The Year in Music: Favorite Album of 2011

#10 - Smith Westerns - Dye it Blonde
  #9 - Peter Bjorn & John - Gimme Some
  #8 - Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer
  #7 - Cults - Cults
  #6 - tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L
  #5 - Wild Flag - Wild Flag
  #4 - Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo
  #3 - St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
  #2 - Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

#1 - PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

PJ Harvey is kind of a weird artist for me.  There are bands that create albums that I will buy sound unheard based on how much I love their previous work.  There are bands who create albums that I will check out a few times before purchasing, usually if I'm not altogether familiar with their work.  And there are artists like PJ Harvey.  I have two of her albums, and they're both fantastic.  But I'm never really sure whether I'm going to like the next one.  Part of it is because her style is always changing.  This album sounds absolutely nothing like Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea.  In fact, if you didn't know they were from the same artist, you probably wouldn't be able to tell.  Her voice doesn't even sound the same.

Maybe I just have a thing for concept albums centered around wars.  My favorite album from last year was Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, an album loosely based on the Civil War.  This time around, the Battle of Hampton Roads give way to the battle fought by ANZAC forces in the Gallipoli campaign.  The references to Gallipoli (and war in general) are all over the album.  There are almost too many to list.  She sings about death at Bolton's Ridge on "All & Everyone", and returning to the scene 80 years later in "On Battleship Hill".  

Musically, this is not the album you'd expect from the same woman who produced Rid of Me.  It's more orchestral, not quite as in your face.  It's more of a quiet reflection of the horrors of war and its effect on Harvey's England, kind of a "what hath we wrought" attitude.  I can't really describe why I like this album so much, but it's definitely filled with earworms.  There probably isn't one song that stands out above the rest, and I'd guess that four or five different songs have been favorites at one point or another.  But I suppose that's what makes an album great.  

Here are the first four tracks from the album, in order, plus the sixth track, which may be my favorite song of the moment.  She did really cool videos for the whole thing.

Let England Shake The Last Living Rose The Glorious Land The Words that Maketh Murder On Battleship Hill

The Year in Music: Second Favorite Album of 2011

#10 - Smith Westerns - Dye it Blonde
  #9 - Peter Bjorn & John - Gimme Some
  #8 - Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer
  #7 - Cults - Cults
  #6 - tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L
  #5 - Wild Flag - Wild Flag
  #4 - Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo
  #3 - St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

#2 - Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

As I mentioned yesterday, it's often an album that either greatly exceeds my expectations or wasn't on my radar at the beginning of the year that scores very highly on my list.  This album falls into the latter category.  I was familiar with the name, but thought of her as a Swedish teen-pop style singer, and maybe there's a case that her first album falls somewhere into that category.  But this album is much deeper, much more mature.  And at the end of the day, it's an album that has yet to bore me.  It seems to get better with almost every listen, and it's been a "go-to" album all year, something I can turn to when I'm in a 'no preference' sort of mood.

It's really not the type of album that I would have expected to like, but there's something about the driving drumbeats on the up-tempo tracks, the entrancing melodies on the down-tempo tracks, and the desperation in her voice as she sings lines like "Every night I rant, I plead, I beg him not to go".  She puts herself into all sorts of different roles on this album.  In one song she's a lonesome girl who's love is unrequited, on the next she's a prostitute announcing "You gon' get some".

But I think what I ultimately love about this album is the pacing.  I like songs, but I'm still an albums guy, and I love an album that I can listen to start to finish without ever feeling like a I want to skip a track.  More than that, I love albums that are more than the sum of their parts, and this album feels like that to me.  I starts of strong with an upbeat, drum-filled "Youth Knows No Pain", then slowly drifts to a crawl at "Unrequited" three songs later.  But it's back to the driving beats of "Get Some" and "Rich Kids Blues".  And what a 2011 album be without a call-back to motown style pop with "Sadness is a Blessing"?  It slows to a trickle on "I Know Places" before making one last triumphant charge on "Jerome", and coasts to a finish with the brilliantly harmonied "Silent My Song", which was just terrific in concert with the help of openers First Aid Kit.  I seriously suggest listening to the whole thing all the way through.  

Youth Knows No Pain Get Some Sadness is a Blessing Jerome

The Year in Music: Third Favorite Album of 2011

#10 - Smith Westerns - Dye it Blonde
  #9 - Peter Bjorn & John - Gimme Some
  #8 - Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer
  #7 - Cults - Cults
  #6 - tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L
  #5 - Wild Flag - Wild Flag
  #4 - Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo

  #3 - St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

Annie Clark's sophomore album Actor would have likely rated very high on my 2009 list if I had actually paid more attention to it in 2009.  As it was, I gave it short shrift until early in 2010, shortly before seeing her in concert for the first time.  The album and the show were both terrific.  Her intention on Actor was to create an album loosely based on Disney score type music, but with much more sinister themes lurking in the background.  Over the ambient and mood setting background strings she layered her beautiful voice, and juxtaposed it with angular, scratchy guitars, never more evident than on arguably the album's best track "Marrow".  

On 2011's Strange Mercy, Annie doesn't completely ditch the movie score backgrounds and lead-ins, and the angular, buzz-saw guitar is still there.  That juxtaposition is what her sound is all about.  The album's first single, "Cruel" sticks mostly to the formula from Actor.  On Cheerleader (the second great song by that title in the last couple years) she sucks you in with her vulnerable voice and quiet background, right before the pounding chorus kicks in, while singing about all the things she's done that she really doesn't want to do anymore - "I've had good time with some bad guys, I've told whole lies with a half smile, held your bare bones with my clothes on, I've thrown rocks and hid both my arms."

She brings a sense of urgency to Northern Lights, the one really rock sounding track on the album, singing of the end of times.  She gets sounds from her guitar that nature simply didn't intend.  It's this albums version of Marry Me's "Your Lips are Red", but without the major key send off.  By the end of the album, she's playing the role of the 1%, crowing about an inherent ability for scheming.  She sings on "The Tiger": When I was young, coach called me the Tiger, I always had a knack with the danger), before thumbing her nose at the proletariat (Italian shoes, like these rubes know the difference, suitcase full of cash in the back of my stickshift.  I had to be the best of the bourgeoisie...Oh America, can I owe you one?

There's something about her waifish good looks contrasted with the way she shreds on guitar that's jarring, but at the same time captivating.  And that's basically St. Vincent in a nutshell, raw power in a subtle package.  It's rare that an album so highly anticipated (at least by me) lives up to the expectations.  These final few slots are usually populated by the albums that really came out of nowhere.  But this album was everything I was hoping it would be.  

Cruel Cheerleader The Tiger

The Year in Music: 4th and 5th Favorite Albums of the Year

#10 - Smith Westerns - Dye it Blonde
  #9 - Peter Bjorn & John - Gimme Some
  #8 - Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer
  #7 - Cults - Cults
  #6 - tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L 

#5 - Wild Flag - Wild Flag

I'll admit to having completely missed the boat on Sleater Kinney.  The Portland trio's back catalog is right up my alley, but I have hard time getting into bands with big back catalogs if I'm not there from the beginning, and when the news came out a couple years ago that they were calling it quits, I didn't put a lot of effort into educating myself.  Post S-K, I became a fan of Brownstein's blog on NPR, and she appeared in videos from a couple of my favorite acts, St. Vincent and the Thermals.  When Carrie Brownstein rejoined drummer Janet Weiss, along with Mary Timony (Helium) and Rebecca Cole (the Minders) to form Wild Flag, I decided I'd try to get in on the ground floor, and I'm glad I did.

As girl groups go, this isn't the fuzzed out retro pop of Dum Dum Girls, or the honky tonk retro pop of Those Darlins.  This isn't really pop at all.  It's pretty straightforward, in your face rock and roll.  The album alternates almost song for song between Brownstein's more up front grunge ("Boom", "Racehorse") and Timony's psychedelia ("Glass Tambourine", "Electric Band").  They don't leave the pop entirely behind, as evidenced in the hand claps on the title track, "Romance".  And there familiar influences all over the record.  Timony's guitar work in the second half of "Short Version" picks up almost exactly where Bradford Cox left off in Deerhunter's "Nothing Ever Happened".

Admittedly, this is another album that I liked before I saw their intimate Empty Bottle Show in October, but I absolutely loved afterward.  Maybe that's not entirely fair, but there's often something about experiencing a song live, hearing a different arrangement, or performed with different emotion that changes subsequent experiences with the recorded versions.  Either way, this is a great first effort, and hopefully there will be more to come.

Romance Short Version

#4 - Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo

Super Furry Animals have been going strong for the better part of 15 years, but that hasn't stopped front man Gruff Rhys from releasing two of the better solo albums of the past four or five.  It wouldn't be wrong to say that this album is very much a distillation of his contributions to SFA, slowed down, stripped down on the instrumentation side, though nicely complimented with samples.  It's an acoustic, piano, glockenspieled album with a myriad of sounds, but not overproduced.  The type of album he can tour with solo (much like he did for his last album, Candylion), but can also be competently backed up by Welsh surf-rock foursome Y Niwl, who led off his live U.S. tour with a rollicking set of Dick Dale inspired instrumentals before taking over backing duties for Gruff.

The album gets its title from Rhys' (possibly apocryphal) habit of collecting shampoo bottles and other freebies from hotels while on tour, and from the actual model of a hotel that he built from said collection.  Yeah, it sounds eccentric, and it's not surprising.  This is a guy who's band drove to gigs in a techno-blaring blue tank, played entire shows in green fibre-optic jump suits, and have been known to take the stage in head to toe golden retriever outfits to play 2007 single "Golden Retriever".

The album leads off with the first single "Shark Ridden Waters", amply accompanied by the Cyrkle's "It Doesn't Matter Anymore", a Bacharach and David number, and you'd swear that Burt Bacharach had a hand in some of the subsequent tracks, like "Space Dust #2".  But turning '60s influences into modern tracks has been Rhys' stock in trade for over a decade, probably most notably on SFA's 2001 album Rings Around the World.  And he proves that you can't complete take the Super Furry Animal out of the man, especially on standout track and second single "Sensations in the Dark".  This album is the perfect way to pass the time between SFA albums, though my Christmas wish is for one more SFA release and tour in the new year.

Shark Ridden Waters

Sensations in the Dark

The Year in Music: 6th and 7th Favorite Albums of 2011

#10 - Smith Westerns - Dye it Blonde
#9 - Peter Bjorn and John - Gimme Some
#8 - Eleanor Friedberger - Last Summer


#7 - Cults - Cults

In a year seemingly dominated by female vocaled '60s style retro pop (Dum Dum Girls, Tennis, Those Darlins, etc.), Brooklyn via San Diego, boyfriend and girlfriend duo Cults produced the retroist and poppyist of the bunch with their terrific self titled debut.  They hit the scene late last year with a sparse bandcamp site and an MP3 for standout track "Go Outside", and not much else.  The buzz grew over the course of the year, followed by a slew of live shows, and the June 7th release of their self titled debut.

They don't make you wait very long to figure out what they've got in store.  The album opens with "Abducted" arguably it's best and most catchy track (though on a number of listens, there are least five or six songs that I could have called my favorite at one point or another).  They bring the tempo down with "Go Outside" and "You Know What I Mean", before settling into a nice medium tempoed groove through most of the rest of the album.  It's pure sugar throughout, though the catchy melodies mask songs about longing, loneliness, bad choices, and ultimately determining that trying to change for others may not be worth it ("But I can never heal myself enough for you....But I can never be myself, so fuck you").  It all leads to the penultimate track "Bumper", which lets us in on a lovers' quarrel that ends when the two realize that they can't be apart.  They nail the '60s top 40 aesthetic perfectly on this record.  It's an easy to pick up at pretty much any time, regardless of your mood.

Abducted

You Know What I Mean

#6 - tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L

A couple years ago I showed up a little early at the Bottom Lounge to see Dirty Projectors, who released my favorite album of 2009.  tUnE-yArDs, made up basically of Merril Garbus and her bass player, Nate Brenner, opened that show to a fairly decent sized crowd, most of who probably hadn't heard of her (I certainly hadn't).  She blew everyone away.  As you can see in the video below for "Powa", arguably the album's best track, she uses looping pedals to record the percussion and backing vocals, building the song from scratch right before your eyes.  As a non-musician, it's pretty impressive.  But it's all the more impressive because of her ability to back it up with her powerful voice and more than competent skill on the ukulele.

This is her second album, and she fulfilled the promise she showed on 2009's Bird-Brains.  She's backed off just a bit from the African rhythms that dominated her debut, added some horns (she toured with a pair of saxophone players all year), and the result is something that's probably a little more mainstream, but still not something you're going to hear on your local top 40 station.  It's not an easy album to have playing in the background while you're at work, because you'll find yourself getting off task so that you can pay more attention to the music.  It's tough not to be taken in.  And it's one where I simply can't separate the album from the live performances, which are simply engrossing.  This album really does a good job of triggering one's memories from her live shows. "Powa" Live at Lincoln Hall My Country