Favorite Songs 2011

1. Grouper - "Alien Observer"
Beautiful song. I played this a whole lot this year over and over and over. Liz Harris proves you can do a lot with a little. Minimal repetition of a lonely guitar/organ figure and isolationist lyrics about being an alien in your own skin/own world/etc.


2. M83 - "Midnight City"
A dream pop song with a trashy sounding '80s sax solo. If you'd described "Midnight City" to me like this last year I would have said "no fucking way I would like something like that." This turned out to be one of many unbelievably excellent pop songs on M83's double album opus Hurry Up, We're Dreaming and if you think "Splendor" or "New Map" or "Intro" are better than this I'd be hard pressed to argue.


3. Tim Hecker - "The Piano Drop"
One of Hecker's finest moments. If you blast this and don't immediately want to hear Ravedeath, 1972 from start to finish you've got a stronger heart than mine. Shimmering guitar static that continually sounds like it's fading out only to completely overwhelm once more.


4. Ursula Bogner - "Sonne = Blackbox"
Imagine if you took some tin can vocal recordings from an old animated Walt Disney film and gave them to Delia Deryshire this is the kind of piece I think she would have made. Beautiful voices that hiccup and glitch out like sped up and slowed down tape loops.


5. Gang Gang Dance - "Mindkilla"
Siouxsie Sioux does rave.

http://soundcloud.com/mexicansummer/04-remember
6. Oneohtrix Point Never - "Remember"
Sorry no video for this one. Daniel Lopatin plays on the same malfunction of memory that James Kirby's entire album as The Caretaker did. Here it's done with a vocal sample that sputters the word "remember" over and over as a mantra. But what is the question?


7. Moon Wiring Club - "RSVP VIP Fresh"
Again no video and I couldn't even find a soundclip for this to post. Great track featuring what sounds like a Vincent Price sample. Simultaneously able to conjur evil while placing it in a setting from a children's cartoon.


8. John Maus - "Believer"
Unless he ends up doing something even more brilliant on his next album I'm going to call "Believer" Maus' answer to Ariel Pink's "Round and Round." While not quite reaching the level of bizarre that song did it still has a quality to it that is endearing in its own way. Kind of like Ian Curtis crooning into a wind tunnel.


9. Rihanna - "We Found Love"
Rihanna continues a streak of great singles. Your appreciation of which completely hinges on how much you like maximalist pop music. Another rave style single in the vein of "Only Girl (In The World)."


10. Kreayshawn - "Gucci Gucci"
This comes from a genre that I often lovingly refer to as "trash rap." Disposable hip hop. I played this repeatedly because it was quite funny. The video is funny too. It's just something to have a good time with. If you want to argue and try and make more of it than that then we'll have to agree to disagree.

Favorite Albums 2011

1. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
A beautiful piece of work by an exceptionally talented man. Easy enough to throw on and enjoy pretty much any time but challenging to the point that I played it repeatedly just trying to compare the differences between tracks that at first seem like identical twins. James Kirby's modus operandi is still the same, dust off some musty ballroom 78s, work his magic and see what comes out the other side. If only it were that simple. The jump cuts that occur between tracks and even within tracks on top of and inside of familiar sounding melodies became the earworms themselves. I became addicted to hearing those static skipping noises as much as I anticipated the actual melodies. Another entry in an astoundingly overlooked oeuvre/back catalog.

2. Grouper - A I A: Alien Observer/Dream Loss
The first of two double albums on this list. Nearly interchangeable with #1 as far as quality, amount of time spent obsessing over it, and total enjoyment. Liz Harris delves back into the type of recordings she was doing before Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill but somehow comes out with two albums that are far better than anything she's done in the past. "Alien Observer" is both the best and saddest song I played endlessly all year. Completely barren in approach and execution, Harris proved that you don't need volume or drums or much of anything other than a quietly repetitious melody and absolutely killer vocal arrangements. I will admit that listening to both albums front to back in succession is not dissimilar to what I imagine downing a whole bottle of barbiturates will get you. It's more lovely though.

3. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
With each successive album I like Daniel Lopatin's work more and more. I love it that he mostly abandoned the Emeralds style synth drone that so many bit off of this year and last. Replica is a garbage dump of manufactured commercial sounds, recontextualized and reformatted in a style not dissimilar from the turn of the millenium glitch trend. The source material is different and makes for a wholly other listening experience. Bonus points for best album art of 2011. The back cover is even better than the front.

4. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
Another case similar to Gang Gang Dance. Anthony Gonzalez gives it his all in a bid to make his version of a double album opus ala Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness. I love double albums. I especially love double albums where the artist is obviously going all out trying to do different things that may make their core audience uncomfortable in some way. This might be the most pop M83 record yet and definitely his best in my opinion. The retarded spoken word bits were limited to exactly one track that was easily skipped. My initial reservations about him affecting a Peter Gabriel style singing voice eventually subsided along with any reservations I had about the garish architecture of some of the tracks (hello, one of them has slap bass). Most of the shoegazery bits have been whittled away in favor of overt synth/electronic pop. M83 suffers naught for it.

5. Demdike Stare - Tryptych
I won't waste too much time here. Last year Demdike Stare released three limited edition 12" albums (Voices of Dust, Forest of Evil, and Liberation Through Hearing). They were all phenomenal. Minimalist, dub techno with samples from two of the best crate diggers in the world (one of which works for Finders Keepers so I think that's a pretty good resume alone). Bleak, sinister, and complex are all words I'd use to describe it. Knowing last year that they were going to release this compilation I was hesitant to put any of those albums in my list. So here you go for all the assholes that can't get with it since the entire world decided that 2011 should be the settled upon year for us to actually critically analyze them. Whatever, as long as these guys keep making records I don't give a shit when people hear them.

6. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
Do I think this record has anything on Hecker's classic 2006 album Harmony in Ultraviolet? Simply put, no. However this is a much better record through and through than his last album, An Imaginary Country. It lacks the awesome mellotron pieces that I loved so much from that album but it makes up for it with a little track called "The Piano Drop" which might be one of his best compositions ever. The first half of the album surges and seethes with industrial strength distortion grind but drops off in the final third when he backs off the noise into some airy piano compositions. Not that these are bad but they make what would have been an even better album play a little lopsidedly. Hecker still has it over pretty much all of the guys who sound even remotely like him at this point. It's been a long time since even Christian Fennesz (who I would call his only real challenger) even posed a threat. As always I can't wait to see what's next. And if you enjoyed the piano pieces from this he released an entire album of piano sketches on a whim that were used as the starting point for this record but sound nothing like what ended up here, instead echoing Satie or Rachel's.

7. Julia Holter - Tragedy
One of those records that just kind of subtly comes in and sweeps you off your feet. It reminds me of The Hospitals' Hairdryer Peace, not that the two albums sound anything alike but that the songs are more like suggestions that emerge half formed from a fog of other sounds. In the Hospitals' case it was blown out/deranged garage rock and harsh noise whereas Julia Holter comes at it from a sort of musique concrete or modern classical background almost. There is a strange vocoder piece in the middle called "Goddess Eyes" that is not at all like the rest of the album. There are samples of an opera singer and foghorns. It's all based around Euripides' play Hippolytus. A completely highbrow affair but prior knowledge is not required to enjoy what I would call a modern classic in the realm of avant-garde pop.

8. John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
If you want a fun evening you could read John Maus' thesis on Punk Rock here and then try to parse out what it has to do with the lyrics of his song "Copkiller" (not at all related to the Bodycount song of the same name). Or you could just listen to this great record he released this year which falls in line as a worthy companion to his friend Ariel Pink's Before Today from last year.

9. Skullflower - Fucked On a Pile of Corpses
Reconciles the Skullflower of IIIrd Gatekeeper with that of Tribulation. Featuring a fleshed out lineup with Lee Stokoe, George Proctor, and Samantha Davies. Unendingly harsh and completely unforgiving. Come prepared to suffer hearing loss or do not come at all. Mountains of treble, strange subtle minor key dirges underneath a shitstorm of static. Offensive track titles. People talk about black metal like that panda makeup is supposed to scare me, it'd go a lot farther if more of those guys made music that sounded like this instead of nth generation Burzum and Emperor tremolo picking and blast beats. Leans towards harsh noise wall at times reflecting back the one dimensional aspects of Vomir and The Rita into something that is actually far more interesting.

10. John Wiese - Seven of Wands
A much quieter album than I would have expected from Wiese. Initially doesn't seem as good to me as Circle Snare but I thought the same with that album vs Soft Punk and now I like it better.

11. Moon Wiring Club - Somewhere a Fox is Getting Married
I almost didn't hear this one in time to even make the list. What a moron I am. I really liked MWC's last album A Spare Tabby at the Cat's Wedding too but I waited to even check this out until it was almost too late. I swear "RSVP VIP Fresh" has a sample of Vincent Price's voice. Hands down the best thing to come out of the whole Ghost Box camp this year even if it wasn't released on that label. Way way WAY better than the new Advisory Circle which I pined and moaned about wanting until it turned out to be a snorefest. "Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail that brings our friends up from the underworld." This should be in the top ten. Don't look at that number and pretend you can add an extra one and stick this in the top ten somewhere because I couldn't find a place for it.

12. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
You want to get weird? Here's a crystal bug staring right at you. Here's Gang Gang Dance pushing weather channel muzak lite into the outro of "Chinese High". Here's the bizarre Siouxsie indebted version of house music on "Mindkilla." Here's another piece that sounds like '90s smooth R&B. You don't like it well I think Eazy E had a few choice words for when that happens. A careful balance between tasteful and distasteful. You decide whether they ride that line carefully enough. There are some missteps I think but a solid album nonetheless.

13. Panda Bear - Tomboy
This is the weakest album to come out of Panda Bear in a while either as a solo album or in his position as a member of Animal Collective. That being said it is still a great electronic pop album. Vastly different sounding than the mind bending sampledelia of 2007's Person Pitch but maybe more like a black and white rendering of the style Animal Collective was into on Merriweather Post Pavilion. Maybe think of this as MPP's awkward little brother or something. The songs are better than a lot of other people's but coming from this guy I kind of expected more. I really like his song from that one skate video this year. "Atiba Song" is what it was known as on the internet I believe but it never got an official release. Why couldn't this record have been more like that? It is what it is I guess. Settling for merely great isn't so bad. (oh and this cover art is fucking awful, thanks for purposely baiting those dudes who were already calling you a man child Noah Lennox...a girl crying...sheesh)

14. The Field - Looping State of Mind
This is the third album from Axel Willner's project. The third to use nearly the exact same cover art as the first two with slight variations ala Pole's 1, 2, and 3. The title pretty much sums it up. Lots of ambient loops playing repetitively. Your enjoyment of this album will depend on your love of such things or ability to stomach/tolerate it. For those of us that do I will say that I like this far more than the second Field album and it is either on par or maybe better than From Here We Go Sublime.

15. Ursula Bogner - Sonne = Blackbox
There has been a significant amount of postulating that Ursula Bogner does not exist, that she is in fact a hoax designed by German electronic musician Jan Jelinek in order for him to produce albums removed from his own canon that owe more to Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram. Bogner's legacy has been a wealth of recordings given to Jelinek by her son Sebastian who he met by chance on an airplane. According to the story the real Bogner died in 1994. This is the second set of recordings produced under this moniker, whoever it really is. It makes no difference to me. I can't fathom why Jelinek wouldn't want to claim these pieces as his own if they were in fact. Beautiful compositions for tape and voice.

16. Tombs - Path of Totality
Another record from a group whose debut I completely slept on. Someone once described this album to me as "like ISIS if they only played a faster version of stuff from Oceanic." Sold. I also hear some tribal post-punk in here like Killing Joke or even early Death in June plus maybe something like Helmet and Quicksand to boot. Good stuff.

17. The Horrors - Skying
I was late in hearing The Horrors' last album Primary Colours. A friend of mine had to convince me that it was actually somewhat within the realm of shoegaze in order for me to finally check it out. I had only heard the band's first album where they did a really bad mix of Bauhaus, The Cure, and The Birthday Party while bringing nothing to the table to really make it seem worthwhile. This album still retains traces of shoegaze but is more in line with '80s soundtrack music like The Psychedelic Furs or Simple Minds. Not bad.

18. Stare Case - Lose Today
I'm sure you're thinking "oh boy yet another Wolf Eyes side project" so go ahead and count yourself out for this one if that's not your thing. Although self-described (hilariously I might add) as a "blues roots" album, Lose Today sounds like a logical extension of the Wolf Eyes sound. Made with more traditional instruments and a few rotten sounding horns this is still harsh enough to distance it from most people's interpretation however loose of "blues" plus there's still enough gross feedback to link it to the noise canon.

19. Andy Stott - Passed Me By
Much like his pals in Demdike Stare, Andy Stott crafted an album of forbidding menace through the use of snails pace tempo and disturbing low end. There are clipped vocal samples that litter this graveyard but the whole affair is massively cold sounding as if the only people that inhabit its space have long since been passed on from this world.

20. Zola Jesus - Conatus
This record started out much higher on my list. I kept going through phases where I loved it but then felt disappointed because I didn't think it pushed the boundaries of what people expect from her enough. Nika Roza Danilova has a great voice, that much I feel certain about. Still a great pop album even if it doesn't quite live up to the highs of the Stridulum and Valusia EPs.

21. Nate Young - Stay Asleep
I always make it a point to keep up with any of the side/solo projects of Wolf Eyes and any of its former and current members. These guys are always cranking out good stuff. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Nate Young's last solo record Regression and this one released on tape continues in the same tradition. Horror movie style drone but supposedly this time designed to ward off evil spirits according to Mr. Young. Sounds more like what I would expect if those spirits were trying really hard to creep me out instead. Quieter than you'd expect from a Wolf Eyes member but stylistically still not that far removed from the family tree.

22. David Tagg - I Am The Wolf
David Tagg has released a ton of drone records and I Am The Wolf is just one of two great releases he had this year along with the gorgeous Dream Compost tape on INSTALL. I played this album endlessly both before and after the tornadoes that destroyed parts of where I live here in Tennessee back in the spring. It's subtle beauty helped me forget about how cruel and terrible life can sometimes be. Sounds like spring to me.

23. Locrian - The Clearing
When I told a friend of mine that Locrian was one of only two metal bands on my year end list he kind of looked at me funny and told me he didn't think of them as a metal band. Only under the most generic of terms would they even be classified as that. This record incorporates elements of old industrial music, drone, and noise under one roof. It has the most wide open space I've heard on a record of its ilk too. It's Locrian doing what they do best and doing it better than they have before even.

24. Atlas Sound - Parallax
This is my least favorite of Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound albums so far. I keep waiting for him to create a record under this alias that equals anything he's done with his band Deerhunter. That doesn't mean Parallax is devoid of great songs, see "Doldrums," "Mona Lisa," and "Te Amo" for the best examples here.

25. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong

Not much to say here. A solid dream pop record leaning toward twee. If you told me you hated this I wouldn't blame you but I played it enough.

Favorites 2011 Jan - Jun

1. Skullflower - Fucked On A Pile of Corpses

2. Grouper - A I A: Alien Observer/Dream Loss

3. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

4. Demdike Stare - Tryptych

5. Panda Bear - Tomboy

6. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact

7. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

8. Peaking Lights - 936

9. David Tagg - I Am The Wolf

10. Tombs - Path of Totality

I didn't know Cy Kill put out an album.

Album Ruiners

Today I want to address an issue that comes up for me seemingly at least once a year. Most recently Bibio's upcoming album Mind Bokeh brought me back to this topic. What happens when a good or even great album has a single song so bad that it nearly ruins the album. In the case of Mind Bokeh this would be the sixth track, "Take Off Your Shirt" (it's not about what you think ladies I promise). On an album full of overblown synths, J-Dilla and Boards of Canada infused pop songs it stands out like sore thumb. A fellow writer at Tiny Mix Tapes commented that it reminded him of Red Hot Chili Peppers and I can kind of see that in the vocal delivery. My wife said the guitar part sounded swiped from a Robert Palmer tape. I keep thinking that it sounds like a heavier BeeGees song or something that might have played at roller discos in the 1970s. Maybe that was the intention, I just don't know. Whatever the case, it really diminishes the impact of an album that, whether you like it or not, at least flows properly from beginning to end and sounds of a piece. And it's a terrible song. If you can empirically prove that it isn't I'd love an explanation.

Whenever I come across a track like "Take Off Your Shirt" my mind always drifts to Led Zeppelin's "The Crunge." Smack in the middle of what is otherwise my favorite Zep record, Houses of the Holy, comes this pretty awful funk jam with someone asking "has anybody seen the bridge"....yeah you guys really broke the 4th wall with that one.... This is the same album that contains "The Ocean," "Over the Hills and Far Away," and fucking "No Quarter" yet they chose to put "The Crunge" in there right along with them.

Just as I was getting over my disappointment with Bibio for including "Take Off Your Shirt" on Mind Bokeh along comes the new Cold Cave album with a similar problem. I will be the first to admit that I wasn't that impressed with CC's previous album Love Comes Close but any band with Dom Fernow as a member is going to get a second chance or two to impress me since I pretty much think Fernow's work as Prurient is the bees knees when it comes to harsh noise (see And Still, Wanting but you may want your hearing tested after its over because that is one hella loud album). Anyway, Cold Cave's new record, Cherish the Light Years, is pretty great. The first single from it, "The Great Pan is Dead" had me at hello. It kind of sounds like New Order if they were a lot more indebted to Throbbing Gristle or maybe Ministry circa Land of Rape and Honey. It's a fairly short record at only about 40 minutes and nine tracks but the seventh song on it, "Alchemy and You" sounds pretty out of place with regard to one of its embelishments. It has what appears to be a trombone arrangement that shitty late 1990s third wave ska would have been proud of....yeah that's right I'm talking about Reel Big Fish or Catch 22 or Save Ferris...hopefully you get the picture. Google those bands if you want, they're all terrible. Don't think so? Don't read this blog again. (insert canned applause).

Whether you agree or disagree on these particular songs and albums, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has ever struggled with this issue. Chime in and tell me some others that come to your mind.

January/February

Here's some stuff from 2011 that I don't hate.

Belong - Common Era
Bibio - Mind Bokeh
Deerhoof - Deerhoof Vs. Evil
Demdike Stare - Tryptych* (technically a comp of LPs from 2010 which were all on my year end list for last year but still deserves more recognition)
FaltyDL - You Stand Uncertain
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
Nicolas Jarr - Space is Only Noise
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine

PJ Harvey's Horn

I really like PJ Harvey's new album Let England Shake. In my mind it is without question one of the best things she's done along in the last decade or so along with the severely under appreciated White Chalk and my personal favorite album of hers - Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. I do feel the need to talk about a serious problem I have with a particular track from the new record though, "The Glorious Land." As many reviews of the album have mentioned already, it contains a sample of a calvary horn. Although the song itself is pretty outstanding, the sound of the horn nearly ruined this one for me. It isn't like anything I've really experienced on an album before now. To say it sounds "wrong" or out of place is the epitome of understatement. That reviewers so far have glossed over just how out of place it is concerns me. We aren't talking about a sample that fits flush with the song or even slips in and out of phase to establish a psychedelic effect. The way the horn is employed on this particular track reminds me of what would happen if I was playing the album in iTunes and had a window on my computer open with one of those pop-up ads that keeps blaring a sound effect or letting you know you've "won" some prize for visiting a site. In fact, the first time I heard it I had to shut down everything else around me and play the track again just to make sure it wasn't something else outside of the song I was hearing. It sounds weak, tinny, and more or less obscures everything else playing in the song when it comes in (which happens several times during the song).

Comments welcome from any and all who have heard the song and wish to chime in.

Built in Backlash Defense

Sometimes backlash is a good thing. Take a minute to consider the implications of what I'm getting at here. It can serve to deflate an artist's rapidly expanding ego, an oft important part of discourse regarding music. Just imagine how different talking or writing about Axl Rose would be if he only wrote Guns N' Roses songs and never ran his mouth back in the day. There's an old saying that goes you've got to "pay your dues" but more and more we're seeing very young artists emerge and enter the press cycle so fast that there literally isn't even time for that. A lot of this can be chalked up to the availability of technology making it easier for musicians to use tools that were never available to the previous generations to sculpt sound into whatever their imagination can dream up. These new artists can arrive fully formed and more often than not they don't get a chance to go through growing pains before their music is either dismissed entirely or exalted.

I haven't read anything on James Blake that makes me think he's got an Axl Rose sized ego. But I also haven't had the chance to seriously digest his self-titled album to the point where I've been able to form my own opinion of it. Why? I certainly have had it as long as everyone else on the internet, where it popped up as far back as December. Problem is that before we were even finished tallying our year end lists for 2010, people were already calling Blake's album the best thing to come along in 2011. Reviews slowly started trickling out and all of them have been alarmingly positive. For a record that seems to me in possession of a few serious flaws I've been a little more than nonplussed at the lack of discussion about the actual music on the album. Parts of it are severely austere and skeletal, to the point of killing the album's flow - "Lindesfarne I" for instance. I know using autotune and other vocal enhancing tactics has got to be reaching the end of its shelf life by now so why is there so much love for Blake treating his own voice on this album. It definitely isn't the revelation for me that The Knife's Silent Shout was by comparison. I can definitely see the attraction in something like "Wilhelms Scream" though even if it sort of reminds me of a dubstep James Blunt (if you could only see my face scrunch up and make a disgusting look like someone just farted and it smelled like rotten eggs). You see that's what my initial reactions to this album have been like. But sometimes an album requires more time of one person than another to really hit the sweet spot. How can I possibly come to my own conclusions when every one else wants me to think this is the greatest thing since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (a record I liked a lot but could also certainly see flaws in).

I was having trouble already when my comrades at Tiny Mix Tapes gave this thing a perfect score. Then I see Pitchfork's review by Grayson Currin. I like Currin's writing quite a bit, he tends to cover the more out there stuff and that appeals to me. I've definitely had a difference of opinion with him before (see his review of Prurient's Arrowhead versus mine and consider that we're both Prurient fans when reading them). Like a few other Pitchfork reviews I've read in the past, Currin's James Blake review preemptively addresses the oncoming backlash - putting it in the context of a young white British dude co-opting dubstep's Jamaican rooted sounds. I have a harder time thinking someone like James Blake is honestly co opting someone else's culture, since dubstep has become ubiquitous in dance music now, than I do with having another review that doesn't address the musical problems the album could interpretively be seen as having in lieu of another 9.0 score from the publication piled onto the heap of praise for Blake. Has the internet snake eating its own tail analogy come to the point where you can get backlash and have a backlash against the backlash before an album even makes it to print publication discussion? Yeah it looks that way. Maybe I'll eventually warm up to James Blake's album over the next few months, maybe it's a mediocre record with a handful of great singles, maybe it's just entirely terrible. What I know for certain is that I don't need to hear someone proactively trying to safeguard their opinion of an album from criticism or backlash. I've written some harsh words on records before and I've done my fair share of praising as well but I despise this attitude that there needs to be a final word on everything. It's okay to be wrong and also to change your mind. I would hate to think that my opinions were completely static regarding music.

Ariel Pink and Stevie Wonder

I fail to understand how not one review I read last year of Ariel Pink's album mentioned how "Round and Round" (Pitchfork's #1 song of 2010 no less) borrowed its opening vocal melody from Stevie Wonder's classic "My Cherie Amour." I make no bones about how much I loved Before Today or that I think "Round and Round" stands on its own as a phenomenal pop song. It just strikes me as a bit odd since Wonder's song is fairly ubiquitous within the lexicon of great pop songs. Would it have been so hard to frame a discussion of the song's greatness in easing through the door on a melody that almost anyone would recognize? Do modern critics think that Pink's audience is so young that they won't know Stevie's song and therefore discussion of it in this context is irrelevant? Or are music critics willfully ignorant to the point because they don't want to admit that a song they fell for so hardcore couldn't be entirely original?

Compare and contrast:
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - "Round and Round"

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round & Round from Delo Creative on Vimeo.

Stevie Wonder - "My Cherie Amour"

Contender For Worst Album Cover of the Year #1

Well, I don't think I can go on another moment in life without pausing to laugh at this. Contender for worst album cover of the year? Definitely. And if the previous three Trail of Dead albums have set a precedent it's that no one should care about this band anymore beyond Source Tags & Codes.

Cut Copy Paste Men at Work

Like a whole lot of other people, I really enjoyed Cut Copy's last album, 2008's In Ghost Colours. Depeche Mode and New Order were pretty obvious touchstones for that album so I was really surprised by one of the first singles from the band's latest album, Zonoscope, because the obvious touchstone is Men at Work (who coincidentally also hail from Australia like Cut Copy). After doing a little Google searching, it turns out that I am not the only one who thinks that "Take Me Over" borrows a little too heavily from Men At Work's "Down Under." Just check the comments section of that link. The first time I played it in the car for my wife she asked me if it was a cover before the vocals kicked in. While Zonoscope album opener "Need You Now" gave me hope that Cut Copy had made a solid follow up to In Ghost Colours, I was pretty nonplussed by Pitchfork's Joe Colly's assertion that the song prepares you for whatever comes next on the album. Maybe he hasn't heard Zonoscope yet, but I have and it is pretty underwhelming. If "Pharoahs & Pyramids" and "Blink and You'll Miss a Revolution" didn't hint at how bad this record is just in its choice of track titles alone then wait until you actually hear them. "Pharoahs" in particular sounds like the kind of generic song a band would record for the soundtrack to Bill & Ted's Excellent adventure if they were going to visit Tutenkamen.

Deerhoof Vs. Evil Vs. Pitchfork

I find it funny how Deerhoof used to be one of those bands that could do no wrong in the eyes of Pitchfork, especially in light of the sliding scores of reviews of the both this album and its predecessor - Offend Maggie. Honestly, Deerhoof isn't doing anything all that different on Vs. Evil to what they did on Reveille or Apple 'O. There's still plenty of off kilter prog pop and Satomi's semi-twee vocal delivery. There's certainly not enough difference to explain away an 8.9 for Friend Opportunity as opposed to the 6.7 awarded to this release. It's even harder for me to stomach knowing that Douglas Wolk didn't even mention "Super Duper Rescue Heads" in his review. That might be the album's best song. The band even made a video for it that was hosted on Pitchfork's site not that long before the release of this album. Part of me wants to chalk it up to what could be called the "Polyvinyl curse," Deerhoof having jumped ship from Kill Rock Stars to Polyvinyl and this being the band's first release on the label. Polyvinyl at one time was heavily associated with what used to predominantly be a vein of indie rock that time has not been too kind to - emo. In this case it wasn't just emo but the label's onetime flagship act is what could be interpreted as emo's least successful and yet most pretentious band - Joan of Arc. I don't recall a single even remotely positive leaning review for that band on Pitchfork and in fact seem to remember reading an interview with Tim Kinsella of that band in Skyscraper magazine about how he had met Pitchfork founder Ryan Schrieber at a bar in Chicago and attempted to start a fight with him over how the site had ruined his band's career. Let's forget for a second that Joan of Arc's main claim to semi-recognition is the fact that they shared members with Cap n' Jazz and not that they ever made a note of music worth a damn. It only takes a simple search using Pitchfork's own advanced search capabilities to peruse the Polyvinyl reviews on the site and see that most releases on the label scored well below average with a few notable exceptions (Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna comes to mind). It could also be chalked up to younger reviewers/changing of the guard at the site too. I mean Deerhoof aren't exactly in line with the current nostalgia wave of hazy sounding groups since they mostly get by on muscular guitar/bass/drums concoctions that are fairly mathy. It would be easier to let this bumble around in my brain if I knew that this opinion came from the sole mind of Mr. Wolk, but as Ryan Schrieber told The New York Times recently, Pitchfork operates on a hive mind mentality and as such they would have had to get several writers to agree on this score.

While I personally can't say that I think Vs. Evil is Deerhoof's best album, it's far from their worst - which is what is implied by the significantly lower score as compared to these:
Reveille - 8.5
Apple 'O - 8.3
Milk Man - 7.6
Runners Four - 9.0
Friend Opportunity - 8.9
Offend Maggie - 7.6

See Douglas Wolk's review here.

Return and Mission Statement

Originally I used this blog to post snarky comments on all things music related. At one time I had a rant on here dissecting the "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived" by Weezer to provide proof of Rivers Cuomo's slow and painful slide into irrelevance from his pinnacle as one of the great pop song writers of the '90s. There was another railing against Girl Talk's Greg Gillis and his "KFC failure pile in a sadness bowl" music to borrow a quote from Patton Oswalt. It turns out I have more free time to do these things now so I will continue. Expect nothing but endless backhanded slaps against the face and occasional accolades. I am not without a sense of humor so feel free to send hatemail to the now deleted email account that I am unable to substitute a working one for or unattach from this blog (thanks for that Blogger).