The National: High Violet (2011)

"It's a terrible love / That I'm walking with spiders," begins the first line of this album. You can kvetch all you want about this kind of melodrama, but I don't have to try too hard to imagine Dylan singing the same words. Besides, like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released six months later, this album is all about the melodrama. The images here, many of which come straight out of the Old Testament, are almost apocalyptic: oceans, floods, spiders, zombies, oceans and floods again, swarms of bees, "Manhattan valleys of the dead." The exaggerated grandiosity of the like is such that I'm finally convinced that Berninger has a sense of humor about his problems. The songs here are also far more universal than anything they've written, except possibly "Fake Empire." As a grad student, I love "I still owe money to the money to the money I owe." Most often, it's the simple quips that hit the hardest: "I don't wanna get over you," "Little voices swallowing my soul soul soul," lines which don't receive their profundity until Berninger's repeated them ad infinitum, turning them into whatever the pomo Brooklynite equivalent of a mantra is, which is probably still mantra. It's so easy to charge bands with crimes of pomposity, in part because it's often true. But pomposity done right can be downright beautiful. This, folks, is pomposity done right.

9/10

Punk Greats #1 Richard Hell & the Voidoids: Blank Generation (1977)

The debut of the notorious ripped t-shirts pioneers and CBGB habitués has transcended time and became my go-to cathartic album. From the first apoplectic assault of the jarring riff which introduces “Love Come In Spurts,” which both is and isn’t a dirty joke, to the final ballad which grows on you despite clocking in at 8:14, this is formalized anxiety at its best. Most of these songs heedlessly heap together various sorts of angst that more respectable and less intelligent writers prefer to segregate: societal, romantic, existential, bratty. So, “Who says it's good good good to be alive?” isn’t a rhetorical question, which would render it mere miff, but hypophora, and he answers, “Same ones who keep it a perpetual jive.” Hell’s nihilism (ha!), so much less histrionic than it might be, is sublimated by the strident dueling guitars of Quine and Julian, not to mention his own poetical prowess: “Your mind's a wreck but that’s fine / It corresponds to mine,” “Feelings will change / we're helpless they must. / We like it that way / eliminates trust,” “I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born.” The last line begins the sinister, almost bluesy title track which works as an anti-anthem today nearly as well as it did in 1977. Despite it’s confirmed place in the punk pantheon, Blank Generation has little in common, musically speaking, with the coeval debuts of the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols. In fact, it really has no real predecessors, nor, even today, any important followers. But hey, that's the kind of the point, isn't it?

10/10