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top ten of 2003
1. Matmos, The Civil War
This album continues Matmos' project of marrying unorthodox sounds and electronic noise to house-music beats. This formula has always been appealing, but it's the thematic underpinnings here that drive this album to greatness. Matmos has never been shy about using themes which reflect their fractured take on the zeitgeist, but an album centered around a set of military marches feels uniquely relevant in a year marked by cynical military action abroad and the redoubling of the battle lines drawn here at home. Soundtrack for a peace march? Dance music for colonial queers? Yes. Oh, my, yes. On Matador.
2. The Books, The Lemon of Pink
The Books came onto my radar last year, with their attention-getting (yet spotty) debut Thought For Food, built around a palette of cello, acoustic guitar, and a blizzard of samples. They've stuck close to the same formula for this release, adding occasional vocals and cutting out the filler, and they've produced a masterpiece. Although these pieces defy easy description—are they songs? instrumentals? electronica? folk? non-linear documentaries?—each one somehow always manages to sound exactly right. On Tomlab.
3. Manitoba, Up In Flames
Music for omnivores. Technically "electronica," this album also merrily raids lush indie-rock leftovers out of the icebox (people who miss the era of My Bloody Valentine and the Stone Roses should take note) and even occasionally slaps some (plundered?) free jazz sax solos into the mix. Incredibly dense, candy-colored, jubilant constructions. On Leaf.
4. John Fahey, Red Cross
By the time of John Fahey's death in 2001, he had taken on something of the status of an American icon. Some of the reasons for this are cryptic and they await the eager student in their occultation. But you don't need to know anything about any of that to know that this was a man who spent his entire life playing the guitar, and when an album is released that contains the final recordings of a man who spent his entire life playing the guitar, you had better believe that that album might contain a testament of a sort that cannot be casually uttered. Compositions of an almost unearthly gravity, rife with the blackness of the grave. On Revenant.
5. ARE Weapons, s/t
In my original sidebar writeup, I called this an album full of "anthems about taking drugs, fighting, and the value of believing in yourself," and I don't know if I can describe it any better now. Occasionally reeks of the desperation of other primal electronic bands such as Suicide, but more commonly sticks to the braggadocio of early Beastie Boys. Only just when you're ready to write them off as another snotty party band, stoopid with googly-eyed O's, you can't help but detect an undercurrent of weird earnestness under it all, even sentimentality. What, exactly, is going on here? Are these songs ironic but posing as sincere? Or sincere posing as ironic? Or a little from Column A and a little from Column B? Nobody knows, but that's a little something you can ponder while you're trying to get the catchy bits out of your brain. On Rough Trade.
6. Various Artists, Wooden Guitar
I usually try to resist putting various-artist compilations on my top ten list, but this one is curated by the exceptionally insightful Dawson Prater of Locust Music, which is rapidly emerging as one of the most interesting labels of the moment. Mr. Prater has selected four important guitarists to contribute long-form acoustic improvisations for this project: Steffen Basho-Junghans, who has been charting out a startlingly new vocabularly for the guitar over the last several years; Jack Rose, who is looking more and more like the heir to the Fahey "mystic Americana" mantle; Sir Richard Bishop, who contributes an arabesque-riddled set that will satisfy fans of his Sun City Girls work; and Japan-improv king Tetzumi Akiyama, who here charts an excursion into the Void. Each individual piece is excellent, and, taken together, they serve as a snapshot of a vital new genre (free folk? deltadelica?). On Locust.
7. The Black Mountain Music Project, Songs From the Black Mountain Music Project
This album, made by indie chanteuse Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Mobilivre-Bookmobile maven Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and a cast of assorted extras during a month out in rural North Carolina, focuses on the (joyous) process of music-making rather than the finished product, and, in doing so, reconceptualizes the very concept of The Album, opens up the door to thinking about an album as a collaborative scrapbook; an arrangement of mementos of intimate time spent together. During its one month of existence, the Black Mountain Music Project successfully completed some lovely songs ("While We Have the Sun" is my pick for Song of the Year), but even the field recordings and other sonic oddments that round out the record serve their purpose: evoking the beauties of the rural environment and an overall ambience of anything-goes creativity. On K.
8. Fennesz, Live In Japan
Fennesz's great talent lies in being able make music that's twenty minutes into the future while still somehow keeping an eye on the tattering grandeur of the past. This album showcases that talent uniquely, as Fennesz spends a great deal of this set disassembling his own back catalogue (clippings from Endless Summer and Field Recordings crop up) and arc-welding the resultant fragments into exciting new shapes. One could say that this is what we all want from a live set: something familiar, presented in a form that reasserts its absolute relevance. On Headz.
9. Rafael Toral, Electric Babyland / Lullabies
Toral is a master of the drone—his Wave Field and Cyclorama Lift pieces are indispensible—but he is also a masterful self-reinventor, revising or deeping his palette of choice from one album to the next. The palette for the five Electric Babyland tracks on this disc—processed music-box—is a new one for Toral but he makes characteristic magic from it. Then he follows these with the three Lullabies pieces, which pair up the music box textures with the sparse guitar melodies and ambient hum which are foundational to some of Toral's other (exemplary) work. On Tomlab.
10. The White Stripes, Elephant
A guilty pleasure, I suppose, but I can't help but be won over by the way Jack White's persona toggles between two incompatible modes: laddish schoolboy and mouthy devil. (Only the latter is capital-R Rawk, true, but don't deny the other its tradition, which at its best looks like Ray Davies or the early Beatles and at its worst looks like the Monkees.) Throw in Meg White's mawkishly loveable "Cold, Cold Night" and an assload of honky blues hooks and I'm a believer. On V2.
all from 2003 >>
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