Albums of 2011
Dec. 14th, 2011 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllYes, well. Not a vintage year, was it? I've only got a Top 20, which I think is the least since I started doing these. On the plus side, that means it's feasible to write a little bit about *why* each album is ace, something I never really had time for before.
20. Up The Workers! Or: Capitalism Is Good For Corporations, That's Why You've Been Told Socialism Is Bad All Your Life - Thee Faction
Second best album title of the year, after Voltaire's Riding a Black Unicorn Down the Side of An Erupting Volcano While Drinking from a Chalice Filled with the Laughter of Small Children (which wasn't actually much cop). Like Keith Top of the Pops or Gyratory System, I don't think Thee Faction will ever quite be able to capture the full live magic on record. But a footstomping rhythm'n'blues band using an outlandish backstory as a starting point from which to complain about the absurd bind in which unrestrained corporate feudalism has landed us? If nothing else, they timed it perfectly.
19. Seafieldroad
Andrew from Swimmer One's second solo piano album, made around his wedding, and so somewhat more focused in subject than his first. Which, given how wide-ranging his lyrics usually are, is a slight problem for me. Still, eight beautiful songs about love on dramatic Scottish coastlines; I can find a place for that.
18. Brilliant! Tragic! - Art Brut
At first, I only really liked the gorgeous 'Sealand', which closes the album with a dream of leaving to rival the Divine Comedy's 'If I Were You'. But living with it for a while, I realised that though this was more of an Art Brut album than before, less Eddie working out his own obsessions with the assistance of a backing band...well, Art Brut are a good band, so that's not really such a problem, is it?
17. 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early '80s - Luke Haines
It wasn't easy to get into this one, because I was born just a little too late to get the reference points - but Haines' ever-more-perverse pursuit of obscurity deserves some applause in itself. And let's face it, the man could spit his was through the telephone directory for Ljubljana and make it sound like a searing indictment of modern society, he's just got one of those voices.
16. The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales
Spiralling ever further into a self-referential hall of mirrors has never sounded so icily magnificent. "I said I was a musical genius, I repeated it 'til it became meaningless, because you assumed I was joking, and then you thought about it, like, he's not joking."
15. England Keep My Bones - Frank Turner
So far as I'm aware, this is a singer-songwriter from a folk/punk background, and he's made a state-of-the-nation album. Should be ball-witheringly dire, right? And yet I hear something amazing, heartfelt yet not crass, much akin to the record about which other people seem to be talking when they rave about that dreary PJ Harvey offering.
14. The Rip Tide - Beirut
Beirut's music always makes me think of a place, perhaps Paris, but if so it's Paris as was, or Miyazaki's dream of Paris, not the ossified heritage/Euston Road dump which replaced it in our fallen world. And normally the Spring sun is shining there, but on The Rip Tide, especially on the paralysingly lovely 'Goshen', I think it's later in the day than usual.
13. C'mon - Low
This might well be one of those cases of a band making the same album again, and it thus being rather surplus to requirements in spite of being good when considered in isolation (see: Tom Waits; The Twilight Singers; Mogwai), but I don't know Low as well as I ought, so I just hear something monumentally heartsore and weary, and am saddened but impressed.
12. The Pleasures of Self Destruction - Babybird
There were the years of bedroom experimentalism, and then the brief and boozy romance with fickle Fame, ending inevitably in a messy break-up. And now Stephen Jones gives the impression of being back in his bedroom, older and wiser if by 'wiser' you mean 'even more disillusioned', and discontentedly stuck in a rut of making songs about discontented lives stuck in ruts. That's not a criticism.
11. 90 Bisodol (Crimond) - Half Man Half Biscuit
Taylor Parkes wrote a massive essay for The Quietus on the band in general and this album in particular, which I'm never going to rival ina couple of lines. In brief: anyone who dismisses them as a comedy band doesn't really understand the uses of comedy, which in turn makes me wonder what they do understand.
(Singles of the year, you say? I barely even know what's a single anymore except via them having videos, and now Gaga's off the boil, it's not too hotly-fought a competition. Still, even if it had been, Nicki Minaj's 'Super Bass' would probably have walked it. Or, more to the point sauntered it. Anyway - on with the Top 10!)
10. Coventry - The Vichy Government
And so farewell to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cappuccino_kid and the irascible Mr Chilton. The last of their suicide notes came in two versions; both dripped with the usual disgust both for the crappy world the Powers That Be have left us, and the pathetic teenage idiocies of the self-described rebels who think to overthrow it. Lightening the tone ever so slightly - ie, from fuligin to merely black - there's also a cover of 'All the Young Dudes' which ought to be on the sex offenders' register.
9. Everything's Getting Older - Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat
As rock, or pop, or whatever you want to call it, continues - like everything else, including each of us - to exist for longer each day than it ever has before, some of its more established practitioners embarrassingly attempt to pretend nothing has changed. Others simply become extremely boring. But a very few know that entropy, like any other topic, can itself become the fuel for art.
8. Cinderella's Eyes - Nicola Roberts
The best member of our last great pop group reminds us how pop, as a genre, can encompass whatever it damn well wants and still be dancefloor catnip. It doesn't sell half as well as Cheryl Cole's single-female-Coldplay beige bilge. Sometimes, hating the public is really easy. Though Nicola really should have included 'Disco Blisters and a Comedown' on here.
7. Travels in the Dustland - The Walkabouts
This album makes me want to get a cowboy hat, move to the edge of a desert, and stare enigmatically into the distance, desolate over something which can never quite be spoken aloud. Then I remember that it's a lot better to listen to that life than live it.
6. The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years - The Wild Swans
Comeback albums by bands I loved have tended to disappoint of late - in particular, the less said about Magazine's, the better. But this, by a band whose original stuff I didn't really know and still haven't especially got into, this was something special, wise and British and wry. Though I'm still embarrassed I spent a month or two thinking the title of the best track, 'English Electric Lightning', was tautologous.
5. Valhalla Dancehall - British Sea Power
Not every track on this is a classic - but as with the album above it, even the less showy songs are perfect background for the rest. And while BSP may still be staring at the surf and the stars (and who'd want them any other way?), they're also one of the many, many bands giving the lie to all those lazy morons who bemoan the supposed lack of political pop - "Everything around you's being sold!"
4. The English Riviera - Metronomy
You know the infinite sadness of summer's evenings as they fade towards night - or is that just me? Multiply that by the intrinsic melancholy of the quieter towns of the English coastline, and you get this. I never cared about Metronomy before - they seemed to be Hoxton beeps for young arseholes. Whether they will ever make another record like this, I don't know. But just this once, wow. So good even other Album of the Year lists appear to have noticed it.
3. 50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush
I think this may be the best thing she's done since Hounds of Love, and given that's one of the best albums by anyone ever...yes, well. At first this felt like a brilliant folly - in particular, I couldn't really process Elton John as the Hawkman-style eternally-recurring lover, hearing only Celebrity Poof Elton John. But now, even he fits into the beautiful snowy landscape of it all.
2. David Koresh Superstar - The Indelicates
And not just because I'm on it. Although I am, which still amazes me. The best band in Britain - plus Vessel, Jeays and Jim Bob from Carter - take on musicals, messiahs and the military-industrial complex, and get me accidentally singing along with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in public. Thank heavens few Britons have heard of The Turner Diaries.
1. Operation: Fascination - H Bird
Like finding an old love letter - and has it really been five years? Right back to the Summer of H Bird, every time, but even without its halo of nostalgia, this would be a gorgeous, melancholy string of synthpop fairy-lights.
20. Up The Workers! Or: Capitalism Is Good For Corporations, That's Why You've Been Told Socialism Is Bad All Your Life - Thee Faction
Second best album title of the year, after Voltaire's Riding a Black Unicorn Down the Side of An Erupting Volcano While Drinking from a Chalice Filled with the Laughter of Small Children (which wasn't actually much cop). Like Keith Top of the Pops or Gyratory System, I don't think Thee Faction will ever quite be able to capture the full live magic on record. But a footstomping rhythm'n'blues band using an outlandish backstory as a starting point from which to complain about the absurd bind in which unrestrained corporate feudalism has landed us? If nothing else, they timed it perfectly.
19. Seafieldroad
Andrew from Swimmer One's second solo piano album, made around his wedding, and so somewhat more focused in subject than his first. Which, given how wide-ranging his lyrics usually are, is a slight problem for me. Still, eight beautiful songs about love on dramatic Scottish coastlines; I can find a place for that.
18. Brilliant! Tragic! - Art Brut
At first, I only really liked the gorgeous 'Sealand', which closes the album with a dream of leaving to rival the Divine Comedy's 'If I Were You'. But living with it for a while, I realised that though this was more of an Art Brut album than before, less Eddie working out his own obsessions with the assistance of a backing band...well, Art Brut are a good band, so that's not really such a problem, is it?
17. 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early '80s - Luke Haines
It wasn't easy to get into this one, because I was born just a little too late to get the reference points - but Haines' ever-more-perverse pursuit of obscurity deserves some applause in itself. And let's face it, the man could spit his was through the telephone directory for Ljubljana and make it sound like a searing indictment of modern society, he's just got one of those voices.
16. The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales
Spiralling ever further into a self-referential hall of mirrors has never sounded so icily magnificent. "I said I was a musical genius, I repeated it 'til it became meaningless, because you assumed I was joking, and then you thought about it, like, he's not joking."
15. England Keep My Bones - Frank Turner
So far as I'm aware, this is a singer-songwriter from a folk/punk background, and he's made a state-of-the-nation album. Should be ball-witheringly dire, right? And yet I hear something amazing, heartfelt yet not crass, much akin to the record about which other people seem to be talking when they rave about that dreary PJ Harvey offering.
14. The Rip Tide - Beirut
Beirut's music always makes me think of a place, perhaps Paris, but if so it's Paris as was, or Miyazaki's dream of Paris, not the ossified heritage/Euston Road dump which replaced it in our fallen world. And normally the Spring sun is shining there, but on The Rip Tide, especially on the paralysingly lovely 'Goshen', I think it's later in the day than usual.
13. C'mon - Low
This might well be one of those cases of a band making the same album again, and it thus being rather surplus to requirements in spite of being good when considered in isolation (see: Tom Waits; The Twilight Singers; Mogwai), but I don't know Low as well as I ought, so I just hear something monumentally heartsore and weary, and am saddened but impressed.
12. The Pleasures of Self Destruction - Babybird
There were the years of bedroom experimentalism, and then the brief and boozy romance with fickle Fame, ending inevitably in a messy break-up. And now Stephen Jones gives the impression of being back in his bedroom, older and wiser if by 'wiser' you mean 'even more disillusioned', and discontentedly stuck in a rut of making songs about discontented lives stuck in ruts. That's not a criticism.
11. 90 Bisodol (Crimond) - Half Man Half Biscuit
Taylor Parkes wrote a massive essay for The Quietus on the band in general and this album in particular, which I'm never going to rival ina couple of lines. In brief: anyone who dismisses them as a comedy band doesn't really understand the uses of comedy, which in turn makes me wonder what they do understand.
(Singles of the year, you say? I barely even know what's a single anymore except via them having videos, and now Gaga's off the boil, it's not too hotly-fought a competition. Still, even if it had been, Nicki Minaj's 'Super Bass' would probably have walked it. Or, more to the point sauntered it. Anyway - on with the Top 10!)
10. Coventry - The Vichy Government
And so farewell to
cappuccino_kid and the irascible Mr Chilton. The last of their suicide notes came in two versions; both dripped with the usual disgust both for the crappy world the Powers That Be have left us, and the pathetic teenage idiocies of the self-described rebels who think to overthrow it. Lightening the tone ever so slightly - ie, from fuligin to merely black - there's also a cover of 'All the Young Dudes' which ought to be on the sex offenders' register.9. Everything's Getting Older - Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat
As rock, or pop, or whatever you want to call it, continues - like everything else, including each of us - to exist for longer each day than it ever has before, some of its more established practitioners embarrassingly attempt to pretend nothing has changed. Others simply become extremely boring. But a very few know that entropy, like any other topic, can itself become the fuel for art.
8. Cinderella's Eyes - Nicola Roberts
The best member of our last great pop group reminds us how pop, as a genre, can encompass whatever it damn well wants and still be dancefloor catnip. It doesn't sell half as well as Cheryl Cole's single-female-Coldplay beige bilge. Sometimes, hating the public is really easy. Though Nicola really should have included 'Disco Blisters and a Comedown' on here.
7. Travels in the Dustland - The Walkabouts
This album makes me want to get a cowboy hat, move to the edge of a desert, and stare enigmatically into the distance, desolate over something which can never quite be spoken aloud. Then I remember that it's a lot better to listen to that life than live it.
6. The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years - The Wild Swans
Comeback albums by bands I loved have tended to disappoint of late - in particular, the less said about Magazine's, the better. But this, by a band whose original stuff I didn't really know and still haven't especially got into, this was something special, wise and British and wry. Though I'm still embarrassed I spent a month or two thinking the title of the best track, 'English Electric Lightning', was tautologous.
5. Valhalla Dancehall - British Sea Power
Not every track on this is a classic - but as with the album above it, even the less showy songs are perfect background for the rest. And while BSP may still be staring at the surf and the stars (and who'd want them any other way?), they're also one of the many, many bands giving the lie to all those lazy morons who bemoan the supposed lack of political pop - "Everything around you's being sold!"
4. The English Riviera - Metronomy
You know the infinite sadness of summer's evenings as they fade towards night - or is that just me? Multiply that by the intrinsic melancholy of the quieter towns of the English coastline, and you get this. I never cared about Metronomy before - they seemed to be Hoxton beeps for young arseholes. Whether they will ever make another record like this, I don't know. But just this once, wow. So good even other Album of the Year lists appear to have noticed it.
3. 50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush
I think this may be the best thing she's done since Hounds of Love, and given that's one of the best albums by anyone ever...yes, well. At first this felt like a brilliant folly - in particular, I couldn't really process Elton John as the Hawkman-style eternally-recurring lover, hearing only Celebrity Poof Elton John. But now, even he fits into the beautiful snowy landscape of it all.
2. David Koresh Superstar - The Indelicates
And not just because I'm on it. Although I am, which still amazes me. The best band in Britain - plus Vessel, Jeays and Jim Bob from Carter - take on musicals, messiahs and the military-industrial complex, and get me accidentally singing along with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in public. Thank heavens few Britons have heard of The Turner Diaries.
1. Operation: Fascination - H Bird
Like finding an old love letter - and has it really been five years? Right back to the Summer of H Bird, every time, but even without its halo of nostalgia, this would be a gorgeous, melancholy string of synthpop fairy-lights.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
not a vintage year?
Date: 2011-12-14 10:31 am (UTC)From your list I second HMHB, Art Brut and Metronomy. And probably Thee Faction although I've not heard it all the way through yet. And I've not heard the Kate Bush one at all yet! & indeed lots of others you mention. But I will, & will release my "best of" after the new year. I have to cos I'm saving KB and The Fall for Christmas...
Re: not a vintage year?
Date: 2011-12-14 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 12:40 pm (UTC)I do love that Metronomy album though- I hadn't really paid attention to them until I saw them at Wireless in the summer, when I realised that I had clearly been missing out!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 05:12 pm (UTC)I can't picture Metronomy live, except maybe in a seaside bar at sunset.
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Date: 2011-12-14 05:57 pm (UTC)I'm not even going to try and convince Adam to listen to more babybird- if you want to have that argument feel free, but I've been there too many times to want to try again! Once he thinks he hates a band, it's pretty tough to convince him otherwise...
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Date: 2011-12-14 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 10:42 pm (UTC)I have, yes, and I still hate them.
Anyway, interesting list - and even more interesting that our only crossover (my list is now on LJ too) is Frank Turner. I wasn't expecting that.
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