The Best Albums of 2011: 5-1

5. Altar of Plagues, Mammal

Pitchfork's Grayson Currin couldn't have hit the nail much more on the head when he wrote that "Altar of Plagues suggest a Wolves in the Throne Room cousin more focused on frailty and struggle than majesty and grandeur." The atmosphere the Irish quartet creates on Mammal is just as massive as that of their Cascadian brethren, but instead of ancient oaks looming like gods over a pastoral landscape, their trees are all dead, casualties of humankind's obsession with conquest. The post-apocalyptic world isn't celebrated here; it's mourned. Each of the four long songs on Mammal is a funerary march, and the polarizing "When the Sun Drowns in the Ocean" includes a field recording of a Gaelic keening ritual – the sound of a woman wailing into the sky in bereavement. Beowulf's funeral pyre is called to mind, where a Geat woman keens over the burning corpse of her nation's mythic hero. Our poet's response is simply "Heaven swallowed the smoke." Altar of Plagues embraces this uncaring natural order, even while placing the blame on human shoulders ("We create this death, we create this entity"). They swallow the smoke without reflecting any of it back as light. Monolithic riffs, pained vocals, and a dark, filthy production job help the band undermine the positive black metal vibes emanating from American shores. The darkest album of the year is also one of its best.

Best Tracks: "Neptune Is Dead," "Feather and Bone," "All Life Converges to Some Centre"
Best Moment: The riff at 8:15 in "Neptune Is Dead." Ho-ly fuck.

4. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake

"It’s a little ironic that the PJ Harvey record with the mellowest instrumentation is also the darkest one. These 12 harrowing tales of World War I lyrically recall the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and in what may be her best performance ever, Harvey’s clarion vocals soar above the mix like an artillery shell over no-man’s-land." (Originally printed in WEEKEND, Dec. 7, 2011)

Best Songs: "Written on the Forehead," "The Glorious Land," "All & Everyone"
Best Moment: The disruptive battlefield fanfare at 0:19 in "The Glorious Land" that does to the song's beat what war does to life.

3. Hammers of Misfortune, 17th Street

No one was sadder than me when Ludicra, the excellent USBM band behind my favorite album of 2010, The Tenant, broke up earlier this year. Had I known that the next album John Cobbett had up his sleeve was 17th Street, I wouldn't have shed a tear. This is simply the best traditional heavy metal album of the last decade. Just as he did on The Tenant, Cobbett has successfully channeled a whole slew of 99-percenter problems into the kind of productive frustration that makes for great metal. By combining the prog-rock elements only semi-successfully integrated into 2008's Fields/Church of Broken Glass with rollicking, Slough Feg-infused metal guitar, the San Francisco natives forge something that feels, if not altogether unique, wonderfully inspired and – most importantly – more fun than almost anything else to come out all year. There's a shortage of modern metal that causes listeners to throw the horns without a hint of irony, but Hammers of Misfortune stands at the forefront of the small movement.

Best Tracks: "The Grain," "Summer Tears," "Going Somewhere"
Best Moment: The emotive twin guitar leads that take over for the piano at 0:14 in "Summer Tears."

2. Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage

2011 may go down as the Year Black Metal Broke, and Washington's Wolves in the Throne Room has as much to do with that as anyone. Celestial Lineage, the band's fourth and best full-length album, was the first black metal album to earn the Best New Music tag on Pitchfork, and the rarely metal-enthused A.V. Club gave it an unprecedented "A" rating. Critics rightly praised its expansiveness, its unparalleled ability to create an atmosphere and its potential to bring neophytes into black metal's fold. What was missing from the narrative of its importance was how incredibly good the damn thing is, and what it means within the context of an already impressive career. Wolves in the Throne Room's Weaver brothers have been toiling in relative obscurity since a little-heard 2004 demo, and Lineage is a culmination of all they've worked toward rather than a sudden flash of greatness coming out of a void. This album is the band's best because they pull out all the stops, choosing to not only focus on hypnotic riffs (Black Cascade), progressive song structures (Diadem of 12 Stars) or atmospheric flair (Two Hunters) but all three at once. What could have come off as ambition overcoming ability turned out to be the best black metal album of the year, not to mention – Liturgy be damned – its most important.

Best Tracks: "Thuja Magus Imperium," "Astral Blood," "Woodland Cathedral"
Best Moment: The emotive groundswell of lead guitar at 5:05 in "Thuja Magus Imperium" that slips back to the ether from whence it came almost as quickly as it erupts.

1. Fucked Up, David Comes to Life

"In a genre as ostensibly bent on upsetting the system as punk rock, the most subversive act of all is revolting against punk itself. Toronto’s Fucked Up did just that with the brilliant rock opera David Comes to Life, which sees the band’s knacks for wall-of-guitars melody and abrasive D.C. hardcore colliding more effectively than ever." (Originally printed in WEEKEND, Dec. 7, 2011)

Best Tracks: "The Other Shoe," "Remember My Name," "Serve Me Right"
Best Moment: Seriously, dude? All of them. Read my post about how this is my favorite album of all time if you don't believe me.

The Best Albums of 2011 (10-6)

I truly believe that 2011 was the best year for music I've ever participated in, but that's probably only because every year feels that way as I dive deeper and deeper into my personal abyss of musical obsession. Like every year, most of what I heard was underwhelming, but the things that I loved – the things that challenged my thinking the most and made me the most uncomfortable– were more enriching than ever. Black metal, my favorite genre, still mostly reigned supreme, but for the first time since 2008's self-titled Fleet Foxes debut blew my mind, a black metal album did not top my list.

If you know me, thank you for putting up with conversations about all ten of these albums, for hearing them nonstop in my car, for helping me work my way through my thoughts about them, for reading what I've written about them already, and for helping me decide once and for all that, yes, these were the ten best albums released in 2011.

10. Leviathan, True Traitor, True Whore

I've never had a harder time convincing myself that it's acceptable to like a record than I had with this one. Sure, Varg Vikernes is a convicted arsonist and murderer, in addition to being an anti-Semite, homophobe and racist, but at least Burzum lyrics are in Norwegian and about The Lord of the Rings. Here, we have Leviathan's lone member Jef Whitehead (aka Wrest), a man arrested less than a year ago on sexual assault charges leveled by his girlfriend, releasing what might be black metal's most misogynistic (and personal) statement to date. And try as I may to hate songs with titles like "Every Orifice Yawning Her Price" and "Her Circle Is the Noose," I can't. Whitehead is too skilled at his craft, too aware of how crucial he is to the entirety of USBM and too willing to push its boundaries. This is a psychedelic album ("Not very black metal at all," Whitehead told Decibel), but unlike the more recent Nachtmystium releases, that atmosphere isn't forced with Pink Floyd puns and saxophone solos. It's found in the way Whitehead constructs his riffs, layers them in relation to one another, emits his trance-like vocals into the musical ether and, most importantly, lets producer Sanford Parker arrange it all. Some of the songs are so abstract they barely qualify as musical, but there always seems to be some subtle hook lurking in the darkness. I've never had too hard a time with the art/artist debate, but when the most morality-taxing album I've ever consumed is this good, it's that much easier to make an ethical listening decision. Hate Wrest because he's a woman-hater and possibly a rapist, but hear True Traitor, True Whore because it's one of the most maddeningly beautiful black metal albums of the last decade.

Best Tracks: "Every Orifice Yawning Her Price," "Contrary Pulse," "Brought Up to This Bottom"
Best Moment: The longing, seemingly infinite spaces between the notes at 0:35 in "Contrary Pulse"

9. Rwake, Rest

I bought my first pair of hi-fi, over-the-ear headphones in 2007 in the same transaction that saw me bring home Rwake's Voices of Omens, so naturally, the two converged in my first-ever truly high-quality listening experience. It was a revelation, partly because of the quality of the sound, but mostly because I'd never heard anything quite like Rwake before. The Little Rock sextet's take on sludge metal is fucked up in a way that has nothing to do with the way Eyehategod is fucked up. It's a backwoods acid trip in audio, the band's sound equal parts terrified and terrifying. Rest adheres to the same self-constructed formula as Voices of Omens – Skynyrd-fried guitar leads, shouted-from-the-top-of-the-Ozarks vocals, gnarly, winding riffs – but is arguably an even better record thanks to its penchant for long-form songwriting. Apart from two interludes, everything clocks in at more than eight minutes, with centerpiece "The Culling" destroying minds and reaping souls for a punishing 16. This is a career-defining record by a band unmatched in its ability to create an unsettling atmosphere and a very distinct understanding of what that atmosphere can be.

Best Tracks: "It Was Beautiful But Now It's Sour," "Was Only a Dream," "An Invisible Thread"
Best Moment: 8:07 in "Was Only a Dream," when everything but a lonely acoustic guitar and CT's distorted roar drops out of the mix for nearly 90 glorious seconds.

8. Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Bon Iver's Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Just say it. Listen to the poetry in it, the sound of the language. That's the core of this gorgeous record, an album full of lyrics like "Armour let it through borne the arboretic truth you kept posing" and synthesizers lifted straight from dentist's office soft rock radio. Justin Vernon followed up the deeply personal For Emma, Forever Ago with what may well end up going down as his grandest gesture. Each of Bon Iver, Bon Iver's ten tracks is a tableau in which specific reminiscences of youth coexist with beautiful vagueness and where anything goes so long as it contributes to the album's unofficial mission statement of expressing inexpressible beauty. These aren't songs rife with conflict; they're vignettes for Vernon and his ever-growing crew of hired hands to give life to emotions more complex than post-breakup agony. Make no mistake, this is still an album built for heartache, but it's a longing for the past and for attaining something just out of reach ("Climb is all we know") that Vernon concerns himself with here, not Emma. It's less personal for him, but better for the rest of us.

Best Tracks: "Holocene," "Calgary," "Minnesota, WI"
Best Moment: The '80s Bolton/Collins intro to "Beth/Rest," when we realize that even on album where the songs are this different from one another, we're in for something really different.

7. SubRosa, No Help for the Mighty Ones

Apart from the seemingly limitless bounds of black metal, the metal subgenre with the most room for innovation is undoubtedly doom. While still nodding to the bands they're supposed to nod to (Sabbath and Sleep, mainly), the Salt Lake City natives in SubRosa have taken the genre in a direction that has never been explored before. Call it rebellion against the repression of living in Utah, but this majority-female doom crew with two (!) lead electric violinists is pushing doom metal somewhere truly bold. The band simultaneously embraces and rejects what makes them so strange, playing up the female presence with songs like the darkly idyllic a cappella number "House Carpenter" and granting the violins main melodies throughout the record while still remaining more or less subservient to the doom canon in their approach to songwriting. Even if some of the best tracks are familiar in structure, they're wildly unique in execution, with vocals harmonizing with violins in a way that seems more typical of opera than heavy metal. Profound Lore Records (responsible for two other albums on this very list) has been a bastion for forward-thinking heavy music from the day it was founded, and label head Chris Bruni's discovery of SubRosa shows that he hasn't lost his touch. No Help for the Mighty Ones will rock the Latter-Day Saints right out of you.

Best Tracks: "Whippoorwill," "Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes," "The Inheritance"
Best Moment: The last vocal hook to the Cormac McCarthy-inspired "Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes" that kicks in around 4:30 and rides the song to its epic conclusion.

6. Burzum, Fallen

The last decade or so of black metal has been its finest thanks mostly to a crop of bands who have challenged the very notion of what it is to be black metal. Burzum's Varg Vikernes does not do that with Fallen. It is no more radical today than it would have been in 1996, and it's so good that that's perfectly alright. If anything, Fallen may be Exhibit A in Vikernes' prolonged case that he doesn't make black metal but fuzzed-out European folk music. His pseudo-Gregorian chants are brought to the front of the mix here, making the Norwegian language catchier than it has any right to be, and the acoustic instrumentation of bookends "Fra Verdenstreet" and "Til Hel Og Tilbake Igjen" is anything but metal, but unlike Burzum's past non-metal experiments, also not ambient electronics. There's also a case against him, however, as the riffs on this album are as black metal as the riffs on any other 2011 release. The monster that opens album highlight "Jeg Faller" could be the best pure blackened riff of Varg's storied career, and the chaos that drowns the middle section of "Vanvidd" practically begs him to start going by Count Grishnackh again and burn some churches. As the questionable From the Depths of Darkness compilation suggests, Varg Vikernes is interested in revisiting his past for the first time in a long time. Fallen marks a serious progression for Burzum, but it's also a tribute to its creator's own legacy. He burned some churches, he killed a dude, and he isn't the biggest fan of Jews and gays, but releases like this ensure that the focus stay where it belongs – on the music, man.

Best Tracks: "Jeg Faller," "Enhver til Sitt," "Valen"
Best Moment: The stark raving madness at 3:42 in "Vanvidd" that would make even Deathspell Omega shit their collective pants.

Tomorrow, my top five albums of 2011, followed by my favorite songs, live performances, and movies of the year.

On 2011's Important Albums

I don't usually do this whole "rebut someone else's thinkpiece" thing, because I figure if you're bothering to publish a thinkpiece, you've put more thought into its topic while writing it than I did while reading it. But I can't leave this one alone.

Steven Hyden is one of my favorite music critics. Top five in the world for my money. His thinkpieces are generally excellent and do what only the best can do – they present me with an idea I'd never thought about before and convince me that it's unequivocally true. That's what was so disturbing about Tuesday's "The year of no Important Albums (and many Good Records)" on the A.V. Club. To boil it down to its essence, Hyden posited that unlike the past few years, 2011 lacked a truly important album, defined as such:

"What’s an Important Album? It’s an album that is perceived to be a momentous work of ambition, invention, and high artistic credibility before it is released, and then proves to actually be so, planting itself in a highly visible place in the culture and acting as a signifier for the year in retrospect. It's the one album you can't avoid hearing about at the end of the year to an almost annoying degree; 'Important' in this context can be taken to mean 'legitimately great' or 'incredibly gas-baggy.' But either way, an Important Album stands apart from the pack as a year-defining work."

He went on to say PJ Harvey's Let England Shake felt like homework, explain how this year lacked a Merriweather Post Pavilion or a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and, while he stopped well short of hating on years without important albums, he steadfastly stood behind the idea that 2011 was one.

I have some problems with this. First of all, the criteria for Important Album is pretty weak here. It's based largely on the idea that lots of critics agreeing that an album is great makes it matter, which even as a critic is a little weird to me. Sure, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is important, but the answer to why it is shouldn't be "Because we all liked it a lot and everyone heard it." That's a start, but there has to be more to it than that. I don't think there should be any standard criterion for what makes an album important. All albums carry the potential to matter, and what they bring to the table that we haven't seen brought before, combined with how they're received and talked about, can create a thousand unique paths to importance.

At the crux of my beef with Hyden's suggestion that there are no important 2011 albums is my belief that there are. For the sake of illustrating my point, here's just a few, with my quick takes why they matter:

Lou Reed & Metallica, Lulu and Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne

In two very different ways, Lulu and Watch the Throne taught us about something my colleague Steven Arroyo and I coined "collaboratorial hubris" in a podcast we did a couple months ago. Lulu was two past-their-prime-but-once-legendary acts colliding, with all involved calling it their proudest moment. Watch the Throne was two top-tier rappers getting together to have some fun. Both revealed that high-profile collabs are usually ego trips and not artistic revelations. Watch the Throne gave us "Niggas in Paris" and "No Church in the Wild;" Lulu gave us "Junior Dad;" both gave us a reason to never want our heroes to collaborate and hype said collaborations through the roof.

PJ Harvey, Let England Shake

Along with the unequivocally unimportant Bon Iver, Bon Iver, this was 2011's best-loved album. It's important for England. I want to leave it at that. What better album can England stand behind as a piece of the national canon? London Calling? Anything else? The West's asleep. Let England shake.

Fucked Up, David Comes to Life

An A.V. Club commenter with some pent-up snark argued on Hyden's article that this album was so acclaimed because it was important, and while I don't see that as a problem, they're probably right. I've said it a million times, but this punk-as-revolt-against-punk thing matters in 2011, as well as being the best record of the year.

Adele, 21

I don't particularly like that this album matters, but the fact that it sold better than any other album in 2011 says a lot about our priorities as a worldwide music-consuming community. The canon now must be revered. Subversiveness is not rewarded at the record store like it is on Pitchfork, plain and simple. Congratulations, Adele. You've dethroned autotune pop sleaze, but you've also dethroned innovation.

Liturgy, Aesthethica, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage, and Leviathan, True Traitor, True Whore

Three American black metal releases this year matter. Aesthethica was the ultimate debate-starter and apparently the album with the biggest crossover appeal. Celestial Lineage got an A.V. Club "A" and a Pitchfork Best New Music but sadly lost steam at year-end list time. Doesn't matter. It showed a band operating relatively within genre-safe limitations and still appealing to more than just the usual suspects. True Traitor, True Whore matters because it pushes art/artist separation to a whole new level. It's like Roman Polanski making a child rape movie or Michael Vick comparing his on-field performance to a dogfight. Making this violent, angry, brilliant album after being accused of sexual abuse was boneheaded but bold, and it made a lot of us grapple with issues we'd rather not grapple with. Well done, I guess, Wrest.

Terriers and The Arbor

Sorry for the silence on here the past couple of days. I've been working long hours and not really having the urge to write in my time off. I do have some time before I go in today and some stuff to write about, so here's something.


I watched Terriers, the canceled FX buddy cop drama (they're PIs, not cops, but come on, it's in the genre) over the course of about a week, and I absolutely loved it. I hate myself for not watching it when it was on the air and helping to delay its demise. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it's effortless fun, and when the stakes get high, they get just as high as they do on, say, Breaking Bad. Donal Logue is great as a highly competent, ex-alcoholic Dude-like slacker – although the fact that he looks just like a 1998 Jeff Bridges may be helping me see the similarities in the characters. Michael Raymond James is equally impressive as ex-con Britt Pollack, the partner to Logue's Hank Dolworth. The supporting cast is all excellent, too, with my personal favorite performance coming from Rockmond Dunbar as Detective Mark Gustafson, Hank's partner from when he was still on the force.

Whereas Breaking Bad has intensified so much from season to season that the funny moments have all but disappeared, Terriers is essentially a comedy in which dramatic things happen, or at the very least a truly hilarious drama. Logue and James' chemistry as they exchange one-liners –albeit sometimes painfully Sorkin-y ones – is natural and endlessly entertaining. To keep bringing Breaking Bad into it (and only because I consider it the gold standard for dramatic television, mind you, not necessarily because there's any deep similarities between it and Terriers), Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are a great leading duo, but riding around with them is never fun. The tension is too real.

What sucks most about Terriers' cancellation is how long it could have continued to be good. When Arrested Development was canceled, it was starting to recycle too many jokes and needed the impetus of cancellation to make its last few episodes as great as they were. The Netflix deal threatens this nearly perfect comedy series. Community's shelving earlier this year was a blessing in disguise. It's a mostly great show, but it was going to run out of cute episode ideas by halfway through S4 and realize that it hadn't developed its characters enough to build the remainder of the series around them. I, for one, hope it doesn't come back, at least not unless Dan Harmon radically reimagines the show. But Terriers could have kept being Terriers for four, five, six seasons without losing steam. They must have felt the network's breath on their necks, considering how neatly the overarching plot of the first season is tied up by the end of the last episode, but that moment as the credits roll and we don't know whether Britt and Hank are going to prison or Mexico, while a beautiful exercise in open-endedness, left me wanting to hit "next episode" on Netflix. Alas, I'll never be able to. R.I.P., Terriers. You could have been the best show on TV.



I also recently watched The Arbor, which may be the strangest film I've ever seen in terms of its approach to storytelling. It's a documentary. Sort of. Director Clio Bernard tells the story of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, her relationships with men, and the lives of the three children she left behind by conducting interviews with Dunbar's family and people who know her work and then having actors lip-synch their answers while aimlessly wandering locations relevant to the material. This is cut with a small amount of archive footage of Dunbar herself and snippets of a public performance of The Arbor, her first play, staged by Bernard himself. Once you get used to the film's conceit, it's just a harrowing narrative film that happens to be entirely true. Relative newcomer Manjinder Virk gives a performance as Dunbar's daughter Lorraine that, if the Academy had any idea what to do with such a strange film, would be garnering awards buzz. She's haunting as a mixed-race outcast who was 10 when her mother died and fell into a life of prostitution and drug abuse. The central discussions about The Arbor all center on Bernard's technique, and I feel like there's almost nothing I can say that hasn't been said, but know that beneath the veneer of a very cleverly told story, the story itself is strong enough to survive a more traditional approach to documentary filmmaking.

Some overstatements regarding Kate Bush's "The Kick Inside"

I haven't written about a film in a while on here, and that's because I'm working my way through Terriers. After that, I'm going to catch up on Justified. I still intend on seeing a few 2011 films I haven't seen yet before I wrap up that year-end list, but for now, expect some more music posts.

Tonight, I intend on asserting totally ridiculous things and barely defending them and asking you to go along with it. Okay, not exactly true. It's pretty widely accepted that The Kick Inside, the first album by Kate Bush, has grown to be thought of as a crucial entry in the canon of rock history. But I think it's responsible for an entire movement – not all of which I can defend – that I'll roughly define as "female auteur music." It's not a wholly accurate label, but it's useful.

Basically, if you're a fan of PJ Harvey, tUnE-yArDs, Joanna Newsom, Florence + the Machine, St. Vincent, or really any other musical act that's a) just a little odd and b) dominated by a female vocalist whose influence pervades every fiber of the music, you need to let The Kick Inside into your life.

Yeah, "Wuthering Heights" is the highlight here, an airy retelling of Heathcliff and Cathy's story brought to life by Bush's falsetto and a powerful David Gilmour-esque guitar solo. It remains Bush's only #1 hit in the UK, and it may hold up as her best song – although the 53 year old behind the excellent 50 Words for Snow probably hates hearing that about something she wrote when she was 19.

Beyond "Wuthering Heights" is a full album of boundary-breaking art rock at a time when that pseudo-genre was still being defined. There's things here that wouldn't be alien on a David Bowie or Peter Gabriel album from the same decade, but it's doing so much more. Before Kate Bush, there wasn't really a female voice doing something so avant-garde and so uniquely herself as The Kick Inside. Perhaps people like Joan Baez, Billie Holiday, Yoko Ono came close, but where the former two stuck to closely to the canon and the latter was too much of a weirdo to garner much crossover appeal without the presence of John Lennon, Bush brought prog rock's survivors and casual radio listeners and girl-power advocates under a banner that was both hummable and genre-defying. "Moving," "Feel It," "Oh to Be in Love," and "Them Heavy People" (to almost randomly name four high points) were challenging in four totally different ways but still managed to have devastating hooks that bury their way into the listener's brain after a single listen.

In some ways, The Kick Inside is the most important album to come out since the dawn of punk. If it had never happened, year-end lists would look might different not just this year but most every year since its 1978 release. So play "Wuthering Heights" one more time, remember why it kicks so much ass and, for God's sake, thank Kate Bush for her contributions.

The Consensus Top 10 Albums of 2011

So here's how I spent my evening. I took the year-end albums lists compiled by ten publications I arbitrarily chose to be representative of some kind of spectrum in music criticism, assigned points to just their top 10 spots (10 points for #1, 9 for #2 and so on), and added it up to find the "official" critics' picks for 2011. The top 10 list had a few minor surprises, but I thought this was a lot of fun, so enjoy the results:

1. Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver (44 points)
2. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (43 points)
3. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life (35 points)
4. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost (22 points)
5. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (20 points)
6-7. Destroyer - Kaputt/The Weeknd - House of Balloons (18 points)
8. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (16 points)
9-10. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l/Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica (15 points)

A few bullet-pointed thoughts:

• Three albums absolutely dominated this year as evidenced by the huge drop-off between Fucked Up and Girls.
• Oneohtrix Point Never! Whoa!
• Otherwise, this is pretty expected. The top three on here are by far the three best albums of the ten, and it's a little relieving that, say, Adele and Watch the Throne didn't sneak on.

The publications I sourced: SPIN and Rolling Stone for old-guard print media, Pitchfork and A.V. Club for middle-guard new media, Tiny Mixtapes and Stereogum for RADICAL NEW MEDIA, The Quietus and NME for jolly ol' England, IDS WEEKEND for college media, and Paste because people who hang out in Starbucks all the time and own cardigans from Hollister need music critics, too.

How David Comes to Life Came to Rule My Life

If you know me at all, you know my year has been all about Fucked Up's David Comes to Life. Today, I decided that it's my favorite album of all time, a suspicion I'd been harboring for a few months. Since I've only been listening to the damn thing for about seven months, I feel it's necessary to put lots of words next to other words and try to coherently explain why I love it so much. Also, I didn't watch any movies or listen to any new albums yesterday.

I remember the first time I heard David Comes to Life. I suppose I should, since it was just earlier this year, but I've listened to it so many times since – easily hundreds – that picking out a single listen has become more difficult.

The first time I ever heard this record, I only heard the first four songs or so. I was at my desk at the Quietus in London, where I was an editorial intern from May to July. My esteemed editor, Luke Turner, played the album through his computer speakers and asked me if I wanted to interview Fucked Up and go to their show at the Village Underground that week. I said I did, even though my familiarity with the band was limited to the vague awareness that Decibel really liked Hidden World. After the album played for about 15 minutes, Luke turned it off and gave me the promo CD, saying he couldn't take any more of that "fat bloke yelling at me." I love you, Luke, really I do.

I took the album back to my flat and played it straight through. I could tell I liked it, but not how much. It's a lot to take in – 18 songs, densely packed with riffs being played by three guitarists and the grating bark of frontman Damian Abraham, adding up to a rock opera. I listened to the record maybe two more times before my interview with bassist Sandy Miranda, which went about as well as you'd expect an interview with someone with as cursory a knowledge of Fucked Up's discography as mine was at that point to go.

But then there was the show.

Fucked Up are unparalleled as a live act. This was made evident by the two hours they bashed my skull in at London's Village Underground after my interview with Sandy. I had a can of Red Stripe, took my position on the rail, and was crushed by audience members and Damian alike. I'll talk more about another gig later, but for now, know that seeing Fucked Up live was my impetus to buy a copy of David Comes to Life for £9.99 at one of the big chain record stores within the week.

Once I had the CD, I started to really dive into the album. I was reading the booklet and playing it almost every day on my tube commute for the remainder of the summer. It climbed my year-end list from #10 to #1 in a matter of weeks, and by the time I was back in Bloomington for the fall semester, it dominated my thoughts. I wanted to attack it with a million thinkpieces from a million angles but fell short in writing any of them because of how impossibly close to the record I felt.

It also did something that can't be underrated in terms of why it's so important to me: It made me feel like I was 12 again. When you listen to and write about music for a living (or aspire to) you hear an awful lot of new albums. Even the good ones get shortchanged as you're constantly seeking out new stuff. It's not a curse; I think it's important to hear as much music as possible if you want to purport to be an authority on it. But it's a marked departure from the person I was when I discovered Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast the summer before 7th grade and wore my CD within an inch of its life. I used to do that with every album I heard, but by 2004, I was trying to hear enough albums to make well-reasoned year-end lists, and I had already started to move toward a quantity-over-quality model.

That's not how I approached David Comes to Life. I inhabited – and still do – everything about it, down to the last cymbal clash and strangled syllable. I read everything I could about it (I had done this with Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in junior high school, and this felt similar), I listened to it ad infinitum (between spins of other new stuff that I was, gulp, responsible for), and I began scrawling the cover art and lyrical passages all over my notebooks. Yeah, David Comes to Life definitely turned me into an adolescent again, and I totally embrace that. Tireless enthusiasm for music can't be seen as a bad thing for a music writer, after all.

I wouldn't say I seriously considered the album as a potential Best Album Ever Made candidate until November. After Fucked Up announced a Manhattan performance of David Comes to Life in its entirety, I jokingly texted my girlfriend to tell her that I knew what I wanted for my birthday. Clearly I didn't use enough winking emoticons, because on November 11th, I was on a LaGuardia-bound plane to see Fucked Up at Le Poisson Rouge.

As great as the band was in London, the full album set they played in New York is the best show I've ever been to, and I was able to decide that immediately after the concert. I put all that lyric learning to use by screaming into the mic throughout the night, I somehow cut my forehead open, and in the midst of one of the most stressful stretches of time of my entire life, I felt at peace with the world.

Unfortunately, I also owed the Quietus an article about the performance. I struggled through a few drafts that I knew were terrible but submitted anyway, drafts that were far too personal to be useful as accounts of what happened at the show. As I slowly edited them to a publishable form, I was forced to grapple with the fact that I would never be able to write remotely objectively about David Comes to Life or perhaps even Fucked Up ever again. I had become too close to the material. It wasn't a surprise, but it got me to thinking about how I'd never really thought that about anything else before. Could this be my favorite album ever? Am I okay with this?

I didn't declare it immediately, but David only grew on me more after the NYC concert. I was listening to it more than ever, easily crossing the 200-play threshold and leaving it God knows how far behind. The holiday season rolled around, and I received the gatefold double vinyl of the album in a gift exchange. Fast forward to yesterday.

Pitchfork.tv posted pro-shot video of the entire set from Le Poisson Rouge. I borrowed a record player from my friend to play the vinyl. I decided to dedicate my day to David Comes to Life. I watched the videos, played the record, and got the chills no less than 10 times. I was ready. This is my favorite album of all time, fuck it all.

I suppose that details my journey to accepting David into my personal canon, but it doesn't do a great job of telling exactly why I love it. Granted, there's plenty of x-factors in play, but it comes down more or less to these bullet-pointed ideas:

• It reminds me of when I was first getting into music. It stripped me of my cynicism.
• Its concept hooked me, but it doesn't detract from the songs themselves, which totally work without the extra context.
  
• Speaking of hooks...holy shit. I dare you not to get every song stuck in your head simultaneously after a few listens.
• All the intangibles – the poem included in the booklet, the cover art, the videos, the mythology of the characters that stretches into singles and comps and older releases – add to something that's so much more than the sum of its parts.
• The giant middle finger it represents toward the entire world. Oh, hey, punk rock world. You want us to write "Police" and "I Hate Summer" again? Fuck you, we're doing a 78-minute rock opera. Oh, hey, indie world. You want us to dial back the screaming? Fuck you, we're a goddamn hardcore band. This is the album Fucked Up wanted to make, and its passion oozes from every note.

So there you have it. Far too many words about my personal attachment to my Favorite Album Ever Made, Fucked Up's David Comes to Life. God let her rest, excelsior.

50/50 and BlackenedWhite

So I'm not going to talk about thinkpieces on here every day anymore. Writing about writing ain't my thing. So that's that. Moving on...

50/50, dir. Jonathan Levine: I finally saw 50/50 tonight, a solid two months after everyone I know finished raving about it. The terrible quality of the print and the screen at the dollar-saver theater I consumed it at aside, I thought it was...decent. It didn't break into my top ten films of 2011, but it did its job. I choked up at the right times, I felt the way about every character that I was manipulated to feel, and I wasn't disappointed when the credits rolled. But was it a great movie? Absolutely not. I don't mean to sound calloused, but there's nothing unique about Will Reiser's battle with cancer or the way his wacky-but-actually-deeply-thoughtful dudebro Seth Rogen dealt with it.

Cinematography-wise, nothing too interesting is going on here. The principal cast is consistently solid, but again, they're all essentially character types in a melodrama. The film shines when it ventures into comedic territory, and that makes Seth Rogen – a very comfortable funnyman – its best performance. One gets the sense that if Reiser had committed to a mostly funny script (thus foregoing some of the autobiography, but such is Hollywood) the movie would have been a lot better. None of the pathos is overwhelmingly effective; it just drifts through your consciousness with the minimum amount of effort required to feel sorry for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Reiser surrogate. It's a mostly lazy movie that works well when it goes for comedy but coasts through the rest of its duration.

MellowHype, BlackenedWhite: The rage that Tyler, the Creator's Goblin inspired this year – both because of its sexist, homophobic lyrics and the far worse fact that it was 80 boring minutes long – had a good portion of the critical community done with the non-Frank Ocean factions of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All once and for all. That caused the reissue of MellowHype's 2010 mixtape BlackenedWhite to go by mostly unnoticed, and while it is a slight album at 11 tracks and barely over 30 minutes, it's an interesting counterpoint to the silky-smoothness of Nostalgia, Ultra and the hateful vitriol of Goblin.

The beats here are great, as all Odd Future recordings with Left Brain's hands on them are, and Hodgy Beats' rapping is far superior to Tyler's. The lyrics here aren't very good, but it's not because Hodgy's a misogynist or a homophobe; it's because he's a kid. Think of the lyrics to Tyler's "Radicals" spread over the length of a whole album and you'll have some idea of the high-school-problems-obsessed nature of BlackenedWhite. Even so, this is a tragically overlooked hip-hop album that is infinitely better than Odd Future's more famous contribution to the genre's canon. With a few more listens, I can see it becoming one of my favorite rap records of the last couple years. Hopefully Wolf next year is even better. I'm not ready to quit on Odd Future just yet.

Moog, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm, "On the cutting room floor: a century of film censorship"

Moog, dir. Hans Fjellestad: I started to watch another film today, but it was a little too heavy for my mood, so I watched this documentary about Bob Moog, the creator of the Moog modular synthesizer. An engineer by trade with only a passing interest in music at the time of his invention, Moog arguably revolutionized popular music more than anyone has since the guitar went electric. It was cool to trace the history of this man and his great contribution, but the truth is, Bob Moog isn't a very interesting individual, and Hans Fjellestad clearly didn't know how to handle making a film with a central character whose invention far outshines him.

Moog talks a lot about how we're all tied to our surroundings and how his garden full of sweet peppers makes him feel at one with the Earth and how there's things that we can't explain and that the way musicians feel when they play their instruments may be an act of God. It's a load of rambling nonsense, for the most part. The film is at its best when Moog takes part in awkwardly staged meetings with musicians who are humbled by his presence and indebted to his synthesizer's contributions to their craft. Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, DJ Spooky and others pay tribute to the man while sharing a room with him, and there's several moments where I grinned in spite of myself to see these legends meet a man who should have no link to them but through a happy accident became integral to their lives.

I also thought it was interesting that the often critically reviled English progressive rock genre was responsible for the first integrations of experimental electronics into popular music. Their works might not hold up in the pages of SPIN or Rolling Stone today, but the beloved ambient, trip-hop, post-rock and any other movement that employs electronics owe them a debt for figuring out how to use synthesizers to their advantage before anybody else.

So Moog stands as a somewhat entertaining way to spend an hour and ten minutes (it's a short one) but ultimately fails as a documentary. There's a lot more to electronic music than this film lets on, and a wider scope would have served the material well.


Inquisition, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Microcosm: An album likely meant to be nothing more than a fun, rockin' black metal romp probably shouldn't make me question notions of the value of originality in art, but hey, I'm a critic, so here goes. Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Microcosm (hereafter Doctrines) is a very enjoyable hour of music. It's also a shameless ripoff of everything Immortal has done since 1999. It's better than Damned in Black and All Shall Fall, worse than Sons of Northern Darkness and At the Heart of Winter, and every song on it sounds like it was cut from the sessions of one of those albums. This presents a problem. Imitation isn't usually considered a very high form of art, but what happens when that imitation is actually better than some of the art it's imitating?

Ultimately, I can't enjoy Doctrines as much as I should because of how intimately familiar I am with what it pays such direct tribute to. Immortal is one of my favorite black metal bands, and in a universe where they don't exist but Doctrines comes out and sounds exactly the same way it does, it would probably be one of my favorite black metal albums. That isn't the universe we live in, though. Like Louis C.K. berating Dane Cook for even subconsciously stealing his material thus invalidating its worth, I can't take Inquisition seriously enough to call Doctrines great. Even as I bang my head along to it and get its (highly derivative) riffs stuck in my head, I can't get around what had to happen so it could exist, namely, the release of a handful of very similar albums by a superior act.

Apparently, Inquisition has been going for quite some time and didn't always sound this way. It's disappointing to know that they're finally getting international acclaim coinciding with their shift to the sound of a glorified cover band. If Inquisition was playing on a tour that I was already going to be attending, I'd enjoy their set, because when I saw Immortal in February, I enjoyed their set. But taken as a work of art, Doctrines doesn't hold up. Originality isn't everything, but there is a line somewhere between homage and plagiarism, and Inquisition doesn't straddle it with nearly enough care.

"On the cutting room floor: a century of film censorship," The Guardian: This piece by Andrew Pulver that appeared in last Friday's edition of the Guardian is an fascinating look at the differences between British film censorship in wartime (no "scenes calculated to afford information to the enemy" allowed), around the time of the release of Last Tango in Paris, and today. As it's easy to imagine, standards have been becoming more lax, but controversies still arise and advocacy groups still demand certain films receive certain ratings or even be banned in the United Kingdom.

What struck me most is that I'm actually rather impressed (and, as an American, annoyed) by the pragmatism of the British censors. The King's Speech, for example, was given a 12A rating without any cut because of the nature of its F-bomb sequence, whereas the hardline MPAA gave it an R rating and released it later with a PG-13 only after the speech therapy scene in which Colin Firth swears was cut out. It was a stupid debate that we had on American shores that, while slightly controversial in the UK, was solved in a sensible manner. As the 21st century proves itself to be more accepting of violence than swearing or sex, I only hope that the MPAA can be a bit more reasonable and begin to model itself after Britain's BBFC rather than Tipper Gore's PMRC.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/09/century-film-censorship/print

Meek's Cutoff, Past Life Martyred Saints, and SPIN's 50 Best Albums of 2011

Meek's Cutoff, dir. Kelly Reichardt: I first became interested in Meek's Cutoff when my friend and colleague Brian Welk told me he didn't care for it. That isn't to say our tastes are typically so divergent that I check stuff out just because he doesn't like it, but he dropped a word that no one should drop around me: Western. I went through a solid year earlier in my college career where I watched a couple new Westerns a week, constantly trying to expand my repertoire, if only so I could understand all the callbacks in Once Upon a Time in the West. The Coen Brothers' True Grit remake was one of my favorite films of last year, so a critically acclaimed 2011 Western was just what I wanted to watch tonight, and after the A.V. Club named in the 5th-best movie of the year, I had the impetus to hit play. It might go without saying, but I absolutely loved the film.

If John Ford made the Old West into a playground for Oddysean hero's journeys, Leone and Peckinpah complicated things with their uncomplicated violence, and Eastwood buried all legends with Unforgiven, the most uncompromising portrait of the American frontier yet may be Kelly Reichardt's. No one is killed in Meek's Cutoff. Horses never move any faster than a trot. There isn't a lawman or an outlaw or even a town. In this film, the West is a place without border or definition, where would-be settlers wander without water or a map, looking for their place in a virgin land. Some writers have argued that nothing happens in Meek's Cutoff, and while that's a weak criticism because things totally do happen, it's also irrelevant, because the typical experience of the Old West (the Oregon Trail in particular, here) wasn't the world of Stagecoach or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Those are fantastic films, but Reichardt sets out to do something entirely different, and she succeeds.

Even so, there is homage to both Ford and Leone in the visual language that Reichardt employs. There are infinite, gorgeous long shots that shine in spite of the bizarre 4:3 aspect ratio, and close-ups show hardened expressions on people who deserve to look hardened. Great performances from Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and especially a hirsute Bruce Greenwood brilliantly fill out Reichardt's world, and Rod Rondeaux is terrific as an subtitles-free Native American whose life hangs in the balance as the caravan decides whether to kill him or ask him to help them find water.

Meek's Cutoff isn't entertaining like the True Grit remake was, and the stakes aren't high enough to call it this year's There Will Be Blood or No Country for Old Men. But it is nonetheless a fantastic, harrowing motion picture that looks to do quite well when I get around to making a final year-end list.


EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints: It's difficult for me to picture Erika M. Anderson in a punk band, but a (very cursory) skimming of the background of her solo project EMA seems to suggest that she very recently was, as a part of Gowns. Past Life Martyred Saints is sometimes aggressive and noisy, but it never crosses into any territory that I'd feel comfortable tagging as punk. It's an interesting album that's driven by a couple really strong single-like cuts in "California" and "Butterfly Knife," and its high placement on the year-end lists for both SPIN (more on that later) and The Quietus, not to mention its Pitchfork Best New Music back in May, had me curious enough to check it out after months of neglect.

It won't have me reconsidering my top albums list for the year. I have no doubts that this is one of those "reveals its greatness on further listens" records, but this blog only really works with snap reactions. Mine with this album isn't nearly complicated or interesting enough for me to be proud of it, but I essentially found Past Life Martyred Saints to be an indie folk album dolled up with some swear words and electronics. It isn't consistently noisy enough to sell me on its strengths as a noise album, but it uses noise as an excuse to cut tracks that don't stand alone as great works of songwriting, which is all folk really has going for it at the end of the day. Pretty big disappointment.

I also revisited Touché Amoré's Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me today, and that went considerably better. Great record.

SPIN's 50 Best Albums of 2011: I know I said this would usually be about essays and thinkpieces, but hey, it's list season and this was my favorite one I've seen yet, so I wanted to give it a shout out. It's the first list besides my own that I've seen place Fucked Up's David Comes to Life at #1, and PJ Harvey's Let England Shake coming in a #2 (it was my #4) is similarly inspiring. Issues include Girls and The Rapture both inside the top 10 (yikes) and the inclusion of Liturgy over Wolves in the Throne Room as an indie-safe black metal choice, as good as that Liturgy album is. Great list overall, though, and I can't wait to pick up the issue next Tuesday.

To rust unburnished

Hello, reader.

Since Blogspot lets you have unlimited accounts, I'm going to force myself to consume media and write every single day of winter break so I return to campus for spring semester a stronger writer rather than a weaker one.

Every day, I'm going to watch a film I've never watched, listen to an album I've never heard, and read a thinkpiece/essay I've never read. Then, I'm going to write some criticism about all three of those things on here.

If that's something you want to read for the next month or so, then please, by all means, follow. I get that this is mostly for me, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't mind an audience.

Excelsior.