Top 5 Albums of the College.

Okay, I swear I’m just gonna blow this one out real fast. No liner notes, nuthin (Update: now featuring liner notes!). Just boom boom boom. Go–[no particular order]

1. Cursive’s Domestica
   I had this one day that kind of sent me soaring off in new musical directions. It was the end of 2000, and I had a final for my film sound post-production class. At some point I realized I had locked myself out of my on-campus shared-studio-style apartment, so I walked back to Park, where my acquaintance and fellow final-taker Jay L. was still hanging around. Hearing my predicament, he basically was like, I gotcha, and took me out to lunch, which doesn’t seem like a big thing but I thought was exceedingly generous (somehow I didn’t have my wallet either? I feel like he paid for me? Or maybe it was just the generosity of offering to fill up the time until my roommate would be home, coming from a guy I liked and worked with on a TV show but was by no means friends with. At any rate, I totally associate this day with Jay’s sharing nature.) On the way to the diner (Manos–the days of going to the State diner had passed), at the diner, and on the way back to campus, all we talked about was music. Mostly, he talked and I listened. (In other words, for those of you who’ve been subject to relentless music ramble/oppression/educational lecture from me, I was in the other seat.) He turned me on to Cursive, who I think I’d heard of through starting to get into Bright Eyes, but had not yet heard, At the Drive-In, and probably a dozen other bands that didn’t stick as well. On the way back to campus I heard “Ceilings Crack” by Cursive for the first time–”Passed out in your yard!…”–Jay explaining that the song caused him to make sure he’s drunk each Bastille Day–I first heard the Cursive story, of the release of the first album, the breakup as Tim Kasher left and got married, then came back…Of course, Jay and I also bonded over the Beach Boys. For the rest of the year, we’d see each other and kind of go nod, nod. I think somewhere I have a picture of him on Fountain Day with Portland Native, he’s wearing a vintage Beach Boys shirt.
   So. Point is, I bathed in Cursive for the rest of college, mostly Domestica. It was catchier than Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, and for some reason I didn’t get The Storms of Early Summer until last year. Domestica is pretty much perfect. It’s got the Cursive-cohesive story holding the songs together (it’s a breakup album, perhaps THE breakup album as far as I’m concerned, although I feel like recently I read somewhere that Mr. Kasher at some point said he saw the couple sticking together in the end). Great, great lyrics that make the physical and figurative battleground and weapons come scarily to life, and some things that are just awful, awful to imagine saying to someone you love(d) (“To prove you still feel/you only feel sorry for yourself”…yeah, I was trying to think of more and pretty much any line on the album works.) It’s not so relentless in its rocking that you’re burned out by the end, but there aren’t really any “slow” songs per se. My favorite (with about eight others coming in close second) is “The Radiator Hums.” Also, randomly, this is the album that made me start paying attention to drums.
2. Bright Eyes — Fevers and Mirrors
   I read about Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst in a magazine that was sitting around at Portland Native’s house. No idea what magazine, I think I’d never heard of it before and haven’t since. I’m not sure what intrigued me, but it was basically this kid who was about my age, who appears so nervous on (very small) stage that he can barely sing, that his voice comes out all tremolous. Whatever it was, I hit the napster (hell yeah napster.) and downloaded most of Fevers and Mirrors. It actually took some time for me to fully get into. I loved “Movement of a Hand” for a quite a while without getting much into the rest, then “Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh” and “A Scale, A Mirror, and These Indifferent Clocks” fell into place. Eventually I really liked the whole thing, though I prefered the more traditional-sounding ones to more…I dunno, different-tempo’d? ”When the Curious Girl Realizes She is Under Glass” or “Sunrise, Sunset.” If I listened objectively now, I’d probably pick out “An Attempt to Tip the Scales” or “Something Vague.” “Something Vague” and “Haligh” definitely hold some forever-sway, though, due just to being so fucking crushing and time-travely. I think I learned the chords to about half the album; every time I hear “Haligh” I’m sitting up against a car in the parking lot of the Oakwoods in LA, waiting for some people to get their shit together to go camping at Joshua Tree (a story unto itself), when I grabbed either Kurt’s guitar or my own and for some reason plonked out  and sang “Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh” note-perfect. There were maybe two people there, half-listening, maybe it was just Jimmy BigHead. I’ve never done it as well since. Apparently I still had my pipes in LA ‘01; I think I did something similar with “Something Vague” in the living room of MP and Richard From Home Depot In The Bronx (though naturally MP also played his own song, which was just as good…) So yeah, it certainly says something about my, er, emotional disposition during college to put this one on the list, but it’s undeniable. I’ve lost touch a bit, but for half a decade or so there, it was really nice to age in tandem with Mr. Oberst as he wrote the soundtrack to my life.
3. Neutral Milk Hotel — In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
   Yeah, so what hasn’t been said? Thanks, Eli for an IM away message that put me onto them. Thanks, Mr. Mangum, for providing one of the only parts of my senior film I’m actually still immodestly proud of. Thanks, Shleigh (and my fellow Pollution Tour 2001 travelers) for tolerating me singing every word of this, drunk, at the top of my lungs as you propelled us swiftly, wind-blown, through the hills of South Dakota in the middle of the night. This album worked best for me by revealing itself slowly.
4. Grandaddy — The Sophtware Slump
   During a small period of college (say, half a semester or so) in which I got myself broken (figuratively), this album fixed me. It had help from the kindness of a stranger, and the listening ears of some real friends, but this album was my medicine for a while. Earlier that fall, Portland Native, Penny, and I had gone on a road trip to my house, where we stayed for a weekend in order to see Elliott Smith at the Recher in Towson. Grandaddy opened for him, and it was quite amazing. Not mind-blowing, like the Flaming Lips show I would see there a few years later, but really good and a little moving and surprising coming from an opening band I’d never heard of. (On my keychain I actually still keep an orange bottle opener that used to have the Grandaddy logo on it from that show.) There was a large video screen behind them, and it probably played different things, but the one I remember looked basically like the cover of The Sophtware Slump except without the lettering, and with digitally-animated deer bounding gracefully across. This very well could’ve been during “So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky,” a song that played a large part in my healing process. Basically during that time in which I felt dumb to the world, I could put on that or “Hewlett’s Daughter” and feel five times better.
   That, of course, puts it up near contention, but I’m sure other albums consoled me at other times (Crooked Fingers, say). Thing is, The Sophtware Slump–and I still believe this today, comparing it against pretty and really good other Grandaddy albums–is fantastic. It’s a sound that seems so commonplace today–throw some bleeps and chirps over an otherwise lo-fi indie-rock song–but at the time was surprising and beautifully executed. There’s a wonderful, disturbing theme of nature vs. technology running throughout, not in an obvious “hey, save the trees down with cars” kind of way, but rather a strange, almost ridiculous way (“Broken Household Appliance National Forest”). Most of all, of course, there are great songs, regardless of what they sound like or are “about”–”The Crystal Lake,” the opener “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” “Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)…and so on. I’d really like to just mention “So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky” one more time. It’s worth it.
5. Tullycraft — City of Suburus
   Tullycraft! Seen before on this blog (albeit in my usual “I’m gonna totally write about this band from first album to last, super-thorough, give a primer kind of deal” and then I conk out after the third release way), this album is what started my love affair. Thanks to both Portland Native and Penny–they can duke it out amongst themselves as to who introduced me, who introduced them, although I believe it was a guy named Ian whose radio show Portland Native and I tried to revive before the Man shut us down who introduced them to Tullycraft. Again, like nothing I’d ever heard. My high school listening to Nirvana and Beck and the Halo Benders brushed me up against Calvin Johnson, but otherwise I didn’t know what twee, or as I like to think of Tullycraft (and how I heard it described then), softcore, was. I know I loved it instantly, wanted for extended periods to hear nothing but. (Portland Native coming through with several tapes full of stuff like Bunnygrunt, the Softies, All-Girl Summer Fun Band, and the like.) City of Suburus just put me in a good mood–no, it didn’t just do that, it made me feel like the world was all right, like my life was fucking great, it was like the soundtrack in a movie that makes the scene MORE than it would be with dialogue or no sound, except the movie was my life. Nearly every track on this is stellar–”8 Great Ways,” “Ticket Tonight,” and of course “Vacation in Christine, ND.” Seeing Tullycraft live last summer may have been the biggest fulfillment of an Always Wanted to See Them/Never Thought I Would dream I’ve ever had.

Bonuses:

1. Modest Mouse — The Lonesome Crowded West/This is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About/The Moon and Antarctica [One of these would be on the real list, but I couldn’t decide on just one of them; I got into mm in I think late 1999 thanks to both my friend Ash and the Spin 90 Greatest Albums of the 90s feature that mentioned them as a “see also” after There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and I thought, geez, I keep hearing this name, and now from Spin, okay, it’s time to find some…So, I think by the time I returned to Ithaca in late January I was insane for the first two full albums and in breathless anticipation of the third. All three certainly lived all over my college career, so they really deserve to be up there. Oh, and don’t forget Building Nothing Out of Something!
2. At the Drive-In — Relationship of Command
3. The Flaming Lips — The Soft Bulletin
4. Everything else released by Saddle Creek from 2000-2002. (I think at some point I had at least one album by every band on their roster, and every one was awesome.)
5. Both of the Elliott Smith compilation tapes made for me by Portland Native.
6. Jets to Brazil — Orange Rhyming Dictionary
7. Built to Spill — Keep it Like a Secret
8. 764-HERO — Weekends of Sound