Caught in the Carousel's Year's Best for 2008
Thomas Cooney
CITC Staff Writer

Album of the Year: Swing Out Sister's Beautiful Mess.
The underappreciated duo's first studio album in four years was a magnificent testament to the ability of melody to lift pop music to shimmering elegance. Comparatively speaking, it lacked the dark Cuban subtext of their masterpiece Filth and Dreams, but it was the best thing to hit my stereo in a long, long time.
Least Good Album of the Year: Seal's Soul.
And this wasn't even the album in which he dueted with Heidi Klum! It was worse than a phoned-in performance. It was worse than a cashed-in money maker. It was like showing up to a convention of classic automobiles behind the wheel of a Yugo.
Song of the Year: Anything that had nothing to do with Lil Wayne. But seriously...it wasn't released as a single, but Raphael Saadiq's "The Big Easy" was the most celebratory three minutes of music in 2008.
Film of the Year: The Visitor. In two hours we were given a poetic treatise on what America used to be, what it is now, and what it will soon become again. Fantastic.
Overall Artistic Disappointment of the Year: Salman Rushdie's unreadable The Enchantress of Florence. So smug a novel as to have a bibliography. One fears that celebrity has killed this genius. At least we'll always have The Satanic Verses, one of the five most necessary books of all time.
What I Look Forward To In 2009:
1. The new Roxy Music album (with Eno!)
2. The new San Ilya album (early samples are earthy and big)
3. The new Lynn Freed novel The Servant's Quarters
4. Rafa's fifth straight French Open title
5. The Dodgers winning the World Series
