Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? A classic case of the sort of band I didn’t pay enough attention to until I saw them live, and really, I can’t think of a better way to fall in love with this band, to go from casual listener to true believer. There’s the theatricality, the unrepentant eroticism, the costumes and stage props hearkening back to the band’s obvious antecedent, another divisive, weirdly pansexual band that you either did or didn’t get. So I came to know the band backwards, by attending their show in March because I had a free ticket, wandering noncommittally around the First Ave balcony during the first few songs, eyes glued to the stage by the end. I came home and spent the first spring thaw listening almost constantly to this album, feeling grateful I couldn’t fully sympathize with its suicidally despairing lyrical conceit and could instead fixate on the ridiculously catchy music that both buoyed and betrayed that premise, a towering art rock song cycle that never took itself so seriously or spread its layers so thick that one couldn’t, at nearly any of its hour’s moments, shake. one’s. ass.

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver What more can be said, really? I won’t go with the Loving Tribute to Brian Eno angle, or the Aging Hipster Makes Dance Music Cool for Thirtysomethings angle, or the Arch Lyrics Skewer Faddish Capitalistic Modalities angle—though strong arguments could be made for all three, and my initial favorable reaction to the album was probably due to some combination thereof. But as time went on and spring came around and I began listening to the album while running or taking the bus somewhere, and began recognizing “Someone Great” as the saddest dance song ever, all those qualifications melted away and it was just me and the music, unmediated by blog-culture interpretations. So, these songs remained unwaveringly solid and dependably good and unpretentiously euphoric right through the rest of the year, so that when I visited Chicago over the summer and sat across a table at the Goldstar talking with Dino about the music we’d been listening to, all we had to say regarding this album was to repeat “All My Friends” and “song of the year!” to each other across the table in increasingly emphatic voices that weren’t half as facetious as they sounded like they were.

Matthew Dear, Asa Breed Over the summer, between the predictable semesters of my academic schedule, there was a weird kind of twenty-five day limbo where I wasn’t fully in school but wasn’t fully out of it; a sweet early-summer routine that had me biking over to campus every morning to spend the day’s first three hours teaching fourteen highly motivated young people about humor writing. The spirit of the project and the rhythm of my days was so weird and unlikely that I began to embrace it: early-morning yoga and midafternoon naps and slow evening shifts at the cafe and the occasional trip downtown to wherever Andrew was DJing that night, all of it punctuated by ill-advised midday runs back and forth across the Mississippi with the sun at its zenith and the heat index approaching the ludicrous. This album had the necessary firepower to get me out of bed and moving fast toward my various destinations, but underneath all that it also had the midtempo, low-frequency moments necessary for slowing down. It’s a spiritual cousin to Sound of Silver, with an infinitely hip sangfroid that’s neither fleeting nor affected; like Murphy, its architect can see beyond the latest scene, adjust his aim accordingly, and launch into that middle distance a kind of music that will last, even as it engages the here and now, so that I’ll be still be listening to it next summer and every summer after that.

St Vincent, Marry Me What these songs mostly remind me of is driving—not just any driving, but driving in the summer, when I finally had AC again; not just any destination, but driving down into St Paul to see Kate, taking 35 to 55 and then, when that conduit was no longer available, when it literally fell away, taking 94. The sounds here are like syrup, layered atop each other until it’s almost too much to take, but unlike most virtuosos she knows restraint, she knows when to back off. “Now Now”, “Your Lips Are Red”, “Paris Is Burning”—they’re epic setpieces crammed somehow elegantly into four-minute capsules, they’re contests between excess and excision. But what stops me in my tracks all these months later—what causes me to chew on the inside of my cheek and jam my hands further into my pockets while I’m walking over the railway bridge toward home instead of driving to St Paul, clambering along icy sidewalks instead of floating around in air-conditioned glass and steel, is the moment when she’s alone with her piano during “We Put a Pearl in the Ground”. That prelude marks a transition and melts into “Land Mines” as the chime and cheer of the album’s first half dissipates, everything goes dark and we go somewhere else, somewhere less certain: summer to fall, open to closed.

Stars Of The Lid, And Their Refinement of the Decline A year ago, in December, I stopped drinking alcohol. That made for an interesting year in 2007, especially the first months. A lot of things changed, including some obvious and major aspects of my lifestyle I was hoping would change, was happy to see change. But perhaps even more significant, ultimately, were the small changes that occurred on a minute level, simple things we take for granted, like falling asleep. I found myself engaged with the process of sleep in a way that being drunk hadn’t really allowed me to be. There are subtle gradations of sleep when when you’re not shoved down into it by drink, and there’s a reason drunken unconsciousness is called blacking out; sober sleep, by contrast, is gray. So I spent my time re-learning how to fall asleep by listening to this album. What could be more appropriate? Stars Of The Lid produce the sort of ambient music that’s evocative of the effect a chemical sedative might have (a previous album was titled Avec Laudenum) but their music creates that sort of mood even in a sober person. The grandest pieces here are given the most flippant titles (“Don’t Bother They’re Here”; “That Finger on Your Temple Is the Barrel of My Raygun”; “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”) as if to tether the drones and bursts of sound to something terrestrial and human—something vulnerable, flawed—amidst the epic soundscapes. Snippets of field recordings and melancholy brass buffet the strings and guitar loops; a note held for what seems like an eternity is, upon closer inspection, a series of exquisitely-placed brushstrokes. Sleep used to be oblivion—one long, ponderous note with a crashing hangover for its coda. Now it’s something finer and more complex.