#that is: who i was writing pre village that turned into cass when i watched and eventually played village

[shatteredfears-arch]

if you can’t tell i’m finally watching mark play the game lol

NOT REALLY DLC SPOILERS BUT ANYWAYS

honestly ethan got to see first hand that raising rose is truly just raising him and mia’s daughter bc she’s no different from either of them

[robinallender]

Albums of 2019/the decade

(‘Martin Brennan’ appearing on This Time with Alan Partridge, my favourite TV programme of 2019.)

It’s impossible to make an album of the year list because I haven’t listened to every album that was released this year. And to make an album of the decade list…? Well, that’s even impossibler.

I suppose I could try to do what James Acaster did in his book Perfect Sound Whatever, but instead of listening to every album from 2016 I could attempt to listen to every album from the entire decade. A Sisyphean task – and by the time I’d listened to all of those albums, it would probably be around 2030. And by that point, providing the world is still functioning by then, I’d have another decade of albums to catch up on. I could draw a comparison to Tristram Shandy here but I won’t. 

(Plume is my favourite novel of the year.)

(‘DNA.’ is the most thrilling three minutes of music this decade.)

The excellent thing about Acaster’s book is that it glories in the fact that beneath all the hype and buzz of big releases, and away from algorithmic playlists and ubiquitous albums of the year, there is a universe of incredibly diverse and exciting music being made all the time. Acaster rightly celebrates bandcamp, which has become something like the anti-Spotify over the last ten years. Thanks to bandcamp, it feels like there has never been a better time to listen to experimental music. Obscurity no longer exists – there is no longer any music which is difficult to hear. 

I’ve become enamoured with Jim O’Rourke’s Steamroom page, where he regularly releases albums of ambient/noise music. if you’re expecting the Bacharach-esque chamber-pop of his Drag City albums then I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. There’s a fantastic interview with him here where he describes his creative process (I’m a particular fan of Number 44).

It feels like the prevalence and dominance of the internet has brought with it a certain kind of musical freedom. There’s a kind of the-music-industry-has-collapsed-so-does-anything-really-matter-anymore attitude which I love! Dean Blunt’s Black Metal (2014) feels like an album that couldn’t have been made at any other time. An ‘anything goes’ album of hip-hop/indie/experimental/weirdness that breaks so many production rules (samples of badly compressed MP3s, levels clipping all over the place) but sounds all the better for it.

Of course the problem with everything being available at the click of a button is that you get overwhelmed with choice. I think this decade I got something like cultural fatigue. I'm pretty sure Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s endlessly meta online show On Cinema should be my favourite thing ever, but I can’t be bothered to watch all one hundred hours of it. And you can’t dip into it because the joke is that it only really works if you watch all one hundred hours of it. Being told to stick with things because they’ll get better in the fifth series…? Can I not just watch Masterchef and have a lie down? 

(I played the Olympia in Paris with Yann Tiersen in 2014!)

The other problem with making ‘best of’ lists is: do you choose albums because you love them or because of their cultural importance? Clearly the best album of the decade culturally was Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly – an actual soundtrack to a civil rights movement, an album of astonishing power and viscerality. It’s a dense, difficult album full of brilliant songs. But you’re not always going to be in the mood to listen to it. You’re not always going to be in the mood to be challenged, or to be saddened that an album like that needed to be made! 

Or should your album of the decade be the album you listened to the most? This would probably make sense since Spotify has taken over our listening habits and now insists on sending us our most played songs of the year, a cruel reflection of our exposed ids (for a Velvet Underground fan, I really listen to a lot of Bastille). Well, if we went by what Spotify suggested, one of the most successful artists of the decade would be ‘ambient rain noise’.

I believe that the truth is between. Some albums on my list I have listened to almost constantly, others I have only listened to once or twice, but they blew my head clean off when I did (Yeezus for example).

(My most played album of the decade was Benoît Pioulard’s Stanza I-III, released in three parts throughout 2015-6, probably because I listen to it most evenings to help me fall asleep. Beautiful melodic ambient drones, drenched in reverb and tape hiss. Er… just a bit!)

(I got to the finals of So You Think You’re Funny in 2017!)

While putting together this list, I thought I’d go back to the albums of the 00s list I wrote in 2009. Deerhoof aside, I kind of got snow blindness from reading it! Significantly, I didn’t even notice at the time that my list was made up almost entirely of white artists. Well, I do listen to a lot of morose indie, a genre not famed for its diversity. But this decade I feel that I have expanded my listening habits, and this should be reflected in my list. I hope it doesn’t look like when Rolling Stone do their best albums of all time and put What’s Going On in the top ten as a kind of afterthought (not even Marvin Gaye’s best album).

Who gives a hoot what I think, this is just a blogpost, it’s not like I’m writing for a major newspaper (although I do need a job if anyone’s reading this), but I think that, even on this platform, this is a really important albeit difficult thing to consider. If this decade is to be remembered for anything it’s that we all have a responsibility to promote diversity in our every action; the 2010s were a decade when the personal became political. It was the decade when it became prudent and necessary to notice things like the fact that I posted a list of my favourite albums and they were all made by white artists, even if it’s on a blogpost that no one reads.

It’s not just racist language and behaviour that must be challenged, we must also challenge the social subliminality and structuralism of racism. So yes, a best of the decade list with only white artists, that is part of the problem! Yes, maybe those were my favourite albums of the 00s, but to use a term that has become increasingly prominent this decade, we need to think of the optics. 

Aren’t you overthinking this? Tying yourself in knots to sound woke? Well, voice in my head, you sound like a bit of a twat, as does anyone who uses the word ‘woke’ pejoratively. 

Can’t you just list your favourite albums? Yes. But my point is: no conversation about culture takes place in a vacuum. Take Mark Kozelek, who topped my list last decade. Would I feel comfortable having him in my list this decade because of his appalling treatment of the excellent journalist Laura Snapes? Not that this would be an issue this decade because of the startling decline in Kozelek’s music. Who could have predicted that Kozelek would go from singing about love and grief with such incredible poignancy to mumble-rapping about buying furniture? (I have written at length about Mark Kozelek before.)

Anyway, I think the terrible state of the world has really affected my listening habits. Basically, life is horrible so I got into ambient music. Turning off the news and drifting off into a hypnogogic daze. What a luxury! 

(From the opening sequence of Midsommar, my favourite film of the year. The murals were created by conceptual designer Ragnar Persson and art director Nille Svensson.)

This is the decade when I no longer collected music – as I switched from downloading from iTunes and buying CDs to streaming it felt like I went from active to passive. It was a decade where music became part of the background – Spotify playlists were engineered to be as bland and un-skippable as possible. So it’s been refreshing to see artists challenge this monotony: Michael Kiwanuka’s dense, conceptual KIWANUKA from this year, and Beyonce’s thrilling video albums. 

(Do you ever listen to something like Otis Redding singing ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ and almost find it hard to believe that that really happened? That it was ever possible for someone so talented and charismatic to ever walk the earth? I got a similar feeling when I watched Homecoming. How lucky we are to have an artist like Beyoncé!)

(I played Green Man Festival in 2012 with Yann and, because Van Morrison wanted to go on first so he could get away early in his helicopter, we played after him on the main stage. So I can sort of say that Van Morrison supported me.)

(How dreadful to lose Mark Hollis and Scott Walker – and Neil Innes – this year. Whenever I have ten minutes to spare, if I’m waiting for a bus or something, I like to listen to ‘After the Flood’. Ten minutes of transcendence!)

(My favourite tweet of the decade.)

(A personal highlight of the decade for me was filling in at a gig at the 9.30 Club in Washington DC by playing ‘Lady in Red’ when Yann broke a violin string.)

Some specific musical highlights of the decade:

‘Sscending’, an extremely blissed out track by Acronym w/Korridor.  

How good was ‘Video Games’? I mean really.

The production on this Nicki Minaj song is utterly fantastic.

I love the lyrically virtuosic Villagers song ‘Earthly Pleasure’.

‘Work’.

Anyway, I’m going to end this by quoting from one of my favourite songs of the decade, and like some dreadful character from a 00s pre-mumblecore indie romcom, it’s by The Shins. 

Love’s such a delicate thing that we do  With nothing to prove Which I never knew 

Albums of 2019 

Orange – Caroline Shaw/Attacca Quartet The Sacrificial Code – Kali Malone Xièxie – Celer Homecoming: The Live Album – Beyoncé Occam Ocean II – Éliane Radigue Requiem for Recycled Earth – James Ferraro Nonlin – Steve Hauschildt Tracing Back the Radiance – Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Cuz I Love You – Lizzo Chastity Belt – Chastity Belt House of Sugar – Alex G (Sandy) Tip of the Sphere – Cass McCombs Designer – Aldous Harding Psychodrama – Dave Titanic Rising – Weyes Blood Compliments Please – Self Esteem KIWANUKA – Michael Kiwanuka When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – Billie Eilish Nothing Great About Britain – slowthai New Miami Sound EP – Twain MAGDELENE – FKA twigs Normal Fucking Rockwell! – Lana Del Rey STONECHILD – Jesca Hoop This Is How You Smile – Helado Negro I Was Real – 75 Dollar Bill PROTO – Holly Herndon uknowhatimsayin¿ – Danny Brown Fear Inoculum – Tool The Reeling – Brìghde Chaimbeul U.F.O.F. – Big Thief

(U.F.O.F. is my album of the year. It sounds like alchemy, music where trauma has been channelled into something beautiful.)

(I supported John Robins at the Apollo in October this year. Cool!)

Albums of the decade (which I might keep amending Life of Pablo style)

Sleep Like It’s Winter, Steamroom 44 & Simple Songs – Jim O’Rourke  Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death – James Blackshaw Magma – Gojira (superb metal album) The Dream My Bones Dream – Eiko Ishibashi The Suburbs – Arcade Fire EARS – Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Spark of Life – Marcin Wasilewski Trio & Joakim Milder Toumani & Sidiki – Toumani Diabaté & Sidiki Diabaté (please listen to ‘Lampedusa’) Closing – Victoria Hume (got me through a very difficult time) For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) – Huerco S. The Uncle Sold – Ed Dowie Witness – Katy Perry (really underrated!) Blonde – Frank Ocean Smoke Ring For My Halo – Kurt Vile Transparent Water – Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita The Curious Hand – Seamus Fogarty Reflection – Brian Eno Looping State of Mind – The Field Tomorrow’s Harvest – Boards of Canada Be the Cowboy – Mitski  Volumes 1-4 – Kosmische Läufer Stateless – Dirty Beaches Bridge Music – Eerie Gaits Veteran – JPEGMAFIA V2.0 – GoGo Penguin Lemonade – Beyoncé Oh Holy Molar – Felix Get Your Hopes Down – Landslide Purist (I played on this album but I don’t care, it’s really good!) Beach Music – Alex G (Sandy) Phantom Brickworks – Bibio Chaleaur Humaine – Christine and the Queens Only Myocardial Infarction Can Break Your Heart – Matt Elliott Dust Lane – Yann Tiersen Black Metal – Dean Blunt The Harrow & The Harvest – Gillian Welch Yeezus – Kanye West Ruins – Grouper Kill All Children – Prison UK (sad music from the future) Age Of – Oneohtrix Point Never (more sad music from the future) Nothing Important – Richard Dawson Hidden & Field of Reeds – These New Puritans To Pimp a Butterfly & DAMN. – Kendrick Lamar  Devil is Fine – Zeal & Ardor    Divers – Joanna Newsom Stanza I-III & Hymnal – Benoît Pioulard alterum – Julie Fowlis Unfold – The Necks DAYTONA – Pusha T Golden Hour – Kacey Musgraves Olivia Chaney EP – Olivia Chaney Wit’s End, Big Wheel and Others & Mangy Love – Cass McCombs

(My favourite album of the decade is, unsurprisingly if you know me, Wit’s End by Cass McCombs, released in 2011. A perfect album of eight perfect songs. I still listen to it at least once a week and I don’t think it will ever lose its magic.)