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. And I haven't even grazed Under an Hour, which is a whole different animal consisting of three near-twenty minute songs which I really can't even begin to describe and, I feel I must sidestep in order to keep some vestige of sanity.

Grasping at a clear musical direction for Menomena seems an almost completely improbable endeavour, and what’s more, a useless one… there’s enough delight and grunge and melancholy and sparkling beauty to make anyone happy, and that’s just terrific.

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.

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.

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.

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! 

Shifting of eyes, shuffling of cards

I've just realized, after another of my nearly endless reviews of my established list in search of any metaphysical crack or sign of weakness, that all but one of my female-fronted picks have been placed in the middle two quarters of rank. That aberrant one not in the middle took away the number thirty nine spot.

I don't know if that's somehow reprehensible on my part, or whether it constitutes a woman-hating act, but to my own credit you'll note that I'm not spouting anything like, "Karen O receives top marks for her boobies!!", or anything of the sort. Give me some credit.

I might say that about Regina though. Karen's more leggy.

Ahem. I think I've had enough of the agonized modesty shtick for this year. This chunk was by far the most difficult to order, much less decide upon its constituents. I mean, it's an eclectic bunch, and there really is no valid reason except favouritism for putting, oh say, Regina Spektor ahead of J Dilla. I mean, Regina has assets; J Dilla wrote his final album while dying in a hospital bed.

I'm a bad person.

Best of '06, thirty to twenty one:

30 Show Your Bones - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
29 The Way the Wind Blows - A Hawk and a Hacksaw
28 We Are the Pipettes - The Pipettes
27 Orchestra Of Bubbles - Ellen Allien & Apparat
26 Young Machetes - The Blood Brothers
25 Destroyer's Rubies - Destroyer
24 Donuts - J Dilla
23 s/t - Working For A Nuclear Free City
22 Yellow House - Grizzly Bear
21 Begin to Hope - Regina Spektor

  

Fever To Tell. There, I said it, everybody can fucking get over it right now. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs got a bad rap this year for no valid reason, other than the excellent, if straightforward Show Your Bones not being FTT2: Fever Harder. SYB isn't garage rock, it's a pop rock album put together by three musicians who've lamentably been crammed way, way too far up the indie-scene's backside. Zinner's guitarwork is crisp and unrelentingly cathartic, the rhythms are hard and buoyant, and Karen O is a creative and extremely powerful frontwoman not afraid of her own fantastic range. Not only do they have the balls to cover Phenomena better than anyone could ever have thought possible, they wrote a ballad to the tune of Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird, or whatever that goddamn tune is called, that turned out catchy and tear-jerking at the same time. It's good, now leave the scene behind.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw, in somewhat the same vein, weren't so much obscured as buried under a veritable avalanche of scenic wankery in the wake of Beirut's madly successful reception, an album partly shaped by AHAAH's own Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost. The Way The Wind Blows, while certainly enamoured of same Balkan persuasions Zach Condon's debut is, succeeds in an entirely different endeavour, much more of an explanation than an extrapolation. The instrumentation is incredible: a wheedling, cavorting dance of the indescribably exotic and deeply affecting. The feelings conveyed in Barnes and Trost's playing, particularly when dashed on Barnes's workmanlike melancholy vocals, are impossibly vivid, and genuinely, unpretentiously moving. A tricky feat for such left-field work by indie rock royalty.

  

I love that Jams can't reconcile my enjoying The Pipettes (that's pee-pettes, they're English) with, well, my being me. It's a tough case to sell: an outfit fronted by three pretty ladies who do little but sing and offer a carefully constructed image to sell.  But if you can get past the kitsch and the - ahem - bracingly poppy exterior, there's a hell of a lot more to this debut. The vocals are, as can be expected, spot-on, and instantly recall any number of old school girl-pop hits no one really actively listens to but everybody somehow knows. The rest of the story is a sheer surprise: the lyrics feature possibly the wittiest writing in an album all year, self-deprecating, funny, and aggressive. Best of all, the instrumentation, provided by principle song-writers and everything-elsers the Cassettes, is enormously creative as well as delivering - with sparkling confidence and unexpected grit - the requisite hooks for each and every song.

I won't pretend I'm an electronica music major, like most indie kids would've liked to consider themselves this past year. What makes Orchestra Of Bubbles great, though, is anything but its rich techno pedigree: it's a glittering, weightless, cohesive album of incredibly pretty sounds, and that's more than enough. Again, I'm not in the business, so I can't offer up much in the way of context or analysis - one pretty blip sounds pretty much like another pretty blip, I don't think they're meant to mean much more. Ellen Allien (Ay-leen, no fooling) and Apparat are, obviously, masters of their chosen craft, and the music herein is startling, powerful, and uncomplicated; evocative without being specific, if you take my meaning. The synths are shiny, the beats are hearty, what singing and sampling goes on is incorporeal and sharp: it's a pretty, many-sided gem, and it succeeds gloriously in that role. And as an aside, I'll take OOB over the hideously over-hyped Silent Shout any fucking day.

  

The Blood Brothers hold a special, bias ridden place in my heart, but the fantastically executed explosion that is Young Machetes absolutely deserves its place on this list, if only for the fact that everyone was sure they'd choke this time around. YM (hah!) is the best punk album of the year. Sure, it was a lean year, but based on the vitality of the Brothers' performance on this cacophonic slab of an album, you wouldn't know it. "Peak shape" doesn't even begin to describe how these men have progressed over the years, nor the poignancy and ferocity of every single song. The confidence apparent in every note is stunning, and the dual-vocalist shtick that is the Brothers' calling card is, finally, devoid of any shtick at all. Both Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie are extraordinarily strong, wildly unique frontmen, and the cohesion that permeates YM's songs could not be tighter, nor put to greater effect. Plus, Spit Shine Your Black Clouds is completely ghetto fabulous (listen before you laugh, assholes!).

Rubies is an album I feel funny about praising, being that I am a Canadian boy and we're expected to do just that. Still, while Destroyer main man Dan Bejar gets everything but oral sex from the critics of my homeland, he's rightly deserving of such adoration. Rubies is epic, jangly, and beautiful, Bejar's writing invigorating and vocals... vocal. This is music much bigger than the man, appealing in an impossible to pinpoint kind of way and with depth I've only had the opportunity to scratch. It's bouncy, mournful, and poetic - it's a troubadour with a symphony playing on a small town's back roads. Something like that.

  

J Dilla must have had the strongest work ethic of any musician ever. I'd like to disentangle thoughts on his final-ish album from the truth of his death from lupus three days after its release, but it's difficult. Donuts is a jagged, incredibly well put-together little album showcasing a man's indescribable talent as a producer. The mix of sounds is beyond eclectic, favouring strong blasts of brass and bass-lead rhythms instead of the infinitely overused cellphone synths and one-two drum beats of the genre. The hodgepodge is amazing, the sampled vocals alternately compelling and sly, the end result superb, witty, and darkened and silver-hued by the loss it'll forever be linked to.

Working For A Nuclear Free City's self-titled debut could be the best debut of the year, if not for Beirut's insurmountable perfection. Fortunately for WFANFC, the two bands are not and could not be in any conceivably sort of competition with one another. The album can't rightly be called electronica or rock, but it's certainly a beautiful, explosive union of the two. Possessed of an extremely broad dynamic and an apparent ambition to cover it all in one album, these boys pack a terrific mass of raw talent into a tight space, and feature a ready and able motherfucking bassist not at all shy about leading these songs with an intense sense of honest groove. The epic synths and needling guitars that swirl about this bass-heavy core don't ever touch the ground, and I'll be damned if any other 2006 release that can make you dance and rock out at the same time with such efficiency.

  

Grizzly Bear did a whole bunch of contradictory things with Yellow House. It's difficult, it's easy on the ears; it's apparently complicated, intuitively simple in orchestration; it's pretty, it's creepy. Like a tidy graveyard in the greenest summer field, the tone and execution of this already-legendary orthodox indie release for grown ups is lush, inviting, warm, and filled out around the edges with a hint of delicious menace. These men are good, they're very good. Trilling, sweeping violin sections, gothic piano rumbles, an effects-laden funereal alto, perfectly tinkly bluegrass strings, a stark intimacy with the melancholic - no one does indie-folk like this so well anymore.

Okay, I love Regina Spektor. Physically, if I could. I wasn't sure if Begin to Hope deserved any praise at all on my first listen last June, and to this day I challenge any fan of the lovely lady to call the second through sixth tracks of the album anything but duds (yes, I include the entirely pointless and half-baked new edition of Samson in this, zealots!). The title is awful, the single is suspiciously radio-ready, and the cover makes her look like a myspace-born wannabe starlet. But, and I mean but, get past all of those things and make it to the second half of the album, and any and all doubts about Miss Spektor's credibility and virtuosity as an artist must disappear. Regina's talent is boundless, and if she made some insufferably vacuous songs on this album I trust it is because that is what she meant to do. Her voice is matchless, her skill behind the ivories is phenomenal, and her songwriting ability can and will make her a figure of mythic proportions for decades to come. Après Moi is both powerful and deft, 20 Years Of Snow dazzling, Lady indescribably sultry without camp, and Summer in the City the most gorgeous realization of Regina's peculiar style and strengths to date. I couldn't stay mad at her, could you?

And on second thought, I think Dan Bejar probably has got oral sex from at least a few Canadian critics.

At least a few, wouldn't you think?

This is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you, Mister Keely

I don't know what I'm doing.

Sincerely? I don't know how people do this sort of thing, the very notion of ranking disparate musical albums against one another is a veritable exercise in madness. What, really, separates my number one from my number forty? They're nothing at all alike! More poignantly, what makes an album worthy of number fourteen and another worthy of twenty six? These artists represent radically different genres and wholly incompatible perspectives! This entire endeavour is intellectually bankrupt! Stop me before I do this again!

Caveats aside, I've always really, really wanted to do this. No, let's not go into why - that way lies madness. The nerdish, utterly vacuous dissection of music is, obviously, a passion for one such as myself. And really, what better expression of nerdy vacuousness is there than an arbitrarily determined list rife with bias?

I'm making it sound as though I don't love every bit of this - I do.

But, and yes I will wax philosophic from time to time, sifting through a year's worth of favourites, some of which I'd genuinely forgotten about (The Grates, Islands, Ultra Dolphins) and others I'd literally discovered the day of my idiotic list-making (Guillemots!), percolated a year's worth of tumult and rage - and the occasional positive feeling - in a most unexpectedly vivid manner. A year's a pretty long time, nyah? If my self-appointed quest to sketch something like this out is devoid of any valid significance, it's at least worthy in its verification of the deep, deep power these albums have had over me.

I think I know why we do this, Jams.

Maybe, maybe not. I look back on two thousand and six and realize, with some moderately sharp pangs of guilt, what massive, collective agnosia we who sing the praises of the alleged anti-mainstream possess. Picking out my top choices for the past twelve months, how often was I confronted by a half-forgotten, viciously neglected album from the previous year that I'd sworn the same type of praises on when it was newish as well? Two thousand four? Much worse, and two thousand three? Forget about it.

It was awkward, somewhere up there with meeting an ex at a party and not remembering the finer points of, oh, say, their name.

Not that such an event has ever, ever happened to me.

Nurr. But making lists like these? A desperate grasp at immortalization of fleeting ideals? A half-panicked, ill-conceived chance at resisting inexorable change? A genuine fear that if we don't proclaim our love for these songs they might be swallowed whole and destroyed by the irresistable maw of history? Something like that. I think, with as much modesty as one who's about to submit that he thinks he knows what the best albums of an entire year are can muster, that such predilictions might drive our entire fascination with identifying and praising only those underdogs and perverse finds we come across in our travels. It's paternal, innit? Songs and artists that no one pays attention to can hardly be said to exist, and that's a pretty affecting idea when you're as soft-skinned and weepy as I certainly can be.

Shut up, I am dreaming. (But that didn't make the list, sorry.)

Thus, for those few who'll read this, and especially for those extremely few who'll read this compulsion-free, behold this, the first act:

Best of '06, forty to thirty one:

40 Me, Myself and Rye - The Russian Futurists
39 Melody Mountain - Susanna & The Magical Orchestra
38 Mar - Ultra Dolphins
37 Drum's Not Dead - Liars
36 Gravity Won't Get You High - The Grates
35 Altar - Sunn 0))) & Boris
34 In Bocca al Lupo - Murder By Death
33 Brightblack Morning Light - Brightblack Morning Light
32 The Horror The Horror - The Horror The Horror
31 Fear is On Our Side - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

  

The lowest echelon of a best-of-the-year list always reeks of nonsense to me. If you've dubbed an album worthy of being on such a list at all, how do you turn around and boot it to the furthest position from gold you can give it? I made it easy on myself. My, Myself And Rye, while a superb album providing a sweeping and beautiful panorama of one-man Torontonian Russian Futurists' style, is, as a matter of fact, an honest to God compilation album. TRF's far-future symphony might deserve better than this, but I needed a patsy. Same deal for Susanna & The Magical Orchestra's cover album Melody Mountain, but this non-album benefits not just from Susanna's silver pipes and a gloriously understated instrumentation from her one-man eponymous Orchestra, it features a motherfucking Prince cover.

  

Mar was one of maybe two or three true-to-form punk albums to catch and hold my attention all year, one that I didn't even realize I respected as much as I did till it came time to make this list. While the Ultra Dolphins certainly don't make a case for themselves based on range of tone or dynamics, they more than make up for it in genuine goddamn vitriol and a fearlessness to incorporate absolutely random, fantastically inexplicable piano breaks and flourishes in a manner akin to pre-Relationship Of Command At The Drive-In's younger, more pissed off sibling. Liars fell on and off this list and occupied more locations during its contruction than any other single album could possibly hope to. Every pass I've taken through Drum's Not Dead has been difficult to the point of frustration, provocative in that it strays dangerously close to discomfort, absolutely bizarre, and finally capped off with the perfect The Other Side Of Mount Heart Attack to remind me that this is not, in fact, a joke, and these men really are musicians.

  

The Grates surfaced in my library during an all-too brief foray into the jarringly lovely world of Twee, and I'd honestly forgotten about them entirely till this week. Gravity Won't Get You High is a superbly simple, completley straightforward blast of sunshine meant to accomplish nothing other than bringing a smile to your face, and it does that without modesty or shame. At the absolute other end of the spectrum, scary drone god-monsters Sunn 0)))'s collaboration with big metal oddity Boris confounds and depresses with the deft hand of artists doing exactly what they want to do - scare, confound, and depress. Altar defies any and all critical expectations heaped on either band with a ferociously understated melange of music. I've heard it picked apart as never delivering on its promise, and hated on for just not being Metal, and that's bunk. Centrepiece track The Sinking Belle, featuring vocals of all goddamn heathen things, creeps me out more than any dodecahedron of noise either excellent band has delivered beforehand. It's a horror movie with a constant, brilliantly overdrawn hush of suspense, and it deserves its accolades.

   

I don't think anyone noticed that Murder By Death released a new album, and I'm ashamed that I nearly succumbed to that's-so-last-year thinking in my slow digestion of In Bocca Al Lupo. Given a chance, the album reveals a band at their musical and stylistic prime, producing exactly the kind of songs they want to produce and alternately pouring on and stripping away the gorgeous instrumentation they're capable of to achieve unceasingly fantastic results. Plus, I'd put it up here even if the entire album was only two-minute long third track Dead Men And Sinners repeated over and over again. Brightblack Morning Light accomplish the same effortless expression of style, but to such perfection and in a hazy, hippy morass of psychadelia that I can honestly say I can't objectively differentiate one track from the other. I've lost hours listening to their self-titled release, and I think that speaks more to its power than anything else.

  

Swedes The Horror The Horror released, without a doubt, the best guitar album of the goddamn year, and it's only unfortunate that it didn't have more competition in a year where such outfits were ignored as blasé, if not openly disparaged for not being with it. They're hooky, they're dancey, they feature vaguely british vocals and lovely sharp tones, and they're fully capable of showcasing why the six-stringer has been the it instrument for most of a century. Lastly, for this installment, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, forever hereafter referred to as the mildly more wieldly ILYBICD for my sanity's sake, crept into my psyche with their synth swaddled update of Interpol's grim update of Joy Division. I outright refused to give these guys a try based unfairly on their admittedly ridiculous name, and was genuinely impoverished for it. Fear Is On Our Side is monumental, dense, and absolutely glittering with obsidian slyness. Alternately furious, visceral, instantly appealing, and mind-numbingly creepy, it is mood music for destroying minds. Repetitive, distorted hooks draw attention away from barely heard voeyeur snatches of synthetic wiles, simplistic drums tap out irresistable rythms over a vocalist's vivid alto, and unexpected bass and synths fill in all the cracks. It's a science fiction film noire soundtrack, and I get lost in it.

This constitutes a suitably large chunk to break off on. Smoke if you got 'em.

Caroline, I am looking in your direction.

Many Lives -> 49 MP

Those months do slip away, don't they?

Oh shit, and we lost a year in there too. Fuckcock and so on.

 This blog isn't intended to be about my personal life - oh well. Writing one's midyear exams while sufferring from the flu's equivalent of Leviathan (fuck you Hobbes, I mean the other kind) is sincerely just not good times. Breaking the bank to provide your family members with suitably expensive baubles meant to convey my honest to God affection for them leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth, much like (as you'll recall from earlier this paragraph) the gallons upon gallons of vomit I had to force out of my body in the days and hours leading up to the most important exams of my life thus far.

But I digress.

Jams and I lack the spiritual grit to produce a coherent, properly ordered best-of-the-year list of any kind just yet. Much as we adore such things, and are vehement in our desire to (finally) complete one, we've both been approaching the endeavour sidelong, without much verve or committment, under the assumption that a more direct attempt would degenerate into bile-encrusted trench warfare punctuated only by mirthless laughter and painful bitchslapping. We don't always agree, you understand.  

More to the point, I (and most of my friends and acquaintances, for that matter) am not of the nature to arbitrarily assign number values to one album or another. We're lovers, etc., and to be perfectly honest, how am I supposed to accurately rank a thing like TV On The Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain against a thing like Man Man's Six Demon Bag?

They're incompatible!

Hence, while we merry jesters put off our sworn duty yet another few days, allow me to assert this contoversial thesis:

Power metal is awesome and so is Dragonforce's Inhuman Rampage. Discuss.



I think I mentioned my predeliction for the hairier arts in an earlier post, I can't recall, or find the post. In what is apparent to me now as a grossly non-intuitive exploration of the greater genre of Metal, I discovered the Power subgenre after years of tepid spelunking through the infinitely less listenable Death/Doom/Black/Sludge varietals. A few things captured my interest, but being in high school I was much more inclined toward the Metalcore cross-breed than anything purer. Grind has its diversions, with An Albatross and the Locust being some of my permanent favourites in any extreme genre, but absolutely none of these avenues pack the viscerally exciting kick in the chest offerred by Power metal.

And yes, this is that kind of metal, the one obsessed with dragons and zombies and the cartoony, medieval slaying thereof. Common lyrical themes include epic battles against a great, possibly ancient evil through unspecified intense combat. This is only part of the style's beauty. Don't hate.

Bands like Hammerfall, Rhapsody, Symphony X, and some with much stupider names (Power Quest, Demons & Wizards, rawk) all have their respective great works, but last January's release by Dragonforce is a veritable paragon of the genre. Yes, I described it as a paragon. This international act based out of the UK (guitarist Herman Li hails from Hong Kong, bassist Frédéric LeClercq from France, keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov from the Ukraine, rythm guitarist Sam Totman from New Zealand, drummer Dave Mackintosh from England, vocalist ZP Theart from South Africa, shit I shouldn't have put this in parentheses) are well and fully aware of their chosen oeuvre's silly repuration. Their third album perfectly takes this in stride, focussing squarely on Power metal's penchant for content over form and dropping the whole thing through the best of Black Metal's technical aspects. Since I suspect most of my friends, and therfore most of my three readers, have no goddamn idea what I just said (I forgive you - this isn't important stuff), I'll elaborate.

Ye Mighty Commandements of Black/Power Metal:

The dual guitar lead is the Lord thy God.

Melody is thy God's one and only cardinal virtue.

An instrument's tone is more important than any other consideration in music.

The blast beat is the absolute pinnacle of drumming. Time not spent pounding out a good tight blast beat is only useful as it lends poignancy to the blast beat which will follow it.

Synthesizers ought to be as epic as possible but ought never to supersede the guitars until a song's obligatory breakdown.

Playing fewer than nine hundred beats a minute makes you a bitch.

Unconventional song structures and not repeating yourself are overrated.

Things like dragons and swords and shit kick ass and anyone who doesn't think so is a pussy or a liar.

Lyrics are only a way of getting sound out of a human being.

No one actually enjoys deathvox.

No one genuinely gives a shit about bass.

I kind of mixed them around in there, but you get the general idea. Inhuman Rampage is the ultimate product of a band realizing they can produce a handful of ass-kickingly breathtaking sounds and desiring only to produce those sounds as long and as intensely as possible. Songs don't differ very much from one another at all, not even lyric-wise, and if you really wanted to you could probably codify about three or four basic building blocks of all eight tracks on the album, different from each other only in key/scale/arrangement, maybe.

But that shit genuinely doesn't matter - when all you want to hear is a face-meltingly, mind-shockingly amazing guitar solo, or the crunchiest verse possibly created by man, when you want exciting music, this album fucking provides to the literal max.

The lyrics are amusingly dramatic at best, and honest to God tripe at worst, depending on your stance on such gems as "Rise over shadow mountains, blazing with power / Crossing valleys endless tears, in unity we stand / Far and wide across the land, the victory is ours / On towards the gates of reason, Fight for the truth and the freedom Gloria!!" found in the chorus of Revolution Deathsquad, but ZP Theart's singing is genuinely fantastic, in a style probably only recognizable to the uninitiated as being in the same vein as Justin Hawkins's of The Darkness fame, only much, much stronger and focussed on the mid-range than the falsetto.

Before I forget, how about these freaking song titles? Fathers, lock up your daughters and so on, this album's packed with literary jewels like Operation Ground and Pound (???), the aforementioned Revolution Deathsquad, and the straightforward Storming of the Burning Fields. All are evocative of the corniest, nun-angeringest vestiges of 1980's silliness one would assume died out when KISS stopped being relevant.

You can understand the flavour of these fellows' love for the epicly histrionic, can't you?

Drummer Dave Mackintosh is your run of the mill octopus-armed demigod, whom I sincerely cannot describe with much gusto beyond the fact that he can sustain eight different, invigoratingly creative blastbeats for an average of seven minutes at a time. That man must be in shape.

Bassist Adrian Lambert (who's since been replaced by the earlier mentioned LeClerq) has the unfortunate predicament of being a bassist in a metal band, receiving approximately eight cumulative seconds of solo time on centrepiece track Body Breakdown.  What's truly a bit regrettable is that Lambert makes it apparent in these seconds that he is really, really goddamn skilled. The rest of the time? You cannot fucking hear him over the other instruments. While his wall of bass is certainly felt, the definition of it is so low in the mix and so engulfed by louder, faster, treble-drenched sounds that it simply lacks presence. He allegedly provides backup deathvox-style vocals on most tracks in addition to his six-string, three finger bassing duties, but I can't hear those either. I don't think he and the album's producer got along, or something.

Vadim Pruzhanov's keyboard work gets much, much more time in the sun, frequently playing on equal ground with the band's guitarists and setting the, ahem, epic tone of most tracks. His tones and style are much in the same spirit of the guitars, and he's apparently replaced a standup synth set with a custom made keytar simply because the stationary unit couldn't handle his intense movements. Tell me that isn't one of the most hardcore things you've ever heard.

Tell me this isn't the most hardcore thing you've ever seen.

I'm sure a book could (and probably has) been written on the virtues of metal guitarists, and I'm not going to attempt to fully dissect Hermal Li and Sam Totman's playing herein. What I love most about the duo, something I can't honestly say about many similarly talented guitarists, is that they use their virtually limitless skills to actually craft beautifully provocative melodies. I mean, no one would doubt the best free-jazz artist's skill, but how many would actually want to sit down and listen to it at any given moment? The chord progressions and licks that compose the bulk of Inhuman Rampage's mass are gorgeous, exhilarating, and mind-fuckingly technical without being obnoxious. This is metal as fuck. It's loud, it's fast, and it's intense as five men with girl hair can be, but goddamnit, it's also incredibly listenable, easy to digest, and if you can tap into the side of you ,and every asshole with a functional heart has it, that finds sustenence in the fantasy drama of any Lord of the Rings battle or shit like that, you can bloody well enjoy this.

What's more, these guys have a readily apparent sense of humour. Their videos are rife with subtle self deprecation and classy shots at their own ridiculous subject matter. That's worthy of respect. And so is capping off fifty or so minutes of sheer verticality with a piano driven, new-age synth laden monster ballad called Trail of Broken Hearts that'd send Kenny G into fits of vomitting and crush every emo band in existence to death.

Do I sound defensive? Fuck you guys.

I'm going to go play D&D.

Yelling at movie characters is neither pleasant nor productive

Exams are leering over the horizon. It's offensive, really. Just as bad is the Lake Ontario climate, which decided to mark the beginning of the brief vacation afforded to me between papers and mid-years by dumping snow all over my goddamn campus.

I manage to keep busy in spite of this.

New one for you today, O gentle and largely imaginary reader. I'm still picking through the massive endeavour which is Califone's Roots and Crowns for proper service within the blogosphere, but the new dusting of snow's pushed pushed up shimmering memories an album I fell in love with in winter.



Dälek are hip hop to me. That's die-ah-lek, for some reason; I'm no linguistics major and am not down, per se, with the umlauts. Prior to being exposed to the tidal wave of sound these two men produce, I was in the comfortable position of spouting epithets like, "I love all kinds of music. Except for rap and shit like that." The genre gets a - just wait for it - bad rap (BAM. Yes I did) at the hands of far too many self-described aficionados. People like their music just so, and it's a knee jerk response to heap scorn on any song sporting a rapping emcee. I was like that, but I was fortunate enough to download the duo's third album, Absence, and have my face, arms, and legs melted off.

I mean that in the best possible sense.

Dälek sport a rapping lyricist, he goes by Dälek (but doesn't constitute Dälek the band) and he is phenomenal. His delivery is absurdly sharp and filled with more genuine passion and, what I really love, anger (!!!) than most any punk or metal vocalist out there. I don't have the stones, much less the experience to try to place him in any sort of context within the greater hip hop genre, but his performance is unbelievably sharp and consistently, jaw-droppingly impressive. I've never, ever heard anyone on record with such flawless rythm and gymnasticly powerful cadence. Dre-era Benjamin Andre might surpass on some points, but his rubber band excellence has been a little overshadowed by his senseless prediliction for mediocre singing of late.

What's even better, and genuinely inspiring, Dälek's subject matter is deliciously dark and astonishingly, viscerally strong. His gruff, meaty delivery of political diatribes is never, ever boring, and thought provoking in a way very very few musicians can really accomplish. He weaves near-future film noir soundscapes, glittering with revolutions and uprisings of passion. Listen to his verses on tracks like Culture For Dollars or Distorted Prose, give him a real shot, and tell me it isn't extremely affecting. His repeated invocation of griot heroes is telling. Griots are traditional African story tellers, troubadours of ancient black tribes respected for their preservation and eternal defence of a culture.

I learned that from Absence and yes I did have to look it up.

Now, here's the rub. Skilled as Mister Dälek is, his presence on Absence is much less than half the story. Much much less. Let's discuss the Oktopus.

I can probably identify one or two of the sounds that show up in a given Dälek track. The rest are sheer goddamn mysteries, and it is absolutely fantastic in that right. The man known as the Oktopus handles the instrumental and production and of Dälek's existence (apparently a fellow named Still contributed on the turntable end, but not as a principle component of the troupe), backing his emcee with unfathomably gigantic beats and mountains of noise that sound like My Bloody Valentine routed their guitars through a reverb effect in Hell. To dub the result as A) Stunning and B) A tad difficult would be more than understatement, it'd be injustice.

I think, as I remember it, the first time I sat through Absence I raved to Jams about it as being something like "If you stripped Gorrilaz of their humanity, tortured them for years and then set them up in a studio with the ability to sample field recordings from Hades, you'd have this record."

Of course, this was gross hyperbole and the Gorrilaz comparison didn't make any kind of sense, but it's a rough approximation of Absence's ability to fuck you up most gloriously.

The Oktopus is a genius. A verifiable candidate for Mensa, entirely on the basis of what he does here. From the skyscraping jaws of Distorted Prose, which bends and scrapes a sampled guitar lick to ridiculous heights, to the jarringly brilliant saw blade and heart-stoppingly technical (and properly beautiful) scratching of Culture for Dollars, the barely contained gargantuan assault of A Beast Caged and the cold clarity in the steam-driven symphony of Ever Sombre, this man is limitless. The music to be found in this album can hardly be catalogued in words, given over much more to severely intense and provocative ambience than simpler musicianship. The Oktopus destroys what anyone might conceive ambient music to be: he's DJ Shadow with rabies and a persecution complex, he's The Books with chainsaw arms. Hell, he's Sigur Ros possessed by the devil, and he does unthinkably creative, utterly unstoppable work.

And it sucks that they've got such little support in the world. They're too noisy for the hip hop crowd and too hip hop for the noise crowd. I don't know if it's my place to call any artist ahead of their time, but I'll be damned if these two never get the respect that's so keenly owed to them.

The Descent was a terrible movie.  I have never slept so well after taking in an alleged horror movie.  They could've called it Gollum: The Big Hungry Musical with Stupid Scottish Women in a Cave for some Reason.  

It may've gotten more attention that way, I'm just sayin'.

Every thug needs a lady

I don't think I ever actually spelled out my adoration for Regina. To further aggravate Krista - who haaates Antony btw lolz - I think she's super purty. So do most people; Krista doesn't. Them's the breaks!

Well. Sitting down and extolling Regina's work would take me hours, which I don't have. I'll gloss over this by saying everything, and I mean absolutely goddamn everything, prior to her recent Begin To Hope is perfect. Perfect. She's the best singer-songwriter ever. Except maybe she's second to Tom Waits.  I don't have time to get into why.  If you want to know, everything is perfect.  Everything, so don't ask.  I gave you your answer.

Begin To Hope had some bad points. And by bad, I mostly mean insufferably poppy and inconceivably shallow. I heart Fidelity, as anyone with a working soul does, but Better and Hotel Song and Field Below aren't good. Not... not terrible. Just not good. That Time is iffy, but gets by on unshakeable pluck. The rest is perfect like the rest of her seemingly limitless repertoire.

Apres Moi is amazing. Lady is better. Summer In The City is fantastic. Every track on the extra special-edition disc is wonderful, and I will fight any one who says otherwise. By hitting them.

And she's purty. Ahee, etc.

Deontological moral frameworks and why you should get out of bed in the morning

As it turns out, one's second year of university is tougher than one's first year. Part of me hadn't anticipated this.

I've been more than a little despondent of late. No single album has grabbed my attention in the same way Danielson and Beirut and so on have managed to in months past, and it's not been for lack of new material coming my way. Clue To Kalo's One Way It's Every Way is an ethereal, jangly little album with lots of pretty sounds. Think Sufjan Stevens fronting the Books with the express purpose of crafting easy-going pop songs. Lovely as they are, the songs have precious little meat on them. Not a lot to write home about, not something I can really sink my teeth into as an imitation imitation critic, you see.

I guess I could gush about Antony and the Johnsons, couldn't I?

I first stumbled onto Mister Antony about a year ago. I remember still being up to my eyeballs in generic rock and roll and punk bands, though I really had made significant progress since high school. The very first chord of Hope There's Someone felt, and I sincerely mean this, like a goddamn breath of fresh air. About all I'd heard about him prior to his sophomore album, I Am A Bird Now, was that he is A) Mind numbingly beautiful and B) Warbly as all get out.

And that was pretty well accurate.

The album is stunning from start to finish. Heart-breakingly honest and absolutely gorgeous. Antony needs little more than a piano and his own, yes it is warbly, voice to carry this album. His song craft is spotless, so much so that trying to quote him out of context invariably sounds ridiculous. He exemplifies, among so many of his excellences, that lyrical work gains its power much more from its delivery than its content. Again, fuck you Decemberists.

Songs run a relatively limited gamut, but in such a way that I Am A Bird Now emits a cohesive, beautifully film noir atmosphere. Like a cozy little restaurant in winter, or a hillside drowned in that sound of rain that everyone thinks of when they think of rain. The sensitive swing of Fistful of Love pops and swaggers ever so slightly, swelling with a perfect little brass section. Hope There's Someone is gothic balladry without the goth, easily the song best encapsulating Antony's gentle, sweeping style. The monumentally powerful outro, with pounding grand piano engulfed in an veritable typhoon of overdubbed wailing, is knock-you-flat-on-your-ass magnificent, and still puts me on pins and needles. Spiralling and Bird Gerhl head down a similar path, but with fantastically different effect. Both can and will break your heart with its plaintive, ineffable honesty and gloriously uncomplicated instrumentation.  The latter showed up toward the end of V for Vendetta, and I may have wept.

There's not much else to explain, really, and the album doesn't need anything more. Uniformly stark and mournful, simultaneously triumphant and vibrant, and all tied together by that indescribable golden voice.

That I Am A Bird Now ensconced itself into the pantheon of my favourite albums so quickly is a testament to its beauty, and fuels my continuing bafflement in how divisive the album is. People hate this music. Not just dislike it, hate it. They ridicule it as childish and stupid, and miss its point entirely.

Now, I try to reign in my opinions on other people as much as possible. I do maintain a strict doctrine of some-things-are-art-and-some-are-entertainment-only, but I can observe a modicum of niceness. But some things get to me, and none more so than a story Jams related to me concerning some residence floor mates. Being connected via hub, and being nosey, she discovered that one had, amongst many many pop standards and mass-produced hip-hoppers, I Am A Bird Now.

That's feckin' weird, innit?

Turns out that the gal in question kept it around specifically to play for her friends and deride as being absolutely ridiculous and awful.  Apparently they'd get a good laugh out of the stupid transsexual man playing at making music.

That fucking burns me, it really sincerely does. Not liking something is one thing, and more power to you if you can respect it without enjoying the music, but that girl's reaction to Antony was tantamount to dragging him into the street, stripping him naked, and spitting on him with a grin on her goddamn face.

I'm oversensitive in matters of antagonism like this, but you get what I'm saying.

Kant, Hobbes, and Morgenthau are running together in a manner much like knowledge. I fear I may be learning.

Purchased experiences don't count and how Generation X ruined my constitution

There's something certifiably wrong with The Dears' recording output.

Their music sounds so much better when played live its as if the two formats contain completely separate bands. Songs which absolutely floor one with magnificience in life sound on compact disc or empeethree as pleasant as an open mouth kiss from an extraordinarily attractive member of the opposite sex, only they've got horrible dragon mouth rot. You know you should be enjoying it, on some level, and yet your senses are telling you to just fucking stop because that is gross.

On record, their guitars sound limp, their drums irritate, and Murray Lighburn's unspeakably golden vocal chords leave, to pound this metaphor into the ground, a bad taste in my mouth.

But Jesus tap dancing Moses, you wouldn't think so from their live work.

I can't understand where the disconnect is. The Dears' sound isn't too far afield of any number of bands who succeed on record. Okkervil River, TV on the Radio, My Morning Jacket, Murder By Death (of whom I was distinctly reminded of at the show), Cursive, Broken Social Scene, all of them pack similar ambitions to Lightburn and Co.'s into a solid format and sound great. No Cities Left and Gang of Losers are good albums; unlike these others, they're not great. Why does this happen?

I can't make heads or tales of it and I'm not going to try. Needless to say the show last night floored me, and was much more than good enough to make me forget the death's doorstep feeling of being awake for thirty four hours with a bad case of the flu. Every note was glorious, the band was class right down to their fingernails, and Murray was one of the most genuinely gracious and obviously serious-about-his-art frontmen ever. The set was a perfect mash of No Cities Left and Gang Of Losers material. I was infinitely more familiar with the former, but I enjoyed both despite being in that peculiar show-state of really liking a band and yet not being able to affect the fluidity of motion/appreciation that other patrons do.

I'm like, I love this band! But no, I don't know this song! Please don't judge me harshly!

I'm so enamoured of Opera that if I don't have at least four tabs open
I feel like a poser. 

I'd rather be watching Firefly

I'm always curious about which way music's going to progress to next.

Shh, I'm trying  hard to avoid pretension here. 

Back in the tenth grade, when punk was beginning its super saturation of everything everywhere and we'd yet to see the machinations of dance-punk sweep over, again, everything, I was telling my friends that synthesizers were going to dominate music, popular or no, before long. Sure, affixing "core" to the end of everything was awesome, and it was great how every flippant chearleader and pot-smoking jock in my high school insisted that they loved punk and emo (Dashboard Confessional/My Chem/FOB and Bright Eyes singles respectively) to death, but it wasn't going to last. A few years down the road, I asserted, punk's going to be a joke and all the bands we listened to wouldn't have made the least bit of impact on music's real history.

Of course, I still wore my Sparta shirt and listened to Taking Back Sunday every single day. The point is I at least knew better.  I put my TheSTART on and committed to memory the synthesized noodlings of The Cinema Eye and Thunderbirds Are Now! and the Stiletto Formal and I believed.

And now what've we got? Samples and synthesizers are standard issue building blocks of music, attached to every genre under the sun. Artists featuring neither aren't taken seriously unless they're doing the country or folk thing, and in that case a band's expected to at least feature myriad traditional and orcehstral instruments to even in out. I'm seeing the term "guitar band" used more and more as a pejorative. "Dance punk" seems to function like ipecac on anyone with ears, punk's going to be recovering from an overexposure hangover for the next several decades, and even mentioning emo is liable to get you shot dead.

I was right, motherfuckers.

I like it, really. The somewhat unpalatable glitch-folk of Grandaddy and A Sun Came/Enjoy Your Rabbit era Sufjan have given way to the absolutely gorgeous likes of Akron/Family, Chad Vangaalen, Grizzly Bear, and Califone. Synth and chamber-pop laden rock, born, I think, principally out of Canadian acts like the Unicorns and Broken Social Scene have flourished through too many artists to name. Electronica, more than any other, has absolutely exploded in popularity and sheer creativity.  This has been a renassaince deliciously devoid of posturing and icon-dependence, and possesses a fantastically down to earth sensibility and warmth that I hope has got years left in it.

But my curiosity's piqued again. Where's music headed to now? Everyone I've talked to seems to have been astonished and pleased by the country and folk revivals of the past few years, but I don't think these fixations have much further to go. I don't see a reversion to guitar rock or punk as feasibly possible for at least another generation, so what else is there?  

Metal's started to enjoy some more widespread and creative exposure, with bands like Sunn 0))), Agalloch, and Boris incorporating radically new approaches to a stereotypically burnt out genre, along with being increasingly well received amongst different audiences. But metal is extraordinarly tough to predict, and any branch of extreme music is going to have to overcome an absolutely staggering stigma amonst non-believers to go critical in the way punk and electronica have in the new millenium.

Is it going to be world music?  I genuinely can't think of where else things could head. It plays directly into the current prediliction for folk and country, doesn't it?

I've got hints of this direction through Man Man and Gogol Bordello, but mostly I've been thinking this because I love Beirut's debut album, Gulag Orkestar, way too damn much.

Beirut has a population of one, officially. Zach Condon plays, and I quote: "Horns, violins, celli, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars)." Holy shit, celli? I don't think that's a word. What pushes the arrangement into indie-kid wet dream territory is the contribution of two bonafide Neutral Milk Hoteliers in the mix. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Tros, presently of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, lend percussion and violin with the same poignancy and understated grace they brought to Mister Mangum's seminal masterpieces, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

It sounds like a mess on paper, and the unorthodox instrumentation can indeed sound a bit sloppy, but this is by and large a terrificly focussed, richly colourful swath of music. Sparklingly exotic balkan melodies are hijacked into beautiful pop songs of the Western persuasion. The tone is overwhelmingly depressed, but sad music has never, ever felt so organic and toe-tappingly alive. It's far, far removed from dance music, but I find it impossible to sit still through the album's indescribably lovely movements.

I tend to sway.

Zach's robust yet ineffably pubescent warble sets down an entirely new path of melancholia, and his miniature orchestra of vibrantly mournful brass and woodwind - and whatever category the accordian falls under - blends unbelievably well. There are lyrics here, but the most brilliantly poetic verses on the album feature Zach giving himself over entirely to worldless wailing, as in the excellent closer After the Curtain and album's heart Mount Wroclai (Idle Days).

Jeremy Barnes's simplistic but rich drumming, favouring a steady bass thump covered in various exulting cymbals, does a superb job of grounding the precocious Condon and his symphony. It's easy to recall NMH throughout, especially flavours of Holland, 1945, The Fool, and Ghost. Barnes is a truly excellent percussionist, and his work here showcases the drums as a viably beautiful sound, not simply a timepiece.

The album is remarkably consistent, and I'm sure the greatest criticism which will be levelled against is its tendency toward sameness. I can forgive it for that, personally. In fact, the greatest departure from Gulag Orkestar's magnificient sound, the near-electronica blips of Scenic World, turn out to be the album's weakest moment. The fantastically realized old-country sound that pervades most all the rest of the album is too good to let go of.

I'm tired and Douglas Coupland isn't helping one bit.