invisible thoughts

3. why should i wait for anyone else?

2012-02-12T19:01:00.000-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#3

Fleet Foxes "Helplessness Blues"

Squandered, all I might have given for love's sake. Leaked out through these wasted years of waiting, what I chose to spend it on instead seems so careless and ill-conceived. I poured water on dirt, never thinking how far this desert might stretch. I tossed my coins into a fountain, without realizing they might be the last to my name. I have this thing, quirk, whatever you want to call it... I guess I got it from my mother... where the more fun I should be having the more intense I get, the more important it is to me that everything be as perfect as what I've sketched out in my mind. It makes me miss the spontaneous beauty that exists beyond expectation. I've ruined more than a few albums by bands I love in this manner. The pressure you impose on yourself to make something feel special. Often my biggest blow-ups occur on my happiest days... trips, breakfasts, whatever. Those are strange memories because somehow they manage to contain in them everything, my best and my worst, as good as it was at the beginning and as bad as it got at the end. An emotional equilibrium, two sides of the same coin. I suppose there's an irony inherent in the idea that this is the thing that broke them. It should be the high point, Helplessness Blues, but the dedication and the sacrifice it took to make this record, Robin Pecknold's pushing, the passion and the frustration, the obsession he escaped into in order to be able to answer his success, made him unavailable, unable to be present for anyone else, let alone reciprocate a relationship. You have to choose where you put your heart. It's a currency you have to pay, one way or the other. He spent his focus here, on this incredible album, but it drove her away. I can imagine it seeming necessary, but I can't imagine it being worth it. And so again we see the best and worst bound together.

In "The Shrine/An Argument" our narrator comes to the same realization. Missing her, he makes a wish and throws his change into the fountain, but the glint of light off the coins becomes the searing morning sun as seen through the broken blinds of their apartment and suddenly we are back there, we don't know how, but we are back there. The glittering reflection of the pool becomes a cascade of moments in which he watches how it all slipped away, one fight, one silence, one missed phone call, one unanswered letter at a time. And so we see the reality is more complicated, and more profound, than the idea. Here is the truth, this album seems to say, now make the best of it. I had that backwards for a number of years. Part of why I love Robin as a songwriter is that he's never really dealt in traditional love song tropes. But I suppose if you asked him he'd say it's because until recently he never really had a relationship to write about. Instead his songs have been about more complex ideas, self-fulfillment, familial bonds, spiritual yearning. Helplessness Blues is not as simple as a break-up album, though heartbreak hangs heavy over it. The same way that their debut dealt with various forms of love, this new record deals with various forms of loss. If Fleet Foxes was about finding home, Helplessness Blues is about leaving it. The choices we have to make on our own, those sudden self-discoveries that terrify us and liberate us and leave us in an unknown land. The title track is not some maudlin self-sorry thing it is a wistful anthem of empowerment and responsibility fueled by the promise of what has already been and what, some day, might take its place. Helplessness Blues exists in a moment we all must come to at some point, of not knowing where to be, and of pushing bravely on alone.

MP3: The Plains/Bitter Dancer
VIDEO: Grown Ocean

20 11:
3. Fleet Foxes "Helplessness Blues"
4. Wye Oak "Civilian"
5. Radiohead "The King Of Limbs"
6. Wild Beasts "Smother"
7. Destroyer "Kaputt"
8. Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

4. you were never alone

2012-02-09T21:28:00.002-06:00

favorite albums 2011

#4

Wye Oak "Civilian"

We are such selfish things on the surface, love defies us. It runs against our most primal instincts, to care for someone else more than yourself. To fill your thoughts, your heart, your cares with those of another... to the rational world, giving yourself up like that doesn't make much sense. Love, real love, is in that regard a miracle. It is our highest aspiration, our most sacred act. Seen with such tender reverence, monogamy might be a source of tremendous spiritual power. The transformation of two things into one. Not subjugation, as many would see it, but sublimation. It is the choice to be more than merely yourself, the decision to count on and be counted on, to reach out for something you could not hold alone. Such profound intimacy is a very rare thing. A relationship as a holy rite, together we perform its rituals... stuck in traffic holding hands, running to the store for sinus medicine. These songs are its scriptures, Civilian is filled with the staggering beauty of love, the heart-shattering sickness of losing it, the strength it takes to be there for someone and the strength it takes to still be there without them. We must never forget to stand awestruck at what can happen between us. After all, remember the band responsible for this enormous album and all its revelations, its darkness and light and murky in-between... all these sounds are the result of just two people. Wye Oak are a duo.

Awake in nightly woe, every day is just the same. They still share a bed, but it doesn't mean anything anymore. He's like the baby teeth she keeps in her bedside table, a relic of the past she has long outgrown. "I wanted to give you everything..." Jenn's voice carries such weight. "I wanted to love you like my mother's mother's mother did." And then, mumbling, an almost sigh, a thought half-formed... she calls him civilian. The album takes his name, it traces how this happened, from being unable to imagine a world apart from one another to day-by-day slipping loose, the bonds too heavy now to bear, drifting further and further, one back into two, until one morning she wakes and doesn't recognize him... a bystander in her life, no fuzzy feelings, no meaningful conversations, no real connection, a separate party. Civilian. Of course it goes wrong, how could it not. Alone is the natural order of things, it's a lot easier anyway. But still, you miss the miracle. I guess it's fitting the image I have of your long drive back home, alone in the dark with your thoughts and this record. Doubt killed us. I never should have let it in. I never should have let it talk us down. But I don't think this is a break up record, I think it is a testament to all of it, good and not so good. After a while you look back and you don't really remember the difficulties, your memory is full of all that wonder you felt. I think that tells us which part was stronger, what to put our faith in. It erases all the doubt. As the roar of Jenn's guitar rises over the din of everyday existence, you remember how good it felt to have yourself defied. I believed it then and I believe it still.

MP3: Civilian
VIDEO: Holy, Holy

20 11:
4. Wye Oak "Civilian"
5. Radiohead "The King Of Limbs"
6. Wild Beasts "Smother"
7. Destroyer "Kaputt"
8. Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

5. slowly, we unfurl

2012-02-06T23:13:00.008-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#5

Radiohead "The King Of Limbs"

"Obligation," he sings, stretching out every syllable for you to feel the weight of it, a single word holding the space most songwriters would reserve for a line. "Complication. Routines and schedules drug and kill you." In one sense "Little By Little" is a typical Yorkian love song: dark, perverse, obsessed. But like most everything Thom Yorke writes, it'll hold whatever meaning you put against it, his songs are prisms for you to shine through with whatever light you like. Could it also be about the death of love, would not another word for that be obligation? Could it be about the slow and steady way in which mundanity overtakes beauty? The way what's special gradually loses its shine? The way we force it, even when we know it's wrong but we just can't help running our tongue across the sore, the hole we dig ourselves deeper into with every word? It contains all those things, and more. I think it is also about Radiohead, their approach to what I guess we must call their craft, the strange space they occupy and the love that they inspire: dark, perverse, obsessed. They've always held their beauty out of mundanity's reach, resisted the obligations that come from being one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, the complications pursuant such success.

Radiohead make their albums unconventional and their releases an event, pushing expectation away entirely. Creatively and commercially this band does whatever it wants on its own unprecedented terms and somehow, despite the tonnage of ten million albums sold, they exist above it all, weightless. A band so carefully considered that they never seem to do anything that doesn't feel perfect, that doesn't seem to be exactly what they set out to do. And so we arrive at The King Of Limbs, it might have felt at first a thing too slight from the most important band in the world, but that seems to be exactly their point. The genius of this album is that it is not meant to be perfect, instead it is organic and loose and spontaneous and too short and too insignificant and lots of other things we think Radiohead isn't supposed to be. This is an album antithetical to all the things we might try to heap upon it. It is just itself. There is a lesson in that. We must rid ourselves of expectation, not just because that is the only way to guess at the otherwise inconceivable beauty and mystery that surrounds us, but because otherwise we'll never make it out alive. The King Of Limbs, this gangly ever-growing tangle of is-ness, understands by simply existing. It is an album of spindly, spidery sounds, moving sideways and in circles casting out its web. An album of open windows and closing doors and buckets with holes at the bottom. An album where an element rises to the surface for a moment then disappears, you might not even notice it, or after a year of listening you finally might. An album which takes the form of a chambered nautilus radiating out from the center, each repetition reaching further and further. An album of dudes who have played together so long they trust each other implicitly, and just want to see how far things can go. In other words another totally brilliant, utterly unique Radiohead album. That's all. Like the best parts of our lives, whatever you decide it's supposed to be, whatever you eventually convince yourself it is, there's more.

MP3: Little By Little
VIDEO: Bloom

20 11:
5. Radiohead "The King Of Limbs"
6. Wild Beasts "Smother"
7. Destroyer "Kaputt"
8. Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

6. dare we put our tongues to the flames?

2012-01-28T18:21:00.004-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#6

Wild Beasts "Smother"

Here they are, shedding, molting, immolating, burning, becoming something beyond themselves. Wild Beasts have been a band about the dance around desire's flames, moths draw to light, whirling dervishes, hedonistic mystics concerned with the crimes of passion. Here finally they give themselves over to the fire with the fervency of fanatics, desperate to prove themselves against death, to see what of them is worth saving, which part will prove strong enough to withstand it and what will have be reborn in ash. Love is a martyrdom. Love is a transfiguration. Fleshed and fleshless. Devoured and devouring. Known and unknowable. It is nothing for the weak willed or the faint of heart. You cannot blink, you cannot let go, it is your faith, your sense of grace that must guide you across everything explicit and everything unsaid, every past and future, ecstasy and horror, against every instinct inside you that tells you "too close!", that tells you to hurt, that tells you to run. Or else in that moment it is lost and as I write you I myself am unsure as to whether or not you can ever really get it back. Shivering below barren trees beaten by the rain, all that's left for me now is a flicker. I'm afraid. My burning footprints on the floor. The things I don't need anymore.

What an album, to have understood all this. To have been so cruelly left in that instant, end come too soon, executed there that earth and hour, and then knowing that if they ever want to escape that awful place they must find a way to open it all up again. Somehow they manage. Tom Fleming's three songs form an arc: he lays out breakfast waiting for her to wake, they spend day after day lost in each other, never even frightened as the world outside their door collapses and disappears, each is all the other needs. But then hole grows even larger, more important things begin to dissolve, goodbye to family and friend, ambition, livelihood, anything in the world that isn't her... and then finally the two of them begin to fade out too. Lines erased, left trapped in the blurred in-between, they lose sight of themselves completely. She just kept vanishing. Is it any surprise he was left behind? No. She did the thing he couldn't do. The last song finds him alone, dumbstruck and devastated, clutching at the empty air. What good is this world now? The song dissolves before he finds out. Hayden Thorpe's share of songs, as he surveys his own shortcomings and regrets, suggest an answer. His marvel of a voice projects immense beauty even in immense sadness, a hopefulness, that in our greatest losses come our greatest lessons, and that somehow it is through our longings that we come to understand ourselves. I wish I knew if that were true. But what I count on is this tear-jerking, wonder-working album to lift me on the days I feel the heaviest. I let it burn through every part of me, I let it destroy me, and then I let it go. A lot like love.

MP3: Loop The Loop
VIDEO: Bed Of Nails

20 11:
6. Wild Beasts "Smother"
7. Destroyer "Kaputt"
8. Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

7. i heard your record, it's alright

2012-01-23T22:35:00.000-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#7

Destroyer "Kaputt"

Dan Bejar has really done it this time. For the last ten years his genius has roamed a kind of willful obscurity, his work exists in a self-contained loop, the result of his increasingly insular conceit... making music about making music. His appeal was left largely to academics, his albums appreciated by those schooled well enough in context to appreciate when he zigs instead of zags. His music is filled with left turns and constant repetitions, always doubling back on itself, always at odds with success for the way it won't let you escape into the familiar pop fantasies. Instead it keeps breaking and calling the listener's attention back to form, shattering the false reality of song. You kind of always felt like the music of Destroyer, that is the surreal, half-formed background over which Bejar delivers his pop music manifestos, was just another part of the critique... it has to exist in a philosophical sense, but if at some point the guitar stopped strumming and you were left with just Bejar's words, it wouldn't change much of anything, thematically. Until now. Within the indie world for which he seems to hold so much contempt, Kaputt ended up as perhaps the most important sounding record of the year.

By adopting the unfashionable sonic excesses of the 1980's, this artist so determined to remain out of reach stumbled smack dab into the zeitgeist, the moment that the Pitchfork world finally came full circle, embracing everything it set out against all those years ago. Our twenties are turning into our thirties, as we speak the indie generation are kids turning into adults, settling down, coming to terms with soft rock and success. It's taken a while, but we again live in a world where you don't have to be ironic to love Hall & Oates, where Sade is suddenly an important influence again, where Avalon is just as sought after as Country Life. Its parodic blend of slick disco, new age electronics, and smooth jazz should almost be laughable... but as always Bejar isn't just giving you a saxphone solo, he's using it as cultural shorthand. He sees these elements as symbols, symbols which all the cheesy pop songs from our childhood have imbued with certain meanings, and it's atop that meaning that Bejar builds his own. These well-worn tropes now speak to us of fading glamor and decaying decadence, of growing older, of loss, of how easy it is to lose sight of simple pleasures, of how complicated things have become. Destroyer uses this sound exactly as it goes en vogue again, but for an artist so dedicated to unfashionable thing I hardly think that was premeditated. Then again, when has Dan Bejar ever not known exactly what he was doing? This is a man who has spent a decade pointing out the absurdities of style, that he is present at the precise moment the caste system of coolness comes crashing down can hardly be coincidence. But I guess that's the beauty of a Destroyer album, you never quite knowing how much of the joke you are in on.

MP3: Poor In Love
VIDEO: Kaputt

20 11:
7. Destroyer "Kaputt"
8. Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

8. i told you i was crazy

2012-01-23T22:34:00.004-06:00

favorite albums 2011

#8

Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"

They took away her guitar. It's perhaps the most obvious sign of Miranda Lambert's ascendancy into country music superstardom... now when she performs they stand her out front like a traditional vocals-only country diva and she has to find something to do with her hands besides play the guitar parts she wrote. A ballad was the thing that broke her, and ever since they've been working to soften her image as the hellraising country-rock firebrand. Maybe the marketing department is right, maybe it's too much, too challenging, too confrontational for such a conservative genre... but you can be damned sure nobody had the guts to say that to her face. She may be wearing the pretty dress now and covering her tattoos, but she still set the car on fire. It's the same tension that underlies "Mama's Broken Heart" where her mother pleads "hide your crazy and start acting like a lady" as if that could ever work for long. Instead Four The Record, not so much a revolution as a transition, tries to strike a balance between the baggage that comes from being the female face of country and her earlier outsider tendencies, all the things that made her such an original and important voice in the first place. Nashville has always ridden that line, between grit and gloss, tradition and rebellion, outlaw and professional, between your furthest dreams and your deepest roots. In that regard, there hasn't been a more important Nashville record in a very long time.

Four The Record is ostensibly her most ambitious record, even in the face of such massive success she refuses a formula, pushing herself and her sound even further, continuing to challenge the conceptions of what country music is capable of... or maybe most importantly what a woman is capable of. Ran has always stood in stark contrast to the role the women of country have been reduced to, waiting doe-eyed and dutiful for a cowboy to come save them. Miranda's females are much more complicated creatures, strong to the point of obstinacy, capable of anything a man can do (for good and ill), as a writer she shucks lovesick stereotypes for the sticky messes we sometimes find ourselves in. Dealing in tough choices and complicated emotions, focus groups be damned, that's exactly what the country audience needs, southern women need to know they aren't alone. It's a bit of tough-minded tradition that was lost somewhere among all those 80's ladies, but in these desperate times we needed it now more than ever. If I had to guess, I'd say that's why her music is resonating now. This, her fourth and most important album, is ultimately a soundtrack of self-fulfillment. Anthems for finding yourself, and for finding in you whatever it takes to move on. For many reasons, large and small, we needed that in this moment. Something we'd been missing for so long, in our music and in ourselves, and so we waited... just as sure as those burnt-brown plains out in Oklahoma wait for rain.

MP3: Dear Diamond
VIDEO: Mama's Broken Heart

20 11:
8. Miranda Lambert "Four The Record"
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

9. i cannot sleep, i cannot think, i cannot dream

2012-01-17T15:41:00.006-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#9

The Dodos "No Color"

I don't know how else to describe it except it seemed like all the color had drained from the world. Yeah, winter's bleak, but this wasn't just one dreary morning, it was a more gradual process... somewhere in my life I was leaking, somewhere in my heart there was a hole. That slow seep of feeling, to wake up lower in the tank than you were the night before, each day a little less bright, everything a little more the same, until finally one morning there's nothing left. When it happens, sputtering out on the side of the road somewhere, really you hardly even notice it. You go to your favorite places, you can't remember why. Nothing has a taste, nothing matters anymore. Spring isn't supposed to feel that cold. The Dodos have seen this black and white world too, how else could you make a record like No Color? For me this album was an alarm bell, one of the most important things in my year, its pounding drums the only thing able to pierce that dark place I was in. Listen to them, these drums, they're sounding out an S.O.S. (yes, that's right, these drums know Morse code). You had it all! You had it all! You had it all! You threw it!

No Color feels like like a ragged mess, but really it's a marvel of construction, each note earned and in its perfect place. A delicate ballet across a tightrope, a dizzying dance along the edge of a cliff, the Dodos play from the bottom of a sinking ship. Logan sounds out the warning on his drum rims, faint at first, Meric furiously finger-picking... until one by one the bulkheads burst and they're singing spitting out sea water, chins up, lungs full, waves rising around their throats. It takes you by surprise, hold on as tight as you can. Urgent, desperate, raging, then turning tender and heartfelt in an instant. So sharp, so well honed is this sound and they don't hesitate to drive it in deep. It hits like an icepick to the chest, no matter how frozen over you may feel, this will unthaw you. The incessant drums chip-chip-chip-chipping away until you've finally been loosed, but by the time this cursed wall comes down, you might be surprised to find the other side empty. The album ends with the thought of her on some spring afternoon, skipping down the stairwell, ducking work early, out to enjoy the sunshine. She's smiling again. That's what all this was for, it has to be. You gave her your colors. And as miserable as your life may have become, it's okay in that moment, just to know she made it out. You see her there in your mind and you want to shout for her. Run! Don't stop! Don't let your boss catch you! As this ship disappears beneath the dark, you can still hear it reverberating off the hull, echoing out through the deep, what's that pounding? It almost sounds like Morse code... G-O-O-D-B-Y-E.

MP3: When Will You Go
VIDEO: Good

20 11:
9. The Dodos "No Color"
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

10. someone to put this weight on

2012-01-14T01:04:00.005-06:00

favorite albums 2011

#10

Drake "Take Care"

There is a problem at the heart of this era, the era of bailout and too-big-to-fail, of class warfare and income inequality, the era of tea parties and occupations... we made a lot of money, but look what it cost us. It's been festering these last few years, these questions of spiritual emptiness and material excess. Who are we? What kind of a world exactly are we trying to build here? But this debate on the overtones of modern capitalism has never had so explicit a moment as this, I mean literally... January 13th 2012... with our morning papers and our evening news trying to make sense of South Carolina, where millionaires are attacking other millionaires over the nature of prosperity. Some of the brightest and best paid minds have been struggling for a way to make success seem sympathetic. Well, meet the prophet of the one percent. Heartbroken and alone, he sits on the cover of his already platinum new album cast as a modern day Midas, a man whose wildest wishes cost him everything he held close. I guess it's up to you whether you find that a compelling argument.

Wall Street isn't the only place being forced to reckon with the consequences of their own unregulated greed, the decades they've spent devouring the American Dream from the inside out... you see the same thing on any Martin Luther King Boulevard. Crack rock being the original toxic asset, and the same no-holds-barred hustler mentality having invaded just as insidiously. Hip Hop had become an increasingly small, insular voice since it was usurped by drug dealer attitudes, the role models of urban radio ruthlessly enforcing a bizarre value system more often than not full of false boasts, material obsession, and misogyny. I can't tell you how excited I am to tell you that era is over, it ends here and now, definitively, with Drake. Kanye, yes, Wayne, sure, but it's been Drake whose unparalleled success so thoroughly transformed the face of the culture. Turn on 101.1 and listen to the next five songs: you will hear four songs featuring Drake and one from some artist obviously inspired by him. And if his message was just that we need to take care, that our actions have consequences, that thoughtfulness and vulnerability are admirable qualities, that the insatiable drive towards success isn't all it's cracked up to be... it would be enough. But as it is that's not even nearly his most revolutionary aspect.

Drake is a study of dualities. Black, white. Toronto, Memphis. Gentile, Jew. Rapper, singer. Underground, mainstream. Tough guy, whimp. Lothario, loser. Confidence, doubt. Hard, soft. High, low. The trick is how he adds it all up, these contradictions and ambiguities of character, the parts of us we always seem so unable to reconcile, the things we're afraid to admit to ourselves. This is partly the reason he constantly confounds expectations, and what makes him one of our most dynamic pop stars. There's always another style to switch to. He can crank out hits, that's proven, but it doesn't seem to interest him (he inexplicably handed off one of the year's hottest tracks to DJ Khaled). Instead he's cashed in his cache on this, Take Care, such a sprawled out and messed up thing, a really weird album by a really weird pop star. I hesitate to call him that, on the one hand he is so ubiquitous, but I wonder at heart if he isn't just a confessional singer-songwriter, the first in his field. He's more concerned with telling his story, breathlessly relating his meteoric rise in real time. Albums are Drake's social media, he uses them as catalogs of relationships and collages of artistic inspiration. You'd be hard pressed to find an album that sounded more like 2011 than this one. Anyone who has ever been let go of instantly recognizes this world. The world of running on empty. The world of not enough. He finally sits at the top but has no one left to show it to. Instead, Drake doubles down against everything he's lost. The process of becoming. This rush, this push, this ride. With everything eroded out from underneath our feet, it feels like flying.

MP3: Shot For Me
VIDEO: Marvin's Room

20 11:
10. Drake "Take Care"

11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

11. life and love and nothing

2012-01-11T00:11:00.004-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#11

Future Islands "On The Water"

Do you think, in the end, it came down to one moment? Hidden somewhere in your past, the horizon line on which everything was hinged. Among all the silences and all the times you turned away, all the half-measures and second chances, everything that was her and everything that wasn't, was there some innocuous thing that served as a tipping point, the imperceptible grain of sand that meant the hourglass had more at the bottom than the top? One of them that if you could have changed it would have changed everything? And instead there you are, stuck in that step forever, dooming yourself over and over again, doing the wrong thing for all eternity. Just like that, all of it lost, everything changed, the world cracked right down the middle, what was once a single line now diverged, torn in two. This sick joke, this Twilight Zone twist. That would explain why even now none of this feels real, trudging up the stairs at the end of the day to absolutely nothing, taking off the tie you still can't keep straight and the shirt that doesn't quite fit, the clank of keys against the counter and the rattle of cat food in the dish and then that terrible silence which still doesn't seem like it belongs, the emptiness of it all the more apparent for once having held so much more.

Maybe there was a moment before how backwards everything became, screwed up and sideways, maybe that moment is still out there waiting for you to find a way to change it, maybe in some alternate reality you did, you said what you felt, you found a way to let her in, maybe she stayed, maybe you really took that trip to Savannah instead of just talking about it, maybe you sat in the sand together on Tybee Island and watched the tide and everything that was so confusing suddenly made sense again, maybe somewhere you're still happy. What would you have to build to get back there? What Tardis, what Invention of Morel? Really all you need is a record player. Future Islands have made a song cycle which seems trapped interminably between those two worlds, the one with her and the one without. And when I say "song cycle" I really mean it, this isn't so linear a thing as an album, it appears unstuck in time, the way people often seem across great distance. There is conflict, there is change, but there is no real resolution... like life. Whatever went wrong, you learn how to live with it. This is a circle, it's never really over, nor does it every really begin, it just ebbs and flows, all one thing. On The Water.

MP3: Close To None
VIDEO: Before The Bridge

20 11:
11. Future Islands "On The Water"
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

12. glowing in the dark

2012-01-06T21:28:00.010-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#12

Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"

Ten years. That's a pretty long time. How do you keep going, how do you keep growing? Ten years ago was my last year of high school, a lot of trying to figure out who I was going to be, coming home every afternoon and putting on Parachutes. They were such a simple thing then, we all were. Songs cool and clear, shining guitar lines lifting grey skies and bathing everything in golden light, a way of seeing the world for its beauty. When I listen to them now I get a little bit of that feeling back, I remember all the times confidence replaced confusion, when I knew exactly what to do and did it. Things made a sudden and natural sense then, uncertainty was just opportunity. A world which is and always has been one thing, the only thing it ever could have been. Each time I go back there, I feel it a little bit less, that shine dulls a little bit more. Ten years can be a pretty long time.

In between then and now, Coldplay have become the most popular band on the planet and virtually unrecognizable to themselves, I'd imagine, as they stand shaggy haired on the back cover of their debut. Headlining Glastonbury over the summer, they peppered Parachutes heavily among the new material, things they hadn't made a point of playing in forever. It's these two albums which would seem the most sonically disparate, but it is the shadow of album one that Mylo Xyloto seems so desperate to wrestle down. Perhaps they invoke it the same way I do, as a reminder, of a time before the weight of expectation and the baggage of a past, a place where they were the freest and thus the truest to themselves. The intervening years began to pile on complications. The towers fell and war broke out and hearts got broken and family passed and people drowned, children were born, countries and lovers fell apart. Some of us had more share than others. It seemed that world back at the start, the little yellow spinning globe, had grown so large as to be intractable, its unravelings and revolutions no longer possible to track. And so we have an album whose ringing piano notes seem to pick up as Parachutes fades out, trying to make sense of "Everything's Not Lost" in a world where almost everything has been.

They outgrew the gloomy Britpop of Travis and Elbow, they outgrew ad-friendly girlfriend bands like Train and Maroon 5, they even outgrew their heroes, the art rock ideologies of Radiohead and the arena rock idoldom of U2. A decade in, Coldplay find themselves in a pop landscape which has changed almost unrecognizably, battling for chart placement against the likes of Beyonce and Lady Gaga. Coldplay has sold more records over the last ten years than any of the acts I've mentioned. Their success inexplicable, their appeal intangible, there is something here that works even when it seems like it shouldn't. I think it has to do with their heart. This is clearly their "pop" album, but it still has the same spirit. Whatever old bands they've aped, whatever new styles they've absorbed, it's always been Coldplay. It's always had that same heart beating just beneath the surface. Even changed irrevocably, somehow still the same. That gentle little piano coda at the end of "Charlie Brown" says everything, hanging there, a reminder of everything that's lost. We don't get those days back again. And yet, under thick swirls of day-glo graffiti and the heavy stabs of house synth, it still shines. Ten years on that heart is still beating. This is where careers end, even for the best bands. You can only keep it in the air so long, that spinning globe. Yet somehow they just keep going. I don't think of Mylo Xyloto as a reinvention, it's more that they just never stopped inventing. But I suppose it's true, when you look at how far they've come this album from their first, Coldplay are not what they once were. Yet somehow as far apart as those two albums sound they are the most similar. They both capture a band at its freest and truest, a band ever becoming itself. However long it lasts or far it takes us, however different we appear or strange we sound, may we all find a way to do the same.

MP3: Princess of China
VIDEO: Charlie Brown

20 11:
12. Coldplay "Mylo Xyloto"
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

13. it was not so unwise

2011-12-27T22:20:00.003-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#13

Real Estate "Days"

There's something about this sound. Jangle pop, college rock, whatever you want to call it. It's such a simple thing, yet so affecting. It evokes an endless stream of sepia-toned Septembers, used text books and thrift store sweaters, golden light and piles of leaves. Instant nostalgia. It's uncomplicated, simple, slow, and sunny, even in its wistfulness it carries such innocence. Days is an album anathema to our age, Real Estate a band which just wasn't made for these times. I mean... it's 2011, are there even any honest-to-god guitar bands anymore? These days kids sit in their dorms with samplers and synths, everything is Pro Tools and iPods, lost it seems is the sacred art of jamming out. This speaks to easier times, hazy and unhurried, an album which must be a classic for the way it captures all those things we left behind and thought forgotten. It's nice to have them back, if only for a moment. To drift down rainy days aimless, meandering among the streets of your hometown, realizing how good you had it. How light it all felt. How easy it was to smile. Funny you never felt it at the time. And that's when you start to wonder, what's stopping you now? Mightn't you grow to feel the same way about all this some day?

There are certain things you want to remember. Turning down the last road home. The first day of summer break. The way Christmas smells. How she laughs. And yet, they go. No matter how hard you try to hold them. Feelings fade, such fleeting things, you end up shuffling around memories of memories of memories. Sometimes it's hard to see the point, it feels like a lot of opportunity squandered. Misspent youth, years adding up to nothing, just different apartments and favorite shirts that don't fit, lazy summers, idle winters, just waiting, all that waiting around for something to happen and you let it slip through your fingers. What was it worth? Well, it led you here didn't it? To this daydream Days, a gentle reminder of the way even the toughest things can fill with that lovely golden light. It's a gift, actually, to be back where it all started. To be younger than yesterday, to have the chance to begin again. You hop in the car and you drive, tracing the telephone lines, past the strip malls sprawl, down the interstate in dead of night. The ocean. Right where you left it. Throw something in, something she gave you. Give it back to the waves. Turn around and start again. You'll pass the places you used to go together, different now. Everything is. That's okay. They led you here. All those wasted miles. All those aimless drives through green aisles. Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise.

MP3: Out Of Tune
VIDEO: Green Aisles

20 11:
13. Real Estate "Days"
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

14. a flicker that bursts into flame

2011-12-20T20:24:00.003-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#14

My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"

If you've ever had the good fortune to see Shara Worden perform, as I have quite a bit over the years, you know just what an impression she makes. See her even once and she's impossible to forget. Somehow she has always seemed a thing apart. Maybe it's her background, trained as an opera singer, which gives her a power and a presence that her trad indie collaborators can't quite match. For her, just as in the opera world, singing IS performance. She carries that sense of theater inside her, as anyone who has seen skip to the front of the stage as the Forest Queen can attest. Her voice is strikingly nimble, yet any moment it may turn to unleash all hell... a hummingbird into a hurricane. We've never quite known what to do with her. She appears perpetually in a supporting capacity, among the times I've seen her: as an Illinoisemaker, the first time she ran through The Hazards Of Love, and most recently a one-off show opening up for The National in that great "jeweled egg." In Knoxville she was radiant (and by that I mean very pregnant), she spoke in whispers and told fairy tales, and it was there I first understood the stunning new direction she would be taking with her sound and that I would never see her opening up for anyone else ever again.

Why do we seem to need people so badly? Why do we only seem able to complete ourselves in someone else? We're told math is the universal language. Perhaps chemistry is closer to the truth... our existence informed by infinite interactions. The chemicals and charges that gave birth to this galaxy are the same that fire off when we kiss. The twinkle in the eye of an infant when it knows its mother's face is the same as a white dwarf going nova some place we'll never even know. The bond that forms between proton and electron every bit the same as the one that forms between mother and child. Since I saw her last, Shara moved to Detroit and had a baby. Suddenly the world made sense, she saw herself more clearly in the eyes of her child than she ever had before. Like Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life, she traces the origins of the cosmos up through human history to the events that led her here to this moment, the culmination of her life, the point of everything... the birth of her child. From such a perspective, all juxtaposition seems moot. Destruction and creation don't seem all that different, endings look an awful lot like beginnings from a certain height. These divisions start to lose their meaning, yet we still don't know what to make of her... unsure of how to listen to an album which isn't quite classical and isn't quite pop. She's never seemed to care, content to live forever in that moment of eternal interaction, a Higgs boson in the unending hymn of creation. She's a paradox, a thing apart. In someone else, she found her true self. By her example, we might too.

MP3: Escape Routes
VIDEO: Be Brave

20 11:
14. My Brightest Diamond "All Things Will Unwind"
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House Of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

15. bring your wonders to light

2011-12-16T09:23:00.002-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#15

The Horrors "Skying"

It sputters to life, drips from a dam about to burst. When it hits, it hits like the sky cracking open, the ground falling away from your feet. This thing is enormous, vast, almost frightening in scope... but so is every place you've never been before. And that's exactly what this is: a new plane. It borrows the visual aesthetic of an acid trip for a reason. Spheres swirling and interlocking, dissolving and glistening together in unimaginable kaleidoscopic harmony. Its songs feel endless, its production opulent, its pull rapturous. This is an album that seems impossible in our post-modern era. Students of psychedelia, The Horrors made the kind of record you don't really see anymore, a heavy and demanding thing, a real journey, something that seems always to be reaching beyond itself. They left everything behind, built a studio, stocked it with Creation records and krautrock, and made for themselves just exactly the kind of record they wanted to make. Tape-warped technicolor fantasia, sprawling sonic cathedrals crumbling into the sea. This is a band that has broken through itself, that has entirely removed the ceiling from its sound.

When they arrived several years ago, like some prepackaged boy band version of The Cramps, they failed to live up to hype or commercial expectation due in no so small part to the perception of production, how fake everything seemed. Behind these clever art college ciphers, there was nothing. The marvelous trick is how they took their inherent emptiness and flipped it, Zen-like, to be a reflection of whatever it touched, a vessel big enough to hold a river. Their translucence, their chameleon-like capacity for change suddenly became their biggest assets. A lot of great art has been made that way, in fact I really think that is the ultimate goal of the artist, to disappear completely. To not be found. That's why I do it anyway. To move beyond myself and touch something more. And the irony of all this is, after The Horrors stopped trying so hard, in breaking through, they literally broke through. Because in doing all that, in splitting themselves open, in doing the things they wanted to do, in making such a overwhelming and visionary statement, they finally obtained the mountains of praise and Top 5 sales they had been tipped for. I think that's a pretty important lesson not just for artists but for anyone. Dedicate yourself to becoming yourself, diving deep inside and pushing past boundaries and what was supposed to be possible, and all those other things you thought were so important might just come anyway. And when they do, when that dam finally bursts and floods your darkness with color and light, it will be more beautiful than you could have imagined.

MP3: You Said
VIDEO: Still Life

20 11:
15. The Horrors "Skying"
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House Of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

16. let the only sound be the overflow

2011-12-08T22:03:00.007-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#16

Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"

Florence Welch is the kind of woman that, a couple hundred years ago, we used to burn alive. Such is her strength, such is her beauty, such is her voice... that supernatural gift so alluring and unbeholden that it must have been sent by the Devil to lead men astray. It's this thing inside her which she cannot seem to control, only give release, writhing to the rhythm of these pounding pagan drums, lost in her ecstatic trance. These are songs of romantic possession, an album of exorcism, and some of the strangest music my mom has ever been into. It is an odd album, somewhere between anthemic Top 40 empowerment and the mournful occult obssessions of Witch House. These are not pop songs, they are ghost stories. It's an album filled with death, but also (appropriate for its Halloween release) with hauntings. The things that linger on after. It's weird how you still need them at first, I mean after they've gone. I gave her everything I could give, she left, what then does that leave me? Not a lot. She was how I made sense of things and so in a weird way I needed her now more than ever. I took one of her dresses from the closet, the shoes she forgot to take, the pillow that still smelled like her hair. And I lit them all on fire. A seance, a conjuration, waiting for spirits in the smoke. Imagine my surprise when I came face to face with the ghost of myself.

I woke up one morning and I realized I had died. Hard to say when, really. Who knows how long that night was, how long that dream had lasted. At some point while I was sleeping my soul just must have separated, it seemed to have disinterred itself entirely. My body wandered around, going through the motions, it drove to work, picked up dinner, watched its favorite programs and no longer looked around or wondered about anything at all, so tenuous was its grasp, just trying to keep its hold. But somewhere far away my spirit floated free, like Cathy's ghost across wind-swept moors and over sea-sprayed cliffs, searching for what it had lost. But I must own it. I drove this division, if I'm honest I staked this heart myself. That's where this album begins. Florence comes around lain against the floor, tears still hot, newly risen from the dead. The victim of some secret ceremony performed without her knowledge, they took whatever it was they needed of her and left. Her other half is out there somewhere, she can sense it. And she must find a way somehow to quench this thirst, to quell these demons, to reconcile the world she has with the one she's lost... because her heart is on that altar, her soul is at stake. Through fire and smoke she conjures it, with a sacred blade she begins to cut, bit by bit, her heart free from its cage. That's how this album ends. Moving from one world to the next. Finally, fatally, set free from yourself. I jumped, and in jumping I knew that my body may be broken against the rocks below but that other, better parts of me would finally be able to take flight. It was over in an instant, everything just went black. Total darkness. Then came light.

MP3: No Light, No Light
VIDEO: Shake It Out

20 11:
16. Florence & The Machine "Ceremonials"
17. The Weeknd "House Of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

17. i think i'm fucking gone

2011-12-06T09:32:00.010-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#17

The Weeknd "House Of Balloons"

You can really lose yourself in the city... so many wrong turns, so many places to hide. Out of thin air this appeared one cold Toronto night, like snow fluttering past street lights and then disappearing back into the dark. It is impossible to separate this music from its moment, the aura of mystery it came shrouded in, as if it were formed from winter and endless night, as if, drenched in decadence and depravity, it were the document of some kind of Eyes Wide Shut underground we were never supposed to find. It begins with an invitation: Open your hand, take a glass. That honeyed voice against the syrup-screwed synths feels like the only thing you can trust. Don't be scared, I'm right here. And so down the rabbit hole you tumble, your black and white life slurs suddenly into gray. Dark, beautiful, and achingly hollow... this numb nocturnal underworld where up is down and lost is found. Here nothing is as it seems, every deal is a deal with the devil. Hallucinations, out of the corner of your eye, flashing lights and shadows, women contorting into impossible shapes... wait... was that... her?

"This is a happy house," he sings over the Siouxsie sample, "we're happy here in our happy house." His voice, the desperation, the hurt, betrays everything. "Oh, this is fun." I'm not sure there is a single honest line in this album, the lyrics are a mix of R&B cliches and tough guy nonsense, the things you tell yourself to justify your actions, the lies we lay down with just to make it through the night. Running from the truth, that's how you ended up here. Blotting out everything, just looking for one moment where you don't feel like you're losing your grip. Or maybe deep down that's exactly what you what, to finally have the courage to let it all go. To feel that weightlessness again, you'll do anything to get it back, mix it with whatever, cut it too many times... anything it takes to make it to the morning, to that glorious, still-sedated moment after you wake up but before you remember she's gone. Gradually it returns, blurry memories of just how far gone you were in those last days. This happy house you tried to hold the roof from falling in on for so long. Truth is you left her long before she left you, you were sleeping with a stranger every night and you never even realized it. Maybe you'll find her out here somewhere, chasing it too, just as confused and just as compromised. As you stumble into the smoke-filled bathroom, a little dizzy but you're fine you just need some water, graffiti scrawled all over the mirror but... wait... is that... you? Gaunt, bleary-eyed, the person staring back at you is someone else entirely. And you realize, even if she was here, you two could pass each other on the street and not even know it, unable recognize each other anymore. It's time to go home. Back into the freezing night. Somebody ought to warn people: a city in winter is a dangerous place to be.

MP3: High For This
VIDEO: Glass Table Girls

20 11:
17. The Weeknd "House Of Balloons"
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

18. i can feel your heartbeat

2011-12-03T12:44:00.009-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#18

Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"

This doesn't feel like an album, this feels like an apocalypse. It comes, when it comes, from a distance. Over the hills there, through the black: flashes of light, low growls. You strain to see its shape. A brewing storm, you think at first. Louder. The lines of battle collapsing inch by bloody inch. Louder. The summoning of some ancient, unnameable beast. Louder. You run, if you think to run. You don't make it very far. It overtakes you in an instant, snatches you into the air, engulfs you, overwhelms you with its primal heavings until they become the rhythms of your own breath. That's when you recognize it. What's been pursuing, this creature that you're running from, the terrible thing that's been loosed... it's you. Monstrous, distorted, half-mad. But it's you. If it is a storm, then it is a hurricane of your own indecision. If it is a monster, then it is a dragon fed from your mistakes. If it is a battle, then it is a war against the worst parts of you. The conflict between your contrary natures, the past finally crashing down on you, the reckoning inside yourself.

Colin Stetson is a saxophonist. The bass saxophone he uses seems at least as large as he is. And what he builds out of that single instrument puts entire orchestras to shame... this complex and ever-shifting world of fire and flood and darkness and light. Everything he does, he does in one take... no overdubs, no loops, no extra parts. He accomplishes this with a myriad of microphones placed on various body parts and across the massive pipings and odd corners of his enormous instrument. You only get one shot at this, so every detail counts. He prepares himself like a gladiator, the process is intensely physical, but once he finally lifts the thing he just begins to breathe. Gradually, it builds. Through blood and spit and bits of lung, shreds of muscle and shards of bone, until there is no difference between the man and his instrument and the noise they are making. Watching him play, red-faced, howling, fighting for breath, bent beneath the enormous weight, it's a miracle he doesn't kill himself. He's literally tearing up his insides, purging it all, leaving nothing behind. It's excoriating. Whatever's left of him, as he finally sets the great thing down and tries very hard not to vomit, is strong enough to stand against anything.

Laurie Anderson narrates bits of the album, one scene in particular recounts how various people react to the Day of Judgment. There were those who didn't run, there were those who couldn't take it. There were those who laid their bodies down, there were those who took out knives. She rolls down the list with the dispassion of St. Peter watching the dead line the gates, separating wheat from chaff. This album is an apocalypse, an intensely personal one, in which a man puts himself on a scale and weighs everything he has. It's exhilarating and exhausting and you should probably prepare yourself... because your day is coming too, friend. It might be a wave of horses descending suddenly from the sky, it might not. However it happens, it's coming. The day when you finally catch up to yourself. The day when you find out once and for all what it is that hides in the deepest parts of you. Turn it up as loud as you can and Judges will give you a glimpse. At the end of it, your heart scoured and scalded, your soul whittled down to its most essential source, you can take solace in the fact that whatever pain follows this pain will be easy, and that whatever is left of you will be strong enough to stand against anything.

MP3: The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man
VIDEO: Awake On Foreign Shores/Judges

20 11:
18. Colin Stetson "New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges"
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

19. it's not a perfect plan

2011-12-02T21:35:00.006-06:00

favorite albums of 2011

#19

St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"

Annie Clark is a delicate thing, odds are if you passed her in the street... hair up, leather jacket, stooped over checking her phone... you might not even notice her. She sends a text and the door buzzes open, just like that she's gone. St. Vincent, her other form, is not so delicate. Annie might remind you of a bird, tiny and pretty and so seemingly fragile, but St. Vincent is pure phoenix: violent and gorgeous and constantly consuming itself from within, spilling out waves of flame in its wake. Her third album oddly feels at once more Annie and more St. Vincent than ever. Strange Mercy, this tender and terrible thing, is a catalog of a particularly tough period in Annie's life. The Year of the Tiger, she calls it, her champagne year. Annie Clark disappears when the door buzzes open. It's always the same. Up the stairs, off with the jacket, into bed. He pulls her in close, but she no longer feels a thing. Now it's up to St. Vincent to make sense of it all.

That's not a bed you want to wake up in. Nothing makes sense anymore, not that you have the strength to acknowledge that. By then you've turned looking the other way into an artform. You passed the dead end a while back, you just can't seem to stop. And even now there's danger in what you'd tell yourself, what you'd try to convince yourself of just to get some sleep. But this is an album that attempts to make sense of endings and expectations we find too impossible to bear. The tough decisions we can't quite force ourselves to make. How things never quite work out the way we want them to. The way things end... long before we ever realize it, long before we have the guts to call it. And then it's over. No surprise, no big production. It's funny how this feels. To have been set free. This gift that feels so wrong, this favor that hurts so much, this freedom that feels just like a jail. Strange mercy. I don't know, maybe it's because I never actually got the chance to hear the other side of things, but when I put this album on, I hear your voice. It says everything you didn't have the courage to. And I know it's all in my head but if this really were what you had to say to me, then I would just want you to know I'm sorry.

MP3: Neutered Fruit
VIDEO: Surgeon

20 11:
19. St. Vincent "Strange Mercy"
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

20. what would hova do?

2011-12-01T12:41:00.007-06:00

favorite albums 2011

#20

Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Screams and the clanging of steel, barricades burning, blood spilling over stone. Somewhere deep within these castle walls, a man waits. Soon the door will kick in and at last they will come for him. The end of everything, the fall of an empire… it begins innocently enough. “You’ve changed,” they’ll say, as if they haven’t, as if you don’t notice the way they look at you now, or the glances when they think your back is turned. Her voice on the phone, the subtle shift in tone, the added weight, at a certain point the pauses say more than the words. “Yeah, I’ll have to come see you…” She used to finish that thought. By then it’s already too late. Whatever you did, whatever you didn’t, they turn on you. Backstabbed and betrayed, bleeding out alone in that little room, shouts growing louder. Everything you built together is burning down around you while the people you trusted the most chase down everything you love and drive their swords in deep. That’s how it starts.

Imagine if they hadn't closed down his high school, if he hadn't started cooking crack in his grandmother's kitchen. Instead of performing at the Inaugural Ball, in a just world Shawn Carter would have been inaugurated. Any idiot can drop out of Harvard with an idea for a tech company. But to go from the Marcy housing projects to a 450 million dollar net worth... there is no longer any precedent for this man, no frame of reference, no accomplishment left to imagine. What, then, does it mean when midway through Watch The Throne he begins to count all the people he's lost along the way, ending "Sometimes I look to the sky and ask why I was born." That a man who has everything, who has succeeded against all odds and beyond all dreams, can feel that way about his life... what does that mean for the rest of us? Kanye's turn: "This is crazy God, just when I thought I had everything... I lost it all." This isn't just a rich man's ego trip. Kanye spent three summers alone in his mother's basement obsessively speeding up her old soul records, a few years later he's the driving force in pop music. The artist might have been ready, but the man wasn't. He fought with Presidents, had millions of people cursing him out, the world's most notorious asshole. He sent his mom to the L.A. good life, a strong black woman who lost sight of her values in the culture of celebrity and died from the complications of an elective cosmetic surgery. His fame cost him his mother, his mind, and the only girl he thought could understand him (now in the arms of some lanky-looking joke). People want the black card, but are they willing to accept the black heart that comes with it? That's something that the pastor don't preach, that's something that the teacher can't teach.

I think Kanye, having just painted his masterpiece at the expense of his sanity, needed Jay-Z, the only person in the world who had been there before, the only person who could talk him off the ledge. Just as Jay-Z, bitter and withdrawn after the civil war that separated him from his friends and left his record label in ruins, needed Kanye, the only person in the world with the creative power to push him to places he hadn't yet conquered. This ended up far from "THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD (TM)" I might have tried to bill it as. It's the aural equivalent of "planking on a million", setting up Otis Redding samples just to Superman stunt all over them. But it also stands as a document of the moral wilderness these men find themselves in, it captures the battle inside us between material and spiritual, all the excesses and hardships and longings and confusions America faces. We need heroes, maybe more than ever. Shawn. Kanye. Barack. LeBron. Dwayne. But maybe we need them so bad right now because some part of us needs to see them fail? The album's last line paraphrases Christ on the cross. That's fine, this album seems to say, let everything fall, let them come. Truth is, there's only one way to remove this crown.

MP3: Gotta Have It
VIDEO: Otis

20 11:
20. Jay-Z & Kanye West "Watch The Throne"

2011: The Year Swag Broke

2011-11-30T10:16:00.001-06:00

Just like that it's over, the best worst year of my life. I think if I tried to explain it all to you I'd fail. I'm not that good with words. But what I can try to do is give you the feelings, the bits and pieces of my year as reflected in the things I'm taking with me, my favorite music and movies and books of 2011. Some of you are new here, which excites me. Some of you have been loyal to this place for years and I can't tell you what it means to hear your thoughts and encouragements. But basically, for the uninitiated, here's how it works. Each day in December I will talk about something I love. If all goes according to plan (ha!) by the end of the month you'll have: twenty albums, ten movies, whatever I think of. It goes in order of a list but the numbers aren't as important as the story they tell together, what it all adds up to. Like life, right? This is where I come to be thankful for the things I've been given this year, the lessons I learned, to sort through them, take what I need, say goodbye to the rest, and then move on to whatever is next.

Thanks for being a part of it.