(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.
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Let's get raised by wolves: the best music of 2017, part one
(The Tris McCall
Critics' Poll, inactive this year, is normally a detailed survey about the
year in music just passed. Starting with best albums, and best singles,
he proceeds to a wide array of categories more specific — best singing,
best concert, best liner notes, etc… — and often more potentially
snotty, from “song that would drive you craziest on infinite repeat” to
“hoary old bastard who ought to spare us all and retire”. He encourages
not just votes but explanations, rants, and jokes.
The following is part one of my ballot: simply my favorite albums of 2017. There's a list, followed by paragraphs of description / discussion to cover anyone I didn’t end up discussing later in the ballot.)
Album of the Year
1. Seeming, SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual
I’ve never had a favorite color: just give me a garish, blazing riot of many colors at once. I’ve never had a favorite food; similar reasoning. I knew what my favorite restaurant was, once, but I’d never lived outside of Iowa, so you can imagine how intense the competition was. I have a favorite TV show, because Doctor Who has done such an immense variety of wonderful things from 1963 to the present that it doesn’t much matter what happens in between the wonderful things; but if you tried to make me pick a favorite TV show with regard to something like “typical level of quality”, I’d be stuck with too many choices again.
I have three favorite movies — alphabetically, Dead Poets Society, Henry Fool, and Lawn Dogs. Favorite book is impossible, though, or even favorite novel / favorite nonfiction book / favorite kids’ picture book. You have to make the categories small enough for me to have a chance. (Favorite Comedy SF Novel: the first 4/3 of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s trilogy. Favorite Comic Novel Set in the Modern U.S.: Jane Smiley’s Moo in a split decision over Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Favorite Comic Novel Set in the Modern Third World: Louis des Berniers’s the War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Favorite Earnest Novel Set in the Modern Third World: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Favorite Dystopian Drama: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Favorite Novel About Parenting: Helen DeWitt’s deceptively-titled the Last Samurai. Favorite Novel About Parenting Whose Author Years Later Revealed Herself to Be an Ayn Randist Creep with a Bug Up Her Ass About Political Correctness: Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Etc.)
In music, dividing questions into “best of a given year” is usually a small enough unit for me to fudge some answers with. “Favorite album ever” is the kind of question I’d expect to find impossible — except in practice, for me, the top two are obvious. They are, for most conversational purposes, *unhelpful* — #1 is Introducing Happiness by Rheostatics (1995), and #2 is Interbabe Concern by the Loud Family (1996) — but that’s not my fault. If you decide to listen to them, I support this decision 100%, and ask only that you listen attentively, and more than once, because there’s a lot going on in each. Introducing Happiness is a friendly, playful, vocal-harmony folk-rock album, full of eloquent storytelling, complexified in dozens of ways by the band’s constant eagerness to work in this super-cool new idea they just thought of. Interbabe Concern is an embittered, depressed-romantic power-pop album, full of excellent poetry and spiteful-but-still-funny wit, complexified in dozens of ways by the band’s constant eagerness to work in this super-cool new idea they just thought of.
After that, there’s way too many possibilities to sort through for my THIRD-favorite album, of course. I don’t quite think Seeming’s new SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual is among the candidates, but. A month prior to its release, Seeming also released Faceless, containing seven (excellent) songs that didn’t make the main album’s cut (as well as some alternate mixes of the main album’s tracks). Faceless probably contains my song of the year, if its spoken-word-tag-team-plus-synthesizer counts as a song at all: let “Articles of Secession” replace “the Unspeaking” as SOL’s bridge from “Zookeeper” to “Stranger”, and now it at least *might* be my all-time 3rd-favorite album. That’s a slight length-reduction of a 60-minute album, which is pretty long, and I assume they didn’t want to fill up the CD; fair enough. But while “Talk About Bones” is a very good closing track, we’d still only be at 65 minutes if we next let it transition to Faceless’s “Beatlock” and dramatic new closer “20 GOTO 10”, and by that point, yes, I’m pretty sure I’d have three favorite albums ever. We could even squeeze in “Yes Artemis” between “…Bones” and “Beatlock” and be safely under 70, with four perfectly good songs still left for the table-scraps album.
I’ll be discussing SOL — what it does, what it means to me — in response to several questions over the course of this ballot. For now I’ll just say that it follows, musically, in the traditions of Sisters of Mercy, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Depeche Mode. I think those are pretty good traditions; you’ll presumably get more out of SOL if you agree. I do think it’s those traditions’ new masterpiece, though.
2. Soul Enema, Of Clans and Clones and Clowns
3. Sparks, Hippopotamus
4. Deerhoof, Mountain Moves
5. Everything Everything, a Fever Dream
6. Magnetic Fields, 50-Song Memoir
7. Floating Opera, Pop Song on the Elevator Down
8. Randy Newman, Dark Matter
9. Barock Project, Detachment
10. Major Parkinson, Blackbox
The next twenty
Algiers, the Underside of Power
Bodies of Water, Spear in the City
Bubblemath, Edit Peptide
Diablo Swing Orchestra, Pacifisticuffs
Flobots, Noenemies
Guided by Voices, How Do You Spell Heaven?
Jesca Hoop, Memories are Now
Landlady, the World is a Loud Place
Morrissey, Low in High School
Nadah El Shazly, Anwahr
New Pornographers, Whiteout Conditions
Paul Weller, a Kind Revolution
R. Stevie Moore/ Jason Falkner, Make It Be
Robyn Hitchcock, S/T
Roger Waters, Is This the Life That We Really Want?
Sarah Slean, Metaphysics
Schooltree, Heterotopia
Tera Melos, Trash Generator
Universal Totem Orchestra, Mathematical Mother
Xiu Xiu, Forget
Pete Townshend once had Roger Daltrey sing “Hope I die before I get old”. Two decades later, John Linnell wrote and sang “I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die”, and while I was only in high school when I learned of the juxtaposition, I knew at once I was on Linnell’s side. Rock music in general has come over to Linnell’s side as well, but aging well is (1) hard and (2) time-consuming, so the field has taken its time serving as a proper old-age community. I didn’t (in my opinion) hear a great album by someone who’d turned sixty by the end of its release year until 2006 — Hello Young Lovers by Sparks — and it didn’t lead any immediate geriatric rush.
Starting in 2012, though, my records show me genuinely enthusiastic about one album by a sexagenarian each year (Rush, Magma, Ian Anderson, Joe Jackson, David Bowie). The apparent causes varied. Sparks, Jackson, and Bowie all showed up as exemplars of lifelong learning: they’d had time to muck about playing rock, electronic dance, and some of the more adventurous forms of classical musics (as well as some jazz in the latter two cases), putting decades of lessons together. Magma’s Christian Vander, longtime noisy weirdo, seemed to have had time to move *towards* rock, or at any rate towards something resembling melodic song structure (in an album that what was still indexed as a single 35-minute track, true).
Bowie’s Blackstar and Rush’s Clockwork Angels both pulsed, as well, with the ambition to make final grand statements, to pull out all the stops because they weren’t going to be needed again. As for Ian Anderson, with and without Jethro Tull, his albums for me have always fluctuated a lot in quality based on how many good riffs he’d come up with. Still, Homo Erraticus was the experienced work of a man who’d retaught himself to sing after badly damaging his vocal chords in the 1980s; retaught himself to play the flute in the late 1990s after deciding that he’d milked all the value he was going to out of his formally-wrong tongue-flute style; and figured out how to re-embody, as a lyricist, a character he’d invented for a one-off experiment in 1972. *And* the riffs were outstanding.
2017, though, was a bumper crop for the harvesting of tough, fibrous perennials. Sparks composer Ron Mael turned 72; where Hello Young Lovers had been the most adventurous (and I think best) album of his band’s career, Hippopotamus works more as a breezy fusion of every style they’ve ever dabbled in, and I’m not sure I don’t love it even more. Randy Newman turned 74; until this year I’d held him at a distance, finding him too prone to cheap sarcasm or (in his Disney career) cheap sentiment, and it’s very possible that most of the problem was mine. But I don’t think I imagined it completely; Dark Matter opens up with “the Great Debate”, in which Newman explicitly calls himself out for his own straw-man tactics (while still having a jolly Ray Charles/ Dr. John-influenced musical time). He takes care from there, unfurling rich, complex, multilayered sarcasm, and the kinds of old-person sentimentality you earn from watching friends die, and watching children stubbornly insist on becoming individuals.
Roger Waters turned 74 as well. There was no reason to expect to hear from him. After the rest of Pink Floyd couldn’t deal with him any longer, he’d released two solo albums in the 1980s that no one appears to have liked; and a severely crabby 1992 album with choral and gospel influences, Amused to Death, that I thought was pretty great, but which didn’t convince the general public either. That, pretty much, was that (although Wikipedia says he composed a 2005 opera based on translations from French of a libretto about the French Revolution). In 2017, though, huddled up with producer Nigel Godrich, he released the furious Is This the Life We Really Want?, sounding more like Pink Floyd than either he or the remains of the band had since 1980. He’s no more subtle than he ever was — singing about environmental refugees, the victims of drone bombs, the American torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, murdered protesters, a society built on its elite’s infinite greed, and the passivity we’re all susceptible to in letting this happen on our watch — but I’ve aged into the awareness that reality often isn’t subtle either. There’s a lot to be said for someone who’ll show you his platform before announcing “If I had been God, I believe I could have done a better job”.
Robyn Hitchcock turned 64. Robyn Hitchcock is a typically strong set of thoughtful, tuneful guitar-rock, and his suicide-sympathizing “Virginia Woolf” — perhaps the year’s kindest song, even if I have friends I’ve had to lobby the other side of that issue with — would be on my Best Singles list if he’d made it a single. Paul Weller (turned 59), former leader of first-wave punk band the Jam, meanwhile made an album in territory he hadn’t trodden heavily at all: low-key rock music built from psychedelia and jazz and even abstracted electronic dance music. His album was as gracious and good-hearted as Hitchcock's, and despite being farther from his home base, just as accomplished.
Stephen Merritt of Magnetic Fields turned 52, still plenty suspicious by “My G-G-Generation” standards, and honored it with the accurately-titled 50-Song Memoir. If it lacked the subcultural impact of his earlier 69 Love Songs, I’m inclined to blame the less-funny title, not any reduction in melody or quality. Or perhaps people hoped that he’d write about his own life in some new way, rather than duplicate the emotionally-removed cleverness he observes fictional characters with. I tend towards emotional remove myself, though; to me his choice was as revealing as anyone could possibly have hoped.
Stephen Patrick Morrissey, meanwhile, turned 58, and feels older with his endorsement of the U.K.’s most isolationist, hate-filled politicians. I feel awkward about the fact that it’s exactly him getting into the news as a jackass that reminded me to check out his new album, and even more awkward about the fact that Low in High School is probably my favorite album he’s ever made. True, that comes with a heterodox opinion warning: for me personally, the Smiths were a mediocre band holding back a graceful and intriguing songwriter (the gloriously inventive “How Soon is Now?” aside), so to me it’s a good thing that he’s finally purged all traces of their sound. Bring on the booming drums, the piano, the traces of klezmer! But more to the point, I like the things he’s singing. Some of it’s the kind of songs he’s always done: quirky personality profiles, enthusiastic lust. Some of it’s political, but strangely, that turns out well. He’s as potently anti-authoritarian as Roger Waters: anti-war, urging us to ignore the addicting brainless clamor of the nightly news, and inclined to question soldiers’ motives instead of bowing to their mandatory treatment as heroes. It’s possible he means something different in “Who Will Protect Us from the Police?” than I do — I’ve heard “freedom of speech” mean “freedom to be an asshole and never be criticized” from a few too many people apparently aligned with him — but it’s also possible he means what I would, and the question is important. As for when he assures the people of Israel “I can’t answer for what your armies do/ they are not you”, Waters might consider his argument facile. But it’s a discussion worth having, and one to which pop music rarely lends its verses.
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The music of 2017 resolved another tension for me that I’d first noticed in 2012, when my annual Best Albums lists started to fill up with progressive rock acts, namely “How do I explain my fondness for a genre built on ‘progress’ that still worships at the shrine of albums made before I was born?” I can thank Soul Enema and Barock Project for my new clarity. Soul Enema, despite the awful band name, sound like a goofy but talented ABBA tribute act that decided to make a bunch of new Rush and Yes songs for the heck of it. Barock Project (and if you were Obama, wouldn’t *you* want to move to Germany and find the least political new career you could think of?) write gorgeously sculpted power-ballads that just happen to be in oddly fluctuating time signatures, and decorated with dazzling synthesizer displays and drum outbursts. And I realize: Duh. I started listening to this stuff for exactly the same reason other people listen to hair-metal or Electronic Body Music or trap music or jangle-pop: because I think it’s fun and I like to dance to it. If the Democrats who call themselves Progressives could master that shit, I bet they’d win some damn elections.
There were ambitious prog-rock albums in 2017 too, of course. Major Parkinson sound like prog if it had been invented in the mid-1980s as a new brainstorm by Nick Cave and Tom Waits, and their lyricist (the singer Jon Ivar Kollbotn?) is one of the more impressive poets in rock. Bubblemath play skewed, aggressive (though tuneful), turn-on-a-dime guitar and keyboard riffs, and embody rise-and-fall dynamics as they sing cyclical stories about mood swings and about people, or societies, trapped in futile repetitive behavior patterns.
Universal Totem Orchestra play with such an impressive variety of rock and classical tools that I have a terrible inability to remember any of Mathematical Mother after it ends, but then I’m always immersed again the next time I put it on (and it comes with my kids’ endorsement). Schooltree’s non-4/4 arena rock, heavy on keyboards and vocal harmonies, meanwhile frames a complex story involving travel between reality and dreamworlds, and a teenage girl meeting the embodiments of various early-20th-century psychological concepts. There’s a chance that someday I’ll realize the story is brilliant, and I’ll rush around telling everyone. Apologetically, I have to admit that my current fondness for it doesn’t include that awareness yet. It doesn’t need to.
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Best Album leftover notes. Deerhoof and Tera Melos aren’t filed as “progressive”, but they’re definitely rock, and definitely spiky and difficult. Mountain Moves is also joyous, even when it slips into protest mode, and while I can’t honestly nominate Satomi Matsuzaki for Best Singer, her giddy sweetness does as much to transform a band into its best self as any vocalist I can think of. Trash Generator has more of a punk-rock rawness, if you somehow fused punk’s “we’ve barely taken any lessons” ethos with the movie training-montage ethos of “there, we’ve practiced for four and a half minutes so now we’re better than everyone else in the world”.
Everything Everything are the latest great Britpop band to get millions of YouTube views over there — reward for their energy and tunes and inventiveness and charismatic singing and sometimes-intriguing verbal imagery — while taking ages to get U.S. record companies to release their albums. You thought we’d outgrown that? Me too; ha ha ha. New Pornographers are quasi-American (Vancouver, so right continent), and their reliably energetic cascades of pop melody are ones our record companies have figured out how to find fans for. Or at least find a good-sized niche. Although I gotta say, I think the marketing dudes are under-achieving.
Floating Opera and Bodies of Water are chamber-pop bands, both excellent and lovely. The former gets extra credit from me for variety, but also because while I incompletely connect with their earnest lyrics, and I don’t always know what the implied metaphors are supposed to mean, I feel sure that there are very fine people *would* relate, completely, if the exigencies of music distribution gave them a chance. Sarah Slean, meanwhile, makes pretty, empathetic, formerly-mainstream pop as formerly-marketable as anything Sara Bareilles or Vanessa Carlton or Paula Cole ever did. Yes, that’s a compliment. My word processor keeps changing her last name to Clean, and while this annoys me, she’s the most appropriate artist here it could happen to.
Guided by Voices have tended to sloppy pop/rock underachievement — as measured by any given record; the total volume of Robert Pollard’s work teeters dangerous in stacks over the heads of anyone who still buys it in CD form — but this year saw them making a mere two records at their most focused and consistent, the tunes strong and the loopy lyrics edging towards sense with tempting frequency. R. Stevie Moore and Jason Falkner represent two generations of weird isolated popsmiths (the latter best-known for his time in the college-pop psychedelia band Jellyfish), and their collaboration saw them egging each other one nicely towards complicated catchy tunes in simple but deranged arrangements.
Algiers seem to be what you get when you combine industrial music with gospel vocals, and Flobots, my favorite live-instrumentation hip-hop band, made their own use of gospel on their best 2017 songs as well. Which parts of the Bible shall we assume were being referenced? The subversive ones, of course; those were always the coolest.
(Continue to part two)
The following is part one of my ballot: simply my favorite albums of 2017. There's a list, followed by paragraphs of description / discussion to cover anyone I didn’t end up discussing later in the ballot.)
Album of the Year
1. Seeming, SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual
I’ve never had a favorite color: just give me a garish, blazing riot of many colors at once. I’ve never had a favorite food; similar reasoning. I knew what my favorite restaurant was, once, but I’d never lived outside of Iowa, so you can imagine how intense the competition was. I have a favorite TV show, because Doctor Who has done such an immense variety of wonderful things from 1963 to the present that it doesn’t much matter what happens in between the wonderful things; but if you tried to make me pick a favorite TV show with regard to something like “typical level of quality”, I’d be stuck with too many choices again.
I have three favorite movies — alphabetically, Dead Poets Society, Henry Fool, and Lawn Dogs. Favorite book is impossible, though, or even favorite novel / favorite nonfiction book / favorite kids’ picture book. You have to make the categories small enough for me to have a chance. (Favorite Comedy SF Novel: the first 4/3 of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s trilogy. Favorite Comic Novel Set in the Modern U.S.: Jane Smiley’s Moo in a split decision over Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Favorite Comic Novel Set in the Modern Third World: Louis des Berniers’s the War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Favorite Earnest Novel Set in the Modern Third World: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Favorite Dystopian Drama: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Favorite Novel About Parenting: Helen DeWitt’s deceptively-titled the Last Samurai. Favorite Novel About Parenting Whose Author Years Later Revealed Herself to Be an Ayn Randist Creep with a Bug Up Her Ass About Political Correctness: Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Etc.)
In music, dividing questions into “best of a given year” is usually a small enough unit for me to fudge some answers with. “Favorite album ever” is the kind of question I’d expect to find impossible — except in practice, for me, the top two are obvious. They are, for most conversational purposes, *unhelpful* — #1 is Introducing Happiness by Rheostatics (1995), and #2 is Interbabe Concern by the Loud Family (1996) — but that’s not my fault. If you decide to listen to them, I support this decision 100%, and ask only that you listen attentively, and more than once, because there’s a lot going on in each. Introducing Happiness is a friendly, playful, vocal-harmony folk-rock album, full of eloquent storytelling, complexified in dozens of ways by the band’s constant eagerness to work in this super-cool new idea they just thought of. Interbabe Concern is an embittered, depressed-romantic power-pop album, full of excellent poetry and spiteful-but-still-funny wit, complexified in dozens of ways by the band’s constant eagerness to work in this super-cool new idea they just thought of.
After that, there’s way too many possibilities to sort through for my THIRD-favorite album, of course. I don’t quite think Seeming’s new SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual is among the candidates, but. A month prior to its release, Seeming also released Faceless, containing seven (excellent) songs that didn’t make the main album’s cut (as well as some alternate mixes of the main album’s tracks). Faceless probably contains my song of the year, if its spoken-word-tag-team-plus-synthesizer counts as a song at all: let “Articles of Secession” replace “the Unspeaking” as SOL’s bridge from “Zookeeper” to “Stranger”, and now it at least *might* be my all-time 3rd-favorite album. That’s a slight length-reduction of a 60-minute album, which is pretty long, and I assume they didn’t want to fill up the CD; fair enough. But while “Talk About Bones” is a very good closing track, we’d still only be at 65 minutes if we next let it transition to Faceless’s “Beatlock” and dramatic new closer “20 GOTO 10”, and by that point, yes, I’m pretty sure I’d have three favorite albums ever. We could even squeeze in “Yes Artemis” between “…Bones” and “Beatlock” and be safely under 70, with four perfectly good songs still left for the table-scraps album.
I’ll be discussing SOL — what it does, what it means to me — in response to several questions over the course of this ballot. For now I’ll just say that it follows, musically, in the traditions of Sisters of Mercy, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Depeche Mode. I think those are pretty good traditions; you’ll presumably get more out of SOL if you agree. I do think it’s those traditions’ new masterpiece, though.
2. Soul Enema, Of Clans and Clones and Clowns
3. Sparks, Hippopotamus
4. Deerhoof, Mountain Moves
5. Everything Everything, a Fever Dream
6. Magnetic Fields, 50-Song Memoir
7. Floating Opera, Pop Song on the Elevator Down
8. Randy Newman, Dark Matter
9. Barock Project, Detachment
10. Major Parkinson, Blackbox
The next twenty
Algiers, the Underside of Power
Bodies of Water, Spear in the City
Bubblemath, Edit Peptide
Diablo Swing Orchestra, Pacifisticuffs
Flobots, Noenemies
Guided by Voices, How Do You Spell Heaven?
Jesca Hoop, Memories are Now
Landlady, the World is a Loud Place
Morrissey, Low in High School
Nadah El Shazly, Anwahr
New Pornographers, Whiteout Conditions
Paul Weller, a Kind Revolution
R. Stevie Moore/ Jason Falkner, Make It Be
Robyn Hitchcock, S/T
Roger Waters, Is This the Life That We Really Want?
Sarah Slean, Metaphysics
Schooltree, Heterotopia
Tera Melos, Trash Generator
Universal Totem Orchestra, Mathematical Mother
Xiu Xiu, Forget
Pete Townshend once had Roger Daltrey sing “Hope I die before I get old”. Two decades later, John Linnell wrote and sang “I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die”, and while I was only in high school when I learned of the juxtaposition, I knew at once I was on Linnell’s side. Rock music in general has come over to Linnell’s side as well, but aging well is (1) hard and (2) time-consuming, so the field has taken its time serving as a proper old-age community. I didn’t (in my opinion) hear a great album by someone who’d turned sixty by the end of its release year until 2006 — Hello Young Lovers by Sparks — and it didn’t lead any immediate geriatric rush.
Starting in 2012, though, my records show me genuinely enthusiastic about one album by a sexagenarian each year (Rush, Magma, Ian Anderson, Joe Jackson, David Bowie). The apparent causes varied. Sparks, Jackson, and Bowie all showed up as exemplars of lifelong learning: they’d had time to muck about playing rock, electronic dance, and some of the more adventurous forms of classical musics (as well as some jazz in the latter two cases), putting decades of lessons together. Magma’s Christian Vander, longtime noisy weirdo, seemed to have had time to move *towards* rock, or at any rate towards something resembling melodic song structure (in an album that what was still indexed as a single 35-minute track, true).
Bowie’s Blackstar and Rush’s Clockwork Angels both pulsed, as well, with the ambition to make final grand statements, to pull out all the stops because they weren’t going to be needed again. As for Ian Anderson, with and without Jethro Tull, his albums for me have always fluctuated a lot in quality based on how many good riffs he’d come up with. Still, Homo Erraticus was the experienced work of a man who’d retaught himself to sing after badly damaging his vocal chords in the 1980s; retaught himself to play the flute in the late 1990s after deciding that he’d milked all the value he was going to out of his formally-wrong tongue-flute style; and figured out how to re-embody, as a lyricist, a character he’d invented for a one-off experiment in 1972. *And* the riffs were outstanding.
2017, though, was a bumper crop for the harvesting of tough, fibrous perennials. Sparks composer Ron Mael turned 72; where Hello Young Lovers had been the most adventurous (and I think best) album of his band’s career, Hippopotamus works more as a breezy fusion of every style they’ve ever dabbled in, and I’m not sure I don’t love it even more. Randy Newman turned 74; until this year I’d held him at a distance, finding him too prone to cheap sarcasm or (in his Disney career) cheap sentiment, and it’s very possible that most of the problem was mine. But I don’t think I imagined it completely; Dark Matter opens up with “the Great Debate”, in which Newman explicitly calls himself out for his own straw-man tactics (while still having a jolly Ray Charles/ Dr. John-influenced musical time). He takes care from there, unfurling rich, complex, multilayered sarcasm, and the kinds of old-person sentimentality you earn from watching friends die, and watching children stubbornly insist on becoming individuals.
Roger Waters turned 74 as well. There was no reason to expect to hear from him. After the rest of Pink Floyd couldn’t deal with him any longer, he’d released two solo albums in the 1980s that no one appears to have liked; and a severely crabby 1992 album with choral and gospel influences, Amused to Death, that I thought was pretty great, but which didn’t convince the general public either. That, pretty much, was that (although Wikipedia says he composed a 2005 opera based on translations from French of a libretto about the French Revolution). In 2017, though, huddled up with producer Nigel Godrich, he released the furious Is This the Life We Really Want?, sounding more like Pink Floyd than either he or the remains of the band had since 1980. He’s no more subtle than he ever was — singing about environmental refugees, the victims of drone bombs, the American torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, murdered protesters, a society built on its elite’s infinite greed, and the passivity we’re all susceptible to in letting this happen on our watch — but I’ve aged into the awareness that reality often isn’t subtle either. There’s a lot to be said for someone who’ll show you his platform before announcing “If I had been God, I believe I could have done a better job”.
Robyn Hitchcock turned 64. Robyn Hitchcock is a typically strong set of thoughtful, tuneful guitar-rock, and his suicide-sympathizing “Virginia Woolf” — perhaps the year’s kindest song, even if I have friends I’ve had to lobby the other side of that issue with — would be on my Best Singles list if he’d made it a single. Paul Weller (turned 59), former leader of first-wave punk band the Jam, meanwhile made an album in territory he hadn’t trodden heavily at all: low-key rock music built from psychedelia and jazz and even abstracted electronic dance music. His album was as gracious and good-hearted as Hitchcock's, and despite being farther from his home base, just as accomplished.
Stephen Merritt of Magnetic Fields turned 52, still plenty suspicious by “My G-G-Generation” standards, and honored it with the accurately-titled 50-Song Memoir. If it lacked the subcultural impact of his earlier 69 Love Songs, I’m inclined to blame the less-funny title, not any reduction in melody or quality. Or perhaps people hoped that he’d write about his own life in some new way, rather than duplicate the emotionally-removed cleverness he observes fictional characters with. I tend towards emotional remove myself, though; to me his choice was as revealing as anyone could possibly have hoped.
Stephen Patrick Morrissey, meanwhile, turned 58, and feels older with his endorsement of the U.K.’s most isolationist, hate-filled politicians. I feel awkward about the fact that it’s exactly him getting into the news as a jackass that reminded me to check out his new album, and even more awkward about the fact that Low in High School is probably my favorite album he’s ever made. True, that comes with a heterodox opinion warning: for me personally, the Smiths were a mediocre band holding back a graceful and intriguing songwriter (the gloriously inventive “How Soon is Now?” aside), so to me it’s a good thing that he’s finally purged all traces of their sound. Bring on the booming drums, the piano, the traces of klezmer! But more to the point, I like the things he’s singing. Some of it’s the kind of songs he’s always done: quirky personality profiles, enthusiastic lust. Some of it’s political, but strangely, that turns out well. He’s as potently anti-authoritarian as Roger Waters: anti-war, urging us to ignore the addicting brainless clamor of the nightly news, and inclined to question soldiers’ motives instead of bowing to their mandatory treatment as heroes. It’s possible he means something different in “Who Will Protect Us from the Police?” than I do — I’ve heard “freedom of speech” mean “freedom to be an asshole and never be criticized” from a few too many people apparently aligned with him — but it’s also possible he means what I would, and the question is important. As for when he assures the people of Israel “I can’t answer for what your armies do/ they are not you”, Waters might consider his argument facile. But it’s a discussion worth having, and one to which pop music rarely lends its verses.
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The music of 2017 resolved another tension for me that I’d first noticed in 2012, when my annual Best Albums lists started to fill up with progressive rock acts, namely “How do I explain my fondness for a genre built on ‘progress’ that still worships at the shrine of albums made before I was born?” I can thank Soul Enema and Barock Project for my new clarity. Soul Enema, despite the awful band name, sound like a goofy but talented ABBA tribute act that decided to make a bunch of new Rush and Yes songs for the heck of it. Barock Project (and if you were Obama, wouldn’t *you* want to move to Germany and find the least political new career you could think of?) write gorgeously sculpted power-ballads that just happen to be in oddly fluctuating time signatures, and decorated with dazzling synthesizer displays and drum outbursts. And I realize: Duh. I started listening to this stuff for exactly the same reason other people listen to hair-metal or Electronic Body Music or trap music or jangle-pop: because I think it’s fun and I like to dance to it. If the Democrats who call themselves Progressives could master that shit, I bet they’d win some damn elections.
There were ambitious prog-rock albums in 2017 too, of course. Major Parkinson sound like prog if it had been invented in the mid-1980s as a new brainstorm by Nick Cave and Tom Waits, and their lyricist (the singer Jon Ivar Kollbotn?) is one of the more impressive poets in rock. Bubblemath play skewed, aggressive (though tuneful), turn-on-a-dime guitar and keyboard riffs, and embody rise-and-fall dynamics as they sing cyclical stories about mood swings and about people, or societies, trapped in futile repetitive behavior patterns.
Universal Totem Orchestra play with such an impressive variety of rock and classical tools that I have a terrible inability to remember any of Mathematical Mother after it ends, but then I’m always immersed again the next time I put it on (and it comes with my kids’ endorsement). Schooltree’s non-4/4 arena rock, heavy on keyboards and vocal harmonies, meanwhile frames a complex story involving travel between reality and dreamworlds, and a teenage girl meeting the embodiments of various early-20th-century psychological concepts. There’s a chance that someday I’ll realize the story is brilliant, and I’ll rush around telling everyone. Apologetically, I have to admit that my current fondness for it doesn’t include that awareness yet. It doesn’t need to.
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Best Album leftover notes. Deerhoof and Tera Melos aren’t filed as “progressive”, but they’re definitely rock, and definitely spiky and difficult. Mountain Moves is also joyous, even when it slips into protest mode, and while I can’t honestly nominate Satomi Matsuzaki for Best Singer, her giddy sweetness does as much to transform a band into its best self as any vocalist I can think of. Trash Generator has more of a punk-rock rawness, if you somehow fused punk’s “we’ve barely taken any lessons” ethos with the movie training-montage ethos of “there, we’ve practiced for four and a half minutes so now we’re better than everyone else in the world”.
Everything Everything are the latest great Britpop band to get millions of YouTube views over there — reward for their energy and tunes and inventiveness and charismatic singing and sometimes-intriguing verbal imagery — while taking ages to get U.S. record companies to release their albums. You thought we’d outgrown that? Me too; ha ha ha. New Pornographers are quasi-American (Vancouver, so right continent), and their reliably energetic cascades of pop melody are ones our record companies have figured out how to find fans for. Or at least find a good-sized niche. Although I gotta say, I think the marketing dudes are under-achieving.
Floating Opera and Bodies of Water are chamber-pop bands, both excellent and lovely. The former gets extra credit from me for variety, but also because while I incompletely connect with their earnest lyrics, and I don’t always know what the implied metaphors are supposed to mean, I feel sure that there are very fine people *would* relate, completely, if the exigencies of music distribution gave them a chance. Sarah Slean, meanwhile, makes pretty, empathetic, formerly-mainstream pop as formerly-marketable as anything Sara Bareilles or Vanessa Carlton or Paula Cole ever did. Yes, that’s a compliment. My word processor keeps changing her last name to Clean, and while this annoys me, she’s the most appropriate artist here it could happen to.
Guided by Voices have tended to sloppy pop/rock underachievement — as measured by any given record; the total volume of Robert Pollard’s work teeters dangerous in stacks over the heads of anyone who still buys it in CD form — but this year saw them making a mere two records at their most focused and consistent, the tunes strong and the loopy lyrics edging towards sense with tempting frequency. R. Stevie Moore and Jason Falkner represent two generations of weird isolated popsmiths (the latter best-known for his time in the college-pop psychedelia band Jellyfish), and their collaboration saw them egging each other one nicely towards complicated catchy tunes in simple but deranged arrangements.
Algiers seem to be what you get when you combine industrial music with gospel vocals, and Flobots, my favorite live-instrumentation hip-hop band, made their own use of gospel on their best 2017 songs as well. Which parts of the Bible shall we assume were being referenced? The subversive ones, of course; those were always the coolest.
(Continue to part two)