It begins with all white, in a sound-proofed hallway,
your staring down the empty eye slits of a lowsocket,
waking on the floor at the foot of the bright light,
blocking and locked hundredth door of luck.
At the opposite end of the hall sits a pair of empty pay public binoculars,
slumped, facing your way.
In the dead of their stare you marvel about,
until you eye this one door that appears to be both half open and closed.
and are drawn moth to the bulb,
head down, as if reeled round a gear by the guts,
inching toward your intuit-picked portal of choice.
Now knelt, yet not without nerves in this moment of mostly glory,
you look for the knob, and see nothing but healed shut keyhole.
Dax-strong in this dream you begin to cut key,
in the furthest corner of a clearest skull,
when you feel your kneecaps being nursed by a white on white welcome mat.
you tilt your skull to read "WOE-BE-GONE"
only written wrong or in mirror.
Your hands and heart full of edge, you lift the mat gently,
and there beneath it's omen embroidered,
sits an intact wishingbone.
You carefully lift your instrument of certain luck to the door,
and it slowly unclenches the scar seem set where it's keyhole would be,
and so you snap bliss bone, cut wish and begin to lock pick.
Until you hear through the thick of the door the deadbolt caughing loose.
Suddenly the fear black above your skull,
beneath your skin goes wild,
as the door of your choice opens itself slowly,
sealing off your face with perfect stripes of rising bone and angst,
of alabaster and pit,
allowing the bright right light of luck
to completely believe
and eclipse you.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Monday, August 06, 2007
Now Get Back To Work
Does anyone else remember those eight seconds back in 2002 when Interpol were going to revolutionize rock music and everyone was using the term "electroclash" like it actually meant something? Halcyon days were they.
I bring this up not to spite those fine young gentlemen out of NYC but as a sincere invocation of bafflement as Our Love To Admire spins before me: bafflement over scene, taste, and the great ambling amnesiac mob that the internet, may it live forever, has gifted unto our generation. Or made our generation into. Or something.
To wit, Interpol has for the second time - zing, motherfuckers - released a tight, gorgeously orchestrated record of honest to goodness rock music, and at the same time they've released something that is going to be ignored, chewed out, defecated on, and generally loathed by the people it was made for a priori, solely on the strength of its progenitors. It's not something any reasonably enabled Interpol fan didn't see coming miles off, the machinations of indie rock critics and fans, if that delineation means anything, very often possessing all the unpredictable grace of zeppelins locked in their elephantine maneuvers, but it's still a genuine shame.
I won't pretend I wasn't right in that bristling phalanx of smarm myself, awaiting Paul Banks and Company's inevitable crash upon our invulnerable wall of sharp taste and pious scoffing, but I'm beat and perfectly willing to admit being taken at an unexpected angle.
Our Love To Admire is a great album, a cohesive and attractive amalgamation of good songs which confidently tread the uncomfortable gap between 2002's infallible gothic Turn on the Bright Lights and 2004's awkwardly upbeat Antics. The production, which utterly failed to capture Interpol's myriad strengths through virtually all of Antics, represents a triumphant resurrection of Turn on the Bright Lights's gotham city poem sensibilities. The tones are resonant, deep, and dark - precisely the aesthetic Interpol needed to perfect. Banks's songwriting retains much of the ineffable cheese it did since he fumbled through "I submit my incentive is romance", but herein his trademark baritone, the whole vibrant sound of it, succeeds gorgeously on its undeniable instrumental quality. Delivered without a hint of self-consciousness or ego, Banks is hypnotic at his weakest and indie rock's magna cumme laude at his best. Even better, the frontman has found a comfortable niche serving as instrument, his greatest strength, and less of a persona, Interpol's greatest distraction, and instead leaving room for the band's always scintillating guitar tones to paint the real textures on these eleven songs. It's refreshing and immediately powerful to hear Banks and Daniel Kessler's signature guitar downstrokes let loose to meander and glow like they did on Bright Lights, notes too often crowded out or hurried in hopeless search for dance rock poignancy last time around.
The downside is we receive no haunting lyricism to match "I'm going to hold your face / and toast the snow that fell", the tradeoff being that we can take this band seriously again. Fair enough, I say.
The rhythm section of Carlos Denglar and Sam Fogarino, for the most part, embrace Banks's instrumentalized voice as a vital rhythmic device, raising songs like Wrecking Ball from enjoyable tonal romps to truly visceral rock gems. This beautiful interplay of musicians, this real sincerity and fusion of endlessly talented individuals, combined with the band's never ending noodling with synthetic effects and a newfound love of more earthly orchestration - the band finally discovered the piano for god's sake - come together incredibly well, very clearly the result of carefully focused skill but producing a record affording listeners so much more than Just Another Album.
The author is far too cool and surprised to dissect individual tracks. He's working on something else, but he can't remember where he left it.
I bring this up not to spite those fine young gentlemen out of NYC but as a sincere invocation of bafflement as Our Love To Admire spins before me: bafflement over scene, taste, and the great ambling amnesiac mob that the internet, may it live forever, has gifted unto our generation. Or made our generation into. Or something.
To wit, Interpol has for the second time - zing, motherfuckers - released a tight, gorgeously orchestrated record of honest to goodness rock music, and at the same time they've released something that is going to be ignored, chewed out, defecated on, and generally loathed by the people it was made for a priori, solely on the strength of its progenitors. It's not something any reasonably enabled Interpol fan didn't see coming miles off, the machinations of indie rock critics and fans, if that delineation means anything, very often possessing all the unpredictable grace of zeppelins locked in their elephantine maneuvers, but it's still a genuine shame.
I won't pretend I wasn't right in that bristling phalanx of smarm myself, awaiting Paul Banks and Company's inevitable crash upon our invulnerable wall of sharp taste and pious scoffing, but I'm beat and perfectly willing to admit being taken at an unexpected angle.
Our Love To Admire is a great album, a cohesive and attractive amalgamation of good songs which confidently tread the uncomfortable gap between 2002's infallible gothic Turn on the Bright Lights and 2004's awkwardly upbeat Antics. The production, which utterly failed to capture Interpol's myriad strengths through virtually all of Antics, represents a triumphant resurrection of Turn on the Bright Lights's gotham city poem sensibilities. The tones are resonant, deep, and dark - precisely the aesthetic Interpol needed to perfect. Banks's songwriting retains much of the ineffable cheese it did since he fumbled through "I submit my incentive is romance", but herein his trademark baritone, the whole vibrant sound of it, succeeds gorgeously on its undeniable instrumental quality. Delivered without a hint of self-consciousness or ego, Banks is hypnotic at his weakest and indie rock's magna cumme laude at his best. Even better, the frontman has found a comfortable niche serving as instrument, his greatest strength, and less of a persona, Interpol's greatest distraction, and instead leaving room for the band's always scintillating guitar tones to paint the real textures on these eleven songs. It's refreshing and immediately powerful to hear Banks and Daniel Kessler's signature guitar downstrokes let loose to meander and glow like they did on Bright Lights, notes too often crowded out or hurried in hopeless search for dance rock poignancy last time around.
The downside is we receive no haunting lyricism to match "I'm going to hold your face / and toast the snow that fell", the tradeoff being that we can take this band seriously again. Fair enough, I say.
The rhythm section of Carlos Denglar and Sam Fogarino, for the most part, embrace Banks's instrumentalized voice as a vital rhythmic device, raising songs like Wrecking Ball from enjoyable tonal romps to truly visceral rock gems. This beautiful interplay of musicians, this real sincerity and fusion of endlessly talented individuals, combined with the band's never ending noodling with synthetic effects and a newfound love of more earthly orchestration - the band finally discovered the piano for god's sake - come together incredibly well, very clearly the result of carefully focused skill but producing a record affording listeners so much more than Just Another Album.
The author is far too cool and surprised to dissect individual tracks. He's working on something else, but he can't remember where he left it.
Friday, July 27, 2007
They're fighting for what?
Trying to explain the Beastie Boys to my father was the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. This conversation did not so much teeter on as plunge headfirst into the unkind maw of the generation gap, and neither of us made it out with any sort of sensical conclusion. What do I tell him?
It's like trying to explain what a clown is. Yes, they do know they look like that, and it's.. it is meant to be funny, but no it's not really that funny and... goddamnit they're the Beastie Boys. Fuck!
It's like trying to explain what a clown is. Yes, they do know they look like that, and it's.. it is meant to be funny, but no it's not really that funny and... goddamnit they're the Beastie Boys. Fuck!
Friday, June 08, 2007
If I ever saw one of those for real I'd immediately die as a self-defense mechanism
I found this and immediately started laughing and crying simultaneously.
Josh
JESUS DAMN WTF
Jess
OMGWTFWTF
Jess
WTF
Josh
LOL
Josh
IT'S USED TO KILL DINOSAURS
Josh
JESUS DAMN WTF
Jess
OMGWTFWTF
Jess
WTF
Josh
LOL
Josh
IT'S USED TO KILL DINOSAURS
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
String theory is both easier and less geeky
In a vain bid at stemming the apparently unending tide of loneliness and, and I'm trying to find a nicer word for pointlessness but I long ago swore I was better than using a thesaurus, I've taken to reading about Warhammer 40,000. Partly because it's repugnantly fascinating, and mostly because I hate myself.
So I swear to God you guys, I will become that guy, the guy who spends eight thousand dollars on tiny action figures and smells like hot dogs in the back of some decrepit hobby shop named something vaguley sinister like "The Black Dungeon" and never come out of there, ever.
Send help.
So I swear to God you guys, I will become that guy, the guy who spends eight thousand dollars on tiny action figures and smells like hot dogs in the back of some decrepit hobby shop named something vaguley sinister like "The Black Dungeon" and never come out of there, ever.
Send help.
Rhyming here with fear makes Robert Smith cry
The other night I was privy to a dream which included a hyper violent rendition of pokemon gang warfare. I can't remember too many details of the event, but I do recall a finale which included squirtles holding their guns sideways. I've been having some very strange dreams of late.
Lyricism has got to be the touchiest subject amidst a veritable touchy ocean of touchy things in the wild canon of music. Discerning the merits of one bit of poetry against another is either, depending on your viewpoint, damn near impossible or the kind of thing English-majors do in impolite grasps at relevance. I certainly fancy that one can prove with mathematical accuracy just how much more sophisticated and creative any Explosions In The Sky record has over, say, that one song Nickelback keep releasing over and over again; but if a lyricist's words resonate with someone, what is there to say? I can recall with nigh-on-creepy detail the pop girls of my high school heyday absolutely overwhelmed with human feeling in the midst of a dance because goddamnit they played that vaguely-countryish ballad Three Doors Down wrote that one time. Good for them, right?
All the same, I violated my self-anointed crusade against ever listening to the radio again just long enough to find out that Linkin Park wrote another goddamn song. I don't care who you are or where your tastes lie, this crap is finely processed drivel which has actually cost me the use of my right arm (not a complete lie):
What you thought of me
Well I cleaned this slate
With the hands
Of uncertainty
So let mercy come
And wash away
What I’ve done
I have actually heard more potent verse from an eight year old - neat story, ask me some time - and know full well that this disingenuous garbage is being sopped out by a thirty-one year old millionaire. I'm going to skip right over asking for the emos to give us a collective break and request of them a forthright and self-inflicted right hook to their own crotches for this. Even those gratuitous lawling popophiles who are sure kids like myself only ever like anything for its kitsch value can't possibly call lyrical turdwork like this anything but lazy, cliché, and dishonest.
I try not to be that indie guy, spouting the virtues of esoteric music, but goddamnit people at least the indie scene gives its listeners some credit!
Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those girls are still giving emotive performances over to whatever ballad is popular nowadays. Credit might not in fact be due to all cases. Intellectual hookers.
Also, stop bigotted indie-hating now before it gets out of control:
Josh
*sends Dan a song*
Dan
let me guess, you love them now, but once they have a modicum of success, you'll hate them
Dan
unless you continue to lke them, but only ironically
Josh
gorillaz? they're a platinum selling band you dick and they have been for years
Dan
it was the Gorillaz?
Lyricism has got to be the touchiest subject amidst a veritable touchy ocean of touchy things in the wild canon of music. Discerning the merits of one bit of poetry against another is either, depending on your viewpoint, damn near impossible or the kind of thing English-majors do in impolite grasps at relevance. I certainly fancy that one can prove with mathematical accuracy just how much more sophisticated and creative any Explosions In The Sky record has over, say, that one song Nickelback keep releasing over and over again; but if a lyricist's words resonate with someone, what is there to say? I can recall with nigh-on-creepy detail the pop girls of my high school heyday absolutely overwhelmed with human feeling in the midst of a dance because goddamnit they played that vaguely-countryish ballad Three Doors Down wrote that one time. Good for them, right?
All the same, I violated my self-anointed crusade against ever listening to the radio again just long enough to find out that Linkin Park wrote another goddamn song. I don't care who you are or where your tastes lie, this crap is finely processed drivel which has actually cost me the use of my right arm (not a complete lie):
What you thought of me
Well I cleaned this slate
With the hands
Of uncertainty
So let mercy come
And wash away
What I’ve done
I have actually heard more potent verse from an eight year old - neat story, ask me some time - and know full well that this disingenuous garbage is being sopped out by a thirty-one year old millionaire. I'm going to skip right over asking for the emos to give us a collective break and request of them a forthright and self-inflicted right hook to their own crotches for this. Even those gratuitous lawling popophiles who are sure kids like myself only ever like anything for its kitsch value can't possibly call lyrical turdwork like this anything but lazy, cliché, and dishonest.
I try not to be that indie guy, spouting the virtues of esoteric music, but goddamnit people at least the indie scene gives its listeners some credit!
Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those girls are still giving emotive performances over to whatever ballad is popular nowadays. Credit might not in fact be due to all cases. Intellectual hookers.
Also, stop bigotted indie-hating now before it gets out of control:
Josh
*sends Dan a song*
Dan
let me guess, you love them now, but once they have a modicum of success, you'll hate them
Dan
unless you continue to lke them, but only ironically
Josh
gorillaz? they're a platinum selling band you dick and they have been for years
Dan
it was the Gorillaz?
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Actually really disturbing
The idea that a person could abuse their own relationship with cooking shows is ridiculous, but here I am writing in the wake of an uncomfortable realization that I've been yelling "Get to the goddamn action!" when television's chefs get too chatty.
You know, some of them try to have a plot. It's a total waste of time, am I right?
You know, some of them try to have a plot. It's a total waste of time, am I right?
Sunday, May 27, 2007
A moth gives freely of itself unto the bulb
Today marks the first time in three years that my last.fm (audioscrobbler, if you're nasty) has beeped, whirred, clicked, and spat out a Weekly Top Artists list completely dominated by hip hop acts. It wasn't so much as a year ago that I'd casually whip out that most frequent of colloquial wankisms that so dominate the self-styled Indie culture, "I like everything; except hip hop, rap and country. You know, good music." Depending on the flair with which you popped out that "good", your audience would know just how hip you are.
Lame.
To be fair, it's really not hard to understand this cadre of skittish youngsters' cynicism toward all things hip hoppy: take a peek at what's busting platinum in the genre and ask yourself if you'd give it even half of one chance to please your ear. The seemingly endless army of store-bought gang-stahs parading around the virtues of mysogyny, crass materialism and dropping things like they are various uncomfortable temperatures aren't exactly stopping their indulgences in favour of anything artistic or progressive. It isn't a stretch to call these false paragons of hip hop things like "rephrensible" and "multiple felons", and brand the rest of the genre likewise and believe me, I was right in there doing so.
Too bad for me. I'm not eager to jump on the bandwagons I'm seeing crop up here and there proclaiming "hip hop is the new indie", because I feel like a tool making any proclamation of the sort and could tell you a few stories you'd like me less for. But with full view of the huge influx of cookie-cutter acts since Modest Mouse smashed their way into the public eye 'round ought-four, I must admit a steady standardization of indie rock and pop.
And you all know what the OC has done to us. Yeah, it keeps me up at night too.
Hip hop, on the other hand, has laboured fantastically under the heavy burden and resulting oversight its overpaid pop culture liasons have reaped. Startlingly unique acts have blessed my ears with seemingly endless poise and experimentation for months. Every conceivable genre has been hijacked into poignant, musically powerful hybrids by any number of artists for years, from metal in Dalek to electronica in Prefuse 73 to glitchy singer-songwritery indie pop in Why?.
You can trust me on this, you'd like the stuff if you gave it that one half chance. Let me point you in the right direction:
Top five hip hop albums to convert indie kids with
5. Why? - Elephant Eyelash
Just talking about this week, this is just this-week-Josh talking here, Why? statistically blew away all comers in the ever-heated battle for my listening time. The solo project of Yoni Wolf, an Anticonian beatmaster making up one third of personal favourite cLOUDDEAD, Elephant Eyelash conjures all manners of psychadelic and pop influences and channels it throught the unbelievably tight confines of Yoni's synthesized beats. Finding his closest mirror in indie-pop favourite Emperor X, absolutely every note on this ecclectic masterstroke finds itself synthesized and tossed together with any number of unlikely mates: acoustic guitars weave in and out of turntable quips, gorgeously selected samples gallop wide-eyed past exulting strings, and Yoni's own half-sung rhymes tell beautiful pop tales that'd make the The Piper at the Gates of Dawn look sober.
4. J Dilla - Donuts
Instrumental, sample-driven, defiantly theatric and sadly posthumous, Jay Dee's late and great celebration of glistening organic production packs the emotive and intellectual impact of any art-film you'd care to name. Drawing his samples from generations of soul and blues and working them over with the skill of a true craftsman, Donuts is a boundless canvas of glittering tableaus, the sleek deliverance of literally dozens of succinct, beautiful feelings so ineffably personal, so obviously real that they shrug off any need for identification. A producer's producer album, Donuts is as sweaty and visceral as hip hop gets, and twice as classy. I can turn this on any day and get lost in it.
3. Dalek - Absence
I've spoken on these two men more than any other artist thus far, and I'll do it again. Signed to Ipecac Recordings, who carry such monster acts as Isis, Hella, and the goddamn Melvins, Dalek are the metalhead's hip hop act. Their latest LP notwithstanding, Dalek bring the noise: whole canyons of it, stretching and gouging sampled instruments, vividly industrial synthesizers, and some of the best scratching in the field, care of turntablist DJ Still. These men literally produce the heaviest drum mix I've ever encountered, bar none, and throw down intelligence and social conciousness with sincerity and vigor. What's best, while the wall of sound that Absence hits you with certainly overwhelms, surrendering to the storm of it yields breathtakingly detailed music, unstoppable layers of sound harnessed into powerful songs as affecting and potent as any of their rock brethren.
2. Prefuse 73 & The Books - Prefuse 73 Reads The Books
This is completely shameless indie baiting, what with the Books' status as indie/electronica darlings, but herein lies the heart and soul of this ridiculous list. Instrumental and sample driven like Donuts, Prefuse 73 Reads The Books opts out of the organic and slaloms gracefully into the electronic, the spiritual and the futuristic. Seamlessly merging the Books glitchy acoustic guitar noodling with Prefuse 73's flawless production and beats, the album soars close to Post Rock, Boards of Canada level ambition but settles comfortably for a celebration of beautiful sounds.
1. Subtle - For Hero: For Fool
Most of the men and women, including my own family, have found me quite honestly frothing at the mouth in praise of Subtle's utter perfection of form and content, and yet I've hardly put any space aside for the angelic For Hero: For Fool herein. I could and probably soon will devote pages upon pages to each and every track, something which so consumed my idols at CMG that they could barely contain their review of even one track in the confines of the mere internet.
Trying to describe the genre-bending Subtle accomplish through this, their second proper album is pointless: the sextet leave such petty considerations far, far behind. The amalgamation of electric cello, Jeffrey Logan's impeccably sharp beats, all manners of woodwind and synthetic flourishes, and Doseone's jaw-dropping impressionist liturgy come together with such grace and gut-level power that I've repeatedly failed to do the men justice - hence the frothing. No single album has ever proffered such crossover appeal, so gorgeously combined mind razing dance aesthetics with such heavenly orchestral dynamics, with such progressive lyricism as could startle any modern poetic scene and render all lesser emcees obsolete. I've made the journey through FH:FF's weightless body numberless times by now, and every trip never fails to leave me overwhelmed.
Lame.
To be fair, it's really not hard to understand this cadre of skittish youngsters' cynicism toward all things hip hoppy: take a peek at what's busting platinum in the genre and ask yourself if you'd give it even half of one chance to please your ear. The seemingly endless army of store-bought gang-stahs parading around the virtues of mysogyny, crass materialism and dropping things like they are various uncomfortable temperatures aren't exactly stopping their indulgences in favour of anything artistic or progressive. It isn't a stretch to call these false paragons of hip hop things like "rephrensible" and "multiple felons", and brand the rest of the genre likewise and believe me, I was right in there doing so.
Too bad for me. I'm not eager to jump on the bandwagons I'm seeing crop up here and there proclaiming "hip hop is the new indie", because I feel like a tool making any proclamation of the sort and could tell you a few stories you'd like me less for. But with full view of the huge influx of cookie-cutter acts since Modest Mouse smashed their way into the public eye 'round ought-four, I must admit a steady standardization of indie rock and pop.
And you all know what the OC has done to us. Yeah, it keeps me up at night too.
Hip hop, on the other hand, has laboured fantastically under the heavy burden and resulting oversight its overpaid pop culture liasons have reaped. Startlingly unique acts have blessed my ears with seemingly endless poise and experimentation for months. Every conceivable genre has been hijacked into poignant, musically powerful hybrids by any number of artists for years, from metal in Dalek to electronica in Prefuse 73 to glitchy singer-songwritery indie pop in Why?.
You can trust me on this, you'd like the stuff if you gave it that one half chance. Let me point you in the right direction:
Top five hip hop albums to convert indie kids with
5. Why? - Elephant Eyelash
Just talking about this week, this is just this-week-Josh talking here, Why? statistically blew away all comers in the ever-heated battle for my listening time. The solo project of Yoni Wolf, an Anticonian beatmaster making up one third of personal favourite cLOUDDEAD, Elephant Eyelash conjures all manners of psychadelic and pop influences and channels it throught the unbelievably tight confines of Yoni's synthesized beats. Finding his closest mirror in indie-pop favourite Emperor X, absolutely every note on this ecclectic masterstroke finds itself synthesized and tossed together with any number of unlikely mates: acoustic guitars weave in and out of turntable quips, gorgeously selected samples gallop wide-eyed past exulting strings, and Yoni's own half-sung rhymes tell beautiful pop tales that'd make the The Piper at the Gates of Dawn look sober.
4. J Dilla - Donuts
Instrumental, sample-driven, defiantly theatric and sadly posthumous, Jay Dee's late and great celebration of glistening organic production packs the emotive and intellectual impact of any art-film you'd care to name. Drawing his samples from generations of soul and blues and working them over with the skill of a true craftsman, Donuts is a boundless canvas of glittering tableaus, the sleek deliverance of literally dozens of succinct, beautiful feelings so ineffably personal, so obviously real that they shrug off any need for identification. A producer's producer album, Donuts is as sweaty and visceral as hip hop gets, and twice as classy. I can turn this on any day and get lost in it.
3. Dalek - Absence
I've spoken on these two men more than any other artist thus far, and I'll do it again. Signed to Ipecac Recordings, who carry such monster acts as Isis, Hella, and the goddamn Melvins, Dalek are the metalhead's hip hop act. Their latest LP notwithstanding, Dalek bring the noise: whole canyons of it, stretching and gouging sampled instruments, vividly industrial synthesizers, and some of the best scratching in the field, care of turntablist DJ Still. These men literally produce the heaviest drum mix I've ever encountered, bar none, and throw down intelligence and social conciousness with sincerity and vigor. What's best, while the wall of sound that Absence hits you with certainly overwhelms, surrendering to the storm of it yields breathtakingly detailed music, unstoppable layers of sound harnessed into powerful songs as affecting and potent as any of their rock brethren.
2. Prefuse 73 & The Books - Prefuse 73 Reads The Books
This is completely shameless indie baiting, what with the Books' status as indie/electronica darlings, but herein lies the heart and soul of this ridiculous list. Instrumental and sample driven like Donuts, Prefuse 73 Reads The Books opts out of the organic and slaloms gracefully into the electronic, the spiritual and the futuristic. Seamlessly merging the Books glitchy acoustic guitar noodling with Prefuse 73's flawless production and beats, the album soars close to Post Rock, Boards of Canada level ambition but settles comfortably for a celebration of beautiful sounds.
1. Subtle - For Hero: For Fool
Most of the men and women, including my own family, have found me quite honestly frothing at the mouth in praise of Subtle's utter perfection of form and content, and yet I've hardly put any space aside for the angelic For Hero: For Fool herein. I could and probably soon will devote pages upon pages to each and every track, something which so consumed my idols at CMG that they could barely contain their review of even one track in the confines of the mere internet.
Trying to describe the genre-bending Subtle accomplish through this, their second proper album is pointless: the sextet leave such petty considerations far, far behind. The amalgamation of electric cello, Jeffrey Logan's impeccably sharp beats, all manners of woodwind and synthetic flourishes, and Doseone's jaw-dropping impressionist liturgy come together with such grace and gut-level power that I've repeatedly failed to do the men justice - hence the frothing. No single album has ever proffered such crossover appeal, so gorgeously combined mind razing dance aesthetics with such heavenly orchestral dynamics, with such progressive lyricism as could startle any modern poetic scene and render all lesser emcees obsolete. I've made the journey through FH:FF's weightless body numberless times by now, and every trip never fails to leave me overwhelmed.
Monday, May 21, 2007
An-a-log
I find it almost impossible to type the word "casino" with any measure of speed. The reason? I always, always type the word "casio" instead. Ugh. If ever there was a music geek in need of a life, well, um, I'm probably a real star candidate.
I mean, I noticed this phenomenon at the tail end of a day where my chief activity was giving my computer a tune up whilst memorizing all the interconnections to be found in the anticon collective. I also may or may not have restarted my sojourn through the fifth HP novel: do shut up.
I'm going to buy some even thicker-framed glasses and spend my evenings with a Moog, excuse me.
I mean, I noticed this phenomenon at the tail end of a day where my chief activity was giving my computer a tune up whilst memorizing all the interconnections to be found in the anticon collective. I also may or may not have restarted my sojourn through the fifth HP novel: do shut up.
I'm going to buy some even thicker-framed glasses and spend my evenings with a Moog, excuse me.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Dumb? Ugly? Rhythm section
Tomorrow I am going in for a job interview. When I say "going in" I mean much like Luke went in to the Dagobah system: confused, stupid, and piloting stolen rebel equipment he would later submerge into a swamp. This interview will determine whether or not I am fit to join something called "Pro Security", a possibility I find both financially appealing and personally nauseating. Although I am certain I could kill a man if I were needed to.
I wonder if that'll come up in the interview. Hm.
About three years ago I picked up the four-stringed variety of guitar known as "bass" and foreswore all other loves. Three years later, I've learned how to use it, and it only took the whole of the in-between time to get me there. It's not so much that I'm good now, but I have dedicated a large enough chunk of my listening life to picking out the low end from songs and judging it as harshly as my frail white body could manage: an exercise which has led me to muster pretension enough to present the following list. In addition to spiking a concentrated globe of my own hate out of the interwub and - hopefully - into your neural network, I'll suggest two tracks as listening material, one supporting my claim (i.e. this bassline sucks!) and the other refuting it (this bassline pwns in spite of Josh's efforts!). I know most of you can't be bothered to track down such things and think, "Hey! Josh has a point!" But then I don't believe any of you exist anyway.
Top five reasons your band's bassist sucks
5. They're using a pick
It's a widely held joke in the music world that all the good bassists are ugly, much in the same way that all decent drummers are dumb as a post. Rifle through your favourite bands with talented four-stringers: would you bang any of those folks? Chances are overwhelmingly against an affirmative, and even freakier are the odds that should you find the odd exception to this rule, and Carlos Denglar and Paul Simonon do jump immediately to mind, you almost always have discovered an accomplished bassist who plays with the condom of the rhythm world: a pick. I have investigated this phenomenon with exceptional acuity and discovered my hypothesis to be accurate in one thousand percent of cases.
Look at a bass, then a guitar. The strings on the former are considerably thicker, more spread out, and fewer than on the latter. The use of a pick on a bass screams, in nearly any corner of the world, that the artist in question wanted to play guitar but thought bass would be easier, or some other pejorative those solo-getting fellows like to lather onto an instrument which has been preposterously lumped in with the guitar because of its overt similarity. Worse, reliance on a pick almost always leads to over-sharp and soulless basslines that lose the rhythmic detail the bass needs to shine. Guys, the whole spectrum of tone, cadence, and technical complexity possible with a bass can be wrought with two or three fingers. Stop picking at it.
The case for: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Parallel Universe
The case against: Interpol - The New
4. They're playing all of three different notes
This is an almost universal problem in popular music, ever since a generation of young people misinterpreted Nirvana's intense minimalist approach to punk rock, eschewed the less easy stylings of classic rock, and became idiots. But even bands with great technical merit succumb to this rejection of the bass's qualities, leaving it to hold down one or two points of a low end as a glorified drum kit. Sure, songs (plenty out of Refused's canon for example) can be provocative by relying on heavy rhythms instead of melodic nuances, but it's a shortchange. The kids that look at the bass as lesser than a guitar like to point out how admittedly gorgeous a handful of chords can sound with six strings, while the bass's capacity for even the simplest chord is limited and Smoke On The Water, when you get right down to it, is about as interesting as it is complicated.
A bassist is ruined by idleness. The instrument has a startling capacity for beauty, vibrance, and acrobatics that begs for full scales, alternation between multiple octaves, and use of the highest and lowest frets for dramatic changes in flavour. And yes, the low-end crunch loosed by a bass can and will crush those tiny guitar's fickle bodies any day of the week, but they can do so much more than just that.
The case for: Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water
The case against: Refused - New Noise
3. They're playing a heap with the tone of warmed over elastic bands
Growing out of the abusive mentality pickers and guitarists pour onto the bass is the belief that the hardware doesn't make much of a difference, that a bassline is a bassline and technical matters which are critical to guitarists, drummers, and any synth op out there are unimportant for the b-tar. The very real difference can be immediately found in even a cursory comparison of the gorgeous punk strains found in any (old) Dan Adriano line to the shambling piles of parts the Beatles inexplicably stuck Paul with for most of his career.
Oh snap. Josh is debating the technical merits of the Beatles' rhythm section. Let's hurry away from this.
The case for: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
The case against: The Clash - Rock The Casbah
2. They're playing whole notes
Don't get me wrong, every single piece of rhythmic possibility open to a bassist finds a critical place in the instrument's oeuvre. It's the songs that resign only enough faith in the bass's appeal as to restrict it to clunky full-bar plunks that utterly fail it. Any number of pop-rock numbers try to pull this shit off, or instead resort to its mathematical equivalent, the nothing-but-quarter-notes-boogie, and it is uniformly awful. Yes, the bass is a rhythm instrument. It is not, however, a metronome. Giving in to this sorry strategy not only sounds terrible and requires positively zero-skill with a difficult instrument, it rips out fully one-half of most such band's whole rhythm section.
The case for: The Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
The case against: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Porcelain
1. They're playing like it's just another guitar
This is the damned philosophy that runs through every other ridiculous idiocy inflicted upon my fair instrument. I'm not so well-schooled in music theory to argue the merits of counter-point and polyrhythms and whatever, but in listening to any number of radio jams over the years it continually sickens me, and it doesn't take an aficionado to perceive this, that when a bassist is playing precisely the same freaking rhythms and melodies as their more popular brothers the instrument actually disappears. You might be able to hear it, maybe, but its presence in a song is completely invalidated and pointless. Not one song has ever been made richer by the inclusion of a redundant bassline allowed only to ape what's already there, so much so that I can't find a single example to pose as a case against me.
Seriously, fucking pop-radio. Amirite?
Y: The Last Man is the best thing I have ever read and I spent a good portion of the past few years doing nothing but reading. If you ask me nicely I will give it to you for free, but unspeakable rituals of the flesh may or may not be involved.
I wonder if that'll come up in the interview. Hm.
About three years ago I picked up the four-stringed variety of guitar known as "bass" and foreswore all other loves. Three years later, I've learned how to use it, and it only took the whole of the in-between time to get me there. It's not so much that I'm good now, but I have dedicated a large enough chunk of my listening life to picking out the low end from songs and judging it as harshly as my frail white body could manage: an exercise which has led me to muster pretension enough to present the following list. In addition to spiking a concentrated globe of my own hate out of the interwub and - hopefully - into your neural network, I'll suggest two tracks as listening material, one supporting my claim (i.e. this bassline sucks!) and the other refuting it (this bassline pwns in spite of Josh's efforts!). I know most of you can't be bothered to track down such things and think, "Hey! Josh has a point!" But then I don't believe any of you exist anyway.
Top five reasons your band's bassist sucks
5. They're using a pick
It's a widely held joke in the music world that all the good bassists are ugly, much in the same way that all decent drummers are dumb as a post. Rifle through your favourite bands with talented four-stringers: would you bang any of those folks? Chances are overwhelmingly against an affirmative, and even freakier are the odds that should you find the odd exception to this rule, and Carlos Denglar and Paul Simonon do jump immediately to mind, you almost always have discovered an accomplished bassist who plays with the condom of the rhythm world: a pick. I have investigated this phenomenon with exceptional acuity and discovered my hypothesis to be accurate in one thousand percent of cases.
Look at a bass, then a guitar. The strings on the former are considerably thicker, more spread out, and fewer than on the latter. The use of a pick on a bass screams, in nearly any corner of the world, that the artist in question wanted to play guitar but thought bass would be easier, or some other pejorative those solo-getting fellows like to lather onto an instrument which has been preposterously lumped in with the guitar because of its overt similarity. Worse, reliance on a pick almost always leads to over-sharp and soulless basslines that lose the rhythmic detail the bass needs to shine. Guys, the whole spectrum of tone, cadence, and technical complexity possible with a bass can be wrought with two or three fingers. Stop picking at it.
The case for: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Parallel Universe
The case against: Interpol - The New
4. They're playing all of three different notes
This is an almost universal problem in popular music, ever since a generation of young people misinterpreted Nirvana's intense minimalist approach to punk rock, eschewed the less easy stylings of classic rock, and became idiots. But even bands with great technical merit succumb to this rejection of the bass's qualities, leaving it to hold down one or two points of a low end as a glorified drum kit. Sure, songs (plenty out of Refused's canon for example) can be provocative by relying on heavy rhythms instead of melodic nuances, but it's a shortchange. The kids that look at the bass as lesser than a guitar like to point out how admittedly gorgeous a handful of chords can sound with six strings, while the bass's capacity for even the simplest chord is limited and Smoke On The Water, when you get right down to it, is about as interesting as it is complicated.
A bassist is ruined by idleness. The instrument has a startling capacity for beauty, vibrance, and acrobatics that begs for full scales, alternation between multiple octaves, and use of the highest and lowest frets for dramatic changes in flavour. And yes, the low-end crunch loosed by a bass can and will crush those tiny guitar's fickle bodies any day of the week, but they can do so much more than just that.
The case for: Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water
The case against: Refused - New Noise
3. They're playing a heap with the tone of warmed over elastic bands
Growing out of the abusive mentality pickers and guitarists pour onto the bass is the belief that the hardware doesn't make much of a difference, that a bassline is a bassline and technical matters which are critical to guitarists, drummers, and any synth op out there are unimportant for the b-tar. The very real difference can be immediately found in even a cursory comparison of the gorgeous punk strains found in any (old) Dan Adriano line to the shambling piles of parts the Beatles inexplicably stuck Paul with for most of his career.
Oh snap. Josh is debating the technical merits of the Beatles' rhythm section. Let's hurry away from this.
The case for: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
The case against: The Clash - Rock The Casbah
2. They're playing whole notes
Don't get me wrong, every single piece of rhythmic possibility open to a bassist finds a critical place in the instrument's oeuvre. It's the songs that resign only enough faith in the bass's appeal as to restrict it to clunky full-bar plunks that utterly fail it. Any number of pop-rock numbers try to pull this shit off, or instead resort to its mathematical equivalent, the nothing-but-quarter-notes-boogie, and it is uniformly awful. Yes, the bass is a rhythm instrument. It is not, however, a metronome. Giving in to this sorry strategy not only sounds terrible and requires positively zero-skill with a difficult instrument, it rips out fully one-half of most such band's whole rhythm section.
The case for: The Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
The case against: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Porcelain
1. They're playing like it's just another guitar
This is the damned philosophy that runs through every other ridiculous idiocy inflicted upon my fair instrument. I'm not so well-schooled in music theory to argue the merits of counter-point and polyrhythms and whatever, but in listening to any number of radio jams over the years it continually sickens me, and it doesn't take an aficionado to perceive this, that when a bassist is playing precisely the same freaking rhythms and melodies as their more popular brothers the instrument actually disappears. You might be able to hear it, maybe, but its presence in a song is completely invalidated and pointless. Not one song has ever been made richer by the inclusion of a redundant bassline allowed only to ape what's already there, so much so that I can't find a single example to pose as a case against me.
Seriously, fucking pop-radio. Amirite?
Y: The Last Man is the best thing I have ever read and I spent a good portion of the past few years doing nothing but reading. If you ask me nicely I will give it to you for free, but unspeakable rituals of the flesh may or may not be involved.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Until the monsters chase you home
Menomena is pop. Menomena is quirky and eclectic and far-reaching in melody and instrumentation. Menomena is pronounced "mah-nah-meh-na" and is supposed to be tied to Muppets, of all things.
Menomena's oh-seven album Friend and Foe takes the more-subtle experimentation of 2003's (wonderfully titled) I Am The Fun Blame Monster! (It's an anagram, bitches.) and incorporates even more piano and a whole whack of different vocals, and somehow an even higher level of energy.
I must say, when writing this I felt repeatedly as though I'd chosen a ridiculously complex project for my entrance into the terrifying world of musical criticism, mainly because as I listen to these songs, new layers and facets are constantly being revealed. No song is consistent in sound and instrumentation in their roughly three to five minute time span. This is what makes this band, on the one hand, a challenge to dissect but on the other, an absolutely exhilarating listen. What's more, the myriad sounds and melodies and the shifts between them are completely seamless. Oh yeah, and don't get me started on the lyrics. Artistry is rife here.
Exhibit A: Foe sees the trio departing somewhat from the ridiculously resonating echoes so present in Monster's songs such as "The Late Great Libido", which is a build-up of
reverberating vocals which'll shake your soul but, um, in a playful way. There's a distinct sing-songy quality to his voice (whose I'm not sure, it seems the members share the mic), which manages to stay playful despite the entrance of what can only be described as thrillingly melancholy piano. Then the drums and Justin Harris's (much revered) baritone sax charge in and the three instruments settle into a pleasant, pretty harmony of sorts.
There's a raucous, dirty sound to Danny Seim's percussion, a tone accentuated deliciously by the squelching sax. Here the often smooth singing, as in "Twenty Cell Revolt", finds its contrast and a certain liveliness. These elements make "Boyscout'n", in fact, the perfect soundtrack for a boisterous, comical romp through an untamed wilderness. Wow, if only the word "romp" weren't so damn appropriate…
Menomena's lyrics drift through various phases of philosophical self-reflection and displacement. Foe's "My My" is a song comprised solely of what-if's, "What if I sold everything I know / And ran away from everyone I know / could I make another place my home?". Menomena's lyrics are generally simply put, and thus do not overcrowd the music in the least. They are instead charged with emotion that may be difficult to pick up at first listen with 
all the other elements grabbing for your attention.
The point I may be not-so-subtly trying to get across is that this band merits a veritable multiplicity of listens, for your sake as a listener and for Menomena's sake as really effing crafty musicians.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Parentheses are lazy writing (bitch)
If you want a laugh, try clicking the "next blog" button up over yonder. The blog constituting "next" seems to change with every individual click, but the last time I checked it was a particularly frank log of dissertations concerning dog sex. How this winds up being my neighbour, I'm sincerely not sure - if I were to have a real neighbour whose entire being consisted of nothing but discussing dog sex, I'm not sure I'd stick around.
I just checked and as of right now we're adjacent to a blog providing nothing but screencaps of arabic porn.
You will note the proximity of the "flag blog" button to the one providing the "next blog" function: I believe I have discovered why.
One time, a long time ago, I said I'd review a certain album for you. What I meant to say was, I'd love to review a particularly pretty album for you sometime in late Spring.
If you know me then you've probably heard me going gang busters about the band Califone the odd time, especially in recent weeks when something clicked inside of me and the ultra-hip americana band pulled a dragonforce directly into third place on my audioscrobbler, up from their previous position of, like, seventieth. I did put 2006's Roots & Crowns somewhere up in the top ten best albums I heard all year, back when I was into that sort of thing, but the thing you have to understand is that sometimes I even know more than my self. That is, I knew this was a fantastic album even though I had yet to really figure out why.
This is a band so mired in sheer talent, so immediately creative in their exploration of a well-worn canvas that the only band I can reasonably liken them to with any hope of getting my meaning across is feckin' Radiohead. I am thinking this is high enough praise to gain your attention, yes?
So, if the phrase "ultra-hip americana" has soiled your mood, please endeavour to make it to the end of my article.
Roots & Crowns is about the prettiest gust of music you're likely to hear in a good long while, it is an album which finds itself hunkering down at the mathematical convergence between beauty and its less popular uncle, substance, and setting up a rustic, dilapidated cabin therein. While the extent of my own knowledge vis a vis the genre of Americana prior to diving into Califone's ridiculously prolific output consisted of all the Johnny Cash I've ever heard, which is embarassingly little, I can safely relate to you that this music is the aural manifestation of a sunset. Frontman Tim Rutili and his merry, allegedly huge cast of conspirators are not so much informed by man's nature and nature's man - if you take my meaning - as they are the gleaming avatars of these most provocative ideals. It sounds grandiose, and it is. Roots & Crowns glides over and embraces topics as smart and provocative as martyrdom, familial loss, loving imperfection, and some vicariously unnameable things with both strength and real sweetness and it could be, in short, country music. But it's far from being so simple, which is what has got me so hot and bothered, if you've noticed. What's set Califone apart, at least for the indie set, is spectacular and gorgeously realized execution and a delicate skirting of cliche. The expression of such common, albeit importantly common themes is so effortlessly performed and beautifully produced on this, their ninth studio release, that the music is pure joy of sound before the surfeit of genuine intellect that is each song's content becomes apparent.
This not just some guys with acoustic instruments in a barn somewhere, this is an extraordinarily modern piece of music. I mean, they have their acoustic guitars most of the time, sure. But they've also brought a suite of electronic and studio-borne tricks at the ready and they use them as artists should.
Now I do in fact have one caveat about the record, and it is its insufferably slow beginning. The four ditties that eat up Roots & Crowns' first fifteen minutes, while pretty in their own right, are easily the most lackluster on the album. They drag, and offer the least by way of the creativity and emotive impact the band is capable of. Opener Pink & Sour is dark and inexplicably electronic, a drawn-out moody affair that's intriguing as a first track, but scarier than most of the rest of the songs without much impact. Spider's House and Sunday Noises are very nearly by-the-numbers country pieces which slink by with a fair bit of simple charm but little presence. If there were little more to the album than what this first act suggest, it wouldn't be worth half the praise that's been heaped upon it.
But things pick up with the inscrutably muscular folk of A Chinese Actor and don't fail to extract the breath from your chest for the next seven tracks.
Our Kitten Sees Ghosts maps out the real tense of the record, a breezey mess of acoustic guitar and rustic soul that absolutely worships the clarity and beauty of sound possible with such classic tools. Feedback and a perfectly produced atmosphere of resonance glimmer across most every bar, a sound that's simultaneously all Califone's own and yet immediately and endlessly attractive. The vibrant marriage of simple, clunky percussion, powerful acoustic radiance, and veritable chasms of productive nuance and electronic noise shimmer and glide across the whole of this record's remainder, not a single note out of place nor a mood imperfectly delivered. Tim Rutili's voice has the consistency of warm syrup and is applied as such. His isn't exactly an American drawl, but the man sings good and slow with a purpose. Better than this, and to do no insult to the man's thick and golden voice, the production of tracks like The Orchids and Burned By The Christians and half a dozen other benefit enormously from the utterly perfect layering of his diligent vocal tracks. There couldn't be more than two or three adorning each song, but the effect is uniformly spectacular, compounding and detailing a simple voice's stark emotion and weary intelligence with sincere elegance.
This is pretty music. But sugary it ain't.
Latterday tracks Black Metal Valentine and Rose Petal Ear - especially Rose Petal Ear - revel in the sort of deep country gothicism which'll raise the hair on the back of your neck in any stretch of unkempt woods. The seamlessly brilliant pairing of tinny, high strung acoustic guitar with sudden swaths of distorted, down-tuned electric bass positively creep me out, in the loveliest sense of the phrase, and realize the potency of the field of music this band's mining without succumbing even the least bit to repetition. Black Metal Valentine leans even more heavily on bare electronics, and seems to grow out of a place between the haunted house of Climbing Up The Walls and the woods around it. It slinks along under foggy vocals and eerily tapping percussion to create some of the most stunning moments on the album, the whole spectrum of dissonant effects coming together in absurdly moving collisions of sound. When Mister Rutili deigns to put falsetto into his songs, as with these ones, he does so with the precision of a surgeon and with the style of the mad variety.
Penultimate track 3 Legged Animal packs all the melancholy, impossible hope, and talent this band possesses into four minutes of flawless pop-folk, the kind of sleepy, sun-on-your-face gem that should woo literally every human being on the planet. Every band has that song which any fan will instantly recommend to anyone halfway interested: this is that song. Easily the most upbeat song to be found on Roots & Crowns, this beauty barely affects a canter its whole length and when Tim Rutili croons, he's completely sincere and masterfully powerful without so much as raising his voice - it doesn't need more. While album closer If You Would breaks out a strident, ethereal piano for the ultimate in swarthy bring-downs, very much the country brethren of Pyramid Song, it's not so much noteworthy for its own pretty, somewhat plain effects, as for the finality of its hazy fade away. The all instrumental outro which constitutes the last handful of minutes of it and the album movingly affect a summary, a microcosm of everything that's just been heard. Strings pick up strains of hope, perversity, and ineffable sparks of fear. It's a breath from the unknown, built on the simply beautiful altar of the earth.
It's very much like a rickety Yellow House you might know, left wide open, abandoned, and wrought with unspeakable meaning. It's the soundtrack to the imagery built out of the countryside we all know, rarely visit, and immediately identify with both as an endless ghost of spindly trees and monstrous shanties, and as the cradel of each of our lives.
Like I said, it sounds grandiose, and it is.
I just checked and as of right now we're adjacent to a blog providing nothing but screencaps of arabic porn.
You will note the proximity of the "flag blog" button to the one providing the "next blog" function: I believe I have discovered why.
One time, a long time ago, I said I'd review a certain album for you. What I meant to say was, I'd love to review a particularly pretty album for you sometime in late Spring.
If you know me then you've probably heard me going gang busters about the band Califone the odd time, especially in recent weeks when something clicked inside of me and the ultra-hip americana band pulled a dragonforce directly into third place on my audioscrobbler, up from their previous position of, like, seventieth. I did put 2006's Roots & Crowns somewhere up in the top ten best albums I heard all year, back when I was into that sort of thing, but the thing you have to understand is that sometimes I even know more than my self. That is, I knew this was a fantastic album even though I had yet to really figure out why.
This is a band so mired in sheer talent, so immediately creative in their exploration of a well-worn canvas that the only band I can reasonably liken them to with any hope of getting my meaning across is feckin' Radiohead. I am thinking this is high enough praise to gain your attention, yes?
So, if the phrase "ultra-hip americana" has soiled your mood, please endeavour to make it to the end of my article.
Roots & Crowns is about the prettiest gust of music you're likely to hear in a good long while, it is an album which finds itself hunkering down at the mathematical convergence between beauty and its less popular uncle, substance, and setting up a rustic, dilapidated cabin therein. While the extent of my own knowledge vis a vis the genre of Americana prior to diving into Califone's ridiculously prolific output consisted of all the Johnny Cash I've ever heard, which is embarassingly little, I can safely relate to you that this music is the aural manifestation of a sunset. Frontman Tim Rutili and his merry, allegedly huge cast of conspirators are not so much informed by man's nature and nature's man - if you take my meaning - as they are the gleaming avatars of these most provocative ideals. It sounds grandiose, and it is. Roots & Crowns glides over and embraces topics as smart and provocative as martyrdom, familial loss, loving imperfection, and some vicariously unnameable things with both strength and real sweetness and it could be, in short, country music. But it's far from being so simple, which is what has got me so hot and bothered, if you've noticed. What's set Califone apart, at least for the indie set, is spectacular and gorgeously realized execution and a delicate skirting of cliche. The expression of such common, albeit importantly common themes is so effortlessly performed and beautifully produced on this, their ninth studio release, that the music is pure joy of sound before the surfeit of genuine intellect that is each song's content becomes apparent.
This not just some guys with acoustic instruments in a barn somewhere, this is an extraordinarily modern piece of music. I mean, they have their acoustic guitars most of the time, sure. But they've also brought a suite of electronic and studio-borne tricks at the ready and they use them as artists should.
Now I do in fact have one caveat about the record, and it is its insufferably slow beginning. The four ditties that eat up Roots & Crowns' first fifteen minutes, while pretty in their own right, are easily the most lackluster on the album. They drag, and offer the least by way of the creativity and emotive impact the band is capable of. Opener Pink & Sour is dark and inexplicably electronic, a drawn-out moody affair that's intriguing as a first track, but scarier than most of the rest of the songs without much impact. Spider's House and Sunday Noises are very nearly by-the-numbers country pieces which slink by with a fair bit of simple charm but little presence. If there were little more to the album than what this first act suggest, it wouldn't be worth half the praise that's been heaped upon it.
But things pick up with the inscrutably muscular folk of A Chinese Actor and don't fail to extract the breath from your chest for the next seven tracks.
Our Kitten Sees Ghosts maps out the real tense of the record, a breezey mess of acoustic guitar and rustic soul that absolutely worships the clarity and beauty of sound possible with such classic tools. Feedback and a perfectly produced atmosphere of resonance glimmer across most every bar, a sound that's simultaneously all Califone's own and yet immediately and endlessly attractive. The vibrant marriage of simple, clunky percussion, powerful acoustic radiance, and veritable chasms of productive nuance and electronic noise shimmer and glide across the whole of this record's remainder, not a single note out of place nor a mood imperfectly delivered. Tim Rutili's voice has the consistency of warm syrup and is applied as such. His isn't exactly an American drawl, but the man sings good and slow with a purpose. Better than this, and to do no insult to the man's thick and golden voice, the production of tracks like The Orchids and Burned By The Christians and half a dozen other benefit enormously from the utterly perfect layering of his diligent vocal tracks. There couldn't be more than two or three adorning each song, but the effect is uniformly spectacular, compounding and detailing a simple voice's stark emotion and weary intelligence with sincere elegance.
This is pretty music. But sugary it ain't.
Latterday tracks Black Metal Valentine and Rose Petal Ear - especially Rose Petal Ear - revel in the sort of deep country gothicism which'll raise the hair on the back of your neck in any stretch of unkempt woods. The seamlessly brilliant pairing of tinny, high strung acoustic guitar with sudden swaths of distorted, down-tuned electric bass positively creep me out, in the loveliest sense of the phrase, and realize the potency of the field of music this band's mining without succumbing even the least bit to repetition. Black Metal Valentine leans even more heavily on bare electronics, and seems to grow out of a place between the haunted house of Climbing Up The Walls and the woods around it. It slinks along under foggy vocals and eerily tapping percussion to create some of the most stunning moments on the album, the whole spectrum of dissonant effects coming together in absurdly moving collisions of sound. When Mister Rutili deigns to put falsetto into his songs, as with these ones, he does so with the precision of a surgeon and with the style of the mad variety.
Penultimate track 3 Legged Animal packs all the melancholy, impossible hope, and talent this band possesses into four minutes of flawless pop-folk, the kind of sleepy, sun-on-your-face gem that should woo literally every human being on the planet. Every band has that song which any fan will instantly recommend to anyone halfway interested: this is that song. Easily the most upbeat song to be found on Roots & Crowns, this beauty barely affects a canter its whole length and when Tim Rutili croons, he's completely sincere and masterfully powerful without so much as raising his voice - it doesn't need more. While album closer If You Would breaks out a strident, ethereal piano for the ultimate in swarthy bring-downs, very much the country brethren of Pyramid Song, it's not so much noteworthy for its own pretty, somewhat plain effects, as for the finality of its hazy fade away. The all instrumental outro which constitutes the last handful of minutes of it and the album movingly affect a summary, a microcosm of everything that's just been heard. Strings pick up strains of hope, perversity, and ineffable sparks of fear. It's a breath from the unknown, built on the simply beautiful altar of the earth.
It's very much like a rickety Yellow House you might know, left wide open, abandoned, and wrought with unspeakable meaning. It's the soundtrack to the imagery built out of the countryside we all know, rarely visit, and immediately identify with both as an endless ghost of spindly trees and monstrous shanties, and as the cradel of each of our lives.
Like I said, it sounds grandiose, and it is.
Friday, May 04, 2007
And then there was something like two
Joshwa, it seems, has grown weary of blogging solo and has thus made this space into a collective of sorts. Whether this is a good idea, or a bad idea... well, I'll try my hardest not to kill it - with uninspired music reviews or y'know, accidental annihilation.
Additionally, I'll attempt to quell desires for excessive self deprecation now, and in posts Of The Future. 'Cause you can only take that for so long until you really wonder if it IS that "inadequate of a review/blurb/whathaveyou" and I do sort of want some respect.
Hooray! A real, goddamn reason to write. Words will flow all comfy-like soon enough, I would hope.
I recently reset my darling last.fm page in light of the nagging demonic voices that told me my top charts were dated and frankly, dull as can be. That'd generally be the direction I'd point someone in if they were to want, for whatever reason, a glimpse of my musical pallette. Oh, man I could've made a witty Owen Pallett joke there... Not that the request-for-an-extensive-overview-of -listening-habits-complete-with-graphs ever happens, but damn, that would make us (yes, I speak for Josh now) really fucking giddy. Music geekery, hooray. But, I digress (hardly a rare occurence for me... editing will be an asset in the Future) and what I wanted to say was that it's currently in shambles but will grow into a beautiful flower representing all that I love and cherish.
Next time: content.
Additionally, I'll attempt to quell desires for excessive self deprecation now, and in posts Of The Future. 'Cause you can only take that for so long until you really wonder if it IS that "inadequate of a review/blurb/whathaveyou" and I do sort of want some respect.
Hooray! A real, goddamn reason to write. Words will flow all comfy-like soon enough, I would hope.
I recently reset my darling last.fm page in light of the nagging demonic voices that told me my top charts were dated and frankly, dull as can be. That'd generally be the direction I'd point someone in if they were to want, for whatever reason, a glimpse of my musical pallette. Oh, man I could've made a witty Owen Pallett joke there... Not that the request-for-an-extensive-overview-of -listening-habits-complete-with-graphs ever happens, but damn, that would make us (yes, I speak for Josh now) really fucking giddy. Music geekery, hooray. But, I digress (hardly a rare occurence for me... editing will be an asset in the Future) and what I wanted to say was that it's currently in shambles but will grow into a beautiful flower representing all that I love and cherish.
Next time: content.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Internet search: hime lick manover
I've been trying to figure out why Google Reader is necessary for the past two hours.
Essentially you use it to plug websites in as subscriptions, and then it compiles any new posts for you to read in customizable and streamlined format. So basically it is an extremely limited web browser. As in, that thing which you use to use it. You know the channel guide you get to peruse satellite television? It's exactly like that, and yet I feel like I am wasting precious kilowatts without it.
I subscribed to Krista's blog and it feels as though I have parked a Google agent outside of her house in a black Cadillac, clad in a trenchcoat and watching.
Essentially you use it to plug websites in as subscriptions, and then it compiles any new posts for you to read in customizable and streamlined format. So basically it is an extremely limited web browser. As in, that thing which you use to use it. You know the channel guide you get to peruse satellite television? It's exactly like that, and yet I feel like I am wasting precious kilowatts without it.
I subscribed to Krista's blog and it feels as though I have parked a Google agent outside of her house in a black Cadillac, clad in a trenchcoat and watching.
Josh actually thinks these topics are related to each other
I like Google, perhaps you've heard of it.
I'm mostly sure I'd wielded the mighty search engine for a good half-decade before I finally made the jump into that tantalizingly vague little piece of text hinting at "More >>". Since then the company has achieved something like Illuminati-scale dominance of virtually every piece of information reaching my and, if my guess is correct, every single other human being's mind.
I can, right now, use Google Earth to find an aerial photograph of my own home then open up Google Picasa to post this picture onto my Google Blog which will be recorded in my Google Reader and thereby into my Google Email account. There are programs from Google on my computer which I have actually forgotten about but I am certain are still there, adorning the deepest dungeons of my digital kingdom smiling happily and sporting stylish interfaces. Every time I so much as look at these sleek paragons of computerized efficiency I feel the whole vista of human possibilty lurch before me, vast fields of potency held open by the nigh endless power of Google.
This would all be very exceptional if I really had anything to do. I am sure very important people are using it right now to actually take over the world.
Now: I like how, even amidst the notoriously violent sprawl of total anguish which is final exams, Spring's managed to drag its cheap ass out of retirement for a swing at legendarily stubborn Kingstonian Winter. This has had two immediately recognizable effects. First, the lot of us students get to ruin ourselves on textbooks and ink fumes with full view and knowledge of the saccharinely beautiful weather outside our crypt-like windows, a land of beauty which seems to relish its opportunity to prod and taunt us whilst remaining just beyond our reach, and flitting into actual goddamn blizzards the moment we step outside. Second, holy jesus spring hormones are ready to get some business done.
In honour of this, as something of a burnt wicker effigy style offering aimed at the placation of our lusty and effervescent god, I'd like to put forth the following list of names, corresponding to what I am sure you will discover to be the eight prettiest folks in indie music.
My list will be complete with pictures. I am sure I do not need to explain the importance of such decadence within the context of my sinful list-making. The pictures, I don't need to tell you, are brought to you by Google. Heee.
Sufjan Stevens
Get it out of your system right now: Gay, Josh, super gay. Okay. Sufjan is a pretty boy, he plays bluegrass instruments with flair and penetrating blue eyes and has somehow made the former sexy. Guys are now going to parties and picking up girls using the humble banjo instead of the classic acoustic guitar, and I blame this man. He has ruined forty years worth of accepted sexual politicking and made me feel inadequate. You also could slice diamonds on those cheekbones.
Owen Pallet
I've recently had to good fortune to see young Owen live, and I can tell you all from experience that he is a good looking boy. The kind that make me curse my mortal body and deliberate over the pros and cons of expensive and dangerous surgery, but I digress. His appeal is astoundingly compounded by his simultaneous invocation of old-school geek culture with ridiculously advanced playing of the violin, and the fact that he both describes his feather-soft singing as complete shit and also on par with the Thin White Duke.
Emily Haines
I admit, sometimes she looks like she's subsisted on wine and cheap gin for a good couple of months: all hungover and partially skeletal. I haven't seen her in person: I'm seventy five percent sure this phenomenon has photography to blame. Emily is, at least under certain light, spectacularily sexy. Her consistently hot-and-bothered lyricism has the uncanny ability to hook directly into my libido and stick there, and when she sings in french I feel like that horny guy from the Adams Family. I can't help it. I don't need to mention that she's an All Canadian superstar, which at this point in time I conjecture does qualify as Supremely Hot, and that she moshes in miniskirts. And did you see that video with the bondage themes? Jeeeeezus.
Karen O
So she's half Korean, and half Polish? Something like that. I relate to Karen as New Yawk's version of Miss Haines: the same, only louder and crazier. Her sense of style very frequently scares the living hell out of me, but when the act's off she's absolutely magnetic. Lithe and allegedly batshit crazy, I can't pinpoint how much of her sex appeal is the direct result of her erotic punk rock persona, but neither do I spend much time deconstructing such things. Her lips are almost as beautiful as Regina's, I like her bangs, and I'm always a sucker for the deep dark hair.
Sarah Balliet
She plays a cello in a rock n' roll band which is inlayed with Iron Maiden album covers. No, not that one, but if you want to come over I'll show you since I plan on making Sarah my girlfriend. I honestly just don't know that much about this beautiful Murder By Deather, except what I have just told you, but her tough-as-nails attitude and conjoined gorgeous cello playing and pretty face is enough justification for the crush I like to assume she reciprocates. One time Jess saw MBD live and she couldn't see Sarah: goddamnit.
Sarah Slean
Being a twin has some funny side-effects which non-twins don't really get. Case in point, I couldn't allow myself to like Sarah Slean all through high school because my twin sister loved her to the point of idolatry and I just didn't like music that Alyssa likes. That's a bad Josh: first year out of high school I got to see Sarah perform in the same church I'd later see Final Fantasy at, and upon seeing my twin sister again the first words out of my mouth were something along the lines of "I saw an angel and she sang to me." I've since scoured the hoary pores of the internet searching for any picture which might accurately convey the overwhelmingly beautiful presence that the songwriter carries like a bracelet, to no avail. The first person to buy my sister a drink at a bar ever was Sarah Slean, and I am really totally jealous.
Valérie Jodoin-Keaton
All of you readers just went, "Who?" Let me tell you: the first time I saw the Dears perform I spent the entire time trying to physically adjust myself to the torrent of absolutely flawless Canadian rock which had flowed into and over me for a good half hour. The second time, I spent almost all of the concert fixated like a crazy man on the equally flawless visage of Valérie. She plays flute and second synthesizer, and is in general a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. I recently discovered that frontman Murray Lightburn is in fact not married to her, but the other girl in the band, and I actually exulted because I thought I had a chance. Jess immediately laughed at me.
Regina Spektor
I know you're not surprised. Also, you're wondering if my blog has had enough frivolous pictures of Regina tossed in for candy. The answer is NO. I don't believe I need to again expunge my deep-seated adoration of Miss Spektor, nor do I think I could reasonably stop talking if I were to begin. She's the prettiest woman in music, you know? Her lips and eyes could start a war, her figure can and does regularily induce aneurisms in yours truly, and her shy and earthly personality and ceaselessly quixotic songwriting taps into the warmest feelings and memories I humbly tote around with me. I have a crush on her, and if this list isn't in any sort of numbered order she still takes first place on principle. I often wonder if I could meet and speak to the lady without melting like a cheap candle: in most scenarios it doesn't turn out well.
Miss Leslie Feist gets an honourable mention for consistently writing and recording the sexiest Canadian pop-folk I have the singular pleasure of listening to. The Reminder recently dropped and it delivers on the breath-taking potential which the Albertan-cum-Maritimes songstress has been working on expressing for years and two moderately fantastic albums. I think she's pretty too, but something deep inside of me registers her as some sort of second grade teacher archetype. I can't really deal with it, you understand.
I wonder if Google's noticed me today. I'm sure there's some way that I can check that, excuse me.
I'm mostly sure I'd wielded the mighty search engine for a good half-decade before I finally made the jump into that tantalizingly vague little piece of text hinting at "More >>". Since then the company has achieved something like Illuminati-scale dominance of virtually every piece of information reaching my and, if my guess is correct, every single other human being's mind.
I can, right now, use Google Earth to find an aerial photograph of my own home then open up Google Picasa to post this picture onto my Google Blog which will be recorded in my Google Reader and thereby into my Google Email account. There are programs from Google on my computer which I have actually forgotten about but I am certain are still there, adorning the deepest dungeons of my digital kingdom smiling happily and sporting stylish interfaces. Every time I so much as look at these sleek paragons of computerized efficiency I feel the whole vista of human possibilty lurch before me, vast fields of potency held open by the nigh endless power of Google.
This would all be very exceptional if I really had anything to do. I am sure very important people are using it right now to actually take over the world.
Now: I like how, even amidst the notoriously violent sprawl of total anguish which is final exams, Spring's managed to drag its cheap ass out of retirement for a swing at legendarily stubborn Kingstonian Winter. This has had two immediately recognizable effects. First, the lot of us students get to ruin ourselves on textbooks and ink fumes with full view and knowledge of the saccharinely beautiful weather outside our crypt-like windows, a land of beauty which seems to relish its opportunity to prod and taunt us whilst remaining just beyond our reach, and flitting into actual goddamn blizzards the moment we step outside. Second, holy jesus spring hormones are ready to get some business done.
In honour of this, as something of a burnt wicker effigy style offering aimed at the placation of our lusty and effervescent god, I'd like to put forth the following list of names, corresponding to what I am sure you will discover to be the eight prettiest folks in indie music.
My list will be complete with pictures. I am sure I do not need to explain the importance of such decadence within the context of my sinful list-making. The pictures, I don't need to tell you, are brought to you by Google. Heee.
Sufjan Stevens
Get it out of your system right now: Gay, Josh, super gay. Okay. Sufjan is a pretty boy, he plays bluegrass instruments with flair and penetrating blue eyes and has somehow made the former sexy. Guys are now going to parties and picking up girls using the humble banjo instead of the classic acoustic guitar, and I blame this man. He has ruined forty years worth of accepted sexual politicking and made me feel inadequate. You also could slice diamonds on those cheekbones.
Owen Pallet
I've recently had to good fortune to see young Owen live, and I can tell you all from experience that he is a good looking boy. The kind that make me curse my mortal body and deliberate over the pros and cons of expensive and dangerous surgery, but I digress. His appeal is astoundingly compounded by his simultaneous invocation of old-school geek culture with ridiculously advanced playing of the violin, and the fact that he both describes his feather-soft singing as complete shit and also on par with the Thin White Duke.
Emily Haines
I admit, sometimes she looks like she's subsisted on wine and cheap gin for a good couple of months: all hungover and partially skeletal. I haven't seen her in person: I'm seventy five percent sure this phenomenon has photography to blame. Emily is, at least under certain light, spectacularily sexy. Her consistently hot-and-bothered lyricism has the uncanny ability to hook directly into my libido and stick there, and when she sings in french I feel like that horny guy from the Adams Family. I can't help it. I don't need to mention that she's an All Canadian superstar, which at this point in time I conjecture does qualify as Supremely Hot, and that she moshes in miniskirts. And did you see that video with the bondage themes? Jeeeeezus.
Karen O
So she's half Korean, and half Polish? Something like that. I relate to Karen as New Yawk's version of Miss Haines: the same, only louder and crazier. Her sense of style very frequently scares the living hell out of me, but when the act's off she's absolutely magnetic. Lithe and allegedly batshit crazy, I can't pinpoint how much of her sex appeal is the direct result of her erotic punk rock persona, but neither do I spend much time deconstructing such things. Her lips are almost as beautiful as Regina's, I like her bangs, and I'm always a sucker for the deep dark hair.
Sarah Balliet
She plays a cello in a rock n' roll band which is inlayed with Iron Maiden album covers. No, not that one, but if you want to come over I'll show you since I plan on making Sarah my girlfriend. I honestly just don't know that much about this beautiful Murder By Deather, except what I have just told you, but her tough-as-nails attitude and conjoined gorgeous cello playing and pretty face is enough justification for the crush I like to assume she reciprocates. One time Jess saw MBD live and she couldn't see Sarah: goddamnit.
Sarah Slean
Being a twin has some funny side-effects which non-twins don't really get. Case in point, I couldn't allow myself to like Sarah Slean all through high school because my twin sister loved her to the point of idolatry and I just didn't like music that Alyssa likes. That's a bad Josh: first year out of high school I got to see Sarah perform in the same church I'd later see Final Fantasy at, and upon seeing my twin sister again the first words out of my mouth were something along the lines of "I saw an angel and she sang to me." I've since scoured the hoary pores of the internet searching for any picture which might accurately convey the overwhelmingly beautiful presence that the songwriter carries like a bracelet, to no avail. The first person to buy my sister a drink at a bar ever was Sarah Slean, and I am really totally jealous.
Valérie Jodoin-Keaton
All of you readers just went, "Who?" Let me tell you: the first time I saw the Dears perform I spent the entire time trying to physically adjust myself to the torrent of absolutely flawless Canadian rock which had flowed into and over me for a good half hour. The second time, I spent almost all of the concert fixated like a crazy man on the equally flawless visage of Valérie. She plays flute and second synthesizer, and is in general a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. I recently discovered that frontman Murray Lightburn is in fact not married to her, but the other girl in the band, and I actually exulted because I thought I had a chance. Jess immediately laughed at me.
Regina Spektor
I know you're not surprised. Also, you're wondering if my blog has had enough frivolous pictures of Regina tossed in for candy. The answer is NO. I don't believe I need to again expunge my deep-seated adoration of Miss Spektor, nor do I think I could reasonably stop talking if I were to begin. She's the prettiest woman in music, you know? Her lips and eyes could start a war, her figure can and does regularily induce aneurisms in yours truly, and her shy and earthly personality and ceaselessly quixotic songwriting taps into the warmest feelings and memories I humbly tote around with me. I have a crush on her, and if this list isn't in any sort of numbered order she still takes first place on principle. I often wonder if I could meet and speak to the lady without melting like a cheap candle: in most scenarios it doesn't turn out well.
Miss Leslie Feist gets an honourable mention for consistently writing and recording the sexiest Canadian pop-folk I have the singular pleasure of listening to. The Reminder recently dropped and it delivers on the breath-taking potential which the Albertan-cum-Maritimes songstress has been working on expressing for years and two moderately fantastic albums. I think she's pretty too, but something deep inside of me registers her as some sort of second grade teacher archetype. I can't really deal with it, you understand.
I wonder if Google's noticed me today. I'm sure there's some way that I can check that, excuse me.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Gulag division, storm the burning registrar
Mister Pallet puts on a pretty show. Loops and bright lights and little asian hippy women and all. Y'know, you really have to wonder how he gets his hair like that, don't you?
Math for the month of April is the following, in brief:
5(exams) = N(study time)
N
- 24X(hours worked/wk)
- 50Y(girlish weeping)
- 100Z(hysterical existentialism)
- 46R(pirate) = A(actual study time)
A <<<<<<<<< N = FUCK
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Yes, you and ten other tough guys
Every day, a Jams has to subsist in conditions far less wholesome than her loved ones would ever wish upon her. Your contributions can help, so please, give generously to housemates. Because the Jams you save could be your own.
(j is for jess) says:
so i really feel like drinking copious amounts of liquid donut ale..
and just fucking everything
Joshua says:
O_o
(j is for jess) says:
that came out wrong ..
Good lord, insomnia is a bitch.
We'll always have your absence
Ugh.
Alright, so Dälek's shiny new album Abandoned Language has been out for just over a month now. I'd like to, if I may, quote some lyrics from this - erm - difficult piece of music in comparison to its predecessor, the masterpiece of industrial meta-hip-hop that was Absence:
Broke stride as last of men realized their deep deceit.
This troubling advance of half-assed crews crowd these streets.
Never mind of who I am, son, just listen when I speak.
Broken paragraphs hold wrath of a hundred million deep.
Brilliant. Humble. Fierce. And now this:
Ranks of MC's infested with fakeness
Dispel your bitch rumors, tune the block with hangers
Wires givin' tumors, never write my songs for consumers
Ironic, cuz' I write my songs for heads with phat laces
on their Pumas.
Yeah. Ugh.
With little exception, my favourite hip hop duo of all freaking time aren't actually doing anything different with this 11 song turd. The elements that made Absence, From Filthy Tongues of Gods and Griots, and even the mildly amateurish Negro Necro Nekros great are all present. There's heavy beats, there's socially-oriented angry man lyrics, there's industrial noisescapes. Really, that's all Dälek ever was. But Abandoned Language? It sucks. It's a nigh unlistenable yawn of an album completely devoid of any passion or depth, and I hate that I have to admit this.
Forget emcee Dälek's daftly inane lyrics this time around, they could be salvaged if his delivery lent them any meaning at all. From the overdrawn titular first track to the hilariously thin complete-with-parentheses closer, (Subversive Script), the man called Dälek just sounds tired. I could get past his needless invocation of mainstream rap protocol - from constant masturbatory self identification to dropping the N-bomb all over the goddamn place - but his limp tone and empty styling of this garbage is unforgivable. His rhythm sucks. His flow carries no impact whatsoever. He doesn't so much rap as he mutters and coughs just barely enough to keep his head above the instrumentation, so underwhelming in the wake of his fierce success on previous albums that I can't reconcile this performance with him being the same man. I don't care who you are or what your profession is, I've heard more impressive speech about social perversity from my mother on any number of occasions.
Now, here's the kicker. I've explained before how Dälek's emceeing constitute less than half of what made Dälek the group great. I was apparently mistaken in initially assigning so much praise to Dälek's partner the Oktopus, since the former actually handles the production and sampling aspects of this music where the latter seems to be chiefly in it for the beats. But nonetheless.
The music that is inflicted on you when you listen to Abandoned Language is less than paper thin. It's flat, lacks any depth or layering, and is boring.
There, I said it.
For some reason these men decided that metallic bagpipes, played off-kilter and off-key, were the future of industrial music and rubbed this godawful effect all over a half a dozen songs with no thought to its effectiveness as a sound nor its synergy with the overall album. Where before we fans were treated with incredibly multi-faceted swaths of gorgeously envisioned, viciously executed seas of noise - both intense and, y'know - featuring rhythm and melody - we now have the five and a half minute all instrumental "scary" track Lynch dropped right in the middle of a fucking hip hop album. Not only does it make no sense for this group to be aping Krzysztok fucking Penderecki of all goddamn people when they used to go on tour with goddamn Isis - this track absolutely ruins what is already a wan, barely interesting album.
Forgive the segue, but I've heard a lot of praise for this piece of music. Those people can go to hell as soon as they get off their avant-garde fellating high horse. The title track off of Absence is ten times as affecting as Lynch, clocks in at four minutes shorter than it, and actually strengthens the album as a whole without running away with its own sense of assinine artistic license. No album is stronger for being interrupted by a piece of music that jarringly reports of its makers saying, "Hey, I've got an idea: let's torture some violins with a belt sander, record it to MIDI, and call it art."
Back to the point: Abandoned Language's production and instrumentation are the very definition of anemic. Now, I realize I'm blugeoning Dälek under the sheer weight of my favouritism here, but Absence had such dense layering and virtually endless chasms of fascinating, genuinely powerful sound that I am still discovering new facets within it. The duo managed to put together the single most gargantuan drum mix in the entire world, conjured massive blows of utterly indescribable music out of the gutters of Hades, and lashed it all together with pure dripping acid out of Dälek's mouth. It was impossible, and they managed it with grace and power. Hell, From Filthy Tongues didn't even reach to such great heights, but pulled off a direct assault of simpler industrial prowess and tighter dynamics without needing to.
Now? Now look at what they're producing: every track has the same goddamn tinny one-two drum beat; by-the-numbers industrial vapours flit listlessly from one end of the song to another without accomplishing anything; the mix is not so much dark as it is maddeningly foggy, to the point where one can hardly understand a word of what Dälek is saying (penultimate track Tarnished, for example, features half of his rhymes delivered whilst his face is behind what I assume is a thick leather baseball glove); uselessly out of place gang vocals repeatedly confuse the proceedings and there is no intensity offered by either camp of this duo and finally my god it just plain sucks.
Fuck.
I waited up for you, you guys. This was just cruel, you understand?
Excuse me while I go carve a gigantic all-caps WTF into my right arm. Good night.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Don't go into that barn
Someday I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be over an utterly insane, ridiculously dramatic misunderstanding.
Monday, March 12, 2007
The dryyyy cracker
I've presently no time for chit chat, except chit chat insofar as expresses my total inability to engage in chit chat. Please except my humblest apologies and most guttural harrumphing.
Just to tickle your interest, however, and because I'd hate to lose you to some other fancy publication hereabouts, here's a sample of the stuff I'm waist-deep in vis a vis school at the moment:
"The UNDP played a crucial agenda-setting role at an early stage with it focus on human security. It was noted earlier that development and human security are receiving more attention now from key global governance institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, partly b ecause poverty and inequality are increasingly considered to be national, regional, and global security threats.
Indeed, there seems to be a correlation between the level of entitlement to human security and propensity for conflict, defined not in orthodox inter-state arms terms but in the wider sense to include the most frequent form of warfare, instra-state. Over the period of 1990-95, 57% of countries experiencing war were ranked low on the UNDP’s Human Development Index, while only 14% were ranked high, and 34% were ranked medium. There may be a causal relationship between lack of material entitlement, health and education, and war.” Link.
Hmm?
Did you make it through all that? What did you think, was it boring or what?
Here's the really freaky part: I couldn't be more off my ass with unadulterated glee whilst reading this junk. A politics major is I.
No, The Dandy Warhols, I will not listen to your infectious blend of indie rock and sparkles.
Just to tickle your interest, however, and because I'd hate to lose you to some other fancy publication hereabouts, here's a sample of the stuff I'm waist-deep in vis a vis school at the moment:
"The UNDP played a crucial agenda-setting role at an early stage with it focus on human security. It was noted earlier that development and human security are receiving more attention now from key global governance institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, partly b ecause poverty and inequality are increasingly considered to be national, regional, and global security threats.
Indeed, there seems to be a correlation between the level of entitlement to human security and propensity for conflict, defined not in orthodox inter-state arms terms but in the wider sense to include the most frequent form of warfare, instra-state. Over the period of 1990-95, 57% of countries experiencing war were ranked low on the UNDP’s Human Development Index, while only 14% were ranked high, and 34% were ranked medium. There may be a causal relationship between lack of material entitlement, health and education, and war.” Link.
Hmm?
Did you make it through all that? What did you think, was it boring or what?
Here's the really freaky part: I couldn't be more off my ass with unadulterated glee whilst reading this junk. A politics major is I.
No, The Dandy Warhols, I will not listen to your infectious blend of indie rock and sparkles.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
You are the sole member of tonight's studio audience
I don't make these, I just like them. Even better, they fit my format snugly.
On a wholeheartedly separate note, I most definitely look for meaning in the most trivial of places. What is it about the peculiar manner in which different people arrange their digital effects that so invigorates my imagination? I'd say it's a long shot, but wager it is the pixels.
Right now, my desktop is smattered with the following immaculately ordered clusters of icons: five pdf's, three on global security and international political economy, two for containing university particulars; my computer; shortcuts to the cheapest geekiest MMORPG in existence and a feverishly minimalist simulation of barroom brawling; a folder containing films on the ethical ramification of corporate law on human life; a sixth pdf which is an entire book on the subject of corporate media's legal and technical control of human culture; a comedy monster film from Korea.
I am sure that this will affect my career someday.
Sigh.
Monday, March 05, 2007
The intergalactic presses have been halted accordingly
Message History
03.05.07 9:37pm Josh: Exactly how much Dragon constitutes a Force?
03.05.07 9:39pm Dan: Infinite.
You know, I think he's right.
So,
Subtle single-handedly ruined every other concert I've ever been to by putting them all to unrequited shame. The electric cello rendered impotent the work of any mere guitarist, soaring and transmogrifying with deft insanity to produce an absolutely un-goddamn-limited palette of sound. A man I could swear was television's Gregory House played sax, oboe, flute, and synth whilst wear an enormous, body-enshrouding cape. Their drums were almost entirely provided via synth and for the first ten minutes I had no idea why that man was hitting his synthezier so wildly. Their canonical drummer also played guitar and looked exactly like Goddamn Kurt Cobaine, and from the moment the first howitzer volley of drums made my pants nearly fall off to Adam Drucker's closing litany of sun-eating machine gun nonsense scraped off of my very human soul, I knew what love was.
I am serious when I say these things.
Unbelievably personal, endlessly artistic, immaculately executed, and Doseone telling stories about New Jersian eggplant and how he got into Rapper Heaven early. He was dressed like a nineteenth century English Lord after a mugging by voodoo priests and threw plastic forks at us. I managed to rescue a filth encrusted, possibly Hep-A toting remnant of this barrage off of the floor afterward and I'm positively never going to let it go.
Perfect.
TV On The Radio's follow up performance couldn't hope to hold my attention with the same exquisite carnality, excellent as it was. Young Liars couldn't have been a better opener, and those coy bastards left Staring At The Sun to the very end of their tripartite encore, but something did feel amiss. It was too heavy, the production-laced nuances of their legendary albums were either impossible to pick out or else abandoned entirely - but then, it was still TVotR. I won't go so far as to say that the anticonian hip-hoppers upstaged the crowned indie lords of New York, but then, they did.
I'm at least three steps out of synch in school, and the ride back afterward felt like a long swim through some sort of gothic, evil cereal, but as my ride-getting, trunk-sleeping-in friends have enthusiastically drilled into my head, it was so totally worth it.
I'm going to have to write a review of the previously mentioned Abandoned Language and so help me God it is not going to be positive.
03.05.07 9:37pm Josh: Exactly how much Dragon constitutes a Force?
03.05.07 9:39pm Dan: Infinite.
You know, I think he's right.
So,
Subtle single-handedly ruined every other concert I've ever been to by putting them all to unrequited shame. The electric cello rendered impotent the work of any mere guitarist, soaring and transmogrifying with deft insanity to produce an absolutely un-goddamn-limited palette of sound. A man I could swear was television's Gregory House played sax, oboe, flute, and synth whilst wear an enormous, body-enshrouding cape. Their drums were almost entirely provided via synth and for the first ten minutes I had no idea why that man was hitting his synthezier so wildly. Their canonical drummer also played guitar and looked exactly like Goddamn Kurt Cobaine, and from the moment the first howitzer volley of drums made my pants nearly fall off to Adam Drucker's closing litany of sun-eating machine gun nonsense scraped off of my very human soul, I knew what love was.
I am serious when I say these things.
Unbelievably personal, endlessly artistic, immaculately executed, and Doseone telling stories about New Jersian eggplant and how he got into Rapper Heaven early. He was dressed like a nineteenth century English Lord after a mugging by voodoo priests and threw plastic forks at us. I managed to rescue a filth encrusted, possibly Hep-A toting remnant of this barrage off of the floor afterward and I'm positively never going to let it go.
Perfect.
TV On The Radio's follow up performance couldn't hope to hold my attention with the same exquisite carnality, excellent as it was. Young Liars couldn't have been a better opener, and those coy bastards left Staring At The Sun to the very end of their tripartite encore, but something did feel amiss. It was too heavy, the production-laced nuances of their legendary albums were either impossible to pick out or else abandoned entirely - but then, it was still TVotR. I won't go so far as to say that the anticonian hip-hoppers upstaged the crowned indie lords of New York, but then, they did.
I'm at least three steps out of synch in school, and the ride back afterward felt like a long swim through some sort of gothic, evil cereal, but as my ride-getting, trunk-sleeping-in friends have enthusiastically drilled into my head, it was so totally worth it.
I'm going to have to write a review of the previously mentioned Abandoned Language and so help me God it is not going to be positive.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Don't go there, just don't
Mother fucker.
Dälek is releasing a new album, Abandoned Language, and it comes out tomorrow.
Dälek!
New album!
And I didn't know about this until just now holy tap-dancing Moses. This is like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one. Yes, a gargantuan, chain-encrusted, fire-breathing Christmas.
Ehm.
So, you'd think that a combination of math metal, Jams's omnipresent white noise, a website consisting of nothing but thousands of pictures of food, and shouting at your computer to locate a copy, any copy, of the album you totally didn't fucking know existed would result in a soothing night's sleep. Wouldn't you?
Alas, some things just don't add up.
I just found a torrent for Abandoned Language. I hyperventilated as my trembling hand carefully manipulated the correct sequence of options that would hopefully, god-willing, deliver this unproven jewel to my ears. I blessed the wanton network of piracy that is the internet and may have developed tumescence.
I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who's losing sleep over industrial noise rap.
Dälek is releasing a new album, Abandoned Language, and it comes out tomorrow.
Dälek!
New album!
And I didn't know about this until just now holy tap-dancing Moses. This is like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one. Yes, a gargantuan, chain-encrusted, fire-breathing Christmas.
Ehm.
So, you'd think that a combination of math metal, Jams's omnipresent white noise, a website consisting of nothing but thousands of pictures of food, and shouting at your computer to locate a copy, any copy, of the album you totally didn't fucking know existed would result in a soothing night's sleep. Wouldn't you?
Alas, some things just don't add up.
I just found a torrent for Abandoned Language. I hyperventilated as my trembling hand carefully manipulated the correct sequence of options that would hopefully, god-willing, deliver this unproven jewel to my ears. I blessed the wanton network of piracy that is the internet and may have developed tumescence.
I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who's losing sleep over industrial noise rap.
I always pronounce it "thee-ate-err" in my head
It's not that I'm a hater, far from it, but neither am I in there watching that red carpet with emphatic enthusiasm, flailing limbs, and a heaping pile of pseudo-voyeurism. You know what I'm talking about. That shit can get out of hand. I did, in fact, take in the middle third of the proceedings, and it certainly invigorated my extraordinarly limp interest in movies in general. I have seen exactly three '06 movies at this point, you see. I can't place a precise cause on my aversion to the theatre, but when friends and lovers come knockin' on my door about this or that hip new big screen number, I shrivel up inside.
I mean, she wore what? Get out of town.
I like that upon finally - finally - completing my critically acclaimed year-end list in the timely season of seven freaking weeks into the new year I actually gave Blood Mountain by Mastadon a third listen and sincerely understood the hype. We clicked, it was hot. I don't know that it'd penetrate that deeply into my graces the way my other two or three metal picks did, but the stripped down, rock n' roll flavour is compelling. It's simpler, more straight forward, more about the rock and less about, say, smashing in your buttocks or whipping one's wang out whilst combatting aliens on a far away inferno-choked world.
Which is not to say that Mastodon couldn't happily do both of those things at once.
I don't really have much to say this week.
I am deeply pleased that Happy Feet won a fucking Oscar.
I mean, she wore what? Get out of town.
I like that upon finally - finally - completing my critically acclaimed year-end list in the timely season of seven freaking weeks into the new year I actually gave Blood Mountain by Mastadon a third listen and sincerely understood the hype. We clicked, it was hot. I don't know that it'd penetrate that deeply into my graces the way my other two or three metal picks did, but the stripped down, rock n' roll flavour is compelling. It's simpler, more straight forward, more about the rock and less about, say, smashing in your buttocks or whipping one's wang out whilst combatting aliens on a far away inferno-choked world.
Which is not to say that Mastodon couldn't happily do both of those things at once.
I don't really have much to say this week.
I am deeply pleased that Happy Feet won a fucking Oscar.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
He's finally come stumbling home
I feel bad about neglecting you, blog.
But real life staged an intervention. That and, after downloading some Limp Bizkit for an ecstatic blast of sheer nostalgia, I discovered that someone had quite seriously tagged it as "post grunge" and I threw up all over my keyboard and lost about a week of my life.
That and, y'know, work and exams.
Sometimes I worry whether my quality in one pursuit or another is indicative of any actual talent, an unequivocably personal expression of skill, or just mimicy with varying degrees of accuracy. Other times I wish my mind had an RSS feeder that put into print all of the disparate tidbits of the absurd that make me question my own wholesomeness. There'd be something in it for everyone. The hilariously mundane (why did that person look at me just now oh god I hope they like me) to the outright offensive (I wonder what faces that person makes during orgasm) would all be presented in impersonally glorious monotype and the internet would be scarier for it. The thing is, I don't even really will these thoughts to percolate through my admittedly thick skull the way they do, they're just sort of there - mechanical responses to stimuli I have little control over. I'm like Pavlov's dogs blessed with the cornucopia of human experience that is wikipedia, eight AM classes, and a libido - shit like this is bound to happen.
I think that, when you get down to it, we're all like Pavlov's dogs.
I'm just throwing these out here because it's mid February and I just don't want to write about them anymore. Don't look at me like that Jams, I wrote like thirty other reviews you can read. After this embarassing little hiccough fades from memory (and my hackles cease to raise at the thought of picking up writing again after a five, six, seven week absence), I can finally get back to what's really important: unstructured mediocrity.
Best of '06, ten to one:
10 Inhuman Rampage - Dragonforce
9 Orphans - Tom Waits
8 Beast Moans - Swan Lake
7 Ships - Danielson
6 Roots & Crowns - Califone
5 Return to Cookie Mountain - TV On The Radio
4 He Poos Clouds - Final Fantasy
3 For Hero: For Fool - Subtle
2 Gulag Orkestar - Beirut
1 Six Demon Bag - Man Man
I really tried to give each of these albums a solid dissection, but it proved too much a task for even one such as myself. Of course I did express my exhaustive, semi-erotic love of nearly half these albums already, so what's the harm in a little cop out? It was agonizingly difficult to put these ten little albums in any semblance of just order, which - among the many other parts of my excuses - can explain my long absence, at least a little bit. Indeed, upon finally placing Beirut ahead of Subtle, and marking my most excrutiating decision down in words, I did suffer a stroke and very nearly swallowed my own tongue.
Mustering up the cajones to once and for all proclaim that Six Demon Bag was the uncontested best album of two thousand and six cost me the use of the right half of my body for nearly a fortnight.
I don't know how to explain what this terminal stretch of my latest, oddest project means, and I'll be damned if my meagre praise can accurately express the quality of workmanship, the veracity of art that each of my choices represent.
Just listen to the freaking things. I'm tired.
But real life staged an intervention. That and, after downloading some Limp Bizkit for an ecstatic blast of sheer nostalgia, I discovered that someone had quite seriously tagged it as "post grunge" and I threw up all over my keyboard and lost about a week of my life.
That and, y'know, work and exams.
Sometimes I worry whether my quality in one pursuit or another is indicative of any actual talent, an unequivocably personal expression of skill, or just mimicy with varying degrees of accuracy. Other times I wish my mind had an RSS feeder that put into print all of the disparate tidbits of the absurd that make me question my own wholesomeness. There'd be something in it for everyone. The hilariously mundane (why did that person look at me just now oh god I hope they like me) to the outright offensive (I wonder what faces that person makes during orgasm) would all be presented in impersonally glorious monotype and the internet would be scarier for it. The thing is, I don't even really will these thoughts to percolate through my admittedly thick skull the way they do, they're just sort of there - mechanical responses to stimuli I have little control over. I'm like Pavlov's dogs blessed with the cornucopia of human experience that is wikipedia, eight AM classes, and a libido - shit like this is bound to happen.
I think that, when you get down to it, we're all like Pavlov's dogs.
I'm just throwing these out here because it's mid February and I just don't want to write about them anymore. Don't look at me like that Jams, I wrote like thirty other reviews you can read. After this embarassing little hiccough fades from memory (and my hackles cease to raise at the thought of picking up writing again after a five, six, seven week absence), I can finally get back to what's really important: unstructured mediocrity.
Best of '06, ten to one:
10 Inhuman Rampage - Dragonforce
9 Orphans - Tom Waits
8 Beast Moans - Swan Lake
7 Ships - Danielson
6 Roots & Crowns - Califone
5 Return to Cookie Mountain - TV On The Radio
4 He Poos Clouds - Final Fantasy
3 For Hero: For Fool - Subtle
2 Gulag Orkestar - Beirut
1 Six Demon Bag - Man Man
I really tried to give each of these albums a solid dissection, but it proved too much a task for even one such as myself. Of course I did express my exhaustive, semi-erotic love of nearly half these albums already, so what's the harm in a little cop out? It was agonizingly difficult to put these ten little albums in any semblance of just order, which - among the many other parts of my excuses - can explain my long absence, at least a little bit. Indeed, upon finally placing Beirut ahead of Subtle, and marking my most excrutiating decision down in words, I did suffer a stroke and very nearly swallowed my own tongue.
Mustering up the cajones to once and for all proclaim that Six Demon Bag was the uncontested best album of two thousand and six cost me the use of the right half of my body for nearly a fortnight.
I don't know how to explain what this terminal stretch of my latest, oddest project means, and I'll be damned if my meagre praise can accurately express the quality of workmanship, the veracity of art that each of my choices represent.
Just listen to the freaking things. I'm tired.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Penultimate in the ultimate sense
Goddamn do I look good in a suit.
That being said, I think I've got an ingrown hair making my life miserable out of the absolute right-hand termination of my jawline. And here I was, thinking that the Gilette turbo I appropriated from Krista - who inexplicably received one in the mail or something - would make my face and neck a marvelous work of modern ingenuity, an alabaster construct to rival that of the Parthenon and yea, even yon Pyramids of deepest Egypte.
But no - I get in-grown hairs. What gives?
Now, fangirlism doesn't go over well with or on anyone, and I personally try to abstain from any such indulgence as much as my constitution will permit. However, TV On The Radio is playing a show at the Kool Haus in Toronto in March and motherfucking Subtle is opening.
Neeeeeegurgleeee!
Where before my persistent, if half-petrified quest for a job in the sunny tropics of Kingston was driven by a powerful need to, y'know, pay for my living quarters, it is certainly now pointed directly at getting my pasty jowels in front of that stage at that preordained date, where they might gape in appropriate levels of awe.
I am, to be honest, a little apprehensive about seeing Subtle live, since it'll be - simplifying mister Doseone and company's grandiose ambitions a bit - the first hip-hop act I see perform. Now, I love Subtle, but as a kid who's attended exclusively rock and punk type shows in the past, what in the hell am I supposed to do when I'm sandwiched in a pit of gangly hipsters and wide-eyed tag alongs, almost certainly unenthused and immobile, to show my appreciation? I'm used to singing along, I really am. Trying to sing along with Doseone would not simply render me the stupidest-looking-kid-alive, I can honestly barely understand that man on record where studio production renders his rapid fire, deeply surreal lyrics almost intelligible. I'm going to be paralyzed, paralyzed with fear and arousal!
Furthermore, if I were to attempt an emulation of Doseone's peculiar tone, I would certainly be mistaken for an epileptic or worse.
Finding the time and energy to write out the remaining sections of my 2006 list is becoming increasingly daunting, particularly as this chunk contains fewer personal favourites and more honest to God deserving albums than any other. So while I certainly respect these albums with the near-unbounded love of someone who'd put them between the twentieth and eleventh best things he's heard in a year, my passion for them isn't such that I've got every note etched into one aspect of my self or another. And without unadulterated favouritism, how am I to proceed in the execution of my ridiculous and absolutely futile self imposed vocation? Woe!
Still, I promised you guys. You guys deserve my lists, don't you, you guys?
I can't believe how long this is taking me.
Best of '06, twenty to eleven:
20 Pink - Boris
19 Return to the Sea - Islands
18 Through the Windowpane - Guillemots
17 Samme Stof Som Stof - Under Byen
16 All This Time - Heartless Bastards
15 Ashes Against the Grain - Agalloch
14 Game Theory - The Roots
13 After Winter Must Come Spring - My Dad Vs Yours
12 Ys - Joanna Newsom
11 Skelliconnection - Chad Vangaalen
Boris is a hell of a tough case to crack. They're drone, they're metal, they sing a little, they're Japanese. I'll be honest: I thought they were singing in English before I actually sat down and paid attention to the vocals properly, to which all three members contribute. The thing of it is, these qualifiers are virtually useless in getting a sense of Pink's enormous, unbelievably dense sound. Their sound is big, it's really big: but it doesn't succumb to rudeness or idiocy the way metal bands with similar ambitions might. To say that aggressive guitar thrashing dominates the tracks is rank understatement. Guitarists Wata and Takeshi's tones are uncomplicated, thick, and dirty, and they absolutely subjugate any and all things in their path. This is metal that remember its roots in rhythm and blues, and takes its shit seriously without pretension. Pink's riffs are a goddamn tidal wave, a wild, bucking mass of distortion only punctuated by treble-drenched squeals for flavour and kept under control by an extremely simple, fantastically straightforward drum kit seemingly dwarfed by the immensity of the two - count 'em, two - other instruments. Songs are long, spartan, and majestic in the way you might think gale force winds chucking an apartment building through a city skyline is majestic. Add in a handful of slowed down, sludgy blues jams like opener (Parting) and (Painted with flame), apparently played with the same overdriven production of behemoths like the title track, and a virtually non-existent visual aesthetic, and I've got almost no hope of accurately describing this gem. It's a masterpiece of sheer ferocity. And yes, it did first debut in 2005, but not in North America, where I give a damn!
I love that Islands didn't sell themselves short and just turn into Yet More The Unicorns. I would chastise them for glorifying the kitsch value of their most unusual core feature - an electric oboe - but that may've been entirely the fans fault. And besides, it's an electric fucking oboe! Hot damn! Showing a bit of maturity and a wonderful lack of ghost and pirate references, Return to the Sea is a hell of a full bodied indie pop record, still at home with simple, lovely dynamics but much more willing to stretch out and experiment than its infinitely listenable spiritual predecessor, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? The instrumentation is absolutely gorgeous, and vividly natural. While inklings of The Unicorns' trademark synthetic veneer still tickle some tracks, this is old time, gloriously orchestral music squeezed through a pop music filter. The result is a little like Danielson's less flowery, more sensical little brother. Nick Thorburn and Jamie Thompson's endlessly light-hearted lilting lyrics and delivery never cease to amuse, to be sure, but their spindly performances are far from the meat of the album. Return to the Sea is an organic wonder. It floats, possibly on a breeze of its own imagining, and pull in whatever exotic fancy catches it attention in the pursuit of the perfect, easy-going pop song. Marimba, steel drum, xylophone, the aforementioned notorious oboe all find disparate and fantastically suited places on this album. These songs undulate with the constantly evolving cast of musicians they contain, never restricting themselves in their workmanlike dedication to whimsy. Yes, whimsy - give it a listen and try to suggest a more accurate term. I dare you.
Under Byen are a monolithic anomaly of post-rock music. Taking the obscure genre's predilection for guitar-as-fabric and classical orchestration as the pinnacle of musical achievement into heretofore unthinkable directions, Samme Stof Som Stof sounds bizarre on paper and record, comfortably hijacking post-rock's established conventions and asserting that yes, vocals and drums belong in there with the rest of the band. Dark, pretty, and inscrutable as all fuck (they're Danish for god's sake), the octet craft fine, exacting, glittering songs dominated by cello, violin, piano, and the Bjorkian alto of Henriette Sennenvaldt and the deep, strong blows of drummer Morten Larsen. What guitar crops up is purely secondary to the cascading, extraordinarily moody orchestral leads. It's a long, opaque record of claustrophobic tones and beautiful snatches of alien optimism, one that shows what the future of post-rock will be much better than the GY!BE axis's increasingly pointless output.
Guillemots don't craft complicated music, though its certainly meant to sound that way. Through The Windowpane isn't anything terrifically new, much less innovative, but what these four men and their instruments do they do well. They make symphonic, movie score aping indie/folk, in the vein of a much more histrionic Sufjan Stevens. The arrangements aren't revolutionary, the setup is tried and true, but the way Guillemots pull it off is absolutely mesmerizing. Through The Windowpane reaches directly for its listeners hearts with the opening flourishes of Little Bear, and doesn't let go on its wishy washy, deeply impressive journey till the very end. Soaring choral backbones, an endlessly appealing baritone frontman, and vivid melody after vivid goddamn melody positively enchant. Sure it's one-note and over dramatic, and it positively gropes My Morning Jacket in all but their most private places, but Guillemots sure as hell know what they're doing - and they do it with surgical precision.
Jams and I absolutely adore the Heartless Bastards, and they're sincerely the most unassuming act on my list. The setup is sheer simplicity: three people, a bass, a guitar, a four-bit drumkit, and the iron-clad baritone of frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom weaving fantastic rock songs of the timeless, exclusively mid-tempo, possibly classic variety. My comrade and I have tried and tried to discern just why the songs on All This Time work as well as they do, but the secret eludes us. These three are musicians of fucking esteem, or at least they deserve to be. The music they produce is so tightly knit, easy going, and unmistakably rock, you'll swear you've heard them somewhere before and loved it. The hooks shimmer and glide effortlessly over meaty, sleepy-eyed bass and beautifully understated tom-heavy drumming. The tone is chunky without grating, the rhythms are uniformly slow while still exciting. It's a contradiction, and it sounds gorgeous. And then there's Miss Erika with that voice. I don't think I'm familiar with a female vocalist who packs a deeper set of pipes - her vocals are epic, breathtakingly smooth, and inestimably powerful.
Agalloch produced what is easily the best serious metal album of any persuasion this year, and I think it's telling of the album's broad appeal that Jeph Jacques of all people was the one to turn me on to them. No other act summons so much genuine, doomy metal and accomplishes it all with such modest, unfettered class. Ashes Against The Grain is unbelievably fucking epic, eight songs adding up to a sixty minutes of mind boggling, earth shattering, folk-infused black metal executed with stunning clarity and incredible restraint. Though you'd never mistake Agalloch's style as anything but earnestly, if unconventionally metal, particularly whilst being buffeted by John Haughm's severely traditional Scary Demon Vocals, the flavour of AATG's tracks is intensely sophisticated. Guitar tones are carefully varied, the production is slick and multi-faceted in a way you'd expect from an art-house rock act like Wolf Parade, and the pace is astonishingly slow, allowing an outright graceful rhythm to the proceedings. It's smooth as well as crushing, and the experimentation these men do with roiling feedback and heavenly synthetic effects is absolutely amazing. The weirdest part? All this experimentation and Scandinavian tinged metal comes from a band out of Portland fucking Oregon.
Second best hip hop album of the year, without a doubt. That's incredibly high praise for an act who only find real competition in the form of the almighty Subtle, still to appear on my list. The Roots have got a hell of a pedigree and a gilded history in urban music, but Game Theory succeeds entirely on its own strengths. It's a cogent, wildly varied, extremely well produced mess of wide awake politicism and critical thought. Every conceivably avenue of musical expression is expertly accessed, from melody-drenched casios to gut-wrenching drumwork to sampling goddamn Radiohead so perfectly I actually got chills. I don't even get chills from Radiohead! It's brilliantly eclectic, the selection of samples and tones uniformly disparate and affecting, favouring jazzy, soulful numbers strapped to a meaty backbone of ?uestlove's aggressive, jazz-tinged drumming and Hub's gorgeously deep, thick bass lines. Black Thought takes every track as a chance to prove that he is one of the sharpest emcees in the genre, and his lyrical dedication against apathy and compliance in the modern industrial world is inspiring and ceaselessly eloquent. Striding piano makes strong occasional cameos, as do funky swaths of guitar, and the rhythm section is always, always tight and visceral. Capped off with an incredibly real dedication to the late Jay Dee, it's an emotional explosion of funk, soul, and, really, a bit of everything else.
The moment I read that My Dad Vs Yours were in some way affiliated with Effrim of Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion notoriety, I got After Winter Must Come Spring without any further questions. Now, I'll admit two things: one, I definitely do think the GY!BE folks have suffered a massive decline since their earlier days, but they're still men and women of enormous esteem in my heart and two, yes, My Dad Vs Yours is the best band name ever. Silly reasons aside, holy shit does this Effrim-engineered, straight-outta-Ottawa album impress. A guitar art band of the absolute highest calibre, a sort of Canadian mini-Explosions In The Sky, these men treat their jangly, perfectly toned instruments with the kind of adoration you'd expect from a concertmaster in a high end symphony. The only non-guitar sounds on the record are the occasional swath of synth and the omnipresent drums, which are serviceable in their dutifully rhythmic role, but both are peanuts to the virtuous, treble-loving, gorgeously interlaced work of the rest of the band. The infinitely brilliant tones and sharp, needling melodies that are coaxed out of bass and six-stringer for every one of AWMCS's eight instantly beautiful tracks must be heard to be believed. Favouring a shoe-gazing, stratospheric meander but not afraid to knuckle down and rock, these men make art without any of the traditional trappings of symphony or post-noun anything. It's a stunning, glittering gem of a record, an utter delight to hear without a hint of superficiality.
Okay, I used to hate Joanna Newsom. It's great that since Ys was released, every indie kid in the world has tried to prove that he/she was and always has been a fan practically since the elfin Miss Newsom plucked her first harp, but prior to her 2006 masterstroke I just really, truly thought she was all gimmick and no substance. She sounds weird, she sounds like a six year old on ether, and Ys doesn't so much tone this down as it focuses it into a lean, beautiful instrument of baroque art and puts it to good use. So, all due apologies to Joanna. The album is a pastoral vista of the neo-classical, a sparsely produced, dreamily arranged panorama of harp, strings, and precious little else. Gone are the flowery hippy freakouts of yesteryear, replaced instead with an invigoratingly simple, breathlessly epic, gorgeously deep medieval sound that tends to stretch very, very long. Its fifty five minute length, in fact, is built on a mean five tracks, of which the shortest is over seven minutes long, and all of which are carried by Joanna's indescribably dynamic voice and truly vivid boondock poetry. It's a stunning achievement of impossibly unique music, benefited enormously by Steve Albini's legendarily stoic engineering and Van Dyke Parks's inestimably virtuous orchestral arrangements and production. That's not to sell Joanna short - though we are talking about Steve freaking Albini and the composer chiefly responsible for the creation of Smile for god's sake - because this is her album, one hundred percent. To say that she's come into her own would be a horrific injustice to an artist whose talent has clearly just begun to reveal itself.
The idea that an album like Skelliconnection could be the work of just one man, Albertan Chad VanGaalen, is ridiculous. It's too much: it's fifteen tracks of incredibly complicated folk/pop/rock songs featuring just way too many instruments played way, way to goddamn well for a single human being to actually be responsible for the whole of it. And yet, that's apparently the case. Skelliconnection is a lonesome, touching, enervating little record that puts sheer, understated musical virtuosity behind only one thing - crafting beautiful songs. VanGaalen's range as an artist is seemingly limitless, producing Beck-like fuzzed out rock songs at one moment, melancholiac old west numbers another, and paranoia inducing freakouts the next. Come to think of it, he might really be Beck Two or something; that's a scary thought. The great thing is, in all these pursuits, VanGaalen is a goddamn prodigy. He exorcizes only the best notes and tones out of seriously downtuned bass guitar, weightless acoustic and electric six stringers, rollicking drums, new-wave synth numbers, and pretty well anything else he can get his hands on. His voice, a thin, ghostly falsetto, is inexplicably beautiful where it could easily succumb to its own weakness. And the songs, the songs are fantastically appealing pop numbers that hijack disparate influences with the deft coyness indicative of artists many years Chad's senior. That I'm putting him (and Joanna, for that matter) up here just shy of my top ten isn't so much a snub as an indication of just how goddamn amazing the competition was in 2006, and I'm going to have a hell of a time explaining myself for my final, fatal go around of this madness when the penultimate issue nearly killed me.
And, before I forget, I love that the definitive sound of Canadian singing has become a high pitched, prepubescent wail. What has Spencer Krug done?
Now, I'm disturbed by how deeply reading nothing but wine reviews has impacted my diction lately. Did I actually use the term "full bodied"?
I don't even think I know what that means!
That being said, I think I've got an ingrown hair making my life miserable out of the absolute right-hand termination of my jawline. And here I was, thinking that the Gilette turbo I appropriated from Krista - who inexplicably received one in the mail or something - would make my face and neck a marvelous work of modern ingenuity, an alabaster construct to rival that of the Parthenon and yea, even yon Pyramids of deepest Egypte.
But no - I get in-grown hairs. What gives?
Now, fangirlism doesn't go over well with or on anyone, and I personally try to abstain from any such indulgence as much as my constitution will permit. However, TV On The Radio is playing a show at the Kool Haus in Toronto in March and motherfucking Subtle is opening.
Neeeeeegurgleeee!
Where before my persistent, if half-petrified quest for a job in the sunny tropics of Kingston was driven by a powerful need to, y'know, pay for my living quarters, it is certainly now pointed directly at getting my pasty jowels in front of that stage at that preordained date, where they might gape in appropriate levels of awe.
I am, to be honest, a little apprehensive about seeing Subtle live, since it'll be - simplifying mister Doseone and company's grandiose ambitions a bit - the first hip-hop act I see perform. Now, I love Subtle, but as a kid who's attended exclusively rock and punk type shows in the past, what in the hell am I supposed to do when I'm sandwiched in a pit of gangly hipsters and wide-eyed tag alongs, almost certainly unenthused and immobile, to show my appreciation? I'm used to singing along, I really am. Trying to sing along with Doseone would not simply render me the stupidest-looking-kid-alive, I can honestly barely understand that man on record where studio production renders his rapid fire, deeply surreal lyrics almost intelligible. I'm going to be paralyzed, paralyzed with fear and arousal!
Furthermore, if I were to attempt an emulation of Doseone's peculiar tone, I would certainly be mistaken for an epileptic or worse.
Finding the time and energy to write out the remaining sections of my 2006 list is becoming increasingly daunting, particularly as this chunk contains fewer personal favourites and more honest to God deserving albums than any other. So while I certainly respect these albums with the near-unbounded love of someone who'd put them between the twentieth and eleventh best things he's heard in a year, my passion for them isn't such that I've got every note etched into one aspect of my self or another. And without unadulterated favouritism, how am I to proceed in the execution of my ridiculous and absolutely futile self imposed vocation? Woe!
Still, I promised you guys. You guys deserve my lists, don't you, you guys?
I can't believe how long this is taking me.
Best of '06, twenty to eleven:
20 Pink - Boris
19 Return to the Sea - Islands
18 Through the Windowpane - Guillemots
17 Samme Stof Som Stof - Under Byen
16 All This Time - Heartless Bastards
15 Ashes Against the Grain - Agalloch
14 Game Theory - The Roots
13 After Winter Must Come Spring - My Dad Vs Yours
12 Ys - Joanna Newsom
11 Skelliconnection - Chad Vangaalen
Boris is a hell of a tough case to crack. They're drone, they're metal, they sing a little, they're Japanese. I'll be honest: I thought they were singing in English before I actually sat down and paid attention to the vocals properly, to which all three members contribute. The thing of it is, these qualifiers are virtually useless in getting a sense of Pink's enormous, unbelievably dense sound. Their sound is big, it's really big: but it doesn't succumb to rudeness or idiocy the way metal bands with similar ambitions might. To say that aggressive guitar thrashing dominates the tracks is rank understatement. Guitarists Wata and Takeshi's tones are uncomplicated, thick, and dirty, and they absolutely subjugate any and all things in their path. This is metal that remember its roots in rhythm and blues, and takes its shit seriously without pretension. Pink's riffs are a goddamn tidal wave, a wild, bucking mass of distortion only punctuated by treble-drenched squeals for flavour and kept under control by an extremely simple, fantastically straightforward drum kit seemingly dwarfed by the immensity of the two - count 'em, two - other instruments. Songs are long, spartan, and majestic in the way you might think gale force winds chucking an apartment building through a city skyline is majestic. Add in a handful of slowed down, sludgy blues jams like opener (Parting) and (Painted with flame), apparently played with the same overdriven production of behemoths like the title track, and a virtually non-existent visual aesthetic, and I've got almost no hope of accurately describing this gem. It's a masterpiece of sheer ferocity. And yes, it did first debut in 2005, but not in North America, where I give a damn!
I love that Islands didn't sell themselves short and just turn into Yet More The Unicorns. I would chastise them for glorifying the kitsch value of their most unusual core feature - an electric oboe - but that may've been entirely the fans fault. And besides, it's an electric fucking oboe! Hot damn! Showing a bit of maturity and a wonderful lack of ghost and pirate references, Return to the Sea is a hell of a full bodied indie pop record, still at home with simple, lovely dynamics but much more willing to stretch out and experiment than its infinitely listenable spiritual predecessor, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? The instrumentation is absolutely gorgeous, and vividly natural. While inklings of The Unicorns' trademark synthetic veneer still tickle some tracks, this is old time, gloriously orchestral music squeezed through a pop music filter. The result is a little like Danielson's less flowery, more sensical little brother. Nick Thorburn and Jamie Thompson's endlessly light-hearted lilting lyrics and delivery never cease to amuse, to be sure, but their spindly performances are far from the meat of the album. Return to the Sea is an organic wonder. It floats, possibly on a breeze of its own imagining, and pull in whatever exotic fancy catches it attention in the pursuit of the perfect, easy-going pop song. Marimba, steel drum, xylophone, the aforementioned notorious oboe all find disparate and fantastically suited places on this album. These songs undulate with the constantly evolving cast of musicians they contain, never restricting themselves in their workmanlike dedication to whimsy. Yes, whimsy - give it a listen and try to suggest a more accurate term. I dare you.
Under Byen are a monolithic anomaly of post-rock music. Taking the obscure genre's predilection for guitar-as-fabric and classical orchestration as the pinnacle of musical achievement into heretofore unthinkable directions, Samme Stof Som Stof sounds bizarre on paper and record, comfortably hijacking post-rock's established conventions and asserting that yes, vocals and drums belong in there with the rest of the band. Dark, pretty, and inscrutable as all fuck (they're Danish for god's sake), the octet craft fine, exacting, glittering songs dominated by cello, violin, piano, and the Bjorkian alto of Henriette Sennenvaldt and the deep, strong blows of drummer Morten Larsen. What guitar crops up is purely secondary to the cascading, extraordinarily moody orchestral leads. It's a long, opaque record of claustrophobic tones and beautiful snatches of alien optimism, one that shows what the future of post-rock will be much better than the GY!BE axis's increasingly pointless output.
Guillemots don't craft complicated music, though its certainly meant to sound that way. Through The Windowpane isn't anything terrifically new, much less innovative, but what these four men and their instruments do they do well. They make symphonic, movie score aping indie/folk, in the vein of a much more histrionic Sufjan Stevens. The arrangements aren't revolutionary, the setup is tried and true, but the way Guillemots pull it off is absolutely mesmerizing. Through The Windowpane reaches directly for its listeners hearts with the opening flourishes of Little Bear, and doesn't let go on its wishy washy, deeply impressive journey till the very end. Soaring choral backbones, an endlessly appealing baritone frontman, and vivid melody after vivid goddamn melody positively enchant. Sure it's one-note and over dramatic, and it positively gropes My Morning Jacket in all but their most private places, but Guillemots sure as hell know what they're doing - and they do it with surgical precision.
Jams and I absolutely adore the Heartless Bastards, and they're sincerely the most unassuming act on my list. The setup is sheer simplicity: three people, a bass, a guitar, a four-bit drumkit, and the iron-clad baritone of frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom weaving fantastic rock songs of the timeless, exclusively mid-tempo, possibly classic variety. My comrade and I have tried and tried to discern just why the songs on All This Time work as well as they do, but the secret eludes us. These three are musicians of fucking esteem, or at least they deserve to be. The music they produce is so tightly knit, easy going, and unmistakably rock, you'll swear you've heard them somewhere before and loved it. The hooks shimmer and glide effortlessly over meaty, sleepy-eyed bass and beautifully understated tom-heavy drumming. The tone is chunky without grating, the rhythms are uniformly slow while still exciting. It's a contradiction, and it sounds gorgeous. And then there's Miss Erika with that voice. I don't think I'm familiar with a female vocalist who packs a deeper set of pipes - her vocals are epic, breathtakingly smooth, and inestimably powerful.
Agalloch produced what is easily the best serious metal album of any persuasion this year, and I think it's telling of the album's broad appeal that Jeph Jacques of all people was the one to turn me on to them. No other act summons so much genuine, doomy metal and accomplishes it all with such modest, unfettered class. Ashes Against The Grain is unbelievably fucking epic, eight songs adding up to a sixty minutes of mind boggling, earth shattering, folk-infused black metal executed with stunning clarity and incredible restraint. Though you'd never mistake Agalloch's style as anything but earnestly, if unconventionally metal, particularly whilst being buffeted by John Haughm's severely traditional Scary Demon Vocals, the flavour of AATG's tracks is intensely sophisticated. Guitar tones are carefully varied, the production is slick and multi-faceted in a way you'd expect from an art-house rock act like Wolf Parade, and the pace is astonishingly slow, allowing an outright graceful rhythm to the proceedings. It's smooth as well as crushing, and the experimentation these men do with roiling feedback and heavenly synthetic effects is absolutely amazing. The weirdest part? All this experimentation and Scandinavian tinged metal comes from a band out of Portland fucking Oregon.
Second best hip hop album of the year, without a doubt. That's incredibly high praise for an act who only find real competition in the form of the almighty Subtle, still to appear on my list. The Roots have got a hell of a pedigree and a gilded history in urban music, but Game Theory succeeds entirely on its own strengths. It's a cogent, wildly varied, extremely well produced mess of wide awake politicism and critical thought. Every conceivably avenue of musical expression is expertly accessed, from melody-drenched casios to gut-wrenching drumwork to sampling goddamn Radiohead so perfectly I actually got chills. I don't even get chills from Radiohead! It's brilliantly eclectic, the selection of samples and tones uniformly disparate and affecting, favouring jazzy, soulful numbers strapped to a meaty backbone of ?uestlove's aggressive, jazz-tinged drumming and Hub's gorgeously deep, thick bass lines. Black Thought takes every track as a chance to prove that he is one of the sharpest emcees in the genre, and his lyrical dedication against apathy and compliance in the modern industrial world is inspiring and ceaselessly eloquent. Striding piano makes strong occasional cameos, as do funky swaths of guitar, and the rhythm section is always, always tight and visceral. Capped off with an incredibly real dedication to the late Jay Dee, it's an emotional explosion of funk, soul, and, really, a bit of everything else.
The moment I read that My Dad Vs Yours were in some way affiliated with Effrim of Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion notoriety, I got After Winter Must Come Spring without any further questions. Now, I'll admit two things: one, I definitely do think the GY!BE folks have suffered a massive decline since their earlier days, but they're still men and women of enormous esteem in my heart and two, yes, My Dad Vs Yours is the best band name ever. Silly reasons aside, holy shit does this Effrim-engineered, straight-outta-Ottawa album impress. A guitar art band of the absolute highest calibre, a sort of Canadian mini-Explosions In The Sky, these men treat their jangly, perfectly toned instruments with the kind of adoration you'd expect from a concertmaster in a high end symphony. The only non-guitar sounds on the record are the occasional swath of synth and the omnipresent drums, which are serviceable in their dutifully rhythmic role, but both are peanuts to the virtuous, treble-loving, gorgeously interlaced work of the rest of the band. The infinitely brilliant tones and sharp, needling melodies that are coaxed out of bass and six-stringer for every one of AWMCS's eight instantly beautiful tracks must be heard to be believed. Favouring a shoe-gazing, stratospheric meander but not afraid to knuckle down and rock, these men make art without any of the traditional trappings of symphony or post-noun anything. It's a stunning, glittering gem of a record, an utter delight to hear without a hint of superficiality.
Okay, I used to hate Joanna Newsom. It's great that since Ys was released, every indie kid in the world has tried to prove that he/she was and always has been a fan practically since the elfin Miss Newsom plucked her first harp, but prior to her 2006 masterstroke I just really, truly thought she was all gimmick and no substance. She sounds weird, she sounds like a six year old on ether, and Ys doesn't so much tone this down as it focuses it into a lean, beautiful instrument of baroque art and puts it to good use. So, all due apologies to Joanna. The album is a pastoral vista of the neo-classical, a sparsely produced, dreamily arranged panorama of harp, strings, and precious little else. Gone are the flowery hippy freakouts of yesteryear, replaced instead with an invigoratingly simple, breathlessly epic, gorgeously deep medieval sound that tends to stretch very, very long. Its fifty five minute length, in fact, is built on a mean five tracks, of which the shortest is over seven minutes long, and all of which are carried by Joanna's indescribably dynamic voice and truly vivid boondock poetry. It's a stunning achievement of impossibly unique music, benefited enormously by Steve Albini's legendarily stoic engineering and Van Dyke Parks's inestimably virtuous orchestral arrangements and production. That's not to sell Joanna short - though we are talking about Steve freaking Albini and the composer chiefly responsible for the creation of Smile for god's sake - because this is her album, one hundred percent. To say that she's come into her own would be a horrific injustice to an artist whose talent has clearly just begun to reveal itself.
The idea that an album like Skelliconnection could be the work of just one man, Albertan Chad VanGaalen, is ridiculous. It's too much: it's fifteen tracks of incredibly complicated folk/pop/rock songs featuring just way too many instruments played way, way to goddamn well for a single human being to actually be responsible for the whole of it. And yet, that's apparently the case. Skelliconnection is a lonesome, touching, enervating little record that puts sheer, understated musical virtuosity behind only one thing - crafting beautiful songs. VanGaalen's range as an artist is seemingly limitless, producing Beck-like fuzzed out rock songs at one moment, melancholiac old west numbers another, and paranoia inducing freakouts the next. Come to think of it, he might really be Beck Two or something; that's a scary thought. The great thing is, in all these pursuits, VanGaalen is a goddamn prodigy. He exorcizes only the best notes and tones out of seriously downtuned bass guitar, weightless acoustic and electric six stringers, rollicking drums, new-wave synth numbers, and pretty well anything else he can get his hands on. His voice, a thin, ghostly falsetto, is inexplicably beautiful where it could easily succumb to its own weakness. And the songs, the songs are fantastically appealing pop numbers that hijack disparate influences with the deft coyness indicative of artists many years Chad's senior. That I'm putting him (and Joanna, for that matter) up here just shy of my top ten isn't so much a snub as an indication of just how goddamn amazing the competition was in 2006, and I'm going to have a hell of a time explaining myself for my final, fatal go around of this madness when the penultimate issue nearly killed me.
And, before I forget, I love that the definitive sound of Canadian singing has become a high pitched, prepubescent wail. What has Spencer Krug done?
Now, I'm disturbed by how deeply reading nothing but wine reviews has impacted my diction lately. Did I actually use the term "full bodied"?
I don't even think I know what that means!
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