Artwork by Aishling Costello

Another year’s end, another selection of some of the best music of the 12 months just past. This took a while, apologies. For two weeks three tracks lay queued up sadly on my laptop, waiting to be joined by their peers, but I didn’t cop on properly until yesterday afternoon, putting in a marathon session in front of the screen as tinsel, wrapping paper and a growing mountain of Roses wrappers wilted at my feet. From a personal point of view we lost some musically this year – Gil Scott-Heron, Hubert Sumlin, the Small Hours and Altered Zones to name a few – but did pretty well out of the gains too. Has 2011 been a ‘good year for music’? Is that a relevant question?  What is good music? Hopefully this will help you decide.

and ever onwards to prudery 2011 mix

Download, share and most importantly, listen. Tracklist after the jump.

1) Clams Casino – ‘I’m God’ (Single)

As a producer, Clams Casino owned it this year. I reckon he was the musician whose music I listened to most over the past 12 months, not by design, but rather because of his Trojan output for musicians such as Main Attractionz, The Weeknd, Lil B and A$AP Rocky. ‘I’m God’ wasn’t on his incredible Instrumental Mixtape (now available for free), but it’s way too good to ignore.

2) Cities Aviv – ‘Coastin” (Single)
3) Lower Dens – ‘Deer Knives’ (Single)

This beauty came as part of Sub Pop’s mid-year compilation and carefully intertwines shoegaze riffs and pop hooks together around an echoing trellis and up to the all-consuming crescendo.

4) Cass McCombs – ‘County Line’ (Wit’s End)

Wistful and yearning, beautiful and melancholy, there is no point in writing anything about ‘County Line’.

5) Peaking Lights – ‘Hey Sparrow’ (936)

Peaking Lights are a husband-and-wife duo based in Wisconsin and they make psychedelic dub music. If you’re looking for a properly alternative 2011 album, 936 fits the bill nicely. They’re on the same label as Sun Araw and although they probably don’t push the freak-out boat quite as far as that, they do a nice job of treading the line between mellow and loose vibes and engaging hooks, with ‘Hey Sparrow’ providing a perfect example.

6) ARAABmuzik – ‘Streetz Tonight’ (Electronic Dream)

Controversial perhaps? ARAAB’s ‘trance hip-hop’ album divided opinion this year, with some of the disembodied beats from Electronic Dream proving just too washed down and well, trancey, for some. There’s no doubt that this is difficult music – who the hell is going to rap over it for a start? But with its quaking drums and longing vocals, ‘Streetz Tonight’ manages to come across as nothing more than an instantly enjoyable listen.

7) Korallreven – ‘As Young As Yesterday’ (An Album By Korallreven)

Another good year for Swedish pop.

8) Curren$y ft. Freddie Gibbs – ‘Scottie Pippin” (Covert Coup)

First you’ve got Curren$y, who is increasingly proving himself to be one of the most consistent and prolific rappers around, lead in over this brilliantly moody and introspective beat AND THEN none other than Freddie Gibbs jumps on and absolutely kills it. One of my favourite rap tunes of the year.

9) Lana Del Rey – ‘Video Games’ (Joy Orbison Remix) (Unreleased)

Ah Lana Del Rey – providing music blogs with streams of crap to debate all year. Is she a fake? What about her lips? PR stunt? Some saw the uncovering of 25-year-old Lizzy Grant’s previous flop of a musical career coupled with her new look as music blogs’ equivalent of Watergate. As the storm raged pointlessly, ‘Video Games’ remained one of the songs of the year. And then the UK bass God Joy Orbison went and remixed it.

10) The Babies – ‘Meet Me In The City’ (The Babies)
11) Nicolas Jaar – ‘Don’t Break My Love’ (excerpt) (Don’t Break My Love EP)
12) Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands – ‘Broken Up Now’ (Golden Syrup)

Golden Syrup is my favourite Irish album of the year. Sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint Kelleher’s musical style, but ‘Broken Up Now’ is an instant hit, with its trotting bass and soft vocals.

13) The Weeknd – ‘High For This’ (House of Balloons)
14) Scuba – ‘Never’ (Adrenalin EP)

Paul Rose of Hotflush tore shit up this year. The high point on his Adrenalin EP arguably comes with the simultaneously swooping and soaring monstrosity of a break-down on the title track, which kicks in around the three-minute mark and raises hairs for another five or so. Flipside however, there is a similar stomping gem in ‘Never’, an ecstatic celebration of raised arms and screams lost to the mad rush of that galloping bassline. Dare I say it – one of the thinking man’s club tunes of the year.

15) WU LYF – ‘Heavy Pop’ (Go Tell Fire To The  Mountain)

.

 - Oh and it’s a bit late and stuff but happy Christmas to all readers and the many people who accidentally drop by while searching for weird porn and album torrents. Thanks for reading.

Squarehead – Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Yesterday I helplessly listened to this ten times in a row and wondered if pop music is psychologically addictive or has any detrimental effects on health.

I intended to do some sort of list with all my favorite albums of the year, but it quickly turned into an absolutely unholy mess and I’m a bit too late with it now anyway. Not wanting to throw all this out, I decided that the best way to proceed was to post on some of my favourite rap and R n’B releases of the year, because rap kicked indie’s arse in terms of exciting releases this year and I listen to a lot of it but feature hardly any on the blog. The post comes complete with an incomprehensible amount of links and pictures and videos in an attempt to mask the fact that this is an extremely poorly conceived ‘list’. End-of–year mixtape to follow. LOADS OF LINKS TO DEADLY FREE MUSIC BELOW. 

Danny Brown – XXX (Fool’s Gold Records)

Danny Brown – XXX

Detroit rapper Danny Brown turned 30 this year, so he named his new tape XXX. Thirty is supposed to be some sort of seminal age, right? So Danny raps about income tax (“that income tax swag”), he raps about growing up in industrial Detroit. He raps about drugs – dealer turned dealed (“I use to turn these drugs/Now these drugs turn my life”) and his various substance abuse problems. Oh, and he raps about his sexual preferences in toe-curling detail too. And by ‘raps’, I mean snarls, growls, yelps and croons, and all with skinny jeans and a half-shaved head of hair. Turning up on any number of guest verses and generally getting himself out there, it’s fair to say that Danny Brown was indie rap in 2011.

Danny Brown – Fields

Quelle Chris Ft. Danny Brown & Roc Marciano – Shotgun

 - Download XXX for free here.

Shabazz Palaces – Black Up (Sub Pop)

“Black Up – the film”

On the third verse of Wu Tang Clan’s seminal ‘7th Chamber (Part Two)‘, Inspectah Deck pronounced ”my rap style has the force to leave you lost, like the tribe of Shabazz…” Eighteen years later, the tribes of Shabazz have been well and truly found. Today, if in some sort of bizarre and values-inverted alternative reality, should someone back me into an uncomfortable corner with an unpleasant-looking implement demanding an album of the year, there’s an excellent chance the words ‘Black Up’ would crawl their way from my mouth. It’s a triumphant celebration, with bongos and other strange percussion, hooks, growls, compelling lyrics and absolutely immaculate production. It’s sort of Bedouin, it’s a movement, deserts and oases, goats’ shit cracked in the dead heat and soaring trumpets. It’s a feeling.
Shabazz Palaces – Swerve

Big K.R.I.T. – Return of 4eva (self-released)

When people talk about this guy, the phrase ‘real southern rap’ gets thrown around a lot, which was something of an alien concept to me until I saw Ludacris casually eating chicken in this video. Return of 4eva has some very rewarding moments, not least on the powerful ‘Dreamin”, which samples ‘Dream‘ by the Brothers of Soul and shows that the premise of ‘southern rap’ is a shifting paradigm. 

 - Return of 4eva was originally released as a free download but it seems to have been withdrawn since. You can download a ‘chopped and screwed’ version for free here.

Death Grips – Exmilitary (Third Worlds)

When you listen to an album that opens with Charles Manson spitting some mad shit about “dealing the cards” and “rolling in nickels”, you know you’re onto something pretty special. This is aggressive Sacramento punk-rap accompanied by live percussion and screams and if you don’t like it, just keep listening to Drake’s new one.

 - Download Exmilitary for free here.

Cities Aviv – Digital Lows (Fat Sandwich)

Cities Aviv is 22-year-old Gavin Mays who, on his breakout 7″, ‘Coastin’‘, boasts that “by the time I’m 25, the world is mine”. An indulgent  claim perhaps, but judging by the quality of the tracks on his May album Digital Lows, not one that I would be entirely opposed to. Not only did he produce one of the smoothest tracks of the year with the aforementioned ‘Coastin”, but the guy admits to having experimented with sampling My Bloody Valentine and increasingly crops up in the same sentences as ‘RZA’. Need any more reason to pay attention? Just listen to ‘Fuckeverybodyhere’.
Cities Aviv – Fuckeverybodyhere

 - Download Digital Lows for free here.

Lil B - I’m Gay (I’m Happy) (self-released)

Ok, ok, ok. Let’s be clear here. I’m Gay is hardly ‘album of the year’ stuff. Far from it. For most of the 12 tracks, Lil B sounds like he has no idea what he is rapping about. While this is ‘positive’ Lil B – ie, he isn’t ‘rapping’ about eating Wonton Soup or being Bill Clinton – some of the wisdom proffered here is purely childish. Capitalism and greed has detrimental effects on how we live as a society? Wow, never thought about that particular theory before.
HOWEVER, I’m Gay did produce one enormous tune in ‘Unchain Me’, a Clams Casino-produced, ‘Cry Little Sister’-sampling groove that genuinely is probably one of the best things Lil B has ever done. Sure, yet again, the lines are somewhat contradictory and naive – he raps “Man the rap game is the slave trade/No time for meditation/Turn into robots/The Devil is money/It’s not even human/The people die for a piece of paper/It’s so stupid,” before stating “Man, just live, however you do it” – but you just know the intention is good. Good intentions alone would not suffice for almost any other artist (can you imagine having the same patience with a new ‘electro-indie’ act? The reek of pretentiousness would be too much), but with Lil B it’s different. ‘Unchain Me’ and ‘Game’ took some heavy plays on my iPod from June on, and by September it was clear that the former had gained an exclusive spot on my soundtrack to summer 2011. I did some seriously mad funking out to that track in the kitchen while eating breakfast on those wet July mornings before cycling the 13 windy and raw kilometres to my unpaid work placement. ‘Unchain Me’ will forever remind me of walking past Tuam livestock mart on lengthy rambles around the town during my lunch-break. If that isn’t ‘rare’ and ‘emotional’, what is? Below is the song’s video – shot in classic Lil B style (poorly), and licence from the man himself to grab the whole thing for free.

http://www.mediafire.com/?o4z4ebht1gettlh CUZ I LOVE YOU IF YOU DONT HAVE 10 DOLLERS TO BUY MY NEW PROJECT HERE IT GOES FOR FREE- Lil B :+)—
Lil B From The Pack (@LILBTHEBASEDGOD) July 02, 2011

A$AP Rocky - LIVELOVEA$AP (self-released)

Yeah the whole $3m debut record deal and the ‘Sound of 2012′ tag means that the 23-year-old Harlem rapper has all the ingredients to a classic backlash/meltdown/disappointment situation round about April next year, but that doesn’t change the fact that 2011 was a very good year for those subscribing to the motto of ‘Always Strive And Prosper’.

A$AP Rocky – Bass (prod. Clams Casino)

 - Download LIVELOVEA$AP for free here.

Frank Ocean – nostalgia,ULTRA (self-released)

When Odd Future started to blow up in stratospheric fashion sometime around late February, their oldest member, Frank Ocean, got little of the attention. Around the time that Tyler, the Creator and Hodgy Beats made their break-out debut on TV, the New Orleans ‘singer-songwriter’ (a term he prefers to ‘R n’ B artist’), quietly dropped nostalgia,ULTRA, an album that had originally been intended for a Def Jam release but was shunted online for free download after Frank tired of the label’s lackadaisical approach. Initially it seemed to be overlooked beneath the growing, growling wave of OFWGKTA’s march on the music industry. The ‘Yonkers’ video arrived, SXSW came and went and finally Tyler’s Goblin came out in early May. The peak of the wave. And then, for Tyler, and some other members of the crew, there was an eerie moment of deafening silence before a barely perceptible dip in public opinion. Listening to Goblin at first was great, largely thanks to the enjoyment that fans got from the bombastic resumption of the personal saga that started with Bastard. After a few listens however, it became clear that Goblin was not the album that had been expected. Not long after, I downloaded nostalgia,ULTRA and spent a day moping around the house eating stuff with lots of salt in it and blaring songs with titles such as ‘Lovecrimes’, ‘Songs for Women’, ‘American Wedding’ and ‘Dust’, and instrumentals from the likes of The Eagles, Coldplay and MGMT. Put like that, it sounds as though it could have been a contender for one of the most depressing days of the year, but the reality was different. It was great and this man is going places.

Frank Ocean – Swim Good

 - Download nostalgia,ULTRA for free here.

The Weeknd – House of Balloons (self-released)

It’s possible that this was my most listened to album of 2011 and if you had told me last December that particular accolade would go to a fucking Rn’B album thick with narcissism, sex and cocaine, I would have laughed and called myself a loser. House of Balloons and everything The Weeknd touched in general was an internet sensation this year. Within the space of a few months, Abel Tesfaye had gone from underground Tumblr crooner to collaborating with Drake and apparently providing every single YouTube browser with their favourite heartbreak ballads. Anyway, this is a very cool album. Don’t be fooled by the glib or washed-down connotations of the genre either – House of Balloons is a glorious nod to that nasty feeling of acute self-awareness and disgust that comes over the room at 5am when the sun flickers off stained walls and the first stabs of a crippling headache rise from the sticky sea of empty cans on the floor…

 - Download three 2011 mixtapes from The Weeknd here, including House of Balloons.

Others;

Kendrick Lamar – Section 80 (Top Dawg Entertainment)

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Thuggin’ EP (Stones Throw Records)

Curren$y – Weekend at Burnies  (Jet Life Recordings)

Mr Muthafuckin’ eXquire - Lost in Translation (Mishka)

Cuts included in this week’s budget mean that one of Galway’s most active disability groups will be forced to shut down for good on December 31st.

People with Disabilites in Ireland (PWDI) has had all of its annual €900,000 in funding withdrawn for the coming year, meaning that the voluntary organisation will be forced to cease all activities at the end of the month. Chairperson of the Galway branch Adrian Reidy says that the group had only been informed of the complete cuts to their funding in a two-page letter from the Minister for Justice and Equality Alan Shatter at a meeting last month. “The news really came as an enormous shock. We have been working with disabled people for 15 years and have been very active in Galway during that time. We invest about €1 million worth of volunteer time in the organisation every year. We have done everything right and have been punished for that,” said Adrian.

He added that while the group accepted that cuts had to be made, disabled people were “a vulnerable and easy target” who had no one to speak on their behalf. He said that there had been added disappointment that no attempt had been made to merge PWDI with another disability group. It is thought that between 400 and 500 people with disabilities in Galway used the local branch’s services in the past year. The Galway branch has a committee of 15 members, including local councillors, and is based in the offices of Galway Bay FM.

“We acted as a voice on behalf of disabled people across Ireland, and now that’s all gone. We had so much more planned, like the opening of a new mobility centre and courses in sign-language, but none of it can go ahead now,” said Adrian. He also revealed that while PWDI will no longer exist in its current format, he will be attempting to launch a new replacement charity for people with disabilities in Galway in the coming weeks, an outlet which he describes as “vital”.

In a statement released in response to the budget cuts, PWDI said that they believed that the disability agenda in Ireland had been set back by 15 years with the news. 25 other PWDI branches around the country will also be forced to close as a result of the budget cuts. PWDI is the only umbrella group for people with disabilities in Ireland, and included members affected with physical, intellectual and sensory disabilities.

- www.pwdi.ie

- PWDI statement on announcement of the closure of the organisation.

Last Thursday night/Friday morning saw the broadcast of the last ever edition of the Small Hours on Today FM. Since 2004 (and since 1997 in a different format) Donal Dineen’s graveyard shift show had been the best and most exploratory music show on Irish radio. Years of late nights spent zoning out to the weird jams presented by the softly spoken Kerryman were an introduction to a wider musical world for many Irish people, including myself, over the years. All day you’d have the chart drudge, the ‘rock classics’, news-and-weather-on-the-hour, gimmicky PR-driven giveaways and then, the other side of the witching hour, DJ Shadow kicking off the show’s intro and a sudden swerve into the deepest and most fertile undergrowth of music new and old. Reggae, UK garage and regular garage, blues, hip-hop, funk, folk, every type of electronic music…Donal didn’t discriminate. Four nights a week you’d have music lovers all over the country drifting off to sleep with new sounds washing through their room. Then, on the cusp of sleep, the tranquility would be shattered by an arm flailing wildly through the still night in search of phone or paper with which to take down the name of a track. I often woke up to a jumbled mess of letters indicating some act to check out in the drafts folder of my phone, and sometimes those acts turned out to be the producers of my favourite music. It wasn’t uncommon either to wait anxiously for days after a show for Donal to update the playlist details on his blog. The advantage of listening to a DJ like Dineen is that the osmotic process of soaking up new music is involuntary. While skimming through blogs, it’s not really practical to hit play on every single widget, so eventually you start to just click into the familiar names and genres. At times, the information overload is just too much. When Dineen joined ‘Radio Ireland’ (as Today FM was originally known) to present the Small Hours’ precursor, Here Comes The Night in 1997, the concept of music blogs and downloading was still very much in its infancy. That’s why the show at first was such a revelation for Irish radio, and Dineen managed to keep up the appeal and incentive to listen well after the proliferation of the Irish music blog scene, Twitter and the spreading influence of international music sites. And while Dineen’s DJing peers on other stations (particularly 2fm) offered little beyond conventional guitar rock, the Small Hours consistently brought new genres, particularly electronica, to Irish airwaves.

You couldn’t get a more atmospheric show than the Small Hours, with Dineen’s whispery commentary bubbling over the keys of some contemporary classical composer or German techno artist as rain lashed the windows and cars streamed past outside. Doing Leaving Cert biology homework to the Small Hours was an intense experience. It was nice to think of people all across the country, from the narrow rural roads of Buncrana to those looking out on yellow streets in central Dublin from tiny apartments all tuned in to the same vibes, as the finer details of the photosynthetic process or lymph system winded into memory. And as beats from the likes of Flying Lotus, Pantha du Prince, Burial, Boards of Canada and Four Tet piped from radios in cars, bedrooms and fuel stations across the country, the night grew late and quietened and listeners chilled hard.

Last week’s four shows were a pleasure to listen to – a particular highlight came in the first hour of Wednesday night’s show with Moths’ live set (some tracks cleverly reworked with vocals) –  as Donal brought in musicians such as Patrick Kelleher and Solar Bears to perform and talk about music in the last days of his Today FM residency. While Dineen has a number of side-projects – notably Parish Records – he really belongs on the airwaves. With luck, he will not go unnoticed for long and the chance now exists for some station to prove its seriousness in the business of Irish radio and offer Donal a slot. Time for Lyric FM to make a brave stand perhaps? In the meantime, 504 of Donal’s shows over the past three years have been archived here. Do yourself a favour and tune in to the last ever show to see what a unique broadcaster Donal Dineen is and was. Be warned though – if you start listening, you might regret what you can no longer have. Onwards and upwards Donal.

Four Tet/Burial – Moth (Parish rework)

Last week The Field came to Galway with his Kompakt labelmates Walls. Both acts are touring off the back of excellent new albums and The Field is probably the finest electronic producer to visit the west of Ireland in a very long time. I had been salivating over this gig for about a month. His latest album, Looping State of Mind, has been lighting up diodes and frying circuits in my brain since it leaked nearly three months ago. I listened to the first album, From Here We Go Sublime, about 382 times in the space of a week, including, mildly embarrassingly, once on the bus when my headphone jack wasn’t inserted properly and the mild-mannered woman on the way to the hospital beside me was unwillingly treated to an earful of Sweden’s finest minimal techno. I had decided that I was going to try to approach Axel Willner after the gig and do something cringeworthy – such as tell him how much I enjoyed his music or the like – before blitzing him with Swedish idioms read phonetically from the palm of my hand. Maybe then, in the cool, yellow air of the Roisin Dubh smoking area, he would reveal to me the looping secrets of his enormous tunes. I fretted about him not playing ‘Everday’ live and the possibility of a power-outage. I was so worried about all this that I started drinking just before 5 pm on Friday evening. I have been telling myself since that I will see The Field some other time.
The Field – It’s Up There

Meanwhile, as the youth get drunk and zone out, the nation continues to lilt eerily up along the ever-narrowing passage of public austerity. The passage is coming close to its most treacherous pass yet – Budget 2012 – and it’s uncertain whether anyone is going to survive. The rotten timber boards of the Republic will scrape slowly against the stony and unforgiving bank, and after some panic, the whole sorry thing will go down in a broiling fury of gnashing and back-stabbing and pensioners found frozen dead and stiff in their bedsits. Monday marked the first anniversary of the IMF bailout and one year on, the country is suspended in a strange two-tiered wedding cake. The top-tier is still fresh and spongy – the politicians proud of being in charge of the country’s ‘model bail-out’ and granting themselves the right to drive in bus lanes. This tier is good and covered in tin-foil. Beneath it lies hard, semi-stale lumps of rank, crumbling raisin-crud. It’s soaked in flat Heineken and there’s saliva and bite-marks everywhere. It’s going nowhere apart from the bin, or to be used as food-fight fodder by the Coke-addled kids whose parents are drunkenly waltzing in the bar and are now free to tear up everything. This part of the cake is everyone else. The children are fascists. Soon the lights in the function room will go off and as the adults’ muffled laughter tinkles through from the next room, these violent brats will descend on the buffet and cake and fuck things up. Much like the freaks in I Am Legend, they’re getting bolder and braver all the time. Yesterday one of them stuck his head above the parapet entirely, although he was a bit too early yet. The Fine Gael mayor of Naas, Darren Scully, seemed content to dismiss an entire race of people live on radio – but of course he wasn’t a racist.

“When you look at the word racist in the dictionary you could probably say it’s wrong of me to make that decision but I’m only going purely on experience and every single case I’ve had that’s been the outcome of it,”

he said, speaking of every black African of all time, ever. He’s stood aside as mayor now, but stays on as a public representative and member of our largest government party. Here comes Kristallnacht.

The Depravations - Old Love Song (Live)

Some good news did emerge over the weekend though. Galway band The Depravations apparently started recording their debut album this week. Posting their EP on the blog last March garnered one of the greatest responses I have ever had to anything on this cyber wasteland, so I presume regular readers (all two) will be pleased to hear this. On Saturday the band did a live set thing for 2fm in Eyre Square. The sky was grey and the Toulouse fans visiting for the city’s biggest rugby match ever were somewhat obnoxious, but the set was as good as ever. This forthcoming album is definitely one to mark down…and buy.

For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to post Nicolas Jaar’s new two-track EP, Don’t Break My Love. Normally a release consisting of just two tracks could hardly be labelled an EP, but this breathy, clicking wonder embarks on such a ridiculous electronic journey that by the end of the second (last) track, it feels as though you’ve passed through a series of futuristic eras. On the subject of Jaar, it’s interesting to look at how his year has panned out alongside that of his British counterpart James Blake. Both had massively anticipated and critically acclaimed albums at the start of the year, but diverged strongly as the year went on and the hype grew. Blake’s style verged sharply into the realms of those still vocals, culminating in his latest (and God awful) EP, Enough Thunder, while Jaar maintained a lofty distance behind his laptop and ends the year with something completely manic like the last minute-and-a-half on ‘Don’t Break My Love’, or the drop on ‘Why Didn’t You Save Me’. The EP is available for free download.

Next month the blog is hopefully going to publish a detailed series on the music of the year. There will be more mixtapes, although my laptop has been dead for a week, rendering my rudimentary mixing software and large swathes of my music library inaccessible. I’m sure my effort to hoover the keyboard and carefully put the machine back into its bag will do the job, but I amn’t going to check for another week yet. In the meantime, make room on your hard-drives for a proper jaunt through some of the shadier lanes and more resplendent avenues of 2011′s musical estate. A sample of what is being touted as the world’s first ‘trance hip-hop instrumental’ album, and some incredibly rare collectible based music. Wisconsin dub and if the Beach Boys had grown up drinking cans in the Phoenix Park and learning Irish in school. Honey-glazed Rn’B and colon-rattling bass. Add some exuberant, vitamin C-packed House and indie heroics and this will absolutely go off. Stay tuned.

“So let me get this straight…you want us to give you a quarter of a fucking million to make this record and you aren’t even sure when it’ll be ready?”

Kevin Shields nodded.

“Fuck…”

We missed a pseudo-important date on the blog last Friday week. It had nothing to do with the continuing downward spiral of the eurozone into chaos and doom, although a new generation of Leaving Cert students will definitely be learning off the names Papandreou, Venizelos and Rehn for a question on ‘The Age of Austerity’ for European history in a few years time.

Nope, the date marked a quiet and inconsequential anniversary for music fans. November 4 was the twentieth anniversary of the release of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, an album which probably should not be written about for another 20 years at least, due to its tendency to draw out awkward metaphors and abundant reams of well-intended but meaningless prose and praise. As a piece of music it provides much to comment on (enough for one Florida State University student to write an interesting thesis on) – words such as ‘swirling’, ‘shoegaze’, ‘guitars’, ‘tremulous’, ‘dreamy’ and ‘ethereal’ will feature strongly – before the sumptuous backstory to the album’s creation is even touched on. It’s a fascinating story, but not one which stands to gain much from being churned out again by someone who was one week old when it was first released. However, given that I rather inexplicably decided to feature 1991 albums earlier this year, passing over this giant would be somewhat of a gaping anomaly. Plus, guitarist Kevin Shields recently launched a new record label, which got me thinking – and hoping – about the band again. Personally, I think it was the best album of that year, and challenges strongly for the premier position on that constantly rotating and ultimately pointless ‘favourite albums of all time’ list of mine. Seems as though I’m far from the only one that thinks this way, so just what is it about this commercially unspectacular and sonically uneasy LP that was released with little or no fanfare, massively over-budget and two years late by a band that had thus far failed to make any substantial impact in their seven years together that makes it so revered?

My Bloody Valentine – I Only Said

For me, Loveless is one of those albums that has heavy associative connotations. At home when younger, we had an amazing big hardback book called A Day in the Life of Ireland. It’s out of print now and I wanted to upload some scans of the pages but when I went looking for it for the first time in years last night I couldn’t find it. I have no idea where it came from either. The concept behind the book was a simple one. One morning in May 1991, 75 of the world’s best photographers started shooting all across the island. From shipyard workers on their morning shift in Belfast to children making their communion in Mayo, the whole spread of Irish life was compiled into a large hardback book of maybe 100 pages. There were nuns and priests, teachers and students, old men and dogs and paramilitary volunteers. (Where are these people now? Do they remember that day? How did the nineties and new millennium treat them? What is the full story behind their photos?) But it was the places that stuck with me the most. It was an effective geography lesson. Each photo was accompanied with a small map of Ireland in the corner, with a dot indicating where the photo had been taken. And some of these photos were remarkable. It’s an Ireland that you’re inevitably going to miss if your entire year consists of commuting along the likes of N17 or M50, or crawling out of bed at noon with a headache and a 4,000 word politics essay due in a few hours. It’s an Ireland that took a bit of a bashing in recent years but still exists, waiting to be camped in and to induce awe and contentment.

Flicking on the likes of ‘Soon’, ‘When You Sleep’ or ‘Only Shallow’ has the immediate effect of summoning the pictures in that book to my mind – sea-sprayed passengers on a small boat off the west coast, watching grey clouds eat mountains in Connemara, people’s bare and muck-flecked feet on the top of Croagh Patrick. The association makes little sense – I first mauled that book with sticky fingers when I was seven or eight, long before I had ever heard of things like ‘reverse reverb’ or ‘tremolo bars’, never mind the album itself. There wasn’t all that much musical reference in the book, although I remember some jubilant action shots of a gig in a Dublin basement and the boozy smiles of bodhran and accordion players in a dark pub, hardly the stuff reminiscent of an indie shoegaze classic. Furthermore, it’s not as though the members of the band were making the record with Ireland’s scenery in mind. It’s probably fair to go so far as to say that the Irish members of the band couldn’t care less about the country during that bleak period in the late 80s and early 90s. They had emigrated years before, on the advice of Gavin Friday, and at the time intended never to have to return. Despite all this, Loveless still sounds like the perfect soundtrack to that book and its moody Atlantic coastline shots and buoyant social portraits.

The real substance of the photographs lay in their collective message. In isolation, photographs of fishermen unloading their catch at Killybegs or a snap of punks chatting to an old lady on a Dublin footpath can be powerful enough, but it was the idea that all these photographs had been taken on exactly the same day in the same country that made the idea of a the book being a real, physical ‘snapshot in time’ so intriguing. It’s a concept that I haven’t seen replicated to such a powerful effect ever since. However, the music on Loveless is definitely woven from the same sort of collective fabric, rich strains which wander down so many different paths but ultimately sprout from the same source. Loveless was nowhere near ever being recorded on the one day, week or even month (it eventually took about two years), but the long echoing tunnel of its tracklist feels like enough of a single entity to qualify. As a full LP, its power is immense. What can be said about Loveless 20 years on? It’s still music to grow up to. It still suits emotional turmoil and moments of dire directional loss. It still acts as a benchmark with which to measure new albums. It’s still great. Every time that paralysing sense of dread, fear and sorrow grips as you watch some small local band set up their miniature city of a pedalboard onstage you can think of Loveless and remember that shit-loads of pedals do have a place in music. It could be ok. And every time the clicking introductory segue into the body of ‘Soon’ sounds out, you know it’s going to be great and things will be fine. The Atlantic won’t go away, and neither will Kevin Shields’ recorded chronicles of that amazing horizontal strata of groaning guitar, which stretch off like seams of grainy rock through a beautiful landscape consisting of Belinda Butcher’s sexual vocals, Jazzmasters and Jaguars, and slowly nodding dinosaurs. Play it loud.

Twenty years later and we’re still waiting for the fabled final instalment.

Slightly longer version of the article that originally appeared in the Connacht Sentinel, October 24 2011.

Over the past ten days, Galway pedestrians will have become familiar with the unusual sight of a slowly expanding gathering of tents, gazebos and colourful signs on the paved plaza at the top of Eyre Square.

The Galway branch of the global ‘Occupy’ protest movement now has around 25 protesters camping out in 16 tents on the square, numbers that have swollen considerably since the first tents pitched on October 15. And despite the almost constant rain, wind and fast-approaching winter, the protesters are adamant that they won’t be going anywhere soon.

Unemployed construction worker Michael Jones, who now acts as the camp’s medic, says that the reasons for his and others’ participation are simple. “The way that this country is using our money to pay of the debts of the banks is disgraceful and I’ve had enough. Camping out here in the rain sucks, but I’m doing it in solidarity with those who have lost their jobs.” Michael added that he felt that the presence of the protesters has actually made the square safer rather than acting as an inconvenience, explaining that some accident-prone late-night revellers have already made use of his first aid skills.

The protesters rely on donations of food and supplies from the public to keep their camp running and say that Galway businesses have so far been ‘very generous’ in their contributions of food. Toilet facilities have been made available by pubs and shops around the square. The number of protesters grows during the day and each weekend, when the camp holds public discussions and live music sessions beneath Browne’s doorway.

Some music just sounds better inside the lurching shell of a bus. There’s something lip-curlingly satisfying about putting on headphones, adopting a world-weary look and turning to lean your forehead against the cold, damp window, flicking past lights, rain trickling down the glass, through small towns and dark countryside, all the while soaking up some new beats you found on some blog. Even better if they turn out to be decent.

Been on a weird electronic music binge for the last fortnight and found this shit is suited perfectly to the cramped joylessness of a Bus Éireann commute.

 - Teeth is a Finnish producer who makes bass music that sounds like a thousand tonnes of Scandinavian ice breaking off a floe and smashing its way down some river to the sea under the moonlight of a sharp night in early spring. It’s uncompromisingly cold. It skittles and shakes and is as good as any bass coming out of the UK right now, possibly helped by the fact that this latest EP, Swarm/Shift/Sequence/Spawn, comes straight from the darkest part of Teeth’s industrial freezer and out to the general public via UK label RAMP. The perfect time to hit play on Swarm/Shift/Sequence/Spawn is right at the top of the hour, when the nauseating brain vacuum that is 2fm’s news bulletin washes through the bus and the guy behind you starts shouting “I JUST TOLD THE JUDGE SHE WAS MAD FOR IT” into his phone. Above is a decent promo blend of all four tracks. Below is one of the hardest cuts on the release, a number that was probably carved with the help of an ice-pick and might just give your iPod frostbite.
Teeth – OJ

 - We’re well late with this gem. Lorem Ipsum is Irish, played a well-received set at last week’s Hard Working Class Heroes and makes glitchy electronic music that sounds possibly a bit like those tunes that are said to still rest unreleased on the computers of Richard D James might. Between Hospitals is the delightful July full-length and provides plenty to be getting on with in the way of fresh Wicklow Mountain synth, but Lorem Ipsum’s Soundcloud also provides a similarly intriguing stream of weirdness. Take ‘Beware Your Woman’ for instance, a re-fix that pits the pop-friendly hook of White Town’s ‘Your Woman’ with the doomey punk-rap proclamations of Death Grip’s ‘Beware‘. It’s real crate-digger territory. Play Lorem Ipsum when the bus driver smacks the air conditioning right up to melt and the already stuffy atmosphere of the inside seat during a Claregalway traffic jam dips into the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno. As the air turns to headache in gaseous state, this stimulating distraction does a good job of busying your ears.

Lorem Ipsum – Beware Your Woman

For those who aren’t in the know by the way, Lorem Ipsum is the proper term for ‘placeholder text’, a phenomenon that will be familiar to graphic designers, print media production folk, Adobe junkies and legions of frustrated media students. Here’s an example: Vestibulum vel lectus leo. Fusce ut odio arcu, in varius leo. Donec vitae nisl neque. Nulla tincidunt varius neque non faucibus. This means nothing.

 - One of the top contenders for the king of bus music title is Burial. He even had a track on his debut album titled ‘Night Bus‘, which made perfect sense to anyone who has watched dusk turn to broody black night through the window of a long-distance bus. No one messes with Burial’s music, for fear of looking like completely talentless tossers in the shadow of his immaculate production and vocal processing. Or at least, nearly no one. Shlohmo’s remix of ‘Shell Of Light’, from earlier this year, goes far to showcase his skills, in that he actually managed to add to the track, rather than just make people grimace.
Burial – Shell Of Life (Shlohmo remix)

Shlohmo’s LP Bad Vibes came out in August and it’s great. This is cool instrumental hip-hop that you hope Drake doesn’t find. Don’t be fooled by the soft finger-clicking vocal chops though – some of his bass packs quite a punch. Fans of Teebs, Flying Lotus, tune in.

Shlohmo – Places

Shlohmo – Teeth

 - Silky Johnson? Nope, me neither. Until earlier this week anyway. Another hip-hop beat maker, Silky’s new tape Hater Of The Year is an eyebrow-raising series of Clams Casino-esque jams. It’s got just enough quirks to keep things fresh throughout 14 tracks. Trawling back through his Bandcamp discography reveals some heavily #Based and Southern influences (Gucci Mane remixes, Lil B productions etc) – which this time last year would probably have been enough to disregard him off-hand, but things have changed…

‘Chasin’ Paper’ and ‘Suffocation’ are particularly great.
Silky Johnson – Chasin’ Paper

So there you have it. Music to help make bus journeys that bit calmer and help everyone else think you’re an anti-social dick. Enjoy.

This post started out as number five in the ‘albums from the year I was born’ series – some sort of slobbery treatise on my favourite album of that year, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. However, once it got dark enough to have to close the curtains and knock on some moodier music, it quickly mutated into something substantially uglier and unpleasant…

Autumn in rural Co Galway is soft. Under old beech trees, fallen leaves are trodden to a squelchy mush by snorting cattle sheltering from the waves of silk-like drizzle that drift slowly across the countryside. The flat landscape, which during the height of a scorching blue day in July is largely dull and uninviting, comes alive to its true beauty on rare days near the end of October, when the clouds part after rain showers and the sun glints across the fields, setting the hedgerows and trees ablaze with an auburn glow. It’s then that it all looks perfect. Even the old barbed wire fences look interesting, winding along the hedgerows like rusty snakes. Town folk go for long walks along the warren of tiny roads that reach in every direction and see the golden ditches and the pensive, gentle livestock and they think things like “ah! why do we never walk around here during the year? It’s delightful. We should do it more often. This is great.” The air is cold and sharp, of the type a Victorian doctor may have prescribed to wealthy patients suffering from breathing difficulties back in 1885. For a while, things are calm. Then it all changes, overnight and imperceptibly, when the clocks go back an hour. It’s not very subtle. People go to bed surrounded by lush fields of laughing rabbits and organic parsnips and avenues of crispy, kickable leaves and wake up to a dark nightmare which doesn’t end for almost three months. People stop walking on the roads and the trees turn black and loom like spindly skeletons and shriek as the wind passes through them. During daylight hours, the landscape is moody and dour. Farmers rush to complete chores in the weird half-light of the late morning and afternoon in places not covered by sodium lighting. The sky remains grey and unpredictable for a while before inky darkness creeps into fields and gardens through the cracks in the branches and from below the ditches and drains of the wet roads. Within half an hour, it’s all over and nature has once again asserted its dominance over the human population, who are reduced to cowering inside their gloomy homes, depressed, or driving around in cars with halogen lights and worrying about hitting the lonely drunks who stagger home from the pubs with no lights or rationality. Some of the drunks fall and crack their heads on the way down the hills and are found cold and unintelligible in the morning. Their blood runs through the slurry effluent and crumbling tarmac and down into the drains, where mangy rats piss in it and then drink  it. Around mid-October, the rats start to find the blood-and-green diesel-and-cowshit of the ditches too chilly for their liking and move indoors. They live the life of lords for a few weeks, eating the animals’ meal and chewing through the insulated wire of electric fences. Eventually discovered, they are tempted with poisons lain carefully inside pipes. At first, they are suspicious and cautiously pull the poison into the daylight for a better look. The much-loved family collie jovially eats all six blocks and groans to his death beside the kitchen stove. Outside, greed wins out with the rats. They finally succumb to the bright blue blocks of Storm in November and curl up in tumble-dryer outlets and car exhausts to die. This is deep nightmare territory for children, who get up in the dark, are driven to school in cars with bloated rat corpses in the undercarriage and come home in the dark after spending their entire day being screamed at and harassed by teachers with dangerously low melatonin levels.

For hours every day enormous tractors roar down the tiny roads, knocking branches and killing cats. Seriously, there are dead cats everywhere. No one is happy with their day unless they have pulverised some feline with car, van or tractor.  The cats’ brains gather hairs and stick to the road like grotesque limpets. When the frost comes they freeze hard and go shiny and magpies and grey crows gather to pick out lumps to bring back to their nests for defrosting. Cow shite is also everywhere, even though all the animals are inside. It manages to reach every nook of the townland, slipping out the farm gate in the dead of the night and onto car tyres and walking-boots and into kitchens and even schools and shops. Illegally dumped bags of rubbish ride the current of the swollen river, coughing out more and more empty shampoo bottles and noxious black silage wrap as they bob along. The animals that have no shed to be put into stand stupidly and frozen at gates, waiting to be fed. As the weeks go by, they get increasingly miserable and alarmed as they slowly realise that they are beginning to sink in their own shit. They get no sympathy. Once November arrives, pheasant season sees the bogs and low Coillte plantations erupt in a blaze of thoroughly unsafe shooting. Signposts through the bogs, long forgotten by the council, are peppered with shotgun pellets. Grim-faced men dressed like the Amazon walk along the roads, their shotguns in half and dogs covered in shit and brambles panting happily at their sides. Sometimes the pheasants end up falling through branches and onto the road, where they can stay for weeks, their chests burst and maggoty and their feathers broken and unloved.

The shops sell out of Powers Gold Label whiskey. The bottles are bought up by farmers who live alone along the wet roads and wear wellingtons to mass. They drive into town on Monday mornings to do some shopping, leaving the old dog shivering and listening to Mid-West Radio in the front seat. The men wander aimlessly though the aisles, examining everything and wondering at the colourful packaging on breakfast cereals and washing detergents, but by the end their baskets are always filled with the same weirdly toxic smorgasbord of small-town supermarket trappings; cabbages, Jeyes Fluid, tins of mushy peas, six-packs of Harp, ginger nut biscuits, mice-traps, carrot seeds, custard, (more) Storm rat poison and 70cl bottles of Powers Gold Label. They go to the post office, then home, where the lights stay on well into the night as they work their way through the bottle and watch video tapes of the 1983 Rose of Tralee or lonely late-night repeats of Nationwide. As they squint at the small television set (propped up with mid-1990s telephone directories, yellowing issues of The Star and artificial insemination catalogues), they eat custard from sheep-and-shepherd patterned crockery with 60-year-old spoons that taste like dirty coins and worry about the possibility of all their animals drowning in their own piss.

A few fields away, elderly people are cold and alone in their homes at the end of empty roads that were once thriving communities. Now they’re covered in weeds and the abandoned bungalows of the smallholdings fall sadly into disrepair and neglect. There are more foxes than people under the age of 70 on the road. The silence is occasionally broken by the sound of an ex-builder in a 4×4 made of concrete and lead panels, who is checking on his forlorn and destitute cattle. He may observe them from his seat in the jeep, without turning off the engine. If none are noticeably dead, he turns and drives back out, his tyres picking up yet another roll of thick, chilled brown dung with which to distribute on his way home. Across the road there is an old house, covered by the limbs of skeletal trees, that no natural light can now touch. The old gate doesn’t open anymore and the garden wall hasn’t been painted since the stations were last on the road, in 1963. Most of the windows are broken and covered crudely with plywood pilfered from childrens’ bonfire piles and election posters. The grey pebble-dash is covered with dank, slimy moss and long weeds claw their way upwards from cracks in the path. To the side, an old turf shed rots away as the corrugated steel roof caves in over the lice-ridden wood and the empty bags of weanling ration. The single black electricity line from the house has been down for almost a year, after a tree fell and severed the only connection to the modern age. Someone or something lives in this house and burns what is thought to be plastic and other strange things in the tiny kitchen grate most evenings, sending plumes of grainy black smoke up into the embrace of the overhanging branches. The smoke looks like that of burnt rubber, but smells entirely different… No one wants to confront or think about what the fuck goes on in that house after dark, under the soot-stained picture of the Sacred Heart, which looks down sadly from above the kitchen mantelpiece.

All this is before the hard ice of December and January, which in recent years has been so spitefully enthusiastic in crippling rural life that it seems as though it will become a permanent annual fixture. The sludge and muck freeze into solid mounds and the water that is brought to animals turns to ice almost immediately…

But enough. That’s called winter and there’s an entirely new post to be dragged out of it. Here are some autumnal tracks. Loveless will wait.

Girls – Vomit

Salem – Redlights

Korallraven – As Young As Yesterday (Girl Unit Remix)

My Bloody Valentine – I Need No Trust

Turns out his roots are in Roscommon, which is a largely wet and dreary place and considered the most isolated county in Ireland in terms of services, infrastructure and fun. This connection should really be celebrated, and instead of doing things like nominating Dana ‘let’s return to the 1950s’ Rosemary Scallon to run for the presidency, Roscommon County Council should be drafting by-laws to make it necessary for McGuire’s music to be played loudly in the streets and over the bleak coniferous bogs of Castlerea and Ballaghaderreen instead. This would partly be in a celebration of their most musically explorative lost son and partly because it may help the people of Roscommon to ‘find themselves’ through the medium of intense freak-out alt drone.

Just to clear things up, Emeralds are an ambient/noise/drone band from Cleveland. Their last album, 2010′s Does It Look Like I’m Here was probably one of the best and most imaginative of that year. Besides McGuire, there are two other guys that play all sorts of keys, plugs, synths and fuck-knows what else. These two are a study in contrasts. One, Steve Hauschildt, stood at his stand of instrumental mystery in a perfectly sedate manner for the entire set. He wore a black shirt of the type purchasable for €4 in Penneys and was completely clean-shaven. Meanwhile, bandmate John Elliot has loose jeans and long hair which he lashed and head-banged against his keyboard as he leaned over it in ecstasy during the depths of the rhythmical looping madness. He was wearing glittery gold Nikes and a massive jacket with a fur-lined hood (he took this off pretty early on and was content to thrash around like a seal in a box for the remainder of the set.)

They were very good. The actual set itself was a single, monstrous piece of work which is apparently going to feature on an upcoming release of theirs. The encore was an improvised live version of ‘Double Helix’ from DILLIH. For an ‘ambient’ musician, McGuire can certainly rock out. His guitar-playing was stunning for the entire set, although at times its more delicate meanders were somewhat lost due to a lack of volume. It’s a pretty brave thing for any act to go out there with the intention of playing just one unreleased song, even if it is the guts of 40 minutes long. The encore was obviously a bit tighter and McGuire jammed energetically for the duration and just as the patterns seemed to be at their most complex and loudest, they cut out abruptly and decisively, as though the electricity had been sabotaged.

Coincidently, today saw the release of yet another solo album of McGuire’s, titled Get Lost. This album follows numerous collaborations, mixes and the A Young Person’s Guide To Mark McGuire compilation from earlier this year, which indicates that the 24-year-old is on somewhat of a creative roll these days. Below is the appropriately fuzzed-out video for the title track, which McGuire shot himself.

________________________________________________________________

— Chelsea Wolfe is a doomy, gloomy Californian who has just released her second album, Ἀποκάλυψι. That’s ‘Apokalypsis’ in English, a word which refers to the metaphorical lifting of a veil and subsequent revelation. Coupled with the album artwork (left), the listener can get a sense of the tone of this album without even listening to the first ‘track’, which is a blood-curdling 22 second horror. The rest of the album is interesting and remains pretty dark throughout. It’s hard not to question the obvious posturing of the image that she cultivates around her music, but at least she doesn’t title her songs with upside-down crosses. Chelsea Wolfe – Mer

The atmosphere around this album positively crackles with despondent Nordic dungeon fear. I don’t know why, but those three words seem to sum the music up best for me. Imagine being locked up in a dark, cold dungeon in the far north of the Arctic waste of Norway, absolutely shitless with fear and feeling extra-furry rats slowly crawl over your bare feet and the dank wet slime of the walls trickle down your back. Meanwhile, others may find the melodrama of it all too much and decide it’s all a sham. Worth a listen either way.
Pale on Pale

Demons

RE the melodrama, check out this press release type thing on her website;

Wolfe’s hometown was a small unspecified burg amidst the trees, idyllic by day and begging exploration, but forbidding once the fog crept in. Her skewed romanticism began early. At 9, she started sneaking into her father’s home studio to record warped covers and goth-R&B originals. But growing up, she never shared her music. It wasn’t until recently she considered making music for others to hear.

After a stint abroad with a nomadic performance troupe playing cathedrals, basements and old nuclear plants, Wolfe returned home inspired. She began toting around an 8-track and recording as the mood hit, eventually winding up with the songs that would become her stunning 2010 debut, The Grime & the Glow. Described as both healing and harrowing, enchanting and narcotic, the album established Wolfe as an elemental force on the rise. Just as telling were a pair of cover songs — the timeless “You Are My Sunshine” and a deep cut from Norwegian metal icon Burzum — that in her capable hands managed to sound equally burnt and terrifying.

________________________________________________________________________________

— Also been listening to Four Tet’s FABRICLIVE 59 mix, which came out earlier this month. Highly recommended if you’re into garage, dub, two-step, house etc. There are loads of reviews floating around so there’s little point in posting much more on it, apart from to say that listened to the whole way through, it’s probably the smartest mix of the year. That and the art-work is bizarre and amazing.

Favourite cuts;

Four Tet – Pyramid
A new one from the man himself, one of two (plus one remix) on the mix. It absolutely bangs.

Active Minds – Hobson’s Choice
Stone-cold garage classic, apparently.

Ricardo Villalobos – Sieso

STL – Dark Energy