58. Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolf (2005)

                                                        

Criticisms of Will Oldhams output are often well founded (i.e. inconsistency, not able to self edit, doesn't reveal true self). However this mid decade gem found Bonnie at his best in vocal power, experimentism and unfettered emotion. Teaming with Matt Sweeney, who allegedly challenged Bonnie to some kind of songwriting competition, which may have appeled to Bonnie's not inconsiderable perversity. Sweeney had been doing the rounds in various indie combos including Guided By Voices & Billy Corgan's Zwaan. What Sweeney provided Bonnie with was a kind of mid period Dylan/Band/Allman Bros wild mercury choogle, with a minimalist slant and dark southern gothic edge. My Home Is The Sea is sung delicately by a duo who could only be landlocked lubbers wearing cut offs and mousey moustastes. Superwolf contains love songs promising rough sex, Bonnies 'horney horn', mournful dirges with inappropriate jokes etc.

Blood Embrace is the albums centrepiece, a tense cheating song, Bonnie's strong high vocal interplays with gently stroked electric guitar, and film samples to tell a tale of a woman who has cheated and confessed to her husband, the sexual tension and ominous, dangerous environment created remains one of the decades finest musical moments, and seals this albums position in this list.

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To The Drift in 10 steps

59. Scott Walker - The Drift (2006)

Repeated themes crop up in The Drift. Silver. Torture. Genocide. That terrifying feeling when it suddenly dawns the body you are looking at is dead, injured, deliberately disfigured. Cossacks Are..."The teeth are too small", Cue..."Bones closing - too soon at the tips". Multiple voices, perspectives muddled. David Lynch style crawls around shadowy corners, doorways.
The violence of retribution, witnessed, enjoyed by crowds, the mutilation of a hanging Mussolini & wife, tribes decapitating each other, Sadaam Hussein hung to baying, mocking audience.
It's not inconceivable once immersing yourself in any recent (i.e. the last 30 years) Scott album that it took 11 years to create. The 30th Century Man doc provides some insight into the mental effort required by Scott and his cohorts to make these monstrous records, where you can see a man hitting a large piece of raw pig with a stick, and Scott visibly anxious about the quality of sound made by hitting a large handmade wooden box.
The Drift is not a comforting listen, it is adult, dark, challenging at times downright scary. It is also original, majestic, endlessly fascinating and hideously beautiful, in the way that Lynch's, Herzog's, Bergman's, Chris Morris' and Frances Bacon's art can be.
Each lyric and block of sound in The Drift is there for a reason. The song Jesse offers the premise of Elvis speaking to his stillborn twin, it begins "Nose holes caked in black cocaine" and ends with the pained cry of "I'm the only one left alive" in Scott's unique mad mock rock goth operatic baritone. Jolson and Jones contains the call "I'll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway" complete with braying donkey noises, whilst managing to be entirely serious. Cue seems to be about viruses. Hand me ups, despite having a reasonably jaunty rhythm contains the most explicit images of torture and war on the album. Buzzers again perhaps concern violent political revenge, and begins with a quote about Milosevic. The Escape is as scary as shit, and almost has a rhyme scheme, at the close of the track a huge evil Donald duck repeats "What's up Doc", I have heard this numerous times and I still get nervous when I know it is coming. This moment reminds me of the stories of American troops blasting US cultural pop and cartoon sounds at war prisoners as a torture device during the Gulf wars. To be listened to with teddy bear to hand.
Finally, A Lover Lovers almost offers respite in a beautiful acoustic ballad, however Scott manages to undermine this by going "Psst Psst Psst" between each line. Truly perverse.
I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Roll on 2023!

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Boredoms vids

Vision Creation Newsun

60. Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun (2000)

One of the greatest live music epiphanies for me, was witnessing a then unknown to me & pals, Boredoms on a baking hot hazy Friday morning, opening the Other stage (then the NME stage) at Glastonbury in 1995. An unexpected outer space mix of free jazz, Napalm Death, and early Sonic Youth, performed with utter precision, power yet complete abandon by this Osaka Japanese group. One possible future music stood before us, making sense of the noise, Krautrock, thrash, electronic elements that our generation had been absorbing via underground record shops, John Peel. All of a sudden the leaden Britpop mob sounded duller than ever, and contemporary exploratory groups like the post rock Tortoise, Mogwai and Godspeed seemed painfully naval gazing and self conscious compared to the exploratory, outward looking, and joyous Boredoms. This is how music would be in the new millennium. Battles, Animal Collective, Black Dice, Lightning Bolt, Fuck Buttons, the embrace of trance within the rock jam, these have Boredoms to thank.
Perhaps Super AE (1998) is the more experimental album, certainly it has more post production, it's more fragmented, and more immediately thrilling. Vision Creation Newsun however completed Boredoms new direction. The whole album is really one long percussion jam (although not really a jam, as there is little improvisation, the whole thing is massively detailed and precise, a Japanese trait?), set around complex and uplifting grooves, Amon Duul II type chants, electronic effects, melodic touches from synths, guitars, all aimed straight at the sun.
Japanese groups such as Boredoms, Acid Mothers Temple, Melt Banana & Boris often get criticism for lack of originality, that they are essentially highly skilled pastiches of classic styles of music. Often these groups have gone one stage further, by venturing far beyond what their musical ancestors were able or prepared to do. They will ask questions like what if King Crimson were punks who liked raving, or imagine if the stooges had heard death metal, or imagine Alice Coltrane jamming with Hendrix and Ya Ho Wha on the moon....on ketamine.
These exploratory avenues appear like uncompleted bridges in the sky, and perhaps only when these bridges are complete, will the future again await us.