...I present you with numbers 25 through 21 of the best albums of 2010! Exciting!!
25. Motion City Soundtrack - My Dinosaur Life
Early in the year, Motion City Soundtrack released their fourth studio album, My Dinosaur Life, an absurdly catchy collection of upbeat pop-punk tunes with a snarky (if somewhat geeky) sense of humor that should cement them as the latter-day wearers of the crown discarded by blink-182 (their reunion notwithstanding. they haven't made any new songs yet, and until I hear the new album my comment stands. Besides, Angels and Airwaves? Seriously?).
Lyrically, the album covers a lot of ground while mostly remaining all about girls (not that there's anything wrong with that). A relationship gone awry is compared to the destruction of Krypton ("Her Words Destroyed My Planet"), a b-horror movie of the sort certain of my friends enjoy ("Pulp Fiction"), and refers elsewhere to Ocarina of Time ("@!#?@!") and Busta Rhymes ("Stand Too Close," a song which, if it weren't catchy enough, features handclaps!), and rambles about his neuroses ("Hysteria"), and all the while, the band pumps out shining, driving punk that would make +44 jealous (Yeah. I went there).
24. Murder by Death - Good Morning, Magpie
Murder by Death's fifth album is a picture of a band embracing the Americana sound that was always hiding behind the corner, both lyrically and sonically. Bourbon and whiskey flow all over the album (As seen in the first two tracks, "Kentucky Bourbon," a charming little drinking song, and "As Long as There Is Whiskey In the World"), there's a whistling solo in "You Don't Miss Twice (When You're Shaving With a Knife)," which happens to be my second favorite title parenthetical of the year, and old fashioned bluegrass stomp on "Yes." If I were giving it an award (other than place #24, a tremendous award in and of itself), I would give it the "Album Most Like Something Mark Twain Would Have Listened To, Had There Been Electric Guitars And Such" award. What Beirut is French bordellos circa 1900, MbD is to Missouri circa 1870.
23. Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea
Brian Eno returns this year with another collection of ambient music tracks. While not the "inventor" of ambient music, Eno is certainly the reason anyone knows what it is and so this album is an interesting look at what the innovator has been creating of late. Sadly, nothing in this collection measures quite up to the... well, "intense" is certainly the wrong word, but close enough, the intensity, the impact if you will, of his earlier work (particularly Music for Airports), the pieces are well-crafted and interesting, and rewarding to repeat listens.
22. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky
Perhaps the doomiest album on the list this year (there's a reason I say perhaps, but we'll come to that later) is My Father Will Lead Me Up A Rope to the Sky, the latest offering from Swans, a band that has apparently been making music since the early 80s (aside from a 13 year hiatus) and about whose history I know practically nothing. Some words come to mind when thinking of this album: "bleak," "despair," and "torment" among them. But make no mistake, this is not black metal or doom rock, despite how it may come off initially. There's a certain country twang in this metal, yes, and some thick, sludgy, apocalyptic drums. The first song ("No Words/No Thoughts") begins with four minutes of post-rockesque intro before Michael Gira slurs into singing, with church bells throughout. Just to give you a taste, there's a delightful song (is that a didgeridoo?) co-sung by Gira's 3 year old daughter titled "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" and elsewhere, Gira imagines collecting every liar on Earth into a pyre and setting them alight ("Reeling the Liars In"). My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky is a difficult record to categorize beyond a sense of despair, of overwhelming bleakness, comprised of country sludge-rock and interludes that sound less like post-rock than like the end of the world. Also, it's amazing.
21. MGMT - Congratulations
MGMT's sophomore album makes the leap from "followers of Of Montreal" to fully-fledged psychedelic-pop makers in the tradition of Pink Floyd. Instead of doing the expected or the simple and making a follow-up composed of singles like "Time to Pretend," the lads made a complex psychedelia album with enough flourish, skill, and panache to indicate that the future will only bring better things. "I Found a Whistle" is the sort of innocent, playful pop song to which I refer, and it leads into the (mostly) stunning "Siberian Breaks," which, at 12:10, still manages to be cohesive and indeed, hold the two halves of the album together. The album flows and peaks and troughs right when you'd want just like any good drug trip should, and that makes it wonderful, and the joy that MGMT squeeze from their instruments is evident in every note.
After something like 8 years in development, Remedy Entertainment released Alan Wake this year to fairly exceptional reviews.
In it, writer Alan Wake, suffering from writer's block for two years, decides to go on vacation to Twin Pe-- I mean, Bright Falls, and relive every book Stephen King has written in the last thirty or so years. His wife is kidnapped by a nameless unknowable evil (cool), people are possessed and you have to burn the darkness away by hitting it with your flashlight before shooting them (sort of cool, mostly repetitive), possessed objects FLYING AT YOUR FACE (pretty cool at first... slightly spoiled since they then point out the Stephen King connection before you can catch your breath), and of course, a writer finding pages describing terrible things about to happen to him in a book written by him that he never wrote (::puff, puff, sharp inhale:: "What if, like, we were all characters in a Stephen King book?"::kaffkaffkaffkaff::).
Before I say a few nice things and end on a high note, I must first indulge my petty gripes, like the fact that a restaurant busboy dolly is clearly far too sturdy for a full grown man to just *push out of his fucking way* or anything. Also, the collecting missions. At one point in the development cycle of the game it was apparently going to be more sandboxy, but developers scrapped that in favor of having more control over the storyline and pacing. However, they awesomely (sarcasm.) left in over 250 items for the player to collect, ranging from the pointless (100 coffee thermoses, essentially the "hidden packages") to the vaguely interesting and mildly story related (radios and TVs, as well as the aforementioned pages describing what's about to happen in the plot), to the actually helpful (30 hidden caches of equipment and weapons). And this might be shallow and petty, but fuck you, there is an achievement for watching a specific TV in the game,
it's the only TV that isn't story related or one of the awesome Twilight Zone parody episodes scattered about, no, it's the TV that plays, I shit you not, advertisements for their sponsors. Verizon and someone else.
One last thing about the story and the importance of proofreading: the pages that Alan picks up from the book he never wrote switch, seemingly at random, between first and third person. I mean... seriously? He wasn't writing Ulysses. No, that's just poor design. And I beat the game in a sitting and a half, which is just too short. It should take me more than a weekend to get all the play out of a game.
"But," I hear you wail, "all those other people really liked it! Doesn't it have any good qualities?"
I will thank you to let me determine the pace of this review myself. I was just getting to the good points, of which there are several. As mentioned above, there are several Twilight Zone parodies (more like homages, really) found on some of the TVs scattered about under the title "Bright Springs," complete with Serling-esque narrations and moral lessons. Also, as the less-than-amusing comic relief character says, the birds go "all Hitchcock on you" at several points, creating a really harrowing experience for brief periods of time as you try to figure out from where the flock is going to swoop at you (hint: it's always the other direction). And the pacing is really good, actually. The game is presented as episodes of a show, so presumably the next game would be "Season 2" (and hopefully longer than 6 episodes). The story is somewhat weighed down by the Kingness of it all, but the ending is open enough (and I am interested enough to play the DLC and see what happens next) that it could go to some really interesting places.
So all in all, not a bad game. Just definitely not the groundbreaking psychological thriller experience you might be looking for.
Bonuses!
+ .5 - for the music selection, especially playing "Space Oddity" by David Bowie over the end credits.
+.25 - for Lovecraftian horror. And for namedropping Lovecraft and, more subtly (really though, good on ya) August Derleth
-1 - for introducing characters solely for the purpose of killing them in the next scene and possessing them to attack you. This is not effective horror strategy. We should care about the fate of these people in this small town where everyone knows everyone else.
-.5 - for including driving for no discernible reason beyond "Well, we wrote all this code back when it was going to be a sandbox."
-.25 - I had another really witty put-down, but I can't remember what it is, so I'm going to take the quarter point anyway.
Total: 7/10. Rent it, enjoy it, put down some unnamed evil. Just don't expect Max Payne levels of greatness.
Doe-eyed lovers and quiet indie kids, rejoice! Belle & Sebastian have returned after four years with their followup to the incredible The Life Pursuit album with their seventh studio album, Belle & Sebastian Write About Love, which is probably the weakest album title they've thus far released (consider this is the same band that released If You're Feeling Sinister and Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (okay, I really just wanted to write all that out. Long album titles amuse me.)).
Luckily, unstellar title notwithstanding, the lads have turned out another largely superb album that will rest comfortably next to Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit (I'll fit 'em all in, you watch) as a cohesive statement of the band's musicianship and the stunning lyrical skills of Stuart Murdoch.
The album opens inauspiciously, with the track "I Didn't See It Coming," a piano driven piece sung largely by Sarah Martin to better effect than any of the songs she (or Isobell Campbell or whomever) has fronted for the band in many many years. The melody is stolen straight from your favorite memories and will surely lodge itself there for a long time. "I Want the World to Stop" is classic B&S, an upbeat pop tempo, a grooving bassline, and lyrics communicating the gray dullness of winter and depression and the longing to escape (think "The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner" meets "Sleep the Clock Around") sung in Murdoch's beautiful tenor with an urgency that grips your heart.
Ultimately, the album's greatest triumphs are its' greatest failings as well. Beside the fact that this album is virtually indistinguishable from other albums in Belle & Sebastian's oeuvre, there's no forward progress as musicians. This could be their third album or their fifth album just as easily as their seventh. And of course, the songs written by Stevie Jackson (I'm thinking specifically of "I'm Not Living in the Real World," a song which I may never play again after finishing this review) and the other members of the band never quite measure up to the urgency, the emotion, the pure heart-wrenching pureness of Murdoch's honesty.
Of course, having more of the same isn't really a concern for fans of the band, because while they haven't moved forward per se, they haven't stagnated either. The music is still bright, emotive, fresh, and relevant, and twee fans all over the world should accept Belle & Sebastian Write About Love with triumphant fanfare for a band who knows exactly what they're good at doing and is going to make wonderful indie pop for many years to come.
8.1/10
It occurs to me that, as I'm the only one here (do you hear an echo?) I could ostensibly review anything I choose. Given the name of the site, I'll try to keep it music-centric, but in the future there may turn out to be ramblings, rants, essays, whathaveyou about Batman, Doctor Who, James Joyce, and The Royal Tennenbaums.
Of course all this is academic as I haven't even reviewed an album yet in my glorious return. But that changes today!
Unless I take a nap.
It has been a day for consuming media. After much Fringe, video games, Always Sunny, Jacob's Room, and on and on, I turned to music I'd been neglecting, as well as some forthcoming albums.
What a year for music it has been.
Today I got through Sea of Cowards, the latest effort from The Dead Weather, the latest in Jack White's seemingly endless list of side projects, the new album from indie-pop darlings Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Let it Sway, and the new Wavves album, in addition to hearing the new records by Ben Folds, Belle & Sebastian, of Montreal, and Badly Drawn Boy. As I write this, I am hurtling toward the end of MGMT's incredible sophomore psych-pop album Congratulations.
I have also quite recently consumed a large quantity of food and smoked a bunch, so this blog post is an attempt to beat sleep. Incoherency may take over. You have been warned.
It also occurs to me that the list currently kept at the right is so dated as to be laughable. Not that you care because, let's be honest, you're either one of two people or you're imaginary. But I shall be replacing it with albums that I might actually review in the future.
And other upkeep things which have all slipped my mind.
Uh...
Being as I'm too lazy to put together a real post just now, here is a short list of some of the artists what will surely turn out to be contenders for any sort of "best-of" list I may put together in a relatively short matter of time.
The Arcade Fire
The Black Keys
Minus the Bear
Vampire Weekend
The National
Band of Horses
!!!
Interpol
Of Montreal
Shit Robot
Scissor Sisters
LCD Soundsystem
Murder by Death
Stars
MGMT
The Dead Weather
Gonna give this another try. My esteemed colleague the faderist has started his own project (link to the right) and the two of us basically left this site to die (it's been a rough couple of years).
However, since writing is a thing that keeps me grounded, focused, and sharp, I'm going to (for about the 92nd time) try to update my blogs more often than never, starting today. Forthcoming will be a short roundup of some of the more stellar albums of the year, including The National, LCD Soundsystem, The Books, and more, in an attempt to not be drowned in albums at the end of the year.
Anticipate it!
