THE JO-TEL … good intentions blogging company

The Besnard Lakes’ anthemic new LP The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night, which was released yesterday, will be getting the deluxe reissue treatment next week, according to their label Jagjaguar. The reissue, due out on March 21st, comes in a high-gloss digi-pack and will contain an extra insert page with youtube links to live performances by the band. It will also feature, as a bonus track, an alternate version of “Albatross”, recorded before the bass guitar was added to the mix. Also, Jagjaguar informs that us that the first 100 purchasers will get a mail-in application for a free album download in mp3 format. A 320kbps download is available for an extra 50 cents per track. Tracklist after the jump.

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Annie (to Thrill’s pregnant sister): “…and your ruling planet is Jupiter.”

Thrill’s brother-in-law: “The big, gassy giant…”

Patsy and I decided to go on vacation at a small town in Washington state called Snoqualmie Falls. We chose to go here because we are nerds. Specifically, we are fans of the TV show Twin Peaks, and several of the exterior locations were shot here. More generally, we both espouse the theory that vacations should be based on a hearty amount of randomness. So there we are. It was December 29, 2009.

We started off at the hotel, arrively punctually at approximately three-and-a-half hours before before check in time, which was, apparently, 4pm. The first thing I did was check out the falls, which is the central attraction of the town. These are the falls featured prominently during the opening credits of the show. The rippling waters of the lower lake outlining such names as “Madchek Amick” and “Peggy Lipton”. I took this photo:

Since there was nothing in particular to do in the hotel lobby, we decided to go to Tweed’s Cafe, which lent its exterior facade and general vibe to the R&R Diner in Twin Peaks. The place is teeming with TP references, including the so-called “Twin Peaks cherry pie” and “damn good cup of coffee”, neither of which we tried, instead opting for the more substantial burger and fries. We termed our 3pm meal “linner”, due to it temporal equidistance from lunch and dinner, and dubbed it part of our newly minted eating schedule whereby one enjoys a non-trifling breakfast prior to 8am, followed by coffee, and then by a satisfying snack at approximately 11am. Linner ensues at around three, and should be dinner-esque in completeness and breadth. The day culminates with a hearty, chest-beating desert– a fruit cocktail, nut and cheese platter, or cookies/cakes are some possibilities. The desert is really the lynch-pin (pun intended?) of the meal, ensuring that the participants go to bed sated yet arise the next morning hungry for breakfast. Here is a picture of the cafe:

The interiors of the cafe were used in the pilot episode only, and replaced later in the series with a Hollywood set. The interior that we encountered on our trip included a candy cane and Santa Clause taped to the wall next to our table and a sea of Tweaty Birds stapled to the ceiling, in honor of owner and titular namesake, Paul Tweet.

We then returned to the hotel and claim our room. After a respectable siesta, we awoke to watch episodes 8 and 9, which contain some of my favorite moments in the series, including Albert’s monologue about being a man of peace and that whole thing about creamed corn.

On Tuesday, we awoke to the strains of vigorous construction hammering. My in-room Internet was not working, which forced me to embark on a hazardous journey to the local Starbucks to complete to a few necessary work items. I say ‘hazardous’ because I was keenly aware of the punishment that would be inflicted by my wife should I stay out for longer than 1.5 hours. I stayed out two hours and returned to a disgruntled Patsy. But I quickly made it up to her by being my normal wonderful self.

We skipped off to go for a hike down to the base of the falls. The falls were picturesque. Looking at them up close, I could understand why David Lynch thought them fitting as a image for the show. The softly cascading water of the cataract dusting the sky in waves like the haze of a dream.

Once we got back up to the room, we had a brief but integral snack/lunch (snunch?) of store bought materials. Then I went downstairs to sojourn in a reading room, snuggling up to the fire and book three of Les Miserables, wherein Hugo was disgressing regarding Paris sewers. Patsy remained upstairs partaking in the comedic wonders of Troop Beverly Hills, one of the worst movies ever made.

After Troop BH was over, Patsy and I took a bath in the spectacular in-room bathtub. It has an assorted series of subsurface lights, including a setting where each color blinked in series. It was nice.

As we were getting ready for a late linner, the lights went put in our room and, as we later determined, all of the rooms. Room service was kind enough to deliver two flashlights. I delivered the mood-appropriate Nico album.

We went to dinner at the hotel restaurant. It was fancier than I expected based on my general knowledge of hotel restaurants. It was nice enough that Patsy and I didn’t really get upset when they shuffled us off to a secluded table adjacent to the kitchen. We had a delicious meal. Patsy maintains that the venison that she ate was the best meat she’s ever had. Also, as a free desert, they brought out two crusher-marble sized balls of chocolate. They tasted like a combination of all of the chocolate in the world in one ball.

We feel asleep to the Lawrence Olivier version of Jane Austin’s classic comedy of manners Pride and Prejudice.

On our third day we woke up early and went for coffee at the Twins Peaks Cafe. Damn good coffee, and hot too! We were informed that the iconic Twins Peaks sign (featured during the opening credits of the show but at no other time during the series) was located nearly in Upper Bend. After a protracted drive along the beautiful, rain-misted road on which we thought the sign was located, we could not find the sign. I should digress briefly to emphasize how scenic this area of Washington is. Purple skies and dense forests capped by the dark, snow-dotted Cascade mountains. And the clouds and misting rain wrap the whole scene in a shroud. We drove back to the cafe and asked about the sign. We were directed to the back of cafe. This is what we were told was “the Twin Peaks sign from the show”:

Funny, disappointing.

We then returned to hotel and read/bathed for the remainder of the afternoon. I read 120 pages of Les Miserables and took two baths. I also started a fire, which I was sort of proud of because I’m not really an outdoorsy kind of guy. I mean, I like camping and hiking but I don’t really bring any valuable wilderness skills to the table. So anyway, I started a fire.

That evening we went to the railway museum. It was terrible– a small room with boring, bland display– but I pretended to be interested to amuse Patsy. It was fun. The trains in the yard were cool though. We took some pictures.

Then we went for a walk, returned home, and went to bed.

THE END

This is not the Whitney Houston song I requested.

-Hip E.

PETE reviews Shutter Island, the new movie from Martin Scorsese.
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Went to see Shutter Island yesterday afternoon. It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I have no idea why. Compared toThe Departed I thought it was way better (partly because Infernal Affairs was also way better than The Departed, and if you’ve already watched the Wire, the whole premise that Matt Damon could get away with all that cell phone shit is dumb).

I won’t say much about it, except that there was this dude sitting in our theater who was a legit crazy dude. They had let him in the theater with all his bags full of crap. I don’t know if he was homeless but I don’t think so. Just crazy. I commented to the guy next to me after the movie, “Do you think that guy was planted to add to the ambiance?” He kept talking to himself and/or to no one. He would make comments like “You like these tough guy movies, don’t you. Yeah, you like ‘em!” Then he’s do a DeNiro impression. At one point, during a very tense moment, he started encouraging DiCaprio to “Punch her in the face! She deserves it!” For the most part it was sort of funny but at one point I yelled at him to shut the fuck up, exact words. He didn’t, but my comment sort of opened the floodgates and two dudes got out of their seats after that to go talk to him. So if you guys see it and there’s an insane person sitting in your theater making you uncomfortable, then Scorsese is even more of a visionary than previously thought.

This edition of PETE’s Corner was brought to by Shark

PETE sends an email to the proprietor of an online poker site, references his good looks.
________________________________

Dear Pokerstars,

As much as I love your site and have very few complaints about the way you operate, if I may make a humble request: Please don’t hold any more must-play tournaments on Valentine’s Day. Or, if you must, at least make them turbo. I understand that a sizable majority of poker players are overweight, anti-social losers who subsist on Fanta and Hot Pockets and have never known a woman’s touch. But I think it’s pretty unfair to hold this tournament today, so the small number of us who ARE good-looking, personable, and have gorgeous girlfriends are effectively excluded from entering because they expect us to spend “quality time” with them and shit. I mean, what’s wrong with yesterday? I wasn’t doing anything yesterday. A little reading. A little studying. I could’ve — and in fact did — play poker for several hours without so much as raising a single hackle on my girl’s neck. But today I’m stuck here preparing a menu for dinner, and I still need to hit up the florist.

Sincerely,
PETE

And the response:

Hello PETE,

Thank you for your email. I appreciate that many players were torn between their love of tournament poker and the love of a girlfriend on Valentines Day. I will pass on your suggestion that we hold only dull tournaments on days when good-looking and personable players are required to spend time with gorgeous girlfriends.

Another idea might be to persuade your gorgeous girlfriend that the best way to spend Valentines Day is playing poker at PokerStars to benefit from the F40 promotion? Imagine the joy of the pair of you holding hands romantically as PokerStars deals you a Milestone Bonus Hand.

Good luck at our tables, and thank you for sharing your thoughts on love and poker!

Regards,

Joanne
PokerStars Support Team

This edition of PETE’s Corner was brought to you by Shark

Q: What Is that??

A:
i. It’s a machine. … A fucking machine.
ii. It’s a HASH PIPE!!!

After reading a Basho collection, I spent a week writing me some haiku.
__________

BRIDGE
a collection of haiku

1

Lunchtime
Car in strip mall lot
My reflection there

2

Morning mirror
Concerns in soft light before
Bathroom beard

3

Five highways
In dark morning, raining –
Car and myself

4

Freeway tunnel lights
Deposition papers piled
Passenger side

5

Dinner in styrophome
In my car –
Body moves home

6

Smoker in late evening
Under a light –
My rumbling car

7

Morning drive over bay bridge
The cars behind me
Disappear in heavy fog

8

Turning the wheel to the right
Then to the left into
The garage — yesterday now

9

I take the steps two at once
Paint peeling and
Ready for dinner again

10

Turning in my office chair —
Fog over Concord’s
Green hills dotted with commerce

11

Feeling through my soft clothes
Saturday morning –
Change for the meter

12

Sunday morning Saturday
Sun Saturday
Morning Sunday sun

-Shark

The secretaries in my office are notorious for being assiduously fussy about the temperature of the office. There are two reasons for this: (1) they are dumb; (2) they have very little to do all day. As such, minuscule variations in ambient temperature can cause massive upheavals that often persist throughout the day. This was much worse at our old office, where the temperature would actually fluctuate by as much as 4 to 5 degrees. One of the secretaries would remark that “it felt really warm” and then would inform the receptionist, whose job it was to email down to building management. Building management would then send Jose, the building maintenance guy, who would be directed by the receptionist to the complaining secretary. Once at her desk he would be reduced to standing around quietly, trying to detect variations in temperature undetectable by anyone who has exerted themselves in even the slightest way, such as walking down the hall. The secretaries however eschew leaving their desks, and so this does not impair their ability to detect, with precision, slight shifts in the ambient temperature. Sometimes, by the time Jose would get to our floor, he was informed that it was actually not warm anymore, but, instead, was “a bit cold”. This would often spark arguments between nearby staff. Once the other staff caught wind of this, it was not uncommon for Jose to be whisked away to another wing of the office were it was reportedly “way too warm now”.

At our new office, the temperature controls are actually amazingly precise, such that the temperature never varies more than two degrees or so. As a result, our secretaries have sharpened their temperature detection abilities to an almost uncanny extent. Variety in two or even one degree(s) from the Platonically perfect office temperature will elicit a verbal gripe. I often get the urge to go out into the hall and inform them that there’s actually a term for temperature that makes you feel slightly hotter or colder even few minutes– it’s called THE RIGHT TEMPERATURE. Sometimes I also think about the whole situation in a biological sense: is this what humans have devolved to? We are the species that once ushered in such transformative moments as “taming fire” and “learning to fashion tools while huddled in inclement Ice Age surroundings in Africa and modern Eruasia”. Yet now our minds have made us so insulated and comfortable that it’s all we can do to focus on whether the temperature is 71 or 72 degrees.

-Shark

Thus would I lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there, of other days besides, the memory of which had been more recently restored to me by the taste of a cup of tea…. All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could discern between them if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of coloring that in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation.

–Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

So there was this incident last week. Patsy and I were going out somewhere and I was killing a mixed drink of some sort on the way out and left the empty glass by the front door, tucked behind a pillar. We returned home at maybe 1:30ish from a modest night out. As we approached our apartment door, we notice that my glass was laying on our welcome mat. The glass was laying on its side, and the two limes in the glass were strewn across the mat. These details are important. If the glass had just been delicately laying on the mat, I would have thought nothing of it– but the fact that the glass seemed to have been maliciously tossed at our doorstep really had me wondering. As I see it, the potential explanation can be separated into two extremes: (1) our kindly co-tenant, who loves having young, vivacious tenants like ourselves, noticed that I left the glass by the entryway and benevolently returned the glass to our doorstep, placing the glass gently on our mat; however, what he didn’t know is that after he left, the glass slowly tipped over and spilled its remaining contents onto the mat– after all the corners of our welcome mat (which I should note is shaped like a heart) are lightly bowed upwards at an angle just stark enough to cause the glass to top over; or (2) our bitter, fed-up co-tenant, fuming with anger over our noisy living style and cluttered garage storage space, upon seeing the glass in the entryway assumed that it could only have been left by the perennially rude tenants in apartment #3, snatched it up and, with a crowning sense of asperity, dumped the remaining contents of the glass (including the limes) and then tossed the glass onto the mat as an intentional sign of malevolence and hatred.

Which is correct? I’ll give you the answer later on it this post. Now, on to the top albums!
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#15
White Denim
Fits

This is the last year of a decade that saw the proliferation and commodification of the indie rock album. The shambling, homemade indie rock sound is no longer one that is limited to the bedrooms of suburban nerds that pour over the Matador catalog and fantasize about cool sounding bands like Superchunk. Now that forays into strange-sounding albums is easier for listeners than in the 80’s and 90’s, indie rock has meritoriously risen to the top. As a result, we’ve begun to see albums that seem to aim, tendentiously, for indie rock’s amateurish sound. Oh I don’t know, Cymbals Eat Guitars comes to mind (sorry), to provide an example. Fortunately, though, White Denim, a band with all the trappings of a standard indie rock band, gave us a decidedly different album this year. What is remarkable about Fits is how much more restless it is than it needs to be. Even the calmness of the album’s second half is, to be certain, White Denim not sitting still, not spazzing out for a whole album like you would have expected from the band the brought us 2007’s Exposion. With its motley melange of moods– chaotic, funky, bratty, sad– Fits is more a ribald slab of steaming humanity than an indie rock album. In this post-Room on Fire world, this is exactly what we needed.

#14
Fever Ray
Fever Ray

The madeleine cracker

I bought the first volume of Proust’s six volume A la recharche du temps perdue (In Search of Lost Time) on June 22, 2002, at Cody’s Book Store (now closed) in Berkeley. I know that because the receipt is still in the book. After I finished it, I passed it on to Hip E., who also read it. Hip passed it to another friend, and then eventually Thrill also read it. Looking at it now, the cover is taped on and the print of the front and back cover is so worn as to be nearly blanched. The book is peppered with dog-eared pages, underlines, written comments, and post-it notes– the remnants of the recognition of interesting moments by four different readers. It looks not unlike Proust’s own manuscript, pictured below:

Of course, the novel is famous for its instances of “involuntary memories”– when certain smells, tastes, or sounds trigger buried feelings and recollections– the first, and most famous of which, is the episode wherein the narrator recalls his youth in Combray via a madeleine cracker dipped in tea. This magically illogical association that the mind contrives behind one’s back is as close as an atheist can come to a “religious” experience, and its biological reality makes it still more inspiring.

[O]ne day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.

I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could, not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. …And I begin to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state that brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished….

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine that on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion that would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

#13
Emeralds
What Happened

This album taught me a couple of things. One of the things this album taught me is that it is a noise album. Unlike your typical ambient album, it is not trying to hone a mood. Instead, What Happened creates a tapestry of sound from modulated din. And, sort of like the dense, collage album cover, the resulting album plays like a mixing of the pallet colors of all recent noise music– apparently Emeralds felt like doing a victory lap from the 00’s as the decade of noise.

This is one of those bands that I know nothing about and like it that way. The music thrives on its anonymity, on the fact that it seems to channel its sound from surfeit technology, on being “Alive in a Sea of Information”, on being sort of how I would imagine a collection of random sounds between radio stations produced by a Steven Spielberg film about strange creatures and suburban alienation. The second thing that this album taught me is that if you’re having trouble describing this album, just use a nonsensical analogy.

#12
Night Control
Death Control

To me, some of the allure of this strange album comes from its shadowy context. On paper, the music is none-too-shocking: nostalgic, lo-fi guitar ballads with hazy vocals. That could describe a medium-size avalanche of late-aughts indie rock albums. But Death Control is label Kill Sharman’s handpicked compilation of a steady stream of unreleased CDRs received from Night Control’s Christopher Curtis Smith over the course of several years. Its 117 minutes are filled with sheer monoliths of lonely rock and roll. I can’t really explain it, but the music on this album sounds unheard. It does not reach out for you. No. Instead you peel it out of the paint in Smith’s room, locate it under the desk while searching for the plug outlet, sweep it under the bed when frantically cleaning only to rediscover it one day when you decide to move your bed. I think I’ll go move my bed.

#11
Built to Spill
There Is No Enemy

The lilacs of Tansonville

There have been no shortage of Proust parodies. Always fond of skewing literary icons, Monty Python wrote a sketch involving a game show wherein each entrant had to summarize A la recharche du temps perdu in 40 seconds. One contestant attempts as follows:

Proust’s novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocably of time lost, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the reinstatement of extra-temporal values of time regained, ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience, re-stating as it does the concept of intemporality. in the first volume, Swann['s Way], the family friend visits…

(Gong goes, time expires, chord of rausic, applause. The meter has hardly risen at all.)

Another contestant, who describes his hobbies as “well, strangling animals, golf and masturbating,” is less successful:

Er, well, Swann, Swann, there’s this house, there’s this house, and er, it’s in the morning, it’s in the morning – no, it’s the evening, in the evening and er, there’s a garden and er, this bloke comes in – bloke comes in – what’s his name – what’s his name, er just said it – big bloke – Swarm, Swann

(The gong sounds. Mee pushes him out.)

But one parody that often flies under the radar is Andy Warhol’s 1955 book, A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu. The shoe-themed parody is described by wikipedia as marking Warhol’s “transition from commercial to gallery artist”.

#10
Krallice
Dimensional Bleedthrough

I liked last year’s Krallice album (Krallice – The Krallice), but this one is just ridiculous. Speed guitarist Mike Barr from Orthrelm (remember that album from a few years back where he shreds the guitar for two straight hours?) joins some dudes from some metal bands (I’m not going to pretend that I knew the names before listening to this band) and makes music that doesn’t really fit any categories. The allmusic guy resorts to calling it “something akin to Steve Reich or Philip Glass playing incredibly dense progressive rock”. Phil Freeman, are you sure you didn’t accidentally review Faust I? Anyway, Krallice is not head banger music. Krallice is more like a metal jam band. And I mean that in, you know, the awesomest way possible.

#9
FaltyDL
Love Is a Liability

Uncle Adolphe’s study

Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven is a strange documentary about people involved with a pet cemetery in San Fransisco. It was Morris’ first documentary and, after initial obscurity, it is now considered an important and influential documentary, responsible– along with Zwigoff’s Crumb– for spawning many of today’s now-ubiquitous quirkumenatries. It concludes with one of the more strangely heartwarming moments in recent movies: a segment about a somewhat dim-witted worker at the pet cemetery who likes to go up on a hill above the cemetery, plug in his amp, and shred guitar riffs into the bucolic valley:

Morris would go to direct such famous films as The Thin Blue Line, the film version of A Brief History of Time, and, most recently, The Fog of War.

However, it took eight years in total for the then-obscure Morris to complete Gates of Heaven. At some point in the process, director Werner Herzog wagered that he would “eat his shoe” if Morris ever actually finished the film. When that happened in 1978, Herzog agreed to eat his shoe, and the events were captured in the aptly named documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. The shoe was prepared by the head chef of Chez Panisse in Berkeley of all places. Herzog refrained from consuming the heel of the boot, noting “one does not eat the bones of the chicken.”

#8
Blank Dogs
Under and Under

I think that Under and Under by Blank Dogs is one of the best lo-fi albums of the decade. If the decade started by lo-fi godfather John Darnielle throwing down the gauntlet with All Hail West Texas, the self-described pinnacle of his Panasonic recording phase, it has continued with the best lo-fi bands expanding the sound in new and different ways. For instance, Eat Skull and The Hospitals making lo-fi sound as bad as it can possibly sound before just being straight noise pollution, or Times New Viking discovering ways to employ tape hiss to heighten hooks, or Ariel Pink using shit recording to confuse and disarm the listeners. Under and Under is unique because it is basically a New Order album recorded on a busted 4-track. It is an album who’s appeal lies in its nuanced and layered sound, and it pulls that off despite the fact that the layers are really to just glorified static. The result is strangely thrilling.

In other news, digging all this lo-fi stuff recently has really allowed me to conjure the perfect adjectives to describe the super-clean studio sound that defines most mainstream releases: distant, sterile, bloodless. Maybe once we’re done with this lo-fi resurgence, music production will have sustained an entire transvaluation of values: maybe hi-fi bands will be seen to surmounting the obstacle of sounding clean, and lo-fi bands will be seen as taking the easy road to immediacy. Then we can start all over again.

#7
Peter Broderick
Music for Falling from Trees

This decade was the cross-over decade for ambient music. Gone are the days when ambient music was reserved for that weird 1980’s brand of yuppie rejects with modern, slightly disheveled apartments, well-groomed pony tails, and complete collections of Steve Roach albums on vinyl. When music wasn’t free, it took this type of person to decide that they wanted to spend hard-earned bones on 110 minutes of drone music, for instance. The cool kids were always going to opt for the Minutemen record. But these days, one need not get into the deep listening music of Paul Oliveras at the expense of the cutting edge surf rock of The Drums. Both can coexist. I have this idealistic dream for the future that skaters, instead of listening to early Unwound and Appleseed Cast, will rock Stars of the Lid and Stephen Mathieu while executing perfect kick flips, or will bob their heads to the minimo-techno strains of Pom Pom or Jan Jelenick while transitioning between a backslide and an olie nosepick with the perfect manual. Coolness inverted. The uncool becoming cool. Isn’t that what, I don’t know, The Modern Lovers were about?

This year was a banner year for Peter Broderick, whose 2007 album Float remains one of the better pretty ambient albums of the 00s. Music for Falling from Trees, a soundtrack to a performance piece, can also be seen as a stand-in not for only for his excellent, Goldmund-esque all-piano work (Docile), but also for his brilliant, atmospheric collaboration with Machinefrabriek (Blue Grey Canvas Sky). That his impressive Type Records follow up to Float (Home) was the least interesting of his four releases this year, says what kind of year this guy had. As the decade when ambient became cool comes to an end, I see no better way to celebrate than falling from a tree.

#6
Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion

The three trees of Hudimesnil

Werner Herzog is a badass. In the annals of cinema, he’s got to be up there with the boozing Sam Peckinpaw, the sadist F. W. Murnau, or the literalist Erich von Stroheim, who filmed a 9 hour (running time) version of McTeaque that kept all of the original novel’s dialogue intact. But Herzog is up there. Just listen to the commentary on Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aquirre: The Wrath of God), one the greatest movies ever made, and you will be regaled with stories like that of Herzog stealing a huge crate of howler monkeys from a South American airport for no reason other than that he thought they could possibly be used in the movie (he was right), or Klaus Kinski shooting off the finger of one of the native extras. Fitzcarraldo, about a man’s doomed obsession to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon, has a no less insane back story, and one that is well-cataloged in both Klaus Kinski: My Best Fiend and Burden of Dreams. Basically, Kinksi was both insane and intensely impolite, a combination that lead to several confrontations with the crew and Herzog’s famous vow to kill Kinksi during the movie’s filming.

#5
Cattle Decapitation
The Harvest Floor

Cattle Decapitation’s Harvest Floor was my favorite metal album of the year. Maybe I should start by saying that if vocals that sound like dying pig squeals are not your thing, you may want to save yourself the download. This is grindcore– the most abrasive of all metal. But I absolutely love how the band weaves standard metal riffage into the madness. Take for instance the five minute mark in “Into the Roman Baths” when grunts and time-signature haywire turn into a vintage Maiden riffs and then, then a few seconds later, back to machine gun drums and 12 times shifts of 9 seconds. But even with the madness, there’s a method to it that rewards repeat listens. When driving home after the average day of 8.9 hours of legal billing, this albums hit the spot somehow, strangely becoming perhaps my most listened to album of 2009. Who knows, maybe after work, while sitting in traffic on the Bay Bridge– a victim of a fancy new, earthquake-safe traffic nightmare called the S-curve– I feel like nothing more than a little allegorical decapitation. Anyway, nice gibs.

#4
Bloody Mary
Black Pearl

I feel like minimal techno has always been about analyzing the bits and pieces of dance music. If that’s the case, then Bloody Mary dons a lab coat and goes fucking full-on “science” on dance music’s ass with this one. Motherfucking beakers and shit. Avogadro numbers.

Black Pearl takes the structure and sound of dance music and sterilizes it, takes the swooning strains of happy hardcore and crushes them onto a Petri dish so to view more readily with the almighty, magnified eye of scientific rigor, takes the climactic builds of techno and rolls them out on microfiche. You feel like you’re learning about stuff when you listen to albums like this. And to extend the thesis of a recent study, if young kids are drawn to lo-fi recording, then I must be getting old, because the purity of this album, when I’m listening to it, slays all lo-fi in my mind. To put it simply: it’s a huge, hulking slab of neatly arranged bloops and bleeps, and the best pure electronic album of the year.

#3
Eric Copeland
Alien in a Garbage Dump

At the start of the decade Eric Copeland of Black Dice was gaining notoriety for going ape at concerts and punching people. At the end of the decade, Black Dice are at what I can only assume is the tail end of a third creative shape-shift, courting fans, like myself, that may have been slightly nonplussed by their Beaches & Canyons-era turn to mellifluous meditations. To put it simply, with Load Blown and this year’s Repo, Black Dice are making some of most badass beats in the history of music. I’m not saying “Ricardo Villalobos and Madlib eat your heart out”, I’m just saying that the Black Dice beats are the filthiest thing anyone’s bobbed their head to since the opening tracks of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. The band deserves its place among the premier bands of the decade.

And, as the decade ends, here we have Eric Copeland on his second full-length solo album for Paw Tracks, sifting through ugly, discarded sound samples to create a strangely pretty album of information overload and confusion. It is at once a modern masterpiece, and a pile of garbage.

#2
Dirty Projectors
Bitte Orca

Vinteuil’s Sonata

Dan Bejar, who is somewhat famous for inserting earnest yet unassuming literary references in his songs, sings on “Virgin with a Memory” from his first album: “Was it the movie or the making of Fitzcarraldo/ where someone learned to love again?” The reference is likely to Herzog’s realization that, despite Kinski’s borderline criminal abrasiveness, he needed him. Indeed, Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu are each unimaginable without Kinski. But Bejar doesn’t get too far into this, content to throw out an obscure reference, but temper it by professing an unscrupulous confusion about the origin of his knowledge.

His co-song-writer in the New Pornographers, Carl Newman, probably couldn’t provide the answer either. Although Newman does not shy away from literary references in his work– note Get Guilty’s “Like a Hitman, Like a Dance”, a surprising reference to Jean Pierre Melville’s great Le Samurai– he said in a recent news article that such references are, for him, more of a lark. According to Newman, “I’ve read lots of books but none of them have changed my life.” In the interest of non-sincerely inserting some literary references in his next album, Newman indicated that he is “researching Proust.” Well, at least, he reports, “he download the sparknotes.” [However, only Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, is available on the sparknotes website. -Ed.]

#1
Baroness
Blue Record

The uneven paving steps at the reception for the Princess de Guermantes

I finished volume six of In Search of Lost Time during the winter of 2004. The 4,457 page tome that I began during the last summer of college was completed at the fulcrum of my time at law school. Being within 100 pages of finishing it, I planned out the last reading session. I walked from the Jo-tel in Russian Hill to the green space in the middle of Civic Center, reading along the way. I sat down on the grass and finished the book. The book’s last and most grandiose moment of involuntary memory is triggered when the narrator loses his balanced on an uneven paving stone:

Revolving the gloomy thoughts that I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard at the Guermantes mansion and in my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car that was coming towards me, the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving stones in front of the coach house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone that was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness that at various epochs in my life had been given to me by the sight of trees that I had thought that I recognized in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavor of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by those other sensations of which I have spoken and of the which the later works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.

I couldn’t tell you, as I type this, anything else I did that winter. But I remember clearly and vividly finishing the book that had been a part of my life for three years– a book about, among other things, embedded associations that had become, itself, not only a trigger of memories, but a source of artistic consolation and emotional solace. There is no higher role for art.

-Shark

Oh! You were wondering about the glass on my welcome mat? Well, yeah, some guy upstairs hates us, he left us a note.