This morning on my commute I decided to listen to an album I don’t think I’ve listened to for at least ten years, Living Space by John Coltrane. I am really glad I did. I was reminded at once why I love Coltrane in the first place. The opening track starts with a subtle meditation on a deceptively non-distinct melodic phrase which slowly builds some agitated intensity until the song erupts in some of Coltrane’s trademark fierce soloing.
A Coltrane solo is a wild onslaught of tense emotional fervor. The anxious oscillation of sometimes contradictory notes will often explode into a swell of ecstatic joy, moving the song forward into as yet undiscovered realms. A great Coltrane song seems like an exploration of some strange aspect of the universe, be it some nether-region of the cosmos or some deep territory of the mind not often explored. This is music that will make your mind wander. It’s a beautiful thing.
The extent of Coltrane’s influence is difficult to define. While listening to especially his mid-period to later work, it’s hard not to instantly recognize the obvious influence on artists like Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, and ohio jazz contemporaries like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. However, we must keep in mind the chaotic times from which this music erupted, and wonder to make degree Coltrane’s innovations and ideas were an inevitability that he became a vehicle for delivering.
In any case, I’m thankful his music exists for us to enjoy and study.
Most musicians who own an iPhone have, at some point, downloaded music apps. At least from my experience, it has been a series of disappointments with the occasional interesting novelty thrown in that gets boring after the novelty wears off. That has now changed for me with Moog’s Animoog. It is seriously the best app I’ve ever come across. It’s almost hard to believe it’s even available as an app in the form it is. The possibilities are endless with this thing. I seriously recommend this to anyone who enjoys music, not just people who create it. I could actually see myself using the sounds I create in actual recordings, or even using it as a performance tool. Seriously, it’s really that good. I purchased it for only .99 the other day. The price will eventually go up to 9.99 but even at that price it’s worth every penny.
On this day in 1946, Roger Keith Barrett was born, but to most who remember him, he is remembered as Syd, the founding guitarist of Pink Floyd, who is sadly now mostly remembered as being perhaps the most famous acid casualty of the late 1960′s. He was so much more.
Syd’s guitar style is often overshadowed by the more precise and calculated style of his successor, David Gilmour. This is somewhat understandable, as Gilmour’s playing is masterful, but it’s too easy to forget the obvious influence his predecessor in Floyd had on his style. Gilmour’s playing is deeply rooted in blues conventions, but often wanders toward more experimental, dreamy realms. It’s almost impossible to dissect how much of this experimental side is in-grained and how much is a product of his initially being chosen as a replacement player for Barrett, but it seems fairly obvious to me that those occasional bursts of experimental psychedelic oddities in early Gilmour solos and leads must have been run through the filter of Barrett’s influence, seeing as Gilmour’s first job in Floyd would have been to learn the songs Barrett wrote for the band.
Barrett remains sadly underrated as a guitarist simply because he is too easily thought of as a drug casualty. The substance of his musical output is considered by many to be of secondary importance to his personal life and the impact it had on subsequent lyrics written by Roger Waters. This is a shame, because his playful inventiveness on tracks such as “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive” provides the listener with a rich tapestry of ideas to explore and enjoy.
So today, on what would have been Syd’s 66th birthday, treat yourself to some of his great music, this time perhaps really listening for the occasional flashes of brilliance scattered throughout his work.
With 2011 drawing to a close, I set out to make a top ten list of albums, as I do each year. After several weeks of listening to my favorite 25 or so albums of 2011, conveniently found on an itunes playlist named ’2011″ (very creative name, I know), I was able to gradually remove albums from the list that, while very good, just weren’t up to par with the albums that eventually made the cut. What I wound up with, though, is not a top 10 list, but a top 11 list, because not one of these albums did I want to leave off the list of my favorites of the year. But hey, this is 2011, so I thought it even better to make a top 11 list. Who the fuck decided that ‘top 10′ was the convention, anyway? It sure as fuck wasn’t me, so I’m doing what I want.
And here they are: my top 1011 albums of 2011. Enjoy.
11. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
Lyrically, I’d call this Harvey’s best, most cohesive album, touching on themes both political and personal, tying them together seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly. Musically, it’s melodies are more infectious than her past work, but not in an irritating way. There are some ideas here that took a little while to grow on me, but once the album sunk in, it became a mainstay on my ipod for a majority of 2011. The most memorable listening experience: starting the album on the last leg of a 20 or so mile mountain biking ride and getting the adrenaline surge I needed to climb that final, grueling hill.
10. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost
That guitar sound! Wow! The sophomore effort by Girls came as a real shock to me, as I was left feeling lukewarm by their debut. I almost slept on this album, expecting it to be similar in scope to Album, but I’m glad I changed my mind and gave it a few attentive spins, because the guitar just sounds so fucking good. I like how the albummanages to shift between styles: moody psychedelia, dreamy, chill guitar pop, jangly indie, almost thrashy guitar shredding, dirty, bluesy solos, and but makes it all sound like it fits perfectly together by means of pure, solid songwriting. I’m not sure about the lyrics, as I haven’t paid close attention, but they seem to be saying some things about some things, I suppose.
9. Gang Gang Dance – Eye Contact
I’ve gone back and forth on this one all year. At one time during the summer, when I was spending a lot of time well, let’s just say ‘partying’, I thought that no one could possibly top this album, that its kinetic beats, weird, tripped-out vocals and generally bizarre atmospherics would be the soundtrack to my life for the foreseeable future. Then, my mind cleared up, the glowsticks stopped showing up in my dreams between festivals and shows, and I put it away. Toward the end of the year, in my efforts to assess the year in music, I gave it a few more listens, then a few more, and what I found is a solid dance album that occasionally loses focus, but is more often than not just really fucking fun to listen to.
8. The Roots – Undun
The Roots are on the run of their career lately, and it’s hard to call this a culmination of their latest efforts, because it comes from a different place. Where the previous few albums have often been successful exercises in stylistic explorations, this album is driven by a tight, cohesive purpose, not the least of which is the lyrical narrative it follows from front to back, exploring serious existential themes without become overly preoccupied with the heady concepts presented. Musically, the production is solid, sounding more tight and focused than the Roots have ever sounded on record before. We’re still waiting for that great instrumental masterpiece from the Roots crew to match their live show, but on Undun they’ve shown they can present a thematically cohesive album that really moves.
7. Radiohead – The King of Limbs
Radiohead’s most difficult album to love is complicated, lyrically inaccessible, melodically distant, deceptively redundant and on the surface, distressingly incomplete. Upon its release, numerous theories sprouted from the perplexed fans who thought “is this it?” Whether it’s brilliant, very good or bad is matter of opinion, and I’ve held all three at various times since its release. Seeing them perform the material live has improved the general flavor of my still-shifting opinions on this difficult work, but I really can’t deny that TKOL has been a consistent part of my musical gestalt in 2011, and one that has more often than not given me favorable feelings and contemplations.
6. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
A softer, gentler Thurston, complete with chamber-musicy string sections, soft-spoken, contemplative lyrics, peaceful, relaxing vocals and some of the most lovely sounding acoustic guitar you’ll hear on record this year. DT is just really solid songwriting, helped not a small amount by Beck’s masterful production, which focuses heavy on creating space for the strings to flourish and grow, creating a sleepy, but not-too-dreamy atmosphere. Occasionally, the music resembles a stripped down, embryonic Sonic Youth noise section played with lighter instruments and with attention paid to melody over tones. Great for late night drives to nowhere, or somewhere, or both.
5. Wild Flag – Wild Flag
Wild Flag just fucking rocks, that’s all there really is to say. I’m not even really sure what they’re singing about, but it seems to fit with the general hectic feel of the music very well. There’s not really a downer on this album, it just keeps going til the final psychedelic garage-rock jam on “Black Tiles” ties the loose ends together and blows them up. This shit is just really fun, and I’m really grateful it’s there.
4. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints
One of the best debut albums in a long time, and one that really feels like a debut. The peculiar thing about this album is that the things that originally turned me off, such as her lyrics, which I initially found kind of trite, and the laboring rhythms, have eventually grown on me to be some of the things I like best about it. This is yet another album on this list which, like the Girls release, gets bonus points because I just LOVE the general sound of the guitars. But, where the Girls album has crisp, polished guitar sounds, this record has a lush, moody, distant sound at times that just draws me in and doesn’t let go. “The Grey Ship” is my favorite song.
3. Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver
There’s nothing I can write about this album that hasn’t been written by a thousand people before me. One thing I can say is that, at times throughout the year I doubted its value, didn’t feel like listening to it, and let it sit unlistened to for relatively long lengths of time. But, each and every time I put it on to listen again, all doubts erased from my mind. The sophomore effort from Bon Iver is a collection of moody, melodically infectious sonic vignettes that are fun to sing along too, strangely enough. The palette of sounds on BI,BI lends itself to discovery after many, many repeated listens. A classic album.
2. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
A complex, shapeshifting, mind-fuck of a hip-hop record that can only be truly heard after you’ve already tried to hear it countless times. Black Up is challenging, but the rewards are worth the effort it takes to truly appreciate it on its own terms. At times dense and even incoherent, it is a masterful collage of sounds and words that relentlessly challenges its own tendencies, thus challenging the listener to follow it in the unusual directions it tends to choose. This can be frustrating at times, because a groove starts and you just want it to continue, but then it stops and starts somewhere else, but after a while this all makes sense. This is a deliberate album that exists in a constant state of becoming, and that is one of the hardest challenges for musicians to meet
1. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Mirror Traffic
My favorite album of the year is also the second album on this list produced by Beck Hansen. His production definitely adds something to the songs on this record, but not to the extent that I really think it wouldn’t be my top album had someone else produced. This album is just perfect from start to finish. Malkmus gives us the best guitar work of his career, propped up by his expert backing band. The lyrics are focused, even when the focus is on being unfocused, and the vocals are classic Malkmus. There’s not a song on this album I don’t like, and that’s not even something I can say for the first three Pavement albums. In the end, though, this is my favourite album simply because it has given me the most joy of any of the albums on this list. From the opening image of a person streaking in Birkenstocks, MT is just a lot of fun, and it’s nice to have a fun album that features such masterful songwriting and instrumentation. This is a modern classic that I suspect will only grow in stature once the dust of 2011 settles, and with which Stephen Malkmus has finally surpassed the output of his former band.
It was nearing the end of the summer of 2010 and I was sweating my balls off in Prague, drinking the common varieties of tasty Czech beer that I had grown to love during my half a year stay there – Gambrinus, Kozel, Staropramen and others – but mainly those three. I was loving my time there, but I had no computer, no guitar and, most importantly, tickets to the first Central Park Pavement show in September of 2010. I had purchased the ticket a year prior, before I even knew I’d be spending most of 2010 in Europe. What to do?
Well, I made the right decision and booked a flight back to the states, back to where I’d see one of the adored bands of my childhood perform for the first time. Okay, I missed my friends and family too, and my guitar, and my mountain bike, and sobriety (well, maybe not so much…)
And so, as Malkmus and the boys busted into the opening bars of “Shady Lane”, and I took a sip on my overpriced Central Park Summerstage beer and sparked up what was likely my tenth joint of the day, I was very happy that I was back in the states, even though I wouldn’t trade my time in Prague and the rest of Europe for anything. I was happy. I was having the time of my life. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, either.
Blast forward less than a year, and I’m ready to set off on another adventure. This time, on the continent of my birth, but on the other side of it. I will be wandering around California. And, I have a soundtrack – what, in my opinion, may wind up being my album of the year, the consistently engaging Mirror Traffic by a band called the Jicks, whose leader happens to be a dude named Stephen Malkmus, who happens to be the leader of Pavement. Nice.
The beauty of this album came as a surprise to me. I’ve spent the past several months listening to a lot of electronic music and hip hop, and I just didn’t expect to fall in love with a guitar-driven rock album at this time. I mean, I expected to like it, but not love it, not think, as I do, that it’s the best thing Malkmus has been involved in since Pavement, and maybe including Pavement. This album is that good. And I know that it will never be for me what Pavement is. It couldn’t. I can still recall vague, distant memories of driving down route 80 in Pennsylvania, blasting Crooked Rain as loud as I could stand, or skating some basketball court in my hometown late at night with “Summer Babe” emanating from the stereo of my car. These are not pivotal moments of my life, but the strength of the music made them into lasting memories, faded with time, but perhaps more meaningful because of that. This new record can never be that, because I’ve grown up, and the impressions left on us as children are endowed with a different kind of meaning than impressions left on our adult selves, though I’m not saying this is bad, or good, for that matter… just different. And yet, as the lead guitar of the track “Gorgeous Georgie” blasted from the speakers in my car as I drove home this evening, I got a tingling in my spine, and I felt good. I felt awesome, actually (no drugs were involved. I promise).
Mirror Traffic is a monster of an album. In many ways, it manages to harken back to that Pavementy vibe – the careless, care-free, profound-by-the-way-of-playful feel that Pavement did better than anyone, and which Malkmus always seemed to be moving away from with the Jicks albums, into more complex, intricate, at times jam-bandy or even proggy territory – and this record has that feel too, but in a better, more natural way. Nothing on this album seems forced. It is fun from start to finish, but engaging, complex, and musically inventive at the same time. But, enough words about this masterpiece. It needs to be heard, not talked about endlessly by a sea of people who just like to hear themselves type… So, in closing, I leave you a video for “No One Is (As I Are Be)”…
