2008 Music Rundown

I never realized this before, but it’s surprisingly easy to do a year-end music rundown when you haven’t listened to much new music! In no particular order except that the Portishead is HOLY SHIT AWESOME, here’s some 2008-released stuff I especially enjoyed.

Albums:

  • Third (Portishead): I have never had high expectations so comprehensively and delightfully exceeded. It is everything I loved about Portishead, yet nothing like what came before.
  • Rook (Shearwater): Gorgeous, varied collection of songs all tied together by Jonathan Meiburg’s supple, versatile voice.
  • Attack And Release (Black Keys): I really love the Dangermouse production on this, the sound breathes and floats in what feels like a very non-garagerocky space but the band sounds as tight as ever.
  • Carried To Dust (Calexico): I didn’t like Garden Ruin much, so I love that this album is so reminiscent of my favourite parts of Feast Of Wire – which is to say, it’s more songs for that time just after the sun’s dramatic dip below the horizon when what remains in the sky is the most ethereal, subtle light.
  • The Bake Sale EP (Cool Kids): Creative beat making, pretty good ass-shaking.
  • Distortion (Magnetic Fields): Stephin Merritt’s songwriting has usually been strong enough to pull off Magnetic Fields’ various concept albums, and this album’s concept – every song drenched in Psychocandy-inspired distortion – had me from hello.

Songs: [1. From albums which aren’t in my favourites list, either because I didn’t like them enough or haven’t heard them yet.]

  • Serpentine (Chris Bathgate): If we named songs the way classical composers used to, this could be “Serenade for piano, double bass, and pensive, almost reverential, human voice”. The album (A Cork Tale Wake) is decent too, and especially recommended if you like The Frames.
  • My Pillow Is The Threshhold (Silver Jews): The quiet shimmering guitar background which escalates to a final minute of restrained soundwall-y bliss is so lovely. The album (Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea) is also good, but omitted from the above list because I rate it slightly less highly than the band’s others.
  • Seeing Hands (Dengue Fever): I came for the band name and stayed for Chhom Nimol’s exquisite voice. I don’t know if loving this song is an overcompensatory wannabe-cosmopolitan response to its all-Cambodian exoticism, but I do know it makes me sway happily from side to side.
  • Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Fleet Foxes): How does a song lie on its back looking up at the clouds, and soar through them, all at the same time?
  • Furr (Blitzen Trapper): Drew me instantly into its story and lyrics, which is rare (for me). The last time that happened was many years ago, with The Decemberists’ Leslie Ann Levine.

But yeah, as is probably obvious, there’s lots more I simply haven’t got round to yet from this year – what else should I add to this list to chase down? What did you love?

  • London Zoo (The Bug)
  • The Renaissance (Q-Tip)
  • At War With Walls And Mazes (Son Lux)
  • Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (Brian Eno and David Byrne)
  • Los Angeles (Flying Lotus)
  • Furr (Blitzen Trapper)

Words Of Mutilation

I’ve always pipe-dreamed about making some foray into freelance music writing, but I usually bring myself quickly back to reality by reminding myself that good music writing is damn difficult. I’m rarely satisfied with any of the writing I do here to begin with, and that’s already about music that stands out to me. So I worry that if I had to churn out something about music I was indifferent to, simply because I was getting paid to do it, the end product would be dismal.

I really hope the same reasons were at play for some of the bad writing I’m about to “showcase” – a rather bitchy thing to do, I know, but what are blogs for if not for occasionally venting the impotent fury that would bemuse and bore everyone else around you?

From Juice magazine, I’m not sure which edition (I photographed the offending text and threw away the rest), Pavan Shamdasani reviews a Pixies tribute album. Here’s the full text of the review:

“This is odd. There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. They were never a mainstream band, and most of their popularity appeared years after their break-up, when Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off their stop/start dynamics. So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special.”

  • There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. Way to start off a review, dude – with a big dose of condescension for your readers!
  • …most of their popularity appeared… Popularity does not “appear” fully formed from Zeus’s head, it is “gained” or “garnered”.
  • So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. Where do I even begin? 1) Ferry disasters have casualties. Bands do not. 2) A huge number of tribute albums are made for people who are live and kicking. Google this if you need proof. 3) It is either misleading or ignorant to describe a band who broke up acrimoniously in 1993 and didn’t reform until 2004 as “still touring up till last year”. 4) The act of putting out an album cannot be described as a strange “occurrence”. It may be a strange “move” or an odd “decision”, but it is not an “occurrence”.
  • And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? Because male emo singers aren’t allowed to enjoy big black cocks, clearly.
  • A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special. What’s so self-evidently wrong with any of the cover choices described? Why do they pay little tribute to what made The Pixies so special? And given that the writer starts off the review by assuming most of his readers don’t even know the band, how on earth are they now supposed to understand this conclusion if he doesn’t throw them any frickin’ bone machines?

Im In Ur Ears, Blowin Ur Mind

My commute to and from work is an hour-long bus ride each way, and I’ve long been convinced that a core requirement of sanity maintenance under such conditions is being able to shut out TV Mobile at all times (except of course if it’s showing any of my reality shows, in which case I have to be right in front of it). When I first got my iPod I was very dissatisfied with the standard earbuds it came with because I needed to really turn the volume up in order to hear anything, and even then all subtlety would be drowned out by external sounds. After a while I decided there was only so much Knifehandchop and hardcore punk I could listen to, so I ventured into the world of Internet audiophile forums to research canalphones.

It was an alien galaxy. People spoke of transducers and woofers and tweeters and analysed their preferences in terms of bass, mid-range and treble tones, which could be thick or bright or transient or any of a dozen other adjectives which I had never thought of applying to music. And they routinely plonked down hundreds of dollars on brands I’d never heard of or seen in the local megastores. After a lot of research, during which I spent more time unglazing my eyes than understanding audio analysis, I settled on the Sony MDR-EX71s for around S$90, one of the more affordable choices I could find at the time. They impressed few experts but were very popular with plebs, and if there was one thing I’d learnt from my research it was that I was definitely an audiopleb.

I was pretty happy with them. They sealed out enough noise that I could listen appreciatively to a lot more music, though they still weren’t much good for stuff like Philip Glass, Nico Muhly or the quiet bits of quiet-loud-quiet type post-rock. Anyway, by allowing me to listen to my iPod at half the maximum volume and thus assuaging my fears that I wasn’t further exacerbating the hearing damage that years of very loud gigs and clubs had inflicted on my ears, they served their purpose perfectly well. Until last week, when after nearly three years of use, the right phone stopped working and defied all my attempts at resuscitation.

Full of trepidation, I ventured once more into woofer world and learnt from this rather epic hardwarezone forum thread that a shop called Jaben Network was a good place to go locally for affordable earphones and great service. I visited on Sunday and was served by a very nice guy called Gabriel. He urged me not to worry about online reviews, to choose based on personal taste, and to feel free to test all their canalphones before deciding.

Sitting down to start testing, I made a quick grab-bag playlist of a few songs I figured were kinda different. I didn’t know what I should be looking for or what I liked, but I hoped some preferences would magically materialize. And they did! In MIA’s Pull Up The People, I found I wasn’t looking for heavy bass, but rather a nice balance between the bass and the higher, spitting beats. In Low’s Belarus, I started to notice the distribution of sounds between my left and right ear, and the flat weightiness of the song’s only beats. In Brian Wilson’s Surf’s Up, I tried to evaluate how well the sounds seemed to occupy the inside of my head; in Ellen Allien & Apparat’s Turbo Dreams, how well the sounds made the inside of my head a massive warehouse full of people raving till dawn. And in Sonic Youth’s New Hampshire, how sensitive the phones were to the tiny high notes that accompany the opening drums.

To my surprise, after listening to three options (I didn’t want to listen to too many because I was worried that too many options would just confuse me) I found I had a clear favourite. I asked how much it was, was told it cost $45 (half the price of my old Sonys) and nearly fainted. Gabriel seemed genuinely pleased at my amazement and told me enthusiastically that my choice was a good one. I think they’re the Crossroads Mylarone Classics reviewed here. From my online research I was vaguely aware that this brand had a new model, the X3s, which everyone was clamouring after but which was in very short supply as a result. The geekdeal-seeker in me briefly considered whether to put myself on the waiting list for those, but I decided that I honestly didn’t think I was discerning enough to enjoy them like an audiophile would, and in the meantime I would rather not succumb to incandescent rage on public transport.

So I got the Crossroads Mylarone Classics, and as soon as I plugged them in on the bus back home I realized my world had been transformed. With the Sonys, listening at half volume would still yield fairly frequent intrusions of My Sassy Neighbour, but with the Crossroads I can now listen at a third of the volume instead and enjoy an existence mercifully free of Patricia Mok.

Just for fun, I added more songs to my initial “testing” playlist (mostly songs I already knew well which seemed like “headphones tracks”) and listened to them on my commutes this week. Espers’ Dead Queen is chillier, its vocals more ethereal. Andrew Bird’s A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head sounds more intimate, like I’m sitting right next to him as he sings just for me. The crazy Japanese drum sounds in Asa Chang & Junray’s Hana now come from distinctly different places and I can imagine the drummer’s flying hands. Outkast’s B.O.B. used to feel dense; now it feels like there’s plenty of space for the ten million things it has going on. I’ve always loved that incredibly euphoric introduction to The Knife’s Silent Shout but now it’s like a catherine wheel in my head and there’s a serious risk of me bursting out on the bus with that frenetic pointy finger thing which really mashed people do to trance.

You get the picture. I could go on for ages, but some audiophile might come and point out that most of the improved sound I’m describing here is entirely psychological and that would be embarrassing. Anyway, this is just to say that if you see a girl on the bus listening to music with the most beatific smile on her face, don’t worry if I suddenly bust out some moves, I’m totally harmless.

Pitch Perfect

Tessa organised Pitch Perfect, a cosy little iPod DJ event, at Pitch Black on Saturday night.

I used my 15 minute slot as follows:

  • Gareth Brown Says (McLusky): I’ve always liked the rather surreal playground taunting of this one – “All your friends are cunts / your mother is a ball-point pen thief”.
  • Drunken Butterfly (Sonic Youth): Because if I don’t play Sonic Youth at every public opportunity to impose my taste on other people, somewhere a fairy dies.
  • How Can I Love You If You Won’t Lie Down? (Silver Jews): Awesome title aside, this is a rather delightful departure from Silver Jews’ usual, rather minimalist, formula of alt-country (though even that’s been good enough to sustain nearly a decade of my fanhood). It’s a lovable, sturdily unpretentious little ditty and I always love singing along with the girl echoing David Berman – “Lie down” “Lah daawn!” – in every word of the chorus.
  • Fuck You Pay Me (Killer Mike): My most recent aggro-hip-hop-dancing-in-my-bedroom song of choice. Though it does get a bit embarrassing when I listen to it while walking along the pavement and have to stifle some of those moves.
  • Sh-Boom (The Chords): Enough aggro, let’s finish with some happy! And this is, quite simply, one of the happiest songs I have ever heard.

Later on, I learned that because Ci’en hadn’t brought her iPod, Peishan had ingeniously appropriated Ci’en’s 15 minute entitlement to play a second slot. This got me thinking (and looking craftily at the empty-pocketed fiance sitting next to me), and so it was that about an hour later DJ “Alec” made his public debut. And I must say I thought his, uh, “choices” were truly magnificent.

  • Enter Sandman (Fade To Bluegrass cover): This isn’t just a novelty cover, I do actually think the bluegrass harmonies and musicianship are pretty tight.
  • Pussyhole (Dizzee Rascal): Sorry about the pun, but this is just such a banger.
  • Long Snake Moan (PJ Harvey): Big dense noisy riffs, quintessential PJ Harvey attitude and a chorus which you just have to shout along to. “You wanna hear my long snake…MOAN! You oughta see me crawl my…ROAR!”
  • Dance Music (Mountain Goats): It took me a while to warm to the Mountain Goats, but this is the song that sold me.
  • All The Things She Said (Cinerama cover): You shouldn’t expect this song to surpass the original because, well, nothing can really surpass Russian lesbian pedophilia. But I like Cinerama’s take well enough, especially the weighty stabs of the chorus and the pensive guy-girl harmonies that bring us to the close.

Sonic Youth Snark Snippets

I haven’t bothered to read many reviews of The Destroyed Room, the new Sonic Youth rarities collection, because, well, good or bad reviews are fairly irrelevant to my need to own anything Sonic Youth, but as it turns out I’m quite happy I wandered into this one at Stylus. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are some especially funny snippets:

“In an effort, presumably, to stay lock-step with Ghostface in the holiday odds £ sods market, the Yoof have put together The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities or More Fish for Balding White Music Critics.”

“The Diamond Sea, which originally clocked in at 19 minutes, wasn’t exactly yearning for an extended mix.”

“If you own all this material, congratulations: you are probably David Fricke or Lee Ranaldo’s mother.”

Popcorn

You know how when half-asleep and half-awake you can get lost in thoughts that are almost like Dadaist films? And if someone happens to come wake you up in the middle of this you start babbling incoherently, like “No, I’m not going to work today because I need to stay and wait for the clothespeg inspector,” and it’s really embarrassing while you sleepily try to explain why the clothespegs need to be inspected (so that your kindergarten teacher can use them in her home renovations, naturellement) and somewhere along the way it slowly begins to dawn on you that no clothespeg inspections will be necessary, you haven’t seen your kindergarten teacher in twenty years, and the other person is laughing their ass off?

(Please God, don’t let this just be me.)

So anyway, this has happened to me a fair number of times while sleeping normally in my bed, but Friday was the first time it was prompted by the particular music I was listening to. Deep in my usual commuting drowse on the bus to work with Hood’s Cold House on the iPod, somewhere around the last 50 seconds of I Can’t Find My Brittle Youth I became convinced that the popcorn machine on the bus was overheated and about to explode. Why was everyone so calm? Maybe I needed to raise the alarm and alert everyone to the danger so we could escape from the bus! Maybe it was too late and we should just all hit the floor to avoid being skewered by flying shards of hot buttered metal!

I jerked awake in shock and stared bug-eyed around the bus for a good five to ten seconds before I realized that springing into either course of action would be a very very bad idea.

Matthew Herbert: Plat Du Jour

I haven’t been enjoying Matthew Herbert’s Scale anywhere as much as I liked Plat Du Jour, which was one of my top albums of 2005. Scale’s nice and catchy for when you’re riding in a convertible and drinking cocktails with paper umbrellas in them but I don’t find it as musically interesting as Plat Du Jour, and after a while all the breezy flirtiness of the music feels a bit vapid to me.

Since it appears (from the Metacritic stats, anyway) that the bulk of music writers don’t agree with me, I thought I’d dig up my old unpublished, unpolished review of Plat Du Jour and give it the props I should have last year:

Plat Du Jour took 2 years to research and 6 months to record. It was born out of Matthew Herbert’s growing distaste for the workings of the international food chain and the songs themselves are crafted using, amongst other sounds, eggs as percussion, melodies made from blowing over the top of a Pepsi Max bottle, and field recordings of slimfast breakfast drinks tied to a bike and ridden round the yard.

So there’s a fair amount of gimmickry on Plat Du Jour and a couple of ways to react to it. One, you can explore the site as you listen to the album, marvel at the lengths he went to in making this, and actually learn something about what we should all perhaps think harder about before ingesting. Two, you can dismiss it as wank and simply see if the album holds up on its own musical merits first without having to bother about The Message.

I chose option two, plus a large order of fries to go. But thankfully, the music impressed me enough to make me want to find out more about The Message, which I think is quite possibly the best outcome a musician could hope for.

Plat Du Jour makes you bop ya head considerably more often than you would expect from an album which bases one of its songs (The Final Meal Of Stacey Lawton) on the jar of pickles a condemned man ate for his last meal. The song featuring various field recordings of chickens (The Truncated Life Of A Modern Industrialised Chicken) is, well, quite funky. These Branded Waters gets great wind instrument tones from the mouths of San Pellegrino bottles and segues halfway into a jazzy bit where I somehow keep feeling they’re going to break into the Super Mario theme. I can’t exactly pinpoint the amazing bass on An Empire Of Coffee from the recording details on the site but I think it’s probably 2 Sara Lee instant croissant tins tied together with a piece of garden string and plucked. Celebrity has Dani Siciliano on vocals, is made entirely from food endorsed by celebrities and features a chorus of “Go Gordon! Go Ramsay! Go Beyonce! Go Beyonce!” Hidden Sugars backfires a bit insofar as it gives me yet another reason to love cans of Coke – which all its melodies, chords and basslines are made from.

Making a concept album is often a sure-fire way to garner criticism from people who just don’t buy into it, but I do think you can enjoy this album purely for its music regardless of whether you buy its message. My only criticism, and it’s tongue-in-cheek at that, is that the great music Matthew Herbert’s made from junk food only validates my abiding love of it. I bet this album wouldn’t be half as fun if it were only made from organic produce.

Sonic Nurse, Two Years Late

I was just about to SQUEEEEEEEEEE all over this blog about Sonic Youth’s new album, which I got my hands on yesterday, but suddenly remembered that my reaction to the previous album was still languishing in my as yet unpublished top 10 list of 2004. Yes, I know.

So, since it’s not like this blog is overloading you with entries to read these days, I thought I’d just dig that up and post it as a prelude.

Sonic Nurse (Sonic Youth):

I should begin by admitting that I am incapable of being objective about this album. I’ve tried and failed to figure out how I would react to it if it were the first Sonic Youth album I’d ever heard, perhaps listening to it only because I’d read a good Pitchfork review, rather than in the context of what feels like the culmination of my decade of fanhood.

This album is vintage Sonic Youth firing on all songwriter and instrumentalist cylinders, and they know it. Pattern Recognition starts things off with what feels like unassailable confidence; you realize that this band which has collaborated with artists running the gamut from free jazz to glitchy ambient electronica and released entire albums of pure feedback is finally doing a tribute to themselves, and it’s going to be stunning. There are no dud tracks here – every song could have been the highlight of some lesser band’s career-peak album. New Hampshire, probably my favourite, is as broody and propulsive as anything on Daydream Nation, and although they keep this album version pretty tight at just a little over 5 minutes, it’s the sort of track that’s just begging for a protracted screaming-guitar-noise-freakout jam when done live. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to describe Kim Gordon’s singing as “heartfelt” before, but in I Love You Golden Blue she breathes her lines with a vulnerability I find surprisingly affecting.

In Paper Cup Exit, the line “I don’t mind if you sing a different song, sing a different song, just as long as you sing, as you sing, sing along” may seem incoherent or contradictory, but if you’re a Sonic Youth fan it makes total sense. As this excellent review at Stylus observed, “despite the consistently fine song-writing the band has to offer, it isn’t the songs themselves that keep their fans coming back. Rather, Sonic Youth is a band at perfect synergy with itself. Every tangential instrumental passage seems not premeditated, but psychically transposed.”

I heard Daydream Nation when I was 14; it changed the way I listened to music. Ten years on, as much as my musical horizons have expanded, Sonic Youth’s sprawling dissonance still explodes more stars in my head and quickens my heartbeat with more pure aural joy than anything else does. Sonic Nurse is my number one album of the year for more reasons than musical brilliance alone – it is beautiful unmistakable proof to me that my favourite band, 24 years, 19 albums, countless experimental tangents, and immeasurable critical acclaim after its formation, has not ceased to listen, create, and rock.

Drum’N’Bass’N’Strings

Something dramatic was needed to break my obsessive aural dependency on the sound of Elliott Yamin’s voice, so I revisited Venetian Snares’ Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, which I’d been enjoying quite a lot before Elliott poured molten sex into my ears.

It isn’t easy to describe why this album’s fusion of (mostly) classical music with drill’n’bass works for me, because at first blush the concept sounds insufferable. The thing is, as drum’n’bass subgenres go, I like drill’n’bass because it has a certain drama and intensity that I find lacking in the jazzy stuff. On the other hand, classical music has lots of drama and intensity but lacks riddim.

Track 8’s sampling of Elgar’s cello concerto in E minor fascinates me. The sample of that famous bit of melody is cut off one note later than you expect it to be – one would have thought cutting the segment off on the D would make for the obvious easy loop but instead it’s left for one more note, which weirds up the time signature and the listener’s feel of the melody. Every time I listen to the track it always makes me feel a bit off-balance at the start, but then I descend into a geeky wanky happy place where I muse about whether I’d feel the same way if I didn’t already know the classical piece, and whether this use of the sample is deliberately intended to elicit this response in the listener, and then I look to the track title for any help but unfortunately it’s called “Szarmar Madar” so nothing gained there; meanwhile, there’s an opera singer throwin’ down high E’s and the chaotic beat’s just tearing shit up, and I start thinking tasteless thoughts about how even Jacqueline du Pre would dance to this except oh wait oops and I’m not even sure whether any of this is good or bad but I like the fact that the song is making me think it.