(Continued from part one. List first, then writing.)
Single of the Year
1. Deerhoof, “I Will Spite Survive”
2. Hanslick Rebellion, “Who’ll Apologize for This Disaster of a Life?”
3. Joan of Arc, “This Must Be the Placenta”
4. Xiu Xiu, “Get Up”
5. Jesca Hoop, “Memories are Now”
6. Lorde, “Green Light”
7. Soul Enema, “Cannibalisimo Ltd”
8. Roger Waters, “Deja Vu”
9. Everything Everything, “Night of the Long Knives”
10. Barock Project, “Promises”
The next twenty
Alex Lahey, “I Love You Like a Brother”
At the Drive-in, “Governed by Contagions”
Belle and Sebastian, “We Were Beautiful”
Casey Dienel, “High Times”
Dirty Projectors, “Up in Hudson”
Igorrr, “Cheval”Kristeen Young, “Nice”
Landlady, “Driving in California”
Liars, “Cred Woes”
Migos, “Bad and Boujee”
Nadine Shah, “Out the Way”
P.O.S., “Born a Snake”
Seeming, “If I Were You”
Seeming, “Stranger”
Skip Marley, “Lions”
Sophia Kennedy, “Build Me a House”
Spoon, “Do I Have to Talk You Into It?”
Voice of Baceprot, “the Enemy of Earth is You”
Why?, “Proactive Evolution”
Deerhoof’s sweet-yet-spiky avant-rock has made helpful strides towards normality lately, none more clearly than “I Will Spite Survive”, the greatest Cars impression I’ve heard in decades. There’s no grand pattern in my Single of the Year choices, but now and then my #1 selection is written in the spirit of support and encouragement; generally a song that I can easily imagine having been a hit, though in practice never one with even a modest fraction of the resources needed to let the world hear and decide. One was Vienna Teng’s “Level Up” (message = overcome your fears and be your best self); another was Marine Research’s “Hopefulness to Hopelessness” (let your aspirations keep you alive even if they are improbable). Dar Williams had a couple, “As Cool as I Am” (your romantic partner need not be your prime source of validation) and “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?” (of course you’re faking your way through the world, that’s fine, everyone else is too). For 2017, we have “You can outlive your executioners”. That’s a solid pitch for the occasion. I’ll take it.
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I'll get to the Hanslick song next section... Joan of Arc’s He’s Got the Whole This Land is Your Land in Your Hand came into my life in a way no album had in years and years: because a hostile review caught my attention and made me think “I want to hear this!”. Long ago, when years started in “19”, I learned of new releases only by the few available print magazines that I could glance through at bookstores while trying not to look too broke to consider taking a copy home. Recommendations thus being in finite and unreliable supply, it wasn’t unusual for me to read some artist called “Miranda Sex Garden” or “Count Zero” or “Imogen Heap” being savaged for what I thought were interesting-sounding ideas, and correctly perk up with a desire to buy their albums.
Now it’s easy to find praise and enthusiasm for many promising records — more than I can plausibly give fair trials to, long before I even get to the good insults. But somewhere in the stew of Pitchfork attacking He’s Got as a “troll manifesto”, “low-passion art-rock [that] seems like a personal insult”, “smirking whimsy-pop”, “sing-songy”, and full of “off-kilter interjections”, I realized I was intrigued — if being annoying were such an unforgivable sin, after all, what the heck is Pitchfork itself doing in my life? I’d guessed right about the album, of course; hence me bringing it up. “This Must Be the Placenta” in particular, from its Talking Heads tribute title on, gets a warped dance groove in which every single choice of synthesizer sound is genuinely strange, the melody and harmony vocals don’t have to be on-key to blend delightfully, and in which Tim Kinsella “look[s] so much like myself, people often mistake me for my own doppelgänger”. Yes, own your issues, Tim. It turns out I have that one too, and together, as 21st century citizens, we can make a community.
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Xiu Xiu are all for making an online community around one’s personal issues, actually: for accepting and together embracing the ways one’s gender and/or sexuality and/or medically diagnosable mental quirks make one a misfit in conventional, profitable society. Truth be told, it’s a novel sort of community that I (middle-aged, pre-Internet sensibility, hobbled by severe ADHD and a naturally difficult personality I’ve worked for decades to make something more welcoming and diplomatic out of) have mixed feelings about. “Get Up”, my new favorite of their songs, plays fair with both the narrator’s and his lover’s perception of his frailty: “Sometimes a person cannot help what they do. You mumble to get up. I’m operating now without belief. You say sh-sh-sh, and to get up…. If you leave, no one will find my corpse. You say ‘Rise from the dead!’”
Speaking for myself, it is nice to be loved by people who accept my weaknesses; it also gives incentive to let my weaknesses fester. Insecurity can, in my experience, breed the strength to change. Observation tells me it can also breed violence, of course. I don’t know where I’m going with this; Xiu Xiu, at any rate, are about seeking a sense of security with one’s own damaged and ill-fitting self. They are also about failing. Probably that has its uses.
Every single Xiu Xiu album, from their 2002 debut on, has toyed with a shifting balance of sad pop, avant-garde ambient experimentation, and the abruptness (though rarely the toolkit) of punk. Their 2017 album Forget was co-produced by two of the most skilled and imaginative producers alive, Greg Saunier (of Deerhoof) and John Congleton (whose own band the Paper Chase and whose work with St. Vincent both explored Xiu-Xiu-congruent territory). Thus, while it does nothing specifically new, it’s probably my favorite of their records, and peaks like “Get Up” are strange but gorgeous.
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Jesca Hoop’s “Memories are Now”, a thoughtful song of heartbreak, is as preternaturally steady and calm as Lorde’s “Royals” was. The new Lorde single “Green Light” starts out calm, but sidles up, with deceptive casualness, to a gloriously extroverted chorus. I was intrigued when eternally chart-topping (and boring) song doctor Max Martin accused “Green Light” of being “incorrect songwriting” — the vocal melody too long, the drum part nonsensically delayed — and liked her pride at her “strong awareness of the rules; 60% of the time I follow them, 40% I don’t”. The rest of Melodrama did not, to me, feel like it lived up to that supposed willfulness, although if Ms. Yelich-O’Connor continues to release one brilliant single every album, she’s going to retain my interest regardless. Jesca Hoop, on the other hand, absolutely does know her forms in order to mess with them; and if her album’s second single “the Lost Sky” is the kind of thing that makes me want to say she’s my favorite active folk songwriter, it never takes much time with her albums to remind me that most of what I like best about her doesn’t fit categories at all.
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Endorsing Taylor Swift's much-maligned "Look What You Made Me Do" feels like a statement that should come with an argument, a cultural mini-manifesto or something. Sorry; I just think it's catchy, a really well-crafted pop song. I don't consider Taylor Swift remotely worth serious respect as a feminist or a role model, for reasons Sady Doyle has written about extensively over the years; but the upside is that I don't take "Look..."'s crabby petulance seriously either. I think it was obvious, to me and Swift and her intended audience, that it was a ridiculous momentary pose. "I'm Too Sexy" was an amusing (and cheerful) 1-minute idea lightly disguised as a song, and I never particularly minded that. "Look..." is a song, and if it's made of the same shiny extruded plastic so much other radio pop is, I still like how well the dayglo colors set each other off.
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I know Skip Marley’s “Lions” because it was the soundtrack to a lengthy Pepsi commercial. The ad posited that the coming together of a multi-racial, mixed-gender, uniformly good-looking, revolutionary young generation is going to somehow be centered around drinking the right brand of sugar-water, made by the right multi-national corporation, that’s buying up all the right rivers and aquifers so that the creepy non-good-looking people who live by them won’t mistakenly use the water to wash clothes or sustain their own lives or anything. As grabbing-my-attention stories go, it’s grosser than Morrissey’s, and “Lions” itself, as generational anthems go, is vague in its inspirational-ness — the kind of song that *can* easily be used in such fashion. That said, it’s catchy as heck, mixing granddad Bob’s talent for melodic reggae and uplift with well-above-average 2017 pop radio production. There’s nothing unusual about songs being open-ended. There’s also nothing wrong with grabbing the ones we like a lot and twisting them to our needs, regardless of whether our opponents are trying to do the same.
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