Well it is that time again, time for my year-end review of my favorite music! These roll around so fast, it really is a marker for me for how fast time goes! This year, however, since I am very crunched for free time, it will be a very abbreviated entry, but trust me that I have thought about this long and hard. I start thinking about my year-end music list sometime around March, and throughout the year roughly 6 or 7 albums at one point in time are poised to take my #1 spot, so I am always thinking about it, but the entries will be short and sweet this year. (If you are interested in seeing how the lists of previous years went, you can see them here: 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 , 2009 ). I would also like to say up front that Neil Young recently released an album which unfortunately I have not been able to listen to as of this writing. Also if you are used to getting a year-end mix disc from me, that will still be coming, they are going out in a few days. If you don’t get these discs but would like to get them, send me a message! I love sending them. So without further ado, the list:
But first! haha. Some honorable mentions that didn’t make the top ten. Honorable mentions:
Fleet Foxes, Crack Up, Willis Earl Beal, Turn, The Shins, Heartworms, Tori Amos, Native Invader, St. Vincent, Masseduction, Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, James McCallister, Plantarium, El Ten Eleven, Unusable Love, Iron and Wine, Beast Epic, and a major shout out to Sufjan Stevens’ live album of Carrie and Lowell songs, which as a live album was released this year, but the songs were from a few years ago, but it was by far one of my favorite things this year.
Now, the top ten:
10. Grizzly Bear, “Painted Ruins”
Grizzly finally, finally live up to the blissed-out art rock potential the showed on their early releases.
9. The National, “Sleep Well Beast”
I love the National, and I love this album, but I was expecting it to vie for the top spot, but instead I only love it and am not obsessed with it. I want to see them evolve more.
8. Run the Jewels, “Run the Jewels 3”
Ok so this albums was released in December 2016 but the PHYSICAL copies weren’t released until 2017, so I’m backdooring it. Hey, if you aren’t listening to RTJ, you literally don’t know what’s going on.
7. Father John Misty, “Pure Comedy”
A few of the songs on “Pure Comedy” are so good they’re practically transcendent; on the strength of those 4-6 songs, this album deserve all the accolades it is getting. Next time, though, we need less fluff.
6. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Luciferian Towers”
End-times post-rock for the new world; instrumental dirge music that manages to be hyper political. Godspeed is never less than earnestly terrifying, and they haven’t lose their edge.
5. Mogwai, “Every Country’s Sun”
It’s a rare year for me when out of the two post rock bands on my list, anyone beats Godspeed, but Mogwai’s new album is a leap forward for them (which is saying something, since they have been around for like 20 years). It is tender, and brutal, and irreverent.
4. Real Estate, “In Mind”
This band’s entire aesthetic is about being understated and melodic. Here they’ve cracked the code for how to do that and be dramatic, too. Each song crackles. Your nerves feel this album.
3. Prophets of Rage, “Prophets of Rage”
This album has taken a lot of flack, and yes, it is far from perfect. But the bright spots–“Who Owns Who”, “Living on the 110”, “Unfuck the World”, “Strength in Numbers”, aming a few others–are so glorious (especially after repeat listens) that the downsides of this project should get a pass. Could they have done better? Sure. But who else is even doing anything like this? It truly is a soundtrack for the revolution. Please give it some spins.
2. The War on Drugs, “A Deeper Understanding”
In all my years making year-end music lists, I’ve never had a harder time deciding between two albums for the top spot. This album is astonishing. Rather than try to do it justice, I want to quote from a review of this album in Pitchfork which I found not only perfectly encapsulated my thoughts on the album, but was itself an amazing piece of writing:
“The band’s lyricist Adam Granduciel doesn’t create fully-drawn characters (other people are phantoms or wishes or memories in his lyrics) but there’s always a desire for connection, and he lets in just enough light to make it seem possible. The album’s first single was the epic 11-minute travelogue “Thinking of a Place,” with a glowing synth swell reminiscent of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 and a patient tempo that suggests a slow walk through the woods in the dark, the kind where you keep your hands out in front of you, feeling for branches. It turned out to be an appropriate introduction to this record because “thinking of a place”—somewhere where you can lose yourself, get out of your own head, somewhere else—is what the whole record is ultimately about. A different songwriter—someone like Neil Young, say—might sketch out what this place looks like, tell us about who we might find there. But Granduciel can’t, or doesn’t want to. And that lack of articulation, that inability to identify the source of pain and the path to redemption, becomes another of the record’s themes. But all that happens beneath the surface, almost subliminally; it’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.”
I mean, yes.
1. Arcade Fire, “Everything Now”
This album has taken a lot of flack in the press, mostly because (I think) it’s not what anyone expected. It is markedly different than their previous albums, much shorter, and veers into pop sound. But the fact is, it is just so good. There was a point where the CD stayed in my car stereo for over three straight weeks. The songs are catchy but artistically sound, the theme of the album well-thought out, important, and brilliantly executed. Yes, there are two clunkers, but the rest of the songs are absolute solid gold. Time’s going to bear out that “Everything Now” is, in fact, a rock classic.
Not only does “White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes remind me of winter, it is about winter; or at the very least, it involves a memory that takes place in winter.
I listened to this song, and the album it is on, very frequently during the first winter I spent in Erie (a very unique time for me, here are lots of entries about it). This song will always evoke, in my mind, the images, smells, and feel of driving the pot-hole filled Erie streets in the dead of winter, with ice and snow filling my wheel wells, and a particular afternoon where I drove to a cemetery which sidles a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, and while this song played in the background, I looked out over the vast, frozen lake, and felt sorrow as well as joy.
The song’s simple lyrics go thusly:
“I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied round their throats
to keep their little heads
from falling in the snow,
and I turned round and there you go!
And, Michael, you would fall,
and turn the white snow red as
strawberries in the summertime.”
Plenty of people hate Fleet Foxes; to many, they are the very definition of a “hipster” band. I just happen to like hipster bands, so it kind of works out for me. And “White Winter Hymnal” is pretty much the quintessential Fleet Foxes song. And it’s haunting and simple and catchy and emotionally evocative. Who could ask for more? Read the simple but amazing lyrics below the video.
I was following the pack
All swallowed in their coats
With scarves of red tied ’round their throats
To keep their little heads
From fallin’ in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
And turn the white snow red as strawberries
In the summertime…
Yep, it’s that time of year again: time for my self-important yet entirely meaningless year-end lists. This year will feature three lists: music, movies, and a miscellany list like this one from last year. We start out with the music list.
Boy-howdy, this was a crowded year of music for me! I would estimate that well over 50% of musical artists that I am passionate about had a release of some kind this year. At one point, it actually just seemed like too much. I wasn’t able to give my full attention to some albums, as they were coming too fast for me to keep up with. (one casualty of this may have been the new Cold War Kids album, which I did not like, but it was sandwiched between a lot of other releases. This year marks the first CWK album to not make my list. Also, The Decemberists released TWO albums this year and I found them both snooze-ville). There even, unfortunately, remain some releases I’d love to hear but I just don’t have the time or attention span to squeeze them in (new albums from Deer Tick, Tegan and Sara, Arctic Monkeys, and a live Sigur Ros release are among the 2011 recordings that will have to wait until 2012 in the Seth household). So it is with all this in consideration that I admit to being such a pansy when making this list, I absolutely had to expand my rankings from the 15 slots of last year, to 20 slots this year. That’s right; not only could I not narrow it down to 10, I couldn’t even narrow it down to 15. Give me a break. I don’t get paid for this.
Also new this year, I have included “post rock” bands in my listing. (for a description of the genre, click the link) In years past I have left them off my list, as the style only appeals to a small group of people, but the genre has become such a large part of my listening life, I could not in good faith leave them off my lists any longer. There were two new albums from two of the heaviest hitters in the genre this year, and they’re both fantastic examples of the post rock game (at number 6 and 13 on my list).
As always, a mix disc chronicling my list will be sent out automatically to folks on my “mailing list”. It will only feature songs from the top 15 on the list, however, due to the inherent limitations of the compact disc. (if you’re on my mailing list, you know you are. Although I typically don’t send the mix discs to my parents, who are otherwise on the mailing list. So, Mom and Dad, if you want one of these, let me know!) If you are not on the mailing list and would like on it, just let me know via whatever method you and I usually use to communicate. But if you want in on the mix disc, let me know ASAP, I’ll be mailing them out soon.
Also, bear in mind (to prevent silly mean-spirited arguments that would prove you know nothing about art) this list is meant to represent my favorite music of the year, not my notion of “the best” music of the year. You cannot argue with what was my “favorite”. And so, without further ado, my top 20 musical releases of calendar year 2011:
20. Radiohead, The King of Limbs
19. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
18. Iron & Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean
17. Wavves, Life Sux
16. Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots
15. Florence + The Machine, Ceremonials I was slow to the party with this band, but I’m now firmly on Team Florence. The lead single, “What the Water Gave Me”, will make you happy to be alive.
14. Young the Giant, Young the Giant One of the best debut albums I’ve ever heard. I can’t wait to see where these guys go as they get their artistic feet under them.
13. Mogwai, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will Mogwai has always been further down my list of Post Rock bands than they are for most; I tend to find them too flippant in a genre that is typically super-serious. But this album blew my socks off; it is harder and more in-your-face than most Post Rock, while maintaining the necessary pretentious artiness that makes my hat fly off.
12. Indigo Girls, Beauty Queen Sister I continue to have no idea why the world at large insists Indigo Girls are only for sappy women or butch lesbians. If perfectly-crafted, heartfelt songs about the most intense mysteries of the human condition (with amazing harmony!) are for butch lesbians, then schedule my appointment with a surgeon. This album proves the ladies can and will keep making compelling music for much longer than most songwriters are able to.
11. The Trews, Hope & Ruin The bar-rock Canadians from my 2009 list make a triumphant return! This album falls short of the majestic magnificence of 2009’s No Time for Later, but contains at least two songs that made me get out of my seat the first time I heard them (“People of the Deer” is a straight-up Earth-scorcher).
10. Real Estate, Days
This Jersey quartet is often accused of being a tad “sleepy” or intentionally understated, but ever since I saw them open for Deerhunter last winter, I’ve been a convert to their introspective, trance-like style of shoegaze rock. Here is the outro to “Wonder Years”, off their superb album from this year, Days:
9. TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light Certainly the most anticipated art rock release of the year, following their spectacular 2008 album Dear Science, many people were afraid we’d never get another TVoTR album after they announced a “hiatus” in 2009. Then, in early 2011, they announced Nine Types of Light, and almost immediately thereafter, bassist Gerard Smith was diagnosed with lung cancer and promptly died. Needless to say, the touring and promotion for the album was all quite bittersweet; but in the end, the album is a huge testament to this band’s power: soaring, soulful and at times, relentlessly rocking.
8. Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues
Nothing brings me closer to full-on hipster status than my affinity for Fleet Foxes. As my tastes evolve from ultra-modern, hyper rock to a more toned-down, Americana fusion, no band epitomizes my own evolution better than this band. Stopping short of “country” but straying far from “rock”, the Foxes make me see and smell the Appalachian mountains of back home with every note. A friend of mine once gave as his reason for disliking Fleet Foxes as “it’s like church songs for hipsters”, and I thought to myself that sounded like exactly why I do like them. And it doesn’t hurt that on Helplessness Blues, frontman Robin Pecknold seems to have been singing from inside my own skull. “So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter…what does that say about me?”
7. The Airborne Toxic Event, All at Once
Just watch this from start to finish and tell me it didn’t change your life:
6. Explosions in the Sky, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care
The other “post rock” band on my list, they could also arguably be called the most commercially successful (they did the theme song for the TV show “Friday Night Lights”, which is one thousand times more mainstream exposure than any other post rock band). Happily, with their first new album since their profile increased, they did not make simpler, more straight-forward songs for “the masses”. Take Care, Take Care, Take Care is probably their most challenging album to date, while maintaining the heightened level of spiritual raw emotion that has always made them impossible to ignore. The ten minute album closer, “Let Me Back In”, although wordless, is a dirge-like cry of sadness for a lost love, reaching a level of thematic complexity that is new for a band that occasionally relies on bombast. And if this CD doesn’t win the Grammy for album packaging, there is a serious problem (yes, they give Grammys for that…just not on television).
5. Wilco, The Whole Love
I’m a relatively new convert to Wilco. Despite them being constantly talked about in the same breath as a lot of bands I adored, I resisted them because of the label “alt-country”, but it turns out, in the last few years, that label started sounding attractive to me. So I started trying them out (and it turns out that “alt-country” is totally meaningless, anyway). Then this year’s The Whole Love came out, and I was totally blown away. Few albums—of any genre—contain so many varying styles of music and so much depth of feeling and subtextual meaning. Check this performance on Letterman from this year, of the album’s lead track, “The Art of Almost”:
4. Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What
Paul Simon has always been one of those songwriters who I knew I loved, but I always stopped short of being an active fan (buying albums, listing him among my favorites, etc). But when one of his songs came on, I was always rapt. (honestly, I like his solo work about 100 times more than his stuff with Garfunkle). But this year, as he released an new album, he did a promotional blitz that managed to work perfectly on me. First, there was this extraordinary appearance on Jimmy Fallon, followed by appearances playing songs from his new album on just about every talk show I tuned into for a week or two. And I just fell totally in love with these songs. Musically they are low-key but extremely inventive, and like most Simon songs, they really shine lyrically. They aren’t the straight-forward, heart-on-sleeve urgent missives that he wrote in his most productive years, but rather, these songs are complex, surprising, bold lyrical poetry that could just as easily be studied in a textbook as played on Jimmy Fallon. I know that’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement for a lot of people—too much thinking, perhaps—but it seems like magic to me. Plenty of songwriters at this stage in Simon’s career are just falling back on old formulas (if they’re making new music at all), but Simon is challenging himself and his audience. “Rewrite” examines the regrets one might have with old age, but through the lens of an artist who can craft how the world views them. It seems like a song Bob Dylan would write if he stopped worrying so much about writing like Bob Dylan. Album-closer and title song “So Beautiful or So What” poses some of the most complicated questions associated with making art—is something art just because it’s beautiful? Or conversely, does beauty DISQUALIFY something from being art? And how important is it if art is good, if the artist is enjoying creating it?
3. My Morning Jacket, Circuital MMJ continues to be the most mystifying, chameleon-esque, dynamic band out there today. Are they space funk? Jazz fusion? Heavy metal? Even they don’t know. To be an MMJ fan is to be a fan of rock in general as well as this band’s unusual mystique. Circuital easily ranks as my second favorite MMJ album (It Still Moves remains firmly in first). Here is a video from the show I attended on this year’s tour. I was front row, directly in front of Jim (the singer)…the song is “You Wanna Freak Out”, from Circuital:
2. Death Cab For Cutie, Codes and Keys
On first listen, I was afraid Codes and Keys was the album where DCFC had started sucking. Nothing caught my attention, and the lyrics sounded suspiciously like Ben Gibbard had given in to writing songs specifically to sound “Gibbard-y” (although it is a testament to his songwriting prowess that nobody familiar with his songwriting would fault me for making it an adjective). But then, a few months after it came out, it clicked. And then I remembered that is how every Death Cab for Cutie album has always been for me. They simply do not pop out at you and declare their presence immediately. It may sound dramatic, but I’m gonna say it like this anyway: Death Cab songs contain universes, and sometimes these multi-layered, subtle, textured universes reveal themselves slowly, bit-by-bit, and sometimes, over the course of years. (every year I find myself re-amazed in new ways by their album Plans. I suspect DCFC fans will know what I mean when I say I just now *got* the song “Summer Skin”). If there is a criticism to be leveled at the band, it is that these encodings (ha! see how that applies to this album’s title?) and hidden universes can often obscure a listener’s personal attachment to a song. I love the DCFC classic “Amputations” because I finally see how it’s looping, counter-acting guitar structure helps to inform the subject matter of lovers who consistently return to a poison relationship that is never going to work. But I don’t love it, necessarily, because it’s important to me.
But once Codes and Keys clicked for me, it did become important to me. Still around are the intricate, hidden gems of musical structure and lyrical content so slick it disguises itself as ordinary, but under that veneer are some of the most prescient, precious conceptual leaps in modern rock and roll. Frontman Ben Gibbard surely knows that each word he writes will be picked over and analyzed by finger-wagging hipsters (on whom he relies for paychecks), yet he’s not scared to write an essentially atheist screed in “St. Paul’s Cathedral”: “When our hearts stop ticking/ this is the end/ there’s nothing past this.” I was actually one of the first to put this song up on YouTube. You can see my little video here. I also found myself delightedly surprised, upon returning to the album after initially dismissing it, to find that the title track had a nearly-hidden crescendo at the end, in a little bit of musical trickery it somehow hid itself rather cleverly at first. Now, when I listen to “Codes and Keys” (the song) I am physically and emotionally moved to a point of near-ridiculousness by the final 2 minutes. Anyone who is trying to get into DCFC, or is skeptical but interested, all I can suggest is that you give it some time to sink in. No other band will more richly reward a patient listener.
1. Hey Rosetta!, Seeds
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read my blog that my favoritest band in the world of all time and forever would get the #1 spot this year. I’ve written nearly ad infinitum about this band, so I won’t waste time going back over why I adore them so much. If you’re new to my blog, scroll up to the tag cloud on the right and click on the Hey Rosetta! tag, which will take you to a plethora of gushing fanboy raves about them. Seeds, their third album, for me ranks squarely as their second best album, but it would take, as far as I can calculate, a literal act of God for any artist to top their previous album, Into Your Lungs (and Around in Your Heart and on Through Your Blood). As far as follow-ups go, Seeds delivers, with enough emotional peaks, insane tempo changes, and heartfelt epiphanies to last two more years, when hopefully the world will have it’s fourth Hey Rosetta! album.
There are many high-points on Seeds, both emotionally and musically, and somehow, nestled in there and almost hidden is the gem “Yer Fall”, which admittedly is not the standout on the album, but after seeing them live in support of this album five times, I can confidently tell you this slow-builder is certainly the live centerpiece (even though it doesn’t get played every show). I’ve posted a video of it below, and if you watch just one of the videos on this page, I implore you to make it this one. Please stick with it to the end; after multiple tempo changes, the song builds to an emotional climax that, even now as I was searching for the best video to post of it, makes me weep. It ends on a stark note, as most of the band sings with Tim, the lead singer, “My love is dead. I buried it.” This video doesn’t even do justice to what I saw on the road this year. In the small clubs, each member of the band loudly sings the final lines into any microphone they can find; the result was an incredible cacophony of intense raw emotion:
Thanks to my buddy Kyle, I have just discovered the joy of Windows MovieMaker. I have been somewhat limited to what I’ve been able to do by all the snow here today, but I did manage to make this little (quite amateurish) video of a snow-covered cemetary by my apartment, with the Fleet Foxes’ song “White Winter Hymnal” playing in the background. The bulk of the video is a little boring, and it gets jumpier closer to the end as I started to get really cold, but I loooooove the beginning, where the train right beside the graveyard is sputtering out steam and making loud steam noises….I just think it goes incredibly well with the music. Anyway, I’m probably not going to be able to resist making and posting a ton of these for awhile, this being a new (to me) toy. Please feel free to ignore them.
I was following the pack,
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied round their throats
to keep their little heads
from falling in the snow.
And I turned round and there you go—
and Michael you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime.
Notes From the Fire 