List of things I attempted and failed to do instead of reviewing this album again:

What I’m going to do, then, is just repost my review from AU when the album was initially released and talk a little bit about it:

I like that review. It says everything I would end up saying at great length here. When I submitted it, I had a conversation with Chris Jones, the editor of AU, about the score I wanted to give the record. I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning it, but I think it might be interesting and I don’t think it reflects badly on either of us. I was pushing for a 9 initially, but he reminded that me that giving it a 9 meant that AU would have to look to stick by that, at the end of the year for example. I was speaking for the magazine rather than myself, saying that it was genuinely a great record. I suspect, also, that having heard the record himself, he felt like I was overshooting a little. He didn’t push it, either, he just raised it with me.

I got what he was saying. I’ve been aware of the general trend towards overrating Irish music in the native media for as long as I’ve been paying attention to the native media’s coverage of Irish music. And I didn’t come to the album blind. I have all the seven inches too. I’d seen these songs live over and over again. When I heard the songs on the record, they were instantly recognisable to me. Yeah Nothing wasn’t just an album in a critical vacuum to me as I reviewed it. It was the LP that a band I’d already come to really like ended up putting out. I thought about it, and I thought, yeah, you have a point. Maybe an 8.

Because there’s nothing particularly new or awe-inspiring about Yeah Nothing. I have friends that listened to it once, thought ‘derivative’ and then shelved it on iTunes potentially forever. I wasn’t even sure I could expect a large percentage of people to listen to it and hear what I heard, even if that was something people did. For the purposes of AU, it was an 8/10, a genre album the reviewer thought was really good and catchy. It wasn’t going to change anyone’s world view.

For me though, it was a 9/10. It was obviously better than other Irish indie pop albums put out in 2011, even though many of them were very good in their own right. The songwriting was more rounded and more confident, the hooks were better, the songs could play with emotions and it was fun, in a specific type of way that I can’t help but love in music. It was better than pretty much every non-Irish indie pop album for me too, for the same reasons. A lot of the best American and English indie pop is plagued by either a dead-eyed detachment or an earnestness that’s a little off-putting whether or not it’s affected with irony.

Yeah Nothing has an inner personality that insulates it from that and makes it relatable straight away. And, like I said, I’d had those songs beaten into me already. I was just happy to have them all together. At some point since August, every single track on the album has been the one I’ve skipped to while walking around. If I was worried, in that conversation with Chris, that I’d end up revising my own opinion downwards as time went by, I needn’t have been. It was an 8 for AU purposes, it was and still is a 9 for mine, and it’s the sixth best album of the year.

And that is the end of this insight into the machinations of the Irish music press and also the way I sort music in my mind and the boring and annoying level of seriousness to my thought processes. Yeah Nothing is great, listen to it.

Squarehead and Patrick Kelleher’s fake VH1 special and the golf-heavy video for Midnight Enchilada.

Squarehead – I Wanna Hold Your Hand

White devils like it. You’re a rap crew educated at Wesleyan, exposed to the world by a joke dance song about fast food and you’re actually called Das Racist, and that’s the line you choose to open your debut album. There’s a lot in those first four words though. It might say ‘confrontation’, in the sense that white people are devils and they can fuck off. It might say ‘guilt’, in the sense that the natural fanbase for pop art raps about products and identity politics turned out to be the white people they were (only sometimes) attacking. It might say college. It might say humour. It might imply that they’re engaging in some uncomfortable cultural appropriation of their own. It possibly says all of that, but the point is it definitely connotes.

It’s annoying to think of an album in a purely heady way, but the way Das Racist present themselves and the way they slid to prominence might demand it. When Relax came out, it wasn’t an album to listen to with fresh ears, it was the thing that Das Racist were finally willing to stand behind, supposedly free of the excuses that could save the often lazy-sounding, patchy mixtapes. Much as you might like to ignore them, they’re fascinating. Witness Heems go through his questions on Tumblr hammering the paste shortcut with the words ‘wet dog’ in all caps because everyone kept saying “I’m white and I think you are being rude to your fans”. Witness them venture a joke about John Boehner to a New York Times journalist who responds by saying she that that sort of thing is why she never asks rappers questions about politics as if they’d just uncovered the gay mafia that runs the entertainment industry. They are internet-era public figures who happen to rap. And if it’s worth hearing what they have to say about burgers and glasses of water, it’s worth at least checking out what they’re presenting as a debut album.

It’s a minefield, really. The album, not the broader cultural presence. It’s rife with ill-fitting juxtapositions and even when they work, it’s never comfortable. In fact, it’s only good when it’s not comfortable. The beats, some contributed by members of bands like Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer, are broadly indie-sounding, even touching the reprehensible chillwave at times. They snap, sometimes, like when El-P or Danny Brown need something resembling an actual rap beat to go over. But mostly they don’t. Kool A.D.’s complex flow fits any beat simply by filling it with syllables, mostly dripping in irony and sometimes even delivered in a half-laugh. It’s indigestible to call it postmodern so, as lay music fans, maybe we should stick to “throwing shit at a wall”. Sometimes it sticks. Sometimes it slides off, but rarely in an offensively bad way. Heems on the other hand, with a huskier rap voice possibly developed especially for this record, either nails it or sounds lost. When he nails it, he’s a hundred times the rapper Kool A.D. is with half the word count.

It’s easy to pick out the songs where the stars align and both just rap good verses without disappearing into either failed shit-at-a-wall collage or hectoring. I have no idea if it’s bad critical practice for me to just list them, but here they are: Relax, Michael Jackson, Middle Of The Cake and Rainbow In The Dark. Kool A.D. goes in especially on the first two, in slightly different ways. On the first one (or ‘the eponymous opener’), he presents Das Racist, as alluded to earlier, in scrapbook form. White devils, coffee, fire and brimstone, bringing light to the kids, the word ‘negro’, being an idiot, maybe getting more popular, Abramovic, Lady Gaga, the word ‘fag’, the Wesleyan, a poetry slam. With various levels of mockery. Aimed at himself and the listener. In an undiscernable ratio. On Michael Jackson it seems slightly less deft, just a string of cool-sounding bullshit, but then what was the verse on Relax? It is hard to find the line, especially when it’s probably not there to be found at all. When it works it, it’s self-evident.

Heems’ highlights are as the moments where he sounds like he feels it, in an immediate sense and not just a general one. On Relax, it goes from background story/identity politics to an aggressive present/identity politics as he growls “I ain’t backin’ out till I own a bank to brag about” and from then on he murders it. The moments aren’t all necessarily political righteousness though, they’re just the parts where he spits the line you remember. The parody brag “known to rock the flyest shit and eat the best pizza,” on Rainbow In The Dark, semi-disowned as meaningless joke music recently (although again, where the fuck is the line?), is cool. Outside of the violent self-definition on Relax, his verse on Middle Of The Cake hits the nail on the head. It’s direct, it’s never clumsy, he fits identity shit in without it sounding forced and he says good shit, like using Fran Drescher as a metaphor for money.

Middle Of The Cake just about evades being annoying for being agenda rap, but other songs don’t, not because agenda rap’s a problem per se, but just because they’re not as good. Brand New Dance is secondary school-level sarcasm (“it’s a brand new dance, give us all your money/everybody, love everybody”). Power feels aimless before Danny Brown comes in and provides an actual, normal rap verse about spending money and getting his dick sucked. Other songs have their own problems. They all have high points – quotables especially – but they have problems too. I am going to strategically ignore the songs that are either genre parody or self-indulgence. They’re alright, but they’re profoundly out of place, and they can fuck off.

But Relax is, above all else, engaging. It’s pleasant to listen to, even if ‘pleasant’ doesn’t sound like a compliment. It is definitely flawed. Pitchfork had a point in bringing up the “incomplete framework of a record meant to be aesthetically unified and audience-dividing”. But that’s partly why it’s so engaging. A uniform success in artistic terms would seem almost crude coming from Das Racist at this point. Yes, you could easily pare off a couple of tracks and there’s a recurring urge to take the red pen to certain lines and ideas, correcting and improving, but it’s the gamble that makes it exciting when it works. The arrogant disinterest they try to project actually ends up creating a sort of vulnerability, especially for Heems, who can suck really badly when he doesn’t get it exactly right. The confusion created by the sometimes meaningless flows and the ideas that don’t quite come off is the atmosphere that defines the album, and it’s that that makes the high points seem really, really high. It’s a reassuring sign that there’s no autopilot. That is enough, somehow, to compensate for everything that’s wrong.

Das Racist – Relax

Unknown Mortal Orchestra is one mysterious dude from New Zealand. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about all the squelches and improbable chords changes and hooks that make this an excellent album. Ffunny Friends, right at the start, is basically just one long glorious guitar hook over bopping drums, broken up by some wobbles, the kind of thing you’d whistle if you were just a happy-go-lucky guy about to get eaten by the monster in a monster movie. How Can U Luv Me (right at the start of what you’d have to presume is Side 2) has another one of those glorious hooks broken up by whatever you put into songs to space out hooks, except this time it’s on top of Sly Stone burp bass and sounds like it’s being played through a shoebox. It’s also vaguely exciting for some reason that someone has rediscovered almost-lost ability to make good songs that sound like the Beatles. It nearly feels like Nelson, rather than simply listening to a lot of psychedelic music and replicating it, has succeeded in the Borgesian task of discovering mind-altering drugs and applying them to rock music in a vacuum with identical results. That’s kind of a meaningless thing to say, but the thrust is basically that it’s difficult to sound like Unknown Mortal Orchestra does without coming off glib or directionless. The record is never glib or directionless, and that’s a feat.
Not unexpectedly trippy music video and the dude not being mysterious at all.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Ffunny Ffriends

9. Milk Maid – Yucca [UK]

It was a weird feeling when, after months and months of listening to this record, I discovered about thirty seconds ago that Milk Maid is a “home recording side-project” of one of the dudes from Nine Black Alps. I have no idea whether or not that would have had an effect on how I absorbed it. After all, I did discover Milk Maid through clicking the last ten or so emails I got from the various PR companies who got my email either from this blog or something magazine-related. I liked it then. I was actually a little shocked and it made me reconsider whether or not I should really be ignoring 98% of the emails I get. Because this is a good band. Yucca is absolutely embedded in the “home recording” aesthetic, certainly, in what might be logical given that the ‘auteur’ has plenty of access to real studios in his day job if he needs it. It’s lo-fi in a conceptual sense as well as just a quality sense, everything sounding a little limp and turned up to a mild fuzz to compensate for that. That’s a good thing. It makes it sound not only personable but personal, lazily underwritten for the most part but with all the focus on the parts of the songs that are supposed to stand out, like a collection of demos for a power pop band. Dead Wrong and Not Me are what should (and might, I have no idea) be the seven inches, the things you keep on regular rotation by themselves, and they’re split artfully by Girl, a sort of disingenuous-sounding Velvet Underground via REM b-side fingerpicked song about an American girl. It all sounds a little disingenuous really, but the convenient thing about this sort of aesthetic is that you can basically get away with anything on the basis that it’s just bedroom bullshit. It’s just a dude imagining himself playing the types of songs he listens to, and the only reason it made it this far is that the songs in his head are good ones. It also, contrary to all of that, has the emotional shifts of a real major label college rock classic, which makes it feel somehow more serious and less throwaway than it might.
Not unexpectedly poor quality music video and all the Milk Maid interviews are boring so fuck that.

Milk Maid – Not Me

8. Hunx And His Punx – Too Young To Be In Love [US]

This is basically just a collection of fake early 60s singles by indie rock’s gayest man. The first record, in fact, was literally a collection of fake early 60s singles called Gay Singles, but this one, being an actual LP, is still wrought from the same unashamed flaying of the Be My Baby drum beat with the attendant oohs and sloganeering lyrics about boy troubles. But, strangely for what seems on the surface like the most repulsively ironic idea for a band since being from New Jersey and liking Bruce Springsteen somehow swung into being Pitchfork cool, it feels honest. There’s a respect for melody to the extent that anything that doesn’t add to a song is left out of the song, and anything that wouldn’t get jukebox plays in 1962 is left off the record in the first place. Yes, certainly, Hunx can’t actually sing that well, and yes, he occasionally writes songs that aren’t even in his range, like Keep Away From Johnny. But where Cassie and Kickball Katy feel like they’re playing at this level of naivety, Hunx seems to own it. It’s not a world he’s creating for fun and nostalgia so much as a refusal to admit that it’s weird or unusual to pretend that the sort of music that now sells Time-Life collections is no longer transgressive in the way it was when your local evangelical pastor was first against it. The lyrical concerns are so simplistic it’s ridiculous: “why won’t you do it with me, I want to do it with you” or “I just wanna be the one who gets to hug and kiss ya tonight”. He’s Coming Back is the closest thing in terms of immediacy and brilliance to Hunx’s flagship anthem, You Don’t Like Rock And Roll. It’s essentially a threat that his boyfriend is about to arrive and beat you up for hitting on him, trading lines (“you better watch your back”) with his female backing singers (“yeah, my boyfriend’s coming back”) until you get the point, and then repeating them again until you can’t forget it. Like any great collection of fake early 60s singles, the record doesn’t stop being catchy for long enough to get boring or annoying. It’s stupid amounts of fun.
My original review for AU and a short email transcript from an interview I did for a short AU introductory piece.

Hunx And His Punx – He’s Coming Back

“Fuzz band goes clean on second record” is the new “female celebrity gains/loses weight”, but I can’t stop mentioning it. It’s especially fun with Smith Westerns because they’re not surfy or garagey. With the curtains thrown open, they are essentially Mott the Hoople, which has strange connotations for their indie rock critical Venn Diagram. Glam rock is not really something that people attempt successfully in an indie rock milieu. And to do it without the glamour? With just the Mick Ronson riffs? It’s weirder than it gets credit for, weirder at this point than the willful sonic messing in the genre that ‘experimental’ is turning into. Fuck, like, Smith Westerns like Oasis. How do they manage to stay good, and avoid being the most annoying thing since… Oasis? If you’ve read anything written on this blog about indie pop since about 2009, you’ll know the justification about to be dropped here. SONGS. Still New is like a version of All The Young Dudes for 2011, except it’s not even for 2011. Dye The World is one of those TOTP 1970 compilation anthems where the lyrics are about what ‘we’ should do to ‘the world’ to make it cool for the teenagers as opposed to lame parents who went to war and want you to finish your dinner. Weekend is just riffs. We like that type of thing around here, songs you just already like and then have to describe in stupid-sounding terms.
A short interview transcript from this blog, where I ask dude if he genuinely, seriously likes Oasis and the HRO post with a (taken down) video by a girl who stalks Smith Westerns, where I got my only ever first comment.

Smith Westerns – Dye The World

14. Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong [US]

When I originally reviewed this for Totally Dublin in March, I ended the 75 word piece with the following sentence: “There’s no doubt that they lay the emotion on thick, but they’re good enough at it to make a certain type of person cry.” The problem with that, if you’re into the rough approximation of theory that exists for music criticism, is obviously that it’s an uncomfortably subjective way of appraising a record. Still, I knew I liked the record, and I knew that if I didn’t admit that sort of subjectivity into the review, I’d end up tearing it apart. Belong is like the injured faun of albums, from a critical perspective. There’s a huge list of things you could complain about. Homage to the point of pastiche or even plagiarism. Americans doing Sarah Records-type twee emotion, with all the problems that entails. An extremely conscious ditching of the 80s pastiche lo-fi sound that took some defending in the first place for an 80s pastiche hi-fi sound. But if you want to like this (and it is an excellent record), you need to just accept all that. Allow yourself to be sad alongside some of the best things to be sad with. New Order drums, reverberating guitars, high, glassy synths and simple boy-girl lyrics delivered with the utmost whispery sincerity. If tambourines and big slow guitar strum swells sicken you rather than fill you with feelings or whatever, you’re probably safe sticking to Untrue. But Belong has an aesthetic, and within that aesthetic, it has some great music. The title track could be used in schools as an example of a perfect soft rock song. Anne With An E is Galaxie 500 level hopelessness-of-all-your-endeavours mournful love music. Belong is a good record.
A video of dogs hanging out of cars, Pains doing a live thing in my friends’ apartment courtyard and my interview with Kip.

Pains of Being Pure At Heart – Belong

13. Vivian Girls – Share The Joy [US]

Hey, it’s those three girls that are bad at playing their instruments in an endearing way. It seems to be getting less endearing to a lot of people. Share The Joy’s not exactly a critically acclaimed record, and one of the things I found interesting from reviews is that Pitchfork mentioned a song that “never really builds toward much of anything”. That’s surely a flawed understanding of the point of a Vivian Girls song, like complaining that a Daniel Johnston song is too naïve or a Dragonforce song is emotionally heavy-handed. Build and release isn’t the only way to make rock music and, strangely, the song in question, The Other Girls, does actually go somewhere. But still, the perceived ‘loss of immediacy’ from previous records is symptomatic of focusing on the wrong thing to like. Share The Joy is, as far as I can tell from my scientific experiments, based on a construction of a false past. They’re the kind of simple melodies, both the sung ones and the one-string guitar ones, you pluck out in a teenage bedroom, except the teenage bedroom Vivian Girls built isn’t real, and it’s not even a real simulation of a 50s or 60s one the way some garage bands’ garages are simulations. It’s a selective remembering, and the whole point is the projected innocence, the not-knowing. Teenage feelings with all of the missing context that implies. Dance if you wanna. Don’t be like the other girls. Stop freaking out over that dude or whatever.
Doing oohs down the phone. Also, r u fallin in <3 with Kickball Katy? (A: Yes)

Vivian Girls – Dance (If You Wanna)

12. Rustie – Glass Swords [UK]

“Having a good night, man?”
“Yeah, it’s good craic, yeah.”
“This tune’s a fucking ripper isn’t it?”
“Yeah it’s fucking class, man.”
“Just on the drink yourself is it?”
“Nah, nah.”
“Oh you dropped did you?”
“Yeah, I did yeah.”
“Long ago?”
“Yeah a while ago now, yeah.”
“Are you feeling it yet, no?”
“Fucking flying, man.”
“Ahhhhh, good man! Not bad are they?”
“Yeah they’re deadly, man.”
“Gonna stall it in and have a bit of a dance are you?”
“Yeah fuck it yeah, let’s stall it.”
“This is a fucking RIPPER.”
A summer mix by Rustie for NPR and a real old Jamie Lidell remix that’s still deadly.

Rustie – Ultra Thizz

11. Tune-Yards – Whokill [US]

Whokill is effectively a recasting of the forms of past music, which is what everyone does these days. In this case, it’s in the form of taking the shape of a jazz rhythm and replacing the parts until it’s still in the shape of a jazz song but isn’t a jazz song any more. To dismiss it as knowingly clever, glib genre tourism (or “Guardian music section bullshit” as one of the critical discourses I regularly engage with calls it) is appealing but pointlessly reductive. There’s nothing functionally different about Tune-yards using a reggae or jazz rhythm than a wonky song being built around one, and it’s about what you build with the plans anyway, not the plans themselves. There’s also an appealing indifference towards sanding down the edges, but in what sounds like a deliberate and studied way, like a version of Dave Longstreth that is willing to countenance the idea that it might be enough for music to just be fun. It might be cynical to ascribe all the talk of “politics” to the fact that Merrill Garbus is a woman with a moustache, so I’m not going to do that. Thinking about this as a political record is about as useful for your own sanity and enjoyment as thinking about E-40 as a Christian Rap artist though. What’s good about Whokill comes from the interlocking melodies, the scrapbook borrowings, the parts where things intentionally don’t fit so that you can’t switch off mentally while you listen. The way it’s built, the little weirdnesses, are the makings of real immediacy, a Deerhoof-type ability to use things that are most definitely not the stuff of pop music to create something that is as straightforwardly pleasing to listen to as pop music.
Mark Richardson interview at Pitchfork and a song live, looking like fun festival music.

Tune-Yards – Es-So

Michael Healy, who wrote this guest post, is a serious wrestling fan, as you’ll find out in this post. This is his take on the CM Punk thing, and an interesting look at what the Greatest Sports Entertainment Company In The History Of Sports Entertainment’s apparent proffering of a hand to the smarks looked like to the people it may or may not have been aimed at.

CM Punk, Success and Disaster, My Fragile Emotional State

Sitting down to write this wrap-up for the year in pro wrestling, my first impulse was to put on my independent wrestling fancypants and drop some esoteric internet Knowledge about the diverse, often remarkable performances of pro wrestling’s finest artists. Manly tears were shed in Ring of Honor, skinny men chopped one another in Chikara, Fergal Devitt continued to proudly fly the tricolour as he kicked Asian gentlemen unnecessarily hard in the head for New Japan.

But the real wrestling story of 2011 was the momentary, fleeting, maddeningly tantalising instant where mainstream professional wrestling became relevant, engaging and culturally unique once again. WWE’s American ratings, their share of the Monday night prime time viewership, has been justifiably declining over the year, now boasting the same numbers that Vince Russo managed to draw in WCW with strokes of brilliance like “the KISS guy” and outrageous creative abominations like “Jeff Jarrett.” The WWE is a bland, bloated, politically fraught, creatively bankrupt, embarrassing product, a complacent monopoly aimed at delivering consistent paycheques to incompetent, disinterested employees onscreen and behind the scenes, exploiting the vulnerabilities of especially dumb children.

I say “especially dumb children” because I have no recollection of having had such terrible taste as a kid. Nor do I remember ever fawning over the pederastic gestures of the company’s most visible babyface. One of my earliest wrestling memories is seeing Brian Pillman pull a gun on Stone Cold Steve Austin when Stone Cold attacked him in his home, as they literally tried to murder each other. These were the guys I got interested in. I liked Mankind because he punched himself in the head. My sister and I liked the Undertaker because he was a magical wrestling corpse. I did not like seeing Shawn Michaels dance around the ring with his pants down as small boys reached out to touch him. Those kids were dicks. Point is this: In 2011 it’s for some reason socially acceptable for children to watch High School Musical and iCarly and to cheer John Cena instead of playing Quake and screaming for the bad guys to mutilate people on live television. If the WWF of 1997 had run an anti-bullying campaign the way the WWE of 2011 is doing I wouldn’t have watched. But the dumbass children of 2011 are lapping it up.

Point is this: the WWF that every single friend I have loved growing up, lads and woman-lads alike, is now the very antithesis of what it once was. Instead of the counter-cultural, rebellious, unique television we watched as kids (which led some of us to appreciate pro wrestling on whole new, possibly ill-advised levels) the WWE has become a company obsessed with trying to prove its relevance by engaging in po-faced stories about inclusiveness and inoffensiveness and wide-eyed schlock. I don’t know what it’s going to be like for the grown-up Glee generation in a few years time (I suspect most children watching now will simply forget about the wrestling show much as our generation don’t really run around dropping Biker Grove or Echo Island references to get cheap pub laughs) but for my friends the memories of the WWF from 1997 to 2001 are very strong.

For me and people like me, cursed with the psychological weakness of pro wrestling bearing the same cultural relevance, the same bearing on life and learning as any book or film or piece of arcane religious knowledge, have kept this period of wrestling with us and explored many many more. Most of my friends have naturally drifted away, alienated by the deteriorating quality of mainstream wrestling, embarrassed that they were ever fond of a product that aspires to (and fails to meet) the standards of the worst trends in popular culture that we have to endure in early adulthood. Last week the WWE ran a commercial for their new network with a dubstep soundtrack running over it. Jesus Christ.

I wish to God that when I said to a group of people the other week that a mutual friend of ours “had that kind of El Generico physique” that they wouldn’t have looked at me like I was having a stroke. My brain, like the brains of the afflicted, wants to be able to express its thoughts and emotions by talking about Terry Funk promos from 1988. I want to tell people that I totally dropped a Macho Man elbow on a sandwich at lunch without people thinking I’m a fan of that show that their 5-year-old cousin with the cleft pallet and divorced parents always wants to talk about at awkward family dinners. And while I could try and tell the world about ROH’s bro-hugs and Chikara’s svelte gentlemen in funny masks and the guy from Bray wearing the Junior Heavyweight Gold in Japan, the industry leader is all anybody knows. The WWE is the touchstone for pro wrestling everywhere and every real fan has to deal with it. Our interest will forever be associated with this weak, bland, failing nonsense.

And then there was hope.

CM Punk, having suffered the same obscurity in the WWE as every other passionate indie-alumnus with the company, used the leverage of his expiring contract and their evident need keep him onboard to build the first significant angle in the company for years. First he cut a shocking promo as Raw went off the air, calling Vince McMahon and Triple incompetent, telling the world he was about to walk away from this terrible company and sprinkling a bit of kayfabe magic into what seemed to be a legitimate shoot promo, telling the audience he’d be taking the WWE championship with him. In the weeks that followed he would promote this view on TV and in proper, grown-up, real world interviews with intrigued news and sports organisations. ESPN listened to him talk about the creative deficiencies behind the scenes in the WWE, that John Cena (the champion and his opponent at Money in the Bank) represented all that was wrong with the company and all of the true fans’ frustrations. He told the world that the wrestling industry might just die out this generation if Vince McMahon and Triple H continued down this path of apathy and irrelevance. One way or another he was wouldn’t be a part of it.

In a space of a few weeks, Punk created from scratch single-handedly what every great mainstream wrestling storyline comes eventually to contain: Two strong personalities with clear but sophisticated moral positions, on the same competitive footing in the continuity of the sport, the outcome of the feud unknown and promising tremendous change. A story the fans could invest in, a philosophical dispute the world could scratch its head over, glowingly debate about in pubs and bars and restaurants, the promise of something new and unknown to think about and emotionally react to. Every relationship in the story, The Cena/Punk, McMahon/Punk and even Cena/McMahon dynamics were multifarious and gave the impression of depth and sophistication. It was a story that I could direct my friends to go watch, link them to Punk’s promos on YouTube and have faith that they were going to get excited. Two sides of a profound argument, a dispute over values, loyalty, change and moral relativism were to collide and be creatively expressed through the medium of the wrestling match. It was truly riveting and, best of all, the cyber-bullying hysteria generation had no idea what was going on.

Remarkably, unexpectedly, the match delivered. A rabid Chicago crowd made up of mostly adults, unique these days outside of Wrestlemania, followed and reacted to every hold, every turn, every shift of momentum, every gesture of defiance issued by both wrestlers. As Punk and Cena toyed with the expectations and hopes of a volatile audience, Vince McMahon walked down to the ring to interfere in the match, ordering the bell to be rung as Cena held Punk in an STF. This was the same Vince McMahon we remembered as kids, not the steroid-loaded cartoon character we’ve had to endure now for years. Cena, true to his square-jawed heroism, released the hold and stopped McMahon from cheating on his behalf, allowing Punk to hit his finish and take the title away from him. McMahon ordered Alberto del Rio to the ring to challenge for the belt with the shot he’d earned earlier in the evening, only for Punk to knock him out and flee into the adoring Chicago crowd, leaving McMahon behind with a look of trauma on his face, his hand outstretched following the new champion out of the building and out of the company.

It was as good a story as has ever been told in a wrestling ring. The mainstream sports media gushed over the show for weeks to come, filling column inches with enthusiastic endorsements of WWE’s first triumph in a decade, encouraging them to keep delivering, often going so far as to predict a new golden age for the wrestling, a new well of creativity having seemingly been tapped. I watched the match the morning after it was broadcast. I remember jumping up and down, screaming at the TV, cheering Punk to his fake victory in a manner that a cynical wrestling aficionado seldom does anymore. Credit is due to John Cena for his facilitating of the story, no doubt. But this was Punk’s baby, the dream of a child of the independents finally getting the chance to do something new on the biggest wrestling stage in the world (smaller though it might have gotten over the years).

But then the hope faded. And once again I looked like an idiot for recommending the WWE to proper, full-on adult friends.

Punk’s contract renewed, the company went back to its old ways. In what could have been a cutting parody of WWE logic if produced by anybody else, Punk’s return landed him inexplicably in a feud with Triple H and, of all people, Kevin Nash, losing the title at Summerslam because of them. Next month, he lost a no disqualification match to Triple H. Online, people were hopeful. Punk had lost after interference from no less than three people, they said, he’ll get his win back in the future. What they failed to realise was that this was classic Hulk Hogan in WCW booking. Hogan used to justify winning by ending the match in nonsense and controversy. What nobody could verbalise was that the hero losing, even losing against significant odds, pours a whole lot of cold water on that previously superlative hero, as well as making everybody look silly. Hogan knew this. Triple H knew this. The WWE knew this. This piece of baffling booking ended what was a glorious month of pro wrestling TV, driving away all the press and lapsed fan attention they were getting, letting the company settle back into its comfortable little rut of appealing to unintelligent children and frustrated, captive wrestling fans.

So that is the story of 2011. For five minutes everybody sat forward, paid attention to wrestling for the first time in a decade, offered me and my wrestling-addled brain the hope that once again I could express my fondness for this unique art form in public and share this ludicrous passion I’ve had to carry with me since childhood with other normal human beings. And then that hope was smothered by the same hideous booking that made WCW a joke back when adults were actually watching. Money In The Bank 2011 will forever be recorded as a classic, Punk’s masterpiece built against the odds in adverse circumstances, but it’s clear the WWE wanted no part of it. So in 2012 I’ll again be spending more time and money on the manly emotions of Ring of Honor, the nerdy humour of Chikara and face kicking antics of New Japan than on the most successful company in the sport’s history. Everything now seems more hopeless in the wake of that optimistic spark of creative insight. Ultimately, 2011 may have only lent credence to Punk’s prediction that this might well be the last generation of pro wrestling in America, such is the incompetence and offensive negligence of the industry leaders.

Also, Randy Savage died.

Them’s The Vagaries #28: The Cuckoo-Clock Of Doom

Here is the end of year episode of the podcast I do. It’s kind of like sprinting a marathon. There’s three parts, sort of. We talk about our songs of the year, then we take a break and when we come back we agree for a while about the two best artists of the year. After that we go to some albums of the year and things fall apart as we get tired and any basic tolerance for the other’s taste in music beyond rap kind of goes out the window.

The show notes are here. Facebook here. Subscribe on iTunes.

Associated with this podcast, I have made a compilation of music Seán would hate, which is (by tradition anyway) the kind of music people who read this blog would like:

Anti-Sean Mixtape – Squarehead – I Wanna Hold Your Hand//Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Ffunny Ffrends//Fair Ohs – Baldessari//Smith Westerns – Weekend//Milk Maid – Dead Wrong//Dum Dum Girls – Always Looking//Cults – You Know What I Mean//Tune-yards – Es-So//Vivian Girls – Dance (If You Wanna)//Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Heart In Your Heartbreak//Male Bonding – Carrying//The Babies – Meet Me In The City//Hunx And His Punx – He’s Coming Back

Also on top of that, I made a “mix” of my favourite rap songs of the year, the tracklist of which follows. Mediafire download here.

Young L – Same Reason (As I Float: The Great John Nash Mixtape)
Lil B – Unchain Me (Im Gay)
Cousin Fik – Hacksaw Ben Thuggin’ (Hacksaw Ben Thuggin’)
Roach Gigz – F A Chorus (Bitch I’m A Player)
Lil Wayne feat. Cory Gunz – 6’7′ (Tha Carter IV)
Gucci Mane – Tragedy (Writings On The Wall II)
Blueprint – Automatic (Adventures In Counter-Culture)
Z-Ro – Never Had Love (Meth)
Kreayshawn – Gucci Gucci (single)
Tyler, the Creator – Yonkers (Goblin)
Mellowhype – 64 (Blackenedwhite reissue)
Curren$y – #jetsgo (Weekend At Burnie’s)
Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire feat. Despot, Das Racist, Danny Brown & El-P – The Last Huzzah (remix)
Meek Mill feat. Rick Ross – Tupac Back (MMG Presents: Self Made Vol. 1)
Young L – Loud Pockets (Domo Kun)

As a man who finds it difficult to keep up with the critical designations of the things that happen in British electronic music (maximalism is in, apparently), I might not be the best placed person to say this, but there was something really weird about the SBTRKT record the first time I heard it. Not that it was that sonically weird in an overall context. In fact, the weird part was that it sounded like it already existed. Like it had always existed. Like a cross-section snapshot of all British electronic music since the 90s, from rudeboy garage to James Blake keening over 0.75 drum hits per bar. Not that it sounds retro, though. It sounds bracingly current, somehow, even though there’s a track that sounds like that most disrespected genre, Pro Evo loading music. I get people telling me to listen to various “post-dubstep” things often, so I’d built up a wall of scepticism. SBTRKT is immediate in a way that none of that seems to me. Wildfire, with Little Dragon singing, is good in a really appealing way, an exhortation to dance but executed with what can only really be described as taste. Maybe that’s what’s good about the whole thing, like it’s, abhorrent as it might sound, a safe version of genre tourism. Pieces of everything, with an assurance of quality.

The Pro Evo-sounding track and dude’s Twitter, avoiding by these choices the whole Wildean “hide the artist and reveal art” anonymity bullshit and the “it’s grand to wear tribal masks” thing too.

SBTRKT – Wildfire

19. Gucci Mane – Writings On The Wall 2 [US]

Everything in me wants me to just type “excuse me for being gangsta, I’m crazy” and leave that as the review of this tape, because that’s Gucci Mane. An insane gangsta rapping about being an insane gangsta who got arrested for being a gangsta and then got out of going to real prison because he’s insane. It’s perfect. What does he do as soon as he comes out? Raps about avoiding consequences for being gangsta by claiming, fully legitimately, that he’s crazy. There is nobody in the world like Gucci Mane. It’s not like this mixtape is wildly different to what you’d expect. It’s got roving 808 kicks and trap raps about trap stuff where he says roughly the kind of thing you’d expect him to stay but he still makes you go “…hold on, what?” and rewind it. Like bragging about having an iPhone. Or “I call my secretary my sexetary, I sent that bitch a picture of my dictionary.” It’s more subtle than it used to be. But there are great songs (Tragedy and the for-girls Brrr (Supa Cold) especially). And it’s got DJ Holiday Season shouting “HOLIDAY SEASON!” and talking about retiring the word crown. What’s better than that?

You can get this for the low price of having to listen to DJ Holiday Season shout his name. Also a making-of video.

Gucci Mane – Tragedy

18. The Babies – The Babies [US]

I fucking hate Woods. As far as I’m concerned, they’re responsible for the downfall of that couple of years of lo-fi I fell in love with, when bands of no major consequence were putting out great, shoddy seven inches and it seemed like there was a 50% chance I’d like any American band booked in Dublin. They made it boring, elevated “vibes” over melody and split opinion. Pitchfork called them a litmus test. I came out whatever colour is bad. I was surprised, then, that a dude from Woods could collaborate with the more annoying-sounding Vivian Girl and still end up making something I really liked. “Muscle” is definitely the wrong term for what they found, but by coincidence or design, they ended up with songs that sound like songs, with hooks that make good songs. Meet Me In The City could be one of those “great, shoddy seven inches” and Personality, surprisingly, is just a punk song. All of a sudden, with a solid basis, the couch potato bullshit of Woods records and Cassie from Vivian Girls’ physically-incapable-of-being-arsed thing become endearing. And it’s a boy-girl record, which you kind of have to cherish when an alright one comes around.

AV Club uses various humorously meaningless music critic-type similes about this. “Passing vocals back and forth as if the mic were an ice-cream cone” indeed.

The Babies – Meet Me In The City

17. Cousin Fik – Hacksaw Ben Thuggin’ [US]

The initial topic of general discussion about Cousin Fik is, inevitably, whether he’s the cousin of anyone in particular or just a general cousin. He’s from E-40’s Cork-sized home city and he’s on E-40’s record label, which is usually a pretty good guide for whether or not people are related to him. At one point on the tape he even says “call me Lil Wayne cos I’m stuntin’ like my daddy,” which just confuses matters. He’s not E-40 though. He can rap really fast, but it’s more like a lightweight boxer than a mental octopus or whatever the fuck E-40 is. He steps in, hits a technically sound volley like Cory Gunz or someone, then steps out and drops a punchline about wrestling or horror movies. You could probably present him on paper as a post-Odd Future rapper if you wanted, but you’d lose the crowd once a note of music played. Because Cousin Fik manages the not unimpressive job of making a song about having a crew consisting of Freddy, Jason and Mike Myers or being Hacksaw Jim Duggan actually sound like hard, ‘street’ rap music. The beats range from cloudy to Just Blazey and Fik stays on top of them all. Because he’s not just good, he’s interesting.

You can get this for free, but also watch this excellent video of the best song.

Cousin Fik – Hacksaw Ben Thuggin

16. Young L – Domo Kun/As I Float (The Great John Nash)/Praktica [US]

Cliché at this point on certain areas of the rap internet that Young L is being underrated and that he should be Lex Luger rich and famous, or at least Clams Casino rich and famous. It’s true. Like those other two dudes, he’s under 25 and he basically staked out a new subgenre for himself with his beats. Unlike those two, though, there isn’t really anyone else in Young L’s subgenre yet. Young L-E-N, from last year, still stands as the manifesto: “nothing but that Martian knock”. There is, indeed, “nobody making this type of slap,” and it’s only developed further this year. Loud Pockets, off the Domo Kun mixtape, is the best example yet, unequivocally the best song of the year. Arcade Pussy, off the Praktica tape that just came out, is fairly conclusive proof that, even if there’s a temptation to call Young L a producer first and rapper second, nobody has developed a decent enough conception of his beats yet to rap better than he does over them. “Not even music,” is how a friend who was attempting to listen to Common put it, and I decided not to disagree. Call it anti-music if you like. Huge low end, Super Nintendo Sega Genesis high end and a dude shouting “respect my motherfucking dick”. If that doesn’t sound appealing, listen. If it’s still not appealing, fine. He made another mixtape this year that was a go at Imogen Heap samples. And that was great too. Young L is a genius. The only reason this isn’t higher is because there’s chaff on each tape. Combine the three and you’d be in top 3 album territory.

Domo Kun tape, the Imogen Heap sample tape and the Praktica tape. Who else you know got a iced-out ghost though?

Young L – Loud Pockets

Young L – Same Reason

Young L – Arcade Pussy

Proceedings at CERN, 2011

Lend me the apparatus to esteem
This addle gumbo split – from the outside

In, to itemise each piece of air
And calibrate the function of the murk.

In all manner of things is intermingled time,
Lest from the soil one see a cow coa-

Lesce, or, hatching from the sky, a bird.
But this is an invitation to disprove

That a swerving, here, of my limbs to life
Occurred a bit before my having willed it

It is difficult to explain in words why I like Panda Bear when I know I’m dismissive of similar music. It could be brand loyalty, though I’d like to think it’s not. The other times I’ve written about him specifically here, I came up with the ideas that a) “you can sleep to it” but it’s not boring and b) his melodies are “the melodies children sing to themselves in playgrounds, the purest, most beautiful music“. One of those is underselling and the other is, in all likelihood, overselling. Both still feel, to some extent, true. Tomboy is hypnagogic music, one long psychedelic lope at a varying pace with varying melodic or semi-obscured lyrical hooks to provide the changes in pattern amongst the repetition. It’s at its best when you lose focus and it feels for a second like you’re hearing a nursery rhyme for adults, as if that’s a normal thing. It doesn’t have the lofty moments Person Pitch had, but they were just highlights, not the whole reason it was good. That’s still the same, I just can’t really express what it is.

Panda Bear questions existence and thinks about ▲.

Panda Bear – Slow Motion

24. Fair Ohs – Everything Is Dancing [UK]

For some reason, the ‘tropical’ arm of lo-fi music seems easy to dismiss now. It’s not as if there’s anything less earnest about having syncopated drums and afrobeat guitars than there is about “updating” 60s garage rock or anything else. Fair Ohs, or at least in their most easily defined manifestation, are bloodline successors of Vampire Weekend, Abe Vigoda and maybe even Surfer Blood in terms of messing around with African styles in a conventional indie rock set-up. It’s been done, I know, it’s not a unique selling point any more. But what if the band is good? There is a distinct element of something nebulous like ‘heart’ about Fair Ohs that makes the negative connotations of still doing tropical pop go away, and besides, their sloganeering choruses are infectious enough to negate any quasi-critical discussion. Baldessari, the opener, effectively has two choruses and nothing else. It’s simple, pseudo-naïve and impossible not to find fun.

BBC Maida Vale session and their website that encourages you to blog about them.

Fair Ohs – Baldessari

23. Z-Ro – Meth [US]

You get the impression that, this far into his career, Z-Ro genuinely doesn’t care about the impression he gives off. There’s a disconcerting sense that he actually believes what he says, even when it’s well-trod territory for most rappers. He is very clear in his hatred of women, especially the mothers of his children, but he has no issue with stealing your girl, ostensibly just to flex alpha credentials. He is on his “fuck the world for no reason shit” on the song dedicated to proving that (No Reason) and everywhere else too. Everyone is getting slapped, and some people are getting shot. It’s actually unpleasant to listen to at times, but there’s something undeniable about how confident and unassailable he sounds when he rolls out the OG croon. The laid back Southern necksnap beats set you up and then Z-Ro sings on his tracks in exactly the opposite way that Drake (one of two people in the world given a dispensation to wear skinny jeans, coincidentally) does. There’s soul to it, real feeling. Even when he’s talking about being “an asshole – by nature”, that makes it ultimately relatable.

Z-Ro endorsing a barber shop and explaining that he doesn’t have bodyguards and a freestyle he dropped on Twitter.

Z-Ro – Never Had Love

22. Male Bonding – Endless Now [UK]

There are two approaches presenting themselves here. The first, well-worn and not particularly interesting any more, is the fact that Male Bonding made a lo-fi record and then followed it up with this one, which is less lo-fi. Like Girls. And Pains of Being Pure At Heart. And Smith Westerns. And a million other bands. Bands aren’t beholden to something as superficial as an amount of vocal reverb, even if that was, embarrassingly, what drew you in in the first place. The second approach is to talk about how Male Bonding, a London band already dangerously close to pastiche of American music, went even further in that direction. Slower and less reckless, this is J. Mascis territory definitely, but if you’re a fan of anything approaching this style of guitar pop, you’ve necessarily gotten over the term “derivative” and you acknowledge that these records have to live and die by their songs, their contributions to the great power pop compilation in the sky. Endless Now is a good record by those standards, and songs like Bones also fulfill the secondary purpose of backing up the idea that it’s time to welcome Blink 182 back into the guitar pop canon.

Review from AU and a cover of Aneurysm from an EMA split.

Male Bonding – Carrying

21. Fucked Up – David Comes To Life [CAN]

I suppose it’s important to acknowledge the fact that this is a rock opera. Fucked Up are, after all, vestigially a hardcore band, and lyrics are all-important in hardcore. It’s something to do with a love triangle and a lightbulb factory. But even though the 78 minute consistent concept has dazzled reviewers and dominated the narrative surrounding the record, that’s not really anything to do with what makes David Comes To Life good. It’s good because it’s the perfect modern power pop record, not separating melody and aggression but wedding them. Pink Eyes’ singing is, of course, melody-free, but that just adds to the impact. Rather than being a record of excess and laudable but ultimately inaccessible ambition, it’s better to think of it as a distillation of the immediacy of hardcore (Pink Eyes spitting out the words “running on nothing” in a way that makes you feel like there’s a lot of phlegm coming out and he’s going to need to sit down afterwards) and the prettiness of pop rock (the Poptopia-sounding high guitar riffs that drive almost every song). At an hour and twenty minutes, sure, it’s difficult to stay open to melodies presented with that much drive, but if you can avoid simply letting it hit you in the face, it’s really a triumph of fun, feelings and an unexpected level of quality control.

Running On Nothing live in their home town and a Pink Eyes interview from the AV Club.

Fucked Up – Queen Of Hearts