20. Zola Jesus – Conatus (Sacred Bones)

It’s difficult to fathom why this one isn’t in my top ten. Hopefully it’ll be in a lot of people’s top tens. It’s pretty good. I guess it’s naturally gonna be Zola Jesus’s big ‘coming out party’ record, sitting on the verge of mainstream(ish) success, and it is SOLID, building on the template established by her ‘Stridulum’ material and hitting all the buttons you’d expect it to hit.

Only trouble is for those of us who’ve been following ZJ’s career, we’ve heard it before. Up to now, every record she’s made, from ‘New Amsterdam’ through ‘The Spoils’ to ‘Stridulum’, has been a quantum leap forward from the one that has preceded it. Having apparently hit peak performance with total KO songs like ‘The Night’ and ‘Can’t Stand’ though, ‘Conatus’ sees her settling back into cruising speed, rolling out a fresh, LP length reiteration of her established style, hopefully picking up a lot of new fans & supporters in the process, but fostering an unavoidable sense of diminishing returns for those of us who’ve been rocking the aforementioned for 18-plus months.

It doesn’t make the music any less good, but it makes it less exciting if ya know what I mean. Don’t ask me why. I could listen to, say, The Queers or ‘70s Black Sabbath making the same album a thousand times over and be perfectly happy, so I don’t know why my expectations of young operatically trained electro-pop ladies from Wisconsin should be any different. Who knows. This subjective/personal music crit is a mug’s game sometimes.

Eleven new cuts of earth-shaking neon-industrial bombast is still nothing to be sniffed at though, and needless to say, when I feel a Zola Jesus itch in the near future, I’ll be reaching for this one to get the job done with less of a sense of over-familiarity. That sounds a bit cold, but hey the world is cold – with fame and fashion and the inevitable dilution of identity knocking on her door, the fact this record stays on-message is an achievement worth celebrating in itself. That Nika Danilova has managed to find a route into mainstream consciousness without compromising the essential ?!?!? of her work is pretty fucking awesome.

Much here is veering hazardously toward the smooth, of course, but all is premeditated, nothing is chronic. Tracks like ‘Vessel’, ‘Hikikomori’ and ‘Seekir’ all have a certain steely calm to them that was missing before, a steadier pulse alongside their menace, to soothe the spirit on those long walks through underground stations and departure lounges, rather than abandoned hospitals and municipals wastelands. Indomitable human spirit amid the burnished chrome, and all that sort of thing. In short, much of ‘Conatus’ seems to be tapping into the same zeitgeist as the ‘Drive’ soundtrack – a sort of brooding electronic dream that can keep on brooding forever so far as I’m concerned. A well-guarded headphone wall to undermine the coldness without.

But all of this is build up. When the hiss of digital noise reemerges ever so slightly, when the weight of melodramatic angst starts to build and break on the astounding ‘Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake’, we’re back where we’ve always been with ZJ, back in the 2019 wasteland, standing atop the burning building, helicopter shot as the credits roll.





19. Veronica Falls – s/t (Slumberland / Bella Union)

Funny thing – I’ve been going to see Veronica Falls play for so long, I’ve played their singles (the re-recorded A sides of which constitute the immediate highlights here) so much, that their ‘long-awaited’ debut album almost seems like an anticlimax in spite of its abundant quality.

In a weird sorta way it’s almost too good; superbly recorded, with a careful balance between live energy and studio clarity, it sees the group inhabiting their chosen persona – that of a jangly indie-pop band who’ve died and returned as lovelorn gothic ghosts – with such calculated completeness, it almost makes me uneasy.

All of which is neither here nor there in the greater scheme of things, so rest assured if you neither know nor care what I’m going on about, this is a great record. If the one sentence sales pitch in the preceding paragraph at all appeals to you, you should totally check it out.

As has consistently been the case since the band stepped fully-formed into my consciousness on the night Michael Jackson died, Roxanne Clifford and James Hoare’s twin guitars provide a curtain of flawless Velvets strum, working in agreeable union with Patrick Doyle’s frantic stand-up drumming, creating an appropriately tempestuous backdrop for these raised eyebrow tales of doomed love and graveside angst, the trio’s crystal-cut voices (bassist Marian Herbain doesn’t join in the singing, to my knowledge) giving the songs a bit of a chilly, melodramatic English folk feel - the perfect musical accompaniment to a march ‘round Highgate cemetery on a freezing autumnal Saturday morning, winter sun glinted through the trees.

Which, conveniently, is exactly the situation portrayed in their video to ‘Found Love.., or their similarly wintry, forest-set clip for ‘Bad Feeling’. See what I mean? Always doing exactly what they should do, this lot. Too perfect.





18. Chain & The Gang – Music’s Not For Everyone (K)

So I could hold forth here about how Ian Svenonious will likely never manage an LP that matches up to his riotous, inspirational live shows, and about how he presumably doesn’t even intend to, at least not via the indulgent idiosyncrasy of the “me plus whoever else shows up” Chain & The Gang set-up. I could talk about how inflated expectation aside though, this is a real fun listen. I could reflect on how much I enjoy Ian’s sly digs at the current lethargic/depressive mindset fostered by constant warnings of impending economic collapse and the slowly degrading quality of life in America, on tunes like ‘Why Not?’, ‘Not Good Enough’ and ‘It’s a Hard Job (Keeping Everybody High)’.

But that’s the kind of bland, reasonable analysis I’ve been churning out for every one of these records, and it’s starting to get to be a drag, man. As a well-needed break, let us reflect instead on Chain & The Gang’s message to their people, as elucidated on this record’s back cover, and reiterated in spoken word form at the start of side two for benefit of the short-sighted or illiterate;

Everyone might switch on the radio
But they don’t get it
No matter how they try, they can’t or won’t
Don’t tell them about it
I know you wanna share
The thing you love so much…
But don’t!

Everyone in this country might own a personal listening device
Everyone might have a state of the art hi-fi
Everyone might have a home library of record albums
Or compact discs
Or even a compiled stack of concert set lists
But music’s not for everyone

[…]

Music’s not for them
It’s for you and me

Does a moth know a flame just because it’s drawn to it?
Does a body know a bullet just because it’s hit?

Does a lemming know the void that waits for it …
At the bottom of a cliff?

Does the worm know the mud
Does the salt know the sea
Does the universe understand infinity?

A clock spends its life marking time
Does it understand mortality?

Do people who listen to music even like it?
Do people deserve it even if they buy it?
Music is not for everyone

Music is for the few, for the brave
Don’t try to explain it to them though
It doesn’t matter what you say
They can’t understand

They’ll never understand
Just sneak away to that hole
Where the music makes its stand

Ludwig Van Beethoven is not for everyone

Shirley Ellis is not for everyone

Helen Shapiro is not for everyone

Bo Diddley is not for everyone

Bobby Fuller is not for everyone

(et cetera)





17. Tieranniesaur – Tieranniesaur! (Popical Island)

An album that I’ve been trying to get a chance to write about for months if I’m honest, Tieranniesaur is very much the kind of thing that I enjoy and approve of without having much to say about it beyond a basic thumbs up RECOMMEND. A full-scale joycore sensation of some kind masterminded by Annie Tierney of Chicks and Yeh Deadlies, this is a galumphing great ten tracks-worth of funk/rock/electro/dub/80s hiphop post-generic pop amalgamation, guaranteed to demolish indie discos worldwide with it’s enthusiastically ramshackle takes on Le Tigre / Go Team / LCD / Funkadelic / ESG type tropes… if only they got a chance to hear it.

Built around a realiable foundation of programmed drums, monster bass and agreeably zany trash-talk rhymes, cuts like ‘Rockblocker’, ‘Sketch!’ and ‘I Don’t Stop’ are total winners on any potential internet-era Jukebox Jury, appearing out of nowhere brazen as you like and marching ‘round like they own the place, demanding remixes, chart positions, hit youtube videos, all the rest of it… and, uh, I guess I’m not very good at finding things to say about upbeat, dancey type music, but GREAT times to be found here, in case you were short on them this year.

Frankly, being hit with a platter like this when you were expecting maybe a nice little folk album or something is weird enough, but midway through, things get weirder, as Tieranniesaur start conquering styles like gleeful mountaineers dishing out flagpoles. Euphoric disco on ‘Pretty Girl String Quartet’, Graceland-esque faux-African pop on ‘Candy’ and ‘Azure Island’, and a sublime bit of straight-laced cinematic funk on the superb ‘Here Be Monsters’.

An astoundingly FUN pile o’ music, full of great lines, great rhythms, awesome tunes, raucous energy and random guest appearances by people I’ve never heard of, ‘Tieranniesaur’ kinda sounds like an audio record of one of the best parties ever, and as such is an experience I can wholeheartedly recommend.





16. The Real Numbers – 12” (Three Dimensional Records)

I caught Minneapolis’ Real numbers almost by accident earlier this year, at the same show I saw Crawling Age, and through the fog of a few beers, they were a revelation - breakneck pace nerd-bounce! Fast, snappy, funny, catchy songs! Loads of energy, small, raucous crowd, amazing fun.

Bought their 12”, and verily, it is a blast. Eight genius weirdo pop-punk songs, over before you’ve really registered them. Occasionally sounding like a Television Personalities record played at the wrong speed, this is the kind of music I will never not love. As their label puts it, there’s “nary a duff cut” to be found here – about fifteen minutes of flat-out joy, nix on the fat – sides A and B both open with total pogo classics ‘Might I See You Tonight’ and Undertones-ish ‘All About You’, both of which I’ll be DJing the fuck out of opportunity allowing, whilst ‘Boats & Cars’ showcases a slightly more nuanced side of the group, sounding not unlike the TVPs played at the correct speed.

Not much else to say really, especially since I’m away from home at the moment and can’t play the vinyl in search of further wordly inspiration. Closest thing I’ve heard recently to the particular kind of greatness found on Nodzzz first LP, this is one of the absolute best of the year from America’s garage/punk/whatever underground. Total winner!

Labels: best of 2011, Chain and the Gang, Ian Svenonious, The Real Numbers, Tieranniesaur, Veronica Falls, Zola Jesus