2009 Wrap #7: Mark Benedetti

It took me until the beginning of this year to finally get to the point where the overload of music and its attendant discourses provided by the internet made me feel like my critical sensibilities were completely shutting down, like I was unable to like, or even distinguish, anything anymore.* So I stopped reading music criticism and started going to more shows. Then I found that I liked these things.**

Flaming Lips Embryonic I should’ve guessed that the Lips would be the band to figure out the bigass rock concept album for the digital, song-at-a-time age: what you do is put together an epically epic, sonically-coherent-but-all-fucking-crazy record, then mix the song order all around. I swear to god this album would have been sequenced completely differently 10 years ago. I mean, how can “Watching the Planets” be the last track? It doesn’t sound like the end of anything! But it totally works in a scrambled way, and there’s this thrilling tension between the songs-as-songs and the songs-as-parts-of-album that you don’t usually get with this kind of thing. 

Nurse With Wound The Surveillance Lounge If you don’t like avant-gardey kinds of music, listen to “Yon Assassin Is My Equal” and then tell me that you don’t like avant-gardey kinds of music. I find this album strangely comforting–it really does sound like a surveillance lounge, which I imagine as being a little like the spacious concourses of newer airports, a little like a holding area for “persons of interest.” It has a warm, rapturous air in many parts, the feeling of being hugged by someone who will soon be leading you calmly into a secure room where you will be kept “for your own good.” It also sounds like Brazil. 

Lightning Bolt Earthly Delights You know, I loved this when I first got it, but now I kind of don’t like it anymore. It stays on the list since as my most-played album this year.

Medusa En Raga Sül My appreciation for metal doesn’t go far beyond Sabbath, Motörhead, and a little bit of second wave black metal. That seems to be a common lead-in for those who will also say this: there is no way to tell you how good the Medusa album is. Also: Medusa live will destroy you.

Micachu and the Shapes Jewellery Kind of a miniature companion piece to Embryonic. It’s got the same kind of oddity-without-pretension and scattered-yet-focused sensibility, but on an anti-epic scale. Supercute+superawesome+a blend of CSS and Disco Volante? Smile!

Ooga Boogas Romance and Adventure (and non-LP single “The Octopus is Back”) 2008–it takes a while for Australian garage rock to reach ears in Indiana. A side project of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, but it seems to me that this spunkier band should be the showcase act. In the crowded, derivative field of garage rock, there are few ways for a band to distinguish itself. Most try through songwriting, which is why there are few things worse than the endless, tuneless barrage of saminess provided by bad garage. The Ooga Boogas‘ songwriting is great: swaggering and sneering, sweet and romantic, with a nice extended-distortion conclusion to side 2. But the production here is deceptively complex, much more than the basic bash-em-out setup implied in the name of the genre. They use every variant–surf, punk, folk, blues–in the garage rock handbook, and all kinds of neat combinations of distorted/clean vocals, powerchords and jangle, and guitar/drums relationships. Particular standout: the Railroad Jerk-ish t hudhut “Clock Is Ticking.”

Comsat Angels reunion show, April 26, O2 Academy, Sheffield, England. Some Irish guy was stunned that my intrepid companion and I had trekked all the way from Indiana for the first Angels gig since 1995, held one block away from the World Snooker Championships. The band was warm, humble, and in good humor.  They opened with my favorite, “Sleep No More,” and part of me was jolted by how perfect it was–there was nothing there to suggest that they hadn’t been on tour for eight months, let alone been on hiatus for 14 years. The rest of the set was almost entirely Waiting for a Miracle and Sleep No More (with 3 from Fiction), and I can’t really describe the live experience of those records’ forbidding, enveloping sounds. I love live shows, but they usually just provide a different, more social context for listening without necessarily improving on recordings or providing a new perspective on the band (also: beer). This was different–I now hear the Comsat Angels, one of my favorite bands, in new and different ways. I love them more. The least disappointing musical experience of my entire life.

Merzbow Merzbannon This is a “remix” of Racebannon’s beloved Satan’s Kickin’ Yr Dick In EP. The primary distinction between it and most Merzbow albums is that this has audible drums. In my search for reasons to like music, the sleeve notice “This record is meant to be played at 45 RPM, but can be appreciated at any speed” really speaks to me. At the end of the day it pretty much sounds the like the other eleventy billion Merzbow albums, which are all equally good, with some being better than others. This is among the some.**

Prurient Rose Pillar. I like his more industrial records, too, but they sometimes sound too much like Nine Inch Nails, and his abscessive, hyperconfessional thing bugs me. I don’t know what the fuck this one is about, and it has an understatement, a stately sparseness, that’s not common in his oeuvre. Exception: the aptly titled “hammer with forty names.”

Art Brut Art Brut Vs. Satan. Their last one was total sophomore slump; I guess you could call this one their junior peak. I just love love love good records about musical taste, and this one might be the best. Cheekily setting up “the record buying public” as Satan is a nice hyperbolic riff on indie pieties, and it’s neatly counterbalanced two songs later by Eddie Argos’ (near-heretical) admission that he’s only just found out about the Replacements. I guess because he’s a talk-singer, Argos is that rare songwriter whose lyrics work when you read them: “Second hand CDs/are cheaper/reissued CDs/extra tracks.” I guarantee he still buys CDs.

*This is actually still happening. I was listening to the Neon Indian album for the first time while writing part of this, and I was halfway through track eight before I realized I hated it and wanted to turn it off.
**Rereading this, it sounds like I don’t even like the thing. Really, I do, and it is better at 45 RPM.

Mark Benedetti takes all the fun out of punk rock by studying it in graduate school. He
also writes at The Dwight Gooden Poster.

Filed under: 2009 Wrap  Art Brut  Comsat Angels  flaming lips  Lightning Bolt  Mark Benedetti  Medusa  Merzbow  Micachu & the Shapes  Nurse With Wound  Ooga Bogas  Prurient Rose