Well it’s the end of 2008, the surf sucks and I’m battling a token seasonal cold. So what better time to recap this year’s highlights in music?

Selections are broken up like any piece of vinyl: SIDE A and SIDE B. Though there’s no hierarchy, SIDE A would be more of the fire and brimstone picks, albums with a bit more of a kick and of higher energy, while SIDE B drifts further out into the temples of unconsciousness. Kinda like Bowie’s Low.

Also included are accompanying PODcasts for each SIDE. So feel free to download and get a better sense of what the hell I’m rambling on about.

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SIDE A

Videotape - My Favourite Thing
Great, great guitar/bass/drum trio from Toronto, Canada. They have no label yet, a crime in my opinion. Their self released album is a lean and catchy piece of rock ‘n’ roll love. The literally indie-rock.
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Subtle - ExitingARM
TV on the Radio - Dear Science
The two seem to be making pop music for some parallel universe; where the sky is green, there is no gravity, we elect black presidents, and prosecute Bush for war crimes… wait. Or maybe they’re just for the ‘other side of the fence,’ for those subversives who enjoy a little confusion in their logic. All the signifiers of hit tunes are there, but the syntax is completely f–ked up. The foregrounded odd, asymmetrical sounds swing the body one way but the heady mix of ambivalence and optimism push the mind another. Gray music for less and less black ‘n’ white times.
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Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna
These guys (and gal) put on probably the best show I saw all year at The El Rey last month. Just an amazing and otherworldly conjuring of sounds, all propelled with an incessant beat bordering on tribal. Their album is a bit more of a polished product, probably the strangest dance record in awhile, but it still retains that urbanism/shamanism trust which made the live show so memorable.
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Wilderness - (k)no(w)here
You get the sense with Wilderness they’re stepping into their music rather than performing it, conduits to a larger impulse. This piece of music was written specifically as the soundtrack for L.A. artist Charles Long’s video installation at this years Whitney Biennial. There’s something notable about a band that treats patience as a revolutionary act. Wilderness don’t offer the listener any easy epiphanies, theirs swell and recede like the tide… if they come at all.
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Nomo - Ghost Rock
The leading afro-beat torch bearers (outside the Kuti family) proudly scorching ears with some hard funk, jazz agility, and big horns. Throw in those distorted synthesizers, some thumb pianos and kraut steadiness and hell I’m a believer. I can’t dance for shit, but dammit those grooves cannot go unaddressed!
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Download SIDE A PODcast Here:

1. Videotape - “Night Lights”
2. Subtle - “Day Dangerous”
3. TV on the Radio - “Golden Age”
4. Gang Gang Dance - “Vacuum”
5. Wilderness - “Chinese Whisperers”
6. Nomo - “Nova”
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SIDE B

Earth - The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull
A new form of devotional music. Earth paint with broad strokes a desolate American west, their twanged riffs and gospel surge expanding out to the horizon like mirages. Glacial in pace, this one takes its sweet time revealing the fragile, deep-rooted beauty to the listener.
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Tape - Luminarium
The Stockholm trio described their record as “a world which lets itself be sensed, not known.” I’ll bite. There certainly is a feeling of elusiveness here, an unobtrusive quality that’s impartial to how active the listening experience is. Melodies, motifs, the suggestion of an idea all fade in from the peripheries, never quite coming into perfect focus though. Relaxing yet unsettling all at once.
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Portishead - Third
Don’t f–k with Portishead. A long anticipated release (their first in 10 years), this record bit the head off anyone expecting some modernized 21st century trip-hop. Stark, closed off beats and sharp corners manifest an underlying dread we all seem to be feeling right now, even after the Obama victory. Beth Gibbons’ beautifully cold voice is reality setting in. Bundle up.
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Hanggai - Introducing Hanggai
The concept of ‘world’ music is a tricky one. We’re all floating on spaceship Earth together, so isn’t everything by definition a world music? This album, not unlike Tinariwen’s Aman Iman from last year, nicely unpacks all the would be divides such simple labels build. Hanggai are a Beijing-based sextet of Mongolian musicians, with two of the members playing the morin khuur (horse-hair fiddle), and another playing the tobshuur, a two-stringed lute. These instruments, along with a hefty bit of centuries-old throat singing, comprise the foundation of their sound. From here though they deftly work in a Western compositional sense along with additions of electric guitar, bass, and electronic textures. The overall effect is no less than stunning, a transcendentally powerful piece of music that anyone from anywhere can understand.
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Mark McGuire - Open Chords
Two tracks, 20 minutes of gloriously looped acoustic guitar playing. Layers upon layers of strummed phrases pile up, their forward momentum shifting the whole thing into newer, bigger textures. A wonderful celebration of a millennia old instrument.
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Download SIDE B PODcast Here:

1. Earth - “Engine of Ruin”
2. Tape - “Moth of Wings”
3. Portishead - “Hunter”
4. Hanggai - “Five Heroes”
5. Mark McGuire - “Daybreak in Delaware”
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