Entries Tagged 'This Year' ↓
February 22nd, 2010 — Personal, This Year
I've been going back and forth about what to write about 2009. There's a part of me that would like to write candidly (and regularly) about what goes on in my life and how I feel about it; people sharing stories of their lives produce some of my favourite online writing, and the idea of being a little bit more open and accessible is increasingly appealing.
It turns out, though, that it will take some significant brain-shifting for me to feel comfortable with (or even capable of) that kind of thing. I'm not even sure it's an effort I want to make. I used to write things that I couldn't talk about, but these days I'm both better at talking and head over heels in love with Real Conversations. I'd much rather converse with you specifically than plaster myself all over a public space and hope that you notice.
That being said, last year was a fairly extraordinary time for me, and I would be sorry to leave it entirely unremarked.
I moved cities once and moved house three times, the last time to move in with the most awesome housemate imaginable. I got a job, then got the same job in a different city, and I got really good at it really quickly. I ended a relationship (one of the most sorely testing experiences of my life so far), met wonderful new people, and worked on reconnecting with wonderful old people (with varying degrees of success). I was sick for the entire year, and I stopped holding my breath and hoping to be well again soon.
I listened to the Mountain Goats excessively enough that even I feel faintly embarassed about it, while struggling to be interested in new music and seeing almost nothing live. I set myself a goal of reading 52 books in the year, reached it quite early, and then burned out spectacularly. I played a few excellent computer games and saw a few excellent films, which rekindled my dormant interest in both.
Most importantly, though, I did a lot of thinking. And I do mean a lot.
The relationship saga taught me a whole lot. I learned that it really does take two to tango; more specifically, the effectiveness and quality of any communication is always going to be partially out of my control no matter how good a communicator I become. I learned that sometimes disengaging completely is the best (and even only) sane option, even (or especially) when it means letting what feel like hurtful untruths go unchallenged. I learned that sometimes you just have to let people do whatever they have to do, and get on with what you have to do.
Incidentally, what is with the romanticisation of terrible, passive-aggressive, co-dependent behaviour in popular culture? Oh, things are terrible, there is no reason to think they will improve (especially since we are not doing anything to change anything), I don't even like you very much a lot of the time, but ~it's love~ so we should stay together? Fuck that noise.
The phenomenal thing was the depth and breadth of thinking about relationships that got triggered. I am capable of some pretty determined and sustained introspection, and my lack of spoons meant I had plenty of time to spend with myself. One of the more significant revelations was that I have always been at my happiest when single.
That says a few things to me, but they all fall under the umbrella of "Hey! I think you've been doing it wrong!" I am, after all, the common factor in all my relationship and non-relationship periods. So I gave myself some mandatory time off to think about it all: a year of being absolutely not allowed "relationship stuff", to be extended or not depending on how much I could figure out in that much time.
It has been brilliant. Having that explicit rule has not only given me the mental and emotional space to re-evaluate what I want in relationships and how I should approach them, it has also made me feel much freer to interact with people in whatever way feels most natural. I am still not sure what will happen when my year is up, but I am confident that whatever it is will be good for me.
Other things that I spent lots of time thinking about last year include: post-ironic appreciation; a large set of ethics- and 'ism'-related stuff; identity; mortality; and, most of all, sincerity and the pursuit of happiness.
By the end of 2009 I felt happier and more like myself than since ... well ... ever. Certainly since long enough ago that whoever I was then doesn't really count as the same person.
2010 so far has only continued this trend. People continue to be awesome. I have rediscovered music (recorded and live) in a big way. Urges to write more and take more pictures and travel more and have more conversations and cook more new foods are gnawing pleasantly at me, and I am even okay with not having the energy to act on most of them.
It is good to be alive.
January 1st, 2010 — Music, This Year
For a good half of this year I could rarely bring myself to listen to new music. It had been a while since I devoured recommendations from Pitchfork and the mp3 blogosphere, but now I was just not interested in hearing new things. I would try to listen to them and realise that I wasn't even listening properly, let alone enjoying the experience.
The most notable side effect of this condition was the amount of Mountain Goats that I listened to.
Leaving aside the year's two new Mountain Goats releases, which I'll get to in a moment, there were a handful of their albums that I really got into for the first time. In chronological order:
Get Lonely (2006), which I may have heard described as "spending a long time at the bottom of a swamp". Not the sort of thing that has clicked with me in the past, but I discovered this year that sometimes all one can do with an overwhelming feeling that one is suffocating at the bottom of a swamp is wait it out with some music that feels the same way.
Full Force Galesburg (1997). Wow. Just wow. This is now on approximately equal footing with We Shall All Be Healed as my most dearly-beloved Mountain Goats album. It is very close to perfect.
The Coroner's Gambit (2000), which had slipped under my radar until I happened to listen through it in a year saturated with reminders to consider mortality. "Elijah", "Baboon" and "Alphonse Mambo" are high points, but the whole thing is somehow very different to its individual parts.
Finally, Zopilote Machine (1994), a late entrant propelled by my sudden discovery that it is not just a "Going to Georgia" vehicle after all, and Nothing For Juice (1996) which I was tricked into exploring by the Awesome Yet Unfinishable Mountain Goats Project and which turned out to be marvellous.
Actual New Music From 2009!
All that being said, there were four new releases this year that I can call my favourites. They are also the only four that I have paid any sustained amount of attention to, but never mind. In alphabetical order:
Eyedea & Abilities - By The Throat
Hip-hop and I have never really gotten along. I have a huge amount of respect for the skills involved, but it's pretty rare for me to find even a single song that I can connect with. Imagine my surprise when I heard the title track of this album, liked it a lot, went to listen to the whole thing, and liked that a lot as well! I lack the vocabulary to explain what I like about it, but with luck it will inspire me to learn.
The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice - Moon Colony Bloodbath
I am not a fan of John Vanderslice. For a while I found this EP kind of alienating, and I blamed it on "the Vanderslice taint". Then I remembered that he produced the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, which I love almost more than anything, and was forced to reconsider. Suddenly, I no longer liked only the John Darnielle-centric songs. Repeated listening really fleshed out the theme, and by the end of the year I had listened to those seven tracks a total of 276 times.
The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come
The Life of the World to Come was my most anticipated album of the year. My first reaction was mixed: some tracks were disappointingly inconspicuous, one was eerily reminiscent of a Barenaked Ladies song, one made me cry uncontrollably the first time I listened to it and has continued to have a similar effect since, and a couple of others landed on me just as hard. I still don't have much of a sense of it as a cohesive whole (much like Heretic Pride or most of the pre-4AD albums), and I think that if I did not have such a strong sense of John Darnielle the person (rather than just John Darnielle the musician) I would be able to maintain a greater emotional distance from it; as it is I think Darnielle is a genius but listening to this album too much (or perhaps at all) constitutes very poor emotional hygiene.
Windmill - Epcot Starfields
A vocalist who sounds like a weird hybrid of Tim DeLaughter and Kimya Dawson. Piano and strings by turns sparse and lush, warm vocal harmonies and cold synthesisers. Lyrics with a tendency towards the bizarre. This album did not stand out when I first heard it, but I keep coming back to it again and again. It is a very pretty, if sometimes affected, album about a very small person in a very large universe.
New-to-me Music Not Actually From 2009!
Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning
I had previously written Bright Eyes off as some kind of ridiculous, bleating, self-indulgent emo nonsense. Thanks to a recommendation from How To Be So Real, I checked this album out and was blown away. Sorry, Connor Oberst, I misjudged you.
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
Another previously-written-off band! What am I, some kind of reformed music snob or something? The Hold Steady's other albums still don't do anything for me, but Boys and Girls in America perfectly captures a reckless, full-throated, self-destructive kind of youth that I can romanticise from a distance without ever wanting to live through.
Manchester Orchestra - I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child
One of Stefan's best recommendations to me ever (so it is in very good company). Standout tracks are "Where Have You Been?", "Sleeper 1972" and "Colly Strings". It's good to let go and just be emo sometimes.
Mission of Burma - Vs.
I sought out Mission of Burma, among other bands, after reading Our Band Could Be Your Life. This was the album that stuck. It's good to listen to really loudly. I think I need to make an effort to listen to music really loudly more often.
Moscow Olympics - Cut the World
This is a strange little EP from a Filipino (I think) dream-pop/new wave/post-punk group who somehow manage to remind me of New Order, Sonic Youth and the Pet Shop Boys simultaneously. I am not sure how "good" it is, but it broke my listening-to-new music drought for me. And I do really like it.
Oops
This is only a part of the post I had intended to write today. As it has grown somewhat large, and my self-imposed deadline for writing something approaches, I will leave writing about the unmusical aspects of 2009 until another day.
For those of you who have made it this far, I am pleased to present my soundtrack to 2009 in pseudo-mix-CD format:
Driving Through Ghosts, or, Don't Mistake Proximity For Fate.
January 8th, 2009 — Music, This Year
The first day of Woodford proper began, as is only proper, by being scorched out of the tent early in the morning. My goodness, it was hot. But this time I did take a picture of Tent City:
That picture was taken at 7:30 in the morning, which means it had been too hot to be alive in the tent even earlier than that. See the shade that's covering some of the tents? Yeah, we didn't have that. It was HOT.
Just inside the festival gate there was a wall painted beautifully with mazes and logic puzzles and things. I took some pictures, meaning to come back and have a proper look later, but somehow I never did.
There was a Poets' Breakfast, where the only vegetarian breakfast food had non-optional eggs (which drjon heroically saved me from having to eat) and the poets were fairly tedious. There was one fellow who did what was basically a stand-up comedy routine, which I enjoyed lots, but as for the rest ... well, I'm glad I discovered on the first day that I didn't need to bother going to the Poets' Breakfasts for the rest of the festival.
Next, I trotted off to the Folklorica stage for the dubiousy-named "Invocation Rituals" set. It was actually really good, despite my misgivings: Tenzin Choegyal chanted and sang and played a flute, as well as attempting some fairly ambitious audience participation, which was lovely, and then Sam Okoth (accompanied by a percussionist whose name I've forgotten who was from England, "just a little north of Africa") came on in his fetching getup:
and put on an excellent performance. I really enjoyed his music, although I wasn't sure if they were all traditional Kenyan songs, just generically "African", or original compositions. He also made some interesting observations, both insightful ("going home" to get some of what you need doesn't have to be about a physical place) and funny (in Kenya, rich people dance slowly because they have no need to move fast - so the sluggish Woodford audience must be made up of very rich people).
There was a third item in the Invocation Rituals set, but I left early to catch Miguel performing at a different stage.
A very competent eight-piece jazz band, Miguel were ill-served by the early hour and the venue. I think they would be much better suited to a back-alley club after dark than an overgrown circus tent in the glare of the morning. The sound engineering at the Grande stage was disappointing, and the band played everything very, very straight, but a few people still got up and danced. I preferred their latin-style songs to the cooler, laid-back jazz, but that may just have been because I was mentally gearing up for a week of festival and wanted something high-energy to feed on. Fortunately, some of that was coming up next.
Waiting For Guinness were fun like a barrel of monkeys. Another one of those bands that people attempt to describe by sticking together different genres, their website suggests "garage cabaret", "gypsy punk", and "gangster jazz" as possibilities. Less feral than the Barons of Tang and orders of magnitude more entertaining than Miguel, Waiting for Guinness made a lot of noise and got people dancing in the gravel and dust, including little kids and people without shoes on (ouch). They also attracted the festivalgoer whom I dubbed Dancing Guy, because I saw him again and again and he was always dancing.
Next up was one of my festival favourites - perhaps even my absolute favourite - in David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band, at the endearingly-named Duck and Shovel venue. Seven band members on stage (one of whom was playing with the band for the very first time), including a cellist, a fiddler and a guy with a whistle (yay!) played a lovely acoustic, celtic-influenced yet very Australian sort of folk music. No pictures, because the ones I took are too dark and grainy even by my low Woodford standards. After seeing this band, though, I immediately re-examined my festival schedule to see how many more times I could see them. (One and a half - hooray!)
After David Hyams, Twisted Oak took to the stage, but I fled the venue after hearing their soundcheck. Not that they weren't musically accomplished, but a bunch of antipodean teenagers playing traditional bluegrass, one of them with a banjo, was really not something I wanted to listen to. While I found much to appreciate in unfamiliar musical genres at Woodford, much of the charm lay in the perceived authenticity of the performers, and Twisted Oak had none of that for me. I wandered over to the Chai tent, where Mr Percival was playing, but despite a certain similarity to Mal Webb (whose performances I already enjoy) and what seemed to be an engaging performance, I was completely exhausted and trudged off to become unconscious in the tent.
Said unconsciousness lasted much longer than I had planned. I didn't have to decide whether the Opening Ceremony would be too cheesy to go to, because I was asleep. I also missed Evenish, Mic Conway's National Junk Band, and That 1 Guy. I did eventually wake up and make my way back to the festival, sat through technical difficulties and some indifferent short films (QPIX's Best of the Best, apparently), then went and crashed for the night. Spoiler warning: Fortunately, this was pretty much the only time I was too tired to see and enjoy things all week.
December 31st, 2008 — Personal, This Year
Prescript: I have been tossing up whether to discuss the songs I have chosen for my soundtrack-to-this-year pretend mix CD that doesn't come on a physical disc. A lack of time has decided for me, so without further ado: My soundtrack-to-this-year pretend mix CD that doesn't come on a physical disc is yours to download here (63.3MB, complete with a sad monkey pretending to be the cover art). Offered without comment, because encouraging people to make their own wildly inaccurate interpretations and extrapolations is much more fun for everybody.
So, 2008. What a year.
It started with all the momentum of the extraordinary December that preceded it - still on a roll from arriving back home to find that I suddenly appreciated an Australian summer, then lucking into a job and a place to live with perplexing rapidity, all while coming to terms with the fact that an entirely unlooked-for relationship had shown up and looked to be making itself at home. January saw me making a silly amount of money by doing simple things well, going to see live music, even joining a band again. Everything was coming up me.
And then I got sick.
Weeks and months of 2008 blurred into an indistinct mess of exhaustion and waiting. Work, fitness, social life, creative pursuits, in fact almost everything I valued fell victim to the sudden collapse of my physical and mental capacities. Never before had I been forced to confront such limitations; all of my previous failures can, in the end, be attributed to apathy and weakness of will. Now, though, pushing myself meant being practically bedridden for days at a time. Various doctors ordered various tests, ruled out a handful of possibilities, and then handballed the case onto someone else, often necessitating several weeks of impotent waiting. Friendships suffered, inevitably; isolation set in. It was not a good time.
However: I came to truly appreciate a dimension of friendship that transcends having shared history or emotional parallels or thinking the same things are stupid, a dimension that tends to be invisible until hardship strikes. There are a few people who stood by me in my uselessness this year, keeping the lines of communication open despite the cantankerous alignment of the planets, for which I am more grateful than I can say. It wasn't always the people I would have picked out of a line-up, and I suspect that some of those who kept the suckage at bearable levels weren't even aware of the good they were doing.
Mid-year, with little improvement in sight health-wise, I moved out of the share house I was in and then up to Brisbane. My communication with people in general had pretty much shrivelled up and dropped off by this point, so not only did my departure appear abrupt, I didn't even feel comfortable explaining it to those who asked. Not my finest moment, and in some ways I was vindictively happy to be leaving the city that I felt had let me down so badly, although there were pangs every time somebody said they would miss me (and every time some bodies didn't say it).
There followed some new challenges: adjusting to new living arrangements in a new city, while too unwell to get out there and stamp my stamp on this new life; reconciling homesickness with the desire to start afresh; getting better. That last, at least, is a struggle I am winning - looking back, the second half of the year looks like a long, slow climb upward, with the only serious dip being the entire month I lost to the aftermath of moving house again at the end of October. While I'm still not going to be capable of walking from Berlin to Postdam again any time soon, and it takes me hours to hack together a long piece of writing, things are looking up.
For all that it was miserable and pointless, it was impossible to come through this year without learning a lot. When all you can manage is introspection, for days on end, you discover how much time there is in a day, and how much it's possible to introspect without running out of navel to gaze at. I realised how many basic things I had always taken for granted, how little I missed some things that I had thought essential, how much I missed some other things that had always seemed fairly inconsequential. I guess you could say that I had no choice but to spend a lot of time nose to nose with myself, and there are no distractions or excuses in the world that can withstand such prolonged scrutiny. I'm really onto myself now (a mixed blessing, and no mistake).
A visit to Melbourne at the start of December was a wonderful chance to reconnect with people and places, and reminded me that for all its faults Melbourne still feels like home. Seeing the Mountain Goats for the first time was the highlight that really pulled everything together for me, though, and I returned to Brisbane newly energised and determined. On a mission from God, as Elwood Blues would have it.
I will not take good fortune for granted, ever again. And I am no longer prepared to sit around spinning my wheels, idly thinking about the wonderful things I want to do instead of freaking doing them. Heck, no. I am going to crack the bones of life and suck out the marrow. And if I don't? I'll have only myself to blame. I'm cool with that.
December 29th, 2008 — Music, This Year
5. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Justin Vernon (who is Bon Iver) self-released this album in 2007, but I didn't get around to listening until this year (when it also got picked up by Jagjaguwar and re-released) so it goes on this year's list. Besides, how embarrassing would it be to only manage a year-end Top Four list?
Considering that "Bon Iver" is an approximation of the French for "Good Winter", it seems strange that this is the kind of music I can only really listen to and appreciate in summer (Sigur Rós are another good example of this odd phenomenon), but on reflection I suppose it is not so surprising. The atmospheric chilliness and claustrophobia would threaten to stifle life altogether in winter, but in the lethargy of summer it's as welcome as a fresh breeze.
For Emma, Forever Ago is a contemplative, beautiful album, at once simple (a guy and his acoustic guitar, additional instrumentation sparse and unintrusive) - and gorgeously rich (Vernon's voice overdubbed so many times, sometimes, that you wonder how he can possibly perform these songs live). Never belabouring grief or sorrow, Bon Iver paints an intimate picture of time spent sitting alone, waiting for the thaw.
4. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
My love affair with Scottish indie rock began last year with The Twilight Sad (if you don't count Mogwai as indie rock, which I don't), and continued blissfully this year with Frightened Rabbit. Their previous album Sing the Greys was uneven and unremarkable enough that even the delectable Scottish accent on display couldn't get me to like it. Fortunately, The Midnight Organ Fight is much more cohesive, assured and just plain rockin'.
Scott Hutchison's lyrics have copped some flak for being clunky and "turgid", but they work for me (and I am usually super-picky when it comes to lyrics that sound naff). The album is blunt and honest - thematically centred around a breakup, it doesn't take the expected route of having the narrator play victim to an evil woman, instead frankly exploring the highs and lows of muddling through modern relationships. And it's not above being crude, either, most memorably in the immortal line You're the shit, and I'm knee deep in it.
3. Radiohead - In Rainbows
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This was a 2008 release for me, because I didn't download the pay-what-you-like 168kbps version (I probably wouldn't have even had I not been travelling at the time), opting to wait for the delicious physical release. Even though I didn't have a turntable, listening to the CDs at a slightly more reasonable bitrate seemed worth the wait. It had been four or five years since Hail to the Thief, after all.
In Rainbows did not disappoint. Commenting further on any Radiohead album, but especially one as hyped and dissected as this one, would be superfluous.
2. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If you have looked at this blog in the last couple of weeks, you may be aware that I love (love love love) the Mountain Goats. Three out of their previous four albums were absolute knockouts, so to say that I was excited to hear Heretic Pride would be a gross understatement.
In some ways it is a departure from previous Mountain Goats material, in that the outcasts who populate the album aren't always regular, struggling people messing up their own lives anymore; John Darnielle has laid down an extra layer of metaphor along with the full-band sound and polished studio production, so that now we have actual monsters in amongst the emotionally troubled loners and desperately clinging couples. On the other hand, Darnielle's minutely-detailed lyrics and all of his esoteric references to weird culture reassure longtime fans that nothing has really changed, in the end.
Until Heretic Pride, all of the Mountain Goats albums since 2002's All Hail West Texas have been tightly held together by overarching themes and subjects, even those that were not explicitly autobiographical. The fact that this comes across more as a collection of songs, closely connected but still quite distinct, is probably the only reason why Heretic Pride doesn't take the number one spot for me this year; for all that I love every song on the album, it can't boast the strength of personality that my absolute favourite albums always have.
1. Shearwater - Rook
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Rook is my album of the year. Flawless from beginning to end, it defies rational description. Some words that I have thought about in connection with this album and then failed to string into sentences: apocalyptic, swoop, majestic, dread, transcendent. Transcendent dread, apocalyptic swoop. Jonathan Meiburg, recent escapee from Okkervil River, sounds like a choirboy exploding and that is just the right thing for him to sound like.
