35. This Night

35. This Night, Destroyer (Scratch Canada 2002; Merge US 2002)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here. 

40. Is a Woman

40. Is a Woman, Lambchop (Merge, 2002)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

55. Trouble in Dreams

55. Trouble in Dreams, Destroyer (Merge, 2008)

By the time of his final full-length album of the decade, Vancouver singer-songwriter and Destroyer bandleader Dan Bejar had come a long way from the four-track adventuring of his ’90s work.  The Aughts saw Bejar release six Destroyer full-lengths and a pair of EPs, as well as four albums as a member of the New Pornographers and two with Swan Lake (see #91).  Even just since his previous Destroyer album, the ’06 breakthrough LP Destroyer’s Rubies, Bejar made substantial contributions to four different groups’ records, including performing the bulk of instrumentation on girlfriend Sydney Vermont’s ’08 album (credited to Hello, Blue Roses) The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty.  If one looks only at the Destroyer material produced in the Aughts, the catalog reveals a series of ambitious and complex works: from his first masterwork Streethawk: A Seduction (’01, see #66) to the bold musical theater of the synth-heavy ’04 Your Blues and beyond, Bejar has repeatedly shown himself to be one of the decade’s strongest and most literate songwriters.  His prolificacy and willingness to work as a secondary on other people’s albums have afforded him an ongoing opportunity to hone his writing and performance, and a sequential examination of his Aughts output also shows one of the decade’s most significant progressions in pop craftsmanship.

Trouble in Dreams came after a sequence of Destroyer albums sprawling in construction or thematic in execution; while its running time almost matches the nearly hour-long Rubies, Bejar’s ’08 effort feels like the first streamlined collection of Destroyer songs since Thief in 2000.  While Bejar and Destroyer may seem synonymous, the project has been a group effort since ’98; its lineup has shifted progressively, though, and Trouble marks the first time in six years that Destroyer’s roster survived nearly intact from its previous record.  Only longtime drummer Scott Morgan is missing, replaced here by Fisher Rose (who played vibes and trumpet on Rubies).  As with most of Destroyer’s albums, Trouble was recorded at Vancouver’s JC/DC Studio with David Carswell and Paul Collins co-producing with the band, the latter one of Bejar’s New Pornographers bandmates.  The album’s production is warmer than any of its predecessors, a departure from the ragged live feel of Rubies; most of its songs are slow-burning, sometimes almost sensuous ballads.  The subjects often seem burdened by fatigue, concession, and a wish to get things over with; the album’s opening line is “Okay, fine,” the narrator of Blue Flower/Blue Flame concluding “A gray ashen sadness rises like the sun, oh well.”  My Favorite Year recalls halcyon days before a blunt reminder that “now it’s gone.”  The protagonist of Shooting Rockets, the album’s eight-minute centerpiece, whose “soul pukes,” finds lightness only in dreams because he has “street despair carved in my heart.”  These songs are cloaked in bewitching arrangements that temper the gritty accountings of the lyrics.  The State and Plaza Trinidad provide noisy interludes, delivering percussive crescendoes that provide sonic reminders of the characters’ emotional stress.  Only on My Favorite Year and Dark Leaves Form a Thread does the mood approach ebullience; even then, though, the narrator is ambivalent: “No, it’s cool, you go, I’ll stay,” Bejar sings on the latter, “perfectly at home with this dread.”  On its lyrical surface a potential gloom trip, Trouble in Dreams is Destroyer’s most sonically beautiful album and another gem in the catalog.

Highlights: My Favorite Year, Dark Leaves Form a Thread, Rivers, Introducing Angels

Sublime bit: Introducing Angels: its lush arrangement, Bejar’s hushed intonation of its title, and the silvery guitar riff slipping through its choruses.

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67. Nixon

67. Nixon, Lambchop (Merge, 2000)

Kurt Warner quietly led his Nashville group Lambchop through the bulk of the ’90s, keeping his carpentry day job while releasing four LPs and one mini-album between ’94 and the decade’s end.  His collective, boasting a dozen or so members from release to release, slowly polished a modest sort of American musical quilt bridging country, rock, and soul.  Wagner’s natural voice is folksy and unadorned with a slight twang; he is capable of lush crooning, though, and from time to time uses a convincing falsetto.  The band’s instrumentation is broad, including piano, organ, vibraphone, strings, horns, and an assortment of percussion; the arrangements often understated, most songs unfold casually at quarter speed.  The music is often elegantly sparse, the ballads complemented by the occasional rave-up and, especially in the lyrics, a mild irreverence all the more striking because of the sedate music.  The group’s first clutch of releases, through the ’96 EP Hank, show a group finding its sea legs; often pleasantly shaky but not without success--2nd LP How I Quit Smoking (’96) is an early high point--their ’90s catalog is a charming set of preparatory materials for the bracing work they would accomplish in the Aughts.

Nixon, the sixth Lambchop record, expands on the developments of its predecessor, What Another Man Spills (’98), which included a faithful Curtis Mayfield cover, Give Me Your Love.  Just as when Porter Wagoner invited James Brown to the Grand Ole Opry, this crossover reveals the continuity between soul and country.  Nixon, in turn, is Lambchop’s soul album.  It swings more than any of the group’s previous work, and Wagner employs a passionate falsetto on nearly half the tracks.  Of Nixon’s soul showcases, You Masculine You and What Else Could It Be are sung entirely in falsetto, the latter with a sleek, mature disco arrangement; shimmering violin cascades are provided on that track and several others by guests the Nashville String Machine.  Grumpus is a grooving, brawnier affair, Wagner’s vocal skirting the rhythm ever so slightly and shooting to the higher registers at the end of the bridge.  The Book I Haven’t Read is even given a Mayfield co-credit, due to its similarity to his ’85 tune Baby, It’s You.  The album’s one single and the band’s only near hit, Up With People, is anomalous in the Lambchop catalog; a pulsing number with a diamond-sharp gospel chorus, its refrain finds Wagner and the choir freely declaring “We are screwing/Up our lives today.”  The album’s finest expository achievement is Nashville Parent.  The epitome of Wagner’s ability for documenting the mundane, it depicts domestic scenes of standing against the kitchen counter with arms crossed, neighbors fighting after a drinking binge, and spitting on the sidewalk but ending up having to wipe it off your shirt.  All of this is delivered in a silky vocal befitting a Johnny Mathis record, the accompaniment the first shining example of the smooth country-soul melange the group would perfect on later albums like Is a Woman (’02) and Damaged (’06; see #90).  The performances and Mark Nevers’s production are leagues beyond earlier Lambchop works.  The accomplishments of Nixon served Lambchop well; the band heretofore largely unknown, Nixon scored them Album of the Year in UK magazine Uncut.  That they would go on to even bigger musical accomplishments is testimony to Lambchop’s status as perhaps the most underrated rock group of the decade.  As for Nixon’s relation to the 37th President, his administration concurred nicely with the rise of the modern soul and disco to which Lambchop pay homage on what is their first great album.

Highlights: Nashville Parent, Up With People, Grumpus, You Masculine You

Sublime bit: When, achingly, Wagner sings the line “You look pretty swell/In your new position” for the second time in Nashville Parent at 4:57.
 
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78. Aw Cmon

78. Aw Cmon, Lambchop (Merge, 2004)

The Aughts began on a high note for Nashville country-soul adventurers Lambchop.  Their ’00 album Nixon was named Album of the Year by UK mag Uncut at a time when the fluctuating confederation of over a dozen members was relatively unknown in their homeland.  ’02 follow-up and somber epic Is a Woman was an artistic breakthrough and their best-produced LP to date.  These albums’ success allowed frontman Kurt Wagner to quit his job laying floors; with his new free time, he embarked on a project to write a song a day.  Wagner still a reticent pop musician after nearly a decade of recording, the project served as a self-legitimization exercise and provided him with enough material for two albums.  In ’03, Lambchop was commissioned to perform a live score to a festival showing of F. W. Murnau’s 1927 silent film Sunrise.  Wagner incorporated his daily songs into that effort, and Lambchop’s ninth album, No You Cmon, would open with an instrumental named for the film.  By 2004, releasing two albums on one day was no longer the dazzling stunt it was in ’91 when Guns ’n’ Roses issued Use Your Illusion I & II or when Bruce Springsteen broke up the E Street Band to unleash ’92 career nadirs Lucky Town and Human Touch.  In ’02, Tom Waits brought dignity to the tactic with fraternal twins Alice and Blood Money.  Lambchop’s UK label, City Slang, released the band’s diptych as a regular double LP with two titles; stateside, however, Aw Cmon and No You Cmon remained two separate entities.

Aw Cmon is the superior of the two albums.  While they are similarly structured, boasting the lushest arrangements of the band’s career to date, uncharacteristically including numerous instrumentals, strengthening their unique amalgamation of soul and the Nashville sound, and operating with a sense of levity absent from their predecessor, Aw Cmon simply possesses stronger and more memorable songs.  No You Cmon is the group’s weakest Aughts effort, an occasionally silly record whose arguable highlight is the quasi-instrumental doo-wop lark Shang a Dang.  Aw Cmon opens with instrumental Being Tyler, starting with a sprightly, mildly funky bassline reminscent of earlier rhythmic Lambchop efforts like their ’98 cover of Curtis Mayfield’s Give Me Your Love before blooming into a breezy orchestral flourish.  Aw Cmon’s other instrumental, Timothy B. Schmidt, wryly named for the Poco/Eagles bassist, is a bouncy, mid-tempo, piano-led pop confection.  Women Help to Create the Kind of Men They Despise climaxes with a slowly chanted vocal line reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s ’67 nutty operetta Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.  “I hate candy/But I like rain,” opens I Hate Candy before gliding into a slinky groove on choruses of “Where’s my little trouble girl/There’s no real trouble, girl.”  Something’s Going On finds Wagner’s voice deeper than ever--going to nearly subwoofer levels on the bridge--his vocals syncopated to the point that they almost function as percussion despite an intricate lyric about anxiety that manages to name check Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles.  The album’s most earnest number, the aching, piano-and-string-laden Steve McQueen, addresses the value of honesty: “Make sure we never ever stand in each other’s way/When you got something that you got to say that’s real/Look to each other.”  Aw Cmon, along with its slighter sister, provides the most fun in Lambchop’s dense Aughts catalog; a playful record, often sensual and occasionally as poignant as their more sober recordings, Aw Cmon demonstrates the band’s increasing virtuosity while remaining true to Wagner’s singular, homespun sense of wonderment.

Highlights: Something’s Going On, Steve McQueen, I Hate Candy, Timothy B. Schmidt

Sublime bit: When Wagner pleads, if ungrammatically, “Take me serious,” 2:48 into Steve McQueen.

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90. Damaged

90. Damaged, Lambchop (Merge, 2006)

A lot transpired for Lambchop and leader Kurt Wagner in the thirty months between the ’04 joint release of the Aw Cmon and No You Cmon LPs and their ninth studio work, Damaged.  The fluctuating Nashville collective, often claiming over a dozen members, had made eight studio albums in a decade, each a progression of their meticulous, elegant update of the ’50s Nashville sound melding country with strings and its ’70s Countrypolitan descendent that subtly incorporated soul music.  In ’05 they released the CoLAB EP, a mutual effort with ambient duo Hands Off Cuba--consisting of Lambchop members Ryan Norris and Scott Martin.  Three of its four tracks find Lambchop tunes rearranged into unrecognizable electronic pieces; this work would figure heavily in the creation of Damaged.  Early ’06 saw two rarities compilations released, both titled The Decline of Country and Western Civilization and featuring different track listings in its US and UK guises.  Most grave, though, was Wagner’s series of health crises including jaw replacement surgery and a bout with prostate cancer.  He recovered, his difficult year informing the typically quotidian lyrics on Damaged.  The album’s inner sleeve features an x-ray of his jaw.

Despite these troubles, Damaged was the lushest, most beautiful Lambchop album to date.  Recorded by their longtime producer Mark Nevers, its sound is more luxurious than that of earlier Lambchop records and is bolstered by string arrangements on three tracks; the songs are linked by electronic interludes constructed by Norris and Martin from samples of the record’s own material.  More subtle than the pieces on CoLAB, they give the album a finespun undercurrent.  Numbering eighteen musicians here, the complex orchestrations of Lambchop circa late-summer ’06 seem to hinge on the understated guitar of William Tyler and the deft piano of Tony Crow.  Wagner’s lived-in baritone is mixed higher on Damaged; on the ’04 albums it was often so low that it disappeared among the accompaniment.  While those LPs featured many upbeat tunes stemming from a Wagner project of writing a song every day for a year, the songs on Damaged stretch out, revealing their more premeditated gestations.  The album opens with its most absorbing number, Paperback Bible.  A literal transcript of a radio call-in show devoted to trading household goods, it exemplifies Wagner’s knack for making the mundane heartbreakingly lovely; Crow’s rationed piano lines appear every minute or two, adding more fragile beauty.  I Would Have Waited Here All Day is a rare male-sung song with a female narrator.  It depicts a woman who spends afternoons at home waiting for her lover to arrive, noting that “The fading sense of anticipation/Is something I’ve come to know”; when he does pull into her driveway, she resignedly concludes “it’s been a lousy day.”  The sole straightforward tune from CoLAB is reprised, here titled Prepared [2], to whose swelling string quartet Wagner declares “I am the most undisciplined of man.”  The closing number, its title taken from the band’s ’06 rarities compilations, is a bombastic, angry survey that takes in the indie-rock blogosphere (“You see your Pitchfork I-rock saviors/And I’m sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors”), Wagner’s health problems, and KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, each verse concluding with the fuming “Damn, they’re looking ugly to me”; by song’s end, the self-deprecating, romantic Wagner has calmed, quietly concluding “And I’m still alone/But you’re good looking.”  Damaged is a striking album, borne of artistic growth and personal difficulty, and a highlight of Lambchop’s expansive body of work.
 
Highlights: Paperback Bible, The Decline of Country and Western Civilization, Fear, The Rise and Fall of the Letter P

Sublime bit: The entirety of Paperback Bible; or, alternatively, Tony Crow’s sparkling piano lines that run intermittently through that song.
 
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94. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

94. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon (Merge, 2007)

Spoon’s sixth long player and final Aughts album, the daftly titled Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, finds the Austin group’s music sharpened and streamlined.  Half fidgety, tight pop songs and half breezy white-boy soul, the record was Spoon’s most concise and economical record to date.  While the junior executive indie rockers’ Aughts catalog consists of four smartly appointed LPs of increasing achievement, these can appear interchangeable to the casual listener; while earlier efforts like the ’01 Girls Can Tell, for example, is built on the same blueprint of taut yet groovy guitar-based backing and Britt Daniel’s obliquely clever lyricism reminiscent of an art-school Elvis Costello, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is more focused, entertaining, and memorable.  As I’ve noted elsewhere (see #108), the Spoon LP you favor may come down to drawing straws; should you decide on this effort, though, the rewards may last longer.

With the group’s lineup in flux at ’05’s Gimme Fiction after the departure of longtime bassist Josh Zarbo and much of that record recorded by Daniel and drummer Jim Eno, Spoon’s Ga lineup is stabilized as a quartet, including bassist Rob Pope of then-dissolved emo veterans the Get Up Kids.  Horn and string guest spots spice up a handful of tunes.  At just over 36 minutes, Ga is about as long as any Spoon album but unlike some of the others it is the kind of record that zips by, begging for another play.  This is in despite of the peculiar placement of The Ghost of You Lingers as the album’s second track; founded on a pounding, one-note piano riff that dominates the song’s three-and-a-half minutes (and whose phonetic approximation provides the album’s title) and with little other sonic meat on its bones apart from a handful of competing, disembodied vocal fragments, the song is long and jarring enough to make listeners with short attention spans turn off the record.  Should the casual listener persevere, the album’s truest reward comes at the third track with a shift to crisp pop mode, continuing at a pithy clip for its remainder.

The band is literate enough to feature a 1963 photo of American sculptor Lee Bontecou on the album cover but classy enough to avoid referential pop-culture overkill in its songs, and much of Daniel’s wordplay on Ga is more abstruse than ever.  Only The Underdog and Finer Feelings offer explicitly linear narratives, the latter an account of a hapless chap from Memphis seeking salvation in the help-wanted or dating sections of the local paper, whichever comes first.  Don’t Make Me a Target, with its “Nuclear dicks with their dialect drawls/That come from a parking lot town,” evokes the slightest whiff of politics.  As important as the album’s lyrics, though, are its arrangements.  Split between the jaunty yet tough-edged pep of tunes like The Underdog (built sunnily on invigorating acoustic guitar, a soft horn arrangement, and handclaps) and the slinky groove of Eddie’s Raga and Don’t You Evah (a cover of a theretofore unreleased song by NYC trio The Natural History), the record is paced brilliantly, at least after the confounding gambit of its second track.  Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is strong while remaining freshly loose and, despite the mix-and-match tenor of Spoon’s catalog, it is as spirited as they'd yet gotten and it makes a respectable choice for the finest record they’d recorded thus far.

Highlights: You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb, Don’t You Evah, Finer Feelings, The Underdog

Sublime bit: How each chorus overlaps with the first line of the next verse in Eddie’s Raga, one of a handful of great uses of vocal overdubs.

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Bubbling Under #108. Gimme Fiction

108. Gimme Fiction, Spoon (Merge, 2005)

Austin, Texas, songwriter Britt Daniel and his band Spoon are the sophisticated workmen of indie rock. They create a sound that manages to be simultaneously luxe and taut, avoiding gimmickry and adding only the occasional tasteful ornamentation such as piano or effects. On Gimme Fiction, Spoon’s fifth album and third of the Aughts, five songs were recorded solely by Daniel and longtime drummer Jim Eno; former bassist Josh Zarbo returns for one song and the rest is handled by session players. Spoon, regardless of roster, evokes classical influences like late-'70s Elvis Costello, solo-era John Lennon (see the piano-led opening cut The Beast and Dragon, Adored) and the Rolling Stones without betraying their own modernism or devolving into pastiche. Daniel’s voice has a narrow range that he escapes only with the odd falsetto, and while each Spoon album has its general stylistic differences they are, arguably, largely interchangeable exercises in cleverly written, sharply arranged millenial-era rock for post-graduates. So why Gimme Fiction? For one, its arrangements are more interesting and diverse than its predecessors, with plenty of piano, resulting in the band’s least monochromatic album to date; for every archetypical Spoon pattern, there is a departure like the prickly disco minimalism of I Turn My Camera On, the nearly sunny pop of Sister Jack, or the opaque almost-dub of Was It You?  Picking a favorite Spoon LP may come down to personal whim, but one could do worse than Gimme Fiction.

Highlights: Sister Jack; The Beast and Dragon, Adored; My Mathematical Mind

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