CATASTROPHIC CONTENT OVERLOAD: Mid-Year-Ish Awards Ish

TADAO, BITCHES

Naturally you can go ahead and count on the rules being played with in both a fast and loose manner - I don't even want to think about how skimpy these lists would be if I actually restricted myself to 2007-only content. Instead, I'm going with the stuff that's made the biggest impression on me this year; please do not use your chloroform. And anyway, you're getting an assload of downloadable stuff out of this, so suck it up y0.

TOP FIVE ALBUMS
5. Voxtrot, s/t: As accurately forseen by yr boy, Voxtrot's solo LP seems to have receded from the consciousness of the hipsterverse already due to concerns about its "unevenness" and "lack of consistency" and all manner of other bullshit aphorisms people whip out whenever an album refuses to engage them on THEIR anointed terms. It's an understandable impulse, of course - Voxtrot is nothing if not a band which, on the surface, might as well exist to give you a holistic argument in favor of the continued viability of power-pop which seems almost custom-built for modern musical discourse, and I'm not going to act like I wouldn't have preferred their debut album if it had been twelve immaculate singles of the calibur of "Raised By Wolves" - but it's a totally, totally wrongheaded one as specifically pertains to the album they actually put out. I mean, even the most cursory look at Voxtrot's back catalogue makes it pretty clear that the open-armed sound of their music is more or less a smokescreen for the relentlessly incisive idiosyncrasy at work below the surface; isn't that a more productive aspect for a band to develop than whatever aesthetic flourishes the zeitgeist dictates sound attractive? It's certainly a conclusion borne out through Voxtrot's album; these days I tend to use it most frequently as a palate cleanser after a rigorous session of Steely Dan therapy (more on this later); you'd be shocked to discover just how much better Voxtrot sounds when you're already in the mindset of listening where you listen to music which in no way needs your permission to exist. (Voxtrot, "Introduction", from Voxtrot) (Click here to buy from Amazon)
4. Justice, †: As much as I hate to admit it, there's part of me that wonders how much higher this album would be if only Xavier had kept his mouth shut about his hardcore Christian beliefs; ever since the buzz started to build I've been nearly incapable of listening to † without trying to parse it like the Bible Code. It's a ridiculously unfair prejudice, of course, although in the specific case of † I think a lot of the knee-jerk aversion is tied more to fans having to eat a lot of crow w/r/t the interpretation of a lot of its signifiers - literally two days before the Pitchfork interview went up, I was reassuring a friend that all the cross iconography and titles like "Waters of Nazareth" were just cases of two dudes finding some outrageously exploitable symbolic material. After all, it's not like Xavier's been running around advocating blowing abortion clinics up or condemning gays to hell; the only real talking point he's put forward is that he's dead serious about his admiration for the bible, a statement which leaves plenty of semantic elbow room for the folks who can't or won't wrap their heads around the idea of, and I think I see a theme for the year emerging, music which reflects viewpoints other than their own. As for me, as long as Justice aren't endorsing the less-than-positive aspects of Christianity; I mean, fuck, it's not like I stopped listening to Arvo Part or George Harrison just because they got all God-y. And besides, on the big list of Christian Music I Have Been Hornswoggled Into Appreciating, † is about ten thousand lightyears better than anything Five Iron Frenzy ever released. As far as I'm concerned, it's biggest sin is the fact that I have to ctrl-c its title every time I want to bring it up. (Justice, "Phantoms Part II", from †) (click here to buy from Amazon)
3. Lil Wayne, Da Drought 3: As a more-or-less hip-hop dilettante - in other words, I can basically be counted on to have a pretty workable understanding of all the hip-hop which breaks through to the crowd which wouldn't otherwise be covering it, but when it comes to deep knowledge earned through years of careful, unguided study, I come off sounding like my little sister ("HEY JAMES THERE'S THIS BAND CALLED THE RADIO HEADS", etc) - I have to admit to a particular affinity for the rise in recent years of mixtapes which basically make the appeal of the mixtape format effortlessly obvious enough to be groked by even someone as dense as me. Tapes like We Got It 4 Cheap and Benzi's stuff and even arguably Dirty South Dance certainly don't have the market cornered when it comes to things like beat appropriation or turning commercially untenable content into art with the genuine capacity for popularity, but for whatever reason they simply seem to do a better job of foregrounding it for ears which otherwise wouldn't be trained to pick up on pleasures like those (i.e. ears like mine). Suffice it to say, Weezy's Da Drought 3 follows in this tradition admirably - some might even say to the point of damaging the overall product since, as much as I sincerely enjoy listening to it, I rarely make it all the way through both discs, but then again it's not like I reread The Brothers Karamazov all that often. (Lil Wayne, "We Takin' Over (remix)", from Da Drought 3) (note that there are two versions of Drought 3 going around; you want the earlier one with minimal input from DJ Khaled, which, if it wasn't freely available, was spread widely enough around filesharing spots to pass as such. Search out that one.)
2. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver: My guess is that, of all the albums released so far this year, LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver is the best bet for canonization; put simply, it codifies the appeal of dancepunk as adroitly and magnificently as Funeral summed up the Merge indie-as-fuck approach to songcraft a few years ago - in other words, it's the album to which the whole aesthetic category's been building since being established in the first place. Hopefully, people won't forget that that's emphatically not what makes Sound of Silver a great album; it may embody more of the genre's tropes in more effective ways than anyone else has even dreamed up yet, but there's still the little matter of pretty much every track on it with a running time of less than six minutes. No, what makes Sound of Silver great is everything else about it - I mean, is the greatness of "Us Vs. Them" or "Get Innocuous" in any way tied to the loose ends they effectively wraps up? Hell no - it's tied to their conception and execution, not some eminantly mutable conception of their context in the popular consciousness; a song as outstanding as "All My Friends" could probably have me screaming about its nature as an overpowering achievement if it were buried in the middle of the second half of a fucking Shins record. (LCD Soundsystem, "Us Vs. Them", from Sound of Silver) (click here to buy from Amazon)
1. The Field, From Here We Go Sublime: This time last year, the big issue was whether the Knife's Silent Shout might be minimal's answer to Discovery. The answer, of course, was a resounding "no"; unlike Discovery, Silent Shout in no way makes the genre of minimal any more accessible, a point made devastatingly evident by my sustained lack of engagement with the whole genre of minimal outside of a few singles until The Field's From Here We Go Sublime dropped from the heavens earlier this year. I hasten to add that I'm not suddenly awash in a sea of Villalobos and Eulberg tracks or anything - even I don't have enough time to suss out the virtues of one sample of a Chilean marching band being looped for half an hour - but thanks to the Field's stunningly accomplished efforts, I can at least say that I've got an idea of what to look for if I were so inclined to dig deeper; if nothing else, From Here We Go Sublime does an outstanding job of laying the hows and whys of the genre's effectiveness bare thanks to the elegantly-assembled textural studies and Willner's supernatural gift for disrupting them in the most viscerally immediate fashion imaginable. And then, of course, there's the way the title track gives way to the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes For You" as the album melts to a close; the potentiality for moments with that kind of earth-shaking brute force makes a better case for minimal's existence in the first place than anything anyone could possibly write about it, myself happily included. (The Field, "From Here We Go Sublime", from From Here We Go Sublime) (click here to buy from Amazon)

(Honorable mention: White Rabbits, Fort Nightly; Chung King, Stay Up Forever; Papercuts, Can't Go Back)

TOP FIVE SINGLES
5. Bloc Party, "I Still Remember" (Lull's Music Box & Tears mix): Given (1) my unyielding love for dreamy, elegant pop music and (2) Bloc Party's undeniable knack for penning melodies which suit that first point like a glove, I see this track as more of an eventuality than anything else - I mean, really, Lull just kinda beat everyone else to the punch more than anything else. But uh WOW did he ever beat everyone to every punch with regards to this particular matter; they do a better job of harnessing the song's orchestral sweep here than Jacknife Lee managed anywhere else on the album, and it's not like Jacknife Lee's some yutz off the street when it comes to coaching a track to its schmaltziest form. Easily the prettiest thing and inarguably one of the, like, three or five best artifacts as judged by any criteria to come from the whole Bloc Party project to date; this is pretty enough to rub elbows with the Flying Pickets' cover of "Only You". (Click here to buy the "I Still Remember" CDS from HMV)
4. Lil Wayne, "We Takin' Over" (remix) - I can't lie and say there aren't aspects of the original version of this that I miss - Akon's hysterics, a few more minutes with That Motherfucking Beat, a chance to hear non-"Rubber Band Man"/"What You Know" T.I. without immediately mulling over my options for other things to which I could be listening - but come on; Weezy's solo version is simply too sleek/liquid-sounding/quotable to give the nod to anything else. I mean, it's plenty awesome for plenty of reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with what it sounds like - if nothing else, he picked a hell of a track in which to address the whole Birdman-kissing brouhaha; let's not even get into the - but it's been my experience that the half-life for that stuff's ability to prove compelling can't hold a candle to stuff like "Great Scott/Storch, can I borrow your yacht?", a phrase I'm still trying (and failing) to work into everyday conversation.
3. Herbert, "Moving Like A Train" (Smith N Hack remix): YEAH YEAH YEAH, 2006 I KNOW SHUT UP. For all my talk about good teaching tools for the charms of minimal up there in the Field blurb, I have to admit that Smith N Hack's work on the remix might actually be a more adroit - if less expansive in its authority - statement than anything on it; unlike From Here We Go To Sublime, which occasionally borders on sensory overload, this is minimal music which doesn't need any explication as to just how it came to be described as "minimal". Since its variations are so subtle and relatively nondynamic, it keeps moving forward apparently propelled solely by the insistence of that infuriatingly involving beat, which is AWESOME; as someone who spent a good two years proudly listening to the gloopiest, most manipulative trance music the world had to offer (holla @ Gabriel & Dresden!), my reserve of good things to say about the mileage Smith N Hack get out of their artfully conceived austerity on this track is damn near limitless. Bonus points for single-handedly obliviating the need for "Fizheuer Zieheuer", too. (Click here to buy it from Boomkat, assuming they ever get any more stock in)
2. Hot Chip, "My Piano": In which Hot Chip take seven minutes to call dibs on the top spot on the Big List Of Incredibly Stupid Bands. I mean, you're just going to give a track as good as "My Piano" away to some mix-CD series? You're not going to hang onto it for your album? Even though it's like one of the three or four best songs you've ever done? You're not going to play it live even though the part played on the piano in question practically sounds like it was engineered in a lab to wreck a house full of people ready to dance? Really? I mean, I guess I shouldn't be too worried given how well their new songs seem to be coming together, but wow. Just wow. (Click here to buy the "My Piano" 12" from Juno)
1. Explorer's Club, "Forever": Still the best 60s pastiche I've heard since either Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation Who Appreciates Long Song Titles" or the Solution's "I Have To Quit You", and those are not songs I base comparisons on lightly. Fun fact: I missed the Explorer's Club's first LA show due to the fact that Beck decided to use it as a platform for yet another one of his infernal goddamned "secret shows", which by this point get publicized so widely that they might as well be called by their real name, "Scientology Recruitment Events". The moral, as always: fuck Beck up one side and down the other, unless of course he happens to be playing "Debra" or "Sexxlaws" or "Lost Cause", three undeniably good songs which are each desperately inferior to "Forever" in their own unique way. (Physical copies of the "Forever" single are long gone, but you can still buy their outstanding debut EP through iTunes. Also MAKE SURE you listen to "Last Kiss" on their MySpace page - if there were even a whiff of an album out of these guys, they'd be making another appearance in this post.)

(Honorable mention: Justice, "D.A.N.C.E."; Lil Wayne, "La La La"; 50 Cent, "She Want It" (feat. Justin Timberlake & Timbaland)

TOP FIVE DISCOVERIES
5. The Wedding Present: I've been searching for years for a mid-80s jangle-pop band that I could really call my own - I gave everyone from Orange Juice to the Jesus & Mary Chain to the Fire Engines a shot, only to walk away with the opinion that I'd wasted my time on something too unrefined or too tuneless or too shitty (respectively). As you can imagine, then, the Wedding Present might as well have dropped from on high right into my lap; with the exception of a few traces of that heroically unfortunate 80s compressed-drum sound, this stuff could not only pass for modern, but surpass most modern stuff even by contemporary songwriting mores. Not that any of this is news to anyone who ever checked out the Wedding Present before me, by which I of course refer to anyone with two shreds of sense in their heads to rub together. (The Wedding Present, "Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft", from George Best Plus)
4. The Shivvers: So my copy of Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Power Pop finally showed up and HEY! Turns out the Shivvers were kinda sorta the best band ever, or at least certainly good enough to to earn the lofty status of #4 on the list of Great Things I Has Discovered This Half-Year; these are simply accolades your band can expect to receive from shut-in dorks like me when you can come up with a whole disc's worth of songs in the neighborhood of being as awesome as "No Reaction" (although that little gem still unsurprisingly stands head and shoulders above the rest of the songs - seriously, if y'don't know, now y'know). It's also worth noting that Lost Hits includes a buttload of live recordings which make it devastatingly obvious that this band could out-and-out play; I would have most certainly included one of them for download had "No Substitute" not been such a glorious monument to awesomeness. Seriously though, America Of Twenty-Five Or Thirty Years Ago - y'all dropped the ball in a big-ass way. (The Shivvers, "No Substitute", from Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Power Pop)
3. William Basinski: As someone who (a) writes a lot of reviews intended to judge how worthwhile a purchase an album might be when I'm either getting it for free or downloading it and (b) isn't afraid to make Mike Powell hate me by getting all meta with my reviews, I constantly find myself wrapped up in the debate over the viability of buying music. After all, the argument goes, how can I possibly say I'm engaging with this stuff when I don't even have to open my wallet - let alone leave my house - to get it? As a result, I've found myself taking a lot more chances where I buy albums out of blind faith in the restorative powers of the commercial cycle; more often than not, I wind up looking like a dunce with a copy of Japan's Tin Drum on my shelf, but every so often I do strike it rich. Q.E.D., I guess, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, without exception the single best, most accomplished piece of music I've bought since picking up Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians on a whim last year, not to mention one which, practically by the conditions of access it creates for itself, might as well be inexhaustible. The big hook for the Disintegration Loops, if you hadn't heard, is that they're a recording of some old decaying tape loops Basinski had been processing the morning of September 11th, 2001, a fact which leads a lot of listeners to check them out in the hopes of the experience being even a little transferable. It's not, of course, and if Stylus ever fucking posts the huge-ass essay I wrote for them it'll make a better case than I'd be able to do in this space while waiting for Bossa Nova to drop off my dinner, but this turns out to be irrelevant anyway since the Loops are just such a pretty way to fill sonic space. More importantly, they're also an excellent introduction to Basinski's m.o., and although I still haven't found anything in his catalogue which compares to the first disc (of four - this shit is not for weak-hearted dilettantes!) of the Loops, it's been a genuine pleasure investigating his work. (Since Basinski's best pieces tend to run between twenty and sixty minutes in length, I'm not posting any of them; I'm buttfucking my bandwidth enough with this post already, and anyway his stuff deserves to be heard via actual physical copies to preserve every minute variation. I highly reccomend poking around his site and picking up whatever catches your ear, or, at the very leastest point of leastliness, picking up the first disc of The Disintegration Loops; if you've ever had even a split second of appreciation for Brian Eno's Music For Airports, you owe it to yourself to move on this.)
2. Steely Dan: For years, Steely Dan was a favorite target of mine, partially due to the Michael McDonald Factor and partially due to the fact that "Hey Nineteen" can most sincerely eat my ass. Well, for whatever reason, I decided to give Aja another shot a few months ago and more or less haven't been able to shake it since. Not that I'd want to, of course - it took about three listens before I realized that the laws of thermodynamics really couldn't get me to Amoeba quickly enough to hand someone money for it, which is of course the ultimate test of any album's quality. It's just such paralyzingly rewarding music; I can't remember the last artist I discovered who made me feel downright virtuous for enduring their songs long enough to "solve" them. And better yet, with the Dan, that solution never feels like the end point in a journey; even once I realized that songs like "I Got The News" were all about delaying gratification instead of simply overpowering you with unmistakable awesomeness right from the jump, I still keep coming back just to savor the moment of realizing it all over again. Now that is a good band, not that it means that "Hey Nineteen" can eat my ass any less. (Steely Dan, "I Got The News", from Aja)
1. Evie Sands: Steely Dan is, of course, "better" than Evie Sands in almost every appreciable, quantifiable way, but I'll be damned if I can possibly let anyone else perch atop a list of recent musical discoveries that I've made. Aja, after all, might as well have been lying in wait for me (or really anyone who takes an interest in the usage of the studio as an instrument) to stumble over it, but Any Way That You Want Me and Estate of Mind would have never had a hope in hell had I not made a covenant with myself to spend the everliving fuck out of the paycheck I earn through my seedy, disreputable, demeaning job on all manner of shit intended to provide the most instantaneous variety of gratification. I mean, this is a woman who proudly advertises - advertises! - herself as a folkie and draws comparisons to Barbara Streisand and James Taylor; under ordinary circumstances I'd rather cook one of my own turds and eat it than listen to anything described thusly. To that extent, Evie was nothing less than an outright discovery for the ages, because in spite of all her contextual baggage I cannot for the life of me stop listening to her album (Any Way That You Want Me in particular stands out as being a more enjoyable record to listen to than anything released this year) or attempting to get others to do the same. Basically, the thing I discovered was that I was dead wrong; I just never expected being wrong to sound so right. (Evie Sands, "A Woman's Work Is Never Done", from Estate of Mind. I strongly urge you to check out Any Way That You Want Me as well, although I think it stands up better as a whole than by any individual track - well, except for the incomparable "But You Know I Love You", of course.)

(Honorable mentions: Sneakers, Shoes, Portishead, Terry Riley, Lil Wayne)

TOP FIVE MOST ANTICIPATED (sadly no mp3s for these - hey, if I had the music readily at hand, I wouldn't be anticipating it, would I?)
5. The end of Jacques Lu Cont's tiresome stint as Madonna's tour DJ: Fuck Madonna. Madonna is shitty and boring, and in my less charitable moments (which are both many in number and frightening in their acerbic nature) I frequently invoke fandom of her music as a conversation-endingly revealing character flaw, and I would have said all of these things before she decided to snatch up one of the single most reliable dance-music auteurs working today for her own selfish benefits. I mean, I can't front like Disco Stuart hasn't been turning out shit-hot fire for her or anything; "Hung Up" is good enough that even I like it, although predictably enough I prefer his extended dub which features as little Madonna as possible. Still, though, even as I type this sentence he could be hanging silk purses from the ears of indie sows, or maybe refining his DJing technique to improve on his quite-fun-but-would-have-been-better-in-a-fairer-world Fabric mix CD, or (O PLEASE JESUS) actually producing an album for a band who could genuinely use the stylistic kick in the ass to come up with better music (read: he should be producing the Killers' next album, and presumably all of their subsequent ones as well). Or, fuck, he should just be sitting on his ass at home playing with a cup-and-ball; basically he should just be doing anything other than working with shitty stupid intellectually-untenable fake-British less-musically-interesting-than-Paris-fucking-Hilton Madonna, if only so that I can start ignoring her full-stop. LIKE SHE DESERVES.
4. Annie, untitled LP: Well, okay, let me refine that a little bit: Annie, the Richard X songs from her untitled, unreleased LP. I mean, I like Annie, but I'm not exactly one of her cult members or anything; she's an interesting enough instrument of blankness, but eh, I'm nowhere near done with Rachel Stevens' last album as far as shoring that particular need up, so w/e. By contrast, I am motherfucking Tom Cruise and John Travolta and That Exceedingly Hot Chick From King Of Queens all rolled into one in relation to Richard MF'n X; even after an alarming period of relative dormancy, he could still show up on my doorstep with an e-meter and I'd probably just hand him my bank card reflexively. And when he works with Annie, I mean whoa, seriously, look out; even if - if - "Me Plus One" weren't as infectious as the Hanta virus, the sheer force of the residual goodwill from "Chewing Gum", arguably the archetypal modern throwbacky synthpop track, would still have me on board with the whole idea of these two gettin' the band back together. And I would have said that before I'd heard they were teaming up for a cover of "Two Of Hearts", too. Seriously, the world is poorer for the lack of this record's existance - I can't even imagine how much of a bath 679 Records must have taken on Anniemal to keep her new one locked away like this.
3. Escort, untitled LP: So the nine-piece disco ensemble known for working with the Metro Area crew and boasting arguably the best sustained run of singles in the game today is putting together an album, huh? YES PLZ.
2. Hot Chip, untitled LP: As previously discussed, this absolutely, positively cannot fail. Well, unless they decide to give "Ready For A Fall" away like they did with "My Piano" (SERIOUSLY WTF).
1. Black Leotard Front, untitled LP: When I interviewed James Murphy - have I mentioned that I interviewed James Murphy? Because I interviewed James Murphy - a while back, I was literally five seconds away from wrapping up my interview (with James Murphy) with a series of hard-hitting questions as to just what the fuck Delia & Gavin might possibly be getting up to which could prove in any way to be an ass-hair's width as satisfying as a prospective Black Leotard Front album, especially since word on the skreet is that they'd already laid down one track (called something like "(Hey Coach) I Read Your Diary", for the benefit of you lazy slskrs) which was just as expansive and just as unremittingly funky as "Black Leotard Front", a peak previously thought to be insurmountable. Unfortunately, the label poo-bah chose that moment to jump in and end the interview before I even got a chance to ask, leaving me with no choice but to disappoint my readership as to the status of what promised to be the single greatest release in the history of the DFA. Le sigh. Oh well. Guess I'll just have to file that one away for my next interview. With James Murphy. Who I interviewed.

AND THERE YOU FUCKING GO. That's like eighty megs of music for YOU, gentle reader; now git offa mah lawn.