(Continued from part one)
(and from part two)
Most welcome surprise
I gave Esperanza Spalding some out-of-my-genre listens back in 2010. It turned out that I admired her Grammy-winning jazz on Chamber Music Society, where she was already starting to fold in gentle pop, classical, and world music influences — but I never got around to liking it. This year, Emily’s D+Evolution became my favorite album by anyone since 2012.
Spalding’s newer influences — Jimi Hendrix, funk, high-energy Latin musics, hip-hop, even high-speed a-cappella — grabbed my attention in a much more direct way, making it easier for me stick around and love the gorgeousness of her jazz chanteusery. The lyrics, not in the grand Grammy tradition, turned out to be smart and intriguing whether about love and lust, race and self-assertion, or the mythologies and missing toys and erratically-kept promises from which we build children into people.
Plus she ended with a Veruca Salt cover. I’d be delighted if I meant the alternative-rock band; they’ve made some great songs. But I’m as happy to mean, no, Veruca the little girl. Wonka had quite the year, come to think.
Biggest disappointment
Psalm Zero, Stranger to Violence. Charlie Looker's previous band, Extra Life, were an amazing blend of heavy, theatrical music with Charlie’s ancient madrigal singing style. Now he sings some like some generic alt-rock singer, and his new band is heavy in an efficiently harsh way. Boring.
Best video
I know two all-time-classic high-concept videos from 2016. OK Go’s “the One Moment”, riffing off its song’s lyrics (but largely ignoring the music), shows us 4.2 spectacularly chaotic seconds of action, then builds a four-minute video out of revisiting them in super-slow motion. It may be my favorite of OK Go’s many inspired videos since the auditorium-sized Rube Goldberg contraption of “This Too Shall Pass”.
Jane Zheng’s “Dust My Shoulders Off”, meanwhile, grabs a simple idea I’m surprised I haven’t seen tried before: the famous paintings at an art museum come to life, and interact with each other and the singer. That said, I’m certainly not surprised it hasn’t been done this beautifully before — and it called my attention to a jolly, utterly pleasant R+B song I would not otherwise have encountered. It works organically with the song, too: the specific interactions among the people from the paintings fit thematically with the lyrics of taking setbacks in stride and trying to enjoy life anyway.
Still, if you prefer great videos that avoid spectacular gimmicks, I’ll happily nominate the low-budget, three-people-in-a-dim-room drama of Shearwater’s “Quiet Americans”. The song is a calm but merciless indictment of a USA whose boasts of moral leadership of the world show all the verbal confidence of our peak with the Marshall Plan, even as we’ve long since chosen to roll back the generous actions, “shake the memories off, hide the evidence under”, and “piss on the world below like a dog that knows his name”. The video’s scenario — an understated mime of swagger, falter, and triumphant rebellion — is at once bleak, and one of the more hopeful near futures on offer.
Best singing
I’ve noticed that almost half the time, I give “best singing” to the singer on my favorite album of the year. It’s happening again, but at least Esperanza Spalding’s Grammy Awards give me credibility this time. Comforting or sultry, indignant or horny, lavishly demonstrative or a little bit scary, she combines perfect pitch with devastating control.
Best rapping
On a single song, Tonedeff. Easily: my favorite track from his album, “Demon”, packs an incredible density of words into an overwhelming rush that encapsulates their mood perfectly. *In general*, however, his rapping can have an Ygnwie Malmstein feel: speed for its own sake can be technically impressive and yet not to lead to speedy understanding on a listener’s end. (even “Demon” works best read along to, although the words give precision to what the sound already conveys). The best communicative rapper is still Kanye, so over an album’s length, he has my vote.
Best songwriting
Regina Spektor.
Best lyrics
Ian (Aesop Rock) Bavitz. He can set a scene beautifully in just a few words; and then, since he has many more words to go, he goes ahead and sketches the nature of several different interpersonal connections, their evolutions over time, and a variety of interesting connections to other subjects that you can pursue or ignore at your leisure.
Best album cover
Aesop Rock, the Impossible Kid. Creepy monsters are people too — except when they’re delightful pets — and when in caves, do as the monsters do.
Best album title
Stranger Heads Prevail (Thank You Scientist). Even though since the implicit contrast is to “Cooler Heads”, I think “Nerdier Heads” would have been more to-the-point…. Actually, never mind. Rob Crow gave us the year’s best title by being more on-point, now and always: You’re Doomed. Be Nice.
Honorable mention, seemingly obvious but in fact defiant: La Sera’s Music for Listening to Music to.
Best arrangements
Blackstar.
Best production
Paul Savage, producing (and drumming, drum programming, keyboard-playing, and string-arranging) Emma Pollock’s In Search of Harpersfield.
On their own, Emma’s songs are praiseworthy. They’re full of elegantly winding melodies; tuneful lightly Welsh-accented vocals; and thoughtful imagistic scenes in which she dialogues with, for example, a vicious playground bully (she loses), or a believer in God’s micro-managing design for us all (she makes her atheism seem a kindly-given present to a deity tired of pretending to exist). That said, the songs are, in design, mid-tempo jangly guitar pop of a type that in my experience can too easily all start to blend together (although my friends who cherish Bats and Chills albums should already be paying close attention now).
Savage (former drummer of her old band the Delgados) doesn’t allow that. Using its basic guitar/ bass/ drums/ modest keyboards/ occasional strings setup, Harpersfield fills any given handful of measures with new accents, new textures, new little variations in the rhythm — not only do the songs avoid blending together, even different lines of the verses or different repetitions of the chorus stay different enough to provoke interest. Elementary school music teachers show us that pop songs slide into easily labeled forms: AABABAB, maybe a C after the second B. It’s easy to make the actual songs as redundant as the keystrokes, and it isn’t reliably punished at all. Me, I like it when every second matters: we only have so many of those to work with.
Most ambitious storytelling (solemn division)
I listed Dear Hunter’s Hymns with the Devil in Confessional among 2016’s best albums, but I skipped the beginning of its title: Act V. Over the course of four prior albums I don’t own, the tale has apparently been unfolding of a Boy who’s grown up to mayor of The City in the years after the Great War, while a charismatic Priest has quietly made himself rich as a Pimp and possibly played games with the Devil and … well, it’s certainly not shy. I suspect the impulse towards "epic" has a tendency to push in unison towards "cliche", so I wouldn’t, for example, argue that it’s sillier or more trite in outline than most of what happens in Series Five or Series Six of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, which I watched avidly.
I doubt the world of fiction needs more secretly-corrupt preachers, *or* more nice guys devoting 2000 years of immortality to guarding their chosen women whom they've never even had the guts to ask on the date. I doubt serious fiction needs more easily manipulated mobs, or more hordes of monsters being told “I am the oncoming storm!” by the hero, and backing away in fear. Not more mental debates with little imp shoulder-Satans (only $29.99 each at the Pottery Barn!), nor more shadowy conspiracies in which human history has been guided by hidden aliens. But that doesn't mean such stories can't work out fine, by the passion and consideration their authors devote to them, and the quality of the music or acting that bring them to life.
And, y’know, Casey Crescenzo gets by with it. I won’t claim I’m invested in his frame story, but he scatters individual songs here and there with memorable lines, and credos for swaggering, and intelligent questions about how to act in the world, and catchy sing-along choruses that even at worst aren’t embarrassing. There’s a female romantic lead named Ms. Leading, and, like, seriously? SERIOUSLY? But that barely affects anything. These are solidly-written lyrics — occasionally better -- set to some genuinely excellent Dixieland- and classical- and metal-inflected rock. If this story is what inspires it, I’m happy to take it.
Most ambitious storytelling (joyfully preposterous division)
Mike Keneally, Scambot 2. Two is less than five — as Radiohead taught us in math class — and in this set I *do* think it’s worth collecting all both. One small part of what I love about Scambot 2 is that it prompted me to re-visit the story of Scambot 1 (2009) in lavish liner-note detail. Ah yes, there’s evil industrialist Boleous Ophunji and his long-suffering secretary Ms. Loring; there’s his brainwiped and remote-controlled puppet Ian McPlant; oh, let’s brightly sing again Ian’s absurd trolling multi-paragraph newspaper-and-Internet comments against folksy columnist Campland Standish (“Cat Bran Sandwich, there you go again: refusing to believe you’re not entitled to an opinion”). There’s Ian’s psychic talking cat Chee! And look, the surveillance seagulls! And the bowling-ball-headed aliens -- and one spongey oblong-headed alien -- who’ve made a safe life as benevolent spies on earth by disguising themselves as a one-hit-wonder alternative rock band given to weird costumes.
The liner notes of Scambot 2 fill you in on the basic background: you won’t grok every callback moment, but you don’t need to. Here’s my favorite, though: due to the extremely high instrumental talent of guitarist/ bassist Keneally and bassist Bryan Beller, an instrumental in part 1 was able to feature a convincing scene in which “Jimmy Garrison, Jaco Pastorius, and Hugh Hopper” (three of the greatest bass guitarists in history) are kidnapped and forced to play a private concert. Scambot 2’s lead track “In the Trees” features one extremely rapid passage, shown in the liner notes as play-written dialogue, in which every short rhyming phrase is sung by a different character taking a different action. For example, the following is an account of twelve syllables taking less than ten seconds:
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Corporal Quango (on an aircraft carrier addressing his men): “Ten HUT!”
Quango’s men (suddenly hit by something from above): “Wait, what?”
Surveillance seagulls (soaring above Quango’s men as they sing the originating location of the offending substance): “Our butt!”
the Quiet Children (heads touching in a circle on their yacht): “Sing OM.”
White-coated technicians (testing a sample of seawater, collected from where Ophunji first captured McPlant): “Black foam?”
Jimmy Garrison, Jaco Pastorius, and Hugh Hopper (arriving back in paradise after a gig in a Mr. Pibb machine in Flagstaff): “We’re home!”
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All of it, I promise you, makes good story-telling sense in (lunatic) context. Taking two syllables to resolve an incredibly minor thread from an album that came out seven years prior, however, is extra special.
The story of Scambot 2 resolves — after its intra-God debates, and reality TV interludes, and boat chases, and important discussions with long-missing childhood friends — in charming utopian revolutionary promise, and even the hope of redemption for the villain. I didn't ask or need anything from it but convoluted escapism that makes me giggle, but since it's here, utopian revolution has a place in our national mood. I still haven't bothered to remove the Bernie Sanders bumper sticker from my car, in part because it's decorative, but more to the point I still have friends who are convinced Sanders would have beaten Trump in an election. "America has been waiting for decades for a cranky 70-year-old Jew who shouts a lot, and wants to break up the conglomerates who own all the TV networks and media companies from whom America learns about its candidates!", they shout. Sure, of course it does.
Mike Keneally is way more fun than Bernie Sanders, like Dr. Seuss is more fun than Noam Chomsky: he's also a better guitarist (he's a better guitarist than everyone). Unless his Exowax Recording Company has some very well-hidden world-dominating plan behind its schedule of avant-rock releases, he shows just as few signs of being corrupt. Vote Keneally/ Bowlingballhead, 2020.
(finish with part four)
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