#100 Gentleman Jesse, Leaving Atlanta
-
"No turning back, I gotta get out of town," Jesse Smith sings on Leaving Atlanta's "What Did I Do." Four years in the making,Atlanta power-pop king Gentleman Jesse's sophomore album was inspired by a series of wildly unfortunate events in his life. The album is dedicated to friends he lost to cancer (ATL punk staple Bobby Ubangi) and drugs (Jay Reatard), and in the time between his debut full-length and this one,...
more »
#99 ERAAS, ERAAS
-
Like urban explorers, Brooklyn post-rock duo ERAAS haunt the gloomy husks of krautrock, darkwave, industrial and dreampop, finding pulsing life within them. Their dark and beat-driven self-titled debut draws on well-established subgenres, but feels utterly new: The immaculate production, full of audible space and teeming with intricate layers, is part of the reason, but most of it is due to the duo's keen command of their style. The result is a clean...
more »
#98 Pop Zeus, Pop Zeus
-
Like a John Singer Sargent trapped beneath a greasy glass frame, Pop Zeus — the project of one Mikey Hodges — smothers opulent hooks in buckets of scuzz. It's no surprise he nicked the project's name from a Bob Pollard song; like the Fading Captain himself, Hodges cuts sweetness with sand, nodding lazily towards '80s jangle pop but ruthlessly chipping off the high-gloss, making what's left feel as raw and as...
more »
#97 Eri Yamamoto Trio, The Next Page
-
Eri Yamamoto was headed for a career as a classical pianist until she fell under the spell of Tommy Flanagan and glided over to jazz. The Next Page delivers on all the refined, creative empathy promised in that backstory.
The 11 original compositions, cleaved by 60 seconds of silence (so you can avoid downloading "track" 7), are structured to simulate a pair of sets at Arthur's Tavern in New York, where the trio...
more »
#96 Adrian Sherwood, Survival And Resistance
-
Adrian Sherwood has spent 30 years unfurling juddering, colon-deep waves of seismic dub, but Survival & Resistance is a very different beast. On this rhapsodic, reflective record, built from the ground up around George Oban’s sublime/subliminal bass, the roots-reggae rhythms are menacing and muted rather than in-your-face as Sherwood expertly guides guest vocalists such as Ghetto Priest through caverns of subterranean dub. The original acid guru Timothy Leary even makes a typically...
more »
#95 Debruit, From The Horizon
-
Parisian electronic producer dÉbruit has built a reputation on his kaleidoscopic array of influences and ingredients, but to peg his fast-changing maximalism as schizophrenic would be a mistake. As with his previous work, From the Horizon ties together multiple strands under a loose theme. This time around, it's the music of West Africa, with samples drawn from indigenous archives and field recordings.
The 13 tracks here lurch from mangled west coast hip-hop beats...
more »
#94 The Cribs, In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull
-
In the run-up to 2009's big-time breakthrough Ignore the Ignorant, The Cribs became the envy of every indie rock band on Earth by recruiting the Smiths' Johnny Marr as their guitarist. When Marr amicably departed after the ensuing tours, you had to wonder: What's next for the band's core trio, the three Jarman brothers?
The excellent news is that this follow-up returns them to their roots in garagey art-punk and strikes out in...
more »
#93 Spoek Mathambo, Father Creeper
-
On his 2010 debut, Mshini Wam, the young Johannesburg vocalist/producer Spoek Mathambo unveiled a sound he called "township tech" - bounding synths, crisp and computery percussion, directly chanted, rapped and sung lyrics, all on top of techno-tinged grooves sourced from South African rhythms. Those things haven't disappeared entirely from his debut for Sub Pop; the groaning 808-driven groove and techy claps of "Put Some Red on It" prove that. But they're...
more »
#92 Carter Tutti Void, Transverse
-
Recorded in 2011 at the Roundhouse in North London, this is a live collaboration between Throbbing Gristle members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti and Factory Floor's Nik Colk Void. Which may not sound like a shoo-in for one of the albums of the year, but overlooking the four semi-improvised tracks that make up Transverse would be to miss one of the most darkly visceral releases of 2012. Carter and Tutti have...
more »
#91 Harmonious Thelonious, Listen
-
Harmonious Thelonious are a dance geek's dream, so rich is their music in resonances and intermingling echoes. In "Argwöhnische Muziek," the track that opens Listen, you might hear the melodic patterns of West African highlife guitars echoed in tumbling synthetic pianos, Terry Riley's minimalist compositions in its phased repetitions, or the cosmicChicago house music of Jamal Moss (aka Hieroglyphic Being) in its raw production tics and relentlessly funky drum programming. Or perhaps...
more »
#90 Vessel, Order Of Noise
-
The temptation with any new talent operating on the fringes of a genre is to tag and file, but parameters are precisely what young Bristol electronicist Seb Gainsborough seeks to avoid. He lobbed his debut into the minimal techno ballpark, but his mastery of the chilly spaces between beats is matched by an urge to humanize them. Order of Noise is aptly titled — it's both precise and controlled — but the...
more »
#89 Mala, Mala In Cuba
-
As part of a cultural exchange sponsored by a rum brand, Gilles Peterson made a pair of albums showcasing Cuban musicians called Havana Cultura. For the recording of the second in 2011, South London dubstep pioneer Mala joined Peterson in Cuba, taking samples and threading them through his own asymmetric, chest-trembling bass. The result was this lithe, sensual album that seamlessly joins the music of Latin America with rhythms that reflect Mala's...
more »
#88 Adam Fairhall, The Imaginary Delta
-
On The Imaginary Delta, pianist and composer Adam Fairhall speaks with a forward-thinking attitude of innovation while channeling the voice of jazz's past. A traditional rag becomes a futuristic avant-garde deconstruction. The use of effects and turntables enhance, rather than preclude, the expression of a soulful blues. A blowing session doesn't miss a beat with the incorporation of sampling. Fairhall has united these disparate elements to create a remarkably engaging album of...
more »
#87 Cody ChesnuTT, Landing On A Hundred
-
Every aspect of Cody ChesnuTT's 2002, 36-song debut — its four-track production, White Album-inspired spontaneity and cheeky lyrics about his dick — introduced the songwriter as a brash, arrogant virtuoso. But just as The Headphone Masterpiece gained notice, ChesnuTT disappeared. Why?
Turns out, he no longer stood by his Masterpiece. ("Even when I was performing [that album], my relationship with God was getting better and I began to feel the conflict...The mindset of...
more »
#86 Tim Burgess, Oh No I Love You
-
Madchester contender, Britpop pin-up, reformed coke addict, Transcendental Meditater, bestselling autobiographer — Tim Burgess has ticked many boxes on the rock superstar checklist in his two decades with The Charlatans. A solo career, initiated with 2003's I Believe, however, seemed to have stalled right there, as his energies were consumed by the Charlies, who enjoyed an unforeseen purple patch through the Noughties.
After the break-up of the marriage that took him to California...
more »
#85 Poliça, Give You The Ghost
-
We sometimes tend to equate Auto-Tune with the throwaway and inauthentic in pop, but it's worth remembering that the technique is really just another tool in a singer's arsenal, alongside more respectable standbys like melisma or smoke-cured gruffness. From Ryan Leslie's malfunctioning seducer in "Gibberish" to T-Pain's transhuman hedonism, Auto-Tune lends a futurist gloss to all sorts of classic song forms; perhaps Justin Vernon and Kanye West use it with the greatest...
more »
#84 DIIV, Oshin
-
In Britain in the early '90s, the influence of My Bloody Valentine inspired a briefly flickering generation of lank-haired solipsists defined by effects-laden guitars and breathy vocals. DIIV, from Brooklyn two decades later, would have been at home on the same bill as Chapterhouse,
Ride and Slowdive, but Oshin would assuredly have been one of the scene's better albums. "How Long Have You Known" and "Air Conditioning" are especially pretty confections, and the...
more »
#83 Beth Orton, Sugaring Season
-
After a six-year sabbatical, during which she focused on motherhood, Orton comeback album was as relaxed and rich and Harvest-era Neil Young, and one of the finest folk releases of the year. Recorded in Portland with producer Tucker Martine, it draped her spellbinding voice over introspective, mesmeric reveries. "Call Me The Breeze" might have been written with Tom Rowland of Chemical Brothers, but the association is deceptive — this was a richly...
more »
#82 Maria Minerva, Will Happiness Find Me?
-
"I hate the idea of 'gigs,'" Maria Minerva told eMusic earlier this year. "It's boring…When I go out, I just want somebody to DJ from about 10 to 6." Maybe that's why Minerva's second proper LP unfolds like a break-of-dawn set from one of her crate-digging 100% Silk compatriots. Caught in a K-hole where disco balls spin in time to handclaps, rubberized bass lines and glitter-dusted beats, it's woozy and weightless...
more »
#81 The Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance
-
By virtue of their hometown (San Francisco) and the labels they've worked with (In the Red, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, and now, Mexican Summer), The Fresh & Onlys are often grouped with shaggy-haired maniacs such as Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. In reality, their gorgeous, glassy-eyed pop is more in line with The Shins, or, to use an era-appropriate comparison for the Nuggets-inclined set, the Zombies. The noisier, feedback-drenched reference points...
more »
#80 Toy, Toy
-
When Toy were first scoped by the wider public as handpicked tour support to The Horrors in October 2011, they seemed almost too good to be true. Sallow of complexion and extravagantly hirsute, they resembled five psychedelic love-children spawned from Mick Jagger's pervy basement in Performance.
They sounded even better: twin feedback guitars with droning echoes of My Bloody Valentine; horizon-fixed motorik beats à la Krautrockers Neu!; a variety of sounds (elegant strings,...
more »
#79 Clark, Iradelphic
-
If Chris Clark's sixth album sounds all over the place, it's probably because that's where it was recorded. The British electronic musician grabbed whatever session time he could while on the road in Australia, Berlin, Wales, Brussels, Suffolk, Cornwall, Norway and London. The result has little thematic or aural unity, but that only adds to its eclectic appeal.
Clark's production style is vivid, close-up, almost three-dimensional in places. Using 1950s microphones, crumbling cassette...
more »
#78 Laurel Halo, Quarantine
-
There's something wonderfully unsettling about Laurel Halo's debut full-length Quarantine. A beat-less electronic album, its 12 tracks bleed into one another, creating a kind of woozy, ambient cloud cover. Hints of pop periodically break through; "Holoday," in particular, feels like the receding echo of dance music past. But ultimately, song structure is bypassed in favor of a sense of ghostly possibility that echoes both early Dntel and classical composer Steve...
more »
#77 Pilgrim, Misery Wizard
-
The debut full-length by Rhode Island's Pilgrim may be one of the most heralded doom-metal albums of the year (along with Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction), but the members of Pilgrim are completely uninterested in the recent rise of hipster doom, which is probably why Misery Wizard sounds so authentically effective. Pilgrim's apocalyptic tones are generated from piles of Lovecraft, some powerful weed and intensive study of the giants of the first two...
more »
#76 Quantic & Alice Russell, Look Around the Corner
-
A band manager of my acquaintance used to regularly warn his acts against "flutes and bongos." And he was mostly right. When modern musicians — especially British musicians — start affecting the signifiers of conscious 1970s soul and jazz, it tends to be just that: affectation. Even Tru Thoughts, one of the finest jazz/funk/hip-hop labels in the U.K., has had its misfires on this front, bands and records that may brim over...
more »
#75 Donny McCaslin, Casting for Gravity
-
Donny McCaslin has long seemed a prime candidate to update and upgrade fusion jazz-rock. Since as far back as Seen From Above in 2000, his tenor saxophone style has been fueled by a rambunctious lyricism that isn't afraid to leave skid marks on his phrases. By "Rock Me," off Declaration in 2009, he'd discovered a fertile and yet phosphorous crossroads between prog-rock and hard bop, and a year later ...
more »
#74 Hundred Waters, Hundred Waters
-
Gainesville, Florida-based avant-folk outfit Hundred Waters defy easy definitions on their beguiling, absorbing and richly detailed debut album. They've toured with Skrillex and recorded for his OWSLA label, and Hundred Waters has an expensive-sounding attention to production value. But it's cheap to sound expensive these days, and singer-percussionist Samantha Moss's fleetly wandering vocals here, swathed in sinuous electronics, have more in common with those of Björk, Bat for Lashes or another recent...
more »
#73 PAWS, Cokefloat!
-
"She wasn't only just my mother," Phillip Taylor slurs over rickety, distorted guitar in the opening seconds of PAWS' Cokefloat!, continuing, "She was my friend, a good friend." As an introduction to the Glasgow trio's rowdily impressive debut album, it could hardly be more fitting, showing off both the band's throwback slacker-rock style and Taylor's blunt, decidedly un-macho lyrics. But on this 13-track, 42-minute set, what separates PAWS from so many other...
more »
#72 Roomful of Teeth, Roomful of Teeth
-
Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there's a lot to prepare you — if you've heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin's Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage's Songbook, and the Swingle Singers — and, let's say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk — then...
more »
#71 NCZA/LINES, NCZA/LINES
-
From Scritti Politti to Junior Boys, there's a long tradition of bookish white guys attempting to reconcile their deep, genuine love of R&B with the vocal chops of software programmers. Michael Lovett, who used to play bass for Metronomy-related indie band Your Twenties, has both the fandom and the feyness, which explains why someone who talks so much about the transformative influence of Aaliyah ends up sounding like the Postal Service.
This is...
more »
#70 Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, The Congos, Icon Give Thank
-
After six installments of Johnny Cash's American series and well-received late-career efforts by Mavis Staples and Jimmy Cliff, there's very little novel about a weathered pioneer musician teaming up with a younger admirer in the hopes of lending a bit of the old fog-and-polish to their artistic reputation. The results are, broadly speaking, similar: a restrained, tasteful facsimile of the artist's best work, prim as a pressed suit and comforting as a...
more »
#69 Family Band, Grace & Lies
-
Grace and Lies: two ghostly characters envisioned by Family Band vocalist (and former visual artist) Kim Krans as a pair of girlish sirens with wily intentions, capable of quick seduction and even quicker betrayal ("I saw them in a field behind our cabin, singing and slow dancing," she's said). It's a sinister and defeating image, but fitting; Krans and her guitarist husband Jonny Ollsin, formerly of the metal bands Children and S.T.R.E.E.T.S.,...
more »
#68 Pig Destroyer, Book Burner
-
Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there's something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004's Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflect the rage, intensity and...
more »
#67 Sea of Bees, Orangefarben
-
When I was 11 my parents sent me to a hellhole of a sleepaway camp where I was miserable (one of the counselors made me eat tomatoes — gross!). It was at that terrible camp where I first heard the song "Leaving on a Jet Plane" played over and over, and to this day I have a Pavlovian response to those familiar lite rock folk chords: When I hear them I'm overtaken...
more »
#66 Christian Mistress, Possession
-
The full-length debut byOlympia,Washington, quintet Christian Mistress is more than a savage, irony-free '70s metal flashback. It's an honest and lovingly composed epic that combines the sludge of Black Sabbath, the guitar harmonies of Judas Priest and the amphetamine bursts of Motörhead.
Several elements levitate Christian Mistress above their peers. The most blatant is vocalist Christine Davis, who unleashes a barrage of skin-stripped melodies that support even the heaviest songs. Equally important are...
more »
#65 Field Music, Plumb
-
The songs of Field Music have always been trim, tidy affairs, so much so that it was a surprise when they loosened up and went big on 2010's two-disc Measure. The U.K. band's short attention span has returned on Plumb, a 15-track collection that races by in just over a half-hour. With no room to stretch out, the band instead raises its sound upward, embracing dramatic guitar flourishes and rhythmic peaks that...
more »
#64 Glen Hansard, Rhythm & Repose
-
There's irony in the fact that Glen Hansard's first solo album comes just a week after the Broadway musical Once triumphed at the Tony Awards. 2007's film-version original of that musical, starring Hansard and the wispy Czech pianist Marketa Irgolová, brought the romantic and creative duo widespread fame. The duo, who eventually dubbed themselves The Swell Season, began recording together in 2008, but the love affair didn't last: They announced...
more »
#63 METZ, METZ
-
On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that's reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins's strained screams; in Hayden Menzies's crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of "Wet Blanket," in the sludgy industrial instrumental "Nausea," and in their grim, dour lyrics. But the...
more »
#62 Lotus Plaza, Spooky Action at a Distance
-
That Lockett Pundt, he'll sneak up on you. In Deerhunter, frontman Bradford Cox's outsize personality makes him an easy lightning rod, but Pundt has played a hardly less electrifying role as the band's guitarist. His first solo album as Lotus Plaza, 2009's The Floodlight Collective, was woozy, winsome dream-pop that confirmed Pundt's familiar gifts for ethereal sonic textures but only hinted at his growing strength as a songwriter. This follow-up is strikingly...
more »
#61 Gonjasufi, MU.ZZ.LE
-
It's one of the more unlikely stories from U.S.beat culture: San Diego's Sumach Ecks moves to Las Vegasto work as a yoga teacher, but not before contributing an edgy, Billie Holiday-like vocal to one track on Flying Lotus's 2008 debut Los Angeles. Impressed with his distinctive scatting, Warp Records offer him his own deal. It's a nice creation myth, and Ecks, who records under the suitably wigged-out moniker Gonjasufi, has thus far...
more »
#60 Neurosis, Honor Found in Decay
-
Like the band's last album, 2007's Given to the Rising, Neurosis's 10th studio album in 27 years, Honor Found in Decay, is a cinematic, multi-dimensional exploration of texture and emotion that weaves together doom-metal, atmospheric rock, dark psychedelia, tribal metal and proto-industrial. But the experimental post-metal pioneers also delve deep into the apocalyptic folk that frontmen Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till have explored on their recent solo albums. "At the Well"...
more »
#59 Ab-Soul, Control System
-
Ab-Soul is the resident word-nerd of Black Hippy, the rap crew that includes the Dr. Dre-anointed young rap prince Kendrick Lamar and the brooding, heavy-lidded, ex-Crip leader Schoolboy Q. He's easily the most cerebral of a fairly brainy crew, and on the ferociously excellent Control System, he produces an immersive, dark and wide-ranging piece of work that takes listeners to Saturn and Andromeda ("Pineal Gland"), sardonically salutes Obama as a "puppet" ("Terrorist...
more »
#58 Lilacs & Champagne, Lilacs & Champagne
-
Alex Hall and Emil Amos are the personalities behind Grails, a Portland instrumental rock collective that's happily traversed so much sonic terrain over the past decade and a half that they'd seemingly make side projects unnecessary. But where Grails absorbs and perverts genres, Hall and Amos's self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne is an act of deconstruction and rebuilding: The duo were inspired by Madlib's dank crate-digging and sample-stitching technique, and they...
more »
#57 Rocket Juice & The Moon, Rocket Juice & The Moon
-
Amid Blur's Union Jack-draped anointment — first at the Brit Awards, and then as the unofficial send-off to the 2012 Olympics — it's worth reminding the world that Damon Albarn is one the U.K.'s arch internationalists. His work with the underrated Mali Music and DRC Music projects, the Afro-Albion supergroup the Good, the Bad and the Queen, and, of course, Gorillaz, has shown him to be a gracious and dextrous ringleader, drawing...
more »
#56 Pop 1280, The Horror
-
"Burn, burn/ burn the worm," goes the ominous chorus of The Horror's pissed-and-pulverizing opener, the perhaps-unsurprisingly titled "Burn the Worm." Subtle, Pop. 1280 is not. But you don't really need a gentle hand when your band regularly and fiercely recalls the finer moments of Liars, the Birthday Party and Swans. Where 2010's The Grid EP sported the occasional synth-heavy hook, The Horror is positively relentless, piling brutal rhythmic grinding on top of...
more »
#55 Frankie Rose, Interstellar
-
Frankie Rose spent the early part of her musical career as a member of a ragtag coven of Brooklyn retro-garage bands, including Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts and Dum Dum Girls. Interstellar, her second solo album since moving on from those groups, shows exactly how to move your music out of the garage: Clean out all the grit and grease, put on some makeup, imagine yourself as a dragon's teardrop...
more »
#54 Can, The Lost Tapes
-
Can's relationship to contemporary alt-rock and pop is so elemental that they have penetrated the DNA of acts as diverse as Happy Mondays, Wilco and Radiohead, plus innumerable others who have worshipped at their groovy altar rather more cravenly over the past 44 years. Frankly, it would be easier to name those that hadn't soaked up Can's stew of psychedelia, free jazz, prog rock, funk, avant-electronica, African high-life and musique concrete.
Following on from the...
more »
#53 Chris Cohen, Overgrown Path
-
While being in any band seems incredibly difficult, Chris Cohen likes a challenge: He's played with Deerhoof, Haunted Grafitti and Cass McCombs, artists too chaotic, daunting or insular to really occupy indie rock's center. It's not surprising that his solo effort Overgrown Path sought retreat in rural Vermont. What is surprising is how it stands up to anything his prior gigs have done, a survey of the past four decades of jangle-pop...
more »
#52 The Gaslamp Killer, Breakthrough
-
Part of Flying Lotus's cultish Brainfeeder posse, William Benjamin Bensussen's debut arrives wreathed in smoke and minus any kind of compass to navigate a way through its quasi-mystical miasma of bass music, psychedelic rock, sampledelia and space funk. Guests including Daedelus, Dimlite and Gonjasufi contribute to its moody panoramas, which are spliced with disorienting jump-cuts and spattered with vocal samples. DJ Shadow is an obvious influence, but live guitar and yiali tambur...
more »
#51 Liars, WIXIW
-
With every release, invigorated both by self-imposed limits and half-baked experiments, Liars discover new aesthetic worlds. Consider the 30-minute dance-punk-to-drone closer "This Dust Makes That Mud" off their 2001 debut They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. Nothing specific about that song, just you know, that it happened. And chew on the go-for-broke concepts of 2004's They Were Wrong So We Drowned (witches, dude) and 2010's...
more »
#50 Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes
-
What was Flying Lotus supposed to do, twist our synapses till they turned blue every single time out? Please — not even Hendrix could have done that. British DJ Mary Anne Hobbs may have declared FlyLo Jimi's modern equivalent, but Until the Quiet Comes, his fourth album, plays like something Jimi didn't get to stay around and make: both reflective and madcap, full of details scurrying in the margins. Take "Tiny...
more »
#49 Screaming Females, Ugly
-
New Brunswick, New Jersey's Screaming Females have turned out roaring punk album after roaring punk album since 2006, amid booking hundreds of their own shows — some in basements and others in massive club venues warming up for the likes of Ted Leo, the Dead Weather and Garbage. Their Steve Albini-produced fifth LP Ugly is a darker, less melodic affair than its 2010 predecessor, which thrived on a perfect balance of...
more »
#48 Bowerbirds, The Clearing
-
In "Overcome with Light," Bowerbirds' Phil Moore and Beth Tacular sing, "Yes, we had some hard work, but now it's right." Their lush third LP, The Clearing, is about unexpected challenges: Tacular's near-death experience; the ending and rekindling of the couple's relationship; building a home by hand. And despite all of that, they pulled through with their best work yet: clear, full instrumentation and a celebration of new beginnings.
#47 Ty Segall Band, Slaughterhouse
-
Each Ty Segall record is a new outfit in the garage-rock prodigy's ever-increasing wardrobe. Slaughterhouse, his latest quick change, is the first release billed under his touring band, a group which includes punky wunderkinds Charlie Moothart and Mikal Cronin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that this is a group that's been traveling the road together, Slaughterhouse is a loose, scrappy set. Some songs are given ample jamming room ("I Bought My Eyes"), while...
more »
#46 Alt-J, An Awesome Wave
-
Anybody who feared that Alt-J's Mercury Prize-scooping debut album was a welter of impenetrable, self-satisfied art-rock was hugely relieved when they finally heard An Awesome Wave. It is not without its angular, opaque moments, and it’s easy to see why some hapless soul coined the term "folkstep" to attempt to encapsulate its melding of folk, electronica, dubstep and barber-shop madrigals, but this is very much a pop album, and one rich in...
more »
#45 Woods, Bend Beyond
-
When Jeremy Earl left Brooklyn for the tiny upstate town where he grew up — Warwick, New York, a rural, rail-side area best known for its annual Applefest — a few years ago, his decision wasn't surprising so much as long overdue. And not just because dude's the founder of a ramshackle rock band called Woods and a lo-fi-leaning label that goes by the name Woodsist. Forestry nods aside, Earl has always...
more »
#44 White Lung, Sorry
-
White Lung's pummeling second album, Sorry, isn't for the faint of heart. "I'm the disease that you've already caught," frontwoman Mish Way spits on "I Rot," one of 10 punk bursts driven by tension-filled riffs, frantic drum assaults and macabre lyrics. Yet Sorry's violent imagery is also deeply poetic — more Plath than Poe — and the album has plenty of melodic moments (unexpected chorus harmonies on "Bag," lively guitar spikes on...
more »
#43 Yellow Ostrich, Strange Land
-
Yellow Ostrich mastermind Alex Schaaf has said that the title of his new album refers to his move in 2010 from Wisconsin to New York City. Yet after making last year's The Mistress under humble bedroom-recording conditions, Schaaf upgraded to a professional studio for Strange Land, and it's that unknown habitat he seems most intent on exploring here. Opener "Elephant King" shows his hand straightaway, riding in on a sparkling guitar figure...
more »
#42 Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon
-
When he wasn't conjuring dust storms of noir-ish, twanging guitar with San Francisco garage-rockers Fresh & Onlys, Wymond Miles was quietly stockpiling his own songs. Not that we're sure where he finds the time: aside from the building buzz of F&Os, Miles earned a degree in the humanities and also became a father. Earlier, he released Earth Has Doors, which evinced a deep appreciation for the lyricism of Scott Walker. His full-length...
more »
#41 Baroness, Yellow & Green
-
Before the release of Yellow & Green, Baroness frontman John Baizley stressed in interviews that the records were going to take some risks and expand the band's sound, partly by being more direct and placing greater emphasis on songwriting. Fans of the metal band's notoriously complex music weren't quite sure how to take this assessment; their responses tended toward wariness and curiosity mixed with guarded optimism.
As it turns out, the...
more »
#40 THEESatisfaction, awE naturalE
-
In this cloud-computing age where everyone is a fan of a bit of everything, it's good to see Sub Pop, the label most famous for bringing grunge to the world, continue to define itself not by genre but merely by brilliant music. They released their first hip-hop album in Shabazz Palaces' much-lauded Black Up last year, which featured Afro-futurist Seattle duo THEESatisfaction; the latter now get their own Sub Pop release with...
more »
#39 Vijay Iyer Trio, Accelerando
-
Let's not mince words: Accelerando is a source of rippling power and resplendent beauty that deserves to be called a masterpiece. (Except I suspect that Iyer, who recorded this a month before his 40th birthday, might top it on some future project.) As with the acclaimed, chart-topping Historicity in 2009, the pianist leads his trio through a stimulating collection that blends sharp originals and a surprisingly disparate array of cover tunes, from...
more »
#38 Jeremy Siskind Trio, Finger-Songwriter
-
There is a classic intimacy to the piano, sax, vocals of the Jeremy Siskind's Finger-Songwriter. Siskind's piano is a mix of elegance and storyteller charm. The slow burn of Nancy Harms's vocals is an enchantment oftentimes dispelled with a smoldering vulnerability. On sax, Lucas Pino is drifting smoke, and on clarinet, a brooding melancholia. Siskind's love of literature the inspiration for each album track, he's created an album of songs about heartbreak,...
more »
#37 Dum Dum Girls, End of Daze EP
-
Sporting black leather jackets, bright red lipstick and hangdog poses, Dum Dum Girls resemble high-school dropouts from another time — the '50s, maybe; or maybe it's the '60s; or maybe it's the '80s. Whenever it is, it's not now. But no assembly of retro references, however clever, will get you to sing with a voice as bold, outsized and sad as Kristin Gundred, nor will they get you to write melodies as...
more »
#36 Perfume Genius, Put Your Back N 2 It
-
The piano ballad has endured as a staple of pop music for decades, and the spectacular success of Adele's "Someone Like You" shows that it still remains a powerful medium to connect plaintive songwriters to tearful audiences. Mike Hadreas, working under his Perfume Genius stage name, offers a unique take on the form, centring his redemptive and soothing songcraft around it on his second album.
On his first, the piano style was rickety...
more »
#35 The Men, Open Your Heart
-
There's nothing quite like a good old-fashioned, skull-splitting album-opener. Judged on those merits alone, Open Your Heart's "Turn it Around" completely fucking aces its final exam. Moreover, it's a refreshing, accessible upgrade for the Men, the Brooklyn noisemakers who set speakers smoking with last year's overdriven, occasionally overindulgent and ultimately overwhelming Leave Home. Its mix of shoegaze grandiosity and punk grit was exciting and powerful, but there were moments where one...
more »
#34 Amit Friedman Sextet, Sunrise
-
Creating his own mix of jazz and Middle Eastern music, saxophonist Amit Friedman offers a debut album of richly-textured tunes full of bombast and beauty. The use of additional percussion and an oudist brings intricacy and detail to the music, but it's Friedman's crafting of simple yet vivid melodies that elevates the songs to something very special, a splendid balance between the complex and the catchy. Furthermore, the addition of a string...
more »
#33 Swans, The Seer
-
Whether he's conjuring up a quiet storm with an acoustic guitar or sharing the asphyxiated psalms of "Sex, God, Sex," Michael Gira has never been the subtle type. That's especially the case with the second coming of Gira's iconic post-punk band Swans, which obliterated the notion of a cash-grab reunion with a series of resoundingly LOUD shows, and 2010's uniformly excellent, AARP-be-damned album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to...
more »
#32 The Invisible, Rispah
-
It’s dangerous to draw simple connections between the life of an artist and the art that they make. But Rispah is named after The Invisible singer/guitarist Dave Okumu’s mother, who passed away early into sessions for the group’s second album, and this loss – and the pain, self-doubt and readjustment that followed – explain the bleak-to-the-bone mood that saturates the album.
“Generational”, the first song, opens with the words “This is serious,” Okumu’s...
more »
#31 Standard Fare, Out of Sight, Out of Town
-
In "Fifteen," on their 2010 debut The Noyelle Beat, Sheffield trio Standard Fare sang about being 22 and not knowing what to do. On the band's sophomore effort Out of Sight, Out of Town, they talk about mindless day jobs, crushed hopes and being "destined to die unknown." Bassist-vocalist Emma Kupa, guitarst-vocalist Dan How and drummer Andy Beswick have carved out a space alongside like-minded British indiepop acts Los Campesinos! and Allo...
more »
#30 Mac DeMarco, 2
-
Mac DeMarco's solo debut from earlier this year, Rock & Roll Night Club, painted the Montreal singer as a breathy, unnaturally deep-voiced, unwholesome creep. On his follow-up, 2, DeMarco has left that caricature for a more reasonable vocal register, a jangling guitar and a set of breezy love songs. Here, DeMarco embarks on a yacht-rock voyage, offering pop songs that are easy, carefree and romantic. Strumming a vaguely tropical-sounding twangy guitar and...
more »
#29 Four Tet, Pink
-
Much of this, the eighth album by Kieran Hebden under his Four Tet guise, will already be familiar to his more committed fans, as six of its eight tracks have been released as vinyl-only singles over the past year or so. For everybody else, Pink serves as a reminder of the Putney-born DJ/songwriter/producer/arranger's subtle, sophisticated talents.
There's something naturalistic about the layers of beat loops and jazz-inspired plays on momentum that run throughout Pink. While...
more »
#28 Bill Fay, Life is People
-
Life is People is the first new record from Bill Fay since 1972, a British singer-songwriter whose beatific and keenly observed music might remind you of Randy Newman or Wilco. It's a worthy addition to a small but hallowed canon of material. Wilco have covered him over the years, and he returns the favor with a solemn, still rendition of "Jesus, Etc." Fay's voice is ragged, pleading, and gentle, and his music...
more »
#27 Orrin Evans, Flip the Script
-
As a pianist, Orrin Evans features a muscular attack with a meaty tonality and impatience with elongated or predictable phrasing. As an artist, he has emerged as a formidable, increasingly indispensable presence in jazz, whether leading the balls-to-the-wall Captain Black Big Band, the politically charged Tarbaby, or small ensemble recordings. Flip The Script is a trio outing with bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Donald Edwards, both necessarily sturdy, exceptionally sentient players when...
more »
#26 Anais Mitchell, Young Man in America
-
Anaïs Mitchell is a writer whose medium happens to be music. As a musician, though, her writerly achievements are undeniable: Her previous effort, 2010's Hadestown, reconceived the myth of Orpheus, coming to life first as a touring theater production and then as a 20-track album. On the follow-up (which also launches her own label), Mitchell avoids trying to top it and simply turns in 11 confident, moonlit folk songs that hang together...
more »
#25 John Talabot, Fin
-
John Talabot's Fin opens with a quiet halo of evocative nighttime sounds — owls, crickets, croaking frogs. It evokes a David Attenborough-narrated nature film, and is definitely not the intro one might expect from a house DJ based in Barcelona, let alone a guy who grabbed so many ears with a song called "Sunshine." The mist-filled seven-minute song that emerges from this dark bog, called "Depak Ine," an inscrutable reference to the...
more »
#24 Mount Eerie, Clear Moon
-
Phil Elverum almost never writes a song that's entirely its own thing. His body of work, initially as the Microphones and more recently as Mount Eerie, is full of missing twins, separated partners, self-pastiches and negative space. Clear Moon is itself a twin (he made another album, the forthcoming Ocean Roar, at the same time). It begins with "Through the Trees Pt. 2," a sequel to a song from 2009's Wind's...
more »
#23 Mirel Wagner, Mirel Wagner
-
"All day I stay by her side," Mirel Wagner sings of her beloved in "No Death," the undeniable buzz cut from this Ethiopian-Finnish singer-songwriter's self-titled debut. "But death has a claim and a right to my bride." In fact, death has already exercised that claim: A stark minor-key blues made only of voice and guitar, "No Death" turns out to be one of an exceedingly small handful of tunes about the joys...
more »
#22 The Walkmen, Heaven
-
If you want to know why your smartest, most iconoclastic friends speak in hushed tones about The Walkmen, check out the opening track of their new album Heaven. In five minutes, this band seemingly sums up rock history, referencing doo wop, "The Duke Of Earl," folk-rock and Lou Reed's street poetry. All crowned by Hamilton Leithauser's winsome croon. This might explain all the hipster fuss.
Still, Heaven isn't pastiche, despite betraying its influences....
more »
#21 Django Django, Django Django
-
How inspired they are by their jazz guitarist namesake is up for debate, but Django Django's name suits them - a screwball, percussive brace of words that matches their madcap-yet-taut music. First emerging a couple of years ago with the loping stomp of the first single "Storm," the group slipped into a fine tradition of psychedelic English eccentrics from Syd Barrett to The Beta Band - the brother of drummer and producer...
more »
#20 Public Service Broadcasting, The War Room EP
-
Usually, there's no greater turn off than music that feels patriotic, which is the reason why Muse's official anthem for the Olympics was so alarming (okay, one of the reasons). But The War Room EP by experimental electronic duo Public Service Broadcasting evoked a spirit of national pride and resilience that chimed in perfectly with the bunting-decked mood of London 2012, while also being genuinely innovative. Granted rare access to the British...
more »
#19 Goat, World Music
-
Drawing mightily from the same retro well as the vaunted Tame Impala, Goat came out of nowhere (or, more accurately, Korpilombolo in northern Sweden) with their joyful and frequently uncategorizable World Music. Nominally Afrocentric in its approach — Fela Kuti and the glittery guitars of highlife heroes Bhundu Boys spring to mind — there's also a distinct German kosmiche attack, leavened with some delicately psychedelic organ figures (as on "Disc Fever," the...
more »
#18 Matthew Dear, Beams
-
At this point — 13 years, five albums, and several side projects into a preconception-skirting career as a producer/DJ/performer — it shouldn't be surprising to find Matthew Dear fully embracing his inner Eno, Bowie and Byrne. And yet, longtime fans still shout "play 'Dog Days'!" at some of his shows, as if they wish he'd stop trying to be a bandleader and return to his twisted techno roots behind the soft glow...
more »
#17 Angel Olsen, Half Way Home
-
"You won't always be walking the safest street/ but you can find your way home," Angel Olsen sings in "Lonely Universe," from her sophomore album Half Way Home. The album's seven-and-a-half-minute centerpiece is a poignant, gut-wrenching account of losing a loved one: "Goodbye, sweet Mother Earth/ without you now, I'm a lonely universe," she laments. But instead of just sulking, she assures others in her position that if they've even begun to...
more »
#16 Royal Headache, Royal Headache
-
In the end, it all comes down to Shogun's voice, a ragged rasp that falls somewhere squarely between young Rod Stewart and sad Otis Redding and infuses every one of the songs on Royal Headache's roaring debut with a big old battered heart. It's easy to miss the first few times: The songs whoosh by like vintage funny cars whipping around a red-dirt race track, antic and spitting flames. But look a...
more »
#15 Grizzly Bear, Shields
-
Remember when Grizzly Bear was Edward Droste's solo project? Didn't think so. And that's okay; while the disconnect between Droste's bedroom-pop beginnings and the band's longtime status as a democracy — with Daniel Rossen at the helm half the time — has been a source of tension in the past, their third album as a full-fledged quartet is sleek and self-assured. Or as Droste admitted in a Pitchfork interview this past June,...
more »
#14 Actress, R.I.P.
-
With a sound that's nearly as heady as its concept — "a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion" — Actress's third album burrows its way into your brain and stays there long after you hit stop. If 2012 was the Year of EDM, R.I.P. signals a return to Intelligent Dance Music. And not the bloodless kind that's more concerned with plugins than an actual pulse. More like an...
more »
#13 Tame Impala, Lonerism
-
Aussie psych-rocker outfit Tame Impala's sophomore effort opens not with a bang, but a whisper — a literal whisper, breathy and insistent, that lazily warps into something else. Fractals of reverb and pedal effect peel off into a glass-eyed haze. Frontman Kevin Parker sings like a latter-day John Lennon, Instagrammed and amplified and fed through subpar speakers. The whole thing builds to a psych-rock anthem so shimmery, so positively prismatic, that it's...
more »
#12 Beach House, Bloom
-
On Bloom, the fourth record by Baltimore duo Beach House, there aren't hooks so much as sultry tendrils perpetually beckoning towards some smoky, purple-lit back alley that never entirely materializes. Alex Scally's guitar ribbons and diddles over synths that twinkle and grind, and Victoria LeGrand's voice is woozy and dark and supple. Increasingly, the words she sings hardly seem to matter, but listen close and there are snippets of sleepless nights, strange...
more »
#11 godspeed you! black emperor, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
-
When Godspeed You! Black Emperor disbanded in 2003, they didn't exactly go out with a bang: Their last album, 2002's undercooked, over-thought Yanqui U.X.O., was upstaged by its packaging, which included a chart that linked missile companies to major labels. So when the group reconvened in late 2010 to play a handful of dates, including All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead, England, it seemed like a second chance. Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, their comeback...
more »
#10 The Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know
-
White-knuckled brooding, it turns out, is a many-splendored thing, as the Twilight Sad fortuitously discovers on its triumphantly depressive third album. The gloomy Glasgownoise-rockers' 2007 debut, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, introduced a cathartic, tempestuous band in the tradition of other downcast Scottish racket-makers like Mogwai or Arab Strap. 2009 sophomore outing Forget the Night Ahead, meanwhile, did away with the arena-ready choruses and dialed up the churning My...
more »
#9 The Flaming Lips, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends
-
No one combines sawmill-roar noise, dying-planet sadness and mad-scientist glee with the heartfelt sincerity of The Flaming Lips. In return, the music world writes Wayne Coyne and his fellow Oklahomans a blank creative check, which they cash with sonic shenanigans that should leave a big, unruly mess but instead reliably yield something endearingly sweet. Amid all their gratuitous drug references and onstage theatrics, the Lips can shape chaos into emotionally comprehensible order...
more »
#7 Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold
-
Anyone looking for a shorthand to describe the devil-may-care attitude pervading Light Up Gold, the irresistible debut from Brooklyn band Parquet Courts, will find it 24 seconds into the first song, when Austin Brown first sneers the album's most indelible hook: "Forget about it!" It's meant sarcastically — he's playing the part of a privileged one-percenter looking down his nose through his monocle at the unwashed masses — but it's a good...
more »
#6 El-P, Cancer 4 Cure
-
El-P's music has always been a mix of sci-fi futurist grandiosity and old-school rap grime, like watching a chromed-out chromed-out, mile-long spaceship reenact the Licensed to Ill cover. Cancer 4 Cure has some familiar hallmarks: El still pushes analog synth distortion until it growls like a '70s stoner-metal guitar; he still sneaks classic hip-hop signifiers into an otherwise dystopian-tomorrow sound (Billy Squier and the J.B.'s always seem to survive the apocalypse), his...
more »
#5 First Aid Kit, The Lion’s Roar
-
Stockholm's a long way from Folsom Prison, a fact that hasn't escaped First Aid Kit. The Lion's Roar, the Swedish duo's sharp, sepia-toned sophomore album, bridges that gap with "Emmylou," an homage to Ms. Harris that makes the ultimate offer for lovers of Woodstock-era country: "I'll be your Emmylou and I'll be your June/ if you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too," sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg pledge. As it turns...
more »
#4 Sharon Van Etten, Tramp
-
Tramp, the emotionally candid third album from Brooklyn-based songwriter Sharon Van Etten, is a slow burn: most of the songs capture the intensity of the moments before a quietly smoldering tree becomes a raging wildfire. Take the lead-off single, "Serpents," which begins with calmly strummed yet unmistakably ominous chords. Then it explodes into something blazing and defiant: "You enjoy sucking on dreams," Van Etten seethes, "So I will fall asleep with someone...
more »
#3 Matthew E. White, Big Inner
-
Richmond, Virginia-reared singer/songwriter/arranger Matthew E. White recently confessed to music blog Aquarium Drunkard that he had made a pilgrimage of sorts to Randy Newman's home in L.A. a few years back. Rather than stalk the venerable songwriter/Oscar-winning soundtrack composer at a distance, though, White worked up the nerve to ring the man's doorbell and hand off his own music. If it was a copy of his poised debut, Big Inner, there's a...
more »
#2 Allo Darlin’, Europe
-
"You said, 'A record is not just a record, records can hold memories/ All these records sound the same to me, and I'm full up with memory,'" Elizabeth Morris sings on "My Sweet Friend," the last track of Allo Darlin's sophomore album Europe. The U.K. indiepop band's 2010 self-titled debut was about the anticipation and excitement of new love: Morris sang about kissing on Ferris wheels, wondered where she'd end up...
more »
#1 Cold Specks, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion
-
"A state of destitution is the starting point for I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, Cold Specks' stark, stunning debut and eMusic's Best Album of 2012. It's sung by a lost child, one who has moved from a place of great abundance to a place of great need. It is, by a good distance, the year's richest and most rewarding record..." Read more about why Cold Specks is our #1 album of 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment