Here’s my personal top 10 of records that came out this year. I went through a brutal day-long internal struggle, trying to decide which album should be on top of the list – but I just couldn’t say whose new album was better, The National’s or Interpol’s. As a result, there are now two records of the year because I couldn’t pick one over the other. The same can be said of the rest of my top ten, which I had to list in alphabetical order because judging the quality of a record by saying it is better than this but worse than turned out to be an impossible task…

Album of the Year I
The National – Boxer
This is an album of an incredible density – once the songs have drawn you in, you’ll find yourself unable to escape them. Matt Berninger’s seemingly calm baritone voice forces you to listen closely due to its slight monotony and thus creates a certain intimacy between himself and the listener. These songs speak to the audience through their familiarity of themes like everyday white-collar drama, the transience of youth and the path of uniform conformity a lot of people choose to take. You’ll find yourself haunted by melodies that are being pushed forward by sharp, precise rhythms of an almost hypnotic quality. The additional instruments (horn, cello, piano, violins etc.) aren’t just the icing on the cake but have a voice of their own and enhance the general feeling of menace and darkness. At the same time, the songs are very clean in their textures as they aren’t overloaded with layers. They never lose their aforementioned density which in itself forms a sort of strong connection, a thread that binds all the songs together into one brilliant whole.

Album of the Year II
Interpol – Our Love To Admire
OLTA shows a lot more variation than its predecessor Antics. It’s more open, more dramatic to a cinematic extend and it’s perfectly sequenced so when you listen to it in one go, you won’t have to skip one single song because they unfold like one big narration, with intricate songs carried by grand instrumentation followed by faster catchier songs which aren’t less beautiful. The two closing songs, Wrecking Ball and The Lighthouse, suggest a completely new direction to the band’s sound altogether and are so overwhelmingly intense… The album clearly has its faults and weaknesses, but it’s also a testament to the band’s growth and considering the album as a whole, as a sum of its songs, it’s simply majestic.
(Just where in the world did the bass go?)

Albums # 3-10 in alphabetical order:

3. Band of Horses – Cease To Begin
Small town idylls meet epic arrangements meet country elements meet lyrical love songs named after… Detlef Schrempf? Band of Horses have managed putting all of these things onto one record and the result is quite amazing!

4. Beirut – The Flying Club Cup
My favorite francophile album of the year. No seriously, I didn’t like the Balkan pop of the debut album but this one takes you on a voyage through France which, as a culture, I find ultimately more accessible as far as musical influences are concerned. A great and charming, at times pompous pop record.

5. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga
Wide in scope, this is a personal but at the same time universal record which is reflected both in the lyrics as well as in the music itself. It’s a bit of the private versus the political, and the songs focussing on the former are clearly the stronger ones as the political-themed ones often seem to be the exact opposite of subtle. Nevertheless a beautiful record!

6. Feist – The Reminder
This is an album that’s diverse in sound but brought together by themes like love and loneliness which Feist delivers in her truly unique, dreamy voice. The contrast of the music and the lyrics creates a good sort of tension, as even the most uplifting-sounding songs can quite unexpectantly bring tears to the listener’s eyes due to what the singer expresses in the lyrics.

7. Okkervil River – The Stage Names
Some might say Okkervil songs might be too weighty on the lyrics side to an extend that the music and the melodies suffer but I couldn’t disagree more, at least as far as this record is concerned. The music supplement the lyrics so well and in a few instances, the melodies are simply so fantastic they make you follow them so closely that you forget to pay attention to the actual words for a moment. When you do listen to the lyrics though, you’ll get to hear some dramatic, personal and sometimes downright hilarious (in all their tragedy!) stories you won’t forget any time soon.

8. Radiohead – In Rainbows
There’s absolutely no doubt that this is a fantastic and unexpectedly accessible album, the only question that remains is: could this album just as well have been released in 1997?
 
 

9. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away
I still love this album as much as when it came out, or even more now which is a surprise really because I first thought that one day I might grow tired of the catchy hooks and wonderful melodies of the album’s most outstanding pop songs like Phantom Limb (which features the best impressionist lyrics ever) or Australia – but that never happened even though this is one of my most-played records of the year! And even better: the songs that seemed slightly less accessible or maybe even bland at first revealed their true beauty after some time. So it’s a really rewarding album that also didn’t lose any of its initial appeal.

10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Is Is EP
Simply the most powerful and sexiest of this year’s releases, period.
 
 

Songs from almost all of these albums (plus a few others) can be downloaded in the songs of 2007 post.

Architecture in Helsinki – Heart It Races (Places Like This, Australia, 2007.)
Band of Horses – Ode To LRC (Cease To Begin, USA, 2007.)
Bright Eyes – Coat Check Dream Song (Cassadaga, USA, 2007.)
Feist – My Moon My Man (The Reminder, Canada, 2007.)
The Good, The Bad & The Queen – Herculean (The Good, The Bad & The Queen, UK, 2007.)
Interpol – Pace Is The Trick & Who Do You Think? (Our Love To Admire, USA, 2007.)
Maximo Park – Books From Boxes (Our Earthly Pleasures, UK, 2007.)
The National – Brainy & Squalor Victoria (Boxer, USA, 2007.)
Okkervil River – Plus Ones (The Stage Names, USA, 2007.)
The Shins – Phantom Limb (Wincing The Night Away, USA, 2007.)
Wintersleep – Archaeologist (Welcome To The Nightsky, Canada, 2007.)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Down Boy (Is Is EP, USA, 2007.)

Next up are a couple of music-related posts – yes, my albums of the year list is on its way! (Compiling a list means having to make difficult decisions about what should be on it and what has to be excluded and whatnot, and that’s not necessarily something I’m good at and explains why I need a hell of a lot of time to write one.)

I’ll start with this year’s most disappointing releases, CDs I’ve really been looking forward to or that I liked when they came out but that turned out to be not as exciting or in some cases downright bland after repeated listens:

Maximo Park – Our Earthly Pleasures: A very good album actually, but doesn’t show too much progression when compared to the band’s debut. It doesn’t offer much variation both as far as arrangements and lyrics are concerned – although the lyrics have their moments of beauty (oh, the last line of the closing song, Parisian Skies: I like the tiny veins on your back/They remind me of the way that porcellain cracks).

The Good, The Bad And The Queen – s/t: This album kept me sane and safely wrapped up in its warm melancholy during the last winter, especially during my daily commuting. The song patterns are just too similar, though, so with the spring came other albums I liked much better which made me forget this one quite fast.

Architecture in Helsinki – Places Like This: Weird in a fun and playful but sometimes too infantile and unstructured way. Could have done with a bit more diversity, too.

Idlewild – Make Another World: Has a few songs that recall the once magnificent songwriting this band used to be capable of but fails to deliver anything outstanding.

Bloc Party – A Weekend In The City: Over-produced, self-absorbed and superficial. I have not given up on them though and look forward to their next album that – for heaven’s sake! – should better be kept out of the hands of producer Garret Lee.

Editors – An End Has A Start: Super catchy melodies that wear off as quickly as they got stuck in your head. Lyrics that try to be clever and Emotional (yes, with a capital E!) but fail horribly. Too superficially melodramatic. I sincerely hope – because I onced liked the band quite a bit – they won’t go further down the Coldplay stadium pomp path with their next album. Another record killed by Garret Lee with too many U2-esque, unnecessary layers.

During my research on Murakami Ryu I realized that Murakami’s been observing both mass culture & subculture phenomena from an almost outsider’s point of view while at the same time he himself is part of this mass media monster, this huge machinery (with both positive and negative qualities) in which everyone seems to be influenced by everyone in their output and instantly influences others the second they publish their ‘product’/output. As controversial as his thoughts and works might be, Murakami has already influenced a flock of younger writers, some of which have paid homage to his works through tiny details in their own works. As an example for that, here are a few connections between Murakami and anime:

1, The naming of a handful of (minor) characters from Eva was apparently inspired by character names from Murakami’s novel Ai to Gensou no Fashizumu (1987) as Anno Hideaki, the director of the anime, later wrote in an essay.

For example, there’s Suzuhara Touji (鈴原トウジ) whose name was “borrowed” from the protagonist of Fashizumu, Suzuhara Touji (鈴原冬二). His friend Aida Kensuke (相田ケンスケ) also has a doppelganger – by name, at least – in the novel (相田剣介). The surname of their friend Hikari, Horaki (洞木), is used in the novel for a male character called 洞木紘一.
One person appearing in the novel called Yamagishi Ryouji (山岸良治) might have been a source of inspiration in the naming of Kaji Ryouji ( 加持リョウジ) and Yamagishi Mayumi (山岸マユミ), the female main character from the Sega Saturn game Evangelion 2nd Impression, though Anno said the ‘Ryouji’ came from a character in a Narita Minako manga, so who knows… There’s also a bunch of very minor characters whose names can also be found in Murakami’s novel, like Tokita Shirou (時田シロウ; inspired by Tokita Shirou（時田史郎）in the novel), and Manda (万田), Yasugi (八杉) etc.

The Murakami/Anno connection continues. In 1998 Anno Hideaki made his non-anime directorial debut when he had the chance to adapt Love&Pop, Murakami’s short novel about enjo kousai which was published in 1996, for the big screen.

2, And then there’s Eureka seveN (2005), the current generation’s Evangelion, which I admittedly quite enjoyed, though not nearly as much as Eva. It was written by the highly celebrated screenwriter Satou Dai, who also wrote (episodes of) other brilliant anime series such as Cowboy Bebop, Wolf’s Rain, Ergo Proxy and Terra e…, to name just a few. He apparently made a cross-reference to Anemone, the female protagonist in Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies (1980) by naming the pink-haired Anemone, the oh-so-tormented pilot of the Nirvash LFO TheEND, after her. In the book, Anemone has an alligator called Gulliver and in the anime, Anemone’s pet is this weird mixture of a duck, a sheep and something indefinable that is called Gulliver, too.

Oh geekiness!

Well then, here it is, version 11 of coinlockerbaby.org. The result is quite… colorful and the coding might need a bit tweaking here and there but I’m too impatient for that right now. (I really want to go back to the book I’m reading!!) I also haven’t tested it on anything else than a Mac and in Firefox so it probably looks blindingly awful in Windows and IE.

I totally forgot that I’ve now been occupying this domain for slightly more than five years! Happy birthday clb.org!

I’m currently stranded at home, down with a cold, taking a much needed break from what feels like the suckiest semester ever. I have so much to do for school and absolutely no time for other things which is really really depressing because I love doing my own things, stuff that hasn’t anything (or very little) to do with uni. I can’t even sit down and watch crappy American TV series anymore. No good old escapism for me. The worst thing about school, though, is that the number of classes that even just remotely interest me is zero. Zero. Which makes all that work even harder because it’s so almost impossible to find motivation for something you don’t give a damn about at all.

So it’s no wonder I’ve been enjoying being sick very very much! As much as you can with your throat and ears hurting like hell ;) But it’s cool and the fact that there’s just one week of school left ’til the holidays makes the prospect of going back to school so much more bearable.

November was surprisingly alright, though. I usually hate Novembers for all their dark, windy, cold, rainy nastiness but there were a couple of very precious moments that made this year’s November so special and unforgettable. The Interpol concert on the 17th, one of the best shows I’ve ever been to, has a lot to do with that.

Speaking of seeing bands: Like I wrote before, I had to go home at the end of last week because I felt that I was starting to feel feverish. I knew I can’t get myself do fix myself food and stuff with a fever, so I had to leave Berlin and have my parents care for me :( And that meant I couldn’t go see The National! I’m really sad about that because I’ve been looking forward to them so much, it could’ve become the last brilliant show of this year of great concerts…

With all those good live performances this year came quite a few amazing records. I feel tempted to make a huge favorite albums of the year kind of post but I shouldn’t get my hopes too high for getting around doing that. But I’ll try! And as unbelievable as it may sound, I have a new layout ready for this place. I was going to upload it before writing this but then all the entailing CSS editing discouraged me and I think I’ll wait till next time I’m going to make a post. Which might be soon. Sooner than February anyway.