THE FIFTY BEST RECORDS OF 2009: Part #3

(I'm gonna try to get this whole deal done before January 4th by the way, so stay tuned!)

40. Slasher Risk - スラシア リスク (Obsolete Units)

I only just got hold of this CD, so probably haven’t given it sufficient listening time to wax lyrical, except to confirm that it is a pleasingly varied affair, signalling many potentially rewarding recording directions from this duo, whose freeform skronk-terror I initially had down as potentially un-recordable. Good work everybody! So, a quick table of contents: #1: five minutes of gloriously knuckleheaded heavy metal thunder, #2: eight minutes of a chiming, wintry dual guitar cosmic ambience, reminiscent of something off Charalambides ‘Our Bed Is Green’, #3: six minutes of industrial cacophony, like the sound of something going very wrong in a very dangerous factory, #4: a twenty seven minute live set of brooding no wave skyscraping and exhilarating stalk-n’-slash sonic violence, and #5: two minutes of Japanese street sounds and subway announcements. Depending on his or her aesthetic preferences, any open-eared listener is guaranteed to find at least three of these five disparate selections to be TOTALLY KILLER. So, let’s have a contest -- which of the above do you reckon I’ve selected to post as an mp3 below? Why not write down your choice on a piece of paper, then hit the download button and find out if your right? C’mon, it’ll be fun!

Mp3> Brooklyn



39. Grass Widow – 12” EP (Captured Tracks)

Like many of the new generation of American bands, Grass Widow throw together a bag of long naturalised elements from surf, punk, psychedelia, ‘80s guitar-pop etc, and invest the results with a sorta indefinable strung out, haunted quality. Unlike many of their contemporaries though, Grass Widow go about all this with a great deal of care and self-confidence, making sure that the four tracks they’ve here submitted to Captured Tracks are invested at all times with tightly wound instrumental interplay, captivating, folk-chant harmonies, killer less-is-more guitarwork, a definite sense of emotional coherence and… well, y’know, all the stuff that makes young people playing songs on guitar, bass & drums good, essentially. ‘Lulu’s Lips’ in particular is a winner, evoking some blissed out 5am nightclub loneliness moment perfectly, drifting vocal refrains hovering over an ESG-worthy rhythm workout and an endless practice amp echo of that guitar slide from ‘Rockaway Beach’. And the other songs are great too – ‘Tattoo’ sounds like a female Wipers falling through a Proustian time tunnel, ‘Thirsty Again’ is like a rainswept 6am journey to the beach to go surfing, just after they’ve left that club from the other song. No fooling - this EP is a solid and beautiful thing in a way that even some sensible old curmudgeon who’d never give in and shell out for yet another oversized, overpriced and poorly pressed 12” EP by some overhyped teenagers on Captured Tracks will be able to nod sagely and appreciate. So bite yr tongue and wait ‘til it’s reissued on an early singles CD comp after their debut album proper wipes us all out next year.

Mp3 > Lulu’s Lips



38. Psyched To Die – Sterile Walls EP (Grave Mistake)

I may not have quite realised it back when I reviewed this 7” earlier this year, but after downloading the mp3s on a whim and sticking them on my player for a quick walk to the shops, the truth became clear: THIS BAND RULES! Psyched To Die do pretty much everything you could ask for from a punk-as-genre band in 2009 (or 1982 for that matter), kicking off like a dynamo for eight songs that have the decency to knock you on your ass, get their point across and end. In terms of pure velocity and rage, you could file ‘em under hardcore, only they’re not regimented or boring enough to stay enveloped for more than a few seconds at a time, given their penchant for relatively clean-toned, fast-moving riffing, strangulated Greg Ginn leads, wiry pre-h/c energy and – joy of joys – comprehensible vocals, all topped off with a palpable sense of all-consuming frustration and misanthropy that spills over into not-half-as-dumbass-as-you’d-expect odes to atomic war, mental health-based incarceration, media brainwashing and the like. I wouldn’t have believed anyone could take these hackneyed ol’ elements and make them sound so fresh again, but… here we all are. Punk rock satori, pretty much.

Mp3> Five Year Plan




37. Jacuzzi Boys – No Season (Florida’s Dying)

It’s hard to write about Jacuzzi Boys without invoking their Florida heritage. As I’ve gone off about when I’ve written about them previously, their music seems to play straight into the same “weird Florida” vibe as their state’s rich heritage of exploitation moviemakers. They seem to rise from a world of swamp ghosts and mutant gators, of turquoise swimsuits, surfboards strapped to the top of broken down Cadillacs and radioactive technicolor blood, a world where twilight and blinding sunshine are indistinguishable, and the beach party goes on forever as the casualties pile up. Putting such flipperies aside for the moment though, any garage-trash aficionado would be forced to agree that Jacuzzi Boys are a good example of that odd sub-set of the music that people in the cold parts of the United States simply don’t make. I loved their singles, and this album delivers big-time, with thirteen bursts of pretty much definitive psychedelic punk, executed in the spirit of the 13th Floor Elevators or the ‘80s Flaming Lips, taking simple four-chord rock n’ roll and somehow rendering it impossibly, pupil-dilatingly weird. The dumbest Spring Break frat boy around could probably get his head around Jacuzzi Boys’ killer rhythm section, sweet, almost classic rock, lead guitar moves and seemingly endless faith in the ‘Louie Louie’/’You’re Gonna Miss Me’ turnaround. But what would he make of the manic tape echo that seems to crash in and out of their songs at random intervals? Or the foggy fuzz burbling somewhere deep in the mix? And what of their lyricist’s somewhat… unorthodox.. approach to getting his tales of haunted cabins, ruined birthday parties and bad acid across to the dance floor? These are just some of the things that help make “No Season” the perfect soundtrack to dancing with a mutant jellyfish girl on a flimsy wooden jetty – and it’s a soundtrack I think we could all benefit from keeping within easy reach.

Mp3> Island Ave.



36. Circuit Des Yeux – Sirenium (DeStijl)

Over the past few years, the figure of the “delay pedal lady” has become a prominent fixture in weirdo music, to the extent of becoming an accepted categorisation in its own right, rather than an occasional anomaly. From early adopters like Fursaxa and Christina Carter through to Grouper, U.S. Girls and Pocahaunted, there’s probably some fiend somewhere penning a retrospective history of the ‘movement’ for a broadsheet paper as we speak. It should go without saying that the above practitioners all represent a way of doing things that I greatly enjoy, but it is nonetheless interesting to note that 2009’s most exciting addition to this shaky pantheon seems determined to fuck with whatever reductionist conventions the aforementioned broadsheet fiend is ready to lay at her door, by way of one of the most challenging, puzzling and unsettling LPs of the year. If I start trying to disassemble the music of Indiana-based Circuit Des Yeux, picking out elements of her haunting goth-girl baritone and internal mic level string/piano/snare mutant blues bleedage from the implacable fog that constitutes ‘Sirenium’ … well, that wouldn’t really be doing things justice. To drag up some creaky old reasoning, ‘Sirenium’ isn’t atmosphere-over-content so much as the atmosphere IS the content, with sheets of drifting, mystifying sound laid thick over whatever core song was once present, like layers of lace gauze over a burn victim’s face. As such, it’s hard to really discuss the album as anything other than abstract impressions – impressions that can’t help but form a Twin Peaks-like netherworld of suburban confinement, strange, atavistic beauty and stark, violent terror. Whatever subjective impressions it’s all meant to convey, it’s hard to deny that the result is completely captivating, and it’s more than a little inspiring to think on what it represents in the continuum of DIY/homemade music – one girl and her laptop, in a house, making astonishing, otherworldly sounds pretty much just from herself and a few bits of junk left lying around in the living room.

Mp3> Paranoid

Labels: best of 2009, Circuit Des Yeux, Grass Widow, Jacuzzi Boys, Psyched To Die, Slasher Risk