13.  The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck
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 started to suck).  But as is so often the case, the opinion of indie purists is largely irrelevant.  And All Eternals Deck is proof enough of that.  It is a beautiful record.  Stunning.  From the gentle fingerpicking, the mellow, round piano, and crisp hi-hat that opens “Damn These Vampires”, it’s clear that this is the freshest, cleanest iteration of the Mountain Goats we’ve yet heard.  What’s surprising is how comfortable Darnielle sounds within this framework.  It’s like he had never produced any other kind of record.  Certainly that’s a testament to his adaptability and raw skill as a musician.  It speaks too, to the quality of his songs, that they can sound good regardless of how they are presented.  And to be sure, this is the finest batch of songs Mr Darnielle has offered us in some time (which is quite an accolade, as he is among the most consistent artists working today).  But after a few listens, it becomes clear that this is how this band was meant to be heard: clear, ringing piano; fresh acoustic guitars, reserved but present percussion.  And arc.  These songs have arc for which his previous instrumentation did not allow.  Indeed, it seems, thirteen albums in, John Darnielle might have grown up.

12.  Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo
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.

11.  Panda Bear – Tomboy
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.

10.  Jay-Z and Kanye West – Watch the Throne
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.

9.  Cass McCombs – Humor Risk
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.

8. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
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.

7.  Destroyer – Kaputt
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.

6.  Cut Copy – Zonoscope
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?

This publication’s review of the eponymous debut from Manhattan’s Cults was perhaps a little heavy on the snark.  But to be sure, this is the stuff of dance parties.  No one should be heard to say that this music would not soundtrack the most grating, pretentious gatherings of hipster girls drinking bourbon and pretending they don’t care about men.  And while those associations are indubitably annoying, they do not make this album any worse.  Madeline Follin is a great vocalist.  She is at her best on standout track “You Know What I Mean,” on which she alternates between cloying vulnerability and desperate, explosive pathos.  Occasionally, she drifts into a more grating whine (“Most Wanted” verges on interminable), but this is rare.  On the whole, she and Brian Oblivion have crafted a winsome debut that portends for a fizzy, sugary future.

24. Antlers – Burst Apart
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.

23. Wye Oak – Civilian
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.

22. The Dodos – No Color
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.

21.  Drake – Take Care
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.

20.  Smith Westerns – Dye It Blonde
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.

19.  The Black Keys - El Camino
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.

18.  Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes
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.

17.  Atlas Sound – Parallax
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.

16.  James Blake – James Blake
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.

15.  Gotye – Making Mirrors
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.

• TV on the Radio – Nine Types of Light
  Nobody wanted to be the guy who coached the Lakers after Phil Jackson.  Similarly, no album should ever have the misfortune of following a record like Dear Science.  But that task fell to Nine Types of Light.  And while the latest effort from the Brooklyn indie stalwarts is by no means on par with its predecessor, it is absolutely a reminder of why we love TV on the Radio so much in the first place.  This album hints at all of the potential that Dear Science so effortlessly realized: the lecherous tenacity, the full-throated swagger, the viciously concealed vulnerability bubbling underneath it all.  It is that tension, that push-pull between the inner and the outer, that has always made TV on the Radio so arresting.  And it’s certainly not captured here as perfectly as the band has sometimes been able to capture it.  But it’s there.  And that’s enough.
  
• The Roots – Undun
  Lucky number thirteen from Philadelphia’s finest neo-soul outfit finds them chronicling the brief wondrous life of Redford Stephens.  The album focuses on the urban conflict between an innate desire to stay on the straight and narrow and the circumstantial realities that make doing that so hard.  Read: the life you want to lead versus the life you have to lead.  The Roots explore this painful clash with typical lavishness.  The beats here are snare-centric, the atmosphere largely the product of an opulent interplay between keyboards, strings, and choral arrangements.  It’s an interesting foil through which to present such a raw, brutal, and common struggle.  But you needn’t more than a few listens to discover how effective it is.
  
• Tyler, The Creator – Goblin
  Clearly, Tyler, The Creator has issues.  One look at the “Yonkers” music video will tell you that.  And while the man has promised his next album will be less, well, completely saturated with references to rape and murder, Goblin is without question the most intriguing hip-hop albums this publication has heard in some years.  It is not Tyler’s first record, but it is the record in his oeuvre that is most undeniably his.  Hedonistic, envelope-pushing, and viciously idiosyncratic.  His flow is lazily self-assured, at odds with the frantic braggadocio of his New York contemporaries.  It remains to be seen whether the next record from Tyler, The Creator (which is due to be called Wolf) is in fact less disturbed than this one.  But at the risk of sounding twisted, it’s unclear whether that would be a good thing.
  
• Frank Ocean – Nostalgia, Ultra.
  What kind of R&B singer covers Coldplay, MGMT, and the fucking Eagles?  I guess the same kind of R&B singer that drops Island Def Jam because he doesn’t feel like he’s getting the attention he deserves.  Frank Ocean (also known as Christopher “Lonny” Breaux) is certainly not your typical R&B singer.  Despite the fact that he’s been the guy behind the guy on more than one occasion, he marches to the beat of his own drum.  He is truly a passionate guy, of that there can be no doubt.  But he is more than a little offbeat; it’s no surprise, then, that he is a member of the nutshow hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.  But don’t be misled; Nostalgia, Ultra. is a far more resigned effort than anything the other OFWGKTA member might produce.  Ocean approaches his misfortunes — big and small — with something that is too apathetic to be pure maturity, but too world-weary to be pure disengagement.  Trying to get a bead on Frank Ocean is pretty tricky, but it’s what makes the album so satisfying.

So with the end of this year begins our retrospective coverage here at Never Learned to Swim.  We begin with our “Top 40″ – a list of the forty best tracks the year has had to offer.  Stay tuned for our list of the 25 best albums that 2011 had to offer, beginning tomorrow.

1. Song of the Year: Lana Del Rey – “Video Games”
   Lizzy Grant is a 24 year-old from New York.  Lana Del Rey is her alter ego, a sultry blonde Elvis acolyte, obsessed with the 1950s and the elusive, fleeting notion of “real love”.  In “Video Games”, the narrative occupies the space of Grant’s fantasies.  It’s unclear whether the song describes a memory or a current moment that the protagonist knows cannot last, but either way, the harp-kissed vocal delivery is more than just coy, pouty affect; it is real, poignant vulnerability.  These are blissful images washed over in doubt.  What is most impressive, though, is Del Rey’s unwavering confidence.  She is a dynamic vocalist and she knows it.  In “Video Games”, she affords her voice few adornments; the chorus finds her alternating between operatic belts and quavering, shy whispers.  Though there is all sorts of hype surrounding Ms. Del Rey’s forthcoming debut, Born To Die, this publication is unsure regarding the extent to which this song portends any sort of consistent production.  But even if it is merely a flash in the pan, it is the brightest flash anyone saw this year.  In a year of underdogs and truly a brilliant year for music, “Video Games” stands tall as the finest single offering of the year.

2. Okkervil River – “Wake and Be Fine”
3. St. Vincent – “Cheerleader”
4. Bon Iver – “Towers”
5. Cults – “You Know What I Mean”
6. Girls – “Honey Bunny”
7. Washed Out – “Amor Fati”
8. Cut Copy – “Need You Now”
9. Jay-Z and Kanye West – “N*ggas in Paris”
10. James Blake – “Limit to Your Love”
11. M83 – “Midnight City”
12. Atlas Sound – “The Shakes”
13. Smith Westerns – “Weekend”
14. Bon Iver – “Perth”
15. Real Estate – “Green Aisles”
16. The Black Keys – “Stop Stop”
17. Tyler, The Creator – “Yonkers”
18. Cass McCombs – “The Same Thing”
19. Lykke Li – “I Follow Rivers”
20. Destroyer – “Chinatown”
21. The Mountain Goats – “Damn These Vampires”
22. Panda Bear – “Last Night at the Jetty”
23. Antlers – “I Don’t Want Love”
24. Bird of Youth – “Right on Red”
25. Kurt Vile – “Baby’s Arms”
26. Radiohead – “Staircase”
27. Drake – “Make Me Proud”
28. Wye Oak – “Civilian”
29. Lana Del Rey – “Blue Jeans”
30. The War on Drugs – “I Was There”
31. Frank Ocean – “Songs for Women”
32. TV on the Radio – “No Future Shock”
33. The Dodos – “Sleep”
34. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – “If I Had a Gun…”
35. The Roots – “Make My”
36. Coldplay – “Moving To Mars”
37. Cults – Go Outside”
38. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – “Heart in Your Heartbreak”
39. Aloe Blacc – “Loving You Is Killing Me”
40. Adele – “Someone Like You”

And sometimes not.

Forget the hype for a second.  Seriously.  Because once all the smoke and mirrors are gone, once you pull back all the curtains and forget all the critical praise and prejudice, once you ignore all the reactions to the praise and the prejudice, all you’ll be left with is a great rock n’ roll record.  Don’t let anything distract you.  Christopher Owens hasn’t delivered a record that imitates Costello; he’s delivered a record that outdoes Costello.

The record begins with a sugary pound; “Honey Bunny” barrels from gleeful, exuberantly sputtered verses into razor sharp staccato choruses, seamlessly incorporating a gorgeous, languid bridge.  It’s a Girls album, so Father, Son, Holy Ghost brims with self-loathing, self-pity, and bitterness: “I’ve been messing with so many girls / who could give a damn about who I am / They don’t like my bony body / They don’t like my dirty hair / or the stuff that I say / or the stuff that I’m on.”  But Owens has been working to perfect the juxtaposition he introduced on Album.  All the tortured instability expressed in the lyrics is situated within a saccharine, soda-shop aesthetic.  Fizzy, jangly strats, bouncy bass, and crisp percussion set a tone that is wonderfully at odds with the thematic thrust of the album.  This creative tension permeates the record.  It’s emblematic of the struggle we’ve all faced: to stay positive in the face of humiliation, rejection, and pain rather than mire in misery.

It’s a miracle that Owens manages to accomplish this push-pull without sounding precious.  But the key is his vocal delivery.  Even within the most effervescent mix, his voice always belies emotional strain, a deep sense of insecurity.  His vocals often sound tortured, distracted, and sometimes even sounding as though he’s holding back tears.  Or else they just sound outright defeated, like on the wonderful “Love Like a River”.  “My love is like a river,” Owens sighs, “she just keeps on rolling along.”   It’s the record’s most compelling song, the first time in Girls’ catalog where our protagonist seems to let his emotions get the better of him.  It’s a powerful moment of catharsis that, in a lot of ways, we’ve been waiting a whole catalog for.

It’s a beautifully sequenced record too.  “Love Like a River” bleeds directly into the sordid, clean-strat and stool dénouement of “Jamie Marie”, the calm after the storm.  It’s a gorgeous song, tired and heavy with regret: “I know I never noticed it, / just what it was I had / up until I lost you, and man did I lose you,” Owens murmurs, “Easy come, easy go…whatever.”  While in a vacuum it might not be that much of a punch in the gut, this kind of resignation hits home and hits hard after the tortured, exultant purge of emotion from “Love Like a River”.

You’ll hear a lot about this record.  I could say a lot more.  But ultimately, my only goal is to convince you to sit and spend some time with this record.  Forget everything you’ve heard.  Hell, forget everything I’ve said.  Father, Son, Holy Ghost is bigger than the hype that surrounds it.  This isn’t a record that is meant for stadiums or even barrooms.  It is a record that was meant for headphones.  For solitude.  For quiet, private, personal moments.  So set some aside and give it a listen.

9.1 / 10.0

I don’t want to get too philosophical about things.  The point is that this way of looking at people often ignores the most fascinating group of people just to simplify things.  So in trying to make our vision of humanity more simple, we miss out on the most beautiful aspects of humanity.  Ironic.  In this case, viewing the world as leaders and followers means dance music is limited to LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk on one end, and their feverish fanboy imitators on the other end.

Thankfully, even though it may be framed as such, the landscape of dance music is far more complex than this.  There are a couple acts too who, though they have not generated the enthusiasm that James Murphy has, and are not as influential as Daft Punk, still leave their own distinct and independent footprint rather than just deepening those of Messrs Murphy, Bangalter, and Homem-Christo.  Cut Copy is one such act.  They’re no pioneers; they’re music sounds familiar because it does tread relatively well-worn ground.

Their previous effort, In Ghost Colours, was long on exuberance if perhaps a bit short on musical sophistication and technical aplomb.  Zonoscope, their newest, is a bit more ambitious and certainly more interesting than its predecessor.  But it manages to achieve this deepened theoretical veracity without sacrificing the bubbly gregariousness that made In Ghost Colours so easy to listen to.  As a result, Zonoscope is an overall more rewarding listen.

Opening track “Need You Now” is a beaut, where simmering verses spill over into the pulsating chorus, a hook with more restraint than anything on In Ghost Colours, but with all appeal.  Dan Whitford and company demand more of their listener here.  You’ll need to meet these hooks in the middle, but they’ll wrap you up more warmly and securely for your effort.  And the moments of exuberant catharsis — like around the four-minute mark in “Need You Now” — are all the more special for their relative rarity.  This is a carefully calculated, thoughtfully-paced record that takes its time and distributes the vigor with an even hand.

For all its measured quality, Zonoscope does have an unfortunate tendency towards self-indulgence.  The most glaring example is the sprawling “Sun God”, with its massive instrumental dance-ambient coda.  “Pharaohs and Pyramids” takes a page out of Hercules and Love Affair’s playbook, situating Whitford’s vocals in a sparse mix before degenerating into a repetitive finale.  But rather than being raw and spartan, the result is inchoate, arbitrary and unsatisfying.  It ultimately sounds too much like a demo to bat cleanup on this album.

But moments like this are to be expected — and can be excused with relative ease — on an album that finds Whitford’s group broadening its musical horizons.  The important thing is that the hits far outnumber the misses on Zonoscope, and it portends a bright, ambitious future for Cut Copy.  They may not be inspiring hordes of dewy-eyed followers, but they are — in spite of it all — carving out their own, very distinct path.

8.1 / 10.0

Ten years on, it’s easy to remember the details of the day, but difficult to feel the way we felt.  Gone is the feeling that we had been punched in the stomach.  Every memory of the day carries a political footnote now.  There’s a decade’s worth of baggage attached to that day now.

As our feelings surrounding that day have become increasingly complex, so too has the music we make.  Having had time to stand in the light of the day and really assimilate what 11 September 2001 meant to us as individuals.  And that has tested our sense of identity.  Time has complicated the way we feel about ourselves, and by extension, it has complicated the way we express those feelings.

We reach into the past.
The 1950s have returned to us today in the form of groups like Best Coast, Dirty Beaches and even Cults to a certain degree, and more recently, Lana Del Rey.  The stage for these groups was set by the blues revival, which came in the form of two duos: The White Stripes and The Black Keys.  Both these groups traced the trajectory of music over the last decade; their respective debuts were dusty and untreated.  And while their latest work casts an eye backward, it has thickened and grown with the times.

We turn to technology.
Animal Collective’s rise has spawned no shortage of imitators.  Samples have become a central element of more than just hip-hop.  Electronic music and house has risen from minimalistic to decadent.  Once a totally self-sufficient genre, it has spread laterally through other genres — Steve Reich’s latest tribute to 9/11 convincingly demonstrates that.  Minimalistic electronica still exists, but it’s not alone; the genre itself has grown beyond the scope of its origins.

And we lay it on.
Sometimes, when the pain is too great, we put up walls.  We draw curtains.  We hide the way we feel by situating ourselves in the middle of a haze.  We hide behind obfuscatory words, noise, whatever.  Just to keep everyone at arm’s length.  In the post-9/11 world, it seems the thing that scares us the most is being really close, actually connecting.  Our relationships have shifted to the internet now.  We bank online.  We have direct deposit paychecks.  We check our own groceries out.  The increasingly sophisticated technology around us has allowed us to generate distance between us and the world we live in.  More and more, we’re isolated actors in a bustling automatic world.  Our most abundant interactions are really just vastly complicated formulas, simulacra of human contact.  In music, this comes through in noise.  Noise, noise, noise.  Bands like No Age, Titus Andronicus, and Times New Viking use noise obviously.  The ascendancy of bands from The Smell in Los Angeles — Abe Vigoda and HEALTH, to name a couple — fit into a similar mold.

The problem is those bands’ noise serves no practical purpose.  It replaces the pathos the music itself would in its purest form fail to achieve with raw energy.  For that reason, those acts don’t really embody this point as well as bands like, say, Bon Iver, whose first album was about as raw as they come, but who has since released a gorgeous, but abstracted, fleshed-out, and thoroughly produced follow-up.

Which brings us to Slave Ambient, the second full-length from Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs.  They are noisy, but they are — for the purposes of this discussion — “good noisy”.  Cut from a similar cloth to (and from the same town as) Kurt Vile, this band takes a pretty fundamentally elementary folk-infused rock aesthetic and drowns it.  Slave Ambient finds them blurring chord changes, soaking through the vocal lines with reverb, giving the whole record a kind of bleary sheen.  Even the most percussive, active moments are awash in low-mixed keyboards.  It’s an ethereal, detached effort — at least from a sonic perspective.  But for all the record’s calculated separation, for as hard as the band tries to create separation between itself and the listener, it is clear that there is a connection there.  Listening to Adam Grunduciel’s crooned assurance, “If there’s a weight on you, then it’s on me too,” it was hard to escape a sense of community with the band.

It’s the kind of push-pull that makes this record successful.  It’s relatable but doesn’t want to relate.  Slave Ambient is an album that uses a wide array of technologies to make itself difficult to read.  Beneath the blur, there is a pretty structurally and melodically traditional rock album here, inspired by a lot of the same bands that inspired their fellow Philadelphian, Mr Vile.  There are echoes of American rock: whispers of Bob Seger and Tom Petty, but with more modern flair than Kurt Vile allows himself — this group clearly listens to Arcade Fire.  The bedrock of this record is an abstracted but unbridled emotionalism in which Mr Vile does not indulge.  This largely excuses the record’s not unsubstantially affected quality.  Tensions like these — between detachment and intimacy, authenticity and affect, or past and present — make this record intriguing but also current.  Slave Ambient is really a model of our time: very consciously a product of “here and now”, but also with one eye cast cautiously back.

The main problem with being so much a product of its time, is that Slave Ambient doesn’t sound particularly new or interesting.  When you’re so “here and now”, it generally means nobody needs to leave “here” to find a lot of other things that sound like you just “now”.  This is the biggest cross that The War on Drugs has to bear: a lack of originality.  This is not the sort of eerie, jarring post-9/11 paean that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was.  Hell, it doesn’t even achieve the narcotic melancholy of Smoke Ring for My Halo.  However faithful it may be, it’s still a reproduction of things that have already been done and been done better by the band’s forebears.  Their sources of inspiration are admirable.  But sharing one’s emotions is not the same as sharing one’s identity.  The band does enough of the former here, but not enough of the latter to leave me with a particularly strong sense of the band’s artistic method here.  “Come to the City” and “Baby Missiles” evoke two parts Kurt Vile and one part Arcade Fire circa The Suburbs.  For the most part, the rest of the record sounds like Smoke Ring for My Halo b-sides — though that’s hardly as much of a pejorative as it may sound like.

This record is easy to write about.  But it’s tough to evaluate in a numerical sense.  It’s a complex, rich, competently executed, well-written record.  That it’s not particularly unique is not very surprising: not many truly original acts emerge these days.  But this record is very reminiscent of Kurt Vile’s work, and Mr Vile is definitely the more compelling act.  The War on Drugs have a lot to say, but they can’t seem to figure out their own way to say it.

7.2 / 10.0

And anyway, regardless of whether this question occurred to you or not, it’s still strange that the common ground exists, and it’s even stranger that it exists in the form of some dudes singing rootsy, dusty Appalachian folk.  I mean, I know they’re from Seattle, but they sound like some racist 70s freak-folk outfit from backwater Kentucky or something.  Or like those weirdos from Deliverance.  In case you missed the header of this review, I’m talking about Fleet Foxes.

Now, cards out: if you are expecting me to get down on my knees and beg to blow Fleet Foxes through this review, then you should probably close your tab now.  Pardon me for pouring cold water on this craze, but I just don’t hear what everyone else seems to hear in this band.  Let’s go piece by piece.

Many say praise this album’s lyrics as refined and inquisitive, as sophisticated explorations of the human condition.  But Robin Pecknold’s songs are not profound explorations of anything; or if they are, his inquiry yields little in the way of discovery.  They are still life paintings, assemblages of images and conditionals.  But listening to Helplessness Blues will not bring you closer to God, it will not bring you closer to answering any of the big questions, and it will not even leave you with the impression that Pecknold and company are particularly close to doing it themselves.

Musically, these songs are precious, formulaic, and practiced.  Granted, they capture nicely the sort of just-bluegrass-enough aesthetic, but it’s hardly genuine.  It’s pleasing, not arresting.  It’s unchallenging, unobtrusive, and easy to forget.  Delicate acoustic guitars whisper nervously throughout the album.  Sparse percussion gives the album a lope-along sort of feel to it, while the band shamelessly piles on the harmonies when they lack compelling melodic ideas.  And as far as melodies are concerned, very few of these songs really dig in and stick with you.  The verses of “Lorelai” are an exception, where Pecknold’s lyrics interweave gracefully with the gentle hum of a flute.  But the chorus fails to pick up where the verse left off, and the bridge is even worse.

The underlying cause of the melodic deficit on this record is that Pecknold’s chord progressions don’t lend themselves to memorable melodies.  His use of major-minor shifts and key changes is undisciplined at best.  Often times, this gets in the way of his melodies; he cuts their legs out from under them, never giving them a chance to develop naturally.  This could be for any number of reasons, but it’s most likely that he wants to keep things fresh and interesting.  This is fine, but cannot be done at the expense of coherent melodic structure.

That said, Helplessness Blues is not an unpleasant listen.  It is uncomplicated stuff, fundamentally pleasing sound.  That’s the blessing and the curse of working in folk music: it’s very difficult to sound terrible, but even harder to sound really special or good.  I’m more inclined to believe that acts like Fleet Foxes and albums like Helplessness Blues will come and go with the years, and they will do so without leaving much of a mark on the music world (this is compared to, say Bon Iver, who is a once-in-a-generation, totally unique talent).  Most of the songs in Fleet Foxes’ catalog sound pretty much the same.  And within this record, there is a monotony that really holds it back, a monotony that stems from the band’s chronic aversion to taking musical risks.

That said, this album is pleasant enough, but it lacks the pathos, the vigor, and the chutzpah to be really special.  What’s more, it doesn’t really constitute a significant departure from what Fleet Foxes have been up to for their entire career.  Aside from the most minor tweaks, there’s nothing particularly new or inspiring here.  No one should be heard to say it’s a bad record, but it’s certainly no game changer, and it’s far from philosophically significant.

I file Fleet Foxes squarely in the same category as Grizzly Bear.  Maybe there’s something really special there, but I certainly can’t understand it.  And I’m not a total idiot.  They found a formula that works.  They exploit it repeatedly on their albums, and it’s crowd-pleasing stuff.  It’s got wide appeal, but don’t dive in — it’s not as deep as some might lead you to believe.  If this is what the common ground between hipsters and yuppies is like, then I’m certainly thankful that common ground between the two groups is as sparse as it is.

6.6 / 10.0

Hipsters love dance parties.

But try and suppress the mental picture of a club full of people, where high rollers get bottle service and everyone goes apeshit when Tiësto comes blasting through the JBLs because “that shit is so old school.”  The dance parties hipsters love typically happen in dorm rooms or the living rooms of Silver Lake apartments, where empty cans of the evenings PBR scatter the floor, and a half-empty bourbon bottle sits on the coffee table, and where the music coughs weakly out of laptop speakers.  And it’s never Tiësto.  For a while, it was LCD Soundsystem.  And hipsters everywhere panicked when James Murphy called it a career, because surely, after a while, dance parties with LCD Soundsystem would be so…well…done.  “What,” they wondered, sipping nervously on fair trade coffee at the “way more legit” coffee house right next door to Intelligentsia (“which is so fucking corporate, for the record”), “are we going to dance to?”

But with the arrival of Cults, these inwardly terrified can stop pretending they didn’t give a shit and breathe a collective (admittedly kind of apathetic) sigh of relief.

Right out of the gates: Cults sound nothing like LCD Soundsystem.  They’re more akin to what Best Coast might sound like covering Panda Bear: lots of reverb, melodies pinched straight from the 50s and 60s, and straightforward instrumental setups — the most adventurous this band ever gets is throwing a little xylophone into the mix.  It’s high on exuberance and charm, low on sophistication and self-awareness.  Brian Oblivion keeps his guitar work out of the way; he’s a textural presence more than anything else.  His percussion is more central, but it’s less like an engine that roars and propels the music forward and more like a heartbeat that silently pumps, keeping everything going.  Madeline Follin’s vocals are the focus, delivering hook after hook with gleeful, hair-flipping abandon.  In that vein, “Go Outside” is the band’s big seller, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a wonderful, uncomplicated pop tune.  But there are moments of real vulnerability too; the album’s best track, “You Know What I Mean” couples slow-burning 50s inspired midtempo verses with an explosive, soaring chorus.  It rings more like desperate rooftop catharsis than sun-soaked pool party soundtrack fodder, but it’s the album’s tenderest, most intriguing moment, and indeed, it’s the best song anyone’s written all year.  In fact, most of the album’s best moments are the throwbacks: “Bad Things” and “Bumper” are other standouts.

Follin is a good vocalist, but she’s the most effective when she avoids the more nasal territory of her voice (which she occupies almost exclusively on the album’s most grating track, “Most Wanted”).  And she knows how to write a decent pop tune.  There are more than one occasion, though — especially in the album’s uninspiring middle third — where the band’s boundless energy isn’t enough to compensate for their lack of interesting ideas.  It’s the sort of thing where your feet will be tapping throughout the whole album, but once you walk away, you’ll probably only remember a handful of the songs.

Cults is fun to listen to with the windows down, but I’m not convinced the band really has the ideas or the discipline to compellingly fill a full album — they seem much better suited to an EP at this point.  After a while, their instrumental rigidity sounds less and less like consistency and more and more like monotony and a lack of creativity.

Cults is fizzy, delicious, but ultimately unsubstantial music: perfect for a dance party.  They remind me a lot of Phoenix early in their career — talented and even meticulous but artistically undisciplined when it came to crafting albums, and too attached to their work to recognize and throw out a weak idea (I can’t explain how else a song like “Never Saw the Point” ends up on this record).  I expect to hear this floating out of windows in hipster havens from Silver Lake to Brooklyn, but I also expect that this band will deliver something better in the future.  In the end, this isn’t anything besides a promising debut.

7.8 / 10.0

But somehow, Greene’s project seems to have more staying power than other blog-fueled up-and-comers.  He doesn’t seem destined to buckle hopelessly under the weight of expectation.  That’s because Within and Without is so totally his.  You really get the feeling he had total control over everything here, that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do.  He wasn’t a square peg being hammered into a circular hole.  He was and is a guy making music that fulfills his artistic curiosity.  So you may not like it, but it’s damn organic.  It lacks the sort of self-satisfied affect of so much indie music today.  Even Panda Bear – to whom this publication is quite endeared – sounds more self-aware than this country boy turned superstar.

I mentioned The Neptunes above.  That might be a little bit of an exaggeration.  But the point is that this is not just chillwave.  It’s got too much drive, too much pulse, too much purpose and restless direction to sit neatly alongside the likes of Memory Tapes or even Panda Bear.  “Amor Fati” barrels relentlessly into its delicious chorus.  Every structural element within the song is designed to return there.  This is not necessarily typical of chillwave, in which motifs usually stand alone with blurrier boundaries between them.  Structurally, the songwriting is much more akin to the sort of thing you’d hear on Top-40 radio than a chillwave album; it’s hip-hop directed chillwave — beat-driven, pop-minded and laden with hooks.

Most of Greene’s songs are layer cakes of synthesizers with a steady, not-too-sexy-for-its-own-good beat anchoring everything.  The vocals are mixed down a good deal, so even though they’re multi-tracked, they sound gossamer-delicate.  He can’t stay off the drum machine for too long; every song eventually delivers a pretty substantial beat.  And he’s a competent enough producer that it doesn’t get monotonous, though one can’t help but be curious about what he can do when he sheds his percussive impulses (in fact, there was room for this on the album; the self-indulgent, frighteningly European, and imminently replaceable “Before” would have been an appropriate candidate for the cutting room floor).  Closing track “A Dedication” is the closest we get to this — it starts off with a gorgeous, plaintive piano loop and hazy, reverb-drenched vocals before shifting its foundation back to percussion.

In the end, Within and Without stands as one of the best, most coherent truly independent debuts you’ll have heard in some time, and Ernest Greene undoubtedly represents a powerful new voice in music, not just in chillwave.  He offers his genre a depth and structural emphasis it sort of lacked before, and a new personality that anyone can embrace.  This is a record not to be missed.  It is an essential component of any chillwave fan’s library, but certainly has broader appeal than that.  Within and Without is among the year’s most compelling offerings.  And somehow, you get the feeling that this boy from Georgia is just getting warmed up.

8.8 / 10.0