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A couple of weeks ago I spent some time in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which is basically the most perfect place on the East Coast to get acquainted with any top-shelf black metal album.  The landscape is uncompromising:  misty primeval forests give way to barren Alpine wilderness, snow-covered rock formations tumble forth from the land.  Here, nature itself seems to be the embodiment of black metal: palpably dangerous and gaudily beautiful in equal measure.  While driving around the mountains in the autumnal sun, I could not stop thinking about Wolves in the Throne Room’s magisterial Celestial Lineage, a fiercely ambitious album that seeks to continue the band’s deification of nature.  The album is not so much cinematic (which implies some sort of editing) as it is panoramic, a sweeping statement that whips through soggy old growth forests, over a wooded ridge, and across the endless expanse of ancient nature.

The album opens with ”Thuja Magus Imperium,” an overture that explores every dynamic pole that the album will reach in its relatively brisk running time:  it begins with a solemn incantation and closes with a impressively feral sense of doom.  Nearly every song on the album reaches for one of these aesthetic edges.  The haunting “Permanent Changes in Consciousness” is little more than the metallic whoosh of someone carefully sharpening a heavy blade, and “Rainbow Illness” swells with bassy sickness before yielding to the breathtaking “Woodland Cathedral.”  But between these quieter moments, Wolves have fashioned recognizably savage vistas of raw guitar whirlwinds and pummeling blast beats.  Of these stunners, perhaps the most central is “Astral Blood,” a ferociously epic song that stands with the best that American black metal has to offer.  The thematic link between these varied aesthetic points is the grand indifference of nature.  But this isn’t kvltish lip-service, Aaron and Nathan Weaver are true believers in the transcendent power of their own music.  Beyond the brutal instrumentation and unearthly howls, this is a band who is serious about making music that feels as incomprehensibly large and as magnificently alive as the hothouse a couple of doors down from the sun.

Rating: 8 / 10

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Björk is a musical universe unto herself.  I don’t mean that Björk is an extraordinarily large character, and I’m not making a coy metaphorical extrapolation from her frank cosmological leanings.  No, I mean that Björk is a musical universe in the strictest sense of quantum mechanics.  Björk contains and seems to paradoxically express every iteration of Björk in every parallel universe that splits her life into multitudinous channels every time she makes an artistic decision.  Somehow, someway, Björk tracks down all of those other Björks floating around the multiverse, hands them a beat and a melody, and places a microphone before them.  And then this godhead Björk sequences the recordings into songs that are so obviously broadcast from a thousand parallel universes.  This is precisely why Björk’s music has always been able to so easily contain its own internal contradictions.  And as warm and inviting as it is alien and beguiling, Björk’s latest album, Biophilia, is a cosmological love letter to the wide-domed universe that contains everything that has ever existed.

Part of Björk’s undeniable appeal has always been her ability to love bigger and more sincerely than most of us can manage between our daily commutes and department meetings.  This is the gift, obviously, of a true artist who has the luxury of thinking longer and harder about the world we all live in.  But this pantheistic lovefest is all over Biophilia, an album title that we should take as a literal statement of purpose.  At nearly every turn, Björk is embracing viruses and cosmic foxes and tectonic plates and mushrooms and orbiting moons and strings of proteins.  Her heart seems so full of biological agape that you can practically feel it throbbing at the center of this album.  And in this sense, Biophilia is a return to form after the  thrillingly experimental exercise of Medulla and the schizophrenic post-millennial breakdown of Volta.  You get the sense that it’s been a long time since Björk felt the overwhelming urge to hug a tree and a fiber-optic cable and the mysterious void of the universe all at the same.  From the liturgical “Cosmogony” to the sweet “Virus” to the amorphous “Mutual Core,” Biophilia is proof—again and again and again—that all is full of love, a thesis Björk has revised and restated a thousand times over, only to say it again in the plainest, most exhilarating language she knows.

Rating: 8 / 10

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Any initiation ritual involving Abel Tesfaye has got to be terrifying.  The drugs, the liquor, the sex, the humiliation, the fear, the thrill—it’s got to be too much for any single person with a functioning moral compass.  And, indeed, the rite turns out to be everything you would expect:

I got a test for you
You say you want my heart
Well baby you can have it all
There’s just something I need from you
Is to meet my boys

What follows is as dark as anything that The Weeknd has committed to tape: a regular Eyes Wide Shut-level orgy of hard drugs and empty sex.  Even for The Weeknd, the level of nihilistic debauchery is startling, especially when he warns that “the clocks don’t work, you ain’t gotta check the time.”  But what saves “Initiation” from being a laughable parody of Tesfaye’s twisted R&B tales of Eros and Thanatos is the particularly menacing music.  Tesfaye’s vocals are slowly pitch-shifted as each verse builds, revealing the demonic core of his lyrics.  It’s a simple but surprisingly effective trick:  by the time he starts screaming at his victim’s girlfriends as he goes down her, his level of self-loathing repulsion finds an analogue in the screwed-down voice that comes rumbling out of your speakers.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched in delighted horror as Pete Wentz stumbled his way through VH1′s 100 Greatest Songs of the 00s.  The list, obviously and completely, is bonkers.  It raises more questions than it answers:  since when did anyone ever take Jet seriously? Avril Lavigne doesn’t have any better singles than “Complicated”? is “Tik Tok” really a better song than “Shake Ya Ass”?  ”SexyBack” over “My Love,” really?  no “Country Grammar,” the fuck?  I don’t begrudge VH1 their popcentric attitude; it’s not like they are going to clear out spaces for Fennesz or Sunn O))).  Plus, “Crazy in Love” and “Toxic” and “Since U Been Gone” are all incredible songs that rightly deserve all the accolades heaped on them.  But I am more baffled by the rock representatives—Jet, Creed, 3 Doors Down, Train, Nickelback.   Is this really the best mainstream rock that the decade produced?  And as if to make up for VH1′s lack of interest in an indie commercial economy, NME threw together a list of the best songs of the last 15 years.  Granted, they have an additional half-decade to consider, but the list is a little too heavy on Anglicized rock (Arctic Monkeys, Foals, Oasis) and too light on rappers not named Dizzee Rascal.  There’s a lot to like about the list, sure, but it seems a little too safe to me.  A really good list, I think, should make sacrifices for bold choices.

Which is exactly the reason that I decided to make my own list.  The first decade of this new century has been marked by the total availability of everything to everyone.  It’s in no way weird to have a complete knowledge of the back catalog’s of Beyoncé and Aphex Twin and Wolves in the Throne Room and The Strokes.  It no longer takes hundreds of dollars and patient crate-digging to find obscure krautrock or afro-funk records; you can become an expert on anyone’s career with a high-speed connection and a free weekend.  And the rise of amateur blog criticism and new professional venues means that there are more opportunities to hear about more good music that all the ‘zines of the 90s could have in their heyday.  It means that kids in Des Moines and Chicago and El Paso and New York and Burlington and Los Angeles and Savannah have access to the same information.  And instead of producing a bland monoculture where everyone blankly praises voices of a generation (what a laughably dated concept, huh?), this massive influx of information means that you can both find groups of like-minded people, but it also means that you can find things you would have never listened to on your own.  Look, every decade is great in its own way, but they all pale in comparison to the sheer volume of incredible music being produced around the globe.  And for the first time in history, we can all listen to it.  And my modest hope is that the list after the jump reflects my big-hearted enthusiasm for the state of music in the first hundredth of the new millenium.

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The Righteous Brothers’ version of “Unchained Melody” is an abomination.  A gushing exercise in sentimental pap, swelling with the grandeur of its own melancholy.  In a sense, this is understandable because a lot of consumate performers miss the song’s narrow mark:  Ricky Nelson, Al Green, Joni Mitchell, Roy Orbison, even Sam Cooke.  Of course, The Goons as led by Peter Sellers (Quilty!) turned the song into a funhouse of fart sounds and grinning cynicism.  But some artists instinctively understand the shattered heart at the center of “Unchained Melody.”  Willie Nelson’s modest cover zeroes in on the narrator’s desperation and doubt, and Elvis sweats his way through a histrionic (but brilliant) version that turns a gentle plea for patience into a madman’s lament.  ”Unchained Melody,” then, clearly belongs to the sentimentalists, the ones with Cupid’s truest arrow buried deep in their tender hearts.  Which means, I guess, that it’s not all that surprising that Lykke Li has turned in a gorgeously insecure cover herself.  The song was originally written for a movie at least partly about a prisoner who misses his wife terribly, and Li’s voicing of the character is a marvel:  she seems to choke back tears and lose her emotional bearings, a plodding acoustic figure accompanying her fragile performance.  Then, as if she realizes the utter hopelessness of her situation—the repetition of “the sea, the sea” seems like a suicidal refrain—Li pulls the song together, hurling out all the big romantic stuff that’s twisting her heart into aching knots.  And when her big moment arrives, when she asks her lover to wait for her, we know that she knows that her lover knows that this is never ever going to happen.  No one will ever be unchained from their cruel fate.

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Improbable as it seems, the last few years have seen a resurgence in non-jazz saxophones.  Once  They’ve been lifted out of jazz brunches and placed squarely into otherwise cool indie records (Before Today, Kaputt, Halcyon Days).  A nasty sax solo even finds its way on to Lady Gaga’s new album.  But while many haute-indie purveyors have found ways to reappropriate cheesy saxophones, Colin Stetson wields an ancient bass saxophone like a war horn.  By using a physiologically complex circular breathing method, Stetson is able to create a stunning flurry of notes that are as beautiful as they are cacophonous.  Stetson doesn’t have time for coy little games of winking irony; in his hands, the saxophone becomes something sincere and apocryphal and primitive and metaphysical.

The stunning New History Warfare Vol 2 showcased Stetson’s compositional talents, forging transcendent moments out of short bursts of hopelessly complex musical figures.  Now, a quick followup EP, Those Who Didn’t Run, builds the album’s achievement by significantly expanding Stetson’s compositions, pushing the two songs outward to over ten minutes a piece.  Titled after a cryptic line from apocalyptic ”A Dream of Water,” a piece narrated by Laurie Andereson, Those Who Didn’t Run feels like a natural extension of New History Warfare both in terms of aesthetic and ethos.

Musically, Those Who Didn’t Run is built of the same raw material: furiously arpeggiated figures, course ghost bellows, martially percussive clacks.  The key difference, however, is that both “Those Who Didn’t Run” and “The End of Your Suffering” are significant investments.  Stretching beyond their own horizons, the songs lock you in for the duration partly because it dares you to engage with such avant-baroque music.  Of the two, “Those Who Didn’t Run” is the more immediately rewarding; its fat, melodic figures are highlighted by the subtle use of counterpointing.  Like a pot of simmering rust, “Those Who Didn’t Run” boils and steams and vents, generating a tremendous amount of heat in the process.   But as challenging as “The End of Your Suffering” may seem initially, it rewards patience because the almost narrative-like arc of the conflict and resolution of the song’s primary themes is breathtaking.  To this end, there is again something vaguely apocalyptic about Those Who Didn’t Run.  When the titular lines pops up in “A Dream of Water,” Anderson seems to be referring to a group who stayed behind to face whatever hellish fate try to claim everyone else.  Like New History Warfare, this record sounds ghosted, paranoid of the universe’s cataclysmic potential.  But, as always with Stetson, just as piece seems on the verge of being overwhelmed, he finds a humane center amid the chaos, a figure, a line, a subtle tone shift that locates something distinctly tender and raw.

I vaguely recall an interview with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch where he claimed, essentially, that he didn’t understand music that wasn’t sincere.  He was depressed (and maybe a little repulsed) by the blankly cynical irony that dominated much of the indie culture from the 90s.  This stuck with me because it seemed like a powerful repudiation of a kind of digestibly ironic art (bad=good) that gets too easily propagated.  The disingenuous inclusion of hairy sax solos in Before Today and Kaputt is frustrating because it’s all about ironic posturing.  It’s a ‘stache, a trucker hat, a sweating can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  While I understand that Tim and Eric certainly have their place in the culture, I appreciate and admire sincere artistic expression more than I do clever re-appropriation.  Because Kaputt feels like an interesting intellectual exercise and Those Who Didn’t Run feels like a thrilling abstract reflection of something resembling the messiness of existence.

Rating: 8.5 / 10

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Given a considerably expensive marketing push by a major label, there’s every reason to believe that Phantogram’s brilliantly bright “Don’t Move” could easily sit alongside Adele and LMFAO and Rihanna in the higher ends of the charts.  And in a fairer universe, this would certainly be the case because the song was designed to be adored.  The superabundant details—the thunderous handclaps, the brassy horn flourishes, the cut-and-paste vocal samples—are so lovingly crafted that they seem to compete for your attention.  Busy without being fussy, “Don’t Move” is anchored by Sarah Barthel’s coolly measured performance: her bill of particulars (“I’m not your drinking problem”) reads more like a point of order.  But since it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing Phantogram at the tops of any iTunes charts anytime soon, you can keep this one close to your heart.

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Feist Metals //  Leslie Feist’s music is close to being the exclusive province of white girls in knit caps and nonprescription eyewear who have read Franny and Zooey at least eight times.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a couple of the softer tracks on Feist’s latest, Metals, had opened their own Etsy shop selling coffee mugs with mustaches or canvas totes with canary prints or some kind of whimsical nonsense.  At times, it’s impossible for me to divorce Feist from her legion of scarved fans: her music seems to be an extension of their chimerically pretty lives.  And, of course, this is deeply unfair to Feist herself because The Reminder is a beautifully crafted album who legitimately earned every success that it garnered.  So, at what point, exactly, does Feist stop being pretty lifestyle music to complement the prettily decorated apartments of white girls in major urban centers and start being a deeply talented songwriter who cannot be blamed for her shappy chic appeal?  When the chorus from “The Circle Married the Line” refuses to leave your head for an entire diurnal cycle.  When she transcends the torch song idiom of “Anti-Pioneer” to create something that verges on a noirish standard.  When the tender “Get it Wrong, Get it Right” threatens to break your swollen heart in two perfectly symmetrical pieces.  When a male chorus purges the tension of “A Commotion” with their aggro-chant.  When it occurs to you that even considering her substantially pretty back catalogue, that even then, “Cicadas and Gulls” is still one of the most unabashedly pretty songs she’s ever written.  When you realize that, you know, fuck white girls, right?, and all their terribly lonely prettiness because Feist doesn’t belong to them any more than any of these artists belong to any of us. Rating: 7.5 / 10

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James Blake Enough Thunder //  For better or worse, Enough Thunder is the logical conclusion of James Blake’s debut album.  The dubbed-out torch songs that populate this short record seem to push Blake’s unquestionable talents in two directions: reliably moving avant-R&B and tediously plodding balladry.  Of course, this is something startlingly new because Blake has never been anything but consistently excellent.  As a risk taker, Blake was bound to trip up at some point.  But there’s no use dwelling on the sensitive tedium of “A Case for You” and “Enough Thunder.”  Because “Fall Creek Boys Choir” and “We Might Feel Unsound” and “Not Long Now” are all tremendous individual tracks that only deepen Blake’s sense of accomplishment over the past 18 months.  Each of these beauties combines Blake’s sensitive ear for heartbreaking melody and his sense of electronic adventure, an obvious intersection between Blake’s experimental and tradition strains.  Rating:  6 / 10

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Anyone could be forgiven writing off Wilco after the picnic-pop of Sky Blue Sky and the dad-rock comfort of Wilco (The Album).  There was nothing in these albums to suggest that Wilco were ever a challenging or progressive or even mildly exciting band.  This was clearly not the band that recorded “Misunderstood” or “Theologians” or “A Shot in the Arm” or “Kamera,” let alone “Spiders/Kidsmoke” or “Reservations.”  They were tepid, frightened of the obligations and expectations they created with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Summerteeth.  And while The Whole Love isn’t going to allow Wilco to retake the mantle of America’s Radiohead (whatever the shit that title was ever supposed to mean), the album is more than enough to remind casual listeners that Wilco still have enough residual weirdness to be a intriguing band.  Opening with the challenging but engaging “Art of Almost,” The Whole Love is an album that dabbles in every era of Wilco’s diverse career: some of it is easy, some it is tough.  At its most fluid (“Black Moon,” “Open Mind,” “Rising Red Lung”), The Whole Love is a pleasantly sleepy record, lulling its listener with its comforting familiarity.  But, as always, Wilco is best when they make bold artistic decisions.  The electric guitar part that careens all over “Born Alone” is thrilling, and the sepia rave-up “Standing O” packs a surprising punch.  Even the A.M.-esque “I Might” is terrific if for no other reason that it feels instantly familiar.  At this point in their career, it’s unlikely that Wilco will ever return to the abject weirdness of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or A Ghost is Born, but it’s entirely probable that they will continue to write songs that will bloat any forthcoming greatest hits package.  Rating:  6.5 / 10

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Jens Lekman An Argument with Myself //  Jens Lekman is still joking, right?  I have to tell you, it’s getting really hard to tell.  An Argument with Myself continues Lekman’s cheese reclamation project with frightening vigor and sincerity.  And here I thought that Night Falls Over Kortedala had obviously wrapped dated soft rock completely in its sweater’d arms.  Whereas Lekman would wink clearly enough to his listeners (as he does by chopping up with deliciously fat horn riff at the end of “Kanske Ar Jag Kar i Dig”), the twee Swede plays it relatively straight here.  To the point that I think I started blushing from embarrassment while listening to “So This Guy at My Office.”  Though the EP’s finale is kind of a dud, it’s schizophrenic opener, the title track, is a towering achievement in songcraft.  Then there’s “Waiting for Kirsten,” a obsessive and sweet ballad about, no shit, Kirsten Dunst filming Von Trier’s  Melancholia in Gothenburg.  These songs are so successful because we understand that Lekman’s wry lyrics contradict the mushy instrumentation.  But when Lekman messily blurs the line between (un)ironically sappy and honest-to-God sappy, he loses the strange power of his aesthetic.  Rating: 6.5 / 10