At the other end of the spectrum, archival imprint Canary Records recently launched a Bandcamp page, offering downloads of albums from founder Ian Nagoski's own extensive collection of 78s for as little as $4.50. The most recent upload is No One Cares: International 78rpm discs, ca. 1912-55. As the wry title indicates, it seems Nagoski doesn't expect these tracks to attract any more listeners than Third Man does for their box set, even at 1/100 of the price. I would also venture that at the end of the day, they each will have cleared about the same profit... none. Both projects are gifts to the music world, archiving sounds that might easily be lost, since there is so little demand for them to be saved.
In his review of The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Grayson Haver Currin notes the box's (literal and metaphorical) resemblance to a coffin. Nagoski's approach to reissues feels opposite to this; he's doing whatever he can for people to hear this music. He too has produced lovely LP packages—from Bed of Pain, whichseems to take the old Smithsonian Folkways one-color album as its model, to Kesarbai Kerkar, a lavish presentation with not one but two nesting booklets inside. But Nagoski has equally made use of CDs—the three-disc To What Strange Place, produced for Tompkins Square and designed by Susan Archie, is probably his best-known collection (despite now being out of print itself). And he's even released CD-Rs: There are now dozens of volumes to explore in his cheap, unannotated "True Vine 78 series" of thinline jewel cases with Xerox covers.
The move to Bandcamp downloads would seem to be just another expedient means to Nagoski’s larger end of sharing the music. It's preservation through dissemination—pamphlets of the word passed out on the street, as opposed to Third Man's precious reliquary kept in an inner sanctum. Which strategy gets the music through to a future Nagoski or White is anyone’s guess.
However, it’s notable that in both cases the 78s themselves are absent. The museum or library idea of preservation—where the original artifact is itself what must be saved—is left behind by vinyl box set and Bandcamp download alike. These preserve the content without the form of the 78. In this way, the download is no different than the LP; both continue the work Harry Smith initiated in the 1950s to preserve music that would otherwise be lost along with the physical artifacts of 78s, by separating it from the format and reproducing it in a different, more current one.
When I reach out to him via email, I find that this larger historical perspective seems to fit Nagoski’s rather mystical view of the 78. "I have no particular feelings about any format other than 78s," he told me. "The other formats are just music delivery systems.” When I asked him to elaborate, I received a very Harry Smith-like reply:
"They are also stones. Magical speaking stones. Stones that remember the voices of human beings. Most are made of, roughly, about 70% ground stone, 20% shellac (the secretion of the lac beetle of Southeast Asia) and 10% binder and color (almost always black).
And because they're stone, they each weigh about a half a pound, which means that you FEEL them as you interact ritually with them at the turntable, and they demand that you engage with them… And you can SEE the records' flaws. You can see the music on them. You can see the relationship that previous owners and generations had with the discs - the bright, unplayed surface of a symphonic record which was purchased purely as a status symbol, vs the greyed grooves and crisscross of scratches of a dance record that came out year after year after a few drinks, vs the flaws of disregard, bordering on hostility, toward an immigrant grandparents' embarrassing nostalgia for Back Home..."
Given Nagoski’s powerful and emotional connection to 78s—objects as inseparable for him from their physical presence and particular history as paintings or manuscripts—all other formats are more or less equal because they only reproduce the music. The download and the LP reissue may not be as far apart as they seem.
Down Is Up discusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos and self-releases, as well as output from small or overlooked labels and communities. This week, Jenn Pelly begins discussing some overlooked 2013 records that are worth another listen.
I was late to the Courtneys, and I wish I'd heard their self-titled 12" sooner—these eight upbeat songs beg to soundtrack the highs and lows of summertime. The Vancouver post-punk trio takes cues from the Dunedin jangle-pop sound of 80s and 90s Flying Nun bands, and at times its ramshackle aesthetic and subtle punk spirit recall the more deadpan corners of early UK indie pop. The Courtneys' wit and attitude are immediately apparent: the custom-branded snapback on their LP cover, the record's lovelorn ode to Keanu Reeves, its song about a quaint and unshakeable crush ("Delivery Boy"), the punchy one made for breezy drives to the ocean ("90210") with a hazy video full of beachside imagery...
You may be wondering: Who could possibly want more of this sort of thing following the 2010 boom of subpar bands that fit that description? It's a fair question, which makes it even more unbelievable that the Courtneys are able to breathe life into this kind of slacker pop in 2013. The songs glide with an air of effortlessness, but repeat listens reveal their depth. The lyrics are often smart, resonant, and at times existential; the musicianship is tight, the hooks are sharp, the songcraft is dynamic. And alongside the sing-song bubblegum themes, darker shades and bottled feelings chug through. Musings on self-governance eventually define the jobless, minimum wage-blues of "Insufficient Funds"—"You can work for yourself!" chants singer Jen Twynn Payne, who (impressively) is also the drummer, and a one-time member of Mac DeMarco's old band Makeout Videotape. Meanwhile, their seemingly sunny "90210" anthem culminates with Jen getting emotional near the sea, thinking about someone she'll only see in her dreams or when she dies. But the music is primarily fun. This might make The Courtneys seems thematically scattered, but real life is that way, too.
Last summer I was preparing to interview Danish downer-rock band Lower when I came across a big group photo featuring participants in the Copenhagen punk and noise scene—the community surrounding venue/practice space Mayhem and Posh Isolation, a label and shop. There's been plenty of discussion surrounding this scene over the past three years and bands like Iceage, Lower, and Vår, among others. What struck me about this image was that only one woman was pictured. I learned she was Frederikke Hoffmeier, a solo power-electronics artist who goes by Puce Mary and has also played drums in the band Timeless Reality.
Hoffmeier's debut LP as Puce Mary (which follows years of limited edition tapes and collaborative projects) could find an audience beyond those interested in the city from which she hails; it's one of the more plainly frightening industrial noise records I've heard in 2013. Success is all air-tight tension, with little release. There are patches of mechanic spoken word hovering about, authoritative and unsettling, over a tightly built industrial churn. Elsewhere ominous drones are cut with piercing slivers of razor sharp electronics or dark, clouded abstractions of crashing noise. "Unnatural Practices" carries the sound of an alarm signaling endlessly over a rhythmic rumble, a feeling of real terror, as if a kind of death is imminent. Near the end, Hoffmeier's experimentations emulate the sound of something screaming its soul out. It feels filmic, like something you would very much enjoy surviving through.
The self-titled 7" from Olympia, Wash.'s Hysterics was one of the best hardcore EPs in recent years, a brutal mix of personal and political messages by whiplash-speed screamer Stephie C. Her often profound observations can resist oppression or rip through the toxicity of modern corporate brainwash. Hysterics are an undeniable force, and Stephie spits her words so fast she could give just about any rising rapper a run for his or her money.
On this year's six-song Can't I Live 7", the band's blurred blast finds Cristol shrieking messages of discontent, fighting against the mind-numbing moments of disengagement that define too much of online life. Working off the rage of the last EP, Hysterics' aesthetic has broadened. They sound savage as ever, with eyes open to the world around them, but here they stretch out to the occasional wider-stanced riff. Stephie's manic articulation more often brilliantly deconstructs syllables into interpretive mutant play, and at one point her buried vocals fall surreally under a mix of noise-guitar experimentation. As a whole, it's more detailed and poetic, with harder-hitting production, and (somehow) it's actually faster.
"Leave Me Alone" is one of my favorite tracks—on the street, and outside society, with no desire to give up name nor age nor destination, nor to crack a smile. "Leave me alone! Don't waste my time!" comes an empowering all-caps group vocal. "Or my space! Can't you see/ I'm a human being!" On Side B, the four-minute "Please Sir" is another highlight, repurposing religious language for what seems like a critique of those who wrongly make judgment calls on others (a reality in everyday life and law-making alike, called "mainsplaining" in some cultures). "Words well up in your mouth/ Time's ripe to impart," Stephie shouts, an audibly sarcastic tone curled into her voice. "That weight in your jeans is just too much to haul."
She continues:
The loudest voice makes the wisest man, Please sir/ Bestow upon me your invaluable gifts, The world as it is through your eyes, My lenses clouded by the thing that I am, Cleanse me with knowledge and perspective, Your opinion descends in splendor and grace, Will you let me raise my eyes to your face?
It is yet another entry into a short but worthy catalogue tackling real injustice without sacrificing artistry. Hysterics have a track from Can't I Live, the 48-second total sonic assault of "Psychic Drain", on the upcoming Beyond Inverstion benefit compilation, which is available to stream in full right now (via Rookie).
Update: The Hysterics Can't I Live 7" EP has been pushed to January.
Shake Appeal is a column that highlights new garage and garage-adjacent releases. This week, Evan Minsker discusses the debut LP from Baltimore's Sick Thoughts, a new live record from Ty Segall's band Fuzz, a split 7" featuring Natural Child and Guantanamo Baywatch, and albums from Melbourne's Gentlemen and the Texas-based Indonesian punk band Secret Prostitutes.
There's a song called "Peaked in High School" on Terminal Teen Age, the debut album by Sick Thoughts. It's hard to tell exactly what the vocalist is yammering on about—every other sound is too blown out for the lyrics to be fully intelligible. But when the chorus hits, it sounds like he's saying, "I peaked in high school/ Peaked in high school/ Peaked in high school/ Nooooo!" The song's message makes sense when you consider the sole entity behind this band: Drew Owen, a 16-year-old from Baltimore. His album is dressed up to look like a Reatards LP, and even with that prominent visual cue leading you to remember Teenage Hate, Owen's record does not disappoint. Every song is blaring and brief, seemingly furious, and completely catchy. It was originally due for an early January release, but you can order it on vinyl right now. And you should.
This year, Fuzz released a batch of singles and a proper full-length. They're closing 2013 with their installment of Castle Face's young-but-already-unstoppable Live in San Francisco series. (The previous installment featured a killer set from White Fence.) This one, recorded live on Ty Segall's birthday, has the trio locking into four beefy grooves. It's got both sides of their first 7" ("This Time I've Got a Reason" and "Fuzz's Fourth Dream"), plus the B-side "You Won't See Me" and their frenetic LP closer "One". It captures the band at their most powerful, so if Segall's prolific nature repelled you from Fuzz records before, this record is the perfect starting place. (Apparently, it's already sold out—but check distros, Discogs, and eBay, because this thing isn't to be missed.)
Natural Child/Guantanamo Baywatch: Surf n Turf split [Suicide Squeeze]
It's a novel concept, putting out a split 7" where one side represents "surf" and the other "turf", but the folks at Suicide Squeeze have picked the perfect pair of bands to embody those themes. Natural Child appropriately supply the turf—they're a Southern-fried outfit from Nashville, and their track "Don't Wake the Baby" sounds like Neil Young when he's joined by Ben Keith (on harmonies and pedal steel). Then, Portland's Guantanamo Baywatch supply their swooning surf jam "Love This Time", which is delivered with Jason Powell's coarse, raucous shout-singing. Two good songs, back-to-back, in a satisfying contrast in styles.
Homeless Records have supplied the world with a sizable heap of thuggish, tough-dude punk music out of Australia. Gentlemen's Sex Tape isn't always as overtly explosive as, say, "Dog" by Cuntz, but make no mistake: This record is packed with intimidation. "Military Style Massage" is led by a sludgy simmer, but by the track's midpoint, the Melbourne band have unleashed their full power: guitars going haywire, drums crashing in every corner of the mix, and the vocals mutating from a muted shout to a full-throated, demonic gurgle.
The Secret Prostitutes hail from Houston, Texas, and their lyrics are mostly sung in Indonesian. At one point in their new album's 25 tracks, they cover CCCP, the legendary 1980s Italian punk band, which may partially explain the inspiration behind the Prostitutes' similarly tinny drum sound. Their guitars are aggressive, and even if the language barrier is an issue, they let loose a few words that make their intentions clear, like the titular phrase in "I Don't Need You". Worth noting: "Siklus Penyalahgunaan" translates to "Cycle of Abuse".
The Secret Prostitutes: "I Don't Need You" on SoundCloud.
The Secret Prostitutes: "Siklus Penyalahgunaan" on SoundCloud.
The Secret Prostitutes: "Orientasi Profit Institusi" on SoundCloud.
Also Worth Hearing: The ripping new single from Sydney punks Red Red Krovvy (via R.I.P. Society).
All successful men are self-made in hindsight, and their memoirs prefer to dwell on struggle and talent over support and good luck. Morrissey is no exception: "It is quite true," he says near the end of Autobiography(which was released in Europe in October and comes out this week in the U.S.), "that I have never had anything in my life that I did not make for myself." Of course that’s debatable, but if you’re buying a Morrissey book, you surely expect narcissism. You might also expect wit, vendettas, pettiness and tenderness, music nerd pedantry, a perceptive critical eye, and real insight into the man’s work. You would only be disappointed with the last.
Midway through Autobiography, Morrissey and his friend Linder drive to Saddleworth Moor, an empty, rain-beaten desolation some miles outside Manchester. On their way home from this lonely place, a drenched half-naked youth looms out of the dark, imploring them to stop. They do not, and when they decide to return he has vanished. Was he a ghost? The possibility is considered. Linder feels he was likely a victim of an assault, pleading for help. Morrissey thinks differently: "My instincts told me he had been placed as bait at a scene of ambush."
There is no conclusion to this story, but of all the anecdotes in the book it gives you the clearest picture of its writer. The Morrissey of Autobiography is not inclined to think charitably of others’ motives: He sees a desperate youth and assumes he’s part of a scam. And why not? Morrissey's world is full of fools, bores, and crooks placed there to vex, snub or swindle our hero. The book is littered with severed relationships, and long-term associates are treated as bit parts compared to those who thwart the singer. His reflexive recoil at humanity starts young; I got to his shuddering descriptions of teen female sexuality ("honeypots yawn like open graves") and put the book aside for several days. Even for his adoring public, empathy is elusive: In one of his on-the-road stories, he chortles at a band member who mocks a fan’s weight. Nonetheless, he spends the last hundred pages basking in their worship.
Autobiography has a roughly symmetrical structure. The Smiths’ career and the 1996 trial over the band’s earnings that finished them are given equal space. After the trial lies hard-won contentment; before the Smiths comes awkward misery. Amidst this misery, in the drear of post-war Manchester and the brutal class and educational system that sustained it, Morrissey struggles to become himself.
Much of the book’s first part is lyrical, evocative, its flowing sentences full of humor and feeling, and overall one of the better pop memoirs I’ve read—the story of a boy growing up through and with music. Morrissey was a fan and then a critic long before he became a singer, and he has a gift for catching his love and enthusiasm as they were, untempered by hindsight. As a Smiths fan, I learned long ago that the New York Dolls were to Morrissey as he was to us, but only reading Autobiography did I really get what they meant to him and why.
What the Dolls had that Morrissey admired was a sense that they had somehow abdicated from humanity. "Their eyes are indifferent. They have left the order of this world." His early favourite records—near-forgotten singles by the likes of Buffy Saint-Marie—had some quality of drama or voice to them that made them stand out, but it’s only when glam comes round that he finds the stars to transform him. Bolan, Bowie, forgotten post-Bowie star Jobriath, Iggy, Lou Reed, and ultimately the Dolls—for the adolescent Morrissey these figures offer a possibility of new ways of being, and a diagnosis for his own sickness: "These were times when...a personal music collection read as private medical records."
In early drafts of rock history the early 1970s were an in-between time—a decadent stretch between the high creativity of the 60s and the purgative of punk. In his stories of the wonder and thrill of finding new idols, Morrissey makes a good case for that being the moment pop really got interesting—turning rock’s rebellious gestures into something braver, smarter and fundamentally queerer. The stars he falls for don’t challenge through what they sing or say, they are disruptive simply by being who they are and looking how they do. "Spare a thought," he writes, "for those who rock the boat. They challenge your attention, and even in your rage you find you quite like them for poking you as if you were a dead mule. Perhaps you are?"
A trick Morrissey uses a lot is to let stories or anecdotes end with a verbal shrug, "And this is how history is made"; "And the new life hammers the old life." It’s a very Morrissey gesture, detached but long-suffering, and it paints life as a parade of inevitable disappointments and petty cruelties. Your strategy against that has to be either transcendence—like the heroes of 70s art-pop—or resignation to suffering. In the most measured and interesting part of Autobiography, Morrissey writes movingly about his favourite poets, and it’s the only time you get even oblique insight into his own lyrical approach. He includes English poet A.E. Housman, quoting lines of stoic despair ("He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?") and citing him as an influence then and now. And it seems to me the way Morrissey made himself unique was by choosing both strategies at once—becoming a star whose very existence implied rejection, but building that stardom around a continued, knowing performance of suffering.
All this is conjecture. Morrissey is effusive about his literary and musical heroes, but you draw your own conclusions about what he learned from them. In fact, one of the strange things about Autobiography is that if I’d never heard Morrissey or the Smiths I’d be baffled as to why I ever should. He is full of praise for his band but his descriptions of their music ("explosive chords...harsh intensity") tell you nothing. His collaborative process—and how that might have differed according to co-writers—goes unexplored. If you come to the book looking for trivia on your favorite Morrissey song, you’ll leave disappointed. Fair enough; the first privilege of autobiography is that you get to decide what mattered, and even golden moments of creativity can feel shabby to live through. His expression of what singing for the first time meant to him— "suddenly, life is close to me"—means more to his story than particular details can. The Saddleworth Moor incident gets roughly the pagecount that The Queen Is Dead does, and anyway it's probably more revealing.
The story of the Smiths, through Morrissey’s eyes, is mostly the story of his perpetual frustration with Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, who—as the singer tells it—was saved from obscurity by the band and resented them for it ever after. Every release finds Morrissey dolefully logging the band’s disappointing chart positions, and Rough Trade’s excuses for lack of promotion. When he does get onto major labels, they let him down too. It’s hard not to sympathise at first, as Rough Trade can’t get copies of "Hand in Glove" into shops fast enough to score a hit, and as the struggles with Travis are told with a sitcom writer’s eye for comic futility. But 14 years on Morrissey is still tutting over the marketing of junk like "Alma Matters", and the put-upon naïf image wears steadily thinner.
This final chunk of Autobiography is grey fare: the tour diary of a middle-aged man of settled habits, and with just as much excitement as that implies. The book devolves into repetitive expressions of surprise and gratitude at Morrissey’s worldwide popularity, interrupted by snipes at British publications that refuse to acknowledge it. The coherence and craft that marked the first half of the book dissolve. If it still feels like a happy ending, it’s credit to how well Morrissey sells his early discontent.
Another privilege of autobiography is rarely being wrong. Morrissey admits lapses in taste on a few occasions—he didn’t think "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" was very good; he took a while to like the Rolling Stones. But in print at least, he’s not a man given to regret or self-doubt. Some controversies go unmentioned, others—like the NME’s accusations of racism—are witheringly dismissed. (Morrissey’s bizarro logic is that calling a real racist a racist wouldn’t be news, so he can’t be one: "Had I actually been racist, the NME comments would reveal nothing and attract no-one.") So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when the world really does seem ranged against him—as in the High Court judgement over the Smiths’ finances—he states his case at numbing length.
Shortening that part is one of many ways Autobiography could be better as a book, and they are all irrelevant: Morrissey’s emphases and exclusions are as much a part of his story as any LP he’s made. I came away feeling that if the book is honest, then fretting about its lack of specific detail misses the point: Morrissey’s songs are already drawn straight from life. If anything, the problem with Autobiography is that—for all its early verve, and Morrissey’s obvious delight in writing—you have heard these stories first, and better, in song. None of his tirade against Geoff Travis is as perfectly cruel as "Frankly, Mr Shankly". His rage at the scars left by his teachers is put across with cold passion, but "The Headmaster Ritual" is still more visceral. His damp, hollowed-out vocal tones on "Jeane" say more about slum life in Manchester than pages of description. These are the best parts of the book, better writing than many musicians ever produce. Even so, they push me back to the Smiths’ records, with renewed regard for their economy, venom, and the precarious teamwork that produced them.
Down Is Up discusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos and self-releases, as well as output from small or overlooked labels and communities. This week, Jenn Pelly explores a new compilation, Dokument #1, which surveys the Copenhagen punk and noise scene that includes Iceage, Lower, Vår, Lust for Youth, Puce Mary, Hand of Dust, and more.
I saw Iceage play New York four times this year, but my favorite encounter with the Danish punk band did not happen at a loud venue. It was among the bright walls and silence of a West Village art gallery, where I viewed a few tiny, impressionistic portraits of singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt by renowned painter Elizabeth Peyton. These were quietly vivid renderings, painted in broad strokes, and to me they replicated the darkly expressive and sometimes elegant nature of Iceage's recent music, as well as the mystique of its distance. The space was totally empty, like a secret show; the canvases were surrounded by huge swaths of white space. Peyton's paintings also helped emphasize another point—Iceage are better known in the United States than they are at home.
That could be said of many of their peers in Copenhagen's small world of art punk, power electronics, and cold synth pop—a community which has gained visibility over the past two years with fuel from a tight-knit circle of musicians. A new 2xLP compilation, Dokument #1, has been assembled by the Copenhagen Main Library to archive the city's underground at this moment, while offering other Danes an introduction to industrial, raw punk, black metal and more. Alongside bands like Iceage, Lower, Vår, Lust for Youth, and Marching Church come the even lesser-known Puce Mary, Hand of Dust, Sexdrome, Girlseeker, Garrotte, and Redflesh, among others. The double album is out this week—it's the 100th release from Danish label Posh Isolation—but it's already been nominated for the Nordic Music Prize. (Last month Posh Isolation also released the ten-track compilation Rosehip, Scallop, Dancer, which focuses more on spacious experimental electronic music.) According to Anton Rothstein, the drummer of Lower, Dokument #1 features 18 bands consisting of 23 people.
The compilation is well-timed. Following Lower's debut EP last year have come worthy 2013 LPs from Vår, Lust for Youth, Puce Mary, and Croation Amor, plus the debut 7" from a promising new project, Communions (streaming above). That's not to mention Iceage's own considerable progress from scrappy teen punks to one of our better current rock bands, kids who (sort of) express interest in literature and performance art and Erik Satie and bring that post-punk sensibility to their songs. If you have seen Iceage perform lately, you have likely witnessed Rønnenfelt's possessed on-stage sky-summoning, as if he's reaching for the drama of Michael Gira.
About one-third of the material from Dokument #1 was recorded live in February, during a two-night showcase presented at the library and performance space Mayhem. I corresponded with Lower's Anton Rothstein via email that month to learn more; librarian Lars Kjelfred also chimed in, as did Loke Rahbek, co-founder of Posh Isolation who plays in Vår, Lust for Youth, Croation Amor, Sexdrome, and Damien Dubrovnik. Two songs from Dokument #1 are also streaming below.
Above, right: Elias of Iceage, by Elizabeth Peyton (Thanks Brandon for telling me about this)
Pitchfork: I've heard that one particular librarian from the Copenhagen Main Library worked on the Dokument project. What is his or her involvement with music in Copenhagen?
Anton Rothstein: Lars Kjelfred is his name, though he prefers the name Mr. Librarian. He is in charge of the music section in the main library of Copenhagen where he struggles to enlighten people about Danish music that's not being played on the radio. He’s been going to shows at Mayhem a lot and has shown great interest in the gang. He invited me, Loke and Kristian to a meeting where he pitched the idea and we agreed to do it after some negotiations and some alcohol.
Pitchfork: Is the compilation being funded by the library? Does the library host music events often? The New York Public Library has interesting programming, but I could not imagine them partnering with a tiny tape label on a joint release.
Lars the Librarian: I thought it was strange to be listening to all of this wonderful music, going to these amazing gigs, and to only be reading about it in international news sources like Pitchfork and NME instead of local. I am sure more Americans are aware of the scene than Danes. So this project is kind of making up for that—setting it right. We didn't fund it, but financially we are taking responsibility for the project to succeed. We expect the 2xLP to sell enough for the project to balance economically.
We don't do gigs that often, that's not our business, but we host artist talks when interesting people visit Copenhagen. Thurston Moore, for example, was here talking about the New York no wave scene. Tony Conrad, Gary Lucas, Alan Wilder, Peter Hook, David Thomas, they have all been here. The gigs in connection with Dokument #1 were done mainly for the recordings, but, of course, also to showcase the scene in the centre of Copenhagen.
Pitchfork: The shows will produce this archive, an artifact of the time. Why does it feel important to capture the sound/spirit of music around Mayhem right now, and have it on public record in Denmark?
LL: I have been a music addict for so many years, and the music from lots of these groups just amazes me. Genres I wouldn’t normally listen to were suddenly just a small step away. If you think Iceage are great, but too punk, try out Vår. Same lead singer, but more poppy tunes. How fantastic is that. I am always looking for my next fix of favorite music, and suddenly there were loads in my backyard and I could go see these acts whenever I wanted. I really wanted to pass that experience on to more Danes.
Pitchfork: Why do you think this music has been overlooked in Denmark?
LL: You have to dig to find. The groups don’t get that much airplay on the radio and they are a bit overlooked, even by the music magazines. That’s a bit strange though. Earlier on, I would have gone mad if a Danish band was touring the states, but that’s normal now. The attention achieved by Lower and Iceage is really something much bigger.
Pitchfork: As you wrote the purpose of the project is to survey the current group of bands surrounding Mayhem. Is it fair to refer to this as "the Mayhem scene"?
AR: Yes. The purpose is to portray or document what is going on within our group of people—who, to be honest, are friends before musicians. Mayhem is where we spend a lot of our time playing music and hanging out, but it’s more than just our base. There are other people in other rooms in the complex, and we’ve also shared other rehearsal spaces around town. But obviously people think of us as the bands and people from Mayhem. You could probably refer to us as that just to make everything easier.
Pitchfork: How did Mayhem begin? What was your first impression of the space and how do you think the existence of Mayhem has influenced the current community of artists?
AR: I am not totally sure of how it all began, but the complex was offered to small community of people and as things progressed we were asked to move in to the back room, which was a very nice gesture. My initial encounters were mostly noise and power-electronic shows that Loke and Christian (from Posh Isolation) would put on. I guess once we got the opportunity to participate in the space, our relationship has developed into a more responsible treatment of the place and a feeling of being home there. Having that one big room that contains all of the rock bands (Sexdrome, Iceage, Lower, Hand of Dust, Zero Figure, Skurv, Sejr and more) is very nice. It feels like we have our own hangout spot where we can be friends.
Pitchfork: How would you characterize the atmosphere and energy at Mayhem? I have watched some videos from shows there and they seem a lot more fun than the shows I have seen with Danish bands in the U.S.
AR: Shows differ a lot. It’s not always actual mayhem, but most of the times we have parties after the show where people go insane. Maybe it’s because so many of the people attending the shows are close friends. It’s not like we want to exclude people from the “outside” or anything, it's rather the other way around, but we do have a lot of fun—at least once the music’s been played.
Pitchfork: In January Iceage participated in an art show in New York, which sort of contextualized their music and visual art within a more global community—lots of artists from New York as well as the Ascetic House circle. To me, it seems like there is pretty strong comraderie between the Copenhagen scene and other pockets of activity in the U.S., maybe more so than elsewhere in Europe.
AR: There’s definitely a connection to the Arizona tribe around Ascetic House. I met Jes in Phoenix in 2011 while on tour with Iceage and felt a bond instantly. I did a show with Marshstepper and Body of Light at Mayhem last year and we had a good time. When Vår and Lust For Youth played in the Sonoran desert last December, the relationship between Phoenix and Copenhagen grew even stronger. I suppose we share a mutual attitude amongst us. In New York there’s Sean Ragon who produced the Vår LP and released the American version of Lower’s first EP. He’s also putting out Hand of Dust’s debut EP.
Some years ago, before we ever ventured in America, we experienced the same thing with the people of Gothenburg, Sweden who had a place called Utmarken—a joint rehearsal space, show space and record shop. We’ve had a very strong connection to them since and we still collaborate with people there from time to time. Recently Frederikke [of Puce Mary] recorded an LP with Sewer Election to be put out on Nattmaran.
Pitchfork: Do you think it's good for the music that there's not as much attention at home?
Loke Rahbek: What we release on Posh Isolation would have a limited audience anywhere. Taking into consideration that Denmark’s population is about 5 million, I think the audience we have seems to be fitting. After all, "Anything's better than posh isolation."
Sky Ferreira’s biggest asset may very well be her bluntness. On and off her records, she says things that you can imagine inspiring some squirming inside the Capitol Records Tower. And after the rough go of it she’s had during her 5+ years as an "emerging" artist making and remaking her debut LP, the recently released Night Time, My Time came as something of a revelation.
One track in particular, "I Blame Myself", stands out as having anthem potential (and not just because I've seen its lyrics quoted a handful of times on Twitter since the album's release). Throughout the song, Ferreira spits self-doubt and frustrations with not being taken seriously—an understandable response for someone who's spent years grappling for artistic legitimacy. People hear the words "socialite," "Forever 21 model" and "drug arrest," and their minds go to a TMZ sort of place. She proves throughout her debut that those assumptions have nothing to do with the kind of songs Ferreira writes these days—but isn’t that the way judgments go for so many of us? That's what makes the track's angst so relatable. "I Blame Myself" achieves a difficult balancing act: It's so specific to Ferreira's own experiences in the public eye, but something about it also feels universal.
The chorus ("I just want you to realize I blame myself for my reputation") is fueled by self-deprecation (which is "a personal issue" for Ferreira), but many of the verses describe struggles that resonate with a lot of young woman in particular. "I’m just a face without a choice/ Trust you’d never like to guess what I think above the shoulders,” she snaps. It gets worse: "Ten years old without a voice/ I feel like nothing’s really changed, now I’m just a little older." All this, mind you, is atop one of the album’s most bubbly melodies and driving beats.
"It's not like, 'Oh feel sorry for me,'" she said of "I Blame Myself" in a recent interview, "because I don't feel sorry for myself at all." Ferreira’s perspective is brave—and even feminist. "I experience feminist culture calling me out and saying I’m not a feminist, but I think I definitely am a feminist, in my own way," Ferreira recently said. “I didn’t know there was a book about how to be a proper feminist, but I think of myself as one because I am doing what I want to do. No one’s telling me to do it."
Ferreira has always walked some sort of line, most notably between a major label home and a more underground sensibility. That sort of balance can seem like a high-wire act, but in reality Ferreira has achieved the best of both worlds: Space and time to do her own thing, with a little more of a mainstream audience to receive it. "I Blame Myself" is a celebration of that middle ground. It would be easy to mistake it as an admission of weakness, but it's really a declaration of force—a song about the power of vulnerability.
Welcome to Mixdown, an ongoing series where Pitchfork staffers and contributors talk about mixtapes and mixes that may not be covered in our reviews section but are worth discussing. This week we're tackling new mixtapes by Rich Homie Quan, Tinashe and Lil Bibby.
Corban Goble: Just so you guys know, I’m not listening to anything that wasn’t recorded in Chris Bosh’s basement from now on. So should I sit this one out?
Jordan Sargent: Chris Bosh’s basement is the new Carlos Boozer’s mansion. Corban, let’s keep talking in cryptic sports references for the rest of the chat.
Carrie Battan: Wait, I can actually go with this, this cryptic basketball reference thing. Most people don’t know this about me, but I was an NBA obsessive in the 8th grade, the year the 76ers were really good. I went home early from my 8th grade dance (I didn’t have a date, obviously) so I could watch one of the playoff games. (This is going somewhere, I promise!) During those playoffs I developed this devastating crush on (then-Sacramento Kings' guard) Mike Bibby, who was a very arcane semi-celebrity for a 13-year-old girl in the Philadelphia suburbs to be obsessed with. I had no one to talk about it with. Anyway, I can’t listen to the rapper Lil Bibby without thinking about it.
JS: Moving on.
CG: This is solid, but something like this is never going to bowl me over. I see a lot of people making the Hell Rell-meets-drill-music comparison and I don’t think that’s far off, though it probably doesn’t give Bibby enough credit. It’s fairly musical and workmanlike.
JS: I’m not sure what the general consensus is, but I much prefer Lil Herb, who is Bibby’s frequent rap partner and who appears on a few tracks here. Herb’s flow is a bit tighter, and he has much more charisma. But as far as pure street-rap, Free Crack is pretty solid. In terms of drill stuff I’d still rate it behind Lil Durk’s tape from this year and even Lil Reese’s from last year (wow much lil). Bibby’s songcraft is a bit lacking compared to those guys. King L really stands out when he pops up on this—he’s just more expressive, though Bibby certainly does have his own moments (the hooks on "Shout Out" or "Tired of Talkin" for instance).
CG: Carrie, did Free Crack exceed or fall short of your Mike Bibby-based expectations?
CB: Bibby, Mike > Bibby, Lil in my eyes still, but I do very much enjoy this tape— highlights include the song with both King L and Lil Herb ("Shout Out") and the song produced by Hit-Boy, "Whole Crew". Bibby has a bit of a French Montana thing going on in that he can sound like he just caught a cold and that he doesn’t have enough sheer charisma to carry a whole project but surrounds himself with good company. Two other things: a) I always like being reminded of Cam’ron’s ability to articulate the imbalances of power within the American workforce (Cam Skit: "America is not scheduled for us!") and b) this is definitely the first mixtape to kick off with a Shakira sample and close with a Florence and the Machine sample.
People have a lot of hope that Drake’s co-sign will help Bibby and Lil Herb get big, but maybe it's Mike Bibby who'll catch on and turn the whole NBA onto them.
CB:Can we all promise right now that We Will Never Stop Going In?
CG: Duh.
JS: I made this joke on Twitter but (but!) I can’t not read this mixtape title in DJ Khaled’s voice. To me, no one more epitomizes the ethos of promising to never stop going in than Khaled. Also it just sounds like a Khaled ramble. I really hope that this leads to Quan’s major label debut being the rap game When the Pawn…. For the sake of space I will not draw that joke out any further. But, really, this is a fantastic mixtape.
CG: I feel like this guy is going to make some catchy shit in his time. I’m pulling out "1000", because that was something I went back to right away, but it applies to a lot of songs on here; just kind of the strechiness and earworminess of many of the hooks. Pretty effortless-seeming, while also differentiating himself from someone who is able to do something similar melodically like Future. That’s kind of stuff I favor.
CB: I’m going to be the downer here and say that I'm not that thrilled by I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In (I just wanted to type it out in its entirety again). "Type of Way" never struck me the way it strikes other people; this tape feels like a slightly flattened out version of that sound. It's telling that the parts I like the best are Young Thug’s guest verse and "I Fuck Wit You Girl", the song on which he apologizes to a girl for cheating on her over and over again.
JS: I’ll single out my two favorites: "Blah Blah Blah", which is basically the inverse of "I Fuck Wit You Girl" but also has an instantly memorable, babbling chorus. Also a kind of weird but funny easter egg referencing Shawty Lo in the pre-chorus. I just walk around going "blah blah blah" now, but just to myself and not to my boyfriend as Quan might advise. Also there is "Walk Thru", which is the best new rap song I’ve heard in months. It reminds me of one of my favorite lost mixtape cuts ever, Young Dro’s smooth R&B track "All That Money". Both that and "Walk Thru" remind me of jook, an airy twist on Miami bass that was pretty popular in Florida a few years back. It’s a sound I love, and the hook on "Walk Thru" is effortless. Everyone should go and listen to Grind Mode’s "I’m So High" when they’re done reading Mixdown.
CB: I remember reading about Tinashe when she teamed up with Jacques Greene earlier this year (on a song called "Painted Faces", which I really like) and wondering whether she’d find a way to make things work within the major-label industrial complex or start working outside of those confines, like so many artists have done this year. This mixtape definitely shows her doing the latter—and it’s occasionally a very nice-sounding tape, but as with a lot of this stuff, it blurs the line between experimental and just amateur. I do love Travi$ Scott’s verse on "Vulnerable"; I'm hoping this song, along with the new "Shabba" remix are the first in a long line of riffs on "I’m In It".
JS: That one with Travi$ Scott is maybe my favorite on the tape, but it’s also the one where Tinashe’s vocals are treated as if she’s just a sample. And that highlights that this kind of R&B can be tough terrain to navigate when you’re working with producers who came up cutting apart vocals. There’s just a really fine line between when this stuff is affecting and when it kind of just floats on by. That said, there are good tracks on here: "Midnight Sun", which has a strong chorus, a tricky little drum pattern and then slips into a swagged out little outro (shoutout to Terius Nash).
CG: Yeah, "Midnight Sun" was the one that jumped out at me too; it feels a little more heated-up than the others. Listening through the tape before "Midnight Sun", I had that feeling like when you’re at a arena and maybe the opener is on, and you’re sitting and chilling and then the song you like comes on and you’re like "OK, I should probably stand up for this one." There’s a few moments on this like that, but a lot of it is kind of aimless and not particularly memorable.
JS: Yeah I’d like to see her emphasize her voice more. I mean, her vocals on "1 For Me" are amazing. That’s a legit chorus. There’s potential here, I think we can all see where this could lead to something pretty great.
CB: If Tinashe were reading this she might tell us to revisit mixtape track "Stunt": "Fuck your opinion/ I don’t need your approval, baby… Talking about some shit you probably never get to do." Hashtag Brandy Deep Cuts.
Since this is the last Mixdown this year, I think we should close out this one in the year-end spirit: by ranking our Top Mixdown Moments in list form.
Mixdown's Top Five Moments:
5. The time Rich Kidz read Mixdown and saluted us via Twitter. 5a. The time Kid Daytona read Mixdown and tweeted gratitude at us even though we didn’t say anything that nice about his mixtape. 4. Carrie pointing out the DatPiff comment that broke down the Delusional Thomas mixtape for everyone (no one) who didn’t understand it was Mac Miller rapping in a chipmunk voice. 3. The time Corban called out Stalley for falsifying details of his alleged college basketball career. 2. Jordan detailing hybrid burger food item in his Yeezus tour breakdown (which was the #1 moment on our Mixdown Reader’s Poll). 1. Carrie's Mike Bibby crush-zone anecdote, which you can watch on ESPN later today as part of the Instant Classic series.
CG: Bieber recently claimed that swag was dead. Any last words?
JS: Swag died when I bought Yeezus tour merch.
CB: 2013 is the year I started earnestly and involuntarily saying "swag" as a statement of approval. Sorry to my friends. Swag is dead. Also, marry me Mike Bibby.
Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville opens with an ad for itself. A fast-talking commercial heralds the main actors ("the amazing Lily Tomlin!"), as though they were lots in an auction or artists on a K-Tel compilation. In the background a group of album covers—all fictional, all from the movie—glide by on an endless loop. It’s a slyly disorienting opening sequence, dutifully listing the cast and director while blurring the line between fiction and reality. Only after the film (and the soundtrack) have been advertised does Nashville settle into the city proper, with the voice of fictional politician Hal Phillip Walker taking over for the commercial barker.
"They’d sell albums that way. You’d hear all that pitch. They still do it," Altman explains on Criterion’s new DVD/Blu-Ray edition of Nashville, which many of us have been waiting to see for years now. The rapid-fire introduction is a wink at the film’s subject matter—American popular culture in general, and the country music industry in particular—yet even today there's something jarring in the way it closes the gap between the actors and the musicians they play. If you didn’t know the names Keith Carradine or Ronee Blakely or Timothy Brown, you might assume they were singers.
"Nashville is, above all, a celebration of its own performers," film critic Pauline Kael wrote in her controversial NewYorkerreview. "The actors have been encouraged to work up material for their roles, and not only do they do their own singing but most of them wrote their own songs—and wrote them in character." In films like MASH and The Long Goodbye, Altman toyed with cast, often assigning roles counterintuitively and letting the actors improvise their own dialogue. In 1975, Nashville appeared to take that strategy even further by letting the actors devise their own music. Most journalists and critics repeated Kael’s assertion, creating a memorable myth around the film.
And yet it wasn't quite true, as film scholar Gayle Magee points out in her 2006 essay "Songwriting, Advertising and Mythmaking in the New Hollywood: The Case of Nashville". A few of the actors in Nashville were singers first, and some of them wrote their songs well before Joan Tewkesbury devised the screenplay. Keith Carradine, who won an Oscar for his ballad of sexual gamesmanship, "I’m Easy", played that song and another original, "It Don’t Worry Me", for Altman on the set of his 1974 movie Thieves Like Us. Ronee Blakely penned "Dues" and "Bluebird" not for her emotionally fragile character Barbara Jean, but for her own 1972 self-titled album; her songs "Tapedeck" and "Idaho Home" are included on her follow-up, Welcome, released the same year as Nashville. Even Karen Black, who had appeared in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces and was one of the better-known actor-singers in the cast, had written her two songs, "Memphis" and "Rolling Stone", long before she took on the role of country ingénue Connie White.
In other words, these songs weren’t written for the movie; the movie was written around the songs. While that feat may not sound quite as impressive as a crew of nonprofessionals spontaneously transformed into a troupe of country hitmakers, it actually adds a new dimension to the film, its soundtrack, and Altman’s broader meditation on authenticity and constructed identity. The original vinyl edition of the Nashville soundtrack—which remains a curious artifact of 70s cinema as well as a surprisingly sturdy album in its own right—includes no definitive tracklist on the back cover, so the tracklist remains vague and disarrayed. In addition to thirteen songs from the movie, the album also includes the artist introductions and between-song banter, often going out of its way to suggest that the character, not the actor, is performing the tune. Altman’s conflation of past and present, actor and character, reality and fiction suggests that American pop culture is a mirrorhouse of shifting identities and distorted reflections.
Some of the performances in the film—like Tommy Brown's rendition of the Blakely-penned "Bluebird"—are set at the new Opry, which at the time of filming was less than a year old. The Grand Ole Opry had been housed at the historic Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville since 1941, but in ’74 it moved out to Opryland, a country music theme park. Altman makes good use of the space, contrasting its elaborate stage and flashy lights with the pronounced folksiness of the emcees, who pitch Goo Goo Clusters between musical numbers. The barn façade that serves as a conspicuously old-timey backdrop seems like a fitting metaphor for this glitzy era in Nashville history and for post-JFK pop culture in general: a symbol of performed authenticity, of sophisticated technology conveying downhome sensibilities.
As it skips from Opryland to the Parthenon (another useful symbol of ersatz culture), the music in Nashville skirts the cusp of satire; some of these numbers are deeply, almost purposefully hokey, while others are legitimately good. "200 Years", sung by Gibson as Haven Hamilton at the start of the film, makes a sharp jab at bicentennial sanctimony and unearned gravitas. Two centuries is not very long for a Western country, and the 1970s are not remembered for doing much right: Nixon was only a few years out of the White House, Vietnam was still a lingering foreign policy failure, gas prices were skyrocketing, and most cities—especially New York—were suffering. Especially in contrast to the increasingly ludicrous promises made by the film’s phantom politician (which include changing the national anthem and barring lawyers from holding public office), "200 Years" shouts down—and therefore plays up—the reality of these problems and Nashville’s blindness to them.
On the other hand, "Dues", ostensibly a big hit for the mentally unstable Barbara Jean, is a serious and affecting account of a rocky relationship, which the film makes clear is a commentary on the singer’s relationship with her manager/husband Barnett (played with oily menace by Allen Garfield). The song positions her as a deeply sympathetic character, one of the few in the movie. And yet, Altman shoots her performance of the song at Opryland in a way that makes it obvious that she’s lip-synching—the only time this happens in Nashville. Immediately following the performance, she becomes increasingly deranged, although Barbara Jean never lets her downhome façade slip even as she rambles on about chicken and her grandmother clicking her false teeth to the radio; the character never breaks character. Barbara Jean seems to be based on Loretta Lynn, from her elaborate dresses to her manager/husband to her on-stage meltdowns. Those who dismiss this film as a mean-spirited satire of 1970s country music culture miss Altman’s complex and affecting maneuver of transforming a real person like Lynn, herself hidden behind Nashville’s gingham and glitz, into a character/caricature, only so she can be humanized again.
And finally there's "It Don’t Worry Me", written by Carradine as Tom Frank, one member of a West Coast country trio and love triangle. On its face, it’s a statement of personal freedom not unlike Kris Kristofferson’s "Me and Bobby McGee", but it appears throughout the film in various iterations: a bluegrass number, a gospel tune, a folk-rock anthem, and a patriotic call to arms. Each time, it takes on new significance and meaning. By the film’s end, when a drifter named Albuquerque (played by Barbara Harris) leads a sing-along at the Parthenon, "It Don't Worry Me" becomes a damning indictment not simply of country music but American pop culture at large, which distracts us from the tragedies and injustices that happen every day, assuaging our fears and numbing our outrage. The ending is at once cathartic and intensely cynical: a bicentennial bringdown that still resonates so many years and hit singles later.
The Neil Young Archives series has kept its targets mostly clustered around a thin slice of his long career: 1968-1971, the brief era stretching from Buffalo Springfield’s dissolution to the cusp of Young’s early commercial peak around the time of Harvest. As I mentioned yesterday in my review of the new Live at the Cellar Door release, I’d like to see Young’s “Performance Series” spread out a little more. Between the 1971 Massey Hall shows and the 1984-1985 International Harvesters shows released in 2011 as A Treasure, there’s a gaping hole in the officially released live timeline that covers some of his best years.
Fortunately, Young is among the most bootlegged artists in rock, and the dark bootleg underbelly of YouTube grants listeners easy access to these unofficial archives. So here are five shows that fill that current gap, some of which will hopefully find their way to official releases some time around the Archives Vol. 2 box set is released in approximately 2029. (Many of these bootlegs—or the stories behind them—I learned about from Tyler Wilcox’s excellent Tumblr, Doom & Gloom From The Tomb.)
“Welcome to Miami Beach, ladies and gentlemen. Everything is cheaper than it looks.”
Though largely recorded in the summer of 1973, the caustic Tonight’s The Night wouldn’t make it into record stores until two years later. That didn’t stop Young and his tequila-soaked Santa Monica Flyers from taking the album on the road, playing the unheard material for befuddled European crowds between long, mumbling monologues about Miami Beach and dead friends. The killer joke of the tour was when Young reassured the crowd, “Here’s one you’ve heard before,” then launching into a second (sometimes third), even longer and more harrowing rendition of the unreleased album’s title track. It’s a sloppy Irish wake gut-punch that makes the studio album sound almost cheery by comparison.
“Here’s another bummer for you...that’s my trip, man.”
Perhaps the most famous Neil Young bootleg of all, this set was a surprise solo appearance at the dinky Greenwich Village club after a Leon Redbone/Ry Cooder bill. Due to a big CSNY reunion, Young never properly toured his incredible On The Beach, leaving this show as the sole evidence of what the long, post-apocalyptic dirges of “Motion Pictures” and “Ambulance Blues” sounded like fresh from the studio. None of this material would have worked in an arena anyway, of course, but its darkness is still lost on a stoned, starstruck crowd who giggle their way through the newly-written “Long May You Run” and shout for “Southern Man,” prodding Young into a hollow-eyed speech about fame. Then again, Young also shares his recipe for pot-infused “honey slides” at one point, so his perhaps his mental state that night wasn’t all that far off from those of his fans.
“Every time I tried to record this song, someone stepped in and stopped it.”
The 70s were so prolific for Neil Young that he eventually started to outpace his record company, putting together at least two albums (Homegrown and Chrome Dreams) that were shelved for mysterious reasons at the last minute. Some of the songs from those records surfaced on this 1976 tour, where shows were split into acoustic and electric halves. At some point, Young’s friend, photographer and archivist Joel Bernstein put together this mixtape of soundboard recordings from the solo sets, rescuing some songs from obscurity and providing a comprehensive digest of his most fruitful stretch of songwriting.
“Neil Young...one of the Ducks, just one of the Ducks.”
Neil Young’s nearly decade-long bad fog of loneliness finally lifted in Santa Cruz, where he formed a new band called the Ducks with local musicians and spent the summer playing under-the-radar shows at the town’s two clubs. The scraps that have been discovered offer a rare glimpse of Young as hired-gun guitarist playing straightforward bar-band rock'n'roll mostly written by other people, with all four members alternating songs and vocals (in a much more collaborative way than CSNY ever attempted). It turned out to just be a summer fling for Young, but some of the razor-edged sound the Ducks deployed at the Catalyst and The Crossroads Club would resurface with Crazy Horse in the Rust Never Sleeps era.
“We’re going to be practicing for a long time today, Mom!”
It’s often forgotten that in the middle of Neil’s supposedly anti-commercial 80’s, he recorded two albums with his reliable collaborators Crazy Horse. People forget this because those two albums—Landing On Water and the live-recorded Life—sound horrible. But the underlying material, such as “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks” or “Prisoners of Rock & Roll,” is actually pretty solid, and some of the weird digital sounds Young was aiming for as far back as Re-ac-tor and Trans are actually pretty interesting when they’re not drowned in 80s cocaine-gloss production. Staged as a faux garage band practice, complete with Mom yelling from upstairs, this 1986 slightly new-wavy edition of the Horse (warning: keytars are involved) can hang with the far more acclaimed earlier and later incarnations, with a boost from a much weirder setlist.
Down Is Up discusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos and self-releases, as well as output from small or overlooked labels and communities. This week, Jenn Pelly talks to Olympia-bred rock band Milk Music about their new video for "No, Nothing, My Shelter", directed by Dylan Sharp of Gun Outfit.
Some of my favorite records of the year came from West Coast bands with ties to the subterranean Olympia rock scene, among them Milk Music's Cruise Your Illusion and Gun Outfit's Hard Coming Down. Today, Milk Music are sharing a homemade visual accompaninment to Cruise highlight "No, Nothing, My Shelter"—an endearing ode to Jimi and Elvis with a rock-as-saviour theme. The video was shot on Super 8 film in the desert outside of Joshua Tree, Calif., where Milk Music were living, and it was directed by Dylan Sharp of Gun Outfit. Milk Music's Alex Coxen plays a mystical joker figure alongside Gun Outfit's Carrie Keith, both of whom tip-toe through the desert and dance on a cliff among other curious ritualistic behaviors. The video has an analog grace and lawless outsider feel to it, much like these two bands themselves. I exchanged emails with Coxen and Sharp to talk about the video and why Milk Music are taking an indefinite hiatus from performing live.
Alex Coxen of Milk Music
Pitchfork: What inspired the video and its characters?
Dylan Sharp: I was inspired by the light of the desert. Thousands of films have tried to use it for psychological effect. That night we were out there, we watched that Leonard Cohen European tour documentary where he takes acid before a show in Italy and dramatically loses the vibe then goes backstage and dry shaves his face before returning triumphantly to the stage. Pasolini's Arabian Nightswas the film I watched right before we shot, which I took a lot of inspiration from. But the main inspiration was "shoot at sunset in the desert, can't go wrong."
I like that Pink Floyd "Echoes" show in the desert, and any part in a Werner Herzog movie where Popol Vuh is playing—not really music videos but performance/ritual in a natural setting. I like how humanizing music videos from the 80s are—seeing some people ham it up in their partially realized dream world and really getting an understanding of where they're coming from.
Pitchfork: Alex seems to play some kind of joker or magician. What about that imagery is interesting to you?
DS: For me, he's an ambiguous clown guy who possesses some marginal powers and just wants to groove. The musician as a performer is a fool, trotting out his personality for the pleasure of the king, but at least he gets to pleasure himself, too. A lot of the imagery was chosen for visual rather than symbolic effect.
AC: The joker dances while the world burns.
Pitchfork: Was there a specific feeling you wanted the desert setting to conjure?
DS: The setting is important because that's where Milk Music lived and wrote their new record. It's a pretty rare opportunity to be able to live in such a remote place with your friends and we wanted to document it. It was easy and fun.
AC: We're also operating on almost no budget, always, so the desert was a wonderful place to make something for cheap because the light is great and it's empty. No stupid looking people or cars to fuck up the shot.
Pitchfork: The video seems to emphasize the act of dancing—the close-ups of carefully moving feet, the images of Alex and Carrie dancing in front of the blue sky, etc. How important is dancing to you?
AC: I dance to stay alive.
Pitchfork: Carrie from Gun Outfit is in the video, and it was directed by Dylan. What's the history and relationship between Gun Outfit and Milk Music?
DS: We're all old friends. I've been playing in bands with Dave since 1999, most recently in White Boss. We've all got a lot of love and respect for each other.
AC: Love, Respect, Trust. Gun Outfit were an influence on us. That's a massive statement, even if it sounds ordinary. Still are an influence. We're lucky to have them as such dear friends.
Pitchfork: Is there any reason you chose this song from the LP for a video?
DS: Hendrix lives.
Pitchfork: Why is Milk Music ceasing to perform live? What do you plan to do with your free time?
AC: I just can't do it any longer. The music business is a bunch of jive bullshit and I don't want us to be available for the public to mutilate and misrepresent. I feel we can exist in more interesting ways while producing more interesting art. And our peers don't challenge the industry AT ALL, just complain to each other about "having" to play shows for bullshit sponsors. I think it's all a pathetic attempt for a current counterculture and I can't have anything to do with it. Life is too short and music is too important.
Pitchfork: What is the meaning behind the title of the next album, Mystic 100s?
AC: Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out. It doesn't matter much to me.
In a 2013 fourth quarter that has seen virtually every leading contender for the Queen of Pop title drop a new album, Beyoncé just trumped everybody, crashing in late last week with an eponymous set that sucked all the oxygen out of the internet.
Before the weekend was even over, Billboard had already reported that Beyoncé is set to debut at No. 1 when the album chart is made official in a couple of days. And Bey isn’t going to win by a whisker, either. The sales number will be fairly impressive—one that will put the upper-200Ks we’ve seen from the likes of Gaga, Miley and Katy to shame. A total of at least 300,000 copies is reportedly a lock, 400,000 is probable, and a number as high as 600,000 is not out of the question.
All this is remarkable for a number of reasons—Queen B is rewriting many rules of the game with this album:
Off-cycle release: The tracking week for the Billboard 200 album chart runs from Monday to Sunday, and Beyoncé materialized late on Thursday night, leaving just over three days to amass sales before the chart week closed. Bey’s 72 hours of sales will trump discs that were in stores all week.
Holiday competition: The album dropped into the thick of shopping season, when album sales are stronger generally, giving Beyoncé a somewhat higher hurdle to clear to reach No. 1. It should be said that by picking a mid-December week, she avoided the two heaviest album-buying weeks of the season, Thanksgiving/Black Friday and the week leading directly into Christmas; in mid-December, 200,000 copies or so is generally enough to reach the penthouse.
Digital-only: Speaking of Christmas, Beyoncé can’t be wrapped and placed under the tree. At least for now, it’s only available as a digital “video album” comprising 14 songs and 17 music videos.
Price: Said album is on sale for $15.99—that’s not just “retail price,” that’s the only price. Sixteen bucks is something we all got used to in the late ’90s, the pre-Napster era of $18 compact discs and no available retail singles. But it’s exceedingly rare nowadays for a front-line album from a major label shooting for a big number to avoid sale pricing altogether. Digital retailers like AmazonMP3 are notorious for deep-discounting new albums—including, most infamously, a 99-cent sale on Lady Gaga’s Born This Way in 2011. Even Taylor Swift’s Red, an album that last year sold a staggering 1.2 million copies in a week and managed to avoid digital deep discounting, was sale-priced on CD by Target and Best Buy at just under $10. A first-week superstar album only selling at $16 is practically unheard-of nowadays.
Retail exclusivity: The only store selling Beyoncé in week one is the iTunes Store. Apple has had exclusives on new albums before, the most prominent being a set from Bey’s own husband—in August 2011, Jay-Z dropped his Kanye West team-up Watch the Throne at iTunes exclusively for its first three days. However, Throne actually underperformed a bit in week one; early forecasters were expecting a number above 500,000, and the final figure was 436,000—impressive, but neither Jay’s nor Ye’s highest. Anyone who thought Queen B limiting herself to Apple’s marketplace would cause her to fall similarly short are eating crow right now, as her rumored sales estimates drift higher and higher.
The person who’s probably most peeved by Bey crashing the album-chart penthouse is the guy who, until Thursday, was expected to easily hold it: country megastar Garth Brooks, whose post-retirement comeback set, Blame It All on My Roots: Five Decades of Influences, took the No. 1 slot last week. The multi-disc box set of covers, greatest hits and a live DVD has been selling strongly since its release three weeks ago.
For chart-watchers, there’s something weirdly poetic about Beyoncé ejecting Brooks from the No. 1 spot. Garth is the king of the nontraditional, make-up-your-own-rules album release—he’s topped the charts before with everything from a slickly packaged box set to a priced-to-move live double CD. True to form, Brooks’s Blame rewrites almost all the same rules as Beyoncé:
Off-cycle release: Dropping on a Thursday—Thanksgiving Day, in fact—Garth’s box set had only four days to amass sales in its first chart week. He rolled a respectable 164,000 copies in those four days.
Holiday competition: By releasing his set on Thanksgiving, Brooks gave himself an even bigger challenge than Queen B—albums landing the week of Black Friday face stiff competition. Blameultimately debuted at No. 3, held back by the ultimate stocking-stuffer album: boy band One Direction’s Midnight Memories, which sold more than 500,000 copes in its first week. (Brooks then had the last laugh, suffering a smaller second-week fall than 1D and ejecting them from No. 1 the following week.)
Pricey: Brooks’s album is both a premium item and a steal. The set retails for $30 and hasn’t sold below $25. But that’s for a package that includes six CDs and two DVDs—unlike Beyoncé, Garth priced his holiday gambit lower than the norm. Still, if you want something new from either act this Christmas, you’re going to need more than a Hamilton.
Retail exclusivity: Brooks has long had a tight relationship with Walmart, and Blame is only available there and at Walmart-affiliated Sam’s Clubs.
Pretty much the only major way Brooks differs from Bey is over the digital question: Garth has long forbade Apple, or any digital retailer, from selling his music. (Since the Beatles hit iTunes three years ago, Brooks remains one of the last digital holdouts; most of the acts mentioned in this 2010 article have since caved.) Most times of year, this intransigence would make Brooks the less consumer-friendly act—but at the holidays, his box set is perfect tree fodder, likely a big reason for his strong, steady sales. This time it’s Beyoncé who’s being the consumer-challenging diva—if you want to give the full Beyoncé experience to a loved one, wrapped up with a bow, you’ll either have to give a gift card or know something about burning DVDs.
In short, when this holiday season is done, it will have been dominated by two albums, and two artists, that set their own terms of sale. And arguably, by releasing the less Christmas-friendly collection but rolling higher numbers, Beyoncé has out-Garthed Garth. What makes the numbers Mrs. Carter is rolling all the more remarkable is that her fans are clearly, largely, buying Beyoncé for themselves.
The question one is left asking, once Beyoncé’s remarkable debut is official, is: Where were all these fans two and a half years ago? Bey’s last studio album, 4, debuted in the middle of summer 2011 with 310,000 copies. That’s a more than solid number, but it’s the lowest debut-week sum of her post–Destiny’s Child career. More remarkably, 4 generated no Top 10 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100—not “Countdown,” not “Run the World (Girls),” not “Love on Top”—making it the only album of her entire career, DC or otherwise, that failed to do so. In total, 4 has sold about 1.4 million copies, solidly platinum but well below the sales of her prior three solo albums.
This explains, in part, why it was so difficult to predict what Beyoncé’s fifth album would do when it finally materialized. In the intervening three years, she’s had America’s favorite baby, sung the National Anthem for President Obama’s second inauguration (not without controversy) and been showcased at Superbowl halftime—events that have only solidified her place in the firmament of national treasures, even if they haven’t done much to get her back on the radio.
Now, throw in all the X-factors surrounding the iTunes exclusive and the rare all-video album (a gambit that didn’t exactly work for Eurythmics a quarter-century ago), and predictions become maddeningly difficult. If anyone tells you they knew a week ago that Beyoncé’s next album would be a foregone blockbuster, they’re either lying or haven’t been paying attention.
With 20/20 hindsight, it’s now clear that Beyoncé is overperforming because it broke the rules. Fans aren’t just buying an album, they’re buying into an event. Artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Garth Brooks have shown that event albums—releases that create their own weather—are high-risk, high-reward prospects.
This time, Bey has made the tactic work for her—like gangbusters. A couple of months from now, we’ll know this ingenious, D-Day-like album release really did work if a song from Beyoncé puts Queen B back in the Hot 100’s Top 10, where she belongs.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Most Played Song of 2013: Deafheaven's "Dream House". I love this song, and would listen to it a lot anyhow, but it helped that my son Henry also loves it, refers to is as "Super Hero Music," and asks me to play it every morning while he does what he calls his "Superman Dance". Imagine a three-year old kid combining hardcore-style floor punching with breakdancing and interpretive yoga, and you're halfway there.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: The new Bill Callahan album, Dream River, inspired me to pull out all my old Smog records, which I do return to from time to time. I ended up listening to the Kicking a Couple Around EP more than any of them. It's so spare and dark and basically perfect. It didn't get its due at the time but looking back I feel like gives a sense of where Callahan would end up almost 20 years later.
Musical Highlights: I organized this two-day event, Basilica Soundscape, up in Hudson, N.Y. with Melissa Auf Der Maur, Brian DeRan, and Tony Stone. We had this one part where Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler directed/conducted a simultaneous performance by Evian Christ, Julianna Barwick, Pharmakon, and Pig Destroyer. It was an idea Matthew and I had come up with one night, kind of jokingly, and to see it work out—and sound as beautiful as it did—was very satisfying. (It was also just nice to be a part of a "festival" that didn't have over-the-top sponsorship or feel like a festival.) Other highlights included Carcass at St. Vitus, Converge at St. Vitus—and just about any other band at St. Vitus, definitely the best thing to happen to NYC live music in a long time. I also enjoyed making ongoing Twitter jokes about Bon Iver's "Holocene", the Emo Revival, and folks like Riff Raff, Jay Z, and Lou Barlow crying themselves to sleep. That, and singingMajical Cloudz songs as lullabies to my kids.
Musical Lowlights: So many people died. And the Pixies.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Autre Ne Veut: "Play by Play" 02 Haim: "The Wire" 03 Majical Cloudz: "Bugs Don’t Buzz" 04 Deafheaven: "Dream House" 05 Rhye: "Open" 06 Crystal & S. Koshi: "Break the Dawn" 07 Glass Candy: "Warm in the Winter" 08 A$AP Ferg: "Shabba" 09 Protomartyr: "Jumbo’s" 10 Daughn Gibson: "Kissin on the Blacktop"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City 02 Bill Callahan: Dream River 03 Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time 04 Kurt Vile: Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze 05 Majical Cloudz: Impersonator 06 Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold 07 Eleanor Friedberger: Personal Record 08 Ashley Monroe: Like a Rose 09 DJ Koze: Amygdala 10 DJ Rashad: Double Cup
Most Played Song of 2013: One of the reasons I don't trust iTunes as a metric of my most played music of the year is that when I get really fixated on a song I'll start it over long before iTunes registers it as having been played, kind of like how rats will compulsively press a button when they discover it gives them a sugar pellet. Conversely, I'll find songs that bring me a sense of peace and well-being when played at low volumes for hours on end, but I don't know that I could say I'm really listening to these songs—it's more like I'm bathing in them, or breathing them like they were air. Anyway, Bill Callahan's "Small Plane" was the new song I played most this year, and Haim's "The Wire" was the new song I listened to most ravenously. I also spent countless hours running in my neighborhood to Theo Parrish's re-edit of Etta James's "In the Basement", which is peerless, and deserves a place at almost any social function.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Hard question to which I will give three answers: Chet Baker Sings, the Roches' The Roches and Thelonious Monk's Solo Monk.
Musical Highlights: Nothing compares to the hours I spent listening to Willie Nelson's Stardust in my kitchen at sundown, moderately stoned and cooking dinner for the woman who in six months I will legally be able to call my wife. Also, watching said woman theatrically drop her mic and walk off the karaoke floor at a Best Western after the KJ turned down her volume during a performance of Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry."
Musical Lowlights: Hearing a wedding band in Cincinnati, Ohio, soundcheck with an unimpeachable rendition of Steely Dan's "Peg" and then not actually play it after the ceremony. Had I known, I would have gone home earlier.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Chvrches: "The Mother We Share"
02 Bastille: "Pompeii"
03 Lady Gaga: "Do What U Want" [ft. R. Kelly]
04 Young Galaxy: "Pretty Boy" (Peaking Lights remix)
05 Disclosure: "Latch" [ft. Sam Smith]
06 Pulp: "After You"
07 Daft Punk: "Doin' It Right" [ft. Panda Bear]
08 Sky Ferreira: "Heavy Metal Heart"
09 Los Campesinos!: "What Death Leaves Behind"
10 Kirin J Callinan: "Love Delay"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Kanye West: Yeezus 02 Chvrches: The Bones of What You Believe
Most Played Song of 2013: Bastille: "Pompeii". The story of the destruction of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii terrified me as a kid. For some reason, I was absolutely convinced that my home city was also going to be buried under thousands of feet of fast-moving molten lava, despite there being no active volcanoes anywhere near Philadelphia. (That we know of, amirite?) Maybe I was just subconsciously absorbing the fact that in the 80s in Philly, fire raining down from the sky wasn't that far-fetched of an idea.
Anyway, when this song called "Pompeii" by the British band Bastille popped up last winter, something buried deep inside of me latched on to it. I've always been a sucker for high drama, and this one is full of it: Lyrics like "Great clouds roll over the hills / Bringing darkness from above," "hey-oh" backing vocals that ring out both ominous and joyful, the kind of chorus that feels like the sun breaking through a thunderstorm. All year, I've craved "Pompeii". I've had to ration it, to force myself not to listen over and over again. I get excited when it pops up in random places, like when it was playing in the grocery store where I was shopping a few weeks ago. Apparently, it's becoming a bit of a hit, so that might start happening a whole lot more often.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' set at the Beacon Theatre in March was one of the best shows I saw this year. In the weeks leading up to it, I indulged myself by listening to a whole lot of Nick Cave back catalogue. I kept returning to this 2004 double LP, drawn in by its regal romance and terror. But later in the year, the album came back to me in an unexpected way.
This fall, I re-read the entire Harry Potter series, because this is a totally normal thing for a 32-year-old to do. (And let me tell you: I'm not the only one on the Pitchfork staff who re-read the entire Harry Potter series this year. Not naming names...) I've also been watching all of the movies. Last week, I made it to the scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in which Harry and Hermione dance to The Lyre of Orpheus' "O Children". I actually gasped. It's a bizarre scene that's not in the book and kind of comes out of nowhere. There's barely any pop music in the entire eight-movie series, and then all of a sudden, here's Nick Cave's unmistakable baritone booming out over a radio at one of the most despairing, most hopeless points in the whole Harry Potter saga. But it works. It really works. And if it ended up turning any young Harry Potter obsessives into Nick Cave fans, well, awesome.
Musical Highlights: On December 2, I experienced the biggest surprise of my life: At the end of an incredibly stressful, miserable day, my boyfriend took me up to the roof of our apartment building and proposed marriage. After a whole lot of screaming and crying, we went down to our apartment and I experienced the second biggest surprise of my life: 15 friends and family members gathered there, having an engagement party. (Somehow, all of these people had been planning this surprise for weeks and I didn't catch on. I like to consider myself a pretty detail-oriented, observant person—I guess I'm not!)
The soundtrack was a special playlist my boyfr—Sorry! Fiancé! Still getting used to this!—had put together in honor of the occasion. It included Pulp's "Something Changed", Bowie's "Be My Wife", the Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love", the Zombies' "This Will Be Our Year", the Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me", and, yes, Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream", among other selections. It was the greatest playlist of all time and I don't care what anybody says because HOLY SHIT I'M GETTING MARRIED.
"Thanks to Joel," Implodes guitarist Matt Jencik offered at the end of their Thursday night set at the Empty Bottle. "I bought my copy of Prazision the week it came out. I guess that shows my age. But I've still got it, and lots of others, too." Prazision is the debut of droning Virginian post-rockers Labradford, the first record issued by Chicago-based experimental imprint Kranky, which Joel Leoschke co-founded with the since-departed Bruce Adams in 1993. Over a long, frozen weekend, Kranky celebrated 20 years of record-making with four shows around the city. As a rule, Kranky bands don't do a whole lot of talking. But when they did, they spent most of it like Jencik, thanking Leoschke for his decades-long commitment to the patient, peculiar music that Kranky's made its name on.
Never ones for brevity, Kranky stretched out their 20th anniversary weekend into four nights. "It's a dream lineup," Leoschke told me Thursday morning. In large part, Implodes' Ken Camden and Kranky publicist/Nudge guitarist Brian Foote were jointly responsible for booking the weekend's festivities. "I told [Ken and Brian] I'd go along with it if I didn't have to do too much," Loescke joked, but the weekend's itinerary neatly hit on every aspect of Kranky's current roster. Thursday was, by most measures, the rock show, sandwiching the psychedelic drones of ex-Chicagoan Rob Lowe's Lichens with the somber, pulsing Implodes and the gristly post-punk of Disappears. Friday and Saturday moved the party to the fairly new Constellation (co-owned by Pitchfork Music Festival producer Mike Reed), with performances from Tim Hecker, Grouper, Benoit Pioulard and others. On Sunday came the main event, a 90-minute set from Texan drone heroes Stars of the Lid at Lincoln Hall that found them joined by the 10-piece Wordless Music Orchestra. Leoschke's long waved off any intimations that there's anything like a "Kranky sound," pointing out the very obvious distance between a noisy rock band like Disappears and the blooming drones of Stars of the Lid. Spend a weekend with this music, though, and certain themes begin to emerge. Vocals are rare, and when present, rarely comprehensible. Song lengths frequently surpass the ten-minute mark. Traditional song structures take a backseat to textural explorations. Much of the music Kranky releases requires a kind of concentration that's fairly uncommon in a live setting, particularly in a rock club like the Empty Bottle; start fiddling with your phone halfway through a hushed 20-minute drone piece, and chances are, you'll break the spell.
There was a kind of tacit social contract at work throughout the weekend, a silent agreement to keep quiet so as not to overpower the often skeletal, low-toned music on offer. Friday at Constellation, Christopher Bisonette set his rippling ambience to a few frames of distressed nature scenes; it's not as though anybody'd thrown a "shut the hell up" sign on the door, but you'd no sooner talk through something like that than you would a movie. At times, the tranquility of the crowd at Sunday's Stars of the Lid show at Lincoln Hall was downright eerie. At set break, the couple behind me ordered food, which arrived two songs into Stars of the Lid. You could tell they were hesitant to even grab a fry for fear of wrinkling the butcher paper. You could, in fact, hear a pin drop; when they started washing out glasses behind the bar, several heads turned, a few scowls were exchanged. With anything less than total absorption from the listener, the most delicate of this music quickly turns into background noise. Like a book that teaches you how to read it as you go along, this music teaches you how to listen to it, how to free yourself from distraction and appreciate its slow motion beauty, to consider every constituent element. When you give yourself over to it entirely, it's a time-distorting, sense-enhancing thing. In this era of endless distraction, that kind of sustained patience takes some adjustment. But the reward for your stillness is considerable: 45 uninterrupted minutes just to think. I know how this sounds, but even today, after several nights immersed in sound, my mind feels clearer, less restless.
Kranky's never chased trends, never signed anybody to keep up their bottom line; for two decades, Leoschke's stuck with a genuine, personal vision that, at a time when all factions of the music industry are scrambling to stay afloat, feels uncommon. Leoschke puts out records he likes; it certainly helps that he has a world-class ear for immersive, forward-thinking music, but the consistency of Kranky's carefully curated output has engendered the kind of trust that allows him to sell out four nights of beautiful, challenging music. Kranky records require patience, but they inspire devotion; how else to explain the hundreds of not-exactly-outdoorsy types who left the comfort of their turntables on the coldest weekend Chicago's seen in some time to chase this music all over the city. Before a brief encore, Stars of the Lid broke out "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface", from 2007's And Their Refinement of the Decline. As the song swelled, the koi pond visuals they'd been playing to went warp-speed; the whole thing quickly became impossibly immense—a good quarter-hour of sheer supernova. Walking out of Lincoln Hall some minutes later to the sound of passing taxis and DePaul kids on their way to the bars was something of a shock to the system. It's easy to forget just how much unwanted noise is out there.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 The Knife: "Full of Fire" 02 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: "Higgs Boson Blues" 03 Haim: "The Wire" 04 Kanye West: "New Slaves" 05 Kurt Vile: "Goldtone" 06 Yamantaka // Sonic Titan: "One" 07 Daft Punk: "Touch" 08 Deafheaven: "Dream House" 09 Arcade Fire: "Reflektor" 10 Foxygen: "No Destruction"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 The Knife: Shaking the Habitual 02 Fuck Buttons: Slow Focus 03 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories 04 Kanye West: Yeezus 05 Polvo: Siberia 06 Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe 07 Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady 08 Swans: Not Here/Not Now 09 Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight... 10 Ty Segall: Sleeper
Most Played Song of 2013: According to iTunes, it's Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Higgs Boson Blues", which had the advantage of coming out very early in the year (and also the advantage of being one of the most audacious/hilarious songs he's written). But I'll always remember the first time I heard it. I got emailed a promo copy of Push the Sky Away the day my son was born last January and, for obvious reasons, I wasn't able to download it right away. About a week later, I went out on a grocery run—my real first bit of alone time following the birth—and listened to the album on headphones as I walked through the supermarket. "Higgs Boson Blues" came on while I was in the dairy section. Comparison-shopping for yogurt value-packs has never felt like so apocalyptic.
An Old Album I Rediscovered This Year: Most expedient way to erase the memory of that new Black Flag album? Revisit the best album they never released: i.e., the post-Damaged/pre-My War legal-limbo sessions heard on the eternally badass Complete 1982 Demos.
Musical Highlights: Two things that seemed impossible at the top of 2013—a new My Bloody Valentine album and a Replacements reunion show—becoming real and not sucking in the slightest. Getting to see two Savages shows on consecutive nights last March in venues small enough for Jehnny Beth's shadowboxing fist-thrusts to make you flinch. Kanye premiering "New Slaves" on "SNL". Japandroids playing the first-ever show at Toronto's Adelaide Music Hall and having their front-of-house monitors used as buoys for people escaping the overflowing mosh pit. Listening to The Knife's "Full of Fire" over and over and over again and feeling like the song was doing different things each time I heard it, like that old Mad magazine flexi-single with eight separate grooves. Fuzz capping an insane basement club show on the night of my birthday with an encore of "Blitzkrieg Bop", "Till the End of the Day" and "21st Century Schizoid Man."
Musical Lowlights: Realizing that I had been listening to Swans' The Seer, my favorite album of 2012, in the wrong order this whole time, because it got uploaded into my iTunes alphabetically. And I've been having a really hard time adjusting to the actual song order, because, trust me, the alphabetical sequence is perfect.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Courtney Barnett: "Avant Gardener" 02 2 Chainz: "Feds Watching" [ft. Pharrell] 03 Bill Callahan: "Small Plane" 04 Thundercat: "Heartbreaks + Setbacks" 05 Fuzz: "Fuzz's Fourth Dream" 06 Protomartyr: "Feral Cats" 07 My Bloody Valentine: "She Found Now" 08 Perfect Pussy: "I" 09 Parquet Courts: "Stoned and Starving" 10 Beck: "I Won't Be Long (Extended)"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Protomartyr: No Passion All Technique 02 Thundercat: Apocalypse 03 Majical Cloudz: Impersonator 04 Mikal Cronin: MCII 05 Thee Oh Sees: Floating Coffin 06 Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold 07 Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt 08 Bill Callahan: Dream River
09 Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze
10 Danny Brown: Old
Most Played Song of 2013: I struggled with worry, anxiety, and panic this year. My Bloody Valentine's "She Found Now" was my go-to emotional balm. Whenever I fell into a cyclical, internet-centric panic, I'd put it on repeat. After a few cycles, I'd invariably level out. I dozed off to this song on several occasions, including one time where I slept through the boarding call for my flight back home. I don't listen to it while traveling anymore.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Lots of Heartbreakers, MC5, and Tres Hombres this year, but more than anything else, I got a ton of mileage out of Motörhead's Ace of Spades. The title track's obviously a ripper, but the entire album's incredible. I liked blasting "Shoot You in the Back" in Ann Arbor parking lots and screaming the part where he goes "WESTERN MOVIES", except for a while, I didn't know that the words weren't "WESTERN UNION".
Musical Highlights: Seeing a bunch of killer Michigan bands: Chit Chat, Haunted Leather, Bad Indians, Growwing Pains, Terrible Twos, Feelings, K9 Sniffies, others. Watching Timmy Vulgar incite a moshpit during a Protomartyr set. Seeing Prince. That Parquet Courts + Merchandise + Destruction Unit bridge show at SXSW. Las Ardillas in Austin. Jessica Pratt at MOCAD. Blues Control at DCCP. Sonny and the Sunsets at PJ's. Listening to Action Bronson's "Larry Csonka" on repeat during my friend's bachelor party. Watching a Detroit audience cheer loudly for Devon Welsh's plain beige t-shirt. Bonding with my Airbnb host in Sorrento, Italy over Iron Maiden's "The Trooper", then seeing a band play that song the same night at a wine bar. Finding an Oh Sees record I didn't know existed on Record Store Day. Talking to Jon Hopkins about Brian Eno. Talking to Flying Lotus about video games. Being told, "No, sir, this food is for R. Kelly" at Pitchfork Music Festival. Getting paid by my alma mater to hang out with Todd Rundgren. Starting a new column and listening to raw sewage rock on the reg.
Musical Lowlights: Though I caught day two (which was amazing), I had to miss the first night of Urinefested in Detroit, which means I missed the final Clone Defects show. R.I.P. Fast Eddie Altesleben.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013: 01 Drake: "Worst Behaviour" 02 Perfect Pussy: "I" 03 All Dogs: "Say" 04 Kanye West: "New Slaves" 05 Swearin': "Dust in the Gold Sack" 06 Iceage: "Ecstasy" 07 Speedy Ortiz: "No Below" 08 Radiator Hospital: "Our Song" 09 Pharmakon: "Ache" 10 Joanna Gruesome: "Secret Surprise"
Favorite Albums of 2013: 01 Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt 02 Body/Head: Coming Apart 03 Merchandise: Totale Nite 04 Deafheaven: Sunbather 05 Majical Cloudz: Impersonator 06 Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time 07 Gun Outfit: Hard Coming Down 08 Nuclear Spring: Nuclear Spring 09 Julia Holter: Loud City Song 10 Milk Music: Cruise Your Illusion
Most Played Song of 2013: According to last.fm, Drake's "Furthest Thing" followed pretty closely by the Merchandise single "Anxiety's Door". According to iTunes, it would be the entirety of the All Dogs demo cassette, and according to my record player (which I think is most reliable for me in terms of compulsive listening habits) it would be Side A of Gun Outfit's Hard Coming Down LP or the Merchandise Live at BBC bootleg 12".
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Digable Planets, Blowout Comb. I first heard about this record from Mark Richardson during my first few months working at Pitchfork, about two years ago. My favorite genre can be loosely defined as Radical New York Music, so I was immediately intrigued. I felt a stronger connection this year after I picked up the very well-contextualized reissue from Light in the Attic and realized what a masterpiece this record is. Speaking of jazz, I heard Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda for the first time this year, which was another mind-blowing experience in music discovery (thanks Jon!) and stands out. Also, the 1986 Dežuje EP from Yugoslavian hardcore band Tožibabe.
Musical Highlights: Watching Priests play "Personal Planes" at Silent Barn; watching Merchandise and Destruction Unit play the foot bridge in Austin; watching Radiator Hospital play a basement show in Bushwick; sitting on the floor watching Majical Cloudz for the first time inside of a hotel room; watching Deafheaven at 285 Kent on my 24th birthday. Listening to World of Echo in the woods by myself for a week while sitting next to a lake re-reading the Pussy Riot book from Feminist Press; listening to Nothing Was the Same on the subway; playing Ground Zero in full on-air several times while hosting Crucial Chaos late-night on WNYU 89.1 FM. Seeing the Gun Outfit film Where's Anton at Spectacle Theater. Watching The Punk Singer for the first time and freaking the fuck out, then seeing it with my parents eight months later.
In general, the visibility of Kathleen Hanna and Kim Gordon, and getting to do a show for both their bands and being nervous about it. Going to the opening of Kim Gordon's art show at White Columns with my sister and realizing, at the same time, that the crumpled banner on the floor of the gallery was "Sonic Youth Band Name Sculpture". Watching Kim Gordon play Issue Project Room and realizing Carrie Brownstein was seated across from me taking pics with her iPhone. Sitting literally six feet in front of Drake at NYU while he explained his thinking behind "Worst Behaviour". Watching kids freak out to Polish rap and coldwave in Katowice; watching some of the realest desert-punk bands I've ever seen in Monterrey, Mexico. Also, anytime I got to spin Huggy Bear, Nancy Sinatra, the Nerves, Occult Chemistry, or the Ronettes at 285.
Musical Lowlight: I still haven't gotten a Fiona Apple tattoo.
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Ciara: "Body Party" 02 Drake: "Worst Behaviour" 03 Disclosure: "Help Me Lose My Mind" [ft. London Grammar] 04 DJ Rashad: "Let It Go" 05 Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home" 06 Arcade Fire: "Reflektor" 07 The Juan Maclean: "Feel Like Movin'" [ft. Nancy Whang] 08 Mariah Carey: "#Beautiful" [ft. Miguel] 09 Kanye West: "Guilt Trip" 10 Arctic Monkeys: "Do I Wanna Know?"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Disclosure: Settle 02 Deafheaven: Sunbather 03 Kanye West: Yeezus 04 Arcade Fire: Reflektor 05 Haim: Days Are Gone 06 Drake: Nothing Was the Same 07 Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City 08 Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze 09 Majical Cloudz: Impersonator 10 Phosphorescent: Muchacho
Most Played Song of 2013: Sky Ferreira's "Everything Is Embarrassing", because it speaks truth to power.
An Old Album I Rediscovered This Year: Derrick May's Innovator
Musical Highlights: Watching a girl who had fallen asleep standing up right before a Crystal Castles show start maniacally jumping around as if she were possessed as soon as the band took the stage. Shouting along in the worst falsetto I could summon to Haim's "Don't Save Me" at a karaoke bar (only a month after Days Are Gone came out; nice work, karaoke bar!). Listening to Drake's "Worst Behavior" sometimes three or four times in a row while driving around Vernon, Connecticut. Seeing Kanye West lay down on top of whatever the fuck that partial-mountain thing was during the Yeezus tour and sing "Coldest Winter", the most heartbreaking song performed in the most heartbreaking way. Seeing a goofy-looking guy in a chicken hat make out with everyone around me during a 4 a.m. John Talabot DJ set in Barcelona. Guzzling vodka in a suite at the top of the W Hotel in Times Square, during a Pete Rock DJ set for Boiler Room, watching partygoers rip open pillows and empty them out of the windows until it looked like it was snowing in the summer. Blasting Ciara's self-titled album at the beach in the Far Rockaways until both me and my girlfriend's iPhones were out of batteries and all the corresponding tequila was drained. Seeing Beyoncé at Made in America and hysterically sobbing during "Halo" (blame it on the Straw-Ber-Ritas), and coasting on a sea of intoxication with my closest of friends the following evening as Calvin Harris' big-room stuff blared on in the foreground. Oh, and how could I forget—SURFBOARD. SURFBOARD. SURFBOARD.
Musical Lowlights: Watching the profession I've wanted to take part in since I started reading back issues of SPIN at the salon my mother went to in fifth grade dissolve into a sea of endless backbiting, sycophancy, and shit-talking, and realizing the sad truth that, when the chips are down, the "writers" who wax endlessly on "what it all means" and constantly stick their necks out to be a part of any conversation that passes through the corroded pipes of social media are also the ones rarely writing anything of substance (or, in many cases, anything at all).
We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Thundercat: "Heartbreaks + Setbacks" 02 Twin Shadow: "Old Love/New Love" 03 Kanye West: "Bound 2" 04 Deerhunter: "Pensacola" 05 Daft Punk: "Touch" 06 Shlomo: "Out of Hand" 07 Giraffage: "Close to Me" 08 Lorde: "Buzzcut Season" 09 Ciara: "Body Party" 10 The Jet Age of Tomorrow feat. Mac Miller: "Juney Jones"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Thundercat: Apocalypse 02 Various Artists: The Music of Grand Theft Auto V 03 Shlohmo: Laid Out 04 Earl Sweatshirt: Doris 05 Deerhunter: Monomania 06 Ty Segall: Sleeper 07 The Jet Age of Tomorrow: The Jellyfish Mentality 08 Danny Brown: Old 09 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories 10 Classixx: Hanging Gardens
Your Most Played Song of 2013: "Bound 2". I know, I know, the critic in me prefers "New Slaves" or "Black Skinhead" or even "Blood on the Leaves". But I love Old Kanye and “Bound 2” was a vision of the College Dropout as he once was: randy, funny, sweet and soulful.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Janet Jackson’s janet. I’m a rabbit-hole listener: Once I fall in love with an artist, an author, or a director, I often splurge on everything they’ve ever done. This year, realizing that the only Janet Jackson album I’d ever owned was her 2001 pop renaissance All for You, I did a deep dive into her back catalogue. Her 1993 album janet. was the one that stuck. Jackson wrote and co-produced all the songs and it’s got a warm early hip-hop vibe that reeled me in all year.
Musical Highlights: Walking past the cube in Astor Place while listening to Modern Vampires of the City, learning how to run distance by letting James Murphy guide me, interviewing Earl Sweatshirt and listening to him talk about Bret Easton Ellis and Kanye West, watching Jessie Ware tear it up at Bowery Ballroom, seeing Unlocking the Truth get the publicity they deserve, and having my friend Alyse give me the nicest speaker that I’ve had since my parents (accidentally) gave mine away.
Musical Lowlights: The only musical lowlights I can think of came when something or somebody ruined a song for me. Goodbye "Ms. Fat Booty"—in competition for the greatest Mos Def song of all time, now doomed by association with a particularly rainy, unfortunate night on the Lower East Side.
Sick Thoughts: 
Fuzz: 
Natural Child/Guantanamo Baywatch: 
Gentlemen: 
The Secret Prostitutes: 
Lil Bibby: 
Tinashe: 
