Best of 2007
Before I bung up a list of the best records I've heard this year I thought I'd re-post this (it went up just before the old site blew up last year), just to get a sense of perspective....
Artist: The Stringed Theory
Album: Universal Relativity
Label: Stadtgruen
The Stringed Theory is the project of Dustin Frelich who projects his warm pulses and fuzzy drones into space out of California - but releases music on the Web-only label Stadtgruen, a German label which, with no recourse to the piss-taking masses, pitches itself boldly into the fray with a manifesto that seeks to explore the divisions between culture and nature and is named after the urban green spaces of Berlin. Frelich's own project is remarkably apposite to this in that it utilises the language of particle physics and the medium of electronics to create what is essentially a sound full of soothing bucolic warmth. It's difficult to listen to this album, especially loud with headphones, and not feel a certain enveloping heat-haze fall over you, or to feel buoyed up by a real sense of pulsing levitation. In many respects Universal Relativity feels (and it is an album that you absorb as much as hear) close to the textures the shoegaze bands explored at the beginning of the early '90s - not so much the raw volume of My Bloody Valentine but the sonic cave cathedrals of the very early Verve recordings, or what Slowdive were trying to do with Pygmalion: it has a similar sense of dynamic space and at times it feels like the surface of drones and oscillations are going to part and reveals obscure nascent songs. A gorgeous album. And to top it all, it's available as a free download.
The Stringed Theory - Universal Relativity
Artist: Stars of the Lid
Album: ...And Their Refinement of the Decline
Label: Kranky
Speaking of warm pulsing drones, the Texan masters Stars of the Lid released a monumental double album this year ...And Their Refinement of the Decline - and this when many had thought them to have split for good. If anything the album was ostensibly a continuation of ...The Tired Sounds Of but it seemed as if the guitars which dominated that record had been dampened and the soft orchestration left to float to the surface. What where they up to on their six year hiatus? I like to think of them as field musicians, or sound-excavators - sitting above vast canyons, or ocean breaches hoovering up the sound of the earth as subsonic radiation and giving it life, giving it form. Contemplating the work that must go into creating this kind of intricate minimalism (and to find more ways and new ways to express the inexpressible) has an oddly frantic effect on me and yet surrendering to the end product results in a clear beatific calm I'm only just beginning to explore. As for the title of this track - I really have no idea. Fulham home games were never this transcendent.
Accompanying Track: Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage
Artist: Burial
Album: Untrue
Label: Hyperdub
This really isn't any of my business. I'm the rockist scum who comes along and appropriates the nearest thing to a dubstep album band and lines it up along the serrated edge of my coffee table, then politely forgets about it. I almost entirely neglect the rest of the genre with its walled-in jitters and magma-deep basslines, and instead throw this up as some sort of shared experience of a newly dreamed London. There you go. But after getting caught up in the spectres' deft emotional embrace this was the record, with its timid, honest nostalgia, that affected me the most emotionally in 2007.
Accompanying Track: Archangel (Phaseone Remix)
Artist: The National
Album: Boxer
Label: Beggars Banquet
And talking of honest, naked nostalgia - welcome to the Matt Berninger show. The National are something of an enigma to me in that it all seems far too simple and far too bland to achieve the heights they do: a rock band that simply puts the pieces of a song together and lets it slowly burn its way into your blood. The alchemist of course, is Berninger, with his evasive clunky poetry and paper-thin skin (reading Lowell the other day it was all so obvious that this was where he'd lifted that line from 'Abel' My mind's not right)- we go back to hear him, we go back to watch him razor open his veins, even if it is happily.
The National - Apartment Story
Artist: Panda Bear
Album: Person Pitch
Label: Paw Tracks
There's been lots written about this life-affirming burst squeezed into the virtual space of a record - if Panda Bear's first album was a expulsion of animal grief at the death of his father, this is like some other journey or projection, cast outward through a kaleidoscope into warm glow of creative childish glee; and whilst it has touchstones (it seems to almost inhabit Brian Wilson at times) it manages to sound fundamentally Other, joyously so. And if you needed a charm to carry with you, you could do a lot worse than this:
listen in between your notes
theres something been going on
while you were busy taking notes
and look in between your moments
theres something good happening
its good to sometimes
slow it down
Artist: The Twilight Sad
Album: Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
Label: Fat Cat
This snuck up on me with its cold tales of childhood misery and hard learning; but it hid a soft heart behind walls of guitars and military drums, leaving James Graham's honest howl to claw back the dense curtain of sound. This record inhabits a soundworld similar to that of Arab Strap, but has none of that band's ironic self-pity, instead it fronts the world face-on. They've made lots of friends and it's easy to see why.
Accompanying Track: That Summer At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy
Artist: James Blackshaw
Album: The Cloud of Unknowing
Label: Tompkins Square
This is probably the record that has consistently astonished me the most - in terms of sheer virtuosity (it channels Robbie Basho and John Fahey but spirals beyond them) and it's clarity and persistence of vision: like Borges' thaumaturge in 'The Circular Ruins' calling forth the golem, this feels as if it were dreamed into creation. Named after a 14th century spiritual guidebook that encouraged a kind of Taoist relinquishment of understanding and knowledge to experience the true nature of God, it is a record to immerse yourself in, walk around in. At times it seems to have solidity, its own architecture, or it's as if Blackshaw's hands are a loom throwing out strands of a great carpet.
Accompanying Track:The Cloud of Unknowing
Artist: LCD Soundsystem
Album: Sound of Silver
Label: audioCD
So there you go after everything this was my album of the year - the thing that made me want to run out and tell people about it and play it loud so that those around might catch on. I had communal experiences to it, and I had quieter personal moments; and for the nine and half minutes we had of it, it soundtracked my summer.
I saw them back in September in an open air amphitheatre in the Rockies where they woke me out of a jet-lagged fug and proceeded to wipe the stage with Arcade Fire and realised then that this was the sound of an artist waking up to the alchemical space between production and reception and the joyous emotional possibilities it contains. I, and the half-bearded throng around me, was elated. And just how many of us didn't realise we were waiting for it?