Carlos Giffoni – “Evidence”
Venezuelan artist Carlos Giffoni has a new 12”, Evidence, coming out 2/14 via Software (Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin’s label), and showcases some of his most accessible work yet. The self-titled track showcases beautiful piano work played by Laurel Halo, and then evolves into a crazy synth riff that one wouldn’t expect from a tenured noise artist (see: The Endless Mirror). It’s gorgeous work.
Xiu Xiu – “Hi”
Always is out 2/24 on Polyvinyl.
Top 30 Songs
30. Bry Webb - Zebra
29. Balam Acab - Oh, Why
28. Elite Gymnastics - Omamori
27. John Maus - Believer
26. Grimes - Vanessa
25. Prurient - Time’s Arrow
24. A$AP Rocky - Palace
23. Baths - The Nothing
22. Jamie XX - Far Nearer
21. Kurt Vile - Runner Ups
20. Deerhoof - The Merry Barracks
19. Burial - Stolen Dog
18. Beach Fossils - What a Pleasure
17. Destroyer - Bay of Pigs (Detail)
16. Emperor X - Allahu Akbar
15. Thee Oh Sees - Corrupted Coffin
14. Braids - Lemonade
13. Cass McCombs - County Line
12. EMA - Marked
11. Clams Casino - Realest Alive
10. Big K.R.I.T. - The Vent
09. Main Attrakionz - Take 1 feat. A$AP Rocky (prod. by Clams Casino)
08. Danny Brown - Monopoly
07. Bill Callahan - Riding for the Feeling
06. Mark McGuire - Get Lost
05. L.W.H. - Bitin and Shakin ft. Western Tink, Mondre M.A.N. & Shady Blaze
04. City Center - Teardrop Children
03. BOAT - Forever In Armitron
02. Purity Ring - Ungirthed
01. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Belong
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Top 30 Albums
30. John Wiese - Seven of Wands
29. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
28. Andy Stott - Passed By Me + We Stay Together
27. Charlatan - Triangles
26. The Men - Leave Home
25. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
24. Clams Casino - Instrumentals
23. Blackout Beach - Fuck Death
22. Chad VanGaalen - Diaper Island
21. James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual + Condo Pets EP
20. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo
19. Lee Noble - Horrorism
18. Destroyer - Kaputt
17. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
16. Big K.R.I.T. - Return of 4eva
15. Braids - Native Speaker
14. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
13. The Weeknd - Hous of Balloons / Thursday / Echoes Of Silence
12. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up
11. Golden Retriever - Light Cones
10. Pete Swanson - Man With Potential
If the world as we know it had actually come to a screeching halt on the dawn of May 21 this year, Pete Swanson’s Man With Potential would’ve been the perfect record to play as us sinners danced amongst the fire and famine. While its rhythmic backbeats and hypnotically-fractured grooves has led Swanson’s solo debut for Type to be billed as a sort of quasi-techno record, don’t go throwing this on at your next friendly mixer; as it stands, Man With Potential is still a product of searing, visceral noise, the kind that Swanson’s dearly-departed Yellow Swans have been dealing in for almost a decade. If there are any semblances of dance-floor pleasers on this thing, they’re eviscerated beyond recognition, resulting in throbbing apocalyptic anthems like “Misery Beat” and “Remote View”. While this record will no doubt raise some eyebrows amongst those who prefer their noise sans strobe lights, its hard to argue against the sheer weight of its power. Man With Potential is the sound of an artist coming into his own, and stands as firm proof that Swanson still has plenty of places to go.
09. Grouper - A I A
There’s a time and a place to listen to Grouper’s 2XLP behemoth A I A, and it’s face down in your bed at 3:30AM drooling into your pillowcase. If The Men’s Leave Home was this year’s ideal soundtrack to lighting dumpsters on fire and tipping over police cars, A I A is meant exclusively for the after hours, when streetlights flicker on and the blinds get pulled down. I know its become cliché to talk about Grouper’s music like its some kind of aural sedative, but c’mon, have you listened to this thing? Between the gorgeously-smeared drama of Alien Observer opener “Moon is Sharp” and Dream Loss’s syrupy centerpiece “Soul Eraser”, A I A is essentially an endless stretch of down comforter, one to cocoon oneself with until REM takes its hold. While there are songs to be cherry-picked and enjoyed outside the whole (“Vapor Trails” and “Mary, on the Wall” come to mind), A I A functions best as a seamless, self-contained dream, one which it always stings to wake up from.
08. Thee Oh Sees - Castlemania + Carrion Crawler/The Dream
In the year of our lord 2011, John Dwyer’s never-stagnant Thee Oh Sees project opted to make not 1 but 2 exceptional records, each which explores a very different side of their joyously-demented song-craft. While May’s Castlemania is bizarre and fairly skeletal, sounding like Dwyer banged it out solo on a collection of toy instruments, Carrion Crawler / The Dream is all muscular, chugging rhythms and fiery bombast, a lot of which is owed to its two —count ‘em— two drummers. While both albums are veritable masterstrokes in their right, most will prefer CC/TD for the sole reason that it’s a helluva lot easier to swallow. Castlemania, despite being home to some hip-shaking, catchy as all git-out numbers (“I Need Seed”, “Corrupted Coffin”), is also frighteningly weird and lysergic, giving way to moments of sheer cacophony and utter lunacy (“Stinking Cloud”, the eardrum-battering end of “A Wall, A Century”). In sharp contrast, the lean, mean grooves of Carrion Crawler are meant for loud, face-melting consumption, preferably while barreling down the interstate or hosting an impromptu graveyard bash. Though it’s easy for a group to stretch themselves thin when it comes to two-a-year releases, Thee Oh Sees have never sounded this invincible. Stay too long? They could never.
07. Main Attrakionz - 808’s and Dark Grapes II + L.W.H. - The Tape Hiss Hooligan
No matter what way you slice it, Odd Future owned underground hip-hop in 2011. Along with those dudes from Iceage, they were this year’s delinquent cinderella story, a group of blood-spitting teens that somehow ended up gracing the cover of Spin and lighting up every dark recess of the blogosphere. While I could easily spend the length of this blurb dissecting and rambling about OF’s head-scratching rise to fame, I would rather lend the spotlight to Green Ova, the true underdog collective that gave hip-hop real meaning this year. Thanks to the workman-like pace of head duo Main Attrakionz and the equally impressive output of associates Shady Blaze and Western Tink, the group’s managed to produce a whopping 10 records this year, nearly all of which are better than Tyler’s mess of a sophomore effort, Goblin. There’s plenty of material to pick and choose from, but the crown jewels are undoubtedly Main Attrakionz’ 808’s and Dark Grapes II and L.W.H.’s debut stunner The Tape Hiss Hooligan. Which one should you start with? It’s hard to say; while 808’s lets loose with some unparalleled bangers like opener “Bossalinis & Fooliyones pt. 2” and the Clams-helmed, A$AP-featuring “Take 1”, Hooligan features some of the finest rap production this year’s seen, most notably on the synth-seared “Bitin’ and Shakin’” and the dizzy, blissed-out “Spinning 87”. Green Ova may have yet to make a “Yonkers”-sized dent in the rap world, but it’s hard not to be optimistic; when you’ve got dreams this monumental, those “Perfect Skies” are never too far off.
06. BOAT - Dress Like Your Idols
The play counts don’t lie—BOAT’s untouchably catchy Dress Like Your Idols is my most listened-to record of 2011. If I didn’t just own Idols digitally like the shameful generation Y-er I am, my copy would be battered beyond belief—scratched, stained, and threadbare from the countless car rides, cross-country trips, and oppressively-humid jogs I’ve taken it on. It may not be as challenging or “intellectual” as albums like Replica and New History Warfare, but what it lacks in musical trailblazing and technical complexity it makes up for twofold in its sheer ability to rock your goddamn face off. For those that yearn for the days when Doug Martsch was kicking out jams like “Distopian Dream Girl” and Malkmus was spinning nothing but gold soundz, here is your holy grail—your shining ray of 90’s era jams in a landscape of tired pop tropes and shit like Skrillex. There’s enough pastiche here to rival the likes of Yuck, but what did you expect from that title and album cover? BOAT mimic their idols so well they transcend them, taking the restless spirits of Keep It Like A Secret and Wowee Zowee and giving them a fresh set of legs.
05. Roommate - Guilty Rainbow
While it may not immediately appear as such, Roommate’s Guilty Rainbow is some harrowing shit. On this, Chicagoan Kent Lambert’s third full-length album under his solo alias, he uses a palette of soft synth tones and other expertly orchestrated tools of the “bedroom pop” trade to paint a blood-red portrait of anxiety—both personal and global—and blow it up in technicolor. The album begins on lyrically bleak note with the ominous groans of “My Bad” and only gains traction from there, closing on a much-lauded (and thoroughly brilliant) cover of GBV’s “Smothered and Hugs”. While covering a track from Bee Thousand can be a lot like taking a red pen to the Declaration of Independence, Lambert is able to elevate his rendition to the point that actually rivals the original, trading Pollard’s 4-track hiss for smeary synths and crisp vocal catharsis.
04. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
Whatever your beefs are with Replica, you can’t fault OPN (né Daniel Lopatin) for trying new things. After his mammoth Rifts compilation in ’09 and last year’s Logan’s Run fever dream Returnal (which is still great, by the way), dude could’ve made another full-length slab of slow synth drifts and retro-futuristic schtick and no one would’ve batted an eye. Instead, Lopatin turned his focus to the “personification of sound” and, um, biomorphism, using looped samples and out-of-context snippets from television commercials as source material. While this could’ve been a mess of masturbatory concepts and grating kitsch in the hands of a lesser artist, Lopatin has more than subtlety and smarts to back up his grand ideas. Replica’s frankenstein-like sound manipulations don’t always make for the easiest of listening (see: the manic, laser-sampling stabs of “Child Soldier”), but like, Ferraro’s batshit brilliant Far Side Virtual, it manages to ingeniously dig into the essence of our current nostalgic kick.
03. Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
Have my thoughts on Bill Callahan’s superb Apocalypse shifted since I gushed over “One Fine Morning” and big-upped it on our 2011 halfway list? Nope, not a chance. It’s still yet another stunningly mature statement from a man whose work rarely falls below excellence. Ride on, Bill.
In an interview with Impose last month, Danny Brown admitted that he’s going to have a difficult time following this year’s totally-bonkers XXX: “It’s something that fucks with me so much because I don’t know what the fuck to do next. Like how can I top this shit?”. All things considered, this is fairly understandable; XXX, in all its drug-addled, zonked-out debauchery, often reads as one massive death wish (hence song titles like “Die Like a Rock Star”), a quality which makes the proceedings all the more real and raw. In a year full of exceptional rap albums, what makes XXX rise above the rest is this sense that Brown is constantly teetering on the edge of sanity, flipping manically from bravado-filled sex talk to teary-eyed confessions. On album closer “30”, Brown takes all of this to its logical conclusion, topping off the track with some of the year’s most gripping, spine-chilling lyrics in any genre: “So the last ten years I been so fucking stressed / Tears in my eyes let me get this off my chest / The thought of no success it got me chasing death / Doing all these drugs in hopes of OD’ing next— Triple X”. In this last echo of the album’s opener, Brown brilliantly wraps up his coked-up opus, leaving the listener to suffer the comedown right there with him.
01. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints
I imagine that after EMA’s Erika M. Anderson claimed Best New Music honors, tore the house down at this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, and earned a surprising amount of new fans with searing singles “Milkman” and “California”, a good amount of listeners dug into her discography to find her work with Gowns, the recently-deceased drone-folk project of Anderson and The Mae Shi’s Ezra Buchla and Corey Fogel. I also imagine that once said listeners picked up Red State, the outfit’s defining ’07 LP, a lot of them promptly (and understandably) ran for the hills. Seriously: Red State is music at its most viscerally terrifying, a guided tour through decrepit Midwestern drug dens, rain-slick strip-mall parking lots, and the jaws of hell itself. Hyperbole? Probably—but listen to “Rope” and tell me you don’t suddenly find beads of cold sweat running down your forehead. While this narcotized terror makes Red State an absolutely brilliant piece of listening, it’s also its achilles heel, occasionally swallowing the music itself whole. The brilliance of Anderson’s solo debut as EMA is the way it takes these raw, uncompromising sensibilities and dials them down a notch, resulting in tunes that are as catchy as they are affecting. Past Life never dwells too long one style, though, and for every rocker like “California” there’s a gorgeously bruised ballad like “Marked” or “Coda” to balance it out. From the opening murk of “Grey Ship” to the last gasps of closer “Red Star”, this is Anderson’s album through-and-through—the most unapologetically personal statement this year has to offer. Listen, weep, and hurt along with her.
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Favorite Reissues
Disco Interno - The Five EPs
Bitch Magnet - Bitch Magnet
Sebadoh - Bakesale
Favorite Tapes
Golden Retriever - Emergent Layer (NNA Tapes)
Blue Angels - Isidora (Digitalis Limited)
Aerial Jungle - Tales of Acoustic Levitation (No Kings)
Favorite Labels
Digitalis, Bathetic, No Kings, NNA Tapes, Hippos In Tanks, Captured Tracks, Thrill Jockey
Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, & The Congos – “Happy Song”
The latest installment in RVNG Intl.’s so-far-so-brilliant FRKWYS series is one for the annals of weirdo music history: dub-pysch guru Sun Araw and likeminded astro-traveler M. Geddes Gengras (whose 2011 Stunned tape The Empty Space is still amazing, by the way) have joined forces with roots reggae heroes The Congos for both an album (ICON GIVE THANK) and a film. Needless to say, I’m stoked. You’ll have to wait until April 9 to get your hands on this bad boy (I know, I’m heartbroken too), but you can sample the proceedings with gloriously righteous “Happy Song”, from which you may or may not get a serious contact high.
Lower Dens – “Brains”
Jana Hunter of Baltimore band Lower Dens has consistently been releasing some of my favorite music for the past 7 years, from two solo albums (Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom, and There’s No Home) to Lower Dens’ 2010 debut LP Twin-Hand Movement and their fantastic 2011 single Batman (one of my favorite songs of 2011). Lower Dens have just announced a new record, Nootropics, which will come out May 30th on Ribbon Music. Here’s the first single off the album, Brains, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite songs of the year already.
mp3 // Lower Dens - Brains
Perfume Genius – “Hood”
Put Your Back N2 It comes out February 21st on Matador.
“The song’s about how if someone knew you 100%, they would go away.”
Clearing – “Blank”
No Kings honcho and impeccable soundsmith Lee Noble lifted some of our SOPA blackout blues this morning with a newly-minted vid by Geoffrey Sexton, who’s previously helmed clips for the likes of Pink Priest and Sparkling Wide Pressure. This time around he’s teamed up with Clearing (Police Academy 6/Skylines’ Joseph Volmer), who recently hit up NK with the coyly-named No Titles cassette. Sexton’s refreshingly crisp (read: not Archive.org) collage pairs unsettlingly well with Volmer’s slow drones, which Noble compares to “Baraka-soundtrack-era Dead Can Dance and Philip Glass”.
Related: I never had a chance to properly gush about it due to my September-December hiatus from BA, but Lee Noble’s Horrorism is (still) an absolute killer of a record, and one that ranked high on my theoretical best-of-2011 list. Bathetic is unfortunately sold out of the goods, but you can still snag a digital copy from the good folks at Boomkat.
Matthew Dear– “In the Middle (I Met You There)” [feat. Jonny Pierce]
Eccentric beat wizard Matthew Dear has a new four-track EP out today called Headcage, his first helping of new material since last year’s stellar Black City. As always, Mr. Dear is just full of surprises—this new release has a track featuring fellow New Yorker Jonny Pierce, better known as the lead singer of indie pop act The Drums. The song is an expertly constructed layer cake of interlocking beats, lush synth tones and lovesick melodies, and despite some strange sounding vocal samples fed through the Dear-filter (or maybe because of it), it’s experimental pop music of the finest kind. Pierce brings his A-game as well with his signature melodramatic vocals, and when its paired up with Dear’s grumbling baritone, well…hold on to your hats, folks. He’s got another full-length coming out this year too called Beams! What a swell guy. Order the EP or pre-order the album over at Ghostly.
Lucky Dragons – “Existers”
L.A. experimental/avant-pop duo Lucky Dragons (♥ and one of my personal favorite bands ♥) are releasing a new LP, Existers, on Brooklyn label Swill Children. They’ve released the title track from the new record, a nearly 7 minute long song which is quite rare coming from Lucky Dragons. It’s a must-listen, regardless, and this album is one of my most anticipated releases of 2012. Pre-order the album on their bandcamp.
mp3 // Lucky Dragons - Existers
The Magnetic Fields – “Andrew in Drag”
The Magnetic Fields are returning to Merge after a string of albums on Nonesuch Records, with a new LP Love at the Bottom of the Sea. Besides that, they’re also using synthesizers again, which haven’t been used on an album since their epic 69 Love Songs. The first single from the new album, Andrew in Drag, wouldn’t sound out of place on that record and is a great return to form. On the use of synthesizers on the new record, Stephin Merritt noted that “most of the synthesizers on the record didn’t exist when we were last using synthesizers.” Pre-order the single here and the album here.
