2011's Best Albums (10-1)

First off, #METASWAG would like to offer an explanation for one of the faults of this list. I listened to a lot of rap this year, but most of it was made by Lil B. The albums I should have adored (Danny Brown, Death Grips, Main Attrakionz, Shabazz Palaces) couldn't compete with my based lifestyle. So: there is no hip-hop in my Top 10. I would feel like a teenager who loves everything but country and rap, except there's a country record on this list. Anyway, I've written about a lot of good music, and the ordering is controversial. So, check it out.

Bonus Awards

Best Album Cover

> I Forgive You - Lil B

Worst Album Cover

> Angels Exodus - Lil B

Best Trend

> Saxophones

... Now:

the Top 10 Albums of 2011

10 | Go Tell Fire To The Mountain - WU LYF

There's a dynamic breadth to Go Tell Fire To The Mountain that has made it my go-to album both for gracious triumphs and pathetic wallowing. Which is to say, I would listen to it after acing a test and whenever I was hungover after a night of piss-poor decision making. Blame the church organs for Go Tell Fire's provocation of ambivalence in me. How better to conjure existential highs and self-disgusted lows than with the same soundtrack to my tumultuous religious career? But that's enough about me; this is affecting, vigorous music with a sun in its belly.

What's more: WU LYF rock in the way rock 'n roll bands rock. The unintelligible roar of lead singer Ellery Roberts accounts for so much of this album's personality, but the volcanic guitars and drum combo forge the bedrock for his unrefined emotionality. And, of course, that organ-ic undercurrent raises it all up on high.




09 | Ravedeath, 1972 - Tim Hecker

This is the devastating work of a master of sound. Hecker specializes in baring the limits of music, and his sonic deconstructions are as loud and dangerous as construction sites. Song titles like "The Piano Drop", "Hatred Of Music", and "Studio Suicide" make obvious the static violence afflicted against conventional music by this album. These are vast, intense compositions that reimagine beauty not as something effortlessly created, but rather as the hard product of gross labor.

If this wordless album has a narrative, it's the one of its cover. We ride inside the dropped piano to its noisome rebirth. Like leaves, this record's piano must love falling, or else it wouldn't take so much time before hitting the ground. When it finally does hit, in the closing three-part suite "In The Air", we find a rubblous graveyard under a foggy caul where piano spectres wonder at their own crushed keys. This is the story of our limits at the end of the night and what we can make when we push ourselves there.




08 | Forever - Sleep ∞ Over

Titanic waves of synth drones. Electronics that crack and fizzle. Whip-cracking percussion. Sweeping, crystalline vocals. Austin's Stefanie Franciotti has single-handedly concocted a witch's brew of blackout nightmare pop so huge you could go deep-sea diving in it. Forever is her debut, and it sounds anything but amateurish. It covers a diverse batch of fully-baked pop songs under its atmospheric umbrella. The rich production results in a cohesive din, or the sonic equivalent of tampered-with Halloween candy.

For every moment Franciotti's vocals roll over you like a thunderclap (and there are many), there's a matching lightning flash from the instrumentation. The implosive surge at the climax of "Stickers" remains almost unmatched this year in terms of pure intensity; I would go in to more deal, but I have no idea what instruments make those sounds. Closer "Don't Poison Everything" might be a long lost dwarven hymn to the Misty Mountain, and that's before we hear the hidden track where the mountain itself sings. The songs here are moody and smart, maybe the kind of music Lisbeth Salander would like.




07 | Channel Pressure - Ford & Lopatin

Listen: the sound of Tomorrow. Channel Pressure is a proper concept album with rock opera ambitions (sample-based pop opera?). The story is pretty much nonsense - something about a computer program trying to make contact with a cyberpunk hacker named Joey Rogers - but the music is precise and evocative. Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin play delirious sample arrangements against analog keyboards with darkly dazzling results.

It's sounds like the music today's Top 40 artists would synthesize if they were assimilated by the Borg. Or, if you've listened to Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never album Replica, it's sort of like that but with added pristine pop sensibilities. Catchy choruses and danceable beats abound. This duo made some of the most nuanced and seductive pop I've heard in years. Resistance is futile.



06 | Viscera - Jenny Hval

Norwegian artist Jenny Hval has written more than a dozen published short stories, a novel, and several albums as rockettothesky. Viscera is the first album released under her own name. It certainly belongs to her through and through. Hers is smart, challenging music whose politics of experience never overshadows the accessibility of its musicality.

This collection of unsongs blurs the line between self and other with the eerie physicality of a David Cronenberg film. The musical arrangements were improvised around Hval's brutal poetry, which is pregnant with violence and self-discovery, romance and excretion, travel and death. As such, the songs are constantly in motion. She is a pioneering artist, never allowing her words to confine her voice. Each track seems to challenge the illusion of fixative song structures, just as they challenge the fixative construction of our own bodies.

Her frank lyricism positively thinks desire and gives rise to some of the most soaring vocal flourishes of the year. "Golden Locks" is about golden showers - yes, that kind of golden shower - but also about how our own bodies betray us and how we can learn to trust ourselves despite (or because) of this.




05 | Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light 1 - Earth

Without knowing Earth's conscious inspiration from the work of Cormac McCarthy, I listened to Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light 1 on repeat while reading his masterful Blood Meridian. It's no coincidence how uncannily the record's doomed country fits the novel's horror-tinged Wild West.

Opener "Old Black" sounds as perilously unsteady as the partnership between Glanton and the Judge. You can almost hear the dancing bear teasing at the sameness of Heaven and Hell. You can almost see this band standing doggedly in the corner of a dark saloon.

In other words, this is shifty, deliberate music. The album's five songs last an hour, of which the titular closing track comprises a third. Its 20-minute lumber could drive you stir-crazy in the right heat, which is the point. Earth fashion widescreen desert landscapes for getting lost. To sit down with this record is to breath in red dust and sweat from head to toe. If you're not up to the task, you'll burn up under its blazing light.




04 | New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges - Colin Stetson

This is an album's album, with impeccable sequencing that draws attention to the sonic range of its creator and sets a steady pace at which to explore it. This is a musician's musician, someone whose technical ability is only surpassed by his vision. Colin Stetson's unbelievable circular breathing, which could quickly dissolve into masturbatory grandstanding, is instead mined for a seemingly endless variety of textures and moods. Over the course of an hour, you'll hear the faintest hums and the most deranged squeals.

With a voice this powerful, he could have fueled the entire album on his own. However, the sound of Laurie Anderson's poetry occasionally augments Stetson's inside-out horsepower, her cold words imposing dramatic shape onto the prehistoric clay of his solo bass saxophone. On "Fear of the unknown and the blazing sun", her alien voice articulates the words "So tell your secrets to parrots" in a way that gives me chills. In fact, most of these songs give me chills. Chills like standing in an open battlefield. There is war in the heart of this album.

War that for whatever reason inspired me to teeter absurdly on my 21st birthday, fist-pumping and head-banging to the raucous clamor of "Red Horse (Judges II)" with a camera in my face - may those photos never see the light of day. For so much of this summer, Colin Stetson's bass saxophone was the coal in my engine. When the heat broke and the thunderclouds rolled out, it rained this music.




03 | Kaputt - Destroyer

Can you be too cool? Destroyer's Dan Bejar, who at this point in his career seemed miles away from making a stab at relevancy, somehow stumbled upon the coolest album of the year. It's suave as suave can be, from its shimmering synths to its glamorous brass. He even recorded some of the vocals while lying down on the couch.

Even if it's an ironic wet dream of stylish restraint, it still features some of the best songwriting of all-time. Yeah, I said it. "Suicide Demo For Kara Walker" is a cryptic meditation on Southern race politics dedicated to an amazing visual artist. The title track soars like radio gold for six glorious minutes. Last year's "Bay Of Pigs", the closing track here, sums up everything there is to love about Destroyer: ambitious lyricism, a fearless flair for the dramatic, and pure style.

The production is airy and airtight, giving ample room for the song's dense arrangements to breathe. I've been listening to Kaputt for over a year now, and even declared it the Best Album Of 2011 back on December 20th, 2010. I was right. This is 2011's Best Album. Oops.




02 | Fuck Death - Blackout Beach

"War, war, war, war, war, war is in my heart/For all the endings, war is in my heart." Who writes stuff like this? Only one person (demi-god) that I know: Carey Mercer. He once again puts together a harrowing masterpiece brimming with brutally honest poetry and once again finds himself just a place or two away from the top spot on #METASWAG.

Let me take you to the first night I listened to Fuck Death. I was alone in my apartment the first night of Thanksgiving break, missing my roommate and feeling sorry for myself. That was when I remembered I hadn't listened to my favorite lyricist's new record. So, instead of going out with friends, I lined up a sixer of Michelob Ultra (sorry I'm not sorry), turned off the lights, and full-screened the digital lyric booklet.

There I sat, shitty beer in hand, staring at what looked like the only truth in the world. In my elevated state, I tweeted, "@careymercer You're supposed to drink alone when you listen to FUCK DEATH, right? #RunAway". To my surprise and fanboy delight, he almost immediately (and sardonically?) replied, "@darwinonaryder One glass of white wine". Though his drink of choice was tragically out of range for this poor college student, it gave me a laugh and a minor personal legend.

Now, for the music that inspired the legend: it's great. This is probably the purest distillation of Mercer's purgatorial self-searching, and it rings true through and through. Would I could describe the mythic voyage of Fuck Death. It's about running away and what we gain and lose when we do so. His answer is what I needed to hear. This is undoubtedly 2011's Best Album. Oops.




01 | A I A - Grouper

What do we believe in? God? Ghosts? Ourselves? Each other?

I get the feeling Grouper's Liz Harris (my hero) believes in her dreams. She makes music that believes in what we unconsciously make and unmake every night, music that delivers us to that creative place. Her sound evokes the liminality of our experience, and this is her masterpiece. A I A is Harris' perfect exploration of the space within ourselves and the space between bodies. This is her perfect collision of fearsome noise with delicate melody.

A I A is a sprawling double album, cloaked in the unreality of sleep and haunted by faded memories. Its twin halves, Dream Loss and Alien Observer, are mysterious and breathtaking counterparts to one another. The former spends more time lost in deep space and submerged in snowy texture. The latter contains the more conventional songs, all of which revive the ephemeral feelings we forget during the waking day. "Vapor Trails" transports me back to the Florida beach of my adolescence, where the sea's choppy mirror breathed life into the stars. "Mary, On The Wall" chokes me up in a way I haven't felt since Littlefoot's mom appeared to him as a cloud in The Land Before Time. "Come Softly" holds the quietude I've only experienced at a monastery. This is sacred music.

Harris has fashioned the perfect medium for recalling the unsteady and fleeting feelings between dreams and memory. I have trouble describing A I A objectively because its music seems so specially made for internalization. It was made for me.

This is 2011's Best Album. Believe that.

_ _ _

I did it. It's finished.

Merry Listmas 2011:

Best Albums (25-11)
Best Albums (40-26)
Best Albums (50-41)
Best Songs (10-1)
Best Songs (25-11)
Best Music Videos
Best Concerts