Best of the Decade: Introduction

As the decade of the MP3 draws to a close, I am jumping on the “let’s make a list” bandwagon. Take this list (spoiler alert: the whole list is here, in a really boring HTML table) with the usual mountains of salt:

  1. I am not an expert in anything, least of all music. Just because I write about music on the Web via a free blogging service doesn’t mean a damned thing. Need I remind you, I am a fool. I spend one day a week dressed like this.
  2. I did my best, but I surely forgot something. I have a nice collection of music, but I do not remember ever record that’s come outin the last 10 years.
  3. The more recent stuff has probably gotten short shrift. Timing is like that, I guess.
  4. My tastes are my tastes and they probably don’t reflect your tastes. Please don’t e-mail me with something about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, the Hold Steady or whatever. I like Sufjan Stevens, Mogwai, etc.
  5. As such, I don’t listen to enough hip-hop. Take that for what it is.

I’ve already written about a lot of these records, including (sorta spoiler alert, if you’re a detective) four of the top five and seven of the top 10. In the interest of keeping your suspense, I will post this list in 10 separate posts, over the course of the final 10 weeks of the year. Two albums came in just under the wire (including no. 100), having been released just a few weeks ago.

The 2000s are my decade, in a lot of ways. I spent my 20s — my defining decade — during this decade. I fell in love. My family situation, uh, changed. I went through college and spent four years giving a lot of effort toward the greatest college radio station in the world. A scant four months before Jan. 1, 2000, I moved away from home and started college. Four years later, I left the womb of the University of Missouri for the East Coast.

When the decade began, I was 18. I am 28 now. Despite being raised Jewish, I didn’t become a man in March 1994 (my Bar Mitzvah); one becomes an adult in his or her 20s. Living on one’s own for the first time. It was the first time I’d had a roommate; later I had two and had to play mediator between them. I got my first job, got my first promotion and changed jobs for the first time. I

Maybe I say this because I’m in it now, but this was my defining decade. No, my favorite album of all time didn’t come out in this decade; that record was released before I was born. But, the years 2000-2009 define me and will have the most lasting of all memories for me. This is the music that soundtracked those memories.

So, without any further nonsense, I present my top 100 albums of the decade. I welcome any and all comments, of course.

Podcast

I mentioned it this last week, but I’ve started a — very poorly recorded — podcast. The URL for the podcast site is http://albumsthatiown.podbean.com/. There, you can listen to the first two episodes — one of me introducing myself and the other with an actual live human guest. Of course, you can also e-mail me (rjgianfortune at gmail dot com) if you’d like to be a guest. You could talk to the Internet about anything you’d like.

This week’s guest is Tony Bowman, who is a lovely human being who runs D.C. Live Tracks, a Web site featuring, uh, live music recorded in our great city.

Again, I cannot stress this enough: If you’d like to be a guest, I would love to talk to you. Please e-mail me and we can figure out the details.

I use Podbean to do the podcast. It automatically generates the feed and whatever. It’s not perfect and, like, Blogger, has some weird constraints. The way I’m doing it is not free, but it’s got the features I need. Including embed.

I haven’t figure out the art — I don’t think I can do that yet. The site’s design sucks, but so does this one. If you care about that, I apologize.

So, if you want to listen to the podcast, you can do so here. You can also do so on the podcast site, where you can also comment, e-mail me, read the links and e-mail me. Take a look.

And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out

A note: The Albums That I Own podcast has started, sort of. I’ve posted a two-minute intro podcast. In it, I just recount what I do, what the podcast will be, etc. The podcast site is here. If you would like to be a guest on the podcast or have a topic suggestion for it, please e-mail me (rjgianfortune at gmail dot com).

Anyway, back to the reviews.


Band: Yo La Tengo
Album: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
Best song: “Cherry Chapstick,” “You Can Have It All” and “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” are among the band’s best songs.
Worst song: “Night Falls on Hoboken” is about 10 minutes too long.

There are new bands to be discovered. There are bands that recreate themselves a million times. There are bands that engender passion and those that spawn a million other bands.

Yo La Tengo isn’t really any of those bands. Having produced top-quality Independent Rock for going on 25, the trio’s various rock sounds have been the backbone of intelligent college radio people since the mid-late 1980s.

The husband-and-wife-plus-fat-friend formula is not one that’s been copied, but it remains classic. Using atmospherics, dual vocals and quirky flair, Yo La Tengo remains one of the genre’s stalwarts.

As is a constant on this site — especially lately — I want to get into my own personal experiences with this band.

Sorry.

My freshman year of college (hell, just about my entire college experience), the station was my life and indie rock soundtracked said life. So, when I found out that Yo La Tengo was coming to Columbia during my spring break, I had to see the show.

There is something of import to remember here: non-frat freshman almost always live in the dorms during their freshman year.

A friend (also a freshman who lived across the hall) and I drove down from Chicago to Columbia a few days before the weeklong break ended. However, we didn’t realize that the dorms were locked and inaccessible during the spring break. The show was Friday night. Drew (my friend) and I had nowhere to stay Friday and Saturday night.

The first night, we saw a friend with an open couch and a roommate’s bed to sleep on; I remember it being the most uncomfortable couch on which I’ve ever slept. But, it was somewhere to sleep. His roommates were back for Saturday night, so we had no idea where to stay.

One of the things about college radio is that there are often open shifts during breaks. So, geniuses that were were, we decided to sleep in shifts at the station — KCOU had a horrifyingly uncomfortable couch– and the other would work the board, play music, etc.

It was a fun time and one I’m really glad I had. That’s college, you know? It’s doing stupid shit and enjoying it.

Yo La Tengo’s ninth album is considered by many — as in our good friend Wikipedia — to be a change in musical direciton, but I’d more consider it an expansion of their previous album, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.

That album’s “Sugarcube” is one of the band’s best songs, with an uptempo craziness. Indeed, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out‘s similar song is moreso. “Cherry Chapstick” is longer, more insane and better, with Ira Kaplan’s guitar sounding like Ken Vandermark’s sax. “Tired Hippo” uses a little drum machine and a tropical bass line to much surprise. “Tears Are In Your Eyes” is slow and lovely, with a Georgia Hubley vocal to die for.

Outside of “Chery Chapstick,” the album’s two highlights are decidedly different. “You Can Have it All” — a cover, originally written by the guy from KC & the Sunshine Band — is a background-y arranged track with an ABBA-esque vocal. Kaplan’s “bum bum bum bum ba bums” fill the track as Hubley intones the sweet disco lyric.

The other great song is one of the reasons I love this band. “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” is a song, but is also a line from one of the three best television comedies ever (it was a Troy McClure-hosted telethon). That there is a band out there willing to name a song after a line in the Simpsons? And a good band, not some crappy emo band from my high school that made it big after naming itself from a character?

Anyway, “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” has a driving keyboard lead line and another of Hubley’s best vocal tracks. Hubley’s voice is one of YLT’s best aspects; it’s slightly powerful while very soft. An easy drumline and a great lyric (“We proudly welcome/Tony Orlando”) make for one of the band’s best songs.

OK, one more thing about this record from my musical biography or whatever.

I applied and was accepted admission to the University of Missouri without every visiting the campus. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of my parents’ house in any way I could. So, the second MU gave me the go-ahead, I said “let’s do this.”

Anyway, as mentioned before, I was raised — musically, that is — by my high school mentors’ tastes and WNUR. Missouri, as a state, seemed to me to be a backwoods nowhere state, but it was more important to me to get out of Dodge than actually care about what eventually became my passion. In short, I had no idea if MU had a college radio station.

To make a long-story somewhat short, I did a registartion weekend thing there during the summer (the famed “Summer Welcome” many MU students will remember) and there was a KCOU booth at the activities fair. I was heartened to know that this Southern — anything south of Peoria is the South to a Chicagoan — outpost had some people interested in Thrill Jockey, Matador and Sub Pop.

Fast forward to the winter.

A few of us go-getters implored the dudes we worshipped at the station — Tony, John, John and Ryan — to let us on the music staff. The new Yo La Tengo record, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, had been sent to the station and instead of handing it out to one or another senior music staff member to review — SOP for even huge albums — the PD (one of the Johns) decided to have a listening party thing at the house he rented. We got a bunch of beer, listened to the record and passed a legal pad around. The next week, he would type it up and those notes would be the official review.

I probably had one sentence in the thing; I didn’t feel like I had any particular insight on the record. But, I’ll say this, it was one of the three best moments of my freshman year of college (the other two being the first kiss with my then-girlfriend and the time she sorted through all the Chex I like out of the Chex mix and gave it to me as something to eat on the drive home to Chicago).

At the onset, I was constantly worried about my place within the station. I initially felt like I didn’t belong a little and I felt like I wasn’t pretentious enough because I only listened to big indie stuff (YLT, Pavement, etc.) and stuff from Chicago (Thrill Jockey, Touch & Go, etc.).

But, sitting at that little gathering, I felt like I belonged. Forget the fact that it’s the band’s best record, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out is tremendously important to me simply for that.

Welcome

In order to further pollute the Internet with my nonsense, I’m taking up residence here. My name is Ross Jordan Gianfortune and I like to write album reviews that no one reads. So far, my tally on the Web is somewhere around 500 and I hope to add to that total with this site/blog/project/whatever.

Albums That I Own is an extension of the One Man, 500 Albums project in a way. In fact, it’s an extension of my “unlisted” series that took place on that site. The unlisted albums are favorites of mine that have no real place on the Rolling Stone list or were overlooked by those who put together the list.

Past unlisted albums (which may be cross-posted here on this site) include:

Albums That I Own will let me stretch outside the RS list a bit. The unlisted albums gave me that avenue and I’d like to expand on it. These albums may not appeal to many of the One Man, 500 Albums readers and for that, I’m sorry.

But, I do want to bring out some of my favorite, odd and misplaced (within my collection, I mean) albums. This site gives me the opportunity to explain my interest, for example, in a Dixie Chicks record. No, I’m not joking.

I’m current a graduate student, I work full-time and I run a baseball blog (albeit posting infrequently), so Albums That I Own will be posted once a week. Any suggestions for albums should be addressed to me. My e-mail address is over there, to the right.