Boards

Good thread so far by the way.

exactly why I love this album so much. nice

Thanks guys.

Bryan sure is amazing - still can't get over how good his drumming is on Boxer and it seems to have transferred fully to this album too. It's almost like he's a soloist sometimes; truly plays the drums like a *musical* instrument

I remember being completely blown away by the drumming the first time I heard Mr November, they wouldnt be half as good without him

The drummer is the only good thing about that band.

and Pilot Talk II is almost as good.

all the other end of year lists? Your last sentence totally sums this up.

All these reviews are so succinct but have a lot of detail, this is excellent work man. Mine are looking pretty weak compared to this, I may can it!

so good job!

Even within the field of drone, I’ve found little that’s as indistinctly sinister as the music of turntable artist Philip Jeck. Jeck works in the shadows; An Ark For The Listener stands as one of the most undiscussed albums of the year. Makes sense, there’s been a ton of drone-related stuff this year that’s been way more indie-friendly. But it’d be a low-down dirty shame if this album got lost in the shuffle. Yes it’s a death-obsessed performance piece based on a poem about a shipwreck, and Jeck tempers his mechanical drones with the most dissonant possible musicality, but I see this as providing welcome variety, rather than a self-conscious attempt at oppressive bleakness. The current hypnagogic crowd looks wistfully toward their memories through rose colored glasses, but the brief snatches of the familiar in Jeck’s work are more like deeply buried traumas working their way to the surface. It seems like rather than trying to remember something just out of reach; Jeck is smearing the image of an uninvited horror hurtling from his subconscious.

The music of How To Dress Well sounds like the involuntary incantation of a mellifluous R&B earworm, the formless syllables of unremembered words pouring out absentmindedly, drawing strange looks in public places. A melodic communication stored in the brain long after any recollection of the words has decayed, that bypasses any conscious thought process to emerge from the mouth of its owner as a ghost of itself. Yet for music that evokes such a transient moment, it has a strangely indelible impact; its cavernous sonics evoke an image of vast darkness, the ephemeral utterances of an undifferentiated pop memory providing company in the void.

Kvelertak don’t give a fuck. They’ll randomly start playing the riff from Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady,’ they’ll squish a Stoogesy groove next to black metal tremolo picking and blastbeats if they damn well feel like it, and don’t you dare try to tell them not to fuck around with hair metal riffs. There are also several moments that suggest these guys are Journey fans. Kvelertak’s gleefully abandoned mixing and matching never comes off as gimmicky though; every weird juxtaposition or stylistic switch up serves one purpose: to rock as much as possible. Bluesy guitar leads make a massive entrance to bring the chorus of Blodtorst into hyperdrive, and the aforementioned Hendrix drop in Sultans Of Satan acts as a surprising ‘oh shit’ moment at the climax of an already awesome song, rather than being a cringeworthy bit of plagiarism. It also works because they know how to follow it: cowbell, natch.

America: fuck yeah. Noise-pop was getting kind of tired, and what better antidote than pop noise? That is, shameless pop tunes built from grinding guitars and way past the red drums, rather than sideways Beach Boys covers soaked in reverb and tape distortion. Like the cover’s squad of crumpled cheerleaders in a red, white and blue fighter jet sent in to bomb the shit out of the modern pop archetype, destroying the trappings and leaving only the twisted wreckage of it’s most basic framework; this piss and vinegar debut is as American as apple pie with a slice of yellow cheese-like product on top and a hot dog on the side. The riffs, the beats, the incessant schoolyard chants are deployed in a militaristic fashion distinct to GOD’S COUNTRY, ‘MERICA; expect Julian Assange to leak their next album. U! S! A! U! S! A!

One or two grammar errors, but that's rather remarkable on a messageboard post(s) of this length. I'm really quite impressed with your summations. You should ask Sean or Mr. Lukowski for a job. Cheers.

it's really good. I'm gonna tune in when you get closer to the business end.
Properly impressive dude.

Carry on.

Long albums are just such a drag, man. Two and a half hours? Of harp? And piano? The fuck I look like, Amish? I can’t get a Roland Juno in there or nothin’? I’ve heard the complaints against this album; I don’t understand them. I can’t imagine anything but immense joy resulting from such an overload of Joanna. It’s not as intimate as Milk Eyed Mender, nor as vaulting as Ys, but in its extensive grooves it cloaks a world of whispered insights and fleeting glances in opulent strings and gently plucked banjo. More than ever before, Newsom bolsters her songs with the weight of the piano, apparently her new favorite instrument, but the moments where she stands alone with her harp stun satisfactorily. The music takes the middle ground between the extravagance and the austerity that Newsom has exhibited in the past, but the songwriting doesn’t. The melodies are as byzantine as ever, and the lyrics find Newsom at her most cryptic. The only thing here that even approaches pop, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company,’ a seven-minute folk rock rave-up full of clattering percussion, stands among her finest songs. The cozy instrumentation of these songs does nothing to compromise their stunning complexity; her music looks as good in jeans and a t-shirt as it does in a renaissance doublet.

You Put A Smell On Me, the sixth track on Matthew Dear’s magnum opus, Black City, calls back to a classic by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the ubiquitous I Put A Spell On You. Hawkins’ manic vocal was pure lustful aggression; Matthew Dear exhibits a more mechanical depravity. Synth arpeggios ricochet off the sides of the mix and burn on contact as if they’re coming out of a deep fryer while a steadfast 4/4 thump grinds away underneath and massive slabs of distortion drop in at regular intervals and emerge, splattering the proceedings in hot grease. The churning precision of the track plays host to Matthew Dear’s smooth advances, while the menace of his intentions lurks just around the corner. Suffice to say, the phrase “little red nightgown” has never sounded creepier. Matthew Dear is making what is identifiably pop music, using elements of the genre exercises in techno and electro-house that litter his back catalog as well as lessons from experimental dance-rock hybridists like Talking Heads, but this music is something unmistakably new. Few others are marrying sounds this extreme to actual songs at the moment, which makes Dear’s musical neo-noir one of the great triumphs of the year.

Black metal is a plunge into the depths of midnight church-burning misanthropy, a convention that Agalloch both acknowledge and stretch to its breaking point. In the dense forest that is Marrow Of The Spirit, the listener must endure the darkness, but Agalloch is always darkest before the dawn; building tension to the point where it sounds like the entire drum kit is about to shatter and guitar strings are on the verge of spontaneously disintegrating, only for the oppressive atmosphere to suddenly expand into a sludgy groove. The album’s few moments of quiet are too quiet, tension at its height due to the knowledge that the next eruption of blastbeats could come at any moment. Marrow Of The Spirit is a constant tug-of-war between the abrasive and the anthemic, an album that changes direction as soon as it seems like it’s settled in, but that still works a good slow build like no other. Heavy one minute, weightless the next.

I’ve enjoyed Hot Chip before, but always from distance. I found their albums weighted down with ironic jokiness, and some suspiciously similar-sounding verse melodies. But then there were those tracks that commanded my undivided attention, singles like Over And Over and Ready For The Floor that transcended their ‘look at us nerds dancing’ antics by demonstrating that these nerds didn’t just know what dance music sounded like, they knew how it worked. With One Life Stand, they’ve shed the goofy poses, and learned how to delay the gratification of huge choruses with expert builds. Songs like I Feel Better and One Life Stand only grow larger once you think you’ve reached the big reveal. It makes sense; this album’s lyrics are almost entirely concerned with the search for meaningful connection, and it certainly helps that the music is built to last. With the herky-jerky moments of their previous work entirely excised, it’s strange that this band is at their most exciting when they’re ready to settle down.

In which Ariel Pink strolls into town like Yojimbo, intent on bringing down both the warring factions that came up under his influence. He leant the shitgaze crowd his murky sonics and tossed-off attitude; the chillwavers offered many concubines in exchange for his hazy nostalgia. While increasingly large numbers of bands started trading on his sound, Pink had found a way to bring it widescreen-style with big budget special effects. Who would’ve thought one of the grungiest and most confusing artists of the past decade was such a stellar pop craftsman? Well, anyone who had been listening. Take a minute to gaze past the muck of The Doldrums, and Ariel’s sincere affection for yacht-rock and new wave and post punk will become apparent in the way he carefully stitches the scraps of them together, forging hazy delicate patchworks of faded memories and unhip genre signifiers. On Before Today his new crack team of road-hardened musicians dresses up songs from his back catalog and new ones with a professional but not overly polished sheen. Ariel Pink’s knack for bizarre interjections and odd left turns gives these immaculately constructed songs a weirdly personal twist. “Hello? Oh hi!”

I must say, the complaints didn’t surprise me: it’s too dense, it’s too weird, it’s too jazzy, it’s just too much; my head fucking hurts. Fair enough. Surely the words “space opera” were enough to scare people off of this one (or maybe the promise of Thom Yorke was too much to pass up)? But for those of us who heard those words and got a little excited, perhaps against our better judgment, Cosmogramma delivers in spades. Bebop bass solos, lavish string arrangements, screamin’ trumpet and smoove sax jockey for position with Steven Ellison’s trademark off kilter drums and wonky synths. The beat-junkie heaven of Los Angeles was like falling in love at first sight with a really hot girl, Cosmogramma is like discovering she’s way too smart for you; a guy can be forgiven for being a little pissed off I guess. But for me, it’s much more reasonable to be overjoyed, and to not even care about struggling for adequate descriptions while sputtering clichés like “ground-breaking.” A sinful den of iniquity, where everybody's doin' the astral plane.

On these two 2010 releases, Daniel Lopatin has proven himself to be a man of extremes. As Oneohtrix Point Never, Lopatin sculpts haunting, lonely synth tones that stretch out into endless space. Returnal is the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey in music, a journey through endless dark matter revealing an essential, indescribable musical truth. I would’ve been content to be lost in it forever, but then Lopatin and bandmate Joel Ford went all Ridley Scott on me with That We Can Play, this year’s Games EP. Beneath their towering chrome skyscrapers of synth, a teeming futuristic city of vintage drum machines and sampled voices forms a stark contrast to the vast wastelands of OPN. The melody in a Games track is a high-speed journey through such a place, where every move reveals something strangely familiar yet somehow foreign. Vast empty space, dense crowded space; as far as retro futurist sci-fi visions are concerned, we got the best of both worlds from Lopatin this year.

Sufjan Stevens was active in the years following his near-universally revered masterpiece, Illinois, but he seemed reluctant about crafting a proper follow up, preferring to release multiple discs of Christmas songs, and crafting an orchestral tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. So when the (60 minute) All Delighted People “EP” was announced and released in one fell swoop, it was startling, and relieving. However, the music itself did little to extend those feelings. It was a guarded and cautious collection of failed attempts to recreate past successes that contained amidst the bloated rubble some very affecting songs and enticing arrangements, but little of the magic of Illinois (contingent mostly on the effective contrast of grand scope and lovingly crafted detail). The Age Of Adz does right by the initial feeling created by the EP’s announcement, and does so by reversing direction almost entirely. Where on previous albums soothing acoustic instrumentation acted as the sugar to help the medicine of the complex arrangements go down, here electronics are the name of the game, and this ain’t no post-hypnachillwitchdubhousewavestep. As on previous electronic foray Enjoy Your Rabbit, Sufjan’s drum machines and synths are hardly fresh or groundbreaking, in fact they’re rather old hat, but when’s the last time a banjo was considered cutting edge? The electronic makeover that’s been the focus of most of the press that this album has received is hardly the point of this music. As it always is with Sufjan Stevens, the magic lies in the way he uses these tools to build vertiginous towers of sound only he could make around songs only he could write, like the disarmingly earnest 25-minute existential come-on of closer Impossible Soul. The Age Of Adz proves that no matter what sounds he’s working with, Sufjan Stevens knows how to challenge and comfort all at once.

Not unsimilar to a duck, the movement on Splazsh happens beneath the surface. Though tracks such as opener Hubble may appear placid, even static at first glance, closer examination reveals these tunes as being in a constant state of flux, as samples dart around the foreground before disappearing entirely, beats drop in and out and what was once familiar is transformed into something magically other. Splazsh seems to invert the history of electronic music to suit its purposes, smearing styles that have fed into each other over the years into a coherent, yet endlessly bewildering whole. Here you have contrast between the neatly stacked vocal snippets in the vertiginous musical Jenga-game of Always Human, and the gentle tap of cyborgic pussy-lickin’ in Supreme Cunnilingus, while the titles Lost and Maze remind you of what’s really going on. There’s a way out, but once you find it you’ll probably just want in once more.

These New Puritans - Hidden
Jonsi - Go
Blonde Redhead - Penny Sparkle
Warpaint - The Fool
Owen Pallett - Heartland
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Going to be in 1-6, were they in 31-36, or are some here and some there?