HONORABLE MENTIONS, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:
-Atlas Sound, Parallax: Review after review lauded Parallax for eschewing the weirdness of Bradford Cox's first two Atlas Sound albums, which had more in common with droning Deerhunter breakthrough Cryptograms than with any of the band's more recent and more consonant work. I'm not sure if I buy the idea that non-weirdness automatically equates with progress in Atlas Sound's case. But Atlas Sound and Deerhunter have evolved in tandem, and the third AS full-length has much in common with last year's monumental Halcyon Digest: the songwriting is tighter and the missteps less glaring than in the past, while Cox's voice continues to find a range and degree of vocal nuance that simply didn't seem possible for him a couple albums ago. This album lacks the experimental exuberance of Let the Blind Lead the Blind, and it doesn't have a best-of-the-decade worthy track like Logos's "Quick Canal." But as a cult follower of Bradford Cox--who is, in my view, a potentially generation-defining artist--I couldn't just like, exclude this from a massive, 6,000-word year-in-review recap.
-Bill Callahan, Apocalypse: This year brought the death of Bert Jansch, a British singer-songwriter best known for his work with the groundbreaking 70s folk (and jazz flute!) outfit Pentangle. So it's appropriate that one of the best albums of the year is so reminiscent of post-Pentangle Jansch, who released a series of brooding, meandering folk records that the likes of Bonny Prince Billy and Justin Vernon obviously gave a careful listen to. But I think I like Apocalypse better than most of either artist's work. The songs are knotty and bleak, with every wandering flute and fiddle, every quiety screetching guitar (the mix on this album is astonishing--it's hard to get guitars to quietly screech), gesturing towards some distant yet rapidly-approaching catastrophe. Callahan's voice is a kind of smoker's barratone, laden with the folk singer-fatalism that a project like this all but requires.
-Clams Casino, Instrumental Mixtape: Who thought the guy who does Lil B's beats would distinguish himself in what's been a bumper year for loud and weird shit? I certainly didn't, although it all makes total sense to me now: Tim Hecker, Onehtrix Point Never and Nicholas Jaar made noise albums that were highly accomplished but sorta brutal to like, actually listen to. Replica produced a few inquisitive "hmmms" for me, but Instrumental Mixtape works on so many levels. At times, Clams' beats are satisfyingly ambient, even Eno-like; at others, they're tightly-layered and highly abstract tone poems that would almost be profaned by the inclusion of a human voice. There aren't many bangers on this one, although Clams is certainly capable of banging when he wants to--the beat for Main Attrakionz's "Illest Alive" has to be one of the sickest things I've heard this year; unlike with Hecker or Jaar, there isn't a track on this that isn't thoroughly enjoyable to listen to. In fact, this mixtape is so good that it's made me reassess my overall ambivalence towards the entire blog rap phenomenon.
-Tombs, Path of Totality: There are individual tracks on this one where Tombs rushes through 30 years of metal history in the course of about 3 minutes--at times this sounds like industrial-period Swans, at others, it sludgier and druggier than the Melvins. But this album deserves mention because it's an ass-kicker that transcends music nerdery. As soon as I heard "Bloodletters" (which has about 8 distinct movements, despite being only like 4 minutes long), I knew I was listening to the most epic rock album of the year.
-DJ Quick, The Book of David: My friend Dov Friedman lamented that this album probably wouldn't show up in that many end-of-year lists, and he's pretty much been right so far. Nineties nostalgia earns you critical plaudits if you're making a sequel to Cuban Linx; weirdly enough, its an apparent detriment if you're one of the few bona fide survivors of the 90s rap scene (i.e. someone who isn't dead or a sellout) who doesn't also happen to be a member of the Wu Tang Clan. Even more disgustingly, I suspect The Book of David was totally forgotten about in the midst of the hipsterization of rap that occurred this year--the kids who should have been listening to a true master like Quik were listening to Shabaaz Palaces and A$AP Rockey instead, which is fucked up, to say the least. This album, is lyrically dexterous, masterfully produced, and full of totally non-ironic gunshot sound effects, making it exhibit A for How It's Done, as far as making an artistically-accomplished yet readily listenable rap album is concerned.
-TV On the Radio, Nine Types of Light: I can't write about this album without also writing about how much I liked its predecessor, Dear Science, an album the kids will be grooving to 50 years from now if there's any justice in this world, and also one of the few non-sanctimonious and non-terrible protest albums of the past decade. TVOTR released the platonic ideal of a follow-up album this year. Nine Types is less ambitious and more subdued than its precedessor, but it's hardly a drop-off or a letdown. It's more restrained and more introspective than past efforts--more adult, as one reviewer put it. What makes TVOTR a band of such generational importance is that they can move in this sort of a direction without squandering even an ounce of hard-earned good will.
AND NOW:
THE TOP 10
10.) Radiohead, The King of Limbs
There was a time in my life when I wanted every Radiohead album to sound like Amnesiac, but I'm past it now. Today, I understand that Radiohead serves one purpose and one purpose only within the context of this enormous and highly atomized pop culture of ours, and that's to take other people's brilliant ideas--usually whatever's on the weirdest outer fringes of contemporary electronic music--and repackage them as only Radiohead can. Kid A was a glorious repackaging of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher; Radiohead's originality, such as it is, comes from their ability to link strange, electronic sounds to tangible human feelings and experiences, and to do so within the context of mindblowingly strange and awesome pop music. Similarly: Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma, which included a Thom Yorke guest spot, is a more original but less effective version of what Radiohead is trying to accomplish in The King of Limbs. Dubstep--or at least the artistically-ambitious, jazz-tinged dubstep that Flying Lotus practices--percolates this album, and when it came out I joked that Yorke had probably finished recording his track with Flying Lotus and said "yes, this is what the entire next Radiohead album should sound like!" And sound like it it does, except with Radiohead-level songwriting, and a Radiohead-like sense of total alienation from everything and everyone, and an eerie, Radiohead-like beauty that comes out in tracks like "Codex" and "Give Up the Ghost," and which no band has ever come close to duplicating. So Limbs isn't Amnesiac or even In Rainbows. But it's still Radiohead doing what it does best, and for that alone it deserves a spot on this list.
9.) Wild Flag, Wild Flag
The one Sleater-Kinney record that Wild Flag's debut is constantly compared to is The Woods, which rocks at near Zeppelin-like levels and is widely considered one of the greatest albums of the 2000s. I guess I like the Sleater-Kinney-anchored supergroup Wild Flag's debut because, as the Zeppelin comparison and as the above music video both suggest, it channels a certain purity that's been lost over the past decade of hype-cycles and firsties and genres that can't push past the six-month mark. Just think, for a second, about how few truly great albums by traditional rock four-pieces have been released over the past 10 years or so. This Is It and The Wrens' The Meadowlands come to mind, as does The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America. But the entire notion of purity and traditionalism in rock has been under attack for awhile now, whether through the popist vs. rockist debates that critics often find themselves mired in, or through the unspoken sense that there's something fundametally reactionary about straightforward rock music. Wild Flag's debut is a straightforward rock album; there's nothing that's experiemental or ground-breaking about it. It's just four immensely talented musicians ripping through one awesome song after another, which wouldn't seem so refreshing to me if this album were anything less than flawless. It's tight and raw and in just the right amounts, and the down-tempo tracks are just as memorable as the up-tempo ones. Most importantly, it's impossible for me not to air-guitar while listening to it.
8.) Frank Ocean, Nostalgia, Ultra.
Tyler, The Creator was lauded for his bracing self-analysis on Bastard--in fact, I lauded him for his bracing self-analysis on Bastard just one post ago. But it's Odd Future bandmate (or collective-mate, or whatever) Frank Ocean who released this year's most arresting confessional pop record. Ocean is just as paranoid and emotionally numb as Tyler, but his pyshic tumult comes across via actual poetry rather than via a series of increasingly sociopathic tangents. "Novacane," a love song about an encounter in which neither person wants to feel anything, or is even capable of feeling anything, subverts usual R&B themes using some of the best R&B songwriting of this or any year. "Songs for Women" is a slow jam about how Ocean uses slow jams as a weapon of emotional manipulation; "Swim Good," as I mentioned the other day, is a radio-friendly banger about suicide. But Nostalgia, Ultra. isn't maudlin or self-pitying; unlike Bastard, it doesn't draw gratuitious attention to its creator's problems. How does it pull this off? By being, first and foremost, a brilliant pop album. Hell, "Novacane" even got some radio play.
7.) Liturgy, Aesthetica
I understand that Liturgy is too hipster-friendly for the metal community, and that Columbia alum Hunter Hendrix's theory of transcendent humanism has turned some people off, not because of its substance, mind you, but because it's an apparent violation of fragile metal sensibilities even to have a theory in the first place. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Liturgy's been smeared as pretentious Williamsburgian garbage, a claim richly deserving of my Bullshit Music-Related Smear of the Year award. See, Aesthetica would be pretentious if it didn't all but confirm Hendrix's assertion that metal offers a possible entry-way to transcendent experience. Parts of this album, like the primal chanting on the vocal track "Glass Earth," point to primative religion as a possible inspiration for the band's sound, as well as its overall ambitions: Liturgy wants you to experience something very specific when you're listening to them, and this is music you're meant to get lost in, music you're supposed to be completely blown away by and sucked into. This album aims to duplicate the sense of ineffable mystery you might feel when staring up at the sky on a clear night in the middle of the desert, and amazingly, it delivers: Tracks like "Glory Bronze" reach the frantic, blissed out-heights that every loud rock band strives towards, while "True Will" juxtaposes Gregorian chant with a whirlwind of guitar, drums and vocals. Hendrix's point here is that Gregorian chant and death metal are both reaching towards the same notion of aesthetic and spiritual transcendence--listening to the utterly mindblowing Aesthetica, this claim doesn't seem pretentious so much as empirically true.
6.) P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake
If this had been released in say, 2006, P.J. Harvey's exploration of the relationship between war and English national identity would have gone down as the greatest protest album of the era, by far. Even now, very little from this or any other historical period competes with it as a popular musical examination of the cost and overall meaning of war. Parts of this album are just incredibly difficult--that bit about "soldiers falling like lumps of meat" is the most disturbing piece of imagery to appear in a pop song this year, Tyler, The Creator's ouvre included. Interestingly, Let England Shake isn't about war in general so much as a specific war, and references to "the ANZAC trench" and bloodbaths concerning strategically-pointless stretches of beach make this album a sustained meditation on World War I, the most traumatic conflict in English history. This specific historical focus has the paradoxical effect of upping its present-day urgency. A war that occurred nearly 100 years ago was so scarring that it can serve as a stand-in for the horrors and pointlessness of war in general. Let England Shake gives us an idea of what kind of scars our current conflicts might be inflicting upon us.
5.) Iceage, New Brigade
I'll honestly be shocked if Iceage can match this the next time out. New Brigade channels pure, unadulterated youth; raw, rattling, and over in under 25 minutes, it's an album that could only be made by a trio of 16-year-olds who don't know any better. But what happens when they do know better--when the production is half-competent, when their work is clogged with No Age-style ambient filler tracks, when they try to stretch song lengths out to over two minutes? What will happen when they can no longer access the youthful energy and angst that power this album? I don't want to think that far ahead, especially since I'm not through listening to Iceage's first effort. A perfectly-paced bombardment of expertly-crafted punk songs, even the album's sub-2 minute tracks (there are four of them) are multi-part jewels of rock songwriting. The band's youthfulness is what makes New Brigades exhilerating, but it's Iceage's uncannily mature craftsmanship that makes this album one of the five best of the year.
4.) Elzhi, Elmatic
I'm of the belief that you're gonna remake Illmatic, you'd better have a damn good reason, as well as about 40 minutes worth of something interesting to say. One of the surprises of the year--hell, maybe even THE surprise of the year--is that a former member of Slum Village who I hadn't even heard of six months ago is equal to the challenge. Elzhi cops some of the beats and some of the pacing and themes from Nas's genre-defining classic, but he does justice to his source material by infusing Illmatic with a new sense of relevance: "Detroit State of Mind" recounts the dangers and difficulties of living in America's most depressed city (where "pimps turn into pastors" and where "even the shorties are pulling glocks from their boxin' shorts") and the entire album is a picaresque about the struggles of life in a devastated corner of urban America. What makes this album really special is that it's not the act of blasphemy that it arguably should have been. Elmatic is a far-reaching survey of the social and psychic ills of its day--just like Illmatic was. Elzhi raps about "Roaches in the ashtray toss and gettin' fast cash/The ski mask way for those who never passed class" in his version of "It Ain't Hard to Tell," one of countless lines in which Elzhi replicates Nas's tightly-wound and at-times impenetrably dense (and internally-rhyming!) lyrical style in the course of evoking his own individual experiences. As lines like this suggest, Elmatic is part tribute, part exercise in intertextuality--and in the end, it's more wholly original than just about anything else released this year.
3.) Wye Oak, Civilian
I usually hate albums that are just too heavy to enjoy, regardless of how musically accomplished they may be--like I couldn't make it past the first few tracks of Antony and the Johnson's The Crying Light, which is quite good I hear. Wye Oak's third full length flirts with the kind of over-the-top downer-dom that's doomed other artists in the past. But it never makes the full leap into Will Oldham or Antony and the Johnsons territory for one very simple reason: this album is just a devastating listen. The vocal arrangements are reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins, and Wye Oak's deft balancing of abrasive noise and whispered, even prayer-like lyrical content reminded me a lot of late-period Radiohead. But it does this album a disservice to compare it to anything else, because Civilian sounds so little like anything else. I know of no other album that's simultaneously so icy and so heartfelt--fuzz and guitar feedback intervene in some of the Civilian's tenderest moments, while Jenn Wasner's voice can go from soothing to frigid to totally otherworldly in the space of a single track. This album's sonic and emotional range is downright exhausting: some tracks have a quiet, funereal quality to them, others thunder and soar. Even so, its sublimity is never compromised. Civilian speaks with an intensity that's all its own.
2.) E.M.A., Past Life Martyred Saints
Speaking of albums that are literally unlike anything I've ever heard: E.M.A's solo debut continues a recent trend of bands from the middle of nowhere producing music that's weirder and fresher than anything produced on the coasts (Oklahoma natives Evangelicals' magesterial The Evening Descends is the signal example of this). Erika M. Anderson is originally from South Dakota, I think, and her first effort is virtually impossible to categorize. Is it folk? Noise rock? Noise-folk? Post-modern country gospel? Is this a singer-songwriter confessional, perhaps? You could attach these labels and about a half-dozen others to this album (album highlight "Milkmen" has clear industrial overtones) without adequately describing what it actually sounds like or does. I'm comfortable saying that this is a very personal album about love and dissappointment and, as she sings in "California," "what it's like to be small town and gay" (assuming E.M.A. is gay, which is far from obvious). And I guess I'm comfortable calling this "indie folk," although so much of this album is impossible to categorize. Even the record's themes are hard to pin down exactly; I'm about ten listens in, and I'm still discovering new corners of Ms. Anderson's psyche to explore. This is powerful, soul-baring stuff, and considering what a listener goes through over the course of this album, the slow-building, even apocalyptic set-closer "Red Star" far and away the most cathartic song of the year.
1.) The War on Drugs, Slave Ambient
Back in the 90s, there was a silly trend of singer-songwriters being hailed as the "new Dylan," as if every generation needed, just fucking needed someone to singer-songwrite all their anxieties and hopes and dreams and shit. The real "new Dylans," I think, are artists who can do that in new and counter-intuitive ways--who convey anxieties and hopes and dreams through noise or obfuscation or even straight-up sarcasm (Black Flag's Damaged is fairly Dylinian in spirit, no?). Slave Ambient is proof that TWOD is a true New Dylan. Their second full-length is a droning and often disturbing jaunt through the wasteland we all find ourselves living in, and it it surveys the psychic and physical ruination that's characterized the past few years using a folk-singer's unique position of detachment and spirit of socio-political critique. But that's not why this is the best album of the year. This is the best album of the year because it's absolutely fucking gorgeous, regardless of whether it's droning or rocking or wandering through a six minute road song. Parts of Slave Ambient are country blues, other parts are arena rock, others are shoegaze. But it remains a work of unnerving aesthetic perfection, regardless of what genre it happens to be working within. No other album released this year has married epicism with urgency more beautifully or more searingly than Slave Ambient, the best album of 2011.
MISCELLANY!
TOP FIVE ALBUMS OF 2010, IN RETROSPECT
5.) Agalloch, Marrow of the Spirit (was Four Tet, There Is Love In You). I command you to drop whatever you're doing and listen to all 17 minutes of "Black Lake Nidstang. "
4.) Woods, At Echo Lake (was Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot, the Son of Chico Dusty) Remind me why people are so far up Fleet Fox's ass when Woods is a band that exists?
3.) Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (was Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest) I've decided it's not cool to hate this album anymore, especially since it's got like, 8 bangers on it. BANGERS.
2.) Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma (was Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma) The album that made me hate most dubstep, while simultaneously causing me to appreciate dubstep as a genre.
1.) Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest (was Jenelle Monae, The ArchAndroid) I still like Microcastle better, but this is objectively the best album ever released by maybe the best band working today. If there's a God out there, my kids will be jealous that I got to see them in concert like four times, rather than wondering who the fuck Deerhunter was when I force them to listen to this.
MOST DISAPPOINTING ALBUM
Panda Bear, Tomboy: This album was so bad that it actually made me reconsider not only the rest of Panda Bear's work, but the rest of Animal Collective's work as well. Well it wasn't bad, per se. It's just that it's the end result of the kind of music that An Col has experimented with for the past decade, and that Panda Bear perfected on Person Pitch. For someone who believes that these experiments were worthwhile and actually historically significant, it was a bit of a wake-up call to hear them culminate in a hazy, uninteresting Chillwav-ian blur.
MOST OVERRATED ALBUM
Shabazz Palaces, Black Up: M83 can't win this, because contrary to what getting a 9.2 on Pitchfork would suggest, most outlets gave Hurry Up, We're Dreaming decidedly mixed reviews. In contrast, everyone seemed to love a generic and fairly inoffensive dupstep-infused rap album put out by a former member of Digible Planets--which, for extra hipster points, was released by Sub Pop! Sub Pop releasing a rap album sure is interesting, isn't it? No, it isn't. At least not in this case.
BEST REISSUE
Jurgen Muller, Science of the Sea
In 1979, a German Oceanographer went out on a houseboat and recorded an album about his life's passion--namely the sea and, more specifically, the process of observing the sea. The results were limited to 100 LPs or so until Digitalis re-released the album this year. You have to wonder where this would rank in the annals of contemporary music if we'd had 30 years to process it; chances are it would a repertory favorite for the Bang on a Cans of the world. Once "Black Lake Nidstang" is done, do yourself a favor and listen to the entire thing.
BEST TOTALLY IGNORED ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Imelda May, Mayhem: I'll admit this Welch rockabilly album is sort of breezy. But just look at the albums on my top 10 list. A lot of them are pretty depressing, no? Mayhem is not. In fact, it's kind of a blast. Though it's mainstream and predictable enough to not be on like, any end-of-year lists, this record just oozes charisma and fun, more so than any other release this year.
MEKONS SONG FROM THE LATE 80S THAT'S BETTER THAN VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING RELEASED THIS YEAR
EARLY 80S MAINSTREAM COUNTRY SONG THAT'S BETTER THAN VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING RELEASED THIS YEAR
EARLY 90S POP-GRUNGE SONG THAT'S BETTER THAN VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING RELEASED THIS YEAR
70S ETHIOPIAN JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL THAT'S BETTER THAN VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING RELEASED THIS YEAR
MOST DEVASTATING BAND BREAKUP OF THE YEAR
But obviously:
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