The Upward Spiral

All of There Is Love in You, especially “Circle,” sounds like the alley behind a gas station with the dusk melting in pools of motor oil. The songs are little beauties hidden in settings you never thought to look.

The bump of dance music is here, but warm, strong and nearly unrecognizable. Four Tet, a.k.a. Kieran Hebden, has always culled interesting electronic music from a sea of eclectic rhythms and sounds, but Love is more focused. It’s the melodic light of his past work, refracted through years of experience.

And that experience is collective: Hebden’s mentor is legendary jazz drummer Steve Reid, who played with Miles Davis, James Brown and Fela Kuti. Hebden, clearly an apt pupil, benefits from all these influences.

“This Unfolds” turns something of a Beck throwaway into Maynard James Keenan in space. The songs are eclectic but together in quiet shifts in tone. “Circling” has chopped vocals in an Afrobeat rhythm and a charming bell pattern. Everywhere, Love rescues childhood nostalgia from whimsy.

Diverse as the Hebden’s sampled sources are, the glue of Love is a song structure unique to dance music. New sounds emerge right on beat. These songs forever add to themselves, building till the end of every song is a whirling, euphoric wave of sounds.

But from where did this newfound joy come? “Pablo’s Heart,” a 12-second recording of a child’s heartbeat recorded on a cell phone, is indicative of Love as a whole. It’s like a dance in celebration of new life. Maybe Hebden’s introspection has upgraded, expanded outwardly.

Songs of Winter

The best time for contemplation is on late winter nights, a friend said to me. Sometimes he holes up in his bedroom and while the world sleeps, he thinks.

The cold harnesses the mind and hones the senses. We see divisions more clearly: the geometry of a bedside table, the sharp difference of darkness and light, the separation of communal identity and the lone self. In winter, the watercolor smear of summer is gone and the world has suddenly come into focus.

Winter keeps us indoors for long spans, which is hell for restless people. But more time affords longer commitments, like that of listening to a record in its entirety. Here are some frosty nuggets.

Music Has the Right to Children – Boards of Canada

Music Has the Right to Children is a future-music dream city submerged in murky water and subliminal messages. Melodies dissolve just as they reach boiling point. Many sounds are so subtle they hardly exist, so strap on some headphones. Hazy jams like “Aquarius” and “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” loom high, stretching a hip-hop beat and warping it forever past time. If Kubrick made beats…

Kind of Blue – Miles Davis

“All Blues” is the winter song on the jazz record. These alien chord changes don’t ever touch ground, despite heaps of praise. A tense theme for driving home from work at the end of dusk, the song has no peers. Kind of Blue is so unassuming but it demands your attention. This kind of record is extinct; it’s for people that have to wait for things.

Kid A – Radiohead

I remember first listening to all of Kid A in the early morning, on a stretch of highway in Colorado. We passed cranes and incomplete shopping malls, all of it dusted with snow, to the chug of “The National Anthem.” The car coasted around a mountain pass during “In Limbo,” a drugged funhouse mirror. It’s an album, man, and each song is a stream into one frigid reservoir.

Knives Don’t Have Your Back – Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton

Haines sets out on a desolate adventure from Metric, the electric-rock group, with nothing but a husky contralto and jazz in the liner notes. “The first three songs all begin with the same note,” a friend pointed out, and he’s right; this is a mood record. The music of a late winter night should be concentrated, sparse and factual. Haines’ path is sad and beautiful.

Others:

• The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground
• 23 – Blonde Redhead
• The Moon and Antarctica – Modest Mouse
• Sanguine – Julianna Barwick
• Turn On the Bright Lights – Interpol
• Songs of Leonard Cohen – Leonard Cohen
• Demon Dayz – Gorillaz

Brady’s Top Ten Albums of 2009

When one of my buddies recently complained what a sorry year 2009 was for film, I pitied him, because for music, the year was a truly great one. Especially compared to the onset of this decade, when bubblegum pop ruled the charts, Napster was hitting its stride and Destiny’s Child was still together.

The lonely thump of late-90s techno that was formerly a major influence on popular music gave way to a movement of open-minded, more cerebral musical ideas.

This year, the iPod generation embraced a quasi-disco revolution, the music industry’s funeral procession is halfway through and music is an almost-free commodity. And Beyoncé is still making hits! (She is one of our generation’s icons) Pop music culture is diverse, fertile and constantly inventive. These are the top records of 2009.

10. Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free – Akron/Family

Bands like The Very Best, Animal Collective and Akron/Family consciously incorporate rhythms and textures from all points of geography, but the last group is special in its technical proficiency. The nods to Afrobeat are subtle like they should be, the songwriting is sound and diverse and if this music has anything, it’s spirit. Wild sounds like a utopian hippie commune, where everyone gets to sing lead.

9. Drift – Nosaj Thing

When I met Nosaj Thing, prior to his opening set for Bassnectar at George’s in November, I behaved like a giddy little girl. I stuttered and posed eloquent compliments like, “your music is nice.” But what could I say? Jason Chung, the 24-year-old L.A. native behind Nosaj Thing, made one of the year’s most compelling records, an unsolvable hip-hop nightmare straight out of “Mega Man.” Eventually, Drift’s tracks sound a little too similar, but no one cares when the beats are as hypnotic as these. For nighttime activities.

8. Logos – Atlas Sound

Fall has been more than kind to Logos, a record that stayed with me through road trips home and back. As a whole, it’s a contemplative record. Bradford Cox, the man behind the moniker, makes songs that get pleasantly lost in a cloud of introspection, and these are no different: “The Light That Failed” sounds like a swamp dive on barbiturates while “Attic Lights” meditates on the leisure of paradise. But Logos is never lazy. Like his recent work with the more popular band, Deerhunter, Cox integrates his affinity for doo-wop into many of these tunes. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but…

7. Alien in a Garbage Dump – Eric Copeland

So you’re throwing the most bumpin’ party of the year. You need a record the fellas can nod their heads to, some beats that make the ladies get down. This record is undoubtedly the poorest choice for that scenario. Alien is skuzzy, violent and downright ugly. The record mashes noise with hypnotic bits of song, sometimes letting them wander (a bold move, especially on the first two tracks), sometimes fencing them in (the excellent “Reptilian Space Beings, Shapeshifting Bloodsucking Vampires”). But Copeland somehow structures his noise experiments into a cohesive record. It won’t make you lots of friends, but Alien is the ideal headphones album, filled with hidden sounds and subconscious melodies.

6. Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street – Jon Hassell

Isn’t jazz supposed to swing? Or does it saunter? I know very little of jazz music and all its folklore. But I know that composer Jon Hassell’s newest record sounds like no jazz I’ve heard. Night creates a voyage through an Istanbul night, shrouded in fog, dotted with silky trumpet lines. Electronics burble for a few seconds, never to be heard again. The grooves are implied, meditative and forlorn. Delicious, like pipe smoke.

5. Childish Prodigy – Kurt Vile

The cover finds a bookish, fancily dressed kid staring into purple dusk as if his date had just abandoned him for a dance with the prom king. The songs of Childish Prodigy sync nicely with this scene: the only thing lonelier than Vile’s thick, groaning voice (think early Velvet Underground) is the swirling chorus of acoustic guitars. With titles like “Hunchback” and “Freak Train,” it’s obvious Vile’s got a case of the outcast blues, but he puts them to good use in psychedelic takes on Nick Drake (“Heart Attack,” “Dead Alive”). Who wants to be prom king anyway, right, kid?

4. Tarot Sport – F**k Buttons

My roommate listens to Explosions in the Sky when doing homework, which I accept but do not understand. Does post-rock lend hydrocarbon extraction a certain sense of urgency? Anyway, this Bristol duo win “best improved” by combining elements of that genre, with its endless, sincere crescendos, and danceable techno beats. It’s no coincidence that Tarot Sport’s best songs are also its most ambitious, with “Surf Solar” and “Olympians” clocking in at over 10 glorious minutes. The group is unafraid of experimenting with sounds, and this set of songs is paradoxically diverse and cohesive. If you want an A in geology, buy this album.

3. Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle – Bill Callahan

The 2007 film, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” is one of my favorites. Brad Pitt’s depiction of the infamous Western criminal is sinister, yet always vulnerable. There are moments when, as a saddled James looks out over the sweeping plains, his eyes are glowing pools of reverence and sadness. Bill Callahan’s appropriately-titled Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is one of those moments. Each song is a thunderhead with pockets of sunshine, minor-chord dirges (“The Wind and the Dove”) interrupted by subtle strings and French horn (“Jim Cain”). Callahan sing-speaks poetry in a baritone as thick and tall as the Smoky Mountains and on Eagle, his unrest has never sounded so at peace.

2. Merriweather Post Pavilion – Animal Collective

Much has happened in the world of Brooklyn sensations Animal Collective since this album leaked on Christmas Day of last year. Merriweather nearly reached the Billboard charts in vinyl sales alone (in the dead of winter, no less!), performed on Letterman (“Paul, do you have anything for the trick-or-treaters?”) and got praise from everyone from M.I.A. to Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. What’s the fuss? Merriweather combines the group’s penchant for repetition with very shiny production in their bounciest, most contagious songs yet, from “My Girls” to “Summertime Clothes” to “Brothersport.” Lyrically, the collective is less secretive, focusing on the communion of domestic life, the simple value of “Daily Routine,” strange and joyful monogamy. Next up: a record about bittersweet fame?

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – Phoenix

All my friends love this album: the one that loves racing cars to the thrash of Metallica, the one that has a (worrying) crush on Ron Weasley, the sloppy-eyed burnout, the earnest farm boy, even my mom. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is not the most innovative release of the year, but it is the most universally likable. It’s your favorite child, skipping, grinning and forever curious. Thomas Mars sings in earnest questions: “Who’s the boy you like the most?” and “Where would you go with a lasso?” and “Could you go and run into me?” This French quartet has been playing together since childhood, and it shows in the fake out into of ”Lisztomania” and the rushing two-part “Love Like a Sunset.” Wolfgang is so clearly the work of a band, an album so pure in spirit and a piece much too fun to describe.

“Fall Be Kind”, An Uneven Triumph

Merriweather Post Pavilion, the breakthrough album that critical darlings Animal Collective delivered early this year, was a swirling, psychedelic foray into pop music and the “mainstream,” which hardly even exists anymore.  It was a piece so joyful, shiny and sugary that on repeated listens, it tended to rot the teeth.

Fall Be Kind, the group’s new EP, remedies this by collecting the scrapped songs from the sampler-heavy Merriweather sessions that lean toward a darker aura. The production (dense as ever, with punchy bass and doctored harmonies on top) is the same, but these songs are more indulgent.

“Old ideas worth doing are taking their time,” Dave Portner sings on the opening “Graze.” Only this band would end their most commercially successful year with a release like this.

Simply put, the group takes chances. As a result, their releases are categorically uneven, dotted with skeletal song sketches, non sequitur excursions and (more often) classic tunes. “Bleed” and “On A Highway” are conscious mood pieces that serve as transitions and little more, while the bookends “Graze” and “I Think I Can” are enjoyable exercises in dichotomy.

But wouldn’t you know it: Fall Be Kind’s best song is also its outlier. “What Would I Want? Sky,” which contains the first licensed Grateful Dead sample, is a pop masterstroke that easily outshines all of Merriweather. With a hop-step rhythm and shimmering synthesizers, the song is the best thing the group has ever recorded and, hands down, the song of the year.

The group is desperate to transform the blasé into the surreal, so the lyric sheet conjures symbols, not stories. These are songs of taxicabs, flesh wounds and roadside workers, everyday images decorated with rhythm and meaning. “I Think I Can” is a balance of self-doubt and self-help, while “On A Highway” imagines a nightmarish road trip (perhaps the consequence of touring for three years straight?).

Animal Collective is a band that self-consciously moves from era to era; they’ve spoken at length to their disdain of stasis and their want of reinventing the songwriting process. They’ve made blunders, but they’ve also succeeded in every step of their growth throughout the decade.

As a new decade begins and the group moves to another era, the future is unsure. For Animal Collective, the climate is ideal.