My Top Ten Albums of 2012

I remember it finally happened one Saturday back in February.

It happened with no prior notice that it was going to happen.

It was February and it was a Saturday and I had just finished watching “30 Century Man,”  which is a documentary about Scott Walker. I mean Scott Walker the musician, of course. Not Scott Walker the Wisconsin governor.

I remember I finished watching “30 Century Man,”  and then I sat there, thinking, “I should really go and buy a CD by this Scott Walker guy!”  I could not fathom how I had missed him all of these years. The thing is, when I got into my van to go to Cactus Records and/or Sound Exchange and/or Sound Waves and/or Vinal Edge, I could not bring myself to turn the key. Cactus Records was not going to have a Scott Walker album, or at least not a Scott Walker album I wanted. Neither was Sound Exchange. The thing is, I knew I was about to spend the better part of my day driving around Houston for an album I would end up ordering off of Amazon.

I wanted the album now. Well, not now now. I mean right there and then now, when this happened, which was one Saturday back in February.

In the end, I wound up downloading Scott Walker's The Drift off of iTunes, which is the whole reason I am telling you this story. I promised myself this was a one-time thing. I promised myself I would not make a habit of it. I promised I would not tell anyone what I had done. I was too good for mp3 music downloads. But for just this one time, I would make an exception.

Of course, that’s not what ended up happening. At all. Of my Top Ten favorite albums of 2012, I only possess three on CD. Three of them were never even released in CD format! (For those of you living in the twenty-first century, “CD”  stands for “compact disc,”  which was a sort of optical disk that your grandparents used to store digital data like music.)

So here they are. The bestest CDs, LPs, and digital downloads I got in 2012.

10. Swans – The Seer

The Seer is a rock album that can bend sound into impossible shapes while hovering in midair. The Seer is a rock album that can freeze time. And of course, with three songs that crash on beyond the 20-minute mark, The Seer had sure better be able to freeze time.

9. Aesop Rock – None Shall Pass

Standing in line to get into the Aesop Rock concert this past summer, I got a little nervous at the number of white suburban kids in Wu Tang shirts I was seeing around me. Uh oh! Not to worry, though: Aesop is a hell of an entertainer. The guy transcends genre, and he sure deserves a wider audience.

8. Scott Walker – Scott 3

This one is from 1968, and Scott’s playing the part of a spaced-out crooner. There are a couple psychedelic ambient tracks, a couple Jacques Brel covers, and even a patriotic ditty (complete with fireworks!). I don’t know exactly what this is, and that’s okay, too. I listen to a lot of damn music, so if it should so happen that I am unable to categorize an album, it’s gotta be a strange beast indeed.

7. Joseph Arthur – Redemption City

Finally, a decade and a half into his recording career, Joseph Arthur tries his hand at some loftier themes. Somehow, it works. Twenty-four tracks of this guy rapping about drugs and Christianity and Wassily Kadinsky, and it works! “Touched”  might just be the best thing he has ever done.

6. Mount Eerie – Clear Moon

“If I look / Or if I don’t look / Clouds are always / Passing over.”  I want to live inside of a Mount Eerie album.  I think this one would be as good a home as any for me. It’s a moody mental trip from the city to the sea, and the analog synths even add a little light to the landscape.

5. Robin Williamson – Skirting the River Road

With Skirting the River Road, Robin Williamson - formerly of the Incredible String Band - enters a VERY exclusive club indeed. He is one of only six artists to have gotten TEN separate albums into my Top Ten of the Year list over the years. I even made him an award in commemoration of this, but he has yet to come pick it up. Dirty hippie bastard...

4. Mount Eerie – Ocean Roar

For quite a while now, Mount Eerie’s music has mostly sounded like a little boy humming quietly to himself as a thunderstorm overhead threatens to crush him like a bug. But Mount Eerie mastermind Phil Elverum has really perfected that sound this time out. I just can’t be objective when it comes to Phil Elverum. The guy can do no wrong in my book.

3. Xasthur – Subliminal Genocide

This is one spooky black metal album. It sounds like the sound of some ghosts left out in the rain overnight who have woken up crying about it, just over the edge of the horizon. Yeah... Yes, that is precisely what this album sounds like.

2. Scott Walker – The Drift

In any other year, this one would have ended up at number one. It’s smart, it’s challenging, and it does not really sound like anything else you have ever heard. The thing is, it is also a miserable listening experience: sort of the sonic equivalent of having all your skin chewed off slowly. Which – don’t get me wrong! – is a remarkable accomplishment for an artist. I mean, you try doing that. But in the year 2012, I did not need this much help at feeling bad.

1. Aesop Rock – Skelethon

This is a hip hop album about cats, death, and eating your vegetables. It’s dark: Kimya Dawson does a nursery rhyme calling her dead best friend “meat inside a box” (“Crows 1”) and Aesop Rock raps about mummifying a pet cat (“How to Make a Homemade Mummy”). It’s goofy: “Racing Stripes” and “Grace” would be embarrassing if they were not surrounded by such brilliance. Aesop Rock raps about “autophagy,” about “a misanthrope vying for affection,” and about “bootlegs of Hawkwind.”  I’d call it a masterpiece, but that would probably scare you away.

Now it is your turn. Tell me: What did you put in your ears this year?

Part 4: A Misanthrope Vying for Affection

+ But… But noo-o-o-o!

+ But ye-e-e-es.

+ But… But I’m all alone now!

+ Oh, I’m sorry. Are you and I having a conversation of some sort?

+ Listen to me! I am all alone in the world! 
+ Alone? Not a chance. There are 7 billion other people in the world.

+ But… But you don’t understand! I don’t like any other people!

+ Statistically speaking, you will probably meet other people you like.

Part 3: Hyde, Jekyll-ized

The crazy bitch that I am, I’ve got a vacuum cleaner’s got a headlight on it. I never even knew it. Presumably, this is a light for cleaning house after it gets dark, right?

But don’t tell me. Do not give the game away. I’ve got to catch up with these little things I’ve been missing for so long… while I have been the crazy bitch who’s victimizing Dana.

And this little switch right here – push it up, push it down – this here’s the on/off switch. Momma didn’t raise no fool. You push it like this and, excuse me – YOU PUSH IT LIKE THAT AND GET THE EXPECTED RESULTS! Would you look at that? I might’ve figured all this out already! What was it we were paying that housekeeper for?

I’m talking back in the days when I was victimizing Dana.

Part 2: Awaiting Spirits and Provisions

Okay, what next?

I’ll say I walk back into my house, but this is a lie. It is a damn lie. I do not walk – not me, myself, I, Katy – because Katy is a wife, Katy is a mother, Katy is but one component of a family. This crying humanoid-ish thing, left behind on a curb, this thing that walks into my house, it is none of those things.

And “my house” – well, that is not really true either, is it? My house, ahh, you should have seen it before! My house was full to bursting with toys and cats and photographs, with squeaky rubber balls and boxes and mountains of shoes. But this here house does not contain a one of those things. This here house is huge and it is cavernous and it is practically empty.  

You could not even lose your keys in this house.

Part 1: An Amicable Marooning

I want to tell you a story.

It is likely – it is even probable! – that this story that I wish to tell is a story which requires more than a single simple blog post to relate. For this is not a tale that putt-putts forward from Point A to Point B in any traditionally recognized manner of travel.

We cannot begin in a place called “Here”  with a young, soon-to-be hero smoking his pipe and staring at the horizon and dreaming of a world lying beyond his own only to wind up in a place called “Over There”  with the same hero – now slightly older, greatly wiser – having won the girl and the grail and the castle and the steed and a new best friend for comedic relief. No! For this is not that species of story. Not by a long shot.

This is a seed. No, this is a cutting – a wee bit snip of root or stem or vine that will grow and grow until it twists up and around and back down again. This is a story that brings in me and your grandmother and Teddy Roosevelt and the first t.v. Even you – yes you! – make an appearance in this story. Briefly, fleetingly, and we’ve had to smudge your face out because we didn’t get your written permission to show you, true. But you’re in there!

In this story, there is no edge where maps fail and ships fall off into space, captains, rats, and all. This story goes as far as we let it.

But this story starts right here.

And it starts with a moving truck. Here, I’m not speaking of a truck in motion, but rather of a truck whose whole purpose in life is to transport people’s household belongings – their couches and bed springs and dressers and the family photos and pet baby scorpions – and take them from one residence to a new residence. To a new life.

The box of this truck has a pale blue stripe down it and the stripe goes on forever. You see a stripe like that, you cannot help but to think, “How can any one person or one family or one village possess so very many belongings that it would require a truck with a stripe so long in which to carry them?”

You’d think that and you’d be justified in your thinking, but our greatest physicists have studied the truck box at great length and they assure us that no matter how much the movers insist they’ve made the wisest possible use of the inside area of the box, it’s still, at bottom, mostly empty space.

But somebody starts up the truck now. You hear it cough. You hear it roar. You see it drive away now. The moving truck is moving.

And as the moving truck moves away, it reveals something there, still on the curb. Something left behind. Something that had, up until this moment, been blocked from our view.

It is shaped a bit like a person. It is human-like. Humanoid… -ish. This thing left behind up on the curb, it is intended to be perceived as being human, and it does a fair to middling job in this regard. The gangly limbs, the bulbous head, the cartoonishly large eyes – it would be easy enough for you to question whether it really belongs to the species known as homo sapiens, but here’s the thing:

It is crying.

And crying makes even the least human of things look… well, downright human.

It cries. It watches the moving truck moving away.

It is me.

And this is how the story that I want to tell you begins.

[**The phrase  “An Amicable Marooning”comes from the song “Gopher Guts” by Aesop Rock, as will the title of every part of this series.]