Music: The Top 50 Albums of 2011 #15 - #11

If I'd handed a piece of work in this late at uni, I'd have been publically flogged. Having a job/losing it/getting another one was something of a sap on my time, but luckily a few of you cajoled me enough to actually get this thing done. So, without any more stalling for time..




#15. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l


2011 was big on introspection, short on overtly political music. Step up Merril Garbus, who starts w h o k i l l with 'My country 'tis of thee / sweet land of liberty / how come I cannot see my future within your arms?' The America of w h o k i l l is a nightmarish collage of consumerism, racial tension, simmering violence and privilege - or lack thereof.

Musically it builds on the ultra lo-fi loops 'n racket of debut album Bird Brain, a gleeful riot of sounds both beautiful (the gorgeous, swooping backing harmonies of 'Powa') and dischordant (basically every instrument throughout 'Riotriot'). But what really makes w h o k i l l  stand out is our narrator. Garbus' voice is a magnificent weapon that she weilds with extreme prejudice, blessed with Carey's range but the dynamism of Isaac Brock. And with this incredibly expressive weapon she relays, for example, her body anxiety; 'I gotta be right, if my body's tight, right?' delivered like a Pepsi ad girl in 'Esso', or 'Powa''s candid homage to a lover who makes her forget about her body altogether. By being everything but also defiantly herself, Garbus makes for a very 21st century angry-young-woman.

#14. Panda Bear - Tomboy

Of all the beloved albums followed up in 2011, Panda Bear's Person Pitch surely provided the most thankless task. It's a handful of note-perfect experiments wrapped around two twelve minute, shape-shifting, indie-prog monsters. It's also so universally beloved that the reason you may not have heard of it is that everyone who hears it becomes an insanely possessive Mama Bear. By the time the much-delayed Tomboy arrived on the scene, following a steady drip feed of rough demos, singles and concept art, it was bundled with a hype you might call 'Christopher Nolan-esque'. As a result, the comparatively relaxed and simple set of songs it contained were given what constitutes a hard time in the blogging community; mildly positive reviews, limited hysteria and a bit of a brush-off.

All of which is unfair; though it might lack Person Pitch's ambition and invention, Tomboy is still a consistent and extremely likeable album that deserves to be lauded as a separate entity. Though still heavily processed, Noah Lennox's vocals are brought right to the top of the mix, and the gorgeous harmonies (which, if his Animal Collective day job is anything to go by, come to him as naturally as digestion) are now wrapped around what are basically 3 or 4 minute pop songs, with choruses and everything. The mood shifts subtly but never jars; 'Last Night at the Jetty' is blissful and carefree, while 'Scheherazade' is quite unsettling, but the difference is sound is little more than a shift from major to minor, mid-tempo to slow, guitar to piano, gentle riff to sparse chords. We're left with the overall impression that this isn't so much a follow-up to Person Pitch as the album Lennox wanted to make just now.

#13. Bon Iver – Bon Iver


Nobody expected For Emma, Forever Ago to do any business at all, least of all Justin Vernon. Brilliant though it may be, it sounds very much like something he had to get done just to keep his head together, a hugely cathartic document of utter desolation. Fortunately for Justin, loads of people are sometimes sad and love pretty music, so what was intended as a deeply personal eulogy for his old band (DeYarmond Edison, half of which put out an excellent LP last year as Megafaun) became a word-of-mouth megahit of Paranormal Activity proportions, leaving the follow up, if there was even going to be one, with a weight of expectation akin to the second coming of Christ.

Fortunately for him/us, Vernon lives and breathes this shit. Where For Emma felt trapped, Bon Iver is a journey, wide-eyed and elated, through an unknown country. The song titles may be locations but they're unfamiliar, and god knows the lyrics aren't giving anything away either. Though the music is, at his heart, Americana-infused folk-rock, washes of synths, keyboard tones and autotuned vocals (which Vernon has pretty much 'won' at this point) infuse it with a further degree of unfamiliarity, leaving us with a strange beast; an alien, ambiguous record which somehow feels incredibly personal. When it originally leaked back in March I guiltily acquired it and proceeded to tell pretty much no-one. It was mine, and christ knows I wasn't going to let anyone else in until I was done with it.

#12. St Vincent - Strange Mercy


Someone must have made an unkind comment about the flutes. We got a few glimpses of Annie Clark: Shred Monster throughout 2009's masterful-but-kinda-twee Actor, but nothing save for a few choice covers at charity events could have prepared us for this in-the-red snarl, the frenzied collapse and pull together of 'Northern Lights', the corrosive, jagged stabs that punctuate 'Chloe in the Afternoon''s impressionist s&m fantasy. But then we really should have seen this coming; she may look and sound every bit like a china doll (something which the promo shoots for Strange Mercy pretty much all picked up on), but her first album opened with 'Now, Now''s barrage of thinly veiled, creepily sing songy threats: 'I'm not the carpet you walk on.. I'll make you sorry'.

Sex and violence hang over Strange Mercy like a dark cloud, and not always seperately; gently cooed statements and pleas like 'I've had good times / with some bad guys / I've told whole lies / with a half smile' and 'best finest surgeon / come cut me open' drip with barely concealed lust and palpable danger, but Clark's playfully ambiguous narrator darts wantonly from character to character, and at times it's difficult to tell whether she's inflicting or receiving. It's this willingness for - nay, delight in - mischief that makes for such a compelling listen. Best of all is the gloriously bonkers 'Surgeon', with its gloriously addictive and disquieting electonic riff, completely ridiculous keyboard solo and my favourite moment in any song last year: it's an 'Eh!', and you'll know it when you hear it.

#11. Destroyer - Kaputt

Over the last fifteen years or so, Destroyer mastermind Dan Bejar has quietly cemented his reputation as one of the most consistent songwriters around in a number of different forms, whether as the apocalyptic Bowie (Streethawk: A Seduction) or as an ambient-drone mastermind ('Bay of Pigs', a new, slightly tweaked version of which closes Kaputt). For his latest outing, he's only used instrumentation that hasn't really been cool since 1983, and was kind of touch-and-go even then. But unlike, say, 'Beth/Rest' - which, masterful though it may be, jars ferociously on first listen - there's nothing heavy-handed about these horns and synths. This is easy listening in the truest sense, and that's absolutely a compliment.

It's hardly just a random aesthetic decision anyway; it's the ideal set dressing for the stage where our narrator, an aging playboy reflecting on his golden years, delivers his 'Mr November', 'Death of A Ladies Man' shtick with an easy charm, humour and the slightest hint of melancholy. The sublime title track's opening lines nail it: 'Wasting your days, chasing some girls / alright chasing cocaine, through the backrooms of the world all night'. Witty, evocative and delivered with exactly the right amount of literary flair. But it goes deeper than that too, and a little prodding reveals subtle in-jokes, cross-references, sly nods to other bands and songs; 'Suicide Demo for Kara Walker', a fascinating, highly conceptual collaboration with artist and racial history commentator Kara Walker is so-called because it reminded Bejar of a Suicide track. So, we have an album that's not only really nice to listen to, but also one that's rich in depth which improves with every listen. Is there seriously anything else you could want?

Music: The Top 50 Albums of 2011 #20 - #16

#20. Atlas Sound - Parallax

From what I can gather, releasing seven great albums in just four years, then casually posting four discs worth of stuff on his blog that he just found lying around, is something Bradford Cox has to do just to feel. With this latest effort, the line between his solo work as Atlas Sound and that with a full band as Deerhunter is even less defined, but his greatest strength still lies in his canny differentiation between which incarnation should have each of the seemingly endless stream of songs coming from his giant brain.

'Mona Lisa', for example, would have sounded jarringly light and sweet on Halcyon Digest, but here it works perfectly as an experiment with pop vocals and structure, a breezy centerpiece for an otherwise uneasy album. 'Te Amo' explores similar territory to 'He Would Have Laughed', but is both looser and more focused. Coming up in 2012: Cox somehow cures a disease using music.

#19. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up

In 2011, hip-hop was all about the fresh-faced kids who smoked weed and talked about their feelings (or about murdering homosexuals, or whatever): OFWGKTA, A$AP Rocky, Kendrick Lamar, Big KRIT, Curren$y etc. etc. But what was also intriguing was the trend for older artists, either established, albeit in a very low key way (DJ Quik) or not so much (Danny Brown, Action Bronson) who still put out fresh, exciting material in abundance despite being a little longer in the tooth. So, naturally, it stands to reason that the best, most forward-thinking hip-hop album of 2011 would come from Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets, who were active between 1993 and 199fucking4. He's more or less 40.

What sets Black Up so fiercely apart from the competition is just how original it sounds. There's nothing out there like this at the moment. Whereas most beats come at you from the club, the street or a hazy sofa, most of Black Up sounds like it's being broadcast from the inside of a Terminator. Alongside this lurching, pitch-dark soundscape, Butler snarls, laments and introspects, like Mos Def in an isolation chamber.

#18. Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

We've all learned to fear the break-up album; in fact, I was so worried about this one that I'd didn't even realize I liked it until my 3rd or 4th listen. Avoiding the pitfalls of indulgence (well, 'Every Defeat a Divorce' aside) and aimlessness, Hello Sadness is their most lean, focused set of songs to date, cutting down on the sprawl of Romance is Boring and laying on the hooks; lead single 'By Your Hand' is as pop as indie rock gets.

A million miles away from the pretty much zero fidelity recording of Hold On Now, Youngster.., Hello Sadness instead comes off like an obsessive studio project; most notably, Gareth's vocals have never sounded better. On To 'Tundra', he sounds like a heartbroken Kele Okereke, and during the smouldering slow build of 'Baby, I Got the Death Rattle' he recalls Let Love In-era Nick Cave. But this is still unmistakably a Los Campesinos! record, and succeeds so utterly because it feels like another stage in their continuing evolution. Give them a few years and they'll be everyone else's favourite band too.

#17. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

No-one had the first fucking clue what to do with Fleet Foxes' eponymous debut. It sounded like nothing on earth before it, so we threw a few half-hearted 'like a folkier Band of Horses' comparisons at it, and everyone liked it, so we all stuck it at the top of our end of year lists, because it felt like the done thing.
Here's the thing. Helplessness Blues is the proof, if any were needed, that the element of surprise counts for everything, because it's a better album but no-one likes it as much.

Whereas Fleet Foxes sounded as if the Wild Man of the Mountains had emerged from decades of isolation and dropped off his mixtape, Helplessness Blues sees him invite himself into your house and reel off all his neuroses while his house band raise merry hell in your kitchen. So, we get more variety in the sound, more experimentation, and lyrics that actually ask questions - loads of them. It sees Robin Pecknold rise from simply the most dominant of the vocalists to a bona fide front man, and it'll be exciting to see how he goes about answering all these questions.

#16. Frank Ocean - Nostalgia, Ultra

After watching his OFWGKTA cohorts become indie megastars by releasing their mixtapes for free on their blog, Frank finally snapped and put out his own much softer, much better mixtape for free and with zero promotion; a direct bird-flip to Def Jam, who'd signed him in 2009 and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with him. An overwhelming wave of critical acclaim later, and now he works with Beyonce, Nas and Kanye West. Tidy.

It's a good job it worked out this way, because nostalgia, ULTRA's sensibilities lie a world away from Def Jam's sheen. These are intimate songs in a domestic setting, with Ocean singing about vinyl collections, getting too high to fuck, squabbling over who chooses the car stereo tunes. He leads in with the heart but acknowledges that there are other organs at play, plays it cool then threatens to drive his car into the ocean. It's as contradictory as all music this open and honest should be.

Music: The Top 50 Albums of 2011 #25 - #21

OK, so my excuse for missing yesterday is quite shit - I got too pissed after work and fell asleep - but I'm not the first person to set an audacious plan in motion, without properly assessing the workload, then utterly fail to deliver. I don't see anyone calling up Sufjan Stevens and asking when he's planning to release albums for the other 48 states. Even Robyn's 'Three Albums in One Year' turned out to be 'Two Small Albums and One Better Album Made Up Mostly of The Other Two Albums.' So, on account of not being The Weeknd, here is another delayed installment of The Single Most Relevant List Ever Published On This Blog.



#25. The Field - Looping State of Mind

There's something beautifully un-show-y about the way Axel Willner goes about his business. The identical
albums covers - being black, this one is the plainest yet(!) - the total lack of press, the continuing exploration of a rich but extremely narrow sonic idea. The first thing most of us knew about the production process of Looping State of Mind was that it was finished, and that we were listening to it right now. So, yes, it's another The Field album of ambient house built almost entirely from micro-loops and minimal beats. And it's just as good as the other ones, and there's still no-one else who's doing this to anywhere near this standard.

#24. Yuck – Yuck

The various lines between influence, homage, pastiche, imitation and outright thievery may fluctuate wildly from year to year, but there's no getting past the fact that Yuck sound more or less exactly the same as Dinosaur Jr. There's really not a lot of wiggle-room there. But does that really matter? I really, really like Dinosaur Jr. And this gloriously catchy debut is - whisper it - as strong as anything J Mascis and co. have ever put out.

#23. Cut Copy - Zonoscope

After their insanely hyped debut, this follow-up limped out way back in February to be met by a mostly huffy reception and forgotten almost immediately. Not sure what everyone was expecting - after seeing the ace cover, possibly something good enough to flood Manhattan - but you're all missing out. Though not exactly a giant leap forward, Zonoscope reveals Cut Copy as master craftsmen, canny experimenters [I'm so uneasy with that word, but I can't think of a better one] and expert handlers of a build and release.

#22. Bill Callahan – Apocalypse

Appropriately for an album with the audacity to call itself Apocalypse (even if Bill Callahan is kind of taking the piss), everything here is on a grander scale than before; longer songs, bigger ideas, a wider sonic canvas. Apocalypse also sees Callahan at his most relaxed and confident, his voice stronger than ever, his humour and his idiosyncracities just as sharp as they were back when he was calling songs things like 'Dress Sexy for My Funeral.'

#21. The Horrors – Skying

'Hey. Did you check out that new Horrors album.'

'Nah man, I don't like that goth punk shit.'


'But they're not goth punks now! They were shoegazers for one album, and now they've cut their hair and they properly sing, and use big synths and horns and loads of really lush production, and they're properly like a psychedelic pop band, like Simple Minds or something - '


' - Simple Minds? Those fags who did that Breakfast Club song? - '


' - and they even.. what? Oh, yeah, them.'


'Yeah, I'm not gonna do that.'


'...'


'I hate you, Steve.'