Ah, 2002. Who could forget the International Year of Ecotourism, Mountains, and the Outback (in Australia)? If that wasn’t enough, the queen celebrated her golden jubilee, the king came back with a bang to win the World Cup, and Hollywood decided it would release (almost) nothing but sequels. Of course, there was also a lot of great music, and here’s a selection of our favourites.

Tracklisting:

1) Broken Social Scene – Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl
2) Say Hi To Your Mom – Kill the Cat
3) The Decemberists – July, July!
4) Spoon – The Way We Get By
5) The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1
6) The Mountain Goats – The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton
7) The Libertines – Time For Heroes
8) Mclusky – To Hell With Good Intentions
9) Pavement – Baptiss Blacktick
10) Sleater-Kinney – One Beat
11) The Mountain Goats – No Children
12) Okkervil River – Westfall
13) Thee More Shallows – Where Are You Now?
14) Julie Doiron – All Their Broken Hearts
15) Múm – Green Grass of Tunnel
16) Iron & Wine – Faded From Winter
17) Carissa’s Wierd – So You Wanna Be A Superhero
18) Wilco – Radio Cure
19) Songs:Ohia – Didn’t It Rain
20) Sigur Ros – Untitled I

What did we miss from 2002? Let us know via the usual channels! Be sure to check out our posts on 2000 and 2001, and come back next month when we’ll be turning our attention to… 2003.

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Side A belongs to Henry Demos who provides a collection of jangly, lo-fi slightly psychedelic, rock songs. Opener ‘Electric Duck’ sort of sounds like Kurt Vile playing melodic jangle pop, while ‘God Dies Alone’ is reminiscent of the experimental rock of Broken Social Scene. ‘Tonight Was Dumb’ uses acoustic guitar and half-mumbled vocals to create something gently claustrophobic and ‘Worried’ is a fuzzy lo-fi rock and roll song. ‘So Slow’ is another standout, juxtaposing perky instrumentation with vocals that sound like ghostly moans.

Lewtrakimou’s side B feels far more experimental. It sounds like she has gone foraging in cassette bargain bins and filled her wicker basket with fragments of lo-fi pop songs, few exceeding the 1 minute mark. Each track is so short and sweet (and strange) that it can be initially a little disorientating, repeated listens are required to feel the full effect. The first two tracks are the exceptions to the succinct track length trend: ‘Oh It’s Amazing’, with its minimal guitar chug and sweet, floaty vocals , and ‘Cyclops Fall’, with it’s cryptic lyrics and strange whimsical atmosphere – it sort of feels like a bad dream in a demented toy box.

This whimsy is a thread which runs throughout the album, with tracks such as ‘Sad as Buckets’, ‘For Onis’ and the title track utilizing elements such as glockenspiel and cheerful whistling, all backed-up by Walker’s pixieish vocals. ‘How Marvelous’ sounds like a sleepy incantation and ‘Man Tie a Sucker Down’ like a candy-sweet pop song playing on a stereo next door. We also get ‘Duty Free Boy’, a pretty instrumental guitar track and ‘Holy Toledo’, a glimpse of a bouncy pop song that sounds weirdly elastic, like in a dream in which your ears don’t work just right.

If all that sounds kinda weird then that’s because it is. But it is also thoroughly original and enjoyable, and a worthy addition to the Fox Food repertoire. Get the album now on cassette tape or pay-what-you-want download via the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page.

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I wrote a brief piece about Josh Scott’s Aero Flynn a few weeks back after reading some words by Field Report’s Chris Porterfield. The letter/essay (which you can read here) painted Scott as a supremely talented musician and songwriter and spoke of the self-titled Aero Flynn album as “quite seriously a life-or-death record” which should be heard as “a spit in the fucking face of the symptoms of disease, like rot and destruction and apathy and cynicism”. Given how much I respect Porterfield’s work, this sort of language got me excited.

The album begins with ‘Plates2’, a restrained track of gentle synths and countrified electric guitars, not a million miles away from Porterfield’s Field Report, while ‘Twist’, which brings to mind Radiohead, solidifies Scott’s subdued vocal delivery. ‘Dk/Pi’ opens with electronics backed by an ambient hum, the spacey bleeps and bloops of Spencer Krug’s Moonface layered on top of something older and less clear. Shambling drums kick in to create a sound akin to The War on Drugs, Scott’s dreamy vocals drifting through the nebulous arrangement with a delicacy that suggests impermanence, as if the sonic environment threatens to consume him. As the song progresses the instrumentation disintegrates, distorting into reverby fuzz and then a confused white noise before blinking out to leave a large cosmic swelling. This is an electrical anxiety, a malfunction in which communication is lost and isolation complete, Scott a lone astronaut surrounded by planetary screams and an airless dark.

The beginning of ‘Crisp’ is gentler but not without threat, an acoustic strum peppered with glitches which suggest the calm is a façade, a veil under which reside wrung hands and sharp edges. “Can I feel you?” Scott inquires over and over, one of many pleas for connection on the album, leaving the listener to wonder if he’s speaking to an individual or humankind as a whole. Or perhaps it’s just to himself in the mirror. Again the track unravels, the introduction of more prominent synths morphing in the final minutes into another hostile environment, a tumultuous sea or some geomagnetic storm that swallows Scott and drags him further from whatever he is trying to find.

Aero Flynn is at once urgent and suspended, trapped between fight and flight in anxiety’s masterful double bind. “I’m so afraid of everybody else” he sings on ‘Tree’, a stuttering electro-pop song, while even ‘Floating’, a soaring track that’s all blue skies and wide open vistas, is permeated with a sense of dislocation, as if the freedom is not his to own. ‘Maker’ sounds like a Broken Social Scene track where lonely sadness is presented as matter-of-fact, at least until the end where Scott utters a single word (a word I can’t quite make out – Home? Whole?) in a way which sounds like the genuine emotion breaking through, a yelp of helplessness or cry for mercy held back or choked out after the first syllable.

‘Brand New’ feels like a crescendo of sorts, a move away from the futuristic electronics that bring to mind space’s dark void in favour of something more organic, a swelling Precambrian atmosphere where conditions are harsh and life is scarce but maybe not for long. Closer ‘Moonbeams’, a piano led track with elements of The National’s slower work, provides no such epiphany. Slow and nervous and sorrowful, the last track again casts Scott as the outlying astronaut looking back at Earth, the final waves of instrumentation mimicking the beautiful, heart-breaking joy of realising you are but the tiniest of specks subject to the largest of forces beyond your control.

This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable. Instead the record feels like a part of a wider narrative, Scott’s story, the illness and suffering and terror that Porterfield alludes to in his piece. The redemption does not begin with an epiphany on track seven and end with clear-eyed certainty. The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.

Aero Flynn is out now on Ooh La La Records (and Dine Alone Records in Canada).

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Hope this works out.

Part II // Night – Tracklisting:-

26. Gospel – The National
27. Asa – Bry Webb
28. Ponytail – Talons’
29. Late July – Small Houses
30. Seeds of Night – The Cave Singers
31. Swamp Dragon – Spirit Tramp
32. Voyage – Kodak To Graph
33. Brooklyn Sunset – AFTA-1
34. Late Nitez – MedicineHat
35. Lost In Tokyo (Jacques Greene Remix) – Koreless
36. Sun (Midland Re-Edit) – Caribou
37. Higher Ground – TNGHT
38. Nostromo – Fortune Howl
39. Salt of Love – Groundislava
40. Cotton Flower – Future Islands
41. Fineshrine – Purity Ring
42. A Real Hero – College (Feat. Electric Youth)
43. Seventeen – Youth Lagoon
44. Anthems For a Seventeen Year-Old Girl – Broken Social Scene
45. Catharsis – The Wandering Lake
46. North – Arrange
47. Singing Sailors – Sad Souls
48. O’ River – The Horse Thieves
49. Long Desert Train – Jason Molina
50. Lurk Underneath – Trouble Books

2012 Summer Mix – Night from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

Again, please support the artists on this mix. Our intention is to share our favourite music with others so hopefully you like what you hear and buy some records.

We tried to do something a bit different with this mix and we’d love your opinion on the idea/track listing. Does it work at all or fall flat on it’s face? Do you have any good themes for a future mixtape? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook or the clunky Tumblr message system. We would love to hear from you.

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Each song uses different parts of interviews Spearing conducted with his neighbours in downtown Toronto. Different instruments and notes are used to compliment the mood or mimic the sound of the voices and a song is produced. A diverse range of people are sampled, from the noisy little girl shouting at her mother in “Ondine”, the deaf “Vanessa” to the sentimental tale from the immigrant “Mr Gowrie”.

It’s hard to explain exactly why the listen is so compelling, which is perhaps the reason I sat on the album so long before writing about it. The interviews are both interesting and affecting and the concept is weird and unique (at least to me). Give it a go and see what you think. Others seem to agree, The Happiness Project won the best contemporary jazz prize at the 2010 Juno awards (The Canadian version of the Grammys).

The album is available to buy from Arts & Crafts and is available on Spotify for you listening pleasure.

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