Popcorn Noises

The Dreaded List, 2009 Edition & 2008 Edition

December 31, 2009:

Last year, I posted my year-end list at the beginning of December, mostly in an effort to not appear as though I was taking cues from anybody else’s list. Sure, as both a critic and a reader of critics, you never want to be accused of being derivative (just like musicians), but on the other hand, it’s kind of a fondles fear. Of course I read other people’s year-end lists and of course I think about them (and discuss them with the handful of people who will talk to me about these things), but in generating my own I’ve made every effort to be true to my own perceptions, feelings, and listening habits.

That said, you know how repugnant I find ranking things, so once again we have our Top 10 plus 15 Honorable Mentions to round it out to an even 25 Favorite Albums of the Year. But even that feels exclusive, so I’ve appended the headings a little bit to better hedge my bets. Mix Tapes, et al. return on Monday. Happy New Year!

HONORABLE MENTION SOME OF MY FAVORITE ALBUMS OF THE YEAR THAT I DIDN’T FEEL QUITE AS MOTIVATED TO WRITE ABOUT, EVEN THOUGH ANY ONE OF THEM COULD HAVE EASILY BEEN IN THE TOP 10 IF THE MOOD HAD STRUCK ME:

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Eating Us
Bowerbirds - Upper Air
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Kings of Convenience - Declaration of Dependence
Major Lazer - Guns Don’t Kill People—Lazers Do
Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Real Estate - Real Estate
St. Vincent - Actor
A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Ashes Grammar
tUnE-yArDs - BiRd BrAiNs
White Rabbits - It’s Frightening
The xx - xx
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It’s Blitz!
Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

TOP 10 THE ALBUMS FROM THIS YEAR I PROBABLY SPENT THE MOST TIME LISTENING TO AND WHICH I FELT MOST COMPELLED TO WRITE ABOUT, EVEN THOUGH THAT DOESN’T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM BETTER THAN THE ABOVE 15 THAT I DIDN’T WRITE MORE ABOUT:

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Good thing Animal Collective comes first alphabetically so we can get this one out of the way. Yes, it’s everybody’s default Album of the Year and yes, it probably deserves it, but for some reason that all just feels so unsatisfying. Maybe it’s because copies of Merriweather have been circulating since the tail end of 2008 and we’ve had so much time to digest, anoint, overplay, and rediscover it over the last twelve months. Or maybe it’s because it’s the popular breakthrough that fans of their older, “weirder” stuff secretly hoped would never happen, so that AC could stay the private obsessions of the art class and their childish positivity would never be picked up on by, say, unironic soccer moms. All that to say: there’s a lot of BS to wade through when it comes to MPP. I think back to the first time I heard it, that dreamy “In the Flowers” intro suddenly exploding at the half way mark into one of the biggest, most exultant moments of musical arrival I’ve heard, a moment that still brings the goosebumps a hundred listens later. I think back to hearing “Bluish,” “Guys Eyes,” and “No More Runnin’” and remarking how Animal Collective no longer needed ten minutes of strumming to put me in a trance state. And yeah, “Brothersport” and “My Girls” still slay on the dance floor. These are the same guys who made “Visiting Friends” and “Infant Dressing Table.” Who’da thunk it?

Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
I might’ve selected this album as one my favorites simply on the merits of arrangement. The guitars are restrained but never dull, the rhythm section is forceful without ever feeling heavy, and the string arrangements rank among the best I’ve ever heard. But then there’s Callahan, his deep and weathered voice all alone at the center of the mix, speak-singing succinct, poetic lines—mostly about heartbreak or birds, usually both, and each representing the other—with a maturity that only a professional of his age (43, a grandpa in indie rock years) could muster. And yet, while his experience and natural ease keep Eagle from being just another old-sad-bastard breakup album, it’s Callahan’s sense of irony and dark humor that make it repeatably engaging. In the midst of an existential crisis, he falls asleep and dreams “the perfect song” with holistic answers “like hands laid on,” half-waking to jot it down, only to find in the morning a string of meaningless gibberish (“Eid Ma Clack Shaw”). He goes on to compare himself and a comrade to “two pieces of the gallows” (“My Friend”) and imagines tear gas-spraying machines at his own grave (“Faith/Void”). In less practiced hands these themes might come off as groundless and overbearing, but Callahan’s world-weary wisdom makes them feel compelling, compassionate, and oddly comforting.

Dan Deacon - Bromst
It seems like a lot of people have forgotten about this record. I mean, I get it: we were all hoping for / expecting Spiderman of the Rings Part 2, another dose of 8-bit squiggling, fragmented Saturday morning cartoons, neon Kool-Aid, and unconditional friendship. Aside from the amazing tunes, that anti-self-consciousness (“No cowards! Everyone must dance!” he would declare at shows) was the central appeal of Deacon’s aesthetic. And now, all of a sudden, along comes Bromst, this incredibly crafted, dense, near-solipsistic internal journey of an album. I saw Deacon perform with his new ensemble shortly after the release of Bromst and, while the maniacal dancing and nominal friendliness remained, the communal effect was decidedly dulled. Maybe there were just too many drunk students crammed into the venue (damn Seminoles), but it felt like the spirit of happy camaraderie that once infected everyone within earshot had become the audience’s cynical pose. So what do we do now? We adjust our expectations and take this record for what it is. Once “Build Voice” hits its double-time gallop, Bromst ‘s moments of calmness, openness, or breathing room are few and far between. “Snookered” and “Wet Wings” offer bits of quietude, but like everything on this album, those bits get layered on top of each other until we’re back in the thick of it. Make no mistake: Dan Deacon is a virtuosic talent, and for those willing to follow him, Bromst is a dizzying thrill ride of the mind. By the time “Get Older” fizzles out, we’re winded and flushed, but ready to jump back on for another spin.

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
An oddly controversial album. In a year whose three (arguably) greatest records—Merriweather and Veckatimest being the other two—all involved previously more avant artists finding room in their sound for pop, Bitte Orca seemed to generate a bloggish divisiveness like none other. Either you were like me and loved every second of it, or you tossed it off as anything from hipster posturing to derivative trend-mongering. Here’s the rub: I think Dirty Projectors are both far weirder and far more normal than most of us think. On the one hand, they are consummate professionals, dedicated as much to the meticulous application of their technical craft as they are to being artful, and in that sense they’re almost dull. For all their hiccuping rhythms and vocal acrobatics, there’s nothing loose or off-the-cuff about them. And yet, when one takes a step back, David Longstreth’s filtering of heavy Zeppelin riffage (and periodic folkiness) and Mariah Carey-ish adult R&B through the lens of conservatory experimentalism is wholly unprecedented. Bitte Orca takes musical elements that, quite literally, everyone is familiar with, lights them on fire, and juggles them with its eyes closed. Oh yeah, and then they throw a blatant Nico rip-off smack in the middle of it. That Dirty Projectors can execute a record like this—raw, sinewy, yet incredibly practiced—while recycling chord progressions and aping their idols so transparently is nothing short of amazing. That Bitte Orca ends up being one of the year’s finest albums is something to celebrate.

Discovery - LP
If I were reading this list out loud to a group of people, this is the album that would drawn scornful snickering and jeering. One of the dudes is in Vampire Weekend (who were cool for all of five minutes in 2007 and are so out of fashion now), and they make synthy R&B pop so indebted to the current zeitgeist that in its weaker moments it approaches pastiche; two high school nerds dressing up as suave jocks. And yet, in a year whose most popular synth-pop band is called Passion Pit (ugh, shoot me), there’s a certain freshness to Discovery’s shiny, wide-eyed smoothness. Discounting LP’s pale second half (in which a well-meaning Jackson 5 cover quickly goes awry, “It’s Not My Fault (It’s My Fault)” sounds like a disposable Hot Chip b-side, and “Slang Tang” just sort of farts around for 2 1/2 minutes), there’s 20 minutes of grand, stylish, and unabashedly eccentric pop music here that displays a level of enthusiasm we don’t even see from the real pop stars who are “supposed” to be making this stuff. Sure, it all boils down to a hit-and-miss experiment, but I have a hunch I’m not alone in having racked up more plays on this record than I ever anticipated. And that’s the central irony—whenever anyone talks about Discovery, they put all their energy into explaining away the context (like I just spent 200 words doing) when we should sit back and enjoy the ride.

Girls - Album
“Man, I felt like I was going nowhere / then I found my way in the song that I’m singin’.” Christopher Owens’ tragic backstory aside, that line from Girls’ Album-closing “Darling” provides a key insight into what drives this band and, let’s be honest, much of the indie rock world. A lot of writers have spent time puzzling over what makes this record connect on such a deeply emotional level given its flat-out rudimentary elements, with many a scribe straining against logic to infer existential longing in Owens’ daydreams of pizza and beach houses. Sometimes a pop song is a work of art because it refracts history through a modern lyric or sonic touches to create a layer of performative distance, but sometimes a pop song is a work of art because it’s simple and unadulterated, a form of comfort that grows out of summers spent listening to oldies radio back before you even knew what irony was. I don’t think that Girls are trying to invest thick layers of meaning into their work, I think they found their way in music and the only appropriate response is to sing it. Brian Wilson may have stuck to lines like “Do you love me, surfer girl?” instead of “You’ve been a bitch, I’ve been an ass” in his dreamy odes to California summer, but no one ever questions whether he meant it or not. Besides all this, Album is a fantastically wide-ranging, superbly recorded, endlessly warm-sounding record. From the crisp surf pop of “Laura,” “Darling,” and “Lust for Life” to the shoegaze revival of “Morning Light” to the slow burn of “Hellhole Ratrace” and even the cheesy balladry of “Headache,” every drum hit snaps, every guitar strum gets plenty of space, and every squeaky vocal sits loosely on top. If Owens was saved by pop songs he’s become one heck of an evangelist.

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
I’ve made no secret of my flat-out adoration of Grizzly Bear, and most anyone who’s talked to me about music in 2009 has heard me bequeath Veckatimest the year’s best record until my face turned blue and whoever I was speaking to lost all interest. That said, I am also aware that, depending on your particular viewpoint, it might seem like a very obvious or very stupid choice (or both if you’re just a total lamebrain). There are hipper, sleeker, savvier, more forward-thinking, and more personally affecting albums to choose from, but I can’t think of any other band that makes room for the listener the way Grizzly Bear do. Their elegant, meandering sense of dynamics and knack for evoking the physicality of aural space allow you to inhabit and spend quality time with their music. It’s not that they’re fussy, it’s that they know that not only is the devil in the details, but the truest rewards are too. That’s why I tend to roll my eyes when anybody (including Ed Droste) calls them a pop band. A pop band—even one with the word “indie” in front of it—is a confrontational thing, perhaps not in lyrical style or bombast, but in the sense of having something told to you, being talked at. If listening to a pop band is like watching a TV show, then listening to Grizzly Bear is like taking up residence on the set. More than any other album this year, Veckatimest draws you in and makes you a part of its world, and that is a rare and valuable thing indeed.

The Postmarks - Memoirs at the End of the World
The Postmarks do not give a crap about your scene. Despite wearing their references on their sleeves, they refuse to be categorized. They’re not a twee band—twee bands are simplistic, regressive, and sing about spending their days at the library, but The Postmarks sound like grown-ups who’ve actually done some heavy reading. They’re also not some kind of retro or nostalgia act. They’re interest lies in timelessness, and they somehow manage to make an album full of 60s film score references sound like it could have been released anytime in the last 40 years. When we try to characterize a band like this, we generally just give it up and call it “indie pop,” but even that doesn’t feel right. The Postmarks are in a class by themselves, and with Memoirs at the End of the World they step into their lone spotlight and belt it all the way to the cheap seats. Immaculately produced guitars, keys, drums, horns, and mountains of orchestra strings all coalesce to ramp up a swooning drama only hinted at in their previous releases. In the midst of it all is Tim Yehezkely, alluring but disaffected, gentle but distant, nonchalant but never boring. She’s Broadcast’s Trish Keenan minus the robotic cool, or a sober and clear-headed Hope Sandoval. Here, she cements her place as The Postmarks’ lynchpin, the lens through which their academic replications become heavenly works of art.

Washed Out - Life of Leisure EP + High Times
Oh great, time for more jabbering about summery music trends and milking nostalgia for more than it’s worth. Time to christen new sub-sub-genres and make uncool things cool by coloring them ironic or sincere or psychedelic or whatever. Anyone putting this kind of thing on their year-end list must be trying too hard or be just plain stupid, right? Normally, you know I’d say yes (and I’m sorry, but Psychic Chasms just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be), but in the case of Washed Out, a.k.a.Ernest Greene, I am prepared to argue otherwise. I usually try to stay away from discussions of coolness or fashionability, but given that this was an of-the-moment sound in 2009 and it’s a game of inches when it comes to telling the difference, we have to look at it in order to define what sets Greene apart. My contention: Washed Out is not cool. He may be making “retro” synth pop with heavy doses of reverb, limiters, and the occasional dance floor stomp, but he’s not here to soundtrack your beach party. Greene takes electro-pop of the past (mostly the schmaltzy Gary Low variety, but also house and even some breakbeats on the last third of High Times) and digs out the sullen pathos you barely suspected was there, not through nostalgia’s rosy Ray-Bans, but demonstrating the damage inflicted by history. Everything in Washed Out’s world is overexposed, sun-damaged, dogeared, and stripped of its utility. That’s why tracks like “You’ll See It,” “Hold Out,” “Belong,” and “Olivia” have the potential to maintain their decayed appeal, continuing to feel vivid well beyond the summer of ‘09. That’s why, when chillwave’s gone the way of dance-punk, Washed Out will still have something poignant to say.

YACHT - See Mystery Lights
This record is a bundle of paradoxes—catchy but lopsided, spare but psychedelic, repetitious but continually new, electronic but with an organic heft, humanistic but strangely transcendent. Above all, it’s one of the year’s best party records, evolving beats and looping guitars while pulling hooks out of thin air and letting each chant go on long enough to invest it with collective weight. “You can live anywhere you want” seems like a stupidly straightforward truth, but as an overdubbed army of Jona Bechtolts continues to repeat it and a sliced-and-diced Claire Evans starts listing off a plethora of planet-spanning locales, you begin to wonder just who says where we can and can’t reside. Freedom, unyielding and uncompromised, is YACHT’s ultimate focus here, but as with any good dance record, everything is subservient to the beat (let’s not forget: this is on the DFA label). “The Afterlife,” “Ring the Bell,” and “We Have All We Ever Wanted” bob along with easy Odelay grooves, while “I’m in Love With a Ripper” parodies hip-hop (duh) and “Summer Song” and the aforementioned “You Can Live Anywhere You Want” trade in smooth disco strut. And then, at the center of this wonderfully off-kilter album, is “Psychic City (Voodoo City),” which takes a bit from a 20-year-old K Records tape as the inspiration for one of the bubbliest, bounciest summer jams of the year. It’s the kind of thing that could’ve followed up The Blow’s “Parenthesis” had Bechtolt not left the band (or Khaela Maricich not been quite so cutesy about everything). Here, Evans brings just enough attitude to the tune to make the bubblegum choruses stand out all the more. Her addition has clearly taken YACHT to a new creative peak and helps make See Mystery Lights one of ‘09’s underappreciated gems.

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December 1, 2008:

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?