Ghost FM’s Favorite Music of 2011

This is the part of end year lists people usually don’t read! They just want you to cut to the chase and…buzz off! There you go. So, what’s this urge for me to write nonsense here? Well, it may sound as an introductory page to the people who’ve either never come across this blog or simply deny it. Like the majority of my friends. So, without further bollocks, Hey every one! It’s Pedram and I’ve been blogging since 2007. It’s not my occupation and I’ve never taken myself seriously, neither have I ever earned a dime out of it. But I happen to have listened to a lot of music and I always wanted to have a joint somewhere to share them. In 2010, I suddenly went berserk and shut down my previous blog. So Ghost FM is the aftermath of a big cyclic redundancy check that dragged me into a neat new blogging platform in which you could follow or be followed by nice people. As of this very day I have some 1049 followers who were kind enough to let me in. I’m currently studying my Masters in Stockholm and I don’t think I’ll ever regret it. 

At the end of each year, I make a list of (only) 10 albums and 10 songs I loved the most. It’s actually not a very nice thing to do, knowing you’re missing quite plenty of work and I hate to hold that banner up as a pointless manifest of “Yeah! That’s it!” The songs and albums here are not the harvest of any specific statistics. The numbers does not necessarily signify my play counts. They are merely…how I feel, you know? But I suppose if you want to see what sounded pleasant to my ears, it’s better you browse back in the archive.

These two lists, of course, lack dozens of fascinating albums and songs this year: I think Dan Bejar recorded his best Destroyer album with Kaputt’s superb freelance poetry. James Blake’s delicate fragility made dubstep sound pop balladry, Mazzy Star returned, Brad Cox brought his latest Deerhunter tenderness into Atlas Sound, Grouper got even ghostlier and distant, R.E.M. broke up with an album handpicked out of their whole three-decade career, Smith Westerns played adorable noisy guitar pop, Nicolas Jaar made brilliant spacey vibes out of breath and snaps, Steve Malkmus played at his most rock ‘n roll, Oneohtrix Point Never reached its pinnacle, Tom Waits returned with favorable material after seven years of no studio albums, etc. See? It was not a bad year for music unlike some heavy ears think.

Anyhow here are our favorite albums in 2011:

And song-wise, the following ten glitter and shine! Not that Battles “Futura” was not instrumentally astounding. And how can you not love Ty Segall’s beloved garage hit “Goodbye Bread”? Does this stop just there? Feist’s “How Come You Never Go There” for instance, or the gentle quality soft rock of Bodies of Water on “Open Rhythms”. That addictive bass line on Peaking Lights’ “Tiger Eyes (Laid Back)”, or the window-shattering industrial of Zola Jesus’ “Vessel”. How to float with anything better than Bill Callahan’s “Riding For the Feeling”. But for now, let’s put an end to all that blatherings of regret. These are my top ten favorite songs of the year:

And just like last year, here’s a little streamer of our favorite songs. If you want to listen to the albums as well. I think you already know what to do, right? Good.

Alright townies! That’s all for 2011 on Ghost FM. Hope you all have a wonderful vacation. Don’t forget to come back in January. Love, hug, peace, candies, cocktails, comic books, caviar, sunny-side ups, iPods, horns, birds, whiskey, bargains, hopscotch, Scarlett Johansson, Blade Runner, hammer, bees, fruits and headphones. Hej då!

P.S. Thanks for all the precious souls taking part on the blog’s polling. I scrutinized the ones I hadn’t already tried. You’re sweet.

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posted 5 months ago

Next Stop Indie Wonderland

“Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely. All you really have that really matters are feelings. That’s what music is to me.” (Janis Joplin)

The Stone That the Builder Refused Will Always Be the Head Cornerstone

A while ago, there was this evening I was too occupied with myself: school tension, the state of being bankrupt and penniless and oh yes, isolation. Next thing I did, I grabbed my iPod and went off roaming the city streets, free from any cell-phones or worries. And it was Burial’s music looping in my ears all along. Fortunately I got distracted with the black thoughts and music replaced the confusion. Trying to breathe deeper and feeling healthier I started to think about how music has wound up sounding like this. And after a while I came to some reasonable conclusions. I’m talking about the rise of indie music around the globe.

Is this trendy indie “thing” something inevitable or is it just a passing phase? Indie music is not something new. Its history goes back about 4 decades, but indie music as a globe-trotting widespread “phenomenon” surely is. And still, regular listeners define it as a genre, while it’s not. This is the same mistake people used to make about alternative music. We still see these two terms in various websites. In fact, genre is something deducted from the sound and instrumentation of a specific music. Though, indie and alternative are not bound to instruments and have never been. How can you put the same label on the music that Tom Waits makes and then Foo Fighters? Indie and alternative are simply classifications or something like that. Similarly, when you talk of jazz and classic rock, you more or less know what you are talking about. But can you do that to indie?

Let’s flashback to the 60s for some vivid examples: One of music’s most glorifying decades, the one in which hard rock blossomed and folk reached its summits and stardom had its reign over our parents’ heads. The Beatles were more than just four guys from Liverpool. They were as important to music as Nelson Mandela for South Africa. No one could stop them and they kept creating masterpieces one after another. These four geniuses were truly a national pride as they conquered over different aspects of pop and rock with each new album. Then there was The Beach Boys who were always overshadowed by the Beatles, though they could speak for themselves easily. Pet Sounds was a burning proof for the American good vibration darlings. The decade, having too many good names on its knapsack and too little time for each to present, also had a variety of underground movements. If Joni Mitchell, The Doors, Hendrix, Crosby Stills & Nash, Dylan and Jackson 5 were loud generation microphones, that was not quite all the story.

On the corner there were a couple of guys working on a spectre called “psychedelic music”. I’m talking about Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators. There was also Lou Reed! Was he thinking of becoming the next John Lennon when he coined The Velvet Underground? Were songs like “Venus In Furs” and “Heroin” written only to rock the audience on stage? Negative. I’m pretty much certain Lou Reed never had big dreams. He was just trying something different back then. And therefore The Velvet Underground and The 13th Floor Elevators never made it big in the news! They stayed patiently beneath the layers until they were finally welcomed and now they are never forgotten. But what were these guys doing in the midst of all that hype? Didn’t Picasso have big dreams when painting Guernica or Massacre in Korea? Or is genuine quality art about something else other than fame and cash? This is the interpretation I’m most convenient with: If The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, The Monkees (yes this is the correct spelling), The Who, James Brown and Creedence Clearwater Revival were like water to a sterile soul, then yet-to-be-figures a la Captain Beefheart, Lou Reed, Zappa, Donovan and even Jefferson Airplane were ploughs for this steady ground. And they ploughed it hard enough for a time to come. They potently did their job.

The 60s was not the only decade with such faces. It’s only by our contemporary age in which the value of a sound as shivering and haunting as Joy Division can be measured. Let’s not go too far: David Bowie might have stolen many hearts with 1972’s Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars, but then 1977’s Low needed much more time to be recognized, since it was not quintessentially rock and roll. The sound Bowie and Eno made back then was least likely to be presented immediately when the outside world was too involved with Pink Floyd, Queen and Deep Purple. Even when Simon & Garfunkel were too busy writing history-making folk anthems, there was always a Nick Drake in a dark quiet room sounding abundantly introspective, enough to be thrown away in its own time and be found (under the microscope) decades later.

Bucks vs. Art In the 80s

So far, no one is to blame. There was nothing wrong with Janis Joplin and Neil Young. They completely deserved all the attention. But there has always been a dismal side to recorded music from its early stages: the tyranny of music industries. These guys were always the ones who decided who should go big and who should not. And their existence yielded two upcoming quasi-tragedies later on.

80s, cultivating its profile after the punk revolution and the early and creative phase of electronic music commenced its road to perfectionism with globalizing another massive genre within its chest: the rise of hip-hop and emerge of more versatile sound of synthesizers and turn-tables. Hip-hop may have begun as a political fist against racism and police brutality remembering Public Enemy days. But overlapping with the resurgence of both local and global interest, the genre became more than just a utensil for riot, but it gradually became something like a culture (not forgetting the NBA fever all around the globe). But hip-hop was not the only phenomenon to experience wealth in the early 80s. We also saw how sonic art can vitalize itself if it can somehow relate to visual art. The offspring of this premise led to the birth of MTV. So far so good! And for nearly a two decade time to come, it was great news and an alternative for state-of-the-art presentation of your music. But let’s consider the low-downs, too.

Enough has been said about the pros of music videos but let’s take a look at the empty half of the glass for an instant. First of all, if Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Dire Straits, Genesis, Peter Gabriel and Police were swimming in budget oceans and were too busy being lucrative all the time, there was merely a little chance for talented low-budget garage rock to surface. Their music have always been stuck in a dead-end without a slight chance to present itself, and by the advent of MTV, this very hardship was more traumatized. If ABBA, Barbara Streisand, Roxy Music, Madness, Boy George, Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Eurhythmics, Billy Joel, Lionel Richie and Springsteen could fill the stadiums up and become all over the place (some deserving and some truly not), these guys, whether you want it or not, were only “the face” of the entire anatomy. If it wasn’t for the sturdy 24-7 support of the RIAA, Tears for Fears and A-Ha might not have been even recognized. And who the hell were Terence Trent D’Arby and Kylie Minogue? What was so special about mediocre acts like Wet Wet Wet, Gloria Estefan and Rick Astley? What led to them making dollars without even pushing anything forward or lifting a finger? Ain’t music (in its artsy form) supposed to be creative and striking sometimes?

And amidst all that jazz and fever, the public ear became deaf, dumb and unaware of another tidal wave that was happening underground, sweeping resident clichés away and brooming this killing static outside; music that could express truer emotions, music that could reflect more genuine states of mind than Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” or Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”, music that - due to its naked and occasionally violent nature - could not be featured in soundtracks or be played in Broadway and consequently didn’t get any major attention from the RIAA. So, the statement of the recording industry to this avant-garde phenomenon could be interpreted as:

If you’re trying to make your audience go mad with creative noise art or that stupid thing that you call grunge, please keep it underground, we are not investing on you experimentalism, it swallows our whole empire down to thin air and is far from profitable. All we need is a killer loop and beat, a proper groove and an addicting chorus line to be repeated until the song fades out, go listen to Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” to realize what exactly we are looking for. And please wear something that glitters and get some weird hairdos! Don’t you listen to KISS sometimes in your life?

Despite all the negativity, there were also indie bands that bloomed and therefore became immortal. They never attracted big local clubs but they spoke for a silent but thoughtful generation. 80s had some great indie moments to be proud of. Just to name a few, we still count on the music of Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Mudhoney, The Stone Roses, The Minutemen and Black Flag. And not to be too pessimist, some were lucky enough to be heard deservingly: take The Smiths, Tom Waits, Human League, The Replacements, and R.E.M for vivid examples. But 80s was the decade of MTV and music videos, hip-hop and electronics and reasonable stardom with international figures such as Michael Jackson, Queen, Depeche Mode, U2, Talking Heads and Madonna.

The Contradictions Pinnacle In the 90s

The way 90s started was so promising. There were band’s making the mainstream that were not necessarily Simply Red pop. Grunge took over and Nirvana stole the charts from Michael Jackson, so did Pearl Jam from Paula Abdul. Guns’ N Roses were ruling the world and there were Seattle music all around. Alice In Chains refrained from being the same metal junk-heads they once were coined on and therefore wrote some soulful songs. Hip-hop also changed its path from political riot to sex, basketball and girls. So instead of Public Enemy, we had Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Wu-Tang Clan and of course Dr. Dre was still pumping orgasm into the genre. U2 entered their electronic/experimental era and came up with diverse color collaged albums like Achtung Baby and Zooropa. The first half of the decade gave birth to more prominent faces. Just take a look at how defining and important bands such as Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, Candlebox, Pulp, Oasis, Suede or even The Prodigy, Beastie Boys, Ben Harper and The Chemical Brothers were to the era. And although some of these acts emerged in the 80s, it was in the 90s when they hit the right spot.

Combining elements from different styles, together with ruthless bravery saw musicians with the magnitude and eccentricity of Massive Attack, Portishead, Aphex Twin and Bjork. So the first 5 years was nothing but good news to experimental souls. Therefore indie music made the best out of the small ground that was opened up for it. As a result, some history making indie albums were released. They were not headliners perhaps but they were at least heard. It was only in this delicate and precious era in which albums as idiosyncratic as My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted, Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville, Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand and Slint’s Spiderland could surface and be recognized.

And as we approached the 2nd half of the 10 years, another hurricane stroked and this time, it seriously had its insurmountable side-effects. I’m sorry to be a bit straightforward but music as we know has never experienced such a plague on its body ever since. It might be unpleasant to digest and bitter to hear but in the end I cannot refuse from screaming out the word: Boybands! Simply put, not only these uneducated child-star teen figures started to ruin pop music to its fullest degree, but what made it worse was the labels and media’s non-stop support. They had earlier notified us of the tragedy with New Kids On the Block and Take That (although the latter had their own good cover songs), but it hammered down on the scene at alternative music’s most glorious moments. At one hand there was Radiohead conquering over all, and on the other hand MTV, VH1 and corporate media was filled with Backstreet Boys, Boyzone and whatever the hell else. Pop, for the first time in its history happened to be void of musical values and artistic tastes. So, Celine Dion found space to present her superficial yawning junk-pop, Mariah Carey was mistaken as a diva, N-Sync had thoughts on becoming the decade’s Jackson 5 and Britney became the speaker of a generation. It didn’t even matter how you were inspired to write your new songs for the core of music was written and performed for 9-year-old school girls. They were merely, the main target.

Fortunately, it’s not up to high school principals to decide what sort of art will be remembered. Curiosity always leads to somewhere. If on the blue screens, Aqua, Christina Aguilera and Puff Daddy had their reign on the youngsters, on the other side of the story there was still quivers. Radiohead’s OK Computer needed some time to be genuinely discovered. The Flaming Lips were slowly crawling through a dark tunnel of noise that led to glory. Indie music never stopped surprising us even at that tough and worried arena. So, we still heard albums in our bedrooms or our headphones that strove to be different and creative and they silently built up their own time and served us well. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was not the kind of sound you could hear anywhere on the streets, fashion shows or TV. It was die-hard music fans that ventured out and discovered its diverse beauty. This was not the only late-90s indie charmer, let’s not forget other timeless disks such as Flaming Lips’ epic The Soft Bulletin, Elliott Smith’s folk utopias that could easily be a dismal sequel to Simon & Garfunkel and Nick Drake’s introspective folk, Will Oldham’s vigorous cravings for self-discovery that led to the haunting opus of 1999’s I See A Darkness under his new moniker Bonnie “Prince” Billie, alternative noise saw some fabulous days while Sleater-Kinney were strumming hard, Chan Marshall and Moon Pix, The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I, The DJ Shadow recipe, The Magnetic Fields at their most defying shape with the immortal 69 Love Songs, Stereolab’s precious moog synthesizers on 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Mark Everett and Eels’ gloomy sister-death-folk of Electro-shock Blues among many others.

And let’s not forget the deep impact that some mainstream alt-rock figures also had on the genre. Beck started as a Yankee loser rapping about suicide and ended up creating an original amalgam of a genre that remains indefinable to date. Bjork, the Icelandic alien that inhabited her own planet, no one could even land near her tribe or they would regret being a copy-cat soon, Alanis Morissette and how she had her own disciplines to blossom as a pop star while she thoroughly lacked the look, Tom Waits and the early 1900s slum-jazz that stays untouched forever and of course Trent Reznor and how he dominated over an obsolete long-forgotten musical style of industrial rock, owned the genre and played it at its best for us. I guess this was all mandatory to kill the perilous hype that was devouring the music. While boy bands were still shaking hands with giant labels, indie music was walking on a thin thread but this line was soon about to reach its limit.

“We’re Making Music For The Fun Of It!” Said Pecknold.

As the millennium came to an end, the dreary days gradually came to reach their toll: the slow death of music industries and labels. This was the most pleasant news for the underground kids to somehow make themselves conspicuous unlike the bitter past. Teen-pop extravaganzas and fans dying to see Justin Timberlake and Nick Carter were still on the run but EMI and Columbia were losing respect. 2000s was not the decade to tell the same boring story. Indie albums started to make lists everywhere. Billboard was down on its knees to keep the public ear entertained with the rotten childish deformed alt-rock that was about to be doomed forever. The same genre that brought daylight to last decade’s darkness with the dawn of Blur, Oasis, Radiohead, Massive Attack, R.E.M., The Wallflowers and Tool, was now about to lose its charm with acts of complete shame that were trying to make alternative music sound like boyband pop. Alternative rock was presented with bands like 3 Doors Down, Creed, Evanescence, Puddle of Mudd, Limp Bizkit, Blink 182 and most disgustingly Nickelback. Avant-garde music could instantly turn to dust once more. But it was with the demise of the record labels that things turned out the way they ought to.

Sorry for mentioning the word Radiohead repeatedly. You know I could escape the name if they just weren’t the most influential musical act in modern art. Kid A pretty much cleared out the path. It was not about conventional concepts and trends that were previously discussed; the band changed their alternative glory and replaced it with a bionic electronic aura that made the album stand as the bravest attempt in probably decades. Kid A notified our ears’ songbirds to stop whistling the stereotyped renditions of our lineages. The new era didn’t demand a Willy Nelson and Ray Charles approach to country and blues respectively, but it requested an algorithm that didn’t also entomb that pedigree, either. Sigur Ros began as a sheer ambient project in the 90s and formed as one of late-90s surprises with Agatis Byrjun. Lord, have I really lost my mind? Did I just pay 20$ to buy this? Or Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-out? Actually, taking a 360 degree spin around yourself, there was no way out. Music didn’t want anything other than this. Destiny! Protect me from the world!

The slow dawn of indie music as the main genre of all, rose even higher when people decided:

“Hey, good music does not necessarily come with some cliché guitar riffs and queasy drums. Why did I think it’s only Slipknot, Metallica and Korn that could blow my mind? And why the hell am I urged to blow my mind every time I want to take pleasure in music? Is music made for our headbanging druggy hours and nothing more? Let me try this new Flaming Lips CD. This Wilco thing sounds sorta drunk-ass country shit but hey it’s pleasant!…and different? wow!”

And this was how the youth and the editors found beauty in weirdest of ways. If Grandaddy lacked the groove, it contained the most psychedelic ambient pads and delightful noises and they didn’t sing about asses as spaceships you want to fly, they talked about surreal gadgets like dial-a-views and shrieked out animal rights, instead! Good music could be gentle and sweet and not a single teenager had ever thought of that. There was no Marilyn Mansons needed to soothe your blues and suck the anger out of you. The New Pornographers provided all the noise density you might need, they only write elite pop gems out of it. Is there a problem? Do you still feel worthless and in vain? Try Interpol! And when you’re settled in the end enjoy a plethora of instruments and a genius brain to bring them all together in one place. I’m talking about Sufjan Stevens! Oh I’m sorry, you were into hip-hop as I recall. No problem, Madvillain is the hip-hop artist you have missed so far. He blends comic-books with lo-fi turn-tables and detaches you from where you are. And honestly, could Joanna Newsom in her wildest dreams write her harp-tinged 2006’s Ys if she was thinking about going multi-platinum? Would you have bought Godspeed You Black Emperor’s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven if all your favorite critics didn’t recommend it to you?

Apparently that’s what keeps an indie musician apart from Whitney Houston, Jennifer Lopes and Li’l Kim. Indie veterans such as Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse), [the late great] Mark Linkus (Sparklehorse), Conor Oberst or Mark Lanegan have walked a long way barefoot! What goes on in Isaac Brock’s mind that Whitney Houston never had the guts to think of? Crystal clear: Brock was never thinking about earning a dime out of his music whatsoever. While Houston didn’t even find time to imagine music in her mind as a form of art. So when it comes to the music of Modest Mouse, Sparklehorse, The Microphones, M. Ward, Andrew Bird or TV On the Radio, it’s immaculately concentrated on the music itself and of course sounding different. And that’s scientifically and statistically where one certain form of art glistens and stands out and sometimes becomes immortal.

So far, we have forgotten to mention another overwhelming factor on the rise of indie music: MP3s. All those Napster battles and Kazaa days passed and MP3 – whether we want it or not – has become the easiest and most portable format of music. So you don’t necessarily have to browse through the aisles of record shops or wait months for deliveries. MP3s have provided a wide space for indie artists to spread their word worldwide, so no hard feelings if The Dixie Chicks go nuts or Neil Diamond becomes a basket case and hey! Screw Linkin Park! We have the device and we besiege the sounds we’re searching for. So in the end, I will only pay for the artists I truly admire and love and I won’t waste my allowance on Avril Lavigne and Hillary Duff. Let bad music be wiped off the map of my mind and intellectual art replace its ugliness. And besides, all those chicks make zillions on their fashion lines and concerts filled with sassy-girls and their mothers. So, stop blaming your inner beast and start applauding the genuine art. Say hello to Arcade Fire.

Indie music has eventually found its path of glory. For the time being, it has become the loud-mouth of modern music. Lord only knows when we’ll face another turning point. Whether we see the return of giant labels or another phenomenon is imminent. But it frankly is not bad at all. Currently, the rise of indie was all a true artist needed. They have found their progress ground as well as their audience. They may not pay much to have their music on their iPods but they are kind enough to spend their weekends seeing them live. So, meanwhile, Animal Colletive can be as experimental as it gets and what could possibly be better? I’m enjoying these vibes, don’t know about you! There’s this immense liberty that I just never want to end.

(Originally written on October 2009)

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posted 1 year ago

Ghost FM’s Favorite Music of 2000s

Album-wise

Here’s how you can have your top 50 albums of the decade: First, hey! this is not 90s anymore so don’t gauge your albums by their hit density. Artists don’t put their 3 best songs on their albums on tracks #1, 2 or 3 anymore. That’s history now! That’s so Bon Jovi! Flush it down your toilet for good. And I emphasize on the word “Artist” there. Also, don’t seek excessive rock and roll! This was not the decade of 17 minute guitar solos Camel and King Crimson way. That’s so 70s again. Let this decade stand for itself. Let it be as mathematical or as simple as it can. Don’t wait for another Sinatra lung and don’t anticipate another Jeff Buckley scream. They were all great I know, but they all had their spots in the last century…right? Last century!

This decade was all about mood, and then again for the 6th or 7th decade in a row, this one was about originality and of course eccentricity. Expect a 5-star album from where you never used to expect. And now that you have them all together in a 1x1 square meter space on the floor, eliminate the ones on the edge. Those are the ones who used to make you feel better but they no longer do. Amy Winehouse for instance! You really don’t want her to become immortal, do you?

Then, assign numbers to what’s left! Keep in mind that the numbers should have a reverse relationship with your appetite: the higher the number, the less you are interested in the album. Note that any album that has a value bigger than 50 goes back deep in your closet. Now you got yourself a pretty neat top 50 albums of the 2000s decade. There are myriads of lists like yours, so technically nobody will give a flying far(m) about your top 50. But it may eventually come as a partial relief sometimes someday in some ways.

These 50 albums are Ghost FM’s favorites in these 10 years starting from Jan 2000 to the end of Dec 2009. So make the best of them while you still can…or you can become a doctor, too! But still…

Song-wise

These precious ten years of music saw both good and evil days, from the conquering of independent music, to burgeoning brave experiments, to brand new approaches to spreading the word, to the never-before easy accessibility of music thanks to MP3s and etc. and then on the other side to saying goodbye to immortal figures such as Elliott Smith, Les Paul, Isaac Hayes and of course the indisputable King of Pop. Here are our 150 favorite songs of these ten years. Numbers are cruel and relentless I know, but everyone has his/her own priorities after all inhabiting a juicy life in a time-space bound galaxy!

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posted 1 year ago