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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As near as I can tell, here is probably what happened:  Flying Lotus, holed up in his L.A. apartment with a spare weekend alone with his newly invented time machine, chrono-hopped back to 1993 to kidnap a minor British popstar in training, a lanky woman whose voice oscillates between cutesy husk to breathy tease, and future-returned back to 2011 where he graciously explained how pop music has sorta not really changed in too many important ways in the past eighteen years and cajoled her into recording a song with him, nothing too serious, an infectious groover called, say, “You Know You Like It,” that would feature a chorus that could have easily come from a Cece Peniston throwaway and a miraculously bassy beat whose only real interest is a good time, and then he filed away the masters on his private SoundCloud (a concept he also patiently explained to her) and sent her back to flat in Camden Town in time for her to pick up the brand new Ace of Base.  Or, you know, something pretty close to all that.

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But seriously, Perfume Genius needs to come with a warning label.  Let’s not worry about schlock hip hop lyrics or coy radio-friendly puns.  A revivalist PMRC needs to petition Matador to warn consumers that overexposure to Mike Hadreas’ woeful breathtakers is likely to leave one with something to a life hangover.  Hadreas’ latest tender depressive is “All Waters,” a fragile downer that, as Matador freely admists, is “a gorgeous soundtrack for anyone trying to keep it together in everyday life.”  The song’s lyrics are either bravely tenderhearted (everything will be beautiful when I learn to love you) or painfully bleak (learning to love you is conditional upon the impossible):

When all waters still
And flowers cover the earth,
When no tree’s shivering
And the dust settles in the desert,

When I can take your hand
On any crowded street
And hold you close to me
With no hesitating.

Because if these lyrics are as bleak as I think they are, then how the fuck does Matador suggest you keep it together after this wrist-slitter?  Just how are you supposed to find the internal motivation to actually get out of bed or shower or shave or climb on the subway or sit at your desk for a full work day or brave another commute home or visit with friends or hold hands with your lover or hope for anything more than for the pain to stop?

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Inconceivably, full-throated chanteuse Anna Calvi has made TV on the Radio’s erotically-charged  ”Wolf Like Me“ even sexier.  By slowing down the race to get each other’s pants off, Calvi recasts the song as a slow grind of metallic shudders and squealing feedback.  The song is no longer a bawdy hunt for a body in the dark; it’s a carnal feast on one another’s bodies.  And when she reaches the song’s climax with its most lascivious couplet—”Down on all fours/Show me what all this howling is for”—she unleashes a brutishly suggestive churn of lecherous blues.