Murder Ink

KillYrIdols Albums of the year (part two)

by Jon E. Lynch

By November and December each calendar year, hordes of bloated, self-aggrandizing critics and columnists are compiling, tallying and whitling down their “Best Of” lists for public consumption. Right around this time last month – in an attempt to bolster our local economy, encourage supporting artists of any sort and help prop up the early holiday shopping types – I began to compile a nowhere-close-to-comprehensive list of my favorite albums released in 2022.

What’s to follow is a continuation/ sexpansion of that list. A 100% subjective take on the things I listened to and enjoyed, rather than what garnered the highest starred or numbered review, widest acclaim or the strongest aggregate Metacritic score. I’ll even make a half attempt to make it easier to digest. Here goes.

Americana-ish

• Hermanos Gutiérrez, “El Bueno Y El Malo” – Two brothers, half Ecuadorian half Swiss, with acoustic and steel guitar, melding the Latin American influences of their grandfather and the textures of Ennio Morricone’s classic Spaghetti Western scores. All instrumental and produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. • The Sadies, “Colder Streams” – 11th full-length from Toronto’s purveyors of surf/country/noir-twang and the last before devastating and untimely passing of co-founder Dallas Good. This band has never made a bad record. • Molly Lewis, “Mirage EP” - Six dense songs of layered instrumental folk-leaning soundscapes with Molly’s trademark whistling creating a throughline. • Friendship, “Love the Stranger” –Pedal steel, sparse guitars, bass, drums, vocal harmonies in a hazy sometimes twangy-leaning indie rock album on the stellar Merge record label. Ended up on repeat. • Various Artists, “Something Borrowed, Something New: A Tribute to John Anderson” – Star-studded tribute to a country music legend. Songs interpreted and recorded by Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Del McCoury, John Prine, Sierra Ferrell, Sturgill Simpson and more.

Rock and Roll, etc.

• Ghost Woman, “Ghost Woman” –No clue how I came across this record but so thankful I did. Multi-instrumentalist Evan Uschenko recorded this album in Arizona and melds psychedelic garage-folk with a variety of other styles into a haunting, cohesive indie/rock record. • Lathe, “Tongue of Silver” – Tyler Davis created a record of heavy instrumental sludge that he’s described as both Doom Country and Heavy Twang. • The Black Angels, “Wilderness of Mirrors” – The Austin, Texas-based psych-rock band released a 15-track, 58minute double LP of some of their best work to date, culled from the sonics of forbearers Black Sabbath, 13th Floor Elevators and the Velvet Underground. • OFF! “Free LSD” – While I may cringe at the moniker, punk rock supergroup is appropriate. Members of Black Flag/Circle Jerks, Burning Brides, …Trail of Dead and Thundercat released this “heavy punk industrial free jazz soundtrack recording.” • Gilla Band, “Most Normal” – Irish quartet’s first record under the new name (formerly Girl Band) of perfectly spasmodic and sometimes caustic postpunk, noise & art-rock. • Launder, “Happening” – John Cudlip is California born and raised. His debut under the name Launder came out of sessions with friends Zachary Cole Smith (DIIV) and Jackson Phillips (Day Wave) and worships at the altar of bands such as My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain and Slowdive.

The Hip Hop I Didn’t Mention

• Roc Marciano and The Alchemist, “The Elephant Man’s Bones” – Collision of coasts with New York’s Marciano and L.A.’s Alchemist creating an album too great in scope to distill here, but easily placed on this list. • Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, “King Cobra” – Direct from their U.K.based label Phantom Limb: “Baltimore hip-hop experimentalists Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals return with vital new album King Cobra, a mighty, omnivorous record that pushes the duo to unstoppable creative heights.” • Westside Gunn, “10 aka Hitler Wears Hermes X” – I’m genuinely surprised that this, Gunn’s 14th mixtape and apparently ninth installment of the Hitler Wears Hermes series, grew on me the way it did.

Don’t forget the aforementioned Bonnie Trash, This Lonesome Paradise and Danger Mouse & Black Thought records. More than mentions deserved go to Goon, Tami Neilson, Chat Pile, Oneida, End It, Soul Glo, Satan’s Pilgrims, Built to Spill, Khruangbin and Vieux Farka Touré, Alex G, The Medicine Singers, Nikki Lane, Smirk, L’Exotighost, and Abraxas.

The best in locally made music that SHOULD have been covered above came from Nathan Schmidt, the Crags and Dreem Machine. Support them and all of the above through Bandcamp or at your local record store. I’m still curious what you listened to this year, whether new or old, that I should be made aware of. Send my recommendations along with questions, comments or gripes. Especially the gripes. KDUR_PD@fort lewis.edu ■

Punk rock supergroup OFF! made this year’s list with their album “Free LSD” (From left): Justin Brown, Autry Fulbright II, Dimitri Coats and Keith Morris.

/ Photo credit Jeff Forney

MurderInk Disappearing act

‘Sugar Street’ a poignant tale of trying to outwit surveillance state

by Jeffrey Mannix

Let’s start out the new year with a peculiar little book that’s fascinating in its atypical way and maybe even unusual enough to fit in with our conspicuously peculiar sociopolitical climate.

Jonathan Dee was contending for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his novel “The Privileges” and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He’s a former contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a senior editor of the Paris Review, and a National Magazine Award-nominated literary critic for Harper’s and the New Yorker. He certainly has the bona fides to be taken seriously, and with his latest hardback novel from Grove Atlantic spanning a courteous 206 pages, we have to give Dee respect for writing an unconventional story well. And in my opinion, he’s written an interesting and even poignant narrative reflecting the extraordinary times we find ourselves living in.

“Sugar Street” is the name of Dee’s seventh published book, about an unnamed, mostly ordinary man who decides to embezzle $168,048 from his partner in a failing travel agency then disappear forever.

Written in the first person, “Sugar Street” is an avenue where our protagonist rents a room after meticulously avoiding a minefield of surveillance for five days to arrive at nowhere he’s ever been or heard of and after a quick but thorough reconnoitering. “Your first instinct might be that the best place to disappear would be the country, the woods. But no, it had to be a city I figured: navigable by foot or mass transit, big enough to be anonymous in. Nothing too cosmopolitan, though, not someplace anyone of my acquaintance would go for a vacation or for some conference or convention. I’ve never so much as passed through; I know no one here; I know no one who’s ever even been here. Nothing to connect me to it: not the tiniest filament of logic or intuition to lead anyone who knew me to suspect that this is where I might have gone to ground.”

Disappearing is more than difficult anymore, nearing impossible when you get right down to trying. “Sugar Street” is more of a memoir of a fictional character attempting to outsmart the systems that are smarter than anyone trying to be perfectly smart.

The book opens with:

“The American Interstate highway system. Wonder of the twentieth-century world. Smooth, wide, fast, inexhaustible; blank, amnesiac, full of libertarian possibility; burned into the continent like the nuclear shadow of the frontier spirit, even if you happen to be traveling east instead of west, not much difference anymore. Route 66, Jack Kerouac, all that shit. But at some point, I snapped out of it and remembered the truly salient, non-mythological fact about the interstate of today, which is that law-enforcement cameras are everywhere. You can’t travel 10 miles in any direction without your movements being logged, your license plate photographed, your face. Certainly once you’re on the highway, there is no way to get off it again without all those things happening, without your whereabouts becoming data, instantly. Right. No more highways, then. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and got off at the next exit, drove around until I found a nonchain gas station, bought a Three Musketeers and an old, folding paper map of the state. They still make them. I remembered my E-ZPass, another data bomb, and threw that into a construction dumpster.” Our man sleeps in his car along the route to somewhere that turns out to be Sugar Street, occasionally querying a worn out clerk late at night in a run-down motel lacking surveillance cameras if he’d take cash for a room, finding stand-alone greasy spoons behind burned-out street lights to eat, keeping to the bypassed routes east, obeying every law, looking a facsimile of normal. When he finally reaches Sugar Street and a “For Rent” sign in a broken, first-floor window, he inquires to a once-comely now booze-ravaged landlady about the rental. With a separate entrance up to the second floor and windows facing the street, a deal is struck, cash is paid in advance for six months so a background check is irrelevant, and a single, pleasant and obviously unattached man is about to blend into anonymity that he knows is against the laws of nature.

Oh, did I say that his money is stolen; did I say that a murder is in the wind? There’s plenty more story here than I have even hinted at. We get to like this man because of his proactive disaffection for the surveillance state, for the goodness he displays on Sugar Street, and as much as we would like tranquility, poetic justice is ofttimes prepossessing.

A peculiar, allegorical book written by a talented, wary penman who’s warming up for another chart topper. “Sugar Street” is just right for January 2023. And Maria’s Bookshop will give you a 15% discount on Murder Ink books, just ask. ■ telegraph