Top ten albums for 2011 with Leon

2011. A hell of a lot of great stuff came out this year, known and unknown, and I must admit I fucked up on the whole listening to everything released part. Regardless, I’ve compiled a list of my favourite ten albums of the year, in alphabetical order. Mostly it’s pretty obvious, but hey, that’s because they’re good. In any case, here’s to an even better 2012.

Top ten albums for 2011

 

Bon Iver – Bon Iver

For Emma, Forever Ago was such a brilliant work of music I figured his next album would be a sad or heroic attempt to recapture it. Thank God he got himself a band and reinvented his sound. This album doesn’t try to touch For Emma, and is made much stronger by that. It’s a wonderful piece of sonic beauty, and proves just how versatile and skilled Justin Vernon is at creating beauty. And I never got the uproar around Beth/Rest, it’s a great track.

Destroyer – Kaputt

This album is so chilled out. I can’t help loving it. Also it name-drops New Order. And has horns and saxophones in it. And deals with the question ‘what’s left for America?’ whilst raising more questions in the same vein. It’s not even a parody of those overly-smooth faux-jazz albums, this rises above that and becomes something much more powerful. Dan Bejar’s dark and wryly witty lyrics and relaxed delivery seal the deal for me here. This is a great album, listen to it.

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

I really didn’t want to like this album. I saw them in early 2010 or thereabouts (I can’t actually remember) and they really bored me. Subsequently, so did their first album. I was all set to hate on this one, when I discovered it was actually very much to my liking. It’s mature, questioning, intelligent, and actually very good. Luscious harmonies intertwine with melody and instrumentation to create great folky soundscapes, and Robin Pecknold seems to be going through a very early, laid-back midlife crisis, questioning who he is and why. It may be hard to get in to, but it’s worth it.

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

The first time I heard Let England Shake, incidentally the day it was released, I loved it. I’ve always thought that PJ was a great artist. But she’s managed to take the mantle of the anti-war movements and create something very English and very relevant, even though it’s mostly about the first World War. It’s a piece of art, this album, and is a guideline to the craft of songwriting. Harvey’s voice is hauntingly beautiful, and the England she evokes is as defiant as it is sad. This album certainly deserved to win the Mercury prize.

Paul Simon – So Beautiful Or So What

I love Paul Simon’s work, and I also loved Surprise, so I was very relieved when it was as good as I thought it would be. Interestingly, it seems to be missing form many of the ‘best of’ lists I’ve read in the past few days, and I don’t really know why. Simon hasn’t lost that beautiful soft voice of his, and his guitar-playing is as understated as it is virtuosic. Lyrically, Simon’s words verge further and further in to free-association poetry. It’s more often than not beautiful and moving.

Radiohead – The King Of Limbs

One of my good friends forced Radiohead on me a long time ago, and I’ve always resented the intrusion until now. This is, interestingly, my favourite Radiohead album. I absolutely adore Tom Yorke’s dubstep (I’m talking Burial and Mala here) influenced musings with the synthesizer, and his alien vocals flowing over the top. It’s an absorbing piece of work. I also like it’s length, clocking at 37 minutes it’s relatively short for a Radiohead album. It’s an album that breaks in to new territory for the band, even though one critic attacked it for being ‘to similar to In Rainbows’. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but there we go. New territory is what Radiohead do best.

Slam Dunk – The Shivers

This album is criminally underrated and unknown. For me, this album is the perfect mix of anarchic lo-fi grunge, and a life-affirming vitality that is incredibly catchy and stirring. This album really grabs you from start to finish, and at the end of the journey it’s a rather cathartic experience. Most of the time this album feels like the band are making it up as they go along. It was a very early release, but it’s a really great one.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me

I love Tom Waits. He’s probably second only to Bob Dylan on the songwriting front for me. I’d loved Real Gone, and was very interested to see what he was going to do next. Typically, he ditched the production-less sound of his last album of recent material for a sleek, sexy and fast moving collection of great tracks. Every one of these songs could have been a single, and every single one is great. Waits continues to be modern, fascinating and very good to listen to.

Tinariwen – Tassili

The rhythms of this album are so primal that I can’t help be entranced by them. Tuareg melodies, I have discovered, tend to be simple, moving and beautiful. Not to mention they’re great guitarists. This album has to be listened to, in order to properly enjoy it, but I would happily say that I regard Tinariwen as incredible. Don’t discard this album as ‘world music’ and put it to the back of the mind. World music it certainly is, universally applicable in any language.

tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l

Man, this is a weird album. Laced with reggae and borderline hip-hop beats, Merrill Garbus lets loose her phenomenally unique voice over a flowing and powerful album. With a ukelele. What’s not to love? In all seriousness, she’s really hit something with this album. It’s not lo-fi, but it kind of feels it. It’s not funk, but it kind of feels it. It’s not novelty, but it kind of feels it. It is, however, great. It’s funny, too.