The Factual Opinion

The Best of 2006: #4

Liars
Drum's Not Dead

EIght years ago or so, my uncle lent me a book called The Secret History of Rock by Roni Sarig, which profiled a ton of band and artists who had--as the title implied--secretly helped develop the sounds used by the artists I listened to at the time.  Sarig focused on artists as diverse as Slint and Van Dyke Parks and Erik Satie and The Last Poets and Flipper and traced their lineage through to Nirvana and 2Pac and Soul Coughing.  This was mind-blowing, of course, in the way that retroactively witnessing the development of an idea over time is always mind-blowing.

Now, of course, there’s not even the potential for secret history of rock. The internet sheds light on everything, with the methods discovering music growing exponentially. The artists on our list who would never have found an audience even as little as three years ago—Lil’ Wayne, for example, and Beirut—have gotten the attention they deserve online. As a by-product, we often get to see the formerly invisible process by which an artist becomes a visionary. Also, as we know well by now, the internet is fickle. This is where the Liars show up.

Over the course of three albums, Liars have made that leap. 2002’s They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top chased fashionable dance-punk, got swept into a scene with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and reached an unfadeable zenith with “Mr. Your On Fire Mr.” Four years later, Drum’s Not Dead is an unclassifiable behemoth of an album. Tribal rhythms and chanting create a sense of extreme compression. Everything comes across as stunningly simple—even obvious—but sounds like absolutely nothing else. 

More than just a monumental album, though, Drum’s Not Dead establishes Liars as a new breed of artist. The experimenters and influencers in The Secret History of Rock had no one watching when they failed. Years later the risk-taking received the attention it deserved. Liars, on the other hand, attempt to be Secret History-caliber artists, but do it in full view of the public. Their middle album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned—widely regarded as a disaster on the scale of Metal Machine Music—undeniably helped develop the sound they achieve on Drum’s Not Dead. To make such a critical comeback at a time when failure can be career-ending, and to do it by creating an entirely new sound—well, that’s unprecedented. We look forward to hearing what they do next.

-Marty Brown, 2006

There's nothing really fun about drone music--regardless of what anybody says, you'd be hard pressed to find relatively sane individuals who are excited to start their day with Om or Orthhelm.  Unless one has a lot of experience with the actual mechanics of making music, which this writer doesn't, than drone is something that's far more interesting as an object than anything else.  One listens to it just to see if it's understandable, to see if it's something beyond just noise--and people who do that usually should be doing something more constructive, like breakfast.  Some people like to make that arguement about the Drum: that it's an album that's constructed of things that aren't really cohesive songs, that don't fall into place.  They couldn't be more mistaken.

When the Liars first showed up with Trench, they were described as post-punk, and due to Stooge-like similarites (wall-like sound, aggro-lyrics and a weird kind of pop song structure) this was a pretty apt description.  The follow up album, 2004's They Were Wrong was universally loathed by critics (an exciting occurence in itself: critics were far more divided regarding the aural assualt of Wolf Eyes and previous no-wave revivals from the SYR series--but everybody, from Spin to Pitchfork, hated the Liars in 2004) and was, even to those who enjoyed, a hell of a difficult listen.  Instead of jettisoning the Wrong sound, the Liars completely jettisoned everything from Trench that didn't work, brought the vocals up a bit, and made They Were Wrong, again.  This time, it worked.  Whether it's because Drum's Not Dead has more, ahem, percussion, or whether it's because it loosely creates a larger thematic story, Drum's Not Dead got rave reviews.  It deserves them all: it's one of the strongest artistic statements any band made in 2006.  The Liars made drone/noise/rock/art/punk music, they made it listenable, they made it intelligent, and they made it exciting. 

Buying cd's is a stupid waste of money--everybody knows it.  Drum's Not Dead was worth the money for one sole reason: the DVD.  If you profess to dig the album, and you still haven't sat through Drum's Not Bread, one of the three album length companion pieces, than get ready to be happy.  To those who didn't really dig the album due to noise complaints, get ready to be even happier.  Although straight-up performance footage takes the backseat to cheap music video tricks, watching the three man crew in the studio does occur, and it's fascinating, educational stuff.  While the films have less to do with the story of Mt. Heart Attack and Drum, the enthustiatic confusion that takes up the album's over-arching story, the films are must watches for anyone with interest in the Liars.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The best recommendation for someone looking for something like The Liars is for that someone to catch the Liars live: this writer did, and it was the best live show of the year.

Pyongyang: A Journey In North Korea

By Guy Delisle
Originally published by L'Association 2004
English Translation, Publication by Drawn & Quarterly 2005

The international travel comic has always been a lucky genre for a lot of artists: not only will your graphic novel sit alongside it's relatives in the comic stores, but Barnes & Noble will also file you over alongside the serious historical books of whatever country you went to.  On top of that, if your subject matter happens to be a relatively upsetting part of the current global situation (Like Palestine, Kosova or the land of Kim Il-Sung,) you're likely to experience a decent upsurge in sales everytime something particularly nasty happens; after all, most Americans like to be informed about the people most interested in killing them.

Guy Delisle is a French animator who spent two months in North Korea in 2001 on a work visa, supervising the outsourced animation of a dull cartoon for French television.  Each night, by the cover of darkness (Literally. North Korea only fully light areas when foreign dignitaries are around.) Guy sat down and sketched up a pretty blistering account of what he saw, and what he experienced.  While the book is, by design, totally subjective, Guy was working so hard to maintain a level of respect and tolerance towards one of the most frighteningly bizarre areas on the planet that expecting him to maintain that in what is effectively a diary is totally insane.  As days mount up, reading about Guy's banal days mixed with the near constant level of inane, psychotic bullshit that is North Korean sociopathy becomes more and more disturbing.   North Korea, after all, is one of the few places on the planet where one can see a real world laboratory of how totally fucked up fascism can become, and there becomes quite a bit of hero worship for Guy.   After all, he's able to restrain himself from screaming and shaking his guide/translators as they spit out some of the most inane horseshit on earth. 

While no one should use a comic book to teach themselves about a foreign culture, it's not exactly like one has a lot of places to turn to when it comes to North Korea.   Like Joe Sacco's deservedly award winning Palestine, these comics aren't dealing with the sort of places that get a lot of in-depth anaylsis from non-governmental sources, and it seems depressingly more common for them to be treated as sound-bytes by the news media.   In America, where the cultural output of consumable art is so often totally cyclical, concerned only with examining itself, it becomes much simpler to treat the remainding areas of the world that we don't know about as if they are somehow correlations of our own country, albeit ones that are less advanced: discussion of foreign values and lands often reveal the American attitude that anything beyond our shores is somehow a part of us, only a few decades behind.   When confronted with a place like North Korea, a place where all the bullshit Communist nightmares of Eugene McCarthy have, inexplicably, become not only true but even worse, Americans are content to just flat out ignore it.   Delisle's narrative, while not out and out political (thankfully, Guy never pulls the "God I hope this country can change" card) is one of the rarest acts of exploratory journalism in the last decade--it's the story of a normal guy (with an Aphex Twin cd and a copy of George Orwell's 1984) who orders french toast only to be treated to a slice of bread dipped in milk and microwaved.   Not only are these the sort of issues a normal person can understand and identify with, these are the types of things that make a place like North Korea seem more real as place, and less as fantastic land of mystery.   Finishing Pyongyang is a dizzying experience: saying North Korea is a weird, scary place is a totally impersonal thing.   Saying it's a place where people say things like "The Eiffel Tower is where all the beggars live, and I know because I went to Paris" is the total opposite.   Neither CNN nor Karl Rove have been able to fully explain to America why it's so scary that North Korea has nuclear weapons--and that's because neither have the sense of what it's like to sit down to french toast and be served milk-bread.

-Tucker Stone, 2006
 

The Unit: Season One

2006
Created by David Mamet
Produced by Shawn Ryan
Starring Dennis Haysbert, Scott Foley and Robert Patrick

When trying to form an opinion and word a response to a show like The Unit, two things are forced to butt up against one another like two billy goats: the desire to enjoy and like a show like The Unit, and the the actual show called The Unit.  When The Unit was on paper last year, there couldn't have been anything more exciting: thanks to a bullet in the throat, Dennis Haysbert wouldn't be returning to 24.  David Mamet had just written another brilliant episode of Shawn Ryan's The Shield, and all three would be teaming up with Robert Patrick to make a hardcore show about the US Special Forces.  Imagining a show like that, reading about it on the web...it still seems incredibly exciting.  So why is the real thing so bad?

When trying to enjoy an episode of The Unit, there's an attack coming from two fronts, an attack that, in all 13 of the first season's episodes, succeeds beyond all imagination.  The first front is the portions of the show that focus on the wives--miscast across the board, the wives of these men all seem to begin every day with amnesia, forgetting what it was they bought into when they chose to marry men far more obsessed with their military lives than anything a family might provide.  Each episode contains at the very least one, and often more, scene where the viewer is left confused, asking oneself, "Why did these women marry these guys?"  The argument "because they were in love" doesn't work--by the end of the first episode it's clear that any sort of romantic emotion has been left behind by these men years ago, and that their loyalty and faith (and, quite possibly, all physical attraction) reside totally in the men they work alongside.  Beyond that, the women fill their days with so little beyond talking about these men who don't seem to care that much about them that they seem barely human at all: after a few episodes, it's like watching a doll house stand up and move around on it's own while the children who rule it are outside playing.  The women behave as if they're so devoid of any desire or want beyond their pretend relationships that it becomes impossible to care for them at all: the only possible explanation for their behavior would require for The Unit to reveal that all these women are robots.  Their behavior makes that little sense.  (They are also such a terrible bunch of actresses a kinder viewer might hope that they were actually built out of a broken Sony Aibo.)

Of course, part of the problem (and maybe all of it) with them women on the show can be dedicated solely to one man: David Mamet.  After all, all other major problems with the show are definitely his. 

Mamet's writing hasn't captured anybodies imagination in a while, (excepting people who like to pretend they actually laughed at State and Main) and The Unit is no exception.  Stuttering out bizarrely autistic conversation and creating new metaphor/cliches out of whole cloth, every character on the show has to suffer it at some point.  While veterans like Haysbert and Patrick are able to grimace out enough world weariness and disgust to make the dumb cowpoke language relatively comprehensible, Mamet's success rate for idiocy remains in his favor for every episode he writes.  His stamp of pointlessly obvious deus ex machina remains throughout even the episodes his name is nowhere near: it's as if The Unit is written only by writers who sleep sitting in a chair in Vermont, underneath bookcases with well-thumbed copies of Mamet's drivel.  Over and over do we witness what looks like relatively normal people (even surprisingly unattractive females, a rare feat for network television) that speak as if they're tongues are made of molasses into ears that serve as trampolines: "What's that?" "That." "What's that." "That's what makes us wives." "Wives." What's that, that makes us?"  "Wives?"  While this would be, without a doubt, unintentional hilarity in small doses, 44 minutes of it is just grueling.  13 Episodes of it? 

That's just suicidal.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

A Call For The Dead

By John le Carre
1962
160 pgs.
Published by Scribner

John le Carre has seen a second love affair with popular culture, although it hasn't made his name any more of a household one than he'd previously experienced.  Always respected as one of the better writers of the British post-war genre writers, his works have started selling again, and a recent flirtation with big-budget Hollywood saw him once making inroads into the American market.  While he's never suffered from seeking publication, anyone with an overactive sensory device might remember that it wasn't that long ago that most of his books were being housed in the "mystery/thriller" ghetto of many bookstores, and some still are.  It's only been in the last five years or so that he's seen the shift over to "literature," alongside such notaries as "The Devil Wears Prada."  With luck, he might go home with some of the people buying whatever piece of paper Dave Eggers recently urinated on.

If said reader decided to go the chronological route, Call for the Dead is going to be where they start; unfortunately, unless they're really dedicated or happened to buy another le Carre, it will also be where they stop.  Despite the introduction, which lends one the (probably correct) assumption that Call is based mostly on true experience, the book is such a work of function over form, of a lack of style that while it may be real, it leaves one craving some lies.  One of the more non-compelling spy books to ever be referred to as "thriller,"  Call for the Dead is so grossly dull, full of such hackneyed stereotypes that it's hard to believe it was ever published.  It's not just that the book lacks mystery, but that it lacks something far more integral--it lacks anything remotely interesting in the first place.  While it certainly wasn't the book that made him a star, and it's notable nor simply due to it's existence, A Call for the Dead is one of the saddest pieces that fill the mystery shelves: a book with far more notoriety (due to it's authors later, justified successes) that's taking up space that belongs to a hundred better writers and a thousand better books.

The Best of 2006: #5

Herbert
Scale

While 2006 can go down for the dirty (Wayne, Clipse, JT and Avatar,) and it can go in for some scary (Walker, Burial and Liars,) Herbert's the one who's bringing the wash.  As complicated as his earlier Bodily Functions, yet far more compulsive, Scale is that rare piece of electronic music that is able to apply the minimalist technique found on Sleeparchive with the lifeblood of a humanistic Daft Punk, and then layer in enough pop vocals and horns to make it sound like the album Cristina Aguilera would've shot her mother to make.  Somebody better hurry up and give Herbert a grant: otherwise, he's going to be enslaved by some label to produce every half-ass pop act that Simon Cowell hasn't emotionally devastated.  Even more upsetting, he could probably make them seem interesting.

Dance music gets a lot of static and derision--The Factual isn't about to argue that most of it isn't deserved.  While no music should ever be labeled "responsible" for any sad state of affairs, dance music is, for the most part, made for and by aggravating collection of the biggest nimrods this world has ever produced.  If it wasn't for Phish and Deadheads, dance-freaks and X-girls could easily take the top spot as the most repugnant fanbase on Earth, even during the heyday of Poison.

Herbert gets a pass--after all, this is the first time in a few albums that he's pulled back on his solo work from just exploratory sound--in other words, he's made a dance music you could actually dance to, instead of just crazy beeps and sexy voices (Bodily Functions grows on you, but it takes some serious abstract thinking to tap your feet to.)  Whether it's left over excitement from his 2005 work on Roison Murphy's album, one of the best pop albums that doesn't involve Justin, Herbert went to town on this one, crafting one of the cleanest love albums in a while.  Scale is a masterstroke, and it's an album that grows into far more than just sexy techno the more it's played.  Most heavy music critics are going to ignore albums like this--to artsy to be a guilty pleasure, but too fun to be taken seriously.  That's their loss: don't make it yours.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

You'd also be might be pleasantly surprised by Ekkehard Ehler's recent A Life Without Fear--an album as bizarre as Scale is pretty.  Although it would be a far cry to call the two artists contemporaries, they're both continuosly exploring the field of electronic music while still making music that people might actually want to hear.  That's a backhanded insult at Alan Courtis.

Matthew Herbert once wrote a manifesto for his work, which included the guideline, “The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged.” Everything on Scale sets in its right place, but Herbert’s attitude about the happy accidents (his manifesto is titled “Personal Contract for the Composition of Music [Incorporating the Manifesto of Mistakes]”) allows his compositions to break free from the rigidity that defines most electronic music. Though they’ve obviously been given extreme attention down to the minutest detail, his songs most often feel breezy and carefree.   

The vocals on Scale unfold slowly. Herbert builds exquisite tension before launching into his hooks. Often, one catchy chorus gives way to a second, even catchier chorus. “Harmonize,” the album’s high point, has no less than five musical phrases which playfully interact with one another until, finally, the joyful “You are the world/ I am your people” swoops in and outdoes them all. The effect is stunning. It’s also fairly orgasmic, but not in the blatant way that most rock music aspires to be orgasmic. Orgasmic in the way that two people can interlock their breathing and rhythms to create something greater than either one could achieve on his or her own. 

An album ostensibly about the nature of love—falling into it, recognizing it, coping with it—Herbert’s Scale may come closer than any album in history to capturing the sound of what we imagine love to be. On the one hand, he has the syrupy strings that we associate with Sinatra and walking in Central Park. He has the antiseptic vocalists singing like they’re in a Hallmark commercial. He has jazzy horn sections and swirling orchestral arrangements. On the other hand, he has a strong pulse, the electronic flutters that sideswipe “The Movers And The Shakers,” the sick bass line of “Moving Like A Train,” the intrusive bleeps censoring the dirty talk of “Down.” With so many contradicting elements knotted into one tight little bundle—so many accidents meeting within such a deliberate construct—it’s practically the real thing.    

For further investigation: Herbert’s wife and primary vocalist, Dani Siciliano, made her own album this year featuring, on one song, the sound a room full of girls slapping their own asses. The album is called Slappers. Also, Róisín Murphy’s nearly flawless Herbert-produced debut, Ruby Blue, was released stateside this year, and comes highly recommended by us here at TFO. Also, for a taste of experimental but accessible electronic pop from a completely different angle, dive into The Knife’s Silent Shout.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 2006: #6

Lil Wayne & DJ Drama
Dedication 2

It's a good thing for mp3 blogs and file sharing.  After all, if you don't live nearby a major rap hub, you probably are only able to pick up CD-R "mixtapes" that reflect your local scene--which, if you live in Houston means you get a lot of great DJ Screw, and if you live in Baltimore, you probably hang out with Spank Rock, but if you live in Nashville you're probably a little sick of David Banner.  If you live in Nome, Alaska, you just need to start uploading more: none of us know what's going down up there, and we're all beginning to wonder if there's any bands in Canada besides the Constellation collective and Malajube.  Does Canada make mixtapes?  Do they make ones without Swollen Members?

Lil Wayne's cheaply put together and non-marketed Dedication II didn't just come out the same year that he was involved in multiple major-label releases, it slaughtered them wholesale: if you listened to Lil Wayne at all this year, and you weren't listening to Dedication II, than you're some kind of freak who still uses the regular old non-satellite radio.  (And yes, that makes you a freak.  Buy an iPod shuffle, you cave-dweller.  You people are what's wrong with America, you and your 2000 vote for Nader.)

Wayne doesn't have the best beats or production value to back him up here--and that isn't a slight to Drama or Gangster Grillz, it's just a statement of fact: the beats are cheaply made and repetitive, which is always going to be the nature of this type of hip-hop.  It's a old school soap box for an old school MC, so if anything about Dedication is going to be more than just an updated diary entry, it's going to be because of Wayne's ability to entertain and impress.  Thank the gods of Kobol, he's got that in spades.  Whether it's "Sportscenter," the single funniest rap/skit track released this year, or "Georgia...Bush," the only protest song of 2006 to have any real meaning whatsoever, Lil Wayne remains one of the brightest artists of the last ten years.  Imagining what he would have done with the strong production forces beyond some of the other albums this year is like imagining a fantasy football team that includes LT, Lee Perry and Chuck Yeager--and Lil Wayne seems to show absolutely no sign of either stopping or slowing down.  Although it's unlikely that Wayne will team up with Steve Albini any time soon, it's clear that just about anything else may be in the cards.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Go buy mixtapes, buy them on Canal and W. Broadway, buy them outside Virgin Megastores, buy them online, upload 'em, download 'em, do whatever else.  There's way more good ones out there than any one website or magazine will ever be able to dissect, and the difference between the good, the great and the what-the-hell could be, quite literally, a couple of inches.

The Best of 2006: #7

Neko Case
Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

Neko Case begins Fox Confessor Brings the Flood with “Margaret vs. Pauline,” written from the point of view of Margaret, who lost three fingers at the cannery. Margaret envies Pauline, who appears to effortlessly obtain everything she wants. “Everything’s so easy for Pauline,” Margaret thinks, “Fate holds her firmly in its cradle.” Usually these kinds of stories end with the Margaret-type character discovering that the Pauline-type doesn’t have everything laid out for her as perfectly appears, but there’s no such revelation here. Neko Case firmly sees herself as Margaret, and her position is clear: The Paulines of the world do, in fact, exist, and she will never be one of them. Subsequently, although Fox Confessor Brings the Flood travels effortlessly through its series of intricately constructed story-songs, everything Case describes—from the blossoming of love in “That Teenage Feeling” to the murder in “Dirty Knife”—comes hard-earned. She may not have lost three fingers, but her hands have gotten dirty creating these songs, and they sound like it. 

Case mostly steers clear of verse-chorus-verse structures, instead allowing her songs to unfold like short fiction—the music twists and turns to support the storytelling. Without the hooks she manages to wring out of almost every line, however, the album wouldn’t be much of a listen. Thankfully, we get the gospel bounce of “John Saw That Number,” which rides along on an old-West barroom piano. We get “The Needle Has Landed”—the album-closer and catchiest number—which spins a variation on an old theme as Case sings, “If I knew then what’s so obvious now/ You’d still be here, baby.” We get her slow-playing the payoff of “A Widow’s Toast,” in which a circle of women grapple with the ghosts of their dead husbands. She multi-tracks the vocals over a subtle guitar—it almost sounds a capella—to create an aural portrait of memory before laying into the wistful refrain, “It’s a faster love than you and me/ Faster than the speed of gravity.” In fact, the entire album reflects a sense of history intertwining with a vision of the future—the desire to change one’s past or one’s fate usurped by the mundane and often tragic facts of the present. “Better times collide with now,” she sings, “and better times are coming still.”

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 2006: #8

Comets On Fire
Avatar

There it is--the album that you never remember to bring up in conversation when you're arguing about the Liars, why The Hold Steady is a good band, and whether or not listening to the Raconteurs will turn you gay.  (They will.)  But when they come up on shuffle, here it was: the album that reminds you that calling Death Cab indie rock is, quite literally, a blasphemy in terms.  Avatar is what rock sounds like, it's what you and I think about when we tell somebody when they ask us how Half-Nelson was--we say, "It f--king rocks." We aren't thinking about Ryan Adams, we aren't thinking about the Decemberists--we're thinking about Avatar, whether we know it or not.  Hanging around the junkyard, the campfire and wherever else bearded drunks go, Comets On Fire have been doing whatever they feel like for years now, and when it came 2006, they decided they were going to remind everybody what the Strokes have been trying to make us forget: that there wasn't anything wrong with liking Led Zeppelin in middle school. Avatar is up to the minute enough to stand toe to toe against Mastodon and Boris, and it walked away with the crown because it liked having fun a hell of a lot more than they did.  If you wanted somebody to rock your body in 2006, you went with Timberlake: but if you just wanted to rawk, than Avatar was the way things went down.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Howlin Rain was another album that should've gotten a lot more love for rekindling people's van-loving power chords, and this recommendation goes straight out to any holiday drivers who are able to hang an arm out of an open window--you'll beat a dent into the door frame.