2007 in music.

it’s time for the obligatory top ten! there was a lot to choose from this year, but i’ve picked the records that somehow really stood out.

10. Stars of the Lid – … And Their Refinement of the Decline

i have a soft spot for electronic classical music, or contemporary classical music, or whatever you want to call it. the stars of the lid are probably the best band working in this minimalistic, chilly genre right now, and it had been six years since the tired sounds of stars of the lid… but their breathless, airy compositions with exactly the right drones at the right time still sound blissful and pregnant with meaning, and that’s all this blogger asked for. more organic than their previous work though – more lamonte young than delia derbyshire. which isn’t at all a bad thing either.

 

 

09. Studio – Yearbook One

studio are a swedish duo. their music is an unlikely combination of krautrock, balearic trance circa 1988 and pet shop boys-ish synthpop. that might sound a bit repelling and too scene for its own good (like, the kind of music scene people wearing couture that looks like thriftstore gear listen to in lounge bars or wherever hipsters go to die), but yearbook one is actually really good. i challenge you to listen to ‘radio edit’ or ‘no comply’ without feeling the desire for a royal serving of ecstasy.

 

 

08. M.I.A. – Kala

some people say music shouldn’t be political. m.i.a., everybody’s favourite tamil tiger, would probably bang their heads against a wall. hiphop infused with the modern lovers, new order, the clash and with aboriginal children on the mic is fine with me, and even if you would want to block the political messages (which i happen to agree with) out, there’d be a hell of a listenable dance record left. and it’s good to know an AK-47 is $20 in most of africa these days, not to mention the fact that she’s out for your money, and she’ll shoot you for it (i’d shoot you if you were a capitalist, stock exchange-crawling parasite and take your money, too, hypothetically speaking).

 

07. Electrelane – No Shouts, No Calls

every once in a while some major label pundit crawls out from under his rock and screams the album format is dead. if they just listened to no shouts, no calls, they’d know this is definitely not the case. electrelane’s specialty is the kind of stereolabby kraut-pop one gets obsessed with before he knows it even happened. this is probably the most cohesive album of the year: 11 concise, pretty songs that break your heart and spin your world around.

 

 

06. Deerhoof – Friend Opportunity

i got into deerhoof with friend opportunity, way back when in 2005 (haha). if that album was a noiserock assault on the senses, friend opportunity is its crazy cousin who lives in a nepali ashram and claims she’s in contact with the cosmic entities after she’s sniffed a gallon’s worth of diesel fumes. on this little objet d’art, deerhoof switch from noisy guitars to menacing tropicalia to japanese synthpop every two minutes or so. ready your ritalin and off we stride!

 

 

 

05. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver

yeah well, if you haven’t heard this album chances are you’ve been in a particularly nasty coma for the better part of 2007. to sum it up shortly, james murphy expands on his eponymous debut’s chunky dance-rock, coming off like this generation’s eno or kraftwerk in the process, and well, it’s a really good album. that port-a-cath does look nasty, dear, you should go download ’someone great’ and rest for a little while, maybe.

 

 

 

04. Caribou – Andorra

dan snaith, aka caribou, has spent most of his career synthesizing sixties psychedelia, latter-day folktronica and 70s drugscapes. on andorra, his fourth album, he somehow permutates sixties sunshine pop, creating a little universe of songs about girls with grannies’ names, sometimes steve reich-ian, sometimes droning, sometimes jarring, at times very ornate and chocked up with strings – andorra is like a bonbon box full of yummy chocolate, there simply isn’t room for even one more heavenly sighed word, drone, or found sound, and it’s just so… satisfying to listen to.

 

 

03. of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

kevin barnes, of montreal’s only real member, had hit a bad patch when recording this little gem. his wife had ran off, leaving him snowed in in norway, in the grip of a bad chemical depression, which in turn spawned hissing fauna. i’ve rarely heard a more accurate expression of serious depression – yes, it sounds glammy, but isn’t glamour the saddest things at times? and yes, it’s bouncy, but if you were on ten tabs of lithium a day, you’d be hopping around like a kangaroo too, trust me. hissing fauna is both catchy and sad, hopeful and desperate. the irony of it all is that this record seems to have been of montreal’s big commercial break – but then kevin and nina are back together and both way happier than they were.

 

02. Panda Bear – Person Pitch

disclaimer: i really loathe animal collective and wouldn’t call it music (all i have to say about animal collective is: fuck off, americans, get a job). i consequently didn’t think panda bear’s solo stuff would be any good, but it is. person pitch sounds like a protools collage of the tribal chants of a long-lost country, the best in acoustic developments this century, and delicious warbly organ drones. it’s a thing of beauty, and i’m addicted to it… but animal collective are still wankers.

 

 

 

01. The Fiery Furnaces – Widow City

the fiery furnaces have always been a tricky band, to say the least. they seem to be stuck in a cyclical movement between awesomeness (blueberry boat!) and complete suckiness (their opus about, and sung by, their late grandmother olga saranthos. it has to be heard to be believed). widow city finds them back in greatness-mode: it’s a 70s-inspired classic rock story about being carried off to decorate bordellos, dancing naked for the sultan of medina sidonia, the hieroglyph for french canal boat, feeling really lonely, inventing ‘the emergency cigarette behind glass’, cairo, demonic husbands with mistresses, the duplexes of the dead, a murderous grand jury, and doormats with nautical prints. oh yeah, the music is quite brilliant too – menacing, sexy math rock grooves, contradictory as that might seem. this is an album that makes me feel like somebody, something not many albums could possibly pull off.

merci, les friedberger.

Not quite there, but really pretty close, really:

a couple of records that are not on this list but almost, almost were: blonde redhead’s 23,  scout niblett’s this fool can die now, the field’s from here we go sublime, matthew dear’s asa breed and chromatics’ night drive (iv).

The Worst of 2007, at least the worst of the so-called good:

animal collective (!!!!!), beirut (!!!!!), justice (!!!!!!), architecture in helsinki, a place to bury strangers, midnight juggernauts, and the worst record i’ve heard for as long as i can remember: white williams. it’s so bad it gets… well, it doesn’t get good, but it makes you want to introduce mr. ‘white williams’ to the dutch euthanasia procedure. worse than yoko ono, worse than bob dylan when he went christian, worse than animal collective, even.

from the vaults, vol. 12.

Seefeel – Quique (1992)

ah, the early 90s, a musical era not unlike the present. starting with the summer of love back in ‘88, ibiza holidays, ecstasy, baggy pants, madchester and discos playing nothing but acid house were all the latest rage. many reasonably well-known bands jumped the electronic bandwagon: my bloody valentine’s loveless was the first real example of guitar-and-sampler rock; the jesus and mary chain went crazy about drum machines on automatic, not to mention the happy mondays, a.r. kane, the orb and countless other bands that somehow expanded on the tired formula of indie rock.

the ‘new rave’ movement might or might not exist as such (i think it only exists in the sick, dumb minds of NME editors, but whateva), but over the course of the last coupla years rock and dance have, once more, found a certain common ground. result: lcd soundsystem, yeah! klaxons. boooring. justice, awful. zillions of indie poseur bands with modular synths… hmm, some are good, some are pathetic. but… there certainly isn’t a modern seefeel around.

seefeel -two twentysomething blokes and one indie girl- decided the time had come to form a shoegaze band in ‘90, which was exactly the same idea half of the uk population seemed to have that year. needless to say, they didn’t exactly stand out from the crowd; they actually were, in their own words, downright awful. then, however, they discovered ecstasy and dance music, and sold their indie records to buy drugs, a sampler and a sequencer.

quique is the result of this bold career move: a swirly, intoxicating mess of a record, that seemingly can’t really decide if it’s dance or shoegaze. there’s nine tracks, two of which are just aimless, but beautiful ambient (‘through you’ and ‘imperial’). then there’s ‘climactic phase 1′, 8 minutes of schizophrenic krautrock-on-a-balearic-beach, and ‘industrious’ and ‘polyfusion’, gamelan music mixed with coldwave techno.

curiouser and curiouser. and indescribable. those aren’t even the weirdest songs on the record. ‘plainsong’ probably started out as a rock song, before sarah and darren tore it apart and resequenced the thing. sarah’s vague cooing about lost love is buried behind a wall of glossy feedback, frantic 808 drumming and what sounds like a burning guitar being sacrificed to an aztec divine entity. ‘charlotte’s mouth’, on the other hand, has retained more of its original arrangement. yes, it’s shoegaze. shoegaze played by depressive raccoons on the first class deck of the titanic. after the latter sank.

anyway, quique came around at exactly the right time for this kind of music. it’s not really eclectic, but more like, ehm, completely insane. seefeel kept it up for two more albums, but went more and more electronic, to the point of not being seefeel anymore. this band was all about the juxtaposition of feedback and primitive samples, and by the time they signed to the much-revered warp label, only the samples and gamelan influences were left.

anyway, would someone please wake me up when a new rave band, any new rave band, releases a record that’s half as daring as this? and get this album, like, now.

from the vaults, vol. 11.

The Fiery Furnaces – Widow City (2007)

the fiery furnaces are the kind of band that, in an ideal world, would be everyone’s favourite band. matthew and eleanor friedberger, siblings, have been making the oddest, whackiest pop music since 2003’s gallowsbird’s bark. the whole prog-pop thing they’re sort of famous for only started on the next year’s blueberry boat, though: an album of weird but addictive, synth-y long songs that change direction every 30 seconds.

combine this with eleanor’s deranged warbling about dancing naked at the court of the sultan, being carried off to decorate bordellos, emergency cigarettes behind glass, having a steam train-o-phobia, and mormons kidnapping her because she’s their leader’s great-granddaughter, and we have a winner.

widow city, the furnaces’ fifth album, was supposed to be their ‘classic rock’ album. yeah, whatever. they already made a ’synthpop’ album that didn’t sound all that different from what they usually do, and a ‘grandmother at the microphone’ album… which is best forgotten!

this one, though, is oddly groovy and has those hilarious, revved-up 70s guitars and cheesy synths a volonte. it actually sounds like the fiery furnaces have tried to limit the amount of melodies they usually manage to cram into one song, and it sounds much better for it. ‘the philadelphia grand jury’ starts out as a strangely sensuous groove, but quickly turns into eleanor barking desperately about the omnipotence of, yes, the philadelphia grand jury.

the closer you listen, the more it seems like eleanor is trying to tell us a coherent story. ‘my egyptian grammar’ is about a desperate woman who cycles around town, xeroxing hieroglyphs to attract the attention of another world entity. it’s also a great pop song, but whatevs. in ‘the old hag is sleeping’, presumably the same woman lives with a beast of a man (‘he smiles only when he can give me abuse’). and so on, and so on.

should eleanor call the domestic violence helpline? i don’t really care, as long as they keep releasing groovy cocktails of everything between twee pop and math rock. one last quote: ‘i’ll drink a restorative beer, to take my mind off these te-a-a-a-a-a-a-rs’. see, there is something going on here.

and, i’m seeing them tonight. someone’s psyched. whee!

from the vaults, vol. 10.

Bowery Electric – Beat (1996)

how bleak the world must have seemed when it became painfully obvious my bloody valentine would never give us another loveless. slowdive, the best pretender to the shoegaze/postrock crown, turned into a boring alt-country band after the commercial disaster that pygmalion was. disco inferno might have gone pop on d.i. go pop, but afterwards they went exactly nowhere at all. shoegaze, in its original incarnation, was dead.

or was it? two new yorkers apparently didn’t really think so. lawrence chandler and martha schwedener worked towards a more claustrophobic version of guitar-heavy dream pop on their ‘95 self-titled debut, then bought a sampler and started experimenting with the combination of noisy guitars and looped samples.

beat is downtempo shoegaze infused with warped hiphop beats (the kind you find on crackly instrumental vinyl from the late 80s). if loveless was the aural equivalent of mdma, and souvlaki was xanax or ambien, then beat is definitely ketamine. i dare you to buy this record, snort enough K to get you in an abstract mood, and listen to ‘black light’ and ‘fear of flying’. it’s a mindfuck.

so what does it really sound like? the opener, ‘beat’, is built around guitar feedback and a simple, repeating beat. schwedener intones ‘words are just words, words are just only words’ like she’s going to jump off a cliff or something. the beautiful seven-minute dirge leaves you completely unprepared for ‘empty words” mesmerizing, towering beauty. strange, slowed-down beats and majestic guitars galore. schwedener and chandler chime in every now and then, dispassionately crooning their dispassionate words over the dispassionate soundscapes.

this, dear reader, is a record that doesn’t convey any emotion at all; it doesn’t need emotions to work its magic. some ’songs’ are actually just long, circular, starry-eyed drones, but then there’s swooning hallucinations like the insanely catchy ‘fear of flying’. fear of flying? wait a moment. this album is about ketamine. and for the law-abiding among you, it’s the closest to that weird, disaffected high you’ll ever come.

after beat, bowery electric managed to turn into a vapid portishead knock-off and disappear without a trace. triphopification, the plague of the end of the century, had got the best of them. so, beat will probably always stay a well-kept secret.

some closing thoughts. is this record very experimental? yes. is it sane? probably not. does it come with sc’s recommendation du chef? you bet your life it does.

from the vaults, vol. 9.

Blonde Redhead – 23 (2007)

blonde redhead is quite a bipolar band. kazu makino, amedeo and simone pace started out as a sonic youth-like noise outfit, and then abruptly went mellow on 2000’s melody of certain damaged lemons, a rather sombre album of muffled no-wave. they were then dropped by their label, and raised the funds to record misery is a butterfly themselves in order to get some more artistic liberty.

what followed was their second quantum leap: first they went from loud to quiet noiserock, and here they went all cocteau twinsy and dreampoppy. ornate, hazy pop about despair, falling and the struggle that life actually is ensued, and the band used a rich, vibrant palette of strings, synth patches, and strange percussion sounds for the first time. they got signed to 4AD -quite an obvious choice, for 4AD was the label of preference for all those late 80s-early 90s marvels of songcraft (cocteau twins! his name is alive! insides! pale saints! this mortal coil!)- and then, only then, their career started taking off, with this decisively not catchy record.

23 takes this new dreampop thing to its peak, going for a dayglo sound that isn’t exactly shoegazey, but almost rivals my bloody valentine in the sheer extent of layering, overdubs, and pretty noise throughout the album. ‘23′, the opener, basically consists of kazu makino’s sweet japanese vocals set against a background of overdriven guitars and frantic drums; yet it’s not as much a rock song as a candy-coloured reverie. most of the ten songs here follow the same scheme: they are far more than the sum of their parts.

its’ strange how ’silently’ works so well with its cheesy synth patches, bittersweet chorus and synthesized hand claps (!?); ‘publisher’ has to be one of the most moving songs i’ve heard the last year, and word has it ‘top ranking’ is built around an aphex twin beat, of all elements. yet these songs escape description. you can only broadly define 23 as emotional guitar- and synth-based indie rock, with a tinge of shoegaze, heavy on the sexy male and female vocals, and strangely touching.

this is a vague review, i know, but do you think cocteau twins or his name is alive reviews were any less vague? blonde redhead is the dreamiest band we’ve got in our not-so-dreamy-at-all here and now.
(PS: if you agree, sue, i would like to quote your review here. it might be a first, but it’s better than anything i could say about 23. drop me a line, kay?)

from the vaults, vol. 8.

Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth (1980)

ah, postpunk! such a refreshing little genre moaning about sex and death in early thatcherist britain, i.e. hell. the times were a bit bleak, and the music was more than a bit bleak. bands like gang of four, wire, joy division, orange juice et al. have been praised into the sky during the last five years’ post-punk revival, but whenever i hear people who were young in the late seventies talking about that scene, these names rarely spring up. the whole post-punk thing wasn’t as much about the bands that would later be glorified, as it was still very much a homebrew, democratic, more or less organic thing.

if you wanted to start a band, that was perfectly fine; there always was a ‘rock against sexism’ or an ‘anti fascist rally festival’ to crash, and there’d be an audience for your ramblings. if you couldn’t sing or play your instrument for an inch, that was alright too; progressive rock was dead, and nobody wanted to be reminded of its virtuoso musical masturbation. colossal youth is very much a product of this era and mindset.

the moxham brothers and their bored-looking vocalist alison statton headed from cardiff, then one of britain’s grimiest places to be. they somehow shot to relative regional fame, doing a couple of london gigs, and ultimately landing a record contract with rough trade. rough trade didn’t exactly bury them in gold, though; they had one week of studio time to record colossal youth.

the result is one of the most immediate albums you’ll ever have heard. it’s not exactly punk either: the moxham brothers play farfisa, bass, various instruments and a tinny drum sequencer while alison coos her glacial, jaded vocals. this might be the first bedroom pop album ever – the sparse instrumentation gives that sense of intimacy you get when some lonely 00s songwriter pieces a record together with protools.

it’s hard to describe what the great thing about colossal youth is. the moxhams and statton were all in their early twenties, so an endearing naivety permeates songs like ’searching for mr. right’ and ‘choci loni’. the sonic minimalism guarantees the perpetual freshness of this record – a bass, a tinny synth and a primitive drum computer will never sound outdated, and the lyrics capture that one moment in time when it looked that england had truly gone to the dogs forever. alison statton’s breathy, distant singing actually sounds very sexy.

despite all of that, there was only one reason why the young marble giants became underground semi-legends. they released a couple of eps and colossal youth. yup, only one album, an ep of outtakes and an ep of testcard music. just when colossal youth started to sell well, they disbanded, and turned to their very obscure solo projects. the one-single-album-syndrome always helps groups to get elevated to a sorta-legendary status. the young marble giants’ sole album, however, was also really, really good.

if you need further reference, the following people all admitted to be young marble giants fans:
kurt cobain, courtney love, laetitia sadier, trish keenan and james cargill. now get your name on that list, dear reader, you won’t regret it.

from the vaults, vol. 7.

My Bloody Valentine - Loveless (1991)

i wasn’t going to write about shoegaze this much, but it’s autumn, after all, and autumn is the time for pretty swirly noises. there are books about loveless, too. it’s one of these albums that have magically been elevated to a legendary status, however, it also lives up to the legend, something you can’t say about daydream nation, psychocandy or even the white album (i abhor the beatles, so there).

part of the thing with my bloody valentine isn’t really the music. they started out as a bad eighties pop group (don’t believe me, huh? go check out the filesharing networks), then moved to jangly indie, and by the time their debut, the lovely isn’t anything, was released, they found themselves at the forefront of a new, exciting subgenre called shoegaze. then kevin shields started to go nuts, and the band did way too much ecstasy. that might sound bad, and i guess it’s not exactly healthy to be high on fuckall all the time, but they probably needed to be fucked up to create something as swirly and drugged-out as loveless.

the album was three years in the making, produced by seventeen different producers, and nearly bankrupted their label. it wasn’t even such a smash hit when it first came out. the years and money were well spent, though. you’ll rarely hear such accomplished music. ‘only shallow’ has the strangest, sometimes metal-sounding guitars, distorted to the point that they could be anything. ‘loomer’ approaches sonic perfection with its outlandish, heavy swirls of music around some kind of strange ballad. ‘blown a wish’, ‘what you want’ and ‘when you sleep’ are pop songs in a very noisy gift wrap. ’soon’ still sounds like the future of rock.

the album’s centrepiece, however, is ‘to here knows when’. the sonic barrage is almost too much to bear, but bilinda butcher’s drugged-out singing somehow smoothes the omnipresent ripples of monster guitar out. the singing on loveless is strangely androgynous anyway, it’s quite impossible to tell if it’s kevin or bilinda warbling on and on about sex on acid. come to think of it, ‘touched’ deserves special mention. if you can make what presumably is a guitar sound like an enraged elephant, you can use me as a foot bench anytime.

with today’s technology, all of this sonic trickery wouldn’t have been all that remarkable, i agree. and that’s precisely why loveless is such an extraordinary record: you can try to record something that sounds like it, but you’ll never quite get there. shields’ mysterious production techniques simply can’t be imitated with midi and protools and whathaveyougot. my bloody valentine made the whole shoegaze/noise genre seem obsolete and primitive in a flash, and then proceeded to blow their brains out with a vast array of hallucinogens.

is this a tragedy? maybe. imagine what’d happened if the mythical follow-up to loveless would have seen the light of day… and was no good. they were probably going to become a boring dance band anyway (oh yes, there’s evidence. ’soon’? the glider remixes ep?). the only thing they ever released after loveless came around, their home studio destroyed itself and kevin ‘fatso’ shields started hallucinating all day, was that wire cover, ‘map. ref.’. it’s good, but it’s not exactly magic. it’s… not loveless. so, will mbv ever reform? i really don’t think so. is that a bad thing? i… don’t know.

from the vaults, vol. 6.

Slowdive – Pygmalion (1995)

what is it about classic shoegaze that makes you feel like sitting in the window sill on a cold winter night, smoking cigarettes and overanalyzing your little dreadful existence? well, not all shoegaze was about that feeling. my bloody valentine just wanted to do more ecstasy and vanish in a colourful whirlwind, and the pale saints were all about valium and little kitties. slowdive, though, perfected the art of tasteful despair on their second album, the excellent souvlaki. you’ll never hear anything sadder.

oh, wait, you will, when you get around to their third and last record, pygmalion. this music isn’t shoegaze as such anymore. it’s cold, wintry, bleak minimalism, replacing the layers upon layers of heavenly guitars and rachel goswell’s dreamy singing with, well, mostly silence and drones. ‘crazy for you’ is built around a processed guitar riff and one single vocal line, and it feels like a cold winter night, the kind of night when it gets dark at 5 and the cold cuts right through your clothes.

then there’s the really minimalist songs, built around silence. ‘rutti’ and ‘trellisaze’ are what postrock should be: sparse, bitter and resigned music that sounds more like talk talk’s last two albums than anything else. ‘blue skied and clear’ is the only real ’song’ on pygmalion, and you’d almost wish for it not to be there. neil halstead has never sounded sadder than when he sighed ‘you said love can be so sweet, you said love can be so good’ with a zillion processed guitar noises swirling around.

this is really an externalization of embitterment and disillusion. slowdive had never been really popular, since the backlash against shoegaze had already begun around the time souvlaki was released. then, when they moved into the british strain of postrock, they blew it with their record label (they originally didn’t want to release pygmalion at all, saying they needed some real tunes in this britpop era), and then disbanded. some members went on to form mojave 3, which isn’t bad as such, but too folky for my elusive tastes.

pygmalion was also the last, and best, british postrock album released, postrock in the original definition of the word, that is. later, americans would hijack the genre and turn it into obnoxious bombast (tortoise? gybe? even, say, mogwai? bleeergh). come to think of it, it might be the last real shoegaze album released, too. pygmalion sounds like the end of an era should sound: graciously resigned, and making you long for something you’ll never have. oh and, the demos for this album are floating around on the net too. they’re a real treat if you like krautrocky, sad distortion.