My top 20 albums of 2011, ordered roughly according to preference. This list is, of course, subject to change and fluctuation depending on my mood, and, I can only hope, will shift following my discovery of whatever great 2011 albums that lie waiting to be discovered.
1. Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges. Stetson’s second solo album is a complex, visionary work made up of hypnotic, haunting parts. More than an accomplished aesthetic achievement, this album offers a powerful re-contextualization of “jazz” for our (rightly) category-cautious age. Listen to this alongside Ernst Reijseger and Mola Sylla’s Requiem for a Dying Planet and try to imagine it as the soundtrack of a Werner Herzog film.
2. Bill Callahan: Apocalypse. Six great long songs that deal with freedom indirectly and one slight Zen ditty that deals with freedom (too) directly. Because, as he announces in his bizarre ode to America, “Everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention.” His, I take it, is the unfortunate series of pointlessly noisy anti-folk bedroom recordings with which he opened his career. He’s been getting steadily better ever since he learned the difference between subjectivity and introspection and chose the former in favor of the latter.
3. James Blake: James Blake. Blake’s distinctive anti-soul croon, pushed and pulled uncomfortably back and forth, inhabits an eroding musical world of minimalist post-dubstep beats that click-clack under sawtooth-y keys and manipulated self-samples. Eschewing conventional structure and any sense of narrative progression, Blake reduces each song to a moment, which he then turns over and over, studying it as it crumbles and slips through his fingers. Blake's full length debut is some kind of minimalist masterpiece.
4. Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What. He’s 69 and he’s still got it—if not more so than ever before. In what is easily his best album since Graceland, possibly his self-titled solo debut, Simon sings about God and angels and making gumbo and (gasp!) Christmas sans nostalgia or sentimentality (well, maybe a little sentimentality); the accompanying music is a perfectly assembled, unfussy complement. One hopes to grow old as gracefully and wear one’s age with this much comfort and contentment.
5. tUnE-yArDs: w h o k i l l. Leftist feminist politics collide with Beefheart-ian instrumental digressions and a powerful, agile voice. I interpret the album title as a question and the songs as further elaborations on the question. The answers don’t come easy.
6. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up. The irony is that an explicitly pro-black hip hop group, whose name is a reference to Nation of Islam mythology, decided to become the first black group (I think) to sign to the Seattle-based indie label Sub Pop, a strategic move that effectively cemented their reputation in the notoriously white circles of indie snobbery who first acclaimed them. The not-irony is that this album is great. P.S. They’re smart enough to recognize the irony and play it to their advantage (note the album’s title).
7. TOKiMONSTA: Creature Dreams / Side 2 of L.A. Series 8. By cleaning up the blurry post-hip-hop sound into distinct and discrete layers, TOKiMONSTA foregrounds the genre’s unconventional, Monk-ish sense of rhythm. The mini-LP and her half of L.A. Series 8 work as a nice complement to Matthewdavid’s ultra-textural Outmind in the sense that the two are excellent distillations of two things members of the Brainfeeder collective do well.
8. Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself. Five ace songs that emphasize how much we need another full-length from this deplorably adorable Swede who seems to effortlessly cough up great melodies and wry, rhyming stories.
9. St. Vincent: Strange Mercy. St. Vincent’s greatest work (so far) is also her most discreet—even the noisiest and fussiest arrangements here convey broodiness rather than rambunctiousness. Yet the threat of violence keeps surfacing from the album’s dark eroticism like a shark’s fin in the ocean.
10. Tom Waits: Bad as Me. As expected, Waits’ latest retreads familiar ground, which is to say it revels in the perverse and seedy side streets and back alleys (not to mention family homes) that make possible the collective imagination of America(na). If his turns of phrase are beginning to sound familiar and routine, though, at least Bad as Me is musically engaging, with Tom turning out some of the best blues of his whole weird and wicked career.
11. Thurston Moore: Demolished Thoughts. Don’t be shocked that Moore has crafted such a beautiful album; Sonic Youth’s squealing feedback jams have always been beautiful. Rather, be shocked that Moore is able to reach such heights without those gnarly feedback jams at all.
12. The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. A collection of repurposed 78s, muted with the dust in their grooves, lightly edited into a series of jarring tonal shifts. “The Caretaker” creates an auditory world that (and here’s the important thing) openly disputes its own existence, provoking important questions about intellectual property and the uneasy distinction between being and not-being. 45 minutes of total texture-porn from a master of the form.
13. Battles: Gloss Drop. An eccentric, mostly instrumental sophomore album that improves on 2007’s Mirrored (this time, even the short texture pieces are worth repeated listening). The subversive soundtrack to global capitalism that anticipates its eventual collapse with bated breath.
14. Serengeti: Family and Friends. Not for nothing is the first word of this album “Dark.” Family and Friends is a stark and challenging effort from this talented and underrated MC, executed with at times brutal honesty. Serengeti’s sensitivity to socio-economic conditions (already well documented in 2006’s Noticeably Negro) helps tremendously, while the MC’s story telling abilities (already well documented in 2008’s Dennehy: Lights, Camera, Action) allow him to express more in these mostly 3 minute songs than most of his contemporaries manage in whole bloated albums. His characters are complex, conflicted, and believable individuals whose frustrations come from their inability to live up to an overarching ideology of impossible success, and whose hope, an important undercurrent throughout the album, comes from their ability to begin to question that ideology.
15. Gary Clark, Jr.: Bright Lights. Y’see, “the blues” is not a genre in the sense that it can be resurrected or reconstituted. The blues, like horror or love, is a state of being that one inhabits and expresses through a carefully constructed grammar. So be wary of critics who position Clark as the savior or redeemer of a lost, dead, or somehow dissolved genre. He’s not that. He is, however, exceptionally talented, if this 4-track EP is to be believed.
16. Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx: We’re New Here. A post-dubstep reimagining of the late Scott-Heron’s 2010 swan song, I’m New Here, with a couple of selected older cuts. There are plenty of obvious ways to go about a project like this, and be thankful that young Jamie xx pretty much systematically avoids them all. Also be thankful he retained the pace and reflexive flavor of the original by remixing the under 30 second interludes as well.
17. Burial: Street Halo. Since Untrue remains one of the few straight electronica albums that I can stand to listen to all the way through without getting either sleepy or fidgety, it goes without saying that this EP can’t quite compare. And yet comparisons are inescapable, since these songs sound so bloody similar to the ones on Untrue, which, it now occurs to me, is actually a pretty good compliment.
18. Matthewdavid: Outmind. One of two excellent Brainfeeder-related releases this year (the other being TOKiMONSTA’s sadly overlooked Creature Dreams). With beats properly submerged in an abstract haze, Matthewdavid dreams up auditory texture that verges on tactile.
19. Atlas Sound: Parallax. In general, I’ve found Bradford Cox’s solo output less interesting (well, less brilliant, anyway) than his work with Deerhunter—working with a band sharpens his writing, and even the collage experiments and stoned flights of fancy somehow work in the context of an album. Yet Parallax, true to its title, offers something more than just Deerhunter in miniature—the lovely melodies and singing, the songs and sounds, all are arranged to evoke a feeling of displacement. It’s just that the object being displaced is not the music or Cox himself—it’s you, the listener.
20. AraabMuzik: Electronic Dream. “And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the scarlet stepped pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.” (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 52)
