Aaron's Pazz & Jop Ballot

I'll stop doing end-of-year posts after this, promise, but I wanted to post a link to my ballot in the 2012 Pazz & Jop, which went live yesterday. My ballot is here.

I've been asking to participate in the Pazz & Jop, off and on, for several years now. It was a thrill to finally hear "yes," though my excitement was tempered a little by the bloodletting at the Village Voice's music department earlier this year. I decided to vote anyway, and I'm relieved to see the names of several critics I admire among the 500 voters.

What did I vote for? You already know what my favorite albums of 2012 were. Horrifyingly, I was the only person to vote for Café Tacuba's El Objeto Antes Llamdo Disco, which landed down at 710. Looks like I was the only voter who picked R. Kelly's Write Me Back as 2012's best. (Like I have in previous years, I'll probably post on my Tumblr about where my personal Top 10 landed in the Pazz & Jop.)

Anyway, I also put together a list of my 10 favorite singles of the year. I only got word from the Village Voice about 48 hours before voting closed, so I had to come up with that pretty quick. I spent an entire day of my vacation freaking out about what 2012's best singles were, avoiding all familial obligations so that I could figure out if Meek Mill's "Amen" is a better song than Beck's "I Only Have Eyes For You" cover. Here's what I came up with:

...with apologies to Beck, Julia Holter, Killer Mike, Tame Impala, Melody's Echo Chamber and a bunch of others, who were on the cusp. Glad I had "Power Circle" on there, since nobody else voted for it (?!?). Rob Harvilla's essay on Future even has me thinking I should have found space for "Turn On The Lights."

If you want to dig insanely deep into the statistics of the results, including individual ballots, then knock yourself out.

Aaron's Favorites, 2010: Always Never Not Giving A Fuck

With apologies to Let's Wrestle, who's fantastic In The Court Of Wrestling Let's has been deemed ineligible, Aaron's 10 favorite releases of 2010:

1. Beach House, Teen Dream

A diffuse, gorgeous sound world. Listening to Alex Scally's guitar unfold over Victoria Legrand's vocal and keyboard melodies is the most enveloping, elegant narcotic on the market.

2. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son Of Chico Dusty
Big Boi just wanted to make an album. Label trouble delayed it for years and kept Andre 3000 away. Whenever it was released, Sir Lucious Left Foot's virtuosic mic acrobatics were never really in doubt. But who could have predicted an album this joyous, this gleeful about the possibilities of funk?

3. Crime In Stereo, I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone
On their swan song, the Long Island group construct a violent, fractured punk. This is "melodic hardcore," but there's little melody here. I hear only fury--in the controlled explosions of the tempo, in the anguished dual vocals, and in the eviscerating guitar textures.

4. Caetano Veloso, zii e zie
The Brazilian master, now 68, cracks open his skull and lets us take a peek inside. The contents--languid, martian jams, which Veloso has termed transambas--are no surprise, and yet he makes each moment sound like a revelation.

5. The-Dream, Love King
The synthesizer symphonies of Love King are a letdown after last year's genius Love Vs. Money, but only just. Dream's music remains the platonic ideal of contemporary R&B--effortless, immediate music, with quirks and charms still revealing themselves months later.

6. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
A fascinating and uneasy mix of West's egocentric philosophizing and terrible humor with the collective ennui of the group vocals, always popping up to comment on the action, as in Greek tragedy. The production is, of course, next level--dizzying, colorful collages of sound that pulse and thump with tenacity.

7. Das Racist, Sit Down, Man
Overheard on Sit Down, Man: "We just like rap, we don't even need rap." Maybe so, but rap needs Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez, at once laconic and whip smart, and surely the first hip-hop group to make eating nachos and reading critical theory sound ill as hell.

8. Grinderman, Grinderman 2
This unholy alliance of Nick Cave and a trio of the baddest seeds don't yet rival their day job band, but damn if they're not coming close. The Grinderguys pound out a strain demonic blues-scuzz you thought they didn't make any more.

9. No Age, Everything In Between
All indie-rock should sound like this: flurries of fuzz and hooks. The album gets stuck in an ambient ditch for a few tracks, but No Age can shred and transcend at will, and even sneak in a couple mid-tempo stunners.

10. Tame Impala, Innerspeaker
A big, groove-oriented psychedelic record in a year when even Dungen disappointed. The reverberations and acid-tinged flow of Innerspeaker aren't just retro signifiers though, they're the building blocks of 2010's most immersive sound.

Critical Beatdown: Round Two

Gucci Mane feat. Plies, "Wasted"
NS: I was originally embarrassed to note that I only know Gucci Mane through a verse he did on Big Boi's beautiful "Shine Blockas," but this anodyne example of shallow, corporate rap doesn't make me think I've missed that much. The beat is okay, the kind of thing Lil Wayne could leverage into something better on his next mixtape. 2/5

AM: A rarity--an ode to getting drunk as dumb and fun as the real thing. Attention minors: there is no such thing as a "Ghetto Public Service Announcement," so take Gucci's pronouncements with a grain of salt, or at least a glass of water. 4/5

Beach House, "Norway"
NS: Beach House could be blamed for not showing much depth in their trafficking of woozy soundscapes, but one can't argue with effective wooze, accompanied this time by vocals that really showcase the best of both singers. Top-notch songsmithing. 4/5

AM: Beach House always sounded out-of-focus, but now they're gone blissfully out-of-tune. If Vic and Alex are going to keep releasing killer first singles like this, I'm going to continue buying their albums the day they come out. 4.5/5

Califone, "Funeral Singers"
NS: Nothing Califone does these days seems as cool as Heron King Blues, but that's okay. The singer-songwriter angle is redeemed, as in the Beach House song, with odd male-female harmonizing, plus some gnarled electric guitar. 3.5/5

AM: They sound rootsy, and they sound worn-out. Neil Young this ain't, but Califone prove there's still plenty of gas left in the tank, if a bit of rust around the wheels. 3.5/5

Timbaland Feat. Nelly Furtado & SoShy, "Morning After Dark"
NS: I'm ambivalent about Timbaland's increasingly digitized direction--songs like this don't carry the luster of early work but this certainly deserves to be the biggest thing on the radio when contrasted with the latest Gaga or Cyrus. It's all about the chorus with this one, and it is a lustrous chorus. 3.5/5

AM: Shock Value's embarrassing moments--and they were legion--were redeemed by their creator's bug-eyed sense of humor and talent behind the boards. Here, Timbo autotunes himself beyond recognition and chases trends, rather than creating them. Just generic. 2/5

Bob Dylan, "Must Be Santa"
NS: It surely is predictably embarrassing, but what else can one say? Dylan-the-singer is worse than ever, he's performing a rather chintzy song written by someone else, and his accordion-laden arrangement is a deadly combination of obnoxious and unmemorable. 0.5/5

AM: Gonna be honest: I don't hate this. Dylan, who apparently has been sipping from the same cup as Gucci Mane, blusters his way through a song that, it must be said, has considerably more vigor than the entirety of Together Through Life. He's one of a kind, he can't help it. 2.5/5

Only A Broken Mind Can Understand...

I was delighted to see that Fucked Up nabbed the 2009 Polaris Music Prize. Though I haven't heard any of the other albums on the shortlist, I have little doubt that FU's 2008 opus The Chemistry Of Common Life was vastly better than the competition. Shit, it's better than almost anything else out there.

Hopefully they'll use the 20,000 Canadian Dollars (a pathetic $19,000 US) to add additional guitar overdubs to "Year Of The Ox."

I've been considering a post on Fucked Up for while, but I haven't been able to get the angle quite right. I've poured over Chemistry, which I would retroactively call at least the third best album of 2008, attended a concert, and listened to the band's recent singles, but something about the group--who are not purveyors of subtlety--evades me.

Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that Fucked Up are important. What they do isn't particularly radical--a fusion of hardcore punk with layers of massive guitar overdubs.* Mixing genres itself is hardly news, and in the 21st century it's practically de rigueur. But Fucked Up's sound has the benefit of being singular. There's an earnestness to their music, and sense that they're exploring new territory. And their hybrid genre sounds enormous, big enough to cast shadows.

What excites me about Fucked Up has to do, in large measure, with how organic their innovation seems. Much has been made of The xx lately, and I enjoy their debut album. Their sound, however, comes as something of a graft: R&B beatmaking attached to slow, sultry guitars and hushed vocals.** On Chemistry, FU's graft goes unnoticed; the swirling guitars are a part of the propulsive whole, just as Husker Du's infusion of melody into hardcore sounded completely natural. Like Husker Du, Fucked Up have added to the vocabulary of punk, and it's an influence future bands will have to contend with.

Fucked Up's publicist never responded to my request for an inteview with FU guitarist and sonic mastermind 10,000 Marbles, so I'll cut off my praise here.


*Nathan noted that Chemistry's overdubs are more reminiscent of The Smashing Pumpkins than My Bloody Valentine. 2009's "Year Of The Rat" single sees the band moving toward the enveloping textures of Kevin Shields' guitar work.

**The novelty of this sound has been overplayed--take another listen to Low's Drums And Guns or Beach Houses's Devotion.