The sound of your life hurtling headlong into the jaws of adulthood like a car speeding towards the edge of a cliff. A rushing thrill of a song with a kernel of time-waits-for-no-man melancholy hidden somewhere in the middle.
Christmas is less than seven days away, and so it's list week here on The Album Wall! Here's what to expect between now and the weekend:
Monday 19 December: Top 20 Songs of 2016 (20-11)
Wednesday 21 December: Top 20 Songs of 2016 (10-1)
Friday 23 December: Top 10 Albums of 2016
Below is the first half of my 'Songs of 2016' countdown. All of these songs (to the best of my knowledge) were released on full-length albums for the first time this year; some selections, such as #17, were available on singles/EPs prior to 2016, but as this is primarily a blog about albums I'm using the release date of each song's parent album in order to determine eligibility for this list.
(The above rule does mean that a few great songs are sadly absent from this top 20. Most notable are Phoebe's Lips by CHUCK, which first appeared on Happy New Years Babe in 2015 and was re-released as part of the My Band is a Computer compilation this year, and Fuck the Government, I Love You, which was the second track on Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom's Don't Believe the Hyperreal several months before it was the third track on The Burning Hell's Public Library. Fuck the Government was actually my 19th favourite song of 2015, so it would be kind of weird to include it in the 2016 list too.)
Without further small print, then, here are my top 20 songs of 2016 (part one):
20) Attached to the Lamp by Sat. Nite Duets
(from Air Guitar)
This is one heck of an opening track. I love the chugging pace, and I love how the words and the tune fit together like two pieces of K'Nex. "Maybe we could go back to Cleveland and play for the sound guy and the other band..." Playing a gig to an empty room never sounded like so much fun.
I too revisited Martha recently (along with the other 13 songs on the excellent Asylum Years compilation), and Fourfoot is totally right about that last line. If you haven't heard it before, do yourself a favour and have a quick listen now:
"And I remember quiet evenings, trembling close to you"
Fourfoot's assertion about Tom Waits and his talent for devastating final lines got me thinking, not just about the last lines of songs but about the last lines of albums. A good last line leaves you reeling long after the song has ended, and that impact is magnified tenfold when there's not another song straight after it.
October's over, the clocks have gone back, and as we all know, music sounds better at this time of year. Here are 10 tracks that have been sounding pretty good to me over the last few weeks...
1. I Don't Want Love by The Antlers
(from Burst Apart)
And neither would you if you'd survived Hospice, the Antlers album that preceded this one. Here's something I wrote about Burst Apart (originally released in 2011) a few weeks ago.
2. Simultaneous Contrasts by Warehouse
(from Super Low)
Probably the most accessible track from Warehouse's unpredictable new album Super Low, which I reviewed here.
Away is Okkervil River's eighth full-length album, and it presents itself as a sort of new beginning for the band. Frontman Will Sheff recorded these nine tracks with a new set of musicians, and this change is reflected even in Away's artwork: William Schaff's nightmarish illustrations, featured on the cover of almost every Okkervil River release to date, have been traded for a gorgeous piece by Wisconsin-based artist Tom Uttech. His beautiful painting is filled with birds in flight, and the theme of taking wing and flying away reverberates throughout this record.
Away's first track is called Okkervil River RIP, which is a pretty strong statement right out of the gate. Before proceeding any further, Will Sheff symbolically slays and buries the band that made Black Sheep Boy and The Stage Names and my personal favourite Down the River of Golden Dreams. Okkervil River RIP makes it immediately, inescapably clear that Okkervil River is dead, long live Okkervil River!
Autumn technically doesn't start for another few weeks, but screw it - it's September, this unpleasantly hot 'n' sticky summer is almsot over, and it's time to dig out your favourite jumper and fall in love with music again. This playlist, featuring ten of the songs I listened to most last month, is as good a place as any to start:
1. Red by Okkervil River
(from Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See)
An exercise in elegant melancholy. The off-key organ solo is...somewhat less elegant, but as a whole, this track about an estranged mother and daughter thinking sadly of one another is very lovely indeed. Read my thoughts on its parent album here.
I got two Okkervil River CDs for Christmas last year: I shared my first impression of Black Sheep Boy in The Album Wall's penultimate post of 2015 but it occurs to me I never really mentioned the other album, 2002's Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See, here on the blog.
I'm not sure why: it's a lovely record. In fact, I think I actually preferred it to Black Sheep Boy at first, although the latter album has grown on me since I wrote that slightly lukewarm First Impressions post.
I first heard Don't Fall in Love on the M4, when Vicky and I were driving back from a post-Christmas visit to her parents' house. Its wistful, slightly folky indie sound felt perfect for that sunny December day, although we were both slightly perturbed when that off-key organ solo in Red came in for the first time.
About a month ago, I shared my ten favourite albums of the first half of 2016. The big question now, of course, is how many of those albums will stick with me long enough to make my proper end-of-year list in December.
To be fair, I've already heard some albums that would've made my halfway list in June had I heard them in time - Mitski's superb Puberty 2, for one. But today, I'd like to look ahead to the coming months and focus on a trio of forthcoming albums that I'm very excited to hear. Don't be surprised if all of these end up in my final countdown come December - if the ten artists who made the list last month are wondering who they ought to be worried about, I'd suggest that these are the top three contenders:
Away by Okkervil River
Release Date: 9th of September
I love Okkervil River. I have loved them since my first year of university, but I've fallen even deeper even love with them recently, mostly thanks to the release of The Silver Gymnasium (which I spent a whole week blogging about)in 2013 and my belated discovery of the even better Down the River of Golden Dreams early last year. Now they've got a new record on the way - I already adore it for its gorgeous cover art (above), and the two songs they've released so far are very promising indeed. Check out nostalgic heartstring-tugger The Industry below.
Good news, everyone: monthly playlists are back for 2016! Here are 10 of the tracks that most tickled my tympanic membrane in January...
1. Animal Life - Shearwater
(from Animal Joy)
Shearwater are a band I've been meaning to investigate for ages, and January 2016 was the month in which I finally got around to it. Animal Joy was the album I purchased (thanks to @dickiesview on Twitter for the recommendation), and it's a very strong set of songs - Animal Life could well be one of my all-time favourite opening tracks, and I've only owned its parent album for about two weeks.
What is it about well-read American indie bands and songs about brutal acts of violence?
That's right, it's a blog about The Decemberists!
Oregon's most successful sea shanty merchants are kind of notorious for the dark, gory narratives that singer Colin Meloy writes to accompany all those hot accordion riffs. However, I'm not just picking on The Decemberists today; since I've been listening to Black Sheep Boy and Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See almost constantly over the last week or two, I'd also like to include Okkervil River in this discussion.
What's the best Okkervil River album? It's a question that I find difficult to answer, and as it stands, I've only heard four-sevenths of their discography; The Stage Names is probably the most cohesive start-to-finish experience, although the The Silver Gymnasium yearning nostalgia-pop is every bit as invigorating a listen. And then there's Down the River of Golden Dreams, which while not as outwardly concept-y as its successors does feature three of the best OR tracks I've yet come across (It Ends With a Fall, The War Criminal Rises and Speaks, and The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Conversion).
Of course, if you've heard the album that separated Down the River... from The Stage Names, the question is a far easier one. More or less everyone on the internet seems to agree that Black Sheep Boy is Okkervil River's magnum opus, from the good folk at Stereogum to my own Twitter followers:
I've never listened to Black Sheep Boy, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. I know that it's supposed to be one of Will Sheff's darker outings (no mean feat considering that its immediate predecessor was the album that introduced us to these lyrics), and I know that it's some kind of concept album, but that's about as far as my knowledge goes: I haven't heard any of the 11 tracks that make up the record, and as I type this sentence, I've no idea whether or not its generally accepted status as Okkervil River's Best Album is justified.
Next week, I'll be compiling a list of what I feel to be the best albums released this year. Which artists will make my top ten? Which outstanding LP will follow in the hallowed footsteps of MENby Quiet Marauder and Days of Abandon by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart? Will Sun Kil Moon's Universal Themes do as well as Benji did last year?
These questions will be answered next Friday (although Mark Kozelek, if he's reading this, probably shouldn't hold his breath on that last one). In the meantime, I have a different sort of list to share with y'all: a list of superb albums that weren't released in 2015.
You see, my CD-buying budget isn't exclusively reserved for brand new releases, and many of the albums that touched my soul this year were released...y'know, in the past. The five records listed below would be ineligible for any self-respecting 'Best of 2015' list worth its salt, but they've nonetheless brought me a lot of enjoyment this year, and I feel that this deserves to be recognised in itself.
So, without further ado, here are my Top 5 Albums of 2015 (That Weren't Released in 2015):
5. Wishmaster by Nightwish
Released May 2000
I was given this album as a Christmas present back in 2013, but I only really discovered the full extent of its brilliance this year. I particularly love Bare Grace Misery, which should have been the theme for Gladiators, and FantasMic, a mind-blowing multi-part metal odyssey about, um, Disney movies. Trust me, it's far more epic than I've just made it sound.
A lot of bands put no thought whatsoever into their names. I know this because I used to be in a band called 1964 Llama Invasion, and another called Johnny Inmate; both of those names were completely meaningless and had absolutely nothing to do with the music either group made (punk and funk, respectively). More recently, I've performed under the name Shiny Tiger, which was the answer I blurted out about seven years ago when a friend asked what I'd name my pub if I had one. I eventually decided that 'Shiny Tiger' would be a rubbish name for a pub, and made it my stage name instead.
For some acts, however, the name is far more meaningful, with repercussions that last for years - even decades - after the initial act of choosing it. One of my favourite bands from this category? Hyperliterate indie favourites Okkervil River.
Okkervil River are named after a short story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya, and while Okkervil River itself is reportedly no more than a "muddy little stream that runs through an industrial park in St. Petersburg", this choice of band name did set a theme that Will Sheff and his pals have revisited numerous times since. For example, their last album (2013's The Silver Gymnasium) featured a song called Down Down the Deep River....
My favourite song of 2013, incidentally.
...which uses rivers as a very potent metaphor for the irreversible flow of time, carrying us all away like so many pooh sticks. This track's title is somewhat reminiscent of Down the River of Golden Dreams, the title of an earlier Okkervil River LP (first words heard on that album: "'Down the River of Golden Dreams!' You can put that together with your river music!"); heck, there's even a track on Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See entitled Okkervil River Song:
But why did the band name themselves 'Okkervil River' in the first place? The following Will Sheff quote, taken from an interview with MTV Hive, offers some clues:
I was taking a 20th century Russian literature class in college and we were just reading a lot of Russian writers from the 20th century - as the name implies. I really liked Tatyana Tolstaya, she’s the great-grand niece of Aleksey Tolstoy. I really love the very brilliant detail in all these stories and there was this really wonderful sense of tenderness. She would go off on reveries on the details of things and that would bleed into a fantasy scenario or a dream-like feeling. There’s a lot of writing in the second person, a lot of jumping around in terms of what she was talking about, and it just felt very intuitive to me. A lot how those experiences might feel to me, where you’re waking up from a dream and you’re jostled around. I was just really impressed by her writing.
The emphasis is my own - those three sentences in bold are as good a description of Okkervil River's songs as of the work of the author who gave them their name. Their entire back catalogue (or the parts I'm familiar with, at least; I'm stilling missing Black Sheep Boy and Don't Fall in Love..., among others) is a river of golden dreams, as it were, with each song blurring the line between reality and reverie, past and present, sleeping and waking. There's a lot of second person stuff, too - here are some excerpts from a few of my favourite OR tracks:
"Your heart's warm and kind, your mind is your own. Our blood-splattered criminal is inscrutable; don't worry, he won't rise up behind your eyes and take wild control."
The War Criminal Rises and Speaks (from Down the River of Golden Dreams)
"Your dad is half-sleeping - but, really, he's gone. Can you hear his VCR weeping?"
It Was My Season (from The Silver Gymnasium)
"No one wants to hear about your 97th tear, so dry your eyes or let it go uncried, my dear. I am all out of love to mouth into your ear, and not above letting a love song disappear before it's written."
Plus Ones (from The Stage Names)
This unusually liberal use of the second person ensures that practically every Okkervil River song draws the listener right into the thick of the action, and the eyes behind which we're seated are almost always those of a participating character rather than a passive observer. One minute you're fleeing your disapproving parents to engage in a forbidden romance with Will Sheff; the next, you're looking across the dinner table at your wife as you ponder the motivations of a man standing trial for monstrous war crimes. It's a great approach to songwriting, and the results are often far more engaging than songs sung exclusively in the first or third person.
But I'm getting off-topic. Having not read them, I've no idea whether Tatyana Tolstaya's stories actually do bear any resemblance to Will Sheff's lyrics, but judging by Sheff's own description, his work has certainly been inspired by Tolstaya's on a much deeper level than mere nomenclature, and that's what sets Okkervil River's band name apart from so many others. Modest Mouse were supposedly named for a line in a Virginia Woolf story ("...even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people..."), but they presumably didn't choose this literary name to reflect the music they were making; Okkervil River did, or if they didn't, the name that they chose turned out to be a very serendipitous and appropriate one indeed.
So I've been watching Avatar (the TV show with the bald child, not the movie with the blue people) a lot recently, and...well, if you've never seen it, here's a quick primer:
Another thing I've been addicted to recently is Okkervil River's second album, Down the River of Golden Dreams (you may remember it as 'that album that took fricking ages to show up'). I could show you another YouTube video at this point, but instead, here's an excerpt from Okkervil River mainman Will Sheff's account of making the album:
"By the end of our stay in that city [San Francisco] from which so many long-haul travelers first cast out onto the water, I felt like nothing so much as a sailor. The last week of mixing I had even slept every night in the back of our 150 Ford, throwing open the back doors every morning to gaze on a deep, wide pool of water left by a week-long series of torrential downpours.
"I guess that’s part of the reason we decided to call the record Down the River of Golden Dreams. It’s the title of the piece Seth’s octogenarian great aunt Nila plays at the beginning of the record, but it’s also because - to be appropriately California - I think that, if Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See [Okkervil River's first album] was an earth record, this is a water record. Sailing away never to return, washing clean to start over, fishing and swimming and drowning and all that stuff is floating around in there somewhere.
"At least, that’s what I hear when I hear these songs."
So here's a new thing. From now on, my last blog of each month will take the form of a playlist, a recap of what I've been listening to (and indeed blogging about) each month. I'm afraid I can't be bothered to compile and share a proper Spotify playlist, but I do encourage all of you to do so for yourselves.
Anyhow, here are 10 of the songs I've been loving since New Year's...
1. Summer Here Kids - Grandaddy
(from Under the Western Freeway)
My first blog of 2015 was all about Grandaddy's debut album, and how it's arguably just as good (and as depressing) as its more popular sequel, The Sophtware Slump. This song in particular is a corker, and what better way to kick off a January playlist than with a song about summer?
I recently ordered a couple of albums from Amazon Marketplace. They were Loves Comes Close by Cold Cave and Down the River of Golden Dreams by Okkervil River.
The Cold Cave album arrived very promptly indeed, and while it's nowhere near as satisfying as the more recent Cherish the Light Years, it is a pretty cool slice of Joy Division-imitating electrogoth.
As of this morning, however, I'm still waiting for that Okkervil River album.
Sure, the cover is horrifying, but I bet the music is awesome!
I've been meaning to write this blog for a while. I've been aware of Okkervil River's Silver Gymnasium video game ever since I did that week-long review of the album last year, but I've only just found the time to play through it.
It was rather different to what I expected.
SPOILER ALERT!
If you don't want to know what happens in The Silver Gymnasium: The Video Game, stop reading now. I'd definitely recommend that you play the game before scrolling down any further.
"Beneath his surface of corruscating omniscience beats a kindly heart. He seems to want you to be in on his jokes, to share the joyous agility of his conceptual and linguistic leaps, the abundance of his cornucopiously stocked memory, and not to sit gazing at him from the cheap seats in resentful admiration."
The above quote is taken from David Gates' introduction to Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, a book that I just started reading. Now, I've read some Barthelme before, and his stories are bonkers - they mess tirelessly with structure and language whilst constantly teetering on the edge of nonsense. Much of Forty Stories (the Barthelme collection I've already read) seemed designed to baffle; Gates' introduction was reassuring, in a way, because it suggested that Barthelme's writing actually does make sense if you read around it. Apparently, Barthelme was always happy to explain himself when questioned in interviews and the like. It's just that he draws from a very diverse reference pool, one that no normal human could hope to comprehend.
All of which got me wondering about albums. Do bands and artists do enough to help us fully understand their work? And how often do they actually want us to understand it in the first place?
Songs and albums are like frogs - it's hard to dissect them using only your ears. If my Silver Gymnasium blogs taught me anything, it's that hearing something is rarely enough to form an idea of its meaning, no matter how hard you listen. I mean, my guesses about that album were all over the place until I glanced at the liner notes - I thought it was about a hiking trip gone awry, when really it's Will Sheff taking a good, long look at his smalltown childhood.
That's one important distinction between books and albums: the liner notes, which give the artist a platform to flesh things out and reveal a little more about the songs on the CD. The Okkervil River album came wrapped in all kinds of supplementary material, and while none of the answers it provided were especially straightforward, it certainly helped to bring the album to life.
Of course, some artists squander this platform and opt to waste the inlay on band photos and artist credits. Do they do this because they don't want us to over-analyse their music when we should be enjoying it? Or because they think the meanings are self-evident? Or because they want us to listen for ourselves and draw our own conclusions, instead of being spoon-fed the 'true' meaning?
There's a whole 'death of the author' argument that I could get into here, but instead, I'm going to show you a conversation I had on Twitter recently. For reference, Fbb is a rather good song from Quiet Marauder's MEN (a.k.a the best album of 2013):
So this is an example of a guess theory I came up with when I didn't have any actual facts to hand. And, as it turns out, my guess theory was actually more interesting than the golden nugget of truth at the heart of it all. In fact, Simon from Quiet Marauder said it himself:
So perhaps this is why artists don't spell it out on the back of the sleeve. Not so much because they name their songs by slapping the keyboard and hoping that someone will read too much into it, but because song meanings are more interesting when the listener chisels 'em out on his or her own. Even if your guess theory is wrong, it's still valid and it ensures that the song will always mean that little bit more to you.
One plea, though, to songwriters. I don't care if you hide your song's meaning behind oblique poetry and obscure pop culture references that only Google will be able to explain to me. I don't care if you get all coy and evasive whenever an interviewer asks what the hell it all means (this, incidentally, is a crime of which Quiet Marauder certainly cannot be accused). I don't care if you take those secrets to your grave, leaving your fans to piece together whatever small meanings they can, forever frustrated by the knowledge that they're probably incorrect.
Just promise me that there's a meaning in there somewhere. It's no fun cooking up theories about, say, Monkey Gone to Heaven by the Pixies...
"See what I'm saying?" God, shut UP fourteen-year-old me.
...only to read in an earlier comment that the tantalising numerology of that song only came about because 'seven' rhymes with 'heaven'.
Why are you ruining my fun, Frank Black and cor_heaven?
Right, I've done the best songs of 2013 - now it's time for the albums. These are my ten favourite albums of the last 12 months, and each one is an outstanding testament to the album as a format. Some scale the highest of high concepts with subtlety and aplomb, while others simply succeed by filling a CD with corkers from one rim to the other.
One side note before we get started: The Crimea's Square Moon is noticeably absent from this list, but not because it's not good enough for the top ten. The band's double-length swansong was officially released this summer, but since I got a pre-order version way back in autumn 2011 (ner ner na-ner ner), I don't really count it as an album of 2013. If you like, you can read my tribute to Square Moon - and The Crimea generally - by clicking here.
Right, now that that's out of the way, let's crack on with that all-important list...
#10 - Reflektor by Arcade Fire
There are plenty of reasons to dislike it (not least its inescapable promotional campaign, which certainly ruffled the feathers of one Trent Reznor), but it's hard to deny that Reflektor is one of the best albums of 2013. It's easily been among the most talked-about, and that kind of hype will often lead to disappointment when things actually get released, but fortunately, the music on those two discs more than justified it. It was a more daring, more ambitious, and altogether more exciting album than The Suburbs, with songs like Afterlife and Here Comes the Night Time making up for the slight lack of truly brilliant tunes on the band's previous release. Oh, and even if it could quite easily have fit on one CD, the second one makes it feel a lot bigger, and a lot more important.
2013 has less than a fortnight left in it, so it's high time I started making some lists. I'll be sharing my favourite albums of the year on Friday, but I figured I'd build up to it a little bit first.
To that end, here are my top twenty songs of twenty-thirteen. Some are from albums that I've been banging on about for months; some are from records that I've never even mentioned on the blog before. It was quite difficult to decide on the right order, but lists like this are so much better when somebody wins, don't you think?
One more note before we get started: I considered limiting myself to one song per artist, but then I decided to scrap that idea because, hey, if your album contains two really spectacularly amazing songs, I want to reward that. Reward it with kudos from my piffling little music blog.
Anyway, enough explanation. Let's rock...
#20 - Lately I've Found Myself Regressing by The Superman Revenge Squad Band
(from There is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time)
My list starts with the opening song of an album I've blogged about a lot recently. More or less every song on There is Nothing...is a lyrical corker, but on Lately I've Found Myself Regressing, they really knock it out of the park musically as well. The frantic drums, the warm-sounding instrumentation, and the "let's pack in as many syllables as we possibly can" stanzas come together to create something truly magical: a magnificent musical meditation on getting back to one's roots that bursts out of its two-minute runtime and leaves debris strewn about your mind for hours afterwards.
