Songs 2008

Photo by Matthew Nistor.

Mp3 blogs are mostly an indie-rock medium. This is an mp3 blog, and yet, indie rock has never left me more cold than it does now. I spent time this year with probably 75% of the records listed on Pitchfork's year-end Top 50. It felt dutiful, like being in a relationship where you're trying to talk yourself into being in love. To indie rock, I say this: it's not you, it's me. I've changed, I guess. I now only need three things from music: songs, soul and good beats. What I no longer need are obtuse lyrics, affected anger or fashionable disconnect.

So what I use this blog for is more of a celebration of what moves me than just another series of blips on our increasingly ticker-fed radars. The emphasis is on my own personal connection, and not the fact that I got there first. And though the handful of readers I do have is a form of pressure to post in a relatively timely manner, I try not to pro-rate the quality of a track just to get something fresh in your RSS feed.

I said all that to say that making a year-end-best list makes even less sense on this blog than it does elsewhere. Although I do seek out and try to celebrate new music, I'm usually late to the party anyway and couldn't give a shit if it's trendsetting or not. But I do find it exciting and surprising to look back on 2008, a year in music culture that I think of as celebrating cold, dated or obnoxious sounds, and see how many things came out that made my soul (and/or ass) quiver.

I am all for the fact that music is moving back to a singles format, and so I wasn't disappointed to find that 2008 was not a good year for albums. (If you are the type that still enjoys owning the physical artifact of your favorite records, browsing the artwork, displaying it in your home like a stuffed boar's head - then I'd say the records to have are: Al Green Lay It Down; Joan as Policewoman To Survive; The Walkmen You and Me; NOMO Space Rock; Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It; Kardinal Offishall Not 4 Sale; Black Milk Tronic; and - if you could only buy one - Jamie Lidell Jim.) But if you're like me, and only have a thirst for concentrate, here, for your consideration, are 15 songs that made my year. Songs that never seemed to wear out their welcome.

Al Green "Lay it Down"

The miracle. Or sign of musical end times. Or both. A furious God casts judgment on a soulless urban music culture by sending his messenger Al Green - resurrected prophet, his flesh, face and dexterous voice still youthfully in tact - back to earth to show the motherfuckers how it's done. Nobody could have predicted it, or that it would sound so vital. Compared to elder Green, the state of youth seems dire.




Gnarls Barkley "Who's Gonna Save My Soul"

Al Green's record could make me despair that soul singing is a dead form. Cee-Lo's performance on this track is the best proof that the end is not yet nigh.



Portishead "The Rip"

When I first zeroed in on this track, it was as much about Portishead's strange, clunky neo-krautrock production, and the hypnotic casio keyboard riff. Then I heard it out of context, when Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood showed up on YouTube covering it with acoustic guitars. I saw the timeless Kate Bush-ness in it then. Beth Gibbons has a strange sense of melody. I'm convinced that she writes more conventional tunes, keeps them secret in her head, and then sings harmonies to them on the record.



The Reflecting Skin "Cavedweller"
I sometimes daydream video concepts when listening to my favorite music. The one for Cavedweller involves some lonely guy at a party. He sits in the same armchair all night long, ignored, while the party rages around him. Then in synch with the pummeling, distorted climax of the piece, his head shoots back, his mouth snaps open, and he suddenly vomits hideous light out of his mouth, eyes, nose and ears while the house is shaken to its foundations.



Santogold "L.E.S. Artistes (XXXChange remix)"

Sometimes the remix is better.



Jamie Lidell "Little Bit of Feelgood (Mondkopf Remix)"

Sometimes the remix has absolutely nothing to do with the source material. And is better.



Jim Noir "On a Different Shelf"

Fugue-like synth noodling gives way to distorted classic rock and vocal rounds about finding inspiration and getting unstuck. Glorious all over the place.



Jonny Greenwood "Prospectors Arrive"

Jonny Greenwood began his foray into absolute music with the score for Bodysong, a wordless documentary with the modest goal of representing the entire human experience - from bloody birth to muddy death - in pictures. His music lived up to the task. It was actually that primordial and base. Greenwood understands the way that orchestral instruments are tools of vibration, and that, when wielded with the right combination of coloring and harmonic perversity, they can strike a frequency so heavy and ancient it predates good and evil.



John Legend "I Love, You Love"

Legend is almost too smooth for his own good. But if you strip the production down enough, say, to just 909 kick drums and Dire Straits guitar swaths, his flavor of over-pretty can really work.



Jamie Lidell "Another Day"

The first video they shot for this was bananas - (somebody help me find this! They've purged it from the web) just Lidell in some toddler's bedroom, playing with puppets and exuding joy. It was a perfect way to communicate why Lidell's retro experiment is more relevant now than it should be. Happiness is always in style, as long as you can dance to it.



Kleerup "Thank You For Nothing"

Hits all the right '80s notes with all the right sincerity.



Q-Tip "Move"

J Dilla will never die. Here his production lends an ass kicking to the most urgent hip hop track of the year.



Raphael Saadiq "Sometimes"

Personally, my song of the year. Wore this one out, up and down. As soon as that filtered organ loop crackles in at the intro, the goosebumps just erupt. I can't explain it.



Black Milk "Bond 4 Life"

With no disrespet to Flying Lotus, he is not the successor to Dilla. Black Milk is.



Fennesz "Glide"

[Untranslatable]

A New Hymn

It's hard to shake my conditioning, raised, as I was, slanted as a row of pews. It's hard to delete the want of soulful communion with fellow travelers. Or to end the search for a liturgy that I can get behind, some kind of text that speaks to the bursts of reverence emanating from my own heart. Because those bursts seem to have a very uncommon frequency, and I've never found a hymnal that could contain them, let alone enough kindred spirits to form a choir.

I've been going out a lot the past few weeks. Some of it has been edifying, some of it simply fun. I've tried reconciling the irreconcilable. I've tried stretching my heart. Holding my liquor. Owning the room. Reaching always deeper. Sometimes you can make a little church in a bar, but the little preacher's kid in me occasionally wakes up wanting to shower off the noise and smoke and projecting in dark rooms to make way for something brighter, quieter and more reflective. When I feel that way, I wish there was a church for my people, with hymns of peaceful uncertainty, blessings of affirmation, a congregation lit in the eyes and hot for the joyful noise.

In another world, my kind of world, 2006 would have been the date entered in Wikipedia for the creation of a new, timeless hymn. A fresh entry into the cannon of Works of Truth. Brian Eno would have been the author. I fantasize about whole groups of people singing, in booming unison, a text this confused and sacred: High above the single bird/ it drifts above the dead volcanoes/ Who's to lose and who's to find/ There's nothing here that I could choose at all.

I imagine that and it's hard not to feel the pang of spiritual exile. But then I think, if Eno wrote this there is at least one other. And probably more.

Brian Eno "Caught Between"



Caught between the earth and the sky
One too low, and one too high
Falling free
and holding on
Nothing there at all

Dropped
and lifted
Gotta breathe
Bottom drifting
on the wave
Holding just a few poor words
or nothing at all

Reaching out to still the sand
The light connects the breaking moments
Drifting to another shore
There's nothing here that I could change at all
Nothing at all

Forced to bend a broken line
Let to hold what we can't find
Then to let it go again
Nothing said at all

High above the single bird
it drifts above the dead volcanoes
Who's to lose and who's to find
There's nothing here that I could choose at all

Movies 2008

Photo by Matthew Nistor

I really hate the idea of making lists of things I like. It seems a little petty and like a symptom of cultural gluttony. But I also know that I read the lists others make at this time every year and that it works as a filter for me so that I can get a sense of what to go look for. I'm at a conflicted point in my life about culture - feeling both that there's just too much of everything but that, on the flipside, I'm seeing popular culture - including hit movies and records - that are great humanist works of art.

I'll start out with film and move onto other things later in the week. Though nothing struck me as strong this year as my favorite movies of 2007, there was a lot that excited me. But rather than try to organize and rate it, let me do a little celebrating and a little bit of advocacy.

There were three films in 2007 that I got worked up over - The Fountain, Sunshine and No Country For Old Men. The great news this year was that all three of those directors put out new movies: respectively Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler; Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire; and The Coen Bros., Burn After Reading. I haven't had a chance to see The Wrestler yet (which is getting great reviews), but the other two did not dissapoint. Burn After Reading is very funny, and very dark. It's a twin to Fargo in the sense that it portrays a world where everybody is an idiot, and blind to their own idiocy, and in which that idiocy often results in cruelty and brutality. But it's funny as shit. Boyle can do no wrong by me (28 Days Later, A Life Less Ordinary) and Slumdog has his trademark vibrancy and energy, only it's far more sentimental than his previoius movies, in a good way. The lovestory that comes out of the story is epic.

Moving quickly through the rest: If There Will Be Blood was the best thing I saw all year (I was sick with a fever but sat riveted through it's heavy running time without feeling a thing - I would pay money just to watch Daniel Day Lewis read the phone book) Step Brothers was the funniest. I haven't gotten bored yet with Will Ferrell or John C. Riley the way some of my friends seem to have, and I think this movie might be the one they were both born to make. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might be as good as There Will Be Blood if it had Daniel Day Lewis in it and Johnny Greenwood's score. WALL-E is astounding - the fact that the year's most hyped summer animation blockbuster was essentially a silent film for the first half is hard to believe. And yet, that wordless first movement was my favorite part. So gorgeous and also very nostalgic for me in an '80s way in its Speilbergian romance of space and robots. Having said that, Kung Fu Panda is just as good, if not better, in its own way. It's a perfect movie, really funny and with the same exquisite pacing and direction as any Pixar film - actually the first non-Pixar animation that I've seen to hit at those levels. Elegy and The Savages were sharp, elegant independents that I'd see again. Iron Man was a better film than The Dark Night, and possibly the best superhero movie yet. I had no idea John Favreu had it in him. Quantum of Solace carried on the rehibilitation of the franchise by delivering a sequel to Casino Royale that has all of that film's rage without any of its respite or romance. Like the Dark Night, it's just endlessly grim. But unlike Dark Night, it's lithe and gorgeous to look at, and doesn't have silly bat cowls and batvoices to take your attention out of your movie-trance. I heard the budget for this film was astronomical, and when I saw it I could see every penny translated.

Advocy-wise, I already made my case for Religulous here on my personal blog. But I don't get tired of pointing one thing out: it's less about religion than the way religion is practiced. Some people have criticized Maher for taking on easy targets: the feeble and easily persuaded everydaymen, rather than professional apologists. But that's a smarter angle, because the true dangers inherent in religion come from those little and numerous lowest-common-denominator moments of minds closing. Maher exposes not just how quick people are to apply a lax set of standards to a particular belief system, but how that standard is incongruous with what they'd apply to anything else - all because they've been conditioned to do so. And Maher captures hundreds of those moments and uses them to support a persuasive thesis. Religion touches everybody in this world, no matter what you believe. So I really feel that everyone should spend the two hours it takes to engage this movie. And it's not like it's homework - it's hilarious.

Rent The Promotion. It's the most overlooked film of the year. A really sweet, unassuming comedy featuring John C. Riley and Sean William Scott and directed by Steven Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness) that manages to avoid a lot of message-cliches while delivering tons of laughs. I quote this movie all the time. Think Groundhog Day.

You Can Have Me, Julie

This is my all-time favorite Christmas track. It's sex in a can. Julie London just kills it.

Julie London - "I'd Like You For Christmas"

Fennesz's Full Blast

Followers of the Hebrew g-d believe that h-s name is so holy it can't be spoken, only referred to. Muslims believe it's a sin to make an image of their prophet, and aboriginal Australians won't let you take their photograph lest you capture their soul. I'm a shitty mystic, but there is something about the music of Christian Fennesz that makes me want to avert my descriptive gaze - to shuffle in backwards, eyes downcast, to the sacred temple of his sound when trying to write about it. It would seem crude to do anything like talk about process, or actual instrumentation, or, g-d forbid, his software. Because in the end it all ends up dumped in a sea. The black fathoms of hot crackling blast. The liquid void. The holy drone of his music.

This time last year I was compiling a year-end best-of list of sorts and a sentence kept popping up in my mind that I never posted: the best album of 2007 was the one Fennesz never released. By that I didn't mean that I had gotten my hands on a leaked draft of a new work by the Austrian sound sorcerer; I meant that 2007 was both the year of my discovery of Fennesz and the period of my life most suited to resonate with the disembodied beauty of his work. It was a year of psychic house cleaning during which I destroyed more fixtures of false belief than ever before. I spent a lot of hours staring at candles, cross-legged on wood floors in dark rooms, fighting with silence. Hours of peeling away the layers of mental dust and paint that had caked onto the walls of my thought. It was subtractive work - taking my mind down to its most minimal, looking for the Still, Small Voice underneath it all. I don't know what, if anything, I found in all that subtraction, but what stayed with me was a better sense of my environment and a certainty that the great spiritual battle of our time is to make war with clutter - the full blast of stimulation and information gushing at us on a daily basis. (Sadly, I'm barely fighting it. I spend more time on my computer than ever. If this blog goes dark, feel free to hope that I left to care for my soul.)

The more I allowed myself to melt the more Fennesz I played. On thick summer nights I'd find the room with the best cross breeze, throw a mattress down and smoke out to Venice. As I listened with chemically widened ears, I knew that Fennesz was making the true music of our age. An ambient requiem for an entire generation of souls sizzling in a digital frying pan - cell phones, microwave ovens and power lines, piping us full of disease and bathing us in a black sea of anxiety. Fennesz, it seemed to me, was the only artist making any music of spiritual concern. It was wordless, wide stuff. Our own voices, bouncing back to us off canyon-like walls of city buildings in reflections of distortion and smeared melodies.

That summer I also took Salvia, the diviner's sage, a few times. I loved and respected it as a leafy portal to lucid dreaming as well as a dangerously powerful magnifier. With Salvia environment is key because it will take the slighest sights and sounds in the room with you and project them up on a massive wall like flickering puppet shadows cast ghoulishly by candles. Idiots cocktail the stuff like a party drug and get sucked screaming out windows and have their souls steam-rolled like doomed 'toons in a Warner Bros. cartoon. I only did it alone, in silence and in the dark. But this one night I was careless and took too big a hit. I came to on all fours, sweating the shapes of my forearms and shins onto my yoga mat, without memory. The fan of my macbook's hard drive eight feet away, a barely perceptible hum under normal circumstances, became a deafening helicopter blade chopping the air just above my head and descending upon my bedroom like the whirling, flaming sword of an archangel.

That Salvia trip taught me something about our true natures and how we weaken them. That we humans are engines of power and dream who muffle the godlike boom of our souls by smothering them in paper-mache nests that we build our whole lives, strip by flimsy strip, until they are as hard and containing as a bomb shield. A piece of information here, some empty stimulation there. NPR, cable, radio, magazines, blogs, records, movies. We're caked over in false security like the shivering homeless - passed out on winter benches, swaddled in makeshift newspaper blankets.

That is what Fennesz's music sounds like - the quiet beneath the debris. It's a vital hum that never competes, never tries to rise above our filters. We can only go diving for it, and once submerged we are given over to dream. Sitting down for the first time to listen to Fennesz's new recordings, Black Sea, immersed in headphones and staring out the window at a heavy snowfall, I saw things. I saw a lumbering dark giant carrying a black Santa sack over his shoulder in which he carried light. I saw him sidle up to the side of a house at night and peek down into its chimney. I saw the giant dump the contents of his bag down the chimney like an electric Pentecost which poured through the home, blanketing every sleeping person in it in currents of white-hot healing.

Fennesz - "Glide" [From Black Sea]



Fennesz - "Rivers of Sand" [From Venice]



Fennesz - "The Point of it All" [From Venice]