Best of 2012 (Now w/ Hindsight!)

I'm gonna be honest, 2012 did not pop out to me as much of a year in the way of new music, at least not like 2011 did. However, I'm a year older and more cynical and less impressed by the nostalgic musical textures making the rounds these days. Cold wave is totally bored and dead, 70s revival has been done to death by now, post-80s 808s now make me gag, witch house was always shit and indie rock needs embalming, its rigor mortise is rampant. That being said, I managed to scrape together 10 records that made their way to my earholes in the last 370 days, which is my standard for whether something should have been heard at all - I heard it. Mind you I heard some other things, this list isn't purely lazy, but what you see hear are the things I made it all the way through more than once without being strapped into a dentist's chair.

 

 Zeus blew up on the Toronto bar scene nearly half a decade ago when they ditched Jason Collett to pursue their brand of uber-catchy, Abbey Road revival album rock. Having been to a handful of their truly scintillating live shows I eagerly awaited a recorded debut. Their Sounds Like Zeus EP and Say Us full length presented a tame, analog rendered version of their energy. It is on Busting Visions that they have perfectly captured what was so great about the '70s harkening sounds of Sloan's Navy Blues, with even more clarity in their sonic vision of the past. Are You Gonna Waste My Time? Anything You Want Dear and Proud and Beautiful are the most recent songs to adequately re-imagine the studio-rock legacy of 10cc in the modern day. A great listen the whole way through. 8/10 

Busted 

 

This one had to go up here as it is a) the best album title of the year and b) a welcome return to form for PE pioneer weirdo Boyd Rice. While I missed the NON project on their first time round at the end of the last century I will surely be looking into them having heard this immense tour-de-force of post-apocalyptic, grating mid-range abuse. If you like anger and sadism, nothing else released this year rivals this newest gospel from the master. Extra points for an old-school Warm Leatherette rendition.

Back To Mono

My introduction to this female singer-songwriter powerhouse came in the form of this seminal release. Tramp is a total breath of fresh air in the world indie-folk lady songstresses as its themes of love, possession, heartbreak and infatuation range from candidly intimate to icy cold in performance. While the textures on this album could have been more varied, the songs themselves are perfect. The stoned haze which the songs sound like they were written in conveys a character on record who is refreshingly as paranoid and guarded as she is subdued and seductive. Looking forward to more from Ms. Van Etten. 

Give Out

Sludge and doom are not easy. These sub-genres are predicated on very basic cliches and thus, like with any music that's been happening for more than 20 years, a surplus of generic and unoriginal bands is continually mounting. This makes seeking out the innovators or even just the talented acts can be exhausting. Luckily I have friends and band mates to do that for me. Monarch are undoubtedly part of that select few. With Omens they demonstrate their monolithic ability to effortlessly create plodding riffs that keep you interested and in the dark while generating an atmosphere that pulls the listener deeper into a darkened pit of depravity. 

Transylvanian Incantations           

 

 A Thing Called Divine Fits is 2012s answer to Kill The Moonlight. This record recognizes Britt Daniel as the true champion of the claustrophobic pop he first perfected with Spoon on the aforementioned 2002 opus. After a decade, Daniel shows that, having wandered down that 70s glam garden path with his old outfit, he can reinvent himself in the idiosyncratic idiom that suits him best. Bonus points for stealing my preferred high school cover of Nick Cave band the Boys Next Door's Shivers.

Baby Get Worse

*** I heard this one early on this year and genuinely forgot/did not realize it was a 2012 release, it seemed too good, too instantly nostalgic. Sleigh Bells have come out the gate firing on all cylinders in a Reign of Terror I hope continues for years to come. Impressively tackling textures as disparate as hair metal shred guitar revival, shoegaze soprano vocalise and grind drum machine programming. The result is a dizzying display of sugary sweet pop melody atop throbbing mechanical heavy metal dance beats. Boom.  
 Never Say Die

 There's not much people won't have said about this one. Frank Ocean completes his ingenious one-two punch of releasing a largely plagiarized mix-tape of improved-upon hits with sonic interludes that made reference to the influential medium within which he was working by creating a near flawless original album that tackled another medium of popular media consumption: television. As we're guided, flicker in hand, through a series of episodes in the young, talented and recognized artist's mind, we experience an emotional roller coaster boiled down to snapshots of unwitting patrons seconds before they drop. Along the way are odysseys of the heart, addiction, commitment and frivolity that grip the listener at every turn, keeping them glued through advertisements.  

 Pyramids

 Aldebaran have long been in the above mentioned distinguished league of funeral doom hordes. Their newest and sophomore effort took a surprising turn for the melodic after the bleak and brooding sludge of 2007's Dwellers In Twilight. Boasting one of the most Thergothon comparison worthy tracks of the past decade (clocking in at a couple under half an hour), Aldebaran's newly donned depressive harmony is a welcome change that does all but eclipse their debut stronghold.

Forever In The Dream of Death  

Cloud Nothings managed to spur a great Albini rant on reddit this year as well as deliver a biting full-length of moody 90s post meets pop punk that brings as much new melody and songwriting as it does familiar textures with King Dick behind the boards. From gloomy mid-tempos to infectious hooky rockers, Attack On Memory carries more excitement than an online scrabble match.

 Fall In

 

By far the most exciting and innovating record this year and shockingly put out by Sub Pop! Spoek Mathambo is equal parts eccentric, hip, South African dance, hip-hop hooliganism and post-rock angst. Father Creeper is an unsettling and idiosyncratic afro-futurist vision of a generation who outlive the end of morality and the world as they know it. With the accompaniment of an extraordinarily versatile band, drum programming and minimal sampling, Spoek manages to realize an apocalypse that's profound nature comes in that it is social and not environmental. And most of this happens over an irresistibly complex dance beat.

Put Some Red On It

SWANS second reactivated effort trumps all with its impeccable conceptual fortitude and all-encompassing range of material. Gira has managed a piece that is retrospective and inventive at the same time, which fits well into the album's theme of endings as new beginnings and vice verse. Culling unfinished compositions from throughout his 30 year career and up to the present day, Gira demonstrates his unchallenged diversity in musical texture. The 30 minute title track alone weaves through avant garde tonal walls, tense marital swells and into the SWANS own brand of bludgeoning proto-sludge droning incorporating, along the way bagpipes, tubular bells, dulcimers, gongs, harmonica and what sounds like a power drill. Through The Seer the SWANS/Angels of Light catalog has been given new meaning and continuity. That's no easy feat.

Avatar 

Its high, and its steep...

This was for J&MC to the 90s what the VU's Loaded was to the 70s; a seminal band that inspired a generation of musicians with their noisiest material release a perfect pure pop record towards the end of their heyday. Occurring amidst the mid-90s mass pop conversion of contemporaries Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., as well as many of their own sonic descendents such as Pavement, Stoned & Dethroned is an incredibly self-aware and polished record. With hangover clarity, J&MC sift the emotional feedback wall of Just Like Honeys past and distill from it concrete sentiments to be transmuted onto a large variety of guitar pop moods. The simple arrangements and the crisp, nuanced production convey a band stripped naked of any glamour or mystique past darkness might hold and simply continuing to make the music they make, which just so happens to be exactly what their present was ready for. With a Junkie's severity, J&MC observe their position in an forgiving cycle of existence and openly embrace it, with life-changing results.       

Going Blind

Been stuck in the 70s lately. At least on wax that is. Anyways, KISS hardly gets lauded enough in metal circles for how heavy they really were for their time. Or maybe they get lauded too much by nerds on the fringe of those circles. Who knows? Who cares? "I don't really know what to do" but enjoy this album as much as I do, on vinyl. After all, it produced probably the best Melvins cover of all time and could be considered a visual precursor to black metal (as KISS clearly were) and innovator of the band shots back cover aesthetic of much BM.

Who's your baby?

How BM is THAT???

Don't shoot the messenger

Disclaimer: I in no way take lightly, am unsympathetic to experiences of nor, least of all, condone rape. I have known both women and men who have been sexual assault and rape victims. My contact with these issues on a personal level has fixed my stance to be staunchly intolerant of the moronic "cultural" insensitivity that arises around these issues. However, I am an enemy of any kind of censorship or inhibition of freedom of speech, including PC-motivated forms of this. If the issue exists in our society, it must be talked about. Making people afraid to use the word 'rape' or address the fact - in any light - that such inhumanities exist is several steps backwards in regards to ever resolving or dealing with such an issue. Music has been the only platform for much discussion of omnipresent social taboos over at least the course of the last half a century and more. I refuse to accept that there is any subject that cannot be addressed through music and lyricism as we have very thoroughly closed so many other doors to avenues of discussion of these topics culturally. With that, I give you both one of the most controversial and influential bands of the 1980s:

Whether you love or hate him (I go back and forth), Steve Albini's impact on electric guitar-based music, record engineering and independent music making is indelible. While his assumed "politics" (remember that term audio-politics I coined?) and overall anti-populist approach to every aspect of the music business has polarized general opinion of him, the sonic signature he left is far from being forgotten. This short-lived, highly provocative follow-up band to his Big Black, named after a disturbing Japanese manga series, are an example of Albini's musical memorability, in spite of negative public reaction. The fact that the comic book which the band cited as the source of the name garnered nowhere near as much criticism (if any at all) from protesters of the band evidences a late 80s PC mentality that was not in search of addressing larger issues but prefered they be skirted and not brought up at all. In case you were wondering, the music here is not overly offensive nor explicit, in fact I'd say less so than most of Big Black's output. Sonically, this is confrontational music, like the rest of Albini's catalog. Being the first band of his with drums, there are amazingly audible similarities to the sounds of bands he would later engineer, such as Nirvana. Vocally, Steve really comes into his own here, defining the soft/loud approach that would mark the grunge era. The recorded sounds themselves are impressively defined, marking the beginning of his thorough 'precise presentation of performance' style of strategic mic placement and minimal effects/overdubbing. Nods to the Cockrock canon of bands like Golden Earring and ZZ Top, with numbers like Radar Love Lizard and a cover of the latter's hit, Just Got Paid, continue what I see as Albini's career-long satire of rock patriarchy. This is where I feel the lyrical subject matter of Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac are most widely misconstrued. It is one thing to be a man making rock music with other men obliviously, another to self-criticize and try to eschew that cliche and another entirely to try and embody all the negative implications of the cliche. I, for one, commend Mr. Albini for his attempt at the latter. After all, isn't that what punk was all about?

This file is really big for some reason...

HAVE A HIT

The first PSF Tokyo Flashback compilation was my teenage introduction to the long and devote tradition of Japanese musical pyschedelia. Not sure, but it seems like at the time this was released it must have been a pretty exciting little pu pu platter of unearthed recordings obscure enough to make at least the western enthusiasts salivate. It was here that I got a formal penetrating of my virgin ears to the disturbing utterances of one Keiji Haino, both alone in a large room and with his longstanding ensemble 不失者 (Fushitsusha). What this little sampler does particularly well is present both the rocking, wanking (High-Rise, White Heaven) and the dark, mystical (Ghost, 不失者, 光束夜, 灰野敬二) sides of the early Japanese scene, as well as those that are the summation of both (Marble Sheep , Verzerk). As far as personal faves go I needn't go on about the importance of Haino or his veteran act (whose 1990 live session here will fuck you up), however I cannot speak highly enough of Verzerk or 光束夜 (Kousokuya). The former, although somewhat trad, deliver a crusher of fuzzy lead heavy psych bordering on metal which the internet claims to be their only work. This is perhaps explained by two of the members evidently pictured literally behind bars in the liners. Kousokuya on the other hand yield what seems to be a characteristically suffering and broken performance that gets at a drunken and deeply depressed emotional interior to pysch rock's posturing facade. Though, really, I love every track, its hard not to also give High-Rise honourable mention for their contribution (notable namesake to the illustrious Japanese outfit from my last post) and clearly being way too cool, and loud, to hear anyone who accuses them of a dated aesthetic. Through live and studio representations, this comp communicates superbly the religiosity with which long-haired Tokyo-ites have practiced their duly inherited craft for decades. Although we weren't there, and we missed the acid, we can still have the Flashback.



Two Horsey

This is a little different from what I've posted in the past. For all you folk rock folks, this should be right up your alley. I should mention that I have a bias because I was on this record and play in Char's band, but it is truly a great album. I think, being around during the time she wrote and developed most of these tunes, that it wasn't until I heard them in this beautiful recording that I realized exactly how brilliant these tunes are. Char has a most amazing ability to articulate emotion simultaneously through voice and music, while doing some impressively complex stuff harmonically that comes off naturally poppy and catchy. Of all her catalog this one, to me, captures both the strength and vulnerability of her personality perfectly in the songs and their presentation. The album also features a who's who of great Toronto/Montreal musicians including Thom Gill, members of Donlands and Mortimer, the Gramercy Riffs and Bent By Elephants. It's also the first of hers to feature Char herself doing bass, drums and of course guitar, voice and songs. Special props to Ryan Granville for an amazing drums/production job! Watch out for this lady, she'll rock your world; she is the reason I like Joni Mitchell.

Way to go Charlotte!