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Favorite “Old New” Music of 2009
Filed Under Updates
We here at Stereopathic seriously love finding new music. Year after year drops new artists and records and tracks we love. But we also keep finding killer stuff from the days of yore, always amazed at the stuff we’ve been missing, and always grateful that we finally got a hold of it. Here’s the best of what caught our ears this year:
Larson
Land of Talk - Some Are Lakes (2008)
Discovered this album this year and have loved it. Killer rock and roll mixed with soulful, mellow grooves.
John Fahey - The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965)
John Fahey a gritty, backwoods, guitar slayer. Beautiful old-timey, low-fi country/bluegrass-inspired acoustic guitar tunes. I love that on one song you hear his dog bark in the background.
Richard Buckner - Since (1998)
Stereopathic had the honor of bringing Richard Buckner to our little town this last year. The show was mesmerizing. Bloomed is the album I’ve probably listened to the most, but Since is quickly pulling ahead.
Ray LaMontagne - Till The Sun Turns Black (2006)
I love Ray LaMontagne. Everything he does, just about, resonates with something in me. He’s not from this time - with vocals that are so soulful and delicate, yet more powerful and gravelly than Richie Havens. It was no surprise to me when I finally got a chance to listen to this album that I immediately fell in love.
Fela Kuti - Gentleman (1973)
Truth be told, I’ve just fallen in love with Fela Kuti this year. I’ve dabbled in the past, but sat down and listened to “Best of the Black President” and some other anthologies of his this year and was transfixed. Gentleman’s a classic example of Fela’s powerful music.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy - The Letting Go (2006)
It was this album that first got me hooked on Bonnie “Prince” Billy and I haven’t turned back.
Molly
The Smiths
They splashed the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack and sang “This Charming Man” before Stars. Seriously, they’re covered all over the place. How cute is that.
Innocence Mission
Thanks to Katay! The sound of Cali sunshine and peach margaritas.
Michael Jackson
I’ve got to admit, I have a whole new appreciation for the man - singer - behind the mask.
“Honey Pie” by The Beatles and Paul McCartney
Yummers.
Voxtrot
Most of their stuff is not new.
Brendan
Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
A record I tried to like upon its critically-ballyhooed initial release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot so underwhelmed me that I gave up reading about music altogether for a few years. That was a very healthy time in my life. Since then I have experienced recidivism in that area, to the point that I now even write about music—and I’m even putting YHF on a Top-something list. Sweep the house clean, seven worse than the first will show up.
Stumbling back into Wilco’s catalog via this year’s pretty good Wilco, I came across YHF again, finally able to hear it on its own terms. In 2002, I wanted a straight alt.country record, and therefore I said, “Wilco, whatevs.” In 2009, I was open to hearing Americana collapse into noise, to hear familiar songs torn apart and reconfigured. That’s what happens on YHF, over and over again, but none of it would work apart from the strength of the songs themselves and their flawless sequencing… and, of course, Jeff Tweedy’s voice as it fights against the noise that drowns him, desperately seeking connection with the people he loves.
Spoon Gimme Fiction
Taut, elemental rock and roll, played with humor and a restrained experimentalism that colors the songs so that even the most straightforward, 4/4 tracks come across like sly curveballs.
Pavement Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Brighten the Corners
In 1994, I didn’t know anyone who listened to Pavement. For all the teenage-me’s vaunted independence when it came to music—after all, I did run with the alternative crowd—that simple fact prevented me from hearing Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain until I was 30 and getting kind of curiously nostalgic for the music of my adolescence. As a teenager, I tended to take on the colors of the music I listened to, and the clarity of hindsight makes me wish I had given Pavement a listen back then. Because maybe I wouldn’t have taken myself so seriously (a diet of Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains will do that to you). Of the two records, Brighten the Corners has stronger songs, but the energy of Crooked Rain carries that record just fine. I don’t know what Steven Malkmus was singing about, but it turns out, as revealed by the recent Pavement reissues, that he didn’t, either.
Richard Buckner The Hill
Richard Buckner played Moscow last April, and in preparation for meeting the somewhat inscrutable and reclusive man, I binged on his records so we’d have something to talk about in case we got stuck talking to each other. Hate those uncomfortable silences. Buckner’s records turned out to be challenging, idiosyncratic, complex—and really worth the time (and, as it happened, we had a blast talking about conspiracies, aliens, weird taxidermy, and lots of other stuff… you shoulda been there).
Of his music, I dug The Hill the most. The record adapts Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology into nine songs and nine instrumentals, originally blurred into one track but now diced into thei 18 component parts. The material is a hand-in-glove fit for Buckner and his kind of dark, trenchant Americana, his voice and his compositions so naturally inhabiting these brief poems that they feel entirely his own.
Rather than read me prattle on about The Hill, go read my review from last March.
Will
This list is in reverse order, so as to place emphasis where emphasis, in my mind, is due.
5. Pinback Autumn of the Seraphs: I thought they were a pseudo-emo band. While raw emotion is present, Rob Crowe crafts music that feels both “pre” and “post” multiple genres. If you only hear one song, check out the song that hip hop will one day sample: Autumn of the Seraphs’s “Good to Sea”.
4.Wattstax documentary and soundtrack: While the soundtrack stands as a testament to the span of soul that Stax Records, from Rufus Thomas, to Albert King, to the white fro wig-wearing Bar-Kays, the documentary is a grainy, vibrant portrait of inner city black culture in the 70s. In an age where Dave Chappelle and his frank, hilarious comments on race have all but disappeared, Wattstax is a fantastic watch. Seeing Rufus Thomas heckle a wayward fan is one of my favorite concert films, period.
3. Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Bros./Sweetheart of the Rodeo : I’ll admit it. I fell for the Gram Parsons myth, but how could I not? One listen to “Christine’s Tune” at the start of Guilded Palace of Sin and I was entranced. There’s nothing I can say here that hasn’t already been eulogized and criticised, but… damn. God’s own singer, indeed.
2. The Replacements: I know, I know. They’re one of those bands every music fan tells you have to hear. It wasn’t til hearing “Alex Chilton” that I revisited the mix tape a friend made me that the ‘Mats clicked. I’ve asked myself why I didn’t get into them before and, while many of their themes relate to adolescence, it’s Westerberg’s tongue-in-cheek attitude that evokes nostalgia and immediacy that makes them so potent now.
1. Grateful Dead: I’m as shocked as anyone to list the Dead as my favorite discovery of the year. Some bands attract a loyal following that becomes so singular in its image that it alienates all but the loyal. Can you name any casual Grateful Dead fans? While I didn’t quit my job to follow Bob Weir and Ratdog around on tour, I have gone days upon days without changing the CD in my car or home stereo from Skeletons in the Closet and Live at Fillmore East 1971. Wading through all the cultural debris surrounding the Dead didn’t take long after a spin or two of tracks like “Casey Jones” and a live version of “St. Stephen”. I also bought a t-shirt.
Comments
5 Responses to “Favorite “Old New” Music of 2009”
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Haha - nice Will. As so many others before you, you have failed my American Beauty challenge. Only Brendan has stood firm against Grateful Dead and I’m convinced he’ll have a Wilco-esque awakening for the Dead as well.
Good pick on the Smiths, Molly.
Perhaps Workingman’s Dead would be a better album for Brendan? That’s my favorite studio work of theirs, thus far.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Indeed. It purty much revolutionized and epitomized my highschool career so I have deep down serious feelins for this album.
I liked YHF when it came out, but I didn’t every like Wilco before that. Sick and wrong!