THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008

Introductory Notes:

I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve been exposed to more of it, because I’ve taken more of an interest, or simply because there’s been more going on that’s hit the right buttons for me, but regardless – 2008 has been a fantastic year for new music.

Whereas 2006 and 2007 found me listening mostly to old records and reissues, and struggling to scrape together a decent end of year top 10, this year I could easily have knocked out a list of fifty records I’ve enjoyed. Compromising slightly, I’ve got it down to a list of thirty really good ones.

And, for the first time in Stereo Sanctity history, I've put them in order too. I'm not sure why really; I guess there's just been so much stuff worthy of love this year, I felt the need to establish some kind of hierarchy to outline precisely which records had the biggest impact on me personally, and to stop the results just looking like a big, confusing mess of disparate music, or something. Obviously my numerical placements are pretty much arbitrary, as I realise that putting a recording of a symphony for 400 guitars next to a South London punk band next to one of Africa's most accomplished musicians next to Jonathan Richman and trying to decide which one is the best is a ludicrous proposition. But no matter, I've done it anyway!

Naturally this means I’ll have to count things down backwards, from #30 through to #1, split across six different posts that I’m gonna put up over the next couple of weeks, which will look slightly confusing if you’re reading ‘em all in one go, but c’mon, you’ve all got your GCSE maths (or nearest local equivalent), I’m sure you can figure it out.

Oh, and, er, THE RULES, as it were: everything I’ve heard during 2008 that was released in 2008 on a longer format than a 7” single, and that consisted primarily of music being released for the first time, has been considered for inclusion. So EPs, 12”s and other miscellaneous misshapes have been included, but no singles, and no reissues or compilations of previously released material. This means that possibly my overall favourite release of the year – Comet Gain’s singles & rarities comp ‘Broken Record Prayers’ – hasn’t made the cut… but that’s probably just as well, as trying to condense the essence of it’s twenty song motherlode of howling, singular expression into a couple of hundred words is somewhat beyond my writerly skills, at least until I’ve had a chance to live with the thing for a little longer.

And so, with these caveats in mind, we say: Hey, Ho! Let’s Go!:

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #1

30. Michael Yonkers & The Blind Shake – Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons (Farm Girl Records)


You may recall my write up of Michael Yonkers’ debut LP ‘Microminiature Love’, on which he indulged his yen for DIY electronics and guitar vivisection, resulting in a mixture of detuned blues primitivism, suburban shut-in nihilism and all-out racket that rendered the record not so much ‘off the wall’ as ‘circling round the ceiling, shrieking like a robot hummingbird’ in the musical context of 1968. Well since then, Yonkers has been remained an elusive figure through necessity rather than choice, his recordings and live appearances sporadic since an industrial accident left him partially disabled during the ‘70s. But, on the basis of this new outing recorded with garage-rockers The Blind Shake, age certainly hasn’t mellowed our man, and his peculiar and terrifying sonic imagination remains undiminished. Coming on like a cacophonous mixture of Cleveland proto-punk, Sabbathian metal thunder and industrial circuit-bending skree, ‘Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons’ finds Yonkers and his collaborators still mercifully oblivious to any notion of canonical respectability, genre convention, or indeed sanity, as his perpetually dissatisfied songs see him taking umbrage with everything from non-specific liars n’ cheaters to the laws of organic chemistry. I recommend playing this one on the stereo at work, just to see the beautiful look on your colleagues’ faces as any hopes might harbour that you’re actually a productive, upstanding citizen with whom they can meaningfully communicate fall away in an instant.

Mp3> Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons


29. Cheap Time – s/t (In The Red)


Not much to say about this one. It’s just a killer album of noisy, punk-ass, home-recorded power-pop. Fourteen songs, each one loaded with exactly the kind of hooks and windmilling guitar licks you wanna hear (or I wanna hear them anyway), thirteen of them clocking in under 2:30. Nice! Echoes here of the songs that actually rock on any given Sloan album, The Nazz, Buzzcocks, Redd Kross – you know the score. All busted out on four-track with mega tape compression and weedy, yelped vocals, and they don’t piss about dragging every mediocre tune out to four and a half minutes like most power-pop outfits either. If Cheap Time are lacking anything, it’s character; tracks fly by in a pretty uniform fashion, and lyrics are mostly pretty inconsequential, but who cares, let’s rock!

Mp3> People Talk


28. Cars Can Be Blue – Doubly Unbeatable (Happy Happy Birthday To Me)


Cars Can Be Blue are, for me at least, the kind of band the ‘skip’ button was invented for. The duo’s more straight up, 100 second guitar/drums pop-punk blasts are vicious things of wonder, directed straight to my musical pleasure points. Three chords, killer melody, zero instrumental fat, a GO GO GO pace and lyrics that alternate between bitchy, cynical insecure ranting and heart-rending straight-to-the-point honesty in a thoroughly beguiling manner more akin to The Queers or Bratmobile than their supposed indie-pop peers. If all 16 songs on here were as good as the opening one-two punch of “Sun Blows Up” and “Coattails”, they’d be top ten, no questions asked. Unfortunately though, CCBB have also built their notoriety largely on a tendency toward one joke potty-mouth comedy songs and skits which are, well… absolutely dreadful to be honest. I mean, that kinda stuff’s not really my scene at the best of times, but CCBB’s contributions to the oeuvre really seem to suffer from a drop in musical standards and a loss of the charm of their better material, rendering them merely kinda tedious and nasty. So for every song here that’s GREAT, you’ve got one that’s kind of ok, and then one that’s just…. NO. The brilliant twelve minutes or so of this record is still some pretty special kinda brilliant though, so here’s hoping for more of it in future.

Mp3> Coat Tails


27. Jennifer Gentle – Effervescent Land EP (Heron Recordings)


If the old, two-man Jennifer Gentle sounded like an alien Syd Barrett impersonator trying to get to grips with earth technology, their current quartet line-up is more like the ten armed, helium-voiced hindu monster spirit of Syd himself, freefalling back into our dimension with enough sugarcubes to kill an elephant and a whole load of new tricks to show off. What the new incarnation has in common with old though is that it still makes about the most utterly joyful, hyper-imaginative, lunatic psychedelic pop available to us on this mortal plain, as revealed to great effect on this splendid four-tracker. Seeing these guys in the flesh for the first time was definitely one of my favourite gigs of the year – just breathtaking. Everything about their music is so, so WRONG, from the affected, temper tantrum shrieking, to the ham-fisted Morricone dramatics, the prog-afflicted mellotron excursions, multiple kazoo solos, wacky slide guitar licks, blaring feedback… dear god, how do these strange Italian men manage to combine it all into something so wondrously RIGHT..? Pop from another dimension in which the Olivia Tremor Control were slaughtered Giallo-style by full moon crazed loons, who didn’t mean any harm, it’s just… it’s just what they do.

Mp3> She’sAlright


26. The Mountain Goats & Kaki King – Black Pear Tree EP (self-released tour 12”)


A great example of two artists with their own highly distinctive working methods getting together in the name of mutual appreciation to make something together, each shedding an interesting new light on the other’s work. John D. brought along a handful of top notch songs, oft recalling the desolation of ‘..Get Lonely’ with an added dose of morbid apocalyptic imagery, along with his new-found fondness for hammering away dramatically at the piano, Nick Cave style. Kaki meanwhile brought her expressively muscular guitar style, her gift for killer arrangements and sound textures, and her hesitant, dislocated vocal harmonies. The result: six very strange and beautiful songs that sound like both, and simultaneously neither, artist. Some pleasantly head-scratching subject matter is on hand too; ‘Roger Patterson Van’ chronicles the death of the bass player from the band Atheist (thanks, wikipedia), whilst ‘Thank You Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle’ appears to be written from the point of view of one of those frogs or mushrooms or whoever the fuck it is that Mario rescues at the end of each level in Super Mario Bros. And it’s a far more earnest and well-developed character study than you’d suspect any song written on that subject by a sane individual really should be, too. I think ‘Supergenesis’ might be about a video game character too – a troubled, pixelated warrior snake it would seem: “feel the wet leaves pressed against me / cling like drowning men / try to hoist myself upright, again, try again..”. I know Darnielle has never been one to do things in half measures, but he might want to consider cutting down on the Nintendo in future. Despite such eccentricities though, these six songs share a rich vein of low key brooding weirdness that I feel renders them this year’s best soundtrack to pondering historical oddities in dilapidated autumnal churchyards.

Oh, and I’ll take this opportunity to note that Kaki King’s album ‘Dreaming Of Revenge’ is really, really excellent too, and should definitely be in this top 30 somewhere, except I can’t think of anything in particular to say about it, and I’m not entirely sure it was 2008. It’s a splendid piece of work anyway, and if I were her I’d be pissed at having been left off the list in favour of a bunch of trashy rock rubbish, and would boycott this blog forever.

Mp3> Black Pear Tree

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Cars Can Be Blue, Cheap Time, Jennifer Gentle, Kaki King, Michael Yonkers Band, The Mountain Goats

Michael Yonkers Band – Microminiature Love
(Recorded 1968 / Released by Sub-Pop, 2003)

Recorded by the exceptional Mr. Yonkers in 1968, and now available to the masses for the first time via the auspices of Sub-Pop, this is an album which pretty much exemplifies the narrative of the “lost underground freak-rock classic” archetype. I’m sure you can turn to google etc. if you want the full story.

The first thing that enters my head when I put this one on is the bit in the sleevenotes about how Sire records were planning to release the album and to try and market Yonkers as a ‘new Hendrix’ figure, but the deal fell through at the last minute. So I ponder that, and I listen to the sound emerging from my speakers, and I think, c’mon man, I don’t know who told what to whom when, but *no fucking way* would a major record label in the 1960s come within a thousand miles of releasing… THIS… even in the glory days of the cash-in psychedelia boom.

I’m still undecided as to whether ‘Microminiature Love’ is actually a good or bad record, or whether such terms even have any meaning with regard to an artefact this far off the accepted cultural map, but I am certain that it is genuinely deranged – as damaged a document of musical fucked-ness any connoisseur of such things could ever hope to find.

Yonkers is perhaps best known (amongst the kind of people likely to know of him at all) as the guy who combined his love for DIY electronics with rock n’ roll, sawing up his guitars and reassembling them as a weirdly tuned, doublenecked Frankenstein creation incorporating a theremin, at the same time as building his own fuzzboxes and echo units from scratch. Which all sounds pretty intriguing I’m sure you’ll agree, but it must be said that this sonic invention is certainly not as much in evidence on the LP as might be wished.

Yonkers and his band play a kind of nightmarish, claustrophobic garage-blues of a distinctly primitive caste, the guitar slowly navigating it’s way through wobbly, repetitive riffs that tend to sound like perverse variations on the Batman theme (so much for the new Hendrix!). Listening closer, it often sounds as if two or more guitars have been layered on top of each other, sometimes clean, echoed and jangly, sometimes deep, rumbling and fuzzed out, but always ever so slightly wonky and out of tempo/key, creating weird droning / overtone effects that hover in the background, occasionally emerging in the mix like rotor blades or croaking frogs. Interesting! Meanwhile, a rhythm section flounder around somewhere, stoned in the far background. Rendered in the kind of low fidelity you’d expect from a ‘60s basement tape, the whole thing has a weird Joe Meek kind of vibe about it, baked in wanton echo and reverb, and a certain, indefinable sense that nothing is quite the way it should be. The simplistic wrong-ness of the compositions, combined with the murk and slipshod violence of their execution, actually begins to sound quite post-punky after a while, perhaps recalling early stuff by The Fall or Butthole Surfers…. which I guess renders it ‘ahead of its time’ by default, by way of gloriously lolling in the same primordial waters of incompetence somewhere BEHIND everybody else’s musicianly time.

Yonkers’ nasal croon of a voice, utterly earnest and uncomfortably bellow-y at all times, is pushed to the forefront of the mix, where he proceeds to let rip on what some will consider a treasure trove of cracked outsider poetics, holding forth via cack-handed, childish rhyme schemes and lunatic repeated fragments on subjects such as depression, despair, escape from reality into odd personal dream worlds, and above all the horrors of war and governmental indoctrination. Songs such as ‘Smile Awhile’ seem almost obsessive in their bleakness, prefiguring the brute cosmic nihilism of Black Sabbath, whilst ‘Kill The Enemy’ sounds like a monotonous forced march straight to the cemetery, ending a blood-curdling shriek and disorientating tape echo.

Yonkers manages to sound deadly serious and deeply unhappy at all times, even then singing stuff like “Navigate your boat / keeping it afloat / round and round and round and round / round and round the moat”. You get the feeling that he has taken up the ‘60s counter-culture baton of free expression for all and naively run with it, although I suspect the San Fran tastemakers and hirsute folkies weren’t really counting on getting hit full in the face with the soul-baring of a paranoid, suburban shut-in like Yonkers when they told the world to let it all hang out.

Track 3, ‘Boy In The Sandbox’ is perhaps the album’s most astonishing moment, as Yonkers sings the story of a boy being indoctrinated from childhood into life as a soldier (fairly corny protest song stuff were it not for his insane delivery), slowly building up the tension and anger and culminating with the image of his young wife crying over the letter announcing his grisly death by bayonet in Vietnam as his baby son sits in the sandbox playing with toy soldiers. And only then does Yonkers let loose and deploy his homemade distortion pedal for the first time. You can actually hear the click of his foot hitting the switch, and then…. whoa! Holy hell! You can have a listen to the results below.

Modern day noise-freaks will relish this bit for sure, and patiently wait through the rest of the album for him to do it again, but in 1968 it must have knocked people out of their seats – a completely unprecedented flying leap into the jaws of oblivion.

So if all this sounds like your chosen pint of wine – well, it’s out there, go get it. Yonkers certainly lends a completely unique and genuine feeling to everything he does here, and I know I’ll be playing this at least a few more times trying to make sense of it all. But at the same time I wouldn’t blame you for reacting to this stuff the same way I suspect some bigwig at Sire probably did when faced with an eager young A&R brandishing a tape recorder: “Get the hell out of my office”.

Mp3> Boy In The Sandbox

Buy link> Amazon

Labels: 1960s, album reviews, Michael Yonkers Band, Proto-Punk, Psychedelia, weirdness