201X - Bangers, Affirmations, and Masterpieces

In the last decade, Kanye West finally released an album I liked, I discovered the incredible Icelandic music scene, and phased myself out of SXSW and my Austin-centric way of life and started exploring new scenes.

I’m also amazed at the amount of killer music that was released in 2009 that I couldn’t include.

Listed in the order I thought of them:

Top 10 Songs

Nick Hakim - The Light
Octopus Project - Sharpteeth
La Vida Boheme - Hornos Del Cal
Svper - El Final De La Noche
Grisalappalisa - ABC
Tyler, The Creator - See You Again
Plateaus - Do It For You
Islands - Carried Away
A Giant Dog - Sex and Drugs
Les Savy Fav - Let’s Get Out Of Here

Top 10 Albums

Black Lips - Arabia Mountain
Nick Hakim - Where Will We Go 1 & 2
Diet Cig - Over Easy
La Sera - Sees The Light
Fucked Up - David Comes To Life
Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Dan Deacon - America
Why? - Mumps, Etc.
Les Savy Fav - Road to Ruin
Die! Die! Die! - What Did You Expect

I love music. I love expression. I love new ways of approaching things. I love the questioning of conventional composition. I love everything about controlling vibrations to make us feel things.

So I made this list as a celebration of the last ten years. I wanted to remember what happened and I wanted to share. Because I love this stuff and I want y’all to hear something on this list and obsess over it.

The main criterion for these 70 or so songs is if they made me think of music in a different way. You know, those moments when you realize what you’re listening to is completely new and different. Ranging from “Oh, you can just do that” to “Oh, you can just do that.” Either the arrangement, the subject matter, or the delivery, something stood out about each song on this list.

Only one song per artist (the exception being St Vincent as she’s almost completely absent from Byrne’s “I Should Watch TV”) and no covers (honorable mention to Wanda’s Jackson’s “Thunder on the Mountain” and Cigarettes After . Sex’s “Neon Moon“).

Putting this list together gave me a chance to go through my photos to see who I was able to shoot over the last few years.

I’ve fallen in love with concert photography since the last decade started. I’ve slowly tried to not only get good shots of the artists, but to capture the environment they perform in. Seeing these performances adds such a wonderful dimension to the recorded tracks. Whether it’s being in a tiny venue at 20% capacity, shoved into the stage the front of a packed ballroom, or watching them open for Crazy Town for some reason, adding those environments to the experience is something I’m moving toward capturing.

All of the typical subjects are here. There are the tales of new love from the stalker vibes of Kitty’s Okay Cupid, the cool ecstasy of Plateau’s Do It For You, and the simple celebration of life that is Surfbort’s Les Be In Love.

Multiple takes on love that has ended. Gangly’s Fuck With Someone Else explores the depressive side of needing to let go to The Coathanger’s Squeeki Tiki sending a final fuck you.

The exploration of youth from the first steps of independence in Diet Cig’s Pool Boyz to prolonged adolescence in Grim Streaker’s Today New York.

The pieces that focused on looking back on life gave me my favorite lines of the decade. A Giant Dog’s amazing Sex & Drugs (“I’m too old to die young/ I can’t even remember being young”) and Why’s Strawberries. The latter contains one of my favorite clusters of lyrics

Your mom, she sits while her hair is in curlers,
Smokes weed and listens to that Garrison Keillor,
That’s how I’ll live when I quit my rap career,
Let her laughter hit the rafters and go out into the atmosphere

Both Island’s Carried Away and Robyn’s Call Your Girlfriend approached vocals in a way I hadn’t thought of before. I’m in love with how Nick Diamond sings into a harmonica to give the two titular words a washed, strained sense as if they were being carried away themselves. The producers of Call Your Girlfriend took Robyn’s last note of the second chorus and turned it in to a sampled solo that still makes me smile.

Noun’s Dogs was my first “Spotify find” where the algorithms and gods aligned to deliver the most fun, weird, amazing piece. The structure made me think of France’s Shiko Shiko, who were the first band I fell in love with at Iceland Airwaves, and whose “Let’s Go To Pyongyang And Kill A Bunch Of People” made me believe in a prog-pop punk future.

And some songs carry a personal weight. I remember studying in the UTEP library a few weeks out from graduating with honors in the twilight of being 31 and listening to Mikal Cronin‘s Piano Mantra. I would just imagine being able to walk across the stage and graduating something for the first time in my life. The sentimental, unsure, and hopeful mood of the music just resonated with me at that moment.

Then there are the eternal bangers in Black Lip’s Raw Meat, SVPER’s El Final De La Noche, and Fucked Up’s Queen of Hearts.

The affirmations that drive us to music with FM Belfast’s I Don’t Want To Go To Sleep Either, CHAI’s N.E.O., and DRAM’s Cash Machine

And what I consider to be absolute masterpieces in Nick Hakim’s The Light, Octopus Project’s Sharpteeth, and La Vida Boheme’s Hornos Del Cal

Everything on this list is something I treasure. Just wanted to share :)

I also made a playlist of my favorite videos from the last decade and it has everything:

1. lethargic and literal raps about exploiting i and p frames
2. an oiled up Icelandic man in long underwear dancing in front of rolling hills of bologna
3. the most joyous telephone game ever played
4. a love story told through dance in a James Bond guise
5. a wonderful summation of the best rock opera of the decade
6. ten seconds of footage turned into a three-minute story of regret
7. two Austinites doing acid at Disneyland
8. an adorable old man shooting his shot at karaoke night
9. an imbalanced bender around Brooklyn in a traditional Korean dress
10. gooey hateful stuff.

201X - Bangers, Affirmations, and Masterpieces /January 10, 2020 by a zugunruhe

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