St. Louis Music Blog

The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll -- a tally of 2008's favorite albums and songs, as voted on by critics and writers -- is now live. TV on the Radio's Dear Science won the album vote, while M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" nabbed the singles trophy. Click over there to see the rest.

Vintage Vinyl just released its list of best-selling LPs and CDs of 2008. (Physical product? Remember that?) Interesting to see how many local releases -- and how much hip-hop/R&B/rap -- is on the CD list, while how much old (and new) indie rock is on the LP list. Looks like you kids are downloading albums by the new rock bands for free, eh?

Top 50 Best-Selling CDs
1. Story Of The Year Black Swan
2. Lil Wayne Tha Carter III
3. Ludo You're Awful I Love You
4. Young Jeezy Recession
5. Black Spade To Serve With Love
6. Erykah Badu New Amerykah Part One
7. T.I. Paper Trail
8. Jus Bleezy Go Hard Or Go Home
9. Radiohead In Rainbows
10. Nelly Brass Knuckles
11. Nas Nas
12. Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend
13. M.I.A. Kala
14. Kanye West 808s & Heartbreak
15. Roots Rising Down
16. Beck Modern Guilt
17. MGMT Oracular Spectacular
18. Portishead Third
19. Usher Here I Stand
20. Raheem Devaughn Love Behind The Melody

So this is a wee bit late -- sorry, I've been battling a cold since New Year's Day, bah -- but hopefully still relevant: three "discs" worth of 2008 quality music. This is meant to be a companion list to the Top 10 Top 40 songs piece I penned, a way for people to perhaps discover some new bands and/or revisit overlooked releases from the past year. I'll have .zip files of each compilation up tomorrow, but these will only be up until Friday, so be sure to snag them while you can. Without further ado:

Disc One: (DOWNLOAD HERE)
My Morning Jacket, "I'm Amazed"
Annuals, "Hot Night Hounds"
The Acorn, "Crooked Legs"
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, "You Could Write a Book"
The Mountain Goats, "San Bernardino"
Ra Ra Riot, "Suspended in Gaffa"
Magnetic Morning, "The Way Love Used to Be"
Jack's Mannequin, "Annie Use Your Telescope"
Goldfrapp, "Happiness"
Tilly and the Wall, "Falling Without Knowing"
The Standard, "Sunday Eyes"
Takka Takka, "Silence"
Kaiser Chiefs, "Never Miss a Beat"
Earlimart, "Teeth"
Parts & Labor, "Satellites"
The Big Sleep, "Bad Blood"
Supergrass, "345"
The Joy Formidable, "Austere"
Bloc Party, "One Month Off"
Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline"
R.E.M., "Hollow Man"
The Hold Steady, "Constructive Summer"
British Sea Power, "A Trip Out"

By Ben Westhoff

Hip-hop A-listers including Rick Ross, Akon and Plies were caught grossly exaggerating their gangster credentials this year. (Turns out they were painfully law-abiding. The horror!) But even if your favorite rapper wasn't caught in a lie, you can bet he or she put out a hilariously absurd record or two in 2008. Here are the most preposterous rap songs of 2008.

RICK ROSS, FEATURING T-PAIN "The Boss" (Def Jam) Though Rick Ross claimed on his debut album, Port of Miami, to know Manuel Noriega, The Smoking Gun website found that Ross was a prison guard rather than an international drug kingpin before he was famous. Perhaps they met in the can? In any case, his assertion on "The Boss" that he "made a couple million dollars last year dealing weight" is absurd. Still, we're tempted to give him a pass on his claim that "I don't make love/Baby we make magic," because, well, we wouldn't know. USHER, FEATURING YOUNG JEEZY "Love in This Club" (LaFace) Sex in a puddle of Patrón, anyone? The story line on Usher's latest album, Here I Stand, is roughly "former playboy takes on fidelity and diapers." But on "Love in This Club," all that goes out the window. Ursh combines hip-hop and R&B's two great passions (discos and humping) without, sadly, elaborating on his exhibitionist fetish. It's clear from Young Jeezy's verse, however -- "It's going down on aisle three/ I'll bag you like some groceries" -- that he prefers to make love in the Piggly Wiggly.

Americans who still think of Latin music as mariachi bands and gyrating Ricky Martins and Shakiras might want to lend a closer ear to the genre. This country's Hispanic population isn't just growing, it's growing more diverse. More and more unique musical styles are being gobbled up, and that should come as good news to alternative gringos hoping to spruce up their castellano. This year's Latin-music highlights come from all over the Spanish-speaking map. We'll start in the farthest geographic corner: an island in the Mediterranean.

BUIKA
Niña de Fuego
(WEA International)
Afro-Spanish artist Buika epitomizes cultural and ethnic diversity. Over three decades ago, her parents fled political turmoil in the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea and made a new life for themselves in a gypsy neighborhood on the island of Mallorca. After stints as a Tina Turner impersonator in Vegas and as the vocalist on some chic house and funk albums made for the European clubs, Buika has found her niche in flamenco and Latin jazz. This year's Niña de Fuego contains many of the same gitano elements found on her successful LP Mi Niña Lola, and pushes the boundaries further by adding Mexican ranchera. Only someone as strangely bohemian as Buika could pull together these emotive styles with just the right amount of melodrama.

THE PINKER TONES
Wild Animals
(Nacional)
Barcelona's Pinker Tones have traded most of their native Catalán for English -- both in language and in beat. On Animals, harmonic backing vocals combine with synthesizers and wah-wah pedals to produce 1980s-style pop and rock steady. The song titles couldn't be more fitting. "Hold On" starts with a choir and then hits the gas with an accelerated Beck-like groove. That's followed by the even more retro number "S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T." and the happy-go-lucky reggae track "The Whistling Song." But Pinkertones do take pride in some forms of hip-swiveling: Be prepared to shake your mod booty to "Electrotumbao."

(Words by Andrew Scavotto; photos by Annie Zaleski)

After devoting a significant amount of time to exploring local music in 2008, moreso than in years past, I've decided to end the year by blogging about my favorite moments. This isn't necessarily a list of my favorite shows -- rather, it's a list of the moments during which I enjoyed music the most during 2008.

(Shame Club, August 2008)

It should be noted that this is the perspective of a fan, not a critic, meaning that this blog is not a critical summary or "best of" analysis. In fact, there are several great local bands that I didn't even see this year, so this list is not even close to being comprehensive or authoritative. I also missed some key shows (the Riddle of Steel finale, So Many Dynamos doing Weezer, reunion shows that I haven't been around long enough to understand), so I'm simply listing the moments that I happened to enjoy the most. Let me know what I missed and tell me about your favorite moments from 2008.

Full disclosure: I have worked professionally with a few of the artists listed below and I planned this year's Lot festival. Regardless, you can trust that everything on this list was included simply because I thought it rocked and was awesome, not because of any self and/or company interest. [Editor's note: I can vouch for that.]

My favorite moments of 2008....

In 2008, independent rock returned to the underground, where it belongs. Given the grand catastrophe that is today's record industry, most major-label executives don't have the time or energy to convince music fans they might like something a little out of the ordinary. They're too busy recycling variations on what were once sure things while desperately searching for career exit strategies that don't involve tall buildings, open windows and running leaps. As a result, fringier artists have had the opportunity to develop outside the spotlight, sans the sort of unrealistic commercial expectations that can lead to self-consciousness, compromise and a lifetime of regret. Not selling means not selling out, as the following albums demonstrate. 

Our Top 10 indie rock albums of 2008 are after the jump.

-- Michael Roberts

Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn't nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn't feel right stuck in the category.

Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper's fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor's note: That's why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater's near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album's instrumentation includes both banjo and a hammered dulcimer. And while we certainly returned to releases by Bon Iver and Bowerbirds throughout the year, we actually heard both records last year, when they were first independently released

After this arduous vetting process, these are the records that survived: ten releases that dabble equally in meat-and-potatoes alt-country, soft-focus '70s pop folk, and the old, weird America of Greil Marcus.

As a Zooey Deschanel character once put it, long before she ever met M. Ward: "Listen and light a candle, and your future will become clear."

And now it's time for the "I love you like a fat kid loves cake" memorial Worst Lyrics of 2008, March Madness-style tournament, this year a terrifying mélange of appalling oral-sex requests, bargain-bin philosophies, grammatical atrocities, and cringe-inducing pillow talk. To elevate the drama, I provided a trusted colleague with the 16 artists who qualified and had him assign seeds--Lil Wayne you expect to go deep into a showdown like this, but Lucinda Williams? Some fantastic match-ups resulted, but in the end, nobody is topping Nickelback's backstage-pass bon mot, as devastating a blow to feminism as Katy Perry and Sarah Palin combined. Oh, for those innocent days of 50 Cent. Click the bracket to see the full "Worst Lyrics of 2008" finals

A couple of weeks ago, an expert on the Harry Potter series told an audience of high school kids how lucky they were to have this Big Shared Experience--these seven books and 41,000 words in common. What does Harry Potter have to do with hip-hop in 2008? In an age when many year-end lists should be subtitled "Ten More Albums You've Never Heard of and Will Never, Ever Hear," plenty.

Technology has made the world smaller, and in response, we've found smaller and smaller worlds to inhabit. Think of a specific era--in some cases, a specific artist's work from a specific era, or even a specific year--and someone, somewhere is re-creating those very sounds. Which is fine, and sometimes a lot of fun. It's just that those folks who are still striving for the Big Shared Experience were the most interesting stories of the past year in hip-hop. They were the people who believed that hip-pop didn't automatically equal T-Pain, or the real pain of automatic IQ loss.

There were several such moments in 2008.

See the Top 10 after the jump...

Any knucklehead with DSL and a laptop can now make an electronic track. With a half hour of clicking and fiddling, you can sample enough cheesy beats and mashups to clog arteries from here to Berlin.

Simple dropdown mouse maneuvers can transform electro tracks into progressive house tracks (from dry and synthetic to wet and gushy), rhythm tracks can be tempo-tweaked with an upward toggle to change a Timbaland beat into a Chromeo one. Add some T-Pain-esque pitch-correction vocals to your between-track banter for that 2008 feel (actually, please don't). The rail guiding it all: that four-on-the-floor stomp. Herewith: nine collections of dance music (and one licentious exception), some of them mixed into sets, others unmixed for your own sampling pleasure.
 

SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO
FabricLive 41
(Fabric)
At least four different Fabric mixes could have landed on any reputable list of the year's best dance collections. Depending on your mood and your hormonal levels, either Metro Area's syrupy Demerol disco mix, M.A.N.D.Y.'s 25-track thumpfest (featuring Yello, Gui Burrato and Booka Shade), or DJ Yoda's insanely diverse FabricLive mix (Violent Femmes, Jurassic 5, Bell Biv Devoe, Adam F, Wiley), could effectively wobble your azz. Simian's stands a little above the rest (save one - see below) in its audacity, inclusiveness and ability to celebrate electro and house without resorting to the stupid futuristic robotic stuff. The set opens with Japanese 1970s cheeseball Tomita, features the year's best dance track, Hercules & Love Affair's "Blind," transforms "Suite Equitra" by the late NYC street composer Moondog (who's having a very healthy afterlife as a mixtape MC) into a dancefloor stomper, hits on current faves Deadmau5, and digs deep in the crates to uncover genius inventor/musician Raymond Scott. It closes with a great threesome: Plastikman's "Spastik" into Green Velvet's "Flash" into (of all things) the Walker Brothers' "Night Flight." This mix will totally transform your rush hour slog home from work.

Plastikman
"Spastik"
(M_nus) (from Simian Mobile Disco's FabricLive.41 mix)

It's time to rank the best of what went around and came around again.

BILLY JOEL
The Stranger
(Columbia/Legacy)
As punk and disco exploded, the Piano Man's deeply unhip 1978 breakthrough proved that top-shelf Broadway/Brill Building songwriting could still sell - and, occasionally, rock. "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Anthony's Song (Movin' Out)" remain priceless snapshots of Annie Hall-era NYC, the title track bares real teeth, and the Kenny Chesney fave "Only the Good Die Young" - banned from several college-radio stations for its unseemly insinuations about Catholic schoolgirls - is still a corker.

Extras: Complete June 1977 Carnegie Hall concert; DVD of Joel's March 1978 appearance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test; thirty-minute making-of doc and facsimile of his lyric sketchbook, scratch-outs and all.

In a year worthy of your rage, metal delivered in spades. What with the economy circling the drain and Sarah Palin coming down from the tundra and then refusing to go back, 2008's been the kind of year that really makes you want to smash your head into walls or punch random strangers in the face. Good thing there were so many awesome records available to serve as a soundtrack for exactly that kind of behavior. The ten discs below are just the tip of a very big, very heavy iceberg. Metal seems to grow stronger each year; 2009 will bring new albums by Mastodon, Deftones, Lamb of God and more. In the meantime, check these out.

METALLICA
Death Magnetic
(Warner Bros.)
Five years after their last comeback, they did it right. Combining the punishing thrash of their early glory years with the thick, bluesy grooves of their 1990s output, the members of Metallica reclaimed their throne as America's kings of metal. Songs like "That Was Just Your Life," "My Apocalypse" and "Cyanide" are made to be heard blasting through speakers bigger than your goddamn house, but even on an iPod, they'll have you clenching your fists and banging your head like a fourteen-year-old amped on testosterone and Red Bull.

In the RFT that's coming out later this week, our music writers will weigh in on what they liked -- and didn't like -- about music in the year 2008. Various writers from around the Village Voice Media chain also weighed in on their jams, lists we'll be rolling out over the next week or so. Here's a sneak preview of these, my list of top ten pop songs.

BY ANNIE ZALESKI

Pop music often gets a bad rap for being disposable or vapid, and in many cases that's true. (Katy Perry, Danity Kane and the Pussycat Dolls, step right up!) But every year, a few irresistible bits of innovative ear candy rocket up the charts and seep into our subconscious.

The following ten singles saturated the Top 40 -- or what passes for hit-oriented radio in this topsy-turvy musical climate -- while proving that accessibility doesn't necessarily preclude creativity.