In the mornings when the summer was hottest I ran simultaneous with the rising of the sun. When I would run, I would round the top edge of he park, the northern edge of the park, and then I would hear their voices. At first the sounds approached sidereal, as sounds that are not sounds, or at least they might not have been sounds. They approached as sounds I only imagined I was hearing, things I could have been hearing, but that I might also have been confusing for something else. I would hear nameless birds with nameless morning song, like gravel being dragged through chirping gravel. I heard them singing in McCarren park.
Then, each morning the sounds became clearer, and I realized that what I was hearing were Poles who have the voices of birds who sing like alligators, bloated drunks who have the voices of birds who sing like vomiting, who have the voices of before-time birds from the ahistorical weirding-in before the gods decided finally just what hell they would set on fire and leave. I would be hearing birds with the voices of the crystalline moment of silence before total understanding, the voices of the fugue before seizure. I was hearing the morning song of birds that gutter with blue and airless tongues. I would hear, and then see, Poles who are themselves the unremembering and self-shitting perfection of the language and the camaraderie of their countrymen, the remembrance of selves who don’t suffer the slightest twinge of memory. I was hearing the omnidirectional rumbling morning song of perfect men, of finished men, men who are up with the rising sun in the clockless day-and-night weather of cigarettes and detritus, the day of the feathered lizard with whose voice they greet one another. I heard the voices of genies drunk from bottles. I am heard Grand men of pomp and exaggerated mien trading in social cache at 3-second intervals.
Every morning I beheld holy men, armies of swollen Charlton Hestons come from underground in awe and ecstatic fear from their meandering in the endless cathedrals where the crucifix is a nuclear bomb; I ran laps around centuries-lapsed penitents once hushed by the now-abandoned jungle pyramids of distant and gone peoples, men who are cockroaches in their own lives, men who are cuckoos nested on the cracked steps outside the favelas, outside what the brochures said would happen at the dawn of hope.
I ran, I turned revolutions around these men. Lennon was the Walrus, but Isaac Brock saw the score and came as the Rat. I realized that I, even with my strong legs and my deep lungs, I am as these men in the park. Henry Valentine Abelard Miller professed his once indignant disbelief, before his grand epiphany, that a whole world could be diseased. He said:
Schizophrenia! Nobody thinks anymore how marvelous that the whole world is diseased. No point of reference, no frame of health. God might just as well be Typhoid fever. No absolutes. Only light years of deferred progress. When I think of those centuries Europe grappled with the Black Death, I realize how radiant life can be if we are bitten in the right place…
In 1927 I sat in the Bronx listening to a man reading from the diary of a drug addict. The man could scarcely read, he was laughing so hard. Two phenomena utterly disparate: a man lying in luminol, so taut that his feet stretch beyond the window, leaving the upper half of his body in ecstasy; The other man, who is the same man (emphasis mine), sitting in the Bronx and laughing his guts out because he doesn’t understand.
Aye, the great sun of Syphilis is setting. Low visibility: forecast for the Bronx, for America, for the whole modern world. Low visibility accompanied by great gales of laughter. No new stars on the horizon. Catastrophes…only catastrophes.
I am thinking of that age to come when God is born again, when now and for a long time to come men are going to fight for food. I am thinking of that age when work will be forgotten and books assume their true place in life, when perhaps there will be no more books, just one great big book- a Bible… I am thinking that in that age to come I shall not be overlooked, then my history will be important and the scar which I leave upon the face of the world will have significance. I can not forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away the other meaningless history… a history of all time.
I was born one of these cockroach men. I know no other world but one in which men simply fight for food and nest in loopholes.
In the park a small army of men and sometimes women, and sometimes the men do wear fatigues, orienting themselves to the north, on the Greenpoint side of the park, just as I tell myself they, Northern people, were before they came from Europe. I was a bug in orbit around them, chasing myself around the skittish edges of the park, my many-faceted eyes seeing sameness and slow waking and Bacchus’ garbage, the remains of yesterday’s frivolous hope everywhere, nearer to the hours when I would be chasing myself around the skittish edges of my cube in the recycled dead language and air of some office, chasing myself around my days, around my weeks, around my years, passing as shit does, perfected, finished.
In this life I am a cockroach.
If you ever had a choice, which crazy dream would you choose? The machinating bureaucracy of the deliberately articulated violence of the civilized world whose auditors (and whose memory) keep their rosters of great men and their tangled residence in Babel, or the scavenging underclass of the roach, sacredly avenging the moment in its rapid transactions of lifespan and legacy for pleasure? The speed of everything remains unelided, in whichever column your debts are tallied. St. Paul, you asked us- Crack up in the sun or lose it in the shade?
Run faster than your fellow rat. Eat more leanly than the cow in an adjoining pasture. Pass more unrepeatably your days, one upon the other into perpetuity. Each breath is drawn in the shadow of a dragon who sings with the ruined voices of men, who sings like the world is ending.
First aired on VH1 in July, 2001, Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story hit all the plucky young working class blokes work hard and get it right success story buttons, taking care to offer an easy to digest gloss on how a bunch of good friends who just love good times and hard work can let a little success and excess go to their heads and perhaps even cause them to roll what appears to be a 1987 Chevrolet Corvette over in an English meadow at 88 glorious LED indicated miles per hour, severing one’s arm in the process. Yea, this genre, whose special purpose was to assuage the guilt and mixed feelings of looking back on the narcissistic and blissfully unaware good times of the eighties, could well have been the poultice that hid and detoxified the psychic wounds of the liberal West long enough for us to charge ahead into the 2000s, unironically looking forward to a 180g vinyl triple gatefold Bobby McFerrin comeback LP.
Unfortunately, not 2 months later, certain events occurred in September of 2001 that would render it seemingly impossible for anyone but the baby boomers to continue to effectively rehabilitate their legacies through cinema. The cheerful gloss put on such topics as a deadly case of alcoholism, the innocent and apolitical acceptance of a worldview that had no problem putting individuals firmly in the “have” column in the global tally of the “haves” and “have-nots” as a reward for public overindulgence in good times and conditioner, these things would soon take a backseat to a polarizing case of the terrors that would strip the paint right off society and take us, unfortunately, back to the right-wing primer coat while American culture went up on blocks in the world’s front yard.
This 2001 gem of a biopic was released at generally the same time as another frank, straight-talking coming to grips meditation on our collective insanity, the Mark “Marky-Mark” Walberg and Jennifer Aniston vehicle Rock Star. Rock Star (a movie I do enjoy thoroughly), was actually given an unfortunately timed release in the month of September, 2001. Can you imagine? Just as we were just beginning to connect the dots between our troubled ’90s inner Eddie Vedders and the crimped and blow-dryed blonde ’80s angels of our natures, we had to put the all the chuckling “those were crazy days” reminiscences aside to join the rest of America in being scared shitless.
Only now, almost 10 years on, do we have someone like Lady Ga-Ga—medicine woman, shaman— who can finally make us feel mindlessly good about ourselves again. Thanks, Hope! Thanks, socially splintering new media! Let the Hair Metal Ideal Truth and Reconciliation Committee reconvene, with Lady Gaga shepherding the lost offenders of the ’80s into her folds to bear the standard that will unite us in all we have been meaning to recuse ourselves from for the past 30 years. Let it begin here with your own private screening of Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story, starring Anthony Michael Hall. You’ve suffered for it, motherfuckers. Now take your reward.
I have to thank the proprietors of Zamboni Soundtracks for turning me on to a lot of really up-my-alley stuff this year. This was one of those recordings the path towards the discovery of which Zamboni lit with their tireless, tasteful tune torch-bearing. According to that blog, this husband and wife duo was signed to Polydor Italy by Vangelis’ elder brother and recorded in Vangelis’ home studio in 1977 while the big “V” (this is a play on the fact that Vangelis is a diminutive form of Evangelos!) was out of town with the aid of Vangelis’ equipment and his usual studio engineer. Welcome to information.
Vangelis— he of Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner soundtracks fame— his last name is Papathanassiou. What the fuck hath God wrought?
Synthy and rhythmic music recorded between 1970 and 1983 is my favorite. Welcome to declarative statement.
I like Ms. Christina Moser’s cool assurances on track “Black Silk Stocking” that if you “Put your hand inside it she’ll show you where to find it,” and “When she is not talking be sure she wants some rocking.” I like a lady who knows what she wants and doesn’t make it confusing for the vendor. Those European girls. They’re so ideal.
Dillinger Four: Civil War (2008)
How is it that I haven’t written anything about this at any point until now? Ever since the first time I heard them— 1998’s Midwestern Songs of the Americas— Dillinger Four has always been my ideal image of what a punk band should be. Poppy but with that galloping punk drumbeat, pedagogical in that Stiff Little Fingers vein of “You think it’s like this, but really it’s like this” with the alternately angry/sad subtext: someone’s a fuckhead and/or exasperatingly dumb and everyone is going to suffer for it.
The band has put out 5 records in 10 years, 1 a year from ‘98 to 2000, one is ‘02, and then this triumphant return to form after a 6-year break in 2008. The songwriting and the music is possibly better than anything they have put out to date— the song structures are poppier and more complex than straight-ahead punk. The “Get a fucking grip on yourselves before we’re all fucked” message is flavored with a carpe diem wistfulness. As they beg the listener to learn the lessons life presents them, they return constantly to the theme of mortality- though they do not relent, there is the disappointed niggling suspicion that, as life stretches out further behind and the future is uncertain, nothing is getting any better.
Don’t confuse this wizened punk attitude with the endlessly self-perpetuating Jesus Christ pose of the martyr, however. As I have taken care to mention, they are unrelenting in the clarity of their message. Relentlessness is the optimism that denatures any trace of martyrdom in hopelessness. Relentlessness, not nihilism, is punk.
Midlake: The Trials of Van Occupanther (2006)
These guys have a schtick and a repeated lexicon that revolves around an idealized golden colonial past. They use words like “shelter” and “give thanks”, and “stonecutter”and praise a strong work ethos and a simple life of labor and benevolent patriarchy to the heavens. They worry in song about bandits. They thoughtfully soothe their “young bride”. It’s funny, but the music, as much of a put-on as it is, is still somehow a convincing illusion in spite of itself, a very effective piece of faux ’70s nostalgia that transports even the most hardened cynic. They’re also excellent musicians.
+/- Xs on Your Eyes (2008)
Quite the quiet tour de force. This was one that emerged at the end of 2008, that I know I listened to extensively, but for some reason didn’t include on either my nearly-were or best-of 2008 list. What kind of a jerk was I? Did I think I was keeping them all for myself? I saw them just this past year opening for the other act these Baluyut boys have been in since they were unplugged from the umbilical cord, Versus, and +/- were head and shoulders better than the band that spawned them. This album is some kind of apotheosis. With acts like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart infatuating the kiddies just long enough for those hipsters’ brain cells that were taking note of the act to die in an avalanche of tight clothes and cocaine, these ’90s veterans came out with the best overwrought and jangly ’90s record ever written. It was like an instructional seminar led by the hand of God, with the hand of God on drums, the hand of God on guitars, and the hand of God on vox. Slow-burning and long-playing. Kind of like the universe.
La Düsseldorf: Individuellos (1981)
Another gem from Zamboni Soundtracks. The rock scene in Düsseldorf in the ’70s and early ’80s was a big influence on David Bowie and Brian Eno, who, I’m sure I read somewhere once, would meet now and again back in the ’70s and exchange records, let each other know what they thought was “hip,” cat. (For some reason, my ideal imagining of these exchanges sees the two rock icons cast as beatniks.) I haven’t been able to turn up that reference, though I can find a few places (here’s one) where Mr. Eno extols the virtues of communal rock drawn from a wellspring of European tradition and ideological foment.
In the interview linked to above, Eno mentions that Klaus Dinger, drummer for Neu!, had seized on the “krautrock” beat as the stripped down essence of the quintessential rock beat. It doesn’t really change all that much from song to song, but it doesn’t need to. After parting ways with Michael Rother at the end of the Neu! project, Dinger formed La Düsseldorf and put out three records between 1976 and 1983. They scored a hit in Germany with the single “Rheinita” off second album Viva!. Find the record online and check out the cover art to see where Brian Eno cribbed the idea for Coldplay’s last album cover.
This 1981 release, with its loud keyboard lines, overt optimism, and its frequent reliance on pure atmospherics, is a departure from the first eponymous album and the second one, Viva!. Of the two projects that emerged from the Neu! schism, I had always considered Michael Rother’s Harmonia to be the fork in the road that led toward virtue, with La Düsseldorf a great band that had ALL the percussion but lacked the soul and innovation Harmonia seemed to have taken with it. The brightness and weirdness of Individuellos turns that map around, though.
Dinger passed away in September 2008, so we won’t have the anticipation of any rumored new Neu! revivals to sustain us on our bleak stretches, but we still have the seismic, hypnotic optimism of his catalog. In this respect, one of the only, we can be grateful the Internet never forgets.
Pedro the Lion: Control (2002)
The year was 2002, the ’90s were well over, and Pedro the Lion were soon never to be heard from again under that name. Louder, more distorted than Achilles Heel, here we have songs of disappointment and reward from a guy who can’t seem to be happy with anything. The title of the record says it all- these are all little stories of the situations from which people suck their lives as pulp from a fruit, those situations that wouldn’t exist but for their absolute control of their destinies.
The American Analog Set: Hard to Find (2009)
I was lucky to catch this excellent band on their farewell tour in 2005. The band had released 6 records between 1996 and 2005 after their formation in 1994, a ten year run of hypnotic and subtle rock often relating the travails and inner vicissitudes of youth and interpersonal relationships. The pretty and brutal honesty of the title track of the record, “Hard to Find”, gives me pause to hold back tears every time I so much as think of it. This is music moving in the steady time signature of life, not of the world-time productivity cyborgs we’ve all become.
We leave marks on each other. We’re not interchangeable. Stop. Remember that.
The Go-Betweens: Spring Hill Fair (1984)
My friend Chifumi introduced me to the Go-Betweens sometime between 2000 and 2002. I don’t know which record, I don’t remember which song. The Go-Betweens have a wistfulness tempered by cleverness, a poppy tone tempered by impossible time signatures. Theirs is the sound of a cleanly amplified guitar or an acoustic and a few real things to say.
I don’t have a lot to say about this record in particular. I love the track sampled here. I love “Love Goes On” from 16 Lovers Lane. I really like the entirety of Send Me a Lullaby, their first album from ‘81. I like this record that I heard the first time this year by way of someone dear.
Part Chimp: I am Come (2005)
Loud. Explodingly loud. Thanks, Todd.
Sebastien Tellier: Sexuality (2008)
I went back and forth on this album, and then I couldn’t stop. Right over the top.
How Dare You: Comfort Road (2008)
It was Sunday morning and I was at 1982, a bar in Gainesville, FL, for the final day of The Fest ‘08, three days of punk and PBR marketing. This band was a splash of Aqua Velva on my puffy skin, and it was good to revisit them again and again this past year.
The Loved Ones: Keep Your Heart (2005)
Power pop/pop punk done right. All right, all right.
An excellent review can be found here at Impose. ’70s guitars hearken back to the ’90s, and all your basic dad rock bands are fused into the soul of Ted Nugent, clarified, and injected into the very small guitar-shredding frame of Melissa Paternoster.
Clark: Totems Flare
I wrote about this record during the summer. It’s all Eerily baroque electronics and unaccustomed sounds, a return to form of his previous milestone, Empty the Bones of You, with its impossibly short intervals between changes. It’s a melding of his talent for off-putting tempo changes and sound processing with his more recent slowed-down and dance-friendlier music. It’s good. Kind of reminiscent of the vocal approach of Matthew Dear these days, but so much more complex sonically and musically. Like Aphex Twin in Flatland.
Wheat: White Ink Black Ink
I also trained my googly eyes on this record earlier in the year, praising the high-energy sincerity, cinematic big-affect pop, loud production, and the elastic, earthquaking time signatures that each of the songs’ parts seem to run independently on. Great new record by a good old band.
Metric: Fantasies
Emily Haines and her band come back from the farce of their last album to write a beautifully acerbic, trenchant, and hard pop record critical of those rules of fame, money, capital, and being untrue to oneself taught to all of us from the the first day we enter school. Lesson unlearned.
Subway: Subway II
Fine, fine, FINE krautrock out on Soul Jazz Records. Clean, simple, rhythmic, and electronic with an overt homage to one of my favorite bands of the genre. Naming a song Harmonia and then sounding just like that band on that track counts as homage, right? What an ineffably cool label Soul Jazz is.
Jay Reatard: Watch Me Fall
This week Jay Reatard was discovered dead at 29, well into an already 15-year long music career. He was a prolific artist the frenzy of whose output was never diluted, whose sound only became sharper and more penetrating with time. Watch Me Fall is a furious and fragile work of punk rock and poetry, and when I learned he died I felt the loss of never hearing another new record from such a committed and relentlessly uncompromising musician as a real shock, as a sudden cracked imperfection in the looking glass in which reality is reflected. Everything is wrong and this is sad.
You can listen to one of the last songs he recorded, a cover of Nirvana’s “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” from his website, linked above.
Pissed Jeans: King of Jeans
In addition to coming up with hilariously insouciant record titles and subliminally offensive song titles, these guys are also capable of really, really, really, laying on the loud. If rock were something incendiary, they would not be lasers— they would be a torrent of experimental napalm issuing at torso-bisecting PSI, flame or no. I sort of hesitate to put this record on this list because it’s not great in the sense that I can think of half a dozen lines from songs or any songs that stand out in particular to me, but when it goes on you’re really in a new space. You’re four or five songs in and waiting for more snide banality. They kind of remind me of Fireballs of Freedom, whose sloppy zest for living death, southern shopping mall style, endeared them to the better fuck you angels of my nature. What if Jeff Spicoli had a gun and a PhD in philosophy?
Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Yes, this did come out last year, and yes it’s good and a lot of fun. It is good and a lot of fun. I guess that’s all I really want to say about that. Is this a record I really need to bring to anyone’s attention?
I’m really glad these guys have made it. They’ve never done anything but keep their heads down and put out great pop records. United and all the great tracks on that record made me a permanent fan.
Everything Bradford Cox touches turns to mystery, and from mystery comes wonder. This record is the quiet soundtrack to your fears. Rough Trade also released a companion to this record with acoustic and alternate versions of some of the Logos songs that is well worth checking out. The acoustic version of “Kid Klimax” somehow takes that song even further into the heartbreaking banality of rustaway, workaday life, but youse gots to get the record from Rough Trade to check it for yourself.
I would like to see some kind of collaboration in any medium between Bradford Cox and César Aira. In fact, I think that about sums it up: Every song that Cox and his assembled crews write is the musical equivalent of the experience of reading any one of Aira’s novels. Bradford, if you’re out there, please read Ghosts and tell the world what you think.
Mew: No more stories Are told today I’m sorry They washed away
No more stories The world is grey I’m tired Let’s wash away
Mew are from Denmark and put the prog in power pop. Think “what if the Arcade fire were good?” Then play this record and expect an answer.
Capsule: More! More! More!
This came out in 2008, but I don’t care. This record surprised me more than half the things I heard this year, and it still never gets skipped when it comes in the rotation. This is a record that has gone over the top and volunteered to come back around to climb up again.
Air: Love 2
If you had told me 10 years ago I’d advise you to check out an Air record, I’d have punched you in the mouth. Then I’d give you one right in the cake. Figure that one out. I guess if someone has given you as long to get it right as these guys have had, though, you might put out a nice krauty suite of tunes just like Air did. Thank the stars for the sage foresight of record execs and their infinite patience.
Say Hi: Oohs and Ahhs
Say Hi almost solely write songs about vampires. Stripped down, echo-laden vocal tracks with quietly minimal rock riffs about romantic vampires.
David Bazan thinks a lot about life and God and all that drinking and fucking he did. It’s a wonder he has any time to sing so soulfully about it. The above-mentioned Say Hi opened for him on tour and also played in his backing band. While you’re checking this out, pick up 2002’s Pedro the Lion record, Control. It just may be the best ’90s record that didn’t see release in that decade. “Rapture” will blow the thinking adulteress’s pants off.
Propaghandi: Supporting Caste
The last time I listened to these guys was on a Fat Wreck Chords compilation- Fat Music Volume 2: Survival of the Fattest, it was- and back then they were pretty straight-ahead polemical oi-format punk. Whatever happened in the intervening 14 years has created an entirely different animal, one that swings from the trees of a different set of time signatures but still wants to pull corruption and capitalism limb from limb, like an episode from The Murders in the Rue Morgue played on guitar.
Converge: Axe to Fall
I don’t know much about Converge. I know they’ve been around for 10 years or so and they hail from Salem, MA. I read somewhere something about this album featuring a lot of interesting collaborations, but when you hear something this incredibly clean and hard, you don’t ask too many questions. I kind of like not knowing anything about a band when they’ve done something that deserves to stand alone without a backstory. The last thing this hard that excited me anywhere nearly as much as this did was the first Genghis Tron EP. One of those guys appears on this record, too, I think. I would say that Torche was “the last thing this hard…etc”, but, yeah, this is way harder than Torche. My good friend and insane drummer Erick had been anticipating this release since this teaser video and is the mensch responsible for turning me on to these guys: CONVERGE New album out soon on Epitaph/Deathwish
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