The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 7

Titus Andronicus
The Monitor

There's probably never been a worse time for concept albums. We haven't hit the point where enjoying an album in its entirety is the latest way to advertise ones oldness, but that's obviously were this train is heading, whether some of us like it or not. Concept albums are probably the worst offender in that conversation--you have to listen to them all the way through, in order, the album art (all of it, not just the cover jpg) is usually a factor, you have to genuinely care about the people who create the album enough that you might give a shit about buying the thing itself...basically, you have to do a bunch of stuff that nobody really wants to do anymore, because music is pretty much another commodity that is ingested with an astronomical sense of greed that rivals 17th Century Catholicism.

Luckily, Titus Andronicus didn't really know how to make a concept album. Oh, they may have tried, but they didn't pull it off. They made something else entirely.

"From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide." 

You're supposed to buy into something else with The Monitor. That it's about the Civil War, which is why there's some cliched historical images of soldiers on the front cover. That it's about growing up in New Jersey and hardwon patriotisim, which is why there's so many Springsteen guitar riffs and lyrics. That's why there's a story that runs through the background of the album--leaving home to fight, finding out that fighting can be soul-destroying, hating oneself, refusing to give up, etc. This is about something, dude. It's like American Idiot, but not boring; like Southern Rock Opera, but without Lyrnyrd Skynrd.

The quote above is from a speech Abraham Lincoln gave when he was 28 years old. It was a response (of sorts) to the murder-by-incineration of a young black man by a St. Louis mob a few weeks earlier. The speech was given to a group of young men, and it's used by Titus to open the album's first song, "A More Perfect Union".

Yeah, you got it. This isn't fucking Tommy, it's not Zen Arcade, or if it is, if the concept album is where you want to hang your hat, then here: this is an album about teenage/early 20's angst, for boys who want to be certain kinds of men. It's about fantasizing about getting the chance to be violent, really violent, to kill people and fuck people over and aggressively quote every badass war line you can remember from a movie or make up your own. It's about getting the chance to have your intestines ripped out of your body and saying "Is that all you bite, motherfucker?"

In that vein, it has a storied precedence--you could think of this as the late release bridge onto Pulp's This Is Hardcore, which was an album that existed so that young man's rage could transmute into young man's solipsistic gotta-get-laid, won't-make-a-convincing-rapper mentality, which is the primary purpose of This Is Hardcore, despite it supposedly being about other things and also being the last useful thing that Pulp (or Jarvis Cocker) did. Titus is an album resolutely uninterested in sex, frequently jumping so far that characters will be children (sarcastically apologizing to their mothers) to old men (the type that sit in bars with other old men and reminisce about being young men who sarcastically apologized to their mothers). The gap in between--the gap where wanting-to-get-laid is, which is ultimately the gap that produces the storehouse of energy that motivates young men to dolotsaviolence and drinkandfightwiththeboys--is never addressed, unless one counts "To Old Friends And New", which is a terrible ballad, the worst song on the album, and kind of sounds like Conor Oberst covering something off the Urge Overkill Stull EP. On it, Titus seems to have felt the lack of a "boy talks to woman" track on their odyssey into the fires of overlong puberty, but the complaints leveled are far too tame, far too restrained--for it to have worked, it would've had to maintain the blind rage and psychotic machismo that populates the songs leading up to it. (It would've needed to be more Odd Future, honestly--the characters painted here, young men who shake the barley only to find the bodies they can drop, boys who fantasize for futures of local bars, a happy alcoholism and the dark arts of "dirty old men"...those are boys who grew up with misogynist stains on their teeth, they didn't whine about the "big words" their girlfriends used to assault their potency.)

All of it--the confusion, the aggression, the failure, the dumb ass picked-up and immediately-dropped Civil War nonsense--it all leads to "Battle of Hampton Roads", which is totally a song of the year, if the only determination required were to point out songs that list things that everybody remembers and shares. In no short order, it's about being a huge asshole and being really worried that the hugeness of that assholery will result in a life of abandonment, it's about being worn out by blank check cynicysm and yet still consumed by the desire to choke self-promoting talentless hacks until their eyes bulge out of their gigantic fucking tick heads, it's about wanting to vomit in a trash can whenever a stranger tells you about the personal tragedies they wear like t-shirts, it's about giving up and going somewhere else to re-create yourself while knowing all the while you're just going to start quoting the same goddamn television shows again, it's about being a gigantic fucking pig that eats nothing but something else, regurgitates it, and then gets furioious and indignant when no one responds to it with the proper display of gravitas and worship, it's about having nothing to say that's original, but claiming that the way you say it is an absolutely new, fresh way to say it, and, of course, it's about playing really loud guitars because you gotta play something, no matter what, even if it's just your ego and a fantasy version of the child you wished you were back in a time when everybody was most proud of the children who were good at being aggressive, violent fuck-ups, because the rest of them were weak ass crybabies who couldn't do shit during the harvest season, and even less during the war season.

But then again, maybe it's just about freedom. That's also something else entirely.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 8

Liars
Sisterworld

Best Liars album? Yeah, I think so.

Real early on the song’s first track, “Scissor”, Angus Andrew sings “I’m supposed to save you now”, which is a phrase that implies all sorts of feelings and intentions, none of which are assuring. Sisterworld isn’t a particularly assuring collection of music. Even at it’s tightest, it's most anxious album to come out this year, and this was a year that felt like a slow motion nervous breakdown.

While this is an album of great sounds as much as it is of songs (holy shit, the screwdriver guitar in the middle of “I Can Still See An Outside World”), but the largest psychological component of Sisterworld is the pluralities. There is never one voice, one guitar - there are many, all slightly out of sync with one another. These are sort-of chorales, creating a sense that these songs are huge things, different from the widescreen cacophony of other Liars records. This is indicative of a rare quality in recent years, and the only album which pursued a similar point was TV on the Radio’s “Return to Cookie Mountain”, which was going for epic vistas. Sisterworld uses the same approach to get small, training a microscope on whispers and screams, all of the cacophonous shit is inside someone’s head, occasionally exploding into external rants or distracted one-way conversations. Andrew’s voice(s) is an out-of-sync internal monologue, speeding up and slowing down rhythmically and dictating the tides of these songs (once again, the vocals “I can Still See An Outside World” recall nothing less than the Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way”).

The minimalist/maximalist nature of these songs sometimes obscures how pretty a Liars song can be, but you have to assume that something like “Drip” could be sweet but is instead dominated by shuddering ambiences, and that that’s the point. The same goes for the harder stuff, “Scarecrows on a Killer Slant” is what Sonic Youth’s “Master-Dik” would sound like if it were actually a good song. That riff basically exists to make you clutch the back of your head and duck into a defensive posture. (There are heavier riffs, definitely, but few as harsh.) The Liars aren’t out to tear your legs off with a riff, that seems to be secondary to what they are doing - which is creating a mental space (a really uncomfortable but still intoxicating one) through their sound space. If these guys were out to just make riffs they wouldn’t make the choices they make, time and time again (the horns and robotic whirring at the start of “Goodnight Everything”? Not there because it sounds cool). The album closer, “Too Much, Too Much” could pass for a Spacemen 3 song, almost...if it didn’t come at the tail end of ten slabs of seasick mental deterioration. On “Too Much, Too Much”, the lilting voices finally find a structure where they sound at home, swirling around each other on the fade-out. It would be serenity...if they weren’t singing about the annihilation of self.

-Sean Witzke, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 9

Robyn
Body Talk

Look, part of the appeal of Robyn is the persona. When the Swedish pop star released her self-titled album in 2005, she depicted herself not only as a badass label-head, but the “world record holder with a high score of two bazillion in Tetris, two time recipient of the Nobel Prize for Super-Foxiest Female Ever, and wartime consigliere to the Cosa Nostra.” She made it very clear that you couldn’t handle her, but that she might waste her time with you anyway, and, if you were lucky, she would cum in your mouth and make it delicious. All the romantic smack-talk could have been a veiled metaphor for her actual monumental achievements—ditching her label, Jive, when they balked at her single with The Knife, “Who’s That Girl;” founding Konichiwa Records purely to release her own music; then getting worldwide distribution for it. Regardless, it worked. Every music geek that came across her path seemed to fall for Robyn—not, I’m convinced, because of her forward-thinking pop music (though that certainly helped), but because she hit the perfect soft spot in the male rock crit psyche: Tell me I’m not good enough for you. Tell me all night long. I BELIEVE YOU. Like the cliché says, dudes wanted her, women wanted to be her. Thus, she insured her maybe true/maybe not reputation of being the pop star that indie kids love, but charts don’t. When Robyn began releasing her Body Talk EPs in May, with the help of five years’ advancement in social media, she became a pop creature purely of our time: over-exposed on the internet, underrated everywhere else.

Body Talk, the album composed from songs off the three EPs she released over the course of the year, could have easily been an extension of Robyn’s Robyn persona. In some places, it is. “U Should Know Better,” a late-album duet with Snoop Dogg, ends the title’s sentence with “than to fuck with me.” Opener “Fembot” twists the persona a bit, as she plays a deeply sensual robot that uses Khia’s “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)” as a mission statement. Robyn follows that with a laundry list of grievances—“My drinking is killing me,” “My smoking is killing me,” and my girlfriend’s favorite, “My boyfriend is killing me”—riling herself up into a fit of, ultimately, good advice: “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do.” For the most part, though, Robyn keeps “Robyn” under wraps. She doesn’t need to telegraph the fact that she’s a badass any more. Instead, she concentrates on enriching her songs musically and emotionally, and the result is an album full of hard-bodied techno pop with a staggering amount of lived-in pathos.

Musically, Body Talk is handled by Robyn and frequent collaborator Klas Åhlund, along with guest producers Röyksopp, Kleerup, Diplo, Patrik Berger, and pop impresario Max Martin, who produced Robyn’s breakout hit “Show Me Love” back in 1996. Together, they build a foundation of crisp drum machine ticks, thunderous bass, and delightfully restrained synths. Without vocals, Body Talk still could have been the best minimal techno album of the year, and it operates under similar rules as one. There’s not a lot of variation between songs, musically or vocally—even Diplo’s Jamaican nod, “Dancehall Queen” lives within the same world as the straight pop songs. Robyn reuses melodies with only slight adjustment, and many of the songs share similar composition. The repetitiveness might have tanked a lesser artist’s album, but Robyn comes out of it with an album containing as many as ten heavy-hitters that, overall, feels tightly-coiled rather than claustrophobic. It works because she nails the details—the balance between pop and hip-hop on “U Should Know Better,” for example; or the wound-up chorus of “Hang With Me;” or the relentless pulse of “Dancing On My Own.”

Robyn’s commercial prospects are better than ever. While she’s been refining her brand of techno pop, the style has become fashionable with the rise of Lady Gaga and Dr. Luke. Yet, on Body Talk, Robyn’s compositions rarely call attention to themselves as forward-thinking pop the way they did on Robyn. The music here is built simply to service Robyn’s songwriting, and her songwriting is what elevates the album to classic status. Concentrating less on her persona opens up Robyn to deep empathy. On “Dancing On My Own,” she watches from the corner of a dank, divey club as her ex-lover dances with his new girl, while on “Call Your Girlfriend,” she sings from the point-of-view of The Other Woman, encouraging the guy to let his girlfriend down easy. Even “Hang With Me,” which could have easily fit in with Robyn’s braggadocio, comes from a place of care for her lover, though she keeps him at a (suitably badass) distance: “Just don’t fall recklessly, heedlessly in love with me/ Cause it’s gonna be/ All heartbreak/ Blissfully painful insanity if we agree/ You can hang with me.” Those moments round out our shit-talking, label-founding, Tetris-ripping pop goddess with intense vulnerability. If that’s not the Super Foxiest, then I don’t know what.

-Marty Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 10

Tyler the Creator
Bastard

The Parental Advisory sticker on the cover of Tyler the Creator’s Bastard has to be one of the most perverse jokes of the whole album. Tyler designs most of the covers for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Odd Future’s Radical cover, for example, shows a vintage photo of a clown, wearing a hat that looks like a pylon, face painted pure white, except for his nose and lips which are painted red and dripping with blood. Hodgy Beats’ The Dena Tape features a legion of kids in uniform—black shorts and black shirts with white cuffs and collars—wearing canteens and gas masks. Often, Tyler’s covers feature little children with their faces Photoshopped in subtle but unsettling ways. Bastard’s is a classroom shot, maybe 3rd grade, white kids. One boy is missing his eyes; another, his entire face. Most of the kids have their smiles turned upside-down. One is wearing a t-shirt with a demonic Mickey Mouse on it. A girl has an upside-down anarchy symbol on her forehead. Tyler has taken these resolutely normal children, made some slight changes, and tweaked them into demon spawn—which is wholly appropriate, because that’s essentially what he’s done to himself. “Odd Future is children that’s fucked up in they mental,” he raps on Bastard’s opening track before launching into an album about being evil, full of vile shit, rape fantasies, abuse, and homophobia—oh, and not having a father. He uses his abandonment issues as an excuse to lyrically indulge in every nihilistic impulse he has. So, when he tacks that Parental Advisory sticker onto the cover—of an album he’s giving away for free, to an audience he didn’t know he’d have, that the RIAA could give a fuck about—as one last, tiny concession to moral rectitude, it’s hilarious.

It’s important to remember that Tyler and Odd Future spent a year or so creating before the rest of the world caught onto them, which allowed them to develop their own distinct aesthetic. Besides the covers, there are a series of videos that depict the crew skating, imbibing god-knows-what drugs, vomiting, and hurting themselves. The undeniable high point among the videos is Earl Sweatshirt’s “EARL,” which accomplishes a level of discomfort in 3 minutes that took Darren Aronofsky and hour and a half to achieve in Black Swan. Odd Future’s self-mutilation digs deeper than Natalie Portman’s because it’s played realistically. Musically, Tyler is unmoored from current rap chart trends. He fills Bastard with hypnotic beats that weld boom-bap to Sterolab chord changes and orchestral flourishes. Tyler frequently pitch-shifts his voice down so that it sounds like Ghostface’s skit staple Clyde Smith. Like the album covers, the effect is alien and alienating—music that will not come to you; you have to go to it. Most likely, Tyler could not have created Bastard with the spotlight shining on him. The trade-off for having time and space to work in a creative bubble, though, is that Bastard also exists in a moral vacuum.

That’s where a lot of Odd Future’s deplorable content comes in. Two of the major lyrical motifs on Bastard are rape and homophobia, and Tyler and Odd Future make them extremely difficult to look past (though lord knows most of their writer fans have tried.) In a culture that has become anesthetized to murder, crime, and drug use, rape fantasies are particularly disquieting offenses. Aside from the obvious violent misogyny involved, rape works differently as a symbol than murder. In rap music, generally, murder is about the will to power, ambition and alpha-dominance. With Odd Future, rape is about controlling another person, taking pleasure in someone’s pain, and, most importantly, defiling what is sacred. Rape is an apt metaphor for the collective’s mission statement, but supremely skeevy nonetheless. Make no mistake—it comes from a place of ignorance and anger, as does the group’s rampant homophobia, which mars the album equally. But if the actual psychology underlying homophobia holds up, half of these kids are going to have a horribly complicated decade, and what sets Bastard and Odd Future’s catalogue apart from other 2010 rape-mongers (like Salem and Die Antwoord) is that the psychology behind it is so transparent.

Tyler’s anger is deeply rooted in his abandonment issues, his persona as “Satan’s son,” and his sense of humor. Let’s not forget that this kid is not a paragon of maturity. On the videos and in concert, he loves rolling his eyes into the back of his head. Loves it. He’s making jokes about being on his period and acting his shoesize, not his age. Stupid shit. Shit that miiiiiiiight have been funny in high school, if you were a Senior entertaining the Freshmen—which is mostly the point. Tyler the Creator’s audience isn’t you, me, or Sean Fennessey; it’s not Nah Right and 2 Dope Boyz, the rap blogs Tyler throws a little tantrum about at the top of Bastard; it’s not mainstream-audience music, no matter how much of an internet meme it’s become. Tyler’s speaking to a group of maybe ten other people—kids that clearly look up to him, in part because they’re younger than him. He knows exactly what buttons to push to make them laugh or cringe—to impress them. This is closed-circuit rap. If anything, he tries too hard to be disturbing. But never on Bastard does it feel like it comes from any place but the wounds. Tyler’s music always sounds like it’s coming from a desperate kid –a prodigiously talented, but horribly desperate kid—and that’s what makes it one of the rawest and most compelling albums of the year. Unfortunately you can’t separate the rawness from the hate. Don’t worry, though. Ten years from now, Tyler will be making his Relapse.

-Marty Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 11

Tame Impala
Innerspeaker

I never gave a shit about Crocodile Dundee.

Oh sure, I watched it, but I can still remember that the primary thing I was looking forward to was that red dress that the girlfriend character wears in the party scene. The rest of the movie was another dumbass fish-out-of-water story, and it was an exercise in trying-to-be-serious for young assholes even talking about that movie: picture every joke, but with Dundee replaced with some aboriginal cutie. It's a fun game!

It was the Simpsons that woke me up to Australian possibility, although I didn't realize it at the time. But now--even after multiple Australian bands have regularly burst onto the scene, making even these lists twice before (once with Cut Copy, once with Radio Birdman)--I'm freely willing to admit that Australia, in my mind, is best represented by the moment when an Aussie kid goes looking for the prime minister. Where does he find him? 

Floating around the lake, in an inflatable donut, drunk as a lord.

That's it, man. It's not the Road Warrior, it's not Hugh Jackman, it's not the Sydney Opera House, it's not the secret Australian dude I used to work with who sends me mediafire links to old Wim Wenders movies--let's be frank, it's not even reality, it's trash culture, reference pointing and the like. It's a goddamned cartoon, and the fact that it's the smartest cartoon with the best track record doesn't change the simple truth that it's a goddamned cartoon.

Funny or no--and that scene is funny!--connecting an entire nation of people to a television episode that, while set in Australia, was geared towards satirizing the Michael Fay caning story is probably the worst possible way to examine anything that culture produces. You'd probably get closer to the mark just making shit up whole cloth.

But this is the Simpsons, and when that show is at its best, there's no place better to find the kernels of accepted truth that do represent the way Americans view the world that surrounds them. For Americans, advertising created Australia, not history. We know that it was founded by convicts, or that it was a penal colony like that movie with the pro-wrestler in it, at least that it had a prison, but now: there's surfing, really great surfing. There's black people who don't want their picture taken that live on the outskirts of reality, and sometimes their babies get taken away by Kenneth Branaugh. You shouldn't fly there, because you'll drop out of existence entirely. It produces beautiful women, even more beautiful men, and all of them are far, far better at drinking than any other group of people on the planet. (The Irish don't count, because there's is a drinking of necessity.) And when you pile these things onto your brain--which we all do, to a greater or lesser degree--it becomes all but impossible not to seek out connections between what we know about something and what we internally believe about it. Which brings us to Tame Impala: a band that can't be expected to cater to the fantasies of the ignorant regarding their mighty land, but one that's still in the position of producing that which fits the stereotype.

Shorter version: this shit sounds like lazy fuck-around music from surfers with studio access. It sounds like a group of dudes who are collapsing the gnarl of their day's end, "sitting around, smoking weed", and they're burying it in the ground with multi-tracked vocals and a million-and-one instances of the "sounds like ___" game. Does it make a difference that it is wasn't recorded in Australia? That the reason it sounds like the softer Flaming Lips songs is probably due to Dave Fridmann's mixing duties? Does it matter that it's getting called psych rock, when all of its messiness and garbling tendencies have been programmed to such a degree that it has more in common with Kanye than it does Moon Duo?

No. None of this makes a difference. Not because it's utilitarian music--it is, to a degree--but because it works, and it's beautiful, and you can get away with anything if you pull shit off. You can sound too much like Bob Dylan and still write a great song, you can spit corny fucking monologues and whine about rich white girls and still make great beats, and, if you're Tame Impala, you can swipe John Lennon's voice and vocal effects from that Chemical Brothers song, you can copy lyrics from stoned campfire conversations, and you can exploit the fact that nobody knows a thing about where you come from that isn't distilled out of the capitalism gangbang. You can get away with all of that shit--you can even tell us you did it!--because you went ahead and did it better than everybody else. 

-Tucker Stone, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 12

Guido
Anidea

The first striking thing about Guido is his affection for pop music. One of few dubstep producers who values songs over sounds, his debut album, Anidea, contains some of the hottest buttered soul since Isaac Hayes covered Burt Bacharach and Hal David. After coming up through Bristol’s grime and dubstep scenes, Guido dropped two 2009 singles on Punch Drunk. The first, “Orchestral Lab” showcased his dubstep skills, thriving on open space, cut by synthetic horns and string stabs. The second, “Beautiful Complication,” was something else entirely. Beginning with distinctly un-rhythmic down beats and hand-claps before exploding into a multitracked, Destiny’s Child-worthy vocal, “Beautiful Complication” telegraphed not only Guido’s love for R&B, but the potential future of dubstep. “Orchestral Lab” and “Beautiful Complication” both show up on the album. So does the B-side to “Orchestral Lab,” “Way U Make Me Feel,” though in slightly different form. When “Way U Make Me Feel” dropped in 2009, it was a slow-burning instrumental—along with Burial & Four Tet’s “Moth,” Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo,” and Joker & Ginz’s “Purple City,” one of the best dubstep tracks of the year. On Anidea, “Way U Make Me Feel” becomes a straight diva moment. Guido grafts a furious performance by vocalist Yolanda onto the instrumental track and makes a good thing even better. The album version of “Way U Make Me Feel” epitomizes everything that Guido is great at—on the one hand, the show-stopping, scenery-chewing vocal is flying in all directions, and there’s nothing even remotely dubsteppy about it; one the other hand, he’s bracing her with uncommonly assured and compelling music.

That’s the second striking thing about Guido: His restraint, which stands in direct opposition to his pop acumen. “Way U Make Me Feel” and “Beautiful Complication” are watershed moments that, in the context of the album, are allowed to sound special. Guido’s general MO is tight songs with a few slight flourishes—a piano run here, some trumpets there—so when the future R&B enters the mix, it sounds both supported by the rest of the album and nothing like it. Throughout Anidea, Guido holds his cards close to his chest. On “You Do It Right,” Anidea’s seventh tune, he deftly uses a clipped vocal sample—the kind that, in the hands of artists like James Blake and Girl Unit, has all but defined the year in electronic music. Guido, obviously a guy that’s tuned in to what’s current, waits half the album and then only uses the vocal manipulation on one song, almost just to prove that he can nail it. There’s also the album’s centerpiece, “Mad Sax,” which chops up a synthetic sax riff into an absolute party-killer. If Guido had begun the album with “Mad Sax,” it would have all been downhill afterward. Instead, he slowly builds up to it with the first five tracks, and down from it with the next six. In an era when artists are consistently trying to blow the roof off with each song, sometimes it’s refreshing to hear someone holding back.

-Marty Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 13

Gil Scott-Heron
I’m New Here

“On Coming from a Broken Home (Part One),” the opening track from I’m New Here, finds Gil Scott-Heron memorializing Lily Scott, the grandmother who raised him. He speaks over a loop of the intro to Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights”—the part that’s all whirring space noises and laser light show fodder, before the beat drops. On Kanye’s version, it’s an acclimating lead-up before some future shit kicks in. For Gil Scott, the loop provides build after build with no release. “I was moved in with her, temporarily,” he says of his grandmother, “Just until things were patched. Until this was patched and that was patched, until I became at 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, the patch.” He clips the t’s and tch’s on his words. He emphasizes in strange places. His inflection drops downward at the end of each line. Gil Scott-Heron has always been considered a spoken-word artist, yet never has he sounded so much like he’s not conversing, but reciting. He’s clearly invested in what he says. At the same time, he’s disconnected from it. His words are vessels, ciphers, empty capsules waiting to be filled with meaning.

It makes sense. Gil Scott-Heron is sixty years old, once a grad school poet who stumbled into a music career with an iconic single (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”), became a 200,000-seat-theater-filling political artist for most of the 70’s and 80’s, and has spent the last two decades getting whooped on by drugs, jail, and disease. In the last five years, he’s spent ten months in prison on a cocaine possession charge and discovered that he may or may not be HIV positive (according to a profile in Entertainment Weekly, he keeps taking tests that come up with conflicting results). I’m New Here viscerally documents Gil Scott turning his focus from the political to the personal—a visionary looking inward. He looks at his life; credits those, like his grandmother, who nurtured the good; and takes responsibility for the bad. “If you’ve got to pay for things that you’ve done wrong,” he says during an interlude, “I got a big bill comin’.” Then he laughs.

So, when Gil Scott-Heron sounds disconnected from his own words on I’m New Here, it may be because he’s too close to the subject matter. Thing is, the album couldn’t work any other way. Gil Scott’s reciting creates an empathetic distance between himself and himself, allowing him to look steely-eyed at his own complexity. Aesthetically, it makes I’m New Here sound otherworldly, something that’s reinforced by producer and label head Richard Russell, who provides bluesy compositions tinged with hip-hop and dubstep elements. It also gives Gil Scott the vocal flexibility to jump from brittle elegiacs to Tom Waits-style barroom songs to vaudevillian comedy (“She said I’ve got an ego on me the size of Texas,” he says, on the cover of Smog song that gives the album its title, “Well, I’m new here, and I forget: Is that big or small?”) Most of all, his voice is a vessel for the poetry—of his own words, Bill Callahan’s, or Robert Johnson’s on “Me and the Devil,”—and the poetry is powerful enough that Gil Scott doesn’t have to emote it to be emotional. When Gil Scott-Heron speaks, his personal history speaks through him.

-Marty Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 14

Charlotte Gainsbourg
IRM

Charlotte Gainsbourg has released 3 albums in her lifetime, one when she was a teenager after recording “Lemon Incest” at 13 with her father, Serge (it's okay to feel weird about that one, by the way). Then she released an album produced by Nigel Godrich, with songs written by Air and Jarvis Cocker, which was... pretty okay. Gainsbourg is more famous (and accomplished) as an actress. Beck has spent the better part of this decade (aka everything after Sea Change) rudderless, making a bunch of albums that all tried to imitate Odelay’s disco-cowboy bouillabaisse approach to genre while keeping his Sea Change/Mutations tone. Each album meant diminishing returns, and there was talk about Beck getting old, about how Scientology had got to him, that the protracted ego cage match with Wayne Coyne on the Sea Change tour had taken a lot out of him, lots of things. The truth is Beck has simply hit the second decade of his career and was having trouble maintaining, which is what happens to everyone. Sometimes it’s one album and sometimes it’s a whole string of “okay-to-middling-to-bad” until they hit a wake-up call. You can’t forget that IRM was released immediately after Gainsbourg starred in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, with a performance which nastily erased any concept of a character that any audience had about her. And Beck, he spent 2009/10 collaborating with anyone and everyone, doing the Record Club covers project, movie soundtracks, producing Jamie Lidell and guest-vocalizing for Tobacco. This collaboration was something each of them needed, coming along right when each of them was stuck in a shit or get off the pot position - Gainsbourg on the edge of being branded a dilettante, Beck of being a career rock star.

They pulled it off. IRM is kind of a 2010 take on Lee Hazelwood writing and producing for Nancy Sinatra, where each of them are exchange being the more dominant voice from song to song, the end result being an album that feels like it couldn’t exist without both of their involvement. IRM has a lot of the hallmarks of Beck’s work - Nick Drake-influenced chamber-pop, trancey space-folk, emotionally brittle orchestral detours, unconventional percussion, instruments copying the sound of machinery and sampled machinery mimicking instruments, distorto-noise, lo-fi boom bap, 60s/70s country, lyrics that are oblique and anthemic. You could argue that this is Beck’s follow-up album to Modern Guilt, but that disregards that Beck’s approach, while idiosyncratic, leaves so much open for the right artist to fill. Whatever impression 5:55 left of Charlotte Gainsbourg (and it couldn’t have been much) has been forgotten in the intervening years, so she’s creating an identity from scratch. What separates her most from Beck’s songwriting is that personality. Her wry humor in delivery, and, honestly, her commitment to embodying these songs. With Beck, even at his best, there is a manufactured distance to every word. That’s part of his appeal. When the words get strange on IRM, that distance isn’t there - so something like “Heaven Can Wait” or “Trick Pony” would be about the sounds on the track, the way the song is composed, how it was being sung. Here both songs are windows into a fragmented thought process rather than an attempt at replicating the same. On “Vanities”, where Beck one-ups his Nigel Godrich/Scott Walker production influences, the result is secondary to how quietly and slowly Gainsbourg sings the emotions not the words. She’s not a diva or a conduit, she’s not going to bust into melisma on one of these tracks. She sings with a slight accent, and often fights to not be buried under the overzealous production. IRM is Gainsbourg achieving artistic maturity. On 5:55 it felt like she was Air and Cocker’s idea of a chanteuse to work out their pop fixations (her parents wrote “Je T’aime... Moi Non Plus” zomg), and while for all we know Beck is working with her for the same reasons , he can’t really do anything but write Beck songs. That’s the only skill set he’s developed. In doing so here, he’s allowed a space for Charlotte Gainsbourg to become Charlotte Gainsboug. It turned out that’s something both of them desperately needed.

-Sean Witzke, 2010