I’m so tired of being wrong

I am struck, once again, by what an amazing live band The Avett Brothers are.

So every evening we can watch from above

Yes, Wilco (The Album) was a great album all the way through. But even so, not one of the other eleven songs came anywhere near being as sublimely amazing as “Country Disappeared”. Given the fact that it is Wilco we are speaking about the track jumps up to a higher level still when played live, which is case in this Blogotheque-video too.

Elliott Smith stopping halfway through “Waltz #2 (XO)”

“I just can’t… I can’t do this song, I’ve played it too many times. I’ve just played it hundreds of times and I’m just sick of it and I just can’t play it. I’m sorry.”

2010 – Looking back at the year that went

I was a bad music fan in 2010. I did have my reasons for not keeping a more than half-hearted look for new interesting releases (involving a lack of time and a tendency to spend my money on older classics rather than up-and-coming underground acts), but in the end it does not truly justify that the year of 2010 is through and I still have not listened to The Age of Adz, This is Happening, The Suburbs or Write About Love from start to finish. Therefore, it would feel slightly weird to set out to write an extensive list comparing albums to one another and hailing one as the definite masterpiece of the year. Instead I have chosen to cover the twelve months that passed by compiling the albums, songs and live acts that meant most to me personally, recognizing that the list would probably look entirely different if I had been more active as a listener.

This is 2010, according to me.

Albums:

01. Have One On Me by Joanna Newsom

Having put only a year between us and the 00:s – i.e. the decade that advocated mind-numbing guitar pop to such an extent that even the dullest of retro revivals was thought of as fresh and original – it is nice to know that some artists are still giving fuck-all about trends and musical conventions. Have One on Me spans over three discs, contains six songs longer than eight minutes and is endlessly complex and unpredictable. Despite looking uninviting and chaotic on paper, the album is never hard on the listener; on the contrary the imaginative arrangements and Newsom’s divine songwriting makes this a ride more instantly rewarding than most albums a quarter of its length. This is a record I will listen to five, ten and fifty years from now.

02. Clinging to a Scheme by The Radio Dept.

After months of almost Chinese Democracy-esque shilly-shallying with release dates, 2010 finally saw the arrival of The Radio Dept.’s third studio album. And it was, after all, worth waiting for. Combining the more accessible, sometimes even catchy pop melodies on their debut masterpiece Lesser Matters with the improved production methods on Pet Grief, the band managed once again to create a record that is equally moving and attention-grabbing, ambitious and reclusive.

03. High Violet by The National

In a way, High Violet was exactly what could be expected by The National. The magnificent quintet from Brooklyn had already made a mark in history by releasing two of the most brilliant albums of the previous decade (I am talking of course of Alligator and Boxer), and was never really likely to live up to the sky high expectations of their millions of fans. Instead they delivered a record of notably less interesting song material than its predecessors, but managed to heighten its listening value by exploring some of their most interesting soundscapes yet. Lavishly produced songs like “England”, “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and “Terrible Love” would not have fitted in on any of their previous releases; here they worked splendidly together as a whole.

04. The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man on Earth

So far in his career, Kristian Mattson’s only real mistake has been his somewhat silly moniker. With two albums and as many EP:s he has proven to possess an extraordinary songwriting skill, augmented by a prodigious competence when it comes to guitar plucking. These two attributes might just be his ticket to folk glory (if such a thing exists) in the future, and The Wild Hunt suggests nothing else.

05. Admiral Fell Promises by Sun Kil Moon

Undisturbed, stripped-down beauty is what Mark Kozelek’s latest solo effort (yes, he is using his band moniker for those now) sounds like. Consisting almost entirely of nothing more than nylon-stringed guitar plucking accompanied by Kozelek’s lone voice, these ten compositions manages to maintain the feeling of drifting on a raft down a calm river for over an hour, without feeling repetetive or dull once. With Admiral Fell Promises, the former frontman of Red House Painters manages to create a piece of art that feels more comparable to Chopin than to any of his slowcore peers.

Songs:

01. Sufjan Stevens – “I Walked”
02. The Tallest Man On Earth – “Love Is All”
03. Joanna Newsom – “Kingfisher”
04. The Radio Dept. – “You Stopped Making Sense”
05. Beach House – “Norway”
06. The National – “Lemonworld”
07. LCD Soundsystem – “Home”
08. Jens Lekman – “The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love”
09. Tindersticks – “Factory Girls”
10. Strand of Oaks – “Bonfire”
11. Broken Social Scene – “World Sick”
12. Wild Nothing – “O Liliac”

Live acts:

01. Pavement
02. LCD Soundsystem
03. Arcade Fire

Television appearances

01. “Stereo” performed by Pavement on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (link)
02. “’81” performed by Joanna Newsom on Later with Jools Holland (link)
03. “Too Much” performed by Sufjan Stevens on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (link)

Unexpected events:

01. Moe tucker supports the Tea Party (link)
02. Joanna Newsom releases three-disc record (link)
03. Phoenix cover “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (link)

Expected events:

01. The Flaming Lips are asking fans for a harp (link – seriously, who is surprised?)

People who will be missed:

Mark Linkous
Alex Chilton

I believe in locomotion

Tomorrow I am leaving for Germany, where I will be staying for a week celebrating New Year’s Eve in that beautiful capital city of theirs. This will naturally mean that I will not update the blog for a few days (I refuse to get with the times and bring a laptop while travelling), which I hope will not be too much frowned upon.

Instead, I present (in layman’s terms: copy+paste) to you a live performance of a suitably named Wilco-song. Which, as a bonus, also contains one of the best guitar solos of all time (second only to “Elevation” by Television).

Auf wiedersehen!

The Radio Dept. goes acoustic

A few days ago, Sweden’s finest currently active pop band made a radio session recorded for KEXP available for download via their website. The set contains acoustic renditions of three songs, taken one from each of their albums, aswell as a live version of the moderate-bashing anthem “The New Improved Hypocrisy”. The brightest shining track is “Heaven’s on Fire”, the awkwardly titled yet danceable live favourite which has here been turned into a heartbroken, piano-driven ballad centered around those mesmerizing chorus lines:

It seems like everyone is on your side
We’re outnumbered by those who take on pride
In constantly moving against the tide
Charlatans just out of reach and out of time

The whole thing can be downloaded from here.

MP3:
The Radio Dept. – “Bus (acoustic)”
The Radio Dept. – “Heaven’s On Fire (acoustic)”

A few for the holidays

Christmas is coming up (and has been coming up for a month or so if choosing to trust the mall decorations here in Sweden), which means it’s time to start digging up whatever small binge of seasonal music one has in order to get into the right holiday mood. And so I did.

Here’s a short selection:

The Felice Brothers – “Christmas Song”
The Flaming Lips – “White Christmas”
Great Lake Swimmers – “Song For the Angels”
Low – “Just Like Christmas”
Mogwai – “Christmas Song”
Sufjan Stevens – “Did I Make You Cry On Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!)”
Sufjan Stevens – “Holy, Holy, Holy”