Best of the ’11: Joan as Police Woman

 

 Joan as Police Woman,
“Flash”

I like the Deep Field album – the single “The Magic” is superb – but I haven’t been able to get into it fully as I just can’t get past “Flash” This is just so achingly crazy SUBLIME that everything else falls into the distance. Joan ‘Jeff Buckley’s former girlfriend’ Wasser always does this, I feel; she always puts something on every one of her albums that completely eclipses everything else, despite them always being solidly excellent.
A note: I tried in vain to find a video or .wav that did any kind of justice to the track. Sadly the shitty sound on the YouTubes mean you miss the warmth, the intricate interweaving of sounds that drift out of deep space and softly dissipate like a sigh. This is pure through headphones in a dark room in the tired early hours music. If there’s one single track from 2011 that I will listen to for the rest of my life, then this is it.

Best of the ’11: Yuck

Yuck,
“Holing Out” / Yuck

As with the aforementioned Sulk, here’s another lot that hit that sweet spot of early ’90s nostalgia: Yuck (have we run out of band names or something?). What’s funny about this band is that although they are, at core, Londoners barely in their 20s, the music is in hock to early ’90s US alt.rock, with the vocalist even adopting the whiny drawl that American indie singers like to use. So we get distorted, fuzzed-out guitar sound over sweet melodic songs, which is all very reminiscent of  the kind of noise pop that swam alongside grunge as pilot fish would with a shark. I’m thinking: Sugar’s Copper Blue album, Dinosaur Jr’s Where You Been? and Sonic Youth’s Dirty, with a bit of Pavement, Pixies and The Breeders thrown in there as well.  Nice.
To think: I had tickets to their gig at the Electric Ballroom in Camden last November and couldn’t go thanks to my bank account haemorrhaging money out till the last penny. This robbed me of the chance to go turbo nutter bonkers in the mosh-pit during “Holing Out”, slam-dancing to the tasty bit of shredding going on on that song (2:20-2:47; 3:44-> in the video). Gah.

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Best of the ’11: Sulk

 Sulk,
“Back in Bloom”

Anyone up for a Madchester revival? You know it’s going to happen sooner or later, so let’s get it out of the way now, shall we?
Actually, although Sulk’s previous single “Wishes” (their debut, I think) was a full on Stone Roses/The Charlatans-y sounding track –  sun-dappled ’60s psychedelia through a filter of jangly late-’80s indie – “Back in Bloom” is more representative of what was around during that ’91-’93 window between Madchester and Britpop when UK indie was in [an interesting] flux. This is more like your Ride, and “All in the Mind” era Verve (ie before the dad-rock anthems of The Verve) : all expansive, sky-scraping guitars and vague lyrics about, I don’t know, girls and waves and stars and euphemisms for drug taking. The usual.
At the moment my interest in this is total nostalgia wank. I can’t seem to help it, I’m afraid. This sound – the sound from my youth and early 20s – is a part of my DNA, and my response to it is purely Pavlovian. In fact a lot of my favourite new music of the past year is down to familiarity, which, I suppose, is an age thing. Good or bad, that’s how it is.
But the sound of The Stone Roses, of course, was itself a throwback, to the music of twenty odd years before, and now we have young Sulk – a throwback to the throwback, and as distant from the Stone Roses as the Stone Roses were from The Byrds and The Beatles . It’ll be interesting to see how Sulk progress from here, if they progress at all.

Best of the ’11: Fucked Up

Just never got the time to finish my end-of-year round-up in 2011, so I’ll set about mopping up the stragglers right here in the ’12.

 Fucked Up,
“Queen of Hearts” / David Comes to Life 

The mighty “Queen of Hearts” single contains the best chat-up line I can possibly think of: “Hello, my name is David“. That, my friends, is a winner. The parent album by the Canadian hardcore band (who I’d never even heard of before 2011) is a four act, 18-track behemoth, which weighs in at a patience-testing 78 minutes. So, it’s basically this shouty-punk concept album about David, a light bulb factory worker who falls in love with a girl called Veronica, a communist revolutionary who – spoiler alert – gets killed during her attempt to blow up the factory.
No, it’s not really a toe-tapper, and, in truth, between Damian Abraham’s own brand of Sgt Throat-Cancer style singing, and the unrelenting, heads-down guitar attack it gets quite wearing before long, if not lyrically incomprehensible. Taken in bite-size pieces, however (the LP’s ‘four act’ break-down helps here), and the result can be exhilarating, and even very affecting once you’ve untangled the dense knot of lyrics. Daring album, interesting band. Really good live, apparently.

Best of the ’11: David Lynch

 David Lynch,
“Good Day Today”

So, what is probably my favourite track of the year is something that was actually released at the tail end of 2010. But seeing as I discovered it this year, and the fact that it practically soundtracked my summer is a good enough reason for me to chuck it into the mix here.
I suppose it makes sense that when so many other bands are making music that sound like “music in a David Lynch film”, that old Eraserhead himself may as well get in on the act. And “Good Day Today” does indeed have a certain Twin Peaks ‘Pink Room’ drugged headspin feel to it, but with a pulsing electro beat and Lynch’s own, er, singular singing voice – helped here by being vocodered, fittingly giving it a disconnected and otherworldy feel. Cut through with jarring sound effects, and with a yearning lyric, it’s actually quite an upbeat, if strange, little pop tune. It’s a shame that the resultant Crazy Clown Time album neither lived up to the lead single nor its title, although the duet with Karen O wasn’t bad.
Maybe David Lynch should leave it to others to come up with David Lynch music?

Best of the ’11: Kate Bush

 Kate Bush,
 50 Words For Snow /”Wild Man“

In interviews Kate Bush can be disarmingly warm, amiable and friendly – just enough to throw interviewers off the scent. Truth is, no-one has really got to the bottom of the oddness of Kate. She puts forward an image that is so… natural and normal most of the time. A deliberate ploy, I feel, to stop anyone getting close, to stop anyone uncovering just what is going on in Kateworld. Good for her, I say.

50 Words For Snow, as you know, is made up of songs built around the theme of winter and snowbound places. Songs about blizzards and ghosts, about luckless lovers, and – with usual Kate bizarreness – about snowmen climbing through windows to have a trysts with sleeping women – which deviates somewhat from Raymond Briggs’ boring yearly bit of animation, and definitely one with more innuendo (“I can feel him melt in my hand” indeed). Then there’s the excellent single, “Wild Man”, which must shoot into everyone’s top 100 songs that are about the Abominable Snowman – and can we get a ‘first’ for the use of the word “rhododendrons” in popular song?
The seven unhurried songs here form an album – a real album – of luxuriant prettiness which may be Kate’s consistent best since The Sensual World (not that I’m saying that 2005′s Arial isn’t a masterpiece, just one that isn’t as easily giving as 50 Words is), though the reviews of it have been somewhat lukewarm when they should have been luke-hot – especially for the caramel smooth duet with Elton John. Maybe this needs more time to thaw in the conciousness in this age of instant gratification.
Yeah whatever…

Best of the ’11: Destroyer

 Destroyer,
 Kaputt

Look, I’m as sick to the stomach with all of the inverted commas 1980s-y, ironic-beard h*pster bullshit as anyone. But, y’know. This is 2011 – when it comes to searching around for new music that’s at least half decent, you’ve got to scrabble about for anything you can get.
Destroyer’s new long player, Kaputt, pushes the pastel-shaded eighties-isms as far as I’m willing to go. Often drifting into jazzy soft rock, complete with Kenny G saxophone, occasionally sounding like some 1985 wine bar music for men who wore linen jackets with rolled-up sleeves over t-shirts, thinking it made them look like fucking Don Johnson or something.
Here’s the thing though: it’s actually pretty good. It has a late summer shimmer that feels airy, soft-focused, and sad. And, here and there, as on the album’s best moment, “Savage Night at the Opera” (I know – fuck that for a song title, but bear with me) there are sighing synths, crystalline guitars and moody bass, like New Order or The Cure at their most languid. It’s music to softly play as you lick Martini from the hollow of the back of a coked-up teenage model on the veranda of your beach house, as a liquid sun slowly melts into the Pacific horizon.

Best of the ’11: Mint Julep

Mint Julep, “Aviary”

I don’t really know anything about Mint Julep, in fact, to be honest, I kind of lost interest when I discovered that the three girls in the video aren’t in the band at all. Still, the vid is one of my favourites of the year. It’s nicely simple and trippy and the hazy ambient electronindie (a term I’ve just invented, btw) is an ideal soundtrack.

“Tis’ the season”

I think I first heard this about – oh gawd – 20 years ago, and have listened to it every Yuletide since. Great comfort listening. “Olives, pickles, scallions. Most folks call ‘em green onions, but they’re really scallions. Do you ever notice that, Joe?“

Best of the ’11: Laura Marling

Laura Marling,
A Creature I Don’t Know

I say again: she was BORN IN THE NINETEEN NINETIES. With the precociousness and the self-possession, I suppose you could say that that’s what your £17,000 a year in private school fees pays for, but the darkness and the depth displayed are part of some whole other mystery.
And Creature is far darker than its two predesessors, and more of a piece. One in which she’s driven by demons, but not ones she’s afraid of – these are ones she uses to become the pursuer, “I’m nothing but the beast, and I’ll call on you when I need to feast.” she sings on “The Muse”. The darkness in herself also seems to give her a hunger for the darkness in others, and this strong sexual allure is what many of the songs here play with, especially the album’s centrepiece “The Beast”: “tonight I sleep with the Beast“. Ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
As ever it’s mainly all about Marling’s cool, conversational croon set to her fingerplucked guitar, with occasional bursts of chamber pop, and sometimes even panoramic keyboard-driven crescendos. Obvious comparisons to Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, and many other folky, confessional singer-songwritery acts of her parents’ generation can be put down to Marling undoubtedly absorbing it all whilst sat on her music teacher father’s knee.  But the 21 year old (okay, we should give the age thing a rest now) is making something unique here, and absolutely head-and-shoulders above her nu-folk contemporaries. Once or twice her songs almost threaten to slide into cosy, Radio 2, Eddie Reader territory, but the Marling’s kinetic drive, and flint-like intelligence always always pushes them well clear. Towering.