Vikings & Beekeepers

The first three months of 2009 have been ridiculous. There’s just been so much good that has come out, leading me to feel wholly inadequate to truly judge it fairly. The truth is, however, I like all the albums mentioned here as much as one person possibly can, making me dubious that anything else could have been much better from the last three months. Of course, this is all said without me having listened to new albums by Fever Ray, Antony, Propaghandi and who knows how many other artists, so I could still really be missing out. With that said, with the exception of number one, I’ve enjoyed everything here pretty evenly and deciding which albums not to write on was based almost solely on what I wanted to write about the most. Here’s to the remaining nine months of the decade.

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I know it seems that every other post I make on Vikings & Beekeepers is intended to be a new series (Alphabetical iPod Diary, Pain For Pleasure, Overrated/Underrated), but I really get the feeling this one’s going to stick.

As voraciously as some people like to ingest the musical landscape, it’s downright impossible to keep up with everything ­– it’s part of the reason actively discovering and listening to music can be so daunting, there are always stones left unturned. Even the oversized boulders get passed up from time to time. As much as I love to devour music at a gluttonous rate, there is so much out there that I haven’t heard, and some of those albums have been thoroughly canonized and are considered to be quite essential and/or important in their own right. There are several factors why a person may have missed out on these kinds of big-ticket albums, and probably the biggest reason is generational (although there a million other reasons like genre ignorance, passive, non-committal listening or just plain old, ugly contrarianism). I began really listening to music in the 90s, which meant I had several decades’ worth of beloved, groundbreaking and historical music to catch up on. Which means every year leads to new discoveries, but that pile of “yet to listen to albums” has hardly been dented.So that’s essentially what I’m aiming to do here. Let’s get all our bases covered. Let’ check our blind spots. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I know we’re already fully immersed in 2009, but save a little room in your heart for my favorite albums from 2008. Instead of discussing and analyzing the last year to any great extent, I’ll simply say this: 2008 introduced me to some wonderful artists I hadn’t yet heard before (Positions one, two and five come to mind) and also provided some high end work from long established artists (like positions three and four). So all in all this was a rad year. It’s a bummer that this measly list of 25 (actually 27) wasn’t able to include immensely strong albums by the likes of Bun B, Wale, Beck, Girl Talk, Gang Gang Dance, the Constantines, the Gaslight Anthem, Jay Reatard, The Very Best, Mates Of State, Grouper, the Dodos, Fuck Buttons, Plants And Animals, No Age, Oxford Collapse, Q-Tip, Paavoharju and especially Earth, who I wish I could have made room for. That being said, the albums that are on the list are truly (in my opinion) the elite batch of the bunch.

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Like I said last week, there’s a big dumb year-end list on the way, but first, let’s vent a bit.

While there were heaps of terrific, possibly classic albums released this past year, the truth is, very few of them are perfect. To quote David St. Hubbins: “It’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” Sometimes artists, even great ones, make a misstep on the brilliant/terrible line. This year there were plenty of artists who put out wonderful, fascinating, risky albums, but many of those artists also showed that they were not infallible on those same terrific albums. So here it is:

10 Terrible Songs From 2008’s Great Albums (in order):

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Well, it’s 2009 and every possible Best of ’08 list has been written, printed and criticized, except for over here at Vikings & Beekeepers, where I’m still trying to summarize the last three months of music. Oh, but what a three months it was. The last three months may have had less really, really great albums, but it had the most regular great albums (which means a lot less padding for 6-10) and hey, finally some halfway decent hip hop albums (although, as it turns out, TI’s Paper Trail was a Sept. 30 release, so I guess I won’t be writing on that one until the best of 08)! Even if I seem to snub some albums here (apologies to Deerhunter), assume you will see them for my year-end list. My final year-end list will come shortly, if you care. I’m doing my damndest to catch up on all the music that I missed in the first half of the year.

Anyway, here’s what kicked my ass as we inched closer to the holiday season.

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In 1979, New Jersey-bred sisters Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche released their first album as a trio. The album, simply titled The Roches, was a sparse collection of quirky New York bohemian folk tracks buoyed by the sisters’ amazingly nimble and alternating sweet and dissonant harmonies (Terre on top, Suzzy in the middle, Maggie on the bottom) and high school drama girl charm (kind of cute, but not quite; kind of hip, but not quite; kind of annoying; but not totally). Of course, it had been roughly a decade leading up to this terrific album. The elder sisters, Maggie and Terre, had actually been performing together since the late 60s, busking throughout New Jersey and New York. The duo were eventually befriended by Paul Simon who recruited the pair to perform backup vocal duties on his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Simon then went on to produce the pair on their 1975 debut, Seductive Reasoning.

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“Advice To The Graduate” by Silver Jews (from Starlite Walker)

There’s something not quite right about Starlite Walker, Silver Jews’ first full length, when compared to later Silver Jews albums. Part of it is because it sounds exactly like I imagined the Silver Jews to sound when I first caught wind of their existence about five years ago. In short, it sounds like Crooked Rain era Pavement with a different singer (Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich provide the bulk of Starlite Walker’s  musical expertise). Singer David Berman’s porch side musings are mostly there, but the songs, for the most part, are too shambolic and tossed off – frivolous even. Berman is a killer poet (barring “Living Waters’” shitty chorus), but he is a considerably limited vocalist (the bum notes on “Rebel Jew” are cringe worthy), so he tends to need a strong cohesive song in order to lay a foundation for his prose. Unfortunately, early Pavement, as much as I love them, is not the kind of structure that one needs and a great deal of the songs on Starlite Walker indicate that. Not so, however, for “Advice To The Graduate,” Starlite’s leading track. If nothing else, Silver Jews are good at putting their best foot forward (with the exception Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea) and “Advice To The Graduate” stands out despite the fact that it sounds a lot like Pavement. Berman shows some of his potential for wry lyricism (“On the last day of your life / don’t forget to die”) while Malkmus takes the mic on the lovely, touching chorus. Starlite Walker, improves during its second half, but “Advice To The Graduate” is nearly enough to buoy the sloppy, uncertain first steps of the album’s front half.

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What I love the most about doing these quarterly reviews is that they’re as far from definitive as you can possibly get. I think back to my first quarterly review and there are albums that are on my 6 to 10 list (or not even on the list at all) that are now more preferred than my top five. These things are very “of the moment.” It’s a living, breathing organism, music. What tickles us one day turns around to bite us on another day. More commonly, what confounds and disappoints on our first listen, may very well morph into something rewarding and worth of re-visitation.

These are the recently released albums that I’ve been enjoying lately. You’ll notice that many of them are fairly popular albums. Perhaps in a few months time I’ll discover a little self-released album brimming with glorious moments. Or maybe I wrote another album off too early. Either way, these are the precious few that spoke to me with immediacy and at least hinted at the promise to stick around for the long-haul.

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“What’s your guilty pleasure?”

There are two different answers that aggravate me when someone asks this fateful question. The first, and the less annoying of the two, is when someone says something that doesn’t make them that guilty: “Oh, I like some rap,” one’ll say. “I hate to admit it, but I like the Strokes,” says the holier than thou art school kid. “I like (insert random older pop act that has been heralded by retroactive critics for years – you know, like ABBA or Michael Jackson or the Beach Boys),” says another. It’s a bullshit copout, but it’s also 100% understandable. If we pick something safe or vague, then we give off the appearance that we are above something that others of a similar ilk consider valuable. It’s a savvy bit of social jockeying for position.

The other more common, and more aggravating, answer is some variation of the phrase, “I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures.’ I like what I like and I don’t feel guilty about it.” Ugh.

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“Adore” by Prince (from Sign O’ The Times)

This is just classic slow jam Prince. When different artists decide to do a song that sounds like Prince (Beck’s “Debra,” Ween’s “Freedom Of ’76.” My Morning Jacket’s “Evil Urges”), this is always the track that is most easily aped. My guess for why they do these kinds of tracks is that they can be so totally ridiculous, but totally awesome at the same time. Even on this track, listen to Prince take this Marvin Gaye style groove and start squealing all over it. It’s totally hilarious, but like most things Prince did on Sign O’ The Times, it’s holds up in spite of itself.

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