Best Of 2008

2008 has been a great year for music. Many favourites have released new material, movies have had great soundtracks and new artists were a plenty thanks to net exposure. Like every year, the CONFRONT Crew has taken a look back at the past 12 months and made their picks for Best Album, Best Single, Best Video, Best Breakthrough Artist/Band, Best Soundtrack and Best Breakthrough Artist/Band under 21.

The only category missing is Best Artist and I think that it’s safe to say that this was Katy Perry’s year. Like her or hate her, she’s been hard to miss. Music Televison, Radio, the Net and Blog sites like Perez Hilton can hardly go a day without featuring her in some capacity. There was hardly a music related Award Show she wasn’t invited too, either as a guest performer or a nominee, and we saw her sets on this year’s Vans Warped Tour were the talk of the show for many.  Add to that the incredible success of her debut album ‘One of the Boys’ thanks to singles like “I kissed a Girl” and “Hot N’ Cold’ and she’s definitely one of the years top sellers.

That said, here are the staff’s selections… we hope you enjoy.

SteveK – Best Album

1) MGMT – Oracular Spectacular

Probably one of the most fun albums of the year, the debut from New York’s MGMT broke all the rules with this one.

The lead single from the album, “Time to Pretend” exploded into pop culture consciousness when it was featured in the films ‘21’ and ‘Sex Drive’, as well as on hit television shows ‘90210’ and ‘Gossip Girl’.

The mainstream success of this independent band has come as a surprise to its founders, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, as I learned when I interviewed them, earlier this year:

BEN: We’re still a little bit confused. We’re really happy that people like our music but we’ve always thought of ourselves as being very strange people, so to be accepted on a mainstream level like this is music to us.

Their music is original, whimsical, high-tech, complex, entertaining and defies every categorization label that Critics and Ingénues alike have attempted to apply to them.

ANDREW: That’s been our goal from the very beginning is to confuse the hell out of people, and thus far we’re doing a good job.

Their music’s appeal is its innate ability to cross genres and audiences successfully. If you haven’t listened to this one, you should make it a New Year’s Resolution to do so.

2) The Mars Volta – Bedlam in Goliath

The story behind this album from Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is the stuff that great novels, movies, and experimental rock albums are made from: While on a tour break in Jerusalem, Omar went on walkabout and was led to a curio shop, where he purchased an ancient talking board as a present for Cedric. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the Parker Brothers board game company release a talking board, under their brand-name, “Ouija”.

They found poems and other writings in Aramaic along with the board, and even as they sent the texts off to be translated, they began using the board. A spirit named Goliath kept coming to the board, and unfolded a long and complex tale of sex, love, incest and murder. The use of the board, its semi-demonic spirit and the bloody tale it told became the basis of their latest album.

Leave aside the question of where they learned to read a talking board written in Third or Fourth Century Aramaic. Conversely, don’t ask why a supposedly ancient talking board had an English alphabet on it. If you can thus wise suspend disbelief, the story is fascinating, and the perfect subject matter for the complex, mathematically elaborate, dark and discordant music of The Mars Volta.

If you’re not a fan, this album should win you over. The Mars Volta are masters of experimental, post-psychedelic Rock. They perfectly portray the dark, twisted story and the dark, twisted lost soul of Goliath, providing chilly, eerie musical entertainment.

3) Portishead – Third

It’s been more than twelve years since we last heard from Beth Gibbons and crew. In the mid 1990s Portishead released two of the most acclaimed trip-hop albums ever; then they announced that they were taking a break and vanished, like those kids in ‘The Blair Witch Project’.

In a year that’s been notable for awful comeback albums, most notably GNR’s ‘Chinese Democracy’, Portishead managed to deliver one of the year’s only comeback triumphs. The music here is near perfect; what works, works extremely well. What doesn’t work is the song “Deep Water”. Everything else is brilliant, which is why this otherwise awesome return to form doesn’t rate higher on my list.

4) Coldplay – Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends

From the first time I heard “Yellow”, I’ve been a fan of Coldplay. I’ve ignored the elitist criticisms from music snobs who said they were bland, lame, what have you; their music has always been enjoyable to me. So, when ‘Viva La Vida’ came out earlier this year, I was really surprised by it. I was surprised because, while listening to it, I realized just how similar each of their three previous releases sounded. While ‘Viva La Vida’ has many of the stylistic signatures that define Coldplay music, their fourth album truly stands apart from the rest, arguably as their best work yet.

5) My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges

This album plays like a tribute to the hillbilly rock of the 1970s and 1980s, taking cues from supergroups like Lynyrd Skynyrd. The music is nevertheless original and fresh, reinvigorating a lost genre of Rock in the process.

My Morning Jacket has been around for a decade, but the band has gone through so many changes (and released a number of indie albums before the 2003 release of ‘It Still Moves’ and then ‘Z’ in 2005) in that time, that it’s hard not to quantify them as a young band. However, ‘Evil Urges’ demonstrates that My Morning Jacket are experienced, accomplished musicians.