For real.
1.16.2009
1.15.2009
won't get fooled again?
Those looking for a relatively concise, impassioned summary of just how much George W. Bush has fucked up this nation should read yellojkt's four-part "Epic Fail" series (the link is to a convenient Google search that lists all four entries). I'm not sure who the remaining true believers are - oh, except probably for asshole jerks like our county executive Scott Walker, who's parading "ideological principles" as to why he wants to flush the county (and mostly, the city) down the toilet, since he's thinking that will help him in his upcoming gubernatorial run with the rest of the state ("I Killed Milwaukee" will be his slogan, should he get his wish) - but if there's a silver lining in this cloud of disaster, it might be that maybe, just maybe, folks will wise up to politicians hypocritically claiming to run for elected office "against government." Not that they're lying, exactly - they want to make sure the government stays well out of the way of their own power and wealth. The rest of us? Useful (in the voting booth) idiots, disposable otherwise. Can't find a job? Hey, the military's still hiring...but don't expect that, if you get injured, you'll actually get coverage, or even an honorable discharge, since they've got folks working to redefine your situation as pre-existing or not combat-related...
1.14.2009
you animal!
Normally, I listen to songs before I post them. But it's 11 at night, Rose is sleeping, and my headphones are in the next room (I'm lazy), so I haven't heard this song I'm posting. Why am I posting it?
Because (1) Neko Case and Anti- Records will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that posts this song. So even if the song sucks (and I seriously doubt it will, given my experience with Case's last two albums), it's still worth posting.
Oh, and (2) I will donate money to the same organization if Neko herself comes by my house...say, next Thursday at about 2pm.
Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve" (Middle Cyclone, 2009)
(via Anti-'s label blog - which also has info on posting the track yourself)
Because (1) Neko Case and Anti- Records will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that posts this song. So even if the song sucks (and I seriously doubt it will, given my experience with Case's last two albums), it's still worth posting.
Oh, and (2) I will donate money to the same organization if Neko herself comes by my house...say, next Thursday at about 2pm.
Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve" (Middle Cyclone, 2009)
(via Anti-'s label blog - which also has info on posting the track yourself)
Resolved:
Ugliest female name: Gretchen.
Ugliest male name: Jared.
Both sound like characters in epic Vogon poetry. Hearing them aloud is an experience akin to feeling an unidentified something the consistency of hard rubber in your mouth as you're desperately and drunkenly consuming an anonymous burrito in a flickering neon-lit place cockroaches are scared to inhabit.
In other words, ick factorial.
Ugliest male name: Jared.
Both sound like characters in epic Vogon poetry. Hearing them aloud is an experience akin to feeling an unidentified something the consistency of hard rubber in your mouth as you're desperately and drunkenly consuming an anonymous burrito in a flickering neon-lit place cockroaches are scared to inhabit.
In other words, ick factorial.
1.13.2009
another in a series of insane musical comparisons
For the first time in way, way too long, I was listening today to Paul McCartney's Band on the Run. First thing I thought: why did I ever think this wasn't a fantastic album? Second, and odder thought: as I was listening to "Jet" (which is a brilliant pop song) I suddenly found myself thinking of Stephen Malkmus. Now, vocally there's almost no similarity; musically, while Malkmus sometimes draws from classic '70s rock and '60s psych (both of which, of course, McCartney had a hand in originating), the emphasis is very different...but what struck me is that the critical darts hurled McCartney's way in the seventies had much to do with the way he failed to fit with then-emerging rock-critical orthodoxy: his lyrics were rarely either deeply meaningful (or attempting same), knottily allusive, or at all self-important, and he seemed pretty unconcerned with being profound. Plus - I mean, Linda McCartney playing keyboards? She wasn't even a musician! (Of course, within a couple of years, had Paul been a young punk, Linda's non-musician status would have been a plus...Paul was ahead of the curve there.) But the reason I found myself thinking of Malkmus during "Jet" in particular was a certain insouciance, an off-kilter tendency toward little private jokes, and the way the lyrics seem to point toward some sort of heavier subject matter but then turn that very pointing into a sort of joking parody. That seems Malkmus-like to me: a couple of lines in "Jet" gesture at the British class system...but they're so vague and joking that any kind of idea refuses to gain traction. Coupled with that are goofy lines like "I thought the major...wass a lady...sufferagette!" - I spelled the last word wrong intentionally to get the extra syllable McCartney adds: you can almost hear him cracking up at the goofy pronunciation...kind of like Malkmus riffing on "career! career! Korea!" in "Cut Your Hair" - or that "the only lonely place was on the moon." Malkmus's word salad tends a bit more toward the recherché (a word that's much more likely to appear in one of his songs than in McCartney's) but he too seems content to riff on associations and sound (compare "jet"/"suffragette") rather than worry meaning to a shred.
So in the seventies, the peak of Rolling Stone high critical seriousness, McCartney's work was dismissed as fluffy, meaningless, pop pap...whereas in the nineties and uh-ohs, Malkmus gets branded with "irony" - which, although not necessarily as critical as "fluffy" was, is still off-base - in that it implies an emotional standpoint either critical or above-it-all, and most often there's little evidence in Malkmus's work to suggest either perspective. I mean, when you write a set of lines like "You are a gardenia pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack of an Afrikaaner candidate for mild reform" (from "Gardenia"), the "point," if there is one, seems more to be a joke at extending a metaphoric comparison far past its breaking point in terms of specificity - not some sort of withering critique of, I dunno, Afrikaaner candidates for mild reform, or mild reform, or the pressing of gardenias.
Next up: why Tori Amos is just like The Kingsmen. Or maybe Leonard Cohen. I'm not sure.
So in the seventies, the peak of Rolling Stone high critical seriousness, McCartney's work was dismissed as fluffy, meaningless, pop pap...whereas in the nineties and uh-ohs, Malkmus gets branded with "irony" - which, although not necessarily as critical as "fluffy" was, is still off-base - in that it implies an emotional standpoint either critical or above-it-all, and most often there's little evidence in Malkmus's work to suggest either perspective. I mean, when you write a set of lines like "You are a gardenia pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack of an Afrikaaner candidate for mild reform" (from "Gardenia"), the "point," if there is one, seems more to be a joke at extending a metaphoric comparison far past its breaking point in terms of specificity - not some sort of withering critique of, I dunno, Afrikaaner candidates for mild reform, or mild reform, or the pressing of gardenias.
Next up: why Tori Amos is just like The Kingsmen. Or maybe Leonard Cohen. I'm not sure.
1.12.2009
please - still no heart attacks
Long-time readers will know that I consider it my duty to mention any and every scrap of musical activity undertaken by Jersey's heroes, the Wrens (example, from my entry posted February 4, 2005: "Kevin Whelan, on his way to work this morning, tripped on a loose bit of carpeting and banged his left elbow on the piano. The chord that resulted consisted of E, F, F#, G, A, and C two octaves below middle C (the expected B is broken) and reportedly will form a leitmotivic chord for the operatic song cycle based on the tunnel builders of Newark, due to be released sometime in 2057. It is projected to be a full 47 seconds long, and recording will commence in 2012, with overdubs scheduled for the following thirty years, while the band's heirs negotiate direct-to-cortex release for the remaining fifteen years").
But really truly actually the Wrens have released a new song. Okay, it's "new" only if you don't notice it's really the same song as "In Turkish Waters," which was released last month (and was on one of my 2008 mixes)...but this is a different recording. What's more, it is the first time all four Wrenseses have performed together in a studio in ten years. And that studio, my friends, is none other than (Zappa looks over at the majestic Albert Hall pipe organ) Abbey Road studios.
Take that, Beatles! Ha - those guys haven't recorded together in the last ten years either! And you're thinking that's because two of them are dead...yeah, well, two of the Wrens were dead (for tax purposes) for a year in the early 2000s, so there.
Anycow, the new song (here titled "Pulled Fences") is available for an entire penny less than a dollar via this little chromium link here. Long-suffering Wrens obsessives may also note that ZOMG it's an entirely new website. (Note: "new" in this sense includes some text not updated since 2002 - but really, there's lotsa new stuff, including a much-more detailed discography, with notes in trademarked Wrens "we suck worse than all you guys think we do" style, and a new layout, and the rest of Charles Bissell's hair is being auctioned off. Hurry, before it's all gone!)
But really truly actually the Wrens have released a new song. Okay, it's "new" only if you don't notice it's really the same song as "In Turkish Waters," which was released last month (and was on one of my 2008 mixes)...but this is a different recording. What's more, it is the first time all four Wrenseses have performed together in a studio in ten years. And that studio, my friends, is none other than (Zappa looks over at the majestic Albert Hall pipe organ) Abbey Road studios.
Take that, Beatles! Ha - those guys haven't recorded together in the last ten years either! And you're thinking that's because two of them are dead...yeah, well, two of the Wrens were dead (for tax purposes) for a year in the early 2000s, so there.
Anycow, the new song (here titled "Pulled Fences") is available for an entire penny less than a dollar via this little chromium link here. Long-suffering Wrens obsessives may also note that ZOMG it's an entirely new website. (Note: "new" in this sense includes some text not updated since 2002 - but really, there's lotsa new stuff, including a much-more detailed discography, with notes in trademarked Wrens "we suck worse than all you guys think we do" style, and a new layout, and the rest of Charles Bissell's hair is being auctioned off. Hurry, before it's all gone!)
1.11.2009
stand in the place where you live...
Strictly local content here...but it's curious how marketers assume certain things based on geography. In today's mail was one of those packets of coupons that arrive periodically - usually, I open them to see if one of them might be for somewhere I go to regularly or might be interested in, then toss it in the recycle bin.
But I've noticed that that marketers assume folks in our neighborhood (about two miles north of the airport, near the Walgreen's where Howell and Chase meet) are more interested in businesses to the south: nearer the airport, in St. Francis, Cudahy, or South Milwaukee. Of the 11 coupons for local businesses with one or two locations, 9 of them were south of us, and of the 2 whose location is to our north, one was three blocks north. Only one featured anything north of I-94...and that was one with two locations, one of which is in the Third Ward. (Those coupons were for an exercise center and a fried chicken place. The other coupons were for a bar that serves your typical bar food, two different Chinese restaurants, an Italian restaurant, a pizza place, a donut shop, a discount haircut joint, a hotel, and a carpet and tile outlet.)
But we ourselves are far more oriented toward businesses to the north of us. We're far likelier to head north when we go out or shop - to the Bay View business district, to the Third or Fifth Wards, downtown, or the East Side or Riverwest. That might be because we're former East Siders and Riverwest residents...but more likely, it's because of the kind of restaurants, bars, and other businesses we're interested in. My guess is that if we lived in a hipper part of Bay View, more of those businesses would show up in such mailers.
Or not: I'm kind of thinking the older, lower-middle-class crowd these places imply are probably more into coupons than yr hipster joints might be. (O noes did I just out myself as being vaguely hipsteresque? Vaguely...I mean, Blogger is like the AOL of free blog sites, isn't it?)
But I've noticed that that marketers assume folks in our neighborhood (about two miles north of the airport, near the Walgreen's where Howell and Chase meet) are more interested in businesses to the south: nearer the airport, in St. Francis, Cudahy, or South Milwaukee. Of the 11 coupons for local businesses with one or two locations, 9 of them were south of us, and of the 2 whose location is to our north, one was three blocks north. Only one featured anything north of I-94...and that was one with two locations, one of which is in the Third Ward. (Those coupons were for an exercise center and a fried chicken place. The other coupons were for a bar that serves your typical bar food, two different Chinese restaurants, an Italian restaurant, a pizza place, a donut shop, a discount haircut joint, a hotel, and a carpet and tile outlet.)
But we ourselves are far more oriented toward businesses to the north of us. We're far likelier to head north when we go out or shop - to the Bay View business district, to the Third or Fifth Wards, downtown, or the East Side or Riverwest. That might be because we're former East Siders and Riverwest residents...but more likely, it's because of the kind of restaurants, bars, and other businesses we're interested in. My guess is that if we lived in a hipper part of Bay View, more of those businesses would show up in such mailers.
Or not: I'm kind of thinking the older, lower-middle-class crowd these places imply are probably more into coupons than yr hipster joints might be. (O noes did I just out myself as being vaguely hipsteresque? Vaguely...I mean, Blogger is like the AOL of free blog sites, isn't it?)
1.10.2009
my new favorite joke
Philip Glass walks into a bar Philip Glass walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar walks into a bar Philip Glass Philip Philip Phil Philip Glass walks Glass walks Glass walks into Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Glass Glass Glass Glass Philip bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.
1.08.2009
Hey! You got Onion in my CNN!
So I'm having lunch at Comet and reading The Onion, when I happen to look up at the TV, which was playing CNN. There's a crawl at the bottom saying something like PORN INDUSTRY WANTS ITS OWN BAILOUT.
You know that Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint, where the main character Ragle Gumm finds objects disintegrating in front of him, replaced only by scraps of paper saying things like DESK and the like? (You know that Orson Scott Card - author of Ender's Game - and the folks who put together The Truman Show should be paying Dick's estate royalties...) This was a more high-tech version, where somehow the world of The Onion had escaped its textual confines and had virally infected the actual news.
That must be the answer. Because with more people unemployed with nothing else to do, how could the porn industry possibly be suffering?
(Next post will not mention The Onion - promise. Unless they pay me.)
You know that Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint, where the main character Ragle Gumm finds objects disintegrating in front of him, replaced only by scraps of paper saying things like DESK and the like? (You know that Orson Scott Card - author of Ender's Game - and the folks who put together The Truman Show should be paying Dick's estate royalties...) This was a more high-tech version, where somehow the world of The Onion had escaped its textual confines and had virally infected the actual news.
That must be the answer. Because with more people unemployed with nothing else to do, how could the porn industry possibly be suffering?
(Next post will not mention The Onion - promise. Unless they pay me.)
1.06.2009
best (if tasteless) t-shirt of the year
Via Decider Milwaukee (a/k/a The Onion's local-edition calendar thingy). I love the way whoever snapped the photo managed to get his or her thumb in the image...
1.04.2009
there's more to life than books, you know - but not much more
Several worthy tracks fell between the cracks of my 2008 mixes - mostly because while there's a place for random tracks, and a place for songs from my favorite albums, there's not a place for songs from albums I own that don't make my top 20. (I don't make the rules, I just - wait: I do make the rules. Guess I could change that.)
One album that might well end up among my twenty favorite albums of 2008, if I were to redo the list after some months, is Simon Bookish's Everything/Everything. I'd just downloaded the album from eMusic a few days before putting together my lists. I downloaded it on the strength of the two tracks linked below, which had been sent around the flackosphere for months.
First, you gotta love a guy who calls himself "Simon Bookish"...and then puts out an album with this cover:
I suppose the simplest way to describe Simon Bookish's music is that it sounds almost exactly what you'd expect music by "Simon Bookish" to sound like. It might also help to imagine a collaboration among David Bowie, David Byrne, and Philip Glass (even though Bookish has a song called "Terry Riley Disco," the horn and keyboard arrangements are closer to Glass's work than Riley's). Both "Synchrotron" and "Dumb Terminal" feature extended, multipart structures, which isn't necessarily typical - but I think Bookish does much to recuperate the diminished stature of the saxophone, abused over these years by everyone from annoying blues honkers to Sanborn-esque cheese merchants. There's also much to be said for the sort of insouciant abstraction of the lyrics, along with Bookish's alternately melodramatic and distant vocals.
Everything/Everything is on Tomlab (another good indicator, if you know that label's work), and Bookish apparently has released two earlier titles, Unfair/Funfair and Trainwreck/Raincheck (noticing a trend?), which apparently do not necessarily sound anything like this.
Simon Bookish "Synchrotron" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
Simon Bookish "Dumb Terminal" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
One album that might well end up among my twenty favorite albums of 2008, if I were to redo the list after some months, is Simon Bookish's Everything/Everything. I'd just downloaded the album from eMusic a few days before putting together my lists. I downloaded it on the strength of the two tracks linked below, which had been sent around the flackosphere for months.
First, you gotta love a guy who calls himself "Simon Bookish"...and then puts out an album with this cover:
I suppose the simplest way to describe Simon Bookish's music is that it sounds almost exactly what you'd expect music by "Simon Bookish" to sound like. It might also help to imagine a collaboration among David Bowie, David Byrne, and Philip Glass (even though Bookish has a song called "Terry Riley Disco," the horn and keyboard arrangements are closer to Glass's work than Riley's). Both "Synchrotron" and "Dumb Terminal" feature extended, multipart structures, which isn't necessarily typical - but I think Bookish does much to recuperate the diminished stature of the saxophone, abused over these years by everyone from annoying blues honkers to Sanborn-esque cheese merchants. There's also much to be said for the sort of insouciant abstraction of the lyrics, along with Bookish's alternately melodramatic and distant vocals.
Everything/Everything is on Tomlab (another good indicator, if you know that label's work), and Bookish apparently has released two earlier titles, Unfair/Funfair and Trainwreck/Raincheck (noticing a trend?), which apparently do not necessarily sound anything like this.
Simon Bookish "Synchrotron" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
Simon Bookish "Dumb Terminal" (Everything/Everything, 2008)
1.03.2009
a house is not a motel, or...
Last night was our first night sleeping in the new bedroom - complete with new bed, sheets, pillows, and blankets. It's always a little odd, sleeping in a new place...perhaps odder when it's your own. You realize that all kinds of little details and rituals need to be worked out and reimagined: where stuff goes, habitual motions, gestures, etc., and of course the obvious getting used to a new bed. We discovered, for example, that the eyebrow dormer lets in a lot of south light later in the mornings: this won't be a problem on weekdays when we get up and go to work, but if we want to sleep later on weekends (and we do), we'll need to find a way to dim that down, without just slapping up something that blocks the light all the time. And of course, we discover minor things that either need to be changed (already, we moved one of the shelves in the closet, partly for cat-related reasons but mostly for functionality) or that we would have done differently had we been able to live in the space before building it. (Dammit - I knew I should have done that Sims thing...)
But for the most part, we're incredibly pleased: Rose's design mostly works exactly as we'd hoped it would, and we're so happy finally to have been able to do this.
But for the most part, we're incredibly pleased: Rose's design mostly works exactly as we'd hoped it would, and we're so happy finally to have been able to do this.
12.31.2008
2008 top 20
Here's a selection of songs from my 20 favorite albums of 2008. I sequenced them to play in order, so the order doesn't reflect any ranking of the songs' host albums.
Ringtone Tycoon: The Automated Pushover
1. The Bye Bye Blackbirds "The Ghosts Are Alright" (Houses & Homes)
2. Ghosty "A Good Customer" (Answers)
3. These New Puritans "Elvis" (Beat Pyramid)
4. School of Language "This Is No Fun" (Sea from Shore)
5. Department of Eagles "Waves of Rye" (In Ear Park)
6. TV on the Radio "Family Tree" (Dear Science)
7. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks "Out of Reaches" (Real Emotional Trash)
8. Shannon McArdle "I Was Warned" (Summer of the Whore)
9. The Black Watch "Peppermint" (Icing the Snow Queen)
10. Mike Viola "That Part of Me Is Dead" (Lurch)
11. Albert Hammond Jr. "In My Room" (¿Cómo Te Llama?)
12. Wire "All Fours" (Object 47)
13. School of Seven Bells "Connjur" (Alpinisms)
14. Momus "Fade to White" (Joemus)
15. The Week That Was "The Story Waits for No One" (The Week That Was)
16. The Chap "Wuss Wuss" (Mega Breakfast)
17. Sam Phillips "My Career in Chemistry" (Don't Do Anything)
18. Portishead "We Carry On" (Third)
19. Beck "Chemtrails" (Modern Guilt)
20. Clinic "Shopping Bag" (Do It!)
Playlist: enjoy! Everyone have a happy new year, and here's to 2009!
Ringtone Tycoon: The Automated Pushover
1. The Bye Bye Blackbirds "The Ghosts Are Alright" (Houses & Homes)
2. Ghosty "A Good Customer" (Answers)
3. These New Puritans "Elvis" (Beat Pyramid)
4. School of Language "This Is No Fun" (Sea from Shore)
5. Department of Eagles "Waves of Rye" (In Ear Park)
6. TV on the Radio "Family Tree" (Dear Science)
7. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks "Out of Reaches" (Real Emotional Trash)
8. Shannon McArdle "I Was Warned" (Summer of the Whore)
9. The Black Watch "Peppermint" (Icing the Snow Queen)
10. Mike Viola "That Part of Me Is Dead" (Lurch)
11. Albert Hammond Jr. "In My Room" (¿Cómo Te Llama?)
12. Wire "All Fours" (Object 47)
13. School of Seven Bells "Connjur" (Alpinisms)
14. Momus "Fade to White" (Joemus)
15. The Week That Was "The Story Waits for No One" (The Week That Was)
16. The Chap "Wuss Wuss" (Mega Breakfast)
17. Sam Phillips "My Career in Chemistry" (Don't Do Anything)
18. Portishead "We Carry On" (Third)
19. Beck "Chemtrails" (Modern Guilt)
20. Clinic "Shopping Bag" (Do It!)
Playlist: enjoy! Everyone have a happy new year, and here's to 2009!
2008 top albums
Typically this entry will feature a mini-essay on some music-related phenomena I observed during the preceding year...but you know, I can't think of anything that isn't dead boring and analyzed to death: declining sales blah-blah, downloads yadda-yadda-yadda, market share zzzzzz... Oh well - at least the RIAA appears to have stopped suing its customer base. (Or the media have also grown bored with covering same.)
Anyway, I care about that stuff only to the extent it affects the music - and while some of those business-type trends indeed are dire (I'm still in shock that Atomic Records will be no more), as it happens there were indeed lots of good albums released in 2008. I don't know what else to call them: music is still most often released in packets of songs from 35 to 75 minutes long, whether such packets ever end up occupying a particular piece of plastic or not, so "album" it is (as in "collection of associated items"). I suspect this is so, and will continue to be so, both from marketing perspectives and from musicians' perspective: the popularity of online playlists speaks to the way people enjoy experiencing songs in the context of other songs, and so songwriters are still attentive to the way a sequence of songs establishes a particular context for each of those songs. And of course, the atomization into single digital downloads is exaggerated anyway; bands still write more than one song, listeners still download more than one, and the moment they start listening, they either put them in a sequence or experience them in one.
Anyway: here's the top tier of my favorite albums of 2008. Within each tier, the albums are simply alphabetical by title. I didn't even attempt to rank them any more finely. "DL" most likely refers to (legal) downloads via eMusic, although occasionally I may have acquired the tracks from a publicist or because the band's giving it away at their website.
Top Tier:
Alpinisms School of Seven Bells: This one blindsided me: I heard one track and liked it, heard another track and liked it, heard a third...then downloaded the album from eMusic and here it is among my ten favorites of the year. It's sort of like one of those old candy bars that has eight different flavors - although in this case, they're blended rather than separated. (DL)
Answers Ghosty: Clever, intelligent, sophisticated pop, well-played and nicely arranged: why ask more? (CD)
Don't Do Anything Sam Phillips: Phillips continues her stealth campaign to put out weird little records that casual listeners think are folk music...the production and arranging on this are spare, subtle, but often rather odd, but her voice is in the forefront, and there's usually an acoustic guitar, so people will overlook that the title track, for example, sounds rather like a My Bloody Valentine outtake. (CD)
Houses & Homes The Bye Bye Blackbirds: I used to agonize slightly over whether it was fair to put albums largely written by people I know on these lists - I don't have to do that when the albums are as good as this one. Songwriter Bradley Skaught says he was listening to a lot of mid-sixties Everly Brothers while the band was making this record, and that shows in the country/folk roots of the songwriting, the sophistication and airiness of the arrangements and recording, and of course in the vocal harmonies (which, being three- and four-part, are more Byrds than Everlys...but had there been a third singing Everly Brother, they would have sounded like the Byrds anyway). (CD)
Icing the Snow Queen The Black Watch: John Andrew Fredrick may not be exactly a one-man band, but clearly it's his sensibilities, and layers of guitars, that dominate proceedings here. The band has eight to ten excellent albums, but bad record-label deals and negligent publicity means they tend to be far more obscure than they should be. (Fredrick has, I believe, a full-time academic position as well, which prohibits much touring, which might contribute as well.) (DL)
In Ear Park Department of Eagles: Because Daniel Rossen's other band Grizzly Bear received reams of (deserved) publicity, people tend to think of Department of Eagles as a spinoff act...but in fact, DoE predates Grizzly Bear, being formed nearly a decade ago by Rossen and his then-college-roommate Fred Nicolaus. There's a curious combination of delicacy and power, even brutality, in the arrangements; the delicacy is easy to hear, but sometimes the band heaps up guitars and basses and pushes them into the red, and the effect is rather like an enormous tree, struck by lightning and falling directly toward you. (DL)
Lurch Mike Viola: This was released in late 2007 online, but since there was a physical release this year (and since I didn't hear the whole thing until this year), I'm counting it. Pure pop for now people (to be unoriginal): as I wrote the other day, I'm well past the peak of my power-pop fanaticism, but when someone gets that combination of melody, harmonies, and clever songwriting and arranging just right, it still sounds damned good. (DL)
Modern Guilt Beck: I keep underestimating Beck - every time he releases an album, I sort of delay picking it up (although having to hold my nose at his Scientology might have much to do with that), and then when I finally get around to it, the album almost invariably is better than I'd hoped, and tends to just get better on repeat listen. Modern Guilt is an exception only in that I actually bought the thing relatively early in its release - and this is the record where Beck seems to integrate much of the disparate strands of his songwriting rather than isolate them into particular albums. He's grown into a versatile, confident, and still exceedingly clever writer and arranger, and he's also become a fine singer - and he has a knack for hiring the right people to realize his sounds as well. (CD)
Real Emotional Trash Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Malkmus is another guy who seems to have settled into what he's doing: his first few post-Pavement releases seemed a bit uncertain, snatching from a stylistic grab-bag and sometimes coming up a bit sketchy in the songwriting department. I think it helps that, even though he's wanted all his "solo" albums to have been co-billed with the Jicks, this is the first album on which they actually sound like a band as opposed to hired hands playing Malkmus songs: even on the rather jammy Pig Lib, the songs sounded as if they'd been entirely written beforehand, and then the band stretched them out. Here the long songs sound as if they've been developed by the band, as part of the writing and recording process (this also means Malkmus and the Jicks are a fantastic live act these days, especially drummer Janet Weiss). It's also interesting to compare this with the most recent Pavement reissue (Brighten the Corners); listening to that Pavement album, the roots of Malkmus's current music are clear. (CD)
Third Portishead: If Portishead had wanted to give this album a real title, Lowered Expectations probably would have been it...at least before it was released. The band hadn't released a studio recording since 1997's Dummy, and as the band epitomized the frozen-in-mid-nineties-amber style known as "trip hop" (a style which had not experienced massive calls for revival), one could be forgiven for imagining that anything new would be either a lame retread or some horrendous attempt to be "contemporary." Nope: the band instead produced the most uncompromising record of its career. Yes, the sound is still cinematic, but from the dark yet romantic aura of its first releases, the sort of film evoked on this album is far darker, more unsettling: a sort of gothic, psychological horror film, whose violence is primarily emotional and almost exclusively offscreen. Beth Gibbons sings like ice on fire - if that fire were carefully banked and focused - and the arrangements are ruthlessly discordant, electronic, harsh...but sometimes also beautiful, a beauty which in such context is as disquieting as menace might normally be. "We Carry On" (the track on my playlist) is practically a Silver Apples tribute in its textures, but if the electronics sound soldered together by Dr. Frankenstein, the microtonal timbres wrench the whole thing out from its roots: there's a synth part whose pitch is halfway between the bass note and a lurching harmony a minor second above, which also plays a role in the song's texture. (CD)
Next Tier:
¿Cómo Te Llama? Albert Hammond Jr.: With his second solo album, Hammond seems nearly poised to relegate his main band, the Strokes, to the trivia-question file - this album feels more alive and lived-in than all but the first Strokes album. Hammond also contributes to what seems a mini-power-pop resurgence this year - in addition to the usual virtues of that genre, I really like the playing and recording on this record: there's a crackling presence to many of the tracks (one guitar in particular, I swear you think the guy's amp is in your living room). (CD)
Beat Pyramid These New Puritans: With Wire moving toward one of its more pop-oriented phases (successfully: see below), and the Fall in one its periodic drifts toward sketchiness, here's a band mining such obvious influences (they're even named after a Fall song) but without seeming like someone's tribute act. Partly that's due to sheer youth and enthusiasm (the band members are in their early 20s), but I think it's also just because they do it so well...and incorporate a lot of more contemporary, electronic influences as well. Oh - and they sound great played really loud. That always helps. (CD)
Dear Science TV on the Radio: While many past TVOTR songs sounded as if the band threw every idea (and every vocal track) they could think of into the mix, here the band cuts back - sometimes even becoming (gasp!) pretty in the process ("Family Tree" is an example, on the playlist). Maybe not as powerful or overwhelming as their first few releases, but when a band is still growing after several years filled with critical acclaim (rather than repeating itself or disintegrating), that's a good sign. (CD)
Do It! Clinic: Clinic roars back, with a little less subtlety than 2007's Visitations and a lot more noise, while still retaining the surrealistic crossword puzzle intrigue of their lyrics. (CD)
Joemus Momus: Aside from having a terrible title (Momus collaborates with Glasgow's Joe Howe, of Germlin and Gay Against You), this album finds Momus incorporating Howe's video-game squiggles into a set of songs often surprisingly indebted to Scottish folk...then again, given that one of Momus's in-the-works projects is something called The Book of Scotlands, maybe that's less surprising. I'm sure many will be alienated and ask why he ruins this perfectly good melody with all that noise (while others will lean the opposite way, wondering why he's gumming up such cool noises with sappy little melodies), I find the combination, and the tension it creates, intriguing and refreshing. And although it didn't fit the playlist, the album's closing track is one of the most affecting things Momus has ever done: a dying vaudevillian wheezes out his last breath, wondering what ever's happened to his world. (CD)
Mega Breakfast The Chap: Speaking of Momus, I sometimes think The Chap is what might have resulted had Momus and Wire formed a band largely influenced by Robyn Hitchcock's "Uncorrected Personality Traits" and the four-part vocal harmonies to go with. Sometimes The Chap's music is almost straightforward, streamlined 21st century rock-pop; other times it's sheer avant-gardist noise; but most often it's both at the same time, with those vocal harmonies piled atop cracking beats, guitar riffs, scratching violin, and glitchy electronic belches and hiccups. (CD)
Object 47 Wire: As I noted above, Wire's moving gradually toward the more pop end of its stylistic pendulations, but Object 47 is curious in that, with a couple exceptions, it works better as a whole than as isolated tracks. The lead track, released for download ahead of the album's issue, was "One of Us," and it's a fine number with a classic Colin Newman vocal melody, but it (along with the album's closer "All Fours") is one of the few tracks that works as well outside its context. Consequently, the album places a bit lower for me than it might have...although it may well be another example of a Wire album gradually rising in my estimation over the years. (CD)
The Week That Was The Week That Was; Sea from Shore School of Language: In a somewhat odd move, Field Music (one of the most intriguing acts of the past few years) split in two this year...even though the Brewis brothers still work together and some personnel are in common between each of the brothers' releases. So, instead of one new Field Music album, we get a short album (just barely 30 minutes long in each case) from two new bands. Fortunately, they're both excellent...and the other curious thing is that they're rather similar, stylistically (suggesting that the break-up was not due primarily to the usual "musical differences"). School of Language's album came out first, led by the simultaneously catchy and annoying glossolalic riff of the four-part "Rockist" (vowel-speak a la "O Superman"), and TWTW's self-titled album came along later in the year. School of Language seems more dominated by keyboards, while TWTW adds some light orchestral coloring to the mix. Both continue to sort of pointillist post-punk/prog mix of Field Music, sounding rather like Gentle Giant at times, although scaled down in terms of ambition and complexity. (CD for both)
Summer of the Whore Shannon McArdle: This is probably the most ruthless post-break-up album I've heard - ruthless both toward the singer's ex and toward herself (the "whore" of the title track isn't her ex's new lover, it's herself). Musically, it's first-rate Chicago-school avant-pop: some country, some folk, some post-rock touches, careful arrangements and production, all done with a great degree of skill, craft, and intensity. (DL)
Honorable Mentions:
One interesting thing about this section: a number of artists whose albums have frequently made the top reaches of my listings ended up here, in the second half of the top fifty. I'm not sure yet if that means they're subpar releases for those acts, or if they're just suffering from the "oh, another decent album from this band again" syndrome.
Doleful Lions 7, Aimee Mann @#%&*! Smilers, R.E.M. Accelerate, Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue, Stereolab Chemical Chords, Future of the Left Curses, The Magnetic Fields Distortion, Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell, David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Sparks Exotic Creatures of the Deep, The Fall Imperial Wax Solvent, The Helio Sequence Keep Your Eyes Ahead, Atlas Sound Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, The Raveonettes Lust Lust Lust, Deerhunter Microcastle, Elvis Costello & the Imposters Momofuku, No Age Nouns, Deerhoof Offend Maggie, Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping, The Hold Steady Stay Positive, Robert Forster The Evangelist, American Music Club The Golden Age, Destroyer Trouble in Dreams, The Baseball Project Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, Fever Marlene White China, The Walkmen You & Me
(If anyone cares, this link brings you to a chart listing the above as well as all the other 2008 albums I acquired, including those I haven't had a chance to listen to - a couple of which have potential to dislodge some of the above.)
The next entry will contain the playlist of tracks from my top 20 albums of 2008.
Anyway, I care about that stuff only to the extent it affects the music - and while some of those business-type trends indeed are dire (I'm still in shock that Atomic Records will be no more), as it happens there were indeed lots of good albums released in 2008. I don't know what else to call them: music is still most often released in packets of songs from 35 to 75 minutes long, whether such packets ever end up occupying a particular piece of plastic or not, so "album" it is (as in "collection of associated items"). I suspect this is so, and will continue to be so, both from marketing perspectives and from musicians' perspective: the popularity of online playlists speaks to the way people enjoy experiencing songs in the context of other songs, and so songwriters are still attentive to the way a sequence of songs establishes a particular context for each of those songs. And of course, the atomization into single digital downloads is exaggerated anyway; bands still write more than one song, listeners still download more than one, and the moment they start listening, they either put them in a sequence or experience them in one.
Anyway: here's the top tier of my favorite albums of 2008. Within each tier, the albums are simply alphabetical by title. I didn't even attempt to rank them any more finely. "DL" most likely refers to (legal) downloads via eMusic, although occasionally I may have acquired the tracks from a publicist or because the band's giving it away at their website.
Top Tier:
Alpinisms School of Seven Bells: This one blindsided me: I heard one track and liked it, heard another track and liked it, heard a third...then downloaded the album from eMusic and here it is among my ten favorites of the year. It's sort of like one of those old candy bars that has eight different flavors - although in this case, they're blended rather than separated. (DL)
Answers Ghosty: Clever, intelligent, sophisticated pop, well-played and nicely arranged: why ask more? (CD)
Don't Do Anything Sam Phillips: Phillips continues her stealth campaign to put out weird little records that casual listeners think are folk music...the production and arranging on this are spare, subtle, but often rather odd, but her voice is in the forefront, and there's usually an acoustic guitar, so people will overlook that the title track, for example, sounds rather like a My Bloody Valentine outtake. (CD)
Houses & Homes The Bye Bye Blackbirds: I used to agonize slightly over whether it was fair to put albums largely written by people I know on these lists - I don't have to do that when the albums are as good as this one. Songwriter Bradley Skaught says he was listening to a lot of mid-sixties Everly Brothers while the band was making this record, and that shows in the country/folk roots of the songwriting, the sophistication and airiness of the arrangements and recording, and of course in the vocal harmonies (which, being three- and four-part, are more Byrds than Everlys...but had there been a third singing Everly Brother, they would have sounded like the Byrds anyway). (CD)
Icing the Snow Queen The Black Watch: John Andrew Fredrick may not be exactly a one-man band, but clearly it's his sensibilities, and layers of guitars, that dominate proceedings here. The band has eight to ten excellent albums, but bad record-label deals and negligent publicity means they tend to be far more obscure than they should be. (Fredrick has, I believe, a full-time academic position as well, which prohibits much touring, which might contribute as well.) (DL)
In Ear Park Department of Eagles: Because Daniel Rossen's other band Grizzly Bear received reams of (deserved) publicity, people tend to think of Department of Eagles as a spinoff act...but in fact, DoE predates Grizzly Bear, being formed nearly a decade ago by Rossen and his then-college-roommate Fred Nicolaus. There's a curious combination of delicacy and power, even brutality, in the arrangements; the delicacy is easy to hear, but sometimes the band heaps up guitars and basses and pushes them into the red, and the effect is rather like an enormous tree, struck by lightning and falling directly toward you. (DL)
Lurch Mike Viola: This was released in late 2007 online, but since there was a physical release this year (and since I didn't hear the whole thing until this year), I'm counting it. Pure pop for now people (to be unoriginal): as I wrote the other day, I'm well past the peak of my power-pop fanaticism, but when someone gets that combination of melody, harmonies, and clever songwriting and arranging just right, it still sounds damned good. (DL)
Modern Guilt Beck: I keep underestimating Beck - every time he releases an album, I sort of delay picking it up (although having to hold my nose at his Scientology might have much to do with that), and then when I finally get around to it, the album almost invariably is better than I'd hoped, and tends to just get better on repeat listen. Modern Guilt is an exception only in that I actually bought the thing relatively early in its release - and this is the record where Beck seems to integrate much of the disparate strands of his songwriting rather than isolate them into particular albums. He's grown into a versatile, confident, and still exceedingly clever writer and arranger, and he's also become a fine singer - and he has a knack for hiring the right people to realize his sounds as well. (CD)
Real Emotional Trash Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Malkmus is another guy who seems to have settled into what he's doing: his first few post-Pavement releases seemed a bit uncertain, snatching from a stylistic grab-bag and sometimes coming up a bit sketchy in the songwriting department. I think it helps that, even though he's wanted all his "solo" albums to have been co-billed with the Jicks, this is the first album on which they actually sound like a band as opposed to hired hands playing Malkmus songs: even on the rather jammy Pig Lib, the songs sounded as if they'd been entirely written beforehand, and then the band stretched them out. Here the long songs sound as if they've been developed by the band, as part of the writing and recording process (this also means Malkmus and the Jicks are a fantastic live act these days, especially drummer Janet Weiss). It's also interesting to compare this with the most recent Pavement reissue (Brighten the Corners); listening to that Pavement album, the roots of Malkmus's current music are clear. (CD)
Third Portishead: If Portishead had wanted to give this album a real title, Lowered Expectations probably would have been it...at least before it was released. The band hadn't released a studio recording since 1997's Dummy, and as the band epitomized the frozen-in-mid-nineties-amber style known as "trip hop" (a style which had not experienced massive calls for revival), one could be forgiven for imagining that anything new would be either a lame retread or some horrendous attempt to be "contemporary." Nope: the band instead produced the most uncompromising record of its career. Yes, the sound is still cinematic, but from the dark yet romantic aura of its first releases, the sort of film evoked on this album is far darker, more unsettling: a sort of gothic, psychological horror film, whose violence is primarily emotional and almost exclusively offscreen. Beth Gibbons sings like ice on fire - if that fire were carefully banked and focused - and the arrangements are ruthlessly discordant, electronic, harsh...but sometimes also beautiful, a beauty which in such context is as disquieting as menace might normally be. "We Carry On" (the track on my playlist) is practically a Silver Apples tribute in its textures, but if the electronics sound soldered together by Dr. Frankenstein, the microtonal timbres wrench the whole thing out from its roots: there's a synth part whose pitch is halfway between the bass note and a lurching harmony a minor second above, which also plays a role in the song's texture. (CD)
Next Tier:
¿Cómo Te Llama? Albert Hammond Jr.: With his second solo album, Hammond seems nearly poised to relegate his main band, the Strokes, to the trivia-question file - this album feels more alive and lived-in than all but the first Strokes album. Hammond also contributes to what seems a mini-power-pop resurgence this year - in addition to the usual virtues of that genre, I really like the playing and recording on this record: there's a crackling presence to many of the tracks (one guitar in particular, I swear you think the guy's amp is in your living room). (CD)
Beat Pyramid These New Puritans: With Wire moving toward one of its more pop-oriented phases (successfully: see below), and the Fall in one its periodic drifts toward sketchiness, here's a band mining such obvious influences (they're even named after a Fall song) but without seeming like someone's tribute act. Partly that's due to sheer youth and enthusiasm (the band members are in their early 20s), but I think it's also just because they do it so well...and incorporate a lot of more contemporary, electronic influences as well. Oh - and they sound great played really loud. That always helps. (CD)
Dear Science TV on the Radio: While many past TVOTR songs sounded as if the band threw every idea (and every vocal track) they could think of into the mix, here the band cuts back - sometimes even becoming (gasp!) pretty in the process ("Family Tree" is an example, on the playlist). Maybe not as powerful or overwhelming as their first few releases, but when a band is still growing after several years filled with critical acclaim (rather than repeating itself or disintegrating), that's a good sign. (CD)
Do It! Clinic: Clinic roars back, with a little less subtlety than 2007's Visitations and a lot more noise, while still retaining the surrealistic crossword puzzle intrigue of their lyrics. (CD)
Joemus Momus: Aside from having a terrible title (Momus collaborates with Glasgow's Joe Howe, of Germlin and Gay Against You), this album finds Momus incorporating Howe's video-game squiggles into a set of songs often surprisingly indebted to Scottish folk...then again, given that one of Momus's in-the-works projects is something called The Book of Scotlands, maybe that's less surprising. I'm sure many will be alienated and ask why he ruins this perfectly good melody with all that noise (while others will lean the opposite way, wondering why he's gumming up such cool noises with sappy little melodies), I find the combination, and the tension it creates, intriguing and refreshing. And although it didn't fit the playlist, the album's closing track is one of the most affecting things Momus has ever done: a dying vaudevillian wheezes out his last breath, wondering what ever's happened to his world. (CD)
Mega Breakfast The Chap: Speaking of Momus, I sometimes think The Chap is what might have resulted had Momus and Wire formed a band largely influenced by Robyn Hitchcock's "Uncorrected Personality Traits" and the four-part vocal harmonies to go with. Sometimes The Chap's music is almost straightforward, streamlined 21st century rock-pop; other times it's sheer avant-gardist noise; but most often it's both at the same time, with those vocal harmonies piled atop cracking beats, guitar riffs, scratching violin, and glitchy electronic belches and hiccups. (CD)
Object 47 Wire: As I noted above, Wire's moving gradually toward the more pop end of its stylistic pendulations, but Object 47 is curious in that, with a couple exceptions, it works better as a whole than as isolated tracks. The lead track, released for download ahead of the album's issue, was "One of Us," and it's a fine number with a classic Colin Newman vocal melody, but it (along with the album's closer "All Fours") is one of the few tracks that works as well outside its context. Consequently, the album places a bit lower for me than it might have...although it may well be another example of a Wire album gradually rising in my estimation over the years. (CD)
The Week That Was The Week That Was; Sea from Shore School of Language: In a somewhat odd move, Field Music (one of the most intriguing acts of the past few years) split in two this year...even though the Brewis brothers still work together and some personnel are in common between each of the brothers' releases. So, instead of one new Field Music album, we get a short album (just barely 30 minutes long in each case) from two new bands. Fortunately, they're both excellent...and the other curious thing is that they're rather similar, stylistically (suggesting that the break-up was not due primarily to the usual "musical differences"). School of Language's album came out first, led by the simultaneously catchy and annoying glossolalic riff of the four-part "Rockist" (vowel-speak a la "O Superman"), and TWTW's self-titled album came along later in the year. School of Language seems more dominated by keyboards, while TWTW adds some light orchestral coloring to the mix. Both continue to sort of pointillist post-punk/prog mix of Field Music, sounding rather like Gentle Giant at times, although scaled down in terms of ambition and complexity. (CD for both)
Summer of the Whore Shannon McArdle: This is probably the most ruthless post-break-up album I've heard - ruthless both toward the singer's ex and toward herself (the "whore" of the title track isn't her ex's new lover, it's herself). Musically, it's first-rate Chicago-school avant-pop: some country, some folk, some post-rock touches, careful arrangements and production, all done with a great degree of skill, craft, and intensity. (DL)
Honorable Mentions:
One interesting thing about this section: a number of artists whose albums have frequently made the top reaches of my listings ended up here, in the second half of the top fifty. I'm not sure yet if that means they're subpar releases for those acts, or if they're just suffering from the "oh, another decent album from this band again" syndrome.
Doleful Lions 7, Aimee Mann @#%&*! Smilers, R.E.M. Accelerate, Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue, Stereolab Chemical Chords, Future of the Left Curses, The Magnetic Fields Distortion, Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell, David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Sparks Exotic Creatures of the Deep, The Fall Imperial Wax Solvent, The Helio Sequence Keep Your Eyes Ahead, Atlas Sound Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, The Raveonettes Lust Lust Lust, Deerhunter Microcastle, Elvis Costello & the Imposters Momofuku, No Age Nouns, Deerhoof Offend Maggie, Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping, The Hold Steady Stay Positive, Robert Forster The Evangelist, American Music Club The Golden Age, Destroyer Trouble in Dreams, The Baseball Project Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, Fever Marlene White China, The Walkmen You & Me
(If anyone cares, this link brings you to a chart listing the above as well as all the other 2008 albums I acquired, including those I haven't had a chance to listen to - a couple of which have potential to dislodge some of the above.)
The next entry will contain the playlist of tracks from my top 20 albums of 2008.
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