A week into this blog and I’m already posting a “Best Albums of 2008″ list? Isn’t that what all those other bloggers–the ones I spent my first rant deriding–do? Well, sort of. Part of the reason I wanted to put this up so soon (after all, there’s still a whole month left of 2008, though as far as I know there aren’t any notable new releases planned until January) is to avoid being influenced by or connected with anyone else’s year-end list. My other excuse is that every music fan has a little Rob Gordon in them, and making these desert island lists just comes with the territory. It helps you keep track of your habits, tastes, and musical culture as a whole. Of course, I could waste just as much web space outlining why we shouldn’t make lists like this and how trying to reduce our collective experiences to 10 records sullies the richness of mass culture, but this way is a lot more fun. With all that in mind, I’ve avoided ranking my favorites beyond “Top 10″ or “Honorable Mentions” and I’ve given brief explanations of how and why I found my “Top 10″ especially enjoyable. These don’t necessarily amount to recommendations or a reductive summation of the year (there are innumerable praise-worthy records released in any given year), but they do reflect some of my musical experiences.

Honorable Mentions
Animal Collective – Water Curses EP
The Cool Kids – The Bake Sale EP
Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
Deerhoof – Offend Maggie
Department of Eagles – In Ear Park
The Dutchess and the Duke – She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke
Hercules & Love Affair – Hercules & Love Affair
The Postmarks – By-the-Numbers
She & Him – Volume One
Shugo Tokumaru – Exit

Top 10
Beach House – Devotion
The longer I listen to Beach House, the more I suspect that the messy, fragile, lo-fi production they employed on their self-titled debut may not suit them all that well. Victoria Legrand seems most comfortable singing clearly in her raspy low register, bolstered by minimal live percussion and with enough open space to allow Alex Scally to nit-pick his guitar counterpoints. Of course, these are mere recording details. Beach House is a band that doesn’t fundamentally change much at all, which is the whole point. Devotion simply finds them smoothing out their rough edges and growing more into their sound. As exciting as it is to watch bands in flux, taking constant left turns and confounding listeners, I find a certain comfort in the fact that, as long as they stick around, Beach House is a band I know I can love.

Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow & Blue
I have no clue as to how widely-known this album (or this band) is, but I count it as a well-kept secret. They’re practitioners of the kind of 3-piece minimalism that usually comes out of necessity for groups of scrappy high school graduates playing dive bars in their spare time. The difference–and perhaps the key to their artistic success–is that Born Ruffians embrace their limitations whole-heartedly (as their monicker and primary-color album title imply), constructing raucous songs out of thin guitar lines, simple bass figures, and playing on the rims of the drums as much as the heads. “Little Garçon,” the album’s only true ballad, is comprised of little more than acoustic strums and vocal “oooo”s, and yet, like the rest of Red, Yellow & Blue, it evinces a kind of austere grace by virtue of its transparency. Of course, all of this is undercut by Luke Lalonde’s yelpy drawl and Mitch Derosier and Steven Hamelin’s backing shouts of affirmation, keeping Born Ruffians grounded in the present and giving the album its pervasive sense of fun.

Deerhunter – Microcastle
Deerhunter have always had a unique relationship with the teenage emotional landscape. Last year’s Cryptograms, an ambient garage rock masterstroke, congealed its layers of distortion, delay, and reverb into a claustrophobic take on youthful alienation. Conversely, Microcastleapproaches teen angst by tempering Deerhunter’s chaotic squall into shoegazey power pop that appeals to the hoodie-sporting outcast in all of us. This teenage empathy is perhaps the best level on which to enjoy Deerhunter. Bradford Cox’s images of social crucifixion on “Calvary Scars” or The Black Lips’ Cole Alexander’s shouted interlude about being “trapped in the basement” on “Saved By Old Times” carry their maximum emotional heft when absorbed through that hormonal confusion (or the memory of it). Thus, by positioning their music in various relations to adolescent turmoil, Deerhunter are honing the much-sought-after skill of being relatable to just about anyone who was ever a teenager, and that makes them timeless.

El Guincho – Alegranza!
It’s easy for American kids to dig up a forgotten sound from some little corner of the world and hype it into the Next Big Thing. It’s not so easy to make music that is at once true to non-American cultural roots, appealing to a mass (read: mostly American) audience, and deserving of artistic recognition beyond a week-long fad. On Alegranza!, Pablo Díaz-Reixa clears all three of these hurdles with style to spare. Much of his success grows out of his “sampledelic” method of construction, a method that has been criticized as just another trend, but one that will grow exponentially as art and technology continue to integrate. Díaz-Reixa reflects this by using the loop conventions of electronic music in expert combination with the celebratory aesthetics of Latin and Caribbean dance music. As a result,Alegranza! is an album that embraces the past (traditional music), present (popular dance music), and future (technological apparatus) all at once while conjuring the kind of joyous street party that renders the “Is that a laptop or a real band?” questions utterly pointless.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
By far the critics’ darling of 2008, this album is practically guaranteed a “new classic” status. And why shouldn’t it be? Fleet Foxes’ sound is grounded in musical traditions that are almost universally embraced by record lovers: Appalachian folk, classic rock, and harmonic west-coast pop. A lot of the album’s popular appeal lies in those traditions too, but there’s been enough wide-spread gushing about it this year that I don’t feel the need to dissect its resonance any further. What really excites me about Fleet Foxes is how determined they seem to continue maturing. Compare the loose, tentative guitar pop of their self-titled 2006 EP to the choral aspirations of this year’s Sun Giant EP, to Fleet Foxes’ dynamic, mystical confidence and you can plainly see that this is a band only beginning to figure itself out. So as much of a success as this album is, I can’t wait to see what Fleet Foxes will do next.

Girl Talk – Feed the Animals
It’s almost unfair to write about Girl Talk in terms of albums. The real way to see Greg Gillis do his thing is when you’re crammed into a small club (preferably on stage crowding around him), dancing feverishly, and anticipating the moment when Biggie Smalls’ “Juicy” verse floats over Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” 2006’s Night Ripper felt like that kind of all-night party condensed into a 40-minute sample marathon, rightly paving the way for Girl Talk’s popular emergence. Feed the Animals continues the trend, but here Gillis allows himself to linger over individual samples and interesting combinations, giving the casual listener a plethora of moments to appreciate just how keen his mash-up technique really is. But, for me, Girl Talk has always been about the performance of culture as a whole, and if Night Ripper was pop music cast as an all-inclusive rave-up, Feed the Animals is pop music cast as a pluralistic cultural stew, where anything and everything is possible.

Man Man – Rabbit Habits
A big part of Man Man’s appeal lies in their ability to craft music that is at once maniacally tight and confident yet completely unhinged and desperate. They’ve made their reputation as a killer live act on these very juxtapositions, leaving audiences wowed at the physical and mental demands of their performance (all five members play multiple instruments and sing, usually at a frantic pace) as well as the natural ease with which they pull it off night after night. Rabbit Habits finds them moving away from some of the noisy abstractions of Six Demon Bag, relying on the emotional tone of Honus Honus’ lyrics to deliver the dissonance. Even a cursory parsing of any of these songs reveals an overwhelmingly nasty and pessimistic tone, from the violent threats of “The Ballad of Butter Beans” to the defeated nihilism of the album’s twin epic closers “Poor Jackie” (”All I see is a shallow grave trapped inside a pretty face”) and “Whalebones” (”Who are we to love at all?”). Many–including the band themselves–have called this Man Man’s “pop” album, but even without the atonal screams and avant-garde bashing, I’ve found it to be just as demanding, confrontational, and every bit a sight to behold as anything they’ve ever done.

Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping
On the one hand, as a follow-up to last year’s wildy successful Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (a lethal combination of disco pop and autobiographical confessions), this theatrical melange about a middle-aged African-American transexual persona Kevin Barnes invented seems like an indulgent detour. But as Of Montreal have strayed further from their psych-pop origins toward full-on glam rock over the last few years, this kind of garishness is beginning to make sense. Why shouldn’t a band whose stage show features DayGlo video projections, costume changes, and some guy in head-to-toe spandex brandishing a samurai sword also make freaky, non-sensical music? And for my money, moments like the noise vamp in the middle of “Nonpareil of Favor,” the anthemic horns of the first minute of “An Eluardian Instance,” the echoing house beat of “Gallery Piece,” or the Euro-pop morphing into a conga jam of “Plastis Wafers” rank among the band’s most captivating.

The Ruby Suns – Sea Lion
Despite its terminally trendy world music references (Kenya/West Africa, New Zealand, Maori, etc.)–and even despite the grating, unnecessary intro repetitions of closing track “Morning Sun”–this is an endearing album that emphasizes lighthearted and bittersweet joy. Ryan McPhun earns his tribal indulgences with communal hooks, his psychedelic flourishes with rough acoustic guitars, and his Brian Wilson references with airtight harmonies. But what really allows Sea Lion to succeed on its own terms is the fact that McPhun can’t escape history. Thanks to the auspicious legacy of Mr. Wilson, sunshine pop will always evoke an idyllic California, and that’s where my imagination ends up every time I listen: blue waves, warm breezes, closed eyelids and all.

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
The hipster jerk in me wants to snub this album. He wants to snicker proudly at anyone who still thinks of it as new, cool, or cutting-edge. He wants make snide remarks about how all his friends love this album but most of them couldn’t hum a tune from Graceland (VW’s rather famous aesthetic forebearer) if they tried. Besides, all that ivy-league prepster hype is so late-2007, right? And yet, when the chips are down, I can’t help but bounce around and shout “AY! AY! AY!” with a big silly grin on my face when the DJ plays “A-Punk.” Ezra Koeing’s melodic precision combines with the band’s deft economy of sound to shove these songs permanently into that reptilian part of your brain that still remembers fast food jingles from 1994. And isn’t that what any great pop song is supposed to do?