Inclus :
Peter Nalitch - "Gitar" [website]
Peter Nalitch seems an unlikely champion for the strong & steely-eyed nation of Russia. But that shows what I know. Buoyed by "Gitar", aviral video hit, Nalitch represented his country at this year's Eurovision Song Contest. (He was singing another, sappier song.) "Gitar" is part lo-fi pop, part yearning serenade, part post-Borat joke. What makes it so special, what lifts it so high on my list, is the way these three genres are confused. As in the video, it's never clear which is on the ascendant. Nalitch's heart is his own.
Joanna Newsom - "Good Intentions Paving Company" [buy]
Dan told this song almost impossibly well, as a very small story. Still, it bears saying - "Good Intentions Paving Company" is the grooviest song Joanna Newsom has ever written. This is not, admittedly, saying much; but "Good Intentions" is effortless in its adaptation of 70s singer-songwriterisms, roving and wry, soft pop with a sharp right hook. Joanna's lyrics are still daft & gorgeous filigree (So with a solemn auld lang syne, sealed, delivered, I sang...), but "Good Intentions" is nothing too complicated - just a losing love-song, a fist-fight with the fog.
Eternal Summers - "Bully in Disguise" [buy]
Eternal Summers' Silver is one of the very best albums of 2010, a record of damned blueberry pop songs, messy and fast. So many great ones - "Able To", "Safe at Home", "Dye" - but the one that's won me deepest is the one that's most unalike. "Bully in Disguise" is an epic ask, a slow ascendancy, the Velvet Underground & 90s lo-fi & today's garagey ba-ba-bas. Love lost, lost found, going on.
Sharon Van Etten - "Love More" [buy]
A song of harmonium, tambourine, voice. Plain and gorgeous. I called it steamy - but not steamy like parked cars, closed bedrooms, breath on cold glass. It lacks the loneliness of ones and twos. I meant steamy like a hothouse, summertime and spring, greens softly curling.
Loscil with Dan Bejar (Destroyer) - "The Making of Grief Point" [buy]
Loscil's collaboration with Bejar (which is inverted, as "Grief Point", on Destroyer's Archer on the Beach 12") is haunting, vivid, like a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a book by W G Sebald. Scott Morgan's beats swim, flourish, recede; and Bejar speaks. It seems a straight telling, an email read aloud, but also it is not; the context is discarded, the object obscured. It's a profound portrait of making art - yet also more than this, not just conceptual, sonically beautiful. Bejar says, "I have lost interest in music. / It is horrible. / I should only make things I understand, I should only make things I know how to construct, however imperfect."
Little Scream - "The Heron and the Fox" [buy]
I spilled a lot of words, introducing you to Little Scream. She is from Montreal. Her songs are not always so simple & soft as this. Next year, when The Golden Record is properly released, I'll write about another one. But "The Heron and the Fox" is perfect in its rude splendour. We measure distances in miles of highway. It doesn't matter how the bird flies, or how the fox runs. We are men and women, locked in cars and buildings and jobs and lives, parked at truckstops, and we cannot slip through the forests, swim through the lakes. We are far away, sometimes, and we cannot take the shorter route. Sometimes the shorter route is closed.
I spilled a lot of words, introducing you to Little Scream. She is from Montreal. Her songs are not always so simple & soft as this. Next year, when The Golden Record is properly released, I'll write about another one. But "The Heron and the Fox" is perfect in its rude splendour. We measure distances in miles of highway. It doesn't matter how the bird flies, or how the fox runs. We are men and women, locked in cars and buildings and jobs and lives, parked at truckstops, and we cannot slip through the forests, swim through the lakes. We are far away, sometimes, and we cannot take the shorter route. Sometimes the shorter route is closed.
etc...
Bon, j'ai pas tout lu, j'ai écouté mes oreilles avec mon coeur... et ça tient presque sur un CD !
