80: Spiderland, Slint

The thing with this album is that I wish, really wish, that I’d come to this album on time. When it first hit. How could I though, I was eleven and an eleven year old kid wouldn’t really have a clue what it is – hell, a lot of the thirty year old kids I know would still get baffled by it.

The reason I wish I came to this when it dropped is because it clearly had an impact. So many of the bands that sit in both my album collection and this list have the effects of this slab of genius in their works.

From the discordant guitars, vocals that are in one song mere spoken word and another screamed out, the intensity of the playing, the diverse and then-uncommon approaches to volume and tempo… not only are these things apparant in records from The Shipping News, Godspeed… Sigur Ros, Early Day Miners…. but these are things I now actively search for in new music whether it’s the latest album from Sonic Youth or when my band gets together and I try pulling some tortured lines from my own guitar.

The songs are strange beasts – the lyrics are at odds with the music but the whole package is so damn hypnotising I cannot hit the skip button. There’s mumbled songs, screamed songs, fractured beats and droning guitars and the urgency of it – the mere half a dozen songs are finished in around forty minutes – is such that it’s still playing in my ears long after the album is finished.

I can’t pick out one stand alone track because that would be to separate the impact of the whole. It’s true that this album suffers from an awful lot of hype. People that work in record shops and spend all day drooling over post-rock vinyl will talk of it in a tone reserved for holy grail’s as phrases like “Will Oldham took the cover photo” and  ”David Pajo was in Tortoise when they made Millions Living…”. Even that cover photo – the band swimming in water, bodies submerged and black white – has been attributed as mysterious and symbolic.

To that end it suffers a blow as nothing could really live up to so much hype. It is, after all, four guys that happened to make a cracker of an album that would inspire many, many other people. Just a shame that there can be a fair bit of pretension among devotees of the genre that puts things up on a pedestal.  However, that cannot change the fact that, in Slint’s Spiderland, the genesis of all the things that would make future albums my favourites can be found.

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81: Songs of Love and Hate, Leonard Cohen

Songs of Love and Hate

I know it’s been said before and there’s no way it won’t be said again and I also know that I’m likely to incur the odd spiteful comment or grimace from those true musos and aficionados that like to put things up on pedestals when I say that I concur with the sentiment that Leonard Cohen writes great songs. For other people to sing.

It sounds awfully popularist to say that Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” is the better (if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s not my favourite JB song) and somewhat cliche to say I’d take Concrete Blonde’s version of “Everybody Knows (and I, surely cannot be alone in that) and that “Tower of Song” is better served by Nick Cave’s vocals. That’s not to say I don’t like Mr Cohen, far from it – nobody can question the man’s ability. It’s just that sometimes his voice doesn’t give the songs the life which that of another artist can breath into it.

That being said, there isn’t, however, a single song on Songs Of Love And Hate that I think is better suited to anyone but Leonard. From the moment his voice pours over the tumbling strings of “Avalanche” to the final “la” of “Joan of Arc”, this album, to my mind (and, hey, what’s this blog all about anyway?) is the perfect match for his voice. Even “Diamonds In The Mine”, which often gets held up as a ‘what the hell is he doing with his voice?’ works for me – it brings to mind one of Bob’s bitter, angst-ridden, rants. While his voice isn’t in it’s natural key there’s no questioning the sincerity of the emotion it bellows.

The fact that he barely touches “Dress Rehearsal Rag” live because he found it so depressing just speaks volumes. The album itself is pretty damn far from cheerful, his voice aches with regret and despair throughout and for someone so seemingly at home with the bleak to come up with something that he himself finds depressing… I have to take my hat off to it.

For me thought there are two albums that define this album and it’s inclusion on this list – “Avalanche” and, of course, “Famous Blue Raincoat”. The number of times I’ve found myself singing ‘New York is cold but I like where I’m living’ or ‘it’s 4 in the morning, the end of December’ and left them hanging in the air because, frankly, that song is damn near perfect in both it’s lyrics, the way it delivers such power from such relatively straightforward wordplay and a nagging melody. Which is why I love “Avalanche” too. A tumbling, cascade of guitar strung notes plunging you straight away into Cohen’s voice.

While it doesn’t contain his best songs, Songs Of Love And Hate does contain the best songs for himself.

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Update on an Update

While searching through pockets and files for the full copy of my driving license I managed not to find the greenish A4 piece of paper that shows I’ve been a good boy ever since passing my test but a folded up wad of half-typed, half-scrawled album titles listed from 1 to 100 with near maniacal arrows denoting position changes, frantic scratching out and replacing of names and the general jumble that is the list.

Accordingly, the next entry is coming up. Though I warn you, it’s not the most cheerful of albums in at 81….

Update

It’s been an overly long and ridiculous time since I last posted here. I started this, initially, as something to do. I was entering a period where my ‘fun time’ would be restricted to no-money fun – compiling a list of my favourite albums, whittling it down to 100 and then writing about them as you see here seemed like a perfect ‘no-money fun’ activity. I figured that doing one a week would see me through the two years it was going to take to pay my loan off.

Well, there’s that funny thing called life and it’s impact on those plans of mice and men… so I’ve been distracted of late and changes in personal circumstances have meant that what was going to be a painful and restricted two years has actually been anything but.

Despite the now completed status of my loan repayments and the non-existance of the aforementioned need for such distractions, I will complete this list. Because I do still love both the art of list-making, music and talking about music. I just have to find the list….

The strange thing is that, looking back at the albums listed so far and what I know to be top of the heap and bustling for positions in the top 10 and 20… even two years after its compiling I don’t think there would be any major changes should I compile it again.

82: The Campfire Headphease, Boards of Canada

The Campfire Headphase

In relation to the music press and, from what I’ve heard, fans of the band, I’m going against the grain here in choosing The Campfire Headphase over albums such as Music Has The Right To Children. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy pretty much everything this band releases including Music Has The Right… but there’s no question that this is their guitar album and, as such, my favourite.

From the point that “Chromakey Dreamcoat” blips into my ears, this album is like some kind of chilled-out bliss for me. It’s more relaxed in pace, to my ears, than its predecessors but the use of guitars – albeit heavily treated and often barely recognisable – makes it perfect to my own tastes.

The Campfire Headphase is focused, more determined to find that distillation of ideas and sounds that had been flirted with on their previous albums. Having come to this band a few years after the album’s release (it’s now four years old) and via the stop-gap ep Trans Canada Highway, I find it strange that listening to it always makes me feel nostalgic. There’s a warmth and sense of things past in the sounds here yet hints that there’s positive on the way are never far.

This isn’t an album that will change your life. It’s not an album that will stop war but, it is one that could bring people together, and evokes that laid back, campfire-like vibe of a laid back, time of fun. There’s no negativity or darkness here, there’s a whole new world of melody and an even larger universe of sounds than previously tapped into.The beats aren’t as head pounding as you can get but each listen will reveal more.

Those that turn to Music Has The Right.. and Geogaddi will say that The Campfire Headphase brings nothing new to Boards Of Canada’s sound. They’re right, it doesn’t. It doesn’t need to, it takes the best elements of things previous and distills them into something that represesnts a relaxed look back at all things great. And adds guitar.

If I’m driving home after a gruelling one at the office, you can guarantee that it will be “Chromakey Dreamcoat” I flick the iPod to and by the time that flows into “Satellite Anthem Icarus” I’ll be in a much better frame of mind and the rest of the album becomes like a dream. What more can you really ask of an album?

Chromakey Dreamcoat

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