24. Dinosaur Jr – I Bet On Sky (Jagjaguwar)

NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE territory for Dinosaur at this point, as the band’s initially questionable 21st century reincarnation has succeeded not only in kicking the world’s ass pretty thoroughly in what cliché demands I call “the live arena”, but also in recording the best album of their entire careers in the shape of ‘Farm’. With any remaining naysayers long since turned to dust, it only stands to reason that they should take their foot off the gas and chill out a while, and that’s where ‘..Sky’ comes in. More spread out than the full tilt rock of ‘Farm’ and ‘Beyond’, this one’s got a breezy sorta quality to it, rather reminiscent of those ‘90s major label Dino albums that Mascis pretty much made on his own, his vox and guitar leads riding atop lighter, intermittently acoustic backing, with even a goddamn keyboard and plinky-plonk piano sticking their oar in on the opening cut.

Moreso than usual, the Barlow tunes sound pretty much like Sebadoh with slightly better guitar (thus earning a ‘meh’ from me), and as for Mascis, well, he’s got his particular ‘thing’ down to a fine art by this stage, so no surprises from that direction either. Normally I’d continue with some generic comment about how an apparently successful, happily married middle-aged man can still manage to conjure up these tumultuous vistas of inarticulate adolescent angst at the drop of a hat, but actually he seems to have mellowed out a little lyrically/emotionally too, sounding at least a BIT less distraught and untogether than he did when he was twenty one, his raging sorrows increasingly filtering through into a kind of rose-tinted wistfulness for chances missed, good times gone, and so forth.

Of course, we don’t really turn up at a Dinosaur record for any of that shit, so let’s get to the point. Though one may blanch when scanning through the mp3s and noting that many of these songs break the five minute barrier, rest assured that many of those superfluous minutes are dedicated to Mascis cutting loose on some characteristically supreme guitar business, and if you’re as much of a fan of unashamed six string grandeur as I am, what more do you need to know? Dude still tears it up like the bastard son of Neil Young and Wayne Kramer wired up to a rig the size of Krakatoa. Hearing him do what he does is a joy at an time of day, and, speaking of Neil, closing track ‘See It On Your Side’ in particular is frrkin’ awesome, catching the band at their Young-est, indulging in a few ‘Cortez the Killer’ riffs for a suitably sublime, greatest hits-worthy fade out.

23. Umberto – Night Has A Thousand Screams (Rock Action)

Could Matt Hill’s third album under the Umberto name see him abandoning the well-worn tropes of fake-horror-movie-soundtrack-core and exploring a more pastoral, contemplative approach to composition..? COULD IT FUCK. Designed to accompany selected scenes from the infamous Spanish slasher movie ‘Pieces’, ‘Night Has 1,000 Screams’ (an English translation of the film’s original release title) shamelessly revels in its own wholly predictable strain of anachronistic synth badassery, tooling up in the shadow of Carpenter, Frizzi and Simonetti for yet another trek into the analogue-haunted VHS wilderness… again prompting me to wonder just how many times all this stuff can be reiterated before it ceases to sound totally fucking cool. When I find the answer, I’ll be sure to let you know. Given the soundtrack conceit, ‘..1,000 Screams’ is understandably more bitty than 2010’s magnum opus ‘Prophesy of the Black Widow’, victim to the sudden tonal shifts and arbitrary track lengths that define most OSTs. But what it lacks in cohesion it more than makes up for with strict, period appropriate awesomeness.

Unruly, bass-bin worrying oscillations feature prominently, providing appropriately hair-raising counter-point to the chiming, Halloween-like melody lines and pulsing, metronomic beats that stomp into ear-shot like the steady stomp of a knife-wielding maniac’s size tens on the opening ‘Boston, 1942’, whilst elsewhere crafty bass-synth lines, Frizzi-endorsed sunny synth choirs and wet drum rolls rise and fall on cue. Eerie, random scuffling droning tones and peals of noise pervade the lengthy ‘Paralysed’, which begins to sound more like something off Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s hauntological terror classic ‘Séance at Hobbs Lane’ in places and, well I’m sure you get the picture. MAGNIFICO, as the bloody maniac who directed ‘Pieces’ might have exclaimed had his original composer scampered back with something this good.

22. Guided By Voices – The Bears For Lunch (Fire / GBV Inc)

I wrote about this just a few weeks back, but in case you’ve got a real bad memory here’s some things I said about it:

“Returning to Pollard though, since when did his songwriting get so, well…. linear? As much as I might swear by the mighty poetry of his conventional crossword-fucking lyrical style, even his most hardcore followers would have to admit he’s been driving it to the far edges of pointlessness in recent years, so it’s kinda refreshing to find him striking out with some more deliberately constructed material. In fact almost all of the album’s Pollard “hits” - ‘Hangover Child’, ‘She Lives In An Airport’, ‘White Flag’, ‘The Challenge is Much More’ – take the route of establishing a single lyrical theme and sticking to it, much in the way that a “normal” songwriter might do.
[…]
More to the point though, all of the above-mentioned songs – plus rousing opener ‘King Arthur The Red’ - stand as solid GBV fare, tunes that could have fared well had they appeared in slightly scrappier form on ‘Under the Bushes..’, and if admittedly none of them are exactly *spectacular*, with the addition of Sprout’s songs that still gives ‘Bears For Lunch’ by far the best Pollard/GBV hit rate in recent memory. And speaking of memory, I was worried initially worried that these songs would fade fast from it, but no - having just experienced a weekend wherein earphone time was in short supply, I can confirm that fragments of ‘Challenge..’ and ‘..Airport’ kept scraping away at the back of my brain, demanding attention, achieving precisely the kind of compulsive, scratch-that-itch listenability that indie rock has always traded on and thus clearing the final hurdle toward official, canonical GBV golden glory.
[…]
Whether anything on this album will make any kind of impression on listeners who aren’t already fully paid up GBV freaks is debatable, but, given the slim chances of said listeners even getting to hear it, that’s very much a moot point. Beginners are free to walk proudly into the record shops and ask for directions to the sanctified classics of the sainted ‘90s, but for those of us who have listened to them and listened to them and listened to them again already, ‘Bears For Lunch’ provides another nice disc to add to the heap, finding our heroes in sprightlier form than anyone might have expected, with the slow, sad creep toward obsolescence and death that accompanies disappointing comeback records happily vanquished… for a few months, at least.”

21. G. Green – Crap Culture (Mt St Mtn)

Oof. If the 2007-2010 lo-fi fun-punk revival was in need of a requiem, disaffected Sacramento quartet G. Green set out to provide, whether consciously or otherwise. Imagine some Mean Jeans style party punk band convening in their friend’s basement to record their next LP and collectively discovering that they were feeling burned out, worthless and generally couldn’t be fucked – that is the general vibe (if not the musical content) delivered on the pointedly titled ‘Crap Culture’.

‘Your House’ might get things started with a spring in its step – all ramshackle stand-up drumming and muffled shout-outs – but it’s like the last gasp of a party’s energy before the fog descends. ‘Pool of Blood’ and ‘Swimsuit Drugs’ spit themselves into the ether as outbursts of talentless, temper tantrum wimpy kid hardcore, frontman Andrew Henderson shrieking incoherently about the sheer fucking unbelievable frustration of being him, the voice of a man who old enough to know better, who just – you guessed it – couldn’t give a fuck. In fact it’s difficult to really make out a single word he says over the course of this record, but the emotional intent comes across loud and clear. The title track drops the drums, revealing a rather more indie-ish underpinning to proceedings, over-pedalled lead guitar making a mess all over a lonely, hopeless ode that recalls something off Dignan Porch’s first album, or contemplative-mode Robert Pollard in a seriously black mood. ‘Gay ‘90s’ and the delightfully titled ‘Mouth on the Floor’ continue to push the jaded, hacked off malaise in scrambling, sub-KBD fashion, before ‘Sinner Now’ closes proceedings on an incongruously epic note, pushing stone-age ur-shoegaze buttons that recall the brick wall splendour of Australia’s Kitchen Floor.

I’ve used a lot of negative words in this review, cos I feel this is a pretty negative record, but that’s not to say it’s not also a good one. It’s chaotic, homemade aesthetic is extremely pleasing, and its desperate emotional upswing hits hard, particularly on those mornings when you crawl beneath the pavement and die. If ‘Crap Culture’ were a person, it would be wearing a dirty t-shirt and broken glasses, and would be charging at you out the doorway of some rancid student party house, cider can in hand. The sound of realising that the ‘scene’ you’ve been wasting your life serving isn’t worth a damn, of witless First World Problems made flesh, I… uh, I like it quite a lot.

Labels: best of 2012, Dinosaur Jr, G Green, Guided By Voices, Heavy Cream, Umberto

20. Blues Control - Local Flavor (Siltbreeze)

Somehow, I’ve managed to miss all of Blues Control’s previous work, but I’ll certainly be making an effort to catch up, because ‘Local Flavor’ is an admirable piece of work. Like most of the other albums in this run-down that are of the vague psyche/drone/space-rock variety, Blues Control benefit hugely here from taking musical forms that are usually experienced as huge, meandering splurges of sound and crafting them from the bottom up into far more concise, deliberate statements that cram maximum inspiration and effect into a thirty-five minute LP, leaving us wanting more. ‘Local Flavor’ begins precisely as you WOULDN’T expect a record like this to begin, with a crashing kick drum and a monumental stoner-metal guitar riff, pounding itself into the ground until the rock pleasure principle subsides and you start to realise that the track has been overlaid with several layers of crackling piano improvisation that sound like they’ve been pulled off an old 78, underlining the essentially droning, repetitive qualities of the rock thud to extremely pleasing effect… and then the trumpets come in – splendid. Each subsequent track lands us somewhere completely different, but the quality is consistent throughout. It should be noted that the trendy appropriations of world music ‘ambience’ that both the album’s cover art and title may lead you to expect are reassuringly absent from the music. Instead, both of ‘Local Flavor’s longer tracks choose to tip their hat toward the much-rumoured but rarely realised drone-psych / dance-disco crossover; ‘Tangier’ adds a throbbing pulse that sounds like it was sampled from directly outside a nightclub to a beautiful, Steve Reich-esque cut-up of vocal sounds overlaid with house-style synths and percussion overdubs, recalling one of those mammoth Arthur Russell disco jams in the best possible way. ‘On Through the Night’, the album’s longest and darkest track, meanwhile builds itself up from an ambient first half into a frenzy of dense, tar pit funk, with crisp electric organ finding itself subsumed into a slow-building cloud of degraded, primeval skree, ghostly bamboo echos and Carpenter-core electronics. In short, an utterly beguiling world of self-contained sound, building on the ruins of its avant garde and avant pop influences to create a real winner.

Mp3> Good Morning

19. Felix – You Are The One I Pick (Kranky)

Another record that I love, but that is proving hard to write about. So let’s take a deep breath and get on with it: Felix is Lucinda Chua writing and singing and playing piano and cello, and Chris Summerlin pitching in with guitar and arrangements and so forth. The songs here are both abstract and imagistic and deeply personal, each one bleeding seamlessly into the next, and comprised of odd, off-kilter combinations of musical refrains, the logic of which is apparent to Chua alone, generally set to sweet, slow, lurching accompaniment that evokes the feeling of dancing drunk on a freezing, rocky beach at night as surely as any medley from the Dirty Three back catalogue. Chau’s lyrics mix dream logic animal imagery (dragons, ponies, weasels all make an appearance) with vicious glimpses of everyday 21st century minutiae and industrial strength discontent, rapture and uncertainty… and the result is pretty stunning – pure musical poetry, like that girl from Life Without Buildings sitting down alone at the piano and letting it all hang out… but no, that’s a shit comparison, fuck it. You know those albums or books you get sometimes that seem just so idiosyncratic and personal that they’re like a guided tour of the inside of the author’s head at the point of composition, yet rendered with such skill that the result isn’t so much creepy or self-indulgent as it is just plain moving and intoxicating? – this album is a bit like one of those, let’s leave it at that.

Mp3> Waltzing For Weasels

18. Favours For Sailors – Furious Sons (Tough Love)

Like some weird, preppy indie-rock butterfly, Favours For Sailors seemed to crash fully formed into the world toward the end of last year, shone with a very particular kind of brilliance and apparently played their final gig a couple of months back, leaving just these six songs, each of them such a tour de force of perfection within their chosen genre, you wonder why Pavement or Superchunk would even bother reforming when instead they could just hire a hall, play these songs on repeat and hang their heads, admitting there is no more work for them to do on this earth. Ok, maybe I exaggerate… but nonetheless, a couple of these songs are so damn spectacular that their very existence seems arrogant – musical to-do lists with every single item happily crossed out. What was it I said about ‘em way back when? Oh yeah:

‘‘Furious Sons’ is a brief set of songs custom built to remind us that a good band who know how to play their guitar/guitar/bass/drums, who have big, bright, clean production, vaguely literate/ambiguous lyrics and fully developed multi-part songs that venture beyond the four minute mark, can still be SO MUCH FUN when they hit the bullseye and do all that stuff RIGHT for once, with energy and humour and the kind of off-the-cuff musical prowess that makes crappy wouldbe musicians like myself curse their sorry lot in life. “Erode My Empire” makes for a great opening track – I love the way the lead guitar hooks splurge all over the melodica-assisted verse-chug, and it’s hard not to crack a smile at the lyrical conceit; “empires erode / from the coastline in / soon I’ll be stuck in a square metre in the middle / probably in Nottingham”. […]The best song though is track # 4, “I Dreamt That You Loved Me In Your Dreams”. It’s STUNNING. An indie-rock ‘Citizen Kane’ in three minutes fifty-nine seconds. And, like ‘Kane’, it both demands a blow by blow written account and supersedes the need for one in its clarity of its intention and expression. It builds moment of awesomeness upon moment of awesomeness like a big, top heavy layer cake for anyone who’s ever enjoyed lively, smart sad-boy indie rock, until it collapses in on itself at just the right moment – instant classic.”

I’ll stand by that.

Mp3> I Dreamt That You Loved Me In Your Dreams

17. The Bats – The Guilty Office (Hidden Agenda)

It’s no secret that I’ve been all about The Bats ever since I saw them play over the summer, doing a set that drew heavily from this album – perhaps that’s got something to do with why I like it just as much if not more than any of the older stuff I’ve got by them – they’re a band who started off strong in the ‘80s and have subsequently just taken it steadily, slowly maturing to a state of ninja-like mastery in the field of low-key, melodic guitar pop. It’s strange that I’ve always sorta clung to the belief that great rock n’ roll is on some level a desperate, unnatural sound – not just electrified and distorted, but a sound that is pushing against something – the sound of people striving to bring it into being in the face of insurmountable personal/technological/physical/social obstacles. Well, The Bats help chuck that theory out the window by vestige of sounding so completely organic, so inevitable and RIGHT that when Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward’s voices meld together on the chorus of opener ‘Countersign’, it sounds like music that could have risen straight from the earth itself, and it continues to drift over the fields at night and off into the starry sky over the course of these twelve tunes, never hitting a bum note, an awkward lyric, a strumming pattern or rhythm or melody that’s anything less than totally, lazily, wonderfully harmonious, to the extent that it’s difficult to believe they ever pick up their respective instruments and DON’T sound like this – an impression that’s only heightened by the welcome return of Alastair Galbraith’s violin on a few of these songs. I guess they’re too modest to make an issue of it, but while other bands have been busy crashing and burning and getting famous and getting fucked up, The Bats have been busy just quietly being one of the best guitar bands in the world, period.

Mp3> Countersign

16. Dinosaur Jr - Farm (Fat Possum)

It is a truth widely acknowledged that the only good things to have come out of the recent mania for nostalgia-fed band reformations are a reinvigorated Mission of Burma, and the totally unforeseen rebirth of Dinosaur Jr as a creative force. And just when folks were getting ready to write their first comeback off as a fluke, they’re off again, thundering onto the track with a monster-truck of an album that’s probably, like, the second or third best one they’ve ever done, once again amping up their time-honoured classic rock + angst + noise formula to deafening perfection. As they get older, there seems to be more Crazy Horse gnarl than ever in the mix, and ‘Plans’ rips off the intro to ‘Cortez The Killer’ so flagrantly, it’s a wonder Neil Young hasn’t been in touch to do whatever it is he likes to do to copyright violators to teach them the error of their ways (he probably makes them do a really hard crossword or something). Or maybe he let them off, just cos the track’s freakin’ great. It’s funny: Murph’s drumming is as functional as ever and you’d be hard-pressed to pick out Lou’s bass line beneath Mascis’s peanut brittle of multi-layered fuzz on most of these songs, so one is forced to ask: what is it about these three guys playing together that gets J writing songs and playing guitar with a desperate, youthful spirit he’s been missing for nigh on twenty years? Is he just knocking out Dinosaur-type material to order, or does he still feel the adolescent loneliness and frustration of these songs as keenly as his yearning yowls and impassioned, stumble-fingered soloing would tend to suggest? Really though, does it matter, when what results is such an overpowering vision of heroic, big budget modern rock, the way it could and should be, if only all those other festival headlining clowns would cut out all the bullshit, up the intensity and actually mic those giant show-off amp stacks up properly for once? Play loud.

Mp3 > Pieces

Labels: best of 2009, Blues Control, Dinosaur Jr, Favours For Sailors, Felix, The Bats

THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2007 : Part 1

Exactly what the title says. In no particular order. Well, in alphabetical order in fact, but no value judgements intended. Ok with that? Good!

No new Mountain Goats or Oneida or Comet Gain or Dead Meadow this year either, so things are pretty wide open to some extent… let’s go!


ANIMAL COLLECTIVE – STRAWBERRY JAM (Domino)

In the past, Animal Collective have always left me enthralled and frustrated in equal measure. That they are one of the most forward thinking (or at least sideways thinking) musical outfits around is undeniable, and their attempts to reconnect the machinery of modern day noise and improv with personal/emotional songcraft and pop structures represents a potentially earth-shattering well of possibility, but I’ve always found myself wishing they could keep their chaotic, introspective tendencies on a tighter leash and focus their talents toward making more deliberate music, songs that hit the listener with a BANG. And that’s exactly what they’ve done on Strawberry Jam. Thanks guys. Finally we can hear the vocals clearly and, as I always suspected, Avey Tare is a brilliant lyricist, howling through the particulars of lust, love and life via a labyrinth of mythic-vs-mundane dream imagery as seven shades of overpowering melodic noise explode all around, the terrestrial origin of the sounds the Collective compress, twist and pulverise into a churning heap of hallucinatory beats, rhythmic patterns and melodies remaining gloriously unguessable throughout. To my mind, ‘Strawberry Jam’ confirms Animal Collective as prime movers in dragging the legacy of genuine psychedelic music-making into the 21st century and, perhaps, one of the greatest weirdo pop bands of our age.

Mp3 > Peacebone


DAVID THOMAS BROUGHTON vs. 7 HERTZ (Acuarela)

A writer’s nightmare, David Thomas Broughton is a powerful and unique performer, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure, whose genius defies easy verbal explanation. The spontaneity and physicality of his performances would seem to make translating his musical vision to record an equally troublesome task, and so this album wisely takes a slightly different approach. Recorded live over a single afternoon in a church in Leeds, it finds Broughton in a more stately mood than that engendered by his gigs at rock venues and festivals, as, backed by improvisations from avant-classical ensemble 7 Hertz, he expands four of his saddest songs into sprawling, free-flowing testaments to loss, regret and hope. If just about any other songwriter stretched four songs on the theme of SAD over the course of an hour, with gaps to fool with looping pedals, clanging kettles and malfunctioning amplifiers whilst an unrehearsed string quartet sawed away behind him, the result would likely be an insufferable piece of self-indulgence, but as I keep saying, DTB is extraordinary, and as such the results are captivating and beautiful. The contributions of 7 Hertz are excellent in their own right, starting out subtle, scrabbling for ground and eventually sprawling into chaotic collapse. Combined with the sound of DTB’s unmistakable voice, somewhat akin to a North of England Tim Buckley, given full reign to echo through the church rafters, this is the best expression of Broughton’s muse yet committed to tape. I only bought this album about a month ago, but I have listened to it many times and will likely listen to it a lot more in future.

Mp3 > The Weight Of My Love


THE DETROIT COBRAS – TIED & TRUE (Rough Trade)

‘Tied & True’ sees The Detroit Cobras bouncing back from the misstep of 2005s sub-par ‘Baby’, coke ad ubiquity and the bursting of the early ‘00s Detroit hype bubble with their best album since the peerless ‘Life, Love and Leaving’. Now bolstered by the presence of Greg Cartwright (of The Oblivians / Reigning Sound) on second guitar and piano, this album works a welcome and indeed pretty awesome step forward for the band. Instead of merely blasting through more vintage soul / r’n’b cuts in ‘garage rock’ style, they’re taking the time to really compete with the majesty of the music that inspired them, treating the slower soul numbers to exquisite Phil Spector / Memphis soul influenced arrangements, whilst still retaining the core feeling and big sound of a kick-ass rock n’ roll band. Those who think any less of the Cobras due to their status as a covers band are really missing the point; as they say themselves, why the hell should they bother writing yet more crappy rock songs when so many amazing compositions from the ‘50s and ‘60s remain undiscovered by a wider audience? Whether or not we’d be better off tracking down the originals on compilations is a moot point but, taken on it’s own musical merits, ‘Tied & True’ is pretty much perfect. Rachel Nagy is still one of the best vocalists around, matching powerhouse blues fervour with rare subtlety, Mary Restrepo’s guitar sounds EXACTLY the way I want guitars to sound, and with the rest of the band swinging out like wrecking crew pros, what can do but submit to classic songs, blasted out with genuine feeling, sweet production and punk rock energy? ‘Try Love’ and ‘Hurt’s All Gone’ bring on a swoon like the best broken-hearted ‘60s soul, and ‘Nothing But A Heartache’ and ‘What’s Going On?’ could get Kafka downing a double and hitting the dancefloor. Maybe I’m just turning into a pop classicist in my old age, but GODDAMN, this is Good Music, with capital letters.

Mp3 > Try Love


DINOSAUR JR – BEYOND (Pias / Fat Possum)

Arriving around the same time as the regrettable fiasco that was the new Stooges album, It took a while to sink in, but damn, this new Dinosaur Jr effort is WAY better than a comeback album by a band who hate each other reuniting for cash has any right to be. I could never really get on with the last album these three guys made together, 1988’s ‘Bug’, largely because Mascis seemed intent on burying the rhythm section beneath gratuitous guitar overdubs, leading to a record that sounded muddy and distant, lacking the drive that made the band’s earliest material so great. And now, a lifetime later, for the first time since ‘..Livin’ All Over Me’, Dinosaur miraculously sound like a band again. J still gets to play with about a dozen exquisitely fucked up guitar tracks, but Lou’s muscleman bass and Murph’s continuing attempts to create a drum style consisting entirely of fills come through loud and clear too, leading to a real best-of-both-worlds scenario. Some reviewers complained that ‘Beyond’ sounds exactly like generic Dinosaur Jr, and yeah, it does, what of it? Mission accomplished! The formula – ragged Crazy Horse glory with a punk rock rocket up it’s arse – has remained intact, and sounds better than ever. Without geeking out too much, let’s simply say that the production here is superb. It’s like a masterclass in how to make a really GREAT sounding modern rock record. J’s songs are, well, more or less the same as they’ve ever been; he still sounds as yearning and confused and vague as he did when he was a teenager, still content to let his guitar do the bulk of the talking, and it’s a joy to hear him shredding on Lou’s “Back To Your Heart”, which is… a really excellent Lou Barlow song. So basically, against all the odds, this is some of the best Dino ever committed to tape, the kind of record liable to win an immediate, pre-conscious “YES!” vote within the first ten seconds from anyone who still harbours a love for noisy, melodic rock music.

Mp3 > Almost Ready

Labels: album reviews, Animal Collective, best of 2007, David Thomas Broughton, Dinosaur Jr, The Detroit Cobras