My Favourite Albums of 2011 (#17 Wolves in the Throne Room - Celestial Lineage)

Tweet Fellow tortoise Karl has completed his albums of the year list with two exceptionally well written pieces on E-40 and Danny Brown respectively. Check them out, even if you don't like rap, because they are just fine examples of music writing, demonstrating Karl's analytic and also playful mind engaging thoroughly with stuff he loves. I envy the dude's clarity of thought, I really do.

Now, to continue plowing my lonely furrow. 

#17 Wolves in the Throne Room - Celestial Lineage

biomatter altar to the moss gods of treeplantopia

Chief among the many things I like about Celestial Lineage is how the album works thematically as an ecological prayer. For example, one of the songs, 'woodland cathedral', depicts the forest as a sacred space and contains the lyrics "In the place of abundant life and constant song/ Through pores of trees spoke ancient time... In this arching dome/ Here, we come to pray". Words like these are echoed throughout a set that continually evokes the awesomeness of nature (that's awesome in the non Bill and Ted sense), through music that can be alienating and tumultuous or mournful in a huge and beautiful way (like the sound of a sad planet). 

To a casual metal listener, this sort of subject matter might seem odd for a black metal album. Like where are the shit-stained altars and re-animated Nordic corpse armies? But, as Wolves in the Throne Room are wont to point out in their consistently excellent interviews, at its core black metal is about metaphysics and mysticism. Satanism is just one avenue through which musicians grapple with the metaphysical mindset. Ecological transcendentalism is another. 

Which brings me to my favourite Wolves in the Throne Room factoid. Apparently, the band have their own sustainable farm where they live like a bunch of modern-day Henry David Thoreaus and Ralph Waldo Emersons. As the man said - "fair fucks to them". They seem to be completely living out the ideology espoused through Celestial Lineage's both grandiose and, in a world where we might soon be firing nukes at each other over ground water, political music.

MP3: Wolves in the Throne Room-Prayer of Transformation

Asleep on the podcast heap #6

Tweet Like Mad Men season 5, episode 6 of the podcast was held up by post production problems.

fuck da man

I wanted to stick to my artistic vision, retain some credibility, and not dumb down, but the studio execs really had me by the balls. They wanted more Ed Sheeran and Skrillex. They wanted laddish banter and a prank phone call bit, and by God, they tried to grind me down. But I held my ground. I stared those suits down, slowly raised my middle finger while making a creaking noise out of the corner of my mouth and said, "Listen up, you corporate vermin. It's my way or the highway! Either take these poorly recorded middlebrow digressions about weird music and films, or hire some sexy show-off kid with all the right moves...but no Goddamn soul."

That told them.

Um the new microphone. Um. Yeah. I know it is a good piece of equipment, but I obviously did something wrong recording this episode as my voice 'clips' just a little. I had no headphones to monitor myself (typical shite with me), and might have made the mistake of leaving the microphone volume up a bit too high. My guest, John from Solar Bears, sounds grand though. He sat in a sensible spot and didn't honk up close to the microphone like his interviewer. I promise to improve over time.

John was a great guest. He's a thoughtful guy with a clear love of cinema. We discussed the director Lars Von Trier, the relationship independent musicians have with bloggers in Ireland, Irish music blogging in general, an "antiquated hip hop" performer called S. Maharba, downloading culture, and finally what to expect next from Solar Bears. It's really good. Do listen.

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Wot's hot and wot's not

Tweet

Get the measure kids. Welcome to the compost heap guide to what's hot and what's not. Because I have no graphic skills, you will have to imagine a picture of a tape measure or thermometer going up the right hand side of the screen. Sorry.

You might worry to find something you think is HOT in the NOT column. First; for shame, you unfashionable goose. But hang in there, it will arbitrarily switch to the HOT column in a couple of weeks.

Getting it right: when treading that fine line between sophisticated and silly headgear, remember colour blocking is KEY this season

HOT

MP3: Korallreven-Sa Sa Samoa (Elite Gymnastics Mix) [ft. Julianna Barwick]

This hits so many sweet spots that it is borderline obscene. The cover image, a close up of a big bunch of pills, would already pretty much sum up this Swedish indie dance track before Elite Gymnastics got their paws on it (BUT OF COURSE it's Swedish. Up there, they wet their fingers with break-up tears before dipping them in MDMA). What the American duo bring to the party is the most shameless throwback hardcore breakbeat you will hear this side of Zomby's Where Were You in '92. 

Also contains: Whitney Houston, the soon-to-feature-in-one-of-my-lists Julianna Barwick, and disembodied voices breathing words like 'Ecstasy' and 'Hacienda'. Somewhere, Simon Reynolds is ejaculating.

Stream: Mohn-Eberplatz 2020

Kompakt old-timers Burger and Voigt are best friends, and do lots of best friends stuff together like eating vegetarian food and making ambient techno (apparently, the lads who founded Kompakt in a Cologne record store all love their veggie grub). This new collaboration comes on like a brooding emotional crisis in a vaguely futuristic darkness (or maybe that's just the title bleeding into my impressions).

Dark Souls

After it received much twitter repping (aka rabid evangelizing) from my friend Aidan, I caved in and bought this game. He will join me on a podcast soon to talk about it. You die a lot in the game, which is central to most discussion around it. Of course, in my day, one repeatedly bit the bullet in many games. Precision platformers and side scrolling shooters appear to have hardened my gaming hide more than I realized, so I've found myself comfortable enough with dying every five minutes. Will I become a rabid evangelist? Will I start to resent games pitched to a wider audience? Will I end up loathing Skyrim? Oh Skyrim, I jest, I love you. Not for your clumsy battle system, but for your hard beautiful landscape, for the wild cragged lands of The Reach under your two moons, for your underground ocean of mist with its bio-luminescent fungal stars, and for providing my Orcen betrothed (yeah, I married an Orc, what of it?).

World Poetry Day

Why not read a good poem?

NOT

Parvo

Remember I got sick? It turns out I caught a weird virus called Parvo. Parvo is also known as slapped-cheek because it makes your cheeks blotchy. 

Steak on a stone

What the fuck is this shit? "Try our exciting, sizzling, steak on a stone experience" bawled a sign outside the hotel in Kells. Curious, I researched this new thing. It appears that you cook your own steak on a slab brought to your table. Let me run that by you again, you go to a place where you normally pay someone else to cook your food for you to experience the "exciting" novelty of cooking your own food. Paying. To. Cook. Your. Own. Food. Of course, there'll be plenty of gawms who'll think this is the best thing ever. The sort of saps whose eyes bug out on stalks when a shitty piece of factory farmed chicken coated in knorr is brought sizzling to their table in a mid price Mexican restaurant in a business park. Five weeks later they'll still be going on about the amazing meal they had in The Aubergine (stock name for an Irish county town restaurant), "it was something else. It came out sizzling. SIZZLING mind you". Here's a thought. Food sizzles on contact with heat. It is very hard to cook food on a hot surface without it sizzling at some point in the process. If you put a poop on hot stone, the poop will sizzle too. There is nothing remarkable about a fucking sizzle.

the mysterious men on Aldi's tills

Tweet "I'll aim for one post per night" I said last week, clearly lying through my teeth. My God, I'm some man for the empty promises. I have a genuine excuse however. A bug has taken up residency in my body since last Tuesday. It's one of those achy, sniffly, low-grade bugs that simmer away just below the level of an actual cold or flu, at a point where it isn't debilitating enough to keep you from work, yet where it remains capable of eroding the vim you'd need to do something extra curricular.

microbe mania

Blog maintenance is just part of the sorry story of neglected tasks and shitty shortcuts that has made up the past week. I've also taken to eating cold spaghetti hoops from the tin, giving the crumpled clothes from my 'clothes mound' (who needs laundry baskets?) perfunctory sniffs before putting them on regardless, and, for three consecutive days, crawling into bed at 7pm to watch a weird series of youtube videos of a man who may or may not have autism talk the viewer through every single NES game ever made (it's called chrontendo and it is more addictive than crack). 

I did manage to get one cool thing done over the weekend, though. I bought a flashy new microphone for the podcast. It's one of those professional looking desk microphones and, I've got to say, I can't look at it without wanting to break into a Johnny Cash song or a mock BBC world service report about the war effort in Europe. It's getting its first spin tomorrow in a podcast where John from the Irish electronic duo Solar Bears will be talking about, erm, cool stuff that he likes (you know the drill). 

Before I go, I'll share a thought for the day courtesy of my mother. Where do the funny men who work the tills in Aldi come from?

"They can't be from around here, their accents are half Northern. And isn't it odd to see men at that age working on shopping tills? I'd expect them to be on security".

You'd swear these men were Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompas the way she talks about them; creatures shipped in to work. An army of mysterious, possibly cloned, middle aged males with worryingly vague accents, shipped in trucks under the cover of darkness to work Aldi's tills. Those men genuinely perturb her and, I'll be honest, they perturb me a bit too. 

MP3: Faine Jade-Dr Paul Overture

This is just a cool acid oddity from a little known 1960s songwriter.

My favourite albums of 2011 (#18 The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient)

Tweet Aaaaaaaand just in case you thought I had forsworn music with guitars entirely, take a look and see.

#18 The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient

I once read a theory in some Brit literary magazine that one main differentiating factor between American and British literature is the physical geography of both countries. It's an easy enough theory to buy into on a basic level, I suppose, when you consider vast rambling things like Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow and a Song of Myself. And you can similarly apply it to cinema, painting, and music. In fact, I read almost the same argument somewhere about psychedelic music. American psychedelic music tends to focus on flight, space, deserts, the cosmos, with colossal guitar lines to match the sentiment, whereas the English variety, if we disregard Spiritualized who have the neck to flaunt this neat theory, is more introspective and almost domestic, all gardens, hobbits, tea parties, and plinky plonk chamber music and shit.

All this comes to mind, because many of the reviews of Slave Ambient described it as a road trip album (almost without exception in fact). This, the critics say, is driving music, open highway dream music, dust on your sunglasses and next exit forty miles away music. It's really American isn't it? That shimmering, dusty sense of openness and scope. I love it. In Ireland, you could realistically drive halfway from Dublin to Galway in the time it takes to listen to Slave Ambient. In parts of America you probably wouldn't realistically make it halfway to the next petrol pump.

I always have a few albums like this on the go. Before, it might have been something like the Hold Steady or Jonathan Richman, something big and romantic and adventurous and innocent. I just buy into that cheesy road trip dream wholeheartedly. I think it is because I lived in Canada for a couple of years when I was in my late teens, which is such a heightened time of life anyway, and before I returned to Ireland I decided to road trip on my own (to the horror of my family back home).

I worked on a friend's farm in Kamloops British Columbia for a few weeks, then upped sticks and hitch-hiked to Montreal, stopping off at a few other mates' houses as I went. It took me three weeks in total, with stopovers in Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Quebec City. Along the way, I travelled in a van with a sad woman delivering samples of Umbro soccer balls to a sports shop in Winnipeg, and in a lobster delivery truck with a weird dope smoking man who belonged to a number cult (he had changed his name because he believed that the letters in his previous name were numerically unlucky - each letter has a corresponding number - and names were a form of control over people. His life, he assured me, now saw the fulfilment of his every dream since he switched his name from Kevin to Kevyne or something. I thought "wow, delivering lobsters in a shitty truck, what a peculiar dream to attain").

So yah, Slave Ambient reminds me of all that good stuff.

MP3: The War on Drugs-Come to the City

Jeff Mangum reprise (how Gardenhead got his name)

Tweet I thought I'd finish my list of albums before March ended. Now there's a thought to have you honking with laughter. Let's see how this week goes though. I'll aim for one per night, and strictly no gibberish allowed. "But it's all gibberish!" - voice at the back.

the only sweater I ever wore/ was knit in 1935

But first, a Jeff Mangum reprise. Did you go? What did you think?

I thought it was a fine gig. Vicar Street can be a big and loud place at the best of times, the sort to cruelly swallow up quiet 'intimate' gigs, yet Mangum was so assured and gutsy in his playing that he possessed the venue with ease. Indeed, he was far more confident and gutsy than I expected (youtube clips of mad sweaty Jeff eyeballing north American audiences back in the day, coupled with the precious reverence his songs inspire, had me fearing the worst - an awkward quasi-religious shush-fest, presided over by pained looking dudes in sweat-drenched shirts). For example, he interacted playfully with hecklers. The Jeff Mangum of my imagination (and he inhabits a big part of my imagination) would never have smartly retorted "yes dear?" to a heckler. Another presumptuous failing on my part.

There were no surprises in the songs Mangum sang. We were treated to all of 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea', a smattering of 'On Avery Island', B side 'Engine', and the harrowing and uncomfortable unreleased song, 'Little Birds'. I was secretly hoping on an extremely long shot for a new track or, on a shorter shot, for an interesting cover version like that time he and Chris Knox sang John Lennon's Oedipal horror-show 'Mother'. But nope. We got an unadorned live reading of Neutral Milk Hotel's small canon.

Because that canon is so small, and because Mangum's fans are, well, they're obsessive aren't they?, there was always a worry that the man might be drowned out by the impassioned singing of overexcited punters hollering those unusual and malleable lyrics that they love and interpret in so many personal ways. As soon as he opened his mouth, it was clear that there would be no chance of that. His voice is freakishly loud and commanding. I swear I could have heard it over the PA and, more than that, I think he could have gotten away singing to a crowded Vicar Street without a microphone. He fucking yodels. Moreover, he even substituted his voice for certain instrumental bits, his throat creating all these overlapping resonances that sounded like a weird folk instrument. It was remarkable, and watching him made me think of Van Morrison on Astral Weeks, stretching phonemes and syllables into big elastic vessels for his expanding soul.

For many, Neutral Milk Hotel = In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Yet, by showcasing a good chunk of On Avery Island between the songs from his magnum (mangum?) opus, Mangum afforded us a view of it not as this sui generis magical thing, but as a product of overarching worries and obsessions that run through his entire repertoire. The dichotomy of revulsion/ fascination with matters of sex in 'Oh Comely' can plainly be seen in 'A Baby for Pree' and the complicated intimations of a redemptive religious afterlife that riddle the entire album 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea' are hinted at in 'Gardenhead/ Leave me Alone'.

Lots of people think Jeff Mangum is nuts. My friend Karl tweeted that he had a dawning realisation that Jeff was not psycho-normative during the gig in Vicar Street; i.e. that his lyrics aren't a stylistic hat he wears but an honest manifestation of a bizarre worldview. I think there is some truth in this. His obsessions are so singular, and can so easily be traced through all of his work from 'A Baby for Pree' through to their apogee on 'Little Birds' that you'd wonder what sort of a zany rollercoaster of a dinner party conversation you might have with the man. In that way, he reminds me of the famous 'outsider' artist Henry Darger who spent much of his adult life dreaming up a fantasy world filled with a band of nude girls who fight against the evils of humanity. There is an all-consuming intensity to Jeff Mangum's particular dream world (as opposed to worlds - it's easy to imagine this stuff as all coming from the same burning place), and Wednesday night was a reminder of just how vivid and tangibly strange that place is.

MP3: Neutral Milk Hotel-Gardenhead/ Leave Me Alone
(Neutral Milk factoid: Jeff wrote the above song after the proprietor of this blog stole his lunch money once)

ghost, ghost I know you live within me...

Tweet I'm going to see Jeff Mangum play solo in Vicar Street tomorrow night. While seven or eight years ago the prospect of such a gig would see kittens come out of me, the word that probably best sums up my attitude now is "wistful" or, perhaps, "curious". I still view In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as a fine album, but probably not as the all-encompassing masterpiece I once thought it was. The little boats we pilot past fixed works of art afford us views of them from different angles, and I'm a good bit down the coast from that album now, at a vantage point where I can appreciate it with a cooler eye.

I guess thoughts of tomorrow's gig make me wistful because I think In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is the last rock album that completely consumed me. My brain set up camp inside that album and didn't leave it for years and I can't see another album weaving the same spell. Time has eroded the required quota of youthful passion for that to happen. So it will be with a fond but slightly dispassionate heart that I'll watch tomorrow's show, and quietly sing along to those songs packed with all that kinetic, strange, and abstract imagery that once seemed to be the centre of my world.

MP3: Neutral Milk Hotel-Two Headed Boy