Popcorn Noises

The Dreaded List, 2011 Edition

I realize the irony in saying this when just a few months ago I moved to Brooklyn, home of the perpetually post-grad, but I like to think that I’ve done some growing up this year. Maybe not “growing up” in the sense of figuring out where I’m going or what to do with myself or how life even works at age 26, but certainly in the sense of gaining a bit of perspective. First of all—and this is a truth I confront with shame every day—the art that people make and the ways other people react to it (especially on the internet!) is just not all that important. It’s weird to wake up and remind yourself that something you love is kinda stupid, but I’ve come to see it as a necessity. I don’t mean this in some short-sighted #firstworldproblems way. This isn’t about culture being useless. It’s about how the hours and minutes of our all-too-short lives are spent. I like music a lot—enough to put my time, effort, and money into trying to keep up with new releases and, for what little it’s worth, type out my indistinct thoughts on it. But I also know that, no matter how many thinkpieces might argue the contrary, real life is not lived in front of screens. Take it from a guy who (like you, probably) spends all day in front of one: it’s better to go outside and walk around, catch up with an old friend over a beer, or make dinner with the people you love. No amount of technological revolutionizing will ever change that.

Anyway, along with all this life-is-beautiful schlock, I also didn’t do as good a job of hearing ‘everything’ as I have in past years (‘11 had its ups and downs for me—it’s complicated), so I have an even smaller facade of authority here than usual. Hopefully no one reading this still has any illusions about a list of 25 (or 50 / 100 / 500) records being definitive. But these are the musics that I liked this year.

HONORABLE MENTION:
A$AP Rocky - LiveLoveA$AP
Big K.R.I.T. - Return of 4eva
The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
Clams Casino - Instrumental Mixtape
Danny Brown - XXX
Forest Fire - Staring at the X
James Blake - James Blake
Jens Lekman - An Argument With Myself EP
The Mountain Goats - All Eternals Deck
Real Estate - Days
Sandro Perri - Impossible Spaces
St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine
Various Artists - Bangs & Works, Vol. 2 (The Best of Chicago Footwork)
White Shoes & The Couples Company - Album Vakansi

TOP 10:

Bill Callahan - Apocalypse

A couple months ago, I was listening to Apocalypse over the living room stereo as I worked, and when “America” came on and Bill Callahan sang “America, you are so grand and golden!,” my roommate looked over and asked a very simple question: “Is he being serious?” I hemmed and hawed for a bit because, frankly, I wasn’t sure either. Callahan isn’t the kind of singer-songwriter that immediately strikes you as a patriot. It wasn’t until recently that I began to see “America”—and indeed all the songs on this album—as mere shards of a person, aspects of someone who, like all real people, can’t be easily summed up with a single idea or handful of lines. Callahan wears a lot of different hats on Apocalypse—he even goes so far as to name them on “Universal Applicant”: punk, lunk, drunk, skunk, hunk, monk. He’s also a cowboy, a gardener, a homesick traveller, an inarticulate poet, a freewheeler, and a Drag City recording artist. The kicker, of course, is how no side of Bill Callahan, no one feeling articulated out of the long stream of them here, stands above the rest. As with all his best work, Apocalypse is born out of a deep and reflexive honesty, one that expresses not only regret, sorrow, loneliness, and guilt, but also beauty, loyalty, wisdom, and charm. His willingness to remain complex and unexplained—to the chagrin of roommates everywhere—is precisely what makes it so golden and grand.

Destroyer - Kaputt

Much has been made of the ‘dated’ sound of Kaputt, of the 80s soft rock and smooth jazz that marks a clear (and maybe lasting?) divergence from the yelpy acoustic rock we’d come to associate with Destroyer. It’s a sizable aesthetic shift, but I’m not sure I buy the argument that Dan Bejar is deploying these sounds as a way of reclaiming them and exposing people’s preconceptions about bad / cheesy music. For that to be true, he’d have to also be positioning himself as witty, edgy, and more-cultured-than-thou, an attitude he was already depleting two albums ago. Here he sounds resigned—tired, even—like someone a few years past his prime trying not to lose himself in bitterness and regret. His words drift out lazily, giving shape to the music’s greyscale atmospheres. Where Bejar once sang as if he were the smartest guy at the party, sniping the pretenses of the bohemian elite, he now wanders along the city streets, either lost in the fog of memory (the title track’s litany of music mags) or hanging on to the last few threads of a likely-doomed relationship (“I want you to love me / You send me a coffin of roses / I guess that’s the way that things go these days”). He’s always written about leisure-class ennui, but Kaputt stands apart because his disaffection finally sounds genuine. Appropriating these smooth sounds just turned out to be his best way of getting there, and Destroyer has never been so enthralling.

Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch the Throne

Consider three of the most prominent samples on Watch The Throne: an auto-tuned Nina Simone on “New Day,” a chopped-up James Brown playing hypeman on “Gotta Have It,” and Otis Redding reduced to a series of exclamatory grunts on “Otis.” As many others have pointed out, samples of such high-profile artists are not cleared cheaply, so their inclusion here functions something like musical bling, a reminder that this was really expensive to make. But the liberties The Throne and their producers take with these iconic voices also belie a strange mix of irreverence for and self-positioning within the history of black music. The crazy part is you can glean all of this without hearing a single word of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s raps, which although they revel in high fashion, finance, and leisure, also fret over the pitfalls and savagery of success, the plight of the poor and marginalized places they’ve come from, and what their somewhat unique position in the upper echelons of society say about it. When it comes to fame and fortune, Jay and Kanye are superhero-kings, but don’t let the shine distract you from the the old truisms that the crowned head is a heavy one and that great responsibility always follows great power. The Throne don’t, even as they steamroll recklessly through some of the funnest-sounding songs this side of any year, a fact that only renders Watch The Throne all the more magnetic.

Man Man - Life Fantastic

In contrast to the flashy, manic trajectory their previous work suggests, Life Fantastic finds Man Man digging in and honing the grotesquery that’s always been at the heart of their music into a brutal nihilistic vision. Producer Mike Mogis smooths out the rough edges of their signature kitchen-sink sound, giving these songs the drive they need to propel Honus Honus’ pitch-black screeds. See, Life is above all a terse, violent album. Honus slumps his way from cartoonish pleas (“Throw me to piranhas!”) to horrific fictions (“Haute Tropique,” “Spooky Jookie”) to dark-hearted threats (“Polish all my boots with all your lovers’ blood”) and always to insatiable self-destruction. “I want you so bad I can’t stand the man that I am” could be the record’s motto if there weren’t five other lines in every song just as worthy. Life teeters on the edge of psychosis in a way that makes it cut deeper and linger longer than any mere tantrum or breakup lament. It’s about being so unable to escape your demons that the only thing left to do is give in and hope for catharsis in being devoured, an artfully-rendered fatalism born out of the constant lack of a bright side to look on. Placed against Man Man’s ever-lively and inventive orchestrations, it’s as striking and compelling a gnashing of teeth as you’re likely to hear.

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

I quit drinking coffee this year—it was helping trigger some dormant anxiety issues—and having never been a morning person in the first place, it takes me a while wake up now. Sometimes I imagine all the tired, achey, bad feelings I ever have manifest themselves inside me as the thick, bitter, tar-like goo that you get when all the tiny grounds collect at the bottom of your coffee mug. It’s as if when I sleep that stuff settles, forming pools in my head whose collective weight bogs me down each morning until they can be properly disbursed back into my bloodstream. Replica has become my balm of choice for slowly un-mucking the corners of my brain each morning. While not an ambient record in any strict sense—what with all the tiny loops and pre-syllabic voices vying for attention—it does over repeated listens develop a soothing quality, something like the glacial fuzz of Windy & Carl or Dan Deacon’s hyperactive sublimity. Because this music is both pre-verbal and suggestive of unbounded space, it takes on a distinctly primordial air, as if sounds, musical structures, and the feelings they evoke were all just beginning to coagulate. Much of it feels downcast, pivoting on lonely tones from a piano or analog synthesizers, but it’s an unclouded, primary kind of sadness, one without cause or context. This is exactly why Replica works: it introduces only the most basic forms and lets your newly-cleared head take it from there.

Shabazz Palaces - Black Up

There’s a joke to be made here about Black Up being a hip-hop album for people who don’t like hip-hop albums, but that would be missing the point. Not only does this record not sound like most rap music in 2011; it doesn’t sound like most music in any genre. This is shifty, elusive noise that has no problem jumping between hard-edged beats, jazzy abstractions, and deep opioid psych at a moment’s notice. It’s modular and comes in 2-4 minute chunks, but it’s hard to call them “songs,” really. Shabazz Palaces’ brand of impressionism plays out like grimy urban noir, where even as Ishmael Butler slyly points out how fake-gangsta rappers aren’t what they seem, he himself is constantly reappearing in different corners of the headphones like a shadowy Cheshire Cat. His accented short-vowel sounds and fondness for tongue-twisting ‘gl’ words—gleam, glow, glisten, glaze—can be downright hypnotic. If Butler and Tendai Maraire only wanted to create an esoteric rabbit hole of dark streets, this would be a perfectly fine album, but what makes Black Up great is the sense that the duo are ultimately in search of functional, human community. In his nervous flirting with a crush at a club, his decrying the “corny…spiritually blasé” world of gangsta rap, and his prizing of action over talk, Butler evinces a veiled, hopeful wisdom that works against the odds stacked by its outre sound to make Black Up a relatable, inviting, and whip-smart album.

tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

Merrill Garbus isn’t one to shy away from uncomfortable subjects, so there’s a lot of them blaring out of her sophomore album. To name a few: poverty, American hubris, self-esteem, body image / eating disorders, police brutality, corporate corruption of art, urban gentrification, and, yeah, love. It’s easy to see these songs like bold-face headlines, a set of issues that grab your attention because they’re supposed to be capital-I Important. And don’t get me wrong—they are important. But there’s a whole other side to w h o k i l l, a vital artistic process that underpins and arguably enables Garbus’ gallantry. Just like on her lo-fi debut (and her much-lauded live shows), she displays here a pointed curiosity for how sounds interact, how they build upon each other to make music. Live percussion loops are constantly criss-crossing the stereo spectrum as snippets of ukulele and vocal hoots flutter in and out. Garbus slices and dices her studio sounds with the cold precision of a sampler and then shows you the flesh, bones, sinew, and skin of each song, piece by piece. In doing so, she exposes the artifice of her own work as much as she confronts personal, political, and social injustice. That’s a big part of the creative brilliance of w h o k i l l, but it triumphs—almost in spite of itself—as a joyful-sounding pop album, wonderfully catchy and fun to listen to. Consider the bar raised.

Twin Sister - In Heaven

Confession time: I never could get into “All Around and Away We Go,” the purported standout from Twin Sister’s Color Your Life EP last year. It wasn’t a bad song, but the band sounded thin, stunted by hazy production and Andrea Estella’s whisper-singing. Twin Sister 2K11 is a different story altogether. In Heaven finds them liberated, spinning distinct, exquisite songs out of delicate parts given plenty of room to move and breathe. The band’s dueling impulses toward cosmopolitan chic and sleepy intimacy work themselves out simultaneously to gorgeous effect, like on “Stop,” where the rhythm section bounces and bops as Estella and Eric Cardona’s voices plead and play, or on “Kimmi in the Rice Field,” where slick Cocteau Twins synth-gaze underwrites a heartbreaking melody. This is clearly a band whose confidence has been bolstered by a year on the road. “Bad Street” fleshes out the stylish strut they’d hinted at on “All Around,” and “Spain” comes out like an alternate-universe Bond theme. They’re even willing to risk the album’s momentum by starting and ending it on some of their slowest, sparest songs (“Daniel” and “Eastern Green”), a gambit that pays off in the way that, after 10 songs and 35 minutes, In Heaven feels addictively short. What better complement for an album could there be than that, for as much as it satisfies, it continues to draw you back again and again?

Widowspeak - Widowspeak

Widowspeak’s debut album is replete with mid-tempo guitar pop tunes, sparely and lovingly recorded, that belie an artisanal ear for detail and construction. Whether it’s the drums that switch from regular to double time at just the right moment or the guitar leads that introduce both definitive textures and vital melodic support, all the pieces fit together without sounding fussy or ostentatious. Molly Hamilton’s smoky coo guides the ear through memories of obsession and loss (“Harsh Realm,” “Hard Times”), through dark woods and grimy back alleys (“In the Pines,” “Nightcrawlers”), all the while toeing the line between sincere indie shy kid and shadowy dream pop vamp. The result is a record of easy-to-love songs that delight as much on the fiftieth listen as they did on the first. For what it’s worth, though, Widowspeak are also a timely band, making use of the swell of 90s nostalgia to set themselves apart from their garage-pop peers by dialing back the reverb and playing up Hamilton’s similarities to Hope Sandoval. Not that it’s a cynical, calculated move (they’re too good for that to be true), but that there’s something to be said for being the right band at the right time. Making music that feels mostly small and personal while still having something to contribute (again, however small) to your particular moment in culture is a rare pleasure for any band, and Widowspeak doesn’t waste a second of it.

Wye Oak - Civilian

I’ve previously written about Wye Oak as a dark horse band—“middle children of indie rock”—but perhaps I wasn’t giving them their fair due. Over the course of three albums and an EP, they’ve always managed to seek out new and unexpected stylistic twists, never getting too comfortable in any of the realms—folk rock, shoegaze/dream pop, guitar pop—they’ve explored. Civilian is by all measures their best and most fully-realized work, a delivery on the promise of last year’s hook-laden My Neighbor / My Creator. Here, Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack not only prove themselves by locating the appealing common ground between all their influences, but they do it so well they carve out a niche that is wholly theirs. Wasner’s guitar has become a force to be reckoned with, whether’s she’s navigating tense arpeggios (“Two Small Deaths,” “Dog Eyes”), creating head-stomping exclamations out of feedback (“Holy Holy,” “Plains”), or aiming toward the cosmos (“The After,” “Hot As Day”). She favors contrast over volume, maximizing the effect of every pause and outburst. Stack, meanwhile, has become a master of coloring songs with subtle textural touches. Cymbals, tom-toms, pianos and organs—they’re all placed with expert care to heighten the highs and deepen the lows. Wye Oak’s patience and craftsmanship have paid off: Civilian is one of the most vivid, absorbing rock records of the year.