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2011: MEH

So here it is, 2011, the fourteenth-ish year for which I have records of my Top 10s, and it is without question the most paltry year for great music I can remember, a year when I struggled to even come up with enough albums and singles deserving of inclusion on my precious lists, which usually overflow into the 40s and 50s. Of course, one could point to my graying hair and sagging under-eye bags as evidence of my increasing lack of connection with The Youth and their Culture, and sure, I'll happily admit to just not getting Lana Del Rey. Kids these days and their YouTubes! However, as I write this, various publications like Spin, Rolling Stone and NME (and Pitchfork in the songs category) have already published their Best Ofs for 2011, and I find their choices not too edgy for my aging, increasingly conservative tastes, but in fact, the opposite: retrograde and dull. So I don't think it's just me. As further evidence, there appears to be a much greater lack of critical consensus than usual, and many of the album choices (Bon Iver, Fucked Up, Adele, Kurt Vile) are folky or rocky throwbacks that seem utterly oblivious to the one area of current musical culture that seems vibrant and alive: the bubbling, ever-mutating world of electronic dance music. I mean, can we just say out loud that "Rolling In the Deep" isn't so much a tribute to "Gimme Shelter" as it is a rip-off?

It's a puzzle: why are 2011's Best Ofs so Worst Of? In the past, I've tried to look to historical, political and economic cycles to try and understand the accompanying musical cycles, like how the Oughts seemed in many ways a rerun of the '80s--oppressively conservative government, economic bingeing, apocalyptic anxiety, and a flowering of experimental pop music. However, we now seem to be in uncharted waters (worst economic crisis since the Great Depression--what was hot back then?) and I'm not sure what's going on. There are some parallels with the late '70s, when a dionysian disco culture took our minds off economic malaise and a beleagured progressive president, and of course there were the (homophobic) hordes rising up against disco in reactionary fervor. But if that's true, is dubstep the new disco? Are bros the new homos? The mind reels. What was I talking about?

More than anything, though, I guess I blame the internet. (Old guy blames internet for things not being like they used to--yes, that's what's happening). But seriously, it seems like the internet is finally having a real impact not only on how we get our music, but what kind of music we like, and what kind of music we make. It's a world where exciting, flavor-of-the-minute singles get viral impact straight out of the box, and then seem cheap and tired a few weeks later, and God forbid anyone stretch that concept over an entire album. It's as if the very ideas of Important Album and Memorable Mass Appeal Single are themselves becoming outmoded, and thus, the only works that qualify as such must themselves embody (or at least acknowledge) that inherent outmodedness. Will there come a day when dorky wannabe music critics posting favorite album and single lists of the year will finally stop, and we'll be forced to just tweet hourly updates about whatever random new space-disco single we found on Soundcloud? One can only wonder. In the meantime, though, there were a few albums and singles this year that still seemed to me not only enjoyable, but, well, important.

BEST OF 2011: ALBUMS

1 PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Leave it to Polly Jean to take the above-discussed trend of looking to the past to an extreme, rewinding not to the groovy '70s but to World War I (!), both for subject matter and for a wistfully, strangely out-of-time musical style. Fans of Harvey's cathartic "50 ft Queenie" days might be initially baffled by this album, opening as it does with a plinking, swinging rhythm and Harvey pinching her voice into a thin, high-pitched warble, but the quasi-music hall sound is a perfect fit for these bleak and often gory tales, told from varying characters' perspectives. In fact, the idea of fully immersing herself in a conceptual framework and character has precedent in tracks like 1995's "Down By the Water," but while that (great) song felt a bit like a self-contained fairy tale, Shake is devastatingly relevant. As NME put it, "Hemingway has the war novel; Polly Jean Harvey has claimed the war album," and just as Hemingway made you weep with shock at both the horror of war's specifics and their implications for the nature of humanity, Shake's references to soldiers falling "like lumps of meat" evoke both antiquated tales and the nightly news, and thus have an even more profound impact. "Oh America/Oh England," laments the chorus of "The Glorious Land," crying that the "glorious fruit of our land" is "deformed children," and while its antique phrasing and folk song shuffle make it sound like a warped 78 rpm record from a pile of 1920s antiques, it could easily apply to Iraq, especially since in one chorus, Harvey talk-sings "America" with a sighing sarcasm, like an awestruck immigrant first sighting the statue of liberty. It's brutal. What's odd is that despite the abject bleakness of the subject matter, it's an oddly euphoric listen, its sound wonderfully rich and strange; take "Written on the Forehead," which is basically a reworked cover of reggae innovator Niney the Observer's 1970 hit "Blood and Fire" crossed with "Rubberband Man," with a repeated chant of "let it burn, let it burn," that's both nihilistic and strangely jubilant. It's an example of how Shake effortlessly melds seemingly disparate styles and eras in ways that always serve the album's aesthetic. It's also worth noting that her performance at the Warfield was the best live show I saw all year, a triumph of restrained musicianship and emotional power.

Full disclosure: I must admit to a certain bias towards this album from a purely instrumental standpoint. Many of the songs are based around the autoharp, which was one of the first instruments I picked up as a small child. My maternal grandparents were very musical--my grandfather, a trumpeter, was even asked to tour with a Lawrence Welk orchestra but turned it down to stay with his young family. Although he died when I was 3, I grew up spending lots of time at Granny's house, and I'd often pull down her autoharp from where it sat on a shelf in the TV room. The autoharp is a great instrument for a child, as the chord notations are printed right on the buttons, allowing you to see, for instance, what the difference is between majors, minors, and 7ths, and what chords sound good next to each other. To this day I feel like I have an instinctive musical sense that I credit to endless hours spent ham-fistedly banging away at that autoharp. Of course, Granny could actually play it, and hearing it in use on this album brings back hazy looking-up-from-child-height memories of her, strumming it delicately and singing along in her own vibrating falsetto, an image which I think Ms. Harvey would say is exactly appropriate. It's of course impossible for me to say whether the album would be such a clear choice for me as my favorite of the year if I didn't have such a sentimental connection to its central instrument, but I truly think it stands alone as the unequaled musical achievement of 2011, and, in fact, PJ Harvey's greatest album.

2. Little Dragon - Ritual Union
Here's another album that connects the disparate styles in service of a unified, modern statement, but in service of an aesthetic that's almost diametrically opposed to PJ Harvey's richly organic work. Here, the touchstones are techno, breathy jazz, Kraftwerk, Prince and Can, all distilled down to a sort of crystalline purity. This is profoundly minimalist stuff, for sure, and while Pitchfork, in their middling review, seemed to interpret this as lazy songwriting, I look at it entirely differently. On Union, Little Dragon seems to have adopted as a mantra the tale I've heard of Prince producing "When Doves Cry": he completed the song, and then started taking tracks and instruments away until he couldn't any more, leaving only a perfectly executed "frame" of a song, in which each element is functional and vital. But while "Doves" was an emotionally cathartic tale of loss, Union has a chillier perspective, as evidenced by its deliberately awkward title, as if asexual aliens were observing a wedding: "Beep, what is this ritual union you hu-mans engage in?" Track three, "Brush the Heat," offers further evidence of my Little Dragon-as-space-aliens theory, as it offers the most austere interpretation ever of bumping club sounds, with a clinking cowbell that's a cross between Salt 'n' Pepa's "Push It" and Fierce Ruling Diva's "Rub It In." Yet the track is still oddly majestic and sexy, sort of like Bjork's robot-makeout video, or a dance party on the "2001" space station. It's all more mechanical even than, well, a Machine Dream, (sorry) but as usual, the expressive and sultry voice of Yukimi Nagano offers the perfect match to all the blips and clanks, as enticing and hypnotic as a lullaby.

3. Com Truise - Galactic Melt
I wanted to hate everything about this album, from the artist's nose-thumbingly lazy name (fuck you, Mord Fustang!) to its jokey '80s cover art, and so it's a tribute to its awesomeness that I turned around completely. Of course, as an admitted and unrepentant Boards of Canada junkie, I can get into anything downtempo and noodly that sounds like it might have soundtracked an early '80s science TV show, so, yes, there was an entry point. But the more I listened to Melt, the more I realized it was going somewhere very different from Boards, who are at their best when they're evoking a hazy memory of childhood's mystery. Com Truise is Boards of Canada for adults, and I mean that in the Cinemax sense: this is futuresexxmuzikk. Melt gets right to business: after a brief intro, we're thrust into the first song, "VHS Sex," and its pumping rhythm and vaguely sinister tones, which intermittently glitch into quadruple-time, are more "Videodrome" than "In Search Of." The blips of hyperactivity amidst the standard 80 bpm patterns continue throughout (making Boards of Canada seem unnecessarily sleepy in comparison) and like Mr. Truise is barely containing his jittery, horny self. But Melt manages to focus on the task at hand, and achieves ecstasy on tracks like "Flightwave" and "Brokendate," with soaring melodies erupting at unexpected moments. (Is that enough sleazy vocabulary for you?) If you want a sexy soundtrack without resorting to R&B cliches, allow me to recommend this album. As a reviewer wrote on iTunes, "I just galactic melted in my pants."

4. TV On the Radio - Nine Types of Light
It's fascinating, and inspiring, to watch how this band (America's greatest?) continues to merge its various instincts, apocalyptic and romantic, political and personal, weaving them together into thoroughly contemporary songs that seem to embody America in 2011. Like most of us, they've calmed down from their post-9/11 anxiety, and that makes the music less urgent, for sure, and one might even say this is an album about... love? The opening track, the ironically-titled (Blur-referencing?) "Second Song," starts with a sinister Stevie Nicks guitar lick but soon erupts into a rapturous horn-led chorus, encouraging "lovers on a mission" to shift "into the light." The counterpoint between a melancholy beat and lovesick lyrics is never more apparent than on lead single "Will Do," which balances an open romantic invitation ("any time will do") with unabashedly sorrowful melodies, the lament of the damaged, the heartbroken. You know, maybe they're still feeling pretty apocalyptic, now that I think about it: "I can't stop thinking how it's all gone wrong," goes "Repetition," this album's "Wolf Like Me," but even that song gets romantic, dropping down to half-speed as the protagonists "lock eyes." This may be TV on the Radio's "Love in the Age of Obama," always looking over one's shoulder, not sure it's even worth it, but still, finding connections in the unlikeliest of places.

5. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
It's a tribute to the greatness of this band that a half-assed, barely-over-30-minutes "mini-album" that for all intents and purposes sounds like Tom Yorke's noodly Coachella solo project still manages to be such a satisfying, surprising listen. Like most Radiohead albums, it grows on you over time, something we sort of forgot with the immediate, accessible beauty of In Rainbows, an era-defining work that would be unfair to hold up against Limbs. But with a little commitment, this album blooms into some glorious colors of its own. While shuffling, skittering rhythms at first seem to be the focus, the album slowly reveals melodic complexity: "Little By Little" offers, underneath the chattering percussion, a restrained intensity not unlike something off of OK Computer, with intricate and subtle guitar work, and "Codex," most of all, harkens back to the pure piano pleasures of Amnesiac's "Pyramid Song." "Give Up the Ghost," with its looped Yorke vocals, is perhaps the most traditionally satisfying track, although again, it's basically a Thom Yorke solo project. This is Radiohead in experimental, searching mode, pulling at intriguing threads that don't always lead anywhere, and letting individual members wander off on tangents, but if that's what helps keep them happy, and the results are still this moving and real, it's hard to argue with their methods.

6. Tycho - Dive
Not to harp on Pitchfork (although I love harping on Pitchfork), but their 7.0 review of this album fell into the exact same critical fallacy that so often frustrates me about their analysis: criticizing what a work isn't, rather than what it is. In this case the reviewer likes the album fine but then starts asking for "a tinge of darkness" and "more surprises," requests that would make this into, uh, hmm, a different album. I'm all for constructive criticism, but docking apples for not being Nine Inch Nails is a bit silly. Dive is what it is: a beautiful and meticulously constructed album, profoundly pleasing and richly organic, despite its obvious synthy influences like, again, the great Boards of Canada. Unlike Boards, Dive always sounds like an album that could be played by a live band, with soft drums, electric piano melodies, and reverby guitar sounds, and like its cover, it's as lovely as a sunset.

7. Low - C'mon
Even as big a fan of these Minnesotans as myself, back on that late summer day in 1994 when I was driving out of Minneapolis for good, broke and alone, listening to them perform songs from "I Could Live In Hope" live on the University of Minnesota's AM station, wouldn't have predicted that 16 years later, they'd still be making surprising, relevant music, but here they are. Nobody under the age of 35 even remembers the word "slowcore," and their contemporaries have gone the way of the dinosaur, but Low perserveres, and continues on their quest to perfect their troubled lullabies. It was "Witches" that first grabbed me, a Neil Young-style ballad with distorted guitars and big minor chords, complete with lyrics that Low does best, quirkily specific ("one night I got up and told my father there were witches in my room/he gave me a baseball bat and said here's what you do") and yet oddly universal. But there's a maturity here that allows every song to arrive at its destination, like "Especially Me," which makes the line "cry me a river" sound brand new, continuing, "so I can float over to you."

8. SBTRKT - S/T
Lots of reviews of this album seem to hold it up in opposition to the turgid skronk of American bro-step and its Skrillexcesses (ahem) and they have a point. But I've never felt that Burial had much of anything to do with Nero, despite the fact that they both seem to be called dubstep, and the honest admission that I quite like them both (does anyone else feel like "Me & You" is the best song Madonna never made?). There's no reason to even compare SBTRKT to, uh, Cookie Monsta. SBTRKT creates delicate and quirky electronic music, with melody, not bass, at the forefront, and often with soulful, affecting vocals leading the way. Okay, "Wildfire" does invite comparisons to dubstep, with its 70 bpm tempo and flirtation with the dreaded wobble bass, but its leftfield melodies (similarly to Santi/ogold's "Creator") pull it back from cliche (as does another stellar vocal performance from Yukimi Nagano). Tracks like "Pharaohs" and "Right Thing to Do" nod at UK bass music and new house styles without feeling like trend-jumping one-offs, and the overall sense is one of dark ecstasy, a party in the sub-basement.

9. Machinedrum - Room(S)
Flying Lotus, on his 2008 Party Ben Top Ten album Los Angeles, illustrated that conurbation's mix of fizzy energy and laid-back cool by weaving layers of samples atop a pretty consistent hip-hop beat, a nod to J Dilla's woozy rhythms. On Room(S), Machinedrum seems to pick up the baton from Flying Lotus, but shifts things up a notch, absorbing the frenetic rhythms of contemporary club culture while maintaining the sonic richness and complexity Flying Lotus exemplifies. Sure, hipper-than-thou publications like Resident Advisor and XLR8R might be tired of the pitched-up R&B vocal trick, but Machinedrum wields it beautifully here, the rearranged vocals adding to the faraway-radio-station vibe. What's interesting is that by doubling the hip-hop bpm with rolling percussion, as often happens here, you sort of end up sounding like the jungle precursor "hardcore" that was a staple of London pirate radio in the early '90s, a style I always loved. But whatever it might be called, Room(S) feels insistently contemporary.

10. The Field - Looping State of Mind
Well, the Top 10 is rounded out with more noodly electronica, but that's sort of what 2011 is all about, and when it's this magnificent and expansive, it's impossible to resist. The Field builds on the promise of their very good 2007 debut album (blissed-out loop-based tracks that rarely come in under eight minutes) by expanding the sonic palette, from opening track "Is This Power," with an easy, sunny tempo and wandering bassline, to "Sweet Slow Baby," which doesn't even really have a tempo, from what I can tell, but throbs with arrhythmic heavenly noise. It's the epic title track that really soars, taking its 10-and-a-half-minute (!) time to get there, but sounding alternately like U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and Underworld's "Two Months Off." That's the Field's real trick: they're symphonic composers, disguised as mild-mannered technoheads.

11. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l
12. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
13. Tom Vek – Leisure Seizure
14. Martyn - Ghost People
15. Co La - Daydream Repeater
16. Unknown Mortal Orchestra - S/T
17. Katy B - On a Mission
18. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up
19. Mastodon - The Hunter
20. Mr. Oizo - Stade 2
21. Wild Flag - S/T

BEST OF 2011: SINGLES

1. Gil Scott Heron & Jamie xx - I'll Take Care of You

I will freely admit to not really getting Scott-Heron's 2010 "comeback" album, I'm New Here, which sounded to me like a crude attempt to update a legend. But leave it to the master of delicately balanced and avant-garde pop, Jamie xx, to not only turn "Take Care" into a great song, but to help me remember what was so great about Scott-Heron in the first place. What originally sounded to my ears like haphazard vocal wanderings suddenly made sense, Scott-Heron's melodic improvisation given a strict, bare-bones structure to hang onto. And now, each gravelly vocal slide seems to carry the weight of the world, sagging with the line "I know you've been hurt," rising up to offer assistance. I hesitate to even call it "melisma," since it's so natural and intuitive, rather than show-offy and brash. I've made much in the past of the great "sad dance" song, where the heartbroken lyrics are both a counterpoint and an echo of the driving, mechanical music, from "Don't You Want Me" to LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great." There's some of that here, for sure, but Mr. xx's warmly organic sounds, like a plaintive guitar line and the insistent piano chords, keep this from becoming too bleak an expression of heartbreak. It's a profoundly moving piece of work that turns ecstatic as looping bits of vocals swirl around each other and warbling synths take up the harmony. We all may carry profound damage, we've loved and we've lost, but the promise of joy still exists, not just to receive but to give, and there's no more fitting eulogy for Mr. Scott-Heron. (As far as the Drake/Rihanna cover/sampling of this track, I don't really care--Rihanna's plaintive reinterpretation of the vocal is sort of nice, but Drake is useless, and the editing is super awkward, so I'm just ignoring it).

2. PJ Harvey - The Words That Maketh Murder
As I said above in describing Ms. Harvey's album, this song, with its references to soldiers falling "like lumps of meat," is a brutally honest depiction of war, from the perspective of a soldier. He rattles off the horrors he's witnessed in a shellshocked way, repeating lines as if trying to convince both the listener and himself that what happened was real. These are the words that describe murder, is one way to read the chorus, but of course, we're really talking about the words that cause murder, that become murder: the orders, the failed diplomacy, the declarations of war. Erasing our battlefield euphemisms still feels like a profoundly important duty today, a lesson we haven't yet learned in the hundred years since WWI, making the song's strange antiquity all the more powerful. After this harrowing account, the song shifts to a coda, where the final line nods devastatingly to Eddie Cochran: "What if I take my problem to the United Nations?" It's a moment that may be music's darkest this year, an abjectly hopeless acknowledgement that (arguably?) humanity's greatest political achievement remains laughably, pathetically insignificant in the face of our unchanging brutal, violent nature.

3. Lil Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot
To me, hip hop lapsed into cliche this year, but leave it to the addled brain of Lil Wayne (and producer Bangladesh) to come roaring back with the freshed sound since "Paper Planes." Of course, it's not like the "Banana Boat" sample is unfamiliar, but it's made so otherworldly over the bottomless, towering bass, it's like hearing it for the first time. I mean, I think it's just basically the word "banana" that's getting looped here, but it just sounds like yelping noise after a while. Wayne is in fine form, offering up weirdly profound lines like "life is the bitch, and death is her sister." While the theme is standard hip hop braggadocio, it's so wild and ridiculous that you can't help but stand in awe.

4. Julio Bashmore - Battle for Middle You
I'm sort of cheating with this and #3 which both emerged at the end of 2010, but had their greatest impact this year, and there was no greater anthem of the triuphmant 2011 return of house music than this. On a micro scale, every detail is pure and simple, a leftfield use of familiar sounds, like a booming 808 bass used on a hypnotic triple-time rhythm, and a pinging doorbell sound that's straight out of classic house but submerged in infinite reverb. Then the crunchy minor-7th rave chords are straight out of, like, Bizarre Inc, but here they seem reversed, building up slowly with spine-tingling effect. The overall feeling is both oddly quiet and also somehow vast, like a rocket into space. It made all other dance music this year sound both overwrought and meager in comparison.

5. The Drums - Money
While this song was a notch faster than just about anything The Smiths ever did, it seems to embody their spirit, complete with wordless moans and a tone of bleak longing straight from the lower class. The tempo is hyper, but the instrumentation is sparse and sedate, so that even the jittery bass seems to float along effortlessly. And of course, what better sentiment to echo the Great Recession than being too broke to buy your love a present?

6. James Blake - Limit to Your Love
Talk about heartbreak. There was no more lovelorn set of piano chords this year than the jazzy motif at the center of this track, and the alternating sections of sub-bass trip-hop make Massive Attack sound cheery. I don't have a problem with Feist, but this version is so much better than her treacly jazz original, so different as to sound like a completely new song. Here I suddenly focus on the three repeated lines: I'm not sure what "a map with no ocean" even is, but it sounds utterly hopeless, a blank wall of endless borders and mountain ranges. Jeez, maybe I do know what it is. Both lyrically and instrumentally, Blake strips things down to almost nothing here, but what there is, is pure, devastating, ice-cold beauty.

7. M83 - Midnight City
Accustomed as I was to the immediate appeal of M83's recent work, it took me a while to come around on "Midnight City," whose shrieking chorus was off-putting at first. But once I caught up to its intensity, I wanted to hear it again and again, and its sudden massive popularity seems to indicate a lot of other people did too. I still love the verses the best, though, with their instantly familiar refrain of "waiting for a ride in the dark," and while that image fits just fine into M83's tradition of exploring nostalgia, the overall feel is much less "retro" than anything on Saturdays = Youth and it's all the better for it.

8. SBTRKT - Wildfire
Another appearance for the 2011 winner of "most in-demand vocalist" Yukimi Nagano, here combined with beats that are just a bit rougher than anything on the Little Dragon album. It's delicate and melodic enough that one hesitates to even call it "dubstep," but the first time I heard it out in a club I was stunned by its raw power and intensity.

9. Washed Out - Amor Fati
Perhaps the most unashamedly enjoyable four minutes of pop music this year, Washed Out brings back the glorious sound of '80s synth pop in a way that's still perfectly modern. While the vocals are right out front, they're lengthened and obscured, something about "these eyes," maybe, "you'll call"? Whatever, you still know exactly what he means, and you can't help but sing along in whatever nonsense your heart desires. I actually think "your heart desires" might be another line.

10. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Niggas in Paris
I just love this beat, a plinky nursery-rhyme keyboard riff over thudding drums, so spare that the transition to the tap-tap snare section is almost unbearably tense. Of course, there's also Jay-Z and Kanye getting ridiculous over the top of it, and while the full album's (pseudo) gold-embossed over-the-top insanity was a bit too much for me, for these three minutes, I just wanted to party along with them.

11. Low - Witches
12. Metronomy - The Bay
13. YACHT - Dystopia
14. Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers
15. The Rapture - How Deep Is Your Love
16. GusGus - Over
17. Cold Cave - Confetti
18. Austra - Beat and the Pulse
19. Jai Paul - BTSTU
20. Jamie xx - Far Nearer

21. Rihanna - We Found Love
22. Nero - Me and You
23. Carte Blanche - With You
24. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Tigers
25. I Break Horses - Winter Beats
26. Friendly Fires - Live Those Days Tonight
27. Joe Goddard - Gabriel
28. Poolside - Do You Believe?
29. Boy 8-Bit - House on the Hill