Blogg → Monster 2009 Wrap-up PART TWO

Are you lost? How did you get here? What time is it? Did you read Part 1 of my Monster 2009 Year-end Wrapup? I think you should go here first, I really do.

2009: The Albums
I haven't finished writeups on all of these choices, but here they are:


Fever Ray: Fever Ray
Let's face it, this was never not going to be my number 1. The Knife is one of my favorite groups of the whole decade, and I'm mildly obsessed with Karin Dreijer, the Swedish mastermind of this Fever Ray solo project. Far from being more of the same chilly electro as her better-known duo, Fever Ray represents a progression of the sounds Karin has been exploring all along, and a more complicated emotional expression. The menace of Silent Shout has deepened into something more ambivalent, a kind of tired anxiety haunted by beauty. This is fitting, as most of the songs were composed while tending to her newborn daughter and struggling with lack of sleep and postpartum depression. Rather than playing it for pathos, this introspective album achieves an eerily gorgeous and oddly visual sonic landscape. The opening song If I Had a Heart hits you with this right away, with headachey synths sawing away behind a bleak and exhausted vocal from Karin. Other gentler tracks keep up this sense of 3am insomnia, from the dreamlike Triangle Walks to the worryingly peaceful Keep the Streets Empty for Me.

Electronic music does not tend to be personally revealing; The Knife has been no exception. So it's surprising how personal these songs seem to be, even as they keep at some remove from the real Karin through her trademarked vocal distortions. There's enough ambiguity to keep us guessing (when she sings "we were hungry before we were born", is she singing about her daughter? Or herself?) but it feels as though we're closer than ever before. It's a stunning achievement and my top album of 2009.


Florence and The Machine: Lungs

Another young female British power-singer, this time discovered singing in a club toilet. Not promising, is it? England has been cranking these faux-soul singers out lately, and it's mostly junk. Why does Florence make the grade? Vocally she's very good, but other singers are about on par, Amy Winehouse among them. I think, alone amongst this crop, Florence isn't straight-out imitating actual (black) soul singers but instead pretty much doing her own thing. She experiments with styles, and pens her own lyrics, without sweetening things up to make them more palatable. She doesn't really try to be a cool and calculated pop star - quite the opposite - and these aren't straight-to-radio manufactured pop tracks. Florence is interested in blazing her own trail. And she does want to bring the masses along.

One thing I'm struck by is how violent this album is, for a pop solo record. In the aggressive Girl With One Eye Florence mutilates a rival, (or is it a lover?) and still threatens to finish the job: "get your filthy fingers out of my pie.. I'll cut your little heart out, cause you made me cry." But in Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up), Florence is the prey, only dreaming of becoming a predator. ("I must become the lion-hearted girl / ready for a fight") The music behind this track is unaccountably lovely, only hinting at the inevitable bloodiness in store. Bombastic track The Dog Days Are Over has her running from an attacker, sounding strangely triumphant even as she reminds herself to "leave all your love and your longing behind / you can't carry it with you if you want to survive." Drumming Song has Florence throwing herself into the river to try to drown out the maddening noise in her head. "But as the water filled my mouth / it couldn't wash the echoes out". And of course, given all this, a relationship would be a cage fight, as in Kiss With a Fist, a straight-up rock track that pulls no punches. Given the disparate styles and musicians at work behind her one might think this wouldn't work as an album, but Florence keeps it together through sheer force of personality, which is the most impressive thing of all. It's an awfully promising debut. I'm certain we'll see a lot more of her, and soon.

(If you haven't seen it, check out this early video of Florence singing Girl With One Eye. It's just her and a dude with a guitar, and she sings the shit out of this song. They are not kidding when they called her album lungs. But the long sustained notes aren't what impress me, it's the fraught little details like on "it's not gonna hu-u-u-urt" that give me chills. Damn, girl.)




Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion

The thing about Animal Collective is, you have to learn how to listen to them. At first it was a little like hearing a foreign language that I know a few words of here and there. I would be looking for a way into the songs and not quite finding it. Really it was the Panda Bear album (that I love love love) that taught me to listen to AC's earlier albums like Strawberry Jam. It gave me the patience to really hear what AC was doing.

Merriweather Post Pavillion is an album that teaches you how to listen to it. It gives you a map right off the bat. For some longtime Animal Collective fans, this is a little redundant, because they're already in, they're with it, they know what to do. I think that's why it hasn't held up for some people, and why MPP is frequently damned with the "accessible" label (faint praise indeed). I can't really see that Animal Collective compromised their sound in any way to achieve this, and even people disappointed with the album don't deny that this is a great collection of songs. It works as a summary statement, and as a real album in the classic sense, one that actually demands listening to as a whole rather than broken up into iPod-friendly chunks. It may well be one of the last few examples of this kind of album we're going to see. For all those reasons it's been one of the albums I've enjoyed the most this year, and certainly the one I played all the way through the most.


The Antlers : Hospice


Soap & Skin : Lovetune for Vaccuum
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
That's what I think this album is exactly - putting away childish things. Soap&Skin calls the above to mind in the most straightforward song on the album, Spiracle, with its repeating phrase "when I was a child"; in this case those childish things appear to be unpleasant memories she can't seem to bury. On this track she sounds fragile and childlike ("please help me"), but when she says at the end of the song, "I *am* a child", I can't quite believe her. It's more like Lovetune for vaccum is conjuring up a notion only so it can relentlessly stamp it out.

Soap&Skin aka Anja Plaschg was born in 1990 (Does that make anyone else feel very awfully old?) She may be an indication of what the next generation's influences will be: Aphex Twin, Xiu Xiu, Black Dice and obviously Bjork. Granting that any foreign woman performing in English is going to be compared to Bjork, the two have similar approaches to electronic music. Their voices are central to the music and they can make their computer-generated instruments live and breathe in their songs. Soap&Skin however, dodges any hint of preciousness, and makes decidedly sinister and sometimes tormented music. Take standout track DDMMYYYY, where it sounds like an IBM is having a fullout panic attack, starting with that glitchy deep-breathing opening and culminating in unintelligible screaming. Even a gorgeous track like The Sun has a strange uneasiness lurking at its corners. Lovetune makes use of beautiful piano playing as a kind of anchor for the glitches and screeches going on around it, along with delicate touches from voice and computer. The best parts of this album are almost unspeakably beautiful, and incredibly promising for this artist's future.


Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Its Blitz

After the genuinely great Is Is EP it was only fair to expect more of the same. Usually an EP is a kind of smoke signal as to what the next album will bring. Instead, when the first single Zero hit, it was a sharp-edged whirligig of a dance track, laden with the synth sounds I was going on about in Part One of this journal. Now, I've always thought that what really made the YYYs as a band was Nick Zinner's guitar work, from the first time I saw them live before their first album had even come out. Karen O was the one in the spotlight, but the guitar was the bedrock for her antics. Putting out an 80's inspired synth-rock album was a genuinely risky move.

And I really think it paid off. Both Zero and Song-of-a-Thousand-Remixes Heads Will Roll really pulse with renewed energy reminiscent of the punky Fever To Tell. And just like the shimmering Maps once gave Karen O the confidence that, yes, wow, she could really sing, and without wrapping herself up in bandage dresses and whatnot, this current changeup in instrumentation really produced some confident, strong songwriting. Besides fan favorite track Hysteric, other quieter songs like the thrumming Runaway and wistful Little Shadow are real standouts in the YYYs catalogue. Its Blitz is the strongest longplayer from the YYYs so far back-to-front, and shows their ability to evolve over time, which gives me a lot of hope for their longevity as a band.


School of Seven Bells: Alpinisms


Grizzly Bear- Vecktamist


Au Revoir Simone : Still Night, Still Light

This is a little more unassuming, a little smaller than the other choices on this list, so much so that it may seem a bit out of place. It's true, I like my music BIG. But this lovely little album really won me over, and only gets more rewarding the more you listen to it. And of course, since it's straight-up synthpop it was inevitable that I would embrace it. The sweet chilliness of it combined with the cover illustration makes me think of being lost in the woods at night, hoping to find your way into a fairy tale. Even one with witches and wolves lurking. Just to find some enchantment. This music will get you there. (I especially like Knight Of Wands, All Or Nothing, and Shadows.


The xx - xx

Runnersup
Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
Passion Pit, Manners
The Field, Yesterday and Today
Bat for Lashes, Two Suns
The Phenomenal Handclap Band, The Phenomenal Handclap Band
Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light
Bibio, Ambivalence Avenue