THE JO-TEL is going to drink its way to Dover

The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes, while the imperialists and their running dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and his like, are impotent. It has proclaimed their utter failure to encircle, pursue, obstruct and intercept us. The Long March … has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation.

– Mao Zedong, 1935

This has been the best year for music since I started paying attention. With music continuing to fragment away from an imposed canon of radio bands, this year might be remembered as the year with the first underground canon. Technology might have helped, but really it was the result of bands putting out albums that were so good that nobody in their right mind could ignore them.

This year might also be remembered as the year when I experience a record number of existential crises. I wouldn’t call them middle-age crises, because I’m 27 and because the crises usually result in me wearing less nice clothes on the weekend instead of buying sports cars. But this was basically the year when I started to wonder what the hell the point was. Driving home from work, after working all day, I would stress about being caught up with music and whether Tough Alliance should make the Top 15 or whether a Top 15 Songs nod for “New Chance” would suffice, especially with an eight-song album– back in June!! I’ve diagnosed myself with hobby OCD. For instance, my office is messy and my personal affairs are anything but in order but I’ll be DAMNED if my DVD collection is not properly ordered (Criterion Collection separated, film noir on its own shelf (should neo-noir also be included?), etc.). But am I just wasting time? If I listened to ten new albums this year instead of 60, would I be less happy? When I die, what will it matter that I know that Guided by Voices actually recorded “Hardcore UFOs” on the roof of Tobin Sprout’s apartment? I guess you’ll have to wait for next year to hear the answer to these questions and more.

But for now, I’ve been more than content to revisit a mind-blowing year in music. To quote Adolf Wolfli, “And now: And now: here begins our Voyage, hunters and naturalists of indefatigable enthusiasm, our team of fifteen horses bears us west and east in the southern part of the heavens.” If I put an album on this list, that means I really really liked it.
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#15
Prinzhorn Dance School
Prinzhorn Dance School 

During a year when seasoned veterans like Animal Collective and Of Montreal were refining their bombast, we start this list off with a band that bravely showed us what our music isn't about. I'm not going to research this, but I'm guessing that nearly every review of this album will use the words "stripped down". That's appropriate, but let's try to do better. Prinzhorn Dance School — Tobin Prinz and Suzie Horn (duh) — create songs without adornment, songs where the confidence of their tone and inflection must make up for the fact that there's often only a sparse bass and drum to kick their song to completion. But the amazing part about these songs is when you find yourself rocking out to them just like you'd rock out to "Hells Bells" or something like that. I think the persona of the musician is key to indie rock, where instruments are not produced and singing is usually out of tune. And if Prinzhorn's lyrical persona wasn’t so perfect, the album would fail. But on "I Do Not Like Change", they cocksurely insist: "I always walk this way." "Worker" with its repetitive refrain "your are the worker", is the detached indie-rock answer to Lennon's "Working Class Hero". What are these hipsters trying to say? Do they like workers or are they mocking them? The point is, I think, that indie rock is traditionally concerned with not caring about traditional concerns. GbV, for instance, really wanted to drink beer on the roof. And the basement. And that's about it. "Crackjack Docker" agrees: "Hopnail boots/ On the escalator/ Bees wax/ On the radiator". "No Books" is absolutely nothing.

Art is about pushing back and revealing new things about the form. In a year where the art of indie music perfected itself, Prinzhorn showed us what exactly was being perfected.

#14
Marnie Stern
In Advance of the Broken Arm

I know. Here you all are. Bright eyed, it's Sunday, you've just skipped through the Prinzhorn blurb and two sips into your morning coffee you're totally ready to run through this entire list but for me this is the last entry I'm writing and I'm hungover Saturday afternoon and I've gone sort of blurb-batty. I've gotten to a point where I have little idea whether what I'm writing is good or interesting or sane. I've been in blurb world so long it looks like up to me. So here's Marnie Stern: earlier release from earlier this year that's stuck with me from early on. She finger taps the shit out of her guitar solos and she sings about Greek mythology et al. And her drummer is the guy from Hella and belongs in a cage. Good morning. Enjoy that coffee.

On another morning, the Chinese Communist (CCP) army woke up feeling hemmed in. The Nationalist (GMD) forces, lead by Chiang Ki-shek, held the mainland Yunnan and Jiangsi provinces tightly. With greater numbers and superior arms, the GMD turned keystone cities like Shanghai and Hunan into impregnable fortresses for their unification regime and were on the brink of completely annihilating the Communists in their Jiangsi stronghold. In response, perhaps conjuring images of the Manchus camping menacingly on the periphery of the Ming empire, the CCP hatched the plan for the Long March: a massive military retreat to evade the pursuit of the GMD and establish a new territorial base on the outskirts of the GMD power, from where the Communist could consolidate their power beyond the daily military reach of the GMD. When the Long March began, the CCP was little more than a fledgling project of the Russian Cominturn. When it was completed, the Communist party possessed a mythical status: divine conquers emerging from the mist off the Hunan dales, in control of the northeast provinces, and bearing down in spirit and power over Chiang's fracturing regime.

[much, much more below]

#13
Boys Noize
Oi Oi Oi

In a banner year for music, electronic may have lead the way, at least in quantity of quality. For me, thick and distorted synths are the new top-heavy drop-D power cords. Not that I stopped loving Cowboys from Hell or anything. It's just that that shit got mastered by Dimebag, who was mastering shit that Metallica and Slayer had already mastered, based on the mastery of Black Sabbath and, in particular, "Black Sabbath". Electronic synths are the new head banging frontiers. Few rocked out harder than Alex Ridha, the main dude in LA cult faves Boyz Noize. "The Battery" is filthy and "& Down" is a jam. And the "My Moon My Man" cover is handy in freaking out limp-wristed Feist fans. Albums by Muscles, Copy, John Maus, and Stephan Bodzin could have filled this space on the list too, but when in doubt go with the band that makes you want to smash things. Also, I'm a sucker for Street Fighter II samples. Seeing-stars-kick!!

#12
The Fiery Furnaces
Widow City

You guys are all dicks. The poor Fiery Furnaces keep going in every direction you want them to — EVEN WHEN THAT DIRECTION IS THE DIRECTION THAT YOU SAY YOU DON’T WANT THEM TO GO. You are really confusing, dudes, and the Freidburgers are still keeping up with you. After Gallowbird’s Bark, you crits tried to laugh them off the stage as White Stripes carbon copies. Turns out Jack and Meg aren’t even siblings, and the White Stripes have never been nearly as good as the Fieries on Gallowsbird’s, and– despite having huge knockers– Meg is nowhere near as hot as Eleanor. So then they released Blueberry Boat, which dispelled the White Stripes comparisons, but ushered in Pitchfork blacklash syndrome as a result of Rob Mitchum’s 9.6 review. It was no longer good enough for BB to be good, it had to not be over-rated. But it was, according to you all. Why can’t they just stick to the melodies without the abrasive and extended playfullness? So then they gave you EP. Of course, that one was too slight. Too cheeky that a band known for long albums would title a 45-minute album EP. In response, you made them go all crazy and put tone-deaf Grandma behind the mic. That was rough, and it was all your fault. But, of course, it wasn’t as bad as you said it was if you had just given it a chance. But you didn’t, and so they returned (for you) to something more traditionally experimental. The result was Bitter Tea, their worst album because it forgot about rocking out and got bogged down in harmonized backwards vocal, repeating songs, and other gimmicks aimed at simulating a modernized psychedelic pop sound. But, dudes, you made them do that. This didn’t stop you for chastising them for trying to blatantly to be weird, though. But what could they do: you wanted them to make a more traditional album and they did and then felt bad because it abnegated their impulses so they tinkered and destroyed it. But now they return with their best album since Gallowbird’s. They’ve removed most of the top-heavy sonics of Bitter Tea and left pure, awesome classic rock pop structure craziness. And still: lukewarm reception, even from fans. Wrong. And “Cabaret of the Seven Devils” proves it. Transitioning by overlaying lyrics in a completely plot-driven song!: a perfect symbol to encapsulate an album that distills why this band is so fascinating and why the unadorned Widow City is a great showcase for their style and also the perfect way for me to end this dense, yet informative review — and one that (I hope you notice) can itself be seen as symbolically encapsulating this album and the Fieries in general. Good night. It was dark now on the outskirts of the Yangsi province, but the CCP high command leaders were awake, a lamp lighting their tent in the heart of the sleeping bivouac. Mao Zedong, a young CCP leader known for his prolific Marxist interpretations, had become disillusioned with his Russian comrades, who’s insistence that the Nationalist Revolution in China was a bourgeois revolution that should be temporarily supported as such, had almost lead to the ruin of the Party in China. Mao quickly rose in the ranks, and by the time the Long March had progressed into Yunnan, Mao was second in command only to Zhou Enlai. Both leaders had distinguished themselves and, in the struggle and strife of the march, had become like emperors on the make, reminiscent in mythology to the founders of the Han, the Tang, and the Ming dynasties.

#11
Battles
Mirrored

Having described in detail the technical merits of Mirrored in my May review, I find little need to rehash how the drums in “Race: Out” slip under the guitars likes two waves from distant seas colliding into each other in a rectangular laboratory wave-pool intended to combine the properties of distant seas (scientist with lab coats adjusting their glasses), for instance. Instead, it might be more productive to talk about Don Caballero. No, not the skater and no not the Casanova wanderer. The early 00’s experimental rock band that I first heard about three months ago upon recommendation from Half Mantis Grouper Mike Bouvet. I think everyone can probably related to the cover of their 2002 album What Burns Never Returns…:

As James P. Wisdom wrote during the early days of Pitchfork, “Don Caballero lingers with repetitive, syncopated melodies that fall upon one another, somehow creating cohesive songs from the cacophony of frenetically beaten drums and dense yet delicate guitar work.” Like on “Don Caballero 3″ when the perky keyboards are laid over hard-rock high hats. Don Caballero. Don Caballero. Don Caballero: and out from a cute little model of a rock band comes dirty old Don Caballero, dead looking, causing tempos to shift from up to down seemingly at the band’s whim, signatures that clash, and everything swirling together like … a song. The great thing about DC and Battles is how, just like math, they see how far creative theory can be sustained within the confines of necessary structure. The Moments– whether it is the off-rhythm rock chords in DC’s “Slice Where You Live Like Pie” or the discordant chant/chiming of Battles’ “Tonto” (Mirrored was sort of controversial for containing vocals, unlike the former EPs)– come when the strange theories become regular music for you. And now, just like that, you are trapped in the model with Don Caballero: doomed to play music that none of your other friends like! You are no Winona Ryder. And there is no happy ending to this.

#10
Deerhoof
Friend Opportunity

The idea that the Long March was a unified mecca from Yangsi to Shanghai is incorrect and probably perpetuated after-the-fact by those intent on turning it into a majestic, mythical journey, instead of the messy military counter-offensive that it was. Until October 1935, the March consisted of three separate armies. In July, the troops under Mao united with the retreating Fourth Red Army. The Communist leadership opted to move towards the Shansi province, although the decision was not unanimous. According to John King Fairbank, “Zhang Guotao preferred to establish a refuge near the border with the Soviet Union. In command of a much smaller force, Mao carefully avoided Zhang’s discovery of this fact, and overcame Zhang’s influence over the subordinate commanders of the Communist forces.” After disagreement over the direction in which the troops should move, the two forces split up. Zhang Guotao’s Fourth Red Army, which took a different route, south, then west and finally north through China, was largely destroyed by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese Muslim allies. The remnants of Zhang’s forces joined elements of the Second Red Army, eventually linking up with Mao’s forces in Hunan.

Still the best of the Deer-titled bands, like Mao’s army of foot soldiers in 1935, Deerhoof cannot be stopped. Friend Opportunity is Deerhoof’s perhaps deliberate return to the tight rock/punk structures of Apple O‘ after the occasionally jammy classic rock sound of The Runners Four. They return with a more complex and refined sense of sound, the hand claps on “+81″ engineered to come from nowhere would not have been possible on The Man, The King, The Girl or Revielle. The big moment for FO is “Look Away”, Deerhoof’s bold ten-minute decision to stare into the abyss only hinted at in some of the transitions on The Runners Four. But, then, what’s up with that “Nietzsche junk” line on “+81″?

Regardless, here’s to them going Here Comes the Indian on us next time with a whole album of “Look Away”s. That’s why Deerhoof is one of the top three bands in the world right now– they make you not only eager, but imaginative for what’s next.

#9
Pole
Steingarten

In his review of The Microphones’ The Glow, Pt. 2, Pitchfork’s Matt LeMay claimed that “[h]earing the record on regular speakers is like staring at the Grand Canyon through a Viewmaster.” In headphones, that album, with its stereo and static effects, tends to wrap itself around your legs and feet as they gently amble through soggy suburban streets after a rain. Steingarten, on the other hand, feels like looking at a sharp new world through corrective glasses for the first time. Speaking from experience as someone who went from 20/20 to crap eyesight during the course of law school, but who didn’t get glasses until a few years ago and who still doesn’t wear them that often because he imagines they give him headaches, the world looks almost wrongly clear when you first don glasses: the detail of tree’s leaves and the clarity of street signs in the distance seem wonderfully scary when imposed upon your previously blurry perception. In comparison to other electronic music, that’s what Pole’s dub-step masterpiece sounds like. The warbles, beats, and taps that layer together to create each song sound like they’re each coming from their own personally mastered world. Each layer feels like a variation on that snowy castle on the album’s cover: precise and detailed in the distance. You can never approach it. But, out by the snow-covered keystone wall, you can certainly settle down with your headphones and watch each snow flake fall on its rooks and parapets. Be sure to look for He Long’s Second Red Army while you’re there. In late 1935, they were driven further west than the Mao’s Red Army, all the way to Lijiang in Yunnan province, then across the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain massif and through the Tibetan highlands of western Sichuan.

#8
Radiohead
In Rainbows

My junior year of college I lived downstairs in a frat house. My room was a single and the only room on the first floor — it was supposed to be a reserved for elite frat bros because it had its own sink and toilet. I was president. That just happened to be the semester when we had a pretty serious rat infestation. Preferring the coolness of downstairs, the rats took a liking to the public couches outside my bedroom. If I returned to my room late at night, I had to throw something in front of me to scattered the rats. The sound of rats scattering, their boney, arched claws scraping the floor like sharpened nail files, is frightening. I don’t believe anyone who claims to be unafraid of rats.

In high school I had listened to Ok Computer just like everyone else and, being instructed that it was kind of weird or artistic, I listening accordingly; appreciating it, but not falling in love as with true high school crushes like, say, Master of Puppets or Pretty Hate Machine. I also stole my friend’s copy of The Bends because I thought that “Fake Plastic Trees” was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard and I imagined doing lots of important and emotional things while listening to it.

By junior year of college though I hadn’t heard anything else by Radiohead until this dude named Gary, who reads this blog, burned me a copy of Kid A. I labeled the CD with a ballpoint pen, tracing over the lettering several times to darken the title. Kid A is my favorite album of all time. I still have that same burned CD from college. I just listened to it in my car last week. Which is amazing considering how much I listened to it that semester and since. As music is wont to do, it became entwined with various things in my life at that time like the look of the trashcan outside my dirty bedroom window, the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, and the memory of a slightly mentally crazy chick that I did it to a few times. Amidst a sea of inaccessibly preened college girls, the C.O.B., as she came to be rudely known, was a breath of mysterious air. I had no idea what her deal was. Fittingly, I met her when she tried to sell Gary (the same dude that gave me Kid A) fake ecstasy, which I later realized was most likely schizophrenic medicine that she should have taken herself inside of selling to Gary. She was pretty. One time when she came over randomly (she usually appeared randomly) I couldn’t resist putting Kid A on. By the time the title track played, she commented on its weirdness. Probably too much like her own thoughts. Eventually she just disappeared. Whenever I heard that album though all I could think of was her … and Walter Benjamin, killing himself in the snow as he fled the Holocaust … and the view of the dumpster from my window. “They think you’re crazy baby/ I think you’re crazy maybe”, lulled Thom Yorke on “Motion Picture Soundtrack”.

Seven years later, Radiohead seems to now just be following me. As I settle reluctantly into a work-a-day routine, Radiohead settle back into traditional album form. After two driving openers, the aptly titled “Nude” lays it all out for you: the soupy intro leading us backward into our realization that after all the growth and struggle and frantic movement of youth and college, we land on terra firma, now in the learned position to firmly admonish ourselves to “not get any big ideas.” Nothing ventured nothing lost. Indeed, the last track “Videotape” feints as if it is going for a swooning “Motion Picture Soundtrack”esque conclusion when the “when I reach the pearly gates” line warbles out longingly. But the song devolves, petering out in diminishing piano and Yorke’s cryptic talk of “videotape”. Radiohead’s victory with In Rainbows is proving that nothing with ever be like your past again. At least until the future, when the past starts over again, larger, more varied.

By the end of my junior year we had succeeded in poisoning the rats. I must have been pretty jaded to their presence by that point, but I took great pleasure and little fear in approaching an ailing rat to prod it with a pool cue or my foot, the last trauma required to spur its coagulated blood to hemorrhage the vital organs and precipitate its convulsing demise.

#7
The National
Boxer

The National are writing the best rock lyrics right now. “Everything you say has water under it.” These vague turns of phase that seem to speak directly to me. “You wouldn’t want an angel watching over/ they wouldn’t wannna watch/ another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.” Those vague turns of phase that seem to speak directly to me. “We miss being ruffians, going wild and bright/ in the corners of front yards/ getting in and out of cars/ we miss being deviants.” Those vague turns of phase that seem to speak directly to me.

That’s the appeal of poetics for me; feelings and ideas conveyed in abstract form so that they hit you in pure form without feeling like they are aimed at you or too telegraphed or heavy handed and I think, incidentally, seeking this means of communication leads to breaking the art form in a way that we call art. Like this:

Renson won national eight five semblence
twenty you run twenty before folgun folsom trancing.

Rememberances when understand like sausage
five turns yesterday when. Begin turns eleven eight
upper ten tendencity aim direct aim for
eight nine heart.

#6
No Age
Weirdo Rippers

It’s probably not fair to Bradford Cox that I hate him so much. It’s just that the Deerhunter frontman is so promiscuously obsequious with his antics and twistedly frank candor. And, of course, there’s the fact that Crytomgrams sucks really bad. There’s that too. Yet the only reason I’m probably writing about this band is that Bradford Cox, lead singer of Deerhunter, called them one of his favorite new bands in a Pitchfork interview. Pitchfork, the all-consuming Deerhunter fans that they are, probably did not want to create a “master-surpasses-the-teacher” phenomenon when they gave Weirdo Rippers a meager 8.0. Or maybe they were holding off so not to laud too vociferously No Age’s first full length LP, a cobbling together of two EPs, when a better distillation of their sound is surely coming down the road. Either way, I can’t be so calculating. (And certainly not as calculating as Mao when he regained Party leadership in early 1935; Zhou Enlai - whose skepticism of mobile warfare had led to Mao’s ascension - taking the position as Mao’s right hand man that he would hold until his death in 1976.) This album rocked like few else this year. The songs shift between droney space-outs to faded Ramones rockers. Sort of like Deerhunter, right, but everything bathed wonderfully in two-tone garage rock reverberation. Lovely.

#5
Sunset Rubdown
Random Spirit Lover

It’s hard to think of Spencer Krug as anything less than a hero. I saw him and his Sunset Rubdown open for Xiu Xiu this year, the adorable little red lamp atop his piano shifting vigorously as he pounded out the chords to “From the Pier and Dead Shimmering.” He was tucked over in the corner of the stage, dressed up in his unassuming polo shirt and clean-shaven face– a champion of the devoted regular guy. For Krug, Wolf Parade now seems like a political strategy to allow him the resources and attention to pull off two amazing Sunset Rubdown albums. Where Shut Up I Am Dreaming had a epicly sloppy feel to it– like a dream gone crazy and beautiful, Random Spirit Lover is the meticulous, “toiled over” (Pitchfork) attempt to understand and organize the dream after the fact.

And it contains some of this year’s most striking moments. Check out “Magic v. Midas”:

Hey woman, with the gold that you keep or which keeps you in your place,
Do you recall that it’s just green and copper taste?
Oh, do you love to dance with a hang like some hula dress so lighting off your noose?

Was it magic or Midas that touched you?
And by magic, I mean “trickery.” And by Midas, I mean “faith.”
By magic, I mean “trickery.” And by Midas, I mean “faith.”

When the song slows down to emphasize the last two lines, it may be the most beautiful 20 seconds of the year. Also, don’t miss the strangely touching closer “Child-Hearted Lovers”:

Where’d you learn to stage dive with such grace
Indescribable face
What do you stay beautiful for?
And don’t you worry about the floor

Yep. No floor to be seen.

#4
Of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Probably the first album to be addressed to pissed off animals, Kevin Barnes’ seventh full-length album is brimming with giddy creativity. It is the best of his career — a career that goes as far back as split shows with Neutral Milk Hotel in 1996. Orbiting around Elephant 6 like Neu! around Kraftwerk, Of Montreal has spun off in its own direction, replacing the sun-drenched psychedelia of its E6 origins with dance-floor disco-glam. But the mentality of those OTC and NMH albums can still be felt in the moments of transcendence that feel haphazardly genuine. Just as when “Memories of Jacqueline 1906″ comes to crash “Courtyard”’s party of discordant jamming on the OTC’s Dusk at Cubist Castle, or when “Gardenhead” rises from the ice-cream truck twinings of “April 1st” only to rush frighteningly into “Leave Me Alone” only to rush frighteningly in the second part of “Leave Me Alone”, bridge be damned!, the moments of emotional exhilaration on Hissing Fauna do not seem targeted or overwrought. When the peak of the domestic quarrel portrayed in the awesome “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” hits, it turns out to be related to the “dodging of fruits and vegetables” as opposed to, I don’t know, “stabbing yourself in the neck.” First you are disarmed with friendly humor, then you are dazzled: “no matter where you are, you’re always touching my underground wires…”

Plus, you can dance to it.

#3
Stars of the Lid
Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline

Originally, I wrote a bullet-point list of specific moments that I love in these songs. I intended to argue that only such a precise accounting could do justice to this meticulously crafted album. “Humectez La Mouture”, “Apreludes (In C Sharp Major)”, “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”, “Don’t Bother They’re Here”: all represented. But driving home on the Bay Bridge tonight, Dcember 7, 2007, I heard my car’s speakers struggling vainly to produce the sweeping sounds of “The Daughters of Quiet Minds” without distortion and I realized my approach was wrong.

The typical blurb will not contain this album, just like how there just seem to be no speakers (at least that I can afford) that can properly showcase it. I feel like I just need to take the album to the top of a cold, snowy mountain - the branches of the black pines barely visible through the thick snow - and just play the music upwards towards the sky: return the beauty to its origin, from whence it will be reborn in its true form: soft fall rain on autumn leaves, a bitter morning frost over desert sand, green moss on a foggy cliff, glittering sea in a bucolic cove, lightning thudding down through an electric night, a blanket of red clouds shrouding the dusking sun. I feel like, maybe, the music will end up being the skeleton key to the mysteries of nature and the world. I guess we’ll see.

#2
Panda Bear
Person Pitch

Sometimes I hate when things are too appropriate, too perfect. Driving down Clement toward Sea Cliff with Patsy, “Bros” magically weaving samples and reverbed vocals into a gleamingly sunny undepressed Brian Wilson afternoon beach happiness trees thankful proud clouds road air sky grass eager sun beginning smooth legs with rolling hills too and joy jam, backpack with wine and sandwiches gentry rumbling on Patsy’s lap. But I, driving, with my just washed and conditioned fluffy hair, overlong (for an attorney) on account of me not getting the haircut that would have interrupted these Sunday activities (the planning and execution of which staves off the coming of the weekday), flapping barely in the wind from the open window, can’t quite explode into the moment. “Bros” feels too apt, tendentiously aimed to make me, the hardened critic, ecstatic.

It’s like that line in “Magic v. Midas”: “When you said that you wished you were worse than you are…”. It was as if I felt too privileged to relate to the song’s happiness. How could I ever create anything important in such ideal conditions? How could I ever appreciate life?

By the time we parked, closer “Ponytail” was only half-way through. I sat in the car. Patsy left and sat outside while I waited out the final minutes by myself in the car. “When my soul starts growing/I feel so full and/ I wish it never would stop growing,” Noah Lennox sang. I felt ashamed of myself.

Finally, in October 1935, the remnants of Zhang’s army joined Mao in Shaansi. But with his army destroyed, Zhang, even as a founding member of the CCP, was never able to challenge Mao’s authority. And after an expedition of almost a year, the Second Red Army– the last remaining army– reached Bao’an (Shaanxi) on October 22, 1936. The date is known in China as the “union of the three armies”, and the end of the Long March. The success of the Long March would presage their Communist victory in 1940. And in 1949, the CCP victory over the Nationalists seemed triumphant and beautiful. A theoretic movement mobilized to overthrow the yoke of the all-too-traditional mechanisms of governance employed by the GMD. Forty years later, the Communists could not longer cloak the violent force required to keep the populace in line. Hundreds were slaughtered in Tienanmen Square, but it was simply the most public example of the brutal oppression that had been employed by the Communists in order to maintain the image of a vibrant and faithful mass that had first been fostered during the travails of the Long March. A compelling story, indeed, but to what end?

#1
Animal Collective
Strawberry Jam

If this is not the end of the road for the Collective’s progression away from Here Comes the Indian, if we have not yet ascended upwards from the earthy heaven of Purgatory, then the world’s pleasure receptors may just need to reorient themselves in anticipation of what’s next.

-Me, jo-tel review

Did I overdo it? The number of times I listened to this album on the way home from work would argue otherwise. Yet, reception has been mixed. Patsy, who likes the album, related to me that the guys at the independent record store in the Mission didn’t like Strawberry Jam very much because there was “too much of the other guy and not enough Panda Bear”. First, two out of nine tracks is not enough? Second, since I’m sure these dudes like “The Purple Bottle” (also sung by Avey Tare), I’m guessing that the problem is more with the lyrics being push to the front of the mix. And the lyrics do assault you. “The other side of takeout is mildew on rice”? “The fireworks that make the babies poop/ They have to”? But all along the way Animal Collective has been difficult, strange. Why would their lyrics be any different. Any stranger and they wouldn’t be strange anymore. The lines have a feel of “Wait, was I supposed to hear him say that?” Just like on “Leaf House” you all thought: “Wait, is he doing a cat meow?” This bad is about making you doubtful before welcoming you in. Despite all the “accessible” labels, Strawberry Jam is no exception.

Regardless, to not appreciate this album because it is too refined or something would be like being a Chinese Communist in 1936 and not celebrating the CCP’s consolidation of power and forces after the Long March because that part of the journey was not as harrowing. If AC gets stuck in this land of pop transcendence (and there could be worse things to happen), then maybe level your aspersions. But at the moment they’ve put out what will be one of the best albums of the decade and one of the few that does not look uncomfortable next to Kid A.

-Shark

[Chinese history segments written by me, with factual assistance from John Fairbanks, Merle Goldman, and wikipedia. Special thanks to Patsy for her editing assistance.]