My favourite albums of 2011 (#20 Mist - House)

Tweet I'm beat. Completely exhausted. I know this because I am hating on things like a lunatic.

Today I hated on freesheet newspapers; a man's voice on the bus; the braying self-important baloney peddled by self-styled opinion merchants on twitter (this type tend to have some variation of "all opinions my own" in their twitter biographies to aid the feeble illusion that they are employed by some important media organisation that actually gives a fuck about whether they are towing some official line with their inconsequential brain farts about Crackbird and Vincent Brown)*; cryptic passive aggression on twitter (I see too many glum riddles directed at unnamed people in order to a: piss the unnamed person off and b: elicit sympathy from one's emotionally manipulated and increasingly exasperated followers); the fact that all the grass verges on my road are mangled by cars parked in the slovenly manner of those who value getting in their door a couple of seconds sooner over maintaining a housing estate; people (clutching freesheets of course) who steam onto the DART like panicky farm animals before anyone has a chance to get off it; some dumbo ad for Lynx for women I saw in Connolly train station; and that old favourite of mine, myself (because I stayed up late last night listening to a podcast about computer games in the full knowledge that I would spend today tired and cranking impotently at the abyss of modern Irish life).

Um...time for some serenity.

#20 Mist - House

I always get the feeling that there are clearly distinct forces at work within Emeralds, pulling the group in different directions at once and thereby lending their music the dynamism, synthesis, and complexity you often find in groups where strong individual talents are just about held in check by the greater effect of their combined efforts (see also: Animal Collective). In the flux of such groups, it's often the case that the distinctive style of one member will win out on a given album. Like you can clearly hear Mark McGuire's exploring guitar style as the element that most informs 2009's 'What Happened', and after listening to Mist's 'House' I get the feeling that John Elliott's compositional style played the larger part in 'Does it Look Like I'm Here?' (my favourite album of 2010 by the way, and I remain smitten with its beautifully poised compositions).

Elliott and his partner in Mist, Sam Goldberg of Radio People, make music that plays like 'Does it Look Like I'm Here?' purified, completely stripped of McGuire's space-tentacles-towards-infinity guitar lines. 'House' is animated by steady pulses that glow like smeared LED lights and beatific synth pads that can deliver literal physical chills through the sense of cosmic, quasi-religious bliss they communicate, music for the escalator journey to heaven in Powell and Pressburger's 'A Matter of Life and Death'. The album's key track, 'I can still hear your voice', is the most euphoric of the lot, drifting completely free of any worldly reference points at all, consisting of wave after wave of hovering chords supplicant to some aural pleasure principle. 

Listening to 'House' I wonder if this is what joining certain cults might feel like? This zonked, never ending drift into happy land? It can be a bit much; it's not as complex or meaty as Emeralds, but as a serenity bath it takes some beating.

MP3: Mist-I Can Still Hear Your Voice

*before you comment about this, I realise that everything I say about twitter is laughably hypocritical. Also, today's hatin' is temporary.