2013 Albums of the Year

Here's the whole list I submitted to the Fiddleback, which used a voting system to determine its Albums of the Year. You can read that here.

First off, just getting this list down to 20 was a challenge. So many notable records didn't make the cut for whatever reason: While Shaking the Habitual sparked many conversations about gender equality, its cold nature meant it rarely got more than a couple spins in the months after its release; Ghost BC’s Infestissumam was the best bubblegum metal record of the year, though its hooks started to dull after a while. Mysterious collective Sandwell District delivered the best mixtape of 2013 with their dark, intense contribution to the Fabric series, but I decided against including compilations. Saves the Day’s self-titled album isn't exactly a return to form, but it’s catchy as hell and marks a decided improvement after 4 mostly unlistenable records. Superchunk continue their return as an active band with I Hate Music, and Noisem & Carcass released the best thrash records of the year, despite the latter being old enough to father the former. Much of the list came down to my listening habits: I can’t really play punk or hardcore at work, so I focus mostly on ambient instrumental music (exceptions must be made though)

In no particular order:

Dawn of Midi – Dysnomia

This is the sound in my head when I envision “contemporary jazz”: combining disparate genres (in this case, minimal techno) with the knowledge and skill of jazz performers. Miles Davis tried it with funk and was ridiculed, and fusion has so many bad connotations that it’s best to put that label to rest. Here we have repetitive melodies played on real acoustic instruments, where real people interact in developing simple ideas into interwoven paths in a way that can’t be duplicated digitally.

CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe

It’s been decades since stadium synth pop had its day in the sun, but the crisscrossing synths of Iain Cook & Martin Doherty with Lauren Mayberry’s Scottish lilt foreshadow a return to the days when Human League were chart toppers. Every nook and cranny of this record is filled with shiny melodies and sparkling rhythms, layered in a way that rewards repeated listens. While “The Mother We Share” garnered the big blog boosts, but stay for “Gun”, “Lies”, “Science/Visions”... the whole thing really.

Autre Ne Veut – Anxiety

2013 was a great year for people who started listening to music at the time Boys II Men released their record-breaking II. Arthur Ashin’s voice is a joy to behold, all studied nuance and hints of gospel. I’m convinced this record would be just as good a capella; not as a diss to the backing tracks, but his voice carries so much weight that it only requires the most minimal of supports.

Joel RL Phelps & The Downer Trio – Gala

Phelps’ last record came out nine years ago and spent a good chunk of its running time focusing on the futility of the war in the Middle East, a war that is still going on as the band reconvened for the follow-up. Gala doesn’t share its predecessors’ anti-war venom, though they are still meditating on mistakes, regret and death. Their sound hasn’t changed much since Customs; the record is split between jagged, bass-driven post-punk, hazy mid-tempo rockers, and small acoustic pieces. A record from them is rare, and their ability to enclose an ever-developing melody in perfect harmony remains undiminished.

Laurel Halo – Chance of Rain

While her debut full length explored the limits of the unprocessed human voice, Halo’s follow up focuses on hardware synthesizers that slip in and out of time, suggesting a future world where the organic and technological are becoming harder to distinguish. The title is a good way of describing the gray, foreboding music here, which takes its cues from techno but tears it apart to show the squishing beast underneath.

Tim Hecker – Virgins

In his first foray with an ensemble, the gritty homemade ambient music of Tim Hecker recalls the hypnotic phases of Steve Reich and  Mike Oldfield; there’s always been a violence to his work, but aggressive performances & the creeping horror of the cover art tie the record to a claustrophobic world where the real and unreal are interchangeable. While his symphonies of feedback & static were never sunny, this development of the stunned silences on 2011’s perfect Ravedeath, 1972 is a welcome continuation of his sound.

The Field – Cupid’s Head

This has been a great year for nominally experimental electronic acts to change up their sound a little; Tim Hecker added actual muscle & sweat into his ambient explorations, and Axel Willner tweaked his warm, melodic take on pulsing Berlin techno. Looping State of Mind was a retread, but only in the best sense, buffing & shining his trademark sound after the detour of Yesterday and Today. There’s more going on in the mix and it requires a bit more attention, but the addition of a little anxiety in his usually lush palette is a welcome change.

Deafheaven – Sunbather

It took way too long for a band to combine the tremolo-picked intensity of black metal with the melodies of the Cure and blurred aesthetic of shoegaze, but this San Francisco duo perfected it on their second full-length. The screaming vocals remain, but they act as a good textural counterpoint to the rest of the band, which has filed the sharp edges down just enough to be memorable but still brutal.

My Bloody Valentine – mbv

Stop focusing on the fact that 22 years have passed since Loveless. Forget that the band dropped the record Radiohead-style, with no lead-up, on an unsuspecting world. Instead, focus on how it will probably take another 22 years for listeners to unravel everything hidden in m b v, a record thick with synths that sound like guitars, guitars that sound like synths, and songs that fold back on themselves before turning themselves inside out. 

Rashad Becker – Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. 1

Don’t let the studious title fool you; legendary mastering engineer Rashad Becker’s debut full length is a wild beast of otherworldly sounds, much more Notional than Traditional. Rhythm and timbre are at play as unidentifiable tones succumb to enveloping static, like nameless beasts crawling across an alien landscape.

Dan Friel – Total Folklore

There’s this unmade music in my head, where all the elements are as beautifully balanced as a classic painting: dissonance and harmony, catchy melodies and jackhammer rhythms. This former Parts and Labor members combines major key harmonies and overloaded electronics with a DIY style that shows the perfect balance between disparate textures while remaining instantly catchy.

Thundercat – Apocalypse

The bass virtuoso’s excellent second record reminds me of what Squarepusher attempted to do on the Shobaleader One record, namely combine hyperactive bass with soul-inflected melodies and the futuristic funk of 80’s pop. Thundercat succeeds because he never lets the programming get in the way of the song, and his melodious voice stretches & compresses around the springy tunes.

Pusha T – My Name is My Name

Everyone loves a villain, and this Clipse member’s first solo non-mixtape is seething with the menace of dealing drugs, eradicating enemies, and dealing with the fallout of crime. Pusha has never been one to hide his age, and it would be a cop out to say his obsession with early 90s rap signifiers didn't strike a chord with rap fans in their 30s. Above all, his rhymes fall into place among bare-bones beats that show what Kanye is capable of when he’s not being self-conscious.

Tiger Village – I-III

This solo effort out of Cleveland released three tapes in 2013, each one brimming with 8-bit melodies, dark noise, and ambient textures. The magic is in how the elements flow seamlessly into one another without the whiplash expected in such tonal shifts. The programmed beats and melodies are surprisingly elastic and organic, showing a mastery of finding the warmth in hardware and software.

Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest

After years in the wilderness, Boards of Canada return with a tapestry of hidden vocals, ghostly melodies and creeping beats so layered and complicated that it has its own wiki. The title alludes to a post-apocalyptic landscape and the music reflects a blasted, sun-bleached world where rusted technology and humanity have their final battle.

Autechre – Exai

More than 20 years in the game and still exploring the limits of technology, this double disc effort combines the lessons the duo learned in their noisy early ‘00s records with the slippery melodies of their ‘90s work. It’s a lot to take in, but Autechre see it more as a gift and so should you; if you like what they do, here’s a ton of it to sift through.

Bill Callahan – Dream River

Dream River finds Bill Callahan in a place where, dare I say, he’s almost comfortable. He’s released records just different enough over the last 20 years to make each one an event for his fervent followers of his skewed look at modern American life. It unfolds as a piece, echoing the creator’s love of listening to records all the way through, and it’s most rewarding to experience as a whole.

Cex – Prosperity

He may not get the blog attention that acts as the modern measurement of popularity, but Rjyan Kidwell has been prolific as ever in recent years. This digital-only release is a collection of tracks as opposed to his usual conceptual framework, but his recent collage-style technique has created tracks that ebb and flow like proper songs built up from a techno foundation, while remaining memorable the whole way through.  

Co La – Moody Coup

Tightly-spun guitar duo Ecstatic Sunshine split into Dustin Wong and Matthew Papich, whose full length as Co La splatters barely recognizable samples across tracks that refuse standard organization while retaining the overdriven attack of his former band. Papich has a steady hand that keeps the tracks stuffed yet uncluttered, starting out small before sprawling out in dayglo colors. There’s an air of menace that, like the cover, is affecting while remaining inscrutable.

Pan•American– Cloud Room Glass Room

Former Labradford guitarist Mark Nelson’s Pan•American project hasn't strayed too far from minimal, staticy dub in the last 15 years, but the addition of percussionist Steven Hess has added another dimension to a project that treats each sound equally. Hess practically paints over the middle section of noisy “Laurel South” with tinny drum n bass rhythms, and “Virginia Waveform” acts like a call-and-response between Hess’s drums and Nelson’s static drone. 

Twin Peaks (Series)

We recently finished watching the original run of Twin Peaks and were trying to watch Fire Walk With Me when the DVD started skipping & we had to send it back to Netflix. The movie is a strange beast, at least what we were able to see, and in some ways seemed inferior & superior to the original series.

The story of Twin Peaks' brief life on TV has been well documented: After a brief but popular first season, David Lynch left to direct Wild at Heart, leaving Mark Frost and his writers with the task of trying to balance the serialized aspect of Laura Palmer's murder with the various story lines that orbited the central mystery. The second, 22 episode season quickly solved her murder, floundered for a while with a couple unrelated story lines, then picked up steam again in time for the horrific finale.

My first suspicion that the second season was going off the rails was when the two main music cues, "Falling" and the jazzy mystery theme, were placed seemingly haphazardly, instead of with the pointed precision in the first season. Sometimes the cues were a little on the nose in the first season, but after Lynch left, they seemed like they were just used as stock music to fill in gaps in the soundtrack, instead of the highly thematic songs they acted as previously.

At it's heart Twin Peaks was a daily soap, and would probably benefited from a 5 episode week, where each plot strand had time to unfurl and progress. Instead, it crammed 6 months of subplots and digressions into a weekly show, with no room to breath. Honestly, by the end I had completely forgotten about Jean Renault, Cooper's trouble with the FBI, and the food critic.

Digression about a digression: James Hurley's whole romance/mechanic subplot feels like an entirely separate show grafted on when the running time fell short. While I enjoy the non-sequitur aspect of the show, this just kind of came & went without making much of an impact. Maybe it was supposed to be slight: the basics of the story were fully fleshed out six years later in Lost Highway. 

While the second season started off by throwing in more story than it could handle, it started to really get out of control after episode 9, when the central mystery is solved and the other stories come into the foreground. The problem is, they're a mess: episodes 10-13 kind of blend together into a mash that serves as a good indication of the moral depravity of the town, but provides little momentum. Once Windom Earle enters the picture in episode 14, it's like a new season of the show has begun.

While the Earle stuff manages to be much more entertaining than the first part of the season, it also seems to go out of its way to consciously bring the cast together, as a poorly disguised Earle gets facetime with most of the top billed actors. It smacks as more of an attempt to fix the messy plotting of season 2 than a chance to introduce another mystery to the show. I would have liked to see Earle's obsession with finding the Black Lodge introduced sooner, as Cooper & the audience think he's simply out for revenge until the very end. Kenneth Welsh is a magnetic presence on screen and single-handedly saves the show from further descent.

While it's foolish to try and pry answers from anything David Lynch does, it did strike me how his character, FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, seemed to fashion a team of paranormal inclined agents around him. Most of his team either had firsthand experience with the creatures from the Black Lodge, or were receptive to it. Did Cole seek these men out, or did they seek him out? Did he feel any guilt for two of his agents being trapped in the Black Lodge? Were there more? And why would FBI agents stationed in Philadelphia regularly travel to the Pacific Northwest?

We should be getting a new disc of Fire Walk With Me in the mail tomorrow, so while I await more amazing imagery (the macro lens! the fingernail! the painting!), we don't expect any answers.

Explosions in the Sky review

I wrote this review for a now-defunct music website. Besides fixing a couple grammar issues, this is how it looked way back when. 

artist: Explosions in the Sky
album title: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
label: Temporary Residence Ltd. 
release year: 2007
rating: 6.5

Explosions in the Sky have made no-frills post-rock their forte; no orchestration a la Godspeed You! Black  Emperor, no jazz pretense like the Chicago scene, and little of the straight ahead rock meets  electronic noodling of Mogwai. Instead, they use the same combination of echo-laden guitars,  chiming bass and martial drums as their elements to forge soundscapes that alternate between  introspective passages and soaring choruses.

So what does their new 6-song album sound like? Much like the others, but that’s not necessarily  a bad thing. You’re hard pressed to find a band with a distinctive sound, and even rarer to  find one with the discipline to develop and refine it.

Even without the title “The Birth and Death of the Day”, the opening track’s brittle guitar and subsequent explosion of chords evokes a violent birth, development and gradual death. The track ends as dulcet tones fade away until a thin, underlying tone is revealed that carries on into the second song, "Welcome, Ghosts." What we get is more of the same, but somehow different; anyone who has listened to their oeuvre can attest to the fact that each album is basically one long song divided into movements that echo each other in theme and approach.

"Welcome, Ghosts" ebbs and flows between shimmering chords and mountains of distortion, fading into the 13 minute centerpiece, "It's Natural to be Afraid." In the album’s major mood shift, it uses a repetitive piano riff, whirling distortion, sawing strings and backwards guitar to sound vaguely menacing before fading away. It's closely followed by some gauzy electronic distortion, which itself fades away before a standard Explosions riff enters. It would have been interesting to hear the proceeding 5 minutes of kaleidoscopic noise be developed, even at the risk of breaking the atmosphere of the album.

The tracks ebb and flow in a similar manner, though the repetitiveness is broken up here and there: a flurry of piano notes that recalls vintage Genesis suddenly appears among the otherwise droning "What Do You Go Home To". "Catastrophe & the Cure" opens with possibly the albums most animated moment: a quickly strummed chord makes its presence known before a volley of slightly overdriven snare hits introduces the rest of the band. Surprisingly, the energy doesn't flag for a while, taking the same basic elements that make up the quiet parts and beating the hell out of them.

A plinking piano melody introduces the relatively brief closer, "So Long, Lonesome." The whole band rallies around that single piano riff, giving it a bed of ascending chords that evaporate just when things get too claustrophobic. Drums charge forward, guitars get more distorted, the piano becomes more insistent, and then… nothing. But they aren't after the big, heroic payoff that one might expect. Their meandering sound lets the listener get lost on the way, unencumbered by the expectation of a destination.

Ted Leo & the Mighty Mighty Bosstones

I take full responsibility for any facts my brain has mixed up in the last decade.

Around 2003 or '04, me & some friends drove up to Detroit to see Ted Leo & the Pharmacists play at the Shelter, which is the basement space below St. Andrews Hall. We pull into the deserted parking lot across the street from the venue and see a couple teenagers sitting on the steps dressed in stereotypical ska punk clothes: checkered vans (nothing wrong with that), Hot Topic bondage pants, Manic Panic hair, and Mighty Mighty Bosstones shirts. 

"I wonder if the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are playing St. Andrews Hall?"

"Ha yeah right, I thought they broke up."

The Bosstones hadn't had a hit since 1997's "The Impression That I Get", in the brief period of time between grunge and the boy band explosion when ska punk barely squeaked into national attention. They've also been around almost as long as I've been alive, so it's understandable that their longevity would result in a solid tour schedule; but in 2004, ska punk was thought to be dead and gone. 

So Ted Leo starts playing, and about 20 minutes in, all of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones exit the dressing room next to the Shelter's stage and walk through the packed crowd while carrying their instruments. The dressing room placement seems a little awkward, especially for the guy carrying the trombone. The whole display seems a little cocky, despite the necessity to get to their show, since a line of a dozen men in tailored suits walking away from the stage looks disrespectful no matter the context. 

The Bosstones disappear within a minute and all attention returns to Ted Leo, who is slaying in the full-band +  keyboard Hearts of Oak version of the Pharmacists. There are no punches pulled, all the hits are there, and everyone is enjoying themselves. 

Then, even before the 10-minute rendition of "Stove By A Whale" (where they're joined on 2nd guitar by I believe James Canty), the Bosstones return from serenading skanking teenagers upstairs, and soaked in sweat under their suits, march through the crowd yet again, lugging their horns past an appreciative crowd that is eager to hear "Timorous Me". The Bosstones, who probably commanded a much larger check for playing the big room, played for half the time as the indie band in the basement. 

The Pharmacists finish up and man their own merch table while, presumably, the Bosstones sit in their dressing room and wait to get paid. The two instances of the show being interrupted are forgotten, or remembered as a bizarre interlude to an otherwise great show. 

Blink 182 - "Dumpweed"

The iPod connector to my car stereo broke, but since my car CD player can play MP3 CDs, I've been making 5-6 hour mixes to make the commute bearable. After realizing most of the ambient instrumental music I listen to at work wasn't going to cut it, I dug out a bunch of pop punk CDs that I haven't listened to since high school. One of them was Blink-182's Enema of the State, which I remember really liking 14 years ago. Does it hold up? No. Oh dear God no.

Before I get to the terrible, possibly destructive lyrics, I have a couple words on compression. In the audio world, a compressor takes a signal and boosts low frequencies while pushing down high frequencies, which is useful in making certain instruments stand out in a mix, especially if they share the same basic frequency range. By the late '90s modern music was in the midst of the Loudness War, where high profile releases were subjected to punishing compression that squeezed each instrument into it's own part of the spectrum so you could hear the snare just as loudly as the lead guitar. This destroyed any nuance and subtlety in a track with the goal of making it stand out when listening to it on the radio; nevermind the fact that radio stations have their own compressors to make sure the songs they play fall within their broadcast guidelines. The most famous instance of this is Metallica's widely panned St Anger album, which angered enough audiophiles to briefly become a news story (and the only interesting thing about the record).

Enema of the State was compressed so much as to become an oppressive, punishing listen. At first listen, the technique does its job, making the instruments push the speakers in a way that gets the listener's attention. After a couple plays, it becomes the aural equivalent of looking at a posterized photograph, where all the gradient and shading is gone, replaced by solid blocks of color.

Who was asleep at the switch when a line like "I need a girl that I can train" was recorded? The arc of the song goes something like this: Guy can't decide whether to break up with his girlfriend because she's crazy, and laments that he could sow his wild oats if only he could find a girl that obeyed him. It's not the subtlest song ever, and it reminds me a lot of the dickhead skaters at my high school, who considered themselves apart from the fray of meathead jocks yet indulged in the same moronic, misogynist behavior. It's not so much that they were terrible people-high school is a training ground for kids to mimic the terrible choices of their parents; it's that they honestly thought they were rebelling against a status quo, not fitting into a demographic that MCA Records exploited all the way to the bank.

This was back when TRL set the agenda for mainstream popular music. They had boy bands for the teen girls, rap for the kids who could drive, and R&B to soundtrack awkward makeout sessions. That left the most-white, mostly middle class droogs that didn't like rap but still tended to invite their girlfriends over to watch them play video games. Blink-182 became The Rock Band, just like Foo Fighters and later Queens of the Stone Age. Mainstream media only picks one white rock band to get behind at once, and their success is due to whatever shady backroom dealings happened between publicists, A&R, MTV and radio.

That kind of chicanery sounds like the only explanation for an album that sounds like it was focus grouped to death; or, fantastically, made in the future where its reception could be measured, then adjusted to achieve maximum exposure. With the money put behind the promotion of the album, nothing was left to chance: so why were the lyrics, ostensibly aimed at idiot kids, set somewhere between Vapid (which is understandable) and Awful? I'm not saying some 90s pop punk band owed it to anyone to be politically progressive, but opening a record with a song about the exact wrong way to handle a relationship, without once reflecting "hhmm maybe that was a bad way to deal with it", sounds like a damaging thing to do.

Matt Bauer - The Island Moved in the Storm (review)

Here's a review of Matt Bauer's The Island Moved in the Storm I wrote back in 2008.

artist: Matt Bauer
title: The Island Moved in the Storm
label: La Société Expéditionnaire
release: 2008

Matt Bauer's banjo-driven folk songs hang together on a gossamer thread, moving from background to foreground with an understated power. The Island Moved in the Storm, his third album and first for La Société Expéditionnaire is a travelogue of worn memories with the gravitas that makes even the mundane elements of the past grow more significant even as they blur out of focus. 

Singer/Songwriters mining the darker side of Americana is nothing new, but Matt Bauer shares some of the same traits that made Iron & Wine's debut stand out: the hushed delivery, lo-fi recording and use of pre-pop melodies makes the music timeless even as it transcends the confines of a strict folk style and become something its own. The instrumentation is predominately just Bauer's voice and banjo, though sometimes embellished by female backing vocals, horns, strings, keyboards and light percussion, courtesy of members of Dirty Projectors, St. Vincent, and others. 

Though the songs could easily slide into theatrical bathos, their economy keeps them from going over the edge. Just as the sentimentality threatens to devolve into bombast the arrangement pulls back, circling on itself and repeating a phrase, letting the listener know that it doesn't subscribe to expected songwriting norms. The point of the buildup isn't to eventually explode, but to revel in the missed opportunities and connections that the songs describe. Like the static shots of rainy landscapes and banal scenes that fill Andrei Tarkovsky films, there are sections of the songs designed for reflection and not necessarily to move the plot along. 

Matt Bauer's baroque arrangements and use of mostly acoustic instrumentation will probably peg him as another dark poet of the unseen America, but he seems as prepared as any for the role. His songs are suffused with the same hidden melancholy of modern life as William Eggleston photographs; seemingly unremarkable scenes unfold to reveal layers of memories and horror.

Thirty-Three

The re-release of The Aeroplane Flies High has led me to revisit Mellon Collie era tracks to see if they hold up after nearly 20 years. While Siamese Dream remains an unimpeachable combination of butt rock and shoegaze (before Corgan’s ambition outstripped his songwriting), I’ve winnowed the double album follow up down to a single track, the final single “Thirty Three”. While “1979” remains the apex of his talent, it got so much radio play in the mid-90s that it’s been flattened into more of a nostalgia piece than a song (a song about nostalgia becoming nostalgic? Damn you, Corgan!). The same goes for “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, which I once heard playing simultaneously on Dayton, OH’s two modern rock stations.

“Thirty Three” was released as a single thirteen (!) months after the album, and the exhaustion shows in the music video. The band had been on the road constantly, lost their touring keyboardist to a heroin overdose, and kicked out their drummer. Chamberlin doesn’t appear in the video or the song itself, which uses the original demo’s drum machine. A band that were never good friends to begin with are putting on a show to wring out more money from a behemoth of a record that was a success despite clinging to a framework that went out of style in the early ‘80s.

Fashion photographer (and Corgan's girlfriend at the time) Yelena Yemchuck directed a literal interpretation of the lyrics in a series of short vignettes that range from interesting-on-paper to bizarre kabuki theater. It probably seemed the height of art on MTV in ’96, but it’s so ham fisted and NINETIES that the only saving grace is Corgan himself doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Perhaps it’s his closeness to the director, but while D’arcy & James Iha sit stone-faced in a tableau, his eyes follow the camera as he lets a smirk slip out.

Corgan’s made no secret of his love of the classic rock album myth, and that comes around as the video closes with a recreation of the Mellon Collie album art with the woman looking at the camera & winking (groan!). It’s cheesy as hell but having been the perfect age when it came out, I can’t help but finding the finality of it oddly affecting. While the album has no storyline or concept (besides “I’m angry and no one understands me”) the sheer length made it into a journey, and the final video had its own kind of closure, even if I can only cringe at the memory. 

Alkaline Trio

Alkaline Trio released a new record this year, their eighth, My Shame Is True. It's decent in the unchanging way their output has been for the last decade plus: Matt Skiba still writes the same song over and over (with increasingly cheesy wordplay), and Dan Andriano still sounds like he's chafing from the miserablist pop punk corner they've painted themselves into.

It's bizarre that their last 3-4 records have passed completely unbeknownst to me, because in the late 90s/early 2000s, they were my favorite band. They were pop punk, but there was something askew; while most of the (admittedly white, male) bands I liked sang about girls breaking their hearts, Alkaline Trio directed the misery inward, describing self destruction and depression in a way that was maybe a little outside of my experience. They were sloppy, and their bass player's ska chops were all over the place, but they were a breathe of fresh air in a scene dominated by the ultra glossy pop punk of bands like Blink-182.

Between '98 and 2000, they released two full lengths and a self-titled compilation of old tracks and EPs. If you're curious at all in them, that's all you need to track down. Even their second record is divisive, containing both their favorite song of mine ("5-3-10-4") and their absolute worst ("Sleepyhead", which shows they didn't yet possess the melodic acumen to deal with a dissonant harmony). So what happened? Longtime drummer Glenn Porter left the band in a manner that rumor suggested was due to either personality conflicts or any of the disgusting scenarios put forth by message boards. Porter wasn't portrayed as a driving songwriting force in the band (a long way of saying he didn't sing any songs), so how did they go from fractured song structures to the paint-by-numbers pop punk of the material following his expulsion?

The situation reminds me of an interview R.E.M. gave during their farewell press tour. Both bands lost a drummer and their subsequent records paled in comparison to their previous work. With R.E.M., that could just as easily be chalked up to age; after all, they were wealthy middle aged men with none of the spark that led to their greatest work. Bill Berry was an equal songwriter with the rest of the band, so maybe he was their secret weapon? That may be true, but I think the bigger issue is the admittance that Berry was vocal in the song arrangement phase, continually chiding the band to make the songs shorter and more concise (the epic intro to "Leave" would never have happened on his watch). I think it's the same unspoken power of the drummer in songwriting that made Goddamnit! and Maybe I'll Catch Fire sound fresher than most late '90s punk, as opposed to the following records rigid verse/chorus/verse structure. The drummer has the power to shape the song and, if they want, get it over as quickly as possible (rarely a bad thing).

Truthfully, Alkaline Trio's songs always followed a pretty standard structure, but what Porter did under the riffs kept them from overstaying their welcome. The most noticeable change is that after Fire, the band stuck to a rigid habit of intro x 4, verse x 4, chorus, verse x 4, outro x 4, etc. That's pretty much the basis for the arrangement of most Western music, basing everything on 4's, but most musicians will add little fills and asides to avoid sterile repetition, or at least to keep themselves entertained when playing the song for the 1,000th time. Porter was constantly scribbling outside the lines, and the result was a lot more interesting than sticking to the rule book.

After Porter left the band, Smoking Pope's drummer Mike Felumlee appeared on From Here to Infirmary. Journeyman drummer Derek Grant filled the permanent role in 2003, and while he's a solid drummer, his workman like style is a testament to his experience as a sideman, where dependability trumps style. His membership is credited with keeping the band together, though I suspect it has more to do with his songwriting style aligning more to the rest of the band that contrasting with it. That's a shame, because history shows it's friction that makes the most compelling music.

Derivative Remix

One of my remixes has been included on the Derivative Netlabel compilation and…and…and… (Disquiet Junto derivations of The Conjuncts by C. Reider). The track was originally done as part of the Disquiet Junto  project, which posts a set of constraints every Thursday and invites people to share their contribution via SoundCloud. My track is called "mateimartainment".

Nick Butcher - Bee Removal (review)

I wrote this Nick Butcher review a while ago and really liked the record. He even emailed me to say he enjoyed my review, thought I think that was just a pretense to ask if we'd put the correct URL for his website with it. It looks like he does more visual art than music these days: http://nickbutcher.net/

artist: Nick Butcher

album title:  Bee Removal

label: Home Tapes

format: CD

release year: 2008

rating: 8.2

Nick Butcher has no lack of artistic outlets: painting, printmaking, bookmaking, design, and music all emanate from the Chicago studio he shares with girlfriend/collaborator Nadine Nakanishi. His output is tied together by a raw, homemade aesthetic that focuses on raw textures and happy accidents. Its no surprise his music follows the same path, using homemade electronics, field recordings and unorthodox sound sources in long, ambient tracks that are as notable for their aural pleasure as their fine-art qualities.

"Tearing Paper" is 20 seconds of static and what sounds like the remnants of a big-band radio broadcast, opening the album with a brief shot of melody the presage the slow burn compositions to come. "Ryman" uses a soft repeating tone as the base for glitchy noise, sounding not unlike Autechre's recent work.

If it wasn't apparent already, this is pretty much music for headphones-only consumption and nowhere is that more apparent than the first epic of the album, the eight-minute "Geist/Coat", which is nearly inaudible for the first minute before a static drone slowly fades in. A single repeated piano note joins the noise, though its off in the distance as if sampled from an ancient 78. Age and disintegration are common themes here, as the past is manipulated and distorted into new forms. At about the halfway point, what sounds like piano and guitar drop single notes as sampled record skips synchronize to form a syncopated beat. This segues into backwards guitar and the low rumble of feedback before ending with a cluster of melancholy chords. The results, though utilizing avant-garde techniques, create a song with a definite flow between the sections that shows a grasp of composition beyond more primitive noise artists.

"Interior, then a Window" is perhaps the most traditional "song" on the album, owing more than a bit to Eno's work. A droning keyboard lays the foundation for the track, with other tones drifting in and out. There's a gentle melody, played slow enough to render it abstract. Little sparks of notes unfurl and disappear amongst the more chance-generated tones, creating the most aurally colorful track on the album.

The title track is trance music for Luddites; it has soothing tones, a glacial pace and interesting textures, but all of it sounds recorded from scratch and processed though any number of analog filters before painstakingly reassembled. The tones generated sound like they came from barely functioning synthesizers, and the whole song sounds stuck together with twine and glue. There's a dedication to craft here that's missing from most electronic music, which strives to remove the work of human hands.

"Sharp Note Singing" is, like "Interior, then a Window", a droning melodic piece, but at nearly 8 minutes it has much longer to develop its pastoral vibe. Like Boards of Canada it evokes images of nature and childhood, and its spare instrumentation means the listener can be immersed in the pure tones.

Artists like Nick Butcher can’t be stopped; whether it’s on CD, in books or on gallery walls, his style of imbuing his art with all the roughness and imperfections of its human creator means he has nearly infinite possibilities in creativity. Granted instrumental experimental music doesn’t have a very wide audience, but those that discover his little world are in for a treat.

Fuck Buttons review

Back in 2009 I wrote record reviews for a now-defunct website. Here's one I did for Fuck Button's 3rd record Tarot Sport.

artist: Fuck Buttons
album title: Tarot Sport 
label: ATP 
format: CD
release year: 2009
rating: 7.9

The English duo went and made a dance record. Not that Tarot Sport will be mistaken for Basement Jaxx anytime soon, but they've taken their homemade electronics and added grooves that make their lo-fi textures all the more enduring.

Opening with the longest track, the 10-minute “Surf Solar” is also the most intricately produced tracks on the album, combining chopped-up vocals and processed samples with operatic dynamics. That kaleidoscopic sound fades into a cloud of noise before leading into “Rough Steez”, which chops up the static with severe tremolo, making a solid foundation for a multitude of bleeps and gnarly distorted tones.

The group always manages to tow the noisier side of their work even when gentler pastures seem imminent; “Lisbon Maru” rides a soft wave of ambient tones until the soft yet insistent groove kicks in, but it’s the chopped-up spurt of static riding the beat that gives it character and keeps the song from a generic chillout sound. The watery, unhinged sample that springs to life more than halfway through the nine minute running time actually sounds like a hook, though its barbed tone lends it a nice offset to the midtempo drum machine beat.

Combining an organ with what sounds like steam escaping, “Olympians” strives for the same epic sweep of the gods of the title. The shuffling, vaguely tribal beat continues as they pile on hook after hook, with a satisfying 4-note motif appears at the halfway mark that adds even more grandeur. It’s not long before the repetition becomes engulfing and what initially sounded exciting becomes part of the overall groove.

The somber “Olympians” fades into the toy-store-on-acid insanity of “Phantom Limb”, which doesn’t develop much beyond the concept of employing as many noisemakers as possible. It’s a schizophrenic piece, and the sheer unpredictability is interesting, but it lacks the cohesion of the longer tracks. Instead of editing a jam down to its basic components, “Phantom Limb” is like fast-forwarding through hours of improvisation without much of a goal in mind.

“Flight of the Feathered Serpent” is a dizzying race to the finish; layering alternately straightforward and off-kilter drum loops and developing the riff from “Olympians” into an ascending psychedelic tornado. Its one of the longest tracks, and despite its limited palette it manages to survive on adrenaline alone, pounding away as it dares dance floors to succumb before suddenly dropping away. It’s that kind of unpredictability that keeps them fresh as they search for their own sound.

Larry Marder on practice

At some point in the mid-90s, Nickelodean (or maybe it was the Disney Channel) showed a brief interview with Beanworld creator Larry Marder. I think he was being interviewed by a kid, who asked him how to get good at making comics. Larry held his hand about 2 feet above the desk he was sitting at and said something to the effect of "start with a stack of paper this high, and draw on every sheet. When you get done with that stack, get another stack and draw on every sheet. The only way to get better at drawing is to do it over and over."

That advice is identical to the 10,000 Hours rule, though as a child it was a lot easier to grasp a giant stack of papers. 

San Antonio

Google Maps has new, higher-quality street level pics of the house I lived in 88-95 in San Antonio. As with most adults looking back at childhood homes, the biggest surprise is scale.

• I thought we had a huge front yard, but judging by the pictures, I could cross it in about 4 steps. 
• The walk to the corner to catch the school bus always seemed like an eternity. It's 3 houses away. 
• The house on the corner used to have giant bushes blocking the view of the pool. Apparently the new owners aren't as concerned with privacy. 
• There used to be a huge tree in the middle of our front lawn, but it's long gone.
• The house across the street was an incongruous split-level in a plat of mostly ranch houses. 
• The day we moved in I got lost trying to walk back from a house that was about 100 yards away from ours. I managed to mix up left from right and my Mom called the cops. 
• All I remember about the neighbor on the right is that a handyman broke into his house after doing some remodeling for him, and the dog was so used to him that he didn't bark. I don't remember a thing about the people on the left except a tornado knocked down a panel of our shared fence.
• Whoever lives there now has installed a canopy that covers the backyard deck (which ran across the entire back of the house). That's a good idea but imagine the cost of installing a canopy that covers half of your backyard. 
• There was gang activity in the surrounding area, and occasional gang tags on fences, but I never felt unsafe. However, I notice most of the houses have metal security doors that they didn't used to. 

Joel RL Phelps / The Downer Trio

In 1999 I was going to high school in Dayton, Ohio, a town where even in the boom of the late '90s had seen its best days pass by. There was a record store in the city's designated "hipster" neighborhood, a couple blocks of cobblestone roads called the Oregon District. Gem City Records had overpriced new CDs, a couple shelves of vinyl, and an enviable used-CD selection. In fact there was a mini economy of used CDs in the Dayton area, evidenced by the now-defunct chain CD Connection. I later learned that the supply was partially fed by teens who realized the anti-theft detectors at Hot Topic were in fact just cardboard.

My favorite part about Gem City Records was that they seemed to carry every music magazine published in the known universe, though they never seemed to sell any. I'd flip through issues of The Wire and Alternative Press to get an idea of what was cool, then buy the CD at Best Buy for $9.99 (I wasn't about to drop $15 on a CD I just read about just because it was sold at an indie record store full of surly clerks). This was the late '90s, so Best Buy still had a pretty big CD section, though today it's usually no more than a couple aisles of Taylor Swift records.

I was flipping through one magazine (or maybe it was just a free saddle-stitched flyer) and read a 2- or 3- page article about a band whose singer I was vaguely familiar with, The Downer Trio. Joel RL Phelps had previously been in indie stalwarts Silkworm, which he left in 1994 after the release of their album Libertine. I had heard of Silkworm through my subscription to Guitar World, which right before the nu-metal explosion had given the editors free reign, resulting in records like Neurosis' Through Silver in Blood and Silkworm's Firewater being named some of their Records of the Year.

The article was either to promote their second full-length (but third release, depending on how you count), 3, or their forthcoming record Blackbird; they were released within a year of each other. The writer focused on how quiet the band was, and as a recent discoverer of Low, I was intrigued. But it was the description of Phelps voice that made me want to track his records down. Here was generally quiet, folk-based music, but over it was something akin to Jeff Mangum, who had just released In the Aeroplane Over the Sea the year before. However, the nascent internet was no help (we still had AOL and the actual internet was a Big Scary Place), and the multiple ways the records were credited made searching for them difficult.

• Warm Springs Night is technically a Joel RL Phleps solo record, as is the Alita Aleta 7"
• The Downer Trio EP is credited to The Downer Trio
• 3 is credited to Joel RL Phelps : The Downer Trio, though I suspect the colon is a relic of the time it was in the hipster toolkit of graphic designers. 
• Blackbird has its credits written in illegible handwriting, so attribution depends on the mood of whoever entered it into CDDB. 
• Inland Empires EP is by Joel RL Phelps ≈ The Downer Trio, where the designer discovered the glyphs window
• Customs' cover just smashes it all together, though Joel RL Phelps and The Downer Trio are on separate lines. 

////

In 2000 I was at college in Bowling Green, Ohio, with a T1 line at my disposal to dig through the waning days of Napster. I finally found two MP3 by Joel RL Phelps: "Apologies Accepted", though the file cut off after a minute and a half, and "Now You Are Found", which was harrowing even before I knew it was about the death of his drug-addicted sister.

However most Napster or internet searches brought back nearly equally obscure Americana musician Kelly Joe Phelps, though the combination of RL/R.L. and the terminology that seemed to equate him equally as a solo artist and part of his own backing band usually only resulted in a (now-dead) fan page, and later his own (also dead) personal homepage.

I can't even find the old fan page on the Internet Wayback Machine; suffice it to say it was sparse, though it did have MP3s of an acoustic session on  KEXP the band had done years ago. A burned copy of that session and the Blackbird CD-R I made in the campus radio station accompanied me on the semester I spent at art school in Italy, surrounded by surly locals and the uniformly sociopath rich white students that seem to be attracted to study abroad programs. This was 2003, when the iPod was still in its infancy; I saw a student with one and I thought it was a tape player. It shows the quality of those CDs (2 of only a dozen I could bring) that I can still listen to them without that exhausting feeling you get when you've listened to a record too much.

The website had some song lyrics, but those (and some guitar tabs) were removed by the site owner because he thought they ruined people's interpretations. I agree: the one thing all of my favorite records have in common is a lack of a lyric sheet.

////

By 2002 I had made a couple friends who were DJs at the campus radio station. It was a small room full of stale air in one of the buildings I never had a class in, but the walls were lined with the station's CD library. Me and my friends would cram ourselves into what amounted to a closet to hang out during someone's shift, trying to figure out how to use the high-end CD replicator that sat in the equipment rack. The most recent acquisitions were stored next to the DJ's chair, but in the far corner were dusty relics not touched since the days Pizzicato Five were popular. Scanning the spines I see one that looks like a handwritten CD-R liner, though someone was thoughtful enough to use a sharpie to write Downer Trio Blackbird on the front of the jewel case.  It sounds so cheesy, but I literally had to catch my breath when I saw that. There was no way it could hold up to what I thought it sounded like in my head, but I managed to figure out the CD replicator and made a copy that night.

Side note: This practice of CD copying was generally accepted in moderation, though if you're a fan of one man band Juffage, you should know he pretty much camped out in the radio station for days on end and ripped most of their CDs to his laptop. 

Blackbird sounded exactly how I envisioned it. After years of that article rattling around in my head, I could finally see if my thoughts would match up with the concrete reality of a band barely written about and almost impossible to find. If it had sucked, I guess I wouldn't be able to go back to that mysterious pocket of memories as I transitioned into adulthood. But instead everything sounded perfect: the band was so in sync that the songs seemed to nearly topple over before righting themselves at the last moment. Despite the initial three-song blast, the rest of the album was exactly as quiet and forlorn as the sound in my head that the article had planted.

////

In 2004 I had an off-campus studio apartment 100 yards from the railroad tracks when I heard there was a new album on the way. I eventually found the one-page website of Moneyshot records, a name the owner must have been sure would return mostly porn if you Googled it. The single page had a release date and instructions for ordering direct, so I sent a check to an apartment in Washington State and hoped for the best.

A couple weeks later the CD arrived: 2 CD set with two bonus CD-Rs for ordering direct: a radio show (in WMV to thwart piracy) and some MPEGs of a show from 2000. Here's the only one I can find online.

Unlike the recorded version, which rests on a throbbing beat and palm-muted guitars, this rendition of "Kelly Grand Forks" ditches percussion altogether and replaces distorted chords with fingerpicking and slide guitar. Whether this is an embryonic version or just what they decided to do that night, I'm always happy when a band tries out a different arrangement live. Bands complaining they can't do a song live need to remember that The Who used to do Tommy with just bass/drums/guitar/voice.

Of course Moneyshot Records seems to have disappeared not long after this album came out. I wish someone like Merge would step up to the plate and reissue all of his stuff; then again, there's probably not too many people clamoring for it.

////

In 2006 I had a full time job and enough money to foolishly label some of it as "discretionary", so instead of trying to find new copies of the rest of his catalog, I just bought them used on Amazon. A previous attempt to buy new copies resulted in Forced Exposure sending me one that I already owned (they were really nice about giving me a refund though). A week later and I had the rest of his discography. No more waiting, no more thinking about a sound for years before I can hear it. The resulting binge was nice, but I can't help but think I would have savored each one more if I'd had to wait a couple years in between.

////

So late last year I'm listening to an interview with Karl Hendricks on Low Times. Curious to read more about the Karl Hendricks Trio, I went to one of his labels site. The first news listing was that they had a couple vinyl copies of 3 ready to ship. I'm normally not a completest in that sense, but it was only like $10 and besides, if nothing else the art would look really good in the 12" format.

When I first listened to it I noticed a LOT of high-end crackle; whether it's the mastering or my stereo, it was kind of a bummer, but I still have the CD.