20. Blues Control - Local Flavor (Siltbreeze)

Somehow, I’ve managed to miss all of Blues Control’s previous work, but I’ll certainly be making an effort to catch up, because ‘Local Flavor’ is an admirable piece of work. Like most of the other albums in this run-down that are of the vague psyche/drone/space-rock variety, Blues Control benefit hugely here from taking musical forms that are usually experienced as huge, meandering splurges of sound and crafting them from the bottom up into far more concise, deliberate statements that cram maximum inspiration and effect into a thirty-five minute LP, leaving us wanting more. ‘Local Flavor’ begins precisely as you WOULDN’T expect a record like this to begin, with a crashing kick drum and a monumental stoner-metal guitar riff, pounding itself into the ground until the rock pleasure principle subsides and you start to realise that the track has been overlaid with several layers of crackling piano improvisation that sound like they’ve been pulled off an old 78, underlining the essentially droning, repetitive qualities of the rock thud to extremely pleasing effect… and then the trumpets come in – splendid. Each subsequent track lands us somewhere completely different, but the quality is consistent throughout. It should be noted that the trendy appropriations of world music ‘ambience’ that both the album’s cover art and title may lead you to expect are reassuringly absent from the music. Instead, both of ‘Local Flavor’s longer tracks choose to tip their hat toward the much-rumoured but rarely realised drone-psych / dance-disco crossover; ‘Tangier’ adds a throbbing pulse that sounds like it was sampled from directly outside a nightclub to a beautiful, Steve Reich-esque cut-up of vocal sounds overlaid with house-style synths and percussion overdubs, recalling one of those mammoth Arthur Russell disco jams in the best possible way. ‘On Through the Night’, the album’s longest and darkest track, meanwhile builds itself up from an ambient first half into a frenzy of dense, tar pit funk, with crisp electric organ finding itself subsumed into a slow-building cloud of degraded, primeval skree, ghostly bamboo echos and Carpenter-core electronics. In short, an utterly beguiling world of self-contained sound, building on the ruins of its avant garde and avant pop influences to create a real winner.

Mp3> Good Morning

19. Felix – You Are The One I Pick (Kranky)

Another record that I love, but that is proving hard to write about. So let’s take a deep breath and get on with it: Felix is Lucinda Chua writing and singing and playing piano and cello, and Chris Summerlin pitching in with guitar and arrangements and so forth. The songs here are both abstract and imagistic and deeply personal, each one bleeding seamlessly into the next, and comprised of odd, off-kilter combinations of musical refrains, the logic of which is apparent to Chua alone, generally set to sweet, slow, lurching accompaniment that evokes the feeling of dancing drunk on a freezing, rocky beach at night as surely as any medley from the Dirty Three back catalogue. Chau’s lyrics mix dream logic animal imagery (dragons, ponies, weasels all make an appearance) with vicious glimpses of everyday 21st century minutiae and industrial strength discontent, rapture and uncertainty… and the result is pretty stunning – pure musical poetry, like that girl from Life Without Buildings sitting down alone at the piano and letting it all hang out… but no, that’s a shit comparison, fuck it. You know those albums or books you get sometimes that seem just so idiosyncratic and personal that they’re like a guided tour of the inside of the author’s head at the point of composition, yet rendered with such skill that the result isn’t so much creepy or self-indulgent as it is just plain moving and intoxicating? – this album is a bit like one of those, let’s leave it at that.

Mp3> Waltzing For Weasels

18. Favours For Sailors – Furious Sons (Tough Love)

Like some weird, preppy indie-rock butterfly, Favours For Sailors seemed to crash fully formed into the world toward the end of last year, shone with a very particular kind of brilliance and apparently played their final gig a couple of months back, leaving just these six songs, each of them such a tour de force of perfection within their chosen genre, you wonder why Pavement or Superchunk would even bother reforming when instead they could just hire a hall, play these songs on repeat and hang their heads, admitting there is no more work for them to do on this earth. Ok, maybe I exaggerate… but nonetheless, a couple of these songs are so damn spectacular that their very existence seems arrogant – musical to-do lists with every single item happily crossed out. What was it I said about ‘em way back when? Oh yeah:

‘‘Furious Sons’ is a brief set of songs custom built to remind us that a good band who know how to play their guitar/guitar/bass/drums, who have big, bright, clean production, vaguely literate/ambiguous lyrics and fully developed multi-part songs that venture beyond the four minute mark, can still be SO MUCH FUN when they hit the bullseye and do all that stuff RIGHT for once, with energy and humour and the kind of off-the-cuff musical prowess that makes crappy wouldbe musicians like myself curse their sorry lot in life. “Erode My Empire” makes for a great opening track – I love the way the lead guitar hooks splurge all over the melodica-assisted verse-chug, and it’s hard not to crack a smile at the lyrical conceit; “empires erode / from the coastline in / soon I’ll be stuck in a square metre in the middle / probably in Nottingham”. […]The best song though is track # 4, “I Dreamt That You Loved Me In Your Dreams”. It’s STUNNING. An indie-rock ‘Citizen Kane’ in three minutes fifty-nine seconds. And, like ‘Kane’, it both demands a blow by blow written account and supersedes the need for one in its clarity of its intention and expression. It builds moment of awesomeness upon moment of awesomeness like a big, top heavy layer cake for anyone who’s ever enjoyed lively, smart sad-boy indie rock, until it collapses in on itself at just the right moment – instant classic.”

I’ll stand by that.

Mp3> I Dreamt That You Loved Me In Your Dreams

17. The Bats – The Guilty Office (Hidden Agenda)

It’s no secret that I’ve been all about The Bats ever since I saw them play over the summer, doing a set that drew heavily from this album – perhaps that’s got something to do with why I like it just as much if not more than any of the older stuff I’ve got by them – they’re a band who started off strong in the ‘80s and have subsequently just taken it steadily, slowly maturing to a state of ninja-like mastery in the field of low-key, melodic guitar pop. It’s strange that I’ve always sorta clung to the belief that great rock n’ roll is on some level a desperate, unnatural sound – not just electrified and distorted, but a sound that is pushing against something – the sound of people striving to bring it into being in the face of insurmountable personal/technological/physical/social obstacles. Well, The Bats help chuck that theory out the window by vestige of sounding so completely organic, so inevitable and RIGHT that when Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward’s voices meld together on the chorus of opener ‘Countersign’, it sounds like music that could have risen straight from the earth itself, and it continues to drift over the fields at night and off into the starry sky over the course of these twelve tunes, never hitting a bum note, an awkward lyric, a strumming pattern or rhythm or melody that’s anything less than totally, lazily, wonderfully harmonious, to the extent that it’s difficult to believe they ever pick up their respective instruments and DON’T sound like this – an impression that’s only heightened by the welcome return of Alastair Galbraith’s violin on a few of these songs. I guess they’re too modest to make an issue of it, but while other bands have been busy crashing and burning and getting famous and getting fucked up, The Bats have been busy just quietly being one of the best guitar bands in the world, period.

Mp3> Countersign

16. Dinosaur Jr - Farm (Fat Possum)

It is a truth widely acknowledged that the only good things to have come out of the recent mania for nostalgia-fed band reformations are a reinvigorated Mission of Burma, and the totally unforeseen rebirth of Dinosaur Jr as a creative force. And just when folks were getting ready to write their first comeback off as a fluke, they’re off again, thundering onto the track with a monster-truck of an album that’s probably, like, the second or third best one they’ve ever done, once again amping up their time-honoured classic rock + angst + noise formula to deafening perfection. As they get older, there seems to be more Crazy Horse gnarl than ever in the mix, and ‘Plans’ rips off the intro to ‘Cortez The Killer’ so flagrantly, it’s a wonder Neil Young hasn’t been in touch to do whatever it is he likes to do to copyright violators to teach them the error of their ways (he probably makes them do a really hard crossword or something). Or maybe he let them off, just cos the track’s freakin’ great. It’s funny: Murph’s drumming is as functional as ever and you’d be hard-pressed to pick out Lou’s bass line beneath Mascis’s peanut brittle of multi-layered fuzz on most of these songs, so one is forced to ask: what is it about these three guys playing together that gets J writing songs and playing guitar with a desperate, youthful spirit he’s been missing for nigh on twenty years? Is he just knocking out Dinosaur-type material to order, or does he still feel the adolescent loneliness and frustration of these songs as keenly as his yearning yowls and impassioned, stumble-fingered soloing would tend to suggest? Really though, does it matter, when what results is such an overpowering vision of heroic, big budget modern rock, the way it could and should be, if only all those other festival headlining clowns would cut out all the bullshit, up the intensity and actually mic those giant show-off amp stacks up properly for once? Play loud.

Mp3 > Pieces

Labels: best of 2009, Blues Control, Dinosaur Jr, Favours For Sailors, Felix, The Bats