friends not trends: 2008 in review (and otherwise)

the going assumption; the working understanding during much of 2008, in my head and at least a decent many others', was that it was an off year for music; lackluster, mediocre, no great shakes. in some ways, i'd still say that was pretty true – as i've harangued before, it was a sucky year for big pop singles, with nothing that felt truly epochal and zeitgeisty, or even especially inspiring ("low"? "single ladies"? "american boy"? dandy party-fodder all, my rather irrational distaste for the latter aside, but hardly the stuff of enduring greatness) – at least not until m.i.a. blasted in from the past with what was pretty undeniably the song of the year, only a year late.

if you ask me, it was also an underwhelming year for albums of the crit-o-sphere consensus-pick variety – fair enough that there are plenty people who, unlike me, were smitten by the fleet foxes, tv on the radio, and bon iver records, but you can't convince me that any of it is urgent and compelling music (tvotr could almost be if they'd get a new producer already.) but i've gotten pretty far away from the indirok party line, so it's pretty irrelevant to ask me anyway. save for the break-out indie-dance triumvirate of swoony sweeties cut///copy, niche-revivalist anomaly hercules & love affair ('08's biggest crossover success story?), and bona-fide auteurs hot chip, the widely-repped alb i dug the most this year was vampire freakin' weekend, by a band whose most notable (and greatest) quality was their endearing ordinaryness.

meanwhile, the year's biggest attention-getters, lil wayne and kanye west, mostly failed to engage me all that much, musically or otherwise. and there weren't really any other major narratives to latch onto, genre-wise or what-have-you, my valiant attempts to herald a big-beat revival notwishstanding (but just wait until '09, oh right it's already here!) save perhaps the perplexing hodge-podge of the auto-tuned/art-attuned afro-techno revolution, which isn't so much an emergent trend as a multi-strand interpretive lens that may or may not be coming into focus.

[there weren't even major genres or trends that got me excited on a more personal level, although i did listen to a fair amount of sleepy twinkly ambientronica (colleen, lullatone, theodore, yokota) and the still-scarequote-worthy "balearic" (hatchback, studio, air france) and glanced briefly at b-more (tittsworth, rye rye.) i've had flirtations in recent years with soul, country, folk and reggae, none of which made very strong showings on my radar this year, but the ethno-beat likes of nomo, el guincho, m.i.a. (as a guest-shotter and general booster), and most especially my recent enthusiasm over radioclit in their various guises – not to mention the shaabi cds i picked up in egypt, or reading about the international selections in tom moon's 1000 recordings book – have me feeling like 2009 may be a year that i try to delve deeper into world music, whatever that ends up meaning. in '08 however, much of my extra-curricular investigation focused on various strains of "classic" british indie-pop from the '80s and early '90s: in an effort to shore up my historical understanding of this stuff (which seems to have influenced a lot of swedes), and under the guidance of AMG (and the liner notes to the legends' facts and figures), i bought albums by felt, lloyd cole, momus, heavenly, the field mice, the auteurs, prefab sprout, and dexy's midnight runners, exactly none of which have managed to make much of an impression, thus far. oh well...]

so much for all that. on an almost completely unrelated note: 2008 was an awesome year for music. as has been pointed out more than once, there's no such thing as a bad year for music. an uninspiring spell for music-that-other-people-like is nothing but a perfect chance to go out and discover what else there is out there to get excited about.

in this case, i found it, by way of my AMG gig – this was my first full year back to being a music journalist (by vocation, even!) several years after having packed it in – and the opportunities it allowed me to hear some artists that i may not have encountered otherwise, especially scandinavians: the astonishingly sincere twee-meisters billie the vision & the dancers, bleeding-heart synth-disco purists juvelen and cloetta paris, art-pop songstresses britta persson, maia hirasawa, and firefox ak, and lo-fi texturalists silje nes, fredrik, and hanne hukkelberg. (a few scandi-pop artists i'd heard before, who didn't release anything of note in '08, nonetheless formed a significant part of my aural diet for the year, largely through my "expert" AMG assays of their excellent back-catalogs: the tough alliance, the ark and bertine zetlitz.)

i also found it with some trusty old favorites, like crypto-fantasist kelley polar, pavlovian powerhouse rex the dog, and neato neo-beatnik why? (what's up with this spelling it in all-caps business? it's as bad as the mysterious made-up comma in the tvotr album title.) also true-blue troubador billy bragg, sludge-rawk guitar-hero al sparhawk (whose retribution gospel choir made the only honest-to-goodness rock album to make my list, right up there at #37), domestic vignettist darren hayman (a lovely rediscovery, both with his new bluegrass bandmates watkins trout & lee and the slightly older project the french), transatlantic twin sweethearts of the radio marit larsen and taylor swift, and the trustiest oldest favoritest of them all, david byrne, who seemed to get way more attention this time around for a way more low-key album, mostly because he got another old dude to write less interesting chord structures for his songs. [sadly, i didn't find it with my other, increasingly-less-dependable old favorite, fat elvis the talk-show-host, who put out, come to think of it possibly the worst, and certainly most slapdash, album of his entire career, and with the silliest title to boot - but, sigh, i've gotten over that one. interestingly, i did find it with my goodfriend matthew sweet, not so much on his 2k8 offering but the delightful four-year-old kimi ga suki * raifu.]

i found it, too, with some total weirdos. it was a great year for weirdos – or perhaps i should qualify that; weirdos who mix some amount of pop in with their weirdness, or vice versa (which makes it far weirder than straight-up weirdness, which is old hat and mostly just boring.) i'm thinking in particular of abstract-expressionist melody masher/noise-terrorist nerd dominique leone, foppish imps (impish fops?)/goofball space-cadets the chap, dadaist retro-wonk/blues-addled alien lifeform pop levi (a late addition to the party, but a tremendously welcome one; his sophomore-step-up, never never love, which shot way up on my list after just one listen, was otherwise dissed and generally slept-on, which is both a shame and a mystery since it's totally accessible and fresh and fun...the weirdness there is more about him than his music per se.) somewhat less enthrallingly, there were those nutsos nôze, whose album was more of a befuddlement than anything. and most of all, there was the incomparable, irrepressible max tundra, who both out-weirded and out-popped the lot of 'em, and also has the distinction of holding down the top spot on my last.fm most-played artists list.***

but best of all, i found it right here in west philly – to be specific, over at the vegan luncheonette, which is where i met '08 great emily bate... already my neighbor, soon to become my friend, and now my bandmate – but first, first, first came the first-rate the fever in the feast, which grabbed me from first listen, and which i just can't say enough good about.

should i be apologizing? look, loving music is absolutely subjective; writing about it ("critiquing") is hardly any less so... and what could possibly be a better way of relating to a musician than, well, relating to her? to be honest, though, our friendship is only one, reasonably insignificant, contributing factor in my fondness for tFitF. which, incidentally, i can actually quantify, about as objectively as is conceivable: as my last.fm charts corroborate, when you factor out "compulsory" listening for review purposes, as well as the fact that the higher-placing artists all had multiple albums contributing to their tallies, it was almost certainly the album i chose to listen to most often in '08.***

although i submitted a request for the assignment, i didn't review emily's album (that is, i haven't yet) – not so much because of bias concerns or conflicts of interest, but more because i feel like i won't be able to write about it in a way that conveys how special it has been to me... or, maybe, more precisely, because i'm afraid that examining it with a view to expressing it in words will force me to see my friend's funny li'l folkysongs as, "objectively," maybe not entirely so special after all.

(which is a silly thing to worry about. that's the whole game of criticism, after all, but it hardly ever has that effect; at least in my experience, reviewing is far more likely to increase my enjoyment and appreciation of albums than to diminish it. which is what explains my tendency for rave inflation.)

or maybe that's not it. a simpler explanation might be that i just enjoy it too much to want to do much of anything else with it besides keep on listening. and singing. and sharing.

2008's been a great year for friends, both musical and actual. here's to hoping that i find at least a few, at least as fine, in 2009.

______________

***[bonus mini-essay!]

2k8 was definitely a different year for me in terms of my relationship to music. it was the first year that i did the vast majority of my listening with mp3s rather than physical objects. over the course of many months, i transferred my entire cd library to digital, all of it stored on my trusty (if sometimes a bit pokey) drobo: the current tally is 57660 songs, or 424.9 days. correspondingly, i spent untold hours in accreted discrete moments of intermittent frittering, pleasurable or painful or both, attempting to organize the constant flood of incoming iTunes data. also, i taught myself a fair bit about laptop djing; also, i got my first iPod (rubylith), lost it, and got another one (obsolith); also, i signed up for the rather ominously-named last.fm.

i'm still not sure if that was a good idea – i did it out of curiosity, but it has become a kind of compulsion; i check it constantly, avoid listening to undocumentable media (cds, for instance) as much as possible, and i'm inordinately peeved that the legends (whom i really don't think are all that great) are still standing as my third most-played artist, just because i apparently took a long time to review a couple of their albums back in the summer sometime...

anyway, last will tell you that my fourteen most-played artists of 2008 (or rather, from the time i joined, around may, until right this instant) were as follows: max tundra, cex, the legends, emily bate, marit larsen, owusu & hannibal, kelley polar, britta persson, firefox ak, cloetta paris, laurel music, amy diamond, miss li, billy bragg. i don't buy it, or at least not completely... i do a lot of my listening, and especially computer-listening, for practical purposes; mix-making, as well as record-reviewing [the names in italics are those that i didn't write reviews of in '08, which is pretty telling.] my continuing gig at amg was, of course, another huge aspect of my musical milieu this year, and the direct reason there are so many scandinavians on that list... all of which means it doesn't entirely match up to my "pure" preferences.

anyway, it's obviously an imperfect (though fascinating) system, and it's not really worth griping or quibbling about... on the other hand, though what's the fun of lists if not to argue about them.

all that crashing's makin' me glitch!

xxxxxxxxx grrrrrrrrrrr xxxxxxxxxx [_hib(er/[ror])nation terminated???////]

hey there, mincetapes faithful. happy belated january? it has been a fine oh-fine oh-nine so far, but an altogether wretched time to be my computer... my poor beleaguered little mnemo has been crashing, spontaneously, sporadically and often, for the last several weeks, and giving me a few other headaches besides... i won't get into the techy specs here, but the upshot is that it has not only functionally prevented me from completing the handful of computer-dependent (and blog-relevant) items on my projects agenda, it's also sapped a lot of my time, energy, and will, which i might otherwise have turned to barreling foolhardily through on those projects nevertheless... anyway suffice to say i have really not been as productive lately as i shoulda coulda woulda been.

primary among them said projects: making some final tweaks to the 2k8 new years eve dance mix to ready it for on- and off-line distribution, assembling my year-end favorites lists in img-enhanced blogpost fashion (as opposed to the ongoing-yearly side-bar fashion currently accessible, which i have been diligently updating and reshuffling) and attending to my stack of outstanding (in both senses!) to-be-reviewed records for AMG...

in other words, i've still got a lot of loose ends left over from 2008, even as 2009 is descending quite upon us... sorry me sorry you. soon i hope.

on a happier note: a hands-full handful of crashes over the course of the evening somewhat miraculously failed to dampen the goodvibes this past friday at feet active, the monthly dance'n'yogaparty (inaugurated last month) for which i am now co-dj (alongside with dj mr. rob't ginkgo)... amazingly, only one time out of the handful did a crash come when music was actually playing from my laptop (perhaps inauspiciously, it was during cocoa tea's smiley-silly "barack obama") - otherwise we were able to juggle our way around it quite nimbly; the convenient/circumstantial grace-save being that rob't and i spent most of the evening (nearly four-hour shared set) switching back and forth almost every song, with our nifty combined two-turntables/two-laptops/two-mixers setup. (like i once saw a-trak and diplo do...turns out you don't even gotta be a superstar deejay.) pretty seamlessly too, even though we'd never dj'd or even practiced together (i'd heard him spin once, that's it.) that was a lot a lot a lot of fun. more to come, i think.

of course, there were a few moments where one of us took the helm for a longer mini-set. my two most noteworthy strings were the (topical) bringin-it-back run of parliament's "chocolate city">"funky president" [title phrase looped>] aretha "hat" franklin's "rock steady" (and, a bit later, "jiggle it">"hold on i'm coming">"1 thing") and, to close out the dancing portion, more or less, will.iam's self-sampled "impatient" > kelley polar's "a feeling of the all-thing" (!) > the dø's "unissasi laulelet" (!!) > that radiobeat/alphaclit thang (!!!) (the de-facto feet-acto' anthem), with bonus obama speech quotesamples, and ginkgo then capped it with the new animal collective jam "brothersport," which i'm pretty sure i enjoyed more than i'd ever enjoyed an a.c. song before... woowoowoot!

and – on another note; last weekend i went to new york to see this guy:


that's max tundra, known to his mama as ben jacobs (and probably other folks too; i wasn't sure what to call him tho, so i just went with max), making his actual u.s. debut performance, opening for the rosebuds. which i didn't see. i saw him the next night, at was was supposed to be his u.s. debut, at le poisson rouge on bleecker st.

the venue, as predicted, was new and hip, but also quite a nice place to be, with cool stenciling work and especially on the two oversized and comfy thrones that are rather inexplicably situated in the downstairs entrance hallway. the djs spinning beforeshow (incl. philly refugee dave p.) weere no great shakes (this was ostensibly a dance-night; the nyc sister party to making time, but the floor was far from rocking – blame it on the djs, not the max tundra funs.) anyway, things completely shifted when m.t. took the stage. i didn't really know what to expect (owen pallett's ravings notwithstanding) but nothing about the set was a disappointment.

first impression: max is a very little guy...the word "homunculus" came to mind, not the nicest but one i could easily imagine him fitting into his lyrics and then singing it so hyperfast you'd never catch on to what he was saying in the slightest. he can sing quite fast, and also quite soulfully, and always with his arms out in an arresting declamatory posture, which looks commanding and preposterous at the same time, which is a fair description of his performance as a whole. sometimes though he couldn't sing quite fast enough, or at least he didn't get back to the mic in time and he'd miss a line or two (like in the nutso "merman," which is like in 19/8 or something) but again you'd never notice unless you'd paid some close attention to the recordings. but that was just part of the fun, watching him race against his own dizzying backing track, take a swig of water and rush to be in place for the next carefully timed mini-keyboard solo, or melodica lick, or, best of all, couple notes on the glockenspiel – his was in a plastic carrying case (sadly, he didn't remove the hinged lid, so we could only watch in silhoutte) and he'd take his vocal mic off the stand and hold it in one hand up to his mallet in the other, as he struck his couple of notes (just a tiny addition to the dozens whizzing by at any given moment) with tremendous precision.

he's a pretty sick one-handed glockenspieler, and also a pretty sick piano player, with some clear jazz chops. and he's a crazy spastic gesticulating dancer – his dancing and rocking out felt like as integral a part of the set plan as his actual playing. and, by the way, he writes some pretty incredible songs too. the setlist was basically everything i could have asked for, and more, drawn about equally from PEBY (see, if you haven't, my review) and MBGATE. last-album favorites like "lights" and "lysine" were all there, and most excitingly the great title track (which i put on fight them on the beaches ages ago), for which he picked up an actual guitar and jangled around a bit, and then extended the chopped-up disco-ey bit for a while in a way that made it seem like a sample (?) which doesn't actually seem possible. and he hit all the highs from parallax as well; opening with "which song," rocking us all with "orphaned" and "the entertainment," and closing (after ridiculous two covers, "so long farewell" and - was it - the "mortal kombat" theme) with "until we die," which felt like an actual cohesive song (albeit an extended, proggy one) and a real emotional moment in a way it never quite had on record. (with, if nothing else, some of simplest, most heart-tugging lyrics.)

and then the djs took back over, and were actually a lot better than previously; some of us stuck around to dance, but mostly the place cleared out pretty quick – i think everybody knew that no dance-party tunes (not even lindstrøm's remix of lcd soundsystem) could hope to match up to the excitement and exuberance of what we'd just experienced.

here's hoping max makes it back for that fabled "u.s. tour" he alludes to so off-handedly in "which song." (based on what he said to me after the show, sounds like a high likelihood that he will be back, probably as the support for an entirely appropriate and equally exciting act that i am not at liberty to disclose.)

tundra, as is much-remarked, spent the last six years making this album on his ridiculously antiquated commodore amiga (c. 1988) – every time he has a glitch with it he just buys a new one, since they're both incredibly cheap and impossible to get service for. still, you wonder how much time and data he's lost by stoically sticking to that set-up. makes me want to be a little more patient with mine. soldier on, little mnemo. hopefully we'll have those mixies and listies up for you in not too much longer...

oh, wait...

ok, ok. before we slip any further into oh-fine oh-nine, time for a proper 2008 year-end best-of round-up re-cap run-down, all proper-like.

albums first [1-24]:


now singles. not doing a list [there's one here if you insist, but i'm pretty typically noncomittal about any rankings apart from my #1 ("sandcastle disco"), #2 ("entropy reigns..."), #0 ("is it you?") and, er, alternate-reality #1 ("girls with my same name")...] instead, here's a mix:

title: Fun and Interesting: 2008 in Pop
date: 23 december 2008
format: cd-r
packaging: red prefactured sleevelope, with assortured colorfous markerings on the disc

1] "Sandcastle Disco" / Solange Knowles
2] "Entropy Reigns (in the Celestial City)" / Kelley Polar
3] "Far Away" / Cut Copy
4] "Broken Heart Tango" / Cloetta Paris
5] "Wrestlers" / Hot Chip
6] "Fun and Interesting" / The Chap
7] "Oh My God" / Ida Maria
8] "Black Fur" / Fredrik
9] "Girls With My Same Name" / Emily Bate
10] "Ten Steps" / Marit Larsen
11] "You Belong With Me" / Taylor Swift
12] "Lily From The Middleway Street" / Billie the Vision and the Dancers
13] "Sly and the Family Stone" / Hayman, Watkins, Trout & Lee
14] "Official Girl" / Cassie
15] "Watch Your Step" / Juvelen
16] "The Entertainment" / Max Tundra
17] "Here He Comes" / Tittsworth ft. Nina Sky & Pitbull
18] "Shake It To The Ground" / Blaqstarr ft. Rye Rye
19] "Fantastic Six (Radioclit Remix)" / Alphabeat [vs. Radioclit]
20] "Blind" / Hercules and Love Affair
21] "Life is Long" / David Byrne and Brian Eno

it's designed as a mix, first and foremost – a bit of a throwback to the way i used to do things – but also as a general representation of my favorite music of 2008, with a particular emphasis on favorite songs, and especially dance jams (which tend to dominate my conception of "singles.") i think it works out pretty well on all accounts. it made a great post-dinner, pre-midnight (dance)party mix on new years' eve, complete with a little respite in the middle for dessert 'n' bubbly, and minorly toast-tweaked transitions in the beaty bits.

a lot of it consists of representative album tracks as opposed to singles strictly-speaking or even stand-alone songles, which is a pretty accurate reflection of how i listened to music this year (on albums, for review purposes or otherwise, rather than as songs, despite making the Great Switchover to an ipod/itunes-based listening system. most of my top twenty or so albums are represented, with notable omissions including why? (whose brilliant "fatalist palmistry" was on harvest gleanings alongside crucial 2k8 jamz by m83, hatchback and sheryl crow), neon neon (almost made it, but "raquel" is kinda long), and pop levi (too late, alas!)

the sore thumbs, then, are things like the "fantastic six" remix (a sneaky way of including alphabeat and radioclit, two acts i didn't really give their due until too late in the game, but in any case it's still my single favorite piece of work associated with either of them), and blaqstarr/rye rye's awesome "shake it to the ground," a great one-off single in a singles genre that my awareness of has suffered for just that reason (see also the tittsworth cut, not a single but better in my book than any of his tunes that were), and, maybe most sorely, cassie's "official girl."

it felt kinda weird to include that b/c it's basically just a straightforward, mainstream r&b/pop single. given another few weeks i might have swapped it out for brandy's truly striking "camouflage" (from another very strong album that i heard too late), but as it is it stands in well enough for a) the other cassie jam that really ruled a lot of my year b) the generally lackluster string of songs that passed for hit singles in 2008, including songs by beyonce, rihanna, missy elliott, lil mama, snoop dogg, kanye, t.i., flo-rida, lil wayne, mariah carey, katy perry, pink, britney, ne-yo, usher and jordin sparks that may or may not have made my sidebar but failed to find a real home in my heart. (the best of that lot being, almost certainly, "sexual eruption," "love in this club" and "no air") almost all of the above, however, did make the 2k8 new years mix... more on that to come!