THIS WILL DESTROY YOU (BY) THIS WILL DESTROY YOU

Post-Rock / Ambient
2008, Magic Bullet Records
MySpace / Last.fm

More than any other form of entertainment, I think
relationships with music are a lot like relationships with people. Chances are, I'm going to listen to an album I like dozens of times in a year, and there's really nothing else that I interact with to that extent. I might watch my favorite movies once or twice a year, at most.  My favorite books?  A few times in my life.  As with people, I'm surrounded by music constantly, and as with people, that relationship is often complicated and unpredictable. Sometimes you meet someone that throws you off at first, even if you can't pinpoint why.  Maybe something about them doesn't quite click with you.  Maybe they bore you.  Sometimes those people end up being the closest to you, as much as you wouldn't have thought it.  Or maybe the opposite — sometimes the most interesting-seeming people turn out to be pretty superficial after getting to know them.  It's the same with some albums.  It's the reason music means so much to people — it is entirely possible, and only slightly weird, to have a relationship with an album that changes and grows over time.  (And while you can't hug or cuddle an album, you can stare lovingly at their album covers in your candle-lit room at night. Not that I've done that.) 

I really liked This Will Destroy You's first album, Young Mountain, when it came out.  A lot of people accused them of being an Explosions In The Sky rip-off, but I thought Young Mountain was better than anything Explosions had ever put out — less cloying, more dynamic and structured.  Then, in early 2008, they released their self-titled, and those comparisons died a quiet death.  Sadly, so did my interest.  Despite the tongue-in-cheek goofiness of the album cover, their self-titled saw the band dropping most of the song-structured prettiness, moving away from obvious emotional hooks toward expansive ambient soundscapes.  Songs still follow a typical post-rock formula, but at an unhurried, linear pace, shrugging off melody in place of texture.  All at once, TWDY stopped writing songs that sounded catered to triumphant movie trailers — this album feels like the soundtrack to some actionless, indie Western.  It's patient, layered and purposeful, rather than a collection of pretty-sounding tunes.  I wasn't very interested in that, two years ago.  Post-rock often ignores easy hooks, but this was ambient even at its heaviest.  It demonstrated an interesting new direction for the band, but it just didn't hold my attention.

Still, since I didn't dislike the album, I kept it around.  About a year ago I started throwing it on every now and then when I needed something droney, something that wouldn't distract me.  And I realized something odd.  Even though the music didn't quite hold my attention, I still enjoyed it.  A lot.  Now, I had other albums I kept around as background music.  Music that's just kind of there, and nice enough that I don't mind it being there.  But TWDY's self-titled was different, somehow.  It was engaging, so long as I didn't focus on it too much.  This album is a musical Magic Eye — I could see the big picture (a sailboat) only when I let my brain go a bit fuzzy, when I absorbed the album without staring directly at it.  And I enjoyed the big picture immensely.  All it once it clicked how much this album is right up my alley, with its melancholy warmth and its open, Westerny sense of space. So I kept putting it on whenever I didn't mind zoning out, and it turned out that was pretty often.  It put me in an almost meditative mood, and despite the fact that I rarely gave the album my full attention, soon enough I was addicted to it.  For an album with few hooks or obvious emotions, I've come to crave the experience of listening to these seven songs, the way they run around you rather than through you, blinking into your attention before dissolving into haze.

Ultimately, the difference between this and other patient, slow-paced post-rock might be little more than tone — which is really what defines post-rock to begin with.  Most instrumental bands fall on bright melodies if they want to inspire, or cold, moody guitar-work if they want to depress — obviously.  It's easy enough to make that work when your sound is structured around tone.  On their self-titled, TWDY doesn't go for those easy emotions.  Their tone is almost neutral, evocative without being cluttered or cloying.  The guitarwork is felt more than heard.  It's as if the music has been stripped of its top layer, the melody that other bands might structure songs around, leaving just the droning, reverby undertow.  More and more, bands like Explosions In The Sky and Mono sound like meandering strings of pretty melodies to me — but here, every moment of the album is part of the greater whole, building toward a tone and atmosphere that sneaks a vast panorama right in under your nose.  It's what makes the music hard to pin down initially, while giving it such deep, resonating impact — this album is beautiful, it is emotional, but it wants to steer you toward these realizations, rather than dowsing you in them immediately. There is a sense of direction, a linear narrative that tugs you forward like the pull of a river, and the songwriting is often deceptively straightforward. You could call it simplicity, I guess.  But for as simple as it is, I've found that very few albums are paced with such confidence.  There are few flourishes, few stylistic surprises — some glitch-style electronica overlays the guitar melodies here and there, and somehow conveys the mesmerizing, crackling warmth of a campfire instead than the cold industrial vibe you'd expect.  Nothing is a distraction here, much less superfluous.

This Will Destroy You paints a clear picture of an abstract feeling, and I just couldn't see it at first.  Few bands can pull that off.  Since I've already established my pretentiousness by comparing music to landscapes, I'm going all out here — this is what makes music stick around for me, not catchy Top 40 hooks.  Sure, you'll enjoy those earworms in 10 years out of nostalgia, but complexity allows a relationship to actually grow.  Lots of artists can paint a clear picture of a simple feeling, and that's important too.  But simplicity generally doesn't build long-lasting relationships.  More often, you find acquired tastes are the ones that stick around.

THE TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2010

10. Fang Island (by) Fang Island
Math Rock / Indie Rock / Everyone High-Fiving Everyone
Fang Island seems to be having such a good time playing their eclectic brand of math-rock that it's hard not to wonder if they aren't, you know, fucking with us. These dudes have the rare ability to make fun music without pandering, probably because fun rarely sounds this musically unique. Completely lacking in the hipster irony you'd expect since pop-punk died, Fang Island is as packed full of delicious post-rock textures as it is whiplash inducing riffage. 2010 was a year of fantastic summer albums, and Fang Island's little burst of relentless, guitar-driven optimism should be on everyone's playlist when warmer weather arrives.  Or really, when you just want to pretend.

9.The Wild Hunt (by) The Tallest Man On Earth
Folk / Singer-Songwriter / Blues
It's not important that Sweden's Kristian Matsson happens to sound like a very famous folk musician.  Pretty much every review of The Wild Hunt mentions it, but Matsson deserves all the recognition he gets for his own ample song-writing talents.  And really, it's not much more than obvious talent and a no-bullshit approach to folk that makes The Wild Hunt such a standout album. Matsson is a master guitar player, and his songwriting is tight, lyrical and concise. Confident, affecting, and yet very catchy.  There are few flourishes to the album, but it doesn't need them — Matsson's voice carries these blues, while his feverish fretwork provides the momentum.

8. Marrow of the Spirit (by) Agalloch
Dark Metal / Atmospheric Folk / Progressive
I had incredibly high hopes for Marrow of the Spirit — possibly higher than for any album in the last year or two.  Really, I was certain that any new Agalloch would take the Album of the Year spot, regardless what year it was released.  So for Marrow of the Spirit to land this low is actually a bit of a shock, though I may very well be undervaluing it at the moment.  Agalloch's albums are always unique and slow to unfold, each with its own defined personality; quintessential "growers."  This is a fantastic hour of music, full of haunting textured guitars and powerful, earnest soundscapes, though Agalloch's songwriting seems a bit less focused than on 2006's Ashes Against the Grain.  Possibly on purpose, since that feeling of openness and sprawl allows Marrow of the Spirit to avoid the claustrophobia of true black metal, even as the band occasionally dips into their bleaker roots.  It's a harsher, icer sound that mostly lacks the warmth of their last two albums, but still finds moments of serenity, redemption, and plenty of atmosphere, making this an album one might easily get lost in on a cold winter night.  Hell, even NPR loved it.

7. Foreign Tapes (by) Parades
Indie Rock / Math Rock / Pop
If you like Broken Social Scene's experimental-indie, jittery pop-rock aesthetic, but think they're a little too sprawling and "anything goes" to make a coherent album, then Foreign Tapes is just what you need.  This haunted summer album manages to hold on to a consistent tone throughout, though that's not to say that Parades doesn't reach to new and strange places.  Track to track, they throw dark, Zeppelin-ish riffs alongside intoxicating drum crescendos and frantically pounding electronics, male / female duet vocals, math-like guitar leads and blaring horns.  It's a strange but fluid menagerie, and shows a personality stronger than any I've heard in indie rock for a long time.

6. The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer (by) Red Sparowes

Post-Rock

Sometimes a band just needs a few albums to get it right.  That's clearly the case with Red Sparowes, who had never particularly impressed me before 2010.  With this, their third album, not much has changed on the surface — they just finally nailed it.  Songs are less meandering, more focused on melody, and Red Sparowes manages to give each track personality without losing the journey of the album as a whole.  Take "Giving Birth To Imagined Saviors," which features one of the best melodies I've heard in a post-rock song in years, or album-closer "As Each End Looms and Subsides," which has perhaps the best climax.  This is the rare case where I'm glad the band didn't try something more experimental, because everything falls into place so flawlessly.

5. Spiral Shadow (by) Kylesa
Sludge Metal / Psychedelic / Progressive
Kylesa may be one of the densest, heaviest metal bands out there, but somehow these Georgian guys and gal have managed to become one of the most accessible too.  On Spiral Shadow, their sound takes one giant evolutionary step into progressive metal. If the Melvins and Built To Spill decided, for some (awesome) reason, to form a super-band, it would sound like this. On first listen, it might seem as if the music is leaner, relying more on atmospherics and psychedelia, but it's more likely that Kylesa just learned how to cram their hundred influences into every moment of riffage.  Psychedelic guitars spiral and bounce back and forth; everything else rumbles along with that good-old buzzsaw crunchiness.  Aided by more forward male / female dual vocals, songs like "Don't Look Back" sound like they could have been radio hits in the early nineties.  It all makes for more opportunities to air-guitar (and double air-drum) than ever.

4. Kvelertak (by) Kvelertak
Metal / Punk / Black'n'Roll

When I first laid eyes on that amazing John Baizley album cover, I figured I was in store for something good, but beyond the Baroness' Stamp of Approval I had no idea what to expect.  Certainly not an Object Lesson in how metal can be unironic, unrestrained, and fun. If Converge gave you the chance to figure out just what the hell was going on before you got knocked out, it'd be this: black'n'roll, punk metal, blackened punk with a dose of sludge. You know how sometimes you're listening to a band that has so much energy, you can't help but appreciate how vibrant and exciting the world can be, and you just want to run up to the nearest person and punch them in the face?  That's this.

3. Dust Lane (by) Yann Tiersen

 French / Indie / Folk

"French," as a genre tag?  Yes.  I maintain that a few countries are their own genre — somehow, through whatever instruments become standard and whatever cultural associations happen over time, some countries just have a vibe.  The same way you can listen to gritty slide-guitar and instantly conjure images of the southern states of America, something about France has created a tone unique in the world of music.  Yann Tiersen is of course no newcomer — most would probably know him as the composer of the Amelie soundtrack, something which is very, very French.  Tiersen is known for his quirky, folky neo-classical compositions, but Dust Lane shouldn't be taken as anything other than an indie-rock album.  And it's an odd album, to be sure, just not in the way Tiersen's fans may be used to.  Every song features vocals, though most are not exactly singing — Tiersen's voice mixes with that of a female guest in a series of echoey, monotone monologues that somehow fit these songs perfectly.  The mood is dense and yet spectral, the songwriting nearly impossible to pin down for style.  Many indie bands sound like they're throwing a dozen instruments at you just because they can, but Tiersen never shows off; he's just using the right tool for the job, whatever it is he's doing.  A combination of things that are entirely familiar in-and-of themselves, yet produce a sound unlike anything else out there. 

2. Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées (by) Les Discrets

Blackgaze / Post-Punk / Folk

If you've been following the underground French music scene over the last few years, you may have witnessed a rare event: the birth of a genre.  It started with Neige, of Alcest, who realized that shoegaze is basically reverse black-metal — and with that wistful French aesthetic and a good dose of folk drizzled on top, you have a style that can't be described with any existing genre tag.  Now, a few years later, Neige's buddy Fursy Teyssier has formed Les Discrets and pushed the music further away from its black metal undertones and deeper into some strange folk / post-punk fantasyland.  Some have started calling the scene "blackgaze," and it's as fitting as anything else. There's a sense of darkness and mourning to Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées, the tone a Grimm's Fairy Tale would have if converted into music. It's dense, too, but that brings us to the shoegaze, the thick, eerie post-punk sound. That the lyrics are all in French only adds to the atmosphere, as Fursy's voice drifts through songs like a dense but small fog, sometimes joining a female vocalist to brighten the atmosphere without abandoning melancholy.  The album occasionally seems hurried to deliver, but when Fursy takes time to slow the narrative and open up each piece, Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées displays some of the most beautiful, surreal sounds I've ever heard.

1. Gifts From Enola (by) Gifts From Enola

Post-Hardcore / Post-Rock / Progressive 
When I reviewed last year's phenomenal From Fathoms, I spent some time trying to figure out just what makes Gifts From Enola so memorable and fresh, for what seems at first like standard guitar-driven post-rock. But by now, it's obvious that post-rock was a red herring.  Surprise!  Gifts From Enola is actually an instrumental post-hardcore band that happens to have a love for post-rock atmospherics.  While From Fathoms remains my favorite of their albums — it's more sprawling and more of an adventure, and I happen to like every detour it takes — the Gifts guys wisely acknowledged their sudden identity-acceptance with this self-titled.  The meandering post-rock subtleties of their very early material is mostly gone, replaced by confident, denser songwriting and nuclear stockpiles of energy.  Vastly improved production values help showcase that unbridled hardcore adrenaline, but these songs would still sound relentless if Justin Bieber's backup band covered them.  This album could hurt you.  Drums are pushed way up in the mix, thudding and propulsive as a cannonade; each hit sounds like something died as a result.  Every bass line sounds something you'd pay money to ride.  The guitars drive it all to a breakneck pace, and remain some of the most versatile in any scene, instrumental or otherwise.  Nothing is outright super heavy — there are no breakdowns like in last year's monstrous "Trieste" — but only because the songs move too fast, mixing grittiness with serenity, and often at the same time.  Take Alagoas, which has quickly become one of my favorite songs of all time (and probably would have been my Album of the Year even if they'd released it as a single.)  The song is a perfect summary of everything Gifts From Enola does so brilliantly, without being too flashy about it.  I can't think another post-rock or post-metal band that's able to conjure as many fantastic riffs as these guys, and still spin that guitar-driven density into something that's also multi-layered, suggestively textured and fully coherent.  For every shift and switch-up, the music never loses focus, and Gifts' personality is clearer than ever before.  It may not be their most ambitious album, or even a perfect one, but this is unquestionably their defining album.  Gifts From Enola's music has a remarkable vitality, the ability to sound fresh and interesting even after dozens and dozens of repeated plays.  An achievement like that takes more than creative genre-bending, or even passion.  There's no equation I can think of to give a record such energy — but whatever it is, Gifts From Enola has it.

INCEPTION AND THE DEFENSE OF IDEAS

This is not a review of Inception. I'm not going to discuss Inception in-depth, either, so there will be no spoilers here in case you haven't seen it yet.  It will hopefully become clear later on in this editorial that I thought Inception was a dashingly-crafted good time, and a movie that got a lot of mileage out of eluding people's guesses of what it would be. Going by the vague premise unveiled in teasers and Christopher Nolan's previous filmography, many likely expected a movie full of crazy plot twists, another film like The Prestige or Memento scattered around a shifting dream-world matrix.  Yet the plot of Inception is fairly straightforward in-and-of itself (despite the complexity of the in-world rules dictating that plot), propelled mainly by the strength of its central idea.  Much has been made of the fact that Inception was one of the few movies released this summer not based on previously-existing material, but I will argue that its originality is far more significant than that: Inception is the rare movie that starts almost completely from scratch.  So this is what I would like to discuss today: ideas, whether they are in decline, and how Inception makes a damn good case that those in the creative arts cannot lose sight of them completely.

So what is a film's "idea"?  Admittedly, I don't have a concise explanation for what, exactly, I'm talking about, as a movie can bring new ideas to the table in a variety of ways.  Ideas permeate every stage of a movie, but for the most part I'm talking about a film's general, central premise. Boil the plot of a movie down to one or two lines, as simple as possible, and you have its premise.  Compare that premise to other films and see how many start to sound the same.  Very few completely original ideas exist anymore, and this is another logical inevitably. Someone more knowledgeable in economics than I will have to tell me the term for this, as I'm sure there is one — like oil, dinosaur bones, or rare Magic: The Gathering cards, there are a finite number of purely original, unused movie plots, and thus their discovery will decrease over time.  A film — or a work in any mode of storytelling — can achieve success, I believe, in two broad ways: its idea, and its execution. Of course, a film doesn't require a new idea to be good; it doesn't even need to alter an existing idea all that much in order to set itself apart.  In other words, it's more important to have a well-executed "story" than a totally original premise.  A good premise can still lead to a bad story, after all, and even a good story can be poorly executed.  (In case this is confusing, the "story" of a movie is the more specific way in which its "premise" unfolds, the way its characters bring about resolution — but for the sake of simplicity, I'm not going to discuss the originality of story here).  Now, to further simplify, I'm going to suggest the somewhat less-than-scientific proposition that a premise can be measured for originality, and that a premise can be varying degrees of original when compared to other films.

Here's an example.  "A soldier arrives in a foreign land where his people are seeking valuable resources, despite the protests of primitive natives.  After falling in love with one of the natives, a beautiful princess, he questions his allegiances and helps to reconcile the differences between the two cultures."  That description describes the plot of Disney's Pocahontas, but it's also the exact plot of James Cameron's recent blockbuster Avatar.  (I am far from the first person to note the similarities between the two). Of course, Avatar got quite a bit of backlash for its lack of originality, so let's look at some other examples.  Many of the best movies made in recent years are not necessarily based on original ideas — which isn't a problem, so long as they establish their creativity on different terms.  Take the premise of There Will Be Blood, which isn't particularly novel: "An oil prospector and his son make their fortunes in turn of the century California."  It's simple, and its success lies in the many elements that make up the unfolding story: its execution.  Of course, in lumping all the elements that make up a film into one category, I don't want to dodge the fact that any of these smaller elements can make or break the film.  There Will Be Blood succeeds, and establishes its originality, through its cinematography, acting, soundtrack, and characters, et cetera.  Similarly, a film can present ideas on a smaller scale, even if the general premise itself isn't necessarily that inventive.  A good example of this is the original Star Wars.  Here's the premise:  "A sheltered farmboy, anxious to leave his home, finds himself caught up in a plot to rescue a princess and overthrow an evil Empire."  Taken on such a basic level, Star Wars doesn't sound all that different from various "epic quest" stories that proceeded it.  Like Avatar, Star Wars: A New Hope can't be given credit for taking an old story and just transplanting it to space.  However, if you view both ideas and execution as intertwined and thus layered, Star Wars gets more original just one layer down.  Let's take a slightly expanded premise: "A sheltered farmboy, anxious to leave his home, finds himself caught up in a plot to rescue a princess after her home planet is destroyed by a seemingly-unstoppable new weapon under the control of an evil Empire."  Star Wars was designed to show off original ideas within its various layers of execution: as set-pieces, plot-points, or even as characters.  Darth Vader, though not unique in his actions as a villain, is fairly original taken in the context of the full movie — in his design, rank, powers, and motivations.  To further illuminate how ideas can set a film apart at every level of design, one only has to compare the original Star Wars trilogy to the new one.  The "prequels" are unoriginal and uninspired in nearly every way that a film can be, often stealing scenes wholesale from their predecessors, relying on flashy effects and overly-stylized, emotionless action-sequences.  It's as if Lucas were merely referencing his original ideas rather than thinking up new ones. Where the original film gave popular culture the idea of a "lightsaber," the new films try to dazzle you with smoke and mirrors: a character with a double-bladed lightsaber!  A character that fights with two lightsabers!  A robot that has four lightsabers!  In my opinion, there is hardly a better example of why we need original ideas.

People are talking about Inception for a number of reasons, of course, but the fact that it has mastered both idea and execution is chief among them.  I wrote this editorial with Inception in mind because the film is itself about ideas — the importance of ideas.  Christopher Nolan isn't the first person to capitalize upon this sort of meta-commentary, but he built a film around it in a way that few others have.  Inception can be taken as a metaphor for the shared experience of watching film, and itself serves to highlight just how a good, bold idea can take hold in people's minds.  An idea is "the most resilient parasite," but the act of "inception" is not limited to a single mind — Inception is itself an act of inception, and I believe this was fully intentional.  Of course, the art of ideas is not entirely lost, and I hope the success of Inception goes to show why it cannot be.  There are many ways for a film to make money, but few ways to build a reputation as a landmark filmmaker.  Take Charlie Kaufman, one of the few scriptwriters in Hollywood to have a large following — and he's earned it.  Kaufman's films are terrifically rich with both idea and vivid execution, setting him aside from nearly everyone else in film today. Charlie Kaufman is successful for his ideas, and this reputation — the strength of the ideas he has set to film — will outlive money-makers like Michael Bay, who contribute very little.  Pixar is another contributor of inventive ideas lately, and most agree that their track record is nearly perfect.  Their reputation is equal to their creativity.  Or, for a more complicated example, take the bizarre career of M. Night Shyamalan, who made a name for himself as a creator of original, odd ideas.  For a while, this worked as well would be expected — take the "idea" behind The Sixth Sense, and consider just how permanent it has become in the cultural consciousness.  Yet interestingly, Shyamalan soon turned this strength against himself, making films that grew ridiculous and uneven, sinking under the weight of expectation that his ideas would come in the form of an astounding and increasingly preposterous "twist."  Ideas are hard to come by, and unfortunately, they're also easy to ruin.

All this hopefully makes the case for Inception.  As I said, this is not a review of that film, and thus I don't want to write too much as if in defense of it.  But for comparison, here's the premise of Inception, the basics of the film stripped down as much as is possible: "A team of thieves is able to extract information from the mind of a target while the target, as well as the team, are in a shared dream.  After a job gone wrong, the team is hired to do the opposite: plant an idea in a new target's head."   In essence, Inception follows the structure of a heist movie.  Yet how many films would be even partially be described by that summary? Any? Could you confuse it with The Thomas Crown Affair or Inside Man?  How about films dealing with artificial realities within the mind, like The Matrix, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or even The Science of Sleep?  Even the basic premise would not be at all similar. Regardless, this is not to say that Inception was executed perfectly: that's been argued, discussed and shouted-about elsewhere, and even if you disagree, I'm not here to debate the point.  My claim is simply that Inception marks an increasingly rare kind of movie — a movie that is entertaining, successful in its use of cinema as technique and art, but a film that also contributes to the shared popular mind, our cultural dream state.  Ideas are scarce, and for every new one, for every Inception, there's suddenly another benchmark.  In the future, any movie that leans a little too close to Inception's territory will at once be compared to it and torn down accordingly — and thus, a little more of that available pool of ideas is taken away.  Let's be fair: it's hard enough to execute pre-existing ideas, to shuffle things around enough so as to find an original story, much less an original premise.  It's damn hard, and rare, to make a movie as well executed as There Will Be Blood, and who cares if it has superficial similarities to Citizen Kane?  But to do both — to invent, and perfect, within the same film — is no longer commonplace in cinema, and is thus understandably lauded as a landmark accomplishment.

BLUE RECORD (BY) BARONESS

Progressive Sludge Metal / Southern Rock
Released 2009

When I put together my Top 10 Albums of 2009 list at the end of last year, I spent weeks scouring blogs and forums and online review sites looking for any albums I might have missed.  But even with all my intended thoroughness, I still made one glaring error.  The Blue Record got a lot of press after its October release, and ended up on many "best of the 2009" metal lists, often finishing in the top 3.  So I downloaded it, listened to it, and decided it was worth keeping around, but it didn't grab me right away.  Every now and then I gave it another spin, until eventually, only a week or two after I published my own Top 10, I suddenly found myself playing the Blue Record more and more and more.  By early January I was listening to almost nothing else.  It's an album that's perfect for any mood or occasion, that I can always throw on after work and find myself caught up in its infectious energy no matter how dull or shitty my day has been.  The Blue Record deserves to be spun all summer long, but it got me through an entire winter.  It's one of the few albums that stands as entertainment of its own right, a soundtrack to 45 minutes of spastic air-drumming.

The thing is, I can pinpoint exactly why Baroness didn't grab me at first.  They're from the elite Georgian school of sludge metal, the same state that's also somehow brought us Mastodon, Torche and Kylesa.  I like all these bands well enough, except for one thing: their vocals.  If you've heard any of them, you know what I'm talking about, because their vocals are all pretty much the same, down to the rhythm and structure.  Each verse is pretty much delivered like this: shout shout shout / shout shout YELLLLLLL.  It's simple and repetitive, and the "drunken bearded man shouting at a bar" vibe always really turned me off.  A lot of metal has this problem, from Isis-derived post-metal to stoner metal and back to sludge.  Not that metal vocals are inherently bothersome, of course — the ones that work, work really goddam well — but that metal listeners tend to be unnecessarily forgiving of genuinely bad vocals.  As much as I respect all of the above bands, I could only take them in small doses because of their vocals. 

Baroness was no different, but I sensed that the music underneath was within my tastes, moreso than their more traditional peers.  For one thing, Baroness isn't nearly as classically sludgey as, say, Mastodon was with their first few releases, nor nearly as wanky-prog-metal-y as Mastodon became with their latest effort.  There's an unmistakable southern vibe to the music, down to the folky acoustic interlude "Blackpowder Orchard" and it wonderfully compliments Baroness' unrelenting, upbeat energy — like a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Melvins with the record player set at 45 rpm instead of 33.  Instead of wasting all their time trying to find the [fucking] heaviest [fucking] guitar tone ever [dudeeee] Baroness sends nearly every song galloping out of the gate with a stampede of drums and riffs so blazing, you may find yourself spontaneously air-guitaring on a crowded subway platform.  [Not that I've experienced this myself. I've... read about it.]  Instead of morphing into some prog-metal, seizure-inducing bonanza, Baroness keeps every song tight and perfectly coordinated, each filled with a ton of texture, little tangents and details and experiments enough to still earn it the "progressive" label, but these elements are always secondary to the pacing of the song, instead of being responsible for it.  Baroness never meanders enough to get distracted.  Songs move fast, almost too fast to keep track of.  The drums are unrelentingly propulsive, like this album is being shot at you out of a cannon.  Yet it's fun.  It's coherent.  It's never boring, it never loses focus, because these guys have their style down to an art.  Baroness doesn't have to be the heaviest band on the scene when the Blue Record contains some of the tightest song-writing you'll ever find south of the Mason-Dixon line.

So after a few listens, something strange happened: I grew to not mind those vocals.  Then, inevitably, I guess I liked them.  Now I can't imagine the Blue Record without them — shouty and rough and incredibly repetitive though they may be, no other style would really fit the energy and intensity of Baroness' music, and I dare say they work much better here than over the slow, heavy march of other sludge bands.  The Blue Record is pretty intense, and dense as well, yet even at its most technical it never loses sight of being fun.  (And there's nothing wrong with metal being fun).  This is an album I want blasting from my porch all summer long.  This is that album that makes me want to own a car again, badly, just so I can rock out to it while tearing down the highway with the windows down.  This album will give you whiplash.

THE FIRE IN OUR THROATS WILL BECKON THE THAW (BY) PELICAN

Post-Metal / Sludge / Atmospheric
Released 2005

I was recently having a discussion with some peers about which albums most influenced our lives — albums that have not only stuck with us, but after first discovering them, drastically affected what music we listen to and how we listen to it.  I can pinpoint many albums that were, in retrospect, important to my current tastes, but most of them were simple progressions of things I was already listening to, another evolutionary link.  Other albums got me into new habits — my flirtations with metal were spread out over multiple years and many extremely different albums — but didn't themselves make a lasting impression, and in retrospect only presented a few easily-digested morsels that encouraged me to pursue new things, new tastes.

When a friend introduced me to The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw in the spring of my junior year of college, the timing couldn't have been more perfect.  For a few months, I had been seeking out experimental, heavy music. I already had a hunch then that I would never be a real metal-head, but I liked a lot of the things metal bands were doing, even if I was having a hard time getting past the often-difficult vocals.  Though I'd been occasionally listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor since high school, I didn't really have awareness of instrumental music at that point.  GY!BE still seemed to me like a soundtrack lacking a movie, and like most people, I didn't understand why a band would decide to remain instrumental.  So Pelican came out of nowhere — I had truly never heard anything like it before.

Now, kids these days can easily describe entire subgenres of instrumental metal by the degree to which they rip off of Pelican (and other forebears of the post-metal movement), but hearing such a thing for the first time, or describing it to someone else, is like trying to explain to a blind man what "green" looks like.  I remember once telling my father that Pelican reminded me of Pink Floyd — a comparison that's so laughably erroneous four years later, I haven't the slightest idea what I might I have been referring to.  The Fire In Our Throats is, for lack of a better word, glacial — not usually a word I'd use to describe music, but I can't think of anything else that fits so well.  It's cold and stark and huge, slow-moving and dense, but most importantly, it's a glacier in retreat, one leaving behind a vision of spring and growth and possibility.  There's a deep-rooted, earthy sense of beauty in Pelican's music, little touches of warmth and grace amidst all the thundering walls of riffage and distortion, not to mention their extremely unique, perfect executed acoustic transitions.  Amidst the calamity, The Fire In Our Throats evokes the sense that one has finally reached The Last Day of Winter (and whatdayaknow, that's the name of the first song!)  Within such an unsubtle musical style, it's an unexpected touch of subtlety that other bands trying to bogart Pelican's thunderous tone seem to completely miss.  A wall of sound becomes boring eventually — we want to be led somewhere, and sludge-metal is at best a way to move us.  Where many other post-rockers tend to paint a scene that's other-worldly, or post-worldly, The Fire In Our Throats is intensely familiar.  Rather than nostalgia, it evokes a sense of expectation.  It somehow makes the air around you feel fucking crisp.  If you listen to it in winter, you will feel striking disappointment when you step outside and see a gray, snow-filled sky.  Studies show playing it once a day will cause plants to grow 34% faster.  (It's science!)

One particular memory perfectly captures all the feelings that Pelican still evokes in me.  As I said before, the timing of my discovery couldn't have been more perfect.  It was spring.  Metal is generally considered depressive stuff, but Pelican is anything but.  That winter had been a particularly difficult time of my life, and it's no exaggeration to say that I felt totally buried in frustrations and anxieties.  Timid music wasn't going to do anything to move me, but The Fire In Our Throats is as uplifting and inspiring as it is loud.  Like spring, there's a sense that mounds of filth are being washed away — forcefully, cathartically, and jarringly.  I needed that, then, and so I took a walk on the first day of spring, past all the sun-tanning sorority girls and shirtless jock douchemonkeys, and went down to the Hudson.  It felt good to get off campus and out of sight.  I found a spot above a cliff and watched car-sized chunks of ice floating down the river, I stared at the mountains that surrounded me, and I realized just how fucking much I loved the Hudson River Valley — everything except that small vortex of suck that was Poughkeepsie.  I could feel the cold whenever the breeze picked up, but it was still warm enough to wear a t-shirt.  And somehow, Pelican was playing exactly what I was feeling and seeing — without words.  I had never experienced that from music before. Suddenly I was getting punched in the face by a sort of frontiersman's spirit, awed by the severity of nature and music with the ability to capture it as textures and sounds.  I felt, dare I say, inspired.

So, Pelican got me into instrumental music, heavy music, and oddly enough, hiking.  (Cool story, bro).  The sense of gravitas and yearning their music evokes has never worn off, and I always feel an urge to put it on when I venture out to Upstate New York.  Sadly, their last two releases have been solidly mediocre, and their sound has since been regurgitated by dozens of bands, bottled and packaged as a tepid subgenre.  It's obvious in retrospect that Pelican's strengths also demand a rather inflexible formula, and after creating such a perfectly-executed landmark album, they'd basically written themselves into a corner.  (I should note that their first album, Australasia, is nearly on par with The Fire In Our Throats, yet presents a markedly different atmosphere).  The Fire In Our Throats still stands as one of the most evocative and emotional albums in my collection, a testament to the (seldom-realized) fact that beautiful music doesn't have to be timid or cloying.

THE MANTLE (BY) AGALLOCH

Neofolk / Metal / Progressive / Soundscape
Released 2002

[For an explanation of Season Albums and Pivotal Albums, please go here.]

Agalloch is one of those bands that, if I bothered to organize and write out my Top 50 Albums of All Time, would so easily dominate the top of the list that the effort would seem to be pointless in the end.  They'd have two albums in the Top 10 and an EP in the Top 15 — it just wouldn't seem fair, though it would reflect how important (pivotal, if you will) their music has become to me. Agalloch is one of those bands — and I hope everyone has at least a few of their own — that is so perfectly tapped into what I desire and enjoy in music that their albums are literally flawless to me, every element so shockingly interesting and engaging with every listen that, no matter how many times I've heard it before, each time I'm surprised to find just how much I like them.

Despite forming over a decade ago, Agalloch's blend of dark atmospheric folk, post-rock soundscapes and black metal gravitas has proven too intricate and complex to spawn any successful imitators.  Those who try seem to capture no more than one or two elements of Agalloch's sound, dividing it up until the result is meaningless, or silly.  On paper, Agalloch doesn't seem all that far removed from the many gimmicky "folk metal" bands out there, but Agalloch isn't interested in simply re-appropriating some traditional musical style — despite my usage of the genre term "folk."  What they're playing sounds folky, but the actual elements are not stolen specifically from anywhere.  There are some unique pieces of instrumentation, sure, but you almost don't notice them, and they're certainly not the focus.  In "The Lodge", for instance, Agalloch creates a surreal echo by striking a deer skull — but you would never realize what you were hearing unless you read it somewhere.  Other songs feature the deep, creepy menace of a cello, or sound clips of footsteps crunching snow, but the songs are driven by simple, standard instrumentation, written in such a way as to evoke a cold winter landscape and carried to perfection by the harsh, dual-vocals and lyrical paganism.

Perhaps the problem of capturing Agalloch's success (or even getting Pandora to recommend anything remotely similar) lies in the term "folk".  Not only has it been around forever (literally), it's currently one of the most re-interpreted and re-imagined genres out there, other than metal.  There's a reason why folk music is forced to embrace every bearded, flannel wearing dude who just wants to strum his acoustic and recite poetry in a breathy voice — well, other than the fact that "I want to have sex with the largest possible number of girls with the least amount of effort" is too long to catch on as a genre term.  Folk has always been around because it is traditional music, which is by necessity always in flux, played by "the people," so to speak.  Traditional instruments can be a part of it, but "folk" literally means "people," and thus singer-songwriters are always sort-of folk regardless of their actual musical orientation.  Thus, for all its vagueyness and ability to transform into confusing other things, folk is a terrible term when you're trying to denote an incredibly specific sound — as anyone who wishes to describe Agalloch's music certainly is.  I'd argue that there should, in fact, be an invented genre term so bands who actually evoke the feeling of being in nature can distinguish themselves — I've heard the term "soundscape" used before, though seldomly, and I'd argue that it's a far more accurate indicator than just another "folk" subbranch with a silly name.

Since this is not a review, I'm not going to spend much time analyzing the actual music of The Mantle.  It's complex in a shifting, understated way, though deceptively straightforward in execution, and as is the case with pretty much every band I editorialize on here, I feel like I would spend the majority of my words just defending the fact that cross-genre hybrids can work without feeling cluttered and disjointed.  There's a clear trend in what I enjoy: textured, layered music that doesn't just borrow from one genre, and even after combining its elements together into a coherent sound, doesn't fit easily into another.  Songs on The Mantle are long and patiently crafted, unhurried and expansive, pagan, cold, eerie; they make you feel like you're stranded in a lodge in the middle of the woods, in winter. The vocals — the most metal aspect of the band — are likely difficult for new listeners, but match the cold textures and dynamics of Agalloch's songwriting, both harsh and clean vocals soon blending into the layered sounds surrounding them.  If you listen to The Mantle in summer, it will still sound like winter (Agalloch has another album for summer).  If you listen to it driving through the Catskills in a fancy SUV, you will still feel desolate and trapped and cold.  Though it's never particularly heavy, fast-paced or intimidating in the way that most metal is, this is a brutal album as much as it is a beautiful album.  The Mantle isn't made to be played at festivals or Burning Man; it isn't a commentary on the fastidiousness or overproduction of modern music; it isn't a reproduction of the bloody good old days of European battle-songs and beer-filled taverns; it has nothing at all to do with people — it is the outdoors, and the influence is inescapable.

PIVOTAL ALBUMS & SEASONAL MUSIC: AN EXPLANATION

In an effort to give myself the opportunity to write about music more often, I'm "launching" a new "feature" on The Luxury Yacht Review.  I never review new albums outright on here, for a variety of reasons that I won't get into, but I would like to discuss music, as it's of equal importance as books to me — and so, I will post editorials instead of reviews, focusing on pivotal albums in my collection, albums that are significant with regards to how I listen to music.  The first of these two overlapping features, Seasonal Albums, is meant to discuss albums that highlight how I listen to music.  Certain albums, regardless of when I discovered them, create extremely vivid soundscapes for me, transporting me to a time or place or often conjuring a whole season.  Many albums with this power have greatly affected my mindset and preferences for music, and their evocative power makes them far more than just "entertainment" to me.

These seasonal albums will, for obvious reasons, often overlap with my second, also loosely structured feature — a sort of unranked Top 50 Albums of All Time deal, generalized here as Pivotal Albums.  Instead of actually making such a list and stressing about its order, by posting editorials at random, I can feature albums that likely would place without having to pit them against one another.  These albums will provide a window into my constantly-shifting musical tastes, as they are the albums which have determined that taste and then weathered my peculiar, inscrutable whims.  They may yet fall or rise in my favor with time, but these are the albums which will continue to influence me until I turn into a crotchety old man who only listens to Led Zeppelin while sitting on his porch drinking beer.

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.

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.