End Of Year Albums/Tracks/Artwork/LiveShows/OTHER STUFF 2010

Favourite band this year: Titus Andronicus

Top Ten Records in no particular order because i am fickle and apart from the Monitor, the hierarchy sort of fades between the rest of them. Oops that makes it sound like nothing else matters except the Monitor which is clearly not (entirely) true! I chose all of these because they were all records that, in some small way, had a time and a place for me this year:

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

Four Tet- There Is Love In You

Abe Vigoda- Crush

Wild Nothing- Gemini

Ty Segall- Melted

Deerhunter- Halcyon Digest

Julian Lynch- Mare

No Age- Everything In Between

Active Child- Curtis Lane

Screaming Females- Castle Talk

Top (12) Tracks:

Well, its hardly surprising!

1. JPNDRDS- Younger Us: This band never fail and this track is like a first boyfriend. At one point i'd say it could even reduce me to tears, maybe at that point when he cheats on you with a girl who doesn't even have every single SY record on CD.

2. Caribou- Odessa: I played this one repeatedly when i went to Wimbledon this year, made the queues a hell of a lot more bearable.

3. Veronica Falls- Beachy Head

4. Mark McGuire- Brain Storm (For Erin): A recent favourite!

5. The Tallest Man On Earth- Love Is All: This is a really beautiful track and reminds me of home movies, being in Australia when i was a kid and all my favourite places there; the smell, the beautiful shades of red on the ground and in the sky.

6. Twin Shadow- Castles in the Snow

7. Ariel Pink- Frightnight (nevermore)

8. Wavves- Post-Acid

9. Fang Island- Daisy

10. Home Blitz- Two Steps: A fun little track which i think is about being scared and pretending you're not i guess.

11. Marnie Stern- Transparency Is The New Mystery: I fucking hate that P4K called this a 'power ballad' even if in jest, but whatever. She's awesome and this is awesome.

12. Sleigh Bells- Crown On The Ground

Favourite Artwork: Julian Lynch- Mare

Least Favourite Artwork: Best Coast- Crazy For You

Favourite Live Shows:

Titus Andronicus!- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Of Montreal- @ Academy 2, Manchester

High Society presents: Felix, Les Etoiles, El Heath- @ Bodega Social

Default This covers ATDI/SY/Fugazi/Refused/And You Will Know Us as part of Hockley Hustle- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Abe Vigoda- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Marnie Stern- @ Bodega Social, Nottingham

Fucked Up and Times New Viking would have PROBABLY made this list, if only those gigs were at convenient times for me when i didn't have work commitments (that's quite funny, really because i NEVER have any work commitments even when i do have work commitments)

Bunch of stuff i've yet to hear, some of which are friends' recommendations:

Sufjan Stevens- Age of Adz (YEP still haven't!)

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Woods- At Echo Lake

How To Dress Well- Love Remains

Delorean- Subiza

Das Racist- Sit Down, Man

Big Troubles- Worry

Little Women- Throat

Rangers- Suburban Tours

Sun Araw- On Patrol

Richard Skelton- Landings

Giant Sand- Blurry Blue Mountain

Gate - A Republic of Sadness

Woven Bones- In And Out And Back Again

Things that should probably have got more listens:

Mark McGuire- Living With Yourself

Zola Jesus- Stridulem

Perfume Genius- Learning

Swans- My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky

Fang Island- Fang Island

Album i have been most baffled by cropping up EVERYWHERE and i'm not sure i'll ever listen to because of this fucking ugly cover.

Earl Sweatshirt- EARL

Hello reader we've reached the end of this miserable journey. I'd liked to know what YOU had on your end of year lists, too! Happy end of 2010!

Mix

Oh, this is new and exciting. My friend posted about 8tracks ages ago, but i've only just got round to posting a mix. All these songs are on a mixtape i made a friend, but they're all stuff i've been enjoying so much off late. It includes my new found love for Burger Records- swiftly making my way through some of their bands, especially Ty Segall and i really like Nobunny as well for the concept.

There's some Abe Vigoda and Ganglians in there too, who i'm seeing in November and hugely excited about. "Crush" is such a great album i totally wasn't expecting it.

They Saw The Waves...That's The Way To Go.

I saw this video a while ago and knew i was going to come to adore this band. "Beachy Head" reminds me of this holiday i went on once with my family in Spain somewhere. We stayed with some friends at a place near the cliffs, and the best moment i remember was looking down to the raging sea and just finding that situation and everything i knew about life sort of hilarious. This band are full of fun and dark moments.

Veronica Falls - Beachy Head from Philippa Bloomfield on Vimeo.

Stay Active

Been listening a lot more to "Curtis Lane EP" by Active Child (Pat Grossi) of late. It sucked me in dangerously quick, like how religion can be overwhelming if you've never heard of it before. Luckily you can still enjoy the best of a record like Curtis Lane without having to convert, pray and maintain practise; it's just really really pretty music fusing choral and dark, melancholic synths. It's not hard to imagine beautiful music with that description, but i think it would be difficult to 'get it right' if you were going to try. What i love best about Active Child is that Pat grew up listening to really dirty rap- (his dad used to work for the rap label Priority Records) but he was also in Philadelphia Boys Choir for the better part of his childhood, so little Pat was introduced to and met Snoop, Dr.Dre, Eminem and still ends up playing gospel music. That's remarkable.

Where on earth did the inspiration for songs like "Weight of the World" "She was a Vision" "Wilderness" come from when your favourite records growing up were mostly about cunts and guns. Weight of the World reminds me in a strange way of the title music for Ecco the Dolphin on Sega; a little heartbroken, lonely, but hopeful. Can't say Ecco was my favourite game to play, now that i think back on it, it was highly inappropriate for my age at the time! It's about a lonely, aggravated dolphin who tries to organise his grief stricken existence by travelling back in time through seas of chaos at a very poor level of physical fitness where you have approximately 3 minutes to complete a really difficult underwater maze because of your failing respiratory system which means you always invariably DIE!

Despite all that, I love Curtis Lane, and this video gets across that 'expansiveness' quite well

Active Child - Wilderness from Jheri Evans on Vimeo.

Ghost in the Machine

Quite a lot recently, i've had this sense of unfamiliarity within my own body, its like a continuous 'what the fuck are you doing?' sense of being which makes me wish i didn't have to associate myself with my Self.

Most of this stems from an extreme detachment, or rather discrepancy, between what i intend doing and what i physically end up doing. It's true a lot of people have good intentions; i used to have intentions too, real ones, like an intention to get into University, get a job, improve my backhand slice, or read 3 books a week.

I've since deteriorated.

I now have intentions like making sure i don't break anything made of glass today. Or, sometimes i have an intention to not get out of my car again because i 'think' i've left the straighteners on in my bedroom. And then i go upstairs, not paying attention, forget why i came back in, i do something completely irrelevant, get back in my car, then wonder if i've locked the front door....and whether i've left the straighteners on in my bedroom. It's a sad state of affairs, and they're not 'intentions' they're just Standards of Sanity, i guess. Thus, my approach to life these days is one of Positive Apathy; why bother thinking about anything when it has no real meaningful effect on what you do, it reaches no further than the thought process itself.

I can only currently describe my feelings as a mix of 'locked in syndrome', phantom limb, being drunk and the relationship the rat and Linguine had in Pixar's Ratatouille. My brain is active but my body is incapable of creating anything beautiful or interesting, i don't recognise my hands when they make a sloppy job out of everything, i find it difficult to pay attention to anything that requires me to sit down quietly and mostly i feel like i'm dealing with a total idiot of sorts.

It's frustrating. What have i become? What was i before? Can i get up from this horrible nightmare.

Meanwhile, this video for Fang Island's "Daisy" strangely depicts a nightmarish version of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you don't get it, watch it again- you'll see. The sense of exclusivity from the world, and how, you quite simply can never physically let people know that hot pants don't suit them.

Fang Island from carlos charlie perez on Vimeo.

Growing some Antlers instead.

It's not my fault really that Nottingham have had some p4k 'gems' in the past few weeks, and thus i am provoked most unfairly to keep these gigs in the blog roll, despite my reluctancy- i am reluctant. i am.....

On Monday night, The Antlers played at the Social....and it was incredible.

It seems we need to start providing bands with some sort of award if their live shows can actually outshine their album/hype mutualism. When i first listened to "Hospice" i thought it was an awesome album, as did probably everyone who bought/downloaded it. I tried my best to ignore the contentious maps of meaning through the inter-webs that crumbled around Pete Silberman's beautifully constructed tower as if it didn't exist- and i couldn't see it falter. I paid no attention to the lyrical density or the fact that albums like this can have real 'concepts'.

...But it became apparent to me on Monday night, that "Hospice" cannot be exclusively phlegmatic on any level- the more you listen to it, the more obvious the hidebound of someone's extremely painful experience, and it's quite frankly, terribly haunting. Not merely because of the emotional burden that goes hand in hand with scenes of illness, hospitals and death that form the bathing fluid of Hospice, but because these emotions can be so probing to even those who haven't fully experienced them.

Death is inevitable, and we all have death anxiety; Irvin D. Yalom (who wrote a wonderful collection of stories called "Love's Executioner and other tales of Psychotherapy") calls it the 'price of admission to self-awareness'. Everything i've realised is down to evolution and telekinesis.... and an extension of such is the way death anxiety works on a collective consciousness. Everyone knows what it is to die, what it means to not exist or to not have someone else exist, to come to terms with the fact that it's a lonely old world and no one person has much of a chance of existing with you forever, no matter how much you love them or need them or want them.

It's also only when we face death that we have the sudden capacity to do remarkable things for others and for ourselves.

'though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us'

the fact is that she won't survive, the idea is that i keep bedside manners and do the best i can.....which means she can throw the thermometer right back at me if she wants to, she can scream and curse and then apologise as many times over as she wants, she can tell me to leave because she doesn't like my tone, even though i'm only trying to make her smile, but something keeps me standing by the hospital bed.

Peter Silberman's lyrics cut through me like a thousand knives; all of which can be found very neatly presented here

"There's a bear inside your stomach, a cubs been kicking you for weeks, and if this isn't all a dream, then we'll cut him from beneath. Well we're not scared of making caves, or finding food for him to eat. We're terrified of one another, terrified of what that means. But we'll make only quick decisions, and you'll keep me in the waiting room, and all the while i'll know we're fucked and not getting un-fucked soon. When we get home we're bigger strangers, than we've ever been before. You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor..."

I guess the track "Bear" is somewhat obviously touching on the idea of abortion, but it kinda reminded me about a form of cancer therapy based on 'visual imaging'; an admittedly pathetic sense of self-healing where the patient creates a visual metaphor for their chemotherapy fighting against a visual metaphor for their cancer. I thought of the bear inside her stomach as this wild and growing tumour in her body, and them not feeling scared of finding food and caves was the created sense of boldness they both had in getting through chemotherapy, he mentions making 'all the right appointments' in an earlier verse, and being terrified of one another stands for each others situations; one coping with a terminal illness and the other knowing and sensing the huge loss that is about to present itself, yet somehow the relationship needs to stay together, until it is no more.

You think you can say everything to someone who you know is going away for a very long time, but things just don't work that way, and all you care is that they don't notice how scared you are. I didn't ever intend to cut these lyrics up like this, but they come alive on that album, and whatever it means, the last thing i want to do is vitiate them. But what is this album if it isn't one to rip up? Hospice is so overexposed, it's actually underexposed....you can't understand another person's grief. This is where collective consciousness doesn't work.

I'm scared to sleep i hate my voice 'cause it only makes you angry. I only talk when you are sleeping. That's when i tell you everything, and i imagine that somehow you're going to hear me'.

When i try to move my arms sometimes, they weight too much to lift. I think you buried me awake (my one and only parting gift). But you return to me at night, just when i think i may have fallen asleep. your face is up against mine, and i'm too terrified to speak................

Live and Kicking with Bears and Japandroids

I've been knocked out pretty much all week. Days and days pass me by in bite size chunks; i look through a hole in the wall every morning i wake up, and see two hours in a 24 hour time span. Two hours spent numb after i've dragged my self around, kicking and screaming for so long that i can't even remember why anymore. And at those times of rare animation, it's pretty ridiculous to chew right when you've bitten off a little more than you can physically handle.

This week was different, because this time i was kicking for a different reason- the undeniable pleasure of great live music will always exist, no matter how dead you feel sometimes. I had travelled to Leeds on the Thursday for a mesmerising evening with Grizzly Bear. They came up and had a little taste, a little feel, and looked up at you with their big Grizzly Bear eyes and there was something special there (this is also what the camera crew on BBC's "Life" had said about the giant squid they were filming, i admit it, i plagiarised). ..


Under the blue and green light canopy, and the mock fire flies trapped in glass jars around them flickering their little wings, Veckatimest took on a whole new meaning for me. Ready, Able was astonishingly lovely, my favourite on that album. Cheerleader soared around the ceiling like birds in formation. The echoey vocals on Knife sounded like Romantic yetty calls up to the balcony where i was stood, and not for a second was i deterred by the ridiculous amounts of people that were rammed into Leeds Met Students Union (it's been a while since i've been to a gig this 'big'), and a good few of them were illuminated around the face with mobile elements (Boo).

As if this wasn't enough, the very noisy, very snazzy, very Sai's top 09 list of albums Japandroids were down in Nottingham supporting A Place To Bury Strangers at Bodega Social. After a rather depressing Friday of catching up on 2 weeks of lecture notes, i was almost too depressed to leave my room, but the very thought of missing Japandroids was a little painful- so i paid 8 quid just to see them support, since i'm not really a fan of APTBS.

Unfortunately, the two-piece only managed a 20 minute set, since they arrived late because their van broke down, but those 20 minutes were spit fire. Brian King the guitarist has a ridiculous amount of raucous energy about him; his enviably skinny guy frame in straight cut dark blue jeans jittered around on stage like a nervous cat. He says in his charming canadian slur that they used to think they were the loudest band ever until they toured with APTBS, and then they felt like a couple of girlies...."like your jeans" scoffed a punter, ZIINNNNGGG. Brian was not happy, and gave us all permission to spit on the guy- he was clearly some fat, rigid ugly person jealous that he wasn't sporting such a physique to prance on stage holding a guitar somewhat convincingly.


The Social crowds are always too cool for their own good (as my friend aptly mentioned after the gig), and remained relatively static despite the hysterical dance-worthy numbers in Hearts Sweats, Rockers East Vancouver, Young Hearts Spark Fire & Boys Are Leaving Town. I wasn't ashamed. I paid 8 quid for this god dammit and i'm gonna have a hip shake.

Got a drink while APTBS were on, went up for the last song. Strobe lighting gave me a fit. Loud. It's fucking loud up here. My ears, they're gone.

Light. all i could see was the fucking light- and this is why they cut Japandroids short???! Whatever. I bought their fucking t-shirt.

So anyway, i see drowned in sound did a ridiculously fucked up review of the Post-Nothing record.....no, it is not about suburban numbness, or blank interactions, or the modern Western malaise of personal and social detatchment. It's just not.

The Cooking Life: Titus Andronicus makes amazing culinary transformation- try it at home!!

Have a horrendous morning filled with car clamps and 2 hour social development lectures??

About ready to die when you get home and literally starving into your knees???

Want a satisfying lunch to ease the grievances?

Find that dusty Titus Andronicus album in the corner of your kitchen and put it into that fucking CD player, because it does exactly what it says on the packet- the "Airing of Grievances"

" i'm a hardcore smoothie lover and like my smoothies to have the perfect consistency; smooth, no coagulation between fruit and dairy, light, tasty, with just the right combo of ingredients. Couple that with ricotta and pine nut raviolli and you have a perfect lunch. But its difficult to get a lunch looking and tasting this perfect (well for me anyway) and its even worse when you're running on 2 1/2 hours sleep"

BUT NOT ANYMORE BECAUSE TITUS ANDRONICUS CAN ACTUALLY SOLVE THIS:

I'm telling you, just once, try making anything in the whole wide world listening to that album and it will come out beautifully. I like the album, not love, more like. But those guys are culinary transformers. I am going to write to them and thank them.

Or maybe i just had a lucky day in the kitchen?....naaaahhhhhhh.

Try it out at home by making Nigella's dark chocolate raspberry pudding cake (it's delicious, even if Nigella is um, the opposite)

185g self-raising flour

25g cocoa powder

250g unsalted butter

2 tbsp creme de framboise (optional)

100g caster sugar

100g light muscovado sugar

250g good quality dark chocolate

185ml strong black coffee

and 370ml water

2 large eggs, beaten lightly

250g raspberries

icing sugar, for dusting

1. Preheat goddam oven to 180C, fan 160 gas mark 4

2. sift flour & cocoa, set aside.

3. put butter, creme de framboise, sugars, chocolate, coffee and water in a thick bottomed saucepan and stir over a low heat until everythign melts and it looks smooth and glossy.

4. stir this mixture into sifted flour and cocoa. beat well until all smooth, then beat in the eggs. (dont worry if its runny, it will set, DONT ADD MORE FLOUR)

5. pour into cake tin (i used a heart shaped one :) ) until 2cm thick, then pour on raspberries, and put rest of mixture on top.

6. bake in oven for 40-45 minutes.

7. grunge is what the cake is alllll about, so dont bother making skewer come out super clean.

8. leave to cool for 15 mins and dust with icing sugar, cut into a broken heart if you wish, because broken hearts are more interesting than complete ones...

and it should hopefully come out like this.........

&

No Such Thing as Nosaj's Thing

The first listen i had of Nosaj Thing's album "Drift" was when i was driving down a relatively lonely dual carriage way on a dark afternoon with huge fat rain droplets pelting down on my windscreen. The sky had just about closed up and there was nothing but the stark distinction between wet and dry as i sat in my little car with the hard, starving rain threatening to break through my windows.

"Drift" sounds like that space between the wet and dry, the space that i feel relatively sheltered in but all the while i can feel the tension that builds as the rain gets harder. If i put down my window it will attack me, though i can't help but want to do it anyway.

The hugely exciting openers "Quest" and "Fog" sounds like what would happen eventually if i decided to open my windows and doors to a torrential downpour, and my car was consumed by rain water; dark and dank and delightfully distressing, and me stood in the midst of it, soaking through and through. By the time the glitchy synth action of "Caves" came around i would spiral into a state of mania, not contemplating my actions but reliving the necessity of them in denial.

On the first listen, i could only get up to track 6 and got impatient with the rest of the album- i thought most of the infectious swagger of this record and the 'drops' were already exhausted from tracks 1 to 6 . How wrong i was! Lords the last track "kicks 7 different types of ass" as one person put it on a album review comment on a site i was on earlier.

I do like this video a lot too- "Aquarium" from the Views/Octopus EP.

Someone tie me to 200 balloons so i can fly away from this world.

Grizzly Bear / Two Weeks from Minimaxwell on Vimeo.

Brain Music: Four Tet

I never appreciated Kieren Hebden's work so much before, but since starting revision for Yr 1 Psychology properly, 'Pause' is the one album i have on repeat almost constantly. It's a been a while since 2001, but the record is still just pacifying 'brain music' that seems to flow as one with the neurones firing around in my confused cerebral hemispheres. Maybe it's the context of my work this week (which has been a lot to do specifically with brain areas and their functions) but i couldn't help but think of 'four tet' as 'four tête' i.e. four heads, which in reality is quite true of the brain anatomy.

The motor cortex and frontal cortex can be thought of as one since they both belong to the Frontal lobe of the brain. The sensory is part of the Parietal lobe, and the visual is part of the Temporal lobe. While the Occipital lobe constitutes the cerebellum area.

Each of these lobes have a specific function, so seem to be four separately functioning 'heads', yet they all combine so beautifully into a integrated system. Unique in their capacities, yet entirely dependent. 'Pause' by 'Four heads' is such a complete album, listening to it makes me feel so aware of this integration of all these working parts of my head, and the stimulation of motivation that fabricate themselves from physical brain matter.

'Twenty Three' specifically reminds me of CSI music, the one that they use in the sequences of 'laboratory investigation scenes' where samples are being analysed, and tested, and fingerprints are taken etc etc. The rhythm is a driving force for my brain, in a highly positive sense, which for me portrays it as less of a 'slave system' in remembering this bombardment of information, but as a strong, and fully capable organ, that i shouldn't ever be afraid of exhausting.

[When i was little, and i felt things were too tuff, i always used to imagine bits of brain falling off inside my body and tumbling into the rest of my body, and the hollow of my chest and empty belly. Now i realise it is so far from that sort of fragility! ]

Another source of joy comes from the beginning of 'Mosquitoes' where the sound resembles that of a blue whale song (You have to wait a whiel before you hear the whale,there are better ones, i haven't properly explored to find some decent sound clips). I love listening to whale and dolphin sonar communication; for the thrill of it just being so foreign to me, and how there's this whole other language i will never be able to learn, no matter what. Kieren's work on this album is both foreign and familiar, which must be why it is so entrancing. Like whale song is familiar as a language of some kind, the children making noise on the track 'Park' is familiar, but the setting of the song is in a other-worldly medium. Just as whale song will never be comprehensible to us, nor will anyone be able to understand it for what it really is, other than a form of sonar communication.

'Glue of the world' stimulates my working memory, 'Everything is alright' are the action potentials flowing through my motor neurones to my fingers that allow me to keep keep keep keep keep keep keep keep on on on on on on on on on on on on on typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing typing..........................

...............................................................................................

...........................................and never stopping....