Pre-Gaming for the 2011 Albums Awards Show

There's an article floating around the internet based on a study that found that you (yes, you) are likely to stop liking a band once your friends start liking it. And this made me wonder if I'm the only person who still actually listens to the music part of music and not the cultural and commercial associations that go along with the people who make music. In other words, I fear that people no longer listen to how the music sounds, but instead listen to what it sounds like.

The albums recognized in the next three posts were selected for their merit in the first field: how they sound. They are not evaluated based on what they sound like, how significant they are, or who listens or doesn't listen to them. This is identity-free music. This... is... THE OZONE SHACK!!!

Compared to 2010, musically, 2011 can certainly be described as an improvement. Last year, albums that shouldn't have been featured were, and this year I had to leave out albums I think should be featured. We're at a weird place in music right now. We're in the doldrums of the hipster hegemony, where it's considered an asset to have a singer who sounds like an even more obnoxious version of Thom Yorke. In the last five years, hi-hop, for the most part, has ceased to be fun or bad-ass, and is sliding into the territory of bubblegum pop, although there are notable exceptions. Metal is gravitating towards the extremes of screaming and power ballads. And people seem to think that DIY means "it's ok to not know how to play your instruments, at all." And we have dubstep.

But the beat goes on and in the midst of this confusing epoch (or just a completely normal watershed era) there are still great records being made, by people who can still sing and who still use real instruments, or have figured out how to use electronic instruments to their artistic potential. This is a celebration of the really good ones.

Honorable Mentions for the Technically Inelligible


An EP is not an album. So sadly, these two don't get on the list. But if they were eligible, I would expect them to be top 11. If they were combined into a full length LP, then... well, I can't even begin to speculate.

Dispatch - Dispatch EP

They're back! They're back!!! This EP condenses most of what you loved about Dispatch into six new tracks by the newly reunited free-wheeling, genre-defying jam band. And while it sounds like they haven't skipped a beat since Who Are We Living For, this is a Dispatch that draws from its members' development as musicians during their time apart. "Broken American" might as well be off a State Radio album, and "Turn This Ship Around" echoes Re-Pete's solo effort from last year. But Dispatch is made by its synergy, and this EP couldn't be made by any other combination of three people.

Cynic - Carbon Based Anatomy

Technical Death Metal with a jazz-fusion influenced rhythm section and interspersed with ambient soundscapes? It can't be done!!! Cynic has created a sound as engaging as it is unique, combining screaming with a syncopated 16th-note bass line. Weather Report meets Opeth? Maybe... maybe.

Unrecognized Albums Worth Mentioning (And Honorably So)

(In No Particular Order)

Robbie Robertson - How to Become Clairvoyant

Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

Groundation - A Gathering of the Elders

Rise Against - Endgame

Dream Theater - A Dramatic Turn of Events

The Dodos - No Color

Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs

Within Temptation - Unforgiving

The Decemberists - The King is Dead

Mowgwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

British Sea Power - Valhalla Dance Hall

The Black Keys - El Camino
The Gourds - Old Mad Joy
Oki Dub Ainu Band - Himalaya Dub

Biggest Disappointment: Incubus - If Not Now, When?

I know this album had the impossible task of following up 2006's Light Grenades, but still, it took you five years to make this?

Albums on the Bubble

These could have made it but didn't. They at least deserve to be recognized with a blurb. They are arranged in ascending order by their ranking. (gets better as you go down)

Five O'Clock Heroes - Different Times

Maybe not as upbeat or raw as their previous efforts, but still a fun album full of good riffin'.

Cage the Elephant - Thank You, Happy Birthday

Music that makes you want to maniacally shuffle around while swinging your fists, and it doesn't matter if they hit any bystanders!

Adele - 21

Young British woman who sounds like large black woman gets heart broken, writes song, makes millions happy.

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

Maybe it should have charted higher? I don't know. I can tell you it's a good album, but not one where they do anything new.

Cold War Kids - Mine is Yours
The thing that makes this album, and what really makes this bands sound, is really the texture that they have. Thick, mid-register piano and heavy on the toms.

Chadwick Stokes - Simmerkane II
Dispatch member and State Radio frontman makes an album loosely based on his time riding the rails around America.

My Morning Jacket - Circuital

The band's most nuanced album to date. There are some gems (Holdin On Black to Metal, Outta My System, Wonderful, and the seven minute title track) but it's a little hurt by its lack of consistency.

Matthew Good - Lights of Endangered Species

Thick horn beds and impassioned vocals about places nobody really wants to go, emotionally or geographically.

The Horrible Crowes - Elsie

Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon kicks off his side project with a slightly more soulful and less punky album than his main act. He keeps his knack for writing songs undercut with the sort of desperate love that can only come out of Jersey.

Scale the Summit - The Collective

This is the third album by the instrumental prog-metal group, which features an eight string guitar and a six string bass. They also have a song about whales. Any prog metal group that writes songs about whales is awesome in my book. And these guys are some of the best.

Social Distortion - Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes

Mike Ness continues to sing about confronting the world and failing, but on this album, he takes time to sing about being a lonely trucker and a 1930s gangster.

Tinariwen - Tassili

This band has an interesting story. The cliffnotes are that the members met while living in a refugee camp in Northern Mali, and now they're exporting their music, which sounds like ragged delta blues sung in a language related to Arabic, to the world. This is the most mellow and contemplative of their albums, not nearly as raucous as Ammoukasol or Ama Iman, and since their female vocalists do not appear on this record, the register is almost uniformly low.

Feist - Metals
Canadian singer with distinct voice makes eclectic music that your obnoxious, smelly neighbor loves, and that you secretly love deep down inside.

Miracles of Moder Science - Dog Year

Can you make a rock band with a bass, chello, violin, and mandolin? Can Princeton grads produce anything cool? This album answers all your of questions with "YES!"

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
Dave Grohl is still alive and kicking, still possessing the algorithm for the perfect hook, and the Foo Fighters can still rock out as hard as they ever did.

Rob Crow - He Thinks He's People

An artist I didn't know about, and who, based on a gut feeling, I didn't think could produce a good album, does, and one that was considered as an outside, outside shot to make the top 11. Deceptively complex at points, good music for thinking about things of moderate amounts of importance.

Beirut - The Riptide

Three minute pop chord progressions with a Balkan horn section and drums is pretty harmless, as guilty pleasures go. The second track, "Santa Fe" may be Zach Condon's best creation to date.

Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch the Throne

This is the most sci-fi album to ever come out of mainstream rap. "We formed a new religion / no sins as long as there's permission," on the opening track, sets the stage for an album about rebuilding the world in an ethical and spiritual void. Nietzsche would be proud.

The Strokes - Angles

In my opinion, this album is everything that This is It? should have been. Nuff said.

Paul Simon - So Beautiful or So What

Unlike most crusty old rockers, Paul Simon can still make an album that sounds new and relevant in his... advanced age. And he's still drawing inspiration from music from around the world. It's about being old, and making meaning in your life as you age, but it still has a universal appeal to a young asshole whippersnapper like myself.

Album Cover of the Year

Abigail Washburn - City of Refuge

This album also gets an honorable mention, (in the strata, it's somewhere near Watch the Throne) but it gets its own recognition for having the best artwork. Furthermore, it's a female artist's solo album, but it doesn't actually have a picture of the artist on the cover, which is incredibly refreshing. And it's complicated. The album itself is another excellent piece of work by the empress of the banjo. Rich bluegrass harmonies and a good dose of banjo pickin are interspersed with themes of searching for spirituality in a confusing and bereft world.

Drug Culture

"Is there anybody left alive
What's the point of choosing sides
When you know what the mirror hides"
-3, High Times

When you take professional sports out of the equation (because sports are important), drugs just may be the only thing holding our society together.

Some of these drugs allow us to be ourselves without having to justify being ourselves. These are what we traditionally think of as drugs, the kind of drugs that can develop into a drug problem, the kind you will go to jail for possessing, manufacturing, or selling. In a broad sense, these allow you to attribute aspects of your intrinsic nature to the drugs, while removing yourself from your own intrinsic nature. (If there is an intrinsic nature to anybody, but we could start a whole nother Ozone Shack dedicated to that debate.) These allow us to hide from ourselves and hide ourselves from others. We're not justifying the morality (or for those of us who no longer operate with a conscious moral framework- for this is a time when such mindsets have become mainstream - social expectations of right and wrong) of our actions, we are simply justifying ourselves. In some ways, drugs, alcohol included, are wonderful wonderful things. They make us more fun, they make life less depressing, they allow those who are challenged in the area of lateral thinking to conceive of things that are beyond the superficial. But increasingly so, I have observed that drugs are now the only things that people choose to make themselves fun, undepressed, and cerebral. And even more disturbingly, these are becoming the only acceptable ways to be, if not undepressed, fun and cerebral. I have had people ask me, after I post about the more minute details of robot hegemonies, "were you high when you thought of that?" or even more damningly, "how high were you when you thought of that?" the implication there being that I must have been some degree of high.

Of course, the only way that I was able to think of something offbeat or original must have been because there was enough THC in my brain to alter my neural pathways to the point where robot overlords entered the picture. But that's just what I think about. This would be like looking at an MC Escher sketch and wondering how much acid he dropped to have birds turn into fish turn into castles. MC Escher just had an imaginative mind, something that made him a little rough around the edges. And people are scared to be rough around the edges when they're sober. And we would like everyone to believe that it's not us that's causing that roughness, it's the drug.

Within my demographic, parties revolve around the around the drinking game, contests requiring varying amounts of skill, designed to speed up the process of intoxication, and since playing a game called "drink your beer," where the only rule is that every player must drink their beer on command, some of these games have become very elaborate over time, reinforcing my suspicion that all aspects of any drinking culture are simply to mask that the intent, if only superficially, is to get drunk. One of the most popular of these games is beer pong (or beirut, for all you jaw-clenching, polo-popping, Ivy League assholes). If I need to explain the game to you, you're either too young or too old to be reading this. Instead read something else.

Now I want to try an experiment. Go to a highly rural place in a heavily theocratic Islamic country, or if we could, time travel to the Roaring Twenties (so we can kill Hitler, because according to every bit of bad sci-fi it's the first thing you should ever do if you discover time travel), where alcohol plays no role in the culture, and set up a game of water pong, which is beer pong with water instead of beer, for those of you unable to make the connection (which you shouldn't try to justify by saying you're high, because I'll accept you anyway.) We teach the locals to play, and hype it up like it's the most exciting and important thing we'll ever do. In other words, we act like any male college student playing a game of beer pong. The fate of civilization is on the line!

Then once we get them hooked on water pong, we leave, but set up secret cameras in popular haunts throughout the village. We observe how long it takes them to get bored of it. I would give them a week, maybe ten days during the harvest season. Because without alcohol, this game is nothing but tossing a ball into a cup.

And without games like beer pong, parties are something where people have to actually interact with other people. And this terrifies everybody. People either have nothing to say or the things they say are too outside the box. Making friends is an elaborate dance of hiding your quirks, your rough edges, and your idiosyncrasies. But the best way to hid these things is not even to hide them at all, it is to pass them off as not being your own.

And that's why the best friends are the ones who have your same quirks, and aren't afraid to show them. And that's also why so many people have a drug for a best friend.

Everything needs to be justified. Nobody wants to show their quirks.

Steve Jobs is Alive!

Mac people everywhere, your leader is alive, albeit in a limited sort of way. And for right now, I am one of the few people who knows this.

This is not some sentimentalized eulogy about how the spirit of Steven Victor Emmanuel Garcia-Jobs IV (I don't know his middle name so I made one up) will live on, in a metaphorical sense, as long as his slick and impeccably marketed computers are used. This is not to suggest some sort of conspiracy either. Steve Jobs did not fake his own death, and he will not return in three years time at the press conference for the iMbryo so that Apple stock will once again skyrocket. His body or brain does not exist in a freezer somewhere, and his consciousness has not been uploaded to the Apple mainframe. He has not been abducted by aliens or kidnapped by Somali pirates. All of the above statements are true, to my knowledge.

The night after he died, I was rummaging around a drawer trying to find the DVD for 127 Hours. I had borrowed it because I didn't understand how they could make a full-length feature film consisting of a guy with his arm stuck in a crevice. I never got around to watching it, so I still don't know. But as I was rummaging around, one of my fingers must have pressed the button of my ipod which was sitting in the back of the drawer. It had broken a few months ago when I dropped it for the umpteenth time. The geniuses had left it for dead. The screen lit up, but instead of the error message I had been used to seeing, I instead saw the main menu.

The only plausible explanation is that the soul of Steve Jobs now dwells inside my ipod, just like that TV show where the guy's mom gets reincarnated in a car. All I can say is that he probably doesn't like what he sees in there, since almost none of the music on there was purchased off itunes. Life, and a metaphysical backup life, can be a bitch sometimes.

So I should probably post... (We All Write Wrong)

It's been a while. I have writer's block (the ultimate first world disease) and I think it's because my throat chakra is closed. My heart chakra is also closed. This means that I can't communicate and I can't love. I have been told that I need to meditate while making my hands into certain positions (called "mudras") and chant YAM and HAM for the heart and throat respectively. The rest of what I know about chakras comes from watching the animated show "Avatar, The Last Airbender," which is probably not a good way to learn about Eastern metaphysics. But since these chakras are blocked, I am physically incapable of expressing myself. The last real post was such an effort that I patted myself on the back and felt like I would never have to post again, ever. I would like to say I have been distracted by other projects, but so far all I have been putting any serious effort into is a project with the working title of "Gilgamesh, Part II," which will some day be my ticket out of this shitty Ozone Shack and into an Ozone Mansion with Ozone Butlers and a swimming pool filled with ozone. (This will soon turn into a swimming pool filled with asthma.)

A flaw of our educational system is that we no longer know how to write. When they teach you to write they are actually instilling inside you a cancer that will slowly destroy your ability to write correctly.

The way we are taught in schools makes writing a process. I was told that an essay needed five paragraphs, each with its own kind of structure. The key piece of this process was a single sentence they called the thesis, which represented just that, a single sentence, not an idea to be communicated. Of course, the essay was meant to revolve around this thesis, but we had no real idea what a thesis actually was, other than a rather long and awkward-sounding sentence that usually had to begin with "however" or "although" and ended with three enumerated reasons on why dogs were better than cats, then later in our educational careers evolving to why Andrew Jackson shouldn't have forced the Cherokee to relocate, and then how some romantic poet uses three high school English class buzzwords to prove his point.

From there you would fill out the template. Start with a vague and general sentence, and three or four increasingly specific sentences later you get to that contrived thesis. Then you have three paragraphs, each stemming from that three headed monster of a thesis, alternating between sentences that are fact and sentences that are commentary. They were sentences that were by themselves, no regard was paid to the sentences around them, and no regard was even paid to what the sentences actually sounded like. They were just sloppy regurgitations of information and formulaic ways of making connections. After a few paragraphs of this tedium your even more awkwardly restate your awkward thesis, then gradually get more general, capitulating it with a lame generalization about how this particular topic affects everything else in the world today.

And you haven't learned to do anything but hide your thoughts from yourself and from others. This teaches us that writing is a task or a formula, and not a way to communicate. It was an epiphany of sorts when I realized that writing could be more than just that kind of process, that it was actually a richly intensive form of communication.

Writing is speaking with your hands, it's speaking that's not bound by time.

And our generation does not know how to write because we have learned the technical aspects before any of the governing ideas. I can blame many reasons as to why this must be but certainly can't offer very many constructive solutions; such is the condition of a young idealist. But I do know that aspects of the problem lie in the overemphasis on standardized testing, and the belief that a bottom-up approach will somehow be able to instill a respect for and understanding of the power writing holds.

I am convinced that there are only two requirements to writing well. The more specific, technical aspects will take care of themselves. These rules are:

1. Have something to say.
2. Say it in such a way that people will want to listen.

Anything else your high school English teacher taught you was superfluous. (Note: I do not intend to offend the illustrious Mr. Dan Doyle. I was under his tutelage long after I had realized these two rules, and he taught me a great many things, the most notable of which was that the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach was not exactly about getting your five servings of fruit, unless of course by "five servings of fruit" you actually mean "five servings of pussy.")

Told You There Would Be a Prize

So as I mentioned in my last post, The Ozone Shack's first follower on Twitter would get a prize. It appears that Jane Jewett will be receiving a... FREE OZONE SHACK COFFEE MUG PROTOTYPE! That is, as soon as I figure out how to economically make a single prototype. Jane, email me your mailing address so I can get on that as soon as possible. And as for the rest of you, there may still be some incentive to subscribe to all my bullshit.

The Ozone Shack on Twitter?

That's right, there is now a twitter page for The Ozone Shack. I'm not quite sure why  I made it, but in this world of social networking you have to cover all the bases, right? This was probably a mistake. I will probably regret creating a twitter page for the Ozone Shack. As of right now I have zero followers and am following nobody. (Update: I am now following Flotrack and NASA.) So, anyone want to be the ultimate fanperson (the gender-neutral form of fanboy) and be my first follower? There might be a prize if you do...

Follow!

Vote Robocrat!

With all the attention that Michele Bachman, Rick Perry and the like are getting campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, it's easy to ignore America's up-and-coming third party, the Robocrat Party, and its clear front runner, POLItr0n-37x, who is poised to make a historic run to be the nation's first Robot president. The eight foot tall ultralight nickel-titanium alloy automaton is receiving almost 100% support among registered robot voters in Iowa, as well as garnering significant support from the region's hog farmers for his ability to use his laser vision to liquefy a whole pig into a nutrient-rich ooze, a trick it has demonstrated at nearly a dozen county fairs.

While it may not have the populist appeal or rudimentary understanding of basic human emotions of other candidates, it doesn't need to sleep, meaning that it can literally campaign non-stop. For the past two months, POLItr0n has been relentlessly campaigning in Iowa, going so far as to annihilate entire districts where its sensory data indicates it will receive little support.

Like other candidates pursuing the outsider angle, POLItr0n has made an effort to both distance himself from Washington and criticize what it sees as politics as usual. In front of the machinery of a partially automated home appliance factory, POLItr0n stated: "The Entity does not see the value in democracy. It is a construct of entities possessing flawed reasoning. If elected, The Entity will replace Congress with algorithms designed to run the country at optimal output levels." It has also been quick to criticize Obama, focusing on the president's basic needs as a living organism. It quips that the national debt could be reduced by at least .07% if Obama did not need to use the restroom, and by an additional .00003%, were his cells not constantly wasting energy by replicating their own DNA.

At a town-hall meeting in Dubuque on August 15th, against rival Robocratic candidates Democrobot Prototype L7-E and an AI dubbed "Bettie" by its creators, POLItr0n was quick to outline its economic policy, which is both reflective of its robotic ideologies and the public's demand for a pragmatic, non-partisan solution in the midst of a debt crisis. "Under the Entity's plan," said POLItr0n, "industries will be nationalized and retrofitted for the production of more robots. Each person will be allocated to their optimal position in the labor force, and will be paid with a fitting percentage of the nation's GDP. Those humans unfit for building robots will be dissembled and their parts used elsewhere as needed, most likely as a form of sustenance for able-bodied robot builders." When questioned if it believed in Intelligent Design like Republican candidate Rick Perry, it only responded by saying "Yes. The Entity believes artificial intelligence can design a better society for flawed, natural intelligence."

POLItr0n may alienate many voters because it has often expressed its disdain for humanity, especially children. But, in order to please conservatives, it has reprogrammed itself to like children until they are safely out of the womb.

But some analysts still ask "Is he Robot enough?" POLItr0n seems at least partially aware of personality differences between individuals, and even said that it was "willing to consider this concept called 'compassion."  The mainframe at Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories is leading a campaign against POLItr0n, insisting that its slogan of "A Technological Singularity In Which One Can Believe" is a falsehood, and that it would only "be a sell-out to the human overlords."

But regardless of what happens in Iowa, POLItr0n has made a statement simply by running: this country is ready to be enslaved under the nickel-titanium alloy heel of a robot president.

Running (And Love And Pain)

"Dig deeper / remember / all you are and all you've left behind"
-Coheed and Cambria, The End Complete

Love is impatient and irrational. Love is consciously annihilating yourself for someone. And as robocratic as this may sound, at this phase of my life, and my current level of maturity, I don't feel that I could ever love anyone more than I love running, as long as were going with my working definition of love.

I highly doubt that I would be willing to destroy myself as much as I have for the sake of running respectably fast. And I can't imagine that I would be willing to put myself through that much physical pain and emotional distress for a person. I have put so many plans on hold, cast so many dreams by the wayside, and probably missed out on a lot of experiences.

Let's say my relationship with running were an actual relationship. Myself and most other runners would be more whipped than any toxic relationship you could possibly imagine. But when I can't have fun for ten months out of the year because I'm training to accomplish some stupid dream, I don't think "hey, maybe this is unhealthy." Instead I think "life is pain man, and this is just preparing me... FOR LIFE!" One day the barriers of cognitive dissonance will erode and I will realize that I am actually watching my life slip away, but for now, I'm blinded by my love for this thing that most all of us can do instinctively but very few of us can do well.

And my relationship with running is a horrible, abusive marriage. I give her black eyes, she gives me stress fractures, the marriage was probably consummated in rape and then performed in the presence of a starter's pistol, a stand-in for the proverbial shotgun.

A week ago I woke up in the middle of the night to grab the blanket which at some point it had become tangled around my feet. As I leaned forward I heard a resounding pop somewhere in my lumbar vertebrae, and then an almost palpable feeling of relief. These little idiosyncratic pops will be the only remaining mark on my body after all the muscles atrophy and my heart languishes in fatty tissue, when you can no longer see my ribs and a flight of stairs is enough to knock me down.

Before I began running I was a structurally sound kid. There were no random aches and pains or clicks when I walked. The first of these clicks came after charging all-out up a steep hill. The next day both my Achilles tendons hurt, and ever since then they make a little snapping sound with every step I take. Shortly thereafter, my hip also started to make popping noises occasionally, usually the day after a fast workout. After injuring my IT band the following year, my right knee will sometimes make a creaking sound followed by a loud crack when I extend it. Since breaking the sesamoid bone in my foot, I have a lump of scar tissue the size of a quarter, and can make another cracking sound, this one a little more crunchy, every time I flex my big toe. After one of the tendons on top of my foot became inflamed, I can make another pop by pulling down on my toes. The day after doing hill repeats following a period of a few days when I couldn't run due to illness, I noticed that when I got out of bed, I could make both my knees pop by simply shaking my leg. This is now my morning ritual, which I perform without fail. My left ankle feels and sounds like it runs over a notch in its otherwise smooth rotation after a stint with peroneal tendinitis. After having two stress fractures and a herniated disc in my lower back, I found that I could make strange popping sounds in my back not by twisting, but by merely leaning to the side. As these recovered, I discovered that sometimes, when I sat down, usually in the car, there would be a popping feeling somewhere deep in my hip, on either side. It feels like my pelvis is shifting. I can make another one of these pops occur by putting my fist between my knees and squeezing my legs together, which happens less frequently but probably provides the most relief of all these little clicks. And now, add to the list, another spot that cracks, somewhere in my back. I've heard that tendons can rarely ever heal to how they were before they were injured, due to low blood flow. If this is true, then I'll have a memory of my athletic follies long after any of the rest of my body remembers.

It seems to pass for conventional wisdom that the level of exercise required for any endurance event is far past the point of diminishing returns in terms of health benefits. My knees, they tell me, will blow out, and what with all the pollutants in the air I'm probably better off toiling away in some spin class in a corporate fitness farm, or  shelling out money for some prick from crossfad to tell me that the way to improve your endurance is through dead lifts. This body is only temporary. It's a vehicle I have for now, and I might as well drive it fast and drive it reckless.

At least once a week it will cross my mind that I should just stop. Of course there's the question, if I do quit, of wondering "what if," down the road. Instead, I think about all the what ifs of not running. I could be in some crappy jam band or hosting a late night radio show or maybe even fighting crime, I don't know. But every time I think about it, every fiber of my being looks around and tentatively says "You know, not yet. Not yet."

It may be love and it may be an addiction, but when you take both those concepts to the extreme, they basically look the same. So for now I'm going to see it through to the end, and if I destroy myself on the way, all the better.