If Bjork’s final act of the nineties was an extroverted, attention grabbing scream of emotion and a refusal to be a passenger in life then her first (and a few might say greatest) act after the millennium was an introspective gentle evolution. Homogenic stands in sharp contrast to her noughties output even though Vespertine may have felt like a musical continuation, because Vespertine is in fact her most introverted release, and perhaps her most refined. I’m not sure what it says about the decade, music or life to turn your gaze inwards and make something so specific (but compelling), so focused on the miniature and mundane moments of ones life, not least mental isolation, but it is an undoubted musical highpoint in the last 10 years. Perhaps it is just an example of the value in ignoring the world and creating one of your own, despite the fact Vespertine is still very much rooted in those indefinable points of reality (see Bjork’s musing on what constitutes a perfect day: 10 glasses of water? A phonecall?).
The evolution is in her song writing, now a more subtle beast ever more carefully counteracted by the electronic undercurrent. The finishing touches on the beats and percussion were applied by uber-muso-geeks, and stars in their own right, Matmos, and their tell-tale experimentation and processed found sounds, acoustic clicks and shuffles are all over the record acting (as well as the footsteps in snow, the shuffling of cards)as an anchor to underpin increasingly lush arrangements . There is no grab your attention stark show stopper like Joga or Hunter, the juxtaposition between the harsh crunching electronics and the emotive strings had gone, replaced by a more synchronised and melodic affair. It is far more minimal and slow burning, a low key moment, to be listened to under a winter sun on headphones – its personal, a listening experience for the individual, a one-on-one affair, and a much underrated thing.
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One actually quite good thing about the current spate of ‘best of the decade’ lists, once you get past their irritating ubiquity, is the almost laughably basic fact that they’re forcing people to engage seriously with the realities of the epoch. Musically, the two great evils of the last ten years were those perennial bedfellows, retro-pastiche and consumer-hedonism – both of which are malign forms of escapism seeking to remove the listener from a meaningful interaction with his/her surroundings, to put ‘the times’ on the back burner. If such soul-searching analyses are a little late in coming, at least they’re forcing people to think soberly about what will matter in the 2010s, a nice contrast to all the obfuscating millennial hysteria of Y2K, and the mood of dippy relativism and near-suffocating political apathy that we’ve been suffering under ever since.
So what will matter in the next decade? What the hell is going to happen next?
To be honest, I’m pretty sure it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Last week Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk) ended his brilliant article in the New Statesman on noughties culture with the following quote:
But if bohemia can rouse itself from defeat and depression, the cultural terrain seems open for contest in a way that it has not been for a long time. Perhaps soon we will be able to look back on the Noughties with a shudder and think: how did things ever get that bad?
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At the end of 2009, dance music as a whole is far from being ‘in trouble’. However, as noted in the previous entry on Underworld’s ‘Two Months Off’, a certain kind of tradition in British electronica of popular experimentalism has dwindled with the unfolding of the decade. What I term a significant minority act – in this genre, people like Underworld, Leftfield, Aphex Twin, artists communicating broadly underground/avant-garde values to a just-large-enough popular constituency – this sort of act is pretty much a thing of the past on these shores (though Burial springs readily to mind as a notable exception).
Fortunately, the bifurcation of British dance music into middlebrow stadium-massiveness (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Calvin Harris) on the one hand and microcosmic obscurity (…) on the other, seemed to provide an ideal opportunity for other geographical regions to flourish.
Scandinavia, of course, was one of the major hotspots for left-of-centre noughties electronica (see TotD entries on Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ and Royksopp’s ‘What Else Is There?’). Read the rest of this entry »
Deerhoof could have been massive; if they’d have wanted to I’m certain they could have been a top ten juggernaut, spewing out hit after hit of giddy J- pop like the bastard cousins of McFly. But of course, they’re not, they have eschewed a potentially lucrative future to splice their pop nuggets with chaotic dissonance and nonsensical ramblings. Journeying through their earlier albums you will be confronted for mere seconds by a sweet and captivating ditty, before being thrown into a scatological whirlwind of atonal whimsy. While they have softened with age, theirs is a sound that has self-consciously remained the preserve of the few. In short, listening to Deerhoof can sometimes be a challenge, but it makes the pay off of discovering those acquiescences to accessibility all the more sweet. They deserve to be in this list by sheer dint of always providing startlingly original moments throughout this decade; they have been unfailingly ready to baffle and charm in equal measure.
The song I’ve chosen to demonstrate the group’s almost schizophrenic personality can be found midway through the band’s 2005 album, The Runners Four, and in some ways equips itself well to sit alongside some of the more chart-friendly tracks on this list. It will never be deemed the most immediate of songs, nor will it be the most cherished, but I am willing to stake my reputation on the fact that, of these 50 tunes of the decade, it has the hook that is most likely to lodge itself in your head and burrow like some sort of benevolent rodent into your brain.
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We’ve got nothing against guitar music per se here at The Grain. The absence of any of the decade’s most successful purveyors of trad-oriented indie rock in our Top 50 tunes list hasn’t been intentional, more a natural expression of our several individual tastes.
If it seems faintly polemical to have included so few ‘nu-rock’ and ‘garage-rock revival’ artists, this wasn’t a conscious decision on our part. It’s just that, having grown-up with the progressive, eclectic hip-hop and dance culture of the nineties, it would seem strange to us to acknowledge with more than a cursory glance bands like The Libertines, The Strokes, Razorlight, The Killers, and The White Stripes, bands who produced music that was not merely mediocre and conservative, but apparently in direct contradiction to the notion of linear history as an ongoing evolutionary process.
But let’s not be too clumsy about this. Let’s not dismiss in totum all those collectives that just so happened to foreground six-string instrumentalism. The Walkmen, for starters, were one guitar band with a relatively orthodox musical blueprint who managed to sound fresh and enticing, and nowhere so spectacularly as on 2004’s ‘The Rat’. Read the rest of this entry »
