32. Transparent Things

 

32. Transparent Things (US version), Fujiya & Miyagi (Deaf Dumb + Blind Communications, 2007)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

37. Merriweather Post Pavilion

37. Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective (Domino, 2009)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

38. Tromatic Reflexxions

38. Tromatic Reflexxions, Von Südenfed (Domino, 2007)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

53. From Here We Go Sublime

53. From Here We Go Sublime, The Field (Kompakt Germany, 2007)

The Field is Stockholm’s Axel Willner, whose instrumental pieces merge moody, ambient atmospherics with the sparse, rhythmic repetition of minimal techno and trance.  His pieces inhabit narrow ranges of tempo and modulation with a focus on cyclic grooves that do not always achieve resolution, sometimes simply fading out after a period of time.  Willner occasionally employs glitch techniques, rhythmically utilizing sonic aberrations that resemble equipment malfunctions; but, his compositions are primarily smooth, hypnotic exercises with a moderately high beat-per-minute ratio.  The mix of ambient soundscapes and upbeat dance-floor vibrations creates a dreamlike effect.  Key to Willner’s music is his use of extremely brief samples—sometimes under a second long—that he manipulates and loops, creating new melodies that frequently become foundations of the tracks.  He often samples other artists’ singing, perhaps only a single syllable or vocal sound.  One of the earliest Field tracks, Action (from his label’s ’05 Kompakt 6 compilation), is built on a sliver of the flute introduction to Reach Out I’ll Be There by the Four Tops.  While it is possible to hear the song as an original techno track and not recognize that it contains a sample, its use of a well-known sound lends it an extra subconscious resonance that can be haunting.  After his first recording, an ’05 remix of Norwegian electro singer Annie, Willner released his first 12” as the Field, Things Keep Falling Down, and the aforementioned Action.  Even before this, he had begun work on the tracks of his debut album; there would be another 12” and two more label samplers, however, before From Here We Go Sublime.

Over the Ice opens the LP with a minimal disco pulse that is not fleshed out until nearly its fifth minute.  A manipulation of a vocal sample provides the song’s melody; it is looped in such a manner that, until an undeniably electronic pitch shift occurs, it sounds like a woman singing wordlessly.  One may listen for years, as was true for this writer, before recognizing it as a syllable taken from a Kate Bush record.  A Paw in My Face begins with a similarly throbbing beat and a synth hi-hat cymbal before the percussion is emboldened and a feather-light guitar accent begins to repeat.  In one of only two explicit revelations here, Willner lets the guitar sample play out as the song fades, showing it to be from Lionel Richie’s ’83 hit Hello.  This is devoid of irony or humor, and the original loop provides one of Sublime’s most genuinely appealing hooks.  The samples do not overwhelm the songs; The Little Heart Beats So Fast, one of the album’s most playful arrangements, is propelled by an infinitesimal snatch of sound that sounds like a woman gasping “ahh,” but could easily just be synthesized percussion.  In Everday [sic], a vocal sample begins at 4:45 that runs at a slightly different tempo than the rhythm, creating an entrancing warp of sound as the song builds and the two parts go, almost imperceptibly, in and out of sync with one another.  The album’s most astonishing moment comes with the glitch-heavy, closing title track.  Composed almost entirely of a ghostly set of samples, it sputters and reverberates for over two minutes before Willner undoes the straps to reveal a reverb-laden passage from the Flamingos’ 1959 doo-wop classic I Only Have Eyes for You.  While Kate Bush and even Lionel Richie are easily understandable touchstones for an Aughts-era indie musician, the revelation of this relatively ancient source material is an astonishing way to close the album.  After this debut LP, Willner remixed over a dozen other artists, and in ’09 issued a second album, Yesterday and Today, incorporating other musicians and full vocal tracks. Any of Willner’s works is worth attention, though Sublime remains his strongest to date and one of the finest techno albums of the decade.

Highlights: A Paw in My Face, Everday, Silent, The Little Heart Beats So Fast

Sublime bit: The Flamingos’ haunted doo-wop is mind-blowing in this context; but, the silvery guitar wisps of A Paw in My Face are truly sublime.

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71. Bugged

71. Bugged, Babybird (Echo/Roadrunner UK, 2000)

Experimental actor and amateur recordist Stephen Jones spent much of the ’90s making hundreds of solo demos, releasing many in a series of inventive and irreverent lo-fi albums under the moniker Baby Bird.  They revealed Jones to be a natural at numerous styles--ambient instrumentals; aching, falsetto-laden ballads; nutty, Casio-driven pranksterism; and effortlessly catchy pop.  Each came with a postcard asking listeners to vote for their three favorite songs.  Interest brewed in the British press, and after his fourth LP Jones scored record deals in the UK and US. For the big-league debut, Ugly Beautiful (’96), Jones and his touring band recorded slick new versions of songs chosen by the postcard voters; a few new tunes were recorded as well.  One of the new tunes, the bubbly You’re Gorgeous, became a #3 UK hit and the group was temporarily swept up in the commercial tidal wave of Britpop.  After this, Jones issued a fifth solo lo-fi work, Dying Happy (’97); for the next studio album, Jones and the group (less keyboardist Huw Chadbourne) retreated from the high-spirited stylings and chart pressures of Ugly Beautiful.  There’s Something Going On (’98) is not short on catchy tunes, but is weighted more heavily toward dark, melancholy material; the album is stronger and more unified than its catch-all predecessor.  No more hits were forthcoming, though, and the group’s US label dropped them without releasing the album; as the Nineties ended, Jones and Babybird returned to cult-act status.

The third Babybird album, Bugged, appeared in the first year of the new decade, the group down to a trio including new member and longtime Babybird engineer and collaborator Matt Hay.  The most energetic, inspired Babybird record to date, the beat-happy Bugged opens boisterously with the thumping, guitar-spiked dance tune The F-Word (later used as theme music for TV chef Gordon Ramsay’s cooking show of the same name).  Eyes in the Back of Your Head and Till You Die follow a similar raucous model, but the album’s most sparkling moments come with its calmer tunes.  Fireflies has a gentle drum loop and simple piano line, its choruses of “If I find them/I’m going to kill them” highlighting Jones’s knack for turning caustic lyrics into pretty melodies.  Wave Your Hands manages to spin a cliche into a beautiful multi-tracked vocal showcase (“Throw our hands in the air/And wave them in the air/Like you just don’t care”).  The album has the plushest arrangements of Jones’s catalog to date; Hay’s programming adds many fine touches, like the synth trumpets in Getaway and strings on All I Want Is Love.  After Bugged, the Aughts saw Jones release three albums under his own name (including two sets of ambient “soundtracks”) and an ’08 double album eponymously credited to Death of the Neighbourhood.  He occasionally revisits the Babybird label, as with the ’06 Between My Ears There’s Nothing but Music; for an ’02 box set of the lo-fi recordings he even made a sixth volume, The Black Album. They all have their moments, but Bugged is his strongest Aughts release by far and a perfect entry point to his complex discography for those unable to locate his classic lo-fi albums.

Highlights: Fireflies, The F-Word, Wave Your Hands, All I Want Is Love

Sublime bit: The shimmering, minimal piano lines that flit through the choruses of Fireflies.

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86. The Taby Tapes

86. The Taby Tapes, Nanook of the North (Best Kept Secret [cassette] Italy, 2003; Hidden Agenda US, 2004)

The thriving Swedish scene saw many of its indie-leaning acts make global headway during the decade, with Peter Bjorn and John, the Knife, the Soundtrack of Our Lives, and Jose Gonzalez among the most well-known.  Urbana, Illinois, distribution company Parasol was perhaps the Aughts’ key U.S. champion of Scandinavian pop music, and all of the acts mentioned above either got their first stateside releases on a Parasol label or their first American distribution from the company.  For every Parasol-related act that broke through, ten more didn’t; NOYOUCMON did not hear them all, but argues with confidence that the most charming may be a mysterious LP credited to Nanook of the North. 

Originally issued by the Italian cassette-only label Best Kept Secret before its formal release by Parasol’s Hidden Agenda imprint, the album has a disingenuous backstory.  The Täby Tapes allegedly collects the tales of a young Inuit man traveling from Alaska to Täby, Sweden and his resultant culture shock and interpretation of matters of love and the ways that geography informs one’s psychology.  Many of the songs are duets in which “Nanook” (who receives the bulk of the vocal and instrumentation credits) is accompanied by a series of female vocalists depicting characters ranging from a dead poet, a dragon, and the town of Täby itself.  Nanook’s music is a sweet, gentle sort of electropop, augmented by acoustic instruments and nostalgic technology such as mellotron, stylophone, omnichord, and optigan.  There is no Nanook, of course; the project was helmed by Swedish musician/ engineer/ producer Mattias Olsson and his colleague and fellow studio wiz Olle Söderström.  Olsson previously played in a series of prog-rock bands including Änglagård, Pär Lindh Project, and White Willow before moving on to poppier horizons with acts like the female-led Pineforest Crunch (which also featured Söderström) and AK-Momo; his production discography is equally lengthy.

While The Täby Tapes is heavy on concept, its storyline is negligible.  The real story lies in the warm, plush electronic arrangements and lyrical dialogues between Olsson/Nanook and the many female guest vocalists.  Olsson’s knack for combining pop melodies with affecting beauty insures that many of the tunes possess a keen sublimeness; much of this also comes courtesy of Olsson’s duet partners.  The splendor is most apparent on the album’s first full track, Karin Boye’s Grave.  A platonically romantic conversation with the Swedish poet who killed herself in 1941, it juxtaposes youthful excitement with the departed’s longing for vitality.  Nanook fantasizes of Boye as his contemporary, giving life another chance and joining his band.  “We would have loved your style,” he sings; Boye, sung by Camela Leierth, has a simpler notion: “I would have loved to be alive.”  The quest for love is the album’s main theme.  Israel and Palestine - A Solution has a loaded title, but reveals less about world affairs than it does of the need for companionship.  St George and the Dragon uses beast-slaying as a metaphor for conquering heartbreak; in Hey Fragile, Nanook concludes “Living is easy, my ass/It’s a warzone.”  The occasional umbrage does not subdue the album’s overall optimism and dazzling winsomeness.  A second Nanook album was announced as early as ’04, but the decade ended without it. Olsson’s prodigious output with other acts and stewardship of his Roth-Händle Studio have kept him busy. One hopes another decade does not close without new material from this exceptional and lovely project.

Highlights: Karen Boye’s Grave, Israel and Palestine - A Solution, St George and the Dragon, Phonecall

Sublime bit: The album is filled with them, but the interplay between Nanook and Boye’s ghost is chillingly gorgeous.
 
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Bubbling Under #106. Velocifero

106. Velocifero, Ladytron (Nettwerk, 2008)

UK electropop quartet Ladytron recorded their first four LPs in the Aughts, ’08’s Velocifero the last and best. Fronted in tandem by Helen Marnie and Bulgarian-Israeli Mira Aroyo, Ladytron possesses a cold, shimmering exterior indebted to ’80s new wave dance music, krautrock, and Kraftwerk. The two singers rarely stray from a threadlike range, their voices entwining in detached, near-monotone harmonies that create an icy tautness. After the anemic ’01 debut LP 604 and ’02’s improved yet meandering Light & Magic, Ladytron refocused. They leapt forward in ’05 with the stunning Witching Hour, whose more sophisticated lyrics and arrangements (including, for the first time, prominent guitar) made it the band’s first essential work. With the streamlined Velocifero (pidgin Italian for “bringer of speed”; also, a brand of motorized scooter), the evolution is even more dramatic. Gone are the short, ponderous instrumentals, and every song feels essential to the album’s narrative arc; the arrangements more often escape their sonic comfort zone (especially on the closing cut Versus, a duet between Marnie and guitarist/programmer Daniel Hunt). Aroyo sings two tracks in Bulgarian, including the ominous opener Black Cat and a cover of the ’96 tune Kletva by the country’s top rock band, Shturtzite ("Crickets"). Ladytron remains most effective on the dancefloor, but Velocifero’s excursions elsewhere show the tremendous growth since the fledgling attempts of their earliest work.

Highlights: Ghosts, I’m Not Scared, Tomorrow

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Bubbling Under #111. Before the Dawn Heals Us

111. Before the Dawn Heals Us, M83 (Mute, 2005)

French electro duo M83’s first two albums consisted primarily of cinematic, ambient instrumentals; ’03’s widely acclaimed Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts saw Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau sonically evolve leagues beyond the drifting mood pieces of their ’01 eponymous debut. Fromageau quit after touring Dead Cities; while Gonzalez did record four of that LP’s pieces by himself, it seemed unlikely that the next M83 work would be a stylistic leap making its precursors appear wan and primitive. Before the Dawn Heals Us, recorded primarily by Gonzalez (six songs tellingly co-written by his filmmaker brother Yann), bolsters the M83 sound with powerful, aggressive arrangements and a bold production style inspired by ’90s shoegaze. Guitar is used more than ever; Loic Maurin’s authoritative live drums are used on eight songs; and several songs have full-blown vocal tracks, a first for the band. This new approach aside, Gonzalez’s songs are still built as mood pieces; one can easily imagine any song here playing as a camera soars above a landscape like the album cover’s skyline. The quintessence of the form comes with instrumental “A Guitar and Heart,” with its layers of echoing, propulsive synths and guitars and Maurin’s booming drum fills marking each segment. Gonzalez is prone to earnest drama, including two spoken parts by actress Kate Moran that some will dismiss as histrionics. Most notorious is Car Chase Terror, whose lengthy dialogue will prove a dealbreaker for some listeners; one tolerates an uncomfortable sequence in a film, however, and Gonzalez challenges us to do the same with an album. Before the Dawn Heals Us documents one of the decade’s strongest evolutions in pop music.

Highlights: Don’t Save Us From the Flames, Teen Angst, Car Chase Terror

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Bubbling Under #120. Seventh Tree

120. Seventh Tree, Goldfrapp (Mute, 2008)

Alison Goldfrapp worked in the mid-’90s as a session vocalist, singing with such electro-centric UK acts as Orbital, Dreadzone, and Tricky. In ’99 she formed a duo of her own in London with another session musician, Will Gregory, and gave it her name. Their 2000 debut, Felt Mountain, is a melange of atmospheric, electronic cabaret. Seventh Tree, their fourth LP, replaces the electroclash of ’03’s Black Cherry and the cold glam-dance crunch of the ’06 Supernature with gentle, warm performances whose muted electronic frameworks are draped with acoustic guitars and strings. The drumless opener Clowns is carried by a softly plucked guitar, and is the most atypical piece here; but, its tone resonates even through the album’s poppiest moments. Alison Goldfrapp’s dynamic soprano covers more stylistic ground here than ever, from the ponderous murmuring of Clowns to the soaring choruses of Little Bird and the assertive pop of Caravan Girl. The lyrics often counterbalance the pastoral moods: Clowns addresses a childish, shallow figure (“What’d ya wanna look like Barbie for?”); the bubbly Happiness mocks a cult’s cynical promises; A&E (the UK equivalent of a US emergency room) concerns a person who waited in vain for a lover’s call only to wake up in hospital, possibly after a pill overdose. Yet the album is no gloomy affair; the songs retain a hopeful glow that matches the late-summer sunlight of the cover art. Goldfrapp’s shape-shifting Aughts output contains many fine moments, but none of the decade’s four albums is as fulfilling and cohesive as Seventh Tree.

Highlights: Caravan Girl, Little Bird, A&E

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Bubbling Under #122. Pocket Symphony

122. Pocket Symphony, Air (Astralwerks, 2007)

One could be forgiven if, while skimming their catalog, it was concluded that the French duo Air has recorded one very long album. Since their ’98 debut LP Moon Safari, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin have become masters of minimal, unhurried electronic music that uses acoustic instruments (usually guitar and piano) and often eschews percussion. Placid, filmic mood music can easily lack personality, but Air has transcended its limitations, crafting an elegant signature sound often complemented by Dunckel’s whisper-thin vocals. Their fifth album, Pocket Symphony (counting the ’00 score to Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides), is notable for its Japanese musical influences and for being their sparsest, most subdued work to that point. The mournful One Hell of a Party, sung by Jarvis Cocker, addresses the starkness of morning-after regret to a melody carried by the harp-like koto and guitar-like shamisen. The album’s other guest vocal, Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping, sung by Divine Comedy frontman Neil Hannon, is equally doleful. Several songs employ mantra-like lyrics, including the record’s most energetic piece, the propulsive Mer du Japon, whose sole lyric is a repetition (in French) of “I lost my mind/On the Sea of Japan.” Instrumentals Space Maker and Mayfair Song boast austere yet sublime Dunckel piano work. Air would take a successful turn toward livelier, rock-influenced forms on their next effort, ’09’s Love 2; the stark Pocket Symphony remains the most graceful in Air’s first decade of LPs.

Highlights: Mer du Japon, Napalm Love, Once Upon a Time

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Bubbling Under #124. Deep Cuts

124. Deep Cuts, The Knife (Rabid Sweden, 2003; Rabid UK, 2004)

Karin Dreijer Andersson fronted mid-’90s Swedish alternarockers Honey Is Cool, her singular vocals the most distinguishing feature (think the Cardigans fronted by Bjork). In ’99 she formed the electro duo Knife with her brother Olof Dreijer; her effects-laden voice would be its key instrument. Deep Cuts, their 2nd LP, employs digital noir, playful rhythms, and sultry darkwave disco grooves. Willfully obscurant though retaining a wry humor, the two refused interviews, wore masks in public, and avoided live gigs. The identity explorations continue on Deep Cuts as Andersson uses pitch-shifting software to create alternate personas: spooky falsettos, child-like harmonies, and husky baritones that can convince you her brother is singing; such software reliance is a risky proposition and the Knife successfully avoids misuse. Heartbeats and Pass This On both use Caribbean steel-drum accents, the former a gauzy roller jam cloaking a lyric about a lover who “knew the hand of a devil/and kept us awake with wolves’ teeth”; the latter, an unsettlingly sexy come-on (“I’m in love with your brother/what’s his name?”). Rock Classics evokes Kurt Weill’s 1920s cabaret slink. The inclusion of two comedic snippets (including the LP’s closing track) serves only to interrupt the sensuality. Deep Cuts is a real progression from the debut, yet lacks the thematic consistency they’d find when its more gothic aspects would dominate their next major work (not counting the soundtrack to Christina Olofson's '03 film Hannah med H), ’06’s Silent Shout.

Highlights: Pass This On, You Take My Breath Away, Heartbeats

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