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The Tris McCall Report

Critics Poll XVI

2005: another Boss year.

Every few years Bruce Springsteen comes down from his compound in Encino, or Mendocino, or wherever it is, with a new record that is so much better-written and better-conceptualized than anything else out there that it really makes the rest of popular entertainment look stupid by comparison. Sometimes we embrace these records (though usually while misunderstanding them) and sometimes we reject them like "um, sorry, Bruce, don't interrupt us with your long stories while we're listening to Art Brut." Hopefully one day humanity will be ready for Bruce Springsteen.

But that day is not today. Critics insist on grading his records alongside stuff by Stellastarr* and Hot Hot Heat and what have you, so you get the spectacle of serious online music magazines giving a Springsteen release the same once-over treatment and letter grade they give to the rest of the fluff that publicists blow through their inboxes. And it's ridiculous on the face of it, because you can't listen to Springsteen albums like that. Springsteen makes records that are meant to stand up to hundreds of listens; you're still supposed to be digging out hidden correlations and layers of meaning in the songs years after you first hear them. Hot Hot Heat and Stellastarr and the rest of them make albums that are supposed to make a big, splashy, immediate impact, and then become disposable. It's like comparing Moses to some advertising executive just because they've both got a message.

Devils & Dust isn't my number one album of 2005; there was another that I thought was, on balance, a better record. But that just points out (as if we really needed any more evidence) what a silly exercise listmaking is. My number one album, and my number five album, and especially my number three album wouldn't even exist if it weren't for Bruce Springsteen. By this I don't mean that they were influenced by Bruce Springsteen, or that they're attempts to copy Bruce Springsteen; nothing as prosaic as that. I mean that they use representational strategies, narrative devices, and storytelling techniques that were introduced to mainstream pop music by the Boss in the mid-seventies. When you listen to these records -- when you respond to this poetry and this lyricism -- you are, in a sense, hearing the fruits of Springsteen's labor. If not for Springsteen, emo -- the entire genre -- would have had to find its language, its metaphors, and its distinctive modes of expression elsewhere. Pull away Springsteen's albums and the flimsy platform that alt-country stands on tumbles into the ocean. I hate to open this can of worms again, because it only gets me into hot water when I say this, but Bruce Springsteen had an immense impact on East Coast hip-hop storytelling and character-writing, and thus on hip-hop in general.

The kid who wrote this year's best album is one hell of a talent. Unlike so many of his peers, he treats his muscular vocabulary as a tool for expression, rather than something to flash like club credentials at postgraduate rock critics and their admirers. Nevertheless, when he makes those chilling intertexual connections between his songs; when he slathers on that overwrought but oh-so-effective romantic imagery; when he oscillates between outlaw-intellectual and crazed-loverman characters; when he builds to those lung-shredding, fist-pumping, Emo-with-a-capital-E climaxes; when he is writing anything at all, he is dipping his pen into an inkwell provided by The Boss.

Every year my top twenty gets wordier and wordier. That's just my steez, fellas. Okay, let's go:

 

Album of the year

There was some debate over whether or not to count Belle & Sebastian's Push Barman To Open Old Wounds as a 2005 album. We considered old EP compilations from Jens Lekman and Fiery Furnaces part of '05, but it felt a little silly to be voting for songs and recordings that we've all known for nearly a decade. Still, the experience of listening to all that stuff end to end, with the windows rolled down, was new to us this year -- and what an experience that was. Forced to list it, I think I'd have it at #7, just below Rehearsing My Choir.

 

Single of the year

 

Best album title

Digital Ash In A Digital Urn

Best album cover

The Seven Autumn Flowers, by Trembling Blue Stars. My copy doesn't have the dumb yellow box on it; it's just the watercolor.

Best liner notes & packaging

Ben Krieger's off-the-wall EP inserts are pretty great, and I liked the song-by-song discussion in the booklet for Sylvie Lewis's Tangos & Tantrums. But Missy Elliott's weird one-woman slave narrative inside The Cookbook proves, once again, that she's the queen of quasioffensive iconography.

Most welcome surprise

C-Murder. As you may know, The Truest $#!@ I Ever Said was recorded on equipment smuggled into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Facility, where the emcee is serving a life sentence. In Finnish mythology, Kullervo was a hero who was doomed by destiny to betray the good guys and to be stopped and driven to suicide, and nobody knew it better than he did. C-Murder, or Corey Miller, is the Kullervo of pre-Katrina New Orleans: haunted by fate, resigned to brutality. But Miller refuses to romanticize anything about his life -- and his unswerving trajectory from street kid to hustler to incarcerated felon is narrated between the bars in an eerie, dispassionate mumble. This is a must-hear for any fan of New Orleans rap, any follower of the No Limit story, or anybody even vaguely interested in America's prison epidemic.

Biggest disappointment

Laura Cantrell

Album that opens the strongest

The Documentary. If only The Game had kept up the pace of the first few songs...

Album that ends the strongest

Black Sheep Boy

Worst song of the year

Cee Lo & Jazze Pha -- "Happy Hour"

Song of the year

I'd like to vote for "Real Big", since in the context of The Mind Of Mannie Fresh it really does sound like the new national anthem. But I can't front: the answer is Okkervil River's nine-minute Romantic epic "So Come Back, I Am Waiting".

Best EP Release

Ben Krieger -- Queen Of The Ocean, Commander Of The Sea. "Stingra" is a multi-section prog-rock song about a bionic jellyfish. Of course I dug it.

Best singing

Tracy Bonham

Best rapping

The answer to this question has, for the past few years, been Lil Wayne. But for some reason I can't bring myself to vote for him. Let's say Bun B instead.

Best vocal harmonies

Maria Taylor. Hey, Maria, I want to make a Suzanne Vega album, too! Hit me up, we'll pool resources.

Best bass playing

John Collins, as usual.

Best drumming

Kurt Dahle. The Collins-Dahle rhythm section, always red hot, turned in a performance on Twin Cinema that rivals anything I've ever heard on a pop album.

Best drum programming

I can't tell whether David Terry from Aqueduct programmed those breakbeats or if he played them himself. In any case, that's not the answer; the answer is Mannie Fresh.

Best synth playing

I'm with Jim Testa on this one -- The Negatones, especially on the break on "Escalator Song".

Best piano/organ/electric piano playing

Tori Amos

Best rhythm guitar playing

Will Sheff. I imagine him running across the recording studio, launching into every gigantic downstroke.

Best lead guitar playing

Alistair MacLean, the new Richard Thompson.

Best use of a non-traditional instrument

Genevieve Gagon, the fiddler in the Heavenly States. Gagon is the best electric violinist in pop music since Jonathan Segel. And Segel wasn't any better.

Best instrumental solo

Damien Paris of the Giraffes,"Honey Baby Child".

Best instrumentalist

Genevieve Gagon

Best arrangements

Like Moving Insects

Most thoroughly botched production job

Metric, Live It Out. When did these guys decide they were Black Sabbath? Get rid of that dumbass rhythm guitar, Metric, and your songs will come back to life.

Best production

I really don't want to answer "Wait 'Til You See My Dick"; I do have limits, you know. Luckily, Rich Nice did enough crazy R&B shit this year ("1 Thing", "Get Right", "We Run This") that I can justify tapping somebody other than ColliPark.

Rookie of the year

The Game. Yet somehow I don't think he's going to be around for very long, and not just because he keeps pissing off 50.

Band of the year

The New Pornographers. Fantastic rhythm section, good guitar players, interesting synth parts and sounds, strong vocalists, excellent vocal harmonies. Go on, top that.

Best lyrics (on an individual song)

A few for you to check out: "Rehearsing My Choir" by the Fiery Furnaces, Craig Finn's "Banging Camp" and "Cattle And The Creeping Things" (though those two are best heard together), Why's disturbing "Light Leaves" and "Act Five", Springsteen's "The Hitter" and "Black Cowboys", "Conversation", "Nothing Compares To Love", and "Chubby Boy" by Mannie Fresh, "The Story" by Bun B, 50 Cent's "Baltimore Love Thing", Lil Wayne's "Fly In" and "Fly Out". If I had to choose one, I'd probably take "Black Cowboys", but just about everything on Devils & Dust is worthy of consideration.

Best lyrics (over the course of a full-length)

The Boss, of course.

Best songwriting

Kevin Barnes. Who ever thought indiepop could get crunk?

Best sounding album

The Massacre

Best concerts of 2005

Best music video

Best guest appearance

Too Short's cameo on Trill is absolutely macktastic; he was the original pimp emcee, and he's still the one in closest touch with the funny side of porn. Also: Birdman, on "Go With Me". He sounds so..... high.....

Sexiest people in pop music

Worst video

"Trapped In The Closet". If I want to watch stupid TV drama, I'll watch stupid TV drama.

Worst singing

Coco Rosie

Worst rapping

Pharrell Williams. What is this man doing on the mic?

Worst instrumentalist

Dino Meneghin, the lead guitarist on Somebody's Miracle. Some of his playing on that album is truly repulsive.

Worst lyrics

"Original Sin? No, I don't think so! Original sinnn-suality! Original sin? No! It should be: original sinnnn-suality!". Hell, it's just soooo Tori Amos that it's hard to criticize; gnostic disasters like "Original Sinsuality" are just the price we have to pay for the rest of her work.

Worst song on a good album

"Celebration", from Late Registration. That wonky synth sound is really beneath you, Kanye.

Crappy album you listened to a lot anyway

Architecture In Helsinki

2005 album you listened to the most

Tie between The Massacre and The Beekeeper. Ah, the duality of me.

2005 album that wore out the quickest

Common

Song that got stuck in your head the most this year

Nas & Quan -- "Just A Moment". Sadly. "Can we please have a moment of truth/ for soldiers and troops away with helmets and boots?/ And families back home who pray they make it home safe/
hopin' that they don't get hit with a stray?/ As day comes and night falls, for the rest of our lives we'll miss y'all/ And though life goes on, we still mourn/ While wishing y'all were home."

Thing you don't know, but you know you should

Rilo Kiley. Also, I never got a copy of The Snow Fairies Get Married.

Man, I wish I knew what this song or album was about

I've given up on the New Pornographers; I now expect them to make no sense. But this year, Spoon really confused me, too. What are those Gimme Fiction songs about?

Album that felt most like an obligation to get through

Late Registration. It's really good, but it's no fun.

Most romantic song

"Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)". I know, it's nasty, and it might be about Renee Zellwinger. It still works.

Funniest song

The intro and "Not Tonight" on The Mind Of Mannie Fresh, the funniest album since the heyday of De La Soul. If Redd Foxx had ever cut a rap album, this is what it would have sounded like.

Most frightening song

"Stressin'", or "I Heard U Was Lookin' 4 Me" from The Truest $#!@ I Ever Said.

Most moving song

"What I Represent" and "The Story" from Trill. I'm not a lachrymose motherfucker, but I cannot get through that album without tearing up. I know the spectacle of a nerdy white guy misting over while listening to Houston g-rap must strike you as ridiculous, and of course it is. But what can I say?, when Bun B says "I'm a tell you how I feel 'cause I'm a God Damn Texan", I get the chills.

Saddest song

Elephant Eyelash, the Why? album, is morbid, bleak, and heartbreaking in a way that only San Franciscans know how to be.

Best cover

I don't usually entertain award-show or variety-show fantasies, since I hate that crap. But back in '92, there was a week or so when I wished I'd been a big celebrity, so I could have gone on that nationally-televised Bob Dylan tribute, and given it straight to all the chickenshit audience members who had booed Sinead O'Connor out of the building. As I am sure you don't need me to remind you, O'Connor had gone on Saturday Night Live and ripped up a picture of the Pope, and for this, the religious enforcers in the entertainment industry decided she was too adolescent to share the stage with important artists such as Sophie B. Hawkins and Fat David Crosby. Forget that she was fifteen years ahead of the curve (her protest, which was almost completely ignored at the time, was against the culture of child abuse in the Catholic Church): the only performer in pop music who'd shown any courage got censured by a crowd that had ostensibly gathered to celebrate the career of a liberal idol. Anyway, had I been there, I fantasized that I would have torn up the game plan, played "Black Boys On Mopeds", and told the audience, Madonna, and hypocritical Kris Kristofferson to fight the real enemy. This, see, is why they don't make me a pop star; this and my lack of discernable musical talent. Now, Charles Bissell isn't a pop star, either -- but he is a Jersey rock hero, and when he has something to say in song, you can be damned sure he gets the room to listen. At the Khyber this October, he closed his show with a cover version of "Black Boys On Mopeds" that felt like a broadside against a year of conformity and media silence, and a year's worth of dangerous days. Late reparation for that disaster at the Dylan tribute, and incomplete, of course; but the message has only deepened and grown more pertinent as the years have gone by.

Song that would drive you craziest on infinite repeat

Devendra Banhart's insane "Chinese Children". This is what he wants to do with his recording contract?

Most consistent album

The People's Champ

Most vertiginously inconsistent album

Hot Hot Heat's Elevator

Most convincing historical recreation

Okkervil River's closer, "A Glow". It sounds like an R&B record from 1957.

Song/album that should have been shorter

Illinois. How many six-minute vibraphone jams does a fella need?

Song/album that should have been longer

Eric Matthews's half-assed comeback.

Album that turned out to be a whole hell of a lot better than you initially thought

Somebody's Miracle. I admit that for a few days there, I lost faith. Forgive me, Liz Phair. This time around, you and your minions made it tough to find the songs.

Most overrated artist

Gorillaz

Album that was the most fun to listen to

The Mind Of Mannie Fresh

Thing you feel cheapest about liking

Believe it or not, I kinda dig "Seasons Of Love". I was in Lee's, buying vegetables, and it came on lite radio. I thought it was some lost Christian Rock masterpiece, or a rare Journey song. I know the lyrics are abominable, but those vocal harmonies on the chorus are pretty dope. Moreover, I do feal cheap about, and thus must interrogate, the sheer volume of violently misogynist g-rap I respond to. It's not like I am comfortable with Lil Wayne's assessment of his lady friends, but I don't cut the album off or anything.

Hoary old bastard who should spare us all and retire

Jon Bon Jovi

Young upstarts who should be sent down to the minors for more seasoning

Louis XIV

2005 album you'll probably re-evaluate in 2006

Tha Carter II

Most overplayed song

"Golddigger"

Sexiest song

Roisin Murphy's "If We're In Love".

Place the next big pop music boom will come from

More Deep South and Texas rap, and more Canadian indie.

Will still be making good records in 2015

Mr. A.C. Newman

Will be a one-hit wonder (D4L doesn't count)

Rhymefest

Biggest musical trend of 2006

In an effort to beat file-sharing and add value to the LP, there will be more faux-concept albums that don't withstand scrutiny. I figure we've got another year of that before we all get sick of it, and go back to writing "I Can't Explain".

Best album of 2006

Nasir Bin Olu Dara

 

Poll album results

Poll singles results

Poll miscellany

Postscript

Check out my Critics Poll ballot for 2004

 

Listen to this e-mail you're sending me now, kids. Does it seem sad? Does it remind you of when?