the blunt pain of pseudo redemption! (2013)

Less about just strictly the bummed out/predetermined/fixed match held between love and our era of ephemerality(movement but constant loss)/superficial connections(post...)/information than it is an observation of the former under the latter's conditions- the picture is just how we're doomed to hurt, how we've always been doomed to hurt, and what that means now, experientially. Less insights like "Thank god for mum and dad for sticking through together 'cause we don't know how," (from the undisputed masterpiece of modern-romance-is-a-joke pop concept albums), and more specific thoughts and phrases, repeated in places where they can take on new meanings- something someone said to our narrator burns itself into his head and haunts him, or when he says it it's a memory and when she says it it's a cry for help. It works because the specificity of its scope actually makes for a generalized or universalized vision of hurt, not a thesis. In fact, the state of not knowing rather than saying anything real clear is recurrent and assists in its affective impact. Last year's 'scariest of the album of the year' was the initial hurt, its rage exaggerated, its structure broken and tangential. This one's the nausea- the pain subsides and is replaced by a confusion and longing, the danger of hope, improvement, and redemption. Its joys, epiphanies, and sadnesses are not lost (in a 'surprisingly musical' blur), but undercut by this confusion- we're never fully sold on any of it because we're constantly distracted. That one's the breakup, this one's the (never really) getting over it.

A-

alt / (:)/:0) / make it real

∞ dolphins! (2011)

to say they were better than radiohead when i saw them would be weird and untrue, but i would happily hear 'forever dolphin love' jammed out for ~90 minutes by these guys rather than see the main act come up with their screens and pedals and laptops and serious faces whining because i paid my hundred(s) of dollars to hear them whine and i'll be damned if they don't whine for like three hours for all the shit i went through to pull extra hours to save those hundred(s) and then sit politely to let the whining commence and let my back go cold and shivery when they touch on something personal which may or may not resonate well beyond their politics and conceptual nihilism.

there's something creepy and icy about this, but it's also affectionate like being in love. i didn't realize it at the time, but it was easily one of the year's better albums when it was released. not that this little rating means anything to anyone, but check this out:

A

1 / 2 / buy

Anxiety (2013)

1. Did gloomy hipsters ruin R&B in 2012? (the guardian, 29 December 2012)
2. Nah (everyone)
3. Will gloomy hipsters ruin R&B in 2013? (someone, 5 March 2013)
4. Nah (most people)
5. Anxiety's all about disconnection and Ashin already told you that before you heard it
6. I guess the inclusion of Munch's The Scream on the cover would've been too obvious, though obviousness isn't something Anxiety avoids, ever
7. The art of disconnection- anxiety as the byproduct of desire and lack, of not having and wanting, or of having and not wanting, behold the nature of desire and the inevitability of anxiety
8. Behold the opening and closing tracks
9. Peter Gabriel
10. Post-internet
11. Grimes
12. Turgid solipsism or a treatise on the self (universal) and r&b in general (pretentious, unnecessary)
13. Seriously though
14. He'll probably fess up and say that's the point, man
15. And I'll be like yeah I know, man
16. And he'll be like did you hear where it's all poppy and there's a buzzsaw
17. And I'll be like yeah that was a cool song, man, is it about your anxiety, my anxiety, their anxiety, or every r&b song ever
18. And he'll be like it's all the same, man
19. Anxiety in the age of superficial knowledge+connections+identities
20. A scream through the vaporwaves
21. Climbing Up the Walls for gloomy 21st century hipsters
22. Does its status as a socio-technolo-musico-psychological dissertation add to or lessen its value?
23. Well, when it gets me by the balls...
24. And then when it doesn't...
25. Love it when it screams to me and gets all in my head and like makes me feel sick
26. Because at those points it's beyond the self-awareness, irony, and intertextuality supposedly defining it- it's startling, and human- a sort of cure for the conditions of its (his, and our) anxiety
27. And when it fails to transcend...
28. A failure. Don't let anyone tell you that its failures enhance its message (Lacanian self-analysis)
29. Because they will, and it matters more than that- Anxiety occasionally transcends both the problems it deals with and its ideological arsenal- an emotional mess that utilizes the 21st century existential crisis for moments both reassuring and genuine (if absurd) 
30. It's about moments, I'm sure, and it has them, sure, and to have highs you need lows, and if it was all desire achieved without the subsequent lack then it would be to avoid the condition of having and not wanting, meaning no anxiety, meaning no Anxiety, and so he sticks to his conceptual guns, so it's more truthful, fine, but man, this makes me lame, or whatever, but on a third of these tracks we get something transformative, something curative rather than reflective, evidence of the power of art, and emotion, whether it lifts or crushes, it breaks us out of our heads rather than telling us what's in there and why we're in there, occasionally it's a work of art beyond the one that people are saying it is, and how am I in the minority not being frustrated by this

B-

try/buy/spotify

Matt Johnson - Burning Blue Soul (1981)

Johnson's gift was making art and torment and inaccessibility accessible with The The. Before that gift was properly realized, however, he produced Burning Blue Soul in which nervous self-awareness, disorienting loops, and arty percussion were met with a punkish disregard for pop structures, and a half-assed psychedelic haze tied together disparate ideas and genres. It's a paranoid mess which for all its eccentricities manages to feel monochromatic, it's expressionistic but too planned and analytic to convey anything other than said self-awareness and paranoia, and it somehow manages to turn experimentation into tedium. Maybe if I hadn't started my day with twee pop I'd be more appreciative of his gloomy post-punk defiance, but I think it all just works better restricted to a pop framework- he writes a killer song when he wants to, and his pains and frustrations are more potent when they border on catchy

C-

stream / -

Lucio Battisti - Anima latina (1974)

Anima latina focusses on a return to basics simplicity in its experimentation, and a drifting liteness in its life-affirming grandiosity. It's so incredibly beautiful and simple that the listener often cuts it up into pieces and complicates it with presumed influences (Talk Talk, AnCo, The Flaming Lips) and dumbass categories (art pop, progressive pop, psych pop, and so on), maybe struggling to enjoy it in all of its self-contained joy and weightlessness. But that's what it wants to be, and that's all it is as well: simple self-contained joy and weightlessness

A

256

Avalon (1982)

I briefly thought about growing up and then I decided against it but my love for cornball sophistipop remained. I actually think it's easier to enjoy records like Avalon when you can't/don't want to relate to its make-out yuppie demographic. There's an unusual atmosphere hanging over Avalon and that's probably thanks to the cover- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for white-collar Romantics divided in regard to what the mythical Avalon means to their white-collar Romantic contemporaries: the end of the colonial dream and the beginning of world music, the return of the colonial dream, or an allusion to Ferry's bedroom out of the spotlight. The best song's the opener which is even more obvious than the title track- Ferry throws every archetypal Romantic image he can at you BUT OH WAIT it's all in past-tense, and allegedly that's all there is- the beauty of times gone by. Pessimistic end-of-an-era vibes, optimistic end-of-an-era messages, or Ferry getting horny and reading 19th Century poetry? I can't tell, and that doesn't really bother me. His croons are some of the best in cornball sophistipop, his moods are darkly seductive (no homo), and the synths which permeate every sound are at the point of atmospheric which occurs just before tacky. Actually my favourite Roxy Music album

A

check

The Divine Comedy - Fin de siècle (1998)

Suitably end of the century concerns and music styles delivered with Neil Hannon's celebrated lyricism blending fin de siècle irony, social criticism, emotional alienation, into something serious and yet self-effacing because anything too serious would cheapen it: "she's not like the others/with their papers and their headphones on/she reads novels by French authors with loose morals." No doubt a minor triumph, problem is I can't get into the way it sounds.

A for effort, C for me going straight back to the effortless A Short Album About Love

here

John Cale - Paris 1919 (1973)

Has more in common (atmosphere-wise) with folk than art or pop or the avant-garde or noise: more Something Else by The Kinks than anything else, which was also strangely folkish in its non-folkishness. It's the timelessness and pastoral-ness, I think. It might be a failure on Cale's part that his concept goes unnoticed even when the listener reads wartime atmospherics and then listens but still thinks of the record as a great companion-piece to The Kinks' masterpiece, or that for all his focus on literature it's only Thomas' childhood romanticism and Lear's nonsense which manage to stick, thus pushing his album way the fuck away from war or anything even remotely sinister... Too enigmatic for its own good, or too good for its own pretension? Sorry Mr Cale but your vibes are just too good

A+

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Yeezy re-upholstered my pussy

Putting this up here for the third (fourth?) time- pop event and crazy good record. By the former I mean I saw praise for this everywhere and was glad to be part of that positivity before cynics and elitists reacted to the famous 10.0 months later. By the latter, I remember bumping the shitty clean leak every day until my cd arrived in the mail- coming with more ugly pictures and accompanying video taking on Black Swan's obnoxious, nihilistic cultural vacuum, and, no shit, beating it

One of those conscious rappers happy to accept he's not an abstract observer transcending the state of things and thus describing them, but rather a product (in the beginning) and an active agent (since ages ago) in said context- intelligent enough to realize that the personal can become political when such a realization is made repeatedly clear, and so 30 something black male going introspective is an intensely emotional/personal and by extension satirical/political work, by now commonly known to be his overblown masterpiece. The lyrics, the sound, the turns, all serve to capture the love hangover: the memories, the damage it does to the ego, the lust, the highs, the lows. A very big, sad, ambitious pop record.

A+

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The Blue Nile - Hats (1989)

1. Over the Hillside 5:05

2. The Downtown Lights 6:29

3. Let's Go Out Tonight 5:16

4. Headlights on the Parade 6:16

5. From a Late Night Train 4:01

6. Seven A.M. 5:09

7. Saturday Night 6:27

Back when I first heard this album I called it self-indulgent white collar dinner party sophisti-pop but I never would've done that if I'd heard Hats first- a record which is almost as indulgent but is also actual sophisti-pop from the actual yuppie era (exciting!)

It has its critics- although more wintry, it doesn't sound too different to music by guys like Don Henley or Sting (or as some really critical people might argue, Kenny G), and in fact because of that wintriness, is all the more horrifyingly decadent, Hats appealing to the melancholic white collar professional believing that his or her own pessimism and feelings of alienation due to privilege (oh the burden!) are profound, true, and complex- and if only the world understood. On top of that, there's the fact that the alien, melancholy landscapes on Hats are almost entirely produced electronically- so cue Aphex Twin and Brian Eno comparisons

Such criticism aside, Hats is a beautiful album! It might detail the triumph of emotion over technology in its aesthetic- dark human emotion rendered electronically (Kanye)- but then we're back to how freakishly decadent such an album is! I don't give a shit about that (it actually puts me off) or the (accurate) Henley comparisons, but there's something special about Hats and it's not that it speaks to my profoundly pessimistic disposition (I'm taking the piss), insight the human condition (again), or uniquely tragic past (dad showered me in money, not love)

Holy shit I can't help but make fun of it... I give up

But I'll give it a

B

so you know that I love it deep down and you might too

For fans of Kenny G, Sting, Don Henley, Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Bon Iver, Talk Talk, and King Crimson's Matte Kudasai

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David Bowie - Hunky Dory (1971)

'Cause why not. Bowie's best and one of the best albums ever. From chambery art pop with surrealist lyrics to punk rock with occult lyrics to Bowie's creepy masterpiece below

Whether it's insanely lyrical or just nonsensical, the inspiration for each bit of nonsense has lyrical and/or conceptual origins/intentions and so works on whatever level you want it to

A+

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Bn Ivr (2011)

"He's a fucking genius. I'd never seen nor heard of him in my life, and I looked up, and I was in a fucking 5-by-5 room with a white guy, smoking weed . . . and his voice is like something I've never heard, and he's using words that are far from common. Within 20 minutes, I realized why Kanye had him there."
-Rick Ross

I thought there was no way I'd ever like this album. To those not sold on it, this description will probably only worsen its case, but I admire the shit out of it because it blends some of the most self-indulgent indie music I've ever heard with white collar dinner party sophisto-pop, and in the end manages to sound really good


In retrospect I see that it is one of last year's best albums

B

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