Monthly Mixtape

August: Top Five Records

You can’t love pop music without keeping High Fidelity in one of the climate controlled places of your heart. John Cusack is the essential everyman (I just quoted a couple hundred movie reviews) and anything his characters believe or say is easy to identify with on some level. His constant top fiving throughout the movie has been copy-catted by thousands of would-be hipsters, aspiring indie darlings, and breakfast-clubbers, myself included. So, here is my desert island top five records, the five albums I could not live without or in this case, imagine living without. Since I don’t have the cyberclout to store five entire albums in the ether I’ll stick with ten songs, picking two from each album.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots – The Flaming Lips
Do You Realize? & Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell

There are many ways to peak as an artist. You can do it without anybody knowing it (like Emily Dickinson), you can do it on your first try (like Weezer), you can have a body of work so well loved that you never actually peak, you’re always considered golden (like The Beatles). With Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips peaked at a time nobody expected. In the music industry, a band doesn’t usually make their best album on the tenth try. The Flaming Lips must be the exception that proves the rule, because this is one of the greatest albums ever made.

Turn on the Bright Lights – Interpol

NYC & Leif Erikson

Turn on the Bright Lights was the album that shook me from the confines of “Christian” music. It was not the first “secular” music I heard, but it was the first full album I listened to on repeat for weeks, rather than random mixes from some tape of songs I recorded off the radio. Interpol’s music was coming from places I identified with deep down, but never expected to understand through a medium like music. This album turned my world upside down in a lot of ways.

Ok Computer – Radiohead

Let Down & No Suprises

Putting Ok Computer on this list probably deserves the classic line from Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity, “What’s next? The Beatles?” Radiohead is without a doubt the Fab Four of the 21st century and Ok Computer is their Sgt Peppers. However, unlike the Beatles, Radiohead is not a slam dunk band that everybody likes or even claims to like. They can be off-putting to a new listener, but if you hear the one right song, it’s like somebody threw some switch in your brain, and you suddenly become a die-hard fan. I didn’t like their music until I heard Let Down, which is still my favorite Radiohead song.

Funeral – The Arcade Fire

Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) & Wake Up

The Arcade Fire exceeded any listener’s expectations by releasing a note perfect debut album devoid of a single weak filler track, pretentious lyric or obnoxious guitar solo. Full of well-arranged instrumentation, thought provoking lyrics and passionate vocalization, The Arcade Fire’s debut was a joy to hear. The title Funeral was apt, as four of the five members of the band lost someone in their family during the recording of the album. As a result many of the lyrics confronted the themes intertwined with death and loss in ways that were sometimes hopeful but never sugar-coated, lifting an already excellent album into the stratosphere.

Figure Eight – Elliott Smith

Somebody That I Used to Know & Can’t Make a Sound

Elliott Smith has a reputation as a depressing singer-songwriter. And I guess there’s no denying that (he did kill himself). But his music has always been so well-written and executed that I usually get a pick-me-up from it. His lyrics are so good that I’ve said on more than one occasion that if you imagine that Bob Dylan could carry a tune without a bucket and had a lot more angst and you’d be imagining Elliott Smith. On Figure Eight Elliott moved beyond the simple acoustic setup of previous albums, adding electric guitars, drums, and keyboards on nearly all the tracks. Like Bob Dylan, when Elliott plugged in, he did some of his best work.