2004 Pitchfork 'Best New Albums' - which of these is the best?

jesus christ this list is EVEN WORSE than the last one

some of the albums y'all are voting for, smh

junior boys and it's not even close. hon. mentions to kanye, björk and annie, in that order. destroy the rest

daydreaming of the possibility of actually going back to 2004 to destroy 90% of these artists, we'd have been spared so much bullshit, no jury would convict

you couldn't come up with 4 you liked on the last one, so i'm not sure why you'd think this was EVEN WORSE

lex has a hardcore anti-mission of burma stance

max richter over college dropout over idk maybe comets on fire? it kinda falls off after that

lex is in these threads >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

white males with guitars = 95% chance of insta lex hate, album even lightly complimented by Pitchfork and that shoots up to 99%

is blue notebooks the one with the not-great spoken word stuff

yeah so i voted for the fiery furnaces

haha tilda swinton reads... proust? maybe? or kafka? s.thing like that

KA

oh god, no wonder i blocked that out

i'm surprised pfork was this tolerable early as '03/'04! i mean there's a ... sure, an a.c. newman solo album was one of the best records of its year, whatever ... aspect to this but eh

there's a guy i know who won't accept that pitchfork can ever have been right about anything because they gave a dismissive review to a reissue of robert wyatt's rock bottom in 2001

these are the things on this list i have not heard, is there anything amazing among them

The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows
Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days
Jason Forrest - The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash
Erlend Øye - DJ-Kicks: Erlend Øye
Mirah - C'mon Miracle
The Plastic Constellations - Mazatlan
Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral
Castanets - Cathedral
The Foreign Exchange - Connected
Dungen - Ta det lugnt
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Virðulegu forsetar
Excepter - KA

woah lex advocating killing black ppl, this thread had taken a disturbing turn

Comets On Fire, Excepter, and Dungen are all worth checking out for various levels of psych and noisy rock.

@thomp yeah this seems like a reasonable list of things to download i guess even if the only things itl that ive listened to in the last couple of years is sonic youth and philip jeck its not really all that offensive or lol

i like that comets of fire record a lot and the jóhannsson record is p dreamy and pleasant

These all made my top 10 in '04:

Junior Boys
Sonic Youth
Erlend Oye
Kanye West
Animal Collective

voted for inches, not a canonical choice but an album that i love a lot and still listen to. sung tongs was probably the one i listened to the most in 04 but it's been a while since then.

im going for junior boys but that futureheads album is a really really good rock record and ive probably listened to it more than the junior boys record

i'm surprised pfork was this tolerable early as '03/'04! i mean there's a ... sure, an a.c. newman solo album was one of the best records of its year, whatever ... aspect to this but eh

Hey - that's a pretty good record. I have no problem with the idea that it was one of the 30 or 40 best albums of that year.

i'm sure i downloaded it very earnestly once

is there anything amazing among them

― thomp, Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:12 PM (14 minutes ago)

amazing, i dunno, but...

Jason Forrest - The Unrelenting Songs... - head-spinning cut-ups of pop & rock, landing somewhere between plunderphonics and party music
Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral - my favorite COF album, the noise and urgency of their early stuff, plus tunes and space
Dungen - Ta det lugnt - devotional retro psych with some surprisingly accomplished pop songwriting
Excepter - KA - decent blorpy melty drug noise

that Comets on Fire album is really great

i liked that Jason Forrest album a lot at the time, but i think id find it a bit annoying now.

I like the next Forrest record better.

yeah, shamelessly exciting. me too, but only by a small margin. he had an album out last year, but i haven't heard it.

huh. Don't think I even knew about it.

comets on fire vs burma vs dungen vs futureheads

Once again I endorse most of the albums in here. Voting Madvillain.

madvillain is great too

man, I love that comets on fire record. dungen one is a good time too.

whoa i forgot that "fabulous muscles" came out that year, great album

i voted for 'a grand don't come for free' by the streets aka mike skinner

i def would have voted for streets of this lot in 04 but ironically i've grown to consider it a real singles album

i still think van lear rose is really great too

yeah I like Van Lear Rose a bunch

voted for Air though, love that album

In retrospective indie became really boring and safe since the mid 00s. Most experimental artist making the pitchfork rounds nowadays is Ariel Pink ffs.

yes and no. i just looked through the 2011 BNM list, and while it does make less room for explicitly experimental and avant-garde artists, it's otherwise pretty similar. tim hecker, nicholas jaar, oneohtrix point never and julianna barwick all got the nod. then again, there's no equivalent of the blue notebooks, viroulegu forsetaror KA or the disintegration loops.

there's a guy i know who won't accept that pitchfork can ever have been right about anything because they gave a dismissive review to a reissue of robert wyatt's rock bottom in 2001

looks like they scrubbed that one from their archives

This canon is balls.

― Alba (Alba), Wednesday, November 10, 2004 3:28 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bjork

I know it's passe to mention Funeral but it is basically the reason Arcade Fire became infinitely popular on lesser records.
That said, I'm voting for Basinski.

the comets of fire and the dungen records seem pretty good, sort of 'i will maybe listen to those next time i'm in the mood for that kind of thing', alternatively i might just forget they exist for another eight years

the jason forrest seems very er busy. i might try and listen to it while engaged in some kind of high-intensity activity and see if that works for me.

do people really still like funeral all that much, i'm kind of amazed by that

this canon is balls

it's interesting ('interesting') to look at their best of from the same year, it has special gunpowder and the pretty toney album which apparently they ignored on release -- it seems like that degree of retroactive canon-making for pitchfork seems to jibe more with what i remember people getting enthused at that year. much-loved indie record that made top ten that year but not BNM: joanna newsom's first record.

The Arcade Fire album is actually good to very good, and I didn't like anything after.

2004 was to the 2000s what 1994 was to the nineties - kind of a definitive "kicking in" of the decade for me.

02: Animal Collective
Sung Tongs
[Fat Cat]
By mid-2004, most music fans had grown just as tired of smug old Brooklyn as they were of self-insulating "iron" {sic} {lol} -- global conflicts were escalating to disastrous levels, politics seemed hopelessly stunted, and warmth and compassion suddenly (and unexpectedly) seemed to become the most appealing aesthetic choices. Thankfully, Animal Collective's magnificent, soaring Sung Tongs successfully and wholeheartedly eschewed spent, Brooklyn-bound ideas about suave sonic detachment and trucker hat-indifference. Sung Tongs is an emotionally thrilling record, impossibly giddy and fully-charged with big, raucous enthusiasm: Acoustic strums and wild, flailing voices (including some mind-blowing harmonies by vocalists Avey Tare and Panda Bear) coalesce into something sublimely weird and undeniably beautiful. Consequently, Sung Tongs is the perfect soundtrack to a six-year old's birthday party, complete with easy singalongs, gleeful hollers of "meow!," and man-made bird twitters-- all cupcakes and costumes and unadulterated bliss. Chances are, 2004 will go down as the year Indiedom collectively flipped for freak folk, and Animal Collective's role in that is undeniable: Somehow, Sung Tongs managed to make us all feel a little bit happier, at a time when we most needed it. --Amanda Petrusich

other non-BNM BoY: modest mouse, tv on the radio, dizzee, fennesz (!), de la soul (!), espers, califone (?), concretes (blah), camera obscura (blah), scissor sisters (...)

xpost ^^^ bullshit like that review that completely fucks up the outlook for AC and fuels twee-haters' ire. Play Sung Tongs at a kids birthday party and I'm sure it would end in disaster. I fail to see the "kiddy/childlike/cupcake" aspect so lazily foist upon their music by so many reviewers. There are no "easy" singalongs on that album, for a start you can't make out any of the words and the twists and turns of cadence and phrasing on there don't really lend themselves to being easily followed. To me (at least on ST) AC's sound is about primordialism, primitivism, getting lost in an animalistic, ritualistic haze - a pure essence of sound that eschews or deconstructs typical rock structures.

i wasn't so much bemused by the conception of what the animal collective record was like as by that conception of what the rest of culture in 2004 was like, you know? you're right, tho

borderline impossible choice between 'Sung Tongs', 'The Disintegration Loops' and 'KA' - I'll probably go with latter, tho - vacation/forget me <3

annie, philip jeck, the streets, panda bear, comets on fire and brian wilson could all be serious contenders, if the 3 above weren't so life-changing...