Drinks with Craig

Well, feck me. Is Jeff Buckley's Grace an album of its time, an overplayed, over-gilded relic defining a particular epoch like a prehistoric bug-wasp trapped in a prison of glowing amber? Or is it for the ages, continuing to astonish those savants that live in small towns like, say, Millsplat and who build large sound levees to divert the flow of dross passing for contemporary music?

Well, one of the perils of iPods is the ability to mindlessly scroll past absolute gems looking for the next album to play; and after some years Grace has hit the 'now playing' list at our house. After failing to match Buckley's soaring vocals, I find that I make the grade on air-drums - this time with devastating results. He put himself 'out there' like very few artists, methinks; check out this clip. The fact that Buckley generates such power and emotion in the very coldest of studios, overseen by a woman who despite praising his 'vocal elasticity' and 'swooning passion' has obviously never listened to his record, demands respect and cements his revered status in cement. Timeless cement.

I'm off for another drink.

-- Craig E. H. 2012 --

THE VINYL FACTORY: The 2011 Anti-List - The Only 10 Records Worth Adoring

Stereogum, Pitchfork, the late Altered Zones - each and every one an inscrutable, wretched list-pusher.  Surely, we might ask, the last thing we need right now is another pointless list (e.g. of early 1993 b-sides anyone?) signifying pretty-well just-about exactly nothing?! 

Well, with the early part of 2012 yielding precious few memorable minutes of first-class new music, let us suspend our self-censoring yet some how self-consciously fashionable anti-list posture for just a few moments and take a brisk peak back at the vinylastically superb moments of 2011 - just to remind ourselves of the kind of soaring, searing competition that this new year's grasping crowd is oh-so dangerously up against. 

Remember when full-length albums really meant something?  Before Jobs et al broke them down into file-sized monetized sound snippoids?  Before his ilk reduced serious artists into little self-sniping, demoralised and hungry (literally) unit shitters.  Remember when albums used to demand such intense and painstaking attention they nearly caused ear bleeds?  Remember when they demanded more from their listeners than just a single click into free download, a pathetically small, wholly unlistenable mp3 file and a god awful ringtone?!! What we need now is a quality-compression, an epi-taste-centre, a coming-together of musical focal points, a modality meltdown.

Surface To Air's The Vinyl Factory offers up the one (and only) list of the year 2011.  Let this little list open a huge space in your head - and make some room to allow last year's most powerful and profound musical artistry connect with your inner-workings. In an era of growing global turmoil and uncertainty, we must rely on our artists (not the markets) to help us make sense of it all. Put on any one of these records - listen to whole thing through - and you'll be a little closer to really knowing "what's goin on". 

These are arguably the only ten or so long-players of 2011 worthy of your enduring adoration into 2012 and well-beyond. Let's hope (and offer a fervent prayer) you have at least one of them.

10. Wire - Red Barked Tree. Technically first released on 20 December 2010 (digital only; properly released on vinyl on 10 January 2011), Wire's Red Barked Tree swept aside a squabbling band of 2010 low lights and blew wide open the prospects for a scintilating 2011's worth of wrecking-ball long-players. Just how Wire managed to formulate and drop the talismanic Red Barked Tree right onto the very peak of an accomplished 30+ year mountainess career and make what has been described as a genuine best-of in new material is quite freakish.

09. Meg Baird - Seasons on Earth.  Meg Baird's 2011 long player showcased a side of Meg Baird and her ensemble cast that hitherto had tended to go without any kind of serious consideration, especially as relates to female musicians.  But Seasons on Earth wholly shored-up the genuine possibility that Baird's songcraft extended to producing what must be recognised as a brilliant guitar record, as well as everything else....and there's plenty else (to love about this record).  The maturity and depth of songwriting (Baird wrote 8 of the 10) on Seasons is perfectly harnessed by her magnificently understated vocals.
Very splendid indeed.

08. Destroyer - Kaputt.  "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker".  "Savage Night at the Opera".  Dan Bejar's ability to take a novelist's approach to deconstructing the reconstructing rock music in the course of long-player with beautiful and chaotic results is not limited to just his fractal-esque lyrics but the sounds and arrangements also.  In fact, Destroyer's Kaputt is a character driven, self-conscious classic, reveling in high drama and low life, with the soundscape both a preening diva and indisputably vital member of the cast.  Bejar's post-modern take on liquid jazz and tubular 80s rock is itself a complex study of a musical epoch which coincided with the last few decades of genuine decadence.  Step into Chinatown and let Bejar and crew whisk you into an unmarked doorway to the nocturnal underworld of late 20th century glamour and ruin.

07. Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place.  'Envelop' (as opposed to the record store guy's emphatic "love that opener - envelope!") is the ideal descriptive monicker for a lead-in to the talismanic properties of The Magic Place.  Cathedral-esque resonances lie at the heart of Julianna Barwick's art and her ability loop multiple vocal strains and musical refrains without ever reducing it to audible 1s and 0s is an innate touch found only in a handful of computer-based live-mixing artists.  But it is her vocals where she swiftly, profoundly and permanently separates herself from a clambering throng of chime-centric aspirants.  Barwick creates a genuinely magic place where the sound of surrounding makes you wants to be them rather than be in them.

06. Wooden Shjips - West. An album of such seductively spiraling rock-outs and psychedelic journeyings that the listener could be forgiven for thinking The Doors had somehow managed to continue recording in a San Francisco basement, albeit in the form of grunge-influenced indie rockers playing riffs and instruments influenced as much by an East coast Velvet's style low-fi artistic defiance as by any kind of West coast trippy roadhouse harmonic bliss-out on blues.  There's something about this record which causes you to want to take flight aboard a wooden ship into an ocean of sound.

05. Wilco - The Whole Love.  One could say that Wilco are enjoying a period where they can do what they want. But that would imply there was a time when they did what others (record labels for example) had proscribed for them - which has never been the case.  The Whole Love brings the listener inside the songcraft and lyricism as though handing a manuscript to a player and inviting them to discover and explore theirs and others' characters in the context of the confusing drama that is the everyday human condition.  Whether old fan or new, it's a pleasure to audition for the cast of The Whole Love.

04. Tom Waits - Bad As Me.  Tom's repertoire, amid comic asides and spectacular smarts, charts the story of an artist's willfully staggering journey to the night stars of the unnamed city beset by switchblades and whiskey scoundrels.  But the vision amongst the vice is sometimes shrouded in clanging obstreperousness.  The Waits oeuvre is littered with such supremely thoughtful essays on life and human weakness it is little wonder the underlying message in Tom's keenly illustrated current world-view helps us to remember that war is hell and love is all. 

03. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for my Halo.  Kurt Vile's transitionally seductive Smoke Ring for my Halo has a soundscape of such scope and aura that it is hard to picture acoustic guitar records of the near and distant future not, at the very least, aspiring to create similarly stupendous audio terrain. Smoke Ring seems as much a recording breakthrough, in capturing the greatest qualities of acoustic guitar, as it is a demonstration in how such singular instrumentation can be used to harken the music of emotion and encapsulate unassuming stories of the soul.

02. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake.  When PJ Harvey announces our society is giving rise to evil children it is impossible to look away. Songs of war and longing is only one dimension of this essayistic masterwork. The other? The desire and ability of humanity to turn away from its self-destructive patterns and perversions and give rise to a new kind of country and nation of humanhood.  Her mastery of the rock song and album structure brings the form indisputably into the realm of serious and significant art. Thank god for PJ.

01. The War On Drugs - Slave Ambient.  With Slave Ambient The War on Drugs have made an album of such unparallelled expansion and skyscraper tall ambition as to reset the standard for the capacity of the album to be significantly greater than the sums of its parts. A return to when album making was a process in producing a piece of art which seeks to deliver a transformative experience to every serious listener upon each and every listen.  Revelatory yet unassuming; powerful and enduring.  Slave Ambient restores hope in the life/art form that is modern music making in the 21st century.