Year-End Critics' Polls '07

good post about 'Untrue': http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/11/burial-untrue/

It's totally reminiscent of the illbient stuff from the late '90s

Ha, I was listening to Burial the other day, and it made me want to put on this:

http://www.trip-hop.net/images/jacquettes/big/703.jpg

"i've given it some thought and i think what i like about it is the slow, treated vocals and the background washes of synth strings, and that it's reminiscent of the illbient stuff from the late '90s."

Ugh. It makes me feel like I'm in a GAP. And the fucking rain sounds brought in? The whole thing reeks of pretension and bad sex.

Dude what is more rock and roll than pretension and bad sex?

(I haven't heard Burial, and I don't really care to.)

how often does it rain in a GAP anyway?

It's hard to keep up on everything. Are there any J-pop lists out there, or South African kwaito ones? I need more gatekeepers I admit, and need to find more streaming sources or something. The Wire 'Global' list does not go beyond the standard stuff I would expect from them, and my list similarly contains Malian and Senegalese stuff promoted in the US and Uk. Despite the internet, unless some 'global' releases from certain genres of music get US or UK releases and are marketed in those places, these genres get lost in these end of the year polls.

"how often does it rain in a GAP anyway?"

Not nearly as often as fake rain sounds are piped in. Burial is the most boring combination of New Age and dubstep imaginable.

i'm curious what you mean by "safe" in the above. where is it written that music is always supposed to be, like, "dangerous"? i thought obligatory rock'n'roll rebellion was jan wenner's territory?

"It's hard impossible to keep up on everything."

Can we all just agree on that and be done with it?

On that note, I've been meaning to ask -- are comments like these ones below meant to be jokes? Because if not, they reallly, really bug me. (I mean, there are hundreds of good albums that aren't on any lists above. Yes, your favorite record is not everybody else's favorite record.) But if they're meant to be funny, never mind.

There's starting to be a disturbing lack of Hissing Fauna appreciation

too many lists are ignoring apparat and mary timony

hey stever, one of the records that might still be on my list is one that is only available in ethiopia -- good thing i was there this summer to pick it up for 250 birr! but i think there's a better chance that my "token" african record will be vusi mahlasela, which i only learned about through global rhythms' cover story. great freakin' record, folk and boogie and classic rock.

without hearing tinawaren or youssou n'dour, I could easily make a pretty good african top ten.

"i'm curious what you mean by "safe" in the above. where is it written that music is always supposed to be, like, "dangerous"? i thought obligatory rock'n'roll rebellion was jan wenner's territory?"

I mean artistically safe, I mean "not taking chances," and "no real risks, no real rewards," safe. But hey, feel free to pretend that everyone who doesn't like something you do is one of those dangerous Rockists we've all heard so much about.

here are three more RA polls

<a href=http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature-read.aspx?id=867>;Top 5 Remixes</a>
<a href=http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature-read.aspx?id=869>;Top 10 labels</a>
<a href=http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature-read.aspx?id=866>;Top 10 albums</a>

gah! here's the URLs

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature-read.aspx?id=867
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature-read.aspx?id=869
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature-read.aspx?id=866

lol

i finally manage to log in after 6 months of this nu-ILX business and it doesn't do HTML

On that note, I've been meaning to ask -- are comments like these ones below meant to be jokes? Because if not, they reallly, really bug me.

kornrulez69 did it for the lulz. These others, not so much.

http://singingfool.com/photos/695/029208_21.jpg

IF THEY ASK YOU WHY WE DID IT, HEY! WE DID IT FOR LULZ

haha

Here is Simon Reynolds, in his Idolator essay last year:

What's striking about all these genres is that they're not just unpop, they're anti-pop. Rejecting the pop principles of accessibility and instantness, they're hard to find and hard to get into. Noise, dubstep, and extreme metal are also hard sounding, mixing varying degrees of aggression and abstraction, physical impact and structural convolution. Ideologically, they are ultra-rockist, cherishing a trinity of interlocking values—difficulty, danger, darkness—and fervently upholding the ideal of underground versus mainstream.

(later):

there's been a return to a default-mode rockism that prizes substance, complexity, edge. If TV on the Radio and Joanna Newsom represent the beguiling, easy-on-the-ear version of those values, those looking for a harder hit are turning to metal, dubstep, noise. There's much to admire about those renegade genres: the seriousness, the earnest aspiration to innovate and overwhelm, the sheer strenuousness and commitment entailed in being a fan.

And Burial's shadowy photo was at the top of the piece. So it was a little weird to finally hear music by the guy, and to find out it was just pleasantly "dark" background mood schlock, not especially difficult or dangerous or substantive or complex or edgy or hard or innnovative in any way I could determine. If people had been telling me that all along (and if the mood music struck me as remotely distinctive, or beautiful), maybe I'd get it. (Maybe people were saying that, though, and I just didn't read them. It's not like I went out of my way to read Burial reviews, and Simon's opinions aren't always everybody else's -- and anyway, I guess he's actually talking about the whole dubstep genre, above, not Burial per se'. But for whatever reasons, I was still expecting, and hoping for, way more than I wound up getting with the music.)

(Er, actually, that was a Pazz & Jop essay, not an Idolator essay.)

<I>I mean artistically safe, I mean "not taking chances," and "no real risks, no real rewards," safe.</i>

But these phrases are all so cliched, and I think you could easily apply them to ANY music you felt wasn't taking the chances YOU wanted it to. By your suggestion that Burial is "wallpaper" music I suspect you want it to be more aggressive, perhaps. But I don't think that making melancholic, even "pretty" music necessarily has to be safe.

I don't think Burial's music is perfect, in the slightest, so I don't mean for my reply to be taken as a blanket defense of him. Perhaps more than anything else I appreciate it on a technical level ("how'd he get those hi-hats to do that?") but I am also moved emotionally by it. Anyway, forgive the snarkiness of the Jan Wenner comment; I just would like to see the terms like "safe" unpacked a bit more, because they're thrown around so casually as to be all but meaningless. Your use of it says more to me about your mindset than it does the music in question.

Sadly, most dubstep hasn't held up to the rhetoric of danger that was used to prop it up.

(Which I suppose makes sense, following in a long tradition of UK breakbeat genres that were supposed to be really scaaaaary -- hello, tech-step -- but quickly calcified into a pretty conventional set of tropes.)

I think a far more genuine take on dubstep's "darkness" is supplied by Skull Disco, who appropriate a Pushead-style cartoon gore aesthetic; you can't quite take the gloom seriously. (For my money, they're also just about the most interesting dubstep out there, and getting moreso, though they're also moving away from the genre.)

appleblim - vansam for the win!

Chuck what phil is implying is correct: don't bother with persevering with dubstep for frights.

The tying in of dubstep with hardness, darkness etc. is very much a latterday thing - dubstep itself was pretty much bass-heavy mood music for a long time. It's only since parts of it have gotten very shrill and cliche-dystopian in the last two years or so that these ideas have started floating around, more as some sort of ideological compensation for the sonic paucity. At least techstep actually was dark and scary and good all at once for about 18 months or so.

The link that Burial has to Simon's overall argument has more, I think, to do with the overacted seriousness of its pleasure - it's the staged refusal of any moments of lightheartedness or even any bouncy intensity that can give Burial that "schlocky" feel. This is why he reminds me so much of the DJ Shadow's The Private Press, an album that I very much like because of its schlockiness, so I'm not trying to criticise Burial in saying this. Perhaps for me Burial only works insofar as it is a schlocky exercise, and I think there's a sense to which his own commentary on his music implies this. This is why there can be such a disconnect between Burial's music and Burial-crit, most of which tries to tie his overt melodrama into some overarching aesthetic of authentic emotions... Burial as the streets' own traumatised memory bank etc. etc. ad nauseum.

Private Press is pretty playful (at times)!

Yeah hence the "much of" - ignore the uptempo tracks and focus on "You Can Never Go Home Again" etc. and the comparison survives.

Just to clarify, Tim, you're saying that the 'streets' trope is a critical one vs. whatever it is Burial thinks about his own music, etc.? At least that's how I'm seeing it.

No Burial himself uses this kind of language as well, but I think he's a bit more self-aware and erm proportionate in how he explains what he's doing vis a vis the music he draws on.

I made a compilation for a friend about a year ago "explaining" Burial - I put on some 2-step and "We Need A Resolution" and then stuff which i thought kind of captured what he then does to this source material - the key stuff being Shadow, Tricky's "Broken Homes" (he even has a track called "Broken Home") and Donnacha Costello's "Dry Retch", which is the closest thing i've found to his cumulus cloud synth work. Oh and the Vladislav Delay remix of Rhythm & Sound.

I always wonder about the use of 'the streets' in these contexts, but to me it's interesting because dubstep in general specifically always suggests a wet-from-rain London street corner waiting-for-the-late-bus feeling. Melancholic but not threatening, and definitely not a sign of its being real as such except by implication, ie, "Damn, it's cold and I'd rather be home."

Hmm that take is quite similar to Tom's piece linked above (which is excellent - check it out if you haven't already) - at least as applied to Burial.

Dubstep doesn't really have much to do with "the streets" as far as I can tell (though as I'm over here in Australia I probably shouldn't presume to judge) - a lot of the crit around it is somewhat caught up in that methodology though. I think this will probably change though as the dubstep audience progressively morphs into a pollywog-style post-breakbeat audience who really don't give two shits about grime (whence all the street-talk came). It's a kind of a bemusing process for me to watch though, if only because my position is even more antiquarian (basically that OG 2-step was not only some kind of aesthetic pinnacle, but also a kind of standard against which critics should hurl their clunky crit concepts as a kind of testing ground).

We can't have you be old, Tim, it's just not on. And yes, been meaning to check out that FT piece...

I def. think you're on the right track in terms of questioning these too-easy critical manoeuvres.

Well, it feels terribly exhausted on a *wide* variety of levels to talk about music's 'realness' in an era of widespread availability that, while arguably limited first and foremost to a certain economically-viable subset of folks worldwide (ie, the time and money and security to be able to randomly download and talk about whatever), is still in more of a flux state in the -- very short! -- history of recorded music than ever. If that makes any sense. The decoupling of artifact and content makes for randomness beyond anyone's imaginings because it wasn't fully understood until we were all well in it, random Wired and Mondo 2000 fever dreams aside.

I think that's a tempting concept from the perspective of an internet music omnivore, but it feels a little, I don't know, co-optive? It may not take long before the world knows about any given little regional scene these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't aspects that only make sense at ground level.

Entirely true, which is where I think the matter of projection as to what that ground level 'really' is from the omnivorous standpoint (and my quote abuse is noted but I'm trying to foreground the point) comes in even more strongly than ever.

"I think that's a tempting concept from the perspective of an internet music omnivore, but it feels a little, I don't know, co-optive? It may not take long before the world knows about any given little regional scene these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't aspects that only make sense at ground level."

This is correct, but does it really apply to Burial? Burial's music strikes me as stuff that probably makes more sense to internet music omnivores than anyone else!

Yeah, totally, I wasn't talking about Burial specifically.

The last of The Wire's lists

Compilations

Achilifunk: Gipsy Soul 1969-1979 (Lovemonk)
After Dark (Italians Do It Better/Troubleman)
DJ Dixon: Body Language Vol 4 (Get Physical)
Box Of Dub: Dubstep And Future Dub (Soul Jazz)
Brazil 70: After Tropicalia: New Directions In Brazilian Music In The 1970s (Soul Jazz)
Broken Flag: A Retrospective 1982-1985 (Vinyl On Demand)
Cries From The Midnight Circus: Ladbroke Grove 1967-1978 (Castle)
Doom & Gloom: Early Songs Of Angst And Disaster 1927-1945 (Trikont)
LARM: From Mouth Cavity To Laptop (Kning Disk)
Mute Audio Documents 1978-1984 (Mute)
Psychedelic Phinland: Finnish Hippie And Underground Music 1967-1974 (Love)
Remove Celebrity Centre (Junior Aspirin)
Savage Pencil Presents Lion Vs Dragon In Dub (Trojan)
Silver Monk Time: A Tribute To The Monks (Play Loud!)
Skull Disco: Soundboy Punishments (Skull Disco)

Reissues

Neil Campbell - SOL POWR (Mundane Music)
Miles Davis - The Complete On The Corner Sessions (Sony)
Vladislav Delay - Multila (Huume)
Fairport Convention - Liege And Lief (Island)
Noah Howard - The Black Ark (Bo'weavil)
Keith Hudson - Brand (Pressure Sounds)
Annea Lockwood - Early Works 1967-82 (EM)
Ju Suk Reet Meate - Solo 78/79 (De Stijl)
Nico - The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970 (Rhino)
Daphne Oram - Oramics (Paradigm)
Pentangle - The Time Has Come (Castle)
Eliane Radigue - Jetsun Mila (Lovely Music)
Terry Riley - Music For The Gift (Elision Fields)
Terry Riley - Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band All Night Flight (Elision Fields)
Seefeel - Quique Redux Edition (Too Pure)
Sly & The Family Stone - There's A Riot Goin' On (Epic)
Sun Ra - Strange Strings (Atavistic Unheard Music Series)
Sun Ra - The Complete Disco 3000 Concert (Art Yard)
Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth (Domino)

Phew, that was a good lot of typing practice today.

"But these phrases are all so cliched, and I think you could easily apply them to ANY music you felt wasn't taking the chances YOU wanted it to. By your suggestion that Burial is "wallpaper" music I suspect you want it to be more aggressive, perhaps. But I don't think that making melancholic, even "pretty" music necessarily has to be safe."

Yes, of course it could apply to any music that wasn't taking the chances I wanted it to. Just like saying something is boring means that I found it boring. Isn't this "subjective crit" 101?

Two things: First, I don't think that melancholic, pretty music has to be safe, which is why Burial disappointed me—it is melancholic and pretty music that IS safe. Second, by saying "wallpaper music," I meant that it seems best suited to atmospherics, and not to active listening.

There's nothing in it that surprises me, that makes me take more notice, that draws me further in—it seems remarkably flat, sonically, despite the obvious care in layers. Sure, it feels like waiting for a bus in the rain, but waiting for a bus in the rain is boring enough that I don't need a record to take me back to that.

I think I'd be happier with it if it removed all of what sounds, to my ear, like cliched dubstep rhythm tracks, and just left the washes of sound—at least then, I wouldn't have to wade through a tacked-on vestigial pseudo-techno to get to what's pretty (and even then, I'd have a hard time recommending it for repeat listens).

And regarding Burial and omnivores, I kind of feel like that's part of the disappointment for me—there are so many other options that are more in line with what I want out of music (novelty and depth?) that I just don't get why this one has been singled out since it doesn't seem to have any of that.

The age of internet omnivores means that I'm too used to having my mind blown to listen to stuff that doesn't connect.

As an aside, for me, reading the criticism around it feels like when Is This It came out and everyone got a hardon for the Strokes, but at least with the Strokes I could understand that there were decent songs there (just nothing that ever whipped me up into the same frenzy).

"how'd he get those hi-hats to do that?"

this is really all i want to know about burial.

Oh, and thanks for that link to Skull Disco—I'm really enjoying the free mix they had up on their front page. It's pretty much what I hoped Burial would sound like (even though I probably wouldn't put something like this at my #1 slot or anything).

see that makes more sense! i like yr comment about waiting for the bus. didn't mean to come off wrong, i just thought "safe," as shorthand, wasn't saying much.

did you get that skull disco mix to download? i haven't managed to. weird.

"didn't mean to come off wrong, i just thought "safe," as shorthand, wasn't saying much."

Oh, yeah, that's totally fair—it wasn't saying very much. And apologies for getting snippy, sometimes everything on ILX feels like sniping, and it gets my back up.

The Skull Disco was working at 1:30 PST, with nary a hiccup. Saved it, imported it, enjoyed it.

Breaking news. . . NPR "All Songs Considered" listeners pick the best albums of 2007 (and yes 15 was missing from the listing I cut and pasted):

25. Artist: Rilo Kiley
Album: Under the Blacklight

24.Artist: Lily Allen
Album: Alright, Still

23.Artist: Tegan and Sara
Album: Con

22.Artist: Beirut
Album: Flying Club Cup

21Artist: Ryan Adams
Album: Easy Tiger

20.Artist: Okkervil River
Album: The Stage Names

19.Artist: Josh Ritter
Album: Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter

18.Artist: Bright Eyes
Album: Cassadaga

17.Artist: Band of Horses
Album: Cease to Begin

16.Artist: Of Montreal
Album: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

14.Artist: The New Pornographers
Album: Challengers

13.Artist: LCD Soundsystem
Album: Sound of Silver

12.Artist: Iron & Wine
Album: Shepherd's Dog

11.Artist: Amy Winehouse
Album: Back to Black

10.Artist: Andrew Bird
Album: Armchair Apocrypha

09.Artist: The National
Album: Boxer

08.Artist: The Shins
Album: Wincing the Night Away

07.Artist: Modest Mouse
Album: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

06.Artist: Spoon
Album: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

05.Artist: The White Stripes
Album: Icky Thump

04.Artist: Wilco
Album: Sky Blue Sky

03.Artist: Feist
Album: Reminder

02.Artist: Arcade Fire
Album: Neon Bible

01.Artist: Radiohead
Album: In Rainbows