6. The Weeknd - House of Balloons / Thursday / Echoes of Silence Genre: R&B
House of Balloons
1. High for This (4:09) 2. What You Need (3:26) 3. House of Balloons / Glass Table Girls (6:47) 4. The Morning (5:14) 5. Wicked Games (5:25) 6. The Party & The After Party (7:40) 7. Coming Down (4:55) 8. Loft Music (6:03)) 9. The Knowing (5:57) Thursday
1. Lonely Star (5:48) 2. Life of the Party (4:56) 3. Thursday (5:19) 4. The Zone (6:57) 5. The Birds Part 1 (3:34) 6. The Birds Part 2 (5:50) 7. Rolling Stone (3:50) 8. Gone (8:06) 9. Heaven or Las Vegas (5:56)
Echoes of Silence
1. D.D. (4:34) 2. Montreal (4:11) 3. Outside (4:19) 4. XO / The Host (7:24) 5. Initiation (4:21)) 6. Same Old Song (5:12) 7. The Fall (5:46) 8. Next (6:02) 9. Echoes of Silence (4:00)
Don't you leave my little life...
There is a four word album review on Rate Your Music which perfectly encapsulates the meteoric rise of Abel Tesfaye and The Weeknd. Interestingly, it's not even for one of his releases, but rather the overlooked 1977 by Terius Nash. The twist, of course, is that Terius Nash is in fact the birth name of The-Dream, writer of smash hits like Umbrella and Single Ladies, and easily the most acclaimed R&B songwriter of recent years. The review in question was a positive one, but it was the phrasing that struck me:
"Abel must be scared."
That review was written in August 2011, just after Tesfaye's second free mixtape had been released (to a somewhat underwhelming reception, at that) on the internet. That review was written in August 2011, two months after Tesfaye turned 21. That review was written in August 2011. Abel Tesfaye released his first music ever in March.
The truly frightening thing about that review, though, was that it was a fairly legitimate comment. House of Balloons had utterly taken the internet by storm upon its release early last year. And when Drake co-signed the guy on twitter a month or so later, the mainstream publications were alerted. The reclusive Tesfaye, out of nowhere, had somehow become the hottest man in pop music.
On the strength of House of Balloons, he absolutely deserved it too. The immediate touchpoints were its seemless incorporation of eerie dubstep backdrops and Tesfaye's subversive and illusion-destroying first-person lyrics about the depravity and blandness of the party lifestyle, along with the eye-catching indie rock samples on a track or two. But what stands out in hindsight is just how many brilliant pop songs that record has. By my count, seven of House of Balloons' nine tracks are great, and only one of those - the admittedly phenomenal Loft Music - showcases any of the soundscaping and musical abstraction more prominent on his later releases. That's far from a bad thing, though; these days, the relative regularity of a Weeknd song like The Morning carries an endearing and almost nostalgic quality.
From the minute the Weeknd's web page became active, though, the focus was never solely on House of Balloons. A minimal banner at the top stated merely "House of Balloons - Thursdays - Echoes of Silence." Tesfaye's twitter feed said the same not long after. No one was quite sure what these things were, but both that and the depth of Tesfaye's ambition were cleared up when Thursday arrived amidst a tsunami of hype in the middle of August.
And a lot of people were disappointed. Certainly, very few preferred it to House of Balloons. And it's fairly easy to see why. For a start, it exists on an entirely different atmospheric plane. The shift between the albums is almost comparable to the depression vector on The Cure's Disintegration; sure, to drag this analogy way too far, House of Balloons had its share of Plainsong-style laments, but Thursday consists almost entirely of The Same Deep Water As You dirges and extended Homesick instrumentals. Pretty much the only song on Thursday on which Tesfaye even tries to defend his pop songcraft title is Rolling Stone, an R&B song with an instrumental backing consisting solely of an acoustic guitar loop and a backwards distorted guitar squall repeated ad nauseum. That such a song works on any level is remarkable; that all that manages to somehow enhance the mood is patently ridiculous. However, there's another reason why people didn't take to Thursday as much as House of Balloons - it simply isn't as good. I'm all for The Weeknd experimenting with song structure and what R&B can be, but there are too many songs on Thursday that just don't work. Life of the Party tries to balance a horrendous bootleg Neurosis sludge riff and a dub reggae beat, and the conclusion "like a mattress on a bottle of wine" would be generous. Meanwhile, Gone and the title track are a combined thirteen minutes of essentially nothing. They don't detract from the atmosphere as such, but if there are songs in either of those tracks they certainly haven't made themselves known to me yet. But that's not to diminish how good Thursday is. If I had ranked the albums separately, House of Balloons would have cracked the top ten, but Thursday might well have sneaked on the lower region of this list too.
Echoes of Silence would be somewhere in the middle. In some ways, it's just as much of a mood piece as its immediate predecessor, but in a far more approachable sense. The vibe of Echoes of Silence is effectively that of film noir, and the sound brings more trip-hop and traditional balladeer elements into The Weeknd's sound than the previous two albums. It's certainly the most nocturnal of the three. It's also easily the most well crafted; almost every track flows seamlessly into the next, there are numerous lyrical callbacks between tracks, and the centerpiece triptych of XO / The Host / Initiation shamelessly beats The-Dream, master of R&B suites, at his own game. Of the three albums, I probably have the least to say about Echoes of Silence, but that's just because it's so ludicrously consistent and perfectly paced that it's a critic's nightmare. The emergence of the piano for the final two tracks, though, is just an absolute revelation, and it would be wrong not to give special mention to Initiation, though, which is almost certainly the most depraved and outright malevolent R&B song I've ever heard. For it to be based around the same seemingly innocent lyric that dominates the dreamy, almost Talk Talk-esque The Host is just a cruel manipulation of the listener's conscience. Bravo, Abel. Bravo.
It's incredibly difficult to know where to rank these three albums. As I mentioned above, 6th is higher than any of the individual albums would have landed separately, but I think that's only fair; they complement each other wonderfully. The real thing I'm having trouble justifying is why they're not even higher; Tesfaye was responsible for more great music last year than anyone else, and I voted The Weeknd as 2011 artist of the year in every magazine reader's poll I saw.
In all honesty, though, I don't think the order really matters at this point. All of these albums are utterly phenomenal, and quite frankly if you don't listen to them it's your own damn loss.
Great stuff. I haven't got around to listening to Echoes of Silence but I'm excited.
Also, how do you pronounce The Weeknd? I never gave it much thought and just said it like it's the weekend but some of my other music friends think it's supposed to be like weakened.
-- Menji~ by Ctrl-Alt-Del http://img.imgcake.com/menjipngre.png
- Seg: I can understand Oneirology, but calling out 50 Words for Snow surprised me. Contrived I could see, conceivably, but corny seems way too far. You really not get anything out of the musical side of things?
Eh, I can see where she achieves Talk Talk's space and use of silence but none of the sudden dynamic gusto. You know that harmonica solo in The Rainbow? Probably the most affecting harmonica solo or quite possibly any solo of all time? Kate Bush never hits that extra level of power. The music is pretty, but combined with heartfelt singing about loving some snowman and him melting being a metaphor for some guy either falling for her or leaving her ass I can't tell which? That is straight up corny. She's got a great voice, though.
Ugh, I don't know if Bohren are on this list, but I was just listening to Sunset Mission and was reminded of the reason I was turned off that album in the first place-- it's an ambient jazz album and there're compression artifacts on it. Totally kills the (admittedly awesome) mood.
Also, how do you pronounce The Weeknd? I never gave it much thought and just said it like it's the weekend but some of my other music friends think it's supposed to be like weakened.
Reading this irritated me twofold! Firstly, cos I totally meant to talk about it in the write-up and forgot - I see the dropping of the second e as masterfully subtle wordplay. And secondly, because I hadn't seen anyone draw the "weakened" connection before and thought I was some kind of genius for noticing it.
But yeah. I'd pronounce it weekend, but I think that the "weakened" allusion is definitely in there on purpose.
Ugh, I don't know if Bohren are on this list, but I was just listening to Sunset Mission and was reminded of the reason I was turned off that album in the first place-- it's an ambient jazz album and there're compression artifacts on it. Totally kills the (admittedly awesome) mood.
Bohren aren't on this list, sadly. I don't like writing off such a wonderful band so casually, but I think they've lost a bit of their spark. Dolores was a good album, but it felt like a bit of a retread, and Beileid is just straight up mediocre outside of the title track. I love love loved their Mitleid Lady EP, though (that guitar), so there might be hope there still.
And yeah, the atmosphere of Sunset Mission is a tiny bit artificial compared to Black Earth or Geisterfaust, but I still prefer it to the former cos the tunes are all so good. Have you heard Geisterfaust? It seems to be the album on which most people start tracking Bohren's decline, but I think it's an absolute masterstroke and the pinnacle of their art. It's ludicrously inaccessible, but I've never heard anything even remotely like it in my life.
5. Tangled Thoughts of Leaving - Deaden the Fields Genre: Post-Rock, Experimental Rock
1. Landmarks (17:20) 2. Throw Us to the Wind (8:40)) 3. ...And Sever Us From the Present (4:15) 4. Deep Rivers Run Quiet (11:12) 5. Deaden the Fields (6:12) 6. They Found My Skull in the Nest of a Bird (14:17)
As I mentioned back in the Tunnel Blanket review, I have a bit of a beaten spouse-style relationship with post-rock. I pretend I look upon the scene with great disdain, and I genuinely do dislike a good 95% or so of music categorized under that label, but when I come upon an interesting looking album, a post-rock tag will only entice me all the more. After all, the implication it carries is one of companionship with Talk Talk, with GY!BE. I would be an utter fool to dismiss such kin of greatness, right?
Alas, such reasoning almost always leaves me deflated and sad when I hear themusic itself. While I spoke the truth saying Deaden the Fields is the best instrumental rock album in over a decade, in actuality that sounds like a far more impressive achievement than it really is. I certainly didn't discover it in any atypical way, either; it was not birthed on a mystical mountaintop, to my knowledge, nor was its arrival on Earth heralded by the sight of a new star in the sky. I found it around three months ago on a regular trawl through the lower regions of the RYM 2011 charts, sporting the same genre tags as above (and an "Avant-Prog" secondary) and the always-promising combination of high rating and low popularity.
I was drawn in, as always. Like a sucker.
But Deaden the Fields almost single-handedly vindicates all the generic pieces of post-crap I've found through such methods and wasted my time on over the years. It's an absolute tour de force, the sort of debut album that bewilders me as to where they could possibly go next. It doesn't give me renewed hope for post-rock as such, but only because I'm fairly sure the average post-rock band don't even possess the talent or ambition to rip this off, never mind build on it.
The first few times I listened to Deaden the Fields, I couldn't decide whether the decision to open the album with Landmarks was brave or just outrageously stupid. Seventeen minutes long, the song sounds like some sort of impossible hybrid of Kayo Dot's Choirs of the Eye and Jaga Jazzist's A Livingroom Hush (complete with Kashiwa Daisuke glitches) and takes almost ten minutes to reach any sort of rhythm. The title feels cynically appropriate, if only because Landmarks initially seems like a harried, touristy trip through every sound Tangled Thoughts of Leaving are capable of, with scant regard for the track's cohesion or musical sense.
With hindsight and appreciation for the album as a whole, however, it seems like not only a sensible but an inspired decision. For an hour-plus album essentially consisting of four songs (...And Sever Us from the Present and the title track are essentially calming codas of the previous tracks allowing the listener to recuperate after their fallout), Deaden the Fields is constructed in a masterful way. The album starts bats*** insane, and, on a pretty consistent gradient, becomes more and more comprehensible as it continues. By the second half of the record, you're essentially listening to Tangled Thoughts' personal spin on an established post-rock template.
But that's in no way a bad thing. Not only is the band's formation, with piano as the lead instrument, almost entirely unique in the genre, they're simply much better at it than pretty much everyone else. For a start, they're an absolutely fantastic musical unit. I hesitate to call Deaden the Fields a "technical" album, given the horrendous implications of such a term, but Tangled Thoughts' are more akin to a jazz trio than a rock band in terms of talent and tightness. Large swathes of the album regularly fool me into thinking I'm listening to some parallel universe version of The Necks. Seriously, in the least gratuitous way possible, some of the stuff the piano work in particular here is amazing.
On top of that, their songwriting is also just way more interesting than most. Even when they base their compositions on the post-rock template, as on the last two epics, their heavy jazz influence and often mind-bogglingly complex compositional style lead them to an entirely unique sound. The "downtime" between the two main builds of Deep Rivers Run Quiet, for instance, is probably the most intense section of the entire song, with distorted guitar squalls jostling for position with straight up noise. When the foreboding post-punk bassline of the final section emerges from the rubble, the sign of actual music is almost a disappointment. And the calm before They Found My Skull in the Nest of a Bird's final storm isn't an ominous guitar arpeggio or mournful strings, but a chaotic, arhythmic drum solo, backed with sporadic Gregorian chants. Cool ****, dudes.
Sadly, I'm not sure there's a particular demographic that Tangled Thoughts' really have the potential to tap into. Their music is severed enough from the standard post-rock sound that afterthepostrock types will probably just look on in mild confusion, but utilizes enough of its tropes to attract the scorn of any hard-headed passing elitist. Ironically, my love/hate complex with the genre is probably the perfect mindset for embracing Deaden the Fields - it is of post-rock, but beholden to nothing; it forcefully drags the genre out of its complacent stasis, but never looks back to see how its peers are doing. It's an album on its own place, almost entirely without peer, and instantly carves out an almost unimitable niche for the band to build from in the future.
I quite like Deaden the Fields. Maybe you would too.
I haven't heard anything by Her Name is Calla, actually! Just looked up a few reviews and it sounds really good. Doesn't strike me especially comparable to Deaden the Fields, though. Based on those, anyway.
I'll give it a listen in the next week or so and report back.
4. Matana Roberts - Coin Coin, Chapter One: Gens des Couleur Libres Genre: Avant-Garde Jazz
1. Rise (7:27) 2. Pov Piti (7:40) 3. Song for Eulalie (8:26) 4. Kersaia (7:33) 5. Libation for Mr. Brown: Bid Em In... (9:47) 6. Lulla/Bye (5:53) 7. I Am (10:05)) 8. How Much Would You Cost? (4:18)
There will never be any pictures of me...
Serious question, guys. What's the most notable jazz album released since 1980? I ask partially because I don't feel knowledgeable enough to make an educated judgement on the matter, but I really don't think there's any obvious answer. Discounting potential clever outsider choices like Naked City, I honestly can't think past something like Buena Vista Social Club. Which is a bit sad, really.
Not that jazz is the only genre to suffer such a dramatic slump. Fickle hip-hop purists have been calling the genre "dead" for nearly a decade (and for a few years there it seemed they might have a point), and I can't remember the last real rock I album I enjoyed. But even if I find the genre hard to fully embrace, the loss of jazz as a creative and cultural force for good seems much more tragic.
Matana Roberts won't be the person to publicly reverse that decline, either. Her music is too personal, too visceral, too painful to ever resonate with any but the most adventurous of listeners. And any potential popularity seems almost like an afterthought; this is music made for pure self-catharsis, plain and simple. But as a statement in favour of the genre's continual place at the forefront of artistic expression, Coin Coin could hardly be more convincing.
You would be forgiven for any initial skepticism, though. The opener Rise is maybe the worst sort of introduction any great record can have; it's not bad by any means, and certainly sets an ominous tone pretty well, but it sounds almost exactly like something you could have heard forty years ago. Which is precisely the problem with most jazz in 2011.
But then Pov Piti hits. The underlying tension bubbles, cracks. The drone swells. And eventually, eventually... Matana Roberts screams.
I listen to enough extreme metal to be fairly desensitized to the odd scream. But Roberts' vocals here are utterly blood-curdling. The sheer pain contained in them is just unreal. I nearly fell off my bike riding home from work the first time I heard it, and even now, fifteen listens later, they send shivers down my spine, reduce me to a quivering wreck. And it's even more distressing because of the lack of real context.
Over the course of the album, things begin to become clear. Gens des Couleur Libres is a loose, high concept musical narration of the life of one of Roberts' ancestors, a woman living in the slave trade. Five of the songs here feature prominent sung, spoken or screamed vocals, and they gradually tell the tale of her birth, auction, work and emancipation. And it's never less than harrowingly told; Roberts spares no grisly detail, no horrendous memory in the telling. When she next screams her lungs out five songs later on I Am..., it all makes sense. You kinda want to scream as well.
Despite my lovely genre-oriented preamble, describing Coin Coin as jazz barely scratches the surface. Sure, jazz is the primary conduit through which Roberts unveils her vision, but the album (and the proposed twelve-part project as a whole) really encompasses the entire modern history of black music. Which makes sense, given its purpose. If the most effective way for her to achieve that was through placing a ten minute, almost entirely a cappella traditional negro Spiritual in the middle of her album, then...well, give Libation for Mr. Brown a listen.
Even when Coin Coin isn't diverging into drone, wordless chanting or mournful Silver Mt. Zion string sections, it's a fairly difficult album to get your head around. The first four songs act almost as a stream-of-consciousness half-hour suite, with very little mind paid to when individual songs begin or end. Roberts' vocals, sung, spoken and screamed, flit in and out with minimal warning. Song for Eulalie in particular makes absolutely no sense outside of the context of the album; sure, the start grooves like a motherf***er, and there's a wonderful section near the end where a bloom of Black Saint and the Sinner Lady jazz orchestration blossoms from a drone, but it's pretty much a mess from a structural perspective.
The latter half diverges from the jazz sound pretty significantly, but it never feels like the tone of the record has shifted. The heaviness of its themes and the gut-wrenching honesty of their execution make Coin Coin a genuinely difficult record to listen to, but no record this year is quite as poignant or powerful as the best moments of this one. I Am... literally forced me to stop and regroup in the middle of a supermarket once, lest I burst into tears. And I'm the least guilt-wracked white guy out there.
Seriously, if you listen to music to feel something deep within you, then you owe it to yourself to check Coin Coin out. Nothing quite compares.
Tangled Thoughts was fantastic (not post-rock by any means I wouldn't have thunk) and I'll be checking out the Matana Roberts album as well. You're definitely restoring my faith in 2011, Giggs
1. XXX (1:51) 2. Die Like a Rockstar (2:26) 3. Pac Blood (2:32) 4. Radio Song (2:22) 5. Lie4 (3:12) 6. I Will (3:16) 7. Bruiser Brigade (feat. Dopehead) (3:45) 8. Detroit 187 (feat. Chip$) (3:05) 9. Monopoly (2:45)) 10. Blunt After Blunt (3:26) 11. Outer Space (2:44) 12. Adderall Admiral (1:43) 13. DNA (2:57) 14. Nosebleeds (1:37) 15. Party All the Time (3:28) 16. EWNESW (2:23) 17. Fields (2:33) 18. Scrap or Die (3:56) 19. 30 (3:18)
...Meet the future, face to face!
I don't intend to latch on to solely the most ridiculous figures in hip-hop, but as with Action Bronson, Danny Brown is a man who I can sometimes scarcely believe exists. Everything about him seems more like some kind of comically over-stylized manga interpretation of a rapper by someone who knows very little about the genre than anyone actually of this earth. I could spend all day talking about his absurd physical appearance, from his gap teeth to his skinny jeans to his ludicrous asymmetric haircut ), or his superbly off-center personality. Even putting that aside, though, the talents that his creator imbued him with are straight up unrealistic. Simply put, in this rap game, Danny Brown is broken. And if anyone cared about the competitive aspect of the genre any more, he should probably be banned.
XXX - named in reference to Brown recently having turned thirty - is the most ceaselessly inventive rap album since Madvillainy. It's probably also no coincidence that it follows a similar template; there are nineteen songs on XXX, and not one tops four minutes. Several of my favourites are under two. There are minimal hooks on most songs, but a fair few forgo them completely and never suffer for it. It's the most clearly flawed album in this top ten, and maybe my whole list (there are three or four songs here that I genuinely don't like very much) but the record takes so many risks that it seems unfair to complain that only 80% of them work to absolute perfection.
And miraculously, they do. The diversity of both Danny himself and his chosen beats on XXX is so great that it almost feels like an impossibly cohesive retrospective compilation of a rapper's growth over the course of a twenty year career. Even as that, the development on show would be pretty noteworthy; for it to happen over the case of a single album, released only one year after Brown's debut full-length, is patently ridiculous.
There are genuinely about six mini-albums on XXX, and six Danny Browns to lead us through them. There's the crazed, drug-obsessed maniac (Die Like A Rockstar), the old school battle rap purist (Pac Blood), the impossibly aggressive gangster rap satirist (Bruiser Brigade), the unstoppable wordplay wizard (Outer Space), the moody Weeknd-esque introvert who confronts the pitfalls of his own lifestyle (Nosebleeds) and the nostalgic who solemnly describes the degradation of his hometown (Fields). And the impossible brilliance of XXX is that every single one is clearly Danny Brown. It's not even that none of it is manufactured; none of it could be - each element is too authentic and perfectly formed. In that spirit, the best tracks here totally blur those lines. On Blunt After Blunt, for instance, Brown effectively plays hype man to himself, and on the album closing 30 he casually switches cadence on almost every line to reflect his growing insanity.
30, to be blunt, might be the best hip-hop album closer ever. It's tense, it's harrowing, and it's completely untethered emotion in a way that rap rarely harnesses. In three minutes it narrates everything the final act of Goblin failed to in nearly thirty. The Metronomy-sampling beat is possibly the most intentionally disjointed piece of hip-hop I've ever heard, and the poignancy that builds as the track gradually swells is absolutely huge. By the climax Brown is straight up yelling into the microphone, and I don't think it's ever failed to send a shiver down by spine. It's almost laughable that a song that starts with the sneered line "Sent ya b**** a d*** pic and now she need glasses" turns into the best hip-hop song of the decade so far. But such is the way of Danny Brown.
Over the course of XXX it becomes increasingly clear that there's very little Brown can't do. His punchlines are outrageously funny, his social commentary is clear and incisive, and he details his drug-fueled antics with glee while never forgetting the other side of the equation. He describes himself at one point as a "smart n**** who does dumb s***," and by the end of the album neither half of that statement is at all in doubt. Best of all, his experimentation comes from a genuine innate weirdness that has probably been missing from hip-hop since Kool Keith went completely off the rails. Danny will probably make some bad albums in his time, but none of them will come from lack of authenticity or creative zeal.
His ear for beats is also utterly phenomenal. The beats here buzz, whirr, float and drone at any given moment, and their only collective feature is that they sound like they can't have been made by actual hip-hop producers. They simply sound so massively removed from any scene in hip-hop now or ever.
As I said above, though, not quite everything here works. Radio Song and Bruiser Brigade are such on-the-nose parodies that they begin to have some of the same problems as the commercial crap they mock (though the latter is partially saved by the moment Brown yells "I'M HIGHER THAN SWIZZ BEATZ' HAIRLINE"). And the end result of Danny's choice to write an entire song about cunnilingus over the album's most uneasy beat just kinda makes me queasy. When I'm not laughing, that is.
But yeah. I'm tired at this stage of writing some gushing end statement about how great these albums are. Just take one of the previous ones, and assume XXX is slightly better still.
And then go listen to it. Because it's phenomenal.
XXX was definitely something else. I can easily see it growing on me throughout the year. Really surprised that's not #1 and that leaves... that Rome album and something else for the last two spots. Not sure what it would be.
-- Menji - www.last.fm/user/menjii You got to put me on. Come on! Come on!
2. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen Genre: Ambient, Drone
1. We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year (6:19) 2. Requiem for the Static King Part One (2:46) 3. Requiem for the Static King Part Two (7:37) 4. Minuet for a Cheap Piano Number Two (3:09) 5. Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears (4:27) () 6. A Symphony Pathetique (12:42) 7. All Farewells Are Sudden (7:36
If I don't have as much to say about A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the recent collaborative album between Stars of the Lid's Adam Waltzie and minimalist pianist Dustin O'Halloran, as I did for the albums immediately below it, that's probably because it doesn't have as much to say itself. This is an album of impeccable beauty, of stunning fragility, of almost impossible grace... but that's kinda all it is. It doesn't aspire to be any sort of sprawling opus with dramatic twists and turns, or anything so pretentious, gosh darn it. It just wants to be pretty. Which is probably the one reason I couldn't quite call it the best album of the year.
Which is a bit dumb of me, considering it's arguably the single most beautiful forty minutes of music I've ever heard. But whatever.
Sure, it's very deliberate beauty. A recent trip to Vienna confirmed my suspicious that ostentatious, overly deliberate forms of grandeur and spectacle just don't work for me, but that only applies to art lacking subtlety. And while Winged Victory certainly doesn't push many boundaries within ambient music (indeed, it sounds exactly as one might expect it to), it's certainly far from being too forthright. This, like almost all the music the two men involved have created in the past, is an album of gentle cello swells, of string drones, and of gentile piano parts draped over the top so effortlessly it's almost surprising they actually had to make this music rather than pluck it pre-formed out of the ether somehow. Musically, it basically sounds like the perfect Eluvium album that Matthew Cooper isn't quite talented enough to make, but to me it sounds like more like some reclaimed artifact than a set of new compositions; music that already existed somewhere far out at sea, or under lock and key, deep in my soul.
Stars of the Lid are never a band I think of as one of my favourite acts, but in truth that's not fair. Because, alongside possibly Natural Snow Buildings, they are the only band whose music I would genuinely attribute healing qualities to. Tired Sounds has long been my stock listen in my weakest moments, without ever really thinking about it, and I never give it credit for the tremendous power it has simply because it soothes rather than emotes.
And A Winged Victory for the Sullen has the exact same qualities, except in infinitely more digestible form. It simply makes my life ever-so-slightly better for forty minutes, regardless of context. If I'm lying in the sun reading, it turns a pleasant experience into one of ethereal tranquility. If I've had a terrible day at work, it turns my crowded bus journey home from a nightmare to a necessary evil. And if I can't sleep, it'll either change that or make my insomnia a ton more peaceful.
It's the album I've listened to most all year, and it's probably the album on this list I'd recommend most unconditionally too. A Winged Victory for the Sullen might be the best ambient album ever, but to me, at least, it's infinitely more than that.
Requiem for Dying Mothers is pretty untouchable, but I dunno. There's not a thing I would change about that album, whereas I could find fault in any SotL release if I tried to be objective about it.
That's a good album, but there's nothing as gorgeous as Requiem for Dying Mothers or Even If You're Never Awake or The Atomium or even Sun Drugs on it.
If you can't tell, I'm something of a Stars of the Lid fanboy.
I feel about Avec Laudenum the way you feel about AWVFTS, pretty much.
People that know my taste, upon seeing Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit atop this list, might be inclined to roll their eyes, proclaim it as an inevitability, and move along. And they might actually be right, but certainly not in the way they think. Because the thought of a Rome triple album didn't fill me with hype and expectation whatsoever. It filled me with complete dread. My expectations were so low I didn't even listen to this until about a week after it came out.
To this day I'm not entirely sure why. Sure, double and triple albums have a deserved reputation for inconsistency and generally being completely unnecessary, but a whole bunch of my favourite artists have put them out before and their careers were hardly derailed by the process. The fact that Reuter framed Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit as a return to the sound of his early work didn't help, though, given that it sounded (as it always does) like a conscious decision to screw his muse and appease the less open-minded part of his fanbase. Especially since his early albums are his weakest anyhow.
In any case, pretty much every fear I had proved completely and utterly unfounded. Far from sounding overstretched at two and a half hours long, Æsthetik somehow feels like the most consistently great Rome record yet. And its sound runs the gamut of Rome's discography in a wonderful way; I don't know if Reuter is even aware how strongly the more subtle influences of his recent work permeate here. If Æsthetik sounds like anything, it's some sort of career retrospective from an alternate-universe Reuter who wrote slightly different songs; he does largely the same things here as he always has, but he's matured so much as a songwriter over the years that he simply does them better this time.
The record's themes, primarily those of anarchism, revolution and overthrowing the state, are easily the most political of Reuter's work thus far. And that plays into his hands lyrically more than might be expected. The way he weaves the occasional love song into the fabric of war and uprising completely transforms the whole picture; the context lends the love songs great poignancy, and they in turn humanize the more political material. Reuter's verbosity definitely gets the better of him at times here (even the ambient interludes are crawling with spoken word manifestos and diatribes), but it's almost funny to see how he manages to carve pop songs out of the most beguiling lyrics. Take the first verse to The Merchant Fleet, for instance:
"Rise and fall in revolt, your plan endoomed, tired of inventing ruses To be more than a name on some tool, you could not refuse it All you fearful, navy souls, hiding behind moat walls You dagger, you noose; Clenched to desks, nailed to benches, tied to counters When all around us hell is breaking loose."
It's not as if this all makes sense in the song either. Reuter squeezes every word in as if his life depended on it, with little thought for rhyme or cadence. But as soon as the utterly gorgeous chorus hits, none of that matters any more. You almost have to laugh at the sheer audacity of the man.
Thus far I've been talking of Æsthetik as a single album, but its three constituent parts are very singular. A Cross of Wheat is the "war" album, all industrial drums, shouted vocals and heartbreaking battlefield ballads. A Cross of Fire seems to focus on the revolution aspect, with lots of patriotism, idealist hope and rallying cries being thrown around. And A Cross of Flowers deals with the fallout from all the ambition; people falling in love and becoming disinterested in the cause, people coming to terms with what they've done in its name, and the like. It's not a narrative, by any means, but it flows wonderfully from album to album, and each album is improved by the existence of the others.
1. Rome - Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit Genre: Neofolk, Singer-Songwriter
A Cross of Wheat
1. The Chronicles of Kronstadt (5:08) 2. The Angry Brigade (2:31) 3. The Spanish Drummer (3:32) 4. To Teach Obedience (4:09) 5. The Death of Longing (5:27) 6. Our Holy Rue (3:45) 7. The Night-Born (3:35) 8. The Pyre Glade (3:42) 9. In Cruel Fire (4:13) 10. A Pact of Blood (3:14) 11. The Merchant Fleet (4:26) 12. A Cross of Wheat (7:09) A Cross of Fire
1. The Brute Engine (5:59) 2. Seeds of Liberation (3:58) () 3. To Each His Storm (3:50) 4. Sons of Aeeth (4:14) 5. August Spies (3:22) 6. To Be Governed (2:18) 7. Families of Eden (3:35) 8. Red Years - Black Years (4:29) 9. Little Rebel Mine (4:27) 10. The Breaking Part (3:54) 11. Eagle and Serpent (2:44) 12. A Cross of Fire (9:16)
A Cross of Flowers
1. The Conquest of Violence (7:12) 2. All for Naught (5:14) 3. You Threw It at Me Like Stones (3:15) 4. Automation (4:38) () 5. Time and Tide (3:17) 6. Dawn and the Darkest Hour (3:23) 7. Years of Abalone (3:25) 8. Petrograd Waltz (4:44) 9. Disbandment (1:28) 10. Ballots and Bullets (3:12) 11. Appeal to the Slaves (4:31) 12. A Cross of Flowers (4:44)
And you will find we can't be governed...
If icon's slightly off-canon choice for the best songwriter of the last twenty years is Gillian Welch, mine is certainly Jerome Reuter. Prior to the advent of 2011, the man behind Rome had released five albums and two EPs in just five years, and not only were they all good, but they showcased an arc of musical development almost unmatched in modern folk. From the martial, post-punk influenced Nera to the noirish, florid Nos Chants Perdus, Reuter showed himself to be not just a diverse songwriter and modern poet, but one who seemed almost incapable of writing a bad song, regardless of the audacity of its musical style. By this time last year, Rome (ostensibly Reuter's solo project) had ascended to the tier of my very favourite bands.
And then something terrible happened. With no warning or explanation, Rome's myspace vanished, their official website wiped. In its place stood a dull brown backdrop sporting the ominous (yet typically eloquent) message "WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS GONE FOR GOOD." Suffice to say that I was a little distracted in work the day I found this, inwardly bawling my eyes out.
A few months later Reuter resurfaced, and, presumably after chuckling at the immense emotional distress he had caused his swooning fanbase, revealed that he had some personal stuff to deal with, and Rome was on temporary hiatus but would be back. Fair enough, I thought, and went on enjoying the other 479 bands on my iPod. By June, Rome were rolling once more, and claimed that their new album, the first in a planned trilogy, would be out before the year's end. A few months later, though, Reuter casually announced that he'd accidentally finished the other two albums in the trilogy too (as you do) and they'd all be released together instead.
This, for whatever reason, scared me absolutely s***less.
Honestly, I could talk about how wonderful an achievement this album is for days. To give some perspective, though, here are the three complaints I have with Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit
1. I'm not as clever as Jerome Reuter
As in all Rome's work, the primary language here is English. Which is nice. His tendency to include all of the languages he speaks in some form remains here too, though, and while I understand some of the French and smatterings of the German I don't quite feel like I'm getting the full experience with my limited linguistic talent, especially given the increased prominence of spoken word interludes here. A Cross of Fire is damn near ten minutes of narrative I don't understand even a bit of! And that's not even going into the Polish folk songs and Spanish war chants he samples.
Poor show, man.
2. Think before you ambient
For the most part here, the ambient interludes work wonderfully. The first real "song" on the album might take nearly eight minutes to arrive, but The Chronicles of Kronstadt and The Angry Brigade is a brilliant way to open an album, and the way The Spanish Drummer finally enters the fold is perfect. The solo violin in the A Cross of Fire opener The Brute Engine is similarly stunning. And the spoken word songs here are better than ever; I'm not sure Reuter has ever presented images as vivid as he does in The Pyre Glade and Families of Eden. It's not all great, though. On song quality alone A Cross of Flowers should be the best single album Reuter has ever made, but it's completely let down by its ambient selection. The Conquest of Violence is seven minutes of oppressive sonic void, and Time and Tide is completely worthless too. That's a fifth of the album right there, doing nothing but waste space. Not every album in the world has to have twelve tracks, Jerome! Jesus.
3. "Petrograd Waltz" is entirely in 4/4
This is just unforgivable.
Other than that, though, it's hard to find fault with Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit whatsoever. Which is utterly ridiculous when you think about it. There are a good fifteen songs here that would represent the pinnacle of most folk musicians' careers, and a number more besides that transcend any sort of folk music altogether. Treat this as three separate records, and Reuter has made three of the best five albums of his career and thrown them all into one package. Treat this as a singular work and it's not only the best thing he's ever done but comes dangerously close to defining neofolk so perfectly that everyone else might as well pack up and go home.
I'm sure he's already written his next four albums by this point, but my mortal mind at least has genuinely no idea where Reuter will go from here. But then I can say about any of the top six placing artists in this list. Æsthetik is, in all honesty, a fairly arbitrary number one; on a different day, any one of them could have landed here. When it comes down to it, though, this just feels like the most timeless; the most impressive; the most deserving. And I'm happy to go with my gut on this one.
Never heard of this dude, I'll have to check this album out for sure.
By the way, from this list I also discovered Gang Gang Dance, Nicolas Jaar and Snowman, so thanks for them! I played songs from all of them on my radio show last night.
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"It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy...let's go exploring!" - Calvin http://img.imgcake.com/calvinfinalpngpy.png
In any case I probably wouldn't start with that album, it's a bit too much to handle if you're not already a fan. Check out Flowers from Exile instead.
From: Giggsalot | #195 Not obscure at all! That really surprises me.
He's not really well known either! You can't find him on a site like Pitchfork for example, which would be my criteria for 'obscure'. His most popular album doesn't even have 1000+ ratings on RYM!
The only reason he isn't on pitchfork and the like is because neofolk hasn't yet become one of the arbitrary niche genres they periodically pretend to care about to seem hip and diverse. The only neofolk artist I've ever seen them review is Current 93, and only after he started collaborating with Antony twenty years into his career - it would pretty silly to call every band in the scene but one "obscure" on that basis. Sites like that regularly feature far more niche artists than Rome just because they happen to make atmospheric sludge metal or whatever the cool new electronic genre happens to be at the time. It's all about demographics.
Within the neofolk scene itself (which is hardly a small one), Rome are easily in the top ten best known acts. Which pretty much disqualifies them from "obscurity" out of hand, in my opinion. Obviously the average guy in the street will never have heard of them, but when you listen to as much music as you or I do you kinda need to shift the threshold or the word loses all meaning. It's like if I rated every album I liked at 10/10; if 90% of my iPod is deemed obscure, that gives no indication of the relative popularity of any of it.
), or his superbly off-center personality. Even putting that aside, though, the talents that his creator imbued him with are straight up unrealistic. Simply put, in this rap game, Danny Brown is broken. And if anyone cared about the competitive aspect of the genre any more, he should probably be banned.
