Damn. I would be so psyched for some serious makeouts either after or during that playlist. What say you, Bootsy?
Indeed.
Happy Valentines Day, everyone. Go kiss a man or a woman.
-CJ
2.14.2011
The 2nd Annual Valentine's Day Playlist: This Time It's Happy!
2.09.2011
1. Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica
The date is December 17, 2004. I am 13 years old. During a period where I was bedridden due to debilitating back pain, I have reached my trembling, nervous hands into the world of music. One of the first things they grasped was Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News (an album that deservedly earned a place on this list as well). I fell in love immediately: Traditional verse-chorus-verse structures abandoned? Catchy guitar playing? And…trumpets? What brazen oddity! Naturally, I wanted more, and debated using my limited funds to purchase another Modest Mouse album that seemed promising, the one that rests on the top space of this list.
At this point, 2004 had been the hardest year of my life. It was about to get much harder.
My parents were divorced, and the arrangement was that we saw my father Tuesdays and Thursdays and on alternate weekends. Due to the car accident which rendered me crippled, he had been unable to see me and my brother for smaller and smaller increments of time and on fewer days. For many years he had been trapped in a whirlpool of prescription drugs and alcoholism, and this was the day we all found that he had finally been pulled under, once and for all. My mother answers the phone at 10 PM. Uneasy horror spreads across her face as the call continues and when she hangs up, she turns to my brother and me and says, “Boys, this is the hardest thing I will ever have to tell you. Your father is dead.”
At this point-I don’t even really know why-I felt the need to buy The Moon and Antarctica. Maybe I could control this one thing. Maybe this one thing could bring peace, halt the deafening silence bursting from the front of my head to the back. That night, it did not. But in the weeks, months and years to come, I found it to be necessary and significant in a way that no piece of art had or ever will be able to match again.
I tell you this background not to illicit sympathy, or to say that my personal connection to this album is the reason that it is deemed album of the past ten years and my personal favorite album of all time. Quite the contrary.
The extraordinary thing here is that The Moon and Antarctica would still be #1 even if none of this had ever happened to me.
This is an album crafted by man and infused with the blood of specters. One does not consider the instruments or the songwriting while listening to this album. Those thoughts occur afterwords. When listening to The Moon and Antarctica, the experience is that of oneness, of every plucked string and enunciation forming a perfect whole that sweeps over the listener as a wave of moondust. Breaking the album down into a song-by-song basis is impossible even as each song stands on its own and makes its mark in a way that completes the listening experience. Each note is a fiber made to create a blanket that covers the earth yet warms you as though you were the only living thing in existence.
The Moon and Antarctica, in the end, is a treatise on the hypocrisy, greed, malice and sloth of the living man, and how all of these things cease to matter once the vaguest hint of perspective comes into play. We travel from assertions of good and of higher power that renders human worries irrelevant (“3rd Planet” and “Gravity Rides Everything”), wander through confused philosophizing (“The Stars are Projectors”) and end, curiously enough, with bitterness and rage (“Life Like Weeds”, “What People are Made Of”). The message couldn’t be clearer: Isaac Brock leaves the album knowing less than he did when he started it, and the listener is implicated in this crime of obfuscation. Yet the listener cannot help but agree with the songs, whether they espouse bitter common truths (“Well it took a lot of work to be the ass I am/And I’m real damn sure that anyone can equally, easily, fuck you over”) or ruminations on the banality of typical communication (“All this talking all the time and the air fills up, up, up until there’s nothing left to breathe, up until there’s nothing left to speak, up until the data parts in space”). We are all to blame, and if realizing that won’t solve everything, it’ll certainly be a step in the right direction.
I suppose that’s the most impressive thing about The Moon and Antarctica. Modest Mouse, throughout their career, have had a tendency to make you acknowledge parts of yourself you didn’t know were there, acknowledge truths that you didn’t know were real. Therefore, unlike many other masterpieces, The Moon and Antarctica is not exceptional for its introspection. Rather than take pieces of from inside itself and display them, it removes them from the listener, gently but firmly, and tells you, “See here. This is what you think, even if you didn’t think it. This is what you feel, even if you didn’t feel it. And this is what you know, even if you don’t know it.”
In other words, Isaac Brock writes, sings and plays his guitar. Jeremiah Green drums. Eric Judy plays his bass. And somewhere, during all of this, you learned. You discovered.
Art can do no greater.
-CJ
2.08.2011
A Token of My Extreme: Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.- Electric Heavyland (2002)
Alien8 Recordings; October 6, 2002 http://www.acidmothers.com/
With our decade end list more or less finished I'd like to announce that no, this column has not permanently disappeared into the ether. As a matter of fact assuming that life doesn't proceed to kick me in the posterior further I intend to release a batch of another twenty reviews like I did last year (maybe more), and this time space them out a bit more prudently so you, good reader, get fewer stretches of zero activity. I've enjoyed being a contributor to this here blog and hope that my reviews inspire more long-term readership in the year to come.
So now that I've dispensed with the fucking Oxbridge pleasantries, let's have at this one shall we?
__________________________________________
Acid Mothers Temple are continuing evidence that Japan produces way more crazed, prolific noisemakers per capita than anywhere else on Earth. And when I say prolific, I fucking mean it--since the inception of the band (which has grown to more of a loose collective, really) in 1995 the Acid Mothers have recorded a catalog of approximately one hundred releases, in various formats both limited edition and still in print, live and studio, under a series of different guises and with various lineups and collaborations and most of it released under their own label. That's a pretty serious work ethic.
Founding member and guitarist Kawabata Makoto remains the single Fripp-like constant in all the outfit's projects, and Electric Heavyland like most of the other records he's played on adheres very strongly to his general formula and vision. That is, don't expect a "song-oriented" AMT album, ever. No, the name of the game here is boundary-pushing (soundwise, lengthwise, etc.) free-form improvisation and experimentation that would make even the wildest of '70s prog acts look pretty limpdick. The volume level varies, but usually only by marginal degrees, and even AMT at their most accessible won't be getting radio play any time soon.
And this album is one of their loudest. Take the craziest space rock freakouts of Hawkwind in their Space Ritual prime, combine with the giant amp stacks of Blue Cheer, throw in the guitar musings of Tony Iommi, Hendrix and Ritchie Blackmore, add a totally wigged-out acid casualty on vocals (this one goes by the name "Cotton Casino") and put Akita Merzbow behind the boards and you have a general idea of what Electric Heavyland entails. This is some goddamn weapons-grade psychedelia right here and by no means the grooooovy, twee Donovan/Byrds/Zombies/Syd Barrett variety, oh no, but a thick swirling miasma of gritty distortion-pedal frenzy, spastic drumming, synth squigglies, wordless screams and a continuous low end rumble that suggests volcanic activity more than anything played by humans. There are only three tracks on the album, and none are less than fifteen minutes long. Get the picture?
This is just about the last thing you want to listen to while high. Try playing this album for an aging Deadhead and he'll probably hide under the furniture convinced that the aliens have returned to abduct him.
And yet--there is a psychotic beauty in what this band does. These jams do have a finite beginning and a finite end, and there is definite chemistry and phenomenally tight playing between those points even as the whole album feels like an endless cacophony. Take for example the lead guitar break seven minutes into the chaotic assault of "Atomic Rotary Grinding God" that is a prelude to about a minute of eerie ambient synth doodling, which then careens into a roaring Motorhead pummel. Then there's the lumbering, deranged riff that kickstarts "Loved and Confused" which is steadily deconstructed over the seventeen-minute track length. The closer "Phantom of Galactic Magnum" (Top 3 Most Badass Song Title, ever) finally blasts off into full freak-flag brainmelter mode, displaying some downright free jazzy inclinations while still being loud enough to obliterate entire solar systems. Sun Ra would be proud.
As of this date, I've heard only three of Acid Mothers Temple's recordings, but Electric Heavyland definitely makes me want to check out more of their oeuvre. This is the ultimate in space/psychedelic/stoner/whatever while still possessing the stones to thoroughly slaughter most any death metal band extant. Lovers of six-string mayhem need look no further.
Translation:
If you love Hawkwind and other '70s mainstays from the harder end of the stoner rock spectrum along with more modern bands like Monster Magnet, there's a fair chance you can survive this. Fans of drone like Earth, SunnO))) and the like also seem to get into Electric Heavyland, despite being nearly their total sonic opposites other than track length and volume level. Everyone else is going to wonder what astral plane their brain left to after 51 minutes. This album does not fuck around, so caveat emptor.
-SJ
1.24.2011
Stuart's Albums of the Year 2010
As Chris is taking his time before we finally announce our album of the already ancient decade, it seems I can put this off no longer.
It's odd to look back at my year in music. I ended last year looking for anything immediate and new and fun, within a month I was swept away by musical forces I couldn't have predicted. Four months later, caught up in some new violence and romance I declared 2010 an important year, said if anything was going to happen it will happen now. Not that my declarations mean anything, the bands rule the state of the scene, I do not. The summer passed and I felt independent music had abandoned me, gone soft and complacent, one hundred bands releasing records described by the press as "hazy, nostalgic", so I took refuge in british beats and electronics. And now I wake up and the year is gone.
And so I find myself unable to turn any kind of objective view on the past twelve months, I was too much of a victim of the sounds to find any impartial distance. Not as much of what hit me stuck as had last year, but what did hit deep, and that's all I have to share. This is the personal list. This was the year to me.
1. Four Tet - There Is Love In You
Mostly Crystal Castles were assholes, and mostly that was fun. Occasionally it was much more than that, I wasn't the only one to find catharsis in the screams of "I live. As Alice - I die" but for the most part it was fun. It was dishonest, it was ironic, it was nihilistic, it was a great party album. Their second self titled is none of these things. Amazingly enough the two canadians released a slow churning gothic record. They didn't loose the four on the floor beat but ever ounce of this feels heavy with honest despair, and though its no longer catchy it only took a few listens for it to seep deep into my skin. Not to mention the non-album version of Not In Love where Robert Smith takes on the vocals - the absolute best track to be relieved this year. Because as long as it's true anyway, we might as well have a chorus of it to shout along to.
It's odd to look back at my year in music. I ended last year looking for anything immediate and new and fun, within a month I was swept away by musical forces I couldn't have predicted. Four months later, caught up in some new violence and romance I declared 2010 an important year, said if anything was going to happen it will happen now. Not that my declarations mean anything, the bands rule the state of the scene, I do not. The summer passed and I felt independent music had abandoned me, gone soft and complacent, one hundred bands releasing records described by the press as "hazy, nostalgic", so I took refuge in british beats and electronics. And now I wake up and the year is gone.
And so I find myself unable to turn any kind of objective view on the past twelve months, I was too much of a victim of the sounds to find any impartial distance. Not as much of what hit me stuck as had last year, but what did hit deep, and that's all I have to share. This is the personal list. This was the year to me.
1. Four Tet - There Is Love In You
(SB review)
It's July and I'm sitting in my friend Jackie's apartment in Oakland and me and Adrian are trying to convince her to drop her plans and to come see Baths tonight in San Francisco with us. She said I don't want to go because I don't like electronic music. Bull shit we called! We both used to have that position, but to think that the instrument has necessary stake on the content is crazy! Besides, it'll be fun! We'll dance. Look she said, electronic music doesn't touch my soul.
And at first I scoffed in my mind because that is generally a bull shit self indulgent statement. Doesn't touch my soul! Ha! but then I remembered that this was not some 14 year old on the internet, this is not someone who would just throw that around. This is my best friend who I respect, she wouldn't say that vainly. So then I was a bit shaken, me and Adrian scrambled for Something at least.
Adrian shrugged. Said It doesn't touch my soul either I guess, but its fun and its interesting and its exciting and that's all you can ask for sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes. I agreed with him but in my mind I faced a small crisis. Electronic music doesn't touch my soul. I realized. It doesn't touch my soul.
Except Four Tet.
And certainly my year was kick-started by his masterpiece, like Jackie's sentence, uncensored, not trying to look cool, not concerned with avoiding cheesiness, just concerned with telling it like it is, Unadulterated music about love. About beauty. Innovative, sure, Minimalistic, Experimental, Danceable even sometimes, but never takes it's eye off the prize. There Is Love In You. It swirls everywhere in my head, all the time, my background radiation. It became associated with my person. It's all I talk about.
There is no story. There is not initial seduction, or boy looses girl, boy gets girl back. There is just the emotion of love. There is just the high feeling. There is just 4/4 beats and swirling guitar lines.
She Just Likes To Fight closes the album, an explanation, Look, four tet seems to say, I Don't Want To Leave Her Now, You Know I Believe. Look, he seems to say, It's Ok. She Just Likes To Fight.
2. The National - High Violet
It's July and I'm sitting in my friend Jackie's apartment in Oakland and me and Adrian are trying to convince her to drop her plans and to come see Baths tonight in San Francisco with us. She said I don't want to go because I don't like electronic music. Bull shit we called! We both used to have that position, but to think that the instrument has necessary stake on the content is crazy! Besides, it'll be fun! We'll dance. Look she said, electronic music doesn't touch my soul.
And at first I scoffed in my mind because that is generally a bull shit self indulgent statement. Doesn't touch my soul! Ha! but then I remembered that this was not some 14 year old on the internet, this is not someone who would just throw that around. This is my best friend who I respect, she wouldn't say that vainly. So then I was a bit shaken, me and Adrian scrambled for Something at least.
Adrian shrugged. Said It doesn't touch my soul either I guess, but its fun and its interesting and its exciting and that's all you can ask for sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes. I agreed with him but in my mind I faced a small crisis. Electronic music doesn't touch my soul. I realized. It doesn't touch my soul.
Except Four Tet.
And certainly my year was kick-started by his masterpiece, like Jackie's sentence, uncensored, not trying to look cool, not concerned with avoiding cheesiness, just concerned with telling it like it is, Unadulterated music about love. About beauty. Innovative, sure, Minimalistic, Experimental, Danceable even sometimes, but never takes it's eye off the prize. There Is Love In You. It swirls everywhere in my head, all the time, my background radiation. It became associated with my person. It's all I talk about.
There is no story. There is not initial seduction, or boy looses girl, boy gets girl back. There is just the emotion of love. There is just the high feeling. There is just 4/4 beats and swirling guitar lines.
She Just Likes To Fight closes the album, an explanation, Look, four tet seems to say, I Don't Want To Leave Her Now, You Know I Believe. Look, he seems to say, It's Ok. She Just Likes To Fight.
2. The National - High Violet
(SB review)
Baring Four Tet, all my favorite albums of the year fall together in terms of a certain mindset. desperation, abandon, bravery of emotion that does not stem from actual courage, but from the belief that the world is fucked. That nothing matters. That looking cool and removed is no longer important. That they are falling into a void. We all take this different ways.
For The National it goes "The World Is Fucked So There Is No Time For Avoidance." the world is fucked so we can only be direct. As Boxer was the screaming behind your eyes as you went about your daily tasks, High Violet is screaming. There is no time for restraint. What made you think I enjoy being left to the flood? Instead of crafting poetry for the feeling you get afterwords they just went ahead and said "I don't want to get over you" instead of metaphors about despair they wrote songs called "Sorrow", called "I'm Afraid Of Everyone" called "Terrible Love". High Violet was the sound of screaming as you fell down into the pit.
3. Los Campesinos! - Romance Is Boring
Baring Four Tet, all my favorite albums of the year fall together in terms of a certain mindset. desperation, abandon, bravery of emotion that does not stem from actual courage, but from the belief that the world is fucked. That nothing matters. That looking cool and removed is no longer important. That they are falling into a void. We all take this different ways.
For The National it goes "The World Is Fucked So There Is No Time For Avoidance." the world is fucked so we can only be direct. As Boxer was the screaming behind your eyes as you went about your daily tasks, High Violet is screaming. There is no time for restraint. What made you think I enjoy being left to the flood? Instead of crafting poetry for the feeling you get afterwords they just went ahead and said "I don't want to get over you" instead of metaphors about despair they wrote songs called "Sorrow", called "I'm Afraid Of Everyone" called "Terrible Love". High Violet was the sound of screaming as you fell down into the pit.
3. Los Campesinos! - Romance Is Boring
(SB review)
If anyone in the world is no longer concerned with trying to look good its Los Campesinos. You think they don't realize that they sound like young teens, strung out on minor social woes and mild narcissism? They realize it. And they don't think it's good, or mature, or alright for 7 grown people to be perpetuating, but they are feeling it, and so they believe they must commit it to music.
If anyone in the world is no longer concerned with trying to look good its Los Campesinos. You think they don't realize that they sound like young teens, strung out on minor social woes and mild narcissism? They realize it. And they don't think it's good, or mature, or alright for 7 grown people to be perpetuating, but they are feeling it, and so they believe they must commit it to music.
And so if We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed was a cry out, realizing that the world doesn't love them, Romance Is Boring is the cry of realizing that there is no love, even on a personal level. Its the cry of giving up on the whole concept of romance, of empty beds, of playing straight chicken with gay girls (spoiler: it's never enough).
Los Campesinos have such a habit of churning out line after line, resonating with immature depth. Claims that he would take your heart, with ease, by any means necessary, just in order to crush it, just out of bitterness. Saying he'd rather be dead than spend his time being selflessly cared for by you. Demanding that romance is boring.
And as the music shifts between noise and catchy melodies, you find that he doesn't believe a word of it, and that really he just wants someone to lie around with, counting the moles on their back. But it doesn't matter. Because there is no love. There is no post-coital, there is just post rock. There is no love and he's not even getting off. That his saddest and most depressing break up doesn't even crack the top 100 list.
These are our immature cries.
4. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
So the National's nihilism amounts to unrestrained despair, and the Los Campesinos' fell on unrestrained lust and bitterness. Kanye's went two ways. The first states, to paraphrase one reviewer, "Let's party like the world is fucked because the world is fucked", and certainly he is good at that. Fuck everything, he says, I'm gonna marry a porn star, I'm gonna have a different girl every night. Fuck the haters, their screams are my theme music. Fuck the world because I win anyway, I have all the fucking power, I don't need you. And he does this brilliantly, with swagger, taking the stance of a wrathful god.
But he keeps rubber banding between this and the realization of what an awful person he's been to everyone around him. He snaps between everything is fucked so I will party, and everything is fucked and it's all my fault. He tells girls he love to run far away from him, confessing that he's never going to give them an ounce of anything honest. He confesses to his sins of flesh, his constant infidelity. He confesses how much he needs her, calling her at two AM, making a fool out of himself on record. He knows how much he's not worthy of it. And he fucking hates himself. And then he snaps back. So that's his life, fuck me, then fuck the world, then fuck me again. He can't get much higher.
5. These New Puritans - Hidden
At the beginning of this year These New Puritans swapped the dance floor for the battle field, giving up their "we are cool as fuck" fashion post-punk beats for war drums and violins, and in doing so they created what has to be the most original sounding album of the year. They still have their little insidious turns of words, "Without a doubt I don't believe the stars are symbols, but lets find out", but gone is the self conscious cleverness. Everything about this album screams business, and these screams sound fucking good.
6. Mount Kimbie - Crooks and Lovers
As the indie world seemed to crumble beneath my feet I stumbled upon the land of british dance music, with Mount Kimbie beginning their reign as the young kings. Their virtuosic blend IDM and sub-bass heavy dubstep is absolutely breathtaking, both immediate and staggeringly interesting, I would spend my whole life at clubs if they played stuff like this here.
7. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
Mostly Crystal Castles were assholes, and mostly that was fun. Occasionally it was much more than that, I wasn't the only one to find catharsis in the screams of "I live. As Alice - I die" but for the most part it was fun. It was dishonest, it was ironic, it was nihilistic, it was a great party album. Their second self titled is none of these things. Amazingly enough the two canadians released a slow churning gothic record. They didn't loose the four on the floor beat but ever ounce of this feels heavy with honest despair, and though its no longer catchy it only took a few listens for it to seep deep into my skin. Not to mention the non-album version of Not In Love where Robert Smith takes on the vocals - the absolute best track to be relieved this year. Because as long as it's true anyway, we might as well have a chorus of it to shout along to.
8. Baths - Cerulean
There was certainty too much talk of what the perfect summer record is this year. And really, I generally don't think "summer" records are that important to begin with, most things season specific tend to be awful. That being said, this is the perfect summer record. Nervous, stuttering beats over shimmering electronics. It's relaxing, it's beyond original and interesting, it's just fucking lovely. In mid July it's everything I had ever wanted.
There was certainty too much talk of what the perfect summer record is this year. And really, I generally don't think "summer" records are that important to begin with, most things season specific tend to be awful. That being said, this is the perfect summer record. Nervous, stuttering beats over shimmering electronics. It's relaxing, it's beyond original and interesting, it's just fucking lovely. In mid July it's everything I had ever wanted.
9. Yellow Swans - Going Places
Yellow Swans broke up and left us the most beautiful noise album that has ever existed. Paradox. Almost coming at it from a post rock perspective, Going Places builds and tugs at you, focusing on subtle emotionality rather than the broader strokes the genre tends to aim for. And yet, it's still noise, still dense and impenetrable. Still the most inaccessible thing this side of Merzbow. Still beautiful.
10. Sleigh Bells - Treats
If you can take Crown On The Ground sitting down then fuck you. Fuck off. The most devastatingly original banger that's hit wax in ages, it can't be denied. And Sleigh Bell's blend of dance, hip hop, and noise rock just tears apart with energy, the first real feeling of violence to arrive on brookyn soil in years. Though the song writing doesn't always back it up, who cares? Get on the floor. Mosh. Shout. Amen.
Honerary Mention: James Blake and Joy Orbison - The Bells Sketch, CMYK, Klavierwerke, and The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow EPs
These two brillient innovators of the genre that's come to be known as post-dubstep (an awful title, anyone will admit, but simple and accurate) turned out some of the absolute best tracks of the year, both for the headphones and the dance floor. Neither came out with an album (though Blake is due for one this February) but it would be beyond a shame for these four EP's to go overlooked.
Bonus list: the best movies of the year
1. Black Swan 2. Inception 3. Exit Through The Gift Shop 4. Enter The Void 5. Biutiful 6. Scott Pilgrim 7. 127 Hours 8. Never Let Me Go 9. The Kings Speach 10. The Kids Are Alright
string ourselves up for love
Yellow Swans broke up and left us the most beautiful noise album that has ever existed. Paradox. Almost coming at it from a post rock perspective, Going Places builds and tugs at you, focusing on subtle emotionality rather than the broader strokes the genre tends to aim for. And yet, it's still noise, still dense and impenetrable. Still the most inaccessible thing this side of Merzbow. Still beautiful.
10. Sleigh Bells - Treats
If you can take Crown On The Ground sitting down then fuck you. Fuck off. The most devastatingly original banger that's hit wax in ages, it can't be denied. And Sleigh Bell's blend of dance, hip hop, and noise rock just tears apart with energy, the first real feeling of violence to arrive on brookyn soil in years. Though the song writing doesn't always back it up, who cares? Get on the floor. Mosh. Shout. Amen.
Honerary Mention: James Blake and Joy Orbison - The Bells Sketch, CMYK, Klavierwerke, and The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow EPs
These two brillient innovators of the genre that's come to be known as post-dubstep (an awful title, anyone will admit, but simple and accurate) turned out some of the absolute best tracks of the year, both for the headphones and the dance floor. Neither came out with an album (though Blake is due for one this February) but it would be beyond a shame for these four EP's to go overlooked.
Bonus list: the best movies of the year
1. Black Swan 2. Inception 3. Exit Through The Gift Shop 4. Enter The Void 5. Biutiful 6. Scott Pilgrim 7. 127 Hours 8. Never Let Me Go 9. The Kings Speach 10. The Kids Are Alright
string ourselves up for love
1.16.2011
2. The Antlers - Hospice
I was in a state of emotional stagnation earlier on in the year, feeling bored and not particularly inclined to feel either happy or sad to any noticeable degree. If it's not too cliché to say so, I was numb. I then listened to Hospice and it all came back. I started feeling again simply because of this music. Hospice is so incredibly depressing and well executed that it becomes hard to listen to, despite being melodically and texturally flawless. It's evocative in the truest sense.
One of the reasons that The Antlers manage to be so emotionally striking is their undeniable authenticity. And truly, authenticty is such a vital part of their emotional impact because of how connected the music is to the songwriter and band. You can feel their personal emotions seeping through. Because The Antlers manage to make otherwise interesting and distinctive sound elements they use (i.e, shoegaze tones, pop melodies) as a secondary, instead of primary focus of their music, the listener can really focus on the songwriting and what the songs are actually trying to get across - the songwriting holds up the music, not vice-versa. The band tie in textural elements frequently found in post rock and shoegaze soundscaping, and integrates them with more conventional songwriting and vocal deliveries, in a way that doesn’t simply sound like an amalgamation of different influences. In other words, The Antlers define their own sound by having evolved far beyond the process of extracting elements from other bands and utilizing them for aesthetic appeal.
Hospice also seamlessly integrates the lyrical content and narrative with the instrumentation. Although there is no sampling used on the album, the sounds themselves is enough to evoke imagery directly correlated to the lyrical content. On the second track, Kettering, the melancholy is instantly established far before you hear any lyrics, starting with minimal upright piano playing, and whispery and strained singing fluctuating in and out of falsetto. Directly after the lines “And I didn't believe them when they told me that there was no saving you”, a cathartic burst of synthesizer drone, a marching band snare beat, and airy reverberated vocals permeate auditory space. Although Kettering is a common example of using pronounced instrumentation to accent a lyrical point, it’s to be noted that The Antlers are the absolute masters of this craft, and tonality is perfectly matched with entire songs, evoking the cold sterility of hospital rooms with synthesizer melodies that recall an electrocardiogram, background tones that sound like the hums of a ventilation system, and guitars and pianos that guide the more ambient elements into the catastrophic mental states that Hospice exemplifies.
This may sound like a limited critique of what we consider the number two album of the decade, but at the same time, with these two elements I’ve described of The Antlers, it’s hard to not realize how distinctively brilliant they are when compared to the rest of the music that has come out in the decade. Watching someone die and feeling a part of you die inside is something that can’t be described in text, and if it could, a musical form to convey such a thing wouldn’t be necessary. The Antlers do something strange to the listener that I can’t even place in words; it’s not merely depressing listening session, it’s almost a completely different experience.
-Adrian
1.11.2011
3. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
Expanding and brightening the grim apocalyptic visions of their first album F#A (infinity), Lift Your Skinny Fists stretches out comfortably into what was once firmly prog rock turf—a double album consisting of only four songs (well, “suites,” more like)—and manages to make all eighty some odd minutes count.
After the heavily ironic and snarky pastiche of the ‘90s, Godspeed ushered in a once-promising new era with one of the most grandiose, emotionally resonant and dramatically ambitious pieces of ear cinema ever made. Regardless of what you think of this Canadian mini-orchestra’s anarcho/Marxist/anti-capitalist views, the main statement of this album is rejection of a cold and cynical modern world—taking the place of lyrics are audio snapshots of preachers at the height of religious fervor, an old man reminiscing about Coney Island’s lost grandeur, and schoolchildren singing in French framed by glorious sweeps of strings, guitar, and horns backed by thundering drums. From the opening fade-in of “Storm” to the cosmic choir of heavenly drones finishing the album, this is BIG music and totally unapologetic about that fact, with crescendos that will make you fall apart sobbing, shaking your fist at the sky and everything in between and if you’re not cranking this to volumes normally reserved for B-52’s on takeoff, you’re doing it wrong.
However, details are not lost in the volume or instrumental density and Godspeed know how to employ each and every instrument for maximum effect—take for example, the few sad, droning piano notes accompanying a distant squelched voice at the end of “Storm”; a swell of mournful violin underscoring a crazed preacher and the screaming guitar lead that takes the crescendo of “Static” to Olympic heights; the Krautrock-like drumming accompanying the guitar and string turmoil at the end of “Sleep”; the rustic, Floydian melody in the middle of “Antennas to Heaven”… I could go on and on, and the band pulls all this off without a hint of pretention, detractors be damned.
Simply put, a more epic album does not exist in this decade, or most others for that matter. This is music for the last concert hall on Earth.
-Stephen
4. Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
If there’s a worse thing to be than a teenager in love I couldn’t possibly fathom what it might be. You have nothing to compare this with. This is the first time this is happening and nobody is quite sure what to do. Your girlfriend doesn’t understand you, she might not even like you that much, and even the most sage adults are so far removed from the situation that they might as well be trying to tell a raccoon how to adjust brake rotors if God forbid you come to one with a legitimate problem.
This is the case for most people: You’re dropped into the deep end of the pool and told to swim or drown in self-importance. Some will be lucky. Some will have a partner that is attracted to them, and that attraction may even be mutual. They might legitimately care about what’s happening with you and you may have an investment in their problems. You may be surrounded by wise friends who have nothing but the best interests in mind for the both of you, and who like both of you, and would go to the ends of the earth for you if they thought they could help something in the relationship in anyway.
You’ll fuck this all up anyway because you’ll still think you’re doing something wrong. There’s no getting around that. Whatever you do it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. You could care for this person more than anyone has ever cared about anything but you won’t want to show it, and if you do it’ll come out as anger or maybe some weird form of lust because this isn’t something that has come out of you before and it’s not something the other person has experienced before from a firsthand basis, and it will kill them, it may only kill them for a moment but there will come a time when you have to show what you really think and whether those feelings are positive or negative your favorite person in the whole wide world will be dead by the end of the night.
Drugs won’t help too much, alcohol less so. They might for a minute but it’ll come back a hundred times worse. Of course you know this now, but you didn’t know it then, and even though you watched all the same movies that everyone else did you think it’ll be different for you, you think you’ll have some ace up your sleeve that’ll allow you to get over all this garbage with whiskey and a keenly adjusted sense of humor. And when the puke hits the wall for the first time that’ll be when you realize it, that you’re no better than anyone else, there’s nothing special about your heartbreak or your precious little feelings and there’s nobody who can help you. The only person who can help you now is you and you can’t even hold your liquor. You can’t even hold onto a simple feeling without it spilling out all over the place and the absolute last person on earth you want to be around is yourself. He’d help if you’d just talk to him, but you won’t. That guy’s a real prick.
And the worst part is that you think you’ll be ready for this when it happens again, and again, and again. You’re wearing chainmail and they’re flying bombers, you’ve got a stake in the race and they own the stadium. Somewhere, buried deep in the back of your head, you understand that everyone’s heart is bigger than everyone else’s and that self-cannibalization is the only sure path to understanding that nothing went wrong because nothing was right in the first place, but she smells nice and looks soft and just like you, she cannot fathom all the calculations she never made, and just like you she will not realize that her problems are universal, and that if there is one thing true about a universal problem it is undoubtedly and unstoppably unsolvable.
If you’re a regular person, all of this takes about six years from the ages of thirteen through nineteen to figure out and experience. If you’re Los Campesinos, it takes about thirty two minutes and ten seconds.
-CJ
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