I feel stupid not writing about this album sooner. It was the first thing I heard this year that I got really passionate about listening to.

The naming of the album is well-chosen. There is a very primal edge to Jonathan Meiburg’s vocals that sells the feel of the album. It’s decidedly dark in places, with aggressively slammed piano parts on tracks that build from dirge-like pacing on ‘Insolence’, or the throaty howl of the chorus on ‘Breaking of the Yearlings’, but soars brilliantly on tracks like ‘Animal Life’ and ‘You As You Were‘.

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‘You As You Were’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The anxious tempo of the piano and the kickdrum thrusts us through the seasonal imagery provided by the lyrics, the energy behind the it building all the time to the finishing iterations of “I’m leaving the life.” It’s the kind of song that makes you want to go out and just… achieve something.

I’m unfamiliar with any of Shearwater’s past work, though I’ve read Animal Life is something of a departure. I’ll say this: it suits them. The best point of departure I could think of would be maybe Mumford and Sons…? In that they have that underlying Appalachian-foothills-desperation thing going on in places, sure, but their big epic songs are cut from a completely different cloth.

There is a surprising lack of cohesion between the tracks. ‘You As You Were’ abruptly ends, leading to the super-slow ‘Insolence’, which itself dumps you right into the guitar-shredding ‘Immaculate’, having the effect of someone punching the gas and the break at song-length intervals. Normally this sort of things bugs me, but the songs are all so interesting, and the constant discrete alteration of pacing keeps you from getting to complacent in your listening.

A microcosm of this effect is readily seen in ‘Pushing The River‘:

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‘Pushing The River’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

I think everyone will probably have a different take on Animal Joy as far as where the best tracks are. What there should be little disagreement about is that it’s a moody, emotive record that unifies a panoply of styles into a brilliant album of music.

Shearwater – Animal Joy

I went ahead and decided to give this record a spin, just because there was a lot of blog chatter about it. For some stupid reason, I had categorized School of Seven Bells in a pretty small box of “bands whose name has ‘bells’ in it.” Not having been as enamored with Sleigh Bells Treats, I had some subconscious barrier between myself and SVIIB.

Stupid, I know.

Once I was past that, I found a lot to love. I’ve heard the genre labeled “nu-gaze”, which I can only guess is a splicing of new wave synth/beats and… whatever the hell shoegaze brings to the party. Whatever you feel like calling it thought, it’s fantastic.

The music itself is based in a very ethereal, tonal foundation, which effortlessly can pick up a nearly dance-inducing drive (as in ‘Lafaye‘) or lull you in and out of consciousness (as in the excellent supporting track, ‘Reappear’).

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‘Lafaye’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The texture of this track, intricate without becoming cluttered, makes it especially good. It introduces the protagonist of the album, Lafaye, who interacts throughout the record with “the ghosts that surround her life,” providing an interesting framework upon which a lot of really go music is structured.

Also worth noting about Ghostory is that the duo of Deheza and Curtis are not afraid to let their songs really evolve. The first single, and an excellent track at that, ‘The Night’, opens the album at just under 4 minutes long. Every other song is longer than this, including my dark-horse candidate for favorite track ‘Low Times“.

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‘Low Times’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The chorus, “Low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low- times”descends first in pitch for the first few ‘lows’, which is kindof intuitive, but midway through, the pitch starts to come back up. Saying ‘low’ while you go higher seemed a crafty and subtle move to me. Not to mention the song just has a lot of restrained energy to it that explodes at the end with the transition to the “p-r-e-d-a-t-o-r” part of the the song.

The latter half of the record is quite solid, with the other standout tracks being the accusatory, confrontationally epic ‘Scavenger’, and the tour-de-force of ‘White Wind’.

Easily this record is one of the best things I’ve heard this year, and I expect I won’t get tired of it any time soon. I’m pleasantly surprised with how approachable I feel the record is, given both its ambition and its deviation from typical formulae of other work in adjacent genres.

School of Seven Bells – Ghostory

Also I’ve been really bad about posting, so this seems as good of a reason as any to get back in the game.

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‘Eyeoneye’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

You’ve done the impossible now
Took yourself apart
Made yourself invulnerable
No one can break your heart
So you break it yourself

Those lyrics that lead into the first chorus are what really caught my ear. So many songs, in an genre, deal with heartbreak. The notion that you’d voluntarily bring that upon yourself is such a curious idea that I can’t help but try and figure this song out.

I could really use some help for what “eyeoneye” means, other than a neat bit of wordplay if forms, rhyming with “reion-ion-ion-ionize”. Seriously, anyone. Chime in. I need Andrew Bird explained to me.

Andrew Bird – ‘Eyeoneye’

I came across it earlier this week in a preview for PBS’s Masterpiece Classic version of Great Expectations:

Watch Great Expectations Preview on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

And while I don’t remember a great deal about the details of that story (I read it what… 7 years ago?!), this preview made me kindof excited for the adaptation. More than that, though, the song really caught my ear. It’s the thunderous standout on last year’s self-titled Anna Calvi.

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‘Desire’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

I really, really enjoyed the track. The rest of the album fares well enough, though still pales in comparison.

Additionally, consider this my official “back in the saddle” post as far as 2012 music is concerned. January didn’t really see all that many interesting releases (for me, anyways), but I’ve finally gotten some decent stuff in the ol’ queue for listening, and it will only get better in the coming months. I shall report back when I have heard something of note.

Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi

It was a good year for the blog though, with some 40-odd posts, nearly all music related, making this the year to beat in terms of content production. It’s still a little unevenly paced still, but we made it through the year without any huge gaps in updates, which I’m quite proud of!

Without further ado, I have linked to the big list of the top albums of 2011. Below, for purposes of aggregation, is my Hype Zeitgeist widget.

For a long while, my eyes mentally registered the glib Welsh indie rockers not as ‘Los Campesions!’ but as ‘band with the Spanish name and the exclamation point’. After hearing the new single off their 2011 effort (review pending), I decided to see how last year’s record sounded, for context.

Actually I ended up buying it on impulse, and it seems my instincts were pretty spot-on. Romance Is Boring is a phenomenal record. If The Wombats are comedians who also happen to be solid musicians, Los Campesinos! are frenetic indie rockers who coincidentally have a wicked sense of humor.

Nearly every track has something notable or interesting or just fun that to do my typical line-by-line would be for too much, so I’ll do my best to pick representative examples.

The first 2/3 of the album almost seem to be a proof-of-concept. Right out of the gate, the first lyrics of ‘In Media Res’,

But let’s talk about your for a minute
With the vomit at your gullet
From the half-bottle of vodka /
that we’d stolen from the optic

Brash and tactless, the group assumes an instant familiarity with the listener, already singing about gross body things inside the first 60 seconds! It’s hard to criticize the language as crass though when it’s accompanied by the finesse of both a string and xylophone accompaniment.

My favorite track from this phase is ‘There Are Listed Buildings‘. While its “ba baaaaa”s are perhaps a little too evocative of DCFC’s ‘Sound of Settling’, the varied vocal textures, bombastic trumpets, and continued employ of the xylophone more than make up for it.

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‘There Are Listed Buildings’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

It’s also worth stating that the use of the refrain lyric “I think I’d do it for love, if it were not for the money” is delivered with such swagger and energy that the whole damn song could nearly stand on that alone. The track is a compact argument for why LC! demand your attention.

The title track is a lot of fun, and has some of my favorite guitar parts. Following that is a series of songs that are impressively consistent insofar as being cleverly written and exciting to listen to; connecting them in places are also a few transitional tracks, which work well.

In what I think to be somewhat uncommon, all the best material on Romance Is Boring is at the back end. The last five songs are distinct in that they meet or exceed the level of craftsmanship seen up until this point, but additionally carry some emotional component to them as well.

‘A Heat Rash In The Shape of the Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me to Charlotte’ has a narrative which begins tongue-in-cheek to be sure, but the cries of the backing vocals “It will never be the same!” along with the content of said letter to Charlotte in the final verse makes for a captivating, even enthralling, listen.

The content takes an even more grave and serious turn in ‘The Sea is a Good Place to Think About the Future’, which tells a really heart-breaking story, and opens up the leitmotif concerning the ocean that pervades the last few songs. It’s a perfect example of how slow songs don’t have to be boring.

In the penultimate slot is hands down my favorite song on the record, ‘This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind.‘

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‘This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind.’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Any song whose opening line is a screaming chorus of “CAN WE ALL PLEASE JUST CALM THE FUCK DOWN!?” is bold to be sure, but to get away with it in all seriousness has got to be classified as a work of art. Lyrical wordplay in each of the versus, but in particular the chorus, is top-notch:

The story of the winter I forgot how to speak:
My mind was like your nation’s flag /
but my breeze was too weak.
How they dragged me to the hospital /
said I had gone deaf.
But I heard everything they said /
it’s just I had no interest.

Slidey-guitars, garnished with a perfect hint of synth… it’s just awesome. Closing things down is ‘Coda: A Burn Scar In the Shape of the Sooner State’. Never minding the silly theme of state-shaped skin conditions, the forlorn repetition of “I can’t believe you chose the mountains every time I chose the sea…” is a really somber, introspective note to end what started out as such a brash and wild record.

Romance Is Boring will win your heart and your mind. It’s equal parts head-banging and thought-provoking. It’s hard to praise the Los Campesinos! collective enough for such a unique and fun LP.

Los Campesinos! – Romance Is Boring