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Upon reflection, it's staggering to remember the varied albums that came out, of all the months, in January. Andrew Bird, A.C. Newman, Morrissey, Franz Ferdinand...but, no album set the tone quite like Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion. I was working in Seattle before this disc dropped and had the fortune to work with and become good friends with Terrance Terich, co-founder of Treblezine.com. After long discussions about music, he burned me a copy of this album, among others. I immediately agreed with him (and everyone else) that this was already one of the best albums of the year. "Summertime Clothes" is an addicting single, with a varied mix of sounds and influences. The emphasis here is on the notion of "collective"--this is a true group effort. I love how the group blends sampling and small sounds (listen carefully--it almost sounds like there are sound effects mixed in) with vocals and guitar that could have come from the 1970s. I played the crap out of this during the dreary winter, and it helped alleviate the depression of Lynnwood, Washington. Listen: Animal Collective >> "Summertime Clothes" |
Monday, December 14, 2009
2009 : 01 "Summertime Clothes" by Animal Collective
Friday, November 13, 2009
2007 : 38-39 Aught Music Roundtable: Love Is Simple by Akron/Family
 Roundtable Part One: "Ed Is A Portal"When this album was released, I wrote that Love Is Simple is "[t]he latest entry in the attempt to write the great American psychedelic folk roadtrip album, and one of the most successful I've ever heard. This album is the triumphant album of experimental folk-rock that acts like Califone, Wilco, and the Flaming Lips have been almost-making for a decade now (and that Camper Van Beethoven were almost-making 20 years ago), but it also breaks from that framework periodically, expanding into ecstatic mind-expanding jams—jams that locate the choice middle ground between the sloppy, shambalic, "No Neck Blues Band" type and the more polished, technically-efficient, "Phish" type, and consequently are more effective than either. Mystical in orientation, singular in vision: at its best, it's like a backwoods Americana version of the Boredom's Vision Creation New Sun." I don't actually think that I have anything to add to that, beyond saying that this track, "Ed Is A Portal," nicely sums up what I'm talking about. You can spare the seven and a half minutes. Trust me. Roundtable Part Two: "Phenomena"Phenomena, phenomena, phenomena. There are two kinds of songs that get stuck in your head, the kind that you can't wait to get rid of and the kind that you want to stay there stuck for as long as you can. "Phenomena" is in second category for me. I love the kind, flowing sound of the instrumentals and the dreamy tone of the vocals. It really makes me want to sing "Phenomena" over and over again. I found Akron/Family's third album Love Is Simple because eMusic suggested it to me. Love is Simple is the perfect title for this album. I can hear a love for the music and a simple approach to making the music. The songs on the album have a deep, rich sound without sounding over produced. This album really caught me by surprise when I first heard it. Phenomena, phenomena, phenomena. Listen: Akron / Family >> "Ed Is A Portal" | "Phenomena" |
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
2006 : 20 "No Space in This Realm" by Akron/Family
Sunday, August 30, 2009
2004 : 13 "College" by Animal Collective
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Sung Tongs is the album I think of as Animal Collective's "breakthrough record"—the first of their studio albums that lived up to the energy and promise of their live shows. As such, there are a lot of tracks worth writing about ("Leaf House" and "Who Could Win A Rabbit" are both exemplary) but when it came time to sit down and write, I immediately knew I wanted to pick this tiny incidental bit, less than a minute in length. Its emphasis on vocal harmonies and odd sonic textures make it instantly plain why some consider Animal Collective to be the "Beach Boys of the Aughts," but my fondness comes less from the way the song affirms some party line and more from its lyrical content. That's pretty funny, since the song only has one line, but when I hear it I never fail to imagine some high school kid not that different from myself at age 17—let's say sensitive, troubled, introspective and overwhelmed. I imagine him hearing the seven words this track has to offer, ideally through a haze of epiphany-making THC, and having his life suddenly change direction. I imagine that one day he will remember hearing this song as the exact moment at which everything began to get better. Listen: Animal Collective >> "College" |
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
2003 : 06 "Mika Rasvaa Maan Sisalla (Part VII)" by Uton
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When trying to describe the one-man Finnish act Uton, I sometimes refer to it as "forest drone." But what the heck does that even mean?  Imagine it like this: you're deep within a Finnish forest, surrounded by whatever kind of old-world botany they've got there. Mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns. At dusk, you come upon a dark grove which contains has a weird cairn of slime-coated stones grouped around the base of a metal apparatus, which looks like a set of organ pipes with some kind a crank attached to it. It might be some forgotten European municipal project from the 1960s; it might be three hundred years old. Tough to tell. The crank is badly corroded, but you're still able to turn it. After you've given it one complete revolution, expecting nothing, the pipes tremble, cough out some brackish water, and then start to emit this music. Darkness continues to fall, and all at once the bioluminescent slime coating every surface around you begins to glow. Listen: Uton >> ""Mika Rasvaa Maan Sisalla (Part VII)"" |
Sunday, August 2, 2009
2002 : 45 "Endless Happiness" by Black Dice
Beaches & Canyons retains its patina in a sonic memory for me. It came to me as a gift from a kind friend who thought I would enjoy it, as a replacement for a limited CD he lost. I would flip through its sides in my studio kind of listening, kind of not, normally preoccupied by something else. Fixing some drawings, making some zines, it wasn’t until the C side that I even really focused. "Endless Happiness" came on caught in a Ashra groove, looping its flute, bass drops and chimes in a familiar kosmiche music way that was entirely its own. Black Dice were familiar to me through the waning days of hardcore in the late 1990s: they seemed to be doing something interesting in comparison to the pallid wash given the genre by emo's emergence, empty tough guy posturing, and boring lectures set to sound by ideologues. Black Dice began as an assault both sonically and physically in a live setting, and this did get carried over in the recorded media; Beaches and Canyons, however, offered little of that repetitive, stabbing, garbled intensity. Instead, it seemed at times more open and more broad, improvised, and sometimes, unfortunately, painfully derivative of a lot of other suitcase-gazers. Stepping back from their impetus and seeing the trail they left behind always made them way more interesting. Make no mistake! Though I began my journey through this 2xLP disengaged, I was halted with "Endless Happiness," its ferocious drumming and blinking electronics; its swelling bass and melancholic melody overtaken by the sea's surf was perfectly hypnotic. I must have listened to this side alone about 10 times the first night I heard it. It finds itself in rotation continually. My attention toward that band hasn't been piqued since drummer Hisham Baroocha departed, but in my opinion this track is a great part of 2002. Listen: Black Dice >> "Endless Happiness" |
Sunday, July 26, 2009
2002 : 29 "Ghost Plants Part VII" by Thuja
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Back in 2002, I picked Thuja's Ghost Plants as my album of the year, and I wrote that it sounded like music composed by a tribe of mutants from the post-apocalyptic future, fiddling with the ruins of our industrial society. The truth of that is embodied nicely in this representative segment (the tracks are all untitled), which jettisons mostly everything about Western song structure and replaces it with little more than ominous electronic oscillations, clattering, grinding, sticks, stones. If you wait for something to "happen" in it you're liable to be disappointed, and yet if you listen to the crenellations and complications of its anti-formal forms with real attention, you will find that they are enormously rich in aesthetic interest, even beauty. Same as anything, I guess, but if that lesson is one that this album can teach then it's well worth the price. Listen: Thuja >> "Ghost Plants Part VII" |
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
2001 : 36 Three tracks by the Sun City Girls
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Libyan Dream is an impossible album to choose a single track from. A re-issue of the Sun City Girls' oeuvre as a part of the Carnival Folklore Resurrection series (#7), this particular selection runs the gambit from the lo-fi garage rocking version of the Amboy Dukes's classic "Journey to the Center of Your Mind" to the seemingly spontaneous skronk "Instantaneous Decisions," to the listenener-friendly surf-rock version of "Vinegar Stroke." If you listened to this with the volume reasonably loud, it would have you equally dancing grooves in the floor and plugging your thumbs in your ears—what more does music ask for? Listen: Sun City Girls >> "Journey to the Center of Your Mind" | "Instantaneous Decisions" | "Vinegar Stroke" |
Thursday, June 25, 2009
2001 : 08 "A Raga Called John, Part Three" by Pelt
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The music world, collaborative and promiscuous by its very nature, tends to generate its share of "strange bedfellows"-type alliances. A good example could be seen by those who kept an eye on psychedelic music throughout the Aughts: early in the decade that scene was characterized by a lot of heady cultural exchange between the free folk subculture and the drone subculture. This fecund blooming of partnerships between two microgenres of music that didn't look that similar on the surface was puzzling: both groups were obviously interested in prying at the doors of perception, but was there really a meaningful sonic kinship, or were these just folks who got along because they liked the same drugs? For my money, this is still an open question, but it's helpful, now as then, to have the band Pelt to gesture at as an illustration of the potency of the allegiance. Everything seemed to flow into them—Fahey-esque Americana guitar, Indian raga structure, ethno-drone instruments from around the globe, acid-trip logic, the blasted-out hum of post-Sonic Youth rock amplification—and from this nexus materialized this campfire apparation: the 2001 double album Ayahuasca. This album maintains real value for me as an awesome synthesis of disparate influences. Listen: Pelt >> "A Raga Called John, Part Three" |
