Better Oblivion Community Center
S/T
I got my first Conor Oberst record in 1995, when I heard Collection of Songs over the house system at Zia Records in Phoenix, AZ. I don’t often approach the till asking who they’re playing—and this was all before the days when one could ask Siri, or Shazam for such info—but the song was busy destroying song structures as I had understood them to that point, and somehow had found a sub-basement beneath the term “lo-fi.” I loved it after a long tutelage and then the next, perfect, Letting off the Happiness (Saddle Creek, 1998), and so on through the next 4-5 records, but then our relationship began to cool.
Oberst’s teaming up with Phoebe Bridgers for this LP was a stroke of genius. Each artist’s weakness is compensated for, each strength amplified. I first heard of it through a twitter friend who announced it as his Album of the Year upon the initial listen way back in March. I was skeptical, but then I heard the first song, and the second, and so on through the rest of this gorgeous, melodic partnership.
Pedro the Lion
Phoenix
So I was pretty well primed to like this album. I’ve been following Dave Bazan’s music since the Whole e.p. came out in 1997 that I bought at True Tunes in Wheaton, IL, and I’ve seen him in concert more than any other artist. The early Pedro records are firmly fixed in the constellation of classics for me, and I dig the solo records nearly as much, though his bite of the feeding hand I find often irksome. But also, I was born and raised in Phoenix just like him, whereupon we both attended conservative Christian colleges, and then settled in the Pacific Northwest (and for awhile attended the same church). This record then, in which Bazan confronts the city of his youth and, in a way, his own back catalog of records that I’ve memorized, is as in my wheel-house as an artistic creation can be.
I love the way he writes the city’s biography. Little things like the mention of Circle K (our local convenience store that is, weirdly, a big part of life in PHX), the touring of model homes (Phoenix is in a perpetual subdivision building boom), and the name-checking streets that I drove down daily in those first magic years when I began driving and mostly used that freedom to attend concerts by bands like this.
Luxury
Trophies
This was the year of Luxury for me. This band has been around—and not just around in the world, but around my own niche musical scene—for some 20 years and I never quite got it. Probably, in the late 90’s and heavily influenced by the Seattle scene/grunge, I rejected the preening, sexy, 80’s punk/The Cure vibe this band radiated. I always knew they were cool, that they were one of us (Christian adjacent rebel scenesters), and I think I may even have had a Luxury sticker on my guitar case, picked up at a Blenderhead or Sometime Sunday show, but I had none of the records.
Well, I do now. Someone put me on to Trophies and I was taken immediately, and by “immediately,” I mean from the first words of the album which read “Like Allen Ginsberg reading ‘Howl’…” The odd thing is, I listened to a CD set of Ginsberg reading his complete poems on a solo drive across the US just after graduating college. It was one of the great artistic heights of my life. But the record doesn't stop there; a lyric in a later song reads “change your life,” a reference to the last line of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which I have translated and taught. Rilke’s work about angels forms the backdrop of my own new book of poems, which I was signing a contract for the very week I heard this record. What are the odds? On and on it goes. The record has feelings about Salvador Dali which I share, and about faith, and a dozen other things besides. But also: it kills. Musically, this record is so bracing and tight that it peers only with Radiohead, in my mind.
Okay, but that isn’t all. A documentary called Parallel Love covering the band’s changing fortunes was also released this year. I watched it at Northwest Film Forum (making it the only movie I saw in a theater this year, and only the second time I’ve ever gone solo to a theater) introduced by the band’s guitarist, Matt Hinton. The film is great and it tells the band’s story, but also the story of the scene out of which they came (which they largely rejected) but which is very dear to me. That film turned me from an appreciator to a fan. I started listening to Amazing and Thank You (Tooth and Nail, 1995) and thought Holy cow! Then I recalled the Andy Prickett quote from the film about their second two records being unbelievably special so I ordered the S/T (Bulletproof, 1999) which is now… I think… probably, in my top ten records ever. I just can’t believe the intelligence and artistry and faithfulness of these songs. I’m missing one record from their catalog and I’m only holding out because I don’t want to overdo it—Luxury records were easily my first, second, third, and maybe fourth most played this year—but I feel like…was it Alexander who wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer? Like that.
The Appleseed Cast
The Fleeting Light of Impermanence
It occurs to me that every album on my list of this year’s favorites features artists who have been making music for 20+ years, and about whom I’ve known for decades. This is surely the first time that’s been true across my year-end lists. Usually, unless a Damien Jurado record comes out, my year in music is dominated by new artists. Year of 1990’s nostalgia? Well, in any case, Appleseed Cast is another one of those. I loved their first album The End of the Ring Wars (Deep Elm, 1998) and the Low-Level Owl records after it and then proceeded on my course of life, occasionally glancing backwards in admiration but otherwise moving on. So when I heard they were making a new record, I was no more than mildly curious, but thankfully, I was curious enough to play the first track. “Whut?” I thought to myself. “What a work is here?” The things this band does with time signatures and technology, the way they’ve matured over the decades, never running out of ideas: the light, I mean to say, may be less fleeting than we have been given to assume.
Starflyer 59
Young in my Head
One last record that I didn’t see coming, and whose ascendance fits the narrative shape outlined above, Starflyer 59’s new effort also resurrected my affections for the band’s whole catalog. Here too, I’d been a huge fan of Silver (Tooth and Nail, 1994) and Gold but then left them alone when they moved away from shoegaze and fuzz toward a more typical vocally-forward sound. They’re a productive band, so there are something like 10 albums in-between those early ones and this and I missed them all, every once in awhile trying a couple tracks, not understanding them, and clicking somewhere else. What made this one different? Well, a shift in sound is one. Starflyer is always evolving and their recent turn toward groove, hook, synth, reminded me of Future Islands, The Fascination Movement, and even Dave Bazan, in the best ways. It gave me an in anyway, and once there, I saw how reflective and thoughtful the lyrics were, how muscular and clean the music. I listened to this record more than any other while driving my daughter to school in the mornings; maybe that’s part of it.
It made me excited about Tooth and Nail again: I watched this documentary about the label’s founding with a lump in my throat for joy at the world that was. And when I had time this year to listen to podcasts (usually when traveling to a conference or a poetry reading) I listened to Labelled. Then, randomly, I met Brandon Ebel (founder of the label) hanging out by SPU. Nothing can be like it was, of course, but I’m so glad some shape of the scene is around still, and gladder still for bands like this, so dedicated to their craft that they keep bothering to make music, despite everything.
Hey: year-end lists are my favorite way of discovering new music (algorithms be damned!), so, if you have one, drop a line sharing it?