Open Up and See (a review of THIS MOTHER FOREVER, a single by Fucked Up)

Fucked Up has since spring of 2010 figured to me as something like COMPLETELY UNSTOPPABLE FORCE OF MUSICAL GREATNESS. I started with a copy of Epics in Minutes that didn't work for me, much, but Hidden World and Chemistry of Common Life thrilled me: loud pounding rock with big hooks, mysterious lyrics that touch on all my favorite themes, a cool visual identity with a sigil symbolizing the band, consistent album covers, weird names for the band members—basically, Fucked Up was a Blue Őyster Cult for people who wanted easier music and a more complicated relationship with the spectacle. Naturally, I was completely invited and fulfilled by all this: the powerful music and the thoughtful packaging.

When David Comes to Life came out, it brought all of the above, plus songs I knew instantly, production that buckled my knees, and that strange magic of chords / melody that puts tears in my eyes involuntarily. (See also: Dead Moon (frequently); Andrew Cashen / Sabrina Ellis (occasionally); a few others (extremely rarely).) It was, and is, one of the great rock records. The band had perfected its moves: speed, shouting, fast repetition.

Then, they got weird. They'd been doing long-song EP releases, based on the Chinese Zodiac (no, really), in which they moved away from their mastery of short/simple rock songs with punk vocals, and began experimenting with overwhelming with scale, not just volume. I started with Year of the Pig, an 18-minute tune with essentially one part, played loud, played soft, played over and over again. The sheer size of the song gave the band a new kind of intensity, ebbing and flowing, not just hitting it and quitting it, and the rhythm almost ... swung. To put it a slightly different way, Fucked Up here stopped being BŐC and started being Hawkwind. And it was very, very good.

They were adding new tricks: length, droning, quietness, new instrumentation, playing slow. Year of the Hare consolidated those new tricks, at least on the B-side, "California Cold"; on the A-side, they took a long, coherent song and gave it the William Burroughs random-cut-up-and-shuffle-and-reassemble treatment, for no reason I have been able to understand. When I can piece together the actual song behind this treatment, it appears to be about as good as Pig.

Then, they ran out of songs: Glass Boys just never clicked with me. When it's playing, it seems fine, and I have convinced myself half a dozen times that the songs were finally sticking in my head, but it never lasts. Then, they ran out of tricks: This Mother Forever is the same thing as Hare, a good/great song (more of the same) occluded by production / presentation moves like "let's not start the song for the first minute-fifteen of its fifteen-minute runtime" and "let's fade it out about 45 seconds before it actually ends". That said, the noodly guitar / feedback / soundscape that opens the song is atmospheric and pleasant; the louder groovy (again) psychedelic part that goes another 30 seconds is a lot of fun; and when the vocals kick in at around 5:45 ...

The band clearly needs the listener to take seriously its attempts at inversion and appropriation, trying to make you think about gender roles and the standard voice heard in a song.

I am the feather
and you are the breeze
I am the lock
and you are the keys
The end of the rope
with all ties severed
you are my hope
this mother forever
I am the dung
and you are the beetle
I am the thread
you are the needle
...

But there's two problems. First, Fucked Up appears to have written the same lyrics about a half-dozen times, so these lines feel pretty familiar. Second, this time around, the alchemical themes and revolutionary fervor just completely fall flat, due mostly to a chanted vocal that keeps resolving into the exact cadence of the nursery rhyme that runs

Here is the church
Here is the steeple
Open it up
And see all the people

In any case, it's new Fucked Up, and I'd rather have new Fucked Up than not have Fucked Up. I've listened to it a dozen times, and I'll listen to it dozens more. I hope their thematic repetitiveness eases up in the way their musical repetitiveness has, and I hope their musical boredom moves past the cut-up technique soon. Until then, I'll keep listening to this.

There's a B-side: it's 30 minutes long, and "features Nunavut singer Tanya Tagaq", and it mostly taught me I don't like throat singing, so I haven't played it after the first run-through.

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2015

Another weird year in music, one that was more controlled by my machinery for music-listening than ever before. My plugged-into-the-stereo music laptop seems to have lost the ability to play entire .mp3 files—this, just a couple years after deciding it was going to play all album tracks in alphabetical order. And my main working / archiving / everything else laptop took a month-long break when, for no reason I understand, its OS became corrupted. Thanks, Linux. I bought a turntable and mostly hated it. I quit using my little walkman and just started using my phone for everything—but once my laptops died, I was basically down to streaming music, which was fine, except at some point, I bought a Chromecast, for streaming from my phone to my stereo. After which, when I was at home, I just wanted to stream stuff from my phone to my stereo, but you can't stream from Bandcamp to a Chromecast, and most of what I loved this year came to me on Bandcamp. I would really have liked to listen to most of what I loved this year on my stereo.

Anyway. Here's my year in HEAVY TUNES, in roughly chronological order. A year of albums for me, more than songs. Some of them even came out this year!
January Early in the year, I gave Sleaford Mods the fairest shot I could. Some of their songs are pretty good! I really enjoyed "shitstreet" and "under the plastic and NCT", particularly the lyric and delivery of "three words: cage, wheel, hamster! 'ere, here's a bit of cheese—nibble the bastard!"

They didn't hold up for me, though: a combination of songs that all stick around a little too long and which are basically impossible to tell apart and a completely unacceptable Twitter presence, devoted mainly to telling people that their beats are bad, which is a little like the Ramones complaining that other people's songs are short, repetitive, and catchy.

More promising and longer-lived was Robonaut, a cool project that provided a lot of the year's best background music for writing. Between the good sounds and perfect song titles, I spent a lot of time with this one on: it's best described as a soundtrack for a science fiction movie that nobody has yet made, and the skittering noises, interesting textures, and sheer sonic interest of the whole thing was immensely pleasurable.

In January, I also started experimenting with Kowloon Walled City. We'll talk more about this later, but what I initially responded to was the curdled, emotionally exhausted, unhappy vibe. I spent a lot of my year listening to this at work, is what I'm saying.

In spring, I added maybe the best Holy Mount record, Vol, a late-2014 release with great glide-riffs, wonderful synth textures, and just enough vocal hooks to scratch all my pop-prog itches. One of the year's best records for bringing some emotional motion, mainly soaring, to static environments (mainly working). It's credibly heavy and/but makes you feel good; helpful in a grind of a year like a dull blade pressed to your inner thigh's veins.

Spring also brought me around to Windhand. I was incredibly late to this band, but when they finally clicked for me, I wanted to listen to little other than their giant-sized Sabbath riffs and sheets of mainly incomprehensible vocals. For now, I'm thrilled to binge on 2013's Soma, but I've tried the record that came out this year a time or two, and have found it pretty excellent. It will be there when I am ready for it.

Similarly, I discovered this year Oakland's own Abstracter, when a metal-looking dude at the coffee shop happened to be watching YouTube videos of them and my curiosity was engaged. It turns out that they're magnificently heavy and loud and slow, with occasional pretty moments that add breathing room. Both 2012's Tomb of Feathers and 2015's Wound Empire are great listens, with "Glowing Wounds" and "Ash" being my favorite songs, the best balanced between overwhelming volume / heaviness and flares of beauty.

The year's prettiest music came from Marriages, a band that evolved from my all-time favorite atmospheric instrumental metal band, Red Sparowes. Vaguely gothy, interestingly textured, and frequently rocking, this was my undisputed record of the year until October. Even if it did get dethroned, Salome was my year's most reliable inspiration for soft feelings, particularly on "skin", "love, Texas" and what would have been the song of my year in any normal year, "less than". Highest recommendation for anybody who is willing to mix their emotions with musical intensity.

By summer, the new Courtney Barnett album had come out, and it was as good as I had expected, if a little overproduced. Maybe the year's best record for singing along!

Summer continued poppy with Roman Cities' ep the Sharksleep Sessions. A great throwback pop-rock album by Kowloon Walled City (and Snailface, and other) bassist Ian Miller, this was the album I reached for when I wanted to feel heartened and vaguely 80s. Bonus points for the invocation of a very 80s neon-drenched version of the future in probably my favorite track, "just like water"! Other favorites were "memento" and "every time you fall".

Just as with Holy Mount, I continued to dig into the back catalog of previous HEAVY TUNE roundup appearer Verma. (Though Bandcamp sure doesn't make it easy to do that—nor do they seem to have a workable version of any other kind of "discoverability", unfortunately. Ah well.) Verma's album Salted Earth might be their best, and the liner notes they give you are definitely wonderful and worth reading.

Unsurprisingly, there was also plenty of Blue Öyster Cult in my year. I saw them for the first time and often went to bed to weirdo 80s stew Revölution by Night. Three of their best second-tier songs ("Shadow of California", "Shooting Shark" and "Take Me Away") with a couple of their worst-by-far ("Feel the Thunder" and "Let Go") with a fair bit of occasionally enjoyable filler, it was somehow an easy record to reach for, especially at bedtime.

As I was experimenting with my turntable, a couple Fucked Up records landed. I was completely "meh" on Glass Boys, including the not-as-gimmicky-as-it-sounds version with half-time drums—even that mild innovation left the songs sounding like forgettable outtakes rightfully clipped off of better, earlier albums—and thoroughly baffled by "Year of the Hare", but "California Cold" might be the single best song I have heard by the band.

Early in fall, I put myself on a no-buying-things diet, which I immediately broke to order Kowloon Walled City's new one, Grievances. I had just seen the band at the Hemlock, and the songs I had liked before had turned into songs I loved. The record is by far my record of the year. Nothing else sounded like this album, nothing else resonated like these songs. Where earlier KWC records seemed devoted to the art of unpleasant, unsettling riffs, this one creates entire landscapes of attenuated anxiety; the riffs are still there, and they hit as hard as ever, but now they embody and evoke a pained kind of endurance, in an aural space that's beautiful and devoted to pain in equal measure. For me, the best example is the title song, which was by a lot the year's best payoff to a hell of a setup.

That sustained me through the very end of the year. But in the last fortnight of 2015, some doors opened up and some air blew in. I was exposed to Okkervil River, and liked it immensely. (Sad that it took me 10 years to come around, but whatever.) "Black Sheep Boy", "Black", and "Westfall" made immediate impacts on me, with great pop melodies and spookier-than-I-expected lyrics. Very much the followup to Neutral Milk Hotel that I'd been needing for a long time.

And two great punk albums came in to abrade my ears a little bit, after two years of a lot of thick, dark gunk (Abstracter, Windhand, Solar Halos, Shooting Guns, etc.). G.L.O.S.S. made as great a punk record as everybody said, and sometimes you need a wonderful punk record to listen to. And Super Unison released a smash hit called "Photorealism" and a self-titled ep that got better every time I listened to it. High-energy and scathing, great music for breaking out of ruts and remembering to tell the cops inside and around us to get up against the wall.

Finally, Lemmy died. I pulled out Motörhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, and for the fourth time in my life, nothing made more sense than Motörhead. Like when I was 16, buying a weird cassette at a truck stop on a Greyhound trip, and falling a little in love with pop numbers like "Dancing on Your Grave" and gruff filler like "Back on the Funny Farm" and world-historically great blues songs like "Killed by Death". Like when I was 24, feeling completely alone in the world and in a new town, and Lemmy growled from stage "don't forget about rock 'n' roll, man, it hasn't forgotten about you". Like when I was a couple years older, in the same town, but alone again, and the lyrics of "Stay Clean" were as true and important as any music ever would be. I wouldn't fetishize the man—caring about women and Jews make that impossible—but the songs can still work and remind us that the good past and the bad alike live on in our days. There's promise there, and responsibility.

—Fat, tired

P.S.: on consumption. I bought everything on this list except: Sleaford Mods, which I streamed until I decided I didn't like it enough to buy; "Salted Earth", which was a free download; Okkervil River (streaming on Spotify for now, paid to see them live); G.L.O.S.S. and Super Unison (streaming on Bandcamp for now). The Motörhead and BŐC albums I bought used, but I have paid to see both bands.

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2012

"An Echo From the Hosts That Profess Infinitum", Shabazz Palaces, Black Up
I spent a lot of the year writing and riding bikes to this record. This song always made me stop to pay attention to its amazing haze-sway backing track: swirling vocals, some intensely melodic percussion, and great beats. My girlfriend says I'm too hard on Sasha Frere-Jones, so let me give credit: it was him who turned me on to this excellent record. Thanks, chief.

"Australasia", Pelican, Australasia
Pelican has meant a lot to me for a long time, and they were, bizarrely, essentially the only band I'd ever really bootlegged. When I heard that Hydra Head was going the way of all flesh, I knew that it was in part my fault, so I took my credit card to the liquor store to the Internet and attempted to atone for my sins by spending quite a bit of money. This song is Pelican at their best: no band not named Iron Maiden gets more mileage out of Sweet Victor Parts (TM Al Burian); no band not named Hawkwind does more with dreamy drone parts.

"Hey Jane", Spiritualized, Sweet Heart Sweet Light
Probably the least inspired album I've bought—even Dirty Work had cocaine and Keef/Mick's desire to punch each other—but this was one song I liked whenever it came on. Spiritualized is evidently completely out of ideas, but this one song they didn't phone in, and not-phoned-in Spiritualized is something I can't not like.

"kicking", "Fat Waves", Torche, Meanderthal
I saw Torche with Big Business, and at the time, their high-gloss candy metal (alternating with deep sludge) left me cold. But "kicking" has better hooks than any guitar song since 1984, and "Fat Waves" isn't far behind. I reached for this record more times than almost any other—it's beyond perfect for getting shit done around the house—despite getting it very late in the year.

"ecce homo", Titus Andronicus, Local Business
It's all downhill after this opener, but this was my song of the year, and it wasn't a particularly close race. The rest of the album is a good Clash record, more Give 'Em Enough Rope's hit-what-you-aim-for than, say, Combat Rock's peaks and valleys or London Calling's thrilling sprawl and reach, but this one song is the kind of epic the Clash never managed, an unhurried lope across the band's previous (monumental) achievements and a sweeping gesture forward. The next album will be a California album, it will be called Manifest Destiny, and it will be epoch-defining. Book it.

"Year of the Pig", Fucked Up, Year of the Pig ep
Took me a while to warm up to this tune, but no song was better for running or for riding my bike across town. Originally, I thought "man, the drummer does the same thing for like 18 minutes, meh" but after I made it through the hypnotic drone sections a couple times and let the record overwhelm me somatically, I was more like "MAN, THE DRUMMER DOES THE SAME THING FOR LIKE 18 MINUTES, AWESOME!". It's a song that requires some effort: it's only good if you keep your attention-payer on. It's a song that rewards that effort hugely.

"In Every Dream Home a Heartache", Roxy Music, Viva!
Could really have been any song off of this record, 2012's token album that made my girlfriend ask "what the fuck is this shit" during one of the coked-up metal-disco moments with extra-theatrical vocal vibrato. But something about Roxy Music really works for me a lot of the time (SPOILER: it is Phil Manzanera) and Viva! was my default "time to go to bed, but I don't want anything fucking mellow on because that shit's for sell-out olds" record.

"tracking the dog", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Peel Sessions

"Holiday Head", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Gun-Shy

"Destroyer", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Live at the BBC
I've loved this band pretty much consistently from the time Totally Religious came out. Back then, I loved that album's weirdo echo-chamber drum sound and 10-million-stacked-guitar-noises production, really liked half of the previous record Bikini Red's weirdo everything-in-an-echo-chamber-one-loud-ass-guitar-track sound, and didn't see a whole lot in Gun-Shy's too-much-drum, zero-guitar mix. Trouser Press rated those in reverse order, and that was the only interaction I've ever had with another human about the band Screaming Blue Messiahs. All I know now is that I like all three, and probably agree now that I am old and tired that Gun-Shy is their best, though if they'd ever recorded a live-to-tape album like the Peel Session I bought from Green Noise Records in Portland all those years ago, that would be one of my favorite records of all time. Their BBC Live record is close, but not quite as great. But everything they did makes me exceptionally happy, and I can make it through terrible 80s production values if I have to...

"dethink to survive", mclusky, mclusky Does Dallas
I heard about mclusky via CopyRanter and I owe Mark Duffy a large bottle of brown liquor for the reference. It immediately became a massive favorite of the Clear the Crease crew. Smart and savage: what's not to like? Well, they did break up. So there won't be any more HEAVY TUNES from mclusky. Funnily enough, though, three (!) years ago, my friend Abe tried to sell me on Future of the Left, the band that formed from mclusky's ashes, and I didn't get it; until last night. 2013's HEAVY TUNES of the year will include Future of the Left's "Arming Eritrea" and "Land of My Formers" plus probably around a half a dozen others. Extra bonus: Falco is a really good writer, not just a really good songwriter. Try his tour diary, excellent hit piece on a shit song, and follow his swell twitter. And, for the love of fuck, spend some money on this band's brilliant music and spare them "the hollow anger of the ignored and jealous".

"hurry on sundown", Hawkwind, Some Comp a Friend of a Friend Made
I've always loved this song, and spent a couple years mostly listening to the excellent Oregon band Nudity's version, but this year was all about listening to the Hawkwind version multiple times in a row, singing along every single time.

"man the ramparts", Botch, We Are the Romans
Because sometimes you can't live your best life without spiky, off-kilter metallic hardcore. Wish it hadn't taken me 10 years to catch up to this record.

"oscillation", The Men, Open Your Heart
Untouchably great drone-groove, somewhere in between "hurry on sundown" and "year of the pig", this record pleased me every time I put it on. Less intense and transcendent than Leave Home, Open Your Heart was more varied—and maybe more easy to forget about. But the band's a keeper, and so's this record, and this song will be a staple for a long, long time.

"the nights of wine and roses", Japandroids, Celebration Rock
2012: year of Japandroids. Despite its obvious greatness, I didn't reach for this album all that often. But live, no songs meant more to me than this band's in 2012. I picked this tune pretty much at random: some nights I loved it the most, some nights I loved "younger us" the most, some nights "restless nights turn to restless years" was the lyric that hurt the most... Of course the real best song off the record is "the house that heaven built", the "anything, anything" of 2012, but like "anything, anything", I can't actually listen to the song all that often (because I don't like crying).

"rana", Pitchfork, Eucalyptus
Too much of this record sounds like hyper-caffinated early R.E.M., but (a) that's not a bad thing by any stretch and (b) some of the record sounds like this, which is as good as indie rock ever got.

It also bears mentioning that the releases from Negative Fun dominated the last couple months of my listening. Great stuff. Full disclosure: I got these records for free and was paid to write about them, but I would have been listening to them and loving them regardless. You will be hearing a lot from She Rides, Dripping Slits, and Red Hex in 2013—and so will I!

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2011

Malverde, Red Fang, Murder the Mountains
Short Version, Wild Flag, Wild Flag
running on nothing, Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
TNK, 801, 801 Live
Woke up Near Chelsea, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, the Brutalist Bricks
Black Captain, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Wolfroy Goes to Town
The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral, Mastodon, Crack the Skye
(), the Men, Leave Home
Boring Girls (live), Pissed Jeans, WFMU Comp
We Left the Apes to Rot, but Find the Fang Grows Within, Red Sparowes, Aphorisms
jigsaw puzzle, Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
always never know when to quit, Big Business, Quadruple Single
Miss Two Knives, Single Bullet Theory, Single Bullet Theory
Estate Sale Sign, the Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Jacket (orchestral), Shallow Gravy, Jacket EP
keep pushin', Pierced Arrows, 45

All Eternals Deck

Tied with David Comes to Life as the record that meant the most to me in 2011. Only misses were "the Autopsy Garland" (a fine song, but the Steely Dan references were a turnoff), "Age of Kings" (too much whispering, too much quavery violin), "Sourdoire Valley Song" (too slow, too much falsetto, but the lyrics might be the album's best), & "for Charles Bronson" (just too on the nose).

Though there's not one song that does it for me every-note/every-word, "Beautiful Gas Mask", "Birth of Serpents", "Prowl Great Cain", are damn close, and "Damn These Vampires" is as close to absolutely perfect as any song I've ever heard; I only left it off the best-song list to try to avoid being completely trite. "Birth of Serpents" and, oddly, "Liza Forever Minelli" have two or three lines that make me misty every single time. "High Hawk Season" makes me sing along with my nothing voice every single time. "Never Quite Free" might have the album's best arrangements, and even though I have no idea what it's 'about', the way the song is put together makes me happy every time I hear it.

David Comes to Life

Almost certainly too long, and with some weak spots like dry rot, but a hell-week when I couldn't go/be home, my lady was four time zones away, all I had was this record through the sub-thumbnail-sized speakers in my netbook, and even though I was kind of crying a lot, everything seemed okay whenever I heard something like "hello my name is David" or "where the fuck is the other shoe", or the spit-shout hoarse desperation of "it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it".

The drums are obliteratingly good, the guitars sound as good as any record you've ever owned, the bass is mixed just a hair too low for me, and the entire album sounds/feels like a heart-full teary-eyed smile-cry confession about how much you like really like somebody and just have to tell them about it all about it right now now now it hurts and goddamnit I had to do it and live/die/lose/win/walk/run/cry/laugh I'll never regret a second of this moment.

My sophomore year, I bought Quadrophenia on tape, used at the Buckingham Mall, a many-mile walk from my house, and I spent untold hours walking around Aurora listening to it again and again--David Comes to Life is less ambitious, less over-done, and slightly less successful, but it rocks a lot harder, and I'm not in my sophomore year anymore.

The stupidest thing I did at a show this year was leave during the encore.

Picked "running on nothing" more or less at random. It's great. "life in paper" would have worked about as well and I'm going to stop adding to this list, b/c if I don't, I'm going to list all but like three tunes.

Pissed Jeans

Old song, probably, but I never heard it, and this specific version is the greatest thing ever. Extra-special bonus points go to the drummer for being incredibly game.

Everything about this track is perfect.

Short Version

This record is only middling, but it makes a lot more sense after seeing them live. On the album, you just get a lot of fairly restrained pop-prog, but live you get a couple of Sleater-Kinney alums with as much raw charisma as anybody playing music, Mary Timony's virtuosity and sly hamminess and a more-than-the-sum-of-the-considerable-parts let's-fucking-go-for-it ethos that made the long, long, version of "racehorse" one of the four or five best live moments I had this year. Real players in the service of an improvisational, incantory, Patti-Smith-like tune: my brain & body were both annihilated.

But on record, "short version" was the best executed pop song with riffs and explosions and "Oh-KAY! Awl-RITE!" and bliss.

()

I don't remember why I went to this show alone; I do remember that I went to see Milk Music, who I love, and who played a very, very good set, and who were absolutely occluded in my memory by the savage brilliance of The Men. I had to leave (home) early, to catch BART, b/c living in the East Bay is a nightmare, and the last thing I heard was a phenomenal rendition of (). As untouchably brilliant as it is on record, hearing it live added a layer of repetition-build, 10 layers of dynamics, and 23 layers of intensity. The definitional HEAVY TUNE of 2011.

I just found out there's another record coming in early 2012, and that's the best culture news I've had since Chinese Democracy came out.

Malverde

Took me a long, long time to warm to this record. Two main obstacles: the first single, "Wires", sounds like (the) tepid gruel (typically) expectorated by Queens of the Stone Age; the first time I saw Red Fang was one of the greatest live moments of my life, with a couple drone-riff & groove-stomp burners they seem to have retired. Compared to "humans remain human remains" and "suicide", a lot of their material has lacked a certain luster--but this song is flawless like a mammoth-sized emerald avalanching down a steep hill, here and there bounding up and catching air, but it doesn't spare anybody, it only builds more tension before flattening whatever's in its way.

Red Sparowes

This band is a long-time favorite--I was loving their shit when I was still getting tattoos--and this EP adds substantial and nasty edge to the band's drone-flow style. Minute per minute, by far the best thing I bought this year. Takes me places every time.

Jacket

Fuck it, I can't help it: this melody really works for me. Venture Brothers is the best show on TV, partly because its creators are legit polymaths.

Woke up Near Chelsea

A toss-up: I only discovered Ted Leo this year, and I've already had a deeply weird relationship with his records. At least three times in 2011, I've been on camping trips with no music and Shake the Sheets stuck irremovably in my head--I shit you not! So for now, I'm not letting myself listen to that record, and I'm holding myself to the Brutalist Bricks.

I had a conversation with David Roth once, and he argued that the production on these records is unovercomably offputting. And there are moments of Bricks where that's almost true*: the drums all sound enh and the bass production is frankly repellent (nowhere more so than on "mourning in America" and the way-too-compressed "the mighty sparrow"), but on this number, Leo's songwriting/arranging genius takes over and rumble-tumbles big riffs over and around seizing melodies. In a way, choosing this song is a cop-out, but these two records spent a huge amount of time in my rotation this year, and will next year too, and this tune might be the easiest one to access if you're not me. (I came fucking close to picking "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", because I fucking love that song, but I thought it better to stick with a straight number.)

Only songs I can't seem to enjoy are "gimmie the wire", which is musically great but I can't get past the "Tipper" line, and "one Polaroid a day", with a creepily in-your-ear soul whisper-growl that I don't like from anybody. The way Leo & his band put a song together--which is songwriting far more than lyric-writing is--is one of the best things I've discovered in the past couple years. Lots of parts! And malproduced or not, the drummer is tight as fuck.

Black Captain

As good a song as Will Oldham has ever written--which inarguably means that it's as good a song as anybody has ever written.

TNK

Heard this on KALX, ran it down mere days later at a time when I was too broke to be buying records. It's by a wide margin the best tune on the record, unfortunately, but I like Eno well enough, and, per my gushing over live Wild Flag, have a lot of fondness for soloy pop-prog, which this is. (There was a BBC recording of Eno's band that turns all the still, measured perfection of Taking Tiger Mountain into slipshod boogie--no shit: avoid that one. Avoid it hard.)

jigsaw puzzle

Beggars Banquet is now my go-to Stones record. Not as scathing as Exile nor as studio-overreaching as Let it Bleed, it's just a perfectly executed collection of surprisingly varied songs--with essentially no idiot missteps (think "Brown Sugar"). I picked "jigsaw puzzle" because I think it probably has more verses than all other Stones songs I love combined.

Open question: did anyone ever take "salt of the earth" at face value?

The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral

Not a huge fan of Mastodon. They're radically overproduced, and the vocals are probably the worst of any major band in any genre. But sometimes the guy stops his atonal keening and the band goes off. They're a lot like Jane's Addiction, in other words, in that their one-trick fake virtuosity is only compelling because they spend so much time fucking around trying to pull off things they're not good at. But at 3:45 or so of this one, when the acoustics & vocals fade away and we get a couple seconds of stolen-from-High-on-Fire Sabbath-saw riffage, nothing could make more sense or be more satisfying: at least until 5:25, when it gets even better for a minute.

Bonus points for the worst lyric any heavy band ever wrote: "wasting valuable time". Hey, dude: your moron B-school ambitions are showing. If you actually want people to think you're a metal band, you follow "wasting" with "my foes" or something. You don't write paeans to efficiency (FFS).

Miss Two Knives

Far the best song on the record, but there's only so many Cheap Trick records in this worthless, degraded world, so sometimes a man just has to shove two knives into the power-pop hole in his soul.

always never know when to quit

I put this on Noodles' .mp3 player and she called me one day to say "this is funny--it makes me laugh". That's half the reason I love Big Business. The other half is that the power of their fuzz & Jared's Axl-like ability to harmonize with himself is heart-squeezingly powerful.

keep pushin'

Saw Pierced Arrows a lot this year, for some reason. Kelly's drumming has gotten better and better, and the pre-Halloween show Noodles & I caught at Thee Parkside was as good as any Dead Moon show ever was. They also opened up for Dinosaur Jr. at the Fillmore, and garnered more than a few fans from the shockingly young crowd. That's where I first heard this peppy little number, which makes me smile.

*I should note explicitly that I think the Pharmacists are sounding on record exactly like they want to: the production Roth finds so problematic is deliberate, not incompetent.