Friday, December 31, 2004

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 18:24:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barry Bruner
To: Emily Bruner
Subject: whirlpools of sound


Hi Emily,

It's been a while so I wanted to write to see how things were going.
...
A very exciting time for me musically, because I'm polishing up my list of the top 30 CD's of the decade. I've been working on this for 7 months! Not continuously, of course, but I had a shortlist that I would examine and tinker with from time to time and now it's just about ready. I set myself a deadline of October 31, which I plan to meet. Around the same time, I want to post the list on my web site. Now, my web site is as rudimetary as you can get, but I've spent some time lately in trying to learn HTML and I've been planning to constuct a music section of the site that will have an archive of top 10 lists from past years, and likely some selected music writings from my ever-growing music journal. Maybe I'll post concert reviews when I go to gigs ...


Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 15:46:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: emily b.
To: Barry Bruner
Subject: whirlpools of coincidence

Barry,
...
That's an interesting idea you've had about the top 30 CDs. I'd like to see your website...heh, don't worry about HTML, i'm sure you have enough interesting text to fill it out. One of my all-time favourite cure sites has almost no fancy graphics, and is just pure interesting infomation...it's tres cool: [link to now-defunct geocities site, which actually might have turned into Chain of Flowers, my memory fails me, but perhaps Emily remembers]
...

That was how it started. More than five years later, finally, a continuation.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

Listening and watching a mere hour of Much More Music Retro (as part of MMM's programming schedule) made me glad that I don't receive that station, lest I turn into a couch potato doing nothing other than reliving the 80's through video. Somehow, I have yet to figure out whether the target audience for 80's revivalism are recovering leg warmer-wearers who want to relive their youth or a different (not necessarily younger) group who enjoy 80's music with ironic detachment. Consider Nik Kershaw's "Wouldn't It Be Good". A great song with an extremely dated video because of the special effects. Watching it in 2004, do I enjoy the video because, or in spite of the kitschy FX? And perhaps I'm not the best test subject here -- I remember this video very well when it first came out, and even though nobody was under any illusions that it was a technical marvel, the expectations were lower. It wasn't mandatory or expected that you had to drop six figures on your video, unlike now.

I know this -- "Wouldn't It Be Good" would be 1000X cooler if that exact video were redone today, using modern computer special effects. The creepy lighting, the alien abduction paranoia, what's not to like? Thomas Dolby's "Hyperactive" is another one that I'd like to see redone (even though the original was pretty out-there as it is, but the body-stretching is pedestrian compared to what could be done today). This certainly isn't true for all 80's videos. Duran Duran's videos never relied on such FX and still look fantastic today (for that reason among many).

Monday, December 20, 2004

With the weight of end-of-year listmaking behind me, I'm back to listening to some older stuff ... such as a CD-R I put together from earlier in the year containing a bunch of artist that I loosely looped together under the spectre of "minimalism". There's hip-hop (Sensational), techno (Motor), psych-drone (Charalambides), and a bunch of S3/Spectrum stuff. That new Charalambides record, "Joy Shapes", somehow ended up here instead of with the rest of my 2004 stuff. That album has been in the back of my mind all year, but I just didn't get around to listening to it that much. It certainly fits in well with the tone (drone?) of most of my top 20. Revisiting it now, I'm reminded that I love it in small doses (20-30 minutes worth) but over an hour and a quarter, the point has been made for me and I start becoming restless. The Tom Carter and Bardo Pond collab has a similar effect on me -- interesting sounds and moods, but the succession of fifteen minute tracks feels too samey after a while.

Not so for the Spectrum material. This stuff hasn't aged a bit, in fact, and the psych-moaning of "Mechanical Man" beat Animal Collective (and their ilk) to the punch ten years early. "Lord Don't Know My Name" and "True Love Will Find You in the End" continue the fine example of "Playing With Fire" by keeping the chord change and note counts low, and "Waves Wash Over Me" is a fine four-word summation of those five particular minutes. And it got better -- Sonic soaked his music in soul a couple of years later and made one of the 90's best albums.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

The date that is synonymous with fun, anticipation, and heart-pounding excitement all rolled into one. So let us cut to the chase and discuss

THE TOP 10 20 ALBUMS OF 2004.

For much of this year, I felt as though I wasn't hearing much new music and would barely be able to scrape together a top ten. My purchasing tastes went the way of "more for less", as I bought cheap hard-to-find used disc after cheap hard-to-find used disc, siphoned what would have been money for new CD's into an internet connection, d/l'ed anything which struck my fancy -- and of those -- bought only a few of my favourites (or even better, went to their gigs). It was an economically sound strategy, if I do say so myself. Namely, (unless it was too cheap to pass up) buy only the music that couldn't be easily downloaded (if at all), and download the rest.

Yet somehow, despite not feeling as though I'd done a good job of keeping up with new releases, at the end of the year I found nearly fifty new albums from 2004 in my collection, which is far more than I amass in a typical year. Plenty for choosing a top ten, or even a top twenty, which is in fact what I will be doing since I'm submitting a top twenty ballot for an ILM end-of-year poll.

Despite having such an embarrassment of riches to choose from, there must be a good reason why I feel as though I haven't connected strongly with many 2004 releases this year. I've got this huge pile of new stuff, but why does it feel like I haven't been *listening* to it? Oh yeah, I know -- because I haven't. Clearly, there's the problem of sheer volume ... the problem of giving the new Dizzee Rascal and Bark Psychosis albums a fair shake (both are records that were critically lauded but I feel as I though I never really "got" them. The BP album drifts by beautifully, it's a piece of art that I appreciate but cannot admire, much like the more understated/vastly more boring album by fellow post-shoegaze alumnus Rachel Goswell. Kudos to Rachel for "Coastline", one of the finest tracks I've heard all year on an otherwise umemorable record. And Dizzee's record certainly walks tall and carries a big stick, but doesn't kick my teeth in like the last one did. When he strips his tracks waaay down to little more than lo-fi, spasmodic beats and basic bass loops -- "Everywhere" is particularly outstanding -- then he's helping to realize my personal ideal hip-hop sound) when they're competing for headspace with Donnacha Costello and Saint Etienne albums that I'm scolding myself for not buying years ago. I remember more moments with years-old music by Galaxie 500 or Magnetic Fields than with most of these albums from 2004. In that sense, my 2004 recalls my 1998, when I spent far more time obsessing over past albums by the Velvets and Drugstore than anything released in 1998 (and surely this contributes to my feeling that 1998 was a poor year for music). Not to mention the long shadow cast by last year's outstanding crop, including a Plastikman album that obliterates anything released by anybody this year. Sure, it's not fair to hold up 2004 to the standards of ghosts from the past, but it's hard not to when I'm more often in the pleasant company of the ghosts than the unfamiliar company of the living.

Having said all that, there were several excellent albums released this year -- honestly! More so than any other year, this list is a "listening" list, which made for easy ranking. Essentially, these are the albums that I listened to the most. I keep coming back to some them because they keep blowing my mind. Some of them are significantly flawed, or even disappointing to me, but I keep coming back to them to capture specific moods, because they make me feel nostalgic, or because they're just too damned fun to play loud (in fact, there's my thirty word summary of the Fennesz album). Rest assured, I look at this list, and I see the same old me. Noisedroneambient! Canadians! My Token 80's Throwback is here! And reassuringly, just like all the other years, there were two or three albums that rose to the top and decisively separated themselves from the pack.

Again:

THE TOP 20 ALBUMS OF 2004.

20. THE ORB -- BICYCLES AND TRICYCLES. In this, the Winamp and iPod Age, we typically cue up albums by a bunch of artists and pump their songs through a random play format. Thus, sometimes it's a bit difficult to remember who you're listening to at any given time. A pumping tech-house track would come on, and I'd assume I was listening to a song from a Kompakt compilation. But no -- it would be from "Bicycles and Tricycles". Later, a droning ambient piece -- the Mutek comp, yes? Nope, "Bicycles and Tricycles" again. The occasional weird and goofy samples remain intact from their ambient house beginnings, along with the playful melodies (albeit in a completely different style of dance music) that give a nod, of sorts, to the tongue-in-cheek humour in abundance on so much of their best work. For me, this was one of the year's biggest surprises -- an album that was a million times better than I thought it would be.

19. DEERHOOF -- MILKMAN. If Deerhoof didn't exist, then an International Coalition of Indie Record Store Workers would have to invent them. They would come into creation via a document that would read "Be it resolved that, we, the ICIRSW, hereby create Deerhoof, a band which exists solely for the purpose of being played in Indie Record Stores, by members of we the ICIRSW, the undersigned. ICIRSW members are forbidden from playing Deerhoof at home, because once the music begins to infiltrate the bedrooms of the real world then it will detract from the indie-ness of our workplaces. The aforementioned Deerhoof will write songs about meaningless and silly subjects, such as dogs on sidewalks, and the milkman. The vocals must be flat, because that is the way of indie. The songs will sound bonkers, with no verses, hummable melodies, or choruses discernable within three listens, and not recallable by memory within six listens. After those six listens however, the indie minions will be inexplicably drawn to the music, meaning they will be drawn to our stores since that is the only way that the music can be heard. Those who have not the patience to make it through three or six listens will find the music to be formless and tuneless, therefore, they will feel uncomforable in its presence, which will effectively weed them out of our store without having to subject them to our asshole chic when they inquire about the Fantasia Barrino album. We are indie, and this Deerhoof entity is ours and ours alone".

18. BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE -- BEEHIVES. "Backyards" makes this album indispensible, in which BSS crush every indietronica act at their own game. That track is a slice of heaven that goes from gentle balladry to swirling shoegaze to twee ambient as if that combination has been the natural order of things since the peak of the Brill Building era. The rest of the album is an anodyne affair that die-hard indieheads will be sure to ignore, but screw those haters -- "Beehives" may be the best chill-out album of the year.

17. DDAMAGE -- RADIO APE. Bonkers. Jittery beats and throbbing melodies punctuate nearly every second of this release. It's a style much like that of Datach'i, except with Datach'i I'm able to recall at least a little bit of what I've heard once it's over. I've heard this record countless times and every time I play it, I hear a completely different record. It brainwashes you and steamrolls the brain squeaky clean, leaving a totally blank slate in time for the next listen.

16. MAGNETIC FIELDS -- i. There's a four year gap between "69 Love Songs" and it's successor, but when the smoke has cleared, "i" will likely be considered little more than an appendix to its gargantuan predecessor. The fanatical genre-hopping is arguably becoming gimmicky (a side-effect of being love songs #70-#83),and being a Verve Release won't help matters, either. Hopefully the strengths of the disco-fied "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend", the fragile opener "I Die", and the perfect, bittersweet closer "It's Only Time" won't soon be forgotten.

15. THE CURE -- THE CURE. They can't get more nu-metal than this, can they? Oh right, forgot about "Never Enough". And the entire "Pornography" album, man, that was a real downer and a half. So why was I surprised that they could sound so good with Ross Robinson at the helm? For those still not convinced, the bonus tracks on the Japanese import are a time machine back to keyboard-laden "Disintegration"-era Cure. Nevertheless, they somehow managed to squeeze out their best pop song in well over a decade, "(I Don't Know What's Going) On". Still going strong.

14. THE DELGADOS -- UNIVERSAL AUDIO. Where did all the sound go? The lack of strings (=HUGEness) was a disappointment at first, the songs seemed bare and empty, but that's just a normal reaction to having the sonic rug pulled out from under you without any warning. Less morbidity, more fragility, and every bit as tuneful as they've ever been.

13. FENNESZ -- VENICE. "Endless Summer" did a great job of uniting people with otherwise disparate tastes. It was noisy enough to keep the noise fans happy. It's melodic, chinstroking moments drew in the folktronica fans (and the Beach Boys references didn't hurt in that regard either). There was even enough mayhem for the Tigerbeat 6 fans to appreciate. But the release of the "Field Recordings 1995-2002" stopgap album (AKA Fennesz's strongest record) ended up foreshadowing the new one -- a return to dense, drifting, hazy music. Unlike "Endless Summer", this is not picnic music for dewey-eyed lovers, although the crescendoes of guitar, raining down on tracks like "Circassian" and "The Stone of Impermanence", are every bit as wonderous as the finest of nature scenes.

12. TAYLOR DEUPREE -- JANUARY. It's full of icy voices, all strung-out and whimpering for attention. They flicker, slowly morphing in intensity, but I'm standing outside a bus stop in the dead of winter, jangling my keys in my pocket, and in my head I can hear the metallic jangling fed through a sampler and stretched in time until the metallic clanks become echoey croaks. This is a chilly album. Or maybe it's just the title.

11. BRIAN WILSON -- SMiLE. It feels like a trip back in time. The physical recording sounds like a Spectorian relic -- as if it was literally recorded in the sixties. There are seventeen tracks here, but at least three times as many distinguishable song ideas. Every song changes its direction multiple times, and every new melody and harmony which emerges sounds more delicious than the last. It turns out that "Good Vibrations" was a preview for Brian Wilson's very own Teenage Symphonies to G-d. No matter how much I read about the mythical "SMiLE", I just couldn't fathom that Brian could really duplicate "Good Vibrations" another sixteen times. Now, I have no idea how to rank this among all the other album, again, it's like it has parachuted in from another era, I'd just as soon attempt to rank "Pet Sounds" among this year's best releases. Ask me about it in another forty years.

10. MÄRZ -- WIR SIND HIER. It's a bizarre mix of psych-folk and glitch, with a German singer blessed with a voice oddly reminiscent of Peter Gabriel. The actual sounds are almost entirely electronic (acoustic guitar is prominent as well) but there's nothing on "Wir Sind Hier" that wouldn't sound great around a campfire. At its heart, this album is aural comfort food -- folk pop with a few electronic embellishments.

9. TIM HECKER -- MIRAGES. Darker and more brooding than previous work, but losing none of the lonely majesty that impels you to stare blankly out a window for hours. Give this man a permanent exhibit at a planetarium. Please.

8. JAKE FAIRLEY -- TOUCH NOT THE CAT. It's an album stuffed with ballbreaking, yet rumpshaking rhythms. Schaffel enough for the club kids who dance among bright lights, hard techno enough for the people who dance in underground dungeons with low ceilings and a thick fog of smoke.

7. ORBITAL -- BLUE ALBUM. Orbital bowed out this year with their best album since the unassailable "In Sides". In 45 minutes, you too can relive all the ups and downs of Orbital's career, from the moronic humour of "The Altogether" ("Acid Pants"), to the introspection of "In Sides" ("You Lot") to the 4/4 banging techno of the Brown album ("One Perfect Sunrise").

6. DEATH IN VEGAS -- SATAN'S CIRCUS. Talent borrows, genius steals. Pardon the cliche, but a spin through "Satan's Circus" provides more "spot the reference" fun and games than the first Elastica album. Except that the DIV album doesn't suck! The opener (and first single) "Ein Für Die Damen" recalls the more sprighty indie rock of their previous album, "Scorpio Rising". But after that, it's sayonara to the chick music and hello to the pitch dark motorik of "Black Lead", the "I Can't Believe It's Not NEU!" mid-tempo motorik of "Sons of Rother", and the chiming popdrone relaxed motorik of "Anita Barber". Not a tribute to NEU! and Kraftwerk as much as it is reincarnation of them.

5. THE ARCADE FIRE -- FUNERAL. The first layer is the vocals -- perhaps my skin has been thickened from listening to the wailing on all those A Silver Mt. Zion albums. The tunes lay under the next layer -- one mini-epic after another, shifting from pleading power ballad to dronerock disco as if it's the most natural thing in the world. The final layer is the lyrics -- recurring motifs of snow and ice blanketing ye olde neighbourhood, and sneaking around behind parents' backs in the name of love and lust. Like Pulp's "His N Hers" and "West Side Story", it magnifies the toil of young love to a point near myth.

4. OREN AMBARCHI -- GRAPES FROM THE ESTATES. At times it moves glacially slow, thanks to clear sine tones that stretch themselves out like a slow pull on a slice of caramel. And just when you find yourself thinking that's a drone album and nothing more, delicate guitar lines appear and the exact same drones take on a pastoral quality. Certainly the most soothing album of the year.

3. BEEF TERMINAL -- THE ISOLATIONIST. The title might have fit better with Beef Terminal's debut album "20GOTO10", which was a more maudlin affair thanks to many long, ambient, pieces. Even the dancier tracks, such as the standout "Sick Love Under Toronto", wasn't much of a party, unless you like to dance to records that evoke the seedy underbellies of a seemingly decaying city. "The Isolationist" is more the work of a man reclining on his front porch, singing his heart out via his guitar. It's a lazy record (again, lazy as in reclined, not perfunctory), thanks to simple hip-hop rhythms that relax the pace, but the looped guitar licks suggest nostalgia and fond memories to me, rather than sadness. Even though it's well-known his mother died during the time that the album was recorded, I still choose to listen for the nostalgia and not the sadness, and I'm sure that the strong presence of the fomer qualities is no accident. The style might seem a bit same-y over the course of an entire album, but the rich (yet wonderfully lo-fi!) tones display a great attention to detail in sound creation, and it's these fascinating timbres which turned me into a devoted regular listener.

(technically released at the tail end of 2003, but wasn't really reviewed or promoted until 2004. I feel safe deeming this a 2004 release).

2. FELIX DA HOUSECAT -- DEVIN DAZZLE AND THE NEON FEVER. One fun thing about the 80's is that I used to sing along to lyrics as dumb and simple as the ones on Van Halen's "1984" and didn't think twice about it. Never stopped to analyze them and dismiss their peurility. As time passed on, things came full circle and I started to appreciate how hard it could be to write a (apparently) simple song. Which brings us to the sassiness of the putdowns and handclaps in "Short Skirts". Or the way "Everyone Is Someone In LA" makes me long to spend the rest of my days as a stand-in driver for one of those helicopter panorama shots of the city that opened the first sixty seconds of seemingly every episode of "Knight Rider". "Ready To Wear" is the most joyous and fun three minutes of the year, and its parent album is all about black eyeliner, striking a pose at your leisure at any time day or night, and shirking the responsibilty of real life for the more pressing responsibility of looking fabulous.

1. XIU XIU -- FABULOUS MUSCLES. There are plenty of frightening noises on this album. Such as the ghastly scrapes that populate "Support Our Troups" and "Mike". Or the queasy videogame death disco of "Crank Heart". Even more startling is the vocal work of Jamie Stewart, who possesses a voice every bit as curdling as the caustic, lo-fi sounds he coaxes from his equipment. All this, and a title track that is one of the most disturbing yet touching love songs I've ever heard. If Trent Reznor, as a follow-up to "The Downward Spiral", hadn't corrupted himself with the perils of starfucking and Marilyn Manson, and had instead locked himself in a remote wood cabin for ten years with unrelenting thoughts of starfucking *with* Marilyn Manson, then he might have taken visceral self-deprecating music to this kind of a new level. "Fabulous Muscles" can (un)comfortably take its place amongst the most unsettling albums ever made.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

A few notable Verve releases from 2004

Magnetic Fields - i. Had "69 Love Songs" never come to pass, many people would consider this to be a very fine album. But thankfully, "69LS" does exist and opinions on this album must suffer as a result. More accurately, the album has a few weak points and has only ten or so songs to pick up the slack, whereas "69LS" has fifty songs to pick up the slack from its weaker moments. "i" sometimes crumbles under the weight of its own genre-hopping ambitions, but the finest moments, such as the fragile "I Die", and the beautiful closer "It's Only Time", are impeccable.

Delgados -- Universal Audio. Recall that I originally thought that "Hate" was a Verve release too. Right now, I'm digging the tunefulness of the new album while missing the bombast of their last (fortunately, that bombast was provided in spades during their live show).

Orbital -- Blue Album. For their final album, Orbital revisited every phase of their career. Their career, viewed as a whole, is a big, giant, Verve release.

Various (Kompakt) artists -- Kompakt 100. Strictly, this isn't a Verve release since only about half of it can be considered to be up to the loftiest of standards. However, that fantastic half has made me smile as much as anything has this year, particularly the daft and wonderful "Weiche Zäune".

Sunday, December 05, 2004

OK, what's going on, how come nobody is saying anything about the new Death in Vegas album, "Satan's Circus"? Maybe it's the daft name, heck, that was a turnoff for me too. But I certainly hope it's not being dismissed for being a 70's throwback. And I hope the people who have praised and re-praised the myriad of recent 80's throwbacks aren't throwing mud at "Satan's Circus" and claiming it's "embarassingly retro", or some crap like that.

DIV are at their best when they're an electronic band that tries to sound like a rock band. Their last album, "Scorpio's Rising", sounded like a rock band, straight up. Now, they're right back to being an electronic band sounding like a rock band which. But now they're playing motorik music, which means they are trying to sound like rock bands that tried to sound like electronic bands. Got all that? In particular, "Sons of Rother" could, aptly enough, turn up as a bonus track on a future reissue of NEU!'s debut and nobody would even blink. Elsewhere, most of Kraftwerk's career is faithfully pilfered (most notably, the lead synth from "TEE" on "Zugaga", and a dead cert for the melody from "Kometenmelodie" on "Kontroll"). The attention to detail (which could also be termed "theft") is startling, and makes this album more of a reunion record by its German heroes than a tribute -- they're not paying homage to NEU! and Kraftwerk, they have become NEU! and Kraftwerk. And honestly, what's better than early-to-mid 70's NEU! and Kraftwerk?

--------------------------

After all the hype, what an embarrassment that "60 Minutes" interview with Bob Dylan turned out to be. And unlike what we might have expected going in, it wasn't because of Dylan's rambling (which was quite coherent, at least for him). Rather, for a guy who professed that he'd always wanted to interview Bob Dylan, Ed Bradley asked completely inane questions with obvious answers. And dumbing it down for the average "60 Minutes" viewer can't explain it, either. "Let's talk about the press trying to pigeonhole you as a folkie/protest singer/prophet/whatever, you didn't like it when they did that, did you, of course not and to make the point let's roll a clip from "Don't Look Back" just to hammer home the point, so my question for you is this: what do you think of people saying you're one of the greatest songwriters ever, because Rolling Stone recently said that your song was the greatest thing there ever was, so how do you feel about people idolizing you, because you're a deity to them, you know? Come on, you're a prophet, you're an icon, I'm telling you now, just admit it already!!".