REGARDING MY NOVEL

I'm about to do something incredibly self-indulgent, something that a blog should never, ever do: I'm going to write about myself.  Recently I finished writing my first novel in years — the first novel I've finished since my sophomore year of college, in fact. Sometime in the next week, I will be sending this novel out for friends to read.  I've been telling people since last summer that the novel was "almost done" and that was always true — it has been written since last May, but it took a lot of editing and a lot of rereading to get it this close to "almost done."  There were interruptions and other stories that sidetracked me, but mostly, I just didn't want to waste anyone's time, much less my own.  My novel very well might suck, but I needed that time to get it as close to "not sucking" as I could manage.  So this entry isn't necessarily here to share anything profound about the writing process, but merely stand as my record of everything that brought me to this point.  By all means, ignore this entry.  However, so that I might one day look back and remember what it took to write the first novel that I was moderately (possibly very) happy with—

It went like this.

I was probably listening to "The Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the time. It's an almost unbearably creepy song, extremely inspiring, and I was living in Bushwick back then — as close as you can get to the end of the world while still paying rent.  I've always been fascinated with the concept of apocalypse, a downfall of society, and almost all of my stories end up being about entropy in some way. This was around August 2007, a few months after I graduated college and moved to Brooklyn.  I had been kicking around some related story ideas for a few years by then, even attempting to start a similar novel during my senior year of college (and giving up after the first page).  The sudden rush I got then (based on little more than a whim, really) became impossible to ignore, so I quickly tossed a plot together and began to write.  I no longer remember what exactly I was going for with that 1st Draft, but much of the story only became clear in the later stages of writing.  To a large, possibly-unhealthy extent, the project was a sort of tribute to the bands that inspired me to write it — I even titled it after an album by A Silver Mt. Zion called Born Into Trouble As the Sparks Fly Upwards.  My goal was to capture the mood I found in those albums.  So I wrote.  Sometime around February or March of 2008, after not-quite half a year of writing, I had reached page 200 and completely run out of steam.  I had enough ideas to wrap it up, but I'd realized them too late, and the plot I had constructed was over-thought and punishingly rigid, giving me nothing to work with and few characters worth working for.  I was in the third act, within sight of the novel's end, but I could write no more than a line or two at a time.  So I quit.

It was a depressing thing to give up on that draft — the closest I had come to finishing a novel in four years. I couldn't do it — finish it, or quit it.  Eventually, I decided to read the whole thing over to see what I was dealing with and hopefully pick up some inspiration.  I knew I liked a few of the ideas, but actually reading the story, I understood that it was awful.  Flimsy, cheesy and poorly executed.  So I went back to the beginning.  The first section in particular was extremely weak, a cheap copout in terms of plot and set-up, but even in considering what I didn't like about this 1st Draft of my novel, I became determined to see it through.  It would take a great deal of work to make it worthwhile, I knew, but I had come too close to quit altogether. So I wrote a new first scene.  It came out significantly improved, enough to encourage me, but I had to flesh out its events a great deal, and suddenly it no longer matched the scene after it.  For the next few months, I wallowed, and procrastinated, and ignored.  I knew, any time I glanced at that messy draft, that very little of it was salvageable.  I would have to start over completely.

Sometime in the fall of 2008, a year after I'd begun, something spurred me to get back at it.  I began with that new intro, figuring I would merge it into my 1st Draft eventually, maybe after I rewrote the first "section" to make it all consistent.  When that didn't happen, when the writing demanded to be new and unaltered, I thought — maybe the next section.  Or the next.  But it never happened.  That 1st Draft was total shit, and it's all gone.  There might be three or four heavily-edited paragraphs from that draft remaining in the entire final novel — that's crazypants man.  The plot is greatly altered as well, retaining its general shape and many of the same points but basically 100% reworked in content.  It's interesting to me how certain settings and scenes morphed into something totally different while retaining the same basic shape, but I don't want this to turn into an audio commentary track (besides, the plot is highly confidential).  What at first was a largely action-driven novel featuring "epic" battle scenes and many inconsequential side characters has been shaped into a primarily character-driven, introspective meditation on memory, identity, and the unspoken mechanics of relationships.  Though I originally went for broad, tedious social / political / religious jabs, I realized I'm a pretty bad writer of social satire.  I can leave that to others.  Instead, I tried to recognize the sort of story I had been writing from the beginning, toy with its structure and subvert the expectations I had created (and believed myself, at first).  It's still a heavily plotted novel — in a rather unique and appropriate way, I hope — but it took that second vision to refine what scraps of inspiration I had in the first. 

More interesting to me than the abandoned "Shitty" 1st Draft is the huge amount of work I had left even after writing the "Way-Too-Long" 2nd Draft.  After writing the last sentence on May 19, 2009,  I was facing a manuscript of 170,000 words. If published in standard print size, that would be almost 600 pages, give or take.  (The average novel published today is between 70,000 and 100,000 words, though some genres lean toward 150,000).  Since I wasn't trying to write a fantasy epic, I knew I had to cut a lot — almost as daunting of a task as that 1st Draft rewrite.  But it was fairly easy to cut.  I might even say I massacred that draft, hacked it to bits, and I'm awfully glad I did.  I went through 2nd Draft, 3rd Draft, Beta and eventually Release Candidate.  Despite removing an entire novel's worth of words by the time I was done, I feel the final draft is unquestionably more developed and detailed. This is standard procedure for a novel, I'm sure, but I still find it amazing how much effort is required in the editing process — it's probably more work than writing the damn thing in the first place.  Of course, that's also what I get for going in without a solid gameplan, something I'll undoubtedly try to remedy in the future.  But now, at long last, I've ended up with As the Sparks Fly Upwards — 104,000 words, content-complete, ready, but still not entirely finished.

Boo-yah achieved.

THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN (BY) SHERMAN ALEXIE

Published 1993, 240 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B+
Plot/Pacing: N/A
Poignancy: B+

It's telling that, for all the vivid, attention-grabbing prose in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, there's barely any description of scenery or setting.  Sherman Alexie's first published book, a collection of short stories, shows us a reservation where alcoholism, marital problems, basketball, and poverty have become almost mystic. Alexie is interested in the struggles of Indians in contemporary America, turning their faults and failings into a new Indian tradition, a culture of Shakespearean Fatal Flaws.  Through interconnected vignettes, memories and fantasies, stories are whittled down to the essence of character's emotions and then mythologized into some kind of Indian lore.  It's both a strength and missed opportunity — for all we're shown about how Indians think and act amongst each other, Fistfight in Heaven certainly doesn't reveal much context.  We get a few clues — lots of gas stations, hitchhiking along the highway, various cities around Washington, and a slew of problems that seem to suggest these places are inescapable — but unless you've been to the geographical region in question, these tragedies seem almost to take place in a floating, disembodied wasteland. And in that sense, you don't have to be an Indian to understand the suffering here, though it would certainly help to explain where it all comes from.

Alexie's characters are both stereotypes and justifications, full of idiosyncrasies that we're told again and again are uniquely Indian and thus transcendent.  Still, the plight of these characters shouldn't seem too alien to anyone — as long as you're at least somewhat familiar with drunkenness, abuse, poverty, alienation and failure.  Alcoholism is such a common theme that it almost fades into the background, lost in the weight of the cultural burdens these characters drag around with them.  The prose, too, is ambiguous enough to leave readers at the risk of their own interpretations, noticeably similar to poetry in both style and substance.  Stories are held together by metaphorical non-sequiturs and extended poetic abstraction, all of which is well written and intelligently conceived, but leaned upon so heavily that the reader's appreciation will likely come down to their threshold for such devices.  Fortunately, Alexie is wise enough to not force any of the character's burdens too hard on the reader, his prose skipping nimbly around either explanations or solutions, and so there's little in the way of redemption here.  There is, however, a great deal of casual racism on both sides, something that is undoubtedly a reality for people in and around an Indian reservation.  As Alexie never goes far beyond his main characters' heads, there's no real depth to these prejudices, and it begins to seem a little too much like Alexie is providing his readers with a reassuringly-sophisticated, book-shaped confessional into which they can dump their white guilt.

Though Fistfight in Heaven steers more toward "interesting" or "thought-provoking" than entertaining or even relateable, it is admirable for its unique voice and examination of a people often ignored by literature and film.  One begins to see how there can be nobility in failure and suffering, and despite the stereotypes and cultural confusion these characters seem to wrap around themselves like a protective blanket, the emotions are genuine, the pain easily, uncomfortably felt.

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2009 (EDITED BY) ALICE SEBOLD

Published 2009, 368 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: n/a
Plot: n/a
Pacing: n/a
Poignancy: n/a

My standard critical breakdown obviously doesn't apply to short story anthologies, so, instead, I'm going to sum up my feelings on this collection here and now, before I delve into specifics.  I suppose I'm judging this book with rather high standards — which I think is fair, considering its title and potential.  Yet even on more lenient grounds, TBASS-2009 is wildly uneven: the first half (a full 150 pages) contains only two or three stories of mild interest, and while the second half is a vast improvement, even many of the better pieces are closer to competent than profound. 

This review will likely end up seeming quite harsh, but I don't want to suggest that any of the writers featured here aren't good at what they do — they are.  The writing is extremely competent.  The problem is that it's rarely anything more than that.  Often competency is enough to make for a good collection, but here, among the "Best," it simply feels underwhelming and lazy.  Too many of these stories seem "safe", something that writing should never be, especially in a form as dangerous as the short story.  Short stories have many uses, their own unique devices and advantages, and there are many out there as detailed and revelatory as a good novel — which is why it's all the more distressing to wade through dozens of mundane shorts that are about exactly what you'd expect them to be about and fail to make any statement beyond their predictable ambiguities.  I'm beginning to wonder if modern authors think that the less you say in a story, the more profound it will somehow be.  Don't get me wrong, subtlety is a necessity in exceptional writing — it's just that subtlety, on its own, doesn't make writing exceptional.  Perhaps new writers have observed too many classics in which this difficult trick has been successfully achieved, and then decided to take it one step further, removing even metaphor and emotion.  Characters in a bland story do little, learn little, and often fail to accomplish what little was possible for them to accomplish in the first place — just like life!  But life is not automatically a story, and suddenly your understated vignette is so very, very far from achieving the all-important mark of memorability. 

Fortunately, as the collection continues, the stories become more entertaining by degrees.  As mentioned already, my ultimate problem is that too few of them leave a mark — not the harshest or most damning of critiques, of course, but something I can't ignore.  There are too many safely open-ended conclusions, too many passive characters, timid narrative glances at poignancy. It's unfortunate, as many of these pieces are extremely solid on their own, and it's a shame to see them somewhat buried.  It should also be mentioned that none of the stories in this collection are remotely daring in regard to content, which isn't even an issue — a story about a woman contemplating divorce while on vacation is gripping when well told.  That's the whole point — an author's job is to make their presentation engaging and meaningful, and the dullest daily drama should thus become fascinating and fresh, just as the most outlandish action-packed spectacle can be tedious in the clumsy hands of a poor storyteller.

Interestingly, many of the best stories aren't set in contemporary America at all.  Two notable pieces take place in modern China; one perfectly-pitched tale in an unnamed WWII-stricken city ("The Briefcase," one of my favorites in the collection); a sublime period piece by the author of Brokeback Mountain once again demonstrates the versatility of familiar settings and archetypes, and its counterpoint, the charmingly odd "The Peripatetic Coffin," shows us the men behind the first ever successful submarine attack.  A few stories in the collection do achieve poignancy, revealing the fine line between a well-told dull character piece and a well-told engaging character piece — such as the masterfully crafted "Magic Words," or "Sagittarius," a meditation on parenthood that should not be confused for fantasy.  One of the best, however, is also the most ambitious.  "Modulation" attempts to examine the role of music in contemporary society from a variety of disjointed angles, culminating in a daring twist.  There are other satisfying stories that I haven't mentioned by name, but only a few authors that I look forward to reading again in the future. It's rare to find an anthology where all the stories are great, of course, but equally strange to find one where all the best are hidden in the back.

LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER (BY) JOHN IRVING

Published 2009, 554 pages

Characters: C
Writing: B-
Plot: C-
Pacing: C
Poignancy: B-

John Irving clearly knew that he had to make up for his last two novels, which were... unfortunate. Last Night in Twisted River is his rebuttal, and at least it isn't awful.  There are some lovely settings and ideas present, but the story lacks — disjointed and sloppy, at times even unintentionally hilarious, Irving never quite pulls off the trademark black humor that made his earlier novels so endearing.  Instead, Irving is so keen on plundering his own life and trying to throw readers for a loop — readers who may have noticed that he writes about the same things with such frequency that Wikipedia literally has a checklist of "recurring themes" for each of his novels — that the book ends up being little more than a wink wink nudge nudge exercise in authorial playfulness.

Twisted River is, like most Irving novels, a life story from beginning to end. The focus rarely strays from Irving-surrogate Danny and his father Dominic — relegating other characters to offstage observations and inconsequential actions — and yet by the end neither are particularly memorable. Irving's obsession with writing about famous writers means that he's created his own sort of generic stock character by now, one he can't seem to develop any further. It doesn't help that Twisted River is almost hellbent on avoiding complex sexual relationships, or even familial ones beyond the two main characters.  Danny's son is a major instigator in the last half of the plot, but he barely receives any page time and almost zero dialogue. In fact, that's true of most characters, who seem to exist just beyond the pages of the novel — even the main characters. The story is never immediate, never moving forward at the same time you are, as if you're supposed to hunt it down yourself.  Irving writes with his usual playfully omniscient authorial voice, imparting details and backstory with the casual, easily-distracted air of an uncle rambling on about family history, but in Twisted River he gets hopelessly bogged down by pointless tangents and loses sight of any narrative momentum.

Take, for example, a subplot about an old local cop chasing the two main characters around the country, trying to kill them. In any other novel it would've been the focus of the story, because it's too distracting to function as a minor background element. Here, it's briefly mentioned every now and then. Worse yet, the threat is never once believable. An 86 year old cop who's still hunting a father and son after five decades — yes, five decades — because of an accident that happened fifty years ago? Maybe this would work (maybe) if the cop had received even a little bit of page time, or been described as more menacing than a fat, stupid, illiterate alcoholic. It's almost hilariously misguided, a bizarre reverse MacGuffin, because all it manages to do is move the characters from place to place occasionally.

Twisted River reads like various unrelated stories jumbled together with little coherency, none of which were very good to begin with. In the last 100 pages, Irving spends a few chapters having his character rant about George Bush and Iraq. These political tangents go absolutely nowhere — they literally just pop up with no introduction right before the end, go on for a few chapters and then vanish, having introduced absolutely nothing to the story except Irving's political views. More bizarre is that they come at a point in the novel when Irving can't afford to be treading water. In the last two scenes, Irving introduces a ridiculous deus ex machina that's meant to be cute and uplifting but succeeds only in befuddling. Still not content, he then tosses his faithful readers a cutesy metafictional twist that does little but offer a new explanation for why this book isn't very good: maybe if Irving had spent more time actually coming up with a story and less time fishing for a weighty-sounding first line, there would be more substance between his linguistic hooks. Alas, he didn't, and John Irving's writing isn't nearly as good as he seems to think it is — it's quirky and full of personality, to be sure, but by the end of the book I was incredibly sick of Irving constantly writing over my shoulder, jumping up and down and clapping his hands at every cute little linguistic trick he kind-of pulls off. If you ever want to die by alcohol poisoning, just play a drinking game where you take a sip every time Irving uses italics for emphasis (or adds a narrative hint in parentheses — he loves both).

I'm sad to say, this will probably be my Last Night in John Irv— you know what? Fuck it.

TOP X ALBUMS OF MMIX: I

I. Sol Eye Sea i (by) Irepress
Progressive/ Psychedelic / Metal / Hardcore / Electronica

Without even getting into the first impression left by the purpley madness on the cover, it's hard to know what to expect going into Sol Eye Sea i.  And after listening, it's hard not to become defensive when spreading the good word — successfully describing to anyone else what you heard is going to be as easy as convincing them you just saw Sasquatch.  Any album as chimerical as Sol Eye Sea, by all logic, should be a mess — and maybe it is a little messy, but damn does it work.

When bands attempt to mix divergent styles together, it can usually go one of several ways.  There are "generic style + additional instrument" bands (folk metal, chamber pop), or bands which write individually unique songs, almost like they're composing a mixtape (Gorillaz, etc.). The danger is always that nothing syncs on a compositional level, and Irepress wisely fuses their influences into a cohesive sound that permeates everything from their selection of tones to the background guitar filler. At various moments on Sol Eye Sea, you'll find these guys re-imagining and re-appropriating prog-rock, post-hardcore, trip-hop, electronica, post-rock and something I'm going to call "Eastern math-sludge metal", sprinkled with handclaps, group-chant vocals, howled screams and nonsensical phonetics, haunting strings, piano, glitch, and a guitar that sounds like a bagpipe.  Oh yes — and soundclips from The Goonies remixed breakbeat style.

I'll try to explain why all this works so well, but I want to note that obviously many people aren't going to agree with me. By virtue of its uniqueness, some listeners will find Sol Eye Sea strange and indigestible.  But to suggest that this is quantity over quality, or some such glib dismissal, would be a gross misunderstanding of what Irepress is doing. The album works because the many style-shifts and quirks aren't simply staggered one after the other; this is a band whose every chord progression and interlude is rich with identity. Even so, style can only get an artist so far. Many critically acclaimed experimental acts — particularly those that incorporate electronic elements — leave me feeling cold emotionally, distant from the music and bored. Take indie-darlings Battles, a band that treads superficially kind-of similar territory as Irepress.  The members of Battles certainly possess musical chops, throwing together so many disparate technical tricks that every hip music blog seems to adore them. But the end result strikes me as only superficially "interesting" music. It's the same problem that a lot of prog-[whatever] faces: each element is there just to be there, and taken apart, each is boring on its own, innovative only so far as its proximity to all those other cute little tricks and odd time signatures. No element of the music is unique to the band; nothing defines their sound. 

Irepress, on the other hand, could never be mistaken for anything else but Irepress, and anyway, they're far too earnest to be hip and too fun to be pretentious. They understand that they need to take their time with their creativity, to pace themselves, and it's a large part of the album's success. There's certainly a lot going on, but importantly, never too much at once.  The tones and effects successfully navigate the fine line between "unique" and "tacky" — whereas the latter would amount to no more than sounds chosen for their strangeness, everything here relates to everything else, making each unexpected turn a textured revelation of tone instead of just a quirky "hey, let's add a theremin!" moment.  In other words, the music is coherent enough to work instead of gimmicky enough to distract you from the fact that it doesn't.

There is space on Sol Eye Sea, and a lot of it — even the first listen gives an impression of an experience. Instead of rushing at you headfirst and pummeling you into attention, Irepress makes music that moves with the flow of some half-crazed mosh-pit breakdown — picture those heavy, deliberate steps, swaying arms, the unpredictable energy, the sudden surge of momentum, the boot that comes out of nowhere and knocks you on your ass. When you look back up, no one seems to be moving very fast, they're just doing their little dance, but things could turn raucous at any moment.  If I really had to get specific, describing Sol Eye Sea?  It's like getting into a Drunken Master style mosh-pit throwdown with Buckethead at a Buddhist-themed discotheque... in space.  You know how there are bands where you can listen to a split-second splash of sound and immediately say "Oh, that's David Gilmour, innit."  Irepress is like that. Dancing mixed with metal? Breakdowns composed as segments of a movement instead of gimmicky transitions? Progressive music that's so fun and engaging you feel like you're on drugs, instead of just assuming the musicians were? They pull it off. This is truly 2009's classic, at least within my collection — and since Irepress aren't likely to spawn many imitators, they will likely remain one of the most original and inventive bands in music today.

TOP X ALBUMS OF MMIX: II

II. Daisy (by) Brand New

Indie / Post-Hardcore / Noise-Rock

Brand New releases an album. The majority of critics give it fantastic reviews. The majority of Brand New fans hear the album, realize it sounds nothing like their last album and immediately hate it. Half of Brand New's fans bail. Well, they're not a band for casual listeners, and this music is anything but: dense and schizophrenic, listening to Daisy is meant to be an unsettling experience. The band has claimed they'd rather make an album that 50% of people hate and 50% of people love than album that everyone kind-of likes, and that's exactly what you have here.

Brand New's lyrical themes have always come together with a clash of contrasts, balancing the narcissism of youth with frontman Jesse Lacey's obsession with death. Songs often seemed to capture a particular sort of violent, spontaneous human interaction, even if heavily buried in metaphor. After a few spins of Daisy, it seems inevitable in hindsight that their sound would shift toward such dynamics as well. Brand New have become full-on composers of noise, dissonance and bizarre inversions. Rather than writing hooks, the band teases twisted squeals and frenetic shredding out of their instruments, savoring every strange tone. Backing guitars sometimes provide rhythm—and sometimes rumble forward in the mix with a sound like a chainsaw revving. This, in the end, is why Daisy works so well: when Brand New does something, they do it well, and I've heard few other bands that are able to use background instrumentation to such unique effect, or craft unorthodox dissonance with such personality.

Daisy is perfectly produced to capture the whole unsettling unfair, and the compositions are so detailed and well-constructed as to make the madness accessible. It was always atmosphere that drew me to Brand New, after all—a sense of mood and tone that their contemporaries lacked before and utterly abandoned by now. Thanks to a clanky, textured tone and aggressive presence in the mix, the bass guitar ends up being one of the most interesting elements on the album. But all instruments serve two roles—you'll also find that same bass doing epically fuzzy slides through the chorus of "You Stole", creating an effect that sounds not-unlike a whale giving birth. It's but one aspect of the tense unpredictable energy that carries the album. Many reviewers and detractors have made comparisons to The Jesus Lizard (or Modest Mouse) and Nirvana. While Brand New has always admitted inspiration from these (and many other) bands, the differences remain stark: where the previous bands chug away at songs with raucously loose, drunken energy—creating the dynamic instability which evokes these comparisons—Daisy is both more conscious of its unbalanced style and unhinged in its execution, creating more forceful guitar delivery, far tighter song structures and a more textured take on "noise rock" aesthetics.

That a band is able to adapt their style so casually while still retaining the sensibilities that make each album recognizably Brand New is no small accomplishment—but each album has to be good on its own, for its own merits, and Daisy succeeds against all odds (and in spite of its flaws, which are certainly there). It isn't a perfectly executed album, nor a contender for their best, but I found myself listening to Daisy more than any other album in 2009. Brand New is clearly a little bit crazy—enough to piss off the people who buy their albums and thereby ensure that they keep putting out good ones.

TOP X ALBUMS OF MMIX: III

III. From Fathoms (by) Gifts From Enola

Post-Rock / Shoegaze / Post-Hardcore

Gifts From Enola's approach to an over-crowded genre is as subtle as it is interesting. A casual listener might dismiss them as "yet another post-rock band," but that would be a mere knee-jerk response, and a terrible mistake. GFE is another post-rock band, but they're deceptively clever about it. I was bored with most of 2009's post-rock contenders, even many albums from skilled old hands. From Fathoms contains no fancy gimmicks to set it apart, no orchestra or tap-dancing or Egyptian-themed lyrics with 4000 year old chord-progressions. There are hints of electronica, a few sound clips here and there and casually-dispersed vocals. But for the most part, this is upfront no-bullshit post-rock. With emphasis on the rock.

Gifts From Enola's main asset is their directness. Led by clean-toned guitars that explode into the mix, songs wash over you with astonishing freshness, wave upon wave of thick solid riffs. That, I think, is the greatest compliment I can give this album, especially considering its genre: more than half a year after it came out, From Fathoms still sounds incredibly fresh each of the many times I listen to it. There is so much energy here, so much enthusiasm and vigor for their music, GFE washes away all the rote, timid post-rock conventions, the epic build-ups and simmering, stewing guitar haze. Sure, there's reverb and delay and crescendos, and song-structures often lead to a pretty epic conclusion, but they do so much more than that along the way. Too many post-rock bands have discovered that a few choice guitar chords and ponderous effects will evoke certain basic emotions, and they dwell upon this, plucking away at melancholy as if it were a result and not a feeling. From Fathoms deconstructs the formula and reassembles it as something new and interesting. Songs are thick and fluid—if Do Make Say Think creates tidal music, GFE has created oceanic music, a background of beautiful storms led by a refreshingly earnest, unpretentious crash of guitars. Song structures don't follow any particular conventions, simply going where they wish, building up and knocking down, often thicker and deeper than you can see through—a major part of the album's freshness and energy. When they want to drop you into a bit of shoegazey indie rock with light vocals, they make sure you notice, they don't waste space with meaningless interludes. When screams come in and then fade out, there's suddenly space, an open sky and a sense of place, a beautiful Alcest-ian acoustic passage to move you forward into the next storm. From Fathoms is often heavy but never sludgey, and so the music seems to drench you, tugging and pushing and tossing you around instead of simply burying you in the mud.

Few bands can pull off the transition from light to dark or beautiful to catastrophic as sublimely as GFE. It's no coincidence that so much of this album mirrors a trip out to sea, and From Fathoms could easily be considered a concept album of sorts, ruthlessly shredding your ship with the colossal "Trieste," stuffing your head in the sink for a while before ending in a trio of surprisingly uplifting, heavy-hitting jams. I have no real qualms with this album, but it should be noted that it is very much an "album"—songs are not meant to stand on their own, and to some (unimportant) extent, they don't. I cannot listen to From Fathoms without listening to the whole thing, a testament to GFE's ability to rush you forward without ever seeming forced or hurried about it. This album covers vast emotional ground (emotional water?), impressively pulling off both sorrow and optimism without ever being manipulative or dull.

TOP X ALBUMS OF MMIX: TOP OF THE LIST

X. Eras (by) Apse
Psych Folk / Ambient / Indie Rock

Imagine that the apocalypse happened tomorrow and the only songs to survive were a few random albums by Radiohead and the Beta Band—random choices, mostly, but that's not important. Now, imagine you could travel 500 years into the future, where you stumbled upon a small society that absorbed and worshiped those albums generations ago, until they fell apart and the only music left was what that nascent society could reproduce and play on its own. If that little tribe somehow had electric guitars, this album is what pop music would sound like by then—filtered through primitive, earthy motifs, bouncy and tribal, colorful and creepy. Most of the surface-layer elements of mainstream rock are washed away, leaving a rough, beautifully textured underbelly. In many ways, Apse's music never feels complete—the vocals are buried in the mix, indistinct and ethereal, like hearing a group of people singing in the distance, hidden by forest. The drums are heavy and tribal, the basslines galloping forward with equal intensity, and the guitar on Eras often does little more than create atmosphere. Many will dismiss this album as half-formed and undeveloped, but if it seems empty, it is only because Eras so perfectly captures a time and place that doesn't quite exist—not yet.

IX. The Other Truths (by) Do Make Say Think
Post-Rock / Jazz Fusion / Folk

Do Make Say Think is one of the longest running post-rock bands in the world right now (that has consistently released albums during the last 10+ years) and so it's rather astonishing that The Other Truths, their sixth, sounds so entirely unlike anything else out there. DMST ignores most of the typical post-rock conventions: reverb and delay pedals aren't used much here, and crescendo-style song narratives are almost nonexistant. The music is tide-like, an aggressive ebb and flow of folky, full-bodied rhythms and jazz-style drums. Song structures go wherever DMST wants them to go, and the music within seems casual, almost lazy—not in the sense that the band isn't trying, but that they've reached a point where they have such command over their compositions that their songs spin airy circles around you with a minimum of effort. This is a band at their creative peak, and there's nothing passive about this music, nothing timid. It's intense, it's soft, it's Westerny, it's spacious, it's jazzy, it's friendly, it's going for a drive and you're along for the ride. With each of the four tracks an ode to the band's own name—Do, Make, Say, Think—one wonders if the members of DMST already realized that they just couldn't ever top a masterpiece like this.

VIII: Axe to Fall (by) Converge
Metal / Hardcore / Punk

Here's the secret to enjoying Converge: drink six cups of coffee first. Axe to Fall is nowhere close to accessible; it's dense and complicated and so aggressive that it's hard to figure out whether you're supposed to bang your head or cower on the floor in fear. But listen to the piece as a whole, let the purposeful pacing and layered intricacies unfold and maybe, maybe you'll be whisked away to the frantic, brutal landscape Converge skillfully paints. Equal parts technical metal showmanship and hardcore mayhem, Converge succeed as much through their delicious array of guitar-tones as by their amazing ability to give such blisteringly-fast songs so much personality. Their sense of tension and relief is masterful, and though the album weighs heavily on the side of tension, it only makes those releases all the more orgasmic. On the few songs where Converge slows things down and expands their sound, one begins to see how all that personality gets wrapped up in these brutal tunes. The Westerny monotone of "Cruel Bloom" is a direct nod to Tom Waits, but that whiskey-soaked, shadow-filled slum is hidden within everything here. Listening to Axe to Fall is like playing Whack-a-Mole... with rattlesnakes instead of moles and a six-string in place of a rubber mallet. Fuck yeah.

VII. Dyad 1909 / Found Songs (by) Ólafur Arnalds
Neo-Classical / Electronica / Ambient

Ólafur Arnalds released two stunning albums in 2009, and though it may be cheating to include both (or either, since neither is a true album in the strictest sense), this young Icelandic composer is just too talented not to be on my list. Dyad 1909 is easily my favorite of these two releases, though I felt it would be unfair to include it on its own. Compiled as the soundtrack for an experimental ballet of the same name, it contains three new songs, two old songs and one astonishing remix. Despite being part greatest-hits, the album is Arnald's most forward and heavy-hitting so far, overlaying booming electronica beats on top of his exquisitely minimalist violin and piano compositions. "Brotsjor" and "Til Enda" absolutely destroy, and since they're new, they're well worth the price of admission on their own. Like a glacier breaking apart and smearing you across the ice, Dyad is haunting, devastating, severe, desolate... and of course, heartrendingly beautiful. Lost Songs was a project conceived by Arnalds earlier in the year, in which he wrote, recorded and released a song every day straight for a week. The songs are short and focused, beautiful for all their simplicity, proving that Arnalds has a better mastery of space, atmosphere and emotional depth than perhaps any other composer working today.

VI. Sunden (by) The Waters Deep Here
Instrumental Metal / Post-Rock

This year's most random pick is also the album probably doomed to perpetual under-appreciation. Self-produced, self-released and almost totally unnoticed by anyone anywhere, Sunden didn't have me expecting much. And yet, in spite of the off-putting band name and barebones MySpace, this album's a total knockout. TWDH writes metal, and pretty straightforward metal at that. That's fine. Post-metal has been stale almost since the day it was born, and Isis-style sludge is getting extremely cliche by now. There may be only one guitar here, but the riffs are all over the place, tearing apart your face like a pack of rabid, unfed bears. The ass-kicking riffs never really stop coming, but instead of looping each or layering simple structures into a dense cloud of atmosphere, the guitarist bounces from one idea to the next, building a basic theme along the way. Songs wander into jazz-like labyrinths of rich, carefully-unfolding jams, meandering and smashing and crashing about without apparent direction before suddenly, satisfyingly hurling you back to the song's center. Though relatively straightforward and sometimes poorly-paced, Sunden proves that crushing, relentless metal can still contain plenty of flavor without resorting to scene cliches and rigid structural dogmas. The Waters Deep Here shows astonishing promise—now they just need to add an apostrophe to their name.

V. Hollow Be My Name (by) Eleventh He Reaches London
Post-Hardcore / Indie Rock / Progressive

Eleventh He Reaches London, like many bands on this list, knows how to combine disingenuous genres into a sound that flows from your speakers as a cohesive, tightly-composed musical personality. A concept album about 1800's Australian colonists who are pissed off at God and the Queen (or something), Hollow Be My Name presents something like a post-hardcore version of The Decemberists. The experimental mindset is there, but the songs are tight, focused and extremely forward, while intricate guitar work, unexpected tempo shifts and angry, rabble-rousing vocals keep the music from ever growing stale. That the album remains so fluid is merely a testament to the skill with which this Australian band composes. The clever, aggressive guitar-work carries most of the weight here, while the vocalist gives an equally incredible performance, showing as much versatility and energy as the rest of the band. Songs bounce along, perfectly paced and wonderfully detailed, unleashing just enough screamed rage, spoken-word growl and raw post-punk grit to make this far more interesting than mere rock'n'roll.

IV. Gin (by) Cobalt
Metal / Metal / Metal

With their third full-length release, two-man Cobalt has shifted the sound of their brooding pagan bonfire hymns from experimental black-metal to something more song-based but equally unorthodox. Gin is an homage to Ernest Hemmingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and the album certainly sounds like a drowned and dreary downward spiral to hell. Lyricist and vocalist Phil McSorley is a Sergeant in the US Army who served in Iraq, and the experience shows, even down to his voice, which rushes over the mix like wind bursting through a broken window. Cobalt has always struck me as one of the most sincere and yet disturbing metal bands out there, wasting little time on dick-wagging showmanship. Their heaviness never sounds like it's there just for the sake of being "metal," while their chilling ambiance, acoustic accompaniments and pulverizing guitarwork remain effortless. It should be noted that genius multi-instrumentalist Eric Wunder plays and/or writes—from what I understand—almost everything but the lyrics, and brings a coherency and energy that few five person bands can match, sculpting a sound that's both straightforward and yet crushingly morose. Every glimpse into pagan darkness makes Cobalt's music no less infectious—these men know how to write an absorbing, haunting song.