A Graves Dishonor

Polly Jean Harvey’s ability to change her musical identity from one album to the next is almost unprecedented. Most other musicians who do this usually tweak aspects of their sound while keeping an overall feeling of familiarity, but Harvey is an altogether different beast. From the blood-spattered guitar chaos of Rid of Me (1993), to the humid Delta blues of To Bring You My Love (1995), to the sweeping pop romanticism of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), it’s hard to believe that these albums were all made by the same woman. 2011’s Let England Shake is yet another about-face. Thematically, most of Harvey’s other albums have been focused primarily on her own private purgatory or paradise. Let England Shake, however, turns her gaze towards humanity’s never-ending lust for war, conflict, and the gruesome consequences that stem from it, with references to the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign of World War I. Musically, it’s often spectral and ghoulish, but it also shimmers with cold beauty, mixing the funeral brass of Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits with the ethereal soundscapes of Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins. Harvey’s vocal style careens from witchy shrieking to a more measured crooning, while her music touches on sounds that range from folk and chamber music to heavily-reverbed dream pop and shoegaze. Album highlight “Written on the Forehead” is a disquieting meditation on modern-day conflicts in the Middle East, its post-apocalyptic imagery contrasting chillingly with Harvey’s lush guitar and sweet delivery, while a sample of Niney the Observer’s reggae classic “Blood and Fire” blares in the background. In closing, PJ Harvey is quite possibly the most important female musician working today, and this is the best, most inspiring album she has made to date.

"I just know that something good is going to happen" Plenty of female songwriters and performers have had a huge influence, from Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin to Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. But Kate Bush’s influence is truly noteworthy, revealing itself in performers of multiple genres and transcending gender. Her 1978 debut single “Wuthering Heights” was a smash hit simply because it didn’t sound like anything else at the time. Bush’s albums have also mesmerized, with 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart showcasing her literary songwriting and elastic voice, and 1980’s Never for Ever showing a growing interest in experimentation and sampling. 1982’s The Dreaming was a true sea-change, far darker and denser than anything Bush had put out before. Today, it’s rightly considered one of her strongest efforts, but at the time, its obscure subject matter and often frightening soundscapes turned off the record-buying public. It’s funny then that Bush followed up her lowest-selling album with her highest-selling album, 1985’s Hounds of Love, for even though it surpassed its predecessor in commercial terms, musically, it was no less complex. The album is split into two sides; Side One, titled Hounds of Love, is a collection of five loosely related songs about love and relationships, making heavy use of the Fairlight CMI sampler and drum machines. “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” provided Bush with her first real commercial breakthrough in the United States, a swirling, sensuous ode to unrequited love with a haunting synthesizer drone and propulsive drumming. Side Two is really where Bush’s unmistakable knack for combining high-art concepts with soulful songwriting comes to the surface. Titled The Ninth Wave, it is a seven-song suite concerning a woman adrift at sea and left helpless to hallucinations and nightmares. With generous influence from Irish folk music and vast cinematic arrangements, it is alternately dazzlingly beautiful and deeply disturbing, populated by visions of drowning, witches, ghosts, outer space and, ultimately, hope. Hounds of Love has since deservedly been regarded as Kate Bush’s masterpiece, and a true gem of its decade.

"They say if you get far enough away, you’ll be on your way back home" With the exception of Bob Dylan, no other male singer-songwriter of the past 40-plus years has the same mythology surrounding him as Tom Waits. From his continually evolving musical persona to his idiosyncratic arrangements and unbelievably atmospheric voice, Waits is truly one of a kind. Following his marriage to musical partner and muse Kathleen Brennan in 1980, Waits released 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, an album that completely discarded his beat poet persona of the 70s and early 80s with its emphasis on unusual instruments and experimental music heavily inspired by Kurt Weill and Captain Beefheart. 1985’s Rain Dogs pushes this aesthetic even further; its 19 songs feature hugely disparate genres: blues, folk, jazz, instrumentals, spoken word, polka, gospel, rock and roll, pop and country music, all tied together by Waits’s incomparable voice and storytelling. A loose concept album concerning “the urban dispossessed” of New York City, Rain Dogs is filled to the brim with skewed narratives and dark imagery, with Waits’s characters rarely getting what they want. Songs like “Singapore”, “Clap Hands”, “Cemetery Polka” and the title track throw together pounding percussion with brass, jagged guitars, wheezing organs and xylophones, with Waits barking and hissing his frenzied tall tales over them. Ballads like “Hang Down Your Head”, “Blind Love” and “Downtown Train” strike an astounding balance between considerable darkness and antiquated beauty. There’s also bone-jarring rockers like the monstrous “Big Black Mariah” and “Union Square”, both featuring guitar work from Keith Richards. “Time”, the album’s definitive track, sees Waits backed by little more than guitar and a sea shanty accordion, offering a glimmer of hope amidst irretrievable loss. Rain Dogs has since been deservedly renowned as Waits’s definitive album and an unimpeachable classic.

"Sugar ‘n spikes ‘n everything nice, everything nice ‘n crazy" "You’ll like it, but you’ll have to listen to it multiple times to really get into it". Ever heard that one before? Plenty of great albums fall under this category, but if there is one album that is head and shoulders above the rest in regards to this trope, it would have to be 1969’s Trout Mask Replica. Whatever conventions that rock and roll is allegedly "supposed" to adhere to, Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band completely ignore. This album is 88 minutes and 40 seconds of pure, undiluted "I don’t give a fuck". Guitars and woodwinds wail and honk while bony drums rattle away in the distance. Beefheart rants and raves like a deranged Howlin’ Wolf. The best way to go about listening to the album is finding a way in through its ever-so-slightly more conventional blues rock songs, like "Ella Guru", "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Sugar ‘N Spikes". "Sweet Sweet Bulbs" is even a little bit pretty. But even with these slightly more approachable songs, this is the exact opposite of easy listening, and experiencing this album in full is the true definition of "mind-fuck". Nevertheless, Trout Mask Replica has proven itself to be not only Beefheart’s defining album, but a defining album for a plethora of other artists, including Tom Waits, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey and Beck. Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band made plenty of other albums that are just as amazing, not to mention a lot more accessible. But none of them are quite this wild or essential.

After coming to the conclusion in late November that My Bloody Valentine’s m b v was album of the year in my Best Albums of 2013 list, I decided to take a real listen to the albums that I had ranked behind it. My choice for the #4 spot was Shaking the Habitual, the newest release by Swedish electronic music duo The Knife, and, after giving it a full listen, it immediately secured its #1 position on my revised list. Since their self-titled debut album in 2001, and belated commercial breakthrough single “Heartbeats” in 2005, The Knife, consisting of siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olaf Dreijer, have slowly developed their chilly electropop sound. A wide range of influences often show through, with Olaf citing techno, grime and Southern hip hop as inspirations, while Karin expresses her love of acts like Kate Bush, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sonic Youth and Le Tigre, as well as a shared love of David Lynch, Korean cinema and even the Canadian mockumentary series Trailer Park Boys. This culminated in their universally acclaimed 2006 album Silent Shout, an album that, while still rooted in dance music, also added elements of dark ambient and IDM. While Olaf’s fantastically innovative atmospheres pushed the album forward, it was Karin that ultimately made their sound what it is. Her voice, often distorted and pitch-shifted Laurie Anderson-style, is at once deeply affecting and blood-curdlingly terrifying, forcing you to meet it halfway, no matter how difficult that is. In the seven year interim between Silent Shout and Shaking the Habitual, Karin released a self-titled album under the alias Fever Ray in 2009, an album that won her rabid positive reviews, and The Knife released the 2010 album Tomorrow, in a Year, in collaboration with acts Mt. Sims and Planningtorock. Based on an opera about Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, its deeply esoteric subject matter and music earned it mostly negative reviews and a muted response from even the most rabid fans. However, this newly challenging musical aesthetic most certainly led them what features on Shaking the Habitual, which is not only, in my opinion, The Knife’s masterpiece, but also the best, most ambitious, most uncompromising album of 2013. Far less accessible than Silent Shout and cutting most ties to dance music, Shaking the Habitual is a fiery, industrial carnival of ghoulish noises and unearthly moans and screeches. Much has written about the album’s deeply political lyrics, which touch on everything from feminism and genderqueer to environmentalism and structuralism. It spits venom at the institutions of the royal family and the nuclear family, as well as the clueless and irresponsible leadership on the part of both the right and left wings. It also includes four instrumental pieces; the short, noisy interludes “Crake” and “Oryx”, named after Margaret Atwood’s 2003 distopyian novel Oryx and Crake, and the two ambient drone monoliths “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized” and “Fracking Fluid Injection”. But that doesn’t mean the album is totally impenetrable. Karin’s vocal performance and Olaf’s mesmerizing soundscapes completely do away with any pretense, and the lyrics, once parsed, often reveal a wicked sense of humor; the track “Full of Fire” even paraphrases Salt-N-Pepa. In closing, no other album has sucked me in quite this thoroughly, and anyone with an inclination towards challenging, complex music needs to give Shaking the Habitual a listen right now. ALBUM OF THE FUCKING YEAR.

A song that makes me glad I'm single....it's that terrifying