WHO WORE IT WORST?: An Examination of Pitchfork's Choices for Best and Worst Album Covers of 2012

We humans are nostalgic creatures, and as such we often find ourselves reminiscing about the past. This is especially true around the end of the year, which is why we all spend the entire month of December making lists of things that happened during the year -- when we are not buoying the economy by trading bobbles-of-questionable-value, that is.

If December is the month of making lists, then January is the month of making lists of those lists, and looks like we have about thirty more seconds left in January to get our word in. Our bad -- we lost our watch in the underground Mayan Apocalypse bunker we built for the holidays, and only realized it was time to come out last week.

Anywho, here at Dear Jerks our favorite list of lists is titled "Hey, We Disagree with These Lists." Tied at the top of that list for 2012 sit Pitchfork's dueling album covers lists; the Best and the Worst. You might think we'd be more in a huff about, oh, an actual music-ranking list maybe, but, really, these two, more than any others we also glanced at briefly, seem to go out of their way to flaunt their arbitrariness. So, now we are art critics, and we will gently poke at these two lists with a stick in a playful sort of way, not in a sort of provoking or mauling kind of way. Seriously guys, it's just for the funsies!

How many chainz are on this thing, anyways?

Kyle: OK, I'm going to start this one right off the top. The first entry in the Best list is Based on A T.R.U. Story by 2 Chainz, featuring a picture of...two chains. That's cool I guess, but I just don't get what the big deal is. So it's an aesthetically boring picture of a couple gold chains against a black background. Are we giving credit for cleverness? Cause this doesn't strike me as particularly clever either. What qualities warrant it's placement on a list of the best album covers? Ian, maybe you can help me out here?

Ian: I actually think the image of the 2 Chainz cover is perfectly fine: what else would you choose to represent the nominal reinvention of Tity Boi? I also really dig that the chains seem modest in size, at least by hip hop standards. Here's what yanks my goat (wait, did I blow that easy idiom?): isn't the point of putting two chains on the cover partly so that you then don't also need his name in the corner? It would be far more "iconic" to leave the two chains alone with the parental advisory label. To say this is one of the best covers of the year is to say: "Those two chains are quite nice, and I like it when things are obvious."

What is less obvious, to me, is why Battles' Dross Glop is on the Best list, while Bear in Heaven's I Love You, It's Cool is on the Worst list. Check it:

The cover of Dross Glop looks like a photograph of ambergris that has been produced by a rainbow instead of a whale. It's a neato picture, but, using the same logic that deems it cool, I don't understand why then Bear in Heaven's cover is...not cool. It is, essentially, simply a different interpretation of what it would look like if a rainbow barfed. This is one of those instances when even a sentence's worth of explanation would help, but alas, these two lists come free of frivolous defenses.

Kyle: I'm going to put on my visual artist hat for a second here and say that I do think Dross Glop is a good pick for the good list. It's very nicely done, where as the Bear in Heaven cover is of a much lower caliber. That being said, I don't think it deserves to be called out as especially bad. I also agree that it's placement on the list seems to suggest that the list makers were not too concerned with contradicting themselves.

Ian: We don't want to nitpick every choice, so let's move along to another confusing pair (more jokes like that ahead!). Death Grips' No Love Deep Web is on the Worst list, but The Money Store's cover is supposedly one of the best. The syllogism here fails: The Money Store is a great cover, so silly/juvenile sex-themed images make great covers, therefore No Love Deep Web should be a great cover, too. Let's be real: it takes cajones to write a dumb phrase on your weiner and take a sad picture of it, let alone slap it (yup) on a CD. 

Come to think of it, dude should have written "The Money Store" on his weiner instead. More symbolic that way. Reviewers would ask, "how are penises like mortgage lenders?" 

I mean, wouldn't you ask that, Kyle?

Kyle: Really, I think the interesting question is, “how are penises not like mortgage lenders?”

Congrats by the way on using “weiner” twice in one paragraph. This is truly a proud day in our short history. Seriously though, dude should have written “The Money Store” on his weiner! Maybe that’s why it’s on the bad list instead of the good one? Like, it has a degree of difficulty worthy of the good list or whatever, but execution cost it valuable points? 

On a side note, if you are brave enough to google image search "No Love Deep Web," the internet is all over the 'replace the weiner with some other thing' meme. It's...only mildly amusing, so maybe just take my word for it. You're welcome.

Ian: I can't help but notice the similar cartoon-animation-on-laser-grid backgrounds of Laurel Halo's album on the Best list, and the Animal Collective album on the Worst list. I guess Animal Collective just picked the wrong subject matter for their cartoon image? If only the neo-hippies went with young women commiting graphic hari kari, which clearly has far more artistic merit than some gross lips.

One interesting detail about the Best list is that seven of the twenty covers are entirely, or close-to-entirely, done in black & white. Ital's Hive Mind is also essentially black & white, except the white is replaced by a kind of 'dirty sherbet' color.

Here's the deal: some of the covers on the Worst list are definitely awful (why is "this-is" hyphenated on the PiL cover??), and many on the Best list are definitely great (come see us in 2019, when The Seer wins Album Cover of the Decade honors).  That said, the Worst and Best lists, when taken together, inadvertently (unless the whole thing is a meta gag) indicate a lack of criteria beyond 'I like it.' This, in its way, aligns with the notion that the quality of art is subjective, which isn't a concept the site is particularly known for encouraging.

We, however, totally believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Except that the following album covers were the actual best album covers of 2012. For great reasons!  Reasons, however, that we are also not going to explain...

Kyle's Favorite Album Covers of 2012

Mogwai - Les Revenants EP

Liars - WIXIW

Wild Nothing - Nocturne

Ian's Favorite Album Covers of 2012

Mogwai - A Wrenched Virile Lore

Regents - Antietam After Party

Billy Talent - Dead Silence

Okay, I gotta break the silence for this one. It's amazing how so much craziness is going on, yet the first question that comes to mind is, "how is the light in the phone booth still working?"

Best Album Cover of 2012/Future Best Album Cover of the Decade

Swans - The Seer

A Mosh Pit Grows in Babytown Brooklyn: Obits at The Rock Shop, 1/18/13

“Is this a real argument?” – Rick Froberg

“I think I get it.” – Sohrab Habibion

Three songs in to their set on Friday night, Obits were as bemused as their audience. After a pair of churning openers, they began to pick up the pace. In the center of the Rock Shop’s modest showroom, amidst all the reservedly nodding heads, a young man, high on life (and possibly other things), began pogoing into people. Unsurprisingly, he was met with resistance, ultimately resulting in a verbal confrontation with a shoo-in for Mr. Autumn Man. Of all things, it was on this kerfuffle of manners that the night's energy pivoted. Someone in the back hollered advocations for the young man’s right to dance, at which point Froberg and Habibion said what everyone else was thinking.

Here are some other things that happened: two bras were flashed (one for a picture, one seemingly just for funsies) in a not-ironic-enough way, an empty beer cup was carelessly tossed to the lip of the stage (nearly grazing a few heads), there was a quickly aborted crowd-surfing attempt…and that was just two pals from Long Island. Not too shabby for a band featuring men well in to their forties, some of them card-carrying members of the Park Slope Food Co-op. Obits, of course, are not the typical gang of responsible, middle-aged fellas.

Listening to Drive Like Jehu’s eponymous first album back in 1991, you couldn’t be blamed for hearing the frantic tear of Rick Froberg’s voice flailing in the din of post-garage-punk spasms, and thinking to yourself, “there’s no way this guy is gonna last doing this for twenty more years.” Yet, here we are. There is a perceptible, gradual line of calming down from Drive Like Jehu through Hot Snakes, and now on to Obits – but it’s a very relative mellowing. It has taken Froberg those two decades to dial it down from 9 to, say, 7. At that rate, he’ll be releasing his jazz and/or acoustic album some time after we’re all long dead. Sure, Obits are probably more melodic and diverse than Hot Snakes or DLJ were, but saying as much is often code for losing steam (and the puns a name like “Obits” invites doesn’t make it easy to resist). In their case, it is more of a matter of slowing down just enough to try out new twists.

It is hard to exaggerate the staying power of Drive Like Jehu. Much like Doolittle and Spiderland, for two examples, it remains unshackled to its era. The same goes for their major-label follow-up, Yank Crime, but there’s something singular about their debut, which fulfilled and far-exceeded the promise of Froberg and DLJ-mate John Reis’ preceding incarnation, Pitchfork. If you have ever been in a rock band whose sound was described more than once as “unhinged,” or your guitar playing as “angular,” you probably owe Froberg & Co. a beer.

Their lyrics, too, deserve hearty accolades. For one, there's the priceless opening lines of “Caress,” where Froberg, after a searing rave-up, maniacally wails “Gracie, we’re making babies, yeah, we’re barefoot on the tiles!” That almost-too-vivid portrait is chased by gems such as “pleasure is your crime/junior is your punishment.” (One really has to hear them in context to fully appreciate their bite.) The acidic wit spray-painted across “Atom Jack,” “Good Luck in Jail,” et al, was an especially welcome counter-offer to the angst and melodrama churned up by that whole Grunge thing that was taking off at the time. Hammering out art-punk with integrity might not have put gold flakes in the schlager back in the day – there were times when the debut went out of print and copies could be found in used bins for around twenty bucks a pop – but, as Froberg asserted with the first song of the first album by his post-Jehu band, Hot Snakes, “If Credit’s What Matters I’ll Take Credit.” Obits also don’t lack for droll humor, though perhaps worldly adult matters like economics (i.e. 2011’s Moody, Standard and Poor) are targeted more than before.

Toward the end of their set, Habibion – whose own 90’s rock resume features the great Edsel -- checks the time. (Automatic) Midnight has passed, and it is now officially Froberg’s birthday. Cheers go up. Some in the crowd try to rouse a verse of “Happy Birthday,” though it doesn’t fully take, maybe because many in the room are out of breath. Defying presumption, in the wake of the first lone dancer’s persistence, the number of moshers has grown exponentially.

 A diminutive woman holding a full-ish beer moves up to pose for an instagram behind the action, and then slides sideways into the throng. A few seconds later, the contents of her plastic cup predictably take flight, splash-landing on the head of, poetically, that first dancer. A man wearing earplugs, who had been grinning end-to-end since he started to pogo, loses his glasses, and, hearteningly, a few other dudes quickly move in to surround him so he can safely grab them off the floor.

The energy level of any given rock gig typically, naturally, decreases at least somewhat with the performer’s exertion of energy as said show progresses. There are always exceptions, though; tonight, Obits are one of them. They feed on and reciprocate the vibe as one-by-one the audience shakes off the shackles of public behavioral expectations. When the last song is announced, the moshers respond accordingly in a last fit of controlled semi-violence. Habibion is psyched to keep up this human aurora borealis of Babytown, Brooklyn, and everyone is rewarded with an unplanned encore, taking all three further chances to cut loose. As they unsling their axes, Froberg notes not wanting to push it, but he might have been the only one in the room who felt that way.     

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Top 11 Records with Suburban Homes on the Cover

When it came time to put down our sandwiches and cobble together Dear Jerks' first annual year-end list, "home for the holidays" was an obvious choice for the theme. Just like it should have been an obvious choice for Beach House to put a picture of a beach house on one of their record covers. And yet, lo and behold, they are now four deep and still haven't gotten their stuff together. (No, the inside of a house doesn't count.)

Needless to say, we got mad about that for a while. Then we realized that if we were going to be mad at Beach House, we'd also have to be mad at Chapterhouse, the Housemartins, Swedish House Mafia -- not to mention Led Zeppelin, for royally botching the Houses of the Holy cover. Not only that, it's hard to stay mad when Santa Claus will soon be waking from his year-long slumber to traverse the globe and break in to the homes of Christians everywhere both devout and non-practicing alike....



11.  Braid - The Age of Octeen

Sure, you can only see the roofs here, but when you think about it, Santa Claus mostly just sees the roofs, so this is like the "Santa's-eye" view. How 'Christmas' is that?!



10.  Golden City - Golden City

That is definitely not Santa Claus coming in for a landing. This was likely taken from the storyboard for the 1986 cinematic gem, starring a G.I. Joe-obsessed Fred Savage, The Boy Who Could Fly.

9.  Silversun Pickups – Neck of the Woods

This gives us the distinct feeling that there's someone inside the window calling the cops on us for stalking.

8.  Swell Maps - A Trip to Marineville

...and this gives us the distinct feeling that someone definitely should have called the cops on us. 

7.  We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls

We were promised jetpacks, but all we got were these single-detached metaphors for disappointment.

6.  Real Estate - Days

This is the same row of houses as on the Jetpacks' cover, taken later that same day from a different angle. 

5.  The Microphones - Window

This family probably asked Santa Claus to bring them a driveway, and FiOS.  

4.  Harvey Danger - Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?

Wherever the merrymakers have gone, Santa is going to unleash a furious wrath when he discovers they didn't leave him the required sacrificial tribute of cookies and milk. Don't make the same mistake. 

3.  The Wrens - The Meadowlands

Tragically, this home has been forsaken by Santa. That is because there is no chimney, which is Santa's only feasible means of egress into any domicile. True fact. 

2.  Oasis - “Live Forever”

Speaking of which: considering this is John Lennon’s childhood home, it is a Christmas miracle that Noel Gallagher is not trying to sneak down the chimney here.

1.  Madness - “Our House”

This may seem like a simple choice, but it is truly an onion of mystery, with each perplexing layer more tear-inducing than the last. Why is there a free-standing brownstone in the middle of a verdant field of flowers? Is the door made out of the sky? Why does it have sinister-ish eyes? Is the roof actually a cartoon bomb? What on earth is that yellow thing tethered to it? Much like Christmas itself, it leaves you asking questions which make no sense outside of its own context.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYONE!

Honorable Mention:  Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Yeah, yeah, we know, could have easily been on the list...but there's too much emphasis on the car and the tree for our tastes. Don't fret, this one is a shoo-in for 2013's "records with lame cars and ugly palm trees on the cover" list.

Oneida Celebrate Their Quinceanera: Secret Project Robot, 12/1/12

(All photos courtesy of Bryan Williams)

Oneida celebrated fifteen years of making sometimes-clanging, sometimes-pulsing, sometimes-disorienting, post-motorik-post-psychedelic music together with a not-secret show at Secret Project Robot in Bushwick last Saturday, December 1st. True to non-form, their set started with three relatively short favorites, including a raucous turn through the garage-burner "Doin' Business in Japan." Then they went to town on a morphing jam that took up the large middle chunk of their nearly hour-and-a-half set. What still photographs can't show is that the lights and graphics were perpetually swirling around the room. It might have been a bad time to be on anything harder than a few PBR's.

The young woman behind me, genuinely enthused, asks her friend, "What are these guys called?" This is always a good sign at shows. Seriously. It means the room isn't entirely the realm of obsessives who can cite every d-side.

There's no question that all of them are working hard, but it's a wonder that Kid Millions' arms don't give out multiple times. There must be a disused pre-war claw foot bathtub somewhere in the back of this art space filled with ice water waiting for him afterwards. "We've got one more...one more nugget," Bobby Matador tells the crowd. The little nugget unfolds and folds itself back up over roughly twenty minutes. If only Oneida could play everyone's birthday, not just their own.  

Mt. Erie Is a Place, and So Is Mount Eerie: Live at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 11/28/12

Phil Elverum’s dedication to his work is apparent in a number of ways. For evidence, look no further than the instrument in his hands tonight; tuning a twelve-string guitar takes more time and patience than tuning a standard six-string. Witness also his schedule. This is Mount Eerie’s second visit to New York City and (Le) Poisson Rouge in as many months. In September they were making the national rounds, but this stop is different. “We’re not on tour,” Eleverum notes to the audience while telling them about the next night’s show at NYU, sounding surprised to say it. Three thousand miles is a long way to travel for a two-night residency in the West Village.  

Same as with the September shows (they also played 285 Kent Ave on that tour), tonight’s set focuses on pulling together Mount Eerie’s two complimentary soon-to-be year-end list toppers in a way that coherently translates into a live experience. Sequencing-wise, this means stitching some linear stretches (starting with the first few songs from Clear Moon) of the two records together, and some other shuffling of the deck. Execution-wise, aside from the impossibility of recreating the massive sound of Elverum’s recording space, the five musicians making up this live iteration do it sincere justice, and conjure the clarity and confusion of both records. If ‘a sense of place’ is one of Mount Eerie’s abiding focuses (and it is), the cavernous de-sanctified church that Elverum renamed The Unknown and set up his analog recording equipment inside of is a physical realization of that focus.

photo courtesy of Bryan Williams

In addition to the two albums, there also exists a 7” of Clear Moon and Ocean Roar condensed. Each side has all the songs from its respective LP playing on top of each other. The concept sounds like a prank or gimmick, but it genuinely works in a peculiar way. Each ‘song’ captures something akin to the aura of its respective album. The hum of “Clear Moon” is warmer; “Ocean Roar” is more violent. They both function similar to how, say, all the individual cheering voices in a crowded stadium form that singular voice-of-humanity tone when heard all at once.

Mount Eerie’s last three releases are something like culminations of long-building themes in Elverum’s music catalog, which now numbers in the hundreds of songs; a body of work that is its own forest to wander and get lost in (and that’s not mentioning his writing, photography, and other pursuits). There are thicker threads stitching his quilt together than the commonly identified “nature,” or the somewhat more apt (if also more vague) aforementioned “sense of place,” but those are proper places to start. They would also make easy jumping off points for generating bad made-up genre names, like “tree-gaze” or “old-growth school,” if that’s your thing.

Stopping short of generating a proper word cloud, to get an idea of where the journey has been wandering to date, it’s a worthwhile exercise to just add up the numbers, not interpret them. Three elemental forces for change in the known living world have now come in to focus over the last three sequential Mount Eerie records: wind, moon, ocean.  These three things have been name-dropped in numerous Elverum songs since he started recording them under his previous nom de plume, The Microphones. Here’s an incomplete accounting…

- Wind’s Poem has “Wind’s Dark Poem” and “Wind Speaks”, but there has also been “I Want Wind to Blow”, "I Lost My Wind", “The Breeze.”

- Clear Moon has “Clear Moon”, but this one has come up a bunch: “The Moon”, "Moon Moon", "Moon, Moon, Moon", “Moon Sequel”, “Moon, I Already Know”, “(2 Moons)”, “In Moonlight.”

- Ocean Roar has “Ocean Roar” and “Waves”, but, again…“Ocean”, “Ocean 1, 2, 3”, “The Same Ocean”, “This is the Same Ocean”, “Over Dark Water”, “Log in the Waves.”

Of course, there has also been the ‘glow’ theme, with The Microphones’ legend-status-securing The Glow Pt. 2, and the various songs about glowing and gleaming and such. What will the next Mount Eerie album focus on? "Air" or "Cold" might be good guesses (see “I’ll Be in the Air”, “You Were in the Air”, “You’ll Be in the Air”, “The Air in the Morning", and “I’m Getting Cold”, “I Want to Be Cold”, “Cold Mountain”,  “Cold Mountain’s Song #286”).

If you’re wondering where the sun fits in to all of this, it is his business partner: the label he runs is called P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.

photo courtesy of Bryan Williams

At the heart of the fixation with change, of course, sits a mountain. No more seemingly static a physical body exists on Earth. But, of course, mountains are constantly shifting, rising, and collapsing. Elverum, in his music, continuously reflects on temporality and impermanence, but he’s also a fourth or fifth generation resident of a town with a metropolitan population of roughly 15,000 – one that, despite its own innate charm, is utilized by non-residents predominantly as a gateway to the farther-out tourist destination San Juan Islands. Like every other pioneer settlement that sprang up on the eastern shores of Puget Sound in the gold rush era, Anacortes once sought to be the terminus for the transcontinental railroad. Its cumulative raison d’etre lies somewhere between being a destination and a stop along the way. The oddly phonetic name comes from a place of personal romance; for Annie Curtis, wife of the geologist who founded the nascent outpost’s post office.

The band reaches back into the Microphones’ catalog for one song tonight. “The Moon” is a fan favorite and back catalog stand out, but its selection might owe more to being a prominent ‘moon’ song, fitting with the new records (it’s a shame there won’t be a ‘Tides’ box set of the two together). Notably, it doesn’t sound like it does on The Glow Pt. 2, it sounds like Mount Eerie covering it. Seems obvious to say, but technically it’s not a cover. The edges of “The Moon” are blurrier, as if reconstructing the barreling momentum of the original from the memory of a dream. After one more, the band leave the stage for all of two minutes and come back for a one-song encore, obliging the woman who beseeches them to “make us move” with what amounts to a straight up funk song for the band, coaxing the reverent heads across the floor to nod a little harder.