The Voice has posted 2008’s Pazz & Jop.

My ballot can be found right…here. I am pleased to see that I was again the sole voter for roughly half of my choices in the “Singles” category.

I think I’m also going to follow Reed Fischer’s lead and post what I jotted down at the time that I filled out my ballot, a month or so ago.

(And a quick aside, given that the link above references Pepi Ginsberg — having seen her read last weekend at the Hex Education Journal’s Volume 1 reading, she’s rapidly joining Will Sheff in the realm of songwriters whose tour diaries stand on their own as powerful travelogues.)

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A lot of the records I liked this year came in on the noisier side of things, and a lot of the noisier records I liked this year hearkened back to my days standing in basements watching bands play through piecemeal sound systems, sweating uncontrollably and losing my hearing and grateful for the fact that I was there. It’s a strange thing, then, to see a band tailor-made for a tiny space playing to hundreds, if not more; given that I found the sight of No Age and High Places at the Bowery Ballroom disconcerting, I can only imagine what Deerhunter’s shows opening for Nine Inch Nails earlier this year must have been like. A running discussion that I had in 2008 involved asking which bands could make the transition from DIY spaces to concert halls and, in some cases, back again; at perhaps the apex of this was the Black Mountain/Bon Iver tour early in 2008, equally striking in the aforementioned Bowery Ballroom as it was in the tighter confines of Glasslands, though the divergent spaces brought out differing qualities from each artist.
This isn’t to claim that the days of basement shows and piecemeal sound systems are over. A couple of the better live sets I saw this year, including San Francisco’s Hank IV and Seattle’s The Dutchess and The Duke, took place below Brooklyn bar The Charleston, a space that’s a dead ringer for any number of late-90s New Brunswick basements. But it’s that push outward — not simply a case of groups moving from a more intimate location to a larger one, but a wholesale export of the fractured, explosive audio that one might hear through a speaker borrowed from a practice space and a decades-old, half-busted amplifier. (On his National Arts Journalism Project blog, Robert Christgau’s recent discussion of sound systems versus headphones as preferred methods for hearing music evolve seems directly connected to this.)
Adherents to the blown-out aesthetic generally start from punk rock and move outwards from there. In the case of some, that reaches out and begins to tweak other musical traditions: the degraded Spectorisms (which seem strangely apt these days) of Deerhunter’s Weird Era Cont.; the skewed baroque-pop that Oxford Collapse* applies on their single “Spike of Bensonhurst”. And while there’s a tendency to push the glorious clatter of noise-punk to its logical extension — see No Age’s “Eraser” for a high point of this — my vote ends up being in favor of the groups that go to places unexpected, that blend together a fractured, impressionist sound with some other quality, that blend and cross-pollinate rather than turn inward. (Sic Alps, Women, and Parts & Labor also come to mind as examples of this.) It’s hard to argue with unchecked momentum and transcendent noise, but to borrow from both and bring in a memorable hook or harmony — that, I suspect, is what I’ll still be listening to come 2009 and beyond.

*-full disclosure: friends of mine; I contribute to crowd vocals on their album “Bits”, which is why it’s not included on my albums ballot.