Top 5 (and a half) - Albums of the Year 2011

Now then. My esteemed colleague MJ has set out his stall as per his manifesto, and this is a fitting time to respond with mine. Part of my remit in writing for this site – other than to amaze and delight with my prose - is to be the yin to MJ’s yang. I’m all for retrospectivism, if that’s indeed a word. After all, there’s nothing more comforting than familiar arrangements of sounds that can act like the company of old friends. However, I still find a giddy, adolescent thrill in finding new stuff, especially when I can pass it on to others. Do I still seek validation like an errant teenager clutching their first LP, hoping their choice was “right”? You betcha. Still, that’s a side issue to discovering great new music to soundtrack my life, and I maintain strongly that there’s as much of that around as ever. What better place to demonstrate that than here, with the end of the year having just passed?

Now that the giddy thrill of buying a CD purely for the cover art and crossing your fingers regarding the content is largely a thing of the past, I spend a fair amount of my spare time listening to things on Spotify. On that basis I’ve made a sister playlist to this post with my favourite 30 songs of the year. Most end of year lists are well researched attempts to draw an objective line under the year. I, however, don’t claim to have eclectic taste - unlike many, when asked what I’m into musically I don’t reply with, “Oh, a bit of everything.” Speaking of which, I must learn to curb my inner rage when faced with such passive opinions from others - at my work Christmas do I found myself drunkenly gabbling “THAT’S CLEARLY THE WORST THING YOU CAN POSSIBLY SAY, EVER!” at a bemused colleague who dared not cite, say, Van Der Graaf Generator. Anyway, my conclusions are based on accrued last.fm and iTunes plays and those that just missed out feature handy one-adjective synopses for the hard of reading. What could be simpler?

First, let’s look at those just missing out on a place on the podium. Bubbling under are....

Wilco – The Whole Love

When not moonlighting as a weatherman, Jeff Tweedy masterminded a reassuring return to form following the jam-band dreck of the last two Wilco records, ones leaning maybe too heavily on the - admittedly show stopping - guitar work of Nels Cline. This record effortlessly balances the experimental and traditional, beginning with the liquid, beguiling motorik of opener ‘Art of Almost’ and never letting up. Solid.

M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

For most people, epic means overblown. M83’s Anthony Gonzalez clearly only understands the term as “understated”, and starts from there. Such an attitude has been hit, miss and – at worst - mediocre in the past, but this is nailed on, and sustained over a double album too. Vast.

Foster the People – Torches & The Naked and Famous – Passive Me, Aggressive You

I’m loathe to lump artists or bands together, but both these acts niftily encapsulate the year’s most danceable, irresistable indie, (that most maligned, hybrid beast). Foster the People have a smoother take on the genre, leaving TNAF to take the reins with the more raging side, captured in the video for ‘Young Blood’, a song which can even survive a cover by Jessie J (I did do a little sick in my own mouth when I heard it though). Oh, the adjectives: Seat-shifting and Antipodean.

The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar

In the year of the feted solo artist - James Blake and Oneohtrix Point Never in electronica; tUnE-yArDs and Destroyer in “leftfield” circles; Katy B, Ana Calvi, (Brit Award winning) Laura Marling and Adele commercially – being in a band in the traditional sense wasn’t fashionable. TJF were duly overlooked in any end of year list I’ve seen. Being an uncomplicated, unapologetic throwback to 90’s Indie (with a capital I) doesn’t help, neither does releasing your album way-back-when in February, but if it’s guitar pedal abusing, swarming rock you’re after then look no further. Epic.

Now the main event: those making my coveted top 5 (and a half). In no particular order they are...

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

The Bends. Boxer. And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. In contrast to “the classics” you necessarily discover retrospectively, all these titles from my adolescence onward felt monumental immediately upon release. Back in February of last year, having debuted the title track to a bemused then-PM Gordon Brown on the Andrew Marr show, PJ added another. Winning her a deserved second Mercury Prize, it couldn’t stand in starker contrast to her previous winner, 2001’s slick Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea.

Far from easy listening thematically, Let England Shake has a headlong bravura, its payoff found in the steadfast commitment to explore our peculiar, often self-defeating, national identity. “Goddamn Europeans, take me back to beautiful England!” begins ‘The Last Living Rose’, a knot of oxymoron the current PM would doubtlessly approve of. Honest self-reflection is never an easy exercise, and this record is dripping with similar statement and insight. It’s not solely a war album per se, but our violent past as befitting any “civilized” Western country is undeniable, so violence had to feature heavily, whether a drunken back street brawl or the horrors of full blown war (past and present) – such acts are simplified without trace of preaching or belittling the memories of those involved. Like any true artist, there’s no direct judgement being handed down - listen to the beautiful piano figure and closing refrain of ‘On Battleship Hill’ and decide for yourself what conclusions to draw as to whether we, as a nation, are where we should be.

Polly Jean would be forgiven for making little strides musically considering the massive thematic undertaking, and she indeed keeps it simple and immutable, that choice only underlining the brutality of the subject matter. Recorded in a church - again a symbol of our past national identity - the atmosphere is spare, downplayed - a flush of horns here, an insistent strum of an autoharp there, the odd sample. Sometimes music serves a lyric, or vice versa. It’s clear where PJ’s preoccupation lies and the record is her strongest as a result.

‘Let England Shake’

Wild Beasts – Smother

One issue I intend to tackle in the future is that of a notional national music scene. We’re prized in the UK for our eccentricity and relentless commitment to furthering the exploration of pop, largely because the weather is shit and we’re all broke, so there’s little else to do. Despite that being my bag, I don’t seem to find much “forward thinking” British music to get excited about now, as reflected in this list - only 3 out of the 10 artists here (including those just missing out on the Top 5) are from these shores. Two of these operate very much in their own (or others’) wake musically, but Smother makes up for our collective dearth of invention almost at a single stroke.

An unmitigated triumph, one maddeningly overlooked for a Mercury nomination, it encapsulates all that’s addictive and curious about us Brits and, unintentionally, rounds off the musical side of Let England Shake. Smother feels dangerous, off kilter, unapologetically preoccupied with sex, intelligence and neuroses, nuanced meanings of which can all be found in the title alone. It could only, somehow, be the product of 4 lads from Kendal, growing up together in splendid rural isolation. Whilst that’s now pretty much inevitably been supplanted by London, the seeds of their restless invention are still sprouting, informing their cracked, uniquely British view.

Smother builds on 2009’s Two Dancers in the best tradition of forward thinking by deconstructing it, stripping away any artifice to something that’s bare-boned yet fully alive. ‘Loop the Loop’, an electric guitar arpeggiated, tom-malletted exploration of the inevitably fleeting nature of love and the hopeless void of sex without it, is pretty much the most awe-inspiring 4 minutes 6 seconds of the year. ‘Burning’ is simply a solo vocal juxtaposed with a jarring sample of what sounds like a knife hitting piano strings reversed for 5 minutes, yet it’s irresistible. They retain a keen sense of what works though - you’d have to go a long, long way to find a better vocalist in either Hayden Thorpe or Tom Fleming, even further in the same band. We’re spoiled.

Three of the best moments of Smother in acoustica

Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Well, what do you say about this? The second proper Bon Iver album has topped many end of year lists, and justifiably so. Despite, it’s fair to say, not having the best time at the Birmingham gig back in November, it’s easy to see what sparked such widespread interest, drawing nonchalant hipsters from miles around. The conundrum faced going into this must’ve been how to follow up a mostly acoustic, unexpected classic of a debut, one which essentially came shrink-wrapped with its own sense of mythology. Head back to that cabin in the woods and do more of the same? Go electric and spin ideas out to prog-esque proportions? Embrace long-thought-dormant mariachi influences? Talk about pressure. If you’re Justin Vernon, you take your time, throw out everything you know, indulge yourself in side projects (Gayngs and Volcano Choir), work with Kanye West and, finally, go widescreen.

The double kick drum of opener ‘Perth’ sets the stall out, and you can almost hear a thousand shaggy, bearded hipsters reaching for the clippers. Bon Iver is, when it comes down to it, a concept album, but that’s no longer the loaded, pejorative term it used to be. Each song title (bar ‘Towers’ and possibly ‘Beth/Rest’) is a specific place-name, some with a designation of a US State to boot, or a play on words around one - the notional opposite of that idealised cabin in the idealised woods. Lyrically, it’s totally oblique, but this just throws that show stopping voice and gorgeous musical tapestries into sharper relief. These are expansive without a shred of indulgence; everything’s downplayed – ‘Holocene’, a song with a glacial beauty I could happily curl up in for days at a time, rings with: “And at once I knew I was not magnificent”. Mr Vernon couldn’t be more wrong.

‘Calgary’

The Antlers – Burst Apart

It takes a special band to write beguiling, honest, gut-wrenching songs. To write ones that walk the tightrope of sincerity which spans the pit of parody and cliche into which so much other work with similar aims tumbles is a real art, and The Antlers have done just that again. Using the most basic elements of synth, guitar and drums combined with Peter Silberman’s impossibly soaring falsetto - another stock-in-trade of the alt-rock genre that would be deployed clumsily elsewhere - these songs are never mawkish, never overblown, never hysterical, but could just simply have been written about you. It’s all there - your doomed attempts at love, your low-level substance abuse, your need for and simultaneous revulsion with others.

The Antlers are at once simple and universal; they’re clever but proceedings never feel calculated - neither the driving, palm-muted ‘French Exit’ nor the insistent pulse of ‘Parentheses’ have anything like a discernible chorus, despite both being ostensibly treated as singles from the record. Instead, a guitar break or a squall of synth or a soaring vocal line qualifies, because they simply feel right. After all, that sense of “justness”, of meaning, is what anyone and everyone’s looking for. A record that shows we can find it, however difficult and painful the search.

‘I Don’t Want Love’ live.

(They were stunning at The Rainbow in Birmingham, by the way.

If you get a chance to see them live, do...)

St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

Another end of year list, another St. Vincent album of effortlessly outstanding baroque, orchestral pop. Written whilst in self-imposed exile in Seattle that Annie Clark, working under the moniker St Vincent, described as a “loneliness experiment”, eschewing electronics for a simple guitar based approach to songwriting, Strange Mercy is squirming and restless. Typically contrarily to its inception, our Annie then shoehorns more musical ideas into this set of songs than some bands do into a career. “I’ve played dumb when I knew better, tried too hard just to be clever”, she sings on ‘Cheerleader’. It’s remarkable - both whip smart and hazy - and sums up an album tearingly at odds with itself, a razor blade in a honey jar.

That said, the record is far from diffuse and maintains a steely focus of intent, honing ideas - thematic and musical - which, considering they’ve come spilling out of a single mind, not a riff or insight seemingly out of place, makes this album’s achievements all the more remarkable. Frankly, it’s terrifying. Take ‘Cruel’, a joyous, galloping ode to abuse and female objectification, the close mic’d bruise of the title track and, crucially, the key couplet of ‘Champagne Year’: “I make a living telling people what they want to hear / But I tell you, it’s going to be a Champagne Year.” Most would milk and repeat that insight for a career. Here it is recognised and laid out on a slab rather than placed on a pedestal – the song actually closes in on itself right after that line. Show, don’t tell, is the key directive. Also, the news currently abound is that she’s recording with David Byrne. Without being too graphic, that very idea makes me moist.

A jaw dropping ‘Surgeon’ from a 4AD session. Have THAT, Anna Calvi...

And finally, the half: Phantogram – Nightlife

A mini album, so automatically discounted from most lists, this release also houses my song of the year in ‘Don’t Move’. Building on 2010’s excellent Eyelid Movies and reflecting the pressures and nocturnal existence that dictate a touring lifestyle - including the hangovers on ‘Turning Into Stone’ - Nightlife pulses, rolls and pitches. It’s chopped up, disorientated, restless, itching with ideas. Everything modern music should be.

‘Don’t Move’. You really mustn’t, unless you want me to answer to. (You might not.)

So that was 2011, a vintage year. The best news, however, has to be that there’ll be a new Mumford and Sons album in 2012! Now that my sarcasm gland’s exhausted with that one reference, I’m off for a lie down…