A Year of Music

OH NOES! I got TAGGED with a MEME! Cosmo hit me with this, and because I needed to get back into writing, I accede to his demands.

In keeping with the spirit of his post, I will not try to come up with the definitive list of 7 tracks I am all into right now, because like him, my favorites lately are totally ephemeral, largely due to the endless deathmarch slog of trying to listen to every bizarre cassette release ever ripped and posted to Blogspot (currently getting lots of play: Smersh. Dier. S•Core.). Instead, I will offer a list of 7 songs that seem to be getting stuck in my head with unusual frequency (whether or not they’re any good, as we shall see), or that are evocative of the leaden, gray summer I am “enjoying” in San Francisco’s wishfully named Sunset neighborhood.

1. Alec Empire – “New Man”

   Taken from his most recent solo effort, The Golden Foretaste Of Heaven, which seems to be intended, in all seriousness, as an electroclash album, years after electroclash collapsed into a cosmic sucking wound of bad electro-house and nth-derivative Daft Punk clones. Why he chose now to abandon the maximally abrasive digital hardcore sound in favor of a particularly unsubtle version of Gary Numan is beyond me. Empire has always had a twonked sense of humor and a broader range than the somewhat monochromatic sound of DHR would indicate, and “New Man”, which features lines like “as long as I can bleed / I’m pretty much okay” display both. This really reminds me of Luke Slater’s doomed electropop efforts on Alright On Top, particularly “Stars and Heroes”, which displayed a similarly take-no-prisoners combination of devastatingly catchy yet obsolete pop and thuddingly obvious beats. Both are mind-obliteratingly catchy.

2. Novembre – “Deorbit”

   Somehow fuses late 80s stadium rock with some genuinely progressive (gothic) metal sounds, and comes out sounding like Catherine Wheel’s Chrome by way of Opeth. I’d never heard of this Italian band before Amazon’s recommendation engine coughed up The Blue, and this is the song that keeps coming back to me, even though The Blue is overall one of the most solid and coherent progressive metal records I’ve heard in the last couple years. “Deorbit” is full of extremely clever songwriting and, to my ear at least, genuine progression over its length, without ever failing to be accessible. Heavy, full of twists and turns, culminating in some of the most perplexing vocal harmonies I’ve heard in a while, and featuring some nifty soloing. It’s a beautiful, mournful, exuberant song.

3. Fairport Convention – “The Deserter”

   If you think Fairport Convention is a bunch of hippies singing about faeyries dancing round the toadstool, you should probably pull your head out of your ass, because you’re missing some of the finest, most on-point music made in the last 100 years. There was a time when Liege & Lief was an essential element of any halfway literate (white) music fan’s collection, and I’d argue that’s a tradition that should have perpetuated to the present day. Recorded in the wake of catastrophe by some of the most talented musicians of the era (Sandy Denny’s voice! Richard Thompson’s guitar! Dave Mattacks’ drumming!), it’s a stunning display of virtuosity that resolutely refuses to age.

   “The Deserter” is a traditional song about fleeing the English Army. The words tell a simple story of flight, betrayal, unjust “justice” and reluctant fealty, and the music is one of those simple folk melodies that hangs in the air long after the song has finished, but what really stands out is the execution. Whether it’s Joe Boyd’s production or the band’s careful teamwork, the result is a song that fills the room, seeping into every corner and crevice, regardless of how loud it’s played.

4. Smashing Pumpkins – “Today”

   I don’t even like Siamese Dream, and I would have sworn I burned this song out of my system at least 10 years ago, but throughout the process of building bookshelves and unpacking boxes and cleaning floors and the various other moving-related tasks I’ve had to do over the last couple months, this song has been an omnipresent and only sometimes unwelcome companion. I sort of think a song about the joys of ending it all in a glorious burst of ecstasy would be less appealing if the weather in our neighborhood had been less crap. Just saying.

5. Jamie Woon – “Wayfaring Stranger [Burial remix]”

   Another simple, haunting English folk song – this time run through the Burializr™, coming out sounding like it was meant to be that way all along. Like most people, I think, I have no idea who Jamie Woon is, but this remix is probably one of the two or three best things Burial’s ever done (along with the original dubplate mix of “U Hurt Me”). A good song for misty early mornings and foggy late nights.

6. Primordial – “As Rome Burns”

   My so-called “friends” owe me big time for never telling me about Primordial. The Gathering Wilderness and To the Nameless Dead are absolutely monstrous records, roaring out of the gate with a ferocious, boundless passion and intelligence that cannot be denied. Notionally this is some kind of pagan or black metal, but it doesn’t really sound like most of the music marching under either banner. Amon Amarth at their best sound a little like Primordial, but without Primordial’s effortless wielding of their own (Celtic) folk traditions, and without Primordial’s ability to use traditional music as a springboard for something fearlessly new. Perhaps Primordial are more akin to Neurosis, although Primordial are more rooted in traditional notions of heavy metal, and there’s little of the self-conscious artiness bands who model themselves on Neurosis these days seem to find obligatory. Maybe they’re a little less earthy and more refined version of Root, which will make sense to fans of that particular group of Czech weirdoes but nobody else. Primordial are mostly just a really, really talented metal band.

   To the Nameless Dead is an album about the collapse of empire, and “As Rome Burns”, with its insistently repeated refrain “sing, sing, sing to the slaves that Rome burns” has a timeliness / timelessness and urgency I find compelling, especially when wedded to rolling tribal rhythms and thickly droning guitars. Special attention must be drawn to Alan Nemtheanga’s singing, which is perfectly suited to the urgent, storytelling style of songwriting favored by Primordial.

   Truly, I haven’t been so excited by a new metal discovery since I first heard Abigor’s Supreme Immortal Art. Primordial could quit now as winners, but I have a feeling they have more in store for us. I hope so.

7. Ministry – “Radar Love”

   Another song, like “Today”, that is on this list more because of its persistence than any actual quality it may have (thank the NAMELESS DEAD I’ve managed to dislodge Nine Inch Nails’ Broken from my frontal cortex, along with the nasty-ass visuals that go along with it, thanks to watching its stupid, demeaning and evil video). I mean, I love “Radar Love” – what’s not to love? it’s one of the best road trip songs of all time – but Ministry’s version is at best 2/3 assed. The main thing it has going for it is its ridiculously over the top and full-throttle take on the chorus, which makes me think of drag racing and funny cars more than lazy trawls down the highway. Not that that’s a bad thing. It just doesn’t strike me as what Golden Earring had in mind.

…but one thing is for sure: when I start wading through the thickets of accusations and counteraccusations, rumor-mongering, sectarian and factional grudge-slinging and post-Situationist po-faced “pranksterism” around the neo-folk / neo-pagan scene, I get the exact same headache I used to get when I was a teenager trying to figure out the American Communist left by reading RCP and SWP newspapers (if you don’t know those acronyms, good for you – all you need to know is that they were / are both claiming the True Marxist mantle for themselves, and they loathe each other).

Out on the fringes of politics and ideology there lies a sticky morass of extremism and paranoia that manifests itself in seemingly incomprehensible shifts in belief, where people will go from hard, statist left to hard, individualist right, without stopping at any point in between. It’s the same phenomenon that produces former-Trotskyite neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, only with much less disastrous consequences (Douglas P may be a jerk, but he hasn’t (successfully) started any land wars in Asia lately). In the case of neo-folk, though, art is involved, and art necessarily involves ambiguity. The problem of figuring out who actually believes what and who is a lying sack of shit becomes completely intractable, so there’s this peculiar Schrödinger’s box, within which a group like Sol Invictus is either a bunch of neo-Nazi meat puppets or kindly, misunderstood friends to Jew and puppy alike, or Death In June are either in hock to Croatian war criminals or bemused visitors to the region who donated money to innocent victims of the Balkan war. If you care about not giving your time and money to people whose principles you abhor, sorting through these messes can be troubling and maddening in equal measure.

To get a flavor for the complete vacuum of truth this sort of churning strife engenders, first read this hatchet job on Sol Invictus by Stewart Home (his Wikipedia talk page is more germane than the Wikipedia entry itself), and then read this confused atttempt to grapple with it on the blog of some innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. To me, it seems inescapable that the neo-pagan crowd has an awful lot invested in keeping their politics as amorphous as possible (mostly to keep their audiences from devouring themselves in an orgy of mutual loathing – fans of neo-folk run across the political spectrum. Black shirts and jackboots for some, tiny pagan flags for others!); it’s more telling to me if (IF!) Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch is an admirer of Jörg Haider than if he’s gone out of his way to make friends with SOME Israelis (as my good buddy Joel forcefully pointed out to me recently, it’s possible to find Israelis who are fans of just about anything, which means that you can’t exactly treat Der Blutharsch having Israeli fans as being equivalent to them getting [K] stamped on their asses by the Rabbinate of Jerusalem).

More materially, Home wrote a foreword for a booklet of Sol Invictus lyrics in the 90s. If he thinks Tony Wakeford is a tubby sack of Nazi shit (he seems to be very fond of calling Tony Wakeford a fat man), what’s that all about? And then there’s the Green Anarchism controversy (search for “stewart home” down the page)… it’s all a big fucking mess, and I’m thankful I don’t have to care.

The thing to take away from this is the disorienting sensation that you have fallen completely through the rabbit hole into a world where nobody ever tells the truth if they can wrap it up in a few layers of obfuscatory ideological nonsense first. I’m no closer to determining whether or not Death In June, Sixth Comm, Sol Invictus and a bunch of the other World Serpent neo-folk bands are closet servants of Space Hitler. For now, the fact that nothing conclusive presents itself is probably good enough; I can’t plausibly be a fan of black metal and own records featuring participation by convicted hate criminals and object too strenuously to artists who at least attempt to keep their politics private. (To completely muddy the waters, the most entertaining English-language source on the violent origins of Scandinavian black metal is Lords of Chaos, written by Michael Moynihan, member of Blood Axis and himself despised as a fascist neo-pagan by much of the far left.)

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that my whole train of thought initially started from investigating Death In June’s use of the totenkopf as part of their visual identity – a symbol, paradoxically, that is much more loaded when it is adopted by an English musician than by a German of any stripe, even though its use is illegal in modern Germany. For good and for ill, the totenkopf is part of German cultural heritage, and is much more plausibly adopted as an ambiguous / problematic / “reclaimed” symbol by someone who inherits from that culture than a self-styled “history student” from outside the context – particularly when that same person, like Douglas P, carries around a four-foot-tall metallized version of the logo on a banner he carries with him when he plays live to this day.

Which illustrates, finally, a point that is obvious to me now but wasn’t when I got into the spooky stuff as a curious and alienated teenager, which is that one of the risks of being a fan of dark, marginal and extreme art is that it is easy to fall prey to mental contamination. For every romantic who finds passion in extremity, there is someone much colder seeking to speak to the darkness in others and manipulate it for their own ends. Some dark art is beautiful and much of it is compelling, but it requires confrontation and self-analysis if you’re to avoid succumbing to the bullshit that comes along with it. Just appreciating it for what it is and not paying attention to the context isn’t enough, if you want to keep your hands clean.

Whenever I see Jack Johnson’s name, Pussy Galore’s “Dick Johnson” starts to play in the back of my mind. “Dick Johnson” is sort of, well, the name is as ambitious as the song gets, but I still enjoy it about 50,000 times more than I’ve ever enjoyed anything by Jack Johnson. I honestly lack the capacity to understand how or why people would actively seek out his music.

In other news, Radiohead is coming to town.

I’ve had the following set of evocative descriptions of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets by Rachel Kiel sitting on my computer’s desktop in a sticky since sometime in 2006, after reading it on Alex Ross’s blog:

The First Quartet is a blade of grass,
the Second Quartet is a pocket knife,
the Third Quartet is a captive bird,
the Fourth Quartet is an old train car,
the Fifth Quartet is a piece of blue glass,
the Sixth Quartet is a worn dress,
the Seventh Quartet is a red crayon,
the Eighth Quartet is a forest fire,
the Ninth Quartet is a paper fan,
the Tenth Quartet is the bottom of the ocean,
the Eleventh Quartet is a bullet,
the Twelfth Quartet is a sleeping lover,
the Thirteenth Quartet is a horse’s skull,
the Fourteenth Quartet is a strand of black hair,
the Fifteenth Quartet is an empty room.

I keep them around both to remind me to listen to Shostakovich’s work more, and to remind me of how much can be said about music in how few words.

Dear Jacob,

Thank you very much for your work with the most awesome hardcore band in existence. The damage you have done to your throat (and my ears) over the years is very much appreciated, and I certainly hope you feel better now than you did when you were writing the songs on Jane Doe and You Fail Me, because to be honest you sounded sort of depressed. Although I guess you’re still not feeling so chipper, because your new solo record sounds like it’s going to be pretty emo. That’s OK, though. I miss Swans too.

Also, thank you for being such an awesome artist and designer. Every time I wear my “PLAGUE QUEEN DEATH KING” T-shirt, it makes me smile, and the covers to Jane Doe and No Heroes are among my favorite in heavy music. Elegant and forceful in their economy, very dirty and very punk.

I do have one question for you, though. Well, not really a question, more an observation. A tiny criticism, even. That would probably have been a lot more useful before Supermachiner put out Rise of the Great Machine. Sorry. I was busy then. But anyway, here it is:

Writing the title out as «ρισε οφ τηε γρεατ μαχηινε» is some incredibly dorky design wankery. Wouldn’t «θριαμβος της μεγαλης μηχανης» have made more sense? I mean, if you had to use Greek? Why not stick to blackletter? That always looks pretty hardcore. Or maybe Gaelic would have been nice.

Aside from that, I look forward to your upcoming projects and hope this letter finds you well. Best of luck with your solo project and Irons!

χαιρετισμους,
Forrest

Just to give you an idea of what it’s like to work at Rhapsody, there was a time last year where a bunch of us were hanging out in the kitchen: a mustachioed QA contractor whose tastes seemed to have frozen sometime around 1977, one of the senior editors, and a couple of engineers (including me). I think it was probably the tail-end of a company meeting. Anyway, we were talking about psychedelic music, and – as it does – the conversation turned to Pink Floyd, and Dark Side of the Moon. Some of us got to wondering who did the ridiculously overblown female backing vocals, and not one or two but three of the people in the conversation were able to name both Clare Torry and Lesley Duncan without looking anything up (unlike me just now). I have a lot of random trivia crammed in my head, but I can’t get at it like that; it’s all connected sideways, and I have to get at it indirectly. Also, I just like listening to Dark Side of the Moon, and feel mild twinges of jealousy that my dad got to see it performed live.

From my inbox, just because it’s funny. 20ML are just as witty, self-deprecating and clever in person.

Dearest Friends,

Over 200 tickets have already been pre-sold for our Noise Pop show, so consider this an early heads-up for those of you who would like to see us perform with a British band more buzzy than a beehive.

In the spirit of this election year, we are happy to inform you that 20 Minute Loop has been VOTED into this year’s Noise Pop festival! That’s right. Instead of carefully cultivating our indie cred, or mixing with the right people (without seeming to care or be aware about it, in true indie fashion), or being signed by a really cool label like Absolutely Kosher or Barsuk, or just catching that unpredictable luck wave that has captured a few worthy acts over the years—instead of those possibilities, we have been selected by popular election to appear in this year’s biggest music festival. We have you, the voters—our music-loving constituents—to thank. Democracy in action. And let us tell you right now: we will not discredit the opportunity you have given us. We sense a desire on your part for CHANGE; not the empty promises of beltway hipsters, but real, positive change. More stimulus packages that actually work: individually-packaged breath mints in a Pyrex bowl placed between the monitors, more projectile vomiting into our sneakers, more goats slaughtered, more of the kinds of things that are meaningful to people like Emily Swansea in Alameda, a young woman who has been disappointed by the timid live performances of her favorite bands to the point that she now refuses to lavish any portion of her modest income on twenty-dollar performances that simply replicate recordings. Emily’s struggle is your struggle.

Love, 20ML

Noise Pop!
w/ British Sea Power
20 Minute Loop (on 3rd)
Colourmusic
TBA
Sat, March 1
Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco
21+, $14 (tickets)

Hard on the heels of my post on Fucked Up and Kelefa Sanneh’s laudable efforts to get them noticed by New York Times readers, I bring to your attention this excellent article by him about dubstep’s ongoing half-assed attempt to penetrate the American gestalt. He does a great job with the nearly intractable problem of describing dubstep (a thing more defined by what it’s not than what it is) and he does it without talking down to the audience. He’s now my favorite critic writing for the Times.

I am no longer even pretending to be in a band, but this makes me want to start a new one:

Like most Metasonix gear (they have a long history of this sort of thing), this is a totally uncompromising, experimental piece of gear that might destroy anything you plug into it and probably requires great ingenuity to make not sound like butt. Also it’s a custom build and will “probably” cost around $5,000, which is insane for something using tubes repurposed from television tuners and old microwaves. It also has a very rude, yet awesome, name.

I bet it’s a ton of fun to play.

(H/T Joel Johnson)

I have sort of a disdain-hate relationship with Nick Denton’s would-be media empire. Over the years, I’ve read Gizmodo, Gawker, Defamer, Jezebel, io9, Fleshbot, Kotaku and Idolator. Sooner or later, all of them except Jezebel have started to really piss me off. Denton encourages an irreverent house style that’s reminiscent of a brain-damaged version of British tabloid culture: gossip reigns supreme, sincerity is toxic, and a cheap, facile presumption of auctorial authority oozes out of every page.

Jezebel makes it work. At least one of the editors is like a retarded kitten, and you want to pet her even as you kind of pity her, and the rest of the editors know how to be provocative (and funny) enough to get Jezebel’s thriving community going on a given topic. Their commenters have sort of taken charge of the site’s vibe, and they’re an interesting group. That’s the only reason I still read Jezebel, even though I probably shouldn’t.

Idolator, on the other hand, makes me crazy in the head. Maybe it’s just that they’re treading very close to where I live, but for all of their cheap cracks and flashy insider knowledge, they still come across as no-talent assclowns. They act like they’re letting you in on the scene, but it’s all written from the consumer’s side of the music biz firewall, so they never really offer you the economic analysis or industry context that would allow you to understand the larger forces at work – something I think is critical in understanding how and why we get the music we do. In place of thoughtful analysis (or useful criticism) we get the same tired-ass shallow celebrity gossip horseshit: who’s got beefs, who flashed their beaver in public, which famous person said something dumb or mean about some other famous person, Amy Winehouse is gonna die, Britney’s still alive, etc. And occasionally some totally insipid “pop” criticism from writers who I know are capable of much better.

That’s the thing that gets to me the most, I think: I know that Jess Harvell and Maura Johnston are die-hard music fans with interesting tastes. Anyone who will go to the mat for Scritti Politti is clearly on my team, and Harvell’s recent analysis of what internet hype is doing to the development of new artists was sharply written and perceptive. It’s just when they write to match the Gawker style that they piss me off, because it does a disservice to music, which I fervently believe deserves to be taken seriously, and it does a disservice to their own skills when every sharp insight is immersed in a sea of semi-pointless snark.

I only subjected myself to them (again) because I’m trying to keep a closer eye on the business end of music myself, and it sort of seemed like they might have some insight into deals like the recent flaps at EMI. But they’re using the same primary sources I am, and tossing it into Nick Denton’s Borg processor to be extruded as partially hydrogenated meta-cultural product, and it’s all terrible and makes me sad. Don’t support their asinine bullshit. Even Pitchfork is better, and that’s not something I admit lightly.

(NOTE to Annalee and Charlie, should they ever stop by: I like you guys just fine, and I wish you all the best in your new gig, but trying to read io9 just makes me sigh. No offense. I think I just come at fandom from another angle.)

I posted this comment on this post on Cosmo’s blog, but it’s really too long to be a proper comment, so I’m reposting it here, now with bonus links:

In my alternate universe, there is no TRL, and people find music through their friends and impassioned record store staff and critics who give the music they love the attention and respect it deserves, instead of being prey to marketing and publicity operations and the fifty billion forms of payola that hedge us all in. That’s where I want to live!

I agree that LOTFP is needlessly paranoid; I agree that most of us start with Def Leppard or Lamb of God before we get to Make A Change… Kill Yourself; and I agree that Decibel is not going to suddenly make the trve kvlt disappear in a flash from Avenged Sevenfold’s stage pots. I still think he / they make many acute observations about the relationship between metal’s margins and the musical mainstream, and that the relationship is, and in some ways needs to be, antagonistic. He defends the borders between “us” and “them”, and that kind of policing, as annoying as it can sometimes be, is part of what preserves metal’s energy.

You and I both came up through the e-music underground, so we’ve been through the situation where that tension collapsed, more or less, and it left a vacuum that sucked most of the good music in behind it. It’s not that the mainstream coöpted the margins, it’s that the margins sort of shrugged or ran out of energy, and with the exception of tiny pockets in Rotterdam and Ljubljana and east London, the renegade spirit that animated the early rave / techno / jungle scene is almost totally dead.

At the same time, I agree with Sandy: I want people to like this stuff, because I love it and I enjoy it when my friends enjoy stuff that I love. That’s why I write about music. If it weren’t for the inclusiveness of the metal community (to sound totally corny for a moment), I wouldn’t even be here. In large part it’s the unfeigned enthusiasm of metalheads (in the pit, shivering in long lines waiting to be let into The Pound) that sucked me back into heshing after a long chunk of my life mostly ignoring it.

Metal fans own metal because they control the terms of the debate and have deep convictions about what they like and don’t like, and what they will and won’t accept as “true metal”. Just look at the LOTFP. They can be dogmatic and dictatorial, but also incredibly enthusiastic. Just look at the the wave of American one-man black metal bands (Xasthur, Leviathan and Krieg being the ones with which I’m most familiar – pity about the Twilight album): all those guys are a pain in the ass to work with (or so I hear), and prickly to the point of sociopathy, but they are clearly motivated by deep (if inscrutable) passions. And for all their accomplishments as musicians, I think they’re fans first and foremost. That’s the beauty of metal, or any other marginal art: there is no line between fan, performer or critic. We all have a stake (and the fans and performers get more votes than the critics, which is absolutely how it ought to be).

I’m obsessed with musical metainformation, but I don’t really have much use for lists. Whenever I see those “random 10” postings that pop up on political blogs on Fridays like verbalized daydreams of leaving the office and drinking beers, I sort of sigh and click on to the next post. I need some context and some motivation to care about somebody else’s musical taste, and lists are more about the compulsive recapitulation of something that probably only means something to the person making the list.

Best-of lists are a compulsory ritual of music nerddom, though, and they do often provide a useful frame for a year, so I generally make some kind of gesture in that direction. Every year ends up being a little different: sometimes I list my favorite records that I bought that year, regardless of when they were released. Sometimes I list the most interesting records released that year (which can run upwards of 50 or 60 records in a year where I buy a lot of CDs – I tend to only buy music I know is going to be interesting in the first place, after all). I experiment with ranking schemes. I try to write reviews for everything (and inevitably fail).

This year, when my friends at Aquarius sent out their yearly call for best-of lists, I figured I’d keep things relatively uncomplicated. Here’s a few lists of albums released last year. Each one’s unranked and sorted alphabetically by artist, and each one consists of albums that were released, in some sense, in 2007. Each one gets a single sentence to explain why it’s on the list. Every release is wholeheartedly recommended, by me if by nobody else.

11 very interesting new releases from 2007

A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Scribble Mural Comic Journal

Simultaneously a sparkly pop record and a bent experimental playground without sounding at all artificial.[*]

Bloody Panda – Pheromone

The interplay between Yoshiko Ohara’s theatrical, dissonant singing and the rest of the music’s hollowed out doom-sludge continues to fascinate me.

Burial – Untrue

Burial takes every cliché of 10 years of UK dance music and uses them to produce something deeply moving and enveloping. [*]

Dälek – Abandoned Language

Even El-P’s most claustrophobic hip-hop soundscapes have never been this bleakly downbeat and close, nor this evocative. [*]

KTL – KTL 2

“Theme” is 27 minutes of slowly building drone that crescendos in a solid wall of shimmering, awe-inspiring noise.

Larsen & Friends – Abeceda

Larsen have always been careful craftspeople with a penchant for concept-driven work, and this musical depiction of a dada abecedary is their most cohesive and affecting album in years.

MIA – Kala

Like the Burial, this warps a lifetime’s (and a world’s) worth of dance, punk and b-boy culture into a set of meditative ass-shakers that neatly balance the personal and the political. [*]

Nadja – Touched [remastered]

Womblike doom metal that is heavy like the sun.

Neurosis – Given to the Rising

Another immaculate album of world-weary pagan hymns from my favorite metal band.

Skull Disco – Soundboy Punishments

Still the only collection of unmixed dubstep tracks I’ve heard that’s interesting all the way through, with tons of micro-variations in the percussion and non-gratuitous samples of Eastern music.

Xasthur – Defective Epitaph

Depression made manifest in sound; an apotheosis of its style. [*]

13 only slightly less interesting new releases from 2007

Colleen – Les Ondes Silencieuses

Naïve chamber music from a gifted amateur. [*]

Dødheimsgard – Supervillain Outcast

I love the way Dødheimsgard are able to just barely keep their bonkers and mean heavy metal under control.

Dopplereffekt – Calabi Yau Space

Contemplative, meditative and cold space music that’s rhythmic without being repetitive. [*]

v/a – Dubstep Sufferah, Volume 3 (mixed by Grievous Angel)

A tightly-edited mix of dubstep and grime that takes a disparate collection of sounds and makes them work together like meshed gears (and free).

Durrty Goodz – Axiom EP

Inventive rhymes coupled with tailor-made backing tracks; I’m hoping this is a promise of things to come in grime.

Earth – Hibernaculum

Dylan Carson’s been around for a long time and tried a lot of different things, so this collection of old tracks in his current style – a kind of rarefied instrumental country – is a fascinating glimpse into the development of an artist who’s had more than his share of ups and downs.

Every Time I Die – The Big Dirty

This album rocks hard and loud and is a hell of a lot of fun. [*]

PJ Harvey – White Chalk

Harvey always takes chances, but this is a big experiment in self-restraint, and it pays off handsomely. [*]

LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver

James Murphy has a talent for making his professional, sophisticated Steely-Dan-meets-Talking-Heads-in-CBGBs-Bathroom-in-1979 schtick sound easy, which is a very neat trick.

Neil Landstrumm – Restaurant of Assassins

Neil Landstrumm goes back to 1992 and comes back with the freshest, most loose-limbed collection of messed-up breakbeat techno and bleepy dubstep he’s made in the 21st century.

The Necks – Townsville

Sublime and trancy minimal jazz; every album from The Necks is one of the most interesting in whatever year it’s released.

Six Organs of Admittance – Shelter from the Ash

The most focused and song-based Six Organs album, which works both despite and because of its marked restraint and conventional take on droned-out psychedelic folk.

Weedeater – God Luck and Good Speed

Pissed off, drunk and really loud.

4 notable reissues from 2007

Current 93 – The Inmost Light: Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song

Beautifully summarizes David Tibet’s preoccupations while broadening them; compiles All The Pretty Little Horses: The Inmost Light, Where The Long Shadows Fall (Beforetheinmostlight) and The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (Theinmostlightthirdandfinal).

Nico – The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970

A nearly complete archive of the haunting voice and harmonium work Nico recorded with John Cale and Joe Boyd (her best period).

Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers – Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969

“Cosmic American music” is right; it’s hard to believe these immaculate recordings of folk- and rock-inflected country standards were made live.

Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth [expanded]

Nearly everything released by a singular group whose minimal sound created a world of its own. [*]

The Björkiest album from 2007

Björk – Volta

This album confused and (seemingly) upset a lot of people, and it’s hard to love, but there are few artists (none of them popular) who surpass Björk’s rigorous and deeply creative engagement with their work. I really enjoy it sometimes and respect it all the time.

From The Slog, the blog of The Stranger, “Seattle’s only newspaper”:

[Stranger staffer] Eric Grandy thinks Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up will make it all the way to the Super Bowl, compeletely disregarding the fact that Canadians know absolutely nothing about football.

I hope that never happens, because then I’d have to pay for Superbowl tickets. I’d put $50 on Fucked Up, no problem.