20 solid albums that stand up fairly well to repeated listening and closer scrutiny. Tomorrow, I will post my top 20 albums of the year.
The Antlers: Burst Apart. Though less ambitious, Burst Apart is a greater work than the band’s debut. The singer’s voice is still tremulous but no longer sounds like he is struggling to be heard—or craving to be listened to—over the sound of his crippling Neutral Milk Hotel-induced inferiority complex.
Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place. Ethereal. According to Wikipedia, Barwick claims she learned to sing like this from going to a rural church in Louisiana, though I’m guessing her record collection has more Cocteau Twins than sacred harp music.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Wolfroy Goes to Town. Though Will Oldham doesn’t come across as particularly disciplined, he has his craft down to a science. This means that telling his songs or even albums apart at this point is pretty much out of the question—the differences are so subtle, I wonder if even Oldham is capable of doing so. Yet his albums all inhabit particular emotional moments. This one, like last year’s Wondershow of the World, is stark, dark, open.
BRAIDS: Native Speakers. So out of touch am I with the hype-manufacturing apparatus of indie-rock crit, I had to hear about this one through Pierro Scaruffi’s website, which is good because I might not have enjoyed it so thoroughly otherwise. Though not quite as original as some people seem to think it is, Native Speakers is an engaging debut with more than a few surprising moments.
Cults: Cults. A friendly male-female indie-pop duo with a solid sense of melody. Excellent use of the glockenspiel.
Das Racist: Relax. Though I suspect last year’s pair of mixtapes contain most of the music they’ll be remembered for, their official debut offers more of the same, with more hooks and less goofiness. I miss the goofiness but appreciate the conceptual angle and sonic consistency they develop here. And at least the album isn’t so mercilessly frontloaded and inconsistent like the mixtapes.
Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. No, this isn’t a Christian rock album, though it does, like the first two Girls releases, convey a redemptive arc (and, ahem, nostalgia). Clearly inventiveness is not this band’s strong suit, but then the genre we call rock ‘n’ roll has always been marked by its capacity for heteropoeisis. And we can all appreciate the fact that they decided to call the album’s gorgeous centerpiece, a delicate song about lovesickness, “Vomit.”
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Vijay Iyer, Prasanna, and Nitin Mitta: Tirtha. A vast improvement on virtually every jazz-meets-raga set ever because it’s not soiled by the shameless novelty of the thing (that means you, Shakti), nor is it a perfunctory excursion that simply reflects without questioning the globalization of aesthetic (not to mention capital) that makes such fusions possible. Iyer continues to be the best jazz pianist working today (yup, I said it), and his collaborators (on tabla and electric guitar) know their theory, too. One only wishes for more fully-formed compositions than the nine offered here.
Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise. L'hiver tortures mon esprit. Où est mon chapeau? Je ne sais pas qui je suis.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Mirror Traffic. No new ground broken here, not that there’s much left to break. Yet treading and retreading over the same nonsensical lyrics, the same messy sounds, the same offhandedly brilliant guitar lines, Malkmus still taps into something, I won’t say a feeling, no, but it’s worth further investigation, whatever it is, or was, or turns out to be.
The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck. I guess since his last album took its song titles from the Bible, this time he’s gone all spiritualist on us and is taking his cue from a deck of Tarot cards. Interesting, though, that the Tarot cards should provoke the same questions about mortality, fate, and loss.
Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica. Layers and layers and layers and layers and
The Roots: undun. It’s only natural that the greatest hip hop band ever (the most consistently engaging in any case) would want to consolidate the success of their incredible string of three albums from 2006-2010 with a concept album. Really, I understand. It’s just that the musical ideas and occasionally brilliant lyrics are bogged down by the album’s attempt at relating a narrative. This encapsulates, of course, the great error of so many concept albums: the need to be thinking about the next song when you haven’t yet left this one.
SBTRKT: SBTRKT. Intricate drum patterns offset by just the right amount of mid-range wobbling and throaty (non-treated) vocals. An excellent contribution to the musical discourse on “dubstep,” which is turning out to be so much better than dubstep itself.
Teebs: Collections 01. An excellent 30-minute companion piece to last year’s Ardour, Collections 01 (hopefully the inaugural volume of a series) makes great use of the same aesthetic. Rebekah Raff also pops in with her graceful harp playing, live on one track and sampled on others.
Thee Oh Sees: Carrion Crawler/The Dream. An intense-to-the-point-of-being-wearying sort of psych-rock record; the kind of album that must be the mimetic product of years of intensive study.
Thundercat: The Golden Age of the Apocalypse. FlyLo co-produced this, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from an unguided listen—‘cept, of course, for some of the space-age flourishes here and there. Sounds good beside TV on the Radio’s album this year, though I’m not sure to which album that innocuous comment is a compliment—likely both.
TV on the Radio: Nine Types of Light. Smooth—almost too smooth. Simpler than their previous albums, too—almost too simple. This one is more on the “Stork and Owl” side of things than the “Red Dress” side of things, but I can live with that. “New Cannonball Blues” is the standout for me, go figure.
Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My Halo. A laid-back set of pretty guitar-based songs, over which Vile (great rock ‘n’ roll name, by the way), with a drawl wearier than it is iconic, delivers lyrics that don’t make much sense or add up to any recognizable narrative. But, then, no one said anything has to make sense in 2011, much less add up to a narrative.
