Meighan may just be bitching about the fact that Pitchfork gave their last record a 4.9, but his point is well taken. And Beaumont is inspired—except he doesn’t agree, at least not entirely. No, he says, it’s not tweets and blogs that have tarnished the rock star myth—it’s not Kanye over-sharing in ALL CAPS—it’s the fact that the “blogosphere, by its own limitation and design, is not in thrall to image.” In times past, fans bought into a rock star’s image as much as their music, and this persona could only be consumed in a few places: live, on the cover of Rolling Stone or Spin, or on television. And access to an artist’s music was just as limited—you had to buy the record from a store or liberate it from your friend’s bedroom. Without a flood of new bands to distract you, a rock star’s image could command the pop cultural stage.

These days, according to Beaumont, with the power of newsstands greatly (and forever) diminished and access to any and everyone’s music significantly amplified, image matters much less, however loud it may scream for attention. “The click-to-hear-it nature of the Web goes against the alluring band-as-gang image readers buy into, copy and adore long before they hear a note,” Beaumont writes. “It doesn’t matter if a singer has anything important, funny or interesting to say, or if they say it dressed as Caligula with a chicken on their head; the music is all that matters online.” Thus, relatively normal-looking but supremely talented dudes like Fleet Foxes can get their due.

Beaumont is right that the Internet has made it easier for average Joes and Janes—people like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Bon Iver or Marnie Stern—to get noticed and respected and, eventually, adored. But he’s wrong that artists don’t attempt to seduce or titillate us with their well-endowed nonmusical personas, and they we don’t sometimes, gleefully fall for it. Just look at Bat for Lashes or Of Montreal or MGMT or MIA—rock stars all. The Web is as much a visual playground as anything else and artists are naïve if they don’t exploit it as such. Image still matters.

It’s not, as Beaumont has it, that the Internet has elevated sound over image—that the blogosphere is some utopia where only music matters. How could it when artists complain that their songs only have a few seconds to grab listeners’ attentions before they jump to the next link? No, the Web has simply done to music what it’s done to everything else: level the playing field. Image still matters, just no more than sound—it’s simply one of the near countless factors a perspective fan might consider.

The problem for rock stars, then, isn’t that their freakishness and bad behavior have lost their hypnotic power. It’s that we have so many choices and no single, reliable guide—sound, image, or whatever—by which to make an informed, lasting decision. It’s now nearly impossible for artists to build consensus and maintain it with the Web constantly distracting us with more, more, more—a factor that Beaumont fails to mention entirely. We’re overwhelmed—and any rock star is just as overwhelmed figuring out how to break through all the static. Which is why there are so very few of them born these days.

Until very recently, rock stars were created when a particularly trenchant sound and image coalesced around a particular cultural moment, which was then translated into popular (if not always critical) consensus, and over the course of a few records, artistic longevity. The Internet has altered this equation in two respects: It’s balanced out the proportion of sound and image needed for the success of any artist—making sound more important and image slightly less so—and, with the fracturing of taste into thousands and thousands of different communities online, it’s made true popular consensus nigh impossible, especially over the long term. It’s the latter, as others have mentioned before, that poses the real problem for rock stars. Without consensus, rock stars can’t move the culture forward (or backward). They’re just another haircut.

True enough. Though anyone over 25 who’s been in a couple bands will tell you it’s never been easy to come up with a great name, Internet or not. As a musician myself, I know the aggravation and frustration of choosing a new name (note: drinking does not help you brainstorm)—and the regret of getting stuck with one you don’t much care for. But Jurgensen’s basic point is well taken: Most of the good names have already been taken and Google isn’t helping matters.

A more interesting question, though, is what bands are doing in response. As Jurgensen points out, some are resorting to half-sentence-long names to give themselves a leg up on search engines. See for example, Ireland’s And So I Watch You From Afar, Scotland’s We Were Promised Jetpacks, LA’s Everybody Was In the French Resistance…Now!, and New York’s We Are Country Mice. Of course, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead—the classic of the genre—largely predates the online explosion. But anyone’s who’s been to SXSW recently will tell you that such tongue-twisting shenanigans have only increased.

One reaction Jurgenson doesn’t touch on is the reverse response: Bands who chose utterly bland, utterly un-Googleable monikers. There’s Woods, Girls, Women, Real Estate just to name a few—all of them formed in the last couple years. If the stockpile of truly innovative, memorable band names has been greatly diminished, why not choice a name that acknowledges that fact, that aims for anonymity—that wants simply to blend in. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I suppose.

I’m not suggesting necessarily that Girls front man Christopher Owens had such lofty, abstract thoughts in his brain when he came up with that stupidly brilliant name. The dude was probably high. But I think it’s a factor nonetheless. Next to sound, image and choice of drug addiction, a band’s name was the most important way it could distinguish itself from its peers 30 years ago. Now fans are bombarded by a whole slew of information when they’re introduced to a new group. There are, to be wonky, many more ways to interface with artists in 2010: MySpace, Twitter, Pitchfork, YouTube, at shows, at your favorite Brooklyn bar, through your iPod, record player, or car stereo. When bands can present themselves to the world in three, four, sometimes five dimensions, fretting over a band name can seem so, well, 20th century.

Which is not to say that band names aren’t important. They just may not be the make-or-break decisions they used to be—meaning that Dananananaykroyd, Girl Fart, and Computer Jesus Refrigerator, can breathe a long sigh of relief.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/musicandculture/2010/02/21/do-band-names-matter-anymore/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/musicandculture/2010/02/13/beers-and-bands-hair-of-the-dogs-adam-meets-fucked-ups-chemistry-of-common-life/ http://thefastertimes.com/musicandculture/2010/02/13/beers-and-bands-hair-of-the-dogs-adam-meets-fucked-ups-chemistry-of-common-life/#comments Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:51:08 +0000 John SW MacDonald http://thefastertimes.com/musicandculture/?p=348 Everyone always talks about the art of pairing alcohol with food, and with good reason: You’re usually eating when you’re drinking. But we’re just as likely to be doing something else when we’re imbibing (something that, ideally, involves no less subtlety or forethought): We listen to music when we drink. At a bar or a club, a ballpark or a rock club, around the dinner table or in the bedroom, it’s always around. It’s so obvious, we barely think about it. But that’s what we’re doing.

And what I’m usually doing is drinking beer. I like the good stuff—Dogfish Head, Sixpoint, Great Lakes, a beautifully floral German hefeweizen, a sour Belgian gouze—but I’ll never scoff at a cold Bud or 2 a.m. PBR. Beer is the stuff of life. It’s what’s for dinner.

So I’d like to ask a simple question: Which beers pair best with which albums? A dorky question sure, but one worth asking. There are almost as many of the former as there are of the latter. It’s an endless discussion. But I think we can drill down to some specifics, a few hoppy ales that nail the tangy spite of an early Cure record, some imperial stouts that do justice to an Arab Strap misery fest, a couple bright, blooming Pilsners that set the mood for the Beach Boys and the Byrds. In a series of occasional columns, I’ll pick out a few choice pairings.

For my first, I’m going with Adam, a dark, robust ale from Hair of the Dog brewery in Portland, Oregon, and “The Chemistry Of Common Life,” the 2008 LP from Fucked Up, Toronto’s post-hardcore pranksters. At 10% alcohol, I suppose Adam’s most obvious connection to the Canadian sextet is that, yes, after one or two, you’d be pretty Fucked Up. But it goes much deeper than that. Both the beer and the album are big and meaty, ambitious and complex, exhausting yet rewarding—things to spend time with. “Chemistry” is over 52 minutes long, and I’d recommend not drinking the beer in any less time.

Think of Adam as an older, more drug-addled cousin to Brooklyn’s Brown Ale or Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale. Hair of the Dog’s flagship brew has an undeniably nutty character, particularly on the nose. Yet unlike those more common beers, the first sip reveals deep hits of sweet malt, dark chocolate, molasses, raisin, (yes) leather, and a warming splash of alcohol. But Adam’s mouthfeel is where it really shines. It’s thick and bready on the palate—the flavors are well integrated and perfectly balanced.

This is about as complex and flavorful as an ale can get, particularly one that hasn’t been aged (though Hair of the Dog recommends you do just that with Adam). The only beers that come close are Dogfish Head’s famed India Brown Ale, He’Brew’s Rejewvenator (each batch of which is made with 400 gallons of date juice), and Ramstein’s Winter Wheat Eisbock, from Butler, New Jersey’s modest High Point Brewing Company. Adam is a perfect American strong ale: heavy yet drinkable, alcoholic without being overpowering, sweet without being sickly.

Similarly, “The Chemistry of Common Life” does an expert job of tempering its extremes just enough to make them palatable. And like Adam, it can feel like a nice little punch to the gut. Nearly every one of its 11 songs sound like three or four hardcore tracks stacked on top of each other. There are guitars aplenty. The band itself has three of them—on record, there could be at least twice that many. “Chemistry” is as thick with power chords as Adam is with malts, and it can be a lot to wade through. The band’s 300-pound frontman Damien Abraham (aka Pink Eyes) screams like he’s got razors in his throat, making every moment urgent, wired, and absolutely necessary. These songs land like tanks dropped from 30,000 feet.

Yet, like Adam, Fucked Up’s second LP rewards your perseverance. Despite Pink Eyes’ feral bark, “Chemistry” is stubbornly melodic. The guitars may be unceasing, but they always have something to say—whether it’s the cries of feedback that envelope “Son the Father,” the ragged chords that open “Crooked Head,” or the chiming Gibsons that introduce album standout, “Black Albino Bones.” Lodged at the heart of this tortured album are undeniably sweet moments: the Vivian Girls’ soaring backing vocals on “No Epiphany,” the mellow Pink Floyd meditation, “Golden Seal,” Dallas Green’s bittersweet yelp (“I need an escape!”) on “Black Albino Bones.” These, to strain the metaphor, are the chocolate and raisins in Fucked Up’s brutal alcoholic brew.

More to the point, drinking this beer with this album just makes sense. You wouldn’t be advised to consume more than one of either in a single sitting; both Adam and “Chemistry” are not for the timid or faint of heart. It may, according to Pink Eyes, be “the little things that get us through life.” But it’s the big beers, and the bigger albums, that make it worth living.

And now there’s Twin Shadow, the pet project of George Lewis Jr, whose debut EP is due out on Terrible this summer. Give a listen and you can probably guess the major European city Lewis recently called home. That would be Berlin. Kraftwerk and “Low”-era Bowie are all over Twin Shadow’s electro-pop. Fortunately, Lewis isn’t simply out to impress his heroes (at least, not with that hair). “Castles in the Snow” and “Yellow Balloon” are glittering little wonders—glo-fi with bells on. “Castles,” in particular, balances its moody synth come-ons with effortless hooks and a surreal sense of humor. “You’re my favorite daydream / I’m your famous nightmare,” Lewis declares. Who would have it any other way?

Some of these guys are great (see Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Small Black), some not so much. But whatever this music is, it’s increasingly starting to sound like hype. So yes, the irony is even greater that we thought: The same technology that could make this music sound a smidge better than my-first-song-recorded-on-a-four-track-at-my-friend’s-apartment-in-Brooklyn is instead used to transmit it across the ravenous blogosphere and onto countless iPods where it’s played through tiny pieces of plastic that make this tinny music sounds even tinnier.

And yet, as Matt LeMay so eloquently puts it over at MBV, despite, or maybe because of the way we’ve stumbled across this music—a blog, a friend’s mix, Pitchfork et al—we’ve eaten it right up: “As we all struggle with the fact that we use music as a social tool, it’s easy to see the theoretical appeal of music made by 18-to-23-year-olds plugging in their guitars and making naive, wondrous blasts of noise for the very first time. It just seems so immediate, so infectious, so guileless, so…. authentic.” This music’s supposed authenticity—one that prioritizes youth, amateurism, and emotional innocence—is even more prized precisely because we encounter it in such a digitized, unauthentic environment.

But this isn’t just about music. A band like Girls is simply the musical iteration of one of the most important trends in pop culture in the last decade: an obsession with quirk and creative naiveté, or simply, twee. You can see it in films by Wes Anderson and in anything starring Michael Cera, in books by Joe Meno and Jonathan Safran Foer, and on television in Comedy Central’s “Important Things With Demetri Martin” and HBO’s “Bored to Death.” Eccentric, mumbling youngsters are the superheroes of 21st century pop.

Of course, rock ’n’ roll is the sound of youth—youth on drugs, youth in love, youth bored out of its mind. But recently we’ve decided to take this idea to its logical extreme: If authentic rock ‘n’ roll is made by and about 18-year-olds, then really authentic rock ‘n’ roll literally sounds like it was made by an 18-year-old—a swirl of endearing romantic clichés over blasts of distorted guitar.  Hence, Times New Viking—a great band, sure—but one whose purchase on authenticity is entirely reliant on the artifice of bad production.

The final irony is that at the very moment when musicians are most dependent on live performance to generate money amid a collapsing music industry, we find ourselves with artists seemingly unable to put on a decent show. As these young blog stars get shoved into the limelight with only a couple month’s worth of buzz and a handful of songs to their name, it’s no wonder they end up stumbling their way through a short set and disappointing newly-minted fans. It happened years ago with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and it’s happening today with London’s the xx (a phenomenal studio band to be sure), Girls, and, most famously, Wavves.

No one is saying tape hiss isn’t a good idea—far from it—or that there aren’t albums that warrant it. Just listen to Spoon’s “Transference.” The whole thing sounds like it was done in five in days in Britt Daniel’s kitchen. No, the danger is when lo-fi becomes an end unto itself, when, as LeMay puts it, bands “mistake aesthetic amateurism for creative sincerity.” No matter how many Facebook friends you have or how many times people have downloaded your first single from RCRD LBL, it’s still, ultimately, about talent and skill—as schoolmarmish as that sounds. The songs have to stand up on their own, and in front of today’s ever-more-demanding audiences. No bedroom auteur should forget that.

So what would a “striped down” Spoon actually sound like? Is such a thing even possible? What would be left—studio chatter and handclaps?

Of course, such a thing is possible, particularly with the band producing “Transference” themselves—particularly with bed-headed Britt Daniel behind the boards. So yes, Spoon’s seventh LP is their starkest yet—its songs only a couple studio tricks away from living-room demos. The record is ragged and rough-hewn, sloppy and a little silly, like Guided By Voices with a thing for Tommy Tutone. But whatever these songs lack in focus, they more than make up for in urgency. Daniel can imbue the most pedestrian of sentiments—say, the forgotten pleasures of fitted shirts—with lust and vitality. And “Transference” is certainly no different.

So while it lacks the drama of “Gimmie Fiction” or “Ga Ga”’s focused grooves, “Transference” may be the easier record to like, if only because it requires less of you. The songs are so simple they’re almost weightless—they could go anywhere at any moment.

And they usually do. “I Saw the Light” comes on like classic Spoon—tense and anxious, shot through with Daniel’s insistent guitar and Jim Eno’s metronome-perfect percussion—before shifting, suddenly, into a 6/4 dirge replete with drunken flange guitar and Elton John piano flourishes. The switch is laugh-out-loud abrupt—like the whole band punched in at once—yet it works, perfectly. Same with “Who Makes Your Money.” Shards of mangled synth, Rob Pope’s warped base, and Daniel’s hush-hush falsetto create an eerie beauty that’s interrupted at the two-minute mark with taut harmonies of warm, eighth-note guitar—a Spoon specialty. The song is frightening and reassuring all at once.

Predictably, there is the odd tune or two that could use some editing. In fact, “Before Destruction,” with its nagging organ and jumbled harmonies, could be cut altogether—a plotless opener to an otherwise stellar short-story collection. And while “Nobody Gets Me But You” comes on like an endearingly heartsick “I Turn My Camera On” with its tin-can funk beat and spastic piano runs, it’s already aimless and tired before the second minute. Give that tune to James Murphy, though, and you’d have every skinny jean sweatin’ till dawn from Bushwick to Silverlake.

Spoon, of course, wouldn’t be Spoon without straightforward, grab-your-beer-and-your-girl rockers like “Written in Reverse” and “Got Nuffin”—tunes that could have shown up on any album since the band’s 1996 debut, “Telephono.” The only difference now is that, with the rougher production, the songs’ seams are there for all the world to see, surely a mark of Spoon’s confidence and one Daniel seems to implicitly acknowledge. “I got nothing to lose but darkness and shadows / Got nothing to lose but loneliness and patterns,” he sings on “Got Nuffin.” So why not let the songs breathe?

In other words, Vampire Weekend’s sophomore LP (due out on Tuesday) will do little to change the central dynamics of a debate that’s been ranging for two years. VW are either insightful chroniclers of the foibles of upper-middle-class 20-somethings or rank imperialists hanging their Ivy League degrees on a few sharp couplets. F. Scott Fitzgerald or Rudyard Kipling.

But while VW may still be a polarizing band, they’re now a much better band. On “Contra,” Koenig peppers his tunes with the same upper-class signifiers (backyard pools, vacations in the Alps), but now they’re surrounded by richer, wilder, more beautiful music. And though the ethnic influences are still there—surely enough to rankle some feathers—they’re treated with greater care and respect.

“California English” starts off with an auto-tuned Koenig (!) slamming verses over something like a calypso beat, before it rushes into a Bollywood-flavored chorus, slams into an Afro-pop guitar solo, veers back into another one of Koenig’s frantic verses before finding its way to a string quartet breakdown (courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij) and the casually brilliant line: “Sweet carob rice cakes/You don’t care how the sweets taste/Fake Philly cheese steak/But you use real toothpaste.” And that’s all in the first 90 seconds.

The rest of “Contra” is just as jam-packed with ideas—some rehashed from earlier material, others, like that T-Pain tribute, plucked straight out of left field. It’s third-wave ska one minute (“Holiday”) and Miami Sound Machine the next (“Run”). There’s Kalimba thumb piano, dancehall synths, and harpsichord; reggaeton, baile funk, and sampled M.I.A. “Contra” is heavy with miscegenated genres, yet the ship never sinks. With the band’s frighteningly agile rhythm section (drummer Christopher Tomson, bassist Chris Baio), the songs race along like they’ve got nothing to prove and everywhere to go. VW’s self-titled debut sounds limp-wristed and petty in comparison.

Koenig’s voice has never been sweeter or his vignettes richer. It isn’t all about highbrow cultural references any more (though those are certainly still there). Koenig’s friends and lovers are real people, not just starched shirts. On the stately ballads “I think UR A Contra” and “Taxi Cab,” Koenig worries over a girl he can’t nail down, an “aristocrat” who “wanted good schools and friends with pools,” “rock ’n’ roll and complete control.” While on “Giving Up the Gun”—a bittersweet stadium house tune unlike anything the boys have done before—Koenig memorializes a friend (or is it himself) who used to “play guitar down at a city bar/where skinheads used to fight,” but whose “sword” now lies “old and rusty/burned beneath the rising sun.“

Vampire Weekend’s primary sin isn’t that they’re aloof and over-educated. It’s that they’re aloof and over-educated on top of a sound and an image that says exactly the same thing. In the past, intellectual, well-read rock stars (wealthy or not)—from John Lennon to Thom Yorke—still played loud guitars in rock ‘n’ roll bands. They still did drugs and wore their hair long. Koenig and co. have done the opposite: Their music is just as mannered as their pronunciation. There’s nothing ragged or edgy or sexy about it. And that, despite the music’s quality, rubs people the wrong way—and understandably so.

All of which takes us back to that whole horchata/balaclava bit. Either you’ll get past it, in which case you’ll hear some fairly ingenious pop music. Or you won’t.

10. The Pavement reunion doesn’t suck.
How could it? Malkmus and co. wouldn’t screw up the biggest reunion in indie rock history. No way. Plus, we know Stephen still has his chops. The Jicks are a great band—no Pavement, certainly—but darn good. If The Jesus Lizard can still do it at 49, so can these guys. And yes, they should be playing more shows. But a full-fledged U.S. tour may be too much to ask.

9. Indie rock gets laid.
Indie rock is all Beatles these days. It’s all perfect pop (Passion Pit), soaring harmonies (Grizzly Bear), and arty ambition (Dirty Projectors). Which is all well and good. Quite good, in fact. But these are all bands you’d bring home to your mother. Ed Droste or Ezra Koenig would make for wonderful conversation over a cup of Earl Grey tea.

No, what the genre needs right now is a little Rolling Stones—a little sex. The one-time kings and queens of cool—The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—have largely abandoned gritty, libidinous rock ’n’ roll for prog-disco futurism. Certainly no one needs Interpol to return and save the day (though they are releasing a record this year). We’re just asking for something a little less pretty, a little less intellectual, and a lot more dangerous. Another LCD Soundsystem record would do just fine.

8. Paul Westerberg tours.
We’ve made our feelings very plain on the matter already. Still, we don’t hold out much hope that Paul even got the message. The guy doesn’t have a computer, let alone a MySpace page. It’s just a sad state of affairs: Westerberg releases a handful of scrappy, fascinating records online over the last couple years (including last September’s “PW & The Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys”), yet refuses to boot up and hit the road. Maybe we’re just bitter ’cause we never saw The Replacements live—we never saw them get bombed and stumble their way through Hank Williams covers.

But who knows, 12 months is a long time. Maybe Westerberg will finally get back into a proper studio, record a brilliant album, and rent a tour bus. Maybe Husker Du will get back together and Westerberg will be sleepless with envy. Maybe he’ll buy a Macbook Pro and start tweeting. Suburban Minnesota can’t be that cool.

7. Guided by Voices get back together.
Wait wait, you say, it hasn’t been long enough—GBV only broke up six years ago. And anyway, Pollard releases another record every other week. He has a new band for christ sake.

Yes, yes, but that’s precisely the point: Pollard needs to hit the road while he’s still young enough to be in a band—while he’s still sober enough to hold a microphone. The guy isn’t exactly the youngest stallion in the coral. He’s got more High Lifes under his belt than half the county. Get the guys back together again, Bob, and the next round’s on us.

6. Animal Collective doesn’t release another album.
Animal Collective is a fine band. We like dudes named after animals as much as the next guy. But the endless accolades heaped on their shoulders this holiday season began to feel a bit like some of their albums do by the sixth track—overwrought. Animal Collective’s latest LP, “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” left everyone (Spin, New York magazine, Pitchfork, The New York Times) in a tizzy over the Brooklyn trio’s “iridescent patterns” and “radiant innocence.” And just last month they released yet another highly praised EP, “Fall Be Kind.” Enough already. Panda Bear and co. should hibernate for a year. It’ll give the rest of Brooklyn, and everyone else, a chance to catch up.

5. Kanye West gets his ego in check.
If, as the Times suggests, Kanye West is—more than any artist this past decade—the one “most emblematic of the times,” then we’re in major trouble. Without his voluminous creativity and charisma, Mr. West would never have made it past the first album with all the ALL CAPS blog-writing, paparazzi-punching, Taylor Swift speech-stealing bullshit he pulled these last few years. His superego scandalized, then it exasperated, now it just bores. If the next decade produces an artist of Kanye’s stature with half his talent and none of his arrogance, we’ll be pleased.

4. Brian Williams launches a music blog in which he shares his love for Antony and the Johnsons and Mos Def.
Oh wait, that happened last year. Now we know “No I in Threesome” is on Brian Williams’ iPod.

3. Michael McDonald forms a new band with Grizzly Bear called “Doobie Bear.”
No, really. If Grizzly Bear has the chutzpah to invite Michael McDonald to sing lead on a special version of the band’s “While You Wait for the Others” (which hipsters predictably loved), can a full album, a tour, even a new band be that far away? We think not.

2. No one dies.
The King of Pop wasn’t alone. Jim Carroll, Les Paul, Ron Asheton, Jay Bennett, Adam Goldstein (aka DJ AM), and most recently singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt all bid us adieu in 2009. In a year when a new celebrity seemed to leave us every other week, rock ’n’ roll had its own burden to bear. Here’s hoping 2010 is a little cheerier and that everyone, no matter their age, takes a sip of whatever Keith Richards is drinking these days.

1. The music industry doesn’t totally fucking collapse.

Girls – “Album”

The band with the best story is often the band that ends up in critic’s year-end lists. Last year it was Bon Iver; this year it’s Girls. As a boy, frontman Christopher Owens traveled the world as a member of the infamously sex-obsessed Christian cult Children of God (he claims to have been in the same room when his mom prostituted herself to raise money for the group). He escaped as a teenager and fell in with Texas millionaire art-freak, Stanley Marsh 3, before finally ending up in San Francisco in his twenties strung out on drugs and his myriad childhood demons.

Now 30, Owens is still a mess—or “fucked in the head” is he affectionately describes himself on “Lust for Life.” But it isn’t all rainy days and lonely nights. Owens wants to get better. Indeed, part of the thrill of Girls’ debut is witnessing Owens’ struggle to turn his psychodrama into sunny, harmony-laden pop. Beach Boys for mental patients. Girls may be freighted with hipster signifiers: the dumb irony of its album title, Owens’ longhaired faux-hippie fashion sense (that’s him on the right), his heavily affected whine. But the guy is nothing if not sincere. “I was feeling so sad and alone / then I found a friend in the song that I’m singing,” he warbles on “Darling.” Sure, why not.

Antony and the Johnsons – “The Crying Light”

Love it or hate it, Antony Hegarty’s voice is one of pop’s most unmistakable instruments. Nina Simone may come close to Hegarty’s tremulous moan, but while Simone is steeped in the blues—her feet planted firmly on the ground—Hegarty is all fairytale and fancy, a voice without parent or equal. Yet on Antony and the Johnsons’ second LP, Hegarty and his otherworldly vox turn their attention to distinctly earthbound concerns. “The Crying Light” is a subtle, but undeniable tribute to our dying climate. On the slow-burning, funereal “Another World,” Hegarty frets over missing the trees, the snow, and “the birds singing all their songs.” On “Daylight and the Sun,” Hegarty cries for “daylight in my heart / daylight in the trees.” The music is both frighteningly intimate and luminously expansive. The compassionate orchestrations—many courtesy of whiz kid Nico Muhly—transform Hegarty’s songs into pop operas. Or requiems for a vanishing world.

Bat for Lashes – “Two Suns”

Of all the year’s major releases, “Two Suns” is most clearly the vision of a single artist. A self-described control freak, the British-born Natasha Khan (aka Bat for Lashes) conceived every aspect of her sophomore album’s production, from its hallucinogenic cover art to the music’s rich, baroque arrangements. “Two Suns” imagines Khan’s real-life breakup with Moon and Moon’s William Lemon as some cosmic Greek tragedy, and herself as the blond-haired Pearl—a mystical goddess caught between following her heart and her dreams. It’s all very heavy stuff. But with the preciousness of her 2006 debut, “Fur and Gold,” largely behind her, Khan’s songs are alive with a world-worn humanity. Based around haunting, elliptical piano lines, “Moon and Moon” and “Traveling Woman” are exquisitely mournful ballads. While “Daniel” is the greatest song Kate Bush never wrote. In a musical age sorely lacking in ambitious female talent, Khan is a breath of fresh air. Tori Amos must be very proud.

David Bazan – “Curse Your Branches”

Like “Two Suns,” “Curse Your Branches” is a classic breakup album, full of the same acrimony, regret, and folly that attend any relationship’s demise. But it isn’t a romance that David Bazan (formerly of Pedro the Lion) is mourning this time—it’s his faith. “With the threat of hell hanging over [his] head like a halo,” indie-rock’s most famous believer struggles with his god and his alcoholism, and finally, painfully, says goodbye to both. But while this record’s drama may be primarily intellectual, it is no less emotionally resonant. The surging piano and synth melody that undergirds “Hard to Be,” transforms a quiet meditation on original sin (a “magical explanation for why the living die”) into a U2-worthy epic. Here, as elsewhere, Bazan’s voice projects a soft-spoken, steely resignation. “I might as well admit it / like I even have a choice,” Bazan sings on “In Stitches.” “The crew has killed the captain / but they still can hear his voice.” Breakups are never easy, kids.

Grizzly Bear –“Vickatimest” and Dirty Projectors – “Bitte Orca”

If Brooklyn had a house band in 2009, it was the surely these guys. Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projecters lorded over the brownstones and organic cheese shops, the faux-dive bars and loft parties, of New York’s other borough like few bands in recent memory. Their albums marked Brooklyn’s whole-hearted embrace by the culture at large, the end of its alienated, scruffy adolescence. David Longstreth’s Dirty Projecters scored a profile in The New Yorker and a cover story from New York magazine in the same month. The New Yorker picked up Grizzly Bear as did everyone from Q magazine to The Scotsman.

By turns spastic and sublime, infuriating and mesmerizing, the music nearly warrants its ecstatic reception. “Bitte Orca” sounds liked a prog rock band drunk on a lethal cocktail of midcentury British folk, highlife guitar and R. Kelly. “Cannibal Resource,” “Useful Chamber,” “Temecula Sunrise,” can barely contain themselves, their freakish time signatures and Longstreth’s manic guitars threatening to tear the songs apart. Yet the bands three extravagantly talented female vocalists (almost) always manage to calm the party down. “Stillness is the Move,” sung by Amber Coffman, is quite possibility Williamsburg’s first genuine R&B anthem.

Though less eccentric, Grizzly Bear’s “Vickatimest” is ultimately the more successful record, if only because it gives you more to hang on to. That would be Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen’s gorgeous, limpid harmonies, and Rossen’s jazz-punk guitar playing. The songs are easier to digest than the woozy psychadelia on 2006’s “Yellow House,” but no less thrilling. “Two Weeks” may be the crowd favorite, but it’s “While You Wait for the Others” that deserves the Oscar—a song that makes transcendence out of a silly old breakup .

It might be fair to wonder where all the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll went in the 10 years since The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs reigned over New York. Longstreth is about as dangerous as a wool sweater. But I suppose we’ll just have to wait until leather and booze come back in fashion—they always do. For now we have hocket singing and West African guitar, which, all things considered, isn’t such a bad thing.

“I don’t listen to music much anymore,” Jim O’Rourke told the Times’ Ben Ratliff in September. And yet, he must have been listening to something during the three, lonely years it took O’Rourke to make “The Visitor”—hold up in his tiny Tokyo apartment living off royalties while he recorded every track himself. That, or he’d managed to store a lifetime of influences in his head. By refusing to release “The Visitor” digitally, the former Sonic Youth guitarist seemed to be saying, sit down, shut up—listen. A point his music made just as powerfully. The record, O’Rourke’s first in eight years, is a veritable seminar on musical Americana. Listen closely to its one, vocal-less 32-minute track, and you can hear shades of John Fahey, Aaron Copland, Fleetwood Mac, George Gershwin, and, yes, Frank Zappa—all of  it suffused with O’Rourke’s soft, pliant virtuosity.

4. White Rabbits – “It’s Frightening”

When White Rabbits’ sophomore LP landed last May, critics had a field day pointing out all the Spoon-isms: The relentlessly foregrounded percussion on (natch) “Percussion Gun,” the slow-boiling bar-band drama of “The Salesman (Tramp Life),” the studio chatter that animates the record’s blank spaces. Spoon’s Britt Daniel did produce the thing after all. But the cynics had it all wrong. Why fault a band for knowing what it wants and knowing where to get it?

Particularly, when it sounds this good. The Brooklyn sextet’s 2007 debut, “Fort Nightly,” certainly had its pleasures, but nothing as weird as “Lioness” or as lovely as “Company I Keep.” On “It’s Frightening,” White Rabbits sound like they’ve always wanted to: lean, mean, and a little out of control—a real rock ’n’ roll band.

3. Memory Tapes – “Seek Magic”

In 2005, Dayve Hawk and his band Hail Social, fresh off a tour with Interpol, were all set to release their self-titled debut—a collection of dancey post-punk tunes perfectly in step with their former tour buddies and much of indie rock at large. Four years lager, Hail Social a distant memory, Hawk is making music that sounds like nobody else. Memory Tapes (not Memory Tape, Memory Cassette, or Weird Tapes—all guises under which Hawk released a string of well-received singles this year) is a curious New Wave/IDM hybrid. Or what The Cure might sound like if Robert Smith took a bath in Boards of Canada’s warm synths. Everything comes on like you’ve heard it before—the brooding guitar figure that opens “Swimming Field,” the lounge funk that buoys “Run Out,” the disco synths that close out “Graphics.” Yet on the final minutes of “Bicycle”—one of the year’s most ecstatically beautiful passages—Hawk manages to combine all these bits of nostalgia in entirely unforeseen ways: a Technicolor haze of synthetic vocal harmonies, 80s dance beats, and New Order guitars.

2. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – self-titled

During a year in which lo-fi became indie rock’s lingua franca (see Wavves, Woods, Times New Viking, the Vivian Girls, etc.), Brooklyn’s Pains of Being Pure at Heart were the genre’s most gifted writers. Anyone can turn up the treble and sing about adolescence and its discontents. But not everyone remembers to leave real songs under all that chilly hiss. Singer/guitarist Kip Berman has a novelist’s eye for detail. His sensitive young things get high on toffee and Vicodin, have affairs with their professors, and copulate in their beloved libraries among the “dust and microfiche.” Yes, it’s all very twee, and yet these guys are no wet noodles. Berman loves his fuzz riffs and starry-eyed solos. And drummer Kurt Feldman never wavers behind the kit. Just because you know your Borges from your Bolaño, doesn’t mean you can’t rock.

1. Phoenix: – “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix”

If Phoenix was ever going to break the U.S. market and become one of the biggest bands in the world—something they’d always seemed destined to do—“Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” was the record to do it. Gone is the minimalist art-punk of 2006’s near-flawless “It’s Never Been Like It”—a record critics loved, but Strokes-haters may have found nausea-inducing. In its place are 10 new tunes that manage to focus everything the French quartet has done well for the last 10 years—the taut, pop hooks, the swaggering, post-punk guitars, the retro-kitsch synths, Thomas Mars’ world-weary heartbreak—into a single, sharp point. “1901” is about as good it gets, a song that still sounds as fresh and urgent as it did nine months ago.

Check back early next week for the records that didn’t quite make the list...

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