Posted: 30 Dec 2011 01:45 AM PST Each Year the eMusic editor's choose their best albums of the year. Here are their 2011 choices.
eMusic's Best Albums of 2011It was a year full of surprising breakouts and breathtaking discoveries, with reliable favorites from familiar faces and strong entries from new voices. Over the course of the next week, we'll be unveiling our picks for the Top 75 Records of 2011.
#75 Poly Styrene, Generation Indigo-
Even in 1977, British punk's Year Zero for outsiders and the dispossessed, Marian Joan Elliott-Said — aka Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex — stood out among all the gob-encrusted white males. A mixed-race girl of British-Somali heritage who appeared on Top of the Pops in braces, she lived a mixed history as both a "barefoot hippy" and a recipient of psychiatric care. Post-punk, she threw herself into Hare Krishna and New Age, but on this second solo album (her first since 1980) she grapples with a real world that unexpectedly resembles X-Ray Spex's formative years: Everyone hates the government, nobody's got a job and the kids want to riot.
Instead of revisiting punk's D.I.Y. DNA, she hooks up with producer Youth to bring together electro, dance-pop, garage rock and protest-ska (stand by for the first sighting of a trombone in pop since 2Tone's heyday). She often sounds like M.I.A.'s older sister: "L.U.V." is a punk chug plus disco-style octave bassline, "I Luv UR Sneakers" sounds tailor-made for the fluorescent germ-free adolescents that X-Ray Spex immortalized, and "Ghoulish" summons the same misty dreamscape as "I'm In Love With A German Film Star."
The album is full of zest and righteous anger, if not subtlety. The punks were unafraid to call a Babylonian downpressor by his rightful name, and Poly carries on in that time-tested vein here. If you're accustomed to reading the tea leaves of Thom Yorke's lyrics for meaning, you might find much of Generation Indigo naive or strident in its assaults on such counterculture folk devils as consumerism, societal disconnection, war, toxic waste and general bad vibes. But who comes to musicians for practical solutions? The point of records like this is not to solve your problems but to inspire you to solve them for yourselves. In that respect, this energy-packed, optimistic, day-glo rabble-rouser is just right for the times.
#74 The Middle East I Want That You Are Always Happy
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The Queensland, Australia, seven-piece the Middle East formed in 2005 over a shared love of Silver Jews, Bill Callahan and Lambchop, and elements of each underscore their deliciously melancholic music. Their sophomore album's opening track, "Black Death 1349," nods towards Smog-style slow-core but is lifted somewhere else entirely by its multi-layered instrumentation and air of haunting dread; "My Grandma Was Pearl Hall" takes Lambchop's air of existential alienation and transforms it into a funereal reverie. This is music which is at times so hushed that it seems to scarcely disturb the air around it: The mono-strummed "Very Many" could be Bon Iver taken to a new, nth level of introspection. So pervasive is this air of library calm that any injection of volume or dissonance comes as an abrasive shock: Within the context of the album, the roistering, Sonic Youth-like "Jesus Came To My Birthday Party" sounds deliberately subversive of what surrounds it. Singer Rohin Jones's vocal rarely rises above a husky, conspiratorial whisper, and ultimately the Middle East's signal achievement is to dream up a music that is as bleak and wracked as Will Oldham yet also hypnotically lush and atmospheric.
#73 DRC Project, Kinshasa One Two#72 Gauntlet Hair, Gauntlet Hair-
Gauntlet Hair's debut is full of warped, echoing pop, a sound the group attributes to influences as disparate as Amy Grant, Seal and the Talking Heads. With tracks like the dementedly zigzagging standout "Top Bunk" and the cymbal-bashing "Lights Out," the album sounds like "Baby Baby" spliced with "Crazy" playing on a radio at the bottom of a well.
#71 CANT, Dreams Come True-
The first thing you should know about Dreams Come True is that its title isn't meant to convey some Disney-deliverable promise of hope and happy endings. It's more like a threat, delivered in a menacing, Tom Waits-as-Voldemort wheeze, atop a grinding storm of electronics. In other words: Careful what you wish for. Love's double-edged sword — more specifically, the edge that cuts your heart out — is the main concern of the debut album by CANT, the solo project of Grizzly Bear bassist/producer Chris Taylor.
Perhaps the second important piece of information about Dreams Come True is that it scarcely resembles the gauzy folkways of Grizzly Bear, even though Taylor is generally regarded as the experimental architect behind the Brooklyn band's sound — its Brian Eno or Chris Walla, if you will. Instead, what Taylor and partner George Lewis Jr. (a.k.a. Dominican-born synthpop artist Twin Shadow) serve up is a mostly melodic and chilled-out electronic weeper whose emotion is crucial rather than cloying. Each 808 heartbreak ("Each time you said you loved me/ Each time you said you cared," sings Taylor on "The Edge") is keenly felt, whether in the form of a Kid A-and-after Radiohead piano plea ("Bericht"), a shapeshifting Animal Collective climax ("She Found A Way Out") or the title track's harsh, Varcharz-era Mouse On Mars deconstruction.
Sometimes it's difficult to find the heart of a mainly electronic, sometimes experimental album. That isn't the case here, as Taylor seems to take cues from the late composer Arthur Russell, whose underwater intimacy was ingrained in his work. In fact, maybe it's the title of the Russell compilation album Taylor digitally restored in 2008 that best describes what the debut by CANT wants you to feel: Love Is Overtaking Me.
#70 Sub Rosa, No Help For the Mighty Ones-
This doomy, female-led Salt Lake City art-metal outfit made one of the most unique and powerful albums of 2011. Featuring violin as the lead instrument, with guitar secondary and a thundering, Sabbath-unto-Swans (male) rhythm section, it had the feeling of occult incantation mixed with carefully crafted pagan folk music (especially on their cover of the traditional English folk song "House Carpenter," delivered a cappella). As thunderingly loud as it is sensitive and emotionally resonant, this is a masterful, assured record that will creep under your skin and bubble up out of your brain when you're least expecting it. Essential.
#69 Toby Twining, Eurydice#68 Dave Douglas & So Percussion, Bad Mango-
In 2011, trumpeter Dave Douglas released three short albums (by modern standards) under his "Green Leaf Portable" rubric. This "portable" designation — as well as the "just another in a series" style of numbering each effort — connotes a casual vibe; loosed from the pressure to make a big statement with some hour-long plus album, Douglas can just try ideas out, play with new people, blow for around 40 minutes and let it be a thing. And yet Bad Mango, the third disc in this series, doesn't feel like a casual, workaday product. After recruiting the classical-scene hotshots in So Percussion, Douglas wrote some new pieces, reworked some old ones, and came up with a new subgenre: percussion quartet plus trumpet. Opener "One More News" comes in plenty hot, as one might expect, though the group also proves it has the strength to conceive of subtler songforms. (Over the course of 35 minutes, what at first might feel like a limited sonic palette never gets old.) The quartet grooves with a complexity honed during their time woodshedding Steve Reich's Drumming, while Douglas's brash-but-bluesy playing grounds the project in jazz tradition. That the players' collective insights are presented with such a lack of pretension only makes the album feel like more of a find.
#67 Sigur Ros, Inni-
Is this live double album a placeholder or a memorial plaque? With the Icelanders on "indefinite hiatus" according to frontman Jónsi it's hard to tell, but either way it's a handsome piece of work: an almost two-hour document, with an accompanying movie, of their shows at London's Alexandra Palace in November 2008. The Palace is a cavernous venue whose treacherous acoustics have swallowed other bands, but Sigur Ros are nothing if not adept at filling a space. Scale is their forte.
Inni opens fittingly with the sonar ping of Svefn-G-Englar, which was most listeners' first taste of the band's engulfing vastness over a decade ago and still feels as much like a weather formation as any piece of music can. A sparse four-man line-up, minus the horns and strings of previous tours, leaves the usually volcanic chorus of "Hoppípolla" a little muted but more than compensates elsewhere. Sequencing is the key. A string of giddy sunburst pop numbers from their last two studio albums gives way to heavyweight slow-burners like "Hafsól" and "Popplagi�°," each one ascending with a shudder towards effects-pedal Valhalla, and finally coasts to a close with the rippling calm of solitary new song "Luppulagio."
As live albums go it's pretty persuasive, though with one caveat: the same kind of applause which gives most concert albums their atmosphere almost shatters the spell here. Compared to all the extraordinary images that Sigur Ros's music evokes, the thought of a few thousand people in a giant hall in north London feels strangely deflating.
#66 Holy Ghost!, Holy Ghost!-
You shall know Holy Ghost! by the company they keep. New Yorkers Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser have been part of the DFA camp for the past decade, first as members of youthful hip-hop crew Automato and then as in-house musicians. Since the duo's debut single, 2007's "Hold On," they have remixed LCD Soundsystem, Cut Copy, MGMT and Phoenix, all of whom leave their mark on this electro-pop debut.
Their most blatantly pop moves sound a little too slick and unconvincing (there's not a "Kids" or a "Lisztomania" here), but they've got the production smarts to keep things interesting. Even the over-perky "Jam for Jerry" turns itself around with a glittering disco coda, while the deadpan slow motion grooves of "Do It Again" and "Some Children" (featuring yacht-rock smoothie Michael McDonald) are good news to anyone mourning LCD Soundsystem's retirement. Running through it all is a theme of hedonism in straitened circumstances. "I'll take some money from the joint account/ I know I know I know we're running out," sings Frankel on "Hold My Breath", sounding uncannily like Phoenix's Thomas Mars fronting late-'80s Depeche Mode. "I love the city but I hate my job," he declares on the seductive after-hours techno of Hold On. "And the city loves me back." At their best Holy Ghost! capture precisely that feeling.
#65 Conquering Animal Sound, Kammerspiel-
Conquering Animal Sound is made up of just two people, Anneke and James who, according to their Tumblr, "make music in their flat every day." And that's exactly what Kammerspiel sounds like: small, delicate, hand-crafted songs that move like the tiny ballerinas atop miniature music boxes. The music is spare — tiny, tinkling bells, quiet xylophones, a few whispery clicks and snaps — and Anneke's childlike voice seems simultaneously full of wonder and caution. "Flinch" is built from plinking plastic pianos and odd snatches of percussion, "Tracer" is shivery and quiet, a low bass hum and sporadic synths that blink like distant airplanes. This is warm, deliberate music, as gentle as a lullaby, as soft as falling snow.
#64 Dirty Beaches, Badlands-
As suggested by the smoke-engulfed, gel-slicked Johnny Cash character on its record sleeve, Dirty Beaches — or, at least, main member Alex Zhang Hungtai — are cooler than you could ever hope to be. He's a real desperado type, playing solo shows with a guitar in one hand and a comb in the other — returning it periodically to his back pocket, presumably right next to his switchblade.
And then there's the music itself. Contrary to what some critics may tell you, Hungtai's songs aren't lo-fi so much as they're beamed from another time and place, the kind of music that suddenly turns up on a phantom oldies station through your grandfather's old transistor radio — the one that hasn't worked in years. Not since Vietnam, anyway.
There's a reason Hungtai has repeatedly said that he's writing "soundtracks for films that don't exist." Like the directors he undoubtedly adores (let's say, David Lynch and Wong Kar-Wai), the singer/songwriter isn't out to entertain us. He's here to cast spells, whether that involves rail-jumping riffs and a rockabilly wail ("Speedway King") or a piano melody that's straight out of a dirty saloon, circa 1869. There's no choice but to succumb.
#63 David Lang, This Was Written By Hand-
This is the first non-soundtrack album by post-minimalist Lang since the recording that included his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion was released by Cantaloupe last year, and thusly, expectations are high. Are those expectations deliberately subverted with an album of old compositions (nothing here is newer than 2003) and only short pieces for solo piano?
Furthermore, many of the pieces here seem to run counter to the expectations of even listeners unfamiliar with Lang: There are deliberately clumsy-sounding rhythms, and intentional "wrong" notes abound. One might doubt pianist Andrew Zolinsky's technical prowess if not for his flawless traversal of "Wiggle"; after hearing that dazzling display of digital dexterity, one must take seriously all the seemingly sloppy bits in the other tracks. It and the beautiful "Cello" are the closest to convention that Lang comes here. Without access to extramusical clues to why the music is constructed the way it is, This Was Written By Hand challenges us to relax longstanding ideas of what makes music good.
#62 The Leisure Society, Into the Murky Water-
Previously bandmates with director Shane Meadows and actor Paddy Considine, both major exponents of the British kitchen-sink drama, one might expect Nick Hemming's Brighton-based collective the Leisure Society to reflect the gritty realism of their critically acclaimed low-budget films. Instead, the former Telescopes' frontman's second album, Into the Murky Water, feels more suited to the classic films of the '60s than the hard-hitting contemporary tales of This Is England and Dead Man's Shoes, as evident on the opening title track, which showcases its cinematic ambitions with a spy movie-inspired fusion of foot-stomping percussion, playful marimbas, sweeping orchestral lounge-pop, and the Morricone-inspired spaghetti western vibes of closer "Just Like the Knife." But despite its occasional Hollywood-style tendencies, its ten tracks are a quintessentially English affair, its pastoral folk-pop nature constantly evoking images of the scenic countryside and quaint village pubs. "You Could Keep Me Talking" starts out as an enchanting war-time ballroom waltz before its plucked pizzicato strings, breezy flutes, and early Beatlesesque melodies give way to a crescendo of shoegazing distorted guitars, "This Phantom Life" effortlessly fuses shuffling Celtic-tinged nu-folk and a grandiose Elbow-style everyman chorus, while "Dust on the Dancefloor" manages to stay on the right side of twee with its Belle & Sebastian-esque brand of melancholic indie pop. Elsewhere, the languid hippy vibes of "Although We All Are Lost" are given an almost hymnal quality thanks to its use of church organs and powerful choral vocals, "I Shall Forever Remain an Amateur" is a gorgeous autumnal campfire singalong inspired by Hemming's stint working in a fabric warehouse, while "Better Written Off (Than Written Down)" is a jaunty slice of Nashville-tinged chamber pop reminiscent of the Divine Comedy, a far more appropriate comparison than those of Americana purveyors Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear who have been bandied around since their debut. Continuing the renaissance of quintessential English folk-pop as heard on Metronomy and Wild Beasts' recent efforts, Into the Murky Water is a charmingly lush and wistful affair which proves that their unexpected Ivor Novello nominations were no fluke.
#61 Ben Allison, Action/Refraction-
Bassist Ben Allison's first recorded collection of cover tunes retains his mischievous spirit: Despite the inclusion of Monk's "Jackie-ing," the most straight-ahead jazz here is a bumpity rendition of the Carpenters' saccharine classic "We've Only Just Begun," which adroitly exaggerates the rhythmic changes in the crooning chorus, promotes harsh accents in the verse sections and then rides a free-spirited sax solo from Michael Blake. Other tracks emphasize atmosphere and texture, less prog-rock than burbling electronica-jazz. Donny Hathaway's "Someday We'll All Be Free" and Allison's closer, "Broken" (the lone original) scuff an otherwise impassive ambiance, marked off by stoic chords, with grainy effects, like sand in a cement mixer, courtesy of two guitarists (longtime Allison cohort Steve Cardenas and Brandon Seabrook) and the analog synthesizer of Jason Lindner. By contrast, on Samuel Barber's "St. Ida's Vision," Lindner's keyboard takes on the rich resonance of an organ. Allison's bass work is spare but incisive throughout. This isn't his best record, but an interesting, innovative departure, with a wider range — from pensive balladry to quirky rock — than you first realize.
#60 Gable, Cute Horse Cut-
It's difficult to imagine quite what was discussed in the studio during the recording of this profoundly odd album. But it is certain that at no point was the following sentence uttered: "Whatever will people think?"
French art-poppers Gable are uncompromising even by the standards stereotypically ascribed to their people, and Cute Horse Cut is uncompromising even by the standards Gable have previously established (live, they have been known to employ such instrumentation as vacuum cleaners, choirs of elderly people and children, and the sound made by dismembering wooden boxes.)
Importantly, however, "uncompromising" is not, in the case of Cute Horse Cut or, to recognise its properly typographed name, CuTe HoRSe CuT, — a synonym for "unlistenable." At the heart of Gable's experimental urges is an acute pop instinct. This combination results in some treasurable flights of whimsy. "The StoNe aND The WoLF" recalls the surreal electro-operas of Kiwi eccentrics Tall Dwarfs. "Day," the only song whose title does not lurch between cases, is an amiable punky trundle in the style of Sonic Youth at their least obscurantist.
Several tracks are mere fragments, shorter than a minute. A couple of these do annoy, inasmuch as they feel like good ideas thrown willfully away — especially the sombre a cappella "HauNTeD," which might have made a fine gothic country ballad in the style of Handsome Family. Mostly, however, CuTe HoRSe CuT is a delectable oddity, just the right side of too weird for its own good.
#59 Gretchen Parlato, The Lost and Found-
In some circles, the invocation of "jazz vocals" runs only slightly behind "lite funk" as an excuse to utter "no thanks." If that's an accurate summary of your attitude, you'll want to work against muscle-memory here. Gretchen Parlato sings with a delicate touch — she doesn't favor much vibrato or tricky, endless strings of scatted syllables — though the wealth of detail in her timing and dynamic range makes for an interesting contrast alongside that breathy tone. (If at first her approach seems a little too breezy-easy, just give it a sec.)
One telling moment comes just past the three-minute mark of Wayne Shorter's "Juju" — here outfitted with words by Parlato. As the subtle, introductory statement of the theme pivots toward an expressive middle section, she unleashes a steady beam of E-flat to match Dayna Stevens's flights of tenor sax. Then she holds it, while Stevens swings around the note. It's an exposed, confident sound — one that puts to rest any debate over Parlato's maybe being a lightweight. By the time her "Juju" closes, with a reprise of its whispered origins, the take has the effect of a well told yarn: there is a sense of some satisfactory distance having been traveled. (Parlato's own tunes provide similar opportunities for flexibility. Check Kendrick Scott's restless drum outro on "How We Love.")
Contemporary piano whiz Robert Glasper co-produced this record, and you can hear traces of his hip-hop-fusion "Experiment" group in the sonics here. His work lets in just the right amount of edge (or worldbeat, as on "Alo Alo") — which is to say, not much at all. Though when that edge comes, it's a welcome virtue all the same, reminiscent of the peppery finish to a smooth drink.
#58 Blouse, Blouse-
The debut full-length by the Portland trio Blouse is full of aural tricks that transport the listener back in time — there's the occasional bent chord that evokes a cassette accidentally left to bake in a backseat, or the intermittent pause that reminds one of a skipping record. These self-consciously retro touches are in keeping with the band's overall aesthetic, though; Blouse crafts minimalist, bass-heavy music that fuses the bare-bones aesthetic of early-'80s post-punk with the sort of moody synth swirls that dominate the Projekt Records catalog. Lead singer Charlie Hilton has an airy, removed voice that rarely belies the emotions she's singing about, although that steely reserve is enough to make one wonder if this album's working title wasn't Black MP3s For A Blue Girl. The steadily loping bass lines, played by Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Jacob Portrait, prevent the sadness from taking over in a self-indulgent way, though; they give the dreary atmosphere enough solid ground to create a space where gloom only takes over for a short while, or at least until the next song starts.
#57 The Weather Station, All of it Was Mine-
As The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman writes introspective folksongs guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings. The album's cover — Lindeman standing in front of trees reflected in a window — looks like it could've been made decades ago, and it's fitting for her music. With no mention of time periods or events, her songs are strictly built on emotions and interactions, complemented by self-aware observations and warm imagery.
Opening track "Everything I Saw" has references to homemade bread and freshly dug-up carrots, muddy streetlights and see-through cotton skirts; in "Traveller," about feeling like a stranger in a familiar place, there's chipped paint on a brick and snow to brush off a jacket. "Came So Easy" mentions quiet evenings in the kitchen and ants pillaging in a single-file line, as Lindeman sings gently about being startled and caught off-guard by a new love, shifting from wincing at "sugar-sweetness" to being tongue-tied and restless.
All Of It Was Mine channels both folk music's early trailblazers and Lindeman's own contemporaries. The smoky soprano in "Know It To See It" is an obvious nod to Joni Mitchell, while the reedier alto in parts of "Traveller" sound more like Laura Marling. The music is mostly acoustic fingerpicked guitars and subdued banjo, with occasional tambourine and a couple bluesy bouts of reverb. It's simple and honest with no frills — sure to hold up through another few decades.
#56 Cashier No. 9, To The Death of Fun#55 Agnes Obel, Philharmonics-
Obel's debut was one of 2011's least assuming and most gratifying surprises. The Danish singer-songwriter arrived, from sight unseen, as a fully formed artist, her breathy, just slightly accented vocal haunting a ghostly gorgeous collection of songs, picked out in a piano technique at once lulling and insistent. "Down By The River" evoked the sepulcral fragility of PJ Harvey circa White Chalk' a cover of John Cale's "Close Watch" suggested rare poise as an interpreter, and the astutely judged instrumentals glued the album into a coherent whole that encouraged, and rewarded, many repeat listenings.
#54 Phoenix Foundation, Buffalo-
New Zealand's Phoenix Foundation are one of leftfield rock's most endearing slow-burners. Having drifted benignly beneath the critical radar for more than a decade, the Wellington six-piece have honed and rarefied their art to the point where their fourth studio album is some kind of quiet masterpiece. They haven't achieved this quantum leap via shock tactics: Phoenix Foundation are classicists, clearly in thrall to the enraptured, sun-drenched West Coast rock of the Byrds. Yet they infuse this quivering album with such a visceral love of life that it never sounds remotely retro. Their meticulously-developed, beautifully realised songcraft is a joy throughout, from the chaste Fleet Foxes harmonics of opening number "Eventually" to the hyperventilating electro-throb of the title track. The gawky rush of "Bitte Bitte" evokes the wide-eyed alchemy of Jonathan Richman. Singer Samuel Flynn Scott is a murmuring yet intense presence, infusing wry humour into the delicious sepia reverie of Bailey's Beach ("This is no joke, I am really broke — and all you can say is, look at that birdie!"). By the epic, Smiths-tinged kiss-off, "Golden Ship", it's clear that practise has made the Phoenix Foundation — well, not perfect, but very, very fine indeed.
#53 The Submotion Orchestra, Finest Hour-
Leeds, the restive capital of the People's Republic of West Yorkshire, has produced its far share of goth, indie rock, downbeat dance music and tubthumping pop. It's nobody's idea of a jazz mecca though, which is why Submotion Orchestra's accomplished debut album comes as such a surprise. Shot through with avant-garde textures, refracted at unexpected dub and ambient angles, and at times even sinister, it's a slick and accomplished collection of ersatz jazz and mellifluous trip-hop.
A few of the band's nine members graduated from the Leeds College Of Music's respected jazz course, while others have plied their trades as club DJs, composers-in-residence, sessioneers and promoters. One, Ruckspin, is perhaps the only classical viola player we've encountered who claims his favourite album is The Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation. The cumulative effect of all this extracurricular work is far from academic or studied, however, the impression is of a varied brain trust running on free-range musical curiosity.
The primary colors on Finest Hour are muted strings, Fender Rhodes pianos, skittering beats and the delicious lazy inflection in Ruby Wood's voice, and it would be easy to make formulaic chill-out for phone ads from such ingredients. But the band is adept at turning their materials inside out to create moods that oscillate from the laid-back to the frenetic. "Secrets" develops from a swirling Jacuzzi of jazz horns into grand, bassy, Studio One-style reggae — Madness co-opted by Sun Ra. The record reaches a transcendent finale when "Perfection" unfurls into a grand, trumpet-led, intergalactic reverie and then disappears into a dub wormhole. The result is diverse and twisting enough to sit alongside vintage trip-hop like Thievery Corporation or Massive Attack without sounding like anything other than itself.
#52 Tinariwen, Tassili-
In 2011, "going unplugged" tends to mean going offline, living a life unencumbered (or enhanced) by the Web, to whatever degree that's possible, for a specified period of time. A couple decades ago, though, the term had a very different connotation: It referred to MTV Unplugged, where songs were performed with only acoustic instruments. Tassili, the fifth U.S.-issued album by Mali's Tinariwen, a Saharan desert ensemble formed in 1982 and led by five rippling electric guitars, takes the phrase both ways. Though there was obviously recording gear involved, the area the band recorded in — "a protected region of the southeastern Algerian desert," per the PR — seems offline enough. On top of that, Tassili is the album where the band goes acoustic.
This might seem like a marketing setup: These guys are, after all, the walking definition of "desert blues." But the style Tinariwen plays is sometimes nicknamed simply "guitar" for a reason: All that six-string interaction has a dense weave that the group's percussionists, Said Ag Ayad and Mohammed Ag Tahada, amplify more than push. The Malians get some outside help, too, and although "Ya Messinagh" doesn't really need the extra oomph provided by a pair of horn players from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, it's kind of nice to hear Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio show up in the midst of "Tenere Taqqim Tossam." They help out on a few other songs as well, a lot more quietly. The spotlight, as ever, is on those gorgeously rough guitars.
#51 Aram Shelter's Arrive, There Was-
A cool extension of the legacy of Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch. The beautiful sound is made up by the contrasts of Shelton's biting alto, Jason Adasiewicz's lapidary vibes, Jason Roebke's powerful bass and Tim Daisy's sharp, roiling drums. The tracks are structured in idiosyncratic and sophisticated ways, with a muscular musical logic that gives the players space to stretch themselves without dissipating. Smart, with a gripping amount of fire burning just under the surface.
#50 Pete and the Pirates, One Thousand Pictures-
The name Pete and the Pirates might suggest a fearsome bunch, but a single listen to One Thousand Pictures shows that these friendly buccaneers want nothing more than to entertain you. From the open-seas setting "Can't Fish" to the lunar imagery of "Half Moon Street," the Reading quintet offer a freewheeling blend of indie rock that's equally reminiscent of goofy Brit-Poppers like Supergrass and sinewy post-punk acts like Wire. The line "It doesn't matter, doesn't matter at all" in "Come to the Bar" encapsulates the group's ethos, while the allusion to Blondie's "Heart of Glass" subtly anchors them to their post-punk roots.
One Thousand Pictures maintains the carefree zing of their debut Little Death, but adds enough variety to show the boys have a song for any mood. Tracks like "Little Gun" — which pairs a disco groove with a cavalry-charged rhythm guitar and soaring sails of reverb — show that they have more to offer than post-punk revival. A frantic sword fight breaks out in "Blood Gets Thin" in the form of clashing cymbals and a villainous guitar riff, followed by the sinister-yet-despondent weep in "Shotgun" and the jovial, almost cutesy "Motorbike." Within each song there's something unexpected and delightful — witness the half-buried scream at the reprise of album highlight "Things That Go Bump" — and the more you listen, the more you feel there's a waggish confidence about this band, one that bodes well for their future.
#49 Fatoumata Diawara, Fatou-
The road to hell is littered with the battered souls of actors who've tried to forge careers as musicians. But Mali's Fatoumata Diawara managed to leap genres with grace and invention. And she's achieved it while being that rarest of things in African music — a woman who writes her own material and accompanies herself on guitar.
Her compositions are remarkably mature for a debut, moving from the uptempo to the gently intimate with easy smoothness, although she seems at her best when the pace slows, as it does with "Makoun Oumou." An ode to her former employer, Wassoulou singer Oumou Sangaré (Diawara was her backing vocalist for a while), the song is deliciously spare — almost naked — with little more than guitar and percussion behind her voice, and the native kamelengoni harp peeking out in short runs. Built around an achingly catchy chorus, the song slowly builds in intensity until it achieves beautiful release close to the end. Like everything here, the song is a showcase for her singing, and it's that voice, a lulling, persuasive instrument, full of sensuality, that seduces the ear, whether Diawara is sounding beautifully ethereal ("Wililé"), built up in pillowed layers of vocals ("Alama"), or giving that raw African blues rein on "Kèlè."
Diawara wears her African roots proudly, but she's definitely not a purist. Mali is the foundation of the sound, but touches of electric piano sneak in on "Kanou," while jazzy electric guitar adds texture to "Bakonoba" and "Boloko," where it duels with n'goni on the disc's only real instrumental moment — something that simply serves to accent the predominance of the vocals. With her first step as a solo artist, Fatoumata Diawara has taken a giant leap indeed.
#48 Jah Wobble, Psychic Life-
Wobble, sculptor of bone-crunching bass lines for Public Image Ltd circa 1979's Metal Box, has made a career out of into-the-lion's-jaws collaborations with some of rock's most influential and outspoken figures, from PiL's John Lydon, to Sinead O'Connor and beyond. His latest album introduces his most satisfying team-up so far, with 30-something Lancastrian singer-songwriter Julie Campbell, who first surfaced a year or two ago on Warp, under the alias LoneLady.
First put into contact by Warp's boss, Steve Beckett, the unlikely duo soon discovered that, despite a 20-year age gap, they had remarkably similar goals. Campbell was retrospectively smitten by Metal Box — she'd barely been born when it came out. Wobble, for his part, had been thinking about making those kind of noises again, after wandering the perimeters of the avant-garde for 15 years. Together, they've dreamt up a far-reaching collection of moves and grooves, all loosely inspired by the genre-busting freedom of the post-punk scene, from which Wobble first sprung.
Campbell's enthusiasm helped him to re-access the mindset of his PiL days, even if he had refused involvement in Lydon's reunion — to the point where he even called in Keith Levene, PiL's mind-boggling guitarist from that era, to play on two tracks. Disciples of that classic record will marvel at "Phantasms Rise...," where Wobble's ticklish up-and-down bass runs scamper thrillingly counter to Levene's savagely churning FX, while Campbell murmurs and coos tangential abstractions over the top.
Psychic Life, however, is anything but PiL by numbers. Instead, Wobble and Campbell tap into the same spirit that birthed its ground-breaking post-punk takes on Krautrock, dub and disco. Opener "Tightrope" marches on a brisk house beat through numerous arms-aloft dancefloor crescendos, while the title track brilliantly matches a robust hip-hop rhythm to an acrobatically zigzagging bass pattern that recalls Wobble's b-line on The Orb's early-'90s ambient-house classic, "The Blue Room."
Against such an unpredictable sonic backdrop, Campbell revels in assuming different voices and styles. In "Feel," she shrugs off ice-maiden froideur in favor of a full-tilt disco vixen's craving for sensual release. On "Slavetown," she yearns and moans and falsettos like an ambisexual funk regent (Chaka Khan? Prince?!), questing to escape the entrapment of her home city, Manchester.
Straddling the immediate and the out-there, the carnal and the metaphysical, with a Zen-like command, Wobble and Campbell have spirited up an album which duly deserves the widest possible audience.
#47 Widowspeak, Widowspeak-
Widowspeak covered Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" for the B-side of their second single, "Gun Shy," and that same sense of swampy, brooding romance lingers over their first full-length. The album expands on the promising sound of their early efforts, which mixed the shadowy sweetness of Molly Hamilton's voice with enough grit and twang to keep things interesting.
All of the A-sides of the singles the band released prior to their self-titled debut are here, and they're still the standouts. "Harsh Realm" is the definitive Widowspeak song: Drummer Michael Staziak delivers a subtle-but-driving rhythm, guitarist Robert Earl Thomas uncorks slippery, winding leads that blur the line between surf and surreal, and Hamilton sings of literal and figurative dark places in a hazy, seen-it-all drawl that evokes both Mazzy Star and Cat Power.
If the band stuck to this searching, darkly beautiful sound — and indeed, "Nightcrawlers," "Half Awake" and "Ghost Boy" do just that — the results would be satisfying. But Widowspeak shows the band knows how to smile, too: "Fir Coat" is a jangly gem that cuts the album's dead-of-night ruminations like a sunbeam; they even kick up their heels on the rollicking "Puritan" and the breezy "Hard Times." A subtle and surprising debut, Widowspeak is even more winning than their singles suggested.
#46 Krallice, Diotima-
Black metal bands typically temper their fury with concision — their ice-pick guitar riffs and relentless blast beats burn out after four or five minutes. But Krallice recognize no such limitations, frequently stretching their compositions to prog-rock lengths. The group's longest piece to date, "Monolith of Possession," from 2009's Dimensional Bleedthrough, runs a staggering 18:44, and "Litany of Regrets," from Diotima, isn't much shorter at 13:39. Guitarists Mick Barr ( Orthrelm, Octis) and Colin Marston ( Behold...The Arctopus, Gorguts, Dysrhythmia) are the band's co-leaders, their staccato riffs and piercing harmonies combining black metal fury with the slowly building power of minimalism or trance music. But the contributions of bassist Kevin McMaster and drummer Lev Weinstein ( Bloody Panda) demand recognition; they give the music an undeniable heft and a supple, even fluid momentum. On "Telluric Rings," the album's high point, Weinstein sets up a powerful groove that bolsters Barr and Marston's aggressive interplay. When it finally gives way to blast beats, the savagery feels earned, and the guitar solo (at about the six-minute mark) is positively transcendent. Over the course of three albums, Krallice have gradually turned black metal into high art, without losing any of the genre's intensity. Diotima is a masterpiece.
#45 Chelsea Wolfe, Apokalypsis-
This year, Los Angeles received a welcome antithesis to the glossed starlets parading its streets: doom-folk maven Chelsea Wolfe, a sepulchral singer-songwriter who brilliantly united her avant-garde performance roots with the arch, punishing rhythms of metal. Her second album, Ἀποκάλυψις ("apokalypsis"), explored end-days scenarios with nuanced melodies reminiscent of PJ Harvey; the goth stomper "Demons" ripped along with untoward destruction, while the standout ballad "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" dared to show her vulnerable side with sighs of, "We could be two straight lines/ In a crooked world." The artfully macabre surf-guitar of lead single "Mer" was a perfect summation of the dark undercurrents of her sunny homeland, as only she could capture them.
#44 Makossa & Megablast, Soy Como Soy-
Austrian DJs and producers Makossa & Megablast hit big four years ago with their debut album Kanuaka, a wild, daring meld of club music and raw, authentic African rhythms — a superb dancefloor mix. They've taken their time over the follow up, and the thought shows. The title track has already been a huge Ibiza hit with its outsized, anthemic sound, but the rest of the record doesn't try to repeat a winning formula. Instead, it throws the windows wide open and looks beyond Africa to the new territory of Latin and R&B with remarkable success.
Not that they ignore the base of their sound. It's there on the bone-rattling "Wangu," with Tony Allen, the man who powered Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, behind the kit, adding his subtle bedrock of layered rhythms that propel the infectious sound of OG Spiritual Goddess's voice. It's an album where the guests, most of them vocalists, bring much to the party, but none as much as Hubert Tubbs, once the frontman for the mighty Tower of Power. His two contributions, "Peace" and "Coming Home," are ripped right out of his heart — soulful and intense, the accompaniment a gloriously spare frame tinged with R&B that lets the vocal shine bright. Nothing's phoned in here; every performance is majestic, every detail of the music carefully created. The instrumentals are equally compelling, whether on "Release the Pressure," which lives up to name with its twisting build that erupts into shimmering melody, or the twinkling atmospheres and bubbling analogue synths of the closer "Love You." The heart of Makossa & Megablast might still be in Africa, but the look in their eyes is decidedly global.
#43 Cymbals Eat Guitars, Lenses Alien#42 Ghostpoet, Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam-
Perhaps the most self-effacing, machismo-free MC Britain has ever produced, Obaro Ejimiwe makes Roots Manuva sound like 50 Cent. Born in Coventry (home of the Specials) and based in London, he's a hard-luck storyteller who raps like he's missed the last bus home on a foggy night in January. Ghostpoet's subject is disappointment, whether it be underwater finances ("Survive It") or the wrenching self-loathing of a bad hangover ("Cash and Carry Me Home"), and his music hovers in the spaces between wobbly-legged dance music, blurry hip hop and Burial-style pre-dawn dubstep. The stirring finale Liiines confirms that disappointment doesn't mean defeat.
#41 Mike Watt, hyphenated-man-
The word critics most often use to describe Mike Watt's music is "elliptical", which should give you some idea just how difficult describing his music is. Ever since his time as bassist for punk/funk legends Minutemen, Watt has specialized in music of evasion. Most punk rock barrels forward; his music is a constant sideways skitter. His songs never take the straight route, but they still manage to get where they're going faster than anyone else, depositing a few unlodgeable sounds in your ear and disappearing all in the elapsed time it takes for you to mutter, "Huh?"
No one can maintain that kind of high-step forever. Mike Watt is 53 now, and hyphenated-man, his new solo record, is a meditation on that truth, a punk-rock lifer's shit-eating-grin look at mortality. A lot of aging men in rock make this record eventually, the one that takes baleful stock of their accumulated scars, settles debts, issues pronouncements. The "Regrets? I've had a few" record. Often, they sag under the leaden weight of their subject matter.
But not Mike Watt's version — his is, well, more elliptical. There are myriad ways to moan "I'm gettin' old" in rock 'n' roll, but nobody else has done so by writing 30 songs dedicated to individual figures in Hieronymous Bosch's gruesome Renaissance triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The titles describe the figures: "belly-stabbed-man," "pinned-to-the-table-man," "head-and-feet-only-man." The lyrics, however, are startlingly direct and personal: On "antlered-man," he sings wryly, "When I was younger, tried to act like something stronger/ But the ego, it just won't let go," encouraging himself to "get naked, let weakness show." As is usually the case with Watt's work, what looks wildly counterintuitive on paper turns out to be, for him, somehow the shortest distance from A to B.
Apart from the words, his voice betrays the years: It has acquired a beer gut and a permanent sunburn, full of the crags and pits that come from decades of "jamming econo." But the antic rhythms haven't flagged a step. Many critics have faltered in conveying this experience, but here goes: It's like riding shotgun in a dune buggy down the sheer side of a rocky cliff, gripping the handles while Watt shouts factoids about the native flora and fauna into your ear. It's thrilling, queasy, and disorienting; it's packed with information and over too soon; and the minute you make it down alive, you want to start over.
#40 Black Truth Rhythm Band, Ifetayo-
The Trinidadian Black Truth Rhythm Band's 1976 album Ifetayo is an essential, much-bootlegged artifact of the rare funk underground that has finally been properly (both legally and sonically) reissued. Led by the recently deceased Oluko Imo (who would later record the very fine Oduduwa with both Fela and Femi Kuti), Black Truth Rhythm Band combined the jazzy branch of American funk; Afrobeat and Caribbean polyrhythms; and pan-African spiritual mumbo jumbo to create slow-burning grooves that were never undercut by the flute solos or joss-stick vibes.
The group is at its most charmingly and liltingly tropical on the almost straight-ahead calypso "Aspire," but it's the deeper, more intense tracks — like the simmering tribal drum jam "Umbala," where even the steel pans sound moody and eerie — that give Ifetayo its funk cachet. The highlights are the storming title track, which finds the perfect middle ground between the uncouth but dizzying rhythms of Fela's Afrika 70 band and the more restrained but clinical Cymande, and the endearingly ramshackle "Save D Musician," which has long been a favourite on the rare funk circuit. While Soundway always puts together beautiful packages, Ifetayo is one of the best-sounding funk reissues of recent years, vivid with tiny details and lovely, cocooning bass reproduction.
#39 Battles, Gloss Drop-
When Battles released their deranged debut album ( Mirrored) in 2007, the New York virtuosos proved that — 20 years after Steve Albini broke brains with Big Black and Shellac — there was plenty of uncharted territory in math rock. That Battles have become the genre's new standard-bearers makes sense: The group features two of its pioneers in Don Caballero guitarist Ian Williams and Helmet drummer John Stanier. But it was singer/guitarist Tyondai Braxton (son of avant-garde jazz icon Anthony) who gave the band their voice, piling unintelligible vox-tweaked madness on top of the group's already maddening prog-rock sound.
During sessions for their second album, Braxton suddenly quit, citing exhaustion. His departure has allowed Williams, Stanier and guitarist Dave Konopka to tighten things up. Gloss Drop is the group's most focused and pleasurable collection yet. It's also (WTF?) straight-up poppy at moments, with loads of ear-worm guitar hooks and propulsive grooves. Call it treadmill music for the art-school set.
Gloss Drop kicks off with the hiccupy, six-minute cluster-bomb "Africastle." From there, the group digs into a 54-minute barrage of knotty prog, electrified bebop, demented calypso, and what- was-that industrial bangers. Yet it's all somehow unified by Stanier's consistently crushing beats and Konopka's mouse-squeak guitar effects. A few notable guests assume Braxton's role as vocalist — including new-wave icon Gary Numan on the jittery "My Machines" and Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino on the hip-swiveling "Sweetie & Shag." But in the hands of Battles, the added star power is mostly just another texture; another cool studio toy for them to manipulate.
#38 Gruff Rhys, Hotel Shampoo-
For all their weirder aspects — the day-glo army tanks, the Yo Gabba Gabba!-on-a-bad-trip artwork — Super Furry Animals make records that are, primarily, beautiful and welcoming sensory experiences. For his third solo album (or fourth, if you count his electro excursion as Neon Neon with producer Boom Bip) frontman Gruff Rhys absents himself from the SFAs' abrasive techno and space-rock dimensions and goes for a low-key and poignant adult pop approach. It foregrounds a fact that SFAs' lysergic sturm-und-drang sometimes obscures: Rhys is a first-rate emotional songwriter, able to connect the domestic with the cosmic. Some of these eye-misting songs — especially "If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme)" — wouldn't sound amiss if they were sung by next year's "X Factor" winner.
It's reflective, intimate but feel-good stuff, with nary a rock guitar in earshot. Instead, there are woozy chord changes, small but perfectly-formed string sections, rolling pianos and more muted trumpets than a New Orleans funeral line. The prevailing mood is of sunny reverie, as if the right music could be powerful enough to transport the Los Angeles sun to South Wales (well, Cardiff sits on its own West Coast and Rhys has never hidden his love of Brian Wilson). His voice in particular sounds just lovely — untutored and heavy on the Welsh accent for sure, but all the more direct for it.
Of course he can't keep his magnificent schizophrenia in check for a whole album. Half-way through "Christopher Columbus," which analogises the beginning of a bad relationship to the mixed blessings that flowed from the landings of 1492, the song suddenly starts sounding like Madness. "Patterns of Power" flips from an AOR acoustic chug into the synth-squelching paleo-funk world of Zapp or Parliament. This is what Gruff and the SFA do, and commercially speaking, maybe it's their enemy. But it's doubtful that the questing listener will feel short-changed by a record that sounds like three or four deeply satisfying albums all at the same time.
#37 Owiny Sigoma Band, Owiny Sigoma Band-
Take five British musicians raised on soul and hip-hop to Kenya, team them with a local nyatiti (lyre) player and a percussionist, and watch as the grooves start churning. "Gone Thum Mana Gi Nyadhi" kicks it all off with a long, easy conversation between cultures, but from there the funk builds, as on "Odero Lwar," where the instruments let the rhythm bubble under hypnotic drums. The album's an understated joy, and even at its most Western, as with "Wire," the African undercurrent remains strong. It's an indication of what open minds and open hearts can achieve.
#36 Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion-
Part of me wants to call this Crystal Stilts' pop move and the rest is giggling its ass off at the very idea. The Brooklyn quintet's second full album doesn't cover much territory that their previous work hadn't. But from the time JB Townsend's Duane Eddy-like guitar lick of "Sycamore Tree" bounds into earshot, In Love with Oblivion is palpably catchier, more upbeat and lighter of tone than anything Crystal Stilts have recorded before. Brad Hargett's vocals are still lachrymose — that's his thing — but he sounds like he's enjoying his role rather than simply mumbling his way through a part, as he sometimes could before. Even a long drone like "Alien Rivers" hums and surges; it's a genuine surprise to discover that the track lasts nearly seven-and-a-half minutes.
Oblivion isn't a lo-fi album, exactly — it's more like an expert simulacrum of lo-fi. Old fans needn't worry: Mysterioso crud is still the crux of the Crystal Stilts sound. But the production, by Townsend (and engineer Gary Olson), keeps the droning quality of old while expanding sonically in a few directions. There's a comfortable spaciousness that belies the group's earlier, more cramped sonics: The way Kyle Forester's organ threads through Andy Adler's antic bass and Townsend's anxiously chiming riffs on "Half a Moon" evokes a carnival at twilight, while "Through the Floor" is straight-up Phil Spector Wall of Sound homage that works even better for coming out of the speakers as if from a different room. (That's true on headphones, too.) Based on Townsend's work here, he'll probably be able to hire himself as a producer for other bands of this ilk for a good while. But the way his confident riffs lead his ever-tightening bandmates, it seems safe to imagine that he isn't going anywhere for a while yet.
#35 Talvin Singh and Niladri Kumar, Together-
Percussionist Talvin Singh — one of the leading lights of the Asian Underground movement of the late '90s — and sitar player Niladri Kumar give traditional Indian music an electric reboot, reinventing the sitar/tabla duo that's been a mainstay of the genre for centuries. Singh provides a steady base, playing so subtly that at times he hardly seems to be there, offering accents — and many touches of atmospheric programming — then crashing like thunder to propel a track like "Joy" through its frantic finale. Kumar, meanwhile, not only brings virtuosic sitar skills, he also employs his zitar — a five-string electric version of the sitar, run through with effects. The interplay between the two recalls such magisterial figures as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussein; they're almost telepathic in the way they support and push each other. Together, they create something that builds on the past but is also completely modern — their heart might be in India, but their outlook is utterly global.
The disc hinges on two long tracks, the title cut and "Threads." The first unfolds like a raga, opening with a lengthy, floating improvisation that slowly builds into a gorgeous melody that carries the second half of the piece. The zitar sounds like a guitar one moment and an exotic sarangi the next, until it all rounds out with a lovely triumphal flourish. By contrast, "Threads" is exactly what its title implies — a series of fragments, ranging from the dreamy to the desperate, all of which weave together to create an oddly cohesive and satisfying whole. By reimagining the way Indian music can be, Singh and Kumar give it breath and accessibility, not only fresh life, but a way forward in the new century.
#34 Little Dragon, Ritual Union-
Little Dragon's command of styles is staggering, from dubstep and dancehall to Prince-ly R&B and early '80s hi-NRG disco. And that's only on the sweet seduction song "Precious." Their light arrangements are also finessed with a kind of feng shui: Where others erect walls of sound, Nagano's pals paint delicate watercolors without seeming precious. Combing the complex chords and subtle tonalities of jazz with electronica's infinite possibilities, they play in their sonic sandbox as if they were carefree children, not musos swinging on serious chops.
No wonder why the Roots' drummer/producer (?uestlove) and Outkast are fans of the Gothenburg group's dark, dubby soul — a sound that's earned its various singers and players spots on albums by Raphael Saadiq, Gorillaz and TV on the Radio's David Sitek. Discreetly freaky soul doesn't get much more futuristic than the avant-garde angles of Ritual Union.
#33 Roots Manuva, 4everevolution-
The riots that hit London last month lend an unpredicted frisson of topicality to "Skid Valley", the most sombre track on Roots Manuva's fifth album. "The cost of life's still cheap round here but the cost of living ain't cheap round here," rumbles the south London MC, adding more with resignation than pride, "Britain remains Britain." The close proximity of chunky party jams like "Watch Me Dance" and "Get the Get" to such downbeat social commentary comes as no surprise from someone who has been following his own varied path since the late '90s and is no less compelling on the cusp of middle age.
While younger, more commercially successful MCs such as Dizzee Rascal and Tinie Tempah know their way around the VIP room, Roots' concerns are, as he spells out in Revelation, "daily grind and daily bread". Recession and depression are recurring themes, set to shuddering sub-bass and Hitchcockian strings, though his oddball humour is never far away. Take the way the paranoid skank of "Who Goes There?" concludes with an eccentric take on upper-class English slang: "Chocks away, toodle and the pips." The wry domestic angst of Wha' Mek? is his most tender song yet while the bubbling urban psychedelia of "The Throes of It" is by some distance his strangest. Neither is anywhere close to being conventional hip hop. Moulding rap into his own idiosyncratic private language, Roots may be too old and too odd to capitalize on UK rap's post-Dizzee gold rush but he still commands attention.
#32 Damu, Unity-
The nebulous sub-genre of "post-dubstep" has many confusing cross-currents and streams, but its most vital contribution has been a renewed emphasis on sensual musicality. Acts like Martyn, Joy Orbison, Zomby and Joker, and labels like Night Slugs, Numbers and Hyperdub, have taken the enveloping bass of dubstep and grime and added funkier and more flexible rhythms, warm chords and zingy synthesized melodies shooting every which way but loose. And now Manchester producer Damu has produced what is possibly the most coherent statement of this strain yet.
The Keysound label boss Martin "Blackdown" Clark — also well known as DJ, journalist and producer in his own right — has always had an ear for the most technically refined producers in grime, dubstep and related scenes, and in signing Damu, his taste is reaffirmed. While Unity contains a broad range of rhythms, tempos and influences, Damu's sheer musicianship gives it coherence. The slow development of its themes and the deadly precision of its sonic palette means that it binds together as a whole in a way that few club albums manage.
Whether the rhythm is a steady house pulse, the skipping funk of U.K. garage, or jazzy syncopations that recall the broken beat scene of the late '90s, there's a glorious excessiveness to the layering of sub-bass, chords and synth leads that is only possible because of Damu's clear understanding of harmony and counterpoint. It's peppered, too, with sensuous vocal snippets and pinprick-sharp high-frequency percussion sounds that act as punctuation and highlights in the unfolding patterns, constantly grabbing your attention and preventing it from becoming merely wishy-washy mood music.
Unity is saved from becoming sonically homogeneous by the insistent hooks that give each track its distinctive identity. The sweet "let the games begin" vocal of "Breathless," the synthetic steel drum riff of "L.O.V.E." (which is so infectious as to be almost, but not quite, annoying), the sheets of white noise that slide and bend across one another in "Maths is Fine for Sum": Each lodges in the brain, making sure that each track functions as instantly and memorably as a great club tune should, even as they contribute to the greater whole of the album.
The lynchpin that holds the album together is the stunning "Ridin' the Hype," which features maverick east London grime MC Trim. On his mixtapes and guest appearances, Trim has been one of the bleakest rappers in the scene, with his slow and sparse style providing a stark contrast to the rapid-fire fury of many grime artists, and his gallows humor and insular surrealism making him seem like some gutter Zen philosopher. Damu's mutant R&B backing and Trim's poetic bent transform the song into a reflection on reflection, one of the best renderings I can recall of that moment, which any true clubber will recognize, when for a moment you step outside yourself and find peace among the noise and movement of the crowded dancefloor.
#31 Other Lives, Tamer Animals#30 Neon Indian, Era Extrana-
When it comes to discussing Neon Indian, we must first answer some questions. Are we talking about a band, or merely the creative outlet of songwriter Alan Palomo? Would you categorize Neon Indian's melted-plastic pop as "chillwave," or is it actually stylistically-restless synth music? And finally, does the heavily-hyped Era Extrana live up to its acclaimed predecessor, Psychic Chasms, or is the debut, in retrospect, ripe for reassessment? The answer to all of these questions is "yes."
Palomo is undoubtedly a burgeoning talent with two albums, a half dozen singles, and a collaboration with the Flaming Lips under his belt (all before turning 24), but Era Extrana, thankfully, feels like a progressive step beyond his once-terminally-chill aesthetic. Granted, Extrana's 42 minutes, at first listen, plays out like a collection of weed-inspired ideas, but Palomo's breathy vocals and dizzyingly hazy instrumentals take time to unfurl and reveal a mature depth.
Opening with the short "Heart: Attack," the album quickly enters into DayGlo territory, with "Polish Girl," "Blindside Kiss" and "Fall Out" all feeling distinctly '80s-derived. The general blueprint is simple: Palomo channels the distorted buzz of the Jesus & Mary Chain and couples it with the glossy coloring of the Psychedelic Furs. And for the true nostalgic, Neon Indian even incorporates Nintendo game console sound effects into most songs — particularly "Arcade Blues."
But while colleagues like Washed Out and Toro Y Moi have all developed their sounds to include elements of pop and funk, Palomo seems satisfied with simply revisiting the strangeness he first explored on Psychic Chasms. Which isn't all that surprising: The terminally chill generally don't mess with a good thing.
#29 Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica-
Oneohtrix Point Never has assumed an important place in the sound and theory obsessed underground with music that consumes as it compels and a unique ability to articulate his vision as something more than just a simple accumulation of "vibes." So it goes with Replica, a mindful album that zones out and tunes in at the same time. Though he made his name with drifting, drafting synthesizer meditations reminiscent of '70s kosmiche acts like Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never shifts into more cut-up forms on Replica. Part of the style started to coalesce on his 2010 breakthrough Returnal, but the material here pushes harder and farther into a realm where abstraction and clarity mesh. "Andro" starts off more or less recognizably, with seething synth tones and a portentous sense of atmosphere, but a signal gets sent when the track swerves, all of the sudden, into an unexpected fit of rhythm near the end. "Power of Persuasion" takes the next step by introducing as an aural plaything the sound of a traditional piano, which proves surprisingly prevalent on the album throughout. The rest of the template sets when sampled bits of voice — or, more accurately, weird incidental sounds made by a mouth on its way to speaking — wander in during "Sleep Dealer." It's a strange mix of subject matter, to be sure. But it gathers into shapes that manage to approximate actual songs, with memorable parts and melodies that linger, while doubling down as experimental ambient soundscapes.
#28 Thundercat, The Golden Age of the Apocalypse#27 Los Campesinos!, Hello Sadness-
The name of Los Campesinos!'s new album, Hello Sadness, comes from a line in its title track: Frontman Gareth (all the bandmembers have adopted the surname Campesinos!) sings, "Goodbye, courage/ Hello, sadness, again," which kicks off a raucous party of Arcade Fire-level bombast, with a searing violin intertwined with a guitar solo over "ooh oooohs." In that song's chorus they all sing, "This dripping from my broken heart is never running dry." It's a perfect example of what this group from Cardiff, Wales, does best: pair self-deprecating verses over chaotic explosions of guitars, horns, strings and glockenspiel. Their songs are accounts of lust, heartbreak and awkward romantic encounters, and Sadness — the group's first effort in almost two years — is on par with their best work. The chorus of "Life is a Long Time" laments, "You know it starts pretty rough and ends up even worse." But it's hard to imagine things getting worse when the album begins with Gareth hooking up with a girl who vomits on his rental tux before they make it back to her house ("By Your Hand"). Few bands could make such an incident sound so far from sad.
#26 Tom Waits, Bad As Me-
Arriving seven years after Real Gone, Bad As Me busts out of the gate with the churning horns of "Chicago." But with the lagging tabla beat of the next track, "Raised Right Men," Waits steps on the brakes, and he more or less keeps his foot down for the rest of the album. The word "relaxed" is nowhere in Waits's lexicon, but there's an unhurried ease to songs like "Talking at the Same Time" and "Back in the Crowd." Waits sings away from the beat, as if even his rhythm section can't set his pace. "Last Leaf" confronts mortality with fleeting defiance, and "New Year's Eve" is a mandolin-tinged waltz, not a time signature that gets much play in his repertoire.
That's not to say Waits has mellowed, exactly. "Hell Broke Luce" extends his interest in the lives of soldiers, with baritone sax so low it sounds like the rumble of mortars and a little simulated machine-gun fire for extra PTSD. "Satisfied" ponders death as a release from the body — "Lay my vertebrae out like dice/ Let my skull be a home for the mice" — but not before its needs are fully met. He even invokes the patron saints of rock 'n' roll dissatisfaction: "Mr. Jagger, Mr. Richards/ I will scratch where I been itchin'." It is perhaps not coincidental that Richards also plays on the song.
Waits scratches plenty of itches on Bad As Me, no two songs are alike, although most draw on templates he's laid down over his long and varied career. The album never quite settles on a mood for long enough to cast the kind of sustained spell as Bone Machine or Small Change do, but with so much time between recordings, it's not surprising Waits feels the itch to dance with as many partners as he can.
#25 Megafaun, Megafaun-
Best known as the band that once played with Justin Vernon in DeYarmond Edison, North Carolina trio Megafaun have soldiered on perfectly fine without the help of the Bon Iver frontman. The proof is in their third, self-titled LP, a confident and polished 15-track set that could prove to be the group's breakthrough.
Brothers Brad and Phil Cook, along with drummer Joe Westerlund, grew up listening to everything from contemporary country radio to experimental musicians like Christian Fennesz. (Dudes' beards don't lie, either: They're huge Deadheads.) And they successfully apply their musical heroes to Megafaun. The drop-dead gorgeous "Hope You Know" pairs easygoing piano with subtle static sounds, while "Serene Return" updates Southern blues for the 21st century, adding peals of distortion and clomping percussion atop haunting acoustic guitar. Not all of the studio experimentation works — "Isadora" is a curious fusion of free-jazz and New Orleans-style brass that grates more than it charms — but the stunning "Get Right" is one journey down the rabbit hole that's definitely worth taking.
#24 The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Belong-
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's 2009 debut album was so well-versed in the arcane classics of twee, shoegaze and C86 guitar jangle that it seemed less like a rock album than a studied, masterful thesis statement. Having earned its cultivated, bookish-pop pedigree with clever songs such as "Young Adult Friction," the Brooklyn band has decided to shake the library shelves with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. This feat occurs 12 seconds into the opening title track of Belong, when an affable intro melody gets obliterated by a blaze of guitars straight off Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream. Butch Vig isn't responsible for the hulk-sized sound of Belong; the Pains recruited the production and mixing team of Alan Moulder and Flood who, coincidentally, also worked with Smashing Pumpkins as well as a sizable chunk of late-'80s U.K. shoegazers ( Ride, My Bloody Valentine, et al).
As such, Belong asserts that the Pains are no longer content to jangle politely in the indie-pop underground; it explores a wider sonic palette without losing the band's familiar fuzzed-out hooks or Peggy Wang's astral synths. In fact, frontman Kip Berman's breathy vocals might be even wispier — at times to the point of inaudibility. What verbiage does come through suggests the Pains aren't quite as pure as they used to be — or at least not as tentative: "You try so hard to keep it together/ And you look so hot in fishnets and leather," leers Berman on "The Body." Meanwhile, "Girl of 1,000 Dreams" charges along with the Jesus and Mary Chain's sense of remote lust and primal reverb. The irony in all this newfound confidence — a sure-handedness that's easy to come by when your highly-anticipated sophomore album never stumbles over the course of 10 tracks — rests in the relative bravado of "Belong." Even if we hear it as the Pains' noisemaking arrival, Berman is quick to undercut that notion when he reaches the chorus: "I know it is wrong, but we just don't belong." The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are outsiders to the core who won't be hushed again.
#23 Jonathan Wilson, Gentle Spirit-
Gentle Spirit is the debut album proper from American producer and singer/songwriter Jonathan Wilson. Recorded by Wilson himself with analogue equipment, the album evokes the classic sound of West Coast Americana from the late '60s and early '70s, taking inspiration from the original Laurel Canyon scene, Rovi
#22 Plaid, Scintilla-
[Ed. Note: The revered electronic duo Plaid have collaborated with Bjork on multiple occasions: she wrote and sang the song "Lilith" from their 1997 album Not For Threes, for example.]
The London electronic duo of Andy Turner and Ed Handley originally intended to put out Scintilli (a Latin word that translates as "I am many sparks") as long ago as 2008 before succumbing to an orgy of tweaking, honing and re-imagining: They proudly boast that every beat on the record took a day to construct. The CD version of the album is housed in a puzzle pack which allows the purchaser, should they be so inclined, to suspend the disk from two interlinked rings to create an "executive CD mausoleum".
Yet put aside the obsessively painstaking creative process and the cosmically pretentious packaging, and what remains is essentially Plaid business as usual. This means meticulously intricate and yet deceptively simple-sounding webs of sound that mostly have a thrumming, twitchy electronic pulse at their core yet which wander with fervent promiscuity through virtually every other musical genre extant, from ambient folktronica ("Missing") to stately dream-pop ("Craft Nine") to the closing serrated glitch-symphony that is "At Last". And when you can dance to them, as on dark-hued techno-throb "Unbank," it is a bonus. Twenty years into their career, Plaid remain contemporary electronic composers sans pareil.
#21 Hollie Cook, Hollie Cook-
When confronted by the debut album by a Sex Pistols' daughter, who was also a member of the final incarnation of the Slits, it's easy to get militant about the unfair advantages bestowed on pop offspring. But one listen to Hollie Cook's first album should dispel such thoughts. It's an unabashedly gorgeous record, built for summertime, born under the twin signs of Carroll Thompson and Janet Kaye, and dedicated to the idea that if there's a better record out there than Junior Murvin's "Police And Thieves" then it's Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking."
Cook calls the record "tropical pop" but really, its jump-off point is the most quality-challenged of reggae subgenres: lovers' rock, regenerated here by youth, wit and the imaginative production of Mike "Prince Fatty" Pelanconi. Cook's voice — breathy, conversational, unaffected — sits inside Prince Fatty's epic sound constructions as if she's the Queen of Planet Dub.
Alongside the daytime pop are equally deft excursions into darkness. "Sugar Water (Look At My Face)" rides a thunderous dubbed-up intro worthy of King Tubby into a tune that begs for big speakers. Fatty doesn't just restrict himself to slavish recreations of the late '70s dub-pop palette, however; "Shadow Kissing" transposes Joe Meek's lowest-of-lo-fi, handbuilt ideals on to a splendid and disorienting piece of motorik reggae. Cook and her producer share the most important musician's trait: a severe allergy to boredom.
Hollie Cook gets bonus points for clocking in at a concise 33 minutes — Prince Fatty clearly applied ruthless liposuction to a record that should please admirers of Lily Allen and Burning Spear alike. Hollie's father Paul Cook must be proud. Her late mentor Ari Up of The Slits, who passed away in October 2010, surely would be.
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