Artist - Autechre
Album - Oversteps
Genre - Electronica/IDM/Experimental

I'll have to try more actively to make sure not all my entries here involve the latest Warp-related release I have a boner over, but for this one in particular it's very necessary. The new Autechre album is upon us!

Here she be

A CHALLENGER APPROACHES

For those of you who might be reading this (do we have any of those people, guys?) that don't know me -- "Hi". I've been too busy / too lazy / too several other things to write an entry up until this point, despite being listed as a collaborator from the get-go.

It took something special to get me off my ass and writing. That something? The latest album by my favorite band.

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - The Brutalist Bricks (March 9th, Matador)

Track List:

1. "The Mighty Sparrow"
2. "Mourning in America"
3. "Ativan Eyes"
4. "Even Heroes Have to Die"
5. "The Stick"
6. "Bottled in Cork"
7. "Woke Up Near Chelsea"
8. "One Polaroid a Day"
9. "Where Was My Brain?"
10. "Bartolomeo and the Buzzing of Bees"
11. "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop"
12. "Gimme the Wire"
13. "Last Days"

It's no secret that I love TL/Rx. Ted Leo is the consummate punk showman -- he is charming, funny, and can shred like few others of this generation. Some have called him a combination of Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello, for this millennium. While he is certainly not as legendary as either of those esteemed musicians, I won't say that it's an inaccurate description.

This is The Pharmacists' fifth full length, their first since 2007's Living with the Living. It is the first LP with Marty "Violence" Key on bass and the first to feature James Canty on rhythm guitar since 2003's Hearts of Oak, one of the best albums of the last decade. The addition and re-addition truly fill out the band's sound. I was always a fan of former bassist Dave Lerner and his wild mane of hair, but his playing never felt so... purposeful as Key's does here. I don't know if the mix will change any, with a month to go, but the basslines are prominent and driving when they need to be, but slink to the back when they need to, and it works very well, at least to these ears. Rounding out the rhythm is Chris Wilson, whose drumming is better than it ever has been.

Onto the front man, and the album itself. My initial reaction is that Ted has crafted some of his best work on The Brutalist Bees. Leo knows how to open an album -- see "Me and Mia" and "Biomusicology", from Shake the Sheets and The Tyranny of Distance, respectively, for further proof of that fact. He hits another homerun on this album too, opening with the excellent "The Mighty Sparrow", a quick, but solid groove through and through, with a very George Harrison-esque solo. It's followed by a rerecorded version of "Mourning in America" a track that was released on an EP in 2008 to benefit charity Democracy Now!. It sounds infinitely better here. It's more polished on all fronts. Crisp, thundering drums, pulsing bass, and an overall balanced mix that the original lacked.

The third track, "Ativan Eyes", is one of my favorites, but I can't for the life of me explain why. It's just a great song, I think. I could say the same of "Bottled in Cork", another song I love for intangible reasons. Maybe it's that it seems to have a strong connection to World War II, despite being a sort of romanticized punk song, with its closing refrain of "tell the bartender I think I'm falling in love."

The real highlights, though, are "Even Heroes Have to Die" and "One Polaroid a Day". The former is a relatively straightforward song. It's got a great chorus, sung in a sort of half-falsetto by Leo: "Even heroes have to die--- / No one lives forever, love / and no one's wise to try". There's nothing less endearing than a punk who refuses to age gracefully, and Ted shows how aware he is of that fact. The other gem, "One Polaroid a Day", is just fantastic to listen to. It has a sort of staccato riff that is just lovely to the ear, and Ted's vocal is a very understated, near-whisper that suits the song so so well. The bass is simple but functional, and the drums are relatively quiet. Everything complements each other so perfectly. It may be the best song the band has ever written.

From cover to cover, the album doesn't really have any truly weak tracks. "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop" is very different, it's got no percussion at all, and has almost a wild-west vibe to it, and sounds like it was recorded outside -- crickets can be heard in the back throughout, and the song ends with about 20 seconds of outdoors-at-night-in-the-summer sounds, crickets, cars passing in the distance. It's not bad, but it's an acquired taste at the very least. Overall, The Brutalist Bricks seems to be the best Ted Leo work, LP or otherwise, in nearly seven years, and it might just be in contention for their best release yet.

Get it here
Buy it here

Hello everyone - long time no write. I haven't been too active on the music front lately, so I'm going to try and condense the last eight weeks of luke into one succinct blog post.

Dessa - A Badly Broken Code
Genre: trip hop, hip hop



This seems to be the Jukebox's album of the year so far. I don't think any of us are completely in love with it, but all of us like it a lot. Dessa reminds me of a female version of Sage Francis for some reason. She blends singing and rap in a way that's reminiscent of old trip hop, but she is undeniably a rap artist. I like that she isn't one of those female rappers that try really hard to show off how hardcore she is. She's content to just sing/rap about a broken relationship or use her intelligent writing to her advantage. This is the first I've heard of her so I may need to swim around in her back catalogue. God knows I don't have a lot of female hip hop!

The Antlers - Hospice
Genre: indie, music to kill yourself to



I'm about six months late to the Hospice party -- probably because the name of the band is The Antlers and who the hell wants to listen to a band named that -- but it finally clicked with me today. This album is equal parts brutal and beautiful - it is heartwrenchingly sad at times and then oddly inspiring. I'm not sure that 2009 had an album that stood out quite like Hospice. It took me ten listens to even decide if I liked it or loved it. The answer is love.

The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year
Genre: opera, electronic, fucking weird



Wow. This album is bizarre. Silent Shout was one of the best records to come out in 2006 and the much-anticipated follow-up to it is a concept opera about Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. It is torturous to listen to at times. There's five minutes of a droning sound, two minutes devoted of a high-pitched beep that makes you want to cover your ears, and some of the strangest opera singing around. It is the kind of album that most bands don't recover from: once they jump off the deep end, there's no going back to the land of normal. The album gets a little bit more Knife-y by the end of it, but at that point it's already past the point of no return.

And yet, there's something bizarrely enticing about this disc. It is fascinating in its own strange way. I find myself listening to it and wondering how the hell they made it, and then when it ends I find myself grateful that my ears are not being pummeled anymore.

Why? Alopecia
Genre: indie rock/emo jewish hip hop



The album I listened to the most in 2009 is the album that should have been my 2008 album of the year, Alopecia. For some bizarre reason I just can not stop listening to Alopecia. Yoni Wolf's brutal honesty and clever as hell wordplay just keeps me coming back over and over and over. It's addicting. I think this album is very close to being my favourite album of all time at this point. I even hooked my girlfriend/fiance/whatever on it recently which makes me like it even more. I need to find a way to stop listening to this before I get sick of it.

Massive Atack - heligoland
Genre: lounge-hop



I was afraid to listen to this album. You see, Massive Attack really defined music in the 90s, first with the seminal Blue Lines and then with one of the best sounding discs of all time, Mezzanine. You couldn't talk about trip hop without somebody mentioning Massive Attack. It was impossible.

Then the 2000s happened and Massive Attack has been irrelevant ever since. 100th Window, while a decent album, never hits the highs of previous albums and while their recent EP was interesting, it wasn't top tier material. heligoland follows this trend of being merely average and therefore extremely disappointing. Massive Attack is a great band that I have great expectations for; when they come up short and merely put out an average album, it's almost worse than not putting out anything at all, especially seeing how this album took seven years to make. I find it hard to imagine a time where Massive Attack is relevant again - time has just passed them by, I think.

RJD2 - The Colossus
genre: instrumental rock, jazz, hip hop



Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. This is one of the most frustrating albums of all time.

At first, it's really cool, a varied instrumental album that manages to make you forget about how bad The Third Hand was. Kenna is an old fave of mine and does and his voice fits in well with RJ's instrumentation. The album stagnates a bit as it goes on, but considering how low he set the bar after The Third Hand, it's tolerable.

And then track 9 happens.



Four minutes later, you're reminded of how good RJD2 used to be and how he used to completely own the world of instrumental hip-hop. It doesn't help that Illogic is one of my favourite guys in the world of hip-hop. Suddenly he's invalidated the whole album by daring to compare it to Dead Ringer. It's not even close to being as good, but that doesn't even matter. RJD2 is officially a tease. RJD2, I hate you.

Seeing as my topic purged and all, I felt I should document this somewhere rather than keeping all three of my fans hanging. And, you know, so that I can laugh at this in a few years time when I only actually like one of my current top five anymore. I don't think there has been a single year this decade that I heard my favourite album from the year during that calendar year. Well, except maybe 2008, but that was such a musical write-off that it barely even counts.

If anyone wants links to / write-ups for any of this stuff, I'll happily oblige. And it'd be awesome to see everyone else's lists posted on here too!

Anyway:

Top 25 Albums of 2009

1. Maudlin of the Well - Part the Second
2. Rome - Flowers from Exile
3. Shpongle - Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland
4. Converge - Axe To Fall
5. The Antlers - Hospice
6. Levon Helm - Electric Dirt
7. Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions
8. The Ruins of Beverast - Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite
9. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. II
10. Natural Snow Buildings - Shadow Kingdom
11. Mos Def - The Ecstatic
12. Amesoeurs - Amesoeurs
13. Cunninlynguists - Strange Journey Volumes 1 & 2
14. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
15. Clipse - 'Til The Casket Drops
16. P.O.S. - Never Better
17. Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster
18. Mastodon - Crack the Skye
19. Wu-Tang Clan - Chamber Music
20. Drudkh - Microcosmos
21. Bohren & der Club of Gore - Mitleid Lady (EP)
22. Burial & Four Tet - Moth/Wolf Cub
23. The Necks - Silverwater
24. Cobalt - Gin
25. Crippled Black Phoenix - The Resurrectionists

Top 25 Songs of 2009

1. Converge - Cruel Bloom
2. P.O.S. - Let it Rattle
3. Mos Def - Life in Marvelous Times
4. Drudkh - Ars Poetica
5. The Antlers - Kettering
6. Clipse - Freedom
7. Converge - Dark Horse
8. Shpongle - Invisible Man in a Fluorescent Suit
9. Maudlin of the Well - Laboratories of the Invisible World (Rollerskating the Cosmic Palmistric Postborder)
10. Animal Collective - Brothersport
11. Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
12. Rome - To Die Among Strangers
13. Sunn O))) - Alice
14. Rome - We Who Fell in Love with the Sea
15. Bohren & der Club of Gore - Mitleid Lady
16. Raekwon, Cormega & Sean Price (Wu-Tang Clan) - Radiant Jewels
17. Sole & the Skyrider Band - Black
18. Levon Helm - When I Go Away
19. Jay Electronica - Exhibit C
20. Joss Stone (feat. Nas) - Governmentalist
21. Lady Gaga - Alejandro
22. Why? - Eskimo Snow
23. Big Boi (feat. Gucci Mane) - Shine Blockas
24. Animal Collective - Bluish
25. Patrick Wolf - Thickets

It seems I work through a year's releases significantly less rampantly than some of my colleagues here - while icon could probably make a top twenty already I'm taking it easy.

Still though, initial impressions and rankings for a few choice albums:

Dessa - A Badly Broken Code
Dixon's Girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eQL3BrRqM8

Can't quite boast the same highs as her debut False Hopes EP, but this is still a thoroughly excellent slice of hip-hop melancholia. There's something about this woman's voice and lyricism that just melt me - I can't think of a single female rapper quite as comfortable showing her tender side in her songs, and it's precisely that which makes her stand out. She focuses more consistently on the topic of failed relationships than on her EP; and while no one in hip-hop has covered that area as well as she does here, it still comes across as slightly contrived at times. It's also probably telling that the very best songs here (Children's Work, Dixon's Girl) are largely the ones which deviate from that lyrical formula. But after listening to A Badly Broken Code I don't want to marry Dessa any less than I did before it, so I guess that's mission accomplished on her part. She definitely has the potential to make an album better than this in the future, but for now I'm very happy with this one, thank you very much. 8.6/10

Eluvium - Similes
Leaves Eclipse the Light: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpVzxGtyN6c

Matthew Cooper is a guy I'm glad the music industry has around. The best description of his music I've ever heard was "baby's first ambient," a quote which I've shamelessly stolen from a Copia review, but I don't see why that needs to be a disparaging comment. Sure, parts of Talk Amongst the Trees aside, he's never put out anything especially captivating or truly worth canonizing. But every single one of his albums have been cleverly put together, easy to listen to, and more importantly good. And despite what the internet might be telling you, Similes doesn't change that. Cooper's voice might not be the greatest, but it fits with his sound pretty seemlessly, and he has a pretty damn good ear for vocal melodies. I won't be praising this as anything mindblowing, but not everything needs to be. Similes is a consistently enjoyable and very pleasant album, and as far as reading music goes it's hard to do much better. 7.2/10

Jaga Jazzist - One-Armed Bandit
Bananfleur Overalt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kOVxteDAQ

Hell yeah, this is the album I've always wanted Jaga Jazzist to make. All of their releases before now have appealed to me on some level, but this takes all of their electronic, post-rock, modern classical and jazz influences and tosses them into a big fusion melting pot. It's barely possible to describe the sound of the thing as it's just so diverse, but it comes out sounded roughly akin to Zappa's more jazzy material filtered through the music scene of the last decade. The nine-minute centrepiece Toccata is arguably the most impressive thing here, with its Steve Reich percussion and booming brass, but the whole album barely puts a foot wrong anywhere - of the record's eight songs, only Prognissekongen and Music! Dance! Drama! fall beneath utter excellence. I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to say that this is their best album, but it's certainly their most impressive, and more importantly it's definitely the one which appeals to me most. Anyone with an interest in jazz, fusion or progressive rock owes it to themself to check this out. 8.1/10

I'll do the other four albums I've heard so far later on, perhaps tomorrow.