oh man, i bought so few albums this year i almost feel guilty bothering with this. either i’m just getting lazy musically, or i’ve zeroed in on what i like so much that i just have no tolerance left anymore for bullshit and wait patiently for bands i like to come out with new material. however, for posterity, i will press on and enlighten you with the scant selections i bothered to pick up and didn’t regret almost immediately after.

you don’t even have to tell me this wasn’t the greatest album, i know, trust me. see how little into music i was this year? but it did grow on me after repeated listens, i have to give it that much. and seeing them play some of these songs live did increase my enjoyment of them, i have to give it that too. so all in all, they still get a slot for being a likeable group of chaps putting down some solid rock songs.

i’d heard their old stuff and thought it was pretty enough, but i guess this was the year i allowed myself to be enchanted by the magic of a band of gypsy frenchmen. i still think there are a couple songs off the lon gisland EP that should have been on the album — ‘elephant gun’ was a killer track — but i listened to this many times and it put me in a nice wistful mood.

i may catch crazy shit for this, but i’ll go ahead and say it: i didn’t love their first album that much. i certainly loved half the tracks off of it, but it may, just may have benefitted from a little bit of hype. in all honesty, i thought this, their second effort, sounded more professional, focused, and even from end to end. there may not have been a ‘neighborhood #3 (lights out)’ track quite as dynamite, but i bet i played it more end to end than the first one and it showed they weren’t a one-off band. good stuff.

pretty high for what’s essentially a rehashing of old material, but damn, if you’re GOING to rehash old material, this is how you do it. i mean, you’d think making some of the best music in a genre even better would be a tough thing to do (other than adding the coolest light show of the decade from within a super-tron pyramid of radness), but these frenchy spacemen make it look easy.

may not be the second coming that some pitchfork-thumping dancefloor junkies claim it to be, but i will concede a few points: yes, ‘someone great’ and ‘all my friends’ are probably two of the best singles in the last several years. and i’ll admit, seeing them live at coachella did knock my balls off, allowing my desert-wearied body to continue dancing through the pain and exhaustion in some sort of blissful delirium. yeah, there are few tracks on the album that i’m not wild about, but you gotta give ’em a sack full of credit all the same.

now we’re into the ones i was actually crazy about — which i know should have been 5 (or even 15) albums ago, but what can you do? it’s a good sign when i’m still putting this one in months later to listen to and continue digesting. when you write songs as densely packed with wordy goodness as these guys, it’s almost a necessity. i’ll admit, i wish there were a few more tracks where they went in to rocking-out mode, but then i’ll find myself hours afterward singing the chorus of the slower ones to myself and have to admit that they serve their purpose on the album too. overall just a great-sounding album for which ‘strong songwriting’ is a gross understatement. i’m still a little angry i didn’t act fast enough to get into their last sold-out show here in LA, although as penance i did memorize all the lyrics to ‘a hand to take hold of the scene’, so it wasn’t a total loss, because that song is fucking amazing.

i was a little curious how this list would shake out back in the summer when i realized it’d be the first december-goat-less year in the last several, giving me no sure pick for number one. i should have realized it’s really not fair to the other bands when you have as much talent as this group does; going from neko case’s bittersweet melodies to carl newman’s poppy gems to the, well, whatever you’d call dan ‘the destroyer’ bejar’s unique sort of indie balladry. i wonder if they’ve ever caused a musical meltdown with that much goodness crammed into one studio? i also wonder if jessica will ever bring this disc back in from her car after several months so i can listen to it more.

• D.A.N.C.E. – justice (or jus-TEECE?)
  most of the album, eh. and even this had to grow on me. but at this point how can you not d-a-n-c-e when you hear it, which is everywhere?
  ….
• back in your head – tegan and sara
  how do you make such a simplistic little piano tapping so goddamn catchy? hot indie twin (lesbian?) sisters, that’s how!
  ….
• punkrocker – teddybears (w/iggy pop)
  for being repetitive in just the right way.
  ….
• is there a ghost – band of horses
  for actually kind of rocking, despite general wimpiness.
  ….
• the orchid – califone
  for not rocking at all, in those times when i needed a song like that.
  ….
• pretty much any remix by MSTRKRFT
  for basically killing it, even on songs that were damn good in the first place.