A variety of things that probably only I care about

Nine months after reviewing this, I’m sometimes a little surprised that I gave this an A. It may be a great album by a great band, but it’s just another Decemberists album, right? But when I read my review, I remember what a surprising new direction this seemed like at the time. It’s rare for an album to redefine my view of an established band so easily, but then, this is a rare album.

A celebration of all that is Tom Waits, Bad As Me didn’t break new ground so much as compress the best aspects of his career into a dense 45 minutes. From the weird to the soulful and the energetic to the calm, that’s a lot of ground to cover. However, this album accomplished it with a series of great songs that manage to feel familiar and original at the same time.

Shilpa Ray has been largely ignored by most people, but I still maintain that they are one of the most promising young bands around. Both the vocals and music can slip as needed from an art-punk frenzy to a silky smoothness, all with a single-minded focus on Ray’s intense vision. The lyrics are occasionally too simplistic (not that you’ll pick out the details through the distortion), but she’s driven by all the right demons. Ray could someday become the best frontwoman in rock.

A bold rock opera, David Comes To Life provides both the brutal catharsis and abstract flights of fancy that fans expect from Fucked Up. The band accepts almost no creative limits (except maybe the storage capacity of CDs, which they took full advantage of), and this allowed them to apply their modern-day vision and excesses to a gimmick usually associated with the vision and excesses of the 1970’s. Fucked Up is one of the best things to happen to the music scene in the past decade.

Punk rock may be fading from relevancy, but this album makes a compelling case for it as a vehicle for tradition and community. I’ve wavered several times on including this on my list, because I think most people see it as a solid effort by an established but over the hill band. Each time I listen to this again, though, I realize that nothing could be further from the truth. As a band that always brought maturity and perspective to punk rock, the Dropkick Murphys are actually improving with age.

Nick Cave recently announced that this side project is breaking up, but it ended on a high note. Grinderman found a level of intensity and catharsis that even Cave rarely attained. This band may be gone now, but its influence is still here in a rejuvenated Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

This old country bluesman has been cranking out albums for decades, but he still may not have reached his peak. Age and experience are great attributes in this style, and he mixes country wisdom with artistic culture in a way that feels perfectly natural for those often-opposed worldviews.

This punk rock supergroup now sings about being old and misanthropic instead of young and angry, but with the same energy and honesty that its members always had.

Though Orvis isn’t new to the country scene (he was previously a member of the .357 String Band), his first solo album truly shows his potential. Excellent bluegrass chops meet more complex country approaches, with rich, varied results. If this album has a flaw, it’s that Orvis still sounds too experimental and unfocused. But those moments that could have been discarded as outtakes reveal an exciting potential for this young talent.

Earle, on the other hand, has finally been around long enough to stop being considered a young talent. Just in time, too, as Harlem River Blues is his first truly unique and personal vision. Country radio may be ever more derivative and unoriginal, but artists like Orvis and Earle are showing us just how much potential the genre has when people follow their own muse without concern for format or tradition.