Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Yes, this one is painfully obvious. Bon Iver doesn't need me to blow this album up any more, but when it comes to definitive autumn music, nothing quite reaches the barren, desolate recordings of Justin Vernon's fateful trip to Wisconsin's north woods. Each frigid chord piling on the last, Vernon's debilitating loneliness is the perfect soundtrack for when the leaves fall to the ground onto a pile of premature snow and you're left to sit in the slush by yourself.
Destroyer - Rubies
Autumn is especially unique for its mysticism, and nobody captures ambiguous elegance like Dan Bejar. Instead of addressing an issue head-on, Bejar meanders his way around each subject. He leaves a trail of yarn behind him as he grasps each nuance until he finally concedes defeat and falls into his web to bask in each song's unconquerable glory, his gentle strums and hums soothing each falling leaf for a safe impact.
Arcade Fire - Funeral
Funeral is a monumental achievement, not the least in how well it encapsulates the majestic beauty of autumn's fleeting brilliance. Win Butler's poignant shouts and wife Régine Chassagne's shrilling shrieks highlight the highs and lows of life and death just as well as the horizon's burning foliage. But even before the album's heady overtones, an inherent sense of belonging pervades the vitalized orchestration, and that serves as the truest representation of life during nature's most complicated season. While the leaves change and winds start to blow, the waning days of autumn send many people inside; and that's exactly where Funeral exists: wrapped in a blanket alongside friends and family in front of warm fire.
Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy
Black Sheep Boy marks the last time that Will Sheff really hurt. I don't mean the I-don't-belong-with-my-friends hurt or the how-did-I-piss-off-my-fans hurt, I mean the honest-to-goodness, give-me-my-knife-so-I-can-wipe-my-tears hurt. And, incidentally, it's his most introspective and chilling record. Whereas his first two LP's chronicled his trials and tribulations with those around him, weaving narratives and lighting torches with his white-hot rage, Black Sheep Boy takes a different perspective. Everything around Sheff is still wrong, but he's started blaming himself. His icy inward disposition barricades his raw soul next to a kerosene lamp behind a stone wall, and each quiver in his voice or crackle in the speakers is his shivering body succumbing to self-preservation. He's too worn out to be enraged; now he'd rather just freeze. So pour yourself some coffee and hurt with him.
Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Graves
Nobody writes songs like this anymore. Kristian Matsson's songs are personal, but in a very natural way. He rides the waves of change and accepts that eventually his life, like nature, will find homeostasis. He inflates his emotions beyond human capacity by putting them into a context of natural phenomena. In this way, he becomes the nature around him so that when the leaves change, he changes too; and when you rake them into a pile, you're consolidating his message; and when you leap into the pile of foliage, you fall right into his ruffled mess; and when you roll around in the stack, you've fallen for his trap.
The Wedding Present - Seamonsters
Unfortunately, autumn also spells the end of many relationships. Just as the ball starts to sting the bat and baseball teams pack it in for winter, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jessica Biel are forced to face the blunt side of a heartbreak. And while Big Star, the Everybodyfields, the Smiths and Beck's Sea Change all made very enticing arguments, when it comes to taking a break-up head-on and picking up the pieces, Seamonsters takes the cake. Its brutal honesty contradicts autumn's gentle glamour, but it presents a true representation of the biting cold hitting your face on a bike ride across campus. It's not that there's no weight in poetry, but sometimes hearts just hurt too hard for forethought and language.
