Video: Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Maps

Ten thoughts on 'Maps' and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to celebrate the 2010 New Year's Eve:

1) The drummer looks like the son of Egon Spengler from Ghosbusters.
2) If the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had only stuck to EPs and noisier music, they might've been consistently great instead of only divisively and/or arguably great.
3) No, I don't know why she's wearing a bow (as in bow and arrows) on her arm.
4) This's one of the handful of songs from this decade that I never get tired of hearing, and had to listen to over and over after I heard it for the first time until I was satisfied. I rarely fixate on a single track at a time, but I had it bad for Maps back in '03. And still do now. Maybe someday I'll do a list of those songs...
5) "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" was one of the dumber examples of "good band, shitty name" to come out this decade, though "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!" makes it look like a monument to self restraint.
6) It's still weird to hear Karen O. laughing and having fun while making animal noises on Embryonic by the Flaming Lips, if only because she comes off as one of those irritatingly confrontational, forcibly "artsy" dressing frontpeople.
7) For some reason I found it really hilarious when a co-worker pronounced their name in a mocking Brooklyn/Jersey mob hitman accent: "yea yea yeaaaaaa."
8) Fingerless gloves, especially leather ones, have never and will never look good on women.
9) I confess to not listening to their third album at all, but Show Your Bones left me with little impression no matter how many times I listened to it. I really ought to revisit it before I say this, but: that album wasn't even a daring failure. It was content sounding, and for something that took three years to record it was just kind of boring.
10) What was with all the bands without a bass player that got popular in the early part of the decade? The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Keys...You don't even really notice the absence either, leading me to conclude that not all bands need a bassist though most of them have one seemingly just for the hell of it.

It's that kind of incisive commentary you can continue to expect from Whiskey Pie in 2010, not to mention more of my droning, nasally voice set to cleverly cut images I found on Google or Wikipedia. (Hopefully I'll get a proper microphone soon so it's a bit more, you hear, audible.)

Whiskey Pie's Best Of 2009 (Part 2)

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

5) I'm Going Away by the Fiery Furnaces: The 2009 releases from Wilco and Yo La Tengo left me feeling pretty meh, so even bands that are normally reliable helped contribute to the general weakness of the year. That said, I ended up loving I'm Going Away by the Fiery Furnaces more than I thought I would. Since this is a release that strips away almost all of the song structure experiments and crazy instrumental workouts of the band's sound, I was initially underwhelmed by the album. But the Furnaces always had the songwriting and melodic hooks beating at the heart of their music, and by focusing on that aspect--and a live-in-the-studio production style--they ended up making one of their best albums. The Friedberger siblings recently issued the digital-only Take Me Round Again, which sees them re-making the songs from this album on their own. In the process they ended up emphasizing that, hey, these are great songs no matter what their form.

4) Beacons Of Ancestorship by Tortoise: "Fun" is not a word I associate with post-rock even if it's obvious the dudes in Mogwai, at least, have a sense of humor. But Tortoise have always given off an intellectual air of clinical studio perfectionism that brings to mind Steely Dan. Yet Beacons Of Ancestorship is the clearest example I heard all year of a band very obviously just trying to have fun with music. Because of this, Beacons may lack the cohesiveness or flow of other Tortoise albums, but it's by far the most fun to listen to and sports a variety of sounds. Call it their "much needed shot in the arm" release if you must, but I never thought I'd be so excited about a Tortoise album after 2005's sleepy, workmanlike It's All Around You.

3) Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear: Yes, I'm not entirely sure how it's pronounced either, but I feel like that was the point. Much like with Dirty Projectors, you have to come up with multi-syllabic phrases to categorize the music of Veckatimest. Indie rock folk pop chamber vocal music? Whatever, the point is, this is an amazing album with a timeless quality to it, bursting with ideas and melodies that never sound obvious or cliche.

2) Merriweather post pavillion by animal collective: Merriweather post pavilion was the best reason to start 2009 just as their recent Fall Be Kind EP is the best reason to let it end. As such, Animal collective felt like they owned the entire year, setting the bar high early for other albums to match and then closing it out in style with a great EP. Every fan seems to have their personal "dude, this is totally the best" Animal Collective album--even if it happens to be Panda Bear's solo release, Person Pitch--yet everyone seems to at least agree that Merriweather is brilliant and rivals their own personal pick. I'm a Sung Tongs man yet there are times while listening to Merriweather when I begin to question my loyalty. It's that good. On a final note, those people who complain that the best songs are at either end of the album--'My Girls' and 'Brothersport'--are neglecting 'Daily Routine' and 'Lion In A Coma', not to mention....well, hell, the whole album is great, so shut up already.

1) Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown: Around June of this year, it seemed obvious to me that either Animal Collective or Grizzly bear were going to take this top spot. But then--confession time--I downloaded a torrent of Dragonslayer, and within a couple days I bought every Sunset Rubdown release I could get my hands on. Spencer Krug has always been my favorite member of Wolf Parade, but his contributions to this year's Swan Lake album were sub-par. Furthermore, in retrospect I overrated At Mount zoomer even if I still like it. But I digress. Dragonslayer catapulted Krug to being among my favorite artists. The opening and closing tracks of the album are perfect mood pieces with vibrant imagery, while all the songs are intricate mini-suites that have two or more different pieces that fit internally together, and with the rest of the album as a whole. Furthermore, the subtle or overt nods to Sunset Rubdown's previous album, Random Spirit Lover, are clever and fascinating attempts at further tying together Krug's already inter-connected body of work. I actually had to take Dragonslayer off my iPod because for a long time it was all I wanted to hear. It is a joy to listen to, an album full of interesting ideas and brilliant songs within songs that I never seem to get tired of. In a year with a highly contested top spot, Sunset Rubdown managed to become my obvious and only choice.

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.

Girls- Album

It's an interesting coincidence that within a year of each other, we got two excellent albums by bands named Women and Girls. What's more, they both show an affinity, if not slavish dedication, to the sound of 60s music. Where Women traced out a noisy blend of pop that sounded like a modern update on the Velvet Underground's monolithic White Light/White Heat, Girls are much more blissed out, dreamy and stoned. Their production and sound recall a less meticulous, less orchestral version of Brian Wilson and/or Phil Spector, filtered through a haze of smoke, pill bottles, and piles of empty beer cans.

The apathetically named Album also bears a very clear vinyl record pacing and tracklisting. You can practically feel yourself getting up to flip the record over after the long 'Hellhole Ratrace', a song that has a circular progression and emotional peak that suggests it should be the album closer instead of the mid-point. It does, however, set the mood for the album's more languid second half. 'Headache', 'Summertime', and 'Lauren Marie' are in no hurry to get anywhere and offer ample opportunity to let you space out and daydream. Even 'Morning Light', a noise-pop shot in the arm which sounds like a cover of something off of No Age's Nouns, has a "late afternoon, riding the couch" vibe to it.

Indeed, this "vibe" is the key to the album's greatness in my opinion. Girls are Californian through and through, and much like how the Beach Boys got their start writing about the culture they experienced in that state, Album has a--you knew this word was coming--sunny, summery feeling that feels unique to California. But where the Beach Boys innocently pined for girls, surfboards, and cars, Girls are only interested in (no pun intended) girls and drugs. Even the bummer songs are catchy and endlessly listenable while being mellow enough to chill to. Yes, even the wall of sound, shoegazer-meets-surf-pop of 'Big Bad Mean Mother Fcker.' This track is pretty much Girls's version of Yo La Tengo's shoegazer cover of the Beach Boys's 'Little Green Honda' from I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, and that's not a bad thing. But I digress. The most immediately enjoyable bits of Album are the pleasant pop of album opener 'Lust For Life' and the 60s soul/girl group-style ballad 'Headache', two tracks that argue strongly for the fact that you can wear your influences on your sleeve but not have to rip them off in the process.

I took awhile to come around to Girls, if only because this is a summer album to its very core and it's hard to enjoy that when it's the midst of winter in Ohio. The Shins at least had the good sense to issue Oh, Inverted World in June of '01, but whatever. Like fellow 2009 breakouts The xx, Girls manage to sound utterly original and fully formed despite: being so young, having some obvious sonic influences, and never having recorded anything before. Album is among the best albums of the year, but here's hoping they name their next album something different so sentences like this one don't sound so redundant out loud.

Album Of The Week: Mount Eerie- Wind's Poem

Often during the course of a week, I'll get ideas for novels I want to write, and the plot, characters, and 'feel' of what I see them as is so vivid and clear to me that it really does seem like a vision I'm being given. However, it's one thing to have visions and extremely specific ideas for a work, and another thing entirely to do them. Filmmakers like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino are visionary in the sense that the sort of art they make is uncompromising and demanding but at the same time like nothing you've ever seen before. It is "visionary" stuff through and through, since they're able to take what exists in their minds and make it real.

This is how I think of Wind's Poem, and Phil Elvrum's music in general. You always get the sense that the entire work existed in his head, and albums are his attempt to put physical form to these visions. Moreover, even at his most consistent and accessible, Elvrum's music is still uncompromising and demanding. Wind's Poem roars to life immediately with 'Wind's Dark Poem', one of the tracks on the album that show the loud side of Mount Eerie. Most reviews have dubbed this Elvrum's "black metal album", but go back to the excellent The Glow, Pt. 2 under his Microphones alias and skip to the songs 'Something Contd.', 'I Want To Be Cold', and Samurai Sword.' This style of music has always been a part of his style, and anyway, I don't know if it really sounds like true black metal. It's more just like really loud guitars: loud to the point of distortion without any need for effects pedals, if that makes sense. Of course just to let you know that he's not to be pidgeonholed, he follows this opening bludgeon with the eleven-and-a-half minute long 'Through The Trees', a languid organ drone of a song.

I have to admit that I don't actually follow Elvrum's career at all, so all the singles, EPs, compilations, and albums he's done are beyond my body of knowledge. But I can say with certainty that Wind's Poem is a clear continuation of the lyrical themes from The Glow, Pt. 2, namely his fascination with nature imagery, a constant sense of a dark foreboding atmosphere, and extreme attention to detail. Most artists would blindly start to yell or scream to match the louder songs on this album, but Elvrum still sticks to his distinctive and calmly emotional voice. He uses it as a detail as much as the centerpiece of Wind's Poem, which is something a lot of artists would find unthinkable.

Wind's Poem is an experience unlike any I've had all year with music. It's like going for a walk on a late Fall night during a storm, the wind and rain alternately pummeling and gentle. Wind's Poem may be remembered as a "black metal" album, but it's all filtered through Elvrum's lo-fi indie rock and singer/songwriter lenses. To put it another way, I don't think of The Glow, Pt. 2 as his "drone" album even though there are some examples of that genre on it. It isn't solely one style or another, just as this one isn't, either. Anyway, Wind's Poem is just as demanding and uncompromising for its production as much as its "black metal." You really, really need to listen to it on headphones; moreover, you need to listen to it in one sitting. This is neither an album to rush through, to skip to your favorite songs while driving, nor is it an accessible, digestible listen. When he sings "I'm the river/I am the ocean of changing shape/I bring bodies/in the void you heard my name" on 'Wind Speaks', you're only about halfway through the album. It feels like much more time has passed, however, because Wind's Poem is dense, both with width and breadth. 'Summons' follows next, all eerie guitar moans and Elvrum's naked voice. You could break the album down into these more reflective moments and the roaring loud stuff, but perhaps it's better to look at it as light or heavy wind. As if to underscore this dual nature of wind and the album's obsession with it, 'The Mouth Of Sky' comes right after 'Summons' and sounds like one of the epic peaks of a post-rock band without all the patient crescendos that normally lead up to them.

Whether you love or hate the films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, you at least have to admit that what they make is very unique, purely their's from conception to end product, and not like anything else that's out there. This's exactly how I feel about Phil Elvrum's music. It's definitely not for everyone, and Wind's Poem in particular is a dense and visionary work that is among 2009's best albums. You'll need some headphones and the right mood to get it, but once you do, Wind's Poem will prove itself worthy of all the effort and patience.

Cymbals Eat Guitars- Why There Are Mountains

The subject of originality is one that fascinates me. Even those things that you think of as coming out of the blue and having no none touchstones are usually just influenced by obscure things you've never heard of. Or anyway, it'll turn out to be a case of people having a similar idea but there's no provable connection between the two. In the past week I've finally gotten around to watching Slumdog Millionaire and Amelie, and while the former is essentially the same old Hollywood-style poorly written crap wrapped up in a unique setting and premise, the latter is original through and through, and has immediately become one of my favorite movies. But I bet if I did some digging, I'd hear that director/co-writer Jean-Pierre Jeunet was influenced by this or that French director or handful of films that I've never heard of.

Cymbals Eat Guitars are in the same school of indie rock as Tapes 'n Tapes, which is to say, their influences are pretty plain. Both bands manage to sound original enough that they can't be called plagiarists so much as students of a certain kind of music. The first Tapes 'n Tapes album was excellent, sure, but it clearly spent its college years in the course of study that may as well be dubbed Pixies 'n Pavement. Cymbals Eat Guitars, meanwhile, take their name from (I'm pretty sure) a Lou Reed quote about how he had drummer Maureen Tucker mostly focus on toms and the bass drum, giving the Velvet Underground's music a primitive/minimalist bent, because he felt that "cymbals eat up guitars" in the audio space of music--too much treble. However, Cymbals Eat Guitar's music sounds like the band stole the playbook of mid-to-late 90s Pacific Northwest indie rock: Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, and Pavement all come to mind when listening to Why There Are Mountains.

Whether this is a bad thing is up to the listener. I want to make clear that at no point do Cymbals Eat Guitars directly rip-off their influences. Just as Nirvana openly admitted to attempting to make good on the ideas of the Pixies and, say, Mudhoney, Cymbals Eat Guitars sound like their own band while calling to mind their influences quite readily. Personally, I think Why There Are Mountains is a good little album, for what it is, but I'm afraid that it's bound to be forgotten as time goes on unless the band really does something amazing with their next album. Too often bands like this fall prey to the same fate that befell Tapes 'n Tapes, which was to make a mediocre, experimental-in-a-bad-way sophomore release and fall into obscurity.

To put it more simply, if you're really into indie rock, particularly the Pacific Northwest brand of the aforementioned bands, you'll enjoy Why There Are Mountains but probably won't love it. This's a conditional recommendation, I admit, so take it for what it is.

Oh, and for the record, the new cover art that was added when the band finally got around to releasing it on a record label is really, really awful.

Album Of The Week: Fuck Buttons- Tarot Sport

It's pretty telling that the first track on Tarot Sport, the new album from Fuck Buttons, is called 'Surf Solar', while the last is dubbed 'Flight Of The Feathered Serpent.' For a duo who mostly spent their debut hovering in place while exploring textural noise, droney minimalism, and, from time to time, incomprehensible muffled screams, it's quite a change to see them producing an album that has a sense of headlong momentum and movement. So, too, have they stripped away most of the noise and all of the screaming while still retaining their own unique electronic sound. Perhaps the biggest change from the (conditionally) must hear Street Horrrsing, however, is that Fuck Buttons are now making something definable as music instead of something that was arguably just musical experiments with the periodic table of sound elements.

Tarot Sport's most crucial progression is the way that the band have embraced the dynamics of songwriting rather than the dynamics of pure sound. The entirety of the album is one long suite that flows into each subsequent song; moreover, they also allow natural ebbs and flows to take place. There's a downright post-rock-ian "peaks and valleys, louds and quiets, minimalism and maximalism" structure to these tracks that helps Tarot Sport connect on an emotional level. I enjoyed Street Horrrsing as a sonic curio, a kind of intellectual think-piece, but it's not the sort of release I feel a connection with or wistfully get urges to listen to again. Not so with Tarot Sport.

I have to admit that I was skeptical when this album started getting really good reviews, since Street Horrrsing was such a demanding, difficult listen. But once the beautiful keyboard washes on the opening of the album kicked in, I immediately had to chuck my expectations out the window. One easy way to put it is that Tarot Sport plays like an IDM/post-rock remix of their first album, gutting out the screams entirely (vocals-without-screaming show up on one track, though I can't for the life of me remember which one), keeping some of the noise elements as texture and contrast rather than the focus, and adding in both persistent electronic beats and post-rock's emotional peaks and valleys. Hell, 'The Lisbon Maru' could pass for a particularly experimental Godspeed! You Black Emperor or Mogwai track, while 'Phantom Limb' has more in common with the experimental beat fuckery of modern Autechre than it doesn't.

Street Horrrsing may have gotten them on the radar, but Tarot Sport is the release that proves Fuck Buttons deserve whatever praise and attention they can get. There's a flow, pacing, and sheer enjoyability to the experience of this album that is years more advanced beyond the debut: in a year with some really excellent, epic, and memorable closing tracks, 'Flight Of The Feathered Serpent' is one of the best. 'Brothersport' and 'Watching The Planets', eat your heart out. Tarot Sport is not for everyone, as it retains some of the noisy textures/washes of sound of their earlier work, but those looking for what is arguably the best and most interesting electronic album of 2009 would be wise to seek it out.