5. Real Estate – Days
No one can credibly claim to have seen this album coming. When last we saw Real Estate, they were operating pretty conventionally within the vein of light-hearted, beachy, rock that eventually spawned the likes of Surfer Blood and Best Coast, among many others. Their new album, while still firmly ensconced in that aesthetic, is a far more sophisticated, serious effort. Gone are the days of wandering aimlessly down the Pensacola shoreline, metal detector in hand, supposedly in search of the elusive Rolex. Here are the hours of creeping existential dread, of fear commingling with love. The presentation is much the same — heavily influenced by the West Coast mid-century rock scene, with jangly guitars providing the ringing, bouncing foundation for swooning melodic lines soaked through with reverb. By now, that sort of sound is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that Real Estate were doing it before it was the New Normal. But Days proves that in the interim since they helped re-introduce us to this brand of rock, they’ve honed and improved their craft. Always a step ahead of the game, it seems.
4. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Many will remember this publication’s passionate invective against the double album. To be sure, many double albums are little more than self-indulgence masquerading as expansive artistic impulse. It is rare that an message worth hearing actually does take more than a single disc to convey. Usually, double albums are full of fat, and stand in dire need of a fresh set of ears and a final trip to the cutting room. Well, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is a double album. And every single second of it is brutally, vitally, critically necessary to the album as a whole, which serves as conclusive proof that Anthony Gonzalez is the most important electronic musician of our generation. These songs are uniformly masterful. The album is rich, sweeping, immersive, and symphonic, while never sacrificing the intimacy of a bedroom recording. Gonzalez pulls off this balancing act so effortlessly, it’s easy to forget, as a listener, how damn difficult it is to achieve. It is Gonzalez’s typical brand of shoegaze-infused electronic, with rich notes of dream pop and even ambient buried within. It seamlessly incorporates and evokes a kaleidoscopic array of influences (classic and contemporary alike) ranging from My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, and The Knife, all the while retaining its own distinct and undeniable identity. It’s high points, “Midnight City” and “My Tears are Becoming a Sea” stand as the finest cuts from Gonzalez’s already sterling catalog. Anthony Gonzalez is no slouch, but this album is his best — and biggest — album yet.
3. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost
It’s safe to say that Christopher Owens has his fair share of baggage. Most of it is related to women. His second full-length effort finds him trying to tackle the various women that weigh down his heart and his head, be it his mother (“Honey Bunny”) or a long lost girlfriend that grows sweeter with distance (“Jamie Marie”), or something in between. As usual, he does it with his characteristic disarming candor. Owens is comfortable in his own skin, and he has only grown more so since his last record. As a result, this record has the faintest traces of swagger — or, if that’s too strong, perhaps confidence is a more appropriate word — lurking beneath the surface. It’s by no means prominent, but it’s there: beneath the self-loathing, beneath the deprecating comments about his “bony body” and his “dirty hair”. Owens seems more sure — and rightly so — that his is a story that people want to hear, and he tells it more passionately. “Love Like a River” is his most impassioned performance yet, brimming with quiet, strained pathos. On the whole, this record has a better arc than anything that Girls have released: the songs are more tightly written, the performances more polished, the mixes cleaner. It’s just a better product. No longer can Christopher Owens simply be called that guy who wants to sound like Elvis Costello. Now, you can call him the guy who outdid Elvis Costello.
2. Washed Out – Within and Without
Ernest Greene likes hip hop music, so his brand of chillwave is particularly inspired by southern hip-hop. For many critics, that was a jumping off point into a discussion of Greene’s masterful interweaving of disparate genres, his ability to blend the immiscible. “The man is an alchemist,” the blogosphere exultantly proclaimed. And that’s certainly true, and it’s what makes him good. But what makes this record great, what makes it a precious commodity to be protected and revered, is its unflinching, instinctive, and totally unaffected independence. It has all the honesty of a man who made it with no desire or expectation of fame. It was a record spawned purely from a creative impulse, not a corporate one. This isn’t meant to be read as a comment against the record industry, mind you — those corporate impulses have brought us the greatest music ever made. But truly independent music — not capital “I” Independent — rarely gets mass exposure. This album is truly independent. This album has a winsome restlessness to it, shifting without care from the larger than life beat of its soaring opener “Eyes Be Closed”, to the quick-stepping groove of standout “Amor Fati”, before closing with the brooding “A Dedication”. Within and Without is an undisciplined effort, but that is its biggest strength. Greene is an impetuous artist and, for now, that’s an asset.
Album of the Year: Bon Iver – Bon Iver
This publication’s review of Justin Vernon’s cabin-produced debut suggested (and was met with not inconsiderable amounts of dissent) that the next album introduce a bit of variety into the mix. That Vernon was a masterful songwriter and a once-in-a-generation vocalist, but needed to develop a taste for adventure as far as arrangements were concerned. His eponymous sophomore full-length finds him doing just that, incorporating not just wind chimes and a few Stratocasters, but experimental saxophone and 80s-style soft-rock inspired piano. But besides the musical shift, Bon Iver is classically Vernon: songs of searching for meaning in the everyday, nostalgic memories of lost virginity and loves that never were, snapshot reminiscences that masterfully evoke that familiar warm sadness we all know so well. Vernon’s not just waxing sympathetic about a breakup anymore. Now he’s meditating on the very nature of loss and coping, tackling the tension between truly letting go of the past while still learning from it. It’s a shocking, compelling, challenging, draining effort. It is truly a masterpiece, and shows what Justin Vernon is capable of. Never Learned to Swim is proud to name Bon Iver’s Bon Iver 2011′s Album of the Year.
In my review of this record when it was first released, I described in (perhaps too) vivid detail my negative associations with this group. Briefly, it was at a concert during which Beth Wawerna and select pieces of her band opened acoustically for Okkervil River. I was with my girlfriend at the time, and we had a miserable evening which, in my mind, precipitated the terminal decay of our relationship. But besides that, Ms. Wawerna was simply awful. Her songs were structurally weak, lyrically incomprehensible, and chock full of inchoate motifs. Pair that with her relatively flat on-stage affect, and you have the makings of a decidedly mediocre performance. But a mere couple of years later, and Beth Wawerna returned with a magnificent, sparkling, razor-sharp debut. The songs here are glittering and polished. Wawerna has turned from an apprentice into a master songsmith. Will Sheff’s production shines too; giving this record a folksy shine that suits Beth Wawerna’s warm, down-home songwriting style and sugary alto. On the whole, it’s a huge step forward, and portends a career brighter than this publication ever imagined. I’m not sure if the changes over the past couple years were primarily in her or in me, but they were changes for the better.
John Darnielle has survived long enough to see himself become a villain in indie circles. His base of fans, once fiercely loyal, has turned on him for turning his back on the four-track intimacy that made him so popular in the first place. Of course, this crowd is a similar-minded crowd to the one that turned its back so viciously on Death Cab for Cutie (before they actually 
Philadelphia is quickly becoming the center of a new wave in music today: artists from this town are peddling fundamental folk songs about doubt and love and loss drenched in a narcotic haze. It’s not really shoegaze, but certainly all these guys listened to Loveless more than a few times. Kurt Vile is at the fore of this trend (though The War on Drugs are another prominent figure, and A Sunny Day in Glasgow are caught in the haze – if not the folksy one – as well). He has delivered a few of good-not-great albums to date, but hits his stride in full on Smoke Ring for My Halo. It is by far Vile’s best offering. These are brooding, nostalgic meditations from a man isolated. The influence of artists as diverse as My Bloody Valentine and Johnny Cash are evident right on the surface of this album. If that sounds fascinating, that’s because it is. It’s hard to call Smoke Ring, and maybe Vile’s whole artistic identity for that matter, totally…his. It would be more accurate to say that it’s the synthesis of a collection of artists he admires. His music, and this album, is a series of projections superimposed atop one another to generate a chaotic but ultimately coherent new image. Vile is something like a malcontent; spending his time pining (“Baby’s Arms”) or meditating on the tension between desires for security and progress (“Peeping Tomboy”). But the nebulousness of his self-perception does not bleed over into his presentation. The latter is focused, elegant, and executed with absolute clarity. This wasn’t the case on his other records; previously, Vile was trying to discover himself as a performer and artist, and it showed. Smoke Ring for My Halo is a realization of Kurt Vile’s potential. It is the record in the Kurt Vile canon where he finally figured himself out.
Animal Collective sucks. For all their droves of adoring fans, they put up a despicable snoozer at Coachella 2010. Their music is droning, pretentious, willfully inaccessible, and undisciplined. And Noah Lennox’s last record, 2007′s Person Pitch, was, for all its flashes of brilliance, ultimately an unfocused effort by a wildly talented young man with no self-restraint. Now it’s unclear what happened between 2007 and now, but Tomboy represents a sea change in the manner in which Lennox operates. These songs are tight and lean. Lennox has gone and got his shit together. This album is cleaner, smoother, less brash and uncivilized than Person Pitch. But this lack of a robust “statement” is refreshing. It’s nice to hear Lennox just air his ideas out rather than present them as ceremonies in and of themselves. These are simpler times for Noah Lennox, it seems. Now if only Animal Collective will follow suit.
On 12 December, your faithful correspondent watched Jay-Z and Kanye West perform “Niggas in Paris”. Nine times. That concert was as opulent an affair as you might expect, far removed from the spartan fare of most concerts you might see at venues like the Troubadour or even the Wiltern. But Watch the Throne, the debut full-length collaboration from the twin titans of the hip-hop world, is nothing approaching understated. This album is aggressive. It’s bombastic. It’s unapologetic. It sounds careless and dashed off. It’s half-assed and undercooked as all hell. They probably put in no effort. Honestly, it sounds like the work of a couple afternoons. But it’s the best hip-hop album released this year. By a country mile.
So usually, Cass McCombs’ music is pretty depressing. Reading interviews with the man, it’s clear that he’s got some rather heavy shit on his mind. Of that there can be little doubt. And it has made him prolific; Humor Risk is the second album he has put out this year alone. His first, WIT’S END, was typical McCombs: dark and deflated. And it’s a lovely record, to be sure. But it’s nothing new. Nothing exciting. Nothing intriguing. Humor Risk, on the other hand, is the most enigmatic record released this year. All of McCombs’ innate cynicism remains, but he presents it within a sunnier disposition. “Love and pain are the same thing, in my opinion,” he shrugs on album standout, “The Same Thing”. That opinion comes across; his many depressions and preoccupations are situated within a brighter context on Humor Risk. If 2011 is the year of the push-pull, the year of the tension between the presentation and the subject matter, then this record is among the most emblematic of the trend. And don’t forget: in Cass McCombs we have perhaps the most underrated songwriter of our generation. A year in which he offers two albums is a year in which we are blessed. It’s just sad that nobody else seems to realize that.
Annie Clark is so hot right now. The underdog personified, she rose from absolute obscurity — “that cute girl in Sufjan Stevens’ backing band” — to relative fame. And clearly, Clark is done with hiding bashfully in the background. “I, I, I, I, I don’t wanna be a cheerleader no more. I, I, I, I, I don’t wanna be a dirt eater no more,” she wails on “Cheerleader”. Strange Mercy finds Clark embracing her prominence and walking with no shortage of swagger into the spotlight. Her solo work is consistently fantastic, and Strange Mercy is no exception. This record will help bolster the impression of her as, a) a legitimately phenomenal guitarist (her inventiveness on the instrument is perhaps eclipsed only by Marnie Stern) and b) possibly a genius songwriter. The aforementioned “Cheerleader” is among the year’s best songs, but Strange Mercy is a wire-to-wire success, with Clark exploring every thrilling corner of her songwriting. What’s really wonderful about St. Vincent records is the sense that Clark is simultaneously discovering things as she goes while at the same time maintaining absolute command of her craft. It’s a mammoth task that she accomplishes with almost careless grace. She is shaping up to be one of the best artists around, and this publication is eager to see what her future holds.
It’s no secret that Dan Bejar likes to drink and screw. The former is evident enough to anyone who has seen him perform live, and the latter will be clear after one spin of any album he’s ever released. And both of those things are great; Bejar’s music has a drunkenly lecherous quality to it that compounds its pathos. He had that style down to a science, too; only he could pull of a song called “Entering White Cecilia” that was actually about having sex with a really pale chick named Cecilia. So it would have been very easy, then, for Bejar to throw back another half bottle of whiskey and put out just another album of his belligerent, perverted sex jams. But on Kaputt, Bejar takes a good, long, (mostly) sober look in the mirror. This record is rife with self-hatred, bitterness, pained nostalgia, and tones of remorse. It’s by far the least capricious work Bejar has ever done, but Kaputt still boasts immense variety, from the sexy shuffle of “Chinatown” to the sprawling, ambitious masterpiece “Bay of Pigs”. It reminds us that Dan Bejar is not some drunken, horny malcontent. At least not just.
High school English teachers often say the first sentence of an essay should be an “attention grabber”. That is to say, it should pull the reader in, it should be the most interesting sentence of your essay. Cut Copy clearly assimilated that message, because they consistently deliver amazing first songs. Their last album, In Ghost Colours, boasted a euphoric opener in “Feel the Love”. But Zonoscope outshines that record in every way. And it starts from song one: “Need You Now” is, quite simply, the best song Cut Copy have ever written. The song lilts and swings through a verse before barreling through the delicious hook. It portends what is to come for the remainder of the album; a confident, airtight affair chock full of memorable jams and sugary dance-floor ready gems. The Aussies have matured considerably in the years since In Ghost Colours, injecting restraint and dynamic awareness into their arsenal where only raw energy used to exist. That makes this a far subtler, far more satisfying listen. It is not perhaps as immediately exhilarating as In Ghost Colours, but it is certainly vastly more gratifying. Unlike its predecessor, this record hits the ears in different ways with every spin. It is rich, nuanced, and almost alive. To be sure, it separates Cut Copy from the pack. What James Murphy void?
For those who had the misfortune of missing Antlers’ last record, the heart-wrenching masterpiece Hospice, Burst Apart might actually be a good primer. While Hospice was raw and heavy, Burst Apart is a more refined, mediagenic effort. Lead single “I Don’t Want Love” is a spacious, refined meditation on the bad decisions that lead to great sex that leads to ugly situations. It’s far less heady subject matter than Hospice, and while it’s not uplifting stuff, this effort boasts a lot more levity. Free now from the concept album frame, Antlers focus more on songwriting and less on narrative and arc here. That makes Burst Apart less of a cohesive whole, but it’s more of a “reach out and touch me” type record. It’s nice to know they can operate within the more traditional frame. What’s really surprising is that they do it better than most.
Some precincts have called it the album of the year. Others haven’t even heard of it. The truth of the matter is that the duo from Baltimore have tried — with more success than most with the same goal — to wed the edgy with the comfortable, the folksy with the modern. It’s an album that really typifies the broader narrative of the year in music: it makes marketable what was heretofore conceived of as the exclusively “independent” aesthetic. At the heart of Civilian is its dynamism. Indeed, the record has all the dramatic gravitas of a live show. Wye Oak’s bread and butter is the shout after the simmer. They build their songs to climaxes and then they really lean into the climax. This structural impulse is bolstered by Jenn Wasner’s ample talent as a guitarist and Andy Stack’s drumming. Plainly put, they have the chops to make interesting an otherwise milquetoast artistic instinct. Civilian is by no means the best record of the year. But it is the best record of Wye Oak’s career. And that definitely counts for something.
This publication has long believed that Meric Long is among the more talented working songwriters around. And there can be little debate regarding the point that the rise of The Dodos was the best thing to happen for music in Northern California since Johnny Cash sang to a bunch of inmates. The Dodos find themselves on a similar artistic track to Frightened Rabbit: each record grows lusher, more produced, more adventurous. But like their Scottish counterparts, they have never changed their songwriting habits. As such, No Color is as deliciously frantic as the earlier installments in their oeuvre, but it is more polished. Purists may take issue with the shift away from the raw, brutal character of Visiter and, to a lesser extent, Time To Die, but ultimately, here is a band with the right idea: they have retained their artistic impulses, but have found novel ways to frame them.
If there’s one thing that Take Care provides, it’s a clear window into how Drake perceives and feels about the world. Nothing is left to doubt or chance on this record. It’s refreshing that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, Drake chooses not to spend his albums hiding behind carefully crafted swagger; reassuring that he chooses to spit rhymes about something substantive, rather than just some stock “I’m rich and go to clubs a lot” bullshit. There is lovesickness here, we see evidence that Drake is subject to the perilous oscillation between self-assurance and self-doubt that dominated Kanye West’s 2010 masterwork, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. And while Drake might be cut from the same cloth as Yeezy — both cull heavily from meaningful personal experiences rather than stock lifestyles — he certainly does not indulge in the maximalism that made MBDTF so cathartic. Drake is vulnerable, sure; but he doesn’t couch it in any sensational way. He is an introspective cat, and that comes through in the silky instrumental landscapes of Take Care. While West really seemed to value the tension between doubt and bombast, Drake prefers honest consistency. It’s probably for the best; nobody can out-Ye the man himself. What Drake has done with this record is earn himself a spot at the table with Mr West. And that is a monumental achievement in itself.
There is something about the fresh, raging euphoria of youth that is really hard to capture in music. Characteristic of youth is a violent depth of feeling about…well, everything. Even the most mundane events are profoundly significant. Perspective goes out the window. It’s all or nothing. “Weekends are never fun, unless you’re around here too,” laments Cullen Omori with a brand of joyous dramatism that would only come from a teenager. Smith Westerns have taken the essence of the teenage years, and put it in a bottle. It’s that well-captured on Dye It Blonde. But this record has much more to offer than nostalgia. In fact, the nostalgia is just a foil for great songs. “Weekend” is one of the best singles of the year, fully equipped with a fizzy opening riff, an infectious refrain, and a wonderful chorus. “All Die Young” is more disciplined; simmering and brooding its way to a cathartic coda. The fact that the carefree character of youth is folded so neatly into really mature songwriting makes this record that much more powerful.
If it’s been said once, it’s been said one hundred times: there are few easier bands to root for than The Black Keys. Against all odds, they have outlasted bands that rose faster and higher than they ever hoped to (The Strokes and The White Stripes are the two most obvious examples), and they’ve done it without repellent swagger or the affected attitude. And what’s more, they’ve done it by sticking to their guns: they love blues, they love rock, and they love it to sound dusty and destroyed. Every record they’ve ever released has stayed true to those basic principles, and it’s nice to see it’s paid off. On this, their first record after having “made it”, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney deliver. It’s by far their most market-aware record; it is quite a tip of the cap to pop music. It continues the trend that was really evident on Brothers, which is that gradual expansion of the sonic palette. While Brothers found The Keys incorporating a full band, El Camino finds them experimenting still more, primarily with keyboards. This record has a range unheard of for this band, from exultant pop gems (“Lonely Boy”) to hard rockers borne from acoustic lamentations (“Little Black Submarines”) to groovy, falsetto kissed, genre-benders (“Stop Stop”). The nice thing is that they manage to do all this while preserving their stylistic integrity. Another plus is that the band finally got disciplined about making a record that was relatively short. El Camino may not be The Black Keys at their very best (that honor still rests with the outstanding Rubber Factory), but it does find The Black Keys at their leanest, meanest, and more radio-ready. Look out world.
Don’t be fooled by the title; Lykke Li got mean. She’s not lovesick and shy. She’s sex-crazed and serrated now. Or, well, she knows how to project that image. This record is unapologetic and aggressive. Her delivery is layered and any heartsickness is soaked through with rage and bitterness. It’s horrifying. And it’s truly awesome. These are, fundamentally, pop songs. But Li has a passion for modern technology, and she uses it to warp her songs, to give them an edge that they don’t — structurally, musically, constitutionally, inherently — have. And that’s fascinating. Many artists use technology to obfuscate or correct their flaws as artists. Lykke Li uses her computer as an instrument. And, lest you forget, she’s properly sex-crazed.
Bradford Cox didn’t want to be an icon. He doesn’t seem to enjoy the spotlight or the scrutiny or the bullshit questions from the sycophantic interviewers. Nor does he seem to relish the adoring crowds. It’s not that he dislikes it; one just doesn’t get the feeling that he particularly enjoys it. But he’s not an icon because anyone thought he would enjoy it. He’s an icon because he is probably a genius. He just is. The man is so unfathomably prolific, and somehow manages to keep the quality of his ever-swelling oeuvre undiluted. Parallax is the third album he has released as Atlas Sound, and it’s got the same ethereally introspective vibe to which his listeners have by now grown quite accustomed. But on Parallax, Cox comes down to earth and lays out his concerns pretty plainly: “Found money and fame, but I found them really late,” he croons on “The Shakes”. This record is harrowing for its candor. It was much easier to listen to Atlas Sound when it was not one hundred percent clear what Cox was trying to say. Here, the thematic heft of the record is intentionally clear. This is an existential crisis on record, a window into a troubled, cynical mind. All the strife and doubt that existed as subtext before is black letter law here. It’s disconcerting. But it’s really beautiful.
Dubstep is terrible. I mean really awful. By that I don’t mean the genre as a whole; there is some great dubstep out there. But the genre has come to caricature itself of late. Now it’s all you heard at trashy New Year’s Eve parties. It’s what bros in white Lamborghinis insist “is best music in Europe.” But amid all the poseurs and the hacks, there’s a 23 year-old kid from London who repurposed the genre and made it beautiful and sad and vital. To what is, at its worst, a genre with all beats and no soul, Blake gives a heartbeat. His debut is alive. It has the quiet confidence of a tenth record, but the freshness of a demo. The best cut on the record is his cover of Feist’s “Limit To Your Love”, which will leave your jaw on the ground for its heart-stopping beauty. As gifted a producer as Blake is, it is his vocals that take center stage here. That’s the most underrated aspect of his arsenal: he is not just a producer. He’s a musician, through and through. And it’s that fact that will make him the John Lennon of dubstep.
I’m glad that the heart-on-sleeve songwriter is making a comeback in indie circles (it never left in the mainstream, much to the credit of the mainstream). I mean, I love Bon Iver, but after a while, all this cryptic shit gets a little tiresome. It’s nice to hear someone singing songs that have meaning and depth without being wildly and intentionally complicated. On “Somebody That I Used to Know”, Wally De Backer wails, “I don’t even need your love / but you treat me like a stranger / and that feels so rough.” That song is emblematic of everything that’s great about this record: direct, unadorned, and full of pathos. De Backer channels simplicity into sophistication here. He does not obfuscate the meaning of his lyrics to compensate for a lack of musical ideas. He does not hide behind strange effects or cheap tricks (except on the record’s weakest track, “State of the Art”). The honesty of the lyrics permeates the whole album, and that’s what makes it truly special.
Since Album came out, I’ve always reacted to hearing about new material from Girls in the same way: I snort and make some snide comment about how it’s going to be wildly overrated, how Christopher Owens isn’t really that good, how it’s so blatantly caricaturing Elvis Costello. Et cetera. I can’t say where this prejudice comes from. I guess, to a certain degree, it’s a natural impulse. That is, I think sometimes we (or I) have a visceral, contrarian desire to rebut hype, to be above a trend. Sometimes, that desire has some veracity – or one can at least find some rational foundation and support for it.
People talk a lot about how there are two types of people in this world: leaders and followers. Like most rhetorical dichotomies, it’s a pretty reductive way of looking at the world. Certainly under rigorous field testing, it doesn’t hold up as a theory. In fact, it seems to only acknowledge the existence of two ends of an almost impossibly broad spectrum. Sure, there are absolute leaders and absolute followers insofar as there are people that embody a lot of characteristics that any one person may ascribe to either of those groups.
The 2000s had their sound. It was a folk decade. You could likely trace any number of reasons for this. Maybe it’s that I’m posting this on the 10 year anniversary of the day, but I can’t help thinking 9/11 had a profound effect on the music people made: stripping everything away except the music. It was the raw and vulnerable sound of being exposed, because we were. All of us were.
I always used to wonder what the common ground would be — if it was ever found — between the brooding hipsters who scuttle around thrift stores and farmer’s markets and the Starbucks-slurping, cardigan clad yuppie masses. What would, what could, bring together the impossibly disparate worlds of Silver Lake and Santa Monica? This preoccupation is by no means a common one, so perhaps it’s not the best way to frame or introduce a review, but here I am.
If there’s one thing hipsters love, it’s vintage glasses that you wear for fashion purposes instead of for vision correction purposes. If there’s two, it’s those glasses and self-satisfied rejection of all things “mainstream”. But if there had to be a third, it would be dance parties.
