Saturday, December 31, 2011

It’s III: Is Other People

Favorites 2011


[1] Julianna Barwick, The Magic Place
[2] PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
[3] Real Estate, Days
[4] Death Cab For Cutie, Codes & Keys
[5] Holcombe Waller, Into The Dark Unknown
[6] Devon Williams, Euphoria
[7] EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints
[8] Dum Dum Girls, Only In Dreams
[9] Bill Callahan, Apocalypse
[10] R.E.M., Collapse Into Now


More than usual, there seemed to be a lot of personal stuff to attend to during the process of sorting through the year’s albums and choosing the most important ten. I hope the outcome isn’t too self-indulgent (if that’s a quality that ranking the art of others can even be said to have). But I have to wonder… Does my preference of The Magic Place to Let England Shake say something about my beliefs concerning the usefulness of language? Do Bradford Cox and Patrick Wolf represent the two sides of my personality, waiting for a wealth of experience to validate one and banish the other? Did Real Estate definitively capture the way we inhabit neighborhoods in 2011, or does it just seem that way because I moved to a new town the same week their album arrived?

And again, there was R.E.M. to remind me where I am and what I’m doing, but they provide that service for so much of the world’s population that to continue loving them indicates a hope for humanity’s future, not just my own, right? It was hard to be too shaken up over their departure this year, since I hear their influence more abundantly than ever. They’re all over my top ten, but especially in Julianna Barwick’s intimate, wordless transmutations of the kinds of melodies they unearthed in the American South, and in the timid, wise murmur of their de facto heirs Real Estate. The first song on Days is called “Easy,” and it’s appropriate, but I don’t understand why no one else has remarked an equal sense of uneasiness in Real Estate’s music, a feeling that their lifestyle, careless or not, has no hope of extending as indefinitely into the future as R.E.M.’s once did (sample lyric: “If it takes all summer long / just to write one simple song / there’s too much to focus on / clearly that is something wrong”). My greatest worry is not that R.E.M. is gone but that their replacements might get crushed by evil forces before their three decades are up.

Anyway, back to the personal. To counteract a top ten as memoir, and to “spread the wealth,” I left Patrick Wolf’s Lupercalia off the final list (it’s already quite clear he’s the man in my life, musically speaking), and hereby bestow it the secondhand autobiography award, so closely did it echo my own feelings about life and love this year. There’s no story here, move along… that was the general reaction to Lupercalia, and indeed, if Victorian literature tells us anything it’s that marriage always marks the end of a story. But Wolf’s belief in true love—and not just as an excuse for something else or as dumb reassurance against cosmic loneliness—is what I’ve been waiting to hear my whole life, even if it’s only slightly less naïve than my own belief. And yet… Is music more meaningful when it offers a glimpse of something we want but don’t have, or shares our sense of destitution? Because I already have everything Lupercalia has to give, in a manner of speaking.


Onward to the top ten:

[1]

I was tempted to offer this as the perfect antidote to instant gratification, a dive back into the warm, timeless waters of memory, but even accepting that “The Magic Place” is a tree from Barwick’s childhood, that’s a false premise: no album this year excited me more with the immediacy of its melodic progression.

[2]

A bit like late 50s/early 60s Bergman: white sky, gray to black earth, searingly plain and yet open to endless interpretation. Also, shockingly fun… “Nothing!”

[3]


[4]

Stereolab became perhaps my favorite band this year. Death Cab For Cutie aren’t quite Stereolab, but they took that band’s name as an aesthetic principle and created the year’s foremost experience in total sound. Even the words are sound for sound’s sake, taking the lyrical strategy of Pet Sounds and grafting it onto the lyrical strategy of Dylan or Malkmus. Which would explain the emotional trembles in an album so unwaveringly cool.

[5]

Sometimes it seems like amazing singers are cheating, tricking us into feeling something by nothing more than the naked emotion or simulation thereof they wear on their voices. But Holcombe Waller earns every word he utters, or, I should say, his lyrics earn their preternaturally dramatic articulation.

[6]

The cassette version, I should specify, though I doubt the Slumberland version really gains or loses anything by re-ordering side B and swapping “Don’t Be Fooled” for “Right Direction.” But I must so specify to allow a metaphor: here’s pop music so saturated (with color, emotion, bleeding strings, crying vocals) that it threatens to flood your tape deck. Maybe that’s the persistent shimmer I hear.

[7]

Music this sincere and therefore unfashionable doesn’t usually end up so close to cool. The world hasn’t heard anything like this since Kristin Hersh got hit by a car and started hearing frequencies.

[8]

“Jail La La” was a thrilling single last year, but I never suspected how much of its power came from Dee Dee’s sly articulation of the words. She emerges from the noise on Only In Dreams and reveals herself as a great singer, as confident as Neko Case. But that’s not what I meant when I proposed this as a country album: note instead the degree of tragedy matched by an equal degree of toughness.

[9]

Not since Rimbaud wrote “I is Another” has an artist been so obsessed with escaping identity. I read something along those lines somewhere recently, about Bob Dylan, I think in a book of Ellen Willis writings. No such anxiety on the part of Bill Callahan. For all the soul searching and shape shifting on Apocalypse, he’s not nearly as impatient to unlock the mysteries of identity as his listener is. This is the same man who dreamt “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” and seemed satisfied with the answers it provided.

[10]

Alternately mistaken as a career summary and a pre-planned swan song, Collapse Into Now is, as the title denotes, another gorgeous set of songs that adhere to their moment in time.


There were enough excellent albums this year to make any of them worth overlooking, but here are ten more great ones, and further miscellanea:

Atlas Sound, Parallax
Big Troubles, Romantic Comedy
Bjork, Biophilia
Kate Bush, 50 Words For Snow
Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion
St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
Tennis, Cape Dory
Wild Beasts, Smother
Patrick Wolf, Lupercalia
Yuck, Yuck


Mixtapes

There’s a mixtape out there for everyone, presumably, and I spent part of December listening to some of the year’s most acclaimed hip hop releases. Danny Brown, with his beautifully mannered (or unmannered?) voice and the necessity of its constant exercise to mitigate total entrapment and despair, with his subversions and ironies (his critique of radio songs is funny and spot-on without offering itself as a viable alternative, but it’s so ear-itching that it accidentally becomes one; elsewhere, just when we’re expecting him to brag, he finds no glory in the prospect of dying like a rock star, or even much interest in partying like one), interested me most. I overcame most of my misgivings about XXX by invoking the storyteller theory of hip hop, wherein the rapper’s primary responsibility is to create a plausible first-person narrator, but the middle section of the album, where Brown gets so caught up in penis accommodation imagery that his voice loses a lot of its character, is a tough sit no matter how you look at it. Still, XXX is a model album in terms of its careful, sometimes opaque construction.


Where’s M83?

…you might be asking right about now. I guess they’re just a band so outsized that no human can give himself entirely to their discography. I’m already overextending my meager soul by loving absolutely their previous two albums. But Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is a lot of fun.


Best opening

So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter, now what does that say about me?
--Fleet Foxes, "Montezuma"

I remember thinking that a couple years ago.


Closing thought

I was blissfully unaware of music, because I heard it so much.
--Zac, on childhood

100

I remember an unusually warm New Year's Eve, driving with my family to the fabric store for some cloth to hang on my bookcases and hide the childish things on their shelves, listening to Swervedriver on a mixtape.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Macromix 11


Same rules as last year. The unveiling happened here.

Track/ Rank

1/ 20 Wild Beasts, “Loop The Loop”
2/ 19 St. Vincent, “Cruel”
3/ 18 Destroyer, “Chinatown”
4/ 17 Lykke Li, “Sadness Is A Blessing”
5/ 16 Minks, “Kusmi”
6/ 15 Big Troubles, “Misery”
7/ 14 Exlovers, “Blowing Kisses”
8/ 13 Girls, “Alex”
9/ 12 Yuck, “Georgia”
10/ 11 Crystal Stilts, “Shake The Shackles”
11/ 10 Holcombe Waller, “Hardliners”
12/ 9 R.E.M., “Oh My Heart”
13/ 8 Real Estate, “Green Aisles”
14/ 7 Jeremy Jay, “Shayla”
15/ 6 Atlas Sound, “Doldrums”
16/ 5 Cut Copy, “Need You Now”
17/ 4 Patrick Wolf, “Together”
18/ 3 Julianna Barwick, “Prizewinning”
19/ 2 EMA, “Anteroom”
20/ 1 PJ Harvey, “The Last Living Rose”


The only very notable omission is Lady Gaga's "Marry The Night," a totally gorgeous song that wore off some of its urgency over the course of the year and which I'll relegate to the "radio pleasure" category now that they've finally made it an inescapable single. The problem, as always, is whether I think of the macromix as a careful sequencing of 20 songs in under 80 minutes, or as a careful ranking of the year's best moments. I originally envisioned a mix that starts with "Marry The Night," moves into more impressionistic night and the city seductions (M83's "Midnight City"), scales back the synths to a minimum (Big K.R.I.T.'s "The Vent"), and then, from the deep silence that follows a man's musings, fades back in with intricate, powerhouse drumming (The Joy Formidable's "I Don't Want To See You Like This"). But those songs just missed the list. After settling on the final, less blatantly narrative permutation of the macromix, above, I also considered switching St. Vincent's "Cruel" for "Northern Lights," because gosh, what a blast that would be after the hush of "Loop The Loop." But it doesn't really matter, since no one (besides me: I have it as an iTunes playlist and it's awesome) is likely to hear the macromix in its proper sequencing, anyway, and I don't know which St. Vincent song is actually "best."

Also, I increased my beats and rhymes quotient too late for this undertaking, but any of the shorter, stranger songs I've recently heard by Danny Brown or Shabazz Palaces would make for great additions, pockets of unprecedented sound.

Lessons this year: I long ago accepted the fact that I won't read every book I want to read before I die, but I have yet to reconcile myself to the same re: music. Entering my twenties, I thought "real life" would eventually get in the way of my ability to keep up with new music, but clearly that was a flawed premise. Any gap in my listening is mostly my own fault, or money's, but not time's.

Albums list, wherein I "spread the wealth" a bit (sometimes great albums lack clear standout tracks, so I don't bother trying to choose a favorite), arrives in the next few days.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Faces

(And one pizza box.)






R.E.M.'s Up minus all luxury and maturity.

Born This Way. Get it?


OUTSIDE OBSERVER IT SEEMED
FACATA TO ME AND THAT'S JEWISH
--closed captioning poetry (The Daily Show, 11/22/11)


I don't think of my characters as being gay. They have sex that's gay because that's the sex I know and understand and care about.
--Dennis Cooper in the latest issue of Out


How dare you do something biological.
--

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Four Corners States, thanks for letting me walk and drive around in you

Starting out in the courtyard






Weird things along the highway


Farmington, NM


(I only cared about the color anyway.)


(While listening to Hüsker Dü's "Games.")


Navajo, NM


~Problems of photography~

1. How to render a computer as both an object in a room and a portal to other rooms. I didn't figure that out with the above picture, but it's probably the best one I've ever taken anyway.


2. How to represent women. The above captures one of the central images that guided/haunted me throughout my childhood: the "Barbie in the dirt" archetype. Most of my malformed notions of femininity come from here. Maybe I heard "Miss World" and "Doll Parts" too many times. Anyway, it's amazing I was finally able to realize this image with my own eye, in such an unexpected place.


Toad



Thanksgiving in Provo, UT



A beautiful town. During a mountain walk I finally discovered a place capable of containing the heaven-and-earth drama of Kate Bush’s Aerial, activating its magic (50 Words for Snow, when I delve into it, might have to find a different place). Bush's ideas about and belief in nature and art have always been straightforward, in a way ("lines like these have got to be an architect's dream"; "so all the colors run, see what they have become: a wonderful sunset," etc.), and Provo is a very straightforwardly beautiful place: snowy peaks, distant lake. But the power and longevity of all of this (Provo's beauty, Kate's belief) renders it mysterious, eccentric. I'm quite taken with both.

The next day



Tourist spot near Moab, UT




Winter (ABQ)