Favorites: The Comsat Angels “Sleep No More” (1981)

The Comsat Angels are another example of a band who should’ve been U2-massive, but have instead been relegated to the footnotes of rock history.  Despite substantial critical acclaim, and even some record label finagling from unlikely supporter Robert Palmer, the band never had an album that broke into the UK chart’s top 50.  Their records have, with unfortunate consistency, gone out of print, making it even more challenging to achieve a reasonable level of posthumous success.

The Comsat Angels released their debut EP, “Red Planet”, in 1979, a record that culminated in a three-album contract with Polydor.  Joy Division was attracting quite a bit of attention at the time, and The Comsat Angels’ post-punk melancholia was clearly in the same sonic orbit.  Their debut LP, Waiting for a Miracle, was released in September of 1980 to trifling sales but near-unanimous critical plaudits.  It’s a fantastic debut that holds up very well against other classics released the same year (see: Joy Division’s Closer, The Sound’s Jeopardy, Magazine’s The Correct Use of Soap, and Echo and the Bunnymen’s Crocodiles).

As good as that record is, it’s still a step behind the follow-up, Sleep No More.  The sophomore album was released almost exactly a year after Waiting for a Miracle, and was met with an even more enthusiastic critical reception.  The record quickly sold out its’ initial pressing, but Polydor’s lagging shipment of additional copies seemed to severely hamper the album’s momentum.

Sleep No More is one of the most consistent batch of songs released in the 1980s, and the album’s rich sonic pallette continues to be influential to this day.  The opening trio of tracks (“Eye Dance”, “Sleep No More”, and “Be Brave”) are absolutely flawless; they are ominous, imposing, and completely enveloping songs.  It would be hard for any band to follow up such a strong opening, but the album never lets up in terms of quality, even when treading in some rather bleak emotional territory.  It doesn’t take one long to understand why this album has had such an impact on the few people who have taken the time to live inside this music.

The Comsat Angels will be re-uniting to play the Sensoria Music Festival on April 26th.

-Chris

Favorites: Souvlaki

*Note: Sorry that I have been absent the past few days.  I took a breather.  Thank you to Jezy for picking up the slack.

 

 

I don’t need to draw a line in the sand between My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, delineating one as superior to the other.  My admiration for the two has comingled peacefully for years.  The reason I say this is that there seem to be distinct subsets of shoegazer fans: those convicted to follow the Ride religion, Crane cohorts, Catherine Wheel spinners, etc.  Even with all of this gerrymandering, to ignore “Loveless” is to blaspheme against the State, but where does that put “Souvlaki”? 

 

Slowdive is certainly no forgotten act, but their stature never rose to MBV levels of cosmic ebullition.  Perhaps a certain amount of this can be explained by the fact that Slowdive didn’t evaporate into quite the same cloud of “what ifs” as Kevin Shield’s project.  The band followed their masterpiece (“Souvlaki”) with another astounding, if less-often heard, effort (“Pygmalion”).  They broke up and leader Neil Halstead formed the equally dreamy, if earthier, Mojave 3.  And he just released a new solo album.  So, yeah, I guess there is less blurry mystique behind Slowdive, but that doesn’t decrease the bliss of “Souvlaki”, which is easily one of my ten favorite albums of the ‘90s. 

 

“When the Sun Hits”

 

 

“Allison”

 

Favorites: Fabulous Muscles

 

The first time I saw Xiu Xiu was in a less than ideal setting: early afternoon at a summer music festival.  This is not music built for plus-100 degree heat with the sun melting your ass.  Though, for me at least and on this one day, the oppressive thickness of the Chicago air somehow met the pitch black hymns halfway.  Dancing to dehydration made sense when Out Hud was onstage, but to bake during Xiu Xiu is a bit much.  I just didn’t care.  This was my band.   

 

 

I managed to worm my way to the front of the crowd, within an arm’s reach of the steel barricade, where stood one of the sweatiest and dorkiest fans I had seen that day.  He shouted at Jamie Stewart, not to express affection, but to voice-crackle a “Hey Jamie!  Throw me one of those water bottles!”.  This is the point where I learned just how athletically inept most Xiu Xiu fans must be as I turned my head to watch Dungen (I think) wrap up their set on the other stage, idiotically placing faith in this guy’s anti-Jerry Riceness.  The water bottle crashed into my shoulder like a scud missile.  Or like a water bottle.  Or like a mixed metaphor. 

 

Fast forward a few months to another Xiu XIu show, this time in Fayetteville, which I was supposed to attend.  I was unable to make it, so Sarah explained my situation to J. Stewart himself, intoning that I was a super fan and devastated by my absence.  And that he once hit me with a water bottle.  He wrote a note apologizing for the incident, giving me permission to hurl a fire extinguisher at him the next time we met.  The next time I saw him was in Oklahoma City.  He passed in front of me, our eyes briefly locked, but even if I had my extinguisher with me, I’m pretty sure I would’ve declared a cease fire.  I hang on to that note to this day in the knowledge that it means as much to me as a John Lennon autograph would to most people.

 

I look forward to each Xiu Xiu split, each 7”, each album, with the same anticipation people look forward to a new season of “Lost”, even with the understanding that they may never top “Fabulous Muscles” in overall personal importance.  The catharsis of Jamie Stewart’s lyrics got me through some rough patches in college, and while I love all of Xiu Xiu’s albums (plus his pre-Xiu Xiu band Ten in the Swear Jar), this is the band’s most successful melding of Dennis Cooper/Harmony Korine/Todd Solondz-level shock horror to pure pop epiphany.  In 2004 I was well aware that I would never comprehend the American mainstream way of life, but I felt okay with that disconnect the first time I pulled through the Wal-Mart parking lot listening to “I Love the Valley OH!” with my windows down. 

 

“Clowne Towne”

 

 

“Crank Heart”

 

 

“Fabulous Muscles”

 

Favorites: Zen Arcade

I knew of Husker Du long before I actually ever heard them. Before the days of high-speed internet, and culturally landlocked in a town where finding decent music to purchase was usually a non-starter, I was cut-off from hearing a lot of the things that I read about. So while I poured myself into the music of contemporaries The Replacements, Sonic Youth, and The Meat Puppets (albums of whom I felt especially lucky to acquire), I essentially settled for imagining what Husker Du’s albums sounded like.

Anyway, spurred on further by the work of writer Dennis Cooper, I finally got around to buying “New Day Rising”, which was a more concise statement than “Zen Arcade“, but it’s the sprawl and barbed wire thrash which makes the latter so enthralling. They were one of the first hardcore bands to expand beyond the tight restraints of that genre, and on this album they laced their loud sound with a psychedelic pop whir that would go on to inform an entire generation of alternative rock. While I certainly have an appreciation for the hardcore movement of the early ’80s (and I would never deny the greatness of Black Flag, D.O.A., Bad Brains, The Circle Jerks, The Germs, The Dead Kennedys, or Minor Threat), it was the groups who took the hardcore ethos and expanded its’ musical palate (The Minutemen, Husker Du, and The Replacements being perhaps the greatest) who I enjoy the most. While hardcore had started out as an exciting west coast intensification of the first wave of New York and London punk, it quickly became every bit as narrow-minded and conformist as the mainstream they were railing against (see: the backlash against Henry Rollins for growing his hair out and against Bad Brains for incorporating reggae into their sound), coupled with an increasingly homophobic, racist, and fascist fanbase. Fortunately, a few bands like Husker Du were able to rise above the meathead attitude of hardcore, taking its intensity but blending it with more interesting and wider-reaching craftsmanship.

-Chris

Favorites: Heaven Up Here

 

Like much of my early musical education, I discovered Echo and the Bunnymen while watching MTV’s “120 Minutes” and their silly band name and possibly sillier coifs stuck in my mind until I eventually purchased “Ocean Rain” at a Dallas record store during a family shopping trip; the same day I bought Sonic Youth’s “A Thousand Leaves” and Sugar’s “Copper Blue”.  I quickly became so obsessed with that album that I greedily snatched up anything else I could find by the band, and their first five albums are essential.  But ”Heaven Up Here” is tops.

 

Ian McCullough’s vocals have often been compared to Jim Morrison’s, and considering that Ian Curtis was also a big fan, he seems a particularly strange touchstone for post-punk Ians.  But as this was a style of music that was theatrical, and at times skirting histrionic, it sort of makes some sense.  The post-punk bands seemed to take the tortured artist template to an extreme, possibly giving way to the misuse of form utilized by emo bands in much the same manner that Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder’s angsty howls were boringly homogenized by Scott Stapp and his minions.  Misappropriation shouldn’t devalue this music though. 

 

The opening three songs on this album rival in intensity anything released under the post-punk banner, with “Over the Wall” continuing to astound me everytime I listen to it.  Things turn exceptionally dark during the gothic center of the album, with the brief but wrenching “The Disease” followed by the epic “All My Colours”, the two songs which seem to encapsulate the feeling of the album artwork.  I’m a big fan of bands who maintain a consistent artwork aesthetic (The Smiths and Joy Division are two other prime examples), and few bands had artwork as evocative and successfully simple as Echo and the Bunnymen. 

 

Any cursory listen to an Echo and the Bunnymen live bootleg (or any of the live videos below) is proof that this was one of the most thrilling live acts of the ’80s and were actually more comfortable and adept in that setting than U2, despite all the empty poses Bono has made to the contrary.  Arena rock for people who don’t like people. 

Favorites: Trompe le Monde

 

I know I’m putting myself in the minority by picking this over “Doolittle” or “Surfer Rosa” (totally ace albums, to be sure…and probably “better”), but for some reason this has always been my favorite Pixies record.  Some say they were running out of ideas, but to me it sounds like they went out in top form.  “Alec Eiffel” is one of the most thrilling songs in their impressive canon.  I’m sure I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times and I never get tired of it.  Frank Black/Black Francis sounds absolutely bonkers on 99% of the album, as if he’s receiving schizophrenic transmissions from all those UFOs he is so fascinated with.  Seriously, his weirdness was beginning to reach Roky Erickson levels of nuttiness, where before he was maybe just on par with David Byrne (haha).  “UMass” is one of the greatest sardonic songs about “intellectual” college students ever recorded (“We’re not just kids/to say the least/We got ideas/to us that’s dear/like Capitalist/like Communist/like lots of things/you’ve heard about/and redneckers/they get us pissed/and stupid stuff/it makes us shout…”).  Their fantastic cover of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On” seems tailor made for the Pixies’ noisy melodicism.  “Letter to Memphis” has some of the catchiest guitar riffs Joey Santiago ever played, as well as one hell of a vocal melody.  Damn the band if they didn’t follow this up with the arguable highlight of the album: “Bird Dream Of The Olympus Mons”, a subtle pop song that ascends heavenwards (or to Mars, I guess).  Fool the world.

Favorites: XTRMNTR

Primal Scream has one of the most fitfully brilliant and regularly frustrating discographies of any band in the past 20 years.  After two so-so albums, the band finally struck a vein with “Screamadelica”, winning the inaugural Mercury Prize and beating out Bobby Gillespie’s former band, The Jesus and Mary Chain, in the process (Gillespie was once their drummer).  It was a game-changer barely a notch below the same era’s “Nevermind” and “Loveless” in terms of scope and influence, deftly blending rock and roll swagger with the hip sounds of house music.  “Higher Than the Sun” remains a high point in music history.  To be obvious: the band’s narcotic intake was pretty legendary.

 

The band inexplicably followed that success with the Stones-aping “Give Out But Don’t Give Up”, which to most was a disappointment.  “Vanishing Point” moved back to a more agreeable sound, and is a minor triumph, but no one was really prepared for the band’s next move. 

 

The news that reclusive My Bloody Valentine wunderkind Kevin Shields had been added to the lineup as a semi-permanent member was pretty exciting in itself, and “XTRMNTR” was an exhilarating success.  The band sounded newly focused and energized, and this is one hell of an adrenaline rush.  “Swastika Eyes” (it appears on the album in two forms; The Chemical Brothers’ mix being marginally less successful than the Jagz Kooner one) is a thrilling barnstormer, controversially criticizing “American international terrorism” but still managing to crack the British singles chart.  “Kill All Hippies” is a slinky, sexy groover with a cheekily confrontational slogan for a song title.  That leads into the album’s strongest track, “Accelerator”, which easily ranks as one of the most propulsive pedal-to-the-metal rock classics of all time, sounding like a mutant collision of The Rolling Stones at their hedonistic best, in the red “Raw Power”-era Stooges, and pure amplifier fuckery.  It has surely put a strain on my car speakers.  “Keep Your Dreams” shows the band is capable of moments of beauty within their maelstrom.  Closer “I’m 5 Years Ahead of My Time”, while not the band’s best, is a well-deserved boasting of the band’s forward-looking panache.  After an album this compelling, the guys deserved a victory lap, because they were certainly running circles around the younger cats.  Too bad they haven’t released anything this great since, but I wouldn’t count them out just yet.

Favorites: 28 for 2008

This was complicated.  When I first sat down to compile my favorite albums of the past year, I thought it was going to be difficult to find 25.  After all, according to my last.fm profile, I must’ve spent more time listening to dance singles and old post-punk, shoegaze, and Krautrock records over the past 12 months.  Then I realized there were 30 albums I really loved that were in fact released this past year.  Then I was like, well, I could stretch it to a top 40.  Then that went to 50, and even that left out some albums I liked.  So I settled on 28 just because I liked the sound of it. 

I had short reviews written for each of these, but decided to scrap them.  These albums already speak for themselves. 

Remember, these are MY favorite albums, so if you disagree with me…no hard feelings.  Feel free to leave comments about what YOU think was deserving this year.

Honorable Mention (Varying from ”could’ve easily made the list” to “have their moments”): The Walkmen “You & Me”; Fuck Buttons “Street Horrrsing”; Benzi and Diplo Present Paper Route Gangstaz “Fear and Loathing in HuntsVegas”; Clipse “Road to Till the Casket Drops”; Abe Vigoda “Skeleton”; Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning “Something For All of Us”; The Gutter Twins “Saturnalia”; Earth “The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull”; The Breeders “Mountain Battles”; Nine Inch Nails “The Slip”; Mogwai “The Hawk is Howling”; Girl Talk “Feed the Animals”; The Bug “London Zoo”; Fleet Foxes “Fleet Foxes”; Young Jeezy “The Recession”; T.I. “Paper Trail”; Sun Kil Moon “April”; Silver Jews “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea”; Hot Chip “Made in the Dark”; Sigur Ros “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust”; No Age “Nouns”; Beck “Modern Age”; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy “Lie Down in the Light”; Evangelicals “The Evening Descends”; Department of Eagles “In Ear Park”; British Sea Power “Do You Like Rock and Roll?”; Genghis Tron “Board Up the House”; The Verve “Forth”; of Montreal “Skeletal Lamping”; The Fireman “Electric Arguments”; Coldplay “Viva La Vida”; Kanye West “808s and Heartbreak”; Vampire Weekend “Vampire Weekend”; Times New Viking “Rip it Off”; Foals “Antidote”; Mr. Oizo “Lambs Anger”

My apologies to: Santogold, The Magnetic Fields, Stereolab, Squarepusher, Matmos, Beach House, Marnie Stern, Free Kitten, Dungen, Morgan Geist, GZA, Q-Tip, Enslaved, Krallice, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Deerhoof, The Notwist, The Howling Hex, John Maus, Blitzen Trapper, Parenthetical Girls, WHY?, The Dodos, Growing, Larsen, Diamanda Galas, Einstürzende Neubauten, and the multitudes of albums that I either haven’t spent enough time with or gotten around to yet.

28. Atlas Sound – Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel

27. Destroyer – Trouble in Dreams

26. Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III

25. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Real Emotional Trash

24. High Places – High Places

23. Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles

22. Wolf Parade – At Mount Zoomer

21. Leviathan – Massive Conspiracy Against All Life

20. Xiu Xiu – Women as Lovers

19. The Very Best – Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit are The Very Best

18. Harvey Milk – Life…The Best Game in Town

17. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair

16. Nachtmystium – Assassins: Black Meddling, Pt. 1

15. David Byrne & Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

14. TV on the Radio – Dear Science

13. Autechre – Quaristice

12. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours

11. Kangding Ray – Automne Fold

10. Mount Eerie – Lost Wisdom

9. M83 – Saturdays = Youth

8. Spiritualized – Songs in A&E

7. Erykah Badu – New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War

6. Portishead – Third

5. Grouper – Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill

4. Lindstrøm – Where You Go I Go

3. Deerhunter – Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.

2. Fennesz – Black Sea

1. Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna

Favorites: Cocteau Twins “The Pink Opaque”

 

Cathedral-sized abstract washes of sound became the basic building blocks of shoegaze and the trick has more recently become de rigor among bands like Sigur Ros and M83, with much of this groundwork lying within the early discography of the Cocteau Twins.  The band created swirling atmospherics in which it was often hard to tell that the guitars were even really guitars and then they placed Liz Frazier’s ethereal, linguistic-mulching vocal acrobatics over the top.  At peak form, the band was absolutely devastating. 

 

I love all of the band’s records (especially “Head Over Heels”, “Heaven or Las Vegas”, and “Treasure”), but it’s “The Pink Opaque” which was my introduction (found in a cut-out bin of all places), and it remains my favorite.  The album was a compendium of tracks, taken from EPs, singles, and compilations, that had never been released in the United States, and they are staggeringly strong from top to bottom.  I once made a house full of people, at Nick and Jezy’s famed Club 805, listen to the album in the dark, and it was a magically hypnotic experience.  Or everyone was just graciously putting up with me for 40 minutes.  That probably happens a lot.

 

Opening track, “The Spangle Maker”, creates a beautiful state of ambient tension before a crashing release three and a half minutes which rivals anything that has followed this blueprint.  Closing piece, “Musette and Drums” creates a dizzying wall of sound as magnificent as anything on “Loveless”, and beat Kevin Shields to the punch by over half a decade.  What comes between those bookends is pretty amazing as well, with “Hitherto” being a particularly captivating example.

 

To the best of my knowledge, this album is no longer in print, but you can still track down copies.  Just don’t steal mine or I’ll kill you with a Gaelic banshee wail. 

Favorites: And Don’t the Kids Just Love It (1980)

In these days of GarageBand and Myspace and Autotune it’s easy to take a truly DIY aesthetic for granted. Pockmarked teens in real garages banging out chords in the keys of sexual frustration, social isolation, running down a dream, man, hopped up on Bennies, whatever. In modern times pretty much anyone can make a recording in their bedroom that sounds professional (The First Baptist Praise and Warship Band notwithstanding). The songwriting might be shite, but that’s not the pointe. The Television Personalities had none of these amenities; still their early recordings are amateurish tiny masterpieces. They may not have had access to Mutt Lange (thank the bombastically overdubbed gods for that one), but they did have access to Kinksian songwriting chops. “And Don’t the Kids Just Love It” helped pave the way for the c86 movement of the early ‘80s and the lo-fi movement of the early ‘90s. The music is witty, full of hooks, quietly heartbreaking (the minimalist 50s ballad-style lead guitar and spoken word on “Diary of a Young Man”, especially), and endlessly enjoyable. One of the songs is, tellingly, titled “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives”, and apparently they also knew where he kept that whimsy of his.

(Part of) a Television Personalities documentary: