Top 10 Green Albums Continued

Sometimes you just need a little music to get you going in the right direction. From eco-anthems to the best in green musicture, these albums will be sure to help you feel the need to be green. Check out our first segment of green music if you haven't yet, then read on for more earth-friendly albums.



9. DJ/Rupture - Uproot

"World Music" is, for most, an under-considered, oft-neglected section of the record store that most people finger through once a year when given to briefly considering the imported, overpriced Manu Chao album. Fortunately, last year's DJ/Rupture release Uproot, might expand "World Music" to include "pan-genre, continent-spanning Mash-Up albums" in its official dictionary entry. In Uproot, DJ/Rupture manages to find threads between songs and tracks, combining them to make something utterly transformative in a way that might hold its legal water with less leakage than, say, Danger Mouse's The Gray Album. DJ/Rupture seems to prove that there are common threads and points of coalescence for all genres, which, when given an Earth Day spin, lends this point of commonality to all countries and peoples that share the Earth.

Perhaps even more Earth Day appropriate (and also a new moral standard for other Mash-Upists to follow), DJ/Rupture released a follow-up album, featuring all of the included songs in full form while giving the featured artists the attention-and residuals-they deserve.

8. Frog Eyes - The Golden River

Not every modern narration can be as profitable or family-friendly as, say, Wall-E. Yet, given the success of films like Wall-E, whose premises were as subversive as they were compelling, perhaps an album like Frog Eyes eco-concept album The Golden River is finally ready for mass-consumption.

With frenetic speed and a disregard for rhythmic regularity and organic, Aristotelian formulation, Frog Eyes evokes and simultaneously captures a world without balance. As singer Cary Mercer croons in "A Latex Ice Age," he asks a pressing question: "What's California/without them streams and them creeks/running down, down to sea?" With a growing population that is poised to outgrow its water-table and reservoir supply within 30 years, the question is one that is in need of an urgent response and embodies the more complicated, grimmer and more difficult side of Earth Day, which sometimes tends to aspire for little more than ribbon-cutting and tree planting.

7. Forever Changes - Love

The brief "Age of Aquarius" might have become little more than bittersweet nostalgia for those that experienced it and decontextualized kitsch like tie-dye shirts and hemp jewelry for those that didn't. In 1967, while the country was at war, the nation bitterly divided along ideological and generational lines and the world at large being separated along a Capitalist/Communist axis, Love released a subversively apolitical album that filtered the pastoral through a 60s So-Cal vernacular. The album dismisses the ideological that divides and conquers, evoking the material, the Earth itself, which unites us. Yet, Love also captures the difficulty in renouncing consumer-based materialism for a materialism of the John Muir variety, confessing: "And I'm wrapped in my armor/but my things are material/And I'm lost in confusions/'Cause my things are material." Avoiding the political is one thing, but to recognize how the immaterial/ideological informs our relationship with it is another.

6. Belong - October Language

New Orleans' Belong completed October Language before Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled New Orleans completely and caused a national disaster whose aftermath is still being felt. However, October Language wasn't released until nearly a year after the disaster, lending the album a salient prescience that was well-noted in many of its favorable reviews. While many reviews located this confluence of old and new, growth and decay and other seemingly diametrically-opposed qualities to the city of New Orleans, the same qualities can be applied universally. What October Language ultimately reveals is that, while such a radically utopian (or, to get all "I studied too much theory and remembered key phrases" on ya'll: heterotopian) state seems impossible to achieve, where old and new, growth and decay, human civilization and natural environment co-exist in a balanced state, the album, like New Orleans itself before the age of expansive oil exploration, racism, of course, withstanding.

5. Dan Deacon - Bromst

Speaking of racism, many argue that racism has been expanded and recodified along new, largely hemispherical lines and is expressed in phrases like "First World" and "Third World," which refer to a country or regions developmental status. Dan Deacon's recent release, Bromst, is a eco-narrative in which much of the world's wealth is concentrated by a single corporate entity who controls most of the world's resources and utilities and wields its power with an iron fist. Sounds grim, right? Well, there is a silver-lining, which, though many of the details of the album are somewhat correct veers more into the utopian. Dan Deacon seems to suggest that, while the world as described in Bromst is rife with death, disparity, inequality and destruction of the natural environment, there is still hope for change. A new "Age of Aquarius" is still possible, albeit less so with

4. Can - Ege Bamayasi

Like Love in a nation divided along cultural, ideological and generation lines, Can rose to the forefront of the burgeoning "Krautrock" scene taking place in a West Germany increasingly open to the world while increasingly closed off to its conjoined twin to the East. With immigrants around the world moving to West Germany in the 50s and 60s, Can benefited from a West Berlin that was both cosmopolitan and a prototype for the "go local" movements that exist-and thrive in many places-today. Despite a costly re-unification process, Germany has been at the forefront of Green movements and precautionary principle living. It now boasts one of the most efficient, top-down recycling programs and well-developed public transit systems in the world. All of this while continuing to foster a cosmopolitan society that recognizing the global without sacrificing the local.

Can is also a short-list shoe-in for the Green movement's official theme song with "I'm So Green," which highlights the process of awareness and education that is also crucial to the success of environmentalist movements.

3. Excepter - Debt Dept.

Excepter's politically-charged 2008 release Debt Dept. addresses the economic issues that ultimately impact the way we use-and abuse-the environment and its natural resources. Written and phrased subversively in terse, imperative ad-speak, the album calls listeners to action against a system that is driven towards endless growth, expansion and the privileging of the few, with the Earth and the citizens of the world ultimately footing the bill. While it might be easy to group Debt Dept. into the polemic-doom-and-gloom category, the album manages to capture a positive and critical component of Earth Day and the Green movement: political action as a force for positive change.

2. Boards of Canada - Campfire Headphase

Boards of Canada are shrouded in mystery. The Scottish duo, whose first full-length releases Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi were well-received critically, quickly becoming short-list contenders and cult favorites the world over. Where Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi depict an environment that is chaotic, imbalanced and oftentimes bleak, both tonally and with many of the samples used, Campfire Headphase reaches for the utopian, but settles into a state of enjoying the harmonic and natural where we find it. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, either.

With hundreds of thousands of acres in public, state and national parks available to the enjoyment and appreciation of the public, Boards of Canada prompt a serious question: why aren't we out there enjoying it? Earth Day is one of the few sanctioned days for our acknowledgement of our relationship with and impact upon the environment. It should, however, be daily, not annually or bi-annually. Whether it is taking a yearly camping trip to a national forest or spending an afternoon at the beach or local park, we should, perhaps, as Campfire Headphase seems to say so poignantly, invoking the well-known "campground principal": leave the environments we enjoy better than when we found them

1. Feathers - Feathers

Already primed for a soundtrack slot on Wes Anderson III's Indie-heavy 2075 feature film, Life Astronautic, Feathers evokes a pastoral timelessness that, despite urban expansion, deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation, is still achievable in this day and age. While it lacks the political expediency of Excepter's Debt Dept, Feathers is just as urgent in its appeal for restoration, conservation and, as is necessary for true enjoyment and understanding, relaxation. "To Earth His Own," as well as an album as a whole, makes an argument for both the Earth and its peoples, quietly asking that we slow down, give up the day-in/day-out hustle-and-bustle and return to the rhythmic , balanced lives of yore.

If you can't wait until tomorrow for your music fix, check out our movie and music review sites. Then get in on all the green action with our best green electronics and services site. Use Earth Day as a chance to really make some changes in your life that will help the whole world. Then, read these other blog posts:

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