The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 1

Cut Copy
In Ghost Colours

Hardly anything about In Ghost Colours screams “Album of the Year,” at least not immediately.  At its heart, Cut Copy’s second album is a 50 minute dance party, overtly steeped in the tradition of New Order.  Upon further inspection, In Ghost Colours spans three decades of tradition, connecting the dots between 80’s synth music, the 90’s electronica boom, and the DFA-consumed new millennium.  It proposes that fun and intelligence need not be mutually exclusive, and—while nowhere near the first artists to make that proposal—stands out in a year when most of our great albums reflected the sullenness and uncertainty of the times.  2008 was a year for global-mindedness and acute political thinking in music, and Portishead, Santogold, Tricky, The Bug, Erykah Badu, DJ /rupture, Wale, Mark Stewart, Vampire Weekend, Drive-By Truckers, Boris, and plenty of other artists that didn’t make our list of favorites released masterful albums embodying those ideals.  But 2008 will also be remembered as the year that, despite its use as a tagline or catchphrase, hope became a true political act.  Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours reminds us that nothing is more politically effective than joy, and no other album moved us, inspired us, motivated our subway head-nodding, lifted our spirits, empathized with our travails, reminded us to keep pushing forward, and made us shake our asses as much as it did this year.

In 2004, when Cut Copy released its debut album, Bright Like Neon Love, pop-leaning dance music didn’t have nearly as much critical cache as it has at present, so it mostly slid under the radar.  Over the next couple of years, however, it amassed a good number of fans.  As the anticipation built for the follow-up, plenty of pop-leaning dance bands sprung up in the interim.  Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, and Klaxons all filled that particular niche, especially among indie rock audiences.  When fellow Australians The Avalanches released their first single in years, “Ray of Zdarlight,” last year it sounded like a cut-and-paste version of a Cut Copy song, sung by George Michael.  Yet, Bright Like Neon Love only hints at the range and skill Cut Copy show on In Ghost Colours—comparatively, it’s a little wisp of an album.  Their earlier singles—“Saturdays,” which tricked out Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” with a “Hanging On the Telephone” type storyline (it’s as if someone tapped into my brain and discovered what I thought the component parts of the best song ever would be); and “Going Nowhere,” a Interpol guitar-driven club tune—were well-made but skeletal songs, hot on catchiness, cold on depth of purpose.  On In Ghost Colours, those ideas get fleshed out into visceral bodies of sound.

“So Haunted,” for example, begins with a similar guitar lick as “Going Nowhere”—a simple, two-chord punk riff just rhythmic enough to be dance-friendly.  From there, however, the song subverts expectation at every turn.  Vocalist Dan Whitford speak-sings in a baritone reminiscent of The National’s Matt Berninger, repeating words with blunt articulation.  On the chorus he bumps his voice up an octave and softens it as he sings, “I get so haunted I fall in your dreams tonight.”  Later, the song completely shifts into a “Blue Monday” homage—the guitars fully drop out, there’s a brief segue, and then the synthesizers kick in, full force.  It’s a classic club trick—pull a musical bait-and-switch, and then drive the people on the dance floor to maximum exertion—but Cut Copy do it in both a pop context and a rock context.  Every song on In Ghost Colours trades in similar genre-busting tendencies, as if Cut Copy set out to pack everything they do well into every song, and somehow manage to succeed.  “Hearts On Fire” would be a brilliant song if it were played on an acoustic guitar, but call-and-response samples (from the same playbook as the ones on Rob Base & DJ EZ-Rock’s “It Takes Two) and a Miami Vice sax solo put it over the top.

Cut Copy have always been interested in dreams—falling into them, running around in them, choosing them over reality.  Maybe that’s why In Ghost Colours has such an ephemeral quality about it—of all the album’s pleasures, few of them are strictly intellectual.  Rather than aiming for the mind, as many of our other 2008 favorites did, Cut Copy muster up all of their talent and ambition in order communicate directly with our bodies and our emotional centers (where are those, again?)  In the end, In Ghost Colours ended up touching us in ways no other album did this year—ways more easily communicated with a smile at the end of an exhausting day, or with a happy little dance in our seat on a crowded subway, than with a diatribe that counts their influences.  2008 gave us plenty of reasons to love and appreciate music.  In 2009, we’re going to need more like this one.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 2

Portishead
Third

If Third were a film, it would open with a chase scene.  The first shot would be incongruous—a bunch of people sitting in a comedy club.  As the emcee announces the next comedian, the drummer of the jazz quartet on stage with him plays a loose roll.  The audience applauds, smiling.  Cut to a cobblestone street.  The camera moves along the individual stones until it catches up with a pair of women’s legs, running.  Fast.  She ducks into an alleyway.  Cut back to the comedy club, the comedian makes an entrance, points at someone in the audience, raises his drink.  Cut back to the girl, frantically searching for a door in the alleyway—something that might take her into the back room of a shop.  She looks back fearfully over her shoulder, before running further down the alley.  One of her shoes flies off, but she doesn’t have time to stop and grab it.  She’s sure her unknown assailant is close behind, so she takes off her other shoe and continues to run.  She reaches a large red door on a brick wall, tries it, and it opens.  She hears laughter, lots of people.  She charges in through the door and finds herself backstage at the comedy club.  She can hear the crowd and the comedian, but can’t see them because there’s a maze of curtains between her and the stage.  It’s dark.  She starts fighting her way through the curtains.  Suddenly, she feels another presence behind her.  She struggles to get though the curtains.  Finally, she breaks through to the other side.  She finds herself in a vacant auditorium that hasn’t been used in years.  On the stage is a television playing a comedy special—the one from the first shot.  She stands, stunned.  A hand gently wraps itself around her throat. 

In an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, Geoff Barrow laid bare the mission statement for Portishead’s third album, 11 years in the making: “We really wanted to sound like ourselves but not sound like ourselves. It was always going to be difficult.”  In all reality, Portishead could have dropped an album in the mold of their towering mid-90’s achievements, 1994’s Dummy and 1997’s Portishead—two albums that form a master class in trip-hop, fusing hip-hop sampling techniques with jazz-inspired torch songs and an aesthetic tuned toward film scores, a sort of visual ear—and been welcomed back after their 11 year absence with fervent excitement.  They chose a much harder road: Rebuilding themselves from the ground up.  Fortunately, the three members of Portishead have a very clear understanding of what “like ourselves” sounds like.  The band got its first record contract after making and soundtracking a short espionage film, To Kill a Dead Man.  In order to make Third, Barrow, Adrian Utley, and Beth Gibbons simply re-imagined themselves as the same artists who made that original film—generating an album full of moody atmospherics.  Another espionage film, without the film.  A series of chase scenes.  A psychological thriller. 

Third opens with “Silence” an elusive song that seems to travel at four different speeds at once.  The churning rhythm never quite syncs up with the ominous melody, and stray beeps and squeals fly about all over the place.  It’s an unsettling, elusive beginning to an unsettling, elusive album.  “The Rip” features Beth Gibbons singing over a delicate guitar riff, with an atmospheric fuzz barely permeating the background.  Slowly, the background begins to overtake the foreground, and the guitar is overtaken by a wave of Brian Eno-referencing electronics that replicate the finger-plucked notes at a louder volume with an otherworldly resonance.  It’s a simple trick, an easy bait-and-switch of a song made effective by Gibbons, whose voice anchors the song.  Much has been made of Beth Gibbons’ voice—critics compare her to Billie Holiday as frequently as they use the phrase “guitar pyrotechnics.”  On Third, Barrow and Utley utilize Gibbons’ voice as the anchor for each song—the unwavering constant under which they can experiment.  On “Plastic,” they augment her with what could be an abstraction of an industrial ceiling fan.  “Machine Gun” is an unrelenting shoot-out between two drum machines, with Gibbons as the negotiator running between them.

Third continues to make 11 proposals for what Portishead’s sound could be—they range from the ukulele-led “Deep Water,” which could have been an homage to Bernadette Peters in The Jerk backed by a couple of doowoppers singing in their sleep, to “Magic Doors,” which begins with an emergency alert signal and ends with a cowbell led free-jazz horn freakout to rival Radiohead’s “The National Anthem.”  On Third’s final song, “Threads,” Beth Gibbons sings, “I’m worn out/Tired of my mind.”  It’s no wonder.  Portishead spends an entire album inventing themselves, scrapping the idea, then reinventing themselves.  When Geoff Barrow said he wanted the band “to sound like ourselves but not sound like ourselves,” he didn’t say “with each individual song.”  Yet, that’s exactly what they do.  In the end, they prove that, in order to reinvent yourself, you first have to know exactly who you are.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 3

The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride

As a critic/practitioner in the tradition of Patti Smith, The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has always written songs from two points of view at once:  the point of view of the singer/songwriter, and the point of view of the audience—specifically, an intelligent, critical, opinion-forming audience.  On the one hand, this sort of extra-sensory perception about his own work often leads to a type of literary over-reaching.  Darnielle has come up with some of the clunkiest rock lines ever put to wax: “The ghosts that haunt your building are prepared to take on substance,” “Those few who've slipped the surly bonds will rise like salmon at the spawning,” “The headstones climbed up the hills.”  On the other hand, Mountain Goats songs are frequently about the inability to articulate feelings coupled with the urgent need to communicate, and the shaky timbre of Darnielle’s nasal voice as he wraps his mouth around a garble of quasi-profound sentiment conveys that contradiction rather, well, eloquently.  His songs’ arrangements tend to avoid confidence, veering instead toward immediacy.  Though pristinely recorded, the acoustic guitars sound slippery and unsure of themselves; the pianos act as if they could meet disaster at the pinnacle of every chord.  Loving an album by The Mountain Goats usually means loving a feeling of awkwardness.  The band’s perfect songs—“No Children,” “This Year,” “The Best Heavy Metal Band In Denton”—strike a tenuous balance between Darnielle’s more affected poetic tendencies and a delicacy in which anything might happen.  This is a band that, when rehearsing, probably has a “sweet spot” when a song has been played just enough that the band knows it, but not so much that it loses the possibility that something could go horribly wrong—like an actor who doesn’t memorize his lines very well in order to allow for maximum spontaneity.  There’s a lot of fun to be had in listening to Darnielle fall short, because he’s always aiming for something special, but the moments in The Mountain Goats’ catalogue when everything clicks are heart-rending—both because of Darnielle’s skill, and because of the series of perfect circumstances that had to fall into place for such an occurrence to happen.  It’s a minor miracle, then, that 2008 produced an album on which The Mountain Goats do everything absolutely right.

John Darnielle’s favorite albums of the year include albums by Blood Ceremony, The Breeders, Killer Mike, CeCe Winans, Jucifer, and Kaki King, as well as Enslaved, Wetnurse, The Donkeys, Coffins, Hate Eternal, Origin, and Prostitute Disfigurement.  This is a man much, much cooler than you or I.  Darnielle’s listening habits take him from relentless metal to southern rap to jazz-influenced to gospel, all far, far away from what The Mountain Goats play.  Listen closely, however, and you can hear elements of each in Heretic Pride—verbal acuity, technical precision, spiritual uplift.  Darnielle has an implicit understanding of how songs work, learned through observation and practice (The Mountain Goats are also one of the most prolific indie bands working.)  Each song on Heretic Pride is crafted within an inch of its life, as Darnielle jumps between ballads and hard-edged rockers.  The math is not complicated.  The ballads often have a fragile, revealing confession at their center—on “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature,” it’s “I’m out of my element/I can’t breathe;” on “So Desperate,” it’s “I felt so desperate in your arms”—but the details in the songwriting give the choruses a lovely weight.  “So Desperate” takes place in a parked car in the parking lot of an Episcopalian church; the narrator of “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” gets claustrophobic while watching the light of an elevator travel up six stories.  The more fervent songs thrive on a creepiness akin to that of all those metal bands with weird names Darnielle likes so much.  “In the Craters on the Moon” manages to turn string instruments into assault weapons, and Darnielle raises his voice to a yelp.  “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” pulls tension out of strained chords as the narrator compares himself to the titular sci-fi/horror writer after admitting, “Woke up afraid of my own shadow/Like, genuinely afraid.”

It all builds to “Michael Myers Resplendent,” which synthesizes the two song styles, creating a ballad with vicious string stabs that tear through it.  Darnielle sings from the point of the view of either the Halloween serial killer or the actor playing him.  “The prom queen’s caught in the high beams,” he sings at one point.  At another, “I spend eight hours in my make-up chair.”  Michael Myers is a stand-in for John Darnielle as much as any other protagonist is a stand-in for its author, but what’s interesting is how the lyrics juggle between the two viewpoints—the person doing the killing, and the person getting ready to act like the person doing the killing.  Essentially, he’s writing about the John Darnielle the singer/songwriter, and John Darnielle the critical audience member—one who also sees things through the singer/songwriter’s eyes.  In the past, he’s had trouble reconciling them both.  Heretic Pride, however, is the point when John Darnielle’s two opinions finally agree.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 4

Santogold
Santogold

Who doesn't know her story by now?  She doesn't like R & B, and made the excellent point that it was pretty racist to assume that she's supposed to.  She wrote a song for Ashlee Simpson.  She's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it guest on the GZA's Legend of the Liquid Swords.  She knows M.I.A., likes M.I.A., understands why you might want to call her another M.I.A., but she likes the Pixies more than global conflict songs about Tamil Tigers.  She opened for Coldplay, and she'll be dropping some stuff with the Beastie Boys before too long.  She's successful.

The actual album she came out with?  The solo thing, the thing that's up here, dancing in the top ten, beating out some notable workhorses?  It's pretty successful as well.  Whereas 2008 was a year full of major artists smashing into the wall and walking away with cartoon birds circling their head, it was also a year where an up and coming producer from Philadelphia could ditch the punk band she fronted for, make a debut album that mashed up all of her loves--the Pixies, the Clash, Blondie, dub, the Neptunes--and become a star.  Unlike fellow "here's my influences" name droppers, Santogold went at it in with the oldest old school trick in the book:  she wrote infectious, catchy pop songs, worked with some of the best producers she could find in her address book, including herself, and then she agreed to tour with a big enough band so that she could get the word out.  She got herself a certified banger out of "L.E.S. Artistes", even though it's just another "I'm pretty awesome, here are some reasons why" type song.

Pop music isn't really my thing.  I don't particularly know how to describe what it is that I like about it, or what it is that I look for when I listen to it.  I can't figure the route that goes from "what is good" to "what is art" with this kind of stuff.  The big stuff--Thriller, or "Like A Prayer", sure, I get that.  But making it through what comes out, what's popular--I wouldn't be the best guide.  Actually, I wouldn't even be a reliable guide.  I can tell you that every time I hear the remix by of "You'll Find A Way" I visualize it as the perfect soundtrack to a gigantic Godzilla type monster tearing it's way through an urban landscape in slow motion.  I can tell you shit like that, but that doesn't really help to describe the music--nor would some kind of made up "confession" of spontaneous dancing or waltzing to "Starstruck", even if it were true.  (It's not, although I do think the portion where she continues to repeat "I. I. see. you. fade" was probably one of the sexiest things I heard this year, and I could see it meriting some kind of physical exertion.)  At the same time, I couldn't begin to imagine there's a massive amount of poetic meaning behind a track like "Starstruck", or if there is, what could be discernible about lines like "Cause dream easy on your cigarette, through it."  That doesn't lessen the impact of the song, at least not in these quarters, but it does speak to a layer of meaning that I probably am not best served to move past.

Of course, that's sort of the purpose of using an adjective like "infectious" to describe it.  That's what Santogold's album is, for me, that's what all great pop music is.  Regardless of inspiration, regardless of meaning, the best pop music is the kind that seeps it's way in through a pore, usually with a single like "L.E.S. Artistes," and then when it's set itself up, it introduces the brain to songs like "Unstoppable", which was just as good when you first heard it, but it wasn't until the seepage from "L.E.S." carved a way through that you start to catch how intense the water plopping bass is, how graphic and sexual the song sounds.  Even songs that, upon first listen, seem less catchy--like when Trouble Andrew starts his low register mumbling in the background of "I'm A Lady"--eventually win themselves over, just because now, you're fully in love with this woman, this world of flawless construction that she's created, and the opportunity to experience more doesn't just become something you crave, but something that's almost necessary.  Technically, it's going to be a triumph, that's a given:  These are Smart People, they Can Make Smart Things.  But it's the spirit, the soul of the thing, that's what makes it a success.  It's not going to be something that can be dealt with analtyically--not anymore at least, because the requirement of analysis is going to be the province of those who escape conversion.  After the transition is made, after the listener gives themselves over to this, this pop beast of seemingly minor proportions--one woman, some producers, songs about fun, being cool, standing strong--the chance to take it apart is past.

Santogold could turn out to be a fluke.  That's totally possible.  This genre--it's not a land of survivors, of getting-by-types.  It's pop, and when pop turns back like a snake to bite the handler, shit is usually fatal, and what comes next is VH1 and an arrest record.  But here, 2008:  she was the flavor of the year, and she earned it.  Twelve tracks, one was a remix.

Perfect album.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top Ten "Abrasive" Albums From 2008

Noisy, individualistic, navel-gazing or just plain unfriendly: some music won't just fail to please a crowd, it will revel in its ability to alienate.  Here's the best of the stuff that demands you're willing to peel your ears back, grab your headphones for, and acknowledge that, yes:  you don't have anybody to share this with.

Ten:

Yellow Swans

Deterioration

Originally released in 2007 in tape only format, Deterioration was finally made available in digital download and CD format in mid-2008, and while it's everything that the Swans have done before--a noisy squall laced with a look-hard-you-can-find-it harmonic beauty that is, as always, too long--it's a fitting, solid release that will keep their fanbase tied over until they release their final studio album in 2009.  Considering that the Swans are officially "retired," Deterioration is a great way to figure out if you're interested in plowing through their roughly 70 album catalog.

Nine:

Meshuggah

ObZen

TFO cannot be held responsible for what might happen to your lunch if you click-to-enlarge that album cover.  Thankfully, that image is the most uncomfortable thing about ObZen, as long as you find heavy metal--the kind that makes Iron Maiden sound like a bunch of pre-teen ballerinas--comfortable. An over-the-top race through everything that makes this sort of music both completely insane and vaguely interesting, ObZen is one of those albums where you have to listen to it a lot, probably more than you want to, to figure out whether or not each song is starting with the exact same saw-blade guitar riffs.  (They aren't, but the confusion is understandable.)  While heavy metal isn't a genre that offers much in the way of "innovation", and the majority of it's current practitioners seem content to keep screwing around with the same basic format, Meshuggah sort of took some chances on this one, mainly by it's unapologetic "let's see if we can kill anybody with sound" take.  If music-as-endurance interests you at all, it's a dizzying ride.

Eight:

John Butcher, Torsten Muller & Dylan van der Schyff

Way Out Northwest

An admittedly distanced response to Sonny Rollins' classic Way Out West, the Butcher/Muller/van der Schyff team-up is one that, as always with anything involving Butcher, lives at the edge where jazz and avant-garde meet.  Butcher's saxophone work is strong, played with the sort of skill that points to his ability to master the old standards (if that interested him, as it clearly doesn't), Dylan van der Schyff pulls back a good bit of his drumming to the point where he's often just throwing out tentative taps, and Torsten Muller whips out the stand-up bass.  What they ended up with doesn't sound anything like Sonny Rollins, but it still sounds like the product of some guys who know what they're doing.  (Which is being weird.)

Seven:

Neptune

Gong Lake

The first of Neptune's twenty odd albums to gain anything like wide release--up until now, it's been on a "buy it from them" deal--shows the band actually becoming, well, a band.  For those of you who don't know, Neptune is most well-known for being the outgrowth of a sculpture project started around 14 years ago, wherein the members (they're a power trio, I guess you might say) built their own instruments.  From whatever, anything would do.  Unlike previous Neptune releases, Gong Lake ends up sounding pretty similar to something that regular old instruments--the kind they sell at Guitar Center--would create.  But "sounding pretty similar" is still a pretty far cry from "sounding like Jack Johnson."  Little of what made Neptune an offbeat noise and rock project has been abandoned, it's just been refined--and while this isn't the most contemporary of projects on this list, it serves pretty well as a quick drop in the lake of what the lighter sound of noise has to offer.

Six:

The Fall

Imperial Wax Solvent

The rules for "abrasive" doesn't mean "abrasive noise rock" and "avant-garde jazz" only, it can also include gruff old Mark E. Smith and his ever-changing backup band made out of his future ex-wives and ex-friends.  After a year that saw Smith release a song that could make it onto the soundtrack for a car commercial as well as team up with Mouse On Mars and make his best album since the early 90's, it's back to the old sludgy, belligerent bellowing fellow that we've come to...well, not love, but tolerate.  Neither as good as last years populist Fall album nor as experimental as the Mouse On Mars project, but still worth a spin all the same, Imperial Wax Solvent is the sound of a group trying to figure out if they're interested in a new crop of fans.  Expect to hear the results in early 2009--or, if Smith's recent behavior is any indication, sometime next Thursday.

Five:

The Vandermark 5

Beat Reader

Returning to his "official" band after spending the last few years toying with his schedule of inspiration/cover compilations, Ken Vandermark and company show why they remain the best American jazz group that nobody cares about with Beat Reader, where Ken made the curious (and ultimately successful) decision to forgo more tenor saxophone and make one of the best albums of the group's career.  Although noise and avant-garde freaks still label the Vandermark 5 as "populist" jazz, it's an absurd term to apply:  free-jazz in 2008?  That's about as popular as syphilis.  Just because they don't have a twenty minute piece of atonal screaming bookending the album doesn't make these guys the future opening band for Jimmy Fallon.  (That would be the Roots.)

Four:

Sonic Youth

J' Accuse Ted Hughes

For those Sonic Youth fans concerned they may have missed another new Sonic Nurse or Rather Ripped, rest your weary haunches:  this is one of those SYR releases, the ones that come in a paper case that you don't care about.  It also was only available on vinyl or digital format.  Hearkening back to earlier releases in the series (this was the 7th of 8), Sonic Youth takes on no guests here--it's just them, instruments, and a heap of improvisation.  Unlike the previous volume--composed for a Stan Brakhage festival--J' Accuse Ted Hughes consists of one live piece recorded at All Tomorrow's Parties and one studio jam session.  Both, as with all SYR releases, are strictly experimental works.  And while live experimental work is usually not the stronger point of this kind of stuff--it helps to have someone to control the levels, at least--"J' Accuse" is actually a pretty effective piece.  The real stand out is "Agnes B Musique," however--ably assisted by former member Jim O'Rourke, it ends up pointing in the direction that future SYR releases--and maybe even standard Sonic Youth albums--might do well to take cues from.

Three:

Hair Police

Certainty of Swarms

Well, if Wolf Eyes aren't going to get it together to drop another classic on our ass, at least we'll always have Hair Police.  After seven years of touring and dropping a good four to five releases a year, Certainty of Swarms could be excused if it had shown up and sounded a little tired.  Thankfully, it doesn't--and while it'll need some of the populist blurbing that gave Wolf Eyes the push that put them into the public consciousness, it'll be a reward to anyone who finds it.  Unrelenting noise, coming straight out of psychedelia and Lexington, Kentucky, Swarms is what it sounds like if you took AC/DC, broke their hands, and made them beat the shit out of their instruments while they screamed in pain.  In a year where everybody danced at the edge of anger while trying to maintain hope that something better was around the corner, the Hair Police displayed what it sounds like when the crazies took over.  In the annals of this type of sound, it's difficult to agree on the classics--but after Swarms dropped, everybody knew who to point to when it came time to claim the titans.

Two:

Clark

Turning Dragon

Although Australians apparently believe that Turning Dragon sounds like the Dust Brothers, the reality is that the album sounds a lot more like what happens when somebody like Chris Clark lets all his obsessions take over.  Whereas the Dust Brothers seem content to get wasted and come up with a sort of "we're punk rock" take on David Holmes style sound-tracking, Clark is more into what the machine--the computer, the buzzsaw, the synthesizer--can produce.  Less personal and more confrontational then previous works, it's also a piece that had less time in the cooker--2006's Body Riddle and 2003's Throttle Furniture took three years for him to allow them out the door.  It's clear that what was left behind wasn't that integral though--Turning Dragon is a far more immediate work, and--if there was ever anything resembling an audience for this kind of stuff--the seven minute "For Wolves Crew" is definitely one of the best things to come from a tired electronic genre in 2008.

One:

Religious Knives

It's After Dark

Hey, it's drone/noise rock supergroup Religious Knives, made up of members of Mouthus and Double Leopards!  What you got for us today?  Could it be pipe organs?  A female vocalist who sounds like The Velvet Underground's Nico, but a little better?  Solid.  While team-ups in the noise/drone scene aren't uncommon, it's rare to see one turn out as nice as this was, to the point where one actually sort of wishes that Mouthus and Double Leopards just shut down so this project can be the sole focus.  An album that's far more listenable than they may have intended, a surprisingly personal take on their obsessions, and a kind-of-sort-of single in "It's Brooklyn After Dark" that, if it was only a little bit shorter, might even find it's way into the public consciousness.  C'mon ladies and gentleman of Religious Knives:  drone for us.  Drone like you've never droned before.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 5

Tricky
Knowle West Boy

In many ways, Tricky made the album that The Streets should have made this year—an origin story, ripe with paranoia, touting ego to spare, but in a self-aware way, using crystalline production to weld together off-kilter beats; an album equal parts subtle and over-the-top; an album that obstinately screams, “Remember, boy, you’re a superstar,” in a thick working-class British accent.  Honestly, if Mike Skinner had made Knowle West Boy, he would have never met the same shrug of indifference that Tricky did in 2008.  But everybody gave up on Tricky a long time ago.  After the release of the seminal Maxinquaye in 1995, tethered to a genre intrinsically linked with 90’s nostalgia and a sound diluted by dozens of Sneaker Pimps and Nightmares on Wax, Tricky chose to get more and more insular and impenetrable with the release of each album.  

Knowle West Boy finds Tricky locked back in to the world outside himself, and it results in his best album in a decade.  It opens with Tricky commenting on himself as he picks up a girl at a bar.  He may as well be commenting on his relationship with his audience, or with critics, as he sings, “Friends, girl, they come and go/But trends remain in constant flow” before bursting into a pop-R&B chorus (think Christina Aguilara.)   Violins intertwine with feedback-soaked guitar and bass licks.  “Veronika” pits temporary muse Veronika Coassolo against a persistent, reverb-heavy march.  “Council Estate” is a frenetic statement-of-purpose that sounds like “Firestarter” recovering from a dopamine bender.  “Baligaga” slings beef around as if its early-millennium rap with a dancehall patois—“Dem bwoy, dey a TV gangsta/Coulda neva wanna see my anger/Can you relate?/It's too late”—as if Tricky can’t reconcile his need for credibility with his need to be heard. 

In the mid-90’s, Tricky re-interpreted Public Enemy’s “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos,” turning the Public Enemy screed into a slinky trip-hop jam (not, in his hands, a contradiction in terms) sung by chanteuse Martina Topley-Bird.  “I'm not a fugitive on the run/But a brother like me begun to be another one/Public enemy servin' time,” sung by Topley-Bird as a surrogate for Tricky, established him as a bit of a schizophrenic personality on record—an impression backed up by his twisted song constructions (playing loops backwards, co-opting samples from his contemporaries.)  On Knowle West Boy’s “Coalition”, he references Public Enemy again—or at least Gil Scott-Heron by way of Public Enemy—as he says the “Revolution will be televised… in Iran and the Holy Koran.”  That moment is a lot of things.  Of course, it’s a pop culture reference, twisted into a quasi-political statement that probably means nothing.  It’s bait.  But, after years in danger of being swallowed by his own insularity, it’s also a sign that Tricky is interested in communication again.  Pop culture references and political hokum demand participation on the other side of the speakers, for all of his experimentalism, that’s something Tricky’s been missing for years.  He’s getting back into the game.

Perhaps that’s why he chooses to cover Kylie Minogue’s “Slow.”  Like he did with “Black Steel,” he turns the 2003 pop confection into a guttural squeal, with electric guitar going bananas while two versions of the song are sung at once—one by underrated singer/songwriter Emiliana Torrini, who turns Minogue’s come-ons into pleasantly confident commands; and Tricky, who makes them unnervingly skeevy.  That duality plays itself out across the entire album, which continues to tread between moments of accessibility and moments of experimentalism, as if Tricky is trying to figure out either how much he has to do to draw you in or how much he can get away with before pushing you away.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 6

The Bug
London Zoo

“What’s wrong with the world?”  “Has the world gone mad?”  “How did we get here and where do we go now?”  Plenty of artists—from TV on the Radio to Erykah Badu—explored these questions across excellent albums in 2008; The Bug’s London Zoo was the only one to ask them point-blank.  A hard-charging, unapologetic, sprawling mess of an album, London Zoo may prove as much of a game-changer for dubstep as It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back did for rap—which would make Untrue dubstep’s Paid in Full.  Think about it:  Burial, like Rakim, is an artist with more talent at his disposal than most, who took his chosen genre to the next level by expanding its range, and bringing it to a wider audience.  Rakim inserted complex rhyme patterns, poetic concepts and long-form storytelling into the rap construct; Burial brought hip-hop production tricks, pop aspirations, and a wicked sense of humor to dubstep.  In contrast to the blueprint-defining Paid In Full, It Takes A Nation Of Millions felt like the immediate discovery of rap’s punk rock.  London Zoo brings the same counter to Untrue, offering a political manifesto that challenges aesthetically as well as socially.  You needn’t look to far to find the lyrical themes of London Zoo—they’re laid into the song titles: “Insane,” “Angry,” “Too Much Pain,” “Murder We,” “Fuckaz,” “Warning,” “Judgement.”  The Bug reinforces the scathing, hopeless paranoia of the lyrics with ghostly production, cranking up the bass so that it sounds like you’re getting repeatedly slapped in the face, weaving beats out of ambient sounds, allowing silence and space to do a lot of the communicating.  He resists giving the music an easy entrance point, and the outcome is an album that actually sounds like as much of a wake-up call as it says it is. 

In addition to Public Enemy’s magnum opus (as well as Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, come to think of it), London Zoo also resembles a more recent classic—M.I.A.’s classic Kala (which, incidentally, I’m ready to say The Factual Opinion grossly underrated last year.)  Like M.I.A., The Bug uses spare production reminiscent of early grime and hip-hop, and has a knack for matching up unrelated musical styles.  London Zoo fuses dancehall and dubstep in a way that expands the possibilities of both genres, and The Bug reveals an ambition as far-reaching as M.I.A.’s—not only with London Zoo’s global-thinking premise, but in its willingness to court a crossover audience by quoting Tears For Fears and Bobby Brown, the way M.I.A. jacked Pixies and The Modern Lovers.  On “Insane,” Warrior Queen turns lines from “Mad World” and “My Perogative” into wounded cries.  Elsewhere, she seems to revel in her own insanity.  The whole album lives in similarly slippery psychological territory, but The Bug never travels too far away from his central conceit:  At its heart, London Zoo is a state of the union address, and things are not looking good.  On “Murder We,” Ricky Ranking sings “People are turning so mad/The place is turning so bad/The streets are flowing blood red.”  Tippa Irie’s list of things that make him angry on the lead track includes Bush, Blair, suicide bombers, the ozone layer, African poverty, New Orleans, and “America is one big soap opera.”  Rather than settling for a political screed, however, The Bug and Tippa Irie turn the song into a rallying cry—or a party jam—chanting, “So many things that get me angry/So many things that get me mad/So many things that get me angry/I gotta say” like he’s trying to turn every Rage Against the Machine fan in the house into a dancehall politico.  “Skeng” sounds like someone moonwalking through a metal detector with a pocket full of loose change, while “You & Me” and album closer “Judgement” aim for a creepier, low key vibe.  “Judgement” contains some of the best straightforward singing on the entire album.  An R&B-tinged voice coos in between harder edged choruses, care of Ricky Ranking.  As he sweetly closes out the song and the album, the singer gently sums up the need for The Bug’s macabre world view: “So much people are losing their minds/’Cause we living in a serious time/I guess it coming like a judgment sign/People have killing on their mind.”

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 7

Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

There's a two part thing about New Amerykah, the first being that it's weird, the second being that it can't really be overstated how weird it is.  If you've spent any time reading any of the album's (near universal) positive reviews, it's pretty difficult to encapsulate what the album could possibly sound like, and why it is that so many describe it so differently.  That won't change here.  Even describing the albums influences comes up short, simply because you'd need all the intellectual references in the music criticism room to catch them all--as far as I've made it, there's Sun Ra, Radiohead's OK Computer, Gil-Scott Heron, any/all hip-hop from the last twenty years, Sly & The Family Stone, George Clinton and his various groups and after that you can pretty much spread the doors open wider and come up with even more.  (Which is why there's a cheap n' lazy "all hip-hop" listed.)  That's not even all the obvious ones.  Obviously, part of the charm and interest in New Amerykah is that all this works--unlike her onetime paramour Common, who tried something similar with Electric Circus and only resulted in producing a couple of somewhat intriguing singles couched in an album that, even looked at kindly, lacked any sort of cohesive structure or lasting interest.  (Hell, I liked it fine, but not in the sense that I've wanted to listen to it in years.)  While Erykah is clearly a brilliant musician, albeit one with a clearly antagonistic bent--New Amerykah couldn't be any less commercial when cast against the sickeningly dull output by the current spat of "soul" singers who claim her as a peer--New Amerykah is an album rife with talent--Madlib, 9th Wonder and Sa-Ra all get involved, and that's not even half of the production staff.  Still, none of those producers could claim to have something like this in their back-catalog, with the possible exception of Madlib, who probably dreams in weird albums.

The ground for the album is set pretty early--movie samples, horn samples, a sultry "ohh" from Badu, and then--well, then the vocal effects, the introduction to the other world that the album contains, and--before Badu starts opening up to show off her impressive range with what might be considered the song's refrain, if you're desperate for terminology--there's a curt, sharp "promise" hissed out from her lower register that cuts through all the clatter.  While much of the song treads familiar ground, in that the guitars and overall sound wouldn't be out of place on Maggot Brain, it's still a strange construction of funk reference points.  The spoken words, overlaid so they smother some of what's being played spell out, a bizarre introduction to some version of immigrants, ordering "a brain sample" taken from one--it's implied--of the singers, all of whom are clearly Badu, matching herself on multiple vocal tracks, and ending with a strange negotiation with a young girl whose voice is processed through computer effects, making her sound like a Speak & Spell on helium.  The closing moments are sequenced right into the beginning of "The Healer", otherwise known as the song where Erykah makes the statement that "it's bigger than religion, hip hop.  It's bigger than the government, hip hop," while speak-singing with such a lazy drawl that it sounds like a throwback to some of the early Texan efforts by DJ Screw--flanging and pitch shifts are apparent, but they don't seem to do much with Badu's delivery, it's more like the sound itself has been subdued to match whatever it is she's doing with her voice to achieve the sound.  That sort of transition--from a Funkadelic inspired sound with a Thom Yorke spin on the Gil-Scott Heron message delivery to a sludgy, thick song--continues.  By the time you make it towards the end of "The Healer" the delivery has changed again, this time with what is assumed to be some kind of pitch manipulation to give Badu's delivery a sort of unnatural wavering quality, and then...and then.  The whole album is like this--a massively produced beast of a thing, utilizing a spectrum of the sort of experimentation in electronica that's more often the province of weird Europeans, but--since it's Badu's taste--used to mechanize and maintain soul & funk into something that's as lively as those genres, but still, graphically weird.  While there's always going to be a touch of the "sounds like a female D'Angelo" thing to fall back on, due to the similarities in the way the two phrase words and their paralleled mastery of range and voice--the spirit here is more similar to something that, fuck.  Bjork would put out something like this, if she didn't spend so much time with Matmos and Eskimos.  It just wouldn't be as funky.

The problems with the album--and there are some, or it would be farther up on the list, as it's defiantly odd, yet a total success--can pretty much be laid at the feet, unfortunately, at the lyrics.  Whereas Erykah hasn't lost her talent for throwing out some controversial stuff, some of that "I won't tell you what this means, but I know it makes you think," she's still operating from a place that's a bit more navel-gazing than she seems willing to admit.  While the album speaks, at multiple points, from the stance of intelligent criticism of racial and global geopolitik, it's a cheap form that fails to reach the sort of heightened level of passion all the production requires.  While it's not as dumb as the Nas video for "Sly Fox," where the implication that destroying ones own property--expensive computer equipment--will somehow lead to the downfall of a dumbed down mass media, it's not that far removed; the most resonant advice given to people is that they should "get mad."  Well, of course they should.  What then?  The only answer provided seems to be more of the nonsensical new age philosophizing that Badu likes to throw around--and while that might be Badu's preferred form, the variation on the "never gets old" philosophical argument that "if your revolution won't let me dance, I don't want your revolution," it should be noted that's the Wachowski Brothers level of argument, and Badu's always seemed to have a bit more going on than that.  Whereas a song like "The Cell" subverts and ignores this sort of irritation by taking the old school gangster rap way-out by being little more than a lyrical study of how bad things can get "poor man got his back to the door/code white stands for trouble/shots from the po-po...blam, blam," most of the lyrical work here takes the boring--though somewhat understandable tactic--of kicking a flaming barrel down a flight of stairs before attributing everything to an odd explanation of the Hindu concept of godhood, with a dose of feminist monologuing on the side.  That's not individual to Badu, obviously--bands like Rage Against The Machine and Pearl Jam built careers out of undergraduate comprehensions of global study, Nas isn't the first rap artist to decide to make a political statement without figuring out what it was going to be first--but when the music, and the construction of music, is this good?  It's not that strange to ask for more.  Still-on the plus side-Badu's album is one that's so strong, that's so impossible to overpraise, that the lyrics, no matter how cheap they can get, can't do anything to "ruin" it.  Like the multitude of samples and vocal effects, Badu can really sing pretty much anything--silly or not, it's going to sound fantastic.  That's the problem with being the top of the class though--it may not be fair to expect from her so much, but really:  how can you not?  When someone is this good, you're always going to end up wondering how much further they can take it. 

Caveats aside:  New Amerykah Part One stands as one the best works of art that arrived in 2008.  Whereas more praise will inevitably be heaped on excellent work from a variety of artists, the simple truth was that this was one of the few of those that took chances, explored form and structure, acknowledged its inspiration, and provided an opportunity to experience something different, something beautiful.  At the end of the day, it's all just going to be music--but in a time when the stuff is traded and stolen in seconds over broadband connections, there has to be a moment where somebody--even fuckers on blogs--acknowledge that this was one that mattered.

Here's ours.

-Tucker Stone, 2008