Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Burton’s Top 8 Songs of the Year (conflict of interest edition)

Burton Parker, December 30, 2009 in Lists. 0 Comments Tags: .

Inspired by Jeff’s post, I thought I’d have a go at doing an end of year list as well. Mind you, I’m barely qualified to even write here. I’ve got all of one review under my belt so far, and an EP at that. I must disclose, many of these artists are also friends and/or clients through my work. That being said, these are honestly, truly my favorite songs this year and I wanted to share. Let’s do this!:

  • Kid Sister – “Get Fresh”
    Easily one of my favorite albums of this year. It’s a fun record, which of course means the retards at Pitchfork hate it.
  • Manchester Orchestra – “I’ve Got Friends”
    It’s not a cover of the Garth Brooks song, although if Chris Gaines had won out this might have been a remotely possible b-side in his alternate universe career.
  • Radio City – “Coming Down Easy”
    These guys come from my neck of the woods and are pretty new. A really great rock song, great bridge, great voice – it’s all there.
  • Medusa – “Mediatrix”
    Perhaps oddly, right along with Kid Sister this was another one of my favorite full lengths. The breakdown makes you want to pull out your nervous system, which the surgeon general still strongly advises against doing.
  • Wilco – “You Never Know”
    Georff Twearrisoneedy
  • Major Lazer – “Pon De Floor”
    This is a case where an already peculiar and engaging piece of music was made all the better by the second weirdest video I’ve ever seen. First weirdest was, well, also Major Lazer.
  • M. Ward – “Epistemology”
    M. Ward makes the best Bible song since “Cum on Feel the Noize”.
  • Coalesce – “Wild Ox Moan”
    Simply a brilliant piece of music. I love everything about this song. It’s a complex song, with complex subject matter, based around a simple, traditional field holler. Well played, sirs. Bonus tip: track down the BBC sessions version for extra rawness.

Short Cuts: The Wooden Birds’ Magnolia

Jeff Laughlin, December 23, 2009 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Time has been harsh on all of us whether we want to admit it or not.  The past is, at best, a disheartening trial and error process gone horribly awry at the exact wrong moments.  This woman or man at this exact point is but an idea, and as a friend at work told me recently, “We’ll all turn to dust anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”  What a boring thought, then, the past. The Wooden Birds have a past.  Look them up on the interwebs and learn that past.  For me, this is an album that arrived in my hands months after it debuted, but has had a wonderful effect on me, their past projects be damned.  They are the proof of a world where style is substance; where lyrics that are mere representations of other lyrics make sense, fit perfectly and craft a world that does not need to matter.  Magnolia is an album of repetition and it spills over itself with no overwhelming leaps.  Magnolia is a good album that relies on the specific talents of The Wooden Birds and asks nothing more of the listener than to let style serve its purpose. Analyzing is for the weak, we are all mired in our past, forward thinking is for the (wooden) birds.  Take the face value once in a while and maybe, just maybe, you can grieve less on your petty failings and just look out the window and smile at humanity.  If we are to die, then let “Choke,” “Hailey” and “Sugar” be our funeral marches.  This album is a bloodless non-revolution.  I’m for it and so be it and all that.  If we are to be dust, let Magnolia lead us home.  It might be the most relaxed we’ve been in this life since we cried upon entering.

Robin Crutchfield: The Hidden Folk

Jeff Laughlin, December 21, 2009 in Music Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Albums frequently lose creative steam.  It happens constantly to bands both creative and drab.  Often the most interesting piece of musicianship on an album are the “in-between songs”– the noises and spurts of creativity when the songwriting become less masterpieces than space.  You know the phenomenon– there’s a few songs then some new instrumentation enters the fold.  Perhaps a piano or a 12-string guitar.  There’s an absence of lyrics or maybe just a vocal harmony.  And it’s the shortest, simplest,  most repetitive song on the album.

It’s also the most creative.  You may not relate to it, but that is the point.  The in-between songs, as a rule, don’t include you in their plans.  They don’t exist to bring you closer to the album. They are disharmonious moments of frustration and bliss– the counteraction to writing and recording an album.

The Hidden Folk is 19 of these songs.  Short bursts of creativity, easily mistaken for dolorous or capricious mood music.  They should not be dismissed so easily, however.

The harp, the lyre and the thumb piano are but three of a myriad of acoustic instruments that intermingle playfully and pan from ear to ear (this album is best heard on headphones).  And with each, comes the feeling of removal– a good thing.  These songs are removed from the normal landscape.  They are whimsical movements that move like nymphs and fairies through forests of rapid movements.  Wind blown leaves, drips of rain, the clouds barely visible, crunching of leaves; the songs create a whirlwind of images without having to try too hard.

Not to say they are effortless.  To the contrary, Robin Crutchfield seems like he labored over these songs to make whimsy each song’s marrow.  Each is injected with a vision and given an energy that permeates through even the thickness of “Insect Machine” or the lightheartedness of the albums opener “We Find Our Way In.”  “Poison Splinter,” my personal favorite, feels like it lasts 4 minutes and it is one of the shortest on the record coming in at just over a minute.

The point of The Hidden Folk may not be the distance between the songs and the listener or the openness of the forest.  The point may not be to traipse through the woods.  The point may lay lax in the motion.  What Robin Crutchfield has created expands the plane of sound beyond acoustic instruments, beyond folk tales or moods.  He has created the album within an album– the album that most cannot write.  The songs written in short bursts of creativity, the throw-aways for most, the ones outside form are common knowledge and long-form fodder for Crutchfield.  It just may surprise the listener how important and necessary his work is– even when the songs seem caught in-between.

The Best of 2009: Fake Bands

Jeff Laughlin, December 17, 2009 in Lists. 8 Comments Tags: , .

10Listensbestof2009

Here begins the 10Listens.com “Best of 2009″ lists.  No reason to do it the right way since we are still new and 30,000 other sites are giving out real lists.  Also, this will introduce our mascot.  He is as of yet unnamed, but is obviously ripped, so don’t fuck with him.  Feel free to suggest names in the comments sections.

10. Bats Hate Jarves– Non-Human Entities

A more experimental album, BHJ shrugs off the sophomore slump with a mix of electronic influences and violent lyrical images.

9. Ketchup Ghost– Cordiality

Sherod Santos’ newest record makes a believer of us all and a fool of the establishment.

8. Gravy Seals– Barbecubed

“Too Much Gravy” might be the single of the year. Infectious beats and intimate MC-ing make this one of our favorite debuts.

7. 2200 Sequences– The Very Best of 2200 Sequences

Who knew that when Mel Hurdley left Many Shocking Things, he would go on to write a masterpiece of epic proportions? One of the only double albums (as a debut!) that keeps the listener interested the entire way through.

6. Tween Wolf– Sports

The follow up to the “Control EP” makes good on the promise for more destruction and madness. “Golf” is easily the best track– a subtle side to the insanity and riffage.

5. Fuck Tuxedo– The More You Know

When these gals sing, the world is listening.

4. Failuretronix– Beat Seeking Missle

Best rap album of the year, its shortness notwithstanding. Best song title of the year has to be “Reagonomix.”

3. French Fires– No, Thank You

Epic production and one of the most amazing voices in Grime/Dubstep.

2. Black Jeeps– The “Disclosure” Mixtape

If you had told me that a mixtape about the movie disclosure would get my head nodding in 2009, I’d have said you were an asshole. Now who’s the asshole?

1. Parked Van and the Rapetones– s/t

This should be on most lists.  It’s the reunion everyone wanted and the most surprising addition to BrendlesFest in over a decade.

Honorable Mention:

Loose Teeth– Under Covers

Gritty and gratuitous, this proves that it doesn’t matter who thinks punk is dead so long as it kicks ass.  The song “2 Much” is a particularly amazing thrasher.

Short Cuts: Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy

Joe O., December 15, 2009 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy provides an ideal soundtrack to a 42-minute train ride for someone with plenty to think about.  The songs chug forward with steady locomotive rhythms, and the album as a whole encapsulates that Zen-like railroad-riding state of mind- especially if you’re still buzzed from the night before and in desperate need of sleep.  Thoughts flow in a muddy stream of nebulous consciousness; recurring flashbacks drift into internal rehearsals for future conversations, grievances not yet aired, true feelings still hidden; gut-scraping anger and disgust yield to resignation and tenderness, and back again, and back again, resonating with daydream reverb against the walls of inner space; time seems frozen under an Impressionistic magic hour sky, even as the outside world zips across the window.

It’s an absorbing soundscape, particularly through headphones.  The deft mix of apparent influences is equally enchanting: the endearing, spontaneous amateurism of Robert Pollard bathed in Tom Petty’s Southern jangle and topped with a splash of Iggy Pop’s bile.  Throughout most of Childish Prodigy, the gorgeous and gritty formula works wonders.  I was hooked from the start by rockers like “Hunchback,” “Freak Train” and “Monkey,” while more tranquil songs like “Dead Alive,” “Overnite Religion” and “Blackberry Song” grew on me more with each spin.  Too bad the album loses most of its steam toward the end.  Despite some neat flourishes- the heartwarming trumpet in “Amplifier,” the train-whistle harmonica of “Inside Lookin Out”- the record’s uninspired final third has little to offer.  By the end of it all I feel restless and frustrated, like when you zone out and miss your stop and now you’re stuck on the express for 15 more minutes.  Then you think to yourself: oh well, at least the scenery’s still pretty.

Lady GaGa: The Fame Monster

Joe O., December 8, 2009 in Music Reviews. 8 Comments Tags: , .

If we can define good pop albums the way Howard Hawks famously defined good movies- that’s three great scenes and no bad scenes- then Lady GaGa’s The Fame Monster is certainly a good pop album.  At least three songs are great, the rest aren’t bad, and at only 34 minutes long it never threatens to wear out its welcome.  It’s shamelessly sleek, glossy and digital, but with enough heart, humor and horror that it is far from soulless.  The only significant problem I can hear is that its tracks are in slightly the wrong order.

It starts with the current mega-hit “Bad Romance,” a move that might have made more sense if not for the last track, “Teeth.”  One of the album’s fun n’ catchy fillers, “Teeth” throbs with four-on-the-floor stomp and neo-burlesque brass as Lady GaGa entices the men in the house to show their proverbial fangs.  It sounds like a slow-burning fuse that’s supposed to psyche us up for a big-ass pop explosion, and for some reason it’s anti-climactically placed at the very end of the record.

So after my tenth spin through The Fame Monster, I shuffled “Teeth” to the top of the order and it worked much better.  Besides, a song as show-stopping as “Bad Romance” deserves at least one opening act.  The profusion of succulent hooks, the Amazonian-cyborg lust and the near-operatic drama would have been enough to cement this song’s status as an instant classic, yet Lady GaGa goes the extra inches when she delivers one of the most deliciously reprehensible lyrics that will ever infect the Billboard Top 40 (”Want you in my room/ while your baby is sick.”)  (UPDATE: Looks like I mangled this lyric. See comments below).  If “Bad Romance” has any warts, they’re the moments when she insists on reminding us in plain English that she’s “a freak bitch, baby.”  Well duh- she made that crystal clear with that sick baby lyric.  I’m nit-picking, though.  Criticizing Lady GaGa for her lack of subtlety is kind of like complaining that Andy Warhol didn’t use enough earth tones.

“Alejandro” comes next, and its tropically-tinged melodies are hard to resist, even as they unabashedly rob Ace Of Base to pay ABBA.  The third track (or fourth on my playlist), “Monster,” is the closest thing the album has to a dud.  It’s perfectly listenable and hummable 21st Century bubblegum, but the chorus hook is a bland disappointment after such a catchy verse. Also, coming from the freak bitch who drenched herself in blood live on MTV, I expect lyrics a little juicier than “that boy is a monster/ he ate my heart and he ate my brain.”

Then we come to the album’s centerpiece, “Speechless,” a lighter-waving power ballad where Lady GaGa takes off her costume and reveals that there is in fact a heart on her sleeve (although even that heart still comes with a sprinkle of Ziggy Stardust).  Dropping such an earnest song in the middle of such a shiny album could have easily backfired- and perhaps it feels a bit calculated and out of place- but the song’s a hit.  It’s especially refreshing in the wake of “Monster,” where the vocally gifted GaGa mysteriously and gratuitously used Auto-Tune.  (Are pop stars now legally obligated to use Auto-Tune in at least one song per album now?)  On “Speechless,” she really shows off her powerful pipes without resorting to Aguileran melismatic overkill.  Prediction: by the end of 2010, karaoke bars across the planet will be sick to death of this track.

“Dance In The Dark” brings the party roaring back to the dance floor, although some folks might miss a step and scratch their heads when our Lady name-drops JonBenet Ramsey during the “Vogue”-style rap in the bridge.  The second-to-last track, “So Happy I Could Die,” offers a pleasantly chill comedown, which is why it stays at #7 in my custom-made sequence.

I end my version of The Fame Monster with “Telephone,” the dynamite discotheque duet with Beyonce.  I’d think an entertainer with Lady GaGa’s sense of showmanship would want to leave her audience breathless and spent, and “Telephone” is exactly the kind of fierce motherfucker that could do that.  In fact, I feel pity for any song that has to follow “Telephone” on a club DJ’s set list.  As the sixth track on the proper album, it upstages everything that comes after it.

I suppose criticizing the sequencing of a Top 40 pop album is a tad overbearing.  After all, Howard Hawks apparently never specified how the great scenes should be distributed among the not-bad scenes.  The bottom line is that The Fame Monster is pretty good, and should be a tough act to follow- not just for Lady Gaga herself, but for her pop-star peers.