{"id":465,"date":"2005-12-24T23:16:06","date_gmt":"2005-12-25T03:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=465"},"modified":"2005-12-24T23:18:22","modified_gmt":"2005-12-25T03:18:22","slug":"music-top-ten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=465","title":{"rendered":"Music Top Ten"},"content":{"rendered":"

So here’s my top ten albums list for 2005. Usual caveats apply (there are lots of things I haven’t heard that I well might like if I did; I can’t always remember if something came out this past year or earlier; I might well feel differently tomorrow than I do today; etc.).<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. M.I.A., Arular<\/em>. After all the controversy<\/a>, still the best beats of the year.<\/li>\n
  2. Kevin Blechdom, Eat My Heart Out<\/em>, which I just wrote about yesterday<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  3. Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out<\/em>. Unearthly<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. Missy Elliott, The Cookbook<\/em>. Missy in her commercially-calculated, humdrum, unambitious middling range (as I said here<\/a>) is still superior to most rappers at their best.<\/li>\n
  5. R. Kelly, Trapped in the Closet 1-12<\/em>. I know the songs weren’t released together as an album — though they were as a DVD — but this musically minimal melodrama is so ridiculously over-the-top and go-for-broke crazy, how can I not love it?<\/li>\n
  6. Lady Sovereign, Vertically Challenged<\/em>. I adore the S-O-V and her demented, tough, and smart-alecky ways. So I have to list this EP, even though the versions of the songs, in this her first American release, are inferior to the UK versions I originally downloaded as mp3s (not to mention that some of her best stuff, like “Sad-Ass Strippah,” probably the most brilliant and vicious diss ever recorded, is not included here).<\/li>\n
  7. Fannypack, See You Next Thursday<\/em>. I can’t understand why this group isn’t more popular. I find their Miami-bass-goes-Brooklyn (with a touch of ESG down from the Bronx) synthesized music, and their sassy, cartoonish, jail-bait girl vocalists, irresistible.<\/li>\n
  8. Vex’d, Degenerate<\/em>. It’s strange channeling these new London sounds — grime and dubstep, though I know there are also other names — entirely through the blogosphere, without access to the scene in any more direct way. In any case, I find these doom-laden instrumentals quite haunting. (Doom-laden isn’t quite the right word, since “doom” implies finality, but the sense that there could be an end is precisely what this dark music denies us).<\/li>\n
  9. Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic<\/em>. Quite different in feel from his previous album<\/a> — this one is more propulsive, less (seemingly) “organic” — but none of the other electronic-music-without-vocals that I’ve heard this year is anywhere near as metamorphic and light- and open-sounding (not to use the obvious cue of the title and say, ecstatic).<\/li>\n
  10. Miranda Lambert, Kerosene<\/em>. I don’t listen much to country, and basically I don’t get<\/em> country at all, but nonetheless I find a lot of this oddly compelling.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    So here’s my top ten albums list for 2005. Usual caveats apply (there are lots of things I haven’t heard that I well might like if I did; I can’t always remember if something came out this past year or earlier; I might well feel differently tomorrow than I do today; etc.).<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. M.I.A., Arular<\/em>. After all the controversy<\/a>, still the best beats of the year.<\/li>\n
    2. Kevin Blechdom, Eat My Heart Out<\/em>, which I just wrote about yesterday<\/a>.<\/li>\n
    3. Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out<\/em>. Unearthly<\/a>.<\/li>\n
    4. Missy Elliott, The Cookbook<\/em>. Missy in her commercially-calculated, humdrum, unambitious middling range (as I said here<\/a>) is still superior to most rappers at their best.<\/li>\n
    5. R. Kelly, Trapped in the Closet 1-12<\/em>. I know the songs weren’t released together as an album — though they were as a DVD — but this musically minimal melodrama is so ridiculously over-the-top and go-for-broke crazy, how can I not love it?<\/li>\n
    6. Lady Sovereign, Vertically Challenged<\/em>. I adore the S-O-V and her demented, tough, and smart-alecky ways. So I have to list this EP, even though the versions of the songs, in this her first American release, are inferior to the UK versions I originally downloaded as mp3s (not to mention that some of her best stuff, like “Sad-Ass Strippah,” probably the most brilliant and vicious diss ever recorded, is not included here).<\/li>\n
    7. Fannypack, See You Next Thursday<\/em>. I can’t understand why this group isn’t more popular. I find their Miami-bass-goes-Brooklyn (with a touch of ESG down from the Bronx) synthesized music, and their sassy, cartoonish, jail-bait girl vocalists, irresistible.<\/li>\n
    8. Vex’d, Degenerate<\/em>. It’s strange channeling these new London sounds — grime and dubstep, though I know there are also other names — entirely through the blogosphere, without access to the scene in any more direct way. In any case, I find these doom-laden instrumentals quite haunting. (Doom-laden isn’t quite the right word, since “doom” implies finality, but the sense that there could be an end is precisely what this dark music denies us).<\/li>\n
    9. Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic<\/em>. Quite different in feel from his previous album<\/a> — this one is more propulsive, less (seemingly) “organic” — but none of the other electronic-music-without-vocals that I’ve heard this year is anywhere near as metamorphic and light- and open-sounding (not to use the obvious cue of the title and say, ecstatic).<\/li>\n
    10. Miranda Lambert, Kerosene<\/em>. I don’t listen much to country, and basically I don’t get<\/em> country at all, but nonetheless I find a lot of this oddly compelling.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}