Bjork - Post

Genre: Bjork. If you don't know Bjork very well, her sound changes a lot, but on this album you should probably imagine Nine Inch Nails if it were fronted by Obaba from "Nausica of the Valley of the Wind." With just a touch of Rogers and Hammerstein.

Where would I have heard of it: Bjork has a tendency to get more attention for her videos than her music, which seems to be a sad side effect of working with Michele Gondry. Still, she had wide airplay on MTV in the mid 90s and was huge even on the radio in Europe. This was her second solo album after the breakup of Sugarcube, the Anarcho-gothpunk collective she helped found in Iceland and with whom she first toured the world. Also this album is well loved by critics, probably the only thing Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and NME agree on.

Anything of note: This album is a pretty decent intro to Bjork: airy, beautiful vocals punctuated by childish screams and a wide variety of musical influences. This is a woman who broke up her first band, a Riot Grrl punk band, to start a jazz fusion band. She exhibits a cheeky and playful sexuality on the album that probably felt like a bold third wave feminist rebellion after her anarcho-punk background. It certainly is massively endearing, but it ended up getting her in trouble. An obsessed fan filmed an 18 hour video of himself making an acid spraying letter bomb while talking about his obsession with her, his views on the world, and making racist comments about her boyfriend. he ended by covering himself in war paint and shooting himself. After this event Bjork began to distance herself from the cuteness portrayed here.

Is it good: My first listen, several years ago, was a bit rough but when I listened to it recently I was blown away. This is overall a positive album, despite the thudding industrial background music. The variety of influences is fascinating and the songs are really enjoyable, full of pop hooks and amazing vocals. really just amazing. Bjork is another figure whose work was familiar but whom I had not fully dug into. I now have a lot of albums to buy.

Beck - Sea Change

Genre: Sad guy with an acoustic guitar.

Where would I have heard of it: It's Beck.

Anything of note: I know little or nothing about Beck. I like his singles I guess, and he's on Futurama a fair amount. That's about it. Apparently this album was a departure? I dunno. I never feel right talking about albums like this without career context that I just don't have. You have to start on a career somewhere I guess.

Is it good: Yeah I guess. Its fucking boring though. There are no hooks for most of the album. it is beautiful, but not super interesting. It is good music for a rainy day when you are reading or for trying to go to sleep. These are important times and we need music for them. This is that album. It took me a long time to get to that point, where I was ok with not all music being brilliantly interesting all the time. But this album kind of sets me back a bit. I dunno. people think Beck is so awesome and this is really nice, just boring. Not even like Belle and Sebastian boring, that I can deal with because they have hooks and a rhythm section. Songs on this album just happen and you maybe don't notice. There's some really nice music here. Meh.

Top 10 Albums of 2013

I may be a little late on this but fuck you. I wanted to do a Top 5 Albums for 2013 and a Top 5 Albums I
Got Into This Year but, uh, it was a really bad year, new music wise, both for me and for the world. I had a lot going on and missed out on a lot of stuff that I would have liked to get and on the other hand most of what happened to music this year was terrible. So instead I'm going to try to do a top Top 10 Albums I
Got Into This Year and will note their release date.

10. Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution - A Call to Arms - 2001

Saying "I have been listening to a lot of ska recently" is no longer cool, but it really was never cool. Not really. There were times when it would get you laid, but it would never be cool. The reasons are multifaceted but suffice it to say that, even during its heydays, Ska was too obscure for mainstream people to understand and too different for the indie scene to adopt. Indie, in all its forms, is a underground alternative to the mainstream. A genre that completely ignores the mainstream, even or perhaps especially if it does so while still maintaining the listen-ability and pop hooks prized by it, is somehow too close to home for the underground to be comfortable with. So it is often tarred as overly simple, often phrased as "it all sounds the same." Similar things were said about jazz and hip-hop. 

Nonetheless it is clear that ska has fallen far in popularity since the 90s. One man who has consistently stood for quality composition in ska, as well as its continued existence as a genre, is Tomas Kalnoky. This is the guy who wrote all of the first Catch 22 album and then left the band because it was becoming too commercial. After a break of a few years the first thing anyone heard out of him was this album, and it is pretty spectacular, even if it is just an EP. It took me a while to get to but it was worth the wait. Born of a brief desire to get back to his roots as a classically trained Eastern European musician, the group fuses ska and Slavic music in a way that is very natural. In many ways the album is a transition point between his work with Catch 22 and his later work with Streetlight Manifesto. There are a lot of rough edges here but the listener is left wanting a full length very badly. One has been in the works ever since and Kalnoky assures people, whenever he is asked, that it is on the cusp of release. Rumors that his perfectionism being a reason for his leaving Catch 22 are totally unsubstantiated and tangential to this topic and you were very irresponsible to bring them up. 

9. Lou Reed - Transformer - 1972

So I got into Lou Reed's solo work after he died. So what. Shut up.

8. Passion Pit - Gossamer - 2012

This is that album with that song that was in commercials about taking a walk. That song is actually a sensitive look at the American Experience in the modern world. The album is catchy and fun and full of similarly insightful looks at modernity. Fun fact: looking at modernity drove the lead singer mad.

The album is very good, but as an indie techno album from a year of indie techno it lacks a certain novelty. This is way better than the albums produced by peers Fun, Owl City, and Foster The People. It's just that after listening to all of them one is wary of the genre.

7. About E - Bongo - ??!! (Probably the early oughts?)

About E is the best thing to come out of this project. A band fronted by Arnold de Boer, who also apparently fronts every other rock band in Holland, manages intensive creative output while also being absurdly difficult to Google. His music is frantically energetic dance punk that makes the most of its lo fidelity and dutch mispronunciation of English to make catchy, clever songs. 

6. Bears of Blue River - Remember the Killer Bee Scare - 2009

Oh My God this album. Another happy discovery of this project, I really cannot stop listening to this album. It is really a 4 song EP, which makes its addictive hooks, sweet melodies, and clever song writing just that much harder to walk away from. Work, the needs of family, personal hygiene, none will compare to the draw of this album. Please send help.

5. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories - 2013

This album's quality serves to show how terrible the rest of modern music is. Daft Punk uses the same technology as everyone else on the top 40: sampling. their music sounds lush and immerseive, even when it is being minimalistic. Everyone else on the Top 40 uses music like an inconventient thing they have to do between nip slips and getting high. If you don't want to make music star in a reality show. Otherwise I want some fucking attention to detail. If you are going to make music with samples, get enough to make music. Otherwise learn the fucking guitar. Or the piano. Or the Fucking hurdy gurdy. Arcade Fire did. fuck you. In fact the only issue I have with the album is the collaborations. Not because they are bad, in fact I think this is another area where Daft Punk showed the rest of Music how collaborations are supposed to work, its just a huge fucking pain in the ass for me to find the album on my iPod. I don't care that some tracks featured collaborations, I can read the liner notes, or read wikipedia. I know they want credit but I think that info should be stripped out when on MP3 playlists. Oh, you think I should search by album? Fuck you. Your mom is an album. That's a whole different menu. And don't get me started on random play. Fuck you. I'LL KILL YOU. 

4. Arcade Fire - Reflector - 2013

Depending on who you are, Arcade Fire may or may not have raised a lot of questions with this album. One sort might listen to this album and find it spectacular, a masterpiece standing on its own, a painting in a dark warehouse, illuminated by a single spotlight. No questions in that case, it just IS, man. If you are of another sort, you might listen to this album and think "How is it that a band which brought the hurdy gurdy back to relevance sound so modern? Is it even possible for Arcade Fire to make a bad album? How can the modern pop charts be drowning in people claiming to draw influence from Caribbean music, but only a bunch of Canadians can get it right?" Yet another sort has never listened to the Arcade Fire, and reacts with increasingly angry bewilderment at their continued pop chart success. A forth sort had listened to this album and disliked it, but they were sadly hunted to extinction.

3. Sean Nelson - Make Good Choices - 2013 

Heartbreaking, wonderful, punchy pop country songs with witty lyrics and a collaborator list to make Bob Geldoff weep. I am going to do a full review later, and I ranted about how amazing it was at the time. Of course it got no press, let alone chart success; that wasn't even on the radar. Despite a few rough patches and shaky production, a spectacular album about everything that is wrong, mostly it is you. Oh yeah this is the guy from Harvey Danger. If you know me you know that I love Harvey Danger, and I was fanatical about this album. What could knock it so low? 

2. Kimbra - Vows - 2011

I think most people who got into Gotye followed up on Somebody I Used to Know by looking up his other work. Some of them bought his albums, and that is fine. Like most people I liked the song but wasn't super impressed by his other work. I will probably buy his album at some point. But I am one of those who also looked up Kimbra, his featured vocalist. And. fuck. This girl is 23 right now, and she was 17 when she wrote this album. And. Dude I fucking tear up when I think about this album. It is so fucking good. She is a way better composer than I will ever be at anything I ever try to be. Even things like combing my mustache. no matter how good I get at it, Kimbra will be better at composing. 

True, she had some good producers, and with pop tunes it is tough to tell how much is her until we get a second album, but she is the sole songwriter on all her songs except two, and those songs realy stand out. She is an amazingly talented artists and I really want to see the next thing she does. That said, this has to have been an insane trip for her, and I am fine with her taking her time. Some of her best songs are the singles, and the music videos are REALLY well done, so check them out on youtube. 

1. Fountains of Wayne - Sky Full of Holes - 2011

This is one of the most perfect albums ever, certainly this band's best. All the songs are tight and there is little dead weight on the album. The lyrics are meaningful and rich and, as you would expect, extremely clever. The title comes from the last song, Cemetery Guns, which will melt your face. Just, clean off.

Amsterdam Calling

Genre: Compilation. Usually I do not buy compilations. I am not sure why I bought this one except it has a band I already liked on it. It is a compilation of Dutch rock bands put together by the Dutch Rock and Pop Institute.

Where would I have heard of it? The DR&PI was apparently handing them out as a promotional item at the 2004 CMJ festival in New York. In terms of the bands on the album, do you like Dutch rock music? I think that’s about it.

Anything of note: I had entirely forgotten about this album. So finding it ripped on my iPod was like finding lost treasure. The bands on the comp are the best of the Dutch rock scene, circa 2004. The music is intensely indie in flavor. It wanders between neo new wave and indie folk, but with a strong indie punk lean throughout.

Usually I avoid comps. Most comps that you find in stores are promotional materials put together by record labels. I will let you in on a secret: marketing materials tend not to make me super excited. Also, most labels stock a variety of artists to suit a variety of tastes. Since most people who do not share my opinion are at least blithering idiots and at worst rabid animals, it stands to reason the majority of a given comp will feel, to me, the way showering regularly or not giving my child a cigarette would feel  to the quivering flesh piles considered the core audience of the average record label.

This album was created as promotional materials for a government agency that sponsors and promotes rock music in Holland. Americans may not think government sponsored art programs would be exciting, but thats where we got Jackson Pollack and that guy was a hoot. Anyway it works really well here because the bands are fucking awesome. 

Voict was the band that convinced me to buy it, And their tracks here are awesome even if I already owned them. It turned out that the lead singer of About E, a band I reviewed and enjoyed early in the blog, was on the album with 2 of his new bands. Apparently the guy changes bands like a man with a serious VD sheds dick skin. Both tracks are spectacular and new for me, so this was a really pleasant surprise. The song “We Buried Indie Rock Years Ago” is particularly awesome. One of the bands is still around, so check out Zea, they are fucking awesome. There are also several tracks by Betty Seveert who is also really really good.

Is it good: This album is amazing. You can get it on Amazon, but I might as well just tell you to buy albums by these artists:

Seedling

zZz

 Zea

Caesar

Voicst

Bettie Serveert

Arrested Development - 3 years, 5 months, and 2 days in the life of

Genre: Early to mid 90s Hip-Hop

Where would I have heard of them: They had a career of note in the early 90s, won a bunch of awards, They contributed original songs to the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. They broke up by 1996, but have reformed a few times, most notably in order to sue NBC for copy write infringement of the name. The show laughed it off but, uh, these guys weren’t nobody. NBC’s lawyers really should have found them. They started doing the odd show or tour with increasing frequency in the oughts, culminating in a new album recorded entirely on a laptop which was released in 2012. This album was their first, the one that won all the awards.

Anything of note: The group was founded as a “positive, Afrocentric alternative to the gangsta rap popular in the early 1990s.” I have to say, my genre of comfort is the rock underground, so finding what is essentially underground rap is both immensely exciting and somewhat unnerving. I know the basics of the background history but am hardly an authority. But here goes.

As early rap became popular it was scary to white people because black folks. The record companies got the most inoffensive, radio friendly acts and pushed them. Hip Hop evolved as a reaction to these saccharine type acts, and in a period of loose record company oversight, new technology, and new composition techniques a period of intense creativity followed. The sampling lawsuit against DelaSoul effectively closed this down by making samples expensive, meaning anyone aiming at mainstream success would need record company approval and monetary outlay for each sample. This made high quality production expensive. At the same time early Gansta Rap had found that it could make up for its low-fi shortcomings by combining fight for the underdog lyrics with an intentionally confrontational attitude. The record industry latched onto Gangsta Rap as a way to capitalize on the emerging market without the extensive legal fees inherent in the lush productions and artistic compromises of the other Hip Hop artists. Those who objected to the increasingly spare nature of the actual music were branded as out of touch crypto racists.

Alternative Hip Hop has existed since the very beginning, and ultimately began achieving mainstream recognition in the oughts via groups like OutKast and Kanye West, but ultimately these acts have not changed the fact that mainstream hip-hop has been more or less the continuous domain of the Gangsta since NWA. Arrested Development helped found this alternative tradition, combining some of the lushness of Golden Age Hip-Hop, the confrontational social commentary hijacked by Gangsta Rap, and acting as a voice of the Afrocentric middle class liberal black community.

Is it good: Yeah, it really is, warts and all. There are lyrics here that sound like they might come from the Cosby show, but there are others that are progressive without being conspiratorial, and all are well delivered. I guess they call that flow. I think I heard that one time. There is really good flow. More importantly this is recognizable as music, made from a diversity of samples. This is not music put together in ten minutes on fruity loops before the guest vocalist came in for a chorus. There is a diversity of influences here, and they are layered into music that is enjoyable on its own without the lyrics. Thank fucking god. 

bis - Sweetshop Heroes

Ok that worked pretty well so I am sticking to this format

Genre/Home Town: Britpop although you wouldn’t know it. When I purchased the album I figured that they were some kind of wanna be J-pop band, as the front cover looks like something drawn by a person who bought one of those “draw your own manga!” books but who only read half of it. My first thought when I heard them was that they sounded like a weird, British version of Five Iron Frenzy, except without horns or Jesus. Essentially they sound like a kids-bop rendition of Op-Ivy. They are from Glasgow.

Why would I have heard of them:  Uh. They had some minor hits in Australia and they had some notoriety in the late 90s as the first unsigned band on The Top of the Pops since the 70s which is guess is nice and interesting if you live in England. They are one of those bands that were famous to famous people. Apparently they toured with every good band that formed between 1994 and 2001. Their big break in the US was writing the closing credits of the Powerpuff Girls. They had a bizarrely long, self made career which amounted to nothing in terms of the US market.  Which is rather admirable and also tragic.

Anything of note: They seem to have pulled something into their music from everywhere they went, and they went everywhere.

Are they good: Man I have no idea and I've been listening to this album for months. They are fucking fascinating though. They are a Britpop band with serious ska influences, and avid proponents of a DIY ethos and scene loyalty. The results are unfortunately subdued. In line with second wave Ska’s emphasis on rejecting the barbarous antics of the punk scene and embracing intelligence, and in line with their desire to remain true to the scene and “the youth,” they don’t curse and maintain a positive attitude. Outside the listed influences one should add J-pop, Eurotrash/house. Given their influences they stick to up-tempo, well produced music. The result is overly slick, but behind the bland production there is some really good writing. They make good use of the Britpop tool kit and add some tricks of their own, including dual male female vocals to give a energetic feeling of crowd participation. 

Unfortunately the result sounds oddly Nickelodeon. The sad thing is that this is a band that did things their own way, worked really hard, toured incessantly, and made some good music that just happens to sound like kids-bob. Essentially my problems with them are the result of the things that happened to rock and pop after they broke up, which is hardly fair. On the other hand the production on the album is obnoxiously smooth, and the emphasis on youth power throughout the album is really dated for someone who grew up to that kind of sloganeering as a marketing tool on Nick.

As a side note I've decided that 90s nostalgia is dead for me, backdated to when I started listening to this album in September. I still hold a fondness for Ren and Stimpy but most of Nickelodeon can kiss my ass. Presumably as soon as I post this a child will emerge from my wife fully formed, and I will spend the next 10 years of my life subjected to incessant children’s programming as karmic retribution for that ugly incident with the nun and the boll weevil. I suppose I should get it over with.

Chinese Stars - Turbo Mattress

Hey all, my creative process has been kind of stymied, and this has really handicapped my ability to deal with the sheer mass of cds I have to get through. The two things may be related. So I am going to try to move to a more streamlined way of doing these entries to get through them without having to reinvent the wheel every time.

Genre: Noise Rock

Why might I have heard of them: The Chinese Stars were founded by some of the core members of Arab on Radar, a highly influential but short lived Providence based band that is widely credited with reinvigorating noise rock, kick-starting the moribund No-Wave movement, putting out one album, and then breaking up. Some of the acts they helped inspire and get started, including The Locusts, have gone on the get national attention, at least amongst a small but dedicated audience of former hardcore fans. They also had a tendency to perform nude, and when they opened for Marilyn Manson they so antagonized the audience that they were ejected. They also played Clark University, which is where I got this EP. The show was, in fact, awesome.

Anything of note: in line with their antagonistic ethos and name, the four song EP was put out on a disc shaped like a four pointed shuriken. This was during the period when some people thought mini-discs had a future for some reason. The resulting disc was functionally a mini-disc, but could not play in a mini-disc player. Nor could it be played in a slide-in CD player. It could only be played in a top- load CD player. I consider this a fantastic fuck you to the audience. Especially since this probably cost more to print.

Are they good: Fuck yeah they are good. They manage the hypnotic drone of noise rock while presenting clear, intelligent vocals and avoiding the blank wall of noise affect all too common in third rate entrants in the genre. They certainly have the attitude down.