Best of 2010: Music

by Jonathan on January 21st, 2011

I thought I’d post my Top 5 albums for 2010; if you’re a Facebook friend, you’ve probably seen these before. Hell, if you’re a Facebook friend, you could probably write this post.

1. Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest

I don’t think I’ve loved a band this much since… Radiohead, I guess. On Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter finally delivered on all the promise of the previous records. The music is precise, but sonically expansive, and beautifully, beautifully textured. I don’t really listen to lyrics, but I’d bet they’re good, too. 31 seconds into “Helicopter”, the song suddenly opens up into something perfect and exquisite, brimming with infinite possibility; that was my favourite moment in music in 2010.

2. Four Tet, There is Love in You

It’s been a kind of astonishing five years since the last full-length Four Tet album, Everything Ecstatic; I guess that astonishes me less because of the notion of how time flies than because Kieran Hebden has been constantly in heavy rotation in my iPod, through collaborations, like the stunning “Moth” with Burial, remixes like his take on Nathan Fake’s “You Are Here”, and the occasional one-off single, like “Ringer“. His great strength as a musician and remixer is an uncanny ability to find the emotional truth of a song; unsurprisingly, for a largely laptop-based album, There is Love in You is an impressively emotional thing. (Sorry there’s not a decent video for the studio version of “Angel Echoes”.)

3. James Holden, DJ Kicks Mix
The first half is stronger than the second, but this is an eclectic, beautifully sequenced and mixed mix; really, my favourite thing about it is Holden’s remix of Mogwai’s “The Sun Smells Too Loud“, which sounds like Stereolab playing Krautrock; you can find the original song here, and you should. No, you must – not only is it a fantastic song, but it’s really interesting to compare to the Holden remix.

4. Girls, Broken Hearts Club

I remain ambivalent about Girls, mostly because of Christopher Owens’ incredibly mannered singing. That said, “Carolina”, from this EP-ish follow-up to Album, is a fantastic song. The dreamy, prog-rock opening is displaced by a tentatively stepping section that leads to a wistful vocal intro to the song proper, a warm blast of alt.countrypolitan, that settles into a strummy choruses that gradually turns into a Talking Heads-circa-More-Songs-About-Buildings-and-Food era outro.

5. Caribou, Swim

Swim grew on me over the year – and actually seemed to grow over the year itself, as every remixer in Christendom climbed on board. I may be in the minority, but for me, “Sun” was its highpoint. I love this video too. I was intrigued that my friend Christine felt that they were making fun of these women; I don’t think that’s the case at all.

The Long Passage

by Jonathan on January 16th, 2011

I’ve just finished Justin Cronin’s The Passage (Balantine), a book that received a lot of attention at the time of its release for a number of reasons, among them that it was perceived as a genre work by a “literary” author, its large rumored advance, and the $1.75 million that Ridley Scott paid for movie adaptation rights. It was a shrewd move on Scott’s part – the book is an excellent read, fresh and cinematic in scope.

The Passage begins with the story of Amy, a little girl whose mother, a decent woman, is forced by circumstances into prostitution. Gradually braided into that narrative are a series of emails from a scientist on a research journey into the South American jungle; he expresses concern that the US military is involved in the expedition, mentions bats and finally reports that they’re being massacred. Back in the US, two federal agents travel around the country, picking up a squad of death row inmates for a sinister and secret government project.

And with that, the basic seeds of The Passage are sown. But the story fairly quickly takes an abrupt jump from thriller-y set-up to post-apocalyptic quest story – it reminded me of anime, in the way that the narrative suddenly blasts from quotidian to cosmic in implication.

As you are probably aware, The Passage is a vampire story, but it’s a vampire story only in the sense that the creatures are incredibly strong, fast, blood-drinking monsters. Cronin has very cleverly reimagined the biology of vampires, which gives the book an appealing freshness; the sexy-European-man-with-retractable-fangs thing is banished, replaced by hairless, glowing, feral humanoids with long claws and rows of razor-sharp teeth.

No, it’s not a typical vampire book at all. Instead, it’s a bit like The Lord of the Rings, in which a band of ordinary individuals come together and undertake a journey to save the world against impossible odds. The Passage, however, is LoTR as a scorched earth Stephen King novel, set in a depopulated wilderness filled with fear, dread and blood.

This world – its physical appearance, its human and predator ecosystems – is what sets The Passage apart. Cronin has created a highly realistic, intricately detailed portrait of a devastated America. He presents vividly the evacuation of Philadelphia as it falls to the vampire hordes; humans clinging to life in a walled colony, defended by watchers on high catwalks and a barrier of bright electric lights that paralyze attacking virals (as the vampires are called); the Gulf of Mexico a chemical swamp filled with the rotting hulls of ships in a vast slick of oil gushing from abandoned drilling platforms.

The story kicks into high gear when it is learned that the colony’s lights will soon fail. A band of colonists must set off through a wasteland teeming with virals, making the long trek by foot to Colorado in a desperate attempt to find a solution.

The Passage could in no way be described as “a quick read” – the hardback weighed in at 784 pages. And it’s not without its flaws, the chief of which can be deduced from the page count: Cronin can be extremely and needlessly digressive, particularly in the second quarter of the book, filled with minutiae of life in the Colony. He writes well – often beautifully – but can’t stop himself from chronicling every little detail and side journey of even minor characters. Much of this is in the service of sculpting the setting, but the book would have been much better if some cruel editor had cut it by 100 or even 150 pages. Seriously, 634 pages still gives you a lot of stuff to read! There are plot holes, the length of the book means lots of characters – some of whom aren’t memorable enough to be distinguishable – and sometimes even already-suspended disbelief is strained to the breaking point, but the plot gradually takes over, and the book moves faster and faster. Overall I really liked it.

I read it on the Kindle (a bit disorienting, given its length), and so I was slightly surprised at the abrupt ending. And then pleased to hear that it’s the first of a trilogy. I really liked the book’s plotting; that there are two more to come makes it all the more impressive, if Cronin can deliver again. The fact also makes Scott seem like the canny, uh, Scot that he is.

By the way, for a funny dissenting opinion, see the one-star Amazon review entitled “It’s like somebody accidentally the last 600 pages” by ikt “Example of a Real Name”. Actually, don’t – it’s funny, and not inaccurate, but it also gives away major end-spoilage. Save it for after you read the book!