THE JO-TEL … now with posts

I figured out a few things for sure this year:

1. Who Jack the Ripper was;
2. How to determine the narrator of Pale Fire by Vladamir Nabokov;
3. Why the legal profession is an unproductive drain on societal resources.

In summary:

Jack the Ripper was a rabid, syphallic marauder in downtown London known as Leather Apron, a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosmiski prone to harass women of low-repute and who was, immediately subsequent to the Polly Lang’s murder (the last of the canonical five), committed to a high security metal asylum under the Jewish “John Doe” moniker “David Cohen”; he was later referenced in the journals of the lead detective as “Kosmorski” by mistake.

The key to determining Pale Fire’s narrator is the footnote for the word botkin, which includes the explanatory definition “king-bot: maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end”, king being an inversion of the name Kinbote, and thereby punning on the miasmic chiasmic mirror of biographer and subject at the heart of the novel, Nabakov’s best.

The legal profession is an under-productive drain on the system because the value acquired by legal competition is an adversarial advantage for the party with a better lawyer but the outcome sought by the side with the better lawyer is not necessarily the better outcome for society, so the advantages of legal advances can only be measured in terms of comparative legal sophistication (i.e. between the U.S. and other countries), which does not manifest in nearly enough advances for U.S. society to make up for the colossal drain of resources caused by an overabundance of capable thinkers crowded into the legal profession.

So much for the acquisition of knowledge. Here are the top 15 album of 2008.

#15
The Acorn
Glory Hope Mountain

List making reminds of Ecce Homo in disguise. Mostly chest beating. And syphallitic delusions of grandeur. Like Nietzche’s biography– in which he declared that reading even one word of “[his] Zarathustra” could raise one to new heights– list making, with its talismanic emphasis of simple answers to messy realities, is inherently Khabalistic. In other words, list-making is a mistake.

Which: we will start with an indie rock album from Canada, which features lots of well-meaning, under-produced backing instruments and yet still miraculously does not at all resemble Arcade Fire (the band is more folk than rock, but let’s pretend the odious amalgam term “indie-folk” doesn’t exist). An obscure little gem, Glory Hope Mountain is filled with lots of flaws– some lyrical (the album is about the dude’s mom, for instance), some musical (the last song lays the sentiment on a bit thick)– that all seem to contribute to its ramshackle magnetism. If this band turns out to be awesome, then this will be their Everyone Who Pretended to Like Us Is Gone moment. They may get more professional, more consummate, more “better”, but you will never quite love them as much as on this one, their sloppy, earnest stab at grandness.

#14
Mau Mau Starter
Waterless Sky

**Full Disclosure: I wrote the lyrics for this.

But praising this album doesn’t feel like self-aggrandizement because it was all Johnny D, working under the nom de tune Mau Mau Starter. And this album is good because of the music. It was produced using Garage Band or something like it, which is to say it is essentially unproduced. It was not designed to leap out of your iPod speakers, vault over the noise of clanking plates and running water, and infect your ears with shearing hooks while you clean the dishes. It is a headphones album because its maker made it with headphones on, focusing on perfecting the layers of sound and refining the subtle transitions in the music. It is a headphones album because it needs to be. Because the mind that made it excels at inserting detail and texture. Just take Johnny D’s computer animation demo real, which, at 33% percent complete, kealed over and died because Johnny D could not skimp on the detail in the interest of merely finishing the project. But he finished this one, and we are all rewarded with the result: an organic electro-pop album inspired by Eno, informed by guitar noodlers like Jeff Beck, and more youthful than anything else I’ve heard this year.

[the rest of the list below]

#13
Shearwater
Rook

If someone told me, say, 10 years ago, that I would have my first “Dad moment” at the age of 28 while listening to the first track from an album by a band called Shearwater, which featured a guitar player from the band Okkervil River, I would have said, “(1) Who is Okkervil River? (2) who is Shearwater? and (3) please kill me.” But, as I explained to Jordan while picking him up from the airport as this song came on, when the heavy guitar part on “On the Death of the Waters” blasts out of the speakers in contrast to quiet, piano-based first segment of the song, I find myself quickly turning the volume down in a very dad-like manner, my aged ears unable to accommodate the rapid change in volume. And, since I have listened to this album a lot, I now usually preemptively turn the volume down before the loud part happens. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. But, regardless, I still get the point of that stark, dad-unfriendly moment: it’s as if Mebourne has structured the album to emanate like ripples from the first huge KERPLUNK! in a placid lake, the album’s undulations flattening out until, by the end, you are actually sitting next to the lake, watching the water gently purr in a small, make-believe sound created by three rocks and a twig. It’s this deliberate structure– the result no doubt of restraint– that separates this one from Palo Santo, and from most other albums of its type.

#12
The Garlands
The Garlands EP

A Short History of Small Art

Large art dates back to the Parthenon, to Stonehenge, to the Caves of Elphanta. But, as with the latter– unappreciative Portuguese explorers taking pot-shots with their carbines at the muralled walls– large art can be unwieldy to future generations, its grand pallet accentuating the temporal anachronism of its underlying themes.  Small art originated, strangely, with The Iliad, a myopic 34-part telling of a small portion of the fabled 18-year campaign. Like Homer’s tale, The Garlands EP, which comes on a mini disc, has no sweeping ebb and flow, no climax, no denouemont– nothing to perish its perfection to later generations. Just four perfect pop songs in under eight minutes. A small shard of art in the system, a pebble under your foot.

#11
The Chap
Mega Breakfast

I like how this album, a sound experiment parading as a dance album, messes with timing. For instance, the lyrics on “They Have a Name”, when transcribed, read: “Heart throb heart throb heart throb heart throb gets the ladies” but depending on state and/or occupation your dome when the song comes on, it can either sound like:

Heart throb heart throb gets the ladies

or:

Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb Heart throb heart throb gets the ladies

Like the lyrics of the next line of that song (”heart throb hits the dance floor”), The Chap stumbled into 2008 bereft of any meaningful reference points. The result is an album that keeps you unbalanced, woozy, and– somehow– dance-floor happy for its entire run time.

#10
Islands
Arm’s Way

The year’s most under-appreciated album is also its most violent. In a year that– both outside and inside of music– might be compared to a “rebuilding year” in sports, I found this refreshing. Many didn’t. But Islands, as a band, has almost been designed, by its belligerent frontman Nick Diamonds, to fluster your sensibilities. Back before this album was released, Diamonds informed the press that “We’re going to make each one ourselves, fold it up in a CFC Styrofoam container, non-recyclable, double plastic individually wrapped”. What a cool, bat-shit crazy “fuck you” to all things progressive!  Similarly, Thorburn in his lyrics doesn’t try to be ingratiating or pleasing to your ear. His bellicose stance is embodied in the album’s peak-moment, 11 tracks in, when he utters “I could see the city/ when I pushed you out of my fucking way.” It’s like when he literally called out some dude at an Islands show at the GAMH in 2006 who had the brazen audacity to ask for “Jellybones” off of WWCOHWWG. Which is why it’s so surprising that his music is happy-island-vibe-y and why I think Arm’s Way is his real coming out party: an earnest, dark, ironically chime-y attempt at gloriously impenetrable music that Diamonds himself admits can bebest appreciated by “recovering alcoholics”. But it is, also, redeeming! “I like how you swim/ You do it with ease” he sings on “To a Bond”. It is these light-through-the-clouds moments that make Arm’s Way a human document: flawed, interesting, difficult and lovely.

#9
Eric Copeland
Alien in a Garbage Dump 12”

I’m not sure why Black Dice’s Load Blown didn’t get more year-end recognition from critics.  I personally heard it too late for it make my list, but then again I don’t do this for a career.  Maybe its nature as a singles and EP comp made it easy to defer recognition of Black Dice’s concise new musical direction to the next proper dose of full-length new material?

Here, though, we have Eric Copeland (from Black Dice) going it solo with what is technically a single, but what plays like an EP and sounds like a full album.  You can imagine him at his computer, having fun with these very modern sound collages. The resulting freedom of song dynamics is not unlike that found in this year’s solo album from Dan Friel of Parts & Labor, except that Alien in a Garbage Dump does not try to reach beyond it contextual capabilities. Opener “Egypt King Tits” is mostly a pitch-shifting vocal sample, but the playfulness behind the song’s alinear movements is thrilling.  Essentially, though, the album is arranged as a shrine for the title track, which welds Steve Reich-esque avante-rock repetition with cheerful, synthesized mantra choruses, a la Panda Bear.  And it may be that Copeland, like Lennox, will use some raw materials from this to cobble together a full release in the vein of Person Pitch.  For now this single—one of the strangest and best albums of the year—is enough.

#8
Earth
The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull

The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull– the best of Earth’s post drone-core albums– is not a music album so much as a vacant movie soundtrack, zombie-ing around the halfway-barren Arizona desert looking for an empty vessel to score.  The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, try these:

1. Illiad.  Particularly, that portion of the rage of Achilles story arch not covered by Homer.  Odysseus and Diomedes had just gleened important information about the location and planned movements of the Trojan army from the unfortunate prisoner of war Dolon, who revealed the information to Odysseus and Diomedes in exchange for the guarantee that he would not be killed.  After receiving the information, the two Greek heros quickly broke their oath and proceeded to cut Dolon head off and deposit his armor as a breadcrumb to aid their return from enemy lines.  Agamemnon then used the information to plan an offensive attack on the Trojans.  The attack was going well for the Argives until Agamemnon was injured and forced to flee from the battle. But before that, there are some scenes of almost picturesque bleakness.  As Gustav Schwab tells it:

Then [Agamemnon] threw himself on the sons of Priam, Antiphus and his charioteer Isus.  Antiphus he pierced with his sword, Isus he pushed from the chariot with his lance. Quickly he stripped them of their armor.  And now he encountered the two sons of Antimachus, the Trojan prince who, beguiled by Paris’ gold, had dissauded the others from surrending Helen.  The youths let the reins slip from their hands, crouched in the depths of the chariot, and pleaded for mercy. But Agamemnon, thinking of their father, slew one with his spear and cut off the hands and head of the other.  And the Argives, on foot and in chariot, penetrated deeper and deeper into the ranks of the enemy, even as a fire lashed by the wind spread through the dense forest.

Imagine “Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow” soundtracking.  [sidenote: why don't more modern reinterpreters "expand" on Homer's telescoping of the entire tale of the Trojan Wars and just adapt a very small portion of the story: a fleshed-out vingette of sorts.  The tale is too sprawling to fully address in a single vehicle, why not comment on its grandeur microcosmically?]

2. Ran.  Apparently Kurosawa was half-blind when he made Ran.  He was not in good stead with critics or audience at the time either.  This often eludes young, modern critics familiar only with Kurosawa as he is currently known, as the canonically Japanese director, and whose work is embolmed in more Criterion Collection releases than any other director.  But, in 1981, he was essentially on the ropes with Japenses funders, despite the highly positive American reception of Kagamusha (e.g., Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film).  [sidenote: this whole "best foreign language film" might be the most artistically counterintuitive aspect of the Academy Award (saying a lot).  It didn't make sense in the 1930's when the awards were just getting started (what with Lang and Renoir making movies in Europe) and it makes even less sense today, now that globalization is a fact more than a theory.]  Maybe it is the after-the-fact adoption of Kurosawaian themes in American Westerns, but I can’t help seeing these samurai epics in an Old West light.  As such, the scene where Emperor Hideatoro (the Lear figure) exits the burning dojo is so rife with both triumph and desperation that it should be scored by the tonally analogous “Miami Morning Come Down II (Shine)”.

3. Blood Meridian. For example, during those climactic scenes were the Judge mystically trails the Kid and Tobin through the desert (more like a shadow that a stalker or marauder) I would use “Dissolution II (Miami Morning Come Down, You Fuck)“, which is from the 2006 Scatter comp, not The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull.  The judge is, after all, an analogy for divine evil.  As for Suttree, that one doesn’t need to get made by anyone else other than me.  Did you hear me, Cohen Brothers (who have called Suttree their favorite McCarthy novel), it’s mine!  But if you do adapt it for a movie then, I guess, Billy Bob Thornton would make a really good, albiet slightly obvious Cornelius Suttree.  Just saying.

4. Lone Star.  Classic Sayles, but would be vastly improved by a soundtrack courtesy of The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull.  It would blacken the quirks.  The quirk would be blackened.  Also, it would accentuate the tone of castrated Western bravado.

[postscript sidenote: I'm still not sure exactly what I think of the title.  The plodding meter matches the album's sound, but-- maybe a little too direct for the album's oblique menace?]

#7
Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles Blurb, Pt. 1: Tell Me What To Swallow

The dance music that Crystal Castles make is novel in the details, the shades. It combines darkness, youthfulness, fun, and heroism in equal measure and ends up being a conflation of (1) your memories of playing Super Mario Bros 2 at your neighbor’s house, and (2) the feeling of being drunk on the dance floor in your underwear.

Opener “Untrust Us”, which rumbles into your ears with the perfect balance of menacing synths and playful bleeps, sets the tone for the rest of the album. “Courtship Dating”, with its sputtering electronics, is basically a pop song just because the vocals are so fucking good. The remix of HEALTH’s “Crimewave” is the best song of the year. In fact, the album has so many high points, it’s easy to forget them. “Vanished,” for instance, pulls you in immediately with its 16-bit melody, and then drops Alice Glass’ vocal sample through the rest of the song, keeping it slightly off-kilter with the melody until exactly 3:49, when the bleeping cycles around to sink perfectly with the lyrics, as the kids go nuts: the beer-soaked consciousness hits the movement of the dancefloor and places their domes squarely in the sky.

Crystal Castles Blurb, Pt. 2: Drink ‘n Fuck

In general, the band does not shoot for glamor, obviously. Most the picture of them are unflattering. Like this one:

Or this one, with its literal self-effacement:

But Alice Glass embodies sexiness via pure attitude more than any other female musician today. From what I’ve seen of their live performances (youtube) she’s a writhing sprite to the gods of drunken recklessness, the ex-patriot baccant of the dark wooden glen, a one-woman maenad tearing all half-assed music asunder:

In other words, Ethan Kath and Alice Glass are role models for the new generation of reckless, feckless, damaged, cheap-booze fueled, neu-rave what?, urban minimum wagesters. “Drink ‘n fuck”? A rather irreproachable weltanshuuag now that AIDS doesn’t exist anymore.

#6
Wold
Stratification

The first thing to realize about Black Metal– USBM or otherwise– is that it is more of a polemic than a realistic world view.  At a time when the tenets that originated from godlike piety have begun to undermine the progression of social mores (see e.g. the passage of Prop 8), Satanism is, in this context, an almost positivist worship of power as the essence of being. As opposed to dogmatic (and by temporal extension anachronistic) tenets passed down from musty sea scrolls, power has the potential to interact with our modern morals and instincts and, in turn, push our social personality forward. In this regard, Nietzsche was a Satanist to the extent that he replaced Schopenhauer’s will to live with the will to power as the irreducible motivator of all actions. Because, you know, Satan, the angel, wanted to be greater than God– that was his only sin, that was why he was punished, sent to Hell. The MO for many modern Satanists is to redeem Lucifer’s thirst for power, to praise his diametric opposition to the stolid doctrines of Christian meekness and Catholic morality. Indeed, there he is: Satan: banished to a place called Hell, created just for him, where he is, as Dante describes, encased in ice from the torso down, three heads hideously melded in a one single head with six wings fanning freezing winds throughout the center of hell, with each head chomping vigorously on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas, respectively. Which … you know … that’s pretty badass.

As for this album, in particular, let’s talk about “Frost Crystal Symmetry”, a jaunty little number. I would describe it accordingly:

It’s like you’re playing pinball in college– that MEDIEVAL MADNESS pinball game they had down at LaVals before LaVals became a Taiwanese restaurant– and you just made the peasants revolt and your ball is getting battered back and forth between some lucrative double hit-point target drops when the pinball machine is overrun by BLOOD THIRTY DEMONS THAT HOLD YOUR HANDS TO THE FLIPPER BUTTONS WHILE THEY EXIT THE MACHINE AND TAP THE PINBALL ON YOUR HEAD AS THEY SCREAM IN YOUR EAR ABOUT THE SLOW, HIGH PITCHED DEATH OF FROSTED DEMONS AND THEN JUST LET YOU GO TO WANDER OUT IN THE SNOWY STREET EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE STILL TAPPING A PINBALL AGAINST YOUR HEAD TO THE BEAT OF A DITHYRAMB AND SCREAMING INTO YOUR EAR AS THE RUSTED CARS WHIR BY AND THE WIND HOWLS AT YOUR FEET AND THEY CLAW AT YOUR EYES AND YOU ENJOY EVERY MINUTE OF IT.

For those looking for a category, I’d say “metal ambient”.

#5
The Walkmen
You & Me

To no other album this year did I feel so helplessly drawn. Comments about the band running out of ideas make sense to me. I see where people are coming from in this regard. “In the New Year” is pretty boldly unoriginal coming from a band that seems to have already tapped out the bittersweet holiday nostalgia vibe– for fuck’s sake, they already have a song called “New Year’s Eve”! And for everyone who has given this album a chance and think The Walkmen are running on empty, I empathize and will not admonish you to look deeper and determine that the album is actually, like One Hundred Miles Off before it, a re-hauled vision and sound. But, you know, if you want to look deeper, you may find that You & Me is a re-hauled vision and sound.

In hindsight, each of their albums evoke a different season or mood. Everyone felt like music in a cold city apartment. Bows was wintery. Hundred had a blurry summer sound. You & Me conjures a year of changes at the New England boarding school. Loves, losses, books under the arm, football in the autumn-colored field, sneaking off campus in the summer to drink beers by the wrought iron bridge overlooking the old tupperware factory. Which is to say, You & Me is a turning point. It feels more comprehensive in mood than the previous albums, more like a collection of short stories.  On You & Me, like on Everyone about five year ago, they seem comfortable enough to let their music shift to fit the mood and story of a particular song.

But then again, The Walkmen have created a sound that is very personal to me. I can’t help it if I still recall playing their first two albums in my CD Walkman as I walked to my summer job in 2004. Or that I still remember pleading the DJ at the Arrow Bar to play “The Rat” so I could lose my shit on the dance. Brent DiCenzsceno, former Pitchfork writer and superbly gonzo musical journalist, in his masterful and polarizing departing review at Pitchfork, lamented having to give To the 5 Burroughs a numerical rating.

My interaction with music goes well beyond simple, academic analysis of sound. Nostalgia, emotional context, the continued story and history behind the artist, the packaging, and everything else matters in my love and fascination with music. This is why writing for Pitchfork, which prides itself on discovering unknown underground artists, means so little to me anymore. Listening to music as some form of continued, insular experiment with recording driven by faceless, MP3-based rock bands bores me. I was immediately prepared to love To the 5 Boroughs from my history with the band– from listening to Ill while playing Atari with Andy Eberhardt, to mowing neighborhood lawns with Gregg Bernstein and Paul’s Boutique in a walkman, to holding my portable CD player off the front cushion of my Buick Century to keep Check Your Head from skipping as I passed over the speed bumps in the Marist parking lot every day after my Junior year, to shooting bottle rockets from poster tubes at passing trucks on 400 off the roof of the AMC multiplex I worked at when Ill Communication came out. It is not mentally possibly for me to switch on apathy towards the group.

When all is said and done, I have spun To the 5 Boroughs at least 30 times while working on some of the most rewarding and enjoyable creative work of my life in the past couple weeks, while visiting a city I love, and seeing people I missed. … I will listen to this album for years to come. You might. Or not. It depends on your own complex web of past interaction with the Beastie Boys, linked memories to the music, or preconceived notion of how hip or not it is to listen to them in 2004.  … Divorcing the lives and backstory from the recorded product of a musical artist equates to making movies without characters.

He’s right, of course. How can you objectively evaluate albums like these? I didn’t grow up with Daydream Nation. If I had, maybe I would not like it less than White Trash, Two Beebs, and a Bean. Maybe if I hadn’t slow danced with Patsy to the Walkmen Christmas song at the jo-tel party while drunk off brandy and egg-nog, I would not love the holiday-friendly sound of this band so much. But subjectivity is the only reality our aesthetic knows. The rest is intellectual approximation. And we get enough of that during the work week.

Also, I know, the title sucks and the album cover is lame. I know.

#4
Eat Skull
Sick to Death

Tape Tear// Lo-Fi //Tear Tape: A Lo-fi Guide to Lo-fi

“How Can Music Be Good If It Sounds Bad?”
Why does it sound bad, because it hurts your ears? It’s grating? Why is it bad that your ears are hurt by the treble-y squeals of guitars plugged right into a four-track? If there is no permanent canal damage, and let’s assume no short term headache either, then what’s wrong? That your evaluating this is the answer.

“Why Don’t They Just Use Over-the-Counter Software and Get a Better Sound?”
Because, as I’ve said before, the shit sound is the artistic statement. I’ll even admit that it’s likely harder to record music this poorly. But it could be worse: you could not hear anything at all but feedback and squealing. But that doesn’t bother me because for some reason I feel like the shit sound makes the song more interesting, so that I’m fine with these bands being purveyors of shit sound. I may be right or I may be wrong. And that unsureness about whether your opinions are generalizable among all with good taste speaks directly to why I think these songs have value: they use means/medium (as opposed to substance) to force you into a more difficult artistic decision. Not like Xiu Xiu, though, you know. Not because they court obscene topics, impose alienating structures, or eschew pop hooks. But because they were deliberately recorded that way. It’s like Duchamp’s stupid fucking toilet. What can be art? When you get something shoved in your face that is deliberately so crude that you wonder “wait, is this art?”– and then, shit … they just button-hooked you, bro– you thought they were doing the streak route to the endzone but they button-hooked you– and you just answered your own question with your question. It’s tautological, just like bad production for the sake of bad production. It’s been done. But it’s a message that can still bear fruit, obviously. Because these bands rule.

“What Do You Like Most About These Bands?”
Their songs.

“Why Is Times New Viking Your Favorite Lo-Fi Album of the Year?”
Because I didn’t want to pick Times New Viking because Pitchfork likes them and I want to be different than Pitchfork. Negative freedom, man– it’s a bitch.

“Would You Be Paying Attention to These Bands If They Didn’t Sound Like Poo?”
Maybe not.

“Is This an Important Year in Particular for This Type of Music?”
Yes. If only because it seems like there’s more of it and more of it is of good quality. Crystal Stilts, Grouper, Sic Alps, and Times New Viking all had great albums or EPs this year. Indeed, this Eat Skull album is more a place holder than an album that is definitively superior to the rest. Moreover, it seems like these bands are touring more, and to more fanfare. Is it cheating that live performances, with unobscured sound quality, seem artificially awesome to an audience that have only heard badly recorded versions of the material? Yes, sort of, but does it matter? The result is the same: these bands sound awesome live.

“Why Did Bob Pollard Not Fix the Part in ‘Hardcore UFOs’ Where the Lead Guitar Cut Out As a Result of Tobin Sprout’s Hand-Done Transition of the Original Tapes to the Four Track?”
Because it “sounded cool, like a UFO.” -Bob Pollard

#3
2562
Aerial

Impossible to not review this technically accomplished album in precise outline form.

I.    WHY THIS ALBUM IS SO GOOD.
A.    A Circumstances Album
1.    Hits a resonate frequency with your life movements by tapping into the rhythm of breathing.
2.    However, it moves off-center with your life– wobbling in chaotic cycles like Ahab on his pivot hole– but slightly faster, which makes it devilish at heightening moods.

B.   Clean Dub(step)
1. It takes the messy dub influences of traditional dubstep and cleans them up so that the album sounds like a virtual reality approximation of dub.  The busted vibrations of dub and dubstep produced by bass or reverbed samples is replaced by cleanly echoing snyths and precise bass hits.
2. This is where the ‘minimo’ comes in.  But don’t expect a Villalobos-esque rave-through-the-wall sound.  This album is big: it’s the best headphones album this side of Steingarten, and the best electronic album of 2008 by a small landslide.

II.   WHY I CAN NEVER FIND THE COLANDER IN OUR APARTMENT.
A.     I Don’t Know.
1.     Everytime I need the colander I can’t find it so I ask Patsy or Deepa and they say, “Um, it’s … here let me just get it.”  And then they start to look around in the kitchen and then I get bored and walk away and then I come back and they’ve found it but I don’t know where they found it.
2.    Then I find myself needing it again and, not wanting to pathetically repeat the process, end up using a plate or something to drain the water, resulting in the loss of more than a few pastas.

#2
Sun Kil Moon
April

I was supposed to quit my job in October of 2007. I set myself a deadline, I initiated my job search, I threw away old, probably not important documents squirreled away in my office to sever ties, I threw away old, probably important documents squirreled away in my office to sever ties. And then I didn’t quit. And, as a final kick in the teeth to my resolve, I can’t even remember why.

I was supposed to quit my job in May of 2008. The plan, sincerely discussed with my then-fiance, was to leave the job before our wedding and then travel the shit out of Europe. And then I didn’t quit.

I am supposed to not spend my whole life at this very office-y job in a law firm where I defend real-estate developers just because it’s stable and pays well. It doesn’t help that I’m pretty good at it despite exerting what seems like skeletal effort at times. I’m supposed to not. Yet the powerful combo of laziness and the paucity of low-stress, rewarding law jobs has slayed my resolve and my optimism.

I sit at my desk and pine for when I was young in New York, move around my favorite albums in my head for this list, daydream about moments like, say, when I’m half drunk on Sunday evening and I fall down on my knees in the middle of Haight Street outside of the Noc Noc because I just conceived the idea for the next groundbreaking American novel that will allow me to walk into my boss’s office that next Monday and put in my resignation with a smile and just say “I’m writing a novel” and then two years later send him a package with a letter thanking him for all his tutelage and support and enclosing a hardback copy of my new novel, the early edition that would not yet feature the effusive praise of both The New York Times and The New Times Review of Books like the paperback version later would.

Then I would remember I was at work. Then, when I got in my car to leave work everyday, April would soundtrack the blankness of the late evening going by my window. Maybe more than anything, the meandering denseness of the songs on this album seemed to mirror the times. The rumbling guitars of “Tonight the Sky” sound like determination in the face of suspected failure. At least for now. But, more than just personal attachment, this album– objectively– is so good that not even 21st century Will Oldham could ruin it. That is saying much. And I don’t even want to know which song Ben Gibbord is on … but the fact that I can’t tell is testament enough.

#1
Portishead
Third

Other than the sound of Beth Gibbons’s vocals and a vaguely driving tone of ominous menace, Portishead arrived in 2008 barring no resemblance to their prior selves. Previously content to strike a novel mood (trip hop), Third finds the band forging each song of this utterly consistent album into a wonderful and strange fun-house of experimentation. The plaintive lyrics and strings at the beginning of “The Rip”, for example, are totally ethereal, and when they give way to midi-driven bout of electronics, it’s like a roller coaster taking a thrilling turn. It’s like, you know, Space Mountain or something.

But what I like most about the album is intangible and defies easy analogy (let’s pretend, for the sake of conherency, that the above analogy to Space Mountain was “easy”). There’s this troubled sound to it– both in the lyrics and the backing music– yet with each unpredictable turn, each spot-on bit of strangeness, the album emits a sense of creative triumph in the eye of pervasive, vacillating sadness. With battle-scarred aplomb, Portishead were Thomas Hardy’s millennial thrush, chirping into the growing gloom.  And me, leaning on my “coppice gate” (my car) on the way home, round the bend of Highway 24, the city obscured by clouds as the full-hearted evensong hits me.

-Shark