A Film Canon

Taking it's name from the outdoor Maryland entertainment venue, Merriweather Post Pavilion is Animal Collective's most spatial effort to date, outlining a sublime, reticulated and, above all, unpredictable sonic topography, veering from glaciers, to shimmering lakes, to rustling leaves, in the space of a single breath. Despite it's heterogeneities, the album plays like a single, extended piece, as Panda Bear's taste for bringing sweetness as close as possible to saccharine without succumbing to it reaches almost unbearable heights, completing the band's movement from freak folk to dream pop, and evoking a world in which the digitisation of sensation has imbued beauty with the responsibility of reclaiming aithesis from aesthetics, and acting directly upon the physiology of the listener, teasing and caressing it into endlessly glistening, shivering palpitations. That said, the album is so enmeshed in digital production that this escape can only be registered as a nostalgia for the period when digitisation seemed like a utopian horizon, rather than a constriction ("If I could just leave my body for a night"), while its sense of communal possibility is deflected into a particularly tribal, industrial extension of Animal Collective's characteristic transplantation of family and tradition onto a more emergent collectivity. The result is an exhilarating, schizoid vision of technology as both determining and liberating, and a vision of 10s music as both inextricably album-bound and spontaneously generating; a kind of aesthetic anamorphism, encapsulated in the optical art rippling across the cover.

The greatest single statement that popular music has not made about homosexuality, the Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece elaborates their mnemosexual apotheosis - the moment after you come out, and realise that you still haven't come out; or, alternatively, the moment at which society's investment in maintaining homosexuality as an open secret, rather than merely oppressing it, becomes most tangible. As Neil Tennant's 'coming out' album, then, it alternates between euphemistic celebrations of heterodoxy and liberation ("Liberation", "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing"), and suggestions of an unspeakability, a necessity for strategic latency, that has only been concentrated by this apparent liberation ("To Speak Is A Sin", "Dreaming Of The Queen"), and is ultimately equated with the past, whether in a personal ("Can You Forgive Her?"), historical, ("The Theatre"), or communal (again, "Dreaming Of The Queen", possibly the album's finest moment) register. Combined with Trevor Horn's magnificent production, this evokes the archetypal mnemosexual space as a dancefloor on which differences can be (collectively) remembered, but never (individually) articulated - the mere supplement to a society prepared to remember, but not tolerate, homosexuality, thereby keeping it in a state of perpetual infantilisation. This temporal slippage is epitomised by "Young Offender", the other contender for best track, in which Neil addresses a lover both older and younger than himself ("...I've been a teenager since before you were born"), or perhaps his past self, as if to suggest the structural, societal basis of homosexuality's supposed narcissism. However, the album climaxes in the aftermath of "Go West", the final track. Here, the deliberate, melancholy undercutting of the Village People's fairly underwhelming utopia is followed by several minutes of silence, and, finally, a short, eulogy for lost love ("...the times we've had, just you and me") sung, uncharacteristically, by Chris Lowe, as if the most honest mode of coming out were a purely private utterance, or an utter disfigurement and defamiliarisation of it's mouthpiece.

The masterpiece of Dream Pop, Heaven Or Las Vegas perfects the Cocteau Twins' evocation of the moment at which language evaporates, moving beyond the incomprehensibility of Treasure to present a texture that coalesces around words as if by accident; or, rather, characterises them as little more than the accidental by-products of a sonic fractal, whose infinite reiterations are merely opened, rather than contained, by the band. The result is a vision of the world immediately before it is bracketed by language; a sensory bombardment that imbues everything with the everlasting, pyrotechnic sunset of Las Vegas, gesturing towards the sublimity - and ambiguity - of consciousness. Even more beautifully, it is a vision of language just before it is bracketed by language, of words as a sensory, rather than semiotic, phenomenon - the lurid maraschino cherry that vocalist Elizabeth Fraser rolls around her mouth, with insatiable delight. From this perspective, the band's decision to name themselves after the French surrealist may have less to do with his shared taste for dream states than with the irreducible, inexplicable beauty of his name, while their ultimate gesture is to explicate music as the attempt to give colour to the blind.

If The Cure's Gothic trilogy (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography) enveloped lead singer Robert Smith in murk, then Disintegration sees him breaking the surface, exhilarated by the touch of night air, but oriented for the first time as to the sheer expanse of waste glittering around him. This produces an unusual mixture of euphoria and doom, encapsulated in the opening track ("Plainsong"), whose refrain ("It's so cold, it's so cold") takes on an almost triumphal quality, and sets the stage for one of the most lavish, atmospheric productions of the 1980s. For the most part, Smith favours long, epic arrangements (up to ten minutes on "The Same Deep Water As You"), relegating lyrics and melody to the pulses of energy required for him and his players to continue treading water.

This is a curious album, frequently moving from the sublime to the ridiculous in the space of a single song. At its strongest, it successfully fuses two disparate, even inimical, sensibilities - Liza's overwhelmingly personal register, which transforms any utterance, however ostensibly impersonal, into a confession of divaesque proportions; and the Pet Shop Boys' (who produced the album, and wrote seven of its ten tracks) taste for playful obliquity, which ensures that, even at his most confessional, lead singer Neil Tennant either appears to be singing about someone else, or about a version of himself from which he now enjoys a melancholy detachment. As might be expected, this combination works best on the five songs written specifically for Liza - especially the epic "If There Was Love", in which the intermittent lyrical concessions to this divaesque grandeur ("I've been working for a long time/Scattering smiles/Must I swallow my pride?") are curbed by the wryer, impersonal verses ("Banks have predictions, Policies made/Prophecies broken, violence deranged"), culminating with an unexpected spoken word segment, in which Liza reaches Shakespearean heights, but only to be gradually drowned out by the sublime synth arrangement. Unfortunately, her two covers of Pet Shop Boys songs ("Rent" and "Tonight Is Forever") are more in the way of a transformation than of a compromise between their respective registers, although orchestrator Angelo Badalamenti's flourish at the beginning of the latter provides a momentary promise to draw out the original's melancholy potential.

Despite featuring some of Bush's strongest moments, Hounds Of Love ultimately feels like an apology for the outstanding idiosyncrasies of The Dreaming, and an attempt to renew her standing with a public alienated from its 'weirdness'. To that end, the A-side, Hounds Of Love, features a collection of fairly accessible pop songs, including "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds Of Love" and "Cloudbusting", all of which are lyrically, instrumentally and compositionally impressive, but refrain from the vocal pyrotechnics of the earlier album, with the exception of such isolated moments as the chorus of "The Big Sky" - "You never understood me/ You never really tried" - whose reproach seems as directed at an intolerant audience as a lover. The B-side, The Ninth Wave, is a collection of songs about women drowning, or lost at sea and, at first glance, would seem to represent both an experimental and vocal counterbalance to the A-side, especially since Bush's voice might best be described as a malicious fludity, threatening to overwhelm both her and the listener with its amorphous, affronting metamorphoses. However, the result is too close to an electronic soundscape to take advantage of the extent to which Bush's voice is itself such a soundscape, making her own vocals seem curiously redundant - as if the allegory were in fact of her own commodification, or transformation, into a palatable presence. That said, the horrific distortions of "Waking The Witch" shock the listener out of complacency, while the shorter tracks ("And Dream Of Sheep", "Under Ice" and "The Morning Fog") restore Bush with some qualified agency, as do isolated segments of "Hello Earth" and "Jig Of Life".

Brothers In Arms culminates Dire Straits' uneasy relation to MTV, and the circumscription of arena impulses that it represents. On the one hand, the eight-minute long "Money For Nothing" viciously parodies the television station, and sees Mark Knopfler employ the dirtiest, bluesiest guitar work on the whole album, presumably in contradistinction to the song's lavish, synthesized opening ("I want my MTV..."). Yet this distinction belies the beauty of that opening, as well as its inordinate length, suggesting that the band are as seduced by (and even indebted to) MTV as much as repelled by it. This may inform their recourse to an unusually cheesy, poppy register in "Walk Of Life", but finds its most perfect expression in "Your Latest Trick" - a ballad for saxophone, guitar and keyboard that was made for that quintessentially MTV elaboration of the smoky, dimly-lit, melancholy lounge to which the entire adolescent world just happens to be invited. That said, these two tracks are notable for doing generic things well, and the album's most idiosyncratic moments come with four of the seven remaining cuts: "So Far Away", "Why Worry", "Ride Across The River" and "Brothers In Arms". Using simple, if powerful, melodic hooks as the mere springboard for ambling, lyrical, understated guitar solos, these arguably come closer to a genuine ambient rock than anything to be found in Brian Eno. Moreover, the last two tracks manage to re-extract an arena sensibility from MTV, as Knopfler both literalises and translates its preoccupation with atmosphere into a principle of his distinctive finger-picking, transforming his guitar into a kind of Aeolian harp, the mere receptacle for the brooding, ponderous weather patterns that hang over the landscapes those songs describe.

This extraordinary album is a sustained, melancholy contemplation of the 1950s from the vantage point of the 1980s, inflecting the youthful optimism of the Baby Boomer generation through the last years of the Cold War, and producing a haunting mediation on suburban melodrama's cosmic aspirations. Not only does this provide a myth of origins for Fagen's distinctively jazzy harmonies (the liner notes inform us that the songs "represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties"), but it radically defamilarises his source material (clearest in the loose cover of Dion's "Ruby Baby"), pairing it with an exquisite, synth-heavy production that ultimately characterises the 1980s - and, more specifically, it's proliferation of digital recording technologies, only just glimpsed at this point - as a resurgence or recovery of everything fleeting, uncanny and melancholy about the experience of recorded music itself; the immediate sense of some absence, or disembodiment. That said, Fagen's synthesisers are only part of the musical palette, and are never obstrusive enough to disrupt this balance between past and present, and its presence in his voice, which has always seemed to hover at a twenty year distance.

Saved is Dylan's most unapologetically evangelical album. Unlike Shot Of Love, its songs are all explicitly evangelical in focus. Unlike Slow Train Coming, it is no longer anxious to understand evangelism as engendering a stylistic continuity with, and even development of, Dylan's earlier musical career. Rather, it translates the Christian (and especially evangelical) equation of conversion with deindividuation into musical terms. As a result, it sounds less like Dylan than any other album in his career; or, alternatively clarifies that such perverse exercises as Self Portrait, or Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded and Down In The Groove's experiments with synthpop, disco and spoken word, merely provide a kind of negative affirmation of Dylan's musical voice, rather than a significant departure from it. Unfortunately, what replaces Dylan's voice in Saved is a fairly generic, self-important blend of gospel and rock, which doesn't even do generic things very well (although "In The Garden" remains a minor classic, albeit one which only stands up to occasional listens). Nevertheless, its a haunting, even Gothic experience to listen to Dylan's shell, as well as the elusive, barely audible residue of its temporarily evacuated inhabitant.

Slow Train Coming is the finest of Dylan's three evangelical albums, largely because it understands evangelism as a stylistic as much as a theological position. Throughout his career, Dylan has adopted a prophetic, apocalyptic tone, both before his conversion and after his renunciation, and hearing him finally fit that tone to traditional biblical content has something of the thrill that might be imagined to accompany hearing one of the Old Testament prophets actually speak, rather than simply reading their words or hearing them spoken by surrogates. In that sense, it feels like Dylan has been waiting his whole career to sing some of these songs - especially 'Precious Angel', whose extraordinary combination of Knopfleresque soft rock and violent, apocalyptic lyrics ("Can they imagine the darkness/That will come from on high/When men will beg God to kill them/But they won't be able to die?") culminates with perhaps Dylan's finest, most panoramic application of his peculiar nexus between speech and song to the simultaneously direct and melodic register of the prophet: "There's fire in your eyes, girl/So let us not be enticed/On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia/To the judgement hall of Christ." This direct, "I'm talking to you, Mr." pervades the entire album, producing a peculiarly confessional evangelism that is both titillating and alienating to the conventional Dylan fan, and perhaps finds its most surreal expression in the magnificent opener, "Gotta Serve Somebody", where he really 'introduces' himself for the first time: "You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy/You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy". That said, there's enough of the bluesy sound of Dylan's earlier recordings to retain that traditional fanbase, particularly on the title track, which provides a compelling reinvention of Dylan's characteristic railroad backdrop.

The first of Eno's albums to entirely disassociate ambience from art rock, Music For Airports is also the first to feature his characteristic map-like cover art - and this combination, along with the title, gestures towards the relationship between ambient music and those amorphous, disorienting, consumer spaces that were to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s, among which the shopping mall, multiplex and spaghetti junction might also be counted. In this light, Eno's definition of ambient music - as a form which both permits of close scrutiny, and is capable of being entirely ignored (as opposed to musak, which only fulfills the second criterion) - might be reformulated in terms of an aid to spatial cognition, whether by virtue of its ability to relax and thereby orient the mind, or its lingering echoes (particularly evident in the vocal backings on "2/1" and "1/2"), which seem determined to reclaim both space and sound as physical phenomena, rather than mere extensions of an increasingly amorphous, intangible circulation of capital. This, in turn, may explain Eno's tendency to construe his music as a scientific, rather than artistic phenomenon, replacing conventional musical terminology with discussion of loop tapes, synthesisers and the bizarre spectrograph-like notations that appear on the back of the album, as well as the increasingly site-specific qualities of his work, which, from this point, starts to move towards some new fusion of music and installation art, anticipating later "sound sculpture".

Self Portrait is one of Dylan's weaker albums, but its weakness at least serves a conceptual end, thereby exhibiting a self-consciousness, and even ingenuity, that makes it incomparable to his mid-80s nadir. This end is twofold - on the one hand, to eschew the revelatory voice that had been increasingly associated with him throughout the 1960s; on the other (and more radically), to reject any consistent or identifiable authorial voice, presumably for the sake of creating the vacuum necessary for the renewed experimentation and development that would culminate with Blood On The Tracks and Desire. Given the album's title, this makes for the most pervasively ironic of Dylan's efforts, and so, once again, redeems itself from the realm of his poorest moments, if only by taking one of his signature affects to its logical conclusion. This self-disassociation, or erasure, ensures that the album's material falls into four major categories. Its largest portion is devoted to covers of contemporary or near-contemporary songs, frequently chosen in a playful, perverse spirit. Most obviously, Dylan covers artists (Elvis, Simon & Garfunkel) whose sensibilities and style are apparently inimical to his own, as if to explicate their shared indebtedness to a relatively recent musical heritage. More subtly, he covers songs whose imagery makes for a surreal contrast with his own recurrent motifs and preoccupations, most delightfully Gordon Lightfoot's 'Early Mornin' Rain', the contrast between its airport backdrop and Dylan's railroad-drifting South acknowledged in the lyrics themselves ("You can't jump a jet plane/Like you can a freight train..."), and perhaps an indirect comment on the incongruity between Dylan's own concerns and the jet-setting lifestyle that they have generated. That said, there are several covers that are more in the respectful, traditional spirit of Bob Dylan - particularly Alfred Frank Beddoe's "Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight)", the highlight of the album - and these segue into the second, and most recognisably Dylanesque, mode, covers of traditional songs (most memorably "Alberta"). Thirdly, Dylan presents a series of live numbers, including an original number ("Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"), but mainly dating from the 1969 Isle Of Wight Festival, whose bemused, disoriented, disappointed crowd is presumably the prototype for this album's intended audience. Finally, Dylan presents a segment of original numbers - although, with the exception of the relatively brief "Living The Blues", these are all instrumentals, or, at least, either reduce Dylan's voice to a chanting instrument ("Wigwam"), or replace it altogether, most extraordinarily with the female crooners on the lavish first track, "All The Tired Horses", surely one of the most startling, unexpected openings in the history of the rock album (and perhaps only rivalled by David Bowie's Low)