the notes

Shocking Pinks /// “This Aching Deal” /// Shocking Pinks

And with that, What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 comes to a close. For now.  I’ll probably sprinkle a handful of entries in throughout the rest of the year.  But hey: Shocking Pinks know how to say goodbye.  What sounds like a solo project is actually a cast of various giggers who revolve around New Zealander Nick Harte, who had a hipster haircut before anyone else and goes well with crippling depression.  His shambling lo-fi has a serious Phil Elverum/Mount Eerie streak and all the uncomfortable intimacy that come with it.  Most of Shocking Pinks, which marked a move from Flying Nun to DFA, bears no mark of the new label, achieving a prickly post-punk whose industrial chill has been swapped out for a naturally cold dawn in frostbitten meadowlands.

Modest Mouse /// “Parting Of The Sensory” /// We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

Only Modest Mouse could have released an album this awe-inspiring and have no one give a shit.  Maybe it was the “Float On” hangover that kept people from really engaging with this one, but its stomp and sheen quickly made it my contrarian favorite out of their unimpeachable discography.  In my head it completes the wasteland trinity, connecting The Lonesome Crowded West and previous infatuation The Moon & Antarctica: the desert in every direction, then ice, then the sea.  But no multi-album narrative is needed to appreciate a death rattle hoedown like “Parting Of The Sensory.”  Isaac Brock sings that “someday you will die and somehow something’s gonna steal your carbon,” and you can put that on my tombstone, thanks.  What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 has up till now focused on newish bands that seemed to fall through the cracks, but someone has to stick up for such mastery of craft and lyric from a group that’s already been around the block.  Don’t bother setting out the laurels; Modest Mouse won’t be resting on them anytime soon.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow /// “A Mundane Phonecall To Jack Parsons” /// Scribble Mural Comic Journal

What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 perks up with A Sunny Day In Glasgow, a consistently excellent and overlooked Philly band with a few essential releases to their ray-of-hope name.  I’ve gushed about them previously, so there’s not much left to say.  Dream pop lost in a funhouse or shoegaze with a stack of twee records in the closet, it’s just instantly, fizzily, giddily good.

Why? /// “Crushed Bones” /// Elephant Eyelash

The leadoff track from Why?’s second album is emblematic of a seismic shift.  Rap is still self-consciously reflexive, still judged by its verbal athleticism.  It may have become the status quo in some respects, but that transition was almost too natural to warrant real interest.  What I believe happened, at anticon and elsewhere, is that hip-hop went from being subversive and boastful to wounded and confessional.  What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 can’t ignore the awesome associative power of acts from cLOUDDEAD to Kanye that got introspective and intimate these past few years.  Why? of course brings a thicket of analog indie atmospherics to bear on his thorny phrasework, achieving the best sort of cross-pollination: one that grants an entrance to fans on either side of the synthesis.  In a world where it’s increasingly easy to retire into an airless niche of very particular sounds, it’s a relief to know artists will keep pushing boundaries for us.

Azeda Booth /// “In Red” /// In Flesh Tones

Last year, rather quietly, Calgary three-piece Azeda Booth conjured a supple and fascinating cycle of experimental glitch-pop with In Flesh Tones, earning their way into my list of What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009.  Their curious textures and laptop precision have obvious forebears, but rarely have such aspects informed a severe whisper rather than abysmal alienation (Radiohead) or ugly, abrasive dance tracks (too many to name).  Their melodic gestures roll off the base composition like bath bubbles; sprinklings of recognizable instruments create shine like a stroke of white paint on a still-life apple.  A worthy follow-up, the Tubtrek EP, is being offered by the band as a free download and includes an essential remix or two: I suggest you grab it and spread the word.

Videohippos /// “Downfall” /// Unbeast The Leash

My favorite Wham City players are also the least appreciated.  What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009, hits the halfway point with the heartsick Casio-punk of Videohippos’ Unbeast The Leash.  The following things will always come to mind with this record: having the house to yourself as a kid, colorblindness tests, sugary cereal, the brutal synth patterns of Suicide, punching walls, puberty.  God help the witness to their confrontational live show (backs to the audience, disturbing appropriated infomercial footage galore) who hasn’t heard this emotional lo-fi-meets-8-bit thrash before.  I don’t mean to make it sound like industrial garbage; nothing can be further from the truth.  If anything, these songs sucker-punch you with a disarming sweetness that rides roughshod over the noise.

Mew /// “Apocalypso” /// And The Glass Handed Kites

While you were busy absorbing theses from instant indie titans like Arcade Fire, Denmark’s Mew were making overdriven, falsetto-busting, laser-guided prog cool again, which is more than enough to warrant their inclusion among the underplayed bands of What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009.  Mid-decade monolith And The Glass Handed Kites, an obvious contender for Worst Album Cover Of All Time, nails a mystifying mix of challenging architectures and catchy melodies, crystalline yet far from rigid.  Predecessor Frengers is a solid record as well, with a shoegazer’s sense of distortion and a metal act’s relentless approach.  It’s a shame Muse’s toxic operas have turned another generation off of anything with weird time signatures or a whiff of fantasy.

Eluvium /// “Everything To Come” /// Talk Amongst The Trees

What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009, day three: I can think of no genre with a bigger gap between accomplishment and acclaim this decade than ambient music.  Without Kranky doggedly releasing the likes of Stars of the Lid, Loscil, Windy & Carl, Tim Hecker et. al., who knows where drone-seeking, overly anxious and orchestrally minded listeners would turn after deciding to give Eno’s Music For Airports a rest.  Well, probably to Eluvium (née Matthew Cooper), whose ghostly Talk Amongst The Trees is equal parts golden afterlife and earth-bound sorrow.  Opener “New Animals From The Air” is eleven minutes of hypnotic smoke curls.  Centerpiece “Taken” climbs an endless, spiraling M.C. Escher staircase for a quarter of an hour.  Haters gonna say it’s the same stuff repeated ad nauseam, but they’re paying too much attention.  Eluvium’s best work is something to marinate the room in, to play (as Eno would have it) on the very border of your consciousness.  Only when you’ve forgotten it’s still on will you be able to enjoy its imperceptible shifts and virtuosic decays.  Loops recycle and degrade, coalesce and split, elemental against a backdrop of pure white annihilating fog.  In a word: prehistoric.           

Iron & Wine | Calexico /// “History Of Lovers” /// In The Reins

What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009, day two: While Sam Beam and Calexico have recorded some lovely, intelligent Americana miles apart from one another, there’s a more instant, quiet rapture to enjoy in the latter fleshing out the former’s songwriting.  Such winning alchemy propels their slender, seven-track collaboration past its rustic trappings and into emotive landscapes.  The varied folk instrumentation (from mandatory slide guitar to surprising soulful sax) is lovingly crafted, flexibly antique.  My senior year at Williams, I shared a suite separated by a common bathroom with a good friend; he and I both owned copies of this small miracle and would notice it playing faintly next door.  We independently discovered that In The Reins was also an oddly perfect hookup record (though with its scant running time, it was wise to leave it on repeat), and eventually the strains of its dramatically Mexican opening, “He Lays In The Reins,” became a euphemism heard through walls.  You can imagine how I reacted to the girl who had it on vinyl.  For all this album sounds unearthed from red Texan dust, I would hope it doesn’t get left there.

Wilderness /// “Arkless” /// Wilderness

There’s no compulsion here, with music outlets polishing their best-of-decade lists, to publish an exhaustive piece that merely grants a window onto my own listening habits.  Plus, this blog already constitutes such a view.  Instead, I’d like to spend a week or two outlining What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009, thereby showcasing some gems that have gotten and are likely to continue getting short shrift no matter how many listeners I attempt to convert.  First up is Wilderness, a Baltimore whose self-titled 2005 debut was a wake-up call to anyone who thought post-rock was just slow crescendos recorded in a barn.  Aqueous and sand-blasted, tribally chanted and classically lucid, Wilderness tapped into a fractal paranoia at one of many Bush-era nadirs for the U.S., marked in particular by revelations of proto-fascist torture and abuse.  Such an environment lent chilling associations to the otherwise encrypted politics of songs like “End Of Freedom” and “Shepherd In Sheep’s Clothing.”  But no track tingles the spine like the mercury-poisoned “Arkless,” its vision of a modern deluge bolstered by avalanches of drums and downright evil spindles of guitar.  James Johnson is a fearless and unique punk vocalist; his Biblical sneer that “the flights of fancy come into ruin” is arresting in its own right and anticipated the vile remarks of Evangelists who saw in hurricane Katrina the justified smiting of a sinful city.  Four years on, the album doesn’t carry the contextual heat it once did, but it remains a all-consuming abyss of high-concept, earth-quaking rock.