Top 10 Albums of 2009

2009 was a weird year in music for me. It was the first time since I started writing record reviews for INK19.com (which would have been 2003 I think) that I almost completely and consciously tuned out the year's output. I know I reviewed a few albums this year, most of which were fine, but nothing, aside from a few friends' bands, stood out and stuck around in regular rotation. I still discovered some new-to-me music and had some albums by old favorites click better than they ever had before. My Top 10 of 2009 reflects the bands and albums that kept me excited. These are in no particular order.

Low - "Secret Name" and "Trust"
"Things We Lost in the Fire" gets lauded too often as Low's best album and usually it's because whoever's doing the talking thinks that it was when they finally broadened their slow-core template (i.e. there are horns on "Dinosaur Act"). Anyone paying attention though would know that there's a lot of experimentation going on under the codified surface of minimal instrumentation and perfect vocal melodies. "Secret Name" and "Trust" bookend "Things We Lost in the Fire" and taken as a trilogy, represents the band's best most focused songwriting and recording period. Low works with such a slight sound palette that it stands to reason they need a producer skilled a capturing the power behind their performances in order to do their songs justice. Steve Albini recorded "Secret Name" (and "Things We Lost...") and there's a palpable difference between his take of the band. Low's previous albums all felt hazy in that ethereal 4ad way, but now they were grounded, vast, stark and thunderous. Every snare it of "Weight of the Water" feels like an exploding bomb and the cathartic release at the end of "Starfire" burns brighter and more naturally than anything they did on their "rock" album "The Great Destroyer." "Trust" (recorded by Tom Herbers) was cut in a Duluth church and utilized the natural reverb of the building's acoustics to bring back some ethereality to their sound. There's a much more chaotic vibe running through tracks like "Candy Girl" and "Shots & Ladders," but most notably the songwriting and arrangement this time around is rock solid and much better than their subsequent efforts.

New Order - "Brotherhood" & "Technique"
No one ever talks about New Order's 1986 masterpiece"Brotherhood" and I don't understand why. "Power, Corruption and Lies," while a stellar album and definitely the best encapsulation of the band's robo-pop predilections also feels full of too many variations on the "Blue Monday" beats. "Brotherhood," on the other hand, is the band writing at its most "organic." The programmed drums are still there, as are the many synth treatments, but, thankfully, these are done tastefully. Most of the record's songs are based around actual guitar, bass and drum interplay. "Every Little Counts" is one of the group's most simple, beautiful songs and it's little more than Bernard Sumner's voice and Peter Hook's bassline. 1989's "Technique" hasn't nearly stood the test of time nearly as well. It was recorded in Ibiza and, unfortunately, has the taint of that region's questionable dance music tattooing a couple of the tracks. Still, there are a number of songs that are among New Order's best: "All the Way," "Love Less" and "Vanishing Point."

International Airport - "Reunion of Island Goose"
I've been looking for this album for years and finally picked it up on Amazon. The band is kind of Scottish lo-fi supergroup composed of folks from The Pastels, Appendix Out, Teenage Fanclub and the like. Their debut album "Nothing We Can Control" came out in 2000 and still probably ranks as on of my favorites of all-time. On that record they sounded like half a Scots Pavement, half Ennio Morricone melodica orchestra. It. was. great. On this one they lost a substantial bit of their luster, but it's still a fun listen and tracks like "Association" and "Cordial Arrest" are epitomes of what shambling pop songs should be.

Iggy Pop - "Lust For Life"
Of course I've listened to this album before. And of course I've loved it for years. It just took me this long to recognize that "Neighborhood Threat" is one of the best songs ever written.

Crescent - "By the Roads and the Fields" & "Little Waves"
Crescent is the only band on this list that was unknown to me prior to this year. I've been enamored with their sister band, Movietone, for about five years so I'm not sure how this is possible. Crescent (and Movietone) is composed of folks from Bristol, UK involved in the messy, noisy music scene there that spawned Flying Saucer Attack. Over the course of the year I picked up Crescent's entire back catalog which ranged from white noise punk through odd sound collages of instructional dialogue and sinister key/bass treatments. By the time the band recorded "By the Roads..." and "Little Waves" they'd mellowed considerably. Both albums are predominantly acoustic, but are no less sonically ambitious. Both albums have tapped into a strong vein of dark dub, which gives the tracks an echoing, ghostly feeling. They feel like night, like fog. On top of that, songwriter Matt Jones threads some interesting field recordings of various beach creatures (geese, seals) to ground the sound even more into an eerie, not-quite-familiar natural world.

David Bowie - "Station to Station" & "Heroes"
Sure, I feel a little bad that "Heroes" hadn't entered into my sphere of musical knowledge before now. It's a classic in form and tone; sleek, refined, robotic, alien, dark and paranoid. I'd be tempted to call it my favorite Bowie album, if I hadn't become reacquainted with "Station to Station" this year. This one, for whatever reason, has fallen through the cracks when it comes to Bowie's back catalog. Sure, aside from "Golden Years" there aren't any singles, but as the link between the blue-eyed soul of "Young Americans" and the cold electronics of his Berlin trilogy, it's pretty great. Most of the songs have minimal vocals, cycling through their rhythms and melodies for five or six minutes. There's so much cocaine-fueled clockwork soul in the title track, "Golden Years" and "TVC-15" and the ballads... "Word on a Wing" and "Wild is the Wind" are a perfect emotional comedown foil to the other tracks' hedonism.

The Schreiber Theory

Yesterday I read David Kipen's The Schreiber Theory, a screenwriter-centric counterpoint to the longstanding auteur theory -- that it's the director whose overriding vision shapes a film. Kipen rightly points out how, for the sake of film history, it's worthwhile to thematically consider writers' filmographies (although it's a nearly impossible task to retroactively undertake given how poorly records have been kept, leaving many writers uncredited or mis-credited), but I think he's mistaken in thinking the shift of star-power focus from producer to director in the '60s and '70s predicates that there will be a similar shift from focus on the director to the screenwriter now. If anything, with an increasing number of films being shot digitally and cheaply rather than on budget-constricted celluloid there's less call for films to be fully formed before shooting begins. The editor seems like a better slot to build a film theory around for the upcoming century.

Carefree

Watched Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers' Carefree (1938) this afternoon. I've never been big on musicals and I'm now making an effort to get accustomed to (and maybe even like) them. I enjoyed this one, but mostly for its non-musical elements. The plot revolves around Tony Flagg (Astaire), a psychologist who's commissioned by his friend Steve (Ralph Bellamy) to psychoanalyze Amanda Cooper (Ginger Rogers) in order to determine why she keeps breaking off their engagement. Of course, Tony and Amanda through their antagonistic/playful interaction fall in love and the screwball situations ensue. It's not a weighty story, but there are some pretty great scenes involving Amanda going on a destructive rampage under the influence of a sedative and, later, trying to kill Tony with a shotgun due to hypnosis-gone-awry. The best scene, though, is the song and dance number "I Used to be Color Blind" which is played out in a slow-motion dream sequence. It's an eerily beautiful and simple scene. For me, production on this scale works much more effectively than the few big-budget '50s musicals I've seen and it makes me interested in checking out the other movies starring these two.

A Mission Statement

Right now I'm thinking that this blog will be primarily concerned with movie reviews, the occasional record review, and sporadic pictures/comments on whatever awesome food stuffs my girlfriend and I cook up.