My most popular posts of 2013

1. An obligatory review of My Bloody Valentine's m b v
2. Pruitt-Igoe and the fate of modernist architecture
3. Notes on Capital, Vol. 1: Labour and reproduction
4. Some refractions from Arcade Fire's Reflektor
5. My top ten of 2013

My top ten of 2013

1. As usual, I could almost pretend I was living in the 90s. 
For me, the year in music really began with the release of yet another charming album by Yo La Tengo. Next thing I knew, Kevin Shields had dropped the new My Bloody Valentine record and I was scrambling to download it. Both albums served as occasions to write and share album reviews, something I really enjoy but rarely do anymore. And when all the dust finally settled, there were plenty of younger artists relishing the sounds of 90s-era indie rock: Waxahatchee, Swearin', Deerhunter (sort of), Parquet Courts, the Dodos, Julia Brown, Speedy Ortiz, Crosss, Anamai, Rae Spoon, and Palehound to name just a few.

2. Indie rock wasn't all I listened to. 
The turning point was my visit to Arizona, a chance to bond with some of my (much) younger relatives who love dance music, hip hop, dub and house music but not much else. It got me prepped for new music from Disclosure, The Range, Braids, Blood Orange and Danny Brown. Another benefit  was that I got to introduce my 17-year-old cousin to Pavement and buy him Slanted and Enchanted on CD (thus reliving a significant moment in my adolescence). Meanwhile, much to the approval of our mothers, we also picked up the new James Blake album: something we could all admire, but also something incredibly seductive and nocturnal. At least, that's what it became for me when I returned to dark, cold Edmonton. Blake has never been afraid of flaunting his bravura or his youthful innocence. At times, his stuff could pass for self-parody, and on a few occasions earlier this year (like a cross-country road trip) it did: my friend and I sang along to the better half of Overgrown. It was hilarious and it probably went longer than either of us thought it should have. We were both under his dreamy spell. Divas rarely come this fully-formed.

3. Winnipeg reigned supreme.
Royal Canoe released an album that preemptively confirmed our collective faith in pop music (Today We're Believers) and made expats like me miss Winnipeg even more than we already do. They also toured their asses off and released several stellar music videos.

4. Canadian independent music was more accessible than ever.
Weird Canada (an unrivalled online resource for new Canadian music) now has an official podcast. There's only one episode but it's good and there will probably be more. Also cool: Edmonton dude Travis Bretzer provided the show's theme.

5. The Polaris Prize was kind of exciting.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor won the 2013 Polaris Prize for last year's amazing Hallelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, and then proceeded to dismiss/dismantle it.

6. Folk/country music geniuses confirmed their status as folk/country music geniuses. 
Bill Callahan released another consistently beautiful album of pensive folk songs, this time with a bit more embellishment than usual (let's hear it for the flute!); and Neko Case proved her songwriting ability yet again, deconstructing gender roles with venom and wit, and singing what might be my favourite lyric of year: "Did they poison my food? Is it cause I'm a girl? If I puked up some sonnets, would you call me a miracle?"

7. Paul Lawton and Mammoth Cave Recording Co.
This guy slagged off the Canadian music industry and made some pretty good points while doing it. His band delivered a bunch of solid material and his label, Mammoth Cave Recording Co.  (once based in Lethbridge, AB, now operating out of Toronto), continued to be awesome.

8. Kanye West, sort of, right?
Some of the conversation surrounding Yeezus and, more importantly, "Bound 2" was pretty interesting, considering the context of race in America, not to mention all the misogyny embedded in Kanye's lyrics. And since this kind of discussion was one of his stated aims, you might say the overblown media circus was a success. Right?

9. Arcade Fire released an epic, racially-charged, seemingly self-aware album.
At its best, Arcade Fire's Haiti-influenced Reflektor provoked some related discussions about the vast amount of cultural appropriation that fuels the North American music industry, and that's only scratching the surface. In my own review of the album, I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt but some of my misgivings remain unresolved.

10. I had a regular radio show at CJSR.
After volunteering at the station and sporadically appearing on the Edmonton airwaves for the last couple years, I was finally able to secure a regular time slot (which will be changing again in the new year). More importantly, though, I finally figured out how to post mp3s of my show online and was able to develop another blog where I could host them. Here's a link to my year-end review, which features a lot of the music discussed above.

And finally, here's a list of my 20 favourite releases of 2013:

II - Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Fade - Yo La Tengo
Overgrown - James Blake
mbv - My Bloody Valentine
Self-titled EP - Anamai
Carrier - The Dodos
You Can't Serve Two Masters - The Ketamines
Today We're Believers - Royal Canoe
To Be Close To You - Julia Brown
Dream River - Bill Callahan
Loud City Song - Julia Holter
The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You - Neko Case
Reflektor - Arcade Fire
Old - Danny Brown
Bent Nail EP - Palehound
Flourish // Perish - Braids
Walking On Ayr - Lab Coast
Monomania - Deerhunter
Obsidian Spectre - Crosss
Surfin' Strange - Swearin'

Some refractions from Arcade Fire's Reflektor

Released with an appropriate amount of fanfare, including a 30 minute special directed by Roman Coppola, Reflektor has been garnering a mixture of apathetic shrugs from the indie kids and hyperbolic acclaim from the many folks (myself included) who still want BIG albums that tackle BIG themes. This is an album for those of us who still care about capital-A albums, but it's also more than that: it's an album that repeatedly calls into question its own legitimacy.

I celebrated Tuesday's release by reading an album review from Rolling Stone for the first time in what's probably been about ten years. It was weirdly satisfying to see David Fricke make overt comparisons to all the baby-boomer greats (U2, The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, The Cure, Neil Young, the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, and so on). The write-up ends by placing Reflektor in the same league as game changing records by Radiohead (Kid A), the Rolling Stones (Exile on Main Street), and U2 (Achtung Baby). Along with Pitchfork, The Quietus made similar comparisons. Perhaps it was in the band's press release. Most of this critical pandering is useless and boring, but it's also somewhat accurate, as it has been for their previous albums. Of course Arcade Fire aren't likely to let go of the Talking Heads, whose influence is obvious on songs like the jittering "Normal People" and the meditative "Afterlife." The U2 comparison isn't that far-off either. On a mid-tempo track like "Porno" Butler's sultry croon is pure Bono, and when you've got lyrics like "there's so little that we know" or "it's the only world we know" shouted into what sounds like empty space, U2's early 90s wanderings certainly come to mind.

Despite its 80 minute running time, Reflektor feels exceptionally well-crafted and well-paced: as it presses on, Arcade Fire manage to earn your trust, despite juggling a variety of things that don't at first glance fit together. You've got the influence of Haitian culture driving the rhythm and the lyrical content of a good portion of the album, a lot of meandering lyrics about the afterlife, the usual adolescent discomfort, a lot of self-referential "reflections" on the nature of art, and some pretentious Greek mythology thrown in just for kicks. And all this comes with several finishing touches from former LCD Soundsystem dude James Murphy, who, by the sounds of it, didn't actually do that much for the songs, but adds even more cultural capital to the whole endeavour.

The themes are BIG but remain rooted in vague specifics. In an interview with Maclean's, Win Butler explains how much of them came from a recent trip to Haiti:

There’s a crazy energy in Port-au-Prince when the sun goes down, because there is no electricity in a lot of the city. A lot of parts of the city are pretty dangerous, and people are rushing around trying to get home. There’s also this nightlife thing that happens, and it’s a combination of really dangerous and fun. Whenever you go to Haiti there are all these packs of missionaries wearing the same T-shirts that say “Jesus loves Haiti” or whatever. You ask them, “What are you guys doing?” And they say, “Oh, we’re going to paint houses.” Well, why don’t you just pay Haitians to paint the houses? I’m sure they’d love to do that. There’s a strange idea of going there to teach people about Jesus, while I’m sure Haitians know more about Jesus than these people do; they’re the most religious people. After the earthquake, people were singing songs of praise in the street. It’s a strange idea that we can teach these people something. The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm and so there’s this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.

I want to think that this has everything to do with why the motif of reflection came to dominate the conceptual structure of the album. Removed from this context, the theme of reflection can be easily glossed over as a way of celebrating art as such. In Lindsay Zoladz's Pitchfork review, for example, Arcade Fire's reflexivity is more or less equivalent to musicians (and critics) giving themselves a pat on the back:

With its clipped snippets of airwave chatter (the BBC's Jonathan Ross makes a cameo), warped VHS hum, and retro-luminosity that nods to a time when synthesizers connoted un-jaded wonder and revelation, Reflektor is designed to be an homage to the many ways music is transmitted, discovered, and incorporated into people's lives.

Ian Cohen tweaks the sentiment a little bit in his earlier review of the band's first single, suggesting that the album's big theme is "the possibility that art isn't a shared, living experience but rather a mirror for our own projections and preconceptions." Well, no shit. I like to think that Arcade Fire have a more nuanced understanding of the work they're producing. Most post-colonial theory begins with the assumption that the Occident has constructed other cultures in way that suits its own purposes (be they economic, symbolic, or political). In Haiti's history, we see reflections of our own violent history, but we also see more. Arcade Fire aren't so naive that they haven't considered the implications of what it means to appropriate other cultural forms, especially when the culture in question bares obvious traces of Western European imperialism of the worst kind. Butler is no post-colonial studies expert, but by drawing out certain elements from his experience in Haiti (most strikingly on "Here Comes the Night Time" ) while employing a self-conscious conceit like the mirror, Butler's lyrics suggest something that usually gets left out of the discussion when privileged white folks use things from other cultures: the appropriated image of another culture isn't simply problematic because of its content but because of its very form. Or, to put it in Arcade Fire's terms, it's not simply the reflection that's at issue but the reflector. In other words, it's important to be conscious not just of what's being represented but how representation itself is a form of cultural production that has a history.  The danger in this kind of thinking is that it can put all the artistic agency in colonial hands, and that's obviously not what's going on here. While this insight isn't made explicit on Reflektor, it's there in the background, and along with it is an assortment of other loose threads that don't necessarily reveal their origin, Occidental or otherwise. Heaven or "Afterlife" is another recurring topic that seems to fit well with a critical view of representation and its use as an colonial weapon for maintaining oppressive power structures.

As has no doubt been said ad nauseum, with Reflektor, Arcade Fire have devised their own hall of mirrors, but what makes this album truly worthwhile is that they've also given us some of the hints we need in order to find a hammer.

New Music: Danny Brown - Lonely

From his new album Old, which is receiving heaps of praise.

New Music: The Dodos - Carrier

Below, you'll see video of the Dodos tearing it up on the Late Show with David Letterman. I've long been a fan of this San Francisco band, and I'm glad to report that their recently released fourth album, Carrier may prove to be their best release. The Dodos have never been a difficult band to like. They're charming and relatively unpretentious; they're solid musicians and they create polished, well-executed indie rock songs. But Carrier finds them at a place very different from where they were a year and a half ago.

In 2012, the Dodos lost their touring guitarist, Chris Reimer (also known for his involvement with Calgary outfit Women). As Dodos frontman Meric Long explained in a recent interview with Andrea Warner on CBC's Radio 3, Carrier is profoundly shaped by Reimer's influence:

Yeah. But with the record especially, the distinction that I want to make is Chris passing away is totally weird and f--ked, but when he was alive — that’s what influenced the record, that’s what made the record. It’s not his death. He was a huge influence on me when he was alive and that’s the part — I didn’t sit down and think, "I gotta write a song about Chris." It doesn’t work that way. Like you said, that’s too much pressure. It’s just not possible. I couldn’t imagine that. So focusing on the thing that he represented to me when he was alive was the inspiration, the thing that kept the songwriting going. I mean, really, there were other things, too. It was a very weird time. Chris passed away and within the span of a month, all of these people dying, family members and stuff — it was a really weird month [laughs].

The band's first single, "Confidence" (see below), starts with a skeletal melody that slowly accelerates into a robust, frenzied chorus. Instead of the campfire acoustics of earlier Dodos releases, you can hear Long using the kind of wiry post-punk guitar work that Reimer brought to the table. The song hits its peak with Logan Kroeber's frantic drumming while Long pushes his instrument to its limit. At just under four minutes, it leaves you feeling like you witnessed an event.