Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 60 to 51

Albums 60 to 51, AWW YEH:

60: Wavves - Wavves

What Nathan Williams typifies above all in recent years is the DIY ethic. Williams recorded all these songs himself using his computer, and with little concern for arrangements or production. Perhaps it's the sign of a golden age that the personal computer and internet connection has given to everyday folks, Vivian Girls are the pre-cursor to Wavves, the big sister of Williams the fuzz-drenched wunderkind. It's debatable whether it's pop music, but Wavves with two v's is the jewel shared amongst blogspotters and second-hand, European Pitchfork readers with a taste for American indie rock and dreadful ambient dregs. 'Vermin' is my favourite, because it sheds a melancholic light on Wavves' otherwise bumptious persona.


59: Ricardo Villalobos - Achso EP

European art wins out for me, it hits right at the heart. To generalise massively, perhaps Western-infected art, like much English 21st century music and film, and American similarly, is impeded upon by societal pains too easily. But then most European art of the 20th century is digesting the terrible experiment of Stalin's Communism, or the catastrophe of the Second World War. European wordless music has a chance to do something different, post-Classical. If Rudolph Arnheim claims that poetry fails after the holocaust then here Ricardo Villalobos in no way refers to such a thing, but proves minimal ambient music prevails. There is life positively spilling from these four tracks, and more than ever, kicks feel like heartbeats. 'Ichso' has a deeply pronounced beat that hits in a little before 5-minutes, and with the right sound system you'll never fail to be enlivened by it. Villalobos is a genius, his craft is a meticulous and endlessly rewarding one.


58: Gang Gang Dance - God's Money

Brooklyn is a goldmine. But Gang Gang Dance don't necessarily sound like they're straight out of New York City, more like the creature traumatised by a globalised community. This creature's pain is expressed in distinctly wonderful melodies, with bouts shrieking and delayed vocal loops. God's Money is the phrase a deceased friend of GGD's used to offer to receivers of his generosity, 'it's not my money, it's God's money,' he'd say. So God is at the heart of these songs, but it's up to fidgety critics to relay whether God is there or absent. For me, these songs are Holy things, 'Egowar' is a masterful expression of modern alternative music. If you're not cut-up when that strange xylophone-like loop comes in then, well.


57: Deerhunter - Fluorescent Grey EP

Deerhunter are the best guitar band of the decade, IMO. Cryptograms is the most innovative use of delay pedals, the antithesis of Bloc Party's twee. But an idea seems to surround the band that they're inaccessible. Well this 4-track monolithic slab of alternative guitar music solves that bollock-wrangle. 'Like New' is maybe about Deerhunter's deceased first bass player, Bradley Ira Harris, 'Be like new/be like you'. Or else it could be Bradford Cox shaking off the high school jinx, trying to be himself. Otherwise, 'Fluorescent Grey' is all about the city and the dying 'the city spotting/the corpses rotting/the glow'. The glow is the colour of dead flesh, as per the title of the EP. Above all that, these songs are invigorating to listen to.


56: The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow

I know this is nailed-on as favourite for real fans of the Shins, but it's heavier-going than Oh, Inverted World. Is it the last really good record by this band? You'd have to argue for a long time to disprove that to some. Me, too. Chutes Too Narrow is altogether a more saddened event for the band, a little Camera Obscura in part, 'Gone for Good' sounds like it helped to write Let's Get Out of This Country in one go. The intricate, lyrical imagery of Oh, Inverted World are apparent though, with grass growing in the corners of James Mercer's bedsheets.


55: Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

Remember this is a personal list, and I think for a lot of people this Wolf Parade record is a certain Top Ten. My favourite is 'Dinner Bells', it's Spencer Krug at his loneliest, 'There'll be no more dinner bells/dinner bells to ring'. I also love how it's 7-minutes plus, it fills a space of time perfectly, never feeling hurried or overlong. 'Shine a Light' was played to me by a friend and we must have listened to it about sixty times that night, it was a memorable introduction to the band. Perhaps Wolf Parade have finally taken a back seat for Krug though, with Sunset Rubdown now arguably making stronger records, Dragonslayer in particular.


54: Department of Eagles - The Cold Nose

This is a long way from Grizzly Bear's dusty classical dirge, and it's got to be Dan Rossen's sense of humour that makes the whole thing such a treat. '$20 lamp! $40 rug! Playstation 2! Tony Hawk 4!' as on 'Forty Dollar Rug', an ode to popular consumerism for the twenty-something males far-flown from the nest. The songs are surprisingly strong here, a first attempt for Dan Rossen as a musician, and our chum Fred Nicolaus also. You get the feeling that songs like 'Sailing by Night' and 'Ghost in Summer' clothes are the early indicators of Rossen's future fruit. Sure, In Ear Park is a very good record, but Rossen's magnum opus is yet to arrive. I can't wait!


53: Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country

Ouch, so Chutes Too Narrow helped Camera Obscura to write this record (material proof pending) but then it appears higher up! What a farce, someone email the media. Well, maybe 'Tears for Affairs' emotes like non-Brits cannot. Soz. That's flagrant racism. Nah, it's just different, Scotland is c-old. Or should I say, as only the Brits can! Look, 'Let's Get Out of This Country' besmirches all that, for these Scots want to live and love in cathedral cities like Munich and Prague: 'We'll wave goodbye to thankless jobs.../we'll find a cathedral city/you can be handsome and I'll be pretty'. Sounds good, ach aye.


52: The Knife - Silent Shout

This is where it gets heated. Silent Shout was Pitchfork's #1 record of 2006, but I'm sorry you don't put Joanna Newsom third behind TV on the Radio, and however much The Knife have crafted something like the best electronic record of the decade (for most people), well, you know, it's personal. Darkness and danceability are rarely married together, but then the Knife came along. Fever Ray is doing something like it currently, but it's less danceable and more minimal beat-intoxication. I listened to 'Silent Shout' on headphones in HMV in Liverpool, and I was scared. The headphones test thing was new, probably riddled by the bacteria of germy trance-face earholes, but the song blew that all away. 'Like a Pen', 'Marble House' and 'We Share Our Mother's Health' make me afraid of the sunlight.


51: Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

Rob Pecknold, Tillman and co. are tapping into something divine. 'Meadowlarks' is distinctly gnostic-cum-early music, a song about a bird that I don't get to see in England. In fact, I saw a model of a meadowlark in the Horniman museum, and it's a creature worthy of the song. There is a sort of running, tree-hugging joke that follows Fleet Foxes around, and it's only because what is directly beautiful and wonderful gets scoffed at. Yeah, the Guardian are guilty of it, particularly in Michael Hann's review of Veckatimest recently, whatever they gave Fleet Foxes last year, 'landmark in American music' blah. On the BBC Culture Show, when Pecknold was asked by Lauren Laverne what his songwriting was about, he meekly replied that he wouldn't know how to write a song for a club night. Fair, Fleet Foxes isn't perfect, but Sun Giant is, nearly.

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.

Record Review: Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer

via Ragged Words
Release Date: 20 Jul 2009
Record Label: Jagjaguwar
In Three Words: King Of Hearts
Ragged Rating: 4/5

By Daniel Greenwood

Sunset Rubdown frontman Spencer Krug’s demeanour is at once stoic and downtrodden, and with Dragonslayer, the band’s third album, Krug is processing an all-consuming lovesickness. Dragonslayer is a break-up record, it’s true: “I believe she only loved my face/and maybe these days are over now,” so sings Krug on the record’s beleaguered opener ‘Silver Moons’. These issues of deceit and artifice are embellished in the album artwork – glammed-up mannequins posing against backdrops of urban decay. Most definitely, the protagonist portrayed by Krug is experiencing women troubles. But also, aside from the lovelorn swoon inherent here, there’s an attention to ageing, and the guise of sexual seductiveness disappearing with time: “Here’s a photograph for you to hold/it’s a picture of just before I got old,” as on ‘Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!’.

It’s ‘Silver Moons’ which sets the scene, with Krug and co. keen to waste no time by imbuing urgency early on. This impetus carries through when married with patience on the listener’s part, and, listen after repeated listen, the music strikes through. As ever, with any Wolf Parade offshoot, Sunset Rubdown offer treats over time, and though Krug admits to ‘pulling faces at acquired tastes’ his band are just that.

The lyrics are what grip you here, amidst what is at first a not wholly riveting instrumentation of grizzly guitars and tumbling drum rolls. ‘Nightingale/December Song’ offers vivid, explosive metaphors for Krug’s change of heart late-on, his attempt at growing old with grace: ‘You need the one who slowly burns/and burns to stay alive/…You are a vast explosion/and I am the embers’. This concession to clarity is fleeting, however. Entering upon the ‘Dragon’s Lair’, the record’s 10-minute finale, is a man looking for a ‘different kind of kill’. But it remains unclear whether our hero’s mantra of “You’re such a champion/You are a champion” is self-help or an admission to the bête noire acting as catalyst for Spencer Krug’s hot-headed wretchedness. These songs are ‘broken-hearted shapes’ and fitting pieces to the puzzle that is Spencer Krug the artist. Dragonslayer is the latest episode in an ever growing compendium of Krugisms.

Film Review: Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains stereotypes.

Snobbery is a difficult game. It’s much like ‘the game’ played out in the Wire, the superlative TV series about a police department struggling to overcome a drugs gang in Baltimore, Maryland. If you’re a music snob, you’re nice to the tax-payer (someone who likes music in itself, will listen to anything, without putting themselves on a pedestal because they like something) but if some m*****f***** steps to you telling you that Glasvegas’ debut record was superior to say Deerhunters’, then you pop that foo’. In this case, ‘pop’ means to either walk away from the antagonist or scythe them down with a pistol-esque glare (slowly, all night, every time they speak).

What about film snobbery? That shit ain’t easy. And in the case of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell it’s impossible. This movie is for anyone who goes to the cinema because they love the experience, sitting amidst strangers for an hour or two, whilst having their face ripped off by intense surround sound. Sarah Wharton is resident Horror-critic here, but for this layman of the genre it’s a nice place to start. What’s most attractive about this disgusting, loud movie is its wonderful sense of humour. All the scares are executed (loudly) with an appreciation of their stupidity. And at this particular screening each screech was followed with a chorus of laughter.

Stereotypes are abound here, a blonde damsel in distress battling a gypsy pensioner with the devil’s curse upon her. But blondie – Alison Lohman as Christine Brown, Drag Me to Hell’s battered protagonist – is made of steel, and this loans clerk (pining after the vacant Assistant Manager’s desk) takes something of a constant beating. This hiding is the product of a curse put upon her coat button by Lorna Raver (Mrs. Ganush). This after Christine reluctantly declines Mrs. Ganush a third extension on a mortgage loan that’s allowing her to keep her home. Christine’s attempts to impress her boss by standing up to Mrs. Ganush’s plea backfires, so cue a quite extraordinary 5pm brawl in Christine’s car between herself and a satanic Mrs. Ganush.

These mini-battles are numerous, and the appearance of a man-goat’s shadow at windows and beneath doorways is a constant fixture of poor Christine’s downtime. You sense Raimi hinting at suburban fears of breaking and entering, but also of racial boundaries, the horrors of Eastern European mystics (a more sinister, subverted fear of Slavs perhaps). Any film that has a billy-goat possessed at a seance and screaming ‘You fucking whore!’ has to be good. Even better in the way that Raimi carries the amusement of it all. If only hell was this much fun!

And for any deplorable elements of this movie (if taken seriously, which really it shouldn’t be) there’s a guilt-edged point about consumerism at the film’s close. Catherine sells all her electrical goods, her jewellery, attempting to raise cash for the goat-swearing seance to come. It looks like things might be ok for this girl, investing in something spiritual – rather than egotistical like a promotion at someone else’s expense – but damn girl just can’t help huh-self. Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you walk all over the little guys, the phlegmy old ladies, there’s a foul-mouthed CGI goat ready and waiting to barrage you for eternity. This film snob just took note.

Interview: Wavves

via Ragged Words
Article and Photos by Daniel Greenwood

It’s a blustery afternoon in London Fields, where Ragged Words aims to meet Wavves’ Nathan Williams and Ryan Ulsh for a chat ahead of their show at London’s the Old Blue Last tomorrow night. The Californians are relaxing in a cranny of Hackney’s the Dove pub, feasting on the crumbling flesh of gargantuan veggie burgers. In fact, I’ve caught Wavves cold, amidst the death throes of another interview:

“Who’s my number one enemy?” ponders Nathan Williams, repeating the question asked of him. “It’d have to be anyone who has anything negative to say.”

The early signs, before even meeting Nathan, are that the creative individual behind Wavves and the newly released Wavvves isn’t allowing the whirlwind of online hype to taint his real world mannerisms – the ones that count – at least here in London. And when our conversation is in full swing, it’s a frank discussion between both Ryan and Nathan about the issue of music downloading, touring, and just how quickly all this has come about for Wavves, a music project that Nathan started in a garage in San Diego.

Wavves have only hours earlier flown in from the States, and whilst wishing the prior interviewer well as she leaves, Ryan chews on chunky chips, a pair of tortoiseshell specs jigging on the bridge of his nose, as Nathan intermittently doffs his Chicago Bulls cap, running his hand through the bristles of his dark hair.

“Dandruff?” Ryan asks.

“Not a good look," chuckles Nathan.

Flaky scalps aside, Wavves are proving massively popular in the US and the UK. This is the final few days of their pre-release window in Europe, before the broadsheets and mainstream journalists crack-on to either endorse the record or scythe it down. Though an earlier, sort of debut – Wavves (notice only two v’s) – has been around for a while. Wavves is available on Woodsist, a label beloved to Nathan, and for whom he’ll put out 7”s in the future. “There’s no clause in my contract [with Bella Union or Fat Possum] that says I can’t do that,” he affirms. But Wavves have been gaining most ground online, where fans and enthusiasts have posted the first record on their crude but doting blogspot pages since the autumn, generally ‘for preview purposes only, please support the bands and buy their music’. What do Wavves think?

“I’m all for it, I don’t give a fuck,” Nathan says, somewhat resigned. |I don’t care if people download my stuff. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stop people from downloading it.”

“Apart my from my records and tapes, everything I have on my computer has been…yoinked,” says Ryan, pausing briefly to think of the right phrase, as if this had just dawned on him.

But how does that make Bella Union and Fat Possum feel? After all, the labels are the ones who put the money into the project and promote the band, the very people who need to make money from fans buying records. But that’s not to say that Wavves don’t buy records, of course they do. Does Nathan ever disguise his opinion around the labels?

“I put my stuff up for free on my blog all the time. I mean, they tell me not to, and that makes sense, they’re trying to make money as well. I don’t make any money off record sales, though.”

Surely if more people can hear this music it’ll open up the chance for more people to get behind the music and attend the show. The fact is that if people like it most will buy it, but they’ll be even more willing to attend shows and mix with other fans.

Nathan goes further: “You’re not going to be able to stop people from listening to it, and, in the first place, if someone wants it so badly that they’re going to take it then I wouldn’t stop them from taking it. I mean, if they’re interested in music, then…even if I didn’t like it, what the fuck – you know? It’s a fight that you can’t win.”

People really are interested in this music. Wavves’ first New York shows all sold out, and these are Ryan and Nathan’s first performances. They’d only recently got together to practice the Wavves material. It’s the same for the London shows with Women – originally billed to support Deerhunter before Bradford Cox fell ill – and Crystal Stilts, not to mention English pals, Pens. They all sold out, too. In New York it got popular enough for the New York Times to send down Michael Carmichael, the chap Ryan calls an ‘older guy reporting on newer bands, kind of like the hip guy’.

The interest in Wavves isn’t limited to aging music critics however. Ryan and Nathan have friends in Vivian Girls, another youthful, scuzzy guitar act to have released an enriching debut in the past twelve months. Vivian Girls covered Wavves’ ‘So Bored’ at the SXSW festival in Texas after Ryan explained how simple it was to play. I put it to Wavves that ‘So Bored’ and ‘No Hope Kids’ are two songs that not only Vivian Girls will gravitate to. It’s a remark Nathan receives with a level of surprise, if not somewhat embarrassed. But those songs will prove popular, both utterly addictive little tunes that carry a lot of weight in their point, but a sense of joyful release in their chorus.

“That song [So Bored] is just about me being bored in high school,” Nathan says. “Those two songs are my favourite from the record, that and ‘To the Dregs’”.

Ryan and Nathan’s work isn’t done for the day as they’re wanted at Rough Trade East for an in-store, one they didn’t expect to be playing. But it’s no disappointment to them and willingly (though sluggishly from their jetlag) they move along. The camaraderie with the Bella Union folk is clear and particularly with label aid Mark, whom Ryan rumours Nathan to have fallen for.

"We spoke on the phone for like an hour-and-a-half, it was a little gay," recalls Nathan.

It’s a day later and the streets of London are emptied as the locals stay indoors to watch the Champions’ League Final between Manchester United and Barcelona. But, yet again, Upset the Rhythm have sold all the tickets for a Wavves show, this time at the Old Blue Last in Old Street. The little room upstairs in the venue is packed, but at this stage of Wavves career – they’re not even teething yet – the ticket holders are curious, some of whom look to be here just for rumour value.

The duo’s live set-up is simple – Nathan on guitar and vocals, Ryan on drums – and it works. Ryan’s drumming is outstanding, feverish almost, his complexion a volcanic red as he powers through the set list. Beforehand he’s a different person, socialising with pint in hand, a modest navy jacket on his back. When on stage he dons a large and luminous baseball cap worn backwards. He finishes the show with a stage-dive, executed much more professionally than tonight’s resident antagonist, who lands on his head when the crowd part.



It’s a funny atmosphere at times, and there’s banter for Nathan to deal with. The failed stage-diver at the front tries to goad Nathan a little. “I don’t know what that means, man,” Nathan responds, drawing a measure of laughter from the rest of the audience. But the songs are electrifying here, with ‘To the Dregs’ a highlight, and ‘Beach Demon’, also. This sober crowd even find themselves devising a pit of sorts at the front of the stage, a pre-cursor to that antagonist’s skull-dive.

This is meant to be Wavves’ first date on their European tour in support of Wavvves, but at time of going to press, Nathan and Ryan have postponed the tour after a peculiar incident in Barcelona, the night after this Old Blue Last date. Anyone who reads Pitchfork won’t need to hear the details of Nathan’s trouble on stage at Primavera Sound. Besides reported behavioural trouble on Nathan’s part, it’s best to keep in mind that these young Californians are only performing in Europe because there’s a demand. There’s no denying Wavves feel grateful for the chance they’ve been given by fans of their music, particularly Bella Union and Fat Possum. When Ragged Words sat down to speak with the band in Hackney, Nathan was musing over the prospect of playing at a festival including Neil Young and Sonic Youth, joking about thanking Crazy Horse for all their support. It was unthinkable to him, an unfathomable circumstance.

The point is that fame, however brief or mild, is a perilous game. And during this process people will want things from Nathan Williams. In this case, Pitchfork didn’t get a performance from the band, but that doesn’t mean that Nathan needs to be strung up in public (or online, in daily indie headlines). Wavves and Williams will be around for years to come, and, I don’t know about American audiences, but here in London and the UK, we’re happy to have had the chance to see this duo in the flesh. But, more importantly, we’re grateful that Ryan and Nathan are willing to travel so far to put on a show for us, however exhausted they may be.

Record Review: Wavves - Wavvves

via Ragged Words
Artist: Wavves
Release Date: 1 Jun 2009
Record Label: Bella Union
In Three Words: Fuck Being Bored
Ragged Rating: 4/5

By Daniel Greenwood

This time last year British-based label Bella Union were celebrating the release of Fleet Foxes self-titled debut, a record which is generally considered 2008’s best. This in itself couldn’t be more different to Wavves - Bella Union’s newest acquisition - but where Nathan Williams, the creator of Wavves, and Rob Pecknold, the captain of the Fleet Foxes quintet, differ stylistically, they do share a level of precociousness. Even without considering American imports Beach House, Abe Vigoda or Peter Broderick, Bella Union is getting it right, in a big way. And for Wavves’ first British shows, the hosting label are alongside the wondrous Upset the Rhythm in bringing a dearth of talented North American musicians to the UK. If signing this Californian protégé was a risk, it’s paid-off.

Wavvves delivers on the blog hype of the past twelve months, but it also simmers with a sense of promise. Williams’ songs are messy but never hazy, underwritten by an existential angst that’s oft identified by indie musicians today, but never captured as simply as does Williams. The cases in point here are ‘So Bored’, a paean to an insufferably dull city-life – too much stuff, too little worth – and ‘No Hope Kids’: “Got no God/Got no girlfriend/Got nothing at all”. It’s a wonderful noise-pop antidote to those of us struggling for fulfillment in 2009. And, thankfully, Wavvves is a cathartic experience.

There are occasions where Williams allows the fuzz to fill the would-be empty corners of these songs, he slows things down and in doing so reveals an introspective tint to the assuredness of more straightforward anthemic clangers like ‘No Hope Kids’. The sweetly experimental ‘Goth Girls’ and ‘Weed Demon’ offer another take on Wavves’ boundless witticisms, as Williams lets his guard down, highlighting a lingering melancholy unrequited elsewhere on Wavvves. But before you know it the lad’s hammering his guitar, the cymbals are thrashing and Williams is reveling in the insatiable boredom of this modern life.

Film Review: Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review wants a new sub-genre in American cinema.

OK, let’s invent a new sub-genre, or at least give this type of film a name: ‘Hollyosophy’ (it’s that or else Phillywood, Sophwood, or Philosowood, the last of which sounds like the soon-to-be-leaked sex tape of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). What is Hollyosophy? It’s a strain of philosophical Hollywood movies, it’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, 2006), The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Synecdoche, New York. It’s a cluster of films interested in the nature of reality, linked by director Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman as writer, or Jim Carrey as the baffled lead. These films are often silly but thoughtful Hollywood movies which, with the help of computer generated imagery, fit into a neat, Hollyosophical package. It’s Socrates in sneakers, Nietszche in négligé (which gives new meaning to the ‘Freudian slip’). But Synecdoche, New York is a Foucault fart.

What Gondry and Kaufman nailed, Hollyosophically, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was visually-compelling mainstream thought-house cinema with the pseudo-indie sexiness of Kate Winslet and Kirsten Dunst, along with mondo-protagonist Jim Carrey. It’s also rather heartfelt and pretty, it made many a man reach for the sugar paper and pritt-stick. There was a gorgeous tune from pre-Scientology Beck, too: ‘Everyone’s got to learn sometime,’ was the refrain.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theatre director convinced that he’s dying, so much so that Charlie Kaufman, director of Synecdoche, New York, allows us to inspect his hero’s poo. Subsequently, the murky shade of Caden’s poop is an aspect of Kaufman’s rather polluted mise-en-scene. Indeed, Kaufman exploits the physical unattractiveness of Caden (arguably a near-perfect rendition of himself, directorially) by filming in near constant close-up. A sense of claustrophobia comes through in admiring the new-to-Kafka Hazel (Samantha Morton), the vacant-to-starry-eyed Michelle Williams as Claire Keen, and Seymour Hoffman’s paunch.

Caden’s complaining is successful on two fronts: alienating Adele (Catherine Keener) and thus his darling daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) (all the way over to Berlin), and secondly in getting beautiful younger women interested in him, namely Claire and Hazel. Caden’s lamentable woes are less from his own loneliness (which he tirelessly, forever underlines) and more his struggles with women: romantically with Morton, artistically with Williams, and emotionally with Adele. Though most damning is Olive’s disappearance with her mother, and her ‘conversion’ to Lesbianism at the age of ten by Adele’s Nabokovian chum Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Seymour Hoffman’s Caden never learns, though. Unlike Carrey’s non-diegetic interior muttering in Eternal Sunshine, Caden never shuts up, there’s no measure to his flagrantly self-absorbed moaning. This probably is intended, but it’s just such a drag. Kaufman and Seymour Hoffman have created a really irritating character, but can you criticise them for that? It’s not a rhetorical question because I don’t know. Do you know? It might be a brilliant performance from Seymour Hoffman, and, via The Savages, he’s fine-tuned the moaner, down from somewhat likeable to entirely annoying. But even if his performance as a douche-bag is convincing, there are real problems with the latter stages of Synecdoche, New York in terms of coherence.

One thing clear enough in reading Synecdoche, New York textually is the magnitude of narrative threads running through it, if not the film’s attempt to regurgitate minor events. Caden tries to reconstruct his life, his many loves and apparent losses, in a gigantic old hangar. The sprawling mess of a ‘play’ never meets its audience in the conventional sense. It remains a work in progress for over seventeen-years. This plot line will signal, for much of its audience, the movie’s descent into nonsense. Kaufman has created what some might call a masterpiece, whereas others might question the obstinate second half that completely belies the notion of film as mild entertainment.

The Russian director Andrei Tarkvosky claimed that Robert Bresson was his favourite filmmaker because he achieved simplicity in cinema. What would Tarkovsky (or indeed Bresson) make of a movie like Synechdoche, New York. The little Tarkovsky in my head would comment on the nationality of the filmmaker and its lead, and call this a very American style of filmmaking. Aspects of self-indulgence are what Tarkovsky disliked about cinema most of all and he didn’t even have to contend with sexy blockbusters, he didn’t live to see the nineties. Tarkovsky’s public writings on film advise budding filmmakers to let the images speak for themselves, rather than trying to make a point, or the director desperately expressing an opinion. He believed you should present an event as clearly and plainly as you can, just as short story writer Anton Chekhov once told his chum Gorky not to write that ‘the waves crashed against the beach as if in anger’, or ‘the rain fell like tear drops’. The idea is that images have connotations all on their lonesome. So, Chekhov or Tarkovsky would probably cuss Kaufman out. Though not really.

But what’s the point in bringing up dead artists and comparing them to Synecdoche, New York? It’s an attempt to get some sort of cultural or philosophical (rather than Hollyosophical) perspective on the clutter amassed by Charlie Kaufman towards the end of his film. It might just be that here is the sort of film which is a bi-product of a self-obsessed age. I’m talking about this age, the one we live in right now, where many of us are in constant, artificial self-reflection. The idea that the internet, for example, has improved the quality of our social or individual lives is, IMO, false. There are many Caden Cotards among us, inspecting a different kind of poop, the kind smeared over interfaces or ‘walls’ as they’re called. And in the event of this constant, meticulous self- and physical-examination – am I good enough, am I hairy enough, am I too quiet? – is that you become a mini-pervert who makes bubbling boils of bug-bites and a cavernous wound of a splinter. LOL.

Generally, Kaufman’s Hollyosophy provides laughs with Caden’s uber-self-awareness, but these chuckles aren’t enough come the 120 minute mark. And in Synecdoche, New York’s case, it was a point ushered in with a painstaking sigh.

Record Review: Akron/Family - Set ‘em Wild, Set ‘em Free

via Ragged Words
Artist: Akron/Family
Release Date: 4 May 2009
Record Label: Dead Oceans
In Three Words: Docile No Longer
Ragged Rating: 3.5/5

By Daniel Greenwood

Set your eyes upon any British mid-to-high-brow music publication nowadays and you’ll find a record reviewed under the branding of ‘Freak-Folk’. This term haunts British music journalists grappling with the ingenuity of New Weird America imports such as Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective. In actual fact, the term ‘Freak-Folk’ is as redundant (however much recycled) as the newly-fashionable Shoegaze re-branding of any old British band putting out a sophomore record with mild attention to guitar effects.

For artists like Akron/Family or Six Organs of Admittance – very different really, but both American and folk-influenced to some degree – it’s less about genre and more a fascination with the relationship between modern America and the vast wilderness it once was. On Akron/Family’s latest record, Set ‘em Wild, Set ‘em Free, the relationship between man and the earth he sprang from is very much advanced – there’s guilt there. ‘Everyone is Guilty’ is a giddy and choppy slice of single material in which the band manage to sum-up the general disorientation that clouds the issue of humans destroying their natural surroundings. And the strings that close the track are just as ambiguous, either signalling a joyous discovery of truth (we are guilty, and we have a chance to change things) or else a tired, saddened release of breath (no one cares, and thus are we doomed). ‘River’ could be an ode to a lost love or a faith flinching: “You are no longer a river to me/…Though your coursing remains.” It’s a beautiful track, too.

One thing clear about Set ‘em Wild is the band’s desire to rock-out. Though, arguably, the blistering switch midway through ‘Gravelly Mountains of the Moon’ disrupts the latter progress of the album. But then again, this is what Akron/Family want to do, they want to experiment further with styles and structure, and they succeed in doing so. But that ‘coursing’ remains, and maybe the band’s experimentation this time (discounting their magnificent self-titled work in 2004) has made freakish the many sumptuous melodies bleeding from this record.

Film Review: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review eventually gets monetary.

The Coen brothers’ now infamous No Country for Old Men has perhaps the greatest opening forty-minutes in modern American cinema. It’s not unlike that of No Country’s Oscar competitor There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). Both movies begin out there on the carn-darn American frontier, the wilderness that Christopher Columbus parked his gosh-darn boat on back in the day. Each opening is slow and seductive, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood digging for oil, and No Country for Old Men’s Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, passing across the land to discover a scene of post-drugs-gang-carnage-warfare. [P.S. notice how only recently does the Western world care about Mexicans dying if it's in the form of a virus that might bother us over here, rather than the hundreds of grizzly, drugs-related killings that make up a far more serious epidemic]. The cinematography that constructs this sequence early in No Country is the spellbinding element. Instead of a constant shot-reverse-shot between Brolin’s stunned-expression!!!1! and the mutilated face of a corpse (Goonies-esque), the Coens allow their camera to linger, and the microphones pick up the buzzin’ flies milling around the feast of rotting flesh both human and canine.

The starkest of images here is Brolin’s Llewelyn happening upon a theoretical Garden of Eden away from the scene of the shoot-out. A solitary tree sits atop a barren knoll, a figure slumped against its stump. Upon closer inspection – and these opening scenes really are a case of closer inspection for both protagonist and spectator – the figure has bled to death, and at his feet is Llewelyn’s very own barrel of oil. Inside the briefcase is a stash of cash which he makes off with, but hidden amidst these dollars is a tracking device. This device directs none other than Satan himself, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, on Llewelyn’s trail. Bardem’s performance is a debut for many of us, an introduction to this quite brilliant actor. Here he’s a resigned but quietly deranged George Clooney, kind of handsome in that death is sexy style. But death ain’t sexy. It’s explicitly violent in this country minus old men and the killings are numerous.

Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff of the frontier (Ed Tom Bell) having to clean up after these pests, and he’s altogether more resigned than Bardem the executioner. Indeed, Bell’s significance is his retrospective role in the film, not as a storyteller, but as the sigh that comes after the fact. Perhaps the film is titled after him, and in a land where violence reigns, what can an old man do but take off his hat and sit on down. The police here are useless, they’re brutalised by Bardem. The concept of police enforcement is undermined by the idea that the only way they could ever actually enforce law is by matching the brutality of the drugs cartels and rogue killers such as Bardem. But it’s also a matter of money, and in No Country for Old Men, money does more than talk – it gets every crazy mother after you – and in the end it gets you killed.

But what is money, really. For those among us who’ve had problems getting even basic employment in the past twelve-months, it’s something we’re not privy to, but are willed by our peers to discuss at length. In one painstaking and baffling advert for vodka that’s currently doing the rounds, its soundtrack claims that ‘money makes the world go round’, against images of cinema-goers kissing the cheeks of ticket sellers. Money, like the internet, is 24-hours. You can get it out at a cash point – if you have some – at 3am in the morning, you don’t have to wait for the bank manager to open his doors the next day. In fact, with a certain credit card conglomerate’s campaign to convince the public (with tongue-mildly-in-cheek) to forget about physical money altogether, finance has become a figment of my imagination. The job you work is worked only on the grounds that you have faith in your employer’s promise to buffer your invisible account with invisible monies witnessed, nowadays, as pithy digits through a smudged and smashed cash machine screen (thanks, Hard-Fi). But, if Joel and Ethan Coen teach us anything, it’s that the banker ain’t the wanker, I am. All the problems encountered with money are there because I choose to participate in an advanced-Capitalist society. Idiot. Though of course No Country for Old Men is far more entertaining and Oscar-worthy than the rant above.

Match Preview: Sunderland vs. Everton

via The Observer

Daniel Greenwood, Observer reader
Having lost the spine of our side to serious injury, it's unthinkable that Everton are sitting sixth in the table with an FA Cup final to look forward to. In recent years, our season has closed with the quiet seal of European football, a modest achievement that gives David Moyes's boys the games to develop, both on the continent and at home. Sadly, going into the Sunderland fixture, there is a blanket of cloud cast over the club. To lose Yakubu in November to an achilles injury was shocking, though Tim Cahill has filled the void and was a decent outside bet for FA player of the season. To lose Mikel Arteta was worse – where would the guile come from without the Basque? The answer: everywhere. However, with last Saturday came a telling blow, a stinking awful injury to Jagielka. But Jags has played his part this season, and, knowing Everton, I won't rule out another dynamic response from this unbreakable squad of players. We are on the up, and in Moyes we trust.

Due a big game: Jo - It's only because the lad's had a lack of games with stipulations and whatnot. I like him, but he'll prove pricey to retain next season.

Record Review: The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

By Daniel Greenwood
Release Date: 17/03/2009
Ragged Rating: *** (3/5)
In Three Ragged Words: Metal? What metal?

Up until this point in The Decemberists’ career, Colin Meloy has contained his storytelling into sole songs that are tied together by themes of self-deprecation and melancholia. The results are devastating. Picaresque, released in 2005, was the breakthrough record for the Portland-based band. It’s a record packed with miniature epics that work like short stories and, up until now, Meloy could be seen as a high calibre short story writer presenting his work in song. ‘On the Bus Mall’ is the tale of young prostitutes that ‘fuse together like a family’, while ‘The Engine Driver’ is the lament of someone unloved and strung along: “And if you don’t love me, let me go”. Castaways and Cutouts (2002) is perhaps The Decemberists’ lesser-known release and remains a well-kept secret. It finishes with ‘California One/Youth and Beauty Parade’ as Meloy calls upon all the urchins of society to join the toast of the town, to rejoice in their bedwetting and pick-pocketing.

The characters Meloy creates are forgotten souls, like ‘Eli, the Barrow Boy’: “dressed all in corduroy he had drowned in the river down the way”. Meloy’s narrator embodies the forgotten, reflecting like a ghoul upon the tragedy that has come before; or else he’ll narrate as an outsider, a feeling unfamiliar to the listener. The Decemberists’ music is tuneful and inviting, and before The Crane Wife (2007) it was hard not to love this band. In 2007 there were signs that Meloy’s songwriting was moving towards epic musicianship (two songs surpass the eleven-minute mark) overlooking the mini-epiphanies that define The Decemberists’ earlier work.

So here comes The Hazards of Love, a 17-part tragic romance hyped for its genre hopping from folk-pop all the way over to metal. There are chomping power-chords to be found, as on ‘The Queen’s Rebuke/The Crossing’ but metal it ain’t. It feels more like sea shanty-rock, an evolution of The Decemberists’ previous allusions to pirate-pop. The ‘metal’ is sparse enough, but the teeth crunching guitars feel a little unsavoury. Still, the impression remains that a record aiming for this sort of theatricality needs something pantomime ugly. It’s not unlikely that this new direction for the band will have fans of old chewing their bottom lip in confusion, and if you don’t enjoy the guest vocals (Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond as our heroine, Margaret, and Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond as the Queen) early on in the album’s lifespan, you probably won’t like them at all.

There are moments of Meloy magic to be had here however, ‘The Drowned’ is the curtain falling on the album, albeit a curtain clawed down by the waves that ‘bear witness’ to our hero and heroine wedded beneath the rushing waters. It’s the saddest song Meloy’s written since ‘On the Bus Mall’ and it’s a suitable finale to a successful decade for this Portland-based band. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come. May their next project find Meloy crushing listeners with the calibre of ‘The Drowned’, because it feels like all Hazards really needs to say is in this one last song. For now though, The Decemberists have every right to experiment.

Live Review: Papercuts @ the Legion, Old Street

via Ragged Words
By Daniel Greenwood

A recent Sunday Times Culture article heralded the return of shoegaze, a genre supposedly pioneered by My Bloody Valentine’s superlative album Loveless. According the article’s author Paul Lester, the influence of the aforementioned Dubliners can be seen in artists like Deerhunter, Sigur Ros, and Lily Allen. And tonight’s show in Old Street’s swanked-out the Legion is organised by Sonic Cathedral, a record label run by music journalist Nathanial Cramp, the sweetheart of Lester’s Times article. But there’s one problem, none of the bands performing here tonight are ‘shoegaze’.

Trailer Trash Tracys open the show with a pleasant sound that doesn’t suggest anything beyond the oblong shape of the venue, and certainly nothing on the scale of a cathedral. This band sound more like fans of the Crystals than Slowdive, in fact, there’s barely anything shoegazey about this band. The same can be said for It Hugs Back, who take an age to start their set, a wait that seems unworthy. IHB have recently released their debut record, and if they’re looking to ship units they’ll need to do better than this. Perhaps you could argue the band are using delay pedals so call it shoegaze if you will, but it’s more pint-gaze. There’s an element of the mundane about their performance, dragging on into the evening, it’s inoffensive and unconvincing.

Papercuts’ maestro Jason Quever has been busying around the venue all night, scribbling in his notebook and supping glasses of red wine. And as the band finally kick things off, he’s in good spirits. Papercuts write love songs, Can’t Go Back (2007) is a superb break-up record, but only ‘Dear Employee’ and ‘John Brown’ make it out tonight. There are calls for ‘Unavailable’, and this reviewer whimpers pleadingly for ‘Summer Long’. But this particular tour is in aid of Papercuts’ fine new record You Can Have What You Want, what Ragged Words’ own Tim Groenland rightfully calls one of this year’s sunniest. ‘The Machine Will Tell Us So’ and ‘Once We Walked in the Sunlight’ are nailed by the band, though at times hindered by a mix that needs the bass turned down. Quever returns for a drab solo performance, ignoring calls for crowd favourites, and it’s a meek end to a rather disjointed evening for all concerned.

Match Preview: Everton vs. Wigan

via The Guardian
by Daniel Greenwood, Observer reader

When Everton were knocked out of the Uefa cup in September, the prospects for the season were grim. Though I never felt we had the financial clout to uproot any of the Sky-four, a battle for European football is now familiar to us Blues. But, as ever, Moyes has pulled it off. Playing a group of fixtures including Liverpool three times and Arsenal and United in close proximity gave Everton the thirst for the challenge. And now we face a Wigan side looking to steal our spot. The task for any team beneath the top four is to keep an eye over your shoulder, but Moyes also knows that a one-game-at-a-time philosophy breeds success, and believe me, if anyone else knows how to get Champions' League football, it's the Stoic Scot. And so we look to beat Wigan and achieve what in September looked so unlikely – a return to the top six.

Due a big game: Jô – The Brazilian has impressed with his positive forward play, but his sour time at City has put his progress back by several months.

Film Review: Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review constains Idealism and spoilers.

During the final deluge of academic work belonging to my university degree, I bought two Mark Twain books. One was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the classic novel, and the other was Roughing It, written by Twain as he travelled around the southern United States. In the final days of essay writing and editing, these two books gleamed from their spot underneath my desk, I couldn’t wait to read something non-theoretical again. Huck Finn was very good, I ate it up quickly, but Roughing It was more of a slog, and in the final stages of the book, with Twain’s rather dull account of molten lava, I couldn’t wait for it to finish. Into the Wild has spoken to me more closely than Roughing It could.

I have never felt such an urge to leave the city behind, to do as Henry David Thoreau did, or as experimental folk-singer Justin Vernon did to record his debut as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago. Thoreau is quoted by the protagonist of Into the Wild, Chris (Emile Hirsch), a 23-year-old post-grad (snap): ‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’ It’s a line from Walden that’s also emblazoned on the cover of the Penguin Great Ideas mini-volume Where I Lived and What I Lived For. Thoreau’s beautiful idea, which he managed to achieve and describe so well is a tragic tale here for young Chris. But that’s only really a footnote, because Into the Wild is an exceptionally-shot movie that charters a vast trek across a beautiful country. That it’s a true story is a fact unknown until the end, and that it’s directed by Sean Penn is another example of his thirst for ideas, for the stories of tragic individuals. It doesn’t match The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller, 2004) for pain-value or grit, but it’s Penn musing on death again. He’s interested, and so am I.

Chris is fed up with ‘things’, with the burden his parents’ troubled marriage hands down to him and his sister Carine (Jena Malone). Chris burns his cash, gives his 24,000 dollar college fund to Oxfam and embarks on a Quixotic journey across America. The opening scenes of Into the Wild are of Alaska, how Chris got here is recounted in stylishly edited sequences that make sure the narration is never boring. Carine narrates, never questioning her brother’s reasoning, only recounting the violent quarrels of her parents, underlining why Chris’s disappearance into the world is more desirable than being stuck at home.

Perhaps Chris is similar to Timothy Treadwell, better known as a man eaten by bears in Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005). To be ‘happy’, it’s a belief in yourself that you need, an inner calm which can transform the world around you. Chris oversteps this mark. The moment that he’s assaulted by a police office, or border patrol, as he sits happily on the empty carriage of a freight train the fun is over. This is the harbinger, the prophecy. If only Chris had gone on home.

The problem is that he loses sight of his goal, and the desire to live alone and off the land in Alaska is his downfall. What Chris strives for is greatness, the greatness he reads about in Tolstoy’s novels, in Thoreau. Personally, it’s Thoreau’s pal Ralph Waldo Emerson who stands over this film: ‘The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him.’