the top twenty albums of 2010: part one

Over the past year I put more effort than ever before into keeping up with music releases. I’ve probably listened to a lot more new music than ever – partly out of active choice, partly out of circumstances in my life (lots of sit-at-computer work, regular conveniently album-length bus rides). That I have, despite this, failed – that there are still a lot of albums released over the last twelve months that I’ve been wanting to listen to, but haven’t yet found the time for – illustrates, better than anything else, the vitality, range and variety of the contemporary music scene.

If one were to attempt isolating any general trend or dominant style to define the year, one could only talk about the distinct lack of any such unifying thread. It’s been a year in which Bon Iver guested on a Kanye West album, in which the lines between genres, audiences and styles blurred into insignificance, and in which multiplicity became, even more clearly, the order of the day.

First, the honourable mentions, in alphabetical order – these are all albums I enjoyed immensely, and that I regret not finding room in the Top 20 for:

James Blackshaw – All is Falling

Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record

Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

The Fun Years – God Was Like, No

Julian Lynch – Mare

MGMT – Congratulations

Moulettes – s/t

Owen Pallett – Heartland

Surfer Blood – Astro Coast

Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

These New Puritans – Hidden

Twin Shadow – Forget

Xasthur – Portal of Sorrow

And now, on to the countdown proper:

20. Social Studies – Wind Up Wooden Heart

While there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about Social Studies, it’s hard not to love a band that launches itself into indie-pop conventions with such joy, invention and relentless energy. Melodies, rhythms, synth lines and guitar hooks collide in a mad, catchy rush,  and while it doesn’t all quite gel entirely, it’s difficult not to get caught up.

19. Current 93 – Baalstorm, Sing Omega

It’s easy to take new work by bands as prolific as Current 93 for granted. Coming less than a year after the monumental Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, this got somewhat overlooked; it’s undeniably a lesser effort, but it’s rendered a worthwhile addition to the David Tibet canon through the surprising little touches that work their way into the band’s established sound: the little girl’s voice that haunts the album, the nightmare circus-organ on epic closer “I Dance Narcoleptic”, and, most striking of all, the vaguely Middle Eastern, percussive lilt of the gorgeous “With Flowers in the Garden of Fires”.

18. The Walkmen – Lisbon

How can one sound effortless, disinterested, and yet intensely engaged at the same time? Whatever the trick is, The Walkmen manage it like no-one else, delivering song after song of elegantly laid-back, pleasingly shambolic melancholia.

17. Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago

There’s nothing here to match the majesty of Rook standout “The Snow Leopard”, but, overall, The Golden Archipelago is the more cohesive, measured, nuanced, and arguably the better album. Shearwater marry gravity to delicacy in a way few others manage – it seems almost impossible that music so slight could garner such weight. Bands that sound this self-consciously Important can be obnoxious; Shearwater, however, never sound anything less than gorgeous.

16. The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra  – Kollaps Tradixionales

Amp up the sound of the Montreal post-rock scene, increase the tempo and add some yelping vocals, and the result is this raucous yet ornate thing of beauty that some have taken to calling chamber-punk – it’s as appropriate a term as any. The Godspeed/Silver Mt. Zion collective hasn’t sounded this vital in years.

15. Sleigh Bells – Treats

Question: How far can you amp up, distort  sugar-rush, bubblegum pop melodies, adding noise and energy and plain old loudness while still remaining unmistakeably pop? Answer: this much.

14. Forest Swords – Dagger Paths

Deep, looped basslines, reverb-drenched guitars, murky vocal and found-sound samples: the ingredients in Forest Swords’ languid, haunting soundscapes are deceptively simple, but the end result is a rich concoction of melodies emerging, increasingly clear, out of mesmerising washes of haze and static. This is evocative, spacious music that envelops you in its idiosyncratic atmosphere, suggesting scratched, grainy footage, washed-out colours, dark figures against blinding sunlight.

13. Liars – Sisterworld

I was lucky enough to see Liars in Bologna last November, under the vaulted ceiling of a medieval armoury-turned-student venue: what’s even more obvious live than it is on record is that this is a band that obliterate the line between the playful and the sinister. Their tongue never leaves their cheek, but the grotesque, twisted and endlessly surprising nightmare visions they conjure are no less disturbing for it. Sisterworld represents the coming-together of the many trends that have defined Liars over the years: abrasive, propulsive punk, off-kilter, unremittingly dark balladry, and percussive, krautrock-influenced art-rock; it’s less of a step forward and more of a consolidation – a rare pause for breath from a band that has tirelessly reinvented itself again and again.

12. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

Hip-hop, Britpop, electro, synth-pop, classical and brass band, blended together into a cartoon-primary-colour-bright explosion: together with The ArchAndroid, this represents something of an apotheosis of the pop album as an all-consuming, multi-voiced, multi-genre kaleidoscopic postmodern carnival. But where Janelle Monaé’s opus is spunky and celebratory, Plastic Beach‘s masterstroke is to use this Technicolor bricolage as a backdrop to voices that sound world-weary, disaffected, tired, torn up. As affecting as it is enjoyable, Plastic Beach is the first outright masterpiece of Damon Albarn’s post-Blur career.

11. Titus Andronicus – The Monitor

Titus Andronicus Go Epic is something of a misnomer – their debut, The Airing of Grievances, was already pretty huge. But The Monitor is, in every way, more: bigger, longer, more ambitious, angrier, more intense. Nominally about the Civil War, but really only using its imagery as a loose metaphor through which to frame the archetypal narrative of the young adult struggling to make sense of himself, his peers and the world they share, this is an album that aims for the rafters – if you name Bruce Springsteen and Walt Whitman as inspirations, you’re hardly thinking small – and hits the bullseye.

(Part Two to follow very soon.)

blood, blood, blood

‘Tis the season, as everyone knows, for the making of resolutions, the arbitrary line drawn in time by the beginning of a new year being as good a time as any to take stock of one’s life and try, however fleetingly, to imagine a ‘new you’. Now, I’m not much the resolution-making type, save for, as I attempted to communicate to a friend some time after midnight at a New Year’s party over music that was far too loud to make this an easy task, a general sense of trying to do better. However, one of the many more-or-less vague intentions contained within that impulse is the desire to write more regularly – by which I mean writing fiction, primarily, but also an attempt, time permitting, to return this blog to being at least a slightly more regular chronicle of things that, in whatever form, leave an impression on me. In the spirit of living up to this resolution, then, let me tell you about the game that, along with the much more celebrated Minecraft, was my game of 2010. Let me tell you, friends, about Space Funeral.

Space Funeral – which, I might as well point out, does not contain any funerals and is not set in space – is a JRPG, but that categorisation, though functionally true, is as misleading as it is pointless. Space Funeral doesn’t really care about being an RPG: although turn-based combat, dungeons, party management, levelling and item shops are all present and accounted for, they’re only there as the necessary frame upon which to hang  You are Philip – a boy (presumably, not that you can tell from the astonishingly bad – and yet effectively grotesque – artwork) thrown out of the house by his parents, still in his pyjamas and crying his eyes out – as he will continue to do throughout the game. 

What awaits outside the house is a dayglo-bright wasteland, like body-horror virulently exploding into a Saturday morning cartoon: houses shaped like smashed heads, monstrous fleshy trees, primary-colour landscapes. It’s a setting that has been, like Zeno Clash before it, compared to the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky because, hey, Jodorowsky is shorthand for ‘weird and surreal’. In truth, Space Funeral‘s milieu is delivered with a nudge and a knowing wink, instantly setting it apart from the feverish intensity of the Chilean filmmaker’s symbolic visions. Rather than mythology, Space Funeral draws upon a highly postmodern stream of pop culture detritus for its imagery: high fantasy tropes (wizards, quests, villages) clash with B-movie horror icons, comic strips, glam rock and poetry – Peanuts and Dracula, Charles Baudelaire and Marc Bolan all feature, in one way or another, and the whole thing is soundtracked by a remarkable collection of avantgarde music (I owe my discovery of the awesome Les Rallizes Denudes to the game, for which I am eternally grateful).

In this lurid hell-carnival of a world, what do you do? Well, you quest, because questing is what you do in an RPG. It’s an interesting point to note that, as peripheral as the RPG mechanics are to your enjoyment of Space Funeral, they serve an essential role in framing your experience of the gameworld. In the absence of any narrative or referential coherence, it is the game’s RPG-ness – the fact that you’ve played JRPGs before, so you instinctively know what to do – that structures your understanding of the game: no matter how strange, how off-the-wall random, how just outright insane the game gets, the mechanics keep you grounded.

The details of the quest? In time-honoured fashion, something is wrong: the world has been somehow corrupted, and the root of the decay appears to be a corruption in the City of Forms, the perfect city of which everything else in the world is an image. Although, as you are repeatedly informed, it’s too late for you, you must nonetheless head north in an attempt to locate this city and, presumably, in some way, fix whatever the hell has gone wrong.

At heart, then, Space Funeral is a replaying of the Heart of Darkness trope: a journey upriver through a world gone mad, in search of the source from which all the madness is flowing. What cannot be stressed enough, however, is how unpredictable this journey is, and what delight you will experience at each new discovery along the way. Space Funeral is a very, very, very funny game – more so, perhaps, than any game since the heyday of the LucasArts adventure – and any number of moments will stay with you and provoke quiet grins when recollected weeks later – the steak farm, the something’s-wrong-but-I’m-not-sure-what conversation with the Blood Wizard, and the encounter with Dracula are the ones that stand out the strongest for me, but you’ll have your own favourites.

And when you do get to the end of the journey (it’ll only take you two hours, tops), well…let’s talk about the ending (and, if you haven’t actually played it yet, please stop reading now, and go play the game THIS INSTANT, for this is one of the still depressingly rare games with a proper, satisfying ending. rather than a half-apologetic, “Yeah, it’s over. Wait for the sequel.”) The conclusion to the player/Philip’s quest  – the arrival at the City of Forms – is remarkable not only for its wit, its blending of self-consciously highbrow literary references (Paradise Lost, take a bow) with the most irrevently puerile of lowbrow humour, but also for how thoroughly it reconfigures the weirdness that came before as the setup for a philosophical point that is delivered – like everything else in the game – with tongue firmly in cheek, but that, given its context, is startlingly (and affectingly) profound. It probably says as much about me and my pretensions as about Space Funeral that I picked up distinct echoes of the Neoplatonism of Romantic aesthetic philosophy at this point – suggesions regarding the relation of art to the world and to notions of a more ‘ideal’ state from which the world has somehow fallen – but these echoes cannot be ignored.

The source of the corruption, it is revealed, is an artist who visited the City of Forms in search of inspiration. Confronted with its perfection, however, he froze: nothing he could create would be anything but a pale, inferior shadow of its beauty. The only course of action left to him, the only way he could free himself, was to destroy the City: but still the world continued to be haunted by echoes of its lost, perfect forms, still occasionally visible through the chaos. And so, he tells us, he must destroy again, and again, and so on forever, always tearing down in order to rebuild anew.

The questions this revelation raises about the role of art and the process of artistic creation are by no means anything new, but, in their context, they couldn’t feel any fresher, or any more vital. Space Funeral is, itself, the wrecked result of an iconoclastic thrashing: primarily a tearing-down of the JRPG, but also of all the throwaway fragments of cultural tropes and ephemera it assimilates. It presents you, the player, with the shredded remains of its inspirations, hastily re-glued together in new configurations and covered with glitter, poster-paint and paper-cut blood, and asks you, “Now isn’t this just more interesting?”  If the resulting chaos is as invigorating, as surprising, as clever and as plain fun as Space Funeral, one is almost inclined to agree that the destruction is a noble cause.

That it passes all of this off as the elaborate build-up to the (brilliant)  punchline of the game’s closing images is, possibly, even more of a stroke of genius.

So, GO PLAY or you will SURELY DIE. Or something.