Two Thousand Eight - 4. Islands - Arm's Way

Usually, even if I make an act like I don't understand why certain bands aren't huge and famous and popular - the Drones for instance, as Pitchfork noted in their review of Havilah last week, are one of those bands. But really, it ought to be pretty obvious why people wouldn't like them. They're just too bleak, and it's a very heartening fact, actually, that people at large would think that. Life would be significantly worse if everyone went around talking about war and death and being all, "maybe you should just die" all the time. Makes for great music, but not necessarily the type of thinking everyone should try to embrace.

But the quickness with which people lost interest in Islands is something of a surprise to me. The Unicorns' first record was justifiably received as a landmark of idiosyncratic turn of the millennium pop music, and like, girls liked it. Guys liked it. Square people and hipsters both liked it cause it was good pop music that was fun. Turns out, as the story goes, that the Unicorns were so idiosyncratic that they broke up before they could make another record. But when they reformed like Voltron into Islands and put out Return To the Sea, it was well received. I recall people saying things like, "I really like that Islands record".

So why then, did nobody give a shit when Arm's Way came out last summer? I'll admit that when songs get longer and less linear I tend to get skeptical, but it's not like most of the songs on Return to the Sea were straightforward pop songs. There's no "Rough Gem", yeah, so my best guess is that the indie rock listening public saw this record as an example of a band abandoning their true identity in the name of artistic progression.

C'mon though, I mean, and really. Besides certain lyrical themes (death, fear, illness) and odd pop culture references ("Ready to Die", "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby"), there's nothing that really ties Unicorns/Islands together as a style, beyond the mercurial personalities of their members. Whimsy, you could call it, within certain bounds. The real problem, then, is that it's not a complete departure from RttS. It's the continuation of the band's interests away from traditional pop song structures towards something more baroque and composed. The reaction to the record then, can't be a, "wow these guys do something crazy and original every time the come out", which was the mindset up iuntil this record, but that now needs to be modified in the direction of, "ok, here's a band finding their voice". Whims are becoming more explicable, messages are becoming more focused.

This record was not received especially well, I think, because it's a solid record, rather than a revelatory one. Every song on here is very good, but no songs on here are as great as "Rough Gem", "Les Os", etc. That said, Arm has moments of brilliance that equal or exceed any heights Islands/Unicorns have previously reached.

Examples:

The middle/end of "Abonimable Snow" is right up there with the Hair's "ghost" series in terms of expressing an endearingly naive, weirdly displaced, but very real fear of the supernatural.

"I Feel Evil Creeping In" hints more definitively than any previous Islands/Unicorns song at what, I think, anyone who listened closely enough to their first two records ought to realize: these guys are kind of bad news. They may be scared and their confused, but they've got a real mean streak in them. If you've ever seen an interview with Nick Thorburn, it's pretty clear that the guy is thorny in a way that's certainly different than the way, say, Lou Reed is thorny, or "rock stars" are thorny. You get the sense he's always had this charmingly innate distaste for things that could erupt at any moment.

The last two minutes of "In the Rushes". The main part of the song is sort of plodding and vague. Nothing anyone would be expected to remember or about which a letter would be written or a blog post written. But then - and when I first heard this song at a show in Montreal during February last year I broke into one of those laugh and smile fits that always strikes me when something totally wonderful and unexpected occurs during a show, usually regarding a new song or a song I've never heard before performed by a band for whom I hold a great deal of affection, once they got to this section - they break into an homage to/reimagining of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" that contrasts with the rest of the song in such a way that you kind of leave your brain for a hot minute. One of the best moments of pop music in 2008.

Two Thousand Eight - 5. The Killers - Day and Age

I love the Killers pretty much as much as any band that exists these days. Yep. Right up there with Future of the Left, the Drones, Max Tundra. And, as you might expect, I pretty vehemently resent the idea that there's no reason to put them in this kind of company. I don't think there's anyway around admitting that the Killers, unfortunately, have the market cornered on melodic pop rock music right now. Just because everyone else in their bracket (with the exception of everyone who unequivocally sucks) is way way past their prime - U2, Green Day, Fall Out Boy - doesn't mean they're irrelevant.

Of course, relevance has nothing to do with it, really. A good pop rock album out to be a good pop rock album and, in fact, is. Day and Age is a great album, as long as you consider albums full of great songs that have nothing to do with each other besides greatness to be great albums.

Something in the appeal that Day and Age and Sam's Town hold almost certainly has something to do with the fact that be very best music in 2008 was not made by musicians with thousands (? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? how much money does it take to make a polished studio record for a major lable if you're not Axl Rose?) of dollars to spend in the creation of a pop album. There is something to be said for professional, high tech, clean sound, and not just in hip hop or "pop" pop music, by which I guess I mean Kelly Clarkson. Would these songs sound ok if they had used No Age's studio setup to record them? Maybe, but more likely they would sound flat and boring.

Brandon Flowers as a starving indie rock singer is commonplace: a dude with an average but impassioned singing voice and a stupid and flashy sense of style. If I passed the dude on Bedford Ave on a Friday night I'd wish to stomp his face. But context changes everything about the Killers. What would be annoying becomes charming, what's boring becomes exceptional. What would it sound like if you took the boring pop rock music and dumb, disconnected, naively nostalgic stylistic obsessions of the last decade together and threw a bunch of money into trying to turn them into something cohesive? It would sound a lot like Day and Age.

In that last paragraph I used the word stupid and the word dumb. The Killers are both and I love them for it. They have never recorded a stupider song than "Joyride", or a "better" song than "Goodnight, Travel Well", or a more a confused rambling Steinmanesque concoction than "A Dustland Fairytale". So, it's a broad album, yes, but I don't mean to give the impression that this album is good only because of its breadth, because, while depth is certainly not their forte, the Killers get deeper on "Losing Touch" and "Goodnight" than they have on any previous songs.

But a broad album is what this is, primarily. Broad in its appeal as pop music is meant to be, even if it goes largely unrecognized on the charts or the radio. I'm really looking forward to blasting "Spaceman" out the window of my apartment this spring and shouting "Losing Touch" out of a moving car when it gets warm enough to roll down the windows.

Two Thousand Eight - 6. The Drones - Havilah

I probably listened to the Drones more than any other band in 2008. This worked out pretty well, as I've gone through some obsessive periods over bands during some pretty awkward times in their existences, and that doesn't work especially well. The most intense period of my Radiohead admiration took place between about 6 months to a year after OK Computer came out and the the release of Amnesiac. Roughly a 3 year span, I think, during which time they released an EP, which is still probably one of my favorite records of all time, in any case, and an LP, which definitely is, and did not tour at all. I could just as easily have listened to nothing but Thin Lizzy last year and been left with nothing to show for it but some perpetual blue balls.

So it was nice that the Drones not only released Havilah this fall and toured in such a way that I was able to see them blow about 20 people's minds in a very small basement room, but also that they're definitely still at the peak of their game.

You can see what I wrote about "The Minotaur" for Tiny Mix Tapes. I won't bother saying anything much more about that. It's an amazing track and represents exactly what this band is capable of when they set their sights on boiling the blood.

But the Drones seem to be dead set on being the exact opposite of their name, and that means that they can't just be trying to rock out on every track. For me this is more often frustrating than anything else. Why does Kanye have to sing? Why do the Drones have to follow "The Minotaur" with "The Drifting Housewife"?

Please do not get me wrong. Sequencing is not The Drones' strong suit, but I think "The Drifting Housewife" is easily better than 80% of the music I heard last year. And since it's by far the least good song in the record, that puts the rest of the songs a pretty decent percentile. "Nail It Down" isn't as exceptional as "Jezebel" or "Shark Fin Blues" when it comes to Drones leadoff tracks, but it's still freaking great. "I Am the Supercargo" is a slow burn for the ages and I'm still fucking trying to figure out what exactly it's about. If you know, please tell me.

Unlike, say Thom Yorke's lyrics, or which are impressionistic in the "I'm just trying to get a vibe going" kind of way, this shit is impressionistic in a way that is actually trying to get something across. You know that "Supercargo" is trying to tackle topics, and you get the sense that it's doing a pretty good job of tackling, even if it seems like it's going in eighteen directions at once. Gareth Liddiard's brain is running from colonialism, some sort of narrative about a marriage, to straight up post modern dissatisfaction, and he's doing what he can to make it make sense, but it's more about just getting things out and that's more than enough. When it's focused, as on "Oh My" and "The Minotaur" the vitriol is fucking blinding, and when it's mixed in with more complicated shit it just takes a little more work to get the marrow out of it.

And lest you think I'm down on the ballads, "Cold and Sober" is the heartbreakingest song the Drones have ever committed to an MP3. Rare is the band that can kill you with violence and silence on the same record. Why are these people not bigger than Jesus?

Two Thousand Eight - 9. Chromeo - Fancy Footwork

Do some people obviously and for some reason sort of wish it was still the 80’s? Obviously that’s a yes. Are some people musicians? Uh huh. Lots of records come out out of this demographic intersection, but Fancy Footwork takes an interesting approach to making it sound like the era of Members Only jackets.

Most bands with an 80s fetish are content to retread hyper trendy ground by packaging dated arrangements in more modern compression envelopes EQed in more bands than Duran Duran could have ever hoped to see in their lifetimes. The resulting listening experience from this sort of approach, a band in 2008 trying to sound like the 80s, isn't the same thing as actually listening to music from the 80s. Talk ‘til you’re blue in the face about how much Cut Copy sounds like New Order or how much the Presets sound like Depeche Mode, you can’t get around the fact that, despite obvious similarities, the records these bands put out this year sound very of their time. Whatever the 80s means in terms of a sound, it comes from a precise meeting of mixing boards, early digital technology, reverb/gate matchups, and other things that are far too specific and far too boring for most bands to care about them.

But Chromeo sidesteps that concern. Forget about the video homage to “Money For Nothing”, Chromeo is on something else even if they don’t know it. Call it reverse engineering. Chromeo seems to start with the feeling you get from a the 80s pop canon recording, or the particular euphoria of geeking out to a blaring freestyle jam, then they somehow remove the essence of the experience from immediate context of production or musical style. Of course, they usually add a lot of that style back, but the point is that they reconstruct the 80s sound largely out of non-musical or non-technological parts. The aim is a faithful recreation of what it feels like to hear 80s music, without actually hearing 80s music being a requirement.

So, you hear vocoders, which ought to trigger some sort of 80s synapse, but if you look a little closer, they use vocoders way more than anyone short of Afrika Bambaataa. It’s awesome because, beyond the fact that it’s goofy, it also makes you think you’re hearing an accurate approximation of what 80s music was like, while it’s actually something totally weird.

Chromeo did this on their first record, too, but to a much more limited degree, and not as skillfully. “Momma’s Boy” is the easiest thing to point to as the turning point. While they were always good at making you dance like you were hearing “Lucky Star” for the first time, Chromeo has also now somehow learned how to do Hall and Oates too! What the hell? And “Bonafide Lovin”? That “oh-uh-oh” bit on the chorus is straight I’m not even sure. It feels like it could be New Edition, but I wouldn’t even compare the two.

Basically, this is a great pop record. The lyrics (I fucking love “what you need is an older guy/With a little bit of life experience/The right clothes and the right appearance”. That’s timeless songcraft in action.) match the music, which matches a certain skin deep, yet very positive and universally applicable emotion. I tend to think 2008 was pretty terrible for pop music, but then I play this record and I’m all: “what am I so worried about?”

Two Thousand Eight - 10. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna

God's Money was a good record, which I liked, and, unfortunately, never really internalized. It's something of an experimental record, whatever that means: in this case it means that the songs are indistinct - the sense that they serve to create an album, more than they seek to be songs in and of themselves. It is a music album, not a group of songs, and needs to be appreciated in 40 minute bursts. Serious listeners have a chance at really getting this record, and everyone else maybe only catches glimpses of what it's about. I pretty much never listened to it seriously enough, but I could tell that there was some subtle stuff waiting in there for me when I had time for it.

Well, three years later, I still never made time and Gang Gang Dance came out with the perfect follow up record. This one has all the great stuff that made God's Money great and other stuff that makes Saint Dymphna even better. The main thing, though, is that this time around the band manages to create memorable songs within the context of a cohesive album. The off kilter loops, Brooklyn via Africa percussion (not the other way around), and magically not cliched atmospherics from the last album are still there but now there are hooks too.

If I ever pretend that I like listening to experimental music that doesn't have any hooks outside of a live context, you have the right to tell me I'm full of shit. Let's be honest - God's Money didn't have hooks enough to bring me back to it, even though I enjoyed it and knew it was a great record. I couldn't be more thankful that Gang Gang Dance wrote "House Jam" and "First Communion" because now I can like them unreservedly. They're now a band I can enjoy concretely, not in some assumed world of musical validity populated by vision without intent, innovation without soul. I guess this is how some people felt when Animal Collective released Sung Tongs. A band that showed perhaps an excess of enthusiasm and too little conception of their own strengths on their first record, made the sort of record they were meant to make on the second try.

Hooray!