Yes, Fuck Your Best Of 2005

After receiving dozens of faxes, telegrams, teletypes, and bricks through my window with messages tied to them about the best of 2005, despite the fact that I'd already acquiesced and agreed to provide a list, I feel compelled to explain why I will be compiling a list.

First, because my friend Earl Buck (not to be confused with the Nobel Prize winning author of The Swapping Neighbors) sent out an email to a handful of people he knew with his list, and I was interested to receive it, and had absolutely nothing to say in reply at first.

Second, because I need to do it anyway to convince a publication that I'm no yes-man and that I actually sort of pay attention to new releases.

I sort of see another side to the best-of list now: how else will you know that I'm cool? I'm not kidding - whatever coolness is, it kind of doesn't matter for the purposes of Fuck Your Jetta, as the real goal here is to be the best 3000 word a day music and bike blog in the known universe, and it already is. However, it's been pointed out to me that now that the readership has widened to the point that most of the readers actually need it to be proven to them that I'm the thoughtful and well-researched writer on the subject of pop music and bicycles that I am, since they have no idea who I am, nor could they care less.

Proven isn't the right word; since you don't know me, you need as much information about where I'm at to be able to affirm some kind of affinity within yourself with what is said here. Much as I hate to admit it, because I'm supposed to do this only for myself anyway, I like the idea of someone else reading what I write and it stirring something inside them. I don't know how many of you actually read to the bottom of my posts, but you have to have a reason to, even if you're really bored and at work at your crappy job. I kicked around most of the music writing sites at one time or another, and mostly found that that affinity wasn't there for me, with, say, Dusted. Too vague, too vacuous, too silly, too whatever, I mostly go back to Stylus because it's good and Pitchfork because they have five new reviews a day, plus lots of news bits that I'm now too lazy to find out by going to say www.mogwai.co.uk.

But I do that because I know where they're at - I've read enough of them to know what they like, don't like, what they do and don't do. One way that I find that out is by year end lists; both magazines do list-form write ups for year end, and Stylus has a top ten list of something or other every fifteen minutes it seems.

So here's where I was at in 2005, in no particular order:

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names - #3
Labrador


This band came to me from a year end list, believe it or not, under the heading "Best Band I've Never Heard But Whose Name Is Really Funny." I would like to think that I'm not the type that feels anything about a band because of their name, but I have to admit, even though it's the type of moniker that screams "our band isn't very good so we gave it a really memorable/long/silly name so that people would pay attention to us", I still checked them out because I lived with a guy named Joshua who was from Oshawa.

The bastard child of They Might Be Giants and The Fiery Furnaces, they slather confident and wordy lyrics all over goofy synthpop full of unabashedly synthetic strings, piano and horns, throwing in drum machines, sequencing, banjos and whatever else is laying around in the Midi directory. Like the pizzas on the menu with fifteen different toppings, lots of bands just throw a bunch of stuff together and it's all for effect, but these two guys from Sweeden (or is it Finland?) are smart nerds in the not cool TMBG way who really sound like they're doing it all in their bedrooms just for fun, but as if the future of the human race depended on it. They're not just making silly sounds, they're building pop songs from the ground up, Fisher Price style.

Buried Inside - Chronoclast
Relapse


At Christmas, I gave my brother about 8 cds full of metal mp3s, basically everything I'd bought or downloaded, but especially the records that fell into both columns. I was most interested in what he would say to this sprawling, gigantic and loud record, as it's excellent, and I was pretty sure that he would never listen to it unless I gave it to him to listen to. As kids, we swiped each others' records, and it's a sort of point of pride for me to put him on something, since he's the actual metalhead, listening pretty much only to metal.

"Fuckin' metalcore dude?" That's what he said.

It so isn't.

Yes, metalcore sucks, being a genre composed entirely of mosh parts (mostly that sound like Pantera, who good as they may be, just do not count as metal), ironic smirking, and vocal deliveries with the intensity of Minor Threat about being dumped at the mall. Yes, it's full of the staples of metalcore - melodic guitar, tempo changes, and screaming in pain vocals. Isis has way more in common with Ottawa's Buried Inside though - a thick, murky atmospheric blur with the impending doom of dark grey clouds rolling in on the horizon. Delivered as an album that's basically just one song, with recurring melodies throughout, and quiet and extremely simple slow parts at the beginning and end of each track bookending the cacophony of the spiraling drums, this is the kind of record that where a tune comes on your mp3 player on random, you switch off shuffle and listen through to the end. This is the true continuation of the first two Isis EPs. Plus, not many metal albums can have strings and not sound like some bullshit like Nightwish.

The Complete Motown Singles
Hip-O Select/Universal


I'm pretty sure that nobody knows this exits. The most important pop label in the history of pop music thus far, likely the one with the greatest number of songs that are memorable, excellent, accessible and totally fun - I'd like to think that Hotel California is still on the radio just because it got played in a lot of places where people drank a lot when they were picking up or getting divorced, but the fact that you've heard Cloud Nine by the Temptations or You Really Got A Hold On Me by The Miracles approximately a million times in the shower, in the car, in a movie, while you were walking through the grocery store or waiting in line at customs and you still love them is the greatest testament to the importance of The Sound Of Young America.

Even better, how about the a and b side to every Motown single released while they were still in Detroit? Mostly songs that you don't know, these early volumes show a Motown that's trying to find a way to sell records, grasping every trend and genre that was kicking at the time, moving toward building that Motown sound. It only barely starts emerging toward the end of the tenth disk at the end of 1962, and only a few certified hits under their belts, and until then, it's a roller coaster ride of everything that doesn't sound like the Supremes at all - the sleazy burlesque band swagger of The Swinging Tigers' Snake Walk (Parts 1 and 2), the desperate and resigned wail of Mable John's No Love ("I'd rather be hurt by love/than not be hurt at all"), the pleading croon of Marvin Gaye's cousin Bob Kayli's Tie Me Tight sounding impossibly sexy and sinister for 1962, the hysterical shriek of the non-hit for the Marvelettes' So Long Baby.

The pop music of the world was shaped by American pop, and Motown shaped American pop. Vital.

Super Madrigal Brothers - Baroque In Voltage
Fever Pitch


No matter how I describe this, you'll think I'm bullshitting you.

Without exaggeration, this is baroque-period-style classical music done exclusively with samples from Nintendo games.

And it's good.

I don't know how good it is if you didn't grow up playing Castlevainia and smashing your controller on the floor because despite having 63 men and 1,245,350 points, you just couldn't beat that boss. The scariest thing about growing up with video games is realizing in retrospect as an adult that the metaphor of NES and Atari games for the world - repetitive play with different but similar scenery, increasing difficulty with no change in dynamic, goals themselves being meaningless, but the work toward the goal gruelling and monotonous, if there is even a goal at all besides high scores - is all too chillingly similar to that of the adult world of work. Almost as bad as that is that those late night struggles to save the princess, and the soundtrack to them, has become so deeply embedded that you can have a limbic brain reaction to certain tones that made up the sonic backdrop to Super Mario 3.

But if you can imagine two adults taking seriously the idea of making music in the vein of Purcell with the bleeps and blips from Metroid, this is the real deal. It's also the only deal, as far as I know, but even just for the oddness factor, it's worth it. Oliver Cobol builds the baroque landscapes, and Fashion Flesh remixes each track Oliver creates. Not for everyone, but the problem with fucked up music is nobody makes it fucked up enough, and the Super Madrigal Brothers aren't fooling around. This is their second record - their first, Shakestation, is out of print enough that Oliver sent me a burned copy when I bought the new one.

Napalm Death - The Code Is Dead... Long Live The Code
Century Media


Yeah, Napalm Death invented grindcore. Yeah, they pretty much sucked after From Enslavement to Obliteration.

But they're back. They've been around so long that they're not only a band, but a concept about how to make extreme music. Extreme music is best left to kids, probably, those that haven't been tempered, conditioned and manipulated into thinking anything has to sound like anything else, and are young enough to just spaz out and keep doing it long enough for the twelve monkeys to at least get out a few partial sentences. In grind, even a couple of words are enough, with a two minute song being pretty long.

So when you take a band that has now been around in one in one incarnation or another for 20 years now, you can't expect them to be on the bleeding edge of what grind means today. Instead, the standard of heaviness has been bumped up enough that this record makes for a blueprint of what a real metal record should sound like today - the blistering speed of Nasum, the technical proficiency of Nile, and the almost classic rock structure of actual songs. Enough to make you forget that they sucked for more than ten years. Am I going to shell out to see them with Kreator at the Medley in February? You're goddam right I am.

Antony and the Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
Secretly Canadian


I hope that this band actually continues to have attention paid to them in the years to come, rather than simply being a spectacle related to the singer's personal life and the media frenzy after the controversy of them winning this year's Mercury Prize for best English album - where I'd seen them last February in a half filled room of 50 or so people, I couldn't get tickets for love or money to their fall show at the Cabaret La Tulipe, post-press-interest.

When I first heard them three years ago, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. There is simply nothing out there with fragile rapturous ache of these songs, the trembling despair and unrepentant fury of Antony's falsetto and the harmonies spun out of piano, voice and glass. Emotionally raw to the point of discomfort, at last winter's show, he hammered the keys wailing the refrain of Today I Am A Boy for a full minute, harder and harder, louder and louder to the point I really believed he was going to break down. And the power of a song that you can't relate to or understand personally to completely overwhelm you is a testament to the truth of Antony's ardor. I find it hard to believe that this record or their first self-titled record can find a wide audience because they're just too difficult, but that's exactly what makes this so important an album, and why everyone should hear it.

Konono Number One - Congotronics

Crammed Disc

You might have guessed that I'm not much of a "world" guy. A few years ago, you were a dork if you didn't mention Afrobeat or Fela Kuti, and I'm maybe the only person that will freely admit that I checked it out only because the Indie Rock Man was telling me that I had to get hip to it. At least the Man was right, because Fela was the most fucked up revoloutionary musical genius that I hardly listen to at all.

Take this as the heavy metal dancing Tom Waits version. There's none of the funk or jazz of Fela, but there's a nodding, trance-inducing clang boom steam to these seven songs that is hard to shake. The up-front and distorted immediacy of the thick and rich sound helps (apparently is was recorded all live, all outdoors with Konono's makeshift sound system and a laptop to record it) and the repetitive and recurring riffs sound like there was just some kind of party going on, and it happened to be recorded, unbeknownst to the band, who were just there to get down and have a blast. I can't even tell you what instruments are being played - it sounds like trash can lids and corrugated metal siding are being used as a drum kit, and for sure the singer is shouting through a megaphone.

What's a thumb piano? I don't even know what a thumb piano is, but it sounds good to me, and way more fucked up than just another Merzbow or Wolf Eyes records.

This I listen to.

The Fruit Bats - Spelled In Bones

Sub Pop

But I'm a popster at heart. They just don't make many good pop records these days is the trouble.

A few years ago, everyone was all up in arms about The Shins. I didn't get it, and I was kind of bummed, because the Shins were pretty fun, and I really wanted to.

I think the problem was that they just sounded too young and naive.

Eric Johnson sounds like he's in his thirties and wishes he was naive. That's a big difference. This is what The Shins were supposed to sound like.

I will also put forth that I basically only like love songs. While there is a playful and goofball summery sort of lackadaisicalness, the balancing undercurrent of trouble in love makes this a memorable pop record. Until now only Grandaddy could make keyboards sound funny, retro and still mournful and gloomy; throw in some picked acoustic guitar and reverby electric and you're wrapped up in a honeykissed bubblegum reverie with just the right proportion of despair that compels me to hit the rewind button on Born In The 70s and Canyon Girl.

Pelican - The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw
Hydrahead


I can see the same problem happening with Pelican as happened to Isis - you start a band going man, nobody does this thing, but somebody should. The pure idealism and enthuism with which you're showing off this thing - your baby - is all over your first couple of records.

Then after a few years of practicing and then touring and playing the same songs over and over, the same sound over and over, you start to get sick of it. You want to make something bigger, more expansive, maybe a (gasp) concept album. Then you make Panopticon and it totally sucks.

I prized the sloppiness on Pelican's untitled first ep more nearly than the instrumental heavyness - the speedy riff that starts Mammoth and drops to half steam sounded like an earthworm chopped in two, the two sides of rhythm section and guitars writhing not quite in tandem, but close enough that it doesn't quite fall apart.

That's all gone.

But you can still hear the heavy-footed plodding but optomistic riffing of the same band in the pretty and spacious songs that stretch out over the hour of this album. There's not many bands that make instrumental songs this lyric and narrative, let alone metal bands. This band is my new Godspeed!, making me believe, as I thought about Montreal's gloomy HOPEfuls that they're starry-eyed and playing their hearts out to just make something beautiful in a world gone bad.

Eluvium - Talk Amongst The Trees
Temporary Residence


Everyone has their womb music - that sound that makes you in your minds eye curl up in a ball and shrink into the safety and oblivion of the living sea, tethered to that which created you in a watery space where you don't need eyes, motor control, or have to make credit card payments for all the Campy Record you've been snapping up.

Sometimes it's just something familiar, sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's sad, and sometimes it actually sounds like the womb.

This is the latter.

I've got a whole genre that I'm building up for myself that I'm hoping to bust out into a full fledged phenomenon, that which takes the quiet, sad but winsome echo and throb of bands without beats like Polmo Polpo, Tim Hecker and now Eluvium.

When I saw this whippersnapper (I think he was all of 21 when he recorded this album) live, he made all of the songs on this album with a single guitar and a number of pedals. It's hard to believe that the expanse is just some strings and knobs, but the swell of the treated and layered guitar builds and falls in upon itself like the blur of the stars around your ship as you approach the speed of light while feeling like it's not moving at all.

So there you have it - you happy now?

In case you ain't heard any of the above, there's a best of 2005 mix below waiting for you.

Pelican - Red Ran Amber
Antony and the Johnsons - Hope There's Someone
Eluvium - New Animals From The Air
Konono Number One - Lufuala Ndonga
Fruit Bats - Born in the 70s
Napalm Death - Diplomatic Immunity
Super Madrigal Brothers - Ah! Belinda I Am Prest With Torment
Bob Kayli - Tie Me Tight
Buried Inside - Time As Ideology
Suburban Kids With Biblical Names - Parakit


Be sure to buy the good ones, unless you're a pirate.