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Dudes
Dreaming dudes. Sleeping dudes. Slumberland dudes. Dudes, alternately, awake and expressing the fullness of their being. If I had to estimate, dudes are responsible for 65% of my daily listening, but nearly 100% of the following list of essential new songs. Ladies lurk on the sidelines, however, in the bright synth melody of “My Terrible Friend,” the sighing harmonies of “It’s Killing Me,” and the history of “Shayla.” So I don’t feel too exclusionary.
Devon Williams – “Dreaming” (from Euphoria)
Let’s Active have returned, and his name is Devon Williams. Silvered jangle, helium words of love, a trebly, colorful pop world.
Jeremy Jay – “Shayla” (from Dream Diary)
If the history of pop music is the history of choruses of oh’s and la’s, then the oh’s of this new take on Blondie’s “Shayla” are the latest to merit inclusion in our long, long book of reverie.
Bill Callahan – “America!” (from Apocalypse)
One need only look at the titles of the album and its exclamatory standout track to understand the bold, expansive style of Bill Callahan’s latest work. The weird, minimal guitar-funk workout called “America!” is purely associative, and panoramic as a result. Vision has had no obstacle on Callahan’s last three magnificent solo albums, which must be why he had to retire the name Smog.
Panda Bear – “Scheherazade” (from Tomboy)
Tomboy’s unlikely centerpiece. We heard six of its eleven tracks on limited edition singles last year, all beautiful, but now they’ve been given new decoration and diminished slightly. Gunshot electricity on “Slow Motion”? A fuller, more present “You Can Count On Me”? But those songs’ reserve, distance, and silence were what made them! This was a Panda Bear who refused to pacify us with vibrant sound! He returns on “Scheherazade,” and gives us an entire world in one piano chord.
Crystal Stilts – “Sycamore Tree” (from In Love With Oblivion)
Oblivion comes on strong, like a heavy new epoch of sound. I’d heard it plenty in my dreary bedroom, but as “Sycamore Tree” lurched into being at Treehouse Records the other day, it sounded utterly new, rattling through that long room. I briefly thought it might be Deerhunter’s Cryptograms, in the moments before its echoes assemble into a dangerous noise.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – “My Terrible Friend” (from Belong)
The most insatiable collection of tricks on an album full of them. Not everyone’s pretty and young, but the Pains convincingly banish everything ugly and old, or cast it in a dark light of universal enchantment.
Radiohead – “Supercollider” / “The Butcher”
Unwisely neglected King of Limbs puzzle pieces? No, that album is too willful and contained and couldn’t fit them. But the wonder here is the same, that five men can combine their energies into such a singular sound. Are they the world’s first drum ‘n’ bass band? Or just the one that time forgot?
Should – “Glasshouse” (from Like A Fire Without Sound)
I once referred to Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” as the “skeleton of shoegaze,” to which esteemed professor Marlon James said, “If you stripped shoegaze away to its skeleton, would you really get Mazzy Star?” Maybe not, but it turns out that wasn’t an entirely useless description: “Glasshouse” had been foretold.
Secret Shine – “It’s Killing Me” (from The Beginning & The End)
The same Secret Shine, rebalanced, the guitars muted in favor of shimmery processed vocals. What motivated them to make an album of such pained teenage romance? Of what happens when lips… touch… oh! Soon they’ll be in the company of Stars or Cold Cave or, gosh, hitting the rare heights of My Favorite.
Girls Names – “Séance on a Wet Afternoon” (from Dead To Me)
The “second-tier” Slumberland band (i.e. not the Pains or Stilts) that’s probably most likely to capture my imagination this year. Songs about death, ghosts and graveyards, and maybe they’re just building an ethereal romantic mythology around those terms, but the thumping bass and groaning vocals (a bit less zombified than the Stilts’ JB Townsend) make them just scary enough.
