Hey! You kids! 2008 Top 10+!

December 4, 2008 • 6:23 pm • POSTED BY Dan Shepelavy

///////// elo kiddies! //////
here’s this year’s kaleidoscopic musical cavalcade!
////// BONUS! DOWNLOAD the 2008 For Your Pleasure mixtape HERE /////

1. Stew: Passing Strange
This years musical highlight, bar none. The best kept secret in songwriting genius, Afro-baroque pop smarty pants Stew takes a bright bow in the klieglights of Broadway for his debut autobiographical musical Passing Strange. Featuring gospel raveups, formative stabs at California hardcore, a heart-wrenching song about getting stoned with your choir director, musical pastiches of bohemian Amsterdam and German anarchist industrial agit-prop (on Broadway!), all in the service of a supremely moving story about the search for the meaning of art in life. Get a taste of it here in the multi-part “Drug Suite” (sort of a “Quick One While He’s Away” to Passing Strange’s “Quadrophenia”)

2. The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement
Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys turns out to be a stone cold genius. Inspired by pre-Ziggy Bowie, Love, Scott Walker, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks (and really, who isn’t?), Turner crafts a widescreen symphonic pop record worthy of its influences. Bonus for the cover photograph by cerebral 60′s pinup photographer Sam Haskins.

3. Dengue Fever: Venus on Earth
A fantasia of lounge, surf, and Nuggets style garage rock sung in soulful Khmer by a Vietnamese version of  Shirley Maclaine during her Irma La Douce phase. A band with a story too detailed to detail here, detailed here, resurrecting and re-interpreting Cambodian rock, the fascinating and heartbreaking history of which is told here and here.

4. Stereolab: Chemical Chords
Venerable indie collective have not sounded this vital and energized since 1998′s Emperor Tomato Catsup.

5. Brian Eno/David Byrne: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Giant pulsating musical brain Eno and supreme art shmengi Byrne have been stalwart members of a mutual admaration society that has yielded some towering masterworks (as well as indirectly causing the formation of the Tom Tom Club) Topping off this embarrassment of riches is this wonderful, quietly self released record. Pastoral, textured, quietly muscular pop. If I could weave it into a blanket, I would nap under it forever.

6. Amanda Palmer: Who Killed Amanda Palmer
Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer is a smart but unhinged tsunami marinated in German cabaret, Sparks records, and theatrical punk rock. Its goth dork quotient is elevated mightily by the fact that the album is accompanied by a book of Victorian-by-way-of-Guy-Bourdin crime scene photos with text by Sandman auteur Neil Gaiman. In brief, a marinated tsunami.

7. Neon Neon: Stainless Style
A neo 80′s synth pop pastiche concept album about the very personification of the coke dusted 80′s aesthetic and culture – aluminum car magnate John Delorean. I was almost afraid to listen to the record lest it sully the rad-ness of the idea. But then I would not have heard the softly flanged homage to Raquel Welch. Which is awesome.

8. REM: Accelerate
Venerable indie rock stalwarts have not sounded this vital and energized since 1986′s Life’s Rich Pageant.

9. Fotheringay 2
Long unreleased album by English folk rock supergroup. They were named for Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned and executed for treason following her alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I of England and place herself on the English throne. That description also serves as an effective portrait of their sound. Lead singer Sandy Denny, who died tragically young, had a voice for the ages.

10. Cluster Live 07/Harmonia Live 1974
Krautrock maestros reform in 2007 for an herb tea soaked knob-twiddling Motorik live jam that fondly recalls their 1974 cannabis soaked knob-twiddling Motorik live jam, finally issued this year.

11. Sea and Cake: Car Alarm
Venerable 90′s indie rock outfit have not sounded this vital and energized since 1997′s Nassau.

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///////// (re) discovered and reissued ///////

Lost Sounds, Eponymous, 2004

The best thing about listening to Jay Reatard’s unjustly underrated analog synth punk project is that it makes me think of this.

Psychedelic Furs: Talk Talk Talk, 1984
Pretty in Pink. Again. And Again.

Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia: My Elixir; My Poison, 2003
English accented stream of consciousness monologues slurred by a blurry chanteuse over guitars played by Lava-Lamps. Or something.

Vanusa: 2, 1970
Va-va-voom! Stupifyingly sexy Brazilian brassy psych lounge jazz.

Amanda Lear: Sweet Revenge, 1978
The truth about Lear’s date of birth, the names and nationalities of her parents and the location of her upbringing has however been a matter of speculation and debate… At the age of sixteen, she relocated to Paris to study at L’Academie des Beaux Arts before joining St. Martins School of Art in London in 1964…In 1965, Lear was spotted by legendary French modelling agent Cathérine Harlé and, eager to find a way to finance her studies, she returned to Paris to catwalk for rising star Paco Rabanne…found herself being photographed for magazines like Elle, Marie France and Vogue and modelling for fashion designers like Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, Antony Price, Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel. After some time, she dropped out of art school, began modelling full-time and went on to lead a bohemian and flamboyant life in the Swinging London of the Sixties, hobnobbing with the rich and famous like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Brian Eno, Twiggy, Sacha Distel, David Bailey, Yul Brynner and Keith Moon…While clubbing with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and her then boyfriend, the Guinness heir Tara Browne, in a Parisian nightspot named Le Castel in 1965, she was introduced to a man that was to change her life, on many levels according to some, none other than Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí... Although she remained Dalí’s confidante, protegée and mistress all through the Sixties and Seventies, Lear was also romantically linked to Brian Jones, which resulted in the Rolling Stones track “Miss Amanda Jones”, included on 1967 album Between the Buttons, had a year-long affair with the married David Bowie and was briefly engaged to Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music but in 1979 she married French aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d’Argens de Villèle who, in fact, was the former lover turned adopted son of controversial gay novelist Roger Peyrefitte….