Read & Listen

2009 in songs: those listened to more than others or loved deeper.

1. The Radio Dept. - David
2. The Crêpes – What Else?
3. Animal Collective - My Girls
4. Pallers - Humdrum
5. Metric - Sick Muse
6. Franz Ferdinand - No You Girls
7. The XX - Crystallised
8. Camera Obscura - French Navy
9. Burial & Four Tet - Moth
10. JJ - My Hopes and Dreams

Honorable mention:

Masha Qrella - Speak Low
Royksopp - The Girl and the Robot
Four Tet - Love Cry
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – 103
Sally Shapiro - Love In July

The top 10 albums of 2009 (subjectively) look like this:

1. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Metric - Fantasies
3. Telefon Tel Aviv - Immolate Yourself
4. Royksopp - Junior
5. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
6. Burial & Four Tet - Moth/Wolf Cub (not really an album, but exceptional)
7. Beak> - Beak>
8. The XX - The XX
9. Franz Ferdinand - Tonight
10. Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra - Take Off!

Merry Christmas! Today’s holiday spirit was best related to this song. Not new, not even a Sufjan-Stevens-like Christmas carol. But truly warm, homey and very lively. Acid House Kings and “This Heart Is A Stone”, they appeared again on this year’s wonderful compilation by their home Labrador label, “Swedes Do It Better”. (Which, by the way, deserves a separate post.) And here is a sing-along version:

The year has almost ended, and I realize that I won’t have the time to write about everything, or even half of what I listened to and graded A. Still, I want to mention a momentarily passion, a gloomy experimenter from Reykjavik with almost otherworldly sound - Ben Frost. Even his Myspace page is “the ghost of Ben Frost.” His album “By The Throat” has a track with a name very pleasant to a Ukrainian ear, The Carpathians. It can be downloaded here.

Ben Frost Myspace

Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind (EP)
[Domino, 2009]

The year started with Animal Collective, with Animal Collective it ends - very successfully at both. Merriweather Post Pavilion irrevocably placed them into the mainstream and brought about a round of applause on the critics’ part. And the current EP only gives a foothold for this.

With most sincerity: I adore Animal Collective. I’ve said numerous times how they influence me personally and help me deal with the chaos around. But I also love them for the fact that they’ve been doing the music they like for such a long time, despite it being too “niche” and somewhat out of place - and now they created a space in this seemingly overcrowded place, and made the so-called mass market embrace them. Five new tracks are not the brightest ones in the now rich band discography. If you imagine that this is the first thing you hear by Animal Collective, maybe you won’t readily grasp them - it’d be better to start off with something like Strawberry Jam or Feels. But for the prepared ear, this music melts in your ears and in-between them, like honey. “Bleeding,” by the way, is a very flow-y song, built primarily on vocals and dragging you into the dreamy ambient. “What Would I Want? Sky” has a sample from good old Grateful Dead’s “Unbroken Chain,” although a rare fan of both bands, divided by generations, can recognize it.

A beautiful bacchanalia: tingling, flowing, rushing and sometimes roaring, but most of all reminding you of elvish flirting in a magic wood. Frisky dancing to the flute (on “Graze”), noise of a close, you’d think, highway (”On A Highway”) - while walking the frailest of paths, and, finally, a true magic and mystery on the closing “I Think I Can,” with shamanic mantras, when the trees and the bushes have thickened around you. All this is quite far from anything you’d expect a modern music scene would bring, but at the same time, it’s nothing but Animal Collective.

Read & Listen:
Official website
Animal Collective Myspace
Animal Collective accidentally leak the EP (via Hotcakes)
Pitchfork news
Preview of Fall Be Kind