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Music: Our Top 15 Albums of 2011
Welcome to our Top 15 albums of the year list. These write-ups were contributed by the music staff as a whole.
1. Real Estate - Days
"All those wasted miles/ All those aimless drives through green aisles/ Our careless lifestyle/ It was not so unwise.” On “Green Aisles”, the second track from Real Estate’s second album, lead singer Martin Courtney pretty much delivers the thesis statement of his band’s existence. You can slough off your anxieties and apprehensions in the company of good friends and open-ended days, they seem to say, and it doesn’t have to be all that complicated. Like Real Estate’s first record, the languid guitar-pop of Days evokes an endless summer of the mind, a halcyon suite of days that bled together some unspecified time in the past, with half-faded memories of afternoons at the beach, backyard barbecues and cruising the highway with the windows down and the radio up. Particular details and circumstances aren’t important - what’s remembered are flashpoint memories and a general, permeating sense of goodwill and simplicity.
It’s tempting to think of these subjects as lacking in depth, but there is an understated grace to the lyrics that lifts them into the realm of metaphor. But the music around the words does most of the work. Courtney layers loops, delay and flange effects to build a warmly undulating guitar sound, while Matthew Mondanile’s leisurely cyclical guitar fills provide much of the melody. The technical proficiency on display is quite high, but this music sounds like it comes easily to these guys, and it’s easy to imagine them living the laidback New Jersey life they sing about, then going downstairs to the basement to jam for hours on end and write new songs for the next record. When so many of 2011’s best albums were existential exorcisms, unabashedly epic, and/or hyper intense explorations of the demands of fame, art, whatever, it was comforting to return time and time again to this record, with its uncomplicated embrace of geniality and hooks for miles. With Days, Real Estate reminded us that it never hurts to slow things down a bit and enjoy the things you love in life. For that, it’s our pick for best album of 2011.
2. M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
“Midnight City”—what a song! Few things came out this year that could elicit such a visceral reaction in just a few seconds, that odd-but-familiar quality of its feature melody, the effortless gigantic catchiness that made it apparent that M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez had taken his skills to a new level. And that was just the beginning, because Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is huge in every way, in its ambition and execution, in its diversity and pomposity, in its thoughtful (if indecipherable) lyrics, in its utterly flawless production and even in its hooks. This is music alternately for bedtime and for the dancefloor, for Victoria’s Secret commercials and for a child’s mixtape. Our second favorite album of the year is an example of a shy French guy relocated to LA and forced to expand on a palette he’d already crafted as grandiose, and if the word “epic” doesn’t seem appropriate from the very first minute on the 70+ minute album, you probably just weren’t listening.
Gonzalez himself said, “There’s this very urgent thing about this album, the idea of not being able to have enough time to dream, and how we have to dream now because life is going too fast.” This idea-packed album embodied that urgency by providing the ability to cherry-pick much-different mini-LPs from its tracklist: a super-chill selection including “Where the Boats Go,” “When Will You Come Home?,” “Another Wave from You,” etc., a brash pop album anchored by “Reunion,” “OK Pal,” and “Steve McQueen”…and we haven’t even gotten to curveballs like the frog-centric “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire” or the heart-rending “Soon, My Friend.” Simply said, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is an embarrassment of riches, and a masterpiece that will be almost impossible for Gonzalez to top.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Aesthethica is a concept album. Thank god. While many reviews focused on that, all parties should just forget about it because Liturgy transcended any overburden by making a dazzling album that stuns with every spin of the disk.
Long after it seems familiar, some nuances become old favorites while scores more are astonishingly apparent for the first time. Aesthethica’s like a world class rollercoaster: it’s ridiculously dizzying, frighteningly good and ton of fun.
Also, as we point out in our live review, this is a band you'll want to see play the next time they come to town: "Upon seeing and hearing them perform live, it’s clear that these guys have not only broken free of traditional black metal's limitations, but may also be on their way to founding a new genre that breaks from black metal altogether, and that would rightly be considered to have sprung from new American black metal."
4. Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
When she first graced an Austin stage a few years back, Lykke Li seemed every bit a part of the Swedish twee-pop bandwagon. What a surprise, then, to hear the introductory Wounded Rhymes track "Get Some," a rather explicit come-hither that revealed itself in the video as more about a female shaman figure wresting control than a sleazy night out. "Get Some" was a bit of a red herring - Wounded Rhymes mostly plays it closer to the vest, even when it rocks out. Li turns in two classics here with "I Follow Rivers" and "Love Out Of Lust" - stunning numbers with huge production that simultaneously evoke sadness, beauty, and (despite her youth) the stories of someone who has done a lot of living already. The album isn't perfect - we could've done without "Rich Kids Blues," which almost defines filler. But the high points are among the best indie-pop moments of the year, whether it's the Doors-like organ propelling lead track "Youth Knows No Pain" or Li delivering lines like "Sadness is my boyfriend" without the hint of a wink. Wounded Rhymes seemed to be Li's coming out party - she's no longer confined to the world of music blogs and "up-and-comer" - and here Li stretches her range and finds her musical persona.
5. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
It’s not difficult to trace the progression Annie Clark has made over the course of her three albums released as St. Vincent. Her 2007 debut established the dichotomy for which she’s become known, exploring the tension between her outwardly placid, all-American doll image and the undercurrent of anxiety and misanthropy roiling beneath. But there was an ironic detachment to her songwriting and delivery that, at times, flattened out the emotional impact of the songs. And though 2009’s Actor featured improved songwriting and the artful appearance of woodwinds and strings, the orchestral embellishments sometimes seemed like transmogrifications of the cutesy archness that shot through her debut.
So who is Annie Clark, really? Listeners get a much starker, bleaker picture on Strange Mercy. It’s fitting that, for the first time, it’s not an unnaturally perfect image of her face adorning the album cover, but a close up shot of her mouth, wide open in mid-scream, covered by a sheet. In preparing songs for the record, Clark isolated herself in a Seattle hotel and allowed her mind to drift into some weird, dark places. The torrent of stultified emotions hinted at in her previous work is brought closer to the surface on Strange Mercy, and accordingly, the overall sound is comparatively stripped down. Clark’s doleful, silken voice is matched equally by her jagged, virtuosic guitar work: she bleeds riffs from her instrument that tear through the songs like scars, or spiral off like the sonic representations of unhinged demons from her id. And while Strange Mercy sees Clark embracing her dark side, she still brings a pop mastermind’s well-honed sense of composition and endless work ethic to bear on her demons: Strange Mercy makes the exploration of inner torment and I-shouldn’t-have-thought-that thoughts sound beautiful and cathartic and necessary. She can still shred, though, and more than ever, she can shock - one only needs to see her live to witness how unhinged she can become. Or listen to Strange Mercy, her finest record to date.
More: Interview with Annie Clark.
6. Wilco - The Whole Love
It’s been a seventeen-year winding ride through A. M., Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost Is Born and more with singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy at the helm that has finally landed this Chicago sextet at The Whole Love, their first recording on their own label dBpm. Although they’ve weaved through some stylistic changes over eight albums, the strength of Wilco remains, and this new effort, the current lineup’s third together, catches them at an expertly cohesive time. And while the album might not be what you’d consider earth-shattering, it stands as sturdy, reliable American rock with stellar musicianship and catchy, sometimes unexpected songwriting with just enough variation to keep us guessing.
The album’s opener, “Art Of Almost,” stirs to life with a distorted crackle leading into drum beat snaps as a swell of strings whirl around like dry leaves, giving way to Tweedy’s crystalline, emotionally rich vocals as sounds trickle, buzz and ring around him. The song dips to a quiet trough before returning with full force and rising with drums beating out and clashing right next to the sped-up screech of a guitar before winding down, and thus beginning the The Whole Love on a thrilling and unpredictable note.
From there, it’s off to the grumbling bass and garage rock organ of the dancey “I Might” where Tweedy proclaims, “You won’t set the kids on fire/ Oh but I might” before setting off on some micro-journeys through softer landscapes of folksier tunes like “Black Moon,” where string hums meet lap steel whine. The album also leaps into action on tracks like “Standing O,” energetically shaking rock and roll hips before settling back down for the curtain.
After hearing the twelve-minute epic closer, “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend),” it’s apparent that there is no better way to end the album. Tweedy’s patient, quiet vocals accompany light steps across keys, guitar strings and brushed drums taking time with each syllable and settling things with four minutes of drifting instrumentation slowly resting.
More: Wilco live at the Moody Theater, and then twice.
7. James Blake - James Blake
James Blake's self-titled record serves as the English electronic musician's first full-length album, released in the midst of five EPs. Three of those (The Bells Sketch, CMYK and Klavierwerke) dropped throughout 2010, putting Blake on the indie blog map and whetting appetites around the world for his unique style of dubstep. Nominated for the 2011 Mercury Music Prize, James Blake stands out in a sea of incredible music this year.
Off-kilter tempos co-exist with tones that are somehow simultaneously soothing and off-putting in many of the LP's tracks, especially "Why Don't You Call Me". The intricate details of sampled sounds, glitched out frequencies, and plaintive vocals may seem disjointed at first listen. Upon further inspection (as well as simple passive experiencing) of the music, it tends to probe at something deeper, causing a love or hate of the polarizing sound.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect (and certainly the most controversial) about Blake is the entire concept of what dubstep is. In an interview with The Boston Phoenix, Blake called out the frat-boy "Brostep" genre cultivating in North America without mentioning the likes of Skrillex and Deadmau5. This ignited a flurry of activity from blogosphere on the pros/cons of Blake's dub verses the current mainstream. Blake's hardest beats drop on "I Never Learnt to Share" under the repeated drones of "I don't blame ya" and the manipulation on Blake's voice on "Lindesfarne I" is a much more interesting use of pitch correction than the T-Pain-ification of all pop musicians. "Lindesfarne II" takes the themes from part I and develops on them further with drop outs and build ups. However, none of it is in anyway dance-able; if that's what you're searching for in dubstep, you won't find it here.
Either way, if you're lucky enough to land on the love side of Blake's music, you can expect a long-term relationship with it. Even though the album was released in February of 2011, he has already released two additional EPs and collaborated with Bon Iver on the tune "Fall Creek Boys Choir" in August. His rendition of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" showcases his acoustic side as well. Look for more captivating and controversial music from this reserved Londoner in the coming year.
8. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost
One of the most unique things about Girls is how they are able to craft something wholly theirs out of familiar sentiments and sounds. Father, Son, Holy Ghost sees the band exploring different musical motifs with stunning results, whether it was the California highway feel of “Honey Bunny,” the Black Sabbath nod “Die” or the beautifully arranged “Love Like A River.” This genre hopping makes for an engaging listen, and highlights the fact that great songwriting can work regardless of the musical backdrop. Still, the group’s calling card remains front man Christopher Owens’ ability to take even the most straightforward sentiments and infuse them with the kind of passion that makes you feel as though you are hearing them for the first time. Both he and the rest of the band have grown by leaps and bounds since their brilliant 2009 debut, Album, and Father, Son, Holy Ghost serves as a manifest to their talents in a way that was only hinted at just a few years ago.
9. Wye Oak - Civilian
There’s a moment early on in Civilian standout “Dogs Eyes” when Wye Oak tumbles off the cliff. The song stops mid-melody, takes a 180, and falls headlong into a gargantuan riff before picking up right where we left off. This detail is Civilian - and for that matter, the Baltimore duo - in microcosm: there’s no sitting still.
Whereas 2009’s The Knot was built on power dynamics, Civilian is more intimate, choosing its rock-out sections wisely for maximum effect. Brothers Mickey and Chris Freeland, the Baltimore hip-hop producers who handled last year’s My Neighbor/My Creator EP, continue to flesh out new layers. There’s plenty of bottom end, sure, but the songs cut deeper thanks to the pristine production and nimble running time. There’s more time to stop and appreciate the immaculate melodies, but before long you’ll be swept up into the muscular momentum of the record.
What’s most striking is this maturation of sound. Gone are the shoegaze-y washes of their past; Wasner’s vocals are front-and-center, confident and passionate. Her guitar playing follows suit, but then again it always has. Razor-sharp, melodically slippery, or just plain heavy, she’s one of the best guitarists in indie-dom today. On “Holy Holy,” it all comes together in four-and-a-half minutes of brilliance. The crunchy chords attract your attention at first, but stay for the second half. Like any truly great song—rock, pop, rap, you name it—one good hook gives way to an even better one. The final minute is pure exhilaration, releasing the tension as it balances on the knife’s edge. The song, like its surroundings, is dark and moody, but Wye Oak know how to hammer that coal into a gem.
10. The Field - Looping State of Mind
Repetitious music can swing in two directions. Done badly it can induces a sense of nausea and claustrophobia, but at its best it move us out of the linearity of time and into the ever present ecstasy of the now. Luckily for us, Axel Willner’s, otherwise known as the Field, latest album Looping State of Mind creates some the most life affirming and transcendent moments that one can derive from a listening experience. Over the past two albums, the Field has been subtly redefining the parameters of electronic music by exploring the micro-sonic possibilities of the loop. On Looping State of Mind, Willner enlarges his palette, adding organic drums, bass guitars, and even chord changes to his highly synthetic, repeating equations. These additions help the album to operate in that ambiguous grey zone between dancing in your head or on a floor. The outcome is a much more rich, full, and three dimensional sound for Willner, allowing his ecstatic equations to leap out of their two dimensional confines and into your body/mind-synchronizing your booty and brain into the possibilities of the present.
More: Our interview with Willner.
11. The Weeknd - House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes Of Silence
Determined to make an imprint on the scene like an asteroid touching down on flat farmland, Abel Tesfaye's designed his project The Weeknd to appear with not one but three delicate, devastating, rich and warped albums made of urban doubt and drugged devastation. The first, House of Balloons, couched raw and unsettling lyricism under Beach House samples and Tesfaye's treated vocals, further swirling the buffer between indie rock and R&B. The second, Thursday, was a confident sequel, using ricocheting snare rolls and moody synthesizers to kick things off with the (comparatively) up-tempo “Lonely Star,” and later capitalized on his love of serials with the double gut punch “The Birds Part 1” and “The Birds Part 2.” And lo and behold, the third promised album, Echoes of Silence, just dropped. If he didn't already make 2011 his year, there's no doubt that Tesfaye will own 2012.
12. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
Few debut records in today’s indie-rock landscape have received the level of critical adulation and breadth of cultural saturation as Fleet Foxes’ 2008 self-titled effort. The Seattle sextet arrived on the scene seemingly fully evolved, with achingly beautiful vocal harmonies, gentle folk instrumentation and mysteriously imagistic lyrics adding up to a majestic American folk record for the 21st century. Its overwhelming success, however, made it a difficult act to follow. Front man and songwriter Robin Pecknold has spoken about the self-induced pressure and subsequent creative struggle that delayed the completion of a follow-up for over two years. The making of Helplessness Blues forced Pecknold to turn inward, temporarily costing him friends and a relationship and inducing an endless feedback loop of obsessive tinkering and existential doubt. It’s a situation that might have shipwrecked a lesser talent, but fortunately, Pecknold and his band are not lesser talents. On Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes take what they do best - traditional folk melodies, ornate, Brian Wilson-esque arrangements and radiant harmonies - and update the formula with an expanded instrumental repertoire and tighter songwriting. The result is an album arguably stronger than their debut.
Pecknold’s struggle to break free from his own past and limitations is present in the album’s lyrics, which are more direct than the abstract ruminations from Fleet Foxes’ debut. On the title track, the 25-year-old wanderer grapples with the notion of individuality, wondering if it might be more fulfilling to be a “functioning cog in some great machinery/ Serving something beyond me.” These personal explorations are particularly resonant with 20- and 30-somethings questioning whether the definition of personal freedom they’ve known all their lives is relevant today. They’re delivered with Pecknold’s arresting tenor, a beautiful, plangent instrument that is adorned with sun-spangled harmonies and a rich array of antiquated acoustic instrumentation. Tucked into the corners of the reverb-heavy acoustic guitars, you’ll find saxophone, mandolin, glockenspiel, timpani, Tibetan singing bowls, and a zither-like instrument called a Marxophone. But make no mistake: Helplessness Blues is still a folk album, picking up on the tradition of Simon and Garfunkel or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
The album concludes with “Grown Ocean”, an uptempo song about a vision of the bucolic paradise Pecknold’s been seeking. “In that dream I could hardly contain it,” he sings, over a pounding drumbeat, “all my life I will wait to attain it.” In the meantime, Fleet Foxes will have to be content with filling themselves and their listeners with the kind of elegant beauty few other musicians are capable of creating.
More: Fleet Foxes live at the Moody Theater and Stubb's.
13. My Morning Jacket - Circuital
Opening the album Circuital with the sound of a gong on the track "Victory Dance" is akin to My Morning Jacket declaring battle. A chorus of vocals emulating a trumpet call comes next followed by well-enunciated lyrics and a build of synth and guitar melodies, all leading to the first beat drop around one minute in. Continuously evolving the song, adding in a few more notes and percussive elements, it really starts building around three minutes with decisive guitar chords and eventually a chorus of "Hope to dance the victory dance in the evening's setting sun". Then just as it appears to be running out of steam, the song culminates in a vicious battle for the melody around five minutes along, leaving the listener ready for more epic sounds. Cue the title track "Circuital".
At a relatively expansive seven minutes and twenty seconds long, the song never drags or seems repetitive, or for that matter, too jam-bandy. It even features the famously sweet croons of Jim James' angelic vocals towards the end, and is followed up on this flexible album by the entirely different "The Day Is Coming". Several of the shorter tracks on the album, including "Wonderful (The Way I Feel)" and "Outta My System" were actually written by James for inclusion in the new Muppet movie but didn't make the final cut. Thankfully they ended up on his band's sixth studio album, which was recorded entirely in a church gymnasium in their hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. This live tracking method faithfully captured the band's energetic and ethereal performance, serving as a welcome respite from the previous album's experimental vibes on Evil Urges
Circuital seems to have the ability to create wider appeal to a mainstream audience, mostly based on a few pop-like songs such as "Outta My System" and "Holding on to Black Metal," while keeping true to the group's indie rock and atmospheric roots.
More: Our interview with Bo Koster before their ACL performance in September.
14. Cults - Cults
There's something to be said for brevity. On the strength of just a couple of blog-released tracks, tastemakers packed Cults' shows at SXSW 2011 to see how the Phil Spector-influenced duo of Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin would do in a longer format. As it turns out, even that left audiences wanting more. The eleven tracks and thirty-four minutes of the band's self-titled debut are nearly all earworms, blending their gimmick (cult leader speeches as background noise) into a haze behind their poppy, modern Wall Of Sound. At times, it almost sounds like a choir of kids instead of an adult duo, and that's part of the charm. The lyrics play darkly off the sun and haze of the shoegazey production: these are damaged love songs, not pop hymns, despite what they sound like on the surface. The male portion of "Abducted" kicks off with "I knew right then that I'd never love her." But he dates her anyhow; it's that kind of record. Some will argue that nothing here is entirely new, and that's fair. But the mix of troubled words, blissful melodies, and beautiful production rang more true to our ears than any of the other beachy, sunny bands of the moment. Cults are on to something - and we can't wait for the next thirty-four minutes of it.
15. Destroyer - Kaputt
Though 2011 may have been the year when the '80s underbelly of yacht rock and cheesy saxophone (see: Bon Iver and M83, among others) resurfaced in a hail of unironic legitimacy, it may have been the early-year release of Kaputt which acted as the signal call of what was the come. Because when this album crashed the party with its boozy, poeticizing languidity, the first reaction for many was “what the hell,” with a profound appreciation only coming later, after the raised eyebrows had fallen. Further, this album, Bejar’s ninth as Destroyer, may have been the strongest proof yet that he’s a one-of-a-kind shapeshifter, someone who despite his lyrical self-referentialism feels no hesitation to shuffle the musical deck with each new release. And don’t get us started on the album’s closer track, which actually served as its prelude as an EP release in 2010: the longer-than-eleven-minutes “Bay of Pigs” set the bar impossibly high for long songs, its endless quotability topped only by how cinematically it moved from exposition to main story to climax and denouement, tackling musics ranging from “ambient” to “dance” along the way.
When we talked to Bejar back in March, he commented on how rock and roll is a young person’s game, while Bejar is now something of an elder statesman in the scene. So there was something in that Goldilocks zone of just right about the fact that—with all these twenty-something '80s copycats rummaging through that decade’s vinyls and cassettes—maybe the purest distillation of that era’s works was done by a man who was actually old enough to do long division when Hall & Oats was the hottest ticket in town.
