By Paul Stephen Gettings
February 14, 2013
January. The end-of-year lists were finally laid to rest, the endless Christmas reissues and reality TV singles finally wiped from the schedules, and we started looking out into the new year, fresh with opportunities for audiovisual treats. Here’s just some of the ones that caught our eye in the first month of 2013.
Animal Collective - Centipede Hz
By Russell Warfield
Even as I heard Merriweather Post Pavilion for the first time (and we all, if you’ll pardon the expression, remember our first time) I was already wondering what Animal Collective were going to do next. Animal Collective are a notoriously restless bunch, who take two steps sideways for every three steps forwards. And what’s all the more exhilarating – up until this point in their career anyway – is how it becomes harder and harder to envision where Animal Collective could possibly go next; it sounding as if they’ve hit their zenith (dare I say, alternative music’s zenith full stop) with each new release, yet somehow managing to simultaneously smash their own apparently non-existent glass ceiling and pull a complete U-turn with whatever game-changing move they play next. … Continue Reading
Animal Collective
By Russell Warfield
This is the latest in an occasional series of features where one of our writers reflects on their five favourite tracks by a particular artist. Here, Russell Warfield takes on Animal Collective, who release their ninth album Centipede Hz this week.
How do you provide a ‘snapshot’ of a band whose most famous attribute is of being perpetually in motion? Boasting a discography built on left turns and diagonal leaps with each and every release – putting out a semi-improvised, whispered acoustic album the moment they actually amass a full line up; releasing a wilfully oblique ‘visual album’ just months after their genuinely game changing, commercial crossover Merriweather Post Pavilion – any selection of five songs from their back catalogue is almost tantamount to picking five songs by five entirely different bands. This retrospective doesn’t attempt to be a best-of selection then, nor to provide an insight into any particular ‘aspect’ of Animal Collective, because their sound and identity is so unfixed as to sabotage any pointless attempt to try. Instead, I pick these songs in the spirit of Animal Collective’s approach to creation – with no prescriptive rules or set frameworks, and no particular rhyme or reason other than overflowing love for wide-eyed music played in earnest. … Continue Reading
26-28 May, 2011
The final part of our round-up of Primavera. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here respectively
Saturday
Due to bad planning on my part, myself and my travelling partner have to check out early in the morning on the Saturday after 5 hours sleep. We at this point know our flight is at 10.20 the following morning, and with airport transfers and such, it will be 30 hours before we will be able to be comfortably horizontal. So we start the day with some nice sitting down at the beautiful Auditori venue for John Cale performing Paris 1919. It’s a wonderful experience, and the orchestra and Cale boom out the songs, which transfer naturally from the introspective tone on that record to a setting such as this one. An encore which lasts almost as long and focusses on old and new material is wildly inconsistent, and too much for a lot of people to take. At one point, during what sounds like a new lounge trip-hop song, people stream to the exits as if Cale had just dedicated it to Franco. It’s difficult to take in some of this material with the level of tiredness I’m feeling, but he’s earned the right to do it after playing songs like ‘Paris 1919′ and ‘Andalucia’.
13-15 May, 2011
We live in hard times, friends. Not hard like it was back in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s obviously, or even the early 80s of course but you know, bread is pricey these days, so pretty damn hard. The enforced economic cutbacks are far reaching and have inevitably spread to everyone’s favourite indie-cred festival, ATP. Now down to just one May festival from the previous years’ 2, one will become none in 2012 due to a big dip in ticket sales caused by all manner of possible reasons; a perceived lack of quality in the curators and invitees of recent years, too much choice in the festival peak season, general overkill and that phrase much used of late: ‘tightening of the belt’. … Continue Reading
Avey Tare - Down There
If, like me, you think of (dare I say, ‘have correctly identified’?) the back-to-back of ‘For Reverend Green’ and ‘Fireworks’ of 2007’s Strawberry Jam as the most towering of Animal Collective’s many lofty achievements, then perhaps you share my slight resentment towards the reputation Panda Bear has garnered for himself recently as ‘the creative one’ of the band. Following the release of Panda Bear’s staggering Person Pitch it felt that, just because he lacked a solo album, Avey Tare had been marginalised, made to look as if he were being carried by his ‘more talented’ band mate. Where’s the respect for ‘The Purple Bottle’? Where’s the love for ‘Peacebone’? … Continue Reading
Kanye West
Forgive me if this feels like I’m already straightening out 2010’s picture frames, pushing its chairs under its tables and hurrying you out of the door marked ‘2011’ when we’re only halfway through August. The trouble is music release schedules operate several months ahead of real time so, as someone who is informed about music releases on a daily basis whether I like it or not, I’m currently existing in a parallel universe where it’s late October/early November.
Luckily, from my position in this imagined future (all release dates are of course subject to change), this autumn looks like continuing what was already been a strong year for new records. 2010 has seen many of the previous decade’s primary acts return in some form or another, to varying degrees of success, such as The National, LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, Big Boi and Broken Social Scene. At the same time, newer acts have continued to hone their sound (Wavves, Best Coast) or seemingly burst out fully formed (Wild Nothing, Male Bonding, Baths). When looking ahead, it’s always the big names that stand out then – but don’t rule out a few surprises along the way. … Continue Reading
Tortoiseshell
Our weekly look into the blogosphere where we talk about six tracks we found out about in the previous Wednesday-to-Wednesday seven-day period.
Track of the week: ‘This Girl’ by Tortoiseshell (Canyons dub)
I find Canyons a terribly, terribly strange band. Some of their stuff have me in hallelujah mode, while some songs seem unnecessarily longwinded. This is their dub of Tortoiseshell’s ‘This Girl’. And it quite works for me actually. It begins understated, yearning male vocals up front, and a lovely, lovely understated bass that goes with it. The bass stays, drums are added, and the vocals go up up up. And rightfully so, because the first time I heard that I was pretty impressed. I could probably live a day on that bass and vocal combination alone. I just love it when vocals do that, and good vocals are quite underrated me thinks. Definitely try and get to that chorus part and see whether it ticks your box, because if it does I think you’re in for a treat. … Continue Reading
HEALTH - Die Slow
With all the best of the decade lists being flung about at the moment, 2009 is in danger of getting overlooked. You can kind of forgive a few people for wanting to get the ’00s out of the way with to start a fresh in the next decade – in terms of world events it’s been a particularly shocking ten years – but this is a music website (usually) and we must avert our gaze, stick our headphones on and enter the parallel universe that is popular music.
New York cast a long shadow over the independent music world in 2009, just as it had done way back in 2001 – the internet and, more surprisingly, large sections of the mainstream fell for albums by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and (Jay-Z’s new favourite) Grizzly Bear. These bands made sonically unique albums that still retain a certain amount of insularity – these are carefully-crafted other worlds on record, and they were a little too careful and too crafted for some.
While we’ve given you plenty of editorial on our albums of the year (50-41, 40-31,30-21, 20-16, 15-11, 10-7. 6-4 3-1), we’re keeping it simple with this list of what releases our gaggle of writers collectively voted their singles of 2009. How did we reach this list, I hear you cry? May I hand over to our trusty friend, Excel Guru, who was last seen pre-ambling our top 50 albums end-of-year thingamejig:
“Everyone sent in a top 10 list and the 50 singles with the most nominations were collected; tie-breaks were decided by how high up those lists the songs were. Then everyone chose 10 ordered singles from the list of 50 and they were ranked using the same criteria as the album poll.”
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