One central salient feature is the cascading sounds that make your body feel like it’s levitating when you’re inside it. I wanted to experience that feeling again. Making something that is so much bigger than yourself that you feel like you are inside the mouth of God. (Michael Gira)

The thing is about making end of year lists is that unless you’re actually a professional music critic (and probably not even then) you really don’t have enough time to properly digest the work by the end of that year. This is especially true when records come out at the tail end of it and you’re still busy giggling about Rick Ross. My top ten from last year is basically garbage right now, I reviewed five on this “blog” but I did make a list of 20 which I’m almost ashamed to even dig up. I’m sure most of it is fine, Deerhunter, Kanye, Titus, Black Angels; I still stand behind those. I heard Das Racist sometime in December and said WOW THIS IS GREAT!!! and then sometime in January, after a few more hits on my mp3 player and wearing out the two or three decent songs I realized that no, this is really shallow bullshit and how could I have been so silly? But, at least it wasn’t Sleigh Bells. Throughout it all, pinned to my mp3 player, a record continued to make groaning, malevolent, apocalypitc sounds at me. It was spitting in anger that I would choose Foals and Das Racist for recognition over Swans’ triumphant return. I was wrong, profoundly so. Swans is one of the best bands in the damn world.

My Father Will Guide Me a Rope Up to the Sky is just about the darkest fucking record imaginable, and possibly the best release of 2010. It is music for the end times, it’s a funeral dirge for America, it’s the soundtrack for an especially bleak Werner Herzog flick (I’ve been thinking of swapping My Father Will Guide… for the music in Lessons of Darkness just for s&gs). The opener, “No Words/No Thoughts,” begins with overlapping chiming of church bells until overlaying guitar effects that sound like buzzsaws, insane mumbling, and unholy screaming dissect the chaotic church bell motif just before the kettle drums rumble in. By the midpoint of this epic piece in the key of armageddon, the snare drums are rat-tat-tating machine gun fire and the hairswinging rhythm of the guitars almost fools you into thinking this metal. It’s not. It’s what metal wishes it could be, if it wasn’t hopelessly corny. Even the most dire Neurosis record withers in the face of the brutal glare of Swans.

Swans goes way back, to the days of the late 70s and early 80s when NYC’s then hipsters flocked around Sonic Youth and the No Wave scene. Swans opened for Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth opened for Swans. Thurston Moore was even Swans’ second bass player occasionally. This band has serious roots reaching into the very genesis of what we now call alternative rock. The thing about Swans is that not only is the music dark, oppressive, aggressive and hostile, so is frontman and architecht Michael Gira. To the point, I’ve heard stories about him shouting at audiences for taking pictures with their cellphones and spitting on moshers to get them to stop being dipshits. Both of these things make him a personal asshole icon/hero to me, but his particularities are what limited his brand of funerary noise rock to the fringes of the music listner’s collective ear balls. He’s known to publically acknowledge that his live shows test people’s patience, they tend to start with over an hour of deafening, kaleidascopic noise effects, which verge of course on the maniacally bleak; which makes me slightly gooey to think about. The albums are much tighter, more practiced and this one in particular is masterfully composed, coupling thrashing noise with quiet tracks and even a dash of a cappella, especially on the closing track “Little Mouth.”

The second track, “Reeling the Liars In” begins gently, simple guitar strumming with a deep chorus of harmonizing male voices before Gira drawls, “We are reeling the liars in/we are removing their face/collecting their skin/we are reeling the liars in.” The song is almost light, because of the hum-along chorus and simple arrangements, it’s as playful and pop as Swans gets at least: “Here is my tongue, now cut out my sin.” Gira’s voice is perfect for this; rich and heavy with a smoker’s timbre like latter day Leonard Cohen without the romanticism. “Jim” is transcendant, the choral theme is continued here and is used to create a sonic texture that rises and gains intensity to the point where it becomes almost trancendant and cathartic. The sunnily titled “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” utilizes a dual harmony between Gira’s daughter and cult icon Devendra Barnhardt that collapses into deafening piano smashes that focus on the resonance of a dozen bass keys on a grand piano reverberating angrily into the abyss. Off key horns join the fray and it sounds like frieght trains going off the tracks. Folks, this is about as dark as things get.

“Inside Madeline” however, is my favorite track. It starts with a lengthy bass heavy intro that’s cross cut with similar themes found in the opening track: squealing, off-kilter and hardly recognizable guitars, droning rhythm, Thor Harris (an Austinite and member of Shearwater) thunders away on the drums as the song rises in intensity, which seems to make it even bleaker as static and squealy guitars rebound against each other like a droning hive of mechanical insects. Suddenly, it breaks. Each layer is stripped away one by one starting with a mute on the drums, a dramatic shift that forces you to focus on the rest of the sonic landscape. As the music ebbs away, you notice each individual component that was fighting each other for space in the drone.This is a tremendous touch, and one that carries through most of these songs. There’s something new for your ears to notice almost every time the record is played. Gira’s vocals come in at their deepest rasp, as strings join him, and the song finishes out with a softer feel. “Clutching like snow to the end of the vine/you are free, free do do nothing.”

I think that line is a central key in understanding the music of Swans and Gira. It strikes me as being deterministic, humans are the snow, clutching to the vine of the earth. Our fall is quite inescapable, the snow will fall to the earth/into the void. Yet, we are still free to do anything which in the scope of the impossibly vast universe is exactly nothing. However, it important to note that this is no reason to give up on everything and collectively kill ourselves. Gira himself says, “I’m not cynical or nihilistic. If I was nihilistic or cynical, I would have stopped working years ago. I am willfully naïve and open to experience. I am very careful not to accept beliefs just because it feels good to believe them.” That’s last statement is the crux, some facts about the world do not feel good, but they are still nonetheless the reality. This is the music of Swans. Punishingly loud, bleak, dark and brooding yet ultimately cathartic. We are indeed free to do nothing. Determinists speak of the liberating nature of knowing our bodies are governed by laws of physics and our own natural processes, that we are essentially “meat robots” with consciousness. Knowing this, they say, is liberating. Free. To do nothing. And everything.

The actual plot seems less than a serious effort to make a story and more like an Inception meme. Baby Doll (Emily Downing), yes that is her name, arrives in a mental institution which quickly becomes a fantasy reality of a bordello where women are held captive and forced to be whores. The villain of the piece is Mr. Blue (Oscar Isaac), a rather creepy ethnic pimp that terrorizes and objectifies the women relentlessly. In fact, nearly all the men in this movie are ugly creeps. Fat ones, old ones, greasy Cuban ones, whatever. John Hamm shows up towards the end with his chiseled good looks and I mock wonder briefly why he isn’t a disgusting creep too (he’s handsome, you can’t be creepy and handsome), but by then the movie’s nearly over and there’s so much fail in this thing that the fact that nearly all the men in it are creeps is just one of the minor things wrong with it. It’s almost like Snyder set out to make an exploitative, sexist, knuckle-dragging male fantasy and to apologize for it he just depicts men as slobbering, hopeless creeps and calls it feminism. Good work dude, you missed the point.

One of the few exceptions to this is the Wise Man (Scott Glenn), the father figure (of course) that briefs the unit of girls in the action sequences which are the third level of Baby Doll’s fantasy or whatever that’s going on here. Baby Doll’s so sexy, right, that if she dances for men she will basically entrance them as if she was some kind of pale blonde siren with tassels on her nipples. The plan is that while the male is entranced by her tits, one of the other girls get one of the four items that they need to escape from the bordello. These four things are always conveniently concealed about the person of the creepy male. However, instead of showing Baby Doll dancing, we zoom in on her face and Snyder cuts to video game boss fights that are not unlike what I described above in my brief plot outline. The action is sort of fun and stupid as hell in an exuberant way but it still lacks the earnest knowing goofiness of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which is an example of a stupid movie that’s actually fucking awesome.

Sucker Punch is one of the most sexist movies made in probably a decade, and that’s saying a lot because there’s an Entourage movie on the way and Sex in the City 2 came out last year. It’s not the sexy outfits and the bizarre action sequences that do it. I actually think those are fine because it shows women displaying strength, courage, power and yes, sexuality. There’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone who denies that super heroes aren’t intentionally depicted as being sexually prime is fooling themselves, and super heroines should display the same kind of sexual power. I won’t deny that super heroines always toe that line between sexist and feminist, but it depends on who is writing and/or drawing them. This movie utterly fails as a feminine empowerment piece, as I’ve read Snyder call it, because the women in it as a universal whole are utterly incapable of dealing with any sort of emotional distress without sobbing like children. Practically every single moment that isn’t a fight scene is filled with girls crying and hugging in their panties in front of dressing room mirrors. I expected panties and hugging but I wasn’t expecting moist eyes with inch long eyelashes dripping tears every 10 minutes.

The drama scenes are especially torturous because the characters do not evolve much beyond being unhappy attractive women. There are five girls, but two of them (the vaguely ethnic tokens, to boot) are so completely underwritten that they’re almost used as accessories to the main blonde entourage of Baby Doll, Rocket (Jena Malone), and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). Cornish does the best she can with the material, being the strong one which means the negative one, I guess, Jena Malone chews scenery, sobbing and crying almost constantly as I’m sure she was directed to, and Emily Browning just kind of stands around and pouts sexily with her collagen lips. She mewls a whine every now and again which I guess is supposed to be her personality. So, you want to write a feminist empowerment piece Mr. Snyder? You should probably start with giving your sexy dolls some kind of personality. Maybe you should have a talk with Joss Whedon, he tends to write super heroines that women actually like. Towards the end of the film, Blue is pressing Baby Doll against the wall and he sneers, “I feel like a little boy in the sand box, watching as everyone else plays with my toys.” He became a stand in for the director at that point, as I felt Blue’s presence is a truer reflection of the motives for this flick than any bullshit about feminism.

Truly this is a putrid piece of shit, already. People will say the visuals are a positive but I disagree. Snyder’s grunge-vision shaky cam slow mo style is already dated. I have to reference the exuberance of color in Scott Pilgrim, and that is something this film desperately lacks. It’s what a lot of action movies these days lack. Everything is washed out, brown on grey on black, even the girls themselves don’t pop with any sort of color or emergency. Worse still, the fight scenes utilize a lot of shaky cam and in the end are confusing, disorienting and a chore to watch. When the girls fight steam powered clockwork Nazis, the camera shakes as if I was there, but that’s retarded because this movie has nothing to do with realism. Shaky cam has to stop. It was incredible in Children of Men, we all know that. But that movie was so realistic it could have been directed by Herzog (it wasn’t, it was the esteemable and incredible Alfonso Curaon), and the shaky cam tracking shots were part of the war documentary immediacy that lent power to that film. A movie that involves bad ass super heroines fighting clockwork Nazis, giant stone samurai and orcs does not need shaky cam. It needs professional style and panache; ridiculous camera angles, digital post production techniques, break the concept of how films are “supposed” to present a story and go straight for unabashed comic book style. You know, like Scott Pilgrim.

I mention Scott Pilgrim a lot because it’s a pretty stupid movie that takes risks, presents the material with color, action, and humor and doesn’t take itself seriously for much of one instant, even ruining its own poignant moments with jokes. It’s a delight. It was what I was hoping for more of. Sucker Punch seems to want you to take the dramatic element of it seriously, but due to the lack of any human levity lent to any single one of the characters it fails utterly. The best you can call jokes in this thing is the silly catch phrases that the Wise Man ends his briefings with. Children of Men is a very dark, bleak film but has more humor in it than Sucker Punch–outside of the ludicrous fight scenes. This underscores the reason why the fight sequences ultimately fail; when a bi-plane piloted by some kind of undead steampunk Nazi crashes into a Zeppelin, exploding it in an enormous fireball or a 15 foot samurai statue opens fire with a minigun I think the audience should be expected to laugh, but because of the humorless “story” there was nary a chuckle in the house. I almost felt embarrassed on behalf of Snyder. But then I remembered that Snyder has an opportunity of a lifetime that he’s using for this and then I just figure, well fuck him.

What’s good? Uh. Well, the girls are really pretty. I especially like the fact that the main cast are all Hollywood PYTs but the older Carla Gugino is still just as truck-stoppingly gorgeous as ever. I was entirely amused by the ludicrous 15 foot samurai fight but when I realized the rest of the movie was going to be crying scene/action scene/crying scene/action scene it wasn’t as awesome any more. Abbie Cornish honestly puts on the best performance of any of the girls, dealing with the script and soldering on as best she can like a real professional. I might be a little generous here since I found her to be the most gorgeous, too. Oscar Isaac is perfectly disgusting, creepy and weird, but still manages to have some greaser suaveness about him. It’s actually a decent performance given how stereotypical and vaguely racist his character is. There’s a part where the girls steal a map and he figures this out because he discovers the map now has two tack holes. That’s a pretty high level of intelligence than is usually displayed by a villain in a POS movie, but at the same time there’s no explanation why there are two maps now.

The music is comprised mostly of glossy, female vocalized covers of noise rock classics like Search and Destroy by the Stooges, Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles (sung by Allison Fucking Mossheart) and Where Is My Mind by the Pixies. This tickled my earballs because I’m a sucker for thrash noise with female vocals as well as combining music with over-the-top fight scenes, but I wonder why he couldn’t use the original songs or pick up some actual female fronted thrash noise (or pick up a less obvious Pixies song, but c’est la vie). Of course, Sleater-Kinney, the reigning queens of noise, wouldn’t sell the rights to any of their songs to score this sexist garbage.

Other than that, it’s really hard to pick something out that’s good about this thing. I’d compliment the exuberant imagination at work in the action scenes but because of the human drama, it is compromised. It’s a huge mess, and has an Inception gimmick tacked onto it, probably after Snyder saw Inception and shit his pants. I really disliked Inception too, but it made more sense than this movie and Inception didn’t make a whole lot of sense. We need to go deeper, people.

Grade: D.

“If it comes to war to end the systematic abuse of animals, I’ll most certainly be taking up a weapon.”

There was a discussion online from a vegan friend of mine in my facebook feed. Someone said the above, and I took exception to it. First of all, it’s B.S., it’s one of those false declaratives that, odds are, they will never actually have to hold true to. By making it they can pretend to be a revolutionary, without actually being one. Second, this implies that the lives of animals are greater than human ones, and there’s no way to make that seem any less ridiculous. Certainly sentient life can be equally valuable, especially if it is valued to the extent that the vegan community does. I don’t agree with that concept that we are equals with the animal kingdom, since consumption of living things is part of the natural order of things, but at least that idea is sound and isn’t strangely subservient.

Now that its been established that the vegan philosophy places humans at, or radically, below animals and that there would be a revolution of sorts that would place veganism as law, there are a few strange contradictions. Are they going to start holding murderous “individuals” responsible? You know like the wolf that killed and ate the lamb, or the pack of lionesses that coordinated an attack on a poor, victimized elephant? The shark is specifically designed to be nothing more than a killing machine, rows and rows of sharp, jagged teeth that render its prey lifeless and bloody in seconds. Blood even attracts sharks, this is the extent of their psychotic hunger! Really, where does this line get drawn? Certainly, vegans and animal rights activists don’t want to destroy all predators. Well, PETA wants all pit bulls to be killed but I don’t think they’re even very well respected in the community they claim to support. However, animal rights activists frequently refer to as animals as individuals, and speak of them as if they are equal to humans, to eat other sentient things but it’s unethical and evil for humans to consume meat, even if we have the teeth built to tear at flesh, and it’s one of the best ways to get protein and fat that your body needs to survive? I’m sorry: it’s ridiculous. If it is a personal and/or ethical choice it is wonderful, challenging and interesting and what-have-you, I respect that. But to take it to such extremes as war on the omnivorous…well, that is a pretty dangerous, ugly concept and one that is completely unjustifiable in ways beyond the simple concept that if life is respected, it means all life not just the ones you ethically agree with.

Full disclosure, I think America’s culture of meat ‘n violence has gone out of control. Over the past month I’ve made a personal vow to eat meat once a day. I am not in the income bracket to afford to boycott meat processing plants or buy organic food (whatever that means), this is reality. By consuming less of it, I am at least doing something. America over-consumes everything, from food, to oil, to land, to media and violence. This is what I think is the most important concept, above any particularities that connect with this. Veganism is certainly a reaction to this truth, so in that way I certainly respect it. It is far more efficient to dine primarily on whole fruits and vegetables, and consume far less animal products than we can now afford. Cheese, butter, milk, and especially cuts of meat are luxuries that we take for granted. In the past you would eat meat once a week if you were lucky. And before you go “Oh well we survived then!” I have to remind you, the life of a peasant was brutal. Sickness and malnutrition complicated what was already a very difficult life. High infant mortality rates and shorter lifespans were common. I suggest reading a peasant narrative or two before anyone even jumps to this conclusion.

Going even further, I am not against violent revolution either. I wrote a piece about Qaddafi earlier that was more than a little bloodthirsty, and I frequently use the fact that the French murdered their king as a defense for the unfairly maligned people of that great nation. In fact, I would go further to say that there may be no other way to liberate capital, as those Republican revolutionaries of the early 19th century did, than to revolt against the elite. It may even be a natural cycle, almost biological for the survival of humanity. Like slash and burn agriculture, it may be better to destroy rather than reform. I’m not ecologically ignorant, either, and I understand the whole validity of many tenets of the animal rights platform. Comparing a war on the consumption of animals for our use to a war on slavery is not only foolish, it’s insulting. Slavery is not a natural order, it’s an ethical one. Humans choose to take slaves, there is nothing in our biology or evolution that shows this to be useful, it is merely vanity. Yes, we needed a war on slavery, it was essentially liberating America’s serfs, much like the Revolutionaries in Europe did by destroying their king, but that in no way is comparable to veganism as the “next step” in our ethical evolution. I am fully familiar with the concept that we grow ethically as a whole, but I don’t think veganism is necessarily a natural evolution. And if it is, I would hope it’s more enlightened and beneficent than to resort to waving guns around and killing people.

It is nature that requires us to eat meat. Not three to four times a day like Americans do, or six different kinds of meat at once and then deep fried with cheese or whatever decadent embarrassment you might see on the Food Network, but just consume less of it. The cougar kills the ram, man kills a cow. This is the way things work. Going against this with all the complex, nuanced arguments that one can muster is still going against your own biology, and contradicting nature in a very real sense. To me, ethical veganism makes about as much sense as taking a vow of chastity because people are victims of sexual assault or sterilizing yourself in protest of death. And by all means, go ahead and do so but don’t threaten me with your (imaginary) gun.

Actually, hold up. This album fucking sucks. It’s so boring! It just goes on and on with weird time signatures and indestinct noodling. There’s no grabs here, it’s basically just washed out, boring and unispiring Radiohead(TM). I know the “hipsters” are going to be way into this because they’re such suckers for this total hack band. I mean really guys, “Karma Police” can you get more wack? I’m not sure if it’s possible, I mean, unless it’s “The King of Limbs.” Is that a real album title or did they just pull it out of their backside? This is one of the worst bands, them and the Suburbs that beat out Lady GaGa and my favorite Eminem. He really speaks to my put-upon white rage. Radiohead is just a bunch of whiny jerks, I bet they’re not even from America. How anyone could listen to this and not think it’s crap is beyond me. But then again, these are the same people that hate Van Halen and won’t pay to see a talented, professional cover band that plays everyone’s favorite hits. You know from Tiny Dancer, to that one Journey song and then the always timeless “Play That Funky Music White Boy.” I love cover bands. That’s real rock and roll, who’s going to cover, lets see here “Codex”? Haha is that really the name of the song? I bet he doesn’t even say that word once in there. Tom York is an asshole, and I refuse to spell his name the way he wants it to because you know, you can’t be all fancy you’re still just Tom. The height of pretentious hipsterism. Radiohead sucks! People who like it are all pretentious!

Rating: A big bucket of chicken shit.

What a dumb, dumb jerk I’ve been. All these years, I had heard of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and I just sort of dismissed it. “Goodness!” I’d say, “This seems to have people a-buzz but I am going to listen to Stone Temple Pilots anyway, it’s familiar and comforting like a terrible hamburger from Jack-in-the-Box.” Grinderman is indeed the new project from the Australian legend Nick Cave, and it shows that old people still can rock pretty good when they aren’t complaining about children being on their lawns or how their dentures keep falling out. The guitars are fuzzed out and grimy, just hows I likes em. Everything’s a bit skuzzball on this record, evidenced by the trashy living room scene with a rather annoyed wolf on the cover. It’s one of those images that really sums the contents of the album up in a nice little package. “Palaces of Montezuma” is one of the best tracks of the year. It’s a love ballad sort of, it’s ever so slightly creepy but still manages to be beautiful expression of desire, especially with the female harmonies during the chorus that float in as if on the breeze. Palaces also has the Line of the Year: “The spinal cord of JFK/wrapped around Marylin Monroe’s negligee/I give to you.” Isn’t that what every young lover wants? I’d be beside myself. “How did you manage to get this??” I’d say. This album also prompted my roommate, who was tripping at the time, to ask during the final track “Bellringer Blues” which has a strange reversed guitar sound that loops around and plays with the track in weird and unusual ways: “Does this song really sound like this??? This is awesome!!!” Yes, Nick Cave is awesome and I’m late to the party but at least here, picking half eaten hors d’oeuvres off the buffet. How can you resist a record that’s got a track on it called “Evil!!”? HUH?

Rating: The cerebral cortex of Barry Soetoro wrapped inside of Christina Hendricks’s enormous brassiere. I give to you.

Phosphene Dream unfurls with “Bad Vibrations” like a cloud of acrid weed smoke. The trip coaxes you into a hazy world of woozy guitars and a singer that seems to be inside of a bucket. And look at that album cover! You could trip balls and stare at that thing for hours. There’s nothing remarkably new here, it sounds like Beatles psychedelics crossed with Black Sabbath Satan worshiping but that’s pretty awesome in of itself. They’re also from the ATX homeboy so you better reckanize. I’m fairly new to this band, having only heard this album just now, five minutes ago. No not really, I’ve been listening to this for the better part of six or seven months. I played it so much when we had company over my roommates requested a moratorium on playing this album until the end of time. I do that sometiems, over play my welcome. Practically, if you want to listen to something that’s old school rock music with some classic pop tracks and some weird space out jams this is the department to check into. It’s kind of unfortunate but there’s not a lot of good old fashioned rock n roll being released right now, and that’s why I like this record. It’s derivative, sure, but it is quality. I mean, if you want straight ahead rock musics, you could always go for Godsmack and Linkin Park who put out new albums this year, but really who the fuck am I kidding that shit sucks.

Rating: ON THIS RIVER OF BLUUHHHUHHHUHHHHUUUDDDD

Look at that ridiculous cover. It’s Kanye fucking a phoenix, at least that’s what the artist says it is. The album cover I have is a ballerina looking embarrassed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rap album that has a cover like this. It almost looks like some kind of indie rock record: the absence of text, the bizarre picture on the cover that seems to be apropos of nothing. You could probably slap that Deerhunter cover on this album and nobody would really even notice. Then again, Kanye certainly understands what one major component of his audience is: indie dorks that are beside themselves in pants shitting glee when he samples Kraftwerk or Can. So far, this album has topped two different Album of the Year lists at Pitchfork and the Onion A.V. Club. The Onion’s best of 2010 list actually seems to get it spot on: part of the reason this album succeeds is because Kanye is some sort of idiot savant. He’s far too dumb and/or self-absorbed to ever worry about falling flat on his face, so he’ll take chances nobody else would even think were good ideas. I think 808s and Heartbreak was that moment when he did fall flat on his face, but most critics didn’t even notice because it was so insane for a rap artist to make an entire album ”singing” via autotune about having his heart broken, that they heaped praise on it anyway.

Is that a good thing? I’m not sure–Yo Brendan I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of the best albums of all time, OF ALL TIME!!!–I don’t care really. It seems hip hop is finally starting to get really fucking weird and experimental and you have to thank Kanye for that at some point. Leading up to the release I was expecting another uneven Kanye album full of highs and lows that would have the critics spurting all over it. I won’t deny that I love some of his tracks, primarily “We Don’t Care” the anthem from College Dropout, but I wasn’t exactly a big fan of that entire album, or Graduation for that matter. I didn’t fuck with 808s at all. Although he gets a few hilarious lines out but for the most part the guy really can’t rap at all.

I’ve always played the Kanye skeptic, I’ve always said that he is a great producer but a shitty MC and tends to indulge himself too much on his own albums preferring left field non-music to actually making something that is good. I can’t hate on this album though, its not that he has changed all that much, it’s just more cohesive and his crazy shit sounds better than it has before. I will say his skills with the mic are improving but he’s still at sub-Dre levels. The most you can really say about his skills on the mic is that he may go between good rhymes and bad ones in the same verse at least he’s not generically rapping about guns and drugs, like most horrible MCs. He’s still doing weird things and still making hilarious jokes: “You got too many Urkels on your team that’s why your wins low,” so far is my favorite. He still blunders into horrible rhymes and just lets them stay there because he’s so full of himself. There’s one in particular where he rhymes “asshole” with “asshole” not once but twice in the span of two bars, as well as the line on “Gorgeous” where he says “People who try to black ball me forget about two things: my black balls.” That’s an awful line that doesn’t even rhyme or make a whole lot of sense and then to compound it, the legendary and nearly untouchable Raekwon pops up right after that to throw Kanye’s amateur raps into more dramatic relief. But even when Nicki Manaj is owning the shit out of “Monster” it doesn’t feel like they’re showing him up;  they’re part of his insanity. He really does not give a fuck about it at all. I’m not sure if he should, he’s probably the most famous, influential, and critically acclaimed figure in the whole game (with all due respect to Jay-Z). But saying he’s “a Chi-town nigga with a Nas flow,” which he says in “Dark Fantasy”, is more than a little delusional.

The album is tremendous, the first four tracks will easily hook most anyone. Currently I’ve listened to “All of the Lights” featuring Rhianna and Drake (apparently) about 15 times in the last two days. Once you get to “Runaway” I don’t know if you can deny how relevant he is as an artist. “Runaway” is a self-aware admission of self: the hook starts with “Let’s have a toast for the douchebags, let’s have a toast for the assholes.” The track is an admission that the reason his relationship failed (the one he “sang” about on 808s) was mainly his own fault, and is a warning to other women that he is a huge asshole/douchebag/jerkoff. Only Kanye West can combine egomania and humility in one strange contradictory package. This self-conscious confession is further continued on “Blame Game,” featuring the wonderful John Legend is one of his best songs in years. That’s more honesty and emotional openness than you’re likely to ever find from a mainstream rap artist, and indeed probably from anyone in the hip hop game at all.

Shit, these things are supposed to be between 250 and 300 words. We’ll stop here at nearly a thousand.

Rating: Kanye West’s opinion of himself.

By the way, while searching for this video there’s an ad for the new Dr. Dre track on all these Kanye vids. I wonder if the old man is feeling a little challenged…Chronic 2011?

And lastly, I just have to include this.

It’s always very exciting when a band with a name that has something to do with deer drops a new record. Deerhunter, Deerhoof, Deer Tick, Caribou, Danger Deer, Broken Deers, Deer Bells, Deer Mouse, Deerosaurus Rex, Deerhat, North American Grazing Mammal With Horns On (great band), and etc. This is definitely the best deer band album this year, with all due respect to Caribou. Besides, caribou are actually relatives of badgers scientifically speaking. Halcyon Digest is the fourth album from these fellows from the Durty Souf, ATL Jawjuh as I believe it is correctly pronounced. I haven’t listened to the others, because this Deerhunting thing is all new to me, I thought there was more boredom and deer urine involved. What is tremendous about this album is how well put together it is; it keeps its balance as a continuous whole in spite of a rather diverse set. For example: the slow, mournful  ”Sailing” is sandwiched between the bouncy, banjo plucking single “Revival” and the triumphant “Memory Boy.” However, the sighing  ”Helicopter” is possibly the best song on the album. From the soothing ambient guitar noise, to the droplet like sound effects, and the choppy, helicopter-like drum beat. It encapsulates Deerhunter’s music as a whole: ambient, noisy, experimental, but not sacrificing listenability and Having a Good Time. Another highlight is “Coronado” which features a sleazy sax straight from the pages of 70s boogie rock. This song hopefully re-legitimizes the saxophone in rock music after so many 80s soft rockers worked so hard to make John Coltrane’s instrument about as cheesy as King Ranch Chicken topped off with Cheetos and Cheez-Its. Thanks a lot Hall & Oates.

Rating: When you go to Burger King and get a couple of onion rings in with your fries.

Blue Album of the Year and the Special Achievement in Oceanic Vibe

No one who has never heard of this band could have expected that the Oxford quintet would move their sound in this direction. Their debut, Antidotes, was brassy, metallic and almost inhuman. It wasn’t quite Dick Cheney, but it was a cyborg that was armed with sharp comments and colorful language. The explosive “Cassius” was a hint of good things to come and Total Life Forever shows that this band is not afraid to push their sound in new directions. Even the singer has a notably different approach that is evident from first track, the soulful “Blue Blood.” Focusing on holding an overarching sonic theme, Foals sacrifice pots and pans for deep synths and gorgeous textures to emphasize the new direction. The album’s centerpiece, “Spanish Sahara”, is a magnificent epic that builds steadily, rising in intensity before it crescendos with a blur of synths that peak with nauseous glee, then recedes back out like the tide. Also of note is the single “Miami” that bounces around like a delirious toddler.Total Life Forever is a satisfying and diverse album that successfully builds on a central basic theme, which is like, oceans or something, man. It is a concept album in the best sense, holding a specific mood and setting without getting overly complicated and trying to make some kind of grandiose statement. Its songs stand alone as singles and together as a cohesive whole. Just avoid “This Orient”. And yes, they are sort of like that other Oxford band, but Foals seem to be having more fun with it.

Rating: When you put on your leather jacket after a long summer in storage and it has a 20 dollar bill in the left inside pocket.