US and A #1

In what is perhaps the most obvious fact in the universe, the existence of prisons continues to be the most damning proof that prisons don't "work."

Oldworldslumming

Some of you have already been directed to this via email, but I thought I'd post here as well. Julie and I uploaded the best of last summer's Europe trip pictures into a Photobucket account. If you want to check em out, go here and log in with "oldworldslumming" and pass "ven1ce." There are a few pictures of Bologna and many each of Venice, Berlin, Prague, and the famous ossuary at Kutna Hora.

Bonus blog feature: the following photo was taken down by Photobucket, presumably because of a questionable violation of their policy on nudity. This is a close-up shot of a diorama of East Germans playing volleyball on the beach that was featured in the Museum of the DDR that we visited in Berlin. Apparently Communism was much better at providing people with a sense of generalized dread than it was at providing them with bathing suits.

Top X of MMVII

Click on the album titles for download links via Sendspace.




X. THE ANGELIC PROCESS - Weighing Souls With Sand

It's a bummer to find out about a good band in the last year of their existence, especially when they've been around for awhile. The Angelic Process started in 1999, and Weighing Souls With Sand is the last recording they completed before a hand injury kept one of the two members from continuing. I have yet to listen to most of their earlier material, but Souls can be summed up like this: latter-day Isis filtered through an even more washy and distorted My Bloody Valentine with programmed drums and emotive vocals. Good songwriting and a signature uber-distorted guitar sound help these guys stand out from the rest of the post-Isis global pile-on (and to be fair, '99 was a long time ago in post-Isis-global-pile-on years). I have this on LP, but I've heard the production on the CD version is better.



IX. GRAILS - Burning Off Impurities

After my initial post-purchase listen to this album, it didn't exactly stick with me. But a subsequent spin later in the year made me "sit up" and "take notice," as the kids say these days. I would have loved to see Grails live in their Burden of Hope period, but that would have happened only if I were a resident of the west coast, which, as the kids say, I'm "not." Seeing them live in 2007 was actually a little bit of a letdown. They're still good songwriters and probably as adept in performance as ever, but you know how it is when you expect to hear certain songs at a show and then you don't. They're more psych influenced now. Maybe not my fave live band, but on record, where I can enjoy them while sitting in my room or harassing the cat or what-have-you, they're still impressive and engrossing.



VIII. DEATHSPELL OMEGA - Fas - Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum

Probably the most chaotic black metal record ever made. Certainly the most chaotic I've ever heard. If you were to ask a diehard which contemporary band is tops in the genre, there's a good chance the response will be these guys. In 2004 they released Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice, a towering, instant-classic album shot through with post-rock gloom, Gregorian chant, and memorable guitar lines in the BM tradition. Fas is their second release since, and it doesn't top SMRC, but, really, doing so would have been a feat and a half. There are some slower, more meditative parts here, but mostly it's a warren of extremely complex, slashing guitar lines underlined by busy drum work. I love the drumming in Deathspell, because it always sounds like the dude's not quite good enough to pull it all off but somehow does anyway, which adds to the chaos. I'm sure that the corpsepaint set would find the comparison, uh, blasphemous, but really this album is to the rest of black metal what vintage Dillinger Escape Plan is to hardcore. A total neck-snapper. (A word to the wise: the band is French, but the singer is a Finnish dude who runs the Northern Heritage label, not exactly a bastion of progressivism. Bootleggers are referred to as "j**ish businessmen" on the front page, and there other misappropriations of the J-word in other parts of the site. If this offends you, as it should, don't buy Deathspell or NH releases. The actual lyrical content of DsO tends to stick to the Satanic and philosophical realms.)




VII. ALVA NOTO - Xerrox Vol.1

Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, is one of my favorite minimalist artists. His Vrioon collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto will forever live near the metaphorical top of my metaphorical go-to late-night records pile. I'm happy to have him blip and bleep me to sleep. Xerrox lies at the other end of the minimal spectrum; it's full of sprawling washes of ambient sound. Rather than try to paraphrase my way through it, here is Nicolai's explanation of the process involved in recording straight from his Raster-Noton imprint's site:

xerrox is the new, self-contained project of alva noto, which like his transall-series (transrapid, transvision und transspray; raster-noton 61-63, 2002-2004) is intended to be released in five parts during the next years. on xerrox, alva noto works with samples from muzak, advertising, soundtracks and entertainment programs. these sounds we hear randomly in everyday life and thereby they become an always present and available public domain. with xerrox alva noto manipulates these recognizable melodic (micro) structures by the process of copying. he alienates them beyond recognition so the results manifest their connection to the original only suggestively. in this respect: the original is copied to the original.

alva noto used several samples from these sources: narita airport tokyo, in-flight program air france, telephone wait-loop lufthansa, hotel apollo paris, suizanso hotel yamaguchi, seven-eleven tokyo, forma london, reaktor, www.kkmovie.com

xerrox sample transformer was designed by carsten nicolai and built by christoph brünggel.

xerrox vol.1 is the first release in a series of five.




VI. THE FIELD - From Here We Go Sublime

Reading Pitchfork's year-end best-of lists always conjures images of the writers spending approximately 340 days out of the year together in a room littered with Chinese takeout containers listening to the same eight fucking records over and over. If M.I.A. had a nickel for every time her name got mentioned on that site, MAYBE SHE COULD MAKE BETTER ALBUMS. Ahem. (I'm linking Bent Burton's City Paper review of Kala here because I think he dishes a healthy dose of awkward truth.) Leaving aside for the moment all the Pitchfork faves that passed me by last year (I've never heard the Panda Bear and Battles records that everybody loves so much, for instance), The Field is a place where we can agree. Sublime came out on Kompakt, which immediately put it in the orbit of music-I-might-very-well-enjoy, but I had also read that it was more in the propulsive, rhythmic vein than a lot of the more ambient Kompakt releases, to which I tend to gravitate. On first listen it didn't do much for me, though I can't tell you how many of my favorite records required second listens to impress me. But it's repetitive, and it's catchy, and it's got the slightest dark tinge to it, and I really love it. And it's got samples from the sweet old Atari game Missle Command. It's his first full-length, and I look forward to listening to his next one . . . a second time.




V. VOMIT ORCHESTRA - Antecrux

[NOTE: In doing some research for the V.O. write-up, I discovered that this album was actually released in December '06. Oops.] This is the record on the list whose existence would have completely eluded my consciousness if not for the good - no, great - folks at Aquarius Records. I purchased my number III and VII records from them as well, but I would have probably checked those out anyway. Vomit Orchestra has been active since at least 2001, churning out a bunch of demos that probably like eight people ever heard until they were collected as the Macabre Paradigm double CD in 2005 (of which I am in need of a copy). Antecrux is the first and as yet only proper full-length album, and it's a doozy. Re-listening to this recently the term "slow-core" came to mind. Sure enough, a peek back at the aQ review (which I had read a year ago but had forgotten) revealed that they had applied that word as well. So let's start there. Slow-core, but with just guitars (no drums, no singing, minimal vocalizations) and electronic ambience. And also very paranoid and on a lot of drugs. Throw in some samples of radio broadcasts and book readings, and one track of buzzing, pulsing noise ("Dance Ov The Sugardrugged Feary"), and you have an engaging and unsettling yet occasionally calming listening experience. Hang tight for at least a handful of V.O. releases in '08, including the imminently forthcoming full-length Tocharaeon from Autumn Wind Productions.



IV. RICHARD CRANDELL - Spring Steel

See Mom, not all my favorite music is made by heavy drug users and Satan worshipers! On second thought, I guess I can't really be sure that Mr. Crandell doesn't liberally lubricate his muse with controlled substances, or that he doesn't sit at the left hand of his dark Father throwing spears at the bastard son of God (thanks Denman or Anton, whichever of you said that first). I digress. Spring Steel picks up where his last thumb piano recording Mbira Magic left off. (He also released a couple of acoustic guitar CD's last year that I will eventually get around to checking out.) Both are great chill-out albums, each featuring percussion accompaniment by a man named Cyro Baptista. This music sits at the opposite end of the thumb piano spectrum from the raucous amplified likembes employed by the likes of Konono No.1. Minimal, relaxing, and beautiful.



III. THE DEAD C - Future Artists

If you think you've heard this band on a Dischord comp, you're barking up the wrong tree in the wrong hemisphere. These guys are from New Zealand and long ago jammed their way into the noise rock pantheon. I'm a latecomer; aside from this newest offering, I own only their split with Konono that Fat Cat put out a few years back and a couple solo releases by member Bruce Russell. Despite their reputation for six-stringed avant-fireworks, Future Artists is more meandering than aggro or blown-out. It consists primarily of long, simmering pieces with more fidgeting than strumming on the strings and with tom work replacing snare backbeats. Not that there aren't crescendos and sizzling magnesium-tape passages, there are; but the overall vibe of this album is sit down, this is going to take a little while. The opening track sets the tone. It's a 13-minute directionless ditty that has no business at the front end of a record. But it works perfectly. No intro, no catchy riffs, just immediate submergence in their primordial C. Take with two tanks of oxygen and other elements as needed. I expect most of you won't like this at all.



II. OBSCURUS ADVOCAM - Verbia Daemonicus

I haven't been digging black metal quite as hard recently, and it's been a while since I've listened to this album. If I ranked my "SOTY" like Andrew, it would be a toss-up between "Starlight to Twilight," which has a great, hummable guitar line that gets repeated over and over and over, and the opening track off my number I album. OA are French, but they don't sound anything like Deathspell or Antaeus or Mutiilation or any of the other big names from that scene. They've got an underlying rockin', even bluesy feel with a good mix of tempos and slick, well-balanced production. There's really nothing groundbreaking about them at all, but this album is so good from start to finish. Dude from Nachtmystium put this out on his Battle Kommand label, but I just read some message board shizz about his basement getting flooded and his distro being damaged, which could seriously impede the vinyl version of this as well as that of Blut Aus Nord's fucked-up alien cough syrup black metal masterpiece The Work Which Transforms God. Christians are surely to blame.



I. DRAGONFORCE - Inhuman Rampage

Dude, seriously. I can't believe I picked this either. I was having a hard time narrowing down my list, and when I stopped to ask myself what album I enjoyed the most this year, the answer was clear. The answer would also have been clear if the question had been which album inspired the most air drumming. This band has been tagged "extreme power metal," and that's on the nose. Showoff guitar parts at consistently fast tempos and the whole thing catchy as all get-out. I highly recommend this to lovers of pop punk. Take away the shredding solos, the pinch harmonics, the keyboards, and the lyrics that appear to be about absolutely nothing (the weakest aspect of this band, completely numbing inanity) this album could have come out on Fat. If you love long hair and pre-choruses; if you can forgive musical cheese when it's served up by musicians who can play their asses off; if you love to "ground and pound" (their words, not mine); and if you love no-budget music videos that are redeemed by a bit of brilliant cinematography during the guitar solos (below), then this album is for you.