My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

Albums listened to in full:

• St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy. Sometimes an artist will just knock you on your ass with an astounding debut, a mid-career left turn, or an unexpected commercial breakthrough. But you’ve got to hand it to the musicians who do the aural equivalent of showing their work.
  
  It’s easy to chart the development from St. Vincent’s earliest releases to the fractured ballads and skronky pop on Strange Mercy. You can practically hear Annie Clark adding and subtracting elements from her music, perfecting it—fewer choral overdubs, more rhythmic experiments, fewer funny ha ha lines like “Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did / Without the kid,” more funny hmmm? lines like “I’ve had good times / With some bad guys,” less piano, and more, more, more guitar.
  
  I loved Actor for the way that Clark played on Marry Me’s superficial* vibe of quirky warmth by slashing through it with violent noise. But it seemed as if Clark knew that those tricks couldn’t power the entire album and, instead of resolving this problem entirely, she front-loaded Actor with the dynamic light-dark juxtapositions, leaving four (five, if you count the bonus track) dramatic ballads to close things out. These ballads range from good-to-outstanding in their own right, but with each sounding like a denouement, their placement—perhaps even the inclusion of all of them on the same album—is a pacing killer.
  
  No problem.  There’s always the next album to fix this. 
  
  Which leads us to Strange Mercy. Here, Clark doesn’t bother with juxtapositions. When the Fripped-out guitars come fuzzing, squishing, and twiddling through, it’s no longer a matter of upsetting the Disney-pretty** status quo; it is the status quo. Appropriate for a soundtrack for what appears to have been a very bad year for Clark personally, Strange Mercy is easily her most musically aggressive official release (although the live Big Black and the Pop Group covers from this year prove she’s capable of even more directness). But her aggression doesn’t sound much like anyone else’s aggression. It’s a twisty guitar hook in “Cruel” that’s practically prog in its speed and efficiency or a kick drum that sounds unnervingly off on the title track. And, of course, it’s the lyrics about “dirty policemen” and recurring images of being stripped or opened up (“Oh Elijah, don’t make me wait / What is so pressing / You can’t undress me anyway,” “I’ve seen America with no clothes on,” “Best find a surgeon / To come cut me open,” etc.). 
  
  I go back and forth on whether Strange Mercy is my single favorite album of the year, but it’s St. Vincent’s best so far. I suspect that might only be the case until her next, though.
  
  * Superficial, if only because hearing Marry Me after getting to know Clark’s later work is a substantially altered experience.
  ** Clark’s acknowledged that Disney music was a major influence on the lush side of Actor.

• Tender Mercies’ self-titled debut. Reviewed here (and published yesterday, conveniently enough).  Honestly, a 4 might have been too generous, and I’m an unabashed fan of at least the first two-and-a-half Counting Crows albums. 

• Terius Nash’s 1977.  Chalk it up to my attention span.  I can’t fault The-Dream for recording such a candid breakup album, but damned if I want to listen to the thing in one sitting, particularly given the general uniformity of sound.  I mean, I suppose he does what he can with slow to mid-tempo contemporary R&B (and what can one reasonable expect on a confessional about a failed marriage—an up-tempo party jam or cross-genre experimentation?), but it’s just … a lot.  I suppose this is why I lean toward those albums that serve up their bleak relationship drama with plenty of stylistic shifts (e.g., Shoot Out the Lights, Rumours, Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer) rather than this or even the Mountain Goats’ masterful Get Lonely, which I’ve probably only listened to once or twice in its entirety.

• Thundercat’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse.  So naturally, I go from one of the darkest albums of the year to Thundercat’s world of absurdly fun bass runs and recontextualized Yacht Rock.  It’s not surprising that a jazz player of his apparent skills and jones for show-offy musicianship would have some affinity for the session player pop of the late 70s/early 80s (not to mention the jazz fusion and prog that fed into it). But The Golden Age of Apocalypse grinds those influences up and flavors them with Thundercat bro Flying Lotus velocity to amaze even people who don’t have subscriptions to Bass Player.
  

• Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972.  I  wasn’t originally planning on including this album in the marathon, since I didn’t own it when I started and had only played it (repeatedly) on Spotify. But, naturally, it made its way into my iTunes library in the meantime.  I have virtually no familiarity with Hecker’s other work and don’t have the vocabulary to go into too much detail on something so steeped in ambient music, but this thing is amazingly powerful.
  
  And unpredictable. I’ve tried listening to Ravedeath, 1972 while reading, editing, or performing other tasks, and sometimes it’s suitably relaxing and at other times, it simply refuses to be relegated to the background and demands absolute attention. It’s monolithic and needy at the same time, like a godlike being who just wants a shoulder to cry on. So I guess what I’m saying is that I recommend it.

Individual songs by:

• Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
• Superchunk
• Surfer Blood
• Tammar
• Ted Leo
• Telekinesis
• Thao and Mirah
• Thee Oh Sees
• Thurston Moore (2)
• Title Fight
• Titus Andronicus