their music pretty much unlistenable if their their hooks weren't so good and their lyrics weren't so damn clever.



King Khan and the Shrines - The Supreme Genius of. . .

This is a band that sounds too cool as a concept (a pudgy Canadian-born South Asian man that dresses in loin-cloths and belts out pitch-perfect sixies garage rock) to actually work. But it does. Brilliantly. And even though this album is technically more of a compilation than a real album, considering how criminally difficult it is to actually get a hold of any of their real albums, I'm gonna have to count it.



Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances

Like the indie-rock equivilent of Jerry Stiller screaming "serenity now!", this album is one hell of a cathartic Seinfeld reference (barely edging out Wale's Mixtape About Nothing as the best musical Seinfeld reference of the year). And dispite the absurdly pretentious band name, the music is remarkably earnest, and includes enough shoe-gazey fuzz to warm my indie rock snob heart.




Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

It's a little hard to believe that this album actually came out last year, considering the critical backlash to Vampire Weekend had begun before this album had even hit shelves last January, But hype and counter-hype aside, this still stands as one of the funnest and catchiest albums that I've heard in a while, and unlike most of the otherwise good music I listened to this year, I didn't forget about it two seconds after the songs ended.