SPIN Top 40 Of 2003

I refuse to believe it wasn't invented by Mark Hoppus when improvising for the film American Pie. Sorry you're all just wrong.

anthony you are like an archetype.

actually i'm amazed you and trife didnt get along better when he was posting.

>>It sounds like a ravey Paul's Boutique" and "they used 1000 samples" doesn't exactly scream "crap big beat" to me.<<

Nah, it screams "what a big lie" -- and it was, since the Avalanches album sounded way more like run-of-the-mill humorless diva house than *Paul's Boutique," no matter how many records it subtly sampled.

"diva house"? Are we talking about the same Avalanches or have I just never really paid attention to them? (The stuff I remember was dense sample-happy big beat that seemed to viscerally connect with everyone who heard it except me.)

It FELT more like diva house than big beat (which can really rock). People made a big deal about all the samples, as if the samples (most of which weren't recognizable anyway) made the music FEEL any different (which samples often do). It's like they took a thousand samples and used them in the most uninteresting way possible! (Then again, I haven't played the damn thing in two years, so maybe I'm confused, or I'd think differently if I heard it now. But I doubt it).

i just heard the avalanches album for the first time a couple weeks ago! i bought it used. it was okay, but it already sounds old. as in dated. but even when it came out it must have sounded a tad too little to late, no? mebbe there was a 1 or 2 week window when it sounded sorta fresh. or maybe the people who really loved it had never heard the decade and a half worth of stuff that sounds similar? but somehow i doubt it. fatboy and chem bros fans musta been jonesing for something similar is my guess.

It's funny, I was just checking that Avalanches record for the first time in a loooong time a day ago, and it struck me as sounding weirdly dated already too. It doesn't sound bad - a few of those tracks are pretty great - but yeah, it feels very stale.

Compared to, I dunno, M/A/R/R/S or *Paul's Boutique* or "Adventures of Grandmaster Flash" or S-Express or KLF or Coldcut or Double Dee & Steinski or Todd Terry or DJ Shadow or Edelweiss on Kon Kan, the record just sounded so fucking SERIOUS. And people acted like Using A Whole Bunch of Samples was a new thing, which it wasn't. At. All. (Well, maybe the QUANTITY was. But then again, I don't like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani, either, you know? Lots of notes as such: who cares?)

I thought me and Trife got along fine Jess!

I just bought this issue cuz of the John Mayer/David Cross singles review thing and SPIN is so all over ILX's jock. They even did the Year In Fred Durst Craziness!

And Chuck is OTM re: The Avalanches. I found it incredibly hard to give a shit about any track for more than 10 seconds.

hee-hee, i was gonna mention everything you just listed, chuck. even edelweiss. people who really love the avalanches will no doubt tell us why all that stuff is beside the point or something. it's really not bad. just lacklustre in parts. i'll take any one song off of my major force box-set over that whole album though.

Some bits from the Avalanches record would sound good if they were less busy, and had some good MCs rhyming over them. "Two Hearts In 3/4 Time," for example.

I am not going to try to figure out my personal top 10 of the year until I actually get to the end of the year, but the ones from that list I have heard more than once are

33 Lucinda Williams "World Without Tears"
30 Cat Power "You Are Free"
21 The Mars Volta "Deloused in the Crematorium"
16 Blur "Think Tank"
10 Radiohead "Hail to the Thief"
05 Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Fever To Tell"
01 The White Stripes "Elephant"

Cat's a little laconic for me, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs could have stood to wait until some more early-EP-quality material came along, but I like the others fine. I would love to hear the Spiritualized and the Outkast, but not too concerned about missing all the rest of it.

Actually, I recall liking some bootleg thing I heard where Avalanches used "Like a Rolling Stone" better than anything on their album.

(As for being "dated," though, I dunno, I tend not to acknowledge that adjective. If music is good, it stays good. If it sucks, ditto.)

In related news: Hey, what ABOUT that "bootleg" fad, huh? Where the hell did THAT go??? (No worries; in seven years it'll be back again, and people will claim like always that it never happened before.)

Apparently it still exists, it's just mostly a continuous mix/live club thing.

The Avalanches' appeal to me isn't the "wow lookit all the samples" approach as it is the general "every genre can be pop" feel to it. It's just a great-flowing album where so many disparate pieces just seem to fit perfectly. And "serious" is the last word I would ever, ever consider when thinking about "Frontier Psychiatrist" or "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time".

The Avalanches completely turned me off with "Frontier Psychiatrist". It just didn't appeal to me AT ALL (which is odd because you'd think that track in particular was tailor-made for me).

I know that "everything fits together all neat" sounds kinda like a lazy way to put things but Since I Left You is probably my #1 example of "how to create a cohesive album-as-entity"

Dan, "Frontier Psychiatrist" is like the everything-goes-haywire moment where every convention of the album gets ratcheted up to obsessively bombastic levels -- Since I Left You's "House of Blue Leaves" sequence. The rest of it's a lot subtler.

(Funny thing: a stand-alone version of "Electricity" was released as a 12" single about a year before the rest of the album was released. Makes me wonder if they ever extracted or constructed single versions of any other tracks; even the "Frontier Psychiatrist" single sounds like it's about to switch into "Etoh".)

Yeah, one of the interesting things to me about Since I Left You is that, yes, they used over 900 samples or whatever and so it feels so dense -- but some of the same samples (the whinnying horse or the "since I left you" vocal) recur throughout the album, which to me makes it feel a lot more centered and soulful than if every track was throwing 20 different genres into a stew (although that would probably be an interesting album in its own right).

I totally adore "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time."

Y'all some PROG mutherfuckers lemme tell ya

Also, whereas a lot of sample-filled music feels like a visual collage, with wacky juxtapositions of various media, the Avalanches (with the exception of "Frontier Psychiatrist," probably) feel more like a bright, messy painting: big streaks of different colors that are distinct from each other but also just look like a huge, multihued splash on the canvas.

(Anthony, I've been worrying about my prog tendencies lately! I was trying to make a mix CD along the lines of Nate's Challenge, and I kept getting drawn to like 12-minute tracks and justifying them for their "mastery"!)

(I don't think that post about painting is going to help me, either!)

Obv focusing on the amount of samples used is missing the point whether you like *or* hate The Avalanches! The point is the sonix! And the "diva house" parts are the best parts!

I like the Spin list more when there were only 20 albums. These big lists seem to just pick every decent album released that year.

07 Thursday "War All The Time" In my opinion this was the best album of 2003 and so far 2004, who cares if it was released last year.

Way to tell 'em.

I agree! That's why Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has been my #1 album each year since 1967!

you suck

tegan i luv u girl, hear good things about pirates, email me back plz!