C.M.C. Reloaded: Let's "Begin Again"

 

New Year and a New Start for Cool Music Central

As we are coming close to the end of our seventh year on Blogger (incredibly enough, our very first post here was on March 6, 2008!), C.M.C. is about to enter Phase III of its online existence.

A little history first: Phase I of Cool Music Central started as a fun experiment sometime in the summer of 1999, a single webpage hosted on Netscape websites which featured our first of many to come "Best Albums of the Month" list. 

We continued with monthly updated lists of favorite albums and tracks accompanied by my rants and raves on new music, while all the years from 1980 and onwards got a "Best of the Year" album list featured on a separate webpage, jokingly titled Cool Music Database (all of which, of course, you can now find here). More pages with festival reviews were added as well, so the original webpage started to look like a proper mini-site.

Fast-forward to 2008: a few months before the shutdown of Netscape websites, our transition to Blogger had started with that first post, which was actually exactly like one of the "rants 'n' raves" I used to post to the old site. Phase II had begun...

January 17, 2015: With an appropriately titled brand new track by Purity Ring, the very fine "Begin Again" from their upcoming sophomore album "Another Eternity" (out early March on 4AD), and a slightly different look, Phase III of Cool Music Central is about to begin!

"What's new?" you will ask, of course. The main difference is that we're going to increase the number of monthly posts but the focus will always be on the music and not the written word. As a famous quote goes, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" and I fully subscribe to that. You will still be able to find my rants and raves about new music (or my "dances about architecture") in the "Listening Habits" series of posts which will continue on a regular basis, but mostly we'll be featuring the music that gets us excited, whether it's a brand new song like the one we've chosen today or an oldie we'd like to share with you, without much commentary. The music will speak for itself, we will just be the curators of the evolving narrative.

So, let's start creating the soundtrack of 2015... the needle has just dropped on the first track and I do like the way it sounds. How about you?

Purity Ring - Another Eternity

2012 Review: Top 60 Albums of the Year (1 to 30)

Happy New Year to everyone! And what better way to start off 2013 than with the presentation of our 30 favorite albums of the year that was.

All the albums that occupy the first five positions of our list equally deserve the honor of being crowned "Album of the Year". In the end, we decided to make 2012 the year of the Cat and give our Number One to "Sun" (Matador), Cat Power’s ninth studio album, which quickly became my personal favorite of her outstanding discography (along with 2003’s "You are free"). Chan Marshal took the risk of trying a new, electronic-based sound for her first album of original material in six years and the end-result is truly refreshing. Despite the various personal troubles that she went through in that time, "Sun" turned out to be her most optimistic sounding record to date, showing us a more mature Chan, ready to deal with the problems of this ruin we’re all living on and to give out some good advice in her most soothing voice.

A good year for a record company is of course defined by its financial results. I have no idea how 4AD is doing in that department, but artistically the historic label has had an outstanding 2012, reflected by the fact that three of its releases are in our Top 5, between the second and fourth place:

"Visions" by Grimes earned much deserved high praise all around and ended up at the top of many year-end lists, while fellow Canadians Purity Ring have also done well with their debut album "Shrines" (our Debut of the Year). If you are looking for a fresh sound that defines 2012, I think the majestic synthpop hybrids concocted by both Grimes and Purity Ring have the answer. The sound of Mark Lanegan and his band, on the other hand, comes from the glorious past of guitar music. It is definitely not new but only a fool would take its classic quality for granted. Best guitar rock record of the year featuring perhaps the greatest singer of the last 25 years in superb form!

As for our fifth "Album of the Year", "Bloom" (Bella Union / Sub Pop) is the record that proves that Beach House are on their way to becoming one of the most important bands of this decade. The continuous evolution of the duo’s sound has driven them to new heights on their fourth and best album so far, a magnificent work that shows it is not impossible to improve on the perfection of "Teen Dream".

Here is the top half of Cool Music Central’s Top 60 Albums of 2012 (for the second half, click here):

Top 30 Albums of 2012

1.   Sun - CAT POWER

2012 was the Year of the Cat: Our Album and Single of the Year belong to Chan Marshal!

2.   Visions - GRIMES

"Grimes' vision for a perfect electropop future takes shape and form in the glorious 13 tracks of Visions" (complete post here)

3.   Shrines - PURITY RING

"Shrines is one of the albums defining the electronic sound of 2012" (more here)

4.   Blues funeral - MARK LANEGAN BAND

"All the different musical elements from Lanegan's many collaborations are weaved together in Blues Funeral, making it one of the most diverse sounding records of his career" (more here)

5.   Bloom - BEACH HOUSE

"A majestic record that may prove to be the duo's finest hour" (more here)

6.   Attack on memory - CLOUD NOTHINGS

"The intense, hard-hitting sound of Attack On Memory is inspired by groups like Wipers or Husker Du and this young band’s true achievement here is that they are able to follow in the footsteps of such legends without missing a beat" (more here)

7.   Silver age - BOB MOULD

"Bob Mould’s Silver Age is a return to the sound of his Sugar years, a record that proves he can still produce the same fire and fury that inspired the early '90s alternative rock explosion" (more here)

8.   Blunderbuss - JACK WHITE

Jack White offers a record that musically may be a little more laid back than his previous work but is no less striking, exhibiting once again his admirable skill of making music firmly rooted in rock tradition that sounds fresh and forward-thinking.

9.   Kill for love - CHROMATICS

The sleeper hit of the year - a cinematic synth pop epic that gets better and better every time you decide to immerse yourself in its  lush sounds.

10. (III) - CRYSTAL CASTLES

Their journey to the heart of darkness continues (more about (III) in our next "Listening Habits" post, coming soon).

11. Give you the ghost - POLIÇA
12. Cancer 4 cure - EL-P
13. WIXIW - LIARS
14. Celebration rock - JAPANDROIDS
15. I bet on sky - DINOSAUR JR.
16. Lost songs - ...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD
17. Metz - METZ
18. 2:54 - 2:54
19. A thing called Divine Fits - DIVINE FITS
20. The bears for lunch - GUIDED BY VOICES
21. The seer - SWANS
22. Worship - A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS
23. Reign of terror - SLEIGH BELLS
24. Lonerism - TAME IMPALA
25. Our house on the hill - THE BABIES
26. Twins - TY SEGALL
27. Open your heart - THE MEN
28. Meat and bone - THE JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION
29. Mature themes - ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI
30. Swing lo Magellan - DIRTY PROJECTORS

For our Top 50 Singles of 2012 click here.

Highlights from our Top 20 Albums of the Year:

2012 Review: Top 60 Albums of the Year (31 to 60)

Last year we published the first version of our year-end album list around Christmas. This time we decided to wait until the very last day of the year before we press the "publish" button, to make sure that as few as possible of the latest incoming records were left out. Seeing the amount of last minute additions to the list, I think it was a good call. Of course there will always going to be a few omissions and this is exactly the reason why we also keep a blog exclusively for our "Best of the Year" lists. To find the final, up-to-date version of any of our year-end lists, just look it up in Cool Music Database - the process of discovery is continuous!

If, however, we momentarily freeze this process on this day, the last of the year, the result we're getting is the list we present to you here and now. Today we are unveiling the second half of Cool Music Central's 60 favorite albums of 2012 plus a few more that deserve a mention and we'll start 2013 with the Top 30. Keep in mind that EPs, compilations and reissues are excluded from this list.

Here are the albums from 31 to 60:

Top 60 Albums of 2012: 31 - 60

31. Django Django - DJANGO DJANGO

32. Synthetica - METRIC
33. Tramp - SHARON VAN ETTEN
34. Ekstasis - JULIA HOLTER
35. Between the times and the tides - LEE RANALDO
36. Kill my blues - CORIN TUCKER BAND
37. Europe - ALLO DARLIN'
38. Nocturne - WILD NOTHING
39. The haunted man - BAT FOR LASHES
40. Sweet heart, sweet light - SPIRITUALIZED
41. Circles - MOON DUO
42. R.A.P. music - KILLER MIKE
43. The money store - DEATH GRIPS
44. Ghostory - SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS
45. Endless flowers - CROCODILES
46. The only place - BEST COAST
47. Animal joy - SHEARWATER
48. Nootropics - LOWER DENS
49. Centipede Hz - ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
50. Interstellar - FRANKIE ROSE
51. Manifest! - FRIENDS
52. Toy - TOY
53. The horror - POP. 1280
54. Strapped - THE SOFT PACK
55. Tuscon - GIANT GIANT SAND
56. Heaven - THE WALKMEN
57. Port of morrow - THE SHINS
58. Researching the blues - REDD KROSS
59. Confess - TWIN SHADOW
60. Hospitality - HOSPITALITY

What else we liked: Sees the light - LA SERA, Let's go eat the factory - GUIDED BY VOICES, Class clown spots a UFO - GUIDED BY VOICES, With Siinai: Heartbreaking bravery - MOONFACE, Clay class - PRINZHORN DANCE SCHOOL, Future this - THE BIG PINK, Master of my make-believe - SANTIGOLD, Four - BLOC PARTY, In the belly of the brazen bull - THE CRIBS, In time to voices - BLOOD RED SHOES, Something - CHAIRLIFT, Quarantine - LAUREL HALO

And here's just a small sample of the albums that we need to give a few more spins before we can decide where they fit in the big picture of 2012: Oshin - DIIV, Zeros - THE SOFT MOON, Melody's Echo Chamber - MELODY'S ECHO CHAMBER, Shields - GRIZZLY BEAR, Until the quiet comes - FLYING LOTUS, Banks - PAUL BANKS, The north - STARS, Don't be a stranger - MARK EITZEL, Coexist - THE XX, Beard, wives, denim - POND, Silencio - LAETITIA SADIER...and the list goes on!

We're signing off for 2012 with our current favorite video (and our last jam of the year), a short fashion film created for The Defiant based on Purity Ring's song "Obedear". Purity Ring have made our favorite debut album of 2012 and, as you can easily guess, they are going to be a part of our next post! Stay tuned for the Top 30... time to get that champagne on ice. Happy New Year!

 Purity Ring - Obedear

2012 Review: Debut Albums of the Year

The preparation of our "2012 Albums" list is well under way and at this point the battle for number one is between two equally worthy candidates. May the best woman win (hint, hint). But until we make up our mind and present the final results in about two weeks time, here’s another one of our mini year-end lists.

Last week we singled out the best albums from the old school, this time we are dealing with the new blood: the best debut albums of the year from new artists and bands. This means that new groups by already established musicians (for example Divine Fits) or first solo efforts by members of well-known bands are not eligible for this particular list.

Although 2012 has not been a vintage year for debuts, we did have a number of highly promising first efforts. The most outstanding of them all came from Canadian duo Purity Ring who released "Shrines" in July, an album that masterfully combines the best elements from the last three decades of electronic music. By the end of summer we were declaring "Shrines" to be our favorite album of the season and now it’s time to bestow upon it the title of "Debut Album of the Year" - well done Megan and Corin!

Here are the twelve debut albums that stood out for us in 2012:

Top 12 Debut Albums of 2012

1.   Shrines - PURITY RING



2.   Give You The Ghost - POLIÇA



3.   Metz - METZ



4.   2:54 - 2:54



5.   Django Django - DJANGO DJANGO



6.   Manifest! - FRIENDS



7.   Toy - TOY



8.   Hospitality - HOSPITALITY



9.   The Horror - POP. 1280



10. Oshin - DIIV



11. Melody's Echo Chamber - MELODY'S ECHO CHAMBER



12. Quarantine - LAUREL HALO



Check out below our favorite debuts from previous years:

Top Debuts of 2011
Top Debuts of 2010
Top Debuts of 2009
Top Debuts of 2008

Listening Habits 07-08.12

On the first rainy day of autumn we’re looking back on the second half of the summer and choosing our favorite albums and tracks:

As we’ve said before, Purity Ring have made the Album of the Summer for us. The young Montreal duo, consisting of Megan James on vocals and Corin Roddick on instruments, succeeds in crafting a rich electronic tapestry on debut album "Shrines", masterfully combining the best elements from the last three decades of electronic music. Tampered hip hop and R&B beats provide the idiosyncratic rhythms that propel the ethereal synth-pop melodies, while Megan’s dreamy vocals become the most important instrument at the heart of Purity Ring’s luscious sound. "Shrines" is one of the albums that are defining the electronic sound of 2012 and given that "Visions" by label-mate Grimes was equally important in that respect, I imagine that they must be feeling pretty proud at 4AD right now.

Further evidence that currently the guitar sound has taken a back seat and electronic music is doing all the innovation driving is provided by "WIXIW", Liars’ sixth album. The former post-punkers and noise-makers, in another twist of their adventurous career path, have ditched the guitars and with the help of Mute label boss and synth-music pioneer Daniel Miller have crafted their most electronic record to date. Liars’ instruments of choice may have changed here, but the end result is as exciting as ever and no less unpredictable, ranging from the fine synthpop of first single "No.1 Against the Rush" to the aggressive dance punk of new single "Brats".

For those of us who are still in need of a regular guitar-noise fix, thankfully there were the summer new releases by Japandroids and A Place To Bury Strangers to keep our spirits high, with a little help from the new tunes by Dinosaur Jr. (their new album "I Bet On Sky" is expected soon) and Chelsea Light Moving, Thurston Moore’s new band, whose "Burroughs" sounds like a long lost Sonic Youth b-side.

Top 12 Albums

1.   Shrines - PURITY RING
2.   WIXIW - LIARS
3.   Celebration Rock - JAPANDROIDS
4.   Worship - A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS
5.   Synthetica - METRIC
6.   The Money Store - DEATH GRIPS
7.   R.A.P. Music - KILLER MIKE
8.   Confess - TWIN SHADOW
9.   Tuscon - GIANT GIANT SAND
10. Heaven - THE WALKMEN
11. With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery - MOONFACE
12. In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull - THE CRIBS

Top 20 Tracks

1.   Watch The Corners - DINOSAUR JR.
2.   Cherokee - CAT POWER
3.   Belispeak - PURITY RING
4.   Synthetica - METRIC
5.   Heaven - THE WALKMEN
6.   The House That Heaven Built - JAPANDROIDS
7.   Burroughs - CHELSEA LIGHT MOVING
8.   Alone - A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS
9.   Plague - CRYSTAL CASTLES
10. Brats - LIARS
11. I’ve Seen Footage - DEATH GRIPS (interactive video link)
12. Big Beast - KILLER MIKE
13. Five Seconds - TWIN SHADOW
14. The Base - PAUL BANKS
15. Lord Knows - DUM DUM GIRLS
16. I'm Not The Phoenix Yet - MOONFACE
17. Die Life - THE SOFT MOON
18. Glitters Like Gold - THE CRIBS
19. Undiscovered Country - GIANT GIANT SAND
20. OK - MICACHU AND THE SHAPES

Watch The Corners - DINOSAUR JR.

(mp3s via stereogum, kexp & sub pop)

Killer Tracks: Purity Ring vs. Cat Power

Time to get back to business after our summer break and what better way to ease back into the groove of things than getting a double dose of awesomeness courtesy of Purity Ring and Cat Power.

"Shrines", the debut full length by newcomers Purity Ring, is by far the best new album I've listened to this summer and undoubtedly one of the most vital debuts of 2012. We'll definitely talk more about it in the coming weeks as it will certainly top our July-August album list - in the meantime, here's the video for one of its best tracks, "Fineshrine", as well as a recent episode of Pitchfork.tv's "+1" series where the band, siren-voiced singer Megan James and synth-wizard Corin Roddick, performs the track in the round at New York City's Le Poisson Rouge and talks about how they came together and more:

Purity Ring - Fineshrine

Purity Ring performs "Fineshrine" at Le Poisson Rouge

Meanwhile, the time is getting near for Cat Power's return with "Sun", Chan Marshall's first album of original material in six years. The first taste, the free mp3 of "Ruin" that came out in June, got us all hot and bothered and shot straight to the top of the list of our 30 favorite singles of the year so far. The second taste, the mp3 of "Cherokee" which you can get together with its remix from Nicolas Jaar by signing up to the mailing list here, is equally seductive and provides further indication that the "Sun" is going to shine particularly bright on September 3. Stream both "Cherokee" and its remix below, via Stereogum:

Cherokee

Cherokee (Nicolas Jaar remix)