The A.V. Club's 10 favorite Madison records of 2009
For those willing to peer into a dozen or so little pockets, Madison music offered a bounty of reasons to get excited in 2009. Noise-veiled spooks and metal bands crept into the daylight, and plenty of dependable young acts proved themselves even more dependable. We'll be rounding up the year in local music in a much broader way this week, but for now, in alphabetical order, here are the 10 Madison-made albums The A.V. Club admired most in 2009.
All Tiny Creatures, Segni EP (Hometapes)
All Tiny Creatures is arguably one of Madison's most exciting new oddities and quite possibly one of the most technical. The Segni EP finds synth-wizard Thomas Wincek quaking the ground between simple and minimal with towering layers of lush melodies and, at times, brain-rattling dissonance. Meanwhile, the backing band rounds out the tunes with rippling guitar swells, accentuating basslines, and savvy rhythms from drummer Ben Derickson. Like Steve Reich and Terry Riley before him, Wincek is a tour de force in subtlety, slowly bending, twisting, and tearing down the contextual backdrop of a single simple idea.
Key track: "Minor" is the shortest and most immediate track on the album, clocking in at four minutes (the epic title track runs 17 minutes). Contorting between a pulsing shuffle of crumpled chords and bursts of droning synth noise, "Minor" quickly warps into controlled chaos.
The Antiprism, The Antiprism (Barbarian Records)
If not for the tortured black-metal majesty that seeps through this album's chilly expanse, you could almost imagine that none of The Antiprism's four members owned anything released after Iron Maiden's Powerslave. It makes the glossy gothiness of Luna Mortis and technical grind of Buried Future sound super-newfangled. If it's the most straightforward set of metal songs we've heard from a local band this year, it's also the best-written.
Key track: "Moonlight Overdrive" makes a plodding epic from a few simple yet dramatic riffs, and keeps getting nastier as it goes—until it gets really pretty at the end, with some help from a mournful xylophone.
Burial Hex and Zola Jesus, split LP (Aurora Borealis)
In what could be one the creepiest releases of the year on a national level, Burial Hex and Zola Jesus team up for an epic split rippling with growling power electronics, crawling synthesizers, tortured screams, and reverberated crooning. The Burial Hex side shows a significant evolution from 2008's morbid sound collage Initiations, exposing a far more cohesive side to main-brain Clay Ruby's soundscapes. Meanwhile, the Zola Jesus portion finds mastermind Nika Roza Danilova collaborating with local no-fi punkster Dead Luke on an epic 19-minute movement titled "Julius And Ethel." Sequenced synthesizers and watery guitars drone under Danilova's unsettling operatic wails.
Key track: "Go Crystal Tears" by Burial Hex is as good a reason to pick this up as any. A spacious drum machine beats like a dying heart as Ruby screams out tortured prose less like a testosterone fueled metalhead and more like someone waking from a coma while being buried alive.
Buried Future, Symphony Of Unnecessary Surgery (self-released)
As Buried Future guns down its listeners with breakneck time changes, zealous riffing, and surprisingly intelligible guttural vocals, it's easy to envision five crustballs with poodle hair in stained sweatpants and jean jackets. Yet the local death-metal band's members are five young and rather normal-looking dudes—in fact, frontman Dave Labedz lives a secret double life as a witty local comedian, which may help to explain the meticulous detail soaked in the growler's lyrics on environmentalism, religion, war, and suicide. With six tunes each punching in over the six-minute mark, Symphony is consistently flooded with enough morbid detail, variance, and brutality for the listener to stay plugged into.
Key track: The pummeling opening riff of "Identity Crisis" slowly stalks the listener before jumping in for the kill with dizzying shred and jackhammer rhythms. Where one might expect lyrics about necrophilia or involuntary abortions, Labedz attacks the philosophy of war: "A simple means of overcoming dated instincts is all we seem to need / Progressive logic, a mode of thought beyond this notion made in a broader scheme."
Dumate, We Have The Technology (World Around Records)
"Dumate, we keep this shit simple / You can tell by the kicks, hi-hats, and the cymbals," MC DLO raps during an athletic verse on the title track of the local hip-hop band's second album. That's only half the story, really: The Bronx-plus-reggae grooves here are always warm and approachable, but it can't be easy to make two rappers (DLO and Dudu Stinks), a producer (Man Mantis), a bassist (Nick Moran), and a drummer/singer (Jah Boogie of Natty Nation) all work together this instinctively. Even though you could argue Dudu Stinks is the most clever rapper in town right now, Dumate doesn't really have one star. Instead, everyone seems to work equally to boost up everyone else.
Key track: Mantis' glittery beat on album opener "Oak Tree" alone got The A.V. Club addicted to this album, but "Violince" is the complete Dumate treatment: Taut live rhythm section, heavy but never clumsy wordplay from DLO and Dudu, Mantis' string-heavy production, and Boogie's rousing vocal hook.
El Valiente, Daceton (self-released)
El Valiente had all of this year and last to become pretty popular for a local instrumental-rock band. The three new tracks on Daceton, though, accomplish a lot more than El Valiente's first batch of songs, El Topo. Eric Caldera's reverb-sprung Telecaster, Joe Bernstein's drums and glockenspiel, and David Sperka's bass really find each other in the mix this time, indulging lots of creepy-crawly in-between passages but also displaying a lot more confidence in their mysteriously catchy melodies.
Key track: "Jewish-Mexican Phantom" lets Bernstein's tasteful drumming walk the line between jazz and prog. It also tackles a whole range of emotions in its 10-minute sprawl, from an intro that's as lighthearted as a rapidly skipping stone to a final feedback-laden sludge-out.
Luna Mortis, The Absence (Century Media)
Local metal band Luna Mortis' The Absence works like a combination catapult and backhoe. With some truly grim rhythmic hardware backing them up, vocalist Mary Zimmer and lead guitarist Brian Koenig come equipped to backflip through lofty guitar flurries and operatic vocal melodies, then feed us some bone-ridden dirt with death-metal chugging and Zimmer's savage growl.
Key track: "Reformation" hits the hardest of any track here, alternating its angry blasts with heaves of windy, polished melody, and displaying a rare gift for making those two sides work together.
Julian Lynch, Orange You Glad (Olde English Spelling Bee Records)
It hasn't taken long for Jersey transplant, UW ethnomusicology grad student, and bitchin' clarinetist Julian Lynch to snuggle into Madison's experimental scene. Orange You Glad unfolds into eight warmly produced meditations that are stuffed with layer upon layer of melodies that swirl, buzz, and twist in and out of noisy bursts of guitar, synth, and droning vocals. The album does such a smooth job of melding genres that it often slips through the cracks of categorization. So often, in fact, that certain publications have attempted to slip him into the conveniently concocted, bullshit "chillwave" genre. On "Venom," blues-affected guitar leads bend and shake over a loose reggae feel, while "Winterer One" crawls with pulsing sonics and slow-attack folkie vocals.
Key track: "Seed" closes the album on a highly explorative note. A wandering bassline builds its way into an oceanic wash of clarinet, synth, and guitar melody so vast that we hear something different each time we listen to it.
The Midwest Beat, At The Gates (Duck On Monkey Records)
The Midwest Beat's adamantly stuck in the past, yet not easy to contain. After a long wait, the Beat followed up a great EP from 2007 with At The Gates, which explores more corners of the band's dusty, all-things-rough-and-retro territory. The Beat hits all the old sounds at near-punk-rock speed, from the innocent, inspirational soul of "Get It Started" to the hyper twang of "Hard To Please."
Key track: "Color Radio" gives psychedelia a similar treatment, and really shows off the huge vocal harmonies the band crafted for this album, with some help from the natural acoustics of its makeshift studio and namesake, Madison's Gates Of Heaven synagogue.
Rust Belt Sermon, Soliloquy (self-released)
Rust Belt Sermon hangs its post-hardcore roots upside-down from a tree and beats them with a gnarled shovel of battering rhythms, jagged shards of atonal guitar, and the urgent throat-shredding scream of vocalist Shawn Bass. Soliloquy is a take on a well-traversed genre that was mastered and spearheaded by the great Fugazi so many years ago. However, its raw and uncompromisingly off-kilter delivery of socio-political angst and fractured melody pumps the tired genre full of fresh air and intelligently powerful lyrics.
Key track: "Siren Worlds" grows from a dose of sludgy doom to fist-pumping hardcore punk with gut-rattling intensity. Dense layers of guitar explode underneath Bass' red-faced and fiery vocals, the lyrics of which match the bleakness of the music with allusions to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
