Branden Barnett – Nine Bullets

There were so many good albums this year that I couldn’t make the decision to rank them, and I know that’s not the most important decision anyway, so this year’s best-of list is in groups with no internal order. This is the art I spent my cherished/wasted time consuming this year. Hope everybody’s upcoming year is full of growth.

Albums, Best of the Best:

Franz Nicolay – Do the Struggle – tentative cynic-folk, sincere show-rock (9B review)
Swearin’ – Swearin’ – last 20 years of music on exhibit in your garage
Branden Barnett – Verse, Chorus, Curse – pop perfection, radio ready (9B review)
Hop Along – Get Disowned – gallery of guts (9B review)
Grabass Charlestons – Dale & the Careeners – rock perfection, finds you through juke
forgetters – forgetters – another verse in The Schwarzenbachian Epic, the story of us
Joel Plaskett – Scrappy Happiness – textbook construction (9B review)
American Aquarium – Burn.Flicker.Die – you know (9B review)
Jeff Rosenstock – I Look Like Shit – he shits out gold; bathroom Brian Wilson
Chris Wollard & the Ship Thieves – Canyons – listen loud. Louder.
Teenage Bottlerocket – Freak Out! – most fun record
Waylon Thornton – Pale Jewel – and the other half-dozen or more albums he put out this year (9B review)
Toys that Kill – Fambly 42 – botanist rock
Lee Baines III & the Glory Fires – There is a Bomb in Gillead (9B review)

Albums, Rest of the Best:

Snakehealers – Cure All – ex-Takers muscle up
Waller – Stoke the Fire – country satisfaction guaranteed (9B review)
Bruce Springsteen – Wrecking Ball (9B review)
Your Heart Breaks – Harsh Tokes & Bong Jokes – misfit rock, very important band
Cheap Girls – Giant Orange (9B review)
Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas
Carolyn Mark – The Queen of Vancouver Island (9B review)
Red Collar – Welcome Home
Nervosas – Descension – punk from Columbus OH that spins off the best east coast punk like Bouncing Souls and Sticks & Stones. Formidable radness.
The Only Sons – When the New Wears Off (9B review)
Cory Branan – Mutt (9B review)
Nook & Cranny – Nook & Cranny (9B review)
The Ones to Blame – Better Times (9B review)
Japandroids – Celebration Rock
A.C. Newman – Shut Down the Streets
Nude Beach – Nude Beach II (9B review)
Mo Kenny – Mo Kenny – featuring a badass David Bowie cover
The Corin Tucker Band – Kill My Blues
Catherine Irwin – Little Heater – arguably the best lyricist alive
Tender Trap – Ten Songs About Girls – Amelia Fletcher is a super hero
White Lung – Sorry – punk from Vancouver!
Bits of Shit – Cut Sleeves – punk from Australia!
Rational Anthem – Sensitivity Training – punk from Sarasota!
Kelly Hogan – I Like to Keep Myself in Pain – this album grew on me the most, listen to “Daddy’s Little Girl” again (9B review)
Hard Girls – Isn’t It Worse? – FFO: GBV, PVMNT, SLKWRM
Guided By Voices – The Bears for Lunch – most consistent of the trio of reunion albums
Dowsing – It’s Still Pretty Terrible – Chicago rock with nerd-soul and skillz
Bedford Falls – Elegant Balloons (9B review)
Waxahatchee – American Weekend – released for free last year, official release this year, and now Katie Crutchfield yields results if you search for her on Pitchfork. Unstoppable Crutchfields. (9B review)

EPs, 7″s, Demos:

Pity Sex – Dark World – pair with Hop Along’s Get Disowned and get to smashing and crying
Lemuria – Varoom Allure
Great Neck – Demo (9B review)
Ben Trickey – Open the Sky
Sebadoh – Secret
H.R. Gertner – Nothing I Want To Give Up Yet (9B review)
Billy + Joe – Breathe (9B review)
Elway – Hence My Optimism
Ryan Sheffield – The Shadowbox (9B review)
Caitlin Rose – Piledriver Waltz – Arctic Monkeys covers from Record Store Day
Alex Kerns & Mikey Erg! – Split 7″ – Kerns is an idea man
Pseudo Kids – Stay Glad
Cayetano – Demo – Philly is murdering
Joey Kneiser – Moonlight for the Graveyard Heart
Returners – Demo – Buffalo NY dark rock featuring Tony from Failures’ Union
Big Eyes – Back from the Moon
Tigers Jaw & Tiny Empires – Split 7″ – bar-band Morrisey-ing from Tigers Jaw and some real furious shit from Tiny Empires
Juice – Demo – like Gustavo Rivera’s stories, poems, or his last band St. Dad, the new project Juice is addictive. Half-real words, half-real sounds, some songs are melodic as Van Morrison, others are as decomposed as a long-dead whale–a constant reinventory of the familiar and the foreign.

Reissues, Lost Albums

Tony Flaminio – The Grim Repair – from the head of the Failures’ Union, reissue of 2003 cd-R
Karen Dalton – 1966 – haunting voice and banjo recorded over porches and kitchen tables at her cabin in Boulder CO
Michael Hurley – Back Home with Drifting Woods – unreleased 1964 sessions from the freak folker and gorgeous yodeler
Jawbreaker – Bivouac – the glory

Books

Padgett Powell – You & Me – nothing has to be as shitty as everything is; read this for energy

Reasons to Stay Alive Next Year

Drag the River, Lenny Lashley, Billy Bragg, Sebadoh,Tin Armor, and Failures’ Union full-lengths. Freakwater playing shows again.

Stay free,

Mike

This is one of those song-by-song reviews of the first time a reviewer hears an album you’ll see here sometimes, except I’m not limiting myself to 140 characters because I have lots of pent-up brain “activity” to dump out. I like this format because it’s like an experiment and I can use the scientific method.

Problem: It’s nice out and you should be listening to music. There’s an album by an amazing songwriter out there that won’t get loads of press because it was just released on Bandcamp and the artist doesn’t get to tour that much. Also, I’ve run out of regular sentences and need some kind of altered framework to force myself to write the review. Can the lazy music reviewer convince his audience to give this gem of an independent album a listen? (Listen to it yourself on Barnett’s Bandcamp; you don’t even have to read this review!)

Background Research: Branden Barnett is the songwriter and lead singer for Columbus Ohio indie rock band Ghost Shirt. Up front, I love Ghost Shirt. “History of the Radio” is a “Heroes and Villains“-grade great song. Barnett and co. followed it up with one of the decade’s best albums, Daniel. I’m serious about how much I love Ghost Shirt. If you take out the occasional Leonard Cohen update, Ghost Shirt is better than any band covered on Pitchfork. They should be college rock legends by now. They haven’t been as active since they attempted a 52 songs in 52 weeks campaign in 2010, but instead wound up with the concept album, Daniel; since then, Barnett has been working on his solo album, Verse, Chorus, Curse, which he funded through Kickstarter. Barnett also produced Shane Sweeney’s The Finding Time.

Hypothesis: Going into this listen, I expect the songs won’t be as lush and orchestral without the rest of Ghost Shirt behind Barnett. I anticipate a sharper sound with lots of synth. WIth a title like Verse, Chorus, Curse, I’m on the lookout for songs that subvert that basic pop song structure. All this based on the two singles and a collection of cover songs Barnett released over the last year to tide folks over while he was building the album.

Here we go: good writing from Barnett, bad writing from me!

Data:

1. “Verse, Chorus, Curse” — A song about breaking routines in love and songwriting, I think. Good, steamrolling intro to the album. “It’s a battleship love.”

2. “Finnegan” — Beatles / Nick Lowe-style power pop. Breaks out into video-game guitar solo at the bridge. “I fed her engine with all of my dreams and slept on the spirals of smoke.”

3. “Last Rites” — Machine whistling leads to more danceable power pow, leads to soul-saving back-half refrain and back to more machine whistling. Brilliant. “If only licking wounds was foreplay.”

4. “Paralyzed by Love” — A different version than the single he released last year. Rusty, gorgeous violin from Ghost Shirt bandmate Samantha Kim, who produced this whole affair. Song of Joey Ramone-esque sincerity and simplicity.

5. “Jack-O-Lantern” — By this point, Barnett has killed it on every chorus; but this might be the catchiest so far. This song could fit on a Ghost Shirt album. Should be on the radio (cough).

6. “Shadow of Vultures” — See, I’m running out of ways to say “Yes. Yes, keep on rocking.”

7. “I Wanna Be Your House” — Total Brian Wilson—Stephen Merritt synthesis, but wholly Barnett’s presence. “I wanna be your house, I’ll be your morning paper.”

8. “Heart Won’t Bend” — This was the other single he released last year; this version sticks pretty close.

9. “Bricks and Wires” — Closer on piano, violin joins late. Standard and fucking devastating. “You have always been the city to me, bricks and wires pass right through me.”

Conclusion: Essential Listening. The songs don’t necessarily subvert the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-repeat structure; they tinker, hone, and restore that structure. “All that I want is a head full of nothing, and ocean of sound, and the heart of a beautiful girl. This is all that it was, this is all that it ever could be.” The pop curse broken by a batch of well-crafted songs that you can drink and dance and drink and dance alone to. What more could you want?

Works Cited:

Visit Brandon Barnett’s bandcamp, listen to the album in-full, and buy Verse, Chorus, Curse. Buy it from iTunes*. Visit Barnett’s website. Follow Ghost Shirt on Facebook.

* iTunes has a different track order than Barnett’s Bandcamp. Actually, it looks like it would be a pretty good sequence. But I went through the Bandcamp bill.

Branden Barnett – Finnegan
Branden Barnett – Last Rites
Branden Barnett – Paralyzed By Love
Branden Barnett – JackOLantern

Tag: Branden Barnett

OSTROV'S BEST OF 2012