Best of 2011: Albums #1.
20 Dec 2011 — Henning Lahmann
So here they are, my albums of the year 2011. We've got December 20, so if your mind can still take more lists, props to you. Promise, we'll try to be as gentle as possible. And just like last week with our track lists, what you find below merely is the result of my humble musing on quite a remarkable year of music - Tonje's own impressions will follow tomorrow. A few more words to start off with, I guess there's no point in denying that Not Not Fun and Hippos In Tanks have shaped my year musically, the former once again (further enhanced by Amanda Brown's disco spin-off 100% SILK), the latter seamlessly taking over the top spot from last year's defining imprint Olde English Spelling Bee. And last, of course this: it's been an extraordinary year for NFOP, so really, thanks a lot for having us.
Read about the top ten albums and check the whole list below:
#30. Terror Bird - Human Culture (Night-People / Adagio830)
#29. Nate Young - Stay Asleep (NNA Tapes)
#28. The Weeknd - House of Balloons (self-released)
#27. LV & Joshua Idehen - Routes (Keysound Recordings)
#26. Gem Club - Breakers (Hardly Art)
#25. Pure X - Pleasure (Acéphale)
#24. Zomby - Dedication (4AD)
#23. Oupa - Forget (Boiled Egg)
#22. Future Shuttle - Water's Edge (Holy Mountain)
#21. Omma Cobba - Omma Cobba (Sweet Rot)
#20. Julia Holter - Tragedy (Leaving Records)
#19. Ensemble Economique - Crossing The Path, By Torchlight (Dekorder)
#18. Grouper - Dream Loss/Alien Observer (Yellowelectric)
#17. Ela Orleans - Mars Is Heaven (Atelier Ciseaux / La Station Radar)
#16. Balam Acab - Wander/Wonder (Tri Angle)
#15. Motion Sickness Of Time Travel - Luminaries and Synastry (Digitalis)
#14. John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Cencors of Ourselves (Upset The Rhythm)
#13. Real Estate - Days (Domino)
#12. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (History Always Favours The Winners)
#11. Sun Araw - Ancient Romans (Sun Ark)
#10. Clams Casino - Instrumentals (Type Recordings)
New Jersey’s Mike Volpe has put out a very remarkable standalone work this year, the five-track Rainforest EP that was released by Tri Angle in June and that features some of this year’s most incredible tracks, most notably “Gorilla”. But it’s his Instrumentals Mixtape, originally dropped as a free download back in March, that has earned him the most respect and that has garnered almost unequivocal praise. And rightfully so, as it was this very roundup of his previous work for numerous rappers, personally unknown to him, that reaffirmed how Volpe had helped redefining the contemporary hip-hop landscape, with rising underground superstars such as Lil B, Main Attrakionz or A$AP Rocky heavily relying on his (unpaid) production efforts. And that the instrumental tracks perfectly work on their own without losing their edge just reconfirm Charlie Jones’s appraisal: Clams Casino makes music like no-one else. Already a modern classic in its genre, Type Recordings cannot be lauded enough for reissuing this masterpiece on vinyl.
#09. Woods - Sun and Shade (Woodsist)
Sun and Shade is the album that pretty much made my summer. The Brooklyn four-piece's sixth full-length is an exuberant, joyful and optimistic effort that does not shy away from melancholic nuances, most fabulously displayed on songs like "Be All Be Easy" or the marvelous "Wouldn't Waste". Then again, the two extensive psych excursions "Out of the Eye" and "Sol y Sombra" prove that Woods are still the most curious among the psych folk lot when it comes to further developing their already very unique style. It's hard to say where Sun and Shade is to be ranked in the band's amazing overall output, but in any case it surely stands out of this year's swell of lo-fi offerings.
#08. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica (Software)
"So Dan has a sampler now", one of my friends bluntly uttered when listening to Replica for the first time, and on the surface, of course this statement totally nails it. After covering ourselves in the immersive synth voyages of Dan Lopatin's last OPN effort Returnal, the peculiar decision to build the follow-up on neglected snippets of 80s TV advertising came as a surprise, to say the least. A few weeks later, and it seems strange to think that Dan hasn't been doing something like this all along. Replica is tightly produced and highly listenable, most of the time it doesn't even feel experimental, though so many things are going on in OPN's work that deserve our undivided attention and, moreover, analysis and evaluation.
#07. Hype Williams - One Nation (Hippos In Tanks)
In a way, the first half of 2011 saw London duo Hype Williams at their zenith. Today though, after no less than three full-lengths in a mere couple of months on three different labels between mid-2010 and March, plus an EP on Hyperdub following in summer, the current state of the project feels a bit like exhaustion setting in. Both Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt have embarked on worthwhile solo endeavors now, and though a new full-length apparently is due rather soon, most likely again on Hyperdub, it will be interesting to see where Hype Williams's path will lead. One Nation, however, is the duo at their most playful and effortlessly creative, it's the thrilling magnum opus of two deranged yet honest seekers of the neglected aspects of contemporary pop culture. Though the album lacks a single outstanding masterpiece like “The Throning”, and though it naturally falls short of providing the sheer, overbearing awe that I felt when first listening to the debut untitled 12 inch released by Carnivals last year, after all One Nation is a strangely coherent, breathtaking effort - with “Businessline”, it features the duo’s most skillfully executed post pop tune to date, and “break4love” is, truth be told, this year’s most oddly devastating piece of sonic introspection.
#06. Weyes Blood & The Dark Juices - The Outside Room (Not Not Fun)
This year’s single most criminally overlooked and underappreciated record. Back in April, when I asked NNF’s Britt Brown if I could write about one of the tracks from The Outside Room, he told me he absolutely loved the album yet at the same time admitted that it’s “pretty different from a lotta NNF stuff”. Kudos to the LA label’s continued, honest open-mindedness towards all kinds of underground music, but perhaps this is exactly where the problem started: No one expected the record to be released there. This sneaking perplexity was probably best illustrated by The Wire’s curious decision to review it together with Xander Harris’s Urban Gothic (a very excellent album in its own right) in one single piece, two works that have absolutely nothing in common except for the label. The Outside Room clearly would’ve deserved a lot more attention - its strangely bustling, haunting outsider folk, carried by Natalie Mering’s strong yet ethereal voice, is one of the most beautiful and fascinating efforts on the darker side of outré pop in 2011. The standout songs “Candyboy” and “Romneydale” are wide-reaching pieces that remain almost bare and frail at their core while marvelously being wrapped in unfolding drones and rich, at times odd yet never misplaced sonic details. A truly outstanding record all along.
#05. Laurel Halo - Hour Logic (Hippos In Tanks)
When I first wrote about Hour Logic this summer, I lauded each and every single of the six tracks but criticized the lack of coherence, of an overarching narrative. Now while Matt Sullivan suggested on AZ the other day that “Laurel’s EP is the soundtrack to an imaginary silent sci-fi film where a cultural shift in information retrieval and consumption leaves significant effects on our brains’ memory capacity and habit” (don’t know where he got this from, could of course be Laurel’s own conception after all), I'd still tend to think that cohesion is not one of the record’s main qualities, but I soon learned to embrace this as its actual strength. Here’s simply someone with a deep knowledge and understanding of contemporary electronic music and its history and heritage, willing - and able! - to take it to the next level. As a result of Laurel’s ravenous thirst for sonic experiments, the tracks may come across as mere finger exercises of an overwhelmingly talented young artist who has not even really started to unleash her true power - howsoever, each and every piece is among the most impressive, deeply entrancing works of electronic music I’ve come across this year, and thus for me this high position feels downright inevitable.
#04. James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (Hippos In Tanks)
Either a whole lot of work or very little work went into this record. For the moment, what beliefs motivated him to kill so many people we can only imagine. The result is so extreme as to almost be offensive, and indeed, it probably will offend a lot of people. Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo — a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold war dictator. He's fond of distending snapshots of the modern world outward into vastly exaggerated, grotesque versions of reality, and in doing so laying bare the more disturbing consequences of late-period (and especially US model) capitalism. In the annals of modern American entrepreneur-heroes, few careers traced a more mythic sweep. It sounds uncomfortably clean and digital. This may have disastrous consequences for those involved, but cannot be described as a disaster. Beneath that exterior, though, lies something much more pointed and engrossing. His mastery of those midfield areas was almost cruel. The joke isn't on us, it is us. Who knows what’s next? I suddenly have the urge to create a metropolis in SimCity before destroying it with an army of UFOs and neon-colored tornadoes. There is much work to be done. But it's fun. Life should be fun. When you frame the crisis like that, it begins to look inevitable, and perhaps it was. Later comes discomfort and agitation – it’s just too much. This, too, is fueling a time of outrage that has left Western politicians chasing shadows. The record is so very 2011 that it almost hurts.
#03. Rangers - Pan Am Stories (Not Not Fun)
Apparently mildly disappointing for anyone who expected Suburban Tours Vol. 2, during the last couple of days it turned out that you won't find Joe Knight’s sophomore effort Pan Am Stories on too many year-end lists. Then again, it’s probably even already a zeitgeist problem we’re facing here: After all, unlike 2009 and 2010, this year clearly was not one to celebrate “haziness” in music production, in fact the word itself has become some kind of an invective in regard to describing and characterizing a contemporary piece of music. There’s very good reason for this development of course, but though one can hardly deny the fact that “haziness” still is one of the prevailing features of Knight’s sound, his debut for Not Not Fun vastly transcends all inept reflections about the mere sonic qualities of the record. With its lush, expansive arrangements that range between 70s prog and soft rock leanings, countless subtle incursions and the artist’s unchallenged, effortless guitar mastery, Pan Am Stories is a magnificent, almost flawless, confidently conceived and above all staggeringly coherent record.
#02. Lee Noble - Horrorism (Bathetic)
For someone who came to know LA resident Lee Noble as one of today's most significant purveyors of psychedelic drone with serious avant-garde ambitions, probably best signified by No Becoming, the outright experimental work that was released on cassette by Sweat Lodge Guru, also in 2011, it's quite a surprise to see the young artist delivering this year's finest pop album. Cause that's exactly what his Bathetic debut Horrorism essentially is: Beneath sprawling washes of layered drone and reverberation lie some of the most beautiful harmonies heard in 2011, with Lee's soft and unagitated vocalization indicating a deeply touching introspection and reflective melancholy, in particular on the wonderfully slow-burning "Your Privilege" and the devastatingly marvelous "Desire Isn't Suffering". Horrorism is a startling, wonderful addition not only to his already remarkable oeuvre but above all to this year's canon of truly essential music.
#01. KWJAZ - KWJAZ (Brunch Groupe / Not Not Fun)
The best release of the year two thousand eleven consists of two side-long tracks, named "Once in Babylon" and "Frighteous Wane", both roughly twenty-two minutes in length. It was first dropped in early April by Brunche Groupe, the cassette imprint affiliated to Rangers' Joe Knight and his peers, in a super-limited edition of one hundred twenty-one. It was later reissued on vinyl by Not Not Fun. KWJAZ is the solo project of Peter Berends from San Francisco, California. This shallow uttering of bare facts may appear out of place, but I honestly have to admit that even after countless listens to KWJAZ, I still find it almost impossible to conceptualize what happens during the tape's running time of 44 minutes. Somewhat pejoratively dubbed “waiting-room hypnagogia” by Ian Latta on Tiny Mix Tapes, both suites offer a deeply contemplating voyage into the remote realms of your consciousness, gently meandering musings on smooth late night FM radio waves. The muffled, jazzy grooves give a truly impressionistic feel, as if they were only made for themselves and thus completely self-sufficient. It's dreams-evoking ambient music, yes, but at the same time so much more, a lush and elegant "mystery mixtape" that with each new listen keeps unveiling new and surprising sonic details that require attention, while steadily serving tremendously delightful excursions into altered states of pure bliss.