Friday, January 20, 2012

My favorite albums of 2011


Better late than never!

Best music of 2011 (almost all progressive rock):
  • Big Big Train, Far Skies Deep Time.  There’s not a flaw in this album.  Every track, every word is exactly right (isn’t this the classical definition of "Justice"?).  No matter how much praise I give Big Big Train or how hyperbolic I sound, I wouldn’t be able to express my love of this band with enough gravity.  Greg Spawton and Andy Poole are probably the best song writers (and song orchestrators!) out there right now.  Add perhaps the most interesting voice in rock (David Longdon) and the best guitarist (Dave Gregory) and the best drummer (Nick D’Virgilio), and what more can I write?  Perfect prog.
  • Kate Bush, 50 Words for Snow.  I’m still acclimating myself to this album.  It’s all excellent except for the duet with Elton John (his voice just doesn’t fit; though, admittedly, I’ve never been a fan of anything he did after 1973).  While this isn’t the album that Aeriel was, it’s brilliant in its own Kate Bush, quirky way.
  • Elbow, Build a Rocket Boys!  Think Peter Gabriel meets Talk Talk meets u2 if you want to get the flavor of this album.  I’m not really sure I get any of the lyrics, but the lead singer’s voice is compelling enough to make me want to care.
  • Thomas Dolby, A Map of the Floating City.  Dolby has been a master of the progressive-pop format since 1982’s “One of Our Submarines” and his first album, The Golden Age of Wireless.  A Map of the Floating City is great poppish music, witty (but unnecessarily r-rated lyrics; I’m not a Puritan by any stretch of the imagination, but the language is so foul that I cringe at parts of the album; and I certainly can’t play the album within earshot of the kids.)
  • The Fierce and the Dead, If It Carries On Like This.  I’m not sure how to describe this album or the next.  These two albums—featuring a master guitarist who clearly pursues art for its own wonderful and Platonic sake--is, simply put, stunning instrumental progressive rock.  I’d be curious to see what adding a voice or voices would do to this music.  If you’re looking for some of the most interesting music created in the last several years, look no further than this work or the solo work of Matt Stevens.  From what I can tell, he’s also just a real mensch.
  • Matt Stevens, Relic.  Experimental but deeply soulful progressive guitar.
  • Flower Kings, Tour Kaputt.  This is a somewhat King Crimson-eque live version of FK songs.  I don’t listen to it frequently or as much as I would FK’s earlier stuff (such as Revolver, one of the greatest albums ever made), but I do like it, and I appreciate what the band members are trying to accomplish with their live performances.
  • Gazpacho, London.  More description of this band on the next entry—but this album is a live and meaningful complexity.
  • Gazpacho, Missa Atropos.  The music of Gazpacho defies description.  This particular album is an immersive concept album about human loneliness and one of the Muses.  I don’t know much about these guys, but I own every one of their albums, and I have a feeling I will always buy anything Gazpacho makes.  Progressive in its best sense, Missa Antropos is heart felt and meaningful in terms of music as well as lyrics.  It’s clear—as is true with every one of the artists mentioned in this list—that the art is pursued for its own sake and for the sake of eternal goodness and beauty. 
  • Marillion, Size Matters.  I’ve been a fan of Marillion for two decades now.  This, by far, is their best live album.  It is equal parts gut-wrenching and joyously poetic in its  music and lyrics.
  • Peter Gabriel, New Blood.  Except for Rush, Gabriel has been my longest love of any of the groups/artists mentioned in this list.  “So” defined so much of my senior year of high school.  And, Gabriel just gets better and more interesting with age.  I saw someone complain that this album is a Muzak verison of Gabriel.  Ridiculous.  These are minimalist symphonic arrangements of many of his songs, and they make everything fresh.  Frankly, these arrangements will probably be remembered a century from now.
  • Rush, Time Machine.  This is, of course, not a CD, but a DVD.  Rush has been an important part of my life since Troy Schwartz and Brad Libby introduced them to me (during detention; oh, how I despised junior high) in the spring of 1981, seventh grade at Liberty Junior High.  As with Gabriel, but in a very different style, these guys have been playing together since 1974, and they just keep getting better.  If you like rock, there’s no greater rock band to listen to than Rush.  Full of flair and humor even after nearly forty years of playing together, Rush and their most recent release, Time Machine, is a thing of wonder.
  • Steve Wilson, Grace for Drowning.  This album has grown on me, as I was confused with it on first listen.  Now, I can’t get enough of it.  It is progressive in the truest and most experimental sense; Wilson has a great sense of silence and cacophony, space and noise.  While he’s not the audiophile that Greg Spawton is, he’s very, very close.
  • Tin Spirits, Wired to Earth.  Schnikees.  What can one say?  All of the members are superb, and, as with Big Big Train, Dave Gregory (Anglo-Saxon guitar demigod since the 1970s) plays lead guitar.  And, how he plays—from great pop to airy Pink Floydish atmospherics to Duane Allman-style solos, Gregory can play anything with love and excellence.
  • Tori Amos, Night of Hunters.  As with Amos’s earliest work, combine equal parts intelligence, anger, and talent, and you have her in a nutshell; her music is never pretty, but it’s always beautiful.
Posted by at 4:21 PM
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2 comments:

  1. Excellent! I will check them out.

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    Replies

    1. Absolutely! Enjoy--and thanks for commenting.

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Holiness in Pfeifer, Kansas

The Christian Humanist

To defend the West, we must follow six tenets:
  • First, that the preservation of the virtues of the West, best understood through the stories of the exemplars of these virtues, is a sacred duty.
  • Second, that one must understand history in metahistorical, theological, and poetic terms as did Virgil and St. Augustine.
  • Third, one must embrace a proper anthropology, defining man by both his inherited sin and his received grace. The person, at root, is a being endowed with rationality, reason, and passion. He is higher than the animals, but lower than the angels. He must, to be fully human, balance each of these tensions.
  • Fourth, Christians (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant)—in alliance with believing Jews and even virtuous pagans—must sanctify the world through the Grace of God. For men of good will to fight amongst themselves squanders precious time and resources, and it leaves the field to the Enemy.
  • Fifth, the real struggle in the world is not between left and right, but between Christ and anti-Christ, between that which is humane and that which is anti-humane.
  • Finally, true remembrance, preservation, and advocacy of all that is Good, True, and Beautiful, comes from a recognition that our highest form of understanding is derived from the reflection of the light of the Logos (Gospel of St. John 1:9) in our souls through the faculty of imagination. In this point, one must follow not just St. John, but the Blessed Virgin Mary: “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Or, as St. Augustine put in it in his sermon on Psalm 58: “Of itself it hath no light, nor of itself powers; but all that is fair in a soul is virtue and wisdom; but it neither is wise for itself, nor strong for itself, nor is itself light to itself, nor is itself virtue to itself. There is a certain fountain and origin of virtue, there is a certain root of wisdom, there is a certain, so to speak, if this also is to be said, region of immutable truth; from which if the soul withdraws it is made dark and if it draws near it is made light.”