Our year in music coverage continues with our Top 50 Albums of the year. The full list, including nos. 20-1, is up today.
Be sure to check out yesterday's list of Honorable Mentions. Beyond that, we've had the Top 100 Tracks, The Year in Photos, The Best of Pitchfork.tv, The Worst Album Covers, and The Top Music Videos.
We won't have any record reviews in the next two weeks but we will be updating with Guest List: Best of 2011, The Year in News, The Pitchfork Guide to New Year's Eve, and other features, news, tracks, and videos.
Thanks for reading Pitchfork this year and we'll return to reviews and regular updates on January 3rd.
50. Youth Lagoon
The Year of Hibernation
[Fat Possum/Lefse]
At first, you feel kind of embarrassed for Trevor Powers: Sure, he's just a kid from Boise, but doesn't he realize what he's up against in 2011? A record called The Year of Hibernation from an act called Youth Lagoon is the sort of thing cynics will surely bury alive if they don't ignore it first, especially if it's filled with warbling synths, faraway vocals, and cover art that purchased the essence of 1983 from the App Store. But at the risk of praising The Year of Hibernation as a triumph of naivety, Powers' debut LP made a real and lasting connection like few other records in the past 12 months. It's half an hour of nothing but heart: explosive crescendos straining against the limitations of its production budget, melodies and guitar scribbles drawn in permanent ink but smudged by reverb, overwhelming feelings about escape and heartbreak rendered with simplicity and warmth when most of his peers were content to sing about nothing much at all. The lesson here: Never underestimate the power of emo. --Ian Cohen
In the continual 1990s Memory Lane cruise that was 2011, Wild Flag managed to sidestep the pitfalls of nostalgia. It was no small feat for a group that pulls all four of its members from some of that decade's best guitar bands: Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, Mary Timony of Helium and Autoclave, and Rebecca Cole of the Minders. But rather than looking back, Wild Flag aims for something timeless. It's a record of passion, liberation, and friendship that fuses 70s punk and careful hints of new wave, full of jagged riffs and psychedelic keys, alternating between Brownstein's fiery howls and Timony's cool drawl. Even with saccharine lifer anthems like "Romance", the album's brightest moments come when you'd least expect them. Timony's mid-tempo rocker "Something Came Over Me" is full of wah-wah riffs and resonant lines ("I feel faint but never weak") while the Brownstein-led "Future Crimes" is urgent and forward-moving, full of repetitive, angular minor chords and ferocious 4/4 beatkeeping that build to a definitive final line: "If you're gonna give up on the fight, then I'm gonna call you a liar!" Words to believe in, especially this year. --Jenn Pelly
48. Toro Y Moi
Underneath the Pine
[Carpark]
If you're a promising young artist partly responsible for turning a Hipster Runoff punchline into a viable (but still often maligned) subgenre, what do you do in order to stand out? Do you chart a course in a different direction, or hope that the wheat will eventually separate from the chaff? Chaz Bundick escaped the increasingly long shadow of chillwave by getting a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and (temporarily) throwing his computer out of the window. Anchored by live drums and Bundick's knack for rhythm, Underneath the Pine fuses disco and breezy soft rock with springtime warmth and blooming psychedelic flourishes. With its lively performances and arrangements brimming with color, the album shows that Bundick's musical talent is as strong as his ear for production-- a pleasant surprise for whoever thought his style was destined to go the way of electroclash. --Martin Douglas
47. Sepalcure
Sepalcure
[Hotflush]
In an interview with The Guardian last month, Hotflush boss Scuba named "Outside", the closing song from bass music duo Sepalcure's self-titled debut LP, as the song he would want to open his next DJ set with. It's a strange choice for a set opener-- "Outside" is beatless, essentially four minutes of drone and clipped voices-- but then again, not much about Sepalcure makes sense in the constant forward-thinking climate of bass music circa 2011. As an album, it doesn't really do anything new, and a few of the signifiers that Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma plunder on Sepalcure were, to some, reaching their expiration dates-- specifically, the use of pitched vocals that Stewart liberally splayed on his album this year as Machinedrum, Room(s). Part of what makes Sepalcure such a deeply enjoyable listen is how familiar it all is, pogoing between juke-derived textures, IDM's click-clack machinery, misty pastoral ambience, and house music's 4/4 insistence while weaving a web of shivering romance that still manages to move bodies. Above all else, Sepalcure offers a necessary reminder that, yeah, change is good, but elegant, refined perfection also has its place. --Larry Fitzmaurice
46. Cults
Cults
[In the Name Of/Columbia]
It's not hard to see why detractors might have underestimated Cults. Young bands with a catchy tune or two aren't exactly rare, and it's only natural to assume the appeal of a sugary-sweet pop song won't last longer than your average rush. The presence of sampled audio from actual cult leaders could understandably strike some critics as gimmicky, too. But still! Even on early internet hits "Go Outside" and "Oh My God", Cults' songs were more multi-faceted than skeptics acknowledged, their hooks barbed with alternate meanings, their core sound enriched by unexpected influences.
The self-titled debut from the New York-via-San Diego duo of Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion confidently underscored their subtle complexity, balancing 1960s girl-group winsomeness with the darker impulses that lay beneath the best songs from that world, fleshed out with elements from shoegaze, post-punk, and contemporary pop. Best of all, each song was a potential sleeper hit in its own right, from kidnapping fable "Abducted" to break-up back-and-forth "Bumper". A recent remix with Freddie Gibbs even showed all Cults' talk about loving hip-hop was for real, while at the same time reinforcing the album's theme about the inherent danger of escapism-- whether into a cult or into pop music. --Marc Hogan
45. Kendrick Lamar
Section.80
[Top Dawg]
Whether due to the encroaching influence of indie and punk or the ascendance of Tumblr culture, amateurism in hip-hop was often hailed as a virtue this year. But Kendrick Lamar ran counter to this trend. It isn't just that he's a technically skilled rapper, although he can certainly hold his own in that department; it's that experience and technique allowed his personality to shine through. Much like other artists in his Black Hippy crew, Lamar's skills feel like byproducts of the discovery of his own voice, and they've allowed him to make things work that might have-- and often did-- fall apart in other rapper's hands. From the slowed, space-y Drake-like production of "A.D.H.D." to the stoned sing-song of "Chapter Six" to "Rigamortus"'s throwback jazzy horn loop, he had an overarching vision and the deftness of ability to pull it off. --David Drake
44. Colin Stetson
New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
[Constellation]
For indie rock fans, it was almost impossible to avoid seeing Colin Stetson wielding his gigantic bass saxophone at some point during 2011. It felt like he was in more than one place at one time, either guesting with LCD Soundsystem, Bon Iver, and Arcade Fire, or heading out on his own to bring the blacked-out beauty of Judges to life. This album felt like a haven for Stetson to retreat into, a place of sanctuary away from the mass audience his sax-for-hire reputation brought him. His ability to be everywhere at once is matched by the alchemical nature of his craft, where it frequently sounds like he's blowing great lumps of iron ore out of his instrument. The desolate nature of the music on Judges makes it feel like he's the loneliest guy in the world, assembling a great wall of machine noise as a buffer from some untold real-life tribulations. Stetson is a runner who finds elation in the pain physical exercise brings, and his music functions in a similar manner-- if you listen up-close to this album you can hear him huffing and puffing away, creating a taxing whirl of intensity that never lets up. --Nick Neyland
43. Lykke Li
Wounded Rhymes
[Atlantic/LL]
In the three years since she released her debut-- 2008's searching and peculiar Youth Novels-- Swedish songwriter Lykke Li got tougher, more commanding: Wounded Rhymes is an aggressive, sometimes brutal meditation on sex and love and the complicated ways they intersect. Li traded in any lingering coyness ("I think I'm a little bit in love with you," she once chirped) for force: "Like a shotgun/ Needs an outcome/ I'm your prostitute/ You gon' get some," she intones here, her voice unapologetic. Wounded Rhymes is deliberate and rhythmic where Youth Novels was moony-eyed, and Li wears her newfound confidence well, bolstering it with heavy drums and big choruses. Her vocals are deep and grainy, even when she's confessing her devotion. Somehow, Li manages to make lyrical declarations like "Sadness is my boyfriend" and "My love is unrequited" sound perfectly self-possessed. --Amanda Petrusich
Lykke Li: "I Follow Rivers":
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Bass music continued to mutate in a million different directions in 2011-- perhaps the surest sign of its unpredictability is the fact that no one has come up with a better term than "bass music" to describe the broader spectrum of dubstep and its discontents. No album better captured this world's sense of possibility than the self-titled debut album from SBTRKT, a journeyman producer and remixer who found his voice by combining lithe grooves grounded in dubstep, garage, and UK funky with economical pop melodies.
Just 43 minutes long, it's a modest record. There's no gatefold sprawl, none of the progressive pyrotechnics that often accompany British underground sounds aimed at crossing over. In fact, it's more coherent than it should be, given the number of vocalists it employs: Roses Gabor, Jessie Ware, Sampha, and Yukimi Nagano and her bandmates from Little Dragon. But from Nagano's squeakily sultry soul to Sampha's smoky James Blake-isms, SBTRKT excels at fusing his singers' idiosyncrasies with his own variable sound-world, by turns lush and jagged. There was no shortage of strong singles, either, from "Wildfire"-- which Drake anointed with his own remix-- to "Right Thing to Do", a perfect example of UK garage that went far beyond mere revivalism. --Philip Sherburne
41. Liturgy
Aesthethica
[Thrill Jockey]
In the last two years, detractors have been all over Liturgy founder and frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. Especially after making Aesthethica, the year's most debated and arguably most redemptive metal album, he's been ridiculed as the epitome of a Brooklyn metal hipster and blasted as a self-aggrandizing loudmouth. Liturgy is indeed comprised of musicians who look like people working at your favorite neighborhood bar. And Hunt-Hendrix published his theories on the advancement of black metal, first presented as a lecture, as a short book subtitled "A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism" earlier this year.
But Aesthethica thrives on that kind of conviction. The tidal drum-and-guitar swell at the close of "Returner", the automatic rage of "Generation", the blissful build of the album's stoner metal aberration, "Veins of God"-- when they're happening, Liturgy makes these moments feel like the most important things in the world, as if rock'n'roll itself has been waiting since its inception to be played with such belief. Hunt-Hendrix isn't an especially great black metal vocalist. Here, though, he hurls his words with the mania of a revolutionary and the spirit of a rebel. Time will tell if he's either; Aesthethica at least stands any test of now. --Grayson Currin
40. AraabMuzik
Electronic Dream
[Duke]
One of the predominant themes in the electronic music of 2011 was the incorporation of previously unfashionable, even unthinkable elements and styles into existent genres. But no one took a more literal stab at it than Dipset-affiliated producer AraabMuzik and his album Electronic Dream, which throws his memorable MPC antics right on top of entire trance songs. Kaskade, Jam & Spoon, Ian van Dahl: this is the real stuff, not just slyly winking hints.
There was a precedent for this, particularly the Dipset Trance Party mixtapes, but Electronic Dream exhibits a new level of directness, calling modern hip-hop's dance-obsessed bluff. The effect of Araab's MPC demolition is more hazy than rousing, the anxious, palpitating heartbeat at the center of it all, manipulating trance's preoccupation with ecstasy and pitching songs down wholesale. Kaskade's "Streetz Tonight" is rendered a burnt-out lullaby, and the jittery coke high of "Lift Off" is the farthest thing from trance's usual warm and fuzzy embrace. A lot of artists tried to make cotton-candy riffs and fist-pumping melodies acceptable in 2011, and AraabMuzik did it transparently enough to make even the staunchest of snobs reconsider aversions to the big and obvious stuff. --Andrew Ryce
AraabMuzik: "I Remember":
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39. The War on Drugs
Slave Ambient
[Secretly Canadian]
Slave Ambient is both an organic, flowing record born from experimentation and an album where individual tunes can stand alone as anthems. So atmospheric interludes like "Original Slave" and "The Animator" bump against songs like "Brothers" and "Baby Missiles", which have more structured melodies and well-defined verses. The result is a big album that's lined with subtle tinges of percussion and noise that give it shape. And then there are the expansive tracks that grow and bleed into each other until they reach moments like the "Come to the City" suite, where War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel drawls out the album's thesis statement: "I've been ramblin'." --Evan Minsker
38. Sandro Perri
Impossible Spaces
[Constellation]
Toronto-based Sandro Perri has been following his whims for a decade now, from the addled drones of Polmo Polpo to the hairy disco of Glissandro 70. He once released an album as a tribute to an Arthur Russell side project (Dinosaur L), while a solo EP, Plays Polmo Polpo, re-imagined his own work. Perri, it seems, is an artist for whom identity is a state of flux, not a resting place. Impossible Spaces teases out the whimsy, contentment, and anxiety of that instability. He prods with buzzing, precise orchestration, and a guitar that sounds cleansed by a Brita filter. Honey-voiced like the Sea and Cake's Sam Prekop, nervously poetic like Russell, Perri is a sober, Sunday crooner. He spends a 10-minute song empathizing with a "wolfman," which is perfect: Perri is constantly on the verge of crisis, an experience he is likely to find pleasantly challenging. Near the end of the ascendant "How Will I?" he centers himself: "Ah, I get closer to the flame/ And panning out in all directions I seem to want to come back to a simple refrain... How will I give?" The message, from an artist as open and warm as Perri, stings: Plausible spaces can be just as taxing as the impossible ones. --Andrew Gaerig
Sandro Perry: "Changes":
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37. Iceage
New Brigade
[What's Your Rupture?]
The early buzz around Iceage focused on the age of the band members, the lack of information about the group, and the fact that folks tend to leave their shows with bloody noses. These Danes are teenagers, sure, but anyone who went to high school after the guitar was invented shouldn't be surprised to learn that 18- and 19-year-olds are making dark, nihilistic music. The blood? That's what happens at punk shows. And there was a time, not long ago, when you didn't know everything about a band before they'd even released a 7".
The most important thing to know about Iceage is that they gave us this near-perfect, 12-song, 24-minute debut LP, a collection that nails the blasted, chaotic energy of UK post-punk and the midnight ambiance of 1980s goth and California death rock and adds no-wave wrapped hooks delivered by baby-faced, vacant-eyed frontman Elias Rønnenfelt, a guy who basically wandered out of some early Dennis Cooper novel. Rather than telling us about Iceage, the talk surrounding the band only highlighted what had been missing in underground music as of late, and New Brigade helped fill that void. --Brandon Stosuy
36. Kate Bush
50 Words For Snow
[Anti-/Fish People]
50 Words for Snow begins with a thirty-five minute triptych of never-quite-resolving piano figures, barely-there percussion, and Kate Bush's warm, generous middle-register vocals disappearing into the landscape that provides this album's thematic and sonic framework. She communes with a snowflake, watches a ghost in Lake Tahoe, and makes love to a snowman, but the oddity of these scenarios recedes before the sensuousness of the performances, less like the falling of snow than the slow undulation of water. Compared to these mysterious pinnacles, Bush seems less comfortable in the once familiar terrain of relationship melodrama or the delight of language. It's as if, having now crossed over into the world of nature that she began to explore on her previous album, Aerial, the human has become a foreign country. But if she never comes back, then this self-loss is our gain: The further Kate Bush drifts into pared-back, elemental simplicity, the clearer it becomes that there is no one else in popular music like her. --Tim Finney
35. Frank Ocean
Nostalgia, Ultra.
[self-released]
Chris Breaux, who goes by Frank Ocean, is a male R&B singer with male R&B contradictions: As much as he wants to listen to his heart, he can't completely ignore his dick. He covers a Coldplay ballad about childhood with absolute dedication but ends it with the rude sound of an alarm clock: The dream is over. A minute later, he's back in a mutually destructive relationship, and has the guts to remind himself that he got what he wanted. The cover of the album features a striking orange 1980s BMW, but on "Swim Good", he's stuck driving a Lincoln Town Car over a cliff. In a skit called "Bitches Talkin'", the ladies tell him to cut it out with the damn Radiohead; in "Songs For Women", he obliges-- he's an indie kid when it comes to alienation but a pragmatist when it comes to sex. The boy in him wails, the adult wins out. The victory-- if you can call it that-- is bittersweet. --Mike Powell
34. Katy B
On a Mission
[Columbia/Rinse]
The club has been the preferred setting of pop for a while now. Not any specific club, you understand: "the club" in the abstract-- a virtual territory where almost-real avatars of our stars can pose, brag, flirt, and fuck. So the first reason to love Katy B is that she makes clubbing suddenly real again, writing songs like "Katy on a Mission" and "Lights On" that are warmly observed miniatures of how wonderful, funny, and occasionally sad going out can be. Their easy candor carries over into her songs about relationships. She is fascinated by liminal moments-- the anticipation at the start of a night; the points where attraction and danger meet-- and has a light, lilting voice far better suited to nuance than grandstanding. And she's a tour guide for London nightlife, from the bubblegum dubstep of "Perfect Stranger" to the brisk UK funky of "Why You Always Here" and the jazzy soul of closer "Hard To Get". Katy B went to the same stage school as Adele, and like her 21, On a Mission mixes the artful and the personal-- but it's as proudly modernist as Adele is soaked in tradition. --Tom Ewing
33. Fucked Up
David Comes to Life
[Matador]
You can think of Canadian bomb squad Fucked Up as legal masterminds, finding one loophole after another in the draconian protocols of hardcore punk: You never said we couldn't write a metafictional rock opera. You never said we couldn't overdub Rubber Soul*-type twelve-string lead guitar. You never said we couldn*'t use extra voices that sing harmonies instead of screaming. You never said... Or you can just give yourself over to the riffs of this massive project, and the way they send maniacal singer Pink Eyes hurtling toward its involuted plot like a huge, bald Angry Bird. Named after a song that's been in their repertoire for years, David's conceptual hyper-abundance spills over beyond the album itself to the delightful David's Town LP (a compilation of "early-80s British D.I.Y. bands" in various modes, all of whom are Fucked Up themselves) and a string of related singles (in the course of which they smash David's fourth wall). And anyway, they seem to like their draconian protocols just fine: Note that every song on David has a three-word title. You never said the old rules had to be the only ones. --Douglas Wolk
32. Panda Bear
Tomboy
[Paw Tracks]
Hymns are designed to unite a crowd of people in praise, aiming for a communal religious trance through the power of group vocalization. On Tomboy, Noah Lennox tests whether a congregational spirit can still be achieved by a single voice slathered with enough multi-tracked harmonies and reverb, a chorus of one worshipping secular matters.
Reviving the compact confessions of Young Prayer and filtering-- and filtering, and filtering-- them through the textures of Person Pitch, Lennox limits his psychedelic excursions to the borders of the home this time around. Overlapping layers of voices and hand-claps try to drown out the dark burbles and rhythmic undercurrents that nibble at each song's foundation. Instead of the pagan freak-out of his other band, Tomboy is a humanist hymnal, full of self-motivating mantras and introspection about growing old and distant from the world. Taking direct instructions for life-- "you can count on me," "got to do what you've got to do"-- and magnifying them with cathedral acoustics gives them a secular spirituality, finding God in the details of everyday life, leaning on echo to feel less alone. --Rob Mitchum
Panda Bear: "Afterburner":
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31. Ty Segall
Goodbye Bread
[Drag City]
Volume has long been Ty Segall's thing, but craftsmanship? Eh, not so much. But on his Drag City debut, Goodbye Bread, the San Francisco-based garage rocker dials back his pop-destructive impulses and shows off his softer side. As singer-songwriters go, Segall is closer to Alex Chilton than Bob Dylan. These are lurching and cacophonous tunes that place a premium on psychedelic gristle, but Goodbye Bread's best moments are possessed of an emotional breadth that has, up until now, been lacking in Segall's oeuvre. The falsetto-driven title track drips with the sweetness of a faded T. Rex record, while the record's heavier excursions, like "The Floor", could have slipped onto the B-side of Nirvana's Bleach. Goodbye Bread is where we learned that, in addition to being a cathartic rocker, Segall is a skilled purveyor of sludgy grooves and stoner romance. --Aaron Leitko
Ty Segall: "Goodbye Bread":
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30. Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972
[Kranky]
Every year, the residents of Baker House, a dormitory near the Charles River on the MIT campus (officially Building W7), push a non-functioning, beyond-repair piano off the roof of the building. It falls six stories and lands near the tennis courts. The first Baker House Piano Drop, done in 1972, is captured in the photo on the cover of Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972. There's actually a unit of volume, the Bruno, named after the racket made by the impact.
Hecker chose the image because it reminded him of "digital garbage," and he set out to make an album that decayed right in front of the listener but never disappeared entirely. The basis for the album is a day's worth of organ recordings made in a Reykjavik cathedral; Hecker uses processors, synths, effects, and production techniques to encrust the pure tones of the organ in a prismatic swirl of crackling noise. These pieces have real body and movement, the organ piercing the noise like points of sun through a dense canopy. Hecker never gives us a literal recording of the piano drop, but you get the sense that this is what it would sound like, slowed down and stretched over fifty minutes, each splinter breaking free and wire snapping, leaving behind only the purest echo. --Joe Tangari
29. DJ Quik
The Book of David
[Mad Science]
"I don't give a fuck about you, you, her, him, that bitch, that nigga, y'all them," hisses DJ Quik on the very first line of his eighth album. To be fair, not many rappers will cop to "giving a fuck," but Quik is able to stay truer to his word than most. As the lone luminary of classic Compton who isn't off producing TBS sitcoms or spinning Dr. Pepper cans on his finger, Quik has both an audience and total autonomy.
That freedom is a rare, valuable commodity these days, and where last year he used it to release an album with fellow MC Kurupt that was as rewarding as it was experimental, in 2011 Quik rediscovered the comfort zone from where he produced a number of classic party albums, and from a listener's perspective that's a very good place for him to be. And though the backbone of The Book of David is those patented funky party records, it's when Quik lashes out at his doubters, his family, and Pharrell (!) on tracks like "Fire and Brimstone" and "Ghetto Rendezvous" that the album most comes alive. Rap will always be a young man's game, but this year the hardest and most fun rap album of the year came from a guy who is turning 42 in January. --Jordan Sargent
Relative to Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, the reaction to Zonoscope was muted. As good as the transcendent build-and-release of "Need You Now" was, when compared with the former LP's lead singles, it felt like a sidestep instead of a leap forward. But even if it didn't carry the shock of its predecessor, Zonoscope won out on the strength of Cut Copy's craftsmanship, showing just how skilled they are at adapting their influences and making them their own. So we got well-rendered moments: the Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac sheen of "Take Me Over" and the sunshine pop harmonies of "Where I'm Going" interlaced with songs full of sharp hooks, patient builds, and choruses that grew more ingratiating with every spin. And when Cut Copy experimented with songwriting structure, as on "Pharaohs & Pyramids", which mixed Chicago house with the group's new wave feel for melody, they were even better. Above all, Cut Copy showed that they know how to weave new songs from familiar touch-points and that they have the songwriting chops to make the patchwork feel of a piece. --David Drake
Cut Copy: "Need You Now":
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If you're one of the most successful and talented people in the world and are married to another one of the most successful and talented people in the world, there's danger in releasing an album about how awesome your relationship is. But 4 works thematically because Beyoncé isn't bragging; she's singing about how she feels happy, at ease, and loved. Since that's all anybody really wants, who could be mad at it? Beyond that, the record is a showcase of what Mrs. Carter-Knowles does so well, which is collecting great beats, singing her lungs out over top of them, and offering something for everybody along the way. You've got the so-thumping-it's-almost-silly club banger ("Countdown"), the even-your-mom-loves-it tearjerker ("1+1"), the empowerment jam ("Best Thing I Never Had"), and a few more heaters. Personal contentment, it seems, has done wonders for her artistic restlessness. --Joe Colly
26. The Field
Looping State of Mind
[Kompakt]
To say the Field has only one trick is to miss the point. Yes, Axel Willner plies a very specific, idiosyncratic sound, spinning discreet micro-samples into fluffy ambient techno clouds. But not only is it an aesthetic worthy of repetition, it's also proven surprisingly pliable and expressive three albums on. Looping State of Mind can't recreate the surprise of From Here We Go Sublime, but it manages the considerable feat of synthesizing that album's cohesion of mood with the more opened-up sound and fleshed-out live instrumentation of Yesterday & Today, from the deep bassline that drops into the mid-tempo drift of "Is This Power" to the Matthew Dear-like vocal mumbles of "Burned Out". And while much of the album is content with gorgeous reiteration (centerpiece "Arpeggiated Love" is like the ur-Field song), it also sees Willner stretching his sound to some new limits: "Then It's White", with its patient, melancholy piano line, is possibly the softest thing the Field's ever done, which is saying a lot. Big change-ups are flashy, but in his career as in his tracks, the Field finds great potential in repetition, subtly varied. --Eric Grandy
25. Gang Gang Dance
Eye Contact
[4AD]
On 2008's Saint Dymphna, Gang Gang Dance made their most succinct set of statements to date. Their desire to sift a broad range of pan-global signifiers through concise pop frameworks continued on this year's Eye Contact, but it also found them building bridges to their past. The sprawling opener "Glass Jar" felt like a half step back to the spliced-up experimentation of 2005's Hillulah, where the rich seam of inspiration they were dipping into needed a greater expanse of time to properly come to fruition. But those echoes didn't prevent this relentlessly forward thinking group from evolving, particularly in the treatment of Lizzi Bougatsos' vocals, which were given more clarity than ever before. On tracks like the infectious "MindKilla", that brighter approach opened up the possibility of Gang Gang Dance functioning as an off-kilter pop act, ready to court a wider audience than the one they've patiently built over the past decade. It's something they haven't achieved yet, but judging from the manic joy of their live shows this year, in which Bougatsos fully embraced her frontwoman role, it stands to reason that the next album could push them further in that direction. --Nick Neyland
24. Julianna Barwick
The Magic Place
[Asthmatic Kitty]
In the last decade, what's long been categorized as indie rock has metastasized toward the mainstream, a process that's been abetted by placement in soundtracks for bands from Bon Iver and Broken Social Scene to Iron & Wine and Imogen Heap. There are a dozen reasons for the incorporation of such artists into major motion pictures, not least of which is their collective feel for texture: As concerned with the song's surroundings as they are with the songs themselves, these bands engender atmosphere.
Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place seems like a natural fit for scores and such; the nine largely a cappella and generally wordless tracks of her second LP create five-minute windows into seemingly infinite worlds of sound, where one little melody bobs to strange rhythms. Indeed, music this pretty often runs the risk of being confined to scores, functioning more to affirm an on-screen moment's importance or majesty than to create it. But Barwick's correlated senses of timing, restraint, melody, and momentum shape their own drama. This is rare music for making even pedestrian gestures seem significant, for making the humdrum resonate newly with wonder. --Grayson Currin
23. Bill Callahan
Apocalypse
[Drag City]
"I watch 'David Letterman'… in Australia!" Bill Callahan has often written and sung about the distances between us, people and places and times in our life. He has not done so in a funnier or a truer way than on "America!", a song written from the throes of an international tour, where a late-night talk show is the only thing that can make you feel closer to home. But "America!" shapeshifts, from a lonely hotel room night cry into a spiraling self-examination of patriotism and military service. Callahan names names: Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Mickey Newbury, among others, by their rank and title, before muttering "I never served my country." The song, until then a gentle acoustic stroll, spiders out into distorted, unconstructed riffs. It's a damned strange and wonderful song, one that is both searching and goofy, violent and interior, incisive and oblique. So, you know, a Bill Callahan song.
After 14 albums, Apocalypse marks a great moment of clarity for Callahan-- he's never sung better or with more strength, his wobbly voice now a tough, controlled baritone. Apocalypse-- a title that seems as much about the incineration of the world around us as it does a cruel joke about overusing that word to describe things that aren't so bad-- has just seven songs. But there is gravitas, a heaviness in each of them, even when things get dependably strange-- flutes! whistling! whimsical punctuation!-- as on the hepcat gambol "Free's". That song is followed by the heaviest of all, "One Fine Morning", a hall of fame Callahan number (few else could get away with the grandiosity of imagery) that's nearly nine minutes long. It finds him singing, optimistically, "We're gonna ride out in a country kind of silence." --Sean Fennessey
Bill Callahan: "Riding For the Feeling":
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22. The Caretaker
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
[History Always Favours the Winners]
Can the simple addition of vinyl crackle turn a jaunty tune into a melancholy listen? How long can you repeat a snatch of melody before the happiness drains away and it turns faintly unnerving? Is it possible to create a sense of something's-not-right-here eeriness through the kind of music that once got your great-grandparents slow dancing? Leyland Kirby's Caretaker project sets out to answer these questions.
Inspired by both the mental disintegration of Alzheimer's disease and the ballroom sequences in Kubrick's version of The Shining, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World evokes haunted heads more than haunted houses. Kirby uses the simplest materials-- short samples taken from literally warped LPs of romantic standards and static-ridden 78s of 1920s dance band music-- to create music that carries an almost unbearable sense of loss. And the surface fuzz becomes an inadvertent instrument in its own right. Foregrounding it, Kirby adds texture and variety to those brief instrumental phrases, and as with artists like Philip Jeck, he realizes that vinyl noise now carries its own unique emotional charge. Combined with Kirby's evocative song titles, Empty Bliss conjure an elderly listener replaying the same old favorite, over and over, as they struggle to get back to the joy they felt hearing it for the first time. --Jess Harvell
21. Jay-Z / Kanye West
Watch the Throne
[Def Jam/Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation]
At a time when economic disparity seems to bisect every cultural and political paradigm, the least sensitive thing you could possibly do-- aside from declare pizza a vegetable-- would be to release a record that often reads like a Kardashian sister's letter to Santa tucked into a gold-embossed Riccardo Tisci envelope. But remember, we're dealing with two professionals here, both smart enough to know that rap as reality is as important as rap as escapism. Watch the Throne may have felt wretchedly excessive at times, but as anyone who can attest to getting down to "Niggas in Paris" seven or eight or nine (or ten!) times in a row can tell you, it's sure fun to play dress-up to. Maybe there was something in the more relatable elements presented here-- ruminations on the price of fame, fatherhood, and race-- that lead us to take momentary respite from this embarrassment of riches and try to grasp the bigger picture. Maybe not: For these guys, overblown excess is a rewarding means unto itself. --Zach Kelly
20. Nicolas Jaar____: Space Is Only Noise [Circus Company]
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Nicolas Jaar borrows his sense of structure from techno-- rhythmic, repetitive, linear-- but Space Is Only Noise isn't dance music. What it is, I'm not sure, but Space's musical amphibiousness-- the exploratory, inconclusive way it straddles so many different sounds-- is also what made me keep revisiting it: While this album is not unfriendly or difficult to listen to, it never really gets up to shake your hand, either.
Jaar's source material is either acoustic or has a frizzed, old-shoe texture: movie dialogue, water, Ray Charles, children. The tracks are hitched to melodies and generally last between three and five minutes, but they don't feel like songs. On the few occasions when Jaar opens his mouth, he chants cosmic nonsense in a low, strange voice. In nearly every case, he errs on the side of telling you too little instead of too much. Part of the experience, then, is making constellations out of what's left in the mix. Several minutes into "Keep Me There", for example, we hear the sound of a couple giggling quietly, followed by the eruption of horns. Think about it. Get R-rated. There's something alluring-- sexy, even-- about patience. --Mike Powell
19. Danny Brown____: XXX [Fool's Gold]
Fueled by Danny Brown's complex, oddball personality, XXX is a careening ride with its own kind of nervy logic. "I Will" is a lewd, kinda sensitive ode to performing oral sex that recalls Lil Wayne's transgressive mixtape days; "Scrap or Die" is a totally un-snarky corrective to Young Jeezy's "Trap or Die", cleverly unveiling a side of poverty connected to the small-stakes sale of scrap metal to junkyards. "Bruiser Brigade" is pretty much a hardcore song complete with crew vocals, and whoa--"Adderall Admiral" samples This Heat's "Horizontal Hold" and Hawkwind?!
And then, on the absolutely devastating second half of the record, the other shoe drops and all the drinking and drugging finally catches up with Danny. So he projects his neuroses onto pill-popping college girls, traces the roots of his vices to a fucked-up family, and speaks on the damn near post-apocalyptic climate of his Detroit hometown until all the pain comes rushing right back on album closer "30", a victory rap lap with a drunken horn beat, tugged along by a swaggering celebration of success and a nagging death wish. Danny Brown is loads of fun to listen to because he raps like a maniac, hilariously and tragically, about any and everything, but XXX stays on your iPod thanks to its precarious balance between being wildly unhinged and conceptually sound. --Brandon Soderberg
18. Atlas Sound____: Parallax [4AD]
Bradford Cox is hardly the first artist to maintain a primary band and solo career concurrently. But where most performers in that position maintain an oppositional relationship between the two gigs (take, for example, Thurston Moore's work within and without Sonic Youth), in Cox's case, each new release represents the next stage in an ongoing dialogue between his projects. And with his latest one-two tandem of Deerhunter's 2010 release Halcyon Digest and this year's Atlas Sound LP, Parallax, he's hit a new high watermark of mutually inspired activity.
Where it was once a receptacle for Cox's most outré ideas, Atlas Sound has now become a reservoir for some of his most accessible songs, as Halcyon Digest's flirtations with AM-radio gold sounds ("Don't Cry", "Revival", "Memory Boy") are furthered refined into Parallax's pristine "Mona Lisa" and "Angel Is Broken", while the baroque flourishes of Halcyon's epic closer "He Would Have Laughed" are compacted into the wondrous "Te Amo". But if Parallax suggests Cox is becoming ever more comfortable with the idea of being a pop singer-- or at least playing the role of one on the Mick Rock-shot cover-- he still applies enough textural disorientation to lend these instantly familiar "Modern Aquatic Nightsongs" an alien, isolated quality. Parallax is a desert-island disc in every sense of the term: even the most radiant moments emit the desolate ambience of a life spent alone among the wind and the waves. --Stuart Berman
Photo by Loren Wohl
17. Clams Casino: Instrumentals [self-released]
There's a startling moment on Clams Casino's debut mixtape when a phlegm-soaked scream rises above the gorgeous murk before quickly being subsumed once again. It sounds like the last gasp of all the East Coast rap this New Jersey producer grew up on-- Dipset, Wu Tang, Mobb Deep-- making its presence known, handing the beat down. When I interviewed Clams (real name Mike Volpe) in March, his claim to fame was working with internet concern Lil B; by year's end, he had production credits on a No. 1 album as well as the debut from the hottest-tipped new hip-hop star around, A$AP Rocky. Not bad for a guy who was soliciting random rappers on MySpace not so long ago.
And even though he's deservedly gaining notice and collaborators for his slow-moving tracks-- which combine Houston's screwed pace and New York's punchy bap and some supremely chillaxed ambient muzak you might hear during a massage-- this tape shows that the Clams Casino sound is best heard on its own. It's heavy, like each track is carrying a medicine ball on its back. It's soothing-- bird chirps and wave crashes can be heard across the tape. And it's completely faded, with each track instantly puffing up its own druggy cloud. Volpe doesn't only represent a new era sonically, but creatively as well.
Instead of digging in dusty basements for apt obscurity like instrumental rap forebears DJ Shadow or RJD2, this beatmaker finds his sources randomly online: "To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word-- like 'blue' or 'cold'-- into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results," he told me. "I had no idea who the artists were or anything." This modern technique sounds like one of Brian Eno's oblique strategies, a way to spur inspiration while making music. But it's also the only way Volpe knows. He's not seeking out muses in scratchy vinyl. He's seeking out feelings, words, whims, and then letting the sounds come to him. --Ryan Dombal
16. Kurt Vile____: Smoke Ring For My Halo [Matador]
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For such a skilled and prolific artist, Kurt Vile sings an awful lot about being lazy. Virtually every track on his masterful fourth album speaks to a desire for rest, sloth, or some form of quiet solace. "I don't want to work but I don't want to sit around all day frowning," he sings. This apparent longing for inactivity, combined with the album's enveloping, melancholic sound, serves to reinforce the impression that these songs are things that somehow just happen, as though Vile himself would be powerless to stop them, even if he wanted to.
But by all evidence Vile's slacker fantasy is, for now, purely aspirational. On Smoke Ring For My Halo and its attendant follow-up EP, So Outta Reach, each track is filled with finely-wrought lyrical and instrumental detail, displaying a level of craftsmanship that belies Vile's nonchalant delivery. Particularly entrancing are acoustic tracks like "Runner Ups" and "Peeping Tomboy", where Vile's delicate fingerpicked guitars can summon the spirit of his late, lamented compatriot Jack Rose. On "Jesus Fever" and "Society Is My Friend", he displays an admirable knack for offhanded melodic hooks that can embed themselves seamlessly into memory, ready to slink into the hum of daily life at a moment's notice. And though Vile's slippery drawl sounds ideally suited to deliver such self-deprecating nuggets as "My whole life's been one long running gag," this hangdog appearance can be deceptive. It's hard work making music this easy. --Matthew Murphy
15. Fleet Foxes____: Helplessness Blues [Sub Pop]
In early 2009, Robin Pecknold rented a house about 50 miles north of Seattle to start work on Fleet Foxes' sophomore album. The folk-rockers' self-titled 2008 debut had already sold more than a half-million copies worldwide and topped various year-end lists (including Pitchfork's). Majestically updating age-old American folk music with well-chosen patches from Brian Wilson's ornate orchestral pop and the windswept contemporary indie rock of My Morning Jacket or Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes was a tough act to follow.
It took two years of obsessive tinkering, and at least temporarily cost Pecknold his girlfriend, but Helplessness Blues succeeds on an Ansel Adams scale. Musically, Fleet Foxes stay true to sun-dappled acoustic guitars and dewy choirboy harmonies, adding 1960s British psych-folk nuances and even a flurry of free-jazz skronk; fans of Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or Van Morrison's Astral Weeks should be on familiar ground. Where the debut's lyrics were timeless and impressionistic, however, Helplessness Blues' concerns are specific and of-the-moment. Out of a generation and an upbringing that insists on the unique specialness of every single person, Pecknold asks whether freedom might not, after all, be about more than rugged individualism.
Borrowing and stealing from a rich musical tradition, Helplessness Blues reminds us what's ours. In the process, it joins the pantheon of source material for some other young searcher to take and make new. As his earnest and idealistic narrator envisions at the end of the title track, Pecknold has become "like the man on the screen." --Marc Hogan
14. Shabazz Palaces____: Black Up [Sub Pop]
Every generation gets the MF Doom it deserves. And the mercurial Metal Faced Villain, whose up-from-the-tombs resurrection re-wrote the template for enigmatic abstraction in hip-hop, has lain dormant long enough to create a vacuum for the role of veteran rap Lazarus.
Enter Shabazz Palaces, a Seattle duo whose creation myth invokes a totally different testament. They are led by the 40-ish Ishmael Butler, who was once known as Butterfly in Digable Planets, architects of eccentric smoke-wreathed cellar jazz. Currently, he's creating a cosmology rife with Nation of Islam imagery, old-time anarchistic Pacific Northwest politics, and an aesthetic as dense, dark, and drugged as tar opium.
Black Up expands upon Shabazz's interstellar EPs from 2009. Some song titles read like Dave Eggers conceiving imaginary chapters of Where the Wild Things Are: "The Kings New Clothes Were Made By His Own Hands", "An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum", "A treatise dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)". "Youlogy" ignores the last half-decade of backpack backlash by taking direct aim at the corporate machines and rappers in $700 Alexander McQueen jeans. Self-produced, the beats are wobbling and wind-lashed-- doom sounds over sulfurous rants worthy of W.E.B. Dubois. Shabazz Palaces snarl with the obverse image; the older gods reminding us that not only the young can lead rebellions. --Jeff Weiss
13. EMA____: Past Life Martyred Saints [Souterrian Transmissions]
Erika M. Anderson comes across as an artist out there on her own, difficult to lump into a scene, movement, or sound. Yes, she covered Nirvana, and her songs have the druggy, blues-tinged spiritual heaviness of grunge; yes, she sang about how bodies can hold harrowing memories, which rightly reminded some people of Courtney Love; and OK, the tone of her voice, direct and tough and confident but also tinged with sweetness and vulnerability, reminded some of Liz Phair. But Past Life resonated so deeply with what can fairly be described as a growing cult because there seemed to be so little standing between us and the music. The line of transmission seemed a little shorter, the narrative surrounding its creation a little less essential. EMA's debut didn't stand for anything, it just was.
Past Life may have been cathartic to make, but it felt less like a personal statement and more like an acknowledgment of shared understanding. Anderson's songs have blood and viscera and ache but they never feel like exhibitionism because we've felt these things, too. In "Red Star", the narrator evokes the cosmos as a relationship disintegrates, and the song builds and builds until the "like a red star" refrain becomes "like a blue scar." And then the album comes to an abrupt end. Blue scars are the ones that hurt, and the movement from infinite scale down into this small, private pain-- the absurdity of that juxtaposition-- is partly what gives Past Life its power. Ultimately, it's an album about exploration, and as a blur of faces and scenery moves by, the woman at the center struggles to figure out her place. And as we listen to her struggle, she helps us figure out ours. --Mark Richardson
____Photo by Dan Wilton
12. James Blake____: James Blake [A&M/Atlas]
James Blake: "Limit to Your Love":
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What if someone had told you, in 2010, that James Blake would make one of the most commanding songwriter albums of 2011? At the time, Blake was known to us only as a mercurial young Londoner with a knack for fitting incompatible parts into elegant contraptions. Whether crafting liquid-crystal dubstep, phantasmal R&B, or introverted Teutonic techno, he could make broken-down mechanisms whir like Swiss clockwork. Still, we had no cause to suspect that Blake would be the one to pull ahead and give the emergent movement of moon-eyed electronic music a superlative statement.
In hindsight, though, you can see exactly how he got to his fierce debut LP: cautiously, by degrees of addition and subtraction, and in plain view. Once the authorial voice and piano crept in on his Klavierwerke EP, it was simply a matter of shifting the proportions, throwing big shadows across the wall. On this album, Blake did the one thing we didn't expect, giving it an aura of fearless exposure: He carefully extracted most of the dubstep and R&B, leaving behind cavities of space that he filled with his voice. But the unexpected breadth and eerie absences of Blake’s breakthrough were part of its magic, but only part. After the element of shock wore off, an uncanny aesthetic remained to be reckoned with. All year, the album lurked on the edge of my mind. It ceased to be an idea and became a place, where a single voice, falling, without direction or scale, became indistinguishable from the one in my own head. --Brian Howe
Photo by Tina Tyrell
11. St. Vincent____: Strange Mercy [4AD]
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On her first two albums as St. Vincent, Annie Clark's signature instrument was her strong, clear, and expressive voice. Never indulging technical or emotional fireworks, she sang more from the brain than the gut, which made her pristinely orchestrated art-pop even more cerebral. But Strange Mercy finds St. Vincent paring down to a straightforward rock lineup in the studio, ditching the involved arrangements, and spotlighting the chaos of Clark's guitar: the choppy riffs of "Cruel", the sneaky punctuation of "Neutered Fruit", the solos that don't sound quite like solos, the themes that mushroom into uncomfortable shapes. "Chasing an abstraction," she called it earlier this year.
Her guitar doesn't upstage her voice so much as it becomes a slightly antagonistic duet partner, often taunting or contradicting her lyrics. Strange Mercy is always on its toes, always toying with some new idea, always building toward the oddly satisfying payoff. The song might be a narrative or an uncomfortable explication of the life of an indie rock artist, and the ambiguity, not to mention the ambivalence, stings. By totally embracing that off-kilter danger, Clark opened up a raw and brave new vocabulary. --Stephen Deusner
10. The Weeknd____: House of Balloons [self-released]
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When the Weeknd magically appeared from the internet ether, there was something truly total about it all: they had the visual aesthetic down, immaculate production, and in Abel Tesfaye, one of the year's most distinctive new talents. House of Balloons takes the NyQuil tint of recent efforts by artists like Drake and The-Dream to a place of uncomfortably photorealistic, gritty darkness: that it's sung with a cherubic voice so clear and sweet only makes it more unsettling. Moving beyond the usual tropes of drugs and excess, House of Balloons presents a world of overdose, withdrawal, chemically-paralyzed sex and vaguely violent seduction, with Tesfaye rendering hip-hop's celebratory narcissism into something downright detestable.
And yet this mysterious entity manages to pull it all off with music that embodies the self-indulgent nature of its own Dionysian decadence, sprawl and all. Seven-minute epics like "The Party & the After Party" and "Loft Music" perfectly reflect the rapidly unraveling personality on display, while "What You Need" infuses up-to-date production values into the best Sade ballad in years, oozing silk even as it bleeds itself out. Yet no matter how conceited the Weeknd becomes, through the faux-psychedelic swirl of follow-up Thursday and pretentious conceptual videos, they've never been anything less than captivating. Inventive, frightening, and dangerously accessible, House of Balloons is an album whose licentious charms are impossible to resist, its uncensored visions of nocturnal saturnalia soothing and disturbing in equal measure. --Andrew Ryce
09. Real Estate____: Days [Domino]
Real Estate's sophomore set is another slab of sleepy suburban sprawl, wasted miles, and those long teenage hours spent hammering out what's real and shrugging off what isn't. Frontman Martin Courtney casts a wistful (but not too wistful) gaze back to his more guileless years, nodding to something like a lost innocence, letting a few phrases say so much. There's a grace and understatement to everything Courtney and company muster that seems to slow everything down just a bit, like they're out a little past curfew and don't want to arouse any suspicion. With slowhand Matt Mondanile's guitar cruising along at about 25 MPH, Days plays like a townie's guided tour through the very same localities they charted on their debut, offering back-of-my-hand stops at all the highlights.
It's not a record that smacks of ambition, exactly, but it gathers its strength in seeming incredibly comfortable with where it's from and what it's doing there, even if it's not too far from where they've been all along. Somewhere in the languid byways of "Municipality", I can hear these Jersey guys tottering around Ridgewood or doing donuts in Montclair, gulping down Frostys as friends talk shit in the backseat. A careless lifestyle? Perhaps. But, the way Real Estate tell it, not so unwise. --Paul Thompson
08. Drake____: Take Care [Cash Money/Young Money/Universal Republic]
"Weezy and Stunna my only role models/ Hef and Jordan my only role models." On "Lord Knows", Drake toasts to four absurdly rich and successful assholes who are by all accounts manipulative, emotionally unavailable, and altogether miserable human beings. So while they might be Drake's peer group, they are not the men he aspires to be on Take Care. Boasting more complex songwriting, vastly improved mic skills, and an astounding curatorial ear, Drake opened himself up to pretty much everything the human condition has to offer.
With partners Noah "40" Shebib and the Weeknd in tow, Take Care integrates dubstep, house, blaring Young Money boasts, New York City thunder, quiet storm, and cloud rap to form the dark center of 2011's pop universe. And yeah, "I blew six million on myself and it felt amazing" isn't something any of us will relate to any time soon, but the elemental sensations underpinning the mood swings connecting the title track's wounded heart, the stunning emotional bottom of "Marvins Room", and the earned triumph of "Underground Kings"-- intoxication, depression, friendship, hatred, jealousy, empathy, lust, loneliness, ego, doubt-- make Drake's experience no more contradictory and complex than our own. In fact, the only emotion that might be missing from Take Care is contentment-- closer "The Ride" might sound like a victory lap for his sophomore album, but then Drake promises "my junior and senior will only get meaner-- take care." So what do you give the man who has it all? The gift of thinking he doesn't. --Ian Cohen
Photo by Anna M. Campbell
07. tUnE-yArDs____: w h o k i l l [4AD]
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Though Merrill Garbus' percussive w h o k i l l pulls from a variety of genres and cultures, when listening to it I kept coming back to Walt Whitman. The two fearlessly gleeful weirdos share a penchant for celebrating real live flesh, and they also have a thing for rewriting national anthems in their own, scribbled hands. w h o k i l l's opening salvo is a killer: "My country, 'tis of thee/ Sweet land of liberty/ How come I cannot see my future within your arms?"
If ever there were a year that needed songs asking questions like that one, it was 2011. True to its times, w h o k i l l is a hand-rendered map of a shrunken country: fractured in the face of economic inequality, dwindling natural resources, and seemingly insurmountable political and social divides. "With my eyes open, how can I be happy?" Garbus shouts midway through "My Country", but the bravery and the genius of w h o k i l l is in how it never once closes its eyes, undaunted by ugliness, internal struggles (Garbus sometimes uses vocal loops in such a way that it sounds like she's having a heated argument with herself), or even the most complex revelations. In "Riotriot", the sheer full-throated power of her voice turns a squirmy confession into something strangely liberating: "There is a freedom in violence that I don't understand/ And like I've never felt before!"
w h o k i l l's 10 songs-of-self are testaments to the power of an idiosyncratic voice, and they're also reminders of the deceptively simple human demands that unite us. In mid-October, a few miles from her country's capitol building and a few more from the city's branch of the Occupation, I saw Garbus open a sold-out show with the call-and-response chant she's opening all her sets with these days. "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE?" she asked the audience. The unanimous roar that followed was as inevitable as it was affirming: YEAH! --Lindsay Zoladz
06. Oneohtrix Point Never____: Replica [Mexican Summer/Software]
In the two years since Daniel Lopatin collected the best of his limited-run output as the 2xCD Rifts, his Oneohtrix Point Never project has become one of the new synth-music underground's most reliable purveyors of trippy, arpeggio-heavy psychedelia. Last year's Returnal marked an intensification of his method and an amplification of his range-- from pure noise to breathtaking lyricism-- but it didn't significantly break with his established mode. Replica does. For one thing, it's the first time that sampling has become central to OPN's music. While Lopatin hasn't retired his trusty Roland Juno 60, it plays a supporting role, adding color and texture to loops sourced from bootleg DVDs of old television ads.
Knowing the backstory supports the techno-nostalgia at play in all Lopatin's music, but it's not necessary to appreciate the sonics themselves, which are severed from any obvious referent-- there's nothing kitschy or crassly retro here. Instead, the new sounds and textures have the effect of breaking open what, until now, had felt like a hermetically sealed world. The smeared mush of frequencies that characterized previous records falls away, revealing lilting cartoon xylophones, quizzical hiccups, and delicate percussive loops that crunch like boots in snow. "Up" employs tribal drum machines of a type unimaginable on an OPN record until now-- and in 7/4 time, at that-- while "Child Soldier" features reconfigured R&B voices over lasers and dentist drills. Lopatin even indulges in stately piano melodies, proving that last year's unlikely collaboration with Antony wasn't as out of character as it seemed at the time.
It's an immaculately paced album, veering from placid ambient interludes to quietly chaotic constellations of found sound; Replica's subjects are media, memory, and the space-time continuum, but the mind/heart dichotomy is the axis around which it revolves. --Philip Sherburne
Photo by Sandy Kim
05. Girls____: Father, Son, Holy Ghost [True Panther]
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As its title indicated, Girls' 2009 debut, Album, was a triumph of simplicity, from its familiar 50s-rock references to all the songs about Lauras and Lauren Maries to the way "Hellhole Ratrace" copped the "Hey Jude" trick of repeating the same refrain over and over again to create an instant sing-along anthem. But anyone who's read a single article about Girls knows that leader Christopher Owens' life hasn't been all pizzas and bottles of wine, and this darker subtext came to the fore on the band's second full-length.
This is a heavy record-- and not just because Girls try to flex some surprising Black Sabbath muscle on "Die". For an album that begins with Owens' self-deprecatingly acknowledging his "bony body" and "dirty hair," Father, Son, Holy Ghost is brimming with confidence and fearlessness, as Girls tackle tough subject matters-- fading romance, spiritual emptiness, reconciling with family-- with the weightiness they deserve, by eschewing Album's ramshackle scrappiness for the classic-rock-radio sophistication of Billy Preston-era Beatles and early-70s Pink Floyd. (Should you not have a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon handy, the gospelized climax of "Vomit" would no doubt match up really well with the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz.) And where Album frontloaded its most immediately engaging songs, everything on Father, Son, Holy Ghost feels like a steady build-up to the late-act stunner "Forgiveness", eight minutes of understated devastation that feels like we're eavesdropping in on the most difficult conversation of Owens' life. Girls were too quick to name their debut record-- even more so than its predecessor, Father, Son, Holy Ghost is a capital-A Album. --Stuart Berman
04. PJ Harvey____: Let England Shake [Vagrant/Island Def Jam]
PJ Harvey: "The Words That Maketh Murder":
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"How is our glorious country sown?" That question, or some strain of it, faulty premise and all, was at the root of pretty much every important thing that happened in 2011. Whether Occupy Wall Street, the London Riots, or the Arab Spring, this year's dominant political ideology was the kind of upheaval that can only be sparked when pat answers to elemental questions-- What do we believe in? What do we deserve?-- no longer satisfy.
And although Let England Shake-- a rickety den of ghost-war stories, tremulous pastoralism and good old fashioned muckraking-- was one of PJ Harvey's most critically adored records, it also spawned its fair share of haters. Amongst detractors, the infamous bugle call that rips clumsily through "The Glorious Land" became a talisman of Let England Shake's supposed heavy-handedness. But when I hear that Reveille, I don't hear finger-wagging; I hear Harvey antagonizing us with war's blinking single-mindedness. I hear Harvey saying that war is (tone)deaf, dumb, and mute, and that the only way to stop something with no sense is with an equal and opposing act of visceral destruction. "How is our glorious country sown-- not with wheat and corn." The notion that humanity is not at the heart of progress is hardly a new one, but it rang rawer than usual this year, and no other record even came close to capturing that. --Mark Pytlik
Photo by Anouk
03. M83____: Hurry Up, We're Dreaming [Mute]
M83 [ft. Zola Jesus]: "Intro":
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Anthony Gonzalez set expectations stratospherically high in interviews leading up to Hurry Up We're Dreaming, name-checking such totems of feverish excess and emotional overload as Smashing Pumpkins' Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Beatles' White Album, and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. But what he eventually unveiled-- 22 tracks of horizon-spanning, unabashedly epic synth rock, a double album without a wasted moment (yes, even including that five-year-old's monologue about magic frogs)-- still managed to confound those expectations. It's hard to think of anyone in indie rock in 2011 who aimed higher, and hit that aim more squarely, than Gonzalez.
His working formula for this audacious feat seemed to be Steal All the Good Parts: If a sound has ever made you break out into a foolish, cheesed-out grin you couldn't suppress, it's probably here. String orchestras, glacial expanses of synthesizers, children's choirs, ringing rounds of mandolin, screaming woolly saxophone-- Hurry Up We're Dreaming doesn't just draw liberally from the spirit of the massive rock albums Gonzalez name-checked, it practically swallows them whole, regurgitating and redistributing them into something listeners from every corner of the music universe can hear a piece of their lives in. --Jayson Greene
02. Destroyer____: Kaputt [Merge]
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The cover of Destroyer's Kaputt finds Dan Bejar in front of the picturesque lookout point in Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Park. Walk a few steps away from that spot in the park, and you'll find another view with a charmingly meta bronze sculpture called "The Photo Session" in the middle of it. The 1984 piece is made up of four life-size people, one photographer and his three American-tourist subjects, and the idea is for actual sightseers to mingle with their metal counterparts, creating a peculiar mix of old and new, breathing and bronze. It turns the typical cheese-ball vacation photo into something weirder and self-reflexive.
That same uncanny effect goes gauzy all through Kaputt, which has Bejar soaking up some of his favorite high-fidelity records-- Roxy Music's Avalon, Steely Dan's Aja-- and filtering their reverbed, horn-spouting sounds through his own unique, free-associative consciousness. The languid music constantly flirts with bad taste stalwarts like lite jazz and soft rock and, in doing so, jumbles our own preconceptions. The result is disorienting-- and wholly pleasurable.
And it turns out these open-ended instrumentals are the perfect foil for Bejar, who abandons his characteristically stuffed and manic lyrical style for something more relaxed. Indeed, he recalled recording some of the album's vocals "while lying down on the couch." After 15 years, this is where Bejar stops worrying about being the cleverest indie rock writer around, which is OK because he's been doing this so long that the smarts simply flow out of his brain anyhow.
Kaputt is an album of mantras about uncomfortable truths made comforting by Bejar's impossibly casual delivery: He's been there, he's seen death and drugs and evaporated dreams, and he wouldn't trade in one spec. On what may be the record's most beatific-sounding hook, on "Song for America", he duets with guest singer Sibel Thrasher: "Winter, spring, summer, and fall/ Animals crawl toward death's embrace." It's a sing-along, Bejar-style. His understated humor is intact, but Kaputt is no joke. It would be far too easy for Bejar to simply poke fun at so many swishy synths, lounge-lizard inflections, and cruise-ship bass lines, but he does something much tougher here. He redeems them. --Ryan Dombal
Photo by D.L. Anderson
01. Bon Iver____: Bon Iver [Jagjaguwar]
Bon Iver might be the record that frees Bon Iver from the myth of Bon Iver: from the endlessly repeated creation saga (cabin, heartbreak, Wisconsin), from the detailed evocations of his beard, from the loaded allusions to his partnership with Kanye West. Bon Iver opens with six long seconds of silence, a clearing. Keep this in mind.
Unlike 2008's For Emma, Forever Ago, which operated mostly within established folk idioms, Bon Iver is unfamiliar, expansive, and searching. Here, spread over shimmery soft rock, Justin Vernon's falsetto is imbued with a childlike longing-- not for a person or a place, but for meaning. He pushes that voice to exigent altitudes, manipulating it in a way that feels both generous and self-effacing; it melts onto the surface of these songs, becoming another strata, a texture, an easy analogue to all the keyboards and sax blows and effects-laden guitar. Talking about the album's copious layers-- and there are dozens, stacked like bricks-- without employing dopey language (even Vernon has referred to these songs as "soundscapes") or barely graspable metaphors has proved a bit of a critical challenge. Ultimately, it feels sufficient just to say that Bon Iver is masterfully assembled-- an ambitious, occasionally devastating exercise in arranged sound.
There's also the album's hazy narrative arc. Songs are titled after real places ("Lisbon, OH", "Calgary") and fake places ("Hinnom, TX", "Minnesota, WI"), but there's no significant difference between the actual and the imagined. So much of Bon Iver concerns memory-- how the passage of time affects our bodies and the way we love, how we reckon with old mistakes, how we abandon prior versions of ourselves-- and to that end, Vernon is a deceptively sharp linguist, mixing nonsensical phrases ("Armor let it through, borne the arboretic truth") with deliberately specific references ("3rd and Lake, it burnt away/ The hallway was where we learned to celebrate"). It's dream-logic, the way memory works. And while listeners might be tasked with supplying the connective tissue, Vernon and his backers provide ample support, a rubric for introspection. Eventually, these songs start to play like emotional Mad-Libs, and a declaration like "I was not magnificent," with its excruciating combination of hubris and humility, becomes an undeniable prompt, a blank to fill in. A cue for whatever kind of self-examination 2011 might have wrought. --Amanda Petrusich
