This multi-post article is late for many reasons, mostly slothfulness, since I scour other year-end lists to ensure I don’t miss out on anything important. OCD has its advantages. So I’ll cover some bands rediscovering their roots, art metal being described as “dirgy”, white men ripping off channeling Joy Division (yes, still), and some post-rock groups incorporating actual human vocals. That’s innovation !! I’ll run out of adjectives, make blatant misuse of semicolons, repeat the same sentence in each review via synonyms, and use every possible opportunity to fling U2 an interweb middle finger. I’m aware of these actions so it makes it all A-OK!
Jonny Greenwood – There Will Be Blood
The film by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love) had its theatrical release in 2008, but the soundtrack by Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood came out in late 2007, so it still counts! Mood: in distress with violins.
Known for his vinyl-sampling jazz percussion-fest albums and dynamically-created soundtrack to UbiSoft’s stealth video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Brazilian/British/honorary Canadian Amon Tobin decided to focus on found sounds for Foley Room to arrange songs with his own take on musique concrète. The cleverly named track “Kitchen Sink” kind of expresses the concept of the album; basically anything goes. His sound designs somehow manage to balance layers of a tiger’s growl, motorcycle engines, and water drops into cohesive pieces that function as songs. Instead of using a snare drum fill, cut-up metal clanging is used. A pounded barrel substitutes bass thumbs. His sonic signatures are still all over the place, creating an original work in his already impressive discography. Besides, it’s fun exercise to attempt identifying the source of each sound bite.
Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline
If you like lush Brian Eno-style ambient mix with droning, this is for you. As a double album containing only a series of elongated clean tones from strings, horns, synthesizers, effected guitar, etc., the latest Lid is surprisingly effective for how minimal it is. Sadly, there are no dolphin cries found in this release.
Jesu – Conqueror/Sundown-Sunrise EP/Lifeline EP/Jesu & Elivium Split/Pale Sketches
The ever-prolific Justin Broadrick (Napalm Death, Godflesh, Final, Techno Animal) decided make 2007 the year where he would turn it up to 11. In frequency of releases. I placed last year’s Silver EP in my top five of 2006 and even though all these releases have the same musical strength, their sameness may have lowered the overall value. After this many releases in one year, the shelf-life of this act may have reached its end much too quickly. There are some golden moments amongst the almost 3.5 hours of 2007 Jesu including Conquerer’s 10 minute mid-point epic “Weightless & Horizontal” with all its hope and overwhelming buzzing guitars, Lifeline EP’s hypnotic “Storm Comin’ On” with Swans’ Jarboe on vocals, and “Farewell”, the opener of the Jesu/Eluvium Split 12″ with its disorienting unidentifiable digital sample panning back and forth behind the overlapping melodies and vocoders. What most people will find of note in this set is the Pale Sketches rarities collection. Most songs are more unconventional by Jesu-standards, leaning more to the experimental side. You’ll find more of a focus on electronic music that will recall Boards of Canada, if they started incorporating the odd metal riff. This is likely the most humanist work you’ll find in Broadrick’s catalog.
According to Burial’s interview with The Wire, he created Untrue with only 2 weeks (!) of production. Like Talk Talk’s later work, sounds are heard at a distance causing the listener to pay more attention… and the interesting parts aren’t necessarily in the foreground. The beat patterns supposedly define Burial as dubstep (who the fuck narrowly classifies music down that far?) so there aren’t many comparable acts. The samples recall voices buried in a radio feed with a constant vibe of ghostly urban alienation. The subtle nuances of samples surround the whole recording to a point where I couldn’t quite grasp the totality of its aural space. Repeated listens reveal new perspectives and yada, yada, yada; the album has a buttload of depth.
With a seven year hiatus between album releases, ex-Depeche Mode member Alan Wilder obvious took enough time to polish off subHuman (when he’s not ranting about the music industry). His previous hints at exploring blues are amplified for the duration of this album, with heavy themes and inventive sample usage creating a series of dark soundtracks. The wordless female vocals in “Allelujah” are not far off from Collide’s kaRIN and a funereal chain gang found on “5000 Years” recall VAST’s song “Dirty Hole”. Seven tracks clocking just over one hour represent Wilder at another creative peak, creating mostly instrumental soundscapes for those with the patience to catch onto it. I only wish I could check out the 5.1 mix.
As a companion to their live DVD documentary Heima, this double CD EP acts as a compilation of rarities and reinterpretations of previously released songs. Hvarf contains three non-album tracks including the more traditionally rock-ish “Hljómalind”. This is followed by re-workings of two songs from their ’97 debut Von; the title track and awesome “Hafsól”. Jónsi still sings like there are 10,000 cocks up his ass (oh, homophobia! jokes!) and the Icelandic language barrier is still there so I simply rely on the phonetics playing off instruments to attain emotional resonance. The Heim side is where the band performs a few of their tracks live, but acoustic. The electric bowed guitars and crashing percussion are absent making these versions not quite as large but the tension is increased many-fold as the live cuts don’t contain crowd noise so the session is kept intimate.
I guess Canadian broadcasters like that there’s a member of their nationality in this band so they can contribute to the Cancon quota while preventing the Canadian public from being inflicted another track from The Tragically Hip or fucking Matt Good. For their second self-produced album, The Arcade Fire has gone for an even wider and darker sound containing strings, pipe organs, horns, accordion, xylophone, etc. that becomes even more eclectic when presented live. They attack higher issues head on including commercialism, religion, poverty, and military conflict all to focus on the fact that yes, hell is other people… or at least the bureaucracies they create are. Unfortunately the songs are brought down to Earth when the voice of co-founder Régine Chassagne comes centre-stage, such as in the first section of “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations”. When her Québécois accent is exposed, the contrast to her husband’s fronting vocals are jarringly poor and highlight that she should stick to being just a multi-instrumentalist. It’s my time to put women in their place on the Internet!
Funky and soulful kraut rock dance punk with freakish lyrics! I don’t feel like writing anymore!
There’ve gone from black metal (Bergtatt/Nattens Madrigal) to classical folk (Kveldssanger) to ambitious industrial rock (Themes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven & Hell) to pseudo-cinema (Pedition City) and back again (Blood Inside). The Norwegian chameleons are back again with a very low-key electronic record, probably hinted at best by Blood Inside’s “Blinded by Blood” (say that 10 times fast). The promotional grayscale photography for the latest album gets all The Seventh Seal with black cloaks (er, hoodies) on Scandinavian shores and they back that image through a convincing cover of Black Sabbath’s “Solitude”, replacing dated flute with an appropriate saxophone. They present utter depression without any weaksauce involved. Take heed, emo bitches! The rest of the album follows this pattern, with deep despair covered through synthesized strings and Coil-ish dark hymns. The vocals are more subdued to avoid some of the cringe-worthy note-misses found on the last album. The last song, “What Happened?”, is an instrumental that closes with forlorn strings and drones, disappearing into 100 seconds of silence.
