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The Tris McCall Report

Critics Poll 2004 -- The Albums

Wouldn't it be nice to win the Critics Poll, even if it was for just one year?

There was a moment at around nine o'clock last night when, sifting through the many, many ballots I recieved for this year's poll, I thought that Brian Wilson's SMiLE had the numbers. I hope it doesn't offend the Beach Boys fans out there too badly when I say that my initial reaction to the possibility of a Wilson win was total horror. Making top ten lists is a game for the obsessor, but I always hope that it shines a little light on our procilivities and priorities, too, and that it can tell us something about our subcultures. Here, though, was a choice that seemed to amplify all of the neurotic frequencies at which our geekazoid fandom resonates -- a legendary lost classic from the Sixties reinterpreted by its mythic author, himself an object of crazy adulation. No matter how brilliant Wilson's work might be, a win by SMiLE would make us all look like we were drowning in our own record collections.

Ultimately, when I counted the votes, I found that SMiLE had been crushed by the same album that is most likely flattening competition on year-end polls across North America. Our winner is an aural hologram projected by the moment: a hybrid of emo hysteria and indie compositional cleverness fed by fear of death and animated by existential defiance. But it shares with SMiLE a certain insularity and self-referentiality, and it makes another strong argument for the eternal recurrence of high-Romantic pop music tropes. If our top vote-getter sometimes felt like it consisted of reconstituted and coarsely-minced parts pulled from Pixies, Talking Heads, Cure, Blue Nile and Bjork records, that was no illusion -- despite its pyrotechnics, here was an album that sounded deeply and immediately familiar to anybody steeped in Eighties rock traditions.

But then 2004 was a frightening year. Maybe we needed the comfort of the records that made us feel okay when all we had to worry about was Ronald Reagan snapping and getting nuclear on Mr. Gorbachev. From Darfur to Fallujah to the shores of Banda Aceh, this was a big season for the Reaper -- death stalked the globe and threw the long shadow of its sickle across our path. Our songwriters and lyricists responded with some grim meditations on mortality: Iron & Wine's quiet songs of sweet suffocation, Hayden Desser's dark reflections on the passing of his parents and the savagery of nature, Diana Krall's sudden left turn toward bleak and fatalistic balladry, the exhausted and elegiac storytelling of Nas, the harsh slide into Mos Def's terrifying big-city abyss, the poisoned whimsy of the Friedbergers, the cold-eyed appraisals of sickness and decay of Joanna Newsom. These were the real protest songs of 2004 -- not the pro-forma anti-Bush polemics, but the plaintive howls against the stupidity of introducing more killing into a world where human life is already so fragile. Asked by many to take a political stand, our own folksingers instead registered a complaint more fundamental, more gripping, and more moving.

"Sleeping is giving in," sang Win Butler in 2004. His voice carried straight through those tunnels of snow in his silent, frozen Montreal. You heard him. You stood up and applauded his temerity, his will to kick back at the unspeakable force that took his parents -- that force that ripped through the Sudanese countryside and Iraqi villages and that hangs over downtown New York City like a gray mist. Could he really keep his eyes open indefinitely? He sounded for all the world like he meant to try. And if he could peel back his eyelids and stare straight ahead at the open casket, maybe we could also find the strength to face the funerals to come with our own righteous outrage, and defiance, and rebellion, and an intolerance of lies.

Okay, let's go. Artist, album, and total points -- you voted for them, now here they are:

Before you ask, yes, that is the biggest win in the history of the poll. Part of it is due to the number of responses I recieved, but this landslide can't be attributed to volume alone. Funeral appeared on a record 42 of the 106 ballots cast, and many of those who didn't list them in the top ten named the Arcade Fire as the most Overrated act, or the Band You Don't Know, But You Know You Should. Funeral's margin of victory was unprecedented, and the sixteen number one votes cast for it flattened the previous high-water mark (nine, for Stankonia, in 2000). Exhausted by nonstop reports of death around the globe, the hipster aversion to grandiose cheese melted away in the face of Butler's fist-shaking, corny refusal to be defeated. When the floodgates opened, they burst wide.

Elsewhere in the top five, we had some repeat visits by old friends. Five years ago, the Magnetic Fields won the poll with 69 Love Songs -- yet many of the same people who voted for the three-disc set in '99 now find Win Butler's vision more compelling than Stephin Merritt's. The flavor of popular Romanticism has changed: no longer jaded, urbane, and Clinton Era-arch, we're back to the hysterical Byronism of the early Eighties. I personally felt that Turn On The Bright Lights was demonstrably superior to Antics, but Critics Poll participants did not agree: Interpol finished fourth again, getting the exact percentage of the vote they did in 2002. This is a good sign, since Poll voters can be very harsh on second albums: consider the wave of obligatory but unenthusiastic downballot listings that Room On Fire recieved last year.

Year by year, Ted Leo continues to creep up the poll -- in '02, The Tyranny Of Distance finished eleventh; in '03, Hearts Of Oak was seventh. But while in the past Leo's support came almost entirely from Jersey, this year, the rest of Critics Poll Nation started to catch on. But if anybody seemed restless with Leo's now-codified punk revival style, it was those voters who'd supported him in past polls: I detected a note of restlessness among those who'd had Hearts Of Oak and Distance at or near the top in previous years. "He's great, but now he really needs to try something new," said left banker and long-time supporter Vanessa Chu, while placing Sheets at #7 (she'd had Hearts at #2). Leo picked up the slack by turning on out-of-state voters, but he is losing his stranglehold on Jersey. In 2004, the Essex County hometown hero narrowly lost our 15 electoral votes to Arcade Fire.

Meanwhile, The Fiery Furnaces leapt 187 points in a single year. Some of this is a delayed reaction, I'm sure, and if we could re-do 2003, Gallowsbird's Bark would probably garner more than 22 points. But Blueberry Boat -- the only album I've ever heard that could legitimately be called Pynchonesque -- was an extraordinary achievement and a career-defining record, and one that has put the brother-sister duo on the map for good. Nobody's ever going to need to strain to distinguish the Furnaces from their peers anymore. They're the ones with the ten minute synthpop pirate stories, murderous childrens' tales, and rambling quasi-devotional yarns about lost pets, fratricide, and the Chicago White Sox. There's nothing out there right now that's even remotely like Blueberry Boat, and as good as Gallowsbird's Bark is, it couldn't have prepared us for the conceptual explosion of 2004.

Support for Mike Skinner's new direction was split: many were enthusiastic, but others found A Grand Don't Come For Free almost ridiculously unmusical. Me, I thought that the monotony was part of the point, and I don't turn up my nose at the most meticulously-elaborated narrative on a pop record ever waxed. But if you preferred the old, hip-hop oriented Streets to the current Books On Tape version, I understand.

One of these things is not like the others, huh? I'm saving my long discussion of Kanye West for tomorrow's singles essay, but for today, let's just say I thought The College Dropout, the year's most undeniable album, would do better than fifteenth place. Hip-hop, once a staple of this poll, continues to be expunged from the albums list.

The rest of this range is dominated by the neo-folkies. One of them gives in to his murderous impulses and then takes desperate refuge under the cross, another has built her album around a heartwrenching story of terminal illness, another is fixated on the grave, and another actually stabbed himself to death with a kitchen knife. If you'd predicted on your 2003 ballot (as nobody did) that '04 would be the year of alt-folk, you would only have been half-right. The distinguishing characteristic of the new wave of folksingers isn't their instrumentation or their antecedents -- it's their subject matter. Writing about a world torn apart by fighting in a year when the justification for that violence was ratified by the electorate, the overwhelming poetic response has not been anger, but a deep and distant sorrow.

More happy returns, or more Eighties nostalgia, depending on how you look at it: two of the greatest songwriters of the decade roar back into the top 20. When we started doing this poll fifteen years ago, David Lowery and Robyn Hitchcock were two names you always expected to see on the ballot: funny, dangerous, and articulate lords of the underground. The last CVB album, Key Lime Pie, finished third on our '89 poll, and Hitchcock's Eye came within seven points of capturing the title in 1990. Since then, the Fegmaniac has skated around the fringes of the Poll -- only Moss Elixir ever captured a meaningful number of tallies. Nobody ever voted for Cracker.

So why the revival now? Take a look at the rest of this poll. In a year that saw top ten lists dominated by morbid freak folksters, it was only fitting that the original grim acoustician would dispense with the psychedelic band trappings and get back to doing what he does best: writing bizarre folk songs about death and decay. Hitchcock, often dismissed during his heyday as a Syd Barrett imitator, was never about madness or drugged-out astral travel; he was the first one to successfully combine the surrealism of the Incredible String Band and late-sixties Dylan with the bleak folk of Richard Thompson. And if you look at the neo-folkies of 2004, that's essentially what they're doing -- surrealism, mortality studies, bleakness, literary allusions, mysticism. Thompson, Dylan, and Paul Simon might be their obvious antecedents, but Hitchcock really fathered them all. He's been a deadbeat dad for the past decade, but he's home now.

Hitchcock has always had a political consciousness, and has always written, however obliquely, about current events. Likewise, while the popular image of Camper has always been "Take The Skinheads Bowling" and "Where The Hell Is Bill?", even a cursory glance at David Lowery's lyric sheet reveals a writer obsessed with geopolitics. On New Roman Times, he dispensed with any joke-rock pretense, and assembled the Roger Waters album he always meant to make: a science-fiction story complete with holograms, aliens, and rocket launchers, set in an occupied and fragmented America about a young soldier turned suicide bomber. Ben Krieger complained, quite rightly, that none of the explicit protest singers of 2004 were making any attempt to understand the mindset of those who supported, and fought in, the Iraq War. Lowery was the exception -- his warrior protagonist was dangerously human and and, despite the Phildickian trappings of his denouement, completely believable.

Elsewhere, Critics Poll voters evidently decided that they liked Carl Newman better with his band behind him -- after two straight top-five finishes with The New Pornographers, his Slow Wonder slid to seventeen.

When I saw a surprising number of ballots listing the excellent ...if shacking up, I expected the local indie record set by the Vitamen (81 points, for Mujer) last year to fall. The Roadside Graves did in fact supercede that total -- but were then smoked by the latest Palomar release. Granted, the commercial success of Palomar's Revenge nearly bounces the quartet out of this category. They've had the advantage of touring with some pretty big names: I got ballots listing Palomar III from as far away as San Francisco. The Graves are still a pretty well-kept Turnpike secret: every one of their 83 points came courtesy of Jersey voters.

Everybody's favorite local neuroticists earned 58 points of their own for Children Of The Bear. But Bear was released way too late in 2004 for it to get a fair shake -- if we were to have this balloting in a couple of months, I'd expect the Vitamen to clear the century mark easily. And there's one record that the trio won't be relinquishing anytime soon -- their three-album career total of 206 points dusts everybody else doing indie music in the tri-state area including the guy who runs this poll.

In more bubbly, star-rolling news, a video game soundtrack has broken into the top forty for the first time -- and Jesse Fuchs is only partially responsible. Katamari Damacy is some infectious J-Pop for sure, but you have to get good at the game before you can hear the whole thing. Which set me thinking: what if your favorite artists started applying skill tests before you could unlock certain songs on their albums? On some level that would be frustration, but hey, you like to play games, right?, there's something undeniably satisfying about achieving that reward. There is no reason why record companies couldn't incorporate agonistic elements into their marketing and production. They'd probably lose a little audience there, but those who stick around would be earning an emotional payoff that you just don't get from sticking your CD in the player and sitting back passively, holding your ass while Sting sings at you.

*************

You guys rocked this year. Three hundred and eighty-two albums received at least a single vote. That's nearly double the 2003 total. It's not merely testament to the increased number of Critics Poll voters -- I got poll after poll this year with deep, comprehensive answers, honorable mentions and running commentary. We had very few desultory ballots. Voters took the Poll seriously. Thank you.

Other albums receiving #1 votes:

  • Amy X. Neuburg -- Residue
  • Autolux -- Future Perfect
  • Bjork -- Medulla
  • Blood Brothers -- Crimes
  • Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music
  • Charlotte Hatherley -- Grey Will Fade
  • Chuck Brodsky -- Color Came One Day
  • Clutch -- Blast Tyrant
  • CocoRosie -- La Maison De Mon Reve
  • Ed Purchla -- Tomorrow's Not An Option
  • Gomez -- Split The Difference
  • Higgins -- Dear
  • Jens Lekman -- When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog
  • Jello Biafra & The Melvins -- Never Breathe What You Can't See
  • Jill Scott -- Beautifully Human: Words And Sounds, Vol. 2
  • Karaoke Revolution Volume 3
  • Keane -- Hopes And Fears
  • Keller Williams -- Stage
  • Kings Of Leon -- Youth And Young Manhood
  • Knights Of The New Crusade -- My God Is Alive! Sorry About Yours.
  • Les Savy Fav -- Inches
  • Madvillain -- Madvillainy
  • Mr. Airplane Man -- C'mon DJ
  • Mos Def -- The New Danger
  • Muse -- Absolution
  • Nas -- Street's Disciple
  • Outkast -- Speakerboxx/The Love Below
  • Phoenix -- Alphabetical
  • The Brian Jonestown Massacre -- ...And This Is Our Music
  • The Church -- Forget Yourself
  • The Court And Spark -- Witch Season
  • The Divine Comedy -- Absent Friends
  • Thee Snuff Project -- Dyin' Ain't Much Of A Livin'
  • The Go! Team -- Thunder Lightning Strike
  • The Figgs -- Palais
  • The Killers -- Hot Fuss
  • The Tiny -- Close Enough
  • Unlovables -- Crush Boyfriend Heartbreak
  • Val Emmich -- Slow Down Kid

I cannot tell a lie: William Shatner got 45 points in the poll.

For the hell of it, review the Critics Poll album results for 2003.

Tune in tomorrow for the singles list, folks.

Click here for the miscellany.

Here's my ballot.

 

With your lightning bolts a-glowin', you can see where you can e-mail me.