shall i complain?

i propose that pitchfork shrink it's year-end best albums list back down to 20, or maybe even 10. wavvves, gil scott-heron, the national, four tet, sufjan stevens... there's plenty of fluff to choose from.

just to waste a little more of your time, i also think they should go back to a simple 1 to 5 star rating system. in their current system, a 7.4 essentially means the album is 74% good. the absurdity of this system is only magnified when something is deemed 100% good, further so when they don't really bother to write about the music or even relevant context. kanye's record is, of course, The Best Of The Year.

here's just one example of this kind of sloppy writing, in the paragraph about Girls' EP, which I will excerpt in its entirety to pad my own meager sunday post:

"Girls' 2009 debut, Album, was an instant classic, a blast of dizzy, wounded love from a band with an immediate, innate grasp of all things guitar-pop. But frontman Christopher Owens has had a rough life, and people with rough lives have a sad tendency to flame out early. It's easy to imagine Album being Girls' one great statement before the demons that helped Owens write his songs drowned his voice completely. So it's a great relief to hear Broken Dreams Club, a clear indication that this band is in it for the long haul. Broken Dreams Club comes from the same aesthetic universe as Album, but it's relaxed to the point of languor. Old-school Nashville pedal steel and crisp Cotton Club horns find their way in, and a warm oldies-radio vibe pervades. But we're still dealing with despair and hopelessness, and Owens still expresses this stuff in the most simple and direct terms possible: 'When I said that I loved you, honey, I knew it from the very start/ When I said that I loved you, honey, I knew that you would break my heart.' At the center of it all sits 'Carolina', a lazy sprawl that takes the band's own 'Hellhole Ratrace' to a more peaceful place." --Tom Breihan

breihan, you fucking twit, go back and edit this part: "people with rough lives have a sad tendency to flame out early." please, compensated music blogger, tell me more about people with rough lives and their sad tendencies. it is tragic how so many of them die after releasing one guitar-pop record.

but i digress, and i also count one fucking sentence about music in that whole abortion of a blurb. the rest has more of a Behind The Music voice-over feel to it.

The Broken Dreams Club EP has six songs. how the fuck do you write 210 words about six songs, and only find time to mention one of them? as a matter of fact, how the fuck is the teaser EP for this guy's sophomore full-length the 22nd best album of the year?

the list this year has a little player embedded under each album's name, where you can press play to hear a 20-second clip from one some on the record. there's also a link that says "buy mp3". lulz.

finally, i'd like to register how upset i am at the pornification of joanna newsom, shown here doing a harp-tease for a blurry neil patrick harris. give it a rest, assholes.

ah, fuck it!

is animal collective really the best we can do? six or seven years after "sung tongs" crashed the independent music scene with it's stellar second track, followed by forty minutes of dull, tactless experimentation, i'm starting to wonder what it's going to take for them to go out of fashion.

"[A] work that gleefully teeters on the line between accessibility and inscrutability."

and that's what's perfect to these types: the ability to sound experimental while still making music that is "accessible", the holy grail of in-your-face independent music. let's take a look at some definitions of "accessible" with a particular eye on the second and the fourth:

"1. easy to approach, reach, enter, speak with, or use.
2. that can be used, entered, reached, etc.: an accessible road; accessible ruins.
3. obtainable; attainable: accessible evidence.
4. open to the influence of (usually fol. by to): accessible to bribery."

so fuck it, and to anyone who thinks like this, fuck you. and if you're soft, and think this and other efforts from animal collective represent a lot of the best music of the last decade, fuck you with a fucking billy club. in a few years, when you cut off your dreads and start shopping at the gap, you'll finally start looking like what we've always known you are: 2016's palin voters.

oy

if you thought i wasn't going to touch lists this year, you were wrong. wrong i tells ya. i'll write a whole big long thing no one will read when i have the time. for now, check out the graph on grizzly bear song, the fifth best song of the year.

"A better name would be Teddy Bear, such is unlikely appeal of this unassuming Brooklyn foursome. But just how did they manage to charm the indie elite and Jay-Z and Solange and Beyoncé and your mom and scores of Twilight-addled tweens? [I]t's not the craftsmanship that's winning people over and making them want to spin this one again and again. It's the intangible, of course, the sound of a band that has struck upon something timeless, inspired, holistic, and-- it bears (ahem) mentioning-- utterly wholesome. Some people will hear 'Two Weeks' and instantly feel better about their day, some will want to join a boys' choir, and most will feel the urge to share this exceptional thing with those close to them."

regarding that first question: could it be because the "indie elite" have tastes that are about as well-refined as those of "twilight-addles tweens" and "your mom"? maybe those indie elite are the type of people who put "(ahem)" after their accidental puns (i.e. pussies), and so maybe it's no accident that their picks are overlapping with the suburban petit-bourgeoisie.

nah, couldn't be. grizzly bear has mass-appeal because they're timeless. it's not like they're completely bland and innocuous or anything. no sir. gotta be those intangibles.

were you aware...

that nine of the ten best albums from the last decade came before 2004? this is a sign of a truly brilliant couple years of music, not at all a sign that compiling a list of the best albums of a decade that isn't even over yet is for retards.

seriously, the strokes, radiohead, modest mouse, avalanches... it's high school all over again! to be fair, though, those albums really were the best years of your life.

kids: DON'T GO TO COLLEGE OR YOU'LL TURN OUT LIKE THIS

http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7693-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-20-1/2/

as i recently warned, pitchfork has put up their top 500 songs of the last ten years (which comes out to roughly one song for every week). and yes, the "list" (such as it is) is pretty silly, with basement jaxx and robyn getting quite a bit of attention, with a top 20 cracked by such mainstream non-artists as rhianna and justin timberlake, and more animal collective on hand than freshman orientation.

but that's not really important. to put together an accurate list of 500 songs is about as easy as putting together an accurate list of the top 500 restaurants on the east coast. it's part fool's errand, but its true purpose mostly is to give a handful of arrogant people a platform to wax educated about media and culture and stuff.

each and every song gets a paragraph. the examples of purely god-awful writing are too numerous to be chronicled. from some guy's belief that Joanna Newsom meant to invoke "whores" when she said "horse", to ridiculous overuse of the gerund, to the fact that anyone who wrote a song about new york was really singing about 9/11; the writing is just hackery. i mean, how many times can you publish the phrase "it goes without saying" before it starts looking like a red flag?

but even that's not really important, at least not to me right now. what i wanted to write about (i got distracted; don't like it? continue not reading.) was the way in which almost all of these writers discuss "what happened in music". the passive voice is used a lot. some bands "were never heard from again". some songs "are indellibly associated" with certain years. aside from being poor writing, this betrays a deep lack of appreciation for the critic's role in the whole process. it's YOU that chooses to notice something or not, to like it or hate it, not some invisible modernizing, culturizing force. a band that pleases one person consistently shouldn't automatically be recast as a band who "has longevity". an artist hasn't "dropped off the face of the earth" just because you haven't written up his last three albums. it's the pools from which the list was drawn that are pre-selected. they have already manufactured taste, now it only must be prioritized, and explained as the result of a mystical, natural process. UGH.


one more thing: marc richardson says, "If the songs on this list were chosen solely by how they captured the zeitgeist in independent music, 'Losing My Edge' would be an easy #1." and i'm afraid i agree with him. a comfortable, computer-owning music appreciator throws together a garage band beat, each new layer being introduced at perfectly predictable intervals, with all the depth of a casio demo-beat; meanwhile the computer-owner talks about cool things he likes, and he's being ironic, but he really kind of isn't, but really he is, but honestly he's lost his edge because he's not cool anymore, but he's actually the sole arbiter of what's cool.... etc.

i don't blame the song for sucking heartily, nor do i blame those who disagree and think it doesn't suck. i blame the critic, the person who says it "captures the zeitgeist in independent music" thus defining the boundaries of said zeitgeist without actually making a creative contribution. i'm not sure about you, but in my zeitgeist, we're not sitting around, pawing at our bald spots, wondering how being middle class and having impeccable taste simply hasn't made us more attractive.


one one more thing: white people have just gotten through "revolutionizing" dance music in the same way that columbus "revolutionized" the americas. when columbus arrived, a whole mess of people were already there, yet still there's a lot of talk about his "discovery".

THE DECADE IS OVER! THE DECADE IS OVER!

well, kind of. i mean, the decade will be over, in seventeen months, five if you don't count right. whatever, the decade is over. do you people even know what that means?

it means soon we get to find out what were the best albums, tracks, and music videos of the last ten years. we'll surely get to find out what some writers think the decade "meant" -- lots of long essays about mp3's, about how online distribution is SO FUCKIN AWESOME!

one thing's for sure: the current crop of pitchfork writers is probably starting to get nostalgic for their college days. consequentially, look for smarmy indie dance bands to be extremely well represented (you know, fast guitar music with no backbeat [whites gotta dance, too]), competing most directly with smarmy indie folk bands (sweet christ on a cracker, i hate those woodland brooklynites who seem to practice their instruments as frequently as they shave).

expect certain TITS bands to be erased down the memory hole (black kids, arctic monkeys, clap your hands...), and expect the editorial staff to show diversity of taste by including a bunch of hip-hop records that they never bothered to promote.

i won't miss the 00's (pronounced "oooohs"). it's kind of been a militarist corporatist nightmare of a decade. if there's one thing we can learn from it, it's that dystopian writers like Huxley and Orwell weren't as imaginative as modern-day republicans and democrats.

musically? general taste has been eviscerated by the atomization of the public, corporate sponsership of music is UP (sales are, of course, DOWN), and brittney spears had more fight in her than the beta band.

while pitchfork has presided over the death of anything like counter-culture, many of us just last november participated in the untimely death of political activism. the next decade's movers and shakers need to survey the wreckage, and realize that being king of the mountain now means only that you reach the peak of a pile of rubble.

up from the slums of shaolin

hey bitches. i'm back again after another hiatus again. thanks again to j-temp for having me.

i was going to write a big long year-end post about how lists R STOOPID, how lcd soundsystem sucks in a way that perfectly captures the idiocy of "indie" music fans, and how negative it is when critics foist their tastes upon lonely impressionable youths... but i never got around to it. i actually chose not to get around to it, because i realized that no matter how many years of awful lists go by, no matter how many times some bullshit record leaps to the front of a list because four critics love it, no matter how the specifics played out, the list itself is a COMMERCIAL exercise, which means they won't stop until people stop paying for music altogether (two years? three?).

when people complain about lists, they usually pick one or two, name a few records that shouldn't have been left off, and then generalize from those omissions until the writer settles on something that he can comfortably call a problem. but this method is silly. obviously readers won't agree with every item on every list. the issue is bigger than that. the project of whittling down every record released over a twelve month period into a list of 50 "essential" ones is hopeless. no amount of "expertise" can help a person accomplish this goal.

simply put, there is too much music. thousands of records slip beneath the collective critical radar. it would be impossible to listen to them all, foolish to try. unfortunately for critics, despite all of their analytical expertise, there just aren't enough days in the year. it hurts me, but i can't fault critics for this.

moving right along to what IS their fault, as soon as a group of these experts decides to compile a list of the "50 best" records of the year, they start lying about what their expertise is good for.

now, the fact that deerhoof's brilliant "friend opportunity" was exactly four worse than arcade fire's utterly embarrassing "neon bible", or the fact that bonnie "prince" billy's "the letting go" was inexplicably left off every 2006 best of list, the fact that the rapture outright sucks -- these sorts of things don't matter. specific injustices pale in comparison to the larger, more important injustice, which is that THOUSANDS OF RECORDS DON'T EVEN HAVE THE CANCE TO GET ON THESE LISTS, BECAUSE CRITICS HAVE NEVER HEARD THEM!!!!

of course, it's not an accident which records they don't hear. different groups of critics have different pools to choose from (which is why this list isn't the same as this list). important question: how are these pools settled upon, and who decides what gets left out?

i have a hunch the answer has to do with money and advertising (i.e. of course they were going to like the new animal collective album [released by domino records]; they'll like the next one too). i'm not making any specific payola accusations -- these schemes are more complex than record labels handing out bags of cash to quasi-intellectual under-sexed writers (if i'm wrong, i'd like my bag of cash now please now).

but this isn't about bribes. it's about interdependent business models doing what they need to in order to survive. as i hinted at above, there isn't much time left for the record industry. music is already free, and things don't become unfree -- unless of course demand outpaces supply, and anyone who's been to a record store in the last few years (anyone?) knows that isn't about to happen. this shit will not sell itself.

people just won't give their money to merge or matador without a little shove. and shoving people is, for the time being at least, a moderately profitable industry itself. neither business can survive without the other. and that is what these year-end lists are (except for the lists that are one voice's personal opinion, which are just narcissistic): a collaborative effort between record companies and record reviewers to keep their fledgling industries afloat for another few years.

kinda sad when you think about it.

Top Records of 2007 part 3

As I sit here watching Karate Kid for umpteenth time, I like to fondly recall some of the records I've purchased this year. It's been a weird one; I worked in a record store for the first part of the year, and got to listen to a lot of new records. And I also had to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers thanks to my ridiculous boss. Ugh.

What I found in all this new music is the same old thing. About five years ago, I fell out of love with contemporary independent music. This fall out also included quasi-indie bands like Modest Mouse, Wilco, I dunno, I just didn't fall in love with any records from 2007. Re-issues were fantastic as usual, and I just built my collection with rarer and rarer discs.

Josef K - Entemology

As most writers will tell you, Josef K were one of the greatest Scottish bands not named Orange Juice. This record got me through slow nights at the record store, and it still gets me going. Some classic post-punk chock full of manic-to-the-point-of-falling-apart drums, tumbling and sometimes slinky bass, absolutely squalling anti-lead guitar scratching, and a guy yelling and speak-singing his way through various bouts of paranoia and hyper glee.

Favorite Song: All are pretty great (if not Interpol inspiring), but "Chance Meeting" gets me every time, only because it sounds so different from the rest of the record. The song has a great build of layered guitars and stilted rhythms. The closest thing Josef K has to a pop song, they manage to make a straight up 4/4 beat sound shakey and nervous, as the guitars build on a giant hook that ends each verse. Also, it contains a great example of how to use a solo trumpet tastefully (Cake, please fucking take note).


Harmonia - Muski von Harmonia/Deluxe

Upon these records being re-released I promptly sprayed urine into my underwear. I love Krautrock, and have been digging into Can, Faust, Cluster, Neu!, Amon Duul II and Kraftwerk for about 10 years now. The first time I got drunk (in 7th grade) my friend put on Autobahn as we drank his father's warm Bass Ales.

These two records came about when Cluster (of the dreamy cosmic music) and Michel Rother of Neu! (the masters of the motorik pulse) collided and decided to create the Blind Faith of Krautrock, a fucking supergroup. Full of synth wash environments, drum machines, spindly patterns and hypnotic guitar drones, these three guys and Conny Plank (the George Martin of this era) made some of my favorite music of the 1970's.

Song- "Veterano" fom Musik von Harmonia is the definition of motorik, taking everything Kraftwerk did with a electro drum kit and morphing it into a pulverising and delayed bomp and swish that is propelled by the fluttering keyboard and guitar syncopations.

"Monza (Rauf Und Runter)" is my personal focal point of Deluxe, a forboding wall of stretched out guitar leads that pulls a thick gauze over the proceedings until a single distorted snarl kicks the song into high gear. Resembling a castoff from Neu 75, Michael Rother's guitars splinter and crash, as the band burbles along. The vocals surge along in a spirited chant, and goddamn it this song needs to last forever! It of course ends eventually. Whatever, it's the shit.


Soft Machine - Soft Machine Volumes 1-3

A psychedelic band so musically adept they essentially moved past the scene in less than a year. Led by the unhinged but steady as a rock foundation of Robert Wyatt on drums and vocals, the Machine played some of the most inspired art-rock of the late sixties. Full of outrageously tight rhythm work-outs, spiraling tape loops, solemn organs and clattering pianos, these guys were the anti-Pink Floyd, superior musicians and truly deranged composers willing to take risks that reward the listener far more than any of their paisley-covered contemporaries.

All of the music on these records is essential if you're a fan of psychedelic and generally experimental music. Volume 3 is more jazz-oriented than the previous entries, but the weirdness remains. Wyatt's side-long composition "Moon in June" is a fucking impossibly dense well of ideas. Vocal melodies and bits of narrative fly by and disappear as soon as they pop up, as a vocal/drums/organ trio gives way to a full-blown quartet sound, which is then overtaken by a creeping organ drone being ripped apart by a jagged violin tape loop. Volumes 1 and 2 are steeped in the pop sound, although still jazz-informed. If you can, find the vinyl versions of these albums, as the CD transfers are pretty horrible.


Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom

I've spoken enough about Robert Wyatt on this website. By now you should know that I like his music, and I am not a fan of cynics who decry that his music is too "whimsical" or "silly." He has one of the most heart-breaking voices in music, and on this recording he gathers his friends and creates a triumphant tapestry of harsh organs, muted guitars, swirling percussion and child-like sea imagery to re-imagine his musical life as it led up to that point. Better production values could've helped (why one would enlist Pink Floyd's DRUMMER to produce a record is beyond me), but I still can't hate it.

This Heat - This Heat/Deceit

These two records alone have changed everything for me. I had close to a religious experience when I turned on "Deceit." I can't describe the music, I've tried very hard. There are elements of prog, avant-garde, jazz, eastern modal music, noise, hardcore, punk, garage rock, psyche, musique concrete, 60's folk, the list goes on.

Please, track down these two albums. They will change everything; band's you thought created sounds and movements are pretenders. These guys were true visionaries.


More later, I'ved gotta listen to some new records I got yesterday. A quick list (even though I'm anti-list):

Neil Young - Zuma
Motorhead - Ace of Spades
Magazine - The Correct Use of Soap
Chrome - Alien Soundtracks/Half Machine Lip Moves
Gong - Camambert Electrique

Time to get my listening on.