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.
