For a good half of this year1 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:2
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 out3 the theme,4 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.5 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 bizarre6. 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.7 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,8 I am pleased to present my soundtrack to 2009 in pseudo-mix-CD format:
Driving Through Ghosts, or, Don't Mistake Proximity For Fate.
- By which I mean the bad half of the year. [↩]
- The order belonging to my discoveries, not their releases. Obviously. Nitpickers. [↩]
- Pun unintentional. [↩]
- There is a top-secret organ harvesting colony on the moon. The two guys manning the station alternate six-month tours of duty with six-month periods in isolation back on earth, because interacting with other people could lead to the discovery of their terrible secret. Cannibalism arises. [↩]
- Surprise! [↩]
- "Carl Sagan, are we doomed? Can we save ourselves from ourselves? Photo hemispheres as they bruise. Save ourselves from ourselves and planetary doom. [↩]
- I didn't realise until fairly recently that "Lover I Don't Have To Love", a song I loved in High School, was actually by Bright Eyes. [↩]
- Or maybe you just know how to use your scrollwheel or Page Down key. [↩]
I am just now beginning to listen to the mix. Thank you for compiling it.
You're welcome. Thank you for listening.
It turns out that posting the soundtrack publicly has made writing about this year harder, not easier, but I aim to get it done anyway.
I'm still not entirely convinced Bright Eyes isn't emo nonsense. I haven't heard the album in question, though: What's different about it?
Some people find it affected, but for me there's a sense of real political and personal feeling behind it; Conor Oberst still sounds like a bleating goat sometimes, but he reins it in fairly well and it's not a bad fit for a more alt-country style anyway; Emmylou Harris contributes vocals on a few songs, which sound phenomenal; he uses strings and horns in ways that I really appreciate.
Overall it's surprisingly down-to-earth and raw, and although my emotional exhaustion at the time left me wide open for that sort of thing I am pretty sure I would have liked it anyway.
(I don't really know how it's "different", because I only know two other Bright Eyes songs.)
Props on the TMG kick. Well worth raving about.
FYI Full Force Galesburg is from 1997, not 2007. Good MGs post though. I'm in the midst of making a mix of favorites.
Huh. Thanks for catching that. I have no idea how I typed that wrong in the first place, let alone let it sit there unnoticed for weeks.