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50: Xiu Xiu
Fabulous Muscles
[5RC]
With Fabulous Muscles, Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart made no attempt to resolve the apparent incongruities between his experimental leanings and his talent for concise pop hooks. Rather, he finally gave this tension the necessary room to blossom. Xiu Xiu's trademark mish-mash of gamelan clangs, overdriven drum machine beats, and new wave guitars was employed much more economically on Fabulous Muscles, affording the album a structural distinctness lost on previous efforts. But it was Stewart's voice that truly rose to the occasion, taking on traces of Morrissey's rich and astute self-awareness, and pushing it to an almost unbearable level of intensity. There will always be those who accuse Xiu Xiu of cheap theatrics and over-the-top catharsis, but Fabulous Muscles succeeds as both the band's most aggressive and its most accessible album to date, proving that sometimes you have to reach pretty far up your ass to find your heart strings. --Matt LeMay
Xiu.Xiu.-.Fabulous.Muscles.-.2004.-.MP3.CBR.192kbps.-.thedrizzl.rar 
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49: Max Richter
The Blue Notebooks
[FatCat]
My local library has a copy of The Blue Notebooks filed under "classical," which I guess makes about as much sense as any other tag they could have given it. Regardless of what you choose to call it, this is intensely powerful stuff, like raw emotion spilled out of fingertips onto the fingerboards of violins, the buttons and knobs of sequencers, and the keys of a grand piano. It's even a sort of concept album, the voice of a woman narrating as she hammers out a manuscript on a manual typewriter during the quiet interludes. Richter's expansive textures and sinewy string scores have a filmic quality that modern ears can't help imputing to them: "On the Nature of Daylight" plays while the hero walks through marble halls of learning as his best friend commits suicide across campus, and "Shadow Journal" is his late-night discovery of the perfect theorem. The Blue Notebooks sounds best when the sun is shining in other longitudes, when it can help beat back the dark of the night. --Joe Tangari
Max.Richter-The.Blue.Notebooks.(192kbit).rar
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48: Loretta Lynn
Van Lear Rose
[Interscope]
As potent a record as any of Rubin and Cash's work together, Van Lear Rose introduced a new generation to feisty Butcher Hollow native Loretta Lynn and added "producer" to Jack White's c.v. As Lynn updates her tales of divorcees, one-night stands, cheatin' men, and family bonds, White wrangles a posse of Detroit and Cincinnati musicians to put epic twang in the May-December hook-up single "Portland, Oregon", White Stripes ruckus in "Have Mercy", and barnstorming boogie in "Mrs. Leroy Brown". But Lynn sounds best-- vulnerable, heartbroken, steely, strong-willed-- on quieter numbers like "Trouble on the Line", the spoken "Little Red Shoes", and "Miss Being Mrs." Generous and good-hearted, closely observed but casual, they're less songs than late-in-life ruminations, coming from somewhere beyond the stage, the studio, or the record label. --Stephen M. Deusner
Loretta.Lynn.-.Van.Lear.Rose(Eghawk).rar
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47: Comets on Fire
Blue Cathedral
[Sub Pop]
Comets on Fire reinstated their scorched brain policy in 2004, tearing open pleasure centers with a stir of echoplex, pure volume... and gentleness? Yes. Blue Cathedral is the best representation of what began over two previous albums-- it aligns screaming, moustache sweat guitar riffs, and unintelligible vocal splatter with shimmering stretches of organ, tinkling pianos, and mood-drenched percussive splashes. It's heavy, as the absolutely maniacal break about 1:30 into opener "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" will prove. But on Cathedral the quintet-- as officially joined by Six Organs of Admittance raga interpreter Ben Chasny-- is equally committed to crafting meandering layers and trances. This singeing of their thoughtful passages with frontal lobe reverb flamethrowers like "The Antlers of the Midnight Sun" is where Comets of Fire get their true power. It's the dynamic that makes Blue Cathedral at once one of the year's heaviest and most artful releases. --Johnny Loftus
Comets.on.Fire.-.Blue.Cathedral.rar
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46: Iron & Wine
Our Endless Numbered Days
[Sub Pop]
Shake off your kudzu-confessional fantasies. Anyone first hearing former film-school prof Sam Beam's lo-fi 2002 debut could be forgiven for thinking they'd stumbled upon a reel of autochthonous, pre-Alan Lomax field recordings. The Creek Drank the Cradle panned across soft-focus Southern gothic scenes like a Civil War-era Zapruder tape, and Beam had the Robert E. Lee beard to match. But Brian Deck's limpid production on this year's follow-up Our Endless Numbered Days confirms old man Beamer is a living, breathing denizen of the aught-four. His songs about the Southland, let's-grow-old-together love and glowering Old Testament deities are as haunting as ever, but now they're sharper and more self-aware. The ostensibly autobiographical intimacy of songs like "Birds Stealing Bread" has scattered like a smoke ring into such Faulknerian parables as "Sodom, South Georgia" or "Cinder and Smoke". But you can still rock your firstborn to sleep with the delicate, melodic "Each Coming Night" and the transcendent back-porch philosophizing of "Passing Afternoon". The disc's freshly polished sound is a reminder that Beam, unlike the antebellum ghosts he evokes, can keep giving us new cinematic visions of the old South. This one's enough to cherish for now. --Marc Hogan
Iron.&.Wine.-.Our.Endless.Numbered.Days.vbr-emg.rar
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45: The Concretes
The Concretes
[Astralwerks]
This Swedish collective's previous release-- 2000's EP compilation Boy You Better Run Now-- is passable indie pop; no doubt a decent seller at Parasol or Darla but unlikely to even have made appearance on Sinister tape trees. Which makes this self-titled follow-up one of the year's more pleasant surprises. With its humid, hazy textures and woozy almost drunken arrangements, it's an indie pop album for the late-night taxi ride home rather than the pre-party cocktails. Sure, the record has a few handclaps and couple of Motown homages but they're weighed down by spoonfuls of Velvets-y lethargy and glassy-eyed consolation. Hmm, heartbreak, melancholia, and clinging to fleeting hopes-- perhaps this isn't so different from most indie pop after all. --Scott Plagenhoef
Concretes,.The.-.The.Concretes.(2004).(VBR).rar
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44: Camera Obscura
Underachievers Please Try Harder
[Merge]
I discovered 2004's most sublime, immediate pleasure by happy accident: Assuming Underachievers Please Try Harder was a new record by the other Camera Obscura, the noise rock ensemble (who knew there were two?), I was initially puzzled, and subsequently swooned, by this charming, urbane confection of Glaswegian indie-pop. It's lovelorn music that avoids the jagged peaks of teen angst and the well-worn grooves of adult heartbreak. Instead, it zeroes in on the young-adult nether realm between them, with canny specificity and a nuanced outlook that's bolstered by the balanced perspective of a male and female lyrical presence. And those melodies! Camera Obscura wears its influences so well you don't mind that one track sounds almost identical to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne", and the whole thing smacks of Glasgow's other twee-pop darlings. Dear Catastrophe Whostress? As far as I'm concerned, this is the latest Belle and Sebastian record. --Brian Howe
Camera.Obscura.-.Underachievers.please.try.harder.rar
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43: Scissor Sisters
Scissor Sisters
[Polydor]
The Scissor Sisters' first single-- a discofied remake of Pink Floyd's lumbering "Comfortably Numb"-- was a neat trick, but it could have cast them as Right Said Fred for the double-aughts. Instead, the Sisters lived down their novel image with their self-titled debut, a dozen tracks straddling everything from 70s disco and glam-rock to 90s house. They touted their pansexuality while squatting in Elton John's honky chateau, and behind the voguing were intelligent, inventive, and forthrightly emotional songs like "Laura" and "Take Your Mama", and "Mary". The album ends with the one-two punch of "It Can't Come Quickly Enough" and "Return to Oz"-- the former an ode to dreaming on the subway; the latter an epic evoking the New York club scene ravaged by drugs. Certainly, stronger stuff than your average pop album. --Stephen M. Deusner
Scissor.Sisters.192.Kbps.-.Full.Album.4.Bonus.Tracks.(By.Strippedmachine).rar
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42: DJ/Rupture
Special Gunpowder
[Tigerbeat6]
Jace Clayton's debut album declares revolt, struts through avenues strewn with police records, sees indifferent ghosts of enemies in tenement windows, and then stares at its bloodied hands with nostalgia. As DJ /Rupture, he previously took Timbaland's polyrhythmatics to its pan-ethnic logic on his baffling DJ mixes, Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite, where Borbetomagus' skree-jazz found good company with Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly". For Special, he eschewed turntables and told a fable about Babylon's fall and the delirium that followed with live sung and performed raggacore, spoken-word, hip-hop, noisecore and Appalachian-folk instrumentation. The entire record is a stylistic mess and veers into so many dazed tangents about the chaos that Clayton leaves us with an exhausted Sindhu Zagoren lamenting over a banjo, "I wish I were a mole in the ground." The blood still cannot be washed and the ears still ring. --Cameron Macdonald
DJ.Rupture.-.Special.Gunpowder.mp3.192.cbr.rar
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41: Les Savy Fav
Inches
[Frenchkiss]
It should be surprising to find a singles compilation on a year-end list, but for Les Savy Fav's legion of wild-eyed adherents, this is a no-brainer. Inches is the culmination of a seven-year project that collects both sides of nine 7'' singles onto one career-spanning disc. Les Savy Fav's consistently electrifying live performances indulge in a sort of beautiful atrophy, where Tim Harrington begins in poised malevolence, then sheds layers of clothing and self-esteem until his de-evolution to an engine of debased humanity is complete. Following suit, Inches is arrayed in reverse chronological order, beginning with the streamlined, dancey post-punk of Les Savy Fav's latest efforts, then steadily regressing to the rawboned chainsaw rock of their earliest. A yawn yawn yawn is just a hair away from a scream scream scream, and it's this tension between cosmopolitan cynicism and raging sincerity on which Inches holds its spin. --Brian Howe
Les.Savy.Fav.-.Inches-Andrey23.rar
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40: The Walkmen
Bows and Arrows
[Recordcollection]
When they're not busy playing gigs in the OC or driving Saturns through early childhood, The Walkmen still miraculously find the time to release phenomenal albums. With their follow-up to 2002's Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, The Walkmen continue to tighten their songwriting; Bows and Arrows is the rare album that's equal parts hook-y accessibility and multi-layered, slow-burn appreciation. They rock sparingly but with great efficacy when it's time to bring down the house, launching into high-octane, guitar-steered thrillers-- notably the desperate betrayal of "The Rat"-- whenever it suits them. They also fill the gaps with beautiful, drunken remembrances ("My Old Man", "138th Street") and hushed piano numbers ("Hang On Siobhan")-- tracks that are easy in their laid-back simplicity but slowly reveal themselves to be subtle, elegant compositions. If puzzling media exploits are what it takes to keep The Walkmen interested and to keep the albums coming, here's hoping the viewing public keep them hip-deep in 90210 clones for years to come. --Eric Carr
The.Walkmen.-.Bows.and.Arrows-ADVANCE.rar
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39: Cee-Lo
Cee-Lo Green Is a Soul Machine
[Arista]
Eccentricity in hip-hop died when Tupac hung up his bathrobe and shower cap and stopped dancing for Digital Underground. It returned when ex-Goodie Mob icon Cee-Lo Green did his first live show shirtless and donned a mohawk of swan feathers pasted to his knotty head. Cee-Lo proves his solo viability on Soul Machine and balances his artistic poles, dabbling in both southern bounce and starry-eyed soul with equal enthusiasm and talent. Rappers with pipes have many imitators but few peers, and Cee-Lo's scratchy vocals are merely amplied by his performer's spirit. Timbaland's drumline banga "I'll Be Around" will be a staple of every college formal grindfest, and "All Day Love Affair" steals a lesson plan from the Harold Melvin School of Performing Arts. With near flawless consistency, Cee-Lo's sophomore release is an instant classic. Who knows? Maybe he's actually that dancing robot from "The Gong Show" that caught on fire. --Jamin Warren
Cee-Lo-Cee-Lo_Green_is_the_Soul_Machine-ESC.tar
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38: Morrissey
You Are The Quarry
[Attack]
Steven Patrick Morrissey has always been a polarizing figure. He didn't help proponents this year by saddling us with Dido rhythm tracks and producer Jerry Finn's monochrome palette. But people criticized the production on The Smiths, too. With Morrissey, it's always about the assiduously ambiguous songwriting, and You Are the Quarry provides plenty of reasons to think of Moz kindly. For one, "The First of the Gang to Die" is Morrissey's finest pop song since "The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get". His effete croon is in career-best form, too. Whoever said Morrissey can't play an instrument never heard the way his voice subtly quivers as he delivers the name "Cromwell" in the riotous "Irish Blood, English Heart", his gloriously idiosyncratic timing in "I'm Not Sorry", or his show-stopping bathos in "Come Back to Camden". Gelignite aimed at sundry quarry-- America, England, boring pop stars, critics, and most all himself-- Morrissey reconfirms his lasting significance. --Marc Hogan
Morrissey.-.You.Are.The.Quarry.(VBR.Ripped.By.XaiN).rar
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37: Jóhann Jóhannsson
Virðulegu forsetar
[Touch]
Like a frozen bugle's subtly looped funeral call, Jóhann Jóhannsson's Virthulegu forsetar unfurls with mesmerizing, oscillating patience over one sublime hour. Recorded in a large church in Reykjavik, Iceland, the epic snow glide harnesses airy voices of 11 upfront brass players plus percussion, electronics, glockenspiel, bells, organ, and piano to birth a four-part tone poem and more goose-bumps than the most glacial Sigur Rós hailstorm. (In addition to the stereo CD, a hybrid DVD offers an engulfing high-resolution 96khz, 24 bit 5.1 surround mix, and a 96khz 24bit stereo mix.) While reactions are bound to be melodramatic (as they should be), in Jóhannsson notes to the piece he lists a number of sturdier things he kept in mind as he composed, including entropy, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, small birds, heat, space, energy, Nietszche's eternal recurrence, and Moebius strips. By bolstering his fragile sounds with these solid references Jóhannsson avoids the bathetic, adding intellectual complexity to an emotional, perfectly whispered symphony. --Brandon Stosuy
johann.johannsson.-.virthulegu.forsetar.-.320.aac.rar
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36: Excepter
KA
[Fusetron]
Experimental quintet Excepter built up a following among hardcore noise and improv followers playing house shows and streaming their live stuff for free online (in addition to issuing a few ultra-limited CDRs), but didn't really get their due as one of the most interesting collectives in rock-- and these days, that's saying a lot for a group of Brooklynites-- until Fusetron issued their debut 12-inch KA on CD this year, appending it with the Vacation EP. Suddenly, a private, surreal experience became exposed for the decidedly inclusive, emotionally detailed experience it could be. KA makes clear that chaos and ambiguity in music make for particularly potent active ingredients. Excepter are hardly the first band to illustrate that principal, but as of today, they are one of the best. More than that, they spin something beautiful out of the storm. --Dominique Leone
Excepter.-.KA.LAME-APS.rar
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35: Mirah
C'mon Miracle
[K]
Anyone who followed Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn's work prior to C'mon Miracle knew that she was capable of bombast, but few could have guessed just how explosive her usually introverted singer/songwriter material could be. On her Phil Elverum-produced third album, Mirah expands her sound and scope without sacrificing the immediate, personal allure of her songs. She offers thoughtful but impassioned political commentary masquerading as an effervescent pop masterpiece on "Jerusalem" but retains her characteristic tenderness on personal narratives like "Nobody Has to Stay" and the spare but deceptively sprawling "We're Both So Sorry". Even the album's sparsest moments are accentuated with enough subtle orchestral flourishes to distinguish Mirah from a myriad of similar artists, and her lyrics have arguably never been sharper or more directly poignant. Miracle's well-considered eclecticism and ornate arrangements never overshadow the fundamental strength of Mirah's songwriting, which has never been as cohesive or affecting. --David Moore
Mirah.-.C'mon.Miracle.rar
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34: Espers
Espers
[Locust]
The three core members of Espers-- Greg Weeks, Meg Baird, and Brooke Sietinsons-- together comprise a living, breathing lexicon of grassroots folk-rock, with the gentle spirits of such long-gone groups as Trader Horne, Shide & Acorn, and Agincourt hovering communally about their campfire. Garnished generously with luxurious strands of recorder, flute, autoharp and dulcimer, songs like "Flowery Noontide" and "Daughter" almost sound as though they were channeled rather than written, with the members of Espers simply giving voice to melodies gathered naturally from the ozone. But the proceedings are also laced with a powerful undercurrent of dissonance (most obviously on the extended acid outro of "Hearts and Daggers") built to ensure that we're never permitted to simply drift away unmoored, our sails filled with Espers' mystical and entrancing exhalations. --Matthew Murphy
Espers.(2003).Espers.MP3.HQ.rar
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33: The Futureheads
The Futureheads
[679]
As my high school government teacher liked to remind his cherubs, the best way to get good grades is to K.I.S.S.: Keep it simple, stupid! I don't know who taught these Sunderland, England cut-ups about the Magna Carta, but Mr. Long's brayed directives must have echoed across the Atlantic. Hardly warmed-over 70s post-punk, The Futureheads recontextualize Anglo brattiness while wielding their instruments with the skill to humble their godly forebears. Kate Bush fans are going ape over the band's cover of "Hounds of Love", pop hedonists will dig "Meantime" and "Decent Days and Nights", punks will go for "Alms" and "He Knows", and basically anyone with a scrap of melody in them will appreciate "Carnival Kids". The Sex Pistols might have helmed a flotilla and blew out the Thames, but The Futureheads are done-up and debonair enough to seize the Palace and rock it to the Stone Age from within. --Sam Ubl
the_futureheads-the_futureheads-advance-2004-ssr.rar
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32: Califone
Heron King Blues
[Perishable]
In the dead of night, the Heron King stalks the park, carrying with him the memory of America's music; but he's forgotten how to separate it, and it all comes out as a singular vision of blues, jazz, soul, funk, rock and country as one music, indivisible. Califone do the heavy lifting of actually playing the songs, and Heron King Blues is the King's word salad audio diary filtered through a modern studio. R&B harmonies rise from the rounded beats of "Trick Bird" to be devoured by the acoustic shambles of "Sawtooth Sung a Cheater's Song", where guitars sound like banjos, cellos sound like slide guitars, and the whole messy mixture sounds like the flow of the Mississippi brought to aural life. The swamp funk workout of "2 Sisters Drunk on Each Other" plays like a fever dream dance party for woodland creatures and the 15-minute title track comes coated in the mud of the Delta, the steel of East Coast skyscrapers and the slag of the rust belt. Meanwhile, the Heron King continues his midnight run, forgetting old combinations of sounds and imagining new ones to put in their places. --Joe Tangari
Califone.(2004).Heron.King.Blues.mp3.192.rar
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31: De La Soul
The Grind Date
[Sanctuary Union]
Few rappers ever willingly step away from the game; most get booted from the limelight for blatant irrelevance and spend their waning capital plotting an impossible return to stardom. Or they start a label. To see De La Soul run through the typical career stop signs and drop one of the hottest releases of 2004 is truly phenomenal. To be frank, 2004 needed an album like this: The Grind Date evokes the joy of a 90s house party without the flippancy, and it provides ample reminder of the highlights of Native Tongues hip-hop. With the help of producer Supa Dave West and a slew of guests from Ghostface to MF Doom, De La's seventh release brims with honesty and sagacity as the trio appropriately updates their portfolio and shape their plug-tunin', hi-fade personas into true hip-hop legends. Check Dave and Pos' verses on "He Comes" or "No" and bask in the wisdom of veterans. --Jamin Warren
De.La.Soul.-.The.Grind.Date.(2oo4).192.kbps.(PC4uRC).rar 
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