Digest - The Morning News

Listening • Diamonds From the Trough, Part 3

Enguarde! Ole! Here here! In the second part of our end-of-year mini-series searching for forgotten gems in the best-of-list, Erik got down dirty with year-end lists and caught some tasty morsels that almost slipped through our nets. Let’s continue wrestling with the lists—there’s a lot of good stuff still out there that we will not allow to be forgotten.

The Catbird Seat’s monthly mix tapes continue to be a thing to behold, especially with the Guardian declaring 2008 “The Year of the Mixtape.” Mr Ryan Catbird’s December mix-tapes are especially worthy when held up next to people indiscriminately uploading almost 1GB of Pitchfork’s Top 100 songs; no context, no voice, just treasure and complete submission. Instead we yearn for the more esoteric, idiosyncratic lists that make the internet a warm place of soul, not just booty.

The Catbird Seat and Gorilla Vs Bear both rounded the year off by applauding Karl Blau’s slow and steady desert-drift. They shared “Mockingbird Diet;” it has lasting appeal but with thousands of tracks and albums called “best,” you’ve really got to go for the quick easy option. Sean from Said The Gramophone succeeds by going for Blau’s “Before telling dragons,” currently at 32 listens. You’ll whistle it through your dreams, skip up the curb, share your best stories, and wonder whether this is the Holy Grail that Weezer will discover after the floods subside.

Bon Iver had everyone’s heart this year, including mine; singing proudly with no apologies—all good. But then there’s Karl Blau; he knocks first, telling grizzly stories in the corner as Bon Iver stands on the table in the next room. Both are good hometown woodsmen but Blau will furnish the soundscape of my mind’s eye with so many more monuments, great forest characters that Bon Iver couldn’t carve or summoun in a decade of winters.

So many sound like Deerhoof, Broken Social Scene, or the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s when they try to do this. Gang Gang Dance either worked hard or got really lucky. They drown you in rain dances and have you reborn and remade from a fiery cauldron in the middle of the jungle. These arty Brooklynites jam through all hues, with little hesitation and complete disregard for compass points and magnetic fields, disorienting listeners and light with a sound so difficult to tune out from. This must sing of pre-rapture parties, in caves painted psychedelic, where we party to lights in the sky, to the end. The Grime MC breakdown at the midway point brings the dance to peak. The whole album is a mirage of LCD Soundsystem running beats, Burial’s Gothic bass busting, and the more hip-tropical Animal Collective beats, a feast for those left lacking in the holiday season.

Listen to Gang Gang Dance at This Recording’s end-of-year run-down. This Recording is “a blog dedicated to the enjoyment of audio and visual stimuli,” and another great discovery this year. The editors at This Recording have you covered for pop-culture reminiscences, and the writers keep spinning words, keep loving, keep finding things and people to love—it’s random, and shuffling, but I’ll read every word while I work out exactly what the deal is, when I hit January. I’ll keep reading as I look and see the door to 2008 is shut, and that there is a whole year to be had: a fresh, clean slate, new tunes, new people, new places. No resolutions for me though, I want my year remembered by lists, not restricted, tied up, and held hostage by something that December Me thought would be smart.

—Mike Smith, Dec. 19, 2008

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Listening • Diamonds From the Trough, Part 2

In every effort to outdo Mike’s first entry in this ad hoc series, I’ve gone about collecting those lapidary listens from the past year’s releases which, though somehow managing to miss my attention, became firmly lodged in the collective consciousness of list makers the internet over.

Some find the whole listing process—in the literal sense of rating songs integrally better or worse than another song—either arbitrary or too unnerving to be helpful. Am I only listening to the 27th best song this year when I could be listening to a song from the top ten? What does that say about me as a consumer? Dispensing with a numbered list altogether is wise of Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua, who offers his collection of the year’s finest tunes as a podcast, free to all takers. Believe it or not, several of those songs have appeared in this very space. Another group eschewing a formal list structure comes to us from the Onion’s AV Club with their offering of celebrity guests’ favorite albums. I honestly can’t tell if David Cross is just screwing with us.

Another list to note is Idolator’s continuing 80 ‘08 (and Heartbreak), which catalogs the 88 things (80 wonderful, 8 tragic; their rules) that made a cultural impact this year, many of which are songs. Songs like Andrew W.K.’s “The McLaughlin Groove” or Parry Gripp’s “Hamster on a Piano”. Songs that, while dearly loved, I was perhaps too ashamed to write about here. Idolator also brings the indie cred with great songs by Jenny Lewis and the French Kicks (listen to “Abandon” here).

Also favoring the old school, numbered list thing is a countdown of this year’s 50 best over at Gorilla Vs. Bear. It is a respectable list despite the inclusion of the way-overhyped and marginally overmaligned Vivian Girls. Oh, those Vivian Girls. Toward the top of the list, at number seven, I was introduced to Grouper, the recording name of Portland’s Liz Harris. The song “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping” off this year’s Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill features dreamy, murky, saturated vocals and instrumentation reminiscent of Beach House and Mazzy Star in their swirls of sweet, somber noise. Another great find on this list is the number two spot given to Austin trio White Denim’s “Sitting.” It bounces along amiably with a refreshingly atavistic bent, but halfway through the song the tempo is halved and an extended garage rock experiment in stereo suddenly slips in, showing everyone who cares to listen what a simple arrangement can become in the hands of musicians willing to go that extra mile. What was cute became so much more.

Finally, while not so much a list as series of kickass posts, My Old Kentucky Blog has been running a Holiday Interview Series with notable persons, most of whom are musicians. (One exception would be the artist, writer, and now record label owner Stanley Donwood who has done all of Radiohead’s packaging artwork since 1994.) One of my favorite, newly discovered tracks from the year is featured in the interview with Alejandra Deheza of School of Seven Bells. The song, “Half Asleep,” apart from being beautiful in the dreamlike, saccharine sense advocated by Grouper, also adds layer upon layer of pop perfection and glitchy programming. It’s uplifting, complex, and you can dance to it. Happy holidays! —Erik Bryan, Dec. 17, 2008

» Listen to "Half Asleep" at My Old Kentucky Blog

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Listening • Re-Appropriating Appropriation

In the past week, two major music blogs (Stereogum and Gorilla vs. Bear) have featured Malawi’s Esau Mwamwaya along with leaked tracks from his highly anticipated debut release produced by Radioclit, the British DJ/production duo with a naughty name. Mwamwaya was also featured on the cover of Fader magazine’s Africa-centric issue earlier this year, and he is increasingly getting attention in the U.S. due to collaborations with such headline-grabbing indie acts as M.I.A., Santogold, Bonde do Rolê, and Vampire Weekend. Now, Vampire Weekend has been maligned in a lot of press over the past year due to their Paul Simon-ish appropriation of Afro-pop, Columbia University grads (read cynically: privileged white kids) that they are. But what does that really say about their music itself? And, furthermore, does it mean that white, Europe-descended performers are forever relegated to finding inspiration from Bach or John Philip Sousa? Does anyone begrudge the Beatles for their infatuation with African-American bluesmen like Bo Diddley? Did it not bring greater attention to those deservingly inspirational artists?

Rhetorical questions aside, what Esau Mwamwaya has done by sampling Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is the deliciously cannibalistic re-appropriation—or reclamation, even—of appropriation. The result, like M.I.A.’s more politically minded contributions, decentralizes Western influence as “normative” and shines the spotlight even more directly on global issues, specifically those relating to the rise of so-called “third-world” (an opprobrious misnomer if ever there was one) nations. Even if I don’t speak the language. —Erik Bryan, Sep. 9, 2008