It’s finally here, Live Eye Tv’s Favorite Albums of 2013! Based on hopelessly flawed metrics, a liberal helping of geographic bias, and a myopic scope, we proudly present what we found to be some of our favorite albums of the past year. With over twenty-five hours of streaming available, these albums are provided in their entirety via Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Spotify.
We have great new work from Sandrider, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Savages, Oneohtrix Point Never, Iceage, Death Grips, and so much more! If you haven’t already signed up for Spotify, I even recommend the FREE version, as it puts so much music at your fingertips, as you’ll see below, while paying royalties to the artists that create it. (Okay, it’s not a perfect world, but…) And while we’re on the topic, don’t forget to support the Arts this season by purchasing tons of your favorite music! It don’t get made for free!! And, what the heck, you deserve it. Cheers & happy holidaze…
Biased by geographical location and our undying love of all things Akimbo, The Ruby Doe, and Good To Die Records related? Sure! But this year, for these ears, it just doesn’t get better than Sandrider‘s massive sonic tome, delivered from on high, Godhead (Good To Die Records)! What started as a side project for Akimbo vocalist, and now guitarist Jon Weisnewski, drummer Nat Damm, and Ruby Doe bassist Jesse Roberts, has grown to eclipse their previous projects.
For Godhead, the follow-up to last year’s self-titled debut, the band returned to work with producer/engineer Matt Bayles (ISIS, Mastodon, The Sword, Blood Brothers) at his Red Room Recording studio, and the album cover features some insanely sick artwork from the band’s own Jesse Roberts. Simply better than all the rest!
P.S. How great was it to have the world finally see and hear, on Monday Night Football, these three hometown heroes rivaling the 12th man with their ear splitting brilliance. So awesome!
Man, it sure was tough keeping up with all the great releases from Chicago’s Captcha Records this year, but Lorelle Meets the Obsolete‘s Corruptible Faces arrived as a revelation–while standing the test of multiple listens! This duo originated in Guadalajara, and for all intensive purposes the multi-instrumentalists Lorena Quintanilla and Alberto González seem to share musical and vocal duties on the record. Recorded and mixed by González at his home studio between July 2011 and February 2012, the record was later mastered by Cave’s Cooper Crain. Stellar tracks abound on Corruptible Faces as the duo expertly weaves garage rock’s immediacy, the throb and drone of psych, massive sound walls of shoegaze, with post-punk’s sonic menace, making for a music that is gorgeously dark and seductively hypnotic!
In recent years, social conditions in Europe seem to have bred a new, strident round of punk rock bringing with it the inklings of an angry, dissatisfied political consciousness. Currently, no one seems to channel this more forcefully, or clearly, than the London-based four-piece Savages! Witness the razor sharp polemics on Silence Yourself‘s cover. The ladies explain: “we live in an age of many stimulations/if you are focused you are harder to reach/if you are distracted you are available;” before using their unique vantage as artist/performer to turn a mirror on the audience by telling them, “you are distracted/you are available/you want flattery/always looking to where it’s at”. It’s a tough mantle to carry, being the fly in the ointment, but Savages bear the Saturnian weight with a stellar sense for the dynamics of post-punk, as well as a truly ferocious sonic approach!
Going into their twenty-seventh year and you can still count on Autechre to push the sonic envelope far left of field. This year’s LP Exai, out now on Warp Records, is the duo’s eleventh, and their longest to date running over 80 minutes. On it, Rob Brown and Sean Booth explore alien, lab-grown beatscapes, showcasing their mad scientist abilities for genetically re-splicing various electronic genres into hitherto unknown species.
While Brown told FACT Magazine this year that “all our albums have divided people,” and while it’s true that Brown and Booth have unrelentingly pushed their techniques and sound by continually reframing their approach, leading to what has become a deeply hermetic practice, the zeal they have to communicate their complex vision has only been augmented thru the years–seemingly growing with each new release!
Punk to the bone, Death Grips have launched another molotov cocktail thru the storefront window of The Corporate System, posting their Government Plates LP to several file sharing sites for FREE download on November 13th. Released without warning, Death Grips also posted a video for each track to their YouTube channel that day, for an unprecedented media barrage. It’s hard to quite know whether Death Grips’ profligacy is due to their stance on the nature of digital information, a “fuck you” to the “normal” ways of doing business, or a gesture of comradery aimed at their audience’s pocket book–though the last option doesn’t sound that likely considering the band’s penchant for skipping out on live gigs (to the detriment of their own gear). Regardless, Government Plates unleashes layers of tension and anxiety using fractured beats, paranoid tones, and MC Ride‘s “better check your meds” vocal delivery for a truly warped installment of the Police Sstate blues!
With weather conditions entering a period of chaos again, 2013 might mark the beginning of the new ice age. While it most certainly will be punishing and brutal, we suggest you leave your snow gear at home! With the punk scene in Europe continuing to fester like an infected wound, Copenhagen’s Iceage returned this past February with their second long player, the blistering and chaotic Your Nothing out now on Matador here in the States, and via Escho in Europe. With dripping venom and youthful abandon, Iceage barely sutures together a sound that mixes goth and hardcore into a vital post-punk mix that does what so little commercial music can, sound truly threatening and dangerous to one’s very existence!
Oneohtrix Point Never‘s Daniel Lopatin has had quite the busy year in 2013, having graced the cover of WIRE magazine back in February, released his brand new long player R Plus Seven on Warp Records in October, as well as performing the multi-media piece R Plus 6/Affect Index with Nate Boyce at MoMA PS1‘s VW Dome in Long Island City, Queens this fall. The artist’s new long player is an extraordinary album that finds Lopatin continuing to push and expand on his approach and sound. Like the past works featured on last years awesome box set release Rifts (Software), the musician continues to display a deft ability for getting himself out of the way of his creations as he enjoys some serious cosmic drift around the heavenly spheres!
Don’t call it a come back! My Bloody Valentine returned in 2013 with their first LP in twenty-two years. Since the band’s 1991 classic Loveless rumors have always swirled concerning the follow-up record, and indeed, it was an arduous journey for Kevin Shields and company during the intervening years. Shield’s, known to be a slow and sometimes difficult worker, has been at “the next record” since the 90’s, and, as bassist Debbie Googe explained this year to Drowned in Sound,
“Most of it is stuff Kevin has done, certainly guitar wise. It’s been a long process, you know. The drums have been added then taken off at least once. His brother did them at one point, then Colm [O’Ciosoig] came in and redid them.”
After years and months of anticipation, My Bloody Valentine’s release of m b v on February 2nd subsequently crashed their website! Scrambling to keep up with the interest, the band had to quickly put up 192kbs versions of the tracks on YouTube for fans to preview. Audiophiles will be overjoyed to know vinyl versions of this record are from a true analogue cut, and thus, “it hasn’t been put through a digital process during the cutting process unlike over 90% of all vinyl available today.” Thank you Mr. Shield’s, we know you wouldn’t have it any other way!
Bukkake ‘Far West’ LP (Important Records)
Seattle’s seemingly secret coven of psychedelic wizards Master Musicians of Bukkake followed up heir amazing Totem trilogy this year with the LP Far West (Important Records). Additionally, the fiercest, most memorable forty minutes of live music I witnessed all year was the band’s opening set for Acid Mothers Temple this summer at The Chop Suey in Seattle! Dressed in exquisite black burqas, and wearing mirrored sun glasses with their head coverings, MMOB were truly fearsome to behold as they shred thru Far West tracks like the devilishly wicked ear-splitter “Arche.” Recorded and mixed by the band’s Randall Dunn, who also just happens to be one of avant music’s preeminent engineers and producers, the album also features a killer cover illustration from the UK artist Simon Fowler, as well as photos from the young photographer Alison Scarpulla.
On Christs, Redeemers, out now on Thrill Jockey, The Body create a brutal amalgam of extreme metals’ most punishing genres while making a hauntingly cinematic experience of Gothic terror. Recorded in Pawtucket, RI at Machines With Magnets, the new album finds guitarist/vocalist Chip King and drummer Lee Buford collaborating with an interesting host of musicians like the Assembly of Light Choir, Ryan Seaton of Callers, as well as noise musician Work/Death.
While in their live incarnation, The Body’s rendering of this material was deeply rooted in doom metal’s massive, punishing bass, making for an awesomely bone rattling experience, the album itself is quite nuanced with orchestral moments, noisy interludes, and avant composition shinning thru the duo’s blackest and most misanthropic offerings. Not for the feint of heart, or other existential wussies, Christs, Redeemers is terrifying and beautiful to the nth degree!
David Lynch released his outstanding second solo LP The Big Dream on July 16th via Sacred Bones/Sunday Best Recordings. Recorded over several months at his Asymmetrical Studio, on The Big Dream Lynch once again teams up with his buddy Dean Hurley, the engineer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist with whom he collaborated with for 2011’s solo debut Crazy Clown Time (Sunday Best).
Lynch has written and performed the majority of the tracks for the new album, though the record also includes a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” as well as a collaboration with the Swedish performer Lykke Li on the bonus track “I’m Waiting Here.” Lynch describes The Big Dream‘s sound as “modern blues,” and says of the writing process: “Most of the songs start out as a type of blues jam and then we go sideways from there. What comes out is a hybrid, modernized form of low-down blues.” Low-down indeed!
Holograms returned this September with a new LP for Captured Tracks, Forever, the follow-up to last year’s excellent s/t debut for the label. The Swedish post-punk four-piece rocketed out of obscurity last year on the weight of tracks like “Chasing My Mind,” “ABC City,” and “Monolith.” These stellar cuts belied the band’s youth while displaying their keen abilities for forging anthemic, rousing music from broken down equipment and the feelings of desolation and poverty.
While there’s quite a crop of punk bands emerging from Europe, Iceage and Lower come to mind as further Scandinavian examples of bands using the genre as a vital weapon to engage their social angst, Holograms’ approach, while still dark and uncompromising, seems the more musical. On Forever, the band delivers a gut-punch of existential post-punk that sounds completely reminiscent, and yet fresh and totally necessary!
We celebrated our Hallows Eve this year with Theologian‘s 2013 release Some Things Have To Endured out now on the sonically diabolical Crucial Blast label. Theologian is the noise/industrial artist Lee M. Bartow, also known as Leech, and he has made all kinds of wicked racket as Navicon Torture Technologies since 1997. On Some Things Have To Be Endured, Bartow teams up with a host of female vocalists from the industrial, noise, darkwave realms, and beyond. Contributions include Kristen MacArthur (Sewer Goddess), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Rachael Kozak (Hecate), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), the professional opera singer Melissa C. Kelly, and more!
This record was co-produced by Derek Rush (Dream Into Dust), mastered by James Plotkin, and it comes in a full-color, six panel DVD size digi-pack adorned with the kind of amazing artwork from Ione Rucquoi that you see above. Bleak and harsh, and beautiful in its way, Theologian’s Some Things Have To Be Endured celebrates the ancient cult of the Goddess with 8 tracks of serious sonic blasphemy?
Shigeto‘s outstanding LP No Better Time Than Now came out in August of this year via Ghostly international. Featuring the future-forward techno of “Detroit Part 1,” as well as the lush tropical ambience of “Ringleader,” Zachary Saginaw‘s stunning new work showcases his exquisite musicality. According to the young artist, this album follows a year of intense activity and work. He explains, “I spent most of the year traveling and that gave me a lot of time to think. I got to know myself a lot better and that helped me be more honest with myself–that helped me write more honest music and gave me inspiration and excitement for the future.” No Better Time Than Now shines track to track with lush production and exacting detail, and even the more noir cuts like “Perfect Crime,” “Ritual Howl,” and “Soul Searching” will amaze with their sonic richness and engrossing content!
Captcha Records unearthed another Mexican gem with the band Has A Shadow. The band’s November release for the label Sky Is Hell Black was recorded and mixed by Alberto Gonzalez of Guadalajara’s Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, the label’s other import from south of the border. The band features members Victor “Remi” Garay on bass, Rodolfo Samperio on guitar, Daniel Garciano on organ, guitar, and vocals, with Gonzalez providing drums and some guitar on the new LP, as well as fulfilling his role as producer.
Sky Is Hell Black was recorded thru the winter of 2012 in Mexico City in a house where bassist “Remi” Garay grew up as a child. On a track like the album’s single”John Lennon,” the band scrapes up huge piles of industrial noise while using a reeling motorik beat to give things quite the lysergic vibe. The track starts with a heavy, buzzing drone and slow building guitar line, before launching into a rollicking rhythm, to which Garciano adds his circling organ and foggy black vocals. Fans of Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain will surely find much to love here! Limited edition copies of the record were available in clear vinyl with “hell black haze”!
Miles Whittaker, the Manchester-based producer, DJ, and label owner, has made music as part of Pendle Coven and the dark-dub duo Demdike Stare, participated as a shadowy member of the HATE project, released music with Andy Stott as Millie & Andrea, put out work under the monikers Suum Cuique and MLZ, but Faint Hearted is Miles first solo debut for his UK label Modern Love.
A relentless experimenter and deep proponent of electronic music in it’s various forms, Wittaker’s work has explored his interests in 90’s-era Jungle, Chicago House, obscure techno, synthwave, Italian concrete, and contemporary noise. On Faint Hearted, he elegantly assimilates those interests using an all analogue set-up. The result is an intriguing listen that often foregrounds machine intelligence to human consciousness, while it slowly tweaks filtered, reverb-drenched loops and bit-crunched beats for 8 tracks of alien ambience.
While Sonic Youth might be on hiatus, or done for good, 2013 saw longtime players Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Renaldo, and Steve Shelley stretching their respective creative legs in a variety of directions. Thurston Moore’s new project Chelsea Light Moving, named after the moving company briefly run by avant composers Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, includes guitarist Keith Wood (Hush Arbors), drummer John Moloney (Sun Burned Hand of the Man), and multi-instrumentalist and solo artist Samara Lubelski on bass. While Moore’s recent solo efforts like Trees Outside the Academy and Demolished Thoughts found the artist exploring some acoustic and chamber rock territory, Chelsea Light Moving’s self-titled debut is a fully plugged in affair returning the guitarist/vocalist to the thrashier, trashier side of the art rock he perfected so well with Sonic Youth.
Oozing Wound smeared itself onto our radar late this summer when it put itself in contention for “Best Song Title of the Year” with “Welcome to the Spaceship, Motherfucker” off their upcoming release Retrash, out now on Thrill Jockey. This ultra-wicked Chicago thrash trio has Zack Weil on guitar and vocals, Kevin Cribbin on bass, and Kyle Reynolds on drums. Additionally, all three members are also active in the cities thriving underground scene playing in bands like Bad Drugs, Cacaw, ZATH, and Unmanned Ship.
On their Facebook page they ask “Are you one of the wounded?” and you think, “Wow guys, thanks for asking…”, until a sinister grin breaks out across their faces, and you realize you’re done for. These guys ain’t asking cause they care about your well-being, they’re here to slay, and you look like easy pickens’!
Word is their track “Welcome to the Spaceship, Motherfucker” recasts the Biblical Joseph as a deadbeat dad, lookin’ to hightail it off the planet the first chance he gets. If that’s not enough to make you think these are three solid dudes you could really get behind, maybe slogans like “Get High, Fuck, Destroy” or “All the best kinds of heavy without all the fattening aspects of rock” will help seal the deal!
Pete Swanson spent the better part of the last decade exploring ambient noisescapes with his musical partner Gabriel Mindel Saloman as part of the Portland duo Yellow Swans. After parting ways in 2008, Swanson took his love for noise and ambience in new directions using them to drive techno into distorted realms of acid bliss on releases like 2011’s Man With Potential and 2012’s Pro Style— both on the Type label.
Swanson returned this past March with his new EP Punk Authority, out via Software/Mexican Summer. The new record finds him turning the noise up to 11 with a blistering sound that funnels keyboard and beat loops thru over-driven, highly saturated effects to create an aggressive strain of mutant techno. The result turns ideas of ambience upside down by producing fields of noise so dense and pummeling as to induce a sort of catatonic, k-hole stasis in the listener. This is the kind of music that will be used to de-frag robots in the future!
In the aftermath of Sonic Youth‘s break up, Kim Gordon has focused on a noise guitar project with the Massachusetts artist Bill Nace entitled Body/Head. Their first LP, Coming Apart, was released in September on Matador. Like the 1969 minimalist film that inspired the album’s title, Coming Apart is an exercise in the slow, and at times seemingly static search for melodic shapes using the artist’s two distinctive tones and dense tension-filled textures emerging from their confined space.
Having only two guitars, and Gordon’s monotoned evocative voice, the mood is heavy and intoxicating. With such a minimal construct, you see how each guitar balances or deflects off the other. As one guitar moves into thick fields of improvised distortions, the other spontaneously sculpts melodies from the rubble of that distortion. This makes for a deeply engaging listen that rewards with each return!
Seattle rockers Kinski released Cosy Moments this past April on Kill Rock Stars. While the new album is the band’s sixth, it has also been six years since Down Below It’s Chaos, their final Sub Pop release. The band began recording with their longtime producer Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Boris) back in 2010, for what would become, per guitarist and lead vocalist Chris Martin, a change in direction and sound. ?We wanted to make something poppier and more direct. That was the kind of music I kept finding myself listening to and that’s what we tried to do. I was getting tired of hearing people step on wah pedals and solo over psych rock. There were so many bands doing that, including us. We’ve always had poppy, song-ish elements, but we took them further this time.” To facilitate the change, Martin added his own vocals into the mix, while approaching songwriting from a more traditional tact by focusing first on the lyrics and music, instead of building songs more abstractly from gear play. The album’s single “Conflict Free Diamonds“, as well as the album’s opener “Long Term Exit Strategy “, are fine examples of this new approach, and they find Kinski confidently moving away from the freak-out, space rock experimentations of their earlier work, into more structured, vocal-centric rock songs!
Xander Harris released The New Dark Age of Love via Not Not Fun this past April. On the outstanding new record he continues to expand upon his post-apocalyptic synthwave visions to deliver another noir installment of Urban Gothic. Inspired by his love of Italian horror films, and the brutal graphic novels of Brian Keene, as well as musicians like Chris Carter, Tangerine Dream, Cabaret Voltaire, and Skinny Puppy, the Austin, TX-based artist creates elegant techno dreams of a future past filled with slasher film camp, and the ennui of nostalgia.
While Xander Harris is often included with analogue synth-based musicians like Dylan Ettinger, Jon Maus, Oneohtrix Point Never, and others, one of the elements that makes Harris’ music unique is his use of an electronic drum set to create his rhythms. Looser and more human sounding, the tracks on The New Dark Age of Love are definitely haunted by a certain creep factor that seems to lie in the nostalgic aire they conjure.
Xander Harris has pursued his passion for the by-gone era of the analog synths with an almost religious zeal to achieve in tone and feel a classic, museum quality to his music. He creates the sounds of a past era when synthesizer music might have suggested, without irony, a more harmonious melding of machine and human. Call it a New Age of Love in which he applys the filter’s of critique and hindsight to amends that future into something more ominous–The New Dark Age of Love. Is this the end of the journey, or just the end?
On Bang The Box! The (Lost) story of AKA Dance Music Chicago 1987-1988, Jerome Derradji hones in even further on Chicago’s underground House scene. This will be the second installment from Derradji’s amazing archival series, with his first compilation Kill Yourself Dancing: The Story of Sunset Record Inc. Chicago 1985-89 also out this year on Still Music. While Kill Yourself Dancing focuses on the trio of young producers Matt Warren, Miguel Garcia, and Ralphi Rosario, and their work with Sunset Records Inc. in the mid to late 80’s, Bang The Box! follows Matt Warren’s defection from Sunset to form AKA Dance Music, in 1987.
As this collection will demonstrate, the label was often a showcase for Warren’s own cutting-edge productions, as well as friend and fellow producer Miguel Garcia, who often worked under the name Michaelangelo. On the track “Pleasuredome,” Warren teams up with friends as the crew Modern Mechanical Music. As you can hear, this was truly a creative time when House music was still in flux, as it absorbed currents in electronic music from genres like disco, new wave, techno, and industrial while taking advantage of cheap and easily accessible equipment like the now legendary Roland TR- 808.
Will MacLean‘s Ice Cream Mission to Mars project put out it’s self-titled debut this past November on the artist’s Toy Moon label. To celebrate the event, we tossed the Chicago-based analogue synth player a few questions about the new record. Will discusses, in detail, the different vintage devices used in the creation of the LP, as well as touching on his long standing interest in synthesizers, how he came to work with David Baker in Variety Lights, and more! You can check out the interview here, while streaming the album in it’s entirety!
Blondes‘ Sam Haar and Zach Steinman achieve a masterful level of craftsmanship on their new LP Swisher out today digitally on RVNG Intl. Swisher is the follow up to last year’s self-titled LP and for the album the duo has “rehauled” their gear and settled into a new studio space where they spent considerable time sculpting their addictive dance electronics.
While Blondes was an exhilarating listen, Swisher finds the duo’s tracks a little less cluttered and more focused, without losing Haar and Steinman’s ability to deftly stretch out arrangements into all kinds of adventurous places. Using dance culture as their launching point, the NYC duo weave house, techno, and rave influences into a sonic experience that is both emotive and kinetic! Stream the album in its entirety with awesome visuals provided by Greg Zifcak.
