The Year in Review: Early Edition!

Normally, I'm maliciously against any kind of review until the last week of December, but I've written so little about current music lately that I felt the need for a bit of "State of the Union"-style sermonizing.

I severely curtailed my spending after buying 48 291 records and CD's while in California and Montreal. I returned home and realised that I was going broke, so I stopped and became yet another enemy of the music industry by downloading huge amounts of stuff from Kazaa. Most of it has been bootlegged live music (the same was true of my downloading habits from the Napster era) so before the president of the RIAA comes knocking on my door, you wouldn't have seen that money anyway, so leave me alone. Therefore, most of my summer was spent trying to catch up with my purchases and downloads, while shopping and gig-going came to a near standstill.

But there wasn't much happening anyway. Fall and spring are the best times for new releases and concerts, so I don't feel as though I missed much. Still, immersion breeds passion, so I do feel somewhat dirty for not being more excited about the release of the new Primal Scream album (in August). Instead, my thoughts were centred on when I'd find the time to spin records and not wake up everyone in my building, and why it was so damned difficult to find Mogwai live tracks from 2001 and 1990's wrestling matches from All-Japan.

I've been on a vinyl fix for about a year now, but vinyl junkies are just that -- junkies -- and extending your financial resources comes with the territory of being a junkie. So now, I can take a hard look at my recent albums without the distraction of wondering about the best way to get Kennziffer records. And my first reaction is that there have been very few excellent albums so far this year. Again, there's a few good releases still expected in the next three months. Also, I was singing the same lament at this time last year (and even later). The only things which have truly blown my mind have been Hollowphonic and Speedy J, and that should surprise nobody given my yen for guitar noise and aggressive minimal techno. Primal Scream's newest is no XTRMNTR, as the Kevin Shields/Scream bipolar monster of noisy dance fear-mongering has failed to spread it's pixie dust over the album as a whole. Scion released a simply astounding compilation of reconstructed Basic Channel material, but I'm hung up on whether to call it a "new" album. Where is their proper album?? With "My Love is Rotten to the Core", Tim Hecker proved himself as the first artist (that I've heard) to expand on the beauty/pop/noise hybrid crystallized on Fennesz's 2001 release "Endless Summer".

The new Godspeed album is out in a month. What will be on it is anyone's guess, I can't find a track listing anywhere. But they've featured three new songs prominently in their concerts: "12-28-99", "Tazer Floyd" and "Motherfucker=Redeemer". The latter is over thirty minutes long, and doesn't the title kick major ass? One of the finest song titles of all time. So, that's over an hour of material from those three tracks. I've been saying for months (and now I'm writing it -- I'm now accountable) if those three tracks alone make up the new album, and the recorded versions do a decent job of capturing the live versions, then it's the album of the year, hands down, lights out, everybody go home. I just recently learned that Albini worked on the recording, so that should answer the question of "capturing the live versions" with a resounding "hell yeah". Keep your fingers crossed.