Muses Thrown

My 47 favorite songs of 2008

2009-04-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

Compiled this a while ago and only now finding the time to post it. Typical musesthrown - always a couple months late!

You're probably scratching your head at the number 47. Well, basically these are the songs from last year I feel like advocating. No matter what arbitrary multiple of 5 or 10 I chose, somebody worthwhile was getting left off. So I decided just to choose all the songs that I felt at least relatively strongly about, and that would be my list.

As always, this embarrasingly reflects the particularity of my listening/purchasing habits - I'm still trapped in an album/CD-centric mode. I bought 51 CDs which were released last year; 33 of them are reflected here. So of course many of them have more than one entry on the list. (Only The Bug should really have 3 songs on here, but I decided to limit myself). But, y'know... if I hear a song I like on www.pitchforkmedia.com or www.cokemachineglow.com I almost always buy the album. Many of these are just those songs.

In the interest of time, I'm only going to offer quick notes on some of these. Drumroll, please....

47. Autechre - bnc Castl

Those crafty Autechre guys have managed to catch on tape, for the very first time, the bizarre music all your electronic appliances make when you're not home. Who knew the microwave was such a kidder? And that fax machine - whoa!

46. Women - Black Rice
45. Wye Oak - Warning
44. Crystal Antlers - Vexation
43. Marnie Stern - Vault
42. My Morning Jacket - Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Part 1

Almost the only song on the otherwise wretched Evil Urges that I can stand to listen to. Given the precedent of Z's "It Beats for You," it appears we can rely on MMJ to provide exactly one near-perfect woozy/vulnerable/slightly spooky ballad per album.

41. TV on the Radio - Dancing Choose
40. Deerhoof - Chandelier Searchlight

In a review of Offend Maggie that I read, this song was referred to as "rockabilly." And sure enough, it's got that stand-up bass thing going on. When the chorus kicks in and she starts singing "Love, love, love, love, LUH - UH - UH - OVE!", my heart stops every single time.

39. Of Montreal - For Our Elegant Caste

Any song that starts out "We can do it softcore if you want, but you should know that I go both ways" would be memorable. When it's by Of Montreal, that phrase is going to be stuck in your head for the rest of your life.

38. Max Tundra - Orphaned

"Follow the bouncing ball," Max says. And it's so captivating and so creative, I happily do so for almost four minutes. Then he starts singing and the magic disappears a little. But only a little.

37. Kingdom Shore - Stray Bullets Singing...

I can't do much better than cokemachineglow, who describe this song as a conversation between the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, played by violins. Utterly subversive, utterly creepy, and bonus points for evoking all my favorite images from The Evil Dead, Pt. 2.

36. Gang Gang Dance - Vacuum
35. Fleet Foxes - Ragged Wood
34. Plants and Animals - Bye Bye Bye

My suspicion lasts about ten seconds, and then they drop that Queen-referencing chorus on my ass and it's all over.

33. Chad VanGaalen - TMNT Mask
32. Of Montreal - Triphallus to Punctuate!

Skeletal Lamping was overall an unfocused, self-indulgent mess. What makes it truly tragic is that Kevin Barnes' obvious talent and creativity don't need any tinkering, as this song aptly demonstrates.

31. Presets - If I Know You

An electro pop ballad makes my "best of" list? Which blog is this anyway?!? Yeah, well - listen to the vocal on that chorus and tell me I'm wrong. Musically, it's the least adventurous track on the mostly-edgy Apocolypso, but damn if it hasn't been stuck in my head ever since I saw the video on Pitchfork.

30. The Week that Was - The Airport Line

Neither of the Field Music brothers' individual offerings in 2008 really grabbed me as full albums, but they both boasted at least one killer song. I don't even hold it against this one that the killer drum track is SOOOOO lifted straight out of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill," cuz this one is just as elegant and sweeping.

29. Dodos - Jodi
28. Cut Copy - Far Away
27. El Guincho - Cuando Maravilla Fui

The punchiest beat on an album that's full of nothing but.

26. School of Language - Disappointment '99
25. Snowman - The Gods of the Upper House

Kingdom Shore versus Snowman for the best aural evocation of a horror movie in 2008? Advantage to these Australians. Not because they're better/more talented musicians, but because the vocal on this song makes my skin creep like nothing has since "Panzrama" (see my favorite songs list of 2006).

24. Portishead - Nylon Smile
23. Radiohead - Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

Radiohead write a ballad, and it manages to be both beautiful and characteristically gloomy/creepy.

22. Plants and Animals - Good Friend
21. Autechre - fwzE

The exact moment when a sentence could contain the words "Autechre" and "fun" and the basic stability of the universe isn't threatened.

20. Leila - Little Acorns

Sometimes a song just needs a single gimmick, and if it's a good one the artist can repeat it for three or four minutes and it never feels stale. The three-handclap beat on this one still makes me giggle, but we also get a fantastic, ever-changing bass line, great interplay between the horns and keyboards, and truly bizarre little-kid wordless scatting.

19. Fleet Foxes - Quiet Houses

Russ says "sonic wallpaper" and I'm not even sure I disagree. But I love the muscular bass on this one and damn if those vocal harmonies don't slay me.

18. Flying Lotus - Camel

The epitome of "cinematic": in that it evokes a progression of images (but I won't ruin yours by sharing mine); in that when that wall of keyboards kicks in I suddenly feel exactly like I'm sitting in a vast, dark space completely transfixed by what's happening in front of me.

17. Stereolab - Nous Vous Demandons Pardons

Late-career Stereolab are disgustingly slick and shiny, like aural teflon. So it's all the more impressive when they can still manage to be punchy.

16. TV on the Radio - Golden Age
15. Snowman - We are the Plague

Cool drum interplay, standard dub bassline, faux-spooky vocals on the verses. Fine so far, but then the singer opens up his throat on the second verse and suddenly the entire thing feels intense, edgy, frightening. They are the virus, they are the plague - and you're infected, bitch.

14. Flying Lotus - GNG BNG

Let's assume the missing vowels are both a's. In which case this song is perfectly named, cuz that's exactly what it feels like - getting nailed hard by three different studly beats in rapid succession, in half the time that it used to take the Chemical Brothers to pull off this sort of thing.

13. Thank You - Embryo Imbroglio

Song title of the year. The sound of tribal warfare, all shouted wordless aggression and scorched-earth jagged guitar and martial drumming. Only the Bug managed to sound more dangerous than this.

12. Jim Noir - Don't You Worry

Easily the most immediately catchy song I heard in 2008, a triumph of ambiance and smart pop songwriting - so who needs originality?

11. The Bug - Jah War

Utterly, completely terrifying. When the Apocalypse occurs, God will choose Flowdan to be its narrator. And this is the Bug's shining moment as a producer, the skitter-skatter call-and-response drums and bass giving you not even a second to get your footing while the echoing "Jah"s buffet you from all sides.

10. Crystal Antlers - Until the Sun Dies (Part 2)

The missing Part 1 must be the "Until" segment of the story, because this sure as hell sounds like the solar death itself in all its glory. "Prog" in its ambitions (but not - thankfully - it's length), unrelenting in its intensity (even during the quiet part), and perfectly balanced at the point where beauty and chaos overlap.

09. Sigur Rós - Gobbledigook

Sigur Rós channeling Animal Collective could have been a) a pretentious, muddy, unlistenable mess; or, b) sublimely beautiful and woozy. Smart lads chose option b. And accompanied it with a video that makes woodland nudity seem playful and innocent.

08. Chad VanGaalen - Poisonous Heads

First of all: that bass line. It's squelchy and menacing and makes this relatively minimalist song sound thick with dread. The sing-songy verses just don't prepare one for the frantic rush into the chorus, and Chad sings these lines "The only thing left was our poisonous heads, and the curse that's been EATING OUR MI - YI - YI - YI - YI - YI - INDS!" with an intensity that obviates any concern about what any of it, y'know, means.

07. Portishead - Machine Gun

Your first two decade-old albums are considered classics. Your reunion is hastily announced and greeted with equal measures of excitment and suspicion. Most bands in Portishead's position would have played it ultra-safe. Bless their souls, they didn't return with a tired old revamp of "Sour Times"... instead they dropped one of the most alien, hostile, challenging slices of sound ever. And it fucking slays. Beth Gibbons as a lounge chanteuse never made any sense to me; this is exactly the sort of aural environment her voice was meant to inhabit: on the edge of a precipice, staring into the void, terrified and vulnerable but eerily resigned. Admit it: you hated this the first time you heard it, but only because it hadn't yet rewired your head.

06. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules Theme

A proud entry in the "more is SO much more" category, "Hercules Theme" is stuffed past bursting. The horns! The strings! The hi-hats! The coo'ing vocals! All so delirious and inviting that you know this dance floor will always have room for more more more sweaty bodies. Oh yeah - also the gayest shit I've heard in a really long time that actually felt like a fresh appropriation of the past instead of just another tired retread.

05. Deerhoof - Snoopy Waves

Deerhoof hire a new second guitarist, and the world is a magical place all over again. I suspect this will sound ridiculous, but the call-and-response interplay between the guitars during the 20 seconds between 0:23 and 0:43 just makes me happy. Oh, and it's a love song addressed to California, and I'm so on-board with that sentiment.

04. Cut Copy - Out There on the Ice

The best New Order song of the last 20 years. I have no clue what "You don't know what to do / There's a game now, who'll be there for you" means, but damn if I didn't sing it all year long. And the tail end of the coda between the second and third choruses, where the bass is burbling and the wall of synths is rising and falling, is so 1989 it really DOES break my heart. Sneaky bastards know it too, imploring immediately after "Don't let it tear us apart, even if it breaks your heart!" I thought the Presets put out a better all-around album, but this song was my guilty glorious pop pleasure of 2008.

03. Future of the Left - Plague of Onces

Fifteen years later, someone finally comes up with a credible response to Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run." This being Andy Falkous, it's brutal, honest, hilarious. Sure, he recognizes all these onces are a plague, but nevertheless: "Why put the body where the body don't want to go?" In other words, he's had your shit and it's tired. And just to make his position unassailable, he backs it up with one of the most lacerating (and honestly jaw-dropping) guitar riffs I've heard in a while. Somehow the bass and drums - despite sounding like they're from two entirely different songs - manage to weave the whole into a water- and outrage-proof fabric. And then they get all stoopid on the chorus just because they can. (See also: "Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues"; some scholars have suggested this is in fact just Part Two of that song.)

02. The Bug - Fuckaz

It's not even the best song on London Zoo (that would be #11, above), but nothing punched me in the gut harder in 2008 than Spaceape's astounding rant on this song. The most awesome thing about it is that 'ape is pissed off at everybody. For every two "fuck-tha-man"-type sentiments expressed on here, there's also a doozy like "Fear those people whose worthless ambivalence leads to nothing but frustration and self-obsessed anger." Sure, the system sucks, but so do you if all you do is sit around and bitch about it. It's brilliant as social commentary, and it's doubly brilliant as a means of getting your ass UP and MOVING. After spitting through two verses of outrage and bile, Spaceape pauses to catch his breath, the music suddenly shifts (and takes my already-fragile equilibrium with it)... but rather than pretend to have anything resembling a solution, all he can do is repeat "How did we get here, and where do we go now?" over and over like the question is his only defense against complete despair. And I don't have any answers either, because I'm just trying to pick my heart up off the floor. Utterly fucking brilliant.

01. Thank You - Empty Legs

2008's take on "Atlas?" Granted they share electronically distorted vocals and crazy beats and rhythmic intensity (apparently this is a recipe for my digitally-bestowed love and approval). But despite sharing similar means to my favorite song of 2007, "Empty Legs" has entirely different goals. This song does not want to be your friend. It isn't inviting you to join its party; it's whistling your ass out of the house to witness a scene of chaos, a cycle of destruction and rebirth. Its interest in you dancing to it is only inasmuch as you dancing would be another form of your submission to it. And good luck dancing anyway, because this is the most bat-shit crazy drumming EVER.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm frankly at a loss to describe this song in any concrete terms. It's sitting here at #1 because it's not like anything I've ever heard before - and that's the real recipe for my love and approval.

Let's try this again... starting with: My Favorite 20 albums of 2008

2009-03-19T00:31:00.000-07:00

Uncanny how it's almost a year to the day that I decided to stop writing on here... and here I am deciding to give this another go. Actually the decision was made a while ago; as always with this venture my ambitions outpace my ability to realize them. But, as long as I remind myself I'm far from a "professional" blogger and this is mostly about personal edification and the odd person or two who actually reads it, all is good. I'm also going to forego my "literary" aspirations and try to keep postings brief and to the point. Which is usually: I liked/didn't like this, and here's why.

So, without further hand-wringing and navel-gazing: here are my favorite 20 albums of 2008. I'll preface by saying '08 was a disappointing year in music for me. Certainly nothing like the powerhouse that was '07. Nothing in '08 hit with quite the force of a Grindstone or a Mirrored, and nothing (least of all its follow-up from Kevin Barnes) was as all-around consistent as Hissing Fauna... . Also, 20 is sort of an arbitrary number, is all I'll say, without wanting to present back-handed endorsements. Here they are:

20. Snowman - The Horse, The Rat and The Swan

Sneaks onto the bottom of the list by virtue of its two absolutely killer tracks "We are the Plague" and "The Gods of the Upper House". Who knew "industrial" could still sound this fresh and scary 20 years later?

19. Jim Noir - Jim Noir

Tuneful, immediate, and actually fairly consistent. Not to mention, almost a better Stereolab album than the one that actually bore their name. Another case where good melodic skills and occasional quirky choices win out over the obvious retro-ness of it all.

18. Dodos - Visiter

This would easily be five spaces higher on the list if the production on the album managed to capture the manic energy of their live show. Watching/listening to two guys create this much sound, absolutely laden with internal dynamics, is something I highly recommend.

17. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie

Back in my good graces, as I pretty much predicted they would be. Not as overall mindblowing as The Runners Four or (as if...) Apple'O, but the handful of best songs on here - "Snoopy Waves," "Chandelier Searchlight," "Fresh Born" - easily stand among their best. Having a two-guitarist lineup again makes all the difference.

16. Stereolab - Chemical Chords

At first I was offended. Stereolab have been making the same damn album for fifteen years now. And the production is so slick! It sounds like something you could buy from a vending machine, shiny and prepackaged, a big bundle of empty calories. (Not to mention - how does it take six people to create this stuff?) But damned if, by the end of the year, a good number of these songs weren't sort of permanently lodged in my consciousness, popping up and waving with big cheesy smirks from time to time. So... fine. I concede. The melodies are great, the songs at least swing if they almost never cut. In short, another Stereolab album.

15. Radiohead - In Rainbows

I know, I know... "this came out digitally in 2007." And changed the world with it's breathtaking break from the record industry, yadda yadda. I'm probably the only person on the planet who actually waited to purchase it until it came out on physical CD. Said release date being 1/1/08 in the U.S., so bite me - this was an '08 release for me.

Overall I agree with cokemachineglow's opening salvo: "all bets are as hedged as they are final." But hey, Radiohead have earned the right not to have their feet held to the fire with every new release. They don't always have to be the most important band on the planet! They said that they "just wanted to release an album", and they succeeded. And it's still sitting on this list, so apparently I liked it. Ed Selway's beats just keep getting better - he's the one guy in this band who never seems like he's treading water. And for all the blather about how this was Radiohead's "love" album, Thom Yorke still mostly (and appropriately, given that voice) sounds like he's predicting the end of the world (though I will grant the standout track for me - "Weird Fishes" - succeeds by virtue of its tenderness, rare territory for these guys).

14. Presets - Apocalypso

Should I be embarrassed by this? Search in vain for the appearance on this list of that other electro pop album that came out in 2008 that everybody else was falling over themselves about. Y'know, the Australians? They get their due on my forthcoming favorite song list, don't worry. The fact is - Apocalypso is a more consistent all-around album. And it also takes way bigger risks that mostly pay off, no small feat considering how ultimately they're still sort of a watered-down Nitzer Ebb. So this gets my official "guilty pleasure of 08" vote.

13. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

I'm not remotely embarrassed by how low this falls on the list. My friend Russ calls it wallpaper music, and while I'll give them more credit than that, this sure don't feel like Album of the Year to me. But it's pleasant enough - those four-part male harmonies have been known to bring me to a tear or two - and on the best songs it even manages to be punchy. So, D+ for originality and an A- for effort rounds out to - number 13.

12. Marnie Stern - This is It... and That is That

I will once again not pretend that I can listen to Marnie every day. But damn she makes the world a more interesting place! And although it never reaches the same heights as that opening triad on her debut, as an overall album it's way more consistent. In fact, this is the only '08 album from which I didn't dismiss a single song; if it had boasted a standout like "Grapefruit" it would be higher up on the list. It probably took me just as many initial listens to even adapt my head to the strange and frightening world of Marnie, but it's a trip that yielded rewards.

11. El Guincho - Alegranza!

I think his live shows are probably even more fun than the album, or maybe it's just that I need to dance to it more so the repetition doesn't start to verge on monotony. Regardless, this is a no-shame party album, bristling with energy and feeling truly like "world" music in the sense that he's pulling from so many traditions and sounds. And he's a master of the little touches, like the "whoo!"s that pepper "Costa Paraiso" and syncopate "Fata Morgana." The other guy who asked us "Why so serious?" in 2008, but really meant it.

10. TV on the Radio - Dear Science

The 2008 recipients of Matthew's "Animal Collective Award", given in honor of finally releasing something I actually enjoyed. I mean, is it just me or did these guys loosen up like twenty-fold on this album? They're still all stern and political and shit, but at least they sound like they're having fun on "Dancing Choose" and "Red Dress." At least the music has some kick and some dynamics instead of just being a big buzzy droning wall. And yeah, "Golden Age" sure was the harbinger of the Obama era that we needed... the song and the era, that is.

9. Future of the Left - Curses

Yep, another late '07 release. But I searched high and low for this album in '07 and swear to [deity of choice] I couldn't find it in stores until February of 08. ("Some deal with the U.S. distributor," said the helpful info desk people at Amoeba when I inquired. And sure enough, a couple months later they were swimming with copies...) This is basically McLusky with keyboards, a McLusky that wants to laugh at you and your idiocy rather than kick you in the teeth for it. They can still bring the fierceness (hello "Plague of Onces"!), but the sense of humor is more palpable this time around. I don't think anybody else could pull off the Beastie Boys stoopidity of "Small Bones, Small Bodies" so successfully, and mad props for the gleeful chorus of "Wrigley Scott" : "They only ate sausage! SAUSAGE ON A STICK!" That still makes me wet my pants, and (as usual) I have no clue what the hell they really mean by it.

8. Plants and Animals - Parc Avenue

Here's what the Foxes were aspiring to, I think, but Plants and Animals are better by virtue of being so surprising. "Faerie Dance" is like four different songs mashed into an epic whole. The Queen-referencing "Bye Bye Bye" sure as hell feels worthy of a raised lighter. "Good Friend" develops a swinging groove and then keeps embellishing on it. And "Mercy" - with its cheerleader chants and Motown horn section - should have been a mess, but is instead a refreshing late-album palate cleanser. Catching them play most of the album live last week - looser, more spontaneous, more playful - only cemented home for me how they earned this spot on my list. Probably the most slept-on great rock album of '08 - you owe it to yourself to give it a go.

7. Chad VanGaalen - Soft Airplane

Who is Chad VanGaalen? Is he the strummy ho-hum folkie on the first couple songs on this album? The eerie lo-fi electronic wizard on the stunning central triad of "Phantom Anthills," "Poisonous Heads," and "TMNT Mask"? The doom-n-gloom storyteller of "Molten Light"? (The video for which still gives me the creeps - so yeah, don't leave out the "freaky visual artist" persona). Oh yeah, and he even rocks out a bit on "Bare Feet on Wet Griptape." I mean, these can't all be the same person, can they? But geez, that voice sure does provide a missing link... I don't even care what any of the stuff coming out of his mouth means, I sure do like listening to him share it with us. So here we have an album that manages to be both the most diverse release of '08, and also one of the most consistent. Bravo!

6. Autechre - Quaristice

Autechre shake up almost all of their by-now-tired tropes... the interminable song lengths, the endless droning loops... and release what I consider to be their best album. This thing is absolutely exploding with ideas, none of which (for once) get run into the ground. It's still got the jagged edges, the bits of beauty stuck in whirlpools of just-off beats, but for all its braininess it also sounds like the guys are allowing themselves to have some fun. Sure, it drags in a few places, but there are also amazing stretches of one jaw-dropping "how the hell did they come up with THAT?" moment after another. Important note: it's best experienced as a full album, so be sure and give it the 60 minutes it deserves.

5. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

The juxtaposition is no accident, since this was the other album in '08 that felt like one long succession of electronic "fuck YEAH!s" Advantage to FlyLo, though, for making it all seem so oddly organic, and also for being a bit more consistent. (And the same kudo here for knowing exactly when to let one set of ideas go and move on to the next). Even more than Alegranza!, this album makes me feel traveller's deja vu - the sense that what I'm experiencing is somehow familiar even though it's built from nominally "exotic" sources. That frisson gives these songs an amazing resonance for me. Failing all that - the video for "Parisian Goldfish?" Just fucking WRONG!

4. Crystal Antlers - EP

Every new band last year had to be Crystal something-or-another. These guys were so clearly the star facet in the crop, yet strangely and noticeably absent from every other year-end list I saw. Seriously, did anybody else bring the NOISE this fiercely and this beautifully in 2008? Every one of these stellar six songs sounds like it's ready to implode under its own weight: shrieking vocals, walls of organ battling it out with "psychedlic" guitar chaos, rock-solid basslines - all held together by an innate melodicism that ensured these gems were stuck in your head even when they were doing their damnedest to blow it apart. "Parting Song for the Torn Sky"? No shit. Their forthcoming full-length debut (despite not-so-encouraging initial press from my pals over at CMG) is easily my most-anticipated album of '09.

3. Thank You - Terrible Two

The most immediately exciting album of 2008 for me. And much like the previous year's #3, if they'd managed to sustain the pace of the incredible half of the album through, um, the other half, this would have been #1. "Empty Legs" and "Embryo Imbroglio" sound like the evil uncles of both Battles and Animal Collective. The DNA's the same, but the differences are as striking as the similarities. The drumming on this album is insane. That it could be the work of one person, without any electronic augmentation, doesn't seem possible to me. And what Thank You bring to the table that neither of those other bands I mentioned do is unrelenting fierceness. The guitar work is so jagged I keep waiting for my ears to bleed; vocals are either warped out of all comprehension or raw tribalistic shouts; grooves are achieved only to morph into new grooves. This is not music for the faint of heart.

But yeah - there are three other songs, two of which trade in a lot of that fierceness for an eerie, icy detachment that's interesting but not engaging. "Pregnant Friends" splits the difference between those two modes, with the first half being a bizarre campfire chant which abruptly turns into utter screaming chaos. (No surprise which half is the one that works for me!) Still, the album works as a coherent whole, and the mindblowing strength of the first two songs gets it this far... I can't wait to hear what they dish out next.

2. Portishead - Third

Fatal admission time: I was never that huge of a Portishead fan. Sure I own both their first albums, neither of which I consider a classic, but I always felt like they blew nearly their entire load on jaw-dropping first single "Sour Times." Eleven years later, I feared the worst when I heard they were releasing a new one.

But then that gut punch of "Machine Gun"... holy shit. They'd traded in the loungey classicism for something cold, alienating, visceral, utterly compelling. Suddenly the music had found a perfect compliment for Beth Gibbons' otherworldly voice. Previously miscast as a torch song chanteuse, she's finally come into her own as a harbinger. Over a decade off made these folks hungry; nothing about Third feels phoned in. The mood is consistent throughout: dread, despair, loss. But unlike the previous albums which both felt a bit samey, no two songs on Third are quite alike. And each bristles with surprising juxtapositions, small details that constantly pop out and keep the listener on his or her toes. Within this context even wispy and fey "The Rip" feels untrustworthy; the album's one moment of disabling vulnerability never pretends to have any goal but - yes - ripping your heart out too. (Honestly, that song never should have worked as well as it did!) Ultimately, Third is an exhausting listen, but in the best possible way. If only all comebacks could be this triumphant.

1. The Bug - London Zoo

I'm not going to lie - much as I love London Zoo it still doesn't have that "Album of the Year" feel to it. Yet it makes it to the top of the heap because nobody else brought as many a-fucking-mazing songs to the table. "Jah War," "Skeng," "Warning" - terrifying. "Fuckaz" - riot-inducing. "Insane" - club track of the year and nobody noticed. (Instead he promoted the hell out of the to-my-ears-inferior "Poison Dart.") On the surface these songs are deceptively simple, but close listen reveals they're brimming with details and are hardly mindless loops. And he matches the beats and moods to his vocalists perfectly. If it's grim and apocalyptic, there's Flowdan intoning doom with his low bass. Spaceape spitting bile in every direction? Drop something minimal underneath that won't distract too much. (Request to the Bug: More Spaceape next time!) For all that the overall palette here is narrow, it's explored throroughly and skillfully - an exercise in singularity that never becomes monotonous. In the end, nothing else in 2008 owned me quite like London Zoo: made me tremble, made my heart race, made me want to jump around.

Farewell for now!

2008-03-17T21:05:00.001-07:00

Well folks... if anyone is even still reading this thing, here's the offical notice... I decided today to just face reality - which is that I've got too much going on in my life to keep up with this as consistently or with the level of "quality" (as if) that I'd really like. I mean, it's mid-March and I'm not even done writing about my 50 favorite songs of last year! What's the point of keeping a music blog if it isn't relatively current and timely? UGH. This is a disappointing admission for me to make... I've really enjoyed getting some of the "stuff" I feel and think about music out of my head and out into the world. I'll revisit it at a later date, that's for sure. But for now... thanks so much if you've ever read this.
Cheers, Matthew

My 50 Favorite Songs of 2007

2008-01-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

OK, so it was supposed to be my 40 favorite songs... but 40 just felt too limiting, given how much great music was released last year. And I wanted to give myself enough space to acknowledge some artists who didn't make my 20 favorite albums list, but still had one or two songs that ruled my year (notably El-P and Deerhunter, who land two each in this list). On the flip side, it was interesting to me how I could really love an album but still be hardpressed to choose more than one song off it for this list (Yeasayer, Field Music, Marnie Stern, Frog Eyes, Aesop Rock, HEALTH, Kristin Hersh). There's a statement in there about how consistent those albums are. And then there's a third bunch where the song that makes this list was pretty much their sole contribution to my year (Kammerflimmer Kollektiev, Supersilent, Prinzhorn Dance School, Shapes and Sizes, Beirut, PJ Harvey, Besnard Lakes, and, um... Burial).

I kind of feel like this list reveals how limited my listening habits really are. I bought around 45 CDs in '07, and I'm afraid I don't venture far outside my CD collection when listening to music. I'm going to try and take better advantage of Pitchfork and Cokemachineglow's podcasts this year, and maybe by the end of '08 my songs list won't be confined to the albums I actually purchased. All of this is a long-winded (and probably unnecessary) apology for how many "repeats" there are on the list. I set myself a firm rule that no artist could have more than 3 songs on it (sorry Shining), and in the end 50 spots are shared by 37 artists. In the top half there are only 3 repeats (go figure, representing my #s 2,3, and 4 albums). So maybe I didn't do SO badly on the breadth issue...

Here's the list itself; the commentaries on each song are a work in progress so be sure to check back every now and then.

50. Prinzhorn Dance School - Crackerjack Doctor

What if the grass really is greener on the other side? What if 2 + 2 really does equal 5 (and Thom Yorke's neurosis isn't as hefty as the reputation he's built upon it)? What if Cheney isn't really an evil bastard and Bush isn't a tool in every sense of the word? Where are the limits of your (or at least, my) incredulity? Prinzhorn Dance School have computed the answer to that last one out to the fourth significant digit. Then they add one, and right there is where they drop this "5 o'clock shocker" (am, not pm, by the way). So ridiculous... so calculated in its meaninglessness... so impossible to dislodge from my aching brain...

49. Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver

In retrospect, I was probably a bit harsh on Interpol when I reviewed Our Love to Admire. So let me make it up to them here: much as I predicted even then, I never turn off this song when it comes up on random shuffle. It's a tricky little beast - indie-by-numbers on the surface, but brimming with lots of satisfying guitar twists as soon as you look beyond its wholesome tunefulness. I'm particularly fond of those short shocked-sounding bursts on the chorus, and the interplay between the drums and both guitars on the bridges. This is what Interpol do best, and here's to many more.

48. Dälek - Paragraphs Relentless

Sinister. That's the word that comes immediately to mind when this sizzling wall of organ and processed guitar hits you in the gut. The mundane beat serves mostly to create motion, a frame on which the rest of the instrumentation strains and writhes against its boundaries; like a Bruegel painting, endless tension and details are contained within a relatively limited palette. Above it all floats that eerie harmonica-like melody: is it a warning of what's to come, or a dirge for what has passed? Either way, I'm rooted to the spot by this song, even as it evokes a deep-seated urge to flee.

47. The National - Brainy

On an album full of songs driven by the drumming, none gets pushed harder by the beat than "Brainy". Everything else - the simple two-note guitar motif that starts the song and continues throughout, the long aching brass and string notes, the resigned vocals, even the lyrics with their talk of "dragging around by the end of your coat" - futilely resists being pulled along. "Think I better follow you around," Matt Beringer admits, but then follows that with the single most memorable line on Boxer: "You might need me more than you think you will." He could be addressing anything or anyone - that insistent beat, the hopes inside his own chest, the lover he won't let run away. The narrative doesn't matter nearly as much as the raw emotion behind his dedication; one of the most moving and (dare I say?) universal moments I heard all year.

46. Parts & Labor - Ghosts Will Burn

On most of Mapmaker, Parts & Labor repeatedly force chaos and structure, noise and harmony, to coexist. But on "Ghosts Will Burn," the chaos is the structure. The beat upon which the song is built is inexplicable but rock-solid, Christopher Weingarten's shining moment among a number of incredible performances. Around it the guitars whine, moan, and burble. The bassline plays tag with both, creating a thick stew of silences interspersed with colliding notes and rhythms. And soaring over top all of it is one of the album's most majestic vocal melodies, like a surfer confident in his own abilities to ride no matter what boils up from below. Get your head around this burst of randomness, and jump on the surfboard with him.

45. Deerhunter - Octet

The Germans down at #15 might actually be named "Shimmering Collective", but this here's the true spirit of that phrase. For almost eight glorious minutes, Deerhunter are the new Happy Mondays: a rock band who aren't afraid to make music you can dance to. The bassline is simple yet powerfully buoyant, and around it the guitars and the vocals swirl in one heaving grinning mass. Taken as is, the song patiently unfolds and builds to its euphoric high, where it lingers for a number of cycles before slowly winding back down. Clip it a bit on either side, and I bet you could slip the middle five minutes of it into any DJ set around 1 am, when the drugs are starting to kick in and the audience is ready to be pushed.

44. !!! - Heart of Hearts

And hey - while we're on the topic of rock bands you can dance to!!! Except this is almost the mirror image of "Octet" - rather than a rock band accidentally making a dance song, a dance band who still can't help but rock out a little. The "dance" components of this equation - chattering high-hats, stuttering rubber-band bass, cheesy/ridiculous accelerating drum breaks - for all that they're pushed to the front of the song, can't obscure the staccato guitar (Gang of Four, anyone?) or the near-insolent nonchalence of the vocals. It captures perfectly the joint statement-of-purpose implied by the band name: we will excite you; we will sneer at the ease with which we succeed. The beauty of "Heart of Hearts" is how they can't help but invite all the rest of us to sneer along.

43. A Place to Bury Strangers - Don't Think Lover

Everything you need to know about A Place to Bury Strangers can be summed up in the first five seconds of this song: buzzsaw guitar riff decapitates, arch 80s drum machine jerks in time to your thrashing body. I'm reminded of that old childhood threat (which by the way, I always found extremely strange): "I'm gonna tear your head off and shit down your throat." Only in this case, after the first deed is done, it's like the band pause in the second. The music gets all soft and monotonal and gooey and wistful, like "hey! no matter how much you hurt me and pissed me off, I loved you! I loved you!" Sobbing and recrimination follow: "Don't.... don't think love... love, will last forever." And now the sinking realization that of course love won't last forever because you just pissed me off to the point that I tore your head off! It's all your fault! Cue buzzsaw guitar riff. Repeat cycle of retribution and recrimination until there's no more (fake) blood to spurt. It's all so cute it makes me want to start a rock band, but only if you can teach me how to make a guitar sound like that too!

42. Burial - Archangel

The indie snob in me is tempted to resist the hype (best-rated album of the year, INDEED!), assert my iconoclasm, and make this the most backhanded endorsement on this list. Aw, fuck it... I admit to being moved by "Archangel" despite how hard and obviously Burial is trying to make me feel moved by it. I further admit to being a big softie at heart, plus (hell, while I'm admitting shit) I'm in a still-new relationship and damned if this doesn't evoke those late-night moments when my insecurities kick in and I find myself thinking "If I trust you... " , "Tell me I belong..." etc etc ad nauseum. All of the expected signifiers are here: big sweeping strings, time-stretched rave-ish vocals, and a combination of truly hollow beats and cavernous metallic bass that perfectly simulates that inner void I'd deny in saner moments I ever feel. Fuckin' manipulative bastard... sombody pass the kleenex...

41. Shapes and Sizes - Head Movin'

It's the only song on which they manage to strike the perfect balance between their innate tunefulness and their disdain for stasis, but "Head Movin'" is no less an accomplishment for its solitude on Shapes and Sizes' otherwise painfully herky-jerky debut album. Brevity suits them - this is one of their shortest songs and it benefits from a notable lack of diversions. For two verses the guitars jangle and the bass pulses; then the strings all but disappear for a clattering percussion-driven coda. Throughout the vocals are boyish, alternately tentative and overconfident, and ultimately winning. Sort of a blip on my musical radar screen in 2007, but it'll probably find its way on many compilations to come.

40. Dan Deacon - Snake Mistakes

If Hrvatski and Max Tundra spawned a mutant child, this is what it would sound like. (Perhaps these were the "coolest dads in dad school" that Dan Deacon had in mind? Except of course he goes on to tell us how "coolest dad" breaks none of the "dad rules", and much like his forbears Deacon breaks all the rules. Except his own.) "Snake Mistakes" features the freaked-out technical precision of the former combined with the utter sense of whimsy of the latter; the result is a Ren & Stimpy cartoon become sound. Irresistible, if you can get past the "cute" factor.

39. Kristin Hersh - Day Glo

It used to be that Kristin's solo music had a much different persona than her band work (first with Throwing Muses, most recently with 50 Foot Wave). Although in both cases the operative word was "intense" - the solo stuff tended to be more sad and contemplative, the band stuff louder and occasionally angry. But on '07's solid Learn to Sing Like a Star, the distinction is all but gone - and nowhere more than on this standout. It's all about the way she keeps building to the phrase "Getting up is what huuuuurrrrrrrts", and how every time she repeats it that last word becomes more emotion-filled, more gravelly. Within the context of what is otherwise a straightforward jangly guitar tune - more shocking. She doesn't just want to tell you about the hurt, she wants you to feel it with her. When I heard her perform the song live, it was downright frightening.

38. Aesop Rock - Bring Back Pluto

This is my friend Aesop. He's pretty cool, although he's not always symbolically comprehensible. So here's the highlights of the story: The clue is in the vacancy, the proof is in his goosbumps. It may actually be safer to play with knives. What's the proper rules for stuffing hostages in trucks? Nine minus one left eight. They're going to want his milk money next. Every dumpster diver's gonna vomit up a comment. This is little Russian dolls that get smaller and smaller still. Eight planets bullied number nine until he fell. When the freakishly disfigured have been triggered to surround you, you will live inside the actual second they let the hounds loose.

Huh, you didn't follow the story? Good, cause neither do I, and likely neither does Aes. Fortunately understanding what the hell he's carrying on about is completely tangential to enjoying the man's music. It's all about the flow of these words, the ways the individual sounds which comprise them create and demolish internal structures, all the time existing in sync and in tension with the gorgeous flow of the loungy music underneath. It's about marvelling at his words/minute ratio (ridiculously high) in joint with how clearly enunciated it all is. Ultimately, listening to it is just fun, meanings be damned.

37. Yeasayer - Germs

I realized in retrospect that despite warily endorsing All Hour Cymbals in my 20-best list, I didn't do a good job of explaining what Yeasayer actually sound like. I'm going to paraphrase my friend Kameron, who - for all that he expressed this with visible distaste - sunk the proverbial nail into the plywood. Yeasayer sound like a bunch of young wanna-be hippies, at least one of whom has been to India or the Middle East and hence injects the music with such-styled "exotic" motifs. Yep, there's a "psychedelic" peace-n-love sort of aesthetic here, which all the religious themes and overlarge generalities in the lyrics only enhance. The two big admonitions on "Germs" are: "Everybody's coming down with the same thing," and "Better get some medicine if you know what's good for you." I should have shared Kameron's distaste, but these guys have a knack for beautiful multipart vocal harmonies that makes the music seem denser than it actually is, and makes those faux-Middle Easternisms feel strangely organic. One of those examples where the music, despite my critical stance, still wins. Which just means that we all win too.

36. Thurston Moore - Silver > Blue

I.e., Daydream Nation unplugged and played on one guitar instead of two. Sure the overall tone is autumnal and contemplative, not explosive and exploratory, but damned if the guitar solo during the long instrumental coda doesn't remind me of "'Cross the Breeze" (among other SY golden oldies). Beautiful without being "easy" listening (there's still plenty of discordance to be found), restrained without being resigned, and engaging because (rather than in spite) of its predigree - I'll take this over any of Sonic Youth's recent output any day.

35. Shining - Stalemate Longan Runner

This song makes me want to start listening to Rush. I know next to nothing about Rush, mind you, and couldn't even name "that one song" they're so well known for, though if you played it for me I'd know it was them. Likewise, I could be completely wrong when I assert that the middle third of this song, built upon some of the most fantastic (and surprisingly straightforward - for Shining) riffage I've ever heard, is a total Rush rip-off. But then, I somehow doubt Rush ever started their songs with a minute of dischordant free-jazz guitar skronk. And I'd be willing to bet money that Rush never collapsed one of their big satisfying power riffs into an electronic harpsichord and keyboard duet. Hence the need to research.... awww, fuck it. Now way did Rush ever write anything this fucking odd and cool!

34. Field Music - In Context

I find writing about Field Music to be pretty challenging. Try explaining sugar to someone without using the word "sweet", or a cloudless sky without calling it "blue." Now confront the opposite linguistic problem: listen to this song - so seemingly effortless, so tuneful, immediately winning. Describe it to someone without invoking that three-letter "p" word which gets thrown around as though it had a universal meaning. My point is, telling you this is "pop" music at its most quintessential has little chance of communicating what I really mean, because "pop" is a pretty subjective experience. So I'm almost forced to reducing the accomplishment here down to its mechanics: that insanely catchy drum beat; the way the dynamic verses (all restless guitar work and beautifully-counterpointed bass) flow seamlessly into the sugar-rush monolithic melody of the chorus. But see, I have to sit and think about that, and this is not a song that requires much thought to love. Better just to say: try this out. You'll like it.

33. Pantha du Prince - Saturn Strobe

This one snuck past my defenses, but I’m glad it did. I mean, I’ve been on an indie rock kick for the last three-to-five years. House and techno music for the most part makes me itch anymore. But this! This makes me wish that I was on the roll of a lifetime (in the, um, “ecstatic” sense), navigating the distinction between finite and in-finite, living inside the music and the music living inside of me. Pantha du Prince evokes and defines that glorious Void with all these grand gestures and piles of strings, then he fills that Void with enough minute details (bells! rainfall!) to make its boundaries seem somehow… within reach. As we used to say about trance when in the right (read: altered) state of mind, this is traveling music; the best way to visit whole other worlds without leaving the space behind your closed eyes, to go everywhere and anywhere while holding still. “This Bliss” as the album title might be overreaching (I still can’t make it through the thing in one sitting), but for these seven-and-a-half minutes bliss is precisely where I'm living.

32. Beirut - In the Mausoleum

I hate to say it, but this is the success to Yeasayer's valiant attempt. Advantage to Beirut for having not only the technical chops (there are more instruments on this song than probably any other on this list) but, more importantly - that voice. The first word I think of to describe it is "buttery," melting out of your speakers and lingering on your ears for a second or two after it's passed. Throw in all the attention being paid to details (especially the layered percussion), the smooth transitions between the sections, and the way the song feels like the musical summary of your amazing three-continent trip last summer, and it all adds up to the most calorie-laden (yet guilt-free!) treat one could ask for.

31. Dizzee Rascal - Sirens

OK, so it's not "grime." It's not even particularly grimy - Dizzee sounds all grownup and big-budget now. That's still our boy Dylan though, spitting a million words a minute and making running away from the police sound like just another part of his daily routine. "Let's take it back to that old skool storytelling shit," he proclaims (oddly enough, after the first verse) but for me the appeal isn't so much the tale as the glee with which he shares it. And it's not as if everything here on the music front is straightforward - listen to the way the music all but disappears on the choruses, leaving just Dizzee's voice and that ubiquitous siren wailing in the background. Or the way all those city sounds (sirens, radios, traffic) lend it an air of gritty realism. I can accept that he's probably never gonna give us another totally alien creation like "I Luv U" as long as his feet hitting terra firma continues to sound like this.

30. Deerhoof - The Perfect Me

Recipe for the Perfect Deerhoof Song

Simple/immediately-catchy instrumental riffs (2 minimum)
Satomi's chirpy speak-sing. (intelligible syllables optional)
Chaotic drumming
At least one instrumental element used in no previous Deerhoof song (which, in this case is that hyperkinetic cowbell)

Organize riffs in baffling sequence that nevertheless feels totally organic. Liberally sprinkle speak-sing and drumming throughout mixture. Follow one of three options for last ingredient: a) sprinkle throughout; b) introduce halfway through song; or c) introduce near end of song. Options b) and c) can be executed with immediate withdrawal or persistence of said element for rest of song.

NOTE: the beauty of this formula is that - eight albums in - it still shows little signs of being formulaic!

29. Battles - DDiamondd

Within its larger context on Mirrored, "DDiamondd" feels almost like a palette-cleanser between twin-behemoths "Atlas" and "Tonto" (see numbers 16 and, errrr, 1!, below). It's Battles' most formalist moment: counterpoint rising and falling melodies, kinetic percussion on the interludes, and Tyondai Braxton's vocals are almost intelligible. They don't seem to play it live, and at a mere two-and-a-half minutes it seems downright tossed-off.

So rewind to the moment in my car when I first heard this song, after rushing across town to pick up the album at Amoeba the day it came out. "Race: In", fine. "Atlas" - stunning, but I already knew that. And then, that moment halfway through "DDiamondd" when the wall of crickets suddenly drops on my unexpecting ass and it was all I could do not to cause an accident because, y'know, it's kind of hard to focus on anything else when your jaw won't get off the damn floor. In brief: the coolest single individual sound I heard all fucking year. And almost a year later, it STILL has that power over me, like "No they didn't! Yes they DID!"

28. El-P - Drive

El-P is really pissed off. See, there's this war being fought nominally for one reason but it's really just to protect your and my (and his) ability to (as the sample on the chorus chirps) "drive drive Drive DRIVE!" And it's to his credit that he's just as pissed at himself for being complicit in the mess; for every reference to "Jesus of NASCAReth" or "military Humvees with no bullet-proof siding", there's a self-aimed zinger like "My triple-A card has one too many initials." But El also knows that protest songs that take themselves too seriously are a total drag. So the entire thing is infused wtih his unflagging sense of (gallows) humor and a continuous stream of background noise and spoken asides (my favorite is that insincere "Sorry guys!" after the "Humvee" line) that act like the ear candy you'll have for dessert after he's (or is it, "the world's"?) done feeding you a steaming hot plate of shit.

27. Of Montreal - Suffer for Fashion

Oh, I could carry on about how this is the best song David Bowie has released in decades... how it was the one that led me to my favorite album of the year... how Kevin Barnes uses words like "emasculate," "vicissitudes," and "emaciate" but still crafts the song's biggest hook from the simple phrase "...not like THA - A - A - A - AT!"... how those cheesy 80s drum machines sound totally fresh and hot... that amazing couplet "We've got to keep our little clique clicking at 130 bpm / It's not too slow!"...

Or, I can just admit that it boils down to two words. After announcing "I know we suffer for fashion", he pauses ever-so-briefly and concludes "or whatever." Barnes knows full well that "we" are full of shit, and this song is both a celebration and a mockery of the whole notion of belonging to a "scene." He plays it both ways throughout Hissing Fauna: (feel/laugh at) my pain, and this is the song that sets that stage perfectly. If there was a Miss Straight America contest, he'd be the ten-time champion and counting.

26. Menomena - My My

I'm still waiting (and I know they have it within them) for Menomena to craft an album that's consistently engaging and not just consistently interesting. But damned if this song wasn't the first in 2006 that actually brought me to tears. The overall tone is set by the shimmering beauty of the organ, Brent Knopf's wistful vocals and stark acknowledgement of his own insecurities, and especially the way the sax and guitar stabs intrude into the space being created like little reminders or self-recriminations that this kind of navel-gazing can lead nowhere good. It all pushes toward a haunting/soaring mid-song climax that in less deft hands would have come across as calculated. Instead: eye leakage from yours truly. If Kevin Barnes was 2006's great ironist, these guys were the year's great.... um, sincerists?

25. PJ Harvey - Silence

Fifteen years ago, PJ Harvey was telling Casanova to bend over, rubbing him til it bled, and cutting his legs off when he tried to run away. Apparently this strategy hasn't yielded long-term success, because here she's more vulnerable than we've ever heard her before. She all-but-whispers, "That by some miracle, you'd be aware...", too heartweary to really hope for anything more than the song's title. Which she repeats over and over at the end like it's all she has left - the only lover who hasn't left her (or been scared away). And the funny thing is, it's just as powerful and moving as any of her previous incarnations. For all that she's gotten softer, it isn't gently that she's going into that good night.

24. A Sunny Day in Glasgow - 5:15 Train

Popular music can't help but recycle old trends or sounds, and in 2007 it seemed like everybody (including these folks, only they did it better than most) had their My Bloody Valentine moment. But only A Sunny Day in Glasgow recognized that big Cocteau Twins-sized hole in our collective audio environment and decided not just to fill it, but to make us forget it ever existed. "5:15 Train" is the flat-out prettiest song I heard all year. The guitars chime and whirr, their vibrations lending the entire affair a hazy washed out bliss - and that's BEFORE the crystalline vocal drops on you as heavy and gorgeous and unattainable as world peace. Best of all, ASDIG make the edges of this song rough: that opening cascade of feedback that sounds like a torrential downpour on a tin roof, the percussion that hits like a stable full of cracking whips. The entire effect is like being thrown overboard by an enormous storm: terror, tranquility, and that sweet sirens' song urging you to surrender.

23. Les Savy Fav - The Equestrian

Les Savy Fav waste no time letting us know how excited they are to be back, six years after their last full-length. First single "The Equestrian" is a flat-out, balls-to-the-floor rocker, the kind for which there will always be a need. Musically it's refreshingly straightforward, with none of the self-conscious experimentation that in the past has been both their greatest strength and worst fault. I'd normally be averse to a balding pudgy guy dropping a straight-up sex jam on me, but as usual Tim Harrington strikes the perfect balance of engagement and distance, humor and earnestness. I.e., "You made me gasp when you grasped my withers" could be sexy, or self-disparaging (Harrington, bless his soul, has never pretended to be anything but a balding pudgy guy, even when he's running around in his underwear), or simply a great rhyme for "You made me shake, you made me shiver." Guys, it was worth the wait.

22. A Place to Bury Strangers - My Weakness

Much as I love them, I have to admit these guys have a great idea:song ratio approaching 1. So, here's the greatest of those ideas, an indescribable ripping guitar sound that drives the choruses and interludes, and leaves it's mark on you even when they're trying to shove it back in its cage on the verses. It also benefits from brevity, being the shortest song on the album. And of course, since it's the most brutal thing they (or almost anyone) have to offer us, they go and call it "My Weakness." Well, I feel my weakness in the knees as soon as this thing comes blasting out of my speakers. (Go ahead, turn the volume down. It'll still piledrive over you and come back for seconds). I think I'm afraid to hear a song they'd see fit to call "My Strength"...

21. HEALTH - Crimewave

In 2006, (the) drum(s) came for a visit. In 2007, they brought their friend Gloriously Atonal Guitar, and they: SMASHED THE KIDS' NEW PLAYSTATION! URINATED IN THE CAT'S WATER DISH! SET THE CURTAINS ON FIRE! DRAGGED YOUR CLEAN SHEETS THROUGH THE MUD! ATE EVERYTHING IN THE REFRIGERATOR! DIDN'T CLEAN UP AFTERWARD! And then they left, just as inscrutable as they'd arrived. Geez, it's a CRIMEWAVE!!! What'd you expect, subtlety?

20. Besnard Lakes - And You Lied to Me

In a year that saw no new music from My Morning Jacket, somebody had to give all us indie kids an epic, reverbed-to-all-hell, southern-inflected, classic-rock-referenced gem. OK, so by "southern" in this case I actually mean "southern Canada"... and of course I'll happily endorse this song in the same breath that I'd dismiss any of that old stuff in whose steps it no doubt follows. All my hand-waving aside, the key word here is "epic." For all that its structure is essentially a cycle through the same basic set of melodies (complete with dramatic long pauses between), the band add in enough small touches each time through that it feels like one long, slow build. The room gets hazier, the emotional tension thicker, the pace keeps picking up... and when release (i.e., the inevitable blistering guitar solo!) drops at about the 5:30 mark, you'll really feel it too. If they could have pulled this off more than once on the otherwise-tepid Are the Dark Horse, I'd be a huge fan, but its singularity makes "And You Lied to Me" all the more impressive.

P.S. Fuck the Arcade Fire.

19. Deerhunter - Spring Hall Convert

If I'm going to continue yammering on about how I love Interpol for their emotional heft and despite their obvious technical limitations, then I should probably extend the same courtesy to some other bands as well. Enter Deerhunter, with the song that I've actually known for the longest of any on this list - Pitchfork released it as part of their (not-so-)Infinite Mixtape series in late 2006. Still, the album didn't drop until early 2007, so we'll "officially" include it on this list. My relationship to the song has fluctuated... the insistent bassline and swirling ambience of it grabbed me immediately. Then I listened to it enough to realize that the rhythm guitar part is the same. 4-note. progression. over. and. over. for minutes. It fell out of favor with me for a while. Then at some point last summer it came up on random shuffle and I found myself cranking the volume and falling for its spell all over again. I love how the vocals just keep getting more and more multi-tracked until half the noise coming out of your speakers is layers of Brandon Cox's voice. And that bassline, with its 1-2 punch on the endless spiral of the second half, still has the power to make my heart beat in time.

18. Interpol - Pace is the Trick

And hey! speaking of Interpol... This one is easy for me to love since its the nearest they got to the outright emotionalism of their best previous work. Paul Banks' voice still has the power to evoke both hope and resignation at the same time. OK, it wouldn't be a great Interpol song if there wasn't at least one utterly bemusing lyric, and Paul hits us with this one right up front: "But it's like sleaze in the park / And women, you have no self-control / The angels remark outside / You are known for insatiable needs." I still can't figure out if it's the women that Paul is accusing of "no self-control", or a friend whose "insatiable needs" relate to women... and wait, isn't most "sleaze in the park" between men? Oh right... it's Interpol... don't listen to the words but the way they sound coming out of his mouth. Like the chorus of this one, whose rising notes: "And NOW I select you, SLOW now I let you see HOW I STUN, see HOW I STUN" was one of the year's irresistible singalongs for me. Even more impressive, the guitar work is the most creative and dynamic they've ever delivered - the monotone quarter notes are kept to a minimum (just a few stretches at the end) and the opening phrase is downright haunting. Finally, Carlos sounds like he's at least awake for this song, which is more than I can say for the rest of the album. Let's not give up on them just yet... clearly they can still deliver the goods.

17. Parts & Labor - Brighter Days

If "Ghosts Will Burn" reminded me of a sufer, then "Brighter Days" is the tsunami: it's that exhilirating, that overwhelming. Especially, that terrifying. If the first twenty seconds of this song doesn't scare the shit out of you, I want to know what natural disaster you've survived. The bass and guitar grunt and squeal at each other like the earth cracking open, while the drummer does his best to emulate what a major city must sound like when it's crumbling around your ears. The dust settles, and then these guys have the nerve (or maybe they're just hopeless optimists) to hit us with one of their custom-made "soaring" guitar solos. Dude, forget the shattered landscape, the minutiae of your ruined life laying scattered around - "brighter days", man! The verses of this sound like mid-90s arena-alterna-rock filtered through the urgency of mid-80s blue collar punks like the Minutemen. Which is to say, pretty damn fist-pumpingly cool. When the aftershock hits (another quick cycle throught that heartstopping intro), it's somehow less frightening. Like maybe you really can live through this much chaos and twisted structure and still sing a pretty song. Obama should really be on the phone with these guys!

16. Battles - Tonto

Even when they try to, Battles are incapable of creating a straightforward rock song. Not that they didn't make a valiant effort; "Tonto" has by far the highest guitar:electronics ratio of any of the songs on Mirrored, and the central section (from roughly 2:30 to 3:45) with its Big Dumb Riffs is perhaps the one moment on the album where they forget their ironic distance and need to fuck with everything within reach, and just rock the hell out! It's frankly stunning, and left me with a catch in my throat repeatedly throughout 2007. Of course the stuff that surrounds it is pretty amazing as well - the tongue-in-cheek bouncing balls of the guitar interplay in the front stretch and immediately after the big emotional payoff, and the slow wind-down of the final three minutes. Here's to glorious failure!

15. Kammerflimmer Kollektiev - Jinx

The grizzled old cowboy leaned back in his creaking wooden chair, casually lifted first one foot than the other onto the weathered railing of his front porch, and settled into the position in which he greeted the morning every day since retiring from the ranch. Today was going to be a hot one, he could tell by the dust devils already starting to dance in the barren fields across the tar road that split the wide-open landscape in half as far as one could see to the east and west.

He saw the dust being kicked up by the wagon train long before he started to hear the creak of wooden wheels, the soft exhalations of the livestock, and the occasional clank of a cowbell swinging on its bearer's neck. As the cluster of worn vehicles drew closer, another sound took increasing prominence within the mix: a series of low moans and wordless syllables. It sounded like a woman's voice, and even before she came into sight the cowboy felt a chill run up his back listening to her. As his luck would have it, she was in the last vehicle in the chain - a wooden cage on wheels much like those he'd seen being used to transport circus animals. Strangest of all, nobody else in the wagon train paid her the slightest bit of attention as she continued producing a string of pained noises. As she passed by his house, they made eye contact; she responded to the gaze of a stranger by leaping up and attempting to shake the bars of her cell. Her moans turned to outright gibbering that would haunt the cowboy's memories during silent moments for the rest of his life. The wagon train plodded on... the products of the woman's tortured throat grew quieter both with resignation to her situation and growing distance... and eventually the cowboy had nothing but his memories to verify that any of it had happened at all.

He'd often wonder: what was wrong with the caged, moaning woman? Why had the wagon train members locked her up? Where were they taking her and for what purpose? How could a bunch of arty Germans so perfectly evoke an old-time American West they'd probably never even experienced in film let alone in real life? And what statement were they making (if any) by dropping into that perfect evocation such an incongruent factor as the moaning woman? He'd jump when thoughts like those would cross his mind; they felt like somebody else's words being fed into his head, like he was nothing but a character in someobdy else's story. When the cowboy felt like that, he'd drink. A lot. Alcohol could kill those strange questions, but he never managed to drown the memories of that disturbed (and disturbing) woman's moaning.

14. Supersilent - 8.5

If anyone's paying attention out there, you might have noticed I haven't added any new updates to this list in a couple weeks now. Well, partly that's because I've been super busy, and partly it's because I knew the next time I sat down to write on here, I was going to have to write about 8.5. And frankly, writing about this song intimidates the hell out of me.

Me and Michael in the car. 8.5 comes up on random shuffle. I explain to him how it's the next one to write about on my blog, and I'm sure I'm going to end up writing a small book. But on the flip side, I'm at a complete loss what to say. Michael has heard this song before. He wrinkles his face and says, "Well, what's there to say?" I laugh the hardest I have in a while.

For all that I tend to gravitate toward "underground" music, that isn't to say that all things weird or arty or difficult are going to appeal to me. I can be abstractly impressed by something and still not feel it's worthy of recommending to folks. Plenty of stuff heartily espoused by Pitchfork or Cokemachineglow fails to register for me. Good old 8.5 wouldn't be sitting this high up on this list if it didn't genuinely move me... if it didn't make me feel... something...

I was tempted to approach 8.5 the same way I did Jinx. They're the two most abstract, arty songs on this list, and they both lend themselves to a cinematic interpretation. The problem is, the images evoked by Jinx are much safer to assume you'll see/hear also. 8.5 is an entirely different beast. I mean, there's a story being told by the song, no doubt of it. But - sort of like hating the movie they made out of one of your favorite books because now when you read the book you see the movie - the story I hear in this song, the images it evokes for me, might not be those it would for you. So let's keep it general... there's loss and there's an overwhelming sense of being lost. There are revelations. Not starburst revelations, but quiet, creeping ones, whose power you don't realize until they swallow you. There's at least one long moment of sheer terror, near the end of the first movement of the song when the distorted metallic voice changes its tone and becomes almost frenzied. And there are moments of stunning beauty: a muted trumpet solo, swooshing synth washes, pastoral flutes. The drumming on this song is amazingly counterintuitive, but then considering what the rest of the band is doing for most of it, a steady beat wouldn't make sense anyway. But for all their chaos, the beats provide some of the only solidity to be found; they define edges within the space created by the song.

I think you should hear this. I can't promise what you'll think of it, or even that you'll want to make it through the entire 12 minutes (though if you make it past the first three - which, for the record, I think are fucking brilliant - you'll have weathered the most "challenging" part of the song). I'd like to think you'll at least find it interesting, even if you never want to hear it again. But it might just invite you back... and if it does, I'd love to be told what you hear in it, what it makes you see or feel.

13. Shining - The Red Room

Fatal admission time: I know next to nothing about jazz. I mean, I know which are the "big names" and I'll happily go listen to live jazz if somebody else suggests it. I can recognize jazz-like cadences or instrumentation when I hear them. But that's about all I can offer on the genre. Which is a shameful admission from a self-professed music lover and would-be online critic.

I laughed out loud when the guy behind the information desk at Amoeba Records told me I'd find Grindstone in the jazz section. I laughed even harder when I heard the album. "Jazz", loosely defined, might have been the dominant motif on Shining's last album In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will be a Monster. I suppose the genre classification makes sense as much as any other would, when it comes to these guys, and at least a couple of them are classically trained jazz musicians. But most of Grindstone only references "jazz" (as I understand it), and certainly not enough to justify sticking it in that section on the band's reputation alone.

Except for "The Red Room," the one track on Grindstone that might not have sent the unknowing jazz afficionado screaming from the room at this bizarre new album they'd picked up on a whim. Then again, maybe it might have. For all that it starts with a warbling saxophone line, that lasts exactly ten seconds before Shining bring the chaos. The bass is practically rhythmless. The horn section spends some time practicing chords then locks into a tight-as-hell (surprise surprise) jaunty melody accompanied by stomping bass drum and, um, handclaps. Another call-and-response transition, and in the third movement the ground completely drops out. Now the horns are blaring, the bass is chugging along like a motor, there's a rising sense of tension that all comes to a head in
my favorite musical five seconds of 2007. Yes, I realize that sounds ridiculous. But this is Shining, and they can do more in five seconds than most bands manage over entire albums. (I was quite gratified by Mark Abraham's review of the album for cokemachineglow; he also thinks these five seconds are noteworthy).

12. Marnie Stern - Grapefruit

"Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 'Grapefruit', our most popular attraction here at Marnie Stern World. Because the 'Grapefruit' is immensely disorienting for first-time riders, we've put together this little safety video to help you anticipate what you've been waiting so patiently in line to experience."

"When you reach the platform, please pull your lapbelt as tightly around yourself as possible, then pull the locking body cage down into a snug and latched position. Your safety on the 'Grapefruit' is our number one concern, and many of the twists and turns it takes require you to be secure within your seat or risk being pitched into free-fall at outrageous speeds."

"Your car will be riding along the Guitar track of the 'Grapefruit.' At the beginning of the ride, the Guitar track rubberbands back and forth so quickly that many first-time riders lose their lunch. We promise that the exhiliration you'll feel at the sensations far outweigh the unpleasant consequences of this occurrence. After tossing you around relentlessly, the Guitar track begins an extended series of punctuated rises and falls that continue through the rest of the ride. Some riders report feeling dizzy at the bottoms of these falls; this side-effect is rather simply mitigated if you just stop holding your breath."

"You'll notice as you progress along the 'Grapefruit' that the attraction features another riderless track we like to call the Drum track. The Drum track is frankly going to scare the shit out of you, and you're not even riding on it. Even we're not entirely sure by what tricks of engineering the Drum track is so chaotic, seeming to collide into the Guitar track repeatedly yet managing to coexist within a single structure. Entire university physics departments have been forced into retirement trying to figure this out, so you don't stand a chance. In fact, a large part of the pleasure of the 'Grapefruit' experience - and we've got the testimonials from fanatical repeat riders to prove it - derives from this inscrutable interaction. Or, as we like to say, it's best just to sit back and enjoy the ride."

"The third component of the 'Grapefruit' is the vocal accompaniment. Our audience research suggests that this aspect of the ride is completely negligible to about half our riders. The other half report that trying to figure out the words of the vocal accompaniment provides them the correct amount of detachment to properly enjoy the whole Guitar-Drum track thing without getting so sucked into it that they freak out. We here at Marnie Stern World pride ourselves in packing our attractions with maximum punch, and are pleased that something as singular as the 'Grapefruit' still lends itself to a multitude of experiences."

"By now you've reached the front of the line and you're ready to strap into the 'Grapefruit.' We share your excitement, and even a bit of your needless dread if you're a first-time rider. And we can all but guarantee that you'll be back for the experience many more times, whether this is your first or your hundredth."

11. Animal Collective - Fireworks
10. Of Montreal - She's a Rejecter
9. El-P - Run the Numbers
8. The National - Mistaken for Strangers
7. !!! - Sweet Life
6. M.I.A. - Bird Flu
5. A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Our Change into Rain is No Change at All
4. Frog Eyes - Reform the Countryside
3. Dälek - Starved for Truth
2. Shining - ASA NISI MASA
1. Battles - Atlas

In addition to fleshing those out considerably, I'll also be posting at some point soon my 10 favorite live shows of '07. And then, finally, onward to '08 - which will start with my review of Radiohead's In Rainbows. (Yes, I know I could have downloaded it a couple months ago. But I'm a CD collector, and it came out on CD in the US on January 1st. Thereby making it an '08 release as far as I'm concerned).

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2007

2008-01-06T13:59:00.001-08:00

I had a really delightful problem coming up with this list: unlike '06, where I struggled to find 10 albums I could heartily endorse, I felt guilty limiting myself to 20 this year! I bought 47 new releases in 2007, the most ever, and with that came a lot of (self-imposed) pressure to try and "keep up". I failed pretty miserably at that, as my reviews record will attest. Still, I think by the advent of '08 I'd done the year justice in my purchases, enough that I think this list represents a pretty good version of what it would have looked like if I had unlimited funds and time. As always, many thanks to Pitchfork and Cokemachineglow for turning me on to so much great stuff this year.

I spent considerable time agonizing over the top three spots on this list. What finally decided me is that this is a list about albums, and ideally an album is an entity unto itself, not just a collection of songs. Consistency becomes a prime consideration - and as much as they're mind-blowing accomplishments, Mirrored and Grindstone both contain some filler. Whereas that title sitting down at #1 has only one song that I can take or leave, and everything else is a keeper. The same thought process had me shuffling the order a bit in the bottom half of the list, and ultimately knocked El-P off of it (he gets his due in my favorite 40 songs, however).

Apologies to those who might have looked at the list when I first posted it (not to mention Menomena, who just got booted)... since then I've listened to Aesop Rock's awesome None Shall Pass enough to recognize it belongs on this list. I guess that's one of the advantages of writing a blog over publishing a mag (whether paper or virtual) - you always have the luxury of changing your mind! Still, I'm ready to stop thinking about this, so without further ado....

Honorable Mention: Long Blondes - Someone to Drive You Home

Not H.M. because it was #21 on the list (that was El-P), but because technically this came out at the end of 2006. Still, I didn't buy it until summer of '07, and even though Pitchfork included it in their year-end list for '06, they didn't get around to actually reviewing it until January. The Long Blondes are essentially the female version of Franz Ferdinand - same snappy wit, same post-punk guitar sound, same love for disco rhythms just below the surface. Kate Jackson's every-woman lyrics occasionally border on trite, but more often get a knowing smile and a hearty sing-along from me. "You're only 19 for God's sake / You don't need a boyfriend", she sings in the beginning of "Once and Never Again", but by the end of the song she's acknowledging her jealousy of the younger woman's range of choices with only a trace of bitterness. One of my favorite guilty pleasures last year.

20. Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English

I think Dizzee is incapable of making a bad album, and even if this one feels like a further retreat from the sonic adventurousness of Boy in Da Corner, it's still a solid and consistent listen. He's enunciating more, but his flow is still intense and nuanced. What surprises me the most about the album is that - at the ripe "old" age of 22 (or so) - Dizzee can convincingly pass himself off as some sort of role model. He's still dodging the police (the epic "Sirens") and ogling the girls ("Da Feelin", "Flex"), albeit with none of the hostility that he used to have for women. But "Hardback (Industry)" finds him warning wannabe 'heads about remembering to pay their taxes (!), and "Excuse Me Please" is a credible lament about the uses of violence - both sanctioned and non-. I don't know how much longer I'm going to find him interesting, but Maths + English would be a worthy departure point.

19. M.I.A. - Kala

There are some serious missteps on this, and her (pretense at) politics grates, but I still have to give M.I.A. props for her iconoclasm. And when her music hits - "Bird Flu," "Boyz," "World Town," "XR2" - all of those other concerns disappear. She could have played it safe, instead she found a way to push nearly every boundary (self- or other-imposed), and it's not like there were that many. Björk should really pay attention.

18. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass

This just in! He's making the list after the year ended, but the album came out a L-O-N-G time ago, so it's not Aes' fault I'm an idiot. It's just that None Shall Pass is such a dense, detailed, demanding listen, it took a lot of listens to get my head around. The music is defiantly old-skool: classic funk, r n' b, and lounge jams with few of the embellishments that other Def Jux acts tend to build their sound on. The real draw here is AR's flow. For all that he's no rapid-fire spitter, does anybody cram this many words into three or four minutes? I think it'll take another twenty listens before the words sink in enough for me to figure out themes (though everything I've read about him suggests the man's literate, not comprehensible). The title track got a lot of love online, but for me the standouts are "Bring Back Pluto", where Aes uses the members of the solar system as avatars for the characters in a story (I think?) over a groovy langurous lounge track; "Fumes," which seems to be a morality tale about taking drugs but gets over with me for the fun it has with tempo and sequencing; and the near-disco outrage of "Five Fingers." The more Def Jux hip hop I hear, the more I'm sold.

17. HEALTH - HEALTH

Acknowledging that pesky elephant in the room (y'know, how this was the Liars album that Liars have apparently lost interest in giving us) in no way minimizes HEALTH's accomplishment on their breakneck, intense debut. At some point - around the time "Girl Attorney" is stripping the enamel off your teeth, or perhaps the way hypnosis gives way to the utter freakouts of the chorus of "Tabloid Sores" - the comparison becomes completely invalid. HEALTH can be reckless, but they're never unconsidered, and if the last third of the album sprawls a bit it's only because they're determined to use every tool available to them. In the Year of Weird, very little felt as gleefully experimental as this album.

16. Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals

All apologies to the Besnard Lakes, but this one is the real "dark horse" entry on this list. Rather than grouse about the sparse instrumentation and their bag of vocal tricks, let me just acknowledge that Yeasayer songs have crawled into my head and refused to come out. It's an easy album to like, and also manages to create an identifiable "Yeasayer sound", always the mark of a good debut album. I might shy away from the gospel stylings on "No Need to Worry" and "Red Cave", but the hazy beauty of "Germs" and "Worms", the epic pomp of "Wait for the Summertime," and especially the powerful understatement of the opening triad sum to a great album whose charms outweigh its limitations.

15. Field Music - Tones of Town

Another one that's impossible not to like. The most immediate touch point is classic XTC, but Field Music are a little more slippery than that. I could just leave it at the indelible pop melodies, but that wouldn't do justice to the attention these guys pay to detail, or their skill at making seemingly-incongrous elements fit into the larger mix. "Sit Tight" is a bubbly little bass and piano-driven number for it's first couple of minutes, but then it smoothly mutates into a funky "beatbox" exercise with synocpated groans and throat pops, presented with absolutely no fanfare or conscious sense of how weird a choice this was. "In Context" is initially driven by a super-catchy drum program, but as the song progresses Field Music keep adding new elements and expanding the ones already present. It's probably the most accessible album on this list, but Tones of Town is also a treat for the more-than-casual listener.

14. Kristin Hersh - Learn to Sing Like a Star

A worthy addition to Kristin's already-considerable body of work. The fleshed-out arrangements (especially the string work by the McCarricks) give her always-compelling voice some room to stretch out and regain a lot of the trademark intensity that was missing on The Grotto. I've always thought my love for her work was a very personal thing, but a number of friends commented on these songs when they'd happen to pop up on random playlists. How many other artists who got their start in the mid-80s are still kicking them out strong? Here's hoping for 20 more!

13. Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm

It's probably the album on this list I listened to the least, and it might even be fair to say I respect In Advance... more than I like it. It's the single most demanding thing I heard in 2007; impossible to have in the background or ignore. But when I'm in the mood, Marnie slays like nothing else. What most impresses me about the album, and what finally sold me on it entirely, is that Marnie never just relies on her obvious technical facility to sell these tunes. There's a very unique songwriting aesthetic at work here, and an irreverent sense of humor - you can practically hear her laughing her head off at all the bizarre conflations and collisions she hurls at you.

12. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam

Granted, for an album to make this list is already implicitly an endorsement. But for this album to make this list - hell, for the phrase "Animal Collective" to even exist on this blog - is a minor miracle. But let me not belabor the past; Strawberry Jam is an all-around triumph - a shimmering, hazy colossus brimming with mirth and relentless creativity. Avey Tare's vocals are the immediate hook, but repeat listens reveal tons of capitvating details in the mix. "#1" and "Cuckoo Cuckoo" suggest a Mercury Rev (!) connection I wouldn't have believed anyone could pull off. And if "Fireworks" or "Winter Wonder Land" don't put a big ole smile on your face, check your pulse. Forget Burial - this one was my big emotional release in 2007.

11. The National - Boxer

If you'd told me on initial listen that by the end of the year Boxer would be sitting just shy of my top ten, I wouldn't have believed you. Six months and countless listens later, I'll just eat some crow and happily hit the "repeat" button. They've replaced Interpol as the band I listen to when in a certain mood. I've already commented on the amazing drum work; the other star is Matt Beringer's soulful, understated vocal performance. It's probably the least flashy album on this list, but no less satisfying for that.

10. Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends

Even excepting my joy and surprise that this album exists at all, I'm going to venture that Let's Stay Friends is Les Savy Fav's best, most consistent release. OK, I find the last third of it sort of uninspired, but even their singles collection Inches had some duds on it. "The Equestrian," "Raging in the Plague Age," and "Slugs in the Shrubs" are LSF in classic attack mode, while "Patty Lee" and especially "Brace Yourself" both skillfully expand their sound without revealing any limitations. Especially in a year when so many other indie rock sure-bets disappointed, Let's Stay Friends helped me maintain my faith in the basic post-punk template.

9. Parts & Labor - Mapmaker

And then there were Parts & Labor, who use that same template as a jumping-off point for some serious noise geekiness. What's endlessly impressive to me about Mapmaker is how the band manage to combine fairly straightforward song structures and downright anthemic vocals with a dogged love for chaos and sonic experimentation. And the whole thing comes off as organic rather than tossed-together. Only A Place to Bury Strangers gave effects pedals a harder workout: from the bleepy opener "Fractured Skies" to the tidal wave crash of "Brighter Days", from the soaring bagpipe-toned solo that propels "New Crimes" to the distortion-wracked solo that makes "Ghosts Will Burn" such a standout. That band name is false modesty, because there's nothing workmanlike about these guys.

8. A Place to Bury Strangers - A Place to Bury Strangers

I'm a bit surprised at how high on the list this found itself. Consider it a concession to the sheer power and conviction of the thing. All the (valid) comparisons to previous artists don't minimize how heavily this hits. But APTBS also have a surprisingly soft-n-gooey center: just check those restrained verses on "Missing You" or (especially) "Don't Think Lover", or the way "Ocean" patiently builds to its earthswallowing climax. And they never let the mayhem get in the way of a good melody. Besides, one of the obvious influences no longer exists, two of the others haven't put out a listenable album in over a decade (I'm talking about YOU, Robert and Trent), and I'm hedging my bets on the much-ballyhooed return of the third later this year; so A Place to Bury Strangers capably - and even brutally - fills multiple gaps in our musical universe.

7. Frog Eyes - Tears of the Valedictorian

I'll keep this as simple as possible. Haven't paid much attention to the lyrics, nor do I really want to, for all that a lot of the favorable criticism of this album has focused on them somehow being a statement of the times. The music is competent, occasionally interesting, but not the biggest reason I can't stop listening to this album or grin like a loon whenever one of the better songs - "Reform the Countryside," "'Stockades'", "Evil Energy, the Ill Twin Of..." - comes up on random shuffle. Basically, I just love listening to Carey Mercer sound like he's on the verge of losing his shit for almost an hour. This was the vocal performance of the year for me, and if I ever get around to doing some vocalizing myself, I'll thank Carey for giving me the permission to be as "dramatic" as I want. Given endless time, I'd write an entire column on the many moments on this album when Mercer gives me a shiver or a chuckle or a brief stab of terror. Instead, I'll just really strongly recommend you give him a go, yourself.

6. !!! - Myth Takes

Effortlessly and endlessly groovy, yet never sounding tossed off, Myth Takes was sort of my party album of the year. I already did it justice in my original review so won't repeat myself here. Nothing guilty about this fountain of pleasure!

5. Dälek - Abandoned Language

Another one about which I'll say little more. Listen to this on headphones and marvel at how dense the production is, how what on first listen seems monotone is endlessly rich and nuanced. Anyone who was into trip hop in the 90s owes it to themselves to buy this album yesterday and sink into its haunted - and haunting - soundscapes.

4. A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Scribble Mural Comic Journal

I'm about to make a near-heretical suggestion: Loveless is sixteen years old, and we need a new touchstone for "this kind of music", however labelled. I'd like to not-so-humbly submit that Scribble Mural Comic Journal is, if not a "better" album, a far more interesting one. Every song represents a different approach (if not two or three) to bringing as much twisted beauty into the world as possible. Neither the voices nor the guitars are safe from distortion, and the songwriting can only be described as "bizarre." And yet, nearly everything works. Kudos to the band as well for front-loading the album with all the weird experimental stuff (I dare you to get through "Lists, Plans" and "C'mon" without an arched eyebrow) and only "rewarding" us with the straightforward "Things Only I Can See" and "The Best Summer Ever" (easily the best Pale Saints songs I've heard since the band tragically broke up over ten years ago) at the very end. This was one of the most uncompromising releases in the Year of Weird, and easily the most gorgeous.

3. Shining - Grindstone

While compiling these lists I've realized that one aspect of music I always like is the ability to reconcile seeming contradictions, to blend disparate elements into some new organic whole. Shining excel at this in a way that only incredibly skilled and talented and creative musicians could. And let's stress the emphasis on that last adjective, because these guys are in no reducible to technical skills alone. There's a pervasive and perverse sense of humor at work throughout Grindstone. Like the way, after spending just a minute hammering home one of the most satisfying monster guitar riffs I've ever heard, "Stalemate Longan Runner" loses momentum and starts back up as a harpsichord solo. Or how "The Red Room" climaxes its first movement - a minute-and-a-half-long free-jazz smackdown so rhythmically intense that I'm gasping - with an amazingly tight and perfectly sequenced five-second call-and-response between the saxophone and what sounds like one of those baby dolls that squawks when you squeeze it. (Words honestly fail to capture this moment; you owe it to yourself to hear this song. Actually, you owe it to yourself to hear this entire beautiful album). And don't even get me started on that cheeky vocodor'ed voice in the second half of "ASI NISI MASA." In less capable hands this could have all been painfully meta- (think late-career Pavement). But back to that "organic whole" I mentioned... "Winterreise" manages to cram into its gorgeous three and a half minutes: heavy metal riffage, the orchestral movement from the theme to Dune, more hilarious vocodor, an electronic piano solo, and some rocking brass - and it never feels anything but natural. Yes, there are transitions here - which prompted some critics to label Shining "prog" the same way the Fiery Furnaces get labeled "prog." Except of course Shining are playing fifteen more instruments and finding ways to evoke common themes throughout a song regardless of the means they're using at any specific point.

"So why's it at #3?" you ask. Let's call it "Giddy Motors syndrome": 5 amazing songs (the four mentioned above + the amazing opener) do not a #1 album make. There's a bit of filler on Grindstone, and there are a couple other songs that border on garish to my ears. All that out of the way: it's a shame more people didn't hear this. In the kingdom of mind-blowing, there was no bigger monster for me in '07 than these guys.

2. Battles - Mirrored

And then there's Mirrored, which has been endlessly poured over, and discussed, and picked apart. Plus Battles toured their asses off all year long. And yes, despite some real filler, it's sitting one spot higher on my list of favorites than Grindstone, which I'm crazy about. Let's call it the difference between breaking down genre boundaries, and making something so original that the entire concept of genre becomes irrelevant. I read a lot of what people had to say about Mirrored, and overall they either had to resort to abstractions and metaphors, or they had to reduce the album down to a description of the means by which it was created. No big surprise that the latter approach tended to be that chosen by people who just didn't like Mirrored. I hate to fall into the tired old trope that "only those who don't understand it couldn't like it", but... that bit of truth in every stereotype and all....

So here's the dilemma facing anyone who loves music, and loves telling others about the music they love... how do I describe Battles to you? What do they sound like? If I told you that "Atlas" sounds like a bunch of Munchkins taking acid and having one crazy-ass dance party, does that sound like something that any sane person would choose as [spoiler alert!] their favorite song of 2007? Or how about I take a stab at "DDiamondd", which sounds like an intergalactic rock band practicing their chords for a minute, before their practice space is invaded by every fucking cricket in the entire universe. And the crickets are chirping. Not feeling inclined to give that a listen? Back in June I wrote that "TIJ" "leavens its brutality with playful keyboard/guitar interplay". See - even I can't quite escape talking about means rather than ends. What did I mean by "leavens its brutality"??? Well, throughout the song there's this loop that sounds like the CD is totally stuck. Maybe that would be annoying after seven minutes, except that everything else the band throws on top of it sounds like they're individually and collectively having the time of their lives.

"Individually and collectively". That's a good way to talk about Battles. In the end, what you have are four incredibly talented and skillful musicians who must also be incredibly bored with making straightforward rock songs. Equipped with a room-full of objects that make noise, three of them burrow inward and start to explore. Ocasionally they pay attention to the others' explorations, even syncing into each other for brief whiles. And it's all held together by the astounding John Stanier, who is just as much a machine as every other object making noise in the room. It's endlessly creative, often humorous, sometimes shocking. And man... for all my abstract appreciation of it - both means and ends - every single time these guys hit a groove on Mirrored (which they do on approximately 8 out of 11 tries) that groove rides itself into the pleasure centers of my brain.

Munchkins on acid. Crickets. A skipping CD. The future, man.... the future...

1. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

News flash: I'm a big fucking music geek. I agonized over this choice. In case the paragraphs above didn't convey this: Grindstone was the most exciting album of the year to me, Mirrored the most impressive. And yet... in the end, Hissing Fauna possesses two qualities that neither of those albums does. First of all, there isn't a single dud song on the entire album. Oh, closer "We Were Born the Mutant Again with Leafling" is a bit wispy. I've been known to lose patience with the twelve-minute sprawl of motorik "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" (but only before I heard them play it live and the big fat lightbulb went off for me). But everything else on this album is golden. Perhaps more important: Hissing Fauna... is amazingly simple and immediate. No hand-wringing over how to describe it to people or who to share it with and who not - if you can't fall in love with this, then you have no sense of humor and are immune to melody. For a start: I could hum most of these songs on the second listen, even before the lyrics started sinking in and I realized that Kevin Barnes is (and I mean this in the most respectful way) the queerest straight guy on the planet. It's actually not the least of the feats he pulls off here, that fairly mundane stories like "Gronlandic Edit" or "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger" still come off deep and meditative. And the man has a wicked sense of camp, razor-tuned to the exact amount of whining and carrying-on that he can get away with and still be funny rather than pathetic (see: "She's a Rejecter", the funniest shit I heard all year). The music pulls off an even more difficult balance; it's easy to write off Of Montreal as 80s synth pop ripoffs. Hell, I'll even admit that in a year that saw so much fantastic analog drumming, here's my #1 album, it relies almost entirely on electronic beats, and they're CHEESY electronic beats. And a number of the songs are carried by fairly simplistic keyboard melodies and/or guitar riffs: "Cato as a Pun," "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse," "Suffer for Fashion" just to name a few. But - like the vocals - they're viral melodies and riffs. Once you're stuck with them, resign yourself to a life of warning potential partners about how you're going to be breaking into song and/or humming at wildly inappropriate moments. Warn those partners that this album, these songs, are HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.

And really - all that catchiness could easily blind one to how creative and risk-taking the music actually is if you scratch a bit. "Cato as a Pun" and "Heimdalsgate" both feature this really bizarre drum sound, like somebody's hitting a bag full of nuts with a hammer. The verses of "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" are all buzzy ambience. And '06 darlings The Knife have nothing on Messrs. Barnes et al when it comes to creepily multitracked vocals. The first time I talked with my friend David about Hissing Fauna, he was trying to tell me which song was his favorite, the one he hadn't been able to stop humming for the past week. "It's the one with all the really weird voices," he exclaimed. Which narrowed it down to like nine of the songs...

So there you go... 20 awesome albums in an amazing (and weird) year in music. Next up: my 40 favorite songs!

2007 in Re-View: The Year of Weird

2008-01-06T12:14:00.000-08:00

Before I dive into my year-end lists, I want to comment on a few general trends I noticed in music in '07. Perhaps it was in part my disappointment with 2006, but '07 was one fantastic fucking year in music for me. And god was it a weird one! So many albums came out this year that felt somehow unprecedented, whether it was slight tweaks or outright overhauls of established formulas, utter irreverence for the notion of genre, or abrupt shifts in the sound of a certain artist. You know it's been a weird year when the new Menomena disc sounds downright tame! Battles made an album so mutant both in its means and its ends that it'll probably still sound futuristic 20 years from now. Shining treated genre as a boundary to smash and reconfigure, and are talented enough musicians that the results never sounded contrived. A Sunny Day in Glasgow (and to a lesser extent, A Place to Bury Strangers) grabbed some revered touchstones and reshaped them into something wholly new and original. Marnie Stern dared us to doubt that a bubbly blonde girl couldn't slay on the guitar. Dälek discovered subtlety and made their best album yet. El-P was weird by NOT being weird; fortunately the tradeoff was "fierce". PJ Harvey released a commercially-unfriendly album full of piano-driven torch songs. Even the perennially-weird released weird albums in 2007: Animal Collective became (to my ears) massively listenable, and Frog Eyes became just accessible enough to be enjoyable. And even though their whole albums failed to register with me, Supersilent and Kammerflimmer Kollektiev will have to share the crown for the two weirdest songs I heard in '07.

The other totally surprising trend in '07 was how many artsists whose previous work I'd loved released disappointing albums. Top of this list was the New Pornographers - if I was mean-spirited enough (like People magazine) to draft a "Worst of 2007" list, Challengers would be #1. Outside of sounding consistently contrived and disspirited, my friend David pointed out (and I agree) that Challengers is still identifiably a New Pornos album, with the horrid result that it's colored the way I listen to their previous (aboslutely cherished) work. UGH. Next up in the realm of disappointments was Björk's wretched Volta. We've been celebrating the woman's otherworldliness for years; but this album (and especially the bloated stage tour) suggests that she needs to come back to terra firma. (There's a quip in there about being, ahem, an Earth invader...) Liars set out to "just make an album", and boy did they succeed. Ted Leo continued his downward spiral into strident irrelevance; that new Clientele album is playing in an elevator somewhere near you; and Interpol finally lost the war against their own limitations. Friend Opportunity graced a lot of year-end lists, but I found it an enervated version of the Deerhoof that I love. The three exceptions to this trend were the fantastic Let's Stay Friends (an easy request, when Les Savy Fav bring the bluster like this); Learn to Sing Like a Star (I almost wrote that Kristin is incapable of making a bad album, but then recalled that her last solo and Throwing Muses albums both left me cold); and - to a lesser extent - Maths + English.

Another big surprise for me in '07 was how much fantastic drumming there was. Considering I didn't hear a single electronic album this year with mind-blowing beats, I have to conclude the analog guys used up all the beat karma. Long before Matt Beringer's melancholy baritone had penetrated into my pleasure centers, Bryan Devendorf's creative, insistent drumming was what kept me coming back to Boxer for repeat listens. "Mistaken For Strangers", "Brainy", "Squalor Victoria", "Guest Room" - all of them are driven by Devendorf. Christopher Weingarten's frenzied banging pushed the chaos factor even higher throughout Mapmaker, and absolutely steals the show on "Ghosts Will Burn." I still can't come up with a better way to describe Zach Hill's playing on Marnie Stern's In Advance of the Broken Arm than "batsoid"; the entire album sounds like a competition between the two of them to be more counter-intuitive. And then there's John Stanier. His might be the only instrumentation on Mirrored that's wholly non-digital, but watching him punish his body in the name of rhythm twice this year has me convinced he's the most robotic of the bunch. Which I mean as the highest of compliments: not "robotic" as in "static and uninspired", but "robotic" as in "totally fucking inhumanly awesome." Danny Seim from Menomena - already well-established as a consistently inventive skin-pounder - continued to do himself proud on Friend and Foe. As befitting the different context, Rob Ahlers sounded restrained on Learn to Sing Like a Star, but his presence gave that album some added heft. Greg Saunier discovered cowbells on the good songs from Friend Opportunity. HEALTH picked up the mantle dropped by that other L.A. single-word band and brought some serious rollicking percussion noise on their self-titled debut. And no discussion of beats in '07 would be complete without acknowledging the insane "Bird Flu." Apart from being poly-rhythmed to all hell, it's probably the only song in the history of humanity that uses a squawking chicken as a rhythmic element. Did I mention how weird last year was?

Wrapping up '07 mini-reviews

2008-01-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

Yep, it's 2008 and I'm still sitting on a pile of recent purchases I haven't reviewed yet. Plus I've been compiling my year-end lists. It's a shitty rainy day here in San Francisco and I'm going to see if I can get '07 all wrapped up!

Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
Rating: 8

Dear Animal Collective: I apologize. Up to this point I've hated everything I heard by you, likening it to a bunch of 5-year olds beating on various objects and screaming. I'm not going to take that impression back... but boy was I ever stupid to assume all your output would sound like that. So, it wasn't until the end of the year - months after this album was actually released - that I happened to give "Fireworks" and "Peacebone" a listen... and immediately fell in love. The five-year-olds have grown up on Strawberry Jam. The overall template now is a buzzing, droning wall of sound which contains endless sonic delights and diversions. And Avey Tare is no longer pretending to be a kitty cat. I still have no idea what he's carrying on about, but the vocals on Strawberry Jam are the sweetest part of the mix. Like Carey Mercer, Tare can go from sweetly crooning to screeching - and back - in two seconds. His vocal melodies are immediate, unpredictable, gorgeous. I don't quite think I'm ready to re-evaluate your back catalog, but I'll never wait almost a year to check out whatever new madness you drop upon the world from this point forward.

Burial - Untrue
Rating: 6

I just don't get it. Metacritic reports that this is the best reviewed album of the year; it made plenty of critics' year-end lists. My friend Russ gets digitally weepy whenever the subject of this album comes up in our correspondence. Everyone talks about how it's so emotional, so evocative. Interestingly, most of these reactions are very personal - specific images or feelings or memories that the album creates or evokes. So I guess I'm just weird or somehow emotionally unavailable, or maybe I just haven't had those same seemingly-universal experiences.... because I find Untrue only mildly interesting. Listen to the first minute of any of these songs - and you've heard the song. The beats are strangely static and nowhere near as intense or creative as so many other similar artists have given us. The emotionalism of the vocals feels calculated to me - but unlike mid-90s rave, who used the same tools in a knowingly ironic way (beneath every helium diva a sly wink), Burial seems to genuinely want to connect with his listeners. Come to think of it, I hate romantic comedies for this exact same reason - and of course those are popularly (if not critically) loved also. Oh fine, I'll give it a 6 because I admit that "Archangel," "Untrue," and "Raver" are all catchy. But this is still the new Exhibit A in my response to anyone who says I'm a blind follower of critics.

Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals
Rating: 7

OK, here's a guilty pleasure. Yeasayer have a knack for vocal harmonies and "foreign"-sounding instrumental melodies that will catch your ear and have you coming back for a second listen. They also score points for filling their songs with enough twists and turns to keep them interesting. All that said - scratch below the surface of this one and what you have is a lot of very simple musicianship. There's a surprising lack of depth to most of these tunes; like a Monet, they're best appreciated from a distance. I like the album, it made my 20-faves list for the year, and it's accessibility makes it an easy one to recommend to friends... but it's always going to be a qualified endorsement.

Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English
Rating: 7

I avoided buying this for months and months. Everything I read about it - in sum, this was Dizzee's "American rap" album (and never mind the irony that it wasn't even released in this country except as a download!) - left me convinced that nothing less than Boy in Da Corner's cherished status as my favorite album of the 21st Century so far was at stake.

Well... this isn't even the first time today that I have to acknowledge my preconceptions stupidly interfered with me hearing a pretty good album. Yes, it's the least "grime" of Dizzee's releases - but he made it clear with Showtime that he's not one to repeat past glories. For all that the sonic architecture has changed, Maths + English is still undeniably Dizzee's. "Sirens" is among his best tracks, as cinematic and hard-hiting as anything from the debut. "Hardback (Industry)", which finds Dizzee posing as a sage elder offering (surprisingly grounded) advice, would be hilarious if the music wasn't so enticingly sinister. "Da Feelin" finds Dizzee reclaiming mid-90s drum n' bass (Omni Trio could probably sue for royalties) momentum as, of all things, an airy summertime jam. Around these highlights are plenty more solid tunes, as well as the expected couple of missteps (notably the insipid Lily Allen duet). I'm not excited about Maths + English the same way I was about either of his two previous albums, but it's still a respectable addition to his catalog.

HEALTH - HEALTH
Rating: 8

I'm resolutely NOT going to drop the name of a certain other band whose name begins with an "L" in this review. Sure, they're older, better-known, and also released a self-titled album in 2007. This one is better: more raw, less calculated, and (most importantly) joyous. So let's think of HEALTH as that other band's snotty younger brothers, making up for their lack of experience with an utter lack of reserve. "Girl Attorney" is 36 seconds of skronk, boom, and bluster... who is she and what did she do that pissed the band off this much? They follow that song with the one-two sucker punch of "Triceratops" and "Crimewave", easily the most intense and uncompromising five minutes of noise anyone hit us with in 2007. Chalk it up to youthful enthusiasm (or ADD), but HEALTH is also endlessly restless... dabbling in a bit of electronic ambience here, dancepunk sneer and syncopation there, and the required ambient noise piece or two. Not all of it works, but then the entire album rushes by in just over a half hour, so you never have time to get bored. (Unlike, say, Be Your Own Pet's album from '06, which was just too damn long and uniform). Boris went all pastoral in '07, and that "L" band seems to have no rough edges left... which left a big void in my musical universe that HEALTH have gleefully and noisly filled.

Pinch - Underwater Dancehall
Rating: 7

After my disappointment with the Burial album, I decided to shell out $22 for an import copy of this one in the hopes that somebody had put out a beat-driven electronic album in '07 that would blow me away. Well, Underwater Dancehall fails to live up to that lofty expectation, but it is a decent release in its own right. The beats are inventive and when the vocals work ("Get Up," "Battered," "Brighter Day" being the standouts) they provide some fascinating counter-rhythms. "Airlock" is a satisfyingly creepy instrumental - like Source Direct without the punishing BPMs. But there's a same-iness about the album that starts interfering with my enjoyment of the songs, and nothing on here hits with the same force as Various' tracks "Sir" or "Soho" from '06, or (for that matter) classic mid-90s Photek.

Prinzhorn Dance School - Prinzhorn Dance School
Rating: 5

I hate to be this reductive... but PDH are basically a post-ironic Fall for the jaded 21st Century. They're even more minimal and monoton(ous), and just as strangely self-congratulatory about their obtuseness. In this, they've got more in common with LCD Soundsystem than a record label. Thirty years later, the "punk" ideal that technical skills aren't required to create affecting music is just another commodified product. I wish I could talk about this album in less meta- terms, but (much like their loathesome album label owner) with music this bald-facedly unaccomplished, the meta-narrative is the narrative. The overall formula: dry male/female chants; simple rhythms on drums and guitar, and post-post-Entertainment basslines that are nearly indistinguishable between songs. The most successful tunes tweak that recipe minimally, say with more interesting percussion ("Crackerjack Doctor," You Are the Space Invader"), or a bit of call-and-response interaction between the vocals ("Don't Talk to Strangers"). Attempts to be sinister ("Do You Know Your Butcher") or commentative (the inexplicable "Hamworthy Sports and Leisure Center") fall flat in the face of the band's deadpan delivery. This one doesn't piss me off as much as Sound of Silver, but it has strengthened my resolve not to give the DFA any more of my money.

Beirut - The Flying Club Cup
Rating: 6

The Flying Club Cup isn't a bad album; if anything it's more lushly instrumented than Beirut's great debut Gulag Orkester. I think I'm just over the novelty of it all. The jejune calliope/reggae rhythms on "Nantes" and "Cherbourg" annoy me to the point of interfering with my enjoyment of everything else that's happening in them. The way Zach brings a stomping multi-percussive rhythm section in around the one-minute mark isn't as effective or surprising considering he used the same trick a number of times on Gulag Orkester. Don't get me wrong - this is still an extremely pleasant album, and accessible enough to be an easy recommendation. I just don't find the overall formula as impressive or innovative this second time around. All that said - standout tracks "Guyama Sonora", the epic title tune, and especially "In the Mausoleum" (probably his best song to date) will likely be gracing my playlists for awhile.

Clockcleaner - Babylon Rules
Rating: 4

Well, Cokemachineglow had to steer me seriously wrong at some point. This is mostly a torpid sludgy mess, devoid of any humor or sense of a larger perspective that could redeem its commitment to ugliness. Which bums me out because I wanted to like this album - awesome band name, great cover art, and all. Instead, after wading through it the least number of necessary times, I'm suspicous of the band's motives for putting their female member on the cover considering the unrelenting misogyny of the thing. A woman's control of her reproductive capabilities is something to lament or even hold against her on Babylon Rules; that is, when the singer even acknowledges her right to any choices over her sexuality in general ("Caliente Queen," "Daddy Issues"). A comparison to Big Black's Songs About Fucking seems inevitable... but that album got by first of all for being musically astounding, and second because Steve Albini was smart (and funny) enough to present himself as once-removed from the ugliness he spewed; a war reporter or a storyteller rather than an active participant. "Precious Thing" made objectification sound fun, or at least never precluded it as a choice one could make (and it also rather smatly left the identity of the objectified unspecified). Conversely, Clockcleaner's "Caliente Queen" just leaves me hoping the girl's got a knife in her belt. And musically, this album is just tired, laying a veneer of echoey surf guitar over standard Jesus Lizard sludge. "Vomiting Mirrors" and "Human Pigeon" are twisty enough (and have indistinct enough lyrics) to be interesting to me, but the rest of Babylon Rules won't be cluttering up my hard drive.

Shapes and Sizes - Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner
Rating: 4

Another huge disappointment, even if in retrospect I probably should have known better. Folk music for the Ritalin generation, Shapes and Sizes initially caught my ear with "Head Movin'", three and a half minutes of quirky jangle pop with a serious case of restlessness. That song and fantastic opener "Alone/Alive" are the two times on Split Lips that the band strikes a proper balance between their instincts for tunefulness and chaos. On the rest of the album, their inability to stay focused or maintain momentum derails every interesting idea they churn out. On top of which, Caila Thompson-Hannant lapses into twee distressingly often. "Highlife (I Had Been Duped)" and "Can't Stop that (Sinking) Feeling" both start out strong and then meander into long, nearly a capella interludes that turn out not to be interludes but the rest of the song. It's frustrating to listen to such a creative and talented group shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly; their occasional moments of brilliance suggest it's all a matter of conscious choice rather than an attempt to hide something.

Pantha du Prince - This Bliss
Rating: 5

Why oh why do I keep buying techno albums? I'll admit that "Saturn Strobe" hooked me immediately, with its brittle bells and constantly-shifting roster of elements. But taken over an entire album, it becomes clear that Pantha du Prince's toolbox is fairly small. When the same four or five beats are switched up a couple times within any given song over the course of an entire album, the overall experience still becomes (for me at least) mind-numbing. Every time I try to give This Bliss a serious listen, I discover that the entire thing has flashed by and failed to leave any impression. None of this is an implicit statement about the album; within the rules by which techno operates, I believe what all the reviewers I've read have to say about its affect. So I should probably just finally learn my lesson about my relationship to the overall genre and move on.

The last three '07 albums I've bought and not yet reviewed were: Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass; Dan Deacon - Spiderman of the Rings; and, Okkervil River - The Stage Names. I haven't listened to any of them enough to write credible reviews, but have listened to them enough to know they aren't going to make my year-end lists. None Shall Pass is dense and a bit intimidating, it will fall around a 7 rating. Dan Deacon is fun and fluffy but sort of substanceless - let's call his album a 6. Finally, The Stage Names has me cursing Pitchfork. If I wanted to listen to straightforward "roots" rock, I'd buy Bruce Springsteen albums. I'll admit first single "Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe" hooked me with its vocal tics, but as a whole the album feels like I've tuned into a self-serious classic rock station. In the final wash it'll get a 5 from me at best.

Phew! My New Year's resolutions for '08 are to try and stay more current with albums - both buying them and reviewing them - as they come out. Thanks to anyone who's still reading!

Mini-Mini Review Blitz

2007-12-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

Sigh... the list of '07 releases I've purchased but not yet reviewed on here now numbers 20. This is clearly unacceptable considering I'm going to be publishing my year-end lists any day now! Of those 20 albums, I've listened to and thoroughly evaluated 12 of them. So, here's tonight's challenge - 12 albums, 5 minutes each, super-no-frills, and I'm all caught up in an hour. Let's do this!

Parts & Labor - Mapmaker
Rating: 8

Parts & Labor start at the noisier end of standard post-punk but then put some interesting twists on it. The vocals are anthemic and melodic. One guitar plays power chords and the other bleeps, bloops, and occasionally sounds like a bagpipe. There's a string of really strong songs here, each venturing far enough from the basic template to be distinctive while still contributing to the overall feel of a solid and consistent album. Also worth mentioning is the fantastic and creative drumming. Highlights are the bizzare "Ghosts Will Burn," soaring opener "Fractured Skies" (whose chorus comes complete with a brass section), and "Brighter Days" which manages to collide chaotic guitar skronk with a Smashing Pumpkins -worthy power chorus and make it seem seamless.

The National - Boxer
Rating: 7

The word you'll constantly read about this album (and in fact, this band in general) is "grower" - and I have to agree. The first couple listens I couldn't connect. But then I realized the vocals were playing constantly in the back of my head, and every new listen has made me love this album more. Much like Interpol, two of the four members more than carry their weight - only in this case it's the vocalist and the outstanding drummer. "Brainy," "Squalor Victoria," and "Guest Room" are all carried by the insistent, creative drumming. The baritone vocals are strangely soulful and moving. Each song seems to have at least one powerful phrase that carries an emotional heft: "You might need me more than you think you will" from "Brainy" or this awesome couplet from standout track "Mistaken for Strangers" : "You wouldn't want an angel watching over / Surprise, surprise - they wouldn't want to watch."

Boris with Michio Kurihara
Rating: 5

Quite a leftward turn from last year's loud-tastic Pink: more contemplative, restrained. Michio Kurihara plays some pretty cool, psychedelic solos throughout the album, and a few of the songs are immediately catchy ("Rainbow," "You Laughed Like a Water Mark," "Starship Narrator"). Still, I liked these guys better when they gleefully banged the hell out of everything in sight.

PJ Harvey - White Chalk
Rating: 6

Let's just be honest: PJ hasn't made a consistently engaging album for a decade now. But I'm going to keep buying her new releases because she's always got some new interesting ideas to explore. On this one she strips down her songs even more and replaces the guitar with the piano - an instrument she's admitted in interviews she barely knows how to play. Of course, her best material has always been more about delivery and raw power than instrumental complexity, and that's the case again on White Chalk. Some critics have called her vocal delivery on this album limited and child-like, but I think she's never sounded more frightening. Sit through the last half-minute of "The Mountain" and see if you don't get goose bumps. Less dramatic but equally effective are eerie opener "The Devil", and the standout track "Silence", with its slow build to Polly Jean moaning the title as if a lifetime of hurt could be summarized with that single word.

Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends
Rating: 7

Any criticisms I might level against this album - and there are few - are immediately halved by the fact that it even exists. We had no reason to expect after the last couple years of "indefinite hiatus", that LSF would ever bless us with another release. And yes - Let's Stay Friends does feel rushed in places, but I think that had more to do with enthusiasm and excitment than a fear that spending some time refining it might end up in it's not seeing day. And frankly, much as I love these guys - every one of their albums has a couple duds on it. So let's not dwell on... oh, the last third of the album. From the opening salvo of "The Equestrian" through the blistering finish of "Slugs in the Shrubs" Les Savy Fav are BAAAAAAAACK! Those two songs and first single "Patty Lee" (who says dancepunk is dead?) are among the band's best ever. Even the dubby experiment "Brace Yourself" works. Tim Harrington continues to be one of my favorite vocalists - and the lyrics on Let's Stay Friends aren't as obtuse as usual. It seems marriage agrees with the guy... though it's interesting that two of the songs on here are explicitly about sexual situations gone awry.

Thurston Moore - Trees Outside the Academy
Rating: 6

It's interesting to me how I can't accept Sonic Youth's turn toward the pastoral over the course of their last couple albums (I'm pretending Rather Ripped doesn't exist) - but Thurston wants to get all jangly acoustic and even pretty - and I mostly like the results. There are no surprises here, and also a couple of "experimental" missteps (the last track - on which we listen to 13-year-old Thurston putting on some kind of weird audio show for what was an audience of one - only confirms the reasonable predictions that the man has been odd for a L-O-N-G time). But there are also more than a handful of really pretty tunes and interesting half-rockers: "Silver > Blue," "The Shape is in a Trance," and "Off Work" are my favorites.

New Pornographers - Challengers
Rating: 3

Challengers is shockingly bad. I'll let others make excuses for it, wag their tongues about how it's a "deeper" album, a more "mature" album than its three predecessors. It's not as if I'm unwilling for the Pornographers to change - Twin Cinema revised the sound of the first two albums significantly with no large drop in quality. But this! My friend David sums it up best - Challengers sounds contrived. The sheer effortlessness of Carl Newman's previous songwriting is nowhere in evidence. Now every leftward veer feels premeditated. The melodies don't glisten, they plod. And fuck - when even Neko Case singing lead can't rescue a song from being a torpid mess... The songs were slightly better live, but not enough to erase my ill will toward this album.

M.I.A. - Kala
Rating: 7

I like this album more than I wanted to, and despite how much M.I.A.'s rhetoric (both in her lyrics and her press) annoys the hell out of me. Rant for another time. There are some truly unlistenable moments on Kala - the little Aboriginal boys singing about fish; the bad duet with Timbaland; the bad duet with Afrikan Boy. (So pretty much - whenever M.I.A. collaborates). This is all more-than-redeemed however by "Bird Flu" alone (about which, more later when I write up my fave songs of the year). "Boyz," "World Town," and "XR2" also contribute heavily to that number up above. I'm even willing to listen to the Madonna-meets-Bhangra pastiche of "Jimmy."

A Place to Bury Strangers - A Place to Bury Strangers
Rating: 8

It's a begrudging nod. These guys are doing nothing original. Take three parts Joy Division (especially the vocals), shake with one part My Bloody Valentine and one part The Cure, and turn the volume up to 11. It's just that the execution is so satisfying! "Don't Think Lover" - hits you over the head HARD, then leans over and croons to you "Don't think love will last." And then hits you over the head again just to make the point. "To Fix the Gash in Your Head" - the song Trent Reznor has been trying to write for 20 years now, dashed off with sickening ease. "She Dies" rips off "Primary," and "I Know I'll See You" rips off (among other Cure songs) "Charlotte Sometimes", but I still love them. And then there's "My Weakness", ten times more brutal than MBV ever allowed themselves to be. I mean all the references and comparisons in the best possible way. Really.

Liars - Liars
Rating: 4

Yet another of my previously-favorite artists changing their formula (which I'm not implying is always a bad thing!) and falling short of past glory. And I hate to admit it, but these guys have pretty much exhausted my remaining fumes of They Through Us all in a Trench - inspired mania. Opener "Plaster Casts of Everything" was an interesting introduction to the "new" sound (and the video is a classic Liars creepfest); "Houseclouds" carries just enough bite to not be dismissable as a Liars song; and the tension/release dynamics of "Clear Island" will keep it on my playlists for a while. The rest of the album? Yawn yawn yawn yawn. I didn't like the Jesus and Mary Chain fifteen years ago, and I don't like Liars posing as them now.

Supersilent - 8
Rating: 5

I admit to buying this at least in part because I'm a sucker for indie cred. Their last album, 6, had one absolutely killer-eerie tune ("6.1") and a lot of more ambient stuff that - for all that it's improvised and experimental - I just couldn't connect with. 8 has one more killer-eerie tune, the epic "8.5" (about which, more later when I do my songs-of-the-year list) and it also has two fairly amazing rhythmic exercises ("8.3" which thuds, and "8.6" which glitches then falsettos) that suggest Supersilent are the new Autechre. Opener "8.1" is interesting. And the other four songs either fail to impress or actively alienate ("8.7").

OK, I managed 11 albums in an hour! And now it's time for bed.

October Mini-Review Blitz, Part 2

2007-10-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

Frog Eyes - Tears of the Valedictorian
Rating: 8

Frog Eyes are in the unfortunate position of being heard of more than heard, due to associations with better-known peers Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire. I don't know to what extent that was merited prior to this album, but the consensus seems to be that Tears is their best to date. And all that aside, it's REAL high on my list and has totally whet my appetite to explore their previous work. Carey Mercer is like the vocalist of my dreams. Get out your thesaurus if you're going to try and explain what he does with his voice, and you will definitely need to scuttle any previous notions about "singing." Carey cajoles; he wails; he harrangues. His voice cracks with passion or outrage or (faux) pain. The lyrics are completely inscrutable, though there's lots of railing against authority and a lot of violent imagery and an overall lack of faith in structures (whether literal or societal). The music, while not as remarkable by itself, does a great job of framing and/or battling with him. Organs and insistent tribal drumming are front and center, the pace is usually breakneck (the slower songs on Tears are the ones that didn't make my personal cut) and appropriately frenzied. (Anyone who needs ABABC song forms should skip this album)."'Stockades'" features insistent banging on the piano for the first two verses and chorus before it shifts into an organ-driven coda that morphs into a swinging outro. Album highlight "Reform the Countryside" starts out as a frightening stomp. Twice through verse and chorus and then it all falls apart, Mercer moaning and grunting "...on and on..." for half a minute before the full band comes roaring back in for a last run-through and yet another extended ever-quieter outro. Months after I first heard it, it still gives me the chills. There are a couple places where Mercer's histrionics are a bit hard to swallow, but overall I find this album fascinating, endlessly engaging, and still surprising.

Kammerflimmer Kollektief - Jinx
Rating: 4

Cokemachineglow put this experimental German electronic/folk group on my radar screen, and after one listen to the seriously-creepy title track I knew I wanted the album. "Jinx" is one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard. Steel guitar, violin, zither, piano, and an unobtrusive drum track set the downtempo faux-spaghetti-Western tone. But what will stick in your head is the deranged vocal by Heike Aumüller. It starts out as quiet wordless moans. As the song progresses new instruments quietly enter the mix, the tone becomes ever more claustrophobic and eerie, and Aumüller becomes increasingly frantic. By the last runthrough she's gibbering as if she's either possessed or maybe being electrocuted. It's incredibly vivid and cinematic, like having the front seat to someone's nervous breakdown.

Unfortunately nothing else on the album is as noteworthy, and a good chunk of it could even serve as nice background music with nobody commenting on it. I don't regret the purchase - but "Jinx" is probably the only song from the album that will persist on my playlists for any length of time.

Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Rating: 9

It's probably late enough in the year now that I can venture this is going to take my #1 spot for 2007. I've pretty much been obsessed with this album for the last couple months. What amazes me about Hissing Fauna is how incredibly fresh it sounds, even as it recycles every trope from electronic pop music from the last thirty years. At various points you can draw lines to Bowie, Queen, Prince, Depeche Mode... the list goes on. It's pop, sure - there isn't a song on here that won't sink into your ears like candy and have you humming along by the third listen. But it's also surprisingly weird, inventive, and darkly personal. Kevin Barnes knows that subtle self-awareness is the key to well-executed camp, so every song comes packaged with a sly wink. "There's the girl that left me bitter / Want to pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her" is not a line that anyone - no matter how caught up in their personal drama they might be - could deliver with a straight face, so Barnes follows it up with a hiccoughing "But I can't I can't I CAN'T!!!!" First single "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" starts out portentous but quickly turns into a quirky 80s keyboard jam, complete with hilarious chorus "Come on chemicals! Come on chemic-oh-oh-oh-oh-als!" And then there's the delightful put-down "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider", where Barnes informs a woman who's not taking the hint, "Eva, I'm sorry but you will never have me. To me you're just some faggy girl, and I need a lover with soul power. And you ain't got no soul power." (Add Barnes to the list of male vocalists I find it hard to believe is straight.) The verses of "Labyrinthian Pomp" are such a spot-on channeling of Prince that the Purple One should be looking into an infringement lawsuit; except, of course, it's ten times better than anything Prince has put out in decades. Finally, Hissing Fauna is the most consistently great album I've heard this year. Only the nine-minute motorik centerpiece "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" elicits an occasional jab at the "next" button from me; otherwise there isn't a dud song in the bunch. In short - buy this, and get your falsetto ready to sing along.

October Mini-Review Blitz

2007-09-10T21:49:00.000-07:00

So many new albums to review - many of them incredible - so little time...

Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
Rating: 5

I bought this based on Pitchfork's "Best New Music" inclusion and also on a couple of his older songs shared with me by friend Russ that I really liked. Well, I guess I'll need to pick up the two older albums and hope I like them better. The Magic Position doesn't do much for me. The best songs are those where Wolf is using some creative sonic effects ("Bluebells", "Accident and Emergency") or where his sense of drama in the vocals doesn't overwhelm the music surrounding them ("Augustine", "Get Lost").

A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Scribble Mural Comic Journal
Rating: 8

Early-90s shoegaze is a sound that seems to be getting mined a lot more recently, but unlike a lot of their fellow archivists (see my review of Asobi Seksu's Citrus) ASDIG bring their own creativity and the result is reminiscent without ever being derivative. "5:15 Train" is that long-lost missing link between My Bloody Valentine's buzzsaw wall of noise and the Cocteau Twins' airy beauty, colliding oceanic washes of feedback with the most gorgeous vocal melody this side of Treasure. "Our Change into Rain is No Change At All" injects some urgency into the same formula with stunning success. But Scribble Mural Comic Journal also significantly ups '07's weird quotient: centerpiece tunes "Lists, Plans" and "C'mon" are chaotic almost to a fault, and show off the band's penchant for unexpected twists in mood and sonics. If I've any major complaint, it's that the murky production often deadens the songs' ambience as much as enhance it. However, even when the ideas being explored don't really gel, I still tip my hat to the fierceness of the band's originality.

Field Music - Tones of Town
Rating: 7

Tones of Town is a nice little British pop album that won't change your life, but is consistent and enjoyable enough that it will probably occupy your playlists for awhile. The songs are tuneful and just quirky enough that they never get boring. Think a more sedate New Pornographers with intelligible lyrics, and you're not too far off the mark. "In Context", with it's fantastic percussion and power chorus, is the standout track, but "A House is Not a Home," "Working to Work," "Closer at Hand," and "She Can Do What She Wants" all feature effortless melodies that you'll find yourself humming even when the album isn't playing.

Album Review: Interpol - Our Love to Admire

2007-08-07T22:08:00.000-07:00

Rating: 6

Oh shit... it's happening again...

A lot of my relatives on my mother's side are fundamentalist/evangelical Christians. So I was exposed to a lot of propoganda as a child concerning the many ways in which my soul was in threat of eternal damnation. One of my most vivid memories concerns a comic book that explained how rock music was the work of Satan. According to this comic, recording studios were the locations of grand Sabbats, where the bands and producers would sell their souls in exchange for some magical quality that would make their music irresistible to listeners.

This is not going to be a response to any part of that ridiculous assertion... but if I had to venture a guess to a band about whom it could be true, Interpol would be my first and final answer. Honestly, I'm at a loss based on any criterion I would apply to any other band why Interpol's first two albums feature so prominently in my headspace, my playlists, my car stereo when I'm blowing off the steam of another long day in the office. The guitar work is consistently and laughably awful - I challenge you to name an Interpol song where Daniel Kessler doesn't play the same note in quarters for multiple measures. Considering that Interpol are widely held up as a "great guitar band," this failing alone should have kept them far from my collection. Add to this Paul Banks' inscrutable and/or painfully trite lyrics (which have been dissected plenty of other places - google "Interpol awful lyrics" or any such phrase), and you can probably see why I begin to suspect diabolic intervention.

Because the fact is I unqualifiably love Antics, and the amazing songs on Turn on the Bright Lights outweigh and overpower the obvious dregs. There are two secret weapons at work here: first, Carlos Dengler is a mind-blowing bassist. His work on the first two albums is consistently fluid, counterintuitive, ocasionally funky, nearly always distinctive. Second (and this is the clincher - what keeps Interpol songs always buzzing around somewhere in the back of my head), there's that voice. Not to mention what Banks does with it. The first time I heard "Obstacle 1" I thought surely somebody was joking. But within two listens, I realized that the song's overwrought vocals had tapped into some deep place in my brain and were never coming out. I'd find myself wailing "But she can READ, she can READ, she can READ, she's BA-A-AAD!" with an intensity that would have led a listener (not that I ever did this in earshot of anyone, mind you) to think I was revealing my life's darkest secrets under extreme duress. Never mind what the fuck any of it MEANS (or even whether it does) - Banks' vocals are Interpol's Satanic deal with me. They've replaced Sleater-Kinney as the band I turn to when I just gotta sing along.

So... long exposition... where's Matthew going with all this? If I had written this review a couple weeks ago when I first started listening to Our Love to Admire, that rating would have been a 5. Maybe even a 4. Let's not kid ourselves - this album has nothing new to offer the world that Interpol haven't done better previously. First single "The Heinrich Maneuver" is the sort of casually great rocker that they perfected on Antics. It won't save your life, but you'll never hit the Next button when it comes on. Album opener "Pioneer to the Falls" is the latest Moody/Atmospheric First Song, and I'll grant I like it more than "Next Exit" (clearly the low-point on Antics). I'll further grant them that "Mammoth" and "All Fired Up" strut and swagger respectively - these are new moods for the band and they're standout tracks even within the larger catalog. But the rest of the album? The plodding verses on "No I in Threesome" (and don't even get me started on that title or the lyrics that support it)... the way "The Scale" tries to be menacing and "Rest My Chemistry" tries to be stately yet they're both just torpid... too much of Our Love to Admire lacks the dynamics of Bright Lights or the tuneful consistency of Antics. Perhaps most unforgiveable is the complete enervation of Carlos' basslines. Whereas he used to bubble and seethe just below the surface, on most of this one he merely keeps the beat. No doubt he'd rather have been composing film scores or something.

Ah but... now we come to that sentence I used to open this review. Because yes - goddamn it - that voice has once again planted some seeds in my barely-consciousness that refuse to be shaken free. I stand by what I just wrote about "No I in Threesome" - it has the pace of a snail, and no points for replacing the usual guitar monotonal quarter notes with (hold yourself down) piano monotonal quarter notes. But fuck if I haven't been walking around plaintively singing "Babe it's time we gave something new a try" for the past month. This infuriates me, but I'm a mere mortal and Paul Banks is gonna burn in hell. The choruses of "Pace is the Trick" (admittedly a decent song in its own right) and "The Scale" have both spent days as the soundtrack to my unfocused waking moments, say when I'm walking down the street or to the bathroom. My friend Russ dubs "Mammoth"'s chorus "another Banks lyrical stinker"... but I'm all for an Interpol song that pierces through the band's normal studied distance and drops a couple impassioned F-bombs.

In short.... oh shit, it's happened again. I want to hate these songs, I want to hate this album, I want to be pissed off at the band (especially Carlos) for giving us something so mediocre and then insisting (as Banks did in an interview with Pitchfork published yesterday) that it's their best. I feel all of that, but... "Babe, it's time we gave something new a try!" sigh...

I just hope the fires are EXTRA hot when Paul Banks pays his dues.

June Review Blitz

2007-06-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

Three newish albums to review:

Bjork - Volta
Rating: 2 out of 10

Simply the worst solo album Bjork has ever offered us. Most of it is frankly boring and/or puffed up with its own self-importance. She should also lay off trying to be "political" - both "Declare Independence" and "Hope" are near-unlistenable. There are three decent songs on the album. I'm willing to buy into first single "Earth Intruders" as an interesting contribution to her catalog, but it's hardly the species-uniting anthem she seems to want it to be. "Wanderlust" is probably the standout track on Volta, but I have to admit it's little better than an Homogenic outtake. Finally, "Innocence" is punchy and perhaps the largest departure from anything she's ever done before. It doesn't merit an entry of its own, but I caught Bjork's show at Shoreline Ampitheatre a couple weeks ago, and found it bombastic, poorly organized, basically a paean to her own ego. I think years of being regarded as one of the most important musical artists alive has finally gone to Bjork's head. In interviews she's asserted that Volta was meant to be a "fun" album rather than an "important" one... but if we take her word for this, then I seriously hope she gets out of the house more and regains the sense of FUN that made the Sugarcubes and her early solo work so consistently awesome.

The Clientele - God Save the Clientele
Rating: 5 out of 10

Up to this point I've really liked the Clientele, and have been willing to overlook a bit of samey-ness in their music (not to mention its utterly derivative nature). But God Save rachets their sound DOWN another notch or two... it's now little better than Muzak. I unfortunately missed their show in San Francisco over Memorial Day weekend - perhaps hearing these new songs played live would have helped me connect. As it is, this album is like one long sigh (or yawn). It's still pretty, but mostly spiritless. There are a few sprightly standout tracks, and they're strangely all near the end of the album: "Carnival on 7th Street," first single "Bookshop Casanova" (I swear I mean it as a compliment when I say this is the best Belle & Sebastian song we're likely to hear this year), and the downright bristly (by this album's standards, at least) "The Garden at Night."

Battles - Mirrored
Rating: 9 out of 10

I've saved the best - possibly even the best album of the year - for last. Apparently 2007 wasn't already weird enough. Mirrored is unlike anything you've ever heard before. Reducing it down to its parts (punishing live drums supplemented by electronic rhythm tracks; insistent guitar riffs; lots of quirky noises and melodies packed in around the edges; and hyper-processed/distorted vocals that usually sound like a group of Munchkins on acid) doesn't begin to do it justice. Better to talk about moods, and the way each song manages to evoke combinations that would have seemed irreconcilable. Outstanding lead single "Atlas" is both whimsical and martial. (My friend Joe told me it reminded him of the weird "rave" scene in the second Matrix movie). "DDiamondd" is a two-and-a-half-minute statement of purpose not unlike Shining's "ASA NISI MASA" - it pounds your ass into submission but still leaves you smiling. "Tonto" - probably the most straightforward song on the album - is math rock with a WAY better rhythm section. "Leyendecker" (another one clocking under three minutes) is sinister but quirky; fantastic penultimate track "TIJ" leavens its brutality with playful keyboard/guitar interplay. The vocals on Mirrored have taken a lot of heat (head to YouTube, watch the awesome video for "Atlas", and check out the User comments) - but I think they provide an amazing counterpoint to the technical proficiency and hardened intent on display here. This could have been merely an impressive album; the vocals make it a fascinating and FUN album. I'm seeing them live in a couple weeks and CAN'T WAIT! This one is a must-buy.

Quick and dirty review blitz!

2007-05-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

Jesus, who knows when I'll get time to write in here again! And meanwhile, a small pile of new releases that I've been listening to obsessively for the past couple months aren't any closer to getting reviews. So, in the interest of at least giving all my avid readers (ha!) an idea of the rest of this year's purchases to date... here are all the other 2007 albums I haven't gotten around to yet, my rating out of 10, and at most a sentence or two about them.

Besnard Lakes - Are the Dark Horse
Rating: 5
Overall too plodding, their attempts at building dramatic tension only bear fruit on two songs, both of which are fantastic: "Disaster" and especially "And You Lied to Me."

El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead
Rating: 7
Not as weirdly wonderful as Fantastic Damage, the latter half drags a bit, and much as I admire the storytelling I simply cannot listen to "Habeas Corpses" without cringing. All that said, "Drive," "Up All Night," "No Kings," and "Run the Numbers" are outstanding revisions/updates on the El-P sound.

LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Rating: 3
I really can't wait to eviscerate this one at length. James Murphy is an asshole, and he can bite me. I'm completely puzzled how so many people whose musical taste I respect can be raving about this album. He's so fucking smug! Even on the song that's either about a breakup or a bereavement, he sounds utterly bored. And there is NOTHING remotely innovative about the music. And finally, I'll refer Mr. Murphy to Ted Leo's still-relevant "Ballad of the Sin Eaters" for a more stomachable take on what it's like to face anti-American sentiment overseas. This album's "North American Scum" makes my blood boil every time I hear it. The title track repeats the same two fucking sentences for eight minutes, and I'm supposed to be impressed? I guess I'm just not cool enough, or hip enough, or just not-from-New-York enough, to get it. Nor, frankly, do I want to.

Shining - Grindstone
Rating: 8
Half of this is the most odd, brilliant, disturbing genre-fucking you'll ever hear. Another review I'm dying to write just to give this beautiful and twisted album the due it deserves. That rating would be a 9 if half of the album wasn't frankly boring little ambient exercises. But the other half kicks my ass more than anything else so far this year.

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - Living with the Living
Rating: 5
Sigh. I love Ted. And I can't put my finger on why this one (even more than Shake the Sheets) feels disappointing and like he's just treading water. I suspect part of it is his increasing earnestness and soapbox-grandstanding. Nothing on here hits with the same punch that most of Hearts of Oak did, preciesely because he's trying so hard to make them hit. And a couple of the genre exercises (the Irish ballad, the - ugh! - reggae song, the unlistenable strident punk screamer) are downright painful. All that said, his performance a couple months ago reconfirmed for me (even as he played only ONE song I actually wanted to hear!) that he's still one of the most amazing performers in the United States.

Deerhunter - Cryptograms
Rating: 6
I'm puzzled by the rapturous response this one has gotten. Half of it is comprised of long ambient drones with little character or memorability. The other half is mostly standard guitar pop with a pretty heavy shoegaze leaning. The two standouts are "Spring Hall Convert" with its haunting vocal and endlessly looping guitar lines; and the bliss-inducing "Octet," which manages to sum up everything they attempt throughout the album and drive it home.

Live reviews I haven't written yet:

Fujiya & Miyagi, Mezzanine
Rating: 5
Simply stunning. Live their sound is raw and jagged and trades the sheen of the album for an undeniable immediacy. You'd never guess from the album how much of the sound really is intricate guitar work. The bassist is inhumanly groovy and SEXY. The guitarist/vocalist's hand gestures are hilariously geeky and restrained - sort of like a less self-conscious Devo. After this show these guys can do no wrong in my book.

Kristin Hersh, Great American Music Hall
Rating: 5
Kristin tours with a full band (really just her 50 Foot Wave mates and the McCarricks on cello and violin), and in the process once again revamps a number of her songs. I'll try to do the performance justice later.

Phew!!!

Album Review: Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm

2007-04-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

Rating: 8 out of 10

Let's assume you don't read Pitchfork and then obsessively check out Metacritic to see what other folks have said about artists that they're, um, pitching. (Yes, that is the recipe to my neurosis... you're so clever to pick up on that!) Then it's possible you're going into reading this review having no idea about Marnie Stern, how incredibly distinctive she is, or what the criticisms being leveled against her are. Cool! I'm going to pretend the same.

This album is an almost non-stop mindfuck. First of all, Marnie Stern plays guitar like she's channeling all those tedious metal "guitar gods" of the 80s. It seems the quasi-technical term for this is that Marnie "shreds." Call it what you will, the shit takes some getting used to. The first couple times through the album, it was difficult for me to hear her madcap technique as anything other than showing off. Thing is, this album also has a vibrant sense of humor, as if Marnie takes nothing seriously, least of all her ability to play a couple hundred notes a minute. Nearly every song throws herky-jerk rhythms, or quirky production choices, or downright puzzling segues at you. And I haven't even mentioned Zach Hill's batsoid drumming, which often works in amazing counterpoint to Marnie's speed chops. It's like they're constantly challenging each other to see who can come up with the crazier rhythm.

So I found myself starting to grin as the album sank in. And then I found myself starting to laugh out loud at Marnie's cheerleader-on-acid multi-tracked chanting. A lot of critics have alleged that the album is too long and/or that its second half is boring and repetitive. To which I say: no fucking way. It's true that she front-loads the straightforward songs. "Every Single Line Means Something" is almost simple by Marnie's standards, and is probably a good place to start with her. "Grapefruit" has a chaotic schizoid rush that's intoxicating, while the galloping album opener "Vibrational Match" shows off her licks at their tightest. Having secured your attention (or sent you screaming from the room), Marnie then kicks off her shoes and gets progressively weirder and weirder. She warps her voice. She stops "shredding" and spits out jagged bursts of staccato noise. And she closes the album with a piece of spoken-word call and response that starts out cute and then half-way through turns into a stomping statement of intent.

My only criticism? This is an exhausting listen, and more than anything else I've heard this year I have to be in the mood for it. Add her in to your playlists and mixtapes with caution, because there's almost no way to transition from somebody else to Marnie without jarring. Does everything on Broken Arm work? Nah. But I'm definitely willing to reward ambition and unbridled creativity over polish or editing oneself in the name of some presumed notion of "listenability." This is an exciting and completely unprecedented album, and I can't wait to see where she goes from here.

Album Review: Dälek - Abandoned Language

2007-03-31T20:17:00.000-07:00

Rating: 9 out of 10

Dälek never make it easy - not for their listeners and certainly not for themselves. Ostensibly, this duo is a hip-hop act: their songs have beats, and vocalist Dälek raps a lot about how the youngsters don't know the history of the genre. But most of their fans are white indie/noise/metal kids (like me!); they also tour with those kind of bands. Within hip hop their closest affinity is probably with the Def Jux acts, but their sound is more accurately described as a serious update of My Bloody Valentine's squall, only ten times more diverse and intentionally hostile rather than simply intimidating as a by-product. Their last album Absence was one of the ugliest slabs of noise you're ever likely to hear... at least until you took the time to wade through the layers and layers of sound to hear the broken, hopeful, beating heart at the center of all the anger. These guys are the epitome of "challenging" - and so it's little wonder they're relatively unknown.

It is also a fucking shame, and one I hope is going to end with this masterwork of a third album. Abandoned Language is the quietest Dälek album yet, but that's hardly a concession to accessibility. You still have to pay a lot of attention to these songs before they start to yield their secrets. I suspect a lot of people will give this a cursory listen, dismiss it as "monotone" or "boring" or "torpid," and never uncover all the beautifully strange sonic architecture lurking below the surface.

Consider first single "Paragraphs Relentless." A simple hip-hop beat, a bit of scratching buried in the mix, bassline so thick and ominous it's hard to pick out notes, and an eerie melody that sounds like a harmonica being played underwater are the prominent features. But listen more closely - at least three other layers of ambient sound shifting and sliding around each other are providing a subtle foundation for the song. Once you catch them, it's impossible not to follow their flow as well. What sounds minimal on the surface is in fact layered, immaculately produced, fascinating. And that's before you even add in Dälek's rap or the way the choruses practically explode with additional layers of sound. The net effect is hypnotic.

Every song on Abandoned Language follows this basic template, and yet each contains a list of details unique to itself that makes it stand out from the bunch. "Bricks Crumble" is built on an almost jaunty two-note bass loop. The choruses add in piles of dischordant strings and voices for a beautifully queasy effect. The song also features a brief instrumental break after the first chorus that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Portishead album. A bit of a crowd-pleaser, except you only get it once. The bassline of "Starved for Truth" thumps like a heartbeat. The frantic beat kicks in, distorted bell-like tones echo off each other claustrophobically, and then the truly-sick chorus drops accompanied by squalling saxophone blasts. Only, it turns out this isn't just the chorus - it's the beginning of an amazing instrumental interlude. Dizzy two-note keyboard motifs start stacking up, the saxophone gets more urgent and dischordant, eerie layers of organ build in the background... are you sweating yet?

I could continue in the same vein, mapping out the way these songs twist, grow, collapse, and mutate - but I'd much rather let you discover their beautiful (il)logic for yourself. Abandoned Language isn't going to be for everyone - it's too demanding, and is too easily heard as uniform rather than brilliantly constructed and produced. It took me at least five listens before I was able to really pick the songs apart, but once I crossed that threshhold my fascination with it has continued to grow. This one's my new favorite album of 2007, and it's going to be a tough act to dethrone.

Album Review: !!! - Myth Takes

2007-03-31T16:37:00.000-07:00

Rating: 8 out of 10

I've been patiently waiting for an album to hit me over the head this year and scream "THIS is a serious contender for Album of the Year!" I ended up giving Menomena a higher rating than I'd originally intended, but that's only because it grew on me. What I wanted was something immediate. If you'd told me that what I was waiting for was the new album by !!!, I would have laughed at you. I liked Let Us Never Speak of It Again, the last (and final) release by these guys' sister band Out Hud, but it didn't hit me over the head. And I'd never read anything about !!! that led me to think they were going to provide the goods either.

Well, let's just say it: Myth Takes is fantastic. The album manages to push enough genre boundaries to be interesting, without ever sacrificing its infectious grooviness. It's danceable, and every song is built on a killer bass line that will have you nodding your head in time - but it's wonderfully varied and even occasionally unpredictable without ever being ostentatious. And, it's sequenced brilliantly: the first three songs slowly build in intensity; the middle four are a seamless peak; and then the final three songs steadily wind down.

I can't think of a more pleasurable way to spend 20 minutes than those middle four songs. "A New Name" starts out a bit jagged on the verses, segues into a woozy bridge with insistent drum fills, and then throws an indelible falsetto over an instantly-memorable guitar riff for the chorus. "Heart of Hearts" is built on restless guitar notes and rattling cymbals duking it out with a sinister looping bass. The arch, processed female vocals on the chorus remind me of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - which in present context is totally a compliment. "Sweet Life" (my favorite song on the album) starts out simply with vocalist Nic Offer singing breathily over a jangly guitar. With zero warning the choruses explode out of your speakers: enter the bass line over a sea of percussion while Offer urgently intones nonsense syllables a la Deerhoof. (It sounds like he might be spelling something, actually, but damned if I know what it is). The song winds down to a single buzzing synth, and then the stomping greatness of "Yadnus" kicks in - 5 minutes of loping bass, jangly dancepunk guitar and a jawdropping percussive breakdown at the 3:20 mark. After that, it's an increasingly dreamy drift through the final three songs, closing out with the sedate and ballad "Infinifold."

There are a few missteps on Myth Takes, most notably the self-consicous hip hop parody "Must be the Moon," whose lyrics tritely recount a club hookup and subsequent sexual conquest. Offer pretty much shoots himself in the foot with the meta-ness of a line like "It's all beginning to sound like a rap song" on the only song where he attempts - poorly - to rap. But the all-around awesomeness of the album more than compensates for this one bad choice.

It's early in the year still; I'll probably get even more excited about other albums in 2007. But Myth Takes' impressive mix of the familiar and unexpected, on top of its overwhelming grooviness and sheer fun, have definitely made it the one to beat at this point.

Album Review: Menomena - Friend and Foe

2007-03-27T19:47:00.000-07:00

Rating: 8 out of 10

Menomena are one of those bands I'm going to champion even when I don't necessarily like everything they've done. On a song-by-song basis, their ratio of "I Like" to "I'm Indifferent To" (there aren't enough "I Don't Like"s to mention) is honestly about 1:1. But man! those "I Likes" are some seriously and memorably strange gems. Much has been made of the way these guys approach songwriting - a custom piece of software spits out riffs, drum loops, etc. and then they mix and sequence these into real songs. Well, I had the pleasure of seeing them live (they inexplicably opened for Gang of Four two years ago), and can testify that they sound anything but canned.

Friend and Foe is stranger, more chaotic, and yet also more consistent than Menomena's debut I am the Fun Blame Monster! Whereas that album seriously lagged in momentum in the middle, Friend and Foe maintains its energy nearly throughout. ("Rotting Hell" is the one plodding sleeper.) On any given song the instrumentation is sparse, yet the overall palette is extremely diverse: multi-part vocals, drums, various percussion, lots of saxophone, pianos, and the occasional blasting guitar. The basic blueprint: select a couple of these elements, assign a melody or two (or three...) to those amenable to such, string them together or let them stage a succession of battles, include lots of empty space to make the explosive dynamics all the more intense, and use some of the most creative and fantastic drumming in the world to hold it all together.

I won't even try to do the songs justice with words - they're best experienced at volume and with an open mind. All three of my favorites are near the end of the album. "My My" is hauntingly beautiful, with an ascending break near the middle that still makes my skin tingle. It's followed by "Boyscout'N", a jaunty march complete with whistling and insistent sax bursts that just keeps getting larger in scope and sound. It burns itself out near the end and the whistling carries the listener over to the epic "Evil Bee," which manages to cram at least five different movements into fewer than that many minutes.

The sheer amount of creativity at work in this album is staggering. The songs are messy yet stately; unpredictable yet organically dynamic. And I'll repeat it: you won't hear drumming this inventive from anyone else. My one criticism about the album is it can be intimidating. There are definitely moods with which it works better than others, and I really wouldn't recommend it for social situations - it's a bit of a jovial bully for your attention. But it rewards that attention admirably and consistently. I expect a long shelf life on this one.

Album Review: Kristin Hersh - Learn to Sing Like a Star

2007-03-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

Rating: 7 out of 10

Y'know, it's almost like I'm in a romantic relationship with the music made by Kristin Hersh (no wonder I seem to have a hard time finding/keeping a boyfriend!) Kristin's music and I have been inseparable for almost 20 years. The romance started out really hot and heavy - the self-titled Throwing Muses debut, The Fat Skier, House Tornado, and her solo debut Hips and Makers are all near the top of my list of all-time favorite albums. As time went on I started seeing the music's warts, but they never became the focus for me, and there were still plenty of high points (Limbo; Sunny Border Blue; the first half of Golden Ocean) to get me through the occasional arguments and misunderstandings. I'm just as committed as I've always been; I'll always find something to like and want around to snuggle with; and I can be objective about the imperfections without them detracting from my enjoyment of the music's companionship.

I mostly like Learn to Sing Like a Star. After the stark The Grotto, this one has a full-band sound: drumming by David Narcizo (surprisingly subdued), electric piano, cellos and violins, and the occasional electric guitar riff all back up Kristin's scratchy vocals and acoustic strumming. It's mostly pretty without being overwhelmingly so. The church bells and rolling drums of "Winter" create an air of menace and expectation that flows nicely into the soaring chorus. "Sugarbaby," "Under the Gun," and "Wild Vanilla" all feature insistent electric guitar solos that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Throwing Muses album.

But as always, Kristin's vocals are the instrument most likely to grab your attention and demand access to your memory. Kristin's voice shows its wear a little more on each new album, but the scratchiness around the edges just adds depth and contrast to the pretty moments, and an emotional intensity to the occasional scary ones she can still conjure. Representing the latter: On the leadup to the chorus of "Day Glo," she repeats "Getting up is what HUUUUUUUUURRRRTS!", slurring that last word out into a near-howl before the electric guitar and violin slink in. It's impossible to ignore. I was fortunate to grab an early copy of the album that came with a bonus disc bearing three songs. The first of these, "Windowpane," is possibly the most intense moment on the album. Representing the former: Both "Ice" and "Winter" feature memorably pretty melodies on the chorus.

Overall the album plays it pretty safe. Several of the songs I haven't mentioned yet are straightforward guitar pop with that distinctive voice sitting - sometimes silky, sometimes uncomfortably naked - on top. It's a decent album but not a mindblowing one. I'm happy to spend time with it until the next one, just the way an old lover should.

Album Review: Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

2007-02-20T20:25:00.000-08:00

Rating: 5 out of 10

I admit to dreading this album. The last time I saw Deerhoof live (opening for Radiohead last summer at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley), bassist/guitarist Chris Cohen had just quit the band, and they seemed completely unable to fill that gaping hole in their sound. They've been on the road for practically the entire last year, and I expected the resulting album to sound rushed and perhaps even reactionary. And of course this band is incapable of recording the same album twice, a fact which has worked equally to their advantage and disadvantage. In fact, by my preferences they've alternated fantastic (Apple O', The Runners Four) and spotty (Reveille, Milk Man) releases. Following on that trend, I expected Friend Opportunity to be in the latter category.

Unfortunately, they've met my expectations on both regards. Friend Opportunity sounds not much at all like any previous Deerhoof albums. For the first time ever, electronics play a major role in the overall sound, whether it's the organs that drive fantastic opener "The Perfect Me", or the bleeps and bloops (for once we're not talking about Satomi's vocals!) that percolate in the background of nearly every song on the album. More distressingly, though, there's almost no sign of the chaotic, noisy Deerhoof of old. Granted, they've been moving steadily popward for the last couple albums. But whereas The Runners Four managed the balancing act between "sleek" and "unpredictable", too much of Friend Opportunity is just.... BORING. And that's a word I never wanted to use in reference to an album by this band.

It starts off with a bang, though. The first three songs are among the best they've ever written. "The Perfect Me" is classic Deerhoof - propulsive power chords (OK, on an organ this time around, but the effect is still recognizable) and Satomi's sing-song vocals on the verses, a couple leftward veers into rifftastic bridges, and a frenetic cowbell in the background throughout. "+81" introduces some jubilant trumpets into the mix and again twists and turns unpredictably like a mountain road. Finally, "Believe E.S.P." brings the funk, Deerhoof-style: a groovy bass/guitar riff battles it out with more cowbell, and Satomi's "pooky pooky beep beep" vocals. So far, so excellent.

But then it's all downhill. The energy level drops several notches, the mood becomes more contemplative than joyous, and the twists and turns start feeling more forced. "The Galaxist" is pretty, but unfocused. "Choco Fight" starts out promisingly with a lurching organ figure and some of Greg's counterpoint drumming, but after the first verse it turns into scales being played on a keyboard - too twee even for these folks to pull off. "Cast Off Crown" pulls the same trick, starting out strong with one of those immediately-memorable Deerhoof power riffs, but ultimately descending into a messy collage of strums and electronic noises. The nearly-twelve-minute closer "Look Away" is interesting as an experiment, but not particularly compelling as a repeat listen. And "Whither the Invisble Birds?" would not sound out of place in an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical - which, if you're at all familiar with this band, you'll recognize isn't a compliment.

I hate to be rough on Deerhoof... last year sucked for them. But ultimately this album feels rushed and unfocused. Of course, if they stay true to pattern, the next one will be another knockout. And certainly the first three songs on Friend Opportunity give plenty of reason to keep expectations high.

My favorite 10 albums of 2006

2007-02-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

I went into writing this list feeling that 2006 had been a pretty disappointing year in music for me. But after hours of listening to these ten albums over and over, and trying to come up with creative and descriptive and accurate descriptions of them, I realized that a few of them had grown with familiarity. But here it is March of '07, I'm finally finished with this blog entry, and I'm ready to let 2006 go with a happier memory of it then when I started this piece.

My criteria for picking these albums, in roughly decreasing order of importance:

- consistency. How many of the songs do I like? How does the sequencing make the album flow as a whole rather than seeming like a collection of unrelated songs?
- innovation. How "fresh" is the sound? Are the influences only hinted at or painfully easy to spot?
- repeatability. Does the album invite repeated listen? Do i continue hearing new things in it every time I listen anew?
- emotional impact. The hardest to quantify or predict. Basically, to what extent does the album vibe for me? Is it specific to a certain mood or situation, or can I find myself enjoying it no matter what mood I'm in? (And a really great encapsulation of a certain mood holds equal weight in my book as a more "universal" album).

And here's the list...

10. Beirut - Gulag Orkestar

I'm a bit surprised to see this album sitting at the bottom of my list, but Gulag Orkestar beats out its competitors by virtue of its originality. Not "original" in the sense of innovative, mind you - but "original" in what it's recycling. How many other recent, putatively "rock" albums are built on a foundation of ukelele, accordian, brass, strings, and marching band drums? A lot of people wanted to throw around Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons, but that just goes to show how little reference we actually had for this little gem. (I kept toying with a comparison to the instrumental half of Telephone-Free Landslide Victory, but that's equally fatuous). Instead, let me suggest a more recent parallel: M.I.A. Maya and Zack both shamelessly plunder the musical traditions of "other" parts of the world, mixing and matching elements and coming up with catchy, sometimes surprising hybrids. And like Arular, Gulag Orkestar is open to as much meta-narrative (and -criticism) as one chooses to throw at it. Pretentious as hell? Yep. Culturally imperialistic? Probably. Does this necessarily have to hinder one's enjoyment of the album? Not at all, especially when Zack's rich tenor is one of the most interesting voices I've heard in a while - not just for how it sounds, but what he does with it. And just for the record, the Knife didn't own the entire 2006 market on multitracking vocals: the harmonies on "Mount Wroclai" transform what starts out as cheesy carnival music into an irresistible sing-along; "The Bunker" just keeps adding vocal counterpoints until it bursts at the seams into a trumpet-driven stomp. Where he goes from here is anyone's guess, but Gulag Orkestar is a worthwhile and memorable debut.

9. Herbert - Scale

And here Stereolab thought they'd recorded space age bachelor pad music. The operative word here is smooooooooooth... so smooth you could play it in elevators and never even notice how many really weird details there are just below the surface of all those tasteful strings and horns and silky vocals. But the details are there, as are the pictures of the hundreds of objects that he painstakingly recorded and sequenced into the mix. The end result is like your grandparents' jazz (or swing, or big band, or...) albums force fed through a Nintendo. Repeated listens are guaranteed to reveal new textures, new sounds, new pleasures - yet the album rarely feels overbusy or even that it was labored over. The overall lounginess of it initially turned me off (it's the only album on this list I could comfortably play for my grandmother), but all those electronic details are what finally sold me. Like the rhythm track on the choruses of "Down, which sounds like a bubble machine in high gear, or how the stomping bass line on the verses of "Movie Star" totally take me back to the "tribal" levels of Kid Icarus. Nor is it all gloss and whimsy - lyrically, the first verse of "The Movers and the Shakers" is a trenchant critique of the war in Iraq. Of course, the guests at your dinner party won't hear that, they'll just be nodding along to the song's revision of 50s swing, which just makes it all the more subversive.

8. Espers - II

Espers' 2004 debut was that rare album that grabbed my attention immediately and refused to give it back. Meg Baird's gorgeous, wispy vocals were the first thing I noticed, but what really sold me on the band was the constant tension in the music between melody and dissonance. It's a good sign when my roommate (who's developed an amazing ability to ignore whatever noise is emerging from my room) felt the need to poke his head in and inform me that "Hearts and Daggers" was "one of the most disturbing things [he'd] ever heard."

Well, nothing on II has evoked a repeat of that response as yet, and it also took me a bit longer to fall for this album's strengths. II is denser, darker, and more aloof than the debut. Espers are now a 6-piece, and the sound is correspondingly thicker. I'm left to speculate why the overall mood took a turn toward the heavy; the vocal melodies are still gorgeous but here they sound haunted. The guitar gets run through way more effects and distortion than last time, which makes it the instrument most likely to define the different "feels" of the songs. And so the last third of "Widow's Weed" is a frightening shitstorm of feedback, while the instrumental interlude of "Mansfield and Cyclops" is made downright eerie by a solo that slowly turns into a keening figure Thurston Moore would have been proud to own. The percussion is similarly diverse and creative, so that the beat of a song often becomes another part of its texture. I hope I'm not making the album sound like a slog - catch it in the right mood (I suggest rain on the windows and candlelight for a start) and it will captivate you.

7. The Knife - Silent Shout

The album on this list that you're most likely to have heard (or at least heard of)... would it surprise you to know that I really didn't like it much at first? Sure, "We Share Our Mother's Health" was my 2nd favorite song of 2006; I fell in love with it within the first twenty seconds the first time I heard it. But as a whole, I found Silent Shout too derivative, too dependent on the gimmick of multi-tracking the hell out of Kerin's vocals. Take those out of the mix, and seriously tell me that the title track or (especially!) "Forest Families" are musically anything more than reheated trance. The beats are neither innovative nor even all that varied. And the last third of the album, with the exception of the sprightly "One Hit", is a drag.

But then I saw them live, and I had to revise my opinion. Perhaps I was just guilty of a bit of hype backlash (I'm still puzzling over Pitchfork naming this Album of the Year). Perhaps I was just judging it by the wrong standards. The fact is, Silent Shout is a pretty great dance album. Considered within that context, the risks that the Knife took in crafting it become more evident. There's no escaping the effect of those vocals - I've yet to experience these songs in an altered state, but I can only imagine they're goose-bump-inducing. I haven't paid that much attention to the lyrics, but will happily concede they evade every single dance trope. "We Share Our Mother's Health" and "Like a Pen" are the immediate hits, but "The Captain" and "Neverland" are the slow burners I find myself repeatedly drawn to simply for the experience of listening to them. So, I concede defeat on this one... and will always be glad I have the images from the live show to accompany it.

6. Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things

Transparent Things is the epitome of cool. Just consider the different definitions of the word.

Cool as in "chilly"
The music is so slick and polished that it resists penetration. The surfaces are fractal - there are more details the closer you listen, but the pleasure equation is identical regardless of the scale at which you regard it.

Cool as in "aloof"
The lyrics aren't just inscrutable, they seem to be calculatedly puzzling. And yet they're intoned with such straightfaced seriousness that you'll find yourself constantly wondering what you're missing. Why does he need a new pair of shoes to "kick it with her"? Is your rocker "bleeding" because they're British, or because you're "losing your bodily fluids"? Are the band just taking the piss when they declare "We were / just preten- / -ding to be / Japanese," or are they offering a wry comment on their own self-mythologizing? Are the two incompatible? You figure it out.

Cool as in "composed"
Go ahead, lob your list of referents at Transparent Things. State the obvious: that "Cassettesingle" is Can with more modern equipment; that "Conductor" is the best Stereolab instrumental drone you've heard in years; that "In One Ear & Out the Other" is reheated funk. Your criticisms mean nothing to this album; it simply continues doing its thing, and doing it so well that you'll find it impossible to stop listening.

Cool as in "socially adept"
Try this at home: put on Transparent Things as background music to every single one of your daily activities. Clean the house to it. Cook dinner to it. Play it for your dinner party guests, and absolutely play it for your sexual partners. Pay attention to it, or don't. Either way, you'll discover that it's good company. It's happy to be sonic wallpaper - unobtrusive, simply nice to look at. But it's also happy to receive your scrutiny, which it will reward with an endless progression of added details. It is simultaneously utterly familiar and utterly strange. It's a thing of beauty. You need this in your life.

5. Giddy Motors - Do Easy

Right here is where this list takes a turn for the irredeemably, beautifully ugly. The album name has to be a joke - there's nothing simple about these twisted, snarling songs - but the band couldn't be better named. "Motors" in the sense that every song starts with the same template: insistent riffage; queasy monstrous bass lines; spare, inventive drumming that uses the negative space just as powerfully as the positive; and Gaverick de Vis' tortured howls, one of the most distinctive vocalists in recent memory. "Giddy" because these songs do not sit still. They're riff-tastic, but hardly monoliths (which is why the Soundgarden comparison I keep flirting with is ultimately inaccurate). The band set up internal structures only long enough to catch you off guard when they shift into jazzy breakdowns ("Sick," "Kapow"), long stretches of noisy chaos ("Panzrama"), or stop-start call-and-response ("Early Morning Pipe"). I really can't exaggerate how talented they are both as individuals and as an ass-stomping whole.

So why isn't the album #1 on my list? Well, it's only eight songs, the last two of which are uninspired instrumentals (particularly after all the dynamics and tension of what precedes them). Of the six that remain, "Nego" is a bit of a dud, the only song that stays pretty much the same from beginning to end. So that leaves five songs, which - no matter how queasily brilliant - add up to an EP, not a whole album. It's also a bad sign when a band takes three years to record eight songs, going through a couple bassists in the process (and Justin Stone has already left the band after Do Easy's release). So it doesn't get my "favorite album" nod, but it sure as hell gets my enthusiastic endorsement, and let's hope they can stabilize things a bit for the next one. (Then again, perhaps the lack of stability is exactly why this is so lovably nasty!)

4. Various - The World is Gone

Imagine that the boy in da corner is joined by a girl with an acoustic guitar. The corner in question is in a jail cell which is slowly flooding (how else to explain the overwhelming sense of dread?) The door is open, but they're too distracted by all the sonic architecture of the place to leave. In the background bellows whoosh, ancient machinery chugs, the wind howls through broken windows. Shadowy arachnid shapes creep around the walls, chittering and scraping and buzzing. The girl attempts to cheer them up by singing ballads, but even these are invaded by the setting. "Rest up while you can," she implores, but the conclusion is unavoidable: "You're a dead man."

The jail analogy is particularly apt because - much like a wall made of bars - the songs on this album contain more empty space than filled. It's an astounding feat of production that these songs can be explosively packed with sound, and still be built on so much silence. Like looking through jail cells, refuge is always visible, never attainable. But frankly - much like the boy and the girl - you'll be too captivated by the experience to even contemplate escape.

3. Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

On which Belle & Sebastian fully realize their drift toward pure pop, reinventing themselves in the process as pillagers du jour. Every song on The Life Pursuit wears a different, immediately identifiable style, and yet the only time they sound derivative is when Belle & Sebastian rip off themselves (the R.E.M.ish jangle of "Another Sunny Day" could have comfortably fit on any B&S album up to this point). Otherwise, this album is like a mini-tour through the last 40 years of pop music history. With the exception of "To Be Myself Completely" - which totally reminds me of Diana Ross and the Supremes (only with a male vocalist) - I won't pretend to identify any of the styles being appropriated, but this album reminds me of being a kid, listening to the "oldies" station with my parents. The overall mood is buoyant but still muscular - just listen to the rumbling bass of "Sukie in the Graveyard" or the insistent last chorus of "Act of the Apostle II." And the best part is that they still manage to sound like Belle & Sebastian. The lyrics are still sly and clever, only now they're delivered in multi-part harmonies. "White Collar Boy" features a hilarious call-and-response concerning the dubious merits of a certain young woman; "Sukie in the Graveyard" celebrates its titular heroine for hanging out at the art school but not enrolling; and, "We are the Sleepyheads" manages to make outsiderhood sound fun. But then, "fun" is probably the operative word for the entire album.

2. Matmos - The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast

The criticism most often leveled against Matmos is that the concepts (or, some would say, gimmicks) behind their songs are often weightier than the songs themselves. Or, to put it another way, in the past for every "Lipostudio... and So On", you'd also get a "For Felix (And all the Rats)." You could respect the ideas and the incredible production, and still not find all of their music listenable.

The Rose has Teeth... is sitting up near the top of this list not merely because it's the best, most consistent album Matmos have recorded. (There's only one dud this time around, the nightmarish wind-tunnel rush of "Germs Burn for Darby Crash"). It's also one of the most interesting and diverse listens that anyone bothered to give us in 2006. You get the frenetic beats of "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein," the seedy backroom grind of "Public Sex for Boyd MacDonald," and the wall of chattering adding machines and typewriters of "Rag for William S. Burroughs." I've already carried on enough about the hilarious "Tract for Valerie Solanos" - probably the best job Matmos have done of integrating the means and the theory of a song. But again: you don't need to know that Drew Daniel recorded the sound his semen makes sliding down a test tube (and just what does that sound like anyway?) to enjoy the mysterious and slightly-creepy "Semen Song for James Bidwell." On the flip side, while knowing some of William S. Burroughs' biography will help you understand the narrative behind the gunshot that marks "Rag"'s first transition, you can also just sit back and listen to (and marvel at) the way analog machine sounds give way to increasing layers of more "traditional" percussion. Ultimately, the album is a success because at its center is solid songcraft and unparalleled technical skill. Destroy the male sex? Not as long as they keep giving us twisted pieces of art like this one.

1. Boris - Pink

There's something you should know about Pink before you listen to it: the album is loud, and it is meant to be played loudly. This is not music that you can throw on as background to anything. It rewrites the rules of the universe such that infinite layers of feedback, frenetic drumming, joyously shouted vocals, and more guitar riffs than you can shake an effects pedal at, all emerge from the finite space of your speakers and fill the finite space that you inhabit. And then they grab your body and they shake you, hard. The wall of feedback that shimmers on top of most of these songs isn't the result of shoddy production - it's the sound of guitars being pushed to their limit to channel as many ideas at once as possible. That diversity exists as much within the songs as between them: "Farewell" and "Just Abandoned My-Self" are the mini-opuses that frame the album, but between them you get deep doom ("Blackout"), melodic psych freak-outs ("Pseudo-Bread", "Woman on the Screen"), and a bit of bluesy Zeppelinesque sludge ("Afterburner"). For all that Pink is unrelentingly heavy, however, it's never a burden. There's a joyous energy and an infectious playfulness throughout most of the album that makes the genre term "metal" completely inapplicable. More than any other album from last year, this one is guaranteed to put a smile on my face, and that's why - even though it was actually the last of these ten albums that I bought - it's my favorite from 2006.

As a good scientist, it behooves me to identify the population from which these ten were chosen. Here's a list of all the other albums I bought in 2006, split into two groups - the "second-strings" that I'd have been writing about if I'd chosen some other arbitrary multiple of 5, and the albums that really didn't have a chance of making my list (for all that most of them included at least one song that I loved).

Figurines – Skeleton
50 Foot Wave – Free Music
Lansing-Dreiden – The Dividing Island
Mission of Burma – The Obliterati
Ellen Allien & Apparat – Orchestra of Bubbles
Excepter – Sunbomber EP

Erase Errata – Nightlife
Junior Boys – So This is Goodbye
El Perro del Mar – El Perro del Mar
Islands – Return to the Sea
Be Your Own Pet – Be Your Own Pet
Asobi Seksu – Citrus
Liars – Drum’s Not Dead
Mew - …and the Glass-Handed Kites
CSS – Cansei de ser Sexy
Oxford Collapse – Remember the Night Parties
Girl Talk – Night Ripper
Telepathe – Farewell Forest
Mylo – Destroy Rock n’ Roll
Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped

My favorite 30 songs of 2006

2007-01-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

This list was originally going to be my favorite 20 songs of last year, but I felt like that number didn't do justice to a lot of artists whose full albums didn't "do it" for me, but still had a constant presence on my speakers. And, expanding the list to 30 meant I didn't feel required to limit the entries from a given album to just 1 song. As it is, I still "cheated", counting back-to-back songs by Be Your Own Pet and Mew as single entries... and this whole "multiples of 10" (or 5) thing is so arbitrary anyway...

Without further ado, here's what heated up my playlists in 2006:

30. "Rats" - Sonic Youth

This is sitting at the bottom spot for a reason: it's a totally begrudging nod. I hated Rather Ripped, consider it a betrayal of almost everything Sonic Youth have ever stood for, and honestly think I've finally drawn my line in the sand with them. "Rats" is the only song on RR that I've wanted to listen to repeatedly, and even my endorsement of it here comes with a huge caveat: almost everything beautiful and great about this song has been done before by SY, if not necessarily better. Thurston's hazy shimmer and minor-chord quarter note progressions, Lee's soaring whole notes and sing-speak of the vocal: this is basically "Disappearer Part Two." Don't take my word for it - listen to the two songs back-to-back and see if you don't agree. All that said, the twisty bassline that anchors all of this free-floatery is an innovation for these guys, and the choruses evoke enough of that old late-80s/early-90s SY sense of longing and journey, that I'm willing to stifle my inner critic and let it pull my head along. Not the requiem I would have chosen for them, but a good song nonetheless.

29. "Down with a High Heel" - Giddy Motors

I'm tempted to say this is the greatest Soundgarden song that Soundgarden themselves never got around to recording, and leave it at that. But trying to sum up any of the songs off Do Easy that simply is reductive and inaccurate. Sure, this is the Motors at their most straightforward, and if it was at the beginning of the album I'd be further tempted to speculate that they were trying to take it easy on us, to tempt us into the more treacherous territory that follows. It's still a restless, queasy listen: all grinding bass and serrated guitar and squealing, syncopated vocals. The long, tense, quiet section in the middle hardly dissipates the song's momentum; you just know these guys are going to come roaring back and tear your head off. Given that the last two songs on Do Easy are boring and practically unlistenable instrumentals respectively, I consider Gaverick's final tortured yelp of the word "feel" to be the perfect end to an album that is never less than uncompromising.

28. "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" - Matmos

A common complaint about movies based on books is that the film replaces the images in a reader's imagination with its own. It's a complaint less often leveled at musicians; how many live performances have you attended that unshakeably fixed an image to a song in your mind ever after? Well, I had this happen twice this year (also see #2 below), and in this case the visual made me like the song even more. I have no clue which of the many exquisitely-layered beats of this song is actually the sound of roses being pounded into a pile of petals, but there's no doubt (this is Matmos, after all) that one of them is exactly that. Power of the visual aside, this is simply a fun listen; you don't need a degree in philosophy (or biology, for that matter) to appreciate the wit of the idea of the rose's teeth, and on the flip side you don't need to get bogged down in the novelty of how the sounds are being generated to enjoy hearing them. A great opener to a consistently engaging and great album.

27. "The Movers and the Shakers" - Herbert

On this song Herbert allows his studio wizardry to show a bit more than on the rest of Scale. The found sounds aren't as buried in the mix, and at no point do all those tasteful 50s strings and brass completely take over the song; there are always burbles or boings to offset the overall lounginess of it. The beat is insistent and yet strangely static, while the instrumental melody swells and ebbs with emotion. The contrast befits a song whose lyrics decry the intersection of religion, power, and war - helplessness versus hope. "I just don't know how to bring about your downfall, damn fool... can't find peace to ring about, can't find trees to sit and celebrate... " I don't know many artists who could pull this off with such aplomb, blending so many different influences and ideas together into a song that never feels heavy or overdone.

26. "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby" - Islands

This is exactly the kind of headfuck we've come to expect from these guys in the course of only two albums. The music is sunny and understated, and the choruses consist of nothing but "doot-doot"s straight out of the Deehoof Cuteness Playbook. So of course the lyrics are dark, full of "bones, bones, brittle little bones," not to mention the suggestive, disturbing title. But it's all fun-n-games; Islands can't even deliver the line "Open your eyes, look around you / Fuck what you heard, you were lied to" in anything less than a jaunty two-part vocal harmony. It's easiest really just to submit to its charms and not ask too many questions.

25. "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" - CSS

They claim to be tired of being sexy, but my response to the full album was opposite in both cases: tiring, and not as sexy as they think. That said, this song with its dreamy theremin keyboards and disco groovy bass manages to get it right by staying true to formula. It's best not to pay too much attention to Lovefoxxx's lyrics; just bob your head along to the way her vocal rides the beat. Hell, with Out Hud gone we need somebody to channel the Tom Tom Club, and this is frothy enough to light up the faces at your party but not linger long enough for anyone to realize, "Wow, this is great but utterly derivative."

24. "The Fuschia Wall" - 50 Foot Wave

I wondered whether Kristin Hersh could maintain the breakneck pace of 50 Foot Wave's first two releases for long, and as I suspected this year's Free Music EP traded a bit of the bombast for a renewed emphasis on dynamics. She's still playing those monolithic monster grooves, but here the boxer weaves and dances rather than just pummels you into submission. Rob Ehler's drumming is similarly restrained, accenting rather than pushing (or pulling) the song along. The descending four-note guitar riff that seems to come out of nowhere and separates the verses from the choruses is ultimately what will stick in your head, even if you're aware this is the second time she's pulled that particular trick. (The first time was on "Freeloader" ten years ago - that time the unexpected riff climbed rather than plopped, and yep, it's still what distinguishes that song.) It seemed Kristin spent most of 2006 on the road (I saw her five times in San Francisco between January and December), and spent her recording time on the just-released solo disc Learn to Sing Like a Star, so it'll be interesting to hear whether the new direction hinted at by Free Music lasts or whether this endlessly restless artist will surprise us with something newer yet.

23. "Dividing Island" - Lansing-Dreiden

It starts out lush and bombastic - tribal drums, what sounds like some exotic animal howling over the rain forest, and then a wall of synthesized strings and brass rising and falling in counterpoint. The vocal traces the same melody as the strings, hushed and breathy. This continues for three minutes, and then a single note guitar riff drops out of the sky and all of a sudden this sounds like a song from one of those 60s rock musicals like Hair or Godspell, all insistence and shouted jubilation. See, it's called "Dividing Island," and that's why it's so schizophrenic. And honestly, that's as far as I've gone to try and figure it out. Everything I read about this band suggests they take themselves a wee bit too seriously, and I've purposely not tried to figure out any of the lyrics because I want nothing (least of all the band's intentions) to interfere with my enjoyment of it's power, grace, or still-surprising transition halfway through.

22. "Farewell" - Boris

The very sound of the opening electric buzz still sends a shiver of anticipation down my spine. It builds slowly, all rippling guitars and a slowly-spiraling feedback loop in the background. The drums grow more insistent, and then at 1:18 the entire sky falls on my head. And I just lay there and marvel at how something so heavy, so wall-like, can still be so pretty and nuanced. And let me state for the record that comparing this to My Bloody Valentine is lazy and stupid. The sonics might be similar, but glistening just below the surface are real melodies. Granted, they last only as long as it takes to play them, but that's just because Boris are restless. I mean, this is the first song on the album, and they're already wishing us "Farewell"??? And just where am I meant to be going with the entire sky sitting on my chest???

21. "The Wonder" - Figurines

"Hey, I didn't know the Feelies got back together?"

"Huh? The Figurines? Who are they?"

"Oh... they're from Denmark? So maybe they don't actually know that they're really blatantly ripping off early-80s jangle pop. I mean, maybe they've never heard the Feelies?"

"No, no... you're right. Hating these guys for being unoriginal is completely besides the point. Every year a flock of new indie bands will traverse this exact same territory, and whether or not they stick is irrelevant. It's a simple pleasure: either you buy into it because it's catchy, or you don't. Either way, in twenty years you'll have completely forgotten about them."

"Well, that's a good point. I still remember the Feelies because they were the first band I ever heard play this kind of strummy peppy indie pop. Hey, that's pretty funny! to think that there's some 13 year old out there who is TOTALLY going to love this song, and twenty years from now he'll be some old guy like me telling the kids that whatever indie pop band they're grooving to is just ripping off the Figurines."

"Sure, no argument - it's catchy stuff. Sure does sound like the Feelies, though..."

20. "Postcards from Italy" - Beirut

"Oh, a ukelele. How quaint," you think, and reach for the Next button. But then Zack's trembling tenor comes in, and your finger pauses. "Hm, he's got a really interesting voice," you admit. And then the martial percussion track comes in and you drop your hand and nod your head. And then! Then the Spanish trumpets pipe up and it occurs to you that this 19-year old kid is like the M.I.A. of traditional European sounds. Just as pretentious, but also just as daring and immediate. And you realize with a sinking stomach that this song is just like those thought control worms from the second Star Trek movie: it has lodged itself permanently in your brain and forever changed the way you'll hear non-rock instruments. The fucker.

19. "Tax Dollar" - Erase Errata

Jagged staccato guitar. Funky counterpoint bassline. And cowbell. LOTS of cowbell. Didn't somebody tell Erase Errata that dancepunk is DEAD??? Thankfully, they seem not to have gotten that memo - and bless their souls for carrying the torch, because this song is a gas. As could be expected following guitarist Jenny Hoyston's departure from the band, it's the percussion that's leading the charge this time around. The guitar steps up on the interlude, but only to establish the surfpunk melody for the song's central indictment: "I got away-ay, yeah I really got away... with murder! Manslaughter! All funded by my tax dollar. American bastard, murderous bitch!" It's the most thrillingly direct this band has ever been. And then the song gets all dischordant and angry sounding and falls apart in a heap. This is Erase Errata, after all.

18. "Mansfield and Cyclops" - Espers

It initially sounds like some lost relic from the 60s - finger-plucked guitar lines, weaving cello and violin, gently rolling drums, and the kind of immediately gorgeous vocal we've come to expect from this group. They could have stopped there, and this would still be a standout. But as with the rest of II, Espers hear a darkness at the heart of this song, and after two runs through the only verse, they spend a couple minutes taking us into the darkness. The basic melody gets subverted, each of the instruments floating along its own path, and the lead guitar starts dropping haunted keening figures that wouldn't have sounded out of place on late-80s Sonic Youth albums. It all unwinds with a stately grace, drifts to a stop, and then the verse reasserts itself for one more runthrough. You can get lost in the multiple details, or just ride the song's wave at its surface; either way this was one of the lovelist ways to spend six minutes in 2006.

17. "Photocopier" - Fujiya & Miyagi

The British vocalist intones in a fake French accent, "We were / just preten- / -ding to be / Japanese" and it's a tribute to how cool these guys are that their pretense doesn't feel pretentious. He follows the line "You're losing your bodily fluids" with the admonition "You're off your bleeding rocker," and leaves you to figure out in what sense the rocker is actually bleeding. I'm convinced the lyrics serve no purpose except to distract you from how effortless the music is, and the vocal rides the jam so tightly it might as well be another rhythm instrument. Elsewhere on the album, Fujiya & Miyagi inform us that they "look through transparent things and... feel OK," and really, what more do you need to know? Sometimes it's better not to think.

16. "Moving Like a Train" - Herbert

And while we're on the subject of "effortless" - this song is misleadingly titled because I don't think I've ever had a train ride that was this smooth. Of course, "Moving Like a Hovercraft" would have sounded too techno-futurist, and might have invited listeners to contemplate the way Herbert uses technology to channel 50s jazz and soul into the 21st Century. But there's no way to convincingly fake the human voice, and this song features one of the most compelling vocals on Scale. "No matter what you heard, you never heard a human make a sound like this," they sing... and it's a boast as much as it's a sly wink at this seamless integration of electronics and organics.

15. "Party" - El Perro del Mar

Sigh. It's appropriate that this song is all about sort of hating yourself (even if you don't really acknowledge it out loud) for the desperation you feel about how much you like somebody else. Because that's exactly how I feel about: THIS SONG. Honestly, what is this doing so high up on this list? By all rights I should hate this: boring strummy acoustic guitar, whiny female vocalist, and the chutzpah to use the line "Be bop, be bop a lu la" in the chorus as though it was an original sentiment. Thing is, Sarah's voice is a marvel in small doses; and unlike most of the rest of the album, this song makes its point and doesn't overstay its welcome. And really, the meta-ness of the delivery is exactly what makes it sort of great. She might be mired down in melancholy, but she's smart enough to recognize it for what it is, as well as (we presume) to recognize how it all just feeds back on itself in a vicious emotional cycle. So she all-but-begs, "Come on over, baby, there's a party going on," knowing full well it's futile, and much as I hate to admit it, I can relate. Sigh.

14. "Cement to Stone" - Lansing-Dreiden

I somehow doubt it was their intention, but this reads like the great lost track from Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair. By turns woozy and direct, not afraid to show the wires and knobs behind its sonics, and a really beautiful vocal melody that haunted me into returning over and over. I'm generally not much for ballads, but this song owned my soft spot in 2006.

13. "Pseudo-Bread" - Boris

As I was obsessively listening to the songs on this list over the last couple weeks, my roommate Keith (mostly to his chagrin) also got to listen to them a lot. (Hey, it's his fault for wiring up the common areas of our apartment for sound). "Psuedo-Bread" by far evoked his most pained response. "Why do you like this?" he asked me. "What does it make you feel?" Well, first of all it makes me grin ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat. It makes me want to jump up and down, or failing that to bang my head so hard I make myself dizzy (which has happened at the gym). When I invoked the word "joy," suddenly it clicked for him. Because "joy" is an overwhelming, pure emotion. It precludes thought or even rationality. When you're caught in the grip of joy, you become an idiot. I freely admit it - this song comes on and I am its bitch. I doubt it will ever work that way for Keith, but that's just as well because our apartment isn't large enough to have two whirling ecstatic idiots banging around.

12. "Apocalypso" / "Special" - Mew

Every year needs to have a guilty pleasure, and these two songs played back-to-back were mine for 2006. I'm not buying the whole "so uncool they're cool" narrative that so many critics threw at these guys; ...and the Glass-Handed Kites is pure cheese. But hey, I allow myself some empty calories every now and then, and you might as well maximize their tastiness. The chorus of "Apocalypso" is ridiculous: chugga-chugga bass line straight out of 80s hair metal, wall of keyboards (also straight out of 80s hair metal - don't tell anyone!), stabbing guitar lines ripped from the Gene Loves Jezebel back catalog (hm, and GLJ were only ever a step away from hair metal), and that smug "soaring" vocal that dares you not to raise a lighter. Unfortunately it's also irresistable. There's a longish instrumental interlude/transition that almost threatens to derail the momentum they've built up, but then "Special" opens with its signature drum triplet (you just know these guys are still congratulating themselves for that one) and suddenly we're listening to an updated version of New Order's "True Faith." Same exact bass line, same exact keyboard chord progression. The illusion lasts for about ten seconds, and then that fey vocal kicks in and you're reminded, "Oh right. Mew." Thing is, the song is pretty great despite its obvious referents. It builds some genuine momentum as it rushes into its chorus and this time doesn't try so hard to be liked. Maybe it's because they know at this point you're hooked and wriggling, and they can afford to cut you some slack. Even more than "Party," I hate myself for loving this... but damned if I didn't listen to it a lot.

11. "Sir" - Various

The grimiest song I heard in not-so-grimey 2006 wasn't even "grime", it was "dubstep." Which just goes to show the utility of genre labels. But how do you answer the inevitable question "What does it sound like?" without invoking a comparison? Well, this sounds like Dizzee Rascal's "I Luv U" all grown up and bitter - twice the hostile atmosphere, none of the youthful enthusiasm. What consistently amazes me is how something so compelling can contain so much empty space. But perhaps Various recognizes that you'll need some recovery time in between getting stabbed by the bass, pummeled by the gunshot beats, and bewildered by the electronic frippery crawling around the edges. It's a shame that Nine Inch Nails (et al.) have already spoiled the genre term "industrial", because I could also say this song sounds like taking a guided tour of a decrepit, rusting factory. Just resist the urge to breathe, you don't know what might be in the air.

10. "Please Visit Your National Parks" - Oxford Collapse

Fucking indie rock. This song is ridiculous. The guitarist knows something like three chords, plus the three he knows how to make sound like a violin. (Which please, is so Camper Van Beethoven!)The entire song consists of two short movements in succession: A B A B, except for the part where the monotone rhythm guitar drops out so we can really hear the violin-sounding guitar solo. The chorus goes, "You should be standing right next to me / Instead of two feet in front of me / Go learn your geography" - and you just know based on that they think the title of the song is really clever.

"So," you're wondering, "what's it doing in the top ten of this list, then, smart guy?" I have to plead helplessness. Pitchfork, may they rot, included it in their "Infinite Mixtape" feature last year, I downloaded it, and upon first listen thought somebody was surely joking. But a weird thing happened as I familiarized myself with all the "IM" tracks... every next time this song came on, it burrowed straight through my ears to the pleasure center of my brain. I started finding myself humming the sing-songy vocal (which is truly the song's secret weapon). I gleefully joined in on the "oh-ee-oh-ee-oh"s in the chorus. I realized that these guys were in on the joke. My inner critic conceded the fight. I even visited a national park. I bought the album and was completely underwhelmed. But I still join in on the "oh-ee-oh-ee-oh"s.

9. "Collarbone" - Fujiya & Miyagi

I'm in endless awe at the number of contradictions "Collarbone" (and indeed, most of Transparent Things) manages to straddle. Simple and possibly even trite on the surface, the perfect background music to just about any activity, utterly unobtrusive. But listen to the details - the percussive elements or keyboards or (especially) the vocal tics that enter and exit the mix with no fanfare - and the song becomes captivating. The lyrics require only as much thought as you want to give them - you can contemplate the reasons he needs a new pair of shoes "to kick it with her," or you can just delight in the funky skeletal anatomy lesson and vocal scatting that wraps it up. This kind of ease takes hard work, actually; the difference between "just enough" and "too much" is razor thin, and this song walks that tightrope like a pro.

8. "We are the Sleepyheads" - Belle & Sebastian

The Motors aren't the only giddy members of this list. The Life Pursuit is full of great, immediate pop songs, but "We are the Sleepyheads" has always stood out for me because it's the one least like anything we've come to expect from Belle & Sebastian. I understand there's been a lot of gnashing of teeth on the part of old B&S fans who feel this kind of sunny recycled (in the best possible sense) pop is an utter betrayal of the Belle & Sebastian aesthetic. These people are immune to joy, is all I can say. The woozy wordless vocal scat, the sprightly jangle of the acoustic, the (horrors!) guitar solos! - this song wears its charms on its sleeve and dares you not to sing along. Besides, lyrically this is like the 10,000-th paean to outsiderhood that Stuart Murdoch has given us, so it's not a total reinvention. It's just now when "people turn their heads / And cross the street whenever we walk on by," he's able to see the humor in the situation and celebrate it. This song invites you to celebrate too.

7. "Bunk Trunk Skunk" / "Bicycle, Bicycle, You are My Bicycle" - Be Your Own Pet

It's a veritable Law of Rock that at any point in time there must be at least one band that plays loud, simple, fast songs and is fronted by a brash, screaming female vocalist who says things nice girls don't say. The musical talent of these bands is often rudimentary (or they quickly evolve past the niche, RIP Sleater-Kinney!), but also completely besides the point - you listen to these bands because the vocalist grabs your ears and kicks you in the throat, not because the guitar work is amazing. After the Yeah Yeah Yeahs showed us their bones and nobody really got excited, the mantle was up for grabs. And so verily, in 2006 the Laws of Rock gave us Be Your Own Pet.

There was no more visceral thrill for me last year than listening to Jemina Pearl screech "I'm an independent mother-fucker!" It's honestly that simple. A minute and a half of thrash-by-numbers and a couple more "mother-fuckers" just to make the point, and the band rushes headlong into the monolithic riff of "Bicycle, Bicycle." I have no clue what "We're on two wheels BABY!" actually means, but Pearl's delivery makes it sound incredibly hot. I want to be on two wheels! Honestly, ignore all the rest of the godawful lyrics on this one, but tune back in at the end when she declares, "Have fun, and be safe with it.... Just kidding, FUCK SHIT UP!" Which, within present context, is, y'know, totally deep.

The band's other not-so-secret weapon was drummer Jamin Orrall, and these two songs contain some of his most inventive banging. The crashing cymbals that open "Bunk Trunk Skunk" sound like an alarm, and he maintains the anxiety on the verses with rolling toms. "Bicycle" opens with a stuttering beat that wouldn't have been out of place on Drum's Not Dead. It doesn't bode well for the future of the band that he left not long after the album came out; but then, BYOP are at their most effective in small doses. The entire album was frankly a slog - you can only ignore the sameness of the guitar work and screaming for so long. But regardless of where they go from here, BYOP have given me two songs that sit fondly on my shelf next to "Speed Heart," "Handsome & Gretel," and "Bang!" as a refuge from adult restraint.

6. "Thursday" - Asobi Seksu

For about a month after first hearing it, I was obsessed with this song. I listened to it repeatedly, walked around with the gorgeous vocal melody from the chorus never far from my headspace, and at moments of true connection (or at least caffeination) shed tears of joy at the beauty of all reality.

OK, then I bought the album and saw them live and realized that this is all so much reheated Kitchens of Distinction squall and haze. This realization has in no way blunted the beauty and power of "Thursday" for me, thankfully. As it progresses, the song continues to swell with new layers of shimmer. And these folks know that the real hook is that chorus; the song peaks at the end of the second time through it, gets all hazy and muted for a bit, and then... returns to the instrumental of the chorus but replaces the vocal with some wordless sighs from Yuki and a pretty background phrase from the boys. In other words, you want to fly with the stars again? Rewind the damn song and listen to it again!

5. "A Visit from Drum" - Liars

In general, I preferred Liars when they were spitting in my face. Too much of Drum's Not Dead crossed the line from "trance-like" to, um, "boring." But at least on this song, Liars' intentions haven't changed, just their methods. The drums don't just visit on this song - they pull you out of the fucking house, roll you down the street, and carry you out to sea to meet an unknown fate. Something this simple and repetitive shouldn't be this goddamn powerful. As always, Angus's voice is another instrument in the mix. But whereas before he used it to rachet up the tension by flailing against whatever the other guys were up to, here his eerie falsetto is strangely comforting, enticing you to come along for the journey. When the guitar suddenly becomes stabbing and alarm-like at the three-minute mark, you're caught too tightly in the song's grip to escape. The vocals become wordless and breathy, and then the beat drops out and banging drumsticks wake you out of the trance you've been in for the last four minutes. Wipe that drool off your chin, feel the pain of withdrawal, hit the "Back" button. Get lost again.

4. "Careening with Conviction" - Mission of Burma

I'm as happy as anyone to have Mission of Burma back among us, but have to admit that neither OnOffOn nor The Obliterati have totally grabbed me. Much of the chaos and unpredictability of Burma v.1 is missing from their 21st Century output so far. That said, "Careening with Conviction" owns my universe as soon as it's opening bass hits my ears. This song can't possibly have been developed over time; I envision it springing to life whole like Athena from the head of Zeus. For all that it's a series of movements, it possesses a stunning coherence and internal logic: the funky rhythmic parts flow seamlessly into the quieter reflective parts flow seamlessly into the jagged guitar solo and back again. All three musicians are at their peak of their skills here both as individuals and as a unit, flipping on a dime between working together as an ass-stomping whole and pushing against each other within a limitless space. It's all about jerking your body around madly, giving you time to re-catch your breath, and then taking control of your limbs and joints again and tugging you along. God-like, truly.

3. "Tract for Valerie Solanos" - Matmos

The Theorist:

Identity politics are inherently contradictory. Like the oppressive social forces they seek to oppose, they reduce individuals to representatives of social groups, and make totalizing statements whose truth falls apart in the face of daily life. The "tract" being recited in this song is the product of a simplistic, violent and disturbed mind that nevertheless states its intentions as liberatory. The artists, recognizing this internal conflict and wishing to embody it in sound, pay homage to/mock the text in question by embedding it in a nightmarish cascade of sounds created by objects that it both literally and symbolically references. They manipulate a cow's reproductive tract in an acknowledgement of the way that a body's reproductive capabilities become codified within oppressive social structures, but also within the author's curious convictions concerning emotional states and interests. Throughout they establish a tension between tight rhythmic structures (colloquially, "beats") and humorously scatological squelches, squawks, and wheezes. The total effect of the song is to create an aural space in which the "tract" can be contextualized and deconstructed, only they accomplish this with sounds rather than words. Hence the listener is invited to appreciate the ironies of the text in a visceral rather than cerebral manner. This is a wild success both as a piece of art and as a piece of literary criticism.

Everybody Else:

Dude. This song samples the sounds made by a cow's uterus. There is an approximately thirty-second stretch comprised of nothing but burps, farts, and other uncomfortably squelchy noises. It wants to be taken seriously as a critique of identity politics; it wants to make you laugh until you cry. It manages to do both. In a word: BRILLIANCE!

2. "We Share Our Mother's Health" - The Knife

The whole of this is so much more than the sum of its parts that mathematicians (at least the hip ones) should create an entire new branch of their discipline in an attempt to figure it out. How can something so minimal, constructed of nothing inherently new, be the freshest song I heard in 2006??? It's like one of the Cylon "models" from Battlestar Galactica - organic on the outside, actually a tightly constructed machine when you cut it open. But of course, neither of them works properly if you dissect them. So I've opted to follow the lead of Gaius Baltar, and just fall madly in love with this alien thing. The chilling effect of the multi-tracked vocals and the icy faux-Asian tonality is perfectly balanced by the sheer bounciness of the bassline and the cheesy straight-outta-the-80s percussion tracks. As if the sonic palette wasn't already rich enough, The Knife's live show also gave me the gift of an indelible, unforgettable mental image to accompany it: Olof merrily swinging large glowing orange plastic sticks in nothing resembling a rhythm (let alone one of the many to choose from in the song). Hey, you know it's true love when even the warts look beautiful, and from the very first listen I knew this song would grace my playlists for ever after.

1. "Panzrama" - Giddy Motors

A great song demands your attention immediately, but fails to give up all its secrets without repeated listen. It should evoke emotions - specifics left to the taste of the individual listener, but the more the better. It should haunt you when it's not around, and even after you know it inside and out, you should continue being surprised by it. You should even have fights with it and then come back asking for its forgiveness. In short, a great song is like a lover.

Well, by all those criteria "Panzrama" is a great fucking song. I find it completely impossible to concentrate on anything else when it comes on. The opening high-pitched keening guitar lights a fire inside my heart, the menacing bassline grabs it and forces it to beat in the same rhythm, and the vocal on the chorus makes it stop dead. Make no mistake - this is some ugly shit. Forget about calling an exterminator - when Gaverick de Vis (easily the coolest name in rock and roll) shrieks "DISEASE!", all small organisms within earshot flee. (That isn't really your skin crawling; it's all your associated microfauna). "INSIDE YOU!" he accuses, and yep - you feel dirty alright. "RECOIL!" he demands, and really you want to, but listening to this song is like rubbernecking - you can't help but stare, no matter how disturbing the view.

The beauty of "Panzrama" is that it's ugly shit played by three incredibly talented musicians. After dozens of listens I still have difficulty getting my head around the abrupt time signature changes that lead into and propel the parts of the chorus. The first time this came on at the gym, I almost injured myself on the StairMaster. I still find it impossible to bang my head to it. The long instrumental interlude that makes up the final third of the song is an exercise in form giving way to chaos, structure crumbling around (and inside of) your ears. The guitar spirals into ever-higher registers, the drummer kicks up the pace, the whole thing becomes frenzied before locking into a groove, it grinds to a halt....

"RECOIL!"

But I can't. And the bastards know it.

My Favorite 10 Live Shows in 2006

2007-01-15T22:45:00.000-08:00

This will be the first of three posts wrapping up 2006. Yes, I know I'm a couple weeks late, but there are a few albums I want to buy and listen to before compiling my lists of favorite albums and favorite songs. In the meantime, my list of shows was actually pretty easy to throw together. I was particularly pleased to discover that these shows are spread throughout the year and across the several venues that I frequent.

Quick note: I went to the first day of Coachella this year, and although I saw a couple good shows (My Morning Jacket, Franz Ferdinand, and the always-sublime Sigur Ros), the overall experience of Coachella wasn't pleasant. Too many damn people, bands too rushed in their set up, awful acoustics in the smaller tents. So no Coachella performances make it into this list (worth noting that both MMJ and Sigur Ros' 2005 shows would have made it onto this list, though!)

10. Califone - Bottom of the Hill, 10 October

I went into this not quite knowing what to expect, but hoped that the chaotic and layered nature of Califone-on-album would translate in the live setting. I was also at a disadvantage in knowing only one of their albums, Heron King Blues. It took the guys a couple songs to "warm up," but what unfolded was exactly: chaotic and layered and head-noddingly good. I'm always impressed when a band can sell me on songs I don't even know, which Califone did masterfully. Tim Rutili is an extremely talented guitarist, able to switch effortlessly between delicate finger plucking and blasts of feedback noise. The drummer was a force of nature. On many of the songs he provided the rhythmic base on which the other two musicians were free to wander, but these songs never locked into a groove - he was always changing the beat, adding in or subtracting new percussion instruments, etc. Yes, there was a laptop or two on stage, but the "organic" sounds always took front and center. I remember thinking repeatedly, "How can only three guys make this much NOISE?" It really was a beautiful show and I'd happily go see these guys again. Hell, I might even get around to buying the new album...

9. Saint Etienne - The Fillmore, 17 February

Probably the most pleasant live surprise of the year. This was all about an excuse to take my boyfriend to a show I thought he might actually enjoy (having subjected him to Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, and Kristin Hersh - see #4 below - in recent months). I expected it to be the two guys twiddling knobs and playing keyboards while Sarah Cracknell breezed her way through the vocals. I certainly did NOT expect three or four "real" instrumentalists, or a reconfiguring of the songs so that very little of the music was actually played on keyboards, nor an overall truly "live" sound. Sure, they focused a lot on the new material, which sounds pretty much like all the old material. But they also more than did justice to the back catalog; "Spring" was an unexpected and lovely treat, and of course we got all the classic old singles. Cracknell seems most comfortable when singing; her between-song banter was repeitious and mostly consisted of asking us a question ("Do you like the new songs?") and then replying "We're so glad." Still, nothing really could stop them (har har) from delivering a buoyant and surprisingly muscular show that had me grinning ear to ear as we walked out. I will go see them again (as I think my now-ex boyfriend Brian would) every chance I get.

8. The Clientele - Cafe du Nord, 22 August

Brian and I had broken off our one-year relationship a couple weeks earlier. But we already had tickets to this, and he still wanted to go... and really, with who better to go see the Clientele but a recent ex-? On top of the nervousness I felt about this being the first time I'd seen him since the breakup, I also feared the worst as far as the show itself went. The sonics in Cafe du Nord are notoriously echo-ey. Great place to see a loud band like Pretty Girls Make Graves (but that was in 2005); potentially not so great to see a band whose music consists of a lot of detailed, finger-picked guitar lines. Sound quality is probably my most common complaint at shows - the drums are too loud, I can't hear the guitar lines, etc. The Clientele's music seemed particularly prone to falling into this trap. And, acoustics aside, I really wondered if Alisdair Maclean could pull off all those details - the singing AND the finger-picking.

Well, I almost feel bad that the "my fears" part of the review will probably be longer than the "they were pretty AMAZING" part of my review. But they were. Amazing. The solution to the dilemma of course is to not amp the shit out of all the instruments. In fact, there were often times when I could barely hear the DRUMS (how often have you had that experience?) And yes, Alisdair can pull those songs off and - more importantly - deliver them in a way that doesn't feel canned. Sure, he hits all the notes, but the tonality is different than the albums. I never thought I'd describe the Clientele as a muscular band, but damned if these songs didn't fall with power and grace - and at half the volume you'd experience at a typical rock show. Brian and I agreed it was a beautiful performance.

7. Mission of Burma - Great American Music Hall, 20 Sep

OK, before I tell you about how fucking LOUD and POWERFUL Mission of Burma were live, I have to make an embarrasing admission. You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned any opening acts as yet. The sad truth is, I'm a 9-to-5 schlep during the day. I can afford myself the luxury of staying out late on a work night to catch a show, but only if I take a nap before hand. So unless I know the openers, or have read good things about them at the least, I don't see them. Yes, I realize I lose hipster points for this - all my chances to hear/see the next "new best thing" being squandered in the name of sleep. I'm in my mid-30s, cut me some slack.

This all comes up with reference to THIS show, because the openers were 50 Foot Wave, and you might have noticed I'm a bit.... um, obsessed with Kristin Hersh. So of course I was there for the opening act, and frankly of the three times I saw 50FW this year, this show was the best. Raw power is never going to be lacking at their performances; what tips a 50FW show from "good" to "great" is how tight they are. It's easy to get caught up in the loudness of their songs and forget that there are a lot of "on a penny" shifts both rhythmically and vocally. Tonight, the band were like a well-oiled machine. I think it was the scariest performance I saw Kristin give this year, the vocals tending toward the huskier end of her spectrum. My ears were already ringing before MoB even took the stage.

And then... y'know, frankly the MoB show is a bit of a blur. These guys are tight, they're loud, they strike the perfect balance between recognizability and not sounding canned, and they pretty much tore the roof off. I really like both The Obliterati and OffONOff without feeling blown away by either of them, but live these songs are consistently great. Oh well, I didn't get to hear "Mica"... and my ears were still ringing two days later...

6. The Knife - Mezzanine, 3 Nov

I've already written about this show in detail in an earlier post. Huge points for being entertaining and not even pretending that they were "performing" the music. I am still haunted by those creepy glowing-orange ski masks. And "We Share Our Mother's Health" will forever be accompanied in my head by the image of Olaf merrily banging away with enormous glowing-orange plastic sticks, completely not in rhythm with the music.

5. Liars - Bottom of the Hill, 5 Jun

I'm about to admit something slightly heretical... I was pretty underwhelmed by Drum's Not Dead. Honestly, I found They Were Wrong So We Drowned a more engaging listen - and of course that's the album where nearly everyone ran screaming in the other direction about how "unlistenable" it is. Harumph. And I already knew better than to hope they'd play anything off the debut, which will forever be one of my all-time favorite albums. So... I mostly went out of curiosity. I'd read the live shows were intensely good, and I was willing to be "sold" on the new stuff.

Liars didn't quite pull that last feat off, but the slower moving stuff from Drum's Not Dead definitely had an intensity and energy lacking on the album. The dual drumming attack of Julian and Aaron put me in a trance, and then like a great DJ can do with a mind on Ecstasy, they took me places. Some of the places were tranquil, but of course this was Liars and those places never lasted. Angus is completely inscrutable as a vocalist - whether he was hanging back or in our faces at the front of the stage usually had little to do with what was coming out of his mouth. And you haven't felt fear until you get the full sonic assault of Liars banging the hell out of "Broken Witch" and Angus looming over the entire venue chanting "Blood.... Blood..... Blood....." In a word, WOW.

4. Kristin Hersh - Swedish American Hall, 14 Jan

OK yes, Kristin appears at three of the ten shows on this list. Clearly I'm the "fan" in "fanatic," right? Well, you go see her live in any of her incarnations, and walk out and tell me you weren't completely fucking moved. Even Brian (bless his soul), told me afterward he'd been kind of dreading it, but ended up thoroughly enjoying the performance.

This was Kristin solo acoustic, and yet it had been billed as "Plays the songs of Throwing Muses." And did she ever! Songs that I had no clue could even be played solo acoustic, like "Hook in Her Head" or "Hate My Way." Her voice was a bit on the gravelly end tonight, but that didn't stop her from performing a mind-blowing 26 songs. It was an amazing way to begin my year of live music, and then of course she went and closed my year on an even higher point. I'm in perpetual awe.

3. Sleater-Kinney - Great American Music Hall, 2 & 3 May

Yes, I went to both shows. Yes, I was butt-ass tired from having just gotten home from a long weekend at Coachella and then some overnight camping/hiking in Joshua Tree. Yes, I'd seen them last year for the first time ever after being such a huge fan for years, and although I enjoyed that show I felt vaguely disturbed by the way it seemed to be all about Carrie. Nope, I'm still not going to say that The Woods ranks in the upper half of my favorite albums by them. And y'know, for all that these shows weren't all about Carrie, and Corin seemed much more into it than she had last year... still, I wasn't surprised when they announced an "indefinite hiatus" not long after this tour.

All that said: Yes, I am very happy to remember them from these two shows. Don't get me wrong - I think Carrie is amazing. No fears of S-K music sounding canned; her guitar work is beautifully chaotic and sloppy yet never a mess. I could watch goddess Janet bang away on the skins all night long. And Corin seemed intensely present, she never checked out. Her vocals were soaring and beautiful; I'm always puzzled by people who say it's the voices that keep them from getting into Sleater-Kinney. Regardless of how I might feel about the album they chose to leave us with, the fact is these three were at the top of their live game this year. R.I.P, S-K... you've left behind a lot of happy/sad fans.

2. Radiohead - The Greek Theatre, 24 June

Dude, it was fucking Radiohead. Of course it's near the top of my list! The less said about Deerhoof's opening set the better... after watching them absolutely slay twice last year, both of their post-Chris Cohen performances I caught this year were frankly heartbreaking. Radiohead, on the other hand, were near-perfect. The Greek is a pretty amazing place to see a show, all the more so when the lighting is creative and interesting, and even more so when the fog starts blowing down over the top of the hill and blanketing everything with an eerieness wholly suited to the paranoia and dread at the core of so much of Radiohead's music. Honestly, I don't even remember the details. For nearly two hours, Brian and I were caught in the grip. I recall being bummed that I didn't hear a couple of the songs I most wanted to ("The National Anthem", for one), but really that's a small complaint to lodge about a show this good. Thom Yorke was amazingly interactive, and even cracked a couple jokes. The visuals were compelling without being distracting. I walked out feeling deeply satisfied. Granted these were the most expensive tickets I bought this year (on a per-band basis; Coachella hardly counts), but it was money well spent.

1. Throwing Muses - Great American Music Hall, 16 Dec

Discussed at length in an earlier post, and I won't bore anyone with it a second time.

Next up - my favorite 20 songs of 2006!

Live Review - Throwing Muses at Great American Music Hall, 16 Dec 06

2006-12-24T23:07:00.001-08:00

Kristin Hersh is a goddess. The woman has been making intense, emotional, consistently engaging music for over 20 years. She's had 4 children, and never allowed pregnancy to stop her from touring. She STILL tours like a madwoman (this show was at least the 6th time she's played in San Francisco in 2006). And, she still puts on one hell of a show - whether playing solo acoustic, with her new band 50 Foot Wave, or, as we had the privilege to experience on 16 December, on a reunion tour for her first, lamented band - Throwing Muses.

Oh right... check the name of this blog you're reading... nope, I'm not "objective" when it comes to Kristin or her music. But of course that intense subjectivity cuts both ways... Throwing Muses' first four albums ruled my teenage years. I had high expectations for this show and it would have been easy to walk away disappointed for whatever foolish reason. Believe me, I'm extremely critical of live shows (which thankfully doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of them, or stop me from continuing to attend), and this one had a lot to live up to. Chances are decent (?) this might be the last time I get to hear some of these songs live. Well, this was frankly the best show I saw this year.

To add to Kristin's godhead, consider that she and Bernard (funky bassist extraordinaire) were also two-thirds of their own opening act! 50 Foot Wave's show honestly felt a bit "flat" to me, compared to the other two times I've seen them this year. I suspect that they've been practicing (or in Bernard's case - learning?) the old TM songs so much lately in preparation for this tour, that it took a while for the 50FW songs to gel. Kristin's voice is an absolute marvel... how can someone shred that much, and still manage to sound sweet when she chooses? I can't recall any of the details, but was left with the impression that the band were tighter and more intense when they opened for Mission of Burma in the exact same space a couple months ago.

I'm afraid I can't really comment on second opening act the Moore Brothers. Most of the audience seemed excited to see them - two guys with acoustics who do really pretty vocal harmonies. Not my speed, and especially incongruous stuck between the very-electric 50FW and TM. Still, these guys were hanging out at Kristin's solo show last January, and I suspect they're personal friends. Me and my group of friends went to the back of the venue and had a beer.

Kristin and Bernard came back accompanied by original Muses drummer David Narcizo, one of the most inventive drummers ever and a personal favorite. David used to be a real hottie back in the day; it's a totally irrelevant (and perhaps needless) comment, but he's kind of looking his age these days. Fortunately that had NO bearing on his performance - the central role of the drumming in songs like "Hate My Way," "Pearl," and "Soul Soldier" was spot-fucking-on. And he looked like he was having a blast.

Frankly, as were we all. The setlist was exquisite; Kristin really delivered on her promise to play a lot of the "old stuff". Here's the list, in chronological order of release:

From the self-titled debut: "Soul Soldier," "Fear," "Hate My Way," "Vicky's Box"
From House Tornado: "Colder," "Mexican Women"
From Hunkpapa: "Bea," "Mania"
From the Real Ramona era: "Cottonmouth" (was the "Counting Backwards" B-side)
From Red Heaven: "Pearl," "Furious"
From University: "Shimmer," "Start," "Hazing," "Bright Yellow Gun"
From Limbo: "Shark"
From the untitled 2003 album: "Mercury," "Pretty or Not"

There were so many tiny little details about Throwing Mus-ic that I love, and the band managed to nail them ALL. Some examples:

"Soul Soldier" - the tempo abruptly shifts in this song at least three times. Not only did they nail it musically, but Kristin's voice also modulated accordingly. You'd never know she'd been howling out 50FW songs roughly an hour and a half earlier, she sounded so "sweet" during the quiet parts.

"Fear" - among the most chaotic of TM songs, and I wouldn't have believed that it could be pulled off with one guitar.

"Mexican Women" - another one with a sneaky tempo change (or maybe even a time signature change?) about two-thirds of the way through. Live, this was more muscular and more intense than I could have hoped. As stoked as I was to hear "Hate My Way" and "Vicky's Box", I had at least heard those two songs played live a decade or so ago. Never never never could I have hoped to hear this gem from my favorite Muses album, House Tornado. The addition of "Colder" from that album was like the cherry on the sundae.

"Shark" - Bernard is a really funky bassist, and this late TM song (from the album on which he joined the band) really shows him off at his best. That said, he did a damn fine job with the more fluid basslines of the older material also.

"Mania" - I never liked this song until the first time I heard it live. But I've never LOVED this song until this show. Kristin didn't just tear through the vocals, but used some inflection and some passion and some variance in the delivery to turn this into the scathing indictment of mental health care that the lyrics have always suggested. I have no clue what I mean by that, having just written it... it's just that this song has always struck me as stream-of-consciousness, but something in the presentation at this show made it "click" for me.

"Hate My Way" - an obvious and long-time fan favorite. David's drumming on this is exquisite, perhaps his best.

"Pearl" - except I have to say that David completely stole the show during the furious breakdown near the end of this song. I swear Kristin has played this song every single non-50FW time I've seen her, but the acoustic version just can't compare with the full band version.

Any quibbles I have about the show are minor. The sound quality was fantastic - at no time muddled, or with one instrument overpowering the others. K forgot the words to one song (don't remember which now), and probably intentionally left out a couple sentences from the end of "Vicky's Box" (which I imagine given the screaming in the middle is a difficult one to perform?) I remain unfulfilled in my desire to hear "Soap and Water" in its full chaotic electric version. None of these are complaints - the show was fantastic!

And as an extra bonus, after checking the boards at throwingmusic.com, I discover that a guy named Steve filmed the entire thing, and is slowly posting songs to YouTube!!! To wit:

"Start" (frankly, not a show highlight, mostly because of the song itself)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSVvANPzZ2A

"Cottonmouth"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfeJcVHeP-M

"Hate My Way"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EoXZKIpa8o

"Pearl" (second half, including David's amazing drumming!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggGSbgZ_lAE

Geez, can you tell I really liked this show?
Rating: 5 out of 5
Happy 2007!!!!

Movie Review: The Fountain

2006-12-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

Warning: SPOILERS! Don't read if you haven't seen the movie and/or don't want the plot given away.

I'd read a fair amount of press on this movie and was already familiar with both the praises and the criticisms it had garnered. After seeing it last night I pretty much have to agree with both. Visually, it's beyond stunning, and I'm glad I saw it on the big screen. It has that trademark Aronofsky obsession with pattern, with multiple short sequences whose visual composition is initially abstract then resolves itself into something identifiable. (My favorite of these turned out to be the inside of an elevator). The stop-gap editing that made both Pi and Requeum for a Dream so lurching to watch has been abandoned for a calmer, more linear flow. Apparently he felt he had more of a story to tell this time around. I really can't exaggerate how much emphasis is placed throughout the movie on detail. I could watch it all over again and pay no attention to the people this time through, but just look at the sets.

The people give mostly great performances. As an excuse to look at (drool over) Hugh Jackman for two hours, you can't go wrong (though the shirtless quotient is a bit low for my taste), and as usual he's more than just eye candy. Rachel Weisz I can always take or leave, but she was convincing in the role as a woman dying of a brain tumor. Ellen Burstyn was fantastic in her cameo role.

Much has been written about the supposedly confusing story of the movie, and I'm puzzled by how literally many of the critics have taken its "three time periods" conceit. Presumably the movie is about a couple who are continually reincarnated throughout time, always to be separated, always to be reunited. I'd like to offer a much more prosaic explanation of what's happening. The movie spends most of its time on the modern-day couple: the dying wife and her biochemist husband obsessed with finding a magic drug that will cure brain tumors. Given that this part of the movie is set in present day, we're meant to find it believable. Well, it's all pretty ludicrous. The "conflict" between Hugh Jackman's character and the other people in his lab is inflated for maximum emotional effect, but the fact is, no serious research scientist, no matter how consumed he is by his wife's approaching death, could believe if he just works hard enough and keeps inventing new combinations of drugs, he'll find a "cure" for something as nebulous as brain tumors. As visually and aurally arresting as the lab scenes are, they're utter fluff. Much more convincing is the love and concern between the couple. She's ready to die, he's not ready to let her go. The night before she actually does die, she passes to him a manuscript she's been writing called "The Fountain," a romantic historical fantasy set in whatever-th century Spain, and asks him to "Finish it." This exchange between the two of them figures prominently throughout the movie: "Finish it." "I don't know how it ends."

OK, so what about the other two couples - the "historical" one and the "future" one? The first are the characters in Izzy's manuscript. I thought the movie made this explicit, albeit not right away... but from the first time Hugh's character picks it up and reading, we are repeatedly thrown back into this historic world where the Queen of Spain sends a Conquistadore to the New World to find the hidden Mayan pyramid that houses the Tree of Life. Sure, Aronofsky uses a pile of symbolism and congruent dialogue to suggest that the Queen/Conquistadore couple are just an older incarnation of the modern-day couple... but I interpret this as Jackman's character simply superimposing the imagery and dilemmas of his present life onto the characters and story in the manuscript. There is no reason to believe that the Queen, the Conquistadore, or the mysterious Mayan shaman guarding the pyramid are "real" people.

As for the "future" Hugh Jackman, and his dying tree in a flying soap bubble... again I see no reason to believe that this is meant to be a real person. The entire scene is too fantastical, too over-the-top, and the movie provides NO explanation for how a bald man and a tree could come to inhabit a soap bubble that is whipping through a nebula toward the dying star at its center. (At least the "historical" sequences have a narrative, no matter how silly or historically inaccurate). I interpret these sequences as the present-day character's allegory for his central dilemma: he can't accept death. And he REALLY can't accept his wife's impending death. In his head, the whole thing turns cosmic and grand, suffused with symbolism from her manuscript. Her voice and visage continue to haunt his bald doppelganger as he wrestles with "the answer."

So, the basic message of this film is, we have to accept death as a form of rebirth. Stated so simply, the sheer lavishness and over-romanticization of the film feel like so much pomp and circumstance to me. I can't help but wonder how the Aronofsky of his previous two movies would have told this story - the research scientist, the dying wife - if he'd stayed true to the unrelenting gritty realism of those films. Instead we're given a fable set within an allegory that the main character has created to distance himself from the gritty reality of what's happening to his wife. I don't really blame Aronofsky for taking this gamble - but I think it all detracts from what could have been a much simpler, more effective film.

I'm giving it a 7 out of 10, a bit higher than I'd like given my criticisms of it... but it is absolutely gorgeous and the nonlinear weaving of the three narratives did a good job of delaying my inevitable disappointment with the simplicity of the story/message at its center.

Review: Live Show, Asobi Seksu, Great American Music Hall, 22 Nov 2006

2006-12-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

I hoped this show might lead to a re-assessment of "Citrus", but unfortunately I'm still as underwhelmed. I went into it knowing that shoegaze is ridiculously hard to pin down live - that hazy wall-o-guitar sound more often than not comes out as formless feedback that does nothing but drown out the bass and drums. While Asobi didn't fall into that particular trap, the guitar was still usually a buzz instead of a shimmer. Probably the best part of the show: Yuki was dead on with her vocals. The band had a strobe light on stage, which the management of the Great American Music Hall were required to warn us about beforehand - but it's kind of besides the point to have a strobe and then not turn down every other light in the house. I can admit to zoning out and nodding my head a bit by the end of the show ("Red Sea" managed to achieve its atmospherics - but only because of the organ)... but I think that was just the beer on an empty stomach.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Addressing "legitimacy" in a live electronic performance: The Knife and Matmos

2006-11-17T18:03:00.000-08:00

This post serves as a review of two live shows I attended recently - The Knife at Mezzanine on Friday, 2 November; and, Matmos at the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday, 18 October. But it's also an essay about the idea of "legitimacy" in live performances, especially as relates to electronic artists, and a comparison of how these two artists attempted to navigate it - one more successfully than the other.

I'm sometimes asked by friends who are not as obsessed with music as I, why I go to so many live shows. This is usually after I've expressed some displeasure with a show I saw recently, which they've heard me express before - the sound quality was poor, I couldn't hear instrument X, it was like listening to the album only louder. For me there is something potentially electrifying about seeing the music - seeing how it's made, who the people are that made it. I like to watch the guitarist's hands as she pulls beautiful noise out of six strings and a row of pedals. I like to hear the inevitable cracks and arrhythms of the singer's voice. Rarely (given I mostly listen to indie rock... a genre known for its lack of showmanship), there are stage moves or personalities to enhance the music. All of these likes are related to the idea that the musicians are actually creating the music right there, in front of me.

Almost by definition, a live show by an electronic artist is likely to disappoint on these criteria. The singer might well actually sing... but if the only instrument being played is a laptop, it's damn hard to connect the tiny motions to their results; damn hard to imbue somebody hunched over an LCD screen with a personality. I'm overstating the case, obviously - in fact, I think most electronic artists labor under exactly this fear as they plan their live show, that they'll be dismissed as knob twiddlers or (at best) skilled mixers (in the DJ sense).

Obviously this is all needlessly reductive. I've seen plenty of electronic artists deliver great performances. Improvisation becomes more important in this world. And before a "rockist" claims that the machines do all the work of making sure things are properly timed, go see Jamie Lidell weave dense rhythmic sound structures out of nothing but his voice, never missing a beat as he captures one vocalization in a loop and immediately launches into the next. My point is that although this concern about what constitutes "legitimate" performance hangs over electronic artists' heads, there are plenty of examples where they've addressed it head-on.

Matmos' The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast is one of my favorite albums this year, and by a long shot is their best to date. Most of the criticisms of these guys contend that their music isn't enjoyable without the novelty of the sounds they sample (shit, semen, cigarettes burning flesh), and furthermore that the concepts behind the songs are impenetrable or poorly executed. These critics reveal more about themselves and their state of mind going into the album then they do the music itself; I don't have to know who Valerie Solanas was, or ponder whether Matmos are paying her tribute or mocking her stridency, to find "Tract for Valerie Solanas" hilarious and brilliant. However, there is some weight to the criticism that Matmos are theoretical/conceptual almost to a fault, and I was curious how this tendency would play itself out in their live show.

The stage was absolutely full of equipment - a piano with lid open and propped up, all manner of percussion, guitars, keyboards, and Drew Daniel's intimidating stack of metal and plastic. There were no fewer than four laptops on stage. The guys were accompanied by three men who beat on guitars, hammered roses to piles of petals on the drums, played bongos, and otherwise generated whatever sounds a given song required. "Solanas" was the first song, and we were treated to a particularly strident and dramatic reading of more of the text by a woman friend of theirs that only increased my awareness of how ridiculous and limited it is. No way is this song meant to be a tribute! Drew busied himself throughout the show between his keyboards and laptops, while M.C. bounced between a keyboard and the piano.

Matmos worked hard to make the show a "performance." A couple of the pieces were accompanied by M.C. doing/creating "live art." There was a completely impenetrable improv piece that involved burning holes into a pillow that was stuffed into a wooden box and capturing the smoke in a thin glass vaccuum tube. (At least I think this is what they were doing - I wasn't close enough to see and relied on the film of it they were projecting to interpret.) M.C. spent a couple of (again) improv pieces either banging on the piano keys or directly plucking the wires inside. Probably most noteworthy, M.C. duct taped an electric clipper to his microphone, and while Drew cued up the wall of wind-tunnel noise that is "Germs Burn for Darby Crash," we got to listen to the hum of the clipper while M.C. shaved Drew's head down to a floppy mohawk. We were needlessly assured beforehand that "what follows is completely staged."

I admit this was all mildly interesting, but it wasn't necessarily entertaining or (here comes that word again) penetrable. Matmos seemed almost not to trust the beauty of their music in its own right, or maybe they really are more caught up in whatever theretical/conceptual framework they've created around it. Frankly, the three best songs of the night were the ones that involved the least performance. In all three cases, the sheer genius and beauty of Drew's programming were sonically front and center. Nor is he simply a knob twiddler... it took me most of the show to figure out that he had one of his keyboards programmed with a variety of squelches, bangs, squeaks, etc. and he was both expertly and sorta randomly hitting those keys throughout the show to add that unsettling layer of "found sound" that can make Matmos so engaging. "Valerie Solanas" was just as hilarious live as on CD. "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" was downright amazing - not only did we get Drew's programming at its best, but the visual accompaniment actually worked for this one as the "extra" musicians pounded dozens of roses into piles of petals while M.C. shook a small rattle containing (we can only presume) teeth. The highlight of the night was a seriously improvised take on "Rag for William S. Burroughs." Gone was the narrative structure of the song (no gunshot); instead they started out with the clattering typewriters from the CD version, which slowly turned into a wall of percussion (both struck and synthesized) that kept shifting and turning and building. Overall, these high points balanced out the long (and frankly, boring - something Matmos should never be!) improv pieces. I wouldn't have missed this show for anything, but I might be hesitant to go see them again.

I'd had my expectations for The Knife's live show raised by Pitchfork's Amy Phillips, who described it as "kinda revelatory" and discussed some of the same "legitimacy" issues that I am here. (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/2006/11/2 and scroll down a bit - worth checking out for the pictures if nothing else). Well, I don't know about "revelatory," but the show was damn entertaining. The Knife deal with the issue of "legitimate" live performance by basically ignoring it. Their show was all weird/creepy theatre... glowing orange ski masks (Frank the rabbit from Donnie Darko came immediately to mind; they also resembled walking jack-o-lanterns), abstract/mildly disturbing visuals projected onto screens both behind and in front of them, and a large cloth balloon to the left of the stage onto which they projected strangely distorted faces that kept turning into a grinning skull. Karin actually did sing (and her vocals weren't as multitracked as on the album; this did not prevent "The Captain" or "Silent Shout" from being chilling), but they made no pretense that any of the music was being "played." Instead, Olaf goofily danced in front of a (needless?) bank of equipment, on which he occasionally hammered with two giant glowing orange sticks but again didn't even pretend or attempt to be in beat with the music. And y'know what? It worked. Two weeks later "We Share Our Mother's Health" came up on my playlist and my roommate shouted from his room, "Isn't that the song where he had the big glowing sticks?" Yep, that image is pretty much stuck in my head too.

The more I've thought about it since, the more canny I think all of this was on the part of the Dreijer siblings. Let's not pull punches - musically The Knife aren't that distinctive. The only characteristics that separate them from any other house/trance act are the creepy vaguely-Asian tonality, and especially the way multitracking the shit out of Kerin's vocals can make her sound like a horde of banshees, or a pissed-off demon, or the Scandinavian Ice Goddess. If they had attempted to "play it straight," the show would have been pretty boring. But the visuals enhanced the mood of the music, and gave the audience something on which to focus besides thinking, "man, this sounds just like the CD."

And for what it's worth - it didn't sound just like the CD. The remix of "Marble House" that they played trumps the hell out of the album version; they got rid of that annoying faux-Bavarian bounce in the verses but kept the momentum of the choruses. Hell, I even found myself liking "Forest Families," a song I can barely make it through on the album. Sometimes the projected images were a bit distracting (I can't listen to "Like a Pen" now without seeing that strange lumpen humanoid figure from the video with his pencil), especially when they were even slightly non-abstract. But the rotating and increasingly dense "spider web" from "Silent Shout" and especially the... well, what I can only describe as glowing rain drops slowly sliding down a window (which I think accompanied "From Off to On" but I can't remember now) - these managed to enhance the music without competing with it.

Best of all.... none of it meant anything. It was simply entertaining and occasionally abstractly compelling, an approach from which I think Matmos could have benefitted.

So, ratings for these shows:

Matmos: 3 out of 5

The Knife: 4 out of 5

Album Review: Asobi Seksu - Citrus

2006-11-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

Rating: 6 out of 10

I swear I wanted to love this album. I've been obsessively playing "Thursday" ever since I downloaded it from Pitchfork's Infinite Mixtape feature over a month ago - often listening to it two or three times a day. Sure, it's Shoegaze v2(K), but the gorgeous melody of Yuki's breathy vocals and the insistent bassline give it an exuberance to which a lot of Shoegaze v1 never aspired. And the musicians don't sit still on this song, but add in fresh layers of shimmer on each new segment (and cannily don't return to that haunting chorus the last time through - so if you want to hear it again, you'll have to play the song again.) "Thursday" has been known to evoke a tear or two when I'm feeling particularly open to it (or caffeinated)... a strong candidate for my favorite song this year.

Unfortunately, most of Citrus doesn't feel quite as fresh. I wish I could make it through this review without mentioning Kitchens of Distinction, but too many of these songs sound like KOD with a female singer. Of course, KOD were always woefully underappreciated, so it's possible a lot of listeners won't know what the hell I'm talking about, and won't find Citrus tainted by mimicry. The stunning similarities have gotten in the way of my sinking into it, however. "Red Sea" is gorgeously hazy and loud, but play it back-to-back with KOD's "Blue Pedal" (from 1990's The Death of Cool) and tell me how - gender of the singer aside - they're substantially different. Same echoey whole notes (in some cases even the same notes!), same frenetic rhythm section, same dynamic build to an extended wall of noise outro. I'll easily grant that "Red Sea" is the better of the two songs (probably my second favorite on the album), but I still can't shake the comparison.

The other standout song is the opener "Strawberries," which actually sounds completely unlike the rest of the album. Yuki's organ is more upfront, and the overall tone is jaunty rather than dreamy. The choruses have an urgent rush to them, and after the second time through the song breaks down to a pulsing climax that's almost shockingly different from the rest of the song, but still feels organically related.

It's pretty much downhill after the epic centerpiece "Red Sea." Yuki's vocal can't save the plodding pace of "Lions and Tigers", "Nefi + Girly" never quite takes off despite some real momentum in the verses, and closer "Mizu Asobi" is, um, cute.

I'm going to see Asobi Seksu next Wednesday, and perhaps the live show will force a re-evaluation. But for now: I don't hate Citrus, and would even recommend it to people younger than me who missed Shoegaze v1. But I'm not blown away by it, either, "Thursday" aside.

Borat; OR: How Part of Me is Still Back on the Theatre Floor Heaving with Laughter

2006-11-11T23:39:00.000-08:00

So friends Luke and Kris invited me to see Borat with them. I've read good reviews but also felt a bit hesitant.... but I too often am busy when Kris calls to invite me to something, so I went. I'm still in utter shock. I tried telling my friend Victor about the movie at the gym afterward, and before I was two sentences into my explanation I was beet red, laughing so hard I was crying (thank God the gym was mostly empty... doubtful that was a pretty sight!) And couldn't STOP laughing, or talking about it in this sort of abortive way: "Oh! There's this scene with a chicken... but I won't ruin it for you." Tears streaming, torso heaving...

I like a movie that evokes a response. The most powerful ones tend to be disturbing... like wanting to take a shower after my first time through Requiem for a Dream, or spending the last ten minutes of Dancer in the Dark sobbing. And I rarely like comedies, because too often I find them insulting of my intelligence, or trite, or reliant on sight gags we've all seen before. Well, I have never laughed so hard in my life at a movie. And when I wasn't laughing, my eyebrows were raised so high up on my forehead in disbelief that it started to hurt. All I could keep thinking (when I was capable of thought): "How did he get away with THAT????"

You can read about the movie elsewhere... I did, and I still wasn't prepared. And yes, I freely admit, a couple of the scenes involve some lame slapstick. But even then, what you'll be laughing at isn't the physical humor but the social context in which it occurs.

And, there is a scene in this movie that my ex-boyfriend, who makes some of the raunchiest and most extreme fetish gay porn in the business, wouldn't touch. How this made it onto a major studio's release schedule is inexplicable.

Finally: the biggest reason I strongly advocate anyone who reads this to go see this film is because it will also SCARE you. During the course of his travels, Barat gets informed by honest Americans who have no clue he's not really from Kazakhstan, that "we should still have slaves in this country." The bulk of a rodeo audience cheers when he expresses the hope that George Bush will drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman, and child. (In all fairness, some of the folks in the audience are visibly distressed by this.) And in one of the most... words fail me. He's at a social function somewhere in the Deep South that has been arranged by an etiquette coach so he can interact with polite society. The house is on Secession Drive. And before the dessert can be served, the black prostitute that he'd phoned earlier shows up unannounced. The not-so-polite side of the society breaks through the cracks of all the genteel faces sitting around the table. I don't even care if it was staged (I'm suspicious about the scene in the bathroom when one of the matrons of the house is teaching him about toilet paper)... it's some of the most incisive social commentary you'll see this year. And it will make you LAUGH.

"You mean the man who tried to insert the rubber fist into my anus was a homosexual?" Oh, God help me... I've fallen and I can't get back up...

Current rotation - early November

2006-11-11T23:34:00.000-08:00

Current heavy rotation on my MP3 PLAYER (cuz iPods are evil).

All of these but the last two are available off Pitchfork Media's "Infinite Mixtape" feature, which I finally got around to downloading.

Giddy Motors - "Panzrama". The wickedest shit I've heard since Liars' debut. Jazz/punk fusion, crazy-fucked up time signatures, and the singer is deranged. And it's about a serial killer. Have I mentioned this song is INSANE? I CANNOT WAIT for the album to come out at the end of this month.

Asobi Seksu - "Thursday". Pure gorgeousness, a kissing cousin to both Kitchens of Distinction and the Cocteau Twins. It actually moved me to tears last week. And I'm SEEING THEM November 22 at the Great American Music Hall.

El Perro del Mar - "Party". By all rights I should hate this... mopey chick trying to talk her boyfriend into spending time with her over fairly standard indie strumming. But the vocal is nuanced and manages to convey both her desperation and her sorta-disgust with herself.

Figurines - "The Wonder." A total kickback to early 80s jangle pop (the Feelies should really sue), but it's catchy and switches gears enough to stay interesting. The nasally singer is amusing.

Oxford Collapse - "Please Visit Your National Parks". Yet another kickback, sorta Dumptruck meets Pavement. But the vocalist is totally in on the joke, singing "Oh-E-Oh-E-OHHHH!" and daring you not to laugh.

Beirut - "Postcards from Italy". I swear I resisted this: too precious, too contrived. It still managed to crawl into my head and take up residence. He's like an indie-rock M.I.A., stealing instruments and musical styles from all over the world (okay, all over Europe).

Matmos - "Tract for Valerie Solanos". A woman stridently reads from a feminist/separatist tract about destroying the male sex. The music mocks her but also eggs her on. The sounds of a cow uterus being manipulated, of shit being thrown on a pile, and various other squelches and mysterious squakws, all feature prominently in the mix. You really have to hear it before you'll believe me that it's FUCKING BRILLIANT, and hilarious, and makes me laugh every single time I hear it. I saw them perform this a couple weeks ago at GAMH, and it was one of the two standouts. Drew Daniel is an amazing programmer; I would totally be his disciple. And they're a gay couple from San Francisco!

The Knife - "We Share Our Mother's Health." The musical equivalent of that jigsaw puzzle you just couldn't stop putting together as a kid, over and over, and always feeling a sense of surprise at how the whole emerges from the parts even though you've seen it (heard it) a million times before. It's that minimal, that basic, and still - every time I hear it I feel utterly hit over the head with how FRESH it is. Caught their show Friday night at Mezzanine, and while I'm not quite as overwhelmed as some other folks on the internet have been, it was still visually engaging and just a bit creepy, and totally entertaining.

An introduction to Muses Thrown

2006-11-11T23:02:00.000-08:00

Why the name? A heartfelt tribute to one of my all-time favorite bands, Throwing Muses. And, it just sounds cool!

Why I'm blogging. I love music. And, though I don't see enough of them, I also love movies. Except, when I don't love either of them. The point is, I'm critical, and I'm always walking around composing reviews in my head. So have finally decided to get it out of my head and out where other people can comment on it, tell me they agree, or tell me I'm full of shit and why. Also a place for me to record impressions of live shows I attend.

For whom. I anticipate three different audiences (real or imagined) for this blog. One, the most important, other fans (and critics?) of the same artists and movies that I'll be writing about in here. I don't kid myself there'll be many of you at first (or ever?) but hopefully I'll attract some attention from folks who have googled or searched this blog provider for some of those artist/movie names. Two, obviously, my friends and family. (Not to imply y'all are less important than audience #1, just that I know most of you don't share my taste in music!). and, Three, the occasional gay man from BigMuscle.com who wanders over here via my link on that site to see what I've got to say about tunes.

Content. Some of the posts you can expect to read will include: reviews of every new CD I buy. Over time, reviews of older CDs that I love. End-of-year lists. "All-time favorite" lists. Reviews and other musings about live shows. Reviews of movies, both new and old. And, every now and then, a "current rotation" list of new songs I've been listening to a lot.

Necessary caveats. I don't have the resources to purchase even a third of the music I'd like to. Any opinions about music I express in here are hardly "definitive." You'll never catch me using words like "the best" in my lists, since that would imply I'd sampled the full range available. And I still feel a bit sheepish about the idea of offering up my "favorites", for the same reason - the sample size is already small. If I only bought 20 CDs this year, how much cream am I really skimming off the top to tell you what my favorite 10 were? Regardless, this is all hand-waving - perhaps an obvious answer to question #2 above is that I'm also writing this for myself. But hope some others listen in.