The Year In Bitch - 2017

I seriously only really took in about half a dozen records this year. Specifically, the new Nine Inch Nails EPs, the new Beck, Manson, St. Vincent, Gorillaz, and, most recently, the new They Might Be Giants*. Three of my five favorite artists had absolutely stellar releases this year (and one of my five favorite artists had a poppy, sweet-and-plasticky-like-a-strawberry-Twizzler release this year) and, in the dearth that is to come, I shall try and recall this shining plethora and hold the memory close as a spark with which to warm my soul...although I will fail and start complaining pretty soon, I am certain.

Along with that tight and isolated four plus hours of music that I obsessed over this year, I did take in a few other things...the pair of Reznor/Ross scores of Patriots Day and The Vietnam War, the excellent new New Pornographers, the new Tori Amos, the new and spectacularly non-Euclidean Drew McDowall, and Transparent by Coil and Zos Kia, a record which I feel ended up perfectly summarizing this year and all its occurrences. You should totally give it a listen, with headphones, while looking over a recap of the world events of 2017. I'm not kidding.

One life changing moment that occurred was when my wife and I (and a small handful of others) had tea with Tori Amos. I mean...it's something I could never fully put into words. She was graceful, attentive, gracious and the Summer Queen of the Sidhe. At one point, when she was chatting with my wife and I and hearing all about our non-fae lives, she took my hand in hers and I almost died. It was a legitimate brush with divinity and I shouldn't have even brought it up because it's like a blind man trying to describe how red her hair is.

Something far more mundane yet also worth nothing from this year...packaging. Starting in February with the physical component for Nine Inch Nails' Not The Actual Events and continuing with its vinyl release, then the physical component for Add Violence, the CD packaging for the new Manson, the deluxe versions of the new Beck and St. Vincent, and culminating with the "Super Deluxe" edition of Gorillaz' Humanz. I talked about a lot of it here, but I must harp on it.
While I don't think any packaging I've ever encountered competes with some of the stuff Coil and its associates have come up with over the years, specifically the insane presentation for Peter Christopherson's Time Machines II, I think it's fantastic, in this world of people blithely renting licenses for songs off of iTunes instead of purchasing hard copies of albums, to see artists putting effort not only into their music, but into the method in which their music is presented. While streaming is convenient as hell, there's something lacking...namely beautiful, full color, 12" by 12" artwork...or soot-covered cardstock, a quick reference guide to a machine that creates dystopian, pre-apocalyptic scenarios, or branded kaleidoscopes and prisms. The music should obviously stand on its own, but the artwork and packaging and all the weird trappings serve to add further depth to the release, expanding the world the artist is trying to create for the listener. That's "listener", not "consumer". All this is to say...I don't know...people still give a shit and will continue to as long as the artists do the same.
But not with cassettes.
Those are fully obsolete.
Beck. 

ONTOTHEMOTHERFUCKINGSUPERLATIVES!!!

Best Song of the Year
This is a tie for me between St. Vincent's "Slow Disco" and Nine Inch Nails' "The Lovers". Here's the former with a string octet and the latter live in rehearsal which won't sound any different unless you're a fan so...yeah.

Worst Song of the Year
"Despacito".
If this song were a person I would hire an assassin to kill it.

BEST! LIVE! NOODS!
I wanted Gorillaz to be epic, but between the ocean of goddamn people (Christ I fucking hate people) and the fact that they were supporting an album I'm 17% into, that didn't happen. Seeing Nine Inch Nails two nights in a row was pretty epic (Panorama and Webster Hall), and certainly better than the last time I fucking did that but it comes down to Mother Feather at the Knitting Factory and St. Vincent at Kings Theater. One was perfectly sculpted and executed like a theatrical performance, and the other was sloppy, wet chaos. On one hand, you have Annie Clark, standing on a stage alone and delivering the same set of songs over three months, never varying, just a series of musical monologues and soliloquies, then you have Mother Feather's unending, goddess-gleaned energy repeatedly driving red hot pop cock rock into the audience's collective face like a dong made of sincerity, lady parts, and power...plus they have a new bassist!

Biggest Surprise
Oh my goodness there was no contest. I was absolutely thrilled by Marilyn Manson's Heaven Upside Down. Despite not being a perfect return to the truly unsettling Manson I fell in fearful love with over 20 years ago, this is the closest thing we've gotten since the ebon opus that was Antichrist Superstar and the best Manson album he's created since 2003. Even if the man backslides, there will always be this album to let us know that Marilyn Manson was back...even if only for a short time.

Biggest Disappointment
This might have been a tie between Beck's exquisitely crafted and glimmeringly hollow pop swamp Colors and Gorillaz' Humanz but, after those three singles Beck released, I should have expected something like this, whereas Humanz was such a letdown. I know it's good, but I don't like it. As of right now, about nine months after its release, I only enjoy two and a half songs ("Charger" and "Hallelujah Money") and one chorus ("Saturnz Barz")**.

Best Album of the Year
Yeah, I know Nine Inch Nails put out a new EP in 2017, but HA, I'm picking one of the other six releases I listened to this year! It's got to be Masseduction. It's like Annie Clark was possessed by Beck and Prince and then did her thing. Tracks like "Hang On Me", "Los Ageless", "Savior", "Slow Disco", the title track...come on asshole, fuck you it's the best. Asshole.
fuck you.

Best Album of Next Year
Um...is it cheating if I give this to the new They Might Be Giants? I mean...Beck certainly isn't putting anything new out next year. Neither is St. Vincent***. The members of Cake are dead and E is working on learning to love himself. So unless something astonishing happens and Reznor actually puts out a new LP in 2018, yeah, the Best Album of 2018 is I Like Fun by They Might Be Giants.
You've got 365 days to change my mind world, step t'me.


Most Anticipated Release of 2018
Well, the third Nine Inch Nails EP obviously, the one that ties everything ever together and brings meaning to my life: artistically, spiritually, and sexually. Duh.
Or is it the new Mother Feather, Constellation Baby? Starring tracks like "I.C.U.", "Shake Your Magic 8-Ball", "Totally Awesome", and the absolutely stellar title track...**** Thing is, no matter how good it is, the new NIN is only an EP, five or six tracks, probably clocking in at less than a half hour...so...oooooch...this is going to be a tie...for now.

Hopes for 2018
A fucking new Nine Inch Nails album! Of course! What do you fucking think?! But I have a feeling that these EPs are going to serve as the only new real NIN for a while. Damn it. So...I suppose...nothing. I have no hopes for 2018. That way, I can't be disappointed! I BEAT THE FUCKING SYSTEM!

* Which isn't actually out until 1/19/18.

** Four and a half if you throw in "Out of Body" and "The Apprentice" from the 2-CD version.

*** Except for a small handful of tracks left off Masseduction, like "Sexclusive", a track featuring Jehnny Beth from Savages on guest vocals.

**** Get it? Stellar? Constellation Baby? STILL GOT IT!

A review of Gorillaz' "Humanz" (Super Deluxe)

Why do people purchase "deluxe" or "super deluxe" or "bonus" or other such named "enhanced" versions of albums? For extra artwork? Unique packaging? More songs? For the sheer exclusivity of it? For me, depending on the band, it's for unreleased/extra music first, then artwork, and only if I really dig said artwork. So when Gorillaz, a band for which the artwork is as important as the music, maybe moreso, announced their new album Humanz a mere month before its release, I went all out; I purchased the two-CD version which featured six tracks not on the standard CD and pre-ordered the "Super Deluxe" version which boasted fourteen new tracks. Between that bonus CD and the SD version, that doubled the tracks on the standard album. After months of delay, I received my SD package earlier this month and sat down with it over the weekend.

Included in the Super Deluxe edition of Humanz is an art book featuring the Instagram posts from earlier this year which detailed the Gorillaz' path from Plastic Beach to Humanz, some scribbled-on lyric sheets, and unseen art from Jamie Hewlett, and fourteen separate records, each a unique color, each in its own sleeve, the a-side containing the album's twenty tracks and the b-side sporting a new, unreleased track. The book and records all come in a huge, faux leather case adorned with lightning bolts. I'll get right to it: while a handful of the bonus tracks are interesting (namely "Colombians" which sounds like something from Goat Simulator, "Midnite Float", and an alternate, D.R.A.M.-centric version of "Andromeda") most are forgettable instrumentals and foreign language versions of LP tracks. 

Now the question: was it worth it? The package was over $350 with shipping and took eight months to arrive. Everything in it is beautiful and well-crafted, although the tracks are mostly Gorillaz-official-website-background-music quality. Would I have been happy with just the standard LP? I'm not a theoretical physicist so I really can't answer that. I'm going to say no though, as I am a completionist and when it comes to Gorillaz, the narrative is important to me, so any new music/images could mean more insight into this non-existent band. For a normal person though? They probably don't even know about this, and is that a bad thing? Digital vs vinyl. Collecting vs minimalism. Each record has only two songs. Arguably, the only less practical way to present this album would be to have twenty-eight one-sided records. Is it necessary. Ooh. There's a phrase you don't hear a lot in conjunction with these special releases. But, then again, it's "super deluxe", what's "necessary" about something labeled as "super deluxe"?

Oy. 

Did you know there's a Grammy award for packaging? Look it up. Nine Inch Nails was nominated in 2008 for Ghosts I-IV and Reznor, Ross, and Rob Sheridan in 2012 for their The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo score packaging. They were nominated for "Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition". THERE'S A GRAMMY AWARD FOR PACKAGING.

A review of St. Vincent's "Fear The Future" tour at Kings Theater on 12/2/17

Annie Clark is a human. I can now say this with complete certainty. The last time I saw her perform, in 2014 at Terminal 5, I wasn't sure; she was too cold and calculating, like some multi-function automaton that had yet to truly master a mimicry of human behavior. Even when she was vulnerable and confiding, there seemed to be a barely audible click behind each teardrop and sigh. This time however, Saturday at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn, she was just a human. A guitar-murdering pocket apocalypse of a human, but a human nonetheless.

The evening started with an hour long Q&A and two-song acoustic performance*, both of which went a long way towards humanizing Clark. Then there was the very start of her first set, which featured Clark almost ridiculously overdressed in a matching pink, vinyl teddy and high-heeled boots**. As the set unfolded, so did the stage, mirroring Clark's confidence and command of the space. For the majority of the second set, Clark merely stood and sang and killed a score of guitars and utterly dominated the theater.

The first third of the show was an almost chronological tour of her past work, starting with "Marry Me" and ending with "Birth In Reverse", while the back two thirds focused on her latest. As much as I enjoy a well-varied and structured set list, hearing the whole of Msseduction from front to back was fantastic as every track had additional depth and highlights not found on the album. One downside to the performance was the overabundance of the not-so-stellar visuals, which consisted solely of extra footage from the albums' two videos and press material. Occasionally they added but more often than not they distracted.

Highlights included a reworked and almost industrial version of 2014’s “Digital Witness”, a heart-rending new string arrangement of "Strange Mercy", “Cheerleader”, and...well, pretty much everything on Masseduction.

Clark recently extended her Fear The Future tour to mid-2018, so if you can, check out a true virtuoso performing one of the best albums of the year.

Shitty photos here.

* "Laughing With a Mouth of Blood" and "the second in the 'Johnny Trilogy'", "Prince Johnny".

** She had mentioned in the Q&A that her look for the live show was a mix of "silly and sexy".