Diary Of a Skinny Kid: 2012′s First Auditory 10-Q

It’s been one hectic-ass yet exciting three months for me.  A month’s worth of time logged in a hotel dodging prostitutes as I take three minutes to unload a suitcase from my car, driving 350 miles a week to sleep in my own bed during that time, leaving behind a life of gallivanting around the plaid craft-beer dive bar scene that is Raleigh, ending my 365-day (almost to the day!) hiatus of The Facebook, the relaxation that finally is financial comfort and a kitchen to suit my culinary needs, and finally (as of yesterday) being settled and looking forward to being able to have some semblance of free time that just so happens to be less than two miles from the edge of the continent.  That’s about as fancy a way of saying “I got promoted and moved to the beach and wanted to keep in touch with the friends I’m leaving behind” as you can get.  The TL;DR of the life of Me for the last three months.

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Some things haven’t changed…my obsession with music.  Along with a New Year’s resolution to learn piano and update this damn thing monthly instead of quarterly…there have been countless releases to help me along my way.  Actually…that’s a lie.  There have been 51.  Exactly 51.  As usual, some of these were much better than others.  What I consider shit follow-ups from critical darlings Odd Future, Of Montreal, and The Men will be found nowhere on this list.  The new hipster is the anti-hipster…and it seems to be just so cool to hate on music review sites.  You’ll find none of this here…my alignment with them is pretty much 50/50.  Couple my own personal taste with the outspoken self-importance that comes with a godawful case of Napoleon Complex, and you get what we have below.

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ANYWAYS, like I said…according to my “Master List” (without Microsoft Excel my life would be listless and disorganized) I’ve compiled 51 albums thus far this year.  Somehow…betwixt negotiating bridges in 40mph gusts scared shitless in a U-Haul, learning 125 new names at work, and having solo peaceful morning walks on the beach disrupted by the rogue washed-up jellyfish I’ve managed to create some semblance of order of level of enjoyment of a fittingly Myrtle Beach-style Calabash never-ending seafood buffet of new releases.  Below you’ll find the best of them.  My viewpoint on the five best, plus nine others (I just picked that number because it made a pretty square, for the sake of formatting) for you to enjoy snippets of an explore for yourselves.

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Honorable Mention

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51 albums is far too much music, with far too much of it kick-ass for me to only talk about five measly albums with you.  So check out the nine below that are all really, really good.  Mouseover the image for the artist/album, and click to enjoy samplings.

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Albums Of the Quarter

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By far the most eclectic mix ever of what I’ve found interesting over a three month timespan.  You’ve got grunge revival, classical drone-y ambient, singer/songwriter, the best hip-hop mixtape to come along in years, and some strange yet immaculate deviation of electronica.  From growers to immediate mind-blowers…if you don’t listen to anything else this year, you absolutely NEED these five records.

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#5 – Ceremony – Zoo

History has been repeating itself musically pretty heavily for the last ten years, from a generational standpoint.  Sophomore year in college I heard “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” and thought an old Page garage demo had been resurrected.  Senior year I danced my ass off to “Take Me Out” and “12:51” even harder than my predecessors did to “Burning Down the House.”  Recycling.

That being said, there’s one movement that’s been left untouched and unspoiled:  Grunge.  This is surprising with the resurgence of flannel into the American mainstream wardrobe but; alas, if I want to feel like a kid and listen to the grimy trainwreck of a loud/quiet/loud mess that got me through middle school I have to resort to the same old Nirvana and Mudhoney albums.  The ten years of complete shit unfortunately influenced by the likes of originally great acts like Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains did a good enough job of watering down the special “soul” that was associated with grunge music in its inception.  Grunge was raw, period.  You can’t recreate raw, and thanks to modern technology (aside from a few select acts) everything that is raw seems pseudo-raw.

Enter Ceremony and their fifth album in as many years.  Twenty years after the hardcore-to-grunge transition…we see it again in one act that stands alone.  Beginning as a hardcore/punk group that’s slowly down-tempoed and up-nastied.   They’re not trying to re-create or recycle…where Zoo wins is the energy it naturally creates…just a group of guys doing what they love and not giving too much of a shit about whether or not you like it.

RAW.  12 tracks coming in at just over 36 minutes play anything but fast, although the timetable would suggest it.  Borrowing from Mudhoney’s instrumental buildups, Bleach-era song structure, the spacious laziness of forgotten cowpunk acts of the mid-80s, and even some Iggy Pop-esque creepy raspiness Ceremony is able to be the first act to re-create raw without having to try to.  It’s effortless…which in the end was the original mindset of the Seattle camp back in 1986, and is why this is the first thing to come along since that fateful day on 1994 that genuinely sounds like it breaks out the heroin and cough syrup.

“World Blue”

“Hysteria”

“Brace Yourself”

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#4 – The Caretaker – Patience (After Sebald)

Alrighty…allow me to butcher some semicolon usage:  A certainty in life is that at some point; not necessarily during the lifetimes of us, our children, or even our children’s children, but SOMETIME; we’re going to be faced with an apocalyptic scenario.  There are several theories of course.  Nuclear war, tsunamis, etc.  Of course, the outdoorsy pseudo-survivalists such as myself are hell-bent on a germ that makes the deceased re-animate and consume human flesh (primarily because we fantasize about Emma Stone being impressed with our home-made water filtration system/perpetual motion machine crafted out of our dead neighbor’s bicycle.  Just me?  Whatever).

NONETHELESS, at some point roughly 90% of the world’s population will die out, and we’ll be reduced to roaming gangs of self-governing bandits.  There will be smoke, the skies will be orange with Nuclear.  THIS IS A GIVEN.  We will forget about our past lives.  This is where The Caretaker comes in.  You know that moment in apolocalyptic movies where the protagonist finds that one item that triggers a flashback to a life before cannibalism and body armor and they reconcile with whichever character they had a conflict with earlier in the movie?  That’s what Patience sounds like.  Drawing the line between ambient and classical, Patience is the destroyed Sonata (not the car, dipshit) left dusty under a pile of rubble.  You pick it up without thinking…and put it in the aged, half-damaged player you find the next week.

The end result comes out like what was once a beautiful work of art…but years of elemental abuse have led to note disentigration, hazy feedback, and the overall dilapidation of what was once someone’s life work.  Nostalgia though…this is something you put in your player and are reminded of how beautiful and simple things once were.  Patience isn’t a grandiose drone project, there are no layers upon layers of ambience and effect to give this music a “big” feeling.  Nor is is a beautiful work of classical piano art.  It’s a destroyed, instrumental piano recording.  But it’s so much more.  It’s a multi-generational glimpse into one’s past.  It’s hauntingly simple…as CMG put it, “Reminiscent of a life not necessarily lived but nonetheless inherited, as if by osmosis.” Whether you were born in the 1920s or the 1990s…Patience makes you remember.

“Everything Is On the Point Of Decline”

“When the Dog Days Were Drawing To an End”

“Approaching the Outer Limits Of Our Solar System”

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#3 – Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It

Look closely at the album title.  Now picture exactly the opposite of what you’d expect of an album with the given title.  There…now you’re more prepared for what you’re about to take in.

Perfume Genius is Mike Haderas on a piano, with a small backing band.  Like Connor Oberst and Elliott Smith before him, Mike Haderas does a really really good job of making you think while you’re listening, “Damn…good thing I’m not THAT guy.”  As a matter of fact, I’d stretch to say that Connor Oberst (we’re talking early 2000s Bright Eyes, here) is even glad he isn’t Mike Haderas.  Haderas was nice enough to provide his own insights into every song on his album in an interview…which is rare.  He describes some of the songs on here as things like “Gay Suicide Letters” and “From some unedited homemade basement porn with an old man and some hustlers.”  Oh…and never mind that this record is being described as more “joyous” and “uplifting” as his 2010 debut.  Jesus Fucking Christ.

This record is the antithesis of a pick-me-up, a road trip album, or anything that may be remotely considered feel-good.  This is the soundtrack for trying to keep it together while the shit of the world continually rains and rains down you amidst a piano and some orchestral arrangements.  It’s a symphonic glimpse into the life of the emotionally scarred and abused as they kick around the tunnel looking for light, after light, only to be kicked in the throat when the perceived light is reached.

Depressing?  Yes.  Graphic?  Very.  You will not feel compelled to go outside and pick flowers and take pictures of things like rainbows and baby deer after listening to this piece of work.  But Put Your Back N 2 It is a necessity for all of us.  People’s lives are like this.  Every day, someone’s life unfolds in a manner of which that this album would be the most descriptive.  That Haderas can graphically and accurately portray his violent and traumatizing life into something so delicate and beautiful is astounding.

“17″

“Take Me Home”

“Put Your Back N 2 It” 

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#2 – Boldy James – Consignment:  Favor For a Favor (mixtape)

Rolling around on 26-inch gold-plated sex with free cocaine falling from the sky like snow.  Thanks to hip-hop music, I’ve learned a lot about selling drugs.  I mean…I suppose there’s still an interest in it if Rick Ross can throw together variations of the same beat by twelve different producers, scream about multi-colored diamonds and contract killers and it can be critically acclaimed?  I’ve always wondered though…where exactly does all of this dope GO when it purportedly leaves Ross’ 30,000 square foot Boca mansion?

Boldy James answers this question for us on Consignment:  It goes directly to him, and is sold in smaller quantities.  He doesn’t buy things like boats and houses with twenty HDTVs, but he’s awfully proud of cutting portions down with baby powder enough to turn a few hundred dollars here, and a few hundred there until he can get himself a higher-quality firearm.  For the sake of not sounding condescending towards the rap/cocaine community, I’ll stop now with the economics lesson.  Lord knows you get enough of it in Consignment.

In this 24-song mixtape that stands out by playing like a studio album, James perfects his angle of rapping about life through the eyes of Menace 2 Society’s O-Dawg, or at best, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale rather than your standard George Jung/Tony Montana impressions.  It’s surprisingly refreshing.  Aside from that…there’s no real material covered here that isn’t covered in every other rap album for the last five years:  Malt liquor, home invasions, booties, etc.  What sets this mixtape apart aside from amazing vocal talent is the overall realism of one rapping about what most drug dealers/hustlers actually go through.  Boldy James represents the 99%.

Aside from the perspective change from the drug community…rapping from the middle-man’s point of view rather than the Don’s (without the Xbox hipster/swag aesthetic that the South’s successfully used to turn a potential hip-hop revolution into mixtape homogenization over the last three years), the Detroit native has hands-down THE best voice in rap since Freddie Gibbs.  With regionalism higher than it’s ever been in mixtape-hop, Boldy James scores another point for the Great Lakes by being a talented enough lyricist to make a mixtape play like a studio album, and by making the same old shit interesting and intriguing.

“Gesu”

“Jackie Brown”

“Consignment”

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#1 – Chromatics – Kill For Love

Johnny Jewel’s been a busy guy for the last couple of years.  Charged with composing the score to Drive, only to have it subsequently shitcanned (and possibly self-released as Themes For an Imaginary Film under the Symmetry monicker), the poster child for retro-disco/synthpop label Italians Do It Better has had his hands in many pots.

Aside from his solo work, he’s been a producer/multi-instrumentalist for Chromatics for the past several years, and Kill For Love is his most recent pot.   Anticipated in the electronica camp just as highly as any of The Weeknd’s 2011 mixtapes from the PBR&B/emo-hop set, Kill For Love finally hit iTunes on March 26, just barely making the Q1 cut.

What makes this album spectacular is arrangement.  The indifferent dryness of  Ruth Radelet’s vocals can come off almost spoken-word at certain points…but the timing on the basslines, drums, synths, and “conventional” instruments creates ninety minutes of a Euro-tightrope balance between underworldy and otherworldly. Thanks to arrangement Kill For Love is able to sound cohesive while pulling from multiple directions and not only play like an album rather than a set of singles (the shortcomings of so many electronic records), but play like the best album of the year so far.

Never mind that Jewel is one of the most forward-thinking revivalist producers (a tough act to balance) in the vast universe that is electronica, and never mind that I’d drop life as we know it if Ruth Radelet phoned me asking to run away with her for eternity.  She could be a 400-pounder with a face covered in skin grafts, and he could be DJ Skrillex, and if the end result was Kill For Love you’d still be reading it as the best record of the quarter.  From analog instrumental (you can call it that since it’s analog) interludes to a Neil Young cover to auto-tuned (WTF?) ballads, production and arrangement takes a highly disparate group of songs and pulls them together seamlessly into the best 90 minutes of the first quarter of 2012.

“Into the Black”

“Lady”

“Back From the Grave”

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There you have it!  Three months in the bag.  Hopefully you’ve found some new stuff with which to enjoy yourself as flowers, jogging, and tornado chasing take the lead for what’s shaping up to be a beautiful spring.

Love Is a Mixtape

Plagarism’s a bitch, isn’t it?  I like to think of it as “inspiration” used in a negative connotation.  Everything’s “inspired” these days…at least creatively speaking.  Take me, for example.  User name snipped from a line from a song, post titled after a book that’s sat unread on my shelf for roughly 14 months (which is a crime in itself).  I had to say something here for Valentine’s Day.  My master plan was to write a grand, entertaining answer to Chuck Klosterman’s Hypothetical regarding lovers:

Every person you have ever slept with is invited to a banquet where you are the guest of honor.  No one will be in attendance except you, the collection of your former lovers, and the catering service.  After the meal, you are asked to give a fifteen-minute speech to the assembly.  What do you talk about?”

This seemed fitting given the holiday, and would be an interesting situation.  Unfortunately the content would be highly questionable…and there’s only so much I could say if I were to address a group of people who could comfortably fit into a half-bath.  So then, PLAGARISM!  Of sorts, at least…I’ve decided instead to honor the women that Guys Like Me worship when most other guys are probably scouring the Web for Megan Fox desktop backgrounds (not that her name isn’t the best intended pun in the history of show business, however).

I’ve created a mix tape of other people’s creative work, along with cover art that upon completion I realized resembles every chick flick made in the last five years.  Dammit.  Still though, I like it better than the general love-slamming February 14 entries (like a certain someone’s cabernet-induced rant about how TV love doesn’t exist..no name-calling or thumb pointing).  This year I’m celebrating a love for the creative, artistically inclined woman.  One who’s not afraid to beautifully bare her thoughts and emotions under the scrutiny of the public eye (no, I’m not talking about vaguely descriptive Facebook rants about how guys don’t text you back quickly enough).  The below mix is a celebration of those who balance looks with incredible artistic talent in a  world where how tight a woman wears her leather pants and how seductively colorful she makes her hair extensions have an embarrassingly large degree of control over professional success.  The mix is aptly titled “Hipster Crush” and can be downloaded…

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For those of you (read:  all of you) who don’t spend fifty hours a week amidst expensive blinking lights and technological buzz-words, simply right-click and open/extract the file once it’s finished saving and the music files will auto-populate in the destination folder.    Track list is below.  Happy Valentine’s Day!

 

Cheese, Whine, and Fuzz. In No Particular Order. The Best Music of 2011

Well…here you have it!  Being the compulsive list-maker that I am (if I could figure out how to set up print sharing on a router configured with Apple I’d put borders on my grocery lists and make them in Excel), I’ve painstakingly compiled EVERY new piece of music I’ve listened to thoroughly in 2011 and made it into a nice list, and then ordered it somewhat into favorites.

20 albums…which is sucky since there was so much good stuff this year, so I’ve included a few songs that were great songs, and for the most part on pretty good albums that didn’t make the cut.  Also, there are honorable mention albums so you can “technically” get my 29 favorites of the year (which I know you’d just totally lose sleep over if you didn’t have).

For further reference, you can check out similar lists at Stereogum, Pitchfork, and Cokemachineglow.  However, they’re not nearly as excellent as mine, obviously.  Enjoy!

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Mentionable Tracks

It’d be an absolute crime for me to listen to roughly 160 albums this year, and only give you a taste of 20 of them along with a snapshot of nine more.  There was a TON of good music this year.  Some of it; unfortunately, rested on albums that just lacked the top to bottom solidarity for me to be able to tolerate the entire thing for the year.  Or they were on 4-5 song EPs, albums by bands that I like that were complete flops (Oh how you disappointed me this year, TV on the Radio), or were glimmers of hope for part of the diluted Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi/Tennessee street/swamp mixtape set that apparently hasn’t grown stale over the last two years to anyone but myself, based off of review scores.

ANYWAYS…here are some songs that I thought were really awesome, but won’t be found on any of the albums on the following list.  25 of them…roughly enough to keep you occupied for a good two hours:

Alex Turner – “Piledriver Waltz” – Submarine OST

Azealia Banks – “212″ – (No Album)

Chemtrail – “Means To an End” – Youth Obsessed Death Culture

Childish Gambino – “Bonfire” – CAMP

Clams Casino – “Realist Alive” – Instrumentals

Cults – “Abducted” – Cults

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi – “The Rose With the Broken Neck” – Rome

The Decemberists – “Down By the Water” – The King Is Dead

Drake – “Shot For Me” – Take Care

Fleet Foxes – “The Shrine/An Argument” – Helplessness Blues

Gang Gang Dance – “MindKilla” – Eye Contact

Iron & Wine – “Walking Far From Home” – Kiss Each Other Clean

James Blake – “A Case Of You” (Joni Mitchell Cover) – Enough Thunder EP

Jhene Aiko – “Higher” – Sailing Soul(s)

The Joy Formidable – “The Everchanging Spectrum Of a Lie” – The Big Roar

Justice – “Civilization” – Audio, Video, Disco

Los Campesinos! – “By Your Hand” – Hello Sadness

Lykke Li – “Get Some” – Wounded Rhymes

Okkervil River – “The Valley” – I Am Very Far

Rich Aucion – “It” – We’re All Dying To Live

Shabazz Palaces – “Fress Press and Curl” – Black Up

The Shoes – “Crack My Bones” – Crack My Bones

TV On the Radio – “Will Do” – Nine Types Of Light

The Weeknd – “The Birds Part 2″ – Thursday

Wilco – “Art Of Almost” – The Whole Love

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Honorable Mention Albums

I can only talk about 10 albums, and I can briefly describe 10 more.  However…there was WAY more music worth mentioning than just 20 albums.  Unfortunately for you, my schedule’s pretty full currently with all of the cigar smoking, baby kissing, model shooting down, and single malt drinking.  ANYWAYS…here’s some stuff that you may like, but for which I will not take the time to provide a description.  Thus contributing to the organized herirarchy of orgasmic auditory pleasance that each group of songs represents.  Also, squares of pictures are pretty so I’m choosing nine honorable mentions because it’s a perfect square.  And it’s going to be alphabetical, so I can laugh from afar (or from a-close…for those of you who are in the greater Raleigh/Durham area) at your attempt to determine the order of excellence of these choices.  I’ve taken the liberty of linking each album’s last.fm page, for your exploratory pleasure.

          

          

          

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Albums Of The Year

Of everything I’ve heard this year, these are the ones that have stayed with me (if I was lucky enough to grab them at the beginning of the year), or in some cases those who made a good enough first impression to where I know they’ll stay with me throughout 2012.  Some of this stuff you’ve heard before, some of it will open you up to newer artists or maybe even forms of music that you weren’t aware of.  A lot of it will probably make you wonder “What the fuck goes through this nutcase’s head on a daily basis?”  Either way…I can guarantee you that if you get some free time to actually comb through this encyclopedia of music, you’ll find something that you’ll at least moderately enjoy that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.  At least I hope so.  Here are the twenty best albums of 2011…by the musical authority that is myself.  I’ve included album art, a brief (or long) description/opinion, and a few notable samples.  Enjoy!

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20.  Russian Circles – Empros

The Russian Circles are about as geographically Non-Russian as you can get…hailing from Chicago.  Empros is their fourth album of beautiful, atmospheric post-rock/metal.  The album consists of only six songs, that are really more like movements.  This is music for the background that sounds more like a 41-minute song than a six-song album.  This music is the soundtrack to a war, to a building hurricane.  The moods go from quiet and peaceful to ravaging violence over the matter of just several seconds in some cases, or through several minutes in others through slowly building crescendos until it seems like everything around is going to explode.  Whereas a lot of the genre chooses to incorporate multiple instruments, Empros shows the Russian Circles’ continuing success at creating instrumental beauty through just three instruments.

“Schipol” 

“Batu”

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19.  Future Islands – On the Water

Samuel Herring is a lunatic.  I’ve been fortunate enough to see the Future Islands come up to stardom since I saw them perform in pizza parlors and friends’ living rooms as Art Lord and the Self Portraits when I was in college.  On the Water is their second critically-acclaimed album.  I’ve NEVER seen a cult following like what the Future Islands have generated.  Their lead singer stands on stage and jumps and yelps and screams and sometimes cries into the microphone, and the hipsters dance around in their plaid shirts and green jeans and eat the shit right up.  Herring sings about love lost on On the Water like in his last effort…with the same successes.  With every word that leaves his mouth, he becomes closer and closer to his own personal breaking point.  There’s no genre for this.  Post-art-dance-emo?  Who gives a shit…The Future Islands make the people so happy they’ll dance to sadness.  The insanity in that is only matched by their stage presence.  I’ve seen them three times in 2011 – twice in Chapel Hill and once in Raleigh.  Don’t miss them.

“Before the Bridge”

“Balance”

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18.  The Black Keys – El Camino

I got my Dad this album for Christmas this year.  He was born over 58 years ago, and he thinks this shit rocks.  That’s how the Black Keys roll.  They absolutely smack of everything that your ex-pot smoking parents hitchhiked across the state to go see when they were younger than you are right now.  Isn’t it awesome how everything comes full circle?  You were probably conceived to something that sounds suspiciously like the Page acoustic of “Little Black Submarines,” and “Stop Stop” will have you rolling your eyes at your parents getting old-folks on you by telling a 20 minute story that doesn’t make sense.  Mainly it’ll be because the song reminds them of some Canned Heat concert they think they went to in 1971, but really can’t remember what songs were played.  When I was a kid, I thought my Dad was invincible.  El Camino encourages me to achieve more of my life aspirations…mainly because 30 years ago he was head banging to some shit like this in a stuffy coupe with no air conditioner…and he turned out just fine.

“Little Black Submarines”

“Gold On the Ceiling”

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17.  .L.W.H. – The Tape Hiss Hooligan

It’s pretty much set in stone that for the rest of hip-hop’s existence, topics of discussion will either be about street shit, fucking, dancing, smoking weed, where you’re from, politics, or how rap sucks.  Which means the only direction this genre can take is on the instrumental end.  The future appears to be the ambient, hazy vibe first displayed by Prefuse 73 musically several years ago with Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, and then with lyrics added by Edan on Beauty and the Beat.  Basically, rap is merging with IDM and other forms of minimal electronic music and being sung by hipsters like Lil’ B, Curren$y, and Main Attrakionz.  These are the people to watch in rap over the next few years.  The PRODUCERS to watch are the ones who are really making artists like this groundbreaking…guys like Ski Beatz and Clams Casino.  L.W.H. follows suit on hazy, distorted beats making old rap topics sounding fresh, new, and interesting.  On Tape Hiss Hooligan he sets the bar for 2012 along the fine like that rap music will have to take to advance.

Bitin & Shakin

On My Shit

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16.  Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring For My Halo

 

Kurt Vile can either come off to you as Elliott Smith after hypothetically picking himself up off of the mountain of needles and tears that were his bathroom floor, or a more depressed Bruce Springsteen.  The result is something that leaves you really unsure how to feel, with a balance of expansive guitar and for the most part, depressing lyrics.  Going solo after a successful stint as the lead guitarist for The War On Drugs (see honorable mention…they released a great one this year too), in Smoke Ring For My Halo Vile walks that tightrope that’s been missing in roots rock between being complacent and jaded.  Vile manages to pull this off in his fourth solo effort in as many years better than…pretty much anyone since Blind Melon, which says a lot.

“Society Is My Friend”

“Runner Ups”

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15.  EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

“Fuck California, you made me boring.”  Yes, Erika Anderson, you’re unique…just like everybody else.  The only thing keeping Erika Anderson (or EMA…which you should be able to deduce are her initials) from being my celebrity crush of the year is that I don’t feel as much like Lykke Li would kill me.  On her fantastic solo debut, EMA successfully comes across as that girl that you find just crazy enough to be interesting at first, until you really get to know her and realize that she is in fact batshit insane and that there’s nothing quirky or cute about it.  Not the record to play on the porch with friends on a sunny spring afternoon, EMA covers topics in Past Life Martyred Saints like depression, molestation, murdering you, homosexuality, and realizing that when you move out of a small town that you’re not really as unique as you think you are.  The entire record comes off as half singing, half confessional.  The genuineness in her voice (which sounds like it’s on the verge of tears for the entire record) and the pure straightforward manner in her delivery are what make this album stand out.

“California”

“Red Star”

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14.  Das Racist – Relax

 

I fall into the camp that has the musical curiosity to where I’m still trying to decide whether or not to take these guys seriously.  They may be pulling off one of the most epic trolls in recent hip-hop history, or they may just be three guys from New York having a good time.  Either way, Relax is enjoyable because I can relate to it.  I realize that this speaks volumes to my maturity level (I’ve never denied my childish sense of toilet humor and use of obscure internet references).  Relax sounds like something my buddies and I would do after the bar if we had access to an MPC, took the time to sample a few random tracks, and had any knowledge whatsoever of ProTools.  Everything on here basically sounds like a drunken bout of who can say the funniest shit and have it sound halfway intelligible…with the occasional cheap Laterian Milton reference thrown in just for good measure.  Relax is 14th on my list this year, which means that there is work better than this for 2011…but I’d definitely rather hang out with these guys more than anyone else you’ll find on this list.

“Michael Jackson”

“Power” (with Danny Brown & Despot)

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13.  Frank Ocean – Nostalgia/Ultra

Aside from “BroStep” (*shudder*), perhaps the most ridiculous sub-genre of music to emerge in 2011 has been dubbed “PBR&B.”  It’s basically if guys who act like Lenny Kravitz made music that sounded more like Maxwell or D’Angelo…for you 1990s people.  Frank Ocean is at the forefront of this music…released almost exclusively in free mixtape form and sang by guys who are too self-aware to sing exclusively about how they’re going to work your body.  Think if early Boyz II Men shopped at Karmaloop, smoked marijuana at Bonnaroo, and sampled Eyes Wide Shut and “Hotel California” on an album released by Jack Johnson’s Brushfire record label.  That’s Nostalgia/Ultra in a sentence.  What separates guys like Frank Ocean from the rest of the R&B world and why his music has received its own unfortunately-named sub-genre is that he sings about shit that may actually happen to you.  Life isn’t about trying to make two Russian twins eating grapes off of each others’ bodies romantic.  It’s about the cool hippie you hit it off with at a concert, and it’s about falling in love on a whim and running away only for it to not work out.  No BMWs and lofts here, it’s all about old beat up mustangs and intellectual attraction.  Great new sound, just don’t let the genre name stick.

“Novacane”

“Swim Good”

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12.  Smith Westerns – Dye It Blonde

Where the Black Keys took us on a nostalgic journey to our Dad’s old basement, and Kurt Vile to the Kerouacian free melancholy spirit of the likes of Springsteen and Dylan, the Smith Westerns come across as those damn kids who really need to take themselves more seriously.  Pretty much every musical form of the 1970s was relived by an acclaimed record in 2011…Dye It Blonde fills in the gap of the Dazed and Confused phase, where nobody can tell you shit.  From start to finish, this entire work smacks of bubblegum, sunshine, and being carefree and completely oblivious to anything that’s going on outside of your own little world.  And sometimes, especially on a warm spring day on your patio with friends, that’s exactly how you want to feel.  The guitars swirl, the drums are simple, and the harmonies and “Oooohs and Aaaaahs” are plentiful and sung with the youthful abandon that most of us twenty and thirty-somethings probably don’t feel enough.

“Still New”

“All Die Young”

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11. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

French Producer Anthony Gonzalez manages to continually evolve on every record, by continuously adding.  His fifth album in ten years continues this by combining elements of all of his last three critically acclaimed works.  The Shoegaze-y fuzz of Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts is there combined with the creepy darkness of Before the Dawn Heals Us and the overblown 1980s excessive cheese of his breakthrough 2008 release, Saturdays = Youth.  On Hurry Up We’re Dreaming, Gonzalez makes something big.  And by big I mean BIG.  Double album big…which almost always dooms an album to failure.  Not in this case.  The early 1980s synthesizer-driven cheese is the most prominent sound on Hurry Up, with dance pads fit for a Sega Genesis game (or dare I even say, Mega Man?), Gonzalez’s carefree yell, and the undisputed greatest moment in music in 2011.  That is, of course, the INSANE saxophone solo at the 3:04 mark of “Midnight City.”  Seriously…this entire song puts a smile on your face, and the introduction of the sax makes your mouth feel as though it’s going to explode upwards, rendering you to a horror movie or a 1993 Soundgarden video.  While “Midnight City” has deservingly launched M83 into the mainstream (if you think you haven’t heard it, you have…it’s been in several commercials and TV backdrops all year), the most impressive thing about this record is that Gonzalez can maintain the same atmosphere and not let his sound go stale for the hour and 15 minutes that this album spans.  Gigantic in more ways than one.

“Midnight City”

“My Tears Are Becoming a Sea”

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10.  The Men – Leave Home

The Men.  This shit sounds like you’d expect it to sound coming from a band entitled “The Men.”  It’s too simple to just say that The Men make pretty much every other new band of the year sound like they need to change their names to “The Women,” so allow me to specify.

Leave Home sounds like if Iggy Pop got together with Ian MacKaye as he was leading Minor Threat through the hardcore revolution of the early 1980s.  It’s like if they were playing a show together, but instead of playing songs they took turns slamming pints of whiskey and played baseball with the empty bottles and guitars as bats.

Leave Home is the last thing you’d possibly want to have in your car if you were taking someone on a first date, unless your date was with Insanity Wolf.  This shit is the soundtrack to a riot.  And I don’t mean your local mindless “Occupy Yourcity” movement.  If everything else on this list is an Occupy protester, Leave Home is an 11-year-old Palestinian covered in rags standing on a flipped charred school bus throwing a Molotov Cocktail as hard as he can into the collective faces of the authority of everything that is calamity and sanity.

It’s tough for me to compare anything to Leave Home, the closest thing I can come up with is the video for “We Are Water” by HEALTH (which I will not link, because it’s so disturbing it will leave half of you vowing to nix me completely from your memory as a friend.  I’m not taking responsibility for that…you’ll have to YouTube it for yourself), except played in fast motion over and over again for eight songs while smoking a bag of meth through an improvised shotgun barrel.  A screaming, distorted nightmare that you wake up like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, with a tail and the room flooded and everything in the ugliest, raunchiest form of disarray, except with way more things on fire.

A lot of people would consider loud, fast, hard music as good driving music.  I would not recommend this.  The only way to drive to this music is to drive a turbocharged bulldozer through a gunpowder factory at maximum speed while taking shots of pepper spray mixed with cheap tequila with coked-up grizzly bears jumping off of the back just eating and destroying every piece of metal they see.   And of course, lots of explosions.

“()”

“Bataille”

“Night Landing”

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9.  Destroyer – Kaputt

Cheese has been rampant this year.  As already discussed, M83 released what is quite possibly the best song of the year primarily due to its overly cheesy saxophone solo, and Justin Vernon made the world issue a simultaneous “What the fuck, dude?” with his closer on his “self-titled” release.  Hell…even Justice’s sophomore album was an overblown prog-rock travesty that at first sounded like absolute garbage, but at the end of the year it’s enjoyable enough for me to forgive them for introducing the blister known as the wobble into the sexually transmitted disease that has become dubstep.

I’m really not sure if Dan Bejar is serious on Kaputt or not…but given his track record he probably is.  Where Bon Iver captures cheese in just under an five minutes, M83 in fifteen seconds, and Justice in heavy snippets throughout an entire record, Mr. Bejar dumps the listener with 46 minutes of pure overblown grandiose adjective adjective cheesy fucking BLISS in Kaputt.

Dancing with yourself across a bustling downtown 2am in a high-gravity-haze, the happiest and most carefree moments of yuppie-dom.  Kaputt is the soundtrack to the happiest moments of indulging yourself, by yourself, in a place in which you’re happy.  The title track is two-stepping to your car in a drunken haze after a phenomenal night at the bar.  “Chinatown” is a windy fall afternoon stroll through the city, with absolutely no schedule.  Enjoying a 2pm beer on the sidewalk of the Carolina Brewery on Franklin Street, taking a smoke break outside of the Museum Of Art on a cold winter afternoon, and other enjoyable activities that one engages themselves with in public on a gorgeous day.

Kaputt embodies the simplest pleasures that are exploring life and your environment, loving being you, all washed in a folk tale voice over a hallucinogenic elevator music haze.

“Chinatown”

“Suicide Demo For Kara Walker”

“Blue Eyes”

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8.  Low – C’mon

Low’s been around forever, and by forever I mean for as long as I’ve been into music.  Allmusic describes them as “sadcore.”  Meh.  Subgenres are a tricky thing, but I suppose that the editors of that website are referring to shit that can’t be classified as emo but that you’d typically only listen to when you feel like crying shamefully in an empty apartment into a bottle of cheap whiskey.  Basically, everything that Morphine and Elliott Smith accomplished over their timeframes.  My consensus since roughly 2003 is that Low should be classified as “Boring-as-hell-core” and nothing else.

All of this changed when I heard the trailer for C’mon on YouTube (isn’t it funny that they do that now) and it featured a snippet from the 8-minute epic “Nothing But Heart.”  This album plays like a live album, but it was recorded in a studio.  It has the one-take feel of a classic live album like Wilco’s Kicking Television, with the complete raw power that can only be delivered by a live performance (reference Magnolia Electric Company’s Trials and Errors for the best example of this).  A lot of really good albums are really good because you can tell the time, preparation, and attention to detail that came into production and mixing after the fact…each instrument acting as its own entity and then being put together by an extremely talented individual to make the sound cohesive.

There’s no doubt that this happened with C’mon, but what’s important is that it doesn’t sound like it intentionally happened.  The details of mixing are there, but it literally sounds like these guys walked into a studio one day, started the opening bells of “Try To Sleep,” went into some amnesia trance for 45 minutes, and passed out from exhaustion after the closing harmonies of “Something’s Turning Over.”  In the middle you get results like “Especially Me,” which is my favorite single of the year (and now the song I want played at my wedding, should that ever happen), and the raw energy of “Witches” that can only be explained by the empty space it seems to create.

Every track on this record seems to suck the energy from everything about it, giving it an open and desolate feel.  It’s a unique feeling that I haven’t gotten from a studio album since My Morning Jacket released At Dawn.  Whereas some music creates spaces all around you, C’mon takes away from the space from around you, rendering everything empty around you and only beautifully harmonized vocals, jagged guitar riffs, and simple-yet-noticeable drums.  It blends without seeming blended, and it completely encompasses you, from start to finish.

“Especially Me”

“Nothing But Heart”

“Witches”

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7.  Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Probably the most simultaneously overrated and underrated album of the year (seriously, Pitchfork?), depending on which website you fancy.  Justin Vernon’s 2011 release had probably some of the highest expectations in the music world (along with TV On the Radio and Cut Copy, who chose to release absolutely clusterfucked train wrecks.  Way to go, guys).

In 2008 Bon Iver released For Emma, Forever ago, which was the product of him breaking up with a girl (that lives in Raleigh, oddly enough), going (for the most part) Into the Wild on everyone for a few months with his guitar and probably a decent quantity of good whiskey, and giving us one of the definitive albums of the last decade.  Mr. Vernon’s made some friends along the way…guest spot on Kanye West’s life work last year as well as partnering with POS and a slew of other multi-talented musicians on the project Relayted, under the supergroup moniker Gayngs (which, as noted upon initial review of this album, should make you really check your definition of “intimacy” if you don’t find it to be one of the sexiest records of the last few years).

On his “self” titled sophomore effort, Bon Iver shows us that you don’t have to be loud to be big.  The largeness of this record disappointed many who gave him such high-marks for the stripped-down production and play of his debut allowing his beautiful falsetto to be the forefront of the music.  Here, Vernon shows his range as a musician rather than just a singer.  There are horns, strings, auto-tune, and a closer that sounds like it would’ve been played at my middle school’s version of prom if I had been born ten years earlier.  He shows us that he’s not only a singer here, but an arranger.

What made Vernon famous isn’t lost on Bon Iver…there’s simple beauty on the tracks that do let his voice shine the most (which are admittedly the best) like “Holocene” and “Michicant” that should satisfy sticklers for his original sound while also possessing enough variety for the listener not to appear as if they could be b-sides from his debut.  And regardless of what others may say…the size and scale of tracks like “Perth” and “Calgary” show growth without sacrificing Vernon’s amazing voice as much as some would like to point out.  Even the closer “Beth/Rest” in all of its cheesiness is able to retain the intimacy of the record, and of the overall feel and mood that Vernon’s created on both his last record and this one.

I like indie rock, but if I meet a woman and pursue a relationship with her based solely on the fact that she likes indie rock as well; well, we better go to concerts every night and talk exclusively about music or shit’s going to get old really fast.  Life is like that in a way…there has to be room for growth or you’re dead from the start.  The critics clamoring for Mr. Vernon’s head should’ve taken this thought process when they spent their springs blogging about how Bon Iver wasn’t more of the same from an extremely talented musician.  He’s not a one-trick pony.  He’s shown us several over the last couple of years with this release being his biggest one, and he’s here to stay.

“Holocene”

“Calgary”

“Beth/Rest”

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6.  ASAP Rocky – LiveLoveASAP

I’ve been looking all year long for a rap superhero.

Last year Curren$y stole the show and made everyone else look absolutely stupid with Pilot Talk.  And I hadn’t been impressed all year until a few months ago.  Tyler, the Creator tried too hard and almost turned hip-hop into it’s own department at Urban Outfitters; and the only producer who could really bring out Danny Brown’s lyricism on a consistent basis was Black Milk, who only chose to do so on a 22 minute EP (your loss, Mr. Brown).  Big KRIT got stale for me, Freddie Gibbs only released mixtapes (a studio would launch this guy into super-stardom) and although Curren$y put out a slew of good mixtapes this year…for whatever reason he just hasn’t called up Clams Casino yet to give his druggy lyrics the ambience they deserve.  Thus…I almost wrote off hip-hop in 2011.

“The Year Of PBR&B” had failed the hip-hop genre to crown someone into the deserved fame of Frank Ocean, Jhene Aiko, or The Weeknd.  See?  You can tell I’ve definitely TRIED.  I downloaded ASAP’s free Deep Purple mixtape in the early summertime, and was mildly impressed.  A few months later he was featured on the first verse of Main Attrakionz’ “Take 1” (which would eventually become “Leaf” on LiveLoveASAP).  This was when he gathered momentum for me.  In November all hell broke loose.  LiveLoveASAP is non-regional…actually it’s ALL-regional.  Actually it’s just non-southern.  A guy from Harlem largely enlists an ambient hip-hop producer and makes shit that sounds like old Scarface.

Rocky’s metaphors, word plays, and mic jokes are a step down from Lil’ Wayne at their worst.  He raps about the typical “rap” stuff like smoking weed, shooting people, and having money (rightfully so…ASAP recently signed a $3M deal, which is rare for a rapper who actually deserves to get paid as much as he does). The genre of this album on my iTunes is curiously definied as “Trillwave.” Clams Casino is credited with roughly half of the tracks on here, which contribute a LOT to the success of LiveLoveASAP.

You won’t find any groundbreaking lyrics on here, only catchier versions of everything else that’s been produced in the rap community for the last ten years.  However…LiveLoveASAP with Clams Casino at the controls for a majority of the time give ASAP Rocky’s skills the same effortless touch that Ski Beatz was able to pull off with Curren$y last year.  And Like Pilot Talk in 2010, LiveLoveASAP smokes the shit out of every other rap album this year.  Not intended.

“Leaf” (w/ Main Attrakionz)

“Peso”

“Demons”

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5.  Neon Indian – Era Extraña

If 2009’s Psychic Chasms was the party where Alan Palomo met the purported woman of his dreams, Era Extraña is the ensuing breakup and his hallucinogenic blur of a rebound odyssey in the deserts of New Mexico.

This album was a disappointment for a lot of people.  Mainly because it was supposed to be the end-all-be-all of the chillwave resurgence of 2011 that was highlighted by (excellent) releases by the likes of Washed Out and Active Child…and an (overrated) release by Toro y Moi.  These guys got snubbed because they’re apparently supposed to be an electronic group (despite only having one release, ever) and they’ve created an album here that sounds like a rock album, a breakup album, even has hints of T-Rex era glam thrown in.  It’s most definitely NOT a chill album.

The levels of psychadelica are tuned to the max, with distortion and hazy pads overtaking the lead synths on almost all tracks.  This is not a nighttime album like the music that the rest of Neon Indian’s counterparts make…this is a dawn album or a dusk album.  This album reeks of orange and red, not black and white (Active Child) or green and blue (Washed Out).  The influence of Neon Indian’s relationship with genre-bending freak-psych undisputed heavyweight kings The Flaming Lips are shown on Era Extraña.

The album cover, as mentioned in my Q3 albums of the quarter, can really sum up the entire thing.  Era Extraña has the best album art of the year.  Mainly because the album art is the album more than on anything else this year.  Close enough to everything, yet voluntarily isolated in everything out there that makes the world beautiful.  The person in the foreground, you can’t tell if they’re spinning around carefree in circles or if they’re holding their head in their hands out of sheer frustration with it all.  That sums up Era Extraña (and Neon Indian in general at this early point in their musical careers) perfectly, you don’t know how to perceive it and there are multiple interpretations.  All of these things make it not necessarily the most accessible electronic album of the year, but most definitely the most versatile and the best one.  Chillwave or not.

“Polish Girl”

“Era Extraña”

“Hex Girlfriend”

“Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)”

“The Blindside Kiss”

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4.  The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong

I’ve kinda touched on this already, but the comparisons stay the same.  I’m pretty sure I hit puberty at the exact moment in the seventh grade that I saw D’Arcy Wretzky playing her sexy ass bass guitar in a mud pit for the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” video.  Depending on who you are, you’ll either feel really old or really young after hearing that statement.  I developed my first hipster crush (before the term “hipster” was in existence…damn that’s hipster) seven years later years later when I was a sophomore in college and discovered My Bloody Valentine and the hot shoegazey mess that is Bilinda Butcher.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart can still best be described as the alien lesbian offspring of these two.  I’m not going to get into how absolutely hot that is, instead I’m going to tell you why Belong is the shit.  1988-1994 is easily the best musical period in my lifetime, and in the lifetime of most of you who are reading this.  Belong takes us back there.

Its critics will say that the record is predictable.  Drawing on My Bloody Valentine’s haze, James Iha’s grimy ass lead guitar, and the song structure of everything that came out of the Pacific Northwest while I was learning my multiplication tables…that’s the “safe” assumption.  I guess what’s so impressive about The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart is that they make this period of musical seriousness, heroin, and pseudo-nihilism sound FUN for a change.  That’s something nobody in the grunge/shoegaze/brit-rock set of the late 80s and early 90s managed to accomplish.

Something that stands out about the grunge movement is that they all sang like they hated singing.  Remember the movie Empire Records?  Empire Records made ‘90s music fun.  Belong reminds us that every art form can be used as a means of entertainment.  Throwing a bunch of cheesy indie-pop lyrics into the hooks, structure, and fuzz that defined a generation and represents the biggest musical shift since the 1950s brings out the enjoyment and the glory of being in middle school.  Refer to it as contrived crap smacking of Loveless and Siamese Dream with a liberal dousing of Belle and Sebastian Lyrics all you want…but I can’t dance to “Mayonaise.”  And now I no longer have to wish that I could.

“Heaven’s Gonna Happen Now”

“Anne With an E”

“The Body”

“Too Tough”

“Belong”

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3.  The Weeknd – Echoes Of Silence

The Weeknd released three mixtapes this year, all were free.  Echoes Of Silence has been in my possession for approximately 36 hours (as of 11:37am on December 23), and honestly there’s no fucking question.  I’ve listened to it four times already.  And I haven’t even started writing about it…that’s going to take at least ten more listens.

…

Okay, that’s better.  This isn’t a novelty thing…like how no matter what, when you leave the newest sexual partner’s house after an 8-hour romp you naturally struggle to remember what you saw in the last; or how The Dark Knight automatically made Batman Begins feel inferior whereas they were actually pretty much on par with one another.  This isn’t that.

Over the last nine months, Abel Tesfaye has launched himself from completely unknown to one of the most recognizable music figures of 2011.  The crazy thing about this guy is that he’s always existed out there, somewhere, doing stuff.  Eating sandwiches, clipping his toenails, buying a jacket, you name it.  A year ago NOBODY outside of a few people in Toronto knew who this guy was, but there he was…doing this singing thing that he’s so damn good at.  Over the course of the last nine months, Tesfaye has taken us on a three-mixtape, 27 song, 2-and-a-half hour journey through the dark corners of everything that is horrible in the minds and bodies of all of us.

Echoes of Silence represents the final nine songs of this trip.  Orgies, cocaine, prostitution, strippers, pills, hard liquor, trashed hotel rooms, walks of shame, ketamine, morning-after hair.  Echoes Of Silence takes the creepy ugliness of everything that is excessive indulgence and makes it beautiful.  Thousands of strippers around the world will be changing their stage names to Diana for their New Year’s resolution so they can express their daddy issues via blacklight to this album’s show-stopping cover opener “DD,” which I had to listen to twice to make sure Michael Jackson hadn’t been unfrozen from carbonite.

From this opener through numerous porn backdrops through mind-exploding drums and voice alterations up to the piano acoustic emotional closer, Echoes Of Silence takes everything that made his House Of Balloons debut an ugly, guilty autobiographic and makes it beautiful.  It takes everything that made the follow-up Thursday a sexual haze of oxy and gin cocktails and makes it clear.  Noah40 and Clams Casino’s production provides the perfect mix between 3am shots of Nyquil in between grams and urban red-light sex appeal, with Tesfaye’s distinctive Ginuwine-gone-wild voice still leaving you wondering if he’s glorifying or regretting, or if he’s just lost like the rest of us.

“D.D.” (Michael Jackson cover)

“Montreal”

“Next”

“Outside”

“XO/The Host”

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2.  Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972

When you work 50 hours on a slow week, you thoroughly enjoy your downtime.  I enjoy ambient music in my downtime.  After a particularly rough day, there’s not a whole lot of things in life that beat stretching out in my recliner, pouring a sweet, smooth, 7% alcohol Stone IPA, burning through a book or literary magazine (don’t fucking call me self-important…if you’ve made it this far you already know how self-important I am to begin with.  I can’t help it…I freaking RULE), and listening to some random noise in the background for accompaniment.

Ambient has been my trade for the entire year.  Got a work PowerPoint to bang out in 30 minutes?  William Basinski.  Flipping through “The Only Meaning Of the Oil Wet Water” for the 358^th time?  Stars Of the Lid.  Falling asleep at night?  Got a whole playlist for it.  I added Ravedeath to said playlist without even listening to it back in early March.  I put it up first as I was laying down for an upcoming early morning filled with pacing furiously around an office, doing my best impression of Vince Lombardi and Ari Gold’s man-child.  I tossed and I turned.  I was listening to…nothing?  Something?  Nothing!  This is ambient music!  This is drone!  This is background!  It was…yet it rang in my ears like the most offending heavy metal you’ve ever heard.  An organ and some synths.  I COULDN’T FALL ASLEEP TO THIS.  I hated Ravedeath.

Aside from the fact that it’s Tim Hecker’s fault that I got three hours of sleep on a Wednesday night, I’ve grown to absolutely love this shit over the past year.  Ambient music exists to exist, simply.  It’s just there.  Hecker makes mere existence impossible on Ravedeath.  Recorded originally on an old organ in Iceland, and then brought back to the studio for endless layers of distortion and reverb, every track on here forces itself out of the background and punches you in the face where you stand, sit, or lay.

There’s no genre-bending here…everything starts out innocently enough.  And before you know it, you’re consumed.  The background reverses itself…the email you’re sending, the macro you’re writing, the love story you’re reading, the road that you’re driving, and most importantly the nothing you’re doing becomes the ambience with what was once the ambience now the center focus of your world.

A dark-drone producer making landmark albums for the better part of the last ten years, Tim Hecker’s goal is to signify destruction on Ravedeath.  The highlight of the album is a two-track suite called “Hatred Of Music,” and the cover depicts an annual ritual at MIT known as the “Piano Drop.”  Ravedeath is wordless, but says enough to fill a book.  Every moment of the few seconds between when the piano leaves the building and smashing into a thousand pieces of the pavement below is captured in Ravedeath, and the beauty of complete and total destruction explodes from the entire record like so many strings and fragments of ivory and wood.

“Hatred Of Music I”

“The Piano Drop”

“In the Air I, II, & III”

“In the Fog I, II, and III”

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1.  The Weeknd – House Of Balloons

YOUR Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

I…don’t really know how to begin to describe this.  “He’s what you want, I’m what you need.”  ”Trust me girl, you want to be high for this.”  ”Bring your love, baby, I can bring my shame.”  Not groundbreaking lyrics by any means, it’s the delivery.  Every line on this record can sum this record up.

Pretty much every R&B album that’s been released like this in the last 20 years has, at its best, been a FirstWorldProblems album.  You know the drill…”Oh I’m really sad because I’m a millionaire and I spend my Monday afternoons snorting coke off of naked expensive prostitutes.”

Some are better at this than others in originality and production quality (Hello, Drake!) while others give the same cough syrup  overdosed vibe but at least add some sort of romantic element to the equation (Hello, The-Dream!).  I sit back in my chair, admire the vocals and specifically the hazy production and I think “Yeah, yeah, I totally feel sorry for you dude.  You’re really sad because you’re rich and pull hot chicks and don’t have a job except singing and plowing strippers so you’ll have more to sing about.”

Abel Tesfaye’s vibe is different.  You don’t get the impression from this first of three (all magnificent) 2011 mixtapes that he’s singing about being sad because he’s doing these things.  Instead…he’s singing about doing these things because he’s sad.  I suppose eventually one can reach the pinnacle of emptiness to where they can’t fill it with anything of substance, so they substitute it with cheap chemicals to make them feel temporarily better, and cheap entertainment to make them feel of value to people.  That’s what The Weeknd’s about on House Of Balloons.  The emptier you are inside, the higher degrees of excess it takes to fill the void that’s inside you.

This isn’t a new train of thought by any means…but when expressed by the absolutely flawless beauty of Noah40’s production and Abel Tesfaye’s desperate, creepy vocals it becomes less a piece of music and more an ironic 50 minute tragedy that surprisingly most people can relate to at one point in their lives or another.

Upon first listen, you’ll be compelled to fuck someone’s absolute brains out to this album.  Go ahead and listen to the words, and how Tesfaye’s voice reproduces them.  You’ll stop in your tracks.  This is not a sex album.  This is an album about the failure of quick-fixes like money, drugs, and attention.  It’s about snowballing and not knowing a way out.  Whether it’s intentional or not, and whether it’s due to the male equivalent of Daddy Issues or not, The Weeknd has hit absolute fucking paydrt.

The most impressive thing about all of this?  It’s a free mixtape.  A product of the Internet hype machine that is social networking.  None of these records have directly made The Weeknd a dime.  In a world where the musical landscape continues to get clogged with mindless cowboy country making singers millions off of pickup truck commercials and revolting brostep where juiced up guidos can make a living pressing play on a laptop, one of the few artists who truly deserves to get paid for releasing his music…doesn’t.

The Weeknd has co-signed with Drake, which will surely launch 2012 into commercial fame for him and all of the money he deserves.  In most music circles though, he will forever be remembered for his 2011 masterpieces, most notably House Of Balloons, which put a liquor and lipstick-stained bow on the package that will now set the bar for R&B to come.

“Wicked Games”

“High For This”

“The Morning”

“The Knowing”

“What You Need”

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It’s been a hell of a year…and all of this music has taken me through it.  Hopefully you’ve found something you liked.  Stay tuned.

redd

So brings us to the 75% point.  If this were a professional basketball game, the third period would be over and some dude who I don’t know would probably be ready to step up his game.  I can’t name names because the NBA fucking sucks.  It being football season, we’ll instead say that we’re about to suffer through another fifteen agonizing minutes of a second-rate backup offensive line allowing Will Ferrell’s athletic rapist doppelganger in black and yellow get sacked for the umpteenth time while I throw an empty glass at the television.  HOWEVER…on to happier affairs:

10.  Washed Out – Within & Without

“And if you look to your North, you’ll see two people fucking.”  I will be your tour guide throughout the course of this list, and you undoubtedly noticed a close up of two people fucking on the album cover that hovers indiscreetly above me.  First impressions would conclude that this is going to be an album about fucking, or one of those background-fucking albums.  It’s not, and I’m so over saying “fucking” in album descriptions (kinda played that out in Q2) so I’m going to cut that nonsense out now.  This album can be romantic, I suppose.  I mean…obviously the couple on the cover appears to be enjoying themselves.  Within & Without is multipurpose, like most chillwave, which makes me not understand why the genre has been considered “dead” for years (more to come on this later).  There’s no setting or “mood” for this record, no atmosphere in which to play it.  It just kind of exists, similar to ambient music.  This is a step above on the interesting level though, in that you can actually tap your foot or sing along to it.  I played this record roughly four times consecutively on the way to a vacation in the mountains in the middle of the night a couple of months ago.  Then I came home, hosted a poker night with 5-8 people of grossly varying musical interests and it was enjoyed by all.  In a summer when major acts like Cut Copy and Ladytron were riding fame to release absolute horse shit excuses for electronic music, Washed Out’s step back to 2008 was refreshing.  This release got horrible reviews on some of the websites I scour for music in my weekly hangover rhythm (Chicken Soup For the Hipster Soul?).  Mainly because it’s accessible, it doesn’t stand out and it’s …general.  There’s a time and a place for general (hell…just look at the track listing, specifically what’s listed below for sample).  When that time and place comes…have this on hand.

LISTEN:  ”Echoes” “You and I” “Far Away“

9.  Motion Sickness Of Time Travel – Luminaries & Synastry

I have this problem-relationship with ambient music.  I either don’t get enough out of it or I get way too much.  I suppose it’s like an actual relationship, except instead of having a relationship with someone I draw vague comparisons to it from someone else’s art form and then write about it on the Internet.  The kind that I don’t get enough out of doesn’t really bore me inasmuch that I kinda feel like I’m not enjoying it for its intended purpose since it just sits there and exists in the background when I’m reading or cooking or writing stupid music blog entries.  Then there’s stuff that I really want to have playing so I can concentrate on stuff but it’s so brick-in-the-face-imposing that it breaks my train of thought.  Luminaries (I’m not typing all of that shit) is a nice happy medium.  The hazy vocals and rhythmic nature of the music keep it just interesting enough to grab my attention, while the blended production and spacey instrumentals and synths keep it well-hidden enough in the background for me to enjoy what I’m doing and enjoy the music at the same time.  The record actually sounds like time travel.  Aside from the embrace on the cover art, there’s something else…romantic about this record.  I’m not sure what the singer is saying (I don’t google lyrics), but as the tracks noticeably shift over the hour or so, there’s a hazy romantic curiosity that hangs over the listeners head throughout.  Not like you’re going to find something right around the corner…this shit isn’t about corners.  It’s about slowly floating through nowhere, just out of reach of something, constantly peeling back layers of fog like curtains (or as my inner child would like to say instead…wrapping paper) just on the edge of discovery, only to find that there’s still a bit more to discover before discovery takes place.  If you haven’t discovered ambient yet, I’d advise you to start here.  It’s an easy listen, non-intimidating, and sits exactly in the middle ground of everything that could be vacuum-packed into the genre.

LISTEN:  ”Late Day Sun Silhouettes”  ”Synastry“  “Dayglow“

8.  Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Aside from being the toughest band in the history of music to find on Google, as well as the easiest band for a dude to search on YouTube and immediately get masturbatorily sidetracked, Girls also has quite the reputation leading up to this release.  They launched out of pretty much nowhere a couple of years ago with the release of Album (which I’m convinced was named to aptly troll the user of every public torrent site and search engine known to man) and shortly thereafter with an equally as acclaimed (I’m talking Animal Collective-level indie critical bukkake) EP.  This is where many bands fail to deliver an acceptable follow-up.  All eyes on you, Christopher Owens.  DELIVERY!  Father, Son, Holy Ghost is less Ted Leo quirkiness and more nostalgic slideshow of everything that made great the music of generations past.  There are high-tuned swirly guitars, Southern Rock organs, bubblegum hooks, Hell…”Vomit” sounds like it could have been recorded in Seattle in 1989.  Some music people have issues with albums that don’t listen as albums, but rather as collections of singles.  Father, Son isn’t an album album, but every damn song on here could gain success as a single.  You can draw references to literally almost EVERY major band in history here.  Heavy stoner metal of the seventies, verse/chorus/verse grunge, T. Rex glam, subdued singer/songwriter (Waits/Drake), absolutely everything.  When the zombie apocalypse systematically and horribly destroys everything on the face of the planet except for a few lone survivors, there’s no record of music made before 1995, and a kid asks me what my parents would have listened to when they were kids; I could have a copy of Father, Son, Holy Ghost and put on a clinic.

LISTEN:  ”Vomit”  ”Magic” “Die“

7.  M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Probably my most anticipated album of the year, next to the bone-crunchingly disappointing TV On the Radio release.  Anthony Gonzalez makes music for tripping on acid in various settings.  In college, I really dug his Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts release.  This was music for tripping on acid in a rural area.  It was followed very closely by Before the Dawn Heals Us, which is probably what it would feel like to trip acid and simultaneously be in a horror movie.  This was wrapped up by his absolutely PHENOMENAL release Saturdays = Youth a couple of years ago, which sounds like what tripping acid would feel like if you were tripping acid in the 1980s.  This is pure speculation that I’ve gathered from watching Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas far too many times, as my hallucinogenic experiences parallel my ability to assemble a car engine or my ability to go to sleep before 1am.  Either way, the fact that the bottle is my salvation rather than substances that make me able to pee my name in my bedroom carpet when it turns into sand doesn’t take away from  my ability to enjoy Mr. Gonzalez’s work.  Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is a blend of all his last three releases.  This doesn’t mean that it’s the soundtrack for eluding an imagined serial killer on a farm in Iowa in 1985.  The shoegaze-y fuzz of Dead Cities, the blend of Before the Dawn, and the nostalgic overblown cheesiness of Saturdays is all here, complete with a saxophone solo from the first single.  There are more vocals on this record and less “dialogue,” which is where Before the Dawn struggled and Saturdays shone.  There’s more song structure, but roughly half of the two-disc track list leaves you wandering, without a feeling of closure, like a highly-thought-out interlude (which is what to expect from a double disc that can fit snugly into a single CD-R.  Pretty much every track on here would be fitting for either the opener or the closer on a really good mix tape, with building crescendos into thunderous drum  movements, all while Gonzalez beautifully adds layers upon layers of synths over fuzz only to burn out when the track appears to be on the verge of an explosion.  If I had to pick a quarrel with this record, it would be the direction of the record as a whole.  However, broken down into individual groups of 2-3 tracks it works perfectly.

LISTEN:    ”Intro” “Midnight City” “Wait“

6.  The Weeknd – Thursday

Surprise, surprise!  Abel Tesfaye is still getting laid a lot and snorting enough cocaine off of said sex objects to kill a medium-sized grizzly bear.  And he’s still really really bent out of shape about it, as is evident on Thursday.  Coming scarcely four months off of his masterpiece of a musical odyssey into blocking depression through massive self-indulgence and objectification, House Of Balloons, we get Thursday.  This is for all intents and purposes, more of the same shit.  Dark and heavy R&B production, creepy self-loathing lyrics, etc…so what the fuck is this doing here in this list?  Balloons part two would be lame as shit.  Well…Tesfaye’s attitude and persona regarding his situation have changed.  Thursday marks four months of progression from where he left off with Balloons.  He’s come to terms with his lifestyle, how it impacts is level of mental health, and (more relevant) how it impacts those around him and the hellishly low level of value he sees in what and who he chooses to surround himself with.  What makes Thursday intriguing is wondering if he’s settled into a state of hopeless complacence, or if the entire damn thing is just a setup for the finale of his three promised mixtapes of the year…due out this winter.  Now instead of guilty about the women he uses, he’s cocky.  Instead of his brain suppressing the emptiness, it blocks it out and fills it with ever-mounding levels of excess.  And instead of waking up in the morning disgusted with himself and who’s beside him…he brushes off his nose, pops two ibuprofen, takes a piss, and uncorks a bottle for breakfast.  Because fuck it, it’s Thursday.

LISTEN:  ”Lonely Star” “The Zone” “The Birds, Pt. 2“

5.  Das Racist – Relax

These guys sound like they’d sell out shows at your local Whole Foods or Occupy (insert city here) protest.  Das Racist are (is?  The fuck?) back from their two 2010 breakthroughs, Sit Down Man and Shut Up Dude.  I suppose most dismissivists who perceive hip-hop’s Affirmative Action plan as a mere bunch of joke-rap stoners could still reluctantly to define progress as moving from The Office references to Laterian Milton quotes in their hip-hop songs.  However…after their increasing fanbase removes their sandals and takes several thoughtful swallows of an $8 bottle of orange juice, they would probably describe Das Racist is “identifiable” above all else.  That’s Das Racist’s gift.  They rap…sort of.  Their success stems from adding a rhythmic texture, rhyme, and flow to conversations we all have on the couch with our buddies once we stumble in from the bar at 2:30 in the morning.  They either blatantly or subtly make fun of pretty much everyone and everything on this record…be it rap fame or the Punjabi hip-hop culture.  They’re equal  parts Gunther and Eminem.  They talk about real world shit…but they add a Lonely Island spin to the pressing issues that Immortal Technique absolutely begs us to care about.  They don’t speak intelligently…if they were sober for any of these cuts I’d be pleasantly surprised.  But the relatable conversational style they continue on Relax makes this record easily enjoyable…mainly because it’s how I would sound on a drunken freestyle if I had any semblance of musical talent.  With so much focus on music as an art form, a fresh take on music as an entertainment form is, well, refreshing…

LISTEN:  ”Michael Jackson” “Power” “Punjabi Song“

4.  The Dream – 1977

In a year dominated by the plentiful (albeit still amazing) “Hipster-Hop” of Odd Future and (more importantly) “PBR&B” of the likes of The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, and Jhene Aiko, the slightly-more-gangsta shit and the classical seems to have been put on the backburner.  The Dream resurrects this with his free mixtape (following suit from the aforementioned artists 2011 breakthroughs).  I just talked about R&B, and more recently I talked about music being identifiable.  The Dream succeeds on 1977 where The Weeknd couldn’t succeed with Thursday.  I don’t just identity with Terius Youngdell because he grew up roughly three hours from me…I identify with him because I actually experience the things he sings about, and can from a second-hand basis (with respect to him) validate the authenticity of the feelings and situations about which he sings (except for all of that “Rolex” business, obviously.  If I could identify with that my life would much more closely resemble that of Abel Tesfaye).  The production on here compliments Youngdell’s stage name…the identifiable nature of each track contains an airy, almost summery, “dreamy” feel.  It much more resembles the traditional R&B that I remember from my childhood standing in the corner of dances in my awkward glasses, drinking homeless wine with my buddies from a mountain dew bottle than the druggy funk-infused norm that seems to be all I ever come across (except the word “fuck” is used here a lot more).  The track placement is also impeccable on this…as soon as you get ready to change this shit out you get the cocky baller anthems tucked nicely in the middle.  So much of R&B is either one extreme or another…capturing unbridled love or reeling heartbreak.  1977 catches that happy medium of highs and lows, disappointment and wanting, that all of us actually experience in our adulthood.

LISTEN:  ”Rolex” “Used To Be” “Form Of Flattery“

3.  Main Attrakionz – 808s & Dark Grapes II

It’s amazing how hype has shifted the landscape of hip-hop over the last couple of years.  Between the southern street team dozen-mixtapes-per-year work ethic amazement of the likes of Curren$y and Big K.R.I.T. and everyone being on the dicks of the likes of Danny Brown and Odd Future (seriously…am I the only one who thinks Tyler, the Creator fudged a D12 audition and shopped away his depression at Urban Outfitters?), the more classic form of hip-hop that we all came up knowing and loving has been seemingly lost in the fold (aside from Freddie Gibbs’ completely breathtaking Straight Killa EP last year).  Main Attrakionz is a true testament that people are still out there being original, doing what they love, and working damn hard at it.  Borderlining stoner rap in production only, the lyrics are straightforward and thought out.  Squadda and Mondre have the work ethic of all of our favorite mixtape hounds, while pleasantly deviating from exclusively rapping about how they grew up in the swamp or smoke weed a lot, and eliminating the annoying “fuck you” statements to all of their past and present doubters.  808s is the best rap album to come out this year, although it’s in mixtape form.  A true studio effort with a single consistent production pattern (I’d suggest Ski Beatz, after he launched Curren$y to underground fame with his work on last year’s Pilot Talk) would shoot these guys skyward.  These guys contain a cohesiveness that you only see with the likes of Malice and Pusha T, or (dare I say) Havoc and Prodigy.  They work well with guests, and even have a couple of buzz names on the guest list (ASAP Rocky’s opener on “Take 1″ is without a doubt the absolute sickest verse in any song of the year so far).  Mixtapes are designed to generate hype.  As of this writing I’ve had this on play for roughly two months, and still haven’t read of a proper studio release.  808s screams “Put me in, coach!”

LISTEN:  ”Take 1” “Nothin’ Gonna Change” “Chuch“

2.  The War On Drugs – Slave Ambient

I thank my dad for getting me so into music at an early age.  When I was about seven I had this unbreakable affinity to country music.  After tolerating this for roughly the most painful five months of his life…one day my dad was sitting around and was like “fuck it.”  He called me into the living room, told me the nicest version possible of “Turn that shit off” (I never claimed to be Justin Halpern), and exclaimed that he was about to show me how music is supposed to sound.  His choice?  ”Heartbreaker” by Led Zeppelin.  As long as I’ll live that one song will personify my love of music, because it changed me.  The scratch of the 20-year-old vinyl (mint condition was an understatement to say the least), and Jimmy Page’s opening guitar riff will always take me back to my childhood.  Since college, thanks to the internet, my musical tastes have expanded beyond what I could grasp on the radio or at the occasional local show.  I enjoy sharing music with my father from time to time.  How I know something is truly timeless is his reaction to it.  He wouldn’t enjoy most of the music on this list…as a matter of fact, this is probably the only one he could get into.  However…this album was stamped “timeless” in my head when I first played it.  It’s equal parts Dylan, Petty, and Springsteen, with a modern layered, almost shosegaze-y spin on it at times.  In my Q1 recap I gushed over Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring For My Halo…as a former guitarist for this band…the all-encompassing sound is able to take his singing and songwriting style and make it something bigger, something expansive and even more meaningful.  This is music to travel to, it’s music to see the world to, it’s music to grow to, and it’s music to share.  It’s the most straightforward “rock” album on this list…and that probably goes a long way in explaining how timeless this sound has proven itself time and time again, what a modern spin can do to the concept, and why I’ll one day play this for the son I’ll eventually have when and if I catch him singing Alan Jackson while brushing his teeth in the morning.  Then I’ll send him to go mow the lawn.  That’s what he gets, the lazy fuck.

LISTEN:  ”It’s Your Destiny” “Baby Missles” “Black Water Falls“

1.  Neon Indian – Era Extraña

We began and will end this quarter with the term “Chillwave.”  See?  This is EXACTLY why I abhor genre-cramming.  Era Extraña absolutely in no way, shape, or form resembles Within & Without.  Which in no way resembles the work or Toro y Moi, Memory Tapes, or the handful of bands that I can think of that have been lumped into this fledgeling category over the last three or so years.  There is absolutely nothing in Era Extraña that you could use the prefix “chill” to appropriately describe.  This shit is bigger than “chill.”  It’s powerful, it’s expansive.  It doesn’t merely exist as a backdrop for other activities…be it cooking, driving, fucking, or “chilling.”  I’m resisting the urge to type in “ChadBroChill” right now I can barely stand it.  Neon Indian released an album a couple of years ago that really sucked…then they covered Dark Side Of the Moon with the Flaming Lips.  THE FLAMING FUCKING LIPS!  There’s nothing chill about the Flaming Lips.  This shit isn’t chill!  This is a DJ getting high on mescaline and re-working Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (arguably one of the three most groundbreaking albums of my lifetime…after Nevermind and Ready To Die).  This shit is sunny.  It’s happy, it’s eighties, it’s messy.  It’s sentimental, it’s pornography, it’s the outside.  This is mother fucking art.  Look at the cover of this album…LOOK AT IT!  I’ll wait.  Okay.  See the cover?  This album sounds EXACTLY LIKE THE COVER OF THIS ALBUM WOULD MAKE IT SOUND.  This is hopping from spot to spot in a crowded city on an autumn evening, ten feet tall and staggering.  This is lying on your back alone on a desolate beach, swigging cheap Cabernet straight from the bottle and staring drunkenly at the stars with a cigarette hanging from your lips.  This is shivering in a pea coat at six in the morning in October and walking to get the mail.  This is driving to nowhere ninety miles an hour.  It’s most absolutely fucking CERTAINLY dancing on a hilltop at dusk with a glow-in-the-dark necklace.  This is the quintessential album this year of all of the small moments that we all forget and take for granted, bottled, recorded, and reproduced for our ears.  This is the album of the fucking quarter.

LISTEN:  ”Polish Girl” “Era Extrana” “Hex Girlfriend“

Well!  That pretty much does it…only three months left in the year.  There won’t be a Q4 update, because at that point in time it’ll be time to talk about the best of the best for the year.  However, with The Weeknd’s finale of the year plus upcoming releases from the likes of Ryan Adams, Feist, Spank Rock, and The Russian Circles just to name a few I can all but assure you that it will be aptly represented.  ’Evening!

Hymn To the Immortal Wind

Swiftly as a draft of wind, moving past her without a trace,

Time, cold and unbending, leaves her standing alone once again.

Long ago, there was the sound of two children running here. Their footsteps, never straying far apart from each other’s, still echo through the woods where and old woman walks on this day.

On a still river surrounded by weeping willows, the woman rows her boat towards the open sea. With a grave face she pulls the oars to and fro, her eyes fixed upon a nearby cliff above the waters. She traces the edge and holds her breath, reliving the chilling distance down to the bottom. Her rhythm is steady and slow as she breaks through the familiar fog. The sound of waves crashing, the lingering smell of burnt wood, and the reflection of branches on the water all remain the same as her memory, as if frozen in a spell. She inhales all she can hold and wonders if winter never ended since that cold night she stood on the cliff with him. Here lies their landscape of memories untouched by the awakening of spring.

On this day the woman prepares for farewell. Heavy are his ashes, sinking in her hand. As she strains to let his remains go, she turns herself to the earth for an answer, a reminder of why she is here.

Beneath her grief she knows there is something beyond the finality of this moment. Like the spring that is born from a cruel winter, there is something here waiting to be born. Resting her hand on the boat, she lets her eyes sleep.

Peering from the thickets of the surrounding woods, a promise tree faithfully waits to welcome this day of their journey. With roots woven deeply into the earth, it is the only thing that’s flourished here where all else has stood still. In the midst of it all, it continues to grow, nurturing the vow that it was planted with as if it were its child. The tree watches the woman tenderly and sways its branches, sending a stream of wind to relive her.

In the place between wake and sleep, there lies a bridge over the waters. The woman finds herself on one end, walking towards the figure standing in the middle. With her arms open, she feels lifted as if she was a child again.

Hours pass before she awakes in the boat and the embrace of dim sunlight. Finding the ashes still waiting in her palm, she blesses them with her love and releases them into a stream of wind that carries them over the waters. The woman travels back into a time where they prayed here together, a dreadful time where they found solace in each other’s promise.

Her eyes follow the flight of the ashes until they fade into falling snow before her – the same snow of the winter that they loved and perished here together.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

He watched the heavy sea stretch to the edge of the earth without fail. Its ever-present body was frightening, yet its freedom beautiful. Above the horizon, nothing remained but a moon and sky stained by smoke. Beneath it, abandoned ships rocked back and forth, half sunken and eaten by decay. For endless miles of empty waters, waves swayed in unison as if they were mourning. The earth knew and the boy did, too.

It was the beginning of a merciless winter and the end was nowhere in sight. A young boy, having lost track of time, hurried through the woods towards an empty patch by the river. With every step he grew uneasy as he could not see her small figure waiting there. Out of breath, he dropped to his knees and prayed in fear.

The sky had cast a dreary blanket upon the earth, draping over every last creature. A stench of smoke clouds and distant eruptions confines people in their homes. Their world was now a ghost town where the sound of children’s laughter was drowned by hunger cries. Even the village dogs had gone mad and roamed the streets aimlessly. What was once a simple life was now a battle to survive each passing day. Perhaps, the earth was preparing to cleanse, for it was the end of time, a rebirth of time.

A pair of small hands covered his eyes and he turned to find a young girl with soot streaked across her face. He embraced her closely as his panic melted, and unable to let go for a single moment they warmed each other until night fell. They inhaled the air around them, ripe with the scent of burnt pine and evening frost, a familiar smell of the place they once called home. Their families had perished, and all that was left for them was a will to stay together. Day by day, they watched themselves surrender to the inevitable fate of the earth.

There it stood in the back of a deserted shed. The boy had found it leaning in a pot as if it was waiting for him, young, green, and alive. That morning that could grow, something that would survive. Upon searching a row of farms, he had caught a glimpse of the young tree left alone to wither. The edges of the leaves had faded into brown, the dirt was dry, but it was alive nonetheless.

Pleased with himself, he could not help but laugh aloud while carrying his new treasure. But as he ran to meet her, he heard heavier footsteps trailing behind him. Before he could glance, a heavy figure thrust him to the ground, sending the tree flying ahead. Having see him rummage through his shed, a man began to kick the boy as if he was nothing but a stump in the ground. The boy heard himself cry out , but as his own voice faded away, he could only hear the sound of his flesh against the man’s fists and feet. For a moment, he ignored the man’s brute strength and watched him stare straight ahead blankly. The look in his eyes was emptier that the village they stood in.

Alone at last after what seemed like hours, they boy awoke in agony. But surrounded by pieces of the shattered pot, the tree remained unharmed, now with his healthy roots bare. Strengthened by the sight of it, he ignored the pain in his body and stood up.

When the girl saw him limping towards her in the wood, she took him into her arms and cleaned him with her torn white clouds without questioning what had happened. Cupping his face, she wept for him as he tried to hide his wounds in shame. They sat in silence together, listening to the wind passing overhead and imagining its destination to be a better place than where they remained.

He brought forth the tree and placed in between. Her pale face appeared fragile, yet hopeful somehow. It had not changed in the years he had known her. When his eyes closed, she still appeared before him.

“This tree is stronger than us now. When we are now longer here on this earth, it will continue to grow. We can leave our memory with this tree”, he spoke.

“Someday, the earth will be beautiful again?” she asked, arranging a dry leaf into his hair.

“Yes. We will find each other here then”, he said.

That evening they planted the tree into the earth and entrusted it with a part of their memory and vow. They collected white stones from the river and placed a visible ring in the ground around the tree, leaving room for the trunk to grow. Together they said a prayer to the sky, asking for the tree to survive the cruel winter and be guarded safely until they could return someday.

As they prayed on their knees, snow fell like tears onto the ground – the first snow of winter.

Two frail bodies teetered along the highest cliff by the sea that night. Three steps from the edge, she wondered what waited on the other side of the black waters. Two steps away, he studied her face, vowing to remember. On their last step, their eyes locked, a silent reminder of their promise. Leaving behind any fears, hand in hand they jumped, a leap of faith into the cold unwelcome waves below.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Above and beneath them was the sound of beating wings. Their arms flailed freely as they glided close together. Remembering the stories that travelled to their village, they knew this must be the place where children fly, the place where all things end and begin again. With their hands inseparable, they soared higher until all they could see below them was a blue velvet blanket with patches of sinking green. For the first time, they felt bigger than the sea, bigger than the earth. Lifted and safely tucked under the gentle wing of the wind, they dove trough the clouds with their eyes closed and mouths open in joy. What a beautiful sight that lay before them, like a dream unfolding in slow motion.

“Carry us until we awake”, they prayed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Under the cold weight of snow, the earth finally hibernates. It is a miracle of winter. Flakes fall as if they were sent to pause time before the seasons begin again. Some are clumsy, some are graceful, but each knows its landing place on the earth.

The only movement here is that of a young woman searching trough the braided pine branches for an opening. Her white dress is camouflaged against the snow. Lost in this dream chamber, she moves trough the white powder, running her hands trough it to awaken her memory.

Parting the branches, she follows an open path cleared before her, swerving its way to a stone bridge adorned with icicles. Someone is waiting for her there, a grey figure, a stranger, watching her trough the shower of white between them. They are uncertain why they have come but they both long to be here. Although she cannot recognize his face, she knows him somehow. As the stand together, a single ray of light grows from behind, wrapping them in its warmth until they dissipate into it. When she awakes, a cloud of winter air still floats above her. It was just a dream again.

On this morning, a man awakes from the same dream, one that reoccurred so often that he felt incomplete without it at times. It haunted him. When his eyes closed, her face still appeared before him, but no one he could recognize.

His oldest memory was being an infant sitting before his family, unable to speak or walk on his own. He cried for days and nights, his small fists clenched, until one day he couldn’t remember why he was so sad anymore. Along with the other children, he learned to laugh and run again. This became his new life, and everything before then seemed no longer his.

The man watches swelling clouds from his window and cannot help but anticipate the arrival of something today. Bodies bustle their way past him as he sits outdoors, but they are like shadows murmuring to one another. They float by unnoticed as his eyes only fall upon a young woman, dressed in white, who stands behind the crowd. He feels comforted, almost relieved by the sight of her, and longs to be near her.

Their eyes lock, a strange longing glance that could not be severed by anything at that moment. Her eyes are like two deep wells of stories, perhaps one he may have heard before. They appear dewy, prepared to overflow.

In this distance, church bells ring! The humming noise and motion of the world seep back in to disturb their peace. If she is a mirage, she will disappear soon, he thinks. But she remains there, motionless. This time is not a dream.

With a final glance at him, the woman slowly vanishes into the sea of bodies. A steady downpour of snow ripples in the wind until he cannot see anything but the movement of white. Chaotic, like a surge of emotion, and yet pure, and delicate, the snowstorm remains an enigma to him. As he tastes the snowfall, he sees a single ray of light piercing trough a cloud, and he cannot help but smile.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

 

The sea is made of our saltwater tears, he muses. As the man drifts to sleep he watches himself dive into a sea lying below. Sunlight separates a path for him to swim and the currents carry him towards the place where light hits the ocean floor. Despite its warmth, these waters are forlorn to him. He descends lower with his palms together, longing for something that he cannot wholly remember. The further he sinks, the younger he becomes, and deeper into his memory he travels.

On the bottom of the sea, puzzling shapes and lines scatter in all directions like a treasure map. Pictures of life above water, a mountain, a cliff, and a tree, pave the surface around a young girl deep in slumber. Her face rests peacefully as if a part of her is drifting elsewhere in another world. From where he stands, it is all a painting to him, a portrait of a young girl waiting patiently underwater.

His eyes follow the footprints that lead from her body to the drawing of a single tree that stands alone. As the sea currents push forward, he imagines the branches blowing with the movement of water. With his finger, he traces a ring around the tree, again and again, as if it had become real before his eyes.

Without awakening her, he lies down and closes his eyes to sleep near her, hoping to meet her there in another place, another dream, wherever she travels to in her sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

At the very end of a tunnel, a faint white light flickers like a hole in a black wall. The man peers from one end before he enters and begins an arduous walk trough the longest path he has ever seen. With jagged slopes and holes, the tunnel becomes a prison where his demons, foes, all tear at his sides to taunt him. But as he stumbles over debris beneath his feet, his eyes never leave the white hole at the end that grows with each step he takes. He treads through it, listening to his heartbeat echoing until he slowly awakes from this dream.

Dressed in white, the same woman stands before him with her head bowed. Her face is solemn and there is a plea in her eyes as she places a letter into his hands. And then, like a ghost who drifted in and out of his days, she was gone.

“Ever changing, growing, and searching
Through stretches of time beyond life and death
This is the journey that every soul makes.
My journey always bring me to
The place between wake and sleep,
A landscape of memories,
Where you and I meet again and again.
Even in the darkest night, in the heaviest storm,
I always find my way back to you.
When you remember, please come back to the place we both know”

Reading her words again that night, the man falls asleep to find himself walking inside of the same tunnel. He paces fiercely with his arms outstretched as if he is pushing against the wind. The air smells of burnt pine and evening frost as the end is near in sight. When he guides himself out into the light, his hands brush against a rough surface, much taller and wider than he can reach. What lies on the outside of the tunnel is a fully-grown tree surrounded by a circle of white stones. He drops to his knees, touching its roots and turning over each stone in disbelief.

Recovering a lost memory is like a dam breaking open, releasing all the water that had been barricaded from flowing. As he sits here, every moment with her in these woods resurfaces within him. He holds a stone in his hands and weeps as he remembers their promise.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

She has travelled far to be here again: Inside the boat, the old woman revives each season of their time together. Listening to the distant sound of beating wings, she gently releases the remaining ashes into the river, but they do not sink. Instead, they are swept into the wind and take flight towards the horizon that lies ahead. She watches them travel on, marvelling at the tenacity of their endless journey.

When she turns, sitting before her is an old woman watching her faithfully. Blessed to have reached this day together, they laugh as spring finally awakens around them. They row passed the weeping willows and a familiar tree still surrounded by white stones. A bridge glows in the light of the setting sun as he takes her hand and guides her onto the ground. Hand in hand, they walk across their bridge into a tunnel of pure light without and end in sight.

“We are not bound by the passing of time.
Underneath every layer of the vessel that we call the body, there lies only the soul,
Where memory lives on”

- Mono, 2009

Half-awake In a Fake Empire

Bands launch from relative obscurity to indie superstar-dom in a variety of fashions.  Justin Vernon broke up with the love of his life, got depressed, moved into the woods for the year, and recorded Bon Iver.  Explosions In the Sky recorded music that happened to go very well with high-school football cinematography, and Peter Silberman from The Antlers wrote a curiously depressing quasi-autobiographical concept album about a dying hospital patient.

The National are pretty damn famous also…probably more so than any of the aforementioned acts.  Hell…they headlined an Obama rally and were some of his biggest supporters in the 2008 presidential campaign, amusingly using their coincidental song title “Mr. November” to don T-shirts in his support (which, funnily enough, in case you missed my headline, is preceded by the line “I won’t fuck us over”).  Not that Mr. Obama is royally fucking us over worse than any other president in recent memory has, at least not in my opinion.

“Mr. November” isn’t a song about Barack Obama, or about being president.  It does; however, explain how The National got famous, and how they’re arguably the most important band for a man in his late twenties in our country’s current state.  It’s a song about anonymity, and a song about stalling.  “This is nothing like it was in my room, in my best clothes.”  “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.”  “I’m the new blue blood, I’m the great white hope.”

I decided yesterday that although I’m (hopefully) too young for a mid-life crisis, statistically, I’ve officially hit my 2/5-life crisis (again…statistically, although I’d cross my fingers for a 1/3 life crisis).  Reasons and events that won’t be discussed here have led me to conclude that I’m falling into the ever-growing hole of young professionals in this country:  existing.  Simply existing, with nothing more.  “Mr. November” is a song about existing.  It’s about setting out for that first job interview, or scholarship interview, or just daydreaming in your room about being something great someday and then looking back 10-20 years later to realize that you simply exist.  ”In my best clothes.”  Who would’ve thought that one of the happiest moments of one’s life at the age of 30 would still be the simple pleasures of high-school success?  It was a lot easier back then (although driving to a corn field to get drunk was a pain in the ass).

Matt Berninger personifies the rat race that encompasses the urban United States, and the life of a late twenty-something in general.  He sings about things that we do.  Yes, it’s great and refreshing to hear the childhood glee from The Arcade Fire’s “Sprawl II,” but that isn’t real life, at least not for most of us.  The liner notes from Mono’s Hymn To the Immortal Wind record nearly made me shed a tear the first time I read them (as if one of the only post-rock videos in existence isn’t a regular onion-carver in itself), and gave the album a completely new meaning…but that’s a Japanese Fucking Folk Tale.  I own fifteen blue shirts, and like to think that I’m “moving up the ladder.”  I see passers-by on the street and envy their lives and imagine what it would be like to be someone else, someone in a different life.  I see old friends that I haven’t seen since we graduated high school in ten years, and old memories from my childhood, and realize how much people in our lives come and go.  I realize that there are some people who are worth keeping in your life, that make you incessantly nervous and that you just want to make laugh so you can see them smile.  I’ve seen something slowly destroy somebody, unable to help but unable to look away.

None of these topics are anything new in a song.  What makes them special is Berninger’s delivery, and the choice of words he uses.  Everything he says seems so…simple.  It sounds like a conversation you’d have at a bar with one of your friends.  Matt Berninger says things the way we think them, and that’s what sets The National apart, and is why hundreds of thousands of Guys Like Me have shelled out money for their MP3s, CDs, concert tickets, and vinyl.

    

Lots of musical acts garner fame and success through creative imagery and usage of words, and their ability for me to listen to one of their songs and think “Hey…me too!”  The difference between everyone else and The National is that not only to they sing about the shit that happens to us on an everyday basis, whether we choose to share these feelings with anyone or not, but it’s done in a language that creates “Hey…me too!  And exactly how he said it!”

That is why The National personifies me, personifies normalcy.  They create the melancholical redundancy of normalcy, while also bringing out the simple beauty in it.  This is their angle, and they work it well.  Matt Berninger, yeah, I know him.  I am that guy.

Summer Mix Series 2011 – “Destination: Desolation, Damnation!”

Download it Here!

1.  Future Islands – Walking Through That Door 

2.  Cinnamon Chasers – Luv Deluxe

3.  M83 – We Own the Sky

4.  The Arcade Fire – Half Light II (No Celebration)

5.  !!! – Infinifold

6.  Asobi Seksu – Thursday

7.  Glasser – Mirrorage

8.  Fuck Buttons – Surf Solar

9.  The Antlers – No Widows

10.  Broken Social Scene – Lover’s Spit (Feist Piano Acoustic B-side)

11.  Benji Hughes – Do You Think They Would Tell You?

12.  The Knife – Silent Shout

13.  The Weeknd – The Knowing

14.  Frank Ocean – American Wedding

The Story:  This mix is signifying my leave from work in South Durham (I40 MM 270) at approximately 8:15pm, driving west towards the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It begins when I crank my car, and ends as I pull over for a quick break at the Davie County rest stop (I40 MM 177).  These songs are representative of the atmosphere, my surroundings, and my mood as I make this drive.  The tracklisting matches perfectly with scenery and time of day, and hopefully can do the same for others, regardless of where they live or how fast they drive.