My Top Ten Albums of 2011
I love top ten lists, because they say so much about the person offering them. Because Japan is so slow in getting new films (no Shame release) and my bit torrent sites can’t ever give me the films I want to see (The Interrupters doesn’t exist) the only possible list I can do for the time being is music…
10. Drive OST
The film was entirely an exercise in stylization, and the music sets this all up perfectly. From the credits playing the electro pop sounds in Nightcall with 80s pink cursive fonts to the ending showing very little yet conveying the mood by playing the entire College song of A Real Hero to a black screen before credits even start. This gives us an entire focus on the music and not only that but a moment of respite as the lyrics confirm what we have just seen throughout the film…a real hero.
Song to check: A Real Hero, Under Your Spell, Night call
9. Local Natives Gorilla Manor
Really a lesser known indie band, the Local Natives released their self funded debut album with Gorilla Manor. Even offering two PVs for their singles, this group will be interesting to watch as they progress. With this you get highly listenable album full of afro-pop guitar set to frantic drumming. Heard it labled as modern folk, but its just really enjoyable music.
Songs to check: Airplanes, Wild Eyes, Sticky Thread
8. Washed Out Within Without
For chill wave, Washed Out seems like a proper name. Yet the album manages to incoprerate elements of every genre to offer a really unique experience. It is an elegant impressive debut that does absolutely nothing in terms of trying to impress, yet manages to do just that.
Songs to check: Amor Fati, A Dedication, Soft
7. Blu & Exile Give me my Flowers while I can still Smell Them
Coming out in mid December this is one of three albums in hip-hop released in December that came from nowhere. The duo, MC and producer offer their second effort since their first Below the Heavens in 2007, arguably best album of that year that no one knew. Silky blue bossa and jazz samples litter the album a Blu delivers complex cadences with the ease of any of today’s best. My only disappointment with The Roots album, unlike the last was that it didn’t have Blu as a guest. If more hip-hop was like this…
Songs to check: Seasons, Mask Your Soul, More Out of Life
6. Bon Iver Bon Iver
Beautifully sentimental! This album like so many other second indie efforts finds the group drifting away from often the things that everybody liked so much about them in the first place. Regardless, I appreciate their latest effort which is more ambitious infusing a lot horns now into their compositions. There music is so subjective, I would say today they are best band to never have a single good music video to ever captures the mood and atmosphere that their music creates.
Songs to check: Calgary, Perth, Towers
5. My Morning Jacket Circuital
Like The Roots, My Morning Jacket is an amazing live band that can almost actually translate well to albums. Circuital is a playful album commenting on everything from getting older and getting certain things out of your system, yet admitting to still holding on to black metal in the process. Sonically amazing, and the album nearly leaves up to how good their live shows actually are.
Songs to check: The Day is Coming, Circuital, Victory Dance
4. Jay-Z & Kanye West Watch the Throne
Luxury rap with a consciousness…they just exude so much taste. Take for instance the lead single’s video. They tear up a Maybach and modify it into a drift car, through girls in the back, and through money out the window, and at the end, text informs us that the Maybach was bought by the artists themselves and auctioned off after the video for nearly triple the price and all the profits to the African relief efforts for the draught. Can you blame them, when Jay raps, “if you been through what I been through, you’d be in Paris getting fucked up too”
Songs to Check: Niggas in Paris, No Church in the Wild, Who Gon Stop Me
3. TV on Radio Nine types of Light
I was actually more excited about this and when I bought this I saw the Metronomy album next to it and in the end came to like the Metronomy album a little more. With that said their latest was great! They shot a video for every song on the album tying in elements of random people sharing their own expirences into the self.
Songs to check: Caffeinated Consciousness, Will Do, A Killer Crane
2. Metronomy The English Riveria
This was my early favorite album of the year. The first single, She Wants is the best music video of the year, combining frozen masquerade stop sequences with surrealism capturing the confusion of what is she actually wants. In the end the thing with this album is that they found their voice and now finally an audience.
Songs to check: She Wants, We Broke Free, The Bay
1. The Roots Undun
Coming out at the end of the year, this was really an instant classic, in a slow year in hip-hop. It is a concept album about a character named Redford Stephens who is an African America who becomes what they want him to be…what they want us all to be. It is existential so the album concerns itself with an individual’s freewill put against the trappings of the corner. This is something that even concerned Sartre- Can an individual be free (existentially) when one’s socio-economic status physically prevents it. It’s a perfectly complex album, to a kid who grew up with a walkman listening to the same tapes over and over of Nas, Wu-tang, and Notorious.
Songs to check: Make My, One Time, The Light House
Rounding out the list would be Tyler, the Creator with his second album Goblin. Easily the best hip-hop video with Yonkers, I like how he is the first artist to me, to really represent the generation behind me interms of hip-hop. The Brooklyn Electro-pop duo Holy Ghost! with their first self titled album, offered an album packed with enegry not felt since MGMT’s debut. The Strokes had a great album that found them abandoning their more straight forward brand of rock in favor of a more indie sound, which does work. Common’s latest effort The Dreamer, The Believer falls in line with everything he has done. Not much new, but a feature with Maya Angelou trumps all. The Kills album Blood Pressures offers a stripped beat box blues album that wins in its honesty and straightforwardness. And for a shameless plug, though earned, I will say the two artist I am working with here in Tokyo both put out great mixtapes in Champloo’s CheW and Breeze’s Runway Clothes, happy to be working with them as far as photography and am looking forward to their next efforts along with the third artist of the trio Martin Ballou.
With that said the disappointments are there. Radiohead and Coldplay both offered subpar efforts, either overly polished serenades with Coldplay or Radiohead’s mundane indescript tracks in King of Limbs. Hip-hop savior Lupe Fiasco released his most commercial, my label made me do it, effort to date. Words I Never Said and All Black Everything offered us images of what the album could have been. And Ghostface released a solid but uninspired effort, which to me has characterized everything since 2006 which saw him release the genius Fishscale and More Fish.
