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dustedmagazine · 1 year

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Learning to go out again: Jennifer Kelly’s 2022 in review

Meg Baird plays Chicago

Meg Baird calls it “people practice,” the ordinary skills that we require to interact successfully with other human beings. Small talk, the appropriate amount of eye contact, a certain minimal degree of comfort in crowds: these are all things that eroded in the pandemic. And going even further, I’d add we ran short of “leaving your living room practice,” the difficult process of readjusting to unpredictable environments again. I got really bad at that in 2020 and 2021.

So, while 2022 was, in many ways, a joyous return to the norm, it was also deeply uncomfortable. Again and again, I’d show up far too early to shows and avoid talking to strangers. I’d mistake soundchecks for music. I’d get bands mixed up and think the opener was the headliner or at least the second band. It was like I’d never been to a show in my life. But gradually, over a year that was really genuinely rich in opportunities to see live music, I started to remember why I loved it — and how to be marginally less annoying to everyone around me. And I got to see some wonderful performances.

There was James Xerxes Fussell’s intricately re-arranged Americana on the eve of a blizzard in January and Jaimie Branch’s mesmerizing Anteloper just a month or so before she died. Our local festival, Thing in the Spring, once again delivered incredible abundance with Lee Ranaldo, Myriam Gendron, Jeff Parker, Tashji Dorji and others all taking turns on the stage. I experienced the twilight magic of Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles on a back porch in Northampton as the bats darted overhead, as well as the viscera-stirring low tones of Sarah Davachi at a three-story-tall pipe organ at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro. I got to see one of my very favorite bands, Oneida, at a club in Greenfield, MA, late in the year. I saw my friend Eric Gagne’s band Footings expand Bonny Prince Billy’s songs into epic, twanging bravado. Yo La Tengo came to my tiny little town and tore the place down. In Chicago for my birthday weekend, I got a chance to hear Meg Baird and Chris Forsyth at a whiskey distillery on the Chicago River. It was a great year. I’m so glad I was there for it.

It was also an exceptional year for recorded music as, honestly, it always is. Here are the records I enjoyed the most in 2022, but don’t pay too much attention to the numbers. The order could change tomorrow, and I may very well discover more favorites in other people’s lists. (We’ll have a Slept On feature at some point early in 2023.) I’ve written a little bit about the top ten, but you can find longer reviews of most of them in the Dusted archives. I’ve linked these where available.

1. Winged Wheel—No Island (12XU): An underground-all-star remote collaboration melds the hard punk jangle of Rider/Horse’s Cory Plump, the unyielding percussion of Fred Thomas, the radiant guitar textures of Matthew J. Rolin and the ethereal vocal atmospheres of Matchess’ Whitney Johnson in a driving, enveloping otherworld. Just gorgeous.

2. Oneida—Success (Joyful Noise): The best band of the aughts has dabbled in all manner of droning, experimental forms in recent years, but with Success, they return to basics. “Beat Me to the Punch” and “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand” are gleeful bangers. “Paralyzed” is a keyboard pulsing, beat-rattling psychedelic dreamworld. Success is Oneida’s best album since Secret Wars and maybe ever. (I wrote the one-sheet for Success, but I would feel this way regardless.)

3. Cate Le Bon—Pompeii (Drag City): Eerie, madcap Pompeii refracts pandemic alienation through the lens of ancient disaster, floating narcotic imagery atop herky-jerk rhythms. Abstract and experimental, but also sublimely pop, Pompeii haunts and charms in equal measure.

4. Destroyer—Labyrinthitis (Merge): Dan Bejar is always interesting, but the COVID lockdown seems to have shaken him loose a bit. Labyrinthitis is typically arch, elliptical and elegant, but also a bit unhinged. Hear it in the extended rap that closes “June” or in the manic disco beat of “Suffer” or oblique but perfect wordplay in “Tinoretto, It’s for You.”

5. Horsegirl—Versions of Modern Performance (Matador): Horsegirl elicits a lysergic roar that’s loud but somehow serene, urgent but chilled. The trio out of Chicago were everywhere suddenly and all at once, as sometimes happens to bands, but on the strength of “World of Pots and Pans” and “Billy” I suspect they’ll stick around.

6. Jake Xerxes Fussell—Good and Green Again (Paradise of Bachelors): An early favorite that refused to fade, Good and Green Again considers old-time music from a variety of angles, often incorporating more than one version of a traditional tune in a seamless way. The music is lovely, made more exquisite still by James Elkington’s arrangements, which are subtle, right and unexpected.

7. Lambchop—The Bible (Merge): Stark and lavish at the same time, The Bible catches Kurt Wagner at his morose and mesmerizing best. Surreal sonic textures—including orchestral flourishes and autotuned funk beats—wreathe his weathered baritone, as he traipses through ordinary landscapes turned strange and warped.

8. The Weather Station—How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars (Fat Possum): Tamara Lindeman drew on Toronto’s vibrant jazz community to form her band for this sixth album as the Weather Station. The band improvised alongside here as it learned the songs. As a result, these songs have the usual pristine folk purity, but also a haze of late night sophistication in elegant runs of piano and pensive plucks of bass.

9. The Reds, Pinks and Purples—Summer at Land’s End (Slumberland): Glenn Donaldson is pretty much the best at bittersweet jangle pop right now, and this wistful, graceful collection of songs about life’s dissatisfactions is every bit as good as last year’s Uncommon Weather. Plus it’s got a seven-plus minute improvised guitar piece right in the middle, what’s not to love?

10. Tha Retail Simps—Reverberant Scratch (Total Punk): Montreal’s Retail Simps make ferocious garage rock with a bit of soul in its tail feathers. “Hit and Run” sounds like a lost Sam and the Shams b-side and “End of Times – Hip Shaker” with having doing exactly that. If they ever remake Animal House, here’s the band.

25 more albums I loved:

Non Plus Temps—Desire Choir (Post-Present Medium)

Joan Shelley—The Spur (Important)

Mountain Goats—Bleed Out (Merge)

The Sadies—Colder Streams (Yep Roc)

Spiritualized—Everything Was Beautiful (Fat Possum)

Superchunk—Wild Loneliness (Merge)

Hammered Hulls—Careening (Dischord)

Kilynn Lunsford—Custodians of Human Succession (Ever/Never)

Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin—Ghosted (Drag City)

Green/Blue—Paper Thin (Feel It)

E—Any Information (Silver Rocket)

Sick Thoughts—Heaven Is No Fun (Total Punk)

Pedro the Lion—Havasu (Polyvinyl)

Pan*American—The Patience Fader (Kranky)

Weak Signal—War & War (Colonel)

Frog Eyes—The Bees (Paper Bag)

Pinch Points—Process (Exploding in Sound)

LIFE—True North (The Liquid Label)

Mary Lattimore & Paul Sukeena—West Kensington (Three Lobed)

Wau Wau Collectif—Mariage (Sahel Sounds)

Vintage Crop—Kibitzer (Upset the Rhythm)

Anna Tivel—Outsiders (Mama Bird)

Chronophage—S-T (Post-Present Medium/Bruit Direct Disques)

Sélébéyone— Xaybu: The Unseen (Pi)

Zachary Cale—Skywriting (Org Music)

Jennifer Kelly

#dusted magazine #yearend 2022 #jennifer kelly #winged wheel #oneida #cate le bon #destroyer #horsegirl #jake xerxes fussell #lambchop #the weather station #the reds pinks and purples #tha retail simpls

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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Dusted Midyear Round-Up Part 2: Mutilatred to Z Money

Pan•American

We continue our look back at the first half of 2022 with another batch of traded records, covering the second half of the alphabet. Check out Part 1 if you missed it.

Mutilatred — Determined to Rot (Redefining Darkness Records)

Determined to Rot by Mutilatred

Who picked it? Jonathan Shaw

Did we review it? Yes, Jonathan wrote “Most of Mutilatred’s music has all the subtlety of a baseball-bat beatdown on parking-lot asphalt. But they can craft a somewhat more complex experience when they wish.”

Andrew Forell’s take:

Whoa! As an outburst of performative pique, I can dig Determined to Rot, a relentless shit show of an album for a relentless shit show of a time, a point Jonathan made far more eloquently in his review. It’s an exhaustive and exhausting experience and Mutilatred’s frustrated rage is magnificent in small does but as a whole too overwrought to take completely seriously. The deliberate ugliness pummels any message into oblivion and you’re left aurally battered by a bloke bellowing the bleeding obvious over an impressive battering ram of a rhythm section and a sludgy mess of riffage. It‘s like daily doom scrolling; we all know things are bad and perhaps we need reminding that wallowing ain’t action or redemption but Mutilatred provide neither release nor comeuppance. Those drums though.

Andrew Forell

Overmono — Cash Romantic (XL)

Cash Romantic by Overmono

Who picked it? Patrick Masterson

Did we review it? Nope

Ray Garraty’s take:

The first couple of tracks here are perfect dance floor material, drum’n’bass-y techno or techno-ish drum’n’bass with some extra flourishes. The next two tracks, “Gfortune” and “Bone Mics,” are variations on Burial (yes, again), and if they don’t feel particularly new, they still provide a needed change of pace after the more danceable songs. “Phosycon,” the final track, makes the whole EP a pleasurable listen. Overmono’s use of a glitching vocal sample turns the cut into the atmosphere of a weirdo disco; it’s too mutant to dance to, but delicious for anyone who is tired of thousands of bands that churn out the same music, varying only the titles.

Pan•American — The Patience Fader (Kranky)

The Patience Fader by Pan•American

Who picked it? Bryon Hayes

Did we review it? No, but Tobias Carroll reviewed his previous record A Son in 2019 and said it made “a convincing case for why Nelson has had such an enduring presence in the ambient/drone/slowcore space.”

Ian Mathers’ take:

Mark Nelson is a musician who’s work I’ve enjoyed but haven’t explored much (and have always meant to, whether on his own as Pan•American or as part of Labradford). Honestly the last Pan•American record I really dug into was 2000’s 360 Business/360 Bypass, and that was because Alan and Mimi from Low sung one of the songs there. I knew not to expect the ambient dub atmosphere of that record from this one, but maybe the biggest surprise for me is how consonant this work is with that entry from decades ago; something in Nelson’s tone or palette seem to hold no matter the instruments or genres he works with. There are some touches on The Patience Fader that hark back to earlier work (it’s kind of amazing what he does with a harmonica here, evoking both the use of melodica in dub and the uses Walt McClements put an accordion to on last year’s excellent A Hole in the Fence), but long stretches of this dusky, plangent LP seem to be constructed of just sparse guitar and pedal steel. It seems to exist somewhere out past both the Durutti Column’s gentler work and the KLF’s Chill Out and it is spellbinding. Nelson himself, in a song title, maybe sums up the feeling best: “Outskirts, Dreamlit.”

Shane Parish — Viscera Eternae (Ramble Records)

Viscera Eternae by Shane Parish

Who picked it? Bill Meyer

Did we review it? Yes, Bill wrote: “This is music that invites both surrender and close listening, the better to feel carried away by an evolving stream of sound.”

Andrew Forell’s take:

Guitarist Shane Parish performs two riveting improvisations on Viscera Eternae. On the first “Hatching the World Egg”, he emphasizes the twang, buzz and sustain of steel strings, moving through a series of themes that build to a more percussive approach with total control of direction, dynamics and tone. “Touching the Silver Chord”, played on a nylon stringed guitar, is lighter with more of an emphasis on shorter melodic ideas that ebb and flow connected by a strong sense of progression. The clarity of Parish’s playing and musical intelligence illuminate both pieces and not a moment of their 20 plus minute run times feels superfluous or wasted. As a first experience of Parish’s work, this was a revelation.

The Smile — A Light for Attracting Attention (XL)

A Light for Attracting Attention by The Smile

Who picked it? Tim Clarke

Did we review it? Yes. Tim said, “Ultimately, whether The Smile spells the end of Radiohead feels beside the point when the music that Yorke and Greenwood are making at this stage in their career is this damned good. ”

Bill Meyer’s take:

Radiohead has never done it for me. While they sort of make sense in the abstract as a 21st century Pink Floyd, a massively successful popular music entity that introduces a few semi-popular sounds to the mainstream, and there’s no denying their record-making craft, I’ve never heard a song from them that I wanted to hear twice. So, give Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood credit for consistency; The Smile, their non-Radiohead band with Sons of Kemmet drummer Tom Skinner, has the same non-effect. While one can appreciate, for example, the way Skinner constructs an intricate percussive mobile around the popping guitar and nervous falsetto coo of “Thin Thing,” the quirky hooks just don’t snag and hold. “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings” sounds like it wants to be an anthem for an uncertain time, but it feels too far away, too insulated, to provoke a response. And the blue eyed, gray skied ballads are really a bit of a slog.

Wayne616 — Grease Files (Still Grinding)

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Who picked it? Ray Garraty

Did we review it? No

Patrick Masterson’s take:

In a year where hip-hop has taken on the contours of Michigan’s influence more than ever, it seems important to highlight that a major attraction of the street raps emanating from Flint and, to a lesser extent, Detroit aren’t just the off-kilter rappers. But run that back a second: Wayne616, whose “greasy” sound began as Mannie Fresh- and Brick Squad-influenced backing beats for his own R&B crooning before he gave up life on the mic for one behind the boards (“I smoke too much for that” he said in an interview recently), isn’t even from those cities, instead pumping out as many as 30 beats a day from the other side of the state in Grand Rapids. This subtle but significant distinction matters less when his forces combine with two of the Great Lakes State’s finest, Rio Da Yung OG and Louie Ray — one the reigning king of the sound, the other ascendant after an unfocused early run. Grease Files technically is just a compilation of old songs Rio and Louie had lying around but hadn’t used yet, so you’re hearing a hunger in corners you might’ve expected one or the other to coast. And though their voices dominate the tape, Wayne also throws in what ought to be his calling card, YSR Gramz’s “Grease,” plus appearances from RMC Mike and Grindhard E on “Fake Sleep.” Anyone paying close attention to Michigan might know the dudes in the booth, but with Grease Files, Wayne616 shifts the focus to the ominous bell rings, fleet-footed snares and clipped cymbal crashes that back them. Slide in.

Winged Wheel — No Island (12XU)

No Island by Winged Wheel

Who picked it? Jennifer Kelly

Did we review it? Yes; Jennifer noted, “No Island would be a monumental achievement in any year, but its origins in difficulty, in anxiety, in separation and tedium make it even more stunning.”

Jonathan Shaw’s take:

Most folks know the highly quotable, front- and back-end bits from John Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” The celebrated devotional piece terminates with the gravid observation that mortality’s Bell “tolls for thee,” and it begins with the equally stentorian “No Man is an Island….” Winged Wheel’s pandemic-period record likely has both those things in mind: psychologically and spiritually impoverishing isolation, and all the too-present death. But the four players in the project also evoke a lesser-known line from Donne’s piece: “any Man’s Death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind….” Across their widely scattered COVID bubbles — in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Ohio — Cory Plump, Whitney Johnson, Fred Thomas and Matthew Rolin shared tracks and layered these songs into organic, pulsing, shimmering forms. In spite of the distances and the temporal dysjuncts, the musicians sound entirely involved with one another, in sync and in aesthetic accord. The emotional weight and socio-cultural dissonance of the past few years are registered (see especially the weirdo atmospherics of “Lasso Motel,” the mournful tones of “Stone Oaks”). But the record continues to find grooves and open, melodically inspired spaces that let the music speak. “Grey on Grey” has grim-sounding title, but you’ll keep coming back to its thrum and cosmic harmonizing. It feels good. It’s the sort of thing that will impel you back toward the world.

billy woods — Aethiopes (Backwoodz Studioz)

Aethiopes by billy woods

Who picked it? Andrew Forell.

Did we review it? No.

Tim Clarke’s take:

I haven’t felt this excited about a hip-hop record since Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, way back in 2001. I’d registered a lot of buzz surrounding various billy woods albums prior to hearing Aethiopes, but this is even better than I could have hoped. Preservation’s production is masterful, employing a shifting and surprising kaleidoscope of dusty jazz and blues samples. Over this understated backdrop, woods and various guests lay down hypnotic flows that paint a vivid picture of urban communities rent asunder by poverty, addiction, and domestic tension. It’s a shadowy, stoned and mesmerizing forty minutes, thankfully free of the hip-hop clichés and braggadocio I often find so off-putting. Aethiopes is consistently great, but the one–two of “Christine” and “Heavy Water” is my standout portion of the record, especially when the rolling beat of “Heavy Water” starts up under Mike Ladd’s verse during “Christine”’s closing moments.

Yard Act —The Overload (Zen F.C. / Island)

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Who Picked it? Patrick Masterson

Did we review it? Yes, Tim Clarke said, “Smith’s words tumble out effortlessly in a colloquial, observational stream, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.”

Bryon’s take:

Earlier this year, I read Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania back-to-back, which I feel prepared me for Yard Act’s dance-addled take on U.K. punk rock’s immediate aftermath. Whereas the post-punk revival of the early 00s missed out on decades of Internet-sourced cultural recycling, rock bands today — Yard Act included — can pull from multiple sources within the space-time continuum when crafting their sound. These lads capitalize on this ability, peppering The Overload with splashes of indie dance and its various offshoots. Vocalist James Smith is the primary draw here. He’s in no way related to the late Mark E. Smith, but his sinewy speak-singing comes across as if the Fall vocalist were cleaned up, dressed in his Sunday best, and dosed on pep pills. Lyrically, Smith tames post-punk’s political vitriol with a hefty dose of humor. Having his tongue planted in his cheek doesn’t really detract from the message at all, but the band’s bouncy rhythms and musical polish sure do soften the blow. Still, The Overload is a lot of fun.

Z Money — Back 2 the Blender (4EverPaidRecords)

Z Money · Back 2 The Blender

Who picked it? Ray Garraty

Did we review it? Yes, Ray wrote that “His cadence ‘estrange,’ takes the over used hip hop words and lets them shine in the new light.”

Ian Mathers’ take:

I got one of Ray’s picks last year and really loved it; as someone who definitely likes rap but frequently doesn’t know where to start aside from a few reliable acts, I appreciate the tip last year and right here. I don’t think I’d even heard of Z Money before his review, but there are already several hooks here that have been reverberating around my head for days. “Datin a Chemist,” “Still Thumbin,” “Notice It,” “Asap Yams” all grabbed me on first listen, and Z Money’s melodic sense and ear for a good line are compelling throughout. All of those tracks are from the first half of this 24-track, 56-minute tape and I wouldn’t have been upset if it had been pared down a little bit, but if I go through and try and figure out what I’d cut nothing stands out as weak. Given the rapper’s pride in not having any features here it makes sense but is still impressive that one guy going this hard solo over solid but relatively restrained productions never gets monotonous. Z Money doesn’t let any of the songs wear out their welcome and whether it’s popping out another solid hook or the activities he’s describing, it’s the kind of hustle that’s hard to knock.

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