Here’s Penelope Spheeris’s seminal Hardcore documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization, in its entireity, live on the Internet. Don’t say I don’t give you anything.

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Prurient – Bermuda Drain – Full Album Stream

Oh Onion AV club, you do know that once you put an ‘exclusive’ on to the internet it stops being exclusive, right? That’s why I’ve gone and embedded the highly-exclusive exclusive of Prurient’s new, maybe final, album Bermuda Drain in to this post.
It was, what? A year ago since ‘Minimal Wave’ (or ‘Cold Wave’ or ‘Dark Wave’) was dug up from the crates and reintroduced as a lost musical genre, strangely familiar (through Depeche Mode, early Human League) and yet coldly alien. Prurient seems to have learnt the language of Minimal Wave and is now applying it to Power Electronics, Bermuda Drain and his work with Cold Cave are the result.

Prurient – Bermuda Drain by TheAVClub

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Death Grips, Ex Military – the best rap album of 2011

Death Grips – Exmilitary by deathgrips

Odd Future had to have an equal and opposite reaction, so here it is: Death Grips. The way their album Ex Military (available for free above) has been released so quickly after Goblin seems almost cruel, like they’re only allowing Tyler, the Creator a couple of months on top of the game before snatching his crown. MC Ride isn’t as skilled a rapper as Tyler, and neither can match OFWGKTA’s Ace-in-the-detention-facility Earl Sweatshirt (that kid can fuckin’ rap), but Ride is bellowing like a dying Auroch over what sounds like Wolf Eyes with a beat one minute, Dalek the next and a broken-down, used up Girl Talk on minute three. Death Grips are willing to be much uglier than Odd Future- for all his rape-raps, Tyler can still sign to the same label as Adele, Vampire Weekend and Weezer. We’ll let anyone in to the clubhouse providing they make the requisite gestures towards inauthenticity on one level (the “it’s fucking fiction” disclaimer on Radicals) and pop-psychology on another (Tyler is screwed up because his daddy was never around.) It’s more radical to embrace ugliness because it’s just there, because drugs feel good and violence makes you a big man. One of the more subversive acts I’ve seen on film recently was Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight offerring multiple ‘origin stories’ to explain his scars and his psychopathy- the message being that sometimes there’s no mummy and daddy gunned down in an alley to explain why a crazy person does crazy things. Tyler says that black males need strong role models, Ride says that he won’t share his drugs with anyone but aliens. You can guess who gets the New York Times profile and who gets to wake up every morning to drag himself to work because he didn’t make a cent off one of the best rap albums released this year.

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Revenge of the other 99% of Humanity

Arthur Miller once said that an era can be said to have ended when its basic illusions are exhausted. I would like to posit two things- that the current era will end once people stop listening to bloodless Italo-disco electro-pop and start listening to bands as grandiose, reverential and human as WU LYF, the World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation. Their new video for ‘LYF’ is above and you can find my personal favorite song of their’s, ‘Heavy Pop’ Secondly, that Vanity Fair is writing articles like this:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Read more at Vanity Fair.

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Psuedo-conservatism and post rock, together at last.

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The Guardian’s New Band of the Day 2010 playlist rides the Chill Waves

New Band Of The Day – Best of 2010

This is something of an odd best-of, since two of the artists that Guardian writer Paul Lester wanted to appear on the list, Drake and Nicki Minaj, refused to allow him their work. Pro tip Mr. Lester: poor is the man whose pleasures depend upon the consent of another. Despite the ommissions it all hangs together quite well- certainly it is more thematically consistent than my own attempt at a best-of (here). This may reflect differing epistemological approaches- positivist, Enlightenment systems-making versus poststructuralist anti-ontology. Or perhaps I just can’t get over how you could put Woodbine’s 2000 song ‘Mound of Venus‘ on to this playlist and nobody would notice.

More at The Guardian

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Click the image to download. Use Winrar to unzip.

It’s done: a comprehensive survey of the relevant musical recordings of the Jan 2010-Dec 2010 period so that future historians can look back and hear the sounds that had us all shaking our leg-warmers in the disco-clubs.
I didn’t go with a ‘cut’ (or is it ‘joint’? I can never tell. Rap is hard.) from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It was, as Pitchfork pointed out, a very good record, a career best, but I’m sure that anybody who would appreciate it has heard it already.

The track list is as follows:

Swans – You Fucking People Make Me Sick
Xasthur – Broken Glass Christening
High On Fire – Bastard Samurai
Earl Sweatshirt – Earl
Deerhunter – Desire Lines
The Body – Lathspell I Name You
WU LYF – Heavy Pop
Alcest – Percees de Lumiere
Tennis – Marathon
Zola Jesus – Run Me Out
Das Racist – Ek Shaneesh
Amanda Palmer – Idioteque
Wrnlrd – Death Drive
Gonjasufi – She Gone
Salem – Killer
Agalloch – To Drown

The last song is significant not only in allowing me to close the album with enough grandeur and majesty to reanimate Richard Wagner, but because Agalloch’s The Marrow of the Spirit is my Album of the Year. Yay.
With Marrow Portland Oregon’s Agalloch have pulled off the difficult feat of releasing the greatest album of their career fifteen years after the band formed. Try to envisage MGMT or Vampire Weekend’s magnum opus arriving in 2022 and you’ll see the magnitude of Don Anderson, John Haughm, Jason William Walton and Aesop Dekker’s achievement. It is fitting that a band who are so heavily influenced by nature would obey nature’s rhythms as opposed to those of the music industry. Like the songs on Marrow, the shortest of which is nine minutes and forty seconds if you don’t count the album’s intro, Agalloch have grown and evolved. This is not to say that their first real album, 1999′s Pale Folklore is by any means primitive- Agalloch are not Ulver, who started out as folk-influenced Black Metal and ended up in unclassifiable electronic weirdness by way of a two disc William Blake inspired concept album, or that they have mellowed with age- Into the Painted Grey from Marrow is closer to Black Metal than anything they have recorded previously. Their progression has been, appropriately, organic.
They aren’t just getting this accolade for releasing a career best album- Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest is their finest recording to date, Malefic closed the books on his Xasthur project and said goodbye to metal with a record that will be hard to top no matter which genre he uses next. The Marrow of the Spirit would be the best album released this year if it was a debut by a previously unknown cadre of mountain-men who had just wandered down from the Cascades covered in mud and deer gibbets. As with any great piece of art its greatness is multi-dimensional, but I would like to venture something: part of what makes it great is that it is accessible. This term is almost prejorative when discussing music, one step away from ‘pandering’, and there is often an undertone of dissapointment when a beloved band release an album that could be described as ‘accessible’. Imagine if Radiohead’s next album was written primarily as a jumping-on point for teenagers who missed out on The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. Marrow will appeal to many people who wouldn’t normally listen to Black Metal, though I doubt your kid sister is going to make the jump from Ke$ha based on the mournful minor-key acoustic strumming in The Watcher’s Monolith.
There are people out there for whom The Marrow of the Spirit will be the first Black Metal album that they will hear. Looking through the rest of the Black Metal genre they will find genuine progress being made by a few outsiders and a deluge of Mayhem cover bands staffed by fascist lunkheads. The few of them who start bands will bring what they learned from Agalloch with them whether their musical is explicitly metal or another genre (indie-rock is in serious need of blackening). Music will get a little bit better for The Marrow of the Spirit being made.

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Gnaw Their Tongues – Le Chant De La Mort Triomphante (with bonus awful Dimmu Borgir video!)

I’m busy putting together a Best of 2010 compilation and realizing that a lot of great music will have to be cut if I’m going to keep it all under ninety minutes. Then there’s the question of including something from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy- should my remit be to simply list the best releases of the past 365 days or show that there were amazing things happening in places you wouldn’t expect? Does Girl Talk count? What about covers? Why can’t I just give the 1-9 spots to Agalloch and make everyone else joint 10th?
Gnaw Their Tongues didn’t make the cut, so I’m putting them here. Gnaw’ is Netherlander Maurice de Jong and what sounds like every symphony orchestra in the western world. 2010 has seen more neoclassical elements work their way into black metal than in the past decade. Every corpse-painted misanthrope and his goat is getting a cellist into their parents’ basement to lay down mournful soundscapes. As with any sudden bandwagon jump there is bound to be more music produced simply to be part of a trend rather than in reverence of the artistic impulses that started that trend (I’m looking at you every single bedroom Witch House producer on Soundcloud). GTT has been doing this a lot longer than most and a lot better than almost anybody. Looking at you Dimmu Borgir. Because you are the worst. Evidence below.

According to Wikipedia that wasn’t Robyn doing the female vocals in that video, but you can’t really believe a source that can be edited by just anybody so I’m going to assume that it was. Also, I’d much rather look at grainy static images of an album cover (even that Scorpions album with the naked ten year old) than pretentious Kerrang! TV fodder. On a more positive note, I would be very happy if I got a Squid Crown for Christmas.

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The Weight of Darkness – Agalloch’s The Marrow of the Spirit

“The initial point of departure for this album was cinema,” says Agalloch bassist Jason William Walton. “We had a specific feel, imagery and pace that we communicated with each other through cinematic references long before musical references. That has long been the case, but much more so with this album.”

Reflecting on the majestic, 65-and-a-half-minute journey on Agalloch’s fourth full-length album Marrow of the Spirits, one can’t help but feel that it’s been as much a cinematic experience as much as a musical one. The Portland, Oregon band has always created grand, sweeping sonic landscapes over the course of their career, but there’s something about the new record that feels like it could lend itself brilliantly to the visual imagery of, say, Alejandro Jodorowsky or Werner Hezog. From the subdued overture of “They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness”, to the vast, epic overtones of “Black Lake Nidstång”, to the striking climax of “To Drown”, Marrow of the Spirits would practically beg for a visual complement were it not already powerful enough for the listener to conjure mental images on his or her own.

“It wasn’t until we told [Steven Wray Lobdell, producer] that we were thinking of the album as a film that he understood immediately what we were often trying to do,” adds guitarist Don Anderson. “Strange how a medium that is purely visual can communicate so perfectly. We would regularly reference Sergio Leone, or Bergman and everyone seemed to instantly know the necessary mood.”

More at Popmatters.

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Marissa Nadler – The Sun Always Reminds Me of You

Working with Xasthur seems to have done terrible things to sweet, innocent folk chanteusse Marissa Nadler’s mind. Sure, her music has always been a little bleak, but giant cat heads eating goats and vomiting blood? That’s Malefic’s baleful influence. You can donate to her Kickstarter Project to help her album get made, and hopefully cheer her up.

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