All right, you’s guys, I’ve got opinions about albums and since everybody likes to show off their super-important and highly-refined musical tastes by way of year-end lists, I’ve decided to join everyone…like a sheep to slaughter. I’m gonna have some oldies which I’ve just been turned onto in 2008 sprinkled in there too, so please don’t be alarmed that I don’t only listen to new music. In fact, it’s not healthy to only listen to new music.
After mine, you have to show me yours though…as creepy as that sounds. So start thinking about everything you heard in this last great year of our unruly despot’s reign, and be ready to list ‘em by the time you finish looking at mine.
In no particular order…
Frances – All The WhileOkay, yes, they are friends but this album is truly original and stands out in a sea of indie-rock music that is becoming more and more boring. Hooks abound, beautiful harmonies, and amazing arrangements…all with a good sense of humor too.
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Here’s an album I was all over when I got an advance copy. It’s totally trippy and neo-psychedelic and totally up my alley. Here’s me singing it’s praises last January…lalala. The backlash is already present but isn’t it always there for bands who get any kind of recognition for actually being good?! They sounded great at a super-packed McCarren Park Pool this past summer too! I look forward to a second album from these cats.
Black Mountain – In The Future
Here’s another one that I got an advance of and I picked it for my year-end list last year even though it came out in 2008. Trippy , heavy, ter’riff’ic! These guys have a great loud live show too. On the album, “Wucan” will hypnotize you…and live, “Wucan” will bewitch your skull. You’ve been warned!
All right, I noticed that a lot of blogs are doing their ‘best of 2008…so far’ lists about now since we’re half way through the year, so I’m gonna blindly follow suit. Well, maybe not so blindly, since I’m gonna allow you to share stuff that you got this year…but didn’t necessarily have to have come out this year. But it can be new too. Whatever you want, because Sh*t L*sts are all about YOU!
So my list is probably gonna be a mix of new and old, cuz that’s just where I’m at. Just click on through after the MGMT album pic below to see my list (which I’m starting to compile in my head as I write this), and then leave your list in comments.
Is music headed towards a beautifully vegetative state where boundaries are ready to be broken down, now that the big record companies have less impact on what we are supposed to be listening to? It kinda feels that way to me lately. It’s either my blindness to the ‘actual’ state of music or there really does seem to be a blurring of the categorical genres that the record companies created in order to properly feed us whatever rubbish they chose to place in said categories. The fact that a band as genre-defying as Gnarls Barkley being in the super-mainstream seems to point to a blurring of what’s cool and what isn’t.
This article on one of the better new bands, MGMT, was refreshing to see. Here are a couple quotes from the boys in the band:
“We have pretty good taste,” says founding member Andrew Van Wyngarden. “We’re fans of the Grateful Dead and psychedelic music. We have crazy jams in our rehearsal space and we’re trying to eventually bring that out more on stage.”
“I think that pretty much everybody in MGMT secretly loves jambands — well, not so secretly. We always have,” Richardson admits. “Around 2000 or something, everybody really wanted to be ‘indie’ and now it’s just swinging back, I guess. I don’t know if that’s true, but I hope it is. I just want to break down those barriers. Segregation has existed too long between the jambands and the artsy-fartsy bands, and it doesn’t need to be there.”
Now isn’t that kinda nice to see that these young guys who are hotter than hell in the ‘Indie’ scene would rather just everyone got along. Animal Collective is another Indie darling group which has admitted to all being Dead-heads as young men. Well, it just so turns out that these are the type of groups that I end up liking, and I don’t think it’s because I also like the Grateful Dead…because these guys are making music that is nothing like the Dead. But they are making good and interesting music that fits just outside of any genre or scene. Shit, check out Of Montreal playing “Shakedown Street” at Langerado. So I think what I like is the fact that these bands are playing music because they love making music and care less, if at all, about making scenes.
I’d like to think that music is heading into a new post-ironic Renaissance, where if you say you like Journey, you don’t have to asterisk the statement with a “I only like them ‘cuz they’re gay” type of qualification. I’m sure that I did that at some point, but I’ve come to a place where I refuse to qualify my taste. Goddammit, ‘I like Kiss’, period. ‘I love Yes, actually’. Or any other number of examples (Phish probably having several examples on their own). Sure, I dig plenty of music that is considered hip and/or smart or what have you, but there’s also plenty of music that is considered hip and/or smart that I just don’t connect with. It’s okay with me if it’s okay with you. I think emotional levels transcend anything external or cerebral.
Unfortunately, some of the people that consider themselves the most liberal sort, can create the harshest boundaries for what is good and bad in art. I realize that this is probably because they are people who are artists or very wrapped up in art in some way, so you can’t help talk about what you love. Shit, it’s unnatural how much I talk about music. But the over-analysis of music seems to keep the boundaries in place, because when we talk about music we can’t help but compare and rank things. And once we come to a super-well-though-out ideal of what is ‘good music’, we defend it by propping up the qualities that we approve of and ripping apart the things that work against the ideal that we’ve constructed.
And since the record companies are dying out, there is the opportunity for us to let the boundaries break down, as we don’t have these companies to package things to what they think our tastes are. I think it’s up to us bloggers and networks of friends to keep things all loosey-goosey and nurture diversity in musical taste.
Remember hearing all the stories from the 60′s and early-70′s about how concerts would be so random and cool? The bill would consist of something like Cream, Melanie, and the Chambers Brothers. Maybe we’re seeing that again with these festivals, like Bonnaroo and Coachella, that keep growing year after year. These festivals bring together fans of Widespread Panic, Metallica, Prince, MGMT, Cat Power, Robert Plant, Kanye West, and so on and so on. As the music industry as we know it, dies…live music thrives. Here’s a cool Times article about just that.
Music will never die. To me it’s the reflection of the underlying beauty of the imperfection of human life. Thank goodness we’re all so flawed. It makes the music so sweet! What we’re witnessing is the sloughing off of the big business that had become too bloated and corrupted by maximizing profits by tapping into the life-giving roots of peoples’ emotions…the people creating the music and the people appreciating the music. This is the same big business which has tried to bait the two emotionally-involved parties against each other, and in a lot of cases, succeeded. Now the greedy middle-man obstructing your view is being escorted out of the venue for being drunk and disorderly. Love wins out over greed. I hope.
What do you guys think?
All right now. I just sat down at the ol’ Macbook with a fresh cup of coffee after a nice restorative sleep last night and yoga session this morning, and I’ve noticed that a lot has happened over the last few days. I was camping in the Catskills with friends and caterpillars, but mostly caterpillars. We had some heavy rain on Saturday, that we waited out and weathered and ended up having a rockin’ good time in trout country. We saw the world’s largest kaleidoscope ™ and even swung by Woodstock to make sure nobody was slacking on the drum circle. If a drum circle happens in Woodstock and no one is there to hear it…maaaaahhhhhn. Anyway, let’s look what happened in the less-trippy world outside of Woodstock. I know that a ton of rock fans (as well as fans of Jack Johnson) did some camping in Manchester, TN over the weekend for the country’s biggest music festival ™, Bonnaroo. Let’s check out some stuff…
Winning Bonnaroo’s biggest-douchebag award looks like it was, hands-down, Kanye West, who had already forced organizers to change his time-slot to late-night so that he could take full advantage of his ‘amazing’ glow-in-the-dark set. With the later time granted, it seems he still couldn’t even get to the stage on time. I think it would be you though, that would be Bonnaroo’s biggest DB if you would wait till 4:30 am for a hip-hop show. It just couldn’t possibly be interesting enough to warrant that kind of wait!
After hitting Bonnaroo on Thursday night, Vampire Weekend played to a soaking-wet Central Park Summerstage crowd on Saturday. Both of these videos are very much worth watching…1) this Bonnaroo video has some good festival footage and a hilarious MGMT interview at the end (which shows us how young the MGMT boys are), and 2) in this one from Saturday with Andrew WK, I’m kinda like, c’mon VW, just play the Petty song and stop making an excuse for liking Petty since your Columbia friends think he’s ‘frat rock’!
Here are some great Bonnaroo pics on Pitchfork.
I just gotta say that for some reason, my Sh*t L*sts post featuring the lovely Duffy, got around 1000 hits over Saturday and Sunday. She didn’t play Bonnaroo, but maybe it’s because she won the Mojo award for Song of the Year. No Rock & Roll Fun seems less than thrilled about the list of winners, although it doesn’t look so bad to me…but I’m also an easily-amused Yank!
No Rock & Roll Fun also posts this Duffy live video, against it’s will. I guess Britain is just inundated with Duffy and tired of the hype, but listen to her sing! Beats the shit out of American fave, Fergie!
Bob Lefsetz continues to know everything about everything in the music world. Which is sometimes very insightful and other times a bit annoying. Bob should see Dave’s math on the pressing of vinyl though!
Just in, Carrie Brownstein at NPR’s Monitor Mix is also opposed to the new wave of British soul singers, and she’s not even British! What do you think, is this genre just too derivative?
Ben Folds does ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’ at Bonnaroo, for the last time.
And on a random note, here’s an interview with Nick Drake from 1971.
More fairly-solid Phish rumors (yet still rumors).
Crystal rocked Round 10 on NewmRadio Rock Trivia, and will soon receive her booty, and Round 11 will start some time this week. Be prepared.
So, I’ve recently stumbled on some new music that I really like, but of course that’s because it’s music that isn’t afraid to go in new (old) directions. It may sound confusing, but how uncool has it been in the last 20 years to sound like prog-rock at all? Correct, very. But throughout that time I’ve still always harbored a love for progressive rock, in all it’s ‘indulgent‘ grandeur. The argument against prog rock has always been that it’s over-indulgent, which I never understood because I figured music would be the perfect place to indulge. It’s every other facet of life that we must curb our indulgences…but why not let’s make the music freer than we?
All right, now that I’ve confirmed that I’m a dork, I wanted to turn you on to some examples of new Indie bands who aren’t afraid to borrow from some of rock’s taboo past. All of these bands had albums that just dropped this month too, that I recommend any and all of. Let me start with this video from a duo called MGMT, who have a prog thing going on in their music. They’ve got something pretty magical going on…this video will prove that… See the video for “Time To Pretend” here.
And here’s the same song performed on Letterman, with capes, mind you…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqzoRQv2UIU&rel=1]
Now check out this band, Black Mountain, who have a heavy prog thing going on. Their new album, In The Future, is one of my favorites right now. Check out them performing ‘Wucan‘ at ATP…wicked riffin’…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhvE-D9osY8&rel=1]
And here’s Vampire Weekend whose album just dropped today, who are not afraid to use African rhythms, rock-style, like the Talking Heads did…and Paul Simon. The Dirty Projectors kinda have the African thing going on too, but first check out this brand-new Vampire Weekend video, and dig their style…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XC2mqcMMGQ&rel=1]
Click on through to the other side, to see the amazing Dirty Projectors video, as promised…
