It’s that time again.

This was at first really easy and then really hard to sequence. Eventually decided, fuck it, the nine-minute track goes first. Most of these are Coachella bands/songs, though the songs chosen aren’t always “oh yeah they played that one well”.

“Spring 2010: 7 of Out of 10”

1. LCD Soundsystem – You Wanted a Hit
2. Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill (Ring Ring?)
3. Broken Social Scene – Forced to Love
4. Broken Bells – The Ghost Inside
5. MGMT – Flash Delirium
6. Gorillaz – Empire Ants
7. Vampire Weekend – Giving Up the Gun
8. MUTEMATH – Armistice
9. Pavement – Trigger Cut
10. Dirty Projectors – Knotty Pine
11. Hot Chip – We Have Love
12. Julian Casablancas – 11th Dimension
13. Public Image, Ltd. – Careering
14. The Besnard Lakes – And This is What We Call Progress
15. The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio
16. Spoon – Out Go the Lights
17. Los Campesinos! – This is a Flag. There is No Wind.
18. Working for a Nuclear Free City – The Tree

2010 Tunes: a Campesinos for All Seasons

Of all the bands I’ve come to truly love over the last few years, Los Campesinos! has been one of the most problematic to recommend to friends. Their 2008 debut album, Hold on Now, Youngster… hit a very specific wavelength of shout-along post-twee anthemic indie rock so confidently and completely that – well – it became difficult to recommend the album to anyone who wasn’t looking for exactly that sound. And is it the kind of thing you’d even know you were looking for until you heard it, anyway? At times overcaffeinated and bouncing off the walls, at others deceptively maudlin and veering close to over-smart, it was nevertheless a record that always gave 110%, a breakneck ride through the weird wonderful world of seven barely-adults from Cardiff that, OK, you kind of have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. And don’t get me wrong: I am there, often, and when I am the music is fucking great. I’ve just found that this isn’t the same for everyone.

But, good news: my friends won’t be able to use that excuse much longer.

The band’s “proper” sophomore album, Romance is Boring, has just been released and I’m honestly surprised how spectacularly these guys have managed to balance their sound. The album as a whole sounds a little more centrist, but it’s barely at the expense of losing anything that makes their sound so unique. If anything, they’re just growing up and branching out, but staying true to themselves all the while.

It’s there even in the first few notes of the album, a slight variation on what I call the LC Riff. If you know the band well, you have heard the LC Riff. It’s a fairly simple but memorable melody – usually played on violin but sometimes synths or otherwise – that appears in many variations across the band’s work. It only shows up at the end of Hold on Now, but pops in and out of a good chunk of odds-n-sods collection We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, often late in the song – check out 3:00 into “Ways to Make it Though the Wall” – always slightly different but an unmistakable callback, a motif, a wink to the fans, whatever. It’s here in full force from second one on Romance, immediately welcoming you to familiar territory. But 30 seconds in it takes a turn into new territory, measuring its time and building up to the big release, with Gareth Campesinos! welcoming you to the album with a phrase you never thought you’d hear him say: “Let’s talk about you for a minute”.

Already in this first minute, they’ve spelled out their mission statement. And, OK, Gareth does spend only a literal minute in second-person before returning to his hilariously pessimistic autobiographical sketches, but hey, baby steps. The song soon submerges into feedback, glides around in it for a minute, seems to meander. And you start to wonder if maybe these guys are losing their way already. But then it roars back to life, so goddamned triumphant that it brings along a whole horn section (pay attention to these horns; they’ll be back), one more killer verse from Gareth, and then, yes, a short spoken-word outro, because this is still Los Campesinos, right – and it’s done. As far as opening tracks go, it’s not a barn-burner in the vein of “Death to Los Campesinos!”, but it does set the tone for the rest of the album pretty perfectly.

The next two tracks are the album’s lead singles, and while I’m not sure I would have chosen the same ones (probably because most of my favorite parts of the album hinge on the word “fuck”), they’re more than worthy as catchy gateway drugs for new listeners. The title track in particular has a great dirty southern rock feel to it, another new direction for them. There are actually a lot of neat new flourishes all over the album, no doubt thanks to musical mastermind Tom Campesinos!. There’s the aforementioned horns, the stringy guitar scraps winding under “We’ve Got Your Back”, the blown-out punk fuzz of “Plan A”. Weirdest and most interesting is “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know” (title aside), a detuned inversion of that LC Riff getting ground around in a thick hyperspeed mash. It’s thrilling stuff. Dunno how they’ll replicate it on stage, but still, thrilling.

It’s great to see how everyone’s stepped up their game here, from Harriet’s violins to Ollie’s drums. Aleks’s presence isn’t as widespread as it used to be – which makes sense given that she’s on her way out of the band – but her contributions are more varied and vital than ever, maybe because of their infrequency. At once sarcastic ice queen on “I Warned You, Do Not Make an Enemy of Me”, judgmental conscience on “A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State” and needling huckster on “Plan A”, she’s become far more than an easy vocal counterpoint, and her presence will be missed.

(Side note: is anyone else really wary of the new lineup? Not that it has anything to do with my hopeless crush on Aleks (well, maybe a bit) or new acquisition Kim Campesinos! personally, but the fact that Gareth’s new vocal counterpart will be his sister places the band dynamic in a fundamentally different light. Like any band with mixed genders and intensely personal lyrics – The Smashing Pumpkins, The xx, hell, Fleetwood Mac – a lot of the fans’ morbid fun comes from speculating on the romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, between the band members, and how those inform our listening experiences. The listener who thinks they must have hooked up has a different experience from the one who thinks he must have a huge crush on her and the one who thinks she must think he has a crush on her and so on. But when you’re talking about two siblings, all this speculation falls away – unless you have a really twisted view of them, which I don’t. Still hoping for the best with Kim, but there’s no denying that the Los Campesinos! of 2011 will be a very different beast.)

But this is also an intensely personal album for Gareth. The word is that most of his lyrical illustrations are only barely fictional, and I don’t think he’s even changed the names of old flames (I can’t believe that the Charlotte to whom he writes letters on “Heat Rash” isn’t the same Charlotte he thanked in the liner notes of We Are Beautiful), yet he doesn’t shy away from details whether hilarious or depressing. Only on “Who Fell Asleep In” does it become a little too much, a slow confessional dirge that’s missing most of the trademark Campesinos humor and vitality. And it’s not a matter of just being slow; by contrast, late-album track “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future” is hardly fast, but carries such epic weight and emotion (and plenty of Gareth’s trademark oddball character sketches) that it easily becomes one of the band’s best tracks.

In fact, Romance is Boring has one of the best late-album sequences I’ve heard in a good long while. From the off-kilter “I Warned You” to “Heat Rash”, a steel-eyed regret that swells into a towering anthem with the return of those fucking horns, through “The Sea is a Good Place” to proper album climax “This is a Flag. There is No Wind”, a vitriolic shout-along that doubles back to familiar territory without once forgetting all the new ground they’ve tread. Here, after the shouts and the choruses and crescendos, the LC Riff comes rolling back in, ready to send the album out on the same note that ended Hold on Now, Youngster. But then it magnifies and bottoms out, and the band comes roaring back in – “Our friends have put the two of us on suicide watch!” – and our expectations are gloriously upended once again. This shit is exhilarating.

It’s a perfect end to the album, though it is followed by one more track: the fittingly-named “Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State”, which is just Gareth, his glockenspiel and a gloom of guitar feedback. It’s a hugely abrupt comedown from the previous song, but in context it feels important, a lament of personal failure aimed at… maybe one of the girls named on the album, maybe the departing Aleks, maybe all, maybe none (see? It’s fun to theorize). It’s such a downer that I usually want to skip the track – though that just starts the album over again. And I am always fine with that.

So, yes, it gives me great pleasure to say that this is my favorite album of theirs, and so far my favorite album of 2010 – which, in a year already filled with new releases by Spoon, Hot Chip, Gorillaz and Massive Attack, is really saying something. It’s exciting to hear and watch one of your favorite bands really maturing and improving, especially when they produce the kind of sound that speaks to a wider audience – without selling themselves or their fans short. It’s a rare triumph of a (technically) sophomore album, and hopefully just one more step in a long and successful career.

2010 Tunes: More Quickies

Some more quick reviews! Hooray!:

Vampire Weekend – Contra
Much as I’m not a fan of their whole Ivy League aesthetic, I’ve still found plenty to like on Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album. Songs like “Cousins” find the band at their most energetic heights yet, while others like “White Sky” further refine the kinds of breezy tropical horizons the band hinted at two years ago. Ezra Koenig seems to have really benefited from his horizon-broadening side projects with The Very Best and the like, even if his love of over-enunciating exotic words causes songs like “Horchata” and “California English” to veer into over-precious nursery rhyme territory. And then there’s “Giving Up the Gun”, an instant classic that’s an unabashed stab at radio play while still feeling like a fresh direction for these guys. It’s just another one of the contradictions that make Vampire Weekend such an interesting band, even if not every hat they wear is to your liking.

These New Puritans – Hidden
I was a big fan of these guys’ labyrinthine debut album, Beat Pyramid, which was awesome in part because it was so obtuse, providing a listening experience that felt like an excavation. Their follow-up retains a lot of TNP’s flavor, echoed horn loops and all, but also feels more straightforward, ironically enough. I don’t doubt that there’s a lot to mine here, but it seems that even the puzzles themselves are too well hidden on this album to really excite the hunt for meaning. Sure, there are songs on here that can stand on their own (“Hologram”, “Attack Music”), but as a whole the album does seems to have too much, well, Hidden for its own good.

Turzi – B
When I first heard “Baltimore” on the radio, my immediate reaction was disbelief that Primal Scream had a new album out already. OK, sure, partly because of Bobby Gillespie’s guest vocals, but there’s no denying that Turzi’s darkly urban electro-rock gives the song a distinct feeling that it could be called “Exterminator 2.0”. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either, especially when the music on most of the rest of the album speaks for itself. A lot of “political” artists lean on either long-winded manifestos or cheesy sloganeering to get their point across, so it’s really refreshing to hear a set of (mostly) instrumentals that just feel like protest music. And, true, without a specific target or worldview, you could argue that it’s not a real political statement; I’d argue back that it least this won’t go stale after six months.

Gorillaz – Plastic Beach
Gorillaz was originally conceived as an anti-band; four cartoon avatars who provided the surreal facade of a faceless and numberless band. That was almost immediately undone when fans found out who was involved (“omigod! Damon Albarn and Del tha Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator!?!”). Then came Demon Days, probably my favorite Gorillaz album because it’s the least Gorillaz-like, basically an Albarn/Danger Mouse vanity project first and some vague attempt at “anonymity” a distant second or fifth. Plastic Beach, now, feels like a serious attempt to get back to that anonymity through such sheer volume of guest singers, musicians and producers that only the vague notion of this as a “concept album” can really keep all this together as any kind of unified piece. That’s not really my bag, but in the age of mp3 downloads and iTunes singles and “the death of the album” (whatever that means), it’s probably exactly what they’re going for. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by a guest list that includes Mos Def, Gruff Rhys, Lou Reed, De La Soul, Mick Jones, Joe Simonon, fucking Mark E. Smith and, uh, Snoop Dogg. The more I look at this as less of an artistic statement and more of a big fat crazy party where each rock luminary gets a turn at the mic, the more it works for me. Is it in too poor taste to end with “Everyone gets a turn with the Plastic Beach”?

Mix well and serve

My seasonal mix-making continues. Tracklist posted without commentary this time, since I’ve been doing a lot of music writing lately as it is (more short reviews tomorrow and then another nice long one on Friday).

“Live Hard” – Winter 2009/2010

1. Vampire Weekend – Cousins
2. Phoenix – Courtesy Laughs
3. Beach House – Silver Soul
4. Spoon – Mystery Zone
5. Yeasayer – ONE
6. Atlas Sound – Quick Canal
7. Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
8. Hot Chip – One Life Stand
9. Four Tet – She Just Likes to Fight
10. The Twilight Sad – Cold Days from the Birdhouse
11. Bear in Heaven – You Do You
12. These New Puritans – Hologram
13. Neon Indian – Should Have Taken Acid with You
14. Massive Attack – Paradise Circus
15. Los Campesinos! – A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State, or: Letters from Me to Charlotte
16. Wilco – Everlasting
17. Girls – Lauren Marie

2010 Tunes: Transfer Pending

Spoon – Transference

Transference has a couple different meanings. A quick internet search reveals that it means, uh, “the process of being transferred” (thanks, dictionary.com!), but also that it’s a psychoanalytic term for taking your feelings for a certain thing and tying them to a new (and often unrelated) thing. Like if you spend your life scared of clowns because one murdered your parents, transference occurs when you begin to fear your roommate because you catch the dude trying on face paint.

So if someone (let’s say a band named “Spoon”) decides to name their new album Transference, is it because they think it illustrates this curious and not-exactly-desirable process? Or causes it? Or is it because Britt Daniel “just thought the word was really pretty”?

Well, shit.

Spoon is one of those bands whose popularity only grows faster the harder they try to dodge labels and meanings. But that hasn’t stopped critics from trying, and with every new album come a flurry of descriptors ever harder and faster and wronger. (Yes, “wronger”. That’s how wrong.)

I have a theory on this and it’s completely self-serving, but oh well: I think their best album is Gimme Fiction. That album found a great balance between the band’s fun-loving and cerebral tendencies, really unequaled before or since. And this was the album when Spoon really started to blow up, but nobody called it at first. Critics thought the album was pretty good, fans wanted more “Stay Don’t Go”, etc. And suddenly: commercials. Bigger shows. Stephen King calls “I Summon You” his song of the year. Near-stupid levels of popularity. And then everyone realizes: oh shit. This album was actually really good.

Fast-forward two years: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga drops and critics fall all over each other trying to be The First to declare this album An Instant Classic. But, really? It’s just another good Spoon album, with the requisite broad hits (“The Underdog”), textural experiments (“The Ghost of You Lingers”) and late-album filler (“My Little Japanese Cigarette Case”) intact. It opened the floodgates to bigger concert venues and a critical jizz-fest, sure, but suggesting that this is their best album is basically a slap in the face to Fiction, Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell.

And here we are again in 2010 with Transference, which finds our boys keepin’ on keepin’ on, and the Quest For New Superlatives is back in full force. These guys are “brilliant innovators”, “scientists of the studio”, “uncompromising visionaries”, etc. And, guys, I know we have to flex our vocabulary muscles and all that, but let’s take a step back for a minute.

One of the few negative – if funny and a little unfair – criticisms of the album I’ve heard is that it’s “a perfectly good collection of b-sides”. I can see where this comes from: a lot of the album is sparse, and some tracks sound like they could be demos – because, actually, some of the tracks are the demo versions, which the band reverted to after tossing out slicker versions. Using demos on your proper album is a ballsy move – so credit for taking the risk, at least – but there’s a reason for this: it’s because demos typically sound pretty janky. And these demos are no different; they don’t get a pass just because they come from Spoon. I love the exaltation that songs like “Trouble” contain “the gritty promise of demos”, as if they’re exciting because they point to the possibility that they might one day become better or, at least, more. But, guys, this is the album! If there’s any “more” it’ll be a Neon Indian remix or an alternate take on disc 2 of the tenth anniversary re-release!

Which raises the question: is a demo still a demo if it ends up on the album? Is a b-side still a b-side if it’s “Yellow Ledbetter”? This album’s layers and juxtapositions might bring about a lot of beard-scratching discussion and postulation, which is fine, but it seems to come at the expense of a lot of fun. It’s a shame, because there is fun to be had here, like in the mish-mash enthusiasm of “Nobody Gets Me But You” and the groovy outro of “I Saw the Light” that grows into its whole own Thing. But there are also attempts at levity – like that “Whoo!” tacked into the coda of “Written in Reverse” whose enthusiasm I just don’t buy.

But this might be unfair. Spoon are allowed to go in different directions (isn’t that what we should want from our favorite bands?), and it’s ridiculous to get upset when they don’t just record Kill the Moonlight Pt 2. But it’s hard to ignore the first thing that makes Transference stand out: its jarring transitions. Second track “Is Love Forever?” bottoms out under its own strain barely two minutes in; “Mystery Zone” sounds so good on the radio until it cuts out, mid-word, rather than hitting what would assumedly have been a peak of ascending notes and sharper strings. How many are really happy to be dropped from these heights straight into the muted, wobbly tones of “Who Makes Your Money”? Probably not a lot. Look, these guys are trying to tell us something with this. This is not the sound of them fucking up; it the sound of them trying to teach.

OK, but what? On further listens you realize there’s actually a lot of stopping and starting on “Mystery Zone”, musically and lyrically. At times Daniel seems to be having trouble forming coherent thoughts. Later, “Out Go the Lights” sends him in a couple narrative directions without settling on a single one. Gradually, it becomes clearer that if these guys are trying to say something, it’s that they don’t know what to say. A quick googling of Transference criticism comes up with telling adjectives: “discombobulated”; “fumbling”; “transitory”. If I wanted to be a total dick, I’d ask: if you don’t know what you’re trying to say, why are you saying anything? (The fact that I didn’t delete this question after typing it out, though, means I’m at least half a dick. Maybe three-quarters.) If this is them being off-the-cuff and uninhibited, why does this all feel like such a carefully crafted experiment?

But, again, I have to back off, because this is assuming a lot. Playing a set for KCRW a few weeks back, they were asked why they included some of the controversial cuts and halts on the album, to which they responded [something to the effect of] “We just felt like it”. The whole interview was a little awkward – the band seemed less interested in explaining their music than just playing it – and it could have been an easy dodge, but you know, why not give these seven-album-deep indie pros the benefit of the doubt?

For me, it’s mostly that there’s a lot to love on Transference, but the roughest parts of the album really subtract from the whole (that smash-cut ending to “Is Love Forever”? It’s just sloppy, with the vocal echoes cut a fraction of a second after the rest of the song), and the closest possibility to a method behind the madness – that the band is just, you know, saying whatever – isn’t nearly a compelling enough reason to appreciate that. It’s not really that postmodern or daring; it just seems half-baked. It’s a shame, because that effort to teach sullies a lot of what could have been another classic from these guys – if that’s what they even wanted in the first place.

2010 Tunes: Quick Hits

Dudes, I said this earlier but I still really mean it: so far 2010 has been a pretty crazy year for music, and it’s only March. May in particular is gonna be extra special, with new releases from Broken Social Scene, The National and LCD Soundsystem! And there’s another 7 months of the year after that.

But there’s already been several noteworthy releases this year, and I felt like writing about a bunch of them. So over the next few days I have a bunch of quick reviews and two longer ones coming up, check them out if you’re curious to know what I think about certain things. Oh, and if you’re curious, samples from most of these bands should be available over on ye olde playlist –>

So here’s what I’ve been listening to…

Massive Attack – Heligoland

Always glad to see these guys back, even if it takes 5+ years between albums. So far I’ve found this album much more interesting than 100th Window – either because they’ve included more guest stars or do more with them this time around. It’s weird to hear Elbow’s Guy Harvey make a guest appearance, and weirder still to hear Damon Albarn on here (I feel like his appearance automatically makes “Saturday Come Slow” a Gorillaz song), but overall most of it works. For the purists, too, “Girl I Love You” is a great Horace Andy track while “Rush Minute” evokes the tense, shadowy 3D tracks of old. All in all, a good collection, and hopefully a sign of more frequent output from these guys in the near future.

Four Tet – There is Love in You

I hadn’t listened to these guys for years – not since my college disc-jockey days of playing as many 6-minute songs as I could find to make the job easier – and I’m starting to regret that. There is Love in You is a great collection of spacey electronic beats, at times soothing and at others thumping. Lead single “Love Cry” has built up a lot of excitement on the blogosphere – pretty impressive considering the thing is nine minutes long and the first half of it is build-up! So, great, now I have another artist’s back catalog to go through. Thanks a lot for being so good, Kieran Hebden!

Hot Chip – One Life Stand

Maybe my standards were too high for a follow-up to my #1 album of 2008, but I’ve found most of this album pretty underwhelming. Maybe also because, of their fairly bifurcated tendencies, I’ve always been much more in favor of the monster jamzzz while One Life Stand falls more heavily in line with their tender side. There are a couple worthy barnburners in “Thieves in the Night”, “We Have Love” and the title track, though they can’t quite reach the apex seen on previous albums. “Alley Cats” is probably the finest song on the album while also serving as its clearest microcosm: A little dancey, a little sentimental, it rattles a bit in the middle when Joe Goddard’s sleepy vocals threaten to derail the entire rhythm (I don’t know what Goddard’s deal is on this album; his papa-bear vocals are usually a welcome contrast to Alexis Taylor’s, but here he sounds either too slow or too doped-up or, Christ, even too auto-tuned to really enjoy. Sad, because I like the guy!), but then Taylor’s sublime vocals roll in, lifting all of us up; “you painted a song”, says he, and suddenly all is right with the world. Maybe I’m being too hard on these guys… sure, there are a few missteps (don’t get me started on “Slush”), but at least these guys are still trying new things, and I’m sure a lot of this will grow on me more over the coming months.

More tomorrow!

Would Recommend: Action Button

I remember a year or so ago reading frustration – from, oddly, several unconnected places around the internet, as if part of some miniature unconscious zeitgeist – that video games, despite having become a huge cultural and commercial force of entertainment, didn’t have much in the way of real criticism. In other words, lots of publications telling you how a game does x well and y not-so-well, but very few sources really trying to beyond and find something deeper. Which, I had wondered, might have had something to do with the inherently interactive nature of the medium itself, since “art” and “statements” and all that would seem to take a backseat to the bigger question of “can player 1 jump over this pit”.

But, I have been proven wrong, at least by one website. Action Button Dot Net so far seems to be doing a great job of providing the kind of deeper insight I never knew I needed about my once-favorite mode of entertainment (now probably my third, but who’s counting). The site design may strike you as off-putting as some review lengths (seriously, you think my writing is long-winded, check out more on FF XIII than you may ever want to read), but what’s here is really good, insightful and unapologetic, and has made me rethink some of my own gaming opinions one way or another (though I still love Mario Galaxy).

Of particular note are the reviews of their 33 favorite games of all time. Check out their review of my number one and their number two, Super Mario Bros. 3, fascinating (the review) and enlightening despite taking 10 minutes of reading time to actually begin discussing the game in question. There’s a particular bit that especially spoke to me, which I’ll quote here – but behind the cut, since it works better in context of the review, so go read that first, seriously, I’ll wait, my blog’s got time–

–and so in talking about how part of the game’s magic is inextricably linked to the times before Gamefaqs when gameplay was about discovery and trading secrets with friends and how often half the fun just came in running the little plumber around and trying shit and playing not to see how the story ended or to get all 101% of the hidden secrets but just to play the fucking thing, Tim Rogers asks:

“Did all this psychological kleptomania really spew from Super Mario Bros. 3, a game we played so much that it became literally incorrect to not crouch before jumping to catch the falling magic wand at the end of the airship boss battles? (The only true way for Mario to be victorious is for him to split-second-snap out of flying crouch and into triumphant standing, wand upraised.)”

…I mean… yeah, that– that was me, in a nutshell, really. Me and my friends, growing up and playing this game. This paragraph is actual truth, what you might call Earned Resonance. And part of it’s nostalgia, sure, but not at all the same kind you get from discussing, say, or The Goonies or Saved by the Bell. It’s almost like the Internet isn’t making the world a smaller place, just showing us how small it’s always been.

Anyway: thumbs up. Would Recommend. Check it out if you like reading extensive, thoughtful essays on video games, and especially if you believe the medium’s about more than just pressing buttons for a few hours. Which, if you’re a real gamer, you should anyway, right?

2009: The Year Freak Broke

It’s weird to me that my main motivation for finishing this list was to want to move on and start talking about the music of 2010. The new year is looking great already! Not that 2009 wasn’t also excellent. There was a lot of great stuff, most notably from established artists who found serious success in evolving their sound (they make up half of this list). Some exciting newcomers in here too, though; I’m excited to see where all of these guys go from here, whether we hear from them next in 2010 or 2020. At any rate, here they are: my Top 10 Albums of 2009.

10. Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Something about Bear in Heaven feels weirdly out of time. There’s something very familiar about this sound – maybe even retro – it remains hard to categorize. “Shoegaze without the gazing” might get you almost halfway. It’s a swirl of sound and texture – at times hazy and at others energizing – that still manages to pack in more poppy hooks that most actual “pop” albums this year. Weirdly against the grain of a year that itself felt against the grain, Beast Rest Forth Mouth didn’t need any tricks or gimmicks to stand out on its own merits.

9. Atlas Sound – Logos
Bradford Cox’s “solo” work can be pretty fucking contradictory, but that’s absolutely its intention. Just look at the album cover: that’s Cox himself up there, but with his face blurred out and a big hole where his heart should be. It’s a fitting illustration of an outfit that is primarily Cox’s, but easily shifts and grows to fit the ideas and abilities of his guest performers. It’s unfortunate that the tracks without guests comparatively suffer a little, but Logos still has “Walkabout”, the great Panda Bear song that could have been, and “Quick Canal”, the best Stereolab song never written. And that’s high praise indeed.

8. Mew – No More Stories Are Told Today I’m Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I’m Tired Let’s Wash Away
Mew’s angular nü-prog sound is, in some ways, as obtuse and uncool as the frustrating title of their new album. But there’s something to be said for letting go occasionally; OK, not just letting go, but really pushing everything to 11, as they do time and again on “Repeaterbeater”, “Hawaii” and “Vaccine”. Though not as immediate as some of their earlier albums, No More Stories finds them pushing in new directions; check out the fractured breakbeats on “Introducing Palace Players” and the unexpectedly uplifting piano riffs on “Sometimes Life isn’t Easy”. The album begins, fittingly enough, with a timeshifting haze of a track that makes as much sense played backwards as forwards. Its title? “New Terrain”, of course.

7. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
The entire industry of musical criticism fell all over themselves this year in praise of Animal Collective’s eighth album, and while I don’t think it’s the end-all of Indie Rock in 2009, it’s impossible not to recognize the genius and musicianship that created some of the year’s strangest hits. From the woozy gallop of “Summertime Clothes” to the near-goofy exuberance of “Brothersport” and, oh yeah, the completely inescapable “My Girls”, there’s no question that without Animal Collective, 2009 would have been a far more somber and less interesting year.

6. Dan Deacon – Bromst
Bromst found tireless party boy Deacon growing up and growing out, giving out without giving up. Using his classical training to create a dense album as thoughtful and adventurous as it is boisterous and party-ready. Nowhere was this evolution more apparent than at his live shows, where a 13-piece backing band did justice to every diverse melody and instrument used on the album, while Deacon himself still bopped over his turntables in the thick of the crowd, never once forgetting that even a thinking man’s party is still a fucking party.

5. Yacht – See Mystery Lights
On his own, Jonah Bechtolt provided a fun and optimistic – if somewhat gimmicky – counterpoint to a lot of the dour, over-thinking indie dance scenesters of the last few years. But the addition of Claire Evans with See Mystery Lights evolved the band from what could have become a novelty act into a full-blown musical force. They’ve gone from appropriating DFA to becoming one of its tentpoles; and if, with LCD Soundsystem increasingly silent and The Rapture unraveling, the movement’s old guard is beginning to fade, at least it’s in the hands of these two promising youngsters.

4. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
For my money, “1901” is the song that ate the world this year; you’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfectly-formed 3 minutes of pop-rock anywhere else in 2009 or even the last several years. Lucky for us, Phoenix didn’t stop there, rounding out the rest of the album with so many other high-energy jams that you might confuse these elder statesmen of indie for the scrappy new kids on the block.

3. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Worst initial reaction I heard to “Stillness is the Move”: “Who the fuck is this, Mariah Carey?” It was as easy to hate on the Dirty Projectors as it was to love them in 2009, which I guess just comes along with sudden explosions in popularity. True, their howling, staccato tendencies aren’t for everyone, but those with an open mind will quickly discover that this twisted variant of pop has an intensity and addictiveness all its own. You’ll find it in “Stillness” and “Cannibal Resource” among others, but it’s Bitte Orca’s arguable centerpiece – the two-pronged rafter-shaking primal scream from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian 3 minutes into “Useful Chamber” – that blows out the doors and really shows the heights that can be reached when you start looking in new directions.

2. Passion Pit – Manners
The common description of this album has been “like MGMT but the other half of the album is good too”. And… OK, it’s not entirely inaccurate. The latest Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere, Passion Pit offered up a serious collection of jams this year, and while this kind of music can have a short shelf life (see: The Go! Team; MGMT, again), Passion Pit has actually been able to overcome this with daring, thoughtful composition and, seriously, that back-end of the album doesn’t hurt (Why “Let Your Love Grow Tall” hasn’t been made a single, I will never understand). There will of course be a new Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere in 2010, but the question isn’t “who will it be”; the question is “can they outdo Manners?”

1. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
How much of our listening experiences do we owe to ourselves? Listening isn’t just a passive activity: every time we press Play, we’re also bringing our thoughts and desires and wants and preconceptions to the table. And everything we feel or know or think we know colors what we hear, which is why the same source material can give two people radically different listening experiences. So how much of my enjoyment of Veckatimest comes from my knowledge of the sheer amount of attention-to-detail work that Grizzly Bear put into their new album? How fair is it that our shared appreciation for Albums Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts helped them secure a spot on this list above other albums I’ve listened to – and maybe even enjoyed – more this year? I couldn’t tell you. But any kind of intellectual second-guessing does a disservice to the masterpiece that Veckatimest is, from the opening thunder of “Southern Point” through the ethereal “Two Weeks”, the rollicking swell of “About Face” and the hard-won triumph of “While You Wait for the Others” all the way through to the measured, delicate end of “Foreground”. Sure, the listener will always bring their own opinions, but they’d be hard-pressed to argue with an album of this exceptional caliber.

Honorable Mentions

Cymbals Eat Guitars – Why There are Mountains
Franz Ferdinand – Tonight
Japandroids – Post-Nothing
Metric – Fantasies
Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms

The Fall 2009 Mix – Now with Annotations!

As you may know, I put together quarterly mixes – I guess “Playlists” except I really do still burn them to CDs – as a kind of musical diary of the previous season. A lot of the music gets chosen because it has some sort of resonance with the people, events and feelings of the time, but some of it also gets put on just because I like it a lot. The actual tracklists for these things only ever get put up on my blogs, so if I lose them I’m boned, but oh well, here’s Fall 2009.

I’m also adding short annotations for each song, for the first time. It’s kind of a writing exercise for me and I may stick with it or not in the future, so let me know if you like it or think it’s horrible.

Music overload after the jump…

“A Few Pebbles Short of an Avalanche” – Fall 2009

1. The Walkmen – Brandy Alexander
“Stop talking and listen to me. I’ll tell you of every dream.”
I’ve been listening to a lot of You & Me lately, but for some reason this short slow-burn hidden near the end of A Hundred Miles Off spoke loudest to me this season. Part of that’s admittedly because I wanted to try a framing concept with this playlist, to do with dreaming and living and how we try to connect the two. Hamilton Leithauser’s no stranger to waxing poetic on exactly this kind of thing, so who better to start with?

2. Yeasayer – Ambling Alp
I like the slow, otherworldly build at the beginning of this song – it’s a nice segue from the setup at the end of the last one. It builds into one of Yeasayer’s most straightforward pop songs yet, and whether you think that’s good or bad is up to you. These guys have kind of unjustly been derided as trying to ape Animal Collective’s bid for more centrist freak-rock in 2009, but I don’t get that. Isn’t there enough room for everyone in this sub-sub-genre right now? Space may be dwindling, but it’s clear these guys are having fun while they can.

3. Mew – Beach
Arriving late because you stopped to smell the roses – it’s something we can all relate to. Distractions are everywhere, and what at first feels like the most important thing in the world can evaporate like any ephemera. And “Beach” is, appropriately, a sunny, poppy clearing amidst the post-prog hills and valleys of No More Stories…, though no less engaging for it.

4. The Dodos – The Strums
“So children, kill your teachers, kill your parents, then kill your preachers”
There’s something kind of amazing about such a blunt statement coming from dudes known for their unironic and typically romantic songs. There probably wasn’t a better anti-authoritarian screed anywhere else this year, if only because it came from such an unexpected and understated quarter.

5. Ra Ra Riot – Can You Tell
It’s pretty on-the-nose, but I like it. RRR does some really tight, catchy pop-rock that doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but still has a welcome place in my library.

6. Bon Iver – Brackett, WI
Its parts aren’t much – all haunted vocals and collapsing chord progressions – but like any great Bon Iver song, they add up to much more than you’d expect. Yet another reason I regret being so late to the party for the Dark Was the Night Red Hot compilation.

7. Animal Collective – Taste
“Am I really all the things that are outside of me?”
Continuing themes from another song you might have heard, this song is actually almost its opposite: downtempo instead of dancy, fearful and reactionary instead of triumphant and forward-thinking. Wouldn’t make a great single, but it resonates. You look back and, with a realization of horror, you may think: “Is this how I’m going to live my life?” Well, is it?

8. Phoenix – Sometimes in the Fall
I saw Phoenix play the Greek Theater a few months ago. I generally hate big concert venues in L.A., since most of the seats end up getting taken by industry types or celebrities or bored rich motherfuckers or whoever – basically a whole crowd of people who are only there to hear the band play their hit single, if that. Behind me at this show were a group of kids that couldn’t help but fill the void between songs by screamsinging “Sometimes in the fall, fall fall FALL!” whenever they could. It wore on me a little, and Phoenix never did play it, but damn if I wasn’t right there with them, a few actual fans in the crisp chill of a fall L.A. crowd.

9. The Flaming Lips – Watching the Planets
It’s just such a crazy, layered song that that you’re constantly finding new things to like about it – the camouflaged bassline, Karen O’s shrieks, the pound of drums so heavy you feel they might explode any second. A lot of Embryonic is purposefully obtuse and abstract, but this is the album’s perfect entry point – placed, of course, right at the end.

10. Built to Spill – Car
A Spin Magazine article once described a lot of Doug Martsch’s songs as (more or less) “epics that sound like throwaways, and throwaways that sound like epics”. I always thought the first bit sounded like a back-handed compliment, but the second is right on the nose with this sub-3 minute track from 1994’s There’s Nothing Wrong with Love. At first understated, it blossoms into a play-to-the-rafters exploration of love, dreams, blissful ignorance and the true nature of all things. And then, not even three minutes in, it’s over. Throwaway? Not in the least. Epic? Absolutely.

11. Bear in Heaven – Lovesick Teenagers
“Lovesick teenagers don’t ever die. They will live forever.”
A spiraling meditation on growing older, wiser, and realizing you haven’t changed as much as you thought. Oddly as dark as it it optimistic, it’s an appropriate illustration of reaching out and flying as high as you can – before you crash into the ground.

12. Passion Pit – Folds in Your Hands
Don’t let sub-par Youtube videos and Talk Show appearances fool you – Passion Pit is a hell of a live band. Playing some songs straight and remolding others (“Seaweed Song” somehow becomes more evocative and unique as a solo piano ballad), the band nailed pretty much everything when I saw them a few months ago. Of particular note was this song – maybe because I wasn’t that familiar with it, I was floored when the 1:22 breakdown kicked in, they knocked it the fuck out of the park and I found myself caught up in the joyous current of pogoing hipsters. I hadn’t known it well before, but now there’s no way I’ll forget it now.

13. Yacht – It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want
The obvious reason being that my home life is about to be upended as I move to a new apartment, but that’s not to belittle this song on its own merits. See Mystery Lights is a hell of a sophomore evolution for a band that used to be a one-man (and fairly one-trick) outfit; their jump to the DFA label isn’t surprising, since suddenly they seem to be one of the only groups trying to push the boundaries laid down by label pioneers LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture. You can track the sound’s evolution as a microcosm in this track alone, but chances are by the 7-minute mark you’ll just want to give in and dance.

14. Islands – Heartbeat
OK, no doubt auto-tune is the Great Satan of 2009, but every now and then it’s actually used appropriately – see most of Kanye West’s Heartbreak and 808s and, well, this song. The weirdly faux-emotional pitch shifts are a surprisingly good fit for a cheery song about jilting an ex-lover. Not that I want an auto-tune indie trend in 2010 (I really don’t), just a nice surprise here and there.

15. Grizzly Bear – While You Wait for the Others
Continuing a theme: there comes a time when even the nice guys of Grizzly Bear have to say “enough is enough”. Maybe you tried really hard (or maybe you didn’t), but if things don’t work out, there will come a time when you’re asked, kindly, to make your way. Veckatimest is lyrically a fairly inscrutable album, but this song, tucked away near the end, has enough emotional resonance to make up for the rest of the album all on its own.

16. Health – We are Water
A mercurial murk of hollow vocals and searing guitars, the soundscape of this song is everything its title suggests. How can we, as people, even try to stay in one place, to do one thing, to feel one way? We put up our walls and make our decisions and follow our plans. But underneath it all, we’re as temporal as any of the weather. We’re slaves to our emotions and our fears and a thousand things beyond our control. We are capricious and petty. We are opportunists and survivors. We are elemental. We are water.

17. Franz Ferdinand – Lucid Dreams
I’ve spent way too long arguing with my friends over which version of this song is the best. I seem to be in the minority thinking it’s the album version (the one included here). Where the single version takes a while to get going, this cut almost blasts out of the gate from the beginning, and doesn’t let up until the electronic morass at the end (which, admittedly, I could do without). The tribal drums, too, really set this apart from the band’s other work in a way that the single version can’t claim. The more I think about it, the more I feel like we’re supposed to like both versions together, as if the single cut is there to lay down the groundwork, and the album version is meant as a very specific call-back that still pushes everything forward. Still, if I have to choose one, it’s this. So there.

18. Oh No Oh My – I Painted Your House
“Perhaps it’s time we grow…”
Somehow, this is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, a cheerily bittersweet song about genuinely trying hard – and failing. It still gets me most every time. But while it’d be easy to wallow in defeat, the important thing is that this song doesn’t. Still, after everything, you’ve got things to build, places to go. If your painting didn’t do the trick? It’s OK. You can always come back later with your guitar.

Missed it by that much.

November was the first month since starting my blog earlier this year that went without a single update.

Shit.

I consider this a wake-up call. I do have things to say (I promise), I just feel a lot of my posts ended up much longer than I’d planned, to the point that I became wary of having to match new post sizes to the monoliths that came before.

That, and people tell me my posts are too damn long anyway. Ha.

Well, it’s probably true. All our attention spans are shrinking, especially when it comes to internet content. When I fire up Google Reader over breakfast, I usually skip anything I can’t get the gist of in a few seconds. No reason to expect my readers to be any different (but here’s hoping!).

So, anyway, short story shorter: more content coming soon. In smaller, bite-size chunks. For Democracy!