After a number
of fruitless years, the experimental collective known as
NewVillager finally made their proper introduction this past
year in a self-titled work that’s bypassed the difficult and
seemingly impossible act of capturing a concept. The album
manages to illustrate the creativity of the very group that
produced it, and it’s an imaginative journey that captivated
me from the start.
The group that
comprises itself of what seems like half the population of
Sweden entered the year with the delightfully twee pop
album, Forever Today. It’s a boisterous, upbeat album
with songs as big as the group itself, and it has all the
things that make me happy - handclaps, poppy instrumentation
and ready-for-you-to-join choruses. Quite simply, it’s an
album I’ve had an immense amount of fun with.
Secret
Rituals ended up being one of those albums I connected
to on a rather personal level, and honestly, the Grates have
always produced things that have managed to fantastically
mirror all the happenstance of my life. They’ve seemingly
soundtracked my unbridled, careless days of youth and
followed me right into the next phase of my life with an
album that deals with venturing into adulthood without being
captured by the trappings of it.
Even if the
beginning of the end comes in 2012, YACHT’s foray into a
future of both utopian and dystopian visions showed me that
I can at least expect one hell of a dance party. It’s an
album with amazingly heavy themes that remain unbridled in a
soundtrack that manages to make the end of the world seems
so much less macabre.
Moment Bends
puts a lampshade on my head and pushes me out into a party
where I can rightly act a fool. Architecture in Helsinki
took my favorite awkward musical era that is the ‘80s and
tipped it’s contents into their latest release to produce an
album that I can have fun and dance to even without the
guise of a drunken demeanor.
With more than
a decade of work in hand, Mates of State are quite
thoroughly a rock institution, and even at that seniority,
they’re anything but stale. The duo continually expands and
innovates their craft to remind you that they’ve gone as
long as they have because they’re more than the novelty of
being an adorable duo. Mountaintop is yet another
accomplishment in their craft with polished pop that’s
energetic and dynamic.
Wounded
Rhymes is quite simply a beautiful album as Lykke Li
offers up a viewpoint that’s just as vulnerable as it is
powerful in a landscape of bleak, post-breakup laments. It’s
a definitive work that proclaims her womanhood, and it’s a
fiery female intent of simple drum beats, other seemingly
primitive-simple instrumentation, and a stripped, ached
vocal.
Considering its
pedigree, one would have expected The King Is Dead to
be an elaborate, operatic epic. Instead, the band I once
thought that was incapable of being understated delivered a
solid, meticulous album that’s taut and disciplined. The
marriage of the band’s grandiose intellect with the instinct
of their rustic, American roots produced an
uncharacteristic, yet distinctively Decemberists, album.
Despite its
title, Okkervil River’s album is quite in your face. Will
Sheff’s distinctive songwriting is evident here with songs
that are strong in personality and attitude. It’s pounding
with intention and musically feisty. I Am Very Far is
a domineering album with one-two punches that always kept me
up in attention.
After this
Seattle sextet seemingly catapulted towards their fame,
their trajectory apparently landed them into a rut of
scrapped sessions and what looked like the band’s journey
into the inevitable sophomore slump. Championing through
these troubles, Fleet Foxes instead released an album that
retained everything we fell in love with while delving into
a deeper, more intricate path that played and refined their
strengths. Helplessness Blues took their golden sound
and antiquated their shine into a weathered treasure of
evocative, intricate music.
In a true
embodiment of the "less is more" mantra, Yellow Ostrich’s
smart, simple layers came to be my favorite surprise of
2011. It’s playful work with a distinctive style that in no
doubt comes from a rather liberal use of looped vocals. It’s
an album of songs that are infectiously catchy thanks to
their simplicity; it’s an album of quirks that stem from
complex stacks of layering; it’s an album that ends too
soon.
It’s been a
long five years since Sleater-Kinney fell silent, and in
that time, there always seemed to be a void in music that no
one else could quite fill. Seemingly annoyed by this fact,
Carrie Brownstein assembled a supergroup that manages to not
only fill the void, but overflow it. Wild Flag plays beyond
the nostalgia of what we’ve missed and play to their
respective pedigrees of rock to bring about an album that
illustrates how Brownstein and her cohort quite simply
understand the quintessential power of rock.
- Brad Benedict
Corteza -
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