Grammys 2013

I didn't watch the show this year, save for The Black Keys' amazing performance of "Lonely Boy" via Popmatters (all the links to the other performances were quickly taken down).  My predictions were spectacularly wrong this year, save for the one I was most sure about (i.e. the snubbing of Frank Ocean).  Black Keys upset Springsteen in the categories that he's owned for more than a decade, and although I have hated generally every two person drums/guitar garage-y rock band that's come along since 2001 (with No Age still being a somewhat inexplicable exception), Black Keys are the real deal, "Lonely Boy" is a killer song, and I feel safe in agreeing with Popmatters that their was the best performance of the night even without seeing another minute of the show.  

Instead of sitting through the entire three hour ceremony, it's probably better to read what really smart people had to say about the Grammys anyway.   Philip Sherburne found some silver linings in Skrillex's dominance of the dance music categories on his SPIN blog.  First, he argues, it's good that Grammy gave the awards to the act that's currently at the top of their game, as opposed to what they usually do (in rock, R&B ... apparently no genre is safe from this!) -- giving the nods to established acts that gets their nominations and awards mostly due to name recognition.  Skrillex's music might be indistinguishable from 90% of Chemical Brothers' back catalogue, but it sure is nice to see those kids and their hip new sounds taking the big win away from those old farts!  Second, the Grammys have given up on trying to integrate electronic music into the rest of the show.  They're content to let the categories stand in their own little quaint corner of the awards universe, much like the classical and jazz categories that most Grammy viewers couldn't give a crap about, rather than forcing the likes of Dave Grohl to play nice with David Guetta to the benefit of nobody.  I completely agree with Sherburne here.  Why force these cross-cultural mashups -- is it an attempt to "contextualize" the music for viewers who like rock but don't know anything about DJ culture?  Was Dave Grohl really going to act as a gateway for new fans possibly getting into Deadmau5?

Jon Caramanica touched on some of the same points in his Grammy piece for the NYT.  Every year we see younger performers on stage with veteran ones, and it's starting to feel like, in Caramanica's words, that the younger generation are being "effectively supervised by an older peer".  It's cool to see "dream pairings" of performers that span generations of music fans, but there are diminishing returns associated with them.  They catch your eye the first through tenth times you see them, but afterward they become just another gimmick that the Grammys use to get people to tune into the broadcast, and they cease to be special.

On the other hand, the Grammys happen only once a year (it's not as if Paul McCartney and Jay-Z are forced to tour together or anything) and the Grammys have always been at least one generation behind popular trends.  Just look at the awards handed out in the 1960's -- almost none of it has any critical cache today.  Caramanica looks at Grammy success of Black Keys and Mumford and Sons with the glass empty.  He sees their wins as enforcement of a Grammy narrative that nothing innovative has been done in music since the 1960's.  But that sort of music was going to win anyway, because the Grammys need thirty years to adapt to new trends.  That being the unavoidable state of things, I say it's better to give the awards to the young guys rather than the older ones.  It's incremental progress, but at least it's something.  

Hyden's winners

Grantland's Steven Hyden has been posting a series of articles that he calls "The Winners' History of Rock and Roll", where simply put, he examines why huge bands became huge and remained huge.  The project was born of the idea that music critics have given too much attention to the plight of the underdogs, that there have been far too many essays written on the likes of the Velvet Underground, the rise of punk rock, and the bands whose music went relatively unnoticed in their time and is due for a reappraisal.  Therefore, if we want to learn something new about the last 30-40 years of music history, it's time to stop combing through the underground obscurities and start focusing on what the mega-successful acts can tell us about changing trends and tastes in music.

Hyden seems to be working from a premise that's clouded by the democratization of music criticism that's taken place relatively recently due to the rise of blogs, social media, and specialty publications/websites.  The median age of music critics has (I think) gotten younger than it was in the magazine and newspaper dominated eras of a couple of decades ago.  More importantly, the nexus has shifted -- and shifted rather quickly -- from writers weaned on music from the 60's and 70's to those weaned on music from the 80's and 90's.  The "missing" generation in the middle, I believe, is mine and Steven Hyden's, i.e. the people in their 30's who didn't have an outlet to write about the music we cared about because the media for doing so (blogs,  tumblrs, etc.) didn't exist. When I was growing up, music criticism was ALL about the winners, and the only way to avoid the steady stream of hero worship and TV specials about the Beatles or Led Zeppelin was to listen to the one alternative radio station in your city or town (assuming there was one), hang around indie music shops, read fanzines, and find like-minded message boards on the then-fledgling internet.  Music criticism circa 1990 was about nothing other than the "winners" that have been unfairly overlooked according to Hyden, and I'm not sure how he could have forgotten that.   

The music fans and critics born between 1970 and 1980 (which includes me) grew up in an age where they were pulled in opposite directions by two very different philosophies.  On one hand was the music of the Beatles and Stones generation, the stuff we wouldn't dream of rebelling against (even though it was our parents' favourite music) because it still sounded so ridiculously good.  On the other hand, there was the "punk saved rock and roll from itself" narrative that was equally well entrenched and well argued by our favourite DJ's and record store clerks.  You kind of had to pick one side.  It wasn't that both sides couldn't agree that the Beatles were a great band, but one side looked backward, confident in the knowledge that music would never be that good ever again, and the other side refused to accept that.  Those viewpoints were, and are, for the most part incompatible.

That said, just about every 70's baby who came down on the side of the punks had a eureka moment where they realized that their side wasn't as infallible as they once thought it was.  Mine happened sometime in 1996, when I heard Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" in full for the first time since ... well, the first time ever*.  Of course I was already familiar with many of the songs, as they were inescapable on FM radio even in the early 1980's, years after "Rumours" was released.  For the punks, Fleetwood Mac were the ENEMY, a key symbol of why punk had to come along to rid the world of multi-million selling soft rock pussies and their sunny LA cocaine addicted friends. One problem though -- when I heard those songs again, for the first time in over a decade (or at least since Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign), my reaction couldn't have been more surprising.

"This is soooo much better than any punk album."

*I wrote about rediscovering "Rumours" back in 2001 ... and when searching for that post, I discovered a "hidden" post, i.e. two separate pieces in the same post that I must have missed when carrying my old blog over to blogspot.

That's when it all came crashing down.  I didn't even like punk (or post-punk) all that much, but it was the philosophy of punk (and the alternative music I loved so much) that got overhauled.  I never looked at idealized, messianic histories of alternative music (which included early 90's grunge by that point) the same way ever again.  On the other hand, as much as I love "Rumours" and other "winners" albums, I don't write very much about them, and in that sense Hyden stance is absolutely right.  I wrote about another long time favourite of mine, Sinead O'Connor's "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got", for the first time just a few weeks ago.  All in all, I've been enjoying Hyden's work a lot, both in this series and in general on Grantland.

However, he picked a strange example with which to explain himself as he introduced the series though -- Arcade Fire's surprising "Album of the Year" win at the Grammys.  If there's any institution that can be counted on to honour the winners at all times, always going with the safest and most uncontroversial choices and never falling prey to critical buzz bands or emerging trends, it's the Grammys.  Arcade Fire's win was an outlier, which is why it was such a surprise.  It's really odd to see Hyden singling out the Grammys as an institution that would confuse acts that the critics consider great with those that consistently move units.

To take it even further, if popularity is dictated by whatever "Middle America" wants to hear, as Hyden states many times in his Led Zeppelin and Kiss pieces, then why aren't Arcade Fire a lot more popular?  Kiss and Led Zeppelin were selling a lifestyle but they were also selling their audience a means of escape.  Isn't that exactly what Arcade Fire are about?  Hyden writes "Middle America" many times when he really means "the suburbs".  Plenty of bands were writing about happenings in New York, but the teenager population in the suburbs across the country was many times higher, ergo, Kiss and Led Zeppelin wrote for them and became as huge as bands could possibly be.  Today, Arcade Fire's third album is called "The Suburbs" and is all about life in the suburbs. Where's the logic gap?

The problem is that writing about the suburbs not the same as writing for the suburbs.  In the same way, writing about the need to escape isn't the same as writing music that makes you feel as if you've already escaped.  Led Zeppelin sold the dream, but they didn't engage in self-reflection, they were famous but they didn't write an album about the "pressures of fame" (e.g. Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On", Pulp's "This is Hardcore").   The kids in the suburbs don't want to hear about things as they really are, about the ups and downs of living the glamorous life.  If you're writing about the gritty reality of life then you've ruined the fantasy no matter how rich and famous you are, you're practically halfway to writing about life on the streets of New York to a limited audience. The airbrushed version of being famous is what sells.

Kiss might have understood that better than anybody.  The third band in Hyden's series, Bon Jovi, were simple kids from New Jersey who mastered the "I dream of escape" vibe that Springsteen had perfected.  What was "Livin' on a Prayer" if not Springsteen with bigger hairdos?  Bon Jovi made it work mainly for two reasons.  First, they presented a simple message in its most basic, most unconflicted form.  No family pressures, no trouble with the law, no teenage angst, just "we're young so let's get out of here".  Second, they looked the part of pretty boy rock stars at exactly the right time in music history when you needed to look like a pretty boy rock star to break through (i.e. the height of the video age).  Hyden has a lot more to say on that in his Bon Jovi article.

I found his Aerosmith and Metallica profiles less thought provoking than the first three, but I'm looking forward to his upcoming piece on Linkin Park because for me their success story has completely defied explanation and I really would like to know more.   

Woke up, got out of bed

Dragged a comb across my head, etc.  Packed a lunch, noticed I was late, grabbed a bus and a train, headed to the office, stopped at the bank, did a bit of work, took a short break, finally logged on to Facebook and was floored by the NEW MBV ALBUM INTERNET MULTIVERSE POSTING EXPLOSION.

So you wait 22 years for an album to come out, the lead guitarist of the band (the biggest perfectionist/procrastinator in music) responds to hecklers at a one-off London gig by saying that the new album would be out in three days, and it TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE?  There were follow-up articles written after that London gig that compiled the last fifteen years of new release announcements, and I couldn't believe that anyone took this last one the least bit seriously.  If I had been betting, I would have placed the odds somewhere between the proverbial "when monkeys fly out of my anus" and "when monkeys fly out of the anuses of the monkeys flying out of my anus" because after fifteen years of Kevin Shields saying "there'll definitely be something out by the end of the year", I thought we knew better than to be fooled yet again.

I don't have anything interesting or constructive to say, I'm just posting for the sake of posting.  I haven't even heard the album yet, but so far the responses have been overwhelmingly positive (yes!!) and I'm kind of glad I slept through those manic few hours when MBV's website repeatedly crashed due to all the traffic.

Just ... wow.  First GYBE, then Bowie, now MBV.  New music that appears without warning, after years of waiting, nearly at the point when fans had reached their peace with the idea of never hearing music from them ever again.

Pazz and Jop 2012

There seems to be a lot less discussion about the results compared to past years, probably due to a number of slowly snowballing factors.  Single-publication and critics' best-of lists start appearing online in late November, making P&J results not much of a surprise in mid-January.  The declining interest in print media in general.  Shifts in music criticism away from generalist and towards specialist publications.  And so on.  List submissions (less than 500, way down from the 600-700 in recent years) and comment submissions are way down too.  They published two of my comments again this year, so you know they must be hard up for submissions.  But seriously, thanks to Brian McManus and the Village Voice, I'll always get a kick out of seeing my name next to Alfred Soto, Phil Dellio, and other P&J commenting regulars. 

I sent three short comment bits this year, and here's the one they didn't publish, a shortened version of my Beach House comment on my Top 10 Albums of 2012 post:

I'm exhausted from reading about other people's best albums of the year, not least because I feel overwhelmed and don't have time to listen to all this great music.  Beach House's "Bloom" was my favourite album of 2012, but if you haven't already heard it then you probably won't get around to it, because just like everybody else (including me), you've got a huge backlog of other albums in the queue that you hope to catch up with one of these years.

So that's why I've picked out the best bits of "Bloom" -- the very best part each of its ten songs -- edited them together, and posted them on Mixcloud (http://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/best-of-bloom/) for your listening convenience.  Now there are no excuses for not hearing "Bloom" because all you need to do is invest a measly one minute and forty five seconds to absorb the very best moments from the year's best album, such as 1:12 - 1:20 of "Myth", which is possibly the best eight second homage to "Heaven or Las Vegas"-era Cocteau Twins ever made, or the spine-tingling bridge from 1:59-2:13 of "Lazuli", or the mid-song break from 1:54-2:05 of "New Year" where guitars wail like crying seals straight out of My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless".  And who knows, maybe you'll like the highlight reel so much that you'll want to hear the entire album.

Glenn McDonald's P&J statistical index is now clearly the highlight of the poll.  Every year I get happily lost among the fascinating statistical tidbits that come out of Glenn's calculations, and this year was no exception.  This year he added new tools for comparing polls and critics' voting habits across different years, including the Breadth Index, which quantifies whether a critic tends to vote for his or her favourite artists year after year.  After years of existing in the background as something of a plaything for hardcore list fans only, Glenn's work is taking center stage at long last.  The final line of his essay sums up the importance of his work perfectly - "arguably, this explorable critical hyperindex is what the poll really exists to build."  The results of P&J might be a foregone conclusion these days, but it's still the largest music poll of its kind and is a golden opportunity for collecting data that will enable us to look at critical and popular music trends in a way that nobody ever had before. 

After several years of collective whining and crying about indie rock and the Pitchfork narrative taking over P&J (lest we forget 2009), Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar took the #1 and #2 album spots, while Miguel and Killer Mike placed in the top ten as well.  Fewer complaints have been heard, even though Pitchfork ranked those same artists high on their list this year.  So in case you were wondering, the indie rock half of the equation was the real problem.  Animal Collective's "Centipede Hz" finished tied for 157th, which is believed to be the largest drop-off in the poll for the follow-up to a P&J #1 album.  Everybody got burned out on AC at around the same time -- probably in the spring of '09 -- and "MPP"'s easy victory in the poll later than year was as fine an example of voter cruise control and hivemind groupthink as you'll find.  In other words, the thinking was "we decided one year ago that MPP is the album of the year, so I guess it still is."  Four years later, and the critical dismantling of AC and the indie rock backlash is all but complete.  I still haven't heard all of "Centipede Hz", but submitted my most indie rock centred list ever, so it was only a partial victory around my house. 

I've heard the usual complaints about not enough musical diversity and participation by voters in specialty genres, and every year I respond by noting how almost none of the diversity complainers stick up for electronic music.  This year, the closest thing to a consensus choice was Andy Stott's "Luxury Problems", at #29 with just 21 mentions (I'm not counting Grimes as "electronic").  That's fairly typical for each year's token electronic album, for instance, last year James Blake finished at #34, the previous year it was Caribou at #25 or MIA at #31 or Four Tet at #35 (depending on your definition of electronic/club music), indie rock blazed a path of destruction over all genres in '09 but in '08 Hercules and Love Affair were at #19, largely on the strength of the crossover appeal of "Blind".  In 2005 it seems like everyone with a passing interest in minimal rallied around Isolee's "We Are Monster" and it finished "only" at #41, but it was nevertheless something of a shock to see that sort of album ranking so high.  Anyway, you get the idea.  Electronic music was mostly ignored again, nobody really cares, let's move on.

Don't blame me if you think there isn't enough variety in P&J.  My centricity score was .201, at #283 out of 485 contributors, putting me in the lower 42nd percentile.  I was in the 46th percentile in 2011 and the 40th in 2010, so this was more or less in line with my average (which has also been calculated!  I'm #633 out of 1067 over the past five years, or the lower 41st percentile of centricity).  Also my Breadth Index is .900, or #89 out of 1083, which means I'm near the top when it comes to voting for different artists each year with very little repetition.

It seems to be the case every year, but once again I voted for two albums that did very well in the poll, and another eight that for the most part did not.  That distribution was less bimodal than in past years, mainly thanks to a fair bit of support for both Spiritualized and GY!BE.  Oddly enough, the biggest extreme occurred in 2009, when my centricity score was skewed by votes for two top five finishers in the poll.  The rest of my choices that year drew a combined total of 23 votes, or about one-sixth of what Animal Collective earned with their #1 album.  My total of seven unique votes is misleading because of the strangeness of my singles ballot, but I did vote for one album with no other mentions and two others with just one other mention.  One of those two was Sigur Ros' "Valtari", which was a huge surprise because they've usually done quite well in P&J going back over a decade. With their four previous albums, they finished at #54 in 2008, #50 in 2005, #25 in 2002, and #33 in 2000 (and #16 in 2001 for "Agaetis Byrjun" yet again).  Spiritualized have been heading in the opposite direction -- #184 in 2003, #80 in 2008, and #34 this year, tied with "Let It Come Down"'s rank from 2001.

Consensus around the top albums seems to be holding steady over the past few years.  62% of all ballots listed at least one of the #2-#10 albums.  That's only two percent lower than 2009, AKA the year of GAPDY.  But my favourite P&J statistic this year is this one, courtesy of Glenn Mcdonald -- of the 7 people who voted for Mastodon's "Curl of the Burl" in 2011, 5 of them voted for "Call Me Maybe" in 2012.   Numbers like that simply defy simple generalizations, you just have to sit back and admire them.  

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 13

"The mix uses a counterintuitive sequence of light pulses" Running time: 47:00 I submitted this mix for Little White Earbuds' podcast competition. Being pressed for time, it didn't turn out as well as it could have but it was fun to make, I enjoyed the experience of recording and submitting my work, and learned more about recording and mastering a mix properly (which I will put to good use in the future. Of course I didn't win anything -- no complaints there, considering the amazing quality of the winning mix   -- but like I said, it was a fun thing to do. It's not so much of a dance-y mix (especially compared to last year's outstanding winning mix by 2toomanygays, but the second place mix in '11 was also full of creative hops between genres and had a downtempo, somewhat tacked on ending, and this year's winning mix by Stewart Brown also shared some of those qualities.

LWE Podcast competition mix 2012 by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Sinead O'Connor, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got"

I have no idea how many times I played this album in 1990, but either this or the Stone Roses' debut were the albums I listened to the most that year.  It's even possible that I haven't listened to any album more times in any year than I did with these two albums in 1990, which is a likely signature of an earlier era when acquiring music was a lot harder (meaning you had fewer albums to listen to in a given year) and the cassette was still a popular format (meaning that you tended to listen to albums straight through more often because fast forwarding to your favourite tracks was such a hassle).

Like with many overplayed albums, I burned out on "I Do Not Want ..." and left it untouched for quite a while.  By chance, I happened to be watching Saturday Night Live on the night that this happened, and the fallout from that incident essentially ended her career as a commercial force.  One might reasonably argue that her breakthrough into the mainstream was a fluke anyway, and that grunge along with MOR rock and country would have bumped her from the charts regardless.

It wasn't until 1995, when I undertook a fun and crazy project to listen to all my CDs and cassettes in alphabetical order, that I rediscovered this album and remembered how great it is.  I only had about 150 albums back then, so this was a realistic undertaking, but I only made it about 2/3rds of the way through before abandoning it for reasons I can't recall.  But it was thanks to that alphabetical listening project (which forced me to revisit music that I hadn't heard in years) that I rediscovered "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got".  And yet, even though I've remained a fan of it ever since, still play it on occasion, and will tell you how underrated it is if you prompt me, I've never written anything about it and didn't rank it among my favourite albums of the 1990's as recently as 2004.  [it may not have been nominated and therefore not eligible in that particular poll, but I wrote up a complete, non-poll related Top 100 around that I can't find right now ... I'm fairly sure Sinead wasn't ranked very high on it]

In short, I've written about that SNL episode before, albeit not very well (re-read at your own risk), and I've underrated "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" even while telling people that it's underrated.

With over twenty years perspective, it stands out as the first true "90's" album. This has been noted by many others I'm sure.  It signifies the turn from the "me" 80's to the confessional, angst-filled 90's, predating grunge and other alternative artists by at least a year.  You could dismiss the epic album opener "So Different" as O'Connor's stab at making a "Troy Part II", but a sample-heavy pop track like "I Am Stretched On Your Grave" could have only been recorded in the early 90's.  O'Connor clearly knew that change was afoot and "Nothing Compares 2 U" made that even more abundantly clear.  The keyboards/strings and muffled drumming could never have been produced in the 80's, and the simplicity and directness of the video was certainly not something that could have been made in the 80's.  I've also always loved how the lack of a bass line (a la "When Doves Cry") and the decisions to leave "mama" and "baby" in the lyrics came across as very subtle tributes to Prince, even though the recording sounds absolutely nothing like him otherwise.  

It's also got Nellee Hooper producing, and Jah Wobble, and ex-Smiths members playing on it ... what could be more 90's than that?

Top ten mixes/podcasts of 2012

Like in 2011, there was more of the usual podcast greatness in 2012.  Next year I'm resolving to hear a wider range of mixes that crisscross genres I wouldn't normally listen to.  More stuff like Ryan Hemsworth's FACT mix, for example, and less techno.  Inventive mixes with inspired track selections spanning different genres are what keeps the Electric Deluxe Podcast comfortably at the top of the podcast heap, with no end in sight to their run of excellence.


Nochexxx, LWE Podcast 111, February 6 (link)

A soothing and often perplexing mix of ambient and experimental music, he crams 32 tracks into 70 minutes but it doesn't come off as hurried in the least.  No matter how many times I hear this mix, I'm still shocked when I check the tracklist about twenty minutes and realize that it's already up to track fifteen or so.  It's an especially amazing effort considering he was sick with the flu when he made this.


DJ Harvey, Resident Advisor Podcast 300, February 27 (link)

Harvey described this mix as "an Afro, Gothic disco-fusion with dark undertones", and you won't catch me coming up with a better description than that.  A truly unique mix by a truly unique DJ.

JD Twitch (Optimo), White Light 54, March 6 (link)

Similar in style, and possibly even better than the famous Schwarz/Dixon/Ame "Grandfather Paradox" mix.


Matthew Dear, Resident Advisor 306, April 9 (link)

If I had to pick one mix from 2012 to play at a party for non-clubgoers that would hopefully keep them all dancing the whole night, it would be this one.


Fred P aka Black Jazz Consortium, TAL080, April 12 (link)

This was the best "DJ takes you on a journey" mix of the year, beginning with house and gradually getting deeper and darker into dub techno.  The transitions are so seamless and subtle that I often find myself zoning out while listening and having to skip back ten or fifteen minutes to remind myself how Fred P got from A to B.

Tommy Four Seven, BALANS020, July 2 (link)

The best mix of deep, dark, cavernous techno I heard this year.  It hits its peak and quickly reaches a point where it feels like he's dialing it down and the mix feels like its very nearly over ... only to keep going for another thirty minutes, getting progressively darker as it goes.  

Tim Sweeney, Groove Podcast 009, June 29 (link)

Tim Sweeney mixes house and techno in combination as well as anyone in the world right now.


Submerge, Electric Deluxe Episode 074, July 16 (link).

I could probably do a separate list of the top ten EDLX podcasts, that's how consistently great they've been.  It's impossible to pick just one favourite, but if I must, I'll go with this huge (2 h 40 m) mix of classic (mostly 80's) techno, house and industrial that perfectly represents the Electric Deluxe M.O.

Karizma, Strategik Rework Mix, July 26 (link).  An entrancing set of house music from Baltimore's Karizma that floats effortlessly from peak to peak.  

Slow To Speak, FACT 351, October 15 (link).  This is one of those times where you read "tracklist not provided" and can't accuse the DJ of being lazy, because this completely bonkers mix defies reduction to a simple tracklist.  Seeing how they've chopped and layered a ton of things all at once everywhere in the mix, you'd need to be an expert trainspotter to identify anything even with the trackist sitting in front of you.  

Top 10 Albums of 2012

I've long since given up trying to regularly follow scenes, trends, or even labels.  It seems that every year I write about how my listening habits -- and therefore my end-of-year lists as well -- are increasingly subject to luck and randomness, and about how I've more or less come to accept (or even embrace) that notion as the years go by.  In that sense, I can feel secure that I've "done my job" if I can say that parts of my top ten list would have looked totally alien and unbelievable to me one year earlier.  In other words, if you could travel back in time and show me this list one year ago, my reaction should be "huh?? In a year's time I'm going to go nuts over [Indie/Techno Act I've Never Heard Of]?"

This list has a few surprises of that sort, but there are even more albums that hit the other extreme where you might need to check your calendar to confirm for yourself that it's 2012 and not 2001.  Yes, it was a good year for big names making great comeback albums.

So ...

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2012

10.  Voices from the Lake feat. Donato Dozzy & Neel, "Voices From the Lake" (Prologue)

Seeing how it's a techno album best not heard outside of your bedroom anytime before 2 AM, this effort by Voices From the Lake isn't for everyone.  It reminds me of the albums released by Starfish Pool in the latter part of the 90's (more specifically, everything after 1996's "Interference") -- woozy, minimal techno tracks that go on forever and dial down the temperature in the room while still being eminently danceable. 

9.  Matt Elliot, "The Broken Man" (Ici D'Ailleurs)

Matt Elliot's journey into folk rock enters its second decade and finds him stretching his sparse balladry to even more epic lengths, with three tracks at or exceeding the ten minute mark.  The Drinking/Failing/Howling Songs trilogy saw him gradually move toward beer-soaked Tom Waits territory, but with "The Broken Man", he ditched the alcohol for solemn tales of loneliness and lost love.  Plus, the expressiveness of his guitar and piano playing continues to grow with every album. 

8.  Silent Servant, "Negative Fascination" (Hospital Productions)

I listen to a lot of mixes and podcasts but that music almost never crosses over into my album listening habits, and I've never been sure why.  I knew Silent Servant very well from his mixes, where he was equally at home playing deep, heavy techno as he was with 80's techno pop and industrial.  His debut full length album was a perfect melding of those two sides of his personality.  "Negative Fascination" felt familiar from the very first listen, I felt like I'd heard it a million times before, and in some sense I had because Silent Servant's podcasts had already prepared me perfectly for his vision of what a techno album should be. 

It's also really refreshing to hear a techno album that's shorter than forty minutes in length. 

7.  Swans, "The Seer" (Young God Records)

Swans deserve all the praise they're getting for their monumental comeback.  I'm a bit surprised that "The Seer" has had this kind of impact, because is certainly not an easy listen. It's long, it's devastatingly heavy, and it's not something you put on unless you're in exactly the right mood for hearing it.  In many ways, it's an album that you admire rather than enjoy, like a classic book that sits on your shelf for years and is rarely read.  Like all two-hour albums, "The Seer" has its flaws, but every one of those ups and downs is essential to the fabric of the album.  You can't just skip to the best parts, you need to be patient and wait them out to properly absorb the album's power.

6.  Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Allelujah!  Don't Bend!  Descend!" (Constellation)

I have to admit that the twenty minute compositions with the predictably monster endings might not age well over years of listening.  I think I learned my lesson there with "Yanqui U.X.O.".  Instead, it's the long droning interludes that hold the album together.  "Levez vos Skinny Fists ..." is their best album because of the combination of long dramatic pieces with the field recordings and other assorted oddites.

5.  Spiritualized, "Sweet Heart Sweet Light" (Double Six Recordings)

Despite its inconsistency, this was the best album from Spiritualized in over ten years, and a surprisingly uplifting, hope-filled effort considering a) most Spiritualized songs are about broken hearts and drug spirals, and b) the (literally) painful circumstances surrounding the recording.

4.  Actress, "R.I.P." (Honest Jon's Records)

Electronic music fans sometimes pine for those days in 1998 when Boards of Canada and Autechre were in their bleepy, moody phases and were releasing music that sounded much like this.  But "R.I.P." is much more than a nostalgia trip.  It not only meets, but easily exceeds the quality of those 90's benchmark albums, twisting those antiquated tones into fascinating new shapes, leaving nearly all the IDM copyists in the dust while still managing to sound almost nothing like them.  "R.I.P." feels like a partial redefinition of the boundaries of techno, and for me, this is the album where Actress finally started living up to all of the hype and then some.

3.  Raveonettes, "Observator" (Vice Records)

One could argue that a band whose music is as derivative as that of the Raveonettes isn't capable of making a great album, virtually by definition.  For instance, you could say it's ridiculous to claim that their 2008 album "Lust Lust Lust" is better than Jesus and Mary Chain's "Psychocandy" because if it's such a transparent attempt to duplicate the original, then it can't have anything new to say.  In trying to be too much like "Psychocandy", it can't make us think about that album in a way we haven't thought about it before.  

First of all, "Lust Lust Lust" is much better than "Psychocandy" because it's executed better -- with better tunes, better vocals, and better harmonies.  You can call the feedback and murky production a tie.

And "Observator" is much better than "Lust Lust Lust" because whereas the latter does one or two things well (because that's all it needs), the former does a bunch of things well, or more specifically, each song excels at something different from all the others.  

2.  Sigur Ros, "Valtari" (Parlophone) 

I still can't figure these guys out, just when I thought they might be going pop (on their last album), they went the opposite way and became the Icelandic Stars of the Lid.

1.  Beach House, "Bloom" (Bella Union)

I'm a bit tired of reading about other people's favourite albums of the year, not least because I feel bad about not having time to listen to them all.  Sometimes its better just to avoid tasks that seem too overwhelming.  And I can't stand critics lists where they try to justify their pick with some kind of higher cultural significance, i.e. "in a year where [signficant political event] dominated the landscape, [album] encapsulated the times perfectly."

As great as 2012 was for music, Beach House's "Bloom" was my album of the year by miles, and this was never in doubt almost from the first listen.  Even so, if you haven't heard it already then you probably don't have the time or energy to listen to it because just like everybody else (including me), you've got a backlog of other albums that you hope you catch up with one of these years.  I get that.  

So rather than sit in front of the computer for hours, hopelessly trying to write the perfect blurb about how incredibly great "Bloom" is, for people who will likely never get around to listening to it no matter what I say, I've picked out the best bits of the album -- the very best part each of its ten songs -- and edited them together for your listening convenience.  Now you only have to spend a breezy 1:45 to hear the very best that "Bloom" has to offer.  Well, perhaps not the absolute very best, because I could have picked out a few dozen fantastic moments just from the opening song, "Myth".  But I wanted to have the entire album represented.  

I have no idea if this will excite anyone enough to go out and hear the entire album for themselves.  The truth is that I was more worried about ruining the album for myself.  If you keep rewinding and rewatching a scene from a movie or TV show, you run the risk of ruining that scene by oversaturation, and losing your enthusiasm for the rest of the movie because you only want to fast forward to get to the best scenes.  Fortunately, I've heard the 1:45 version of "Bloom" a number of times already and it only makes me want to put the album on repeat and never take it off.  

Now that's a great album.  

"Myth", 1:12 - 1:20.  Probably the best Cocteau Twins impression ever ("Heaven or Las Vegas" era), which includes about 70% of the music recorded by the Cocteaus.  

"Wild" :59 - 1:08.   Out of all the "Saint Etienne goes shoegaze" moments on the album, this might be the best.  

"Lazuli", 1:59 - 2:13.   This short bridge might be the finest moment on the album.   

"Other People", 2:19 - 2:27.  Another brief bridge/interlude.

"The Hours", 1:16 -1:31.  Of course the best part of this song had to be the chorus, because it's the best chorus on the album.  It actually pained me to cut this clip down to less than fifteen seconds.  

"Troublemaker", 1:49 - 1:56.  It's the weakest song on the album, but the chorus still delivers.

"New Year", 1:54 - 2:05.  This is during the mid-song break where there's a "Loveless"-lite passage with wailing guitars and other noises that sound like seal cries.  

"Wishes", 2:20 - 2:27.  Yet another great instrumental passage.

"On the Sea", 4:40-4:51.  I had no choice but to go with the big finish.

"Irene", 4:02 - 4:09.  The repeated refrain in the song's last three minutes can't be topped, but it also can't be easily excerpted.  So I chose the moment when the guitar revs up again and starts re-entering the song in full force, because that's the exact moment when the "Hey Jude" repeat until forever ending becomes an inevitability.  

Best of Bloom by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Two techno links

In XLR8R's "The Art of the Mix CD" feature, Derek Opperman wonders if the mix CD still means anything in the age of free mixes available in every corner of the internet.  His panel of interviewees (all of whom recently released a commercial mix CD) say yes, although would you expect them to say no?  It would be like saying "don't buy my CD, there's no point to it".  The consensus seems to be that the CD is a more carefully curated mix of songs compared to the typical free online mix.  Plus the CD can offer other perks, like exclusive unreleased tracks and special packaging, that you won't get in an online mix.   

But you have to read all the way to the end to hear the punchline, courtesy of Jack Dunning aka Untold -- "I'm kind of glad that we got [this mix CD] out this year, because in one, two years' time, I don't know if it'll be viable from a distribution point of view".  One thousand words reporting on the supposed magic and relevance of the mix CD, but by the end, they basically admit that the mix CD won't exist in a few years time!  I also think that the music world will lose something forever when the mix CD goes the way of the homemade mixtape, and I'm also fairly sure that Dunning is right.  

Mario Kolonić Pytzek interviews journalist Philip Sherburne for Burek, and Sherburne is on point as usual.  I was surprised to read that he's grown out of clubbing somewhat and finds the time to spend 10-12 hours a day listening to and reviewing music.  I would have liked to hear more about how records generate "buzz" these days.  People have been discussing consensus building and the hivemind mentality (online or otherwise) since forever, but music discovery, purchase/download, and consumption habits are constantly in flux and I would have liked to hear more from Sherburne on the topic.  Plus, his comment that "writers and editors gravitate toward what is already getting 'buzz'" is a bit of a dodge -- after all, where does that buzz originate?  Don't those same writers and editors look to generate it from their own writings, at least some of the time?

Woob, "Have Landed"

The first Woob album, "Woob 1194" remains a masterpiece of ambient music and one of my ten favourite albums of the 1990's.  After countless listens, I can still be shocked and surprised by its endless twists and mood changes.  Woob's "comeback" album, "Repurpose", contained a mixture of new and reworked older material, and although the new recordings didn't reach the high standards set by his best 90's output, they were plenty good enough to satisfy curiosity seekers that Woob still had "it" after all this time.  After seventeen dormant years, coming back and sounding like a perfectly acceptable version of yourself is a victory for fans and the artist.

That's why Woob's newest album is so disappointing.  I've listened to this album a bunch of times, trying to figure out who or what this version of Woob is supposed to be, or for whom this music was written for, and I'm no closer to figuring it out than I was after my first listen.  Most of "Have Landed" comes across as an audition reel for future soundtrack work.   Parts of "Space Therapy" and "Thieves" could be a the beginnings of a new ballet production, or perhaps his attempt at rewriting a "Lion King" musical.  "Finale" is a slice of ambient jazz for those who wished the Em:t label releases would have sounded more like Ninja Tune.  As to whether any such people existed in the 90's (or today), I have my doubts.

Woob isn't afraid to experiment on "Have Landed", and there are plenty of odd sounds and dramatic shifts in mood that one would expect from a Woob album.  It's a breezy listen and seventy minutes tend to just fly by, but soundtracks usually aren't the main event, they're the background music that enhance the real action on the screen.  But there's no movie, and no action, which means that on its own, "Have Landed" is mostly forgettable once its over.