1. Butcher Boy - React Or Die year-end heads-up for DiS
Glasgow is typically characterised as a dreich, dank and violent city, but much of its musical heritage seems to be centred around the light, graceful and romantic: Orange Juice, the Fannies, Belle & Seb, and Camera Obscura. Butcher Boy need to be added to that list, and not just because of their similar style; their continuing low-profile, even in their home city, is perplexing considering the strength of both their albums so far. If debut Profit In Your Poetry was hugely promising, React Or Die fulfils that promise, with ten achingly pretty, perfectly paced and impeccably produced songs in thirty fatless minutes.
In opener 'When I'm Asleep', singer John Blaine Hunt pointedly insists that his night-times are sterile: "I never dream, I never feel anything" he sings over a trilling mandolin melody. His vocal control is important: he doesn't hold a note for an instant more than necessary; it's only when the song swells, when the strings and mandolin combine into a gorgeous melancholy, that his vocals allow for breath, his emotion seeping through. It's as if his stoicism is stolen by the song.
This whole record does that to me. I struggle to stay composed. I've tried to pinpoint why the keyboard outro of 'You're Only Crying For Yourself' draws my eyebrows into an arch and teases my tear ducts to stir, every time I hear it, like Pavlov's bell. But, well, my attempt at critical detachment is stolen by that song, by all of them, by their exquisite arrangements, by Hunt's romantic lyrics. I'm convinced React Or Die will one day be recognised as an equal of any of its hometown's indie-pop classics. For now, it's either "just too beautiful and bright for these times"; or I'm finally going batty.
2. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion MPP was The Skinny's album of the year, as you can read about here (or that last blog post on the left there). 3. Fever Ray - Fever Ray In my head, the music I imagine my hypothetical future self will make is closer to this in style than any other album, ever.
4. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career My first Camera Obscura album. I know!Between this and Butcher Boy, I've had a swoonful year.
5. We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls My breathless Clash review for it here, which I knew was breathless at the time but I still stand by 100%.
6. Dananananaykroyd - Hey Everyone! My 5-star Skinny review here, which I think is only my fourth full-marks album review - after Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, In Rainbows, and Third. 7. Bat For Lashes - Two Suns I fucking love that cover by the way. 8. The Field - Yesterday and Today In retrospect, better than his first album, which I wanted to like more than I actually did. Yesterday and Today has several passages of staggering beauty, I can't imagine ever getting bored of it. 9. Japandroids - Post-Nothing Anthemic garage rockwell encapsulated by the minimalism and friendship of the cover; until any clever sod can work out what the fuck is really "important", the answer is mates, music, girls and fun. Lad rock says the same, but Japandroids say it better. 10. Tony Allen - Secret Agent One of the many sensible objections to music lists is that it's impossible to compare two works of art from completely different genres, so it's feels kinda weird positioning Tony Allen in a list just under Japandroids (and, for that matter, Japandroids in a list just under The Field). I try to make a guess as to how much I've enjoyed a record and rank it accordingly, because when you begin to think in genres, you apply your own perception of stylistic limits to the limit-free work of others. I discovered Afrobeat in 2009; it's not a genre I claim to know a lot about, and perhaps Afrobeat know-alls aren't impressed by Secret Agent; I haven't a clue. All I know is I played it to death and loved it every time.
Time is a great leveller when it comes to musical reputations, because it's much easier to make a solid judgement when you have the space to think freely about what you're listening to without the pernicious influences of hype, fashion or the temptation to be a contrarian. A year after it was first leaked, it comes as no surprise that Merriweather Post Pavilion still feels like the obvious choice for album of the year. It felt special from the moment it landed. If 12 months haven't dulled our feelings, will ten years? When will someone criticise it on its own terms, instead of on the tenuous extra-musical grounds of over-hype or hipster-hate? Where is the backlash going to come from?
"My parents listen to it and they're proud of it, and they like a song here and there, but it's definitely not their thing," Geologist tells The Skinny. So perhaps Geologist's mum could tell us why we're wrong? "No, I don't think she'll want to start the backlash! It's something she can show to her friends or to my grandparents, show them that I'm doing something worthwhile with my life, even though I have a beard!"
Merriweather Post Pavilion is going to be spoken of in rarefied terms for years to come, so you'd better get used to it. Sick of hearing the Kid A story yet? Well there's a MPP myth in the works already, you know how it'll go: progressive-this and zeitgeist-that. It's a wonderful album. It deserves it. "We love this record and are really happy with it, and we're very happy that people are receiving it so well. It feels good, you know?" Geologist says. "Everybody who puts something out into the world... wants it to be respected. We put a lot of work into it. But I think we have to be careful about it, we're going to be very conscious next time not to make MPP part two because that would be pretty boring." Panda Bear is still picking faults: "I don't know that we'll ever be completely happy," he says. "Listening to something 500 times or so throughout writing, touring, recording, mixing, mastering... you start to notice little things you might change. Sometimes you want to change things just because when you started the thing you were a different person."
Change it? Don't be silly. Panda Bear tells us something else remarkable: "We knew we wanted to have more of a focus on bass and bass frequencies, and we had some themes in mind like ballet, but like most of our albums the spirit of the thing kind of just came on gradually." Did you catch that? Ballet! Geologist, on the other hand, drops names like Kylie, dubstep star Burial, and Berlin minimal techno label Kompakt. Try to pin a genre on Merriweather Post Pavilion. It can't be done. Part of the MPP story, still in production, will require a succinct distillation of its aesthetic, one or two words to sum it up. But everyone's stumped. Merriweather Post Pavilion is an alien conflation of Burial, Kylie, Kompakt, ballet and bass. How could it not be album of the year?
2. GRIZZLY BEAR - VECKATIMEST Through no fault of their own, sometimes great bands acquire unhealthy legacies: Nirvana, I'm looking at you particularly. One of Pavement's aesthetic choices which was seized on big-time was a perceived musical sloppiness, a too-cool-to-care attitude that has afflicted countless indie rock bands since. Grizzly Bear care about the placing and playing of every note, and that discipline doesn't breed sterility: their studied vocal harmonies evoke plenty of emotion. And when they're livelier, as in the first two songs and the last two-but-one, the spotless production gives every movement its space. Grizzly Bear might've sent you to sleep before, but now they'll start you dreaming.
3. DIRTY PROJECTORS - BITTE ORCA Bitte Orca is where everything finally came together smoothly for New Yorker Dave Longstreth, mastermind of the Dirty Projectors, who'd previously handicapped himself by concocting ambitious ideological aims for his albums that he wasn't quite able to fulfil. Bitte Orca keeps things simple, relatively speaking, by foregoing overarching themes in favour of accessibility, achieved not by compromise but by focus. It's not a concept that glues these nine tracks together, it's the songs themselves: post-punk, afrobeat, indie pop, garage rock and contemporary R&B all mingle happily in the company of Longstreth and the girls' elastic vocals. Bizarre on paper, brilliant in practice.
4. DOOM - BORN LIKE THIS 2009 was a strong year for hip-hop, thanks to the likes of Raekwon and Mos Def outperforming the disappointing returns of megastars Jay-Z and Eminem. Best of them all was Daniel Dumile's umpteenth album, his first as all-caps DOOM, an endlessly replayable journey through his comic book rogue fantasies that's a little darker than prior efforts. Dumile's gruff croak serves up a thousand perplexing rhymes for you to unravel, and guest spots from Rae, Ghostface and a little-known lady called Empress Star all impress. Born Like This is Dumile's best solo record since Vaudeville Villain.
5. THE TWILIGHT SAD - FORGET THE NIGHT AHEAD "We didn't want to make something that sounded like the first record, we definitely think we've progressed and moved on as a band" guitarist and producer Andy MacFarlane tells The Skinny. But how Forget The Night Ahead compares to debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters is a matter of heated debate. We (or rather you, discerning reader) placed Fourteen Autumns second on our list of the best Scottish albums of the decade; the NME included this one in its overall century of the century. "You'll always get some people saying 'it's not as good as the first record'" MacFarlane says. "Those people are wrong. But other people have been very kind about this one." It's a tight call, we'll grant that.
6. CONVERGE - AXE TO FALL "This is a brilliant, furious album that manages to be both misanthropic in its message yet therapeutic in its sheer catharsis" said Chris Cusack in his 5-star Skinny review of Converge's seventh album Axe To Fall. But it wasn't straightforward for the progressive hardcore band to put together, because they borrowed the talents of nearly 20 guest performers. "Bringing some friends in to contribute to the songs added some new challenges to the process for us for sure," vocalist Jacob Bannon tells us. "But I really enjoyed what we created together and it seems that people are enjoying it, so that's a positive thing".
7. THE PHANTOM BAND - CHECKMATE SAVAGE "We went in [to the studio] pretty naïve thinking that we were ready to make an album and were all set to record it in a fortnight, and it ended up taking about 9 months on and off" reflects Rick Anthony, lead singer of Glasgow's Phantom Band, who released the best debut LP of 2009. "It sometimes feels like we’re parents of this kid – you try and bring it up right and do the best by it but at some point you have to step back and let it go off on its own. It has its fuck ups but we still love it." We love it too.
8.MASTODON - CRACK THE SKYE [by Dave Kerr] Having equated the struggles of modern life with hunting for crystal skulls down a dark hole on 2006’s Blood Mountain, Mastodon took to the sky(e) for the fourth and final album in their ‘elements’ series. “It’s an astral planing dream,” guitarist Brent Hinds forewarned us of the progressive odyssey to unfold. With a narrative backdrop of Tsarist Russia, psychedelic flavours were thrown into a blender with banjo-led sludge metal and ADD song structure – an unlikely recipe which has seen the Atlanta quartet realise a curious crossover appeal. So what are they doing differently? “We scream like banshees being stuck in the ass with a knife, although now there’s a lot more singing going on,” Hinds shrugs. Will someone please relay this idea to Duffy?
9. BAT FOR LASHES - TWO SUNS For all the talk of its mystical themes and lavish production, what few people seem to mention about Two Suns is just how great a singer Natasha Khan is. Granted, singing ability isn't as important as X-Factor judges might claim, but Two Suns wouldn't be half the album it is without Khan's exceptional pipes. There's not a hair out of place on Bat For Lashes' Two Suns, a surprisingly inventive and remarkably touching second album that confirms Khan's singular talent. She even persuaded Scott Walker to collaborate; how can she possibly exceed that?
10. BUTCHER BOY - REACT OR DIE It's well established by now that Glasgow's indie-pop credentials are second to none, a view supported by another fabulous album by Camera Obscura this year. But don't overlook Butcher Boy, whose second album React Or Die is a real treasure, borrowing equally from Belle & Sebastian and Arthur Lee's Love in the sculpture of ten heartbreakingly pretty songs. "My initial direction was that we should aim for something folky, in the sense of it being old and unsettling", singer/songwriter John Blaine Hunt told us. "And even if it was unsettling, it must still be beautiful." It definitely is.
So it was exciting to have Simon Reynolds give the Stylus comeback a shout-out in his latest Guardian decade round-up yesterday. Also, he's participating, which was a surprise. I know he did an article for Stylus when it first opened, but he wasn't a regular contributor, unlike one or two of the regular writers who I believe can't take part. Anyway, one of the things Reynolds talked about was ex-Styluser Ian Cohen's Funeral blurb on Pitchfork's Decade list, which posited that Funeral was "the last of its kind", a unifying consensus-builder whose reception was so positive that it gave birth to a cynicism and contrarian-impulse in today's blogosphere that makes such unifying "event" records near-impossible now.
But cynicism and contrarianism have been a plasma through the internet's venous system since it came to life. Was Funeral's reception really cynicism-free? I liked Reynolds' phrasing that the blogosphere's "greatest liability" was that "there's no cool or ego-burnishing value to be generated from agreeing with other people". He's right: saying "I agree" doesn't impress anyone. Saying "no, you're wrong, and here's why..." is potentially very impressive. It's how you prove how smart you are, how different you are, how you tend to be right whilst everyone else is fooled by a variation of the same mysterious osmosis which fools the idiot public into believing the Black Eyed Peas are amazing. Look how smart I am, I see through it all. But that all depends on the "and here's why..." explanation being convincing.
Third gratuitous Stylus reference: the still-going Singles Jukebox last week caused a minor music blog kerfuffle by being very critical of the Animal Collective song "My Girls", being retrospectively analysed as it was missed on initial release. Of course, no record in the world could be loved universally, and there are surely lots of very good reasons to be unimpressed by Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavillion and "My Girls". But they weren't articulated well here; instead we got nit-picking rants, generalisations, assumptions and a lot of imagination. It looked less like genuine musical distaste and more like personal rep building. It wasn't "this is what I think of the music" it was "this is how uniquely I think".
It seems to me that a person's mode of reacting to music can be placed on a spectrum. At the far left, there are people who are very tolerant of and receptive to hype, who convince themselves that whatever their own most credible source says about a record is how they feel too; positive, negative or indifferent. These people rarely admit to being so influenced but to them, the canon is self-evidently accurate. At the other end, there are people who are very intolerant of and suspicious of hype. They convince themselves that the conventional wisdom on a record is dead wrong. If a record is well-hyped, it's probably shit, because other people get excited about rubbish things. People rarely confess to this position either (though Frank in my office does - which is maddening, but refreshing). To these people, the canon is self-evidently boring.
[Unfortunately, it's not quite so simple as this (so help me refine this if you can), because we have to work out what counts as "hype", a "credible source" and a "canon", because none of these things are the same for everyone. Also, I suspect a lot of people react differently, left-or-right, based on many different factors.]
Well, any critic who wants to be better at his job should strive to sit in the middle of that spectrum. The ideal is that no review should be influenced by other, prior reviews. I know I've been guilty of that in the past (and I probably don't know that I have, too), but people who put themselves forward as reviewers should at least attempt to adopt that mindset: of being equally as skeptical of hype as of dismissal. I don't think Ian Cohen is right that Funeral was the last of its kind, because I've read convincing rebuttals of that album's status, whilst the only Merriweather Post Pavillion backlash I've read has been straw-clutching and self-serving.
I admit it: I love Merriweather Post Pavillion; I don't care if you think I'm just another bee in the hivemind. I love Funeral too. So mock me.
Finally: to go further, the ideal is that no review should be influenced by any external factors at all. This reviewer must live in a cave with only a record player and a selection of fine headphones for company. Is Amy Winehouse's second album actually one of the best of the decade, as OMM and The Times have claimed? I always avoided it because I suspected she was mostly famous for being a fuck-up. Is it humanly possible to listen to that album without her tabloid persona influencing your reaction?
Taken By Trees - East of Eden (***) album review for the skinny
Victoria Bergsman's second album as Taken By Trees is born of admirable intentions: seeking to break free from her comfort zone, she travelled with a sound engineer to Pakistan to find some local musicians to record with. So while East of Eden never strays too far from Western indie-pop norms, its South Asian instruments and backing vocalists give it a vivid sense of the exotic. Bergsman's lethargic vocals even sound like she's wilting in the heat, although, if you remember her guest spot on Peter Bjorn & John's Young Folks, that's just the way she sings. A blog-chasing cover of Animal Collective's My Girls seems unnecessary, but there are other, better moments on several tracks: the man wailing in the distance on unsettling opener To Lose Someone, the flicked-out guitar trills of Watch The Waves, the complex but gentle hand-tapped percussion of Day By Day. East of Eden is ambitiously conceived and modestly played.
animal collective - oran mor (glasgow) - 6/11 - (***)
Strawberry Jam has proved to be one of the most divisive albums of 2007, with just as many people saying they hate it as others who say they love it. Similarly, Animal Collective’s return to Glasgow splits the audience once frontman Avey Tare pulls out with a throat infection just hours before the gig. Playing on without him, Panda Bear and Geologist perform an hour of jams from Panda’s recent Person Pitch album, with only two Animal Collective tracks appearing all evening: Chores and Derek, both from Strawberry Jam. So for those unfamiliar with Person Pitch – not the easiest of records to get into on one live listen – it emerges as a frustrating night and not what they had bought their ticket for. Perhaps it should have just been cancelled instead: but on the other hand, for those who knew and enjoyed Person Pitch, hearing Take Pills and Bros instead of For Reverend Green is no great loss. In fact there's a real hypnotic quality about the dreamy throbs and echoing vocals - and the blinding background lights – which leaves the crowd silent and motionless, as if in a trance. Above scything synth noise and snatches of falsetto chorus hammered into a beat, Panda Bear sings like a stuttering yodeller in a cave, inducing those who are turned on to really tune in for the trip. Those who aren’t tuned in might have preferred it if Panda had dropped out at the start.
3. Fever Ray - Fever Ray
4. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
8. The Field - Yesterday and Today
9. Japandroids - Post-Nothing
10. Tony Allen - Secret Agent
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