The new Savages record is fucking nuts.  I don’t even know what to do with it it’s so good. I can’t sit still, it’s almost alarming how in my lane this thing is.

I want to eat it and then throw the album sleeve on the ground and roll around on it like a dog. 

When exactly did they start making transparent blue-marble vinyl (and why is it so beautiful)?  What is the point of having a goofy line of faux-testpressings if you’re going to package hauntingly beautiful discs in the generic paper sleeves? 

The sleeve even says it will be black; you need to decide on a theme for your art project and stop tormenting me with your radiant wax!

Currently listening to Brandt Brauer Frick’s Miami Theme.  It’s gorgeous and shot through with creeping dread, but there is a heavily filtered bass tone sprinkled throughout the ten-minute track that seriously sounds like someone farting into a fan (at length). 

I thought my headphones were broken (that I’d finally blown them out somehow), but I just replayed it on the hi-fi and it’s still sounds like quantized flatulence. 

It’s a really good song, and you should listen to it. 

Just be ready.

Holy shit the comics included with the new Knife album are intense (and awesome).  Much more political than their prior work, but that should surprise no one (given the buzz)

For me it’s sort of the platonic form of the Cure song.  I only love other Cure songs to the extent that they approximate that one.

I bought The Bends on cassette tape a little less than a week after it came out in March of ‘95.  It was the last tape I would ever buy at a physical store, actually.  I listened to it a few times and really enjoyed it, but it didn’t really catch me just then…

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So, so much glue.

If I never touch or smell epoxy (stiff / kerosene),wood glue (wet / papery), liquid nails (creamy / rancid almonds), construction polyurethane (slick and gooey / evil vanilla), that vile orange spray glue that bubbles and foams like a purulent boil and bonds in seconds to anything it touches (instantly tacky / oven cleaner, for days), or any other adhesive unguent again it will be too soon.

But it will be soon.

So my new media player pulls pictures from the internet when you play albums.  As near as I can tell it just GIS’s the band names and shows you what it finds.  Which usually pulls up pictures of the band, their albums etc.  But for bands with names of common items or critters it quickly becomes hilarious. 

I just had a 45-minute impromptu dance party triggered by a string of pictures of actual Grizzly Bears roaring at each other, wherein we tried to find bands that would nerf the image finder and then attempted to dance out the images (interpretively).  The climax/breakdown occurred during Health’s USA Boys  where we just kept getting pictures of cheerful medical professionals and grinning anthropomorphic teeth over and over again. 

We ran out of ways to smile at each other and just started baring our teeth with opened mouths like wolves, laughing openthroatedly around our gums 

In retrospect it was probably inevitable.

I know I’m a few weeks late to the party, but I thought I’d do another installment of my year-end wrap up. I kind of like the idea of going back through everything at the year’s end to make an accounting and organize my own impressions of what I’ve heard this year.

I took in about 170 albums worth of new music this year, and another fifty or so filling in the back catalog.  Almost all of these got the three differential listens (speakers, headphones, car), and most of them got a good bit more than that.  My overall impression has been that this wasn’t a particularly “new” year.  I didn’t hear anything that sounded startlingly unusual, but there were lots of fun takes on familiar sounds.

I’ve included my ten favorite albums from last year in no particular order, with some commentary:

2:54, S/T : Adventures in the lusher-than-Lush region of Collide-like goth-tinged dream pop.  No surprises here, but it’s pitch perfect. In other news, VICE compared it to the feeling of going down on your first goth girl in the bathroom of the Werewolf Dungeon.

Drokk : Concept album [√]; by Geoff Barrow of Portishead [√]; about Judge Dredd [√]; in the style of an 80’s minimal synth film score [√].  There was only one chance in twenty I wouldn’t like this album.  Mission accomplished Geoff Barrow: you’ve finally tapped into the lucrative “Old Goths who love Judge Dredd, but also like Portishead enough to listen to side projects” market, the Venn diagram of which probably more or less completely overlaps with the regular readership of this blerg.

Chairlift, Something : If you haven’t heard this album, forget what you think you know about Chairlift and watch this, then come back and finish reading.  Frivolous, inscrutable, but so, so catchy.  Upbeat songs about vehicular homicide with humorous lyrics. Full disclosure: this album is so far into my lane that it only took me about 45 seconds of listening to appreciate that this album was going to be big for me.  I heard that insane synth-hook in a demo clip of Sidewalk Safari, and immediately ordered without further reflection.

Marissa Nadler, The Sister - This album reminds me of a specific style of adult contemporary that was popular in the middle oughts pushed through death trauma and delivered to a Homeric hell where everyone just sits around on the abyssal plain, and is bored by the afterlife, each spirit quietly wishing they could trade places with the meanest wretch among the living just to escape the endless lack of sensation. The ghost of Norah Jones doomed to eternal exile, in short album format.

RosenKopf, S/T - Electro-Industrial with incoherent shouting of slogans scratches a deeply-seated itch in me, that I’m not sure will ever entirely go away like a particularly nasty case of scabies you got from Al Jourgensen that time you got to meet him backstage

Grizzly Bear, Shields - This slot was either going to be filled by this album or the new Bear in Heaven album, but I ultimately decided that this album was a little more pleasantly complicated and a little less up its own ass.  And it’s really, really pretty.  I like it less than their last effort, but (from my perspective) they were already so far out in front a step backwards is still winning.

Swans, The Seer - I don’t really need to explain this to you all.  If I have any followers who aren’t Swans fans, I’m not aware of it.  This is clearly album of the year material and is probably my favorite Swans album since “The Burning World.”

Andy Stott, Luxury Problems - Ambient, sinister bass music will never not be interesting to me.  Does it sound like a haunted factory full of spectral women wailing in torment while also grinding out a third shift?  If so, I will buy it.  I promise.

Burial, Kindred/Truant- And on the subject of ambient, sinister bass music being of perennial interest to me, Burial’s been on fire this year, and Truant is astonishing.  Every release, I think “he won’t be able to surprise me with another permutation of musique-concrete-for-strung-out-hobos,” but it never fails to floor me.  And I just wind up driving around (or wandering around) at night listening to it over and over.  It makes me feel hungover just listening to it, but I can’t stop listening to it.

Trust, TRST- I’d been waiting for this puppy since I first heard candy walls in early 2011, so when it arrived this year (fully formed like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus) I was pretty stoked.  Non-Goths and people without time for New Order or Depeche Mode can just skip to the next entry.  Everyone who is still reading should buy this album tomorrow.  I haven’t heard a better synth-pop club-goth record since I can remember.  Maybe I never heard one.

Honorable Mentions:

These are ten additional albums that I listened to frequently and enjoyed a great deal, but that didn’t quite push up into the obsessive listening hall of fame.  If you haven’t heard these albums, I commend them to you:

Crystal Castles, III

Julia Holter, Ekstasis

Mark Lanegan Band, Blues Funeral

Raime, Quarter Turns Over the Living Line

Horseback, Half-Blood

Cult of Youth, Love Will Prevail

Sharon Van Etten, Tramp

Lower Dens, Nootropics

Bear in Heaven, I Love You It’s Cool

The Gaslamp Killer, Breakthrough

Lately I’ve been having some real trouble with my favorite album.  I can’t seem to hear it except with the “bad ears.” Everything sounds out of place or inharmonious (and not in a good way).  It’s not just a matter of being tired of hearing it (after all these years and four or five hundred listens), it just doesn’t sound like I remember it sounding no matter how I listen to it. 

My sound reproduction equipment is better than it’s ever been, and I even tried it on my old speakers to see if that would turn it around.  Zilch.  It’s pretty clear the fault lies in me.  It’s just disheartening: it’s the sort of album that I could wake up in the morning, put it on, and sit down in front of the speakers and cry my eyes out for a half an hour.  The kind of album I could listen to every night for six months straight and not mind.  The kind of album I put on to let some sun into the room when the drugs were starting to go pear shaped.

On reflection maybe that’s it; I remember being really confused and ambivalent about the album until I started doing more serious drugs.  Maybe this is the terminal stage of my drying out process, and I’ve so thoroughly lost the little turnings and habits of mind of drug consciousness that drug music no longer even sounds good to me.

I’m not sure I want to think very hard about that right now.