Top 5 of the Decade - Albums

Over the next month, in a lame attempt to mark the end of the decade, the LBAM will be running down some "Top 5 of the Decade" lists. Thrilling, I know. Try to contain your excitement.

So we'll start with albums. I am well aware that neither of you who read this blog share my taste in music. You're both wrong, so just get over yourselves.

#5 - Bastardos! - Blues Traveler, 2005

Blues Traveler released a couple of really mediocre albums this decade, 2003's "Truth be Told" and 2008's "North Hollywood Shootout." The former was boring and the latter indulgent, including a baffling and rambling jam with Bruce Willis. Bastardos! was unlike anything BT did before, and they'll probably never do anything like it again. I'd almost suggest that if you don't normally find yourself liking Blues Traveler, this might be an album to check out. Prominent use of a horn section makes the best parts of this album sound maybe like Chicago would've if Chicago had ever managed to rock with any amount of hardness at all.

Highlight: She and I has great horn arrangements underneath a great John Popper vocal performance. Amber Awaits has the kind of hook that made Blues Traveler famous, and a shitload of money, in the 90s, but is probably a better song than Runaround or Hook

#4 - Song of the Traveling Daughter - Abigail Washburn, 2005

I gues 2005 was a good year for music I like. This album is more or less indescribable and just saying it features old-timey, clawhammer banjo playing, cello, and Chinese lyrics won't get most people to listen. The trick, I have found, is to just get people to listen without telling them what it is they're going to listen to. The results are just amazing.
Highlights: Rockabye Dixie, Who's Gonna Shoe - If you can watch and listen to Abigail Washburn sing either of these songs live and not fall a little bit in love with her then you lack some essential qualities of soul and character that probably make you not worth knowing.

#3 - Takk - Sigur Ros, 2005

There was a long time while working on my MFA where I didn't bother listening to anything else. I wrote a solid half of the poems in my thesis while listening to this album. Inspiration distilled into music.

Highlight: Hoppípolla - I could listen to this song every day for the rest of my life and still love it.

#2 - The Hard and The Easy - Great Big Sea, 2005

My favorite band reclaims their identity as a roots/folk/acoustic band rather than a pop group. And while I don't mind their pop stuff, it was their acoustic folk with its impressive vocals that drew me to them in the first place. The real test of this album is there is not a single song on it I skip over if I listen to the album. I can't say that about Something Beautiful* or Fortune's Favor, the albums preceding and following The Hard and the Easy, respectively. I mean, England, on Fortune's Favor, might be the best original song they've done this decade, but it also comes on an album with clunkers like Dream to Live and Oh Yeah. Blech.
Highlights: The River Driver - The kind of stirring, introspective, gloomy folk song that made me love this band the first time I saw them, in...1997? 1998? Something like that. And Captain Kidd never fails to make me want to plunder something.

#1 - Our Endless Numbered Days - Iron and Wine, 2004

Sam Beam is a poet. I don't say that about many songwriters. Maybe 3...him, Ellis Paul, and Colin Meloy. This is an album full of poems. I sometimes feel like the album is some kind of series of poems, with each song in conversation with each other.
Highlights: The last five tracks are grouped on my iTunes as having been played the most. That's probably why this is #1. They are, in order, Each Coming Night, Free Until they Cut Me Down, Fever Dream, Sodom South Georgia, Passing Afternoon. Listening to this in the car the other day, I said to the official wife, it makes me want to write a paper on the intertextuality of the lyrics. Yeah. English major.

Apologies to: Ellis Paul, whose Live album from 2000 should probably be on this list. The Decemberists. Either The Crane Wife or Picaresque could easily be on this list as well. Bright Eyes, for I'm Wide Awake, it's Morning. Tim O'Brien, for the double release of Cornbread Nation and Fiddler's Green, which were both fantastic traditional albums. It would probably have been unfair to even consider Down the Old Plank Road/Further Down the Old Plank Road by the Chieftains in collaboration with more people than you can shake a stick at. You can consider this #6-10 of the list if you like.