Friday 30 December 2011

eMusic Critic's Choice Best Albums 2011

Each Year the eMusic editor's choose their best albums of the year. Here are their 2011 choices.

eMusic’s Best Albums of 2011

It was a year full of surprising breakouts and breathtaking discoveries, with reliable favorites from familiar faces and strong entries from new voices. Over the course of the next week, we’ll be unveiling our picks for the Top 75 Records of 2011.

#75 Poly Styrene, Generation Indigo

  • Even in 1977, British punk's Year Zero for outsiders and the dispossessed, Marian Joan Elliott-Said — aka Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex — stood out among all the gob-encrusted white males. A mixed-race girl of British-Somali heritage who appeared on Top of the Pops in braces, she lived a mixed history as both a "barefoot hippy" and a recipient of psychiatric care. Post-punk, she threw herself into Hare Krishna and New Age, but on this second solo album (her first since 1980) she grapples with a real world that unexpectedly resembles X-Ray Spex's formative years: Everyone hates the government, nobody's got a job and the kids want to riot.



    Instead of revisiting punk's D.I.Y. DNA, she hooks up with producer Youth to bring together electro, dance-pop, garage rock and protest-ska (stand by for the first sighting of a trombone in pop since 2Tone's heyday). She often sounds like M.I.A.'s older sister: "L.U.V." is a punk chug plus disco-style octave bassline, "I Luv UR Sneakers" sounds tailor-made for the fluorescent germ-free adolescents that X-Ray Spex immortalized, and "Ghoulish" summons the same misty dreamscape as "I'm In Love With A German Film Star."



    The album is full of zest and righteous anger, if not subtlety. The punks were unafraid to call a Babylonian downpressor by his rightful name, and Poly carries on in that time-tested vein here. If you're accustomed to reading the tea leaves of Thom Yorke's lyrics for meaning, you might find much of Generation Indigo naive or strident in its assaults on such counterculture folk devils as consumerism, societal disconnection, war, toxic waste and general bad vibes. But who comes to musicians for practical solutions? The point of records like this is not to solve your problems but to inspire you to solve them for yourselves. In that respect, this energy-packed, optimistic, day-glo rabble-rouser is just right for the times.
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#74 The Middle East I Want That You Are Always Happy


  • The Queensland, Australia, seven-piece the Middle East formed in 2005 over a shared love of Silver Jews, Bill Callahan and Lambchop, and elements of each underscore their deliciously melancholic music. Their sophomore album's opening track, "Black Death 1349," nods towards Smog-style slow-core but is lifted somewhere else entirely by its multi-layered instrumentation and air of haunting dread; "My Grandma Was Pearl Hall" takes Lambchop's air of existential alienation and transforms it into a funereal reverie. This is music which is at times so hushed that it seems to scarcely disturb the air around it: The mono-strummed "Very Many" could be Bon Iver taken to a new, nth level of introspection. So pervasive is this air of library calm that any injection of volume or dissonance comes as an abrasive shock: Within the context of the album, the roistering, Sonic Youth-like "Jesus Came To My Birthday Party" sounds deliberately subversive of what surrounds it. Singer Rohin Jones's vocal rarely rises above a husky, conspiratorial whisper, and ultimately the Middle East's signal achievement is to dream up a music that is as bleak and wracked as Will Oldham yet also hypnotically lush and atmospheric.
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#73 DRC Project, Kinshasa One Two

#72 Gauntlet Hair, Gauntlet Hair

  • Gauntlet Hair’s debut is full of warped, echoing pop, a sound the group attributes to influences as disparate as Amy Grant, Seal and the Talking Heads. With tracks like the dementedly zigzagging standout “Top Bunk” and the cymbal-bashing “Lights Out,” the album sounds like “Baby Baby” spliced with “Crazy” playing on a radio at the bottom of a well.
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#71 CANT, Dreams Come True

  • The first thing you should know about Dreams Come True is that its title isn't meant to convey some Disney-deliverable promise of hope and happy endings. It's more like a threat, delivered in a menacing, Tom Waits-as-Voldemort wheeze, atop a grinding storm of electronics. In other words: Careful what you wish for. Love's double-edged sword — more specifically, the edge that cuts your heart out — is the main concern of the debut album by CANT, the solo project of Grizzly Bear bassist/producer Chris Taylor.



    Perhaps the second important piece of information about Dreams Come True is that it scarcely resembles the gauzy folkways of Grizzly Bear, even though Taylor is generally regarded as the experimental architect behind the Brooklyn band's sound — its Brian Eno or Chris Walla, if you will. Instead, what Taylor and partner George Lewis Jr. (a.k.a. Dominican-born synthpop artist Twin Shadow) serve up is a mostly melodic and chilled-out electronic weeper whose emotion is crucial rather than cloying. Each 808 heartbreak ("Each time you said you loved me/ Each time you said you cared," sings Taylor on "The Edge") is keenly felt, whether in the form of a Kid A-and-after Radiohead piano plea ("Bericht"), a shapeshifting Animal Collective climax ("She Found A Way Out") or the title track's harsh, Varcharz-era Mouse On Mars deconstruction.



    Sometimes it's difficult to find the heart of a mainly electronic, sometimes experimental album. That isn't the case here, as Taylor seems to take cues from the late composer Arthur Russell, whose underwater intimacy was ingrained in his work. In fact, maybe it's the title of the Russell compilation album Taylor digitally restored in 2008 that best describes what the debut by CANT wants you to feel: Love Is Overtaking Me.
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#70 Sub Rosa, No Help For the Mighty Ones

  • This doomy, female-led Salt Lake City art-metal outfit made one of the most unique and powerful albums of 2011. Featuring violin as the lead instrument, with guitar secondary and a thundering, Sabbath-unto-Swans (male) rhythm section, it had the feeling of occult incantation mixed with carefully crafted pagan folk music (especially on their cover of the traditional English folk song "House Carpenter," delivered a cappella). As thunderingly loud as it is sensitive and emotionally resonant, this is a masterful, assured record that will creep under your skin and bubble up out of your brain when you're least expecting it. Essential.
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#68 Dave Douglas & So Percussion, Bad Mango

  • In 2011, trumpeter Dave Douglas released three short albums (by modern standards) under his "Green Leaf Portable" rubric. This "portable" designation — as well as the "just another in a series" style of numbering each effort — connotes a casual vibe; loosed from the pressure to make a big statement with some hour-long plus album, Douglas can just try ideas out, play with new people, blow for around 40 minutes and let it be a thing. And yet Bad Mango, the third disc in this series, doesn't feel like a casual, workaday product. After recruiting the classical-scene hotshots in So Percussion, Douglas wrote some new pieces, reworked some old ones, and came up with a new subgenre: percussion quartet plus trumpet. Opener "One More News" comes in plenty hot, as one might expect, though the group also proves it has the strength to conceive of subtler songforms. (Over the course of 35 minutes, what at first might feel like a limited sonic palette never gets old.) The quartet grooves with a complexity honed during their time woodshedding Steve Reich's Drumming, while Douglas's brash-but-bluesy playing grounds the project in jazz tradition. That the players' collective insights are presented with such a lack of pretension only makes the album feel like more of a find.
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#67 Sigur Ros, Inni

  • Is this live double album a placeholder or a memorial plaque? With the Icelanders on "indefinite hiatus" according to frontman Jónsi it's hard to tell, but either way it's a handsome piece of work: an almost two-hour document, with an accompanying movie, of their shows at London's Alexandra Palace in November 2008. The Palace is a cavernous venue whose treacherous acoustics have swallowed other bands, but Sigur Ros are nothing if not adept at filling a space. Scale is their forte.



    Inni opens fittingly with the sonar ping of Svefn-G-Englar, which was most listeners' first taste of the band's engulfing vastness over a decade ago and still feels as much like a weather formation as any piece of music can. A sparse four-man line-up, minus the horns and strings of previous tours, leaves the usually volcanic chorus of "Hoppípolla" a little muted but more than compensates elsewhere. Sequencing is the key. A string of giddy sunburst pop numbers from their last two studio albums gives way to heavyweight slow-burners like "Hafsól" and "Popplagi�°," each one ascending with a shudder towards effects-pedal Valhalla, and finally coasts to a close with the rippling calm of solitary new song "Luppulagio."



    As live albums go it's pretty persuasive, though with one caveat: the same kind of applause which gives most concert albums their atmosphere almost shatters the spell here. Compared to all the extraordinary images that Sigur Ros's music evokes, the thought of a few thousand people in a giant hall in north London feels strangely deflating.
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#66 Holy Ghost!, Holy Ghost!

  • You shall know Holy Ghost! by the company they keep. New Yorkers Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser have been part of the DFA camp for the past decade, first as members of youthful hip-hop crew Automato and then as in-house musicians. Since the duo's debut single, 2007's "Hold On," they have remixed LCD Soundsystem, Cut Copy, MGMT and Phoenix, all of whom leave their mark on this electro-pop debut.



    Their most blatantly pop moves sound a little too slick and unconvincing (there's not a "Kids" or a "Lisztomania" here), but they've got the production smarts to keep things interesting. Even the over-perky "Jam for Jerry" turns itself around with a glittering disco coda, while the deadpan slow motion grooves of "Do It Again" and "Some Children" (featuring yacht-rock smoothie Michael McDonald) are good news to anyone mourning LCD Soundsystem's retirement. Running through it all is a theme of hedonism in straitened circumstances. "I'll take some money from the joint account/ I know I know I know we're running out," sings Frankel on "Hold My Breath", sounding uncannily like Phoenix's Thomas Mars fronting late-'80s Depeche Mode. "I love the city but I hate my job," he declares on the seductive after-hours techno of Hold On. "And the city loves me back." At their best Holy Ghost! capture precisely that feeling.
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#65 Conquering Animal Sound, Kammerspiel

  • Conquering Animal Sound is made up of just two people, Anneke and James who, according to their Tumblr, "make music in their flat every day." And that's exactly what Kammerspiel sounds like: small, delicate, hand-crafted songs that move like the tiny ballerinas atop miniature music boxes. The music is spare — tiny, tinkling bells, quiet xylophones, a few whispery clicks and snaps — and Anneke's childlike voice seems simultaneously full of wonder and caution. "Flinch" is built from plinking plastic pianos and odd snatches of percussion, "Tracer" is shivery and quiet, a low bass hum and sporadic synths that blink like distant airplanes. This is warm, deliberate music, as gentle as a lullaby, as soft as falling snow.
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#64 Dirty Beaches, Badlands

  • As suggested by the smoke-engulfed, gel-slicked Johnny Cash character on its record sleeve, Dirty Beaches — or, at least, main member Alex Zhang Hungtai — are cooler than you could ever hope to be. He's a real desperado type, playing solo shows with a guitar in one hand and a comb in the other — returning it periodically to his back pocket, presumably right next to his switchblade.



    And then there's the music itself. Contrary to what some critics may tell you, Hungtai's songs aren't lo-fi so much as they're beamed from another time and place, the kind of music that suddenly turns up on a phantom oldies station through your grandfather's old transistor radio — the one that hasn't worked in years. Not since Vietnam, anyway.



    There's a reason Hungtai has repeatedly said that he's writing "soundtracks for films that don't exist." Like the directors he undoubtedly adores (let's say, David Lynch and Wong Kar-Wai), the singer/songwriter isn't out to entertain us. He's here to cast spells, whether that involves rail-jumping riffs and a rockabilly wail ("Speedway King") or a piano melody that's straight out of a dirty saloon, circa 1869. There's no choice but to succumb.
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#63 David Lang, This Was Written By Hand

  • This is the first non-soundtrack album by post-minimalist Lang since the recording that included his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion was released by Cantaloupe last year, and thusly, expectations are high. Are those expectations deliberately subverted with an album of old compositions (nothing here is newer than 2003) and only short pieces for solo piano?







    Furthermore, many of the pieces here seem to run counter to the expectations of even listeners unfamiliar with Lang: There are deliberately clumsy-sounding rhythms, and intentional "wrong" notes abound. One might doubt pianist Andrew Zolinsky's technical prowess if not for his flawless traversal of "Wiggle"; after hearing that dazzling display of digital dexterity, one must take seriously all the seemingly sloppy bits in the other tracks. It and the beautiful "Cello" are the closest to convention that Lang comes here. Without access to extramusical clues to why the music is constructed the way it is, This Was Written By Hand challenges us to relax longstanding ideas of what makes music good.
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#62 The Leisure Society, Into the Murky Water

  • Previously bandmates with director Shane Meadows and actor Paddy Considine, both major exponents of the British kitchen-sink drama, one might expect Nick Hemming's Brighton-based collective the Leisure Society to reflect the gritty realism of their critically acclaimed low-budget films. Instead, the former Telescopes' frontman's second album, Into the Murky Water, feels more suited to the classic films of the '60s than the hard-hitting contemporary tales of This Is England and Dead Man's Shoes, as evident on the opening title track, which showcases its cinematic ambitions with a spy movie-inspired fusion of foot-stomping percussion, playful marimbas, sweeping orchestral lounge-pop, and the Morricone-inspired spaghetti western vibes of closer "Just Like the Knife." But despite its occasional Hollywood-style tendencies, its ten tracks are a quintessentially English affair, its pastoral folk-pop nature constantly evoking images of the scenic countryside and quaint village pubs. "You Could Keep Me Talking" starts out as an enchanting war-time ballroom waltz before its plucked pizzicato strings, breezy flutes, and early Beatlesesque melodies give way to a crescendo of shoegazing distorted guitars, "This Phantom Life" effortlessly fuses shuffling Celtic-tinged nu-folk and a grandiose Elbow-style everyman chorus, while "Dust on the Dancefloor" manages to stay on the right side of twee with its Belle & Sebastian-esque brand of melancholic indie pop. Elsewhere, the languid hippy vibes of "Although We All Are Lost" are given an almost hymnal quality thanks to its use of church organs and powerful choral vocals, "I Shall Forever Remain an Amateur" is a gorgeous autumnal campfire singalong inspired by Hemming's stint working in a fabric warehouse, while "Better Written Off (Than Written Down)" is a jaunty slice of Nashville-tinged chamber pop reminiscent of the Divine Comedy, a far more appropriate comparison than those of Americana purveyors Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear who have been bandied around since their debut. Continuing the renaissance of quintessential English folk-pop as heard on Metronomy and Wild Beasts' recent efforts, Into the Murky Water is a charmingly lush and wistful affair which proves that their unexpected Ivor Novello nominations were no fluke.
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#61 Ben Allison, Action/Refraction

  • Bassist Ben Allison's first recorded collection of cover tunes retains his mischievous spirit: Despite the inclusion of Monk's "Jackie-ing," the most straight-ahead jazz here is a bumpity rendition of the Carpenters' saccharine classic "We've Only Just Begun," which adroitly exaggerates the rhythmic changes in the crooning chorus, promotes harsh accents in the verse sections and then rides a free-spirited sax solo from Michael Blake. Other tracks emphasize atmosphere and texture, less prog-rock than burbling electronica-jazz. Donny Hathaway's "Someday We'll All Be Free" and Allison's closer, "Broken" (the lone original) scuff an otherwise impassive ambiance, marked off by stoic chords, with grainy effects, like sand in a cement mixer, courtesy of two guitarists (longtime Allison cohort Steve Cardenas and Brandon Seabrook) and the analog synthesizer of Jason Lindner. By contrast, on Samuel Barber's "St. Ida's Vision," Lindner's keyboard takes on the rich resonance of an organ. Allison's bass work is spare but incisive throughout. This isn't his best record, but an interesting, innovative departure, with a wider range — from pensive balladry to quirky rock — than you first realize.
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#60 Gable, Cute Horse Cut

  • It's difficult to imagine quite what was discussed in the studio during the recording of this profoundly odd album. But it is certain that at no point was the following sentence uttered: "Whatever will people think?"



    French art-poppers Gable are uncompromising even by the standards stereotypically ascribed to their people, and Cute Horse Cut is uncompromising even by the standards Gable have previously established (live, they have been known to employ such instrumentation as vacuum cleaners, choirs of elderly people and children, and the sound made by dismembering wooden boxes.)



    Importantly, however, "uncompromising" is not, in the case of Cute Horse Cut or, to recognise its properly typographed name, CuTe HoRSe CuT, — a synonym for "unlistenable." At the heart of Gable's experimental urges is an acute pop instinct. This combination results in some treasurable flights of whimsy. "The StoNe aND The WoLF" recalls the surreal electro-operas of Kiwi eccentrics Tall Dwarfs. "Day," the only song whose title does not lurch between cases, is an amiable punky trundle in the style of Sonic Youth at their least obscurantist.



    Several tracks are mere fragments, shorter than a minute. A couple of these do annoy, inasmuch as they feel like good ideas thrown willfully away — especially the sombre a cappella "HauNTeD," which might have made a fine gothic country ballad in the style of Handsome Family. Mostly, however, CuTe HoRSe CuT is a delectable oddity, just the right side of too weird for its own good.
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#59 Gretchen Parlato, The Lost and Found

  • In some circles, the invocation of "jazz vocals" runs only slightly behind "lite funk" as an excuse to utter "no thanks." If that's an accurate summary of your attitude, you'll want to work against muscle-memory here. Gretchen Parlato sings with a delicate touch — she doesn't favor much vibrato or tricky, endless strings of scatted syllables — though the wealth of detail in her timing and dynamic range makes for an interesting contrast alongside that breathy tone. (If at first her approach seems a little too breezy-easy, just give it a sec.)



    One telling moment comes just past the three-minute mark of Wayne Shorter's "Juju" — here outfitted with words by Parlato. As the subtle, introductory statement of the theme pivots toward an expressive middle section, she unleashes a steady beam of E-flat to match Dayna Stevens's flights of tenor sax. Then she holds it, while Stevens swings around the note. It's an exposed, confident sound — one that puts to rest any debate over Parlato's maybe being a lightweight. By the time her "Juju" closes, with a reprise of its whispered origins, the take has the effect of a well told yarn: there is a sense of some satisfactory distance having been traveled. (Parlato's own tunes provide similar opportunities for flexibility. Check Kendrick Scott's restless drum outro on "How We Love.")



    Contemporary piano whiz Robert Glasper co-produced this record, and you can hear traces of his hip-hop-fusion "Experiment" group in the sonics here. His work lets in just the right amount of edge (or worldbeat, as on "Alo Alo") — which is to say, not much at all. Though when that edge comes, it's a welcome virtue all the same, reminiscent of the peppery finish to a smooth drink.
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#58 Blouse, Blouse

  • The debut full-length by the Portland trio Blouse is full of aural tricks that transport the listener back in time — there's the occasional bent chord that evokes a cassette accidentally left to bake in a backseat, or the intermittent pause that reminds one of a skipping record. These self-consciously retro touches are in keeping with the band's overall aesthetic, though; Blouse crafts minimalist, bass-heavy music that fuses the bare-bones aesthetic of early-'80s post-punk with the sort of moody synth swirls that dominate the Projekt Records catalog. Lead singer Charlie Hilton has an airy, removed voice that rarely belies the emotions she's singing about, although that steely reserve is enough to make one wonder if this album's working title wasn't Black MP3s For A Blue Girl. The steadily loping bass lines, played by Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Jacob Portrait, prevent the sadness from taking over in a self-indulgent way, though; they give the dreary atmosphere enough solid ground to create a space where gloom only takes over for a short while, or at least until the next song starts.
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#57 The Weather Station, All of it Was Mine

  • As The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman writes introspective folksongs guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings. The album's cover — Lindeman standing in front of trees reflected in a window — looks like it could've been made decades ago, and it's fitting for her music. With no mention of time periods or events, her songs are strictly built on emotions and interactions, complemented by self-aware observations and warm imagery.







    Opening track "Everything I Saw" has references to homemade bread and freshly dug-up carrots, muddy streetlights and see-through cotton skirts; in "Traveller," about feeling like a stranger in a familiar place, there's chipped paint on a brick and snow to brush off a jacket. "Came So Easy" mentions quiet evenings in the kitchen and ants pillaging in a single-file line, as Lindeman sings gently about being startled and caught off-guard by a new love, shifting from wincing at "sugar-sweetness" to being tongue-tied and restless.







    All Of It Was Mine channels both folk music's early trailblazers and Lindeman's own contemporaries. The smoky soprano in "Know It To See It" is an obvious nod to Joni Mitchell, while the reedier alto in parts of "Traveller" sound more like Laura Marling. The music is mostly acoustic fingerpicked guitars and subdued banjo, with occasional tambourine and a couple bluesy bouts of reverb. It's simple and honest with no frills — sure to hold up through another few decades.
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#56 Cashier No. 9, To The Death of Fun

#55 Agnes Obel, Philharmonics

  • Obel's debut was one of 2011's least assuming and most gratifying surprises. The Danish singer-songwriter arrived, from sight unseen, as a fully formed artist, her breathy, just slightly accented vocal haunting a ghostly gorgeous collection of songs, picked out in a piano technique at once lulling and insistent. "Down By The River" evoked the sepulcral fragility of PJ Harvey circa White Chalk' a cover of John Cale's "Close Watch" suggested rare poise as an interpreter, and the astutely judged instrumentals glued the album into a coherent whole that encouraged, and rewarded, many repeat listenings.
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#54 Phoenix Foundation, Buffalo

  • New Zealand's Phoenix Foundation are one of leftfield rock's most endearing slow-burners. Having drifted benignly beneath the critical radar for more than a decade, the Wellington six-piece have honed and rarefied their art to the point where their fourth studio album is some kind of quiet masterpiece. They haven't achieved this quantum leap via shock tactics: Phoenix Foundation are classicists, clearly in thrall to the enraptured, sun-drenched West Coast rock of the Byrds. Yet they infuse this quivering album with such a visceral love of life that it never sounds remotely retro. Their meticulously-developed, beautifully realised songcraft is a joy throughout, from the chaste Fleet Foxes harmonics of opening number "Eventually" to the hyperventilating electro-throb of the title track. The gawky rush of "Bitte Bitte" evokes the wide-eyed alchemy of Jonathan Richman. Singer Samuel Flynn Scott is a murmuring yet intense presence, infusing wry humour into the delicious sepia reverie of Bailey's Beach ("This is no joke, I am really broke — and all you can say is, look at that birdie!"). By the epic, Smiths-tinged kiss-off, "Golden Ship", it's clear that practise has made the Phoenix Foundation — well, not perfect, but very, very fine indeed.
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#53 The Submotion Orchestra, Finest Hour

  • Leeds, the restive capital of the People's Republic of West Yorkshire, has produced its far share of goth, indie rock, downbeat dance music and tubthumping pop. It's nobody's idea of a jazz mecca though, which is why Submotion Orchestra's accomplished debut album comes as such a surprise. Shot through with avant-garde textures, refracted at unexpected dub and ambient angles, and at times even sinister, it's a slick and accomplished collection of ersatz jazz and mellifluous trip-hop.



    A few of the band's nine members graduated from the Leeds College Of Music's respected jazz course, while others have plied their trades as club DJs, composers-in-residence, sessioneers and promoters. One, Ruckspin, is perhaps the only classical viola player we've encountered who claims his favourite album is The Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation. The cumulative effect of all this extracurricular work is far from academic or studied, however, the impression is of a varied brain trust running on free-range musical curiosity.



    The primary colors on Finest Hour are muted strings, Fender Rhodes pianos, skittering beats and the delicious lazy inflection in Ruby Wood's voice, and it would be easy to make formulaic chill-out for phone ads from such ingredients. But the band is adept at turning their materials inside out to create moods that oscillate from the laid-back to the frenetic. "Secrets" develops from a swirling Jacuzzi of jazz horns into grand, bassy, Studio One-style reggae — Madness co-opted by Sun Ra. The record reaches a transcendent finale when "Perfection" unfurls into a grand, trumpet-led, intergalactic reverie and then disappears into a dub wormhole. The result is diverse and twisting enough to sit alongside vintage trip-hop like Thievery Corporation or Massive Attack without sounding like anything other than itself.
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#52 Tinariwen, Tassili

  • In 2011, "going unplugged" tends to mean going offline, living a life unencumbered (or enhanced) by the Web, to whatever degree that's possible, for a specified period of time. A couple decades ago, though, the term had a very different connotation: It referred to MTV Unplugged, where songs were performed with only acoustic instruments. Tassili, the fifth U.S.-issued album by Mali's Tinariwen, a Saharan desert ensemble formed in 1982 and led by five rippling electric guitars, takes the phrase both ways. Though there was obviously recording gear involved, the area the band recorded in — "a protected region of the southeastern Algerian desert," per the PR — seems offline enough. On top of that, Tassili is the album where the band goes acoustic.







    This might seem like a marketing setup: These guys are, after all, the walking definition of "desert blues." But the style Tinariwen plays is sometimes nicknamed simply "guitar" for a reason: All that six-string interaction has a dense weave that the group's percussionists, Said Ag Ayad and Mohammed Ag Tahada, amplify more than push. The Malians get some outside help, too, and although "Ya Messinagh" doesn't really need the extra oomph provided by a pair of horn players from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, it's kind of nice to hear Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio show up in the midst of "Tenere Taqqim Tossam." They help out on a few other songs as well, a lot more quietly. The spotlight, as ever, is on those gorgeously rough guitars.
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#51 Aram Shelter’s Arrive, There Was

  • A cool extension of the legacy of Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch. The beautiful sound is made up by the contrasts of Shelton's biting alto, Jason Adasiewicz's lapidary vibes, Jason Roebke's powerful bass and Tim Daisy's sharp, roiling drums. The tracks are structured in idiosyncratic and sophisticated ways, with a muscular musical logic that gives the players space to stretch themselves without dissipating. Smart, with a gripping amount of fire burning just under the surface.
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#50 Pete and the Pirates, One Thousand Pictures

  • The name Pete and the Pirates might suggest a fearsome bunch, but a single listen to One Thousand Pictures shows that these friendly buccaneers want nothing more than to entertain you. From the open-seas setting "Can't Fish" to the lunar imagery of "Half Moon Street," the Reading quintet offer a freewheeling blend of indie rock that's equally reminiscent of goofy Brit-Poppers like Supergrass and sinewy post-punk acts like Wire. The line "It doesn't matter, doesn't matter at all" in "Come to the Bar" encapsulates the group's ethos, while the allusion to Blondie's "Heart of Glass" subtly anchors them to their post-punk roots.



    One Thousand Pictures maintains the carefree zing of their debut Little Death, but adds enough variety to show the boys have a song for any mood. Tracks like "Little Gun" — which pairs a disco groove with a cavalry-charged rhythm guitar and soaring sails of reverb — show that they have more to offer than post-punk revival. A frantic sword fight breaks out in "Blood Gets Thin" in the form of clashing cymbals and a villainous guitar riff, followed by the sinister-yet-despondent weep in "Shotgun" and the jovial, almost cutesy "Motorbike." Within each song there's something unexpected and delightful — witness the half-buried scream at the reprise of album highlight "Things That Go Bump" — and the more you listen, the more you feel there's a waggish confidence about this band, one that bodes well for their future.
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#49 Fatoumata Diawara, Fatou

  • The road to hell is littered with the battered souls of actors who've tried to forge careers as musicians. But Mali's Fatoumata Diawara managed to leap genres with grace and invention. And she's achieved it while being that rarest of things in African music — a woman who writes her own material and accompanies herself on guitar.







    Her compositions are remarkably mature for a debut, moving from the uptempo to the gently intimate with easy smoothness, although she seems at her best when the pace slows, as it does with "Makoun Oumou." An ode to her former employer, Wassoulou singer Oumou Sangaré (Diawara was her backing vocalist for a while), the song is deliciously spare — almost naked — with little more than guitar and percussion behind her voice, and the native kamelengoni harp peeking out in short runs. Built around an achingly catchy chorus, the song slowly builds in intensity until it achieves beautiful release close to the end. Like everything here, the song is a showcase for her singing, and it's that voice, a lulling, persuasive instrument, full of sensuality, that seduces the ear, whether Diawara is sounding beautifully ethereal ("Wililé"), built up in pillowed layers of vocals ("Alama"), or giving that raw African blues rein on "Kèlè."







    Diawara wears her African roots proudly, but she's definitely not a purist. Mali is the foundation of the sound, but touches of electric piano sneak in on "Kanou," while jazzy electric guitar adds texture to "Bakonoba" and "Boloko," where it duels with n'goni on the disc's only real instrumental moment — something that simply serves to accent the predominance of the vocals. With her first step as a solo artist, Fatoumata Diawara has taken a giant leap indeed.
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#48 Jah Wobble, Psychic Life

  • Wobble, sculptor of bone-crunching bass lines for Public Image Ltd circa 1979's Metal Box, has made a career out of into-the-lion's-jaws collaborations with some of rock's most influential and outspoken figures, from PiL's John Lydon, to Sinead O'Connor and beyond. His latest album introduces his most satisfying team-up so far, with 30-something Lancastrian singer-songwriter Julie Campbell, who first surfaced a year or two ago on Warp, under the alias LoneLady.







    First put into contact by Warp's boss, Steve Beckett, the unlikely duo soon discovered that, despite a 20-year age gap, they had remarkably similar goals. Campbell was retrospectively smitten by Metal Box — she'd barely been born when it came out. Wobble, for his part, had been thinking about making those kind of noises again, after wandering the perimeters of the avant-garde for 15 years. Together, they've dreamt up a far-reaching collection of moves and grooves, all loosely inspired by the genre-busting freedom of the post-punk scene, from which Wobble first sprung.







    Campbell's enthusiasm helped him to re-access the mindset of his PiL days, even if he had refused involvement in Lydon's reunion — to the point where he even called in Keith Levene, PiL's mind-boggling guitarist from that era, to play on two tracks. Disciples of that classic record will marvel at "Phantasms Rise...," where Wobble's ticklish up-and-down bass runs scamper thrillingly counter to Levene's savagely churning FX, while Campbell murmurs and coos tangential abstractions over the top.







    Psychic Life, however, is anything but PiL by numbers. Instead, Wobble and Campbell tap into the same spirit that birthed its ground-breaking post-punk takes on Krautrock, dub and disco. Opener "Tightrope" marches on a brisk house beat through numerous arms-aloft dancefloor crescendos, while the title track brilliantly matches a robust hip-hop rhythm to an acrobatically zigzagging bass pattern that recalls Wobble's b-line on The Orb's early-'90s ambient-house classic, "The Blue Room."







    Against such an unpredictable sonic backdrop, Campbell revels in assuming different voices and styles. In "Feel," she shrugs off ice-maiden froideur in favor of a full-tilt disco vixen's craving for sensual release. On "Slavetown," she yearns and moans and falsettos like an ambisexual funk regent (Chaka Khan? Prince?!), questing to escape the entrapment of her home city, Manchester.







    Straddling the immediate and the out-there, the carnal and the metaphysical, with a Zen-like command, Wobble and Campbell have spirited up an album which duly deserves the widest possible audience.
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#47 Widowspeak, Widowspeak

  • Widowspeak covered Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" for the B-side of their second single, "Gun Shy," and that same sense of swampy, brooding romance lingers over their first full-length. The album expands on the promising sound of their early efforts, which mixed the shadowy sweetness of Molly Hamilton's voice with enough grit and twang to keep things interesting.







    All of the A-sides of the singles the band released prior to their self-titled debut are here, and they're still the standouts. "Harsh Realm" is the definitive Widowspeak song: Drummer Michael Staziak delivers a subtle-but-driving rhythm, guitarist Robert Earl Thomas uncorks slippery, winding leads that blur the line between surf and surreal, and Hamilton sings of literal and figurative dark places in a hazy, seen-it-all drawl that evokes both Mazzy Star and Cat Power.







    If the band stuck to this searching, darkly beautiful sound — and indeed, "Nightcrawlers," "Half Awake" and "Ghost Boy" do just that — the results would be satisfying. But Widowspeak shows the band knows how to smile, too: "Fir Coat" is a jangly gem that cuts the album's dead-of-night ruminations like a sunbeam; they even kick up their heels on the rollicking "Puritan" and the breezy "Hard Times." A subtle and surprising debut, Widowspeak is even more winning than their singles suggested.
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#46 Krallice, Diotima

  • Black metal bands typically temper their fury with concision — their ice-pick guitar riffs and relentless blast beats burn out after four or five minutes. But Krallice recognize no such limitations, frequently stretching their compositions to prog-rock lengths. The group's longest piece to date, "Monolith of Possession," from 2009's Dimensional Bleedthrough, runs a staggering 18:44, and "Litany of Regrets," from Diotima, isn't much shorter at 13:39. Guitarists Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Octis) and Colin Marston (Behold...The Arctopus, Gorguts, Dysrhythmia) are the band's co-leaders, their staccato riffs and piercing harmonies combining black metal fury with the slowly building power of minimalism or trance music. But the contributions of bassist Kevin McMaster and drummer Lev Weinstein (Bloody Panda) demand recognition; they give the music an undeniable heft and a supple, even fluid momentum. On "Telluric Rings," the album's high point, Weinstein sets up a powerful groove that bolsters Barr and Marston's aggressive interplay. When it finally gives way to blast beats, the savagery feels earned, and the guitar solo (at about the six-minute mark) is positively transcendent. Over the course of three albums, Krallice have gradually turned black metal into high art, without losing any of the genre's intensity. Diotima is a masterpiece.
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#45 Chelsea Wolfe, Apokalypsis

  • This year, Los Angeles received a welcome antithesis to the glossed starlets parading its streets: doom-folk maven Chelsea Wolfe, a sepulchral singer-songwriter who brilliantly united her avant-garde performance roots with the arch, punishing rhythms of metal. Her second album, Ἀποκάλυψις ("apokalypsis"), explored end-days scenarios with nuanced melodies reminiscent of PJ Harvey; the goth stomper "Demons" ripped along with untoward destruction, while the standout ballad "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" dared to show her vulnerable side with sighs of, "We could be two straight lines/ In a crooked world." The artfully macabre surf-guitar of lead single "Mer" was a perfect summation of the dark undercurrents of her sunny homeland, as only she could capture them.
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#44 Makossa & Megablast, Soy Como Soy

  • Austrian DJs and producers Makossa & Megablast hit big four years ago with their debut album Kanuaka, a wild, daring meld of club music and raw, authentic African rhythms — a superb dancefloor mix. They've taken their time over the follow up, and the thought shows. The title track has already been a huge Ibiza hit with its outsized, anthemic sound, but the rest of the record doesn't try to repeat a winning formula. Instead, it throws the windows wide open and looks beyond Africa to the new territory of Latin and R&B with remarkable success.







    Not that they ignore the base of their sound. It's there on the bone-rattling "Wangu," with Tony Allen, the man who powered Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, behind the kit, adding his subtle bedrock of layered rhythms that propel the infectious sound of OG Spiritual Goddess's voice. It's an album where the guests, most of them vocalists, bring much to the party, but none as much as Hubert Tubbs, once the frontman for the mighty Tower of Power. His two contributions, "Peace" and "Coming Home," are ripped right out of his heart — soulful and intense, the accompaniment a gloriously spare frame tinged with R&B that lets the vocal shine bright. Nothing's phoned in here; every performance is majestic, every detail of the music carefully created. The instrumentals are equally compelling, whether on "Release the Pressure," which lives up to name with its twisting build that erupts into shimmering melody, or the twinkling atmospheres and bubbling analogue synths of the closer "Love You." The heart of Makossa & Megablast might still be in Africa, but the look in their eyes is decidedly global.
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#43 Cymbals Eat Guitars, Lenses Alien

#42 Ghostpoet, Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam

  • Perhaps the most self-effacing, machismo-free MC Britain has ever produced, Obaro Ejimiwe makes Roots Manuva sound like 50 Cent. Born in Coventry (home of the Specials) and based in London, he's a hard-luck storyteller who raps like he's missed the last bus home on a foggy night in January. Ghostpoet's subject is disappointment, whether it be underwater finances ("Survive It") or the wrenching self-loathing of a bad hangover ("Cash and Carry Me Home"), and his music hovers in the spaces between wobbly-legged dance music, blurry hip hop and Burial-style pre-dawn dubstep. The stirring finale Liiines confirms that disappointment doesn't mean defeat.
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#41 Mike Watt, hyphenated-man

  • The word critics most often use to describe Mike Watt's music is "elliptical", which should give you some idea just how difficult describing his music is. Ever since his time as bassist for punk/funk legends Minutemen, Watt has specialized in music of evasion. Most punk rock barrels forward; his music is a constant sideways skitter. His songs never take the straight route, but they still manage to get where they're going faster than anyone else, depositing a few unlodgeable sounds in your ear and disappearing all in the elapsed time it takes for you to mutter, "Huh?"



    No one can maintain that kind of high-step forever. Mike Watt is 53 now, and hyphenated-man, his new solo record, is a meditation on that truth, a punk-rock lifer's shit-eating-grin look at mortality. A lot of aging men in rock make this record eventually, the one that takes baleful stock of their accumulated scars, settles debts, issues pronouncements. The "Regrets? I've had a few" record. Often, they sag under the leaden weight of their subject matter.



    But not Mike Watt's version — his is, well, more elliptical. There are myriad ways to moan "I'm gettin' old" in rock 'n' roll, but nobody else has done so by writing 30 songs dedicated to individual figures in Hieronymous Bosch's gruesome Renaissance triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The titles describe the figures: "belly-stabbed-man," "pinned-to-the-table-man," "head-and-feet-only-man." The lyrics, however, are startlingly direct and personal: On "antlered-man," he sings wryly, "When I was younger, tried to act like something stronger/ But the ego, it just won't let go," encouraging himself to "get naked, let weakness show." As is usually the case with Watt's work, what looks wildly counterintuitive on paper turns out to be, for him, somehow the shortest distance from A to B.



    Apart from the words, his voice betrays the years: It has acquired a beer gut and a permanent sunburn, full of the crags and pits that come from decades of "jamming econo." But the antic rhythms haven't flagged a step. Many critics have faltered in conveying this experience, but here goes: It's like riding shotgun in a dune buggy down the sheer side of a rocky cliff, gripping the handles while Watt shouts factoids about the native flora and fauna into your ear. It's thrilling, queasy, and disorienting; it's packed with information and over too soon; and the minute you make it down alive, you want to start over.
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#40 Black Truth Rhythm Band, Ifetayo

  • The Trinidadian Black Truth Rhythm Band's 1976 album Ifetayo is an essential, much-bootlegged artifact of the rare funk underground that has finally been properly (both legally and sonically) reissued. Led by the recently deceased Oluko Imo (who would later record the very fine Oduduwa with both Fela and Femi Kuti), Black Truth Rhythm Band combined the jazzy branch of American funk; Afrobeat and Caribbean polyrhythms; and pan-African spiritual mumbo jumbo to create slow-burning grooves that were never undercut by the flute solos or joss-stick vibes.







    The group is at its most charmingly and liltingly tropical on the almost straight-ahead calypso "Aspire," but it's the deeper, more intense tracks — like the simmering tribal drum jam "Umbala," where even the steel pans sound moody and eerie — that give Ifetayo its funk cachet. The highlights are the storming title track, which finds the perfect middle ground between the uncouth but dizzying rhythms of Fela's Afrika 70 band and the more restrained but clinical Cymande, and the endearingly ramshackle "Save D Musician," which has long been a favourite on the rare funk circuit. While Soundway always puts together beautiful packages, Ifetayo is one of the best-sounding funk reissues of recent years, vivid with tiny details and lovely, cocooning bass reproduction.
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#39 Battles, Gloss Drop

  • When Battles released their deranged debut album (Mirrored) in 2007, the New York virtuosos proved that — 20 years after Steve Albini broke brains with Big Black and Shellac — there was plenty of uncharted territory in math rock. That Battles have become the genre's new standard-bearers makes sense: The group features two of its pioneers in Don Caballero guitarist Ian Williams and Helmet drummer John Stanier. But it was singer/guitarist Tyondai Braxton (son of avant-garde jazz icon Anthony) who gave the band their voice, piling unintelligible vox-tweaked madness on top of the group's already maddening prog-rock sound.



    During sessions for their second album, Braxton suddenly quit, citing exhaustion. His departure has allowed Williams, Stanier and guitarist Dave Konopka to tighten things up. Gloss Drop is the group's most focused and pleasurable collection yet. It's also (WTF?) straight-up poppy at moments, with loads of ear-worm guitar hooks and propulsive grooves. Call it treadmill music for the art-school set.



    Gloss Drop kicks off with the hiccupy, six-minute cluster-bomb "Africastle." From there, the group digs into a 54-minute barrage of knotty prog, electrified bebop, demented calypso, and what-was-that industrial bangers. Yet it's all somehow unified by Stanier's consistently crushing beats and Konopka's mouse-squeak guitar effects. A few notable guests assume Braxton's role as vocalist — including new-wave icon Gary Numan on the jittery "My Machines" and Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino on the hip-swiveling "Sweetie & Shag." But in the hands of Battles, the added star power is mostly just another texture; another cool studio toy for them to manipulate.
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#38 Gruff Rhys, Hotel Shampoo

  • For all their weirder aspects — the day-glo army tanks, the Yo Gabba Gabba!-on-a-bad-trip artwork — Super Furry Animals make records that are, primarily, beautiful and welcoming sensory experiences. For his third solo album (or fourth, if you count his electro excursion as Neon Neon with producer Boom Bip) frontman Gruff Rhys absents himself from the SFAs' abrasive techno and space-rock dimensions and goes for a low-key and poignant adult pop approach. It foregrounds a fact that SFAs' lysergic sturm-und-drang sometimes obscures: Rhys is a first-rate emotional songwriter, able to connect the domestic with the cosmic. Some of these eye-misting songs — especially "If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme)" — wouldn't sound amiss if they were sung by next year's "X Factor" winner.



    It's reflective, intimate but feel-good stuff, with nary a rock guitar in earshot. Instead, there are woozy chord changes, small but perfectly-formed string sections, rolling pianos and more muted trumpets than a New Orleans funeral line. The prevailing mood is of sunny reverie, as if the right music could be powerful enough to transport the Los Angeles sun to South Wales (well, Cardiff sits on its own West Coast and Rhys has never hidden his love of Brian Wilson). His voice in particular sounds just lovely — untutored and heavy on the Welsh accent for sure, but all the more direct for it.



    Of course he can't keep his magnificent schizophrenia in check for a whole album. Half-way through "Christopher Columbus," which analogises the beginning of a bad relationship to the mixed blessings that flowed from the landings of 1492, the song suddenly starts sounding like Madness. "Patterns of Power" flips from an AOR acoustic chug into the synth-squelching paleo-funk world of Zapp or Parliament. This is what Gruff and the SFA do, and commercially speaking, maybe it's their enemy. But it's doubtful that the questing listener will feel short-changed by a record that sounds like three or four deeply satisfying albums all at the same time.
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#37 Owiny Sigoma Band, Owiny Sigoma Band

  • Take five British musicians raised on soul and hip-hop to Kenya, team them with a local nyatiti (lyre) player and a percussionist, and watch as the grooves start churning. "Gone Thum Mana Gi Nyadhi" kicks it all off with a long, easy conversation between cultures, but from there the funk builds, as on "Odero Lwar," where the instruments let the rhythm bubble under hypnotic drums. The album's an understated joy, and even at its most Western, as with "Wire," the African undercurrent remains strong. It's an indication of what open minds and open hearts can achieve.
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#36 Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion

  • Part of me wants to call this Crystal Stilts' pop move and the rest is giggling its ass off at the very idea. The Brooklyn quintet's second full album doesn't cover much territory that their previous work hadn't. But from the time JB Townsend's Duane Eddy-like guitar lick of "Sycamore Tree" bounds into earshot, In Love with Oblivion is palpably catchier, more upbeat and lighter of tone than anything Crystal Stilts have recorded before. Brad Hargett's vocals are still lachrymose — that's his thing — but he sounds like he's enjoying his role rather than simply mumbling his way through a part, as he sometimes could before. Even a long drone like "Alien Rivers" hums and surges; it's a genuine surprise to discover that the track lasts nearly seven-and-a-half minutes.



    Oblivion isn't a lo-fi album, exactly — it's more like an expert simulacrum of lo-fi. Old fans needn't worry: Mysterioso crud is still the crux of the Crystal Stilts sound. But the production, by Townsend (and engineer Gary Olson), keeps the droning quality of old while expanding sonically in a few directions. There's a comfortable spaciousness that belies the group's earlier, more cramped sonics: The way Kyle Forester's organ threads through Andy Adler's antic bass and Townsend's anxiously chiming riffs on "Half a Moon" evokes a carnival at twilight, while "Through the Floor" is straight-up Phil Spector Wall of Sound homage that works even better for coming out of the speakers as if from a different room. (That's true on headphones, too.) Based on Townsend's work here, he'll probably be able to hire himself as a producer for other bands of this ilk for a good while. But the way his confident riffs lead his ever-tightening bandmates, it seems safe to imagine that he isn't going anywhere for a while yet.
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#35 Talvin Singh and Niladri Kumar, Together

  • Percussionist Talvin Singh — one of the leading lights of the Asian Underground movement of the late '90s — and sitar player Niladri Kumar give traditional Indian music an electric reboot, reinventing the sitar/tabla duo that's been a mainstay of the genre for centuries. Singh provides a steady base, playing so subtly that at times he hardly seems to be there, offering accents — and many touches of atmospheric programming — then crashing like thunder to propel a track like "Joy" through its frantic finale. Kumar, meanwhile, not only brings virtuosic sitar skills, he also employs his zitar — a five-string electric version of the sitar, run through with effects. The interplay between the two recalls such magisterial figures as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussein; they're almost telepathic in the way they support and push each other. Together, they create something that builds on the past but is also completely modern — their heart might be in India, but their outlook is utterly global.



    The disc hinges on two long tracks, the title cut and "Threads." The first unfolds like a raga, opening with a lengthy, floating improvisation that slowly builds into a gorgeous melody that carries the second half of the piece. The zitar sounds like a guitar one moment and an exotic sarangi the next, until it all rounds out with a lovely triumphal flourish. By contrast, "Threads" is exactly what its title implies — a series of fragments, ranging from the dreamy to the desperate, all of which weave together to create an oddly cohesive and satisfying whole. By reimagining the way Indian music can be, Singh and Kumar give it breath and accessibility, not only fresh life, but a way forward in the new century.
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#34 Little Dragon, Ritual Union

  • Little Dragon's command of styles is staggering, from dubstep and dancehall to Prince-ly R&B and early '80s hi-NRG disco. And that's only on the sweet seduction song "Precious." Their light arrangements are also finessed with a kind of feng shui: Where others erect walls of sound, Nagano's pals paint delicate watercolors without seeming precious. Combing the complex chords and subtle tonalities of jazz with electronica's infinite possibilities, they play in their sonic sandbox as if they were carefree children, not musos swinging on serious chops.







    No wonder why the Roots' drummer/producer (?uestlove) and Outkast are fans of the Gothenburg group's dark, dubby soul — a sound that's earned its various singers and players spots on albums by Raphael Saadiq, Gorillaz and TV on the Radio's David Sitek. Discreetly freaky soul doesn't get much more futuristic than the avant-garde angles of Ritual Union.
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#33 Roots Manuva, 4everevolution

  • The riots that hit London last month lend an unpredicted frisson of topicality to "Skid Valley", the most sombre track on Roots Manuva's fifth album. "The cost of life's still cheap round here but the cost of living ain't cheap round here," rumbles the south London MC, adding more with resignation than pride, "Britain remains Britain." The close proximity of chunky party jams like "Watch Me Dance" and "Get the Get" to such downbeat social commentary comes as no surprise from someone who has been following his own varied path since the late '90s and is no less compelling on the cusp of middle age.



    While younger, more commercially successful MCs such as Dizzee Rascal and Tinie Tempah know their way around the VIP room, Roots' concerns are, as he spells out in Revelation, "daily grind and daily bread". Recession and depression are recurring themes, set to shuddering sub-bass and Hitchcockian strings, though his oddball humour is never far away. Take the way the paranoid skank of "Who Goes There?" concludes with an eccentric take on upper-class English slang: "Chocks away, toodle and the pips." The wry domestic angst of Wha' Mek? is his most tender song yet while the bubbling urban psychedelia of "The Throes of It" is by some distance his strangest. Neither is anywhere close to being conventional hip hop. Moulding rap into his own idiosyncratic private language, Roots may be too old and too odd to capitalize on UK rap's post-Dizzee gold rush but he still commands attention.
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#32 Damu, Unity

  • The nebulous sub-genre of "post-dubstep" has many confusing cross-currents and streams, but its most vital contribution has been a renewed emphasis on sensual musicality. Acts like Martyn, Joy Orbison, Zomby and Joker, and labels like Night Slugs, Numbers and Hyperdub, have taken the enveloping bass of dubstep and grime and added funkier and more flexible rhythms, warm chords and zingy synthesized melodies shooting every which way but loose. And now Manchester producer Damu has produced what is possibly the most coherent statement of this strain yet.







    The Keysound label boss Martin "Blackdown" Clark — also well known as DJ, journalist and producer in his own right — has always had an ear for the most technically refined producers in grime, dubstep and related scenes, and in signing Damu, his taste is reaffirmed. While Unity contains a broad range of rhythms, tempos and influences, Damu's sheer musicianship gives it coherence. The slow development of its themes and the deadly precision of its sonic palette means that it binds together as a whole in a way that few club albums manage.







    Whether the rhythm is a steady house pulse, the skipping funk of U.K. garage, or jazzy syncopations that recall the broken beat scene of the late '90s, there's a glorious excessiveness to the layering of sub-bass, chords and synth leads that is only possible because of Damu's clear understanding of harmony and counterpoint. It's peppered, too, with sensuous vocal snippets and pinprick-sharp high-frequency percussion sounds that act as punctuation and highlights in the unfolding patterns, constantly grabbing your attention and preventing it from becoming merely wishy-washy mood music.







    Unity is saved from becoming sonically homogeneous by the insistent hooks that give each track its distinctive identity. The sweet "let the games begin" vocal of "Breathless," the synthetic steel drum riff of "L.O.V.E." (which is so infectious as to be almost, but not quite, annoying), the sheets of white noise that slide and bend across one another in "Maths is Fine for Sum": Each lodges in the brain, making sure that each track functions as instantly and memorably as a great club tune should, even as they contribute to the greater whole of the album.







    The lynchpin that holds the album together is the stunning "Ridin' the Hype," which features maverick east London grime MC Trim. On his mixtapes and guest appearances, Trim has been one of the bleakest rappers in the scene, with his slow and sparse style providing a stark contrast to the rapid-fire fury of many grime artists, and his gallows humor and insular surrealism making him seem like some gutter Zen philosopher. Damu's mutant R&B backing and Trim's poetic bent transform the song into a reflection on reflection, one of the best renderings I can recall of that moment, which any true clubber will recognize, when for a moment you step outside yourself and find peace among the noise and movement of the crowded dancefloor.
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#31 Other Lives, Tamer Animals

#30 Neon Indian, Era Extrana

  • When it comes to discussing Neon Indian, we must first answer some questions. Are we talking about a band, or merely the creative outlet of songwriter Alan Palomo? Would you categorize Neon Indian's melted-plastic pop as "chillwave," or is it actually stylistically-restless synth music? And finally, does the heavily-hyped Era Extrana live up to its acclaimed predecessor, Psychic Chasms, or is the debut, in retrospect, ripe for reassessment? The answer to all of these questions is "yes."



    Palomo is undoubtedly a burgeoning talent with two albums, a half dozen singles, and a collaboration with the Flaming Lips under his belt (all before turning 24), but Era Extrana, thankfully, feels like a progressive step beyond his once-terminally-chill aesthetic. Granted, Extrana's 42 minutes, at first listen, plays out like a collection of weed-inspired ideas, but Palomo's breathy vocals and dizzyingly hazy instrumentals take time to unfurl and reveal a mature depth.



    Opening with the short "Heart: Attack," the album quickly enters into DayGlo territory, with "Polish Girl," "Blindside Kiss" and "Fall Out" all feeling distinctly '80s-derived. The general blueprint is simple: Palomo channels the distorted buzz of the Jesus & Mary Chain and couples it with the glossy coloring of the Psychedelic Furs. And for the true nostalgic, Neon Indian even incorporates Nintendo game console sound effects into most songs — particularly "Arcade Blues."



    But while colleagues like Washed Out and Toro Y Moi have all developed their sounds to include elements of pop and funk, Palomo seems satisfied with simply revisiting the strangeness he first explored on Psychic Chasms. Which isn't all that surprising: The terminally chill generally don't mess with a good thing.
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#29 Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica

  • Oneohtrix Point Never has assumed an important place in the sound and theory obsessed underground with music that consumes as it compels and a unique ability to articulate his vision as something more than just a simple accumulation of "vibes." So it goes with Replica, a mindful album that zones out and tunes in at the same time. Though he made his name with drifting, drafting synthesizer meditations reminiscent of '70s kosmiche acts like Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never shifts into more cut-up forms on Replica. Part of the style started to coalesce on his 2010 breakthrough Returnal, but the material here pushes harder and farther into a realm where abstraction and clarity mesh. "Andro" starts off more or less recognizably, with seething synth tones and a portentous sense of atmosphere, but a signal gets sent when the track swerves, all of the sudden, into an unexpected fit of rhythm near the end. "Power of Persuasion" takes the next step by introducing as an aural plaything the sound of a traditional piano, which proves surprisingly prevalent on the album throughout. The rest of the template sets when sampled bits of voice — or, more accurately, weird incidental sounds made by a mouth on its way to speaking — wander in during "Sleep Dealer." It's a strange mix of subject matter, to be sure. But it gathers into shapes that manage to approximate actual songs, with memorable parts and melodies that linger, while doubling down as experimental ambient soundscapes.
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#28 Thundercat, The Golden Age of the Apocalypse

#27 Los Campesinos!, Hello Sadness

  • The name of Los Campesinos!'s new album, Hello Sadness, comes from a line in its title track: Frontman Gareth (all the bandmembers have adopted the surname Campesinos!) sings, "Goodbye, courage/ Hello, sadness, again," which kicks off a raucous party of Arcade Fire-level bombast, with a searing violin intertwined with a guitar solo over "ooh oooohs." In that song's chorus they all sing, "This dripping from my broken heart is never running dry." It's a perfect example of what this group from Cardiff, Wales, does best: pair self-deprecating verses over chaotic explosions of guitars, horns, strings and glockenspiel. Their songs are accounts of lust, heartbreak and awkward romantic encounters, and Sadness — the group's first effort in almost two years — is on par with their best work. The chorus of "Life is a Long Time" laments, "You know it starts pretty rough and ends up even worse." But it's hard to imagine things getting worse when the album begins with Gareth hooking up with a girl who vomits on his rental tux before they make it back to her house ("By Your Hand"). Few bands could make such an incident sound so far from sad.
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#26 Tom Waits, Bad As Me

  • Arriving seven years after Real Gone, Bad As Me busts out of the gate with the churning horns of "Chicago." But with the lagging tabla beat of the next track, "Raised Right Men," Waits steps on the brakes, and he more or less keeps his foot down for the rest of the album. The word "relaxed" is nowhere in Waits's lexicon, but there's an unhurried ease to songs like "Talking at the Same Time" and "Back in the Crowd." Waits sings away from the beat, as if even his rhythm section can't set his pace. "Last Leaf" confronts mortality with fleeting defiance, and "New Year's Eve" is a mandolin-tinged waltz, not a time signature that gets much play in his repertoire.







    That's not to say Waits has mellowed, exactly. "Hell Broke Luce" extends his interest in the lives of soldiers, with baritone sax so low it sounds like the rumble of mortars and a little simulated machine-gun fire for extra PTSD. "Satisfied" ponders death as a release from the body — "Lay my vertebrae out like dice/ Let my skull be a home for the mice" — but not before its needs are fully met. He even invokes the patron saints of rock 'n' roll dissatisfaction: "Mr. Jagger, Mr. Richards/ I will scratch where I been itchin'." It is perhaps not coincidental that Richards also plays on the song.







    Waits scratches plenty of itches on Bad As Me, no two songs are alike, although most draw on templates he's laid down over his long and varied career. The album never quite settles on a mood for long enough to cast the kind of sustained spell as Bone Machine or Small Change do, but with so much time between recordings, it's not surprising Waits feels the itch to dance with as many partners as he can.
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#25 Megafaun, Megafaun

  • Best known as the band that once played with Justin Vernon in DeYarmond Edison, North Carolina trio Megafaun have soldiered on perfectly fine without the help of the Bon Iver frontman. The proof is in their third, self-titled LP, a confident and polished 15-track set that could prove to be the group's breakthrough.







    Brothers Brad and Phil Cook, along with drummer Joe Westerlund, grew up listening to everything from contemporary country radio to experimental musicians like Christian Fennesz. (Dudes' beards don't lie, either: They're huge Deadheads.) And they successfully apply their musical heroes to Megafaun. The drop-dead gorgeous "Hope You Know" pairs easygoing piano with subtle static sounds, while "Serene Return" updates Southern blues for the 21st century, adding peals of distortion and clomping percussion atop haunting acoustic guitar. Not all of the studio experimentation works — "Isadora" is a curious fusion of free-jazz and New Orleans-style brass that grates more than it charms — but the stunning "Get Right" is one journey down the rabbit hole that's definitely worth taking.
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#24 The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Belong

  • The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's 2009 debut album was so well-versed in the arcane classics of twee, shoegaze and C86 guitar jangle that it seemed less like a rock album than a studied, masterful thesis statement. Having earned its cultivated, bookish-pop pedigree with clever songs such as "Young Adult Friction," the Brooklyn band has decided to shake the library shelves with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. This feat occurs 12 seconds into the opening title track of Belong, when an affable intro melody gets obliterated by a blaze of guitars straight off Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream. Butch Vig isn't responsible for the hulk-sized sound of Belong; the Pains recruited the production and mixing team of Alan Moulder and Flood who, coincidentally, also worked with Smashing Pumpkins as well as a sizable chunk of late-'80s U.K. shoegazers (Ride, My Bloody Valentine, et al).



    As such, Belong asserts that the Pains are no longer content to jangle politely in the indie-pop underground; it explores a wider sonic palette without losing the band's familiar fuzzed-out hooks or Peggy Wang's astral synths. In fact, frontman Kip Berman's breathy vocals might be even wispier — at times to the point of inaudibility. What verbiage does come through suggests the Pains aren't quite as pure as they used to be — or at least not as tentative: "You try so hard to keep it together/ And you look so hot in fishnets and leather," leers Berman on "The Body." Meanwhile, "Girl of 1,000 Dreams" charges along with the Jesus and Mary Chain's sense of remote lust and primal reverb. The irony in all this newfound confidence — a sure-handedness that's easy to come by when your highly-anticipated sophomore album never stumbles over the course of 10 tracks — rests in the relative bravado of "Belong." Even if we hear it as the Pains' noisemaking arrival, Berman is quick to undercut that notion when he reaches the chorus: "I know it is wrong, but we just don't belong." The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are outsiders to the core who won't be hushed again.
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#23 Jonathan Wilson, Gentle Spirit

  • Gentle Spirit is the debut album proper from American producer and singer/songwriter Jonathan Wilson. Recorded by Wilson himself with analogue equipment, the album evokes the classic sound of West Coast Americana from the late '60s and early '70s, taking inspiration from the original Laurel Canyon scene, Rovi
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#22 Plaid, Scintilla

  • [Ed. Note: The revered electronic duo Plaid have collaborated with Bjork on multiple occasions: she wrote and sang the song "Lilith" from their 1997 album Not For Threes, for example.]








    The London electronic duo of Andy Turner and Ed Handley originally intended to put out Scintilli (a Latin word that translates as "I am many sparks") as long ago as 2008 before succumbing to an orgy of tweaking, honing and re-imagining: They proudly boast that every beat on the record took a day to construct. The CD version of the album is housed in a puzzle pack which allows the purchaser, should they be so inclined, to suspend the disk from two interlinked rings to create an "executive CD mausoleum".







    Yet put aside the obsessively painstaking creative process and the cosmically pretentious packaging, and what remains is essentially Plaid business as usual. This means meticulously intricate and yet deceptively simple-sounding webs of sound that mostly have a thrumming, twitchy electronic pulse at their core yet which wander with fervent promiscuity through virtually every other musical genre extant, from ambient folktronica ("Missing") to stately dream-pop ("Craft Nine") to the closing serrated glitch-symphony that is "At Last". And when you can dance to them, as on dark-hued techno-throb "Unbank," it is a bonus. Twenty years into their career, Plaid remain contemporary electronic composers sans pareil.
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#21 Hollie Cook, Hollie Cook

  • When confronted by the debut album by a Sex Pistols' daughter, who was also a member of the final incarnation of the Slits, it's easy to get militant about the unfair advantages bestowed on pop offspring. But one listen to Hollie Cook's first album should dispel such thoughts. It's an unabashedly gorgeous record, built for summertime, born under the twin signs of Carroll Thompson and Janet Kaye, and dedicated to the idea that if there's a better record out there than Junior Murvin's "Police And Thieves" then it's Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking."



    Cook calls the record "tropical pop" but really, its jump-off point is the most quality-challenged of reggae subgenres: lovers' rock, regenerated here by youth, wit and the imaginative production of Mike "Prince Fatty" Pelanconi. Cook's voice — breathy, conversational, unaffected — sits inside Prince Fatty's epic sound constructions as if she's the Queen of Planet Dub.



    Alongside the daytime pop are equally deft excursions into darkness. "Sugar Water (Look At My Face)" rides a thunderous dubbed-up intro worthy of King Tubby into a tune that begs for big speakers. Fatty doesn't just restrict himself to slavish recreations of the late '70s dub-pop palette, however; "Shadow Kissing" transposes Joe Meek's lowest-of-lo-fi, handbuilt ideals on to a splendid and disorienting piece of motorik reggae. Cook and her producer share the most important musician's trait: a severe allergy to boredom.



    Hollie Cook gets bonus points for clocking in at a concise 33 minutes — Prince Fatty clearly applied ruthless liposuction to a record that should please admirers of Lily Allen and Burning Spear alike. Hollie's father Paul Cook must be proud. Her late mentor Ari Up of The Slits, who passed away in October 2010, surely would be.
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#20 Radiohead, The King of Limbs

  • In a SPIN cover story during the press run-up to Hail To The Thief, Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien mused to Chuck Klosterman about longevity in rock. "I'm interested in bands as beasts," he said. "I'm interested in U2 and the Rolling Stones and Neil Young & Crazy Horse....[Being in a band] is a complicated thing to do over the expanse of time, which is why I respect it so much." For Radiohead, the most revered apocalyptic doomsayers in rock, this is a disarmingly prosaic concern. For hardcore devotees, it could be deflating to hear the band's members discussing their inner dynamic like marriage counselors.



    And yet: Asserting the right to exist, and pondering the absurd level of difficulty inherent in maintaining such a basic right, has always been one of Radiohead's great themes. From the moment the first of their Great Trembling Visions of the Future dawned — that would be 1997's OK Computer — Radiohead have always spoken in two voices: the screaming panic of data overload and the whimpered plea, behind it, to just be left alone. Hey, man; slow down. They are reasonable men; get off their case.



    On The King of Limbs, their eighth studio album, Radiohead sound like a band that has figured out, once and for all, how to exist. In that regard, it is both an achievement and a subtle forking in the road — from here on out, Radiohead don't seem likely to struggle very much; they know who they are, and they have gotten fearsomely good at making their music. The corollary to this is the slight pang from realizing that, well, they might never truly surprise you again.



    If you can listen past this pinprick of disappointment, King of Limbs offers a wide set of generously enfolding arms for you. At a serenely inscrutable 37 minutes, it is their shortest record yet, but it beams with relaxed, lived-in confidence. The music never attempts something it doesn't achieve with aplomb, offering glimpses of every facet of Radiohead's ever-fluid sound along the way. "Bloom" layers a small tumble of piano against a rippling, blinding sea of clicks and pops — once the bass line starts crawling up the center of the song, you realize with some astonishment that they have built a sensual, undulating groove from a blizzard digital snow.



    They do it again on the twitching arrhythmia of "Good Morning, Mr. Magpie," which sputters like a set of cut wires on a basement floor until Yorke's voice glides in, clear and calm. Throughout The King of Limbs, you sense that Radiohead been living with the noise of their own chattering machinery for so long now that they can't imagine life without it; on "Lotus Flower," Yorke plays patty-cake with it, punctuating the piston-like hammering of the downbeat with handclaps. The second half of the record dissolves into a shimmering blue sea of sound, with Yorke's croon sailing over top like a boat pushed with one foot. "In your arms/ I think I should give up the ghost," he sings on the beatific "Give Up The Ghost" — a peaceful hymn of surrender, perhaps, to the machines he's spent years cowering beneath.
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#19 Charles Bradley, No Time For Dreaming

  • Before CDs, before the Internet, soul music freaks had to rely on serendipity find the best dusty tracks: O.V. Wright's "Nickel and a Nail," Bunny Sigler's "Regina," Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart." I heard all of these for the first time on a little radio station, between the hatch marks on my dorm room FM radio, fine-tuning the dial enough to hear the announcer, writing down the info, and then heading off to my local dusty used record store, hoping to get lucky. Listening to Charles Bradley's No Time for Dreaming, reminds me of those musical dorm-room epiphanies. His voice is gritty as a gravel road, reminiscent of deep-soul men from Otis Clay to Joe Simon.



    But Bradley is no forgotten soul great, though tracks such as "How Long" and "Golden Rule" could be lost Stax B-sides. Dreaming is a debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice. Of course it's a Daptone record, those same soul-purists-with-hearts-of-gold who brought us the beloved Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. As with all of the artists in the Daptone catalogue, Bradley is backed by horn and rhythm sections that sound, literally, vintage. In this case, it's a new combo: the Menahan Street Band, led by guitarist/producer Thomas Brenneck, beautifully backing Bradley's stories of hard luck and regret. "Heartaches and Pain" is Dreaming's standout track. The true story of Bradley's brother's murder, it's disturbing in a way few of those "classic" soul records could ever dare to be.
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#18 Wye Oak, Civilian

  • Had they formed in Britain 20 years ago, it would have been easy to categorize Wye Oak. The frail, vague fuzz-heavy pop conjured by Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner is irresistibly evocative of the groups who trailed in the immediate wake of My Bloody Valentine: As such, Wye Oak would have seemed obvious company and kin of Slowdive, Chapterhouse and Pale Saints.



    In a different time, and on a different continent, the Baltimore duo come across as something treasurably strange and anomalous. Civilian, Wye Oak's third full-length, is obviously a work conceived in thrall to My Bloody Valentine's "Holy Holy," "Hot As Day" and the title track especially. However, Wye Oak are too clever and too restless to be content with pastiche-mongering, and warp the bedrock MBV influence with a taste for post-punk garage rock that occasionally evokes R.E.M. ("Two Small Deaths", "Dog Eyes") and a flickering tendency towards gothic folk (the lovely, mournful closing track, "Doubt").



    "Civilian" is an album which demands attention and effort from the listener. For all that Wye Oak's music verges on abstract, with the vocals mostly buried deep in these sumptuous squalls of guitar, "Civilian" is not intended � and wouldn't work as background noise. Wye Oak's soundscapes contain multitudes.
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#17 June Tabor and Oysterband, Ragged Kingdom

#16 Antlers, Burst Apart

  • If the Antlers' debut offering, 2009's magnificently-realized Hospice, rehabilitated the notion of the overwrought concept album, its successor, Burst Apart, is a far more informal affair. Where Hospice forensically documented the demise of a terminally ill cancer patient from the perspective of her besotted partner, Antlers frontman Peter Silberman reports that the Brooklyn three-piece deliberately went into Burst Apart "without a map...we let the songs grow organically." Despite this newfound laissez-faire attitude, the record's mood stays pretty much the same to great effect. The Antlers' forte remains deeply brooding, viscerally emotive epic songs that unfold over vistas of humming synths, gorgeously calibrated guitars, and Silberman's pensive, abstracted-yet-intense lyrical musings. Put simply, the Antlers always sound profound, even when they aren't saying much.



    The mood is established on plangent opener "I Don't Want Love," where Silberman's keening falsetto pinpoints the self-doubt and pain of a commitment-phobe, and he continues to unravel through spectral, existential musical essays such as "Parentheses" and narcoleptic single "Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out." There are echoes of Radiohead on "Rolled Together" and "No Widows," as drummer Michael Lerner sketches a sparse, skeletal tattoo. "Putting the Dog to Sleep" closes the proceedings on an appropriately anguished note, with Silberman howling "Prove to me/ That I'm not gonna die alone." It's lush, lavish and heavy with intimations of mortality — as is the vast majority of this splendid album.
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#15 The Rob, Funky Rob Way

  • As if beamed in from an alternate African universe, Rob's 1977 debut is an alien dance transmission propelled by layers of percolating percussion, so far ahead of its time that the six cuts here sound contemporary now. Listen to the just-escaped-from-Shaft wah-wah guitar of "Just One More Time" going up against the Moog behind Rob's pleading vocals, or the wavering keyboards that hover over the melody on "Your Kiss Stole Me Away," like a stolen, bizarre interstellar broadcast. This is different. This is the mothership.







    Rob was definitely a man with a musical mission. Said mission is what took him to the city of Takoradi in Western Ghana, searching for like-minded souls. The result was this disc, just 500 of which were originally pressed, but which has in the ensuing years become one of the secret classics of African funk. Much of the credit goes to the backing band, Mag-2. They were Ghanaian army personnel, equipped with the best instruments and some of the hottest talents under their leader, the wonderfully-named Amponsah Rockson. They amplified and enhanced Rob's vision and helped make Funky Rob Way the little piece of glory that it is. With a huge imagination, a band rapport tight as the Famous Flames and a horn section as fluid as anything on a Willie Mitchell production, they make the tunes swing with a righteous, effervescent fury. "Loose Up Yourself" and the title track funk up breathless little riffs, the drummers working up a sweat, the trumpets glistening in the spotlight. It's future funk not just to move the feet, but feed the head, too — and bring tears of joy to George Clinton's eyes.
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#14 Girls, Father, Son, Holy Ghost

  • Girls impressed just about everyone with their 2009 debut, Album, a far-reaching effort that melded all manner of styles and themes with intelligent lyrics and unimpeachable technical skills. Their eagerly-awaited sophomore effort, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, flicks through the songbook with similar stylistic abandon, constructing an immaculate sonic veneer which occasionally threatens to obscure the album's deeper emotional impact.







    They certainly don't lack ambition, however; over the course of 53 minutes, the duo cram in a raft of disparate ideas, dipping in and out of dense southern rock ("Die"), feather-light jangle pop ("Saying I Love You"), sad-sack shoegaze, glam stomps, country twangs, and even an all out doo-wop ballad, in all its overwrought, tear-stained glory ("Love Like a River").







    As with its predecessor, the mesmeric vocal talent of Christopher Owens is the glue that holds this ship together, his trademark blend of insightful rumination and simplicity tricking the listener into a false sense of security — most of which quickly evaporates when attention is paid to his often unsettling lyrical sentiments ("No nothing's gonna be all right/you know it's all gonna get fucked up tonight", he laments in "Die"]. But despite these dips and feints, Father... is most definitely at its best when it's down, as with the stretched out dirge of "Vomit," and the ever-swelling gloom of "Forgiveness," both of which showcase the band's knack for visceral, heartbreaking power pop of immense calibre. Father, Son, Holy Ghost might be a little over-buffed, but it's nonetheless a powerful achievement, and a boundary-devouring stretch beyond contemporary indie's timid remit.
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#13 Bjork, Biophilia

  • Björk is always interesting because she is always interested. Her enthusiasm for new ideas is so palpable that what in other hands might seem unwieldy and pretentious — like, say, an album about life on Earth, accompanied by apps, essays and other conceptual overflow — glows with almost childlike wonder. Ambitious yet understated, Biophilia feels like the record she's been working toward all her career, with its celebration of contrasting impulses: nature and technology, order and chaos, thought and instinct, immediacy and mystery, beauty and noise. This is Björk's territory alone. It's not that nobody else would attempt something like this, it's that you probably wouldn't want to hear them if they did.



    Despite all the extra information contained in various editions of the album, the songs make perfect sense on their own terms. The marvelous "Cosmogony" ponders the origin of the universe in less than five minutes, each verse relating a different creation myth and each chorus erupting in grateful awe. "Crystalline" traces flickering patterns of gameleste (a custom-made hybrid of gamelan and celeste) before shattering them with an out-of-nowhere frenzy of drum 'n' bass. The gorgeous "Virus" is a metastasizing simile for love, expressed in terms of everything from fungi to dynamite. "Mutual Core" underlines its "body-as-planet" image of "tectonic plates in my chest" with sudden, volcanic beats. Biophilia is full of little epiphanies like this. The ideas don't get in the way of the music; to the contrary, they're encoded in every note.



    On "Thunderbolt" Björk asks, "Have I too often craved miracles?" It's a sharp question from someone who has spent more than 20 years seeking the transcendent and working out new ways to express it, on the understanding that it might not always come off as hoped. But when she manages to corral so much curiosity and imagination into just 50 minutes and still achieve a sense of subtlety and space, well, that does feel pretty miraculous.
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#12 Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

  • Singing in that unequivocal lonesome tenor of his on the title track to Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold tells of his childhood. "Raised up believing I was somehow unique like a snowflake," he sings; but he soon follows with the converse wish, to be "a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me."



    Pecknold's desire to transcend himself has a touch of zeitgeist to it. Similar notions echoed through President Obama's recent speech on community and the social compact, and pulsed beneath the surface of Jonathan Franzen's lauded Freedom. Of what use is personal freedom if there's no greater society beyond the self? Freedom involves others.



    So later in that same song, when Pecknold exclaims, "I'm tongue-tied and I can't keep it to myself," his fans — and perhaps his bandmates and his label — are no doubt grateful. From the opening reverberations of "Montezuma" to the furious strumming of "Sim Sala Bim" through the geese-honk rupturing of epic centerpiece "The Shrine / An Argument," Helplessness Blues stuns with its refined yet unfettered beauty. It oozes out of every nook and corner, it rises in every chord change, it radiates in every convergence of the Fleet Foxes' honeyed voices, and it washes over listeners in waves.



    A few moments, like the gorgeous, wordless voices that open "The Plains / Bitter Dancer" or the lilting waltz of "Lorelai," will no doubt make an older generation recall the halcyon harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel and Crosby Stills & Nash, but the band stakes ground firmly in the present. Pastoral as the music sounds, turmoil and doubt courses just under the surface. Rather than the earthy impressionism of its predecessor, Pecknold's words on Helplessness Blues document a creative struggle. He ponders his role as an artist, pines for a "selfless and true love," and seeks throughout to escape the state of "just looking out for me." Meditating on loss and temporality, that even these successes too will pass, Pecknold finds comfort in small moments instead. On the hushed ballad "Blue Spotted Tail," he asks that eternal question: "Why is life made only for to end?" He then hears a voice on the radio and "couldn't help but smile," for a brief moment outside of himself.
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#11 Zola Jesus, Conatus

  • Nika Roza Danilova's voice seems biologically-engineered to convey longing. There are different strains of longing, of course: there's romantic longing, hopeful longing, confident longing and even longing that's laced with the faint tang of panic. It's that last one Danilova's is best at: in live performances, she has a tendency to stomp forcefully from one end of the stage to the other, over and over -- a pint-sized Lady Macbeth frantically trying to self-exorcise. Even when it's unclear what she's singing, the�way�she sings it is enough to generate shivers.



    Appropriately, Danilova's voice -- which occasionally seems to imagine Siouxsie Sioux in a High School production of�Evita�-- has always been the centerpiece of the songs she records as Zola Jesus. In the past, it was beamed through layers of static, like a lighthouse struggling to puncture dense fog. While it often made for arresting listening -- on "Dog" from�The Spoils, it sounded as if she were singing while being smothered -- her past full-lengths often felt like they were more about texture than composition. But onConatus, as suggested by the two spectacular EPs Danilova released last year, the songs at last have fully crystallized around her. They're built mostly by stretching blue bands of synth across drum tracks that clatter like dancing skeletons. On "Hikikomori," keyboards flicker on and off like strobe lights, and Danilova sings as if balled up in the fetal position in the corner, her voice (which may or may not be saying "I've got sister in my hands") as pain-wracked as ever. In "Seekir," it soars confidently over the kind of minor-key electropop backdrop that got trotted out in the '80s any time a director needed a soundtrack for a vampire disco.



    Which brings up another point: people like to use the g-word when talking about Danilova's music, but there's a level of both manufactured drama and manic overstatement to goth that's wholly absent fromConatus. Danilova's songs instead sound like they're coming from somewhere darker and less precise -- a deep plunge into an icy stream of consciousness. It's impossible to draw a bead on their literal meaning, but there's a kind of�sensory�meaning that feels both more profound and more affecting. Take "Skin," a quietly devastating ballad that arrives late in the record. The song throbs with a kind of shapeless sadness, its piano accompaniment gradually dissolving from lurching block chords to dizzying, disorienting arpeggios. The lyrics can be parsed only in brief flashes -- "In the sickness, you find me," and "In this hole I've fallen down" -- but their combined impact is wrenching. Like much of�Conatus, the song drifts by like a dream; fragmented but vivid, non-linear but deeply unsettling, its effects lingering long after the light begins filtering in.
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#10 Nicolas Jaar, Space Is Only Noise

  • Nicolas Jaar is a full-time student at Brown, head of the up-and-coming Clown & Sunset label, and, oh yeah, creator of 2011's most rapturously acclaimed American electronic-dance debut. Space Is Only Noise is all over the place stylistically, which is probably one reason it's gone so far beyond dance audiences. (That, and electronic music is reaching out more widely than it has before.) It's moody more than anything else, partly because of Jaar's brooding (and oft-treated) vocals, which recall the young Matthew Dear, another guy who splits the difference between singer-songwriter and beat maestro. Recently I asked Jaar if he bores easily. "Um, yeah, kinda. Good job on that one. Totally!" he said. You can hear it in these restless, engaging, shape-shifting tracks.
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#9 Ghostpoet, Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam

  • Perhaps the most self-effacing, machismo-free MC Britain has ever produced, Obaro Ejimiwe makes Roots Manuva sound like 50 Cent. Born in Coventry (home of the Specials) and based in London, he's a hard-luck storyteller who raps like he's missed the last bus home on a foggy night in January. Ghostpoet's subject is disappointment, whether it be underwater finances ("Survive It") or the wrenching self-loathing of a bad hangover ("Cash and Carry Me Home"), and his music hovers in the spaces between wobbly-legged dance music, blurry hip hop and Burial-style pre-dawn dubstep. The stirring finale Liiines confirms that disappointment doesn't mean defeat.
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#8 WU LYF, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain

#7 Cut Copy, Zonoscope

  • The Melbourne band Cut Copy have built a career on updating the electropop of the 1980s. Suave, dour and evincing the appropriate amount of heartsickness, their first two albums were full of steadily percolating songs that bathed downcast melodies in pulsing LEDs. They were also saturated with an artful melancholia: Cut Copy write the kind of songs that take place at two in the morning, and usually at a high school drama club after-party. Imagine if the first few Depeche Mode records were gracefully understated instead of flamboyant and chic and you're getting close.



    On Zonoscope, Cut Copy don't alter their approach so much as temper it: The rhythms are a little less insistent, the focus more on sharpening the details rather than deepening the groove. What emerges is an album of moments rather than anthems: The krautrocky drone of "Alisa" gets sporadically attacked by hornet's nest guitars; "Take Me All Over" sports a guitar line that's little more than a nervous twitch and a bass line that's eerily similar to Men At Work's "Down Under," but its backdrop is a cornucopia of weird rattles, miniature congos and synths that sparkle in the distance like the aurora borealis. "Pharoahs & Pyramids" is a comprised of a constellation of pinprick electronics, tiny flecks of sound they scatter across the song's black backdrop like glitter.



    The album works just as well for those without the patience for deep focus. Frontman Dan Whitford arranges his small universes of sound around the same dour, deliberate baritone vocal melodies that characterized the group's first two outings. As a frontman, he pulls off the contradictory combination of vulnerable and assured: his voice prances proudly up the center of the songs, a bold, grand, sweeping gesture on an album characterized by nuance. The worlds he creates may be tiny and flickering, but make no mistake: He rules them.
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#6 The War On Drugs, Slave Ambient

  • "I'm just drifting," Adam Granduciel sings through the reverb on "Come to the City," which arrives halfway through the War on Drugs' first new album in almost four years. He's only telling half the truth. The Philadelphia-based creators of ambient roots-rock took a long time following up their 2008 debut LP Wagonwheel Blues, but it wasn't because they were listless; it was because co-founder Kurt Vile struck out on his own, recruiting Granduciel for his backing band, the Violators. While the 12 songs on Slave Ambient indeed have droning, meandering qualities, the hypnotic effects merely soften the album's working-class muscle and sharp hooks.







    Much like Deerhunter's 2007 CryptogramsSlave Ambient oscillates between sun-burnt psych-pop bliss-outs and disorienting instrumental interludes. Unlike most bands in the avant-garde mold, however, the War on Drugs have in Granduciel a vocalist whose throaty burr rambles casually in the all-American tradition of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Songs like "Baby Missiles," re-recorded here after an appearance on last year's Future Weather EP, boast the bombastic organs, stirring drums and passionate shouts of potential live show-stoppers, but they're cut nicely with the mellow reverb and uncanny production textures. Vile may be gone, but his former band is hardly directionless. As Granduciel observes on jangling road anthem "Brothers", "I'm rising in to the top of the line."
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#5 The Field, Looping State of Mind

  • Loops are like riffs — some have it, some don't. The artists that create the best loops — Armand Van Helden in his late-'90s prime is the best example — find and/or chop up something kinetic. The Field's Axel Willner is different because he's going for something more meditative, even as his hard four-to-the-floor beat moves bodies. His music undulates and comes at the listener in waves, a distension that creates a sense of longing. They're bite-sized and broad-canvas at the same time: you want to know how the loop ends, damn it. Especially if you're already hooked on Willner's way with squeezing a well-known piece of music, be it the Flamingos' (and doo-wop's) masterpiece, "I Only Have Eyes for You" or Lionel Richie's "Hello" (from "From Here We Go Sublime" and "A Paw in My Face," respectively, both from 2007's From Here We Go Sublime), until it seems alien and all the more beguiling.







    Title to the semi-contrary, Looping State of Mind is more composed than either Sublime or its undersung follow-up, Yesterday and Today. Here, Willner's sound is both harder and sleeker. But even if gauziness is part of what you go to its predecessors for, Looping's sharper focus actually makes it more immersive, not less: These are structures to get lost inside. It's easily the Field's funkiest album, while still remaining lush and widescreen. "Is This Power" kicks if off like a homespun variation on epic trance — a Field touchstone since his first single, "Love vs. Distance," in 2005 — before cutting down to strutting post-punk bass, then returning to normal, only funkier. The same basic formula (including bass break) applies to soothing monsters like "Arpeggiated Love" and "It's Up There," where dozens of details emerge at the music's edges, but the big picture is most important of all.
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#4 EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints

  • Like many of us, Erika M. Anderson escaped her early 20s alive, but just barely. The harrowing and spectacular Past Life Martyred Saints, which she recorded under the name EMA, is her recollection of the years spent in that post-collegiate daze of faux-grandiosity and encroaching panic that amounts to a Petri dish for terrible life decisions. Anderson takes rueful, angry stock of several such decisions over the course of the album's nine songs. As such, it falls into a rich rock 'n' roll tradition: the Bohemian Squalor Survival Report.



    Like the Liz Phair of Exile In Guyville or the Elliott Smith of Either/Or, Anderson comes to us sounding as if she had dragged herself, gasping and on bloodied elbows, away from the big city — in her case, L.A. — that nearly blotted out her soul. She sings with Phair's flat tone and scorched-earth honesty, and Smith's quietly trembling rage, over messy blobs of electric guitar and wispy implications of drums. She hints at body mortification on "Marked" ("My arms, they are see-through plastic/ They are secret bloodless skinless mass"), and then snarls it outright on "Butterfly Knife": "You were a goth in high school/ You've gone and fucked your arms up/ You always talked about it/ They thought you'd never do it." Anderson has a bone-chilling gift for crystallizing her song's messages into one indelible phrase and burying them at the base of your brain. On "Butterfly Knife," she coos, "20 kisses with a butterfly knife." On "Marked," she moans, frighteningly, "I wish that every time he touched me left a mark."



    Past Life Martyred Saints isn't just a gothic house of horrors, however. Anderson can be incisively funny: The immortal opening couplet "Fuck California/ You made me boring" belongs in the great rock pantheon of SoCal kiss-offs. There are moments of furtive sweetness, too: "If this time through/ We don't get it right/ I'll come back to you/ In another life" goes the nursery-rhyme chorus of "Anteroom." The record is bathed in warm echo, making it perversely comforting to bask, or wallow in. It uncannily resembles the headspace Anderson depicts — a life period both devoid of and fraught with meaning, somehow simultaneously aimless and volatile. And one that continues to inspire enduring works of art.
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#3 M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

  • The sixth record by electro-pop act M83 is kinetic, jarring and ethereal — a double album set in the dreams of a brother and sister, exuberant because it's not limited to confines of consciousness, but felled slightly by its own scope. M83 leader Anthony Gonzalez seems to have cherry-picked from his own id, carefully compiling the best elements of his past albums: the knotty experimentalism of their 2000 self-titled debut (in which the song titles, memorably, revealed a short story), the beautifully downtrodden fuzz of sophomore album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts and the buoyant new wave of 2008's Saturdays=Youth.







    Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is gorgeous because of its careful balance; each vocal keen and keyboard percolation fits into the larger thrum of grandiose synth swells and lightly-plucked guitar — they're interlocked, intuitive moments that move the melodies forward unpredictably. Zola Jesus sets the tone in "Intro," fervently howling over a beautiful, wildly-shifting orchestral-pop landscape; she ushers in the entire album and also, more specifically, the brother's narrative. His fantasies are set inside whimsical, loosely cohesive tracks: a child's earnest narrative about a magical frog unspools over a binary, Brian Eno-like backdrop. "This Bright Flash" sets frantic rock drumrolls amid sweeping keys and ghostly harmonies, and the languid outro "Soon, My Friend" is layered with beatific, inch-thick harmonies and is shot through with a simmering tension that suggests daylight is a burden.







    The limitations of Gonzalez's fantastic conceit crop up in the second half — the sister's story begins ponderously with the dark, expansive "My Tears Are Becoming a Sea." Like the first disc, the sister's half is packed with arrestingly lovely moments; a few too many, with little variation between structures and vocal/electro stylizations to convincingly suggest a new character. The new wave pulse and soaring falsetto of "OK Pal" could just as easily have come from the brother's mind. One of the sister's most understated and affecting moments, the staccato twilight expanse of "Fountains," feels like the tonal sequel to the brother's "Where the Boats Go." Family bonds are powerful, no doubt, but the crossovers suggest that these gorgeous songs work best independently, adding up to a lovely journey, even if it doesn't quite live up its intimidating premise.
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#2 Wild Flag, Wild Flag

  • When the legendary Portland-based trio Sleater-Kinney announced their indefinite hiatus in 2006 to widespread dismay, there was no official explanation as to why. One had to suspect, however, that it wasn't because guitarist Carrie Brownstein, frontwoman Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss felt burned out, but rather for deeper, more complex reasons. In 2010, the tantalizing news surfaced that Janet and Carrie were re-grouping as Wild Flag with Helium's Mary Timony on guitar and vocals and The Minders' Rebecca Cole on keyboards. For months, there were no recordings, making live videos a valuable commodity. When they began to surface, they proved that not only did that old authentic urgency remain, it was the crux of the new band.







    The group's debut is underpinned by a do-or-die urgency and an existentialist drive which sets its scene in the most feral of arenas: the rock club. Opener "Romance" is all about the transcendence of song and movement, how "we dance to free ourselves from the room," how "we've got an eye, an eye for what's romance/ we've got our eyes, our eyes trained on you" — a sly nod to their heritage, but one that's tempting you into their future, too. It's an irresistible allure — Cole's keyboards are squelchy and coy, and Brownstein and Timony zoom from nose to tail of their frets. It sounds immediately classic, already iconic, but fresh as well, and it makes you realise how long it's been since there's been a truly vital guitar band. Chris Woodhouse's production is barely there, giving the record a carnal, live feel; even when the four indulge in one of their more psychedelic wig-outs, every element feels essential. The end of "Glass Tambourine" finds them spiralling off in all different directions: Weiss the spitting motor, Cole a Krautrock dream, and Brownstein and Timony marveling at the cosmos.







    The penultimate track, the lurching, squawking "Racehorse," is a distillation of the fundamentals that Wild Flag set down in the face of dilly-dallying dilettantes and non-believers: "Where are you going?/ What do you own?/ What are you selling?/ Who do you know?" they goad amid spirited bursts of winding guitar and Cole audibly battering the keys. It's the final challenge in Wild Flag's wondrous initiation ritual, one that urges you to set aside baggage and bullshit for the crux of Brownstein's flaming, gravel-voiced home slamdown: "What you don't know is me," she roars with a mixture of fury and pride. The underlying message is not one of defeat, but a reaffirmation of the need for identity and principles if you're to be better than average, acknowledging musicians and humans' propensity for transformation. When it comes to Wild Flag, theirs is an incarnation that we want to hang on to for as long as they'll let us. Their debut is incendiary, an epiphany-inducing thing.
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#1 Destroyer, Kaputt

  • Dan Bejar has clearly had a few too many. Normally, he's muttering asides to himself at the far end of the bar. Tonight, to your surprise — and then, your mounting consternation — he's plopped himself in the seat next to you, and — oh, God — he's whispering poetry about Kara Walker to you over a Chuck Mangione smooth-jazz saxophone. It's supremely uncomfortable, not to mention a little creepy and sad. But something about him keeps you in your seat. For one, he's funny. "I sent a message in a bottle to the press: it said, Don't be afraid or disgusted with yourselves'," he cracks, and you're about to laugh when he suddenly admits, "I thumbed through the books on your shelves" and boom, everything's creepy again. There's a sort of soulful-wreck quality to him, however, that pulls at your heart, and against your better judgment, you spend the night with him.



    This is the lonely, intimate, and oddly desperate world that Bejar builds in Kaputt, his millionth record as Destroyer, and his strangest by far. His records have always been strange, but previously, it was a warm, contented brand, the sound of a lifelong music hobbit happily lost in his hole. On albums likeDestroyer's RubiesTrouble In Dreams and Streethawk: A Seduction, Bejar seemed to be building an archly cryptic one-man graduate thesis on rock history the way other men might build complicated train sets. On Kaputt, the music hobbit wanders, blinking, out into the night, looking for romantic companionship. Things go poorly.



    For starters, he's picked duds that are about 30 years out of fashion: smooth-jazz horns, quiet-storm vibraphones, fretless bass, caterwauling female backup singers. It's the makeout music of his now-distant high school prom, and it's grown a little musty. Secondly, he's not exactly whispering sweet nothings to the people he meets: "Oh child, you're never going to make it/ New York City just wants to see you naked/ and they will," he leers on "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker." On "Kaputt," he's pillow-talking you with a chorus of obscure music magazines: "Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME/ All sound like a dream to me."



    That Kaputt manages to suggest all of this poignant subtext while still just pouring gorgeously out of your speakers makes it Bejar's richest achievement. It balances neatly along several precarious aesthetic lines: between beauty and kitsch, between irony and sincerity, between sensual and cerebral, funny and sad. Bejar's witticisms have never been sharper, and they've also never been awash in this much glimmering, beautiful sound: Trust a music student of his caliber to make such a forceful argument for his chosen genre. Kaputt amounts for a startlingly convincing argument for what soft-rock does right, which is maybe an appropriate endpoint for a record partially about failed seduction. If you spend an evening drinking with Bejar, it might come to pass that neither of you get laid. But you will at least discover a few new records.
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Read more: http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-best-albums-of-2011-3/#ixzz1i6UwIFmz

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