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!
1 comment:
Once again, another job well done.
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