Listening to albums in 2009 is different than it was ten years ago because of this. You go in with less at stake and, while that means less risk, it can also mean less reward. The fact that these ten albums actually inspired that same sense of justification and reward made them Racecar Brown's top ten albums of 2009.
The Solange Knowles cover of "Stillness Is the Move" may have been the year's most notable moment that screamed "this looks bad on paper, but sounds awesome in practice," but Discovery's LP was right up there. Take the keyboardist from Vampire Weekend, Rostam Batmanglij, and the frontman from Ra Ra Riot, Wes Miles, and have them make a electro dance-pop record?
From the tremolo synths of "Orange Shirt" it's clear that LP will defy expectations. While many artists venturing into uncharted territory might be too eager to throw all there tricks at the listener at once, "Orange Shirt" unfolds slowly, not trying to do too much. It's indicative of the whole album. LP works as much with open space and silence as it does with its buzzing synths and old school drum machines.
Truly impressive about LP is how quickly it works its way into the subconscious. Like Vampire Weekend's debut, it's unconventionally catchy. A single listen of either record implants it in the memory banks permanently, even Angel Deradoorian's acrobatic vocal performance on "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". What's even more surprising is how some moments consistently surprise, like the slow motion chorus on "So Insane" or the handclap madness of "It's Not My Fault (It's My Fault)". That ability, to be so memorable and still so surprising, is a difficult trick to pull off, but LP makes it seem like no big deal, with a easy nonchalance that makes the record itself impossible to shrug aside.
John Cusack's Rob from the movie High Fidelity says, on the making of a great mix tape, that "you gotta start off with a killer, to grab attention." As true as that is for a mix tape, it's equally true of albums. A lot of the albums on this list have spectacular side-ones, track-ones, but only one would be as immediate and connective as My Maudlin Career's opener. It starts out with those two powerful stomps and it's clear from that point the group has perfected the chamber-twee they've been cultivating over their, um, maudlin career.
The Glaswegian twee-pop group released Let's Get out of the Country in 2006, but My Maudlin Career sounded as if they had actually gone out there and traveled the world. Aside from the obvious reference to French naval officers or song titles like "Other Towns and Cities", My Maudlin Career was decorated with splashes of Russian strings, Californian surf-rock, French squeezeboxes, and early '60s American girl-pop. It sounded as if it had crossed oceans, lending a world-weariness to the Parisian-style lyrical romances.
Achingly indelible, My Maudlin Career is wonderfully contrasting, such as when the triumphant sentiment of the title track ("This maudlin career has come to an end/I don't want to be sad again) is canceled by the obviousness of the self-deception implicit in singer Tracyanne Campbell's defeated delivery. Even the bombastic horns of closer "Honey in the Sun" belay the depressing sentiment of "I wish my heart was cold." Campbell may be determined not to be sad again but she just can't help it, and My Maudlin Career triumphs because of it.
Experimental art and the avant-garde are always interesting. That's kind of the point of them. In some ways they're designed more to inspire discussion, about the art itself, about the medium in which the art is working, about the context of the art, than it is designed to inspire pure genuine enjoyment. That isn't to say that experimental art and the avant-garde aren't enjoyable, just that they're often more about hitting the head rather than the heart.
Something beautifully transcendent happens when avant-garde artists attempt to include artistic conventions into their work. When done with a deft touch, the two ends of the spectrum can come together to form something that isn't quite a middle ground, but rather a reimagining of both experimental and popular art, where they work together rather than apart.
That's what Bitte Orca, 2009's offering from Dave Longstreth and company, is: A reimagining of experimental music and popular music, where they both work together to create something a little more than both. From the joyous explosion of electric guitars and drums a minute into "Temecula Sunrise", the rhythmic shuffle that knocks "Two Doves" just left of center, or the danceable virtuosity of "Stillness Is the Move," the Dirty Projectors played with the conventions of both avant-garde and pop, making something deliciously moving from either perspective.
One of the elements that defined Antony Hegarty's last offering, 2005's I Am a Bird Now, was a hope that shined through even the album's darker moments. The Boy George duet "You Are My Sister", though slow and morose, still contains the heartwarming if simple sentiment "You are my sister and I love you." Later track "Fistful of Love" could be mistaken musically for an old Motown soul classic, with bursts of saxophones in all directions, and the cymbal and snare rides with which Berry Gordy loved to back his tracks.
Contrarily, The Crying Light is remarkable because of its striking hopelessness. Whereas on I Am a Bird Now Hegarty tempered his dark moments with bursts of light, The Crying Light works in the opposite way, where even a triumph like the gentle guitar waltz of "Aeon", with Hegarty practically spitting in joy, "hold that man I love so much," can't seem to shake loose of the album's pervading moroseness.
Packaging isn't something critics deal with a lot, but there wasn't a more appropriate album cover than Antony's for The Crying Light. Dramatic, beautiful, depressing, and artful, the one image is inextricable from the album's music, particularly Antony's request during "Epilepsy Is Dancing" to "cut me in quarters, leave me and quarters," a sentiment stated so powerfully that it resonates even through closer "Everglade"'s sweeping strings, coloring them in grayscale.
It seems hard to believe that rock music could do anything that sounds even remotely fresh with just guitars and drums. The last time something marginally unique happened in rock music with just those two elements was 2004, when the now-defunct Death From Above 1979 released their one and only full-length You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, which exploded with force and vitriol that now it seems preordained that it wouldn't have been able to last.
That's why hearing Japandroids' Post-Nothing for the first time was so revelatory. Yes, it's only guitars and drums and, yes, sometimes they wear their standard indie-rock influences on their sleeves (Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, blah blah blah), but there was something immediately unique about Post-Nothing. Something that made you feel not the least beet embarrassed about pumping your fist in the air and shouting "XOXOX! XOXOX!" at the top of your lungs.
Tracks like the "Heart Sweats" and especially "Young Hearts Spark Fire" spat out 20-something relationship philosophies like they were nothing, with phrases ranging from the hilarious ("Your style's such a mess, girl/I should know I used to date a sylist") to the accidentally profound ("I don't wanna worry about dying/I just wanna worry about sunshine and girls"). It was that seemingly accidental quality to the best parts of its sound that makes Post-Nothing so endearing; If there had been a sense of calculation to this frenetic burst of energy it wouldn't have sounded nearly as fresh. As it is, it sounds like the Canadian duo stumbled upon to something brand new, even if the medium they're working in was nothing new.
At this point, it's only vaguely necessary to talk about Christopher Owens' incredible story, right? Dude grew up in the Children of God, saw his mother essentially prostituted to various dudes, ran away, was de facto adopted by a Texan millionaire, moved to California, met Chet Smith, did a lot of drugs, and recorded Album. Got it? Good.
Look, the story behind Girls and the creation of Album is amazing, no doubt about it. Reading interviews with Owens where he talks about the wide-eyed wonderment of doing something simple like going to Borders, or the strange audacious things that he witnessed within the cult is an interesting window into what cult life is like from both the inside and the outside. Ultimately, though, while there are signs of his former life on Album, they're more whispers than shouts.
"Lust For Life", as I alluded to in the My Maudlin Career blurb, was the strongest side-one, track-one all year. While it didn't touch on all the sonic ground that Album covers, it was a concise emotional statement, one expanded in the meditative repetition of "Hellhole Ratrace", the beach philosophy of "Summertime", and the yearning of "Lauren Marie." Musically, they perfected the '60s Beach Boys surf-vibe so many others tried with less success to emulate in 2009, pairing "409"-style melodies with the simple emotional ache of the Elvis Costello. But for a record that had such an incredible backstory and such classic influences, it still somehow sounded bright and new, sounding simultaneously as if it had always been around but like nothing that had been heard before.
On this blog I wrote about the revival of the '80s aesthetic in 2009, in fashion, in attitude and particularly in music. I made point to mention the misremembered reminiscence of the chillwave movement that was punctuated by groups like Memory Tapes and Washed Out. It was like an homage to an era that didn't exist, a sort of "what-if" take on what they felt like the '80s "should have" sounded like. With that in mind, aside from the higher production values, Passion Pit theoretically should have fallen into the same category. They didn't.
Manners' opener "Make Light" explodes with vitality and energy, it's new wave synths mixing with the ADD Ocasek guitars. It 's a great example of how Passion Pit transcended the sound of those chillwave groups by taking the '80s for what they were, embracing the sounds that were actually there ("Little Secrets"' NES synths, or "To Kingdom Come"'s Buggles effects) and updating them for consumption in 2009.
If Manners were all just '80s pastiche, though, it wouldn't have been nearly as rewarding a listen or as repeatable a disc. What makes it so successful is the utter seriousness these guys have in their playful sound. They used their insatiable energy and big screen, go-for-broke style to frame the longing and pain that bubbled to the surface on tracks like "Swimming in the Flood" and "Moth's Wings". It was the duality of using joyous sounds to explain joyless moments that affected listeners, sounding like the comedown from '80s excess that never happened but was truly deserved.
It takes a certain amount of cojones to name your album after one of the greatest musicians and composers in human history. It takes even more cojones to actually replace his last with the name of your band, and a still greater pair to reference Mozart and Liszt in your album of dance-flecked pop rock. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix had the cojones, and more importantly, the musical skill to pull it off.
The first side of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is the one that people lose their shit over, with the opening salvo of the two singles, "Lisztomania" and "1901", the latter of which reached the mainstream consciousness by being placed in a Cadillac commercial. For my money, though, it's the closing half, starting with "Rome" and running the table to closer "Armistice", that comprise Wolfgang's emotional core.
Like an organically instrumentated Passion Pit, Phoenix linked triumph with defeat, with even its most towering moments tempered by an unfulfilled yearning, like when swelling, gentle keyboards and ticking guitar lines of "Girlfriend" can't disguise Thomas More's tired delivery of the titular line. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was another example of how the musical lines have blurred in 2009. Weirdly, in a decade in which genre walls seemed to disappear, it was something that was clearly a pop rock album to expose how the walls between mainstream and the niche were just as false.
Hey, let's talk about Africa! Every conversation about the Very Best's first actual album, that came on the heels of last year's excellent Are the Very Best mixtape, seemed to concern the cultural implications of a group like the Very Best. Two white boy producers from Europe teaming up with an African transplant in England with an insane voice to appropriate a variety of traditional African styles in dialog with just as many Western pop styles, particularly from the world of dance, where Radioclit, the two producers came from.
Here's the thing. None of that matters to Warm Heart of Africa. It doesn't matter that one of the members of Radioclit met singer Esau Mwamwaya in Esau's bike shop. It doesn't matter what the guest appearance of Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend says about the give and take between Western and African music styles. What matters to Warm Heart of Africa is being absolutely unrelenting in hitting your pleasure centers in a variety of ways.
Tracks like "Yalira" and "Rain Dance" give the sense of being next to roaring bonfires, dancing and singing and vocalizing along with masses of people. "Chalo" and "Mfumu" sound as influenced by new wave as anything this side of Phoenix. "Julia" and "Ntende Uli" stomp and crackle as if expecting Lil Wayne to come in and drop a wild verse at any moment. But its ultimately Mwamwaya's voice that is Warm Heart of Africa's primary weapon. Smooth and effortless, it soars over vaguely Indian strings on "Kada Manja" and injects a sense of play into the steel drums of "Kamphopo". And as interesting as the musical discussion of Warm Heart of Africa's roots may be, it becomes utterly pointless in the face of the power of something like the pastoral, a cappella closer "Zam'dziko".
There's used to be an assumption that if someone was making a concept album, it meant they were either overly pretentious or overly ambitious. Sometimes, terrifyingly, both. Take for example the convoluted atrocity of something like the Smashing Pumpkins' MACHINA I, which Billy Corgan spent years meticulously crafting, and it shows in the worst way. Nothing sounds natural, and the unfollowable "story" that apparently included characters like Glass and June and the voice of God in a radio, did nothing to help Corgan's supposed masterpiece.
Hospice, recorded by Peter Silberman during a period of self-imposed social exile in his New York City apartment, deftly and obviously avoids those pitfalls. In fact, without the story or concept of Hospice, it wouldn't have the same emotional heft, the same powerful affectation that it does. It gave Silberman a framework in which to expose his pain, an outside way of viewing the events of the album.
There's an intensely personal feel to Hospice, even from the first moment of the meandering piano instrumental "Prologue". It only compounds when the words kick in on "Kettering", where the themes of the album lay themselves bare when Silberman sings, fragile and breaking, "I wish that I had known in that first minute we met the unpayable debt that I owed you." When you're dealing with a story of a careworker falling in love with an emotionally abusive, terminal cancer patient, drama is to be expected and, in less deft hands, Hospice might have been crushed under the weight of such a difficult story. Instead, Silberman wisely makes the stakes less about life and death and more about the emotional conflict implicit in loving someone who hurts you.
Musically, the album is just as devastating. Gentle organs and ambient noise crop up, rising and falling around Silberman's whispery razor blade of a voice, framing these personal moments that occasionally expand or explode into bursts of guitar noise like on "Sylvia"'s crushing chorus or static feed back on the crescendo of "Atrophy". Pop songs like the guitar-driven "Bear" and mandolins of "Two" are haunted by their context in the rest of the album and lent an additional emotional weight because of it. Hospice works so well because of its tortured, truly heartbreaking mood, one that could have been swallowed up by the drama implicit in concept albums, but Silberman's measured hand created something both intelligent and communally painful by avoiding the tropes of concept bombast and instead letting listeners into a world of private, intense pain.
Hey! Finally looked at your stuff!
ReplyDeleteI find it odd that you write a whole diatribe about concept albums and then completely ignore "The Hazards of Love." Also, no P.O.S. (or hip-hop of any kind) is a little disappointing. I guess, all in all, a little too heavy on the electro for my tastes; there just isn't enough variety. But hey, a valiant go, and I respect you for it.
That's because The Hazards of Love was good but nothing special, an album where the concept dominated and obscured the music. And hip-hop had a weak ass year. Raekwon and Mos Def had the two best hip-hop albums of the year easily, but neither of them were absolutely mindblowing. In a list of ten they all have to be extraordinary and nothing in the hip-hop world was.
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