plane: 2017 | Sputnikmusic

granitenotebook 12.11.17	good list, we have a lot of similar picks. did you listen to julien baker, four tet, or rostam? they seem up your alley
ShitsofRain 12.11.17	nice 1
johnnyblaze 12.11.17	yay 4 do make and alvvays. Toronto represent.
oodlesofnoodles 12.11.17	Always love to see Do Make Say Think's album getting represented, definitely my post-rock pick of the year. Also I totally agree with you on Mount Eerie, that album is so hard to talk about critically...
polyrhythm 12.12.17	nice top three
Dewinged 12.12.17	Description for 1 is on point. Props for 15! Crazy album
cylinder 12.12.17	Shame 17 landed next to 16
Ryus 12.12.17	yeah youre right 16 is far better than 17
Cygnatti 12.12.17	^disagreed ._.
zaruyache 12.12.17	didn't know about that eluvium album, gonna check it like three times in a row.
Chortles 12.12.17	great list. there's a lot of goodness here that i wish i liked more though, except 25 - absolutely stunning record. laurel halo is a queen
cylinder 12.12.17	“16 is far better than 17” Far better Far
luci 12.12.17	so half the list are 5s? classic lewis. classic year
Toad 12.12.17	niiiiiceee & taaastyyyy
Winesburgohio 12.12.17	1 is a baptism by fire more like
Winesburgohio 12.12.17	i'm just being facetious really, excellent list obvs (surprised myself by how much I adore 4, of all things) but looks like i'll be defending Subtemple alone :O
Willie 12.13.17	The Bjork album is my favorite since her first two albums. As you might imagine, I haven't heard anything else on this list.
calmrose 12.13.17	just checked out 12, lovely album
sixdegrees 12.13.17	more like plane crash
verdant 12.13.17	ha ha good one six!!! you are very funny keep it up it's inspiring to watch : )
sixdegrees 12.13.17	are you gonna be okay
OldCrime 12.13.17	Agreed, 30 transcends ranking.
Winesburgohio 12.13.17	plane rekd LOL
Gyromania 12.13.17	Probably the single greatest list all year if not of all time
theBoneyKing 12.13.17	All y'all claiming A Crow Looked at Me is some special thing that transcends music and ranking and rating need to get your heads out of your asses, it's just a fucking album.
sixdegrees 12.13.17	words fail ratings fail
Gyromania 12.13.17	It's hardly an album tbh. It's a deeply depressing album that would prob be better suited as a journal entry. Affecting but not exactly enjoyable to listen to imo
Gyromania 12.13.17	There's barely any 'music' on display, and zero hooks. Obviously that would defeat the point, but it doesn't make it any more engaging
theBoneyKing 12.13.17	Phil Elverum wrote 11 autobiographical songs about dealing with the death of his wife and released them as an album. You can listen to it just as you can listen to any other album. He clearly wanted it to be consumed and analyzed as an album. Otherwise he wouldn't have released it as such. Despite how personal it is he released it into the world and you can make your own personal connection to it as you can any album. I don't see how it is in any way "unrankable" or "unrateable" or even "unlistenable".
theBoneyKing 12.13.17	People saying it's "unmusical" in any way are talking bs, there are absolutely melodies in it and there's plenty of music in the background. Is early Bob Dylan also "barely music"?
theBoneyKing 12.13.17	I don't have a problem with you specifically plane I just dislike the narrative that the album isn't music or is unrankable, if your reason for not ranking it is just that you don't know where to rank it that's fine.
Winesburgohio 12.13.17	when i saw him he was just hanging out wearing jandles before the show exploring the bars back room and he was conducive to an impromptu interview and can confirm great dude also let's get some focus on what's really important fellas: 1) is, actually, very very good indeed
Winesburgohio 12.13.17	sach i think you're labouring under a misapprehension here
theBoneyKing 12.13.17	Listening the album again for the first time in a while right now and can confirm I still have no trouble finding it conventionally enjoyable. Does that make me a sociopath? Maybe.
Winesburgohio 12.13.17	i'll quote Iai's (perfect review) here because i think it pertinent: "Death has almost been rendered a meaningless plot device in art and entertainment these days, but death isn't Spiderman pulling on a latex suit and vowing to avenge Uncle Ben. Death isn't your man from Blade Runner giving a pretty little speech about having seen things you people wouldn't believe. Death isn't about deciding whether to save Ashley or Kaidan. Death isn't about candles in the wind or following people into the dark. A Crow Looked at Me reclaims the reality and the magnitude of death."
Winesburgohio 12.13.17	s-s-senpai noticed me :#3
Jasdevi087 12.13.17	nvm too slow
Jasdevi087 12.13.17	"to externalise the grieving process in a manner such as elverum has with a crow looked at me serves to strip death of its personality in an attempt to try and objectify and generalise the anguish" why do you see this as a negative and do you think maybe your own personal view on what death should be is the key variable here?
Winesburgohio 12.13.17	Sach, for what it's worth I think that's why i have such a hard time about it -- it feels like such a personal expression of grief, and Phil makes no bones about the specificity of his situation, it's purposefully anti-universalizing, sprinkled as it is with unique, achingly personal detail. Which is what makes it so uncomfortable and makes it so difficult to appraise on a critical framework; the album casts us in the role of voyeur, to the extent i feel like i'm eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for me. Ultimately i hope the album provided Phil with catharsis and a modicum of closure, but it's made very clear he's not trying to offer the listener the same; this selfishness and singularity of grieving is so so real. Just my take. Cheers.
Jasdevi087 12.13.17	"but the seemingly forced understanding of the audience is awfully disingenuous and depreciative" I'm not 100% on what you're saying here, but if you mean that the audience are forcing themselves to understand Elverum's grief then I'd say you're actually the one being disingenuous here by placing the fault on the audience rather than the album itself. "and as a piece marketed for consumption it is rather grotesque so far as it is the sale of grief; a kind of abstraction of emotion to a consumable product that we pay for, and perhaps a brilliant little embodiment of the post-modern capitalist experience" kinda feels like you're pretending this album is unique in this respect. why not generalise this to any other song or album written about grief? or by extension any emotion? kinda comes across as arrogant bias towards this particular release "people aren't buying it so much for the musical content but the evocations it brings" I think those are actually one and the same thing, since the particular evocations brought out by the record are by the musical content. Unless of course you're implying that people are buying the record just on the concept that the guy's wife died, which is probably fallacious since it doesn't consider that most of the people actually paying money for it are probably fans of Elverum, so could genuinely be buying it for the musical content, or that a good portion of them probably initially heard the album for free before purchasing "so while it retains the personality of grief for elverum the reaction is one altogether forced and mildly disgusting in its bombast" again this here just reads as you deciding how the audience is reacting to it "perhaps it has that effect for people, but then the questions beg; why not feel that emotion whenever we hear of death?" there it is again, how do you know that other don't indeed feel similar whenever they hear of death? "why must it take this to evoke such pain? " there it is one more time "must we pay to feel?" have not paid a cent to hear this album tbh
Jasdevi087 12.13.17	"it seems a lot of people are impressing a kind of profundity of resonance when i imagine there's no that many people out there (relative to the album's huge audiencebase) that can relate to losing a wife." or empathy? "it's the lyrical/thematic content that people are attaching themselves too" yes but the lyrical/thematic content is part of the musical content. unless you're trying to say that Elverum could have just released a piece of paper saying "yo my wife died" and we'd slap a 4.5 on it "i don't see everyone crying when they watch the news in the morning, y'dig" yeah haven't seen anyone cry listening to this either, not sure what your point is "good for you...?" again, really struggling to see your point
Jasdevi087 12.13.17	"look at perceptions of homeless people, left to their death the majority dissociate or just don't give a single flying fuck" yeah and that's too fucking bad but you seem to think that a generalisation, which might i add is by your own perception of other people's internalisation of events around them, applies to every person on the planet and specifically to the comparatively tiny sample population that is this album's audience
Jasdevi087 12.13.17	"empathy relies on understanding so you're more or less just backing up the idea of forced affectation, cheers bro" plane, being the beautiful human being that he is, already sorted that one out for me so cheers "od no, the thematic content is reliant upon, and made up of, the album's context. in a lot of ways a crow looked at me satisfies the definition of worthless art. within its contextual framework it is incredibly difficult to criticise but removed from its context it is entirely ineffectual." yes, it is. particularly in this context, the lyrical and thematical content makes the seemingly ordinary and roughly performed musical aspect mean something other than what it would had it existed in exactly the same way void of the context "not sure if you watch the news but there's a lot of talk of death" getting further away from understanding what it is you're trying to say every time you give an answer like this "if people normally internalise anguish why have they gone to such lengths to externalise it for bro? does bro's pain mean that much more?? are homeless people just not worth reaching out to?? is it only when a bearded dude with a guitar cries that we are allowed to cry??" no idea what you mean or where you're coming from now. pretty much exclusively beginning to read like you think you're better than everyone else who listened to this album just because you're looking at things differently "it applies to a vast majority of the west (as it is embodied by representative western thought at the macropolitical level -- which at the least implies at least a slight majority vote for such an existent sentiment)" pretty much says to me that your argument rests on the assumption that this is true regardless "the sample population that is this album's audience is largely made up of middle class white folk, which make up the large representative majority of western thought -- these people aren't special" cheers "look at snox for example" I would rather avoid a direct line of sight with Snox as much as possible
Jasdevi087 12.14.17	pretty hard to argue that his inflection doesn't convey affect either
Jasdevi087 12.14.17	well no that depends, what if his bread-based album was received just as well, I get the feeling we'd be in here arguing about that because someone pissed in your cornflakes about everyone except you enjoying it
Jasdevi087 12.14.17	I think you'll find a lot of people could argue that a lot of the hip-hop albums you're trying to sing tough love for are phoned in in their own way musically. I've seen maybe 5 people claim the album "beyond criticism" again, this is boiling down to you don't like this, and other people do, other people don't like that, but you do
Jasdevi087 12.14.17	"not at all though you're projecting so hard lmao" i'm not necessarily telling you how it is, i'm telling you how it reads "but i come here to criticise what sounds like the laziest attempt at indie folk/slowcore i've heard in some years and i'm the devil" it's probably got something to do with the pretense you come in with that you're better than everyone else cause you've got this "insightful" contrarian disposition that you almost never defend in a way where people understand where you're coming from and are more open to see your side of the argument
Jasdevi087 12.14.17	"what it reeks of more is a weird double standard whereby a bearded white man is allowed to feel emotion and loss whereas black kids that have been involved in criminal activity can't because they're bad people " where are you getting this "allowed to feel emotion" thing from? this probably comes down simply to the fact that people find it harder to feel intimacy with "someone who's been involved in criminal activities" precisely for the reason that they come across as "bad people", which pushes away people who see their behaviour as morally reprehensible regardless of whether or not they "chose that life :100:". because we're talking about two completely different kinds of people here ("bearded white man" who we can alternatively think of as: artist just getting by in life who recently lost his wife to natural causes completely out of their control) and ("black kids that have been involved in criminal activity" who we can think of as: young artists that have been involved in criminal activity losing loved ones in complicated, but potentially avoidable situations) the reception to these two kinds of people is obviously going to be different, because they are two different kinds of people. you also have to accept that most of the middle class white people you're demonising here did not grow up with hip-hop, and therefore do not find the genre as easily intimate as the more familiar "bearded white guy with acoustic guitar", and i'm happily accepting the other side of the coin to be true as well on that one
Jasdevi087 12.14.17	"Damn, dude pulled right out. RIP half this thread" nah SowingSeason's just on his ass constantly wiping his comments, not his fault on this one I did quote the parts of his comments I was responding to so the context isn't entirely lost
Kiran 12.14.17	I'm out of touch - what is #1? Need to hear Krule's new one, so behind on everything..
Kiran 12.14.17	I didn't know Fever Ray had a new one, feel like I should've seen it in the papers here at least. Gotta get that one. And Alvvays. And didn't know Animal Collective had a new one. So much to listen to.
Kiran 02.23.18	Sorry, forgot to check back here :( I like the new US Girls record. A lot of songs, very few albums...a lot of Paul Simon Graceland (took me 26 years to get around to it...), the new Malkmus obviously