Aught Music

2009 : JPB's Best Of

2009-12-31T23:00:00.004-05:00

I didn't write about as many discs from 2009 as I would have liked—I was busy traveling, and completing my work for the semester, and getting ill—but I thought I'd close out my writing for this blog with a quick top ten.

10. Jason Crumer, Walk With Me
Restrained minimalist compositions which periodically descend into shredding noise. Read more | Listen: "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant"

9. Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport
I prefer the less polished raw energy of their 2008 debut, Street Horsssing, but this follow-up is still an undeniably fine selection of anthemic psychedelic stomp.

8. Mountains, Choral
This outfit, made up of former Apestaartje personnel, has released three fine albums of pastoral drone this decade. This newest one stayed in heavy rotation for me this year.

7. Sunn O))), Dimensions and Monoliths
The boundaries of the Sunn O))) project have grown broader with each release, absorbing more and more material like some kind of black metal Katamari. This album finds them experimenting with keening choirs ("Big Church") and transcendent horn playing ("Alice"). It's not always successful, but when it works it expands their scope breathtakingly.

6. The Antlers, Hospice
A staggering song cycle about death, loss, and grief. Best way to hear it is by yourself, in a slowly darkening room.

5. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes
This album filled the slot that was filled last year by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head's Glistening Pleasure, and in 2005 by Architecture In Helsinki's In Case We Die: indie-pop music, made by young people, charming, charismatic, polished, and addictively sweet. A slightly shameful pleasure, but also a true and abiding one.

4. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
This is the great indie-pop album of the year: upbeat, energetic, yet also somehow grandly sad. Read more | Listen: "Lisztomania"

3. Gregg Kowalsky, Tape Chants
The idea of creating music by playing recorded matter on 6-10 cassette tape players simultaneously may sound a bit like someone trying to update Philip Jeck's turntable installations and performances. But Kowalsky's project is really its own thing, with conceptual underpinnings that differ completely from Jeck's, and just one immersion into Kowalsky's invitingly smoggy low-fi drone makes it completely clear that this is a soundworld that must be appreciated on its own terms.

2. Dan Deacon, Bromst
The eleven pieces that compose Bromst mostly sound like the soundtrack an old-school videogame that you might have experienced in a dream: all velocity and candy color. But just when you're ready to dismiss them as whiz-kid geekery they open up into something lovely, possibly even holy. Listen: "Red F"

1. Jónsi and Alex, Riceboy Sleeps
Beautiful ambient tracks from this side-project of Sigur Ros vocalist Jón Birgisson. Each track arranges acoustic instruments, voices, crackle, loops and hum into a kind of billowing fog that permeates directly to my brain's pleasure pathways.

—Jeremy Bushnell

2009 : 19-20 Jack Rose & Charlie Parr

2009-12-31T10:39:00.001-05:00

Jack Rose and Charlie Parr are two guitars who are often called "new traditionalists." Finger-pickers harkening back to an earlier era, Parr plays traditional folk and Piedmont blues-style songs on 6- and 12-string guitars, and banjo; Rose comes from the John Fahey tradition, but also incorporates elements of Indian ragas and minimalist drone.

Parr's father grew up on a tenant farm in northern Iowa with 17 siblings and rode out the Great Depression on freight cars. He rode them to Appalachia and Texas and every other corner of the country. He finally settled into a job shoveling animal parts at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minn where he raised Charlie. Charlie dropped out of high school just one year in and left home to see the country. He settled in a rooming house in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis in 1985 learning songs by artists his father used to play on the record player: Elizabeth Cotton, Fred McDowell, and Doc Boggs among others.

Jack Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He started playing the guitar at age 10 and joined the group Pelt in 1993. In 2001, he began recording more and solo acoustic guitar compositions, appearing on the seminal Wooden Guitar compilation on Locust Records. His open tunings and long form compositions never lost the psychedelic and rock flavors of his earlier music, almost defining the word "deltadelica."

Both Jack and Charlie carry a certain blues and folk tradition forward, while putting their own stamp on it, reinventing it, bringing their own influences to it. Here is Parr covering a Blind Willie Johnson song, "God Moves On The Water," while Jack plays his own composition, "Kensington Blues."

A sad footnote: Jack Rose died of a heart attack on Dec 8 at the age of 38.

—Darren DeMonsi

Listen: Jack Rose >> "Kensington Blues" | Charlie Parr >> "God Moves On The Water"

2009 : 18 "Blood Bank" by Bon Iver

2009-12-30T09:17:00.002-05:00

There is no song this decade that makes me feel a feeling of atmosphere the way "Blood Bank" does. The cover of the EP shows this snow-covered car with the door slightly open. This song sounds like walking through the snow to get that photo. There is no other way to put it. You know what I am saying if you have ever walked through snow so heavy that you need to pick up your knees with every step.

I also love this song for the topic matter. How many other songs are about specific episodes of TV shows? The fact that it's about a episode of Northern Exposure makes it even better. I love the idea of looking at a bag of blood and trying to figure out whose it is. Are the things that make us who we are in our blood or someplace else? All these ideas keep me coming back to this song.

Aught Music

2009 : JPB's Best Of

2009 : 19-20 Jack Rose & Charlie Parr

2009 : 18 "Blood Bank" by Bon Iver

2009 : 17 "You Don't Have to Be A Prostitute" by Flight of the Conchords

2009 : 16 "Tokyo" by Telekinesis

2009 : 14-15 Two tracks by The Decemberists

2009 : 13 "Drunk As Fuck [Top Billin Remix]" by Tittsworth

2009 : 12 "Demons Out" by Art Brut

2009 : 11 "Poison Trees" by The Devil Makes Three

2009 : 10 "Effigy" by Andrew Bird

2009 : 08-09 Two tracks by Doom

2009 : 07 "Lisztomania" by Phoenix

2009 : 06 Aught Music Roundtable: "This Tornado Loves You" by Neko Case

First Pass

Second Pass

2009 : 04-05 Aught Music Roundtable: These Four Walls by We Were Promised Jetpacks

2009 : 03 "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant" by Jason Crumer

2009 : 02 "In These Arms" by The Swell Season

About the delay

2009 : 01 "Summertime Clothes" by Animal Collective

2008 : 23 "The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" by Sia

2008 : 22 "L'effaçage" (excerpt) by Radu Malfatti

2008 : 21 "Snakes of Hawaii" by Army Navy

2008 : 20 "The Healer" by Erykah Badu

2008 : 19 "Love Is" by Ringo Starr

2008 : 18 "red light" by Rod Modell

2008 : 17 "Don't Haunt this Place" by The Rural Alberta Advantage

2008 : 16 "Librarian" by My Morning Jacket

2008 : 15 "This Will Never Be Our Town" by Jason Anderson

2008 : 13-14 Two tracks by Jenny Lewis

2008 : 12 "Arms Like Boulders" by The War On Drugs

2008 : 11 "Lament" by Jacaszek

2008 : 10 "Long Division" by Death Cab For Cutie

2008 : 09 "Stephen Stephen" by Apples in Stereo

2008 : 08 "Bedroom Costume" by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head

2008 : 07 "Ragged Wood" by Fleet Foxes

2008 : 06 "Oliver Square" by Cadence Weapon

2008 : 05 "Time to Pretend" by MGMT

2008 : 04 "You, Me and the Bourgeoisie" by The Submarines

2008: 03 "(I Don't Want To Die) In the Hospital" by Conor Oberst

2008 : 02 "Psychotic Girl" by the Black Keys

2008 : 01 "Inner City Pressure" by Flight of the Conchords

Week of Rest

2007 : 38-39 Aught Music Roundtable: Love Is Simple by Akron/Family

Roundtable Part One: "Ed Is A Portal"

Roundtable Part Two: "Phenomena"

2007 : 37 Aught Music Roundtable: "Paper Planes" by M.I.A.

First Pass

Second Pass

2007 : 36 "Intro" by Graham Lambkin

2007 : 35 "Impossible Germany" by Wilco

2007 : 34 "Turn On Me" by The Shins

2007 : 33 "Circadian Rhythm" by Son Volt

2007 : 32 "Don't Make Me a Target" by Spoon

2007 : 31 "Shine In Exile" by Beat The Devil

2007 : 30 "Trial of Champions" by 3 Inches of Blood

2007 : 29 "The Mesopotamians" by They Might Be Giants

2007 : 28 "Brunettes Against Bubblegum Youth" by The Brunettes

2007 : 27 "The Coolest Kid in School" by The Teeth

2007 : 26 "Lament of the Highborne" by Russell Brower

2007 : 25 " We're The Trees" by A Sides

2007 : 24 "Sad Songs" by The Frames

2007 : 23 "Sexfaldur" by Amiina

2007 : 22 "St. Pauli" by Art Brut

2007 : 21 "My Moon My Man" by Feist

2007 : 20 "Section 23: Get Up and Go" by The Polyphonic Spree

2007 : 19 "Rue The Blues" by Oakley Hall

2007 : 18 "Stay Tuned" by Robert Wyatt

2007 : 17 "White Kids Aren't Hyphy" by MC Lars

2007 : 16 "Water Line" by Sage Francis

2007 : 15 "Buckethead" by Carbon/Silicon

2007 : 14 "All My Mistakes" by The Avett Brothers

2007 : 13 "No Cars Go" by Arcade Fire

2007 : 11 "Superheroes 2007" by The Toxic Avenger

2007 : 10 "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" by Of Montreal

2007 : 09 "Harder Than You Think" by Public Enemy

2007 : 08 "Outlaws" by Joe Purdy

2007 : 07 "Don't Lose Yourself" by Laura Veirs

2007 : 06 "Plasticities" by Andrew Bird