5 Alternative Top 5s for, but not necessarily related to, 2012.

Since I started this blog my mission statement has been "I can't compete with Pitchfork, so why bother?" So why compile a list of the 10/40/1000 best albums/songs/gigs of 2012 when a million other publications have produced better ones? Nonetheless, I thought putting together a few end of year lists would be fun.

Instead of doing a more traditional "best of the year" list, I've decided to compile 5 top 5s that I want to compile. Are they related to 2012? I think one is. I hope that they are nonetheless funny, informative, and a little bit different. To help me with making these lists I've drafted in two of my closest musical allies: Tyrone Stoddart and Finlay Bernard. Tyrone is a long-term friend and band mate. He somehow manages to simultaneously have the best and worst sense of humour of anyone I know. Finlay has something that was vitally important to this project. He has the largest one I've ever seen. It's meticulously maintained. It is however unfortunately so big that women find it intimidating.

His music collection. 

He has a large music collection.

Pervert.

Music I just did not get this year.
I try not to be a dick in life. It helps. I named this blog Pointless, Harsh, and Long after the Dirty Projectors lyrics over on the right there, but I like the dual meaning. I think that the majority of blogging is indeed pointless, harsh and long, and I hope that I distance myself from that, even if only a little. But every now and then being a dick is important. It's also good for the soul. Patiently allow me to get 5 things off my chest:

1. The Lovely Eggs - Wildlife
• Wildlife is one of the worst albums I have ever had the displeasure of hearing. I imagine the band's sound could only be replicated by handing instruments to the nastiest, sleaziest nursery-age children that money could buy. You would indeed be buying them, because their parents would have sold them on the black market.
  
  
2. Holly Herdon - Movement
• I wish I loved Movement - it would allow me to say boundlessly pretentious things like "I can totally hear her Skype calls coming through these songs".
  
  
3. Swans - The Seer
• I patiently waited 10 and a half minutes for the introduction to this song to end.
  
  It didn't.
  
  
4. Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...
   
   

   I'll admit I only came to the snappily titled The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do recently, based on the attention it has been getting in critics' best of 2012 lists. I might grow to love it over time, but for now I just don't get it.

   
   

   I was immediately struck by how well Ms. Apple can write lyrics - her phrasing is exceptional - but when listening to the album I simply feel stressed.  Maybe it's because Apple and her jazz background are smarter than I am, but an hour or so of almost atonal piano music makes me feel like I'm listening to a woman's dissent into madness. Not in a cool Brand New way, but in an "I've chosen to listen to the soundtrack to The Shining as a bit of light entertainment" kind of way.

   
   
5. San Cisco
• Full Disclosure: I've not even listened to this band. I loathed them from the second I saw that the screenshot for a YouTube video for a song called "Awkward" featured some Topman-looking indie brat singing with an iPhone text messaging box superimposed next to his head with the words "do do do do do doo do" in it.
  
  
  Am I getting old and grumpy? Probably. But if the band's record label are going to describe Awkward as a "viral megahit from down under" I don't want to listen to it.

Best Opening Tracks.
And so ends our connection to 2012, and also, thankfully, our connection to being a massive dick. Despite what iTunes has done to the way we listen to music, it should not be forgotten that albums, in their entirety, are works of art. My favourite albums are those which feel like journeys. When the last song ends I like to feel like I've been part of something, that something significant has taken place over the court of the record. Of course, every journey must have a beginning, and these are some of our favourites.

1. Hornets! Hornets! by The Hold Steady, opening Separation Sunday.
• Separation Sunday is perhaps the best example of the album-as-journey idea I led off with. When How a Resurrection Really Feels closes the record it's impossible not to feel as if you've borne witness to a significant development in the life of the record's main character, Holly.
  
  Hornets! Hornets! sets the tone perfectly. Craig Finn's raspy narrative "sung" solo, talking about girls who are "gonna have to go with with whoever's gonna get me the highest", sets the tone perfectly for the seedy, drug filled story of redemption to follow.
  
  
2. Pots & Pans by Les Savy Fav, opening Let's Stay Friends.
• Pots & Pans stands apart from the magnificent chaos that is Let's Stay Friends. It's driven by mid-tempo purposiveness, huge, delay-soaked guitars and some of the finest drumming on the record. It's sort of how I imagine Coldplay would sound if they had balls.  It acts as a mission statement as much as it does an introduction:
  
  "The people said no. The drummer said yes. This tour is a test."
  
  
3. Perth by Bon Iver, opening Bon Iver, Bon Iver.*
• The true power of Perth as an opening track is apparent when it's used to open Bon Iver's live sets.
  
  *yup, it's called "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" and it's by Bon Iver.
  
  
4. Jenny was a Friend of Mine by The Killers, opening Hot Fuss.
• Just as it's unwise to go full retard, it's unwise to go full Vegas. Before the Killers went full neon lights and suspect facial hair, the massive Jenny was a Friend of Mine opened their perfect debut.
  
  
5. Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes, opening Elephant.
• Seven Nation Army has become this generation's Stairway to Heaven. Everyone you went to high school with can "play" it on guitar. It's used in football chants. When you search it on YouTube one of the suggested results is "Seven Nation Army dubstep". It's easy to forget that, when played properly, it's actually a really great riff and that's why it became so popular in the first place.

Best songs under two minutes long.
It's easy to tell if a short song works. It should leave you feeling like you need more. The beauty of such songs though is that they can be listened on repeat without feeling tired.

1. True Colours by Gallows. [0:39]
• PUNK MUSIC.
  
  
2. Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River. [1:19]
• It wouldn't be a PH&L blog post without gratuitous Okkervil River adoration. Black Sheep Boy is of course in fact Tim Harden's track, and in many ways is everything an Okkervil River Song is not: short and to the point with no flowery lyrics. The contrast is fascinating, especially when it is borne in mind that this tiny song led Will Sheff to create an entire double album about the troubled "Black Sheep Boy".
  
  
3. Self Esteem by Andrew Jackson Jihad. [1:37]
• Some songs simply don't need to be long, as this fine folk punk demonstrates. Could you cram this much John Darnielle-y lyrical artistry and crash cymbal love into just one minute and thirty seven seconds?
  
  
  No. You could not.
  
  
4. Stranger Calls by Honeydrum. [1:52]
• Three things that we're intensely passionate about: Lobster Festivals, Donald Sutherland, and good value music.
  
  
  The French Canadian province of New Brunswick has given the world all three. Honeydrum's excellent shoegaze pop 7" is available for a mere $1. The title track fits comfortably into our sub 2:00 criteria.
  
  
5. Fashion Coat by The National. [2:03]
• Okay, so we're cheating with this one. The studio version of Fashion Coat actually comes in at 2:03, but our roguish amateurism is why you're still reading... right?
  
  
  High Violet, the band's latest album, is a masterpiece of atmosphere, helped in no small way by its excellent production: Matt Berninger's baritone singing often sounds like the voice of God. But returning to 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers reminds us just how good the band's songs and textures, stripped of all expensive studio tricks, actually are. The succinct Fashion Coat is exemplary.
  
  
  "Everywhere I am is just another thing without you in it."

Best unreasonably long song titles.
We started compiling this one on a purely objective basis - most characters wins. But that just got boring. All the winners were either obscure post rock bands or Sufjan Stevens.Instead, we've compiled 5 tracks with long titles, but tracks that are also worth listening to.

1. The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation - Rednex.
• We said worth listening to, but we couldn't not include the outright winner. At 305 characters (including spaces) Rednex win.
  
  It's just a shame that everything about the song is terrible.
  
  
2. The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won - Chumbawamba.
• Not technically a song, so it couldn't win, but at 865 characters it deserves an honorary mention. What's more, the album is pretty much everything that the Rednex song is not.
  
  Everything about it isn't terrible.
  
  
3. They Provide the Paint for the Picture Perfect Masterpiece That You Will Paint on the Inside of Your Eyelids - Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution.
• The best part of this song is listening to Thomas Kalnoky sing its title in about 3 seconds.
  
  
4. Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Our Music is All Awful Noise and We're Just a Bunch of No-Goods - All Shall Be Well (and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well).
• Some post-rock made the list. This band deserved a mention because of their humility and humour. They're lovely, check 'em out.
  
  
5. Late Due to Sweatpants Boner (Alarm Malfunction, Slow Motion Love Interest, Mean Principal, Etc.) by Ebu Gogo.
• When pushing Finlay on the subject of why this song ought to make the list he began to describe it as "happy math rock... sort of".
  
  That charming description was reason enough.

Top 5 songs to make love to.

1. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
2. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
3. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
4. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
5. Remix to ignition - R Kelly

My own personal top 5 musical moments of 2012.
I know this makes it 6 top 5s, but this last one's just for me. 

1. Discovering Titus Andronicus.
   I wrote pretty extensively about why I fell in love with Titus Andronicus in October's post The Enemy Is Everywhere. The band's existentialist indie punk has soundtracked the year of my life in which I came to realise that we've only got one life, and that it's far too short to be spent doing something we don't love.
   
   
2. My first encounter with vinyl.
   In an apartment just north of UT campus in Austin, Tx, the girl I had just begun dating (I was living in the States, it was "dating") introduced me to the ritual of dropping the needle and listening to music the way it was supposed to be enjoyed. 
   
   
   I couldn't have asked for a better Sunday morning.
   
   
3. SXSW 2012
   Early in 2011 I had to chose which University I wanted to study abroad at for a year. I had no idea. The University of Texas at Austin stood out. I knew a lot of bands from the city. I'd heard that it played host to a variety of music festivals.
   
   
   Snobs will tell you that SXSW isn't what it used to be. That could be the case, but I struggle to care. Admittedly, I didn't have a badge so couldn't attend any of the badge-only events, the state of which I suspect is what bugs a lot of SXSW veterans.
   
   SXSW 2012 was one of the greatest weeks of my life, but it made me reflect a little unhappily on Scotland and it's drinking culture. At virtually every event I attended in the festival I was handed free drink, free food, and asked to enjoy good films or good music.
   
   
   When I returned to Scotland over the summer I began working at an outdoor bar in the Edinburgh festival. Drink promotions are outlawed in Scotland because of our chronic binge-drinking culture. While this hacks me off, I can understand the rule. Even without people consuming inane amounts of unreasonably cheap booze, as a barman I saw some pretty shameful stuff, received abuse, and witnessed plenty of fights. While I loved SXSW, the contrast made me sad to realise that Scots can't be trusted with a drink.
   
   
4. Bonding.
   One of my favourite pastimes is spamming the Facebook walls of friends with links to bands that they might like. I enjoy getting spammed in return.
   
   
   While both my brother and I are middle class white boys from a well-to-do suburb in the south of Edinburgh, this year I discovered that we're both pretty passionate about hip-hop. As passionate about hip-hop as two middle class white boys from a well-to-do suburb in the south of Edinburgh can be. A beautiful spamming relationship ensued.
   
   
5. Starting this blog.
   I have no idea what I want to do with my life, but I think it's important that I try to find something that I love. I've started this blog. Over 1000 people from across the world have read it. I've also been lucky enough to do a bit of work for AnyDecentMusic?
   
   I owe a massive thank you to my friend mentioned in no.2 for encouraging me to grow some balls and start searching for a career I'll enjoy.

Scotland the (not so) Brave.

• Reflections on the connection between Scotland's music, history, and culture.

When I find time between blogging and complaining about university I write songs. Recently I was toying with some lyrics that raised a few eyebrows from a band mate:

Edinburgh is in my soul -
in poetry, pain, and worn stone. 

There's grit and rain in my bones.

To me this seemed largely self explanatory but apparently it is not. Here I'd like to talk a little about where I was going with these lyrics, and the influence that I think that Edinburgh and Scotland generally have over their resident artists.

Before we begin, I'd like to set a couple of things straight:

• This is a link to 500 Miles by The Proclaimers. Watch it. Purge it from your system. If we're going to have a serious discussion about Scotland and music, certain songs need to be very much out of consideration.
  
  
• I'm not a nationalist. Here I'm talking about cultural pride, not nationalist pride. Cultural pride is healthy, nationalist political pride is not. Being an advocate for a nation's art and culture is not the same as wanting a nation's independence because of a thinly veiled bruised ego. Sadly the distinction all too often becomes a little blurry.
  
  

I don't want to talk politics, so let's move on to art. In 2009 Pitchfork reviewed We Were Promised Jetpacks' These Four Walls. The most interesting line in the review suggested that "perhaps there is something about a thick Scottish accent that allows us to indulge in grandiose emotional sentiments... swaddled in glottal stops and guttural consonants, the dramatic changes in dynamic feel earned and the sensitive lyrics feel roguishly honest." 

So it would seem that Scots have an innate ability to convey sentimentality with a certain legitimacy. Indeed, Pitchfork has been far from forgiving when Americans wear their hearts on their sleeves: they demolished Seattle-based The Head and the Heart and Texan Josh T. Pearson for their over-earnest, pandering lyrics and delivery.

Where might Scotland derive this innate ability from? From a young age I have had a vague awareness of being part of a literary and artistic culture. My first exposure to adult literature was through the massive collection of Inspector Rebus novels owned by my mother and grandmother. Ian Rankin made Edinburgh itself a character in those novels: a dark and troubled one plagued by the constant sense of the weight of history. Indeed, Rankin has authored an entire book on the essential "Scottishness" of his characters. More classically, Scotland was the birthplace of Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns. I studied Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde in high school and I think it would be fair to say that the polarised light and dark of the main character/s symbolises Edinburgh and the mysterious contrasts that Rankin brings out so well. Elsewhere in high school I studied Muriel Spark's ultra-bohemian, ultra-upper-crust-Edinburgh Miss Jean Brodie. What's more, Edinburgh boasts the tallest monument to a writer in the world and plays host to the world's largest arts festival.

The country's geography and architecture - and the way they often combine - add to this foundation of inspirational sentimentality. The view from the window of the room I write in looks a little like this. The photo collages on the Wikipedia pages for Glasgow and Edinburgh are perfect showcases for the sorts of scenes that I find inspire the songs I write. The literary history is the "poetry" I mention in the lyrics I opened with, the physical appearance of the country is the "worn stone". 

To move away from my own work, I find that the songs that I make the strongest connections with are those in which the lyricist drops in small details that make the events and settings in the songs real. It gives the impression of the song existing as a small part of something with much greater significance. This occurs regardless of whether the songs are about places, events, or people. A good non-cultural example is Ryan Adams. Adams is a master of picking out the most painful post-break details, honing in on the memory of "the way she loses her keys" or the striking absence of "the dresses, the shoes, and the clothes". To consider more nebulous concepts but to bring argument back to music channelling a wider culture, I found that living in America brought the music of bands like The Hold Steady to life, allowing me to truly appreciate the little tropes, characters and stereotypes that comprise Craig Finn's world.

The examples of Scottish artists using Scottish details to give their songs a sense of being part of an extensive history are many: Scott Hutchison references the Forth Road Bridge and Roddy Woomble describes the "rain in Albion Street". Look deeper than these explicit references to Scottish locations and we find Woomble describing "tartan blankets" (in Hour after Hour, a song so folk I can't find it on YouTube), a simple artefact that ought to fill anyone who has spent time in the Scottish Highlands with a nostalgic glow. Deeper still is the atmosphere created by King Kreosote and Jon Hopkins, depicting the sense of awesome lonely space that the Highlands can fill us with.

Once all explicit references to Scotland are removed - what remains? I like to think that Scots artists channel their history and surroundings to create ineffable connections to their home country whether they intend to or not. I think that with the lyrics I mentioned in the introduction to this piece I was trying to describe the sense of history that I find inescapably affects the way I think and write, but yet can't quite put my finger on. This would indeed offer some explanation as to why Pitchfork felt that there was a hard-to-pin-down reason that We Were Promised Jetpacks could be sincere without being clichéd or gimmicky when others perhaps could not.

Of course I know that this argument isn't without its flaws. I appreciate that I could be putting sentimental carts before logical horses. It could very well be the case that the centuries of history do not lend legitimacy to the art, but instead the Scottish accent forges a false connection to the past and fools the listener into thinking there is legitimacy where in fact none exists. Maybe the Scottish accent is like the kilt towel or the whisky flavoured condom: a gimmicky exploitation intended to do nothing more than encourage the gullible to depart with their cash.

I realise that by stating my argument is based on something ineffable I make it unchallengeable in the same way that religious types make the existence of God unchallengeable ("aha! But you can't prove God doesn't exist") but that, I suppose, is sort of the point. With this piece I have presented some evidence which may or may not point towards something that cannot be proven or dis-proven. I suppose I'm arguing that a degree of faith is required. Scots are a sentimental and emotional people after all... 

Critics, Genres, and One Way Streets.

• Reflections on why genre classifications and the opinions of music critics ought to viewed as existing as part of a "one way street", set up by way of me trying to defend a few bands that people might be too quick to dismiss as "emo".
  

Whenever I go drinking or driving with my brother (note: or) there reaches a point in the evening when he asks me a very important question: "Do you still have Ricky Martin's 1999 gem of Latin pop-perfection Livin' la Vida Loca on your iPod?" Each time I answer yes. Good god, yes.

My music collection operates under a strict no-deletion policy. My iTunes collection has outlived several computers, USB hard drives, and iPods. I enjoy rediscovering a song or album I haven't listened to for years. I also enjoy intentionally revisiting songs that I listened to growing up; songs from the likes of Alkaline Trio or Green Day.

I'm not saying that those who aren't willing to endure an entire Atreyu record because it was acceptable ten years ago aren't "real music fans". I'm not trying to force my opinion on anyone. As will become clear, the point in this post is to encourage reader's not to take the opinions of others seriously. To make this point I'd like to try and defend three bands that some might be too quick to dismiss as mere "emo". Having made a cliched "never judge a book by its cover" argument, I'll then move on to talk a little about my philosophy on why genre classification and the opinions of music critics exist on a one way street.

STARS.

I'll start with a band who, despite displaying a few emo traits, are easy to defend. Any release by Canadian Broken Social Scene affiliates Stars is typically met with critical acclaim. When presented as a list of facts, however, Stars sound... awful:

• The cover of Set Yourself on Fire features a semi-naked chick in a pink balaclava wielding some sort of bloodied knife and/or sex toy. 
• Oh yeah, it's called Set Yourself on Fire.
• The album Heart (yup, it's called Heart) opens with a track called What the Snowman Learned About Love which itself starts with each band member saying in turn "I'm ___, and this is my heart."
• In Do You Want to Die Together? Torquil Campbell asks "What's the point of life without my heart?" He is 40 years old.

On the basis of these facts alone I would forgive anyone for writing off Stars as a band of trembling train wrecks who haven't emotionally aged since high school. Given a chance, however, Stars simply make sense. There's something undeniably alluring about Campbell's obscure-actor background; a background that lends a certain legitimacy to the melodrama of his music. Moreover, musically, Stars never miss a beat. Even if a listener doesn't feel that Campbell's acting career can redeem his preteen lyricism, the millimetre-perfect pop that his band plays is irresistible.

The beat two push right before the second verse of Reunion has the power to wash away a multitude of sins.

BRAND NEW - The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. 

Perhaps less immediately defensible are Brand New. The band unavoidably attracts comparison to the emo genre, being associated with the likes of Taking Back Sunday and Finch. I won't try to defend their discography as a whole. It would be fair to say that their first record is lost to the chasm that is the early-00's emo movement. Album number three, The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me is however an undeniable work of genius. Its title makes reference to bipolar disorder, and every second of the record seems to have been birthed from a place of complete madness. Obsession, extreme self-loathing, screaming insanity and grisly deaths of innocent children. They're all here. The atmosphere of this loose concept album is absolutely enveloping. When combined with expertly deployed dynamics, the results can be genuinely unsettling.

Were that not enough, Degausser and Sowing Season are built on guitar work that Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor would be proud to call their own. The drum production on tracks like Millstone and You Won't Know is beefier than a burger encased in other burgers instead of a bun. If you're sitll not convinced, listen to the noisy-as-hell minor-major modulation halfway through Limousine.

FOUR YEAR STRONG - Rise or Die Trying.

Now i'm backed furthest into my emo-defence corner. Four Year Strong's Rise or Die Trying utilises more staples of the emo genre than either of the above examples. It makes regular use of that sickly, blocky synth lead sound made popular by Enter Shikari. Women are referred to as "catastrophes". Hell, sometimes the album breaks into full on screamo beatdowns.

But Four Year Strong gets away with it. The band makes tongue in cheek pop punk music that knows exactly what it is and doesn't apologise for it. It's impossible not to enjoy song titles like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Hell" or "Beatdown in the Key of Happy" when it's understood that they're meant to be fun and uplifting. If the album artwork doesn't make you smile then you don't have a soul. The reason Four Year Strong can pull off their shenanigans is that behind them lies an extremely competent group of musicians. Palm muted guitar riffs and drum fills are gloriously executed at break-neck speeds. The lyrics, while not to be taken seriously, display a great aptitude for rhythm and rhyme. Their vocal harmonies don't need to be defended by anyone.

Rise or Die Trying definitely isn't Sunday morning music, but it's definitely great music. It doesn't go well with a glass of red wine on a pleasant evening, but I'd recommend it for the gym: the balance of anger and uplift works wonders.

And so to move on to the broader point I'd like to make. First, I'll concede that I haven't really defended emo here. I haven't tried to defend the likes of My Chemical Romance because some things are simply indefensible. What I have done here is point out that great music has been produced by bands that some might overlook because of unhealthy associations with that most stigmatised of genres. I hope it's apparent from the above that what these bands have in common - whether it's the pop-perfection of Stars, the atmosphere of Brand New, or the complexity of Four Year Strong - is that they have undeniable talent that transcends any petty, irrelevant genre classification. They've simply made good music that I enjoy listening to. Good music that I might have been inclined to ignore or turn away from if I was embarrassed by its links to emo.

In my post The 5% I wrote extensively on the dangers of our social musical prejudices. Genre bias I think is another example of the cancerous prejudice I talked about in that article. From a similar place as the genre and social prejudices also comes music critic influence prejudice. I find it easy to recognise this in others because I have to work hard to fight it in myself. Just as I find it vital to suppress thoughts like "am I too old to be listening to Four Year Strong?", I find it vitaI to suppress thoughts like "I really like everything by Bloc Party but maybe I shouldn't. Pitchfork only gave Four a 4.9." In my previous post, Critical Engagement, I talked about why it's important to remember that artists are only people. In the same vein, it's important to remember that music critics are only people who happen to get paid to voice their opinion.

This of course isn't exactly correct. In providing a lettered or numbered rating for an album a good critic will take "big picture" issues, external to his or her own opinion, into account. They will consider how far the artist in question has developed since their last record, or whether the record is pushing the genre with which the artist is associated to interesting new places or merely causing it to stagnate, in turn reflecting badly on that artist's peers. These factors are however irrelevant to the average listener's enjoyment of music. While they are important in a broad sense, they ought to be entirely divorced from any subjective and emotional connection a listener makes with a song or record. What's more, while these issues are important, what essentially lies at the centre of every review is nonethless merely an opinion. A professional critic's opinion is no more valid than the opinion of a banker or a shop clerk. On top of all this, owing to the subjective nature of opinions and musical taste it is arguably dangerous to associate them with any notion of "validity" in the first place.

If an album by a band you've never heard of has been critically lauded, check it out. If a band is said to be of the same or similar genre to your favourite band, check them out. A negative review of an album you like however is irrelevant. A great album being associated with emo is irrelevant. It must be borne in mind that genre classifications are essentially nothing more than a means of cataloguing art. It's mad that they've become decisive in shaping our tastes. Equally important to remember is that critical media exists solely to serve the public. It should never work the other way around. 

Genres and reviews therefore operate on a one way street. They allow us to pull good music towards ourselves, but they should never cause us to push it away.

Critical Engagement.

• Reflections on the importance of being able to critically engage with our own work and the work of others.

"Yeah, but you didn't" is a phrase I've gotten used to hearing. I hear it a lot because I begin sentences with "if I made this album I would have..." a lot. Here I want to let off a bit of steam and give three examples of easily-correctable mistakes that have inexplicably slipped through the production net. However, having done that I'd like to talk a little bit about the critical process, because I think it's unhealthy to be unduly deferential towards artists and assume they got it right simply because they happen to sit on the right side of the reasonable talent + sufficient drive + right place at the right time equation. This post is about the importance of critical engagement with art, and about why criticial engagement isn't quite the same as all-out criticism.

THE XX - INTRO

Where better to begin than with complaints about an introduction? The introduction to The xx's first album is really cool. Unfortunately, it's also entirely gratuitous. It's engaging, offering glimmering hints of the album to come. It builds up... Then fades out awkwardly before the album proper starts with VCR. It winds me up because it's glaringly obvious how the introduction could, and should, have been made to work.

The introduction is in A minor. VCR is in A minor's relative major - C. In layman's terms: you can shove them together and it'll sound good. VCR begins with the glockenspiel-sounding thing playing solo. There's something pretty about the musical space of the first few bars. What would highlight this space better than the contrast created by a minor introduction crescendo-ing to the point of bursting then catching the listener off guard by choosing, rather than to allow that tension to explode, to suddenly modulate to the major key whilst ripping out all of the instrumentation, leaving nothing but the delicate glockenspiel melody? Simple, really.

For an example of this sort of "gapless introduction" done right, see the excellent and unfortunately one-off A Call to Arms EP by Thomas Kalnoky's Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution. The introduction and Here's to Life are separate tracks on the CD, but there isn't a gap of silence between them. Rather than being purely gratuitous, the introduction is a logical extension of the opening track: separating them out on the disk simply gives the listener the option of skipping the introduction if they want to get into the song itself right away.

WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS - HARD TO REMEMBER

In my experience as a Scot living abroad I have found that our nation's international profile owes a great deal to Mel Gibson and quality indie written by bands signed to Fat Cat Records. Based on Scotland's debt owed to Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks, this complaint feels uncomfortably like treason. Nonetheless, someone involved in the creation of We Were Promised Jetpacks' second record has a lot of explaining to do. The album's fifth track, Hard to Remember, isn't the best the band has ever produced, but that's okay. For people into big, doomy, Mogwai-sounding guitar music it's probably a fairly enjoyable listen.

There's a major problem however with the song's chorus. "It's hard to remember a colder November". Each time it's sung, the middle syllable of November sounds awful. Whether the problem is that a few more vocal takes were required to get it right, or if it's just an unfortunate but unavoidable terrible melody and lyric combination for Adam Thomson's voice is hard to say, but someone in the chain of production failed in their duty to prevent that syllable from reaching public ears. I can appreciate that some might argue that the raw sound of the vocal track is healthy for modern music but there's an ocean of subtle difference separating raw from off-key.

THE JOY FORMIDABLE - WHIRRING [album version]

My third complaint is perhaps best exemplified by attempting to reconstruct a conversation that might have taken place between Ritzy Bryan, singer of The Joy Formidable and Rich Costey, the producer of the band's first album. I imagine it went something like:

• "Rich. Y'know Whirring?
  
  "The song from your EP? Yup. Love it."
  
  "Cool, well seeing as we're re-recording it for the debut album, I've got a great idea for what we can do with it."
  
  "I'm always open to new ideas - shoot."
  
  "Right, well the song is three and a half minutes long. I'm thinking seven min..."
  
  "I'm gonna stop you there. Seven minute songs are hard to pull off. You've got to do a lot to keep listeners engaged for that long. You guys especially will have to be careful - you make a lot of noise. Your noise works, but what makes it work is your immediacy and intensity. What are you thinking? Maybe a quiet section? An interesting middle 8? Something technical? Some nice guitar melodies?"
  
  "Shit no! Y'know the point where the song ends? Where a reasonable person would end the song? Where we ended the song first time round? Yeah, that bit. From then on we're just going to smash the fucking shit out of our instruments for three and a half minutes. Sound good?"

It's hard to pinpoint exactly the point between the producer's brain and his mouth that "that's really fucking dumb" became "great!" but it's a shame that it did.

While this post has been primarily an opportunity for me to vent, I hope that it inspires anyone reading to think about all those little things that could have been done differently. I think that this is especially important for anyone involved in anything creative, whether it's painting, writing high school essays, or playing in a band. William Faulkner said that writers have to be willing to kill their darlings. My favourite paraphrase of this comes from Will Sheff, who has said that artists must be willing to kill their babies. To that end, criticising the work of others is perfect practice for when the time comes to be objective and unsentimental about our own work.

On a lighter and more general note, being critical is a lot of fun. Lester Bangs got it right when he said that we have to remember that rock stars are only people. This in mind, he began his interviews by saying the most offensive thing he could think of. As I said in the introduction, a significant portion of the formula for success is simply right place/right time. If you've got an opinion on something, don't shy away from sharing it: who says your view isn't as valid as the man with recording contract? Don't be afraid to stand on any toes. If artists can't take cheap shots to the ego then they shouldn't put their work into the public domain. Now, I hope that it is obvious that this is all part of one big cycle. We have to be willing to kill our babies, take pot shots at the offspring of others, but ultimately be okay with people prodding our own kids with sharp sticks.

Of course, everything is a question of balance. I'm not advocating a musical Occupy Movement. It's important to be both critical and open minded. We have to learn what we like and what we don't like, and why. Having done that it becomes interesting to try and figure out the reasons behind the decisions of artists that we perhaps don't agree with. This is what I like to think of as critical engagement, and it can in fact lead us to discover a new love for things that we at first would have dismissed.

Anyone who I have ever engaged with on the topic of music will be aware that I am unreasonably deferential towards the artistic output of the aforementioned Will Sheff and his band, Okkervil River. However, if I wasn't prepared to reserve criticism and persist with some his work I don't think I would appreciate a lot of it to the extent that I do. The band's songs roughly divide into three groups: the big pop-rock hits, the mellow folk tunes, and the slow-burners. The slow-burners drop the tempo to a plod and often drag on beyond the five minute mark. Give them time, however, and they'll make it worth your while. When given your full attention and taken in the context of their respective albums as coherent wholes, the musical and lyrical crescendos in tracks like Blue Tulip and So Come Back, I Am Waiting can be deeply moving. Seven or eight listens in, a simple lyric like "I lie back on my pillow and ask what her husband is like" can suddenly make each part of a track like Hanging from a Hit fall into place, colouring in everything that comes before and after and making it obvious just how good a song it is. 

I admit, however, that when I first discovered the band my mental category now called "slow burners" was called "the boring self indulgent ones". Nonetheless, my love for the immediately accessible pop-rock hits led me to give time to the mellow folk tunes. Getting to know these tracks caused my interest in Sheff as an artist to grow. I discovered that the man understands that an album in its entirety is a work of art. Everything from the artwork to the lyrical themes ought to lend something to the album's overall expressive purpose. Respecting that, I gave the slow burners the attention they truly deserve.

In amongst my musings lies a lesson. Removing artists from pedestals is healthy, but it isn't a licence to be an asshole. Critically engaging with art deepens our appreciation of it, but it isn't the same as being needlessly critical. Overall, learning to critique the work of others improves our ability to critique, and accept criticism of, our own.

Painting in Black and White.

• Reflections on why it's acceptable to compare every noisey two-piece indie rock act to The White Stripes.

On Friday night a friend of mine took me to see the Gaslight Anthem. They deliver what they promise. Anthems.

Anyway, more contentious was the entirely inappropriately chosen main support, Blood Red Shoes. The loud Brighton-based double act bombed. It's not that there's anything particularly terrible about them - sloppy time keeping and gratuitous PA system-based introductory music that staggers into a first track in an awkwardly different key are sins which can be forgiven as misplaced enthusiasm - it's just that there's nothing particularly interesting about them.

Let's just say they're no White Stripes.

"No!" you'll complain. "Comparing every indie rock duo to The White Stripes is predictable and unfair. It would be like comparing 95% of all rock bands to The Beatles simply because they also happen to have four members." While I agree with you in principle, the reality is that the comparisons are unavoidable. A heavily distorted guitar accompanied solely by a drum kit is an extremely limited and specific musical palette. If you choose to restrict your resources in this manner then you unavoidably face comparison with the act that perfected the formula.

Picture, if you will excuse the pun, an artist choosing to create a new work using nothing but black ink on white paper. If the artist were a good one, there would be a reason behind this decision. He would innovate. Depth, tone, and expression would have to be represented in a manner not requiring colour, or their absence would have to be felt for a very specific and thought-provoking reason. No absence would be felt.

There would be a big difference between such a competent painting and a painting which was merely unfinished - a series of black lines waiting to be coloured in.

The White Stripes represent the master artist here. Their limited palette works because Jack White is simply an extremely competent and innovative guitar player. Moreover, their particular blues rock influenced niche lends itself well to both rhythm and lead duties being handled by the one guitar.

Death From Above 1979 pull it off by making so much noise and having so much energy that any additional band members would be drowned out and left behind.

Last month Two Gallants successfully deployed the formula on The Bloom and the Blight. Sure, not every track on that album is a keeper (although let me assure you that some are), but it works because both drummer and guitarist have enough musical charisma to keep the whole thing interesting.

Blood Red Shoes however create unfinished paintings for no apparent reason. Rather than do something creative with the two person formula, they write uninspiring rock songs without colour or variation. Now, having a lead guitarist or bass player wouldn't instantly make the band interesting - a bland song is a bland song - but it would at least be a start.  

It's a shame though to come to such a conclusion when the resources for innovation are definitely already available. Both band members sing. Two vocalists: one male, one female. Do we see interesting lyrics, interplay, harmonies, and novel ways of highlighting the natural contrast between their voices, leaving us convinced that any band with more than two members is acting in a lazy or self indulgent manner? No. They take it in turns to do the exact same thing. Yell. Different gender, same yelling.

Big. Snare. And. Crash. Cymbal. Bangs. On. Each. Beat. Of. The. Bar. Accompanying. Big. Ol'. Power. Chords. And. Shouting. Only. Works. In. Moderation.

The Enemy Is Everywhere.

• Reflections on Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, and a questioning of the extent to which our station in life affects our taste in music.

Titus Andronicus were one of those bands whose name I'd read a lot around the internet. Friends had recommended them, grouping them (loosely, I now see) with lyric-heavy bands like Okkervil River or The Hold Steady. I was aware of the Springsteen New Jersey lineage.

I finally caught the band at SXSW 2012. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was way too hot. The entire week I had only  one pair of jeans with me. No shorts. The jeans got sweaty. The desert-heat hangovers were horrible things. Still, Gin and Tonic courtesy of whoever was sponsoring whatever event always made them better. I think I only began fully functioning each day around 5pm. I probably did some serious damage to my body over the course of the festival.

Despite my afternoon blues, Titus Andronicus put on one of the best shows I'd seen all week - and they made my sweating look amateur while doing it.

The night before I had watched the Shins, supported by M. Ward. When the keyboard malfunctioned during a (sort of) cover of a Monsters of Folk track, Ward stormed off the stage as his techs, embarrassed, tried to fix whatever was wrong. His band shared awkward glances. The crowd shuffled or giggled nervously. Ward could be seen just of stage, throwing himself into a small chair, his mutterings distantly being picked up by some working mic. I've still got a lot of love for the man, but ever since things just haven't been the same.

The following day Titus Andronicus also suffered some sort of malfunction. What went wrong I can't remember. It doesn't matter. I took a while to fix. I think. Was it ever fixed? Probably. I don't know. Not one person in the crowd cared. Singer Patrick Stickles kept the crowd entertained - simply by talking at them. He talked about the shirt he was wearing (The Men), and drank from one of those weird, milk carton-looking free water thingies they were giving out, twisting it upside down as he drank, elbows at all sorts of angles, in order to drain its contents in a few seconds. His unique, wide-eyed, unhinged charisma was captivating, especially after Ward's performance from the night before. The man is all the right kinds of mad.

The music's pretty good too.

Since that day I've been a fan of the band. I was pleased, then, to see that 2011's The Monitor made it into Pitchfork's recently published People's List. It wasn't surprising to see the band doing so well after the site's heartfelt endorsement of their music. However, it interested me to read that 88% of survey respondents were, like me, male. The most represented age bracket was the one in which I find myself: 21-25. I find myself slap bang in the middle of the Pitchfork bell curve. Slap bang in the middle of the bell curve of people who are inclined to spend their time responding to polls on Pitchfork, anyway.

It was this that got me thinking about the reasons behind Titus Andronicus' popularity and if they might hold some importance to young men in particular. I began to think back to shifts in my own musical tastes and to what extent  they were a product of phases and changes I was going through to try and establish if there might be some common quality linking the demographic that loves The Monitor.

I hit puberty at the height of emo's popularity. My friends began listening to bands like Funeral for a Friend or Alexisonfire. I didn't take to the genre at first: I was quite happy with skate punk. Puberty actually went pretty well until girls came along and the derailment began. I embraced emo wholesale, its every defining characteristic finding a place amongst where I was in life and in the world at that moment in time.

Now, rather than describe where I am in life at present, I think it would make more sense to describe The Monitor. It's filled with brilliant contrasts. The band are obviously intellegent but are never arrogant about it: the record features readings from the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis which when heard at the right time can actually be surprisingly moving. Any pretentiousness however is successfully destroyed when it becomes apparent that the readings make up part of The Monitor's tongue-in-cheek "US Civil War as extended metaphor for the troubles of growing up" concept. If the monitor is indeed a concept album, the concept is loose, and it all plays out like a super camp war re-enactment.

In places the album offers thought provoking observations on the minutia of family and human relationships. In others it's completely insane. The latter half of No Future Part III's five minute run is simply the repeated line: "you will always be a loser". It's an album best listened to from start to finish because songs generally reach the seven minute mark and are constructed from often awkwardly yet always brilliantly cobbled together sections of loud and soft. Subject matter includes alcohol and drunkenness, and there are several references to "urine" and "excrement" and everything in between. It's like a sonic bar brawl. It's the sound of friends late at night, fifteen beers too many, all hammering the same four guitar chords and singing about anything. If a listener doesn't break into a smile upon reaching second to last track "...and Ever" then they can only be soulless. Listen to the album. You'll see why.

The album is chaos, the overflowing product of an underlying rage: a constant, but all too often vague, rage. The album's subjects, and perhaps audience, are summed up neatly in a line from final track The Battle of Hampton Roads - "is there a girl in this college who hasn't been raped? Is there a boy in this town who isn't exploding with hate?".

Taken in sum then, The Monitor is perfect for the 21-25 year old Pitchfork survey responder who finds himself on the brink of leaving education and/or stumbling around in employment somewhere near the bottom. The Monitor is a means of ventilation for those coming to terms with compromised dreams, disappointment, and learning to make-do. It's a record for those brutally let down by some people while finding themselves building alarmingly strong bonds with others. It's an album for those faced with new awful adult sadnesses that are simply without solution and that no amount of self involved moping will correct. It helps those trying to discover in vain that illusive thing that will make it all seem worthwhile. Every second is a visceral declaration of humanity and our right to not be okay with a world that can't live up to promise or expectation.

The Lincoln passage mentioned earlier is a good representation of the "helpful message hidden under a layer of urine soaked madness" contradiction I'm talking about. The reading goes "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed amongst the whole human family there would not be one cheerful face left on earth." For an emotionally stunted young man, the gut reation to this statement is to laugh, to revel mawkishly in the self-indulgence of it all, and to throw alcohol at the problem. Underneath however lies a communication of solidarity: Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the world's most renowned sufferer of depression and his presence on the record might be of some tacit consolation to those faced with the problem who are for whatever reason unable or unwilling to seek help. At a time when depression and suicide in young men is on the rise, this can only be a good thing.

So, the album feels like an embodiment of an emotional state, all gathered up and spat out onto a single compact disc. It's a reflection of a very alarming and particular point in life, in the same way that emo as a genre was several years ago. For me, a recent shift (or at least expansion) of taste more generally has been very much identifiable. The music of bands like Japandroids and Fucked Up is playing a part in my life that I don't think I would have foreseen a few years ago. In 2009 if I had been told I would be listening to punk rock again by 2012 I would have seen it as a step backwards away from my perceived "artsy" indie and folk leanings. I wouldn't have been able to understand that I would develop a need for something a bit more primal and indeed useful.

Other genres and the emotional support that they provide have begun to feature more heavily than I would have once anticipated: the music of The Roots has begun to make a certain sense to me, with something about Undun immediately clicking. I would never be so deluded by self pity as to argue that I can fully relate to plights discussed within its songs, but I do think that there is a certain universality in the overall bleakness of the album. Universal too are the messages of hope that The Roots are capable of delivering elsewhere.

I'm glad that I came across Titus Andronicus this year. Are they the "end of higher education emo" for a generation of young men? Perhaps. 21-25 year olds, made up 88% of males, selected The Monitor as one of the greatest albums of our time. I suppose there's something nice about a demographic championing an album that helps us come to terms with the fact that we are just that - a demographic: a faceless mass let loose on a world that doesn't care. It could simply be that these are simply good fun songs, and that the age bracket statistics are merely a coincidence, but I hope it goes deeper than that. 

We need all the help we can get.