Best Albums of 2008 - Part 1
Ok, let's get this thing done. Personally, I think 2008 has been an excellent year for new music - especially when I look back at the fairly pedestrian list I made last year... Something feels slightly awry though, as if things are approaching some kind of critical mass. Perhaps it's just that end-of-year fatigue thing but I felt something similar when I saw Fuck Buttons earlier in the year: something in their shattered pastoral gave me a horror vision of music piping out of the very ground, a shimmering wall of indistinguishable inescapable noise from which we recoiled and in attempt to block out wore ear-dampeners attached to ugly metallic head braces. Perhaps I should get some fresh air...
Artist: Distance
Album: Repercussions
Label: Planet Mu
Repercussions is a brutal, ceaseless record. Its stock beat is a buzzing halfstep, but Distance has always been interested in the seething dynamics of metal (think Sunn O))) or Isis; and check out this mix he did with Vex'd for Mary Anne Hobbs - tracklist here) and on this album whilst the metal influence isn't obvious, you can almost sense it as an undertow, sucked into the density of the sound. Yet the record does have also have a brittle metallic edge to it and at times you can almost see your reflection in its surfaces (check 'Skeleton Grin'). 'Loosen My Grip' below, is noirstep - Bark Psychosis on downers; the track looks over its shoulder for faces in the pooling shadows... It also gives the lie to any notion of a misty-eyed view of London: it might just be the sewer of filth running beneath Burial's Romantic dreams of the city.
Accompanying Track: Distance - Loosen My Grip
Artist: Dark Captain Light Captain
Album: Miracle Kicker
Label: Loaf
I made a few half-formed comments about the gone-missing nature of that brand of spooked folk that seemed dominant for a time a couple of years back - that experimental, creaky, emotionally fraught wave of music that seemed to grow up around the Homefires festivals set up by Adem. On reflection though, it's tempting to say that along with Gravenhurst, Tunng and The Memory Band, Dark Captain Light Captain are still worrying at the edges of this particular seam of sound and that it hasn't gone anywhere. There is a simple element to the Dark Captain Light Captain sound but something inexplicable dwells below the surface, a kind of clammy throb, part Beta Band, part Can - and I wonder how much of that has to do with the presence of Robin Proper-Sheppard, the mute genius at the centre of The God Machine, one of the most quietly influential bands of the '90s. Whatever the reason, Miracle Kicker is an intriguing album and promises much for the future. 'Questions', below, is a beautfiul record.
Accompanying Track: Dark Captain Light Captain - Questions
Artist: Aidan Moffat
Album: I Can Hear Your Heart
Label: Chemikal Underground
In Arab Strap, Moffat sang of fractured relationships and damaged sex over walls of guitars and electronics. On I Can Hear Your Heart Moffat strung together a drunkslut narrative of similar themes over chamber pieces, made up of mariarchi fugues and noirish asides. It dragged up memories of your own past, and of futures you can never hope to have, and managed to be appallingly filthy and emotionally engaging all at once. Superb stuff.
Accompanying Track: Aidan Moffat - Good Morning
Artist: Various - Mixed by Appleblim
Album: Dubstep Allstars Vol.6
Label: Tempa
This is a a great way to get a sense of the dubstep scene and Appleblim as magus at the heart of Skull Disco records is something of a 'second-wave' overlord. I swear for the first 20 or so minutes of this I thought I'd heard my record of the year - it does tail off but the dynamic of the mix is such that it drives you onwards. If Margins Music is a great walking album, this is one to drive to.
Accompanying Track: Martyn - Suburbia
Artist: Dusk and Blackdown
Album: Margins Music
Label: Keysound Recordings
Dubstep may have a downtempo narcotic heart but to me it has always been a music of movement, and it makes the most sense when walking. And Margins Music is, essentially, a lamp-lit tour of London; a collection of field recordings of hidden spaces: debris-strewn high streets, council estates, the impossible labyrinths of rat runs and alleyways that lace the inner and outer suburbs like neural pathways. I listened to it as I walked across the suburb I had grown up in on the outskirts of the outskirts of west London. Under the clag of grey skies the album seemed incredibly oppressive, claustrophobic even, as if the life of the music were being crushed by the very forces that created it. It was the perfect soundtrack to the place.
Yet there is a real sense of optimism at the centre of the record that takes longer to appear; but it is there, and once you notice it the joy of it is obvious. Not much lures me back in to London these days but there is something exhilirating about the fact that this music is pouring in torrents from the place. Bring it on.
Artist: Fennesz
Album: Black Sea
Label: Touch
Continuing on a watery theme from the mighty Venice and the single On A Desolate Shore..., Black Sea is evidence that Christian Fennesz is at the very top of his game. Indeed this album might be his most honest and least adorned to date with his guitar largely untreated at times and the soft billowing drones and keyboard washes at times seeming to flow almost organically across the surface of the sound. Yet out of something so simple comes a complex and indefinable beauty. 'Glide', the album's centrepiece, is like a summing up of everything that has come before - a live rendering of the process that Fennesz has been perfecting across varying different projects. It's as if he is polishing away the edges of a great sculpture, gradually working towards uncovering a precious something at the centre, something that has been pulsing away unbidden for years. Long may it stay hidden.
Accompanying Track: Fennesz - Glide
Artist: Ufomammut
Album: Idolum
Label: Supernatural Cat
Ach, for once a record entitled to the worn out epithet 'crushing and intense'. This was my first brush with Ufomammut, a three piece that make a sludge of glorious psychedelic noise. And Idolum is a monstrous thing, lumbering and obese, bulldozing everything in its path.
Accompanying Track: Ufomammut - Stigma
Artist: The Grand Archives
Album: The Grand Archives
Label: Sub Pop
For anyone else who was desperately disappointed with the second Band of Horses record, this is the place to turn. Mat Brooke was in Carissa's Wierd and Band of Horses with Ben Bridewell but left just after Everything All The Time was relased and Bridewell returned back to Carolina. It appears he took much of Band of Horses' sun with him. To put it simply The Grand Archives is a record with a handful of aching, beautiful songs on it with Brooke invoking the wide open spaces of the north west in his gentle, soaring voice. Another valuable addition to Sub Pop's growing roster of great pop bands.
Accompanying Track: The Grand Archives - Sleepdriving
Artist: The Ruby Suns
Album: Sea Lion
Label: Sub Pop
More great pop music from Sub Pop, this time in the shape of Ryan McPhun's The Ruby Suns. The talk when it came out was that this was all Animal Collective like ringworm but I think that was over-stated. It does share some of their rhythmic sense but is more rooted in pure world-pop than the AC not to mention way more accessible. Here's what I thought back in May...
I put this up merely to share a record that I keep coming back to. They sound young, young and joyous - must be something they put in the water in NZ. Also, the singer is called Ryan McPhun and it doesn't appear to be a pseudonym. The foundations are there to hear: some Graceland skitters, some Animal Collective vaulting, Brian Wilson trapped in bed...Whatever, it's just a great record. These two tracks capture the camber and tilt of it - the first a Polynesian swing number, the second a languid pop symphony that might, just might be the comedown B-Side from Elephant Stone. Enjoy.
Accompanying Track: The Ruby Suns - Tane Mahuta
Accompanying Track: The Ruby Suns - Morning Sun
Artist: The Week That Was
Album: The Week That Was
Label: Memphis Industries
Yet more great pop music, but this was odder, more cerebral. Essentially a solo project of Field Music's Pete Brewis, this record was born out of a week free from TV, Brewis suddenly inundated with a whole host of other information - that great tide of creative flow we keep artificially penned in, bunged up with bullshit discourse thrown out of the ache-brain glowbox in the corner of the room. Supposedly structured like a Paul Asuter novel the record was part of a rich seam of British pop music stretching back through Trevor Horn produced Kate Bush, XTC (fairlight synths? check; thwapping snares? check), ELO and even the McCartney of 'For No One'. It feels out of time and probably is but the album is half an hour of time-capsuled music that stands alone and is all the better for it.
Accompanying Track: The Week That Was - Scratch The Surface