Fatboy Slim - "The Rockafeller Skank"

Ladies and gentlemen, the song that topped The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics poll in 1998. 

Father John Misty - "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)"

I've been thinking about Father John Misty's sophomore release I Love You, Honeybear ever since it came out, which is now almost exactly a year ago. A concept album about Mr. Misty (a.k.a. Josh Tillman) getting married, the record ought to be in my wheelhouse -- I'm unabashedly pro-love -- and yet Honeybear never quite clicked with me.

Why not? I gave the album a new bunch of spins lately after its strong showing in Pazz & Jop to maybe figure out why. Ultimately, I think Honeybear begins and ends beautifully, but the middle section sags under the weight of too many fussily-arranged tunes. It's a marriage album in which Tillman's cleverness sometimes outpaces his melodies or his insights. At its best, the record resembles something that Eels would do -- E has a penchant for utilizing concepts to give a collection of songs a structuring device -- but Honeybear's candid acknowledgment of the panic/excitement involved in saying "I do" is a bit too conceptual for my taste. Sentimentality can be wince-inducing, but so can manic, self-conscious irony.

That said, there are plenty of stunning tracks. "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)" is one of them, and this bit always, always, always kills me...

First time you let me stay the night despite your own rules 
You took off early to go cheat your way through film school 
You left a note in your perfect script
"Stay as long as you want"
And I haven’t left your bed since

2015 in Review: My Top 10 Albums of the Year

Now that The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll is out -- hey, I did pretty well in my predictions -- I guess I might as well reveal my Top 10 albums of 2015. This was my 16th year of voting in the poll, which absolutely blows my mind. 

1. Jamie xx, In Colour 
Not since Moby's Play has an electronic dance album felt so spiritual, alive, cohesive, resonant, human. 

2. James McMurtry, Complicated Game 
Portraits of long marriages and old souls trying to find whatever contentment they can in ho-hum lives. Just think how down in the mouth James McMurtry is going to get if a Republican wins the White House.

3. Tame Impala, Currents 
Kevin Parker decides to put away the guitars (mostly), ends up making his most rocking and lovely album anyway.

4. Kurt Vile, B'lieve I'm Goin Down  
The critical consensus seems to be that Vile's new one is kinda like his last one. I have no problem with this.

5. Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly
The Album of the Year from the Artist of the Moment is also a great fame's-a-bitch record, Lamar's complaints about celebrity folding nicely into his anxious, thoughtful looks on race and poverty. Still, I hope he extricates himself from Dre.

6. Jason Isbell, Something More Than Free 
Like Vile, Isbell is being discounted a bit because his new album isn't the breakthrough of his last one. But the sturdy, melancholy tales of Something More Than Free suggests that, sobriety now well in hand, he still has tunes flowing out of him.

7. Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment, Surf 
As a messy, poetic exploration of urban life, Surf beats Chi-Raq. Funnier and more humane, too.

8. Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog  
My review after I saw the movie:

HEART OF A DOG: Laurie Anderson hems, haws and digresses around the husband she dearly misses. Lou Reed ends up having the last word anyway.

— Tim Grierson (@TimGrierson) October 16, 2015

The accompanying album only heightens the poignancy, provoking you to make pictures in your mind and imagine Anderson is speaking directly to you.

9. Grimes, Art Angels
Not since -- what, Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine? -- has an artist so successfully junked her first stab at a new record and come up with something so challenging and yet so fun, as if this was how it was always supposed to sound.

10. Pusha T, King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude
Released terribly late in December, King Push hasn't fully revealed itself to me. But I couldn't stop digging Pusha T's reliably steely, brutal songs. Added bonus: No Chris Brown on this album.

To see my full ballot, which includes my list of the year's best singles, go here. (Hint: Drake and the Weeknd dominated the radio, as well as my list.)

2015 Pazz & Jop Poll Predictions

I'm still mortified by how poorly I did predicting last year's Pazz & Jop Top 10. (I really didn't think Black Messiah's complicated musical landscapes would have had sufficient time to sink in with enough voters to carry the day.) Nonetheless, I feel more confident in this year's guesses, mostly because I don't think No. 1 is in doubt at all....

1. Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly
2. Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
3. Grimes, Art Angels
4. Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell 
5. Father John Misty, I Love You, Honeybear
6. Jamie xx, In Colour
7. Sleater-Kinney, No Cities to Love
8. Tame Impala, Currents 
9. Adele, 25
10. Carly Rae Jepsen, Emotion 

Other albums I considered for the Top 10: Vulnicura, Summertime '06 and The Epic. We'll know how well I did when The Village Voice releases the poll results on Wednesday. I'm expecting To Pimp a Butterfly to win by a large margin. As for the singles poll, I'm torn between Drake's "Hotline Bling" or Adele's "Hello," but my gut says "Hotline Bling."

(Update: The results are out now and, yes, I nailed the top album and top single. I got eight of the Top 10 albums correct, overestimating Tame Impala's and Adele's chances and not giving enough credence to Vince Staples and Kamasi Washington. Overall, I'm surprised by the relatively soft showing of Ms. Adkins: 25 was a paltry No. 35, while "Hello" tied for No. 9. My ballot is here.)

Kendrick Lamar - "These Walls"

It's only late September, but if I had to make a prediction about the front-runner for Pazz & Jop, I'd have to go with Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. (Of course, considering how poorly I did with my last Pazz & Jop forecast, maybe you should ignore me.)

"These Walls" hasn't been released yet as a single from the album, which surprises me. Smooth, melodic but no less lyrically complex than Pimp's other tracks, "These Walls" is a change-of-pace highlight of the disc, moving between sex and incarceration to examine different types of "walls."
 

2014 Pazz & Jop Poll Predictions

Almost 30 years after its release, Brothers in Arms is going to win Pazz & Jop. The War on Drugs' third album, Lost in the Dream, is my pick to top the annual music critics poll, whose results will be announced on January 14. I like Lost in the Dream -- its pretty guitar textures get to me when I'm in a certain mood -- but it mostly reminds me of Dire Straits' 1985 record, which I would describe as "elegant" and "accomplished" and "sophisticated" and "dreamlike" and "perfectly fine but also a bit much." (By the way, Brothers in Arms landed at No. 20 on that year's Pazz & Jop poll, just barely beating "Money for Nothing" guest vocalist Sting's first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles.)

If Lost in the Dream does win, it'll be the first time a straight-up indie-rock band won the poll since Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. The War on Drugs' strongest challenger will be St. Vincent, the only good thing that's ever come out of the Polyphonic Spree.

Here are the rest of my predictions for the Top 10....

1. The War on Drugs, Lost in the Dream
2. St. Vincent, St. Vincent
3. Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 2
4. D'Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah
5. FKA twigs, LP1
6. Taylor Swift, 1989
7. Beck, Morning Phase
8. Angel Olsen, Burn Your Fire for No Witness 
9. Aphex Twin, Syro 
10. Sharon Van Etten, Are We There  

I'll talk about my own ballot once the Pazz & Jop results go live Wednesday. But for now, I'll just say that two of the albums I'm guessing hit the Top 10 made my own album list.

(Update: Wow, I was wrong. I assumed that the very late arrival of Black Messiah at the end of the year would keep it from topping the poll. But D'Angelo is indeed your winner. I got the top five right, but in a different order. Overall, I was correct about seven of the top 10, which isn't too shabby. My own ballot is here.)

Deafheaven - "Irresistible"

Deafheaven's Sunbather almost made my Top 10 of 2013; it's a beautifully punishing metal album. But the track I picked is its gentlest: a piano-driven instrumental called "Irresistible." Which is an apt title.

2013 Pazz & Jop Poll Predictions

Next week, The Village Voice announces the results of its annual Pazz & Jop music poll. (Amazingly, this is my 14th year of submitting a ballot.) Last year, I did a pretty impressive job of predicting the Top 10 in the albums list. So, let's try again this year.....

1. Kanye West, Yeezus
2. Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City
3. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
4. Arcade Fire, Reflektor
5. Lorde, Pure Heroine
6. Disclosure, Settle
7. Chance the Rapper, Acid Rap
8. HAIM, Days Are Gone
9. The National, Trouble Will Find Me
10. My Bloody Valentine, MBV

If I'm right and Kanye wins, it'll be the fourth time he's topped the poll, tying him for the most times by any artist in the poll's 40-year history. (Bob Dylan has won Pazz & Jop three four times. Outkast, the Clash and Elvis Costello have won it twice.) The published results are expected to be live by January 15. I'll talk about my own Top 10 then.

(Update: Well, the list is out now. I got six of the Top 10 right, including the top three in order. I just had a feeling that Beyoncé was going to be a surprise entry -- I wish I'd had the guts to include it. And I thought about putting in Wakin on a Pretty Daze as well but went with Trouble Will Find Me instead. Dumb, dumb, dumb. If you're interested in seeing my ballot, it's right here.)

Arctic Monkeys - "Do I Wanna Know?"

My Pazz & Jop ballot has been sent in. (The results will be out in early January.) I'll reveal my picks then, but for now here's a song that just missed my Top 10.

Disclosure - "F for You"

With the Pazz & Jop ballot deadline on Christmas Eve, I'm currently spending a lot of my time going back through the year's best albums to decide which ones are going to make the cut. I feel pretty confident one of them will be Settle, the debut album from Disclosure, a duo made up of brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence. Just about everything on Settle grabs the ear, but today I'm really feeling "F for You."

Jason Isbell - "Elephant"

Southeastern will definitely be making my Pazz & Jop ballot. It's Jason Isbell's most consistent post-Drive-By Truckers album, but it took me a while to get into it. These songs initially felt a little too blandly "confessional" for my taste, but a few spins in the car and a little concentration made me realize how touching and pointed so many of these stripped-down tracks were. Take "Elephant," which is purely fictional, as far as I know, but has such rich, precise detail that it seems based on fact. Regardless, it rips your guts out.

Ashley Monroe - "Used"

I'm in catch-up mode, listening to acclaimed albums from earlier in the year that slipped through the cracks in preparation for my Pazz & Jop ballot in December. Two albums I'm especially concentrating on at the moment are Ashley Monroe's Like a Rose and Kacey Musgraves' Same Trailer Different Park. Two young, promising country artists, and I'm quite enjoying both records. Maybe I'll pick something from Musgraves next week, but for now I'm going with Monroe's sad, sweet "Used." (I was tempted to go with the very good "You Ain't Dolly [And You Ain't Porter]" but changed my mind at the last minute. If John Prine decides to do another In Spite of Ourselves-style duet album, he needs to cover that sucker.)

2012 Pazz & Jop Poll Predictions

The Village Voice is about to reveal the results of its annual Pazz & Jop music poll. So, for the hell of it, my predictions for the Top 10 on the album list....

1. Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
2. Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city
3. Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel...
4. Japandroids, Celebration Rock
5. Grimes, Visions
6. Tame Impala, Lonerism
7. Bruce Springsteen, Wrecking Ball
8. Alt-J, An Awesome Wave
9. Miguel, Kaleidoscope Dream 
10. Swans, The Seer 

I can't wait to see how completely wrong I was.

Santigold - "The Keepers"

Here's why you should never put together your Pazz & Jop ballot while suffering from a low-grade fever. While compiling my 10 picks for Best Singles, I typed in Santigold's "Disparate Youth," my mind so foggy that only after I hit "Send" on the online ballot did I realize I meant to put "The Keepers," the second single from Master of My Make-Believe. Somehow, I got the two titles mixed in my brain, which would be bad enough. What's even worse is that I may, in fact, have actually put in "The Keepers." (It's all such a blur I can't even remember now.) As someone who takes this stuff inordinately seriously, well, it's incredibly embarrassing. Anyway, here's the song that I meant to include on my ballot. We'll find out next week, when the full results are announced, whether I actually did.

Yuck - "Shook Down"

Yuck's self-titled debut came out just a little over a year ago. It made my Pazz & Jop ballot, which prompted a colleague to comment, "I'd rather just listen to Dinosaur Jr." To which I'll respond with a snippet of Robert Christgau's assessment of them: "These four Brits are compared to so many '80s-'90s bands you should figure they don't sound much like any of them." He then goes on to compare them to Sleigh Bells and Best Coast, two bands I really love. Here's "Shook Down," which doesn't sound all that much like any of those aforementioned groups.

TV on the Radio - "Killer Crane"

For me, one of the biggest shocks of this year's Pazz & Jop music poll was how low TV on the Radio's Nine Types of Light ranked. Not even in the Top 40 -- ouch. I'm not saying it's a masterpiece -- it didn't make my album ballot either -- but I had assumed that TVOTR were one of those groups (like Wilco or Radiohead) whose every album would at least make a decent showing in P&J. Apparently, people just didn't dig Nine Types of Light. Too bad: Here's the great track "Killer Crane" from the disc.

My Pazz and Jop Ballot; or, Defending 'Goblin'

Even though it's been six years since Robert Christgau got fired from The Village Voice, I remain positively giddy each January when his creation, the Pazz & Jop music poll, comes out. This year's edition went live today, and count me as one of the people who assumed that Bon Iver's self-titled second disc was gonna win the album poll. Boy, was I off: It finished in ninth. The actual winner was tUnE-yArDs (the brainchild of Merrill Garbus) and her second disc, w h o k i l l. It was the first time a woman has topped the poll since Lucinda Williams' 1998 record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. That was also the last time women occupied the top two spots: Williams narrowly edged out The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and this year Garbus slid by PJ Harvey's career-comeback Let England Shake.

Of course, Pazz & Jop isn't the same without Christgau's year-defining essay that always used to accompany the results. (Last week's "Rock & Roll &" essay is more about his best-of list than the music year in general, although it's definitely a must-read.) I've been contributing to P&J since 2000 -- my No. 1 album that year was And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out -- and while I miss Christgau's hands-on stewardship of the poll (although he still does contribute a ballot) I think this is by and large still the definitive countdown of the best in music.

This brings us to my ballot. A focus on film reviewing in recent years -- and a concentration on covering rock music thanks to my work at About.com and Revolver -- has made it a little tougher to write about all the albums and songs that matter to me on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, so I figured I'd take a moment to highlight some of my picks. But probably, I should just spend my time defending my No. 1 album of 2011, Tyler, the Creator's Goblin, a lowly No. 98 on the album chart that contained votes from 700 music critics. Even Metallica and Lou Reed's universally loathed Lulu charted higher.

Released in May -- just two months after the artist born Tyler Okonma turned 20 -- Goblin was impossible to judge without also discussing the man behind its making. The leader of Odd Future, a buzz-heavy L.A. rap collective, Tyler, the Creator has been criticized for his homophobic and misogynistic antics that he's been unable to defend in any meaningful way. Goblin is a treasure trove of similarly disgusting sentiments, and he and his posse of Odd Future rappers -- with the possible exception of Frank Ocean, whose Nostalgia, Ultra suggested he might be the one guy in this group who has a healthy amount of empathy for other human beings -- do little to convince me that these dudes aren't straight-up jerks.

And yet... in ways that recall Never Mind the Bollocks or Appetite for Destruction, Goblin is a record I find fascinating and gripping in almost perfectly indirect proportion to how much I like the artist personally. Goblin is Tyler's second album -- his first was Bastard -- and it's been compared to the unapologetic rage of Eminem's early records. (As Brad Wete noted in his Entertainment Weekly review, Goblin really deserves the title My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy even more than Kanye's 2010 record does.) Tyler's anger at those around him -- music critics, Bruno Mars, kids who grew up rich, Bill O'Reilly, girls who won't sleep with him, girls who will sleep with him but give him diseases -- may be partly in his head, but as a producer and a record-maker, he knows how to turn his album into a paranoid, claustrophobic hall of mirrors in which his misanthropy starts to develop its own kind of bizarre inner logic.

But despite his monstrously ugly persona, Tyler succeeds in making his shallow complaints compelling. He mourns the friends he's lost, he pines for the one good girl he managed to come across -- naturally, it's his fault that she got back with her old boyfriend -- and when he talks about killing himself, his freak-show keyboards and jittery samples give the boasts a frightening realism. (Even when it's stooping to mere shock value, Goblin turns out to be rather effectively shocking.) And while he doesn't want you calling his music horrorcore, there's an undeniably nightmarish quality to it. But that doesn't mean it's monotonous: Only after weeks of slowly digesting Goblin and then putting it away for a while did I realize how the songs' hooks had stuck with me. No question his petulance ties the (admittedly overlong) disc together, but his beats -- sometimes merciless, other times tricky, occasionally haunting -- are a close second.

If Goblin was a movie, it might be Rampart or There Will Be Blood, starring a thoroughly detestable main character who we don't like but whom we come to understand. And so we have yet another musician whose personal behavior is repellent but also fuels the vibrant, upsetting and, yes, sometimes funny art that he makes. You wouldn't want your daughter dating this creep, but on Goblin he lets you enter his dark twisted fantasy. Just remember it's a fantasy -- or at least I hope it is.

2010 pazz & jop

I'm still digesting all the information, but this year's Pazz & Jop results are now live. As I guessed, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy won in a blowout. After that? I thought The Suburbs would be No.2, but that spot went to LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening. My ballot is here. (Spoiler Alert: On the album side, I'm Mr. Consensus. On the singles side, I'm very much on my own.)

2009 pazz & jop

I didn't say it out loud, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but I correctly predicted that Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion would win this year's Pazz & Jop music poll. I don't love the record as much as my colleagues do, clearly, but looking back on my review of the album from almost a year ago, I see that even I could tell that it was a step up for a band I think is generally overrated but admirable in its ambitions.

As for the singles chart, I never bothered making a prediction. But I still say that "Empire State of Mind" is a great Alicia Keys chorus weighed down by a so-so Jay-Z rap. (His "On to the Next One" off the same album is a far superior single.)

And what about my ballot? You can see it here. It follows my usual pattern of being more closely aligned with the consensus on the albums side. My favorite songs tend not to be a lot of other people's favorite songs -- I suspect that may be somewhat intentional. I love songs that feel personal rather than shared. In fact, three of my singles picks didn't show up on a single other critic's ballot: an Eels tune, a dance remix of Christian Bale's Terminator Salvation on-set freak out, and (to my mind) the standout track on Neko Case's acclaimed album. I think anybody with an open mind would enjoy the hell out of all three. But it don't worry me if you disagree.

about those pazz & jop commenters regarding beyonce's "single ladies"

I haven't sent in comments to Pazz & Jop for a few years, but I still enjoy reading other people's. This year's batch contained a few people knocking Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," mentioning that while they loved the song, they found its underlying message repugnant.

I've long complained about how cynical and alien Beyonce comes across when she attempts to evoke universal emotions, but I've never found "Single Ladies" to be about (in the words of one commenter) "one's duty to get married." Rather than being some "retrograde" (another commenter's opinion) sentiment, I think the song is in the grand tradition of "Respect," "I Will Survive" and other female-empowerment anthems. The guy should have appreciated his woman, should have made some sort of commitment to her, but he chickened out -- he acted like a dog. So she's out the door, and she's bringing her friends with her.

People who know me will point out that "Respect" and "I Will Survive" are the sorts of songs that drive me crazy at weddings. They've become cliches now, no question about it. After the 1,000 wedding it's featured in, so will "Single Ladies." But for now, enjoy it -- and don't feel guilty about it.