2008 Favorites: Los Campesinos!/We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

Los Campesinos! may not consider We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed to be their proper second album, but whatever it's place in their discography, its the best collection of material they released this year. To my mind it is the first 'real' record anyway. Hold On Now, Youngster… was a good record taken on it's own merits, but tonally it was just a continuation of their Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP. The giddy sugar rush of Fingers played out at album length left me with a sore stomach and the unsettling feeling that this promising young band had only one gear and they were going to gun the engine until the car ran out of gas. Eight months later this record came out and shortened the odds on Los Campesinos! Turns out they wear desperation as well as they do joy, and that they're interested exploring the threads that connect the two (reflected in the duality of the title). The band's indie rock fetishizing - so key to their early material and appeal - is reigned in here: less inside baseball lyrics, no pep squad shouts, no exclamation points in the song titles (as opposed to four on Hold On Now, Youngster…) just ten great songs delivered with the confidence and charisma a great young band coming into it's own. Turns out that all the twee fixation on indie rock bands was besides the point: Los Campesinos are a band worth getting fixated on themselves.

2008 Favorites: fivethirtyeight.com

Though the internet may give all opinions (relatively) equal weight, it cannot disguise the fact that they are all not created equally. Following the election this year made separating the good online outlets from the bad especially important since it became clear that while the newspapers we're floundering and the TV networks were in a race to the bottom, the online community had finally achieved preeminence (in the zeitgeist if not the numbers, we'll have to do better than 15th in the world in broadband availability for that). Fivethirtyeight.com, though initially baffling to a numerical neophyte like myself, quickly set itself apart from the pack with its methodical calculations, thoughtful analysis, and clear-eyed, if not exactly non-partisan, view on the political landscape. Nate Silver, armed only with oceans of data, an elegant system for decoding it, and his dispassionate tone made a believer out of many a newsreader and blew away the conventional wisdom concerning polls and their use. If you followed fivethirtyeight you were always one step ahead of everyone else - two ahead of the tail chasing media - and after it was over you were left wondering how we ever made it through elections without Nate and crew. Only .7% off in their final projection! The thought of it almost makes me miss the election. Almost.

2008 Favorites: Okkervil River/The Stand Ins

Will Sheff may turn his nose up at the term lit-rock, but when you're writing sequels to earlier records (complete with connecting cover art!), re-purposing "Slope John B" to eulogize Berryman, and intertwining the stories of your band into your music so much that it is impossible to separate them it's time to give up the ghost. You'd prefer prog-rock? Though the band has the musical muscle to stand out of the crowd (good enough for the exceptional Jonathan Meiburg to peel off without batting an eye), it's Sheff's literary preoccupation - and skill - that separates Okkervil River from it's peers. The motown metronome of "Lost Coastlines" is good enough to make you not realize the song has no chorus as Sheff's story of a wandering band (comprised of his wandering band) spills out. And when he does get around to writing a proper rock song ("Pop Lie") it's a dissection of what it means to make and listen to music . Popular music is lousy with deconstructions of itself, but who goes after the audience too ("...and you're lying when you sing along")? You're only playing that game if you've got more on your mind than just rocking out, so whatever term you like, let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Not that thats a bad thing. There will always be a place in rock music for the brainy kids who sound like they swallowed a thesaurus, because most of the time its an asset and not a liability.

2008 Favorites: Frightened Rabbit/The Midnight Organ Fight

To paraphrase the inimitable Susanna Clarke, is it true that while melancholy belongs to all the world, it's individual extractions are made up according to different recipes? Are there distinct and tangible differences between Jewish sadness, gentile sadness, white sadness, black sadness, etc...? If so, The Midnight Organ Fight seems to be a pure distillation of Scottish sadness. Scott Hutchison allows his honey on sandpaper burr run to roughshod through his pained lyrics, while the band only makes fleeting attempts to push their sound past the Lowlands and Northern Isles. So what keeps this record from being some Thistle & Shamrock-style cultural artifact? Grant Hutchison's drumming is the key musical element; for despite the singer/songwriter feel of the material, this is really a drummer's record. Like any good sibling Grant is inclined to kick his brother's ass when he's feeling too sorry for himself, and the drum work on this record has an electric effect on the material. The other key is the sad sack in the middle. Scott Hutchinson paints his demons exquisite and lovely detail but keeps it relatable throughout - drawing the audience in instead of pushing them away. After all, everyone is alike under the skin, right?

2008 Favorites: Deerhunter/Microcastle, Weird Era Cont.

An album I so enjoyed that I bought it twice (I just could not wait for the physical release - I'm weak). With Microcastle Deerhunter totally realized the ideas they had been toying with on the Fluorescent Grey EP and the result is a band in full flower. From the first chords of the beatific opener "Cover Me Slowly" to the epic cacophony in the final moments of "Twilight at Carbon Lake" (in which the band finally perfectly synergizes their love of noise, shoegaze, and 60's pop), Microcastle is a collection art-damaged pop pleasures. It's vestigial twin Weird Era, Cont. is much the same, but radically different. Where Microcastle is comprised of twelve perfectly calibrated pop songs, Weird Era's tracks ebb and flow together in the amniotic fluid of the gauzy production. They are the dreaming of Microcastle; a translucent collection of Neu!-like rhythms, wall-of-sound harmonies, and shoegazing guitar. The exception is "Calvary Scars II/Aux. Out", which takes a delicate seed of a song from Microcastle and allows it to bloom in both expected and unanticipated ways. Closing out the record it proves that Deerhunter are still exploring the evolution of their sound and that progression will be as unpredictable as it is satisfying.

2008 Favorites: Marnie Stern/This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That.

My favorite record of the year. Listening to her music approximates the feeling of falling inside someone else's head, with all the attendant chaos and impenetrability. Declining to use her music to tell stories or espouse opinions Stern prefers to catalog the myriad of reflections that exist in the hall of mirrors of her mind. That's why her virtuosic guitar playing (and Zach Hill's drumming, better integrated here than on her debut) is not gimmick: it originates from the way she expresses herself creatively. Add all the glimpses, echoes, shards, and shreds together and you get a sense of the person - and no one did it better in 2008.

What the hell is wrong with this country?

I hate it here.

2008 Favorites: Michael Haneke's/Funny Games

I was so taken with this movie that I will never recommend it to anyone. Haneke American-ized his decade old Austrian mindfuck and by doing so strengthened it's impact instead of diminishing it. Funny Games is about American movies and American audiences, and the subtitles and Euro-centricities of the original distanced the film from it's subject. Now with the barrier removed it plays even more as intended: a meditation on the festering wound of the American film going psyche. The film's detractors call it didactic and exploitative. Perfectly true, but precisely the point. The moralizing tone Haneke adopts is a perversion of prestige film pretension (see: Ed Zwick and Paul Haggis), while the manipulation of space and time are no more extreme than your average summer tentpole - only here it serves to undermine the audience's expectations instead of gratifying them. The rise of the torture porn genre and other various grotesqueries in the years between the original and the remake merely underline Haneke's argument. There is no audience for this film in America.

2008 Favorites: The Dodo's/Visiter

The limitations of the two-man band only seem limitless (see: The White Stripes). And in light of Visiter's kaliedoscopic sounds, the Stripes "primitivism via constraints" theme seems more like a lack of creativity than possibility. Because where Jack and Meg are simplistic, Meric and Logan are sophisticated. Their background in Ewe Drumming and metal form the twin pillars of the record without succumbing to the cultural colonialism of the former or the potential tedium of the latter. The perfect combination syncopated drums and acoustic guitar [each given equal presence in the mix] is forceful and propulsive, yet complex and intricate. All that from a two-man band, proving once more it's not the tools of the trade, but the imagination and skill of the artist.

2008 Favorites: Fiery Furnaces/Remember

My go to Fiery Furnaces album ever since it was released, this behemoth (51 tracks!) live record is as close to a definitive statement as you could ask for on the Friedberger sibling's music. Though its a more than a little disingenuous to even call this studio edited Frankenstein a 'live' album - it's more a chaotic fever dream of their entire catalog played out as one continuous song. Looking back it seems more and more likely that their studio albums are just Rosetta Stones for understanding their electric and ever-evolving live sets. Don't believe the liner notes: this album has to be taken in all at once or not at all. One complaint: no "Police Sweater Blood Vow"

2008 Favorites: Kanye West/808s & Heartbreak

Screw the haters, the Colberts, and the fake Twitter-ers. This is a great record. Yeah, he spends the whole record wallowing in self pity, but hell, I can relate. The Auto-Tuner? Radiohead used it to buckle and bend Thom Yorke's vocals to better voice his alienation, so why can't Kanye? Sure, it'd make a better EP than an album but with myopia came focus: no skits, no intros, no outros, & no fussy arrangements. Kanye brought the songs and from where I'm sitting there ain't no arguing with "Love Lockdown", "Robocop", "Heartless" or "Amazing".

ASIFA Gallery Show

My piece for the ASIFA Gallery Show at left.

The show was great. Had to skate early, but other than that it was fun, fun fun. Glad Ambrose made it down.

k

i reckon that i save at least ten minutes a day by typing "k" instead of "ok" when talking on messenger. thank god.

Typo

Domain of proofreaders and editors. Scourge of writers and designers. Just glad it wasn't my bad this time. Poor Callie. Probably not that big a deal. Who reads a magazine ad and then contacts the company via their street address these days? It ain't the nineteenth century anymore.