1. U2, How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope)
Sure, it's an old-fashioned idea: an album that's ready to take on the world, with big tunes and benevolent thoughts that add up to unironic anthems. Yet that ambition is fulfilled, triumphantly, by songs with durable melodies and genuine dramatic sweep, by the Edge's most aggressive and layered guitars, and by lyrics and vocals from Bono that never get so high-minded they forget to be human.
2. Youssou N'Dour, Egypt (Nonesuch)
PHOTO: AP
Senegal's greatest singer, and West Africa's self-made cultural ambassador to the world, set aside the band style he perfected to work with an Egyptian string orchestra on an album of new devotional songs. The album is a statement of trans-Saharan African unity, a profession of Islamic faith and, most of all, a collection of humble, loving affirmations, with strings shadowing and fluttering around N'Dour's exquisite vocals.
3. Brian Wilson, Smile (Nonesuch)
PHOTO: AP
If Brian Wilson had finished Smile 37 years ago, it would have been the milestone he intended it to be: an album-length pop symphony about America as myth and history. Even now, remade from scratch with new performances (and Wilson's more weathered voice), it's less risky but still a magnificent folly. Its musical and verbal free-associations hold together, full of whimsy and melancholy, with harmony to solve every dilemma.
PHOTOS: NY TIMES
4. Bjork, Medulla (Elektra)
Bjork wasn't the only one to make an album almost entirely of vocals in 2004; so did Tom Waits. But only Bjork could mingle Icelandic choirs, human beat boxes, eccentric male rockers and her own dynamic voice into songs that can be complex and otherworldly or devastatingly intimate.
5. Green Day, American Idiot (Reprise)
While most punk-poppers were whining in 2004, Green Day came up with a latter-day upgrade for the Who's Quadrophenia, in which another guy named Jimmy tries to survive a 21st-century world of trauma, drugs and media brainwashing. In songs that stay terse and tuneful, even when they extend to nine-minute suites, Green Day helps resurrect the rock opera with punk's own passionate impatience.
6. Juana Molina, Tres Cosas (Domino)
This whispery album is the latest invitation into the reveries of the Argentine songwriter Juana Molina. It's built from her acoustic guitar picking, her hushed voice, melodies with the simplicity of lullabies and rustling, rippling, melting synthesizer backdrops that fill the songs with mystery.
7. Kanye West, The College Dropout (Roc-a-Fella/Island Def Jam)
What Kanye West isn't -- a thug or a crunk party guy -- is nearly as important as what he is on his debut album. Shunning the pop-rap stereotypes, he's a thoughtful guy with a sense of responsibility, a sense of humor and enough genuine sympathy for underdogs to excuse his obsession with his own career. And he keeps the touch that made him a hit-making producer, brilliantly exploiting samples to make tracks burst with exuberance.
8. TV On The Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch and Go)
Sheer density defines this New York band: tracks overloaded with guitars and electronics and a tangle of references from electro to doo-wop, early Eno to Public Enemy. Amid the tremolo-strummed guitar drones and looped drumbeats, the voices hold on to yearning despite every grim portent.
9. Juliana Hatfield, In Exile Deo (Zoe)
There's nothing structurally radical about Juliana Hatfield's latest batch of rock songs about lust, addiction, loneliness and betrayal. It's just that each one is so precisely realized: from melody to aphoristic lyrics, from her clear but wary voice to arrangements that support and claw just where they should.
10. Animal Collective, Sung Tongs (Fat Cat)
Avey Tare and Panda Bear, the songwriters behind Animal Collective, have come up with an album as psychedelic as anything from the 1960s. There are moments of nutty overdubbed playfulness and stretches of sublime delicacy that simply revel in the ways guitars can reverberate, not to mention Brazilian beats, Beach Boys harmonies and selected random clatter. They make silliness profound, and vice versa.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby