As promised, here’s the first installment of our obligatory best of ‘08 respects. We were originally going to do this as five posts over five days, a full feature on each album. As we started kicking around ideas, we realized that we’d have a real hard time limiting the list to five, and Johnny has already done lengthy features on almost every single one of the candidates. So we decided instead to do just two posts- the top ten albums, in two installments. Here are the bottom five.

First, each of us submitted a personal top ten. Five albums were on both lists, and then we used a rough brackets system to pick the rest. Fuck Rolling Stone and Pitchfork’s lists. These are the albums that you shouldn’t leave 2008 without. -Skwerl

Portugal. The Man is one of those bands that you just never find out about if a friend doesn’t tell you about them. They’re not really for mass consumption, and their handlers seem to be aware enough of that fact to be concentrating less on broad marketing campaigns and more on just getting their music out there and letting it speak for itself. And in this case, we’re happy to help.

If I was in Portugal. The Man, I would probably be pretty sick of people comparing my band to The Mars Volta, as if there’s no more than two bands in the universe that make music that sounds like this. Then again, in all fairness to reviewers, it’d probably pretty hard to find another psychedelic, spastic latin jazz-metal band with an eccentric, wailing frontman fond of high registers.

Fortunately for everyone, Portugal. The Man brings a creativity entirely their own to the table.

Editor’s note: Yeah, another new feature. Retro Reviews. Just like you, we often stumble upon great albums weeks, months, even years after they were first released. And of course there are plenty of albums we’re still in love (or hate) with that came out before we launched Antiquiet. So here’s something Johnny wrote about the Mars Volta record that came out in January. It holds up.

The Mars Volta have taken the art of the concept album to a new level.

The sixth-dimension latin-funk math rockers, founded by vocalist/lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist/composer Omar Rodríguez-López, returned from the ether earlier this year with The Bedlam In Goliath: a relentless, uncompromising juggernaut of an album that, as they put it, “didn’t want to be born.”

Welcome to the March issue of Antiquiet. Let’s start with a roundup of what I’ve been listening to over the past week or so: New Moby, new Morcheeba, new Goldfrapp, an independent band called The Builders And The Butchers, the latest Mars Volta record, and some old stoner rock: Five Horse Johnson and Sasquatch.
Read on for links and video…