Dannie Flesher, seen here next to long-time partner Jim Nash (who also died in 1995), was a pivotal figure in my musical development. Wax Trax! was my original record label ideal, before Factory, Warp, Suction, Kranky, Ghost Box, Type, et al. As a BMG and Columbia House subscriber several times over, I ordered just about every CD labelled "industrial". Unfortunately for me, much of it was pure crap, including much of the stuff from Wax Trax at the time. The label may have been on the decline, but it was also becoming an essential repository as a distributor for Warp and other UK techno, the likes of which I'd discover a few years post Wax Trax phase. Yet, I've been returning to much industrial/EBM (both on and off Wax Trax!) during its golden period. During the mid-1980s when almost everything turned to shit, Wax Trax style industrial was some of the only interesting music being made, and also a much-neglected link to acid house. Before I heard the news today about Flesher, I was listening to LFO's Frequencies on the way to work and couldn't help but notice how the rubbery bass and artificial-trash-can percussion resembled nothing less than Wax Trax-style industrial dance (and they certainly exploited that link too at the time through projects like Al Jourgenson's Acid Horse, though no one seems to have noticed).
That this dude was 1 year older than me terrifies me. Yet, he also seemed to have crammed more life into 29 years than I could have dreamed of. I only saw Reatard live once, on a street corner in Philadelphia outside of Sailor Jerry's, but if there ever was a case to be made for the continuance of punk (and, as you might guess, I don't there is much of one), Reatard was it. I figure he might've appreciated the inappropriateness of these selections...
TOP SHELF ALBUMS 2009 1. Mordant Music- SyMptoMs 2. Oneohtrix Point Never- Drifts 3. Fuck Buttons- Tarot Sport 4. Dan Deacon- Bromst 5. Broadcast and the Focus Group- Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age 6. Brock Van Wey- White Clouds Drift On and On 7. Animal Collective- Merriweahter Post Pavillion 8. Mount Kimbie- Maybes EP 9. Black Moth Super Rainbow- Eating Us 10. Ducktails- Ducktails 11. Roj- The Transactional Dharma of Roj 12. Leyland Kirby- Sadly, The Future is Not What it Was 13. Prodigy- Invaders Must Die 14. Annie- Don't Stop 15. The Flaming Lips- Embryonic 16. Matias Aguayo- Ay Ay Ay 17. Pimmon- Smudge Another Yesterday 18. Jon Hopkins- Insides 19. Falty DL- Love is a Liability 20. City Center- City Center 21. Nomo- Invisible Cities 22. Martyn- Great Lengths 23. Sunn 0))- Monoliths and Dimension 24. Hecker- Acid in the Style of David Tudor 25. Kreng- L'Autopsie Phenomenale De Dieu
HONORABLE MENTIONS (in alphabetical order) Bibio- Vignetting the Compost, Elegi- Varde, Robert Henke-Atom/Document, Junior Boys- Begone Dull Care, Kid606- Shout at the Doner, Moderat- Moderat, Neon Indian- Psychic Chasms, Duncan Powell- The Push EP and Remixes, The Present- The Way We Are EP, Moritz Von Oswald- Vertical Ascent, Weird Tapes- More Tapes/ Get Religion EPs
PINNACLE SONGS OF 2009 For individual tracks, I tried to limit myself to one song per artist for songs, but this proved too difficult in some cases. In these instances, honorable mentions were selected,usually vastly different examples of works, remixes, or b-sides to the A.
**The Quietus has a mostly great series of "Wreath Lectures" on the ending decade worth your time
**The Wire also has a remarkably unirritating list of bests for 2009 with Broadcast and the Focus Group and Oneohtrix Point Zero (whose double disc I just got and am spinning madly) at the top!
Also, a (shorter) review is up on the newly reissued and amazingly never released collaboration between Patrick Cowley and Jorge Socarras (of Indoor Life). I'd never heard of Indoor Life, who are fantastic, and all I'd heard of Cowley was his anthemic "Menergy". Do yourself a favor and do a quick Youtube search for anything Patrick Cowley put out, because it's all amazing. It's nothing like the album in the review linked to above (which is far more post-punk/proto-synthpop/art-pop), but I haven't found a bad tune in the bunch so far.
There's the expected litany of "Aww c'mons" in the comment boxes, in which several of the nice people from PM-god love 'em- try to defend our honour. With specific regards to Animal Collective, I can't help but feel much of the contention comes from the fact that the album was released in January and people have been hearing about it all year (as if we haven't been hearing about Dark Side of the Moon for 37 years). As much as critics boast of MPP's accessibility, it is a difficult album for the uninitiated. For those who've failed to be impressed in the past six years, it's not dissimilar to the their previous albums, just a kinda better version of it. It's not my #1 of 2009, nor my #1 Animal Collective album, but it's definitely one of the better consensus-y albums in recent memory. But there's nothing worst than hearing over and over again about an album you find to be either kinda lame or just plain mediocre, so I see why people are upset. I don't think any album could be truly great without its naysayers.
Grizzly Bear I can't speak to, because I still haven't heard the album in full. A few of the songs I heard were good-not-great, but "Two Weeks" is still quite fantastic. Everything about the song shrieks "indie status quo" in 2009 (an example, as mentioned in the previous post of Middle-of-the-Road as strengh), but those DRUMS! Why has no one else one off about those slippery vapor trail drums?!
Also, worth checking out, in addition to all the lists, is the Top Reissues, where I have a bit on Kraftwerk
A lot of things I found out about while researching that introduction would likely have made my final list and perhaps altered its trajectory slightly (after compulssively weighing my finger upon the repeat with Mordant Music's latest, it'd likely be my new #1- and definitely made my list for Pazz and Jop- which I'll be voting in this year), but I feel it's a really strong showing.
If all that name-dropping that this windbag dished out in that opener wasn't enough for you, Philip Sherburne does me one better here (though he definitely uses some names that were known in the 90s).
Lots of year-ending and decade-ending lists popping up, and no I can't resist peaking either, but no need to post all of them here. My own personal list will probably pop-up at some point after you're sick to death of seeing them. My decade list keeps changing. There's a strong urge not to over/re-emphasize the familiar canon and given others a fair shake (part of the reason Fact's list was so admirable), but then there are also albums just too hard to ignore. As of this moment though, I'm leaning towards giving a bit more gravity to those who presented with the shock of new, as it seemed extra difficult to do in this decade, with barely any reinforcement from emerging trends and movements(the fault of music journalists, to be sure, who rarely stopped long enough to find connections).
Simon Reynolds's recent Guardian post on the fragmentation of opinion on the latter half of the decade seems to disregard two essential turns that may have caused the split in consensus as the decade drew to a close; the collapse of publishing industry and the collapse of the music industry. Both were at a downhill slope beforehand, but their near-demise completely relinquished their authority in fans who were turning to all the inexpensive or free ways to receive music and opinion, finding them equivalent or even superior means of consuming new ideas and tunes.
There were positives in this divergence. As Simon points out and my 2009 retrospective paragraph for PopMatters accents, there is a ton of great music out there, overwhelming amounts in fact. The death of the monoculture is by no means worthy of plaintive eulogy by any self-respecting nutritionist of the ear. Yet, the monoculture still kinda lives on, doesn't it? Each new U2 or horrifically-designed Springsteen album absorbing far more thought time then they deserve (the new issue of Rolling Stone even suggest that many of these fogies may have puttered out their best work...ever(!) in the past decade. Can any one but Rolling Stone fathom a world where that might be true?).
Elsewhere, a lot of what rises to the top of these lists you'll soon be sick of is what Simon has elsewhere called "pernicious adequacy" (in reference to Sonic Youth, perhaps one of the more soporifically adequate bands around, the slight tweaks of their established formula inspiring a chorus of niggling chatter that's usually more interesting than the album in question). Thus, the long tail of music's current reach has inspired a mainstream in the naughties that seems to be content to remain at the end of music's history, to accept its narratives and just do as well as it can within it. The remaining mainstream has seen the savages tearing down the walls and locked itself into a gated community, hoping that maybe the fans of this decentralized vanguard will tire of the snark and the solipsism, stop posturing and accept something "authentic", ie- deliriously okay (not MOR-mind you, a differentiation worth exploring, but not here). I mean once Prurient and Villalobos can be dismissed in the same breath as "hipster bullshit", where else can you go? This decade literally saw periods where white noise, barely pulsatile house, and drone metal were cool bandwagons to hop on for a while. After that kind of austerity, you kinda have to collapse back to the middle a little bit.
There's the potential to rip it all up and start over again, as music has lost many of its previous restraints with music as a sound product pretty much a non-issue for much of the listening audience. But the comforting temptation to accept adequacy and careerism in the face of an uncertain future has never been greater either.
RE: Fact's #1 album of the decade (see previous post for link), Rogue's Foam, who does terrific and lengthy analyses, has a detailed exegesis of the aforementioned artist's work, along with fantastic embedded paintings by Whistler.
There's a great alternative 100 Best Albums of the Decade feature running now at FACT magazine with an incredible selection list and a couple I'd never heard of until now. Spoiler alert: Some selections in high positions may repeat in my eventual list of the decade, though perhaps this won't come as much of a surprise.
Great to see mention of The Caretaker, Belbury, Monolake, Ariel Pink, Metro Area, Luomo etc., who probably won't make a lot of these lists, but made really influential and era-definitive records (but, ech, to see the Artic Monkeys on this list after that embarassing "5th Best British Album" at the NME fiasco makes me somewhat proud I'm not British- though hardly more proud to be American).
PopMatters is counting down the Best Music of 2009 in the next two weeks and I'll have a few entries here on the list, but you check them all out and listen to sound samples to see what you think.
"Denied the propulsive fuel of conscious intent, a human being is little more than a complex aggregate of accumulated memories, a living multi-track tape-recorder." - Kek-W on the Caretaker
"The threat is no longer the deadly sweet seduction of nostalgia. The problem is not, any more, the longing to get to the past, but the inability to get out of it."- K-Punk on the caretaker
