THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #6

5. Those Dancing Days - In Our Space Hero Suits (Wichita)


Dear Diary – Ok, I’ve got to admit it – I’ve got a MASSIVE crush on Those Dancing Days. A purely platonic, impersonal musical type crush I mean. I wasn’t really sure what to make of them when they first showed up; I’d see them from afar, played on the radio or, like, mentioned on some weblog, and I couldn’t even decide whether I liked them or not – they’d play a song, and I’d be like, wow, I know on some level that was completely incredible, but somehow… I dunno, I don’t know if I get there they’re coming from. I guess they just run with a different crowd. Like, people who read Artrocker, or Pitchfork, or college students or something. But – don’t ask me why - there was a certain something about them. They stuck in my mind. So I asked the people I knew about them, and some of them said “Yeah, I know them, they’re cool”, and other people were like “no way, you don’t wanna hang out with them, they’re lame!” But by that stage I just couldn’t stop thinking about them, and I had three songs by them that I’d just play over and over, and then their album came out, and it was even better. Every single song was amazing! And then one night I saw them, and and… I couldn’t help myself, I just blurted it all out:

"Wow, Those Dancing Days were FANTASTIC last night! One of the best live bands I’ve seen in ages…. If there’s one thing I don’t like about their records (and that’s a big IF) it’s that they’re a tad over-produced, so I’m so, so glad to have seen them totally rocking all those incredible songs live to a half empty hall of about a hundred students (and about eight people over twenty sticking out like sore thumbs) on a freezing Monday midnight. As is obvious from the records, their drummer is INCREDIBLE – she looks about twelve and rocks out like John Bonham doing session work for ’80s Madonna. And the rest of them are no slouches either – not much in the way of show(wo)manship, but that’s fine with me since they’re busy playing the living hell out of their songs and looking like they’re loving every second of it. The intro to every single song, even album tracks and b-sides, got an immediate “yes! I love this song!” reaction from me and/or others in the crowd, and it’s the first gig I’ve been to for ages that had a proper, spontaneous encore. Not to mention dancing on a Monday night. Shrug ‘em off if you like, but in their own way Those Dancing Days are DIY as fuck – no gimmicks or hype bullshit or pandering to genre/gender/age-based preconceptions, just five cool, characterful girls working hard to make the biggest, best, skyscraping, optimistic pop music they can imagine. WOW. I LOVE THIS BAND SO MUCH!”

Mp3> I Know Where You Live


4. Vivian Girls - s/t (Mauled By Tigers / In The Red)


I think I’ve probably said more than enough about these girls recently. Y’know, stuff like:

“Subject of a rising tide of hype, listeners in search of the latest outsider skree may be surprised to discover that Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls are initially a dead ringer for, well, The Shop Assistants. The sing-song melodies and echoes of ‘60s girl-group pop, the frantic, stand-up drumming at hardcore tempo, gloriously messy live-to-tape recording and skin-peeling early JAMC distortion – it’s all here, though admittedly with the C86 giddiness kicked out in favour of deadpan NY cool. That’s the formula, and as far as formulas go, you’d better believe it's a good one. But there’s more to the Vivian Girls than that. There’s something that’s hard to define creeping around the edges, something timeless that reveals scene-making hype for the sad joke it is, and that makes this record, this band, very special indeed.

The brittle love chants of “Wild Eyes” and “Tell the World” and corresponding temper tantrums “No” and “I Believe In Nothing” are almost vicious in their simplicity and emotional directness, dragged straight from the brain of any film noir teenage daughter of yesteryear, trying to make sense of a threatening, staccato black & white world. Pure, sinister, feminine rock n’ roll. But the girls wait until the stunning “Where Do You Run To” to really hit their stride, slowing down to a brooding, mid-tempo psychedelia, leaving shivering harmonies and tamed feedback hanging in the air like a frozen moment in some David Lynch directed dancehall of the soul – orange moon sinking on the horizon, sunglasses on stage, and there’s something bad waiting outside, but that’s ok, cos you’ll never have to go there.

Here is the kind of ineffable suburban teenage forever that Spector/Wilson wannabe producers sweat over their LA studio consoles for years to fleetingly recapture, reborn as a ragged punk howl and laid down raw and alive by three girls with little more than a couple of mics and a reverb unit. Such is the joy of life in 2008.”

Play loud.

Mp3> Where Do You Run To


3. The Wave Pictures - Instant Coffee Baby (Moshi Moshi)


The Wave Pictures have been around for a few years now, and they’ve made records in the past, and I’m sure they’ll continue to do great stuff in future. But I’m also confident that when future pop historians look back to tabulate our age, they will deem this one THE Wave Pictures record – the perfect moment that encapsulates the essence of everything that’s great about this band.

I must have seen The Wave Pictures play half a dozen times between mid ’07 and early ’08, and every time they were incredible – wowing the crowd, kicking out the jams, bringing a great, good natured atmosphere. Everything a live band is supposed to do, everything their mentors Herman Dune used to do at the peak of their powers a few years back. You know that feeling when you see a group play, and they’re trying out new-ish songs, and you’re just *floored * by how good they are, thinking “oh man, they’ve GOT to record that one for their album; no wait, this one’s DEFINITELY got to be the single” etc? You don’t? Well either way, it was a bit like that. Then along comes ‘Instant Coffee Baby’, and it’s got a full scorecard of all those songs that blew me away in their live set – ‘Just Like A Drummer’ and ‘that oranges one’ and ‘the one with that great line about the Italian coffee machine’ and so many others – only now they’ve got names, and they’ve been laid down live to tape over a few days in a basement studio, with perfect, clear sound, and with hand-claps, ad-libs, background laughter, guest appearances, rockin’ solos for everybody… all the energy and spontaneity of their live shows! “Tell ‘em about it on the bass guitar!” Fucking perfect!

David Tattersall’s star is blazing bright throughout this album, as a songwriter, guitarist, singer – love him or hate him, he’s definitely stepping up to the plate of the greats as a rock band central presence here, stamping every second of his songs with his personality, making them impossible to ignore. Desperately running down the joy and wreckage of a lifetime’s worth of romantic disasters, small town English upbringing and poverty-stricken touring exploits, he’s by turns arrogant, absurd, hilarious, spiteful, tender, baffling, bereft, naïve, spine-chilling, tender, dumb, hateful, lovable, conceited, heartbroken….. you get the idea, and like it or not, you know you’re gonna be playing these songs twenty, thirty times and enjoying the hell out of them before you get to the bottom of it all. There’s always been something almost militantly unpretentious about The Wave Pictures’ approach to music: three friends, whatever instruments are lying around, a three chord turnaround, a killer rhythm section, a few handfuls of real life-derived lyrics, a great melody on the chorus, a rockin’ solo just for laughs, and an unspoken sneer at anyone who needs more than that to get their point across. And on the strength of this album, it’s hard not to see their point. “And I read your letter / about how you love Sgt. Pepper / but I know one day / I’ll do better!”, David sings on ‘Kiss Me’. Mission accomplished, and then some.

Mp3> Instant Coffee Baby


2. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride (4AD)


I threw more than enough words onto the fire regarding this one back in February. But regardless, here are a few more. Listened to with ten months retrospect, Heretic Pride above all seems like a chronicle of mental breakdown, reinterpreted as a masterpiece of imaginative songwriting, in which the turmoil of real life is projected back at the listener through the prism of gothic horror and pulp fiction imagery, to startling effect, as mist-shrouded agents block a desperate flight home, as a band t-shirt glimpsed in a bathroom reveals a desiccated corpse, as knives in an ex-girlfriend’s kitchen gleam like weapons in an inescapable killing ground, as a store clerk’s smile brings on visions of cosmic annihilation…. there but for the grace of god, etc. An extraordinarily powerful record, in every sense.

“I dreamt that I was purged atop
A throne of human skulls
On a cliff above the ocean
Howling wind and shrieking seagulls
And the dream went on forever
One single static frame
Sometimes you’ve got to go where everybody knows your name”

Mp3>How To Embrace A Swamp Creature


1. Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City)


This year, I found myself devouring, internalising and generally clinging on to the Silver Jews back catalogue, much like a post-apocalyptic caveman who’s just discovered the bible. So it was with perfect timing that David Berman released one of his band’s strongest, and certainly their brightest, collections of songs to date, right on schedule to catch me at the height of my devotions. In a brief Q&A with Plan B magazine back in May, Berman said: “Touring gave me a good look at who I’d be speaking to when I wrote again. In the past I only had a blurry face to go on. What I saw was a lot of tender-hearted young people with little in the way of wisdom gained from harsh experience, leaving them vulnerable to the saturation and aftermath”. And indeed, his newfound confidence as a mentor to his listeners is obvious throughout ‘Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea’, as he steps boldly forward from the emotionally shaky foundations of 2005’s ‘comeback’ record ‘Tanglewood Numbers’, combining the gutter-bound wit of old with the infectious wisdom and musical perfectionism of a man born again, ready to share some lessons learned.

As with most truly great albums, this isn’t some epic attempt to paint a sprawling musical picture of the whole of life or something; it’s just thirty five minutes comprising ten carefully selected songs from the pile the band happened to have lying around, no more no less. Ten songs that, without wishing to overlook the band’s oft wondrous arrangements, any bum can recreate with a cracked voice and a handful of fingers; in fact a chord sheet and tabs are helpfully provided in the LP for that very purpose. But nonetheless, ten songs so densely packed with wit, wisdom, and crab-walking suburban profundity that their resonance will (I would like to think) echo long through the minds and hearts of the kind of people who listen to the words in songs and like to seek more songs with better words, long after Drag City has gone kaput in the face of the forthcoming dark age and the ‘Jews have retired to their poverty-stricken critical laurels.

I know I’ve used the words ‘wit’ and ‘wisdom’ twice in scarcely the space of a paragraph, but fuck it, wit and wisdom are what Silver Jews in 2008 are all about. Like every genius out there, Berman recognises that the funniest things and most serious things in life are one and the same, and, above all else, ‘Lookout Mountain..’ is uproariously entertaining. “San Francisco B.C.” has gotta be the most inspired long-form narrative song since the Velvets’ “The Gift” or Dylan’s “..115th Dream”, highlighting the most graceful wrangling of a rhyming dictionary I’ve ever encountered, whilst “Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer” and “Partybarge”, initially sounding like goofy, confounding joke-songs, reveal delightfully skewed depths on repeat spins. “Suffering Jukebox” could launch a rousing singalong in any hypothetical honkytonk of the soul, its central conceit still flat-out killer after hundreds of listens, whilst closer “We Could Be Looking For The Same Thing” would raise bittersweet tears from the same audience of imagined mountain men moments later – simply a straight-up, beautiful and wholly honest love song – no gimmicks, no jive, no spikes.

‘Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’ is one of those records, like Leonard Cohen or Richard Thompson used to make, like Jonathan Richman still does make, that is hugely enjoyable, but that teaches listeners something important at the same time, asking nothing in return. Edutainment for the soul. Quite what it’s teaching you exactly, I wouldn’t care to elaborate, that’s up to you to figure out, but let’s just say that if previous Silver Jews records were near-biblical masterpieces of self-pity, this one starts from the same square, but approaches the game with a hell of a lot more get up and go.

(Oh, and best cover art of the DECADE also, I think.)

“Somewhere in a foggy atlas
Lookout mountain, lookout sea
First life takes time, then time takes life
Now the next move’s up to me”

Roll on 2009.

Mp3>Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Silver Jews, The Mountain Goats, The Vivian Girls, The Wave Pictures, Those Dancing Days

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #5

10. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron & Fred Squire – Lost Wisdom (Southern)


Phil Elverum – alias Mt Eerie / The Microphones - makes a lot of records. And, though he may experiment with everything from harsh electronics to “acoustic black metal”, the focus of his muse is always essentially the same: very austere, introspective vignettes of personal revelation, expressed with a very old fashioned sense of classical Romantic awe. As such, ‘Lost Wisdom’ is, I would wager, the perfect Phil Elverum record. Within it, he plays eleven of his best, most elemental, songs; just quiet-sing and soft guitar strumming, accompanied by Julie Doiron’s sublime vocals (I know I’m not usually one to obsess over vocal styles, but seriously, I cannot express how wonderfully Julie’s voice fits in with these songs), and beautifully understated electric guitar from Fred Squire. All of the elements here are in order: beauty is the result. Any of these songs, most of them under two minutes, contain the capacity to become your entire universe, so be listened to hundreds of times on repeat and to leave you changed as a result, if you could only stand to give them enough time/concentration, or if they were just allowed the good grace to hit you at the right moment – that moment of exquisite calm and collapse that each of the songs represents; the moment that takes us beyond ourselves. And if the songs fail to do that, if they start to sound insufferably precious and weak-ass after a while, and you want to take ‘em off and put something with a bit more of a kick to it…. well that’s not their fault. Let it stand as a condemnation of the noise and chaos and confusion and shit and selfishness of our modern lives, rather than of this record, because it is in essence that rare thing: a perfect piece of human self-expression fully realised in isolation from all else.

Mp3>Voice In Headphones


9. Throw Me The Statue – Moonbeams (Secretly Canadian)


I had a good old ramble about this one back in August, from which I submit to you the following edited highlights:

“…let it be said that I’ve been listening to ‘Moonbeams’ again and again, and enjoying it immensely. Why? Well, what can I tell you; I guess it’s just plain GOOD. Fuck it, perhaps it’s even great! […] And that’s that – I’ll hand in my ‘music writer’ badge at the door. Obviously there are lots of instruments and sounds on here that I really like […]; the fuzzy, clipped weezer-y electric guitars, some really on-point live drumming and wonky, overdriven casios. And in fact, all this stuff, good and bad, is mixed up in a really cool way throughout these songs, jammed as they are with rad riffs, ingenious melodic bits and pieces, inventive rhythms, singalong choruses with pleasantly unlikely chord progressions - a veritable smorgasbord of multitracked musical fun, if you will. I’m not going to win my writer-badge back by stating that the shorter, punchier tracks with the loud guitars are clearly the best ones here, but it’s true, so I’ll say it anyway. 'This Is How We Kiss' is the Obvious Hit Single, should such a thing have any meaning in 2008. iTunes says I’ve played it 36 times, not including mp3 player listens. It’s fucking perfect! Two minutes and eight seconds of the kind of geek-pop gold that wearers of black-framed glasses the world over secretly dream of whilst dutifully listening to their dreary Finnish folktronica records or whatever.

But, the fun doesn’t stop there, oh no - many of Throw Me The Statue’s other songs are almost as good. […] And the key is, of course, the songs. Throw Me The Statue’s main guy sounds like he has something he desperately wants to convey, probably re: failed relationships, or never-happened ones, or imagined ones, only he can’t really blurt it all out in a straight-up fashion for fear of maybe upsetting the people concerned, or making himself look like a jerk, or perhaps just cos that would make for boring songs (all perfectly valid reasons of course). So instead he scrambles his muse up into awkward mouthfuls of veiled meaning and book smarts absurdity that make Stephen Malkmus look like an open-hearted balladeer by comparison, at least until he decides to step out and throw in few lines of plain, descriptive fact before triumphantly scampering back again, as if to say “HA! GOT YOU!”. […] So to all my compatriots out there who’ve ever clutched a Guided By Voices song to their heart as if Bob Pollard’s cut & paste musings were the very sum of cosmic truth strapped to a second-hand Who riff (which they are)… you’d better believe Throw Me The Statue are on to a rare winner.”

I saw these guys play a couple of months back, and they didn’t play “This Is How We Kiss”! Can you believe that? It’s like if you went to see B.O.C. and they didn’t play “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”! Anyway, never mind.

Mp3> This Is How We Kiss


8. Zatopeks – Damn Fool Music (Household Name)


It’s an odd business, pop-punk. In theory, the best genre ever – the music of suburban delinquents who never got over The Ramones, pushing speed, volume, good humour and obvious pop melodies to their natural conclusion. In practice though, things can quickly be soured by a few too many second rate bands reducing the whole deal to a joyless exercise in genre convention, all seemingly recorded by the same dude, who sets the desk for “a bit too slick” then goes out to get a sandwich. All it takes though is one really good band with a unique voice of their own, and we’re cooking with gas once more, as all the reasons why I love this music come flooding back. Enter South London’s Zatopeks with their second album ‘Damn Fool Music’, one of the strongest and most enjoyable records I’ve heard all year in any genre. They’ve got the velocity, attack and energy of this music down pat, with all the hardcore tempos, processed cheese fuzz guitar, bouncing Deedee basslines and singalong choruses are present and correct, sounding as instinctively right as they ever have done. But beyond that, the band take a slightly more wide-ranging approach to things, incorporating elements of ‘60s pop, rock n’ roll to pleasing effect. And most importantly, they’ve also got a truly great, ambitious songwriter in the shape of frontman Will DeNiro, whose smart and engaging lyrics mark the band out as something special from the word go. Just about every song here manages to kick off with the gut-wrenching immediacy of Jawbreaker or The Replacements, addressing subject matter ranging from broken relationships, depression and getting older via healthy detours into politics and history, to the more traditional punk concerns of getting wrecked and hating The Daily Mail, all approached with a refreshing level of insight and honesty, and a self-effacing English punk-bloke wit you’ll recognise from Milky Wimpshake or early Billy Brag. Oh, and some REALLY kick-ass tunes too. They even do a couple of really great, affecting acoustic songs, worthy of any of the above reference points. Yeah, for real. Perfectly paced, perfectly executed and overflowing with feeling, ‘Damn Fool Music’ is a brilliant piece of work, building up a picture of the band’s ideology and the singer/writer’s inner world that comes pretty close to doing for disillusioned punk blokes in the Heathrow flightpath what ‘Let It Be’ did for teenage delinquents from Minneapolis. I realise this probably isn’t exactly sounding like nectar from the gods to all you cutting edge underground music types out there, but seriously, what we’ve got here is a really fucking great band deserving of an audience way beyond the punk-as-genre ghetto, and if you’ve ever been remotely into the idea of guys with guitars playing loud songs about stuff that’s on their minds, or if you’re just looking for the perfect, unpretentious headphone-blast to get you on the way to work in the morning, I’d recommend giving them a shot.

Mp3s> Radio Marija
Jumble Sale


7. Pete & The Pirates - Little Death (Stolen Recordings)


Speaking as a feckless, overgrown moping indie fool, Pete & The Pirates are a very comforting presence. Come on, their excellent debut album seems to call out, come and have a pint with us; bring your unfashionable shoes and your shitty winter jacket and the bags under your eyes and tedious tales of your rubbish job, and all will be well, for we are feckless overgrown fools too, and we have a load of fast-strummed, jangling guitars like The Verlaines and The Clean used to do, and a drummer who goes off like a rocket, and a basketful of really, really great songs all about girls, and being sad, and girls, and wanting to stay in bed, and… um, well that’s about it really. All topped off with a load of fiendishly wonky pop-genius lead guitar hooks that’ll worm their way into your brain like nothing since all those Pixies songs way back when. Hooks that, along with the inherently anthemic potential of many of their best tunes, would get these fellas played incessantly on the radio were there any justice in the world, gaining them the respect of a fanbase stretching way beyond the bounds of feckless indie fools, and earning them enough shiny pounds to quit their rubbish jobs and to go live a life of comfort in nice big houses just like, I dunno, Blur or somebody. But as all us moaning, dissatisfied bastards know, there is no such justice to be found, which is exactly why we need bands like Pete & The Pirates to make us feel better by singing beautifully sad songs about the indignities of having to get up in the morning, and, ironically, giving us a perfect kick up the arse to get us out of the front door in the process. Thank you Pete & The Pirates! Long may you continue to sail the suburban seas, making ‘indie’ – sans suffix – seem no longer a dirty word, but once again like a great, righteous thing we can wrap around us like a big ol’ blanket.

Mp3>Knots


6. Jonathan Richman - Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild (Vapour)


That every Jonathan Richman album is, taken on its own terms, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, goes without saying. But, as the uncharacteristically downbeat cover art eerily suggests, this one has a quite different feeling to anything he’s done in the past. From the outset, Jonathan’s voice sounds more distant, less self-assured, than he ever before, his guitar playing softer and more fragile, as his sole accompanist Tommy Larkins manfully attempts to lay down the quietest drums ever set on record. Befitting this change of pace, Jonathan has turned in perhaps his darkest and most questioning set of songs since he was working out his adolescent angst in The Modern Lovers. As fans and admirers of Mr. Richman, this change is initially disconcerting, making us worried for his ongoing health and happiness. But as selfish music fans, we can enjoy one of the most vital and affecting record he’s made in years. In many of the songs here, Jonathan expresses frustration with his homelife, or maybe just with growing older in general. “You are the light of the world / so why is your world so grey?” he pleads on the unspeakably tender ‘Our Drab Ways’, whilst other songs find him reflecting on young love from a distance, acknowledging for the first time that that’s not really his place in the world anymore. “They’re gonna take this sterile place and make it live”, he declares, welcoming in the protagonists of ‘The Lovers are Here and They’re Full of Sweat’. There are two renditions of one of my favourite new songs, and perhaps the most angry and controversial song Jonathan has attempted for a while, “When We Refuse To Suffer”, in which he rejects the use of anti-depressants in no uncertain terms, even shredding on an overdriven electric guitar for the first time in decades on the second version, as he spits out the lyrics with frightening passion; “..that’s when the air freshener wins, and the moon outside is the loser!” Make of that what you will, but personally, I say right fucking on Jonathan, and thanks for having the guts to sing this one for us. The same sentiment applies doubly to the album’s closing track, and the one that will mean the most to many listeners, ‘As My Mother Lay Lying’, in which he sings about speaking with his mother on her deathbed. There’s not much more I can say about that one – if your eyes are dry by the end of it, you have a far harder heart than I. For all that this is a harrowing and unhappy collection of songs though, Jonathan’s ongoing faith in the beauty of the world around him still shines through every pore of it, and my favourite song here is definitely the title track. I mean, it’s just an old fashioned love song I guess, just like some other ones he’s done in the past, so simple in its construction it’s like it’s barely there at all, it could blow away in the breeze, but… oh man, does he ever nail it. For over thirty years now, Jonathan has been a master of turning exactly what’s on his mind at any given moment into great and life-affirming art, and, though he’s clearly been having a bit of a rough time of recent, he has once again succeeded wonderfully. I hope that ’09 proves a bit more of a fun time for him and his nearest and dearest, but either way, I’m sure there are many of us out there who have been reminded by the strength of this album that, as the excellent (tho sadly defunct?) ‘Concert Haikus’ weblog succinctly put it recently;

There are few people
In this world that I love half
As much as this man

Mp3>Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Jonathan Richman, Julie Doiron, Mount Eerie, Pete and The Pirates, Throw Me The Statue, Zatopeks

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #4

15. Christina Carter - Texas Working Blues (Blackest Rainbow cassette)


Following the recorded output of Charalambides / Christina Carter can be a frustrating business. Anyone who’s seen the Carters live, or heard their best records, will know the extraordinary depths of power and catharsis their music can draw upon. But pick the wrong selection of product off the shelf, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re the most pretentious and self-involved musicians who ever walked the earth. For instance, Christina’s ‘official’ release for 2008 – ‘Original Darkness’ on Kranky – seems to me to be an unsatisfying and difficult affair, piecing together disjointed musical fragments and spoken word monotone into a confounding and uncomfortable failed(?) experiment. This micro-label cassette release meanwhile (no I don’t actually own a copy – I copped a sneaky download), is just plain beautiful - one of the most engrossing and satisfying solo Christina joints to date. In contrast to recent stark, brittle outings, the sound here is instantly warm and welcoming – maybe that’s deliberate, to suit the songs, maybe it’s just the fuzzy, analogue cassette factor. Either way, it’s a winner. This is exactly the kind of music I always WANT Christina to make, and those familiar with her work will know the score by now I’m sure; dense, happy spiderwebs of heavily effected, finger-picked electric guitar notes hanging in the air like bright yellow smoke, tracing ghosts of divine melodies that never quite seem to coalesce, whilst sustained vocal syllables cut through like hot knives, comforting and settling, telling you exactly what’s up, even when you can’t make out the words. To say nothing of some of those star-gazing Garcia-esque solos you always assumed Tom was responsible for on the Charalambides records. Blessed with more in the way of form than is often the case, this is fascinating, wholly honest and idiosyncratic songcraft with a strange, non-linear psychedelic desert drift that recalls nothing so much as the testimonies of earlier Texas psyche-blues travellers Cold Sun. I think this would sound amazing whilst stoned; y’know, where you get into that headspace where you’re listening to music, and the spaces between the notes seem to stretch out, becoming more important than the notes themselves..? This is the kind of record that gets you to that stage whilst sober. “I want to use my voice for good, however small the good, in this world of foolish dreams”, Christina sings on ‘Preserve Our Face’, and so under the spell are you by that point, there’s nothing to do but to spit our a slurred, delay pedal “HELL, yeah” from deep within yourself, and slip back down to dig the sunrise, or something.

Mp3>A Blind Eye

14. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash (Matador/Domino)


Back in May, I said:

“Were this not the work of a man with so much history and expectation still hanging over him, we might even be able to appreciate it for what it is. And what it is is an extraordinary, bold and deeply STRANGE concoction of sweet, stoned fuzz and vertiginous audiophile thunder, cross-pollinating full band progressive rock blowouts with more hallucinatory, laugh-out-loud wordplay than ever before, all assembled like some grand architectural folly, with Malkmus’ perfectionist production aesthetic searching the studio console as usual for some manner of rock perfection that is never quite ‘old’, never quite ‘new’, but is certainly pretty oblivious to the social/cultural context of making a record in 2008. The results are meandering and monstrous in equal measure, an hour or so of genuinely multi-faceted, imaginative music that makes perfect, goofy rock n’ roll sense but is at same time completely off the map, answerable to nothing except the inscrutably odd logical-musical pathways of the hallowed Malkmus brain. Previous solo Malk escapades may have paid reference in passing to such comfortingly dusty fetishes as Turkish psych, obscure folk rock and European prog, but it’s only on ‘Real Emotional Trash’ that he’s really dared to step fully out of his own ‘indie’ shadow, putting together the kind of powerhouse band you kinda suspect he’s always wanted to have backing him up (that’s veteran Jicks Joanna Bolme and Mike Clark, with Janet “she-is-so-awesome-we-don’t-even-need-to-bother-pointing-it-out” Weiss taking over on drums of course), and playing a brand of big-in-every-sense, capital letters Rock Music whose central axis veers between CLASSIC on one hand and WEIRD on the other, and proceeds to take no prisoners.
[ … ]
There’s a definite feeling on ‘Real Emotional Trash’ that this time Steve’s got his Orange amp and his boutique fuzz pedals and fingers itching to get busy. His scrabble board keeps on delivering the goods, he’s got a band behind him who could chase Robert Fripp round a labyrinth all day, and he’s gonna fuckin’ JAM, regardless of what anybody wants or expects. And I for one say: bring it on Steve, I can dig it!”

Well, don't know about you, but here at the end of December, he's still got me "dancing like a pitbull, minus the meat".

Mp3>Hopscotch Willie


13. Hotpants Romance – It’s A Heatwave (Happy Happy Birthday To Me)


“You said my lipstick was the best you’ve tasted / c’mon baby let’s get wasted!” Yes! Hotpants Romance are here, and their album - 12 songs in 17 minutes - is nothing less than inspiring in it’s wrecked, Ramonetastic, homemade pop splendour. And they cram a pleasing amount of variety and ideas into that seventeen minutes too; “Shake” and “Blow My Fuse” are the perfect grrl-garage party anthems, like if Thee Headcoatees had shaken off Billy and learned to play their own instruments, whilst “Effing & Jeffing” and “We Used To Meet” lurch more toward shrieking, electrifying noise-punk, and “I Don’t Wanna” is the purest and most touching forty-five seconds of DIY pop yearning you’ll hear this year. It’s always a thrill to hear a band who set enthusiasm at ‘10’, technique and musical know-how at ‘who cares’, and kick your ass into remembering that that’s exactly how it should be. Can’t sing? – just shout! Got a guitar? – whatta you waiting for, hit the fucking thing! And if you’ve got the songs in your head and the awesomeness in your heart that these girls have, you’ll be the best band in town within minutes. Magic. With a fucking ‘k’, if you must.

Mp3>Effing & Jeffing


12. Congregation - s/t (Bronzerat)


This year, Congregation played for a capacity crowd of about twenty people in the really nice vegetarian cafe down the road from my work, and they were very loud and very good. I enjoyed it when a late-working co-worker walked past the front window and stared in with a classic ‘these damn beatniks with their rhythm & blues!’ type expression. Congregation also brought out their first album this year, and it is also very good. It’s got a real professional sounding production job and, whilst my initial instinct would be to want to hear this band in a more garagey live-with-one-mic set up, it works well for them. There’s some big echo, heavy delay and slap-back on the guitar, some overdubs and suchlike, but, most importantly, Victoria’s songs are allowed to stretch out into some darker territory than is communicated by their live show, with a very real sense of vicious depression creeping in between the more raucous r’n’b footstompers; songs such as “Dose Of Hell” and “Never Forgive” deliver as their titles promise.

Reviewing Congregation’s first single, I ventured: “This is some vitally genuine, minimal electric blues right here – not ‘genuine’ in the sense of paying cack-handed homage to some never-existed traffic jam of blues cliché, but genuine in the sense that it’s music with guts and heart, wrought from exactly the elements it needs to hit your own personal spot, wherever you are in time & space, and not or note nor beat more.”

And, after seeing them at 2007’s End Of The Road festival (although probably with memories of a couple of other shows I saw them at in mind too), I got a bit carried away and cranked out the following; “Benjamin Prosser is a shit-hot rhythm/slide guitarist, playing consummate electric blues and boogie that raises the spirits of Bukka White and John Lee Hooker, recalling just how propulsive, spine-chilling and flat-out awesome this sound was before the late-‘60s generation drove it headfirst into formalised, shrieking self-parody. Victoria Yeulet sings sweet, subtle and impossible to ignore, with the commanding authority of an Irma Thomas or a Bessie Smith. A bass drum thump and Victoria’s leg bells bring the mama-heartbeat. Basically, Congregation jam together some of the best elements of some of the best fucking music ever made, and bring it straight back to us, ragged and powerful in a way that never goes out of fashion. ”

I think all of that still basically holds true, so why repeat myself? I think these guys are fucking great, essentially.

Mp3>Hard To Bear


11. Howlin Rain - Magnificent Fiend (Birdman)


Earlier this year, I said:

“Howlin Rain’s less-is-NOT-more restatement of the grandest ‘70s rock truth is a thing of absolute beauty when it comes together, and it’s a shame that the rabidly enthusiastic review I had planned of their ‘Magnificent Fiend’ album ground to a halt upon the realisation that however, well, magnificent the record’s first side may be, the second half sadly loses it’s focus a bit and drifts off into confusion. But on those three hefty tunes that open proceedings – BOY HOWDY, do they ever get it right!

The way than Ethan Miller has grown into a singer is in itself a wonder – from being the babbling, echoplexed drunk nearly ruining all those early Comets On Fire jams a few years ago, he’s now got his tonsils exactly where he wants them, moving effortlessly between a laidback Jerry Garcia croon and a fearless Fogerty bark as the music dictates. And thankfully, in Howlin Rain, that’s exactly what the music dictates. Take all the best bits of early ‘70s ‘Dead and Creedence, add a heroic dose of Blue Oyster Cult’s skyscraping high concept weirdness and a healthy reverence for the dusty, meaty tones of the Hammond and Fender Rhodes, combine with a spirit of positive and reckless invention, as opposed to aimless pastiche, and happy days are here for one and all!

And the lyrics – dear god, the lyrics. Let’s just say that if those of us who value truly extraordinary and inexplicable rock lyrics were to band together and form a club (and perhaps we should), there’d be little doubt that Ethan Miller would be getting our annual grand prize (perhaps the much-coveted B.O.C. medallion?) for this one. The Moorcock-inspired ‘Dancers At The End Of Time’ is pretty cool, but ‘Lord Have Mercy’ takes the biscuit. Whatever headspace Miller inhabits that allows him to belt out stuff like this without fear of ridicule, I want to get there. Lord have mercy indeed.”

So for any aspiring songwriters out there wondering how to do a real proper chorus…

“Mrs. Amelia Underwood,
Carry my heart in your hands!
Jesus will shine on your journey,
Into the Hollow Lands!”

…is how to do a chorus.

I’d pass on Howlin Rain’s advice on the verses too, but it’s still blowin’ my mind too heavily man. Listen and learn.

Mp3>Lord Have Mercy

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Charalambides, Christina Carter, Congregation, Hotpants Romance, Howlin' Rain, Stephen Malkmus, The Jicks

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #3

20. Lords - Everyone Is People (Gringo)


Lords’ first album from a couple of years back gets my vote as one of the unexpectedly amazing, inventive and ass-kicking British rock records of the decade. Beginning from their assorted backgrounds in muscular post-hardcore, the three gentlemen of Lords essentially set about dragging their music back through the wilds of gutbucket blues, ‘70s boogie thunder and chaotic jazz-inspired chops, and emerge all the stronger for it, and with a bit of genuine emotional character to boot. I mean, imagine: a heavy rock band who claim they’re gonna fill in the gaps between ZZ Top, Fugazi and Charles Mingus…. and then proceed to actually go ahead and DO IT. ‘Everyone Is People’ finds them refining their approach a bit – the performances are tighter and more reined in than the debut, the production is punchier, with heavier low-end, although they still take it easy on the distortion, which is cool. As before, guitar-tones are essentially clean, but achieve massive heft through the foolproof method of playing really fucking loudly through really good amps. There’s less flailing, bebop drumming, fewer sideways thinkin’ Zoot Horn Rollo guitar licks, and the vocals are perhaps less effective, occasionally resorting to the blooze clichés and Tom Waits crackly phoneline effect that the band’s debut so masterfully side-stepped. All of this would be disappointing, were it not for the work Lords have instead put into THE RIFFS this time around. Oh my lord, THE RIFFS flatten all, like the elephant on the cover. Tunes like “The Things We Do For Money” and “We Shook The Royal Throne” just step right up and demolish that wall of self-deprecation that forbids mild-mannered guys from indie backgrounds from really *rocking the fuck out* in obvious, glorious, unapologetic, fashion, and there’s some real classic “eat this!” back and forth soloing between the two guitarists to enjoy in places too. Naturally though, even in their most out-and-out rockin’ moments, Lords have still got group dynamics and inventiveness to die for, and a wild sense of good humour, resulting in an eventual brew that resembles…. uh, I dunno…. The Magic Band kicking the shit out of Queens Of The Stone Age or something? Put on your Gnarly Man-Rock Hat, just for a minute if you find such things distasteful, and the conclusion becomes self-evident and objective: this shit RULES. No further questions.

Mp3>The Things We Do For Money


19. Birchville Cat Motel - Four Freckle Constellation (Conspiracy Records)
18. Birchville Cat Motel – Gunpowder Temple Of Heaven (Pica Disk)



That there are a lot more people than there used to be out there making long-form drone music of one kind or another is no secret. That some of them have a tendency to poison the well somewhat by putting out lots and lots of it without much concern for quality control, encased within £££-harvesting limited edition, mysterioso formats, safe in the knowledge that this kind of subjectively experienced music is more or less immune to conventional critique, is hardly news either. In fact, as a gripe, it’s getting pretty old, and I should probably can it in future. I wouldn’t want my more rockist (guitar pop-ist?) tendencies to obscure the fact that I do actually listen to a lot of drone / ‘new music’ stuff, and take great pleasure from it. As you may have gathered from my write-up of the Rhys Chatham record, I’m becoming ever more of a sucker for stuff that approaches the musical equivalent of science fiction’s ‘Big Dumb Object’ theory. With this in mind, it is my considered opinion that, for all of his dozen or so annual releases under three or four different names, it is New Zealand’s Campbell Kneale who is the real KEEPER when it comes to the contemporary expression of this kind of music. Or at least, in the process of picking up bits and pieces of his discography here and there, I’ve never heard anything that’s been less than completely extraordinary, and 2008 has been a particularly good year for his Birchville Cat Motel mothership, with two new bone fide masterpieces to add to the trophy rack.

‘Four Freckle Constellation’ continues the work began by the truly astounding (sorry about all the superlatives, but what else can you do?) ‘Scream For Me Long Beach!’ / ‘Our Love Will Destroy The World’ material from a few years back (think Kevin Shields if he’d just kept on going further and further out after ‘Loveless’; think HOOVER OF THE GODS). It ditches the percussion and leftover rock DNA though, concentrating instead on arcs of screeching high end mic feedback and dense, tamboura-ish guitar distortion, ala Matthew Bower’s Sunroof project. As is ever the way with this shit, each track is punishing at first, but within two minutes you’ll hit the comfort zone and your ears will stop itching. Then you can switch off your attention, start doing something else (like writing this review), BUT – this is drone sufficiently powerful that it refuses to stay locked in the background. Ten minutes tops before you find yourself flashing toward gleaming, spectral vistas of…. fuck knows what, but it’s something a mile high and pretty solid, made of diamond, metal and molten lava, approaching fast over the lunar desert. Advice for life # 1: nobody who’s ever uttered the phrase “music to take drugs to” knows what the hell they’re talking about.

‘Gunpowder Temple Of Heaven’ is even better. A single 46 minute piece that seems to go for the jugular of taking on LaMonte Young, Conrad, Riley et al at their own game, it begins as a disconcerting mass of warped radio voices and looped casio-fuzz, but before long a central theme emerges and it sounds …. hmm, how to put this… It sounds as if Campbell Kneale died, and he went to heaven, and they said to him “so, what do you do then?”, and he said “I’m a musician”, and they were like “Oh really, we’ve been waiting for one of those”, and he was like “well then, show me what you’ve got!” And so they lead him to a cathedral organ of cosmic scale and construction – pipes climbing high across the length of the milky way, divine light shining from within, cherubim and angels flitting majestically between them, establishing homesteads, towns and cities scattered across the instrument’s galactic expanse. And so he steps up to the keyboard, cracks his knuckles, tries to vaguely remember the fingering for a real killer minor chord in the upper register, and HOLDS IT DOWN. The result? Perhaps the only time you’ll ever get a chance to say that something called ‘Gunpowder Temple of Heaven’ is appropriately named. Advice for life # 2: To all kids everywhere hunched over delay pedals thinking they’re blowing minds: fuck that dead-end shoegazer bullshit, this is how it’s done.

Mp3>Damn Infinity Hairpie (from ‘Four Freckle Contellation’)


17. Pierced Arrows – Straight To The Heart (Tombstone)


Scarcely more than a few months after breaking up Dead Moon at the end of ’06, Fred and Toody Cole were back in business with a new name, a drummer and – perhaps – new sense of purpose, and on the basis of this ‘debut’, business is good as ever. Fans of Dead Moon will know exactly what they’re getting here, and in fact this is the group’s strongest set for a while, certainly their rawest. Fred launches straight into freaked out anti-war tirades on ‘Guns Of Thunder’ and ‘Black Rainbows’, guitar fuzz set to ‘NASTY’ for a real guttural, heavy psyche sound, but it’s Toody’s ‘Caroline’ that’s the real stand-out, another fist-pounding, self-mythologing hymn to halcyon teenage days and long-lost chances. ‘Shades’ meanwhile is a great, desperate blues, another in a long line of blood-curdling songs that seem to be about the Coles’ own relationship. And, as ever, it’s a mystery how they keep it together so well as a band and as a couple, with Fred on stage spitting blood every night about how “..she plays me like that bass guitar!” A totally wrecked cover of Neil Young’s ‘Mr. Soul’ is another highlight, maxing out the original’s ‘Satisfaction’ steal to great effect. “The Wait”, “Up On A Cloud” and “Lost” are all absolute killers too, captivating enough to stand alongside anything in the Dead Moon back catalogue. And that’s yr lot. So, if you’re in search of innovation, or indeed a fifth chord or a competent guitar solo, do yourself a favour and look elsewhere. But for the rest of us, this is straight ahead, gut-level outlaw rock n’ roll, like red diesel for the stripped down Mad Max buggy that’s gonna get you through the post-apocalyptic wasteland. And it’s great to still have these guys with us keeping the engine running.

Fuck it, this is an amazing album, and I’ve put it WAY too low in this lame top 30; have two Mp3s:

Caroline
The Wait


16. Electric Wizard / Reverend Bizarre split 12” (Rise Above)


Yes, I’m afraid that’s actually the cover. Sorry.* When I ordered it off Rise Above’s website they said I was getting the ‘censored version’ too, so god only knows what these antisocial deviants actually wanted to put on the front. Anyway, it certainly proves that Electric Wizard have access to vaults of grizzly ‘70s horror that make my own stash of old Redemption VHS seem rather pale by comparison – but would we expect anything less? Electric Wizard is as Electric Wizard does, and “House On The Borderland”, the side-long weird fiction epic they turn in here, is probably the best thing they’ve done since reforming as a four-piece. When I first played it, my flatmate came up tell me to turn it down cos the bass was making the floor shake, so that’s certainly a good sign. If not * quite * as heavy and hypnotic as the glory-days of ‘Dopethrone’, it’s certainly a welcome bloodthirsty lunge back toward the sick psychedelia of ‘Come My Fanatics’, complete with droning b-movie organ and howling wah-wah leads adding some pallid colour to proceedings. As an attempt to capture the cosmic dread of Edgar Hope Hodgeson’s extraordinary novel in deafening doom metal form, it’s pretty groovy. Admittedly, I don’t remember Hodgeson mentioning any of the “priestesses of black magic” or “apocalyptic rites” about which Jus Osborn grimly intones here, but unimpeachable b-movie logic dictates that if he had found room for them, well the whole thing would have just been EVEN BETER, so we’ll let it slide. On the flipside meanwhile, Reverend Bizarre, Finnish True Doom stalwarts commanded by one Albert Witchfinder (seriously), turn in a characteristically funereal take on Beherit’s ‘The Gates of Nanna’, which gives them a great opportunity to break things down mid-song for an “ave Satan, ave Lucifer” shout-out to their infernal lord & master. I love Reverend Bizarre, and the way they manage to walk a fine line between utter austerity and earnest dedication to gothic despair on the one hand, yet on the other hand they’re so self-consciously goofy and OTT, with their slow motion drum solos, giant crucifix necklaces, faux-gregorian chanting, it’s… beautiful. Unusually for The ‘Rev, who’ll gladly drone on the point of utter tedium on their own albums, their track here is a bit short to justify a whole side of vinyl, so they bulk things out a bit by reversing it and sticking the backwards version on the end. Genius. Old school doom doesn’t get much better than this disc, anyway.

*Seriously, I hope nobody’s angered or upset; I know I’ve got no justification for perpetrating such nasty & degrading imagery, even when it is viewed through the comfortingly kitsch lens of ‘70s euro-horror. I considered not posting the cover, but on reflection decided that would just seem censorious and sensationalist, and would have sent you all straight over to google image search to find it anyway.

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Birchville Cat Motel, Electric Wizard, Lords, Pierced Arrows, Reverend Bizarre

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #2

25. Rhys Chatham – A Crimson Grail: For 400 Electric Guitars (Table Of The Elements)


Yep, FOUR HUNDRED. Glenn Branca may, allegedly, have done the ‘guitar army’ thing first and, arguably, with greater sonic imagination, but it’s Chatham’s ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ compositions (also see: ‘Guitar Trio’, ‘Two Gongs’ etc.) that have brought a more ferocious, single-minded WEIGHT to the table. Whether that becomes a weight of transcendence or annihilation can be hair’s breadth decision for the individual listener, but one thing’s for sure: his shit is heavy. When rock fans such as myself are drawn to recordings like this, we inevitably tend to approach them in sweaty-palmed anticipation of an unfathomable, brain-imploding multiplicity of string-mangling Thurston Moore caterwauling. And we are, equally inevitably, disappointed, then eventually awed, by the extent to which a legion of axes, split into battalions playing carefully scored overlapping tonal patterns, end up sounding not like guitars as we know them at all, but quite a lot like a more conventional, acoustic orchestra, as the timbre of individual instruments is lost within the vast space of the concert hall, their rock-power nullified as they are melded into a hive mind of pure sound, like a living string synthesizer the size of Antarctica. Particularly amazing on this recording is the way in which massed overtones seem to linger in the rafters, imitating the sound of human voices, like ghostly choirs of altos and sopranos, fading out just beyond the grasp of our ears. It has been argued in some quarters that the compositional element of Chatham pieces such as this one is somewhat unsatisfactory, and indeed, Crimson Grail’s rote cinematic swells and distant, ambient melodics cannot really be said to represent the spearhead of the avant garde forty years after the hey-day of New York minimalism. But whatever. The sound itself is incredible, leaving no space for such mealy-mouthed cerebral whining as it swallows you whole. I mean, c’mon – four hundred electric guitars, four hundred amplifiers, reverb the size of Jupiter – YOU WERE SAYING, Mr. Critic, it seems to bellow, as the learned musicologist crumbles to dust beneath the force of Chatham’s cosmic bombast.


24. Fucked Up – The Chemistry Of Common Life (Matador)


Say what you like about Fucked Up, they sure know how to start an album. An ominous 1972 vintage flute solo rises from the silence, glimmers of feedback and fuzz build up as it fades, then WHAM, the fucker explodes into about half a dozen overdriven guitar lines, a pulse-racing motorik beat, a gutteral “WaaaaaaGGGGgggggHHhhhh!”, and … they’re OFF! A shoe-in for ‘intro of the year’, for sure. From there on in though, ‘Chemistry..’ initially seems like something of a confused and underwhelming record, after the motherlode of 2006’s colossal ‘Hidden World’. Sure, the guitars (lots of ‘em) keep on chugging, the drums keep on pounding, Pink Eyes keeps on ranting on about god knows what, but in the process of cutting the umbilical cord to their hardcore roots and advancing into a more amorphous kinda studio-bound punk spacerock, the band seem to have lost some of the fearsome urgency that fuelled their earlier work, and instead sound like they’re driving blind, keeping the riffs and the 4/4 flowing on autopilot without a clue as to their eventual destination. And for all the careful attention that’s clearly gone into recording and layering them, the guitars sound neutered and over-polished, lacking the crucial centre of ferocity and off-the-cuff violence that makes for good hardcore. Then, on the second or third listen, it CLICKS. What have we basically got here? Three chords, one beat, a singer intent on spouting gobfuls of incomprehensible wisdom at all and sundry, weird multi-layered noise and electronics, general feeling of some rough n’ ready rock dudes attaining escape velocity and pillaging blindly through the multiverse? – this is HAWKWIND for the 21st century, dude! And suddenly it all makes the most wonderful sense. Long may the, uh, Fucked-Lords fly.

Mp3>Son The Father


23. Sic Alps – U.S. Ez (Siltbreeze)


Usually it annoys me when people insist on comparing all these new zero-fi scuzz bands to Guided By Voices, because, y’know, GBV’s original line-up were recording lo-fi through necessity rather than through affectation, and furthermore, they put a lot of work into making their records sound clear, and interesting, and great, rather than just sitting back and taking pride in sounding as shitty and half-assed as possible. Sic Alps though, to their credit, really DO have a mode of operation going on that begs a GBV comparison, simply with regard to banging out tons of short, easily melodic, lyrically confounding songs, and piecing them together into cohesive and intriguing albums amid bursts of weirdness, failed 4-track experiments and flatout noise. Obviously their songwriting isn’t half as hot as Pollard and co (whose is?), but I don’t think they’re really trying to compete in that race, which is fine. Both bands may betray a heavy ‘60s influence, but the sound Sic Alps are aiming for is quite different. Often, they seem to be gunning for some groovy beatnik-bluesy shuffle, like 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', Aftermath-era Stones or the really early Magic Band stuff. Which is awesome! And at other points on ‘U.S. Ez’, they’re hitting on a more spaced out line of reverb-drenched psyche-pop, which is really very nice too. I definitely get the feeling that if these guys had made it to the studio and got in an outside producer instead of recording at home, they would have emerged sounding more like, say, the Black Keys or the Brian Jonestown Massacre than anything Siltbreeze or basement-dwelling noise scenesters would touch with a bargepole. Just cool, solid, easy-going retro-styled rock n’ roll, essentially. There’s a real nice, positive energy going on here that I’m down with, not to mention some great riffs, weird words, hair-raising noise and captivating melodies. They use the limitations of their lo-fi-fu in a kinda pleasing fashion too, exploring distorted, decaying drum thwacks and distant amp hum in a way that’s warm and fuzzy and analogue-mysterious, rather than abrasive or irritating. So, yeah, this is GOOD STUFF right here, sorta nicely, sloppily pleasurable – in many ways, the diametric opposite of the more confrontational end of the ultra-lofi spectrum. The musical equivalent of sitting down in a comfy chair and drinking some beer and forgetting to shave. It’ll be a joy to hear what they get up to in future. More of the same I’m guessing, and that’s just fine.

Mp3>Gellyroll Gumdrop


22. Moss – Sub Templum (Rise Above)


It’s been a hard-fought battle for thee ultimate in glacial metal sludge over the past few years, but all bets are off – Moss have won the doom arms race. Taking their initial cue from Burning Witch’s torture chamber approach to metal convention, Moss’s secret weapon is their bloodyminded refusal to bow to the extremity of their own art, their ability to keep their amplifiers shackled to the mast of song form, even as the basics of rock band ‘dynamics’ threaten to collapse through sheer hellish lethargy and weight of noise. What I mean is: when you listen to Sunn 0))), you’ve always got the ‘ambient’ escape route; zone out, treat it as a drone; relax. Listen to Asva, and you’ve got their different compositional ‘segments’ and experiments in sound to keep you occupied. Listen to Moss on the other hand, and they refuse to let you forget for a second that you’re FUCKED. As the sub-neanderthal sub-bass creeps outta the tarpit at a BPM approaching single figures, for five, ten, twenty, thirty minutes at a stretch, the drummer keeps on drumming – painful, heartbeat defying chasms hanging between each snare thwack – and worse still, the singer keeps on singing – inhuman howls of pain that seem to linger in the air indefinitely until the dude’s poor throat seizes up. Jus Osborn of Electric Wizard is at the controls, bringing the kind of sickening heaviness that his own band has been lacking of recent, and it’s good to have it back – a total cocoon of roaring, misanthropic noise-comfort. But The ‘Wizard are practically a party band compared to these guys. Moss aren’t the only band to gleefully take doom metal to it’s further extremes, but, for all the mish-mash of esoteric imagery adorning their album sleeves (I spot medieval alchemy, freemasonry, thelema, Seal of Solomon – the usual suspects), they’re one of the only bands to do so whilst reminding you at every turn this is still music made by *people*. People who are still, on some level, trying to sing you a song. LOOK HOW WRONG IT WENT, and tremble.

Mp3> Dragged to the Roots


21. Toumani Diabate – The Mande Variations (World Circuit)


When I found myself getting into Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate’s ‘In The Heart Of The Moon’ a few years back, I naturally assumed it was the late Toure’s contribution I was digging the most, he being the blues-based guitarin’ guy and all. But now I suspect it was probably Diabate who brought the lion’s share of that record’s otherworldly yet utterly earthbound beauty, as a similar beauty is chronicled in pretty much every second of the man’s solo work, of which The Mande Variations represents something of a motherlode. It’s certainly been his highest profile release in the West thus far, appearing during the year in which African music started to make some serious inroads back into 1st world musical consciousness, and presenting nearly an hour of Diabate’s unaccompanied Kora playing. And, once you’ve heard it, there’s not much more to say, beyond an acknowledgement that this is amongst the most pure, peaceful, heart-stoppingly beautiful music you will ever hear; the testimony of a man who has dedicated his every waking moment to mastering these nine strings, and to drawing from them the most graceful, satisfying sounds available to us here on earth. It’s melodies, harmonies and purely expressive tonal explorations seem to carry a power that is universally applicable, able to stop any music lover, from any culture, dead in their tracks. Music like this exists on a plain above and beyond any thorny griping about the convoluted politics of Western youth adopting African musical idioms, about the reductive labelling and marketing of ‘world music’, about the phony lure of ‘exoticism’, or whatever else. This is music for everyone, no explanation offered, and none required. Everything you need to know about it, you can find within it.

Mp3>Elyne Road

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Fucked Up, Moss, Rhys Chatham, Sic Alps, Toumani Diabate

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