The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 10

Nik Bärtsch's Ronin
Holon

Operating as an avant-garde jazz quintet under Swiss composer Nik Bärtsch, Ronin craft tight, deliberate instrumentals, achieving through repetition a kind of ritualized hypnosis.

Their modus operandi is the modul, a lengthy meditation of song bound to frustrate the impatient. The shortest track is the first, "Modul 42," and it's more than six minutes.

It begins with the chimes of a piano, Bärtsch playing a series of notes that might score a pensive moment in a film, like gray dawn breaking on the day of a trial. Kaspar Rast, the drummer, then taps a cymbal and they're off: Rast focusing on hi-hat and the rim of his snare, brass man Sha adding accents, and bassist Bjorn Meyer coloring the scene with a foreboding that matches Bärtsch's now-darker notes. Percussionist Andi Pupato works subtly, skulking around in the background, jingling here and trickling there, possibly using a drain pipe at one point.

"Modul 41_17" develops slower. The opening piano is muffled, its tones sounding more akin to the shallow twang of a rubber band than to the standard resonance of hammers on strings. Meyer comes in, playing variations of a sequence, then roaming as Bärtsch's instrument regains its voice. Ronin burst forth at 5:22 and 6:56, with rimshots, puffs of alto sax and a conviction in Bärtsch's fingers, and the rest of the piece is devoted to the band expanding on an indefatigable loop by Meyer.

One thing that stands out, aside from Ronin's obvious technical prowess, is how restrained they are. Not only is nobody showboating, but most of the time no one player strays from the pack. If there are solos, they are masked rather than spotlighted. It fits Bärtsch's expressed path of asceticism, or self-denial. Moreover, the pace at which the tracks evolve can be seen as its own form of denial: the antithesis of instant gratification.

Yet Bärtsch's credo, which he details in the liner notes, is that "an ecstatic groove and an ascetic awareness of form and sound in composed music are not mutually exclusive." In other words, asceticism doesn't have to be bland, boring and sexless.

So let's test that with "Modul 45." Meyer sticks to a rigid bass pattern, but it's a funky one. The hinge-like whine of Sha's saxophone adds some heat, and Bärtsch's piano circles around it before they lock step. Meyer breaks pattern and throbs deeply, leading to a delicate passage from Bärtsch. And then -- kablammo! -- a florid blare from Sha's hot, hot sax.

Case closed.

Change of venue

So I have moved once again and am now operating out of Seattle. I really hope things work out and that I can stay awhile. Moving is so much work! I'll be rolling out my top 10 soon. Just a few more days left in the year. When I start posting them, go ahead and share your top 10 in the comments area, if you want. Here's to a better year (and to Obama)!

Sourer times

Portishead
Third
Score: 6

The release came at the worst possible time seasonally: spring. Flowers blossoming, sun shining, dewdrops sparkling --- and Third, a bitter cry coughed up in a wasteland.

And yet the album doesn't make a good hibernating companion, either, even with winter threatening an early visit.

Displaying its birth order in its name, Third represents Portishead's return after a decade of inactivity. That time span also saw little in the way of side projects, Beth Gibbons' 2002 collaboration with Rustin Man, Out of Season, being the lone pursuit to bear LP fruit (not counting albums on which Geoff Barrow or Adrian Utley served as producer, and there weren't even many of those).

Perhaps more crucially, Portishead became legends in that time, recognized as trip-hop architects, canonized by critics, and later revered by Gnarls Barkley and others, who cited the band as an influence. Though they hadn't broken up, the hiatus began to cement itself as it stretched year after year, making it easier to view Portishead's work with the same finality accorded to bands long gone, rather than as a current, unfolding creative endeavor.

So it's understandable that Portishead might elect to make significant changes before delivering their first album of the new millennium. It's just disappointing that their new direction plays against their strengths.

The haunting beauty of Portishead, and of Dummy especially, has been jettisoned, and any remnants of it remember only the haunting part. Gibbons' voice, which moved with liquidity around those chilled-out beatscapes, now contends with a punishing, militaristic presence that shrivels it.

First single "Machine Gun" unleashes a pummeling of pom-pom-pom-poms, each vicious enough to be a whip snap, as Gibbons despairs, unable to connect with "a savior come my way." "We Carry On" conducts a forced march with a synth loop and a martial snare, repeating like a mantra of negation. The quiet acoustic guitar plaint that opens "Small" gives way to the contortions of a demented organ.

"Third" is a gnarled skin of loose ends: the fragile, would-be hymn of "Deep Water," complete with ukulele and barbershop-esque guest backing vocals, is flotsam bobbing up awkwardly between the electronic rough trade of "Machine Gun" and "We Carry On." "Silence" cuts off prematurely, yanking us out of its hypnotic rhythm and into the chime that starts off the much slower "Hunter." Gibbons' acoustic moments recall the dark folk of Out of Season but are undigested asides, insufficiently incorporated.

Highlights "The Rip" and "Magic Doors" show that in the 21st century, Portishead still have the power to transfix. "The Rip" lays its delicate Iz-like acoustic picking over a low, alien whirring, and as it grabs Gibbons' last pre-bridge lyric and draws it out over the next minute, the track builds with toms and an electronic pulse, until she re-enters with the next verse. The hurdy gurdy-outfitted "Magic Doors" wobbles at first, but Portishead nail the piece together with perfectly timed Rhodes piano. It's a resounding clangor of safety in a disquieting world.

Bit torrents

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
Score: 9

If you grew up in the late '70s or in the '80s, chances are you spent a fair amount of time playing video games. And as you exercised your thumbs --- or your wrists, if you had a joystick --- your brain soaked up all that repetitive theme music.

As Crystal Castles, Ethan Kath and Alice Glass of Toronto take an experimental approach to music making, one of their tools being sounds from a modified Atari. It's a key launch point for whatever strikes their fancy. On their first full-length, that's a compelling agglomeration of rock freakouts, ambient techno, pitch-shifted vocals and creative samples.

Kath, who does the music, employs synths, sequencers and circuit bending. Glass, the singer, revels in the emotional purge of a shriek. Kath's manipulation enables Crystal Castles to change and rearrange those bleeps and blips and burbles, marshaling them into something greater than the sum of their parts. Witness his chopping and splicing on "Untrust Us" (sampling Death From Above 1979) and "Crimewave" (sampling Health).

In the frantic "Xxzxcuzx Me," Glass excoriates the mike over machine-gun beats as circuitry spasms around her. "Knights," which begins with a deep synth bassline and a metronomic clicking, drenches its druggy vocal line with distorted keys. "Untrust Us" builds its humming chant over a pattern of synth bloops, bringing in a faint buzzing in advance of the chorus. The buzzing, like a garage band at only a hundredth the volume, is nearly subliminal. Until the end of the song, that is, when it kicks into the foreground at full volume.

More than the half the tracks on Crystal Castles are uptempo numbers indebted to house, techno and electro-pop. "1991" palpitates with binary beats, fervidly pulsing before sliding into "Vanished," a relative breather. The vocals you hear on "Vanished" come not from Kath but from an extended sample of Australian band Van She. The instrumentals and songs with sampled vocals buffer the acid in Glass' strangled yelps and cries, providing variety and lending stability.

But just when you think you've sized them up, Crystal Castles reveal the surprise among surprises, "Tell Me What to Swallow." All vapor and gossamer, it shows that Glass can sing -- like an angel even, when she's awash in overdubs. Profane, meet sacred.

Now Scything: Kaki King, Beach House, Gavin Rossdale

Kaki King
Dreaming of Revenge
Score: 6

When Kaki King lets her fingers do the talking, it's easy to listen. The guitar mag perennial can handle plenty of instruments, and in addition to her weapon of choice, she wields bass and percussion here. Her voice, on the other hand, is a different body, comparable to a foreign medium through which she passes gingerly. Her slight, colorless vocals distract the listener and seem to pull her from her stringed world. When spoken in short bursts, as on "Pull Me Out Alive," they work better with her tapping technique; drawn out, as on the plaintive "Life Being What It Is," they steer the focus onto her weakest element. Smartly, Dreaming of Revenge is largely an instrumental album, with seven of its 11 tracks vocal-free. Take in the scrabbling and snapping of "Bone Chaos in the Castle" and the way King caresses sighs out of lap steel and electric alike on "Montreal," and you might see what the guitar magazines have been going on about.


Beach House
Devotion
Score: 5

If you're jonesing for a feel-good song, don't turn to Beach House. (That'd be the Beach BOYS you're looking for.) No, the Baltimore duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally pretty much stick to ... well, they don't really do sad songs, either. Devotion, like their self-titled debut two years earlier, wanders a perpetually socked-in soundscape of keyboards, reverb and organ thrum. If it could take shape, it would definitely be a plateau. There's a sense of depression to Legrand's songs of domestic life, as if she experienced sadness once but is numb to it now and is trying to reclaim it. In "All the Years," for instance, she describes "sitting on a rock, just / waiting for a key / to sleep inside the house / of old serenity." Devotion's mixing job plays up the band's haziness, but that doesn't flatter the material. Scally's guitar rarely rises above murk level. Legrand's vocals are difficult to pick out even when they aren't vying with a lot of instruments, and the lyrics are often opaque. "Astronaut," a somewhat psychedelic liaison, is really the only reason to read the liner notes. The mantralike chorus of "Gila" provides a much-needed hook; outside that, there's not much to latch onto.


Gavin Rossdale
Wanderlust
Score: 4

Fellow Brit Mike Skinner of The Streets once declared, "I make bangers, not anthems." Gavin Rossdale does the opposite. Post-Bush and post-Institute, he shoots for the stadiums. Virtually every song on his solo debut tries to make grand statements (or at least big sounds) out of whatever's on his mind. Those things, regrettably, come out dressed in generic lyrics and verse-chorus-verse structures, which betray the effort Rossdale puts into his vocals. The imbalance between action and emotion culminates in a chorus that goes, in part, "Better get in my car and drive." It doesn't help that the phrase is preceded by "caught in a landslide," 'cause if you're caught in a landslide, you can't very well drive, though we can presume it's a metaphor (or maybe both are metaphors). Dave Stewart of Eurythmics worked with Rossdale in writing three songs ("Future World," "Another Night in the Hills," "Beauty in the Beast"), and Shirley Manson and Katy Perry contribute backing vocals, but their collective influence barely registers. If there's a sophomore slump in Rossdale's future, he won't have far to fall.

Follow them into the dark

Death Cab for Cutie
Narrow Stairs
Score: 7

Ben Gibbard writes drama, not comedy. But even with that in mind, the songs on Death Cab for Cutie's sixth album run notably darker than those on Narrow Stairs' nearest predecessor, 2005's Plans. And with fewer melodic entry points, the album isn't easy to get into.

Now four years removed from their indie-label days with Barsuk and enjoying a higher profile than ever before, Death Cab took a minor risk by making a less accessible album. Of course, it's obvious they weren't weren't too concerned with its commercial appeal, judging by the length of the first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart." Giving commercial radio stations an eight-minute-plus song is a good way to get ignored. Yet the single found a strong radio presence, even if many stations evaded the time commitment by playing an abbreviated version.

"I Will Possess Your Heart" showcases a lesser-known talent of Death Cab: the long song. Back in 2002, the steadfast trudge of the Stability EP's title track --- likely influenced by slowcore pioneers Codeine, for whom Gibbard has expressed admiration --- demonstrated that the band could lock in a mood and keep a song interesting even in lengthy instrumental passages. The plangent title track to Transatlanticism and an extended version of "We Looked Like Giants" on the The John Byrd E.P. proved this was no fluke.

At first, "I Will Possess Your Heart" seems to fit with Gibbard's other portraits of bittersweet romance: It's just a fellow following his heart, hoping for the best, eager to please and earnest to prove. But the second verse exposes the man as more than persistent, beginning with "there are days when outside your window / I see my reflection as I slowly pass." The way this development creeps up on the listener pairs well with the night-driving groove of Nick Harmer's bass and the canter of Jason McGerr's drums in the 4 1/2-minute instrumental opening section, almost as if they're a harbinger of the window-peeping to come. In retrospect, the title itself hints at the character's intentions. He's not going to win your heart; he's going to possess your heart. This guy's not taking no for an answer. He's going to get what he wants, possibly by force, if it comes to that.

Though this drift into seaminess is probably the only moment that will make some younger Death Cab fans squirm, Narrow Stairs has plenty of cobwebs in its corners. If they were about the same person, "Cath" and "You Can Do Better Than Me" could be successive chapters following a meek lonelyheart: "You can do better than me -- hey, wait, Cath! I'm better than that guy!" And the brooding guitars of "Talking Bird" and feedback that hangs in "Bixby Canyon Bridge" convey definite friction.

Musically, "No Sunlight" is deceptively bright, with a surf guitar prancing and with piano highlights that glisten like dewy pie cherries. It's Gibbard's youth, all footloose and fancy-free. Until the clouds roll in. "The optimist died inside of me," he declares, even as the track remains happily upbeat. It's akin to Transatlanticism's "The Sound of Settling," a giddy sing-along that began, improbably, with the lyrics "I've got a hunger / twisting my stomach into knots." "Long Division," farther along Narrow Stairs, keeps similar company. Building itself on bass throbs and an oblong chord progression, the hooky Photo Album throwback is likely to join "Baba O'Riley" and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" in the hall of mistaken song titles, thanks to a repetitive chorus involving the word "remainder."

Still, the darkness has brought some stumbles. Tabla proves an odd fit (go figure) with Gibbard's vocals and the band's standard instrumental toolbox, disabling "Pity and Fear," though the Indian percussion works better for them when it's largely covered up by electric guitars. Puzzlingly, the track spikes in volume, then immediately cuts off, followed only a second later by the deliberate guitar tones of the last song, "The Ice Is Getting Thinner." The album has good pacing and logical sequencing up to this point, making it that much more frustrating of a decision.

The album closer leaves us on a pensive note. Returning to nature metaphors, Gibbard tells how two people have grown apart with time, not unlike ice floes. "We're not the same, dear, as we used to be / the seasons have changed and so have we."

The same holds true for Death Cab.

As the Crow flies

Sheryl Crow
Detours
Score: 5

Somewhere between the
time Sheryl Crow went
from mold-scraping and french toast-serving to
Kid Rock-dating (and dumping), her earth went fallow. Conflict and passion leached, she sang a could-be ode to tanning. 2005's glossy and conventional Wildflower didn't help matters. This time around, she comes armed with some serious fodder, namely a broken-off engagement, a recovery from cancer, and an adopted son. Yet for all the creative possibility these topics offer, Crow often proves unable to convert that to a powerful performance.

In "Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)," for instance, her exam-table entreaties are fairly flat despite the gravity of the situation, and when her multitracked voice is used for an overlapping effect, the result doesn't resemble mortal pleading, but surface-level whining.

"Diamond Ring" is a small improvement: Over the stagger of a kick-snare beat, Crow recalls how her push to get married was the catalyst in dissolving a relationship (with Lance Armstrong, in all likelihood). An organ churns for the chorus as Crow tests her pipes. It's a rare instance of her singing forcefully and reaching for high notes, and it's one of the better songs she's written this decade. Unfortunately, it seems as if she's concentrating on hitting her notes rather than conveying the emotion that she clearly must feel. As a result, she can't quite pull off the pathos. The raw song itself, however, is good enough to become a standard. Assuming Crow's plight is common enough to invite feelings of solidarity, it will be interesting to hear what other artists bring to "Diamond Ring" in the future.

The life change that does produce a solid performance is "Lullaby for Wyatt," a tender tribute to her baby son, in which she expresses premature worries along with the standard pledges of parental caring. "How do I keep you from losing your way?" she wonders, "Hope you'll go out and you'll come back someday." What could have been a treacle cradlesong instead achieves a rounder quality, more representative of the sweep of emotions brought on by new parenthood.

In general, the sparer the song on Detours, the better Crow fares, and vice versa. The title track and "Drunk with the Thought of You," both largely acoustic numbers, whisper their wings with Beatle dust, hinting at Crow's Fab Four appreciation (she covered "Mother Nature's Son" for the "I Am Sam" soundtrack and "Here Comes the Sun" for the "Bee Movie" soundtrack). By contrast, the hippie-dippy "Out of Our Heads" grafts a torpid Euro house beat to slide guitar and accordion, and the percussion for "Love Is All There Is" sounds too canned.

From the beginning, when the loud, pro-studio "Shine Over Babylon" rudely tailgates the pretty, lo-fi folk of "God Bless This Mess," it's apparent that Detours is muddled. But the album's not without its moments.

Burning the book of love

The Long Blondes
Couples
Score: 10

Romantic strife is The Long Blondes' stock-in-trade, but Couples affords the topic an inflamed sense of urgency, writhing as if dunked in turpentine. Kate Jackson, the album's principal voice, bounds through tales of curdled love, yowling here, sashaying there, as the rest of the band shake the dust off new wave and disco, assimilating them into their tightly wound rock 'n' roll.

The lyrics, nearly all written by lead guitarist Dorian Cox, examine the intrigue inherent in affairs: the emotional twisting and turning that upends lives and turns people into marionettes.

"Too Clever by Half" swivels to an R&B rhythm and outlines a "Closer"-style web of betrayal: "You both planned to leave your lovers and run off with each other / and leave us to look like fools." Jackson delivers the lines seductively, her character's coquettishness meant to draw the cheater close. Clearly possessing the upper hand and knowing it, she savors the moment, her words exposing themselves as a taunt. Then she sticks the knife in: "When you and her were out, I would go 'round to his house / and I don't have to tell you what we did next."

The roles are somewhat reversed in "Round the Hairpin," which throws a rented car into the equation. He's at the wheel. She's at his mercy. A keyboard lurches and buoys, combining with drummer Screech Louder's snare taps to lock in the trajectory, weaving back and forth, back and forth. When the taps give way to crashes, it's the terror pounding in the passenger's head. "Don't let me die," she pleads (possibly a last-minute ad-lib by Jackson, since the phrase isn't listed in the liner notes for the song). The driver's response, spoken by Cox and barely audible over the now-screaming guitars, is a chilling ramble, complete with, "If I can't have you, I don't want nobody / If I can't have you, I don't want to live."

Similarly, the woman at the pub in "The Couples" feels that failed love has sucked the life out of her. Now jaded, she clings to her self-pity as she watches the guys and gals. "People have the nerve to tell me that they're lonely," she moans to herself, "You're not lonely --- I am, baby."

All of this is heavy stuff, but Couples is a hemorrhage you can dance to. The slinky bass line of "Too Clever by Half" invites you to strut, and "Guilt" demands more, its disco-indebted beat and humming keyboards poppy enough to be a floor-filler. When it comes to vocals, bassist Reenie Hollis and guitarist-keyboardist Emma Chaplin add to the variety, providing the shouted chorus on "Here Comes the Serious Bit" and backing vocals elsewhere.

The final track, "I'm Going to Hell," is a towering inferno of a rock song -- huge enough to be a Broadway production -- with piano pounding worthy of at least a few puffs of "Great Balls of Fire." "I don't watch soap operas," one of the cheaters confesses, "maybe I should / I need to know if being the bad guy's any good." Everything about the song goes for broke: musically, vocally, thematically. It goes for the throat and hits the heart instead.