Lie Dream of a Casino Soul

Music Review 2011

2012-01-05T17:50:00.000Z

Another year where I think there hasn’t been a huge amount that has grabbed me until I start going through the releases and realise there were so many things I enjoyed a lot for a few weeks and then forgot about.

For me, it’s been a good year for the more traditionally structured, narrative lyric based albums but that may just be down to my age, background and a weakness in my concentration at the moment for more expansive and abstract work.

Consequently, I haven’t been grabbed by much outside of the standard rock/pop/indie idiom this year. There have been some drone, electronic, abstract, collage things that I have enjoyed but quite little that has struck a very strong chord. However, to keep that in context, these are the type of albums that generally take longer to settle under the skin so it’s quite possible a more left-field release than those listed here will end up being a retrospective favourite. This is something that has tended to happen in previous years so no reason to assume it will be different this time.

Hip hop again is conspicuous by its absence but I fear, at this point, that ship has sailed for me.

Elements of more straightforward electronic/R&B inflected sounds than previously and I am not really sure why that is. Possibly the post-dubstep tendency for anything loosely resembling dubstep and fitting with the progressive dance music idea seems to subject to a trending bump that (to me) wasn’t so apparent in other years. Hence, I tend to find myself being exposed to more electronic music that utilises straightforward and more traditional song structures than I would have in the past, witness SBTRKT, The Weeknd, James Blake etc.

Apart from the albums, I think my favourite song of the year was 212 by Azealia Banks. It is just absolutely fantastic pop music. It seems to be one that has grabbed everyone who has heard it also.
In contrast to this, my tuppence worth on Video Games. I don’t really care for ideas of authenticity or whatever that seem to have informed most commentary on this track but I think I laughed out loud the first time I heard this. It is so over-egged as to be almost a parody of a pop song. People who like it seem to talk about the breathy, effortlessness of it. All I can hear is someone straining a gut to sound effortless and failing miserably. This is a horrible song.

Before I go into the favourites then, some disappointments to mention. I wasn’t expecting a lot from Bon Iverhaving seem them live on one of the tours after ‘For Emma..’ and being so bored I left a few songs from the end to drink in the bar until my friends were ready. At that point, I was pretty sure that that first album was nothing more than a happy accident and the future would hold either repletion with diminishing returns or a whole lot of production to cover up a hollow centre. Nonetheless, I tried the Bon Iver record having read such glowing praise of it. But really, come on, are you joking? If someone had played it to me and told me it was the Matt Cardle record, I wouldn’t have doubted it; dull, MOR dross.

Didn’t manage to see the attraction in M83 either, though a lot of people I know seem to love it. I think it is just something about the keyboard sound that make my synapses flare and a silent scream form in my chest. I just can’t get past that feeling to give the thing another chance.

The original of I'm New Here seemed overrated to me at the time. A decent and interesting enough album but it did seem a lot of the hyperbole was because he had managed to make an album as much as the content within. So perhaps I approached the Jamie xx reworking with a jaundiced eye and, admittedly, I didn’t give it a huge amount of my time but I found it pretty pointless. I found it added nothing to the original, textures that were in place were removed and replaced by angles that seemed only self-referencing to me, the elements of value inherent in the original lost somewhere in translation.

Similarly, I was completely unmoved by albums from The Antlers, Handsome Furs, Iron & Wine, Hercules and Love Affair; all artists who I had liked previous albums by.

Oh, and The Fall. Yes. The new Fall album is not good. There, I said it.

I guess, to those who know me, it can be no surprise that the albums by PJ Harvey, Destroyer and Josh T Pearson figure so highly on my list of favourite albums. They fit this template perfectly and, for me, share an effectiveness of narrative.

1.PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Let England Shake touches on a number of areas that I have always loved. Strangely, it is the first PJ Harvey album I have really liked after 20 years of trying. I like the conciseness of the lyrics and the way there is a narrative delivered that, whilst seeming ostensibly to be based around events of the Galipoli campaign of almost a hundred years ago, resonated as a kind of ‘state of the nation’ for contemporary times. I have read some references to the fact that she was apparently also inspired by the likes of Rum, Sodomy and The Lash and the art of Goya and Dalí among other things. Some of these you can hear in the music and some in the lyrics but some other elements (like the Doors) are harder to reconcile. Nonetheless, the narrative is compelling and convincing and very effectively supported by the arrangements. I have no hesitation in calling this a genuinely great album.

2.Destroyer- Kaputt

The Destroyer record, Kaputt, is similarly affecting in its evocation of a time and a mood and perhaps resonates with me in part because that time is the early to mid eighties when I was between the ages of five and ten. The arrangements pretty much directly reflect this period and it stays just the right side of pastiche a lot of the time. In this way, it reminds me of the Gayngs record from 2010. Where it really triumphs however, is that lyrically it evokes so many of those feelings of being trapped in a suburban bedroom, reading NME and the world of the Smiths and New Order seeming glamorous and other-worldly yet somehow attainable if you could just overcome your diffidence. I am not sure I would have found it so striking though had I not followed Dan Bejar’s career all the way as I would imagine that voice could still be pretty off-putting to those unfamiliar with its growth over the previous albums.

3.Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

In my top five, the only album that is a little different is the Colin Stetson one. It’s rare that I like any kind of brass unless it was recorded prior to about 1965. This, however, touches on a lot of elements I like, from the touches of sax redolent of sixties jazz pioneers such as Albert Ayler to the layers of percussive and bass sounds reflecting on a more modern non-jazz avant-garde. The combination of elements is managed beautifully making this an extremely engaging and rewarding listen.

4.Josh T Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen

Josh T Pearson had been pretty much AWOL for about a decade since the first and only Lift to Experience album. His Last of the Country Gentlemen is a wonderful album but if you are in the wrong mood for it, it can seem almost unlistenable. The record is a Blood on the Tracks style analysis of a collapsed relationship and, at times, can make for very uncomfortable listening. One could describe him as brave for sharing some of the details he does but you could also just think, ‘what an asshole’. I tend toward the latter sentiment but there is a car crash compulsion which overtakes my squirming at the voyeuristic nature of the listening experience. There is little added to the sound apart from his voice and some pretty rudimentary guitar playing. However, as simple as the playing is, the repetitions and elongations of ordinary musical phrases weave a tapestry that can, at times, be as effective as any sound collage. Each song is stretched to, or beyond, its limit and each one seems perpetually on the point of collapse. He just about holds the whole thing together though. You do come away thinking that, as with Dylan, for every extrapolation on the minutiae of the relationships failure, there is an innocent party somewhere out there given no voice to retort.

5.Richard Buckner - Our Blood

Richard Buckner is another straight ahead sort of lyrical album though, as ever with him, the songs tend toward the allusive and abstract, expressing more a sense of something than the thing itself. It is perhaps not as effective as some of his previous work but, over time, the songs may settle in me deeper and it could turn out to be a favourite. Apart from the songs themselves, I have always loved his voice and it sounds particularly fine on this one, age adding a little more his deep melodic groan as it plays between the lines, stepping on and off beat to wonderful effect, transforming these clipped and truncated sentences and out of context phrases into perfectly formed little poems of longing, regret and waste.

6.Atlas Sound - Parallax

Parallax by Atlas Sound may have appeared higher had it not been for the fact that I only picked up a few days before Christmas. I have found something to like in most of what Bradford Cox has done over the last few years, from Deerhunter to Atlas Sound. The sound of both acts seems closer now that it was initially and I love the lo-fi dream pop sound of this record. For the last week or two, it has been on the stereo once or twice a day and it has taken a bit of time to get inside it. It is very beautiful throughout, with beautiful and memorable melodies, shot through with a lovely delicacy. Like the Deerhunter records, I am pretty sure this one will resonate with me even more over time but even at this early stage I can be sure it will be something I will return to for years.

7.James Blake - James Blake

I had listened to the James Blake album a lot in the earlier part of the year but even then it was one that worked for me sometimes and not others. Still an excellent album but haven’t felt the need to hear it for a few months although I am sure I will return to it. Will be interesting to see where he goes next.

8.Trouble Books & Mark McGuire - Trouble Books & Mark McGuire

The Trouble Books and Mark McGuire record is surprisingly cohesive for such a collaboration. This was often my default album when I wanted something that lend itself to calm and contemplation and consequently it often ended up being played on the bus in the mornings when I was struggling to be fully awake and wanted to disappear from the sounds of the morning commuters. I find that the vocals tend to come to me like another instrument in the mix and, oddly for me, I have no idea what any of the songs about or what the lyrical content is at all.

9.EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints

I really loved the EMA album but it has tended to be one I listen to obsessively for a few days and then not at all for a week or two before repeating the cycle. I am pretty sure this will be something I will be listening to for many years. Like some of the others I have mentioned, it is a completely engaging narrative, supported by arrangements that are perfectly suited to it. It reminds me of Blood on the Tracks, Patti Smith and Kim Gordon and as wonderful as this album is, I cannot wait to see what the next one will be like. It can be hard to tell on the basis of one record but already it looks like the opening gambit from and artist who will be engaging and interesting for a very long time.

10.Bill Callahan - Apocalypse

I loved Smog and I love Bill Callahan. There is actually a lifelong narrative traceable in his music which makes each new release interesting regardless. There were subtle shifts in the dynamic toward the end of the smog moniker and these have continued through the Bill Callahan records. This one takes that on a little further as he seems surer than ever of his song-writing strengths and thus seems more comfortable to be loose with the lyrical structure. I would prefer the first two albums but, in its’ own way this one is also wonderful and points at interesting directions for future releases.

11.Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat - Everything's Getting Older

This is a very beautiful work, arranged magnificently by Wells, the only criticism is that sometime Moffat seems to be repeating elements from some of the old Arab Strap songs.

12.Tom Waits - Bad As Me

A far more convincing album than Real Gone. He is still writing good songs and the music is as lively as ever. The only problem I have here is that there are times when it feels like you have heard it all before, but I guess it is difficult to avoid that after so many albums.

13.Chelsea Wolfe – Apokalypsis

A little unfocussed in places and some of the production is a bit irritating but there are some cracking songs in there.

14.The Caretaker- An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

This will be a grower. Old time ballroom music tweaked and shifted to unsettle you. Beautiful stuff; the music of uneasy dreams.

15.David Thomas Broughton – Outbreeding

I have a love/hate thing with Broughton. It’s big and brash and all him which is good but sometimes the repetitions and the accent become wearing.

16.Eleanor Friedberger- Last Summer

Surprisingly linear given that she is one half of The Fiery Furnaces. This is still growing on me but it is a strong, engaging indie pop record so what’s not to like?

17.War on Drugs - Slave Ambient

Sometimes the vocals bother me with these guys but it is good to hear a band sound so strident and passionate without slipping into wannabe stadium rock cliché (I’m looking at you, Okkervil River)

18.Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts

A slow burner and initially I thought Becks production made it sound like a Beck record with a Sonic Youth influence. It’s starting to enter my mind by the back door though as guitar lines linger and seem like the ghosts of old Sonic Youth tracks I listened to obsessively as a teenager. He seems to be treating it as an elegy for their lost relationship and perhaps I am listening to it as an elegy for my lost (sonic) youth. I any case, its beauty is emerging slowly and it’s a good thing.

19.King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine

King Creosote has often annoyed with some of his lyrics, the odd dodgy rhyme spolining an otherwise decent song, plus his albums are often very inconsistent. The presence of Hopkins seems to have focussed his efforts here and it’s a lovely little album.

20.Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

This has some lovely songs and then some horrible guitar parts that really bother me. Overall, I have decided I like it but it mithered me a bit.

Some others

These were all pretty enjoyable but in most cases they were the sort of things I loved once and then wasn’t bothered with the next couple of times until loving again a while later.

21.Cat's Eyes - Cat's Eyes
22.Marissa Nadler - Marissa Nadler
23.Battles - Gloss Drop
24.Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
25.Ford & Lopatin - Channel Pressure
26.SBTRKT - SBTRKT
27.Gillian Welch - The Harrow And The Harvest
28.Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
29.St. Vincent- Strange Mercy
30.A Hawk and a Hacksaw– Cervantine

These are all ones I want to spend some more time with (or listen to a second time!)

Beirut - The Rip Tide, Black Keys - El Camino, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Wolfroy Goes To Town, Chelsea Wolfe - The Grime and The Glow, Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys, James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual, Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, , Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong, Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for My Halo, Weeknd - House of Balloons, Cults – Cults, Dirty Beaches – Badlands, Feist – Metals, Low - C'mon, Men - Leave Home, Mogwai - Hardcore will never die, but you will, My Morning Jacket – Circuital, Panda Bear – Tomboy, Radiohead - King Of Limbs, Real Estate – Days, Smith Westerns - Dye It Blonde, Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler/The Dream, Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

These were ok but a bit disappointing

Frank Ocean - Nostalgia, Ultra, Horrors – Skying, Iceage - New Brigade, John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, Magnetic Fields – Obscurities, Sic Alps - Napa Asylum, Tapes 'n Tapes – Outside, tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l , TV on the Radio - Nine Types Of Light, Ty Segall - Goodbye Bread, Wild Swans - The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years, Youth Lagoon - Year of Hibernation, Yuck - Yuck, Zola Jesus – Conatus, Okkervil River - I Am Very Far

And finally, couple of cracking reissues.

Disco Inferno - The 5 EPs

Michael Chapman - Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967–2010

Mark McGuire - A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire

I'm Ready

2011-09-06T00:28:00.000+01:00

Albums of 2010

2011-01-04T11:16:00.002Z

1. Beach House - Teen Dream
I just find this really beautiful

2. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
It seems as they have begun to break through a little they have gone even murkier than before. Took a while for this to settle on me but when it did it spoke to me like a conspiracy, deft and delicate, coy and charming.

3. Richard Youngs - Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits
His pop album, apparently, and it is far more immediate than most of what he does. Surprisingly concise for him and I find a loose narrative that engages; moving close and pulling back just as you attempt to hold it.

4. Wolf Parade - Expo 86
Much better than the previous effort; seems the members have stopped keeping all their best songs for their other projects and there is the sense of them playing off each other rather than against.

5. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
This is a sprawling mess of breathless falling over themselves vocals, the conceit of a concept that is really just a vessel for the character and complaints of the singer. And bagpipe solos. Altogether a more effective use of a Bruce Springsteen influence than the likes of Gaslight Anthem. Full of passion and often unfocussed youthful rage; which is good. And big beards, which is also good.

6. John Grant - Queen of Denmark
Some days I love this and others it makes me want to slap him. It is engaging and honest and there is the feeling of someone cutting loose on their ideas, even if they sometimes go places that prove faintly embarrassing.

7. Fall - Your Future Our Clutter
As ever, it’s just the Fall and is therefore wonderful in a way nothing else can be.

8. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
I think my liking for this is partly due to my return to using an mp3 player after a long time without. Not sure I would like it much had I just listened to it sitting still. But walking to it, it all makes so much sense. Good fun and full of ideas; the one criticism being that, at times, it all sounds a little too easy for them.

9. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky
In many ways they have mellowed substantially from their earlier output; yet this is still full of dark menace and, at times, genuinely scary but always interesting.

10. Spoon – Transference
What I love most about this band is their production. As someone who tends to focus quite a lot on lyrics it surprises me that I can often remember guitar lines and little production tricks more than actual songs from their albums; the dynamics keeping the relatively straight songs interesting. Nonetheless, it still works very well as a quite standard American indie rock record.

11. These New Puritans – Hidden
More ideas than one would normally expect from a Brit ‘next big thing’. There is the sense that they haven’t quite found their sound and, if they can build on the promise, this might be viewed retrospectively as another false start (I haven’t heard their first album so that might provide a different context). For now though, a pretty excellent album that points to a lot of interesting things to come from them.

12. Sleigh Bells – Treats
Full of fun sounds and half-finished ideas that are tossed away as the next one arrives. This makes me suspect that I will hate this in time, but for the moment, the sense of a band enjoying themselves makes it a great listen; albeit one that could become cloying over time. It’s one of those situations where you like an album a lot but couldn’t really see yourself being interested in the follow-up.

13. Gayngs – Relayted
Indie MOR but manages to stay just the right side of parody. The songs are a little long but, overall, one can forget the conceit of the concept and enjoy a pop album that sounds both heavily referential and quite fresh.

14. Grinderman - Grinderman 2
More fun than the first outing and the only thing that seems strange is that Grinderman has come up as the main Bad Seeds have begun to engage more with those harder roots again on Lazarus.

15. LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
Not as good as Sound of Silver but sits in nicely alongside it. James Murphy just seems so savvy and unfussed. I remember watching Jools Holland during the year and seeing so many of the performers being all studied and guarding their pop images. Then LCD came on and, to all intents and purposes, he moved and looked like your drunk uncle at a wedding yet somehow managed to be the most convincing pop star on the show by a country mile. Post-modernism without the arched brow.

16. Mount Kimbie - Crooks and Lovers
This has been one that has struck me over the last few weeks but I suspect it’s immediacy may be a failing more than a quality. I am not sure it takes the dubstep template quite as far as reviews have suggested, and one gets the sense that some journalists are trying to pep up a genre that was becoming staid. That said, it does have a lovely mix of warmth and cold which makes it more of an effective album listen than many of this type.

17. No Age - Everything In Between
I wasn’t overly convinced by them prior to this album; they were interesting enough but seemed over-hyped. On this, they have tidied up the ideas and let them breathe through the songs a little more, everything is more focussed and concise and there is much more form to the songs, but with still enough noise and messiness to prevent it from becoming boring.

18. Strand of Oaks - Pope Killdragon
Initially I found this relatively dull; just a fairly standard singer-songwriter style album. I guess it shows how the listening situation can have a strong effect. Whilst mourning a personal loss, we had more snow than I can ever remember in this country. Each day when I trudged through the snow to get groceries, I found myself playing this on my headphones and it made sense to me. Something to do with the snowy landscape and the grief made it resonate. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to get it to make as much sense when I am sitting at home yet.

19. Forest Swords - Dagger Paths
I have only been listening to this one for a few weeks and (like Mount Kimbie) there is an immediacy which may mean it slips below the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never’s new one in time; that one has just proven too difficult to grasp properly so far. Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful album of evocative sounds and implied narratives that I find myself hitting repeat on when it ends. Always a good sign.

20. Richard Skelton – Landings
Another dark and evocative record that is still growing on me. I expect I haven’t gotten the full value of it yet, given that I am listening to a download while waiting for the full book/cd package to arrive my mail. The sound of barren landscapes and the static that hangs upon them, a sadness writ large but a poeticism striving to break through. This is a recent acquisition too and I expect it’s full beauty has yet to become apparent to me.

There was much pleasure to be had in the following also, some of which are probably only here because I haven’t had enough time to live with them yet.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs, Bill Callahan - Rough Travel For a Rare Thing, Books - The Way Out, Brian McBride - The Effective Disconnect, Chris Abrahams - Play Scar, Damien Jurado - Saint Bartlett, Dave Couse – Alonewalk, Demdike Stare - Forest of Evil / Liberation Through Hearing / Voices Of Dust, Fresh and Onlys - Play it Strange, Giant Sand - Blurry Blue Mountain, Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here, Gonjasufi - A Sufi And A Killer, Howe Gelb And A Band of Gypsies – Alegrías, Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Hawk, Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me, Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts, Matthew Dear - Black City, Max Richter – Infra, Oneohtrix Point Never – Returnal, Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme, Roky Erickson – True Love Cast Out All Evil, Sam Amidon - I See The Sign, Shearwater - The Golden Archipelago, Strong Arm Steady - In Search of Stoney Jackson, Superchunk - Majesty Shredding, Tricky - Mixed Race, Twin Shadow – Forget, Walkmen – Lisbon, Wavves - King of the Beach, Xiu Xiu - Dear God I Hate Myself, Yeasayer - Odd Blood

2010-04-28T14:48:00.000+01:00

many years ago

courtesy of...

2010-04-27T22:11:00.003+01:00

Never got round to my albums of the year or decade.. Maybe I still will...

This is nice though

Stylus

and this particular inclusion..

2010-04-26T23:29:00.000+01:00

Cahoots

2010-01-29T21:21:00.002Z

Formative years were a drag
But we passed the time somehow
I´m in cahoots with the
Upper classes now

Byebye 2009 in rap

2009-12-23T17:43:00.001Z

It's been real.

Shoutouts to the stuff I left out, like Playboy Tre's Liquor Store Mascot mixtape, and Southern rapper Max Minelli's mixtape over NY 90s beats, Hip Hop Dreams & Backpack Wishes, and the jerkin' dance and music craze of LA this year, which brought back drum machine minimalism and a DIY aesthetic, and rap groups! And female MCs running things! Shoutouts too to all the stuff I didn't hear, such as Dalek & Themselves repping the avant guard, and that one great backpack boom bap album that might have been out there somewhere. All thanks to the Stallard.

Jay Elect

2009-12-23T17:40:00.006Z

Jay Electronica - "Exhibit C" (radio rip, 2009)

This is now availible at iTunes in full and in CD quality, but I gotta pick the radio rip for three reasons. One, the DJ uses the Mr. Magic world premier tag (radio legend Mr. Magic passed away this year). Two, the DJ finds a part near the end so ill he has to rewind. Three, this is the version the internet rap stans went crazy over.

Elect is the other side of rap & the internet. He's never made an album or a mixtape. New Orleans born, he wandered the U.S. like a "hip hop Jack Kerouac", as URB put it, 'til In 2007 he made a 15 minute piece without drums in Mac's Garageband, using Jon Brion's OST to Eternal Sunshine, put it up on his myspace, ppl clicked through from his myspace pals Eryka Badu and producer Just Blaze, and the buzz grew and grew. Some earlier tracks came out, over Dilla and Madlib beats. In early 2008, a smattering of new tracks. Then radio silence ending with this track airing on Shade 45.

Higher learning

Giles Peterson Worldwide (.mp3, 80MB) - Much of his music is contained in this lengthy and charmingly shambolic interview, which has a real laid-back late night feel. I recommend you hear at least the first 20 mins or so, which is straight music, no talk.

If you're a fan, you can download this Dec 22, 2009 Tony Touch interview with some excerpts of newest stuff and some live rap.

Jesse Serwer's piece for URB (.pdf), Jan 2008.

Video edition

2009-12-23T17:13:00.004Z

Shabazz Palaces - "Belhaven Meridian" dir. Khalil Joseph (FiveSix Media, 2009)

Nice b/w, dizzying inverted camera. This is a piece that sounds like an excerpt from a tapestry of sounds. After the cover of the Mos Def album, this vid has the second Killer of Sheep ref in hip hop 2009. It's a student film from 1977. I saw it in a new print last year (at the IFI), and so did a lot of other people, it seems.

Lil Boosie - "Mind of a Maniac" (Superbad, Trill Ent., 2009)

Noz linked this vid to Method Man's crazy-eyed video outings. For me it's closer to Gravedigga's "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide" vid: in your face craziness in a mercilessly pop structure, everything seems like hook, or anything that isn't hook is hurtling towards hook. At any rate, "classic 'oh shit' inducing rap video imagery...feels like some 1993 shit. Before Hype [Williams]." Ayup.

Higher learning

WHAT IS SHABAZZ PALACES Sounds like a shaggy dog tale from FiveSix Media.

Cached version of Ozone interview with Boosie talking about how his record co. ruined Superbad.

Country rap tunes, mayne

2009-12-22T15:47:00.007Z

UGK

UGK - "Purse Come First" feat. Big Gipp (UGK 4 Life, Jive 2009)

UGK - "Da Game Been Good to Me" (UGK 4 Life)

"Purse Come First" has some anger, paranoia and political commentary that would make it fit right in beside "Cell Therapy" on Goodie Mob's 1995 Soul Food. Except with some religious apocrypha thrown in. And a money-over-everything hook apropos of nothing that I can detect. "Da Game Been Good to Me" has an excellent Pimp C hook and coda, and an aggressive Bun B verse in the middle.

I didn't know about UGK until they guested on Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'" in 2000, by which time they were already legends down south. Producer/rapper Pimp C, one half of the UGK duo, died in December two years ago, so it was nice that this posthumous album was pretty damn good.

Big Boi

Big Boi - "Fo Yo Sorrows" feat. George Clinton & Too $hort (Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, Grand Hustle, 2010?)

Big Boi - "Shine Blockas" feat. Gucci Mane (Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty)

Cooler than a polar bear's toenails, as the man said. If this record ever gets released, it may well be a classic. Leaks from it date back to at least 2008 ("Royal Flush", "Dubbz" etc.).

Z-Ro

Z-Ro - "Intro" (Cocaine retail, Rap-A-Lot, 2009)

Thug shit with emotional hood preaching. Cocaine came in two versions: first was a three hour long unauthorized bootleg supposedly hosted by "DJ Dramaqueen" with new material mixed with stuff from the vaults, allegedly leaked by the artist himself to stores and corners in Houston, and then the retail version rushed out in its wake with 17 tracks of new material only. The bootleg is darn near undigestable in a calendar year, but the 15 minute long "Fondren & Main" on it, screwed and chopped by the late DJ Screw, is damn near my jam of the year. I like to load it on the ipod then walk the irish streets like an astronaut visiting a strange planet.

Z-ro, AKA Z-ro tha Crooked, AKA the king of tha Ghetto, AKA Rother Vandross. He's a great example of the "regional rap" phenom, a legend but America doesn't know his name. Any of his names. Hear him at the height of his virtuoso emotive fast rapping (something there's very little of on Cocaine) on "Look What You Did To Me" from 1998, building to a climax by verse two. Before that he was already a part of DJ Screw's Screwed Up Click (the SUC Z-ro reps to this day). DJ Screw invented the "chopped & screwed" version, rap songs pitched down to near half-speed (screwed) and messed around with a little by the DJ (chopped). Apparently it's great to listen to while on a Southern drug of choice, codeine-based cough syrup mixed with soft drinks. A shitload of Southern rap albums have chopped & screwed versions. DJ Screw fatally ODed on syrup in 2000 at 28.

Freddie Gibbs

County Bounce (midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik, mixtape, 2009)

Gibbs had not one but two releases that were among the best of the year, both released free to the internet. The mixtape as mixtape The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, a somewhat roughshod but lyrically compelling compendium of his work to date, and the mixtape as album, the perhaps slightly shallower but carefully, sumptuously produced midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik. I've already tried to sell it to Dar using "County Bounce" and failed. I throw my hands up. How can you not like this?

Higher learning

Freddie Gibbs - "Higher Learning" (midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik)

"UGwho?" - Listen to the "Pocket Full of Stones" remix while the Martorialist talks about the birth of country rap tunes.

You can also check out MF's 2009 rap picks at the end of his epic rundown of the decade in rap tracks.

Actually just bookmark his blog: he's a funny motherfucker, and he'll not only tell you that Herzog has made a sequel to Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage, but also post two scenes from it that will change your life.

Jesse Serwer's excellent piece on Ro & Cocaine

Noz has two collections of Pimp C productions.

All about that 'Ro, you already know, mayne. An' if you ready to plex, he done already put the clip in.

"what major label rap album that's been pushed back from 2008 to 2009 has the best chance of a) being released in '09 and b) not sucking?" - msg board post from December 2008.

NYC addendum

2009-12-22T15:40:00.003Z

Cormega - "Journey" (Born and Raised, Aura, 2009)

Cormega made two fine albums in 2000 & 2001. I haven't heard this one yet, but this is a nice track that I forgot to include in my NY post.

GBV

2009-12-20T19:24:00.002Z

Just so my blog doesn't forget me.. back soon

D(S)

3: The Year in Wu

2009-12-18T10:05:00.004Z

Welcome to the year in Wu songs. It was such a busy Wu year that at least one Wu-related record passed me by completely: Method Man & Redman's Blackout! 2.

Mocky - "Birds of a Feather" feat. GZA (12", Crammed Discs, 2009)

GZA pens an elegant verse bookended by Mocky's sunny soft-serve retro-soul. GZA uses birdsong like gear, he tells us. I like this.

True story: the Liquid Swords on my hard drive is the same one ripped from the CD I borrowed from Darren circa 1997, except three hard drives later. I think I gave the CD back eventually, so hopefully it's safe to tell this.

Masta Killa - "Things Ain't The Same" (unknown, Nature Sounds[?], TBA)

It seems like this original Wu member was never interested in any sort of fame. He didn't release a solo record 'til 2004! This song emerged around September and it's a beautiful recounting of memories and impressions from a low-key street dude.

Ghostface Killah - "Stay" (Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, Def Jam, 2009)

I didn't get around to picking up this album of love & sex raps, but I still ended up with six loose tracks from it: "Not Your Average Girl", "Stay", "Stapleton Sex", "Paragraphs of Love", "Guest House", and "Let's Stop Playin'". All of them are good to great, so I probably messed up there. Or got lucky, I suppose. "Stay" is one of the softer tracks, and one of the more ordinary in form, but it's definitely the one I'm feeling this morning.

Raekwon - "Have Mercy" feat. Beanie Sigel (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II, EMI, 2009)

Bonuses included, there are 24 solid tracks on this album. I didn't know what to pick. It's amazing that Raekwon came up with a record this solid in the 90s Wu mold in 2009.

This sequel has been talked about for years. "New Wu", a RZA-produced track then known as "Wu Ooh", emerged around January. "Tell a friend, it's that symbol again", Method Man told us on the hook. Wu fans were "scarred for life", he told us on the verse, because we "can't forget the cuts". Excitement went up a notch. "Build your own OB4CLII" posts with possible tracks began to hit the blogs, more often than not headed with the classic no-budget, over-the-top "!Coming Soon!" image of mysterious origin. Noz called the record "our Smile", only half-joking if he was joking at all. Late Summer, a guy called Memory Man takes Raekwon acappellas over the last decade and marries them to original beats on Scarface and Kung Fu themes on the mixtape Cuban Revolution. We were ready. And when it came, it was good! That's not how the script usually goes. It's long though, and relentless, with little levity, and no supremely blunted beats with a little space in 'em like "Incarcerated Scarfaces"; a little too much orchestral riffs, a little too much toughness, a little too dense. But I'll take it. Mhm.

Higher Learning

The Tao of Wu - Naturally.

http://www.blakroc.com/videos.html (autostarts) I liked the feel of these little "webisodes" of rappers (inc. RZA & Raekwon) working with the Black Keys this year for Dame Dash's Blakroc project.

TROY blog on RZA's "Sunshower", in the context of this GZA interview about rhyming for hours, ferrying from Staten to roam the boroughs of NY searching MCs to battle, samurai-style.

2: The God MC

2009-12-18T03:26:00.003Z

Since my sleep pattern has gone deeply strange, and since his name came up in nearly every post so far, time to visit this year's release by one of the best to ever do it.

Rakim - "Holy Are You" (The Seventh Seal, SMC, 2009)

This song creeps me out. The hook is sickly-sweet pious orthodoxy, flipped here into some heretical Five Percenter doctrine. You can still hear the smug, stifling weight of homogenous mainstream belief in it. Rakim rips into it backed up by queasy synth riffs stabbing and flaring the track til it becomes pyrotechnic blasphemy. It's awesome, in a religious sense.

What's surprising about Rakim's return after a decade away is how well the album fits into 2009. It's full of hooks that you don't want to hear on a Rakim record, and production choices that send you diving for the skip button. Then you realize that the productions you skipped to are boring ones. Rakim's voice alone is a bass keynote that injects a thrilling drama into gaudy production, but it's not at all a good album. Also, I don't wanna hear love raps on a Rakim record that aren't "Mahogany"; certainly not more than one. I mean I'm glad he's happy and all, but I want what he surpasses all at: rapping about rapping.

The Anglo music press let their readers down for years by not understanding bragadoccio in rap. (I remember reading the line, "Thankfully there's no 'Hey look at the size of my willy' nonsense here".) You make something out of nothing. You walk up in the spot and amaze everyone simply by what you say. Or more correctly, by how you say it. By how you manifest yourself. It's pure.

Rakim was born with the stars aligned perfectly. He took it further in a way that seems as natural as breathing. His rapping about rapping is a document of a way of being in the world that totally convinces.

Kid Wizard Rakim - Live @ Wyandanch High School, 1985

This just hit the net last week: Biz Markie introducing a 17 year-old Rakim already on some Supreme Mathematics. At 1:54 above he kicks his game-changing "21 MCs" lines (the same ones Bee Why references in my name-dropping post) a year before "My Melody".

Rakim - "The Saga Begins" (The 18th Letter, 1997)

Late-period (or I suppose mid-period, we have to say now) Rakim, explaining my point.

Rakim - "Guess Who's Back (Buckwild remix)" (12", Universal, 1997)

Great use of a Chuck D sample. Never realized just how good Buckwild was 'til his Diggin' In The Crates comp came out a few years back. Of course gravitating towards rappers like Rakim, Big L, Nas, etc. doesn't hurt.

Higher Learning

"21 8 Up" - Noz has the full Wyandanch track, to-the-point commentary on the context that provides, and a link to the full tape.

"Feed Me Hip-Hop And I Start Trembling" - The record prompted Ta-Nehisi Coates to write about Rakim, so it's all good.

"Correction" - More liek the Washington LOLst amiright?

"Islam in the Mix: Lessons of the Five Percent"

NYC Heroes 1

2009-12-16T08:41:00.008Z

Only a few posts to go in my (that is, dq's) 2009 rap rundown for Dar. Hang in there. I'm heading to Thomas House and then Edan @ Twisted Pepper on Friday, so that could kill off this series right there. Yez should come out.

OK, so some established Noo Yawk names dropped some stuff I dug this year, for the most part 'coz they smack the track with that NY attitude our nonchalant friend above probably describes more than he represents.

DOOM

DOOM - "That's That" (Born Like This, Lex, 2009)

DOOM - "Ballskin" (Born Like This)

MFDOOM loses the MF for some reason, re-uses instrumentals, adds a snare to a three-year-old Ghostface collaboration that just seems mad annoying in its novelty, has a homophobic diss track aimed at Batman (or whatever rap star you wanna guess is represented), is gone before you know it on several tracks, has another rapper (Raekwon) do the work alone on another, keeps it lo-fi throughout, and still ends up somehow with an album that feels complete and of a piece. Total Stallard-bait on "Cellz", where he lifts Bukowski's "Born Into This", the poet's own voice narrating the world going to hell horribly. That's much more affecting without competing with DOOM's sci-fi laser wars on the track, so I passed on including "Cellz" here. "That's That" serves as a distillation of his aesthetic, but at a point where his assurance is leaning towards feel-good rather than alienating. "Ballskin" is more of that intriguing flow, wordplay and rhyme placement. I'm sure everything means something on this record, it's just not always easy to know exactly what.

Blaq Poet

Blaq Poet - "I Get It In" (Tha Blaqprint, Year Round, 2009)

This is really called "I-Gittitin" or something like that, but I don't rep the mispelling of this no-nonsense phrase - it's a real misfire. I played the living fuck out of this track this year. The whole album is really solid, even if it doesn't get much more complicated than this: head-busting NY hip hop driven by the force of Poet's personality. He's a rap vet going back to the days of the Juice Crew vs. BDP. He gets it in. "Let ya get closer, then I put this shit to closure / leave your ass in Nova Scotia, stiff, where nobody knows ya."

Mos Def

Mos Def - "Quiet Dog Bite Hard" (The Ecstatic, Downtown, 2009)

Gave this album a listen when it came out, and my thoughts were, "Great, don't need to hear any of this again - on to the next!" Since then I've heard it a couple of times in Orla's, and she pointed out that this track in fact rocks. "Quiet Dog Bite Hard" is quite immediate, and I shouldn't have missed it. The idea sneaked up on me that maybe the album has rewards that don't give themselves up easily. It's full of musical half-ideas that disappear to be replaced by the next. When Mos is rapping, he's mostly half-rapping. When singing, mostly half-singing. The whole thing comes in and out of focus constantly, but it may not be as half-assed as it appears when you just want him to kick it "raw-boned like Skeletor". For those of us who endured his laughable "performance" in Dublin a couple of years back, the suspicion of half-assery is never far away. I don't care how likeable he was in Be Kind, Rewind. Well, I do, kinda.

Busta

Just a note to say that as far as I can tell Busta continues to kill it everywhere but on his official releases. Other people's mixtapes as with the above, features, freestyles, remixes of fellow NYC hero and Orla-approved Q-Tip... that "Scenario" impulse to try to slay every rapper on the track still remains any time his record company isn't looking.

Stay tooned for NY heroes part 2: Rakim & The Year in Wu

Higher learning

Pitchfork's top 6 rap songs of 2009 Heheh.

Best Rap, 2009 - Good list from Noz. In the intro he makes an "A Milli"-related point similar to one I made the other day.

Colour wheel rap

2009-12-14T05:48:00.010Z

G-Side - "My Aura" (Huntsville International mixtape, Slow Motion Soundz, 2009)

You hear a song like this, and wonder why G-Side aren't huge yet. It's smooth, groovy, dancefloor-friendly music that's easily relatable to the funk and soul we've been hearing all our lives, or even the funk- and soul-influenced hip hop most kids have been hearing all their lives. Could be it's just too much fun.

The hook is an extension of b-boy attitude, taking it into the magic ego stratosphere you hear on blues tunes sometimes ("Gonna be a magic boy, come back and buy this town, put it all in my shoe"). It seems like concepts aren't played out in rap anymore once they become popular, just taken to hyperbolic virtuosity, til it's not even your car or chain that's dazzling anymore, but the very impression you make on the atmosphere. Just like battle rappers always knew, there's no limit on ways to make it known how fresh you are, it's just a matter of how you come with it. They come with seventies strut, outlandish self-assertion and a touch of spaciness.

G-Side are from Huntsville, Alabama, where NASA build their rockets. Their first album, last year's Starships & Rockets, references this on its cover and uses space travel as a lyrical device. It picked up some internet love, which they reference on this follow-up mixtape. Huntsville International is yet another manifestation of the mixtape-as-album; free original music created especially for the purpose. All production here, as on Starships & Rockets, is by Block Beataz, and it's as carefully crafted as anything released to stores.

Gucci Mane - "Lemonade" (The State Vs. Radric Davis, Warner Bros, 2009)

'Scoochi! BURRRR! Gucci's driven into delirious monomania by his own flyness once again. He's the other side of the mixtape paradigm, having flooded the streets with countless numbers of them (this year three were released on one day at one stage) using cheap-sounding beats from in-house producers such as Zaytoven, rapping variations on themes of cars and ice like the battle rappers' riffing on jazz standards of diss. When you ask Gucci the time, he tells you it's "fifteen past the diamonds". It took a degree of immersion before I could appreciate his slurred Southern delivery and the insistent cadence of much of his flow, and gain access to the stupid joy of his catchphrases, and his amazed repetition, as in "Wonderful", "Gorgeous", "Photo Shoot" and this track above. All his tracks don't have the unexpectedness of this hook though, with the drums dropping out for a female iteration.

Much of the appreciative writing on Gucci online (as opposed to the hate) has been by Jordan and David of So Many Shrimp. Jordan occasionally sits in with the pop-pickers at the Singles Jukebox, and David coined the colour wheel rap concept: I bit this whole post from him. The Gucci album was somewhat of an event then, after the buzz garnered by the huge number of mixtapes, but it turns out to be a a solid barometer on the major label rap album in the oh nine, full of guest appearances and bullshit hooks catering to different demographics. The worst tracks are sequenced together, so a significant slab of the album spends its time begging you not only to turn it off, but also to never listen to it again.

The "Lemonade" track is by Bangladesh, who previously produced the "A Milli" beat for Lil Wayne. Ironically, that may stand as the last big beat that absolutely every rapper had to get on. The preponderance of original music on mixtapes may have killed off the ubiquitous hot high-profile hit that becomes the "freestyle" instrumental of the moment, a lineage that seems traceable back through "A Milli", "Throw Some Ds", "Lost Ones", "In Da Club" and beyond.

DJ Spinna - "More Colors" feat. Elzhi (Sonic Smash, High Water, 2009)

Elzhi on the mic, Spinna on the track.

I guess DJ Spinna is a minor hero of the late 90s resurgence of independent label hip hop, as one half of the New York duo Jigmastas & as the producer lacing numerous other tracks of the times—sometimes by big names, sometimes by the kind of acts who drop a couple of dope 12"s and go back to their regular hustle never to be heard of again, like it ain't no thing. Those guys always seem kind of magical. After his Polyrhythms Addicts project he was as likely to spin a set of breaks source material or house or Stevie Wonder as hip hop, so I was kinda surprised to see him release a producer album this year. His beats are interesting as ever, though with more disorienting scuzz than he let into his dreamy late 90s stuff. You can nod along to all of it, but the record varies with whoever's on the mic. Only a few tracks really stand out. Elzhi's from Detroit, the city that's kind of taken on the mantle of New York lyricism with a street sensibility, as seen in MCs like Royce Da 5' 9" and Guilty Simpson. He goes back a ways, but most recently brought out The Preface last year with production from Detroit's Black Milk, himself an MC. "More Colors" is a continuation of the concept broached on "Colors" from that album.

Bonus beats

DJ Spinna - "New York" feat. Krym (Sonic Smash, 2009)

Jigmastas reunion.

G-Side - "Huntsville International" (Huntsville International)

Introductory track on the tape, for an idea of the breadth of Block Beataz productions. This has rock guitar that always seems endearing when its essentialist core is ripped from its context and put in a hip hop one. There's just the slightest hint of elements from the trance rap sound they pioneered on Starships, too.

Gucci Mane - Classical (The State Vs. Radric Davis, 2009)

Gucci gets quite nimble on the intro track to the new album. I'm installing this one in the pantheon of urban cod-opera alongside Dizzee, Jamelia and World Famous Supreme Team.

Higher learning

"The 25 Most Hip-Hop Cities In America"

Photos from Huntsville

Two or three things I know about Gucci - No idea what he's on about really, but couldn't resist the Godard ref in the title. Dissent in the comments.

How to rap along

http://somanyshrimp.com/2009/02/05/the-30-best-gucci-mane-tracks-of-2008-intro/

Over 'A Milli' Remixes - Bangladesh comments on versions of "A Milli". I like the last one too.

Female A Milli remixes

Belgium

2009-12-11T23:34:00.000Z

What's the story with Belgium?

Why do Flanders Belgians push Iggy Pop's, Michel Houellebecq inspired, jazz inflected recent album to only 76 in the charts whilst the Wallonian Belgians managed to get it to 39? Is this a sign of more serious conflict. I feel like investigating the demographics and social drivers that led to this difference. I won't though.

Yes, Iggy Pop has a Michel Houellebecq inspired, jazz inflected recent album.

No, it won't be listened to and thus won't be my album of the year.

Somebody out there please listen to it an let me know what it sounds like.

Thanks.

System

2009-12-10T22:10:00.014Z

Sometimes supporting Liverpool FC this season—looking dreamily at the football Arsenal play, and wondering if Jamie Carragher will ever be as happy as Andrei Arshavin—yeah, sometimes all you have to keep you going is the thought, "At least we didn't fire Harry Redknapp and end up here. That would really suck right now." And sometimes all that's needed is to throw the needle down on something so incendiary that smoke issues from the stylus. Yep, it's dq back once again with the ill behaviour, taking out that frying pan, shining it up real good, flipping that mofo vertical and smacking you upside the head with it on some "It's the year in hot raps, bitches!"-type steez. And by that I mean talking about rap while Dar's busy. And by busy, i mean battling it out in a relegation dogfight. Here's a track that makes me feel all like:

Reks - "System" (Produced by DJ GI Joe, from More Grey Hairs, Showoff, 2009)

Drums and horns, basically. Drums that shuffle and swing even as they slam, and horns that sound like a call to arms or the stuff to bring walls crashing down, even as their synth-like woozy sustain brings out a touch of softness, an emotion that renders as elegiac. It's a perfect accompaniment to this rap, where Reks is passionate and hungry as fucc.

This was a new song released to the net to publicize the release of a collection of odds, ends & leftovers from his already overlong but still pretty dope Grey Hairs album (Showoff, 2008). Reks is a Boston-based MC who brought out a well-received debut some years back, became somewhat of a local underground star, and by his own account thought he had made it, drank a lot, and was an asshole to everybody. The album didn't sell though and he was dropped by his record company, which forced him to cobble together beats for a disappointing second album that he sold out of the back of his car. So last year's Grey Hairs was something of a re-emergence. Discounting More Grey Hairs as a placeholder, it'll be interesting to see what he does next.

O well do I remember the "hip hop fell off" crowd being muchly amused that one of my fav tracks of 2007 was a formally staid Premo-imitation called "Nostalgia". You know, in the sort of rap dork chatrooms in which these conversations take place for me. Here's the thing, though. By hip hop, they generally mean musics from the school of New York lyricism, or message rap, or dusty looped samples and hard snares, or some combo thereof. "That classic hip hop". "Real hip hop". And by "fell off" they mean "isn't hot right now". But if there weren't so many MCs making boring music who seem like they are self-consciously pandering to this demographic with "real hip hop" tropes, maybe people would sit up and take notice when somebody from that school steps up and spits fire. Which is all that's required from any rapper, ever.

Bonus Beats: Name-Dropping Edition

Reks - "Say Goodnight" (Grey Hairs, 2008)
When DJ Premier scratches in Rakim's classic advice on a track, I think it's safe to assume he thinks you're nice.

Skillz - "Who's Sickest" (Freestyle on Hot97's "Drama Hour", 2003)

Bee Why - "Remember The Times" (12", Wolfpak, 1997)

Higher learning

Little Young video - Carping done right in this nicely pitched, deceptively light get-off-my-lawn grouchy old man rap [(c) ichlugebullets], based around a diss of astonishing economy: "Understand where I'm coming from? Nope, you probably don't. That's coz you a little young."

Name drops in the latest Game mixtape: we count them - Name-dropping done wrong.

Image source: Achewood, October 22, 2001

One for the treble, two for the bass

2009-12-07T21:00:00.007Z

Hey. I'm dq, I'll be posting here every couple of days for a week or two to tell Stallard about rap I liked this year. At the end maybe I'll throw up a link to a folder of tunes to download.

So anyone who has smudged their fingers on the pages of the Britland music press down the years knows that the great satan rockism has been cast out, right? That we do not favour "real" instruments over others, nor the album over the single; that we do not lionize the current work of past heroes, and that we give Mariah the same listening attention as the indie heroes de jour, at least before forming a judgment. Rappers knew most of this already, but have been messing up by making cohesive LPs since like 1984. Well fear no more, because they and their record companies have pretty much given up that lark and got with the program. It's one for the ladies, one for the clubs, one for the streets and one for the love. Nevertheless, it's been exhilarating listening to rap this year. I dunno if I'll get that across here though because 1) I can never really sort anything beyond the tracks I'm feeling any given week, and 2) rockism is a bitch to kick for real, and I feel I'm gonna be gravitating towards old names and folks who made good albums. Let's kick it off with a case in point. You should probably assume any tracks I post are NSFW, and in this case you should definitely assume it.

Quote unquote BOUGIE

DJ Quik and Kurupt - "Watcha Wan Do" feat. YoYo (from BlaQKout, Mad Science, 2009)

This beat is insane, yes? I saw a guy somewhere say this was the only major label type beat on the album. Maybe he's connecting it to the pop weirdness heyday of Timbo and Missy, or something, I dunno.

Quik is a West Coast rapper/producer extraordinaire of long standing. People of my geography and generation may remember his "Just Like Compton" from the brief shining window that was access to Yo! MTV Raps in the early 90s. ("Do You Know" from BlaQKout samples another late night MTV classic of that period, Soul II Soul's "Back To Life".) Kurupt is another Cali rap veteran, he of Tha Dogg Pound and sundry Death Row collabs back in the day. There's an alternative version of this on the album which has more, and filthier, raps, and it's excellent, but it's at the expense of YoYo's verse, and everybody needs YoYo's verse.

It's funny. I always think my initial connection with hip hop was the Anglo press going mad for Nation of Millions, followed quickly by 3 Feet High & Rising rolling a double six in Hot Press. But then I recall hearing Eric B. and Rakim after Paid in Full was offered as album of the year by a Vox Popped London kid on No Limits, and surely the Coldcut London remix was in the ether before M.A.R.R.S. And then comes a sudden memory of clandestine trading of dubbed NWA tapes in primary school, us giggling at the obscenities. Shoutout to Moorsy, wherever he is. Last news I heard was that he got kicked out of gambling rehab for asking a security guard to do the Lotto for him. Anyway I don't know about this, since candidates for likely tracks date to around 1990. But the point is that filthy raps are great.

Bonus beats

DJ Quik and Kurupt - "9 x's Outta 10" (BlaQKout, 2009)

This is a "smart art piece" according to the NYT. And a kickass track that bends spacetime at will according to me.

RIP Liam Clancy

Pour one out. Last time I saw the Drake, a friend of my late father's, he was telling me he'd been to the cinema for the first time in decades, to the new one in Smithfield in fact, to see The Legend of Liam Clancy. I felt bad for not going at the time, and for not investigating the Clancy Brothers too much, also.

I'm not going too far out of my lane here, for a couple of reasons. After all, there's the story of their being abroad in the small hours of New York, trying to get into a club. And a black guy at the door says, "It's really only for brothers in here tonight, man." To which Liam replies, "Sure, we are! That's me brother Pat and that's me brother Tom and ..."

The Times piece is right about his stealing the show in No Direction Home. I dunno about being wan for the shut-eyed ones so much though. I used to bump an old Clancy Brothers tape, and it's the rowdy ones I remember as best. Drinking songs, and "The Holy Ground" and the kickass sea shanty "Old King Louis":

King Louis was the king of France, before the revolu-SHY-AN!

Weeeeelll haul away, we'll haul away, boys!

But then he got his head cut off, which spoiled his constitu-SHY-AN!

Away, haul away! We'll haul away, boys!

There's an interesting issue when it comes to so-called "black music", about what are usually called "African retentions". Take jazz. It was ignored by musicology 'til it could be ignored no longer, much in the same way what kids were doing, kids left for dead among the bombed-out rubble of the Bronx, was ignored for half a decade, among the gangs that filled the vacuum left by Hoover's COINTEL undermining of the Panthers and the communities decimated by the Cross-Bronx Expressway, til someone said hey we could record this and sell it. Good idea. So around 1930 people take recording equipment to West Africa and find in musics there all the things that struck them as singular about jazz. Polyrhythms, blue notes, improvisation, syncopation etc. Or as Alyn Shipton puts it in A New History of Jazz, "polyrhythmic and polytonal ensembles, a strong accompanying rhythm that emphasizes what (in European music) are regarded as the 'weaker' second and fourth beats of a four-beat measure, the microtonal flattening of certain pitches of a scale, and collective improvisation over a regularly repeated pattern."

There has been debate about this, leading mainly from the dissensions of van der Merwe (“The Italian Blue Third”) and Tagg (that's Tagg in the image heading this post). Shipton for his part discounts call-and-response, a feature usually listed as such a retention, on account of its ubiquity in various traditions, not least the sea shanty, which dates back as early as 1493 in the European tradition.

It's tricky though, because there are compelling early accounts, usually from surprisingly observant and sensitive wives of Plantation owners, of African slaves using call-and-response in their native languages in a way that struck them (the observers) as singular. Blues emerges as a rural form with an obvious call-and-response element. By the 1910s or so, jazz players are backing blues singers, answering with horns the sung phrase. Kool Herc originates hip hop spinning James Brown's "extensive vamps", his voice "a percussive instrument with frequent rhythmic grunts", and "with rhythm-section patterns ... [resembling] West African polyrhythms" (Collins). When I say hip, you say hop. Hip. Hop. Hip. Hop.

Seafaring Lore and Legend has my shanty above as "O Haul Away". Apparently it's "the best known of the short-drag chanties". Seafaring Lore also gives this account:

Before steam finally ousted the clipper ship and the so-called windjammers (the big square-riggers that replaced clipper ships as the workhorses of the sea...), it was not uncommon for residents of waterside Sydney in the 1880s and 1890s to be treated to a round of chanty singing the like of which will never be heard again. With a whole fleet of clippers gathered at their anchorage, waiting for the wool to come in from the outstations, the crews would often spend an evening filling the still night air with some old and much-loved chanty:

The men of one ship would start a chanty. Soon it would be taken up on another ship, then another and another. Presently the harbor echoed with the harmonies of a dozen crews. Occasionally one crew would sing a verse, the entire fleet joining in the chorus, another crew taking the next verse, and the chanty thus proceeding through the fleet.

Wow.

There's an old saw about young males from certain parts of Watts and Compton and Oakland having a better life expectancy on death row, with appeals and so forth, than on the streets. But here's Kurupt & Quik photographed shooting a video for "Moroccan Blues" from BlaQKout:

Higher learning

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/

"Open Letter about 'Black Music', 'Afro-American Music' and 'European Music'" by Philip Tagg

Seafaring Lore & Legend @ Google Books

"Puffin' on Blunts and Drankin' Tanqueray" - Pristine recently unearthed video for a 1992 Dr. Dre b-side feat. raps from Lady of Rage, Daz & Kurupt

Bougie

The Best of DJ Quick Essential chronology by Matthew Africa. I played this all Summer from #5 to the end. str8 fire.

Friday Afternoon

2009-12-04T15:06:00.002Z

Just very bored today. No work to do and no feeling to do anything else but go smoke every half hour. Here's Richard Buckner.

Ed's Song

D

Making it Back

2009-12-03T20:53:00.002Z

When I played this one night, a friend intimated that he was as bored by it as he would have been had 'Summer in Siam' actually been playing. I didn't understand.

Angels of Ashes

2009-12-03T13:35:00.001Z

From Scott 4

The Angels of Ashes will give back your passions again and again
Their light shafts will reach through the darkness and touch you my friend
They'll fly in a mind dance and blind you with wings wrapped in flame
If you're down to an echo they just might remember your name
In the unbroken darkness where emptiness empties alone
There's no starting or stopping where there is no right or no wrong
Well that's all right for some who can hang the absurd on their wall
If your blind hands can't grope through these measureless waters you'll fall
You've been following patterns and fleeting sensations too long
And the fullness that fills up the pulse of durations is gone
Let the great constellation of flickering ashes be heard
Let them burn with a fire all it takes to confess is a word, just a word
I can recommend angels I've watched as they've made a man strong oh so strong
If your humbleness shows then I'm sure that they'll take you along
You can tell them who sent you it might help to get you above
You can say that he laughed and he walked like St. Francis with love

Bacon and Berryman

2009-12-03T10:42:00.002Z

Unable to read for months, the nervous hyperactive energy reaching a pitch of noise and speed that makes concentrating too difficult. Attempts to re-read loved books even failing. The only exceptions being two stories that I have managed to finish, ‘A Small Good Thing’ and ‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver. A few pages, perhaps chapters of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and ‘The Outsider’, both enjoyed immensely as a teenager and enjoyed again in the pages I read. But soon, I am skipping through the pages looking for random phrases that catch my imagination and I can let rattle around for a few hours. Before long, the books are forgotten at the bottom of my bag amidst scraps of paper; articles I have printed or poems and songs I have never finished. And so today, again to try read and, conveniently, to tie in somewhat loosely to this album of the year malarkey.

Today it’s ‘The Dream Songs’ by John Berryman, finally acquired a few months ago (from the excellent Book Depository) after a few years of intending to. Poetry seems to make more sense for a scattered and unfocussed mind. I love this book but find it difficult to absorb; each poem requiring reading and re-reading again and again for the effect to sink in. It could be a long time before I feel I have any measure of it. In this way, I find it more like my relationship with paint than with text. I, like I suppose most, force the words to reveal themselves to me, resonance immediate and more often than not understood to a point where it can be broken down into component parts of style and delivery and content etc. Paint is not like that for me. Perhaps it is a critical confidence, I am not sure. I have no problem taking apart the structure of a piece of writing or a piece of music; I feel I have a sufficient depth of knowledge of both forms to analyse and criticise; praise or dismiss. I don’t have that depth but it feels like I do. I don’t have this feeling with paint.

A number of years ago I went to see a Francis Bacon exhibition here in Dublin and came away knowing there was something there for me but with very little idea of what it might be. It took five years for those images to start appearing in my dreams and then in my waking mind and slowly the sensual responses began to make themselves apparent. It took another two years or so for me to get to the point of actually reading a little about him and looking online for some of those images again. Now, I find him a very pervasive figure in terms of my thoughts regarding most, if not all, forms of art. I look at times for his lines in film; I wait for his sense of dislocation and entropy in music. Yet, I know so little of his work at all and have no context for it in terms of his lifeline, his development as an artist. There is another exhibition of his in the city at the moment but I have a fear, or at least trepidation of going along. I am afraid of something not working for me, of some balance and settling he has found in me being upset or dismayed. It runs for a while yet so perhaps I will get there. Or perhaps I will read more on him and find a real life context to apply the work to before returning to the images themselves.

In the meantime, I have the interviews and will read this piece from the New York Review of Books later.

In any case, Berryman works the same way for me. Implications and sociological extrapolations make themselves known weeks after I have read the poems; often from lines I can no longer place. I have never had this, or at least not to this degree, from any writer before and I am trying not to force it; trying not to try and understand too well too soon.

So back to music. As I have been reading Berryman this morning, I think of this song (John Allyn Smith Sails) about his suicide. It is, on some days like today, my favourite song about or referencing Berryman. Other days, it is my second favourite. Okay, there are only two that I know of. The other is ‘Stuck Between Stations’. Although I did reference him in a sloppy and now discarded song that also references Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Olivier Messiaen and is simultaneously about Monk and my wife. I think. It was written in drink and delusion so I am not completely sure where I was trying to go with it. Pretensions? I gots ‘em.

So the song is about the suicide of Berryman and I do love it although some days I hate the Beach Boys referencing coda; other days it seems perfect.

And everything is part of a review of the year eventually. So Bacon, Berryman and all the rest lead me to Okkervil River’s ‘The Stand-Ins’ as a potential inclusion on an albums of the year top something. It’s not a great albums and my relative liking for it certainly contains elements of brand loyalty, having liked some previous work of theirs; particularly the previous two albums, although in different ways (The Stage Names, Black Sheep Boy).

As I say, I have a relative liking for it. There are huge reservations but in the absence of other indie rock albums to affect me this year, it still gets a fair few plays. I do like my indie rock. The first big problem I have with it is its cleanliness. The production and indeed the melody lines are all so sprightly and a little too right most of the time. Each song does pretty much what you would expect it to and it’s all a little too neat in its referencing of classic pop/indie pop etc. The second problem is the lyrics. One can admire the construction of the phrases and some of the playful delight in language that is apparent. Unfortunately, the lyrics are, for the most part shot through with conceit and judgement; leaving the impression that you are listening to the musing of a very ugly person. For all that, one can get lost in the heady mix of wanton verbosity and sharp melodies but it can become tiresome very quickly. And that is one of my favourite indie rock records of the year. Perhaps I have outgrown that area and hadn’t noticed.

One of the better songs on it, partly because the melodies are rich, confident and assured and because there is that much less conceit in the lyrics than in some others, is Lost Coastlines. In support of the album, the band had artists they met on tour cover songs from it and upload them to YouTube or something like that. The performance of Lost Coastlines from this is one I really like. It features a Will Sheff duet with Carl Newman of the New Pornographers and it’s the confidence and lack of vanity in Newman’s performance that makes is so wonderful for me. Enjoy.

Bored trying

2009-12-02T13:45:00.001Z

Bored trying to come up with favourite albums of the year among records that made no impression on me first time round, I have gone back to the beautiful Manafon by David Sylvian. This takes me back to earlier stuff and I love this track from Brilliant Trees

The Ink in the Well

D

Albums

2009-11-19T10:44:00.000Z

Trying to work through those 2009 albums

Bill Callahan is working for me today

"Show me the way, show me the way, show me the way
To shake a memory

I flipped my forelock, I twitched my withers, I reared and bucked
I could not put my rider aground
All these fine memories are fuckin' me down"

D

Too much music

2009-11-18T15:21:00.001Z

So, was about to start listening to stuff that I have from this year and work out some reviews. My media player tells me I have 116 hours of music released this year. May have to irrationally dismiss some without giving them any more time.
But seeing as irrationally dismissing things is a favourite hobby of mine, that shouldn't be a problem.

Out you go Beck's full cover of the VU & Nico record.

Okay, that's a start then.

D

Review of the year (and decade) in music Part 1

2009-11-16T15:32:00.002Z

I, like most of us, remember the music of my youth by resonance. I suppose when you are going through so many seemingly profound changes, you tend to put great value in the music which provided the soundtrack. My initial exposure to the music that had a formative influence on the way I would listen for the rest of my life was a hugely affecting thing. I can remember feeling quite lost as a twelve year old; thinking that there was no voice that spoke to the way I was feeling. I had found a real sense of human communication from novels by that stage but they seemed other-worldly somehow, there was no way I cold have aspired to have lived the lives these people lived. I was also very sad and morose. This is, I am sure, a part of my character that would have found its way to the surface regardless but I can’t help feeling that it was particularly pronounced because of the books I had read at that young age. I had grown tired of the novels I was ‘supposed’ to be reading. Everyone seemed to think that a twelve year old boy would love fantasy and adventure. To this day, I still don’t know what would make anyone want to read 'The Lord of the Rings' but when it was continually recommended to me by adults who appeared to still hold it in high regard, I felt somewhat duty-bound to give it a look. I tried ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and finished neither; wanting to scream at every page I laboured through. It just seemed like complete rubbish. I am sure there are plenty who can point out nuances and clever little things that make it worthwhile but I didn’t care then and don’t care now.

So it was that I went through the shelves of my sisters rooms and read whatever I could find. I don’t claim to have properly understood much, or even any, of the things that I came across but the effect was still immense. Even at that age, I could somehow identify with the predicament of the main character in ‘The Immoralist’ by André Gide and to some degree with the concepts in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ and ‘The Outsider’. These and others were weighing on me as I began to move towards my teens. So this morose little boy feeling that the only voices who spoke his name were dead authors who seemed to come from another planet wanted something new to listen to. I had always had access to records by the likes of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin and these still worked for me to a certain degree at that point but it seemed like there should be something altogether more serious out there that could speak to me, to some degree, the way the books were speaking.

Then, at twelve, I heard Joy Division for the first time and suddenly there was some sense. Here was a young guy growing up in similar surroundings to my own who had just decided to express himself and had done so with a depth and clarity that made a Neil Young song about heroin addiction sound weak and silly (forgive me). Here was something deep and meaningful. Pretentious, I know. Joy Division seemed to be speaking directly to my heart, in the music and in the lyrics. This was profound. Okay, The Smiths and The Cure soon began to seem quite profound too so there is a failing in this. The point is not whether Ian Curtis wrote better songs than Neil Young or whether Joy Division were a better band than Led Zeppelin but with that feeling, that moment of clarity that came to me within about thirty seconds of the opening bars of Love Will Tear Us Apart. And that feeling is what I have spend the last 20 odd years trying to recreate every single day of my life with the music I listen to. In the years from that first exposure to Joy Division until I suppose I was into my early twenties, these moments came thick and fast and I can name you the year, the band members, often the b-sides to the singles for so many albums from 1988 up until about 1996. After that, the feeling has dwindled. This is natural, I know. My concerns changed, I have heard so much music that the shock of the new is harder to find. It still comes though. As a teenager, I was blown out of the water by Gratitude Walks and the rest of its parent album, ‘Mercury’ by American Music Club. By the Jackson Five referencing intro to ‘Debonair’ by The Afghan Whigs. I was forced to hunt the record stores every week for a full year for an import copy of ‘There is No-one What Will Take Care of You’ by the Palace Brothers having heard one track by them (which isn’t even on the album) on an Irish TV Show hosted by the wonderful Donal Dineen. ‘Filler’ by Minor Threat still lets me cast off everything I have learned in the last seventeen or so years safe in the knowledge that my anger is justified. ‘Fight the Power’ by Public Enemy still tells me that militancy can speak to militancy regardless of the system or paradigm it seeks to change.

Given all of this, I could say that I have been disappointed by the last year in music; or even the last ten years. The sense of diminishing returns is inevitable as you trawl through guitar band after guitar band or rapper after rapper looking for that moment again and again. I feel however, that plenty of these moments must still be there and I am either missing them or I have had them but have just absorbed them and moved on without any real impact amidst all of the other stuff going on in my thirty something life. I cannot think of a single album released in 2009 that has made me want to put it on again when it has ended or a song I have wanted to listen to five times in a row because I can't figure out why it has so spectacularly nailed me to the wall. Perhaps, as I say, I have just forgotten them and as I trawl back through the years releases in the next couple of weeks I will be reminded of some astonishing gems. If I am, I will let you know.

The albums of the ‘noughties’ is a far trickier proposition. There are albums I remember having loved at the time of their release that I can’t remember any detail of beyond the title right now so a lot of revisiting will be required there. ‘Ghetto Pop Life’ by DM and Jemeni is one such random example plucked from the wreckage of my memory.

So off I go now to listen to the beautiful 2007 album ‘Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline’. It helps me to think. And to breathe. Suffice to say, that’s enough to get it on my list of the decade somewhere. But it seems a typical choice; is it anything more than a chill-out album for people who want to look clever? Another two that seem typical and will be there are ‘Post to Wire’ by Richmond Fontaine and ‘Meadowlands’ by The Wrens. ‘Post to Wire’ is filled with Willy Vlautin’s wonderfully affecting stories of the dissolute and broken; falling through the wreckage of their ruined lives and finding the little moments of grace in one person or one tiny notion of transgression that makes it okay to keep on living. ‘The Meadowlands’ is an album-length lament for the failure of the dreams of just being an ordinary workaday midlevel indie-rock star. Nothing special in the dream but the depiction of the fall-out is rendered magnificently.

Ah, the resonance.

So, middle-aged albums both. But at least I have started to think of a list and can send you away with some recommendations amidst all this negativity. Enjoy. And return when I am saying something more positive.

D

It pays to talk

2009-11-14T17:10:00.002Z

It pays to talk to no-one... no-one!

static

2009-11-13T15:25:00.002Z

static, originally uploaded by Broken Arts 2009.

it’s easy sitting here
it’s easy being the one
you left behind
to think of life in
terms of static
in terms of broken light

Untidy Scrawl

2009-11-09T21:13:00.002Z

Untidy Scrawl, originally uploaded by Broken Arts 2009.

dappled gray
imitation of me,
drinking wine
and talking loudly.
too loudly
for fleeting glimpses
of beauty;
but only flecks
of truth
break in the light.

G and D 1978

2009-11-09T21:11:00.001Z

G and D 1978, originally uploaded by Broken Arts 2009.

I love this photo and wish I still had that t-shirt. Although looking at those chubby arms, it might be too big for me now.

Richard Clayderman

2009-11-09T21:05:00.005Z

Richard Clayderman, originally uploaded by Broken Arts 2009.

Some vinyl I inherited from my sisters when they moved out and/or no longer had a record player. Now the subject of the previous post will know where her treasured Richard Clayderman classic went to. Damn!

More below

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38877762@N05/sets/72157622646051769/show/

Barry Manilow

2009-11-09T20:29:00.000Z

My nephew's attempt to embarrass his mother on the Internet has to be helped. She shall remain nameless, but these are her records.

http://i37.tinypic.com/25rl0fb.jpg
http://i36.tinypic.com/3502fs8.jpg
http://i37.tinypic.com/296diiv.jpg
http://i34.tinypic.com/23lkjo.jpg
http://i36.tinypic.com/29nvzio.jpg
http://i36.tinypic.com/2ev3e9y.jpg

Lenny

2009-11-07T12:54:00.000Z

Reflections on a resonance

2009-11-06T11:17:00.003Z

Bright Star - Peter Bradshaw - Keats

My 'blaze of perfection and rightness' looks now like a scar, an embarrassment from which it is difficult to recover. I seek a new Endymion. The greatest trouble of youth is the feeling that you know best and the subsequent lifelong attempt to recover from such a thought. When immaturity remains long after it should, through a failure to find one's own skin through an authentic and adequate reflection, the late realisation that you are not the wunderkind or the enfant terrible you tried to be in the myth you created for yourself is more difficult to swallow whole than it would be had you matured at the right time. It needs to be broken down, deconstructed, cast in new light and new language. My Endymion asks to be written, but from a point of humility I am struggling to learn.

Albums of the year

2009-11-05T14:48:00.002Z

Seeing as I haven't posted since last years albums of the year I figure I might prepare to do so for this years, with the added bonus of an albums of the decade to squeeze in. I'll post this now to remind myself to do a proper final list by the end of the year.

Current thinking on some albums of the year are Alasdair Roberts, Antlers, Atlas Sound, Bill Callahan, David Sylvian, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Oneida, Richmond Fontaine, Vic Chesnutt. Nothing there I can love without a little resistance though.

Not sure if it's been another of those tired years for me and music or if I am just particularly tired at the moment as I try to think about it. Perhaps I will try listen to one of them every day and write a review of it and see if I can work things out from there.

The albums of the decade is a whole other thing and I am not sure I will be able to do anything more that a cursory list that I completely disagree with a few hours after I make it. Like all my lists then.

D

Short and messy yearly review

2009-01-07T11:57:00.001Z

My albums of the year etc….

For some reason, this seems to have been a very long year in music for me. As I am looking back on the year, I find it hard to believe that stuff like Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! And Saturnalia are less than a year old. For this reason, I think that things released early in the year or that I got early in the year have suffered in this little poll of mine by virtue of seeming a little old hat. I always thought it would be interesting to do a poll for 5 years in the past and see how things have weathered. Even looking back at my last years 10, I reckon if I did a list of my faves of 2007 today, there is very little chance that Bishop Allen (#10), Burial (#8) or Jens Lekman (#6) would make the cut. So, this is my best of 2008 for this week, or today at least. I have found it quite a satisfying year overall musically. A lot of artists I like have released fairly decent albums without blowing me away at all (Hold Steady, Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, Randy Newman, Silver Jews, Elvis Costello). A few decent reissues I have enjoyed (Hank Williams, Pogues, Arthur Russell, Clash live, Dylan) and some fairly decent young rock-type bands that have got me dancing round the sitting room with a silly a hat and a spilling drink (Sic Alps, Deerhunter, Jay Reatard, The Fall). The depressive pleasure of the The Odd Couple. The second album I would class as metal that I can remember liking as an adult in Earth’s The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull. FYI, the first was Ministry’s Psalm 69. Even Tricky made a half-decent record this year.

The AMC record grew on me as the year went on. Well, it got played more at least. Sad to say, it acts like an Eagles album to me; it’s tended to be the default soothing MOR selection I have made when I have had a rotten hangover. When I want to engage properly, it tends to last about 2 tracks.

I found the Okkervil River record a disappointment. This may be symptomatic of my current relationship with live shows. I saw them sometime in 2007 and absolutely hated the gig; so much so that I struggled to listen to their previous albums after it and I think the stink of vanity from that show stained the subsequent record as there was an icky showiness to all of Will Sheff’s lyrical conceits.

Fleet Foxes’ album was pretty but the fact that I really had to be in the mood for it or I wanted to smash the speakers when it came on precludes me from considering it anything more than a cute aside in my overall impression of the year.

Felice Brothers and The Gaslight Anthem were worthy; fulfilling my need for blue-collar barroom Americana but neither were albums one could really take to heart, so full were they of generic reference points. Great bands to play the rhyming game with though. On first listen, see how many times you can predict the rhyme they will use on the next line. Ok, too easy, but now that I have given up on Ryan Adams completely someone needs to fill that void.

I notice a distinct lack of any new left-field stuff in my listening this year but have not really looked into the reasons. Shearwater, Sun Kil Moon, Micah P. Hinson , Bonnie Billy, Destroyer, Damien Jurado, had their moments. Ting Tings, MGMT and Glasvegas had singles I liked and albums I didn’t. The Shortwave Set, Wolf Parade, Lucksmiths and TIndersticks disappointed. Port O'Brien and Santogold didn’t do much for me and Vampire Weekend irritated the hell out of me with their Graceland-isms.

The absence of any hip-hop (well, discounting the lovely Steinski resissue I thrilled to constantly for a few weeks) is surely down to a feeling of diminishing returns. I really can’t be arsed sifting through hip hop releases for the tiny percentage that have any worth to me. Ok, I can be arsed doing this with middle class white indie rock so maybe I am just falling increasingly into my comfort zone. If you read this Dermot, help!

Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals worked well for me and sent me back to some stuff I had forgotten about (although, in retrospect, I didn’t really need the Ludacris refresher) but over time it all became a bit too Jive Bunny for me.

The reissue for Fed (Plush) was a strange delight at times and an MOR mess at others. Again, I am a moody fecker.

That’s all I can think of for now.

Any year that saw the release of a synth-pop concept album about John Delorean is a good one by me.

1. Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

Sweet, soulful and thoroughly engaging.

2. David Holmes - The Holy Pictures

Nice to see him back to making proper albums and this was lovely in a sort of fuzzy post-Mary Chain way.

3. Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Cont

This album reminds me for some reason of Meadowlands by the Wrens, which is one of my favourite albums of the last few years. It’s something perhaps about the way the album intros and then the effectively rendered sense throughout of constraint and impotence without sacrificing the keen pop sense. It could be due to the fact that I got this quite late in the year that it is showing so high but I am finding it an totally engaging listen (the Microcastle disk) and look forward to the Weird Era portion revealing itself in a similar fashion, which I am fairly confident it will, given time.

4. Walkmen - You & Me

This seems to creep up on me again and again. Not sure why I like it but I keep coming back to it.

5. Max Richter - 24 Postcards In Full Colour

Not as satisfying as previous efforts, but still terribly beautiful.

6. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair

To dance to or sit on the couch wailing to; I even like Antony’s bits.

7. Jay Reatard - Matador Singles ‘08

Just great pop in short bursts, marginally preferred to his other comp.

8. Neon Neon - Stainless Style

I reckon I might despise this in 6 months but for now, it is my favourite ever concept album about a car manufacturer.

9. Sic Alps - A Long Way Around To A Shortcut/U.S. Ez

I tend to listen to both of these as one album and they make me giddy sometimes, which is enough really.

10. Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent

It’s another Fall album and he turned 50 so it’s in.

Sweet Jens

2007-09-07T00:48:00.000+01:00

Clearly I am failing to update this sufficiently but hopefully I will get my shit together and start improving on that. For tonight, my wife has headed to bed and there is wine to be finished as I am off work tomorrow so I am just listening to music and figure I may as well post here.

I have been listening to the new Jens Lekman album a bit today. He seems to be quite happy with the fact that it has leaked. I supppose this is largely down to the fact the it was through filesharing that he made that little breakthrough that he did. As far as I know, Maple Leaves and Black Cab were posted all over the place and helped him build a tidy little fan base. So, in that context, I can't resist uploading this track.

I have returned to it half a dozen times today, which is a lot for me. If you can imagine 'Famous Blue Raincoat' filtered through a prism of Dan Treacy and the lineage of Europop you may get there. Suffice to say, it is thoroughly gorgeous. I remember someone saying that if you don't blub the first time you hear 'Kentucky Avenue' by Tom Waits then you are dead.

Well, this works on a somewhat different level. If you don't cringe when he sings 'your father puts on my record' or 'he takes out the booklet and starts reading', then you have never sat on the couch of your girlfriends' parents and drank a drink you don't drink. Okay, perhaps that doesn't put it on par with Kentucky Avenue but maybe it puts it where it ought to be in the context of beautifully affecting pop music. Or maybe it is simply faint praise and I should be ashamed.

It's wonderful and the way he says his name is so sweet.

Now I sound like a 15 year old girl which, while essentially a warm and fuzzy feeling, is perhaps not the level of critique I was aiming for. Nonetheless, enjoy the song.

Poor Nina. Poor dad. Is there to be no privacy?

D

Jens Lekman - A Postcard to Nina

This year I'm not a folksinger, and that's made things easier

2007-08-21T21:36:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I still try to be but it has been a long while since I made any concerted effort at it. I have become a listener again. This is sort of why I started this blog. I got jealous of all those people with the music blogs who upload an album a day or something. So I have started it but I don't think I will be uploading many albums. Maybe the odd one if it's out of print or whatever. Maybe i will record some of my own stuff and post that. Maybe I will post some of my writing. It's all unclear to me at the moment but hopefully I will do something. Previous blogging attempts were scuppered by relying on what I could do at work but now I am connected at home so I should be able to maintain it a little better; assuming I don't drive my wife mad first of all. So maybe I will be a folksinger again, like Johnny Cash or somebody. Or maybe i will be some other kind of a singer. Or maybe I won't sing.
I am listening to Frog Eyes' Ego Scriptor from 2004. I have just got it and it's the 36th and final (for now) album from a list of Vancouver albums I made a few months ago. So I am happy to hear it and enjoying it so far. Sloppy as hell but, hey, that's a good thing. Gives a maybegonnabefolksinger some hope.

Dar

Just a start

2007-08-21T14:13:00.000+01:00

Just to start this thing off I guess.. nothing to say this afternoon. Will intro and all that later.