My limbic system took in the sounds of 2009 and sent me into some distant world. Passing the sounds to my cerebellum as I danced the year away. Now I am back with my most “nerdy” excel sheet, straight from the cerebrum, giving my take on The Top 20 Albums of 2009.

Enjoy!

(just in case you have no clue what I am talking about find my top albums from 2000 – 2005, my intro will explain how “nerdy” this process is)

1.  The Pains of Being Young at Heart:  The Pains of Being Young at Heart

2.  The XX:  XX

3.  Lookbook:  Wild at Heart

4.  …and You Will Know us by the Trail of the Dead:  Century Self

5.  Girls:  Album

6.  Cold Cave:  Love Comes Close

7.  Matt and Kim:  Grand

8.  The Little Girls:  Concepts

9.  A Place to Bury Strangers:  Exploding Head

10. Animal Collective:  Merriweather Post Pavilion

11. Sonic Youth: The Eternal (that’s right, they are easy to pass up but they still have it!)

12. Bear in Heaven:  Beast Rest Forth Mouth

13. Throw Me the Statue:  Creaturesque

14. Say Hi: Oohs & Aahs (I am a sucker for the “hook”)

15. The Wooden Birds: Magnolia

16. The Papercuts: You Can Have What You Want

17. Yo La Tengo: Popular Songs

18. Cymbals Eat Guitars: Why There Are Mountains (Bring me back to the beginning of it all)

19. Fanfarlo: Resevoir (Sound like many but sound good)

20. Julian Plenti: Julian Plenti … Is Skyscraper (Who cares what everyone else says!?!?)

Others to listen to, not that they were next in line but wanted to pint them out.  Some great songs on these albums and some bands that deserve attention:
Minor Kingdom: My Back Will Bend (any folk music fans?); Jack Penate: Everything is New (Pure Pop from the other side of the Atlantic); Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros (2 of the top 10 songs of the year off one album?); Washed Out: Life of Leisure – EP (waiting for the full length); The Mumlers (from my neck of the woods and a lot of fun)

Thanks for reading.

Make Moon @ Troubadour

TSS first discovered Make Moon when they opened for Octopus Project at the Troubadour about three months back. Recently Tim Corbin “Dallas” and an acquaintance ventured to watch them perform at Silverlake’s Spaceland. Here is their collective accounts of the evening:

Upon first appearance, Spaceland’s stage seemed to be taken over by a time warped Viking/Pilgrim hybrid of a band. Were they going to raid and colonize Spaceland? Explore the North Western sea brink? Perhaps harvest some maize? Luckily for us they were there just here to play music, enter Make Moon a five man band lead by their very impressive singer/front man: Drew Morgan.
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Day 2, Saturday – “The Ghost of Patrick Swayze”

The video below was shot by Capt. AKAK and George Pants:

Dirty Dancing was first mentioned by the trip’s catalyst, Yang Wang. While spending time with him in the JFK baggage claim he had mentioned that Kutsher’s was where the movie was shot. I think my Mom and two sisters watched Dirty Dancing several hundred times, actually wearing out the VHS tape we’d used to record it off cable, but for some reason I could remember no details of the plot except for the fact that Patrick Swayze was in it. Actually, I think I remember more from the MAD Magazine spoof on it, Dorky Dancing, than I do any part of the movie – I had a bad MAD Magazine habit and spent most of my allowance on it. In the 3rd grade I copied a poem from one issue and turned it in as my own work. The teacher, Mrs. Young, was incredulous but could prove nothing.

Google Images at work

Without having anything to compare it to in the daylight Kutsher’s appears to be the exact place where they shot the film: there’s the pond, large dining rooms, the hotel, cabins, pathways, lawns and it’s all surrounded by woods. Several people in the town of Monticello told us that the movie wasn’t actually shot at Kutsher’s but at another, similar, nearby resort. Why all this discussion of a pop-culture relic? Ever since we had disembarked from the plane Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity had been enveloping us in long chains of cause and effect. The rest of the weekend and subsequent road trip around New England would eventually look like a Mandelbrot Set after punching all the data into one of Capt. AKAK’s spreadsheets while being bored on the flight home to Long Beach. Dirty Dancing was just the beginning.

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Day 1 – “Where did we go/days when the rains came”

From JFK we drove North in a rain which had begun as we’d loaded our bags into the back of the rental car. At this point we had become crazed from lack of sleep and were having extreme difficulty in utilizing the parts of our brains that help you find places. The fact that the roads in the New England states make no sense to people raised on freeways, the grid system and adequate signage didn’t help either. Eventually, with the help of a purchased map, Internet directions, directions from 2 different smart phones and eventually a gas station attendant we made it to Monticello, New York, where our hotel was.

For the last two years All Tomorrow’s Parties has been held in the hotel and on the grounds of Kutsher’s, a once-famous resort from the “Borscht Belt” era which reached its peak during the mid-1960′s when Jewish families would come and spend summers at the various loosely connected resorts that the Catskills region was famous for. Nowadays it’s a downtrodden, practically abandoned relic echoing what was once an upscale-now-kitsch past. Attendees at All Tomorrow’s Parties had the option of staying in one of the old resort’s rooms, but they were expensive – although the performers stayed for free – or you could try to find a cheaper room in nearby Monticello.

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The Man who gave us a ride to the airport in Long Beach, CA. Capt Shabbin.

The objectivity of journalism is typically a farce. The author can never completely hide their intentions in writing what they’re writing, no matter how pedestrian the topic. At the very least perceptions and attitudes that they’re not even aware of as being the basis from which they’re writing color their work.

That being said it’s probably best just to be out with it: I’m not even going to attempt an unbiased account of the following events involving a trip in which two friends – Capt. AKAK and George Pants – traveled from Los Angeles to New York to witness and participate in 2009’s All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival. It begins, as many stories begin nowadays, on Craigslist.

After the festival we wanted to drive back across the country to Los Angeles on old US Highways: US 20, US 12, US 2, etc. Being the cheap bastards we are, or more accurately I am, I figured that we’d try to find one of those mythical situations that are assumed to exist but probably don’t: the family who needs their car driven from one side of the country to the other and is willing to pay you to do it. We never found them. Instead, we found a man identifying himself as Yang Wang.
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Rock out like you get paid to disturb the peace

I was introduced to Nomo at my apartment, and it instantly took me back to the first time I had heard head hunters. I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since. I called my brother in New York to tell him about it. He was at work as I was describing them and did a quick search. “Ann Arbor, MI based post-afrobeat dance explosion?” he asked. Exactly. It would be impossible to review the album as a whole as each independent track has a unique flavor and texture to itself, but I can say that the juxtaposition of modern beat sampling, funk-inspired rhythms, thick and crunchy horn choruses, and sax solos makes Ghost Rock incredible. It definitely gives you a direct order to rock the fuck out.

Check the album here:

Megafaun make me want to move to Durham, North Carolina where I imagine my life would involve frolicking around in forests, exploring gorges and finding shady rocks to use as diving boards into hot springs.  Brothers Brad and Phil Cook, along with Joe Westerlund make music that’s best served gathered in a circle lit by the moon and campfire while you “sing to each other like friends telling stories,” as their buddies Akron/Family might say.
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Ryan McGinley, from "Sun and Health"

Los Angeles, July 23, 2009 -

The night began like most others in L.A.; we sat in traffic. My friend Krystof was trying to figure out why his iPhone didn’t sound right playing through my car speakers. I wasn’t paying too much attention – I was busy checking my work e-mail on my phone while driving and attempting to explain a lecture I’d been listening to during my morning commute on the nature of memory by some guy named John Steele (a random Pirate Bay download). Little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be. From Wikipedia, “While his work is often closely related to the psychology of fragrance, in talks and writings Steele also explores Buddhism, Vedic culture, the great yugas, geomancy and geomantic amnesia, geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces.” That could easily be a review of the new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record.
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Two weeks ago, I went on a mini tour to see Dirty Projectors back-to-back nights at the Troubadour and then the Casbah in San Diego. The first night consisted on a special night out between Ebee and I where we decided it should be just the two of us as we tried to recapture the magical events that had inspired so much awe in us on New Years Eve in New York merely 7 months ago.
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It was 7 years ago when Bloodclot bought me my first Tortoise album, A Million Now Living Will Never Die. We proceed to cruise the Pacific Coast Highway at approximately 60 miles per hour along the Huntington/Newport Coast. The opening sang off this album is roughly 25 minutes long and was the only song listened to for this particular drive. My life was expanded into an entirely different universe since then. I had no idea music like this existed; electronic in a way but way more organic in nature. The music which is at the heart of the post-rock genre. Over the course of the next two years, I became obsessed with all post rock bands: Tortoise, Slint, Isotope 217, Godspeed!, Trans Am, etc. I have more than 20 albums in which John McEntire plays drums/produced. Frequently, I would play a Tortoise album in my car and end up getting lost on my way home from falling into the K hole that is their sound frequency.

About two years ago, me and about 6 of you were able to see Tortoise live for the first time at the El Rey. I am very excited to be afforded the pleasure of seeing them again for the tour of their new album, Beacons of Ancestorship, due out June 23rd.

Two Drummers plus Jeff Parker on Guitar……lots of energy and fun. And also you know Johnny Mc is the greatest drummer ever in my humble opinion.

Ten Tickets @ $29 a piece.

1. Capt AKAK
2. Capt Shabbin
3. Willum
4. mRoyed
5. Hello Kitty
6. ebee
7. Angel
8. WB Records Friend
9. MartotheLyn
10. ??