Some Favorite Music of 2011 Part 2

Cut Copy - Zonoscope: Dumber than a sack of hammers, Cut Copy make dance music roughly one hundred million times better than Barry Gordy's relatives. New Order would have killed to make some of these tracks. Standout track "Need You Now" is pharmaceutical grade disco.

EMA - Past Lives Martyred Saints: I'm a proud supporter of Sad Bastard music, especially the strain that draws inspiration from Suicide and Nick Cave as opposed to Nick Drake and Elliot Smith.  EMA echos some of the Birthday Party's no wave sensibilities without all that Flannery O'Connor Southern Gothic stuff. There's more than a hint of "16" Gold Blade" in standout track "Butterfly Knife": "Only God can make it right/ in the desert underneath the light/ 20 kisses with a butterfly knife," which is frankly an awesome thing to sing in a song.

Fucked Up - The Life of David: The Life of David is very long (19 tracks over 1 hour and 21 minutes) very loud (punishingly so), very ambitious (It is a concept album - nay, it a ROCK OPERA, with an incomprehensible plot line with 80's anarchists blowing up light bulb factories), very baroque (some of these songs have pretty dense structures for pop songs - intro, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, verse, bridge, callback to an earlier song, chorus, solo, chorus, coda), and sometimes very grating (lead singer Pink Eye is an oldskool hardcore screamer, and he's not bad at it, but there's a LOT of incomprehensible screaming going on here). Still, it's pretty fucking great.

Jay-Z & Kayne West - The Three Great Songs on Watch The Throne: "No Church in the Wild." "N*ggers in Paris." "Otis." Those are some freaking great songs. Otherwise, eh.

Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo (with bonus addition of War on Drugs - Slave Ambient): Kurt Vile's got

Radiohead - The King of Limbs: No one cares what I think about Radiohead's last record, but I will tell you that I like it. If Neu! had continued to make music after Neu! ‘75 (and if one of the two dudes wasn’t dead), “The King of Limbs” is what I’d imagine they would sound like today.

The Rural Alberta Advantage - Departings: There’s something upsetting and addictive about the Rural Alberta Advantage’s second record - a collection of propulsive anthems about young love and small town ennui, subjects I thought I had no need to hear sung about ever again. The bleating voice of lead singer Nils Edenloff has some of the nasal urgency of Jeff Mangum, as most reviewers have observed, but his songwriting doesn’t have the same holy resonance or mystical overtones of Neutral Milk Hotel, which may be good for Nils and his mental health, but which renders all NMH comparisons moot. No, these songs are the kind of things one wants to shout along to at some 500 person capacity venue no matter how dirt stupid it makes one look. The reason any of this works is because the drumming is something like 400 times better than your average indie-rock band. That’s my theory, anyway. All I know is that I could not stop listening to this record. “Under the Knife” and “Tornado of ‘87” are under my skin, repeated endlessly while I’m on my excercycle (is that a thing real people use, or is it just something I say to amuse myself because it sounds preposterous? I don’t really need to know). I also know I’m actively mad at how much I like those songs, because it feels like something a 15 year old should love, and I am not 15.

Some Favorite Music Records of 2011 Part 1

These will be in some sort of order, alphabetic or otherwise - although definitely not in some ill defined Order of Quality. However, a proviso: Spotify has kind of fucked up my ability to think about music by making almost everything even more free and super easy to access. I no longer have any grip on what constitutes An Important Record outside of the very obvious (basically, it boils down to "is Kayne involved? What about Drake?"). I still think it is useful to spend time with Important Records, and to think about them with some of the critical thinking skills our elementary school teachers tried to impart on us, because popular music is in many ways the most base of all the arts, because it connects with us in the subterranean recesses of our brains and bodies, because there are many people who enjoy Kreayshawn and LMFAO in non-ironic ways, because I'll admit to enjoying Kreayshawn in an ironic way, because enjoying anything ironically is the first step towards being an awful and irredeemable person, because that is the moment curiosity and investment in the larger cultural conversation dies, because music once was such a central pillar of my life and my self definition, because I fucking love writing and recording my own music, because I've always been as attracted to criticism as I've been to the text itself... just because, obviously. As I grow older, I grow more aware that my opinion is basically worthless. Still, I need to express it - and in the process, my opinion gains gravitas, and my skill at expressing it improves. So, onward we trudge:

Battles - Gloss Drop: Battles is not a dubstep band. They never employ wobble bass. However, they do know how to engineer a Heavy Drop that would be the envy of, I dunno, Joy Oribison. While some of their compositions on this record rely a little to heavily on making squiggly noises for the sake of making a squiggly noise, the propulsive, cascading repetitions and interlocked sheets of noise congealed into one of the most satisfying experiences I've had listening to music while walking home from the bus station after midnight in years. "Sundome" is the standout track, with guest vocalist and Boredoms leader Yamantaka Eye howling euphoric nonsense over a colossal groove until the seams of sanity unravel at the song's climax. 

James Blake - James Blake: As happens every year since the founding of Pitchfork Media some fifteen years ago, some preposterously named new genre of music built awareness and bewildered my parents by having the audacity to exist. This year, Chillwave seemed to rise above the miasma, at least until bitter people started yelling at Lana Del Rey (I still don't know what a Lana Del Rey is). James Blake sort of became the consensus "best Chillwave guy" early this year after releasing his self titled debut, as far as I can understand, and with reason. Although I'm only slightly more comfortable talking about Chillwave than I was talking about Lana Del Rey, it seems to be a sparse, skittish type of late-period Portishead music with a lot of treated vocals and loneliness. "Limit to Your Love" is the standout track, a staggeringly beautiful track driven by a simple R&B piano vamp and a hugely impressive vocal performance from the young Englishman with the same name as the somewhat famous American tennis player who went to high school with John Mayer.

Bill Callahan - Apocalypse: The former Smog, Callahan has had one of the longest, most consistent careers in independent music, well known for his opaque black humor ("Dress Sexy at My Funeral," "Prince Alone in the Studio") his weirdly moving explorations of strange things ("Teenage Spaceship"), and his dating of gorgeous indie darlings (Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom). Apocalypse is probably his best record, eight long songs dominated by Callahan's creakily honeyed baritone and oblique and unknowable lyrics that veer from plainspoken ("Drover") to simultaneously stupid and borderline genius ("America!").  This is Callahan's sparsest record since dropping the "Smog" moniker after "A River Ain't to Deep to Love," although the arrangements are still gorgeous, especially on the standout track, "Baby's Breath," a shambling, tempo-shifting song that seems to be about spousal murder or gardening, or maybe both. 

Blackout Beach - Fuck Death: Cary Mercer's obsessive quest to tackle every huge topic in the history of human thought continues on Fuck Death, which subjects war, honor, and valor with the same verve and historic sweep as Blackout Beach's last record, Skin of Evil, tackled love, obsession, and jealousy. However, like that last Blackout Beach record, this weighty subject matter is handled without quite the same baroque grandiosity that can make the primary outlet for Mercer's obsessions, the band Frog Eyes, such a hard sell for those who haven't already bought into his very idiosyncratic style. While the very high degree of difficulty in deciphering Mercer's cryptic, allusion-laced lyrics has been lessened somewhat on this record, these aren't exactly Pete Seeger songs, friends. He even sings "you should be ashamed, Philistine" before embarking on the most cacophonous jumble of lyrics on this record, "Hornet's Fury Into the Bandit's Mouth," - the hell if I know what the fuck that refers to - and although "the grace of flight is alright" might be my favorite single line this year, I'm fairly perplexed as to what it means. Shouldn't the grace of flight be something more than merely alright? The standout track on the record is it's centerpiece, "Be Forewarned, The Night Has Come," a song that opens with the buzzing synthesizers that dominate this record before shifting suddenly into a jagged explosion of guitars that sound like they're being played though dying amplifiers.

Chad VanGaalen - Diaper Island: Chad VanGaalen would be grandfathered into this year's best record list simply because he was instrumental in last year's best record, "Public Strains" by Women. Even if "Diaper Island" was not up to the Canadian's usual standards. Even if it was awful. No reason to worry: "Diaper Island" is just as beguiling as VanGaalen's historic output, a screwy lo-fi collection of pop masterpieces. Standout tracks abound, from the haunting "Sara" to the spiky "Freedom for a Police Man" but my favorite is "Heavy Stones," for inexpressible reasons.

Crystal Antlers - Two-Way Mirror:  Crystal Antlers are mining a vein of 60's garage rock like that cataloged in the Nuggets box sets with uneven results, but Two-Way Mirror's highs are so high they induce vertigo. "Jules' Story" kicks things off as well as any first track in the history of long players, and that segues directly into "Seance," a carnival-esque ditty that must be what Organ Grinders play in Hell. While there's a lot of aimless noise that doesn't amount to much following those knockouts, it still gets a mention in this list.

David Thomas Broughton - Outbreeding: "The Complete Guide to Insufficiency," is one of those holy records for me, like "In An Aeroplane Over the Sea" or "Black Sheep Boy" or "Third/Sister Lovers." It means something. It was recorded live in a single take at a church in Leeds - church bells can be heard in the background sometimes - and while it incorporated bits of written songs, much of it was improvised and looped into Broughton's pedals, with flubbed notes or bad ideas repeating until they bled into the fabric of the music. Anchoring that beautiful disorder: his baritone, which sounds so little like any other musician I can't quite find a reference to it in the vast catalog of weird singers I love. The Yorkshire accent is very prominent in both pronunciation - "fucked" becomes "fooked" - and sentiment - "God loves a murderer; there's so much sin to forgive" - although I'm basing that latter observation without knowing any Yorkshire-men personally. It just seems like the kind of thing a guy from Yorkshire would think. Here's a clip from a few years ago of Broughton on Spanish television:

"Outbreeding" is not like "Insufficiency." He's not alone, for one. There're other musicians playing some loosely defined arrangements in all but one song, and the exciting spontaneity of Broughton's live performance feels forced into weird places, like the circuit bent toy blurts that arrive unannounced in "Perfect Louse" and exit before they've time to explain themselves. The blips work in that live clip because you can clearly see how little thought went into putting them in the song beforehand; here, in a studio setting, one can sense some calculation and editing that robs that kind of thing of it's power. Still, a lot has been gained in the transition: "Nature" has a force that nothing Broughton had done heretofore because of the rhythm section, accenting his wry dour humor more effectively than a random Mario sound drop ever could. My standout track is the seemingly little loved "Onward We Trudge," whose title does adequately describe the sensation one gets listening to it - but it's a hypnotic trudge, and at the conclusion one is surprised to find themselves a better person for having trudged though it.