Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 10 to 1

10. Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

Perhaps it's late 2008 with the streetlamps spilling orange light onto the bare branches; or the spring of 2009, with the clocks going forward, daffodils nodding in front gardens in the blue light of a chilly April-time dawn.

9. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender

January 2007 definitely. Rain falling on grey paving, cracked slabs spurting black muck when stepped on. But then there's a harp and a harpsichord: 'I am blue, and unwell.'

8. Deerhunter - Microcastle

The clocks have gone back, it's early November. It's stuffy on the tube, the trains are empty but the floors are covered with wet footprints that glint in the glare of the halogen bulbs.

7. The Clientele - Strange Geometry

Ireland, June 2007, whirring along the lanes lit green on either side. 'Julia, I get on my knees!' Sitting on the flat rocks, looking out at the ocean that is unending, apparently beyond it lies America. The water is sparkling and sloshing: 'I can't seem to make you mine/through the long and lonely nights/but I tried so hard, darling.'

6. Animal Collective - Feels

Summer 2007, drunk and listening to Loch Raven, staring at an old Japanese painting of a bird on the mantlepiece. Or else it's lying in bed listening to Banshee Beat and having the quiet revelation come full-circle: 'I don't think that I like you anymore.'

5. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

March 2007: Sunny weather. Someone Great's mourning work amidst the throbbing incandescence of Western Ireland's motorways.

4. Panda Bear - Person Pitch

'When my soul stops growing.' Sitting in a ferry cabin, the water green in the porthole window, the uneven gait you acquire the moment you try to stand up. 'Hey man, what's your problem?/Don't you know that I don't belong to you.' The feeling of beginning, eventually. Infinity.

3. Joanna Newsom - Ys

Driving to Scotland, the smell of methane coming from the fields, where cows and bulls sit in the aftermath of a long downpour.

2. Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It in People

March 2006: What a recommendation. I called you to make sure. Any excuse. Spring in Liverpool: broad blue skies, the red-brick university buildings basking in the golden light of the early afternoon.

1. Arcade Fire - Funeral

March 2005: Hearing Haiti upon descending into King's Cross tube station, like a song I'd heard before, so familiar. Like much of the good in life. August 2005: Seeing a friend's face when he emerged from the tent at Reading - euphoria, confusion, disbelief. September 2005: Leaving London in a car full of stuff. 'We let our hair grow long/and forget all we used to know'. I kissed her dancing to Power Out.

Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 20 to 11

I said too little last time, no pictures as punishment (overruled):

20. Mt. Eerie - Lost Wisdom

Phil Elverum. We saw him in Tufnell Park. Had never been there before. Graeme bought two tickets and came down from Liverpool. It was a bleak October night. High Places supported, I bought 03/07 - 09/07 from Rob Barber and lost it somewhere on London Bridge as we whizzed into the river through slots in the bridge barriers. I bought Lost Wisdom from Phil Elverum. I didn't lose it. Graeme wished he'd brought a CD for Phil to sign. We got lost and walked over another bridge, towards the Tate. We scuffed our shoes like percussive instruments on the wet and mucky iron bridge.



19. Liars - Drum's Not Dead

Downloading music has its perils. You listen to a record only briefly through these dull computer speakers that hyperventilate at the presence of a bassline. That was August 2007. In June 2008 Liars played with Deerhunter and High Places in a theatre renovated by volunteers. Mostly students and recent graduates who aren't native Scousers. We got to the show early and a big van with a Czech plate was parked outside. Bradford Cox was crouched outside the doors of the venue smoking a cigarette and prodding an mp3 player with this finger. He wore black shades and seemed moody. A girl lulled around the entrance complaining of a stomach ache. High Places were soundchecking inside, loudly. We were the only non-band members there for a while.



18. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

'The Knife' did the rounds on MTV2's 120 minutes. That was the way to find out about music. It's a song that has no real pull, just this looping melody that goes on and on. It does suck you down like the sand that swallows the band in the video. I found Yellow House in HMV in Liverpool and had no real interest in it for months. But there was an allure early on, perhaps the surprise of actually finding this record in that temporary store, in a city with poor record shops. This album performs something like mourning work. Listening to 'Little Brother' in an aeroplane over the clouds, a little dinky plane a speck below: 'My little brother will be born again.'



17. Beach House - Devotion

Sitting in Liverpool Lime Street, the train begins to pull away. On my mp3 player is an album I uploaded from John's computer. It has a picture of a man and a woman sitting around a table with a cake and candles. The music throbs a bit, matching the rhythm of the pendelino. It's a faintly sunny morning, a mist is dissolving in the fields. A woman is singing in a sometimes harsh whisper about astronauts, Turtle Island, by the dark of the park. I will wait for you there weeping silently.




16. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam

September 2007. Back in Liverpool, desperate to be there. Screaming 'YATZAH YATZAH' along with Avey Tare to that opening track. Now it's November, fireworks night is a shocker. Sefton Park is full of people, a mass of dark shapes, an amorphous squelching mass. You play up, and you play up for months to come. November in the North, a trench. A while later I'm lying in bed one evening: 'At the end of the day/when no one else is looking'. Chores gets you out of it.



15. The Decemberists - Picaresque

You send me SMS after SMS about the Decemberists. I'm not talking to you to try and be cruel. It works. You quote 'Angels and Angles', I don't care. You have ingrained in me an interest in this band. I do a Homer Simpson and give Picaresque to a family member as a Christmas present. She hates Colin Meloy's voice. 'Can I borrow it?' 'Oh, take it, please.' The Engine Driver, We Both Go Down Together. On The Bus Mall is haunting. And months later I put it on the stereo and look at you while it plays. It's not you. It's the song. And you've got your own back, again.



14. Jens Lekman - Oh, You're So Silent Jens

November 2007, Manchester. They actually have this in HMV? I pick it up. I'm telling you, you should listen to this record. Like fuck do you. You listen to Cat Power, and even then you barely listen to her. You won't be borrowing this one. Jens Lekman becomes a limb. Maple Leaves, Rocky Dennis's Farewell Song, I Saw Her at the Anti-War Demonstration. Jens taught me to sing. He taught me how to forget about you.



13. Gas - Nah Und Fern

I am yet to read a satisfying written account of this music.







12. Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans

Going to classes at 9am, sleeping at midday. Enduring sleep paralysis, throwing my shoulders upwards, breaking the hold. She was cleaning her bedroom and my stereo came on. Seven Swans was in the CD player. It was a numinous experience, she said, sitting on her windowsill with a dusty cloth in her hand. 'I can see a lot of light in you/and I think that dress looks nice on you.'



11. Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline

When I put this CD on, a grave sense of relief came over me. This is the music I have been looking for, I thought. I said it to you later. But when you do find that music, you know it's a death knell of sorts. Those feelings are rare. And maybe that's why I download so much from blogs, anything that I can. It's the sense of discovery that pervades all walks of life, that nomadic longing. But I have settled down somewhat with music, and whenever I settle down to this record it posits me somewhere else entirely. It is meditative. I am utterly reassured about existence with this music rising and falling against my ear, drifting off and coming back.

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.