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Thursday, December 15, 2005, 1:24am

It's past time for my latest best-of-year list. I've been procrastinating a bit, see, because 2004 was such an amazingly brilliant year for new music that I would have a hard time making a top-20 list, much less my customary top 10. Nevertheless, here's my best shot. For the newer readers, note that this is a best of 2004, not 2005 — the extra year allows for a bit more perspective as well as a chance to catch up on releases that passed me by originally.

1. Isis - Panopticon
   I think I might be biased in favor of this one since it was my first real encounter with this kind of post-rock/metal hybrid. Nevertheless, Panopticon is epic, sweeping, majestic, and absolutely gorgeous: all while being balls-to-the-wall heavy. That's quite an accomplishment in my book.
2. Magma - K.A
   When I first heard this, I couldn't believe how good it was. Now, after having heard some live recordings of Magma from the past few years, I have no trouble believing it. These guys still have it — incredibly, after 35 years they really are still at the top of their game. An instant zeuhl classic, made even better by the fact that it boasts easily the best production and sound quality of any Magma album ever.
3. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Of Natural History
   One of the most promising new bands out there, and if their live shows are any indication, even an album as coherent and powerful as this one doesn't come close to fulfilling that promise. No sophomore slump here — Of Natural History, especially its first half, pretty much blows me away — but I'd wager that the best is yet to come from these guys.
4. Electric Masada - 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 4
   This is the record that spurred my tentative exploration of John Zorn-related projects into a frenzy. Dense and intense fusion in the best sense of the term; like Bitches Brew-era Miles that rocks harder and sounds, well, a lot more Jewish. My review hypes it up a bit more than is necessary, but this is still a sterling release and a must for fusion fans.
5. Zu & Spaceways Inc. - Radiale
   Combine the brutal intensity of Italian free-jazzers Zu and the funky inclinations of Ken Vandermark's Spaceways Inc., and the result is... one of the best albums of 2004. The first half features some wickedly heavy fuzz bass that would do any upstart zeuhl band proud; the second half opens things up a bit and has some killer covers of Funkadelic and Sun Ra. I prefer the less claustrophic and funkier latter half, but both are fantastic in their own right.
6. Guapo - Five Suns
   I'm a bit off on my review of this one, harping a bit too much on Guapo's overt Magma influences. True, those influences are there, but man do they know how to use those influences to make something pretty stellar. The 45-minute titular suite is a hard-driving, nonstop instrumental beat-down that's hurt only by the fact that it's front-loaded, opening with its best and most creative 5 minutes.
7. Kruzenshtern & Parohod - Songs
   Where the hell did these guys come from? Wild punk-jazz klezmer, with an upbeat melodic sense tempered with a healthy penchant for all-out noise. And vocals that you'll find either annoying as hell or unbelievably hilarious (I love 'em). Definitely the most unique item on this list; I hope there will be a follow-up coming soon.
8. Tanakh - Dieu Deuil
   Smoky indie-rock featuring some of the most haunting, beautiful melodies of the year. Jesse Poe's lyrics and rich vocals combine with many interesting, slow-paced instrumental interludes to make one of the more distinctive indie-rock efforts I've heard recently. One of those records that transports you into a different world while you're listening.
9. Thinking Plague - Upon Both Your Houses
   This live recording from NEARfest 2000 is essential for fans of this contemporary American RIO band, mostly for its hard-edged, focused takes on tracks like "Warheads" and "Kingdom Come." This is a rare, valuable document of a top band in top form, and one that rarely performs live.
10. Mastodon - Leviathan
    I really think I prefer the thrashier, dirtier Remission, but for some reason I keep coming back to this one. If "progressive metal" didn't mean "symphonic prog with cheesily heavy guitars and even cheesier squealing vocalists," Mastodon would be the ultimate progressive metal band. Instead, they're just a kick-ass metal band with lots of proggy tendencies, and nowhere are those tendencies more evident than on this album.

This list, more than any other best-of-year list I've done, is likely to change practically daily. Any number of albums could pop into the top 10. Just a few honorable mentions, as I browse my alphabetically-ordered list: Amarok's Quentadharkën, Tim Berne's Acoustic and Electric Hard Cell Live, Anthony Curtis' Book of the Key, The Decemberists' The Tain, The Dillinger Escape Plan's Miss Machine, El-P's High Water, Faun Fables' Family Album, Satoko Fujii's Zephyros, Receptor Sight's Cycles and Connections, Univers Zero's Implosion, Wilco's A Ghost is Born...

The list could go on, but I think I've made my point. And the really shocking thing? The really shocking thing is that 2005 hasn't been a disappointment after the awesomeness of 2004. Probably not quite as strong overall, but there's been some amazing music released this year as well. Over at Pitchfork, in his review of Koenjihyakkei's new Angherr Shisspa, ex-Ground and Sky reviewer Dominique Leone makes the bold claim that "In 2005, rock-based progressive music is bubbling below the surface with almost as much vigor as it did in the late 60s, just before it hit the pop charts in the early 70s during the heyday of Yes and ELP." Based on the above list and my projected list for 2005, I'd have to agree. It's a good time to be a fan of progressive music (with a lowercase, not a capital, P).

Note: you can also see my continually-updated top 10 lists from 1997 through 2005.

Wednesday, December 7, 2005, 1:59pm

Yesterday I signed up for eMusic.com after posting the below entry, to get my 50 free downloads. Sure enough, it's on a purely track-by-track basis, so I downloaded the entirety of Fantômas' Delìrium Cordìa, all 74 minutes and one track of it, and still had 49 tracks left to download. Hmm.

I also discovered that while Tzadik has nearly 400 albums up on eMusic, it's equally if not more exciting to find that both ReR and Atavistic have some 125 albums each up there as well. This is alongside plenty of indie labels, jazz labels, metal labels, and so on — eMusic is strong in all those areas, weaker in classic 70s music, mainstream prog, and, actually, contemporary mainstream rock and pop.

I also may have to rethink what I posted yesterday about exclusively using eMusic as a kind of scouting service. It does seem a little silly to pass up on what is essentially an enormous amount of incredibly cheap music. Still, I'm not quite sure what my approach will be. Most of the things I really like I'll probably still buy on CD, but for other things I might just settle for the MP3s.

Tuesday, December 6, 2005, 3:17pm

Most everyone who's been paying attention knows by now that Tzadik has put their entire discography, nearly 400 albums, online at eMusic.com. I think this is unbelievably awesome, and is going to result in Zorn's label getting a lot of money out of me at least. However, I'm only using emusic for the unfortunately brief (30-second) free previews, figuring out what I like, and then going to a real record store to buy the actual CDs. I'll probably sign up eventually for $10 a month just to download a full track from each album that sounds promising, and make more informed decisions based on that.

Call me old-fashioned, maybe, but the true reason behind this decision to buy actual CDs isn't necessarily that I like having a real CD with real packaging — although that is also true. The real reason is that emusic is kind of behind the times and only offers downloads as lossy MP3s. If they offered FLACs, I might rethink. Still, this is extremely cool, and who knows — I might download full albums I might not like quite enough to buy the actual CD of.

Also, another eMusic flaw is that they seem to charge by track — you pay a certain amount to be able to download a specific number of tracks per month. They don't seem to have a download-by-album option, so you pay a lot more for an album that has 20 short tracks as opposed to 3 long tracks. Maybe once you sign up a solution to this problem becomes apparent. It does seem like a pretty major issue.

You can browse Tzadik's catalog at emusic from this starting point.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005, 3:41pm

Does anyone know of any good books on the modern avant-jazz scene, say, from the mid-1980s on, or even from the 1990s on? I can't really find any. Hell, it's hard to even find anything on the free jazz scene from the 1960s on. Ted Gioia's History of Jazz, as close to a canonical text in terms of recent jazz histories as there is, has a nice section on what he calls "postmodern" jazz, touching respectfully on various folks such as John Zorn, but only in a fairly abbreviated fashion.

I'd love to read a full-fledged text about the "downtown" NYC free-jazz scene, or even better, a broader history that also touches on possibilities for "avant-jazz" in the future, given the proliferation of cross-genre pollination in recent years — ranging from the Blue Series hip-hoppy stuff to more oddball, unclassifiable material on labels like Cryptogramophone or Nine Winds. There's a rich history here, with plenty of fascinating biographies and musical trends to draw on (just based on the scattered interviews with various prominent figures that I've read), and I'm sure there's plenty of interest. I guess it's only a matter of time before something shows up on the shelves. It seems like this is too self-conscious a scene for something not to turn up.

On the other hand, a good book on avant-rock seems like a total pipe dream, unless Chris Cutler ever feels like writing another book. I did just order Bill Martin's Avant Rock, but I don't have very high hopes for it, and it doesn't seem like he really talks much about RIO or the contemporary avant-rock scene, instead focusing on the more well-known likes of King Crimson, and um, Yes. Well, I guess that shouldn't be surprising... we already know he's a Yes fanboy.

I'd love to write such an avant-rock history myself, but as of now I certainly lack the large-scale perspective and experience to tackle such an effort, to say nothing of the fact that I am musicologically illiterate (perhaps irrelevant, but probably not).

Sunday, November 13, 2005, 1:43am

For some reason, September and October were two of the most prolific CD-purchasing months I've ever had. I'm still struggling to keep pace in terms of listening to and digesting all the new stuff I've gotten in the past couple months — and I'm failing, and thus trying to cut back on new purchases in the near future. (This is aided by the fact that my purchase rate for the past couple months has been entirely unsustainable.) But, here are a few quick thoughts on some of the things that I've been hooked on. Most of these are new acquisitions I got in the past couple months, but some are older things that just happened to catch my ear recently.

• Cos - Viva Boma
  Canterbury-styled fusion has never really done much for me; something about the light, breezy nature of things and the wispy keyboard tones has always turned me off a bit. But Viva Boma gets it right: it's breezy Canterbury-esque fusion all right, but the band isn't afraid to rock out at times, and a really strong, almost funky electric bass presence and some rather seductive female vocals definitely help. Definitely need to explore these guys further — conveniently, Musea appears to be reissuing a lot of their albums that were previously out of print.
• Grits - Rare Birds
  And here we go again: if not quite as clearly Canterbury-influenced, Grits' jams on this live album are definitely "breezy fusion." The heavy Rhodes presence makes it palatable to me, along with the fact that the melodies are just really tasty. I remember Steve Feigenbaum griping on rec.music.progressive years ago about how the Grits albums were going out of print. I sure wish I'd picked them up way back then; I'm definitely happy I got my hands on this now. Fantastic stuff aside from a couple really embarrassing poppy vocal tunes, and now a feverish search for As the World Grits is about to start.
• Ensemble Nimbus - Key Figures
  Another brand of prog/RIO that is kind of hit-or-miss with me is the sort of fusionish avant-rock of the sort practiced by Zamla Mammas Manna, Miriodor, The Muffins and so on. Key Figures falls into that category, but like Viva Boma I am lovin' this shit. Not implying it's as good as the Cos album, but this is fun stuff, and I even like the programmed drums. Glad I have this one, as it's on the long-defunct APM label and, like everything else on APM, has disappeared without a trace in recent years.
• Heldon - Stand By
  Would you believe that this is the first Heldon album I've ever heard? As a serious King Crimson fan it's always been evident to me that I need to hear this band. And especially after hearing Richard Pinhas' work in other contexts (such as Fossil Culture with Peter Frohmader), I knew I'd like this stuff. Yet somehow I've just never gotten around to buying any Heldon, until now. And now, I know I need all their albums, because this is great stuff.
• Cecil Taylor - Conquistador!
  And another "would you believe?!" This is the first Cecil Taylor I've heard! And while this is a bit mind-bending and challenging to digest, especially consisting as it does of two 20-minute tracks (but hell, if I can handle Tim Berne's sprawling compositions, I can handle this, or so I tell myself), Taylor's playing is phenomenal and I can enjoy it even when all I'm doing is just letting the sheer intensity of it wash over me. Must get more... I seem to be writing that a lot, which bodes poorly for my wallet...
• Enslaved - Isa
  If you like what Opeth is doing but kind of think they're a bunch of proggy pansies who need to toughen up their metal cred a bit, maybe this is the band to turn to. Accessible, melodic black metal that caught my ear from the first listen, unlike much extreme metal which tends to take a while to sink in with me. And yet another band whose back catalog I still need to explore!
• The Beta Band - The Best of the Beta Band
  Considering that I have all of this band's releases, it might seem at first that purchasing their new greatest-hits album is a bit perverse. But it has a bonus CD with a full live performance on it, and I always thought these guys were much better live than on record. Still, it seems like a very odd marketing strategy to pair a greatest hits collection and a live album on one release. Presumably greatest hits albums appeal to casual or new fans, while live albums appeal only to die-hard fans and completists. Maybe they were hoping to snare both audiences. Well, it worked on me, at least. (By the way, the live album is excellent. I haven't bothered to listen to the greatest hits disc yet, and don't really expect to.)
• Nil - Nil Novo Sub Sole
  I'll be reviewing this one in the near future. I got this a few months ago and was really surprised when it kept finding its way back into my CD player. As a rule, I'm pretty jaded when it comes to symphonic rock, but something about the moodiness and dark edginess of this album has been keeping me not just interested, but even enthralled. I'm not really taken with all of the album, but a couple of the songs are just tremendous. Always a pleasant (and rare) surprise to find new symphonic prog that can push my buttons.
• Zs - Zs
  I wrote about this one a couple months ago, but it never really sunk in until now. Dual saxes, dual guitars, and dual drums sure sounds like a helluva fun lineup, but what these guys do often seems like it's as annoying as it is fun. But once I started paying more attention, my jaw basically dropped to the floor at the tightness of this ensemble and the complexity of their compositions. I would love to see these guys live, I can't imagine how visceral it must be. On record they come off as pretty much entirely academic.
• Tim Hodgkinson - Each in Our Own Thoughts
  Here's one that I keep expecting to floor me, but it just never has. I bought it for "Hold to the Zero Burn" (aka "Erk Gah"), which was originally a Henry Cow piece and has been described as the missing link between "Living in the Heart of the Beast" (for the me absolute definitive Henry Cow composition) and Western Culture (my favorite Henry Cow album, overall). So far, though, I haven't found the visceral appeal of the former or the intellectual delight of the latter in "Hold to the Zero Burn," and in fact the whole album seems a tad bit anemic to me. It's so highly-rated by people whose tastes correspond to mine, though, that I keep trying and I don't intend to give up anytime soon.

Friday, November 11, 2005, 12:12am

Having moved about six weeks ago (locally in Washington, DC), I only just — two days ago — got a broadband connection set up at my new house. And I'm relieved to have it again, not so I can check e-mail or the weather or the news or music sites, no... but so I can get back to my Dimeadozen addiction. For those of you who haven't gotten with the program, Dimeadozen (hereafter just "Dime") is a carefully-controlled bittorrent site on which users post live recordings — but any hint of any commercially-released material, or material from bands who publicly condemn live recordings, is immediately removed, so theoretically it's all legit. Further, only lossless formats are allowed (ie mostly FLAC files — MP3s are allowed only if there is no lossless original recording).

In just a couple months on Dime, I've discovered recordings of bands I honestly never expected to ever, ever hear live recordings of. To wit: Art Bears, Weidorje, Aksak Maboul, Happy Family, Shub Niggurath, Änglagård, even some zeuhl band so obscure no one has ever heard of them (and they never released any recordings), Evohé. It's amazing how these unlikely, decades-old recordings of unbelievably obscure bands come out of the woodwork. There have also been plenty of recent recordings of equally-obscure modern prog bands, including a bunch from NEARfest 2005, as well as from various avant-rock festivals in Europe.

Probably my favorite finds, though, are a couple of immaculate soundboard recordings of Belgian avant-jazzers Aka Moon with guests: one from 1997 with African percussionist Doudou N'diaye Rose (who also collaborated, decades earlier, with Toubabou), and one from 2002 with a turntablist who just rips. Great stuff!

In fact there's so much great music to be found on Dime that I have been having a hard time balancing my listening between new CDs and new live recordings. I've never been a huge fan of live recordings simply because there's so much music out there to discover that I always kind of thought it a waste of time to listen to 20 different versions of the same songs; but when you get recordings of such obscure bands who are supposedly great live, it's tough to resist. And I'm not regretting my time spent with most of this stuff!

Thursday, September 22, 2005, 10:43am

Man, Stewart Voegtlin at Dusted is absolutely and hilariously spot-on here, re cello quartet Apocalyptica's efforts to cover Metallica tunes:

Apocalyptica, looking more like a quartet of Vegas magicians than classical musicians, made the egregious mistake of reworking the majority of post-Cliff Burton Metallica into chamber music for high school band choads. Unfortunately, this misstep failed to call the process of "covering" into question. Ideally, "to cover" should not mean, "to shadow;" to lay a pale sheath of onionskin over an original. Covering should maintain some of the original tune's integrity, but there's got to be a contribution from artist to source material. Anything other than well-honed personal homage is cataclysmic karaoke.

Ha! This is from his review of Erik Hinds' recent album covering Slayer's Reign in Blood. It's a facinating work, since Hinds performs his cover renditions solo, on an acoustic instrument. I'm actually not familiar with the original, but I'm still getting some enjoyment out of this cover.