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.

Retro-spective: My favorite albums of 2011 (10-6)

This year I've gone a little overboard in my exhibitionism. Alongside the usual long-winded review you'll find original illustrations for each of my ten favorite albums. Some draw on a particular song, others are straightforward portraits; still others aim for something more personal and evocative.

In a year crammed full of nostalgia--from Destroyer's 80s homage to The Horrors' big-haired shoegazing, not to mention the forceful return of early 90s guitar rock via The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Yuck, etc.--one album stood out for in its effort to draw this kind of memory work--and its politics--into question. But alongside PJ Harvey's meditations on nation and violence, other artists pushed through familiar territory to produce new sounds. Earlier this year, James Blake had the press swooning with his dubstep-infused R&B and Colin Stetson channelled something chaotic and primordial with his multiphonic saxophone, while both Annie Clark (St Vincent) and Chad Vangaalen entered the ambivalent spaces of domestic life with tragicomic results. With every year it becomes more difficult to narrow down and organize a list of my favorite albums--I've pared it down from thirty or so. Strong releases from stalwarts like the Dodos, Wild Beasts, Bill Calahan, The Roots, and Stephen Malkmus require some mention, as do new discoveries like Iceage, Dog Day, Main Attrakionz, Braids, the Weeknd, Shabazz Palaces, Peaking Lights and Jessica Jalbert. For many it was the year of Bon Iver, a charming enough folk-singer who turned out to be incredibly polarizing (producing among some of my friends the longest Facebook debate I've ever taken part in). Meanwhile, Radiohead fans had to grapple with a surprisingly weak showing from a band whose fans have come to expect nothing less than game-changers--besides a viral video, it seemed less an RH album--less a cultural event--than a blip.

I've split the list in half, with the first five following below. I'll try and post my top five in the next several days.

10. Chad Vangaalen - Diaper Island (Flemish Eye) 

It's not his best record, but it's probably his most consistent. If you like restrained guitar noise and conventional folk-rock this is the Chad Vangaalen album for you. It's full of moments that can only be described as "heartwarming" (but in Vangaalen's imagination, I'm sure this kind of description gets at something more perverse or grotesque than sentimental). Although it pays lip-service to domestic topics like child-rearing, relationships, etc., Diaper Island is still full of the wonderful weirdness, humor and creativity we've come to expect from Vangaalen. This illustration is based on one the album's more frenetic tracks, "Freedom for a Policeman." The song would be a straightforward punk jam about a violent encounter with the law were it not for a hilarious bridge/breakdown, where the policeman's blows slow down and we become privy to the psyche of an agent whose enforcement of the law is momentarily suspended--suddenly, at the level of fantasy, something sappy and pathetic comes into view. That's my take, anyway. Vangaalen's at his best when transforms the familiar into something strange and surprising.

9. James Blake - James Blake (Universal)

I'm not usually one for singer-songwriters, but James Blake is in a separate class. A poppier dubstepper, Blake introduced me to the wonderful world of sub-bass--his album also convinced me that I need a new stereo/soundsystem to appreciate the depth of his sound. It all sounds effortless. Sure, it's pretty music with a wide appeal, but each of the songs on Blake's debut retains a degree of darkness that keeps his music compelling, mysterious even.

8. Destroyer - Kaputt (Merge)

Dan Bejar has been kicking it for nearly two decades. In my mind, this is his best album since 2001's Streethawk: A Seduction. Those of us who've been craving layers of ambient brass and woodwinds over top mid-tempo electro beats can pass out with smiles on our faces. The much-hyped 80s motif has found an appropriate home in Bejar's well-oiled hands, and the result isn't so much sentimentalized nostalgia for a wasted decade as it is reminiscence of parties we were too young to appreciate.

7. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

"Forgive the kids for they don't know how to live." It could be a simple accusation, but St. Vincent's Annie Clark spends the greater part of her third album accepting responsibility and dealing with the crushing guilt of her own failings. Part of what makes her so compelling is the feeling that she really shouldn't have to do so--that she's constantly reacting preemptively against what people think of her. Songs like "Cheerleader" "Neutered Fruit" take a confessional, prayerful tone that's anything but comforting: she's constantly putting herself into question, at one point memorably imploring a surgeon to come cut her open. The whole thing seems like a perverse, sacrificial offering--not so much an apology as a window into her own twisted psyche. Strange Mercy is "strange" for a variety of reasons: musically, it's adventurous and unconventional; lyrically, it's honest and evocative. But despite her best efforts to lay bare her own depravity, Clark seems unable to produce anything that's not beautiful, or at the very least, compelling. Indeed, it's strange that this confusing existential mess could be delivered with such force and candor and still require mercy. For Clark, the error of self-interest--manifested in her own guilt-ridden account of despair--is always there, lurking in the shadows. As with Terrance Malick's recent film Tree of Life, Strange Mercy succeeds in showing us how productive the traditional dialectic between nature and grace can actually be. "It's not a perfect plan," she sings on "Champagne Year," "but it's the one we've got."

6. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien (Memphis)

Along with a handful of well-recieved albums from the past year (such as those from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Yuck, etc.), this album sounds like it could have been released fifteen years ago and would have had no trouble finding an audience. (Here is where I would normally list a bunch of bands that New York's CEG sounds like, but it's obvious enough.) But as nostalgic retreads of the 90s go, this is by far the most dynamic and well-crafted. It's also the most melodic guitar based rock record I heard this year. The songs on Lenses Alien are the kind that harness and transform the abrasive energy of teen angst into sheer catharsis. That description's a bit overstated, but so is my subject matter. For all the missteps (such as "The Current") and cringe-enducing lyrics (that more often than not resemble bad high school poetry), I'm won over by the unapologetic delivery of Jeremy D'Agostino's vocals. Sometimes he sounds like Conor Oberst in the worst way; other times his belting sounds like a real exodus.

text, translation and the printing process

My job at CMU Press meant I had almost unlimited access to the printing press at CMU. No, the two are not at all connected. CMU Press has never had occasion to use the almost hundred year old press. Such books are printed elsewhere. Most printed materials (usually class projects, as the press is major component of book history courses at CMU) hold the "spyTower Press" imprint. I've used the printing press for projects like the one featured above, which was the last piece I worked on while in Winnipeg. The image (which features St. Jerome, joined by a range of symbols) is cut from a linoleum block, but the red (or rubricated) text (an excerpt from what is perhaps the most famous of John Donne's Devotions) is set in various sizes of Goudy Bold, one of the many font families to which I had access.

Before this, I had mostly been cutting blocks about the quarter of this size (8.5" x 11"). Normally I'll have a specific object in mind and conceptualize the project based on it. Early on, I had my mind set on cutting out a forest but had no text in mind. I was nearly resolved to use an early passage from Dante's Inferno, which begins in a dark wood, but the image would have had to be quite complex. One day at work, I noticed this excerpt from John Donne's Devotions posted on the English department bulletin board, and I instantly fell in love with it, in part because it relies so heavily on book imagery. In this passage, death does not delete or remove us from the world; rather, it translates us "into a better language." Here, Donne presupposes the textuality and translatability (the finitude, and thus the instability) of human life -- I like to imagine that it anticipates Derrida, but it's clearly a bit of a stretch. I chose to feature St. Jerome partly because of his significance (and recognizability) as a figure associated with texts and translation. Perhaps most well-known for translating the Bible (Greek, and, in the case of the Septuagint, Hebrew) into Latin (now referred to as the Vulgate), St. Jerome also appealed to me because of the range of symbols that accompany him in most of his artistic representations (skull, lion (!), hourglass, various texts, etc.).

Before beginning this project, I'd had some experience working with lino-blocks. It started with a series of birds I cut a year and a half ago. I found the cutting process quite addictive, not least because the medium was so different from what I'm used to working with. I love how it brings together the subtractive element of sculpture and the two-dimensionality of drawing. It's a bit strange at first and requires a mental flip: you must remain conscious of the fact that you are only ever creating negative space. However, during the artistic process, I've never felt quite so connected to a medium.

making art that matters

The new issue of Via Media is now online. Contents of this issue focus on the relationship of art to theology and vice versa. My article attempts to link our culture's appetite for kitsch to a perversion of sacramental theology: a desire to transcend the "resistence in the material" about which the Victorian craftsman/writer William Morris speaks. Here is an excerpt:

Our culture has a large appetite for art that evades the risks of craftsmanship. We hunger for art that allows us the false comfort of a space beyond discernment, beyond a reality of competing interpretations. Such dreams manifest themselves as kitsch.(1) With kitsch, all answers are given in advance of any questions. As the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously put it, kitsch is characterized by “an inability to admit that shit exists.”(2) It is that sentimental fiction in which art allows us to forget and do away with our bodies.

Theology holds a special interest in the material world. We believe it to be given and entered into by God. For this reason, Christians must recognize that our taste for kitsch runs parallel to a belief in the disposability of materials. If we believe that God creates out of nothing, then we must understand the idea of waste, of kitsch, as a human perversion of creation. Even the vast amount of religious kitsch we take for granted is a symptom of contemporary Christianity’s tendency towards Gnosticism.

Andres Serrano’s much-debated 1987 photograph, “Piss Christ” (the image of a plastic crucifix immersed in urine), provoked outrage from Christians of all stripes, not least because Serrano had been granted funding for his artwork by the American government. Nothing about this image of Christ on the cross appears wrong or upsetting. It is only when we hear the title that we become uncomfortable. That this piece of religious kitsch from a gift shop could provoke such hostile reactions means that, whether he knew it or not, Serrano was making a profound theological claim. We tend to turn religious symbols into kitsch. The problem with our reaction is not that we are offended; rather, our error is that we are not offended enough, and our offense is not directed at the right target. There is indeed something monstrous and fundamentally horrible about Christ’s death; something that conservatives evade and liberals idealize. In the crucifixion we begin to see that “this monster is of our own making,” for to look at ourselves in Christ’s suffering and live “is to confess that the power by which we have brought the world to such a sorry pass . . . is but the reflex of frailty.”(3) Serrano’s work rescues the scandal of Christ’s humanity from a culture that prefers to keep religion separate from the threat of everyday life.

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1 Thomas Kinkade, whose website boasts him to be “the most collected artist in America” is an easy target. Yet Kinkade’s work is a fine example of kitsch as sheer craft: the product of an artist who has transcended the “resistance in the material” and become a master of bucolic scenery: commodifiable images of cottages with glowing windows sterile gardens.

2 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 236.

3 Terry Eagleton, “Tragedy and Revolution.” Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Eds. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 16.

i am no man - i am dynamite

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil:

“it is we alone who have devised cause, sequence…law, freedom, motive and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself,’ we act once more as we have always acted – mythologically” (219).

In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” Michel Foucault describes the historical development of humanity as a series of interpretations. Against those who “seek the soul in the distant ideality of an origin,” he writes, effective history “unearths periods of decadence, and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with suspicion --not vindictive but joyous-- of finding a barbarous and shameful confusion” (89). Although historians have generally taken great pains to remove that which reveals their grounding in particular time and place, “effective history is [an] affirmation of knowledge as perspective” (90).