Retro-spective: My favorite albums of 2011 (5-1)

(Click here for the preamble and for albums 10-6, illustrated and illuminated.)

5. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges (Constellation)

Most of the music I enjoyed this past year fit within familiar pop conventions and made use of familiar sounds. Musically, I'm a creature of habit: just as inclined toward repetition as I am toward novelty. Colin Stetson's solo record stands out not only because his vertigo-inducing songs avoid easy categorization, but because he uses unfamiliar sounds to channel the chaos of a forgotten (I want to say "Old Testament") world. To do this, Stetson bypasses most of the studio wizardry that other solo artists normally rely on. No loops here - just a muscular man and his massive machine. Along with his much talked about circular breathing technique, Stetson uses several different mics (variously located on his instrument and his body) to produce a wide range of primordial sounds that actually seem to capture the kind of archaic violence suggested by his (very pretentious) album title. The result is so utterly brutal, at once so mesmerizing and jarring, that Stetson's collection quickly became one of the most divisive and disturbing albums of the year.

4. Wye Oak - Civilian (Merge)

Here's what I wrote about this album back in May. For the most part, I think it still holds true:

It's a soothing, satisfying record: cohesive and gentle, but incredibly cathartic and uncompromising at the same time. It's the kind of record, in other words, that you'll want to listen to all the way through. This is going to sound like the worst kind of cliche, but for me, Wye Oak have found a paradoxical balance, the fullest expression of which can be found in the alt-rock of the early 90s. So it's a little creepy how much this album seems suited to my tastes.  Wye Oak's second proper LP highlights a stunning vocalist (Jenn Wasner), ample feedback, grungy breakdowns and lyrics with vaguely religious themes. For instance, there seems to be an ongoing dialectic between Creation and Evolution in Wasner's lyrics that's oddly compelling. Musically, things appear relatively stripped down (the band performs as a two-piece), but every so often Wye Oak's sound becomes incredibly expansive.

3. Sandro Perri - Impossible Spaces (Constellation)

I was introduced to the wispy voice of Toronto's Sandro Perri back in 2006 with his second proper album, Tiny Mirrors. I still like much of what I heard, but at the time I thought it sounded a little too stripped-down, a little too straightforward for a folksy singer-songwriter with clear Afro-beat influences (and a major debt to Arthur Russell). What I saw as shortcomings five years ago were perhaps over-corrected on Impossible Spaces, a cohesive collection of songs I honestly didn't think Perri was capable of. In interviews he's made it clear that he took every one of those five years (since Tiny Mirrors) to work on the new record. And it shows. The grand scope these songs--their dynamic structures and lush instrumentation--is carefully balanced by the intimacy of Perri's softly sung narratives. I tried to flesh out one of them (the ten minute epic "Wolfman") in the image above.

2. The Antlers - Burst Apart (Frenchkiss)

A haunting, absorbing chamber-pop album from Brooklyn's finest students of atmosphere and emotion, Burst Apart demonstrates that there is life after the kind of trauma explored on the Antlers' 2009 debut, Hospice. But if the conceptual overload of Hospice has indeed been left behind, it's only just barely. These songs speak of emotional collapse and relationships that are doomed to fail. Each track sounds as though its teetering on the edge of something terrible--be it chaos, the abyss, or isolation. Combine the apocalyptic tone of Menomena with the sublime reach of a group like Sigur Ros and you might have something close to the Antlers' sound. Despite the deep darkness of Peter Silberman's vision, Burst Apart is oddly comforting. For all the acknowledgments of subjective depravity, ineptitude, and confessions of deceitfulness, Silberman hits on something similar to St. Vincent's Strange Mercy and ultimately refuses to give himself the last word.

1. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Vagrant)

As expected, PJ Harvey was rolling in accolades by the time 2011 came to a close. Clearly, I'm in agreement with most critics when they praise Harvey's latest album as her best in a decade, but I'll confess that it's not a record I put on unless I'm in a particular mood. To tell you the truth, I've spent less time listening to and more time thinking about Let England Shake. It's impossible not to. And that's part of the reason I think this album is so strong--it effectively gets under your skin and stays with you. The music is catchy, at times eerily familiar thanks to some well-chosen samples from other artists; but once Let England Shake wins you over, your left to deal with a batch of heavy (and, at times, heavy-handed) questions, the kind we normally try to evade. Back in November, I wrote a lengthy Remembrance Day meditation on Let England Shake that should help to explain why I think this album was so important and so necessary for 2011. I guess I'll leave it at that.

catholic commons (shout out)

My previous post on PJ Harvey and Walter Benjamin was the offshoot of a piece I was writing for a blog called Catholic Commons. The full article is now up, but there's plenty of other good writing to check out as well, most of it by friends and former colleagues.

Remembrance Day with Walter Benjamin and PJ Harvey

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

~ Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Leading up to Remembrance Day, I've spent a lot of time with Let England Shake, PJ Harvey's Mercury Prize-winning release from earlier this year. For me, it invites the kind of reflections on memory and history that were made by Walter Benjamin. Such an awareness of historical representation seems all the more necessary on a day when we are constantly met with the imperative to "remember." Much of the media recites this platitude as though the task at hand is self-evident, but I think Harvey's album, like the work of Benjamin, draws such rituals of remembrance into question. Remember how? What's at stake in such practices? How do they help construct and inform our current condition?

The celebrated war photographer Seamus Murphy shot a video for each of the album's twelve tracks. Each one is quite remarkable. I've posted several here, but I'd highly recommend searching out all of them.

New Music: PJ Harvey, Radiohead

It appears to the be the year for English pop artists to engage in political critique -- well, sort of. Who knew musicians could still find their arsenal by tarrying with the pastoral tradition?

PJ Harvey's Let England Shake isn't terribly complex ("How is our glorious country sown? Not with wheat and corn" -- "Our land is plowed by tanks!" Harvey sings on "The Glorious Land"), but musically there's a lot going on. Harvey's familiar songwriting style is stronger than ever (best heard in songs like "Bitter Branches" and "In the Dark Places"), but it seems she's taken the lessons of failed albums like White Chalk and her recent collaboration with John Parish (A Woman a Man Walked By) to heart: here, murky production, disparate soundscapes, and a Victorian-gothic aesthetic merge with reflections on post-colonial England: a nation constantly in dialogue with its own legacy (as she demonstrates on the haunting centerpiece, "England"). Harvey's approach is to play with, juxtapose, subvert cultural resting places with a downright bloody history: into this mix she throws lines from English protest songs, reggae samples, and tons of autoharp. In other words, Harvey's task with Let England Shake is to re-energize the English tradition of political critique. It could have been a heavy-handed train-wreck, but in Harvey's hands (and thanks incredible team she's assembled: Rob Ellis, Mick Harvey, John Parish, Flood, etc.), Let England Shake reminds PJ Harvey fans why we came to love her in the first place: not for her brilliant insights, but for the raw emotion that can only come by looking the devil in the face.

Radiohead's music always gestures toward some kind of late capitalist malaise, and The King of Limbs is no different. Indeed, this time around there seems to be a strong resonance between the natural imagery transparently there (both in the cover art and in Yorke's lyrics) and a recently resurfaced debate over forest enclosures throughout much of Britain. But regardless of its political timeliness, The King of Limbs is a strange animal. As is often the case with Radiohead's albums, early reviews have been typically vague. It's not their best album -- I think we're all agreed on that -- but neither should it be written off as a misstep. The King of Limbs is a good album, but it's also their most idiosyncratic -- only Amnesiac comes close. There's a strong dubstep influence and the more organic elements that characterized In Rainbows have retreated into the shadows only to reemerge in two oddly situated tracks: the lovely, effortless, out-of-place piano ballad, "Codex," and its partner, the echo-chamber folk song, "Give up the Ghost." The rest of the album is comprised of rhythmically complex songs that seem to fold in on themselves; at times, one wonders what the rest of the band was up to during recording sessions. As for immediate highlights, there's the devious lead single (below) "Lotus Flower" (in my opinion, this is one best tracks of the year so far), the very catchy, occasionally clumsy "Little by Little" (which picks up nicely from Amnesiac's "I Might be Wrong") and an album closer ("Separator") that actually does something -- to put it a bit differently, "Separator" is more expansive than what we get on the rest of The King of Limbs: it incorporates a fantastic lead guitar line, releases some (dearly missed) ambient steam, and gets as close to an anthem ("Wake me up") as Radiohead can currently get. We Radiohead fans need not despair. The King of Limbs is full of fine moments. More than anything else, we're victims of our own anticipation.

Delilah, PJ Harvey, and Samson Agonistes

Delilah, to be sure, has traditionally been considered a notorious woman; but as she tells us in John Milton's Samson Agonistes, “Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed, / And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds” (971-2). Indeed, her name still appears now and again in popular music (many examples are terrible; see, most recently, "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White T’s; as a music lover, it pains me to even bring this song up), where, she is associated with adultery, betrayal, and all-around immorality. She has become a loaded symbol, but she has also become a bit of a cliché.

Delilah’s currency popular culture isn't entirely disappointing. PJ Harvey’s 1992 debut Dry features a song called “Hair,” in which Harvey assumes the voice of Delilah. In "Hair," Delilah's initial fetish for Samson’s hair soon turns diabolical and domineering (at least in the eyes of the man): “Samson the strength that's in your arms / Oh to be your stunning bride / Samson your hair glistening like sun / Oh would that it were mine / Samson your hair that's in my hands / I'll keep it safe you're mine / He said, ‘Wait! Wait! Delilah my babe, / you lied in my face, / you cut off my hair, / you lied in my bed.’” Harvey’s main point of interest is in sexual politics: Delilah’s subversive cunning is the true source of power, while Samson’s divine potency is shown to be quite fragile. In the final lines, she dictates and redefines the terms of their relationship: “Samson you'll stay with your ’Lilah / I hold you in my hands your hairy strength. / My man, my man.” Delilah’s sexual satisfaction turns out to be her great weapon of domination; consequently, Samson has become her possession.


 

Milton’s poetic tragedy, Samson Agonistes, sets things up somewhat differently. Delilah emerges at the centre of this narrative, but we only meet her after the notorious betrayal has already taken place. Samson’s pathetic status as a blind prisoner makes her visit all the more troubling. In addition, Milton has twisted the story such that Delilah is not merely Samson’s mistress; rather she is his wife. Her actions are therefore even more dispicable. Recalling Satan’s epic movements in Paradise Lost, Delilah enters the poem described “Like a stately ship,” brave and richly “bedecked,” resembling the whore of Babylon (710-20). However, Delilah's infidelity has less to do with sex than it does with religion.

Delilah's final excuse for divulging Samson's secret rests on the contraints of her Philistine religion: she was “Adjured by all the bonds of civil duty / And of religion” (853-4). Again appeal to her own weakness, she asks, “what had I / To oppose against such powerful arguments” (861-2). This defense seems like it would have been especially relevant for readers in Milton’s time. One could easily see puritan Dissenters making the same excuse (that is, religious coercion) for their having participated in state-required Anglican worship: Delilah resigns herself to the fact that “to the public good / Private respects must yield” (867-8). Milton would, of course, reject such logic. Indeed, by his divinely inspired martyrdom, Samson eventually proves that “private respects” do not simply die away when they are outwardly repressed. 

Samson is guilty of having been “uxurious”: his over-love for Delilah, his wife, has resulted in his own subjection. With the sensuous rhetoric that ensues, it is not difficult to see how Samson was swayed to give up his secret. Though it may be “feigned remorse,” Delilah’s speech encourages our sympathy and Samson appears unreasonable. That is, until Delilah misogynistically reconfigures her own weakness as “incident to all our sex” and immediately suggests that Samson’s own error “show’dst me first the way” by mistakenly entrusting his secret to “woman’s frailty” (775-83). Furthermore, Delilah explains, “I saw thee mutable / Of fancy, feared lest one day thou wouldst leave me . . . No better way [to endear thee] I saw than by importuning / To learn thy secrets, get into my power / Thy key of strength and safety” (794-99). Here, it seems, PJ Harvey’s Delilah is not too far off Milton’s mark. Her reasoning resonates with Eve’s considerations just after eating the forbidden fruit: she is tempted toward sexual mastery over her partner by withholding a powerful secret.
   
Indeed, Delilah’s final words bring us back, once again, to her currency within contemporary popular culture, where she has become a symbol for subversive feminity, rather than a national hero:
  
    My name [. . .]
    To all posterity may stand defamed,
    With malediction mentioned, and the blot
    Of falsehood most unconjugal traduced.
    But in my country where I most desire,
    [. . .]I shall be named among the famousest
    Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
    Living and dead recorded, who to save
    Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
    Above the faith of wedlock-bands [. . .] (975-986)

love is just a four letter word

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? (from High Fidelity)

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, another stupid holiday that, like Halloween, made more sense when I was seven than it does now: handing out my cheap, superhero-themed Valentine's cards at school and carefully preparing my own special Valentine's card receptacle like the rest my classmates. I could get behind that.

These days, the obvious thing to do is make a list of my favourite break-up songs. Some are laughable, others are frightening, but all of them share the same heaping spoonful of self-pity.

1. Here - Pavement
"And I'm the only one who laughs / at your jokes when they are so bad / and your jokes are always bad / but they're not as bad as this."

2. Divorce Song - Liz Phair
"I would have stayed in your bed / For the rest of my life / Just to prove I was right / That it's harder to be friends than lovers / And you shouldn't try to mix the two / Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy / Then you know that the problem is you / And its true that I stole your lighter / And its also true that I lost the map / But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to / I had to take your word on that."

3. Nobody's Fault But My Own - Beck
"And on the day you said it's true / Some love holds, some gets used / Tried to tell you I never knew / It could be so sweet / Who could ever be so cruel, / Blame the devil for the things you do / It's such a selfish way to lose / The way you lose these wasted blues / These wasted blues."

4. I Don't Want To Get Over You - Magnetic Fields
"I could listen to my therapist, pretend you don't exist / and not have to dream of what I dream of; I could listen / to all my friends and go out again and pretend it's enough, / or I could make a career of being blue."

5. Rid of Me - PJ Harvey
"You're not rid of me . . . . Till you say don't you wish you never never met her."

6. Pink Triangle - Weezer
"When I think I've found a good old-fashioned girl / Then she put me in my place / If everyone's / a little queer / Can't she be a little straight?"

7. Damage - Yo La Tengo
"The damage is done."

8. Cato As A Pun - Of Montreal
"I can't even pretend that you are my friend / What has happened to you and I / And don't say that I have changed / 'Cause man, of course I have"

9. Get Gone - Fiona Apple
"You got your game, made your shot, and you got away / With a lot, but I'm not turned-on / So put away that meat you're selling."

10. Forever For Her (Is Over For Me) - White Stripes
"I blew it / And if I knew what to do, then I'd do it / But the point that I have, I'll get to it / And forever for her is over for me / Forever, just the word that she said that means never / To be with / another together / And with the weight of a feather it tore into me"

(Honourary Mention) An Ode To No One - Smashing Pumpkins
"I took a virgin mary axe to his sweet baby jane, / lost my innocence to a no good girl, scratch my / face with anvil hands, and coil my tongue around a bumblebee mouth /And I give it all back to you." Alright Billy. I'm sure it all makes sense in your head.

albums of the decade (XI)

PJ Harvey - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (Island, 2000)

With her sixth album, Polly Jean Harvey came dangerously close to that refined musical wasteland called adult contemporary. This was her album to be "all grown up," to flirt with her maturity and the polished sounds of the studio. Even her more abrasive songs ("This is Love" and "Kamikazee") feel watered down and somewhat drained of their sexual energy. That said, Harvey has never sounded this confident in her ability as a musician, and it's unlikely that she ever will again. Ever the shape-shifter, Harvey's most cosmopolitan persona coincided nicely with the beginning of our new, self-consciously global millenium. It's no wonder the album was awarded the Mercury Prize the following year; it seems to capture some of the romance, the ambivalence of urban life at the beginning of the decade. I mean, I was only 12 at the time, but I sensed it. So mature for my age and all.

To be honest, it took me until 2004 to buy this album. By this point in time, I was well into my longstanding obsession with Peej; and even then, four years after its release, Stories... felt current. "Good Fortune" is one reason for this; it's quite simply a song to fall in love with. Another reason that Stories... still sounds so fresh is Harvey's almost timeless songwriting and her ability to inhabit characters from a wide historical spectrum (see 1995's To Bring You My Love or 2007's White Chalk). But as Harvey sings on "A Place Called Home," "Now is the time to follow through, to read the signs. Now the message is sent, let's bring it to its final end." She's still acting, of course, but this time she isn't playing a repressed Victorian or a prostitute from the deep South. This time round, it hits a bit closer home.

There are plenty more high points on Stories.... A stirring duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke ("This Mess We're In") is definitely one of them. Like many of the tracks on this album, Harvey's lyrics on "This Mess..." show an awareness of the cityscape and her place within it, taking care to frame her own point of view. "You Said Something" is probably the most cheerful love song Harvey's ever written (given that the vast majority of her songs about love are brutally violent and sexually perverse; it's her schtick). This one turns out to be about a couple of ex-pats on a romantic excursion in Manhatten. Pretty great! But the album ends two completely depressing songs: "Horses in My Dreams," which is a bit of a dirge, and "We Float," which advises us to "take life as it comes" because "one day, we'll float." Is she talking about escaping to heaven? Or about drowing in a massive flood? Either way, I think she covers the same ground as Modest Mouse's 2003 sing-along, "Float On." I always thought she was more of fighter. And I'm glad she's bounced back.

Black Hearted Love

Judging by the first single/video, A Woman a Man Walked By is going to be full of testosterone, distortion and sexual innuendo. Though I enjoyed the chilling piano ballads that defined White Chalk, I'm quite pleased that Polly Jean has returned to her grungier roots. See for yourself.


The new album comes via Island on March 30 (less than 10 days). Easily my most anticipated of 2009 thus far.

Looking forward

*Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
First song, "Zero," sounds very promising, but Karen O won't be pulling a Billy Corgan and shaving her head any time soon. At first listen, I don't know about the synths: not quite as sexy as Zinner's guitar work, but I bet he tears it open when they do this live and by the end of the song you can hear it.

*Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
Ed Droste does an interview with Tom Breihan from Pitchfork. It won't be out until May and I'm desparate to hear some studio versions, especially after watching these guys perform "Two Weeks" for David Letterman. If it's anywhere as good as Yellow House, well, I just don't know what I'll do. Probably write something about it and use a lot of superlatives. I've never done that before.

*Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Things are pretty quiet beyond some vague descriptions from Matador rep, Gerard Cosloy ("Suffice to say we’re pretty amazed at the way the band delivered something this neoteric while still sounding like, well, themselves") and wonkiness from Thurston Moore ("juicy supersonic songs" and "heavy ass weirdo hooks"). It's also the studio debut of former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold.

*PJ Harvey and John Parish - A Woman a Man Walked By
Nothing in the way of songs yet, but plenty of buzz. The Quietus recently featured an interview with John and Polly. It comes out four days after my birthday, so I'm hoping I won't have to buy it. What else is a birthday for?

Another anticipated album; not on such a grand scale, but nonetheless worthy of everybody's attention:

The Other Brothers - The Other Brothers
Donovan Giesbrecht and Chris Neufeld's new collaborative project. A few songs have been posted on their snazzy new website.

Save the dates:
Mennofolk Manitoba: Feb 28, at The Park Theatre.
Winnipeg CD Release: April 3, at The Park Theatre.
Winkler CD Release: April 6, at Covenant Mennonite Church.

Hey, something cool is actually happening in Winkler. Why am I not surprised that it's at Covenant?

One more can't hurt

I loved White Chalk, was a little disappointed with Uh Huh Her, but my expectations are fairly high for this follow up. Four days after my birthday, no less. I've been listening to Dance Hall at Louse Point a fair bit lately. Oddly underrated, it's the Harvey disc I go to instinctively. But it be as sombre? Maybe she'll spend less time sitting down.