Pages tagged “best of 2008”

Paste:Local Chicago weighs in on this year's best music from the Windy City.

Last week, The New York Times unveiled its "10 Best Books of 2008" list, and seven of the selections were published by Random House imprint Alfred A. Knopf. The sweep is not exactly surprising, as Knopf sits at the upper echelon of literary publishers; but if you take this 7/10 domination and include the ownership that came with the recent restructuring of Random House, two of the remaining three are from the Knopf/Doubleday Publishing Group.

Picking a “best of” list reminds me of all of the philosophical barbs one runs into when judging music. Instead of expounding upon what makes up my definition of a "top album," I’ll keep things simple.

Yay! Best of 2008 Lists! Ok, so I found out Hail Mega Boys was released in '07, but I'm leaving it on the list anyway.

1. Annuals - Such Fun (Red Ink)
2. Cloud Cult - Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) (Earthology / Rebel Group)
3. J. Roddy Walston & The Business - Hail Mega Boys (Morphius)
4. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (Mute)
5. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark (New West)
6. The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound (Side One Dummy)
7. Slow Runner - SHIV!
8. The Cool Kids - The Bake Sale (Chocolate Industries)
9. Spiritualized - Songs in A & E (Universal / Spaceman)
10. Girl Talk - Feed The Animals (Illegal Art)

Here's the list of my top albums of 2008, which I begrudgingly cobbled together after being told, no, I was not allowed to vote for last year's Everybodyfields album in all ten spots. Don't believe anyone who tells you music journalists have it easy! Life is hard.

“Best Music Scene.” It’s a slightly absurd claim and unprovable to boot. But before you fire off that missive defending [insert your city here] as more vital and creative than Denton, allow me to refine the argument: Denton, Texas, is simply the paradigm of a healthy music community.

Check out Paste's top 50 albums of 2008...

The sound at Park City, Utah’s Sundance House is terrible, and a chunk of the crowd is more interested in chattering and munching on hors d’oeuvres than paying attention to the duo on guitar and piano, even if it is the debut performance of what will eventually be known as She & Him—the collaboration between indie-music darling M. Ward and movie star Zooey Deschanel. This 2007 Sundance Festival audience doesn’t get high points for attentiveness—they’ve already pretty much ignored Glen Hansard of The Frames playing alongside Markéta Irglová, his co-star in the buzzing film Once.

Check out Paste's top 10 television shows of 2008...

Check out Paste's top 10 video games of 2008...

Let’s be frank: any best-of list says more about the people who
 assembled it than it does about a particular year in music. In 2008, “crystal” bands—Crystal Stilts, Crystal Antlers and Crystal 
Castles—took over the “hottest band name” title from “wolf” bands. Everyone from Lil Wayne to Kanye West discovered the joys of Auto-Tune (thanks, T-Pain). Many of us discovered Balearic Beat, courtesy of revivalists like Quiet Village and Air France. The absence of these trends from our 2008 year-end list proves that we’re not simply trying to deliver a handy summary or highlight reel. We don’t want to hop on every trend, nor do we want to buck them just to be contrarian.

For the second consecutive year, Paste asked a constellation of authors to share with us the books they admired most in the past year. We offer their thoughts, musings and endorsements with no further prologue—after all, you’ve got some reading to do.