decade's best #24

24. Super Furry Animals
Mwng [Flydaddy, 2000]
Inside the Super Furry Animals canon, Mwng stands out and not only because it’s an album sung entirely in their native Welsh tongue – how often have their songs sounded as spontaneous, cohesive and purposefully inscrutable as on this priceless, somewhat underrated psychedelic pop record? The creative infrastructure of Mwng is loose but immense, pulling all of the band’s strange misshapen ideas and musical eccentricities into an alluring whole. Of course, a big part of the intrigue is in not being able to comprehend a word of what Gruff Rhys is singing. Rhys still sounds pathologically mellow as ever, but there is a sense of stridency to his vocals on Mwng, perhaps buoyed by the rarefied song material. “Drygioni”, an 1½-minute prog-rock flight of fancy, marks a meaningful start of something for this psychedelic troupe, while adenoidal tunes such as “Ymaelodi A’r Ymylon” and “Dacw Hi” romp into new enchanting dimensions, unpredictable and carefree in the knowledge that there is method to the madness of Mwng and its unusual medley of songs.

decade's best #25

25. M. Ward
Post-War [Merge, 2006]
I think it was Bob Dylan who once said something to the effect that songs should be heroic enough to give the illusion of being able to stop time. The sort of magical transcendence described by Dylan may well apply here as Matt Ward’s operative mode on his fifth album Post-War, as he gracefully stitches together micro narratives of nostalgia that bear the indelible mark of his smoked-tinged croon: songs about time lost and time regained, songs about love in the time of unspecified wars. Ward has always sang like a man of constant sorrow and he put that moody tenor to good use on the opening “Poison Cup” and especially on the title cut – the introspective pull of “Post-War”, its lyrics curdled in a familiar warmth (“Don’t they love you in mysterious ways/ You say yeah but this is now and that was then/ Put a dollar into the machine and you’ll remember when”) as Ward pines for the better times of old over a fog of vintage keyboard notes, is quite remarkable. Aside from sad songs, he also tempers the blues-drenched melancholia with vivid joy in a few of the album’s up-tempo, rockier numbers; to have such accomplished musicians as Mike Mogis, Jim James and Neko Case backing him isn’t too bad a deal, of course, as the contemplative “Chinese Translation” and a raucous cover of Daniel Johnston’s “To Go Home” work especially well in this full-band setting. And yet, it is his haunted voice that you can’t quite shake off, as the curative comforts of Post-War transport you into a state of antiquarian bliss, unsure as to how it is that you got to feel this way in the first place.

beau travail (1999)

I've recently watched Claire Denis's beautiful Beau Travail for the third time (this time on DVD) during the long weekend. Here is an edited version of what I wrote about it exactly three years ago:

The weirdest thing happened at the theatres, just before Beau Travail screened, when this middle-aged patron demanded to find out from the ushers why so few people were in attendance. (I counted about nine of us, which was a reasonable enough audience I suppose for such niche fare. I’m always infatuated with the emptiest picture houses anyway. Very Goodbye Dragon Inn.) It was a strangely profound moment, but whatever.

That evening in February 2007 was actually my second viewing of Claire Denis’ film (first caught it in 2000) and this French filmmaker’s brooding, obsessive work still retain that strange effect on me as in the first time round – it's a film still capable of fucking up my mood for days on end like few could. It’s like these mysterious objects at play in Beau Travail have hid out in the deepest and most remote outskirts of my consciousness for several years, only to return as these deep-dark dream sequences soaked in brine.

Denis seems to be building her story of an emotionally remote soldier’s personal reflections, which borders on suicidal remorse, more from her own life experience living in postcolonial Africa and only vaguely from the Herman Melville story that the film was supposed to be based on. Her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard (who also shot Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire), always have an unerring eye for the most ridiculously sublime images. How do you erase from your mind these scenes of haunted legionnaires ghost-trawling through a ghetto dawn, bare male bodies going through lavishly choreographed calisthenics routines under the sun, or that final shot of lead actor Denis Lavant gyrating wildly to the excruciating Corona dance-hit “Rhythm of the Night”?

decade best #26

One of the best of those supposedly limited-edition compilations released in the past decade that I managed to get my hands on a few years back, via a friend (the hard-copy version, that is – oh now, those waning glory days of CDs!), was The Golden Apples of the Sun, the album of freaky folk songs curated by Devendra Banhart for Arthur magazine in 2004. It served as my introduction to interesting performers the likes of Josephine Foster, Vasthi Bunyan, Antony (a really wonderful take of “The Lake”) and the ever compelling Joanna Newsom. Her album is the only one helmed by a female singer-songwriter on this list, but I want to add that I’ve also rather enjoyed the works of Gillian Welch, Cat Power, Aimee Mann and Nina Nastasia in the past decade.

Joanna Newsom

The Milk-Eyed Mender [Drag City, 2004]

Many have burrowed deep into the whimsical music of The Milk-Eyed Mender, reveling in its unknown pleasures and Joanna Newsom's boisterous fairytale poetry. Kindred freak-folk musician Noah Georgeson's pitter-patter production serves her idyllic folk songs very well, allowing the sheer wonder of Newsom's unique voice and harp strings to sink in. Through the course of the melancholy tidelands as imagined in this full-time dreamer's adventurous storytelling, it is fantastical pop songs such as “Inflammatory Writ” and “Bridges and Balloons” that are truest to Newsom's escapist vision. “Never get so attached to a poem/you’ll forget truth that lacks lyricism,” she sings on the gentle ‘En Gallop’ like a haunting aphorism. It is on moments as such where The Milk-Eyed Mender exudes the familiar textures of fever dreams and casts its most endearing spell.

mixtape (february 2010)

Storyboard of urban myths, the ascendance of doubt
A Sunny Day In Glasgow “The White Witch”
Real Estate “Green River”
Beach House “Zebra”
Frances Gall “Cet Air La”
Slumber Party “I Never Dreamed”
Grizzly Bear “Boy From School”
The Beach Boys “Surfer Girl (1967 rehearsal)”
Bart & Friends “Hounds of Love”
Belle & Sebastian “Put the Book Back On The Shelf”
Joan of Arc “Ne Mosquito Pass”
Luna “Bewitched”
The Sea and Cake “Jacking the Ball”
The Velvet Underground “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
Charlotte Gainsbourg “Me and Jane Doe”
Girls “Laura”
Cass McCombs “Dream Come True Girl”

All the time in the world for an unintelligible end: I had been boning up on a few bric-a-brac masterworks by prose artists whose writings – specifically, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Paul Auster’s Moon Palace and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, to name three – seem to have such an inextricable bond to the ashen cities they write about. By that same token, this mixtape of interstate love songs are kind of appropriate.

don't forget when it all felt right

The place held by Beach House among the current crop of dream-pop avatars has already been well cemented by its first two albums of brittle paeans to love, devotion and a bevy of strange obscure objects of desire. The new and rather brilliant Teen Dream takes a slightly different tack, the song material better developed and sounding more fully formed, more immediate, though essentially it’s still Victoria Legrand (voice and keyboards) and Alex Scally (guitars) reprising their aching brand of atmospheric pop nostalgia. Legrand’s singing continues to dazzle, a lungful of romantic melancholy that cradles the lush mellifluous perfection of “Silver Soul” and “Real Love” – these torch songs aren’t necessarily autobiographical reflections, to be sure, but her singing gives them a sense of warmth and personal geography. Former single “Used To Be” (also one of my favorite Beach House songs) is given a fresh, more expansive arrangement. The duo are clearly developing into much stronger tunesmiths with the breathtaking musical settings of “Walk In The Park” and “10 Mile Stereo”; or take the uninterrupted bliss of “Better Times”, where the waltzing melodies shadow the damaged romanticism Legrand conveys (“Been a fool for weeks, ‘cause my heart stands for nothing”) like reassuring patches of darkness and light. Songs and drifting moments such as these underpin the soporific appeal of Teen Dream, with Beach House weaving an elaborate web of tenuous memories, frights and other glowing emotional relics.