Whiskey Pie's Best Of 2009 (Part 1)

(Read the full, badly spellchecked text below for clarifications of bad sound quality and my mush mouth)

To be perfectly honest, 2009 was one of the weakest years for music in recent memory. Thinking back to last year in particular, I had a much harder time deciding the order of my "best of 2008" list. 2009, by contrast, was really a race between three for the top spot and then a rabble fighting for the other 7. You know, sort of like crabs trying to climb out of a pot of boiling water, continually reaching the top and tumbling or being pulled back down.

There were no obvious trends to the year--or at least none that I thought were anything other than forced categorization--so I'll skip the ivory tower monologues about the further blurring of genres and get right to it. This is Whiskey Pie's Totally Inessential, Weeks-Too-Late-To-Be-Relevant List Of The Top 10 Albums of 2009.

10) Album by Girls: While I really hope they come up with a better title for their next album, Girls did put forth the effort for the music of Album. A summery California record that is subtly and sometimes not so subtly recalling 1960s California music, it also has some subtle and not so subtle appreciation for weed and lazy, hazy afternoons.

9) Wind's Poem by Mount Eerie: In my review of Wind's Poem, I described it as "like going for a walk on a late Fall night during a storm, the wind and rain alternately pummeling and gentle." It's too bad that so many reviews describe this as Phil Elvrum's black metal album, since nothing here is heavier than anything from The Glow, Pt. 2 from his Microphones band, but I digress. The album is dense and challenging, but those with patience and a good set of headphones will find much to love.

8) Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors: It took me a long time to fully come around to Bitte Orca. It is such a unique, experimental take on pop music that I hardly knew what to make of it at first. Much like my initial experiences with Deerhoof and the Fiery Furnaces, I started by giggling at how seemingly random the song structures developed, at how arbitrarily sounds came at me. But with time, it is obviously deliberate and calculated, leading me to conclude that this band is either visionary and basically uncategorizable, or that they're willfully perverse songwriters who don't want to make it easy on the listener. Whatever the case, Bitte Orca is one of those fascinating, divisive listens that I think everyone should hear even if they will likely end up hating it.

7) Tarot Sport by Fuck Buttons: Assuming you ended up liking Street Horrrrsing by Fuck Buttons, your reaction may have been similar to mine: "huh, this is really interesting stuff, but I don't ever feel like listening to it." Tarot Sport, then, plays like a remix and reboot of Fuck Buttons, bringing in post-rock structures of loud/quiet/loud and melodic peaks and valleys while also adding the driving beats of electronic music. Since they took out all of the screams and just enough of the noisier textures, Tarot Sport ends up being a surprisingly compulsive listen for what is, still, a relatively experimental electronic album.

6) Embryonic by the Flaming Lips: While At War With The Mystics was far from a bad album, between its mostly forgettable orchestral space pop and the band's increasing emphasis on elaborate stage shows, everyone had all but forgotten the old Flaming Lips. Their earlier, noisier albums actually aren't the masterpieces that people make them out to be, so it was a relief to listen to Embryonic for the first time and see that they didn't revert to the 1980s so much as tear it up and start from scratch. Embryonic is a LOUD, demanding listen, but even as a double album it moves at a much brisker pace than their two previous releases. Also, any album that has Karen O. from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs making animal sounds rather than actually singing is OK in my book.

The Flaming Lips- Embryonic

In the spirit of the double album nature of Embryonic, I've decided to break my review up into a three parts with an intermission after the second part. You know, kind of like a play only with better writing and no acting.

Oh, and by the way, this is going to be a long review, so just skip to the end if you want the Cliff's Notes version.

Part I: Why You Might Hate Embryonic

Though they had a huge hit with 'She Don't Use Jelly' in the mid-90s, The Flaming Lips didn't really become a household name, music-festival-headlining-force until the mid-00s, thanks to The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Those two albums were hardly typical pop music, but they definitely saw the Lips curving their music to a populist, arena friendly, anthemic and fun direction. This wasn't a bad thing; I love those albums and the band deserved all the success and critical adulation. And even though 2006's At War With The Mystics left me a bit underwhelmed, it gave the world a handful more choruses to sing along with the band at their 'insane psychedelic spectacle life affirmingly fun' live shows.

As the band grew more popular, I kind of got the impression that there was a bigger and bigger disconnect between their albums and their live shows. The band make use of some pre-recorded music live, and since there's so much buzz about the crazy costumes, lights, confetti, fake blood, and that big bubble thing that lets Wayne Coyne walk on top of the audience, you get the feeling that, while it's still about the music, it's at least equally as much about the experience of watching the band perform. This isn't bad, but I personally think the albums suffered for it. I suppose I'm mostly talking about At War With The Mystics here, but my point remains.

So, then, we come to Embryonic, an album that pretty much undoes all the crowd pleasing anthemic art rock of everything else the Lips have done for the last 10 years. It's pretty strange to think that 10 years ago they released their most 'pop' album with The Soft Bulletin, and Embryonic is their most experimental. It's debatable whether their early albums were just as experimental and noisy as this, but they sure don't seem like it in retrospect. In fact, Embryonic is evidence of why Dave Fridmann can be a brilliant producer. Just as he helped Sleater-Kinney realize their distorted, loud, classic rock selves with The Woods, he gives the Lips a suitably overdriven and stuffed production for this album. The early Lips releases sound kind of thin and treble-y to me in comparison. But I digress. We were talking about why you might hate Embryonic, weren't we??

Make no mistake: this is not a pop album. The emphasis is less on songs than on sheer totality of sound. This is surely the loudest Lips album, ever, and if you cut your teeth on 'Do You Realize??' or 'Race For The Prize', you'll hate every second of this album. When it's not going for the electric freakouts and thundering bass and drums, it's going for spacious, psychedelic, and slow numbers like 'Gemini Syringes.' I don't know if this is true, but Embryonic feels like it has the least singing and lyrics of any Lips album. Again: if you don't like challenging sounds, non-traditional song structures, and chaotic production, avoid Embryonic at all costs.


Part II: Why You Might Love Embryonic

If, like me, you were left a bit underwhelmed by At War With The Mystics and have been confused at Wayne Coyne's public sort-of-beefs with bands like The Arcade Fire, then Embryonic represents a welcome revitalization. Not since Zaireeka have the Lips taken such a huge chance with their music. For example, every Lips album has awesomely weird and weirdly awesome song titles, but they never end up being as strange and experimental as the names suggest. Ironic, then, that most of Embryonic's song titles are succinct, because the music is a true trip. Granted, this is hardly Trout Mask Replica territory here, but there is a lot of noise, loud instruments of all sorts, punishing drums and fuzzed out bass, and Wayne Coyne singing in ways I've never heard him before. He sounds like Jim Morrison on 'Sagittatius Silver Announcement', and hell, the band even coaxed Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make animal noises on 'I Can Be A Frog', which is the album's one moment of true levity.

During the press for the release of the album, Coyne mentioned that the some inspirations for it were the electric music of Miles Davis and classic double albums like Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti. The former is most obvious in Embryonic's electric freakouts; during the louder tracks like 'Aquarius Sabotage', they often verge on the out-est moments of Davis's Agharta-era band, minus some funk and R&B influences. Actually, the opening bassline to 'Your Bats' is pretty much the same one from the beginning of Jimi Hendrix's 'If 6 Was 9', which is pretty damn funky when you really think about. Regardless, the influence the band took from that Led Zep double album was in letting it all hang out. For a double album, Embryonic is relatively compact, since each disc is only around 36 minutes, but fun larks like 'I Can Be A Frog' and the falsetto sort-of-ballad 'If' would probably have been left on the cutting room floor if this were a single CD's worth of material. So, yeah, it's good to know that the band was able to include them, since they provide a great contrast to the rest of the album.

Intermission

Watch Wayne Coyne talk about some time he saw the Northern Lights

Part III: Conclusion

On one hand, I find it hard to recommend Embryonic with as much gusto as I normally would, since I think most people are going to find it a tuneless, loud/noisy or slow/psychedelic mess. On the other hand, I think Embryonic is the best album they've made since The Soft Bulletin. Were I really cynical, I might call Embryonic a calculated attempt to win back critics who might have stopped thinking the Lips were "cool" because they were getting so mainstream and mannered...but ultimately, I guess I don't really care even if that was true. Embryonic is a hell of an album, with, as I mentioned earlier, a "sheer totality of sound" that is borderline overwhelming on first listen.

Embryonic is a ballsy album to put out in this day and age. It's already perverse enough to make a double album, but to also make it the loudest and most experimental thing you've ever done--I would argue it's also their weirdest, mainly because it's not self consciously/ironically weird like their others--is, well...it's actually kind of funny now that I think about it. Just as I ended up loving Tortoise's Beacons Of Ancestorship because that band was returning to exploring new ideas and the more experimental elements of their music, Embryonic feels, at least in my heart, like a comeback from a band I had mostly written off as fun but not terribly interesting or chance taking. This album is definitely not for everyone, but if that's the worst thing I can think of to say about something then I'm generally sure I have something truly great on my hands.

Cliff's Notes Version

If your favorite Flaming Lips song is something like 'Do You Realize??' and you think the best thing about the Flaming Lips is their psychedelic spectacle live shows, then Embryonic is not for you. If you wish the Lips would make the most experimental, loud, and psychedelic album of their career, and make it a double album, then Embryonic is for you...and you're the sort of person I want to party with you.

Video: The Flaming Lips- She Don't Use Jelly

Say what you will about the facelessness of mid 90s alt rock, but wasting an afternoon watching MTV (or watching Beavis and Butthead watch MTV videos) was always a good time. There's a quality to these sort of videos that was by turns surreal and apathetic, as if they were thrown together at the last minute, fueled by hangovers or afternoon bong hits.

Ironic, then, that a Flaming Lips video from this era would be so relatively normal. I mean, the strangest thing about it is Wayne Coyne, who--red/orange hair or not--looks 25 years younger than he does nowadays.

Album of the Week: Danielson- Ships

If there's one thread running through indie rock, it's the constant struggle between authenticity and sincerity vs. irony and sarcasm. Not that bands can't tap into both, but many indie rockers end up going so far into the overly clever realm, piling on so much irony and sarcasm into their act that you can't believe a word that comes out of their mouth. At the same time, because of the proliferation of overly coy indie rock bands, it's hard to tell if the other ones mean it or not. Such is the case in point with Danielson, an overtly or understatedly Christian band made up of an actual family (hence why they sometimes perform under the name Danielson Family). For years people questioned the sincerity of the act, suggesting that someone so odd and quirky couldn't really mean what he was singing, dressing his band in nurse uniforms to symbolize the spiritual healing the audience was undertaking, and donning a tree costume himself to reference the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

People forget, of course, that indie rock has never been a terribly successful genre. To suggest that Danielson was using Christianity to gain publicity and pretend to be a weird band misses the point, since the band couldn't hope to gain much in the process. No, indie rock has always been the place where the freaks and oddities go to make their music free of outside influence. Danielson are simply too strange and not overtly Christian enough to fit on those modern Christian music compilations you see advertised on TV. Moreover, they're too good for it. For, with the release of Ships in 2006, the indie rock world came to realize the truth: whether or not you're Christian doesn't matter, because this album was some of the best music of that year.

Ironically, the only caveat emptor I can make about this music has nothing to do with its spirituality. I've never detected enough Christian-ness about the album to consider it fully sacred, and I doubt if anyone listening to it who didn't know about the band's story could hear it. No, the problem is Daniel Smith (aka Brother Daniel, the band's leader) and his voice. As is typical with most great indie rock bands, he has a very distinctive set of vocal cords--in this case, very high pitched, squeaky, and sometimes borderline shrill. It's not that he can't sing, it's that the way he sings is destined to turn people away from the music. I've come to love his voice, but there is a 'getting used to' period you'll go through with Ships. Think of it as the final litmus test to enjoying this incredible music.

Every song on Ships bursts from the speakers with melodies, sounds, and inventive songwriting. You don't come across such unique indie rock/pop very often, and the whole package has the same uplifting, borderline-orchestral majesty that the Flaming Lips's The Soft Bulletin does. Where that album came to life affirming music through space-pop and psychedelia, Danielson arrives at it via shining Brian Wilson-esque pop and spiky, skewed indie rock. Corralling a list of collaborators and band members about two dozen strong, Daniel Smith managed to craft eleven songs of both immediate satisfaction and lasting flavor. Like the Everlasting Gobstoppber of Willy Wonka film fame, it tastes good right away and never stops revealing new facets of flavor.

At the center of every song lies Smith, and the arrangements, ever malleable, turn around his every dip and turn. Even simpler songs like the closing 'Five Stars And Two Thumps Up' follow his straightforward delivery--watch the way new instruments and background vocals are added and subtracted as he moves through the song. Along with impossibly catchy gems like 'Did I Step On Your Trumpet' come the more complicated and rewarding songs like 'Bloodbook On The Halfshell' and the epic 'Kids Pushing Kids', which keeps bobbing up and down for more than six minutes but never runs out of steam or ideas. Speaking of which, though the album is a hair over 42 minutes, it contains enough meat for a recording twice its length. This isn't a case of "too many things packed, schizophrenically, into a small amount of time" like some Fiery Furnaces albums can be, but more that lesser bands would stretch these ideas out into an album far longer and thus far weaker.

Regardless of what you think of Danielson the band, there's no denying Ships as an album. It's been scarcely two years since its release and I'm afraid it's destined to be forgotten in the endless pile of indie rock best-new-bands that come out every few months. Not to say that the bands that have arrived unto the scene since Ships aren't good, but it's easy to get lost in the discovery of new, exciting things and forget about the true masterpieces of yesteryears. Ships is--I'm going to say it--a true masterpiece, and one of the greatest, most unique indie rock albums of this decade-so-far.

Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 5- Bitter Tea

After the frustrating Rehearsing My Choir album, I probably would have taken any subsequent release from the Fiery Furnaces as a return to form. Funny, then, that Bitter Tea was apparently recorded around the same time as that album and intended as a companion piece--though for the life of me I don't know why, since it's nothing like Rehearsing My Choir and would only serve as a palette cleanser.

I suppose, then, that's always been my assessment of Bitter Tea. It initially struck me as mediocre and confused, but with a year or two behind it, Bitter Tea stands as the great album it always was. So, why couldn't I see it at first?? Partially it was because it followed Rehearsing My Choir and I thought of it as an "OK, they haven't totally lost the plot" kind of apologetic release. Which it isn't, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Mostly I thought of it as confused and mediocre because of the heavy emphasis on keyboards and experimental backwards vocal conceits. The songs of Bitter Tea are every bit as good as Blueberry Boat when I consider them piece by piece, but as a whole they don't have the same transcendent feeling. I think that's because there's not enough guitars on this album. Not that other Furnace albums didn't have mounds of keyboards, but they also rocked out from time to time. Bitter Tea could almost qualify as their new wave album, if I were so inclined to label it. At the same time, it's their backwards vocal funhouse album.

Please remember that I have nothing against backwards vocals: I actually love Pullhair Rubeye unlike seemingly the rest of the world. But too often bands use it for self consciously difficult reasons, and your mileage will vary. On Bitter Tea, it only seems to work when it isn't the central function of the song. 'Vietnamese Telephone Ministry' irritates me because it's almost six minutes of dueling backwards and forwards vocals, mutated keyboards, and skittering drums; it never congeals into anything other than "my, that was a neat experiment...what's the next song??" Six other songs from the album use backwards effects, but since they don't feature them so prominently, they work. They pop up in the beginning of 'Oh Sweet Woods' and are peppered throughout, for example, but the grooving dance beats and sweet acoustic guitar instrumentation are at the heart of the song, not a bunch of gibberish.

I apologize for the abrupt transition (though in retrospect it's apropos for the Fiery Furnaces), but I want to get back to my original point about this being a palette cleansing, apologetic release. Since Bitter Tea sounds closest in spirit and sonics to Blueberry Boat, its lasting impression on me was always that of a safe album, a reminder to us of why we loved the band in the first place. Well, it does remind us of why we loved them, but that's due to its own merits and not its adherence to Blueberry Boat blueprints. In the end, it wasn't so much a palette cleanser as it helps isolate Rehearsing My Choir as the oddity in the Fiery Furnaces' discography, doubly so because it was recorded at the same time as that album. How different would feelings for both be if their releases were switched, and Bitter Tea came out after Blueberry Boat and EP??

There's a lot to say about the album that has nothing to do with the music, and I feel bad about that. Here I am six paragraphs in and I've only scraped the surface!! Well, let me just jump into it: 'Police Sweater Blood Vow' is another oddly perfect Fiery Furnaces pop song that could've easily fit into the latter half of Bluebery Boat, with a joyous "vibrate buzz buzz ring and beep/tell me babe what time is it now??" chorus. The first four songs build up steam in a near-suite of energy that releases in the ballad punch of 'Teach Me Sweetheart', truly one of Eleanor's best vocal performances on record. Finally, there's 'Nevers', which works wonders with the backwards vocal shtick by switching back and forth between regular and backwards seemingly word by word, before repeating the melody of the song in constantly mutating ways. Too bad, then, that two songs are repeated in different mixes at the end of the album. This sort of thing always bugged me about The Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips, too. But I digress.

I feel as though I've said so much about Bitter Tea and yet not enough. But then again, that goes for every Fiery Furnaces release--they're as fun to talk about as they are to listen to. But all that really matters is that, once all the equations were figured and votes tallied, Bitter Tea still stands as a great Fiery Furnaces album: nothing more, and nothing less.