It's Like Christmas 2: Filter Gives Us Another Fucking List of Records They Like

Double-thanks for not even doing it at the year's proper midpoint, you whores.

Let's see what they picked:

1. Fleet Foxes -- Helplessness Blues. "I gave my love a cherry that had no stone...."
2. Paul Simon -- So Beautiful or So What. The latter.
3. Battles -- Gloss Drop. Coming Soon to an Ice Capades near you.
4. Explosions in the Sky -- Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. You Suck, You Suck, You Suck.
5. James Blake -- James Blake. James Blake.
6. Panda Bear -- Tomboy. As a rule, I hate any record that anyone uses the word "lush" to review. It invariably promises lame techno tricks disguised as deep feeling. I wonder if you're legally required to present your removed testicles to Filter before they bestow the moniker.
7. Other Lives -- Tamer Animals. The White Stripes died for this?
8. Gang Gang Dance -- Eye Contact. Oh, dear. Someone seems to have murdered Florence + the Machine and then resurrected them with some kind of voodoo ceremony into the bodies of Sailor Moon characters. My wife will be so unhappy.
9. Iron & Wine -- Kiss Each Other Clean. 'Natch.
10. Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi -- Rome. I loves ya, DM, honest I do. But why you brought Jack White in for his singing voice on an orchestral record like this defies my imagination. Also, where the hell is Penfold?
11. R.E.M. -- Collapse Into Now. Grampa done woke up, and he wants him some loud git-tar before  his afternoon constitutional. But don't keep it up too long, or he'll start a-mumblin' agin.
12. Shabazz Palaces -- Black Up. Because what Hip-Hop needs is a lounge act that gives its songs Fiona-Apple-Style names.
13. Beastie Boys -- Hot Sauce Commitee Part Two. OMG Remember Back to the Future?
14. Floating Action -- Desert Etiquete. I got bored listening to the samples and went and listened to Vincebus Eruptum by Blue Cheer for the first time instead. Now I have to decide if I want it on iTunes or CD.
15. Black Lips -- Arabia Mountain. Do you think that if these guys step into the same room as the Black Angels, the fabric of Space-Time will rip? Or will they just cancel each other out?
16. J Mascis -- Several Shades of Why. Yet none explain why everyone decided midway through the last decade that everybody has to pretend to be a folkie.
17. The Dodos -- No Color. Especially when there are perfectly good real folkies, like these guys.
18. Bill Callahan -- Apocalypse. Or this guy.
19. Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. -- It's a Corporate World. The band name isn't funny. The album name isn't funny. What's funny is this guy singing "We Almost Lost Detroit" with sincerity. Like, "Whew! The Motor City Sure Dodged a Bullet That Time!"
20. The Sea and Cake -- The Moonlight Butterfly. This isn't a bad band. They play the same indie-folkie-pop as everyone else on this list, but they play it well. But this album represents the nadir of post-modern musical packaging. To wit: the band is called "The Sea and Cake." Two things that, in most circumstances, have nothing whatever to do with one another. What does this mean? What does it evoke? NOTHING.  The album is called "The Moonlight Butterfly." Not "The Moonlit Butterfly," which would create a specific, and lovely, image. No, it's "The Moonlight Butterfly," which means NOTHING. And what's the cover art? A pencil drawing of an elephant on yellow.

Post-Punk Lo-Fi Alt-Country Power-Trio

These and other terms I have absorbed over the course of weekend with The Rock Snob's Dictionary, a book I'm almost positive was intended as a joke platform to snark at bands and musicians that the artist's don't like. It's useful, in that I learned a few things, such as the existence of people who plume their elitism by referring to Bob Dylan as "Zimmy." And the combination of this book and Keith Richards' autobiography has actually made me want to give Gram Parsons' music a listen. I probably won't, though, because I already spent my music budge for the month on a Black Angels CD.

Somehow, I'll manage

The New Raveonettes Sounds Awful...

...and I haven't heard a note.

the revealingly titled Raven in the Grave is rife with the somber, gossamer 4AD mannerisms of yore. The dreamy longings of “Forget That You’re Young” decisively call up the specter of Cocteau Twins, while “Apparitions,” with menacing gallop and funereal atmospherics, has Clan of Xymox’s mournful markings all over it.

The Raveonettes need their Surf Riffs. It's what makes them interesting. Poor fools, they peaked with their first EP.

The Major Lazer Video

To be blunt, I lacked the courage to respond with Andrew Earle's tart invective. The experience pole-axed me, and I still can't express my reaction in anything like critical terms.

No, I'm not going to link it. You know how to use the Internet.

New Beastie Boys Album

To Buy or Not to Buy? Honestly, To the Five Boroughs kind of soured me on everything since Ill Communications.

Here's Pitchfork:

Looking at their arc from a purely musical perspective, you could divide their career in half at the midpoint of that decade-- at some point between 1994's Ill Communication and 1998's Hello Nasty. Their first four full-lengths came in less than eight years, and during this stretch, they were hungry and on the move, restlessly searching for new avenues of music expression. They're just now getting to their third proper album (fourth, if you want to count 2007's instrumental LP The Mix Up) in the 17 years since.

I think that's just about right. Hello Nasty is good, but not great, and they've only gotten older since. Every critic's desperate attempt to plump them up as "Beastie Men" or "engaged post-wiseasses," has failed to cover up the fact that they've lost their spark and are basically decaying into a Beastie Boys cover band.

But hey, I could be wrong.

Rating My CD's: Aging Balding Star

31. Kings of Leon -- Aha Shake Heartbreak


Two years ago, the wife and I spent our anniversary in Philadelphia for a Kings of Leon concert. We kicked around my old stomping grounds, bought  tees, savored the aroma of cannabis wafting from the levels beneath us, and had a grand time. I would call it about the peak of my KoL fandom. Since then, I've progressively lost interest.

It's the sort of thing that happens with bands: you discover them, pour over them, wait with growing expectation for successive releases, and then lose the thrill. They wouldn't be the only band I did this with this decade (Hi, Black Rebel Motorcyle Club), but they may have been my favorite.

And I haven't really wanted to dwell on the why, because the why digs at one of the most annoying cavils that people toss at bands: "They sold out." I hate listening to people whine about their favorite bands selling out as soon as more than 50 people have heard of them. Your favorite groups don't suck because you have to share them with people ostensibly less cool than you are. They suck because any group that a status-obsessed nerd such as you likes is bound to be awful.

If Everything That I Hate in Music Was Distilled into a Single Record...

...it would be this:

It's so miserable being a bad art student's shitty crayon drawing

First of all, the band name is just preciousness summa cum laude, an almost deliberately obnoxious display of off-putting, self-congratulatory wordiness, all to express an idea that's been moldering in the ground since William Wordsworth moped around Tintern Abbey. The name is so painfully earnest that it makes me wish to see them star on someone's FailBlog.

The cover art magnifies the effect. I detect a pale (naturally) echo of the pink-and-blue trend in indie album art. I'm at a loss to guess what else I'm supposed to see, save another whispy, ill-defined soul in chains. Why not just paint a sad-eyed unicorn or vampire? It would appeal to the target audience just as well.

And the music? They sound like the Cure. Sometimes they almost want to sound like the Jesus and Mary Chain, but they haven't the courage to go for it. So they sound like the Cure. The End.

In conclusion: there's such a thing as leavening your sensitivity with humor or guts. Try it sometime, dweebs.

Wire Has a New Album.

I've been waking up to Pink Flag in my CD-clock radio for a couple of weeks. It works nicely.

I have Chairs Missing on vinyl. It is sublime.

But for the new album, which Wire supported by adding a layer to Jimmy Fallon's crust of hipsterdom, I'm thinking...Amazon MP3. Why?

1. Wire is almost by-definition digital music.
2. The album cover is kind of ugly.
3. It's cheaper that way.

Gallows Humor

Andrew Earles seems to lament a band called Gallows receiving the most recent style "PRESENT AND FUTURE OF PUNK".

I don't blame him. The cover art of their debut album looks like someone put strychnine in Roger Dean's acid.

Magnet Sucks

It is official.

Nothing if not a model of consistency, Buffalo Tom has been making the same decent-to-great music since 1992’s Let Me Come Over. Actually the Massachusetts trio’s third album, Let Me Come Over feels more like a debut, as it zeroed in brilliantly on the group’s strengths, namely the earnest, imagery-laden, acoustic-gone-electric songwriting of guitarist Bill Janovitz and bassist Chris Colbourn and the propulsive punk undercurrents supplied by drummer Tom Maginnis. Judging by the band’s latest, Skins (Scrawny), it’s a formula that still has legs. Skins is the group’s eighth album and second since reuniting after a 10-year (sort-of) break, and its world-weary lilt and been-there/done-that themes make it the perfect grown-up companion piece to Let Me Come Over’s reluctant coming-of-age angst. It may be the best thing the band has done since that LP. Buffalo Tom will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

So how'd you like to read that five times on a web site's main page? Which is what happens every time they let people guest-edit the mag: the same by-line advertisment appears over and over again (because Heaven Forbid we have to click on an anchor link to discover who in Hades Buffalo Tom is, if we happen to give a moldy crap).

This is what they've devolved to. No Over/Under since September. No Put Up Your Dukes for a year. No Where's the Street Team? since January 2009. I may have slagged these regulars before, but I like them much better than giving indie-bands and has-beens (anybody out there really hungry for the B-52's political outlook?) a platform upon which to wallow in their self-assurance.

Do these clowns actually have anything to say about music? Because right now they could achieve the same results by liking things on Facebook.

Reminiscing You

On the one hand, it never bothers me to see the nose thumbed at the hipster doofii, and prejudices in music condemned. Almost all music is better than its detractors would have it, or else it would not have fans. So Frank Valish's "Musical Explorations, or My Ever-Shrinking Indie Cred" blog is generally a good thing.

On the other hand, there's certain things I don't like to see revisited:

*Shudder*

I remember the days when almost every band looked like this, and I remember it sucking. There's just such a uniform blandness, intensified and not diminished by the obligatory androgyny. So when Valish writes:

Thankfully, however, if one digs beneath the surface of Waite's pop career, there are more than a couple laudable compositions, and the second part of his set on this night featured some of this more gratifying material. In his lost late '90s/early '00s years, Waite released some truly affecting pieces of singer/songwriter pop, examinations of New York City life, introspections, possibly autobiographical, on a self-medicating former rock star, and narratives about young musicians dreaming of stardom. And it is songs like these that are the most moving and revelatory in terms of the artist John Waite has become. "Downtown," the tale of the downtrodden former star whose hit song is now more recognizably sung by another, is a window seldom seen into the consciousness of an artist whose more famous days are past him. And, even more impressively, when Waite launches into early career peaks, such as 1982's rocking "Mr. Wonderful" and such '70s Babys material as the "Midnight Rendezvous," or the show closer "Head First," it's like the years have melted away. Here, the man is untethered by his former fame or the weight of past hits, such like that which led the protagonist of "Downtown" to the street corner for his high 15 years ago. It's a man reborn. And for me, it is some small reassurance that maybe you can in fact go home again.

... I believe him. And I don't wish any ill on John Waite, whose music I wouldn't recognize if I heard it. Health and prosperity to him, says I. But dear sweet Lord, if there's anything I would like to remain in blissful ignorance of, it's 80's ballad stables like "Missing You" and "How Did I Get By Without You." I heard enough of those between the ages of 3 and 13 to last a lifetime.

The Double-Helix at Work

Enough of all this blather about the 80's Revival and the coming 90's revival. The real shift in fasion is Aviators vs. Wayfarers.

Old and Busted (for now).

New Hotness (for now)

Under the Radar Denounces Blog Hype, Slags Pitchfork

I love it when they fight.

It’s a story that has repeated itself far too often, and for every Arcade Fire or Bon Iver that translated blog momentum into near unanimous acclaim, there was a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Midlake, Voxtrot, Sound Team, Cold War Kids, or Tapes ‘n Tapes that received a strong push from the blogosphere and found that by the time their second album was released, a lot of people had jumped off the merry-go-round. Without the opportunity to develop a fanbase that would invest time and money in them, those bands found that the same listeners and writers who had championed them had either moved on or weren’t interested in watching a band go through growing pains.

The internet expands, but human memory does not. There's only so much room for so many bands in our hearts or our wallets. I haven't listened to any of those bands, because my music tastes are a lagging indicator. It's very rare for me to get into a band on their first disc; I usually wait until they've been around and have learned to grow. That way, I don't have to sit around waiting for the next record to drop.

The only time I stepped outside of this rule was in 2002-2004, when I made a point of jumping on the Rock Revival bandwagon. This led me to purchases as diverse as the White Stripes and the Vines.

If blogs were the gatekeepers for the indie rock kingdom, Pitchfork were and are the undeniable kingmakers, having essentially launched the careers of Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, and others with one glowing review. The blogs might discover a band, but if that band is going to move beyond the blogs into the larger bloodstream, Pitchfork needs to officially confirm it with a “Best New Music” review.

They do? They are? Why Pitchfork particularly? Why not Spin or Magnet or CHARTattack or that plucky little Under the Radar? Is Pitchfork the hit-king?

Ariel Pink's Empty Graffiti

Via Fluxblog, this messy catchall, which Perpetua praises for it's "cheap glam Cobain look":



Bit of Suicide, bit of Bowie, and...something else...can't quite put my finger on it:

Ah...



Hurry that 15 minutes up, boys...

The X Most Blah of Whatever

I've made it this far without taking note of anybody's Top Ten of 2010 Lists. It's not that I find such exercises completely useless; it behooves to take stock of what has passed and what can be considered favorable and unfavorable. I just find them over-used: a cheap device to garner attention and controversey (which is to say, more attention).

Filter's Top 10, however, spares us no exhaustion. Not only do we get the Official Magazine Top 10, but the Top Reviewed Albums, the Publishers', Editor-in-Chief's, Associate Editor's, Layout Designer's, writing staff's and Guy Who Sleeps on Our Couch's individual Top Tens. By the time you're done, LCD Soundsystem would have implanted itself as a self-regenerating meme in your mindhead.



This totally changes my mind about irony.

Anyway, I thought I disliked Top Ten's because they were thoughtless and non-authorial, but it turns out I liked them even less when they're detailed and transparent. Maybe I only like the funny kinds. Let me know if you see any.

I'd Like to Feel Bad for Creed...

...I mean, it's 2011, and the hip still won't miss the opportunity to bash them, even for things they had nothing to do with.

According to Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper, little Walter Eikrem was walking home from school in his hometown of Rakkestad when all of a sudden he found himself on the same path as a pack of wolves.
Instead of crying wolf and running away, Walter did what seemed to be the only logical thing to him: he pulled out his cell phone, took the ear buds out of it and turned Creed's "Overcome" up full blast while screaming and waving his arms.

And the wolf ran away. GET IT LOL C WUT I DID THR?

Then I remember how skull-scrapingly bad Creed's music is, and I'm more or less fine with it.

Irony is Boring.

I liked the first two editions of Pitchfork's Why We Fight, but I've missed every one since. I've read #3 and #4 just now, and while I thought #4 was an okay walk through the perils of MIA's playing with politics, I got three quarters of the way down #3 and was suddenly, un-utterably bored with the entire enterprise:

This idea of knowingness, though-- our relationship with it can get complicated. Right now, one of the internet's most successful bastions of knowingness is a blog called Hipster Runoff, a performance that's almost nothing but knowing: It shrugs, it takes an arch, pseudo-scientific tone, it puts every other word in scare quotes. Here you go, it seems to say: Here is your weird market of hipness and cool. The end. You can take it as withering satire, if you want to, because its skewers are dead on target. Of course, if its pseudonymous author really thought the market of cool were that pointless and vacuous, why spend so much time thinking about it-- why know it well enough to be savvy? It's not so much a satire as a whole performance of knowingness. And even if I don't often have the stomach for it, I can't pretend the performance isn't an immaculate one: it's knowingness raised to the level of poetry, free of the burden of "intent" or sincerity or any point beyond what the reader reflects out of it. It goes beyond "the author is dead" and turns the author into some kind of zombie.

When I was in college, REM had a rather large hit song with the line "You said that irony was the shackle of youth." At the time, I disagreed, saying that irony was the weapon of youth. We were both right, I suppose, but I don't care to examine the matter much further than that, because Irony, capital "I", is not that interesting. It's not really a thing, it's an act, a choice. That's why an analysis or discussion of Irony will always feel overblown. And it's why Family Guy will always be less than its competitors.

I say that because the article namedrops The Simpsons. But The Simpsons, however arch it seemed, always leavened its snark with a sincere heart. The show actually cared about its characters; even, or especially Homer. Homer Simpson serves the show as the butt of most of the jokes, but if something really really bad happened to him, fans would be heartbroken. Because Homer is not really a bad guy, just flawed and limited, like all of us are.



Family Guy, on the other hand, doesn't really care all that much. About anything. The show's evolved from an even arch-er version of The Simpsons to an endless On the Road movie with a drunken hipster dog and a gay baby standing in for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. It's breezy and stupid and fully aware of its breeziness and stupidity, and works them like Stevedores for every laugh. At the root of every Family Guy gag is the thought, "This is so completely retarded that I have no choice but to laugh."



And while such cheap absurdity is a well that may never run dry, it's a good distance away from the archness and intellect of The Simpsons, and light-years away from its great rival South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's show is a lot of things, but almost never ironic. Rather, it's bone-cuttingly satiric, to the point of being mad-dog mean:



The humor here comes from saying the unsayable, and while that sounds knowing, it's not irony, because it's meant with deadly earnestness.

My point is that irony is not worth the effort of hashing out, because it's by no means as central to our cultural narratives as people who wallow in it, or fuss about it, think it is. There's a time when we all love it, and think ourselves superior for being aware of it. It passes.

Perpetua Sticks it to M.I.A.

At Pitchfork:

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.

I should probably stop wailing on the girl. That "Born Free" video really got under my skin somehow.

MIA = Missing In Action, in the Jungles of Hip.

 A few months ago I shot a quick dart of snark at Sri Lankan-born rapper MIA over her intentionally-infamous "Born Free" video. I did so without a whole lot of knowledge of anything about her other than her popularity amongst the hipsters, and Andrew Earles' tart dismissal of her:

It’s amazing the lengths to which music consumers, makers and critics will go to avoid appearing—gasp—racist. If the Sri Lankan-born M.I.A. had instead hailed from Tulsa, Okla., with the exact same music in tow, well, she would still be there right now. I call it TV On The Radio Syndrome: If they were white, one-eighth of the press and attention would’ve come their way. Music critics are terrified of facing this fact. M.I.A. provides lazy listeners with an easy multicultural accessory, the equivalent of traveling through India by way of seeing The Darjeeling Limited.

And so I would have let the matter rest, had not Ace of Spades linked the NY Times' skewering of her radical pretensions. Which he goes on to lambaste:

Basically, M.I.A.'s rule seems to be that if you're talking about her being a terrorist as if it's a chic, fashionable, daring, awesome thing -- i.e., as a good thing -- then she is a terrorist, precisely as she herself often claims.
But if you're saying it's a bad thing to be a wannabe terrorist jocksniffer, then she's not, and you are just being an unfashionable dolt who doesn't understand her sly humor.

After which, he links to the following (Content Warning: Real corpses and violence):

No Matter How Many Times I See It....

...I never get tired of watching the South Park Goth Kids burn down the Hot Topic. I like it so much, it almost makes me want to listen to Goth music. But that's a genre, aside from some Misfits and Joy Division discs, that I haven't really checked out (and I don't think they count).

On the other hand, sensitive rebels...