#xetas

So anyway, with that caveat, music was as important as ever in my life, and maybe more so, because of the continual flood of unbelievable, awful, comically evil events on the world stage. We somehow seem to have elected Voldemort as president, a sex-abusing, corrupt, traitorous idiot, who will not shut up even for an instant, despite having a vocabulary of approximately 20 words. So turn it up, drown it out, take it away…the music remained very good this year, even when nothing else did.

It was a year when Michael Chapman made one of his best records ever, 50 years into his career, and backed by a brash young collection of guitar slingers and new jack folk dudes – two of whom (Steve Gunn and James Elkington) came out with their own excellent records as well. It was a year when a fractious, not entirely comfortable collaboration between West African traditionalists and French punk rockers pretty much owned my stereo, when Mark Lanegan guested on a haunting album by Tinawaren and also turned in his own soul-stirring rock album.  I might have listened to less straight up guitar banging this year than usual, but if you have to pick a couple, you could do a lot worse than Xeta’s Husker Du-ish The Tower or feedtime’s back-from-the-hiatus Gas. More fantastic albums from Protomartyr and the Sleaford Mods, not surprising, but welcome anyway, and the wonderfully mordant, rueful and very Irish outing from Seamus Fogarty, which no one else seemed to pick up on, but I loved. 

My two favorite songs this year will not appear on anyone else’s songs of the year lists, but whatever, next time you’re feeling wistful, check out Jack Cooper’s “Memphis, Lancashire” or hone in on the mesmerizing instrumental break (that’s Chicago free-jazz cellist Tomeka Reid) on James Elkington’s “Wading the Vapors.”  I could also listen to Lanegan’s “Emperor” any day, all day, despite or maybe because it kinda reminds of Iggy’s “The Passenger.” 

 Reissues feel a little like cheating, because who the hell would reissue them if they weren’t already great, but still, a few of them measurably enhanced my life. I spent months on Cherry Red’s Fall singles collection and another very happy week or so talking about them with my Dusted pals. And discovering  Jackie Shane — both for the quality of the music and the amazing story of her life — was unquestionably a highlight of this fall.  

So with that, and out of the three hundred or so new albums that I listened to this year at least a couple times, and the maybe 100 that I played on repeat enough to have much of an opinion, here are the ones that moved me the most.

Michael Chapman — 50 (Paradise of Bachelors)  

50 by Michael Chapman

I said in Blurt: Now in his 70s, Chapman sings with some authority about all the things you give up for a life in music – a settled abode (“Sometimes You Just Drive”), a late-model vehicle (“Spanish Incident”), a working relationship (“Falling from Grace”) and cold hard wherewithal (“Money Troubles”). And yet, surrounded by younger and contemporary peers, in a translucent mesh of jangling, tangling guitar/bass/banjo tones, he makes a case for the difficult path he’s chosen. “You know I don’t scare easy… but I do get scared,” he rasps on the superlative “That Time of the Night” (last heard covered by Lucinda Williams on the Oh Michael What Have You Done? tribute album and before that on 2008’s Time Past and Passing). The lilt in the line pulls the tune out of the darkness, the massed guitars and hushed group vocals bring shivering into the light.

Group Doueh & Cheveu — Dakhla Sahara Session (Born Bad) 

From my Dusted review: This is not the kind of collaboration where you have to untangle who does what. The focus shifts from one band to another within the space of the song, and each comes out of the fray more or less as he or she went in. Cheveu’s members make no attempt to bend to the West African aesthetic, and Group Doueh plays from their rep book right over whatever punk mayhem Cheveu has put on offer. There’s a great deal of tension in these tunes, as two very different sets of musicians block out space for themselves. And yet, it’s a wonderful thing, feistier and more belligerent than most cross-cultural meetings. “Tout Droit,” the CD’s most exhilarating cut, sets up a rousing, shout-chanted Cheveu chorus, punctuated by grunts and “huhs,” then cuts it to ribbons with ravaging flourishes of guitar, ebullient forays of singing. The two bands are doing entirely different things, at the same exact time, and it works like a motherfucker. 

Mark Lanegan Band — Gargoyle (Heavenly)

I celebrated my long-term affair with Mark Lanegan’s voice in this review at Dusted: Mark Lanegan can sound like a voice from the crypt, his hollowed out, deep-black whisper almost too low to hear properly, a whisper like Leonard Cohen if he’d recently been to hell, a whisper that could frighten children into eating their vegetables. In Gargoyle, though, he uses this whisper sparingly; the hairs on my arm rise to it just once, during “Nocturne” and for the rest of the time, the one-time Screaming Trees’ front man sticks to melody. Gargoyle is a singing record, a tuneful record, a densely, headily arranged record that surrounds Lanegan’s gothic reveries in soft glowing light. There’s almost no negative space in these ten songs. All are filled, end to end, with enveloping textures and sustained sounds. 

Xetas — The Tower (12XU)

The Tower by XETAS

Hail, hail, rock and roll, say I in Dusted. Xetas, out of Austin, make an unholy racket, a noisy, feedback blurred firehose spray of sound that does not quite obscure a tendency towards tunefulness. The hooks bristle with barbed wire abrasion, putting this band more in line with Hüsker Dü than the Wipers, but they’re in there, glinting out of a cyclone of broken glass and diesel smoke. So, also, a kind of positivity radiates intermittently through the rage and turmoil of this band’s attack. The Tower, Xetas’ second, vibrates with the brash, brave defiance of 99%-ers who have been beaten down, but aren’t quite finished yet. 

Jack Cooper — Sandgrown (Trouble in Mind)  

Sandgrown by Jack Cooper

Bill Meyer and I both wanted to cover this one, and then we each did a “no, you go ahead” kind of thing and neither one of us ended up reviewing it for Dusted, but I wrote about it for Blurt thusly:  These shimmering songs are full of ellipses, the spaces between guitar notes clouded over with wistful nostalgia for Jack Cooper’s lost seaside childhood. Cooper has gotten a fair amount of ink lately for his quietly subversive, acoustic dueling guitar duo Ultimate Painting (with Veronica Falls’ James Hoare), also rather luminously introspective, but Sandgrown is more personal, with the smell of salt air, the sting of sea breezes, the sharp sense of loss and change running through every track.

Sleaford Mods — English Tapas (Rough Trade)  

Back into the Sleaford Mods fold with this one, the words again appearing in Dusted: Key Markets and the follow-up EP T.C.R., to me, sounded a little thin, as if the concept of Sleaford Mods, whatever it was, had already been fully explored, the meat pried out, the beginnings of self-parody creeping in. English Tapas reverses this trend. It returns to the sly humor, the hypnotic barking aggression, the occasional whiffs of wistful tune-ish-ness slipped in between robotic beats of Divide and Exit and maybe does it one better. 

James Elkington—Wintres Woma (Paradise of Bachelors)

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Wintres Woma by James Elkington

I listened between the lines at Dusted:  James Elkington, once of Zincs and now the go-to guitar guy for any number of indie icons (but most prominently, Jeff Tweedy and Richard Thompson), has an effortless skill in this latest solo album, the kind of picking prowess that dissolves like smoke into mood and atmosphere. He is a very good player, a lovely relaxed singer (in the vein of Bert Jansch) and an eccentric writer, whose songs borrow liberally from British folk tradition, but veer into unexpected directions. But if you want to know what’s mesmerizing about this slow burning beauty of an album, listen to the intervals, where Elkington dreams jazz-inflected fever reveries with a set of musicians that includes bassist Nick Macri, drummer Tim Daisy, and, most remarkably, violinist Macie Stewart and improv-jazz cellist Tomeka Reid.

Seamus Fogarty—The Curious Hand (Domino)

I fell in love with this album the first time I heard the line in “Mexico” about getting reamed out by the boss for a smoke break. I also reviewed an album that doesn’t really exist (it was revised between promo and release) at Dusted:  Seamus Fogarty makes shaggy songs, rumpled as if they’d been slept in rough, and plaintive at their core but with a shrugging, wry, what-are-ya-gonna-do sense of humor. Though mostly acoustic, leaning heavily on strummed guitar with some lovely melancholy fiddle, viola and maybe cello for accents, his songs also incorporate electronics and evocative field recordings.

Protomartyr—Relatives in Descent (Domino)

Relatives In Descent by Protomartyr

Four great albums in a row, who else is doing this?  My Dusted review: Protomartyr ruminates on the nature of knowing in its fourth full-length album, tangling knotty intellectual conundrums over an obliterating roar. Backed again by a Detroit post-punk freight-train clamor  — Greg Ahee on guitar, drummer Alex Leonard, bassist Scott Davidson — Joe Casey, the band’s rumple-suited, bile-spitting nerve center, finds a free-associative space for rant-poems about consciousness, memory, free will and the refracted shards of current events.

 Feedtime—Gas (In the Red)

Naturally, I root for the old guys, again from Dusted:  You might expect some throat clearing, some tentative beginnings, in a band that had taken off the previous generation, but no, from the opener, “Any Good Thing,” you hear the same noisy slide-bent guitar riffs, the same rough and furious rhythms, the same growling, monster-voiced vocal attack as ever. feedtime might have gone out for a pack of cigarettes, slipped back in casually and ramped up to eleven.

  Loved these, too.

Julie Byrne—Not Even Happiness (BaDaBing)

Jaimie Branch — Fly or Die (International Anthem)

Joseph Childress—Rebirths (Empty Cellar)

Heron Oblivion—The Chapel (self-release)

Tinariwen—Elwan (Anti-)

Stef Chura — Messes (Urinal Cake)

Feral Ohms—S-T (Silver Current)

Pere Ubu—20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo (Cherry Red)

Upper Wilds—Upper Wilds (Thrill Jockey)

Melkbelly—Nothing Valley (Wax Nine)

Kelley Stoltz — Que Aura (Castle Face)

The Clientele—The Age of Miracles (Merge)

Algiers — The Underside of Power (Matador)

Avey Tare — Eucalyptus (Domino)

Golden Boys—Better than Good Times (12XU)

Gunn-Truscinski Duo—Bay Head (Three-Lobed)

Contributors—ST (Monofonus Press)

Mark Eitzel—Hey Mr. Ferryman (Merge)

 Reissues/Comps

The Fall—A Sides and B Sides (Cherry Red)

Jackie Shane—Any Other Way (Numero Group)

V/A—Ote Maloya (Strut)

 I really like books, too, so here are my favorite reads from last year as well.

 George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

Hamid Moshin, Exit West

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

An American Sickness, Elizabeth Rosenthal