Let me first inform you of my ground rules: I always pick my year-end Top 10 with complete subjectivity, without consideration of an album's importance or buzz or overall critical standing. (Besides, I've probably never heard many of the consensus faves this year.) These are simply my very own personal favorite records of 2004.This year, though, it feels more like a Top 4 than a Top 10. Here's the question I put to myself: Which of these albums will I still put on for pleasure five years from now? Answer: The first four.
The remaining six (and honorable mentions) are really good, of course, but in 2009 they'll more than likely be somewhere in my house — on a shelf or in a bin or in a random stack — with a glaze of dust on them. Chances are I'll run across a few of them; I'll blow hard on the jewel case, load it into the machine and really dig it, at which time I'll wonder, "Wasn't this on one of my Top 10s a few years ago?"
1. Dave Douglas: Strange Liberation (Bluebird/BMG). The trumpeter/composer, one of jazz's true trailblazers, injects bold imagination into tried-and-true small-group format, without discarding the rules or resorting to pure iconoclasm. Douglas' sextet, featuring guitar ace Bill Frisell and Uri Caine on nothing but Fender Rhodes, telepathically navigates these heady pieces with a mixture of audacity and grace. Strange Liberation expands the rhythmic palette to include rock, space dirges, ballads, Latin, funk and more, all shape-shifting adroitly. It's an album that seduces immedi-ately, and then has staying power.
1a. The Black Keys: Rubber Factory (Fat Possum/Epitaph). Stripes, what stripes? When it comes to guitar/drums duos with a bent for the blues, it's not about the White Stripes, it's about the Black Keys. OK, so perhaps such strident comparisons are not exactly in order — The Black keys are two dudes from Akron, Ohio, who deftly drag their blues through the garage and infuse it with lo-fi punk grit. Great, riffy songs, soulful singing and pointed six-string work come courtesy of Dan Auerbach. His partner Patrick Carney bashes away — his time wavers some, but that fits the music just right.
2. Tears For Fears: Everybody Loves a Happy Ending (New Door/Universal). Here's one to shout about. This disc, TFF's first since 1996, brought Curt Smith (high voice, short hair) back into the fold with Roland Orzabal for the first time in 14 years. Happy Ending flew under the radar, but it's a grand collection of epic, Beatles-leaning melodies, lush production and gorgeous vocals. And it's no throwback to the mid-'80s. Here's to new beginnings.
2a. Van Hunt: Van Hunt (Capitol). The Atlanta-based neo-soul artist delivers a thoroughly assured debut album, his silky pipes caressing a series of lushly melodic tunes that lovingly evoke such past heroes as Curtis Mayfield, Shuggie, Sly, Stevie and early Prince. The undulating grooves and flowing production are old school in the best possible ways.
5-10. Bill Frisell: Unspeakable (Nonesuch). The guitarist is practically a perennial on my Top 10s, and I make no apologies. The restless artist is full of surprises, imbuing his jazz-based sound with just about anything that comes to mind, from country to folk to blues to world music. We'll call Unspeakable an abstract groove album. Frisell's playing had been particularly subtle, even reticent, over the last couple of years; here he breaks out with the occasional wailing solo and alarming sonic smear. The dense arrangements are decorated with small horn and string ensembles. Another unclassifiable achievement from an instrumentalist who consistently evades category.
The Streets: A Grand Don't Come for Free (Vice/Atlantic). At first blush, a white boy from London by way of Birmingham delivering raps in a thick English accent wouldn't be in my wheelhouse. But Mike Skinner (aka The Streets) captivated me with his story arc about the small travails of an ordinary lad. This is not life writ large, as is the case with most American hip-hop, but a personal expose from a guy who has money troubles, fallings-out with his friends and rocky relationships with women. With repeated listens, A Grand Don't Come for Free went from amusing novelty to a revealing peek into British culture. And the unrefined hooks really stuck in my dome, yo.
Charles Caldwell: Remember Me (Fat Possum). The Fat Possum fellas discovered Caldwell, then in his late 50s, in 2002 just a few miles from their offices in Water Valley, Miss. He'd never played for money, just for free drinks at parties. So it's particularly bittersweet that the bluesman died last year of pancreatic cancer before Remember Me was released. The album fits into the rough-and-tumble "drone" style of the North Mississippi hill country (think R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough), which eschews 12-bar chord structures and instead relies on hypnotically repeated electric guitar licks and black-cat-moan vocals. Short of field recordings, music doesn't get much more primal than Caldwell's. The practitioners of this unique sort of blues are dying off fast, so it's entirely possible that Remember Me could be the last of its ilk.
Greg Osby: Public (Blue Note). The disc catches the alto saxophonist in a club setting, where he and his band (and guest trumpet Nicholas Payton) bring an elastic post-post-bop feel to a mix of standards and originals. Osby excels at reconciling order and melodicism with the more abstract freedom of the avant-garde. His solos cut-and-paste vigorous mouthfuls of notes, finding a middle ground between the stock fluidity of bop and the cacophonous squalls of "out" players.
John Vanderslice: Cellar Door (Barsuk). This is one of those rare pop albums, issued by the San Francisco-based singer-songwriter (I use the term loosely), that emphasizes storytelling as much as hooks, grooves and performance. Vanderslice's cryptic poetry examines death, madness, despair and various oddities with subversive humor. His elliptical, off-kilter melodies and aggro-acoustic guitar are made all the more urgent by his yearning, tightly wound tenor, a voice that somehow portends trouble.
Steven Bernstein: Diaspora Hollywood (Tzadik). The effervescent Sex Mob leader/trumpeter serves up the third installment of his Diaspora series, this time with a set of traditional Jewish songs, cantorial pieces and a couple of originals. Many of the tunes sound like minor-key blues, set in a contemplative jazz quintet setting and conjuring strains of Ellington, Mingus and others. Exemplary mood music.
AND THE LIST CONTINUES:
Bill Charlap: Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein (Blue Note), sublime piano-trio jazz; U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope), the Irish band's best set since early '90s; Sun Kil Moon: Ghosts of the Great Highway (Jetset), new Mark Kozelek project is appropriately hypnotic; The Vandermark Five: Elements of Style … Exercises in Surprise (Atavistic), Chicago outré-jazz outfit in top, muscular form; Firewater: Songs We Should Have Written (Jetset), underheralded NYC band has its way with a cool set of covers. eric.snider@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Dec 29, 2004 – Jan 4, 2005.