Maybe it’s a result of my hampered attention span, or maybe it’s a noncommittal fear stoked by the ceaselessly fast churn of new musical acquisitions as demanded by the perpetually buzzing hive mind of blogging culture, but I really felt drawn toward the EP format this year as a way to discover and indulge in new music without having to sit through — god forbid — the entire 40-plus minutes required for full length albums. Keeping in the spirit of the times, here are a few of my favorite EPs of the year:
10. Deerhunter – Rainwater Cassette Exchange
“Famous Last Words” (buy)
Deerhunter is window shopping on the Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP. With “master the art of psychedelic drone rock” checked off their musical bucket list, the band has taken the opportunity to set aside their heavier sonic baggage and experiment with a leaner, more diverse set of styles. In the course of a spare fifteen minutes, Deerhunter manage to traverse from languid tropical punk to hyper-compressed Krautrock to a jangly, piano-and-tabla Georgian raga before returning to the tremolo-tinged garage rock they mastered back on Microcastle, all without breaking a sweat or indulging in so much as a single extraneous guitar solo.
9. Johnny Headband – Phase 3
“Wastin’ Time” (download)
Resurrecting the frenetic energy of rave-era Primal Scream with the clamoring expansiveness of TV on the Radio, Johnny Headband have released a beast of an EP — a post-apocalyptic bacchanal rife with electrically charred bass, sandstorm guitars and howling, multi-tracked harmonies. It’s just a shame that a noise this bombastic wasn’t heard by more people outside Detroit.
8. Julianna Barwick – Florine
“Cloudbank” (buy)
Spectral choral music for the driftless. Recommended for those who thought Sigur Rós were too structured for their tastes.
7. Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind
“What Would I Want? Sky” (buy)
Animal Collective became one of the most fashionable bands to hate on this year for releasing one of the most inventive and enjoyable albums of 2009 (funny how that works, huh?). Regardless of your undoubtedly fixed opinions on the band, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist appear to be completely oblivious to the maelstrom of hype and web 2.0 academic treatises they’ve sparked as a result of Merriweather Post Pavilion and decided to cap the year off with one of their most curiously cohesive and playful EPs yet.
6. Flying Lotus – L.A. EP 3 X 3
“Infinitum (Dimlite’s Re-finitum)” (buy)
It’s utterly inconceivable to me how music like this was conceived. It’s like a photo negative of a what I expect a song to be: textures are reconfigured as percussion; beats are spliced, reversed, and processed into jittery, techno-futurist melodies; vertical planes become three-dimensional vectors; up is down; black is white; rhythm is the bass, and the bass is the treble. If this is what the future sounds like, I remain hopeful that I’ll get my hoverboard after all.
5. Jon Hardy & The Public – Little Criminals: Songs From Randy Newman
LITTLE CRIMINALS by Jon Hardy & the Public from theFOUNTAINstudio on Vimeo. (download)
It was meant to be a brief affair: for one night only, St. Louis’ hardest working band was going to pay tribute to one of America’s greatest living songwriters. But the resulting collaboration played to the others’ strengths so well that it would have been criminal to lose the effect to the woozy memory of bar lore. Randy Newman tends to play the role of a satirical schlemiel, but when his work is played with the forthrightness and brio of Jon Hardy & The Public the songs feel invigorated with new purpose and meaning. Great songwriting should allow for artful interpretation, and both are present here.
4. Beirut – March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland
“My Night with the Prostitute from Marseilles” (buy)
March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland is an odd job. It’s two completely separate EPs, really. For Zapotec, Zach Condon took his Balkanized brass balls down to Oaxaca, Mexico to recruit a ragtag band of native horn blowers to backtrack his somber, wayfaring songs. It’s fine; about what you’d expect. But what really got me excited was Holland, “Realpeople” being Condon’s nom de plume for his pre-Beirut bedroom pop project. The resulting tracks can be a little undeveloped at points, but the strange juxtaposition of Condon’s mournful croon with the wistful gurgling of cheap electronics produces some of the most listenable synth pop this side of the Magnetic Fields’ Holiday.
3. Washed Out – Life of Leisure
“New Theory” (buy)
Beachy, headphonic, chill. During the interminably long Summer of Death, 2009, the slow jam sampledelica of Ernest Greene’s Washed Out provided just the sort of escapist and nostalgic salve needed to reassure anxiety-wracked blogbros that everything was going to be a-okay.
2. Destroyer – Bay of Pigs
(buy)
When it was announced that Dan Bejar was going to release a 13-and-a-half minute “ambient disco” track based loosely around the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, there was no doubt that it was going to be anything short of epic. And where Kennedy failed with his CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Bejar delivered. Even in the most obtuse sense, I’m still not sure what — if anything — the song “Bay of Pigs” has to do with the actual event in 1961, but with blisteringly surreal lyrics about how “a ransom note written on the night sky above remind me what, in particular, about this wine I love,” I’m not about to start complaining. Bejar is in fine form here, popping up like a harrowed and woolly narrator to regale us of the time he was trapped inside the sea’s guts or bathed in golden sunlight, only to recede back into the foggy aether of synthesizer just as mysteriously as he arrived. The acoustic guitar, when it finally kicks in, feels like a life raft — the sturdiest, most reliable instrument in sight. If it weren’t for a certain French band who penned a tune about a Hungarian composer, this would be the single greatest song of the year. Oh, and there’s another track on this EP. It’s okay.
1. El Perro del Mar – Love Is Not Pop
“Heavenly Arms” (buy)
There’s a lot to love here: the battered sincerity of 1980’s Lou Reed, the fluid bounce of Balearic funk, the spectre of G.K. Chesterton, the amorous and classical voice of Sarah Assbring. This isn’t a happy record — El Perro del Mar’s rarely are — but it’s spiritually nourishing, full of poignant and unchained melodies that exude a deep, inner warmth. It’s a remarkable maturation for Ms. Assbring as a songwriter, who has set aside the conventions of 1960s girl group acts here for the light groove of organic dub, but it’s the maturity and patience demonstrated within these songs that give them their allure.
El Perro Del Mar “Change Of Heart” from The Control Group on Vimeo.
5 Comments
I am unabashedly part of the Animal Collective backlash. As someone who’s been known to worship many a left-of-center experimental indie rock band (Fiery Furnaces, Liars, Deerhoof, et al), I was, after reading the glowing press about Meriweather, no longer able to ignore this Animal Collective thing. So I gave the album more than a couple concentrated listens. And I had no desire to listen to it again. It’s not bad by any means, I guess I just think the Flaming Lips scratch that same itch and have much nicer fingernails.
You nailed “Bay of Pigs”: that acoustic guitar is a life-raft for the song, and the difference between “just okay” and “completely amazing.” And you called out the second best line in the song too (I still love the opener, “Lately, I’ve been….drinking.”
Also, “Heavenly Arms” is a really terrific song. Thanks for bringing that one to my attention.
@Andrew — Fair enough, but have you heard Embryonic? I’m still waiting for that one to sink in… I think it’s reasonable to suggest that both bands scratch the same itch, but I feel like they come at it from completely different vantage points: the Lips come from a psychedelic punk rock band that goes into freakout territory, while AnCo dabble more in improv/noise that coalesces into “songs” — there’s intersection for sure, but I wouldn’t call ‘em interchangeable.
@Scotter — Thanks, I probably never would’ve checked out Bay of Pigs if you hadn’t kept hounding me to listen to Destroyer’s Rubies this year.
I often prefer an artist’s EPs to their full-lengths. Weird? Dunno, but regardless I agree with a lot of your choices. I’d also add Kaki King’s “Mexican Teenagers” and Cat Power’s “Dark End of the Street” (or was that 2008?).
Where’s your list of singles?