Ride, Live at the 930 Club, Washington, DC, September 17th, 2015

In 2013, My Bloody Valentine reformed, recorded a new album, and went on tour. In 2014, Slowdive did the first and third of these, prompting me to joke that in 2015 it was Ride’s turn. And here we are.

Of these three shoegaze groups, Ride were the rock traditionalists; MBV and Slowdive were forerunners of post-rock, using guitars and pedals to make sounds free of form, at times experimental, ambient, and discordant. Ride, on the other hand, rejected the shoegazer moniker, were more likely to listen to the Nuggets box set–they’ve covered The Creation’s “How Does It Feel to Feel?”–and it’s no accident that after they broke up guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Andy Bell joined Oasis, albeit as a bassist.

And so on Thursday, September 17th, a rock show broke out at Washington, DC’s 930 Club. Ride opened with “Leave Them All Behind,” as close to a defining statement as they have. The band clearly wasn’t content to “play the hits,” as they were, busting out “Birdman,” live for the first time since 1995, as well as “Decay” and “Seagull,” both for the first time since 1991. “Twisterella” followed the first of these rarities, with Bell, doing his best guitar god impression and inexplicably clad in a Neu! trucker hat, turning the song into a southern boogie workout via his clean, single-note picking. “Black Nite Crash” and “Time of Her Time” similarly rocked, with the middle-aged crowd pogoing and bopping along. Mark Gardener, Ride’s other guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter, broke up the group when Bell brought these songs to the studio, but he was all smiles this evening, harmonizing with his co-vocalist in the style of The Byrds. Meanwhile, Laurence Colbert dished out plenty of hi-hats and cymbal crashes and bassist Steve Queralt held down the low end.

Ride may still reject the shoegaze label, but delay, reverb, and other effects pedals were employed on many songs, including an extended freakout in the middle of “Taste,” while the vocals from Gardener and Bell were appropriately buried in the mix throughout. When Bell asked the crowd if this was their, our, first Ride show, many hands stayed down, and there was plenty of singing along during the concert. “Vapor Trail” was dedicated to us first-timers, Bell’s guitar and pedals mimicking the famous cello solo. The band closed with “Seagull,” sending the audience out into the night ears ringing, and thus ends the holy trinity of shoegaze reunions.

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Slowdive, Live at the 930 Club, October 22, 2014, Washington, DC

Pic via http://dcmusicdownload.com/2014/10/24/review-slowdive-930-club-10-22-14/

Slowdive seems, on record, to float away, barely tethered to pop and rock history, a contrast to other other shoegaze acts that make up the “big three,” My Bloody Valentine and Ride. MBV was and is rooted in the Beach Boys, 1960s girl groups, and the Brill Building sound, and Ride wouldn’t exist without the jangle of The Byrds and the mod scene of the late 60s. Slowdive only hinted at MBV’s guitar squall and Ride’s nod to influences, instead crafting slight, ethereal songs on Just for a Day, eventually becoming so ambient that the group recorded with Brian Eno, and dissolved while working on the experimental Pygmalion.

In concert, however, the group rocked, combining the best of all worlds. “This is a pop song,” announced singer-guitarist Rachel Goswell, before starting Souvlaki’s lead track, “Alison,” and so it was, clearly indebted to The Byrds, as was concert opener, “Slowdive.” Torrential sheets of guitar–I counted over twenty-five pedals between Goswell, Neal Halstead, and Christian Saville, all of which got a workout on “Crazy For You”–filled the venue, grounded only by Simon Scott’s expert drumming, which focused on snares and hi-hats early in the set. Bassist Nick Chaplin alternated between the traditional rhythm section and threatening to blast off with the guitarists.

Befitting the shoegaze moniker, the vocals were buried in the mix at times; one could barely hear Halstead’s flat, slightly nasal voice and Goswell’s was sometimes reduced to coos, especially when she contributed to the three-guitar attack. Saville turned the solo on “Souvlaki Space Station” into a slide guitar clinic, an alt-country, sci-fi, spaghetti western that exploded into ambient noise. Even the dream poppy “Catch the Day” and the hushed, folky “Dagger” got workouts, drenched in reverb and delay.

Unlike MBV’s live struggles last year, Slowdive didn’t show many signs of rust. Goswell joked with Halstead throughout, and the only false start was corrected without tension. The band live-premiered the b-side “Albatross,” a post-rock song that follows the “loud-quiet-loud” formula they helped to pioneer.

In 2013 I saw MBV live. This year I saw Slowdive. It’s your move in 2015, Ride.

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The Top Thirty-Something Albums of 2013 – The Beerbrarian Guest Post

Some background: every year the proprietor of the blog and I trade top 10, or 15, or 20, or whatever lists. Then we argue and make fun of each other as if we could change the others’ mind. Here is my list (and here is his). If you like it, feel free to stop by my blog where I talk about libraries and beer, and occasionally post a link to a semi-relevant song. You can also follow me on twitter. If you don’t like it, as George Will says “Well…”

This year I’ve organized albums into four tiers, ranging from something like “excellent” to “good.” The top tier is in order, the others I’m listing just by tier, because hey, it’s my list, and because I thought there were semi-clear cut-off points between these groups of albums. Here goes…

Tier One, in order

Sigur Ros – Kveikur: This band spent the last two albums in the wilderness, mistaking pretty sounds for cohesive, coherent records. Perhaps shedding a band member provoked an identity crisis. Like a grade school student trying on new personas, wondering where they want to try to fit in, Sigur Ros cuts an album that shows they spent the ‘90s listening to the pop-industrial stylings of Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins. The band drops its most aggressive record to date, polished to a slick studio sheen as if Mutt Lange was behind the boards. Heavy percussion, prog-metal tendencies, and actual verse-chorus-verse song structure, albeit at 6/8 time, make this perhaps the most accessible Sigur Ros record as well as the most unexpected. This is as tight, compact, and mainstream as this band will get, and the result is their only album you could credibly play on a road trip.

Savages – Silence Yourself: Politicized without being political, Savages are a thrash band that happens to play post-punk in the vein of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Pornography-era Cure. Jagged, angular guitar riffs, a tight rhythm section, and a snarling beast of a lead singer add up to one of the better debut records in recent memory.

Deafheaven – Sunbathers: It’s black metal. It’s post-hardcore. It’s shoegaze. It’s post-rock. It’s screamo. It’s walls of guitar noise, piercing Neil Young-style solos, blast-beat drumming and then…. silence. It’s gravity-defying and earthbound. One of the best explorations of musical space from the new breed of smarty-pants metal groups out there. But mostly it’s uplifting.

Kanye West – Yeezus: Let’s get this out of the way right now: Kanye is the GOAT. There’s no one better, past or present. He’s not on the next level, he is the next level. There’s enough going on here to write a dissertation on, and I suspect that people will try. Yeezus is an album full of self-loathing that reminds me of the controversy around Guns ‘n Roses’ “One in a Million;” Kanye’s misogyny says so much more about him than it does about anything else. “Dude misses his mom and lashes out” is the pop-psychology take I subscribe to. “The plan was to drink until the pain’s over, but what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?” he asked on his last album. We still don’t have an answer. He writes some of the most fascinating lyrics around: “She Instagram herself like ‘bad bitch alert / the Instagrammers watch like ‘mad bitch alert’” sums up so much of 2013 in terms of race, class, celebrity, and gender, and the cultural tourism that stems from those cleavages. But there’s more. The trappiest, trunk-rattlingest, DJ Khaled- est, “We tha Best-est” song on the album, the one you’d like to bump the loudest? It features a Nina Simone sample about lynching. Elsewhere, dancehall menacingly interrupts songs, beats drop out, and the most soulful song on the record, “Bound 2,” was the subject of an embarrassing video/home movie leak. Absolutely fascinating, and the album spawned some of the best music writing of the year. To wit: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9395729/kanye-west-yeezus-fatherhood http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/how-kanye-wests-i-yeezus-i-is-like-i-sgt-pepper-i-or-i-kid-a-i-or-i-riot-goin-on-i/277087/ http://thetalkhouse.com/reviews/view/lou-reed http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/18/yeezus_samples_stream_a_mixtape_of_samples_from_kanye_west_s_new_album.html

Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City: The greatest trick VW ever played was their first, applying African compositions to preppies and being in on the joke while too many critics weren’t. Now they’ve gone and made their most challenging album, both musically and lyrically. A mediation on growing old that shouts out my late night falafel joint and borrows from Souls of Mischief’s “Step to My Girl.”

My Bloody Valentine – m b v: An album that has no right to exist that sits comfortably alongside the rest of their cannon, twenty years after the fact. “Touched” and “To Here Knows When” from Loveless are the precedents for this album, which is less “pop” than their others. Unlike this album, their live show has some rust.

Tier Two, in no particular order

Neko Case – The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You.

Los Campesinos! – No Blues: Back to positivity for my favorite bunch of miserablists. It suits them well.

Atoms for Peace – Amok: This feels like a much more natural fit for Thom Yorke’s electronic- and percussion-based songs than Radiohead, as explored in this concert review.

Tricky – False Idols: One of the year’s most pleasant surprises, Tricky doesn’t attempt to reinvent the trip-hop wheel, but instead adds to it. This record would be ahead of its time in 1997, but it sounds just right in 2013, an interesting juxtaposition of the familiar with the challenging.

Besnard Lakes – Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO.

Mogwai – Les Revenants: The late-career resurgence continues with this seething, slow-burn soundtrack work.

Run the Jewels – S/T: El-P, Killer Mike, and an 8-track.

Danny Brown – Old.

Tier Three, in no particular order

Wax Idols – Discipline + Desire.

Surfer Blood – Pythons.

The National – Trouble Will Find Me.

The Night Marchers – Allez! Allez!.

Tegan and Sara – Heartthrob: Pop suits them very well.

Waxatachee – Cerulean Salt: On the 20th anniversary of Exile in Guyville, we got this. We are very very fortunate.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Push the Sky Away: A quiet, slow burn that threatens to, but never does, explode. By far the best album of Nick Cave’s career to rhyme “Hannah Montana” and “African Savannah” (your move, Vampire Weekend), but probably only the second- or third-best of Warren Ellis’ career, who takes a well-deserved bow here.

Chvrches – The Bones Of What You Believe: Synth-pop done smart.

Tier Four, in no particular order

Pusha T – My Name is My Name:

No Age – An Object: It’s hard for a two-piece to get more stripped-down, but consider this their Darklands. The songs hold up.

Cult of Luna – Vertikal: More smarty-pants metal, complete with a bass drop in the middle of an eighteen-minute long song.

Local Natives – Hummingbird.

Mazes – Ores and Minerals: Someone else has also been growing up with Yo La Tengo.

A$AP Rocky – LONG.LIVE.A$AP: This album is a death-knell for regionality and sense of place in hip hop, but if you’re going to kill it, this is how you do it, with syrup, bounce, and trap executed perfectly alongside ‘90s-style bangers.

Rhye – Woman: Easier to pronounce than Sade.

London Grammar – If You Wait.

MIA – Matangi: Much better than you think it is.

The Men – New Moon: The nominally post-hardcore band continues to mutate, winding its way through folk, americana, and alt-rock.

Touche Amore – Is Survived By.

Singles:

Daft Punk – Get Lucky

RVIVR – Paper Thin

Pusha-T – Number on the Boards

Pusha-T f. Kendrick Lamar – Nosetalgia

Spotlight Kid – All is Real

Phosphorescent – Song for Zula

Jason Isbell – Elephant

A$AP Rocky – Goldie

Deerhunter – Leather Jacket II

The National – I Should Live in Salt

Suede – For the Strangers

Fuck Buttons – Brainfreeze

Youth Lagoon – Mute

Janelle Monae – PrimeTime feat. Miguel

Majical Cloudz – Childhood’s End

Cheers – Janelle Monae, for giving more of herself than in the past. Kendrick Lamar on “Control.”

My Bloody Valentine, Live at The Electric Factory in Philadelphia, November 9th, 2013

It’s difficult to assess something that shouldn’t be. My Bloody Valentine hadn’t released an album in over twenty years until earlier this year, when vocalist, guitarist, and bandleader Kevin Shields made m b v available late on a Saturday evening in February.

This album was a culmination of a recording process that started seventeen years ago, and the band’s reunion tour was a first opportunity to hear them present the material, new or otherwise. Shields, however, had other ideas.

The concert, at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory, began with three songs off their classic album Loveless. The low-end crunch of “Sometimes” sent rumbles of bass and distortion throughout the venue, overpowering the vocals from Bilinda Butcher. Then, after what was to be one of many false starts to a song, the band launched into “I Only Said.” Colm Ó Cíosóig’s crushing drums stood out above the wall of noise created by Butcher, Shields, bassist Debbie Googe. and Jen Marco, a touring guitarist and keyboardist. “When You Sleep” was an early standout; a Beach Boys song run through consecutive filters of C86-style jangle, John Hughes’ films, and a punishing roar of guitar squalls. A wall of amplifiers dwarfed Shields, stage left, and early in the set he retreated into them as if they were a cocoon.

The mellow, for My Bloody Valentine, “New You” followed, the first song they played off the new album. Ó Cíosóig’s Madchester-style breakbeat continued to serve a reminder that under the noise, the band has a diverse palette to draw from.

Yet Shields was unhappy with some of the technical aspects of the show, and it showed. He missed one of Cíosóig’s drum counts. Googe’s bass and Butcher’s low-end D, A, and E notes made some of the vocals unintelligible, and during “Come In Alone” Shields stopped in the middle to change guitars. It is unclear whether this was an error on his part, or on one of the guitar techs. These mistakes rattled Shields, someone who is such a perfectionist that he waits twenty-two years between releasing albums. Whatever sounds he was making with his guitar and pedals, he made it clear that they were the wrong ones, confusing the audience.

The stage lighting was at times abrasive, forcing audience members to look down or to close their eyes. With a band like My Bloody Valentine, however, not looking may be an asset. There are few groups that can provoke feelings of synesthesia quite like MBV. Without the benefit of sight, Shields’ guitar-based tone poems evoked both the color schemes of impressionism and app-based generative music. The presence of the band playing in the same room was enough of an experience, as waves of sound washed over the audience and Butcher cooed wordlessly through songs like “To Here Knows When.”

The band is infamous for ending concerts with extended versions of songs, often exceeding the fifteen-minute mark. It was telling, then, that the closing song, “You Made Me Realise,” lasted just under seven minutes.

Befitting the shoegaze moniker, the band members never interacted on stage, each one lost in their task, reinforcing the discomfort. Aside from thanking the audience and wishing them, us, goodnight, Shields’ only stage banter was to apologize for the sound.

Setlist
Sometimes
I Only Said
When You Sleep
New You
You Never Should
Honey Power
Cigarette in Your Bed
Only Tomorrow
Come in Alone
Only Shallow
Thorn
Nothing Much to Lose
Who Sees You
To Here Knows When
Wonder 2
Soon
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise

Atoms for Peace – Patriot Center, Fairfax, VA, 9/30/13

I’ve never seen Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke happier than he was on Monday night, dancing with reckless abandon around the stage while his Atoms for Peace bandmates found grooves reminiscent of both West African percussion, thanks to Joey Waronker and Maura Refosco, and Krautrock, thanks to Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who here plays guitar and keyboards. It also makes perfect sense that Flea would be the bassist for this group. After all, his life seems like one long bass drop, and he also pogoed around the stage like a theater geek’s take on someone with a deficit disorder.

The setlist focused on Yorke’s solo record, The Eraser, for which Atoms for Peace formed, and the band’s first record, Amok, released earlier this year. The majority of the three-quarters full arena seemed to be there out of curiosity and respect for Yorke, and true to DC’s reputation, did the “standing still” for most of the concert as the band filled the venue with brittle funk. Yorke completists got to hear U.N.K.L.E.’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” reworked by the band, though sadly the drumming on Massive Attack’s propulsive, big beat Underdog remix did not make an appearance. Of the newer material, “Ingenue” was a rare moment of relative quiet, Yorke on piano, Godrich plinking away on a synthesizer, and culminating in a drum and bass breakdown in which Refosco played a bucket. The two standout songs came from The Eraser. “Cymbal Rush” closed the first part of the set with Yorke on piano singing one of his more lucid songs while the dual drumming of Waronker and Refosco clattered around him. The high hats and Brazilian percussion entered, increasing the beats per minute as Godrich and Flea created a wall of noise. And then, silence. The Eraser’s title track opened the first encore, with a melody so slinky and seductive I half expected Prince to come out and duet (side note to the Purple One, please cover this).

None of this is to say that Yorke seems unhappy with Radiohead, who he’s dragged closer and closer to something like Atoms for Peace over the last two records, shedding three-guitar rock and then Brian Eno-esque ambient soundscapes for more beat-driven adventures, but as of this moment, Atoms for Peace feels like his band, and more importantly for the audience, they feel like a band, not a side project.

Setlist

01 Before Your Very Eyes

02 Default

03 The Clock

04 Ingenue

05 Stuck Together Pieces

06 Unless

07 And It Rained All Night

08 Harrowdown Hill

09 Dropped

10 Cymbal Rush

_________

11 The Eraser

12 Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses

13 Rabbit in Your Headlights

14 Paperbag Writer

15 Amok

_________

16 Atoms for Peace

17 Black Swan

Top 15 Albums of 2012 – The Beerbrarian Guest Post

Some background: every year the proprietor of the blog and I trade top 10, or 15, or 20, or whatever lists. Then we argue and make fun of each other as if we could change the others’ mind. Here is my list (and here is his). If you like it, feel free to stop by my blog where I talk about libraries and beer, and occasionally post a link to a semi-relevant song. You can also follow me on twitter. If you don’t like it, as George Will says “Well…”

15) Titus Andronicus – Local Business: Basically yelling, sweaty barroom punk. About eating disorders.

 

14) Dinosaur, Jr. – I Bet on Sky: I mean, if all these other groups are going to pretend it’s 1993, may as well take the genuine article, this year’s winner of the “Yo La Tengo Aging Gracefully” Award.

 

13) Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city: An ambitious album that aspires to be something like a nuanced The Chronic that largely succeeds. Yet also a B+ album in a down year for rap that gets graded and fellated like an A. But either he’s got an A in him, or he’ll just be the next Lupe Fiasco.

 

12) Lee Fields & The Expressions – Faithful Man: Pretend it’s 1972. Things were simpler then.

 

11) Purity Ring – Shrines: Glitchy and processed yet organic and warm, goth yet whimsical, southern rap bounce with lily white (girl) vocals. Something like trip-hop for our times.

 

10) Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music: Nobody spit hotter fire in 2012. Double- and triple-time, crazy political without falling into the “conscious” trap.

 

9) Swans – The Seer: The second-best psych freakout of the year actually works as something like the flip side to Lonerism (see below). A demanding two hour-long bad trip that is somehow disturbing, uplifting, and revelatory.

 

8) Passion Pit – Gossamer: Pop music! With the help of Nico Mulhy you get something like Jonsi, the Polyphonic Spree, and ABBA in a blender. The lead singer is mentally ill, and the lyrics reflect that. I don’t know how much longer he’ll last. Better get in while the getting’s good.

 

7) The Amazing – Gentle Stream: Sax solos! Really. So pretty, so fragile… Did you know that this was released in Sweden in 2011, so it was in last year’s top 15, too? Well, now it’s a 2012 US release, and I like it more.

 

6) Frank Ocean – Channel Orange: I believe this is a first for a top ten list (since I wasn’t doing these in the 1970s), an actual R&B album, and perhaps the most interesting one since Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information at that.

 

5) Japandroids – Celebration Rock: Two smart guys do loud and dumb. Transcendentally dumb.

 

4) Tame Impala – Lonerism: The psych freakout of the year. Wayne Coyne, take a memo.

 

 

3) Beach House – Bloom: I note that Beach House traffics in bullshit. But it’s pretty bullshit. It’s good bullshit. They worked hard on this bullshit. And I threw parties in grad school.

 

2) Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!: It’s been eight years since the last album, but nobody’s done it better than them since. And nobody will. Welcome back.

 

1) Tamaryn – Tender New Signs: What I like so much about this album is that it traffics in the slow, languid atmospherics of Beach House’s Bloom, but with much less affect and mannerisms. Beach House is what you play at your tasteful grad student party, all academic bluster and Yellowtail Shiraz. Tender New Signs is for when most of the guests and bullshit have left and someone lights a joint.

 

Singles: Purity Ring – Fineshrine; Tame Impala – … Feels Like We Only Go Backwards; Grizzly Bear – Yet Again; Frank Ocean – Pyramids; Childish Gambino and Bun B – Trill OG; Angel Haze – New York; Quakers – Fitta Happier

Cheers: To Spotify, which allowed me to hear all these and more.

Jeers: To Spotify, which is probably killing the music industry (Please buy music if you like it!). To Sigur Ros, who would rather be pretty than good.

Radiohead @ The Verizon Center – Washington, DC – June 3rd, 2012

About two-thirds of the way through “Feral,” the fifteenth song Radiohead played at Washington, DC’s Verizon Center on Sunday, June 3rd, something odd happened: Colin Greenwood dropped the bass, in the dubstep sense of the term. This doesn’t happen often at rock shows, yet it did here. It was unexpected, chest rattling, and, in hindsight, completely logical. Economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that twentieth century capitalism and its processes prepared souls for socialism. In 2012, Radiohead prepares indie rock fans for dubstep. While Skrillex can go from emo never-will-be to superstar DJ, Radiohead has attempted, at least on record, to do the opposite; a group of people so alienated and detached from place and time, from what’s around them, that they go beyond getting lost in the machine, ultimately becoming it.

The band has been heading down this path for some time now, since at least In Rainbows, and possibly since some of the earlier b-sides (“Kinetic” and “Worrywort,” on Amnesiac’s “Knives Out” import singles come to mind). Radiohead’s live shows used to be events in and of themselves. Now the concerts exist to help album listeners make sense of Radiohead’s minimalist streak: haunting vocals, slight melodies, sub-bass, and metallic, tinny drums that blur the lines between man and machine.

In 2003, a Radiohead concert would trigger lines down the block. In 2012, a function of the economy, the most recent two albums, or perhaps a combination thereof, one could walk up to a scalper and purchase tickets ten minutes before showtime for well under the face value of $70 plus fees. The floor section of the arena was two-thirds full, with a scattering of empty seats on every level.

The band opened with “Bloom,” the lead track from The King of Limbs. It was louder and more visceral than the synthy repetition expressed on that album. A second drummer, Clive Deamer, added for this tour helped create a breakbeat that wound through much of the new material, so much so that one could divide the In Rainbows and TKOL material into two kinds of songs: those that featured synthesizers as the melody or those that used jagged guitars from Johnny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien as the melody. The constant was the breakbeat. “Staircase,” “Identikit,” and “Supercollider,” new songs, fell into the former category as well.

A sizeable portion of the crowd got what they were looking for when Johnny Greenwood launched into “Airbag” next, but given how much of the new material was translated for a large venue, even songs from the two most recent albums became arena-rock crowd pleasers. The band employed multiple guitars on most songs, pausing the dubstep-as-rock show vibe for “Meeting in the Aisle,” an obscure, beat-driven (in the Chemical Brothers-do-trip hop sense), instrumental b-side from 1998 that now sounds prescient, a forerunner of where Radiohead has spent much of the twenty-first century.

Monitors that doubled as sound panels hung above the band, ominously changing positions and functions with each song, sometimes acting as a shield or border, other times broadcasting the band members’ stage movements to the crowd, still others flashing colors, keeping time with the rhythm section.

The band ended its first encore with the noisiest, rudest version of “Paranoid Android,” I’ve heard, then returned for a second culminating in “The Reckoner” off TKOL, which has become an unofficial closer. All in all, Radiohead played for just under two hours, with only two songs off OK Computer, and nothing off their first two albums. Given Radiohead’s most recent DC concert experiences (one rainout, one traffic fiasco that ended in partial refunds), many in the crowd, myself included, were hoping for a bit more, but all in all the show was excellent. Now it’s time to revisit recent recorded material to see if the concert would help me make sense of it, and of Radiohead’s new unsurprising-yet-surprising direction. Colin, drop the bass!

Setlist

01 Bloom
02 Airbag
03 Kid A
04 Bodysnatchers
05 Staircase
06 Codex
07 Meeting In The Aisle
08 The National Anthem
09 Nude
10 Morning Mr Magpie
11 Identikit
12 Lotus Flower
13 Go To Sleep
14 The Gloaming
15 Feral
16 There There
——
17 You And Whose Army?
18 15 Step
19 Supercollider
20 Paranoid Android
——
21 Give Up The Ghost
22 Separator
23 Reckoner

Top 15 Albums of 2011 – The Beerbrarian Guest Post

Some background: every year the proprietor of the blog and I trade top 10, or 15, or 20, or whatever lists. Then we argue and make fun of each other as if we could change the others’ mind. Here is my list. If you like it, feel free to stop by my blog where I talk about libraries and beer, and occasionally post a link to a semi-relevant song. You can also follow me on twitter. If you don’t like it, as George Will says
“Well…” Be warned that the word “best” appears a lot below.

1. Los Campesinos – Hello Sadness: They’re now 4 albums into their career and this might be their best. Or their 4th best. They’re consistent, and this is their most mature, adult album, which means they can actually play instruments now and shout less.

2. Fucked Up – David Comes to Life: Speaking of shouting… In a year in which not a lot of bands even tried to matter, and those that did pee sitting down, it’s strange that a hardcore group with an uncommercial, ungooglable name would actually make a rock album. Yelling, female guest vocalists, presaging the Occupy Wall Street protests, the best guitar riffs I’ve heard in years? It’s all here.

3. Bon Iver – Calgary: Some people think Justin Vernon pees sitting down. I don’t. This is beautiful.

4. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake: Her best in recent memory, maybe ever, and I bet Nick Cave is kicking himself for letting Mick Harvey take The Colour of The Earth to PJ Harvey, or maybe that’s a story I like to tell myself.

5. The Roots – Undun: Stripping away between 25 and 34 minutes off your typical rap album in 2011, or 2007, one would think The Roots would be forced to actually focus. Instead you get a song cycle about a victim and perpetrator of inner city violence bookended by two Sufjan Stevens suites, which oddly makes for their best album since Illadelph Halflife, and maybe ever.

6. Comet Gain – Howl of the Lonely Crowd: Painfully jangly, painfully British. I just assumed it was a reissue from the C86 scene.

7. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost: It’s time to admit these guys, or this guy, are legit.

8. Mogwai – Hardcore Will Never Die…: By embracing Krautrock and baroque, among other styles, Mogwai have made their best and most vital album in just about a decade. I placed it here because it doesn’t sound like Mogwai.

9. The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar: Overproduced to the point of murder, but damn if it’s not the best sounding album of the year on computer speakers, which is the point of that overproduction.

10. Clams Casino – Instrumentals: Picture a cross between Moby’s Play and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing, if it were composed by someone who drinks too much cough syrup.

11. The Antlers – Burst Apart: A slow, gorgeous burn.

12. Yuck – s/t: Everything alt-90s-style power-pop is supposed to be, even if they wouldn’t know what breakfast was if Teenage fan Club didn’t eat it.

13. Seapony – Go With Me: Cuter and janglier, which is how I really like ‘em.

14. Veronica Falls – s/t: Cute and jangly, which is how I like ‘em.

15. The Amazing – Gentle Stream: I don’t know who these guys are, or what their backstory is, but the blend of British pastoral folk with psych and shoegaze is a winner. More please.

Singles:

Tyler the Creator – Yonkers,

Lana Del Ray – Video Games,

Nas – Nasty,

PJ Harvey – The Colour of the Earth,

The Joy Formidable – Whirring,

Death Cab for Cutie – Codes and Keys,

Holy Ghost – Some Children,

Beirut – Santa Fe,

Cold Cave – The Great Pan is Dead,

Fleet Foxes – The Shrine/An Arugment,

I Break Horses – Winter Beats,

Danny Brown – Monopoly