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10 Favorite Albums of 2011
Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place
Softening the blow of R.E.M.‘s departure, pt. 1: Intimate, wordless transmutations of the kinds of melodies they unearthed in the American South.
PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
A bit like late 50s/early 60s Bergman: white sky, gray to black earth, searingly plain and yet open to endless interpretation. Also, shockingly fun… “Nothing!”
Real Estate – Days
Softening the blow of R.E.M.‘s departure, pt. 2: The timid, wise murmur of their de facto heirs.
Death Cab For Cutie – Codes & Keys
Stereolab became perhaps my favorite band this year. Death Cab For Cutie aren’t quite Stereolab, but they took that band’s name as an aesthetic principle and created the year’s foremost experience in total sound. Even the words are sound for sound’s sake, taking the lyrical strategy of Pet Sounds and grafting it onto the lyrical strategy of Dylan or Malkmus. Which would explain the emotional trembles in an album so unwaveringly cool.
Holcombe Waller – Into The Dark Unknown
Sometimes it seems like amazing singers are cheating, tricking us into feeling something by nothing more than the naked emotion or simulation thereof they wear on their voices. But Holcombe Waller earns every word he utters, or, I should say, his lyrics earn their preternaturally dramatic articulation.
Devon Williams – Euphoria
The cassette version, I should specify, though I doubt the Slumberland version really gains or loses anything by re-ordering side B and swapping “Don’t Be Fooled” for “Right Direction.” But I must so specify to allow a metaphor: here’s pop music so saturated (with color, emotion, bleeding strings, crying vocals) that it threatens to flood your tape deck. Maybe that’s the persistent shimmer I hear.
EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
Music this sincere and therefore unfashionable doesn’t usually end up so close to cool. The world hasn’t heard anything like this since Kristin Hersh got hit by a car and started hearing frequencies.
Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams
“Jail La La” was a thrilling single last year, but I never suspected how much of its power came from Dee Dee’s sly articulation of the words. She emerges from the noise on Only In Dreams and reveals herself as a great singer, as confident as Neko Case. But that’s not what I meant when I proposed this as a country album: note instead the degree of tragedy matched by an equal degree of toughness.
Bill Callahan – Apocalypse
Not since Rimbaud wrote “I is Another” has an artist been so obsessed with escaping identity. I read something along those lines somewhere recently, about Bob Dylan, I think in a book of Ellen Willis writings. No such anxiety on the part of Bill Callahan. For all the soul searching and shape shifting on Apocalypse, he’s not nearly as impatient to unlock the mysteries of identity as his listener is. This is the same man who dreamt “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” and seemed satisfied with the answers it provided.
R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now
Softening the blow of R.E.M.‘s departure, pt. 3: This gem. Alternately mistaken as a career summary and a pre-planned swan song, Collapse Into Now is, as the title denotes, another gorgeous set of songs that adhere to their moment in time.
