Nailing Smoke to the Wall - 2006 in review, part 2

Back for more, with Tony Dale (Lee follows below)

This is the time of year I like to call "nailing smoke to a wall time". With the proliferation of releases on CD and LP on major and minor labels, and the explosion of artifacts issued by the handmade CD-R underground, chances of actually hearing more than an infinitesimal sample of what's going on are slim, and add to that the increasing impact of download only releases and you've got an exercise on par with sorting out the shenanigans of quantum particles. Nonetheless, here is a selection of ten releases that stayed with me more than briefly - works that in effect became invisible co-travelers in the hurtling rail cart that was my passage through 2006.

It must have been around February when I first heard Tanakh's Ardent Fevers (Alien8), and from the first listen I pretty much knew it would be appearing on my best of 2006 list. It followed a 2004 double CD of prepared piano drones, and couldn't have been more different: a sensory overload of songwriting classicism and rock dynamics, tightly controlled pop-songs and explosive guitar freak-outs. Central track "Still Trying to Find You Home" conjures with the heart of the mythological rock beast, Doppler-shifting from the melancholy of Townes Van Zandt to the rampant glory of Crazy Horse in full flight. Shattering the paradigm of the psychedelic underground, Ardent Fevers is a release that deserved to be heard by millions.

Christian Kiefer and Sharron Kraus might seem an odd pairing at first glance, with every possibility that Sharron's powerful and distinctive voice would run right over the top of the subtle melancholy of Christian's low key delivery, so effective on the mordant dust-bowl Western narratives to be found on his brilliant folk-rock opuses Welcome to Hard Times and Medicine Show. But The Black Dove (Tompkins Square) works not despite of this dichotomy but because of it. The tape-trade call-and-response story that evolves through the record plays out like and exchange of letters between a woman and her lover with the twist that the audience becomes increasingly aware that one of them is a ghost. It's unapologetically high concept and highly successful with it. While we're on the subject of skyscraping concepts, they don't come much more ambitious than Current 93's Black Ships Ate the Sky. The first full-length C93 release since 2001's Sleep Has His House (Durtro/Jnana) is a dark river of imagery along a continuum containing everything from nursery rhymes to David Tibet's deeply personal apocalyptic visions, housed in music setting ranging from chamber folk to noise-dirges. Long-term collaborators Michael Cashmore and Stephen Stapleton and new collaborator Ben Chasny are key players in bringing Tibet's visions to life, as various obsessions are given full reign: Gnosticism, Kierkegaard, Louis Wain's Catland, the Patripassianist Heresy and Coptic Christianity all play their part. The hymn "Idumea" is used eight times throughout, most affectingly sung by Marc Almond to open the record and Shirley Collins to close it. The finest Current 93 record since Thunder Perfect Mind and for a while in 2006 I played nothing else.

The biggest discovery for me in 2006 was the Deserted Village label out of Ireland. I guess I'm not the only one - the scene was well represented on Deep Water this year, and Kevin's interview did a lot to put real people and ideas to the mysterious sounds emanating from the label. 2006 marked the year that the fledgling label found its feet, shifting focus from somewhat indigestible improvisation and drone to a more balanced sound containing elements of folk, progressive rock and improvisation. No release exemplified this more than their first "proper" CD release, United Bible Studies The Shore That Fears the Sea. It's all there on one typical track "Tributaries of the River Styx under Dublin" which evolves from an introductory drone/raga form through string band psych-folk over an ambient electronic bridge to a meditative acoustic guitar resting place. Elsewhere, many other delights await the adventurous listener. Dave Colohan is a key United Bible Studies member, and his "solo" project Agitated Radio Pilot provided another one of the year's most comprehensively satisfying releases. Primarily known for melancholy guitar landscapes (as on 2004's A Drifting Population) ARP unleashed a double 3" CD-R - one disc of heartbreaking singer-songwriter material and one disc of more extended progressive rock influenced material - on new Irish CD-R label Rusted Rail. I've reviewed Your Turn to Go It Alone twice already, in my ARP column for Deep Water and for the Ptolemaic Terrascope, so I won't bang on about it any more, except to urge anyone who hasn't heard it to send a few Euros in the direction of Rusted Rail and check it out.

The work of peripatetic Sacramento musician Anton Barbeau is a reminder of a time when great songs with naggingly-insistent hooks roamed the earth in giant primeval herds; as opposed to now, when they are more likely to be found in barely sustainable numbers in fenced sanctuaries. In the Village of the Apple Sun (Four-Way Records) is classic 60s-influenced psychedelic pop, stalking everything from The Who circa The Who Sell Out to the likes of Skip Bifferty and Blossom Toes in its feverishly intelligent search for the perfect audio high. A swirl-up of psych-pop, mini-symphonies, song fragments and found sounds it ping-pongs the listener between delight and bemusement, satisfaction and sonic-interruptus, and has the most potential for melodic skull lodgment of any record I heard in 2006, and it's not always the bits you expect or even want to that stay with you. Also trading in vintage psychedelia, but in a completely different way are Elephant 6 survivors Elf Power, back with their umpteenth full-lengther, which also happens to be strongest outing yet: Back to the Web (Rykodisc). The transition to from recent indie rock outings to driving and highly melodic folk rock works brilliantly and their past occasional weakness are suddenly upended and turned into strengths. Andrew Reitger, never the strongest vocalist, has never sounded better and more suited to his material, and the arrangements are a dense thicket of 12-string guitar, violin and cello, accordion, percussion and much more besides. The influence of Middle Eastern folk and gypsy music is everywhere amidst the splendid production and seamless stream of killer songs, exemplified by the wonderful title track, which recalls the best of West-Coast 60s legends Kaleidoscope. Notionally an odd signing to the elite Rykodisc label, it makes sense when you hear the record.

In a year when the so-called freak-folk movement continued to disappoint with each over-hyped release, fans of psych-folk were probably looking elsewhere for their trips, and several releases stood out once distance from the hype was achieved. Espers have somehow been drawn into the freak-folk thing, though they predate most of the hype, and sound totally different to bands like Wooden Wand, Feathers and Bright Black Morning Light or solo artists like Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom. If you privilege pristine recording techniques, skilled chamber-folk performances, strong composition and pure vocals you are usually going to end up with a pretty damn fine record, and that's exactly what one finds with Espers II (Drag City). Any tendencies to hobbity medievalism are constantly kept in check by Greg Weeks's screaming acid leads and sheets of noise, and the record walks the line between folk and psych and progressive modes perfectly. It's one for lovers of Pentangle, Trees, Spyrogyra and so forth. Fern Knight's second CD Music for Witches and Alchemists (VHF) is cut from the same cloth, and it's no surprise that various Espers members help vocalist, cellist and songwriter Margie Wienk to flesh out her songs into comprehensively great pieces of work. It helps that the material is so strong, of course. More traditional in its approach than the Espers CD, the listener is enveloped in music as delicate and exquisitely beautiful as spun glass. If you ever came across Fern Knight's debut Seven Years of Severed Limbs for the German label Normal Records, forget everything you heard, for Music for Witches and Alchemists takes a lighter and less tangled path, and is a huge evolutionary step from that record.

Any year with a Handsome Family record in it is a good year (they seem to come with the frequency of leap years) and so it is again with 2006 and Last Days of Wonder (Carrot Top). Though perhaps not as strong as its predecessor Singing Bones which followed the duo's relocation from Chicago to New Mexico and captured the hallucinogenic effects of that change in setting perfectly, Last Days of Wonder contains some of Rennie Sparks most extraordinary and surreal lyrics, whether she is imagining the last days of Tesla in the title track or characteristically detailing her impressions of the decay at the edges of towns and cities and, in general, all the scrabbling sounds in the walls of the world elsewhere on the record. Musically, as if not to detract from the pleasures of Rennie's text, Brett Sparks's musical settings are more generically country than on Singing Bones or going back further, their masterpiece Through the Trees. Even so, the results are so singular they easily muscle their way into my top 10 for the year.

I feel bad about some of the things I couldn't include, but on any given day they could also be in my top 10. So honorable mentions to Flying Canyon's self-titled debut on Soft Abuse, Nick Castro's Come into My House on Strange Attractors, Comets on Fire's blistering Avatar on Sub Pop, Sharron Kraus, Meg Baird and Helena Espvals's Leaves From Off the Tree project for Bo' Weavil. These and many others helped make it a great year.

Finally, our man Lee Jackson

What can I say about 2006? It was one of those scramble-just-to-keep-up years. I have no idea how I made it through in one piece. A lot of folks didn't. ‘06 was the year the music died, literally and metaphorically. Many albums dealt with death, just as gods in the rock/pop landscape did the same thing. Nikki Sudden (of the Swell Maps, Jacobites and right on up to his excellent final solo album, Treasure Island), Arthur Lee (the founder of Love), Grant McLennan (The Go-Betweens) and even the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, were still at least hoping to ply their trade when they left us. And then there was the sad demise of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's founder and inspiration on so many levels. Syd the rock star may have died long ago, but it was the real Syd-Roger Keith Barrett-the person whose final days remain enshrouded in mystery and urban myth that finally checked out in 2006.

Albums: I can't help but see Current 93's Black Ships Ate the Sky (Durtro/Jnana) as some sort of all encompassing response to the horror and fear of life today. Black Ships works on many levels: as a warning or prophecy (which is, I think, the real point of apocalyptic art), a mythical commentary on the state of things, as a dark, brooding, psychedelic folk record with rich production value, measured performances and a vivid series of images courtesy of ringmaster, David Tibet. He hasn't sounded this angry in ages, and I'm not sure any Current record has ever sounded this rich and varied sonically. One of Tibet's favorite bands of the moment, Om, also released a prime and short slice of fuzz-sludge skree in second album, Conference of the Birds (Holy Mountain). Epic side-long opener, "At Giza," remains one of the most memorable slow psych workouts I heard in 2006 with nods to The Doors and 13^th Floor Elevators and a welcome restraint that's comparable to the recent recordings of Earth and little else.

In the avant-psychedelic underground it was impossible to ignore the contributions of Matt Valentine, Erika Elder and The Bummer Road in 2006. Mother of Thousands (Time Lag) may not be as good as the finest Valentine's other ensemble The Tower Recordings has to offer, but it's an intense song cycle, touching on death and nature's dominion while exploring the line between free jazz and old blues with enthralling results. Their set at Terrastock probably swayed my opinion here some, but this one's been a bit of a good luck charm round here anyway. Just a quick glance at the cover image makes me smile. Their new one's supposedly even better. A band that I have no doubt the above has influenced in one way or another is Ireland's United Bible Studies. They've dropped a handful of remarkable CD-Rs over the last few years before finally getting an official CD out to the masses. The Shore That Fears the Sea (Deserted Village) is as close as I'll get to a favorite psychedelic folk jazz sort of album in ‘06. And that might just be because of the song, "Hellical Rising," a timeless example of the beauty of trad Irish folk, home recording, banjo and soaring harmonies.

There were quite a few interesting releases that explored similar terrain as the above in fact, revealing that place where trad folk, electronics and jazz overlap. James Blackshaw's O True Believers (Important) saw the young master do things with a 12 string acoustic that made me feel blessed to breathe. I still haven't seen him live, but the gentle plucks, picking and harmonium of this record take me there in a way that no other solo musician really did in ‘06. Mike Tamburo gets close though with the aid of His Orchestra (including contributions from John Fail, Keenan Lawler, Matt McDowell, Brad Rose and more) on the expansive drone raga rush of The Ghosts of Marumbey (Music Fellowship/New American Folk Hero), which fuses his Fahey-esque picking style with dense fogbanks of layered electronics and found sounds. The results bring together the finest aural elements of his past efforts while revealing the oceanic depths of his compositional abilities.

Charalambides have been around a long time and managed to roll through their share of shakeups and changes. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right? A Vintage Burden (Kranky) didn't necessarily hit me like their last official studio album, Joy Shapes, but it did reveal a welcome return to songcraft and tonal intensity that I thought they'd all but abandoned up to this point. Phil Todd and his Ashtray Navigations also dropped a heavenly and masterful mind bomb in Four More Raga Moods (Ikuisuus), which I've gushed about at Foxy Digitalis, so I'll keep it short here and just say that this is my favorite AN platter to date. Bardo Pond released something like four albums in '06, including their latest studio offering, the lumbering drone blast of Ticket Crystals (All Tomorrow's Parties), but I personally was even more impressed with the lovely rustling glide of the limited Sublimation CD on Three Lobed.

I also dug on some of the rock in '06, well a lot of it really (actually I mostly listened to old James Gang albums). It was so nice to see Maryrose Crook and the Renderers back in the game with the masterful, brooding Ghosts of our Vegas Lives (Three Beads of Sweat), and I was very lucky to discover Oakley Hall (this is where Papa Crazy eventually ended up after quitting Oneida), which dropped two albums in '06, the most recent Gypsum Strings (Brah/Jagjaguwar) being my top pick of their propulsive kraut roots (opener "Confidence Man" makes me think of Gram Parsons locked in a 2-note battle with Can). And Comets on Fire dropped a fine barn-burning groove blast in Avatar (Sub Pop), though it never really grabbed me the way their last one did. It seems like a warmer.

Two idiosyncratic songwriters deserve mention this year too. First is Scott Walker, the dark lord of oblique emotional isolation and twisted chamber music. The Drift (4AD), his first album in 11 years, is definitely a Scott Walker record-sonically fascinating, lyrically frustrating, musical journeys straight down into the gaping abyss. Definitely not for everyone but hard to ignore in a roundup like this. Something similar could be said for Joanna Newsom's Ys (Drag City), on which she managed to wrangle Jim O'Rourke as producer, Steve Albini as engineer and Van Dyke Parks as orchestral arranger. If that's not the hipster's dream team, don't know what is. It's not an easy record to enjoy in a conventional sense, but then neither was Parks' solo masterpiece, Song Cycle Vol. 1, and I couldn't imagine living without its bizarre textures. Same goes for Ys. Newsom's pixy voice and ornate delivery are an acquired taste, but the depth of and devotion to her art is undeniably real across these six tracks.

Psych folkies of note in ‘06: Christian Keifer & Sharron Krauss's The Black Dove (Tompkins Square) proved to be a heaven sent pairing with Krauss's angelic English croon and banjo invigorated by Keifer's own hushed folk pop tunes and instrumental embellishments. Flying Canyon's self-titled debut of "doom folk" on Soft Abuse is a mesmerizing warm trek through the dusted back roads of emotional desolation, and Birch Book (B'eirth of the incredible In Gowan Ring in Dylan/Cohen mode) delivered a fine piece of work in Fortune & Folly (Helmet Room), the first recorded but second released Birch Book album. It features another one of my favorite tunes this year in the bittersweet counterculture anthem, "Young Souls." And let's not forget James Toth and his Wooden Wand and the Skyhigh Band, who pulled off a welcome surprise with the haunted Christian psych folk revelries of Second Attention (Kill Rock Stars). Very good stuff, indeed.

A few unclassifiables: Volcano the Bear released their finest studio album to date with Classic Erasmus Fusion (Beta-Lactam). My great letdown of the year was not being able to see them play at Brainwaves (had tickets, plans fell through), but being able to throw on this dazzling chamber/psych/jazz/dada 2CD freakout any damn time I wanted made coping a little easier. Truly amazing. And what about Sunno))) & Boris's long overdue coupling on Altar (Southern Lord). Not bad at all, though maybe a tad underwhelming for my expectations. The song "The Sinking Bell" is a dreamy drift of slow-core psych bliss which earns the album mention here. More impressive with Steven O'Malley's sonic explorations in his new avant-noise trio, Aethenor; Deep in Ocean Sunk the Lamp of Light (VHF) murmured and clattered with a dark life that was unique and immediate. And I hope some people hear The Nether Dawn's Outer Dark (Celebrate Psi Phenomenon), a provocative trawl through ghostly plucks, bluesy motifs, field recordings and sound sculpture from Antony Milton, head honcho at Pseudoarcana.

Limited: There were tons of really amazing CD-R and tape releases this year, far too many to list here now, but a few of my favorites were Pefkin's minimal Nico-esque art-pop scapes on Pingle Pangle (Pseudoarcana); Deep Water's own Adam Bugaj's similarly enthralling sound mobile, Wave of Tears; Agitated Radio Pilot's gleaming dark folk and soundscapery on the Your Turn to Go It Alone double 3" on Rusted Rail; Jazzfinger's Winter's Shadow Between Two Worlds (Curor), Tom Carter's Sunswallower (Wholly Other), The Clear Spots Mansion in the Sky (Deep Water) and pretty much everything I heard on Foxglove and New American Folk Hero, and no I didn't hear it all. I do have a life you know.

And let me just take a moment now to mention the official reissue of Maypole's The Real LP on Anopheles which comes in vinyl only. The version that dropped on CD on Radioactive a year before is a total fraud to be avoided at all costs. Anyway, Maypole is something of a mystery; the Baltimore natives released one album in ‘71. Think Big Star, Pretty Things and the like. It's simply one of the rawest and most ambitious heavy psych/power pop hybrids I've ever heard. I hope more people catch on, and something tells me they will. There were a lot of amazing reissues this year, but this is the only one I'm mentioning here.

So I could keep going. Both Neil Young and Bob Dylan released albums that mattered in '06, and what about Wolf Eyes, Keenan Lawler, Six Organs of Admittance, Rick Bishop, Espers, Alastair Galbraith/ Richard Youngs/ Alex Neilson? There was an overwhelming abundance of moving, important releases and just too little time to sort through it all. No matter. Long live the creative impulse!

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