THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #5

10. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron & Fred Squire – Lost Wisdom (Southern)


Phil Elverum – alias Mt Eerie / The Microphones - makes a lot of records. And, though he may experiment with everything from harsh electronics to “acoustic black metal”, the focus of his muse is always essentially the same: very austere, introspective vignettes of personal revelation, expressed with a very old fashioned sense of classical Romantic awe. As such, ‘Lost Wisdom’ is, I would wager, the perfect Phil Elverum record. Within it, he plays eleven of his best, most elemental, songs; just quiet-sing and soft guitar strumming, accompanied by Julie Doiron’s sublime vocals (I know I’m not usually one to obsess over vocal styles, but seriously, I cannot express how wonderfully Julie’s voice fits in with these songs), and beautifully understated electric guitar from Fred Squire. All of the elements here are in order: beauty is the result. Any of these songs, most of them under two minutes, contain the capacity to become your entire universe, so be listened to hundreds of times on repeat and to leave you changed as a result, if you could only stand to give them enough time/concentration, or if they were just allowed the good grace to hit you at the right moment – that moment of exquisite calm and collapse that each of the songs represents; the moment that takes us beyond ourselves. And if the songs fail to do that, if they start to sound insufferably precious and weak-ass after a while, and you want to take ‘em off and put something with a bit more of a kick to it…. well that’s not their fault. Let it stand as a condemnation of the noise and chaos and confusion and shit and selfishness of our modern lives, rather than of this record, because it is in essence that rare thing: a perfect piece of human self-expression fully realised in isolation from all else.

Mp3>Voice In Headphones


9. Throw Me The Statue – Moonbeams (Secretly Canadian)


I had a good old ramble about this one back in August, from which I submit to you the following edited highlights:

“…let it be said that I’ve been listening to ‘Moonbeams’ again and again, and enjoying it immensely. Why? Well, what can I tell you; I guess it’s just plain GOOD. Fuck it, perhaps it’s even great! […] And that’s that – I’ll hand in my ‘music writer’ badge at the door. Obviously there are lots of instruments and sounds on here that I really like […]; the fuzzy, clipped weezer-y electric guitars, some really on-point live drumming and wonky, overdriven casios. And in fact, all this stuff, good and bad, is mixed up in a really cool way throughout these songs, jammed as they are with rad riffs, ingenious melodic bits and pieces, inventive rhythms, singalong choruses with pleasantly unlikely chord progressions - a veritable smorgasbord of multitracked musical fun, if you will. I’m not going to win my writer-badge back by stating that the shorter, punchier tracks with the loud guitars are clearly the best ones here, but it’s true, so I’ll say it anyway. 'This Is How We Kiss' is the Obvious Hit Single, should such a thing have any meaning in 2008. iTunes says I’ve played it 36 times, not including mp3 player listens. It’s fucking perfect! Two minutes and eight seconds of the kind of geek-pop gold that wearers of black-framed glasses the world over secretly dream of whilst dutifully listening to their dreary Finnish folktronica records or whatever.

But, the fun doesn’t stop there, oh no - many of Throw Me The Statue’s other songs are almost as good. […] And the key is, of course, the songs. Throw Me The Statue’s main guy sounds like he has something he desperately wants to convey, probably re: failed relationships, or never-happened ones, or imagined ones, only he can’t really blurt it all out in a straight-up fashion for fear of maybe upsetting the people concerned, or making himself look like a jerk, or perhaps just cos that would make for boring songs (all perfectly valid reasons of course). So instead he scrambles his muse up into awkward mouthfuls of veiled meaning and book smarts absurdity that make Stephen Malkmus look like an open-hearted balladeer by comparison, at least until he decides to step out and throw in few lines of plain, descriptive fact before triumphantly scampering back again, as if to say “HA! GOT YOU!”. […] So to all my compatriots out there who’ve ever clutched a Guided By Voices song to their heart as if Bob Pollard’s cut & paste musings were the very sum of cosmic truth strapped to a second-hand Who riff (which they are)… you’d better believe Throw Me The Statue are on to a rare winner.”

I saw these guys play a couple of months back, and they didn’t play “This Is How We Kiss”! Can you believe that? It’s like if you went to see B.O.C. and they didn’t play “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”! Anyway, never mind.

Mp3> This Is How We Kiss


8. Zatopeks – Damn Fool Music (Household Name)


It’s an odd business, pop-punk. In theory, the best genre ever – the music of suburban delinquents who never got over The Ramones, pushing speed, volume, good humour and obvious pop melodies to their natural conclusion. In practice though, things can quickly be soured by a few too many second rate bands reducing the whole deal to a joyless exercise in genre convention, all seemingly recorded by the same dude, who sets the desk for “a bit too slick” then goes out to get a sandwich. All it takes though is one really good band with a unique voice of their own, and we’re cooking with gas once more, as all the reasons why I love this music come flooding back. Enter South London’s Zatopeks with their second album ‘Damn Fool Music’, one of the strongest and most enjoyable records I’ve heard all year in any genre. They’ve got the velocity, attack and energy of this music down pat, with all the hardcore tempos, processed cheese fuzz guitar, bouncing Deedee basslines and singalong choruses are present and correct, sounding as instinctively right as they ever have done. But beyond that, the band take a slightly more wide-ranging approach to things, incorporating elements of ‘60s pop, rock n’ roll to pleasing effect. And most importantly, they’ve also got a truly great, ambitious songwriter in the shape of frontman Will DeNiro, whose smart and engaging lyrics mark the band out as something special from the word go. Just about every song here manages to kick off with the gut-wrenching immediacy of Jawbreaker or The Replacements, addressing subject matter ranging from broken relationships, depression and getting older via healthy detours into politics and history, to the more traditional punk concerns of getting wrecked and hating The Daily Mail, all approached with a refreshing level of insight and honesty, and a self-effacing English punk-bloke wit you’ll recognise from Milky Wimpshake or early Billy Brag. Oh, and some REALLY kick-ass tunes too. They even do a couple of really great, affecting acoustic songs, worthy of any of the above reference points. Yeah, for real. Perfectly paced, perfectly executed and overflowing with feeling, ‘Damn Fool Music’ is a brilliant piece of work, building up a picture of the band’s ideology and the singer/writer’s inner world that comes pretty close to doing for disillusioned punk blokes in the Heathrow flightpath what ‘Let It Be’ did for teenage delinquents from Minneapolis. I realise this probably isn’t exactly sounding like nectar from the gods to all you cutting edge underground music types out there, but seriously, what we’ve got here is a really fucking great band deserving of an audience way beyond the punk-as-genre ghetto, and if you’ve ever been remotely into the idea of guys with guitars playing loud songs about stuff that’s on their minds, or if you’re just looking for the perfect, unpretentious headphone-blast to get you on the way to work in the morning, I’d recommend giving them a shot.

Mp3s> Radio Marija
Jumble Sale


7. Pete & The Pirates - Little Death (Stolen Recordings)


Speaking as a feckless, overgrown moping indie fool, Pete & The Pirates are a very comforting presence. Come on, their excellent debut album seems to call out, come and have a pint with us; bring your unfashionable shoes and your shitty winter jacket and the bags under your eyes and tedious tales of your rubbish job, and all will be well, for we are feckless overgrown fools too, and we have a load of fast-strummed, jangling guitars like The Verlaines and The Clean used to do, and a drummer who goes off like a rocket, and a basketful of really, really great songs all about girls, and being sad, and girls, and wanting to stay in bed, and… um, well that’s about it really. All topped off with a load of fiendishly wonky pop-genius lead guitar hooks that’ll worm their way into your brain like nothing since all those Pixies songs way back when. Hooks that, along with the inherently anthemic potential of many of their best tunes, would get these fellas played incessantly on the radio were there any justice in the world, gaining them the respect of a fanbase stretching way beyond the bounds of feckless indie fools, and earning them enough shiny pounds to quit their rubbish jobs and to go live a life of comfort in nice big houses just like, I dunno, Blur or somebody. But as all us moaning, dissatisfied bastards know, there is no such justice to be found, which is exactly why we need bands like Pete & The Pirates to make us feel better by singing beautifully sad songs about the indignities of having to get up in the morning, and, ironically, giving us a perfect kick up the arse to get us out of the front door in the process. Thank you Pete & The Pirates! Long may you continue to sail the suburban seas, making ‘indie’ – sans suffix – seem no longer a dirty word, but once again like a great, righteous thing we can wrap around us like a big ol’ blanket.

Mp3>Knots


6. Jonathan Richman - Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild (Vapour)


That every Jonathan Richman album is, taken on its own terms, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, goes without saying. But, as the uncharacteristically downbeat cover art eerily suggests, this one has a quite different feeling to anything he’s done in the past. From the outset, Jonathan’s voice sounds more distant, less self-assured, than he ever before, his guitar playing softer and more fragile, as his sole accompanist Tommy Larkins manfully attempts to lay down the quietest drums ever set on record. Befitting this change of pace, Jonathan has turned in perhaps his darkest and most questioning set of songs since he was working out his adolescent angst in The Modern Lovers. As fans and admirers of Mr. Richman, this change is initially disconcerting, making us worried for his ongoing health and happiness. But as selfish music fans, we can enjoy one of the most vital and affecting record he’s made in years. In many of the songs here, Jonathan expresses frustration with his homelife, or maybe just with growing older in general. “You are the light of the world / so why is your world so grey?” he pleads on the unspeakably tender ‘Our Drab Ways’, whilst other songs find him reflecting on young love from a distance, acknowledging for the first time that that’s not really his place in the world anymore. “They’re gonna take this sterile place and make it live”, he declares, welcoming in the protagonists of ‘The Lovers are Here and They’re Full of Sweat’. There are two renditions of one of my favourite new songs, and perhaps the most angry and controversial song Jonathan has attempted for a while, “When We Refuse To Suffer”, in which he rejects the use of anti-depressants in no uncertain terms, even shredding on an overdriven electric guitar for the first time in decades on the second version, as he spits out the lyrics with frightening passion; “..that’s when the air freshener wins, and the moon outside is the loser!” Make of that what you will, but personally, I say right fucking on Jonathan, and thanks for having the guts to sing this one for us. The same sentiment applies doubly to the album’s closing track, and the one that will mean the most to many listeners, ‘As My Mother Lay Lying’, in which he sings about speaking with his mother on her deathbed. There’s not much more I can say about that one – if your eyes are dry by the end of it, you have a far harder heart than I. For all that this is a harrowing and unhappy collection of songs though, Jonathan’s ongoing faith in the beauty of the world around him still shines through every pore of it, and my favourite song here is definitely the title track. I mean, it’s just an old fashioned love song I guess, just like some other ones he’s done in the past, so simple in its construction it’s like it’s barely there at all, it could blow away in the breeze, but… oh man, does he ever nail it. For over thirty years now, Jonathan has been a master of turning exactly what’s on his mind at any given moment into great and life-affirming art, and, though he’s clearly been having a bit of a rough time of recent, he has once again succeeded wonderfully. I hope that ’09 proves a bit more of a fun time for him and his nearest and dearest, but either way, I’m sure there are many of us out there who have been reminded by the strength of this album that, as the excellent (tho sadly defunct?) ‘Concert Haikus’ weblog succinctly put it recently;

There are few people
In this world that I love half
As much as this man

Mp3>Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Jonathan Richman, Julie Doiron, Mount Eerie, Pete and The Pirates, Throw Me The Statue, Zatopeks