2007 was a year of a lot of surprisingly bad albums, but while there was a lot of disappointment, there were also a lot of pleasant surprises, not to mention the albums that actually lived up to their expectations. And though I wish I could list all of the pretty good albums this year, for the sake of keeping this under a few pages I won’t.

Coming in at number 10 is Faun’s Totem (fourth from right on top). Though it’s a bit more low-key than their previous work - no parallels to Renaissance’s bouncy “Rhiannon” - it slowly but surely grew on me over the year as serenely beautiful harp-driven neoceltic folk music. The vocals and instrumentation, while not significantly different from previous work, were nonetheless still superb. The electronic and rock elements we heard in the postlude to Renaissance’s “Rosmarin” aren’t developed much further (I’d argue it’s a good thing; Schelmish’s forays from Corvus-esque Medieval to In Extremo-esque medieval metal haven’t worked out so well for them), but the same sort of subdued grind moves it’s way surprisingly tastefully into the chorus of “Zeit Nach Dem Sturm”. I don’t want Faun to turn into a metal band, but honestly, I wouldn’t mind hearing more songs like that one in the future.

Number 9 is Steven Delopoulos’s Straightjacket (third from right on the top). After being delayed more than half a year, Steven’s sequel to the terrific Me Died Blue doesn’t disappoint: his folk guitar picking on his solo project is just as impressive as his flamenco-tinged Burlap to Cashmere of old. The picked guitar is still the centerpiece of the album, but he’s added a gospel choir to a lot of the songs. It’s kind of rough at points - its entrance is rather abrupt in “As If Love Was A Sword”, and it doesn’t really jive with “Ruin of the Beast”, but it’s nonetheless an interesting addition. There’s also more experimentation on this album than on the last. “Halt” doesn’t follow any conventions of normal songwriting, but it’s an interesting crescendo to punctuate the album. “Open Your Eyes” was another pleasant surprise on the album - a piano driven song completely absent of Steven’s signature guitar, but one of the most compelling on the album nonetheless.

The third album on our list at number 8 is David Crowder Band’s Remedy (second from right on the top). Though sadly absent of the banjo that appeared on A Collision (and even more on B Collision), the electronica is featured even more prominently. That’s what makes the album so catchy: from hard beat-driven songs like “Can You Feel It?” to the the more subdued beeps of “The Glory Of It All”, their fusion of infectious pop rock with electronica and scratches, even without the bluegrass influence, is unique and well-executed enough to keep one coming back to it for a long time.

Our number 7 is Caspian’s The Four Trees (far right on the top). Whereas a lot of post-rock in the vein of Explosions in the Sky is pretty formulaic and unvaried, Caspian creates beautiful and ethereal melodies without confining itself to a particular sound. Instead of an album of six ten minute songs, Caspian punctuates its long (though not obscenely so) songs with short and powerful interludes. Instead of a constant happy dopamine rush, Caspian ventures into eerie and sometimes even angry sections, even using (gasp) heavy distortion on their electric guitars. Hardly ever boring and fairly unique in execution, The Four Trees is an album almost deserving of the pretentiousness surrounding the genre. Almost.

6 is Within Temptation’s The Heart Of Everything (third from right, bottom). I wrote a full review of it when it came out, but I will add that I’ve found myself listening to it even more than The Silent Force. The EPs since then have added a number of great songs to their repertoire of the Heart Of Everything era, my favorite being “The Last Time” from the All I Need EP. The Heart Of Everything is symphonic metal at its most epic yet tasteful (as opposed to Nightwish, epic but ridiculous).

Bringing in the top 5 albums is Tenhi’s Folk Aesthetic (far left). Each member of Tenhi is also a visual artist, which could explain the brilliant cover art, easily the best of the year: simple conceptually and visually, but communicating volumes. Dark, minimalistic, yet ultimately beautiful, it describes perfectly their music. Folk Aesthetic is a three disc set, with early and unreleased work. It contains both the guitar-volin-flute trifecta that defined the majority of their prior work, but there’s also a lot of the piano-and-drums of Airut : Aamujen - sometimes in the same song. The vocals are deep, subdued, and a perfect complement to the melancholic and subdued atmosphere of the album. Tenhi can take a while to grow on you, but there are plenty of songs like “Kausienranta” that are instantly appreciable.

4 on the list is Omnia’s Alive! (second from left). Taking the opposite approach from Tenhi, the album cover is ornately and densely decorated in a pencilled book style, with beautiful artwork in the same style throughout its album leaf. With lyrical inspiration from the likes of Poe and Shakespeare, this album moves Omnia from the Pagan era to later Western history (though I’ve wondered about the inclusion of Palästinelied on the Pagan Folk album). Unlike their previous work, Alive! is largely in English except for the bit of what sounds like Gaelic in the title track (correct me if I’m wrong), and features by far the most hurdy-gurdy that Omnia has ever used. But the tin whistle/harp combination isn’t gone - Satyrsex is upbeat, catchy, and pretty amusing for an instrumental song, and several others appear on the album. The three-part harmony that defined Omnia in the past is unfortunately only heard on the title track, but their interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven more than makes up for any shortcomings. Clocking in at 9:07, it’s probably the least boring song of that length that I’ve ever heard. It’s wonderfully emotive, and builds brilliantly through the many verses, bringing to mind some of the poetic interpretations of Loreena McKennitt.

In 3rd place is Alcest’s Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde (fourth from right, bottom). I gave it a listen on a whim after randomly coming across it on a music review website tagged as “Post-Black Metal”. Usually I’m pretty disappointed with music I come across on Google, but this was everything the label brought to mind and more. Neige, the multi-instrumentalist behind it and several other bands, turned it from a raw black metal band and everything that entails into a fusion of the black metal style with the shoegazer/post-rock aesthetic, with ethereal euphoric melodies sprinkled with a high, smooth, and indistinct voice built using heavy electric guitars and double bass pedal drums. He says in interviews he’s never listened to shoegazer type music - that may or may not be true, but it’s a brilliantly innovative album nonetheless.

Our 2nd best album of the year is Subway To Sally’s Bastard. The characteristically Subway deep chugging of the electric guitar never appears and the melodies are occasionally a little awkward, but the vocal harmonies hide it well and give the songs a rich feel, and there’s more folk instrumentation than has appeared on their last few albums. The opening song “Meine Seele Brennt” is a perfect opening song: every bit epic and grandiose, without any hint of the ridiculous that usually accompanies bands that like to describe themselves that way. Not that Subway has ever ventured into the ridiculous. From fun folk songs like “Tanz Auf Dem Vulkan” to the eerie polyphony of “Canticum Satanae”, Bastard is the culmination of just about everything that makes Subway To Sally great.

And the number 1 album of the year, as you might have guessed if you’ve been keeping track of the album covers above, is ASP’s Requiembryo. I was skeptical of 2-disc studio albums after Tanzwut’s unrefined Schattenreiter last year, but boy did this one deliver. Combining three of my favorite musical styles - Church liturgy and gregorianesque harmony, folk and world instruments, and metal - I’d name this easily the best album of the decade so far (I’d go back further, but the more I do the more tempers I’ll inflame). The album - especially the second disc’s requiem - is thematically ingenious and musically superb, touching on neoclassical (”Erinnerung Eines Fremden”), medieval (part 2 of “Offährte”), electronic body (”Kyrie (Eleison 2: Mercy)”), punk (”Finger Weg! Finger”), neocelt (”Hymnus: Heaven”), gregorian (”Introitus Interruptus”), folk metal (”Duett (Das Minnelied Der Incubi)”), drum and bass (”De Profundis”), and black metal (”Exsequien: Hell”). I don’t know where this album came from - his past albums have ranged from mediocre to terrible - but wherever it did, I’m hoping there’s going to be more along these lines.

 

Skyrocketing macroeconomy. Massive production glut. Artificially low wages. Déjà Vu?

American businesses in the 1920s caught a wave of technological advance. Ford’s assembly line technology was catching on everywhere, and workers were becoming more and more unnecessary as automated machines replaced humans in all sorts of sectors. With this key new technology arriving from the automotive sector, the auto industry is in fact strikingly parallel to the American economy on the whole.

Ford Motor Company, the pioneer of the assembly line, had a strikingly progressive mindset: In 1914, Henry Ford cut the labor hours of his workers, as many other companies were doing in light of new automated capital expenditures, but in doing so, did not cut their pay. In fact, Ford for a long time was a leader in the automotive industry in wages. After all, without money, how would his employees buy his cars?

If only the rest of the industry had such a long-term outlook. GM under the leadership of Charles Kettering took the view that “The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction“. This, along with the short-term profits mindset, led GM and most heavy industries to replace workers with machinery, pay as little as possible to stay competitive in the job market, and watch profits soar.

Now look at China. Vast, austere and impersonal, the average Chinese corporation has the cost-cutting, profit-maximizing mindset of the 1920s American corporation taken to a ridiculous extreme. With little regard for even the lives of the consumers, Chinese corporations unscrupulously substitute cheaper parts and ingredients to shave costs. Wages are suppressed far below any standard ever held by Americans, and they, like America of the 1920s, produce far more than their population can absorb.

So what’s the difference? Why did America crash, and will China do the same?

As Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner Eccles put it, “mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption”. Because wages were kept low, companies like GM tried to force out mass consumption in a massive advertising blitz according to the aforementioned Kettering philosophy. Consumers were forced to buy on credit, which was in the long run an unsustainable income supplement for such a large number of people. Now China would certainly be in a position even worse than we were; the income disparity has been consistently rising since 1985, and their population has far less purchasing power on a whole than the American population of the 1920s. The difference, however, is that China’s production glut is not intended for its own population.

Now that we’ve established in economic terms what everyone already knew, we can look at the consequences of China’s structural choices. While they will continue to grow as long as the West - the primary absorbent of their overproduction - does, if the West ever runs out of steam or if China somehow catches up economically, China will have nowhere to go. Their continued growth depends on our continued consumption, and if we for whatever reason stop absorbing their glut, then China will be in exactly the same situation as America of October 29, 1929.

Mitt Romney’s speech on religion last week was a missed opportunity. He took the occasion to posit some feel-good Universalist theology that, frankly, there’s no way he actually believes, when he could have turned it into a major advantage over every one of his opponents. His goal should not have been to convince the Christian Right that Mormonism is an acceptable religion, but rather to prove that he himself is a qualified and capable candidate to lead the country. And that task is, or could have been, much easier.

Firstly, we are not electing a religious leader. Even given the Christian Right’s agenda to legislate morality, how different could the legislative agendas of the Mormon Church and the wider Christian Right be? As great as the doctrinal chasm between Mormonism and Orthodoxy is, no difference between his position and the goals of the Christian Right can be attributed to his Mormonism. Of course, the Christian Right’s agenda is dubious at best anyway (I’m looking at you, Huckabee and supporters). Though Romney actually is in line rhetorically with a lot of it, the main thrust of his campaign is elsewhere - fiscal policy, for example.

But the Mormon issue is not necessarily a campaign detriment to be neutralized, as he has so far made it out to be. Mormonism is a demanding religion, requiring intense self-discipline. In everything. From wider personal moral conduct to little things like diet, every aspect of life is strictly self-controlled. Now compare to Giuliani, now on his third marriage, or Clinton, who was recently caught planting reporters in her press conferences. The thought of the words “Romney” and “scandal” in the same sentence is almost ludicrous, because people know him as a sober and self-controlled guy.

But enough about personal lifestyle. The real question is how this discipline translates into job performance. The answer, as it turns out, is stunningly well. As governor in Massachusetts, he reengineered the healthcare system from wasteful and incomplete to lean and complete. And he did it without incurring exorbitant deficits, all because he had the tenacity to look over the numbers and draw ambitious but realistic conclusions from them. As CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Olympics, he took a $379 million revenue deficit and restructured the entire hierarchy to produce a $100 million profit. And as far as the nation has fallen into debt, we need now more than ever not only fiscal responsibility, but ambitious cost cutting and a massive waste-cutting government restructure if we are to reclaim for the long-term the value of the Dollar.

Fiscal responsibility isn’t the only effect of Mormon self-discipline. Foreign policy will benefit from his propensity towards impossibly ambitious yet always pragmatic approaches. Such competence could only serve to quell the vitriol increasingly coming from places like Europe and Asia (but don’t expect Venezuela to quiet down anytime soon regardless of what we do). In fact, there’s hardly a function that the President serves that wouldn’t benefit from a disciplined and phenomenally competent bearer.

I just hope that he can capitalize on that in time for Primaries.

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

This is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections in recent memory, with three different candidates seeking to break a different axis of the White Male Christian dynasty of US presidents. Mitt Romney, who would be the first Mormon in the White House should he win, is in a unique position in that his religion, unlike Obama’s race and Clinton’s gender, positions him at a major disadvantage from the establishment without his minority group providing him with much of a corresponding advantage.

Romney’s recent speech was meant to allay the Christian Right’s fears of a Mormon in office, and if the news reaction is any indication, was a smashing success. The thrust of his speech was an ecumenical plea to ignore the differences of our religions with a bit of patriotic “Yay Freedom!” thrown in for good measure.

What he is trying to say is “I am a person of faith. Forget the fact what my faith is, that I am a Mormon. You might be Christian. You might be Jewish. I’m a person of faith. I believe in God”
Roland Martin, CNN

Shy of the Unitarian Universalist Church, hardly any marginally doctrinally versed Christian - even one who would gloss over the doctrinal divisions among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy - would consider Mormonism of the same lineage as the Christian faith. Though the Universalist idea that all religions point to God is appealing to the masses as a nice feel-good belief, I doubt most Christians will buy it. Kennedy appealed to a similar popular idea in his famous speech to which many are comparing Romney’s - that religion is private and inconsequential in the public sphere.

Romney also purported that religion and freedom are necessary for each other. He even said explicitly that one without the other will perish. The point that freedom requires religion requires a very loose definition of freedom and religion: the Greeks of ancient Athens, for example, were by any modern definition “free” in the political sense, but their religion had become an allegory for the machinations of the natural world, and the gods were effectively nonexistent by the time of Aristotle. Whether this can be called religion is debatable, but his juxtaposition of the first point - that religion requires freedom - is flatly and demonstrably false. In fact, nearly the opposite is true: it is amid the lack of freedom that religion most flourishes. Persecution is a fire that refines and purifies faith.

There are countless historical examples of this, for it is the martyrs that people of any religion esteem: the Confessing Church is arguably the best snapshot of the ideal of the Church in modern history. Forced underground after a Nazi program banned the Bible in churches to be replaced with Mein Kampf (”the most sacred book to Germany, and therefore God”) and required the adoption of a doctrine of Positive Christianity - a reformulation of the Christian faith to conform with Nazi ideals, the Confessing Church exemplified not only compassion by hiding Jews and other persecuted groups, but doctrinal integrity by continuing to meet under the banner of Orthodoxy. The Church worldwide is still indebted to the Confessing Church for the theology that came out of it during that period. It was only when the war ended and freedom in the Western sense was restored that, to the dismay of leaders like Moltmann, the Confessing Church was rendered all but unnecessary and the German Church as a whole strove to return to its prewar state.

The Church in China is another oft-cited example. The house churches that meet against the will of the State and its theologically flaccid official churches embody on a larger scale than in any Western country the devotion and sacrifice inherent to true Christianity. The Early Church is another, persecuted under the Roman Empire until Constantine instated religious freedom in Rome, securing for it a dominant material and political position that sent it on a long slide of decay and corruption.

No, though freedom may or may not require religion in the loosest sense of the word, religion if it is truly of God in no way requires freedom, or any earthly institution to persevere. False faiths may fall away under stress, but it is the mark of Godliness to be made stronger by persecution.

Tune in next time for: Why I support Romney anyway