The Best Album I Own

Duncan Sheik’s PHANTOM MOON is the best album I own.

I’m someone who loves the absolutism of rankings and “best of” designations. As anyone who has asked me what the best pizza in New York or game in the Mario Brothers franchise knows, my opinions tend to skew towards the draconian and pedantic. But I’m not apologizing.

But even with my opinionated mindset I have a hard time pinning down one music album as THE BEST I OWN. Music is so mood-dependant, and my own tastes are so varied, that it’s counterintuitive that one thirteen-song collection could be like qualitatively head-and-shoulders above the rest. But here I am saying that the third studio album by that guy from New Jersey who wrote the radio tune “Barely Breathing” is more important to me personally then, I dunno, Pink Floyd’s ANIMALS or ABBY ROAD or GRACE.

Released in 2001, it got proportionally the amount of attention that a third studio album from a sometimes-touring singer-songwriter got in the pre-John Mayer age (the B.M. epoch, which is an apt designation because that guy is literally made of feces). This is to say—very little. No one has heard this. Adam turned me on to it years and years ago, and I have no idea how he heard it, though I chock it up to him being from New Jersey and just being awesome about knowing things.

It is painfully beautiful. It is tristful and susurrus, and other words I like that asymptotically approach a description of the mood it evokes. Evocative is only the beginning. It almost has a message to deliver, but seems uninterested in whether or not you receive it. Even further, PHANTOM MOON, more so then most albums, feels like it lives. Like it is something that exists and goes on and on looping its tracks ad infinitum, and occasionally you tune in to an old friend saying wise things who may not sound quite new or exciting but, god damn it, they get you and they’ve seen you grow up and they know you’re gonna be okay if you just keep on being the good person you are, you know? Maybe I’m projecting. This album is breathing alright, and not barely, it’s so vital and rich and—here is the kicker—MELANCHOLY rather than sad.

I guess that’s what made me sort of pine on it this morning, the dictional difference between these two words, and the mastery at which Sheik and co-writer Stephan Sater walk this line (correct, ten years later the pair would reunite to score the Broadway hit, and only fitfully good SRING AWAKENING….but this is so much better). Though the entire album is contemplative and raw; though many songs are richly minor in key; though it has slow, nagging moments that seem to be trying through sheer force of will to materialize in the physical universe as poetry or I dunno a fucking transcendent vista, it isn’t sad. Some tracks are upbeat and peppy. Some aren’t. But all of them make you feel like you are listening to honest-to-god music, something that doesn’t come around that often these days.

Track by track, it doesn’t miss a beat. Bookended by a prelude and full version of the enigmatic and sparse THE WILDERNESS, we understand Sheik and Sater are interested from beginning to end with those areas outside the bounds of the city and its neuroses, no love stories here, no terrestrial woe. It is larger than that. THE WINDS THAT BLOW and TIME AND GOOD FORTUNE seem almost a biblical in their importance, parables that have truth to offer if you’ll listen. MOUTH OF FIRE is the oddest track, with a palpable yearning, an almost sexual energy that the pair again would re-visit (with much more populist, broad strokes) in SPRING AWAKENING. LO AND BEHOLD is also something of a vague religious story, but doesn’t feel nearly as flimsy as a Sufjan Stevens joint. SAD STEPHEN’S SONG is not sad, but rather bubbling and surreal. It feels like a musical version of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” They have always existed in the same room in my mind and both claw at the same dream-logic and sensibility. (maybe it’s all the “Mermaids” imagery, but it has got to be more than that). It’s the best track on the album.

I could go on. And you’re probably not reading this because there’s nothing worse than an album review for an album you haven’t heard. Or you think I’m lame that such a crooning, serious work is “my favorite.” I could protest that I like all sorts of music and that I love the energy of dance or hip-hop, but I feel like that’s the equivalent of that white woman yelling ”I’m educated!” to the conductor who tried to quiet her down on a Metro North train. So I’ll stop there. But if you want a meaningful CD for an afternoon at home, or busywork in the office, or really anything less energetic than running at the gym, you can’t beat this one.

By the way, the best pizza is Di Fara and the best Mario game is Mario 3. Definitely.