Here is the best music we heard in the past year. Most, but not all, of Howie’s picks were released in 2018. Cory will explain his picks below.
Top 14 (in random order)
BUMMER, “Holy Terror” – KCMO’s bastard sons of The Jesus Lizard do it harder, faster, and shorter than you. Finding new and exciting ways to sound mega-pissed-off on stage, and be totally nice off, since 2012!
Janelle Monae, “Dirty Computer” – Her St. Louis show was the highlight of my musical year, hands down: crack band, phenomenal dancing, amazing visuals, and Janelle at the center of it all, magnetic. Doesn’t hurt that the excellent album is accompanied by a sci-fi “emotion picture,” either.
Shredders, “Dangerous Jumps” (2017) – P.O.S., Sims, Lazerbeak, and Paper Tiger toss off a quick one that somehow, to my ears, captures some Beastie Boy energy while sounding fresh as heeeeellllllllll. I get the sense it started as a lark but I could do with a follow-up as soon as they’re ready. (2nd Doomtree record I’m blurbing; may not be the 2nd you read!)
Young Bull, “Midnight Climax” – My hometown rock & rollers have been drinking hard at the Church of Lemmy between studio sessions where they put a polish on songs from 2015’s “Demo” plus some new ones (see closer “Chainwhipped,” which is exactly as heavy as the title sounds).
Cosmic Ground, “IV” / “relics vol.1” / “relics vol.2” – Dirk’s kosmische project and perennial Best Music We Heard favs Cosmic Ground had a productive year, with a new record (really a double) and two batches of old odds and ends. You’re into the Berlin school or you aren’t, and this won’t change your mind… but it might prove a gateway.
Jon Hopkins, “Singularity” – This record divides in half, with choppy, noisy bangers up front and near-straight ambient in the back half. Closing tracks “Luminous Beings” / “Recovery,” featured in an excellent episode of the podcast “Song Exploder,” stitch the disparate elements together seamlessly.
Yob, “Our Raw Heart” – Following a health scare (“scare” doesn’t do it justice; he could easily have died), Mike and the band return with a record that sprawls over every mode Yob has ever tried, from the harshest to the prettiest, and does them all at a higher level than before. This is the sound of masters, crafting unbridled brutality and beauty over 73 gripping minutes.
P.O.S., “Chill, Dummy” (2017) – “Next time you ask yourself where hip-hop is going, ask yourself: where am I going?” observed Mos Def in “Fear Not of Man.” P.O.S. is going to an arty-but-knocking place no one’s been before, and this is his transmission back. Five records in, and this dude sounds about ten times hungrier than your favorite rapper. (Doomtree #3 / 3).
Kamasi Washington, “Heaven and Earth” – Washington balances his influences – bop, psych, Latin jazz, soul, the theme from the original “Star Trek” – differently on each track; with multiple listens the whole two-and-a-half-hour experience grows less overwhelming and more varied. Always good to spend time in his cosmos.
Dessa, “Chime” – She’s back, with her leanest, feistiest batch of torch songs yet; the bangers bang harder, the ballads cut deeper. Reading this year’s book, “My Own Devices,” adds depth to an already-deep record. One of three Doomtree crew albums on my list this year; MSP out here killing it!
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, “Wasteland” – A return to form plus some twists after 2015’s slightly uninspired “The Night Creeper.” There may be a bit of a concept lurking in the background, but for now I’m just enjoying the old school riffs and double vocals.
Wye Oak, “The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs” – Jenn and Andy are some of my favorite kinds of musicians; just so far out on their own trip that points of reference fade. There are familiar guitars and drums and synths, but they put them together in their own private, idiosyncratic way without losing groove, melody, or immediacy.
Helium, “Pirate Prude” (1994) / “Superball+” (1994) / “The Dirt Of Luck” (1995) / “The Magic City” (1997) – I rampage through an old band’s discography every year (several bands, usually) and this year it was Helium. “The Dirt Of Luck” is out of print on CD and it outrages me; we need to be talking about Helium at the level we talk about Quicksand or Throwing Muses or Hum, and I don’t think we are yet.
The Breeders, “All Nerve” – Up against the wall, probably my record of the year. I’d never have guessed they could do it in 2018, or how satisfying it would be to have an amazing Breeders record this far into the future. “Last Splash” and “Pod” will always loom large, but… honestly… this may be their best-*written* record. Period.
Honorable Mention:
Condor – Unstoppable Power (2017)
Hiss Golden Messenger – Hallelujah Anyhow (2017)
Judas Priest – Painkiller (1990)
Robyn – Honey
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Sparkle Hard
Need to check out:
Low – Double Negative (which almost certainly would have made the main list if I had spent more time with it)
Below will be a sorta goofy list from your main man Cory, on account of we had a baby in late 2017 that was supposed to come out of my wife in February of 2018, so it was an “early surprise family baby.” (Howie was there when it all went down; ask him about the howls!)
That meant I was AWOL for the year-end list in 2017, for the first time… so now I have to be extra WOL this year.
Well anyway, this post is going well so far and it’s just the beginning. Here’s some stuff I got excited about this year (and maybe last year! ):
Steely Dan, “Aja” (1977) – I’m officially a dad, and thus, I’m slowly getting obsessed with records that my dad’s obsessed with. I always thought Steely Dan was cheesy dad-music because my dad’s the only person who ever listened to them around me, but I’d only heard the hits. Then I decided to listen to Aja because it’s so lauded, and the hype is real and founded. Currently obsessed with “Peg.” (It’s weird to love a band that always seems to be mocking me for listening to them, but here we are.)
Look Park, “Look Park” (2016) – The album I was listening to on Spotify ended, and since I was driving, I let Spotify play me some other stuff it thinks I would like. Sometimes, like with Look Park, it works! I heard a few songs and was like “GD, that sounds like the dude from Fountains of Wayne, which would make me mad except the songs are so good.” And then I look it up and it’s Chris Collingwood from Fountains of Wayne (blonde guy). It’s folkier and organic sounding than FoW but it’s still got all that great songwriting.
Four Tet, “New Energy” (2017) – This isn’t majorly profound or anything like that, but it’s also perfect for listening to at night when you’re doing some writing or whatever. It sets the exact right curious-blissful-serene-spacy mood we’re all looking for so we can listen to it when we write bad jokes.
Ra Ra Riot, “Need Your Light” (2016) and “Valerie” (2013) – I always read their band name in articles about Vampire Weekend, so I didn’t want to listen to them. Their name is too cutesy and they look like a band that *thinks* they’re VW but aren’t as good at writing songs. I still think VW is better, but Ra Ra Riot is the real deal. “Water” is undeniable (although weirdly it does feature Rostam Banmanglij, former member of VW), and their cover of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” is my jam of the summer.
Jamie xx, “In Colour” (2015) – After getting obsessed with Burial, my friend Jesse let me know that if I liked Burial, I’d probably like this. I’d tried to listen to it before, but didn’t get it. I wanted to give it another shot, so I put it on in the car home one day. The first track is “Gosh,” and it’s sorta silly but really fun, and when the subtle bass drops halfway through, it’s the best.
Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue” (1959) – I keep thinking I already talked about this record, and it’s because I did in another guest blog post… but I haven’t yet for MFR I don’t think (You have. -h). Anyway, this album is perfect. Especially when you have aquamarine lighting and tea and some writing to do. A+.
People should really think about giving this kid a chance.
David Brubeck Quartet, (full discography) (1946-2007) – This group exemplifies what I love most about jazz, especially the real moody “rainy-day Paris with coffee and a long-ass cigarette” type of vibe. I love music that makes me think of New York in autumn, and they’ve got a song called “Autumn in Washington Square.” I LOVE it.
Carried three projects across the finish line last weekend (and currently am working on some others):
From left to right:
Drew’s late-’90s black Russian EHX Big Muff (a version 7 per Kit Rae, if I recall). This thing sounds amazing; medium gain for a Muff, not too scooped in the mids. It wasn’t working at all; replacing the footswitch got it going, plus I modded it to accept external power (originals are battery-only), flipped the PCB around (originals are mounted backwards), and got the original knobs back on. The pot shafts are all in various stages of bended-ness and the pots could fail any time, so this is a studio piece. It’ll be sad when they do because the shafts are narrow, and the cool knobs only fit on those shafts, so when the time comes for replacing the pots it will probably need new knobs
Malekko Helium octave fuzz/distortion. I modded the input cap, selectable via the toggle toward the lower left on the side, which makes it a lot more useable in live performance and tracking. Sounds great for single-note riffs but has been limited to studio use; I think this mod might earn it a permanent place on my board!
Mr. Furious Audio Inverting JFET amplifier. My Mars Lights bass sound (GK pickup > Boss OC-20 > EHX POG > Music Man Sixty-Five) is out of phase with my Orange amp, so I built a simple inverting near-unity-gain (slight boost) JFET stage pedal to run in the bass signal path to put it back in phase. Sounds like almost nothing on its own, but the whole rig sounds better when the speakers push and pull at the same time
Before mixes make it to the car or the stereo or the clock radio, I test them on the washing machine.
With a newly rendered mix playing on my computer speakers, this position is off-axis and and above the near-mono sound source. It reveals imbalances and other problems that aren’t immediately apparent on my carefully placed stereo studio monitors. I’ll go back and forth between the monitors and this speaker/position combination several times when I’m working on a mix before it’s ready to test elsewhere.
I’ve spent a lot of time here in the past month, with more to go. The good news is that I have one song sounding great everywhere, and can apply some of what I’ve done there to the rest.
Stone Brewing’s rock ‘n’ roll co-founder, Greg Koch, who was nicknamed “Beer Jesus” by the a Berlin tabloid newspaper, is taking his business to Germany on a mission to oppose the most beloved industrial beer in the world and join Europe’s craft beer revolution. Will he succeed? Greg must first challenge the established beer culture in a country where brewing has been restricted by the infamous 500 year old beer Purity Law . However, in his quest to fight mass market beer, it turns out that Greg has even bigger obstacles to overcome, from struggles with bureaucracy to cultural differences and stubborn traditionalism.
Besides being a cool film, we can finally talk about the music in the second clip above; it’s Dark Satellites!
Matt had put temporary tracks of too-famous-to-license So-Cal punk into a rough edit of the film, and this past summer he approached Cole for recommendations of artists who could submit music he could use in the final cut. We decided it would be fun to break in Drew’s new garage/studio by taking a shot at it ourselves, and two instrumental tracks we wrote and recorded made it into the film.
We had fun writing and recording things with a specific purpose and parameters in mind, and are excited to see the documentary when it comes out.
[System of a Down’s] second album, Toxicity, succeeded, improbably, in a radio environment that favored simplistic formulas. Max Martin had stamped popular music with his surefire songwriting brand, ushering in a cross-genre rush of structurally identical singles from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears. System of a Down competed with the bros of Nickelback, Creed, and Staind on the alternative charts, bands that dressed up the Martin school of pop with power chords and ham-throated vocals. Most of their songs took the form of the confessional: Men apologized to women and to God for their sins, which tended to include substance abuse, emotional neglect, and general chauvinism. Post-grunge incubated a strain of sincerity so obsequious that no amount of nostalgia has yet to rehabilitate it. It lives on as a punchline that itself has grown passé.
Dark Satellites played with this dude, Reptoid, Friday night.
Opinions will vary on the music but if you can get through four minutes, I think you’ll respect what he’s doing creatively, physically, and technically. I’ve never seen or heard anyone doing anything quite like it, and the man/machine collaboration/conflict is pretty compelling.
The key to it all is how the drums trigger the synths. It’s live and not on a grid, which is what gives it that combination of super-tight (drums and synths hitting at the same time) and human feel (no grid). There’s almost a jazz or tribal drumming undercurrent to the harsh industrial noise. (Saying this out loud seems pretty weak but I want to give those of you who won’t like this something to listen for to understand what’s happening here and why it’s cool.)
Poorly pictured below is my Sunn 4×10 cab, which I’ve re-wired for stereo in order to play both of my Mars Lights amps through it. (This way I don’t have to haul the Music Man’s cabinet to gigs. This may also work for h&s, Sneaky Sneaky Snakes, etc.; any situation where I’m using the GK pickup on my guitar.)
Not quite doing a full stack right…
I want the cab’s speakers to all be in phase (all pushing or all pulling simultaneously, not one side pushing while the other side pulls). Sometimes pedals change the phase via latency, or flip its polarity* 180 degrees, so yesterday I tested all of my pedals to see what’s good to use when both amps are running through the Sunn cab. “Good,” in this case, means the pedal does not flip polarity in either bypassed or engaged mode.
* Polarity is whether, starting from silence, the first half-cycle of the sound wave is positive (pushes the speaker) or negative (pulls)
It felt a bit like making molar solutions in chemistry class; for whatever reason, the straightforward task doesn’t mesh with the normally-strong intuitive area of my brain, and completing it is a real challenge.
The whole process was a bit of overkill. There’s less of a phase relationship than I expected between the octave separation between the signals, the different distortion in each signal path, and the latency of the octave down signal. Still, the whole rig sounds slightly better (again, less than I expected but noticeable) when the polarity matches.
Results are that for most pedals, 80-85%, input and output polarity match and I can use them indiscriminately. (In retrospect, this is a good engineering practice generally.) I didn’t find any that change polarity in bypass mode. A handful change polarity when engaged; something like a one-transistor (MXR Micro Amp, Rangemasters, etc.) or three-transistor (Tone Bender family) is just going to do that in their normal configuration (each transistor gain stage flips the polarity of the signal) unless the engineer adds an amplifier stage to flip it back.
But because the rig as a whole needs one polarity flip to sound its best, I want to find an always-on polarity-flipping pedal for one of the signal paths. I have a couple candidates – my Falcon Heavy prototype’s second channel, a Basic Audio Scarab Deluxe fuzz – or I could build a simple high-headroom unity-gain single-JFET pedal for this specific use case. Probably would not have any controls or even a footswitch; just in and out jacks and power input. I plug it in, it does its thing.
I will probably do this. Maybe even today. Ack, I guess I need to prep a box first. Maybe I’ll do *that* today.
tl;dr – Bunch of pedal-geeky stuff, now I don’t have to haul a 2nd cab to Mars Lights and other gigs where I’m using my octave-down guitar thing, spent a few hours working on stuff only recording engineers will notice.
In the course of writing a yet-to-be-published post about sonic connections between V For Voice songs and older stuff, I got stuck listening to most of Bigger Sounds From Fewer Folks a weekend or two ago.
My memories of hunkering under my bunk in Frees Hall, recording those first songs to 4-track, are pretty clear. (For my own parts, anyway; I have no memory of recording Scott’s!) But it struck me; I didn’t own a 4-track at the time, so it must have been borrowed. Cory helped me narrow the suspects down to Josh O, Wisecarver, and Lupo.
Pretty sure it wasn’t Lupo’s; that just doesn’t ring any bells at all. I feel like it was Josh’s, but a passionate advocate could probably convince me it was Matt’s.
It doesn’t matter at all, it’s just a bit weird to think back to how for the first couple years I was working with borrowed gear (the 4-track for Bigger…, then Fred Ritter’s digital 8-track for Near and Far, etc.). I could have afforded a system like either of those, and I wonder why it took two records plus a doing bunch of other less-official recording to go ahead and buy something.
