Sonic Youth is the perfect candidate for the first round of Discographied. As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy them, but haven’t spent time with a solid chunk of their catalog. At fifteen full-length LPs, that’s no surprise, but given the variance of opinion on their albums past Daydream Nation and Sister, it’s understandable. Fifteen is even a conservative number, excluding the eight EPs of experimental recordings released under the SYR banner, their self-titled debut EP, seven other EPs, soundtracks, singles, bootlegs, solo releases, and the Ciccone Youth side project LP. Needless to say, this endeavor will not be comprehensive. If you want a more comprehensive take on Sonic Youth, consult Mark Prindle.

I’ve chosen to listen to the fifteen LPs and their self-titled debut EP, disregarding any bonus tracks appearing on reissues. Will I miss out on some great songs by ignoring all of those other releases? Sure. Would hearing the noisier, more experimental side of Sonic Youth give me a better sense of their overall aesthetic? Naturally. Would listening to every last song drive me completely insane? Dear God, yes. If you’d like to suggest a few essential peripheral releases, I’m all ears, and will get to them in a bonus round once I’m through with their full-lengths.

This entry will cover their first EP and their first five LPs: Confusion Is Sex, Bad Moon Rising, EVOL, Sister, and Daydream Nation, which is a nice arc covering their 1980s releases and ending before their signing with Geffen.

Sonic Youth EP – Neutral, 1982

Highlights: “The Burning Spear,” roughly half of “The Good and the Bad.”

Low Points: The other three songs.

Overall: My prior idea of early Sonic Youth being “unbridled noise that slowly formed into more discernable songs” is completely destroyed by their debut EP. Their lone release featuring original drummer Richard Edson*, Sonic Youth is remarkably mellow. This EP has virtually no guitar noise or feedback and instead emphasizes rototom-heavy drumming, giving it a beatnik vibe in spots. Much like Killing Joke’s debut EP, Sonic Youth feels more in line with the prevailing musical tendencies of the post-punk era than with the signature style featured on their debut full-length. “The Burning Spear,” in spite of a notable Gang of Four influence, is the most memorable track, pushing the guitar chimes to the front and even adding a power-drill wail. “I Dreamed I Dream” features the earliest instance of Kim Gordon’s penchant for artistic sloganeering when she mumbles “Fucking youth / Working youth,” but this blueprint that got significantly better upon reuse. “She Is Not Alone” and “I Don’t Want to Push It” are purely for Edson fans, since the former plods along with only a few guitar chimes and some laconic Thurston Moore vocals keeping me awake and the latter actually features a drum solo. “The Good and the Bad” is an eight-minute long instrumental that begs for more guitar noise and less busy drumming. Gordon keeps it afloat at times, but it’s a losing cause. Cut in half, it would’ve been a solid track, but their guitar textures are simply not interesting enough at this stage to justify such aimless drifting.

Have I mentioned that this EP primarily features standard guitar tunings? Yes, that’s a big sign that Sonic Youth is a false start at the beginning of their catalog. Elements of their signature sound are present, but only “The Burning Spear” brings them to the forefront. Richard Edson simply doesn’t mesh with the group’s style and throws off the tone of these songs. Fortunately, they make some significant progress over their next fifteen LPs, so I won’t judge them too harshly for this one.

*Fun fact: I had no idea that Richard Edson was the parking attendant in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Vito in Do the Right Thing.

Confusion Is Sex – Neutral, 1983

Highlights: “(She’s in a) Bad Mood,” “Protect Me You,” “The World Looks Red”

Low Points: “Confusion Is Next,” “Making the Nature Scene”

Overall: From its queasy opening chords, Confusion Is Sex opens the proper Sonic Youth era. Gone is the beatnik vibe of the Richard Edson days; enter a newfound emphasis on confrontation and noise as bastions of their approach. Confrontation too often feels forced within music, but it makes an enormous amount of sense within Sonic Youth’s historical and cultural context circa 1983. It’s profoundly different from the more literal take on confrontation favored by hardcore bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat, but no less visceral. This context doesn’t excuse the too-frequent indulges of performance art dramatics, but I’ll take those over the boredom of “She Is Not Alone” in a heartbeat.

The Moore-sung “(She’s in a) Bad Mood” and the Gordon-fronted “Protect Me You” start Confusion Is Sex with an overwhelming sense of doom and gloom. There’s not much structure to be found, but the guitars chime and clang with spooky energy, the bass rumble amplifies the tension, and temporary drummer Jim Sclavunos’s performance is recorded poorly enough to sound menacing. Maintaining this atmosphere proves to be an issue, however. Feedback experiment “Freezer Burn” leads into a live take of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which is a head-shaking drop in fidelity, but at least the latter features Bob Bert’s powerful drumming. “Shaking Hell” starts off with the Gang of Four-esque funkiness from the Sonic Youth EP, but quickly takes a turn down the dark alley where Kim Gordon chants “Shake off your flesh” like a bloodthirsty vagrant. “Inhuman” is defiantly lo-fi rocker with an energy that I hardly anticipated during the first two songs. “The World Looks Red” features lyrics from Swans’ Michael Gira, but it’s Moore’s clear vocal performance and the dueling guitar noises—one sounds like a music box being played backwards at half-speed—that set the song apart. Sadly, the last two proper songs shit the proverbial bed.

“Confusion Is Next” is a clanging, tuneless headache that’s not excused by the punk blast in its final minute. “Making the Nature Scene” is a rambling, Kim-Gordon-yells-things track. At least the instrumental “Lee Is Free” ends Confusion on an interesting note, compiling an array of guitar textures that sound like malformed church bells and frog calls. Its impact is lessened, however, by my utmost certainty that Moore and Ranaldo have thousands of hours of practice tapes with similarly wonky tones.

I’ll commend Confusion Is Sex for being a record of intriguing ideas, but without structure and focus, too many of these ideas veer off course. I was foolish to expect the album to maintain the portentous clamor of its first two songs, but the chaotic flow and weaker tracks diminish the genuinely disorienting feeling of songs like “Protect Me You” and “Shaking Hell.”

Bad Moon Rising – Homestead, 1985

Highlights: “Brave Men Run (In My Family),” “I Love Her All the Time,” “Death Valley ’69”

Low Points: “Society Is a Hole,” “Ghost Bitch”

Overall: True to its title, Bad Moon Rising feels like a late-night drive down a west Texas highway, as sleeplessness slowly turns into insanity, everyone turns on each other, and morning never arrives. Without the chaotic bits interrupting the sense of portentous doom that began Confusion Is Sex, this mood can actually ebb and flow on Bad Moon Rising, much like the back-half of Wipers’ Youth of America. A consistent rhythmic drone and brief segues between songs tie the album together as a single piece. It’s a marked improvement over Confusion and a proper, timely statement (much like the Wipers’ album), but the individual songs settle into the whole instead of standing apart.

Bad Moon Rising starts on a high note with the mesmerizing arpeggios of “Intro” leading seamlessly into the relatively bright chords of Gordon’s “Brave Men Run (In My Family).” Gordon’s vocals capture the perfect level of distanced danger and violence, matching the song’s transition from its optimistically bright beginning to the heightened caution of its fade-out. Sticking with the highlights, “I Love Her All the Time” is a buzzing love song occasionally punctuated by bursts of distorted guitars and drums. “I’m Insane” appropriates industrial rhythms for Moore’s focused delivery of lines from the back covers of pulp fiction novels.

Moore and Gordon each provides a misstep. Moore’s “Society Is a Hole” demonstrates the album’s biggest strength—cohesion—also contributes to a notable weakness: at six minutes, it’s simply too long for a one-chord drone dismissal of modern society. “Ghost Bitch” is the album’s requisite dose of Kim Gordon irritation, her melody-free vocals chanting over rudimentary industrial pounding. The beginning of the song provides some interesting ambient feedback, but once the Gordon vocals come in, that’s all I hear.

The majority of the record falls into this rhythmic drone, but album closer “Death Valley ’69” breaks the tension with a much-needed dose of energy. (Can’t help but think, “We made it to the tire fire, guys! We did it!”) No Wave pioneer Lydia Lunch is the rare vocalist who is able to out-pretense Kim Gordon, which is an accomplishment on an album containing the pained drone poetry of “Ghost Bitch,” but her mirrored duet with Moore is less irritating and more intense than I’d expect. No surprise that this song is one of the hallmark tracks of early Sonic Youth.

Considering that “Death Valley ’69” and “Brave Men Run (In My Family)” comprised a pre-album single, I’m inclined to bring Bad Moon Rising down a notch, but its overall atmosphere is worth hearing as a whole. While those songs are the clear highlights, they also feed into a compelling album arc. Bad Moon Rising would, however, be better off as a mini-LP, trimming some of the fat from “Society Is a Hole” and “Ghost Bitch.”

EVOL – SST, 1986

Highlights: “Tom Violence,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Star Power,” “Expressway to Yr Skull”

Low Points: “Death to Our Friends” isn’t necessary, but it’s not bad either

Overall: I haven’t stressed this point until now, but pre-EVOL Sonic Youth suffers from the “You had to be there” syndrome of certain groundbreaking art. Those early records were particularly exciting because they caught a genre in transition—moving away from prevailing contemporary ideas, pulling in outside influences, expunging tired clichés. 25 years later, the shock value of that movement is largely gone, but those documents remain. I can appreciate those albums for what they are—for the 2010 listening experience of Confusion Is Sex or Bad Moon Rising documented above—but I can’t fully appreciate what it was like hearing those albums in the context of 1980s underground rock. So much of what Sonic Youth brought into underground rock has since been normalized, so things like wonky alternate tunings (Polvo, ahem), prepared guitar treatments, drone-oriented soundscapes (Kranky Records), and postmodern nightmares (Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F# A# Infinity would be an apt companion piece for Bad Moon Rising) now seem strangely commonplace. I can’t blame Sonic Youth for their timeliness and innovation, but I can prefer the more timeless material those early experimental records evolved into, starting with this aptly titled album.

Bad Moon Rising demonstrated Sonic Youth’s newfound ability to shape their avant-garde influences into an actual album arc, but excluding “Death Valley ’69” and “Brave Men Run (In My Family),” its songs were still dominated by their experimental lineage and their confrontational stance toward rock and roll norms (melody, for one). EVOL opts to subvert from within by embracing shorter songs and memorable melodies, trading confrontation for listenability. Those elements still take a backseat to the creative approaches to guitar and song structures, but their presence helps EVOL tremendously.

I’ll hand it to Kim Gordon; barring the first 1:15 of “Secret Girl”—an unnecessary soundscape delaying the entrance of the disturbingly pretty piano part—her three songs on EVOL are all top notch. “Secret Girl” shows that ornate beauty can still be unnerving. “Starpower” limits the vocals, letting the disorienting guitar and bass parts dominate the song. And “Shadow of a Doubt”? I’ll be stunned if I come across a better Kim Gordon song on one of the remaining albums. The layered harmonics—pulled lower than usual thanks to those alternate tunings—would alone make for a wonderful song, but it’s Gordon’s alternately hushed and feverish delivery that sets the song apart, reciting the combination of sex and murder inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train. The intimacy in “Shadow of a Doubt” is truly impressive; even in a song about two films, there’s no distance between the Gordon and the subject matter.

Thurston Moore also has three excellent songs—the excellent opener “Tom Violence,” the woozily propulsive “Green Light,” and the notoriously great closer “Expressway to Yr Skull.” Moore opens the last with “We’re gonna kill the California girls,” but unlike the threats of violence on Bad Moon Rising, this sentiment is marked by its nonchalance. It’s supposedly about Madonna and Sean Penn, but the lyrics are so vague that any cultural criticism is effectively irrelevent. “Expressway to Yr Skull” is all about the rise and fall of its guitar-driven rollercoaster. After a few ups and downs, the final two minutes of ambient echoes closing out the album feel earned. (I know I vowed not to listen to the bonus tracks, but a few times the cover of “Bubblegum” has come up after “Expressway” and it’s unendurably terrible.)

Another strength of EVOL is how even its weaker songs aren’t particularly bad, they just don’t measure up to “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Expressway to Yr Skull.” Lee Ranaldo’s “In the Kingdom #19” is a poem about a car crash with Mike Watt on bass (shortly after the D. Boon car crash, even). Its engine-revving guitars are neat, but after a few spins of EVOL I’m tempted to skip it. “Death to Our Friends” is a decidedly competent instrumental. Moore’s “Marilyn Moore” is essentially one of the droning cultural critiques from Bad Moon Rising performed with the cleaner aesthetic of EVOL, but there are a few moments when the buzzing guitar noises gives way to an affecting calm.

I can appreciate Bad Moon Rising, but I don’t anticipate ever loving it. EVOL, however, floored me on the first listen and kept me coming back for more. I’m almost reluctant to move onto Sister, since I’d rather stick with “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Starpower,” and “Expressway to Yr Skull” for a few more days. For the first time in their catalog, there’s no need to reconcile the difference in eras. EVOL has lost nothing in the last 24 years.

Sister – SST, 1987

Highlights: “Schizophrenia,” “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” “Stereo Sanctity,” “Cotton Crown”

Low Points: “Hot Wire My Heart,” the “Kill Time” part of “Pipeline/Kill Time”

Overall: The fundamental question about Sonic Youth albums changes with Sister. It’s no longer “Is this stage of their development interesting out of its historical context?” EVOL answered that one definitively. Now it’s “Is the songwriting on this album consistently good?” Sure, there may be a sharper change in the approach to the songwriting on a given album, presumably Dirty and NYC Ghosts & Flowers, but most of their avant-garde impulses will be pushed to non-album material from here on out, whether it’s the Ciccone Youth album, the Fall covers EP, or the SYR series of EPs. This divide maintains Sonic Youth’s experimental side (and their street cred), but it also means that their official LPs are now known quantities with a certain level of expected quality.

Sister certainly exceeds such expectations, both fitting into the prevailing sound of late 1980s indie rock and dictating what groups would rip off in the years to come. Virtually every one of these songs offers at least one of the following, if not all of them: a tricky verse guitar part; an insistent vocal hook; a mesmerizing noise bridge; a dramatically effective change of pace. If pure songwriting is the determinant of success, Sonic Youth nailed it. I spent far longer with this album than I anticipated, since every time I’d hear something new, some new song would stand out from the fray.

The majority of those highlights are Thurston Moore tracks, which vaults him to the top of the SY totem pole for this go-around. Although “Expressway to Yr Skull” is the most notorious song from EVOL, Kim Gordon contributed “Shadow of a Doubt”—its best song—and two other solid tracks, giving her a higher success rate than Moore. (Lee Ranaldo, buddy, you need more than one song to get in this fight.) This time it’s Moore with the tremendous success rate. Opener “Schizophrenia” is primarily a Moore song, a mid-tempo demonstration of their newfound melodic instincts and their invitingly warm guitar tone, but Gordon does appear midway through with a dreamy embodiment of the song’s titular theme. “(I Got a) Catholic Block” is a nervy post-punk song that covers a remarkable amount of ground in less than three and a half minutes. “Stereo Sanctity” features some excellent surf-inspired drumming from Steve Shelley, which forms a pounding underbelly for Ranaldo and Moore’s strafing. “Tuff Gnarl” wrote a good amount of 1990s indie rock with its opening verse (including at least one Rectangle song), but Moore doesn’t wear out its welcome, making the descent into noise even more noticeable. “Cotton Crown” is a Moore/Gordon duet—I’m surprised that there haven’t been more of these—that gradually twists its carefree lilt into the best noise bridge on the album. “White Cross” is one final blast of tricky indie rock to close out the album. Six original Moore songs (two with Gordon assistance), six winners.

Moore hardly has the exclusive rights to Sister, since Gordon and Ranaldo each contribute a great song of their own. Gordon’s “Beauty Lies in the Eye” is shockingly lovely, an even more drugged-up version of Mazzy Star’s desert shoegaze. Ranaldo’s “Pipeline/Kill Time” starts with two minutes of a downright boogie that easily makes up for the growing distance between his vocal performance and the increasingly melodic deliveries of Moore and Gordon.

There are a few slight issues. The cover of Crime’s “Hot Wire My Heart” gives some 1980s scene recognition to an early California punk band, but the song’s punk minimalism ultimately sounds too removed from the rest of the album. Making the song a b-side or hidden track would have been preferred. As much as I dig the “Pipeline” half of Ranaldo’s lone track, the “Kill Time” half does just that, wandering for about for two and a half minutes. Yes, it makes sense thematically in the song, but it takes away some of the momentum from “Stereo Sanctity” and “Tuff Gnarl.” Finally, Gordon’s “Pacific Coast Highway” is a love/hate affair; I love how they brought back the industrial nightmare of Bad Moon Rising with more focus, I love the switch to the floating instrumental mid-section, but I cannot stand how Kim Gordon says, “I won’t hurt you / As much as you hurt me.” Words cannot express how much her delivery of “me” irks me. If that’s the point, kudos, but that one syllable makes me itch to skip the song.

Sister lacks a definitive song like “Death Valley ’69,” “Expressway to Yr Skull,” or “Teen Age Riot,” but its consistency is remarkable, even with those minor missteps. It’s not the edgy early stuff, the first instance of excellent songwriting, or their double-album epic, but Sister’s comparatively less exciting dominant trait—being a great single LP—shouldn’t be undervalued. I suspect Sister will stick around my playlist for a while.

Daydream Nation – Enigma, 1988

Highlights: “Teen Age Riot,” “’Cross the Breeze,” “Total Trash,” “Hey Joni,” first two parts of “The Trilogy”

Low Points: “Eliminator Jr.,” “Providence,” lyrics in “The Sprawl”

Overall: Sonic Youth had certainly been important, exciting, and influential prior to Daydream Nation, but this album made them icons of alternative/independent rock. (That sentence was auto-completed by Microsoft Word once I typed Daydream Nation.) To put it in more personal terms, there was no debate as to the first Sonic Youth album to pick up when I was in high school. I doubt that I’d heard any of the album prior to buying it, even “Teen Age Riot,” because of my lack of indie-oriented friends, but I’d done enough reading to know which one to buy.

Being confronted with a double LP as my first taste of the group, however, seems foolhardy in retrospect. Loved “Teen Age Riot,” sure, but I could probably count my total spins of the entire album on one hand prior to this week. Getting stuck on a particularly great first track is a specific problem of mine (Rex’s Rex, Pinebender’s Things Are About to Get Weird), and the difference between the inviting riffs of “Teen Age Riot” and the dissonant propulsion of “Silver Rocket” was enough to make it happen. The latter features the noise bridge that so many EVOL and Sister songs utilize, but since I hadn’t heard those records, I couldn’t recognize that trick. Now that I can pick up on Sonic Youth’s structural tendencies, the album doesn’t seem so daunting. (I’m also thirteen years older, so I’d imagine that plays into it as well, but let’s return to the actual album.)

There’s no point to saying that Daydream Nation is great. It is. Any devil’s advocate arguments seem like pointless trolling. The most scathing criticisms (only 8/10 from Prindle!) I’ve found mention that a few of the songs don’t measure up to the highlights. I’d argue that it’s true, but ultimately irrelevant. “Eliminator Jr.,” the Kim Gordon punk conclusion to “The Trilogy,” is most frequently cited, but I don’t think its lady cock-rock is inherently bad, just a strange tonal switch following “Hyperstation.” The noise collage “Providence” is unnecessary, but reality check: is Sonic Youth really going to record a double album without including at least one formless noise collage? Come on. Fewer people critique Kim Gordon’s feminist, proto-riot grrrl lyrics in “The Sprawl,” but some, including myself, find them a touch tedious. Yet the song itself is great and most of it is instrumental. Finally, most “critical” reviews have issue with one of the three Lee Ranaldo songs, usually “Eric’s Trip” or “Rain King,” but I felt like all three of his songs are marked improvements over his past output, especially “Hey Joni.” On an album with fourteen tracks (counting “The Trilogy” as separate songs), two or three low points is expected. The overall quality remains superb.

The high points of Daydream Nation are almost unfairly assured as forward-thinking rock songs. The riffs feel more traditional, based more often on crystalline arpeggios and roaring chord progressions than the wonky noise leads that dominate those earlier records, but none of them feel dumbed down in the slightest. Even with its dreamy Kim Gordon open, “Teen Age Riot” never veers off course into a noise bridge. Prior to Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth reveled in those noise parts of the songs, even presenting them as the true attractions to the songs. This approach gradually evolved over the previous two records, but “Teen Age Riot” is when they recognize how great their hooks can be. Gordon’s “The Sprawl” and “’Cross the Breeze” each stretch out past seven minutes, but it’s hard to find a moment in “The Sprawl” when the melody isn’t floating along in its closing mist or one in “’Cross the Breeze” when its considerably momentum is completely gone. The beginning of “Total Trash” is so casually endearing, predicting countless Stephen Malkmus deliveries. “Hey Joni” is the relentless Ranaldo rocker that “In the Kingdom” and “Pipeline” could only hit at, choosing to accelerate rather than drift into aimless noise. The first two parts of “The Trilogy” cash in on the epic dynamics of “Expressway to Yr Skull” with even greater peaks and valleys. A few more songs merit mention as highlights, but that’s what happens with a classic double LP.

I keep thinking of Television’s Marquee Moon, one of the towering achievements of 1970s NYC punk, and it’s a telling, flattering comparison. Sonic Youth emerged from the fringes of this scene, initially embracing its more avant-garde tendencies, but the compelling lyrics and confidently creative guitar work on Daydream Nation refers back to that album’s combination of storytelling and songwriting. Sonic Youth took a strange, interesting journey to get to Daydream Nation, whereas Marquee Moon was Television’s debut LP, but each album manages to bring in the past, define the present, and look to the future. Daydream Nation is undoubtedly Sonic Youth’s greatest achievement. How many bands can pull off a double album with minimal fluff? Almost none. What about double albums that crystallize a genre and capture an era at the same time? Even fewer. Its monumental stature, however, doesn’t guarantee that it’s the best album to start with or that it will ultimately be your favorite Sonic Youth album. I may very well prefer Sister, since it’s simply easier to pick up and spin in the car, but that doesn’t take anything away from Daydream Nation.

How great are Amazon wish lists? I no longer have to feel guilty about having relatively esoteric tastes when it comes to gift-receiving, since the givers, in this case my in-laws (thanks!), don’t have to track down some hard-to-find LPs. There are limits to what you can find on Amazon, of course, but I enjoy hunting the out-of-print albums, so in-print albums or recent reissues make a nice foundation.

124. The Dead Texan – The Dead Texan CD+DVD – Kranky, 2004

I just finished writing my entry for The Dead Texan for my decade-end album list (spoiler alert!), which means three things: first, I enjoy the album a great deal; owning it was long-overdue; and it’ll be difficult to write about the album without rehashing everything I just wrote. Instead I’ll focus on an aspect of this release that I failed to mention in that blurb: the accompanying DVD. Consisting of seven videos done by Christina Vantzos and Adam Wiltzie, the video portion is very pleasant, if not as memorable or affecting as the music, although I suspect that wasn’t the aim. The repeated motifs, casual animation, and vivid colors are more of a jumping-off point for your own imagination. If only MTV had a late-night show like 120 Minutes/Subterranean for ambient music, but that seems rather unlikely. You can watch a number of these videos on YouTube, including “Aegina Airlines,” “The Six Million Dollar Sandwich,” and personal favorite “The Struggle,” although none of them quite match up to this fan-made clip of Stars of the Lid’s “Requiem for Dying Mothers, Part 1” starring Alf.

125. Tom Waits – Swordfishtrombones LP – Island, 1983

I own three albums from earlier in Tom Waits’ career (Closing Time, Nighthawks at the Diner, and Foreign Affairs) and I’ve heard a few of his later junkyard-percussion and gravel-voiced albums (Rain Dogs and Mule Variations), but I hadn’t ventured into a commitment with any of them for a very specific reason: I know when I should listen to Tom Waits, but I’m never in that situation. Here’s the ideal situation for putting Tom Waits on my turntable: it’s 3am, I don’t know what day it is, I live in a musty apartment above a bar in run-town part of town, and I am drinking whiskey. Oh, and I’m heartbroken, but it’s been a while since the break-up, so it’s a more general sense of heartbreak. That’s the perfect storm for Tom Waits, as I imagined it, and the odds of it ever happening for me are about one in eight million. Yet Waits seems so perfect for that mood that I’ve struggled to find a replacement setting.

This morning I gave up trying to match Waits to the proper mood and put my newly acquired copy of Swordfishtrombones on the turntable. It’s 11am on a Saturday morning in December. I’m wrapping presents for my wife and watching USPS trucks swarm the neighborhood. It’s a far cry from the parade of misfits Waits invokes, but these songs still manage to set their moods. I expected a greater emphasis on the clanging, junkyard songs, but what impressed me so much about Swordfishtrombones on my first listen was the variation. The instrumentation, the production values, the moods, the vocal styles—the album switches character from song to song, yet still holds together. This feeling sunk in when “Town with No Cheer” and “In the Neighborhood” closed out side A. Those songs are closer in spirit to his earlier recordings, but the mix, the lyrics, and the delivery all separate them.

What hasn’t sunk in yet is the content of the songs. There’s no lyric sheet included with this reissue of Swordfishtrombones—I don’t know if there ever was one—and a few of Waits’ more dramatic vocal inflections prevent easy transcription of his words. The recourse for this issue may be David Smay’s 33 1/3 book on the album, which I’ve added to my to-buy list, but until then, I’ll give Swordfishtrombones a few more listens to iron out the details. I’ve long respected Tom Waits for being such a profoundly original artist, but Swordfishtrombones marks the first time that my respect wasn’t accompanied by an equal level of distance.

126. The Feelies – Crazy Rhythms LP – Bar None, 1980 [Reissue]

I’ve listened to Crazy Rhythms a few times over the years, most recently in conjunction with my post about its 1986 follow-up, The Good Earth, but it’s never fully sunk in. I understand the appeal of the record—it’s an inspired blend of post-punk, new wave, and the nascent strains of college rock—but transitioning that recognition into genuine fondness has been tricky. Here’s my theory: I’ve encountered all of their typical elements too many times outside of the context of this specific band to be surprised by them. Mid-fi production values, hyper-strummed clean guitars, casually melodic vocals that occasionally skip toward an impassioned yelp, a live-sounding drum kit; all of these elements have filtered down into later indie rock bands as building blocks of the sound, particularly in the 1980s but also (more selectively) in the 1990s and 2000s, so their combination here sounds too familiar. The Good Earth sounds more stereotypically college rock, in part because that sound officially existed by the time of its release, in part because the group’s rhythm section had changed and was less idiosyncratic. Yet that record doesn’t carry the same acclaim as Crazy Rhythms, an album I could no longer ignore now that there’s a nice vinyl reissue out.

Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty also recently picked this album up, having noted its countless references in Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards memoir, which I’d also read late this summer. He primarily discusses the Feelies’ peers in the 1970s, namely Talking Heads and Devo, both of which make sense as points of comparison, but the key word he uses in relation to Crazy Rhythms is “hypnotic.” That’s the quality that’s stuck out to me as I keep flipping the slab of vinyl over. The rhythm section is both jittery and insistent, the fast-strummed guitars sound like 33rpm parts played at 45rpm, and Glenn Mercer’s vocals often chant lyrics fast enough to sound like an incantation. It’s a recipe for a rapidly vibrating hypnotic disk. The other point that Scott made that clicked with me is that it takes a few listens for songs to differentiate themselves from the whole, likely because of the hypnotic quality I just described. Yet after a few listens, I’m itching to hear specific songs again (“Loveless Love,” “Moscow Nights,” “Raised Eyebrows”). Perhaps Crazy Rhythms was a grower all along, but my advice would be to give it a few extra spins before passing judgment.

I feel dirty buying LPs from Amazon, since I’d much rather support a local record store or a mail-order place like Parasol, but in this particular case it was my only option. After going into home-buying mode and saying goodbye to discretionary spending for a few months, I looked at my credit card reward certificates as the only viable option for a fix.

It’s a little surprise that such a niche product has become regular business on Amazon, but even Best Buy stocks select vinyl nowadays. The music industry recognizes that they can’t afford to ignore any money-making possibility since CD sales continue to decline, so if anything, the vinyl resurgence should continue. I saw the LP for the new Pearl Jam album in Target; is Walmart next?

122. Mastodon – Crack the Skye LP – Reprise, 2009 – $15.49

I’ve made half-hearted, ultimately failed attempts in the past to get into Mastodon, but I’d read enough tempting descriptions of this album to merit a spin. Moodier than older Mastodon? Sure, I’d like that! Their prog-rock impulses take over? Why, that doesn’t sound too bad. Two epic songs? Yes, sign me up. Put two ten-minute-plus songs on an album and I’ll give it a chance.

All of these factors suggest Crack the Skye is another fringe metal title that appeals to me because of the ways it’s not metal. Faith No More’s equal parts hard rock and metal. Mr. Bungle’s self-titled LP is probably their most metal effort, but its avant-garde, ska, and cartoonish impulses are a huge draw. I didn’t get into Isis until Oceanic, when they let post-rock dynamics surpass Aaron Turner’s gutteral bellow. (Floodwatchmusic, my source of genuine metal criticism, called Isis “snooze metal,” which I can certainly understand from his perspective.) Pelican’s essentially an instrumental version of Isis, drifting further and further away from the doom metal tides of their first EP and Australasia and exposing their drummer’s limitations in the process. Those are the big names in my fringe metal collection.

By all means Crack the Skye waters down the group’s original ferocity—melodic vocals; clean guitars, overt prog-rock references—but I wouldn’t call it fringe metal. Mastodon is too driven by their decidedly prog-metal storyline to be anything but metal. For those unaware of Crack the Skye’s story, here’s Brann Dailor’s description from an interview with Metal Hall eZine:

“There is a paraplegic and the only way that he can go anywhere is if he astral travels. He goes out of his body, into outer space and a bit like Icarus, he goes too close to the sun, burning off the golden umbilical cord that is attached to his solar plexus. So he is in outer space and he is lost, he gets sucked into a wormhole, he ends up in the spirit realm and he talks to spirits telling them that he is not really dead. So they send him to the Russian cult, they use him in a divination and they find out his problem. They decide they are going to help him. They put his soul inside Rasputin's body. Rasputin goes to usurp the czar and he is murdered. The two souls fly out of Rasputin's body through the crack in the sky(e) and Rasputin is the wise man that is trying to lead the child home to his body because his parents have discovered him by now and think that he is dead. Rasputin needs to get him back into his body before it's too late. But they end up running into the Devil along the way and the Devil tries to steal their souls and bring them down…there are some obstacles along the way.”

What Dailor doesn’t mention within that brain-melting recap is how the death of his sister fits in, since she inspired the album title and a few songs have explicit lyrical references to her passing. Without this emotional undercurrent, I suspect Crack the Skye would come off as an impossible-to-follow exercise in astral travel, like a quickly fleeting memory of last night’s dream. Is it possible that the title allows me (or even encourages me) to read more into this connection than Dailor intended? Certainly, but I wouldn’t say that’s a drawback.

Crack the Skye’s biggest challenge is balancing the new and the old: the sung vocals and the guttural incantations, the mid-tempo melodies and the heavy riffs. Opener “Oblivion” has been compared to Alice in Chains in several places, which is telling. Much like Isis moving more toward sung vocals on In the Absence of Truth and overtly sounding like Tool, Mastodon can’t quite control what their less metal vocals reference. That doesn’t mean I necessarily dislike the melodic vocals throughout—Mastodon has a surprising ear for vocal harmonies—but “Crack the Skye” stands out so much because of the guest vocals from Neurosis’ Scott Kelly.

With regard to the riffs, the heavy, churning guitar parts in “Divinations,” “The Last Baron,” “Crack the Skye,” and “The Czar” stand out so much that I wonder why there aren’t more of them. The drifting, mid-tempo passages are fine, but there are simply too many of them. The natural recourse for this issue is getting into earlier Mastodon albums, specifically Leviathan and Remission. These two albums, especially the former, have surpassed Crack the Skye by a wide margin at this point. They’re crammed with complex, brutal parts and don’t have the bloat of Crack the Skye.

My ultimate take on Crack the Skye surprised me. I ended up preferring the elements that had held me back from getting into Mastodon in the past, not the moodiness and epic song lengths that enticed me this time. I suspect that if I’d already gotten into Remission and Leviathan first, I’d have a much higher inclination to dismiss Crack the Skye outright. Yet its bloat and moodiness come with the territory of its increased emphasis on prog-rock tropes, so I’m willing to overlook them to some degree. I certainly hope that Mastodon can split the difference on their next LP, but the biggest credit I can give to Crack the Skye is making me care about that next album.

123. The Twilight Sad – Forget the Night Ahead LP –FatCat, 2009 – $18

I passed on seeing Young Scottish Indie Rock in person back in October, when the Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks held a Battle of the Poorly Named Bands competition at Great Scott. Clicky Clicky favorites Frightened Rabbit did not attend, but it was two-thirds of the recent resurgence in solid Scottish indie rock. I’ll likely buy the WWPJ album down the line and reserve longer commentary on it until then, but their combination of dynamic swells, Gang of Four rhythms, and youthful energy is a nice palette-clenser for the thoroughly dour Twilight Sad, who I saw with Great Northern at the Middle East Upstairs a while back.

I enjoyed most of the first Twilight Sad full-length, 2007’s Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, but it took a number of spins for Forget the Night Ahead to sink in. Three key hurdles: 1. James Graham’s accent makes the already opaque lyrics downright intractable 2. The removal of additional instrumentation like the accordion makes the wind-tunnel guitar roar awfully samey after a few songs 3. Their attempts at quieter songs and up-tempo “pop” songs pale in comparison to the dramatic mid-tempo highlights. Essentially, I’d get through remarkable opener “Reflection of the Television” and solid first single “I Became a Prostitute” only to see my attention peter out by the middle of the album.

It took “The Neighbours Can’t Breathe” coming up on shuffle for me to give Forget the Night Ahead another shot, but it’s the key to the album. (Apparently it was included as a demo on their 2008 odds-and-sods collection The Twilight Sad Killed My Parents and Hit the Road, but that’s for super fans, which I’m not. “Untitled #28” has considerably clearer vocals and a greater emphasis on the organ part, but overall feels like a demo.) It has a compelling combination of urgency and obfuscation, as Graham mixes understandably pressing lines like “You keep pulling my heartstrings” with cloaked confessions like “And I’m not in the white when we play hide and seek.” Forget the Night Ahead comes down to this push/pull tactic—every hint of clarity, whether sonic or lyrical, is quickly combated with a swell of guitar feedback or a baffling line that’s repeated until you accept that it’s crucially important to Graham’s state of mind.

Forget isn’t as inviting as Fourteen Autumns, but its claws dig in deeper, its impact lingers longer. I suspect the change in aesthetic was driven by their live show, which left earlier material sounding too skeletal without its instrumental flourishes, but the songs certainly support this suffocating emphasis on guitar bluster. Would I appreciate some daylight on their next album? Certainly. But the constant dusk on Forget the Night Ahead is fine for the time being.

My long-overdue best of 2009 list is now up. You can sample these twenty fine records with links (YouTube and mp3) for songs from each album, or download the two-CD Recidivistic Best of 2009 mix, which, surprisingly enough, features songs from each of these albums.

The top five became clear to me by early November. Six through twelve were in consideration most of the year. Beyond that, it was a crapshoot. I considered including albums from Boston Spaceships, Constants, Do Make Say Think, J Dilla, Mission of Burma, A Place to Bury Strangers, Ring, Cicada (opted for Heroes of the Kingdom—more on that decision soon), We Were Promised Jetpacks, and Wye Oak, all of whom could have easily made it. There is a handful of great recommendations I’ve barely processed (including Floodwatchmusic’s number one, Blut Aus Nord), which may very well top a number of these albums in the near future. If I’ve learned anything about list-making, it’s that the finished product is always temporary. These are the twenty albums I’d recommend first if someone asked me today.

I’m still planning on doing a top albums of the 2000s list, but given the frequency with which my views change as I track down more great albums, it may be a while.

Shortly after my previous post about Gordon Withers’ funding drive for the mastering and pressing of this album, Withers thankfully reached his goal, which resulted in the MP3s being delivered to my inbox a few months ago and the LP being delivered to my house earlier this week. It’s nice to see my name on the back of a vinyl sleeve, especially when it’s accompanied by such great music.

121. Gordon Withers – Gordon Withers LP/MP3 – Self-released, 2009 – $10

Most of the discussion of Gordon Withers’ music has been focused on the circumstances surrounding its release, whether it’s the Callum Robbins benefit album of Jawbox covers or the Kickstarter funding drive for this release, that the actual music might have been overlooked. While I’d be amiss to ignore the fact that such a blindspot might have happened anyway—after all, it’s instrumental solo cello that we’re talking about—Withers’ combination of covers and originals deserves more than a passing spin.

I’ll tackle the five covers first. I was familiar with four of the five songs—the Notwist’s “One with the Freaks” being the lone exception—and if step one for a successful covers record is having inspired material, Withers nailed it. The Notwist cover reminds me that I slept on Neon Golden for too long, but a viewing of the “One for the Freaks” video establishes two things: first, they’re far more rock and less electronic than I remembered, second, Withers does an excellent job cello-izing the song’s vocal melody. Chavez’s “Unreal Is Here” always struck me as overwhelmingly melodic and surprisingly mellow for such an angular indie rock group, a statement that, “Yes, we can also do this style of music better than you’d ever imagine.” Because of this emphasis on melody and mood, it’s an easy, yet rewarding translation. (Note: “Tight Around the Jaws” would make for a real badass cover, as well. And don’t get me started on “Wakeman’s Air.”) Don Caballero’s “For Respect” benefits from the absence of drums, since there’s more than enough to replicate from the guitars and bass. (Plus, forcing his brother Stephen to step into Damon Che’s shoes seems like cruel and unusual punishment.) It’s the most technically impressive cover here, handling both the rigid riffs of the opening and the strafing runs of its close with equal aplomb. Burning Airlines’ “Flood of Foreign Capital” features J. Robbins on glockenspiel (he produced the album and appears throughout, but helping cover his own song is a nice touch), but Stephen Withers’ layers of percussion steal the show. Finally, “Forget” isn’t the first Mission of Burma song I’d suspect to be covered, but it closes the album with involving interplay between Withers’ multitracked cello and Robbins’ piano. It also reminds me that I need to listen to more of those then-posthumous MOB compilations.

I’m interested to see how many people took Withers up on the “Pick a song for me to cover” option, since those songs could easily comprise a nice mini-album. I know Jon Mount tasked Withers with Juno’s “The Young Influentials,” which should be wonderful, and someone else signed him up for a Jets to Brazil cover, but if I can accurately extrapolate his taste in music to his audience’s, I bet there are some other excellent songs in the queue.

There’s a necessary give and take between the covers and the originals, since it’s hard not to get excited about hearing a new version of “Unreal Is Here” or “For Respect” and that’s likely what draws listeners like myself to Withers in the first place, but what impressed me the most about Gordon Withers was the strength of the original songs. These songs combine classical approaches and indie rock structures. “Cast into the Sky” builds into a cacophonous peak before distilling this dissonant streak into a somber ending. The first half of “Revolving Doors” could easily be a cover of a long-lost uptempo indie rock song, but it’s the mid-song course correction into flowing melodies and slower tempos that sets the song apart. “Memories of the Future” is the closest the LP comes to chamber music, turning its foreboding deep line into a swirling undertow before letting it drift off into regret. “Defenestrations of Prague” is the clear highlight of the LP, a six-minute-long track loaded with starts and stops, sawing countermelodies, and energetic crescendos. “Defenestrations” proves that Withers has absorbed compositional tricks from the artists he covers and determined their best usage for cello.

Returning to the surface view of this album, Withers has done a remarkable job of getting people interested in his music, which I can’t imagine is an easy task for a solo cellist. The Jawbox covers album was an excellent introduction to his performances, as well as being a benefit for Callum Robbins, and Gordon Withers is a perfect next step, balancing covers and originals with equal weight. It’ll be interesting to see how his own work progresses as he spends more time as a member of J Robbins’ new band, Office of Future Plans, helming Quadruplestop, his four-person cello group, and contributing to We All Inherit the Moon, an ambient/post-rock group from various parts of the country, but if Gordon Withers is any indication, overlooking his own releases would be a huge mistake.

A few months prior to this visit, I’d wondered what was up in the world of Rachel’s. Since 2003’s superb Systems/Layers, their lone release was the Technology Is Killing Music EP, a scattershot eighteen-minute-long track in the spirit of the postmodern musings of its predecessor but lacking its emotional resonance. They had performed Systems/Layers with the SITI company in Urbana, Illinois in 2005, but since then, their only news items had been appearances on soundtracks like Hancock. (Director Peter Berg, who also helmed the Friday Night Lights film and still oversees the unbelieveably great Friday Night Lights television show, is no stranger to post-rock, having introduced the sporting world to Explosions in the Sky.) Last spring there were rumblings of a forthcoming Shipping News album, but those took a back seat to more pressing news.

As I mentioned on Twitter in the fall, Jason Noble’s been battling cancer since the late summer. You can read more about it on his Caring Bridge blog, and send him well-wishes. (Note: The donate link on the site appears to donate to Caring Bridge, not Jason Noble directly. They do provide an excellent service, but it’s worth noting.) I’ve only met Jason Noble once, at the Fugazi/Shipping News/Rachel’s show in Louisville back in 2002, but he was awfully nice to someone who was obnoxiously gushing at the time. Between Rodan’s Rusty, Shipping News’ Very Soon and in Pleasant Company, and Rachel’s Systems/Layers, he’s made some of my favorite music. I hope he continues to handle the treatment well and doesn’t suffer any setbacks. Get well soon, Jason.

In light of this development, I feel bad for Rachel’s pianist Rachel Grimes, whose solo debut Book of Leaves came out in September with little advance press. Seeing it in Newbury Comics was the first I’d heard about it, but since Rachel’s has a solid track record—except for the harpsichord song on Selenography, shudder—I eagerly picked it up.

120. Rachel Grimes – Book of Leaves LP – Karate Body, 2009 – $22

I had a reasonably accurate idea of what Book of Leaves would sound like—closest to Music for Egon Schiele or the minimal piano songs on Systems/Layers like “NY Snow Globe.” Although Rachel’s is a collective, the contributions of the three main members—Grimes, Noble, and viola player Christian Frederickson—are all unique enough that it’s noticeable when one takes lead on a song. I suspect that there’s a push and pull between Grimes/Frederickson and Noble for the balance between classical and rock elements, more often leaning toward the former (especially on Egon Schiele, but occasionally emphasizing the latter to great effect (“Full on Night [Recension Mix]”). What made Systems/Layers so compelling was how they circumvented this tug-of-war by choosing more postmodern approaches to song structures in lieu of their collaboration with SITI. There are more rock moments and more classical moments, but neither sticks out as much.

In a very literal sense, Book of Leaves picks up where Systems/Layers left off, since that album closed with “NY Snow Globe,” but on a broader scale, those intriguing postmodern approaches to song structures and sonics have been greatly reduced. Like Dusted mentioned, the most interesting songs are those that take off-kilter approaches: “Mossgrove” turns percussive punctuation into an absorbing drone, “Starwhite” takes the opposite approach and emphasizes the reverberating space in between chords, and “She Was Here” slates its repeated chords against field recordings. Such field recordings pop up a few other times on Book of Leaves, but more variety than just birds and insects would help the recording considerably. The other songs vary from reserved to exuberantly melodic, but my preferences lean toward the former, particularly for "The Corner Room" and “A Bed of Moss,” which closes out the album on a somber, emotional note.

Grimes’ biggest challenge was transitioning from the collective approach described above to a purely individual approach, and I don’t know if she conquered it on her first solo venture. I’ve spun Book of Leaves a number of times and too many tracks float by without clamping down, leaving me with a largely blank slate after the album’s over. I suspect that I’d like Book of Leaves more if she’d recruited a few key collaborators from the collective, but then it would essentially be another Rachel’s LP. I certainly wouldn’t mind getting another one of those, but I would also like to see how Grimes progresses as an individual performer. Hopefully one or both of these things happens.

Pressing note: The vinyl of Book of Leaves (which is in a gorgeous gatefold, by the way) was available in two editions at Newbury Comics, one with a book of sheet music (which was the case for the first 100 copies), one without. The price difference wasn’t enormous, so I opted for the sheet music. Who knows if I’ll ever practice the piano enough to actually learn these songs, but it was a unique option. This book of sheet music is still available direct from Rachel Grimes herself for $15.

Beginning my string of year- and decade-end content, here is my 2CD mix for 2009. (Yes, each of these will fit on a CD. Turn off the two-second gap in between songs.) You can download disc one here, and then download disc two here. Both ZIPs contain the iTunes album art. If either of these links goes down, let me know and I will repost. The track listings are below, which include links to individual YouTubes when available (click the song title), earlier writing on the album in question (click the album title), and additional commentary for albums or songs I haven’t beaten to death already (or will beat to death in the coming weeks in future entries of The Haul; quite a few of these are in the discussion queue).

I consider 2009 a strong year for music, especially considering that this mix doesn’t include many common picks for best songs or albums, i.e. Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Phoenix, St. Vincent, Bat for Lashes, the XX. If you have a strong case for any of these bands, post it in the comment section and I may give them another shot.

Now for the music I do like.

CDI: The One My Wife Will Listen To

101. Superchunk – “Learned to Surf” (3:50) – Leaves in the Gutter EP

Superchunk is apparently eschewing LPs and instead using EPs and singles as a feeder system for their future greatest hits compilation. I am fine with this development.

102. We Were Promised Jetpacks – “Quiet Little Voices” (4:18) – These Four Walls

103. Deerhunter – “Disappearing Ink” (2:22) – Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP

Just an EP and a single this year? You’re slacking, Deerhunter. (Yes, I know Atlas Sound released an album.)

104. Bill Callahan – “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” (4:15) – Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

105. National Skyline – “Bloom (Single Edit)” (5:35) – Bloom EP

106. Systems Officer – “East” (3:36) – Underslept

Pinback’s Zach Smith puts out a solo album that sounds remarkably like Pinback, yet I enjoy this considerably more than the last few Pinback albums.

107. Clark – “Future Daniel” (4:03) – Totems Flare

108. J Dilla – “Mythsysizer” (1:44) – Jay Stay Paid

109. Hammer No More the Fingers – “Radiation” (4:04) – Looking for Bruce

For a band that reminds me of the all-too-forgettable Schatzi, I do enjoy Hammer No More the Fingers’ mix of Archers of Loaf indie rock and cleaner hooks. You can read more about Looking for Bruce at Built on a Weak Spot.

110. Wye Oak – “For Prayer” (3:49) – The Knot

I’m on the fence on whether Wye Oak’s sophomore release is better than its predecessor and if it’s one of the top 20 albums of the year. My tentative answers are “Yes” and “No” respectively. The guitar work is considerably better, as “For Prayer” demonstrates, but the album misses the occasional levity of If Children.

111. Wilco – “One Wing” (3:41) – Wilco (The Album)

Wilco’s semi-self-titled LP is unlikely to drop jaws, but it’s a nice halfway point between the dad rock of Sky Blue Sky and the more explicitly postmodern LPs that preceded it. (Halfway might be an exaggeration. It's still dad rock.) I enjoy a few of its songs a lot, “One Wing” in particular, but I rarely listen to the album as a whole.

112. Boston Spaceships – “The Town That's After Me” (1:16) – The Planets Are Busted

At first I was surprised Bob Pollard had released two separate full-lengths with Boston Spaceships (The Planets Are Busted and Zero to 99) this year, but then I remembered that he’s Bob Pollard and that’s par for the course. Both albums are consistently good and will eventually be grabbed on vinyl.

113. Rachel Grimes – “Starwhite” (1:24) – Book of Leaves

114. The Twilight Sad – “The Neighbours Can't Breathe” (5:24) – Forget the Night Ahead

115. Heroes of the Kingdom – “Disasterol” (2:52) – HOTK

116. Tortoise – “Prepare Your Coffin” (3:36) – Beacons of Ancestorship

Pitchfork talks about how Beacons of Ancestorship features more of the dancier side of Tortoise. I knew my issues with this album could be condensed into one sentence!

117. Deleted Scenes – “Ithaca” (4:09) – Birdseed Shirt

I still like the songs, but the mix of this record is criminal. They were so much better live. Have J Robbins do the whole thing next time. He has restraint.

118. Fuck Buttons – “The Lisbon Maru” (8:15) – Tarot Sport

119. Jesu – “Losing Streak” (6:13) – Opiate Sun

Justin Broadrick’s biggest problem is quantity over quality, so a four-track EP of actual songs is a welcome return to the days of Silver.

120. Tim Hecker – “Borderlands” (4:30) – An Imaginary Country

CDII: Dude Rock Is Alive and Well

201. Future of the Left – “Arming Eritrea” (2:57) – Travels with Myself and Another

202. Part Chimp – “Sweet T” (3:05) – Thriller

203. Obits – “Widow of My Dreams” (4:21) – I Blame You

204. Raekwon – “House of Flying Daggers Ft Inspectah Deck, Ghostface, and Method Man” (3:51) – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt. 2

It’s a Wu Tang reunion with J Dilla beats. Method Man is in rare form.

205. Dinosaur Jr. – “Your Weather” (3:05) – Farm

I recently mentioned my malaise with Farm, but that doesn’t extend to the Lou Barlow songs, which continue to be excellent.

206. Built to Spill – “Pat” (2:36) – There Is No Enemy

My first listen to There Is No Enemy sputtered out before the halfway mark, but there’s some surprisingly inspired material on the back half, especially “Pat” and “Done.” I admittedly need to give this album more of a chance.

207. CFCF – “Crystal Mines” (3:58) – Panesian Nights EP

CFCF’s full-length Continent features deeper hues of the 1980s electronic revival, but I enjoy the 8-bit feel of the EP more. Both are worth checking out.

208. A Place to Bury Strangers – “Exploding Head” (3:32) – Exploding Head

The guitars are straight shoegaze, but everything else sounds like 1986, which predates shoegaze. Strangely jarring.

209. Constants – “Genetics Like Chess Pieces” (5:45) – The Foundation, The Machine, The Ascension

210. Port-Royal – “Balding Generation (Jatun Remix)” (5:02) – Balding Generation EP

Port-Royal’s Dying in Time is two steps forward, two steps back from Afraid to Dance. For every new texture, there’s a recapitulation of the Moog melody from “Anya: Sehnsucht.” For every compelling vocal delivery (“Anna Ustinova”), there’s one that goes too far into electro-pop (“The Photoshopped Prince”). Yet despite these setbacks (and a bloated runtime), I’ve still listened to it an awful lot. “Balding Generation (Losing Hair as We Lose Hope)” is a highlight, but I prefer the stuttering glitch of Jatun’s remix, which condenses the song’s emotional crest into a more digestible package. Additionally, it got me excited for Jatun’s Blanket of Ash LP, which comes out in March.

211. Russian Circles – “Malko” (4:33) – Geneva

Russian Circles officially passed Pelican this year.

212. Polvo – “Beggar's Bowl” (4:59) – In Prism

213. Mastodon – “Divinations” (3:28) – Crack the Skye

214. Gordon Withers – “Defenestrations of Prague” (6:06) – Gordon Withers

215. Mission of Burma – “Comes Undone” (3:08) – The Sound The Speed The Light

216. Isis – “20 Minutes / 40 Years” (7:04) – Wavering Radiant

217. Last Days – “Life Support” (5:27) – The Safety of the North

218. The Life and Times – “The Politics of Driving” (5:01) – Tragic Boogie

Noted exclusions include Neko Case, Shannon Wright, Pelican, Sonic Youth, and the Flaming Lips. Who else did I miss?

117. Polvo – In Prism 2LP – Merge, 2009 – $24

In Prism was by far my most anticipated album of 2009. It was a big enough surprise that Polvo played reunion shows last year, but when they unveiled a few new songs along with greatly revamped classics, I was stunned. I became hopeful that they’d record a new album, which soon enough became reality. By the time that “Beggar’s Bowl” appeared as an advance mp3, I was practically frothing at the mouth. Response to “Beggar’s Bowl” was a bit mixed—the general response was that it was a good song, but it didn’t feel Polvo enough—but I make no qualms about my affection. It’s a stomping, metallic update of their old sound. When I saw Polvo at Brooklyn Bowl in July, I was practically frothing at the mouth for In Prism, yet I’d have to wait a few more weeks for the full album to leak and until September 8 for the vinyl. It’s now January, which should be enough time for me to process In Prism.

I won’t make any bones about it: I love In Prism. Is it the best Polvo album? Probably not. Does it sound exactly like vintage Polvo? Not really. Is it far, far better than Shapes? Yes! The last question was the softball I’d lobbed to the album when I first heard it—be better than Shapes, come on, you can do it—but that’s selling In Prism wildly short. They’re simply not going to be the same band they were twelve years ago, which is entirely understandable given their musical experiences since then, the group’s new drummer, and their own ideas about not merely rehashing the past. The biggest difference between In Prism and vintage Polvo is the approach to their guitars. The queasy mid-fi chimes and swoops of Today’s Active Lifestyles and Exploded Drawing had been polished up a bit for Shapes, but the change is far more noticeable now. Guitarist Dave Brylawski even admits to playing in standard tunings on In Prism, which is shocking considering the bonkers alternate tunings they used for those earlier albums. The two big results of this change are 1. a diminished emphasis on those wonky guitar licks as foundations for their songs 2. a higher level of control for song structures and layering. It’s a give and take, but if these developments are the manifestation of the dreaded “maturity,” Polvo has aged marvelously.

The second biggest difference between In Prism and older Polvo albums is the split between Ash Bowie songs and Dave Brylawski songs. By This Eclipse and Shapes, Brylawski’s classic rock influences were readily apparent in his songs, but since Polvo’s original demise, Brylawski’s been keeping busy, most recently as the frontman for Black Taj. That band’s 2008 release Beyonder felt a lot like Brylawski’s later Polvo songs, with an occasional swagger added from being the primary frontman. I expected his songs on In Prism to be close to Black Taj songs, perhaps even repurposed riffs, but that’s not entirely the case. They don’t feel disconnected from the rest of the album, but they do maintain their own separate flavor. “D.C. Trails” ambles along like some of the mellower songs on Fugazi’s The Argument before concluding with some impressive guitar pyrotechnics. “City Birds” has a touch of a classic Polvo riff in its wandering, warbling lead guitar, which flirts with the vocal melody. “Dream Residue/Work” is the most sonically interesting of Brylawski’s songs, starting with an overdub-heavy introduction before hitting a push and pull between driving vocal melodies and moody guitar passages. With more energy, these songs would be highlights of the album, but as is, Brylawski’s laid-back vocal performance relegates these songs to solid album tracks.

Whereas Brylawski’s kept busy with Idyll Swords and Black Taj, Ash Bowie’s songwriting output has been minimal since Polvo’s initial split. His 2000 solo debut, Libraness’s Yesterday and Tomorrow’s Shells, was a cleaning-out-his-closet collection of sketches and demos, which was nice for obsessives but not particularly memorable. He’s spent time as a bassist for the BQs and a touring guitarist for the Fan Modine, but neither of those low-profile gigs even matches his previous stint as Helium’s bassist. This period of compositional silence (he’s supposedly close to finishing two Libraness albums, but I’ll believe that when I hear them) could’ve resulted in a rusty comeback, but Bowie’s five songs on In Prism are all exceptional, like he’d cashed in twelve years of inspiration to prove that he’s still got it. “Right the Relation” is the closest to classic Polvo, starting with a bent-note riff that leads into new drummer Brian Quast’s confident, muscular beat. It’s loaded with stops and starts, left-turn riff changes, nimble bass lines from Steve Popson, and a charged Bowie vocal performance. “I killed my creation / To right the relation” could easily apply to the reunion itself, and after that opening salvo, consider the relation righted.

Three more points about the previously discussed “Beggar’s Bowl”: First, even if Popson and Quast bit the thump-thump-thump bassline and drum breaks from Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” it's a smart theft. Second, the lyrics and vocals update earlier Polvo dream narratives like “Fast Canoe” and “When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams,” which was always my favorite style of Ash Bowie lyrics. Third, the dramatic build-up is still enthralling, and the seamless transition back to the main riff is impressive. Whether “Beggar’s Bowl” sounds like classic Polvo is irrelevant; if this song is the start of the next chapter, I can’t wait to read more.

“The Pedlar” is Bowie’s pop song on In Prism. It somehow turns a jittery guitar noodle into a workable lead, then rewards your patience with an atypically flowing chorus melody and layered synth flourishes in its outro. “The Pedlar” splits the difference between new Polvo and the catchier parts of Magic City-era Helium (dragons not included). I’m surprised it wasn’t released as a single, but it’s not 1994 anymore, so indie rock seven-inches aren’t compulsory.

As great as those three songs are, Bowie’s finest achievements on In Prism are its two longest songs, “Lucia” and “A Link in the Chain.” The former begins with a mournful, reserved introduction, with Bowie’s quivering voice reflecting on “The color of leaves on October trees” before a dramatic crash of guitar. For most bands, this shift from quiet to loud would be enough to carry the song, but at the 2:25 mark, “Lucia” changes course completely, pulling in dueling guitar leads, an enthusiastic Bowie vocal (“New moon / Shadows the sky / Open your eyes and tell them goodbye”) before hinting at the reticent chorus of “Lucia / I thought you were gone.” Midway through, the song splits the difference, building back up with hand percussion, cello, and Bowie’s ghostly titular evocation. Those knotty guitars keep pace, leading the song back to its original charging tempo. It’s a constant tug of war between these elements, but it never feels out of control. Unlike the aforementioned “When Will You Die” from Exploded Drawing, which rambled on far too long for my liking, “Lucia” earns every second of its 8:15 runtime. It’s not quite as long as the album closer, “A Link in the Chain,” which weighs in at 8:47, a ponderous exploration of Polvo’s new motifs. There’s Brylawski’s mid-tempo fetish, which Bowie anoits with restrained emotion on “Now with a gentle word / You send a chariot to send me home,” the woozy sonic burst of “Dream Residue/Work,” the emotional range of “Lucia,” and the layered guitars of “Beggar’s Bowl.” It’s essentially 1970s progressive rock in range and structure, but unlike the classic rock appropriations on Shapes, it always feels natural. The tides of guitar that conclude the song are as majestic as anything Polvo’s done before.

Comparing Polvo’s reformation to those of Mission of Burma and Dinosaur Jr. is surprisingly favorable for Polvo. Mission of Burma’s comeback has been remarkably rewarding (see below), equaling the energy and passion of their earlier work if not quite the same level of inspiration, although The Obliterati by no means lacks inspiration. Dinosaur Jr.’s comeback has been universally acclaimed and I certainly enjoyed Beyond, but I felt diminishing returns on Farm for the very reason people have praised it. Dinosaur Jr. is too comfortable playing what they think a classic Dinosaur Jr. song should sound like, even if the band dynamics nowadays are 180 degrees different from that classic era. Isn’t there an inherent laziness in choosing not to progress and instead giving listeners exactly what they expect? Polvo’s reunion shows demonstrated a welcome unwillingness to cede to those expectations, choosing to tear older songs apart and build them up anew, and In Prism features a similar view of the past. There are ties to their past sound—“Right the Relation,” especially—but most of the record takes new directions, new approaches, some of which you may very well not like as much as Exploded Drawing. If the crowning achievement of the new Dinosaur Jr. albums is that they sound like their vintage SST albums, doesn’t that imply that you still prefer You’re Living All Over Me and Bug? I do. Even with Mission of Burma, my fondness for The Obliterati never threatens to surpass my appreciation of Signals, Calls, and Marches or Vs. Even though I answered it in negative, my earlier question about whether In Prism is the best Polvo record still matters, since I had to debate it. In Prism might not equal Today’s Active Lifestyles or Cor Crane Secret, but five months in, I prefer it to Exploded Drawing, which is still quite an achievement. Who knows how these albums will rank in another twelve years.

118. Mission of Burma – “Innermost” b/w “… And Here It Comes” 7” – Matador, 2009 – $6

I had to double-check Matador’s web site to be sure that this double A-side single wasn’t an advanced shot from Burma’s upcoming The Speed The Sound The Light LP, since Burma did that series of one-sided twelve-inch records in advance of The Obliterati without including any new material. Sure enough, “Innermost” and “…And Here It Comes” will not appear on the album.

I do take issue with calling it a double A-side, however, since “…And Here It Comes” has all of the direction, melody, and momentum on this single. The chorus is as good as anything on The Obliterati, which seriously whets my appetite for the new album. “Innermost” feels downright wonky in comparison, pushed forward by a big bass sound and an off-tempo. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but for now I’ll keep the single on “…And Here It Comes.”

119. J Dilla – Donuts 2LP – Stones Throw, 2006 – $15

I went to Newbury Comics hoping that another big recent release—Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt II—would be pressed on vinyl and available for purchase, but that didn’t happen (and to my knowledge, still hasn’t). It did get me flipping through the hip-hop vinyl, in which I found J Dilla’s Donuts. I’d recently skimmed it and felt interested enough to merit the purchase, so I went with an increasingly rare impulse buy of a new LP.

If I paid more attention to hip-hop, I would’ve known about J Dilla (Jay Dee) years ago, since he was quite busy in the mid 1990s producing tracks for artists like the Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest. Instead, I only heard about his solo albums after the fact. J Dilla died of the blood disease TTP in 2006 at the age of 32, just three days after the release of Donuts. It’s the sort of life story that could cloud my judgment of an artist’s work, but Donuts would be surprisingly affecting even without its tragic context.

Donuts’ closest aesthetic match in my collection is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, another instrumental hip-hop album, but J Dilla takes an entirely different approach to sonics and song structures. Vocals and samples are chopped up and looped, creating a swirl of syllables that eliminates any need for an MC. Soul samples dominate the underbelly, but almost every song has some ingenious touch that turns my ear. The most arresting aspect of Donuts is its architecture. At 45 minutes and 31 songs, song ideas never overstay their welcome and frequently leave me wanting more. Yet it’s how these pieces fit together that truly impresses. It reminds me of Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes in how most tracks make far more sense within the context of the whole, how tracks reflect upon each other, how a switch in tone or tempo makes one song sound that much better. One comment on Stylus’s review of Donuts mentioned how the reviewer failed to mention a single song title, but that makes complete sense to me. Directing a listener to sample one song in the middle of the album defeats the purpose.

31 short songs without structural doubling or tripling is a veritable pupu platter of production treatments, so it’s no surprise that most tracks from Donuts have been utilized by MCs on their albums and mix tapes. Yet right now, I’m not itching to hear the rapped-over versions. No slight to any MC choosing one of these beats—good taste, at least—but being able to hear these songs once and figure out more of the overall puzzle is a more enticing proposition.

Jeff Garber’s been clearing the National Skyline vaults this year with a series of EPs, proving that the eight years between This = Everything and Bliss & Death (which I covered here and here) weren’t comprised solely of Year of the Rabbit, the Joy Circuit, and National Skyline’s The Last Day EP. These EP tracks are culled from a cast-aside National Skyline album called Faux Evil, a brief foray as the Black Swan, and b-sides from the Bliss & Death sessions. I anticipate the third EP to be more of the same, but he may very well be working on some all-new material for that one. [Editor’s note: No idea if this third EP will ever come into existence.]

The barometer for success on both of these EPs is straightforward: the closer to Bliss & Death and the further away from The Last Day the better. I’m not expecting anything like the National Skyline EP or This = Everything, but I don’t want to relive the yearning modern rock of “The Last Day.”

As I mentioned before, I hate buying MP3s and would’ve bought physical copies of these EPs long before their digital counterparts, but I had $10 of Amazon MP3 store credit to spend and only one logical use. If Garber decides to press all of this stuff on vinyl I’ll gladly fork over the money for it (hint hint).

115. National Skyline – Bloom EP MP3s – Adventure Broadcasting, 2009 – $4.99

With two alternate versions of songs from Bliss & Death, the Bloom EP feels like a standard CD5 from the mid 1990s. The title track gets a single edit, done for its video, which will make it easier to slot into my year-end mix, but I probably could’ve done a reasonable edit on my own. “Edge of the World” appears in an acoustic take, which is pleasant but hardly necessary. So the EP comes down to its three unreleased songs. You can read Garber’s origins for the songs here, but it’s worth making those comments a bit more transparent.

“Gravity (I-IV)” is the clear winner, a nearly eight-minute-long take on shoegaze-informed 1990s rock that Garber deemed too heavy for Bliss & Death. While I think the 1990s part would make “Gravity” stick out on the album more than its comparative heft, it’s a nice venture into Fantastic Planet-era Failure and probably more interesting than anything that came out of Garber’s collaboration with Ken Andrews himself, Year of the Rabbit. (Don’t expect me to return to that album anytime soon.)

“Lights Out” and “Silence” are more mixed. The former was deemed too poppy for the album (accurate) and ultimately comes off as a more musically interesting version of “The Last Day.” Trite lyrics like “Wearing all the things that nobody wears / Whoa-oh” don’t do Garber any favors, but the post-U2 guitar textures are fine. “Silence” starts out as a muffled piano ballad before bursting out multi-tracked guitar leads. It ends with a return to the minimal aesthetic of the intro, but I’d prefer if he’d stuck with that style the whole song.

116. National Skyline – Look into My Eyes EP MP3s – Adventure Broadcasting, 2009 – $4.99

Look into My Eyes features four new songs and one alternate take of a Bliss & Death song. The latter is a drum-programming-happy version of “Glimmer,” which sounds more like This = Everything but the aesthetic doesn’t quite fit the song.

The rest of Look into My Eyes stresses something that first came to me regarding Bliss & Death: the outros are almost always the most interesting part of the song. The title track is a zero-sum game, as negilible modern rock guitars and trite lyrics are balanaced out by intriguing outro and some better vocal melodies. “Hope?” starts with more of the mid-tempo semi-acoustic foundation from much of Bliss and Death, but its extended outro is a great payoff, layering synth trumpets, a focused guitar arpeggio, hand claps, and strummed acoustics with aplomb. It could have easily been on the LP. The two-minute “In Flight Movie” bucks the trend by being a short instrumental, but I could argue that it’s an outro waiting to happen. Finally, “Someone Else’s Dream” technically kicks in during the bridge, but the second half of the song is so much better than the relatively bland beginning.

I have to wonder if Garber salvaged these songs by tacking on the interesting parts. While that may sound cynical, I look at it this way: imagine how good his next LP will be if he starts with the outros.

Shortly after its March 2008 release, my friend Scott recommended Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards, his memoir about growing up in New Zealand and New York, getting into music, and recording and touring with both Galaxie 500 and Luna. The only hold-up was that I was almost completely unfamiliar with Wareham’s music, despite being inundated with references to Galaxie 500 when I was getting into second generation slow-core bands like Codeine, Rex, and Low. When I found a remainder copy of Black Postcards, I figured, “What the hell,” snapped it up, and read it over a few days.

Black Postcards is an entertaining read, even if Wareham isn’t always the most likeable narrator. The early sections on growing up in New York and getting into punk rock and post-punk were the most appealing, but I also enjoyed his trip up to Boston to attend college at Harvard and the formation of his first “real” band, the slow-core forefathers Galaxie 500. His tours of duty with Galaxie 500 and Luna provide excellent inside information on what it was like to be an indie rock band in the late 1980s and a struggling major label band in the mid 1990s, but they also paint an occasionally unflattering picture of Wareham as a motivated, unbending band leader. Wareham can’t disguise how his personality clashes with in-band couple Damon and Naomi led to the break-up of Galaxie 500. He also can’t gloss over how his on-tour affair with new Luna bassist Britta Phillips (once the singing voice of 1980s cartoon singer Jem) broke up his marriage with the mother of his child, which leads to some painful recollections of his life around the time of his divorce. Wareham’s glib sense of humor provides some levity during this part of the book, but tabloid fodder rock and roll cliché of that event is difficult to ignore.

If you’re interested in the three distinct era of rock music covered, Black Postcards is worth a read, but knowing the songs he discusses ahead of time would be a help for the Galaxie 500 and Luna specific sections. My recourse for this knowledge gap was to quickly run out and grab On Fire, the Wareham album that carries the most critical acclaim and came off the best within Black Postcards.

114. Galaxie 500 – On Fire LP – 20 20 20, 2009 [1989] – $18

I’ve dabbled with Galaxie 500 and Luna before, specifically this album for an incarnation of iPod Chicanery, but the only thing I actually owned from either group was the one-track promotional single for “Chinatown.” (Side note: Is any format more loathsome than the one-track promotional single? I know I have a few of these floating around from my used CD bin days, and every time I was excited enough about a dollar CD not to look at the songs included until I got home. Potential match: the four song promotional single, which includes the album mix, the single mix, and two call-out hooks.) The Galaxie 500 template is relatively simple: loping tempos, reaching, falsetto vocals, low-key lyrics, vaguely autobiographical lyrics, lightly psychedelic guitar solos, and a general debt to the Velvet Underground. That group is a notable blind spot for me, but I still know a mid-tempo Velvet Underground song when I hear one, and Galaxie 500’s songs aren’t usually that far off from it. The best element is Wareham’s guitar work; he fills a lot of space with relatively few chords, treating the canvas with light brush strokes and muted reverb.

On Fire is a nice addition to my Sunday afternoon listening pile, but two things keep me from pulling it out more often and/or buying more of Wareham’s music. First, Wareham’s voice is fine when he isn’t reaching too much, but when his falsetto begins to crack on “Strange,” I long for the Naomi-fronted “Another Day,” which comes much closer to traditional lilting dream pop vocals. (If Black Postcards taught me anything, it’s that Wareham would never cede control of the vocals for fear of losing his stranglehold on the band.) Wareham’s vocals are likely an acquired taste, but I’ve listened to On Fire enough times to accept that I’m never going to love them. Second—and this point will either sound harsh or long-overdue—Galaxie 500 is not an exciting band. Like most mid-tempo slow-core, the threat of boredom is strong, and after a side of On Fire, I’m just about there. Having a vague sense of Wareham’s typical sound while reading Black Postcards made me scratch my head about his major label deal. While I can’t deny that there were some leftfield hit singles in the 1990s alternative scene (Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You” might be the closest stylistic kin), it’s hard to imagine one of his songs becoming a hit in anything other than adult alternative, which isn’t the easiest format to break a song. Potentially irritable vocals? Not remotely exciting? Let’s sign them right now!