THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 4

30. The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck (4AD)

That this is my least favourite Mountain Goats album since John Darnielle signed to 4AD all those years ago should be self-evident from its placement this low on the list. Deprived of a central concept to work around, it seems to find his songwriting flailing around in a number of odd and unsatisfying directions, as the band’s sound falls back on a competent but uninspiring strain of MOR acoustic indie-rock that’s getting pretty damn old, its few self-conscious attempts at experimentation (in particular, the Disney-ish dude choir on ‘High Hawk Season’) emerging as unwelcome embarrassments – the kind of thing that reinforce all the worst clichés about this band and its fans.

Nevertheless, there are many good and worthwhile songs here. ‘Estate Sale Sign’ is an immediate favourite - a breakneck sprint through ritual sacrifice, decrepit shopping malls, fading movie stills and birds of prey circling on high, it sticks around just long enough to throw up hints of a cruel and bizarre story beneath whilst remaining thrilling and elusive – a perfect Mountain Goats song really, recalling the fractured narratives of “We Shall All Be Healed”. ‘Beautiful Gas Mask’ is a similarly killer tune, threading lyrical non-sequiturs into a great bit of “no idea what it’s about, but it sure gets the blood pounding” goodness. The self-explanatory ‘For Charles Bronson’ is almost an absolute stormer, it’s momentum sapped somewhat by over-polite production and an unnecessary middle section, a fate shared by the half-great ‘Prowl Great Cain’. Perhaps tellingly, two of the best cuts here recall the more brooding, relatively low-key approach of 2009’s ‘The Life of the World to Come’ – piano-led opener ‘Damn Those Vampires’ (which fleetingly conjures the dusty desert-horror fables of movies like ‘Near Dark’) and, probably the overall highlight of this record, the richly evocative ‘Age of Kings’, which perhaps breaks interesting new ground for Darnielle, building it’s atmosphere not through any blood-curdling lyrical invention, but simply through its elegant, burnished gold string textures and stately melody.

A lot of the other songs here I don’t really ‘get’, but that’s ok, really, I mean, that’s fine – after all, a lot of the old boombox era records only mange maybe a 50% hit rate in all honesty. Darnielle has had an absolutely spectacular run since ‘Tallahassee’, and it would be churlish to expect it to last forever. What’s more worrying is that the crazy passion and fury that’s fuelled The Mountain Goats for twenty odd years seems to be dissipating here. Like many successful songwriters before him, Darnielle is starting to feel the effect of his being a guy who sits in an office all day with a piano writing songs for a living, rather than some desperate ne’erdowell trawling the highways trying to make a buck, or whatever. Basing one’s career almost entirely on compositional chops is always going to be a uneasy balance between “that’s an interesting subject, I should probably write a song about it” and “here’s something terrifying that happened when I picked up the guitar this evening, I don’t know where the fuck it came from”, and if you insist on being prolific, that balance is always gonna get a bit off-whack sometimes.

Then again though, a lot of people seemed to like this record just fine. The reviews were good. Is it weird that for some reason I think the songs on last year’s throwaway Extra Lens side-project way overshadowed even the best ones on this album? On what side of the band/listener divide is the energy really draining away here? Are The Mountain Goats changing, or just me? Something to ponder in the dark hours of the night. Whatever - # 30 dudes.

Beautiful Gas Mask




29. Maria Minerva – Tallinn at Dawn tape / Cabaret Cixous LP (Not Not Fun)

Two whole albums of laptop transcendence from the prolific Ms Minerva, rising above blog-hype and cool-label-anticipation-disorder and “TRIVIA FACT: interned at The Wire” to really make her mark on the world of…. whatever the hell you call this kind of thing.

‘Tallinn..’ is ostensibly the weaker of the two sets of recordings, but there’s a stark naivety and sketchy pop minimalism to the songs herein that I really love. It’s just awesome, untutored homemade songs really, assembled out of little more than random samples, midi synth lines, Maplins-mic vocals and cheap effects, but within this evidently limited framework, Minerva reveals a great knack for sound-assembly and an uncanny ear for a really haunting melody. All of the record’s strengths are fully in evidence on the tremendous ‘Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll)’, one of my favourite tracks of the year, which fuses chunks of some long lost youtube rock star interview to bass and drum patterns that sound weirdly organic despite never claiming to have known life outside a harddrive, spinning swathes of psychedelic burble like week old memories of some euphoric nightclub moment, topped with a shivering vocal like something out of one of Marianne Faithful’s weed-inspired greenhouse dreams. Or something. I dunno. Point is, it’s great. Twenty seven iTunes plays and counting.

‘Cabaret..’ is a far more elaborate affair, often a bit too amorphous to really get an angle on, on first listen seeming like an endless blissout of disconnected, muffled-through-the-walls club music and pan-cultural East End art blather that’s engrossing without ever manifesting anything really distinct. On repeated spins though, attention is drawn once again to the strength of Minerva’s tricky vocal melodies, and their central role in organising the dubbed out clouds of this sound into something not just tangible but pretty damn magical, as heard on the superb ‘Honey Honey’ - not so much blissful as a second-hand descriptor but more, y’know… actually blissful, heavily phased vocals fading into a haze of reconstructed Indian street-singing as the track progresses. Again, it never really sticks around long enough to sign off on its beauty, but fleetingly there’s something pretty special there. Similar feels can be felt in ‘Soo High’, submerging mixing skeletal r’n’b structure under heavily processed ice-cream van chimes and reverb layers to sublime effect, and ‘Pirate’s Tale’, a fully-formed masterpiece of this nameless whatever, taking us from Spitalfields out to sea, knocking on the doors of all the adjectives I’ve thrown around in this review in the process.

Ineffable, irreducible DIY hypnogogical cosmopolitan collage-pop of the highest order, Maria Minerva’s records will inevitably sound dated as shit to our stupid ears five years down the line. All the more reason to enjoy them now then, I’d suggest.

Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll) [from ‘Tallin at Dawn’]


Pirate’s Tale [from ‘Cabaret Cixous’]




28. Yeh Deadlies – The First Book of Lessons (Popical Island)

From May:

“Come on in and relax, these songs seem to say (without getting too happy-clappy about it), everybody’s welcome. Maybe life’s not perfect – in fact we are going to tell you in lyrical form about all manner of awkward situations and personal upsets - but the sun’s shining and it’s a quiet afternoon and we’re all on the same page here, so grab a pint and we’ll weave our merry tunes for ya.

And fucking merry they are too, full of great, interesting melodies and attention-grabbing little musical bits and pieces, and they tell us about a bunch of stuff that’s maybe taken from their lives or maybe just made up, and for once you actually care. As Yeh Deadlies have moved away from the more overtly folky approach of their earlier recordings and assumed the mantle of a full electric pop band, joint singers/writers Padraig and Annie have correspondingly developed a real knack for cramming odd and personal details into the songs whilst never letting them meander too far from their core function as strong, emotionally resonant pop songs. Most song lengths remain on the right side of three minutes, tempos remain upbeat, and collapses into diary entry banality are strenuously avoided, but each number still succeeds in communicating the essence of a situation, an idea, a feeling, whatever. So, uh, I’m no expert or anything, but I think that probably adds up to official Real Good Song-Writing. Well done everybody!

Although Dublin is a big city, this really sounds like a rural album to me. Or it really hit the spot when I put it on whilst barrelling through the countryside last month, at least. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the songs seem to pull together to create an agreeable picture of life in a small-ish provincial music scene, from the reflections of a DJ at a small town club night surveying the 3am carnage in “Disc Jockey Blues” to the tale of a kid growing up and joining a band in, er, “The Kid’s in the Band”, and so on.

If ‘The First Book of Lessons’ was a movie, I think it would probably be one of those ‘90s British indie movies where young people in brightly coloured clothes live amid drab, dilapidated surroundings, and they go to transport cafes, and go surfing, and sit together on the cliffs and stuff like that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be shite (because most of those kind of movies were shite), but y’know what I mean.

In a field submerged ‘neath a flood of bilious careerists and terminal hat-wearers, Yeh Deadlies sound like good people playing good music, and that’s really something to be thankful for.”

No Rock n’ Roll Dreams (in Empty Beds)




27. Jeffrey Lewis – A Turn in a Dream Songs (Rough Trade)

Jeffrey Lewis’s previous LP ‘Em Are I’ was my favourite record of.. when did it come out again? Year before last? Ok, yeah – 2009. In particular, admired the way that Jeffrey managed to take the fallout from what was obviously a pretty devastating break-up and turn it into a set of songs that was enjoyable, profound, funny, musically ambitious and generally optimistic, transcending the moansville routinely occupied by about 98% of spurned singer-songwriter types.

Kind of sad then to hear him returning this year with a record as thoroughly down-in-the-dumps as this one, nixing the raucous punk and rock n’ roll outbursts the gave colour to his previous albums in favour of what is largely a one man acoustic trawl through different flavours of listless self-pity.

Anxiety and morbid self-examination have always been at the heart of Lewis’s songwriting of course, but in the past he’s always managed to put a good spin on it, using humour and weird, homespun wisdom to engage with a more universal sentiment – a talent that often seems to elude him here as he offers a number of dreary strumathons bemoaning the fact that girls don’t like him and he’s forced to go to restaurants on his own and aimlessly wonder the streets and stuff and DUDE, for christ’s sake, it’s sad that you feel so bummed out, but carrying on like this in public isn’t going to help matters! Pull yourself together, go play some great shows and draw some awesome comic books, you’re great at it and you’ve got loads of wonderful friends, and everybody loves you! Jeez, some people.

Thankfully though, this is still a Jeffrey Lewis album, and Jeffrey Lewis is awesome, so there’s plenty here to enjoy. For one, ‘Cult Boyfriend’, a perfect example of the kind of instant classic yeah-you-got-my-number-buddy pop culture referencin’ hits that got us loving him in the first place. For two and three, there’s ‘Krongu Green Slime’ and ‘So What If I Couldn’t Take It’ , intricate, image-packed rambles that seem like weirder tangents from some ‘60s underground comic in audio form, telling tales of primordial retail economics, cosmic entropy, hallucinogenic suicide rampages and flunked mafia executions. ‘Time Trades’ is a good one too, vaguely recalling Richard Hell’s similarly named song and stretching a dark-hours-of-the-night philosophical tangent into a convincing trail of reassuring wisdom, bypassing our cynicism in a way that only Lewis can really get away with. Opener ‘To Go And Return’ is real nice as well, a gentle, shimmery folk-psyche fingerpicker enlivened by droning, discordant brass.

In fact, who am I kidding – at least 50% of ‘A Turn In The Dream Songs’ is really great, and it’s at least 100% better than it would have been if some other bearded jerk had made it. It would be easy to pull apart the threads of depression and narcissism that underpin even the best of these songs, but why bother, they’ve always been there, they’re part of what makes Jeff Lewis the writer/performer he is, and here’s hoping he can take some inspiration from the noble sentiment of songs like ‘Time Trades’ and work up a more positive frame of mind for the next time he hits the studio.

Cult Boyfriend





26. Y Niwl – Album (Aderyn Papur)

Behold – the best Welsh language surf album of the year!

But seriously folks, even if there were dozens of Welsh language surf albums to choose from (and I sincerely wish there were), I’d like to think Y Niwl would still be riding high on the hog with this lovely effort.

I should admit that I’ve actually been listening to a lot of surf music this year. I really like it, in fact I think it’s one of the greatest musical forms around.

It’s a genre that works best I feel when completely disconnected from all the mouldering aesthetic bumpf that goes along with it. I remember once hearing an old interview with The Pixies, where they were talking about their fondness for surf music, and how when they listened to it, they weren’t thinking of hotrods and beaches and Californian dudes surfing and all that stuff, but instead of “crazy little people, running around, doing stuff!” That just about sums it up I think. It’s evocative, exciting music that deserves a wider framework of imagery to work with. Thus I really appreciate the fact that Y Niwl play great surf music without making any effort to try to harness the ‘surf’ aesthetic. No stripey shirts or tiki lounge kitsch for these guys – in the one press shot I could find of them, they’re standing in somebody’s back garden in the rain, next to a conservatory, having a cup of tea. Stubble and bobblehats and rain macs – classic SFA/Gorkys Welsh stoner guys really. Much respect to them for taking this fine music wholly on it’s own merit, and playing it so well, devoid of period goofery.

On the scale of surfitude, I suppose you might say Y Niwl are more on the relatively laidback side of things - the kind of surf band one imagines might enjoy a quick joint or two before practice. Not for them the rip-roaring fretboard theatrics of Bambi Molesters or Los Straitjackets. Largely, Y Niwl prefer to explore a woozier, more psychedelic take on surf conventions, their sound crisply recorded as the genre demands, but swathed in a heavily atmospheric undertow of beautifully cavernous reverb and echo, rolling in across the tunes like Aberystwyth sea mist, genre-defying electric organ riffs chiming in too to add a whole other layer to a beautiful sonic, uh… layered thing? By which I mean, a brilliantly recorded, imaginatively rendered, good-natured, instantly enjoyable pile of vaguely trippy instrumental rock. Nice work!

Undegpedwar

Labels: best of 2011, Jeffrey Lewis, Maria Minerva, The Mountain Goats, Y Niwl, Yeh Deadlies