(aka: We Always Seem To Start These Things Late) I may know a lot of music (though that's questionable), but I hope no one will mistake me for knowing a lot about music. I am, most definitely, a layman. What I do know is much more scatter shot than chronological, or even close to complete within any given genre. I know little to nothing of theory/scales/time signatures/harmony/melody and can barely play the thumb piano. What I offer here is a list based on my opinions of the music released in 2008 to which I was exposed (already doubly subjective). The numbers by which they are ranked are fairly arbitrary, though chosen through much internal debate. And while I have given you little to no reason to take heed of these opinions, I will say that I spent a great deal of time thinking about them and reflecting on them, trying to understand them and acknowledge them as objectively as possibly.
25.Pocahaunted - Island Diamonds (This review does take into consideration the numerous releases Pocahaunted had this year such as Chains, Mirror Mics, etc. This is probably the case with several other artists on this list) Toward the end of the summer, I took a much-needed vacation at a family friend's house on Long Beach Island. Most of my time was spent letting the sun do terrible things to my skin while I drank, napped and read a bunch of Etgar Keret short stories on the beach. I kept mostly to one small section of the island but, by about halfway through my visit, I couldn't shake the feeling I should get out and see what there was to see. I decided to drive all the way to the top of LBI to the Barnegat Lighthouse State Park. The drive was long and slow, and I decided to listen to the new Pocahaunted [proper] album, Island Diamonds.
It was the perfect fit.
These hypnotic, dubbed-out, chant-and-drone jams carried me in a slow, sun-poisoned daze as the car crawled up the island amidst the meandering stream of vacationer traffic.The steady tick-tacking of the drum beat, and more precise monotony of the clanging guitar had given the established sound of Pocahaunted's echoing chant just the right, new path to follow.
As high energy as this kind of drugged-out haze can get, perfect for half-conscious cruising on any kind of slow, summer burn.
24.Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours This album is a mix cd that just happens to be composed completely of original material, at least in the sense that these are not someone else's songs. Sure it's fluffy, and maybe a little derivative at times, but at its heart, all it ever hoped to be was a really good dance pop album. And, unlike albums like Hercules and the Love Affair (which sounds a lot more like late 90's/early 00's Disco Revival than a pure Disco reinvention), it never feels locked into being one very specific sound.
Plus I've been waiting patiently for this album since Bright Like Neon Love made my year end list of '03, and this new one didn't disappoint in the least.
23.Gruff Rhys - Candylion Everyone seemed to be talking about what a great comeback album Hey Venus! Was. I never quite heard in it what I read about it. It wasn’t bad or anything like that, but it didn’t make me feel anything like I felt with Radiator, Geurilla or Mwng. Then Candylion came out, and I didn’t pay much attention to it, as Rhys’ last album inspired about as much excitement in me as the new SFA album did. Toward the end of ’08 I finally gave Candylion a good listen, and I’m really glad I did. To me, it has all the variety and vitality that Hey Venus! Lacks. I’ve never pictured SFA being an arena band, but Venus seems to lend itself to such a presentation. Candylion, on the other hand, is intimate, irreverent, druggy, sing-songy, beautiful and silly all at once.
22.memes - with my whole heart (cd-r) The sound of dysfunction. An anemic rasp whispering secret stories to stumbling beats, and bass-lines from the floor below. Only the guitar has the strength to tell the truth plainly and its outlook is bleak at best. In fact, the only time things brighten, the feeling is of the peace that comes with passing. Moments of aggression tell the story of endured and inherited anger, followed with the frustration at the inevitable.
Shattered and shattering, this is the unquestionable knowledge and display of all things broken and sad, bruised and lost, naked and bleary. Though deformed and often ugly, it bares more beautiful truth in its vulnerability than anyone should have rights to.
21.Yuhasz - Pauline and Emile A while back I wrote a review, or more appropriately a description, of a cd-r pre-release of Yuhasz's first album. Well, this past year saw the proper, if very limited, release of that album. While the music is exactly as it was then, it is still just as solid of a release, and with the added appeal of beautifully elaborate packaging. Housed within several layers of greenish-grey, brown-speckled tile sheets, made complete with a hand-assembled hing and locking handle, it is a package befitting the music trapped inside. As its creator more or less put it, it's beautiful but with just the vague possibility of danger. Screws jut out from the base of the hinge, and the tile edges are still rough and somewhat jagged. It's slightly menacing, while beautiful and coldly organic.
20.Tobacco - Fucked Up Friends If you've heard Black Moth Super Rainbow, then you won't be too surprised by Fucked Up Friends. What you'll feel, though, is a focus a little more towards head-nodding and body moving. Cloudy synths, raspy vocoded voices and crunchy, lo-fi beats beg to be dropped at the club. Bruce Haack for the back-packing, hip hop set. The overall sound is a one or two trick pony that may not be able to sustain itself between the two projects indefinitely, but for right now it's a fun listen from a solid album.
19.Girl Talk - Feed The Animals In a weird sort of way, I've felt very torn about Feed The Animals, and dismayed by the polar reactions it inspires (both of which I can sympathize with). On the one hand, it is an extremely danceable, well-crafted and paced album. It's also a hell of a lot of fun to listen to. On the other hand, it's been done many times over before and, as a good friend of mine more or less put it, "if I wanted to hear Public Enemy, I'd listen to Fear of a Black Planet."
Here's the thing, at least for me: for the last couple years of high school, into the first couple years of college, a lot of my friends were djs, and I spent many weekends at clubs, parties, raves, etc. Though never a true dj myself (thanks to lack of motivation and prohibitive equipment costs), I've always been a major proponent of mixes. I still think back longingly to the dubbed copy of one of Dieselboy's earlier Wu-Tang infused, drum-and-bass tapes, and the copy of Tony Touch's 50th mix tape (still floating around either in my car or storage) which forever burned the phrase "put it in my mouth" into my brain.
To me, Feed the Animals is like one of those tapes. You keep it in your car, like surplus jet fuel to get you amped for a Friday night, or to rescue an increasingly monotonous car trip or lame party. Like the 2ManyDJs sets/mixes which came before it, it's got a lot of beats, melodies and choruses the vast majority of any dance-starved party can recognize, but made new/revitalized in a way which makes it enjoyable for those who wish they never had to hear that song again. ever.
And, for those who would complain about the way he jumps from sample to sample, staying only briefly on any one song, I offer these two defenses: he's making something of his own, something new from something old; In using only snippets, he's proving that there's a reason these songs are pop hits, even if that reason is often quite small.
18.Excepter - debt dept Feels a little more Cabaret Voltaire than Throbbing Gristle to me (contrary to what some have said). These hippies have come a long, dark way from their earlier albums, but the link is still there. Songs still seem to lack any real link to a traditional beginning, middle, end structure. Much more minimal, beat-driven ideas march along, sometimes falling apart, sometimes giving birth to a new direction, mid-song. Though this and their last album seem to mine increasingly dark atmospheres, they also feel at their goofiest and most irreverent. Like dancing in a circle on a sugar high, covered in fake blood.
17.Future Twin - s/t (untitled?) Unlabeled except for wordless artwork which looks like something between the Aurora Borealis and an anemone erupting into a Super Nova, and dubbed onto what appears to be some sort of McDonald's promotional cassette, this first release from future twin feels like an artifact from an unplaced time. Clusters of decayed and decaying loops haunt and float through the brief collection of tracks. Squeals echo and bounce amid a drone that could be the multiplied cacophony of church bells or the distant but formidable din of some great, run down machine.
All these sounds fight against varying degrees of muffle, wow and flutter. I can't begin to say what existed from the original recording, and what is the result of dubbing to a tape of such questionable condition. Much like the archetypal artifact, this only adds to its fragile charm. As though these loops might one day soon crumble right in my tape deck.
16.Robedoor - Closer to the Cliff A chanting choir is overpowered by the deafening rumble of a looming stack of impossibly large amplifiers. The ghost of a melody adrift a lost sea of harsh, dead winds. The bellowing pulse of an ancient computer wakens a swarm of ghosts whose cries reverberate in the rusted strings of an amplified but derelict guitar. A slow and deliberate evocation of chords from the unearthed organ of a crumbling church inspires mourning from its parishioners, trapped inside its great pipes.
These are the images I imagine while listening to Closer to the Cliff, and the idea that the very recording of this material caused the tape they were mastered on to wither. Not the sound of evil, so much as a meditation on darker things.
15.Emeralds - Solar Bridge Drone is such an overused word, isn't it? This is more like a deep, complex hum of electricity. Sounds making mountains to awe over as more crest and flow over their great and jagged tops, emptying into a shimmering sea. More, still, form a ball of white light, rising up and emitting rays to illuminate this world of sound.
This album's inclusion to this list is as much as a stand-in for their live performance (which I was fortunate enough to see at 2008's No Fun Fest), as it is for the two cuts which make up its length. Emeralds create within the listener a trance which brings the focus back to its hypnotic sounds rather than leaving the mind blank and vulnerable.
14.Ruby Suns - Sea Lion For those of you wondering what the fuck everyone was hearing in Vampire Weekend, maybe give this a go. Definitely post-Animal Collective, but more adventurous than just some also-ran. They’ve got that classic, shambolic indie charm, at times feeling like the lost, worldbeat-dabbling connection between the early lo-fi jangle and later electric/electronic white dance funk of Kevin Barnes’ Of Montreal. (The only bummer is that one of their songs, “Oh, Mojave,” is in a Windows commercial. But I guess that just finds more common ground between them and Barnes.)
13.She & Him - Volume One
It's been made painfully clear to me that I am in no way alone in my fondness for Zooey Deschanel. From her wise-ass make-up counter quips in The Good Girl, to her sweetly intimate shower caroling in Elf, I've been swooning. But, unlike that other de facto indie-boy crush, she's put out an album of covers that feels as honest, unpretentious and personal as any collection of singer/songwriter 4-track home recordings. She & Him have managed, pretty consistently, to shine some new or different light on a lot of familiar songs (not unlike Girl Talk).
There's a certain feeling of vulnerability in her voice, not to be confused with weakness but, rather, a naked honesty (not unlike singing in the shower). She's got a voice, though not without its imperfections, which conveys the personality behind it, or at least the one she wants us to see, perfectly.
What M. Ward brings to it with his arrangements and production only adds to it. The sound is sometimes huge, sometimes bare and minimal, but it always feels like it was recorded in a tangible space, not some pristine, sci-fi vacuum. Whether he's cribbing Jeff Lynne or Phil Spector, it always feels as though the sound was carefully determined for each song so as to get that much closer to the truth of it, at least as Ms. Deschanel (or Mrs. Gibbard?) tells it.
12.Fleet Foxes - s/t Warm, harmonic mountain folk hymns from some old souls. Each song soars with the reverb of a great church hall.Confident vocals sing with the feel of innocence, not naivety, and a refreshing lack of irony. Even the more melancholy pieces have a twinge of hopefulness and love. These songs are comforting in their familiarity without feeling like a just simply a stale genre revival. It's a quality that's rarely acheived well these days.
Production goes a long way on this album, but it's simple choices that add a bit of weight and bring out that warmth without getting in the way of the music, or calling too much attention to itself. It allows the life of this album to stand on its own and truly be heard.
11.Sebastien Tellier - Sexuality Like a more sly, but just as silly Chromeo, Tellier makes his intentions plain with his tongue only half-tucked in his cheek. Starting off with an instantly classic, headnodding summer cruising jam that makes me almost pine for a lowrider, he wastes no time in laying the sex on thick. Throughout the album he oscillates back and forth between the best aspects of cheesy and sleazy. From all those dumb songs of synth’s awkward adolescent years in the top 40 (that we can’t seem to forget in spite of ourselves), to all those trashy numbers better suited to a pole dance (until we hear them at the club and can’t help but dance a little closer in hungered anticipation). You only wish this album was ironic.
10.Squim - Zephyrus Layers of loops, disintegrations and tones peak and fall, build and recede. Quiet outbursts punctuate distant ringing. Stirrings jump cut to warbling echoes. Beacons projected in one directions pass sonar waves and reversed guitar lines headed the other way. Diminishing reverberations rattle into dust. Two stories are told in multiple parts, ranging from ominous to impatient, ambiguous to serene, immediate to confused. These are colorful stories worth hearing, if you’re willing to listen.
9.Social Junk - Concussion Summer Not necessarily noise rock, more of a general cacophony, but not without its quiet moments. Tracks built upon clatters and bangs over tribal drums, sometimes with harshly overdriven vocals riding their broken rhythm. Other times a single guitar chord is strummed rapidly and unevenly over the pounding wail of a distant electric guitar, sounding like the echo of hammering metal running from the courtyard through the halls of some old, stone prison. Cymbals steadily ridden to the effect of grinding metal. Drum loops sound like the deep, stomach-kicking elastic concussion of someone beating the side of a half-rusted oil barrel—what would sightings sound like at 2/3rds the volume but twice as clear? Patience is a virtue Social Junk can manage. Those listening at home will be rewarded for similar qualities.
8.Juana Molina - Un Dia Juana Molina has been exploring the creation and interaction of looped vocals and instrumentation for quite some time now. I would dare say she has been among those at the forefront of this ever-increasing group of musicians using recent advances in looping pedals and keyboard sampling to achieve the one-[wo]man-band effect of layered/harmonized vocals, percussion and melody without the assistance of other musicians, even in live performance.
Her fourth album, Son, used this technique to create a dense collection of songs that wound and twisted inward, feeling, at times, like an impenetrable tangle of overgrowth. Her sense of playfulness and curiosity was there, but it felt so tightly woven as to choke the overall flow of the album.
While Un DIa is definitely not a departure in technique, and has her trademark sound, it is a different album than its predecessor. For one, it never feels weighed down by or in individual tracks. There is virtually always a sense of propulsion and momentum. The times when the album slows feel more like a rest between sprints, a time for reflection. Then it's back to the race, as patterns relay with, and leapfrog over one another. Rhythms skip and skitter underneath the melodies, kicking up stuttered vocal cadences. Each song feels like a collection of transcending vocal textures and rhythmic patterns. Un Dia is an album to be appreciated for how well chosen its complimentary loops, melodies and rhythms are, and for the beauty they create together. Not as much for the intricacy of its craftsmanship.
7.Stereolab - Chemical Chords Pretty much from the beginning, Stereolab have mined the world of, and charted the universe of pop music. Their vessel was many times built from pieces of The Velvet Underground, Can, Neu! and others more on the rock end of music, but they have never strayed too far from the worlds of Esquivel, Perrey-Kingsley, Mutantes and others who sought to realize the idea of what Pop could be.
Their output, however, was pretty consistently realized as either nuggets of pop embedded into streams and mountains of avant experimentalism, or fragments of pop stretched to the very limits of their former definition (The latter can also been seen in the work of frequent collaborator and sometime Stereolab member Sean O'Hagan's other project, The High Llamas). In short, PopAvant, not the other way around.
With Fab Four Suture, they came close to the latter, approaching an album, quite literally, as a collection of singles. But the tracks which bookended that album made it quite clear that they were not quite there.
With Chemical Chords, they may have finally reversed the definition of their output. Condensing years of pushing, pulling and playfulness into 3-4 minute bites. Starting it off is the peppy, blinky bounce of Neon Beanbag, another beautiful tribute to their friend and former bandmate Mary Hansen (the first being on Margerine Eclipse, "Feel And Triple", which was, arguably in its entirety, a tribute to her, as well as a record of Stereolab at their most emotionally frank and direct). The album never really veers off this course, keeping things mostly up-tempo, musically at least. Lyrically, Sadier seems to have as many societal woes to speak of as ever but, since lyrics have never really been my forte, I'll leave that to the others.
Many complain about this new phase in Stereolab's sound (which seems to have begun, in the wake of the appropriately titled Sound Dust, with Margerine Eclipse), but there has been much complaining as far back as Emperor Tomato Ketchup, much of it by the same people. Maybe I'm towing the party line, but this album makes it pretty easy on the arms.
6.Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna Feeling like inspiration was found in dancehalls en route from North Africa to somewhere in the Middle East, Gang Gang Dance returned with their most aggressively direct and song-oriented album yet. For better or worse, their earlier releases seemed to meander peacefully until they found a song they felt was worth stopping on. Here, even at their most ambient-esque interludishness, the focus was sharper and the result more tangible. Not content to wash over you, their aim this time was to move you.
5.Ponytail - Ice Cream Spiritual Pure, mounting energy. Like a more primal Marnie Stern, a more singular Deerhoof, or a cleaner, distinct and more radio-friendly Lightning Bolt. These songs pulse, radiate and vibrate toward each new moment. The singer seems to be espousing some fresh revelation with each track. I have no idea what she's discovered but I'm keen to find out.
4.Portishead - Third What can I say about this band, and this album, that hasn't been said a million times over? To come from a genre that's fallen to a level just shy of pariah status (due to a glut of practitioners wore it thin and past it's welcome by turning all of its signature aspects into permanent cliches), and create something fresh and beautiful and relevant without abandoning the core of the identity you began with, that's fucking noteworthy. I remember thinking, sometime between the release of their second album and the live NYC Orchestra album, that this group could do a spectacular Bond song (in fact, there may have been some Hollywood rumors of this floating around for all I know). Looking back on what the franchise was like at that point, I'm glad they didn't. But it gets me to thinking, with the release of Casino Royale, the Bond franchise changed, or grew, into something more fitting the world around it: a little grittier and a bit more down to earth in its cynicism, pessimism, and violence. Sure, it's still a spy fantasy with big action set pieces, jet setting and sex, but it plainly shows a darker, brutish and bitter side to its main character, who is defined by the almost animal like immediacy of his actions. And, once again, I can't help but think that this "new" Portishead would make a good fit to the new Bond. Whereas once they wore their spy fetish on their sleeve, channeled through a hip hop sensibility via scratchy old record samples and sung through melancholy but detached vocals; they now project something more akin to a weary sadness and pessimism. Scratched up old record samples have given way to an overall fuzzy lo-fi crackle, evoking a certain dirty and rough immediacy, as well as an imperfect humanity, as opposed to a scene from some lost, noirish fairy-tale from a previous generation. Instead of the psych-tinged soundtrack, we get echoes of a happening gone sour, invaded by thoughts of torture, bombing and shadow conspiracies not as looming threats, but as everyday news.
3.Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill With this latest album, Grouper has captured the sound of sad, dreamy pop folk emerging from her well established reverberating sea of disembodied vocals, droning guitar strum & fuzz, and floating artifacts of lo-fi hiss & hum. Somewhere between the changing of tides and an incoming/outgoing dream, songs condense from the fog enough to sound as though they're across a great, blooming field or just on the other side of half-shuttered eyes. Grouper's drones create an intangible but familiar world in which to listen and imagine the meaning of her gently muffled words. It's the kind of sadness you could swoon and marvel at all day, as the dampness creeps through your clothes to your bones.
2.Beach House - Devotion You know, it took a while for me to really warm to Beach House's Devotion. There was definitely an immediate appeal to the icy organ & spare percussion, recalling Antena's more melancholy moments. The music, and most assuredly the band's name, evoked a very specific image: a beach front house amidst a large storm in the middle of winter. The ocean is tumultuous chopping and crashing at the shore line. Outside the amber yellow of the living room, the world is a dense and hazy blue-grey. The windows bow and bend at the strong, whipping winds. What's funny about all that is that it's actually two memories combined: the shores of LBI in Winter time, and a summer beach trip spent inside due to a formidable hurricane pulling at the shore and pushing at the windows as though they were thin sheets of acetate. And that, for me, was the key to this album. Although I had responded, at first, only to aspects of the album, it wasn't until I saw them one sweltering summer day on Coney Island that everything clicked. There's is the sound of summer in winter, the thought of a grey, snowy day as the sun beats through your body to the hot tarmac. It's music to swoon to, and thank god I had someone to swoon over/with, or I might have been one of the many to swoon right to the ground that day in involuntary worship, most likely feeling a rush of cold as darkness funneled in between them and the blazing sun.
1.Burning Star Core - Challenger Feeling like the complimenting score to a spare title sequence laid over exterior shots of some distant, unforgiving planet, the opening title track to BSC's latest proper album sets a very potent tone. Feeling very minimal with its phasing tones complimented by solitary and alternating keys, it's like the breathing of a machine punctuated with the sting of its various indicator lights. And although its broken up by what feels like a door opening into another, livelier existence, the two worlds never merge but, instead, exist side by side, complimenting each other in their differences. This, as much as anything else, gives Challenger it's lasting quality. BSC hops from plain to plain with each track, but the leap never feels forced or too far from where he left off. Following the opener, we land on the Growing-esque delayed, bouncing guitar yowls of "Beauty Hunter"; the diminished warbles, crinkles, tings and pitch-shifted hums of "Through the Bars of a Rhyme"; the overlapping, layering and shifting vocal loop of "Mezzo Forte"; the imagined field recording of a thousand ping pong matches with "No Memories, No Plans"; and on... Maybe that spaceship didn't explode all those years back, maybe it just keeps blinking out to some new existence, maybe one where satellites crack like egg shells, leaking rainbows into the blackness of space.
