43. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

43. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (self-released, 2005)

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. 

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88. In Rainbows

88. In Rainbows, Radiohead (self-released, 2007; TBD, 2008)

Just after the release of their fourth album Kid A in fall 2000, Radiohead appeared on Saturday Night Live playing new songs The National Anthem and Idiotheque.  A complicated, electronics-heavy performance also featuring live horns, for many viewers this was a jarring, exhilarating first glimpse of the band’s new sound.  As previous LP OK Computer (’97) had been hailed as an instant classic, anticipation for Kid A was high.  The abstrusely experimental record abandoned the guitar-based, melodic efforts of their first three LPs yet managed to debut at #1 in the U.S., possibly the most unconventional album to chart that high.  Kid A would come to be revered as a watershed, earning the top slot on numerous critics’ assessments of the Aughts.  As the band opened the decade in a bracing, confrontational way, so they ended it; self-released seventh LP In Rainbows subverted industry paradigms by appearing with nearly no advance notice, available for download directly from the band at the price of the buyer’s choice.  Offered as such for roughly two months, with many buyers opting to pay nothing, the record still hit #1 upon its physical U.S. release, selling millions of full-price copies and leaving the music industry in its wake.

Discussion of the album’s distribution model often overshadows that of its music, despite its quick ascent to the top of many critics’ ’07 year-end lists.  This aside, the album marks a creative renaissance for Radiohead.  The ’02 LP Amnesiac consisted of songs recorded at the same time as Kid A; not precisely an outtakes record, it is the group’s dreariest effort.  ’03 follow-up Hail to the Thief is an improvement, an occasionally aggressive and more emotionally articulate set of songs that lags due to its length.  In ’06, frontman Thom Yorke released his debut solo LP The Eraser, a primarily electronic effort.  Its sonic inspirations continue on In Rainbows, whose opening track 15 Steps begins with skittering electro-dubstep percussion before being joined by a fluid bassline and gently chorded guitar riff.  Weird Fishes/Arpeggi opens with a similar percussion figure, this time played live by Phil Selway; the drums propel the song through an insistent crescendo, ending abruptly for a verse before crashing in again.  The avoidance of typical verse-chorus-verse structure that began with Kid A continues here, the songs often progressing through distinctive movements without repetition.  The album is more soulful than most previous Radiohead efforts, often courtesy of Colin Greenwood’s bass.  On tunes like Jigsaw Falling Into Place and Bodysnatchers, they actually swing like a rock group.  Not all the tunes are groovy rockers, though; Faust Arp features an impressive string arrangement courtesy of the Millenia Ensemble, and All I Need boasts an orchestration based on piano and Selway’s cymbal washes.  In Rainbows bears repeated plays better than any Radiohead album of the decade. It would be a fool’s errand to quibble with the importance of Kid A, which conditioned millions of fans for experimental music’s rise in the mainstream during the Aughts.  In Rainbows, though, born in a happier time for the band than Kid A, is one of the finest albums in a now lengthy career that has seen many highlights.

Highlights: Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, Bodysnatchers, Jigsaw Falling Into Place, Videotape

Sublime bit: The hypnotic guitar picking described in the title of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, along with that tune’s ethereal Yorke vocal.
 
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99. For Emma, Forever Ago

99. For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver (self-released, 2007; Jagjaguwar, 2008)

For Emma, Forever Ago is an album borne of circumstance rather than intention, a personal document whose primal expression and slow-burning catharsis allow it to resonate emotionally with listeners despite an impressionist approach that, like its cover image of an iced-over window masking the trees outside, offers beauty while rendering much of the content inscrutable.

In late ’06, following the breakup of his marginally successful group DeYarmond Edison, Justin Vernon decamped from the band’s adopted base of Raleigh, North Carolina, to his birthplace in Northwestern Wisconsin to spend the winter alone gathering his thoughts at his family’s cabin. He did not plan on a cohesive project; nonetheless, he fiddled about on instruments and recording equipment he’d brought along to pass the time between cutting firewood. Over the ’06-’07 holiday season, Vernon’s noodlings took shape and resulted in a new solo project he dubbed Bon Iver, a malapropism for a greeting meaning “good winter” that he picked up from watching Northern Exposure DVDs. Vernon issued the songs, originally intended as demos, in a small ’07 vanity pressing that caught the ear of Bloomington, Indiana, label Jagjaguwar, who issued the work nationally the following year. Vernon had recorded three previous solo albums and five more with groups, yet it was the unintentional cabin demos that brought him acknowledgment.

At its core a folk record, For Emma, Forever Ago features Vernon on acoustic guitar, makeshift uses of a drum set’s components, and a soulful falsetto recalling Lindsey Buckingham. Vernon’s adept engineering, use of effects, and layering of overdubs gives the album a dense, warm atmosphere belying its solitary origins. It is an album heavy on feelings--while the songs generally seem to deal with alienation from and within relationships, Vernon’s vocals are opaque and more is communicated through inflection, tone, and dynamics than by language. Frankly, Vernon is not a dazzling lyricist, and more enjoyment may be had if one avoids the provided lyric sheet that reveals the songs to be packed with free-association tangents. What is most striking about the record, then, are its moods and the strength with which his abstruse inner journeys can speak to the listener regardless of clarity. Snatches of language, allegories for Vernon’s personal explorations, slip through. Repeated like mantras, phrases such as “So ready for us/so ready for us” (Creature Fear), “What might have been lost” (The Wolves) or “Would you really rush out/for me now?” (Blindsided) produce an aura of ennui, reflection, and the confusion that follows a relationship’s end. The album’s most lucid piece, Skinny Love, finds Vernon abandoning his falsetto to sing, full-throated, a list of reminders to a flame who claims her “love was wasted”: “I told you to be patient/I told you to be fine/I told you to be balanced/I told you to be kind”; not so much angry as lamenting, it is the LP’s most gripping song. As he does with romance, he seeks equilibrium within himself; Lump Sum concludes, “Balance we won’t know/We will see when it gets warm.” Vernon followed For Emma with an EP of new songs, Blood Bank, its title track a straightforward composition; its remainder, though, consists with varying success of mood pieces like those of the album, an approach he continued on an ’09 collaborative LP with the band Collections of Colonies of Bees. Those efforts feel more contrived than the raw emotion of For Emma, though, and its cabin demos are his first timeless work.

Highlights: Skinny Love, Creature Fear, Lump Sum, Blindsided

Sublime bit: Vernon’s between-verse wails of “My my my/My my my/My my” in Skinny Love.

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