There’s no post here that could be good enough to justify a co-founder’s several-month absence from this site, so instead of making my first post a mammoth mega-concept-post (I have an idea for one of those, though), I’ll start with a scattershot of scraps: seven mostly unrelated thoughts on music from this past decade.

1. Kanye is underrated

It’s way too easy to hate on Kanye, with his ALL CAPS BLOG POSTS and “imma let you finish” and his awards show tantrums. The reason I don’t really judge him that much about it is because a) I’m convinced that the majority of Americans underrate the pressures of being a 24/7 celebrity, that they’d have their share of meltdowns if given virtually infinite money and respect only to have it periodically taken away, and b) each one of his errors is caring too much about something instead of caring too little. He doesn’t get caught with a prostitute. He inarticulately addresses race issues.

The difference between Kanye and other mildly-respected-but-still-love-to-bash-em musician shipwrecks (e.g. Britney, Amy Winehouse, Chris Brown) is that Kanye has visionary talent, an enormous work ethic (four meticulous albums in seven years), and a generational-potentially-historic career that could very well be in its infancy or, at worst, its adolescence.

Maybe “underrated” isn’t the right word, as he’s getting a lot of end-of-year and end-of-decade love on countdowns and recaps. Maybe “overhated” and “underappreciated artistically.” Kanye is very much an auteur – someone who has a clear voice, someone who represents yet transcends his influences, someone who has impeccable intuition even if quirks and miscalculations speckle his oeuvre. Honestly, I don’t care if he carries himself like a love-hungry baby as long as his music continues to bristle with passion unmatched in hip-hop.

There are a few pieces of evidence I could use in my Kanye-as-genre-defining-auteur case, but I’ll just bring up this one. Ask me if you want more. I have them ready.

808s and Heartbreaks. Most critics gave it love, and a few of its singles had Top 40 traction. (I like it a lot but don’t adore it. It’s maybe an 8.08 out of 10.) Still, a lot of people turned their nose up at it as lazy, uninteresting, trendy. How completely far from the truth.

It came from Kanye’s desire to prove that he wasn’t just a competent beatmaker, that he’s something special and timeless and has actual inspiration. (Of course, anyone who had listened closely to his albums and observed his skill at combining unlikely sounds into something that sounds natural and soulful would already have known this.)

To do this, he ironically chose the most trendy and bashable of instruments: auto-tune. Far from following the flock, as it might appear, he reminded us that auto-tune just an instrument/tool and not a movement, that it can sound good or bad depending on how skillful and artful its user is. Listen to the album: it’s careful and nuanced and deep in a way that T-Pain and Chris Brown aren’t and can never be.

This album epitomizes Kanye’s essence: paradoxical, unexpected, and slightly ironic. He makes a claim for respectability using auto-tune. He redefines gangsta rap while wearing a polo shirt. He moves the tough, beat-driven hip-hop industry forward by sampling old-school, vocal-based music. He’s rap’s biggest baby and its hardest worker. The mere fact that any of this actually works seems at once counterintuitive and expected. Everything about Kanye is a self-contradiction

(Semi-tangent: His debut album is the one getting all the love, which is a bit of a shame considering it’s probably his weakest. It’s about 40% skits and novelties. I’ll admit that it was an influential prototype and that it set a new formula. But I’d also point out that he did similar stuff producing Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, an adored album whose success is deeply indebted to Kanye, which people often forget. However, Late Registration is Kanye’s best album to date, not College Dropout.)

2. Here’s to the Night might be the least romantic romance song ever

Do you care about the band Eve 6? You should. They’re better than you think they are. Just because they have a little bit of a Gimmick (talking really fast) doesn’t mean they made bad music. Their best stuff is so far past gimmick status, I’m offended if you call them a gimmick band. They don’t even talk that fast on most of the songs on their third and final and best album (see point 3 for more info).

Anyways, Here’s to the Night off of their sophomore Horrorscope became one of their biggest hits as a tearjerking graduation hug-your-acquaintances-and-tell-them-you-love-them ballad. It has the sound of a great, timeless love song. It’s got some real whoppers of lines in there: “Don’t let me let you go” – “Here’s to the tears you knew you’d cry” – “Tomorrow’s gonna come too soon.” It has violins. We’re talking heavy duty emotional waterworks and sap here.

…But take a careful look at the complete lyrics. Read them all the way through, and think about what he’s saying. He’s talking about a drunk hook-up! What!? “Put your name on the line, along with place and time.” “Are you willing to be had? Are you cool with just tonight?”

This had to be intentional. Somebody dared them to make the most romantic-sounding song about a one night stand they could. It’s like Every Breath You Take – a beautiful ballad that’s actually about stalking someone. The Police later admitted that, yeah, they wanted to see how many people would make a stalker song their first married dance. Eve 6 was just carrying the torch.

3. Speaking of Eve 6, It’s All In Your Head is phenomenal

One of my picks for album of the decade is It’s All In Your Head, Eve 6′s third and final album. I’ve already written a rambly, subpar post on Earn This about how much I love this album and why, track for track, it’s one of the best of the aughts. So I won’t elaborate too much here.

There’s a chance that it’s over-calculated as an edgy, Kid A, In Utero attempt at darkness and low accessibility. But I’ve listened to it enough to know that, even if it is calculated, it isn’t noticeable to any extent that it might bother me.

If I had to take a guess, it’s that Collins wrote a few songs, realized, wow, this is pretty heavy compared to our usual, and then just ran with it. He convinced the band and the producers to make it sound slightly experimental and uneven. Whaddya know, it worked.

The tension that led up to Eve 6′s break-up after their third album probably helped make It’s All In Your Head great, but I can’t help but wonder how high the band might’ve soared if they had a chance to stick together. They could have, slowly and surely, gained traction as a great band.

What a great transition opportunity!

4. Relient K reminds me of The Beatles

I’ve thought and thought and thought, and the band whose trajectory Relient K most matches (on a creative, not commercial, level) is The Beatles.

Relient K – absolutely one of my favorite bands ever already, and they still have plenty of recording life left – started the aughts making puddle-shallow Christian pop. Their 2000 self-titled debut shows a knack for a decent melody, but that’s about it. The lyrics have little wit, the harmonies are lacking, and the songs are pretty derivative. Softer to Me is the album’s faint glimmer of ambition, but that’s all. Compare this album to the Beatles’ early shows on the Liverpool bar scene where they build their chops.

Their follow-up The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001) is an enormous step up in every way. The songs are better, the sound is better, the lyrics are smarter, the tones are more textured and diverse. It’s still relatively generic, but at least it’s decent filler. There are a few gag-inducing puns, but a classic song or two nonetheless. This album is like Please Please Me or With the Beatles: inconsistent but promising, even if it doesn’t signal at all where the band is headed; fun at the time, but ultimately insignificant besides a few songs once the “real” albums start coming

Their third album, Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right… But Three Do (2003), is like a cross between Rubber Soul and A Hard Day’s Night. It’s secretly Relient K’s most enjoyable work, rooted in their early sound and technique with a few flourishes and flirtations of a more complex, ambitious, serious craft. But most people look a few albums ahead in “best of” discussions, even if this earlier stuff will probably age just as well. Rubber Soul and Hard Day’s Night are the same way.

Two Lefts is one of my few favorite albums ever. I won’t elaborate too much since I’m working on a review, but it’s the perfect balance of spirituality and fun. It doesn’t go for the jugular, but uses a few playful little images as a lens for some pretty serious themes. It’s a great transition album: forward-thinking and backwards-reflecting, feet effectively in both camps.

On Mmhmm (2005), their fourth album, the band got a major contract and released a loaded, serious work that is my runner-up favorite by the band. It features their two best songs to date — possibly top three or four.  The album is like Revolver in that it’s a bold statement and the big, fearless leap into something bigger than the band was before. (The album is not like Revolver in that it’s not particularly kaleidoscopic or diverse.)

The next album and leap forward was Five Score and Seven Years Ago (2007). It’s bizarrely parallel to Sgt. Pepper’s: the songs aren’t quite as consistently good as the previous album’s, but the album’s sound is more diverse and striking. The highs are mighty high, the lows are still pretty good, and the album ends in a dramatic, existence-contemplating epic (A Day In the Life for Sgt. Pepper’s and Deathbed for Five Score).

The Beatles-Relient K analogy keeps on working: Relient K/The Beatles’ next project is a slightly indulgent if entertaining side effort, Magical Mystery Tour/The Bird and the Bee Sides. It’s only debatably a “real” album, but it helps the band further develop its voice. It’s good, but slightly secondary. The next album is probably better as a result of the band getting more practice here.

The Bird and the Bee Sides also has shades of The White Album, in that the voices of each one of the band members’ voices is heard and the album is overstuffed and really broad.

Finally, we get to Relient K’s 2009 release, Forget and Not Slow Down, and the analogy breaks down. There’s no good Beatles comparison here. It’s far too meticulous and conceptual to be RK’s White Album, and it’s not a polished semi-throwback (Abbey Road) or an underwhelming collapse album (Let It Be).

Instead, it shows the band at an impeccable craft and new experimental high. I love that they’re making music like they really want to make the best album possible. It sounds like they really believe that their fans deserve a full-hearted, open-minded effort. They trust us to judge on quality, not familiarity. It’s a contemplative album that effortlessly swerves between dark and feather-light. There’s a hint of Dark Side of the Moon here in the way the album reprises itself and freely flows from beginning to end as if one track.

What I miss from this album is that sound from Two Lefts like they were just hanging out and having fun. The hunger for the band to be great has grown and grown and swallowed the band’s original playfulness. But I’ll take hungry and brilliant over playful and predictable any day.

I worry that the band has hit their ceiling, but then again, I’ve had that concern since Mmhmm, and the band hasn’t stepped down from any challenge yet. A bigger concern for me is that some money-hungry executive will shoot down the band’s next big leap because it’s “uncommercial” or some nonsense like that. Keep on keepin’ on Relient K.

(I’ve talked enough about Relient K for one post, but I just want to add that I’m really looking forward to their probably-inevitable throwback phase when they sound like they did around Two Lefts or Anatomy, and make their best album ever. I’m predicting a top five hit on the rock charts and overdue renewed public interest in their career by 2016.)

5. I wish Taylor Swift was my older sister

I’m guessing you look down upon pop/country album Fearless, Taylor’s second LP. It’s teeny-bopper radio music that’s surprisingly good. Her voice is greatly enhanced by digital wizardry so that she sounds like a young Shania Twain.

…Except, Shania Twain is a cowgirl and a tease in a leather skirt. She sounds better with a lite dance beat behind her or syrupy mega-ballad production in front of her.

Taylor is a genuinely good-hearted young lady. She sounds best pouring her heart out with a few understated fiddles and guitars as accompaniment. She writes or co-writes every one of her songs. This is in contrast to the Jo Bros and Miley, who will record whatever boardroom-designed garbage is necessary for them to sell millions.

Taylor Swift is more patient and has more of a vision. She’s slowly reclaiming a rap generation for country music. Most impressive of all, she’s doing this while preaching sound character, chastity, and genuine concern for mankind.

She’s clearly nice and hard-working. I’ll overlook her People Magazine romances – one of the Jonases and a Twilight guy – and presume her real personality is like the one she sings. If not, she puts on a good show, because her interviews make her seem simply delightful.

She’d be the ideal older sister: A good role model with a congenial personality and a great intuition for living life with character. She knows hard work and a savvy approach gets results. I would do well to have an influence like that in my life. (Don’t betray me, Taylor. I don’t want to have to eat these words when your cell phone nude pics leak or you get sent to the hospital for binge drinking.)

6. My favorite Green Day album isn’t by Green Day

Foxboro Hot Tubs: What a gaudy band name, as wonderfully bad as any hair metal song. That’s what the Green Day guys named their side project in 2007 when they released the album Stop Drop and Roll!!! to a “meh” from most critics.

I’m with Stephen Thomas Erlewine, though. It provides a compelling alternate history where they pursue their Kinks fetish from Warning to garage rock levels, falling head over heels for a half dozen other British hallmark bands along the way. This is what Green Day could’ve become if they didn’t want to be, you know, serious and all. The craft and polish from 21st Century Breakdown and American Idiot are there, but the arena ambition isn’t.

Okay, it might not be quite as good as American Idiot, I’ll begrudgingly admit, but it provides an answer for a tantalizing “what if” — as in, “What if Green Day never grew weary of being an underrated punching bag for critics?”

My biggest complaint about the album is that they didn’t blow it up to Definitely Maybe level of making every song catchy enough for the album to pass as a greatest hits package.

7. Ska’s afterlife rules

For better and worse, the third-wave ska movement died with Bradley Nowell. There was a hit here or there for the next couple years, but by the turn of the century, it was no longer cool to sing about romancing and drugging and farting to a sped-up reggae beat, like Reel Big Fish and Sublime and No Doubt and The Bosstones and Less Than Jake so valiantly had.

But as soon as the genre that made critics gag found its resting place, something great happened. People making ska either quit if they were lousy/in it for a buck, or they stopped trying to make songs they thought would sell and started making songs they thought were good.

The rise of what I will call ska’s fourth wave, even though it’s more the drag-back from the third wave, includes Rx Bandits, Streetlight Manifesto, The Slackers, and Big D and the Kids Table. Now the music has found ways to be forward-thinking while still remaining loyal to the traits that define their genre. It’s a bit underground and doesn’t sell many records, but darn if it isn’t some good music.

I would expand on why it’s so good, but I have the sudden urge to go turn on Streetlight Manifesto’s Everything Goes Numb. You should go do that too.

If you like music featuring impressive craft, substance, and some brains, and you have a soft spot for the ska backbeat like I do, then you would do well to investigate ska’s fourth wave.