12: Letzte Instanz’s Schuldig (“Guilty”) was a mostly uninteresting alt-metal album. But the songs were extremely catchy and stood out well one from another. Usually Letzte’s albums will have a few dud tracks which just don’t stick in the brain, but not this time around. This is as good of a pop metal album as anyone has produced, as far as I’m concerned.

11: Amorphis’ Skyforger caught me by surprise. Like Schuldig, it’s main asset is that its riffs are extremely catchy. Most of its songs in fact are built upon one or two riffs which are repeated through the whole song, which serves to make the songs very distinct in the mind.

10: Isis’ Wavering Radiant, however, is very unlike the previous two: the songs aren’t exactly what one would call catchy. But they are heavily atmospheric, and very heavy. The songwriting has improved since the last two albums, and after seeing them in concert this year I can also say they put on a great show.

9: Rome’s Flowers From Exile is a big departure from the martial atmospheres of their previous work. I liked those better, but the new Rome (self-described as “folk noir”, which will apparently continue with the next album as well) is hardly bad. It’s not as memorable as Masse Mensch Material (last year’s #2 album), but it definitely contains some emotive gems.

8: Eluveitie’s Evocation 1 – The Arcane Dominion was a worthy attempt at an acoustic album. The drums and bass give it a denser texture than one would expect from an acoustic album – almost as if it were a rock album (a la early Garmarna). For the most part the songs stand well on their own, though occasionally it falls into the rut of metal bands trying to go acoustic – the feeling that “this was originally a metal song” – though not nearly so much as bands which release acoustic versions of songs which were originally metal (e.g., Subway to Sally’s Nackt, Letzte Instanz’s Das Weisse Lied).

7: Faun’s Buch Der Balladen (“Book of Ballads”) would be several places ahead if it had more songs like Sigurdlied (“Sigurd Song”) and Tanz Über die Brücke (“Dance Over the Bridge”), brilliantly atmospheric harp pieces with haunting double-female vocals. As it is the album meanders around with mediocre to good songs around these two. They’ve chosen not to go experimental as they were playing with on Totem (2007’s #10 album), which you are immediately made aware of on the cover labelled “Acoustic”. It’s very much a throwback to early Faun overall, but that’s hardly a bad thing.

6: Subway to Sally’s Kreuzfeuer (“Crossfire”) doesn’t seem to have the touch that was apparent in Herzblut to Bastard (2007’s #2 album), but is still a worthy listen. There are a lot of catchy songs on the album, but they don’t have the unique folk-y sound that Subway at various points put on their songs. Nevertheless, their talent is still apparent, and the album is a fine listen.

5: Sólstafir’s Köld is an interesting mix of almost-black-metal, almost-post-rock compositions, and an almost-Western flair. Top it off with sludgy clean vocals, and it’s certainly a hard album to pin down to a particular genre. The dynamics of it, extended sections of minimalistic melancholy juxtaposed with towering anthems, make for a fine album.

4: Unto Ashes’ The Blood of my Lady was a big surprise, and by far the best album Ashes has ever made. The help from Sonne Hagal’s vocalist served well to make a much richer album vocally. The somber beauty of Sonne Hagal’s albums has also carried over, especially in the two songs lifted from Jordansfrost (Who Has Seen the Wind and Vengeance; by no coincidence the best songs on the album). There is much less of the eeriness that characterized earlier Unto Ashes albums (though it has not completely disappeared; I Will Lead You Down is very much traditional Unto Ashes).

3: Caspian has become one of my favorite post-rock bands. With Tertia, they’ve continued with wonderful and enthralling compositions – heavier than one would expect from Explosions in the Sky, for example, but never quite approaching post-metal from any direction. Tertia is even more heavily atmospheric than even The Four Trees (2007’s #7 album), with extended sections of reverbed guitar noise, and more experimental, with more glockenspiel and drum kits. It’s a fine listen, and like The Four Trees, rarely gets boring – a rare feat for a purely instrumental post-rock band.

2: Altar of Plagues’ White Tomb is a lot like Sólstafir, except more so. It’s clearly post-black-metal, with harsh vocals and sprawling compositions (though without any hint of uplifting shoegaze atmosphere), and again the dynamics are what make the album. The production is extremely good, and the atmosphere is masterfully woven, evoking somewhat of a post-apocalyptic angst.

1: Newcomer Wardruna bursts onto the scene with Runaljod – Gap Var Ginnunga, a beautiful and haunting concept album about the runic alphabet. Reminiscent of Karl Sanders but without the kitsch, Runaljod is minimalistic, heavily atmospheric, and extremely dark, weaving its themes through understated fiddles, ancient horns, distant chants, and a variety of improvised percussions. It’s definitely an album to get enveloped in, and I eagerly await the rest of the trilogy.

Best EP: Wolves in the Throne Room’s Malevolent Grain was leaps and bounds better than their forgettable full-length Black Cascade which followed shortly after. The first song, A Looming Resonance, is not only by far the best songs Wolves has ever done, but possibly one of the best songs I know (and I don’t say that lightly). With a dark shoegaze atmosphere constructed with black metal stylings and the immaculate vocals of Jamie Myers of Hammers of Misfortune, the result is an extremely emotive and poignant song. The other track Hate Crystal was above par for Wolves too: though more typical for them, the chord progression at the end also turned out very emotive. It’s a shame Black Cascade didn’t follow in this vein.

Best Artwork: Amesoeurs’ Amesoeurs.

Best Split: Though I was tempted to give it to Panopticon and Wheels Within Wheels’ It’s Later Than You Think, I can’t withhold it from Alcest and Les Discrets’ split. Alcest’s Percées De Lumière was more reminiscent of Amesoeurs than Alcest, and yet managed to sound better than Amesoeurs (though still not quite as good as Alcest from Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde (2007’s #3 album)). However the real standout from the EP was Les Discrets’ L’ Échappée, a beautiful not-quite-black-metal-but-heavier-than-most-post-rock song with strong vocals, confident percussion, and very present guitars. I look forward very much to what Fursy will create with his upcoming album.

Best Compilation: The World Comes to an End at the End of a Journey, featuring six post-black-metal artists Ethereal Beauty, Shyy, Heretoir, Soliness, Dernier Martyr, and Dopamine. Heretoir and Shyy were definitely the highlights of the compilation, but there was nothing worse than listenable on the whole album. The maturation of this scene as these bands release albums and get big is going to be a fine development in the still nascent post-black-metal-scene.

Tooting my own horn: Epta Astera’s SALIGIA was released this year. You should give it a listen!

Though it was originally instituted for the protection of the distributors of media, copyright has come to be regarded in popular mindset as protection for the incentive of artists and innovators to create. The distribution industries know that the function of protecting the distributors as such has been made unnecessary by the advent of the internet, so they no longer try to justify copyright laws that way. They would have us believe instead that without copyright laws, actors, musicians, and writers could not make a decent living.

No doubt this is true for a few artists in the case of music, but copyright is hardly a windfall for artists in the current regime. Royalties from media sales account for a very miniscule portion of the average artists’ income.

So whose interests do copyrights serve? Certainly not those of the average artist signed to a major label, who in most cases does not even own the copyright to his work. Given recording and production costs, only the most successful artists will ever see any profit from media sales: the money for everyone else is in concerts and merchandise – naturally saleable items.

Why then do record labels exist, if artists usually can’t reap profit from their intellectual property that way? They are middlemen, lubricating a market in the absence of suitable technology. They collected and fronted the large amounts of capital necessary to make a recording, press it, distribute it, and market it. They negotiated for scarce shelf space in retail stores and for playtime on the radio. They were the artist’s voice to the world.

But that was a world without the infrastructure and technology we have now. Where before you had to invest large amounts of money before you could even think about producing music, the returns to investment diminish much more quickly now: anyone with a computer and a microphone can self-produce music of a reasonable quality. This simply was not possible in the world where record labels thrived. The barriers to entry in media production are practically nonexistent now that we can record, mix, and master all on an affordable computer. Not only that, but the advent of the internet allows artists to self-distribute on their own terms. With no limited shelf space for which to negotiate, nothing is required but a website (and even that is becoming unnecessary with services like myspace and last.fm).

As the amount of capital necessary to make good quality media declines, a multitude of smaller, more competitive record labels are able to spring up (and indeed have sprung up), allowing the artist to outsource things which he may not have expertise in, such as production or album art. At the same time, as internet broadcasting has obviated the need for vast investments in broadcast towers, a multitude of smaller, online radio stations have sprung up, negotiating directly with smaller artists and labels and filling niche markets which could never have been filled by airwave radio.As storefront distribution becomes more irrelevant, so does that advantage of a major label. In fact, the only irreplaceable service of the major record labels is sheer marketing muscle.

This is the business model of the labels: their business was built on investing in a few big acts simply because the cost was so prohibitive. So when costs came down, rather than downsizing and investing in vast numbers of new artists, they expanded their artist repertoire a bit, and shoveled the savings into marketing. Modern pop acts are, and have always been, nothing more than marketing dollars behind a pretty face.

Perhaps this was acceptable twenty years ago when it would have been infeasible for artists to self-publish. But there is no excuse for its continuance through the advent of the digital age. Yet it persists. The question must then be asked: why do major record labels still exist at their size? The answer is simple: copyrights.

Copyrights and intellectual property protections, as discussed earlier, are a windfall primarily for the record labels. This secures for them vast streams of capital, which are then funneled right back into marketing more pop culture monoliths. Indeed, the niche markets served by new radio stations are a threat to the dominance of the monoliths. The major record labels have been trying to stifle smaller radio stations by mandating exorbitant royalty payments for radio play, in order to secure the market for a cartel of monolithic radio stations, which would no doubt play only the monolithic acts.

Exactly the same problem exists in the movie and television industries. The major studios build their business on investing huge amounts of capital in monolithic blockbusters. As the barriers to entry continue to fall, the money is invested into marketing. This gives us, like in the music industry, a small number of actors with exorbitant salaries and near universal recognition.

This is not what culture should be: it is neither good nor natural. Where government fiat normally does no worse than to make the market inefficient or place financial burdens on one party or another, copyright laws have become a blight upon culture itself. By enforcing distributors’ claims on culture, we do not incentivize the creation of culture – we stifle it, and homogenize it. Consumers have fewer choices in a world where copyrights are owned by a company whose only irreplaceable service is raw marketing muscle.

$787 billion worth of fiscal stimulus to get the economy back on track, and the best volley Conservatives can lobby is that it didn’t work. With the Obama administration’s widely off-the-mark estimates as to the unemployment rate with or without the stimulus (the actual job losses exceeded the estimates without the stimulus), the debate now centers around whether the stimulus did any good or if we’d have experienced even worse job losses without it.

If only the worst thing that could be said about the stimulus bill was that it did nothing: its pernicious effects are far worse than any politicians or pundits seem to realize. Both sides of this debate entirely miss the point. The failure of the stimulus bill is not that it didn’t create or save jobs – It may or may not have in the short term, but this fact is irrelevant – it is that we are setting ourselves up for a worse crash in the future.

Why do recessions happen? It is not a random occurrence that occasionally besets Capitalist economies: it is the result of malinvestment realized too late. Because the capital which has been invested in can only be sold at a net loss or converted to more valuable capital at great cost, once people realize they’ve been investing in the wrong things, they have to take a hit.

Individual malinvestments are extremely common in the market – imagine the businessman whose business ventures fail time and time again. Anyone who loses money on the stock market has made a malinvestment – and the market is generally resilient to this sort of isolated malinvestment. So what causes so many people to malinvest in tandem such that we get a recession?

Price distortions.

Now the perniciousness of the stimulus bill starts to become evident. The goal of the stimulus bill is to stimulate “aggregate demand” so that we can return to “full employment”. These terms obscure the nature of the situation. The reason we are not at “full employment” is because we have invested in capital which cannot be converted into things people actually want to buy. Returning to full employment is meaningless if we are not producing things people want – think of the giant paperclips produced by Soviet manufacturers in order to meet an arbitrary weight quota. These workers were employed, but their productivity was useless.

This is what the stimulus is doing for us. It’s postponing the problem – the problem that people have invested in worthless things – and propping up their value as if a worthless investment is just as good as a good investment. There is no such thing as homogenous aggregate demand: there is demand for cars, and there is demand for computers, but these are totally separate things. But after all, GDP is a number which doesn’t care what is produced. It doesn’t matter to the employment rate how the workers are employed. Keynesian economic metrics obscure the health of the economy just as its terms obscure the nature of our problem.

The Stimulus bill essentially implements a command economy by open market operations. Our government decides what to spend money on, and so prices shift accordingly depending on what they spend it on. The bigger the stimulus, the more we start to see the same economic problems of command economies arise in our own backyard. $7 87 billion can effect a lot of shifting – distortions which will ultimately come back to bite us with a deeper recession until we let the market adjust and get rid of these bad investments.