RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: ERIK KENWARD
Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards

So after Nick emailed me about writing something for this I sat down like a putz to hash out my top ten albums in 2006 – something I've done on a semi-formal basis for a few years now, something which for the last couple of years has seemed like a purely formal exercise. Thousands if not trillions of words have been expended on the post-file sharing death of The Album. The hack music critical think piece observation of the last minute or so seems to be that, 'Kids don't even think of albums as objects anymore, man. Can you believe that shit?' Sometimes if we're sitting around drunk or in the middle of a very long car ride or both, my girlfriend and I will talk about how people in our very specific micro-generational cohort (we both turned thirty this summer) may be the last folks to have direct, first-time-around relationships with all the major physical commercial music formats. (First 45, Frank Mills "Musicbox Dancer"; first LP, Weird Al In 3D; first tape, Mr. Mister Welcome To The Real World; first 'cool' tape, REM's Document and Love & Rockets' Earth, Sun, Moon (in a blow-out birthday two-fer); first cd, The Stone Roses – and this all within seven or eight years.) I suppose this is all catching up with me on a visceral level this year because I'm in the process of being driven out of my own home by my cds, a common affliction of my micro-generational cohort if the internets are to be believed. What else? Tower Records went out of business I guess.

You can say, guy, that the twelve song-ish, 40 minute album is an arbitrary outgrowth of market forces – manufacturing constraints, the greater margin in bulk sales. But, not to be all Mojo Dad rockist or anything, I'm still a huge 'sides' guy and organize my playlists accordingly. If we lazily posit the album as a narrative analogue to the novel, it seems like something you could say is that one of the most significant interpretive shifts of the last century with regards to the novel – the post-structuralist prioritization of the reader over the author – is repeated in the present moment's technologically-abetted prioritization of the consumer over the album maker (i.e. album vs. playlist.) I know, straight out my own b-hole, but I guess what I'm saying I guess is that any engagement with the narrative of the album is increasingly both an act of will and a reactionary gesture.

I feel like we're still more or less on the front edge of getting comfortable with all this new lack of corporeality. According to The Wire (not that The Wire), ghosts are the new wolves so that's something. Another thing is that thinginess -- being something – is more than ever a punk rock move in and of itself, which is why there's Hospital Records and ebay. There's also list making. There's always been a lot of list making sure, but now the list's the thing. One thing Hitler was right about is that people like structure but I think we're less big on sequence these days. Which is to say that I guess maybe the other reason I'm so big-picture on all this stuff is that new Tom Waits' album Orphans. 'Cause I think it's about what happens to the album after file-sharing. The label calls it an album, but it's really a b-side collection. It's not a box set, but it's a little too big to listen to in one sitting. And two of the discs are basically too same-y to make for truly satisfying start-to-finish listens. It more or less forces you to dump the whole thing into a playlist and hit shuffle, in which case you get an infinite number of the best twelve song-ish, 40 minute Tom Waits albums ever. Which is kind of genius. I could also say something about how it collapses twenty years worth of material into an eternal present/not-present (just like the Internet!), but I don't know, maybe you don't like Tom Waits. Also, there's that super-useful taxonomy so fuck a top ten list for now. Off the top of my head:

Brawlers
Ghostface Killah – Fishscale
Joanna Newsom – Ys
Agalloch – Ashes Against The Grain
Wolf Eyes – Human Animal
Mastodon – Blood Mountain
Nachtmystium – Instinct: Decay

Bawlers
Clipse – Hell Hath No Fury
Current 93 – Black Ships Ate The Sky
Celestiial – Desolate North
Burial – Burial
Tim Hecker – Harmony In Ultraviolet
Belong – October Language

Bastards
TV On The Radio – Return To Cookie Mountain
Tom Waits – Orphans
Phoenix – It's Never Been Like That
The Knife – Silent Shout
The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America
MV & EE with The Bummer Road – Mother Of Thousands
Girl Talk – Night Ripper
Michael Mayer – Immer 2
Lindstrøm – It's A Feedelity Affair
Sunn O))) & Boris – Altar

I think I might already disagree with what I just wrote but I'm not changing it 'cause time's a-wasting. As far as the counter-intuitives go, Ys is totally a Brawler because even if it has strings and harps and poetry it whips that gauntlet pretty hard and Hell Hath No Fury? C'mon that’s gotta to be one of the saddest albums of the year. What else? The Phoenix album. It's Never Been Like might be one of my favorite albums of the year and I think I'm cool with that. Total hair-salon-lobby-magazine rock, but great hair-salon-lobby-magazine rock. I don't know if all the record's Strokes-isms and Franz Ferdinand-ities are cynical or lazy or worse, but they flip 'em and re-use them better than their originators. Which I think makes them sound like they should be more foreign that merely French. Sort of like if first-wave eurorock dudes had gotten a hold of a stack of 2004 Blenders instead of Axis: Bold As Love.

And, apropos of nothing in particular, I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that The Wire was the single best thing I was aware of this year.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006