PS. I know, I know, it's a bit vague. The deal is: I'm not reviewing it. The Skinny review will follow, probably in a month or so, written by someone else. So I couldn't be too prescriptive about what's good and what's not in The Skinny's name, in case the reviewer disagrees.
Here, I can say I think it's very good. I'm not sure yet whether it's better than Midnight Organ Fight, but there isn't much in it, and it's sure to give their profile a big boost. I think the fans will be really happy.
Stylistically, the key concern for me about this third album was the possibility that FRabbit might accentuate the sentimentality (a.k.a. "they sound a bit like Snow Patrol in parts") in a bid for popularity. That might make sense to Scott Hutchison, even subconsciously, seeing as his unsentimental debut was nowhere near as popular as the follow-up (and remember, that's when Snow Patrol themselves became mega, when they went all widescreen weepy). I really like Midnight Organ Fight, I didn't find the sentimentality too much at all, but I know some people did. Winter of Mixed Drinks is definitely not schmaltzy, so it may well win over some listeners who weren't convinced by MidnightOrgan Fight.
Welcome back to Broon's Tunes for comprehensive coverage of The Stylus Decade, cos I've apparently got nothing better to do (haven't you?)
The Stylus Decade comprises 200 blurbs between 100-500 words long, and eight long-form essays.It's far too much to read in one sitting, and far too much to discuss in one blog post, so I've decided to dedicate the next year or so to line-by-line analysis on this blog.
Not really.
All I'm going to do is mention a few of my favourite parts which I picked out while reading it.
The Blurbs
I don't mean to sound like a miserable bastard (it just comes naturally y'know) but when people just talk about the calibration of the lists, the numbers and sequences and omissions, the music itself is forgotten. I'm sure half the people who moan about Kid A being number one actually do enjoy that record, or at least enjoyed it before they realised everyone else enjoyed it much more than them.
Anyway, there's little worth to any stated opinion about music without justification, so I'd rather focus on many of the fine justifications offered up by my Stylus colleagues. As stated, there's too many to mention, but these are a few which jumped out at me.
I think my two favourite blurbs are those by Jonathan Bradley for The National's Boxer (No.41), and Fergal O'Reilly's Discovery (No.3). I've read them both four or five times now, because they're both just so wonderfully constructed. No quibbling, go read them in full.
Mike Orme's "Rebellion (Lies)" somehow manages to give a new perspective to one of the most-played indie rock songs of recent years (No.93)
and while you're there, check out Theon Weber's pinpoint take on the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps" (No.82).
Paul Scott's says The Strokes "Hard To Explain" (No.59)
"both embodies and celebrates the indolence and inarticulacy of youth with a wit many miles from their contemporaries."
Most of Dom Passantino's album blurbs made me laugh, partly because he can always be relied upon to pull an obscure Britishism out of nowhere (rare in online music journalism which is always targetted at an American audience). Case in point: Half Man Half Biscuit's Achtung Bono (No.87) making the list in the first place; also, Brenda Blethyn, Danny Dyer, Rio Ferdinand and Nick Knowles all getting a namecheck in his blurb for it. No wonder he loves that band. But also, check out his Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus (No.60) blurb, which is self-deprecating in a wholly admirable and very funny way.
Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca was one of only three 2009 albums to make the list. It's the kind of album music writers will always love, because it's so easy to write about, there's so much going on that it'll always provide a thoughtful writer with ways in which to show off their knowledge and interpretation. But the intro para to Tal Rosenberg's blurb (No.58) is particularly imaginative, and the rest aint bad either.
Actually, Tal was in top form throughout. Check out his short Erykah Badu (No.99), and his longer DJ Sprinkles (No.71), which come to similar conclusions: "so often, great art is the actualization of the all of the artist." That's what authenticity is, isn't it? When an artist can't help but convey their weaknesses as well as their strengths because they convey themselves, in full, their all. There's a dissertation in there somewhere.
Two of the hardest blurbs to write in this project were Merriweather Post Pavilion (No.23) and Kid A (No.1), the former because it's the great hype beast of the last twelve months, the latter because it's the great hype beast of the last ten years; so nobody reading your blurb is coming in disinterested. But Jeff Siegel and Josh Love did great jobs with their write-ups, in contrasting ways: Jeff didn't even acknowledge MPP's hype or context, he just talked about the record, remarkably in terms I hadn't read it written about before; while Josh wrote almost entirely about the reception to Kid A, the arguments, the meanings of those arguments, its importance, not in grand socio-cultural terms (the dreaded z-word avoided) but in real, fan-level reality.
Peter Parrish on Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River:
Even when Sheff dabbles in the slightly ridiculous, as on "A Stone," he pulls it off. By embracing the ludicrous and flipping the song's focus on its head, he takes us on a bittersweet Pixar adventure about the daydreaming fancies of stones. As the mournful trumpet solo plays out, it's quite possible to start feeling sorry for inanimate chunks of geology.
For all its dark reality, anger and sadness, that's the moment when Black Sheep Boy really won my heart. It made me care about a goddamn make-believe rock.
Yes!
I've no idea if I agree with Ian Mathers' Six By Seven (No.95) blurb, but it was good enough to persuade me to buy the album on CD (it's now at the bottom of my pending pile, to be heard in approximately 4 months' time). Mathers' Endless Summer (No.74) was excellent too, though I know I don't agree with his high estimation there. Just below it, I enjoyed Todd Hutlock's take on Villalobos's Alcachofa (No.73), partly because writing about minimal techno is so damn hard to do without concocting ridiculous imagery or falling back onto cliche. Todd avoided both pitfalls with ease.
I actually need to stop now because there's just too much, and this post is already too long for 100% of the internet to read (margin of error 0.1%). I've not mentioned any song blurb in the top fifty and I've barely touched on the top twenty albums page which was the best overall page of the lot! I just can't cover it all, but leave a comment if you fancy mentioning anything else in particular.
The Essays
I have no real interest in country music, but I found Thomas Inskeep and Josh Love's chat about country very interesting: it seems I'm not alone in my disinterest for the genre, it discussed why, but it also explained a little why I might be missing out. Josh:
"The big complaint I think people still have is that country is corny, but of course that's because the songs are actually about stuff. It's a lot easier to not be corny when your songs are about nothing."
I don't know how I might adjust to songs that are actually about stuff. That kinda feels like a challenge.
"Twee ambiguity returned to the forefront with the freak-folk of Joanna Newsom and orchestral outpourings of Sufjan Stevens paving the way for too-hip LCD Soundsystem and Animal Collective to putter into the fold. Radiohead's lyrics went back to not making sense."
"...Unfortunately, those who really did detail atrocities went mostly unheard and unwanted, especially in rap. Nas reversed his tough-guy roots to do hardline reporting in a KRS-One move most took as preachy. Mr. Lif and Public Enemy made no waves ripping the housing crisis and even star of the hour Lil Wayne mostly got laughed down for trying to extend his moment ten minutes to blast Al Sharpton."
Is that all about the internet? The net is an eternal feedback loop. If your fans are a little bit annoyed with some of your lyrics, it's easier than ever for them to tell you, tell your label, and tell other fans. Where once they might've silently slid away, now they bitch and moan in comment boxes. And political lyrics are always likely to provoke negative feedback. When the net puts a billion opinions in front of you, idiots and experts level in the name of democracy, it's so much easier to play safe and out of the rabble.
Finally, I must recommend Mike Powell's piece (made of lots of little pieces) which is written in such a thoughtful way, using anecdotes and confessions and unanswered questions. Mike never writes like an expert handing down truth; he's always accessible, open to ideas, perceptive but not prescriptive. His work is always worth a careful read, and his essay for The Stylus Decade is no exception.
There's two ways to analyse The Stylus Decade: we can talk about the lists, and we can talk about the writing. Unfortunately most of the analysis I've seen so far has been fixated on the former, but I'd like to discuss both over two posts.
The Lists
Complaining about lists is even more tedious and pointless than complaining about referees (I seem to be making a lot of referee analogies lately), so I'm going to break with internet convention and be positive about it. Both listmakers and referees have a massive number of potential decisions to make that no other single observer could possibly agree 100% with (the vast majority of decisions in a football game go unremarked-upon, including hundreds of decisions not to blow the whistle for a potential infringement). There are 40,000 albums released every year; that makes 400,000 for the decade; it's impossible to pick a sample a hundred-large which simultaneously includes all the albums reader A loves but none of the albums he thinks are over-rated (but are loved by reader B). Let's not even get started on the songs list! Both these boring and irrational pursuits of ref-slagging and list-slagging are easy to learn and impossible to master, which unfortunately makes for a lot of bullshit swilling around the internet.
The main criticisms of The Stylus Decade are that it's a predictable result and that it's too similar to Pitchfork's P2K list: Kid A at No.1 and Sound of Silver at No.2 is boring, and the Kid A result, Discovery at No.3 and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at No.4 is identical to Pitchfork (these criticisms are pretty much the same, because the people who follow music lists closely enough to predict them are the same people who complain about the ubiquity of Pitchfork taste). Several of our staff are disappointed that Kid A won: those being the staff who didn't vote for it; if a record I hadn't voted for had won, I'd be disappointed too.
Even Simon Reynolds was unhappy - as he wrote on his blissblog, "The Stylus Decade was a jolly good read, but, um, those results. Meaning the Top 20 albums. The same old names." Then he revealed his ballot, including Discovery (his No.5, our No.3), Kid A (his No.11, our No.1), The Blueprint (his No.17, our No.7), Since I Left You (his No.24, our No.9) and Ys (his No.25, our No.14). That's right, five of "the same old names" in our top twenty had their positions boosted by his votes.
These kind of criticisms, which I've seen elsewhere too, are just so transparent. Presumably he voted for Discovery because he loves it and admires it and believes it should be recognised; exactly the same reasons I voted for Sound Of Silver, and Untrue, and so on: the same old names he wasn't so pleased to see. It's a group list. It's a collective effort built by consensus and compromise. It's not The Simon Decade. If these names hadn't been at the top of the list, we'd be liable to claims of inconsistency. And of course anyone who's been paying attention knows all about these albums already; these people should have learned by now that the lower reaches of these lists are where to find the 'interesting' choices.
As for the Pitchfork comparison: well anyone harbouring impressions of Stylus and Pitchfork being like chalk and cheese clearly didn't read both sites. Also, about half-a-dozen writers who contributed to The Stylus Decade also contributed to P2K, so inevitably there's going to be significant overlap. I'm going to quote Stylus writer John Cunningham now, he's already done some comparison between our list and Pitchfork's:
"I do think there are a lot of similarities between our list and Pitchfork (somewhat inevitable, as Nick admits), but I'm also pleased at some of the differences:
Burial, Untrue: #5 Stylus, #41 Pitchfork Primal Scream, XTRMNTR: #10 Stylus, #142 Pitchfork Ghostface Killah, Fishscale: #11 Stylus, #75 Pitchfork Joanna Newsom, Ys: #14 Stylus, #82 Pitchfork Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP: #16 Stylus, #119 Pitchfork Bjork, Vespertine: #17 Stylus, #92 Pitchfork PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: #18 Stylus, #124 Pitchfork
Not to mention the fact that nearly a third of the albums in the Stylus top 100 don't show up at all in Pitchfork's top 200, including 11 albums in the top 60:
24. Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft" 33. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 36. Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye 40. Studio, West Coast/Yearbook 1 45. Bark Psychosis, Codename:Dustsucker 46. Lindstrom, Where You Go I Go Too 49. Mountain Goats, We Shall All Be Healed 54. Britney Spears, Blackout 56. Booka Shade, Movements 57. Luomo, The Present Lover 59. Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress"
I'll add to that, five top 20 Pitchfork records which placed lower (or not at all) on ours:
Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica (Pitchfork 6, Stylus 34) Sigur Ros, Agetis Byrjun (Pitchfork 8, Stylus 77) The White Stripes, White Blood Cells (Pitchfork 12, not on Stylus) Sufjan Stevens, Illinoise (Pitchfork 16, Stylus 72) Kanye West, Late Registration (Pitchfork 18, not on Stylus)
And we can also point out that, eg., the Stylus 100 included Luomo twice, Britney once, and the White Stripes not at all. Doesn't that say something about the orientation of the site?
Those complaining about Stylus's one, three and four matching Pitchfork's don't seem to have fathomed that there are ninety-seven albums not at one, three and four.
As for the singles list, the voters, writers and seemingly readers too have all acknowledged the impossibility of naming a hundred-best songs of a decade, so it's even less worth arguing over. All I'll say is a song I didn't vote for, won.
When I said I wanted to be more picky about what I write, I meant I want to do more interesting things like this: before Christmas I wrote a foreword for a book! OK, so it's a book that hardly anyone will buy, but it's a book nonetheless, so it feels a bit more... important than writing for a magazine, which itself feels somehow more worthwhile than writing for a website. It's a book of live rock photography by my friend Markus Thorsen, with lots of stunning images taken around Edinburgh's smaller venues. More details (including my foreword) can be found at his website.
Since the initial purpose of this blog was just to put everything I write for other sources in one place for my mum and dad to see (Hi dad!), I may as well put all my Stylus Decade blurbs here too. If your interest is more in music than in me -- say if you're not a member of my immediate family -- I highly recommend skipping back to the main Stylus Decade page and reading the masses of great album and single overviews there.
Here's what I did:
Album No.96 The Twilight Sad Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (2007, Fat Cat)
...but zero springs, and just one depressing summer; that's how sullen Scots tally up the years. James Graham's memories feature cold days and hard rain, and Andy MacFarlane's guitars howl like freezing winds, but the key track on The Twilight Sad's debut album, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, is about that summer as remembered by the teenage Graham: a summer of school holiday boredom growing into intense feelings of isolation. Graham starts by innocently announcing his age, before exploding into a fury against his "strong father figure" and "loving mother". The rage is unreasonable, probably, but the savage, sarcastic delivery leaves no doubt that it's real, too.
So that's the summer jam. But it's not just Graham who knows how to exploit the simple power of placid/passionate shifts. MacFarlane's Mogwai-sized guitar storms and soft, glistening lulls provide a sense of size, kept in check by the recurring appearance of a warm, wheezing accordion. Those dynamic moves within each song are also part of a larger pattern, cohering nine ordered tracks into one intense, epic and elegant journey. By the end, Graham's vulnerable kid has become a persecutor, but he hasn't turned nasty, he's just grown up.
Single No.84 Antony & The Jonsons "Hope There's Someone" (Secretly Canadian, 2005)
Antony Hegarty's voice is hard to deal with in a communal setting: his frail, androgynous wail is unsettling, his vulnerability is total; it begs to be mocked. But in solitude, with attention, it's uniquely moving. Antony takes 30 seconds into his breakthrough album to convince doubters of its power—that chilling falsetto, rising into the chorus, sounds like he's bravely holding onto the tune while he weeps. The anxiety of "Hope There's Someone" is unresolvable for decades to come; but listening to it alone, it feels pressing.
Single No.69 The Avalanches "Since I Left You" (Modular, 2000)
What happened to the bright new dawn of collage pop? You'd be forgiven for hearing this record eight years ago and predicting that this decade would be full of songs just like it: cheaper, faster computers, better software, and Napster surely meant that millions of kids would be able to knock up a seamless montage of an afternoon. It didn't quite happen like that, but don't blame the lawyers: there's plenty of unauthorised mash-ups and remixes around. Perhaps we just didn't realise how outrageously skillful The Avalanches were. A decade in, nothing's come close to matching "Since I Left You"'s distillation of pure joy from a hundred different songs.
Single No.50 The Walkmen "The Rat" (Record Collection, 2004)
All it takes is a well-intentioned request for The Walkmen to lose their rag: one long suffocating chord, furious, frantic drumming, and Hamilton Leithauser throwing accusations out like he dare not breathe in, throat tightened, anger but no air escaping. Leithauser's straining vocal and the momentum of the drums combine for a nervous energy that's thrilling to hear unleashed, like an articulate and timely rant that finally closes an argument. Like that, except that this is not final: even after a moment of reflection Leithauser returns to her door, and now he's pounding with both fists.
Single No.29 Gnarls Barkley "Crazy" (Downtown, 2005)
Of all the crushing realisations to dawn on a child, that the pop charts aren't always right is one that occasionally receives a challenge in adulthood. Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" was No.1 in the UK for nine weeks before being deleted by the band. They had no fanbase, they're not sexy, they weren't famous, it wasn't a gimmick, it wasn't in an advert or a movie. Sometimes the song wins, or rarer still, the performance. Dangermouse's ghoulishly detached backing chorus and dramatic string sweeps wouldn't sound half as good without Cee-Lo's masterful one-take vocal, a lesson to any singer still holding on to the handrail.
Single No.2 OutKast "Hey Ya!" (LaFace, 2003)
Mark was a trance DJ. He didn't talk to me about music because he knew I wasn't into trance. Annie was a huge Westlife fan. She didn't talk to me about music because she knew I wasn't into Westlife. Jack didn't talk to me about music because he was eight years old. In the space of a week each one of them started excited conversations with me about one song. "It's wicked," Mark told me; "It's amazing!" Annie told me; "I love it!" Jack told me; "I know!" I said. Then the video came out. Next time I saw them, we talked about it again. You can guess how it went because you had the same conversations. "Hey Ya!" acted like a decade-best song from day one: it opened eyes, it energised people, and there was almost no dissension. "It's not hip-hop," a few whined; "but listen to what it is," everyone replied. So, we could talk about its exuberance, its charisma, its bravery, its dichotomous structure, its odd time signature, its veiled ambiguity; but I know y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
The artwork is terrific, the lists so far are pretty good (no list satisfies everyone, not even the compilers), and the writing is really, really great too.
My only hope is that my own blurbs don't stand out as consistently inferior to the others. I don't think they do, and they haven't been picked out and mercilessly ripped apart yet (so far as I've seen), but I've got a high-profile one coming on Friday, we'll see how it gets on. Music writers are like referees, in that virtually all the discussion that surrounds them is negative. So I'll know I've done a decent job if I'm not talked about.
Stylus is the best publication I ever wrote for, and it always will be. So this decade-end reunion, and this decade-end, seems like a fitting time to withdraw from music writing. I think I've done quite well.
I'm not retiring completely (this post could quickly be made to look silly), but I'm going to be a lot more choosy about what I write. No meat'n'potatoes stuff. Features about Scottish bands I love and who I want to help? Sure, and I've got one commissioned already. Album reviews for artists I feel strongly about? Hmmm, possibly. Festival reviews, and reviews for sold-out or expensive gigs? Definitely. But I'd rather spend time on other things -- reading (not about music), watching films, going to the gym, learning Ableton Live, going out -- than all that other stuff that clogs my week up, little previews, middling reviews, all the mindless procrastinating on blogs...
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.
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