Best albums 2009

As the tittle says, 25 albums worth special attention this year. The bubbling under section would be huge so I have to save it for later times, respectively.

1. MSTRKRFT: Fist Of God (Dim Mak/Downtown)
So you may ask what's this dated piece of non-sinusoidal crap doing here? Well, after all the years of indie and alternative musicians flirting with the avant-garde with no plausible outcomes since the No Wave heydays of Sonic Youth; after all the recent hype about shitgaze and beardo rock and a dozen of other new genres emerging only to show that the guys behind the big talk are nothing but pussies afraid of amplifiers; after years of nurturing my senses with the likes of Merzbow, Masonna, power electronics, whatever... Fist of God is the first album in ages, that when played through only a moderate PA-set, was actually able to hurt my ears. The pain becomes unbearable at about 7:10 minutes when Victor Santiago Jr. cries out his unintelligible "GetBoogalooGetBoogaloo!" howl, somewhere from the depths of the Hadal zone. Toss that phrase to an anthropologist and it will be like giving a sheet of bubble wrap to an infant - pure joy. Fist of God is one berserk of a tongue-in-cheek craphouse classic.

2. ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: Merriweather Post Pavillion (Domino)
I don't like Animal Collective. They are not my cup of mushroom tea. They are not my piece of space cake. The Animal Collective is not going to get a piece of my ass. Their only release I've found intriguing was Animal Crackbox which I was unable to purchase because of the limited pressings of 2000 copies or so. Fuckwits. Who needs them?
Well, the music press does. The press who deliberately adopted the band as their sweetheart ages ago. Propably because someone was a friend of someone of someone who used to bang someone at P4K. I've never heard a single bad word about Animal Collective and the same goes for Merriweather Post Pavilion. How the hell are you supposed to review an album that stands outside all critique, chosen to be the torchbearer of 2009 already in January by fixed fight throwing media mobsters? And then again; the album is actually brilliant. That is when you are fucking high on drugs I suppose. If you're not, it's just as shitty as their earlier works. Be warned.

3. THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART: s/t (Slumberland)
Anyone who names his band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is propably a rapist. Who knows, maybe the whole group is some kind of a cult of diabolic sexual devourings and ruthless gangbangs? The point is that it's just too easy to have biased attitudes towards them.
This article has multiple issues; People will find you an asshole with no second thought if you name that way (1) your orchestra (2, I bet my head they call themselves an orchestra, not a band, disgusting pricks don't you think) that play retroish(3) twee(that is 4, for some) pop with DIY-aesthetics(5) and mock-Glaswegian art school(6)tradition mannerisms somewhere far leeward from the footprints of Charles Rennie Macintosh(7), sporting cutesy(8) looks on their DIY(9) barf-bag of a record sleeve that make you want to smash their cutesy rapist faces with a brick to raise back some of your indie cred after someone tricked you to check out their album(10). Since none of this really matters, I guess they've made a heck of a record.

4. GIRLS: The Album (True Panther)
Christopher Owens made the most uncomfortable happy-go-lucky record of the year and will propably die of an overdose within the next one. It's called showbisnes and it's what keeps California blooming twelve months a year.

5. THESE ARE POWERS: All Aboard Future (Dead Oceans)
Yuck. Another shitty tittle for a band again. Makes you expect another deal of cute wide-eyed indie pop. No. Most of All Aboard Future actually sounds like a set of broken in-bay-automatics in a conveyor car wash. So, your tiny hobo mind really thought it would be a good idea to sleep the night at the Exxon tunnel wash?

6. THE XX: s/t (Young Turks)
The xx are the mean rivalry band of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. They are more suspicious, more sinister, and they always have dirty tricks up their sleeve. They are always the last two groups to duel at the battle of the bands in a local soda-pop joint. the xx play foul and smoke long cigarettes, when The Pains smoke no cigarettes at all. Luckily the latter always win, since they have the deus-ex-machina Fonzie type of saving character on their side, who is also the little brother of Vince Taylor. But that's a whole different story.

7. THE HORRORS: Primary Colours (XL)
Maybe because The Horrors are late-comers into the NYC'ish post-punk revival sound, they've been able to filter out the most obvious cliches of the style and emphasize the more sustainable elements in genre. I wasn't the only one to be surprised to hear that while drifting somewhere in the same shallow waters as Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cure and Depeche Mode, they've avoided half-hearted imitation and the use of cheapest gimmicks in the production; Although years late of their time, the Horrors have made the record that The Rapture, Brakes, Editors, White Lies, Interpol and other clone bands strived to create. Sure they throw in some Jesus & Mary Chain mannerisms and trademark monotony of Ian Curtis and the likes of, but also venture as far as the Satanic Majestie's era Stones (Three Decades) or play with the misé en scenes of less-accessible postpunks like Public Image Limited (New Ice Age). Not to forget the overall krautrock influences dominating many of the songs. Maybe it's that motorik-beat indeed that creates the true nocturnal pulse, the feeling of time and space that their contemporaries lacked. It's the atmosphere along multi-lane highways. Music to drive all night by.

8. MAJOR LAZER: Guns Don't Kill People, Lazers Do (Downtown)
Nothing but a typical and healthy defensive statement; the wish to bury this album six feet under alongside with MSTKRFT, every goddamn Crookers remix and a couple of other naughties fad-raisers. Maybe they could seal the Major Lazer album in a 2009 themed time capsule? When opened a couple of hundred years in the future it destroys the human civilization, who, after nuclear disarming are practically unknown to weapons of massdestruction, and having melted their guns into plows - are unable to fight back. Worst one-liner of the year? "Vibrate like a Nokia."

9. GRIZZLY BEAR: Veckatimest (Warp)
Best engineered indie record of the year. Where disfiguration and strict modernisms are the keywords in production these days, Grizzly Bear paints with thin delicate layers of sounds slowly melting into one another. Very old fashioned I must say. At first I thought it was a Moody Blues or Colosseum record, or... something. In any case it struck me dumb. Yes, I was punched with the retro mallet. It felt quite nice anyhow.

10. THE FLAMING LIPS: Embryonic (Warner Bros.)
Like its name suggests, Embryonic is rather sketchy. But that doesn't make it any less exciting. One can only imagine what the final delivery will be like; the ending scene of 2001, maybe? A rock opera about those slugs in a can that survived the Spaceship Columbia explosion? Embryonic may not be classic but it certainly thrills you, and sets up some great and bizarre expectations... The Lips have made their most angular and ambitious record in years and for a band with a life span of two decades that is a long time.

11. YEAH YEAH YEAHS: It's Blitz!
The Yeah Yeah Yeah are all the rage. Like the Flaming Lips mentioned above, one might have thought their evolution to come to a halt. Instead they've renewed themselves with a sharp cutting, dance floor corroding near-masterpiece. At times It's Blitz! is so easy-accessible that you almost feel bad about it, but then again the upbeat gems like Zero and Heads Will Roll make sure you hit replay again and again.

12. WAVVES: s/t (Fat Possum)
Some of you propably know the classic Letterman clip with the drug frenzied(?) Crispin Glover raving onstage with his platform shoes; "You ever seen a guy drowning?" Letterman keeps asking seemingly disturbed. It was a ghastly, uncanny expression from the "I've seen it all" -man, totally surprised by Glover's fucked up performance, yet a perfect depictation of the moment. The man was drowning on stage. Exactly the kind of moment that one was able to witness at that faithfull night of May in Barcelona half-a-year ago, When Nathan Williams flushed his promising career down the drain in about 20 minutes. After the incident the blue eyes of indierock suddenly became the frontline asshole in media (well, some of us expected him to be a douche right from the start, call it precognition) and now he is practically suppressed dead and forgotten. I even have a hard time realizing that the record came out in 2009. Maybe a future cult-album?

13. COLD CAVE: Love Comes Close (Heartworm)
Might it be coincidence that the most chilling of coldwave albums released this year has a typography identical with that of Nick Cave's first solo album? These guys make the likes of Wilson from Limey, Mark Lewis of Peeping Tom and other antiheroes of murkiest cesspool drama seem like nice chaps. Nick Cave himself is starting to seem like a reliable babysitter for your newborn, and Mark Almond would be turning in his grave, if he had one.

14. BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW: Eating Us (Graveface)
One would expect to run into Black Moth Super Rainbow while glancing through a record collection heavily relying on 90's retro-lounge-psychpop. Oh, crammed somewhere between Saint Etienne, Stereolab, Super Furry Animals and Kula Shaker LPs. It's all very corny... and charming at the same time. So hard to resist grooving along with this.

15. PHOENIX: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Glassnote/Loyauté)
The power pop poster boys of Phoenix represent just about everything that makes you hate the French. Easygoing, sharp-dressed and balancing somewhere between artistic credibility and arrogant flamboyance in their superficial, yet so perfect tunes. They are less pittoresque than Air and not as tough or street smart as Daft Punk, which means they are more middle of the road than most of the bands on the list. But no matter how radio friendly, one must appreciate the architecture of their songs. I bet they get all the chicks too. They're French.

16. SLEEPY SUN: Embrace (ATP)
San Franciscan hippies. Ungroomed, wear no shirts, prefer jam sessions instead of throwing a gig. You get the point. The songs are not so much retro rock, than a series of bad trip flashbacks. Imagine this playing from an 8-track cartridge of a worn out '61 Impala convertible, parked in some deserted godforsaken Big Sur of a beach. You just drove 20 miles forth and back only to find that Owsley wasn't home and his wife hit you with a broom and now you are stoned to death with crappy liquor in your veins and you feel like dying and you stare at the night sky and listen to the slow quiet whimperings of waves to the waterfront and you feel that the whole world is dying with you.

17. ATLAS SOUND: Logos (Kranky)
After prominently showing up on various listings and leastwise positively toned ratings (not only because of his vast output of releases as Deerhunter/Atlas Sound) for about three years now, one might say that Bradford Cox is an indie superstar in the true meaning of the word. He has achieved what most left fielders are striving for in vain; establishing himself. It's a shame that his songwriting, although always fascinating, is still too bantering and lukewarm to produce true classics. Cryptograms was great and Microcastle was not bad, but they share the same shortcomings that Logos is suffering from. The songs seem half-built, bearing a kind of ghost momentum. For a while you see it and then it's gone and you can't be sure if it ever was there at all. Like a well done magic trick.
So maybe he is a some sort of trickster spirit. But after a while all this makes you feel that Cox maybe isn't that comfortable with his cult icon status - or that he finds it trivial. This is the reason why he seems like one of the most admirable musicians today.


18. MOS DEF: The Ecstatic (Downtown)
The overall paranoia of The Ecstatic is intense. An intense feel of being somewhere else. Misplaced and drifting. The atmosphere is anything but American, it's very European, drawing his inspiration somewhere from a combination of Antonioni, Rimbaud and Burroughs in Beat Hotel era Paris, you can almost imagine Mos Def building up this epic trip during an opium binge at the depths of some den in a Jewish ghetto or a riad in Tangiers.

19. DINOSAUR JR: Farm (Jagjaguwar) / SONIC YOUTH: The Eternal (Matador)

20. LA ROUX: s/t (Polygram)
How very easy to smirk at La Roux indeed, but the fact is that when totally forgotten a couple of years in the future, it will take a couple more and those old record-thriftshop-wandering gurus of disposable dance music, who cannot live without their daily doses of Oakey & Moroder will find this worth 180 grams of gold.

21. TELEPATHE: Dance Mother (V2)
Mark my words; electroclash rehabilitation will occur in two-to-three years. Telepathe are so out of style, that they almost sound like forerunners. I was forced to choose between Tegan and Sara and these girls for my list - it was a quick choice.

22. THE ANTENNAS: Feeling Feline Tonight (Novoton)
As the anxious melodrama of The Collector kickstarts Feeling Feline Tonight, one is able to find himself somewhere between the dark shadows and the contrasted back lights. There is a sense of adventure and a feeling of nostalgia and bitterness going on every moment. Although drapered in ultra cool vintage synth textures, the overall tone is associated with the unreal, the fantasy, the history and the dream. Antennas at their best are as campy as Roxy Music. But as the Roxy approach was strictly sentient postmodernism, the Antennas are retro-postmodernists with an admirable counterfeit of the overtly sentimental cinematic sound of past decades.

23. BEAR IN HEAVEN: Wholehearted (Hometapes)
Oh my, another bear/fox/wolf/fucking-eelworm-band expanding the fauna of Brooklyn. Thoreauesque longing, bucolic post-rock melodies and organic chord developments seem to be the new black in local hipster circles - in fact it's just about as cool as hoarding footstamps. I guess all this is passable in a city infested with rodents, cockroaches and Puerto Ricans. How about some realistic band names for a change? The Rats? How randy would that be?

24. BLACK LIPS: 200 Million Thousand (Vice)

The new Black Lips album sounds good as usual. This time they are maybe even a wee bit more sinister, smudgier & murkier. You know, the kind of mean ass music that Jack The Ripper likes to hear before going out to paint the town red. Lock up your daughters.

25. NASA: Spirit of Apollo (Anti)

This "record" is a lot of fun... for about five minutes. Then one starts to realize the epic measure of NASA sucking dick. Well, wait for 20 years and Spirit of Apollo will be notorious. In sucking dick.

Epitaphs

Luke Haines has achieved everything smashing that Morrissey used to be. How is he going to use it, eventually?

In popular music, nostalgy is the weapon of choice, and Luke Haines has always known how to handle it. On his new double album, 21st Century Man, he dwells even deeper in homesickness and feeling of bittersweet yearning, acknowledging both historical and sub-urban settings and a various crowd of artists from Kinski to Russian futurists during his mass. Klaus Kinski must be one of the most beautiful pieces of music recorded this year, alongside with Love Letter To London - whether it's the Weimaresque longing of Heimat in crippled and decadent post-war Berlin, or the memoirs of a war criminal exiled in a tropical paradise, Haines is able to create perfect imagery, realistic but romanticised at the same time.

Stephen Patrick Morrissey is another seminal figure who has been drawing his inspiration from the frozed-to-death-conservative British Ground. Both Haines and Morrissey speak the same language, that is high literature, and operate with the very same currency, that is, the imperial nostalgy, that is The Pound. While tapping his fingers into the thin sheet ice on a frozen lake for several years, he became elevated into a demigod, which finally more or less killed him as a person. By 1988, at the time of his first solo album, Morrissey was practically sitting on a goldmine. Now, twenty years later he has became nothing but a master in turning his artistic value into materialized value; a bankbook sturdy as his waist and a congregation of loyally attending fans who keep touring and recording profitable, even if the program would be more than shallow in tone & aesthetics. And pumped up with this treacherous battle-drug of ecstatic applause the old warrior keeps on going. Slamming his axe against the ice, now, instead of the wry, gentle, awkward knockings of Vauxhall And I, Morrissey is selling England by the pounding. He has turned his artistic currency into dollars and placed it in a low-risk investment, that keeps him moderately well-earned time after time, but which is an utter bore. A Fort Knox of yawns. A spider-web-laiden mausoleum where he has to hold in the humidity of his breath and the slightest whimper goes on echoing forever.

In this context Luke Haines is putting out something that Stephen Patrick never would. Not even in his worst nightmares. Haines is writing his last words as a 20th century artist, and declaring his birth as a 21st centurian. And he does it by simply announcing that he is a sentimental stuckist, and about to die in the 21st Century. There is no magnificent manifest of self-arrogancy - a formula that Morrissey has so succesfully utilized, strictly for the sake of a glamorous show that justifies the middle-aged faggot his existence, without any actual message behind the ceremonial pomp. This would almost tempt one to make a reference to the Emperor's New Clothes, if he wasn't so eager to decloak himself on stage, something one must appreciate from a man of his built.

Haines confesses that this might be his death as an musician. He states something artists have very hard time admitting; that he already made his masterpiece and is now playing with the left-over pieces of the puzzle. After this self-reflecting and non-feigned record, it will be very interesting to see how Haines is going to use his remaining capital. To build an idiot pensionary hooked on historism, or to boldly go - through some bizarre metamorphose. Maybe vanish into a superdense white dwarf of a star?

This apology of an album is accompanied by Achtung Mutha - a loosely themed collection of songs, built around The Great Brain Robbery. The spoken word performance of anti-Turnerian PoMo-conceptualism critique in form of a trepanation scene, divided into three tableaux, is an undeniable tribute towards Lou Reed's little twisted rock-novellas, but actually the result comes more closer to The Jeweller by John Cale with a little twist of Stuart Home. The result is not too original, but by a writer as talented as Haines the pastiche is so excellent you've just got to lay back and enjoy it. Very creepy. Very British. Rest of the tracks are short and vignette like, surrounding the backbone of the story, still all quite enjoyable. This is what still makes Haines interesting as a song-writer. His style is minimized and unpretentious. Haines' writing is never of epic quality, he writes ditties - and loads them full of emotion. Even a song as trivial as English Southern Man that seems completely worthless, is saved by a trick as simple as a charming synthesized chorus, totally out of place and corny for a track almost minimalistic in nature.

The tittle track of 21st Century Man is the only exception here, a throw-away melody where Haines actually tries to cram so much cheap & obvious nostalgy in to a autobiographical narrative, that it becomes absolutely pathetic. This kind of long poetic zeitgeist composition is a hard one to handle, and even challenging as a source of parody (see Gimme Indie Rock by Sebadoh). The result is an awful Forrest Gump of brit-pop. Pure sentimentality. Then again, right here he bluntly puts out the perfect motif of his album:

"What can you do when you've did your masterpiece, I did that in the nineties, I was all over the nineties"

Luke Haines: 21st Century Man
(Fantastic Plastic Records, 2009)
Record rating:
-21st Century Man 9.0/10
-Achtung Mutha 8.0/10

Lies, storytelling, self-mythologising and marketing erotic capital

...and yes, we buy it. It's pop music.

Let's begin by summing up some of the vital stats. It's 2009. I bet that I'm not the only schmock who hardly even noticed that the first decade of the 21st Century will end in about four months. It will be 40 years since After The Goldrush and Paranoid. It will be 45 years since Highway 61, Rubber Soul, Love Supreme. It will be 50 years since Joan Baez first time strummed her guitar on record, 50 years since Coltrane blew Giant Steps. 50 years, the average age of a baby boomer who is using his last efforts to support the record industry clenched inside the iron fist of web distribution.

Classic rock is not a dinosaur. It's not even a Fossil. It's a barrel of oil in a jumble sale of an Arab who is cleaning his semi-detached garage in Alamein to accommodate his new Toyota Prius and his emancipated son's drum kit so that he can become indie and street smart and cool and avoid being bullied at school.

Neil Young and Axl Rose propably both realized a long time ago, that their unreleased records people were starving for year after year, were more valuable unreleased than released. In music business where publicity is worth fighting for, a business were myths and legends are merchandisable goods of unlimited value, these unreached holy grail albums were hype raisers essential to their career. And while the decade finally reached its apex, they also realized that they weren't getting any younger. Neither the audience. The market value of Chinese Democracy and Archives would drastically drop if they wait another ten years.

Axl was certainly aware that releasing Chinese Democracy would determinate his career. For Neil, things are not that bad. Archives is not an item of passionate craving for the average nostalgic middle aged listener, or the randomly back catalog digging juvenile (awakened by indie cred rehabilitation). Archives is the product of Neil Young's mad scientists lab for a true grit hardcore fan. They are the only ones to purchase this humongous first volume of completism lunacy. Some of them shall praise it, some hate it. Maybe both.

I'm not diasappointed with the first part of Archives. I don't have a right to say that, since here is the average listener. The average halfhearted chump who has no real interest, nor shelf meters for Mr. Young's egotripping projects. No doubt about it, there are real gems here. And the very early stuff is truely interesting. What I Am disappointed for, is the fact that just like Chinese Democracy, Archives was way more fascinating before it materialized. A myth, a legend. And Neil Young killed it.

We all love stories. Don't we?

Neil Young: Archives Vol 1
(Reprise 2009)
Record rating: 7.0/10

Of Rapunzel syndrome

...But sweet, really sweet

Albeit the ultra cheap video for La Roux's Bulletproof looks like something designed to attract pre-teen kids during the first couple of years of this millennium (remember brands like Anastacia or Pink?) the tune is one of the catchiest ones this year, along with Quicksand, In for the Kill and perhaps Lisztomania by Phoenix. One thing that bothers me though, is Elly Jackson's hairdo. It looks like a huge cone of cotton candy. What if it really tastes like cotton candy as well? I've always thought that the fairy floss has a distinctively similar texture to human hair. The hair of a very old woman. Strongly perfumed and candied with the icky cider resembling artificial aroma of a strong hairspray, the really cheap ones you know. The colour may be artificial as well, I think... Well, that's part of the branding of the floss I suppose. Indeed cotton candy does not only remind me of human hair, but also of the amorphous solid nature of this damned guilty pleasure hit music. I use to think albums with melodies as sugary as this, my "coitus records" - you feel sticky after them. When people in movies have sex they never need a Kleenex nor a glass of water after it all. I wonder why. But that woolish texture, hmm. Did you know that trichobezoars were thought to have remedic powers until a silver cutlery thieving cook of Ambroise Paré was poisoned to death and treated with a bezoar with no effect?

La Roux: S/T
(Polydor, 2009)
Record rating: 8/10

When I Paint My Masterpiece...

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are evolving into the jet plane age of American Smooth

I've never been that much into the triple Y.

Then I saw the video for Zero. Gladwrapped, Ramones groupie clad, shopping cart cruisin' (in 2009! Guts!) Karen O - the only true Madonna of the real screeching punky Riot Grrrly-girlish electroclash - delivering an album strong as this even after the genre itself has vanished and dried up being nothing but a new monotonous Ladytron album recycling the same cliches every once in a while.

The strength of this record lies, besides a kick-ass cover, in a less punky, more songwriting based approach and dancewise production. I already mentioned this year's strongest single, the epic feet mover Zero. Heads Will Roll is almost as tempting, with its sexy chorus, cricket menace synths, hungry sounding back beat of cannibal drums and a string arrangement loop reminiscent of Gary Numan's Me. Ha! Original? No. Hooky? Yes.

There's also a quirky appeal in that very Yeah Yeah Yeahs type of signature sinisterism of Shame and Fortune, which, let's face it, sounds nothing but a chocolate bar commercial. YYY are well aware that a lackluster song without a substance can be turned into a moment of musical suspense when you add enough danger into it. Alas, the ballads are a drag, lacking the aforementioned aspect. Loaded with strong emotion, but musically so very uninteresting. Runaway and Little Shadow are completely worthless, while Hysteric has a potential lost with the old fashioned production. Makes me think of present day U2 trying to play girl pop.

And oh yes, there's Dragon Queen (the tittle? Again, guts! Love you Karen). It's a fascinating attempt to duplicate the glam sexy Johnny Jewel type "Italo meets minimalism" dark disco, the result being something much more organic, retroish and original, sounding like something from a James Bond versus Saturday Night Fever double feature from the seventies.

All in all: It's Blitz! is not a perfect record, but a nostalgic trip back to the millennial times, where the new wave of indie wasn't something idiotic and a bunch of kids stopped dwelling in escathologic depression and traded their unwashed jeans for plastic and lipstick. Naturally all this sounds a bit dated today, but so does every record of artistic maturation. See, there's a difference between artistic growth and being artistically mature. The first is when you release your second album which is praised in unison, latter is when the critics think you're a relic but the actual audience has been growing with the artist and consider your release incredibly strong. It's like they've made their own Blood On The Tracks.

As a post scriptum I must add that I do like Ladytron, but for a band taking their tittle from a Roxy Music song they should pay more attention to artistic variety. It sounds like mockery. I bet I will soon hear it is mockery, irony, a tribute, what ever...

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz
(Interscope, 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10

Bob Dylan: Blood On The Tracks
(Columbia 1974)
Record rating: 9.0/10

May contain artificial emotions and emetics

"Shit, still in Saigon"

Stumbled upon this while checking out what the Guild of Pretentious Hipsters from Brooklyn -media are into nowadays. It's not fair to judge a band by just one single track. Usually. But Quiet Little Voices just reveals We Were Promised Jetpacks to be so evidently crappy that I do not, I definitely NOT want to hear another song from the group ever again.

A good four minutes of mind melting pathos and angst. Remember Carlos the Jackal? Well he was an amateur compared to these professional assassins, experts in the field of suffocating the listener with their emotional overload which leaves absolutely no room for imagination or interpretation (let me try, umm, my interpretation is that these guys are sad, depressed... or maybe hungry?). No diversity, no ambiguity, just a crap load of overflowing expression of "pain". Fake as hell.

Why is it that we are living in a culture of exaggeration? Why is it that Nick Drake did the same thing with just a guitar, a capo, and a few sparse anxiousness lacking reciting whispers? Why is it that he made you feel empathy without moaning in pain? Why is it that he didn't throw that big cream puff of his ego straight at your face leaving your eyelids so sticky that you were unable to recognize who was it from the band being in such tremendous emotional misery that he had to comfort himself by humping you at backstage? Why is it that the actually sad guys kill themselves, not in Paris in a summer rain, but after purchasing a pack of cereals and listening an Iggy Pop record?

So, why does this band sound so familiar? Artificial feelings and overdramatization so that your audience won't miss a thing, since they've paid 30 bucks for that Vegas show ticket, right? Yeah! I restate, We Were Promised Jetpacks are not assassins, they are nothing but errand boys, delivering a message. From Celine Dion. In the manner of not shooting the messenger I might as well give them another chance one fine day.

We Were Promised Jetpacks: Quiet Little Voices
(Fatcat, 2009)
Track rating: 2.0/10

Possible forthcoming record rating: I'd like to have a t-shirt instead, it's more convenient and, chance is, enough ironic someday to be worn in company of hipsters with t-shirts slightly over the top being enough ironic. Man, It's a one delicate issue. Ain't that a drag?

No sleep 'till celestial object

Sleepy Sun may have created the soundtrack for Summer 2009

When I grow up I'm going to put up a band. And we will do so much drugs! Our album covers will be symbolism filled and esoteric, and our song titles pseudo-artistic and cryptic just like the tittle of this blog article above. And our clothes will be ugly and dirty. Oh, did I tell you we are about to do so much drugs? We'll do thumbprints of acid and mescaline and shitidrine and it will be like visiting all the museums in Paris in one day. And our music sounds just about the same as everything done before us, but it doesn't matter since it's not about how the music sounds, it's about how the music tastes like.

Sleepy Sun is a genre band, one might even say generic. Droning guitars, religious themes, drugged up vocals and a good deal of echo. Besides the obvious influences from the sixties there are echoes of Black Mountain, The Oscillation, Spiritualized and even Kula Shaker. Most of the tracks work fine for me... With two exceptions, the hang-the-lyricist-mood agitatingly titled Snow Goddess, which propably tries to imitate Kid A era Radiohead, and then, the vocals in Duet With The Northern Sky simply sound disgusting.

The most satisfying track must be the downcast, subtle, still somehow entheogenic whirlwind of gentle fire, Golden Artifact, a tornado of flammable liquid moving in slow motion, more kissing than consuming. The strange atmosphere makes me think of the mellowness of Grateful Dead's Dark Star every time I hear it. I would like to taste more of this stuff.

One would make a mistake calling Embrace a record of great originality. It would be unfair to call it mediocre as well. Thumbs up because of Golden Artifact and the guilty pleasure soothing thought that after the summer I'll check into a rehab and throw away this piece of easygoing "music to take dope in the park by".

Sleepy Sun: Embrace
(ATP, 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10

Classic Revaluated; The Monks - Black Monk Time

or the record better known as the one from the band of the mayor of Turtle River, Minnesota

I guess at least part of you know the story so far: 20 years after a devastating blitzkriegish war that almost burned down the whole world, five American soldiers stationed in BDR form a band. You can see them playing in German television under a moniker of "The Monks", wearing black robes, nooses around their necks, and their heads tenure-shaven. The vision is apocalyptic, the music is ugly. Ugly and demented. Reminiscent of an SA marching band playing the Horst-Wessel-Lied with electric guitars (and one electric banjo) and Pink Floydish organ that cries out like an overdriven Jericho trumpet from hell. And the fact is that the German teenagers are dancing to this. It's 1965 and it's anglo-saxon pop music, so of course they are crazy for it. The scene is very decadent and disturbing. The first impression is that The Monks are Pure Evil.

One must point out that the historical importance of this album is questionable. Released only in Germany without any remarkable success, there's no doubt that the likes of Velvet Underground and The Fugs were actually superstars at the time compared to these guys. Hardly anyone heard the record in 1966 so it won't really make a difference if they invented the use of guitar feedback (as it is claimed) or if they pioneered punk (or postpunk, or maybe industrial, EBM or death metal for God's sake!).

But the lack of a historical substance is nothing compared to the fact that the record is awesome. I already mentioned the EBM context; The Monks are actually something like Nitzer Ebb thrown into the sixties. Philistine as a beer hall full of nazis. The music is mechanical, set over the most roaring, almost tribal drumming and violent tambourine clashing, making it look so evident that rock music is nothing but a form of a primitive religious ritual.

If the music is a combination of strict militarian monotony and the all collapsing chaos of war, the lyrics are nothing more than psychotic rantling of bigotry, ranging from torsos of protest songs to nihilistic battle cries, sometimes near existentialism in their minimalism (Drunken Maria). Gary Burger's vocals are aggressive army marching chants of call and response ("People kill, People die for you!" of the horrifying Complication). At times it's all just wild shell shocked stream of consciousness - the opening track Monk Time being the best example of Burger's hysteric rhubarb ("My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond who is he? Pussy Galore is coming to town! Stop it, it's too loud for my ears!") the band beating the shit out of their instruments in the background.

The Monks' idea of a love song is degenerated as well. The bluesy rumbling I Hate You, with Burger crying out the "(unintelligible line) -- I Hate You with a passion baby! -- I hate you because you make me hate you!" opening, must have been a truly shocking moment in 1964 or 1965, when the audiences were almost completely nurtured with lyrics fitting to the boy meets girl canon of popular music. But I guess not that many actually got shocked. Some did, but the German teenagers, maybe a mite challenged with the English language, seemed to be happy raving while the band were playing numbers like Shut Up, where the protagonist, with an intonation of a Germanic warrior, yells his counterpart to shut up and stop her crying.

One should remember that the Monks were five GI Joes in a foreign country, frustrated by cultural isolation and pissed off with the army. Music like this couldn't have come out in New York, neither in Frisco. Somehow it makes sense, that in these stranded conditions they were forced to create the most barbarian, primitive, menacing album of the sixties.

The Monks: Black Monk Time
(Polydor, 1966)
Record rating: 9.5/10

Snapshots

Filthy Dukes / Jackpot / Crookers

Like eighteen out of twenty graphic designers, the one behind Filthy Dukes' single cover embraces the imagery of a pyramid meeting the eye. No problem. It's a nice looking sleeve and the 12" inside is worth listening too. Imagine Manfred Mann's Earth Band recording a funkier version of that annoying Ghostbusters theme song. Can't get any better than that? It can. There's a remix by Fred Falke. Maybe the track offers nothing we haven't heard before from our favorite filter house guru, but it's still a nice piece of work. The cream of the crop? Emperor Machine of DC provides us with a one hell of kick-ass remix that sounds like it was actually Giorgio in person producing that wicked Manfred Mann session!

Speaking of eighteen out of twenty, that's approximately the frequency of Permanent Vacation Records putting out a perfect release of nu-disco. Jackpot's flanger heavy Ragazza goes swaying somewhere between old school italo and Queen's Radio Ga Ga with a juggling bassline very reminiscent of a Roland Jupiter 8. I must say I like it a lot, the b-side alas being not so interesting.

Meanwhile, Ministry Of Sound's German division is re-launching the Crookers' huge club anthem, Kid Cudi's Day N Nite. Too bad that a track that's been available for something like twelve months now seems nothing but an overplayed dinosaur. What a noble legacy for the year; One will always remember 2008 for Crookers, bassline, blog house, and as a year when Youtube video killed the recording star. MoS is truly beating a dead horse.

Filthy Dukes: This Rhythm 12"
(Universal 2009)
Record rating: 9.0/10

Jackpot: Ragazza 12"
(Permanent Vacation 2009)
Record rating: 8.00/10

Kid Cudi / Crookers: Day N Nite 12"
(Ministry Of Sound 2009)
Record rating: 7.0/10

Halfspeed you Black Mountain soundalikes

'Twas the squarest of times... or was it?

There seems to be a wave of bands drawing their inspiration from the 70's, taking not only the best, but also the worst aspects of the Rotten Decade and fortifying them. Busy imitating the lost hippies who nurtured their minds with a hazy mixture of psychedelia, progressive and hard rock, the guys from Arbouretum have all these influences and clearly they listened the right records through with a loving ear. This album is maybe the best, most depressing piece of suburban low-rent postpsychedelia since Jade Stone's posthumous Mosaics from 1977. You can imagine a lonely aging deadhead listening to this album at 11 am, already dead stoned from honey slides, mumbling how music these days sucks, especially glam rock and disco, desperately trying to tell himself that Uriah Heep on a good night can be almost as good as Iron Butterfly on a bad night. It's a nice vignette they are pulling, but unfortunately it's also just as depressing as its true predecessors, and listening to more than couple of tracks of this otherwise ok album will make you fear that your life starts running half speed for good.

Another candidate, Julie Doiron, seems to represent the style of indie rock that... um... well... the style of indie rock that originated when a long long time ago Lou Reed convinced Mo Tucker to sing on After Hours. Later Doiron throws in some pretty well snarling guitar, á la P.J. Harvey / The Kills. Especially on Consolation Price and Spill Yer Lungs . So you know the influences and I guess you can imagine what this record sounds. Nothing too special. But well, the melodies are actually nice or even catchy and I have no problem with the idea of putting this on again from the start. The lack of originality maybe sucks here, but there is something of the same disillusion here than that of Arbouretum, with a feeling of taking its place somewhere in past decades. A tired, very nocturnal vibe that could make this a nigh time sister album for Song Of The Pearl. I think of an open window in a suburban summer night, moths flying in and getting drunk on the smoke of dope while I'm listening this.

Arbouretum: Song Of The Pearl
(Thrill Jockey 2009)
Record rating: 7.0/10

Julie Doiron: I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day
(JagJaguwar 2009)
Record rating: 7.0/10

Cool vintage disco, never worn

Today's electric independent sounds like condensation on the surface of a soda can

I tend to be somewhat skeptic about album format dance music, but this compilation is just so much fun. So totally leaned back that after a few drinks at 5 pm, you are unable to tell when the Chic song coming from the worn out soundsystem of the empty dancefloor ends and someone puts this fine set of nu-disco spinning.

The album frontloads with two superb tracks, 1gnition's Secret Sunday Lover -edit by Greg Wilson and Goblin City by the Panthers as Holy Ghost!'s dub version. Both have killer basslines and the latter keeps jerking exactly like the Leagues' Don't You Want Me, although not sounding like synthpop at all.

Following takes are not too bad either. The rising electro duo from Belgium, Aeroplane remixes Paris by Friendly Fires. Reminds me of Neon Neon in their most easy-going mood. Cool. Hercules & Love Affair have never been my wet dream of choice, but their version of a Chaz Jankel (always soaking wet, yes) track is good fun. It's something very dangerous as a matter of fact. When you loose that, for lack of a better word, sophisticated nu-disco sound for a moment and start sliding towards a nightmare ridden DT with Midnite Vultures by Beck as a soundtrack (a band of lizards playing which may be a gas or may not)... It's not bad, more like a dead-drunk guy pulling a pocket knife on you. It gets some of your adrenaline flowing.

A couple of other tracks as well are about to go from chilled to cheesy. I could do without Love On The Line, Brooklyn Club Jam and especially DJ Koze's remix Minimal which I find horrendous. Luckily the end of the album is saved by Holy Ghost's superior Hold On, which I'd already cite as a piece of classic vintage disco. Another original, Low Motion Disco's Low Murderer... is the most lavish sounding piece of, again, beckish trash retro - this time in a good way, no lizzards in sight since I'm keeping the DT's away with a nice flow of booze. You see, this song might be playing in the very same bar near the beach line where the pinball machine of Motorcycle Theme edit blinks in the corner. We even hear a nice Franz Ferdinand rework, sounding like Happy Mondays doing their Barbados "vacation", which makes me want to order another glass of white rum on the rocks and sell all my clothes for a vial of crank.

VA: Future Disco - A Guide To 21st Century Disco
(Azuli 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10

Truck driving madness

Glen Campbell is like Southern Comfort served to Casey Jones with gasoline and coke

You know movies like Car or Maximum Overdrive, where some poor guy gets haunted by a psychotic truck driver? Or maybe the vehicle itself has an evil urge. The reason for this berserk behavior is never fully explained in the film, but I guess that in real life the reason would be a massive load of bad country in the car radio.

See, every year somebody gets an idea to put out a greatest hits album by a Legendary Hick Artist called The Essential Legendary Hick Artist (Different Running Order Than Last Year). So the mattress burner in a Texaco cap whose CB handle is something like Big Chief or Bosco keeps listening this monotonous set of old hits in his eighteenwheeler cabin and one fine day he just snaps and it's all road rage and hellfire. By these standards the New Glen Campbell collection is something to set any road warrior ready for an amok ride.

If you're about to purchase a Campbell recording for approximately 15 euros and want to get an impression of a musician more than just a rednecked rhinestone cowboy, I'd still go for the Capitol Years anthology released in 1998. It has all the hits, plus Morning Glory with Bobbie Darin, a take on Universal Soldier, the wicked Every Time I Itch I Wind Up Scratching You, and a couple of other rarities that give you a hint that Campbell was operating on a far more broader range at the time, than the coverage of a typical C&W station's AM tower was. There's some nice traditional tones in the Buffy Saint Marie cover, or Daniels' Folk Singer. And the perfectly lazy countryfunk of Southern Nights - I always use to imagine Lennon doing a version of that one... Campbell is quite a diverse guitarist after all. If you've ever heard his acid washed work on Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by Kenny Rogers you'll know what I mean... Perhaps they should include that one on a compilation some day.

Glen Campbell: Greatest Hits
(EMI 2009)
Record rating: 5.5/10

Glen Campbell: The Capitol Years 65/77
(EMI 1998)
Record rating: 9.0/10

Sounds like Stephen King's Blues

Back in 1974

Guess what? I wanna show you something. It's an old open-cut mine pit filled with soiled rain water. About 6 feet deep and probably infested with Naegleria fowleri and a bunch of other nasty things as well. And it's the coolest place in the world! Of course we have to ride our bikes there for a good eight miles in the late July heat (with our t-shirts tucked in our shorts for hiding the dirty magazines). But hey, it's the best place to swim and dive and cough out our chasty lungs in privacy smoking those Kools you pinched from your mother's desk drawer.

So thinking of now, that was the best summer you ever lived. Those endless days at the lake in the open-cut pit. The other ass-kick thing was an LP that your brother gave you when he moved out. The album you played through five times in an afternoon in your room, where the smell of pubescent sweat and semen was thickening the hot air.

Those are the defining memories of that summer. Next summer it was all forgotten. You were interested in nothing but scrobbling Laura's snatch. Even sold your records to buy a car! That AMC Gremlin, which broke down to pieces after 35 000 miles, so underpowered, you had to shift down with the AC on to climb the slightest hill. Man, was that the shittiest car ever produced.

Death: ...For The Whole World To See (1974)
(Drag City 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10

Knee deep in twee

or the pains of not being a douchebag

So maybe it's just irony, but for god's sake they have the worst name in, say, the last 13 years of pop music. And see how cute they look. Aww, I should be hating this. But there is some strangely sincere feeling in these songs. Something tells me that unlike 98% of indie population, these kids are not in the business only for getting laid.

Call it a hunch... maybe I'm wrong. But the very first track definitely sounds like The Shop Assistants and beside all the jangling guitars they have some screeching guitars as well in the next one, which is nice. Now, I'm trying to think like the average "I'm digging this crap because it's trendy not to be trendy" douchebag, who wants to get laid. I might hit a club, do my jangling and screeching shit, put my jangling and screeching shit back into my jangling & screeching case which has a Tiger Trap sticker on top of it - maybe get laid. Or, I could cite Arcade Fire lyrics to the first person in the bathroom cue. Why not use a guaranteed aphrodisiac instead of digging up (the truly awesome) stuff like The Shop Assistants? Well, they did it and they don't give damn if they get laid or not. That's why this group melted my heart... sort of.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart: S/T
(Slumberland 2009)
Record Rating: 7.5/10

Shine on Motherfucker

Wavves calls a new generation of West Coast surfer emo defeatists to unite

Why is it that the record industry thinks a bunch of Californian fakesters is what we are craving for, year after year? Beach bums without a tan, slackers who never have enough slack since they are busy recording lo-fi tapes in their daddy's garage (see, no tan).

The latest craze is Wawves. According to an established magazine the Wawwes case is pretty sad; he used to work in a record store but couldn't handle the jocks bullying him. So now he's moved back to his parents, and being bullied by his younger brother's friends who stole Wave's precious drum kit. So he started making music about how sob sob lonely he is because at the record store he was at least able to discuss about some old skool hip hop records with the nerdy customers.

Now aren't we glad that Wawes got a record deal and was able to cut a critically acclaimed album to heal his pressure cooker of an ego? Wrong. Because of this we have to keep listening, if not the record, but the Pitchfork kids namedropping the guy - for maybe even four months or so. Crap.

Why is he doing this? Writing your own hip hop blog and getting virtual credit doesn't make you a better person. Getting a gazillion last.fm plays from other surfer emo kids doesn't make you a better person. "Finding your place" among a shitty subculture is the same thing as hiding in the dark of your daddy's garage for the rest of your life. All because you couldn't handle with a couple of asshole jocks? Stop gathering a worthless congregation of summer goths whose only revolution is to dwell in their own misery. Your grandpa who died in Korea would despise everything you are. Down with being a pussy - walk back to that Sam Goody's shithole and kick some ass. Rise and shine!

By the way; the record itself is not that bad at all. Then again, one more thing that makes me feel uncanny is the guy's pseudonym. Anyone even slightly illiterate would typo it all the time. You don't sell records with a name like Wavvves. It sounds like a 15 year old hipster trying to lolspeak during a Jell-O Shots and Vicodin induced toilet hug. I get disgusted.

Wavves: S/T
(Woodsist 2008)
Record rating: 7.0/10