If I was making a list of the worst album covers of the decade, this badboy would score a lot higher. What sort of an offensive mess is it anyway? It looks like a shitty programme of events from an international irrigation solutions conference, or a still frame from a Genesis video. The sort of album cover you would cross the road to avoid.
Number 19 eh? I wrote a lot about William Basinski and The Shins. Now, I'm worrying myself about having to give every other album on my list a similar depth of appraisal - something I just cannae do. So The Moon and Antarctica is going to receive one of my shorter posts (believe me, there are some very long ones waiting in the wings). Isaac Bro, I hope you are down with me on this one (testing, cos William Basinski took an interest in the post about him). And forgive me in advance for saying this - in spite of the obvious magnificence of 'Float On' - Modest Mouse lost their way after this album.
So what can I say about The Moon and Antarctica? First, it is properly gorgeous; the drugsick flanged-out guitars on 'gravity rides everything' are, to me, the most satisfying and most pure example of a certain mid-nineties American indie sound. It's cosmic guitar...coupled with man troubles, grief, and the upside down logic of one very fucked up and very talented dude's inner life. It was real, y'know; like before the Arcade Fire showed up and convinced the world that having a second cousin die in your family was good enough reason to record a disengenuous emo album for emotionally retarded adults.
I think The Moon and Antarctica is about delirium tremens (among a lot of other far out shit you'd be hard pressed to decode properly), or coming off drugs in a hard way - including all the emotionally draining and odd revelations that go with that state of being. It is a rehab album. But an interesting one. Paranoia, tiny cities made of ashes, rats, gravity turned inside out - it's ferocious lyrically. It also seems to have a sort of scientific script of its own (Hi, I'm Isaac, I am detoxing, these are the new rules of natural science: I can get away with them because my music is so arresting and my lyrics are kinda rad).
#20 William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops (2001-2003)
First, just look at those covers. I would love to own all four of these on vinyl and mount the sleeves on a wall like that. But without the text that identifies them as a conceptual tape loop experiment tackling themes of entropy and decay, obviously. 'Cos that would just look buffoonish and pretentious. Second, I weirdly feel the need to acknowledge that this choice might not technically constitute an album in spite of the fact that I am making up the rules of this list as I go along. The disintegration loops were released separately over a period of years. But they are a very much of a piece (as the super artwork indicates) and, moreover, they all evolved from th.... ame ....cording ....ocess in Willia... ...inski's apar..ent....
That last sentence was me trying to make my paragraph read like a disintegration loop. Y'see these recordings are famous primarily because of their missing bits. Or more specifically, the process of those bits becoming missing as the music loops toward oblivion, sometimes lurching violently like a dying old poet with syphilis and other times fading away smoothly [grasps for metaphor] like an esteemed professor dying in a Swiss euthanasia clinic? Anyway, the story goes that Basinski, an avant garde classical composer of loops, accidentally gave birth to the recordings we know now. During a digital archiving session, he let one of his old magnetic tape loops continue to run after noticing that flakes of magnetic tape were physically crumbling away at the recording head. He became fascinated by deteriorating change in the resulting sound and he let the loop continue until it destroyed itself. It was this eureka moment which imbued the Disintegration loops with their grand (and fairly high-art) concept. They became a profound meditation on processes of decay and ruin.
The story (taken as Gospel elsewhere) also has it that the recording process finished on the morning of 9/11, allowing Basinski and his ageing arty mates to sit on the roof of their downtown Manhattan loft and listen to it for the first time as the twin towers fell, or so he "alleges" according to a kinda skeptical wikipedia entry. It's just too good. I picture a silhouetted tableau of ravaged bird skeletons jutting archly out of deckchairs, ooohing and aaahing at the fin de siecle spectacle of it all, sipping martinis cool as you like, congratulating William how he made the perfect soundtrack to the most shaping single event of our new century, and wondering what dear dead old Andy would have thought. Smell a story which seems just a bit too fortuitous for its own sake or wot? Regardless, there is enough fortuity in the process that saw these remarkable recordings come about. The music speaks very powerfully for itself without the symbolic back story.
The original loops (before they develop Alzheimer's of the cassette-ribbon) are uniformly beautiful and deeply textured with lots of components. They are also nearly always mournful. If you were a fanciful sap, you might fancy that the loops are aware that they are dying from the get-go, a thought helped by the fact that some of them sound like the searching trumpets of vast lonely things floating through space. As they deteriorate, most change shape in mesmerising ways. Indeed, some become even more beautiful, dissolving slowly and imperceptibly into a molten acquiescence with their inevitable fate for anything up to an hour or more (as you may imagine, listening to these loops can be quite zen).
The loops don't all go gentle into the good night though. One or two of the others (particularly the first loop on the second album) have frightened me to be honest. Their structure falls away so violently, cracking either side of bottomless holes of negative space where the music is supposed to be. You feel like you are perched on the edge of a nothing, an actual proper metaphysical 'nothing', watching something beautiful and familiar (the rhythmic loop, by now, so acclimatised in your mind) crumble away at the edges of this empty horror. It sent me sick with a once latent but now rapidly uncoiling dread. A spectre-memory from the wondering root of the child's brain.
It was a night I woke in a dark place that wasn't my bedroom. Either through sleepwalking or from snoozing on a couch past bedtime, I had ended up in the downstairs sitting room, or some distorted gloomy mockery of it. Having never been there at night, the strange angles, shadows and ambience in the room utterly annihilated my childish perceptual representation of the place as being somewhere that exists only by day. The deepest shadows were voids, each and every one of them. Black voids. Not the dark, but negative space. Being 12 years shy of my first encounter with John Lennon exhorting me to relax and float into one of them, I had a kenipshit and puked super noodles all over myself with anxiety. I wasn't afraid of monsters, or even the dark. I was afraid of the idea, and the possibility, of there being a 'nothing'. So, em, yeah...those Disintegration Loops then, they sure bring back those fond nostalgic memories eh?
Also, I like to fancy that there is a loop for everyone. I've found my loop to fall in love with, Loop 1 on album 4. What's yours? I hope you wrestle with this ambient masterpiece and find out.
Every piece of writing about this nigh perfect sunshine-pop album is obliged to mention a scene in the movie Garden State where Natalie Portman tells the dork from Scrubs that the song 'New Slang' will change his life. Said scene (which is toenail-curlingly terrible by the way) has since become cultural shorthand for a certain sort of clichéd All-American 'indie' existence - the overthought and awkward young life and its soundtrack. Interestingly, and in spite of the now unavoidable association, The Shins' first record doesn't fit easily into such a pigeon hole. The scene in Garden State would have made a lot more internal sense if Natalie Portman's character had recommended your man a Smith's song or something by Death Cab for Cutie because 'New Slang', like all of James Mercer's songs on Oh, Inverted World, is both lyrically obtuse (though quite expressionistic) and emotionally remote - the work of an enigmatic songwriter smitten with both the classic UK and US '60s pop sound. He's a man who you feel is a lot more concerned with a song's aesthetic form rather than its emotional pay-off.
So we've established that Oh, Inverted World is unlikely to change your life. What it most likely will do, however, is give you goosebumps, such are its marbled merits. It plays out like a best-of playlist constructed from a successful afternoon spent bargain bin diving in Amoeba records or some such place. Actually, in that way, Oh, Inverted World reminds me of The La's classic debut due to the obvious amount of fussing that went into achieving its prettily faded aura. The production arrests you from the first breathy lines of 'Caring is Creepy' then hangs like a mist over the rest of an album which, for all its artfully constructed delicacy, is constructed of more songwriting steel than a truckload of its contemporaries.
Reading back, this appraisal makes Oh, Inverted World sound a bit emotionally bereft doesn't it? It's not. The songs are slippery with Mercer's surrealistic lyrical style, where odd couplets and unusual images can tug you from all sorts of funny angles (sample WTF lyric - godspeed all the bakers at dawn/ they all cut their thumbs/ and bleed into their buns) especially in the context of the gorgeous music. Speaking of which, 'New Slang' is about as gorgeous as music gets. It bubbles up from a long sigh of an intro, hangs around for a couple of exalted moments, then tapers back away into the same sigh, leaving you feel like it goes on in both directions for ever.
When I first got my hands on this unusual album, I was immediately charmed by a warm, chiming little cuckoo-clock of an instrumental called 'sunshine clouds (and everything proud)'; so much so that it became my new mobile ringtone before I had even heard the album run its full course. I never got bored of it, but it did annoy the fuck out of a lot of people. I know this sounds like a odd way to begin a critical approach to this or any album, but this is a funny album. I'm not sure if it is what a lot of people seem to think it is for a start. Talking Heads revivalism? Only in Alec Ounsworth's voice really. Neutral Milk Hotel channellers? Well, songs like 'Is this Love?' do sometimes come to a familiar spluttering and emotive boil. But we could play pegs and holes all we want and get no closer to the real essence of this one. It has depths to plumb. Go on, drop a few heavy thoughts down the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah well and hear them reverberate with a satisfying splunk.
Because of, or in spite of, the way they were announced to the world (as an unsigned band hype story), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah felt, to me, misunderstood as another average-to-good hype band. The truth was far more intriguing. And it still shines enigmatically from within the crystalline case surrounding 'in this home on ice' and over the beautifully bombed-out, distant, instrumental ambience that pillows Ounsworth's vocal acrobatics during 'upon this tidal wave of young blood'.
"Wot's that? A fookin' remix album? You're arvin' a larf mate!" Well, it is and it isn't. For his much-hyped Fabric mixtape, the hooded-eyed Chilean mystery man of percussive techno (or, if you read discogs - microhouse/horsetranquiliser house/po-mo deconstructed micro mash-ups of deep llama bleat house) decided to fuck around with a bunch of his own unremixed music. In the process, he effectively created the first proper Ricardo Vilallobos album since Thé Au Harem De Arichméde.
It's an exhilarating wormhole of a record which, above all else, displays a ferociously creative intelligence head-over-heels with the sound of percussion; doolally for a drum; smitten with sticks that hit taut surfaces. Just check the sporadic thunderings of Japanese ceremonial drumming that break over 'Andruic and Japan' and fucking feel it. You'll never encounter a workmanlike Ableton thud on a Villalobos record.
Anyways, every last click, every disembodied 'womp', and every bowling ball rolled over bubblewrap has its fussed over (but not fussy) place in this microcosmic symphony about what? Well nothing really. Just the sheer textural joy of sounds and rhythms. Sounds that get followed and chased by more sounds. Lubed-up sounds spinning on roundabouts. Sounds that climb ladders and slide down snakes. And, yes, sounds that sometimes do disappear up their own holes. At key points a strongly developed bassline or extended vocal sample (such as the brilliantly shattered 4/4 electro-pop of '4 wheel drive') makes itself felt above the microcosm to give the whole thing the illusion of progression, but the astute Villalobos listener knows you don't progress horizontally with this stuff. You tunnel.
Cripes, I never expected to deal with these sort of problems when I agreed to become a virtual venue. First, Candy Claws's bizzarro backstage requests, and now this useless lump of a virtual roadie - I downloaded him from freeware so it's probably my fault. Well it looks like things are just about fixed up, so I'll hand you over to the brilliant Candy Claws, who I am very proud to have presenting exclusive music on my weblog...
Here we are in Ireland at last! It's been a dream working with Kevin at Indiecater putting "In the Dream of the Sea Life" out into the world. If you see him around, shake his hand and give him many gifts. We're on a "virtual" tour, and today we have a video for Lantern Fish, second song on the album. Ryan went to Bucerias, Mexico two weeks ago with his family, and filmed the descent into Mexico City at night. The footage was twice as long as the song, so we cut it into two parts and overlapped them. Here you can see evidence that humans have finally learned to make sparkly fields of light, something the plankton have been doing for millions of years. Will all of these videos be in black and white? What will the universe say?
You can stream the entire album, read reviews, and pick up a copy (digital or physical) at Indiecater.
Visit our blog to catch up on the tour and see a full list of dates and links.
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Time to stop gnawing your fingernails guys, the exit poll results from my brain have started to trickle in. But first..a picture of Santa, taken after he rolled into Kells atop a fire engine and heroically switched on the Christmas lights. Thanks Santa, we were genuinely worried this year.
As you can see from the picture, Santa also managed to accidentally light up a person. Thankfully, she only suffered minor burns, and, being in the civil defense, was able to regenerate the damaged flesh using her special suit.
But second...Candy Claws (Santy Claus's lil indie cousins) are dropping by tomorrow night as part of their virtual tour! Pop in at 7pm to catch their exclusive video.
Right then, the list. Oh one last thing. I said I'd be rigorous, but didn't really manage. The closest I got was faffing around with scraps of paper with album titles scribbled on them last Sunday afternoon. It's a list in flux, but I'd like to think it's representative of my relationship with music over the last nine years. In others words, some stuff is pretty obvious, and some is less so. It's all very personal though.
#25 Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)
A couple of weeks ago I listened to Silent Alarm for the first time in a while and it pretty much punched me in the face for not remembering its brilliance. It also kneed me in the gut with this deep and weepy sense of nostalgia, which is odd because it only came out in 2005. While my getting smashed and hopping around indie niteclubs to 'Helicopter' might partly explain this response, I think Kele Okereke's songs themselves should probably shoulder most of the blame. Especially the less visceral and more romantic numbers like 'This modern love' and 'So here we are'. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say these songs are so breathy and evocative that they colour memories in retrospect. Like, did I really run down Brighton Pier with Tamara one chilly December night to watch the stars turn to dawn over the English Channel, holding hands as the MDMA we got from Effie's mate...shite, that was an episode of Skins wasn't it?
Silent Alarm: a lighthouse in the decade's dark ocean of NME guitar indie, and better than the Libertines.
#24 Luomo - Vocalcity (2000)
In the sort of marriage between the visual and the audio aesthetic that I love, the cover - a face fragmenting into tiny squares across an ice-blue disco ball - gives you a bit of an idea of what's going on with this one. Volcacity is the Finnish dance producer Sasu Ripatti's (aka Vladislav Delay)'s first and best release as Luomo, the moniker he adopted for recordings that spin endless lengths of strange fabric out of the bones of house music (fruit of the loom-o?). Beats rattle and click like marbles dropped on hard surfaces in huge hollow spaces while analogue bass lines contort themselves in a receding sea of jazzy movement that shifts seamlessly across lengthy tracks. All the while, that mainstay of house music, a treated vocal (male? female? joyous? mournful? emotionless?) is an ever-present will o'the wisp leading us through Vocalcity's organic musical terrain. Actually, the word 'organic' gets bandied around a lot in relation to certain types of dance music. Volcacity deserves the description though. If you buried it in your back garden and sprayed it with baby bio, it would probably grow into the next Luomo album.
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People moan about lists a lot at this time of year. But hey, lists aren't all bad. Look at Schindler; his list saved lives. And what about Santa's list? Sure without that objective global roll-call of naughtiness and niceness, spoiled little rich shits would get loads of cool stuff for Christmas while their virtuous but poor counterparts get crap from Valuland. And then, of course, there are shopping lists, not to mention lists of wanted people to look out for on holiday, or lists of endangered things like buildings and charismatic megafauna such as the giant panda, or even fifteen truly bizarre creatures. In fact, the list goes on...
To an expectant crowd, Oskar finished his list and announced the name of his all-time number one favouritist Irish stand-up comic of the decade
I'm a list-a-holic. Indeed, at this time of year, I hoover them into me like gak into Amy Winehouse. Pitchfork, Irish Times, The Quietus, State - you name it, it's all gone up me and man, am I wired for shite-talk. Yet, I've never been great at making them, because I typically balk at the small degree of application and rigour required to make one that is anything other than arbitrary. This year will be different, though. No. It really will - for the following list of reasons.
(i) I spent 2009 finishing a PhD, so rigour and application come a little easier to me now.
(ii) I began the decade aged nineteen and am finishing it aged 28 so I am well placed to do an albums of the decade type thing.
(iii) I work a 9-to-5 type job at the moment so if I write blog posts every evening I don't have to choke on the invisible 24-hour backward vomit of PhD guilt that stalked me last year.
(iv) I think this was a brilliant decade for music (refer to sneak preview MP3 below)
(v) I also think this was a brilliant year for music.
(vi) I just want to look back over my twenties.
With the above in mind, I'm going to attempt two lists. The first will be of my top 20 albums of 2009, and the other will be of my top 20 albums of the decade. I'll alternate between them over the coming month. Of course, the construct of objectivity will be utter nonsense here. If you want a good example of objectivity, though, look to State's ongoing countdown which draws on a wide pool of journalists with varied tastes. As a counter example, my lists won't be heavy on pop (which is probably better represented by songs anyway), hip-hop, or country. Similarly, they won't be definitive or anything like that - just me looking back on a year and a decade. I do hope they'll be illuminating, or at least encourage readers to check out either what's new or to go back to the old stuff they've forgotten about. Finally, I invite comments. Like, if you're roughly in my musical ballpark and want to duke it out over albums I'm fair game. Also, if there is an excellent album from a genre with which I'm not au fait, please let me know. However, if you are going to try to tell me that I am some sort of cunt for not having the Arcade Fire anywhere near my top 20 then now is probably the time to leave. Here goes!
