I've not finished my list, and it was a tough year because there weren't all that many albums I was even interested in, and of those there are several I never did actually get. Anyway, here's where I'm at as of today.
1. Kayo Dot - CoyoteTerrifyingly stark in places, a very carefully composed but abstract melodrama, a feverish meditation on illness and dying by band leader Toby Driver and terminally-ill Yuko Sueta who sadly passed away during completion of the record. Fusiony, gothic, arch, traumatic. There is a frustration and a tension here which goes resolved for some time, not unlike specific influence Scott Walker's
The Drift. Once again Toby Driver has succeeded in a long-form conceptual composition with all the twists and turns of dream-logic. Some people say this album is too depressing, but for me, a lot of it really speaks to me. The confusion and loss of identity, the loneliness and despair, and yet the strange disembodiment and dramaticisation of it - as if it was something that was happening not to Yuko Sueta herself but the environment around her.
2. The Stares - MeridiansWhile decidedly less surprising than their debut, every bit as good. More gentle folksy songs with impeccable production from Randall Dunn and lush string and horn arrangements by Eyvind Kang. Beautifully simple melodies and cryptic lyrics as before. There is a warmth and width here, a quiet intimacy and optimism that's simply infectious. This album almost never came out, but then it did. It's just a shame that still nobody knows who these cats are.
3. James Blackshaw - All is FallingInstrumental 12-string explorations with additional strings and percussion, intimate and melancholy, and yet at the same time soaring and grand. Repetition is the key here, and the slow evolution of melody and shifting harmonic colours. The oddly hypnotic voices calming counting out the rhythm on Part 6 are a playful deconstruction of this musical Möbius strip.
4. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps TradixionalesSilver Mt. Zion as usual, but rawer and punkier than ever. Efrim's voice is strained and torn and angry and broken and painfully beautiful as ever. Everything is fuzzed out and roughed up. The tone here is as always one of despair pierced by the tiny powerful light of hope. Perhaps bleaker than ever, but also more resolute in its opposition to the encroaching darkness. Everything is broken and wrong, but alas, here we are.
5. Land of Kush's Egyptian Light Orchestra - MonogamyThough somewhat self-sabotaged by a peurile computer voice reading some very explicit sexual obscenties, this is a delightfully flighty Egyptian electro-acoustic folk-orchestra spinning allegorical yarns with strikingly colourful imagery. Guest female vocalists provide lyrics and sing with vigor across several tracks - adding a femininity and sexuality to these tracks that wasn't as present on last year's Against the Sky. There is a density and weight that comes only from having this many musicians contributing their small parts to the grander whole.
6. Hans Zimmer - Inception Official SoundtrackBwoooooom, bwoooooooom, bwooooooom... This soundtrack has become fairly iconic already, with its signature brassy stabs, but what's more interesting to me is the structure and overall shape of the pieces. Crescendos build into those impossibly large stabs, while other pieces drift slowly through a kaleidoscope of ambiguity and clarity. Dream-like, little snippets of melodies and ideas half-remembered emerge and come to the fore. There's a very electronic feel, though it's mostly orchestral.
7. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to HeavenIt's Swans. Well it's sort of Swans. It's closer in style to Michael Gira's solo work than to Swans of old, though certainly with a stronger aim towards the building violence and energy. There's lots of latter-day Swans influence in the tubular bells and snarling swells of No Words/No Thoughts, but then a song like Jim is a slightly louder Angels of Light. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Angels of Light - but this feels like a transitionary album, like it won't be until the next album, after a cycle of touring with Swans material, that this reunion will take true form. Still a great record.
8. Twilight - Monument to Time EndCaught me by surprise, applies trademark black metal bleakness and brutal sounds to post-rock structures and production. A heady but effective mix. Guitars are wide and hypnotic, drums are thick and roomy, and vocals are indecipherable screams... It does seem to take the traits of black metal and turn them into something more exciting than just another shitty-production-on-purpose grim-for-grim's-sake BM release that are so common. It reaches outward in the way post-metal does, for a more ethereal sound, for a wider array of emotion and feeling, but it doesn't meander so much, and always retains that blackened edge.
9. Jónsi - GoIt's slightly sickly sweet at times, but these are some damn catchy tunes which befit Jónsi's voice. Quaint and lyrical evocations of joyous childish wonder, with a mix of english and icelandic words. The percussion is not your standard kit-playing, rather it is unorthodox and orchestral which evokes a primitivism and earthiness helps ground the record and prevents these string-heavy songs from drifting aimlessly in space.
10. Brian Eno with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams - Small Craft on a Milk SeaThis album is instrumentally narrow, but quite off-kilter. Jangling angularities here, sparse galciers of sound there, all building to great effect. Built around specific clusters of ideas, and evoking Eno's earlier ambient work without retreading on old ground. The suite that comprises
Flint March through
2 Forms of Anger is evocative of King Crimson's ProjeKcts in its fusion of the electronic and organic. Overall the album lacks a certain centre, a reason that Eno albums tend to have, it seems much more like a highlights reel cut from several hours of studio improvisation than a cohesive record, but that in itself is probably its reason to exist, as a document of the process by which it was formed. That seems like something Eno would do.
Edited by user 13 December 2010 03:25:30(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
