Would've

This is a listing of albums that I came to way too late in the game, and that would have, given the proper timing, been most certainly counted among my favourite albums of this past decade. It’s a category, I expect, will continue to grow over the course of this new decade. Each is worthy, without question, of being listed in any best of the decade listing for 2000-2009.

Fire Show
Saint The Fire Show
(Perishable, 2002)

Saint The Fire Show is one of those completely off-the-charts-unique, slightly grating albums that spins in a universe all its own and, eventually, with repeated listens, turns into something astounding and permanently scarring (an experience reminiscent of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock or Slint’s Spiderland). Post-rock experimentalism at its most crooked and awry.


Sean McCann
Midnight Orchard
(2009, Roll Over Rover)

I’ve already written this up here.














The Skygreen Leopards
One Thousand Bird Ceremony
(Soft Abuse, 2003)

The pastoral, patchwork folk of The Skygreen Leopards was never so disassembled and airy, pristine and sunlight twinkling, as gorgeous as it is on their debut for Soft Abuse. Why I waited so long to listen to the boys on their debut after so thoroughly enjoying their now more pop oriented psych folk, is beyond me. Don’t let it happen to you. No wait, you knew better. Loveliness.


Peter Kolovos
New Bodies
(Thin Wrist, 2009)

Did I mention that the vinyl packaging for New Bodies is absolutely deluxe? So is everything on Thin Wrist. Of course, I just reviewed this thing last week, but have been listening to it for a good enough amount of time to know that it will imprint on this past decade most solidly. Essential.


-Thistle

Peter Kolovos - New Bodies

Peter Kolovos
New Bodies
(2009, Thin Wrist)
RIYL = Kevin Drumm, John Wiese, Derek Bailey

Peter Kolovos plays the guitar like John Wiese works a circuit board, his guitar squawking and scribbling out its beautiful spit and grit – its malfunction – all over the place. And New Bodies, New Bodies is the best album I missed last year. How good? Well, I would probably place it somewhere in my top 3 albums of 2009. Possibly number one. Which makes it an obvious mention for one of the best albums of this past decade. I understand that Kolovos’s experimental, hard glitching guitar work, like the spastic blues of Bill Orcutt (probably the other best album I missed from 2009), is a descendent of the all mighty Derek Bailey, but nothing from that man mangles me in quite the same way as New Bodies does. It’s as if, in his improvisations, in these obvious new tones, that Kolovos’s intuition knows perfectly the position and placement of each dotted note, each puncturing slice and every extended wall of garbage laced crunch. The album is, simply, perfect in its deconstruction, its balance, its weight and kill. Do not underestimate this. New Bodies is what a guitar was meant to sound like. It has simply taken all these hundreds of years to perfect it. Mind blowing.

-Thistle