Found this like a couple weeks ago or something from rockpapershotgun, and forgot to mention it until now. It’s been linked all over since I think. But if you haven’t tried it yet, you must. First person tetris is just that, really trippy, and if you want something extra trippy, or you think you’re really good at tetris try night mode hahaha.
New Vampire Weekend is pretty good. New Mos Def (2009) is really good.
Happy new year everyone, I hope you didn’t spend it like I did, with a 103 degree fever which I’m still recovering from. I haven’t posted in awhile so I wanted to give small recaps of the year through the always fun, best of lists. I think I’ll be making 3 or so of these perhaps with the general areas of: music, comics/books, other.
My own list of albums of the year (notice that not all the albums actually came out in 2009, I just bought them in 2009, although they’re all relatively recent) note that they aren’t in any particular order, I can’t really pick one album as an album of the year:
1. Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come (2009)
Another great John Darnielle work, I thought it a funny concept following his previous album “Heretic Pride”. As I understand it Darnielle is an avid churchgoer, and each track is named after a bible verse. That’s about as directly biblical the album gets, don’t get me wrong there is a lot of religious references in the songs as per usual, but John Darnielle has sort of reached this strange subtle multilayered genius with his lyrics, where you can’t ever really tell what he’s singing about whether it’s heartbreak or being a sacrificial slave in the circus maximus. Hannah and I saw him recently, and as per usual The Mountain Goats are really good live.
2. Krallice – Dimensional Bleedthrough (2009)
I guess these guys are labelled as Black Metal but they’re far to experimental to be considered just black metal. Dimensional Bleedthrough is the band’s second full length album. I also got their first album, which is S/T, this year and it is equally amazing. There is so much technical shredding, and layered changes to every song that it almost sounds like an ambient album at times, if it wasn’t so fucking metal. Tied for my favorite metal album of the year.
3. Antlers – Hospice (2009)
Picked this up fairly recently, very dark and introspective album, brooding at times, all while being very pretty music.
4. Converge – Axe to Fall (2009)
Easily the best album since Jane Doe. I’ve always liked Converge, and Jane Doe remains one of my favorite albums of all time. Axe to Fall is really really hard, brutal hard. Tied with Krallice for favorite metal album of the year.
5. These Arms Are Snakes – Tail Swallower and Dove (2008)
I don’t know how I missed this album in 2008, but whatever, great record. These Arms Are Snakes are former members of Botch, by far one of my favorite bands of all time. This record is a lot tighter, controlled and angrier than their previous album Easter.
6. Wavves – Wavvves (2009)
If you don’t know Wavves it’s the project of Nathan Williams, and sounds like this awesome lo-fi, noisy, surf rock. Choruses like “I’m soooo bored” and having half the song titles involve the word goth in them seems to be a pretty good recipie for success. I saw the guy play with Zach Hill drumming which was fucking awesome.
7. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – The Century Of Self (2009)
I did not like the two albums following Worlds Apart, and I didn’t actually like Worlds Apart very much either. That said, this album is really good, a lot of comparisons have been made to Source Tags, and I think they’re pretty justified, Century of Self has a very large scope and is an epic album.
8. Matt & Kim – Grand (2009)
Really catchy stuff, high energy pop, and these two are really good live.
9. Fucked Up – Chemistry Of Common Life (2008)
Although they don’t sound really alike, this album reminds me of Refused- Shape of Punk To Come. Fucked Up is a punk band for sure but this album is unconventional in it’s non traditional 4-4 setup, heavily layered guitars, instrumental tracks, etc. all the while being very angry. I saw them play a special show where they only played this album, which was awesome as they had a bunch of extra musicians like Andrew WK and the Vivian Girls to play all the extra studio parts, these guys are good live. They have three guitarists, the band is huge.
10. Here We Go Magic – S/T (2009)
I sort of picked this up randomly, but it’s a great one. Very chill and catchy, but also pretty ecclectic if that makes sense. Didn’t realize this guy’s based out of brooklyn too.
Honorable Mentions: Isis – Wavering Radiant, Legion of Two – Riffs, Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion, Major Lazer – Guns Don’t Kill People Lazers Do, Coalesce – Ox, Charles Spearin – The Happiness Project, Sunn O – Monoliths & Dimensions
Shows seen: Krallice (twice), The Happiness Project, Mountain Goats, Sufjan Stevens, White Mice, Wavves (w/ zach hill drumming), Fucked Up, Melt Bannana, Mount Eerie, 3 Inches of Blood, Lightning Bolt, Blonde Redhead, can’t remember the rest but it was a pretty good concert year. Also to note, I saw Liturgy like at least 5 times this year as they seemed to open for every band I went to see, they’re a good metal outfit, with a really good drummer.
Albums I want to pick up: Sunny Day in Glasgow’s second album, new Mos Def album, new MF Doom album, Fever Ray, new Lightning Bolt
Looking forward to in the immiediate future: new Four Tet album in Jan. and show at Le Poisson Rouge in Feb.
And who would ever think I’d like reggae dancehall music.
PS. I’m going to eat so much.
In no particular order, this is a doublebow that hannah and I saw from the top of our apartment building a while ago. This was right after a storm, I actually think it was raining. June and May were really rainy, like seattle, like 25 out of 30 days were raining. July was sunny.
So there was a competition called Reburbia, put on by inhabitat and dwell. Very cool concept, how would you re-envision suburbia. We (the gang) had discussions, and brainstorms about the subject and ultimately couldn’t come up with anything cohesive. This is a really hard prompt. The problem started with how pragmatic should the solution be, and the question of what is suburbia. When a somewhat pragmatic approach is viewed, lets say we want mixed use within suburbia, commercial, community space, etc. And lets say we would like to add some other integrated community green space, bike lanes everywhere, integrated public transportation, and all those nice things. Well you’ve just turned suburbia into a city. And that’s where thing started to get annoying, because we realized that suburbia is and has always been about living with a “country or rural” type of life with proximity to the city. Now I don’t mean farming animals or whatever, but having a nice quiet place, without the noise and bustle of the city, but close enough to the city to work or be entertained or whatever. Most ideas about turning the suburban into the urban then seemed really silly, because a lot of people don’t like city life, a lot of people like driving cars, and a lot of people like privacy, a lot of people like having much more space for their dollar, and don’t really know or hang out with their neighbors. Which is why a lot of people live in suburbia, among other reasons. We conjured up visions of deconstructing houses to make passageways to other buildings, sinking buildings, matta-clarking buildings, using demographics as program for suburia, etc. None of which really grabbed us. Eventually I think we were burnt out on the thing, because we couldn’t decide on an answer/other obligations/timeline. (The timeline was really short, considering that it only allowed for 5 images my guess is they wanted a ton of really quick ideas on the subject, suburban wind farm, and McMansion zoo, etc.) I saw the problem with suburbia not so much with the actual cookie cutter designs, excessive and reckless use of land/space, and general blah of existence. The big problem was that people want these cookie cutter neighborhoods, excessive and reckless use of land/space, and general blah. A 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 3 car garage, complete with pool and manicured lawn and built in a spanish style stucco whatever is awesome to most people! People love it! Attacking or undoing the image of this suburban ideal seemed to be more useful than proposing bike lanes or windmills for the already wide ass streets. Because it seems the general populous’ suburban preference is the largest design hurdle to overcome.
As a side note, I want to eventually produce a collaborative work called Delirious Sacramento, sort of an homage to Koolhaas’ Delirious New York/funny assessment of a fairly average city in comparison. I’ve grown up in the suburbs, all my friends generally have as well, and now there is a large group of us living in the city. We all have mixed feeling about the city in general, as there are merits to both. I do think it’ll be a worthwhile long term project and working on this submission and thinking about suburbia in general was a great kick start to Delirious Sacramento.
Back to the competition: At a certain point I was like fuck it, I’ll just make something fun, stemming from the idea that the suburban ideal must be subverted. This is what resulted. (BEHIND THE CUT)