#sticks is on drums surge is on vocals and amys on bass

[nonbinary-sticks-the-badger]

they would be in a punk band (and a polycule)

[dustedmagazine]

“1, 2, 3, 4!”: Jennifer Kelly’s 2018 review

Jennifer Kelly is a frantic romantic.

Rock and roll forever, sure, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that the guitar/bass/drum idiom has been pushed way off to the side in the cultural conversation. Mainstream sites list “best rock records” as a weird, subcultural genre, with a slightly bigger audience, perhaps, than best cumbia records or top Hawaiian slack key recordings (but not much). Worse, to come up with a reasonable size list they include all kinds of things that don’t belong. I mean, really, is Mount Eerie rock by any definition?

Rock isn’t dead, but it’s been made to sit in the corner. The only time in 2018 when everybody thought at once about a guitar band was when Pitchfork’s Jeremy Larson dropped his scathing, hilarious review of the Greta Van Fleet. For a moment, we all snickered as one.

Big rock was terrible in 2018. It almost always is. Yet there’s something disingenuous about the genre of year-end write-ups that laser in on the absolute worst and most bloated of rock bands to make a point about the art-form as a whole. Sure, Imagine Dragons suck. Yes, “Africa” is a soul-destroyingly awful song no matter who sings it. No, I’m not wading into the whole 1975 thing. Who has time? Who has the heart for it?  

Because this year, against a tide of commercially viable horse shit, against a backdrop of monolithic indifference, rock bands of all configurations, from all countries (but really especially Australia), continued to make great punk and rock records. And, I, for whatever reason, heard more of them than usual, and it made me happy. And maybe that’s the secret to being happy in music, in any year…find your niche, listen to the best in it, forget about what the mega-corporations are trying to sell.

Also see it live. My big highlight this year was seeing the Scientists in October (with Negative Approach, too!), but it was a pretty great 12 months for live music. It started with a fantastic show comprised of Mike Donovan, the Long Hots, J. Mascis and his Stooges cover band and Purling Hiss (with J on board for one song) at the Root Cellar, a venue I’d never heard of before that show, and that ended up putting on a string of great events. I saw Marisa Anderson, Paul Metzger, Speedy Ortiz, Howling Rain, Trad Gras Och Stenar with Endless Boogie, that Scientists show and Gary Higgins at the Root Cellar this year, and I missed a lot of shows I would have liked to see. Other great shows happened outside the Root Cellar – The Thing in the Spring in Peterborough with William Parker, Bonnie Prince Billy and others, Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric at the Parlour Room, Messthetics at the Flywheel. Western Massachusetts has been in a commercial chokehold for years, with one organization controlling most of the venues, but there were a lot of options this year.

So, here’s to the drummers with their sticks in the air, counting off the four. Here’s to the guitar player wrecking his knees jumping up and down as he/she furiously slashes away. Here’s to the sweat and muck and black humor of $10 shows with four bands on them, two of them still in high school. And here’s to the people (me at least and possibly you) who like these things. Eddie Argos of Art Brut, who used to top these lists and now merits a footnote, spoke for this tiny, beleaguered sub-cult when he urged “Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s rock out.”

Indeed. Let’s.

Amy Rigby—The Old Guys (Southern Domestic)

The Old Guys by Amy Rigby

Let’s just set aside the fact that the first and best song on this album is an imagined email exchange between Philip Roth and Bob Dylan on the eve of the Nobel ceremony or that Rigby namechecks three of my favorite ever TV characters in “New Sheriff.” Let’s forget, too, how rare it is for a woman of roughly my age to be making her own music and controlling her own destiny even now in 2018. No, let’s focus on the songs which are sharp, smart and full of hooks, the clean, romantic chime of Rigby’s electric 12-string, the viscous pleasure of the arrangements. This is the very best kind of rock record, one that doesn’t attempt to remake the genre but somehow makes it bigger, brighter and more necessary. The songs sounded great, live, too, with the great Wreckless Eric in tow, and the two of them bickering like old married couples do, and Rigby glowing with triumph by the end of the show.

 Shopping—The Official Body (Fat Cat)

The Official Body by Shopping

Bubbly in a hard way, strict and minimal in a manner requires body movement, this album arrived early and stayed on my go-to list all year. For Dusted, I wrote, “You could bounce a quarter off the bass lines in this third Shopping full-length. They’re pulled hard and tight against minimalist syncopated drums, the leaning, waiting, anticipating space between the thwacks as important a character as the beats themselves. The London-based trio harks back to the funky, stripped down post-punk of bands like ESG and Delta 5, with hints of the boy-girl bubble and pop of the B-52s and Pylon.

 Salad Boys—This Is Glue (Trouble in Mind)

This Is Glue by Salad Boys

Always weak for NZ lo-fi and equally a fan of the early R.E.M., so of course I fell for this buzzy daydream of a record. “Psych Slasher” bursts with immoderate, glorious joy in the chorus, then cuts back to uncertainty in the verse, the ideal blend of rambunctious rock and wistful pop. “Exaltation” is a gentler sort of classic, just as radiant but moodier, its murmur-y vocals disappearing into cloud banks of fuzzed guitar tone. The whole record sits on the knife edge of rock and indie pop, leaning one way and the other, but never falling over.

 Patois Counselors—Proper Release (Ever/Never)

Proper Release by Patois Counselors

I went all in for “So Many Digits” in my Dusted review this year, but the two great punk songs on Proper Release are “The Modern Station” and, especially, “Target Not a Comrade.” This latter song chugs and lurches on guitar and bass, trembles with wheedly keyboards and crests in a massive, hummable refrain. It’s a catchy, twitchy punk tune that’ll hit you in the part of your brain where you keep Wire and the Buzzcocks, hooky as hell in a weird, distorted way.

 Bodega—Endless Scroll (What’s Your Rupture)

Endless Scroll by BODEGA

Flipping the gender cliché, Bodega is an all-woman band with a male singer. Its tight, nervy, jangles wrap around themes of internet-age dislocation and movie references. Smart, sarcastic, ironic, sharp, Bodega bristles with what you want from a garage punk band but reveals a surprisingly soft heart uncovered round about “Charlie,” a wistful song about a boy who died too soon.

 Bardo Pond—Volume 8 (Three-Lobed)

Volume 8 by Bardo Pond

The eighth in a series of improvised albums, this year’s Bardo Pond record towers and surges with monumental heaviness. I wrote at Dusted that, “The sound, vast and muscularly monolithic as ever, seems more like a demon summoned periodically from a ring of fire, than the product of any sort of linear development.”

 Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore—Ghost Forests (Three Lobed)

Ghost Forests by Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore

This year’s most beautiful album, Ghost Forests undergirds lyric folk melodies and angelic pizzicato harp plucks with roiling, violent darkness. My Dusted review observed “The best and most interesting [tracks] juxtapose the muted violence of electric guitar with a harp’s serenity. A guitar howls from a distance throughout “In Cedars,” pushing a simmering turbulence up under sun-dappled lattices of harp picking. Later “Painter of Tygers” does the same trick of joining muscle to fairy dust, the electric guitar raging from far away, while harp and voice spread delicate magic over the tumult.”

 Seun Kuti & Egypt 80—Black Times (Strut)

Black Times by Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

Fela Kuti’s youngest son inherited his dad’s fierce political commitment, his rhythmically unstoppable Afrobeat style and a few of his band members, but this wonderful album is more alive and present than a tribute. “Struggle Sounds, “ with its hard-bounce of a beat, its blurting sax, its ecstatic backing chorus, its swagger of horns and fever-dreamed keyboards dances through history right up to the modern day. “Last Revolutionary” enumerates past African heroes and connects them to the now. I wrote, “Kuti extends his father’s legacy, its tight rhythmic interplay, its fervent political engagement, its relentless exhilarating uplift, while bringing it a bit further into the present.”

Ovlov—Tru (Exploding in Sound)

TRU by Ovlov

I first noticed Ovlov at the Thing in the Spring Festival, on an eclectic Thursday night in a book store, where the sweet surge of guitar sound felt solid enough to body surf on. Later, for Dusted, I said of Tru that “Ovlov churns a monumental fuzz, a wave of surging, undulating, feedback-altered sound …. You can almost poke it with your finger, this onslaught is so palpable. It stirs your hair like an oncoming breeze.”

Speedy Ortiz—Twerp Verse (Carpark) 

Twerp Verse by Speedy Ortiz

There’s something so bendy and unpredictable about Sadie Dupuis tunes. They hare off in unexpected ways. They stop and start. They interpose weird little intervals of pop and noise. They refuse to behave, and end up exactly as they should be, though never what you’d expect. Twerp Verse takes more pop turns than other Speedy joints, but in the tipsiest, most eccentric way, with acerbic asides in the lyrics that catch like fishhooks and stay with you. “Speedy Ortiz offers a serrated sort of pop pleasure, full of rhythmic complexity and gender confrontation,” I observed in my Dusted review.

 Had enough rock? Me neither

Here are some more punk rock and garage records that I couldn’t squeeze into the top ten overall, mostly in the order that I thought of them, but Constant Mongrel and Richard Papiercuts are pretty great and that’s probably why I thought of them first.

Constant Mongrel—Living in Excellence (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Richard Papiercuts— Twisting the Night (Ever/Never)

GOGGs—Prestrike Sweep (In the Red)

Hank Wood & the Hammerheads—S-T (Toxic State)

Obnox—Bang Messiah (Smog Veil)

Zerodent—Landscapes of Merriment (Alien Snatch!)

Sleaford Mods—Stick in a Five and Go (Domino)

Ethers—S-T (Trouble in Mind)

IDLES—Joy as an Act of Resistance (Partisan)

Bad Sports—Constant Stimulation (Dirtnap)

Lithics—Mating Surfaces (Kill Rock Stars)

Art Brut—Wham! Bang! Pow! (Alcopop)

 Whoa, slow down!

Also a shout to the musicians who made more than one really excellent album this year. Ty Segall made five, I think, but I didn’t love all of them as much as Freedom Goblin and Prestrike Sweep.

Obnox—Sonido del Templo/Bang Messiah (Astral Spirits)/(Smog Veil)

Mount Eerie—Now Only/(After) (Elverum & Sons)

Ty Segall—Freedom Goblin (Drag City)/GOGGs—Prestrike Sweep (In the Red)

Ryley Walker—Deafman Glance/The Lillywhite Sessions (Dead Oceans)

  Nevertheless, they persisted

And finally, hats off to the bands and artists that have been going forever and continued this year to produce great music.

Kinski—Accustomed to Your Face (Kill Rock Stars)

Low—Double Negative (Sub Pop)

Loma—S-T (Sub Pop) (Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg plus Cross Record)

Oneida—Romance (Joyful Noise)

Wreckless Eric—Construction Time and Demolition (Southern Domestic)

Messthetics—S-T (Discord) (The great Fugazi rhythm section plus a young guitar ripper—one of the best live shows of the year for me.)

Charnel Ground—S-T (12XU) (This is Kid Millions from Oneida, Chris Brokaw and James McNew from Yo La Tengo, and as you’d expect, it’s really good.)