Not all of Stereogum’s favorite sounds conform to what folks expect us to cover. In this space, resident Bananafish fetishist Brandon Stosuy focuses on bands, albums, singles, and villages in Sweden that may otherwise pass by unnoticed. This week’s eclectic virtual milk crate contains the best weirdo albums of 2007.
It’s rough putting your year-end favorites in a separate pile, dividing shit by genre or some other designation. I did an all-metal list elsewhere. This here involves metal (which I’m listing separately), but consciously expands the boundaries to include my other most-listened-to genres (and sub-genres and whatever). Every year January approaches, I hem and haw about placing a hierarchical rank on what amounts to deeply personal listening habits. This list is basically what I enjoyed (and enjoyed most often) over the past dozen months — which only makes it the best to these buzzing ears, though I recommend each highly and if you enjoy a sample posted herein, I think you’ll totally dig the rest of the artist’s output. The list is only in a general order, but in that order for a reason. I kept it minimal so I was only writing about the stuff that truly blew me away.
Yellow Swans: At All Ends (Load): First off, this was maybe Load‘s best year in recent, post-Wonderful Rainbow memory (big ups, Ben). You’ll see a bunch of Load records scattered throughout here — and that’s after listening to and absorbing thousands of different albums. I could’ve easily included Clockcleaner, too, but feared accusations of payola. Or noise coupons. Or something.
Of all the great Load release in ’07, my favorite’s At All Ends by Portland duo Yellow Swans. I’ve always appreciated the piercing electro-noise of Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman, but when they softened the scree some on At All Ends it sucked me in like almost no other album in ’07. LIke remember how people really got into Belong’s glistening October Language last year? Up that to the intensity of a much larger swarm-per-inch ratio without losing the fragile beauty. More a late December Language. Absolutely perfect atmospherics on the mesmerizing title track.
Love that it builds without falling to a cliched super-dynamic ending. The record’s masterful like that. YS also run the label JYRK, self-releasing tons of CD-Rs/cassettes. Keep your eyes and ears peeled over here.
[Yellow Swans]
WZT Hearts: Threads Rope Spell Making Your Bones (Carpark): This was obviously the year of Baltimore; for me, the most intriguing group to emerge from that moment is WZT Hearts (“Wet Hearts”), who layers drums, guitar, and various effects into lapping, psychedelic, jazzy sound escapes. Threads, the followup to 2006′s Heat Chief, is a plush (as in soft) dust storm of white noise, laptop, pedals, tapes, gurgling bells, space-y court music, thunderstorms, haunted spells. It’s glitchy and swooshy, and always nighttime somehow — buzzy, loose wires connecting the spill. Enjoy this video of some WZT action.
Grab more at their MySpace.
Magik Markers: BOSS (Ecstatic Peace!): I’ve loved MM as a live band for a long time, but in ’07 they showed some songwriting chops behind the on-stage smarts. More than that, Elisa Ambrogio found a way to cram her brilliant wordplay and between-song banter into painfully honest and beautiful lyricism. Drummer (and multi-instrumental teacher) Pete Nolan is the perfect percussive counterpoint (I know Lee Ranaldo produced, but even if he didn’t, you gotta hear some early SY in his swells). After losing their bassist Leah Quimby, the duo proved stronger/more complex in smaller numbers. It’s occasionally annoying seeing Arcade Fire nab the accolades they go for lyricism when you have someone like Ambrogio writing the stuff she does, mixing Kali, blood, drunkenness, ache, and bad dreams, along with an elliptical but fleshed minimalism like this tiny random bit from “Taste”: “The only car on the raw sheet highway is riding / The stars for him are only coat lining / You cannot sweat a piebald horse and make it a steed / I cannot take your want and make it a need.” Or how about when she terms herself “the secular Pentecost / squeezing out the blue snake.” It can trip and breeze achy toward the visionary; it’s not merely anthemic, clever, or cute.
Sir Richard Bishop: Polytheistic Fragments (Drag City): Sun City Girl Richard Bishop has always been a fascinating guitarist. Polytheistic Fragments makes good on its title — both religious seeming and epically segmented, or partial. A song like “Cross My Palm With Silver” feels like it could mosey forever with it alchemical undertones; “Free Masonic Guitar” like its picking is the result of some secret handshake. In a year that fellow Sun City Girl Charles Gocher died of cancer (in February), this hits, in retrospect, however wrongheaded, like elegy … though not something as wackily shuffling and Raymond Scott-seeming as (the okay, kinda ominous) “Cemetery Games.”
You can hear more at MySpace. In ’07 he also released While My Guitar Violently Bleeds on Locust Music. This video, from August 2005, finds Bishop doing “Raga Blues” in Manchester.
Burning Star Core: Blood Lightning 2007 (No Fun): Burning Star Core (Cincinatti-based noisemaker C. Spencer Yeh) has been doing his thing since 1993, but it was 2005′s The Very Heart Of The World that really drew me into his electro-acoustic psych and drone work (it’s essential, so really do look or it). This year’s otherworldly No Fun release opens with “The Universe Is Designed To Break Your Heart,” which starts with Yeh doing something with his mouth, before increasing the amplification and mixing in doses of fuzz and violin that escalate into a torrential swirl, spinnings out with a self-contained, moving beauty.
Step further into Yeh’s blizzard at MySpace.
John Wiese: Soft Punk (Troubleman Unlimited): I spent some time on Wiese in the second installment of the Outsiders, where you can locate some of his sounds, but here’s another from his opus-to-date, Soft Punk.
Thematic, too, since you should be on some sort of seasonal vacation, right?
Mouthus: Saw a Halo (Load):: I spoke about them in the first volume of the Outsiders, just two weeks ago. Dig backwards here.
Sightings: Through The Panama (Load): Though they’ve been around for ages, we slapped Sightings with a BTW because their sixth album Through The Panama felt like such a huge creaking and careening leap, even in regards to 2004′s superb Arrived In Gold. Their rhythms are more strangulated and sharp (and just plain sick on “Cloven Hoof”), guitarist/vocalist Mark Morgan’s angry vocalisms all the more assured. The BTW link will give you a tune; visit their MySpace for more of the murky, no-waved Brooklyn trio.
Speaking of Brooklyn expansiveness, Excepter added a couple new members this past year, both with day jobs — so might as well tie-in two different column with this update form film archivist John Fell Ryan:
Lala Harrison and Clare Amory joined Excepter as “full-time” members this Summer. Lala teaches private music lessons to kids and Clare is a Pilates instructor.
That’s our first Pilates instructor. Follow up, please?
Changing amplification some, the metal records you should buy before you suffer from that overpraising-Ire Works affliction (in no order, kinda):
Watain: Sworn to Dark (Ajna Offensive/Season Of Mist)
Deathspell Omega: Fas – Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum (Ajna Offensive/N.E.D.)
Bergraven: Dödsvisioner (Hydra Head)
Wolves in the Throne Room: Two Hunters (Southern Lord)
The Ruins of Beverast: Rain Upon the Impure (Van)
Nifelheim: Envoy Of Lucifer (Regain)
Om: Pilgrimage (Southern Lord)
Blut Aus Nord: Odinist (Candlelight)
Skeletonwitch: Beyond the Permafrost (Prosthetic)
Alcest: Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde (Profound Lore/Prophecy)
High on Fire: Death Is This Communion (Relapse)
Portal: Outre (Profound Lore)
Wold: Screech Owl (Profound Lore)
Baroness: The Red Album (Relapse)
Finally, Islaja‘s pretty new album Ulual YYY wasn’t my favorite of her output (that’d be Palaa Aurinkoon), but the video for “Pete P,” the best track on the record, deserves an honorary place here.
And while we’re in Finland, here’s Es‘s “Sateenkaarisuudelma III” from Sateenkaarisuudelma, also on the super Fonal label.
What have you dug that hasn’t seen love on the year-end listserve?
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My personal favorite for release of the year would have to be The Four Trees by Caspian. Great instrumental album, I am loathe to say post-rock, that continues to impress, even after repeated listens. Powerful, beautiful, visceral, it is a shame that more people aren’t listening or aware of this band. Definitely worth finding.
http://www.myspace.com/caspiantheband to take a listen.
nice to see John Weiss, Sightings, and Yellow Swans covered.
some other gems:
White Rainbows – Sun Shifts
Woelv – Tout Seul Dans La Foret En Plein Jour Avez Vous Peur
Skull Defekts – Blood Spirit/Drums are Singing
Kemialliset Ystavat – Untitled
Tim Hecker – Radio Amor
John Maus- Love is Real
nice to see Sightings, Yellow Swans and Sightings covered:
Merzbow – Merzbear
Kemialliset Ystavat – Untitled
John Maus – Love is Real
Tim Hecker – Radio Amor
White Rainbow – Sun Shifts
Throbbing Gristle – Part Two: The Endless Not
I’ve long thought the end of industrial music arrived the minute a new millennium began. In some sense I am right. There is no more “punch”. No more intriguing structures. There is no more originality. Only one band, the very band that invented this category, the godfathers of industrial music themselves, could raise the spirit back from the dead, Throbbing Gristle. A strange life indeed, THIS ISN’T YOUR AVERAGE INDUSTRIAL ALBUM. This is free form jazz splintered by factory made, assembelized cold industrial steel. I had always had a fond interest in the Throbbing Gristle catalogue, including its many facets: Coil, Psychic TV, etc., but this opened my ears/heart & soul to what I believe is one of the crowning achievements in musical history. Screaming/depraved madness looped on top of improvisational harmonic genius. Romanticism through the most emotionally disturbed vocals bleeding over ripples of precocious and crunchy sounds. I know this album won’t be for everyone, and that’s ok, but for me it doesn’t get much better than this. I am intensely attached to these noises. Machines and humans are mourning together again and if I die tomorrow listen to this in my honor.
Needs more Pavement.
I still think Do Make Say Think put out one of the best records of the year with “You, You’re A History in Rust”.
I thought the ponys-turn the lights out was rockin good stuff but that hasnt really gotten much love anywhere
right on, Lucas! I love that album too. It always seems that a few albums released early in the year are snubbed when the “best of” lists are compiled. This year it was DMST and Menomena.
I’ve been stuck in a rut lately musically, but will check these out. Always looking for previously uncharted territory…for me, anyway. Thanks!
that Yellow Swans record is great, it’s nice to see them finally getting some attention after all these years. some other great stuff…
White Rainbow “Prism of Eternal Now”
Emeralds “Servant”
Earth “Hibernaculum”
mewithoutYou totally blew me away this year with their “brother, sister” release.
truly great experimental rock that they obviously pour their souls into.
Thanks for Burning Star Core recognition. Spence is really honing his droning.
Stereogum spent so much time giving props to the band I am about to mention, so I am surprised to not see them mentioned on here: The Forms. When the dust cleared at the end of ’07, they were sitting pretty somewhere in my Top 3 Albums of the Year list. I was surprised not much was said about their release, considering they had a few successful jaunts with 2007 heavy-hitters The National. Pitchfork totally shut them out with a review, as well, despite giving their debut an 8-point-something.
Chris Batten & The Woods – “If We Never Stop Moving” EP on iTunes
Awesome 5 songs. This band gets better and better with each EP. Great live show and an awesome collection of tunes. Shame it was overlooked by you Stereogum-ers! Oh well..not too late to look now!!
Thunderhawk’s GRAVITY WINS!, for my time and money, was the best album no one heard in 2007. Check it out at http://www.myspace.com/thunderhawk band.
The Mount Eerie album/10″ was excellent, as was a lot of the stuff mentioned above.
I also agree that the Ponys’ album deserved much more celebration than it saw; what an excellent record. The Black Lips, too, should’ve broken through to the mainstream in 2007 with GOOD BAD NOT EVIL.
division day – beartrap island (re-release, but still…)
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your focus on some of the best metal albums to come out this year. Though I enjoyed Ire Works to a degree, I agree it receives too much praise and enjoyed the Baroness and High on Fire albums a great deal more.
I will also check out Deathspell Omega as French black metal is apparently where it’s at these days.
Cincinnati is spelled “Cincinnati.”
Great post!
Merry Xmas
VIRV.TV-Indie Music Television
@jared
I hear you, especially re: Kemialliset Ystävät and Hecker. All good suggestions.
@Liam
Earth was on my list, then I took if off at the last minute … another totally worthy album.
@alex_pastepunk
The Deathspell’s amazing — French black metal is definitely worth exploring (look for Antaeus and Peste Noire as well). Best metal album of the year, in my opinion: Watain (old-school Swedish black metal).
the most shamefully ignored band all year was shapes and sizes. split lips, winning hips, a shiner is incredible!