By naming this recurring column Album Of The Year (Of The Week), yours truly is poking fun at the hyperbolic manner with which the click-addicted mainstream rock press informs us that St. Vincent Sigur Ros, or Radiohead have a new album out.
Since we now live in an age where anyone reading such reviews has the power to close this page and go hear the album for themselves, allow me to tell you about a particular album that is kicking my ass right now.
As a bit of a music lover, myself, I grew up reading fuckloads of album reviews and the word "layered" gets thrown around a lot. These days, it gets used a lot to describe anything Trent Reznor records for a movie, but there is very little melodic soul to what Reznor is doing these days.
He's using all of this state-of-the-art gear, often just gifted to him before the rest of us even have a chance to get our sweaty mitts on it and, sadly, has fallen in love with the minutiae of available perfection and forgotten about the song, whereas the new album by Preoccupations is ALL ABOUT THE SONG. AND THE LAYERS.
Truth be told, it's layered as fuck.
That doesn't mean the meters are pegged with tons of distorted guitars all turning to mush in the mix. No, there is a degree of thought put into the arrangements here that the NIN's and Depeche Modes of the world used to know better than anyone, but have lost touch with somehow.
Wait, there's more.
Every song is 100% different from the one before it, or after it. Hell, you'd be hard-pressed to tell that its the same band. As I type, they're drifting into a kind of Mr. Bungle-meets-Alice In Chains vibe ("Manipulation") without ever sounding like either band.
A song later, the band is doing what Notorious-era Duran Duran could not - write a memorable song! "Antidote" - the first half of it, anyway - is the song that Simon LeBon was trying to write but "Meet El Presidente" came out instead.
On "Solace", the interlacing angular guitar work of Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen announces the song with an elegiac dignity usually reserved for royalty, and the song proves itself worthy of the crown.
Yeah, that does sound a little bit like hyperbole, doesn't it?
But sometimes great albums will do that: They make you break your own rules, go back on promises you made on someone's deathbed, and make you question the firmness of the terra beneath your own feet.
They strip the room of air, of gravity, and of any way of telling which way is up or down and, the minute the rides over, we realize we wanna go again.