Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco.

Norman: My first pretentious pick was Radiohead’s Kid A. My second is Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The best way to describe the music on this album is that it’s a collection of songs that are falling apart but still somehow actually still there. They feel like they’ve been deconstructed and reconstructed over and over again, so you can feel both the tearing down and building up of the song structures at the same time. And yet somehow a lot of the record has a light, airy quality to it that I find hard to pin down. So, not only is this pick pretentious, my way of talking about it is pretentious, too. 

There isn’t much I could say about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that hasn’t already been said by the indie-hipster music press. But I will say this. I used to live within walking distance of where it was recorded, at a studio in Irving Park, a north Chicago neighborhood. One time my friends and I walked down the street and figured out where it was. We stood outside the building in semi-ironic wonder and then went to a sports bar next door for 50 cent wings. 

Favorite Tracks: Dang, everything is great here. Fine. “Kamera,” “Ashes of American Flags,” “Pot Kettle Black.” 

Modern Vampires Of The City, Vampire Weekend.

Tyler: Vampire Weekend in my estimation pre-2013 were a fine band, sprightly and fun, but nothing more than that. Struck me, they did, as kinda upper-middle-class “world”-pop, references to campus and whatnot reminding me pleasantly of my own college days, even as I felt slightly guilty for enjoying music that sounded just so damn white. Paul Simon by way of Dave Matthews Band.

Then came ’13, and Modern Vampires Of The City. It’s their apex, those university fetishes transported to New York, the lyrics keen, truly effective cross-cultural storytelling. Whether it be the frenzied atheistic hustle of second track “Unbelievers”—“We know the fire waits, unbelievers, all of us sinners the same”—or the lovely spoken-word interlude of “Finger Back,” wherein frontman Ezra Koenig describes “this Orthodox girl fell in love with the guy at the falafel shop, and why not? Should she have averted her eyes and just stared at the laminated poster of the Dome of the Rock?”

The empathy and eye for detail in that short short tale are terrific, from the simple encouraging “Why not?” to the perfect micro-observation that the poster is laminated. This sort of delightful composition, woven into soundscapes equal parts dreamy and zippy, makes for a luminous listening experience. Modern Vampires is everything an overeducated band of quad-crossing misfits like Vampire Weekend hopes to be. With it, they proved they can climb a special kinda sonic mountain, in the very least laying groundwork for 2024’s fantastic Only God Was Above Us. If they continue to crank out all-timers like those, even on occasion, they’ll continue to rank among our best 21st century power-pop outfits. Keep it up, you professional alumni, you.

God Help the Girl, God Help the Girl.

Norman: In one of our earlier installments I highlighted a concept album by Pedro the Lion. In my notes on that record, I said that I didn’t really care much about the story itself, even though I know it’s there. Now I’d like to highlight another concept album, and this time I do care about the story! 

The story, a young girl with some mental health issues gets out of the hospital and finds healing through music and friends. What has long intrigued me about this story is the trajectory from broken to whole, from totally checked out to living your best life now. Eve, the central character, is a wonderful portrait of human metamorphosis. She goes from protesting that “There is no way I’m looking for a boyfriend, no way I’m looking for a scene,” from the title track “God Help the Girl” to “I read a book a day like an apple / but I did not eat / And so the doctor came to me / he said a woman does not live by the printed word / forgive yourself and eat,” from the closing track “Down and Dusky Blonde.” It’s really a beautiful story.

God Help the Girl is less a band and more of a side project for Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch. He actually pulls a little bit from Belle & Sebastian’s catalogue, reframing tracks like “Funny Little Frog” for the narrative arc of this album. I’ve been a Belle & Sebastian fan for years, so it’s no surprise that I would enjoy anything Murdoch does. But God Help the Girl drew me in first with the music itself. This is what you would call baroque pop music. Everything that makes a good pop/rock song is there, but there’s also a string section and maybe some flutes or who knows what. Everything its tight and lovely. 

Favorite Tracks: “God Help the Girl,” “Perfection as a Hipster,” “I’ll Have to Dance with Cassie”

Magic, Bruce Springsteen.

Tyler: 2002’s The Rising reestablished Bruce Springsteen as America’s rock ‘n roll conscience, the album his most prominent release since Born In The U.S.A. in 1984. The Boss had released plenty of material in the eighteen years between those two records, including the exceptional ’87 release Tunnel Of Love, along with three further studio LPs, including The Ghost Of Tom Joad, a somber piece of work boasting a title track eventually reimagined by political rock upstarts Rage Agaainst The Machine. The Rising, though, was an album people wanted before it was even recorded. Springsteen and his E Street Band had delivered a stirring performance of a song called “My City Of Ruins” on America: A Tribute To Heroes, a cross-network charity special arranged in the wake of September 11, 2001; only natural, it thus seemed, that the man would follow the moment with a timely slate of material written and performed about our changed America. He did just that. The Rising is a fine album with many terrific moments. It’s imperfect, but it captures that moment.

Of course, that moment proved fleeting. as the administration in charge of that changed America took wholesale advantage of a spirit of union at home and abroad, hurtling the U.S. into a great big war crime of a conflict in Iraq. By spring 2003, inspired Rising anthems like “Waitin’ On A Sunny Day” no longer fit the moment, no matter the songs’ merits. Springsteen had done his job, and the best of The Rising still makes for good listening 23 years on. Its spirit of triumph in adversity’s face was undercut, though, and an LP we all thought was punctuation has with some time proven transitional.

Not so 2007’s Magic. Underpromoted at the time, unheralded to this day, it’s E Street Band Bruce at a startling latter-day peak, muscling in with legitimately hard-rocking first track “Radio Nowhere,” unrelenting all the way through to the haunting conclusion “Devil’s Arcade,” to say nothing of bonus inclusion “Terry’s Song,” a remarkable closing elegy for an irresistible friend. The material throughout the album bears plenty of such sadness, even an upbeat romp such as “Livin’ In The Future,” in which the narrator “woke up Election Day, sky’s gunpowder and shades of gray.” Not for nothing is the title track a starkly-delivered monologue from a duplicitous maniac: “Got a shiny sawblade, all I need’s a volunteer; I’ll cut you in half while you’re smilin’ ear to ear. And the freedom that you sought’s driftin’ like a ghost up in the trees. This is what will be.”

I’m no Springsteenian expert. I love the song “Backstreets” but never read the fan zine of the same name. Magic I will nonetheless confidently say ranks among the man’s most political efforts featuring the full band behind him. Born In The U.S.A. absolutely qualifies in the category, but even it makes time for sunny-sky nostalgia with “Glory Days,” as well as lust unsettling and lust understandable, “I’m On Fire” and “Dancing In The Dark” respectively. Magic at its most romantic can be found in the incandescent aging-bachelor’s ache of “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” or the driving, cryptic ode “I’ll Work For Your Love,” while the rest of the album in the balance skews darker, even when it doesn’t sound so stark. “Long Walk Home,” which Springsteen introduced live in 2025 as “a prayer for my country,” is as inspiring as it gets, and even it is devastating at its core, depicting a small town run over by time and progress, its remaining beacon of American faith a “flag flyin’ over the courthouse, means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

At the time of Magic‘s composition, recording, and release, of course, Springsteen knew well that America’s leaders were betraying that courthouse flag. That’s what makes the album a stronger work than The Rising, and as noted The Rising is already pretty damn good. Magic transcends, though. It sees the true America, the one that got us where we are today.

Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Girls.

Norman: Do you want to go genre-hopping? Now is your chance. Surf rock is here. Gospel has been invited. Hard rock is over there in the corner. There’s more than enough influence from the 60s and 70s to go around. It would be reasonable to criticize Father, Son, Holy Ghost for having no particular direction and for just ripping off sounds that have been done to death. Fair enough, I guess. But I don’t care, because even if Girls is just retreading old ground, they do it so well. 

Like a lot of my favorite albums, it’s dark. Christopher Owens, the lead singer and main songwriter, grew up in the Children of God religious cult, spending his early years travelling all over Asia and Eastern Europe. He broke away from his parents’ religion at 16 and moved with his sister to Texas. This is a precise recipe for psychologically tortured music. Look it up. It’s right there in the songwriter’s cookbook. The emotions on this record are raw and the themes – death, forgiveness, and love – are as big and bold as a banner. 

Girls broke up after this album and Christopher Owens went on to have a solo career, but nothing has ever come close to the dense variety of Father, Son, Holy Ghost. 

Favorite Tracks: Again, this is impossible. I’m giving you three, but this is completely inadequate: “Die,” “How Can I Say I Love You?” “Just a Song” 

The Mountain, Heartless Bastards.

Tyler: Heartless Bastards frontwoman and creative leader Erika Wennerstrom used to bartend from time to time at Northside Tavern, a large, hip bar located in my hometown Cincinnati. I drank there a few times! Cincy pride!

That bit of non-serendipity aside—it is highly unlikely Wennerstrom’s bartending days ever overlapped with my post-collegiate retreat to childhood pastures—I love Heartless Bastards and am proud we shared a town. The lion’s share of the band’s albums are top-notch affairs, and The Mountain is my gun-to-head favorite. It rocks and it’s loud and it’s hard-charging even as it bursts with pensive melancholy. Previous release All This Time was all over the moon about being in love; The Mountain, the opposite. Here’s Wennerstrom beating herself up for being sad, defiantly announcing her solitude, feeling out at sea, staying as high as she can, explaining why she had to go. It’s all just so damn listenable, good damn rock music written and played with real heart by a woman who can croon and shout with the best of any of her peers. I’ve seen the band twice live, Wennerstrom solo once, and all three shows kicked thorough ass. So too does The Mountain. There’s not a thing I don’t like about it, and so here it is.

Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood.

Norman: About two years ago, while living near Buffalo, NY, I bought a ticket to see Weyes Blood perform in Toronto. I was pumped to see her translate her lush, intricately produced take on 70s FM radio to a concert stage. Then, two days before the show, my wife’s step-mother died. So, we had to get ourselves down to Alabama and Weyes Blood performed without me. That’s my Weyes Blood story. 

There are times when I struggle to articulate what it is I love about an album without repeating myself or sounding like a cliche. Titanic Rising is maybe the chamber pop album of the century for me. Do you like chamber pop? If so, this album will be for you. It feels massive and haunting, but also smooth as silk. And maybe that’s why she named the record Titanic Rising.

Favorite Tracks: “Andromeda,” “Movies,” “Wild Time”

The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Neko Case.

Tyler: I recall an interview with Neko Case, in which she described the song “Hold On, Hold On” as her first truly autobiographical composition. Given Case’s penchant for gothic lyrical nightmares and dreams, it’s not hard to believe her in this instance. “Hold On, Hold On,” narrator burdened by loneliness and bad habits, has the air of truth.

The thing is, “Hold On, Hold On” is but one song, located on the stratospheric 2008 Case LP Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. Fox Confessor is the Neko release that almost found its way into my 25 here, the rich sorrows and textures bewitching me every time.

I didn’t go with Fox Confessor, though, as it’s not the Neko Case album that nails me most dramatically to the wall. In 2013, she dropped The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, and it guts and fills me every time out. This one feels more incisive, offering up deeper cuts of the artist’s soul and history. In “I’m From Nowhere” she’s pulling off that rare achievement, the touring musician’s lament; two tracks after that, she’s detailing a horrific observed incident of brutal parental emotional abuse, her heart breaking in “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu.” Then comes “Calling Cards,” a wonderful ode to time-spanning friendships, followed by “City Swans,” a skipping, uncharacteristically optimistic dedication to a sometime lover. The selections on The Worse Things Get feel as much chapters as songs, an appropriate foreshadowing of Case’s eventual literary memoir, which is notably titled The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. She really means this stuff.

Then there’s “Ragtime.” It wraps this album up, and is my favorite Neko Case performance, by some distance. It’s a phantasmagorical whirring winter carol, and it contains Case’s own perfect summary of herself and the best of us. “I am one and the same. I am useful and strange.” Damn straight, Neko. Keep the torch lit. We’ll be listening.

Maraqopa, Damien Jurado.

Norman: If you’ve ever listened to Damien Jurado’s first nine albums, you would have guessed that this guy, who has worked as a preschool teacher at points to supplement his music career, was on a quick path to a suicide. But then, without any explanation, on his tenth album, Maraqopa he was more hopeful, almost cheerful by his standards. I went to see him in concert and he was running his own merch table after the show. I was very tempted to ask him exactly what caused this turnaround, but it seemed like one of those questions that might be slightly annoying/offensive, so I held back. 

Jurado is a Christian, and so I’m tempted to think that something clicked in his spiritual life that hadn’t before. On “Life Away from the Garden” he seems to find himself released from his doubts. On “Everyone A Star” he seems to be seeking a kind of absolution. And on “Museum of Flight” he plays a character finding love. All of the great songwriting and instrumentation is there, but you get the sense that Jurado is really finding himself again. Maybe finding a sense of sanity and clarity that he hasn’t had in a long time. Or maybe he was simply ready to play a character who had a spark of life? 

I’m a huge fan of Damien Jurado’s work, and so this choice was one of my more difficult to make. If this is a little bit of a cheat, I’ll ask you to give me a pass, but I’d also recommend two other albums, from the darker period: Where Shall You Take Me? (a folk masterpiece) and On My Way to Absence (if you want to get pitch black dark). 

Favorite Tracks: “Life Away from the Garden,” “Working Titles,” “So On, Nevada”

Turn Blue, The Black Keys.

Tyler: Legend has it that, many many years ago, The Black Keys were a righteous duo who progressed from two-man blues-rock to smartly-produced bangers boasting just enough grit to avoid gloss. Those are days lost to the mists, though. The Black Keys this world knows beckon personal moral apocalypse by playing for crypto charlatans and make the news when drummer Patrick Carney calls the cops on his wife Michelle Branch. The spirit of Robert Johnson really lives on with these two.

With that squandered cool noted, then, I must concede hypocrisy, because here I am stepping up to preach gospel about the Keys’ 2014 creative departure Turn Blue. Coming out of 2011, when their tight El Camino launched the deservedly ubiquitous hit “Gold On The Ceiling,” the band was at the sort of commercial peak that often allows musicians at least one album of Doing Whatever The Hell They Want. What the hell The Black Keys wanted to do, then, was make a hazy, compelling divorce album. Stripped of sunshine and devoid of the poppy artifice that would later dominate their work, Carney and bandmate Dan Auerbach on Turn Blue mine actual emotional blues to the best of their ability, exceeding all possible artistic expectations given the heave-ho crunch of even their finest prior accomplishments. The first track here is not a catchy single, but rather a bitter, stony kiss-off called “Weight Of Love.” The mood doesn’t improve from there, not in the quickened tempo of “Fever,” or even the major-key radio-ready album-closing “Gotta Get Away,” the firecracker of a conclusion. I love “Gotta Get Away,” and the band was right to allow their final dose of heartbreak to at least sound upbeat, but even that song—and with it the album—concludes bitterly that “maybe all the good women are gone.”

Seeing as how all the good women are not, in fact, gone, the sentiment that routinely stirs me when listening to Turn Blue comes one track earlier, in “In Our Prime,” when Auerbach sings “Every now and then I see a face from way back when and I explode.” That’s not a reference to a former lover alone; that’s sensitivity to entire weeks, months, years gone by. Friends lost to time; people known through onetime partners; strangers who became confidantes only for a night. There are spirits bound to all the skeletons in our closets, and some of them are quite unwelcoming, even if the individual memories are good. We all know bad times. We all sometimes want to leave a life, a lifestyle, behind. Often, of course, these valleys come thanks to romantic tumult, and that’s why we’re talking about profundity on a damn Black Keys album. Just as chilling, though, can be recollections of stark times lost alone, hours addicted and/or otherwise miserable, ceaseless streams of daily sorrows punctuated for better or worse only by, and there they were—those faces way back when. “In Our Prime” is a helluva song overall, an involving emotional climax, and Turn Blue is an exceptional accomplishment, a cut above your average everyday divorce LP. It’s in that lyric, though, that my platonic attachment to the spirit of the album lies. That is to say, if ever Nate or Josh from Ann Arbor read this, Tyler’s alive and will always love you both. Let’s take this moment, my old friends, and then never meet again.

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