My Top Twenty of 2005

Amazingly, I never finished this.

Here it is, nearly 2006, and I've heard perhaps 2% of the new indie rock of this year and about 25% of the new hip-hop/r&B, but not by choice. So what can I do but write my OWN top twenty, without regard to chronilogical protocol. That is, this is the stuff that I found myself going back to the most this year, "guilty pleasure" (such a bourgie phrase) or no. Some of them are songs, some are albums. All, in my opinion, have something special to offer. And very few, if any of them, came out this year.

1) Tall Dwarfs- "Hello Cruel World"

"Hello Cruel World" combines the first several eps from New Zealand's '80s lo-fi pysch-pop masters Tall Dwarfs. One of the cadre of artists with ties to the Flying Nun label- which has released more great pop (The Bats, The Chills, Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, for example) than any label post-1964 has any right to. I first got into this when my lovely girlfriend put it on, thinking I'd probably love it. It didn't sink in right away, but the overall tone was intruiging- the tinny, chirpy, strained voices and warm analog fuzz of the whole thing was captivating even without songs to back it up. But I must have been asleep when "All My Hollowness" came on- as I've been obsessed with that brilliant tune for about 8 months now. Made up of nothing more than a chorus of handclaps and footstomps for drums, cheap organs, and sullen, pitchy vocals, it somehow manages stunning beauty anyhow. In fact, I'd say it's a strong contender for top five best songs of all time. Any real songwriter would kill and infant to come up with something this good. And the rest of the album contains a lot of great moments as well, mixed with weird, fever-dreamy lapses into lo-fi psych-noise and found sound. The opener, "Nothing's Gonna Happen", nips at the heels of "All My Hollowness" in terms of overall impact, and contains one of the greatest lyrics of all time- "stiff pricks in the general direction- of anywhere but home". Essentially essential.

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