Shining LIGHTS on Our Disconnected World

Perfectopop's Best Albums of 2009:
#17 The Listening by LIGHTS

Canadian electropop darling LIGHTS (and winner of Canada's prestigious Juno award for Best New Artist) may claim to be from another galaxy, but her songs sound like they take place on a plant not to different form our own. If they truly are intergalactic, though, they must take place in the same dark but beautiful galaxy of auto-tuned beings that Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak took place on.

Yet LIGHTS' planet has an interesting mix of desolate cities and majestic natural areas. Songs like "Drive My Soul" and "February Air" are about trying to make a human connection in immense and impersonal cities, much like 808s. Despite all LIGHTS' pictures of herself posing with candy-colored ray guns (disclaimer: she totally did it before Lady Gaga and Beyonce), the album starts out with LIGHTS as a damsel in distress looking for a "Saviour" and somebody to drive her soul.

On the other hand, LIGHTS sings of nature as though it is a magical force that can rescue her from this isolation. Her song "River" is a prayer to a river. Conceptually, it's similar to Owl City's "Hello Seattle," whose last eight lines are like a prayer to the city. LIGHTS is frequently compared to Owl City, with good reason: both deal in a subdued style of electropop not often heard. And the fact that they're touring North America and Europe together can't hurt. (If I wasn't such a crazed Owl City fanatic, I probably would have compared her music to his instead of Kanye's, but I could write a whole 'nother post about how the world his music creates is much more magical yet similar to our own than hers... And don't even get me started on the subtle differences between Owl City and the Postal Service...) But I digress.

By the middle of the album, LIGHTS has made a human connection and spends her time comforting this guy, insisting that he shouldn't worry about her ("The Last Thing on Your Mind") and should face every situation with courage ("Lions!"). And in this world of isolation, LIGHTS eventually finds lots of people in similar situations. In "Face Up," she instructs this boyfriend to "Look at the people all around you/The way you feel is something everybody goes through."

Though none of the tracks are as dynamite as the cartoon weapons she loves to pose with, the album's only true dud is the treacly ballad "Pretend," whose sappy nostalgic lyrics sound especially bad with LIGHTS' weak and breathy voice. The album's timeline isn't perfect either, but if a few tracks were switched around, LIGHTS could weave a wonderful story about finding compassion and courage in a disconnected world remarkably similar to our own.

2009: A Year in Review

Happy slightly belated new year! 2009 was a pretty darn decent year for pop music. Kanye led a charge of autotuned robots to hold the charts hostage, then led a one-man assault on the VMA's attempt to give redundant awards to every pop star, then stormed a few late-night talk shows before going home to watch "Single Ladies" on repeat and sulk. Miley Cyrus embarrassed everyone else in the recording industry by outselling all their albums with the subpar pop (and hip-hop-country fusion) of The Hannah Montana Movie soundtrack, then really rubbed it in by outselling their singles with her supremely catchy and critically tolerated (if not adored) "Party in the USA." Lady Gaga appeared. And the Black Eyed Peas lured Fergie and will.i.am's egos back to make a few more number one hits as a group.

But as a girl who loves lists and statistics, no year in review can be complete without a countdown of the year's greatest albums. My dreams of reviewing every single significant pop album released this year were crushed when I realized there were five days left in 2009 and I probably had at least 30 albums to listen to, half of which I hadn't even heard of yet. Then my dreams of creating a purely objective list of the undisputabel best albusm of the year were crushed when I looked at Rolling Stone's list and realized I had only listened to one and a half of the albums on it. And so, I settled for my top 20 favorite albums. Still 10 better than Rolling Stone's list. Suck on that.

I'm kind of irrationally terrified of being perceived as some wanna-be hipster indie snob, then being mobbed by the masses of people who secretly despise hipsters (oh, you know you want to strangle them with their designer scarves), so here's a bit of a rationale for why the upper reaches of my list are very indie-heavy:

As great as 2009's singles were, most of them came from albums released in late 2008. Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Kanye... all fall 2008 releases. The Black-Eyed Peas, Shakira, and Rihanna were three of the only major pop artists to release popular albums and singles in 2009. And so, I'd say 2009 was not a great year for the radio-ready pop album. And heck, pop-punk hasn't had a good year since '04. That means it was up for indie, electropop, and alt dance to pick up the slack, and I am happy to report that they stepped up to the task.

And I'd love to list all the albums I meant to listen to but didn't (Adam Lambert, Shakira, Little Boots, Noisettes, Cascada, Florence + The Machine, Andrew Bird, The Bird and the Bee...) and all the perfectly good albums that I'm not including because I don't consider them to be pop albums (Green Day, U2, Jay-Z...), but that would take days, and I would still probably forget somebody important like the Black Eyed Peas and make their fans at least mildly annoyed.

Also, I should note that I am reviewing albums, not EPs, because if we started lumping together compilations of roughly four to eight songs with compilations of roughly nine or more songs, it would just be chaos and anarchy. Sorry Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, NeverShoutNever!, and that other release from Andrew Bird; you won't be on the list.

I'm going to post one review per day for the first 20 days of January, to draw out the suspense. And because writing these reviews can take an effing long time. So without further ado, I will post today's review. And yesterday's I missed. And the one for the day before. Oh gosh, school hasn't even started again, and I'm already behind...

In the meantime, if anyone reading this has their own list of favorite albums and cares enough to post it in the comments section, I'd love to hear some other opinions! [Not that I need ideas... I honestly do have the full list ready; I just like suspense...]