Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 70 to 61

Here's the Spotify playlist.

Albums 70 to 61, get in:

70: Azeda Booth - In Flesh Tones (2008)

Azeda Booth have gone largely unnoticed in the blogosphere, and there's not been a single mention of them in the British press. But that suits their sound. In Flesh Tones is a pale sounding record, with androgynous vocals bleating meekly amid swathes of swooning keys and trickling percussion of sticks and toms. For any fan of quietly ambitious ambient music this is a must-have. 'Ran' is the opening and standout track, the best unknown of 2008.


69: Belong - October Language (2006)

What Deerhunter do so well in parts on Cryptograms, Belong do for breakfast. Delay pedals are the least you can blame for this oceanic sound, where only the song titles do any talking. Take 'Who Told You This Room Exists?' and 'I Never Lose. Never Really', titles which suggest a standpoint, the posing of a question or a slither of rhetoric that capsizes into the stonking depths of these near hierophanous spaces of sound.


68: Dan Deacon - Bromst (2009)

Don't listen to this record if you've had any coffee, if you're particularly susceptible to palpitations or anxiety. I can imagine that listening to Dan Deacon's masterpiece in a busy inner-city might elevate you somewhere else, or will make you collapse. Deacon borders on genius, his songs are much like paintings, ecstatic works of art like something Miro did, but somehow all the more collected and congealed. Deacon is a patient artist whose live shows, apparently, are the best out there, whether you're a fan or not.


67: Feist - Let it Die (2004)

Leslie Feist is an integral part of Broken Social Scene, with her, the band aren't the full chomp. Just see Kevin Drew and co. cameoing in The Time Traveller's Wife (WTF?). I know. What she does well is humility, but more heartbreak. Actually, Feist has a pretty good crack at truth: 'The saddest part of a broken heart/isn't the ending/as much as the start.' I find that lyric to be positive in its reverse, you haven't lost anything by being alone. It's what you give to someone else, rather than what they can do for you. Perhaps.


66: Papercuts - Can't Go Back (2007)

I think Papercuts' most recent record, You Can Have What You Want, is pretty bloody good. It's not got the praise it deserves, but for a 4-star review in the English Times newspaper. You Can Have is an oneiric affair, all mooted loveloss and broken, droning organs, whereas Can't Go Back is a straight up folk megapiece. 'Sandy' is the love song for any summer, 'Outside Looking In' is a superb anthem for loners. Do not let this one slip by you.


65: Lindstrom - Where You Go to I Go too (2008)

Though album opener ‘Where You Go I Go Too’ runs close to 30-minutes, it feels more compact than much of Lindstrom’s last record It’s a Feedelity Affair. The Swede can be heard panting at the the title track's end, and for the listener it could have been the heavy breathing of a laboured-slog. Instead it’s the sumptuous rush of adrenaline that reaches its peak at around 27-minutes, an exhilarating surmount. The arrangements are impressive, and Lindstrom’s skill in this department is what makes the record a real joy.


64: Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

It’s near impossible to work out what Liz Harris is actually singing on the opening track of Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, but the angst living within the harmony makes such knowledge unnecessary. ‘Disengaged’ opens with the sound of a world ending, the harbinger of some unspeakable sadness that will consume everything by the end of the song. And it kind of does, moving into 'Heavy Water/I'd Rather be Sleeping', with Harris singing 'this love is enormous it's eating me up'. To me, it's the issue of living and dying, investing or sleeping. For Harris she's lost beneath the waves, but the idea of being anywhere else is an unrequited desire.


63: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Lie Down in the Light (2008)

'If there's only one thing I can do/and you know that I don't want to do it' sings Will Oldham on 'Easy Does It', a paean to procrastination. The big pluses about this Bonnie 'Prince' Billy record are the production and its sense of momentum. The first few songs swan swiftly along and towards the album's close the momentum arrests in two lovely, plaintive numbers - 'Willow Trees Bend' and 'I'll Be Glad' - the latter offering hope to the Lord Himself: 'You'll always have me around'. Oldham's is a catalogue to be mined as if for jewels, let's hope he sticks around some more.


62: Department of Eagles - In Ear Park (2008)

Daniel Rossen's stench is all over Yellow House, Grizzly Bear's first official recording as a four-piece. And perhaps that stench is so strong that Rossen had to pull away, giving more space to the Grizzle Bizzle project and throw all his roughed-up, acoustic virtuoso-isms into something almost completely his own. Fred Nicolaus is Rossen's other half here, but the poor blighter has to work and wait while Rossen sojourns with his full-time band mates. But then so do fans of Department of Eagles, who waited a long time for this quite ominous record that shelves the sample-o-rama-cum-beatmania of DoE's dormroom offering The Cold Nose. 'Balmy Night' feels a little elliptical here at the record's end, but it's my favourite because Rossen's at his heartiest and most Chekhovian.


61: Vivian Girls - Vivian Girls (2008)

OK, I didn't get Vivian Girls for a long time. Vivian Girls' 20-minute run time seemed just to whizz-by, with the emotional content of the songs completely elusive. But after seeing the Brooklyn three-piece live and thus studying their material more closely, you realise that these are brilliant songs. There's an emotional intelligence to the way Cassie sings about lusting after others: 'I'm going insane/going out of my mind/does he know, does he know/that he's totally fine,' because she pulls-off the pop sensibility with aplomb. It's so quickfire. 'Tell the World' is a psychic romance that feels like the album's centre-piece, a signifier of the record's need to express the sheer excitement in loving someone else, and in being alive. Though 'I Believe in Nothing' proves that theory all wrong.

Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 80 to 71

Here's your Spotify playlist.

Songs 80 to 71, do it:

80: The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (2007)

One thing that really sticks about The Twilight Sad is singer James Graham's Scottish accent. It's so fitting for songs like 'Cold Days from the Birdhouse' and 'And She Would Darken the Memory'. It's also his employment of the c-word whence describing someone wasting away at his desk. The guitars are what make the record, with Graham's simmering hostility finding the perfect foil in the swathes of hammering guitars that push the band ever upward, the rolling, stuttering snare grounded beneath it all.


79: Pan American - White Bird Release (2009)

Labradford are a band, like Stars of the Lid, whose style you could describe as 'barely-there', or 'simmercore'. Mark Nelson is Pan American, formerly of Labradford. But Nelson's work as Pan American is more like Stars of the Lid, with more willingly ascending drones and the advent of husky, right-up-close vocals. Listening to this record is like wandering on the edges of sleep, it really feels like sleep-paralysis. Rather than the strange disturbance of being half awake and half asleep, it's fine to drift along these faint lines.


78: Madvillain - Madvillainy (2004)

I don't propose to know much about Hip Hop but I like Pete Rock, but he's more straight-up. The combination of Madlib and MF Doom came together in 2004 to make something of a comic book for the ears, or, if you're a bit high brow, a graphic novel for the cochlea. My favourite samples are in the intro track, where Doom introduces Madlib, and a little 1950s Reefer Madness-esque voice chirrups 'How do you do?' at irregular intervals. The record's sense of humour and thirst for texture is unrelenting.


77: Flying Lotus - Los Angeles (2008)

I can't work out Steven Ellison's beats. They suggest the anxiety and paranoia of an artist who works assiduously and on his own. 'Itchy' is the closest you'll get to defining it, but the real joy is in the ambient thrums and fledgling basslines. This is music that is very hard to write about and absolutely brilliant to listen to. You could almost say it was life-affirming. Beautiful, danceable and frightening all in one.


76: Pantha du Prince - This Bliss (2007)

It was the Pitchfork review that turned me onto Pantha du Prince, an introduction to the minimal techno field, one that led eventually to Ricardo Villalobos and on to Gas. The thing that hooks me about Pantha du Prince is a resemblance to nature vs. science, technology vs. trees. The medium is all computers, no doubt, but the spirit of the music is vast. 'Saturn Strobe' and 'Asha' make up the first two tracks, and I though they may have come from an overheating laptop in a dark room, the shakers on 'Saturn Strobe' sound like the empty, echoing streets of Berlin.


75: Tinariwen - Aman Imam (2007)

Water is Life is the translation, but it could easily be Music is Life (perhaps for a less poetic European House reincarnation). 'Mano Dayak' and 'Matadjem Yinmixan' are key to the album's melodic core, the chanting doesn't out-do Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for toil, but the measure of the band's vision is bountiful. It feels almost post-rock in its sense of place, with the unmistakable African guitar sound that reinvigorated a turgid Western scene in the early 00s.


74: Broken Social Scene - Feel Good Lost (2004)

Some might describe Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning's work here as a poor man's Pan American or any other Kranky-imprint. But any record with Feist appearing on it is fine with me. It's nice to listen to songs like 'Alive in 85' or 'Guilty Cubicles', to inhale their wistful, almost teenage romanticism and realise the monstrous brilliance that was to arrive in 2002 when Drew and Canning built the BSS ark.


73: Dirty Projectors - Rise Above (2007)

I've never listened to Black Flag, but I know their songs are nothing like those that appear courtesy of Dave Longstreth on Rise Above. That's probably the point. 'Thirsty and Miserable' highlight Longstreth's compositional skill combined with the heavenly vocal harmonies of Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian. Some people really don't like Longstreth's voice, but it's a bit like Colin Meloy or Joanna Newsom - though very different - in theory it's a taste worth acquiring.


72: Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (2007)

I remember sitting in my university computer room and listening to 'Keep the Car Running' a few weeks before Neon Bible was released, my hopes were sky-high. I even remember a BBC Newsnight Review episode where the album was reviewed by a group of journos. A TV Chef tore into Win Butler for trying to lecture 'him' about climate change (?) and another novelist called it 'dull'. A Guardian journalist said it was 'scarily good'. It turned out to be a bit of both of the former descriptions. For my money (not much), 'Intervention' is a faux-anthem that underlines Butler's clunky lyricism which is found elsewhere on 'Black Wave/Bad Vibrations'. But not many bands can write songs like 'Keep the Car Running', and as much as it sounds, I actually really like this record.


71: Rufus Wainwright - Want Two (2005)

Rufus gets a bad deal from high-brow motherfuckers, and, if there's one thing Rufus ain't, it's a motherfucker. But that's beside the point. 'Memphis Skyline' is reputedly a song about Jeff Buckley, and it couldn't be more subtle - it neither confirms nor denies it - but Wainwright has admitted as much. The Canadian claims he was jealous of Buckley's successes in the early 90s when Wainwright was floundering in bars and pithy clubs. 'The Art Teacher' is a plaintive love song about a Turner painting and a lost, well, love. Ok, so Rufus's croon may not be for everyone, but, yikes, it works wonderfully for some of us.

Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 90 to 81

Albums 90 to 81, here's the Spotify playlist, let's go:

90: Dodos - Visiter (2008)

Killer songs are generally abound on Dodo's debut, 'God?' and 'Ashley' are lovely and they go somewhere. At least, by the end of the record, it feels like you've been moved some place else. Blistering acoustic guitar thrumming and rim splatter pitter patter with the sticks.


89: Ponytail - Ice Cream Spiritual (2008)

Dustin, Ponytail's manic rhythm guitarist, typified the creative process for the band as building a bridge outward rather than some towering mass upward. It's the perfect simile for a band that really need to be experienced live to be experienced at all. 'Late for School' is an anthem for kids who just got out of bed and realised it's past nine o'clock. 'Oh! No! I'm late for schooooool!'


88: Why? - Alopecia (2008)

Probably the best first 5 songs on any record in 2008, Alopecia is the most interesting record of that year, and possibly the wittiest and generally most brilliantly written of the past few years. 'If you grew up with white boys who only look at black and Puerto-Rican porno because they want something that their Dad don't got/then you know where you're at/murdering your earholes shut with wet coke in a Starbucks' bathroom with the door closed/...Sending sexy SMSs to my ex's new man/cause I can'. Kurt Vonnegut would have rejoiced.


87: Italians Do It Better - After Dark (2007)

The perfect introduction to a range of artists both melodic in sound and conscientious in mind. Mirage's cover of 'Last Night a DJ Saved My Life' is my favourite, but Glass Candy's 'Miss Broadway' is a should-have-been for many critical 500 songs of the decade.


86: Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs

Do Andrew Bird's songs feel like hard work? Maybe they do, but it's only because he offers a good deal of investment, if you can wait out the beautiful parts of his songs. A bit like any Wolf Parade off-shoot, Bird's compositions are sneaky buggers that are fuzzy at first but soon enough they're ingrained on your psyche and inhabit a period of your memory. 'Sovay' is an instant stamp, though. 'Sovay, so vain', I think.


85: Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend (2008)

Summaries of this record in 2008 end-of-year lists referred to 'haters' a lot, but there weren't too many from what I could see. Maybe a few people who'd grown a bit tired of decent American indie guitar bands. Nevertheless it was the winter 2007 tour with the Shins that opened Vampire Weekend to the broader British public. I remember laughing at the name, 'what a stupid name', but was quickly shut up by 'Cape Cop Kwassa Kwassa' which is a ridiculously simple ergo brilliant song.


84: Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days (2002)

It's pretty incredible what Sam Beam has done with the Iron & Wine sound, it's never grown stale. The man has a wonderful, very powerful voice that can reach out into an auditorium perhaps as you might not expect. On The Shepherd's Dog Beam expanded the band and the sound, but Our Endless Numbered Days is Beam's folk at its most refined. The Creek Drank the Cradle feels a little too meek sometimes.


83: St. Vincent - Actor (2009)

Yes, Annie Clark is beautiful, but that would count for nothing if she didn't have the persona. What's most attractive about Clark's style is her sense of suppleness, the damaged air that's carried over from her debut Marry Me. Clark shares Phil Elverum's sort of candidness but in a popular format that is entirely rivetting and diverse on Actor. 'All of my old friends aren't so friendly/and all of my old haunts are now haunting me'.


82: The Ruby Suns - Sea Lion (2007)

Sea Lion has the same sort of effect as Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. You end up saying to yourself, 'Why don't I listen to this more often?' The Kiwis shake things up no end, 'Adventure Tour' and 'Mojave' are remedies for those of us drowning in an age of plodding British 'pop' and 'rock' music. Exciting song structures and soulful ambience make Sea Lion a real diamond of a disc.


81: The Field - From Here We Go Sublime (2007)

The Field showed me that dance music was OK. You don't have to be white, bald and English to like it and, at their heart, songs like 'Everday' possess a transcendence that is of the genre of electronic music only. Lots of room to jump up and down with eyes closed. You don't need drugs for music this good.

Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 100 to 91

Disclaimer:

This isn't a definitive list of the best records of the decade, it's not possible for one person to compile something like that. You can only talk about what you've heard, about what's set itself as a figment of your recent past. In this case, my recent past is 2000 to 2009, and here is the music that's either followed or led me through it.

You'll notice lots of records from 2007, that's the year I really learned to love new and predominantly American music. I don't think any other country (bar Sweden) comes close to it for the sheer range of styles and artists.

Here's the Spotify playlist so you can listen for yourself.

Most of it is probably wrong:

100: Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (2001)

'A Place for My Head' was brilliant. At 15, you're still a child. There was enough fantasy and nu-metal to go around for a solid group of chums. This was a record for mid-teens with a diminishing sense of violent angst that goes-with growing up in South London. It's also a strangely sexless record.


99: Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

I remember this being an event for older people. I was still playing N64. It only hit it in 2005, and sadly, it was Tom Cruise that lit this one up. Radiohead are enormous, but perhaps it's their ambition that swells their fanbase between so many different people. You can tell they're doing something right when some people still don't like The Bends. It's depressing, apparently.


98: Ricardo Villalobos - Fabric 36 (2007)

'The most meticulous music' is how a friend described minimal techno, and it's true. This is almost cinematic in its strange, microcosmic attention to detail. Nothing is more satisfying than a Ricky Villalobos kick. Villalobos's music sounds to me like a tapestry, he sows the tiniest things together and they bloom into something else entirely when realised as a whole.


97: El Guincho - Alegranza (2007)

El Guincho borders on irritable/addictive, but like a good rash it clears itself up and can be beamed back upon in hindsight as a worthy stoicism. It's also the closest anyone has come to matching Madvillainy or Person Pitch for sampling skills. 'Palmitos Park' is danceable and beautiful.


96: Findlay Brown - Separated by the Sea (2006)

This is an underrated record that seemed never to get an American release. Separated by the Sea was a five-star affair in the Guardian, and though you often find Dave Simpson handing out 4-stars like Pizza Hut flyers, The GDN are generally right about the fivers. 'Green Pram' and 'Come Home' do the sad, folkish job. Polished stuff.


95: I'm from Barcelona - Let Me Introduce My Friends (2006)

OK, MASSIVE band (numerically) but succint pop music to sing along to for months. However strange the Blogotheque videos of the lead singer orchestrating timid diners in a Spanish restaurant into a rendition of 'Tree House' are.


94: The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003)

It's a good question, actually. 'Tuff Ghost' does it for me here, there's something irrepressibly itchy about these songs, as if they're all about to fall over.


93: Kria Brekkan & Avey Tare - Pullhair Rubyeye (in reverse) (2007)

Mark Richardson at Pitchfork panned this (the original, unreversed version) but you know he just went home, loaded the thing into Logic and turned it upside down. But he was right, these are lovely, simple folk songs, why reverse them?


92: Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew - Spirit If... (2007)

Kevin Drew doesn't do himself any favours with cock-rock performances at the Shepherd's Bush Empire minus the imperative female contigent of BSS, but this is a super album that probably has gone unnoticed by people who'd actually probably generally really like it.


91: Death from Above 1979 - You're a Woman, I'm a Machine (2004)

These were sensational at Reading in 2005. Sadly, now You're a Woman, I'm a failing solo project/bland electro nipper. 'Little Girl' is one of the best songs of the 2000s.

Record Review: Six Organs of Admittance - Luminous Night

via Ragged Words
Release Date: 17 Aug 2009
Record Label: Drag City
In Three Words: God Isn’t There
Ragged Rating: 4/5

By Daniel Greenwood

The indie- or modern-classical genre is flourishing. It’s been led in recent years by the prolific 12-string guitarist James Blackshaw, classical-drone connoisseurs Stars of the Lid, and the Gnostic frontier-folk of Six Organs of Admittance. Admittedly, James Blackshaw is the most rambunctious of the three, with an overt sensibility for the natural world clear in his song titles such as ‘Skylark Heralds Dawn’ and ‘The Elk with Jade Eyes’. Blackshaw borrows titles from literature for his songs, too, as on his latest The Glass Bead Game, care of Herman Hesse. Stars of the Lid are the seemingly softer touch, but their barely-there style of surface level string instrumentation is devastating in its sparseness, its disappearance and reappearance. Citing David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as inspiration, the Austin, TX pair of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie imbue a modern sense of despair that’s either hardly noticeable or completely life-affirming.

There’s a big whiff of philosophical intellectualism about these sorts of artists, and though Six Organs of Admittance fall closest in line with nineteenth-century transcendental American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Ben Chasny – the man behind Six Organs – writes lyrics that, at first, completely belie Emerson’s pantheistic (in everyone and everything) kind of God. On ‘Ursa Minor’ Chasny sings: “Good people dying everywhere/ask if God is even there”. But perhaps it’s misguided to dive straight at Chasny’s lyrics, because the real joys of Luminous Night are the instrumental elements. Opener ‘Acteon’s Fall (Against the Hounds)’ has a tune to whistle with pride as you ride on horseback at a canter through the prairie. Panpipes have never sounded so good.

Luminous Night is a dark, brooding work of art. The strength and diversity of the instrumentation – groaning strings, tremulous 12-string picking ala Blackshaw – pretty much oversteps the vernacular of an indie critic. But as a fan it’s great. To recall Emerson, Chasny has little of the positivism you find in the philosopher’s writings, but perhaps it’s simply time and circumstance that divides the two. For where Chasny’s protagonist asks for proof of God (‘Bar-Nasha’), something Kant and Nietszche discouraged over the past few centuries – God cannot be proved nor disproved; God is dead – Chasny’s answer to his own question appears in the storm of distortion that is ‘Cover Your Wounds with the Sky’. And, indeed, the flutter of piano keys that pricks the load are as cold stars in a crumbling winter sky. There are darker undertones still, with ‘Ursula Minor’ alluding to a parent and a child starving in a winter famine. The song ends with a worrisome set of lyrics: “The hospital’s no place to say goodbye/I’m taking you to the shore/at the edge of the shore I kiss your eyes/You know that I’ve never loved anyone more.” Perhaps pantheism exists for Chasny after all.

The work of James Blackshaw, Stars of the Lid and Six Organs of Admittance is providing fans of lo-fi, folk and classical with a generous meeting point. It seems a natural progression for music as art and philosophy. These artists are expressing their concerns and limitations in a style of music that underlines the infinite push of well-made, meaningful instrumental music. In the case of Six Organs of Admittance, Chasny is asking the questions straight out, with panpipes.

Film Review: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains self-mutilation, apparently.

In the Guardian G2 supplement a few weeks ago, fashion writer Hadley Freeman spoke out in defence of Brüno. Freeman was responding to the criticism aimed at the film by vox-pop gobbers and journos alike claiming not to have seen the film but criticising it nonetheless. Freeman’s argument was succinct – if you ground your opinion in individual, first-hand experience you will see your lazy prejudices recede.

And, obviously heeding Freeman’s article, a writer for the Daily Mail has published a piece amongst deriding Lars von Trier’s Antichrist without actually seeing it. Consequentially, the quiff himself Dr. Mark Kermode reasoned on Radio Five Live recently that you can’t deride art you haven’t experienced for yourself. But with the Internet and advanced media technologies such as TV news and portable audio-visual gizmos, the ability to wet your toe with a plethora of pies is the gift of the age.

The initial reactions to Antichrist have been in lieu of the fact that it contains explicit self-mutilation and torture. I don’t know what makes this more barbaric-sounding than Eli Roth’s Hostel movies, or the Saw lot. You’ll find as many horrible though non-sexual scenes in Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Jean-François Richet, 2009), also more cruel, and racially motivated. Perhaps Antichrist has hurt so many feelings because it stars two very convincing actors, because it is as many parts beautiful as it is unwatchable and as boring as it is horrifically rivetting. Sounds like life, right?

Willem Dafoe is He, and Charlotte Gainsbourg She, the couple the film is based around. But you probably knew that. Their son falls to his death from the window of their home in the opening sequence, a scene von Trier presents in black and white, with Handel playing over the top. It’s uber slow-motion, and, if you’d come in late to the film, you might think it was a perfume advert but for the penetration shot and the child falling from a ledge.

Gainsbourg is braced with grief and Dafoe makes the decision to step away from his role as partner to play the therapist. He runs through little exercises that don’t work. Gradually there are signs of a severe and violent side to Gainsbourg’s character, one night she cracks her forehead repeatedly against the rim of the toilet bowl. Mostly, her behaviour flares up and culminates in her mounting Dafoe, as if in reaction to her suffering. Hence the claims of misogyny by some critics.

He discusses whether a change of scenery might help, a place that she’s afraid to visit. The story moves into the woodland, an horrendously glowering mass of pine and oak trees and face-high ferns that dress the forest floor. This is no refuge. In one quietly comical scene He is distracted by an agitated fern, upon closer inspection he finds Fantastic Mr. Fox eating his own innards, ‘Chaos will reign,’ sayeth the fox. And it showers.

The couple stay in a Tarkovskian dacha reminiscent of the summer house in Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974), and perhaps that’s why von Trier dedicates the movie to the Russian. I don’t see how a film like Antichrist, with such fine cinematography and appreciation of the frame – barring the obvious use of handheld footage of the couple – can be dedicated to someone like Tarkovsky as a joke. If Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowkski, 1994) is Amelie in hell, then Antichrist is in part Mirror’s antipode.

I don’t go along too much with Peter Bradshaw’s theory of Antichrist being a joke on the director’s part, though von Trier will enjoy the limelight shed by the mob. Gainsbourg’s manic sexual episodes are symbolic of a troubled woman, and von Trier hints that her trauma may not be entirely to do with her loss. She seems reactionary in her constant mounting of her partner. These acts of mindless indulgence on her part are reminiscent of modern men and women: ‘Let’s fill the aching void inherent with either alcohol, cocaine or a penis.’ One way or another.

The violence is nasty (had to cover my eyes) but it’s kind of necessary to make a point. It doesn’t make nice entertainment, but WTF, cinema isn’t entirely about entertainment. It’s a scientific medium in its construction – the lens as a glass to magnify – it can offer an insight that is entirely necessary in modern, post-Second World War society. While Antichrist isn’t Friday Night Fun at the multi-plex and goes against what the majority of cinemagoers desire (escape from the anxiety of real life) at least I can invest in it. It’s refreshing to see a movie in 2009 that a director stamps his authority on.

Record Review: The Tough Alliance - The New School

via Ragged Words
Release Date: 20 Jul 2009
Record Label: Service
In Three Words: I Love Sweden
Ragged Rating: 4/5

By Daniel Greenwood

No one makes popular electronic music like they do in Sweden. It began with the Knife’s Deep Cuts back in 2004 (‘Heartbeats’ was song of the year for many, thanks in part to Jose Gonzalez’s cover version) and since then it’s been all Jens Lekman, Studio and The Tough Alliance, with ambient melancholics JJ recently becoming the new indie blogspot darlings. And that’s without even mentioning Air France or the Knife slice-off Fever Ray. You can’t help but feel that all the praise is well-deserved though, apart from the Knife, few of these artists have really been appreciated anywhere other than the handful of hegemonic leftist-indie websites. And that’s strange only because this is pop music to a beat, with the sunshine and witty sense of self reminiscent of the Beach Boys.

For the Tough Alliance, it’s a blend of English-as-second-language vocals, a well-reared sampling methodology, indigestible melodies that suck like leeches at your frontal lobes, and an imperious style of production as good as any cash-rich studio dope. These Swedes are bedroom musicians of the highest calibre. Among them, The Tough Alliance are lodged in the leftfield, and they don’t reveal much. In an interview with Pitchfork, the duo responded to a question about the nature of the band: ‘It is what it is, man… People seem to have an unhealthy need for simple, shallow, and irrelevant information and we feel it would oppose the essence of The Tough Alliance to encourage this destructive behaviour. We want the focus to be on the expression of the unity of TTA, not on our personas.’

If 2007’s A New Chance is a swift and perfectly-formed piece, The New School – the band’s debut originally released two year earlier - is something different. It’s five songs larger and twenty-minutes longer whilst being altogether more grounded. TTA have since built songs from the soil upward, but here the Swedes are compiling tunes brick by digital brick. And, for a while, The New School might not be what latter TTA fans had hoped for or expect if coming to for the first time. Whereas A New Chance grabs you by the ankle and flings you around the room, The New School requires a little more patience. At fifty-minutes it might be a too long for those expecting instant joys. Beyond the record’s underbelly of midget kicks and thudding CPU thrum-toms, there lies a contemplative edge. The sampling of the Kopite refrain ‘You’ll never walk alone,’ is probably an ode to TTA’s hometown football club (LOL), but for this bitter Evertonian reviewer it’s a concession to commitment.

The New School in itself sounds like a call to arms, with ‘Koka Kola Veins’ – the standout track here – musing on those in a sugary, cola stupor: “We got koka kola veins/we don’t know our names/blah blah blah”. It’s not necessarily a criticism but a confession. For TTA at least, it’s time to stop fucking around.