I contributed five reviews to Clash's look back at the 50 best albums published in the magazine's five-year lifespan. Click the links below to see them on the Clash website, or read them all in full below the fold. Here they are, in reverse order:
- 46: Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend
- 34: Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
- 24: Burial, Burial
- 18: London Zoo, The Bug
- 13: Ys, Joanna Newsom
46
Vampire Weekend, ‘Vampire Weekend’
(2008; XL Recordings) Back in late 2007, as British folk waded through the neon seas of nu-rave with the first crunch of a comedown starting to bite, you’d have been forgiven for wondering: “Hell’s teeth, man, where on earth has all the jaunty jingle-jangle guitar-pop gone?”
Happily for fans of airy unpretentious indie, preppy lyrics and string arrangements that sound like the Ski Sunday theme tune, Vampire Weekend were just across the pond in New York, getting set to release their debut album. The self-titled release dropped in 2008, and sounded as fresh as the smell of cut grass on campus lawns. The effortlessly breezy songwriting and spacious, African-influenced rhythms made ‘Vampire Weekend’ a record you wanted to live with: an endlessly enjoyable and replayable indie joint that challenged you not to engage with it. Thanks to the musical talents of the group, particularly Rostam Batmanglij, the record is richly textured, with classicist keyboard arpeggios, swooning strings and just the right amount of percussion.
Although the tracks are often simply arranged - second single ‘Oxford Comma’ rides four stabbed guitar chords, a restrained beat and the occasional piping organ swell – they never feel empty. Lead singer Ezra Koenig gets much of the credit for keeping things moving along. His wry, observational lyrics pull off the neat trick of locating the band firmly in the Ivy League’s moneyed milieu while giving him enough distance to observe and report. There’s even space for some poetic magic: the frankly gorgeous ‘Bryn’, a tale of college-holiday separation from a campus love, drops similes and metaphors as artfully as you’d expect from a lyricist beefed up on Eng-Lit courses. When Koenig says: “Eyes like a seagull/ No Kansa palm beetle/ Could ever come close to that free”, he nails the cultural divide between coastal and interior Americans – and undermines it with his slyly critical choice of symbolic animals.
This is an album overflowing with these lovely little moments, which means it repays repeat listens in spades. Even if the thought of sun-kissed indie-pop made by benevolent characters from a Bret Easton-Ellis story makes you sick, you’ll find yourself seduced by ‘Vampire Weekend’.
34
Fleet Foxes, ‘Fleet Foxes’
(2008; Bella Union)
When an album starts with a cappella four-part harmonies, an Appalachian melody and the words “Red squirrel in the morning, red squirrel in the evening, red squirrel in the morning, I’m coming to take you home”, you can bet your last bottle of moonshine you’re in for a trip down Americana’s dusty back roads. Fleet Foxes are that rare beast: a band that wears its influences on its sleeve and yet sounds totally individual.
Put simply, their debut album is the most exquisitely written long-player of the last year. The blend of backwoods folk, classic rock and southern Californian pop is often breath taking, creating a musical world that is by turns ecstatic and melancholic. It’s never less than revelatory, though. As the band’s showpiece harmonies weave around the patiently built melodies, the album takes you into a world of pastoral imagery and sepia-toned reverb more evocative of revolutionary-era America than the 21st Century. On ‘Ragged Wood’, lead singer Robin Pecknold exhorts his lost love to “Come down from the mountain” and “Run through the woods” to return to him: it’s nature which provides the albums thematic touchstones, not the city.
The songwriting is stunning throughout, skilfully baiting and switching to provide lots of surprises without ever losing a natural flow. ‘Meadowlarks’ begins with a sparse guitar part and distant vocals, slowly changing key and coming to a delicate crescendo halfway though before ebbing away into a wash of beautiful harmonies and interwoven folksy melodies. The whole album is an example of the musicians’ craft, and it’s lovely to hear.
The whip-smart production, courtesy of Phil Ek, further bolsters the impression that you’re listening to something Henry David Thoreau would have on his iPod. ‘Fleet Foxes’ is clean and crisp, yet the subtle reverb and clever treatment of the complex vocal harmonies makes it sound like a hi-fidelity Herbert Halpert field recording.
‘Fleet Foxes’ would be an astoundingly accomplished album if it had been the work of a band of old hands and grizzled veterans. As a debut release, it’s absolutely amazing. By turns shimmeringly beautiful and starkly haunting, it’s as near to perfection as you’re likely to hear for a long, long time.
24
Burial, ‘Burial’
(2006; Hyperdub)
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of being lost in thought as you ride the top deck of a London night bus, rain refracting orange and white streetlights through the window and blurring your view, you already know exactly what listening to ‘Burial’ is like. This is urban music in greyscale, the cartoon noir scribbles of grime and the Technicolor headspace of dub reconstituted to fit forgotten Zone 3 estates. It’s despairing and hopeful in equal measures: unusually for dubstep, it’s music with soul.
As dubstep began to step out of the shadows in 2005, the emphasis was purely on dirty low end designed to rearrange organs in the club. Skream’s fantastic ‘Midnight Request Line’ had taken the uncompromisingly dark aesthetic of grime, slowed it and warped it into something weirder and more introspective and pushed the new sound into the public consciousness with an unlikely crossover club tune.
As it solidified around producers like Skream, Benga and Kode9 and labels like Tempa and Hyperdub, the scene began to blossom more fully. The unexpected flower was Burial. Unlike his peers, he hadn’t released a string of 12”s before dropping his eponymous debut. The secretive producer came out of nowhere with ‘Burial’, an album which walked the tightrope between the underground and the mainstream.
Eschewing club sound-systems for headphones, the album focuses on subtle inflections of mood rather than up-front dancefloor killers. The fast-moving drums are constructed of field recordings, including the click of Burial’s brother’s Zippo, making the sound sources as ephemeral as the skittering two-step rhythms which underpin the music. The wash of distant synths and manipulated vocal lines that drift around the densely programmed beats replace dancehall dread with genuine emotion.
Like DJ Shadow on ‘Pre-emptive Strike’, Burial mastered and reworked a genre in a way that appealed not just to headknock aficionados but to casual punters too. Some will argue that Burial produced better work on his follow-up, the Mercury Prize-nominated ‘Untrue’, but listen to the North African drones and restless, searching beat of ‘U Hurt Me’ or the Basic Channel pulse of ‘Prayer’ and the noble failures melt away in the face of its derelict beauty.
18
The Bug, ‘London Zoo’
(2008; Ninja Tune) ‘London Zoo’ is a beautiful beast, following the capital’s long tradition of twisting Jamaican music into new forms with its teeth bared and claws flexed. Kevin Martin, recording an LP as The Bug for the third time, puts together a fearsome take on sound-system culture which sees the cold, impersonal streets of London glowing in the light of dub’s Babylonian fire – all cavernous bass, dancehall rhythms and imperiously dark and crunchy beats.
If you’re looking for a handy genre to slap on the album, Boomkat’s tag of ‘industro-dub’ is pretty close to the mark. The introspective instrumentals of dub’s other recent mutation, dubstep, are nowhere to be found here: these cuts are club-friendly monsters, with vocal hooks riding straight, if insanely heavy, beats. It’s Martin’s most accessible music to date, stripping some of the abrasive clutter of previous outings back to reveal pop flourishes aplenty.
It’s also bloody raging. Tippa Irie kicks the album off with, appropriately, ‘Angry’, toasting over a sparse, pacey ragga-bass pulse to reel off a list of things that piss him off, from the rape of Africa by Europeans to the USA’s response to Hurricane Katrina. While the tempo fluxes across ‘London Zoo’, the sentiment doesn’t weaken. The toasters and singers keep up the intensity across the album, with fine showings from Ricky Ranking, Killa P, Flow Dan and Kode9’s go-to guy, Spaceape.
Special mention goes to Warrior Queen. She runs the show on standout track ‘Poison Dart’, taking on a sea of throbbing bass most MCs would drown in. It’s an imperious performance. When she says “a boy think sey me soft”, you’ve got to wonder if the man in question has ears: it’s the dub sister of PJ Harvey’s scarily aggressive ‘Rid of Me’.
As you’d expect from an album steeped in south London’s reggae roots and the darkness of grimey dub, it’s the bass that weaves all the collaborators together into a coherent whole. By turns enveloping and destructive, it pulls you along like a rip tide and leaves you feeling elated but bruised – it’s a glorious experience. Let this album have its way: let the deep spaces of the low end consume you.
13
Joanna Newsom, ‘Ys’
(2006; Drag City)
Originally lumped in with the psych-folk movement - that loose and ragged band which numbered Devandra Banhart, Vetiver and Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy among its number - Joanna Newsom made a mark with the intricate harp playing and squeaky, self-consciously weird vocals of her debut album, ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’. Good as that was, it didn’t even hint at the wide-open prairies and reed-bound riverbanks her follow-up would cover. Made up of five lengthy, richly orchestrated songs, ‘Ys’ was the most individual record of 2006, bar none.
By turns gothic, folksy and otherworldly, ‘Ys’ is more like a quintet of Appalachian sagas set to music. There’s an epic quality to Newsom’s songs, with the sweeping vistas of Midwestern folklore permeating both music and lyrics. They’re tales of grief and love wrapped up in the symbols of folklore.
This is exemplified in ‘Monkey and Bear’, a morality play of gender politics that has more in common with Angela Carter’s post-modern fairytales than it does with any indie album you care to name. When Bear escapes human captivity with her lover Monkey, he sweet-talks her into continuing to work as a dancing bear in order to support him, first saying, “we must unlearn this / allegiance to a life of service” before encouraging her to “bear a little longer to wear that leash”.
Without delving too deeply into the feminist message about patriarchy, it’s enough to say it doesn’t end well – Bear walks into the sea and vanishes in the waves. It’s heartbreaking stuff, with the music following and emphasising the pace and tone of the action, from rhythmic caesuras as Monkey pitches his “But…” to fast-plucked melodies as Bear swims out to her end.
This link between the music and the lyrical content is consistently powerful throughout the album thanks to the stunning orchestration of Van Dyke Parks. It’s so rich in detail that you’ll still unearth nuances years after your first listen. Like the soundtrack of a great musical, the arrangements propel and colour the stories perfectly.
‘Ys’ is ambitious on a grand scale. Even if you come away from it perplexed, you have to admire its scope. It’s simply a unique piece of art. Listen to it now, you damned philistine.
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