When you try to determine what was the best music at the end of a year, it can be more than overwhelming for several reasons. First, I am far from being close to have listened to a tenth of what was released, so probably tons of good music has completely escaped me, secondly, I naturally go toward music I am already familiar to, and don’t venture much into,… rap for example. Like any list, it is completely subjective, and reflects the chooser’s personality more than anything. I forgot which famous person said she would prefer to remove her clothes than reveal her musical tastes, but yeah, she was right in a way, it can be pretty intimate.
There are also several factors which enter into consideration: if I have seen an artist in concert and liked him/her, I have a tendency to prefer this artist to another one I have never seen perform, yeah the live factor is a big one for me, as I have actually seen live 12 of the 15 artists chosen here.
But the ultimate factor for me is longevity,… if I am still listening to an album after a few months, or better, after a year, it is the definitive answer. I used this longevity barometer to determine my fifteen 2011 best albums,… oh well it may just reflect what I am listening right now, and could be totally different in two months!
15. The Belle Brigade – ‘The Belle Brigade’: It may sound like vintage classic rock, but it is working. Their self-titled album is full of these sibling harmonies that the duo has been perfecting to their finest, giving a real life to upbeat sing-along pop anthems.
14. DeVotchKa – ‘100 Lovers’: I know the music can be highly dramatic, over-the-top operatic, and we-want-to-embrace-the whole-world-scene with its Eastern-Gypsy-via-Latino-roots influences, but I still like the album. ‘100 Other Lovers’ has these killing strings, ‘Bad Luck Heels’ has these Mariachi trumpets, and other songs are bombastic in the good sense of the term. I like it for its varied cinematic power.
13. Hanni El Khatib – ‘Will The Guns Come Out’: El Khatib’s intense raw-swampy blues sound is unique whatever people say, it’s anchored in the macho-bad-boy image of the 50s but it has also a totally modern aggressive and noisy delivery. And he can transform classics (‘You Rascal You’, Funkadelic’s ‘I Got a Thing’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’) into totally unrecognizable songs.
12. Bosco Delrey – ‘Everybody Wah’: It is strange that this album did not get more attention, it is fun, inventive and quite clever. It is a little bit as if Beck had been wearing a leather jacket and had a bolder and sexier delivery. And the first half is loaded with garage-bluesy-rock hooks!
11. Bright Eyes – ‘The People’s Key’: I was surprised to not see it in many 2011 best album lists! Come on Spin magazine! Bright Eyes is at least better than the Foo Fighters or Lady Gaga! You gave him a 7 out 10 and it doesn’t even figure in your 2011 50 best albums list!! Anyway, I will let aside all the nonsense-batshit-crazy-pseudo-philosophizing talking, at this point it is just half-entertaining half-annoying, but the rest is filled with great melodies, hooks, it is full of vitality, energy, despite the fact that the lyrics may appear to say deeper things than they actually do.
10. Cults –‘Cults’: It could be a guilty pleasure, it’s so sweet, bright and sunny that some of you may get a sunburn just listening to it, and it’s definitively not an album for you if you like your music dark and sinister. The songs may not be completely original, but Madeline Follin’s child-like-Diana-Ross vocals and their girl-group sound build these catchy-as-hell poppy songs that work like Prozac pills.
9. Tom Waits – ‘Bad As Me’: I have a thing for Tom, whatever he does, I know that he has his bag of tricks that he is re-using every time, the stomping-what-exactly-was-that tracks, the devastating ballads, the disheveled-end-of-the-world-street-preacher songs, but he is a magician with his bag of tricks and he knows how to reinvent them each time. It’s vintage Tom Waits, and it’s new Tom Waits.
8. Panda Bear – ‘Tom Boy’: I have said it before, I am always oscillating between sublime and boredom when I listen to it in its entirety, but I keep coming back for ‘You can Count on Me’ or ‘Last Night at the Jetty’, that I could listen to forever. It’s monastic and poppy, redundant and soothing, complex and mysterious. When you want to get lost in Hymn choirs or drown in kaleidoscopic reverb.
7. Kurt Vile – ‘Smoke Ring for My Halo’: It is not easy to re-invent folk music, it took me a long time to enter into Kurt Vile’s detached melancholia, but when a song pops up in my iPod shuffle, I totally enjoy it and wonder why I am not listening to it more often. Then I remember all these songs work better in contrast with others. Just like Panda Bear’s ‘Tom Boy’, you can lose yourself easily in too much of that same enigmatic soundscape. Because this soundscape precisely remains quite enigmatic for me, vast and blurry at the same time, as if each string was echoing with itself. But ‘Jesus Fever’ is just great, ‘I’d pack my suitcase with myself/But I’m already gone’, it is so harmonically layered, you are also gone.
6.. Lykke Li – ‘Wounded Rhymes’: I found it bold, powerful and desperate the first time I listened to it. Complex and unexpected, the songs seemed to come from nowhere, and then there was this doo-wop-y ‘Unrequited Love’ song or this Phil Spector-like production ‘Sadness is a Blessing’. The whole album is both dark and luminous, and Lykke Li sounds so tough and vulnerable at the same time.
5. Fucked Up – ‘David Comes to Life’: First, the songs sound like an assault, a vengeance wrapped in a fury for sound and Damian Abraham’s raucous howls for vocals, but it is in fact a completely sweet melodic sound, upbeat and super catchy. It’s also a rock opera, a concept album, with a massive and full sound,… but are they still classified as hardcore? Only Damian’s vocals seem to be.
4. Thee Oh Sees – ‘Carrion Crawler/The Dream’: This is grandiose psychedelia at its best, infectious and infernal. When I listen to ‘The Dream’ I have synesthesia, I see colors covering colors, in a totally unexpected way. It’s ferocious and messy but each song gives you a shot of adrenaline mixed with a dose of psilocybin, great combination.
3. Black Lips – ‘Arabia Mountain’: There is not a bad song on this fun-fun album, their retro sound and playful-bad-boys side (I have seen the videos!) seem to serve very well their The Ramones’ sound meets The Beastie Boys’ attitude. Because music should not be depressive all the time, it’s sunny, surfy and cheerful, and I should listen to it right now!
2. Mogwai – ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’: I like mystery, and Mogwai is a mysterious band, and this is due to their complex krautrock-y-metal-melodic sound which is more interested by the slow building of a song than its actual destination. It is a curious and enduring adventure into thick grooves opening vast, endless landscapes, and you may come back from it a little different.
1. Girls – ‘Father, Son, Holy Ghost’: You rarely hear an album with such diversity, some people may have said Chris Owens has done his homework right, sure, but the result seem effortless, and totally enjoyable and instantaneously familiar. And this is the magic of this album, how did he do this? Each song sounds great and brings a different and original facet to an album which could have easily sounded cliché-like, but never do. I don’t know if it is because Owens was not able to experience any pop-rock music when he was young (he was in a cult) that he is able to have this fresh-wide-eye look on everything he has missed, but he sure is very successful at it. It is a sensible and moving album, which make me feel all-warm inside each time I am listening to it.