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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Various Artists Brand New Wayo: Funk, Fast Times, & Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979-1983 // When I was a teenager, I always admired the kind of people who cherished lovingly curated compilations of the music of obscure movements or time periods or exotic locations.  But the unfortunate reality is that reissue sets are prohibitively expensive.  Thankfully, I have a totally awesome girlfriend who bought me a copy of Soul Jazz’s latest compilation of Nigerian Boogie.  With the recent Nigeria 70 and Nigeria Special anthologies, Nigerian Boogie is finding its moment in the relative spotlight.  While I can’t compare it to those previous compilations, I can say that the music that spans across Brand New Wayo‘s double LP is dizzyingly exciting Afro-funk of the highest order.  Flush with petrodollars, Nigeria evidently spent the late 70s and early 80s in rapt celebration of their newfound democracy (which would later sort of collapse with another military coup).  If Brand New Wayo is at all accurate, then Nigeria in those years feels like a non-stop party of coke disco and speed funk.  And the best of the anthology mixes funk and disco and afrobeat into an intoxicating brew.  There’s Oby Onyioha’s incomparably lovely “I Want to Feel Your Love,” an insidiously catchy number that wouldn’t have been out of place in Studio 54 in 1978.  Then there’s Mixed Grill’s afro-centric “A Brand New Wayo,” the only track that really recalls more familiar afrobeat of the 70s.  The twin highlights on the record, though, are Kris Okotie’s “Show Me Your Backside” and Dizzy Falola’s “Excuse Me Baby.”  These two lushly produced tracks sound like a cross between Fela Kuti and Stevie Wonder, as the wonderful liner notes point out.  All told, I don’t have the historical knowledge to speak about the relevancy of his exhibition, but I know music enough to understand that this is a superb collection of disco-funk for anyone in the market for playful horns and nasty synthesizers and deep grooves.  Rating: 8 / 10

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Fucked Up David Comes to Life // Let’s not pretend that there aren’t precedent’s for Fucked Up’s latest opus.  Both Double Nickels on the Dime and Zen Arcade are enormous records that need a significant investment before they start dolling out returns.  Still, David Comes to Life is a prohibitive record: prohibitively paced, prohibitively dense, prohibitively aggressive, prohibitively sentimental.  But considering that it’s the most ambitious punk record in a generation (or two), David Comes to Life is certainly not prohibitively enjoyable.  Taken as a whole, the album is just too dense to truly enjoy as a long player, especially when you consider that the band are telling a complicated, surreal love story about a pair of Thatcher-era factory workers in love with each other.  But outside of the byzantine narrative, David Comes to Life features some impressive punk songcraft.  The album begins with an unbelievable string of excellent songs: “Queen of Hearts,” “Under My Nose,” “The Other Shoe,” three of the best songs on the whole record.  Getting to the end of record may be difficult (especially after playing the first quarter on repeat), but the album rewards patience.  ”Lights Go Up,” the record’s closer, is a real barn-burner.  Well, they’re all barn-burners.  David Comes to Life is a fantastically loud record that never flags or wavers; it never loses steam or sacrifices its quality.  While the narrative aspect of the album may be its most frustrating feature, David Comes to Life thankfully doesn’t depend on its appreciation.  If you’re up for 80 minutes of scorched-earth power punk, then this record is an embarrassment of punk riches.  Rating: 8 / 10

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Clams Casino Rainforest // No longer content with the breathless cooing of Imogen Heap, Mike Volpe’s appropriations of hauntingly beautiful samples now extend to the cinematic.  The first video for Rainforest is a selection of hauntingly beautiful tracking shots from Werner Herzog’s tropical mindfuck Aguirre the Wrath of God. The combination of Volpe’s sounds and Herzog’s images is more than appropriate because both men seem to be concerned with local stories that seem to have sweeping, celestial import.  Rainforest is an EP that feels both incredibly small and incredibly large, telescoping between the two with effortless ease.  This paradox at the heart of Clams Casino’s music is the exact feature that makes Volpe one of the more interesting beatmeisters of recent memory.  The closing track, “Gorilla,” best exemplifies this paradox of size and scope.  When locked into a quietly lush groove of dense bass and hushed strings, its cruising the through the starry firmament of cymbal crashes and aching vocal samples.  Elsewhere, as on the breathtaking “Natural” or “Waterfalls,” Volpe aims for the slow burn of a blooming, flowery synths and ghosted vocals, finding the cooler regions of ambient that Enya has yet to discover.  While Clams Casino’s previous release, the excellent Instrumentals, was largely taken from beats he crafted for others, Rainforest features five tracks that exist in and of themselves.  This represents a significant step forward for Volpe because it further establishes his own voice outside of the marketplace of beats.  Rating: 7.5 / 10

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Beat makers without rappers are like directors without actors.  They don’t make products; they make theories.  And in this case, the man behind Clams Casino is auteur whose theoretical pictures are some of the most intriguing pictures playing in the art house of your mind.  The first view into his forthcoming Rainforest EP, out in late June courtesy of Tri Angle, is “Gorilla,” a super sad ride through a wasteland of blasted cymbals and tumbling snares and menacing vocal samples pitch shifted beyond recognition.  What starts as a grim march soon gains some emotional liftoff thanks to those background strings.  By the end, the song takes on this strange quality whereby it’s both beset by gravity and wholly unmoored by it.  This is undoubtedly another exciting product from one of the most rewarding beat theoreticians working right now.

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For whom does the beat album beat?  Aspiring rappers looking for cheap rhythms?  Established rappers on the market for underground talent?  Homegrown beatmeisters looking for inspiration?  Prophetic heads looking to call a career early?

Beat albums have always seemed to me  to be more like catalogs hocking hip hop commodities than artistic documents.  Of course, plenty of artists transcend this commodified aspect of the business:  DJ Shadow, Madlib, J Dilla, Oh No, Pete Rock.  But look closely at that list: each of these artists fundamentally changed the way that a supportive beat could sound and what could be made with found sounds.  All great producers are all revolutionaries:  Shadow is a crate-digging intellectual, Madlib is a postmodern soul man, RZA is a hard-edged urban Morricone, Dr. Dre is a gangsta funkenstein.  It’s not hard to imagine Clams Casino’s debut beat record, Instrumental, joining the ranks of Endtroducing… and Donuts as a seminal record that broadened the palette of popular music because he brings something that is conspicuously absent from hip hop history: unabashed beatuy.

Of course, we all buy into the Keatsian definition of beauty as truth.  And in this respect, RZA’s gritty productions are beautiful, DJ Shadow’s kaleidoscopic breakbeats are beautiful.  Even Rubin’s thunderous rock-infused beats are beautiful.  But Clams Casino’s fragile instrumentals are conventionally beautiful; they’re unashamedly pretty.  While it’s not included on the album, Casino’s beat for Lil B’s “I’m God,” which mixes a breathy Imogen Heap sample with a muted, tumbling beat, is the most representative song he’s ever produced.  ”I’m God” throbs with an aching sadness that clutches at the bottom of your throat.  Though “I’m God” is sorely missed on the record, Casino has filled out the record with an embarrassment of riches.  ”Numb,” the only unreleased track on the record, is an obvious highlight because of lonesome billows of hazy vocal samples that buffet around the lurching beat.  Likewise, “Realist Alive” is nothing without the slow, plaintive Adele sample.  Casino’s source material is certainly surprising (Imogen Heap, Janelle Monae, Björk, Adele) but it’s not his only trick.  The translucent sheets of synths that blow in and out of the mix are frequently breathtaking, as they are on “Real Shit from a Real Nigga” and “Motivation.”  The end effect is a record shot through with an unspeakable kind of sadness, a loneliness that only a song can really capture.

But it’s not all somber hip hop ennui.  The skeletal “She’s Hot” is all handclaps and bass, and “Cold War” prepurposes Janelle Monae anthemic plea into something closer to a percussive element.  And then there’s “Brainwash by London,” a track that seems to borrow heavily from dubstep’s use of ruined synthesizers and blackout bass tones.  The instrumental isn’t upbeat necessarily, but it’s not as hip hop oriented as everything else, especially when the screaming maniac shows up halfway through the song.

As a beat record with its raps surgically removed, Instrumentals may seem like a near pointless exercise in self-promotion.  But without the intended rhymes accompanying these tracks, the listener is left with something akin, as my girlfriend pointed out, to the brilliant Garfield Minus Garfield.  While Soulja Boy or Lil B aren’t slinging around rhymes, the beats nonetheless create an existential drama that locates a kind of sad beauty in their lonely samples and their beats’ inexorable march forward.  The unashamed prettiness of much of this record feels like a sea change to me: Instrumentals isn’t concerned with cool credibility; it’s perfectly satisfied with moving something deep inside you.

Rating:  8 / 10