Best Of..: Streetlight Manifesto: Something in the Between

9. Streetlight Manifesto: Somewhere in the Between


Streetlight Manifesto was a really big part of my college experience, and somehow, I have always, always, always failed to see them because I am a terrible fan (sorry! ☹ ). So, I’m kind of cheating and putting it on my 2008 list because 1. Its my list and I can do what I want, 2. I feel bad about being a bad fan, and 3. I got to listen to it a lot more this year than I did last year because it was released so late. Also, the lack of time now that school has started has meant that this whole one post per album thing is taking forever.

As a bonus, here are some wayyy slow acoustic tracks from this album and another that are just magical:

Streetlight Manifesto: Somewhere in the Between
Streetlight Manifesto: Forty Days
Streetlight Manifesto: Dear Sergio

Related posts:
Best of 2008: #10: M83: Saturdays=Youth
Best of 2008: #11: TV On the Radio: Dear Science
Best of 2008: #12: Mount Eerie: Lost Wisdom
Best of 2008: #13: Cloud Cult: Feel Good Ghosts
Best of 2008: #14: Ratatat: LP3
Best of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Best Albums of 2008: #10: M83: Saturdays=Youth

10. M83: Saturdays = Youth

This list, you may have noticed, has surprisingly fewer post-rock albums than last year. Not really sure why this is the case, except that I went in a bunch of different directions with the genres I was exploring. One thing that clearly would have made the list had it been a full-length is Paego Paego’s A Bird for Every Country, which you can get free on their Myspace. As it was, Saturdays=Youth was, for me, functionally this year’s And Their Refinement of Their Decline, with a lot more Brian Eno. It wasn’t a great work rotation album, but the kind of thing that I returned to again and again when I just wanted time to freeze so that I could disappear into oblivion.


Related posts:
Best of 2008: #11: TV On the Radio: Dear Science
Best of 2008: #12: Mount Eerie: Lost Wisdom
Best of 2008: #13: Cloud Cult: Feel Good Ghosts
Best of 2008: #14: Ratatat: LP3
Best of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Office: Mecca

Listening to Office makes me feel really good. And they have a song about the Olsen twins called "Double Penetrate the Market." I think that's pretty much all I have to say about that.

Download Mecca (for free!) here.

Best Albums of 2008: #11: TV On the Radio: Dear Science

11. TV On the Radio: Dear Science

As I get higher up the list, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to really say anything about these albums that hasn’t already been said.

Dear Science has everything that I love about this band—borrowed styles synthesized to perfection, evoking a mixture of several decades, converging space, time, and aesthetics in a way that is entirely fresh, entirely theirs. TV on the Radio is a band that is only made possible by the historical moment they occupy, and this album is a product of the forces of the universe that made this year what it is. This year was not tired noise, it was not repetitive or without surprises. It was melodious, complex. It reverberated and left an uneasy aftertaste, only to be washed away by the clarity of its end.


Related posts:
Best of 2008: #12: Mount Eerie: Lost Wisdom
Best of 2008: #13: Cloud Cult: Feel Good Ghosts
Best of 2008: #14: Ratatat: LP3
Best of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Best Albums of 2008: #12: Mount Eerie: Lost Wisdom

12. Mount Eerie: Lost Wisdom

On this album, Mount Eerie actually sounds a lot like one of my favorite bands from the Pacific northwest, the Finches. There is a forlorn female voice, the gentle strum of a guitar, and a generally morose quietude. Sometimes, it turns up one corner of its mouth in an ironic and sad smile, and other times it sits calmly in the dark.

Like a lot of albums featuring her as a guest, Julie Doiron totally makes Lost Wisdom what it is. It is casual and folksy, refusing to follow any rules or conventions at all but, instead, favoring a warbled stream-of-consciousness in every track. No one warbles meaninglessly like Julie Doiron does, and she really shines in pretty much every track. Phil Elvrum is great, as usual, though this album decidedly highlights his vocal abilities more than any of his other, more instrumental work.

Many of the songs on Lost Wisdom sound completely ad hoc. There is no discernable pattern to pick up on or anything really to sing along with. As a musical artifact, though, it is incredibly successful in evoking memory and affect. Unlike a lot of albums on this list, Lost Wisdom is not at all particular to this particular moment. It is sort of timeless and ever-present. It compensates for the avant-garde by refusing to maintain a safe distance. The album’s quiet folksiness are in your face and in your living room. You can hear every guitar strum and every breath. It is an intimate moment shared with a friend, in which neither person talks, but rather stares into the other’s eyes and suddenly understands. The internal stream of thought goes something like this:

what i find
will be found easily
and only when i'm not looking for it
without looking for the morning
in the sunset
and it's like this
and my will to live
hides implied
in my heart beating
without looking for fulfillment
but just accepting it


Related posts:
Best of 2008: #13: Cloud Cult: Feel Good Ghosts
Best of 2008: #14: Ratatat: LP3
Best of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Best Albums of 2008: #13: Cloud Cult: Feel Good Ghosts (tea-partying through tornados)

13. Cloud Cult Feel Good Ghosts

“From a million little pieces, have you found where your place is?”

This is an album that has come to symbolize one of my most important relationships, and all of the weird stuff that happens in the tug of war of making it work. It all started when I made him go see this band with me. He was grumpy and I was not in the mood to deal with it. We had a really quiet, sort of awkward dinner, the kind that we always have when one of us is kind of mad at the other. We got to the show an hour late and still managed to have to sit through the terrible (and I mean TERRIBLE) opening jam band. And then suddenly, there was Cloud Cult, and I was happy and K. was happy and he kept being like, “wow, I really like this band. Do you have their other albums?” Pretty soon he was an even bigger fan than I was, and he was so glad that I made him go along. K. and I spent the last year mending our relationship and listening to this album on long car rides.

I guess you could call it our un-breakup album. It reminded us of our mortality, of the ways that the subtleties of human drama drive us apart in ways that can be catastrophic, and how we can come back from those horrible, dark places by trusting each other. There are a lot of things I could say about the album musically, but they really just aren't as important as the other stuff.

<3
Related posts:
Best of 2008: #14: Ratatat: LP3
Best of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Best Albums of 2008: #14: Ratatat- LP3

14. Ratatat: LP3

Ratatat is my most listened to band of all time, and LP3 seamlessly adds itself to my usual playlists featuring this band. The album has its own distinct identity, though, which you can read about here in my post from a few months ago. I don’t feel like writing a whole thing about it and there’s quite a bit of this list to go.

Related posts:
Best of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Best Albums of 2008: #15: The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks

15. The Submarines: Honeysuckle Weeks

I expected a lot from this album, to be honest, because Declare a New State went so above and beyond my expectations. Honeysuckle Weeks did not quite meet all of these expectations, but that is how these things work. The cuteness trick that seems to work so well for Mates of State (I never managed, btw, to get their newest album but I suspect that it would have made its way onto this list if I had) kind of expired after the first try. Where it isn’t as cute, this album is super girly, in a way that makes my female masculinity feel threatened and grumpy. On top of that, there are those annoying iPhone commercials with “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie.”

Once I got over being disgruntled at the inherent mainstreaming of everything good in the iTunes/internet age and decided it was okay to let a little bit of sentimental girliness into my life, I actually found Honeysuckle Weeks quite enjoyable to listen to. Conceptually, it is a reminder to have hope even when growing up, responsibility, the sudden disappearance of your significant other, etc. are a depressing reminder of your own mortality. Honeysuckle Weeks came to represent, for me, the part of this year when I changed my attitude, opened myself up, went on long walks in the sun, and learned to sew pretty dresses that I actually enjoyed wearing. Who cares if I am going to die one day, and who cares if I hate shopping malls and douchebag altbros, and most of all, who cares if some of the people I chose to trust were the wrong ones, if it is bright and cool outside and I don’t have to be frustrated at the way my shirts fit because I can make my own? Suddenly, mornings are happy occasions and that dark cloud that hangs over everything has to go find some other poor, brooding person to depress. There is coffee and light and happiness and I am at peace with myself. How awesome is that?

Yeah, whoever thought I’d ever say something like that, but I’m glad that Honeysuckle Weeks got to be the soundtrack to a lot of my self-discovery and reconciliation this year.

Related posts:
Best of 2008: #16: Grand Archives: S/T
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro

Best Albums of 2008: #16: Grand Archives-S/T

16. Grand Archives: The Grand Archives

Surprisingly, this album is fairly upbeat. Given the band’s roots, I had expected something slow, sad, and haunting. It certainly (and very easily) could have been. Instead, we are presented with something wonderfully jangly, something that warbles rather than lamenting, something that whistles to itself as it walks down the street. Lyrically, it is caught between nostalgia and sadness, memory and overcoming. The album could easily be the soundtrack to a sad romance novel, the kind in which the main character, faced with breaking free and leaving behind a lover or remaining lamentably imprisoned, leaves, and in doing so finds a voice with which to express their love in new and intense ways. That the album does this without painting a very clear picture of what is left behind is an interesting move—as if the whole thing is one suspended movement of freedom, happiness, longing for the past, relief, and hope for the future.

Related posts:
Best of 2008: #17: Yelle: Pop-up
Best of 2008: #18: Parenthetical Girls: Entanglements
Best of 2008: #19: The Gaslight Anthem- The '59 Sound
Best of 2008: #20: Billy Bragg- Mr. Love and Justice
Best of 2008: Intro