TOP 10 NOW: \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\shawty got poll poll poll poll poll poll poll (part II: 2008 ALBUMS)/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

the heavy stuff (boris, torche) is the poppy/song-based/linear end of the spectrum

It is ILM the western world.

― The User Formerly Known As Pfunkboy Latterly Known as.. (Herman G. Neuname), Tuesday, February 17, 2009 7:48 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xp although many people don't consider khanate 'off-putting'. it's all relative, innit? personally I find vampire weekend and cut copy a lot more off-putting than things viral.

I wouldn't expect really extreme music to make the top 5, almost by definition, but I might expect a 50-album list on a site as diverse as ILM to stray a little further from the middle ground.

xposts (damn, Contenderizer making the point really fucking succinctly and making me look like Mister Wind) ...

portishead is probably the most difficult/forbidding/unfriendly album on this list. the fact that it's at no.1 seems slightly at odds with the mood set by the rest, so that's quite a pleasing result

This is an interesting point and I wouldn't argue with it; however, surely it's got more to do with the fact that Third was a record by a "name" band, hotly anticipated, than with ILMers being contrary?

I mean, it sort of stands to reason that the bigger event a release is, the more of us are going to hear it. I'm certainly one of the less imaginative/exploratory posters here, but even those who are off beating paths through the experimental undergrowth need to actually know about a record's existence before they can hear it.

The other thing with "difficult/forbidding/unfriendly" is that -- let's be honest here -- it's largely in the eye (er, ear) of the beholder. I remember reading a piece by David Keenan a few years back that basically seemed to be arguing that any music that was remotely pleasant to listen to -- ie wasn't the aural equivalent of testicular torsion -- was some kind of dreadful sell-out, and I just thought: what, you tool, you actually won't allow yourself to feel any pleasure from music? Sometimes ugly noise is all I want to hear, but the fact remains that I'm still doing it for pleasure; because I enjoy it. Like most people, though -- ILMers not excepted -- I guess I listen to pleasant things for pleasure marginally more often than not.

I'd be really interested to hear what someone from the more extreme end of the spectrum thought of this: M the G? Herman?

LJ, have you heard the Alex Moulton record? I'd be interested in your take on it. It's prog-disco!

xxp: Middle ground? Wasn't the talk about 21-50 all about how esoteric it was?

m the g,

yes i agree. a lot my picks didn't make the list and i didn't think they would. i even voted for like local mpls bands that have only sold a couple hundred CDs but figured i might as well

You asking me what I think of Keenan? He's a tosser who overchages for cdrs in his mailorder shop (VT)

Just a pity that ILX polls dont allow you to rank a list of 20. Then you would get a lot more voters. But then perhaps the results would be even more lowest common denominator/middle ground.

I'd be seriously interested to hear what noise fans thought thee best noise record of the year was.

They're too busy arguing over Analogue vs Laptop sounds

Some people said they didn't see the point in voting as their fave records wouldn't make the list.

i think those people have missed the point of voting somewhat. obv all my 20 votes deserved to make it, but i didn't vote with the aim of all of them making it...

I wouldn't expect really extreme music to make the top 5, almost by definition, but I might expect a 50-album list on a site as diverse as ILM to stray a little further from the middle ground.

i think the list strays quite far from the middle ground in all directions tbh, and i don't see why the music you're complaining didn't make it is any more worthy of inclusion than all the music we voted for which didn't make it...like, what makes khanate or whoever "further from the middle ground" than the foreign exchange or trus'me? depends on what you consider to be the middle ground...

Just a pity that ILX polls dont allow you to rank a list of 20. Then you would get a lot more voters.

I seriously doubt this.

xp "difficult/forbidding/unfriendly" certainly is in the ear of the beholder, but for me music's certainly all about pleasure, of various stripes: profound, profane, boneheaded, cerebral, sensual...but to me there's just as much pleasure and joy to be had in discordant, brutal, nihilistic sounds as there is in soft, mellifluous, technicolour ones.

this list is notable for its distinct lack of the former, is all.

re: keenan. he runs a great wee record shop (though yeah, overpriced) but I'm not a fan of his scorched earth, atonal-improv-or-death approach. it's incredibly conservative in its own way.

It's not like Khanate even had an album out in 2008. They split up a few years back.
(However an album mostly recorded 3 years ago, with vocals just having been finally added by Mr Dubin himself ,has just come out and is the best album they made since the debut, so maybe it will make the 2008 poll next year!)

Just a pity that ILX polls dont allow you to rank a list of 20. Then you would get a lot more voters.

I seriously doubt this.

― Lots of praying with no breakfast! (HI DERE),

Why? Some polls get 150 votes. Would be a lot easier for lazy people to vote than emailing.

You still have to get said lazy people to pour through over 100 albums to pull out 20 they care about and order them. You also need a polling interface that allows you to easily do this.

Which unfortunately probably isn't possible

But if it was, i'm sure you would get way over 100 voters

there's always been a meme within the critical and broad-eared listening community that attaches a kind of political/aesthetic heroism to truly difficult music -- and that denigrates or condescends to the "merely pleasant". seems to me that this meme became dominant (or selectively dominant w/in people-thinking-and-writing-about-music circles) in the mid 80s-mid 90s, what with the anti-commercial stances, celebration of noise/experimentation for their own sake, contempt for pop, love for anything "extreme" or outsider-y, etc.

since then, these ideas & aesthetics have lost traction. it's hard to find a lot of critical/popular support for the idea that difficult, "challenging", willfully anticommercial music is inherently more valid (politically or otherwise) than things that might actually sell/appeal to general audiences. using pop forms to express rage or aggressive dissatisfaction is, i think, even looked at a bit askance. instead, there seems to be something like an orthodoxy of comfortable, cerebral pleasure in critical approaches to music. "music can be so nice, so majestic, so comforting, so thoughtful, so appealing and so much FUN -- why would you want to make it all harsh and angry and hard to listen to?"

i know i'm overstating things, and probably communicating badly, but something like this does seem to have happened over the last 10-15 years.

Some of us aren't looking for music that is difficult to listen to. We're looking for music that genuinely blows our minds with thrillingly original and fresh expression. I can't articulate it very well, but it seems to me that bands are happy if one element of their music is novel, rather than the whole joyful fabric of their music. You can be challenging and have fun at the same time!

Being novel for novelty's sake almost never works.

"looked at askance" unless delivered with a sort of good-natured teenage flair...

like, what makes khanate or whoever "further from the middle ground" than the foreign exchange or trus'me? depends on what you consider to be the middle ground...

this is disingenous. some musics are MUCH more audience-unfriendly than others, often deliberately so. rusted shut or blue sabbath black cheer are gonna push "that's not music, you can't play that shit in the office, turn it off NOW!" buttons for a lot more people than FE or trus'me.

same goes for a lot of noise-type electronic music, esp of the non-dance variety.

I don't mean for novelty's sake! I'm talking about artists with a vision that is authentically novel, that temporarily and thrillingly rewires the way one understands music.

LJ, have you heard the Alex Moulton record? I'd be interested in your take on it. It's prog-disco!

― The Reverend (rev), Tuesday, February 17, 2009 12:06 PM Bookmark

i think our voting procedure is working out just fine

^^^

You are basically using a lot of obfuscatory words to say "I'm talking about artists I like," LJ

So I am, Dan. I'm just a bit of a fiend for progression and structural complexity tbh

Will check out Moulton. Like I say, I actually made quite a few really sweet discoveries and have few complaints about the overall poll results. Not perfect for me, but really good music.

That record totally fucked my mind last night.

I like structural complexity as well, but I also like structural simplicity and find that when it's done well, it is near untouchable; this is the main reason why I have absolutely no beef with Lil Wayne placing in the top 10 of this poll.

Well, I'm all for simplicity if it's presented in the form of a strong, personalised, and convincing musical narrative. I'm guessing things like Lil Wayne (and my own vote Half Man Half Biscuit) fall into such a category. More important still than progression is for a song to determine its identity at any one given moment, and to fight for that identity, whether it shifts or not.

i think one thing that's definitely happening is that the commercial/noncommercial barrier has been getting wrecked for the past ~10 years, which may be a driver for what contendo was saying.

i think the list strays quite far from the middle ground in all directions tbh, and i don't see why the music you're complaining didn't make it is any more worthy of inclusion than all the music we voted for which didn't make it...like, what makes khanate or whoever "further from the middle ground" than the foreign exchange or trus'me? depends on what you consider to be the middle ground...

for starters, I'm not in the least bit complaining, or maintaining that anything else is 'more worthy' of inclusion. just registering an observation that what are commonly thought of as more extreme/experimental styles are largely absent.

the question of where the middle ground lies is an interesting one though, and by no means simple. maybe it's to do with the unifying elements of western pop music - maybe linear and/or traditional structures, repetitive rhythms, relatively mid-paced tempos, etc. maybe it's to do with mood, vocal delivery or decipherable lyrics. maybe it's to do with whether you can dance to it or whether it has a 'tune'.

in other words, I clearly shouldn't have used the term. for my purposes here, I'm talking about stuff that inspires the reaction mentioned by contenderizer – i.e "that's not music", aka the contents of the wire/terrorizer.

(although it's interesting that the bug was the wire's no.1 album of the year, although this was perhaps unexpected from the other direction, given that it's a relatively accessible, if dark record.)

out of curiosity lex, what do you consider to be the more experimental/far-reaching/whatever offerings here?

i think the bug makes PERFECT sense wr2 the old-school anticommercial stance. though it's pleasant to listen to, it's also socially/politically critical and self-consciously "dark", even a little bit "dangerous". would have gone over big with the your flesh crowd circa 1990.

another way to look at this is to say that there isn't a lot of politically-engaged music on this list. several gestures in that direction, but only a few albums that make an explicit issue of their politics/social critiques. and maybe that's to be expected, but nor are there many albums that even imply a political engagement through anger, alienation, confrontation, difficulty, etc.

i mean, that's my at-a-glance read, but is it fair?

"nor are there many albums that even imply a political engagement through anger, alienation, confrontation, difficulty, etc."

= missing the point? if not so aggressively, then how do these records address their political context?

is there politically-engaged music that potentially could be on the list but isn't? i'm just trying to think of what the alternative is.

i thought it was a great year for politically-engaged music - certainly erykah badu, young jeezy and the bug all felt momentous in the way they grappled w/social and political ideas, and in the way they all seemed to capture something distinctly of 2008

out of curiosity lex, what do you consider to be the more experimental/far-reaching/whatever offerings here?

lol i'd've said the bug or erykah, but apparently the bug is "accessible". whatever! you try playing that in any office.

Most people are well-versed enough in a couple of genres to make claims as to what constitutes "the middle ground" of those genres. But I don't think anyone on ILM can hold themselves out as understanding the middle ground of contemporary music generally, because, well, they haven't traversed all that ground. After all, at base this metaphor means a middle distance between two points, and it's not feasible to argue that all music can be arranged into a linear fashion from most to least experimental given the multiplicity of divergent impulses that music may choose to express, and the variety of mutually exclusive sonic approaches by which this can be done.

Moreover the upshot of the celebration of extremism ten-to-fifteen years ago is that a lot of those outer edges have been well-mapped and no longer contain vast tracks of uncharted territory. It's incredibly difficult to stumble upon absolutely new ground now, and innovation such as it is occurs in moments of recombination and resulting mutation (i.e. a large part of the GGD album's "step forward" from God's Money is its active engagement with dance and urban music, which transforms their prior sound into something relatively new-sounding). For the most part, people who continue to dwell at "the outer margins" do so with the same potential for greatness as any genre-devotee, but that's what they are: a genre-devotee, working within a tradition. If anything, it's precisely the "pop"-tinged noise outfits that have something to offer here, insofar as the broader listening community simply haven't engaged with noise at all, and hence are more liable to - as per lj - have their "minds blown", even if the music doesn't appear challenging to noise-hardcore

fwiw Gang Gang Dance for instance didn't exactly blow my mind but I really really love the album as a narrative, and enjoy the thoroughly appealing combination of statements they make

xxx-post no. i don't see much explicitly political music that's close to surface WR2 the pop mainstream and/or critical interest zone. i mean it's here and there (queer politics in stuff like Antony, throwback punk stuff like Against Me!, teen alienation in crystal castles, implicitly political extreme music like BSBC & load bands, etc.), but seems to have become quite unfashionable as of late. a few years ago, it seemed like "new weird america" bands like animal collective were expressing some dissatisfaction with commercial music forms and technological society, but those critiques no longer seem present in ACs music. and that strain of wild & woolly "freedom" isn't as popular as it once was.

lex OTM, though. there is some. i'd mentioned the bug, but badu & jeezy 2. those seem like real outliers, though. rare things. and where's the rock/indie equivalent?

a few years ago, we might have seen stuff like the locust, blood brothers at least flirting with the list, right?

if Burn, Piano Island, Burn didn't make the list in '03 then tbh ILX fucked up big-time

agree w/ tim WR2 the "well-trodden"-ness of the outer edges. i think we're seeing the pendulum of interest in extremes swing back after a few decades in the twilight zones. i'm not bitching about this, though - just observing the effect.

lex OTM, though. there is some. i'd mentioned the bug, but badu & jeezy 2. those seem like real outliers, though. rare things. and where's the rock/indie equivalent?

is this where we get into the quirkification of pop culture over the past few years, and the resultant fear of earnestness?

probly

yeah i mean that animal collective song has the line everyone quotes--"i don't care much for material things / i just want 4 walls and adobe slats" etc. etc. which could be read in that way but any dissatisfaction they're expressing is pretty vague--not surprising when they have reasonable means and (as far as I can tell) normal middle-class backgrounds.

i think you're right abt blood brothers but i don't really want to revisit the days when people were repping for them either.

lex: heh! I meant it was relatively accessible in a wire context. the bug would last far longer on an office stereo than, say, borbetomagus.

Tim: you're right re: middle ground and all. I guess more broadly, the list is narrow in terms of its adherence to western pop styles - i.e. no jazz, classical, free improvisation, folk, modern composition, world music (I know, a rancid term, but what else is there?) - unless the finnish psych counts. I only alighted upon the lack of 'noisy stuff', for want of a better catch-all, because that constitutes a significant chunk of the music I know and love, and its absence is therefore the most glaring to me.

i just can't think of too many indie standard-bearers who really have the gravity and credibility to do something as convincing as Jeezy or the Bug (whatever I think about their music).

arcade fire, hold steady, AC all could pull it off, if they wanted to, if they really meant it. and i guess i should include arcade fire among the bands who do retain a political edge in their music.

another faded trend that recently kept politics, punk "opposition" and social critique in the indie/critical eye: GSYBE! & constellation-style cinematic sadcore.

^ the latter thread persists in the current vogue for vaguely "metal" post rock stuff, instrumental or otherwise. isis, pelican, jesu, etc. much of which IS strongly political.