New York Times' Top 10 Albums of 2008

《纽约时报》的 Jon Pareles 也代表这份报纸选出了他心目中的 2008 年十大唱片。同样地，每张唱片的封面都链接着相应的豆瓣页面。与《时代》的榜单相比，有 3 张专辑两边都看上了，看来 TV on the Radio、Portishead 和 Santogold 真是今年的赢家。尤其是 TV on the Radio，在《滚石》杂志 2008 年 50 大唱片中也排名第一。好了，大家先看看吧，回头我再挨个推荐其中的曲目，不过这次比较挑战，因为扭腰时报所选的有 6 张专辑我压根儿就没听过。 :-(

1. Dear Science
by TV on the Radio

Desperation and anger give way to celebration through sheer force of will on “Dear Science.” For this album TV on the Radio traded its noisiness for clarity, the better to reveal the workings of its ambitious, multilayered songs: programming and hands-on playing, rock and funk, elegies and dance grooves, accusations and embraces. Each song follows its own idiosyncratic path from mourning to affirmation.

2. Third
by Portishead

After an 11-year separation between studio albums, Portishead resumed the desolate mood of its 1990s trip-hop, but with none of the cushioning that made its old albums boutique staples. Its new songs are just sparse beats, isolated hanging keyboard chords, jolts of electronic dissonance and the utterly inconsolable voice of Beth Gibbons, contemplating perpetual loneliness.

3. The Mandé Variations
by Toumani Diabaté

After collaborating with musicians as diverse as Bjork and his fellow Malian Ali Farka Touré, the virtuoso kora (West African harp) player Toumani Diabaté has an unadorned solo instrumental album that brings a world of ideas to his tradition. Playing ancient West African pieces and his own compositions, he plucks complex yet transparent counterpoint, sometimes urgent, sometimes serene, in meditations that never flaunt how cosmopolitan they are.

4. New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
by Erykah Badu

Far removed from current R&B, Ms. Badu plunges into deep, strange funk to ponder her own psyche, the desperate state of the ghetto and the state of the nation. The grooves are sparse, jazzy and hollowed out while her multiplied voices drift in with unsparing observations, advice and arguments. It’s a late-breaking successor to Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” and just as uncompromising; Ms. Badu places the seductive "Honey" at the end of the album as a sweet reward.

5. In Ear Park
by Department of Eagles

Childhood memories and thoughts of mortality ride a carousel of retrofitted California pop, with cascading guitars and vocal harmonies that grow far more pensive than sunny. Department of Eagles is Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear resuming his collaboration with his college roommate Fred Nicolaus, backed on the album by Grizzly Bear’s rhythm section. The sound of their introspection often unfurls to cinematic richness while holding on to the intimacy of a shared secret.

6. That Lonesome Song
by Jamey Johnson

All the pain of what sounds like a bitter divorce can’t dislodge the craftsmanship and country classicism of the songwriter Jamey Johnson, and the tension between autobiography and a good couplet gives “That Lonesome Song” an extra poignancy. Mr. Johnson places his low, stoic voice in lean, old-fashioned arrangements with pedal steel guitar floating above, and in confessions of his own excesses, he’s harder on himself than he is on his ex.

7. At Mount Zoomer
by Wolf Parade

Wolf Parade’s two songwriters, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, trade off songs and volley big ideas about cities, wars, memories and human connections. The analog keyboard tones hark back to the 1970s and 1980s, and so does Wolf Parade’s willingness to build toward marches and anthems under their quavery lead vocals. Behind the pomp and ambiguity, though, is a pop sense that fills the songs with foot-stomping hooks.

8. Microcastle
by Deerhunter

With a wistful familiarity that’s spookier than most scare tactics, Bradford Cox sings about “dreams that frighten me awake”: woozy visions of murder, confinement and vampires. They’re placed in echoey, neo-psychedelic jams, circling through a few chords, that mingle disorientation with obsession.

9. Alas, I Cannot Swim
by Laura Marling

Somehow Ms. Marling, now 18, gained a perspective that sees romance as part of larger cycles of life and death in her songs. And somehow she was drawn not to contemporary rock but to a folky, largely acoustic production that modestly updates 1960s folk-rock and links her to a long British ballad tradition. For further mystery there’s her smoky voice, mature without affectation.

10. Santogold
by Santogold

The terse, confident, beat-loving, wiggly-voiced character that Santi White makes of herself as the leader of Santogold obviously follows through on the pugnacity of M.I.A. and of Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But Santogold brings her own fixations to the ultralean new wave, reggae and electro tracks: notably the competitive ambitions of an artist who declares herself unstoppable and sets out to prove it.

[via New York Times: A Mix of Vocals, Lyrics and Styles]

TIME's Top 10 Albums of 2008

《时代》杂志很可恨，一张帖子非得分成 10 个网页来发布，靠，赚PV啊？榜单上有 6 张专辑我没什么发言权，挑选的编辑 Josh Tyrangiel 没关注过，不知道啥品味，不过就冲着他选出了《Santogold》、《808s & Heartbreaks》、《Third》这几张，还算是颇得我心。TV on the Radio 的《Dear Science》和 Lil Wayne 的《Tha Carter III》听得还不够多，没什么深印象，重新播放了一下，好像是还不错。下面这 10 张专辑，回头我各挑一首来推荐。大家先看榜。点击专辑封面可进入相应的豆瓣页面。

1. Tha Carter III
by Lil Wayne

Tha Carter III is beyond sprawling, but its lack of discipline is also its point. It's a pop showcase for Dwayne Carter, the very peculiar cough syrup-swilling New Orleans rapper who swears he improvises all of his rhymes. Whether he really does is anybody's guess, but amid all the Auto-Tuned vocals and effects — no rapper enjoys hearing his own voice distorted more — are shrewd commercial choices (the No. 1 hit "Lollipop," the Jay-Z duet "Mr. Carter") and extended periods of verse that take rap back to its essence: talking. On "DontGetIt," over a sample of Nina Simone's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," Wayne tells a 10-minute life story that meanders into an indictment of drug laws and an out-of-nowhere slam of Al Sharpton. The words are smart, but the delivery — just behind the beat, in a voice that sounds like Miles Davis lecturing on Robitussin — is hypnotic.

2. Dear Science
by TV on the Radio

This Brooklyn band spent most of its first three albums emptying out the tool shed in pursuit of weird things to make noise with. This time they haul out all their usual unusual props — out-of-time drums, jazz horn squawks, power tools — but in the service of great tunes. With its Beach Boys '"ba-ba-bas" and killer lo-fi guitar, "Halfway Home" is all propulsion and energy, the best album opener of the year. "Family Tree" is a rock ballad sung with great tenderness by Tunde Adebimpe while "Red Dress" is the smartest thing about race this year not written by Barack Obama. Hopefully the merging of their cerebral side with melodies you can actually hum will finally get TVotR an audience outside their borough.

3. Death Magnetic
by Metallica

You can be forgiven for thinking they were washed up after three mediocre albums — they thought as much themselves. But a few months with Rick Rubin and a return to their thrash roots produced the best album in Metallica's catalog. What brought them back is simple: speed and length. Metallica has never played as fast or made songs that last as long. Case in point: Death Magnetic's best track, "Broken, Beat & Scarred," which has a chaotic, minute-long intro and a melody-line that bobs and weaves until the 3:30 mark, when, just after James Hetfield barks the career-defining Metallica lyric, "What don't kill ya make ya more strong," all four band members start playing as hard and as fast as they can — without sacrificing a single note — for another two minutes. After all these years, Metallica still has the capacity to make you bang your head. Now they just make you do it faster and longer.

4. Feed the Animals
by Girl Talk

Sure, Girl Talk (ex-engineering student Greg Gillis) uses shards of hundreds of already well-known songs to make his secondhand hits. But bolstered by the most liberal interpretation of the fair use statute known to man, he's made the rare album on which every track is a party-starter. Like all DJs, Gillis has a great set of ears and a hell of a laptop, and it's a must to listen with his Wikipedia page open just to keep track of all the wild collisions, like K7 into The Carpenters into Metallica on "Like This," or Ice Cube's "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" into Hot Chocolate's "Every 1's a Winner" on "Give Me a Beat." Gillis slips in the odd social message — pairing Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike" with Ludacris' money loving "What's Your Fantasy," for instance — but his most powerful statement is cribbed from David Bowie: let's dance!

5. Vampire Weekend
by Vampire Weekend

Dubbed the "whitest band" by the experts over at Stuff White People Like, these recent Columbia University alums do indeed sing about such pressing subjects as Oxford commas, albeit with the proper disdain ("Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?") But their whiteness has less to do with their familiarity with the MLA Handbook than an unrestrained admiration for blackness. From the Afro-pop guitars and soukous rhythms to name-checking Lil Jon ("First the window, then it's to the wall/ Lil' Jon, he always tells the truth"), it's clear this band knows its melanin. If that sounds a tad anthropological, the joy of this debut is that it never feels it. The Afro-pop and indie rock fusion is seamless, particularly on "A-Punk" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," which includes the lyrical deprecation "This feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too." More than most new bands, Vampire Weekend knows how to find a song's soul without compromising its wit. Peter Gabriel would be proud. Paul Simon would be prouder.

6. 808s & Heartbreak
by Kanye West

Imagine if you took an album's worth of blues lyrics and removed all the blues. That's what West does on this hastily produced record about the death of his mother and the dissolution of his recent engagement. The words are brutally introspective ("Chased the good-life, all my life long/ Look back on my life, all my life gone") but they're sung through the anonymity of Auto-Tune over beats generated mostly by the ancient Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, one of the first drum machines, so you'd expect their power to be muted. Instead, West turns his gimmick into an innovation; the effects make him sound ghostly and sad (and better, since he can't actually sing). Not everything on 808s & Heartbreak works, but what does is fascinating — and haunting.

7. Santogold
by Santogold

Santi White spent years as an A&R executive before making her solo debut, and her seasoning, as well as her taste, shows. Mining poses from Gwen Stefani, Bjork and Grace Jones, and melodies from New Wave, pop and whatever else her laptop spits out, she creates a new persona — "a black girl who's not singing R&B," is how she puts it, tongue firmly in cheek. She's also a fusionist who knows influences don't mean a thing if you ain't learned to sing. And sing she can, with a voice flexible enough to sound like her friend M.I.A. on "Shove It" and Blondie on "L.E.S. Artistes." "Creep up and suddenly/ I found myself/ An innovator," she rasps on the latter; for now her innovation is pastiche, but you get the sense there's more, and even better, coming.

8. Third
by Portishead

After a 10-year hiatus, Bristol's once famous trip-hop trio returned with an album that was less accessible — and far prettier — than their previous work. Packed with a Portuguese soliloquy, austere Krautrock rhythms and muscular synthesizer melodies, the first half-hour is more impressive than lovable. Then the ukuleles begin. It sounds like a joke at first, but "Deep Water" gives Beth Gibbons the chance to sing her wounded heart out and create a little island of prettiness that blooms into more prettiness the rest of the way. Third takes multiple listens to crack, but it rewards patience with a textured majesty.

9. Little Honey
by Lucinda Williams

After years in misery's ditch, Williams finally put out a happy album, but it's a little more nuanced than its publicity. Songs like "Tears of Joy" and the grinding guitar-rocker "Real Love," show off a singer no longer ill at ease with easy pleasures (although, uncharacteristically, she's suddenly at ease with lyrical cliché) while the Elvis Costello duet "Jailhouse Tears" proves she can even be funny. For all the smiles, there's also plenty of material where the mood darkens. "Circles and X's" and the glorious "Wishes Were Horses" ("If wishes were horses/ I'd have a ranch") get Williams back to longing, territory where she's unrivaled as a writer and unbeatable as a singer. The balance, though, makes this Williams' sweetest album.

10. Rockferry
by Duffy

Because Aimee Ann Duffy is young, British and has a rocket-powered voice that seems to find its natural expression in '60s soul music, the Amy Winehouse comparisons are inevitable. For the record, Winehouse is better. But on "Rockferry" and the delicately sweet "Warwick Avenue," Duffy proves she's at least in the game with an impressive display of vocal and emotional range. The album sags a bit toward the end, but its best songs have a captivating innocence that seems born of 24-year-old Duffy herself. On that front, she's got Winehouse beat by miles.

[via TIME]