Best Music of 2008

Another year of quantifying tastes, this time with more links and less prolix. Begin!

Gettin’ Your Pastoral On

If this video clip doesn’t turn one into a Fleet Foxes fan, I don’t know what will.

iPod Touch & iPhone Last.FM Scrobbling

Since Apple doesn’t allow third party apps in their iTunes store to run in the background, uploading your listened-to music in real time over the air (EDGE/3G/WiFi) is not possible. That is, unless you jailbreak your device and install MobileScrobbler. The free Last.FM iPhone app is for listening to online radio and checking listening histories, not for actual scrobbling.

Haujobb – NinetyNine

In the late 90s, EBM, IDM, and DnB had come to a head, but the German electronic duo of Daniel Myer and Dejan Samardzic came along to properly bridge their gaps. Under the main guise Haujobb, they managed to compose one of the most interesting electronic albums of the decade while still retaining signatures established on their previous groundbreaking releases.

Their work from 1993-onward was more styled after Vancouver post-industrial act Skinny Puppy, with distorted vocals and heavy beats dominating soundscapes also containing synthesizers, manipulated samples, and sci-fi movie dialogue. Their work in the new millennium focused a bit too much on audience-grasping future pop, but in between there was some quality experimentation.

The Nail Was in the Coffin Long Ago

Insert more funeral jokes.

Welcome to another edition of me telling you what is already known. So St. Anger was an utter embarrassment of tin drums and dull songwriting. After watching the album’s documentary Some Kind of Monster, I could only conclude that Lars Ulrich is one of the smuggest motherfuckers on the planet. Yes, you’re the first band ever to express anger in a positive way. Fucking innovators.

After that critical wreckage, the band assembled themselves by just regressing to their past successes. Use the same riffs as found on …And Justice For All? Extend songs minutes past their expiration point? Reintroduce solos that are technically laughable when compared to their already barely-above-average guitar output from the eighties? Check on all of the above.

Most major publications are giving it positive reviews because it’s comfortable, familiar, and infinitely better than St. Anger. But it’s pointless. If you want Metallica, throw in Master of Puppets and then stop it halfway through because all that riffing gets boring pretty damn quickly when taken into the context of today’s music. From the directions acts like Agalloch, Opeth, Cult of Luna, and Mastodon have taken metal, Metallica’s one-dimensional approach is completely irrelevant when overtaken by the musicianship and songwriting exemplified by the former. Attempts at diversity like S&M or “The Unforgiven III” are cringe-worthy.

So why bother? As Henry Rollins said, if a place has electricity, Metallica can play a sold out show. Cash! Cash! Lots of cash! Even with bad public relations stunts throw around, they can still tour the world and watch the bones roll in. As an artistic statement, this album really has no purpose. Why did I just spend four paragraphs on this? Consumerscape blogosphere!

Best Film Soundtracks

Cliff Martinez – Solaris
Lush sci-fi electronic with a numb feeling.

Peter Gabriel – Passion: The Last Temptation of Christ
Tastefully appropriating other cultures.

Clint Mansell (Featuring Kronos Quartet) – Requiem For a Dream
Haunting movements built for curling into the fetal position.

Philip Glass – Koyaanisqatsi
Repetition ascending to a chaotic swirl.

Ennio Morricone – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo)
“The Ecstasy of Gold”. That’s all you need to know

Best Albums of 2007 (#10-#1)

I’m not slow. Just deliberate. Why did this fucking article take five months to write? Why is the only hip-hop is this list made by white men? Similar. Political. Different needs. Watch Once if you’re alright with losing a tiny chunk of one testicle. It’s heartwarming and bittersweet! Like a Jewish girl molested by her doctor (thank you, Sarah Silverman.)

Best Albums of 2007 (#20-#11)

Do you like Phil Collins? I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn’t understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where Phil Collins’ presence became more apparent. I think Invisible Touch was the group’s undisputed masterpiece. It’s an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Christy, take off your robe. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. Sabrina, remove your dress. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism. Sabrina, why don’t you, uh, dance a little. Take the lyrics to “Land of Confusion”. In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority. “In Too Deep” is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment. The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I’ve heard in rock. Christy, get down on your knees so Sabrina can see your asshole. Phil Collins’ solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like “In the Air Tonight” and “Against All Odds”. Sabrina, don’t just stare at it, eat it. But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist. This is “Sussudio”, a great, great song, a personal favorite.

Best Albums of 2007 (#30-#21)

Where’s the official soundtrack to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine from John Murphy and Underworld? Yes, I realize the non-orchestrated version of “To Heal” appears on Underworld’s out-dated Oblivion With Bells and that somebody uploaded an edited audio rip from the film’s DVD, but I want something with decent quality for shite’s sake. Also, Candiria’s Kiss the Lie is still indefinitely postponed even though it’s been finished since 2006. It seems their label won’t release it unless the band tours, but the band won’t tour without their drummer… who left the band. Brilliant. Now for more gobbledegook culled from the unfettered wasteland of my mind.

Best Albums of 2007 (#40-#31)

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!

Best Albums of 2007 (#57-#41)

My original intention was to scale back this year’s list since 2006′s article turned into a 10,000+ word behemoth. I never even expended that much energy for upper-year university papers. A little bit shorter, a whole lot sweeter, so was the plan that was made to fail. I’m going to break up this year’s edition into more digestible chunks. Luckily 2007 was a much better year where I wanted to move most entries up the list rather than down, so mediocre Incubus albums won’t be allowed to bleed through. Now let me condescend your place in the world by using the collective terms “kids” and “folks”.

iPod Touch

Hip to be Square

In an endeavor to fill my empty soul with joy in the form of capitalist fulfillment, I embraced my consumer whore nature and purchased an 8gb Apple iPod Touch. The “I” stands for inflated sense of ego.

In early 2007, my CD/MP3 player broken and I never really got around to purchasing another device. A friend threw me a replacement in the form of a JSK Digital MP-407 USB thumb drive MP3 player (oddly, the manufacturer doesn’t have a web site), which had a measly 256mb capacity. I generally only listened when mobile on transit and I also stuck to the same artist for a week at a time, so it really wasn’t an issue only have two or three albums with me at any time.

The manufacturing defects of the thumb drive started to become exposed via random player reboots and the inability to lock the next track button leading to my pocket suddenly deciding on song changes. I decided it was time for a quality player, but resolved to not making it an impulse buy. My next plan of action? Impulse buying an expensive mobile music player. Of course, as a fashion accessory, it kind of is a thief-happy device due to the white earbuds. I didn’t even let those rubbish pieces of audio equipment leave their packaging. Instead, I’ve been using my dumpy (but adequate) Sennheiser PMX-60 pair which don’t attract much attention, although they supposedly leak a lot of sound due the open design… but nobody on public transit has complained yet. I dare you! I FUCKING DARE YOU! I tend to keep my iPod in concealed as to avert the questioning eyes of the young and the beautiful. That I must above all things love myself.

I’ll get right into the Negative Nancy.

It bugs me that controlling music volume or making a track change both require looking at the screen. So you can’t just throw a hand in your pocket to make a quick adjustment. No Adobe Flash negates the “full web experience” that Apple claims. It may be a strategy to avoid streaming video that isn’t YouTube or a method to reduce memory usage, but Flash is now a necessary component of the web. It isn’t just used for frivolous splash pages anymore. There is also no scrobbling through Last.FM to keep a record of all the music you listen to. There are workarounds and I imagine there will be a supported standalone app once the iPhone SDK third-party additions are allowed to be copied over through iTunes in June.

Now on to why the thing sells well. Apple sure knows how to throw a nice graphical layer or some simple, useful features. The user interface is pretty and responsive with its PowerPoint-style page transitions from menu to menu. My attempt at drunk Facebooking while sitting in the crowd at a Guelph Storm hockey game was luckily thwarted by the small touch keyboard, hazy vision, and my Man-Sized fingers. The next morning moved nicely into a session of hungover bed-chillaxing while checking the message history in a competition to see if I could delete possible items before recipients read their contents. It was as I remembered – nothing sent since I was too drunk to log in. Stay in school.

Some of the iPhone/iPod Touch-specific webapps are very nice, such as the aforementioned Facebook version, mostly since it doesn’t waste whitespace on advertisements (which I block anyway, on PC) and doesn’t require zooming on any screen. The zoom in/out finger strokes can get tiring when browsing the web, but once more sites create webapps, it can make the mobile Internet experience much more seamless.

I’ve yet to really use the features of the Touch other than music and email, mostly since I don’t want a jailbreak attempt to create a $350 brick. In all actuality, with my lifestyle, the WiFi features are simply a gimmick since I’m so often near or at a PC anyway. I probably soon will be buying a mobile phone, but the iPhone was never in my frame of thought since Rogers are fucking assholes about allowing their wireless service prices to even approach anywhere near the somewhat reasonable prices of US provider. This covers both their equipment costs and data plan options. Of course, the reviews of the iPhone for its phone functions haven’t been too praising, other than the visual voicemail feature. I’ll probably instead find an unlocked Sony Ericsson and be that annoying jackass double-fisting expensive technology while crying out for Nature as the disillusioned man-child he really is.

Music Distribution Done Right

The new Nine Inch Nails instrumental release Ghosts I-IV finally got music release methods down to the way they should be. By self-releasing five different packages choices, the consumer can make a decision on how much they wish to invest into the product. The higher-end selections are for the hardcore listeners that decide quality and support for the artist are paramount, while the digital download or 2CD set attract the casual listener. For any package, you get the immediate lossless, DRM-free download link so you don’t have to wait for your package to ship. You can even sample 1/4 of the release in a shareware-like plan to invite listeners to purchase more. This range of selection doesn’t devalue music, as I felt Radiohead’s deceiving blind 160kbps MP3 fiasco introduced and Saul William campaign represented for its fully-free download option.

Within hours of release, there was so much immediate demand that the web servers handling orders were down to a standstill. This, of course, exposes the limits of HTTP as a delivery platform; this is why the über-nerds prefer BitTorrent for data transfer. I bought the $10 2CD release however my FLAC download cut off at 161mb out of 608mb done due to the server overload. Now the best part about the new album is its licensing under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, which means I can jump on The Pirate Bay to grab the album in full and it’s completely legal. The abandonment of outdated copyright law restrictions puts power completely in the consumer’s hands (hello to you, democracy). It doesn’t make the assumptive pretense that the artist or audience are a victim or criminal. They’re on equal ground and have the free will to define the value of a piece of art. I imagine in the next month you’ll find Ghosts I-IV is worth far beyond expectations simply due to the message its release represents.

Music Industry: Stabby, Stabby

When Pigs Fly: The Death of OiNK, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide by Rob Sheridan pinpoints many of the similar opinions I have about current music. It’s difficult to support an industry where no-talent businessmen reap the rewards while those expending the effort that means something get cast aside. For years it was an exercise of learning the golden rule: he who owns the gold makes the rules. With the current technology, we now have the power to bypass the middlemen and enjoy music as it should be. This means turning off your radio. It’s nice to see artists like Saul Williams, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Radiohead allowing fans to directly support their work.

While perusing my bank statements a couple days ago, I discovered the last time I purchased music was June 5, 2006. It was Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations, in which the Canadian release, of course, didn’t include the b-side bonus “Glorious” found on the Japanese and iTunes releases. I had actually downloaded the release months before the purchase, as I had done with Absolution, which was out in Europe almost six months before North America. The instant retrieval of information is oh-so naughty in a world where regional markets must be established to maximize profits (see: video games and Steam Territory Deactivations). When I Mother Earth’s 2003 final release, The Quicksilver Meat Dream, rapidly faded away due the glut of “Three Days Default Theory of a Nickelcreed”-itus permeating Canadian airwaves, I stopped feeling any sympathy for record labels. For now, my money is better spent paying off student loans and watching the music industry curl into submission.

I do what I must because I can.

LOUD NOISES! I love lamp.

The ongoing saga of the loudness wars continues with an article from austin360.com, Everything Louder Than Everything Else, detailing the compression techniques used in modern sound recordings that make listening to music exhausting.

Have you ever heard one of those test tones on TV when the station is off the air? Notice how it becomes painfully annoying in a very short time? That’s essentially what you do to a song when you super compress it. You eliminate all dynamics.

This was the main annoyance I had with Front Line Assembly’s 2006 album, Artificial Soldier, mastered by Brian “Big Bass” Gardener. For such an underground band, I don’t understand why they would destroy the whole recording when they aren’t even competing for records sold. Hell, people that enjoy the band listen with headphones or hear the songs in a club. We don’t need to hear digital clipping. Furthermore, the article goes into why this paradigm shift has taken place:

We listen to music in completely different ways than we did 20 or 30 years ago. For most people, music is listened to on the go, in cars, on headphones while running, on computers at work. Music has to compete with the sound of your car’s engine, has to punch through the background noise of street traffic or a loud office.

This is pretty much true for me. The couple hundred CDs I own are stowed away in my parent’s basement and now I only listen to MP3s on my computer or MP3 player. I don’t even own a standalone stereo. Sound quality also deteriorates by the subsequent compression placed on music by FM radio and MP3 player equalizers. Ever notice television commercials are much louder than the actual program? That’s due to the compression placed on the sound to make them jump out from the program. It’s just a marketing tactic to do the same on music, stressing a lack of subtlety in the art.

• What is the worst mastered CD?
• Over the Limit (Rush)
• Imperfect Sound Forever (Stylus)
• Another Victim of the Loudness Race (Depeche Mode)

Now for some asides, it looks like there will be no Deadwood movies to close up the story. Those HBO cocksuckers. There’s also some Scrabble OUTRAGE! over the term lesbo being a valid word in the video game. I guess this dude hasn’t seen the South Park parody of 300? Move on, sugartits. Simon took the time to uncover other slang accepted by the game when he came across:

Nedette (noun): derogatory name for a female adolescent hooligan

The hooligans are loose, the hooligans are loose.

Seeds in fruit should be made illegal in the Western world. Also, please don’t eat citrus fruits near an LCD monitor.

Take a glance at Quirking Around to find out how indie fags drool and dick jokes courtesy Judd Apatow rule. Wes Anderson’s shtick has been pretty tiring from the get-go and it looks like The Darjeeling Limited’s characters only continue the trend of banal details that aren’t even smirk-worthy. Next up is Juno which all its Little Miss Sunshine whackisms. Even Michael Cera yet again playing George-Michael Bluth can’t save this from only being another flavour of the week. But we have Richard Kelly’s clusterfuck Southland Tales to look forward to! You should read this above article if only for this quote:

He still believes Second Chance will be bankable, once the bull gets the testicle-goring out of his system.

Speaking of Judd, I spent last month watching the full season of Freaks and Geeks leading up to the Superbad/Knocked Up marathon. I guess I didn’t grow up around a cliquey high school so I didn’t really relate to the “it happened to you, didn’t it!” humour (Trailer Park Boys did enough of that for me). I probably most appreciated the ignorant father played by pseudo-Canadian Joe Flaherty for such cold war gems as:

Lindsay Weir: Dad, give me one good reason why there can’t be a woman president.
Harold Weir: It’s called three irrational days per month. Now, I would have no issue with the other twenty seven, but we’re talking about the atomic bomb here.

I also took the time to watch season one of Friday Night Lights in one go and managed to do it in 4 days. I really need a life. On the plus side, since Demonoid is now blocking all traffic from Canada, I didn’t have to seed the 8gb file to get an even ratio. Yarr, me booty. I actually didn’t find the constant ShakeyCamâ„¢ (even during dialogue) as distracting as I find in action films (Batman Begins, I’m looking at you). However, I doubt I’ll be watching season two since there’s already whispers about it being canceled when the premier only airs next week. I can also say that it’s fucking odd watching a prime-time show scored by post-rock band Explosions in the Sky and supplemented by TV on the Radio, LCD Soundsystem, and Isis, amongst others.

Finally, you must acquire the new Oceansize album Frames as it’s the best of the year. Notice my not so diplomatic verb.

Yeah, I just wrote a post using the term “paradigm shift”.

Tool: They Live (Without Roddy Piper)

Despite misgivings about 10,000 Days, one really can’t deny the chance to check out Tool in a live setting. I’ve seen Tool twice previously, the first time on September 18^th, 2001 at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, followed by August 25^th, 2002 at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, of which visuals I previously described. For July 9^th, 2007, I headed back to The Hammer to see them after an almost five year hiatus.

For pre-drinks with friends, we hit up Hess Village at Gown & Gavel (I enjoy how the site’s logo is in Comic Sans). On the way out, I noticed the Leafs’ Brian McCabe and his entourage exiting the patio. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to be that Typical Hockey Fan and make a loud (but distant) accusation of suckage. Next time.

We were in section 122, row 4 which were the best seats I’ve ever had for a Tool gig. I don’t think my frame will ever want to deal with the physical realities of general admission. The stage had four 10′ high screens, with two larger screens to the side of the stage. There were three circular-structured lights above the stage that rotated and laterally moved about while later in the show, green laser lighting was introduced. Alex Grey’s large-scale Sacred Mirrors curtain was also revealed behind the short screens, similar to how the Lateralus tour setup was handled.

Nearing the end of the show, singer Maynard repeatingly requested for no flash photography, to which you could see a dozen flashes in the crowd within the next minute. It’s not like security really searches people anymore, due to the pint-size of mobile phones. Then the fans wonder why he performs whole concerts turned away from the crowd.

Aside from ambient segues (including “(-) ions”) and the instrumental extensions to a couple songs, here’s the setlist:

1. Jambi
2. Stinkfist
3. 46 & 2
4. Schism
5. Lost Keys/Rosetta Stoned
6. Flood (intro)
7. Some Days It’s Dark (cover of a Death Lurks song from Kids in the Hall’s Brain Candy)
8. Flood
9. Wings for Marie
10. 10,000 Days
11. Lateralus
12. Vicarious

Overall, yeah, I pretty much go to see Danny Carey drum like a motherfucker.

Running Megamix

Nike+ may continue commissioning the creation of iPod Nano exercise mixes by LCD Soundsystem and Aesop Rock to appease the hipster market share, but they don’t have my touch. Savour the flavour.

1. (6:12) The Knife – Silent Shout – 07 – Like a Pen
2. (5:56) !!! – 2007 – Myth Takes – 03 – Must Be the Moon
3. (7:41) Celldweller – 2003 – Celldweller – 04 – The Last Firstborn
4. (5:44) Covenant – 1996 – Sequencer – 06 – Tabula-Rasa
5. (3:53) Skinny Puppy – 1990 – Too Dark Park – 03 – Spasmolytic
6. (5:01) E-Craft – 2001 – Dos Unit – 02 – Embryonic
7. (5:55) Cleen – 1998 – Designed Memories – 02 – Freezeout
8. (8:00) Infected Mushroom – 2003 – Converting Vegetarians (CD1) – 07 – Scorpion Frog
9. (9:37) Hybrid – 2000 – Wide Angle – 11 – Finished Symphony
10. (5:39) New Order – 2005 – Waiting For the Sirens’ Call – 09 – Guilt is a Useless Emotion
11. (5:01) KMFDM – 1995 – Nihil – 03 – Flesh
12. (7:18) Envy – 2006 – Insomniac Doze – 07 – A Warm Room

Running time: 75 minutes, 57 seconds

Top 50 Albums of 2006, Pt. 2 (#25-1)

Here’s the rest of my top albums list, which is a continuation of Pt. 1. Can I now admit that approximately 50 through 10 are ranked randomly? They’re more expressions of what I’m listening to and I’m indifferent as to how they relate to each other when enumerated. It’s going to be OK.

Top 50 Albums of 2006, Pt. 1 (#50-26)

Do you like Huey Lewis and the News? I find talking about music has always been a very subjective experience, throwing about vague assertions while trying to claim it’s just an opinion, but kind of fact. Then there are those that use it as an excuse to stretch thin their English lit degree. I did it because I’m a narcissistic arsehole. Over a year ago I wrote up my Top Albums of 2005 with brief descriptions of each album, and then a few months ago, supplemented that with my leftover list. This time, it’s a bit more… extensive. I’m a huge geek like that. I’m also a music snob. So stop, collaborate, and listen because I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven.

I found 2006 to be a lackluster year in music, as when I was making my list, I kept wanting to push entries down in the rankings. So some of this may read as a queue of snarky criticism rather than a collection of praise. You know me and cynicism; two peas in a pod. A sexy pod, at that. So you’ll find plenty of maturation through melody and ascending tremolo. It’s all the rage, kids.

Milton Wrote About These Migrations

After getting a 500gb hard drive for my new PC, I decided it was time to move my music collection from hundreds of CD-Rs to a more permanent medium. One advantage my former method had was if one disc failed, I only lost a couple albums. However, with a hard drive, a failure means a massive loss that may crush my very soul. I cannot afford a RAID right now. The migration itself has ended up being arduous, pure acid hell.

The real problem is that in my yarring career, I had different standards for storing media, whether it be in the file naming schemes, ID3V1/2 tags, or the capitalization of song titles. So for thousands of albums I scoured over each individual track, ensuring the tags, filename, and directory structure were all correct. I also made sure to remove any photos in the file system or embedded in MP3s themselves. I’m hear for the music, not to see some low-res image on my screen when a song plays. This is done all done through Tag&Rename.

For music playback, I use Winamp with the AlbumList plug-in installed, having it set to sort folders by “path and filename”. I made sure to disable auto-scan on Winamp’s startup because that check is taxing the hard drive. Which brings up how I hate Soulseek’s auto-scan on startup to build its file sharing database, but it has no ability to disable, unless you remove the share altogether. I digress. For sorting my folders out, in the root music folder, I have set out genres with artists inside each that I want grouped together. For instance, a “Canadian Rock” folder contains “I Mother Earth” and “The Tea Party”. This is sensible. Each group has its own folder, with compilations and soundtracks going under a “Various Artists” folder. Each album has a folder within the artist directory, sorted by year. So I have “i mother earth – 1993 – dig” and “i mother earth – 1996 – scenery and fish” to make sure the AlbumList plug-in will have the releases sorted ascending.

So with this plug-in, you can perform the same actions as the usual playlist, such as pressing F3 to search all albums, highlighting a release, and pressing enter to queue in the playlist. Make sure to check “Enqueue when double-clicking or pressing ENTER” under the Option tab.

Why do I go through all this effort for ease in music access? Because I spend too much time on my computer… and iTunes is a bloated piece of shite. I like the fact my minimal installation of Winamp v5.33 is only using 38mb. Just because present PCs having more RAM, it doesn’t mean one should code sloppily and get their feature creep on.

Now for a musical tally. Number of songs: 41,920. Size in gigabytes: 269. Number of releases: 4,109. Just to think, this leaves out the physical CDs I own, which are back in Nova Scotia, and I also left out a couple dozen albums that I didn’t think were worth copying to my PC. I really don’t understand my post-industrial/noise fascination earlier this decade. I am also aware of people that have more than a terabyte of music available over a network. I thought I was mental.

Sidenote: Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3′s dictionary function didn’t recognize “terabyte” as a word, instead suggesting megabyte. Thanks.

So, how about that Tool Time Conundrum?