2011: Hatred of Music

I felt less compelled to finish a top 10 list for music this year. Not because of a lack of quality music: on the contrary, I was having trouble trying to decide which albums made the cut. Nor was it because I lost faith in the arbitrary sorting of music by capricious criteria.

Maybe I am just getting older. Or maybe just lazier and I didn't want to write paragraphs about some of my favorite albums ("It was just good man, get off my back!") Only time will tell.

So as a change of pace, I present to you my 30 favorite albums of the year along with blurbs when I felt like I had something I wanted to say.

A Winged Victory For The Sullen
A Winged Victory For The Sullen
(Kranky)

Alexander Turnquist
Hallway of Mirrors
(VHF Records)

Atlas Sound
Parallax
(4AD)

Austra
Feel It Break
(Domino)

Battles
Gloss Drop
(Warp)

The Black Dog
Liber Dogma
(Soma Records)

Biosphere
N-Plants
(Touch)

Cut Copy
Zonocope
(Modular Recordings)

The Decemberists
The King Is Dead
(Capitol)

Sometimes it's easy to forget how our personal histories with bands color our receptions of albums. For me, Fables of the Reconstruction is just another record in R.E.M.'s massive back-catalogue but for a (relative) old-timer it might be ruefully perceived as the turning point when the band sold-out its college rock roots. Likewise, The Crane Wife just about exhausted any desire I had to ever hear another Colin Meloy album while, in contrast, it is my brother's favorite Decemberist's record as it was his introduction to the band. Absence, however, makes the heart grow fonder and here I am five years later warmly embracing the prodigal band for its return to form album [also see Radiohead's In Rainbow]. A great live show at Edgefield doesn't hurt the redemption narrative either. So even though an album like Ravedeath, 1972 is objectively and subjectively the better record, it is just another in a never-ending series of fantastic Tim Hecker albums and thus less of a memorable 2011 musical event.

Dustin O'Halloran
Lumiere
(Fat Cat)

The Field
Looping State of Mind
(Kompakt)

Gang Gang Dance
Eye Contact
(4AD)

Despite adoring Eye Contact, I purposefully avoided Gang Gang Dance when they came through Portland on their most recent tour. After stupidly deciding to watch a minute clip of the band burning money on a promotional video, I feared that actually seeing them in person would sour me on the record. That would have been a shame because this album is the perfect synthesis of two incongruent elements seemingly designed to appeal only to me: the ineffable female vocals from 4AD label mates Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance and the brash Famicon synth lines from 90s Japanese arranged video game soundtracks like Falcon's Ys IV ~ The Dawn of Ys ~ Perfect Collection Vol. 3. Although the latter is more likely the result of trendhopping off the Caribbean synth rhythms of Deep Cuts era The Knife, I am not judging: this album is like a Katamari ball of influences, omnivorous devouring everything it hears. The iridescent cover art perfectly reflects the album's Hellenistic cosmology/musicology: syncretic, opulent, kaleidoscopic, decadent, and exotic.

Implodes
Black Earth
(Kranky)

Jacaszek
Glimmer
(Ghostly)

Junior Boys
It's All True
(Domino)

Kate Bush
50 Words For Snow
(Fish People)

Nils Frahm
Felt
(Erased Tapes Records)

A wunderkind. He received the only standing ovation at the Substrata 1.1 Festival, miraculously even winning over chin-stroking noise dudes with his minimal yet impassioned piano playing.

M83
Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
(Naïve)

Radiohead
King Of Limbs
(Self-Released)

Rauelsson w/ Peter Broderick
Replica
(Hush Records)

Ricardo Donoso
Progress Chance
(Digitalis Recordings)

Roman Flügel
Fatty Folders
(Dial)

My love for Dial is already well documented around these parts so it should come as little surprise that another one of their releases should find its way onto my year end list. Not that you need the Dial name to certify the quality of Fatty Folders: Roman Flügel is not some hotshot rookie drafted from the label's farm system but a techno stalwart from the late 90s. On the House-Techno continuum, Flügel's brand of electronic tends more towards the fleecy house of John Roberts than the cool minimal techno of Efdemin and Pantha du Prince that built the house of Dial. And while early Dial full lengths were typified by their extraordinary conceptual focus, Fatty Folders is a diverse menagerie of tracks only held together by Flügel's meticulous attention to detail and glorious melodica flourishes. Any fans should also track down Flügel's other releases from this year; his Desperate Houseman EP has tracks that rival anything on Fatty Folders

Soft Metals
Soft Metals
(Captured Tracks)

Steve Hauschildt
Tragedy & Geometry
(Kranky)

Ssion
Bent
(Self-Released)

I didn't think it was possible: a band not only outplaying the headlining Fischerspooner but also upstaging them as well. Performing in butch black leather, Ssion were like The Darkness but stripped of all the ironic metal machismo leaving only the core flamboyance. During "Clown" - the setlist's climax - Cody Critcheloe pointed to people in the crowd cackling, "You look really funny" before turning towards himself and proclaiming, "It's okay. I'm funny too." One of the defining elements of the pop spectacle is its inclusiveness -- that the sheer outrageousness gives us permission to be ridiculous and dance along as well.

After the concert, I was ready to spread the gospel but the album Fool's Gold certainly wasn't going to be making many converts. Unlike the fierce and provocative live performance, Fool's Gold sounded thin and tinny. With only the Peaches-esque calling card "Street Jizz," Ssion looked like how most critics viewed Fischerspooner: performance artist one-offs without the requisite musical chops.

Thus with quite a bit of apprehension, Bent (which Critcheloe offered for free online) sat on my hard drive for months without being listened to. Which is a shame because Bent is a revelation: a full on electro pop masterpiece full of immediately catchy tunes and subversively sexual lyrics. Or at the very least, if the lyrics to "Growin" aren't X-rated, the filthy beat and sweaty baseline certainly should be. In many ways, Bent reminds me of one my favorite releases from the last decade -- Subtle's for hero: for fool. In particular, Critcheloe's fun-house mirror narrative personas, clever wordplay, and shifts in vocal registers bare a passing resemblance to the master himself, Doseone, and provide what could have been just a vacuous exercise in disco signifiers a playful dose of pop deconstruction.

Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972
(Kranky)

Tycho
Dive
(Ghostly)

Washed Out
Within and Without
(Subpop)

Various Artists
Air Texture Volume 1
(Air Texture)

Various Artists
SMM: Context
(Ghostly)

Perhaps it seems a bit odd to have a compilation as my favorite album of the year. I know it always [irrationally] bothered me when a mix like Immer appeared in best electronic albums of the decade lists. Something about cherry picking tracks and "merely mixing" them together seemed like cheating. Which in turn makes this choice even more of a personal oddity: it is not even stamped with the indelible mark of the auteur but instead exquisitely curated by Ghostly, one of the best labels in North America.

Ghostly, like Factory Records before it, has perfected the art of making music a fetishized cultural artifact in the age of digital distribution. SMM: Context is a treasure to hold: lavishly illustrated and cut into ponderous 180 gram vinyl. Ghostly has even furbished these disparate tracks with an overarching narrative. The cover artwork captures the final moments of a book as it slowly smolders into ashes. Although not explicitly spelled out as such, it seems reasonable to assume that when Ghostly states that "The book's original purpose--that is, information--is erased, and the remaining fragments have become a piece of artwork, open to interpretation and the whims of context" they are also thinking of the nature of ambient music itself which seemingly "changes depending on when and how they’re listened to."

The album artwork also provides a proper framework in which to understand the music held within. As Ghostly elegantly describes the genre label they invented for the purposes of this series, "SMM….evaporate[s] the already unspooling musical boundaries between classical minimalism, electronic and drone composition, film soundtracks, and fragile imaginary landscapes." I don't love the enigmatic acronym (although their characterization of the music as "slow-moving" gives you a hint to its origins); it is a bit angular and sharp for music so focused on texture and atmosphere. If they hadn't already used the term for a different series, Spectral would have been a perfect nomenclature for this music: ethereal white noise that hovers at the peripheries of our sense.

Overall, it is Ghostly's attentiveness to the holistic experience of listening to an album that elevates SMM:Context over other anthologies such as Kompakt's Pop Ambient series.