2005 Favorites, 15-11

15. Animal Collective-Feels
It's a good thing I really like this album, because if I didn't I would go mad in my duplex. For a few weeks this album was impossible to escape or ignore; the walls of my room seemed to be singing "Bees," usually because they were. Is this album less adventurous than the last AC? I don't know, maybe. As with every animal collective album I've heard, the songs are enormously hit-or-miss; while "Banshee Beat" and "Did you see the world" are wonderful songs, a few tracks like "Flesh Canoe" and "Daffy Duck" are beyond me, or maybe filler. The better 2/3 of this album is absolutely stellar, though, and the craziness of the AC not only penetrated my lodgings this semester, but my spirit too.

14. Vitalic-OK Cowboy

Daft Punk's Human After All was one of the three biggest album disappointments of the year for me, along with the White Stripes and Death Cab for Cutie. I was expecting, or at least hoping for, greatness with each of those releases, and each time I got mediocrity (Daft Punk, Whit Stripes) or shit (DCFC). Thankfully Vitalic was there to catch my Daft Punk fall. OK Cowboy is a great album, one that I have appreciated more as the year goes on, one that, along with new Alan Braxe, makes me still believe in the power of French House music. Maybe next semester will convert me to the German Kompakt school of techno, but the french beat-masters will always have a special place in my heart, even if they are Human After All.

13. Devendra Banhart-Cripple Crow

I know how cool it is to be a freak-folk nerd, but I can't dive headfirst into the genre. Try as I might, I can't fall in love with Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective sounds too typically avant-garde to count as a seperate genre to me, and Iron & Wine and M. Ward just sound like regular folk to me. (I do really like Islaja, though, if they count). Anyway, Devendra Banhart has been the exception for me, the figurehead of the freak-folkers that I admire and enjoy. Boy, this year he didn't disappoint, delivering an epic, exhausting album that is as confusing as it is fun. Sure he wrote the best anti-war song since Vietnam, but what the hell does "Little Boys" mean? Yes, his album is more produced than his last few, but the production only enhances his range of emotion, making a whirlwind of a trip that I'm not always up for riding. Oh, and Devendra Banhart also shared another special place in my heart; he is an artist that both my mother and I can really get into; I can't wait to buy her this album for Christmas.

12. My Morning Jacket-Z

So many different reviewers and fans alike have noted that My Morning Jacket is "pulling a Wilco" or something like that on this album. From the contexts of these statements, I feel that about half of these people are right on, the other half dead wrong. Those who think that, like Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Z is a spacey, abstract and otherwise Radiohead-y version of alt-country, these are the wrong ones; Z is totally folksy, sounding just like the Kentucky I've lived near my entire life. However, those who think that, like Wilco, My Morning Jacket have come from the narrows of alt-country twang and achieved something more universal, more transcendent, these people are exactly right; MMJ is no longer a jam band, and is now making music that is as significant as just about anything else being put out. I'm not historically a fan of MMJ, as youc an probably tell, but I was wowed by this album. Good work, guys.

11. Spoon-Gimme Fiction

Don't ask me to rank my favorite Spoon albums. If I absolutely had to, I would either arbitrarily pick or have some sort of meltdown. Each album until this year (well, Girls Can Tell, Series of Sneaks, and Kill the Moonlight) was so linked to a different period of my life that I couldn't dissociate the two. Then Gimme Fiction came out. I was slow to warm up to it, which may have had something to do with the insane influx of good music at the time I got this. But once it really kicked in, I fell into this album like I fall into the others, going through phases of different favorite songs ("My Mathematical Mind"? "I Summon You"?). I also heard from E-Harv a CRAZY story about a friend of his who dated Brit for a while. A long story, she wrote him an email that contained the line "500 miles is a drive" from "I summon you." It's 500 miles from TEXAS TO HERE, INDIANA! Somehow that made my day, and increased the significance of this song. Years from now, I am sure that Gimme Fiction will be linked to late spring of this year as well, and it will remain in the mix for my favorite Spoon albums.