The Top Music Albums of 2008

So a thing about me that I haven't revealed on the blog is my obsession with music.

Although pitchforkmedia.com does a much better job of listening to music and reviewing it professionally, I figure blogs are a way to publicly share masturbate about one's interests.   As such, I was asked today by a musical friend what's my top ten of 2008.  He has a blog too http://www.stevemathewes.com/blog/

I haven't given the top 10 of 2008 much thought.  Many album dates blend together as I get older and think that things I liked in 1998 are current.  I still think Meat Beat Manifesto's "Acutal Sounds and Voices" is still one of the best concieved electonic music albums to date.  

Well, after sorting it out and consulting the wikipedia and the ever so holy Pitchfork to check my release dates, I'd have to say the following will make the list. 

Sadly, I don't think this list encompasses the full breadth of my musical tastes, but when you don't invest a lot of time in the hobby, the hobby repays you with a list that reads like a music reviewer for pitchformedia...I think that's the last I will mention them...it's not like I would love to have a job there...

1) Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago 

Though I can't really process the order of the other albums listed below, I feel passionately that hands down this singer songwriter has constructed something very special and enduring with this release.  Beyond that, this is a very intimate and emotional album as well.  It runs the gamute of human experience from love to loss, like most any modern musicians work.  But can it feel so much like home, like a place I want to be, by myself, reflecting on what actually happened?  What really will happen?  And what kind of person I really am...does it measure up to what I want to be?  All this and more can be found in For Emma...and yes it happened a long time ago didn't it?  But it's that powerful memory of that love, that makes the experience of being human, worth it all...the monumental, culmination of experience from birth to death, from civilization to civilzation, of the scraps of writings in the tablets of a babylonian love song to the works of art, produced today in the cutting edges of technology of the internet.  Bravo Bon Iver!   No pressure on a follow up... 

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
Lykki Li - Youth Novels
Magnetic Fields -Distortion
Kleerup - Kleerup
TV on the Radio - Dear Science
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Wolf Parade - At Mt. Zoomer
Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel

There's a bunch I want to hear but haven't heard yet like Fennesz, Max Richter, Dungen, Luomo, Antony and the Johnsons and the Castanets.  Hopefully 2009 will hold much promise musically so I can continue to blather about and eat up space on the internet.