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See what I mean?

A number of last-minute entries delayed the publication of my year-end list of the best albums of 2010, but I hope you won't mind. The delay was also prompted by my realisation that the list I published last year did not in any way reflect the actual best albums of that year — for instance it completely neglected to mention Other Lives, whose eponymous début album was secretly the best album released in 2009, in my humble, and now revised, opinion. (Here, give "End of the Year" a listen; it seems appropriate).

Now where was I?

10. Sun Kil Moon — Admiral Fell Promises (Caldo Verde)
Mark Kozelek seems to have taken some time off to take classical guitar lessons. Or maybe he's always been able to play like this, but at any rate, this is a solo effort, just him on nylon-string guitar and his distinctive, cotton-wool infused voice. This is a late-night album if ever there was one. Turn out the lights, pour the wine, and let Kozelek lull you into a mellow, candle-lit stupor. This is easily the most low-key album on this list, and although there is nothing quite as haunting or unshakeable as "Heron Blue" off 2008's April, for all its calm and sombre moods, there is something vital about this album. Good luck trying to understand a word Kozelek is singing, but that won't stop you feeling he nevertheless has something to say. Something, moreover, you won't mind taking the time to hear.

• Listen to "Ålesund"

9. Victoire — Cathedral City (New Amsterdam)
Victoire are a Brooklyn-based all-female quintet to whose existence I confess I was not alerted until I read NPR's list of this year's best classical releases. Which is to say, this album is a bit of a late entry into my year-end list, here, but that needn't dissuade you. Describing themselves as a "chamber-rock ensemble", these ladies produce some truly intriguing instrumental music. Similar, I suppose, to other post-rock groups like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, particularly in the use of obscure vocal recordings in the background, Victoire nevertheless do not indulge in the endless cycle of crescendo and diminuendo that often threatens to undermine whatever impact these bands might otherwise be striving for. Instead, we have a more quiet and subtle, multi-layered collection of post-classical as well as post-rock compositions.

• Listen to "A Door into the Dark"

8. The Tallest Man on Earth — The Wild Hunt (Dead Oceans)
Swedish troubadour Kristian Matsson is not, by all accounts, particularly tall. Strap an acoustic guitar on him, however, and he becomes a giant, capable of captivating large audiences on the strength of his finger-picking prowess and infectious songwriting alone. Then, of course, there's that voice of his. All Songs Considered recently broadcast a solo show of his from New York, and as the announcer rightly noted, it is a rare musician who is able to hold an audience like Matsson did on that occasion. Now, in the past I've often felt that he was playing a little too much up to the obvious comparisons between him and Bob Dylan, on this album (and especially on the 5-track EP released later last year, entitled Sometimes the Blues Is Just a Passing Bird), he has stepped out of the shadow of his predecessor and has begun to come fully into his own as a singer and songwriter in his own right. (At least he dropped to regrettable propensity for glissando and vague stabs at high notes that by turns delights and dismays Dylan's fans and detractors). Matsson is actually both a more technically accomplished guitarist and a better singer than Dylan, and on this album (and the EP, which, I suppose, should be jointly listed here) his melodies are now starting to catch up with his talent. Have a listen to these two songs, one off the album and one off the EP, which showcase his various talents quite neatly.

• Listen to "Troubles Will Be Gone" & "Like the Wheel"

7. Ass — Salt Marsh (Static Caravan)
Why anyone would choose to perform under the name "Ass" is something of a mystery to me, I must confess. Supposedly it is short for Andreas Söderström Solo, but that doesn't make it any better, really. I first became aware of Söderström's work via his previous album, My Get Up and Go Just Got Up and Went, an, as the press release has it, "quietly intoxicating" album of acoustic guitar noodling and not much else besides. Salt Marsh finds Söderström still in a hypnotic, melancholy mode, but this is a more ambitious record in terms of the different layers of instruments used. My favourite track on the album, "One Piece Concept" reminds me of TNT-era Tortoise. But don't take my word for it. Go listen to it yourself.

• Listen to "One Piece Concept"

6. Anaïs Mitchell — Hadestown (Righteous Babe)
Whoever Anaïs Mitchell is, she certainly knows all the right people. This "folk-opera" presents a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and features the vocal talents of Justin "Bon Iver" Vernon (who is simply everywhere these days) and the righteous babe herself, Ani DiFranco, amongst others. The result is a somewhat startling mixture of genres and styles which nevertheless makes total sense from start to finish. It seems Hadestown was originally a stage show, and it definitely has that feel about it, but it doesn't feel like a disembodied soundtrack to something else. Rather, just as the Drowned in Sound review puts it, "it creates a world you’ll want to return to time and time again".

• Listen to "Why We Build the Wall"

5. Clogs — The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton (Brassland)
Clogs, which, you'll forgive me for saying so, is a stupid name for a band, is a sort of side-project for Bryce "The National" Dessner. Although it would be possible to assert the opposite, since he and Padma Newsome have been producing beautiful pseudo-classical music since before The National ever played a note. In the past, their music has been largely instrumental, frequently composed on the basis improvised studio jam-sessions, or so Wikipedia tells me. On Creatures, their fifth studio album, they've enlisted the help of Shara Worden, who, as you probably know, can do no wrong in my eyes. Or my ears, for that matter. And she doesn't disappoint here either. The album was included on NPR's list of the 5 best genre-defying albums of last year, where it certainly belongs, but, in my opinion, it is also quite simply one of the 5 best albums of last year tout court.

• Listen to "On the Edge"

4. Strand of Oaks — Pope Killdragon (eMusic Selects)
"Alex Kona was twelve feet tall / His mother got killed by bowling ball / As she skipped across the wooden lane / Two frames from a perfect game". Thus begins the fifth track on Timothy Showalter's (aka. Strand of Oaks) second album, Pope Killdragon. Showalter, who mostly just sings and plays the guitar, seems to have also borrowed Vangelis's synthesizer for some of the tracks. It's a curious mixture, really, but it works nonetheless. Casting the otherwise straightforward singer/songwriter vibe in a distant, cinematic haze. At the end of the fifth song, Alex Kona remarks that "You don’t understand / What it’s like / Growing up here", whereupon he picks up his electric guitar and launches into the monumental "Giant's Despair", an apocalyptic barrage of distorted guitar and drums worthy of anything Black Sabbath might have come up with in the mid-Seventies. It was here that I realised I was in the presence of greatness.

• Listen to "Last to Swim"

3. Get Well Soon — Vexations (City Slang)
Like Strand of Oaks, Get Well Soon consists almost entirely of one man, in this case Konstantin Gropper, a 28-year-old multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter from South-Western Germany. His début album, Rest Now, Weary Head! You Will Get Well Soon, came out two years ago to some critical acclaim, and in January of 2010 his second offering, Vexations, was released, which is also when I first heard of him, via the music video for his song "Angry Young Man", taken from this album. Gropper's baritone is often eerily reminiscent of Matt Berninger's (of The National fame), and in some ways the two bands are also similar musically, in particular with reference to The National's more epic compositions. But there is also a certain playfulness about Gropper's music which prevents it from becoming turgid or self-indulgent, although he certainly does sail quite close to the wind on that count on several occasions. Above all, it is quite clear from the 22 tracks which make up (the deluxe edition of) Vexations that there is a precocious and extremely fertile musical imagination at work here, such as on stand-out track "5 Steps / 7 Swords" which transforms Pergolesi's Stabat Mater into a Balkan brass-band dirge and pits it against a driving rhythm, while Gropper intones whimsical lyrics about death and the afterlife. If that sounds over-the-top, perhaps it is, but it works, somehow, nonetheless. The pair of songs which open the album provide a key to understanding the dynamics which underlie what follows. Track one, "Nausea", is a slow, dreamy waltz, introduced in storybook fashion by a young woman recounting how, on a "bright and beautiful morning in spring" she had gone out to collect wood for the fire when she "stumbled upon this strangely formed root...". Three minutes later, the drums kick in with an irresistible 4/4 beat (reminiscent of Blur's "Song #2") and the album takes off from there. There is much to explore here, and I have only begun to scratch the surface.

• Listen to "5 Steps / 7 Swords"

2. Shearwater — The Golden Archipelago (Matador)
Rook, Shearwater's previous offering, was without a doubt the best album of 2008, and I listened to it more or less non-stop from the moment I first got my hands on it, following a recommendation from Blog Meridian's John B. And so it was with great anticipation that I cranked up the volume on their latest album, The Golden Archipelago. Initially, I was ambivalent. The didn't seem to flow into one another as they had on Rook, they all ended a little too abruptly, as if the musical idea driving them suddenly ran out. But as I persevered with it, I came to appreciate some of the nuances which I had missed on my first few listens, and tracks such as "Meridian", "Black Eyes", and "Landscape at Speed" began to open themselves up to me. But the album as a whole hasn't come together in quite the same way as Rook did; the songs still seem to end too suddenly, and Meiburg's voice at times veers a little too close to the mellifluous (let's call it the "Chris de Burgh-factor"). That said, this is still the second best album of the year, in my opinion, and there is no question that Shearwater are among the most interesting bands currently making music in the Western hemisphere. Just, if you're new to their work, give Rook a go first, and the likewise excellent Snow Leopard EP.

• Listen to "Landscape at Speed"

1. Agnes Obel — Philharmonics (PIAS)
One reason this list is so late is that at the last minute I was forced to reassess my entire top-ten because of Danish singer/songwriter Agnes Obel, of whose existence I was entirely ignorant up until the 29th of December. Obel, who is 29, lives in Berlin, and released her début album Philharmonics in early October, receiving rave reviews in the Danish independent music press. She recently announced a series of six concerts in Denmark in February. The tickets were gone in a flash. At first blush, such excitement may seem extreme. Obel's album consists of sparse, downtempo, piano-and-vocal meditations; hardly the sort of thing that usually sends an entire nation into raptures of ecstatic anticipation. Naturally, I had to figure out what was going on here.
I must say, this album cast its spell on me even before I had heard half of it. (Basically as soon as I heard "Riverside", the second song on the album). There is something irresistible about these deceptively simple compositions. I haven't checked to make sure, but I would say that fully half of these twelve tracks are in waltz time. The instrumental tracks and the title track in particular invoke Erik Satie and fin-de-siècle orientalism, and in general there is a music-box quality to the songs, a sort of nostalgic fragility which is at once mournful and comforting. You know I'm a sucker for that stuff.

• Listen to "Riverside"

Honourable mention:

• Woven Hand — The Threshingfloor (Glitterhouse/Sounds Familyre) | David E. Edwards continues his post-16 Horsepower pilgrimage to lands dark and foreboding. The unrelenting, earnest intensity is still the driving force behind his music, plus, of course, that voice. Shades of darkwave (Dead Can Dance, in particular) here and there, which suits his customary brooding style admirably.
• Hurray for the Riff Raff — Young Blood Blues (eMusic Selects) | Another interesting release I discovered on eMusic this year was this album by New Orleans-based folk/blues/alt. country outfit Hurray for the Riff Raff. Cat Power-esque vocals plus accordions and banjos... a rollicking good time was had by all.
• Sarah Kirkland Snider — Penelope (New Amsterdam Records) | I suppose I felt I could only go for one album featuring Shara Worden on vocals for the top ten, and the Clogs album is just a little better than this one. Needless to say, however, anything to which Ms. Worden lends her voice is worth your time, so by all means give this a go.
• Zoë Keating — Into the Trees (self-released) | Minimalist cello-looping, as singularly compelling and hypnotic as anything one has come to expect from Ms. Keating. I was a big fan of her first album, One Cello x 16: Natoma, and she doesn't disappoint on this one either. Go listen.

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The deadline for submitting something to next year's NeMLA has already passed, and having looked at the panels on offer, I decided not to submit anything. Unlike the ACLA where everything is post-colonial this or gender that, NeMLA tends to attract extremely conventional topics ("Calvino and the city: new critical perspectives", for instance), and perhaps that is true of approaches to national literature in general. But there was one panel I was intrigued by:

Understanding Avatar: A Movie Made for the Masses

Are the primitive yet "linked-in" Na'vi of Avatar the manifestation of a form of nature now dreamed about by modern "users" dependant on the Internet for their understanding of the world? Did James Cameron select obvious metaphors and recycled themes to ensure Avatar would be understood by bloggers and "textrs" no longer capable of subtlety or wit? Does the popularity of Avatar represent to the "erosion of language" prophesized by Sven Birkerts as a morbid symptom of the electronic age? Please submit 250-500 word abstracts to ...

What a bizarre panel proposal! Its alleged object of inquiry, James Cameron's 3D epic Avatar, is seemingly just an excuse to rehash conventional fears about the degeneracy of Western culture, the decline of literacy and the intellect in the face of the unmanageable proliferation of text on-line. Who says "bloggers and 'textrs'" are "no longer capable of subtlety or wit"? The CfP begs this question entirely. Of the three rhetorical questions here, only the first is potentially interesting with regard to the film itself: A sort of reverse-ethnographic study of the "primitive yet 'linked-in' Na'vi" can indeed offer revealing insights into naive Western attitudes towards the 'natural' and the 'primitive'. The whole film is essentially a gigantic heap of white guilt, a redemption fantasy, where the white colonialist gets to 'save' the natives and save himself in the process. The story is a sad one, told many times. And, as Slavoj Žižek argued persuasively at the time, it has serious racist resonances. But even that is as old as the hills. There is nothing "new" here, and singling Avatar out as somehow more deliberately simplistic and indicative of cultural decline than any other Hollywood blockbuster seems blinkered and self-defeating.

Image via Wikipedia

(Part one here)

My good friend Jan Küveler, who writes for German news daily Die Welt, has just published a little piece on the My Little Pony IMDb mystery, entitled “Lügen haben kurze Beine” [lit. “Lies have short legs” (like ponies, get it?); in English, of course, lies have no legs at all]. After explaining the concept of My Little Pony to his German-speaking readership, who may not be familiar with the little pastel-coloured plastic ponies, as well as the democracy-in-action fact that the open rating system on IMDb is usually a fairly good indicator of whether a film is worth watching, he offers his appraisal of this curious hoax (my translation):

It is unlikely that this is a case of the production company trying to promote a bad movie, as one of the few “genuine” reviewers supposes. The other reviews are too absurdly over-the-top for that. None of the reviews ever mentions the actual content of the film, presumably because none of the reviewers has actually ever seen My Little Pony: The Princess Promenade. This is clearly all a big joke, an internet hoax, a sort of digital flash-mob. […] But what this prank really reveals is just how easy it is to manipulate ostensibly unimportant, marginal information on the Internet. Wikipedia and the IMDb only work when there are lots of attentive users who will not hesitate to raise the alarm as soon as they smell a rat. But where there is no-one looking, the door is wide open for wild distortions and ruses—whatever their motivation may be. But when some unsuspecting soul finally does come along, they’re all at sea. And when even someone like Roger Ebert can be affected, then no-one is safe. Be that as it may, one thing is for sure: it’s a hoot (or rather a whinny).

Davis: Not that again. You can’t be serious.

Janette: I am.

Davis: You’re a damn good chef.

Janette: I am better than good, but this town beat me. Much as I love it, I’m not trying to fight with it anymore.

Davis: But New York?

Janette: I want to see how I stack up against the big boys, you know? Without all these broke-ass levees and blocked gas lines and…

Davis: May I quote the author of La Cuisine Creole? I believe it’s your professional bible.

Janette: Jesus, Davis do you ever stop?

Davis: New York is very fashionable and fast, so fast that you can’t even stroll through it. You just get pushed along. And don’t plan on getting invited to any backyard barbecues. ’Cause there ain’t no backyards.

Janette: You don’t know that!

Davis: Everyone dressed in business suits, working, working, working, and of course the, uh—what do you call ’em?—the financials are very strong.

Janette: Davis…

Davis: Would you rather have a strong economy, or a four-hour lunch? Would you rather have a Macy’s Day Parade, with fuckin’ Bullwinkle floats, or an impromptu second line, where you dance your ass off with your neighbors?

Janette: Is your check from the tourism board in the mail?

Davis: There are so many beautiful moments here.

Janette: They’re just moments. They’re not a life.

On his Twitter page, Roger Ebert has shared an interesting link: the IMDb reviews page for My Little Pony: The Princess Promenade. Writes Ebert, ‘How can “My Little Pony” possibly be this good? IMDb? Hello?’ Well, having read some of the reviews, I find myself asking the same question. User mudkiprex, for instance, writes that he wasn’t expecting much from the film when his girlfriend convinced him to watch it , but that he was “pleasantly surprised”.

The plot it amazingly insightful without being too pretentious or condescending. If Orson Welles had made a movie about talking ponies, this is the movie he would have made. I can't recommend this movie enough. Anyone can appreciate it and it works on so many levels. The visuals are really amazing, especially considering the budget. The voice actors were all spot on. And the pacing is perfect. I was almost moved to tears by its innocent and simple beauty. I didn't want to cry in front of my girlfriend because it would have been embarrassing to cry during a pony movie, but it was just that good. Do not miss this hidden gem.

This is by far not the most effusive praise this direct-to-video animated feature has received, and nor is it the only 10-star review. Another review states that it is “Second only to the film classic ‘Last Tango in Paris’ in terms of its cutting edge cinematography and intriguing and highly original plot”.

So, like, what gives?

My first thought was that this must be some kind of Internet flash mob. A quick trip to Wikipedia confirms my suspicion:

The film has considerable critical acclaim for a direct-to-DVD animated movie aimed specifically at children. The film holds, as of July 2010, a score of 7.8 on the Internet Movie Database from a total of 4,357 votes. Out of the votes, a total of 3,269 gave the film the highest vote of 10. One voter left a review of the film stating it was a “staggering masterpiece” and “[a film that was] able to move me to tears of exultation and utter, boundless joy.” There has been an unproven suggestion that these high scoring votes and extremely positive reviews are a hoax. Evidence pointing to this again comes from the reviews: “The graphic sex scene was also masterfully executed, with the camera moving over our copulating couple with smooth grace and majesty as their bodies ripple and throb before us.”

As the final quote indicates, quite a lot of these super-positive reviews share a distinct tendency toward the absurd and grotesque, but the interesting thing is that there is seemingly no way of proving that this is a hoax. I mean, it must be—right?—but what, if anything, can or should be done about it? How did this thing get started?

Answers on a postcard, please.

It is S.O.P. to blame the closest male when there is a murder suicide. You can always tell who did the killing in one of these cases. If the news says “Monster kills family and takes coward’s way out” it was the dude, if they say “couple killed in apparent murder-suicide” it was the woman.

Over at The Stranger, Lindy West has an insightful, amusing, not to mention damning review of the new Sex and the City film, which, I should mention, I haven't seen, nor do I have any plans to do so in the immediate future, especially after this review. Writes West:

In order to escape their various imaginary problems, our intrepid foursome traipses off to dark, exotic Abu Dhabi ("I've always been fascinated by the Middle East—desert moons, Scheherazade, magic carpets!"). When they arrive, Carrie, because she is aprofessional writer, announces, "Oh, Toto—I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!" Each woman is immediately assigned an extra from Disney's Aladdin to spoon-feed her warm cinnamon milk in their $22,000-per-night hotel suite. Things seem to be going great. But very quickly, the SATC brain trust notices that it's not all swarthy man-slaves and flying carpets in Abu Dhabi! In fact, Abu Dhabi is crawling with Muslim women—and not one of them is dressed like a super-liberated diamond-encrusted fucking clown!!! Oppression! OPPRESSION!!!