The Post-Rockist

[Editor’s note: We’ll be at Pitchfork this weekend, but since we’re going to miss Friday, we wanted to give Public Enemy some much needed preemptive lovin’.]

Public Enemy - “Bring the Noise”
(from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back)

When I first heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, I thought it sounded outdated and a little too old school for my tastes. After all, it had been a little over a decade since it was released, so it wasn’t surprising that it didn’t seem incredibly relevant to me at the time. The reason I picked it up was because it was one of those albums that consistently made all the Best Albums of All Time lists, in everything from The Source to Time magazine. From what I could tell, its importance and cultural impact weren’t up for debate and it was a classic in every sense of the word. Being a curious music fan with limited knowledge and taste, I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about and see if it could live up to the hype. So after hearing it a few times, I was a little disappointed that it hadn’t changed my life.

That would come later.

It Takes a Nation sat on my shelf for a couple years before I listened to it again. It had become one of those albums in my collection that I set aside before fully absorbing, as I waited until I was in the right mood for it. After all, you can’t force music to reach you when you aren’t ready for it. Like wine, music can require a bit of patience, but oftentimes it’s well worth the wait. So that year I decided I was going to listen to as much hip hop as possible, since it was a genre I enjoyed, but didn’t know a whole lot about. Being a middle class white kid from a small town in Michigan, the only hip hop I was exposed to growing up was whatever I saw on MTV in the nineties. As I was making my way through classics I had missed like Raising Hell, Paid In Full and Three Feet High and Rising, I figured it was time to give Public Enemy another try.

So I put It Takes a Nation back on my stereo and it felt like I just got punched in the face. I was immediately struck just by the sound of it. I’d never heard production as dense as this before. It felt like all my senses were being bombarded at once. How could I have ignored this before, I mean physically? There were samples colliding all over the place from police sirens to James Brown horns and beats to Malcolm X speeches to guitars from Slayer and David Bowie. Plus they were even sampling themselves! It was music that forced you to pay attention to it since there’s so much going on and it’s never pretty. Production team The Bomb Squad wasn’t interested in creating music that was even remotely pleasing to the ears. They wanted to hit you over the head repeatedly and without mercy. Their production assault mixed with DJ Terminator X’s up front scratching technique created a sound that was totally relentless. (Continued)

Gather ’round, chirren, and let Grandpappy Prockist tell ye a tale of yesteryear — a halcyon time when there was only one iPhone, one Flavor of Love, and, thank God, only one time of year when music bloggers would rigorously compile their highly informative and not-at-all redundant “Best Of” lists. But 2008 is a different beast altogether, and facing the onslaught of all this confusing New Media I can hardly remember the name of Barack Obama’s former madrassa, let alone the name of that album that I swore was the Greatest Thing Evah way back in February. So, for the purposes of posterity and to meet your clamoring demand,* the elders at the Post-Rockist have decided to piece together the following critically definitive and immutable** lists*** of their favorite records of 2008, so far. Enjoy!

* We’re assuming
** Lists subject to change at any time, most likely December
*** “Lists” are presented in no particular order whatsoever

Todd’s Faves of ‘08 so far

Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel
“Recent Bedroom”

Imagine you have a pop album. Now, go ahead and load it with all kinds of aural embellishments — buzzes, beeps, fuzz guitar, ambient drones, synthesizer glissandos, glockenspiel, bells, music box, krautrock counter-rhythms, drifting choruses, sampler collages, etc. Next, and here’s the unusual part, take the meat and bones of the album, the hooks and riffs and backbeats and overearnest lead vocals, and chuck them out entirely. What you’d be left with would sound pretty close to Atlas Sound’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel. Listening to it is a ghostly, out-of-body experience best suited for high-quality headphones in a zero gravity environment.

Forget the early ’90s, this is what I think of now when I think of Dream Pop.

No Age - Nouns
“Eraser”

Nouns is a raw, noisy, dense punk rock bulldozer. But underneath the squalls of distortion is a highly nuanced album, crafted with daredevil riffs, shocking melodicism, and a merciful willingness to plant green spaces in the wake of No Age’s destruction. It’s kind of like being roundhouse-kicked in the face by Chuck Norris: it’ll knock you flat on your ass, but at least you’ll appreciate the artfulness of the kick as you’re flying through the air. (Continued)

Charlie Don’t Shake - “The Ballad of Pat Brown”
(from America Is Our Office)

…Aaaaand, we’re back. Did you miss us? Oh, what’s that, you didn’t even realize we were gone? You’ve been too busy downloading the latest Santogold remixes, watching yet more video clips of the same few Robyn tunes, and telling all your friends how you were way into No Age before Pitchfork ruined everything with a debatable ‘Best New Music’ label? That’s cool, man, we’ve been doing, uhm, the same thing, I guess.

Aw, who the hell am I kidding? We’ve been out of touch. Between day jobs, relocations, personal responsibilities, and freelance hand modeling gigs in Thailand, it’s not always easy, or worthwhile, to keep up with the mercurial tastes of the interweb’s tastemakers. Sometimes you just want comfort music – good, all-American rock & roll that you can blast out your open car windows without having to worry whether or not a skuzzy, two-chord guitar riff meets a predetermined hipster quotient. This is where Charlie Don’t Shake enters the picture. (Continued)

Bon Iver - “For Emma”
(from For Emma, Forever Ago)

This is the kind of creative awakening all of us romantic, moony creative-types wish for: a retreat to the north, a burst of lightning in a field of deep meditation, a fully realized work of art borne from the soil, fresh and whole, edifying like a baptism.

What happened here? Justin Vernon spent a few months in a cabin in the woods, never intending to make a transformative album, or any album at all. But weeks went by, he took up his guitar and his four-track and looked at the snow and, one can only imagine, this heartache-lovely piece of poetry poured forth intact.

In the real world, Vernon released For Emma, Forever Ago independently under the name Bon Iver (French for “good winter”) last fall; it was scooped up by Jagjaguwar records and re-released this February. In the real world, yes, For Emma has been prattled on about at length. You kids out there in the real world probably know about it already; maybe you’ve listened to it a few times yourself. But as soon as I put this album on, friends, I leave that world – the snarky, self-conscious sphere of who knows what and when and how well, where all that ever happens sincerely is second guessing and spilling coffee.

It’s not just the album’s spare-ness, or how lonely it is, or the fact that you can hear a chair scooting over creaking floorboards and sirens howling miles away or Justin Vernon coughing or dropping things. It’s not just the eerie whistling, the gentle hand-claps or the expansive, echoing harmonies. (Continued)

Spiritualized - “Baby I’m Just a Fool”
(from Songs in A&E - do yourself a favor and pre-order it now)

I am hyperventilating as I write this. God, I am such a geek.

There are very few bands that can elicit as visceral a response from me as Spiritualized. The very first time I heard the pummeling white noise on the introduction to Live at the Royal Albert Hall give way to the glorious opening note of “Shine a Light,” my knees buckled out from under me and I was left genuflecting in front of my speakers. Upon hearing the title track on Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space for the first time, my eyes started to water uncontrollably. And Spiritualized’s live concerts, the best known legal alternative to powerful psychedelics available today, have frequently caused my tongue to loll and ears to bleed. When Jason Pierce strolls across a stage, disinterestedly clapping for himself along with the rest of the audience, my inner Garth comes out a little bit. I’m not worthy.

For an atheist, J. Spaceman commands devotion. (Continued)

Lou Reed - Interview
(from American Poet)

The Velvet Underground - “Crash”

The Velvet Underground - “Caroline”

The Velvet Underground - “Wordless”

The Velvet Underground - “Friends”
(all tracks from Squeeze, currently out of print)

Doug Yule has always had a bad rap. Despite being in the Velvet Underground longer than either John Cale or Nico, he’s permanently been relegated to second-rate band member status — the Sammy Hagar to Cale’s David Lee Roth. Decades of snobby fans and critics with a selective memory have envisioned the Velvet Underground as all noise and experimentation and “European Son” and Sister Ray,” while dismissing their forays into pop music as pleasant but not integral. But even in the official record, Yule’s consistently given the shaft. He’s the only member of the Velvet Underground not inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and he wasn’t even asked to participate in their early ’90s reunion tour (where, despite the band’s iconic status, VU was still just opening support for U2). And to top it all off, the 1973 album Squeeze, recorded by Yule without any of the original line-up, has been swept under the rug and neatly disregarded as a non-existant part of the Velvet discography. (Continued)

Dark Leaves Form a Thread

Foam Hands

From Trouble in Dreams

In an attempt to be original and awesome, I was thinking of writing an entire review of Destroyer’s newest, Trouble in Dreams, without mentioning any of the lyrics. I was thinking about exploring other topics that might be interesting to Dan Bejar-o-philes, such as the difference between singing and speaking in Destroyer’s songs (I’ve been designing several charts and graphics using Powerpoint to reveal this difference visually for every song on Trouble in Dreams). Or perhaps I could’ve written an essay about how Dan Bejar does not sound anything like David Bowie at all, contrary to popular blog-belief. I was going to describe the continuously building melodies on “Dark Leaves Form a Thread” and explain guitarist Nicholas Bragg’s vertiginous melodic maneuverings by using a Hilbert Curve as a wicked rad metaphor. I was even thinking of just writing about how Dan Bejar’s hair has gotten totally out of control.

And at 3am Sunday morning, on a drunken, pizza-devouring tear, I had the brilliant idea of defining the new Destroyer album by comparing and contrasting it with an episode of The Cosby Show I was watching (the one where Denise chooses which college she’s going to attend), and I have several illegible, pizza-stained notes to prove it. (Continued)