Yearend: 2008 Top Ten Albums (Boston Phoenix, 12/31/08)

1. Metallica | Death Magnetic [Warner Bros.]
2. M83 | Saturdays = Youth [Mute]
3. TIE: Ladyhawke | S/T [Modular] ; Lady Gaga | The Fame [Interscope]
4. T.I. | Paper Trail | [Grand Hustle/Atlantic]
5. CSS | Donkey [Sub Pop]
6. 3-WAY TIE: The Sword | Gods Of The Earth [Kemado]; Witch | Paralyzed [Tee Pee];  Torche |  Meanderthal [Hydra Head]
7. RTX | JJ Got Live Ratx [Drag City]
8. Judas Priest | Nostradamus
9. TIE: Boris | Smile [Southern Lord]; Gang Gang Dance | Saint Dymphna [The Social Registry]
10. Mercury Rev | Snowflake Midnight [Yep Roc]

See everyone else’s Top Tens here:

Year in National Pop: New attitudes (Boston Phoenix, 12/22/08)

HE’S GOT IT! Like T.I.’s “Whatever You Like,” Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” was a straightforward ode to being rich and getting laid.

Music is a drug, as they say, distorting perception and shaping reality into æsthetically appropriate patterns and themes. In heady times like these, it can be a real trip to look back through the past year and see what our musical idols were telling us about ourselves all along — whether showing us our most craven inner id, or echoing the cynicism that grows in our hearts as we react to the madness around us. As MGMT said in one of the most beguilingly mind-bending pop moments on record this year, “We’re fated to pretend.”

The interface between reality and fantasy is almost always a war zone in contemporary rap, but this year it felt as if the fantasy were ready to snap. Rap’s sonic frontier shifted radically, as the legal hazards of sampling meant that most rappers had to get by with synths and beatboxes. Whereas Kanye West’s new digital sobfest 808s and Heartbreak faltered, other rappers were able to make spare production work. “It ain’t frontin’ if you got it” is a line uttered in two Top 10 rap tunes this year: Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and T.I.’s “Whatever You Like,” both straightforward odes to being rich and getting laid, in that order. T.I.’s song is particularly epic and seductive, if only because its brazen fantasy is so tawdry and false: when he offers to “gas up the jet tonight and you can go wherever you like,” he seems to forget not only the then-$4-a-gallon gas tariff but also his own ankle-cuffed house arrest.

“Whatever You Like” was eventually dethroned from the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100″ by another T.I. smash, his duet with Rihanna, “Live Your Life,” a song equally obsessed with the twin goals of reaching for the stars and making that paper, with, at the beginning, T.I.’s somewhat contradictory spoken exhortation to “stop lookin’ at what you ain’t got and start bein’ thankful for what you do got.” T.I.’s success here hinges on his understanding that the goal of a pop song is to put the zeitgeist in a blender and hit “puree.” “Live Your Life” does that with gusto — did I mention that it’s dedicated to “all my soldiers over there in Iraq”? Of course, it doesn’t really matter what you’re singing or rapping about if you have Rihanna. Which may explain why “Live Your Life” was one of three #1 hits Rihanna had in a year where she didn’t even put an album out. The 20-year-old Barbadian is the bellwether of a trend in superdivas where the ability to get a tell-tale sing-along hook on the radio is more crucial than the ability to display a multi-octave voice or manufacture lyrical introspect.

If there was one constant in 2008′s pop sweepstakes, it was the rapid ascent of female solo artists willing to toe the line between pop diva and electroclash queen. The ubiquity in 2007 of Daft Punk and Justice seems to have emboldened a new generation of producers to harshen up the beats of dance pop and add some grit to tween pop. How else explain the jolting dance rock of, say, Miley Cyrus’s “Fly on the Wall” (on the otherwise turgid Breakout), or Britney Spears’s über-catchy “Womanizer”? The thing about diva pop is that as pop music (somehow) becomes more flagrantly sexual, the hand tips toward female artists who know how to channel that sexual energy into a dance vibe. Which means that even an ode to being cheated on (like “Womanizer”) or a diatribe against an ex who couldn’t commit (like Beyonce’s tribal detonator “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”) can be a banger if there’s enough sass and ‘tude thrown in.

This new attitude also opened the door to newcomers (with the right producers). I was particularly impressed with a number of production jobs by French electro-shocker Space Cowboy, who worked magic for ennui-laden British tart Nadia Oh (with her offhandedly slut-tastic “My Egyptian Lover” off her Hot Like Wow album) and especially rising star Lady GaGa (whose album title The Fame could be prophetic if enough people hear glam-slam-thank-you-ma’am smashes-in-waiting like “Starstruck,” “Just Dance,” and “Poker Face”). Of course, the story of the year in terms of sassy chicks being provocative is Katy Perry, who turned her back on her strict religious background just long enough to pen her ode to making out with another girl as long as her boyfriend doesn’t mind, “I Kissed a Girl.”

Meanwhile, the more accessible acts of the underground seemed intent on reanimating the corpse of the ’80s. M83′s lauded Saturdays = Youth whooshed listeners back to their respective proms with its John-Hughes-soundtrack-that-never-was. New Zealand oddball Pip Brown a/k/a Ladyhawke put together a stunning pastiche of invented ’80s-isms, creating anthemic dance pop that rocks hard and mopes harder — like Bananarama fronting Depeche Mode. And São Paulo players CSS continued to party all over the world on Donkey, with their increasingly sophisticated synth/guitar rock/pop carried aloft by lead singer Lovefoxxx’s mix of innocent ineptitude and charming viciousness. Brooklyn’s Gang Gang Dance departed from their formless morass of wordless space jams to merge sparkling washes, weightless euphoria, worldbeat-inflected gaiety, and sex-starved dance-floor whump on Saint Dymphna.

When pop music is at its giddiest, heavy metal can be depended on to bum everyone back down to earth, and the new Metallica record would do just that if it weren’t so thrilling to hear these dudes defiantly back in the saddle again. Sounding like the by-product of a series of stern talkings-to, Death Magnetic sees Hetfield, Ulrich, and company return to the Black Forest guitar romanticism so painfully missing from the ugly-sounding records they’ve pumped out over the past two decades. If they’re still coming at you with songs about suicide, war, depression, and anger, at least they do so within the confines of tightly arranged jams and unbelievably gratifying waves of rockitude. But whereas Metallica got real, the rest of the metal world continued to get more unreal.  Amon Amarth and The Sword continued in the vein of 2007′s top metallers, High on Fire and Mastodon, constructing elaborate mythologies to deepen their prog-metal labyrinths. The result is accomplished stoner thrash with song titles you can barely pronounce (e.g., the Sword’s axis-shifting single from ’08′s Gods of the Earth, “Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians”).

And whereas metal has become more knotted and complex, so much of what used to be called “indie rock” has become contemplative. The patience required of metal fans in recent years to make it through tedious works by Sunn O))) and Earth has now beset the not-quite-rock world. Plodding gorgeousness permeated new works by indie luminaries Beach House, Portishead, and The Bug, to name a few. Meanwhile, the runaway success this year of newcomers Fleet Foxes — with their winsomely anachronistic CSNY-meets-Appalachia — was a resounding victory for the twin indie virtues of preciousness and perceived authenticity. But I was most impressed with the back-to-nature lushness of Mercury Rev’s Snowflake Midnight, wherein the band used programmed beats and a myopic obsession with the natural world to shed their previously annoying Flaming Lips–isms and discover an X’d-out bliss. It’s like catharsis on tape.

CSS: Brazilliant! A quick foray into Brazilian rock (Boston Phoenix, 8/5/08)

In order to get on track with where to start with Brazilian music, I began at the beginning, asking a few employees at the greatest coffee place in the world, Panificadora Modelo on Medford Street in Somerville, “Hey, I’m a white guy in a Slayer shirt, where should I start with Brazilian rock?” The two women at the counter had never heard of CSS and didn’t seem to care much about Os Mutantes, but, man, did they ever bicker over whether I would like Pitty and Legião Urbana. (Verdict: both rule.) Their recommendations of Sepultura and the soccer-anthem cheesepop of Skank aside, here are six albums’ worth of Brazilian rock madness:

SPECTRUM | GERAÇÃO BENDITA | 1971 | Shadoks Music | When hippie culture hits, it hits hard, especially in places where playing crazy music became an act of political defiance, like ’60s/’70s Brazil. Spectrum are less a band than a collective, and for the most part Geração bendita sounds like Helios Creed crashing a CSNY rehearsal: a decidedly lo-fi and uneven record that veers from plangent and harmonious folk yearning to pure skronk to communal bongos set against shimmery cascading wah-wahs.

LULA CÔRTES AND ZÉ RAMALHO | PAÊBIRÚ | 1975 | Shadoks Music | This meditation on the four elements is a true lost classic, as most copies were destroyed in a fire upon its release. Its CD reissue is an important discovery: an uncategorizable mishmash of rock, folk, classical, and tribal weirdness. The creation of humankind, face-melting guitar, druggy laughter, ominous Mellotron action, shattered glass, and mysterious chanting all add up to one of the most essential psych albums ever.

RITA LEE | BABILÔNIA | 1978 | EMI | Ms. Lee was a member of tropicália legends Os Mutantes, but after being ousted, she began cranking out a steady discography of pop/rock/dance hit LPs. Echoes of Debbie Harry’s spunk and classy sass can be heard on this one, especially on the dancy-yet-psychedelic floor stomper “Miss Brasil 2000” and the vaguely “Rock and Roll Hoochie-Koo”–ish “Sem Cerimônia.”

AS MERCENÁRIAS | O COMEÇO DO FIM DO MUNDO | 1982-’88 | Soul Jazz | A panoply of panicked vocals, relentless beats, and slashing-yet-mannered guitars that retains more of a samba tradition than other female-led post-punk units like, say, Au Pairs and Delta 5.

TITÃS | CABEÇA DINOSSAURO| 1986 | Wea | If Brazilian rock is tops when it’s railing against authority, this release is one of the nation’s blood-vessel-bursting best. A bizarre and schizoid mix of arch Gang of Four–ish weirdness with white-Reebok-arena-Nerf-pomp peppered with moments of reggae-via-Men-at-Work. Whew.

LEGIÃO URBANA | QUE PAÍS É ESTE| 1987 | Musicrama/Koch | Renato Russo could be deemed Brazil’s Morrissey, but his singing and LU’s playing are far too muscular and confrontational to be taken for a bedroom mope-about soundtrack. Top-rate tunes with stellar guitar layering on a par with the best of Johnny Marr and Will Sergeant populate the band’s first five albums, but this one gets the nod for its political urgency and topicality.

CSS: At home away from home (Boston Phoenix, 8/5/08)

SÃO PAULO ROCK CITY? “It’s our home, we love it — but I think everyone in the band feels that every time we come back, nothing’s really changed.”

CSS guitarist Luiza Sá is resting in New York City, on a rare break from her band’s non-stop tour, and reminiscing about the first song they played at their first rehearsal: Madonna’s “Hollywood.” “We met up to rehearse, we were all in the living room, and we’re like, let’s just play something to see how it sounds. And then [CSS vocalist] Lovefoxxx came in wearing a Motörhead T-shirt — I think she was scared that we were going to be all ‘Rock and roll, grrrr!’ — and we turned to her and said, ‘Hey, we just learned Madonna’s “Hollywood,” ’ and she was so happy about it, just ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”

CSS’s willfully careless mishmash of pop and rock styles has made them an international phenomenon and arguably São Paulo’s biggest musical export. The success of “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above” and “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex,” from their 2006 CSS Sub Pop debut, shows that, at least in certain circles, the world is ready for their mix of froth and hooks. “We love all the pop stuff.” says Sá. “We do love the Pixies, but we also love Mariah, you know? And we don’t want to choose. Our songs are our versions of pop.”

Said songs are fun and wacky; they’re also naively naughty. “Fuck Off Is Not the Only Thing You Have To Show” is all the more insanely catchy for its nutty use of the English language. “When we did the first album, we didn’t speak English all the time, so we could say a lot of shit and we didn’t realize it. Now, we’re not the same people because we’ve toured a lot, and we speak English all the time, and the new album shows that. The first album we recorded not really even considering that we were going to tour; and then we toured so much that we changed as musicians. This new album is much more organic, much more how we sound live. We’re not being all serious and trying to start a revolution, you know. It’s still us, we’re just a little bit more mature.”

People’s expectations in advance of their new Donkey LP raise some interesting issues — especially in the Western-pop-hegemony department. When your first album is beloved of the Anglo world as a quirky lo-fi work of funny, semi-broken English, are you being patronized just a little? And does it matter that CSS are from Brazil? (The initials stand for Cansei de Ser Sexy, “I Got Tired of Being Sexy.”) Or are they just another indie-dance band playing festivals and touring the world?

Recently departed CSS bassist Ira Trevisan told one journalist she was sick of being asked about CSS’s “Brazilian heritage,” adding that in some ways “it would be good if we were Belgian.” Ms. Sá has a gentler take: “Look, São Paulo is our home, we love it — but I think everyone in the band feels that every time we go out and come back, nothing’s really changed. Brazil’s like Italy in a way: the best food, the best scenery, a lot of cute-looking people, a pleasurable life, but it’s a little bit more slow, and as far as music goes, it’s not the best place for pop or rock in English.

“We all heard American and British rock through our young years, and we could identify with it much more than with Brazilian pop. I don’t think after the ’60s and ’70s that anything great happened in Brazil, music-wise. There was a military takeover, and it brought out a lot of lazy music. From year to year there’s always something interesting coming out of Bahia or Pernambuco, but Brazil’s so huge and so diverse that if I’m talking about the music scene in Bahia, it’s one thing, if I say São Paulo, that could be the opposite. But you know, I don’t know any bands I could even tell you about. I mean, I was born there, and I miss it, but the last time I was there, I was like ‘Okay, I feel like I’m on vacation and I need to go back to work.’ ”

This explains lyrics like “Baby you’ve got me thinking about the place I left behind/A suitcase in Helsinki full of things I want to set on fire,” from Donkey’s “Left Behind.” Like CSS’s debut, Donkey is a party record — but this time the party is worldwide, and they’ve bent (somewhat) to the demands of their popularity. Sá: “The most Brazilian thing about us is that we are partying all the time, celebrating. We just try to make the best show all the time. We get all the energy for that moment. I think it comes across, people know they’re going to have fun when they come to see us.”

CSS + THE GO! TEAM + MATT & KIM + NATALIE PORTMAN’S SHAVED HEAD | Roxy, 279 Tremont St, Boston | August 9 @ 7 pm | $22–$25 |www.ticketmaster.com or 617.931.2000