Top Eleven Albums of 2007
1. Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam (Domino)
What is so rewarding and interesting about this band is how crafted and cared for they make improvised music sound. Or how improvised the crafted. A poet recently reminded me that many artists herald childhood for inspiration. AC are in “nostalgia’s palm” (see the underwater “Unsolved Mysteries”) but they are not afraid of childhood or even enamored of it. They are it. Zero artifice (at least the negative definition of the word). And endlessly inventive; everything is new. Like when Paul does the talking in “Yellow Submarine” and I think, I can’t imagine how they imagined to do that, but I’m so very grateful they did.
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Heima is an Icelandic word meaning “at home.” The epigraph to the 2007 film of that name reads, “Having toured the world over, Sigur Rós return home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland.” How one plays an unannounced show with any audience at all besides cast and crew escapes me, but some of shows documented in the film by director Dean DeBlois do look sparsely attended enough to be so. The show in K rahnj kar in support of (and at) the “protest camp” and those protesting the building of the K rahnj kar Hydropower Project – an enormous and expensive dam – and flooding of what singer Jónsi Birgisson calls “The biggest unspoiled highland in Europe” (a fact unverified, as of yet) looked less attended than my circumcision. More than anything the film highlights this ability of the band’s, to be as intimate as an acoustic mountainside show in the Highlands and so massive as to be not multi-national but interstellar, the feeling of traveling in a space so immense it is akin to not moving at all; like Dave’s 2001: A Space Odyssey hurtle through the dark universe of space but not as terrifying – or only occasionally so.
“I am waiting to be changed,” states Atlas Sound’s front (and only) man Bradford Cox Spring on his debut LP, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. While Spring articulates it, it is more often (if only because lyrics are so few here) and most obviously the music saying this on Blind. That is the sort of music it is; a circle, repeating – or straying off into an ovoid or a starlit squibble. It is music to be built on, sounds being subsumed or augmented by other sounds.
“I want to be seen with a fresh pair of eyes” declares the title track to Brooke Waggoner’s debut EP. It is the half-hour’s middle and end that offer such eyes to the listener, with closer “Legionnaire” leaving one anxious for the LP to come.
“Yossarian … gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. … The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.”
“There’s only one thing you need to ask yourself about prosecuting a war you’re too old for: how would your stomach feel, in the provincial airport, as you waved your sons off to fight it?”