NO GENRE

Frying saxophone solos!  Synthesizers recreating lost sunny days!  Nihilistically lewd mixtapes inspiring dozens of new entries on Urban Dictionary!  Tricked-out dubstep for American mall rats!  The musical trends that defined much of 2011′s critically-lauded output were roundly ignored by my favorite records of the year.  The best albums of the year invented their own one-band microgenres.  EMA gave us California confessional poetry, while WU LYF reinvented protest punk for a generation without a cause.  Wolves in the Throne Room continued to hone their environmental black metal.  Das Racist refined their postmodern identity joke rap.  Peaking Lights invented Midwestern dub, and Matthew Herbert imagined such a thing as porcine house.  Colin Stetson’s Blood Meridian jazz was as refreshing as The Field’s glacial soul trance.  The Weeknd was a visionaire who fashioned a shockingly sleazy form of rohypnol R&B.  And then there was Björk doing her best Björk in years.  As always, the bands that conveniently forgot that a dominant aesthetic existed in both the mainstream and the underground produced the most rewarding albums.  Maybe this is more a reflection of personal taste, but 2011 seemed like a thrillingly strange year because it took me months to listen to anything that sat on top of the iTunes charts because I was so deeply enmeshed in an album of skronky avant-garde jazz.  As a relatively low-key year (compared to the beast that was 2010), 2011 favored a lot of these dark horses and long shots if you were willing to listen past the noise of the lomography revivalists and the bedroom mix-masters.

Photo Credit:  TheHutch

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Taking stock around New Years is for amateurs.  It takes real courage to look over your shoulder in the middle of the year.  The disappointments have already started to pile up, but so have the accomplishments.  The winners, the surprises, the sure bets, and the dark horses—they’re all present and accounted for here.  I arbitrarily capped myself at twenty albums, so there are some otherwise very good albums missing from the list: Raekwon, Africa Hitech, Egyptrixx, Ghost.  But what is here is, I think, the best that 2011 has to offer intrepid listeners.

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If you needed further proof that the universe is an actively cruel place that simply bides its time before cutting your life too short, then look no further than the case of Gil Scott-Heron’s last couple of years on earth.  Here is a man who reclaimed a lot of legitimate critical intrest after his prime: he wrote, recorded, and released an album that struck a chord with contemporary listeners.  Last year’s I’m New Here garnered Scott-Heron more attention than anything since his 1971 masterwork Pieces of a Man.  And, then, Scott-Heron teamed up with Jamie XX for an excellent remix record that is easily one of the best albums of the year.  And the bitch of it all is that Scott-Heron was more widely known and appreciated and revered now than at any time since the early 70s.  That is to say, though, that his early work with ghetto jazzoetry on records like Pieces of a Man and Small Talk at 125th and Lennox were also widely regraded for their confrontational social commentary.  While Scott-Heron spent his last decade in and out of prison for drug charges, he had successfully mounted a comeback effort in 2010 with I’m New Here.  And now all that work is left to be remembered by a wider audience than ever.  This is a key role in fandom that we’re rarely asked to perform: to keep someone’s career alive by passing them on to friends and loved ones.  While tracks like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Comment #1″ will probably not be forgotten, there’s no reason that fewer and fewer should hear something as great as “The Bottle.”  Scott-Heron’s death really only means that we have work to do.

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Earth Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I // Dylan Carson is a badass who makes badass records.  His first run of three albums (Earth 2, Phase 3, and Pentastar) were badass.  Then, he took a decade-long badass break (probably to be a more low-key badass) only to surprise everyone with a couple of totally badass records.  On the whole, Carson doesn’t have time for your concerns about conventional song structure or length.  And he clearly has no idea what’s happening in contemporary music because, let’s face it, this badass shit sounds out of place.  But that doesn’t mean that Carson is a stodgy old man out of touch with your hip drum machines or your cool vintage synthesizers.  No, Carson is making the music that brought about the Twilight of the Gods before history was recorded in known human language.  His work sounds more like myth than music.  Yeah, he’s a badass, like I told you.  Much like his badass return album, Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method, (Oh, I should have mentioned that his song and album titles are also badass), his latest release, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light is a dusty western guitar epic that blooms slowly over sixty minutes.  There are no real highlights to speak of because you have to consume the totality of Carson’s records to feel any impact.  And in that sense, Earth is a distinctly cinematic project: its panoramic portrait of a barren lanscape that thrums with unshaped menace.   Also, I’m going to call this one early: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light is the most badass album cover of the year.  Rating: 7.5 / 10

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Gil Scott Heron and Jamie XX We’re New Here // At the end of the day, Jaime Smith’s remix of Gil Scott Heron’s I’m New Here is pretty pointless.  The decision seems so arbitrary that it might actually be genius.  I would have expected the man who defined The XX’s singular sound to remix almost anyone else before revisiting an old man’s triumphant return to form.  Granted, I don’t know Scott Heron’s I’m New Here well enough to compare/contrast the remix with the original.  What I can say with confidence, though, is that Smith’s work both within and without The XX has been nothing short of revelatory (check out his awesome remix of Nosaj Thing’s “Fog“).  Seemingly everything he’s touched in the past year or two has been solid gold.  And he brings that Midas Touch to We’re New Here.  Smith dresses Scott Heron’s wonderfully poignant voice, which croaks and groans in all the right places, in slick duds that sparkle and glimmer.  The production on this record is a marvel.  The dynamic range is clearly defined by the three elements that are usually present in a given track: the terrifyingly deep low end, Scott Heron’s wizened voice riding in the mid range, and ringing synths shooting skyward.  The whole record plays like an exquisite mixtape that gains traction early, builds inexorable momentum, and crescendos within the last couple of minutes.  As such, there’s no real single highlight, though there are few tracks that standout a little bit more than the others. “NY is Killing Me,” “I’m New Here,” Running,” and “I’ll Take Care of You” are all particularly excellent.  For a remix record that no one really asked for, We’re New Here nonetheless defies expectations by being a lot better than it has to be.  Rating:  8 / 10

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Braids Native Speaker // If Animal Collective had never recorded Feels, then Braids’ debut album would be a brilliant revelation.  But considering that Feels does exist, Braids comes across as inoffensive acolytes who are measurably talented but perhaps short on original ideas.  But maybe this isn’t nearly the damning charge that it appears to be: Native Speaker is a thoroughly enjoyable record filled with adventurous tunes that create colorful, expansive environments that encourage you to roam and explore.  At its best, Braids borrows Feels’ jangley guitar figures and tribal drum patterns and weds them with the sweet-voiced Raphaelle Standell-Preston.  ”Lemonade” and “Glass Deers” take this motif and run it to its logical conclusion: hypnotic beats ground swirling guitars and synths while Standell-Preston yelps and coos and yowls.  In the end, it probably important to remember that most AC biters are creating awful reductive hypnogagic pop that sounds indistinguishable from one another.  At least Braids are liberally borrowing from Animal Collective’s best period.  Rating: 6 / 10

Demdike Stare Tryptych // Image a haunted house that isn’t so much scary as it is gloomy and you’ve envisioned something close to Demdike Stare’s mammoth triple-album Tryptych.  The record, which collects the pair’s trio of album-length EPs from last year (Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing, and Voices of Dust), is a sprawling complex of ghost-haunted hallways and ghoulish trapdoors and spooky ambient noises.  From the exorcism chorus of “Caged in Stammheim” to the dub-Arabia of “Desert Ascetic,” Tryptych is eager to unnerve you with eerie sounds.  Disembodied voices, icy gusts of wind, rattling chains, psychotic violins, deathly bass hits, distant samples from mysterious corners of the earth, the musical palate is grim but adventurous.  There are a lot of analogues to Demdike’s signature sound (Aphex Twin, moodier Autechre, obscure dub plates and horror movie soundtracks), but I’m not quite knowledgeable enough to point to specific influences.  I can say that the trio of records collected together is utterly haunting, though perhaps a lot much for most people.  If you’re feeling adventerous, you should head over to Modern Love’s website to stream the individual EPs.  Rating: 7 / 10