Best of 2010
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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.