#88. The Fire Show - Above the Volcano of Flowers (Perishable, 2001) and Saint The Fire Show (Perishable, 2002)

The journey that Michael Lenzi and Seth Kim-Cohen took between 1995 and 2002 as the core duo behind both Number One Cup and The Fire Show is an odd one to try to parse out. Number One Cup were a pretty standard college rock band, never making anything wholly great - 1999's People, People Why Are We Fighting? came close though - but never sinking into the mire like so many in their style did. Once that project ended though, things got much more interesting. Lenzi ond Kim-Cohen rechristened themselves as M. Resplendent and Olias Nil respectively and started a new band that seemed to exist solely to put Number One Cup's odder moment to shame. The Fire Show could be said to have resided at the weirdest end of the post-punk revivial, though their self-titled debut came out a full two years before that began in earnest and only their swan song Saint The Fire Show was released within its scope, the same way that This Heat resided at the fringes of the original post punk movement. Not to say that The Fire Show are in the same sonic realm as This Heat, though a few moments on Above the Volcano of Flowers recall them to some degree, but their respective places in their era's post-punk scenes are comparable: identifiably related to the sound but way too fucking weird to be full embraced by the core fan base.

The weirdness isn't at its highest point on the band's sophomore release, 2001's Above the Volcano of Flowers, but the fact that it's not as uncompromising as the releases on either side of it isn't a slight on it as an album. If anything the immediateness of it is its biggest asset, allowing for an easy entry point for ant interested party that still hints at the band's idiosyncracies. Take opener "Designing a Steeper Cliff," for instance; it's anchored by a warm, fluid bassline and continually returns to a pleasant trumpet fanfare, but in between the occurrences of that sort of pedal riff the band flits between moody cello-augmented choruses, straight hard rock interludes and verses where M. Resplendent's sole accompaniment is the rhythms section. It all flows wonderfully mind you, but the fact that in 7 and a quarter minutes the song spans no fewer than 4 genres without skipping a beat should give you an idea of what sort of abnormal shit the band can get into, and that's just when they're being accessible. The album then goes all directions at once, incorporating strict post punk ("1986.6") moments of prettiness (the closing trio of "Dismissal, "Thistle" and "Whistle") and 10 minute epics that defy any sort of simple categorization ("Sonny Liston, Dead Like Latin.") Really, by the time you've gotten to the looped, processed guitar and hip hop drum samples that make up "Bed With Ambulance Police Light on Top" it should be abundantly clear that The Fire Show aren't interested in that whole accessibility thing on the whole, but the interesting directions it goes between those points can be exhilarating.

It's Saint The Fire Show, however, that provides the most exhilarating listen. It makes even the oddest stuff on Volcano sound like Resplendent and Nil were reigning it in to an astonishing degree. "Designing" may have thrown a lot of different genres into the pot, but something like "Making of Dead Hollow" does this in a way I've never heard before, flipping the switch between about 5 different instrumental environments while Resplendent carries on a consistent vocal line with no regard for the changes going on behind him. It's a much less inviting way to start off the album, granted, but it sets the stage for the rest of the material better than anything else could have. I've actually come to think of it as a puzzle more than a song: once you 'solve' it, realize why it does what it does the way it does it, it's immensely satisfying and every subsequent time you go through it it becomes easier to get on its wavelength. Once you're there the rest of the album falls into place: it's taking the ideas presented in "Dead Hollow" and going in different directions with them, more angular on"The Rabbit of My Soul Is the King of His Ghost" and "Deviator Feel Like Crook,") more moody on the gorgeous "Dollar and Cent Supplicants" and all points in between. The biggest curveball it throws though, is saved for last when the band's take on "You Are My Sunshine" amplifies the dark, twisted meditation on loss and obsession that it was always meant to be. It's the perfect kind of cover from my stance: completely re-contextualizing the familiar by arrangement alone and without fundamentally altering the lyric. You'd never think that a children's song could be the stuff of nightmares, but between the discordant horns, Resplendent's despairing vocals and the menacing guitar tone it come damn close. It's not an easy listen for sure, but it closes out the album, and sadly the band's career with an appropriately uncompromising moment.

Coming up tomorrow: The defining moments of the indie-electronic movement.

#89. 'That's not nice, the way you treat me'

Fight Like Apes "Jake Summers"

"Jake Summers" is a bit of an oddity in the scope of this list in that there are two separate versions that were given some form of single treatment. Initially it was the version from FLA's debut EP How Am I Supposed to Kill You When You Have All the Guns?, basically a glorified demo recording albeit one with a highly visible spark of creativity, that was issued as a separate 7", then upon the release of the band's official debut ...and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion a year later, the rerecorded version was released as the unofficial first single. The differences between the two versions are readily evident, but they illustrate one of the most fascinating aspects of a band's evolution: the jump from the demo to the first studio effort. It's not always an easy transition to analyze, though in the era of peer-to-peer music trading there's a larger chance of coming across the first foray a band makes into the world of recording, but hearing how well the rawness of those early recordings translates to actual production compared to playing into your friend's 4-track is often a fascinating thing to hear.

The original release is raw as hell. The playing is more rudimentary, the production muddier and the whole track plods along at a not-fast-enough tempo, and yet "Jake Summers" still comes across as a great, great song in spite of all those faults. It could just be the fact that I heard the 2008 version first and thus know what a few minor adjustments brought out in it, but even if the order I heard them in had been reversed I'd like to think I would hear the potential in the 2007 version. The way that potential got brought out is pretty simple, it was just minor tweaks to the sound as opposed to a full scale overhaul, but the results were undeniable. From the get go it's obvious that not only is the production much improved but that the bad are much more skilled and confident. The bassline is faster and slightly more intricate, the synths are less rudimentary and Maykay's vocals are much more upfront and unrelenting. The rawness is still there, but it doesn't muddy up the track the way it did on the initial version.

The weird thing is that in either iteration, if you were to parse out the different elements of the track and just list them on paper it would look like one of the worst songs ever. Musically it looks like a painful combination of synth racketry and rudimentary rhythm work all gone about while a shrieky woman lays out some questionable phrases in the context of a series of unconnected vignettes. And yet, the way Fight Like Apes go about it nothing could be further from the case. all those things are true, sure, but they sound utterly fantastic in context. What does the second verse have to do with the first verse? Does it fucking matter when it's setting up that primal wail before the last chorus? Are the synths really the best place to focus the track? Just listen to the pre-chorus where the band approaches prettiness for a few lines with an absolutely sublime synth underlay. The whole song refutes the sort of annoyingness that it's elements suggest by placing them in contexts where that sort of misgiving doesn't matter one iota. Most of all, it refutes them by being fun all the way through, a quality sorelye lacking in a lot of modern singles no matter the genre.

#89. Radiohead - Amnesiac (Parlophone, 2001) and Hail to the Thief (Parlophone, 2003)

I swear I didn't plan to write my piece on Radiohead's two minor releases the day after Pitchfork proclaimed that Kid A was the best album of the decade. I swear this was totally unintentional timing on my part. The fact that Kid A wasn't gonna be part of this list, on the other hand, was a long time coming on my end of things. I loved it when it came out, and still do to some degree, but as I was making the first draft of this list I never felt the need to include it. When I re-listened to the four albums Radiohead graced us with this decade it didn't engulf me the way it used to, it was pleasant and nothing more. I know there is a certain segment of the people who might be inclined to read this list that will be after my head for saying thins, but as good a first impression as Kid A left it just hasn't held up the way Radiohead's next two albums did.

Both albums have that weird distinction of being well regarded on the whole, but subject to a lot af odd and baseless criticism from a few corners. Amnesiac gets less flak than Hail to the Thief, but it still has the reputation of being an album of outtakes that weren't good enough for Kid A, which I have to say is total bullshit to me. I'd half believe that the overall reaction to the album would be better if the fact that it originated from the same sessions as Kid A weren't quite so well known. That might deflate the whole Kid B school of thought to some extent, but there would still be the fact that any album that came out after a landmark recording like Kid A is gonna be more heavily scrutinized. Hail's alck of a heros welcome seems to come out of people who were either reluctant to embrace the band backsliding to more basic guitar music - while Amnesiac was too far the other direction - or expecting that return to sound more like OK Computer - not gonna go into that one here but I recently knocked it down to 3.5 stars. So the criticisms mostly base themselves around them not being as good as their predecessors, and I was with that crowd for a while, I'll admit - I think I had Kid A at the poll position of my mid-decade top 50 with Amnesiac somewhere in the 30s and Hail nowhere to be seen - but time has been much kinder to Amnesiac and HTTT than I had anticipated. The tracks that struck me as pure experimental wankery grew into at the very least adequate experiments in odd moods if not true highlights of the album and the tracks that struck me as filler turned out to be so much more than that. It was an odd experience to just all of a sudden fall in love with the whole thing while my stake in Kid A was falling, but as it was happening it felt damn near logical.

Back to the whole Kid B thing for a bit: If you think about it, would any of these songs have fit with the overall mood of Kid A? Other than the gorgeous "Pyramid Song," - which I won't say anything more about for obvious reasons - "Hunting Bears" and maybe "Packt Like Sardines" none of the material that wound up on Amnesiac could have been dropped in amidst the songs on its predecessor without drastically altering its effect. In my mind Kid A is the mood album and Amnesiac is where the band let loose with all manner of odd genre experiments that still work in the context of an album. It's not quite as varied as its follow up, but it still offers a much wider breadth of material than any previous Radiohead album. There's the most experimental stuff the band's ever done ("Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and "I Will") some excursions into light dub ("Dollars and Cents" which rides the funkiest - read: only remotely funky - bassline Colin Greenwood has ever constructed) and jazz (closer "Life in a Glasshouse") alongside a few throwbacks to their more guitar-based 90s albums ("Knives Out" and "I Might Be Wrong") and those few that actually sound of a piece with Kid A mentioned earlier. Sure, Kid A had it's share of variety, but for my money Amnesiac pulled it off better.

And if you're talking variety, that's something that Hail to the Thief has as it's best weapon. I remember a lot of people crying that it didn't sound like Radiohead at all - and for a band as malleable as Radiohead proved themselves to be this decade that sort of criticism is a bit odd to say the least - but to my ears it's exactly what Radiohead would sound like if you let them loose in the studio, without the self imposed guitar phobia of the previous two albums. It results in what's possibly the band's creepiest album, especially the central trio of "Where I End and You Begin" through "The Gloaming." I'd say that once those three clicked my appreciation of the album increased quite a bit. I always found it to be better than the consensus opinion would dictate, but I never loved it until I realized that it was centered around evincing paranoia without spelling it out too much. Sure there's the allusion to 1984 in the first track, but after that things get much more insidious; the overlapping vocals on "Sit, Down Stand Up" seem to play a game of text-subtext with mundane instructions obscuring sinister ideas, the coda of "Where I End..." gets sinister with its repetition of 'I will eat you alive/And there'll be no more lies' and "A Wolf at the Door" is just incessantly unpleasant on all levels but couched in a wonderful melody. It's easy to call it an unpleasant album but it's unpleasantness sounds so damn good that I can't fault it.

Coming up tomorrow: The much more alienating flipside to these two.

#90. 'Nobody else, so we can be free'

t.A.T.u. "All the Things She Said"

Marketing is just as big a driving force in pop music as the singles themselves. In order for something to get popular it needs to have a whole series of factors working in the background to get the song/artist out to the public in a way that all but ensures a massive surge of popularity. There's the obvious stuff, the music videos, promotional visits to daytime talk shows, radio spots pimping the new album and any other advertisement for the product, but the more fascinating area is what I'd call image management. I'm not of the industry at all so this might be total bullshit on my part, but I'd wager that there's a whole cottage industry in the backrooms of the big 5 where artists in development are tweaked by focus groups the way a pre-release movie would be. Something about the way that any new artist comes out with this air about them that says 'I am what the youth of America want right at this moment' just gives me images of the singer standing in front of a panel of market researchers who are telling him that America doesn't like that smile, try this one instead and so on. It's humorous for sure to think that the level at which these artists are a product extends to that length, but someone in one of those backrooms at Universal in 2002 saying 'America wants to see two girls kissing' might be the only explanation for t.A.T.u.'s existence.

Now, t.A.T.u. weren't the first lesbian(?) pop stars, or even the first artist to use some sort of sapphic imagery to boost their appeal, but I don't think any artist before them was solely centered around lesbian(?)ism in the same way. Even if the world at large wasn't convinced that the lesbian thing was anything more than a gimmick, it didn't stop them from grabbing a fairly large chunk of notoriety and popularity on its back. Their singles were all cut from the same cloth thematically, basically amounting to 'If girl-girl love is wrong I don't want to be right' with a side order of 'Society want to keep us apart? Fuck them!' thrown in for good measure. Of course the songs were secondary to the image of the two remarkably telegenic young girls kissing, but that didn't stop the army of producers and songwriters behind that side of the process from churning out a great slice of pop as a first blast. Really, it wasn't necessary for them to release anything besides "All the Things She Said" because any subsequent singles just tore up the same ground and did it nowhere near as well.

As usual with this type of thing it's not so much the lyrics that sell it as a great song as it is the production and arrangement. Given that none other than Trevor Horn was behind this one it's not surprising just how immaculate the end product is either. Every single part of the mix is just perfectly placed, from those tight, snappy drums that announce the arrival of the chorus to the synth-strings that act as the interlude post chorus and the slightly majestic keyboard motif that kicks the song off. It all adds up to sound like the textbook example of the debut single: bombastic enough to alleviate concerns about their relative inexperience, dynamic enough to suggest a bit of range to the rest of their material but not too much of either of those aspects to leave the feeling that whatever comes next it could be bigger and better. It's the consummate studio creation basically, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.

The kicker comes in the chorus though. That multitracked, overlapping vocal arrangement absolutely makes the song for me, giving the whole scenario that t.A.T.u.'s career was boxed into a sense of urgency that never materialized on their other singles. The arrangement gets that across more so than the words themselves, suggesting the sort of racing thoughts that would accompany the whole initial lesbian shock thing without having it explicitly stated. It's kind of remarkable how much mileage the chorus gets out of a grand total of two lines, but the way that they're aaranged and produced make it seem like so much more is being said through so little words. Not talking about subtlety or nuance, still a bit early in the list for that stuff, but just harnessing the power of simple words to their maximum effectiveness. That efficiency bleeds out into the verses too, where the girls' hesitant, breathless delivery is as responsible for evincing the first crush mentality as the lyrics. It's oneof those instances where I'm willing to overlook things like fairly perfunctory lyrics because of how the producers work with them to get more out than you'd expect.

Coming up tomorrow: Possibly the most obscure single to grace the list.

#90. Boom Bip and Dose One - Circle (Mush, 2000)

Lame...one word. Uncomfortable in my own skin

Adam Drucker, better known as Dose One, is probably on my shortlist for most vital musician of the decade. When he popped up at the tail end of the 90s I wouldn't be surprised if no one had the slightest clue how to respond to his...shall we say, unique style of rapping. Looking back at his three contributions to the seminal Anticon manifesto Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop two things should have been obvious to the people who hopped on that train when it left the station: Dose is one talented motherfucker and he's the kind of talented motherfucker that no one in their right mind could deem accessible. He's a nasal voiced white boy with more of a root in beat poetry than hip hop and seems to thumb his nose at anything resembling traditional structure, but that's the appeal. Hell despite the sort of learning curve you'd assume for someone like that he seems to have found favor with a lot of people who generally despise rap - I know that Themselves' "It's Them!" has gotten more than one metalhead interested in hip hop in a way that the likes of the Wu and Biggie never could. He's an acquired taste is what it boils down to, but once it's acquired it easily becomes a favorite.

But back to his being among the most vital musicians of the decade, one only needs to look at the breadth of his discography to see why. Aside form his two most well-known projects - both of which will get their own bit later on - his solo and other collaborative releases comb all corners of the undergournd hip hop scene, from the eerie, dadaist soundscapes of Themselves to the ultra abstract Greenthink albums with Why? and even something approaching accessible indie rock with the Themselves-Notwist collaboration 13+God. The fact that all of those projects were seriously considered for the final writeup here says as much about he dude's consistency regardless of context as it does about the greatness of Circle, his collaboration with ace producer Boom Bip, that it overshadowed stuff that strikingly original to get make him the second most represented artist in the final project. I could have easily tacked on a bit about Themselves' Them if only to expound on how much "It's Them!" will rearrange your circuits, but truth be told Circle is deep enough to merit its own post.

Jesus didn't cut the grass, he just got all melodramatic and martyrific and sat in it
And don't tell anybody now, but, uh,
I'm making this whole thing up as I go along
And it feels good
It's unleavened profundity loaf bread, y'know?

That passage from "Questions Over Coffee" pretty much sums up the lyrical headspace of Circle. It's Dose One at his most beat poet irreverent and stream-of-consciousness, which is a special thing to witness. One review of this said that the best way to try and enjoy this is to read along with the liner notes to give yourself a bit more of a grounding in exactly what he's going on about, but as far as I'm concerned that's secondary to the way his words work in conjunction with Boom Bip's production. It's weird that these two never worked together much after this because for my money no one other than his Themselves/Subtle partner Jel has ever worked so well with Dose's idiosyncrasies as Boom Bip does here. The production is all over the place, form hyperfast jungle beats on "Slight" to meditative near indie-rock on "The Birdcatcher's Return" but in each setting Dose's vocalizing is a perfect match to its surroundings. I'm saying 'vocalizing' because he's never 100% concerned with rapping at any given moment, shifting into a weird croon on "Art Saved My Life 71" or a paranoid wail on the claustrophobic "Wishful Thinking"to suit the production. That makes it sound like Bip's forcing Dose into odd situations but it never sounds that way, there's a logical flow to Circle that few hip hop albums, underground or not, manage to achieve.

To call it anything other than Dose's show would be a bit of a lie, although the instrumental "Town Crier's Walk" might be my second favorite track on the whole thing. The symbiosis between the two parties is great and all, but the joys come more from how Dose adjusts to Bip's soundscapes than anything else, really. Although I'm not blessed with a copy of the lyrics (buying a copy soon, no worries) just hearing the way the words sound in the various contexts is exhilarating. The few lyrical shards that stick without a reference are, well, fucking weird to put it lightly. I only have a handle on half of what's being said in "Questions Over Coffee" since it's about the fastest I've ever heard Dose go in the middle section but the shards that stick are a melange of surreal images, twisted philosophy and overall weirdness. That's about how it is with the rest of the material, although there are a few more traditional moments. "The Birdcatcher's Return" even folds in a chorus of sorts with the repeated mantra of 'I can't get lost/I don't know where I am' before going even further off the deep end of surrealism in the last verse. I should note that that was my first exposure to Dose One, and even at 14 I understood that it was a truly amazing document of a side of hip hop I'd never heard before. It was a bit of a gateway drug, though even now it still strikes me as far too weird to engage any sort of casual listener.

Coming up tomorrow: I am a holder of unpopular opinions about certain artists that cause fanatical devotion.

#91. 'Security came and said "I'm sorry there's no skatin' here"'

Lupe Fiasco "Kick, Push"

When it comes to hip hop. I'll fully admit that I tend to enjoy the abstract/experimental side of the genre to a much higher degree than the mainstream side. I'ts not for lack of trying, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm an album guy above all else, and when it comes to the album a lot of mainstream hip-hop can't keep my interest. Whether it's an over-reliance on skits or the pointless business used to fill 80 minutes' worth of album when there's only 40 minutes of material, it just always seems that the more mainstream albums don't do enough to merit my interest beyond a few gems of singles. I know that's a terribly reductive way to dismiss a fairly broad genre, and to be fair there's plenty of near great albums that fall under the mainstream qualification, but it's incredibly rare that even those near-great albums work enough for me to come back to them the way I can pretty constantly come back to them without getting frustrated.

So when I say that Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor might be the best mainstream hip hop album of the decade it sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I don't mean it as such. It really is a remarkable achievement in the genre, proving that going abstract isn't the only way to create a wholly interesting piece of hip hop. Of course there's enough otherness to hold Fiasco apart from the rest of mainstream hip hop, I mean, you wouldn't hear any other major hip hop star do something like "The Instrumental" for instance, but the weird moments are outnumbered by the fairly standard ones. Yet despite their standard nature Fiasco brings them to different level than his peers somehow, whether it's the honesty of his emotions or the overall positive vibe that the whole album gives off. It's not quite on a high enough level to make my albums list at this point but it was definitely one I considered for a while. Of course knowing that I'd have an opportunity to go into the greatness of "Kick, Push" here made it easier to let it slide from the albums list, so let's get to that.

I mentioned that there's a very positive vibe to Food and Liquor, and "Kick, Push" is a sterling example of that. It's pretty much a straight up love story on a few levels, and not a crass one either. I know that it's old hat to go on about the misogyny that seems to pervade a lot of hip hop, so I won't, but I will say that I still find it kind of odd to hear a hip hop track where the rapper shows such respect for the woman he's singing about. The boy-girl love story may be second to the boy-board one that encompasses the whole song, but the second verse is just a perfect depiction of young love, albeit one where any relationship is predicated on her being willing to be second to his skateboarding. It's sweet, and that's an emotion that rarely makes it into hip hop singles and I for one totally welcome it.

The song's not all sunshine though. Maybe it's just the knowledge of its second part later in the album - not a single but probably the best thing Fiasco's done - but the occasional bits in here that harsh the good vibes seem to carry more weight than they did at first. The way each verse ends with someone relaying the 'there's no skatin' here' message works in the song by underscoring the prejudices against the song's main topic and intruding on a wide-eyed love story with a heavy dose of reality. Fiasco may not dwell on it here, but it gives the song a tinge of hopelessness, the idea that no matter where the protagonists go they'll always be chased away by some sort of authority figure. It's a song about love, true, but it takes a much more realistic tone in those moments compared to the wide-eyed naivete that marks the other sections. I for one love that sort of thing, the way that Fiasco will somewhat undercut his major themes at regular intervals as kind of a reminder that behind the sunny horn and string samples and simple love story there's always that element of this being about rebels who can't exactly ever be at peace. It doesn't kill the positivity altogether but it's a welcome little dose of reality nonetheless.

Of course it all comes back to the freedom the characters derive from their lifestyle. The perseverance they always fall back on in the chorus, the just keep moving to the next good grind mentality, the community that they develop. Even if it's never true freedom it's enough for the ones that Fiasco's dedicating it to. He obviously knows the is and outs of this subculture and details it without anything resembling judgment one way or another. It's also remarkable just how smooth Fiasco's flow is at this early a stage in his career. I know he'd been a mixtape fixture before Food and Liquor's release but for a first single off a first album it's shocking just how confident he sounds. He's not the most nimble tongued or spit-fire rapper out there but he definitely does this stuff better than most,including, it has to be said, his guru Kanye West whom he upstaged on "Touch the Sky" the year previous to this. "Kick, Push" may have stood out initially by just being positive in a sea of negativity of varying degrees, but without a strong hand guiding it on a lyrical level it could have fallen apart on closer inspection. It didn't and I'm very glad about that since it means that Fiasco's definitely a talent and not just an outlier.

Coming up tomorrow: LESBIANS!....?

#91. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz (Interscope, 2009) / Santogold - Santogold (Downtown, 2008)

This pairing makes more sense the more I think about it, even if at first I wouldn't have ever though that these two shared anything beyond their New York pedigree. Of course a few years ago if you'd told me I would have a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album or a full bore pop album in consideration for my top 100 albums of the decade I'd have probably laughed at you, so there's that too I guess. At any rate, the major reason I'm grouping them together is that they represent two distinct and multifaceted takes on pop music and give lie to the idea that pop is a singles genre first and foremost. Sure, both albums spawned some absolutely mind-shittingly great singles, but they also work just as well as full albums, which is rare in the realm of pop music. It's not just their variety - and really that's just the case with Santogold on any large scale level - but their full understanding of what makes for an album as opposed to a collection of songs.

The album thing has generally been the downfall of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Until It's Blitz I would have comfortably labeled them as a band who's only worthwhile releases were their EPs, anything longer seemed to fall apart due to horrible sequencing or a lack of good material, or in the case of their debut Fever to Tell a combination of both. They always pulled out a great single or two in the end, but as far as full releases go it seemed that the longer they were the less they had to offer. The fact that It's Blitz is actually pretty much front-to-back awesome isn't the only surprising thing though, there's also the part where they decided to turn into an early 80s dance punk group without so much as a warning shot. I was a huge fan of the preceding Is Is EP's unrestrained darkness, and was secretly hoping they'd go more in that direction, but the complete 180 they actually did is infinitely more rewarding. The fact that the band sounds like they're having the most fun they've ever had making this album is downright infectious and gives the album the sort of center that their previous releases sorely lacked.

It also helps that it kicks itself off with what might be the best one-two punch of any album released this year. Between "Zero"'s reveling in the joys of being an unknown quantity and "Heads Will Roll"'s smirking dance floor nihilism the band built up enough goodwill to tide over all manner of potential blunders. The great thing is that those blunders never happen. The album doesn't maintain the energy of those two, but the moodier moments pack just as much of a punch. "Hysteric" and "Skeleton" especially are touching in a way the band hasn't been since "Maps" completely obliterated me back in 2003, and hearing them in the context of an album that isn't bogged down by as much unnecessary crap as previous YYYs outings adds to their emotional punch. It needs to be said that Karen O is absolutely on fire here. Her voice had been getting more assured with each passing release, but it's a huge leap forward for her that she can carry stuff like "Hysteric" and "Runaway" with the sort of poise and strength she does here. The latter also features some great work from the rest of the band, crafting the perfect build up to match O's fairly devastating lyric and give the song the sort of cinematic fell I'd have never associated with them even a year ago. Then they go into disco and sound just as great and the album makes sense: the balance between the personal and the frivolous all handled lightly and arranged for maximum impact. The shock of how good it is has worn off, but it's still the sort of 'finally!' moment I was waiting for to make the YYYs more than a one or two song wonder.

It feels a bit odd that it's led off by "Zero", but given that the YYYs are defined so heavily by what they've done before that the joy they find within the confines of being a theoretical 'zero' is totally plausible. Santogold, however, is the sound of someone living out that joy for real, not encumbered by any sort of expectation at all. Unless you were paying attention to GZA's Beneath the Surface album or are an aficionado of the deep cuts on Mark Ronson's Version Santi White was pretty much an unknown quantity when her album dropped, and it seems to revel in the lack of preconceptions the listener will have about it. White genre-hops with reckless abandon, covering everything from futuristic electro ("Creator") to some of the best Interpol songs they never recorded ("L.E.S. Artistes" and "Lights Out") to punkier blasts ("You'll Find a Way") and all manner of more urban sounds (classic ska on "Shove It" and "Unstoppable," light R 'n' B on "Starstruck"). It makes the album hard to pin down but incredibly fun to listen to. None of the shifts are head-snappingly abrupt so there's a sense of albumness underneath all the variety. It also helps that the best moments are spread out pretty evenly throughout the album's length, and that the non-singles are often just as good if not better than their more widely known album-mates.

The major difference between these two albums is that Santogold takes itself much more seriously. It's Blitz sounds like an established band taking a bit of a lark into light territory, and it's a great little lark if so, but Santogold has something to say, dammit. White's a good eough songwriter to not let things get heavy handed, but there's definitely an underlying message on a lot of the songs (coincidentally it's the better ones that have this quality...make of that what you will) from "L.E.S. Artistes"' stand against the hipster dilettantes in the NY scene or the pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps anthem that "You'll Find a Way" comes off as. Like I said though, White never lets the topics get in the way of the hooks, and Christ are there hook on here. The upside of it is that it feels substantial as an album; it's definitely not the lightweight fluff you'd expect from something under the pop umbrella.

Coming up tomorrow: The first of two sides of the weirdest MC ever.