THE FIFTY BEST RECORDS OF 2009: Part #9

10. Vivian Girls - Everything Goes Wrong (In The Red)

From my review a couple of months back:

“The idea of self-defined, punk-birthed musicians paying tribute to the mechanised emotion of girl group pop is a fascinating one, and it won’t have escaped your notice that it’s become a pretty ubiquitous notion in pop culture over the past few years. Which is no bad thing, obviously – it’s easy and fun to tip a wink to the classics and vamp on some Spector-isms. But what sets the Vivian Girls apart, particularly on this LP, is that they approach this terrain with the spirit of total, deadly seriousness that’s necessary to give such angst-driven material life, recognising the Spector/Morton canon for the bloody heart of darkness it is, and responding in kind with an album that’s dead-eyed, blank-faced, introverted and drained of all the usual affectations and signifiers. It’s got its fingers in its ears, and it’s not listening, especially not to YOU. Tantrum music.

Like the classic NY girl group productions, ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ strikes me as an urban record – a barrier to block out the noise of the city, to create a safe space for internalised melodrama to thrive. This album is the sound of The Shangri-Las out on their own, beaten, rejected and building a wall; a wall the like of which those fucking producers couldn’t even imagine. Not an exotic, enticing wall to trap the listeners inside, but a razor-wire topped prison wall of senseless repetition and tinnitus-inducing distortion, compressed to fuck to keep the hurt inside and keep EVERYONE. ELSE. OUT. Just like some pissed off hardcore kid jamming a tape in his walkman circa 1985.”


Mp3> Can't Get Over You



9. Let's Wrestle - In The Court Of The Wrestling Let's (Stolen)

Opening track: “My friends are in prison / and that’s where I want to be / cos I hate everywhere / They said if you want to help / just kill yourself / but I won’t / I won’t do that”.

On this debut full length, the very real angst and depression that has always lurked at the heart of Let’s Wrestle, barely concealed beneath the scrappy, self-deprecating humour of their terrific series of singles and EPs, finally breaks out and makes itself known. Initially, that may seem an unsavoury development, for the scrappy, self-depreciating stuff was an absolute blast that left us with a handful of absolute classics of DIY pop carnage, whereas there’s certainly no shortage of white guitar bands moaning tiresomely about the sad state of their affairs. But thankfully, Let’s Wrestle’s process of development here is somewhat akin to when The Television Personalities moved beyond singing ‘Part-Time Punks’ and ‘Where’s Bill Grundy Now?’ and presumably surprised everyone still paying attention by knocking out the flat-out best run of masterpiece albums of the 1980s. Ok, so Let’s Wrestle haven’t got that far quite yet, but with Wesley Patrick Gonzalez’ substantial song-writing talent, his ability to put across a loveable, sympathetic loser persona to accompany his tales of woe, and the band’s ragged power trio drive and smirking underdog jollity, they’ve certainly thrown together a fucking brilliant record, one that speaks of the travails of going to the job centre, watching TV, getting dumped, buying a new mattress and, above all, not having a girlfriend, and leaves you feeling that you’ve just spent forty minutes in the company of some wise, witty and noble adventurers, rather than just three suburban misfits with self-esteem issues who like to shoplift lager from Sainsburys and daydream about one day being Dinosaur Jr. Musically, they’re bursting with ideas and ability, but one gets the feeling that, like Dan Treacy or the Swell Maps before them, they’re never going to sound *quite right*, no matter how much they work at it. They’re never going to qualify for whatever race it is guys in rock bands are supposed to be running. Awkwardness hangs over them like a weird cloud, and, to a substantial extent, that’s what makes me love them, what makes me recognise them as MY PEOPLE, pulling out all the negative and pathetic aspects of my own character and parading them around in front of me in the form of goofy, hilarious rock songs that would probably still sound like they were held together with sellotape and twigs if Sony signed ‘em and let ‘em have a year of studio time. And amen to that – I hope they keep doing it forever.

Mp3> It's Not Going To Happen



8. The Cave Weddings - EP (self-released)

So regular readers will have got that I love The Cave Weddings by now. For those who haven’t, here’s some blather to prove it:

“Boy do I love The Cave Weddings! They really are just awesome piled upon awesome. Since these songs have been in my possession, I’ve listened to nothing else. I suppose grumblers and those of an anxious disposition may be apt to claim that bands like The Cave Weddings sound contrived and generic, that they’re just writing catchy pop songs to a formula, reducing lyrical/emotional signposts of unrequited (boo!) vs requited (yay!) love to a near abstract gesture. Well claim away dudes; that’s what Buddy Holly and The Ramones were doing, and when the formula is turning out a 100% hit rate to rival Buddy Holly and The Ramones, criticism is futile. These songs are SO GOOD.

How do they get it so right? Just a gallophing great rhythm guitar, a twangy, catchy lead line, some simple, enthusiastic drumming, a real likable wasn’t-made-for-singing voice straining to hit the right notes, some ba-ba-bas, tried & tested melodies of elephant-killing power…. it ain’t rocket science. But when all the elements are in alignment, when the band sound so damn happy to be here… you can’t beat it.”

If you can accept that rock n’ roll doesn’t always have to be about noise and terror and teenage frustration, but can just be happy and cool, then these five songs are perfect rock n’ roll.

Mp3> Let's Drive



7. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - s/t (Fortuna Pop)

I first heard this one in, like, December ’08, but it was officially released in Feb ’09, and I got far too excited about it in May ’09:

“Needless to say, it was during one of my periodic retreats to the Welsh hills that the tables turned, when I downloaded a leak of The Pains album on a whim and stuck in my earphones to go for a nice long walk. BOY, is it an album. Outside the city, far from any music scene backbiting, my above reservations started to seem like the petty, snidey, insular bitching they undoubtedly are. Fuck ‘indie-pop’; what I was listening to as I barrelled down Welsh country lanes was rock n’ roll the way the Velvets rewired it forty years ago: the drummer plays simple stuff real enthusiastic, the organist holds down big, single chords and lets them ring, the bass doubles back on itself in sweet melodic patterns, and the guitars go FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF, covering everything like a happy rainstorm. The recording is huge, with everything amped up, filed down and maximised to digital-age, killer proportions, the chord changes are lovely, the songs are heartfelt and the lyrics are memorable and smart. What’s not to love?

My friend and I spoke briefly to the guy from The Pains at one of their gigs, and he seems like a really sweet, modest sort of fellow. I’m sure his band didn’t MEAN to make a Battle-Album. I think they’re just careful, ambitious, and very good at what they do. But nonetheless, they have made a Battle-Album. In one fell swoop, they manage to out-twee the neo-indiepoppers, to out-Superchunk the neo-indie rockers, and even to out-‘Gaze the neo-shoegazers on the longer tracks, with their motorik rhythmic drive and luxurious layered distortion. Within their designated sphere, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are kings of the castle. If you’re into any of this kinda stuff, they are henceforth the band to beat.”

Mp3> Come Saturday



6. The Mountain Goats - The Life Of The World To Come (4AD)

Trying to find a concise quote from my review of this album was hard work – it’s a pretty…um… ‘one paragraph following directly into the next one’ type piece full of digressional pontification, although it’s probably one of the better things I’ve written this year. And I know I’m always a dreadful bore on the subject of The Mountain Goats, but I really think this is one of the most beautiful collections of songs released in recent years, regardless of your thoughts on their previous work. It’s also one of, I think, only three introspective, acoustic songwriter type records in this top 50. Maybe I’m cheering up in my old age. Anyway, here are a few bits from the review that kinda get to the heart of the matter:

“The album’s true heart lays somewhere else entirely, in the sparse, ringing piano chords that underscore John’s voice on ‘Genesis 30:3’, one of the simplest and most beautiful devotional songs Darnielle has ever written. When I say ‘devotional’, I’m not sure whether the song expresses devotion to a lover or to a God, but to be honest it scarcely matters. As with several of the best songs on the record, Darnielle intentionally blurs the distinction between earthy and metaphysical faith, and in the process succeeds wonderfully in rising above the knuckleheaded bickering and terminal point-missing that blights 99% of contemporary discourse on religion, instead cutting straight to essential core of belief. In these songs, he speaks of the reality of feeling something within you that stretches beyond yourself, of the overriding sense of faith in the beauty of the world, and of a sense of purpose and an unwavering certainty that can be clung to throughout the very worst of times, whether it manifests itself as devotion to a church, as a gnostic ‘spark of the divine’, or simply as time spent in the arms of your beloved, or with an equally beloved family – for what, after all, is the difference?

[…]

Darnielle’s success here comes in the way he approaches his subject matter not as a dogmatic Xtian, but as the kind of flawed, spiritually bereft post-industrial human that modernist novels always used to warn us about, picking up the lessons of the scriptures for the first time and finding them more relevant to his own being than he ever suspected. As the chaotic, self-doubting protagonist of ‘Romans 10:9’ confirms for us in a rousing chorus adapted straight from the text:

‘If you can believe in your heart
And confess with your lips
Surely you will be
Saved one day’

And if we can put aside our kneejerk secular distaste for such phraseology and take that at face value, is it not a pretty fucking righteous note on which to start the day?”

Mp3> Genesis 30:3

Labels: best of 2009, Let's Wrestle, The Cave Weddings, The Mountain Goats, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, The Vivian Girls