The Best of 2004

1. U2/How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

In many ways U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb represents something of a return to earlier days of this great band, although U2 have never made this album before. Even forgetting about the music for a moment, hard as that is, with Steve Lillywhite as producer and engineer, the album just sounds right, like a U2 album seemingly is supposed to sound: frenetic, bracing, chilly, trebulous. Atomic Bomb stays in your face, and in your memory, longer and with less distraction than its 2000 predecessor, All That You Can’t Leave Behind. It strikes an expert balance between the aggressive and the reflective; it's as noisy but not nearly as angry or as scarfaced as War or as contemplative of the battles as The Unforgettable Fire, as if certain of the wounds the topics of those albums wrought have healed over. (But marks will ever remain.) It seems content to occupy the immediate moment, making it less expansive, metaphoric, and overtly reverential as The Joshua Tree. It rocks, truly scorches at times, actually, but does so straightforward, and so pushes fewer envelopes of sonic and stylistic innovation as Achtung, Baby. It’s hard to imagine many of the narrators of these earlier albums swinging at a place called Vertigo, as one narrator does here. But this U2 is older, in their way more mature and complete as artists and messengers and citizens than on any album before. A trip to Vertigo? Fine. Rounds on me.

Musically, the Edge’s now-legendary guitar dominates this album in a way not heard since those older days. Even a short tour of the album to discover his amazing variations. Consider the dynamic crunch and underrated murk of "Vertigo." The fuzzy, distorted grind and acidic rusty-nail fills on the glitter-rocking "Love And Peace Or Else." The razor-wire arpeggiating and melodic lyricism and shadowy counterpoints of "City Of Blinding Lights." A maelstrom of guitar virtuosity, "City" cruises in slowly like a jet, a roar of feedback evoking its massive engine, delicate notes of piano hitting passengers' windows like a nighttime rainshower, our noses pressed against the glass as we descend into the city’s "fireflies" of light.

Perhaps because of where these great musicians find themselves now, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb emerges as perhaps U2's most romantic album, perhaps the first to probe so deeply such mature themes of human love, frailty, and family. The album’s succession of sizzling performances, its often mentally scouring melodies and arrangements, can cloud these undercurrents, but they’re there if we listen closely. In the end, the album’s brilliance really comes from this fundamental, almost chemical blend of words and play. When Bono sings to his lamented father almost as a conversation with himself, on the transfixing "Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own," the Edge’s clockwork rhythm licks seem to symbolize the time the narrator needs to figure that out. As "Miracle Drug" weaves its beseeching, passionate theme of love, desperation, and hope, the Edge crescendoes in a blaze of chords, as he will do throughout, as if to make sure the whole message propels to the heavens.

On the front cover of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, U2 sit quietly, unbothered, as if checking in as the official providers of passion for the hour or so to come. Perhaps the best way to dismantle an atomic bomb is to detonate it. Lead the way to the fuse, their faces seem to say.

2. Air/Talkie Walkie

3. The Cure/The Cure

4. Telefon Tel Aviv/Map Of What Is Effortless

5. Drugmoney/Mtn Cty Jnk

6. Sonic Youth/Sonic Nurse

7. PJ Harvey/Uh Huh Her

8. Grant-Lee Phillips/Virginia Creeper

"Shippin’ off to the country/Where the tales are tall/You’ll come back with a story/Or ya won’t come back at all."—from "Waking Memory"

On his third, and most assured, solo album since ending his underrated band Grant Lee Buffalo, the soulful, Northern California-cool singer/songwriter Grant-Lee Phillips crafts a seamless cycle of rootsy, folk-inspired songs almost literary in their lyrical images and craftily inventive in their instrumentations and arrangements. The best of the song-stories on Virginia Creeper weave amazing tales about, or otherwise evoke, a cast of indelible, interesting women. Even the first track celebrates that most captivating of inspirational women, "Mona Lisa." Then we learn about the "Lily-A-Passion," a "piratey soul full a’ vinegar and glitter." And later "Calamity Jane," "shootin' off that mouth again" as she shoots down men’s hearts too, and "Josephine Of The Swamps," who causes a howlin in the sleep and a churning of the soul of the trembling narrator. And finally, and most balladically, in the truest literary sense of the word, we meet "Susanna Little." The song spins the lengthy tale of the turbulent life of a Creek Indian woman who surely must have lived somewhere in that Delta, sometime; and you know you wish you'd had a chance to know her. This stirring, hymnlike tune and Phillips’ soulful performance of it stays in the memory like the greatest of folk ballads always have. It is the only song here rendered by Phillips on piano (a wonderfully creaky thing that it seems Susanna herself might have played), accompanied, as often heard here, by Eric Gorfain’s expressive, knowing violin.

The sort of music Phillips makes on Virginia Creeper, given its simple objectives, can at times become a solitary affair. No one could ever deny the simple, primal, singular power of a man, a voice, and a guitar. But Virginia Creeper also triumphs as an arresting collaboration between Phillips and about ten other musicians, many of them playing age-old music machines like dobros, mandolins, and accordions, ukuleles and upright basses. These musicians shine in their accompaniments in ways as brilliantly as Phillips himself does, with voice and acoustic, throughout. Listen as Gorfain’s itchy violin shudders and chills through the sly, waltz-timed "Wish I Knew." Listen as Greg Leisz’s pedal steel pines like a lonely wind in "Waking Memory," its little message of travel and longing making it one of the more thematically central and emotionally affecting tunes on the album. Listen as The Section Quartet, featuring and led by Gorfain, musically provide a sense of strain and gravity to "Far End Of The Night," in a way that only chambered strings can ever do. On this song, that theme of lonesome travel recurs, the narrator marking slow time (hanging ominously, somehow appropriately, "like a noose") on some Topeka road, with only "static on the radio." Grant-Lee Phillips becomes the Virginia Creeper, but he does not wander alone.

As long as people live, especially when they live in places we tend to pass by on the way to some place noisier, there will be stories to tell and songs to sing like Grant-Lee Phillips crafts on Virginia Creeper. Pull up a chair or a car seat, sit back, revel in them.

9. Wilco/A Ghost Is Born

10. Idiot Pilot/Strange We Should Meet Here

The Rest of the Top 20:

11. Claro Intelecto/Neurofibro

(Three Essential Tracks: "Contact," "You Not Me," "Nobody")

12. Ben Kweller/On My Way

(Three Essential Tracks: "Hospital Bed," "On My Way," "Down")

13. The Snake The Cross The Crown/Mander Salis

(Three Essential Tracks: "Empires," "A Gathering Of Shades," "Echolalia")

14. Interpol/Antics

(Three Essential Tracks: "Evil," "NARC," "Take You On A Cruise")

15. Beastie Boys/To The 5 Boroughs

(Three Essential Tracks: "An Open Letter To NYC," "Ch-Check It Out," "Rhyme The Rhyme Well")

16. Moments In Grace/Moonlight Survived

(Three Essential Tracks: "The Blurring Lines Of Loss," "The Patient," "No Angels")

17. Swayzak/Loops From The Bergerie

(Three Essential Tracks: "Then There's Her," "Another Way," "Speak Easy")

18. Stereolab/Margerine Eclipse

(Three Essential Tracks: "The Man With 100 Cells," "...sudden stars," "Feel And Triple")

19. Roni Size/Return To V

(Three Essential Tracks: "Sing," "Bump'N'Grind," "No More")

20. Morrissey/You Are The Quarry

(Three Essential Tracks: "I'm Not Sorry," "First Of The Gang To Die," "How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel?")

Other Strong Releases (random order): Faithless/No Roots, Elbow/Cast Of Thousands, Luomo/The Present Lover, Lucien-N-Luciano/Blind Behaviour, Beanfield/Seek, Secret Machines/Now Here Is Nowhere, The Emperor Machine/Aimee Tallulah Is Hypnotised, Elevator Division/Years, The Music/Welcome To The North, 60 Channels/Covert Movements, U.N.K.L.E./Never Never Land, Styrofoam/Nothing’s Lost, Ron Sexsmith/Retriever, Rainstick Orchestra/The Floating Glass Key In The Sky, Ezekiel Honig/People Places & Things, Liars Academy/Demons, Efterklang/Tripper, Chevelle/This Type Of Thinking Could Do Us In, The Trashcan Sinatras/weightlifting, R.E.M./Around The Sun, Random Factor/Convergence, Lali Puna/Faking The Books, Psapp/Tiger My Friend, Zeromancer/ZZYZX, Old Devil Moon/Midnight And Bright, Circlesquare/Pre-Earthquake Anthem, Abra Moore/Everything Changed, Lamb/Between Darkness & Wonder, Igloo/Igloo, The Tragically Hip/In Between Evolution, Tonya Donelly/Whiskey Tango Ghosts, Aeroc/Viscous Solid, VAST/Nude, The Moontrane Conductors/Empty Sea, Juana Molina/Tres Cosas, Savath & Savalas/Apropa’t, Further Seems Forever/Hide Nothing, Slicker/We All Have A Plan, The Cardigans/Long Gone Before Daylight, Duran Duran/Astronaut, Rogue Wave/Out Of The Shadow, Skalpel/Skalpel, As One/Out Of The Darkness, Lori Scacco/Circles, Pink Grease/This Is For Real, Pedro The Lion/Achilles Heel, I:Cube/3, Tears For Fears/Everybody Loves A Happy Ending, Nonpoint/Recoil, Tara Jane O’Neil/You Sound, Reflect, Chroma Key/Graveyard Mountain Home, Kevin Moore/Ghost Book Soundtrack, Vanessa Carlton/Harmonium, Felix da Housecat/Devin Dazzle & The Neon Fever, Now It’s Overhead/Fall Back Open, Name Taken/Hold On, High Contrast/High Society, Strategy/Drumsolo’s Delight, Franz Ferdinand/Franz Ferdinand, Sarah Harmer/All Of Our Names, Washington Social Club/Catching Looks, The Reputation/To Force A Fate, No Motiv/Daylight Breaking, The Velvet Teen/Elysium, Melissa Auf der Maur/Auf Der Maur, The Exies/Head For The Door, Robert Miles & Trilok Gurtu/Miles Gurtu, Zero 7/When It Falls, Capitol K/Happy Happy; Mice Parade/Obrigado Saudade, Starsailor/Silence Is Easy, The Get Up Kids/Guilt Show, The Finn Brothers/Everyone Is Here, Peter Searcy/Couch Songs, Incubus/A Crow Left Of The Murder, The Crystal Method/Legion Of Boom, Local H/Whatever Happened To P.J. Soles?, The Pale/Gravity Gets Things Done, Janet Jackson/Damita Jo, Gingersol/Eastern, The Church/Forget Yourself, Statistics/Leave Your Name, Sixtoo/Chewing On Glass & Other Miracle Cures, The Cooper Temple Clause/Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames Break Loose, Clara Hill/Restless Times, The Prodigy/Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, Juliana Hatfield/In Exile Deo, Orgy/Punk Statik Paranoia, Project e.l.f./Project e.l.f.; The Walkmen/Bows And Arrows, TV On The Radio/Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, Sondre Lerche/Two Way Monologue, Helmet/Size Matters

Glossary of Artists (2004)

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