Other Favourite Albums From 2009, pt 2.
And some more albums that grabbed me in 2009:
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Music fans who subscribe to progressive ideas within music - including most professional reviewers, I suspect - want their favourite artists to innovate, to not rest on their laurels but to respond to a new time, new fashions, with new sounds. At the same time, I suspect most of us want the band to stay the same, too, to keep the essence of what we liked about them. Some musicians have such a distinctive essence that they can play lots of different kinds of music and flourish, without losing too many fans. Radiohead, for example, are still obviously Radiohead whether you’re listening to Pablo Honey and Kid A - there’s a sensibility they apply to both Pixies-y stuff and Aphex Twin-y stuff, something to do with Thom Yorke’s voice, the kinds of melodies and chord progressions they use.
Embryonic, on the other hand, almost (though not entirely) sounds like the work of another band to the one called the Flaming Lips, the one that made Yoshimi or The Soft Bulletin. Coyne’s falsetto isn’t much in evidence, and the blissed out Alice-In-Sciencey-Wonderland LSD trip thing is totally gone. But, though I liked the old Lips, I like the new one too, just as much, for completely different reasons. It becomes clearer in a way, that where much of their earlier music was an escape into surreal fantasy, a lot of Embryonic is more like an attempt to see the world as it is - it’s an ugly, distorted, out-of-kilter, menacing album because that’s how the Flaming Lips see the world. This is explicit on “Evil” and “If”, but much of the rest of the album also wrestles with our ability to cause each other suffering.
Perhaps because of this attempting to see the world as it is today, Embryonic has unusually contemporary influences for a band that’s been around for over two decades now - “Convinced Of The Hex” sounds a little like the weirder side of Spoon, “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” sounds a bit like the weirder, more recent My Morning Jacket, “Aquarius Sabotage” and “Your Bats” could well be Black Moth Super Rainbow, “I Can Be A Frog” isn’t a million miles away from Devendra Banhart, etc.
Embryonic is also an overly long album with songs that come to blend into each other towards the end, and which could have done with a little more editing. And it was a hard album to listen to in full because of how overdriven and compressed the mastering is; I rarely care about all that Mastering Wars stuff, but Embryonic really gets a bit much. But even if it’s overly long and overly compressed, it still sounds like an important album, it still feels like it sums up 2009 in some vital way.
Downloads and streams: mp3s of “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” (via Fluxblog) and “Watching The Planets” (via StG’s best of 2009 list at #28); very NSFW video for “Watching The Planets” and more SFW video for “I Could Be A Frog”; live footage of “Convinced Of The Hex”, “Silver Trembling Hands”, “Watching The Planets” (on KEXP), and “I Could Be A Frog” (on KEXP); song by song commentary by Wayne Coyne.
Philadelphia Grand Jury - Hope Is For Hopers
In contrast to The Flaming Lips, Philadelphia Grand Jury aren’t wrestling with the problem of suffering in the world - Hope Is For Hopers is just fun party-minded indie rock. Uncomplicated but hook-ridden pop songs, a fun live show, and not taking themselves too seriously. It reminds me a bit of a more garage-rocky (1990s Australian band who sat halfway between Weezer and Pavement) Custard. What could possibly go wrong?
Philadelphia Grand Jury are the first of the bands that I sort of consider my peers to have gained some sort of prominence in Australian music; they seem very much JJJ-sponsored right now. Philly Jays main man Berkfinger played drums in a band called the Crustaceans, that was on the same record label as my girlfriend’s old band. One gig, he filled in on drums in her old band. I remember being at her old apartment and maybe listening to an early demo of “Going To The Casino (Tomorrow Night)”. Berkfinger, last year, also recorded an album for a band I play in (Tom Stone and the Soldiers Of Fortune) as part of his day job as a engineer at a Sydney studio. So perhaps there’s a little bit of hometown pride in my liking this so much.
But it also feels like the music that my peers should naturally make. It sounds like music made by people who were listening to alternative radio stations like Triple J or 4ZZZ or 3RRR in the mid-to-late 1990s, when bands like You Am I, Custard, and Regurgitator were as popular as some of the biggest overseas bands. But also, made by people, who kept up with music, who, you know, know not to try to sound like Pearl Jam. It’ll probably end up being quite influential.
There’s a very Australian self-depreciatory streak running through the songs, too; when Berkfinger sings “What could possibly go wrong?” about going to the casino, it’s obvious that he knows what could go wrong, that he’s taking the piss out of the gambler’s optimism. The title of “Foot In My Mouth” is self-explanatory. The chorus of “The New Neil Young” speaks volumes: “these are such ordinary times/ we lead such ordinary lives.” Onyas, Philly Jays.
Downloads/streams: Mp3s for “The Good News” and “Going To The Casino” (via JJJ Unearthed); official videos for “Going To The Casino” and “The Good News”; live footage of “I Don’t Want To Party (Party)”.
Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
It’ll be a rare top albums of 2009 list that completely ignores Veckatimest. The emphasis on the critical acclaim seems to be on its intricate, sophisticated, detailed sound, its downtempo chamber pop and whatever. And it’s slow and full of Jeff Buckleyish falsetto male vocals. And having a mass of vocal harmonies, as always, suggests that effort went into the recording (though, let’s face it - a hell of a lot of effort went into every recording on this list). And there are a mass of harmonies that help this record to stand alone. But the thing that makes it work is that it’s fun. It’s playful.
The most obvious indication of this playfulness is the alternative version of “While You Wait For The Others” with vocals by Michael McDonald you can download from iTunes like I did. This is Michael McDonald of “What A Fool Believes” fame, whose most recent releases include Motown covers albums, covers of “Hallelujah” and a Christmas album. He’s probably got a show in Vegas. We’re talking the smoothest of smooth yacht rock vocals, and we’re talking this smoothness being sung over Grizzly Bear’s nervy, uncertain (but quite sophisticated and intricate) indie pop. It’s incongruous and kind of bizarre, what with the “hurrrr” in McDonald’s blue eyed soul vocal style.
Yacht rock, after all, is sophisticated, intricate music that prizes technical proficiency; it’s not a million miles away from Grizzly Bear. The main difference, when it gets down to it, is that Grizzly Bear are being fawned over, whereas Michael McDonald is largely seen as an irrelevant joke. And Grizzly Bear know this, and they know how ridiculous it all is, and they are happy to play with the minds of their listeners. I just hope that, when Ed Droste eventually gets reduced to Neptunes covers and Christmas albums, that there is some young band willing to let him in on the new cool thing.
Downloads/streams: Mp3 for “Cheerleader”; September 2009 podcast from NPR World Cafe of acoustic session/interview (mp3); official videos for “Two Weeks”, “Ready, Able”, and “While You Wait For The Others”; Live on Letterman doing “Ready, Able” and “Two Weeks”; Live on KCRW doing “While You Wait For The Others”; band website album page, with (truncated) streams of each song, lyrics, etc.
