a moment extracted from the crush of work

Posted on May 16th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I don't have a hell of a lot to say about it, but I'm among the many (it seems) who think the new Portishead album is terrific. I'm only a moderate fan of their old work -- like but not love -- so the departure from their old sound doesn't bother me. And I think the extent of the departure has been exaggerated. Still, it doesn't surprise me that a lot of old fans are down on it -- see the reviews at Rate Your Music, for example* -- and I'd expect that you, Donald, might not go for it.

0 comments.

today's work headphone music

Posted on April 1st, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Motorhead, Ace of Spades
Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs
Aterciopelados, Caribe Atomico

All solid toe-tapping albums. The Pinback has moved back into my near-daily rotation, and retains its grip on my Favorite Album of 2007 spot. I only stopped listening to it for a while out of fear of overplaying it. I say again, if you have a taste for lots of catchy, intricate parts strung together into hypnotically memorable songs, combining great musical instincts with an obsessive attention to detail, you should check out Autumn of the Seraphs. It's hard to compare Rob Crow's distinctive songwriting styles with anyone else, but if you imagine a somewhat cooler, more rounded and smooth-sounding Spoon, you wouldn't be far off from Pinback. It's also one of those albums that is gratifyingly, almost frustratingly consistent: nothing to skip, no letdowns, but also nothing so clearly outstanding from the rest that it would be the obvious choice to play for someone. Which also means it may not be immediately arresting, but if you keep playing it, it creeps into your nervous system and makes a home there. (Like Spoon.)

0 comments.

another strangely obsessive project

Posted on February 18th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, 70s Survival.

It's probably obvious by now, but the Seventies Survival Project is dead. I've just found too many missing songs to continue in the spirit I originally intended. It's too bad, because it was fun.

But in the spirit of Pointless Obsession, I've decided -- don't ask why -- to really, really know 1990. To that end I am putting all my 1990 albums on my mp3 player, and investigating all the important ones I don't know, and even ones I dismissed at the time. I am using RateYourMusic's top albums of 1990 and esoteric albums of 1990 as my main references. This is especially useful in two ways: there's a lot of hiphop I don't know, and RateYourMusic is over-represented with metalheads. Of all the areas I have been largely ignorant of in recent years, those are the two I have been most interested in recently. Prog and folky stuff are also pretty well represented.

On the other hand, country hardly shows up there, and the annual Village Voice critics poll is unlikely to be much help there either. Anyone know a reliable source of best country albums by year? Modern jazz doesn't fare too well, either (though jazz dominates the RateYourMusic charts well into the 1960s).

I'm also deliberately trying to know as little as possible about the albums before I listen to them. Album titles and covers are often a giveaway, of course, but I'm not reading about albums before I listen to them.

Very preliminary listening reports:

Megadeth's Rust in Peace, despite the stupid title, is a fantastic album. I keep listening to it in headphones three times in a row, and none of it has palled. That one's a purchase.

Bathory's Hammerheart is not bad, but kinda silly. I mean, even for metal. Viking concept metal is just hard to take seriously, and much of it drags. Hugely influential, apparently.

Brand Nubian's One for All is very very groovy. I don't know why I'd never listened to it before, since I've known for a long time that I like most of the Native Tongues-related stuff. Another definite purchase.

Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, despite the dumb title and the standard tiresome braggadocio, has monstrous beats. Probable purchase.

Mike Oldfield's Amarok sounds like a meandering mess.

6 comments.

another one for 2007

Posted on January 14th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

M.I.A.'s Kala sounds amazing. Great beats, great sonic textures, big clear production. I'm still getting my head around the songs, but it's consistently engaging, with a large number of arresting passages, and I'm confident this is going to end up in my top ten.

I wouldn't have heard of this album were it not for those awful hipsters (specifically, Pitchfork's best-of-the-year lists solicited from indie musicians). Thank you, hipsters!

2 comments.

taking for granted

Posted on December 13th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I enjoy Radiohead, but they've never been a special favorite. I like some of their albums more than others, but I don't know their stuff inside and out. I admire their adventurousness, and I find it interesting that a large fanbase has so far followed them where they wanted to go. I think of them as a great band, more objectively than subjectively. I didn't like Hail to the Thief at all, and while I didn't give up on them -- almost everyone has an occasional bad album in them -- they slipped lower on my priority list, and while everything I heard about In Rainbows made it sound interesting, I hadn't got round to it and didn't really intend to anytime soon -- didn't even have it on my shortlist of potential Best of 2007 albums I needed to track down.

Which is a longwinded way of saying, I heard it in a bar last week and was blown away.

0 comments.

eponymous hiphop?

Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

It was only when I began actively compiling Eponymous Albums That Aren't Debut Albums -- now up to 86 items -- that I became aware that there seems to be a much lower percentage of eponymous albums in hiphop than elsewhere. Does that seem true to anyone else?

0 comments.

eponymous update

Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

The list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums is up to fifty. A surprising number of them are from musicians who actually had an eponymous debut, but chose to repeat the title.

17 comments.

eponymous but not first

Posted on December 5th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

Over at the useful and fun website Rate Your Music, I have begun a list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums. I've seeded the list with twenty albums, and am takin suggestions for more (I have to add them myself). I'm only interested in standard albums of new material: not compilations, box sets, etc.

11 comments.

c'mon already

Posted on November 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Now that Pylon's fine debut album Gyrate has been re-released yet again, can we please get a cd reissue of their fantastic second album, Chomp?

4 comments.

puzzled regrets

Posted on November 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Why, when I was nineteen years old and obsessed with the strange avant-funk of the first, eponymous, 1983 Golden Palominos album, did no one tell me that I really needed to hear Miles Davis's On the Corner?

4 comments.

another contender

Posted on November 8th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

Richard at the Existence Machine was right: I love Person Pitch, the 2007 solo album from Animal Collective co-leader Panda Bear. It's sonically beautiful, and it keeps opening up the louder I turn it; as with Feels, the tunes are memorable, and there are long hypnotic riffs, and it's alternately goofy and sublime. I see that Richard is also a little tired of people making Beach Boys comparisons, and says "The comparison is more conceptual, I think, than anything else. People are more reminded of the Beach Boys than really claiming that Animal Collective actually sound like them." That's probably true, and it's true of Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes, too, but there's still something in the sound that brings the comparison to people's ears before they start analyzing the music, I think. I hear the Incredible String Band in Animal Collective and Panda Bear's music as well, and that's also probably more a conceptual similarity than really sounding like them. As far as sound goes, has anyone compared this to Popul Vuh? The long meditative riffs with the echoey, otherworldly production sound more like Florian Fricke than Brian Wilson. I also hear the big hollow early Magnetic Fields sound in places, particularly on "Ponytail".

4 comments.

another candidate times two

Posted on October 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I wrote, briefly, several years ago, a quick reaction to hearing Cafe Tacuba for the first time:

Wow. Listened to this twice on headphones yesterday. Very occasionally, no more often than once a year (probably less), I hear an album for the first time that I immediately know is going to be one of my very favorites, an album I return to with pleasure for years. It's a warm feeling, mixed excitement and gratitude. It's usually with an artist I've never heard before.

I only found out a few days ago that there was a new Cafe Tacuba album due, their first in four years, and of course now I have it. "Of course" because I didn't think of them when I was ruminating the other day about who my favorite rock band was now that Sleater-Kinney have broken up, and the new album reminds me that there's no doubt that it's Cafe Tacuba. Sino, the new one, isn't their best -- that would be 1994's sprawling Re, one of the ten best albums of the 1990s -- but it's good enough to be almost certainly a top five album for me this year. It's not as experimental or as big as their last couple of albums; they've stripped the instrumentation back down to the basics, and the songs are rock songs. In a way, it reaches back to their earliest work in its straightforwardness and simplicity. The big difference is these days there is no part of the rock palette they don't try, and they're good at everything they do. There are modern rock influences in their sound -- a few years ago Pitchfork, flailing for a comparison, called them "Mexico's Radiohead" -- but they like the arena rock sound too; in fact, what I hear most in Sino is Who's Next (and Velma hears U2).

I've only listened to the album a half dozen times, so I haven't learned it yet; but I feel compelled to note it now because Cafe Tacuba remain unjustifiably off the radar of great rocknroll. I don't say "inexplicably", because it's perfectly explicable: their songs are entirely in Spanish, and they make no concessions to the American market. (They don't have to; they are huge in Mexico.) But I urge you, if you want a complete picture of what is going on in the world of rock music, you owe it to yourself to try them. Start with Re; it's consistently great, it's all over the stylistic map, and you'll know whether you need to hear more.

They're playing Hammerstein in November, and Velma and I plan to see them live for the first time. Excited!

3 comments.

early trivial response to andrew bird

Posted on October 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lyrics.

I've listened to the new Andrew Bird four times today, and some of it's sticking, while some of it sounds like ordinary indie singer-songwriter fare to me; I'll definitely be giving it more attention in the next week.

The only thing I have to note right now is that when he sings "We'll fight, we'll fight", it sounds to me like he's declaring "Whale fight! Whale fight!" It doesn't help that he goes on to sing "they'll fight, they'll fight", which rhymes with "whale fight".

1 comment.

2007 for me thus far

Posted on September 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I am, as I have mentioned*, much less assiduous about keeping up with current music than I was a few years ago. Not out of a lack of inclination*, but a lack of time, and an increased focus on exploring music of the past.

Right now my favorite album of the year is Pinback's Autumn of the Seraphs. I have a weakness for intricately patterned songs that could be described as infectious grooves in formal straitjackets, and if you make a consistently good album full of them (Pell Mell's Interstate, Spoon's Girls Can Tell, Komeda's What Makes It Go), I'm likely to get obsessive about it. Rob Crow has been a riff factory since his earliest days with Heavy Vegetable; Pinback have a burnished, smooth surface, powered with seemingly effortless invention. Autumn of the Seraphs is hypnotically catchy from start to finish, and is the album I think I'm most likely to come back to with undiminished pleasure for years.

If it weren't for Autumn of the Seraphs, either Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? or Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank would be unimpeachable albums of the year. The Of Montreal album explores new emotional and musical palettes for Kevin Barnes, who is musically my favorite pop songwriter of his time, and it's his best batch of songs since The Gay Parade. Modest Mouse have leapt so high with their most recent two albums that I realized I may have to consider them my favorite rock band (in the wake of the breakup of Sleater-Kinney); last year I would've said Spoon, but the most recent two Spoon albums feel like the band is running in place while Modest Mouse have exploded forward.

Edited* to add: How could I have forgotten to mention Gogol Bordello's Super Taranta!, which belongs with the two above. Bitingly funny songs, awesomely energetic folk-punk attack, and a vocalist who sounds like Rowlf the Dog with a Russian accent. I wish I'd taken a hyperfan friend's recommendation and seen them live several years ago, because the hype is growing fast this year. Super Taranta! isn't as consistent as the albums above, but its peaks are breathtaking.

Hovering right behind are Dizzee Rascal's Maths and English (musically amazing, but the subject matter -- being a star, how to be a star, those other phoneys, etc -- is uninspiring), and Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare (mainstreamed postpunk, witty, improvement on solid debut). I'm still getting my head around the new Animal Collective and Fiery Furnaces albums, but they sound like they're going to be well up the list once I've absorbed them. The new Wilco, Spoon, Art Brut, and Ted Leo are solid, enjoyable albums, not great but good. The Spoon and the Ted Leo haven't added any favorite songs (yet) for me to their extensive legacies, which is somewhat disappointing. The Wilco album has got some of their best stuff, but I'm not as big a fan of their best stuff as I am of Leo and Spoon. I probably haven't given the Art Brut as much attention yet as I should.

What else should I make a point of hearing this year?

16 comments.

today's work headphone music

Posted on July 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Boring Posts.

Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society, What Spirit Say
Shipping News, Very Soon, and in Pleasant Company
(++ "How To Draw Horses")
Phillip Johnston's Big Trouble, The Unknown

3 comments.

today's work headphone music

Posted on July 18th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Boring Posts.

Duke Ellington, Soul Call
Lambchop, Is a Woman
King Tubby & the Aggrovators, Foundations of Dub
The Coctails, The Early Hi-Ball Years
Comsat Angels, Sleep No More

0 comments.

work music

Posted on July 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Boring Posts.

I've decided, for no reason I can articulate even to myself, to track the music I listen to on headphones at work.

28 June 2007

Duke Ellington, Uptown
--repeat
Cub, Come Out Come Out
The La's, The La's

2 July 2007

Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society, Live in Warsaw
--repeat
Borah Bergman, Meditations for Piano

3 July 2007

MX-80 Sound, Out of the Tunnel / Crowd Control
Six Organs of Admittance, School of the Flower
Brooklyn Funk Essentials, In the Buzz Bag

5 July 2007

The Sea and Cake, Everybody
Komeda, Pop Pa Svenska / Plan 714 Till
Aterciopelados, Gozo Poderoso

9 July 2007

Earth Wind & Fire, Earth Wind & Fire
Henry Mancini, The Jazz Sound from Peter Gunn
David Bowie, Station to Station

10 July 2007

Paul Hindemith, Kammermusik 1-3; Kleine Kammermusik
Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society, When Colors Play
Peggy Lee & George Shearing, Beauty and the Beat

11 July 2007

Philadelphia Roots (Soul Jazz)
Nao Wave (Man Recordings)
Chris Hinze Combination, Sister Slick

Fascinating, eh?

5 comments.

updating 1999

Posted on May 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

I borrowed a few 1999 albums from the library to try to fill some of the many listening gaps in my 1999 top fifty list. A few quick notes:*

Mos Def's Black on Both Sides is probably one of the twenty best hip-hop albums I have ever heard.** It may end up in my 1999 top ten. It's long, but engages my interest all the way through, and its musical textures are right up my alley.

Sigur Rós, Ágætis Byrjun. I'm trying to give this a fair shot, but through two listens in headphones at work I've been thoroughly bored. Not only does this seem to be all about sound with little attention paid to structure, nothing about the sound grabs me. It just feels meandering and moody. Maybe something will snap into place some listen down the line.

Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin. Somewhere between the previous two. Intermittently engaging, sometimes very interesting. I'm remembering a lot from play to play, which is always a good sign. I tried this album years ago, and it left me cold; ever since I've grouped it with Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs, albums from the same period that lots of people thought were right at the top of the year and that didn't put me off but didn't grab me, either. I came back to The Soft Bulletin because I was blown away by "Free Radicals" from At War with the Mystics (and listening to that song again now it reminds me of a Ween song from Pure Guava, but I can't remember the name).

Marion Brown, Live in Japan. I've only listened to this once, but it sounded great, with long songs that never palled. This will make the list, but I haven't begun to learn it yet.

*I'm trying to figure out how to get substantial writing done here. I haven't had time to flesh out ideas into the kind of posts I like, so I am trying writing quicker, shorter things, to see if I can build them into more substantial posts.

**An area in which my opinion means fuckall.

8 comments.

1999: another shortlist for the incredibly pointless 999 albums project

Posted on April 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

I am slowly compiling a list of my favorite 999 albums from 1951 to the present, playing by the same rules as the 99 albums list (no best-of compilations, etc). I'm doing this a year at a time. This is the second shortlist: my 1999 top fifty (the first twenty to twenty-five will probably make the final list). 1998 through 2000 was the most intensely obsessive stretch of new music listening in my life; this list may be the peak of albums that make people go "who the hell is that"? Yet in these three years I was more aware than ever of all the albums I didn't and couldn't hear, all the new music I couldn't follow. Many -- most -- of the albums in rateyourmusic's top fifty are ones I never heard, or heard once, or heard one song from. When Sonicnet got eviscerated by MTV and I lost my job professionally keeping up with new music, I abruptly gave up on digging for new music on my own, letting stuff come to me more than I pursued it; since then most of my active searching has been through the past, and there are far fewer obscurities on my new music lists.

Choosing among the top three in 1999 is one of the toughest decisions for me in any year:

1999

The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I
Of Montreal, The Gay Parade
Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
Lilys, The Three Way
Fiona Apple, When the Pawn...
Sleater-Kinney, The Hot Rock
Self, Breakfast with Girls
Randy Newman, Bad Love
Applesaucer, Applesaucer
The Vandermark 5, Simpatico
The Negro Problem, Joys & Concerns
Abigail Grush, The Phantom Beat
Kristeen Young, Enemy
Bis, Social Dancing
Dave Holland Quintet, Prime Directive
Les Savy Fav, The Cat and the Cobra
R. Stevie Moore, The Future Is Worse than the Past
Shannon Wright, Flightsafety
Wilco, Summerteeth
Opeth, Still Life
Pinback, Pinback
Sam Prekop, Sam Prekop
Joel Forrester & People Like Us, Believe It
Lamb, Fear of Fours
Joe Henry, Fuse
Greg Brown, One Night

(a live album, but the songs are mostly otherwise unrecorded; originally issued on vinyl in 1982, but the cd resissue is the complete show.)
Archer Prewitt, White Sky
We, Square Root of Negative One
Built to Spill, Keep It Like a Secret
The Roots, Things Fall Apart
Friends of Dean Martinez, Atardecer
Jason Falkner, Can You Still Feel?
The Beta Band, The Beta Band
The Aluminum Group, Pedals
The Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage
U.S. Maple, Talker
Owsley, Owsley
Hovercraft, Experiment Below
Blinker the Star, August Everywhere
Etienne Charry, 36 Erreurs
April March, Chrominance Decoder
Prince Paul, A Prince Among Thieves
The Music Tapes, First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad
XTC, Apple Venus, Volume One
The Science Group, A Mere Coincidence
Oneida, Enemy Hogs
Kristin Hersh, Sky Motel
Clare Cooper, Valentine
Steve Coleman & Five Elements, The Sonic Language of Myth
Clive Gregson, Happy Hour

4 comments.

1989: the first shortlist for the incredibly pointless 999 albums project

Posted on March 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.

I am slowly, in my copious free time, compiling a list of my favorite 999 albums from 1951 to the present, playing by the same rules as the 99 albums list (no best-of compilations, etc). I'm doing this a year at a time. This is my 1989 top forty (the first twenty to twenty-five will probably make the final list):