"Nurse and Soldiers" postcard from MIT's Asia Rising collection
I'm kind of an animation junkie, but only as an extension of my interest in all kinds of movies. What I'm trying to say is this: don't read too much into the fact that my first post about movies is about a feature-length anime. There are a few anime writer/directors who rise above the bog-standard robots-and-girls-with-cat-ears stuff - most people are familiar with Hayao Miyazaki at this point, but Satoshi Kon is another name people should get to know. Like Miyazaki, his anime features have a distinctive visual style, as well as a few prevailing themes that run through his work. He is very interested in the surreal aspects of modern Japan and the blurring of reality created by technology. I've never seen his first feature, Perfect Blue, but Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika all deal with these issues to some degree, as does his excellent series Paranoia Agent.
As you find with much anime, though, people are quick to discount any value in the story or theme. "It's all about the crazy visuals!" And that's true to some degree - the thing that will draw people to Paprika is its crazy dream sequences. The movie follows a group of scientists who have invented a device that records dreams and allows multiple dreamers to "network" for therapeutic purposes. One of the devices is stolen, though, and our hero Dr. Chiba (aka Paprika) has to track down the thief and determine his intentions in taking the device. The dream sequences are excellent, but I find myself drawn to the smaller details that are signatures of Kon's work. The movements of the individual characters, their postures, and facial expressions are among the best I've seen in anime. Like many surreal anime works, the ending is a little abrupt and lacking in explanation of what just happened, but that didn't detract too much from the overall experience for me. The film's excellent use of dream dynamics and dream logic, the quirky characters, and the fun references to other films (Roman Holiday?) made the movie more than worthwhile.
And here's a song by the Swiss beat band Les Sauterelles, which happens to be about a dream machine!
I'm glad I decided to review my 25 favorite releases of the year, but I'm also glad it's over. This was not what this blog was meant to be. Tomorrow, I'm going back to the regularly scheduled parade of random graphics and single-paragraph blurbs. Thanks for reading.
25. Robert Pollard Is Off to Business by Robert Pollard 24. Consolers of the Lonely by the Raconteurs 23. Mountain Battles by the Breeders 22. Re-arrange Us by Mates of State 21. Parallel Play by Sloan 20. Accelerate by R.E.M. 19. Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes 18. Dig Lazarus Dig!!! by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 17. Distortion by the Magnetic Fields 16. Nouns by No Age 15. Introducing Gentleman Jesse and His Men by Gentleman Jesse 14. Rip It Off by Times New Viking 13. Looking Into It by the All Girl Summer Fun Band 12. You & Me by the Walkmen 11. Furr by Blitzen Trapper 10. Microcastle by Deerhunter 9. Heretic Pride by the Mountain Goats 8. Matador Singles '08 by Jay Reatard 7. Lust Lust Lust by the Raveonettes 6. Fixation Protocols by the Capstan Shafts 5. Twilight by the Baskervilles 4. This Is It and I Am It... by Marnie Stern 3. Brown Submarine by Boston Spaceships 2. Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit 1. Yes Boss by Kleenex Girl Wonder
#2 Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit (Fat Cat Records) "If you record an album with just ten songs, three instrumentals is too many."
This is what I thought to myself as I listened to Frightened Rabbit's debut album Sing the Greys back in 2006. The record had gotten some good online reviews, and I liked a couple of the songs I'd heard, but the album didn't really deliver on the potential I was hearing. I particularly liked the band's knack for using pop dynamics, starting their songs with a modest arrangement and then adding sounds gradually and dropping them all away for a second before piling back on again. I made a mental note to check out the Glasgow band again when they came out with another album.
I picked up Midnight Organ Fight the day it came out and found that Frightened Rabbit had built on their strengths and learned some new tricks as well. Lyrically, Midnight Organ Fight is in a different league from Sing the Greys - while they are both break-up albums, the new record is operating on a different level entirely. The titular organs (no pun intended) are not the musical kind, and they point to the synecdoche of the album's central theme. It's all about reducing relationships and sex to the organs, bodily functions, and chemistry involved. It's not as sordid as it sounds, though - well, actually it is. It is pretty raunchy in parts, and our Scottish friends don't pull any punches with the dirty talk. But it's also a lot more sophisticated than it sounds.
"The Modern Leper" compares the famously extra-bad skin condition to feelings of unworthiness in a relationship. "Fast Blood" is about how blood rushes to certain body parts at certain times. "Head Rolls Off" addresses the question of brain death and heart death in the larger scheme of things. "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms" is about... I don't really know, but hey, it's all about body parts. Other songs on the album are about pleasant activities like being poked in the eye and having hormone races. Midnight Organ Fight's slavish devotion to its conceit is admirable on one level, but the lyrics are also evocative on an emotional level. Reducing relationships to human biology is just really sad, adding a layer of pathos to the typical breakup album sentiment, making this record something special.
Take "The Twist", for instance. It's about dancing. Simple enough, right? But the lyric refers to wrists, shins, hips, hair, and ears. And the chorus revolves around the line, "I need human heat" - a particularly sad way of expressing the need to have a connection with another person. The song is also a good example of the dramatic build that Frightened Rabbit puts into the songs on the record. It starts with a keyboard bounce and Scott Hutchinson's croaking voice, and then choral backing vocals start to weave into the melody. Gradually, a tambourine, drums, and guitar enter the mix. And then, at the end of the second verse, when you think you're hearing what the song has to offer, the drums come to life and a chanting backing vocal singing "extrasuperveryextrasupervery" takes the song to another level. Frightened Rabbit is going back into the studio in early 2009 - if they can take another huge step forward with their new material, their next album will be amazing.
#3 Brown Submarine by Boston Spaceships (Guided By Voices, Inc.) It's hard for me to write about the music of Robert Pollard - I've lived with it for so long and it's been such a big part of my life for over a decade, that it seems like there's nothing left to say. And that sounds really weird because most people have never heard of Robert Pollard or Guided By Voices, the band he fronted from 1983 to 2004. That's one of the odd things about being a big fan of something very obscure. Talking about how I listen to this album and why I like it is almost pointless because it's so different from how any non-fan (the entire population of Earth minus a few thousand) would hear it.
I can say a few general things about Brown Submarine - like most of Robert Pollard's work, it's inspired by British-Invasion pop, '70s progressive rock, and arty post-punk. His lyrics are more direct and less surreal than they were during Guided By Voices' brief time in the spotlight, but they are still pretty oblique at times. Some of the songs are new compositions, while others are pulled from the Robert Pollard "suitcase", an archive of demo tapes that goes back decades. It says something about Pollard's commitment to his vision of music that his brand-new compositions can sit comfortably next to something he originally wrote in the '80s.
The thing that makes Brown Submarine stand out among Pollard's recent projects is, simply put, ex-GBV bassist Chris Slusarenko. Since Guided By Voices broke up, Pollard has released five solo albums, all helmed by producer Todd Tobias. It's hard to say whether it has more to do with Tobias' extensive participation in these records (playing almost all the instruments, as well as arranging the songs and recording them) or Pollard's idea of what a solo album should be, but there has been something different about these solo records. The songs seem to take themselves too seriously, and there is something flat about them. I say that as someone who loves all these albums, but it's a good thing that the Boston Spaceships project was different by design. Pollard has said that Boston Spaceships is indended to be more "fun", and Slusarenko (who is the Todd Tobias of Boston Spaceships) has made choices that fit this agenda, shaping a more youthful dynamic in his choices as he brings these Pollard songs to life. Bringing Decemberist (and former Maroons frontman) John Moen in to play drums on the album was a good call as well. Brown Submarine really is more fun than other recent Pollard albums, so I'm thankful to Slusarenko for getting Pollard out of his rut a little.
The subject matter on Brown Submarine matches the tone, as well. Most of the songs are about getting with girls or sleazier things. "Ready to Pop" is about a fat man's enjoyment of his wife's pregnancy because they are the same size. "Ate It Twice" is only ostensibly about cake, and "Soggy Beavers" does not require or merit any discussion of its thesis. "Two Girl Area" sounds like another song that more or less speaks for itself, but it actually has a poignant lyric about love. It's hard to see where the second girl of the "area" fits in at all. It's hardly up there with David Crosby's "Triad" or Tom Heinl's "Three-Way" in describing what you think it's supposed to be describing. But the melody is sweet, and it has that sense of fun that drew people like me to Pollard's music in the first place. The best news is that a new Boston Spaceships record, The Planets Are Blasted is due for release in February (five months after the release date of Brown Submarine!) If Pollard plans to release two Boston Spaceships records a year, that's fine with me.
#4 This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That... by Marnie Stern (Kill Rock Stars) Marnie Stern is the best kind of headache. Keep in mind that I am only a casual fan of headache-inducing music (although some would probably say otherwise), but there's something about Marnie Stern's experimental rock assault and shrill, chirpy singing that really works for me. And seems like a pretty interesting person, too - she first heard the music of Sleater-Kinney at the age of 23 and decided to be a great guitarist. A Don Caballero video she saw brought her around to the idea of a finger-tapping technique to build her sound around. Her first demo of songs got her a record deal, and before long she was recording with well-known drummer Zach Hill.
I have little time for music that is all about guitar - I admire guitar virtuosos, but their style of playing (generality warning!) usually comes across as too much or too slick. It may say something negative about me that I prefer to listen to the music of poor guitarists. I have trouble saying how good of a guitarist Marnie Stern is, but when I watch her performing "Transformer" live on Radio K (see the picture caption above for the link) I see someone doing something pretty difficult and definitely different. The guys at Guitar Center would probably say, "Pshffffbt!", but everyone hates those guys anyway. And there's something about the songs she writes and the way she layers the sounds that makes it more interesting to me than most music of its kind. I hate to use the word this way, but it's... feminine somehow. And I like that.
And it's not ALL about the guitar-playing either. Marnie Stern is not an amazing vocalist, but her pep-club shouts and surreal lyrics complement the whirling guitar leads in a lovely way, bringing the meager melodies to Deerhoof-esque levels of noise-joy. The album works as a cohesive piece as well, with a great lead-in track followed by three standalone singles, "Transformer", "Shea Stadium", and the unstoppable "Ruler." The middle of the album, though is the high point for me - the trio of songs that follows the singles is not as catchy as what came before, but "The Crippled Jazzer", "Steely", and "The Package Is Wrapped" are the juggernaut that power this record. I feel exhausted and elated after hearing these three songs in a row. The song quality dips a little at that point in the album, but it comes right back with "Roads? Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads".
This might seem to contradict what I just said, but the single song that makes the album for me is "Ruler" - it's all about "Ruler". If I hadn't heard that song online (and then replayed it a dozen or more times) I wouldn't ever have bought This Is It and I Am It... This is my favorite song of the year, hands down. It is immaculately composed and arranged, but it is so effortless in its execution that, when I hear it, I am drawn into the song completely and find my body moving involuntarily to its rhythms. And I'm not a guy who dances - sorry, ladies. I try to limit it to some head-bobbing if I'm listening to the song at work, but I have been known to cut loose a little more in the privacy of my own home. It's that infectious.
#5 Twilight by the Baskervilles (Secret Crush Records) Am I immolating my "indie cred" by including a band from the power-pop ghetto in my Top 10? Probably, but I'm not sure what to do about my love of power pop. It's a genre that really has kind of been ghettoized in recent years, the popularity of anomalies like Fountains of Wayne notwithstanding. These days, it seems like all power pop musicians look like record-store-owning burnouts (and their wives) - see above. You have to go to special websites like NotLame.com to find out about the scads of power-pop records that are produced by struggling bands in local/regional scenes. Frankly, it's only by chance that I found out about Twilight at all.
I should say now that this record has nothing to do with the highly successful vamp-tween novels born out of the erotic dreams of a Mormon housewife. The album Twilight started out as a singles project by the Harlem-based Baskervilles. They put up a new one-song single on their website about every month for about a year and a half - the songs are all still there if you want to listen to the whole thing. I'm sure I've mentioned my love of singles clubs on this blog, so you may not be shocked that such a ploy drew my attention. I found myself coming to the blog on a regular basis to see if a new single had been thrown up yet. It helped that the singles were all produced by Mitch Easter, a power-pop musician (Let's Active) and well-known producer (REM, Pavement, etc.) When the band decided to dress up the songs a little at the end of the project and release them as an album, I was primed to hear the completed project (in spite of the inexplicably terrible cover art - what happened to the awesome art concepts from the singles series?)
The album is a lot of fun, the kind that makes me wonder why power pop has been relegated to the outskirts of music discourse in recent years. The Baskervilles are by turns wistful ("Where Did My Summer Go?"), sleazy ("Sweet and Sour"), and gleeful ("A Little More Time"), and the songs display a good variety of sounds, touching on chamber-pop, jangle-rock, and shoegaze. The vocals are strong if a little faceless, and the singles-collection approach makes for a consistent album with a very strong second half.
"A Little More Time" was the seventh single of the Twilight single series, but it takes the opening-track position on the album. Starting with a jumpy string trio riff, the song is one of the most joyous I heard all year. There's not that much to it, but the clap-along bridge and harmonies make for an unbeatable power-pop formula for people who like that kind of thing. And there's nothing wrong with being one of those people. I don't think that power pop will ever be the "cool" sound again, but... well, I don't really have a good way to end that sentence.
#6 Fixation Protocols by the Capstan Shafts (Rainbow Quartz Records) I love the picture of the Capstan Shafts above, one of the few existing pictures of the band (i.e. Dean Wells of Lyndonville, Vermont). The Capstan Shafts is Dean Wells' little-known home recording project, and the blurriness and poor lighting are a good visual representation of the kind of music Dean makes. Although the Capstan Shafts project bears all the hallmarks of a spare-time recording project, it boasts got an impressive set of accomplishments. He's released music on eight record labels, and his discography includes nine albums and fifteen EPs. I have 320 Capstan Shafts songs in my music collection. The most amazing thing about this accomplishment, aside from the fact that his music is great, is that Dean started releasing music in 2004. Releasing almost 100 songs a year for four years is an accomplishment that may be unequaled.
The quantity of music is obviously not in dispute, but there has been some discussion about the quality of Capstan Shafts releases. The songs are, without a doubt, very home-made sounding. But Dean really does a lot with what he has to work with. He plays guitar, drums, bass, and piano, and he does all the lead and backing vocals, creating a fairly full sound. The songs are always short - the average Capstan Shafts song lasts about 90 seconds. But Dean knows how to make the most of the time, abandoning verse-chorus-verse structures to better suit his time constraints. The melodies are timeless British-Invasion-by-way-of-Guided-By-Voices stuff delivered with the slapdash charm of great lo-fi pop.
Fixation Protocols is not the best album that the Capstan Shafts have ever released, but it is still one of my favorite releases of the year, particularly when paired with the Miles per Famine EP that was also released this year. Like the best Capstan Shafts records, it almost works like a concept record. Where the The Sleeved and Granddaughters of the Black List record told the story of a man in love with a painter, and Euridice Proudhon retold the Orpheus myth as a modern romance, Fixation Protocols comes across as an abstract treatise on the history of American politics presented as a metaphor for - you guessed it - love. How else do you explain song titles like "Communists in 19th Century America", "Song for Monometallists", "The Framers Blameless Enterprise", and "Voting Hopeless"?
But no Capstan Shafts record would be complete without a few straightforward songs of love and longing, and "A Heart That Never Flies" is one of his good ones. The lyrics show Wells' usual playfulness, starting with the couplet, "Everything else is a distant third to you and your good word" and going on to argue a case for the love of a "fragile nutmeg boy." Don't like it? That's okay - Dean is writing new songs as we speak. I checked his website today and found out that he is selling a new full-length called Cretin Flowers - you can get a free EP version of it HERE (and there are several other Capstan Shafts releases you can get free on the Internet with a little looking.)
#7 Lust Lust Lust by the Raveonettes (Vice Records) I'll admit that I dismissed the Raveonettes prematurely. When they suddenly appeared on the scene in 2002, it seemed like they were everywhere. It's not hard to see why - they had a great marketing hook. They were doing back-to-basics black-leather garage rock with a strict set of rules. All songs in Bb Major. All songs under three minutes. All songs restricted to three chords or less. I'm all for musicians making things challenging for themselves, but this sounded more like a band pretending their own limitations and lack of experience were choices rather than necessities. And the other thing that bugged me was that they got all sorts of attention from MTV of all places. Their videos got a lot of play, and it seemed like it must be their label, Columbia, trying to give them the old "payola push."
This year, though, the Raveonettes made an album good enough that all is forgiven. The single from Lust Lust Lust caught my attention with its spy-theme riff, Portland references, and white-noise distortion interludes, but it was the video for "Dead Sound" that convinced me to pay closer attention. They'd stopped talking about their strict "rules", but their simplicity now seems more driven by choice than before. And they've found ways of creating dynamics that elevate simple songs, using their Jesus-and-Mary-Chain-inspired noise to their advantage by dropping it away from a chorus or bridge and then throwing it back in at the key moment. Little touches like the faraway-sounding drum machine on "Blitzed" or the clip-clop percussion on "Sad Transmission" keep things fun.
Which is not to say that the album is not simple, almost to the point of monotony. Somehow, though, the monotony seems like a value-add this time. Even the lyrics address the same ideas again and again - take the line "Your heartbeat stops when I tell you that lovers always part." Is that line from the song "The Beat Dies"? is it from US bonus track "My Heartbeat's Dying"? No! They have a third heartbeat-oriented lyric on the record, "Sad Transmission". It's this kind of obvious repetition of themes and sounds that puts me at ease, knowing that it's a method that I can enjoy if I just let go a little. And it honestly works so much better than the Magnetic Fields' more cerebral attempt at the same concept with their Distortion album.
"You Want the Candy" does a good job of demonstrating their way of reducing, simplifying, and borrowing from obvious sources with great results. The title may be a reference to their friend and producter, Richard Gottehrer, who wrote the classic "I Want Candy". That's right - the guy from the Strangeloves, one of the great fake garage bands of the '60s. The propulsive drumming, the filthy-cute lyrics, the way all the instruments drop out at the beginning of each verse... what's not to like?
#8 Matador Singles '08 by Jay Reatard (Matador Records) "Jay Reatard didn't release an album this year, you idiot. A singles collection is not an album!"
Hey! Not cool, disembodied voice attacking me on my own blog! But you do have a point, to which I respond by saying that sometimes a singles collection is not a singles collection. Jay did release a singles collection this year titled Singles 06-07, collecting, oddly enough, the singles he released in '06 and '07. Matador Singles '08 is not really a singles collection, though - Jay signed with Matador Records this year and wanted to put out a series of six 7" over six months this year. The singles were printed in a very limited edition, though, and people had trouble finding them. This was not a big issue, though, because Jay was planning on bundling them together and releasing them on CD in October anyway. The singles were really just promos to draw attention to the album they were pulled from, and it worked. I'm surprised that more bands don't do this - it has worked well for bands like Bishop Allen, raising their profile and exposure in an ever-shrinking music-news cycle and giving bloggers something new to talk about every month. Maybe they don't do it because you end up with an album with a confusing title like Matador Singles '08.
Jay Reatard is Jay Lindsey - I found this out when Amazon.com got skittish about printing his nom de plume and started listing his albums under his real name. He's a pretty young guy who's been kicking around the Memphis punk scene (such as it is) for a while. I'd never heard of him until the release of his breakthrough album Blood Visions last year - it drew some attention because of the photo of Jay on the front cover in his briefs covered in blood. The weird thing is that everyone is pretending like they've known about him for ages. Reviews and articles talk about how he's been a prolific artist for years and dropping the names of his early albums with the Reatards as if they own them. The truth is that everyone just found out about him, and the timing is good because he's making huge leaps in his songwriting right now and people should be paying attention.
The Blood Visions record was gritty pop-punk, with an emphasis on sneering attitude and relentless velocity. But the pop hooks were there, and Jay's singing has always been influenced by the clipped, yelping style of post-punk as much as the real punk vocalists. And he's been spending his time since releasing that album coaxing out the pop hooks in his songs by varying his approach and developing some interesting ways of recording his songs to get all kinds of different sounds. Of the six singles that make up Matador Singles '08, only one of them is really "punk". The first three singles showcase great songs like the more-lighthearted-than-they-sound "Painted Shut", "An Ugly Death", and "Screaming Hand". They are very pop-oriented and fun, and the fourth single was a neat surprise, a cover of Deerhunter's "Fluorescent Grey". The fifth single was the punk one, containing three songs that sound close to the Wire/Buzzcocks sound of the 06-07 singles. The sixth single, which Jay has said is a fair representation of where he's going with his songwriting, toned things down even more, borrowing from the cute and quirky style of the kiwi-pop of New Zealand in the '80s. Jay is growing fast as a pop talent and releasing a lot of great material - it won't be too long before people won't have to pretend that they've known about him for ages.
#9 Heretic Pride by the Mountain Goats (4AD) John Darnielle, the man behind the Mountain Goats, is a cipher. He is a student of classical studies, but he is also a boxing enthusiast. He is one of the great narrative songwriters of our time, but is also a vocal fan of Scandinavian death metal (and, yes, I am saying that there is something odd about that.) He has written a book about Black Sabbath, but no self-respecting Sabbath cover band would ever consider sharing a stage with the Mountain Goats. There is no question that Darnielle is a mysterious character.
He also happens to be a terrific songwriter. His last three albums have been amazingly cohesive and affecting character studies. 2002's Tallahassee explored the entrancing combination of matrimony and violent alcoholism, while 2004's We Shall All Be Healed examined the nihilistic lifestyles of young meth addicts. 2005's The Sunset Tree took things one step further, as Darnielle wrote a song cycle about his childhood and his troubled relationship with his stepfather. He had written concept albums earlier in his career (Sweden and All Hail West Texas come to mind) but this trilogy is considered by many to represent the pinnacle of Darnielle's songwriting.
2006's Get Lonely was a departure, not following a set of characters but uniting unrelated songs with a single mood and theme instead. As such, it was roundly panned by the critics. Like Flannery O'Connor's return to writing short stories after the publication of her novel Wise Blood, Darnielle drew criticism for returning to a lesser form after mastering the greater. Also, the album was problematically boring. This year's Heretic Pride is also an anthology, mixing songs about monsters and mystery with stories about young people in peril. But this collection is Darnielle's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, wringing a new level of impactfulness from a familiar form.
"Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident" is an excellent example of this, showing the masterful concision and succinctness in Darnielle's songwriting. A guy enters the restroom of a Berlin nightspot after hours, only to find a sobbing girl slumped against the sink. The sight of her reminds the guy of another girl that has meant something to him. Some interpretations of the song have him accosting the girl - but this is not what happens. He doesn't acknowledge the girl at all, doing his business and washing his hands with scalding water. He leaves her there under the sink, advising her with a silent remonstrance: "Stay weightless, formless, blameless, nameless". A thumbnail sketch describing an encounter in about 100 words, it is one of the best statements on the desire to obliterate identity that I've encountered. Sometimes it doesn't take a novel.
"Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident" by the Mountain Goats
#10 Microcastle by Deerhunter (Kranky Records) Some things are better experienced without any preconceptions or foreknowledge. Movies with surprise endings, for instance. I wish I could go back and discover Deerhunter without knowing anything about them. They've been the Pitchforkmedia equivalent of a Drudge-siren for over a year. Extra! Extra! Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox has Marfan Syndrome! He wears dresses! He posts pictures of little boys on his blog! He keeps a bowel movement diary! He accidentally left his new demos on an unprotected part of his website and it got leaked! This is the kind of attention-seeking that makes me want to stay away from a band.
The reviews of Deerhunter's last album, Cryptograms, didn't really suck me in either. Even the good reviews made a big deal out of the fact that much of the album was instrumental - as much as I like the idea of instrumental rock, it never really holds my interest. And many people didn't really care for their instrumentals, so I thought that Deerhunter was just not my thing. And I wasn't quick to change my mind, even when the buzz around Microcastle began long before its release date. Deerhunter had released the much-loved Fluorescent Grey EP and Bradford Cox had been releasing consistently good music with his solo project Atlas Sound and through his blog.
When it came down to it, two things got me to purchase Microcastle. The first was seeing a short documentary on the making of the album online - I love seeing band's describing their recording process, and the music they were making was really captivating. The second thing was Weird Era Cont., the bonus full-length album that was included with every Microcastle CD. I admit that I love bonus discs and double albums, and the prospect of a whole second CD of music was almost too much to resist. Hearing a few promo tracks on the web confirmed that this was a record worth having.
I still think that Cryptograms would be a chore for me, but Microcastle takes the same ideas and makes them accessible. This time around, the suite of mood pieces in the middle of the album aren't instrumentals, providing more subtle break between the pop-oriented material that starts and finishes the album. The Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine influences are still an important component, but the Youth-ful sonics are used to dress up classic pop melodies. I think that the album would remind me of the 60s girl group sound, even if "Vox Humana" didn't use the famous "Be My Baby" drumbeat. "Never Stops" is one of my favorites on the album, contrasting a chirpy verse melody over plucked guitar with a roaring feedback-laden wordless chorus. This is a great example of where Deerhunter seems to be going, and I anticipate Bradford Cox continuing to develop as an attention-seeking songwriter worth paying attention to.
Starting today, we're officially talking Top 10 stuff! The ten best albums that I bought and then later remembered buying when I stayed up that one night putting together this list - does it get any more definitive than that? For the sake of summarizing and paying one last tribute to our runners-up, here's what was in the less prestigious 3/5th of the Top 25:
25. Robert Pollard Is Off to Business by Robert Pollard 24. Consolers of the Lonely by the Raconteurs 23. Mountain Battles by the Breeders 22. Re-arrange Us by Mates of State 21. Parallel Play by Sloan 20. Accelerate by R.E.M. 19. Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes 18. Dig Lazarus Dig!!! by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 17. Distortion by the Magnetic Fields 16. Nouns by No Age 15. Introducing Gentleman Jesse and His Men by Gentleman Jesse 14. Rip It Off by Times New Viking 13. Looking Into It by the All Girl Summer Fun Band 12. You & Me by the Walkmen 11. Furr by Blitzen Trapper
Image of Blitzen Trapper from the Blitzen Trapper Myspace page
#11 Furr by Blitzen Trapper (Sup Pop) I just noticed that I totally forgot one album in assembling my Top 25 list - the self-titled record by boat-shoe-wearing wuss-rockers Vampire Weekend. Apparently, it came out in January and I have to admit that I think it's a pretty good record. So I'm going to shoehorn some Vampire Weekend content into today's entry, even though it wouldn't have made it as high as my #11. I'm going to list some ways that Furr by Blitzen Trapper is a better record than Vampire Weekend. I know - these two albums have little to do with each other, but I'm tired of writing these little reviews without having an arbitrary framework to prop them up.
Reason Number One: Furr made a better first impression. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the title track from Furr. It was National Record Store Day, and I'd gone to my favorite local CD store, Gray Whale Music, to take advantage of some great sales. I don't remember what I purchased, but I remember that I got a free Sub Pop sampler with my purchase. Later that evening, my wife and I were driving home from my sister-in-law's house with the sampler in the player. And a song started with the line, "When I was only seventeen, I heard the angels whispering. So I drove into the woods, and wandered aimlessly about until I heard my mother shouting through the fog. It turned out to be the howling of a dog." That was all it took. I think I heard about Vampire Weekend first on Pitchfork. No contest.
Reason Number Two: Furr has more than a couple musical ideas. Vampire Weekend does a good job of combining chamber-pop songwriting with Afro-pop embellishments, but that's pretty much all you'll find on their album. Furr is not as all-over-the-place as Blitzen Trapper's last record, Wild Mountain Nation, but they haven't lost their interest in trying new things. The spiritualist lullaby "Furr" and murder ballad "Black River Killer" show a lyrical precision I didn't find in their earlier stuff. "Not Your Lover" is a tender piano-based love song, while "Love U" is a three-minute dirge of screaming and distortion. "Sleepytime in the Western World" and "Saturday Nite" bring the party vibe. "God and Suicide" and "Stolen Shoes and a Rifle" are excellent country-pop songs, and "Echo/Always On/Easy Con" grafts a spacey piano piece onto a Clinic-like melodica shuffle. Nothing they do completely diverges from their California-style, 70s-influenced country-rock, but they make the most of a fairly expansive palette.
Reason Number Three: No boat shoes. You can't imagine the singer of "Stolen Shoes and a Rifle" wearing boat shoes, and that's a good thing. A down-tempo number that starts with acoustic guitar and pedal steel, the harmonies add a lot to the chorus - "Oh, the stones won't be lonely here this year - it's gone." And then the drums come in, adding needed energy to the second verse. The song is a good distillation of the melody, mysticism, and musicality that makes Blitzen Trapper better than Vampire Weekend.
Image of the Walkmen courtesy of Tell All Your Friends PR
#12 You & Me by the Walkmen (Gigantic Music) It's hard for me to articulate what draws me to the Walkmen - if you've read this blog at all, I'm sure you know that it's hard for me to articulate pretty much anything. The best way I can think of to describe it is that every Walkmen song brings to mind a single image - a group of exhausted, angry young men in the middle of an empty ballroom after everyone else has gone home, howling in impotent rage and not caring that their ties have come undone. The only variation in this image I get when I listen to their new album, You & Me, is that the ballroom is in Venice, Caracas, or Kowloon.
You & Me is a traveling record, but it's not really a "tour" record like some bands make. It's about wandering aimlessly - on "Seven Years of Holidays", Hamilton Leithauser sings, "I’ve traveled so far in my war, and I’ve lived in a suitcase for too long. Eugene, I’m lost!" And, even though the record is very much about travel, there's not really an "on the road" feel to it because the "room" is part of every song. The Walkmen love reverb, and they've gotten pretty good at using it in a way that creates a sense of space. The echoey sounds tell you that they're in a hall or a chamber or even a church - it's very organic in that way. So what you get is this sense of a band moving from room to room, city to city, country to country, wailing about wanting to go home. It's better than I'm making it sound, I think.
I picked up the first Walkmen record, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, when it came out, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't need another Walkmen record. The songs were not about "rooms" - at that time, they were more about "a room." The album gave the feel of a single space, and, although I liked it well enough, it was a little claustrophobic for me. They've released four albums since then, but You & Me was the first that differentiated itself enough to seem worth picking up (well, I have to admit that I'm going to pick up Pussy Cats, their song-for-song reproduction of the Nilsson record, at some point because I love novelty records). The claustrophobia is less of an issue now because of this sense of movement, and because of a smart palette of sounds - horns and piano are used to great effect, and the percussion is often a big component. Tambourine, sleigh bells, and woodblock pop up throughout the album, adding refreshing dynamics to the rhythm section.
"Four Provinces" is a favorite of mine from You & Me, and it starts with an anthemic riff and a tambourine flourish that lead in to a clattering flamenco rhythm. The song was apparently originally called "Hey, Leah" for obvious reasons. The phrase punctuates the choruses of the song - Leithauser spits the phrase out in his coarse yelping way, and the song build to what seems to be a lilting bridge before ending abruptly. The lights go out in the ballroom, and the Walkmen shamble off to their next locale.
Image of the All Girl Summer Fun Band by Thomas Oliver
#13 Looking Into It by the All Girl Summer Fun Band (AGSFB Music) The ladies of the All Girl Summer Fun Band have owed us a new album for five years (to the extent that a fan can ever argue that musicians owe them new music). But they have good excuses - they've been pretty busy. Frontgirl Kim Baxter runs Kissycake, a company that sells cute tote bags, onesies, and tee shirts. Jen Sbragia is a talented graphic designer. Kathy Foster has a full-time gig playing bass in the Thermals with her guy Hutch Harris. And Ari Douangpanya had a baby boy and elected to drop out of the band altogether. Also, the girls do work for Portland's Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. It's amazing that they had time to put together a third album at all, let alone record, produce, design and release the record themselves out of their homes.
The record was worth the wait. Looking Into It is a different album than the first two they released through K Records. Kim, Jen, and Kathy have been through a lot in the interim, and it comes through in the songs. They aren't singing about "Mr. and Mrs. Troublemaker", "Canadian Boyfriend", or "Jason Lee" anymore. The references to video games, charm bracelets, and flavored chapstick are gone. The songs have titles like "Something New", "Not the One For Me", and "This Will Never End." Even "Plastic Toy Dream" is about growing up and putting away childish things. The girls are all grown up now, addressing more grown-up problems in a more grown-up way. I have to say that the more abstract lyrics aimed at some "you" in most of the songs was jarring at first, but it fits their updated sound.
The AGSFB have definitely beefed up their sound since their last album for K Records, 2. Most impressive are Kim Baxter's guitar leads and solos, which are in a different league from her previous work. Also, the arrangements are more meticulous, almost fussed-over in the way that harmonies and instruments are layered. It doesn't sound home-recorded, except that you can imagine the girls working on it in the evenings and weekends over a period of years trying to get things just right. For me, Looking Into It loses some of the "summer fun" and charm of the previous records because of this bigger, shinier sound. They didn't even release it until September - where's the summer fun in that?
Luckily, the band's sound has gained as much as it has lost with the new energy and competence, delivering an aggressive but feminine sound that you don't hear too much in indie music these days. You could compare it to Palomar or the Owls, but at times it is most reminiscent of the sharp, edgy pop of late-period Lush (especially their last album, Lovelife.) It's a sound that the world needs more of, and the All Girl Summer Fun Band delivers it in eleven flawless tracks. Even the instrumental title track has an infectious hook, and a couple slow numbers in the second half provide a nice counterpoint to the album's first six uptempo tracks. The collaboration on this album is more seamless as well, without some of the jarring instrument-switching and songwriting differences from their earlier records. The album's final track, "This Will Never End" brings the album to a closing high point, building on a great "uh-uh-uh-oh!" vocal hook from Kim, riding Kathy's propulsive drumming. Hopefully, the song is telling us that the girls are grown up, but we haven't heard the last of them.
"This Will Never End" by the All Girl Summer Fun Band
#14 Rip It Off by Times New Viking (Matador Records) My apologies to Times New Viking but today I want to start by saying - yay! - we have completed our first month of daily posting at Wires and Waves.
Now on to business. Times New Viking don't want you to know that they're a pop band. I'm not sure why - maybe it has something to do with them being art school students. Maybe it's because they weren't a pop band at first but have become one by mistake. And, to be fair, they make it hard to tell that they are writing songs that, in some cases, borderline on bubblegum pop. For one thing, they bury all their songs under an almost impenetrable layer of noise. They are one of those bands that makes you doubt that your audio equipment is working properly and, once you've decided it's supposed to sound like that, you end up trying to explain to everyone who gets in your car that it's supposed to sound like that. The guitar, drums, and vocals are all overdriven (overdrived?) to the point of fuzzy distortion, and the mix is purposefully muddy.
And it's just loud. The back cover of Rip It Off says "Please play loud" but that may be a joke of some kind because it's impossible to not play this album loud. For one thing, the way it is mixed super-hot and compressed into oblivion, it still sounds loud on MUTE. Also, there's no way to hear the hooks and nice subtle touches buried in the noise without cranking it up - at low volume, this album might as well be 31 minutes of white noise. They do other things to distract you from their pop songs - like giving their songs names more appropriate for art installations. "Relevant: Now". "Allegory Gets Me Hot". "Fashion to Talk About the Moon". And then there's the "contains explicit lyrics" on the front cover - there's no way that this album has enough profanity on it to require that label. They put that there themselves!
But then they put this in the liner notes of the album: "Times New Viking play pop songs." Of course they do! If they didn't, I wouldn't be listening. I've tried to get into real noise (or "noize") music, and it doesn't do anything for me - it has to be noise-pop. And Rip It Off is my favorite noise-pop record of the year. Keyboardist Beth Murphy and singing drummer Adam Elliott bring the pop hooks and joyous choruses on this record, and guitarist Jared Phillips is an underrated guitarist (supposedly had no experience when they started the band) - his riffs and leads emerge from the cacophony from time to time to great effect. Rip It Off does a good job of making the noise tolerable over the album's half-hour length, varying the approach and throwing in calmer songs like "DROP-OUT" and "Another Day" to provide a break from the constant bludgeoning attack.
"The Early '80s" sums up what Times New Viking is all about pretty well. It opens Side 2 of the album - how cute, they're pretending that records still have sides - with a nice,clear guitar riff. And then the noise crashes in. Beth and Adam sing in unison, and a keyboard part provides a stabilizing low hum in the right channel. A minute and a half later they're done - but just what were they singing? I think it's a love song - this first line is, "I wanted to buy you flowers from the new thirteen colonies, but you came alive you came alive YOU CAME ALIVE in the early eighties!" It's a bouncy pop song about being in love, but it's trying to disguise itself as something else. Nice try - we're on to you.
Image of Gentleman Jesse courtesy of the Gentleman Jesse Myspace page
#15 Introducing Gentleman Jesse and His Men by Gentleman Jesse (Douchemaster Records) Gentleman Jesse (pictured above holding what I assume is a prop wiener dog) is Jesse Smith, bass player of the Atlanta retro punk band the Carbonas. They seem to be part of a local Atlanta scene that doesn't get a lot of national attention - I'd never heard of any of the bands on Gentleman Jesse's label, the quaintly named Douchemaster Records. Jesse came to my attention the same way a lot of people heard about him - he started getting good reviews on some of the bigger music sites and, more importantly, every one of these reviews mentioned the Exploding Hearts. You may have heard about the Exploding Hearts, one of the best bands to come out of the Pacific Northwest in the last decade - they issued one album of amazing pop songs in 2003. Shortly afterward, though, most of the band-members passed away in a terrible traffic accident, leaving music fans to wonder what might have been.
So it's not surprising that an Exploding Hearts comparison will get you places. And Introducing... follows through on its promise to remind you of the Exploding Hearts sound, perhaps to a fault. You may remove the CD from the tray a couple times to make sure you didn't accidentally put the Exploding Hearts album on by mistake. All the same influences are there - the Undertones, the Buzzcocks, Rockpile - it's a classic sneering power-pop record with no shortage of pop hooks. The lyrics don't create the same vivid world of neon-spray-painted garbage cans that the Exploding Hearts managed to evoke, but the songs take on the problems of jobs and relationships in a way that is easy to identify with.
Of the albums in my Top 25, I've owned Introducing... for the shortest period of time, but it's got a sound and a set of songs that sound immediately familiar. As a result, the album doesn't demand a dozen or more listens to get a grasp of what it's doing. It's kind of like the picture above - the wiener dog is pop music, and the kid in the shades is punk. They're staring each other down, but there's also a spark of kinship there. Gentleman Jesse rides this line between pop and punk to great effect on this record, putting some oomph behind the songs without sacrificing the pop hooks. And I listened to the record back to back last night with the Exploding Hearts, thinking that I could draw a one-to-one comparison in the tracklists, but it turned out that the albums are not as similar as I'd thought. "You Don't Have To (If You Don't Want To)" is one song where I was SO sure I'd heard the riff before, but I guess Jesse just has a talent for writing classic-sounding pop songs.
"You Don't Have To (If You Don't Want To)" by Gentleman Jesse and His Men
Image of No Age courtesy of the No Age Myspace page
#16 Nouns by No Age (Sub Pop) No Age reminds me of the early '90s. They come from the LA noise scene that centers around a venue known as The Smell, but their music is steeped in the sounds of the noise pop and lo-fi bands of a decade ago. The duo of singing drummer Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall do the LOUD-quiet-LOUD thing pretty well, dropping stretches of ambient loops and washes of feedback between crashing, noisy pop songs.
When their first major release, Weirdo Rippers, came out last year, I checked it out and found it to be a real odds-and-ends collection of singles - it sounded like the experiments of a band trying to figure out where they were going. It didn't seem like something I'd listen to much. Strangely, most people now refer to it as their debut album, even though I don't think it really was one. I prefer to think of Nouns as their real coming-out party. I got a Sub Pop promo CD earlier this year that had a pretty good song from Nouns on it called "Eraser", but it didn't raise my interest level much.
What changed my mind about No Age after I concluded I wasn't interested? This is one of the cases where I've had my mind changed by online discussion of an album. I don't think I got caught up in the hype around No Age - I still don't think they are the second coming of Pavement or anything. They sound more like a cross between New Radiant Storm King and Versus, two indie also-rans from the Pavement era. But the descriptions and discussion of the album in online music forums were so enthusiastic that I gave it a try. And their sound really works in the context of a cohesive album - the instrumental tracks are more interesting than I thought they'd be, and they provide a welcome respite from the pounding pop attack of the more upbeat numbers. The album has a good flow, starting and ending on real high notes.
The melodies are still a little too simple and repetitive - some of the best-liked songs on the album like "Teen Creeps" seem to have only one melodic idea that is repeated for the length of the track. And the last two songs on the record, "Ripped Knees" and "Brain Burner", have almost identical melodies - was that intentional? My favorite tracks on the record are those that combine the ambient loops with their melodic pop sensibility, like "Things I Did When I Was Dead". The squealing loop that comes in before the vocal is probably my favorite thing on the record, and it creates a bouncy but off-kilter foundation for one of their better vocals. Nouns is a great debut album, and I hope No Age builds on the mix of mood and attack found in their best songs as they go on. Their next album could be even better and more cohesive - it's one I look forward to.
#17 Distortion by the Magnetic Fields (Nonesuch) Stephin Merritt, the famously curmudgeonly songwriter behind the Magnetic Fields, loves rules. From the beginning of his musical career, Merritt has allowed his music to be shaped by its limitations. His first two albums had restrictions of necessity on them - The Wayward Bus and Distant Plastic Trees were recorded using the best sequencing software he had access to at the time - unfortunately, that software was the not-really-a-sequencer program Band-in-a-Box. As time went on, Merritt recorded an EP of songs each consisting of a single loop of samples and a record of synth-based country songs. On his breakthrough project, 69 Love Songs, his only rule was to write 69 love songs covering as many genres and kinds of love as possible. The success of this release demonstrated well that Merritt's now self-imposed limitations were resulting in music that caught people's attention.
Since 69 Love Songs, Merritt has ratcheted up his rules. He adapted two Chinese operas into Broadway showtunes. His last album, i, was composed entirely of songs starting with the letter "I", presented in alphabetical order. It was also the first of what he claims will be a trilogy of "no synth" albums, an odd choice for a composer that has made such effective use of synths in the past. His second "no synth" album is this year's Distortion, the challenge of which was to write a set of standard songs and present them in the most distorted way possible. Every instrument on the album, except for the drums and vocals, has had natural distortion added to it through studio tricks. The result is an album that sounds exactly like the description above - the distortion is applied liberally but smartly so the songs are never completely lost in the haze.
Having said that, though, one problem I have with the record is that the lyrics are hard to make out at times. This is only an issue because Stephin Merritt is one of the best lyricists working in music today, and it's frustrating to have to strain to follow the words. I was listening to "Zombie Boy" yesterday and thought I was mishearing the third verse - I checked the album lyric sheet and discovered that the lyric is actually, "I heard when you cried/and I answered your knocks/Let's make you a bride/with another two cocks." That's not the kind of line I typically miss during a whole year of listening to a record.
And "Zombie Boy" brings up another minor issue I have with Distortion, and that's a slight dip in Merritt's consistently excellent songwriting quality. Several of the songs are pretty much throw-aways in my opinion. "Three-Way", the album's opening track, is an instrumental which would be fine from a songwriter who leans heavily on strong lyrics. The exaggerated pathos of "Till the Bitter End" and the jokey "Zombie Boy" are also pretty weak. And, I admit that this is a very personal quibble, but "Mr. Mistletoe" is a Christmas song, and I just don't like Christmas songs thrown into the mix in otherwise non-holiday-related albums. So that's four songs out of thirteen that just don't do anything for me - this was a ratio of joke songs to real songs that was tolerable on a longer project like 69 Love Songs, but I expect more consistency from Merritt's more economical projects. This is only a "slight dip" in quality, though, because the rest of the songs are uniformly excellent and a definite step up from his last album. Take "I'll Dream Alone" - it starts with a distorted guitar line that sets up the verse melody, punctuated by less-distorted piano stabs. The verse is short and makes good use of Merritt's baritone to set up the soaring chorus with its lovely female backing vocals, a classic but slightly slowed down girl-group drumbeat, and a low-level feedback buzzing in the background. Hopefully, the third installment of the "no synth" trilogy gives Merritt a chance to step up his game again with another unique set of songwriting handcuffs.
Image of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds courtesy of Andrea Barsanti
#18 Dig Lazarus Dig!!! by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Mute Records) Prior to picking up Dig Lazarus Dig!!! this year, I didn't know much about Nick Cave. I was introduced to the Australian singer through the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire - his songs appeared in the film, and he makes a brief cameo (with the Bad Seeds, I think). I can't be sure - in my mind, I am conflating his cameo with Lou Reed's, which may have something to do with my liking this album a lot. I also owned a cassette of the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World, which contained a Nick Cave song called "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World". It was a good song, and I was even more impressed with another Nick Cave song I heard a couple years later on a CMJ sampler CD called "Red Right Hand". It was weird, though - I liked all the songs I heard by Nick Cave, but I never really felt any impetus to learn more. I blame this on "goth".
Not goth people or goth fashion or goth music or gothic architecture - just the concept of "goth". Nick Cave's first band, the Birthday Party, was one of the pioneers of the goth sound in the early '80s (late '70s?), and I could see that he was associated with the movement from my first exposure to his music. I tend to avoid certain genres of music - goth, hardcore, ambient, IDM, new jack swing - because I associate them too closely with a single mood. Maybe it's the pragmatist in me that wants to gravitate toward music that is more utilitarian - I want to be able to enjoy an album regardless of my mood. Nick Cave's music appealed to a certain drama-prone, macabre part of my psyche, but I thought it wouldn't be good music for daily listening around the house, so I stayed away.
Lately, I've been hearing really good things about Nick Cave's recent work, particularly Lyre of Orpheus and the recent releases by his Grinderman side project. But it was good that someone helped me break through by giving me Dig Lazarus Dig!!! as a gift - I didn't have any baggage attached to whether my purchase would be worthwhile, so I just gave it an unbiased listen. And it's really really good. It's definitely less "crying in a sepulchre under a full moon" and more "wandering in the desert in a soiled tuxedo with an empty bottle of Scotch", which helped me get over some preconceptions. And the songs have a lot of variety and nuance, exploring a variety of seedy characters and questionable locales. Cave rails against literary giants, threatens his enemies by moonlight, makes sleazy advances on young girls, and pines for lost love, all to great effect. The throbbing bass and propulsive drums are a constant, but the instrumentation is fresh and varied throughout the album. Check out the burbling synths and buzzing organ in the intro to "Today's Lesson", one of my favorite songs from the album.
It's definitely time for me to go back and explore the oeuvre of Nick Cave, particularly his highly-regarded '80s records. Where to start? From Her to Eternity? Should I go straight to 1994's Let Love In? Let me know if you think there is a good starting place, although I think that Dig Lazarus Dig!!! has given me as good a start as I could have hoped for. Part of me still shies away from the melodrama that saturates Nick Cave's approach to songwriting - it's not really dish-washing music - but this album is good enough to puncture some of my unfair preconceptions. My sincerest apologies to all the goths in the house.
In his article "Rockerdammerung", originally published in Baffler magazine, Mike O'Flaherty wrote this: "Indie rock still exists, sort of. A large minority within the indie scene was not able or willing to get signed; unfortunately, it almost seems as if they decided to fend off cooptation by making their music as repellently self-indulgent as possible. But the inventive formal sense that once redeemed those tendencies has vanished. Indie work still draws on other musics, but it now does so with the listless dilettantism of a yuppie browsing through the ethnic-foods section at Treasure Island."
Ouch. What better way to introduce this year's most divisive new indie act, Fleet Foxes? Their success isn't hard to explain - their pleasant folky sing-alongs are dipped in warm reverb and swathed in layered vocals. But the backlash against Fleet Foxes is also easy to understand, not because they're bad but because they are getting accolades they really haven't earned. Their album is good, but it's starting to show up at the tops of Best Of lists - is it really that good? The band's fans and critics point to the Beach Boys influence in the band's vocals and arrangements, but both sides are marking too much of it. The Fleet Foxes sound comes more from English trad folk like Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and the Incredible String Band. Although one nickname for the band I heard also makes a good shorthand: Crosby Shins and Nash!
I think that one problem with the Fleet Foxes record is that it's not got enough "Good Vibrations" and too much "Willow's Song" (you know, the folk ballad Britt Ekland sings as she strips naked in her bedroom in the movie Wicker Man.) The emphasis in many of the numbers is on atmospherics - the reason that "White Winter Hymnal" stands head and shoulders above the rest of the songs on the record, for me anyway, is that I can remember the how it goes an hour after it ends. The other songs have memorable hooks, but they rise unannounced out of the melodies to catch your ear and then disappear again under the waves of reverb. I think this is why people critical of the album often ask, "Where are the songs?" Every song has great moments, but the three tracks that follow the excellent "Quiet Houses" are so indistinct when taken in together that the second half of the album can seem amnesia-inducing.
You can accuse them of the kind of "listless dilettantism" that O'Flaherty talked about, but their album is still an impressive first full-length. And I've heard that their live show is excellent, extending their comparisons to My Morning Jacket further in the way they add muscle and energy to their songs in live performance. Of the songs on the record, "White Winter Hymnal" is easily my favorite - I remember hearing it the first time on a Sub Pop sampler earlier this year and being knocked back by its simplicity and blend of influences. You can find that song all over the 'net, though, and I think that "Ragged Wood" really tells the story of the line that Fleet Foxes walks between catchy pop songs and atmospheric folk. Maybe, with time, they will be part of bringing "the inventive formal sense" back to indie music.
Loyal readers of this site (of which there are approximately zero) already know how important R.E.M. was in getting me interested in music as a young person. I was living overseas at the time, so I always felt a distance from things like release dates and music-press hype. Still, I remember scouring the magazine racks of Singapore's bookstores looking for mentions of a new R.E.M. record allegedly to be called Automatic for the People. I was back in the States when their next album Monster came out, and I went to an album release party at midnight to get a copy. I already had their new single "What's the Frequency Kenneth" memorized from watching it every day on MTV's Buzz Bin. I know - this was a little late in the R.E.M. popularity arc for my fervor to peak, but I stuck with the band through the rocky years that followed.
Until their last album Around the Sun, which I listened to on a (totally legal) stream online and immediately decided I never needed to hear it again. The sonics were so muzzy and insubstantial, and the lyrics were so embarrassingly over-the-top that I thought R.E.M. were going down a path I couldn't follow. Luckily for all of us, everyone in the USA felt that way as well (no accounting for European tastes) and the band decided to pay attention.
This year's new release, Accelerate, is a great return to form. Its sound is varied, aggressive, and sometimes even surprising - who thought R.E.M. could surprise us (in a good way) at this point? But the sharp, over-driven organ buzz on "Houston", the warbly minor-key backing vocals on "Sing for the Submarine", and the breathless rush of "Man-Sized Wreath" all indicate signs of life from college rock's elder statesmen.
Why did it just barely just crack my Top 25? The lyrics are still a problem for me, for one thing. "And the weblines that get tangled as you willied and you wango'ed"? "Try to turn your talking points on me - history will set me free"? Not great. And, although Mike Mills' backing vocals are all over this record, elevating it above anything they've done since Bill Berry left the band, the melodies don't have as many hooks as you'd hope for. And the pacing of the album is a problem - starting with the album's title track, Accelerate loses some momentum that it never really gets back. But it really comes down to the fact that this is R.E.M.'s 14th album, and it's hard to get too excited about an old friend that's been around for as long as you can remember. I can say this, though - I'm excited to see what R.E.M. does next, and I couldn't say that three years ago.
Photo "Entry in the Wall of the Kremlin." by Rostov Velikii from the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection, 1911
It's that time of year - December is the time to count down the the top [insert number] [insert category] of [insert year]. Like, for instance, the Top 25 Albums of 2008. This wouldn't be a proper music blog if I didn't spend an entire month reviewing the best stuff I found this year with some kind of faux authority that comes with having the time and meager HTML skills necessary to publish this list. So I think we can assume that this list will be the final word on the subject of 2008's musical releases. In spite of the fact that I didn't hear most of the big releases of 2008 (sorry, Lil Wayne), and most of what I did hear actually fits into a Top 25 list. With a few exceptions that were so unremarkable that I don't want to write about them at all (sorry, Centro-matic and South San Gabriel and Futureheads). I'll summarize numbers 21-25 today and then each of the Top 20 releases will get an entry of their own. Here we go...
25. Robert Pollard Is Off to Business by Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices Inc.) It's no secret that I'm a devotee of Guided by Voices - I have almost everything they ever released, as well as almost everything that their frontman Robert Pollard has released since he put his band to bed in 2004. So how does this album barely scrape it into my Top 25? For one thing, Pollard's solo albums lately have settled into a comfortable groove, so some of the thrill is gone. Pollard has friends that are willing to do 90% of the work on his solo albums, so all he has to do is send a demo of the song to his producer and collaborator Tim Tobias, who records all the instrumental tracks and brings Bob in to record the vocals at the end of the process. The result is a weird distance that you don't hear in Pollard's earlier works, when he was really in control of the project. Of the three new albums Pollard released this year under various guises, this one is not my favorite, so I'll write more about his superior 2008 release later this month.
24. Consolers of the Lonely by the Raconteurs (Warner Bros.) The Raconteurs' second record is a fine release, showcasing their considerable blues-rock chops and pop songwriting. The White Stripes' Jack White and power-pop singer Brendan Benson collaborate here more seamlessly than on the first Raconteurs record, coming up with a sound that is more than the sum of its parts. Having said that, though, the album never really made much of an impression on me. It says something that the most memorable song on the album for me is a cover of Terry Reid's "Rich Kid Blues".
23. Mountain Battles by the Breeders (4AD) I've been a fan of Kim Deal since her time with the Pixies, and I've enjoyed all the releases that her Breeders have put out since back when it was a side project with Belly's Tanya Donnelly. This album was a bit of a surprise to me, though. It has the weird sonics and great Deal sisters' vocals that you'd expect from a Breeders album, but it is an oddly moody set of compositions, and songs like "German Studies", "Istanbul", and "Regalame Esta Noche" come across as unsatisfying genre experiments with extraneous non-English lyrics. Maybe it's a set of songs meant to create a sense of restlessness, melancholy, and movement, but it adds up to an unfulfilling, too-disjointed listen.
22. Re-Arrange Us by Mates of State (Barsuk Records) I admit that I bristle at reviews that say that the Mates of State have gotten boring. I know they the couple that makes up the Mates of State have a baby now and are in a more domestic headspace, but that shouldn't change their ability to make energetic, quirky pop songs. In 2003, The Mates of State released Team Boo, and I was surprised that it was not recognized as one of the best releases of that year, brimming with creative songwriting and pop hooks. Every song seemed to be three pop choruses crammed together without any discernible method, but this was what made the sound so refreshing. The truth is that the Mates' new record is too conventional - the melodies are still there, but the composition process has become too orderly, making for a record with eight good ideas in ten songs, where Team Boo had thirty-six good ideas in twelve songs. It's still a fine pop record, though, and I can't explain why I haven't given it more listens.
21. Parallel Play by Sloan (Yep Roc) I really wanted to find a spot in the Top 20 for Parallel Play, but it got edged out at the last minute. Sloan is a classic power-pop band like the greats of the early '70s (Badfinger, Big Star, etc.) that all had more than one talented songwriter. Where most power-pop bands you see these days have a single figure shaping the band's sound, Sloan democratically shares writing duties across its four members. And there are some great tunes on this record, but drummer Andrew Scott's contributions don't come anywhere near his great songs from past albums. All four of his songs sound like failed genre experiments, particularly the cod-reggae sound of "Too Many", my least favorite album closer of the year. It's a solid album overall, but it's a disappointment after last year's revelatory Never Hear the End of It. Here's "Witch's Wand", a song that deserves to be on a Top-20-worthy album - sorry little pop song. You came really close.
Wires and Waves is a daily music blog by Nathan J. All songs featured on the blog are presented temporarily for preview and promotional purposes only. If you hear something you like, go buy the thing. Or, better yet, go to a show and buy an overpriced T-shirt. Or send a big envelope of unmarked bills to an artist you feel a special spiritual connection with.
If you represent the copyright holder of a song posted here and you would like the song to be removed, please leave a comment and it will be yanked forthwith. If you are upset because your song has not been featured yet at Wires and Waves, feel free to contact me, and I'll see what I can do.
Now Playing
The Double Cross
Sloan
Yep Roc
Only In Dreams
Dum Dum Girls
Sub Pop
Cults
Cults
In the Name Of
Hit After Hit
Sonny & the Sunsets
Fat Possum
Rolling Blackouts
The Go! Team
Memphis Industries
Let's Go Eat the Factory
Guided By Voices
GBV Inc.
