In the midst of wading knee-deep through 'Best of 2013...' lists in a variety of journalistic outflow-pipes (brilliantly lampooned in that Vice article) I tried to do a bit of year-end stocktaking of my own. To be absolutely nakedly honest, I've felt that despite listening to a plenty of good music that I loved, 2013 seems very slightly disappointing, in so far as I feel I ended up with a cart-load of albums that I loved, but just not as hard as whatever came just before them. Maybe that's absolutely going to be always the case: you hear an album, love it because it's like nothing else you've heard or feels just new in some shiny undefinable way, and then the next album comes along and somewhere somehow, when you're expecting the band or whoever to give you the self-same music-buzz all over again, you've succeeded in jading your ear canals to their sound and you manage to sabotage their hard work and best efforts and inadvertently create a let down for yourself. So, although maybe I blame myself for this, 2013 just felt like it gave me a lot of albums that I liked but didn't love, and which caused me to go back and re-enjoy earlier work. Of all I listened to, only Mount Kimbie, John Grant, James Blake, and Phosphorescent put out albums that seemed appreciably better than earlier work. In contrast, the list of albums this year that I loved, but didn't love as much as their predecessors, is much longer: Wolf People and Wooden Shjips I mentioned in the previous post, but they were joined by Washed Out, BoC, Gold Panda, Forest Swords, Nathaniel Rateliff, Polica, and Jon Hopkins (in addition, Goldfrapp's Tales of Us was appreciably better than Head First, but still shy of Felt Mountain/Black Cherry/Seventh Tree-brilliance, and the Laura Marling album was better than the last one but not as good as the one before that). All of those albums I loved, I just didn't love them as much as I'd hoped I would: oh the joys of the relentless disappointment-engine that runs between our ears. Anyway, back to the new-music-recommendation. I had a pretty shit year, and at the darker times I spent lots of the late summer listening to the Phosphorescent album, and it made me feel like I was getting better (and, as a by-the-by, it somehow significantly contributed to the decision to grow my hair long again, whatever that means). The three tracks below from Muchacho speak of the joy of lust (Ride On / Right On), the misery of love (Song for Zula), and, I don't know, the wonderment of existence? (A Charm, A Blade).
If our blog does nothing else, it has given me Phosphorescent, which I feel scratch an itch that so many bands have almost but not quite managed to scratch for me, including the Black Angels and the Black Keys, neither of which are that close to Phosphorescent but both of which are close in the sense of what I was looking for from them.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes doubt my own evaluations of these now/earlier comparisons, because it seems to depend so much on exactly when one tunes in. I love the new Forest Swords album so much more than the previous one--which I was so "meh" about I didn't even buy it--but I'd never heard the previous one, and I had such an intense experience discovering him, falling in love with the album over an afternoon, and then seeing him two days later.
For me the biggest measure of this dynamic is PJ Harvey. So many of her albums are arguably her best, and the one people will argue to the death for is so often the one they heard at just the right time in their lives, when everything gelled just so and PJ spoke to their exact moment.