MADISON
INSTITUTE of MUSICOLOGISTS (MIM) 2011 OFFICIAL BALLOT – TIM SPEAKER
Ok, so it's really fifteen. But it was a really strong year so I went with more than ten.
15.
Wild Flag—Wild Flag
The
sound is the blood between me and you
Rock and roll is alive and well and living in the
hearts of these four women. Killer top to bottom.
14.
The Black Keys – El Camino
But
everybody knows / That a broken heart is blind
Loving it, but since it just came out I haven’t
been able to spend the kind of time with it that I need to.
13.
The Twilight Singers—Dynamite Steps
All
come alive in the present tense
The disappointment was in the buildup; the
promise of Dynamite Steps was too
great, as word of a new Twilight Singers album, following one of the best
albums of the past decade—Powder Burns—would
also feature Gutter Twin Mark Lanegan as well as erstwhile genius (and personal
guitar-god) Nick McCabe of the Verve? The lure proved too much. Instead of an
epoch-defining work, Greg Dulli and Co. return with another excellent album of
noir rock.
It’s tough to call this a disappointment, as it truly does have its
moments (like the Song of the Year contender The Beginning of the End), but considering the buildup, it was hard
not to feel a bit letdown. Again, that isn’t to say I don’t love this album,
because I certainly do.
12.
We Are Augustines—Rise Ye Sunken Ships
Well
call the police, go ahead call your shrink / Call whoever you want but I won't
stop the car
I love albums that have a good story behind them,
and this one is a doozy. From Paste Magazine’s review:
Jim,
the brother of lead singer and songwriter Billy McCarthy, had a very troubled
past. Since high school, he lived in homeless shelters and on the streets of
California after succumbing to excessive substance abuse. He was also committed
to psychiatric hospitals on multiple occasions.
Jim
eventually used a knife to attack a worker in a shelter where he was living. He
then found himself in prison and diagnosed as a schizophrenic, unfit to stand
trial and too dangerous to stay with the general public…For four years, Jim
remained in solitary confinement, his only escapes being small stints at more
psychiatric hospitals…While staying at one, he overheard he’d again be
relegated to solitary confinement…He panicked…Then hanged himself.
Their
mother, also a schizophrenic and addict, came to a similar demise. Lying on a
cot in a homeless shelter, she overdosed on sleeping pills and cocaine…Next to her
bed, she had scribbled two things on the back of a business card from a local
mortuary: her children’s names…Billy, Jim and their sister never knew their
father.
The funny thing about this album, one sprung from
so much darkness, is that is sounds mostly triumphant. Though it does trail
off a bit, a more honest group of songs you will not find this year.
11.
Dirty Beaches—Badlands
Speedway
/ It's taking over me
Badlands
sounds like it was unearthed from beneath the garbage barrels behind CBGB’s,
the mutant offspring of a late night jam session between Suicide, The Cramps,
and Elvis singing lyrics written by Charles Starkweather in an alley somewhere
in my dreams. Very, very hard to leave this out of my top ten.
SIDE NOTE: This is the best album cover of the
year, by far. To fully experience the album as it was intended, pick it up on
vinyl like I did. Pressed on white wax, the grime sounds like a demented
symphony, and the noir-ish photography provides ample evidence for the need to
continue producing tangible packaging.
10.
Bon Iver—Bon Iver
…and
at once I knew I was not magnificent
Another tenderly brilliant album from Justin
Vernon, Wisconsin’s most famous cabin dweller. The blatant Peter Gabriel-ism is
a bit concerning to most, but since I actually like Peter Gabriel (and am not
afraid to admit it) I am OK with it.
Of anyone on this list, I think his next
album will have the highest stakes (so to speak) of his career.
09.
The Horrors—Skying
The
moment that you want is coming / If you give it time
Another set of gorgeous, post-punk warbles. The
law of diminishing returns does govern this follow-up to my 2009 Album of theYear, Primary Colours, but it is
still a strong batch of high quality, billowy, psych.
08.
Chelsea Wolfe—Apokalypsis
We
could be two straight lines in a crooked world…
Chelsea Wolfe snuck onto the musical landscape by
releasing her debut album The Grime and
The Glow in the final week of 2010. I discovered that album in late spring,
and spent a considerable portion of the summer of 2011 playing Halfsleeper on repeat late into the
night. Her follow up—Apokalypsis—was
released in September and is an absolutely white-nuckle, horror movie scary
collection of feral doomfolk. In a good way.
This album has an atmosphere that is totally exclusive to anything else put on wax this year. Listening, you can almost smell the smoky haze of incense burning at some ancient, biblical rite taking place, being presided over by a feral priestess that may or may not be PJ Harvey. It kind of reminds me of the atmosphere created on the title track to the first Black Sabbath album, if that helps describe the late night, bizarre environment constructed here.
I found myself in the month of
December basically playing Tracks (TallBodies) on repeat, hypnotized by it's repetitive spell.
SIDE NOTE: Try as I might, I could not find this
on CD or (extremely) limited LP, as it was mostly a digital only release. A
sign of the times I guess.
07.
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – Self-Titled
Build
a little fire where it’s cold…
This is the best album of the year while you are listening to it. Nothing
makes you feel this good—so good that it feels like a collection of Be Here Now B-sides, which is the
ultimate compliment I can give it. I ask you to listen to this record, and take
a moment to appreciate the level of traditional English-with-a-capital-E
songwriting here, as nobody else does this anymore.
A dying art to be sure.
06.
Foo Fighters—Wasting Light
I
never wanna die / I never wanna die / I'm on my knees / I never wanna die…
Are Foo Fighters the last straight-up rock and roll band
in the mainstream left in America? I must admit that the placement of this
album was significantly influenced by repeated viewings of the extraordinary
documentary Back & Forth. The album, like the documentary that chronicled its creation, is a look back in order to forge a new path forward. Many of the best songs here—Dear Rosemary, I Should Have Known, Bridge Burning, Miss The Misery, Arlandria, and the spectacular Walk—all deal with the subject of reflecting on past losses, past mistakes, past failures as a way to appreciate what you have now, today, in the present. A song like I Should Have Known is given incredible gravity not only by the subject matter—not being able to stop someone you care for from self-destruction, one of which is explicitly Kurt Cobain—but through the inclusion of Krist Novoselic (performing for the first time with Grohl post-Nirvana) and Pat Smear (now back in the fold as a full time member) a resonance that supersedes the Foo Fighters as a musical entity.
Few
albums are as life-affirming as this set from Grohl’s Army, and that alone set Wasting Light apart from most of the
pack this year.
05.
Florence + The Machine—Ceremonials
And
would you leave me / If I told you what I've become?
Blown away by the power of her talent. Lyrically,
musically, and vocally this album is phenomenal – I was totally caught off
guard by Ceremonials. Superb in
every category. Calling her a force of nature is not mere hyperbole, she seems to exert powerful sway over the elements.
04.
M83—Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
I
woke up stronger than ever…
Epic in the best sense of the world, this
sprawling shoegaze/technopop extravaganza should come with a map. Huge in sound
and scope, this album steps forward from 2009’s John Hughes inspired
masterpiece Saturdays=Youth. Should
M83 mainman Anthony Gonzalez have decided to prune this back to a single disc,
it certainly would have fought for Album of the Year. But forget about all
that, just take it as it is – a bittersweet mix of upbeat heartfelt symphonies
dedicated to the loss of innocence and youth.
Beautifully confidant.
SIDENOTE: If Hurry
Up, We're Dreaming was released when I was 22, it would have been the
soundtrack to my life. Every song sounds like a movie. Also, I highly recommend
seeing them live. They are absolutely massive live.
03.
The Horrible Crowes—Elsie
If
you should go there before I do / God's gonna trouble the water
This side-project from Brian Fallon (who may be
my favorite young songwriter in America) reaches into areas of lyricism
undiscovered in his day job as Gaslight Anthem’s director and guiding force. Elsie seemed to get better and better
with each and every listen I gave it. An album about loss, in it's many forms.
SIDE NOTE: You know when you lose your
objectivity about quality because you feel so close to a work? This album has
served as my companion through the long hours of grief in the wake of my
brother’s death last August. I spent every available minute driving the
backstreets of South Carolina in September and October listening to this album and
I will always have a hard time listening to it.
02.
Zola Jesus—Conatus
Cause
it hurts, yes it hurts to let you in…
An operatic goth/synth/dance/dreampop tour de
force. The Goth Queen of Madison, WI takes on a broad range of subjects and
moods here; fitting for an album whose title—Conatus—is latin for moving forward. Conatus is a major leap ahead in terms of songwriting, production,
and instrumentalism from her brilliant twin 2010 EP’s Stridullum and Valusia.
The best compliment that I can give this is to say that it is a complete work,
a true album in the sense that each song is sequenced with precision, and work
as links to a whole.
Heroic, picturesque, heart-wrenching, strong.
01.
PJ Harvey—Let England Shake
Goddamn
Europeans! / Take me back to beautiful England…
Not her first reinvention (my favorite would be the now over 10 years old, still phenomenal Stories From The City,
Stories From The Sea) but certainly the most convincing and total, Let England Shake is a brilliant
treatise on post-WWI Britain. It is of the utmost importance that artists
continue to challenge their audience with complex, confrontational, or
uncomfortable material and Harvey has found inventive and distinctive ways to
do this since the early 90’s. Even in a very, very strong year for female
artists, Harvey continues to be in a class unto herself.
SIDE NOTE: I find the current pre-eminence of PJ
Harvey as an influence on contemporary, female based "rock" to be truly
fascinating, as it is difficult—nearly impossible—to imagine much of the
significant female work at present without her influence. A brief look at my
Top Ten Albums of 2011 exemplifies this – Chelsea Wolfe, Florence + The
Machine, Zola Jesus, and countless others bear her distinctive mark. It’s as if
her particular brand of intelligent, literary, visceral rock and roll has aged
with such formidable significance and dignity that what was once periphery has
now become central to the post millennial, post collapse-of-the-music-industry,
post rock-as-cultural-force, post rock-is-dead musical landscape (this same
observation may also be applied to the work of Nick Cave). I am not certain why
this is, but I think it is a worthwhile discussion to cultivate.
