2015 Top Ten

Time for my annual blog post! There was a lot of great music released last year, in contrast to 2014. No problem coming up with 10 albums I absolutely love, and I've had to include a lot of honourable mentions. Really I should just call this a top 17, as any of these records could, on any given day, take top place in my ever-shifting preferences.

Today, however, the list goes:

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

Shye Ben Tzer, Jonny Greenwood and the Rajasthan Express - Junun

John Carpenter - Lost Themes

Deerhoof - Fever 121614

Deerhunter - Fading Frontier

Moonsocket - Eurydice

Nap Eyes - Whine of the Mystic

Joanna Newsom - Divers

Sexwitch - Sexwitch

Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell

Honourable Mentions:

Beach House - Depression Cherry

Björk - Vulnicura
Dungen - Allas Sak
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress
Grimes - Art Angels
Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete
Vulva Culture - In Vain

The Letter

It is December in the garden,
an early winter here, with snow
already hiding my worst offenses —
the places I disturbed your moss
with my heavy boots; the corner
where I planted in too deep a hole
the now stricken hawthorn: crystals
hanging from its icy branches
are the only flowers it will know.

When did solitude become
mere loneliness and the sounds
of birds at the feeder seem
not like a calibrated music
but the discordant dialects
of strangers simply flying through?
I have tried to construct a life
alone here — coffee at dawn; a jog
through the chilling air

counting my heartbeats,
as if the doctor were my only muse;
books and bread and firewood —
those usual stepping-stones from month
to freezing month. but the constricted light,
the year closing down on itself with all
the vacancies of January ahead, leave me
unreconciled even to beauty.
When will you be coming back?

— Linda Pastan

2014 Top Five

Hey. Long time, no see. I know I vanished without a trace half a year ago and made it sound like I might never be back, but I couldn't just let the year end without counting down my annual top ten albums. It's a tradition that outweighs any practical concerns like lack of time or audience.

There's only one problem this year, though. You might've guessed it from the title of this post. I haven't heard enough 2014 albums to make a list of the ten best.

Well, that's not exactly true. I listened to exactly ten new albums this year. But it seems kind of misleading to just list them as the ten best. Right?

The question is, why so few records heard? Either things are looking very poor for new music or I'm getting too old to keep up with what's current. I'm not sure which scenario I hope is the case.

I should mention that, in preparation for this list, I did go and check out a bunch of tracks from other artists being celebrated all over the place. But none of them compelled me to investigate further. However, that could still have more to do with my own advanced age than with the current state of popular music.

Anyway, here are my top five picks from the ten new albums I heard in their entirety this year. These ones all managed to make their way through the layers of dead or dying skin cells and into my stagnant bloodstream to produce that familiar tingly sensation in my withered, slowly failing heart.

Beck - Morning Phase

Caribou - Our Love

Cousins - The Halls of Wickwire

Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire for No Witness

Sevendeaths - Concreté Misery

I would also like to mention that Impatto Sonoro, an Italian music webzine, chose one of my own solo songs for their best-of-2014 playlist. How they ever heard about my Bandcamp-only release in the first place is anyone's guess, but I'm incredibly flattered. Check it out! (I'm 23rd down the list.)

And finally, for the sake of posterity, here's my resolution for 2015, written to myself on Christmas night after ingesting certain substances both intoxicating and illuminating:

This need for validation is so limiting. And all-consuming. It's addictive. No wonder Facebook and Twitter and the like have taken over our lives so successfully. Please jettison it, as soon as possible. Waste of energy. If you want to share something with someone, do it out of generosity. Not out of a need to feel like you exist, as judged by others. You know you exist. That's all that matters.

Happy new year!

Time for a Change

Yeah, I guess maybe I'm done with this here blog. At least for now. Might start another one; I'll let you know. Many thanks, gentle readers.

Score One for the Dark Guys

This video just came out and it makes me really happy. It's a song by one of my favourite local bands, Monomyth. They recently got signed to Mint Records, so now they get to make cool promotional videos for their fun, catchy songs. My bandmate Josh Salter is one of the members of Monomyth, so that makes me extra happy.

But what makes me happiest about this video is that it's directed by weirdo/outsider advocate Seth Smith and stars weirdo/outsider Matthew Grimson. Matthew's a dear friend of mine and an all around genius, so it's great to see him doing his freaked out thing in such a public forum. Now if only people would listen to his songs...

Everything Looks Better in Black and White

I rented Visitors on DVD last week, knowing nothing about it except that it was the fourth instalment in Godfrey Reggio's "Quatsi" series. Koyaanisqatsi, his first, made a huge impact on me when PBS aired it in 1985. I'd never been so moved to question the prison of our modern human culture before, nor had I ever heard the beautiful, repetitive music of Philip Glass.

Now an experienced culture-hater and Glass-lover, I wondered how Reggio's latest film would affect me. The third one, Naqoyqatsi, had been pretty ugly and disappointing, or at least that's how I remember its computer-generated weirdness. But Visitors ended up amazing and hypnotizing me with its surprising simplicity.

For one thing, I had no idea it would all be in black and white. For another, almost the whole film is images of human faces in super slooooow motion. Sounds potentially very dull, I know. But the slowness really makes you pay attention to the minutest of movements and expressions, until humans seem creepily beautiful and endlessly fascinating. As in Koyaanisqatsi, the simple act of distorting time causes you to wonder again and again, "How have I gone this long and missed all this?"

The music is really good, too. There's the usual Philip Glass arpeggiation, but it's slow and varied, rich and beautiful, never veering into the intentionally irritating zone that some of the original film's soundtrack occupied. Quite haunting, really. And then there's the quality of the black and white.

I don't know anything about the special camera that was used to film this movie, but the depth of tone is  truly astounding. It's really what gives the whole viewing experience such a special, eerie quality. All the shadows are a really rich black, and the midtones are darker than usual too. The highlights, on the other hand, are plenty light, yet you don't feel like there's too much contrast. Instead, things (mostly faces) seem to step out of the darkness into a soft, painterly light like Vermeer subjects without their hues. There's maybe a slight purple cast, humanizing things subtly.

When the film was over, I got kind of obsessed with the possibilities of monochromaticity. All my Instagram posts for the next week became about testing the limits of black and white, trying to capture a similarly dark romanticism. I guess those Sable Island horses probably had something to do with this obsession too, now that I think of it. Anyway, here's what I've gotten so far.

Down the Garden Path

Been awhile. Sorry. I suddenly have nothing to say. Here's a diversion while I try to come up with something meatier. It's a fun little weird grammar-quiz/word-game/puzzle-thingy I wrote for a website my friend in Toronto edits. Keep it to yourself, though, because it hasn't actually been published yet.

The Edge of Nonsense
Ever start reading a straightforward-seeming sentence and suddenly find yourself scratching your head in confusion? You're not alone. The following "garden path" sentences will have you second- and third-guessing how you thought English worked. They're all punctuated properly and make grammatical sense, but it might take you a few passes to figure out how. Hit the Huh? button [it'll be a button on the actual website —ed.] when you think a) you've understood, or b) you're so lost you can't remember words how go.

1. The dog walked by the mailman barked.

Huh?
No barking civil servants are needed to make sense of this weird sentence. The trick is that everything but the final word is the subject. So, the thing that barked is the dog that was walked by the mailman. Implausible, you say? I figure there's gotta be at least one mailman out there who owns a dog. Right?

2. The club admitted a new member was bribed.

Huh?
I'm glad that club confessed to bribing a new member. It doesn't legitimate their recruiting methods, but their acknowledgment of wrongdoing will be taken into account by the court.

3. Many fish the river.

Huh?
Many fish live in rivers. Probably even more do not. But this sentence is not about any of those fish. It's about a popular waterway and the many anglers who try their luck in it.

4. Fall in love with a friend is vibrant.

Huh?
By now, I'm assuming either you're loving these or you've moved on to something more immediately gratifying elsewhere on the internet. Probably involving cats. If you're still with us, here's a nice poetic image for you: fall is vibrant when you're in love with a friend.

5. When army camps are civilians ever jealous.

Huh?
And why shouldn't those civilians be jealous? Maybe they'd like to camp too. Why should army have all the fun?

6. If bananas don't advertise it.

Huh?
This is just a bit of advice you can take or leave as you see fit. Keep your craziness to yourself. It only makes others uncomfortable. If you're perfectly sane, go ahead, act however you want. I'm sure you'll be accepted and probably make lots of friends. But if less than 100% there, you might want to watch that you're not broadcasting your mental state too loudly. In other words, if bananas… Am I over-explaining this?

7. Sparrows called from the treetops seldom reply.

Huh?
Sparrows THAT ARE called… Those sparrows can see that you're not one of them. They're not dumb, you know. Now get out of that tree and stop advertising how bananas you are.

8. Fruit flies like nesting chickens dance.

Huh?
From sparrows to dancing chickens! OK, this is probably the trickiest one here. Are you ready? Fruit is to flying as nesting chickens are to dancing. I.e., it doesn't do it. My profoundest apologies.

9. Bosses can corrupt or lazy employees.

Huh?
I guess this one's pretty hard too. Replace the word “can” with “fire” and it will all be clear. You really are a good pal to have stuck around this long. And have I told you how great you look in that sweater?

10. Drowning swimmers can be helped and is wrong.

Huh?
This sentence is much easier to understand if you reverse the terms on either side of the “and”: Drowning swimmers is wrong and can be helped. Tempting, sure, but there's really no defense for it.

Assuming you got this far without causing yourself or anyone else bodily harm, congratulations on being a bona fide linguistics nerd. And if you understood all the sentences without any help, congratulations on being Noam Chomsky!