Rok jak to rok. Ma całe 365 dni. Muzyka jak to muzyka. Ma moc przez całe 365 dni. W tym roku jak co roku w muzyce znów dużo, dobrze i konkretnie. Gdy zawodzą Ci znani, to zaskakują debiutanci. Gdy rozczarowują nowe twarze, to powalają giganci. Ot, normalna kolej rzeczy. Jak było według mnie w tym roku? Zobaczcie sami.
Are you lost? How did you get here? What time is it? Did you read Part 1 of my Monster 2009 Year-end Wrapup? I think you should go here first, I really do.
2009: The Albums
I have to come back and complete my writeups for these, but here they are: Fever Ray: Fever Ray
Let's face it, this was never not going to be my number 1. The Knife is one of my favorite groups of the whole decade, and I'm mildly obsessed with Karin Dreijer, the Swedish mastermind of this Fever Ray solo project. Far from being more of the same chilly electro as her better-known duo, Fever Ray represents a progression of the sounds Karin has been exploring all along, and a more complicated emotional expression. The menace of Silent Shout has deepened into something more ambivalent, a kind of tired anxiety haunted by beauty. This is fitting, as most of the songs were composed while tending to her newborn daughter and struggling with lack of sleep and postpartum depression. Rather than playing it for pathos, this introspective album achieves an eerily gorgeous and oddly visual sonic landscape. The opening song If I Had A Heart hits you with this right away, with headachey synths sawing away behind a bleak and exhausted vocal from Karin. Other gentler tracks keep up this sense of 3am insomnia, from the dreamlike Triangle Walks to the worryingly peaceful Keep The Streets Empty For Me.
Electronic music does not tend to be personally revealing; The Knife has been no exception. So it's surprising how personal these songs seem to be, even as they keep at some remove from the real Karin through her trademarked vocal distortions. There's enough ambiguity to keep us guessing (when she sings "we were hungry before we were born", is she singing about her daughter? Or herself?) but it feels as though we're closer than ever before. It's a stunning achievement and my top album of 2009.
Soap & Skin : Lovetune for Vaccuum When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
That's what I think this album is exactly - putting away childish things. Soap&Skin calls the above to mind in the most straightforward song on the album, Spiracle, with its repeating phrase "when I was a child"; in this case those childish things appear to be unpleasant memories she can't seem to bury. On this track she sounds fragile and childlike ("please help me"), but when she says at the end of the song, "I *am* a child", I can't quite believe her. It's more like Lovetune for vaccum is conjuring up a notion only so it can relentlessly stamp it out.
Soap&Skin aka Anja Plaschg was born in 1990 (Does that make anyone else feel very awfully old?) She may be an indication of what the next generation's influences will be: Aphex Twin, Xiu Xiu, Black Dice and obviously Bjork. Granting that any foreign woman performing in English is going to be compared to Bjork, the two have similar approaches to electronic music. Their voices are central to the music and they can make their computer-generated instruments live and breathe in their songs. Soap&Skin however, dodges any hint of preciousness, and makes decidedly sinister and sometimes tormented music. Take standout track DDMMYYYY, where it sounds like an IBM is having a fullout panic attack, starting with that glitchy deep-breathing opening and culminating in unintelligible screaming. Even a gorgeous track like The Sun has a strange uneasiness lurking at its corners. Lovetune makes use of beautiful piano playing as a kind of anchor for the glitches and screeches going on around it, along with delicate touches from voice and computer. The best parts of this album are almost unspeakably beautiful, and incredibly promising for this artist's future.
Traditions are made out of repetition, so here's another most played music of the year... 2009 edition. Yay!
Just like in past years, this chart is ordered by averaged plays - Averaged plays = Total Plays / Album Total tracks; And like journals past, this one is not without a small sob story of lost scrobbles. Aside from the usual mishaps there was also a computer breakdown halfway through the year that made the gap between my local library and the last.fm stats even greater for those albums that were released on the first half of the year. No need to cry much because I was able to update my library, so technically no stats were lost, just scrobbles. *sigh*
About 2009 I will say that there was just too much music to take in, especially on the second half of the year. This led to many albums not getting enough plays, even though I did enjoyed them, there was just not enough time for them to gain proper chart recognition. Yes, a list of most played albums is not an accurate thing.
In honor of those albums, I have decided to include the stats of 25 albums and save the rant for the Top 15. I also decided to disqualify Telepathe's Dance Mother, because I barely even listened to it this year. It got to my mid-year countdown mostly based on the older tracks, that I think it's not all that fair.
Anyhoo, here we go!
Most played #25 - #16
Apologies to these pretty good albums.
Top 15 15. Atlas Sound - Logos Played 175 times – averaged 16 plays per track
This album will forever be remembered as the one that includes the happiest sounding song of 2009: Walkabout! That song makes me think of those old Disney cartoons with lots of music and very little dialogue. Something that may include a train or a car rolling down a road with very obtuse hills. The rest of the album does not run on that same vein, but it's still a very melodic, contagious, and at times delicate, album.
14. Micachu - Jewellery Played 282 times – averaged 22 plays per track
What could you expect out of something that uses broken bottles, vacuum cleaners and others self-built instruments? The year's craziest album of course! To say that this album goes to the point is to cut it short. Most songs don't even pass the 3-minute mark, and even the shortest tracks - like 0:53(!) Sweetheart - are real songs. Its brevity could very well be its biggest strength and, even when they don't contain an actual melody, most of the songs are very catchy.
There are bands that want to make as much noise as possible, these guys just set their pedals to obliterate! This album a bit more melodic compared to their debut and, if I dare say so, a lot more fun to listen to without ever sacrificing their main objective: rock your face off!
Dead Man's Bones is the extra-curricular project of actors Zach Shields and Ryan Gosling. I wasn't really that interested in it when I first heard about. Don't know if you've noticed but there are a lot of actors with musical projects and... well, I said I wasn't really that interested in it. That was until I got a free mp3 of a couple of songs was immediately sold on it. Neither of them is musically trained so they decided to take that to their own advantage, get a bunch of equally untrained kids to do choir bits, gather up every possible story about werewolves, zombies, et al. The end result is very interesting. The kids inject a lot of energy into it, making it equally charming as it is a bit heartbreaking and creepy.
Just like I said on my mid-year countdown, this album is not far off the road from their first album. It's still got those raw, violent songs mixed with a few more delicate electronic interludes and anarchy/take action inspired sample tracks.
In a way, Humbug walks close by the hand of their second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, even down to the awful title. There are a lot of 70s progressive rock guitars that sound even bigger, and slightly heavier, on this album. Half of it was produced by James Ford, who worked on FWN, while the other half was taken over by Josh Hommes of Queens of The Stone Age/Eagles of Death Metal. If you listen closely, it won't be difficult for you to guess which tracks were produced by whom. There are a few that sound just like QOTSA, that is not such a bad thing.
This is one beautifully crafted album! Every song has a bit that damn near wants to take your breath away and melodies that flow so easily and get stuck in your head. The one thing that could perhaps break it for some people out there is the falsetto, but made no negative impact whatsoever.
I'd like to add that I got this album from eMusic ,that it included a bonus track, so these stats were produced by 11 songs.
If I could, I would recommend this album to anyone who dared listen. Generally speaking, it's on the late 80s britpop side of the equation. I won't lie to you, they sound a bit Smiths-y, in a great way! I'm planning on writing a love journal in the upcoming weeks. These following tracks are a good start-up...
Not much too add from my mid-year observations. Beautiful album that still manages to feel intimate and personal. One thing worthy of note is that I liked Ed's songs better on this album, as you can see by the list below.
At first, there were some ugh-another-one-of-those-bands feelings, but this album ended up winning me fair and square, with its nicely crafted skewed and dark atmospherics. Truth is you gotta have strong compositions to hold themselves together as you put them through so much distortion.
Well, well, well. Look who we got here!... at number three. As some people may have read, I had some mixed feeling with this one. Mostly good, but still mixed. The track order doesn't feel right and the production is a bit over the place, some songs have crystal clear details (Reflection of The Television, The Room, At the Burnside) while others sound a bit muddled (Made to Disappear, Interrupted) It gave a bit of an uneven feeling to the album. I think it managed to creep up to the top three because I still can't understand it, which leads to a lot of repeated plays in search of enlightenment. Though I've given up for the time being.
02. Fever Ray - Fever Ray Played 684 times – averaged 68 plays per track
By mid-year, this was the one album that had me the closest to going cuckoo-cuckoo over it. Those feelings still stand, though I didn't have much time to listen to it because of all the new music that came out the last few months of the year, that's probably the only reason it couldn't hold on to the top spot. Shame!
Thought I'd add that her live show was the perfect blend of lasers, smoke machine, creepy scenes and dancing wizards!
01. Ramona Falls - Intuit Played 748 times – averaged 68 plays per track
Shocked it beat out Fever Ray! (They were technically tied with 68 averaged plays, but this album had more overall plays) I consider this to be a one-man vengeance for that 2007 loss. Ahem. I wrote some thoughts on it a few months back. The level of attention to details on this album is what really sells it.
And I must mention the excellent video for I Say Fever!
I love watching this because it's the kind of video that invites you to decipher its meaning while putting it in the same context of the original song.
My first thoughts are that the scent of "fever" (reads: Fieber, german) represents each characters' deepest desire that has the power to unleash the true essence of each one of them. The perpetrator, who's been hiding his interests for the female character underneath the façade of correctness, wants to unleash this true essence. This leads him to take off his own eagle mask and attempt to forcefully unveil this side the other characters have worked so much to keep a secret.
This symbolism works brilliantly as eagles is a strong hunter with a sharp vision and a symbol of salvation. In the context of the video one could interpret it as the one character who recognizes the true face of the woman, who shifts from a serene smile and innocent look into a rabid wolf.
All in all, a strong year with lots of good music, but in the end no one blew my brains out for more than a couple of weeks or so. So there's a positive, but mixed, feeling about the year. Still the list of album to complete/get is far too long. See you next year on the revised list!
A big shout out goes out to Doug Scripts, who created an iTunes Script to calculate "Total Play Count of Selected Tracks", making my life a whole lot easier.
Ive got nothing to do, so lets shuffle my ipod so i can remember what i loved the most on 2009. Sorry if some of these arent particularly from 09; the internet at uni is shit and i hardly ever found the time to get new music,,,anywaysss! here they are, in no particular order, obviously...
#10.The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love
This album reminded me a lot of their 2004 EP, The Tain, which also has tracks that seamlessly blend together into one - as well as their "harder" sound". I don't like it as much as their two previous albums, but I have to admit, it has an epic quality about it.
#09.Regina Spektor - Far
One thing I love about Regina Spektor is that she's not afraid to experiment with unconventional song structure and vocal stylings. While Far continues her move into increasingly popular and accessible music, she still retains these qualities.
#08.God Help The Girl - God Help The Girl
This is a soundtrack album for a musical film that Belle & Sebastian's frontman is writing - to be released sometime in the indefinite future. This album sounds like the movie will be a throwback to French New Wave of the 1960s. In typical Belle & Sebastian style, it can be best described as precious and adorable.
#07.Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band - Outer South
This is very much an ensemble album, several of the songs are not written or preformed by Conor Oberst. This is unfortunate, because those songs he wasn't involved in weren't all that good. However, his stuff on this album is good enough to keep it in my top ten.
#06.Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Their sound reminds me a little like the Strokes - they have some great guitar and a beat that's really great to dance to. I'm generally not a big fan of synthesizer in music, but these guys use it to great affect. In short, this album is just a lot of fun.
#05. Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light
I can almost guarantee you won't like Antony's other-worldly voice when you first hear it - I didn't. It's very much an acquired taste. But now I think his is the most incredible voice I've ever heard. I recommend starting with his 2005 album I Am a Bird Now, but this is a very good follow-up.
#04.Elvis Perkins in Dearland - Elvis Perkins in Dearland
Elvis Perkins' previous album had a melancholy, folksy, Americana sound - perhaps reminiscent of mid-19th century bluegrass. This new album continues the same sound, but spruces it up with a full complement of drums, horns, organ, and other period-appropriate instruments. This guy is a seriously talented musician.
#03.The Raveonettes - In And Out Of Control
Their 60s pop sound works nicely with their deceptively dark lyrics. When you combine it with their noisy feedback, it's like a mix between Jesus & Mary Chain and the Shangri-Las. This album has more pop then their previous stuff and I'm really liking their direction - it's probably my favorite album of theirs.
#02.M. Ward - Hold Time
I am a huge fan of M. Ward's old-fashioned, folksy sound seeping with blues and country influences. While it's not the flawless album that Post-War (2006) was, this is still a very strong effort.
#01.The Legendary Tiger Man - Femina
This is a rather obscure choice for my #1, but bear with me. I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon this album and want to share it. Femina has a sparse, stripped-down blues sound driven primarily by some awesome guitar riffs. Per its namesake, each song on this album has a guest female vocalist resulting in a distinctly different sound for each song. Not every song works for me -- there are a few misses -- but it's still an amazing and unique
Antony and the Johnsons
