Gold Sounds: Peaking Lights Remixed

I’ve been pretty sporadic in my posting. Between general apathy and then being spurred on by year-end list-frenzy, I’ve neglected CFC quite a bit lately. I figure one of the best ways to re-enter the fray is with two things I love coming together in a wonderful way.

 

Best Records of 2011: Top 10

I’ve already blown a couple hundred words on what a good year for music it has been. I had composed a little rant about how, despite the high quality to be found across wide-ranging genres, there really wasn’t a clear high-water mark, and then Stephen Hyden went and wrote a longer, better piece about that very phenomenon in the AV Club. So that sort of boned this introductory paragraph about how difficult it was to crown a number one without a cultural swing (whether generic or broader) to join or rally against. Enjoy this really great top 10 even if it is devoid of material which made Zeus quake or stirred fears of revolution in the late Kim Jong-Il.

 

Best Records of 2011: 20-11

Here we go, the top 20. These are the first ten albums of 20 records that got the most spins, raised my heart beat most often, or calmed me down enough to actually sleep once in a while.

 

Best Records of 2011: Honorable Mentions

I didn’t realize how good music was in 2011 until I started making my year-end lists. Though I had trouble deciding just what would make the awards podium, the wealth of remarkable material is, well, remarkable. You’ll probably notice, when it’s all said and done, there are a number of high profile omissions, that says more about the quality of music this year than what may have been “lacking” in those releases–also, I didn’t want to have 30 or 40 honorable mentions in addition to a top 20. Without further ado, let’s open the flood gates with a list of EPs, splits, and LPs that were great but didn’t quite fit in my top 20. In other words, I really enjoyed these and got tired of trying to assign numbers, but felt these in need of a spotlight. (Don’t read anything into the order, it’s all alphabetical, folks.)

 

Gold Sounds: T’bone

T’bone
Mt. Trashmore
Clown Ethics Recordings

Chicago math rockers T’bone make complex grooves for the kids who just barely passed Algebra II. Mt. Trashmore tracks tend to fall into one of two categories: pulsating jams with fairly conventional structures and completely or largely instrumental exercises punctuated with bellowed non-sequiturs.  The trio–Ed Bornstein on drums, Pat McPartland on guitar, and Leland Meiners on bass–pack a lot of ideas into a song, time signature and key changes abound, but they went for the populist jugular on the lyrics.

 

First Half Awards: Token Metal Album

We’re already over halfway through 2011. I wanted to highlight a few fine records I’ve gotten into so far. I wrote up a list of my favorite Iowa City releases for Little Village Magazine already, so I won’t be rehashing that, I’ll just single out some stellar releases and unnecessarily pigeon-hole and qualify them cause, why not?

Liturgy
Aesthetica
Thrill Jockey

From about ages 13 through 16, give or take a year or two, metal and hard rock ruled my radio. Discovering Radiohead around 16, marked the beginning of a pretty precipitous decline in head-banging and a more regular move toward “the standing still.” After a violent shunning of all things stupid, loud, and crude–my dismissive stance on metal and hard rock–for the early part of college, I allowed myself to enjoy the louder things in life. I have, since my junior year of college, found a few records that really up the decibel level and also appeal to my “more refined” tastes.

 

First Half Awards: Best Soundtrack to your Cooler-than-Thou BBQ

We’re already over halfway through 2011. I wanted to highlight a few fine records I’ve gotten into so far. I wrote up a list of my favorite Iowa City releases for Little Village Magazine already, so I won’t be rehashing that, I’ll just single out some stellar releases and unnecessarily pigeon-hole and qualify them cause, why not?

Peaking Lights
936
Not Not Fun

Madison, Wisconsin’s Peaking Lights became a reggae band so gradually, I hardly even noticed. But now that they make the coolest, lemonade-sippin’, flip-flop-wearing drone music in the Western Hemisphere, you just have to have this thing spinning when things get chill, the sun starts going down and you begin to ironically roast vegan marshmallows–yeah I laid it on thick there, sorry.

 

“GOOD Mondays”: “Otis”

[This is, of course, not another G.O.O.D. Friday cut, and therefore not another review of a GF cut, but I already had this heading and all, so deal with it.]
Kanye West is half a year removed from downright dominating Twitter with his weekly leaks, but he’s a spotlight fiend. Before we could entirely come down from all the critical hysteria over West’s fifth magnum opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (a title that still sounds like he stole it from Panic! At the Disco), we were already hearing rumbles about an EP or album-length collaberation with Yeezy’s boss, mentor, and “big brother,” Jay-Z.

 

Tangled Up in Blues: New William Elliott Whitmore Album on the Horizon

Iowa’s greatest musical treasure*, William Elliott Whitmore is less than a month away from unleashing his fifth full-length offering, Field Song.

 

Tangled up in Blues: Edward Gray – Old Bending River

It’s been five years since Ed Gray last laid tracks to tape. That resulted in one of my favorite albums of the last 10 years, the lo-fi stunner The Late Gray Ed Great. The long-awaited follow-up to Gray’s 2006 masterstroke, Old Bending River is considerably more polished. Before you start bellowing “sell out” or some such nonsense, that doesn’t mean Gray is penning tunes for Train or Matchbox 20; River is still dark and gruff, it’s just recorded on some better microphones.