Election 2008: The Best Albums on eMusic

For a tiny moment it seemed that Elliott Smith was going to be the "new Dylan" of Generation X; his exquisite balladry so perfectly captured the wistful dance with hope and hopelessness enacted by the shadow children of the Baby Boom. But it wasn't to be, not only because of Smith's struggles with depression (which led him to suicide in 2003), but because Smith's moment called for something more subtle. Hear it on this exquisite disc, a homemade charm bracelet strung with anger and hope and lovely broken dreams. Smith was a lo-fi pop perfectionist — his melodies and simple song structures aimed to match the Platonic ideal of his heroes, the Beatles, but his arrangements were raw as punk, as was his fragile tenor. In love songs like "Between the Bars" and tales of cosmic disappointment like "Ballad of Big Nothing," Smith grasped the beating heart of that old ennui, the dark side of the indie rock spirit.

No vocals. No lyrics. No solos and no leader. Instead, the nine-member Montreal collective known as Godspeed You! Black Emperor specialize in a surging symphonic post-rock, incorporating everything from ambient feedback drones to abstractions of hardcore punk; its second album is its masterwork.

Arranged in four continuous suites that forego conventional song structures in favor of orchestral movements, Lift Your Skinny Fists frames and contextualizes GY!BE’s compositions with automated gas station announcements and odd field recordings. Yet its multiple climaxes of sobbing strings, restless drums and sustain-drenched guitar are what define the record.

Playing off the double-meaning of its title, “Static” moans slowly, an unearthly hum merging with elegiac strings. Suddenly, a seething metal cacophony erupts until the song wears itself out, leaving behind a buzz that brings the piece back to where it begins. A spoken memory of Coney Island launches “Sleep,” which features a frantic and more rhythmic summit than the other songs, continually collapsing and starting up again. Like sequins on a black tar sea, the fourth suite, “Antennas to Heaven,” sprinkles twinkling glockenspiel over a thunderous din. Another sustained quiet passage follows, but at the album’s conclusion it turns shrill and discordant, offering neither resolution nor rest. As its title suggests, this imaginary soundtrack for dreams, revolutions, genocides and afterlives feels like a frustrated prayer, but one that's full of fighting spirit.

To call Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga one of the year’s two or three best rock albums is to overstate how much it sounds like a rock album. There’s no mistaking its imperturbable swagger and seething refrains for anything else — Spoon still knows how to write a song that could fit into each of rock’s past five decades without tipping toward any one in particular. But even songs on Ga Ga that traffic in guitars don’t sound like they were written with guitars in mind. Spoon sounds more interested now in drums and empty space, both of which sparkle and boom in ways that make singer Britt Daniel sound positively electrified to be in their presence.

The sparse and experimental lean of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga places it closer to the group’s 2002 breakthrough Kill the Moonlight than its bash-minded follow-up Gimme Fiction. “Don’t Make Me a Target” opens on a note of resignation and rage, with portentous guitar and piano that build toward a sort of atonal rockabilly jam about two minutes in. From there, though, the album takes on an air of mystery with “The Ghost of You Lingers,” a gorgeous and terrifying ballad in which Daniel’s distended voice duels with blasts of static and more reverb than could ever sound earthly. The jarring tonal shift into “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” proves perverse but, as goes for most of Spoon’s moves at this point, not overly pleased with itself: After bells and slappy drums enter like Phil Spector as summoned by David Lynch, the buoyant tune takes over and lodges into that part of your brain where pleasurable pop hooks go and stay mum.

What sticks most on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the grain and range of Daniel’s voice, which must have been miked a dozen different ways to capture his timbral moods in tracks as disparate as “Don’t You Evah” (Spoon’s most funky song yet, by a good measure) and “The Underdog” (Spoon’s most Billy Joel-like song yet, to the same degree). Nothing Daniel does has ever sounded labored, but Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga finds him and his band with a newly refined balance between craft and restraint.

Originally released in 1993, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 effectively launched the career of Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James; though he had already gained a degree of notoriety for his single "Digeridoo" and the Analogue Bubblebath EP, SAW 85-92 was his first foray into long-player territory. Listening to the album today, it's almost hard to believe that it's the work of the same artist who would go on to create tracks like "Windowlicker" and the notorious "Come to Daddy." Pensive, melancholic, even understated, the album foregoes James' later interest in shock value in favor of emotive melodies, hypnotic rhythms and spine-tingling electronic timbres.

But James — infamous for bizarre stunts like DJing with sandpaper disks — subtly seeds his reputation as a prankster in a few crucial ways. First there's that nagging titular modifier, "Ambient." Unlike the placid, beatless manna with which the genre is generally associated (thanks in large part to Aphex Twin's 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a far more tranquil affair) SAW 85-92 thrums with the shuddering rhythms of Chicago house and European EBM (Electronic Body Music). This is hardly hard house, however; despite the distorted drums of opening track "Xtal," bright chimes and childlike vocals lend it a beatific feel, while uptempo cuts like "Pulsewidth" and "Heliospan" are about as jarring as a crash-landing in a pillow factory.

The other tricky business here concerns the music's provenance. The album's title suggests a compilation of material reaching back to 1985 (when, as Allmusic's John Bush points out, James would have been only 14 years old). While age may be a red herring, style isn't: in 1985, Chicago pioneers like Phuture and Fingers Inc. were just beginning to invent the rhythms and timbres of acid house, a sound that wouldn't begin migrating to the UK until 1987 and 1988. It's possible, of course, that in assembling the album James fleshed out youthful synthesizer sketches with contemporary techniques.

In any case, the album's cohesion moots such fact-checking anxieties. For all its restraint and even its primitivism, the record is as inventive as anything James has ever done. Electro's machinic rhythms ("Ptolemy," "Ageispolis") recall Kraftwerk and Model 500 while breakbeat hardcore's diced drums ("Heliosphan") preface the breakneck intensity of drum & bass; distorted electronics and melting tones suggest something like laudanum industrial ("Schottkey 7th Path") and one properly ambient track foregoes beats entirely to revel in an expansive drift of sound ("I").

James-watchers will note the origins in SAW 85-92 of numerous Aphex tendencies: recurring titles, a fixation upon chemical sounding names, an affinity for kitsch. (The spoken-word sample in "We Are the Music Makers" comes from Gene Wilder's 1971 classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) But you hardly need to be a completist to appreciate the record; indeed, casual electronic-music fans may find this to be the only Aphex Twin record they need. But it's certainly one that anyone with any interest in the genre owes it to him- or herself to check out. Despite its age, it hasn't dated one bit.

After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.

Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.

A big group doesn't always make a big sound. Sprawling Toronto-based indie rock collective Broken Social Scene, whose ranks usually hover around nine instrument-hopping members, fuss over the details on You Forgot It In People, their breakthrough full-length. Rarely dipping outside traditional rock band instrumentation, BSS somehow make a bunch of guitar/bass/keyboard/drum tunes sound uniquely sparkly and sweet. The group sounds self-assured as members trade vocal duties and scuttle between galloping, raucous indie anthems ("KC Accidental," "Almost Crimes"), strutting, faux-tropical workouts ("Looks Just Like the Sun," "Pacific Theme") and swooning melodrama (album highlight "Lover's Spit").

Rather than making an indiscriminately large racket, BSS use their bulging roster to fill the nooks and crannies of You Forgot with small sonic treasures. Layered guitars twinkle a little more when sidled-up next to a high harmony piano vamp; acoustic guitar and brushed drums are teased and textured by a winsome, dulcimer-like lead line; a plodding midtempo number is made soaring with subtle strings and a flanged, layered vocal harmony. It took every shred of every idea from the freewheeling group, but they managed the neat trick of using more to make less — luckily, it's a distinctly thrilling treat.

The Magnetic Fields’ magnum opus really is 69 love songs. As if this challenge was perhaps too easy, Magnetic Fields songwriter and lead singer Stephin Merritt upped the ante by writing the songs in almost as many genres: the tracks jump from Tin Pan Alley to country, from indie rock to techno-pop, from Celtic lullaby to Brill Building anthem. Lyrically, you’d be hard-pressed to find a nimbler pen among today’s songwriters—Merritt’s is a wit inspired by debonair ‘30s New Yorker magazine humor rather than The Daily Show. While the sheer heft of this collection is overwhelming at first, it’s also remarkable in its sustained quality: few bands can come up with even a handful of brilliant tunes; Merritt came up with 69.

Neko Case hasn't had much need to prove her credentials as a major artist since making her solo debut with 1997's The Virginian, but she's been refining her skills in the recording studio on each subsequent release, and with 2006's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood she's fashioned an album that can cautiously be called a masterpiece. As always, Case's voice, an instrument of impressive strength, grace, and expressive power, is the star of this show, and she's never sounded better than she does here, but what sets this apart from her other fine work is her growth as a songwriter and producer. Case wrote or co-wrote all 12 tracks on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and her tales of failed friendship, faith stretched to the breaking point, and love that causes as much ache as comfort are subtle and expressionistic but deeply evocative, conjuring images and feelings that linger long after the album has ended, especially the spectral "Star Witness," the moody yet romantic "That Teenage Feeling" and "Hold on, Hold On," and the darkly beautiful closer, "The Needle Has Landed." And Case and her co-producer, Darryl Neudorf, have assembled a superb cast of musicians to accompany these songs, among them members of the Sadies and Calexico as well as Garth Hudson of the Band, Howe Gelb from Giant Sand, and Kelly Hogan. Together they've sculpted a dozen elegant sonic landscapes that are beautiful and richly detailed while meshing with the moody textures of the songs in their open space and unwillingness to crowd either the singer or the other players. The cumulative effect mirrors both the beauty and the sadness that lurks within the human heart, and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is a rich, mature, and deeply satisfying piece of music that deserves and demands attention -- if this isn't Album of the Year material, it's hard to say what is.

There’s only one bad thing you can say about Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire: it doesn’t contain career highlight “Elevator Love Letter.” Otherwise, this album is pretty much the perfect indie-pop record, replete with girl/boy harmonizing, epic choruses and the type of catchy tunes that could’ve only been created (these days, anyway) in Canada.

But it’s not just perfect pop constructions. Check the extended coda on the title track, which cuts off the propulsive tune and takes it to outer space. Or “The Big Fight,” where the group seemingly hires a different producer mid-song and turns a plodding lament into an upbeat instrumental. Or the flat-out electro-jazz-punk maelstrom of “He Lied About Death.”

At heart, though, Stars is a pop band, and pop music is about moments that make your heart swell a little bit larger than you thought it could. Fire has plenty of those, too: when drummer Pat McGee starts syncopating on “One More Night,” when the group “woo”’s are indistinguishable from the oscillating synth on “Ageless Beauty,” that one moment of silence before each chorus in “Soft Revolution”… I could go on, but what’s the point? Words are useless when you run up against this type of album. Dig in.

Doolittle is the Pixies album that endures — virtually as harsh and radical as their earlier Surfer Rosa, but balanced with production and melodies to match; proof that leader Black Francis cared as much about Brian Wilson as Charles Manson. Titles along the lines of "Debaser," "Waves of Mutilation," "Gouge Away" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" don't exactly evoke a party in the woods, but Francis, like another of his favorites, David Lynch, had a knack for draping the psychopathic and sexually repressed in overlit sweetness. Only "Here Comes Your Man" arguably tries a little too hard, coming off as an attempt at R.E.M.-style jangle pop. So many elements went into the Pixies' desert flower sound: the roll of Kim Deal's bass, Francis' Spanish-tinged vocals, the guitar attack choking off cold. Deal doesn't really have a standout lead vocal this time, but she and Francis use their harmonies (more back-and-forths) to evoke an eternal war between the sexes: the passion sounds they turn into a bridge on "Tame" are rote, robotic, numbed — anything but sexy. Does "Hey" sum up Black Francis' view of romance? "Uh/Said the man to the lady/Uh/Said the lady to the man she adored, and the whores like a choir/Go uh all night." A foul worldview, but here, at the height of postmodernism, it made for sublime pop.

Cat Power’s fans, detractors and those level-headed types who flirt between both camps generally agree that the singer, Chan Marshall, is blessed with a lovely, unaffected voice. Opinions diverge in how that voice is applied. When stripped of grounded instrumental backing, Marshall can seem rambling and lost; when paired with dynamic musicians, however, she is emboldened. The artist chooses the latter path on The Greatest, recording in Tennessee with session vets who helped Al Green and Willie Mitchell craft Memphis soul in the ’60s and ’70s. The subsequent work is downbeat, boozy, spooky and very Southern — the archetypical Cat Power album, even if it took a bunch of old souls to bring to fruition.

"Don't get any big ideas," goes the first line of "Nude," the third song on Radiohead's haunting seventh record, "they're not gonna happen." This is, of course, hogwash — a willful bit of Thomfoolery designed to accentuate a theme by understating it. In Rainbows is a record full of big ideas, ideas about solitude and desertion and depression and dislocation — to say nothing of its notions about record distribution.

And let's, please, say nothing of its notions about record distribution. For weeks after its arrival all anyone could talk about was how much (if anything) they paid for it, obscuring any discussion of what Rainbows actually is: a stunning sustained consideration of loneliness set to a somber, underplayed score.

Musically, In Rainbows — like Hail to the Thief before it — finds Radiohead winding their way back towards something like conventional songwriting. That an album where the opener boasts jazz guitar, drum 'n' bass rhythms and bursts of cheering children can be considered even remotely "conventional" is a testament to how far afield Radiohead were before this. They're calmer now, constructing songs from blue bands of synthesizers and delicate, twinkling arpeggios. With the exception of the ragged "Bodysnatchers," which hurtles forward on the back of briny guitar, most of Rainbows is disturbingly serene. The songs maintain a kind of steady cruising altitude: "Faust Arp" threads solemn strings through Brit-folk finger-picking; "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" speeds along on galloping percussion and swooping, sine-wave guitars. It's a welcome reminder of how good Radiohead still are at writing plain old pop songs, even if those pop songs are full of ruminations on loss and mortality.

Which, of course, is where Thom Yorke comes in. His writing has grown more direct — on In Rainbows he's fonder of plain old declaratives than on much of his past work — but most times that superficial glibness conceals a deep-seated unrest: "I don't want to be your friend," he sings at one point, "I just want to be your lover," a sentiment that sounds sexy until you realize what it means is that he's not going to call you the Day After. Ditto "All I Need," where he unspools a series of distressing pledges of devotion ("I'm an animal trapped in your hot car" is one) only to end up at "I only stick with you/ Because there are no others." Not the valentine everyone hopes to get.

In the album's final scene, Yorke finds himself before God who, apparently as resistant to new technology as he is sin and death and canoodling, plays back Yorke's life for him on a VCR. As he is for most of Rainbows, Yorke is there by himself, but instead of rifling through his regrets, he has an eleventh hour epiphany. "This is one for the good days," he croons as the piano death-marches behind him, "And I have it all here in red, blue and green." It's a startling redemption, ending album-length isolation with the refrain, "I know today has been/ The most perfect day I've ever seen." This, to say the least, isn't what we were expecting. Where's the longing? Where's the dread? Where’s the hopelessness? Who's the wiseguy? What’s the big idea?

Three years after the sonic honey of Mass Romantic, the New Pornographers come up smiling once more with their sophomore effort and Matador debut, Electric Version. These beloved indie rockers stick with the syrupy goodness found on their first album, but opt to turn the amps up for a brighter, slicker sound, hence the title. It's a kitschy play on the band's power pop, and Carl Newman and secret member Dan Bejar keep their clever lyrical twists in tune. Twiddling riffs and organs dance with Neko Case's sunny harmonies on the rollicking "It's Only Divine Right" and "From Blown Speakers." The energy is there, but Electric Version captures a new kind of energy from the New Pornographers. While Mass Romantic was a little more quirky in spirit, Electric Version is more polished. They took just under a year to create this album, so naturally a fresh confidence would transpire and "The Laws Have Changed" highlights the New Pornographers' musical growth. This album standout is bold as brass, drenched in Case and Newman's perky vocals. "All for Swinging You Around" takes things further with wacky synth beats and tripped-up percussion, Velocity Girl-style, but its the band's own glossed-over rock & roll on "Miss Teen Worldpower" that truly represents the smooth emotion and might behind the New Pornographers' sound. Electric Version is an enjoyable and easy listen, chock-full of hungry hooks and brimming with indie rock's classic humility.

John Coltrane established himself as a solo artist with a prolific series of recordings in 1957 and ’58, yet the sessions comprising Lush Life still stand out amid this creative torrent for a couple of reasons. Because Red Garland failed to show up at the studio, the first three tracks put Trane in the relatively rare context of a piano-less trio, and bassist Earl May’s judicious style provides further elbow room for the lyrical gushes of sax on the love songs and the blues — soulful yet quicksilver phrases demarcated by rhythmic eddies and reveries.

But most of all this collection is renowned for Coltrane’s ability (abetted by a full quintet here) to vividly convey both the grandeur and the intimacy of “Lush Life,” during his 14-minute treatment of Billy Strayhorn’s classic composition. His emotional discernment and restraint enhance the poignant turns-of-phrase, an acute sensibility perhaps indebted to his own struggles with drug addiction at the time. But “Lush Life” is hardly a solo triumph: both arco and pizzicato, this is one of bassist’s Paul Chambers’ more noteworthy accompaniments, and Garland’s lengthy piano solo nourished his reputation as a master of silky ballads. The disc closes with the nascent, relatively pacific, hard bop of “I Hear a Rhapsody.”

Where were you when you first heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea? I was a college radio DJ, and I remember seeing the CD on a table (it had just come out), and someone had put a piece of masking tape on it that simply read: "I LIKE TRACK #6!" And so I played it that day on my show (track six is "Holland 1945," the fuzzy, bombastic one), and fell in love. No other record mattered as much. But here's what's great about that: I am not special. So many people have a story like that with this record — a girlfriend put "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" on a mixtape, a friend tried to pass off "Two-Headed Boy" as his own. This album is not only intensely personal in its perspective (we all felt like we knew leader Jeff Mangum after hearing it), but intensely personal in its reception. It is also, to put it bluntly, one of the greatest albums ever made.

Broad strokes first: yes, the album has roots in the tragedy of Anne Frank and the Holocaust. In a tremendous interview at the time in Puncture with eMusic's own Mike McGonigal (read it here), Mangum said:

"While I was reading [The Diary of Anne Frank], she was completely alive to me… So here I am as deep as you can go in someone's head, in some ways deeper than you can go with someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine, having the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank."

It's an album of empathy, of fear, of the everyday horror of insecurity and doubt. It's an album that has "Oh Comely," its streams and streams and streams of words anguishing between religion and sex and love and death, Mangum, broken, singing, "I know they buried her body with others/ Her sister and mother and 500 families/ And will she remember me 50 years later?/ I wish I could save her in some sort of time machine/ We know who our enemies are," and then a muted trumpet mourning like at a Gypsy funeral. It's an album where Anne Frank dies but "now she knows she will never be afraid." It's an album by a man whose nerves are so raw, his senses so acute, that all pain is his pain, all life is his life, all death is his death. And he can't escape it. Ever.

Yet it is a glorious album, too. It is intensely sad, perversely morose, and yet there is so much joy. There is the exaltation of "Untitled," the horns of heaven welcoming him and little Anne home. There is the unreal beauty of "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," "What a beautiful face/ I have found in this place/ That is circling all round the sun," it begins, the Theremin ringing and the saw singing, and then the heartbreaking end jumps up before we can turn away: "And one day we will die/ And our ashes will fly/ From the aeroplane over the sea," the words' beauty so striking that it takes a moment to realize their horror, and yet still a romantic shock lingers. Would this be so bad a way to go?

Mangum hasn't made a Neutral Milk Hotel album since. It's been more than a decade, and yet Aeroplane looms like the truest possible words at the worst possible time. It could not be more beautiful. It could not be more vulnerable. In that interview with McGonigal, Mangum said something else that reveals so much. "I don't consider myself to be a very educated person," he said, "'cause I've spent a lot of my life in dreams." With In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, he released those dreams to the world. And they were perfect.

On principle alone, I tend to resist acts carried skyward by the brute force of Apple’s starmaker machinery. By the time Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” the Caesars’ “Jerk It Out” or Wolfmother’s “Love Train” embedded themselves permanently in our collective cerebral cortex, the resentment and rot had set in, forever tainting the tune in question no matter its relative genius and/or adrenaline quotient. Thus it was that most of the great unwashed were first introduced to Leslie Feist’s “1234,” a cracking tune from The Reminder, the third album chock-full of the erstwhile Broken Social Scene member’s characteristic pop eccentricity.

Here’s the catch: for all its various charms, “1234” isn’t even the best song on this album — that particular accolade falls to “My Moon My Man,” an insistent, piano-driven bit of twilight obsession with a compulsively watchable airport-themed video to match. Gone are most of the vague jazz affectations found on the Canadian’s nevertheless stellar sophomore outing Let It Die, replaced instead by an ADD-afflicted cafeteria menu of faux-campfire blues (“The Park,” “Intuition”), hypnotic Joni Mitchell-isms (“The Water,” “How My Heart Behaves”) and pseudo-gospel spirituals (“Sealion”) all carried on the strength of Feist’s buoyant, god-sent vocal gift, an instrument capable of wringing emotion from any song it serves like blood squeezed from a rock.

The Reminder proved not only to be one of the finest discs of 2007, it served as an, erm, reminder of the staying power of one of indie-pop’s most outsized talents (albeit, one served up in a modestly-conceived package), overcoming the Apple corps hegemony through sheer force of emotional conviction.

A tiny, subtle diamond in a field of ten-foot neon exclamation points, Boxer, the stately, flawless fifth record from the Brooklyn group the National, draws strength from the power of suggestion. "Let's not try to figure out everything at once," Matt Berninger sings softly in the glowing opener "Fake Empire," and that line could be a statement of theme: On Boxer, the epiphanies take their time.

Since their relocation from Ohio to New York, the National has built a career on writing wry songs that express sympathy for the bedeviled. 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers found them merging grizzled Americana with a Flannery O'Connor kind of fatalism, crafting stories about misanthropes whose dreams had dried up and whose only recourse was to blame everyone around them. Alligator, released the following year, took that same anger and internalized it, turning the gun around and tying up acrid metaphysical aggravation in thick, silvery ropes of guitar. That record was mainly about exhaustion, but Boxer is about resignation. Its title is a clever bit of misdirection: they don't mean someone who fights, but someone who confines. The characters here are either burned out or walled in, aware of their limitations but working to accept them instead of becoming incapacitated by them.

Fittingly, the songs are coiled and quivering — no release or eruption, just a steady, insistent simmer. Sound arrives not in distinct notes but reverberations: guitars echo, organs pool, bass hums and buzzes. The jittery, insistent "Mistaken for Strangers" builds to a groan instead of a shriek and "Guest Room," which is as close as Boxer ever comes to an anthem, blots its big finish with inky smudges of bass and rolling clouds of feedback. This temperance is the album's ace up the sleeve: rather than betting their worth on one hook writ large, the songs unfold a little more with each pass. What starts out foggy and puzzling is gradually revealed to be a bounty of small, elegant moments. Drummer Bryan Devendorf is the group's anchor; his percussion is odd and atypical, strange thrilling bursts of sound that knock the songs off balance. His playing is completely counterintuitive, loaded with sudden stops, unlikely drops and improbable rolls.

Berninger, in his early 30s, is a Tennessee Williams kind of frontman: tired of parties, hyper-aware of his own age but roaming the nighttime city anyway in the restless — and fruitless — pursuit of something more. But instead of getting bitter or nostalgic, Berninger seems to be moving toward a kind of acceptance. "Tired and wired, we ruin too easy," he sings on "Apartment Story," and the key there is the pronoun — it's not the ruining that matters, it's the peace that comes from knowing you have someone to be ruined with. Again and again Berninger finds comfort in companionship, and even when he's singing "walk away now, and you're going to start a war," it doesn't sound so much like an ultimatum as it does a sly, gentle plea to come back to bed.

This, in the end, is what Boxer is all about: the first step after the Big Dream fails. It's a record about the implication but not the explanation, the clues but not the mystery. It's a record full of down-payment dreamers, ruined princes and glowing young ruffians who are learning to be satisfied with everything they haven’t got. They're beaten but grinning — half awake in fake empires, but waiting around to see the sun.

The title of Arcade Fire's debut was inspired by a succession of bereavements afflicting the band during its creation. Forced to the creative brink by such an accumulation of sadness, Funeral finds them delving into some odd corners, particularly in the four-part "Neighborhood" suite, a fantasy about children living in the snow, developing without adult input during a prolonged power-cut. Despite the prominently keening violins, the band's dense, layered sound has some similarities with the Flaming Lips, especially since Win Butler's strained squawk of a voice inescapably recalls Wayne Coyne's. The inevitability of aging is the album's main theme, with "flowers growing on the grave of our love" in "Crown of Love," and Butler observing in "Wake Up" how "now that I'm older, my heart [is] colder." Regine Chassagne's "In the Backseat," meanwhile, brings a bittersweet poetry to bereavement, as she notes how "my family tree's losing all its leaves."