THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 1.

Yeah, I decided to make it forty-two. And your point is..?

Here’s the two bonuses, before we move on to the usual five-per-post run down.

42. Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams (Sub-Pop)

Sneakily checking this out prior to release a couple of months back, I scribbled some stuff here that still sums up my feelings quite nicely really.

‘Only In Dreams’ is such a leap from DDGs previous material, it’s like listening to a different band. Amazing to think that as recently as the end of last year, she/they were still knocking out tracks in the same lo-fi vein as her earliest material (cf: the ‘He Gets Me High’ EP, ‘Stiff Little Fingers’ 7”, the Misfits cover on the b-side of the ‘Bhang Bhang..’ single). ‘Only In Dreams’ though is full steam ahead toward bombastic, mainstream-focused guitar-pop that really sounds like The Pretenders.

Inevitably, this takes them a lot further away from the elements that initially drew me to the band, but as far as second album progressions go it’s a logical and well-executed move I s’pose. The chief failing here isn’t so much the sound as the fact that – for me at least - the songwriting doesn’t match up to the high standards set by the first LP, favouring generic love songs and empty platitudes over the weirder/darker details and character studies that stood out on ‘I Will Be’. But the drumming’s still great, the guitars still have a reassuring coating of fuzz n’ phase all over them, and when it all works, it’s pretty brilliant - you’d certainly be hard-pressed to find better gigantic, transcendent, radio-ready pop/rock songs than ‘Bedroom Eyes’ and ‘Just a Creep’ in the racks circa 2011.

Far from a total bust then, but basically listening to ‘Only In Dreams’ feels a bit like seeing a much-loved pupil graduating from art college and getting a job in the city or something. Bye bye Dum Dum Girls, hope you have fun out in the big wide world! I’ll stay here playing that f-ed up tape with ‘Long Hair’ and ‘Hey Sis’ on it.

Youtube > Bedroom Eyes




41. Hype Williams – One Nation (Hippos in Tanks)

Writing previously about impeccably mysterioso London duo Hype Williams, after catching them live last year and subsequently reviewing their first 12”, I ended up comparing them to Boards of Canada. A fairly random shot at a passing insight, but one that now makes me feel kinda vindicated, as ‘One Nation’ sees them jettisoning the final traces of the cut n’ paste murk and sketchy bedroom improvisations that characterised their earliest material (check out the ‘High Beams’ EP if you can find it, it’s great), and defaulting to a fully synth-based approach that… well, that basically sounds *so much* like Boards of Canada that the similarity becomes unavoidable. Or at least, I think it does. I suppose it could just be some weird fixation I’ve developed?

Anyway, Hype Williams’ main departure point from the BoC blueprint – aside from generally working with a slightly more threatening, lo-fi aesthetic – is the removal of any head-noddy 4/4 ‘beatz’ (always the element that narked me on BoC’s otherwise very fine records), and their replacement with the kind of menacingly fragmented dub-step type drum programming that I won’t embarrass myself by trying to define, as I’m basically pretty unfamiliar with the styles from which it originates. Further contemporary signifiers can easily be heard in another significant addition – that of direct vocal samples - heavily echoed sighs and exultations, warped reflections of contemporary club music and radio pop.

In keeping with their previous releases, ‘One Nation’ takes the form of an entirely unmarked white label 12”, anonymous but for the fact that Boomkat put it in the post to me when I ordered the Hype Williams record. I had to dig up an illegal download to find any track titles (where did they come from? Did some random uploader make them up?), and just had to google again to find out what label it’s on. Feeding into this aesthetic of overall eeriness, HW, like BoC before them, succeed in creating an atmosphere of Utter Creep by means of dragging ostensibly ‘positive’ sounds – crackly poetry recitals and pitch-shifted self-help dialogues, echoing watch alarms and distant ice cream van chimes (no laughing/crying children this time round, but I think I caught a few on the last record) – out of their original contexts, letting them float anxiously in the void, twisted out of shape alongside the duo’s soothing, distantly familiar melodies, made strange via deteriorating washes of electronic sound. Y’know, just like…. uh, so look, I don’t wanna sound like I’m hitting HW w/ plagiarism allegations here – it’s really good to hear this stuff revisited, retooled - made more visceral and unpredictable for a new era, and, as ever, ‘One Nation’ is an engaging and rewarding listen that takes on a life beyond its obvious antecedents.

Soundcloud > Warlord

Labels: best of 2011, Dum Dum Girls, Hype Williams