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. 

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR: #9 LEE RANALDO - BETWEEN THE TIMES AND THE TIDES

Lee Ranaldo - Between the Times and the Tides

Way back in 2001, in his review of Murray Street, Rob Mitchum introduced two hypothetical examples of Sonic Youth fans:

Meet Jeremy. Jeremy likes Sonic Youth. His favorite album by the Youth is Goodbye 20th Century, their self-released cover album of avant-garde works by various modern clasical composers. The CDs currently in his five-disc changer are Shalabi's St-Orange, Xiu Xiu, Merzbow, the Boredoms, and Fennesz. 

Meet Erica. Erica likes Sonic Youth. Her favourite album by the Youth is Dirty, the band's most direct flirtation with mainstream rock. The CDs currently in Erica's five disc-changer are the Breeders, Blonde Redhead, Wilco, Neutral Milk Hole, and Sleater-Kinney.

I would say I'm more like Jeremy than Erica in my relationship with Sonic Youth (my favourite SY album is A Thousand Leaves, for the record), but I can appreciate the straighter moments of the band's discography with greater ease than Jeremy, probably. If you assume that the audience for a Lee Ranaldo solo album is going to be, first and foremost, Sonic Youth fans, then it's natural to try and figure out if Between the Times and the Tides will appeal to the Jeremys or the Ericas out there. I would bet the latter are going to find more to enjoy and return to on this than the former, but it would be a shame to limit this album's appeal to a certain cadre of Sonic Youth fans. What this album is, as far as I can tell, is the year's best straight-up rock album filtered through one of the more distinctive songwriting voices in indie rock over the last three decades, something like what Wilco have been trying to do on their last few albums without entirely achieving it.

If we play a game similar to Mitchum's and ask which Lee made this album, it's the Lee who loves the Greatful Dead and Neil Young much more often than it is the Lee who played with Glenn Branca and performs improvised film scores in Text of Light. That's not to say there's no overlap between sonic identities throughout; the album is wonderful in part because of how natural the moments of overlap are. This means that the album feels curiously out of time: nothing about it fits in exactly with the current indie rock landscape, but it's all so intrinsically a part of that landscape (this is the product of a guy who helped make indie rock a thing, after all) that everything here could have always existed. If there's a certain early-to-mid 90s aspect to these songs--the album could have come from some indie band out of Chapel Hill or Athens or any other college town suddenly making its major label debut in the wake of post-Nevermind dollar chasing--it's not in the name of some retro impulse, but rather the result of so many of those bands speaking the same language, musically, as the one that Ranaldo helped to invent while in Sonic Youth.

Beyond contextualising, beyond theorising, this is an album that shows off what any Sonic Youth fan has known for decades: Lee Ranaldo can write a hook. Part of what kept so many people (like myself) waiting for this album for so long was the promise of what Lee could do with an entire album to write majestic, transcendent guitar songs like "Karen Revisited" or "Hoarfrost" or "Hey Joni." If anything, though, this album does more to reinforce the idea of Sonic Youth as a band rather than a collection of individuals--and Lee Ranaldo as a discrete component within that band--than anything they've released collectively lately. These are obviously and distinctively Lee Ranaldo songs, but they're quite different from what has previously defined that term on Sonic Youth albums. He's never been as nakedly romantic as he is on "Stranded," nor as breezy as he is on "Fire Island (Phases)," and if the acoustic "Hammer Blows" sounds like it might have fit into the rural first side of Murray Street with a little bit of tweaking, it's better for not having done so. He even provides an epic the equal of anything he's produced with Sonic Youth in "Xtina as I Knew Her," a career highlight with a sense of drama that he's never quite demonstrated before.

I never really believed I'd hear this album--not Between the Times and the Tides specifically, but a Lee Ranaldo solo album full of songs--and then it showed up. I wrote a review that became the most popular post in this blog's history after getting linked to on the Sonic Youth message board and Lee Ranaldo's Facebook page. It's funny how life works. Ultimately, the best thing I can say about this album is that despite years of waiting and wishing for it, the actual manifestation doesn't disappoint. I'm happier for having it in my life. To return to our hypothetical Sonic Youth fans, I'd bet that Erica is happy this exists, and--even if it's not going to replace East Jesus or Amarillo Ramp as his go-to Lee Ranaldo solo release--I suspect Jeremy is, too. At the very least, freed from the limitations of five-CD changers, they could both find room for it on their iPods.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR: #10 EARTH - ANGELS OF DARKNESS, DEMONS OF LIGHT II

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Last year, I overlooked the first part of this when compiling my end of year lists because I forgot that it came out in 2011. This is only partly an attempt to correct that oversight. Since reemerging with 2005's Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, Earth have been one of the more interesting bands going. Channeling his proclivity for feedback, drones, and bass into new musical avenues--country, blues, psychedelic rock, free jazz--Dylan Carlson has come a long way from Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars. The culmination of the wandering, patient experimentation that's defined the band's past decade of work, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II deepens the slower-than-slow improvising of the previous installment by lightening up: this is probably the brightest music Carlson's been associated with (though the droning cello throughout keeps anything from threatening to get too major key). Carlson's guitar is mixed way up front, and his playing deserves careful study--if a generation of metalheads could get hip to this rather than generic shredding, the genre would certainly be headed in an interesting direction. For all of Carlson's contemplative playing, an approach that leaves no melodic permutation untested, no variation on a chord unplayed, Adrienne Davies and her drums are a subtly powerful force, providing crucial momentum to music that threatens to stop entirely at any moment, while Lori Goldston and Karl Blau tangle their cello and bass, respectively, around the shapes Carlson's guitar lines make.

As a guitar player (and one who grew up reading the kinds of guitar magazines that put people like Kirk Hammett on the cover), I've found Carlson's growth and development as a player over the last decade or so incredibly interesting, and I have to bring my appreciation of this album back to his work on it. Mostly, it's because I haven't found much guitar playing that excites me over the past few years. Earth, though, is one of the few bands that continues to produce music that interests me in the guitar and its possibilities as an instrument. Carlson's playing is wonderfully business casual throughout: sharp enough to hit a million subtle accents when called for, but otherwise in no rush to be in any particular place or to do any particular thing beyond taking chords and melodies apart and stretching them a mile wide. The Angels of Darkness releases have been particularly impressive because I tend to think of improvised music as challenging (even alienating) in its foregrounding of abrasion and dissonance. Thus, something like Fenn O'Berg or Charalambides can be immensely rewarding, but the music demands concentration; whatever enjoyment you are getting out of the music, you've invested a certain amount of patience and attention to find it. Earth's music on these two albums, and particularly Angels of Darkness II, is not like that. Challenging, yes--and often more so than its near static surface would suggest--but rarely abrasive. This is warm, inviting music, and if it asks for patience, it rewards that patience with slow-motion crescendos that are undeniable and hypnotically enchanting melodies. If you thought the world was ending Friday, you could do worse for a soundtrack.

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.

REFLECTIONS ON ALBUMS OF THE YEAR COUNTDOWN

I spent the past eleven days cataloguing my favourite albums of 2011 (it was supposed to be ten days, but I was in no mood to sit in front of my computer and write on Christmas Day). All told, it worked out to a little over 7750 words on fifteen albums. If you add in the two pieces I wrote on eleven songs I really liked in 2011, the count is up to almost 9500 words. That is a lot of words (if you've read your Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that clause should prove I am human. I will also say to you if you are very tall, "Oh, you're very tall!"). Anyway, the point here is not to toot my own horn about writing a certain number of words about music (akin, I suppose, to telling someone just how long you danced about architecture). Rather, I just wanted to think out loud a bit about my experience writing this list.

I. Format

I am surprised at how easy it was to decide on a format for the write-ups themselves. Basically, I knew that I wanted to avoid a general discussion of a particular album's strengths (cf. Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011, not that there is anything wrong with that approach, necessarily). This was to be my list and it had to explain my understanding of the album (I made a conscious effort fairly early on to avoid the second person. I don't think it appears in anything after the Neon Indian write-up). Of course, entirely subjective and personal criteria do not necessarily make for great evaluations--a point I try desperately to make clear to my students--so I wanted something slightly more objective/universal and review like to accompany my own relationship to the album. Thus, the two paragraph structure seemed ideal. It was flexible enough to shift with albums whose place on the list owed more to the explanation accompanying the more objective components and with those whose place on the list owed more to my own encounter with them than anything else. Hopefully, if one paragraph wasn't engaging for the reader, the other paragraph would be. If neither paragraph was engaging, well, maybe the links to YouTube videos proved satisfying.

In terms of the actual number of albums, I picked ten (with five honourable mentions) partly to force myself to evaluate albums rather than picking a number large enough to allow me to just list every album I listened to this year and partly for practical reasons: ten seemed like a good number that would keep this doable and lend some weight to the selections. I kept the albums separated into the top ten and the honourable mentions rather than top fifteen for much the same reason. It seemed important to have a demarcation between "good albums that I enjoyed" and "the best albums of the year" (I guess this is my own personal good record/important album distinction). Before I actually sat down to do the list, I assumed that several albums from the honourable mentions list would make the main list and I was somewhat surprised at how easy it was to separate the two lists once I started working.

II. Schedule

I anticipated that writing something every day for a set number of days would be difficult. I don't tend to work that way on anything. Doing the list this way proved to be both challenging and rewarding. There were a few entries on the list for which I had some notes written in advance (Neon Indian, Kode9 & the Spaceape, and Tim Hecker), but I tended to avoid using them. As much as possible, I wanted this to be a process of sitting down to the computer each day as the desire came over to me and writing the piece while listening to the album in question. In two or three cases I found my way into the write-up the night before, and wrote a few sentences or a draft paragraph, but largely these were drafted as I listened and then edited/expanded. Sometimes this task seemed daunting and unpleasant, with the desire clearly not about to come any time soon (My thought process: Another one? Really? Whose stupid idea was this? Oh, wait...), and at other times, all the desire in the world couldn't produce a useful sentence. During the second half of the list, my own schedule for this became increasingly rigid--generally, it was wake up, start working, finish and post by mid-morning. I'm not sure I really achieved this with any of the entries, but it gave me a structure within which I could work.

What made this worthwhile was not that it built in a sense of obligation or anything like that (though it did just that), but rather that these write-ups fed off each other, illuminating connections I'd never noticed or, at the least, never articulated to myself. If I'd just written these in a concentrated burst over a couple days or haphazardly as I felt like it, I doubt those themes would've emerged. In a similar way, I found that shared aesthetic properties (and the aesthetic properties that ultimately led me to pick these albums over others) became clear for me in a way that I think I was only subconsciously aware of prior to writing. Though I didn't take advantage of this at all, I also appreciated that doing the write-ups one album at a time allowed me to reconsider the list as I wrote it. There were a few minutes of dithering at times about the place of an album (especially 6/7 and 3/4), but I decided to stick with the order as I initially determined it.

III. Overall Reflections

Despite some complaining at times on my part, this albums of the year list was by far the most fun I've had with this blog. It felt like a simple and straightforward way to get back to why I started this blog, to have a place to write and think about music. In an age of such widespread access to music (via YouTube, Spotify, torrents and P2P, etc., etc.) there's bound to be at least a whiff of genre tourism to any list outside of one with a specialized focus. I don't really know a lot about the genres (hello, bass music!) out of which many of my favourite albums emerged, so I'm probably more of a tourist than most who are writing these lists (this was also part of my reasoning in focusing so heavily on my response to albums as the contextual framework, even when discussing an artist's past work and the new work in relation to that corpus). I hope, though, that the aesthetic and thematic connections that emerged in the write-ups offered something like a picture (if not clear, at least muddy) of my own aesthetic preferences. That is, I'd like to believe that taking into account the things I very clearly like (via what I said in the write-ups), nothing on this list should be too surprising or out of keeping with the other entries. This is the second year I've done an albums of the year list* and I plan to keep it up for as long as it remains a fun activity. It will be interesting for me (if for no one else) to see if the aesthetic concerns that are already apparent after two years of this continue to crystallize or if there is a radical shift.

Anyway, if you read any of the list, I hope you enjoyed it. If it introduced you to any new music, or reintroduced you to an artist you'd lost touch with, or just made you reevaluate--for even a second--something you dislike, then I think the list proved its worth. Onward to 2012 and more great music!


*Last year's best album (in my opinion, of course) was Cosmogramma by Flying Lotus (paired with the Pattern+Grid World EP). The runner-up was Four Tet's There Is Love In You.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011 #1: THE WEEKND HOUSE OF BALLOONS/THURSDAY/ECHOES OF SILENCE

Albums of the Year 2011: #1

 The Weeknd - House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes of Silence

I'm apparently in good company with this choice. This was a pretty simple decision: nothing else released in 2011 made me want to listen to it more than this trio of albums, and when I wasn't listening to them, I was thinking about them. Like another group whose stock exploded in 2011, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, The Weeknd's graphic depiction of sex that inhabits a disturbingly shady space between clearly consensual and aided by drug (ab)use generated a number of compelling think pieces by the likes of Nitsuh Abebe and Sean Fennessey--the Fennessey piece is actually paired with a take on Odd Future member Frank Ocean's Nostalgia, Ultra.--and for good reason: part of what makes The Weeknd so compelling and repellent at the same time is Abel Tesfaye who, like Tyler, the Creator, manages to genuinely turn stomachs while exerting a fierce charisma. Thankfully, The Weeknd avoids the rape and over the top violence of Odd Future (a factor that, unlike some other listeners, I am unable to "bracket" out of my listening experience--this is not some amazing moral high road I'm taking and by no means is it a criticism of Abebe, whose work I love: I am clearly capable of bracketing out my unease at tales of women being plied with drugs in order to be coerced into group sex when I listen to The Weeknd), but the elements of Tesfaye's persona here are incredibly rich. When, on "The Zone," he asks his partner "I'll be making love to her through you / so let me keep my eyes closed. / And I won't see a damn thing / I can't feel a damn thing / but I'm'a touch you right," the acknowledgement of how manipulative and exploitative his behaviour is, coupled with his admission of a kind of absolute anhedonia, transforms otherwise run of the mill seduction diary entries into a strikingly contemporary psychodrama (Abebe, in his piece on The Weeknd and David Lynch, draws a comparison to Tricky, but I'm not sure that the comparison really works on the level of content--Tricky's psychodramas seem of a different sort).

To be clear, I'm not saying these admissions make the persona in the song "good"--and here, I do want to bracket something: the question of autobiography vs. persona,* which is both incredibly complex and probably the question to discuss w/r/t The Weeknd--or that they excuse his behaviour. Rather, I think they add depth to his character in a way that illuminates certain (largely unpleasant) aspects of being a 21 year old male who is heterosexual in contemporary Canada (and the US) and the repercussions of those aspects for both heterosexual 21 year old males and the females with whom they interact.** This is really tangled; basically, the fact that anhedonia, both as a voluntary state and an inevitable byproduct of modern life, has been kind of the key theme for me from "High For This" all the way through "Echoes of Silence" seems incredibly important, not as an excuse for what the persona in this narrative does--ingest a lot of drugs and have sex with a lot of women--but as an explanation for what makes the persona such a seductive figure. What seems to make people invested in this character/able to relate to him is not his hedonism, but the nihilism and anhedonia that overtakes any attempt at hedonism while fueling continued (and inevitably doomed) attempts at hedonism (i.e., the "XO 'til we overdose" slogan adopted by Tesfaye's fans). Or, as the persona would have it in "Wicked Games," "Bring your love, baby, I can bring my shame / Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain." Tesfaye's narratives here seem to be, essentially, ones of jouissance. Now, the important critical question, I think, in discussing these narratives is to follow Jameson (following Lévi-Strauss) and ask what is the real social contradiction that Tesfaye's narratives attempt to resolve (in my view, the Balloons trilogy is an exploration [and attempted resolution] of the psychosexual demands of late consumer capitalism after the rise of Web 2.0). As Abebe points out, this is similar to the area mined by Kanye West (and Drake, a close friend of and collaborator with Tesfaye) in his recent output, perhaps one of the clearest narrative attempts to solve the increasingly apparent gap between capital's demands and human capacity for fulfillment within those demands.

Now, while all of this analysis definitely enriches my experience of the music, this would all be for naught (or, more likely, would be for a lower spot on this list) if the music didn't sound as good as it does. Tesfaye knows how to get the most out of his voice--his impression of Michael Jackson is scary good--and the backing tracks are evidence of extremely good taste and a strong compositional ability. Contrary to the apparent internet consense, I think Thursday is the best album of the trilogy, and the most fully-realized work here. House of Balloons is a brilliant introduction, the sound of talented young man with a vision getting it almost perfect, and Echoes of Silence is a fitting and fairly gripping end with a pretty amazing Michael Jackson cover, but Thursday, from those opening shudders by Abel Tesfaye on "Lonely Star," is the sound of a star at his (hopefully just first) peak.*** Each album in the trilogy reveals new flourishes, from House of Balloons' sample-delic nightscapes to Thursday's flirtations with guitars to Echoes of Silence's brilliant vocal-warping on "Initiation" (James Blake, eat your heart out!). More importantly, though, nothing about the music pulls you out of the sustained immersion in this narrative that Tesfaye clearly wants. In this sense, the comparison to Tricky (along with other people who have haunted this list, like Boards of Canada and Burial) is dead on--this is as fitting a match of form and content as Maxinquaye. In his take on music in 2011 for the AV Club, Steven Hyden claims that there were many good records but no important albums released this year. While there are several records on this list I would be willing to nominate for important album status, I feel strongly about The Weeknd's trilogy of releases. This is vital, beautiful, confusing, damaged, and disturbing music that captures something of life in 2011. I can't ask for more.

*In a nutshell, the poles between which this question operates: Tesfaye is either doing one of the best acting jobs since Bowie or he's an incredibly creepy (but also typical--and shocking in being so typical) young man. I'm inclined to believe it's probably six of one, half a dozen of the other.
**Cf. The incredibly disturbing monologue in "Lonely Star," with its proclamation from an unnamed female (who might actually be Tesfaye's voice pitched up?) that "My body is yours. Give them any other day but Thursday. . . . Every Thursday, I wait for you. I'll be beautiful for you every Thursday. I exist only on Thursday."
***Re-reading Mark Fisher's piece on Michael Jackson not long after listening to "Lonely Star" for the first time, I was struck by how well his description of the first vocals on "Billie Jean" fits Tesfaye's song, too.

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).

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #3 BNJMN BLACK SQUARE

Albums of the Year 2011: #3

BNJMN - Black Square

I have to admit that, ignoring the cliches about books and covers (because this is an album, not a book, damn it!), I first picked up BNJMN's second album of 2011, Black Square, because of its cover. It reminded me of Lorn's very good album Nothing Else,* which is not a bad comparison. Both albums offer a kind of stripped down take on their respective electronic music genres (roughly, house for BNJMN and techno for Lorn) that does nothing to disguise the constituent elements of the tracks or the process of their composition. Indeed, few of BNJMN's tracks can be said to have a narrative or much in the way of development, at least in terms of progression from one point to another. What Black Square excels at is to introduce a theme or groove and then simply add and subtract elements from the song. This sounds simple and a recipe for boredom, but it's not: Black Square succeeds because of the excellent pacing of those additions and subtractions and the way that they subvert what at first seems like the linear trajectory of the track. This is not music that has an intro just to build up anticipation for the beat to drop; quite often, when the beat does drop, the other elements of the track refuse to give way for it, continually disrupting its attempts to impose a kind of strict tempo or pulse on the track. His approach is perhaps most obvious on "Open the Floodgates," the album's most direct nod to house, in which the chopped and shuddering music continues to push to the foreground, overwhelming the most club-ready beat on the album. Halfway though, the whole track enters a hall of mirrors with lasers zipping everywhere and the beat rushes in to save the day, only to be overwhelmed once more. Basic kick drum patterns often run underneath the tracks as anchors, but this is far from the asceticism of mnml: the percussion often swings and syncopates merrily along. 

None of this is done in a self-indulgent or show-off-y way, though. What's most impressive about Black Square is the ease and confidence that permeates the music. Aside from the two pretty-sounding but forgettable short tracks ("Enterlude" and "River Way," whose pitched down twinkles are a wonder), these are songs that impress with their purpose. Not a single element feels out of place or enters or exits at the wrong time (a matter of vital importance on an album like Black Square). BNJMN tips his hand early on, as "Primal Pathways" and "Wisdom of Uncertainty" lay out the basic template of everything that's to follow: the former's gorgeous synth strings demonstrate the melodic territory the album is going to cover, and the latter provides an easy to follow primer on BNJMN's compositional methods, adding and subtracting elements before a minimal bleeps-and-percussion outro cools things down. The title track covers some of the same ground as SBTRKT, all sleek, stylish, and sexy night moves with some nice hand percussion layered in the mix that really enhances the groove. The album's final two full songs, discounting "River Way," are the best here, though. "Lava" takes the foundation of "Wisdom of Uncertainty" and explodes its aesthetic possibilities, connecting a long build up of elements added to the track one-by-one to a fantastic melody (the flanged strings that creep around the edges are heavenly, and the Morse code keys to open the track wouldn't sound out of place on a Stereolab album). Slowly, everything is pulled away, leaving just a first pieces of the song; the final thirty seconds of the track might be my favourite part of the album. As good as "Lava" is, though, "Hallowed Road" does it one better. Aided by a truly excellent bassline, "Hallowed Road's" mournful tune feels like the final transmission of a dying space station. There's something vaguely worrying or threatening about the melody and atmosphere, but BNJMN wisely keeps this from developing into full-blown menace. In a list full of albums with great closing tracks, "Hallowed Road" might be my favourite closing track of the year, which is saying something. I wasn't enamoured by BNJMN's first album of 2011, Plastic World, but Black Square really made an impact with me. Its confidence and compositional nous suggest that BNJMN has a bright future, and I eagerly await his next offering.

*Speaking of Nothing Else, I have to say that I think it does the same things that people are lauding Kuedo's Severant for, only it does them more effectively and with a better set of tunes to boot.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #4 SBTRKT SBTRKT

Albums of the Year 2011: #4

SBTRKT - SBTRKT

The first time I listened to SBTRKT's self-titled debut, I was confused. I couldn't figure out what to do with the album; it was so obviously likable--isn't current electronic music from the UK supposed to be difficult and challenging?* The rising and falling vocals on "Heatwave" are like the vocals in "Windowlicker" re-purposed for a (great) pop song. The female vocals and massive synths of "Wildfire" deliver a sugar rush as potent any song on the radio. "Ready Set Loop" sounds like the most frenetic level of Sonic the Hedgehog spliced with bucolic downtempo. The twinkling vibes and wounded vocals of "Never Never" make for one of my favourite songs of the year. Eventually I stopped trying to figure the album out and decided just to enjoy it--without a doubt, this was one of the best music-related decisions I've made all year. Like a lot of the music on this list, SBTRKT sounds fantastic at night and would (I imagine) make for a great night in the club. Unlike a lot of the music on this list, though, SBTRKT is not about a nocturnal world of dread and ghosts. This is music that is, to borrow a phrase from Björk, all neon like: flashy, fun, stylish, with just a hint of the melancholy of the early morning hours after a night out seeping in at the edges of tracks like "Hold On," "Right Thing to Do," and "Never Never." The album itself might not be revolutionary--it doesn't really do anything to push bass music forward--but it's an appealing synthesis of styles by an able synthesist who's picked all the best bits from the various areas he draws upon, which makes for a great listen. Indeed, it's in that light that the name of the project (short for "subtract") makes most sense, as everything on the album is streamlined for maximum impact.

One of the immediately noticeable characteristics of SBTRKT is the album's craft: the production is immaculate, the vocals mixed out in front without obscuring the music, and the beats veering from hyperspeed skitters to straight four-on-the-floor bangers.The use of multiple vocalists is the inspired touch that really sets the album apart, though, especially given that these vocals are delivered relatively straight with no chopping or processing.** Sampha, whose voice is featured on seven of the album's eleven tracks, is a wonder, shifting from an almost conversational middle range into a slinky falsetto at the drop of a hat, all the while providing a surprisingly vulnerable edge in his lyrics and delivery. Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon's turn on "Wildfire" is anything but vulnerable; she has sass and attitude to spare, commanding attention. Of course, she also knows enough to get out of the way of the squelchy synths that periodically rise up to swallow the track. "Pharaohs," featuring Roses Gabor, is the closest SBTRKT comes to the kind of straight-up trance-pop that has been so ubiquitous on commercial radio the past two years, and if it's a little underwhelming, it's still catchy and anything but a chore to listen to. The vocals tracks are so good, in fact, that it took me awhile to get my head around the instrumental tracks, which are hidden away at the end of the album (SBTRKT is surprisingly backloaded, as the final three tracks are the best on the album). The break about 2/3 of the way through "Ready Set Loop" is a moment of pure magic, and "Go Bang"--which really benefits from what sounds like live drums mixed in with its programming and wouldn't be out of place on I Care Because You Do--sums up the appeal of the album in its waves of flourescent synth arpeggios. I'd love to hear a whole album of SBTRKT instrumentals, but I'd also love another album of songs fronted by Sampha. Based on this debut, there doesn't seem to be a way for SBTRKT to miss with the next one.


*Please note: tongue-somewhat-in-cheek, here.
**Thankfully. Not every track gains power from chopped, looped syllables and androgynous moans. SBTRKT is wise enough to recognize the talent of his vocalists and to leave them alone to do their thing.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #5 TIM HECKER RAVEDEATH, 1972

Albums of the Year 2011: #5

 Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 and Dropped Pianos

Ah, it's nice to kick off the top five with a Canadian (not that I'm biased or anything). Back in October, I said that "I find Ravedeath, 1972 less interesting than Harmony in Ultraviolet and An Imaginary Country." I would like to revise and correct that statement: Ravedeath, 1972 is every bit as interesting as either of those albums. It might even be better than them. Hearing his set at Moogfest 2011 (when "Chimeras" appears about 2/3 of the way through the set it feels as lighters-in-the-air as the appearance of any artist's hit song in concert) definitely helped change my mind*--as did the release of his excellent set of sketches for the album, Dropped Pianos--but what really won me over was just sustained, concentrated listening. More than that of any other artist on this list, I think, Tim Hecker's music demands deliberate and conscious engagement in order to achieve a kind of immersion. The meaning of his work seems to hang forever just beyond the limits of perception, by design: "I've always been interested in that threshold of being between, of hiding, obfuscating. It's so suggestive." This is not to say that his music is cold and cerebral: one of the best things about Hecker's work is how thrillingly physical it is--this is sound that moves you and that gains significant emotional impact from its very physicality. The album's opener, "The Piano Drop," has real weight and depth in its shimmering waves, but it's the rest of the album's foregrounding of the tension between the organic, material process of Hecker's piano and organ playing and the digital process of editing and treating those recordings that presents this physicality par excellence.

At the same time, though, and perhaps even more importantly, Ravedeath, 1972 is an example of how far Hecker has come as a composer. As reliant on multi-part suites as anything since his debut, Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again, this album's "In the Fog," "Hatred of Music I"/"Hatred of Music II," and "In the Air" all take advantage of their extended length to work through several movements. In interviews, Hecker has consistently mentioned church music when describing his own work--he's described himself as "a guy who does things on the borderline between church music and new age" and his music "as something like fake church music"--and, in their immensity, these suites represent Hucker's most fully realized version yet of a kind of secular church music, what Hecker calls "intense saturated musical expression." Though he's been criticized in the past for being slightly too academic, his concern with "digital garbage" and "imploding and rebuilding from the fragments of things that have been kind of pummeled" takes on a new, visceral edge here, as the organ and piano are attacked by digital noise and treatments throughout "In the Fog" and "In the Air" (and attacked is the appropriate verb, as one listen to "In the Fog III" will make clear), exposing the violence of his composition process. Indeed, "Hatred of Music I" is probably the harshest thing he's released since "Whitecaps of White Noise I"--the power of the organ, even without his treatments is a thing to behold. Of course, as in the first few seconds of "In the Fog III" and "In the Air I" or the last few minutes of "In the Air III," his approach also makes for moments of breathtaking beauty. The standalone tracks are not to be outdone in that sense, and their patient, mournful melodies are heartbreakingly pretty, pushing the sounds and techniques of his last few albums to new levels. A decade on from his debut under his own name, Ravedeath, 1972 confirms that Tim Hecker's music is sui generis and, just like Burial's, keeps getting better by becoming ever more his own. 

*Go that link and listen to/download that performance. It's an amazing document of Hecker live and better than any of his officially released live stuff.