Mike Watton of Haunted House: Favorite Albums of the Decade

These are my first, second, third, fourth and sixth favorite albums of the decade. Radiohead’s Amnesiac would rate ahead of Broadcast for me, but you can read people’s thoughts on Radiohead any number of other places. So, Broadcast it is.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti The Doldrums: My favorite album of the decade, and close to my favorite album of any decade. This guy graduating from Beverly Hill High School and making these songs was one glorious climax to the post-WWII years of the American 20th century. David Berman once said that the best art in this country will always come from the suburbs before Greenwich Village or San Francisco. Case in point: The Doldrums. It’s very easy to give this the label of outsider art. And it probably is as coherent of an illustration of what it’s like to be an outsider in middle-to-upper class America as there is using sound. But it’s a bit more all-encompassing than just that. One of my favorite experiences with this album came at about three in the morning at a rather affluent home in Des Moines. I was practicing my putting on a home-putting device, with a glass of whiskey. When “Young Pilot Astray” played, it felt like the most perfect intersection of time, place, activity and music that I could recall ever having. It truly is an album to experience wealth to. A year later, I rode in a packed car down a highway in rural North Carolina as the sun set, “Among Dreams” playing. Everyone sang along deliriously for the entirety of the song, without the slightest bit of self consciousness. It was about the most euphoric young punk experience one can have over five minutes. So while it is an album for rich people, it truly is an album to experience poor young arthood to at the same time. It’s an album that could’ve been playing in the background at anytime, anywhere I’ve ever been in this country, and it would’ve been perfect. [Purchase]

Madlib Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6: Dil Cosby & Dil Withers Suite: The best Madlib production of the decade came on Beat Konducta Vol. 1-2: Movie Scenes. It’s called “The Comeup (The Come Down),” and it’s beautiful. Maybe even more so than Ariel Pink, it’s the perfect embodiment of the romantic dream version of what Southern California wishes it could be. Or maybe what I imagine it to be. Either way, it’s absolutely ghostly and depressingly hallucinatory. Sounds like I want the afterlife to feel like. You should find the time someday to get stuck in Santa Barbara traffic with it playing on repeat. Vol 5-6 of the series, released together and made as a tribute to J Dilla, take all that and stretch it out over an hour. Earns the name “soul” as much as any album ever made, and made me believe that more than any other genre, soul works best as a blast of sound with no beginning and no end, just a big mass with no real structure. [Purchase]

J Dilla Donuts: This is a bit of a heavy one. It got released a few days before Dilla died and he spent the last of his energy getting this finished, at least partly while in the hospital. And everyone should be damn happy that he did. This is what American music is all about. It should make you want to steal a Ford Mustang and head into the sunset, staying in dingy hotel rooms with dingy hotel room light the whole way out to the coast. Lots of chain smoking and eerie restaurants along the way. It’s got a lot of the same qualities as the Madlib stuff I talked about, though the sound is a bit harder to pin down. Some of it borders on experimental. Still, one to fall asleep in the palm trees to. “Time: Donut Of The Heart” is one of the decade’s most beautiful songs. But it’s kind of silly to pick certain tracks when it’s really the album as a whole that’s so perfect. [Purchase]

Andrew W.K. I Get Wet: This album was the anthem of the period immediately following 9/11 for a lot of people, and it was damn exciting. It came out a couple weeks after I saw him in DC. I thought it was strange that he was playing a larger venue like the 9:30 Club, because I had been under the impression that he was still a very unknown guy who played his music on a tape player and ran around. Instead he came out with a metal band and I had no clue what to think. When I picked this up I was still confused, so much so that I bought it the day it came out because I couldn’t stop thinking about that DC show and how bizarre it was. I figured out quickly that it’s pretty simple and nothing to over think. And it was still difficult to wrap my head around. Basically, you’ve got hundreds of overdubbed keyboard and guitar tracks with lines like “Your life is over now/Your life is running out/When your time is at an end/Then it’s time to kill again” howled over it all for a half hour. And its effect is extreme, whatever you might think of it. His show at the Quest in Minneapolis shortly after this release was the most euphoric show I’ve ever been to, by far. Just so damn fun. I was laying on the ground by the end of it and felt high for weeks after it. So many people think this album is just boneheaded and stupid, and they’re right, but they’re still over thinking it in dismissing it that way. Also, they’re missing a lot. It’s an album of simplicity that is so grandiose and multi-layered that, as much as any of the often-named creative masterpieces from Forever Changes to Kid A, it earns the right to be called a work of art. It’s a house of mirrors inside this guy’s imagination, no doubt about it. [Purchase]

Broadcast The Noise Made By People: Somehow, this was released in the US on Tommy Boy, home to Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah and the Jock Jams series. Maybe it doesn’t matter what happened to it in this country, the music on this album is about as quintessentially English as it gets. And I mean that in a very complimentary way. If you’ve ever been to England, outside of London, this is the soundtrack to it. So it’s kind of like a Gap Christmas ad gone medieval. It’s always grey outside, the streets are all ancient and are lined with beautiful stone architecture. The pubs all have dark carpet and fireplaces. Basically, it’s cozy. The whole thing makes you want to buy a sweater. That’s this album. I’m not sure you can find an album more evocative of the landscape it came from than this one. It’s not warm, but it’s extremely comfortable. The musicianship relies largely on Moogs and the like, but in no way is it gimmicky. The songwriting and composition is very advanced. The vocals are among the most beautiful you’ll ever hear. And the band is famous for coming up with great drummers. If you ever find yourself in Cambridge late at night and your girlfriend has to save you from a 30 year old woman and 12 boy who are attempting to mug you, this record won’t give you your manhood back, but it will make you feel like you’re right at home, at one with Bubonic Plague-era buildings and uninterested in whether your balls are still in your pants. [Purchase]

Official | MySpace

Also: Haunted House “Guess Who’s Not Coming To Dinner” Review