So, this was going to be the year when I finally got my act together and published a nice bunch of reviews of my favorite albums of the year by the end of the year. Turns out it’s not going to happen, as I got dumped on this December with snow, work, family stuff, and, most recently, preparing to move.  So, no plethora of album reviews for you, but I will try to do better next year. I figured the least I could do is put together some lists of favorites, even if I can’t provide much of any context, description, or justification for my choices.  Here are my favorite albums of 2009, arranged in an arbitrary manner most convenient to my purposes.

Fifteen Favorites:

1. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
3. Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
4. M. Ward: Hold Time
5. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
6. Woods: Songs of Shame
7. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
8. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
9. Passion Pit: Manners
10. Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
11. Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
12. Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
13. Girls: Album
14. Atlas Sound: Logos
15. Ganglians: Monster Head Room

Five EPs:

1. Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
2. Abe Vigoda: Reviver
3. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
4. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
5. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

A Trio of Great Rock Albums:

1. The Dead Weather: Horehound
2. Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
3. Sonic Youth: The Eternal

Two Magic Albums:

1. Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
2. Memory Tapes: Seek Magic

A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)

• Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
• Dan Deacon: Bromst
• Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
• Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
• Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
• Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
• Mos Def: The Ecstatic
• Small Black: Small Black
• Wavves: Wavves
• Wilco: Wilco (the album)

Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time.  I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.

Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com.  They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it.  I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music.  You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album).  I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site.  I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.

An Album Review

Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!

Dan Deacon: Bromst
Carpark Records
Released March 24, 2009

Try “Woof Woof” ( Track 8 ) right here right now for some fun, free, immediate gratification. It’s just as easy as pushing that button your parents really don’t want you to push. Go ahead, push the button. PUSH THE BUTTON!

It sounds like a hand-labeled cassette given to you by a friend, or found in an attic or an old drawer.

We have had a lot of rainy days lately around these parts.

It feels like it was recorded in a cabin in the mountains, a homespun recording with the tape hiss in the background to prove it.

It is filled with both simple folk songs and swirling psychedelic jams.

I pretty much live in a cabin in the mountains.

It is as likely to have been recorded four decades ago as four days ago.

With the exception of the giant eyeball UFO.

The songs of this album are full of pattering drums, dripping guitars, and falsetto harmonies. They make me think of the rain when I listen to them.

The cover art might as well be my own home canyon it looks so similar, all green-hued and overcast.

One of the best songs on the album is called “Rain on You,” and features the chorus, “Oh, how the days will rain on you.”

Um, Neil Young.

This is a great rainy day album.

See my pictures of South Fork from last week if you would like a comparison.

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino, 2009)

It should be good to share our favorite things
I’ll keep an open mind if you let me in
Don’t let your temper rise, don’t get a bitter face
Try not to judge me on my kind of taste
And don’t go changing clothes when they don’t like yours

This invitation and counsel comes from the closing verse of the song “Taste,” a squelching Beach Boys-meets-Main Street Electrical Light Parade stomp from Animal Collective’s latest opus, Merriweather Post Pavilion. If ever there was one album worth leaving your musical comfort zone for, an album worth spending some time getting acquainted with, allowing it to grow and reveal its many delights and rewards to you (even, and maybe especially, if you didn’t like it at first), this is the one.

Throughout their career as a band, Animal Collective has tapped into the joyful, scary sounds of childhood sonic exploration. By this I refer to the fun, meandering, genius songs that some four-year-olds make up on the spot, or the wild sounds you might hear an untrained five year old who has free reign at a piano pound out. In other words, these are the musical activities children feel free to do before they learn to do them the proper way, before they become self-conscious and embarrassed about such behavior, or before the keyboard cover is slammed down and they are dragged out of grandma’s living room to timeout. The members of Animal Collective either never moved past this stage or they found some magical way to revert to it. They are “playing” music, and as play it is imaginative, primal, experimental, fun, obnoxious, and, perhaps above all, mysterious.

I emphasize the mystery of their music because It is often nearly impossible to figure out what instruments, sounds, or playing methods you are hearing at any particular moment in an Animal Collective song.  In past efforts their lyrics were sometimes difficult to correctly decipher and included words placed together as much or more for their sound as for their meaning.  Again, this mystery and abstraction points back to that childlike propensity to “play,” their ignorance of many of the conventions of musicianship or their belligerent refusal to adhere to them. Over the course of their career they have developed their own idiosyncratic methods of creating music using their instruments, their computers and their voices, and this has made for several albums worthy of the listening ear of an open-minded music fan. However, with the songs on Merriweather they have clearly become masters of their self-made musical methods; this is their most accomplished and accessible album to date, in both songwriting and arrangement. Each song is fully formed, inhabiting its own lush and unique world.

Their instrumental mystery/mastery is in full play from the outset of the album with the song “In the Flowers.” Various abstract noises soon resolve themselves into a waltz rhythm featuring a triplet figure played on an instrument that, with each morphing note, sounds like it could be something different: Is it a harp? a harpsichord? a guitar? a treated piano? a synthesizer? After the second verse the song explodes into a beautiful cacophony of abstract sounds that give the effect of a full-on symphony orchestra: strings, brass, woodwinds, the whole package. I say “give the effect” because this “orchestration” is likewise of indeterminate instrumental origins. This wonderful noise blasts out over a thick electro-timpani beat and orchestral percussion. It simultaneously evokes a Tchaikovsky ballet movement and contemporary electronic dance music. Such musical references to dance make the lyrics and music entirely symbiotic, as the singer imagines dancing with the one he loves, from whom he is currently far removed.

Unabashed playfulness and lyrical mastery also abound in “Summertime Clothes,” which is at once a hugely weird summer jam, a perfectly written pop song, and a sort of “Good Vibrations” or “Singin’ in the Rain” for 2009. Sizzling, gurgling soda pop sounds and ambient street noise accompany euphoric singing that describes a hot summer nighttime walk through city streets:

It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel
Hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal
I point in the windows, you point out the parks
Rip off your sleeves and I’ll ditch my socks
We’ll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass
Weave through the cardboard, smell that trash
Walking around in our summertime clothes,
Nowhere to go while our bodies glow
And we’ll greet the dawn in its morning blues
With purple yawn, you’ll be sleeping soon
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you

To me, one of the most winning aspects of <em>Merriweather</em> is the fact that so much sonic playfulness and weirdness is coupled with lyrics firmly grounded in domestic life. These are not songs about random sex, drugs, violence, and rock n’ roll excess, nor are they political rants, trite love songs, or absurd fantasies, but rather songs about wanting to provide a decent home for your family (“My Girls”), songs about missing your spouse when traveling (“In the Flowers,” “Guys Eyes,”), songs about waking up early and getting your child ready for the day (‘Daily Routine”), and songs giving advice to a little brother (“Brother Sport”).  In these songs the mundane becomes magical and the banal goes wild.

A fine example is “Daily Routine,” which, with its cut-up organ flourishes, vocal harmonies, and fat hip-hop beats sounds like a Timbaland remix of Yes’ “Close to the Edge.” However, in contrast to the mysticism of Yes songs and the vulgarity of much of hip-hop, “Daily Routine” lyrically depicts the pedestrian events the title implies, “Make sure my kid’s got a jacket / And coat and shoes and hat. / Strap a stroller to my back / Bouncing along every crack.” The true genius comes in the second part of the song, all slow, echoing, reverb-drenched drone over which the lines “Just a sec more…in my bed / Hope my machine’s working right” are sung repeatedly, musically re-creating the feeling of wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.

Despite the many details and colors of the music, it is the simple exuberance of many of these songs that keeps me listening to them over and over again. I love the counter-intuitive brilliance of closing the album with a song as enthusiastic, infectious, and stadium-ready as “Brother Sport.” I smile and marvel at the audacity of filling the hand-clapping pop anthem chorus of “My Girls” with the so not rock-n-roll lines, “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things / (like a social stance) / I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls / (Woooooooh!)” Taken together, the songs of this album set forth a refreshing view of life in which the hottest party is at home with the family, and nothing is more exciting than spending time with the ones you love. In my opinion it’s a mature perspective to express with such wild and childish sounds. Due to this album’s sonic inventiveness, its musical hyperactivity, its total lack of cynicism and negativity, and it’s all-around positive energy and joyousness, I can’t really imagine an album coming out any time this year that I will like more than this one. Ultimately this is why I feel this is the one album among so many that is worth the time of the not-usually-patient listener: the more you listen to it, the more it may make you happy.

TV on the Radio: Dear Science(DGC/Interscope, 2008)

TV on the Radio showed up on the scene a few years ago with the startling soul/punk/industrial/doo wop Young Liars EP. Their second full length, the absurdly titled Return to Cookie Mountain, was a dense grower with multi-layered soundscapes; it eventually won out as my favorite album of 2006. With Dear Science, TVOTR have synthesized and put into practice all the knowledge gained from their prior experimentation. They have de-cluttered their mix, trading in some of the noise for an array of clean, polyphonic grooves and some more overt pop moves, even adding some great string arrangements to several songs. What results is a strong album in an evermore eclectic and satisfying fusion of styles that hardly anyone else dares to throw together: R&B, post-punk, hip-hop, indie, electronic, jazz, afro-funk, prog/art rock, and probably a load of other things I haven’t picked up on. They’ve spent the past few years sounding like absolutely no one else in rock, possibly because they sound like scattered fragments of everyone else, deconstructing everything from Radiohead to Usher to the Pixies. On this album they’re putting it all back together.

“Halfway Home,” the high energy album-opener, is also the track most in keeping with the expected TVOTR sound, if slightly more upbeat than usual. Syncopated drumming and heavily effected, chugging guitars create a drone background for some Beach Boys-styled “B-B-Ba-Ba-Boms,” over which lead vocalist Tunde Adebimpe croons with a voice that is not entirely unlike that of Nat King Cole.

Adebimpe is not the only vocal force, however, the band having been blessed with not one but two gifted vocalists and lyricists. Kyp Malone contrasts Adebimpe’s smoothness with a slightly more idiosyncratic, soulful vocal style. Check out his voice on “Golden Age,” the album’s celebratory “lead single” which sounds like it could have been unearthed from Michael Jackson’s long-lost collaboration with David Bowie and Brian Eno. The classic groove is clearly meant to get everyone on the dance floor, but the lyrics here have as much in common with the language of hymnody and the biblical psalms as they do with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,”

Move your body
You’ve got all you need
And your arms in the air stir a sea of stars
And, oh, here it comes and it’s not so far
All light beings
Come on now make haste
Clap your hands
If you feel you’re in the right place
Thunder all surrounding
Feel it quake with the joy resounding
Palm to the palm you can feel it pounding
Never give it up you can feel it mounting
Oh it’s gonna drop gonna fill your cup
Oh it’s gonna drop gonna fill your cup
The age of miracles
The age of sound
Well there’s a golden age coming round, coming round, coming round

This simultaneous subversion and fusion of mainstream pop musical styles with spiritual (or in other cases political, poetic, and scientific) language to create curious and stunning lyrics recurs on many tracks. Production-wise, “Stork & Owl” sounds almost like something Timbaland could have brought to Justin Timberlake, but instead of the stereotypical lover man lyrics one expects from such a track, a close listening reveals more of a meditation on death and the challenges and chances of life, with lyrics like,

Death’s a door that love walks through
In and out, in and out
Back and forth, back and forth

Turn from the fear of the storms that might be
Oh, let it free, that caged on fire thing
Oh, hold its hands, it’ll feel like lightening
Oh, in your arms, safe from the storms.

A couple more favorite tracks I would be remiss not to comment on specifically:

• the absolutely vicious afro-funk groove of “Red Dress,” with its equally vicious and self-eviscerating lyrics which once again mix the biblical, the popular, the political, and the sociological.
• the souled-up In Rainbows-ish tracks “Love Dog” and “Shout Me Out,” which follow directly on its heels,

and

• album closer “Lover’s Day,” an absolutely ecstatic and occasionally explicit love song set to a fife-and-drum New Orleans march, complete with a multitude of both live and sampled woodwinds and horns.

Each song on the album is rock solid, fully formed and fully inhabiting its own sonic world. Quite a feat for an album of such diverse sounds. The heterogeneous sounds have made it easy for me to get caught up in repeated listens, as it’s hard to get bored with all the variation. And yet, despite the differences, the tracks seem to beg to be listened to one after another, as sequenced. They gain resonance by their juxtaposition. Taken as a whole, I feel the album partakes of a bit of that freshly canonical/instant classic feel most recently exemplified by In Rainbows.

Recommended for anyone who likes smart, adventurous funk/soul/rock music, and anyone who’s ever wanted to somehow listen to Kanye West and U2 at the exactly same time (am I the only one?)

By the way, you can listen to any or all of the tracks on this album for free just by clicking on the little triangle play buttons in the box at the top of this article. Streamed courtesy of the excellent lala.com music site.

I should also note that the only reason that this review is included in my best winter albums of 2008-2009 series is that I listened to it a whole lot this past winter.

Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop, 2008)

I don’t know that I can honestly call the Fleet Foxes’ debut a wintertime collection of songs. A few unabashedly wintry songs are included (check out “White Winter Hymnal” and “Blue Ridge Mountains” below), but they also sing songs of summer, songs of fall, and, most of all, songs of spring:

What a life I lead in the summer
What a life I lead in the spring
What a life I lead in the winded breeze
What a life I lead in the spring

the foxes sing in a cappella harmony as the needle hits the groove on side one of the Sun Giant EP. So how do I get away with calling this a featured winter album? It is exactly this full-on seasonal frenzy that made this music so appealing on those days when our house was entombed in snow. It gave me hope in the eventual arrival of other seasons. The rustic, pastoral details of the lyrics reminded me that the natural world brings life and color, not just an overbearing white coldness. And also maybe it is more simple: despite all the hype, I really just became acquainted with this pleasant folk phenomenon at the turn of the year. Since then, many of these songs have become the definitive soundtrack to my winter. My wife loves this music too, so many times we listen to it together. And as for the winter influence, it’s hard to deny the complete appeal of lines like, “Come down from the mountain, you have been gone too long / Spring is upon us, follow my only song,” in the middle of a cold February in the Wasatch Mountains.

I mentioned hype. This album has gotten a lot of it, from the time of its release last spring through to topping a lot of end-of-year lists. I ashamedly admit that I ignored this music partly because of that hype for quite awhile (although since then I have clearly humbled myself), and I’m not exactly sure what I will write at this point that hasn’t been written a hundred times already. I could mention that this music sounds natural and organic in every way. I could speak of fine folk-inspired songwriting and impeccably arranged vocal harmonies. I could describe their sound as the King Singers collaborating with the Shins. I don’t know for sure if these things have been said or not, because I’ve been trying to avoid the reviews so I can write this without inadvertently plagiarizing anyone. I’ll just end with this recommendation: if you like the song “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes. If you like Crosby, Stills & Nash, John Denver, Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Byrds, or Joni Mitchell, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes. If you like Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Bobby McFerrin, or My Morning Jacket, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes. If you like music, you’re probably going to love Fleet Foxes.

[By the way, this is another album that sounds absolutely incredible on vinyl. I know I said that about Microcastle, too, but I promise I'm not going to say that about every album I ever talk about. The vinyl edition includes the superb Sun Giant EP as a separate record in a gatefold LP, which otherwise you would have to buy or download separately. You will want to get your hands on that EP because its songs, a couple of which are sampled above, are as good as or better than those on the full length.]

Deerhunter: Microcastle (Kranky, 2008)

Microcastle is the perfect album for a snowy winter afternoon in which you find yourself at home alone in the mountains.  It drifts, it floats, it accumulates.  It exudes a fuzzy analog warmth and an expansive ambience that blankets the whole house (our house is cozy).  Since the time that I purchased it early last November, it’s been by far my most played vinyl record, primarily because it just sounds so thick and warm and good in that format.  (Don’t let that dissuade you from trying CDs or MP3s, because the analog warmth is not it’s only strength.)

The dichotomy of cool and warm sounds are what make this album so compatible with winter listening; it’s like watching that snowstorm out of the window of a fire-warmed house, while the wind is howling through the top of the door and the walls are creaking. Much of the frigidity is in the lyrics. For example, the first lines sung on the record are “Cover me, cover me / Comfort me, comfort me,” and on the track “Never Stops” (press the play button at the top of the article to listen to it if you haven’t already), you’ll learn that it’s none other than winter that never stops.

This is a tight collection of songs with just enough sonic variance around the edges to keep things interesting.  The style? It’s basically 60s guitar pop/garage rock with the occasional 50s-styled rock n’ roll ballad.  Think of the Byrds, think of The Zombies (“Time of the Season”), and also think of early R.E.M., Deerhunter’s fellow Georgians who also revamped this 60s style in the 80s). It’s just not that straightforward, though; the songs are stormy and occasionally obscured by a tasteful amount of ambient, shoegazer, drone, and other post-punk/indie noise tricks blowing around in the background.  Think most particularly of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth.

Some highlights:

• The album begins with an instrumental track called “Cover Me Slowly,” a Pink Floyd meets My Bloody Valentine widescreen slowburner which leads directly into the subtle and jangley “Agorophobia,” with the aforementioned appropriate opening lines:
  

• “Nothing Ever Happened,” which is just an all-around great, propulsive rock song that brings all the different sounds of the album together:
  

• “Neither of Us, Certainly,” because it is sonically the most snowfallingest song on the album:
  

• “Twilight at Carbon Lake,” the closing 6/8 ballad that starts out sounding like something Elvis might have crooned over at Sun Records, but expands and erupts into a beautiful caucaphonous climax:
  

A final note, to more fully secure this record’s impeccable winter credibility:  On the band’s official blog (more bands should have blogs; Deerhunter’s is great), lead singer Bradford Cox wrote a post lamenting the inadvertent leaking of this album months before the intended late October release date. (I just noticed they have now removed this post from their blog, so I’m now linking to an article that quotes the post.) One of Cox’s stated sadnesses over the leak was not that the band had lost a lot of potential sales from pirating, nor so much that the leak had undermined their publicity buildup scheme for the album, but rather that he had very much envisioned this music as a “fall/winter” record, designed to be listened to initially at that time of year, rather than the summer. I love that they think about this stuff as much or more than I do, and I love that they very much succeeded in creating a wintry record.

[This album also comes with a bonus CD entitled Weird Era Cont (even with the vinyl copy this second disc is a CD).  It is like standing out in that snowstorm looking longingly in through the window of that glowing, warm house.  Here the production is a little rougher and songcraft is sometimes secondary to sonic experimentation.  It has some real gems and greatly adds to appeal of the overall package.]

I don’t know how they were able to intuit my music listening desires so well, but it turns out that NPR is streaming new albums in their entirety before they are even released, and they just so happen to be the exact albums I’ve been wanting to hear.  I guess it could just be that my tastes fall in with a key market demographic for public radio, but I’d rather not spoil the magic too much with those sorts of thoughts.

I just listened to the beautiful new album by singer/songwriter/violinist/guitarist/whistler Andrew Bird, entitled Noble Beast.  I think it will take a few more listens for me to truly digest it and describe it fully, but I’m definitely picking this one up when it comes out next week.

Now I’m listening to M. Ward’s album Hold Time, which doesn’t come out until Feb. 17.  Ward continues to write songs that sound like classic folk/country/rock n’ roll sides, all performed in his easy, seemingly effortless style and recorded with his signature old-timey, atmospheric production.  This album adds some occasional strings and keyboards to his usual mix of acoustic guitar and reverb, as well as some classic T. Rex-styled stomp on a few tracks.  All in all, it’s a bit of a Jack White meets Jack Johnson kind of album, and another one I’ll be looking for in February.

As of Monday (1/19), these good folks will also be streaming Animal Collective’s latest noise celebration masterpiece Merriweather Post Pavilion (which I’ve been listening to repeatedly since I purchased the early release vinyl version last week), and Bruce Springsteen’s soon to be released Working on a Dream.

Somehow, although living through the entirety of the eighties, I missed metal entirely.  How could this be?  I think it is at least partly because in the eighties I was a little only child and I had no older sibling or bad neighborhood kid to bring the likes of metal to my attention. I was accustomed to mainstream pop music and my parents’ singer/songwriters and soft rock.  In sixth grade, a friend of mine, whose dad was a DJ for the classic rock station Z-93, got me to start listening to Rush and Led Zeppelin, and at that point I thought I really had hit the hard stuff.  As an early teenager I found much of my favorite music in the grunge and alternative of bands like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, and later, Radiohead.  The rhetoric of music writing at the time informed me that Nirvana and Pearl Jam had killed metal, and pointed back repeatedly to indie and punk bands of the eighties as their forebears.  Subsequent quests into the roots and branches of that music led me ever deeper into this world of indie music, comprising styles to which anything resembling metal seemed (upon a shallow look) anathema.  Metal seemed to be a genre of has-been guys with big hair, make up and bad come-on lines screeched in falsetto; meanwhile I was checking out Sonic Youth.  It’s interesting to me to realize now that I’ve spent my whole musical life tiptoeing around metal: I’ve listened to my share of classic hard rock, progressive rock, grunge, punk, post-punk, and post-hardcore, pretty much every single genre that borders on metal, without ever actually listening to metal.

My metal ignorance officially begins to end today.  For several months I’ve been curious about Death Magnetic, the Metallica album released this year.  I’ve heard a track or two on the radio, I read an article about the controversy of Rick Rubin’s superloud production on the disc, and I’ve wanted to hear it, but not badly enough to just go buy it.  Just last night a copy came into my hands, courtesy of my lovely and indulging librarian wife.  I feel that my 28 years virtually metal-free now place me in the unique position to be able to listen to Death Magnetic with ears somewhat fresh to both an extremely popular band and the genre as a whole.

So, what are Metallica on about in Death Magnetic?  Death, obviously.  Certainly not a new subject, it being a special source of inspiration and fear for composers and poets over the centuries.  But this is no “gather ye rosebuds while ye may;” rather, it is expressed in sentiments such as “choke the clock / steal another day,” and this touching quatrain:

Claustrophobic
Crawl out of this skin
Heart explosive
Reach in, pull that pin

James Hetfield sings as though his entire life has been filled with deathmatches in the coliseum and heinous, paralyzing car wrecks of twisted steel from which he was only freed by the jaws of life.  A perusal of the Metallica band biography does in fact reveal that they suffered a horrific bus accident in the late 80s, in which one of the original band members died.  This is a reality that provides a fair amount of credibility for some of this imagery.  “Jaws of Life,” in fact, would make an excellent title for a Metalllica song, but, unfortunately, it’s not featured here.  We are, nonetheless, treated with anthems and diatribes such as “All Nightmare Long,” “Broken, Beat & Scarred,” and “My Apocalypse.”

It’s just a little bit ironic to me that such dismal lyrics and titles are paired with music that is so full of energy and life, and yes, maybe just a little anger, too.  The musicianship is impeccable; there are guitar solos and tempo changes all over the place, lots of great riffs that aren’t overused, and in case you are even less familiar with the fundamentals of this type of metal music than I am, I should mention that they play very fast. The production is loud, muscular and clean (and by clean I mean no reverb or bombastic echoes), which is exactly as it should be to highlight playing of this precision.

Sonically, this band is far from death, which has made me realize that, rather than death, the songs are about the struggle to survive through life’s challenges, and I guess to a certain extent, the struggle to want to stay alive.  It’s a very common theme expressed in extremely dramatic fashion:  “Luck. Runs. Out. / Crawl from the wreckage one more time.”  I have to say I am somewhat impressed with Metallica, and am desirous to listen in on their back catalogue in more detail.  So far, my only regret or criticism concerning my foray into metal is that there aren’t more musicians willing to put this kind of strength, energy and ferocity into music that is not just about surviving life, but expressing the fun, joy and beauty of life.  In other words, why don’t more people play loud and fast and happy? Blah, blah, blah.  And now, I will try Fleet Foxes, who I have ignored until now mainly because of the hype.

[This "metal" experiment springs out of an attempt to fulfill my current end-of-the-year goal to catch up on 2008 albums that, for whatever reasons (busyness, ignorance, and an initial negative reaction to hype being the three primary ones), I haven't yet given a chance.]

Years ago I had a musical pining (one among many; I should probably verbalize and codify all of these sometime) for guitar that sounded like neon.  That is the simplest way I know to describe it.  Vibrant, loud, pulsating, humming with a palpable electric energy, intensely clean and clear.  It’s been in my head all this time, and although occasionally I have heard glimpses and allusions to my imaginary timbre, its full actualization has forever eluded my ears.  At times I have entertained the possibility of trying to take up electric pedal or lap steel, for, among other reasons, I thought it might be the instrument best suited for me to eventually obtain my Disneyland electrical light parade fireworks star wars light saber hyperspace sound.  Haven’t gotten very far on that one so far, but I’m not dead yet.

Last night I was on emusic.com and on a whim I downloaded an album by one Marnie Stern, after hearing a few seconds of clips.  By all extraneous indications, this album does not appear very exciting.  The cover art looks a lot like it could be a Joni Mitchell album. (Nothing against Joni, I love her music.)  Marnie Stern isn’t exactly a name that screams out “Rock Goddess.”  But all of this melts away in fervent heat when you press play, as I did when I got home from work today.  No one else was here to confirm or deny, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a constant smile on my face while loading and unloading the dishwasher, as I did today, listening to the album two times straight through.  Marnie pretty much stole my neon sound (well, at least one aspect of it), but I’m not mad because she’s done so well with it, adding layers of overdubbed joyous vocals to her songs and finding a totally kickass drummer that is in all ways equal to her enthusiasm and stratospheric shredding.  In order to prove my unspoken sonic theories she has called forth a frenetic calculus of rock and roll exultation.  I’m just proud to have been such an important influence upon her music.

Of course I make this post all about me and my overly baroque writing, but still you must hear a track.  Her record label is offering a  gratuitous mp3 of a great one, entitled “Transformer,” a line of which provided this post its title.  Enjoy.

This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That

by Marnie Stern

Released by the label Kill Rock Stars on October 7, 2008.

I don’t know the name of the drummer because I just have an mp3 version, but I can find out.