If there was any lingering doubt that Portland is enjoying a musical
golden age, surely it has been silenced this year. Though I have loved
many more, here are some of my favorite local albums from 2008:
1. Au—Verbs
When Au took my breath away with their self-titled debut album in
2007, I was comforted that I was in the hands of what I suspected was a
truly great band. When the group returned this year with a supporting
ensemble of 20 regulars from Portland’s improvisational music community
and stole my heart with their transcendent follow-up, Verbs, I
was honored to know it would be in the care of what I am now
certain is a truly great band. A controlled, clattering cloud of
keyboards, percussion, woodwinds, guitars, and voices at once more
ecstatic and more structured than Au’s debut, Verbs is an
affirmation.
2. White Hinterland—Luniculaire
It takes guts to cover classics, and audacity to tackle a foreign
musical tradition. It takes tremendous talent and sensitivity to do
both simultaneously and successfully, and—as the five-song,
French-language EP Luniculaire demonstrates—White
Hinterland pianist/singer Casey Dienel has all these things. In
reinterpreting epoch-defining songs popularized by ’60s French pop
giants like Serge Gainsbourg, Dienel and her superb band not only do
justice to them but give them new life. That the two original White
Hinterland compositions are on par with the time-tested French
masterpieces speaks volumes.
3. Point Juncture, WA—Heart to Elk
For many bands, three years between albums means they’ve lost their
way. For indie rock torchbearers Point Juncture, WA, three years just
means taking your time to write and record the best 13 songs you can,
which, in this case, are jaw-droppingly good. The band—who employ
familiar rock instrumentation, augmented by vibraphone and trumpet, and
catchy-as-plague vocal melodies to make detailed pop music indebted to
Yo La Tengo and Stereolab—are fairly traditional in their
methods. But, as Heart to Elk bears out, traditional methods can
yield outstanding, original results in the right hands. Here’s to
taking your time.
4. Eliot Rose—The Calculated Dream
Some records are deeply personal in that they are unflinchingly
confessional. Eliot Rose’s The Calculated Dream—a
charmingly awkward, neo-doo-wop, electro-pop oddity constructed largely
from kalimba, synthesizers, and Rose’s bittersweet baritone musings on
travel, space, and time—is deeply personal in that I cannot
conceive of there being more than one mind in the world capable of
creating anything like it. Contrasting the infinite, heartbreaking
indifference of the cosmos with the rich pageantry of individual life,
The Calculated Dream was this year’s leftfield, under-heard
delight.
5. Dragging an Ox through Water—The Tropics of
Phenomenon
On his first full-length-ish effort, ox-dragger Brian Mumford
unexpectedly varnished the bruised-is-beautiful acoustic guitar work
and hobo tenor trill at the center of his formidable live show with a
thick coat of uncanny, pre-fab synth sounds and homemade, sputtering
analog electronics. At times baffling, consistently visionary, this
12-inch is the definitive work of an as-yet-named genre wherein harsh
noise and tender balladry are proven to be far more closely related
than previously thought.
6. Grouper—Dragging a Dead Deer up a
Hill
Not since Sonic Youth’s Evol has an album been both so lovely
and so disturbing: hypnotically strummed guitars, watery delay, tape
hiss, field recordings, and gently harmonized soprano vocals. The wife
of Renaissance madrigal composer Gesualdo was famously murdered by her
husband in 1590 when he caught her with a lover: This is the music I
imagine her ghost making—hopeful, haunted, with all the time in
the world.