The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I just got my Napster subscription so I'm planning on taking you all up on your lists. MIA's "Arular" probably tops my list. It's #8 on Puce's list as well. Makes everything touted as "best of..." by the professional pundits sound like so much product in comparison. Amazing album.

But I guess as much music as I've listened to this year I can't really opine on "best of 2005" because I don't consume music that is that new very often. It would have to be my "favorite music first discovered in 2005".

Beethoven's Piano Sonatas

Rogue Wave - not the new one, though

MIA - Arular

The Mills Brothers - Most everything they did

The Residents - Animal Lover

Artie Shaw & the Gramercy Five - Complete

Albums I didn't personally care for in 2005

Brian Wilson - Smile

Barbra Streisand & Barry Gibb - Guilty Pleasures

Coldplay - X+Y

Madonna - Confessions of a Dancer

Sigur Ros - not the new one (cover looks like Two Sausages Kissing - don't know the real name)

Jim of Seattle wrote: Crappiest Pieces of Trash of 2005

Brian Wilson - Smile

Was that necessary?

Jim of Seattle wrote:MIA's "Arular" probably tops my list. It's #8 on Puce's list as well.

This album has risen sharply in my list over the last month. However, it hasn't grown on my friends at all, who google their eyes at me incredulously as I blast it in the car sandwiched between Aphex Twin and Modest Mouse. Does no one but me appreciate contrast?

What's wrong with ( ) by Sigur Ros? Maw.

WeaselSlayer wrote:What's wrong with ( ) by Sigur Ros? Maw.

Yeah, maybe not the crappiest piece of trash, but that guy (Mr. Ros, I guess?) certainly loved that one phrase, I forget now, which he sings over & over & over throughout the entire album. I don't even speak his language, and I'm still tired of him telling me that. OK, putting it on that list was a little much. More accurately, I didn't care for it too much.

Spud wrote:

Jim of Seattle wrote: Albums I didn't personally care for in 2005

Brian Wilson - Smile

Was that necessary?

Not sure if you mean "Was Smile necessary?" or else "Was dissing it necessary?" I think that album stirred up a lot of burned crud from the bottom of my psychological stew pot. He tried to do something exactly like I've been meaning to do for a long time, but it didn't work, which made me question my own muse for making me think it was a good idea all this time.

Jim of Seattle wrote:"favorite music first discovered in 2005".

Beethoven's Piano Sonatas

Surely you didn't just discover these. Perhaps you mean a particular recording? Do tell. I need a new set (gave my Gould to mom).

roymond wrote:

Jim of Seattle wrote:"favorite music first discovered in 2005".

Beethoven's Piano Sonatas

Surely you didn't just discover these. Perhaps you mean a particular recording? Do tell. I need a new set (gave my Gould to mom).

Ummm... yeah, I just discovered them. In fact, I basically just discovered Beethoven, whom I never much cared for before. He was my big revelatory discovery in 2005. Now I can't get enough of The 'Hoven. The Gould is 50 frickin' bucks, but I'd love to own it. I have Claude Frank, which I like because he sorts them on the 10 CDs into little programs on each CD rather than just presenting them in numerical order.

Big thanks to the folks who put The Decemberists - Picaresque on their lists. I'd heard it a few months ago but hadn't given it the attention it deserved. What a great album.

Actually, Marcus, I liked your entire top 5 list. I already knew Fiona Apple's, but had never heard of the Go! Team.

bestof2005
Susumu Yokota - Symbol
Sufjan Stevens - Illinoisoinesoineoisne
Khonnor - Handwriting
Mew - Mew and the glass-handed kites
Buck65 - Secret House against the world

these just missed the cut
Stapleton - Hug The Coast
Boom Bip - blue eyed in the red room
65daysofstatic - One time for all time
Why? - Elephant Eyelash

Jim of Seattle wrote:Not sure if you mean "Was Smile necessary?" or else "Was dissing it necessary?" I think that album stirred up a lot of burned crud from the bottom of my psychological stew pot. He tried to do something exactly like I've been meaning to do for a long time, but it didn't work, which made me question my own muse for making me think it was a good idea all this time.

The latter.

Sure. There are problems with Smile. Let them lie. Perhaps he needed to finish it to be able to move on. Can't wait to hear what he comes up with now that he has THAT out of his system.

Maybe I don't know enough about its or his history to be able to place it in the proper perspective. All I know is that it was an ambitious and abandoned project from the 60's that he managed to finish last year. I experienced the album pretty uninformededly, I'll admit.

So when you say he tried to do something like you have been trying to do for a long time, do you mean "finish a project from the 60's"? I don't think so.

Do you mean to compose and arrange music by recording different fragments of a track separately, and then weave them together with elaborate technical wizardry, thus embuing the songs with amazing dimension and depth previously unheard of in popular music? I think you are beyond that as well.

Do you mean to create a teenage opus to God? Probably not.

What, pray tell, are YOU talking about?

I've got a 20-minute song written (was supposed to go an entire album length eventually) that basically consists of non-stop unrelated fragments of lyric and melody that writhe around in an amorphous pop soup with few if any discernable verses or choruses and no discernable meaning to the words. Which is what it sounded to me like Wilson was doing. Of course his production and vocal performance is far beyond what I'm capable of, but the idea seemed very similar, and I didn't think it worked. His album is part of the reason I stopped working on my thing. Van Dyke Parks' "Song Cycle" is the same sort of thing and that doesn't work for me either.

Isn't that kind of what Kraftwerk does with some of their albums? I am thinking "Trans-Europe Express" and "Computer World", for example. Those work pretty well.

Not very familiar with Kraftwerk, so I just now listened to "Computer World" (thanks, Napster), and it isn't at all the same thing. They are taking a relatively small number of little snippets and repeating and expanding them into long minimalist rhythmic pieces, whereas Wilson and Parks are using a very large number of small unrelated snippets once each, like a medley of unknown tunes. My idea was more like that.

Spud wrote:

Jim of Seattle wrote:Sure. There are problems with Smile. Let them lie. Perhaps he needed to finish it to be able to move on. Can't wait to hear what he comes up with now that he has THAT out of his system.

Coming from a 'Brian Wilson is a genius but he has yet to prove it conclusively, even Pet Sounds has its moments of dross in amongst the greatness' camp, I have to say what he came up with next, an album of truly lame xmas songs, including two (count'em!) appalling original compositions, suggests the sandbox isn't such a distant part of his past ...

Just sayin'

j$

Uh, yeah. I mean, like, after THAT.

I think I kinda felt like Jim, in that I didn't feel like I could get my grip onto much on the Smile album. Something was happening and then something else was happening and it simultaneously felt amorphous and glommed and samey, and I can't figure that out. I will try again, but I don't get it yet.
-bill

Well, you may say it didn't work, but I applaud him for trying. Good God, it practically killed him.

However, you are correct in that it did not turn out as awesomely as it might have. However, this is often the case the first time someone tries something. The same is true in many fields. You have to build on what came before. Learn from Brian, Jim. Give it a go. I plan to. In fact, I have a similar project I have been working on for the past three years. I plan to finish it before I die.

SPUD

Jim of Seattle wrote:I've got a 20-minute song written (was supposed to go an entire album length eventually) that basically consists of non-stop unrelated fragments of lyric and melody that writhe around in an amorphous pop soup with few if any discernable verses or choruses and no discernable meaning to the words.

also known as "the songfight orchestra"

Jim of Seattle wrote:"favorite music first discovered in 2005"

For me, it would undeniably be Leonard Bernstein's "Mass," which I just got for Christmas. I can't believe how gut-wrenchingly fantastic it is.

When the congregation goes into a frenzy during the Agnus Dei, and threatens to burn down the earth between shoutings of "dona nobis pacem" (grant us peace), you know this isn't your normal ceremony.

"Things get broken" and the following "Secret Songs" are some of the most powerful things I've heard in a long time.

Jim of Seattle wrote:Big thanks to the folks who put The Decemberists - Picaresque on their lists. I'd heard it a few months ago but hadn't given it the attention it deserved. What a great album.

Actually, Marcus, I liked your entire top 5 list. I already knew Fiona Apple's, but had never heard of the Go! Team.

Cool. I've said this a bunch of times but I found out about the Decemberists just last January, I think. I then went on to see them live in Seattle in March, and again in Seattle in September, and in Spokane in October. I like the band a lot, and recommend their other releases just as highly (The Tain, a fifteen-minute long piece in five parts, is probably up your alley).

The Clientele's been putting out great stuff for several years now. They're on Merge Records, along with the Magnetic Fields, Arcade Fire, Dino Jr., Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, Superchunk... In fact, they toured with Spoon in 2005 (and I missed them at the same venue where I saw the Decemberists in March by like three days). All their stuff sounds like it was recorded contemporaneously with the Kinks, Byrds, and Beatles in the A.M. radio sixties, but this most recent one is the most-produced of all of it. The other stuff just really sounds indistinguishable from ancient vinyl records, in fidelity and content.

That Petra Haden and Bill Frisell disc has some Gershwin covers, and a Tom Waits cover, and other standards. Petra Haden is in the Decemberists, and is formerly of That Dog and The Rentals. She did a cover album of The Who Sell Out last year, entirely by herself, entirely a cappella (predictably titled Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out). Bill Frisell is a jazz guitarist that's pretty innovative. I had the good fortune of seeing him live at Bumbershoot, briefly, and it was really spectacular.

Brian Wilson's Smile: Really, really good. That's all I have to say about that.

Anyway, Jim, if you haven't checked out my radio show you might like it. I post playlists and mp3s of the show and announce titles on-air, and I play all kinds of stuff maybe you aren't familiar with. It's in the Radio Show thing in the Sidefights forum, I think, though right now only the most recent show's up (12/12). Hopefully next semester the show will be Friday nights from 6:30-8:30 Pacific.