best of 2011 (that i listened to)

So I'm definitely not one of those people who keeps up with new music lightning-quick, listening to the next big thing the second it comes out. It usually takes me a while. Sometimes it takes me a long while. (I still haven't listened to The Suburbs). I get to it when I get to it.

That being said, this list is going to be pretty awful. I'm doing it mainly to see how many albums from this year I actually got around to listening to. So here goes and such.

1. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life

2. Doomsday Student - A Jumper's Handbook

3. Black Lips - Arabia Mountain

4. The Vinyl Stitches - The Vinyl Stitches

5. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

6. The Mountain Goats - All Eternals Deck

7. iceage - New Brigade

8. Boston Spaceships - Let It Beard

9. Andrew Jackson Jihad - Knife Man

10. Algernon Cadwallader - Parrot Flies

11. Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two

12. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Mirror Traffic

13. Yuck - Yuck

14. Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil

15. Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

16. The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

17. Radiohead - The King of Limbs

18. Okkervil River - I Am Very Far

19. British Sea Power - Valhalla Dance Hall

20. The Dodos - No Color

21. The Dirtbombs - Party Store

22. The Strokes - Angles

Yikes. Not a whole lot. More than I thought I'd have, admittedly, but still...not good. I need to work on that.

Pretty good year, as far as I've heard from it. A few major disappointments (Radiohead, The Strokes), but a ton of albums that I'm going to cherish for years to come--pretty much the entire top ten, really. Great albums.

LOTS of albums I still have to get to though (Bon Iver, PJ Harvey, etc.), but I have a system I like to keep to that helps me listen to everything in my collection while slowly filtering new music through. I have a 160gb iPod that's constantly full, and I like to make sure I'm not leaving any music unlistened to. And the two times I deviated from that system this year, I was crushed. (Radiohead and The Strokes).

P.S. - People seem to be sleeping on Doomsday Student for some reason, but they're carrying on the spirit of Arab on Radar wonderfully, and I really think their new album rivals anything AOR ever did. Not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, but I've heard damn near NOTHING about this band from anyone else.

being robert christgau

(Decided to try something new at work on Tuesday. Wrote a review of each album I listened to, all day, quick-burst, Christgau-style, snark left unbridled. It was fun. Internet was out last night, so here it is now.)

Porn – Wine, Women and Song

Melvins-style sludge that rocks harder and stays more professional than their skuzzy brethren. Band name aside (a classy upgrade from “Men of Porn”), these guys don't fuck around. Riffs out the ass and a purity of attitude and style that overwhelms and sucks you into its being like all good metal should.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request

Better than the first request, by a good deal. Stones cocksucking aside, there are plenty of great tunes under the experimental touches. One of the more capable Anton treatises, though like all the rest it falls incomplete, a tossed-off masterpiece that could've been. Too much Brian Jones, not enough Keith Richards.

Sleater-Kinney – All Hands On the Bad One

Riot-grrls with the chops to sound like a big-grrl band, the talent to write legitimately great rock songs, and the sense to ditch the fem bravado for the real deal. No need to say “Suck My Left One” here. They demand in as many words what Hannah will beat you across the head with, only it's significant outside of the socio-political context. Who needs that shit anyway. They sure don't.

Les Sexareenos – 14 Frenzied Shakers

Proof the Chuck Berry riffs are still worth ripping off 60 years later. You can call it punk, but it's no more dangerous than the Sonics. At times they're damn near a carbon copy of them and every other early garage rock band, which is kinda the point. Zero originality points, but for 14 tracks rock 'n' roll appears to be alive after all. (Also, putting 16 tracks on the CD is an excellent punk-ironic touch.)

Guided By Voices – Alien Lanes

Not quite Bee Thousand, but few things in life are. Lo-fi, but it really shouldn't be. These guys need not hide behind the fuzz. Can't say that for many other eight-track demi-gods, yet I love Lou Barlow all the same. Probably could've been killer at half the length, but the sprawl gives it it's charm. When he hits, Pollard is as good as any songwriter alive. He just needs to hit more.

The Lemonheads – Lick

Hard not to look down on any Lemonheads album that isn't Ray or Come On Feel. Still a solid enough album though. They're thankfully shedding the last of the Hüsker Dü fanboy issue, but that obnoxious guitar sound is still there, smothering the band's burgeoning songwriting. The Bob Mould impression just isn't that good. It's been done better. So have Evan Dando's songs.

the beatles - sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band

Is there an album in existence more drenched in context than Sgt. Pepper's?

It feels weird to even use that word to describe it, "album." It's an entity, a piece of music history in itself, if not cultural history, or human history altogether. There's a seemingly endless list of accomplishments and an immense world of influence all attributable to a mere 13 tracks. More success than any band would hope to achieve in their entire career, multiplied by a hundred--all from just one Beatles album, and arguably not even their most influential one.

It's all absurd, and there's really no point in talking about it. I won't say anything that hasn't been said before. Plus, if you weren't there for it's release, you can't understand the full effect it had on the world. You just can't.

For someone like me, born in 1989, who didn't hear a Beatles album until he was 16 because his parents had been sick of hearing them for decades, someone who experienced the end result of the Beatles in the countless bands they inspired way before he could even pick out a single song... It's impossible not to be underwhelmed by this album.

I'll never forget the first time I listened to Sgt. Pepper's. It was one of the CDs I picked up on one of my many library trips, and I could not have been more excited. I had read Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums" list, I had read a few reviews online, I had at least a sense of the amount of hype surrounding it, and I was totally prepared to have my mind blown by what was categorically the greatest album ever made, according to everyone that mattered.

And I was let down. Hard.

Even now, having listened to it probably dozens of times, the general psychedelic feel of the whole album still sounds hopelessly dated. On my first listen, it sounded like a bunch of drugged-out songs about a circus or some shit. It was just...weird. This was the greatest album ever made? There was no way. Rolling Stone was clearly fucking with me.

I've grown slightly more fond of it over time, admittedly, but it never reached that lofty position in my mind among the greatest works of rock 'n' roll, as the critics and the writers and the rock stars lead me to believe. Pet Sounds clearly has better songwriting. Loveless blew my mind more on a technical level. And as a far as psychedelia is concerned, I'll take the diluted garage version found on Pebbles or Nuggets any day. It's just not that impressive.

Granted, this is me saying this in 2011. And I completely understand that. When you look at the rest of the music world in 1967, Sgt. Pepper's towers miles above anything else. I know. Studio achievements, technical breakthroughs, even the goddamn track listing was revolutionary. I get it. It changed everything.

But all of that is reliant on the context. You have to know that Sgt. Pepper's is a great album. You have to know that it changed everything. Which is all fine and good. But I just never thought the album stood up by itself, without that outside knowledge. "A Day in the Life" is a wonderful song, and is arguably the best song the Beatles ever wrote, let alone the best song on the album, but the rest of it is just tedious, strange, and sounds like it was recorded for a world I've never been to before. Which is true, I suppose. (I've never done any psychedelics, which practically drenched the world this album was born into.)

I guess my point is that I really don't like Sgt. Pepper's all that much, and I don't feel bad about it.

There was a time when I tried to convince myself that this album was incredible, just like Trout Mask Replica was fascinating and Faust wasn't boring as all fuck. But it's just not what I think. I'd rather listen to the White Album or Rubber Soul or Revolver or even Magical Mystery Tour. And that's okay. Because Rolling Stone doesn't get to decide what music I should like. I do.

pain jerk - recycled music

I may be the most immature person I know.

I graduated from college in May, degree in-hand, wandered out into the real world, and it's really a wonder that I'm still alive.

I had to write a couple checks today to pay for a doctor's visit, and I had to Google "how to write a check," because I had been using a debit card since I was fifteen. I honestly had no fucking idea how to do it. And even with the Googled instructions in front of me, I still fucked up one of the checks and had to redo it.

The whole college education thing I paid thousands of dollars for (or eventually will, I guess) doesn't seem to have done a goddamn thing for me. I can write, I can hold a logical conversation, I can rattle off stupid meaningless facts that I picked up somewhere along the way, but I'm completely incapable of existing in society as I am today.

All of my college friends are living at home. All of them. We're all too broke to even begin thinking about moving out. Most of us have jobs. Some of us are going to grad school.

The difference between me and them, though, is that if push-came-to-shove and they had to move out and make a quick living and survive, they could do it. But I really don't think I could.

Sometimes I think I have agoraphobia. It'd be nice, really--having an excuse not to leave the house, ever. But really I just think I'm a fucking moron, and having to be around people day-in and day-out reminds of that, constantly. So really I'm not scared of people, I'm just scared of having my own insecurities and weaknesses reflected back on me by everyone I come into contact with.

My days now are just a series of fuck-ups, hesitant conversations, and awkward eye contact. I feel stupid every day of my life. I feel completely incapable of normal human communication, yet that's what I'm paid to do, eight hours a day, five days a week. At a college, no less.

I'm twenty-two, not that much older than the students I interact with--hell, some of them are my age, if not older--but I still feel that same incredible, numbing disconnect with everyone I talk to. As a result, I feel way fucking older than twenty-two. It feels like life is passing me by double-time. I'm wasting away in my khakis and dress shirt and completely phony attitude and appearance, because...well, I don't know.

I need money, I guess. To pay off my loans, which I used to get this college degree I clearly utilize so well. And to pay off my credit card, which I used in the precious few months of freedom after college that would've been totally awesome and amazing if I hadn't been hilariously depressed the entire time. And to pay for music, which is really the only thing keeping me going at this point. (Also beer.)

My dad says I'm buying music now because I'm growing up. Which is clearly bullshit. I'm buying music because I have money.

As much as I never would've admitted it, I've always felt guilty downloading music. Especially when it came to the lesser-known, independent label, dudes recording in their basements kind of music. Which I love. You can spin it anyway you wanted to (and god knows I did), but I was enjoying their art without giving anything back to the artist. And there's just no way to sit right with that.

I've probably bought more music in the last few weeks than I have in my entire life. I got a nice package from Parasol in the mail today (The Extra Lens, Black Dice, The Hentchmen, Brick Layer Cake), and it was such an incredibly satisfying feeling unwrapping that needlessly taped up box of music. Not just the feeling of getting something in the mail (admittedly an excellent feeling), but the fact that I was enjoying music as something other than a Mediafire download or a soulless Mp3. My asshole music friends here on the Internet will tell me that you can't even hold music, but goddammit, I held five different CDs today, and I was holding music. (I also got a Lake of Dracula compilation.)

I hate to be that cliché twenty-something rambling on about the glory of vinyl, but standing in a record store in a basement in Frederick, flipping through racks upon racks of albums, stumbling upon gems like Two Nuns and a Pack Mule, Freedom of Choice, or a copy of Sticky Fingers with the zipper still intact... I honestly can't remember the last time I was that happy. And there's not way to explain it or justify it, because it's fucking stupid, and I know it. It's a dead medium. It sounds like shit. It degrades over time. It's a pointless fetish item coinciding with a larger, mindless societal grasp toward a nostalgia I never even owned to begin with, and it's insane. But I don't really give a fuck.

People ask me that whole "what would you do if you had a million dollars" question, and my honest answer (after sleeping for like a week straight undisturbed) is that I would get a van, drive around the country looking for record stores, and build a record collection. Then I would get a room with a swanky stereo setup (not too swanky--my ears are too dead to really appreciate the good stuff), and just listen to music, all the time. Again, it's stupid, but it's real, it's my own, and it's fucking something, which is more than I have right now.

And right now... Right now all I want is to have my ears smashed in by two walls of flowing static. Just to cleanse and burn it all away for a few minutes, numbing me down and closing everything else out, giving myself a break from feeling like such a waste. Which, consequently, is all happening through a pair of brand new cans (HD-558's) that I bought with the pay from my soul-crushing job. So I guess I'm getting something out of all this bullshit after all.

dog leather - greezy man and stinky man meets smutty ranks on tarantula hill

Out of the multitude of new artists I saw at Whartscape in 2010, DJ Dog Dick was certainly one of the more interesting. His music was an unholy hybrid of noise and hip-hop, and his sanity was questionable. It was loud and borderline painful, but it was fascinating to watch, and enjoyable on a level I couldn't quite explain. It was simply music unlike anything I had ever heard before.

Dog Leather, a collaboration between DJ Dog Dick and like-minded artist/DJ/maniac Sewn Leather, follows along the same warped patterns set out by Dog Dick, and the result is an album every bit as defiant as his solo work.

The sound is almost impossible to describe. Abrasive dub, littered with fractured samples and sparse percussion, with frat-boy stoner rap scattered over top of it all. You can throw out any number of buzzwords and try to tie it to any number of artists--I've seen writers compare this to witch house, which is an absolute joke--but none of it comes close to the reality. (If I was trying to spawn the next bullshit NME cover story, I'd go with "post-crunk" or "psychedelic glitch" or "PCP-core.") Just when you find yourself adjusting to the spaced-out dub flow, bam--flute solo. Once they have you relaxed and situated, watch out--walls of shrieking feedback over a jackhammer synth beat. For good measure, random interludes of cell phone recordings are thrown in between tracks. It's all over the place.

The only element really tying the album together is the manic, druggy energy that flows freely throughout. (Not only are there allusions to smoking PCP, but the CD case includes a few blatant drug images--just in case you had any doubt as to their muses.) It doesn't sound like anything, even track to track, which is a unifying factor in itself. But once it's over, once the blur of sounds fades out, you're left undeniably wanting more.

The madness of it all, the dizzying amount of influences that come together to create such an oddly satisfying product, just leaves you feeling empty afterwards. It feels like just that--a product, an end result, a cold, hollow piece of music lacking any real depth or passion. It feels like a tossed-off side-project, which it may very well be.

That's not to say there isn't anything to like on Greezy Man and Stinky Man. Surprisingly, the tracks with the most half-assed rapping turn out to be the most memorable. (Definitely did NOT see that coming.) "Do Gleat Her," "Gunky Monks," and "Goblin Massacre" are undoubtedly party anthems at the innermost depths of the Baltimore underground that I can only hope to glimpse on occasion. The dub styling on "Troll Spray" even makes for downright pleasant music. I'll be giving this plenty of listens in the future, and I certainly don't regret coughing up some money to support a product as unique as this. It just doesn't quite live up to its potential. Here's hoping Dog Leather gives it another try in the future though.

the vinyl stitches - all strapped up

(I missed Friday's post due to personal conflicts and alcohol. Mainly the alcohol, stoked by the conflicts. Which is odd, since normally it works the other way around. But that's okay.)

There came a point in my life, about six months ago, where I realized that I was forcing myself to listen to music I didn't really enjoy. I had turned my iPod into a rock critic's wet dream, at the expense of my own pleasure, to fulfill some dated, convoluted standard that was irrelevant to begin with. Which is pretty fucked up.

I wish I could remember the specifics of this epiphany. All I know is I slowly began admitting to myself that I really don't like Captain Beefheart, Faust, or Andrew Bird, but I love shitty noise rock, every Mountain Goats live show ever recorded (pre-2004), and most especially, garage rock. So I deleted all the shitty prog and experimental arty nonsense that was simply exhausting to sit through, and began delving deeper into the mindless caveman garage bands that truly got my dick hard.

I've become quite the pompous ass when it comes to garage, if I do say so myself. I've run through every volume of Nuggets, Pebbles, and Back From the Grave many times over, trying to pick out the few bands in those collections that actually released more than one 7", and in the process developed a love for that raw, noisy, awful racket that accompanies good, true garage rock. It's just attitude and naïvety, kids who just wanted to be rock stars so they bought guitars and figured out a few chords and ripped off the Stones and the Who as close as they possibly could without straight-up copying the riffs note for note. It's primal and pure and it's more exciting than any other music I've encountered in my relatively-short life.

The early-2000s brought on a wave of "garage-revival" bands, most of which were absolute shit. The good ones were "garage" in the vaguest sense possible--somehow the Strokes, the Hives, and the Vines fall into this category, when they were really just playing poppy rock 'n' roll with a healthy dose of punk posturing. The bands that actually tried to sound like their Nuggets idols are the ones that suck the hardest. The Flaming Sideburns, the the Mooney Suzuki, the Datsuns, and an endless stream of other bands that played pristine bullshit rock songs and completely missed the point. Where was the edge? Where was the grime? Where was the fucking soul?

The list of modern revival bands that I actually enjoy is short and sweet: the White Stripes, the Greenhornes, Black Lips, the Hentchmen, and maybe the Kills, if we're pushing the boundaries far enough. But none of them quite have that garage sound down like of one of my favorite new bands, the Vinyl Stitches.

These guys got it right. Which is apparently really fucking hard to do these days. They have more in common with the 80s-90s revival groups that predated the whole movement, and did it better than anyone else--the Gories, Oblivians, the Chesterfield Kings, etc. The Vinyl Stitches probably fall somewhere between those three groups. Take the Nuggets songwriting of the Kings, mix in the Oblivians punk attitude, and filter it through the delicious cacophonous fuzz of the Gories, and you get something close to their new album.

The thing that makes this band stand out among the army of look-a-likes is the energy. They sound just as excited and restless as the original wave of garage rockers. Whether they're plagiarizing that energy wholesale is beside the point, because they're plagiarizing it really, really well. I believe it. They're not celebrating rock 'n' roll in the third-person, in that obnoxious Hellacopters style that permeates everything "revival"--they're just living it. Which is cliché as hell but it's true, so who gives a shit. The Vinyl Stitches set out with "a vision of creating a band that would reproduce the live spirit of rock 'n' roll!" (Emphasis there's, not mine.) The scary part is that they somehow succeeded.

All Strapped Up is simply one of the most enjoyable rock albums I've heard in years. Which fits them perfectly into my new-found approach to honestly enjoying music. Not that I'm dropping the noisy, rough shit altogether--I'm listening to 2 by Hanatarash as I type--but it's nice to be able to fit one or two of these nice, wholesome albums in the rotation to lighten the mood on occasion.