ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2013

It's been ages since I've posted anything, mainly because of an increasingly busy life, but, as Ian Malcolm said, life finds a way. I don't have time for separate posts, unfortunately, so my list will appear in one long post this time. There are other amazing releases that deserve recognition that aren't on the list--Tim Hecker's Virgins, Anthony Child's The Space Between People and Things, Karen Gwyer's Needs Continuum, Darkstar's News from Nowhere, Forest Swords' Engravings, The Black Dog's Tranklements, E.M.M.A.'s Blue Gardens, Pure X's Crawling up the Stairs, Rocketnumbernine's MeYouWeYou, Laura Veirs' Warp & Weft--and I strongly urge you to check them all out, too. Also, there were a number of albums that I never managed to get a handle on or that were disappointing in various ways that I would have expected to end up on this list: Boards of Canada's Tomorrow's Harvest (at times I think I love it, at others it just leaves me cold), Lee Ranaldo and the Dust's Last Night on Earth (dad rock in the worst possible way that got rid of almost everything I loved about Between the Tides and the Times), The Weeknd's Kiss Land (absolutely fascinating because of how unlikable Abel Tesfaye makes himself, but a little lacking in the hooks department), and the Besnard Lakes' Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO ("People of the Sticks" remains phenomenal, but the album as a whole is a little too comfortable and midtempo for its own good). And now, on to the list!

Albums of the Year 2013

 10. Four Tet, Beautiful Rewind (Text)

The album starts strongly and finishes strongly, but Beautiful Rewind doesn’t quite have the same brilliance as 2010’s There Is Love in You. When it’s on--the rushing jungle of “Gong,” the motorik intensity of “Parallel Jalabi,” the disorienting takes on Four Tet’s wall-of-shimmer that are “Ba Teaches Yoga,” “Crush” (which should be at least twice as long, cutting off as soon as it starts to get really interesting), and “Unicorn,” and the surprisingly poignant “Your Body Feels”--Beautiful Rewind shows off just how good Kieran Hebden is at making a palette that is, in theory, limited seem too expansive to ever run out of new permutations, much like his friend Burial. Unfortunately, the middle stretch of the album (particularly “Kool FM,” “Buchla,” and “Aerial”) feels underdeveloped, lacking focus and relying on repetition that feels more grating than driving, taking the ideas from tracks like “Ocoras” and “128 Harps” from Pink and failing to do anything new with them. A flawed effort, then, but one shot through with, if not greatness, at least very goodness. 

9. Machinedrum, Vapor City (Ninja Tune)

Travis Stewart's last release, Room(s), passed me by. After hearing all the hype I checked it out, but it made no sense to me (I haven’t gone back to try it again, though I probably should). “As a Child,” though, my favourite track from Lone’s Galaxy Garden, convinced me that there was something to all this Machinedrum love. When “Eyesdontlie” dropped, I was enticed by the descriptions that people offered--jungle, footwork, Burial--and I understood them this time. Hearing “Gunshotta” was an entirely different experience. The tools are, at this point in 2013, painfully overfamiliar, but the execution is flawless. I can’t disagree with the assessment that the album is frontloaded, but when I hear the best Boards of Canada song to come out in 2013 (“Center Your Love”) in that first half and still have tracks like “Rise and Fall” (which could’ve stepped off of Black Secret Technology) or the warped, melting pop of closer “Baby Its U” (which in my brain splits the difference between Jai Paul and Jon Hopkins) on top of “Eyesdontlie” to look forward to, I don’t much care. 

8. These New Puritans, Field of Reeds (Infectious)

Nick Southall reckons that the “Talk Talk similarities are over-emphasised in some circles; this is something quantifiably different to that, even if the odd musical moment or the ethos as a whole feels redolent,” and I can sort of get on board with that. If there is Talk Talk here (and let’s not kid ourselves--there is), it is Talk Talk as reimagined by Bark Psychosis. Indeed, Hex (and maybe some of ://Codename: Dustsucker, like “400 Winters” and “Burning the City”) seems the better comparison all around than Laughing Stock. Actually, despite not sounding anything alike, the album that Field of Reeds most reminds me of is Trail of Dead’s Source Tags and Codes. Similarly, Elisa Rodrigues’ vocals on “Dream” (and elsewhere) call to mind Fovea Hex’s Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent project. Field of Reeds is more than good enough to stand on its own merits, though. “The Way I Do” earns the cliché of dreamy--I can’t imagine how it couldn’t haunt your sleep for weeks after you hear it--and it opens the album with a fairly conventional structure. What Field of Reeds delivers in spades, though, is dramatic, shifting pieces (like “The Light in Your Name,” “V (Island Song),” and “Field of Reeds”) songs that seem formless until you accept their internal logic, in which case they become magnificent, three-dimensional spaces for you to play in. This is difficult, challenging music that never feels trying, and it amply rewards every minute of attention you give it.

7. Mogwai, Les Revenants Soundtrack (Sub Pop)

It’s a cliché to say this, so I’ll get it out of the way now: this might be the best thing Mogwai’s released since Young Team. Seriously. Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will was a great Mogwai album, but it also has come to feel like something of a corner. At this point, Mogwai does Mogwai so well, what’s the point in really listening to their albums? That this soundtrack recasts their sound as one of frosty, unnerving beauty (the stretch from “Relative Hysteria” through “Modern” might be the best run on anything Mogwai’s ever released) is a subtle but necessary bit of evolution, and if the oscillations of “Modern” or “This Messiah Needs Watching” point the way toward Rave Tapes next year, I’m very excited (that someone tried to criticise the teaser for that album for sounding like Ghost Box with dodgy drum machines is hilariously misguided, because that sounds awesome). At other times, mainly in the first half, Les Revenants offers the sequel to Come On Die Young that I never knew I needed, and “What Are They Doing In Heaven Today?” succeeds in all the ways that “Hound of Winter” fails. Mogwai feels due, after almost twenty years, for the kind of late career renaissance that a band of their quality deserves. Hopefully this is the start.

6. My Bloody Valentine, m b v (self-released)

Context be damned, at its best m b v is stunning. Bilinda Butcher’s voice turning into a beam of light from the heart of a globular cluster on “only tomorrow,” Kevin Shields’ perfect half-sighed, half-sung vocal for “who sees you,” the synths and coos of “is this and yes” suggesting the sterile beauty of the moon soundtracked by a particularly austere Stereolab, the heavy-lidded sensuality of “if i am,” the pulsating guitar break of “in another way,” and the fire-breathing rollercoaster ride of “wonder 2” are the show stoppers, but there are little joys and surprises throughout. Even the missteps--the somnambulistic “she found now” is both too long and terribly out of place; the 80s-indebted synthpop of “new you” is faceless, even with the help of a voice that has burned into the brain of a generation of indie rock fans, a soundalike that vanishes from the brain as soon as it stops playing; the insistent chugging of “nothing is” is insistent, chugging filler--can’t detract from a surprising triumph: Kevin Shields released something, it’s not as good as Loveless, and the world (and My Bloody Valentine) didn’t end.

 5. Burial, Rival Dealer EP (Hyperdub)

I’ve been listening to this a lot since its release about two weeks ago and I’ve only just started to make any sense of it. It feels to me like the conclusion of the Burial 2.0 format started with Kindred and perfected, I’d thought, on the “Truant”/“Rough Sleeper” single from the end of last year. Some of the claims made for this release have been . . . large, I’ll say (to keep it polite), but it does offer some interesting points to chew on regarding the exact nature of its politics (and those who are denying the release any political substance are flat out wrong). Burial has never been as reliant on darkness on those championing the “his new turn toward the light” narrative; his music has been from the very beginning not just nakedly emotional, but aspirational toward a transcendental grandeur that was more than just the perfect distillation of end-of-the-night blues (“Forgive” samples “An Ending (Ascent)” for god’s sake!). I’m still not convinced by “Hiders”--not because those drumbeats are bad, but because I don’t think the song actually needs its triumphant second half: at half its length, it would have made a glorious call back to his very earliest work--but “Rival Dealer” and “Come Down To Us” are majestic in the best sense. The suite format that Burial has been toying with comes to breathtaking fruition on this EP. The ambient final third of the title track, the final return and beef up of the melody in “Come Down To Us” prior to the Lana Wachowski sample, the treatment of that (somewhat contentious) sample on its own, are all signs of Burial’s absolute command of his sound at this point. I have no idea what comes next and I can’t wait to hear it.

 4. Jon Hopkins, Immunity (Domino)

If you played the first half of this album for me as a kid (or even as a teenager), I’d have told you that it sounded like the future. The endlessly squelchy beats and the rubber band, oscillating melodies are only part of that, though. The feel of the first half just is futuristic to me, somehow. When I hear it, buildings stretch into the sky, lights streak by overhead, and spacewalks by Saturn's rings are a common vacation (of course, then my imagination turns dark and the future's all about fuel/food shortages, civil unrest, and techno-fascist dictatorships, but this is what I get for growing up on pulp science fiction). I never want it to end (indeed, both “Open Eye Signal” and “Collider” seem like they never do end--somewhere, in the ether, they just continue on and on to infinity, pulling and stretching themselves into ever finer strands of beats and melodies). Like Machinedrum’s Vapor City, this is a frontloaded album, with the more ambient second half certainly pretty (“Abandon Window” makes clear the reasons that Hopkins was Eno’s protégé by approaching the beatific grandeur of “An Ending (Ascent)”), but slightly too languid (“Form by Firelight”) or too featherweight (“Sun Harmonics”) to make quite the same impact on the listener. Even with its second half slowdown, though, Immunity is often breathtaking in a way that feels quietly original, despite all the comparisons to Actress, Burial, Border Community, Aphex Twin, et al.

3. Jai Paul, Jai Paul (self(?)-released[?])

An album that may not have been actually released (perhaps the perfect Internet-age album, in that sense?) that works as such a vital document of the times because it gives them a past: low bitrate streams, bad cellphone cam videos, the no-fi blasted at maximum volume as a substitute for quality, nuance, substance. The songs on this album are constantly dropping out, melting away, switching abruptly to the next sound on the playlist, the next video/picture/website you have to see. This is not just pseudo-experimental pretention, though. From the Bollywood blasts of “Track 2” to the gleeful information overload/sci-fi fantasy of “Track 10,” from the frenetic desperation of “Track 5” to the warped softness of “Track 9” (“Jasmine”), Jai Paul offers up whirling, colourful hooks that go straight to the brain’s pleasure centres only to disorient them. Ultimately, when someone asks me what the last five years felt like, when they need some kind of phenomenological sense of the grain and texture of the world, a glimpse into how it sounded and therefore how I experienced it, I’ll point them to this. If that’s not the sign of a future classic, I don’t know what is.

2. Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt (Don Giovanni)

Much like with Neon Indian’s “Sleep Paralysist” a few years back, that Waxahatchee’s “Coast to Coast” was not an inescapable global mega hit this summer is clinching proof, in my book, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Beyond that admittedly killer lead single, though Cerulean Salt offers a number of deep cut gems--from the bass-led slow dance of “Brother Bryan,” to the brief, never repeated ramp up of “Lively,” and to the gloriously tumbling chorus of “Peace and Quiet”--and perhaps the most consistent across-the-board songwriting all year. Katie Crutchfield’s lyrics are next level good, full of the kind of details that make a song like the humidly evocative “Hollow Bedroom” come to life and the entire album achingly poignant. More importantly, though, her voice and her arrangements take these songs into harrowing, unexpected directions: when Crutchfield lets go at full power in “You’re Damaged” the moment is arresting in the best possible way.

1. Mount Kimbie, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth (Warp)

I fell in love with Mount Kimbie's "Sketch on Glass" when I heard it four years ago. Indeed, along with Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo," it soundtracked quite a bit of that summer for me. I fell out of love with Mount Kimbie's debut album Crooks and Lovers, though, and we're still trying to patch things up. What a relief, then, to unashamedly fall back in love with them here. “Blood and Form,” a serious candidate for my favourite song of the year (for a long time every bus journey to campus ended with it), opens like some kind of cosmic bowling ball made out of black holes: its bass is so impossibly heavy that nothing can escape it. The spiraling synths that make up its second half cause my brain to see the same colours as a good game of Geometry Wars. “Made to Stray” feels exactly like the sun coming up. “So Many Times, So Many Ways” is the greatest Broken Social Scene song that BSS never wrote. King Krule’s guest appearances have gone from distracting to essential over the course of the year. All of this and none of this describes the charm of this album, which is so small and modest, such an obvious product of home and hand (opening with a song called “Home Recording” might actually be a little too on the nose), and so utterly bewitching. I listened to this more than anything else in 2013. 

YEAR IN REVIEW: TOP FIVE EPs OF 2012

The EP is a sorely underappreciated format for the most part. While it gets praise in isolated instances--for example, the near universal acclamation for Disco Inferno’s series of EPs leading up to their second album, 1994’s sampledelic post-rock high water mark D.I. Go Pop--critics in end of the year lists or roundups of the “Greatest [x] of [y]” tend to go for the flashy single or the totemic album (indeed, good old Nick Southall’s “Top Ten EPs” feature for Stylus back in 2005 is the only such list I can recall off the top of my head--I agree with only one choice out of those ten, but that’s a story for another day). The EP deserves more love, and not just because there has been an exceptionally bumper crop of EPs released this year. With more room than a single but less pressure to make a statement than with an album, the EP is truly the perfect form for experimentation. Transitioning between styles? Experimenting with new members, elements, or directions? Refining an earlier breakthrough? Entering (or re-entering) the game with a new band or as a solo artist? The EP has your back in all of these situations. Thus, in honour of this plucky format--and, full disclosure, to make my own life somewhat easier as I compile my end of the year lists--here’re my top five Extended Plays of the year (to qualify, a release must loosely conform to what I've understood to be the traditional definition of the format: twenty five minutes or less of music or four tracks). Long may they reign!

5. Gonjasufi - MU.ZZ.LE

Gonjasufi himself billed this as a “mini-album,” but at just twenty four minutes it can be snuck onto this list even with ten tracks. Not really a reinvention of anything that he did on A Sufi and a Killer--opener “White Picket Fence” makes it clear that we’re staying in the same ballpark--MU.ZZ.LE manages to condense and focus what was a fairly sprawling album. Gone are the sub-Tom Waits numbers, thankfully, and in their place are the most concentrated blasts of weed-fueled paranoia since Tricky’s Pre-Millennium Tension. The EP resembles the soundtrack to a spy on a bad trip mid-cover blown freakout. While its production values verge on the non-existent, the distortion, hiss, and murk throughout fit the cracked and broken vocals like a glove, highlighting the tenderness and fragility in Gonjasufi’s voice even at his most righteously pissed off. All of that, and the sensuous “Feedin’ Birds,” a career highlight given some erotic sweetening via backing vocals from Gonjasufi’s wife.

4. Shlohmo - Vacation

Despite the somewhat dour colour scheme of its cover art, Shlohmo's Vacation EP is anything but dark or depressing. Instead, the EP takes the humidity of last year's Bad Vibes and infuses it with tropical colours, creating an astonishingly alien soundworld that feels a little less ponderous, less heavy of limb, and more free-flowing than his earlier work. Despite all of its potentially played out trappings--particularly its treated vocals--something like "The Way U Do" with its alternatively pitched-up and heavily distorted keening winds up strangely singular, somewhere between post-dubstep bass music's vocal refractions, tri-Angle style witch-house/drag demon moans, and classic rave diva melismas. The real gem here, though, is "Rained the Whole Time," during which you can practically see the steam and mist curdling and the water dripping as a forest springs up in your room, the whole thing resembling something like early Four Tet after it has degraded in the soil for a few centuries. 

3. Burial - Kindred

Burial's had a busy year, by his standards: two releases of his own (Kindred and the interesting Truant single that just came out on Hyperdub), an old track resurrected and worked by Dusk+Blackdown, "High Road," on the duo's Dasaflex, and a track with friend and schoolmate Four Tet, "Nova." All of this and hints of an album in 2013? Someone's feeling mighty productive lately. Trying--unsuccessfully, I'm sure--to put the baggage of "Burial the groundbreaking artist" aside for a minute, what makes Kindred interesting on the level of "Burial the musician" is its sudden push forward into a new method of organisation for Will Bevan. Where something like "Night Bus," "Forgive," or "In McDonalds" had its own status as a separate track, little sonic sketches that fleshed out the context for the vocal-driven big numbers but that remained independent of them, "Kindred," "Loner," and "Ashtray Wasp" favour a collage approach that splices between the two types of track at a moment's notice. Covered over with the omnipresent hiss that defines Burial's productions almost as much as those androgynous ghosts floating through them and stitched together with ridiculously deep bass, these tracks aren't a break with what's come so much as a redefining of the template's parameters. More than ever, Burial's music feels like a journey, but not just through lost pasts and never-to-come futures: these are journeys you can take in the present, that are repeated night after night. If it's a little short of last year's Street Halo EP (his career peak to date, in my opinion), Kindred's still a welcome addition both the the Burial canon and the Burial mythology.

2. The Spaceape - Xorcism

The surprise of the year, for me, this EP introduced the Spaceape as a solo artist, and it turns out that he doesn't need Kode 9, Burial, Marytn, or anyone else to make gripping music. It might feel like a long way from the flash-forward Afro-futurism of 2006's Memories of the Future, but there are genetic links that make it feel like the inevitable destination for "Sine of the Dub." Unflinching and brave, Xorcism details the Spaceape's struggles with cancer, expanding on the science fiction biopolitics of last year's collaboration with Kode 9, Black Sun, in astonishingly personal terms. Over a bed of percussive Haitian voodoo music, Xorcism is a conjure tale, a communion with and a dispelling of the ghosts within, Stephen Samuel Gordon becoming ever more shamanic and prophetic throughout. Painfully brief, this is a flash in the darkness, a stealth attack and swift retreat, an apparition, here for a minute and gone even before the next arrives, elusive as smoke even in its corporeal focus. There's nothing else like it out there, and it's surely one of 2012's most vital releases.

1. CFCF - Exercises

Quietly elegant and moving, CFCF's Exercises EP dazzled me in the summer months when its chilly sound felt like a breath of fresh air amid all the heat and sun. With the change into Fall, though (and soon into Winter), the icy elegance of the EP's tracks has become an even more appropriate soundtrack to the day. Neither as studied nor as academic as its title would suggest, the miniatures on the album engage with 20th-century minimalism and avant-pop as much as they do contemporary trends in electronic music. The results are stunning, with the flowing, repetitive lines of "Exercise 3 (Buildings)" as hypnotically holographic as the best Philip Glass, and the gently wistful "Exercise 5 (September)" a slice of exquisite, autumnal pop beauty, offering a patient expansion on David Sylvian's original. On the more beat-driven pieces, like "Exercise 2 (School)" and "Exercise 8 (Change)," it's easy to imagine this as chillwave in the process of growing up, shedding some of its hedonistic nihilism in favour of something a little darker and stranger, yes, but also more human, more emotionally complex and compelling. What keeps me coming back to the EP, though, and what makes everything here succeed is Mike Silver's way with melody and his ear as a composer for the right sound as much as the right note, a crucial attribute in music this carefully designed. As a statement, Exercises content and format leaves it a little self-contained, so it will be exciting to see where Silver takes his CFCF project next with a wider field to play on.

REVIEW: BURIAL + FOUR TET - "NOVA"

Burial and Four Tet

Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) just tweeted a link to "Nova," the latest collaboration between Burial and himself (this follows their previous collaborations "Moth" and "Wolf Cub" from 2009, and their work with Thom Yorke last year on "Ego" and "Mirror"). This is a treat, coming so soon after Burial released his Kindred EP, and at less than six minutes it feels like something of a counterbalance to its lengthy suites. "Nova" is, as you can imagine, wonderful, starting off like a half-remembered song from a dream, all disconnected snatches of vocals just beyond comprehension and far away glimmers of melody. I particularly love the stuttering chords and vocals over those Burial drums in the first half of the track, and when everything takes off in the second half after a brief lull, "Nova" goes to another level. Achingly melodic, the climax is like the best moments of both artists distilled to deceptively simple elements, what every imitator and detractor has clumsily attempted to grasp, but with an obvious level of mastery and craftsmanship that transcends well-worn sonic signifiers. The close, with its static and what sounds almost like whale noises (a Burial favourite), is pretty, if a little inconsequential, but at that point the heavy lifting has been done.

This track hits the sweet spot for a collaboration between these two in a way that none of their other tracks have quite matched, with the lushness of Four Tet's work offered a propulsive lift from those 2-step drums that Burial favours and the approach to the vocal meeting somewhere in the middle. Both "Moth" and "Wolf Club" had moments of brilliant, but they felt stitched together, the boundaries between the two artists too clear to work as anything more than a Four Tet track added to a Burial track or vice versa. Here, though, there's a give and take that suggests two artists who are comfortable with each other and able to push each other into new territory. The idea of an album length collaboration between the two has become an increasingly tantalizing prospect over the course of their collaborative history, and this track really makes that seem like a masterpiece waiting to happen.

All in all, "Nova" is seriously, compulsively listenable and one of the best examples of  "glowing" music--as Burial has described the music he tries to make--I've ever heard. Indeed, this sounds more "glo-fi" than most of the chillwave stuff that got that tag a few years ago, bright and colourful in just the right way. Come December, I can see this fighting for track of the year. If it's any indication of what's to come on a new Four Tet album, the follow up to 2010's There is Love in You is going to be something special.

REVIEW: BURIAL - KINDRED

Burial - Kindred EP
Hyperdub, 2012

New music from Burial is rare. In the four and a half years since he released Untrue in November 2007, he has released nine collaborative tracks and four new Burial songs: "Fostercare," from 2009's 5: Five Years of Hyperdub and the Street Halo single last year, which included the title track, "NYC," and "Stolen Dog." The release of this single brings that total up to seven with the title track and b-sides "Loner" and "Ashtray Wasp," or just over half the number of tracks on Untrue.

I make this point not to find fault or criticize. To say that Burial's sound is distinctive would be an understatement: for all that artists have attempted to imitate his omnipresent crackle and hiss, his ghostly, androgynous vocal samples, and his syncopated, aqueous drums, there's something that Burial's music brings to the table that is uniquely his own. His name has become shorthand for a certain palette, so familiar at this point, in much the same way that My Bloody Valentine or Boards of Canada have become widely used shorthands for certain combinations of sounds and emotions. What's amazing, then, is that given the relative paucity of his output over the last few years, and given the similarity in terms of sounds and elements that Burial's music has favoured since Untrue, that familiar palette and the emotions it evokes still resonate.

Without ever seeming to change, Burial's music has developed over the past few years, becoming more nuanced and subtle while avoiding any hint of insularity, which would be death for his sound. His music is intimate as a touch or a whisper, but as elusive and ephemeral as a shared glance as you pass someone on the street. The tension between the titles of the songs on this single--"Kindred" points to togetherness and community while "Loner" signals isolation, alienation even, on top of loneliness--is a perfect encapsulation of his music.

This tension between community and isolation is reflected in his rare statements about his music and the purpose behind it. He's talked about making music that reflects his sense of London, a city full of "distant lights, down the end of your road" and how his songs need to be "faith restoring somehow to me." He constantly refers to the idea of his music glowing, of its appropriateness for:

when you come back from being out somewhere; in a minicab or a night bus, or with someone, or walking home across London late at night, dreamlike, and you've still got the music kind of echoing in you, in your bloodstream, but with real life trying to get in the way. I want it to be like a little sanctuary. It's like that 24-hour stand selling tea on a rainy night, glowing in the dark.

Taken together, these ideas all form the Burial aesthetic: unidentifiable voices heard through the walls, late-night walks in the rain, glowing angels watching over us.

Kindred is Burial's biggest leap forward since Untrue, a release that finds him working with the developments in bass music over the past two years without abandoning his signature elements. The upfront and aggressive drums of "Kindred" might be relatively free of hiss and hard and menacing as jackboots, but they're recognizably Burial, resembling more than ever the fishbones he's referenced when discussing drums. Similarly, "Loner's" first half, although ostensibly one of Burial's most club-friendly moments is full of odd touches: the mix seems inside out, the vocal samples trying to escape the bright arpeggiated line that dominates the track, the drums occasionally skipping or stuttering, explosions of ghostly hum and fog-like hiss disrupting the momentum. When the unaccompanied vocals sing out at the end of the track, it's a relief from the crushing, driving music that's come before. Their eerie melody is shaded with ambiguous meaning, at once comforting and hopeful and forbiddingly alien.

It's on "Ashtray Wasp," though--which Scratcha DVA previewed a few minutes of back in December--that demonstrates the amount of progress present on this single, as it synthesizes the new and the old and suggests just how potent Burial c.2012 is. The track begins with a nice, excitement generating buildup that sounds like "classic" Burial--the hushed, shuffling drums joined by an attention grabbing vocal sample. After a few movements, though, the track really takes off in its second half. The gently knocking rhythm and synth pulses that open up into a beautiful world of Four Tet-ish twinkling and truly warped vocal sampling is both unbelievably virtuosic and arresting. It's my favourite moment here; I can only hope that Burial chooses to develop this particular strand further at some point.

Not everything on Kindred is perfect and not all of Burial's experiments work, but that's what is so exciting here. When one of these developments clicks--like the euphoric moment that starts "Kindred" and recurs throughout or the eruptions of hiss and fog that periodically swallow these tracks up--it sounds genuinely thrilling, an artist delighting in his own power. What's more, it changes the tone of the most frequent question surrounding Burial's music--how far can he take this sound?--from incipient weariness to anticipation. The Quietus knew this back in December when they said "Burial gets better with each release by becoming more and more like Burial." It turns out that identity and the music that surrounds it is more rich and varied than anyone expected.

Back in 2007, Burial talked about his music--and music in general--having a kind of social function:

You see people and you're disconnected from them, they mean fuck-all to you, but other times you can invest everything in someone you don't even know, silently believe in them, it might be on the underground or in a shop or something. You hope people are doing that with you as well. . . . It's easy to fall away and fuck up and for many people there's no safety net. Sometimes one tune can mean everything, it's like a talisman. . . . When you are young you are pushed around by forces that are nothing to do with you. You're lost, most of the time you don't understand what's going on with yourself, with anything.

In the face of this confusion and loss, music offers a haven, a place of solidarity. In 2012, with a world of precarity and austerity being all that we (but especially youths) are commanded to expect, Burial's music seems more important than ever.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #2 BLUE DAISY THE SUNDAY GIFT

Albums of the Year 2011: #2

Blue Daisy - The Sunday Gift

Few albums I heard this year were heavier than The Sunday Gift (maybe only Earth's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, really). The obvious points of comparison--Massive Attack c.Mezzanine, Tricky c.Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension--are there, but combined with the softer, rain-soaked greyscale of Burial's Untrue.* The bright colours on the cover feel like something of a red herring; the music on this album is almost relentlessly cast in shadow or harshly illuminated by uncovered 100W bulbs. There's a very real sense of anger on this album that, devoid of someone like Tricky's playing with sexuality and gender, makes for a brutal listen, but one that resonates in the wake of the London riots this summer. If the post-political is the most political, this album soundtracks what that politics entails: fear, doubt, paranoia, and anger, the dystopic world of Children of Men brought one step closer to reality. In this sense, the album pairs well with Black Sun and Pinch & Shackleton, but whereas those albums felt extraterrestrial somehow (or at least temporally distant), The Sunday Gift is shockingly of the present moment. The defiant undercurrent of "it doesn't have to be this way" that is so prevalent in hauntological music from the UK is supplanted here by anger and mourning that it is this way. Menace is the starting point here, with "Distance (Once Upon a Time)" pacing nervously, stalked by its echoing strings, setting up the long march to "The End." Anneka's vocals on "Firewall" are definitely not "Safe From Harm"--she sounds as if she's keening in the wake of a massive armed force's march through a city, the spectre of total policing that is increasingly becoming a reality in the UK and its aftermath.  Heidi Vogel's wailing vocals on "Fallin'" sound so often as if they're saying "no," the denial echoing round and round, lost, empty, and almost defeated. There are no real track breaks here, so everything tumbles together and feeds off what came before. After a few songs, it starts to add up to a bleak picture.

For an album that threatens to slip into broken and defeated territory, though, there remain slivers of hope and uplift. Hey!Zeus's massive turn on "Psyche Inquiry" suggests the anger that fueled the summer's riots finding a voice to struggle and fight on with, a way to demand changes and to hold people to account. The final two songs proper, discounting "The End," cover some of the same ground as Burial's "Raver"--particularly the second half of "Only For You," with its arpeggios and piano/vocals emerging from the hiss and crackle, and the club-ready, almost ecstatic beat of "Spinning Channels"--softly glowing in the darkness and offering a possible way in out of the horror of the rest of the album. Of course, aside from all this context, the music sounds phenomenal. When the beat drops in "Shadow Assassins" it is an upsurge in intensity that is breathtaking at high volumes. "Raindance," with its squalls of noise and arresting chants, might be the closest the album comes to the psychedelic colours of its cover.** And for an album whose world is so resolutely overcast, this is a surprisingly varied listen that is never a chore. Much of the credit for this is due to the vocals: in place of the chopped, looped, and pitch-shifted syllables favoured in so much electronic music right now, The Sunday Gift, like SBTRKT's self-titled album, demonstrates the power of full vocal tracks. Beyond Hey!Zeus's appearance on "Psyche Inquiry," Anneka's two turns on the mic, "Firewall" and "Spinning Channels" are both wonders. The latter is possibly my favourite on the album: the wordless elegies of the album's first half re-cast as a spectral rave diva. Back in 2009, SBTRKT called Blue Daisy as an artist to watch based on the strength of "Raindance." Clearly, this was a man who knew of what he spoke. Few albums released this year feel as timely as The Sunday Gift and almost none do a better job of presenting a massive talent coming into his own. It's a harrowing journey through the darkness of this album back to the light, but well worth your time and energy.


*Another, perhaps surprising, point of reference for me is Radiohead's Amnesiac (cf. this and this), an album whose themes and lyrics (much more so than the techno-dread of Kid A) seem to become more relevant with each passing year.
**Another surprising connection? I can't help but be reminded of The Fifth Element's soundtrack during "Psyche Inquiry" and "Raindance" (criminally underrated movie, by the way).

AND ANOTHER SONG I'VE LOVED IN 2011

As I continue getting some year-end lists in order (I'll hopefully have the first round of album of the year stuff up tomorrow--honourable mentions/things that just missed the cut of the actual list), I came across an absolutely unforgivable omission to my "Ten Songs I've Loved in 2011" list. I didn't even consider this because for some reason I forgot it came out in 2011 (I was convinced it had come out in 2010). Anyway, here's an eleventh for my list of ten songs.

Burial - "NYC" off Street Halo EP

It's heresy, I know, but I have to admit that I've always found Burial's music kind of boring (though I've loved the idea behind his music since I first heard of him). I understand why everyone went crazy over his first two albums--and Untrue definitely has some great songs, like "Archangel," "Endorphin," and "In McDonalds"--but it was all a bit same-y for my tastes. I have no such complaints with this EP, though, and "NYC" is far and away my favourite thing Burial has ever released. As The Quietus put it today in their discussion of the preview of his new track "Ashtray Wasp," "Burial gets better with each release by becoming more and more like Burial, not a statement it's possible to make about many modern artists." Here, that's more than enough--it's quintessential Burial. There's nothing that I can really put my finger on to say what sets it apart from his other songs: it hits that Burial mood with all of his familiar sounds, but rarely have desolate wraiths of forgotten joy been so seductive (especially in the quiet moments with just those voices and the vapours of his synths). The hitches in the beat that crop up every now and again are quite nice, too, providing a kind of propulsion-through-hesitation that amplifies the sense of this sonic world falling apart before your ears (reinforced by his omnipresent crackle and ghostly hums). 

SOMETHING LIKE A BLOG POST ON "SHUFFLE"

A few random thoughts on the eve of the start of a new semester.

Two song titles that make me chuckle every time I see them:
"Stupid Prick Gets Chased by the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend" by Mogwai and "Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck" by Catherine Wheel. Of course, it helps that both are actually great songs beyond having punchlines for titles: the Mogwai song is, fitting its origin, really quite tense and filmic and the Catherine Wheel song, thanks to Tim Friese-Greene's always stellar production work, features the same amazing harmonica sound found on those later Talk Talk albums.

Speaking of said harmonica sound: "The Rainbow" by Talk Talk. The way that note just builds and then explodes from 7:04-7:16 is just wonderful. I'd say it sounds like a rainbow, but it's a little too violent and unhinged (not that I'm complaining). Also, wow, the guitar that comes in at the start. He must be hitting the strings really hard because it sounds way out, but it works so well with the piano. It really is astounding that the same band that wrote this (which is also a great song) made Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock (twenty years old this year!). Both albums have a pretty sterling critical reputation these days, but they deserve more actual listening than I'm sure they get. I know I'm guilty of letting them sit for criminally long times without a spin. As albums they're so intense, though, that it's difficult to do anything else but let them wash over you--there's no fading into the background, especially not with Mark Hollis' voice coming out of the speakers at you.

I'd been hearing a bit about The Weeknd when they released their first album, but I wasn't really in the mood to check out an R&B band from Toronto. With the release of their second album of the year, Thursday, this past Thursday, though, I figured it couldn't hurt to see what they're about. After listening to Thursday, I have to say that I'm impressed: it sounds great, sort of halfway between Brainfeeder and mainstream pop. It reminds me of Massive Attack (pre-Mezzanine, maybe during the Protection era) and early Tricky (circa Maxinquaye) in a lot of ways. I didn't pay enough attention to the lyrics to pick up on the tales of debauchery that supposedly make up all the lyrics, but I can see this being just sort of noirish and outre enough to score a more "sophisticated" night out for a lot of people (kind of like Portishead when Dummy came out--actually, "Cowboys" from Portishead isn't a terrible touchstone for The Weeknd's sound, to a certain extent). The way that the voice is used isn't quite as arresting as Gonjasufi, but the vocals really do grab your attention. I'm interested to see what album #3 in this trilogy will sound like.

A great companion to The Weeknd that came out on Brainfeeder recently is Shlohmo's Bad Vibes. It's less indebted to IDM and jazz than Flying Lotus, so it's able to feel much more like a kind of malfunctioning, robotic R&B, but it retains the kind of glassy, airy tones that made Teebs' album Ardour so great and that Four Tet regularly transforms into moments of great beauty. There are some Burial-style disembodied voices that creep up and moan like ghosts in the background, but they're handled well and aren't really much of a distraction. It would be nice to hear what Shlohmo could do with some real vocals, though. Actually, lately I've been really wishing that Bjork would hook up with the Brainfeeder roster. Just the thought makes me sort of dizzy. Or maybe if Laura Darlington could guest on a few of Shlohmo's tracks the results might be as impressive as her turns at the mic on Flying Lotus' last two albums.