Toad Top 20 Albums 2008: 1-5
1. Meursault – Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues
I know I can’t be objective with regards to this album, but believe me I am being honest when I tell you that it is the best thing I’ve heard all year. Whether it’s the obvious hits, the peculiar interludes, the perfect blend of pop songs and experimental electronica, or the trajectory and integrity of the album as a whole, I don’t think I’ve heard better than this for years.
Meursault – Salt Pt.1
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2. The Felice Brothers – The Felice Brothers
A warmer, more immediately emotional album I couldn’t really imagine. The voice and the slow pace are so rich and arresting that you find yourself overcome by sadness almost immediately, and that hold on your emotions is never once loosed for forty minutes.
Felice Brothers – Greatest Show on Earth
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3. Langhorne Slim – Langhorne Slim
Of this top five, all but the Felice Brothers have firmly enhanced their reputations with me with superb live performances. With Langhorne Slim it wasn’t the emotive power of bands like Meursault, Shearwater or the Low Lows, it was sheer charm. Sean Scolnick delivered his songs with such easy charisma that you just couldn’t help but warm to him. Like Barton Carroll, this is an album whose style is far from revolutionary – more a familiar mish-mash of what I would vaguely describe as Americana. That familiarity is something which turns out to be a bonus in the end though, as the album worms its way under your skin like few others.
Langhorne Slim – Diamonds & Gold
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4. Shearwater – Rook
Occasionally beautiful, but often thunderous, this album was an immediate success with me, building up to all sorts of crescendos oozing a ferocity you rarely expect. I still don’t know if it’s the loveliest or the angriest album of the year.
Shearwater – Leviathan, Bound
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5. The Low Lows – Shining Violence
This is another album I didn’t necessarily expect to find this high on the list when I first heard it, but for some reason it’s just grown and grown on me this year, while more highly anticipated records have kind of dropped away. It broods and snarls, growling it’s tunes at you from behind a wall of reverb.
The Low Lows – This Modern Romance
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Nailed it! Yes! Ahem.
Interesting that the Felice Brothers’ record causes you to be “overcome by sadness.” It doesn’t really have that effect on me, although it is far and away my favorite record of the year. Tunes like Goddamn you, Jim, Don’t Wake The Scarecrow, and St. Stephen’s End are freighted with real sadness, but much of the time it seems to me that the heaviness of the tunes is sort of tongue-in-cheek, like they’re taking the murder ballad right to the edge of bathos. The humor really comes through on Take This Bread, Frankie’s Gun!!, Love Me Tenderly, Whiskey In My Whiskey and Tip Your Way, but it’s just below the surface in many other places. The live performance of these songs–even the serious ones–is incredibly playful and joyful.
I was just listening to Meadows by Porlolo while I took down the Christmas decorations, and I realize that I hadn’t really appreciated it enough before. It’s superb. “Leaking with loveliness” is, if memory serves, the operative image here.
Man, A Small Stretch of Land is a fucking corker of a tune isn’t it? Neil Pennycook’s voice on that tune is really (dare I say) sublime.
Hey, what happened to my avatar? And my profile won’t even let me make one. Is this your doing, Young?
Erm, it should be working. Can you log into the admin area? If so, one of the plugins should allow you to upload an avatar.
Well, I can log in but I can’t do much of anything after that. I think a C&B kill switch got thrown somewhere.
In other news, Tom Cruise claims that his dyslexia was cured by Scinetogoly.
Morning……
Didn’t help Travolta’s son though, did it?
(Sorry. I know that was wrong but couldn’t resist it. Happy New Year, folks.)
I really love the felice brothers album. only got it there during the holidays but have become addicted to it.
great top 5 matthew. that low lows album is something else and love the shearwater record too. do not have any langhorne slim but plan to
investigate on your glowing recommendation.
and c&b – i’m with you. i love that album. but despite the number of tunes you could describe as stand out tunes, small stretch of land is almost the perfect song for me, and located where it is on the album is the perfect pause for breath just before the storm brews again. i love it.
Cheers, Euan. I think Small Strech of Land is brilliant for very similar reasons. It appears kind of out of nowhere, at a very key moment in the album and, like you say, highlights why the actual assembling of the record itself, irrespective of the songs themselves, is a work of art all of its own.
Mock away, Bart, mock away. Mind you, as others have said before me, I bet Scientology funerals are fucking brilliant, what with all the aliens and volcanoes and death rays and spaceships and so on.
yep. perfect song at the perfect moment. and you’re right, shows perfectly how an album should be more than just a bunch of songs thrown together.
I do love the Meursault album and it made #5 in my end of year list, and Shearwater was also there. An excellent piece of work, Mr. Toad.
Early entry for thread of the year here.
I’m trying to stifle a gale of girlish giggles here in the office as the conversation swings wildly between complimenting a fantastic song on a fantastic album, and shamelessly ripping the piss out of a bunch of deranged lunatics.
It’s made my day.
Hmm.. “A gale of girlish giggles.” My new year’s resolution might be to shoehorn as much alliteration into my comments as possible.
Ed, the Meursault album had nothing to do with me at all – it was all finished, recorded and done before I ever got involved.
Dylan, they aren’t deranged. The souls of dead aliens skulking about in volcanoes is no sillier or less plausible than all that snake/apple/flood nonsense, so I think it’s time we starting giving all religions equal respect.
Equally little respect, I mean, obviously.
You know when we agree on the ultimate and final apex of taste at the end of the year somethings misaligned in the universe, buddy!
I loved that album from the first listen, from the first note. It was like having a dream of the most beautiful woman in the world and then meeting her twin brother in a bar and fucking the hell out of him later that night.
And yeah, “Small Stretch of Land” is that little note he leaves on your pillow in the morning before leaving… so fucking perfect, aaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh!
Anyhoo, back to religion. Monarchical reign, colonization, and the Spanish Inquisition v. small number of kidnappings and forced withholding of food and water until dementia or in a few cases death, all funded by an elite class. Hmmm… I think Catholicism has them beat, sorry boys.
Yeah, it’s surprising how many people have said that..
awww I missed you too dylan!
and I ate sooooo much chutney whilst in London last week, I’m looking for recipes now.
kissesss,
Tart
Hi Tart,
Happy new year!
Now see, if I was a far more rude person than I am, I could take a line like this:
..and come back with an awfully inappropriate euphamistic line like “So you didn’t leave the hotel room to go out sightseeing much, then?”
Luckily I’m not a very rude person.
rude? you know I take that as a compliment
but no, we were with regular, non-fucking friends so we did see quite a bit of London 
wait, i thought the regular friends WERE the fucking friends??
Everything’s fucking around here, Marcy.
fuck yeah, baby!
Even I don’t understand where that went.
Fuck you.
[...] If you read his blog, this is what he would say) and it is looking good. Especially his best of list being all in place. See below for a track from his #1 album from Meursault that just so happens [...]
could you upload them again?
Sorry mate, don’t even have the zips myself anymore.