These two albums have a great deal in common.  Instrumentation on both is very synth-heavy, and both rely heavily on multi-tracked vocals.  Yet, these two albums travel in quite different directions.  “The Sunlandic Twins” is a very chipper, danceable album with a lot of very catchy melodies.  The vocals placed very far forward in the mix, bringing the lyrics to the forefront.  Fortunately, the lyrics are clever, occasionally delving into the sort of vivid scenery-painting I usually associate with acts like Donovan.  “Oslo in the Summertime,” which sets very vividly descriptive lyrics over a sweltering bass line, leaves very distinct images in my head.

The straightforward pop songwriting is broken up periodically with instrumental interludes.  Some of these instrumentals, like “October is Eternal,” can be quite angular and avant-garde.  Yet, as experimental as the album sometimes tries to be, it never strays too far from accessible dance pop traditions.  Most of the album is built on simple repeating quarter notes in the baseline, and I even hear a little disco in some of the guitar parts.  Some songs, like the earworm (and occasional Outback Steakhouse jingle) “Wraith Pinned to the Mist And Other Games,” are little more than vocals, drums, and a bass line.

Even at its most extreme, “The Sunlandic Twins” seems tame next to “The Age of Adz.” Stevens’ album starts with a fairly accessible guitar ballad, but quickly departs for psychedelic and orchestral points unknown.  Swirling woodwinds and emphatic low brass permeate the album, punctuated with asymmetric, and often uncomfortable, synthesized rhythms.  The way these disparate sounds are layered upon each other really reminds me of some late Beatles songs, like “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

The orchestration on this album is not the only symphonic aspect of this album.  The album culminates in “Impossible Soul,” a massive Beethovenian twenty-six minute chorale of a last movement that is as grand and orchestral as anything you will find in popular music.    This scope can be something of a mixed blessing – many of the songs meander, and I even found myself dozing off during the first half of the album during my first listen.  Even “Impossible Soul” overstays its welcome, with a musical “cleansing of the Shire” that drags on for three minutes after the logical conclusion of the piece.  Still, the second disc is surprisingly entrancing, with “Vesuvius” and “I Want to Be Well” on the C-side as the standout tracks on the album.

Both of these albums have spent a large amount of time on my turntable since I acquired them, and each has lodged songs in my head.  While the of Montreal album is certainly a lot of fun to listen to, I find it’s the thick baroque textures of “The Age of Adz” that keeps calling me back again and again.

Music Video of the Year: Janelle Monae – Tightrope

We open with this category simply so we can have this particular video right up at the top of the article. I first saw this video in late spring, but I’ve gone back to it again and again over the year. Built around a song that really should have been the song of the summer, it marries a remarkable visual style to the best music video dancing since Thriller.

Song of the Year: Zeus – Greater Times by the Wayside

No embeddable video for this one, but you can watch it over here.

Clocking in at exactly one minute, this bite-sized ballad still manages to sound sweeping and expansive. This is songwriting at its most economical.

Album the Year: The Limiñanas

This album is drenched in a smoky French cool that this American can only dream of. This debut album is packed start-to-finish with jangly, atmospheric, and deceptively simple songs. There were other things this year that I may have listened to more, but nothing that could transport me quite so much as this record.

Plus, with its pearlescent colored vinyl, the record looks as unique as it sounds.

The Hilarity Award: Pharcyde – Ya Mama

Ah, the eternal verisimilitude of the ‘ya mama’ joke. Is there nothing it can’t make unreasonably offensive?

Yeah, it’s from ’92, but it’s new to me.

The Earworm Award: Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

Gaga has been writing by far the best stuff on mainstream radio for the past couple years, as proven by the sheer volume of covers out there. While “Telephone” may have rattled through my head for much of the spring, “Bad Romance” takes this award for having caught the ear of musicians everywhere.

I also have to give Gaga a great deal of credit for the skill at which she can get a rise out of people. She has built a media persona for herself more systematically and meticulously than any artist since Marilyn Manson, and people go out of their way to pour out vitriol about her in conversations. Almost every music video on YouTube, regardless of its age, will contain a lament about Lady Gaga.

The Chameleon Award: Phoenix – Lisztomania

I still don’t know how it’s possible for a song to get simultaneous play on both ‘adult contemporary’ and ‘new rock alternative’ stations, but it’s a catchy song, nonetheless.

I replaced my old shelf system with two CM9′s by Bowers and Wilkins, driven by a Denon 697 receiver.  Even off my junk store-brand turntable, they sound positively divine.  The sound is rich, mellow, and amazingly well-defined – I’ve been hearing studio chatter and flubbed notes where I never noticed them before.  I had considered putting a list together of all the little things I’ve noticed on all the old albums I’ve been listening to, but I always wind up just putting on another album instead.

I’m not sure I would have written this post unless I had wanted to link to this insightful comic.  Touche’, Mr. Munroe.

Meanwhile, at the BBC Proms…

The symphony is a vital part of the Albuquerque classical music community, and has been for more than seventy-five years.  It provides affordable entertainment, education, and edification.  Losing this organization would be a blow to the community.  In November, the NMSO launched the Give Thanks for the Symphony campaign.  The NMSO needs 5,000 people to donate $100.  There’s even an online donation form, to make the process as easy as possible.  Whether or not you can donate $100, I encourage you to donate what you can.  I know I will.

All it takes is a valid e-mail address, and it’s yours.  Steer your browsers over here to grab a copy.

Schumann and Chopin shared the first half of the program. Schumann’s “Overture to Manfred” was played first. At its best, “Manfred” was moody and expressive, and I was reminded more than once of the symphony’s strikingly melancholy performance of Mendelssohn’s “Scotland” Symphony from an earlier season. However, more often than not, the orchestra (the strings, in particular) sounded hazy and indistinct, like a piano played with too much pedal. The brass section has clearly been working hard, though, and their entrances were sharp and precise, cutting through the otherwise muddy atmosphere of the piece.

The titular piano poetry was presented by Janina Fialkowska, who played Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor. She played expressively and lyrically, managing to make the percussive piano sing more sweetly than the strings that were backing her. As one would expect from Chopin, the piece was very characteristically written for the piano, and Fialkowska brought out a sweeping, majestic quality in her instrument that is seldom heard.

All that being said, I confess that I did not terribly enjoy the performance. This is not necessarily the fault of Fialkowska, or the NMSO, or even Chopin. Rather, I simply dislike the piano concerto as a form. To make the piano stand out over the orchestra, composers must fill their concerti with massive block chords spanning as many octaves as will fit under two hands, and runs, doubled in both hands, that run from end to end of the keyboard. The piano is a bright, percussive instrument to begin with, and this style of writing makes the instrument too bright to blend effectively with the orchestra. Composers know intuitively that the piano sounds comparatively brittle and mechanical. When it is not the solo instrument in a concerto, it is used only in ballet or other percussion-heavy works, if it is used at all. Almost any melody a composer would care to write could be played more effectively by a different instrument. Strings are more expressive, flutes sweeter, oboes more plaintive, bassoons more droll. The brass can play more majestically, and percussionists more dramatically. And yet, in a piano concerto, every melody is assigned to this jack-of-all-trades, making every passage into a music box miniature of itself. This is why I am consistently under-whelmed by the form. While I admit that I was held rhapsodic by Christopher O’Riley’s performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” with the NMSO in years past, I will also admit that spying Rachmaninoff concerto in the second half will almost always inspire me to sneak out early.

The second half of the performance opened with Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” Principal flutist Valerie Potter played the Prelude’s spiraling melody with great emotion, and Figueroa coaxed a shimmering, effervescent sound from the orchestra. The result, befitting of the poem that inspired Debussy, was both seductive and mystical.

The concert ended with Georges Enesco’s “Rumanian Rhapsody.” Based on a Rumanian drinking song, the Rhapsody was lighthearted without seeming frivolous. Its appropriation of bawdy source material called to mind Richard Strauss’s “Till Eulenspiegel,” while the piece’s insistently repeating phrases reminded me of a drunken John Adams. The orchestra threw themselves into the performance, which was giddy, sensuous, and bombastic, in turns. This boozy piece was a great deal of fun to hear, and left me thinking of “In Taberna.” Bibit!

The New Mexico Symphony Orchestra paired up with the Albuquerque Youth Symphony for their latest Classics series concert, “Violin Pyrotechnics.” Any fears that I had that student performers would drag down the level of the performance proved to be completely unfounded, as the quality of the music in this concert was consistently head and shoulders above anything the NMSO has done this season. AYS brought a youthful exuberance to the performance, which was matched by the energetic younger audience that followed them to the concert hall. The musicians of the NMSO played with both greater zeal and greater accuracy than usual. Whether this was a result of getting more practice while preparing the students in AYS for the stage, or simply from the NMSO veterans not wishing to be outplayed, these two orchestras together managed to be better than either one independently.

This was well showcased in the Dukas fanfare that opened the program. While the NMSO brass section generally plays energetically, their entrances are generally something less than precise. However, the section played this fanfare cleanly and accurately, without sacrificing their usual extemporaneous energy. This energy did not disappear as other sections joined in, either. Schumann’s second symphony, with its virtuosic second movement, was played brilliantly. Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” found both full orchestras on stage, and it made such an imposing wall of sound that I could not tell any of the players were any less than seasoned professionals. It is a testament to the dedication and hard work of the students of AYS that the NMSO is only improved by their sharing of the stage.

Of course, no symphony program is complete without a solo work, and this did not disappoint, either. Violinist Philippe Quint led the orchestra in Erich Korngold’s violin concerto. Korngold composed scores for many early films starring Errol Flynn and others. While this concerto was an attempt at a serious concert work, it is still firmly couched in that cinematic style, with the rich major seventh chords underpinning sweeping, sentimental melodies. Even though the harmonic language Korngold used sounds more at home in the cinema than the concert hall, the piece is masterfully written and orchestrated, marrying high and low technique as well as any Italian opera. Quint played the piece masterfully as well, with a rich, sweet tone that belied the difficulty of the work. That Quint played a Stradivarius only made the piece that much sweeter.

The songs themselves are pretty minimalist in construction.  Most songs are built on a single guitar or organ riff that repeats with little variation for the duration of the song.  As such, the same two to three chords form an ostenato bass throughout.  This may sound dreadful on paper, but John Adams built entire operas of such endless repetition, and those operas were hypnotically powerful as a result.  While no where near the scale of, say, “Nixon in China,” “The Limiñanas” is similarly hypnotic.  The songs build interest not through the traditional verse/chorus structure but because of the gradual shifts in harmony and timbre that come from the changes in inflection that occur throughout each track.  In any given song, the repeating ostenato becomes its entire harmonic language, and varying that ostenato would break the song’s hypnotic spell.  Through insistent repetition, even the harsh ukelele dissonances in “Chocolate in my Milk” sound logical and even inevitable.

This album has a poignant sound that recalls the end of summer.  The ringing guitar chords echo old surf guitar groups like The Ventures, and the occasional dissonant chords sound very bittersweet with this instrumentation.  Some of the songs borrow ostenato patterns from other, earlier songs, (opener ‘The Darkside’ uses the same pattern as ‘Migas 2000,’  off their debut 7” single) and this makes the additional songs sound familiar and even nostalgic.

I recognize that this album may not be everybody’s cup of espresso.  I have friends that thrive on constant change in their music, and I’m sure they would be bored to tears by this album.  For my part, I find “The Limiñanas” to be utterly enchanting every time I listen to it.

Like it?  You can download this track for free over at The Needle Drop.