Viernes 9 Abr 2010, 0:47
What this dusty old journal needs is some new(er) content–so how about some 4-month-old content?
What follows is more a new-to-me list of the best music I ran across in the past year, though some 2009 releases appear here. Because of my yammering on (and on) above, the comments below will be brief but, I hope, reflective and not reductive of what you'll hear.
Balmorhea, All Is Wild, All Is Silent (2009). Named for a small town in West Texas known for its enormous spring-fed swimming pool (now a state park), Austin-based Balmorhea is yet another post-rock band in that city. This group's sound has a chamber music feel to it, with its acoustic guitars, piano, violin and cello serving as foundations and some electric instruments as ornamentation. This album's music (and its title) are inspired by the letters of one of the very earliest American settlers in Texas–he was there even before the arrival of the famous-for-Texas Moses and Stephen F. Austin-led settlers to the land between the Brazos and Colorado rivers. It works even if you don't know all that, but (I think–and I may be writing about this album later) it becomes a richer listening experience if you do. Good driving-across-the-prairie music, at any rate.
Boards of Canada, Twoism (1995; 2002). Electronica, I suppose you'd call it, but with a "live" rhythmic feel to it that so much of that music lacks. As I listened to this for the first time, I kept being reminded of the sort of thing you hear on the radio program Hearts of Space, but more overtly shaped by rhythm than much of that music is. If someone were to ask me what "chill" is, I'd point him/her in this direction.
Magnolia Electric Co., What Comes After the Blues (2005). This band and its previous incarnation, Songs: Ohia, were one of last year's big revelations for me. Jason Molina, the singer and principle songwriter, is a Neil Young soundalike whose music captures much of Young's brooding mysteriousness from those early-'70s albums; Molina's music mixes that with an alt-country vibe (think Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, the Jayhawks). The website has lots of samples from this and the other albums, plus scores of full-length live performances. Good stuff.
Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile (2008). Meyer (bass) and Thile (mandolin) work the space between bluegrass, jazz, and classical music. It's a tribute to just how intertwined the instruments are when I say that at times, it's difficult to know which of them is the one I "should" be listening to. Virtuosic, indeed, but often moving and, more than occasionally, witty and even humorous.
Luciana Souza, Duos II (2005). Souza is yet another in Brazil's apparently-endless line of smoky-voiced altos. I posted about Souza's album Brazilian Duos last year; this album also offers up older and contemporary sambas and bossa novas, but the playing and singing on this album has a jazzier feel. This is instantly likable and yet holds up to repeated listening as you become more aware of the wonderful musicianship on display here.
Tinariwen, Imidiwan (2009). The cover art for this album pretty much conveys what is important about this group: in particular, the desire to make music out of whatever is at hand. But by way of concluding this post I'll quote the (translated) lyrics of "Tamodjerazt Assis" ("Regret Is Like a Worm") and hope that some of the music you heard last year speaks this earnestly, this nakedly:
Regret is like a worm, anxiety is like war
For my youth which I wasted
I touched incandescence, I burned everything whole
I set fire to myself, I became like cinders
I wasted so much time with futile things
Getting mixed up with lies, with schemes, and with treachery
When I was a child, I was determined
When I was a child, I was already disconnected
I lived beyond the news of the world, I wasted everything.