04: 10-6

10. Volcano Choir - Repave

Volcano Choir is lucky that nobody likes them. Repave is an album with a tracklist of one-word song titles, cover art without text, and not a single lyric that makes sense upon first listen. Even if a band branded as trustworthily indie, such as The Arcade Fire, tried to pull this off, they would be mocked everywhere from craft beer bars to freshman dining halls.

You would think that might point to the album being difficult. In fact, Repave is almost exasperatingly simple compared to the band's first album. Volcano Choir went from blips, noise, and screeching static laid over finger-picked guitars, hand clapping, and eerie moaning to riffs lifted from Zeppelin, sing-along choruses, and rhythmic pitch-modified swagger.

Yes, Repave is music that Volcano Choir certainly wrote with the intention that it be deciphered and deemed "difficult" by the greater music establishment, but they most certainly didn't mean to bore their core audience.

Repave is pop music for people who like atonal noise.

For all the "We're claiming 'Almanac' as ours and ours only" pretense of one-word song titles on the album, their use in practice is a playful one. The titles and songs themselves combine to act as quirky artistic adjectives far more so than grandiose statements on the greater themes of life. Every song on Repave is an exploration of a very personal, subjective set of feelings, and in no way could be construed as a statement on the human condition or an attempt to define any reality beyond the sounds captured within Pro Tools during album's recording sessions.

Look at the joke of a song, "Acetate." The Choir spends eighteen seconds twiddling on their guitars before cutting into a wobbly, foot-stomping battle march. They then drag the song up a mile-high cliff only to push the beat off the ledge into a tide pool of an easy-to-hum, hard-not-to-shout-along-with chorus/outro hootenanny. Throughout the Repave, the band destroys their greatest ideas on a lark, and they do this to the point that one could say that Repave doesn't present the listener with any ideas at all.

The difficulty of the album is that The Choir never offers up their songs as "what if" puzzles along the classic lines of "sad lyrics + disco rhythm" or "screamed vocals + fruity loops beats + 'cello." Every song has to deciphered within its own universe. So as soon as any of the songs start to sound like they could be break up songs or dingy pub anthems, a verbal or sonic non sequitur redirects the content back towards the unquantifiable. More than choruses, Volcano Choir offers the listener reminders and revisitations.

Though it's important to note these are reminders of only what the band, itself, created. Volcano Choir is not a band that shows its innards very easily. Yes, you can point to the cut-and-paste assembly of the band members, but it's not easy to point a new listener towards Repave by rattling off a list of RIYL x, y, and z albums.

Repave's greatest asset is its insistence on evoking where other albums would default to describing. This creates a situation in which even if a million people were to fall in love with Repave, each person would have a completely individual and disconnected experience with the album so it would still feel like you're the only person in the world who is in love with this album and this band.

by Blaha 41

by JUburton

9. Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Daze

Kurt Vile was blasting over the sound system of the L-shaped comedy club, an awkward record for an angular room. Smoke Ring for My Halo was, for some reason, serving as the house music as we awaited Hannibal Buress; a contradiction in style, substance, and subtlety, if there ever was one. “Baby’s Arms” hypnotized me from the opening sitar-sounding guitar line. I downloaded the record that night. A few short years later, Mr. Vile brought us Wakin on a Pretty Daze, the best record of 2013.

About four-and-a-half minutes into Wakin on a Pretty Day, the drums stop for a second. “Rising at the crack of dawn/I gotta think about what wisecracks/I’m gonna drop along the way, today.” The insinuation being that Vile’s head is so full of them, he has to make a mental To-Do list. The beat resumes, but the pace quietly picks up in intensity for a few bars. There is urgency here, ironic considering it comes not even halfway into the 10-minute opening track.

But length is no issue here. Vile has three songs longer than eight minutes, and not a second of them is boring. Production, long a hallmark of Vile’s work, continues with meticulous detail that cuts so deep and so wide that now, eight months later, the listener still finds nuances that haven’t been heard yet.

“Girl Named Alex” grows and collapses into itself in six minutes. Mr. Vile promises to do his best for God and country in “Too Hard,” a lazy river of a song that finds pedal steel powering its slow undercurrent. He succeeds. “Air Bud” could be about a golden retriever or an ounce of California’s finest strain. After a record full of uptempo, mellow, psychedelic rock, I neither know, nor care. There is cowbell, and lots of it.

There is no record I connected to more this year, nor one I listened to more often. This is an instant classic that will sound timeless in a decade. I’ll be older then, but these songs won’t.

One pictures Mr. Vile in California over the last two years, surrounded by smoke and whiskey, lazily writing every self-reflection and inside joke he can set to guitar and synth. And that may have been how the record was made. But if its inception was slow and nonchalant, its enjoyment is enhanced with movement. Wakin on a Pretty Daze craves to become the soundtrack to an expedition, no matter the distance. Some records need air. Some need isolation. This needs kinetic energy.

Drive somewhere. Run. Walk a city street. The songs beg you to move, to feel, to explore, to be. Here, there, anywhere.

The direction doesn’t matter.

by Boyd

8. Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer, Different Park

http://anopenlettertocalliekhouri.blogspot.com/

by AlaskaFox

7. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Once in a great while, some work of art is released to virtually universal positive acclaim. Most of the time, this sort of cultural zeitgeist is praised for “changing the landscape” or “pushing the envelope of what [insert creative endeavor] can mean in today’s societal landscape.” This is all mostly bullshit journalists put down to make word counts or at least give the impression that they know anything about what they’re trying to discuss. Often times, they don’t and you end up with a slew of white kids comparing fey noise poppers to the Beach Boys or thinking TV On the Radio are worth a fuck.

The inevitability of that cycle is that an album is released (or in these days, leaked, streamed, broadcast from loud speakers on a flat bed truck driving around gritty, upwardly mobile, urban neighborhoods that twenty-something whites have suddenly moved into) and we all talk about it incessantly for a few days and then it sits on the cultural shelf for the rest of the year, like some Christmas gift whose purpose has run its course by the time the batteries die. And we do this over and over all year long, finally thinking that we’ve accumulated enough knowledge to put together some list of albums to which we think everyone else should pay attention. It’s a dirty cycle, but someone has to perpetuate it, right?

However, sometimes one of these albums actually makes a cultural impact. It starts a dialogue on something, anything really, and it makes us question what could be possible from the artist going forward. Sometimes a work takes you aback in such a way that it leaves you unsure of what you just experienced, except you know that things are never going to be the same after the rest of the world gets wind of this statement.

Is this latest Vampire Weekend album that kind of work? No, probably not, but that’s up to the individual listener, I guess. I’m not really sure those sorts of moments exist in our culture of instantly discussable art. But I know that a lot of people really seemed to like this album, myself included. That a bunch of privileged white kids who mostly sang about roofs, grammar, and Mexican beverages somehow figured out a way to humanize their work, expand their sonic palette, and make an album that a lot of people seem to appreciate might just be the grandest statement they could make in this day and age. Wheels work for a reason; they don’t need to be reinvented. While we sat around all year arguing about any number of things, this album simply always sounded as good as it did the first time I listened to it. To craft an album as trusty as the Dockers these dudes wear might just be enough in this day and age and Vampire Weekend might have figured that out before the rest of us.

by Spilled Milk

6. Chvrches - The Bones of What You Believe

On about eight or so listens now, and the repeated theme of Stay Positive The Bones of What You Believe is finally showing itself to me, in its many incarnations.

The Mother We Share – If people “tell the truth [they] will always be free” but lies perpetuate bad relationships

We Sink - Does not apply

Gun – She will be a gun and is probably gonna come for you. She does not seem to be lying about this part.

Tether - I haven't figured this one out yet.

Lies - "I can sell you lies, you can’t get enough" and they both believe.

The Bones of What You Believe = telling lies will strip your relationship to its bones.

Under the Tide - "I would go anywhere with you. What a lie."; Lie again means someone has to "believe"

Recover – Not applicable

Night Sky - "I’m the only one who gave you truth (speak to me)” – another lie?

Science/Visions – Does not apply

Lungs – “I will sell you a future you don’t want like I did last time”; lying to herself and each other

By the Throat – “Honesty will wreck this home that we made”

You Caught the Light – Does not apply

Don't understand?

http://ufck.org/forums/showthread.phpt=222675&page=24&p=9215720&viewfull=1#post9215720

by JUBurton