40. No Problem – And Now This (Deranged)

Every year’s best-of list needs an obligatory Canadian punk record, and the appropriately named No Problem dutifully provide, with a no-nonsense burst of heavily ‘Flag-influenced mid-fi hardcore, hitting all the bases you might expect with applaudable vigour.

The band have a sloppy, forward-charging momentum reminiscent of Keith Morris era ‘Flag or early Adolescents (NO SOLOS), but for better or worse their vocalist leans heavy on the Rollins impersonation – altogether too heavily at times, and to be honest I nearly deep-sixed this one straight after he threw in a ‘that’s right!’, an ‘UGH!’, a staged coughing fit and an ‘I…can’t…BREATH’, all in the space of the 1:50 opening track.

Thankfully, subsequent numbers reveal No Problem to be a somewhat more interesting proposition than such po-faced silliness might suggest, adding a welcome dose of self-reflexive humour that makes me suspect that such macho exhortations are at least partly intended as self-parody (cf: the album title), especially once songs like ‘Ghost Car’ and the terrific ‘Spoiled Little Brat’ veer off message into the realms of full-on KBD zaniness. The band’s sound also becomes more opne-minded here and there, incorporating some unexpected touches like the odd four-note lead guitar line thing that glides over the top of ‘Most Days’, that vary the hue of their musclebound attack slightly, giving some tracks a feel akin to Fucked Up circa ‘Hidden World’, an invigorating mixture of raw violence, good ideas and relentless enthusiasm. Not that there’s anything wrong with just plain sounding like Black Flag of course – an ambition they continue to court with at least a certain level of success. After all, anybody coming to a party like this in search of open-minded self-expression is setting themselves up for a letdown.

It’s punk. It’s good. It’ll do. UGH!

Soundcloud > Spoiled Little Brat



39. The Advisory Circle – As The Crow Flies (Ghost Box)

By this point, the ‘hauntology’ aesthetic that Ghostbox helped define should really have jumped the shark - named and defined and discussed and picked over in Cultural Studies journals, we should be sick of this shit – fed up with the easy nostalgic cues, recycled webs of imagery and hints of pagan otherness lurking ‘neath the covers of second hand Penguins.

By rights, the label’s artists should be moving on before things get silly – expanding their operations into less thoroughly explored realms, or else pulling apart the threads of electronic/occult coziness that underlie their work in search of deeper mystery beneath. Or at the very least, dropping the aura of lounge/library politeness and writing some fucking good tunes.

Ironic then that ‘As The Crow Flies’ should find Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle digging his heels in, sticking stubbornly to the familiar, and emerging with one of the most enjoyable records on the label to date. From the nod to ‘The Owl Service’ opening titles on the cover art to the well-worn patterns within, this is Ghostbox by numbers really, but served up on this occasion with a solid musical heft and major key melodic inventiveness that makes it hard to resist sinking once again into the familiar idyll of a ‘70s that never was.

Opening – how else? – with BBC news pips and a faux-Orwellian public service announcement, ‘The End of the Beginning’ kicks things off with a convincingly stately fantasia of ‘motivational’ synth lines and hypnotic percussion, reminiscent of Neu!’s ‘Isi’, before the faux-radiophonic nature docu music of ‘Here! In The Wychwoods’ shimmers with a kaleidoscopic grandeur last seen on the best of Boards of Canada’s ‘Geogaddi’. Stranger idylls follow, such as the rolling pastoral love theme of ‘Innocence Elsewhere’, the mildly menacing action movie electro of ‘Modern Through Movement’ (which evolves into something like John Carpenter scoring a new theme for ‘Rainbow’), and the beguiling school hall dance therapy banishing ritual of ‘We Cleanse This Space’.

So far, so ‘YEAH, THAT’S KIND OF EXACTLY WHAT I EXPECTED’, but by this point you’re already hooked on another journey down the Ghostbox rabbithole, and let the zeitgeist shift as it may – the strength of this record makes a good case for this being a consistently rewarding place to be. There are a few missteps along the way – an overreliance of cutesy synth-bliss here and there (a touch more creep in the mix please!), and a misguided step toward vocodered indie-dance-pop falls rather flat on the closing ‘Lonely Signalman’, but by and large ‘As The Crow Flies’ is less the redundant retread we might have feared, instead playing out as a painstakingly realised perfection of this particular form.

Soundcloud> Learning Owl Reappears



38. Fergus & Geronimo – Unlearn (Hardly Art)

Not so much a ‘disappointment’ as a sudden, unexpected left turn, Fergus & Geronimo’s debut LP singularly fails to deliver on the kind of exultant, high energy soul-pop that their superb run of singles had promised, instead shanghaiing us for a trip to altogether choppier, more conceptual musical waters. Fusing disconnected genre pastiche to a series of cynical lyrical diatribes, invigorated by an occasional outburst of salty passion, ‘Unlearn’ is a curious record indeed – weird and offputting to the extent that when the duo do fall back on their talent for Awesome Pop suss, its use seems more assaultive than earnest – killer hooks and heart-on-sleeve vocal delivery used to rub salt into the wound, like hints of the fun we won’t be getting whilst these guys are still pissed off about something.

All of which can be taken as a compliment… kinda. Regardless of what it might not be, ‘Unlearn’ is certainly a pretty intriguing prospect, assembled with a kind of skewed, malign intellect reminiscent of Sparks or John Cale. Branching out in all directions from a straight-forward garage-psych base-camp, ‘Girls With English Accents’ plays as an eerily dead-eyed recreation of ‘Aftermath’-era ‘Stones, whilst vicious anti-music critic rant ‘Wanna Know What I Would Do?’ is one the most evilly catchy tunes you’ll have heard this year, it’s sing-song flute-led melody aimed at staying lodged in your head for weeks, even as the uncompromising venom of the song’s message lunges audaciously toward career suicide. Anti-boomer screed ‘Baby Boomer / Could You Deliver’ and slightly more obtuse anti-yuppie screed ‘Where the Walls are Made of Grass’ both benefit from elaborate baroque-psyche breakdowns that seem to exemplify ‘Unlearn’s focus on detourning traditionally upbeat musical gestures with negative lyrical snark – a tactic that’s in danger of turning terminally sour by the time ‘Forced Aloha’s indie-rock-album-closer sunset drift takes time out to announce that “your life is nothing / but an ugly beach-house fuck”.

This overriding tone of scatter-gun discontent is hammered home to such an extent that reprises of rousing singles cuts ‘Powerful Lovin’’ and ‘Baby Don’t You Cry’ start to sound lost amid the bile – like hugs from someone you suspect is about to switchblade you. Everything comes together nicely though on ‘The World Never Stops’ – an infectious, darkly funny love song, the protagonist reflecting on the inevitable cycle of life & death as he ogles girls – just about the best Sparks hit that Sparks never wrote.

That Fergus & Geronimo have the potential to knock out any number of smart, soulful garage-pop smash hits is clear. That they seem so sick of the contemporary world that they just want to fuck us up instead is kinda understandable. Outsider status firmly established and fair-weather fans dismissed, it’ll be interesting to hear where they head next.

Soundcloud > Wanna Know What I Would Do?



37. Swamp Witch – Gnosis tape (Gay Scientist Recordings)

Oof! Crashing in with the most suffocatingly heavy doom metal tone I’ve heard this year, Swamp Witch are a band whose name say it all really – a blackened, humid haze of grave soil and stagnant bong water, turned pungent and nasty in the Southern heat, like choking to death on Spanish moss. Fun times! Densely atmospheric whilst never losing their foundations as vicious, recognisable heavy rock songs, the three tracks on the A side here pull in all the best bits of extreme doom stalwarts like Moss and Burning Witch, pressing them down into a relatively economical twenty minutes of trudging terror - a thick, psychedelic mix allows for screeds of feedback, distant, mysterious screams and the vocalist’s coruscating black metal roar, but, crucially, the band never let it slide fully into stoned abstraction, keeping the riffs coming, keeping the heads banging in greasy slo-mo. Praise be. Vinnum Sabbathi!

And as if that wasn’t enough clinically depressed heaviosity for you, side B actually calls in one of those ‘Chopped & Skrewed’ stoner hip-hop DJ guys in to rework the same material, further slowing the pace to a sickening, medicated crawl, cranking the bass and swathing the whole deal in digital echo – basically exaggerating all the excesses of this genre to a level of skull-crushing fuckedness - the sound of being hit on the back of the head with a shovel and buried alive in the Everglades. So if you’re the kind of person who needs that in their life right now, you know where to look. YOU WILL NEVER WASH YOUR HAIR AGAIN.

Great sample from Al Adamson’s ‘Satan’s Sadists’ utilised on both sides too. Never gets old.

Soundcloud > Novem



36. Expo 70 – Death Voyage (Dead Pilot)

I’ve checked in from time to time with Justin Wright’s work as Expo 70 over the years, and whilst I’ve always found the music therein to be a pretty enjoyable tribute to the ‘70s heyday of Kosmische/experimental rock, it’s never really managed to make much of an impression on me beyond the level of a well-executed period dress-up. A nice surprise then to cop a listen to ‘Death Voyage’ and discover that Expo 70 has been forging on ahead into some darker, murkier and altogether more compelling territory of late, here presenting a series of lengthy, drone-based tracks (I know, who’da thought it?) that immediately put me in mind of a soundtrack to some non-existent cosmic horror movie about an experimental submarine expedition, voyaging to uncharted depths in a pitch-black oceanic trough, uncovering vast chthonic ruins of unknown origin and… who knows what else, lurking out in the darkness?

But maybe that’s just me.

I wouldn’t count on it though, as ‘Death Voyage’ is certainly a carefully sequenced record, swinging about as close to establishing a ‘narrative arc’ as an instrumental drone-rock album conceivably can, creating a dense, atmospherically consistent cycle of tracks that builds in intensity throughout.

Second track ‘Silent Watcher’ is particularly good, with rampantly phased synths sounding out like malfunctioning sonars, working an uneasy stand-off with sketchy, post-rock style guitar aggrepios to establish a mood of oppressive, monolithic dread that sets the tone for everything that follows. ‘Metensomatosis’ and ‘Travelling Circular Labyrinths’ up the ante, working with layers of tape-mangled Frippertronic doom guitar, gradually building to an eviscerating celestial din the recalls the work of Birchville Cat Motel’s Campbell Kneale (no small boast). By this point all bets for survival are off, allowing the record to boil over into the epic brownout of ‘Summoning Recapitulation Upon The Pyramid Temple’, as the lights goes out, water floods the hold and human life seems a very long way away indeed.

A brilliantly effective, reassuringly crushing take on the ‘one man drone-rock odyssey’ formula, ‘Death Voyage’ completely flips my take on Wright’s work. Awesome in the sense that it instigates awe, it sees him confidently stepping into the gnarly shoes of his inspirations rather than just paying gentle homage from afar.

Soundcloud > Silent Watcher

Labels: best of 2011, Expo 70, Fergus and Geronimo, No Problem, Swamp Witch, The Advisory Circle