Great thread thus far. Love those Panda Bear songs. Like a wall of sonic bliss.
Great thread thus far. Love those Panda Bear songs. Like a wall of sonic bliss.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
It's just so strange, because I love psychedelia, noise, electronics, old Mercury Rev, pop and experimental music, which is pretty much exactly what the AC crew is. Except their music does absolutely nothing for me. Oh well...Quoting Derek (view post)
#18 Brian Eno - The Drums Between the Bells
Eno has been very hit or miss these days. While 2008's collaboration with David Byrne, Everything the Happens Will Happen Today, was one of the best things Eno or Byrne have ever done, Eno's 2010 album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, is the very definition of lazy, taking the phrase "phoned-in" to a whole new level. And so I had no idea what to expect from 2011's Drum Between the Bells.
Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised, and you might say I was blown away. Eno tapped into some new vein of creativity here; the album sounds new and futuristic, while simultaneously utilizing sounds and techniques the artist has used before. We have a mix of acoustic and electronic instruments, glitch, abrasive guitars, bubbling synths, samples, vocoded vocals, spoken word, and all manner of bleeps and blips.
What's more, the album is consistently surprising and engaging. It also has great flow as it moves from one track to another, creating the kind of sonic journey I expect from artists like Eno. This album proves that, while there have been many imitators, there is still nothing like the original.
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i don't know if that's true. i think their different periods can appeal to different people
i myself prefer their freak folk stuff (sung tongs and feels) and have slowly started to become indifferent. did not care for tomboy in the least. the less said about avey's solo efforts the better
I'd say your an exception. At least in my experience, people either like them or they don't. Obviously different albums inspire different degrees of support/loathing, but almost everyone I've come across is either on one side of the fence or the other.
Awesome thread! I'll be looking forward to both your updates. I have lots much to catch up on already, especially Daniel's posts.
Derek, nice honorable mention list. Glad to see War on Drugs make it. I think I like them better after Vile left. Have you seen them play? I saw them with the sax player from Destroyer a couple weeks ago following a cluster of shows from Bon Iver and The National the days before. Good performance, but the sound was crappy and excruciatingly loud. Surprisingly, Bon Iver was the best of the three by far. The lead singer from The National put on quite the spectacle by going into the crowd and bringing people down to the general seating area despite protests from the security, which made up for his awkward drunkenness that persisted most of the show.
Getting back to the list. The Necks are good stuff. They remind me of a darker, more brooding version of Medeski, Martin, and Wood. Fleet Foxes would also be on my list. Helplessness blues definitely rates on my list for top 10 singles. I had a hard time with Opeth's Heritage. Their whole prog direction has this sortof pretentious veneer which fails to work for me. I'd rather listen to them play riffy Black Metal instrumentally than anything else. Owl Splinters really shows Deaf Center's great knack for economy of notes. Good pick that one. I think it's my favorite ambient release of the year with Hecker a close second. Strangely, most people I know either can't stand AC, or just dig Merriweather Post Pavilion. I am firmly in the Panda/AC love camp. Slow Motion is one best singles of the year for me.
The Red Shoes (Powell, 1948)
Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen, 1993)
Spring Breakers (Korine, 2012)
Sydney (Anderson, 1996)
El ángel exterminador (Luis Buñuel, 1963)
For those growing impatient, the list veers more towards rock, pop, etc. after this.
18
Jacaszek - Glimmer
Ambient music is often discussed in terms of its unique ability to evoke memories and take the listener to a distinct time and place, be it real or imaginary. No other album released this year may have nailed those particular qualities quite as well as Jacaszek's Glimmer, a blistering, nostalgic album whose success rides on taking instruments of the past (harpsicords, chimes, mandolins, oboes) and reshaping them for his own modern compositions. The arrangements and instrumentation are impressive enough, and certainly this could just as easily be classified as modern classical as ambient if genre classification's your game, but the ways Jacaszek uses them to create a genuine longing for the past, replete with melancholy, and the seeming inability of our memories to capture it takes Glimmer from a very good to a truly great album. The intermittent interruptions, glitches and decay that inhabit nearly every song hint at their incompletion (see particularly the second half of the astounding "Evening Strains to be Time's Vast"), the musician's own failure to recapture that which is lost. The result is an album that is both haunting and invigorating, complex yet accessible and emotionally raw yet brilliantly composed and realized. If I'd had more time than the last 5 or 6 weeks to soak it in, there's no doubt Glimmer would've landed higher on my list.
Favorite Tracks:
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Love this track. Need to check out the whole album.
#17 Two Bicycles - The Ocean
(available via bandcamp)
From the first few seconds of Two Bicycle's The Ocean I am instantly whisked away to a realm of nostalgia and memory. As Derek said in his last entry, the ability of ambient music to evoke memories and places is an important one, and one of the main reasons why I am so drawn to the genre.
Two Bicycles does not dwell in the deep end of the drone pool, instead the artist fully embraces to use of melody and structure, and creates pieces that are warm and childlike, whimsical and happy. It is an easy album to love, and it fully embraces the listener with open arms.
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Like that second track there, D. Also good to see Eno on your list. I wasn't as disappointed with Small Craft as you, but I agree this new album was a marked improvement. I'm not usually a fan of spoken word albums (not that that's all this one was), but he really created the right atmosphere for it to work.
17
David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights - Left By Soft
David Kilgour is most celebrated, and deservedly so, for his work with the seminal New Zealand indie rock outfit, The Clean, and for co-founding the brilliant Flying Nun label with Chris Knox and friends. And while The Clean's music, especially from their beginnings in '81 through the early 90s is beyond reproach, Kilgour's solo efforts always took a back seat. Where The Clean were more raw and aggressive, though always playful, Kilgour's solo work is much more laidback, restrained and unassuming. It never quite wows you like The Clean's best singles, yet it is consistently rewarding, featuring subtle yet masterful guitarwork with a tinge of psychedelia that is blissful and tender with an ever-present hint of melancholy. Left By Soft, seemingly overlooked or maybe just forgotten by everyone, continues to build upon Kilgour's already rock-steady body of work with another group of songs that contain his trademark of barely off-kilter guitars and his heavenly voice that sounds just as good as 30 years ago. It doesn't fit into any scene, break any boundaries or define any new sub-sub-genre. What it is is the work of a finely tuned master who, after three decades, simply can't help but write a handful of absolutely fantastic pop tunes. It almost seems as if the breezy effortlessness with which Kilgour's songs come across have led people to take him for granted. But nearly every one of Left By Soft's 11 tracks withstands close, repeated listens that not only ensure one of their solid songwriting, but which also contain emotional undertones that get me a little choked up every time. I can only hope Kilgour keeps sticking with it because there are few musicians who've delivered more consistently throughout such a long career.
Favorite Tracks:
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Me neither. But that's usually because of the music, which tends to be boring jazz or something without an edge. Also, on the Eno album the voice is strongly incorporated into the music; Eno uses the cadence and and rhythm of each strengthen each other. It might be one of the finest spoken word albums around.
#16 Animals as Leaders - Weightless
Animals as Leaders = two 8-string guitarists + a drummer
But are they pretentious and self-indulgent?
As fuck.
Fact: Tosin Abasi is a sonic executioner: a demon-slaying, dragon-destroying god of wrath of fury. His weapon of choice?
Weightless is an extreme, instrumental metal album that mixes in small elements of glitch and electronica to create something that is wholly original and unique. It’s like getting smashed in the face and kicked in the gut with the essence of PURE sound.
I’ve said it before, but when I listen to music I want to hear musicians and artists who are the best at what they do, people who can play the crap out of their instruments, people who can construct the most interesting things I’ve ever heard.
Animals as Leaders is such a band, and Weightless is such an album.
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Well put. It's not simply spoken word over background music. The two are closely intertwined, one informing the other, which makes it much more listenable.
The great thing about him is if you like the songs I posted, you'll most likely dig all of his solo work. Here Come the Cars is his masterpiece (example...seriously the progressions are just so friggin' beautiful!), but A Feather in the Engine is his more outright and consistently psychedelic album so I'd guess you'd like that one the most.
16
Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler/The Dream
It wasn't until a couple months ago when I saw Thee Oh Sees headline a show on Halloween night that I really got what the band was all about. Not that their brand of psych rock so far-out that I needed to see it first hand to understand it, but there was always something in their earlier albums that seemed almost too reckless, either rushed or just too vocally weird for me to fully embrace. On stage, together, they just rocked-the-fuck-out, keeping up a remarkably frenzied pace for over an hour and playing off one another's energy as well as almost any of other band. But to speak to their bothersome inconsistency, their other 2011 release, Castlemania, is one of my least favorite albums of the year. That it was almost entirely a solo project of Dwyer's, with the band merely showing up in the studio to help, shows how collectively, they manage to gel and restrain the over-the-top indulgences that individually, at least Dwyer and lead guitarist Petey Dammit! (as if the name didn't give it away) can exhibit. With Carrion Crawler/The Dream, originally planned as two separate EPs hence the slash, the band make their first foray into more expansive songs, featuring more 5+ minute songs than all their previous albums combined. And yet, the feverish garage rock pacing is hardly lost, but rather is integrated into the twists and turns these songs take given a little more breathing room. Brigid Dawson is also more present as vocal accompaniment, her smooth, sexy voice curbing the oft-shrill voice of Dwyer and adding another layer of harmony and playfulness present throughout the album. Ultimately, I'm not sure what caused Carrion Crawler/The Dream to come off as a more cohesive, enjoyable and flat-out fun album than The Oh Sees previous efforts, so I'm content to simply turn up the volume and blast this baby from start to finish.
Favorite Tracks:
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#15 Dawes - Nothing is Wrong
While I do tend to like music that is more experimental and technologically-focused, sometimes nothing beats the power of good song writing, and the latest album from this alt-country band contains eleven great songs. The music here isn't adventurous, nor is it unique or challenging. It's just a solid foundation upon which sit a set of amazing songs crafted with the kind of poetic nuance and eye for detail one might expect from the likes of Neil Young or Crosby Stills & Nash. Front man Taylor Goldsmith's vocals are relaxed and natural, and his brother's, Griffin, in-the-pocket drumming creates an exciting backbone upon which layers of guitar and organ are draped.
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15
Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
Perhaps even more than any of his previous albums, Tim Hecker's latest, Ravedeath, 1972, seems to focus on the disintegration of music and pushing notes and melodies to their breaking point, towards oblivion. Like all of his work, this album is haunting and unsettling yet nonetheless beautiful, but there is a constant tension present between the foreground and background as well as the song's progression and its destruction. It's fitting that the cover of the album depicts a piano teetering on a roof awaiting its own destruction (the picture itself is from the original 1972 event at MIT which has become a longstanding tradition whose significance I haven't a clue about) as Hecker uses the piano, the only non-digital sounds on the album to my ears, as a counterpoint to the digital drones and fuzz, the lone analog survival struggling to keep its identity amidst the otherwise digital arsenal. Hecker's subtle yet striking balance between the two, never veering too close to pure piano ambient not straying to deep into the fuzz/noise end of the spectrum, not only makes for fascinating listening experiences, but also shows that these two disparate sides of ambient can both inform and expand on the other.
Favorite Tracks:
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Good write up. Although, I wish Hecker would learn about mid and low frequencies. I feel as though so much of the Hekcer-style of modern ambient forgets about two of three groups of frequencies of sound. I know that one of these days he'll make an album that I love; I'm just waiting for it, and I keep checking in.
#15 Big Spider's Back - Memory Man
When I first heard Big Spider's Back's Memory Man, it was with an overwhelming sense of jealousy; this, I thought, is an album that I want to have made. Once I got over that sentiment, I learned to appreciate the album for what it is: an expert example of electronica and pop-ambient (or, chillwave, or glow-fi, or whatever the kids are calling it these days). You can tell that BSB has a background in more traditional song writing, because the melody and hooks are never too deeply buried beneath the mountain of dense atmospherics and bubbling electronics. This is one of 2011's most consistently interesting releases.
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14
The Psychic Paramount - II
To say that Psychic Paramount's II is for people who like guitars would be like saying that skydiving is for people who like wind. This is not merely full of masterful guitarwork, it's full pure, unadulterated guitar fury. There's not ounce of wasted time - album opener "Intro_sp" starts off instantly at 100 mph and it barely slows down from there. For sheer adrelanine rush, there's only one album from this year I'd put above it, but the speed of the album also never allows things to feel rushed or sloppy, yet the production is rough enough to always keep a raw edge in every song rather that spiff things up with squeaky clean production, probably my least favorite sound for heavy rock like this. But while this is first and foremost a guitar album where strings are figuratively smoking or on fire from start to finish, Jeff Conaway's frequently stunning drumming adds a much needed layer of constant change to play against the wall of guitar noise. The result is an album that can knock you off your chair or blow out your eardrums if you're not careful. If there's been a bit too ambient or mellow music on my list so far for you, this'll cure what ails ya.
Favorite Tracks:
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Gonna do one more while I have the time.
13
Dirty Beaches - Badlands
Taking nothing away from David Lynch's own release from last year, Crazy Clown Time, but Dirty Beaches' Badlands is not only the better album, it's ironically the more Lynchian of the two. Alex Zhang Hungtai has stressed the influence of Lynches films on his music and I can only approximate his unique sound by saying it's kind of like Suicide doing a 50s rockabilly soundtrack for an imaginary Lynch silent film. Nostalgia is central to Badlands conceptual core, but in an almost entirely abstract, surreal way. One gets the sense of lost love in "True Blue", endless travels down dark highways in "A Hundred Highways" and the bustling sexuality of troubled youth in "Sweet 17", but the album's haunted echoes and scratched up surfers make it feel as if these songs come from a different dimension, containing genuine human emotion, yes, although somehow from a past that never existed in fictionalized hyperreal worlds where the naive longings for love, freedom and beauty cannot escape the darkness that lurks beneath the everyday. While my previous analogy may give you an idea of what the albums sounds like, here's one that hints at what it feels like: the eternal struggle between the Jeffrey Beaumont's and Frank Booth's of the world, alternating in some ineffable way between the sweet dreams of the former and the unthinkable nightmares of the latter.
Favorite Tracks:
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#13 Lullatone - Soundtracks for Everyday Adventures
(Available via Bandcamp)
Soundtracks for Everyday Adventures is probably the most pleasant album released all year. It's playful, whimsical, sweet, and happy. It tickles the nostalgia bone more joyously than any other album I know of. Listening to this album while doing almost anything makes doing that thing more fun.
I will always love you for introducing me to Lullatone.
ritch:
"We eventually managed to find them near Biskupin, where demonstrations of prehistoric farming are organized. These oxen couldn't be transported to anywhere else, so we had to built the entire studio around them. A scene that lasted twenty-something seconds took us a year and a half to prepare."
I was so happy the day I discovered them on Bandcamp. I can't even remember how I stumbled upon them, but I'm glad I did.I will always love you for introducing me to Lullatone.
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