The following songs and albums were released prior to 2011, but despite this keeping them from my upcoming best songs and albums of 2011 lists, they deserve special recognition. Songs aren’t featured if their album is, although I’ll usually feel inclined to mention it, like, say, Teddybears’ “Rocket Scientist.” I could list many more songs (Yuck’s “Rubber” comes to mind), but I’m keeping it to my very favorites. With albums, I either link to where you can listen on Spotify (get Spotify) or a place where you can download and listen. With songs, I use Youtube.
Released in the UK in 2009 and making its way stateside this year, Dan Willson’s heavily literate singer-songwriting is at its densest on “Religious Songs,” included here and also released in 2008.
Self-released at the tail end of 2010 and thusly fully recognized this year, this is an innocently vulgar collection of old-timey rock and roll. Check out “Shit Shower n Shave.”
“I’m not a rocket scientist/I rock the house and sign the tits/And that’s it.” Released internationally in 2010 before hitting the states this year (with the tracklisting shuffled but no new songs, despite added features from B.o.B on “Get Mama a House” and Robyn on “Cardiac Arrest”), Teddybears’ sophomore effort Devil’s Music uses Black Eyed Peas pop tactics to rock harder than anything else out there, particularly on “Rocket Scientist.”
The makings for what would finally materialize in 2004 as Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, The SMiLE Sessions was released in November, 2011 and perhaps serves as an alternative for those who want to hear Brian Wilson’s magnum opus sung by younger, fresher voices.
Released this year on Record Store Day, treat this as an alternative to Wussy’s utterly perfect 2005 debut, Funeral Dress. The stripped down acoustic arrangements take out the power and emphasize the frailty Chuck and Lisa’s relationship and the playful, classic melodies that deserve to exist in eternity as standards. This best serves “Crooked” and “Don’t Leave Just Now.”
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“Rolling in the Deep” – Adele
Though 21 was released in early 2011, this single, which made its mark stateside this year, was released in November 2010. Perhaps the most celebrated and ubiquitous song of the year, Rick Rubin turns “Rolling in the Deep” into the howl immediately following a breakup that shatters a strong woman.
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“Super Bass” – Nicki Minaj
Released on the deluxe edition of Pink Friday in November 2010 but released as a single this year, this is bubblegum hip hop, the kind so sweet that you need another stick right afterward. Arguably the best radio hit to rock 2011.
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“Weekend” – Smith Westerns
Released as 2011′s Dye It Blonde‘s first single in late 2010, “Weekend”‘s strong central sentiment (“weekends are never fun unless you’re around here, too”) is built on Beach Boys ‘ooooo’s, Marc Bolan vocals, and juicy guitar licks.
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“Get Some” – Lykke Li
Wounded Rhymes dropped this year, but “Get Some” came last November as the peak of Lykke Li’s sense of pop, with a jungle beat supporting a vocal that, while usually tender elsewhere, sounds convincingly sexual here.
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“Katy on a Mission” – Katy B
Released on 2011′s On a Mission, Katy B’s slightly avant dance music never quite got its formula as perfect as on this 2010 single.
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“6 Foot 7 Foot” – Lil Wayne (Featuring Cory Gunz)
Sampling Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat)” song the way this does, “6 Foot 7 Foot” already justifies itself as a novelty, but Lil Wayne, who released this Tha Carter IV track last December, delivers his batshit punchline rap better than he would elsewhere in 2011: “Real G’s move in silence like lasagna.”
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“Call Your Girlfriend” – Robyn
I recognized this last year with a mention, but 2011 found people noticing Robyn’s wonderful Body Talk a bit more, and she got to perform this wonderful song on Saturday Night Live. Listen to that bridge where it sounds like her voice escapes her, floats up, and blows up, blindingly illuminating anything close.
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“I Just Had Sex” – The Lonely Island
Released and appearing on Saturday Night Live last December, “I Just Had Sex,” with its spin on bragging of sexual conquest in hip hop and its all-together-now key change, had viral potential, The Lonely Island’s biggest (and that’s saying a lot!), the could only be comprehended in 2011.
One recent November afternoon, I woke to find that the first snow of the season had fallen. I spent that day and the nine after it writing about my the songs from my favorite album, Arcade Fire’s Funeral (which first truly hit me during the first snowfall of a past year), in ascending order of favoritism.
One of my favorite touches on Funeral is that rush of water that you hear at the beginning of “Haïti.” When they hear the soldiers yelling, into that river they’ll go. Wedged between the album’s two most theatrical songs (perhaps to heighten their effect), the key to “Haïti” is that it’s the only song of the ten that stays small. It’s quiet, and it shuffles along that way. However, it’s not quiet because it’s afraid to get loud, but because it’s hardened, confident, and knows to keep its mouth shut: “Guns can’t kill what soldiers can’t see.” But the plan isn’t to remain on the run; its revolutionary words, whispered to us in French, demonstrate a plan for societal reclamation that might be delusional, but when you fight back (even by running away), you fight for it all, knowing you’ll win. It finds positivity and says fuck the rest in the wake of overwhelming tragedy, just like the rest of Funeral.
9. Day 2, track 10, “In the Backseat”
I’ve always hated driving on freeways. I love hugging the shoulders, so too often I hear my tire run over the grooves that make your tires hum like hell. I can’t focus on the same thing for too long, so either I begin to fall asleep or I make sure from the start that I’m not the one driving. Winter break is coming up, and whenever my years in Morris hit that midpoint, my father drives three hours here and drives me back to Woodbury to be with my family for a month. After that, he drives me back to school and then spends another three hours navigating back to my parents’ Woodbury home in the snow. This year is the last year that he’ll do that coming back to a son: My brother ships off to college next August, possibly mine.
I spend that time in the back of his sedan, with all of my hard drives and amplifiers that I decide to bring home for the holidays, listening to some of my favorite albums, so I play Funeral a lot. Its finale starts with this stanza: “I like the peace/In the backseat/I don’t have to drive/I don’t have to speak/I can watch the countryside/And I can fall asleep.” And I can, so I do. My father diligently braves the unforgiving snow for three hours as I lay innocently in the back, guilty of the crime of doing nothing (and also failing to fasten my safety belt).
“Alice died/In the night/I’ve been learning to drive/My whole life.”
Chassange’s grandmother Alice died before the writing of Funeral, and the Butlers and Richard Reed Perry suffered family deaths, too. ”In the Backseat” is the only song on the album to directly confront any of these personal tragedies, and the above line, which frames the goals of a family relationship as learning from them in preparation for when they leave you, is devastating in the extreme. I wonder how the couple who let their hair grow long and forgot all they used to know in the album’s beginning would react to it, as they tucked and rolled from the car instead of learning to drive it. Chassagne’s cries, of loss and of undesirable independence, disappear beneath the guitar and Pallet’s mournful string arrangements, and the funeral is over.
And so I think of what I’ll do later in life when listening to “In the Backseat,” taking over control of vehicles both literal and figurative and hoping like hell that I’ll be able to steer forward.
8. Day 3, track 5, “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)”
Along with “Une Année Sans Lumière,” this is the most modest of Win Butler’s songs on Funeral, and that guitar part that circles over the song sounds like “Lumière”‘s in reverse. Following the violent “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” “7 Kettles” sounds restrained, which makes sense with Butler’s perfectly illustrated feelings of diligent patience: “I am waiting ’til I don’t know when/But I’m sure it’s gonna happen then [...] They say a watched pot will never boil/I closed my eyes, and nothing changed/Just some water/Getting hotter/In the flame.” In the back half of this most recent August, circumstances caused me to nearly break down when I heard this.
Despite the chaos outside, the narrator in “Power Out” leaves his house without a plan and tries to find some light, but the one in “7 Kettles” just watches as his neighbors are starting up a fire, holding out hope for a world in which he’d be more comfortable raising children, the prospect of which is the only thing that keeps him going. Two albums of talking about wanting a daughter while he’s still young later, Win Butler is starting to grow old. The world might not be as apocalyptic as how he paints it in his neighborhood series, but he’s seeing that while time is what a seed down in the soil needs, it also kills old folks and wakes up babies. Just like we knew it would. With the world getting worse before it gets better, “7 Kettles” paints patience as a tragedy.
Now if only I could understand why there are seven kettles.
7. Day 4, track 3, “Une Anée Sans Lumière”
Lyrically simple and thematically light (maybe taking a rest after depicting a neighborhood buried in snow where neighbors dance in police disco lights), “Lumière” is perhaps the most elemental pleasure on Funeral. The only Win Butler song of the eight to refuse Pallett’s always-knockout string arrangements, it still manages to demand the word “beauty” more than anything on the album. Its rotating guitar line exists in silence until light drums enter and a relieving cymbal hit splashes into the vocal, and I’d bet an English speaker never would have thought that saying “I ride a horse that wears blinders” could sound so lovely. Towards the end it raises its tempo to a gentle, tumbling electric guitar riff before another six string screams on top of it while the band shouts something completely indiscernible. The girl’s father, blind to the narrator’s and her relationship, is mocked: “Your old man should know/If you see a shadow/There’s something there.” I can’t imagine why he’d see one, though. The opening lines (excepting that perfectly sung “hey”), translated: “The streetlights all burnt out/A year without light.”
6. Day 5, track 2, “Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)”
With family death in the air, the first two songs on Funeral, and the first two in the four-part “Neighborhood” series, deal with losing family members, but whereas “Tunnels” chronicles an escape, “Laïka” details a jettisoning of older brother Alexander, a troubled youth who causes conflict within the family (fighting his dad until the police come, which the neighbors respond to by dancing in “the police disco lights”), whose lack of care for his fate results in one of my all-time favorite rhymes, even if the rhyme isn’t perfect: “Our mother shoulda/Just named ya Laïka.” Just as the song hits that chorus, Pallett’s violin progression sends the whole thing skyward before Arcade Fire resumes chanting about the sad story of Alexander, who makes his best attempts to forget about the family that abandoned him after they forced his vampirized self to live off his own cried blood.
One thing that “Laïka” exemplifies about Funeral is a reason, though certainly not enough reason, that I prefer it to the band’s second and third albums: The performance. The scratched, barred harmonic guitar riff on top of that thudding drum beat that moves so lightly on its feet throughout the song, Pallett’s soaring violin moving being replaced by an accordion riff (which later materializes vocally as “the police disco lights”), and the vocals that cheerlead the poor soul that they’ve cast away all come together to sound, as opposed to perfectly pre-conceived like on Neon Bible, spontaneous and spilling over with ideas, one of their most brilliant being comparing a brother to an innocent dog the Russians launched into space that died in Earth’s atmosphere.
5. Day 6, track 6, “Crown of Love”
Each half of Funeral begins with a love song, but whereas the happy couple of “Tunnels” escapes into themselves from their parents and their world, the devastated lover of “Crown of Love” snuffs out not-within-him sparks and shrugs off not-upon-him hands lest his mother witnesses his inner turmoil in this waltz of despair. ”They say it fades if you let it,” begins the song, but the narrator obviously doesn’t want to let it, sadly pleading “If you still want me/Please forgive me” as guitar somberly accompanies the chorus. As Pallett’s strings flow over the second verse, he demands a straight answer, but after a cymbal crashes dramatically a verse later, the song blooms while our narrator laments the straight answer he received, flowers growing on the grave of their old love, taken down from something eating him just like a cancer.
Also like “Tunnels,” this song blossoms into a sonic goal, transcending after Win screams a second time, “Your name is the only word that I can say!” Maybe he won’t let it fade, but at least he seems excited by the prospect of being hopelessly in love. By the end of the song, the strings are joyfully chasing each other in circles. The pains of love keep growing, and this doomed fellow is thinking that’s just lovely.
4. Day 7, track 4, “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”
“The streetlights all burned out/A year without light.” A dreamer wakes up in his neighborhood to darkness and then indifference. ”Not really something to shout about,” he shrugs. Previously pictured as fraught with domestic disputes and climatic apocalypse, the neighborhood of “Power Out” is more violent, with its gigantic beat and frantic guitar that are both outright metal, though less so when cast against jubilant xylophone. Things are way out of control thanks to the indifference of its residents: “Kids are swinging from the power lines/Nobody’s home, so nobody minds.”
The parents in “Tunnels” cry at the loss of their neighborhood, but the parents in “Power Out” freeze up, left with no dreams or plans while our hero goes out into the night, goes out to pick a fight (“There you are!”), and goes out to find some light. He’s left to grow up in some strange storm while the world remains indifferent to these menacing, insane kids, who aren’t all talk like those of “Rococo.”
Sure enough, on the darkest night, neighbors were all shouting that they found the light, resulting in further chaos (rather than one looming over a father’s shoulder, shadows of varying sizes frighteningly jumping all over the wall) and one of the best moments on the album: “We found the light!” But these monsters are still dying out in the snow, and if you light a candle, it had better be for them, because they will find it. Nothing’s hid from those kids, and you ain’t fooling no one with the lights out.
Funeral teaches us over and over again of youth’s beauty, but when it meets indifference it becomes nasty. The guitar that lifts the song into a swirling vortex and the damned creepy violin ascension as Win demands an answer to “what’s the plan?” are too appropriate. Win has an idea: When bemoaning the state of the world, take it from your heart and put it in your hand.
Finally, as if the lights are cut out again, Win howls “Where’d you go?” Régine’s response is a cry of death.
3. Day 8, track 9, “Rebellion (Lies)”
There’s one Beatles moment that always makes me stop, smile, and appreciate its compositional brilliance: The third verse of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” High A’s keep screaming out of the guitar with each hit at a constant interval.
After transitional guitar skittering from “Haïti,” a kick drum on rhythm with your heart’s lubs, and a hovering bass riff that establishes itself as the song’s backbone, a single snare hit breathes life into the song and a constant flow of glorious A’s beam out from the piano, the song climbing until it’s towering before it’s begun. The song keeps growing from there, picking up a bit of life after seemingly every bar as the lyrics become less and less concerned with reality. ”Sleeping is giving in” and “people say that you’ll die faster than without water,” the song warns of slumber like we’re still on the run in wartime Haiti, and we treat them like adult fibs to which children eventually unlock the truth: “But we know it’s just a lie/Scare your son, scare your daughter.”
During the break, siren guitars to mimic the bass line and Pallett’s violin, better than it’s ever been, show themselves. After the break, everyone decides to fall into dreamland, and the song becomes markedly sexier: “People say that your dreams/Are the only things that save ya/Come on baby, in our dream/We can live on misbehavior.” The next verse finds everyone retreating underneath their covers, hiding the night away from their brothers (Alexander?) and with their lovers.
Another break between lyrics makes it seem like day and night are passing. Win crows a call to wake up when he reiterates the song’s second stanza: “People say that you’ll die![...]But we know it’s just a lie!” Win and company sing, “Scare your son, scare your daughter” and repeat it twice for posterity as the song mellows down a bit, but then two enthusiastic handclaps propel the song into full form for its final act, starting with an expanded reprise of the chorus. In dreamland, the sun and moon are here and all right, and the young chorus shouting “Lies! Lies!” (the same one that claimed “we found the light”?) couldn’t sound happier to be reveling in their rejection of reality.
Pallett’s finest string arrangement finishes the band’s finest composition in an outro that sounds sorrowful but excited and headstrong but demented. On the backs of giants like “Tunnels” and “Wake Up,” “Lies” serves as Funeral‘s mission statement: It’s not that those anthems are removed from reality, but that they consider it and reject it. That’s daunting and probably impossible, to be sure, but if there’s one band out there whose transcendence can match the feeling you get every time you close your eyes, it’s Arcade Fire.
2. Day 9, track 7, “Wake Up”
Greeting you with a titanic guitar riff, “Wake Up” instantly establishes itself as the most powerful song on Funeral, and that’s including the indie via metal one with the word “power” in the title. Kick drums and tambourines, cymbal crashes that rock you like waves rock Max’s boat, and a wordless chorus that penetrates universally because it sounds like everyone is singing it make up “Wake Up,” but you have to wonder why one of the most celebrated indie songs of all time so easily earns that u-word, with everyone deciding it just makes sense to sing along.
“Wake Up” is the song that best represents Funeral‘s attempts to reclaim the joys of childhood as a colder-hearted adult, missing the days when your heart could be filled up by nothing, blind to and uncaring of what is and isn’t a lie. The reckless kids of “Power Out” are “just a million little gods causing rainstorms turning every good thing to rust,” and while they’re out dying out in the snow, they’re growing bigger, falling in and out of love, and being more scared than scary. The bridge and a rejuvenated form of the song’s first half repeat, “With my lightning bolts a-glowing/I can see where I am going.” The “Power Out” kids don’t need the streetlights lit (“Look at ‘em go, look at ‘em go!”) when they have faith in their future.
The song ends with a more juvenile and light form of the song’s initially titanic C-Am-F progression that spryly bounces around, overcoming the doubt and drama expressed earlier in the song to harmonize responsibility and youthful freedom. After previous songs call to everyone to find some light and wait with bated breath on a world to better allow raising children, the big revelation comes when Win sings, “I guess we’ll just have to adjust!,” the last syllable of which disappears into the chorus, which everyone is singing because everyone longs to escape youth before seeking to reclaim it, hoping that they can overcome their constant dissatisfaction with the way things are. That’s everyone’s story.
One of Funeral‘s many magics is how it convincingly outlines universally experienced dilemmas before it powers through them. ”Wake Up” exemplifies Funeral being music as therapy.
1. Day 10, track 1, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
“And”
It’s surprising that we never think about what is implied by this second half of a compound sentence. What’s before the comma? Win Butler’s grandfather and Régine Chassagne’s grandmother had both recently died. By beginning midsentence, Arcade Fire hint at these tragedies being inspiration for the album’s tragedies, spending the funeral reexamining what life means.
“If”
“Tunnels” is a hypothetical. It’s an if-then statement regarding a fantastical situation playing out in a very real imagination. ”Tunnels” and the rest of Funeral isn’t about the world outside, the one so feared in Neon Bible, but personal, introspective journeys for meaning presented as universal dilemmas. In Neon Bible, everyone is afraid, but in Funeral, everyone is reminded that they’re not so alone in their terror.
“The”
Ha! Just kidding.
A mourner trying to figure out how to handle a tragedy his parents just can’t dreams of what he’d do in a world where a snowfall buries his home and the homes of those close to him, leaving his parents devastated and unsure of how to act. The narrator then completes the conditional statement by introducing a romance to the apocalypse. He’d brave the snow and tunnel to his lover.
Excited by his fantasies, he celebrates his own thought and reiterates that yeah! he’ll dig a tunnel, and from his window to hers. She joins him in his escape, climbing out of her chimney to meet him in the middle of the town so they can be alone. They find relief from the awful world in each other, and our narrator wishes it would go on forever. With no one else around, the couple lets their hair grow long and forgets all they used to know, abandoning everything they’ve loved because they’ve discovered that all they need is each other.
Everything is pure and magical until they have children, but having forgotten all they used to know, they finally miss the parents they left behind, wishing that their presence or knowledge could assist them in raising their children to achieve the same euphoria that they’ve discovered. The idealistic romance has surely gone bananas, and they finally wonder what the hell ever happened to their parents. Then they just look into each other’s eyes and the chorus comes back, but this time more complete: “You change all the lead/Sleeping in my head/To gold/As the day grows dim/I hear you sing a golden hymn/The song I’ve been trying to sing.” I can’t think of a more beautifully put thought in the history of recorded music. It verges on mawkish (and Win’s cries don’t help those who are already cringing), but the confidence and comfort with which those words are confided (not to mention that piano backdropping them) mark an early peak to an album that never once shrinks or slows down.
After, the song reaches its objective, and its instrumental section lets you feel what they do. Once producing gently falling notes like a snowfall, the piano is now banging center stage in an empty but sound-filled auditorium while the guitar calls to it, screaming from atop the balcony.
Despite all this peace, the mourner of the recently deceased wants the ashes spread all around his heart, choosing to live with hardship instead of fleeing to immediate happiness. His acceptance a hyperbolic journey of the id versus the ego, he can now begin to truly appreciate the significance of the Funeral.
The first thing we heard from Das Racist was “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. “I’m at the Pizza Hut/I’m at the Taco Bell/I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” it went over and over and over, but everyone loved it. Some tried to say that it was social commentary on consumerism, but it was really just this generation’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”: A song made brilliant by its sheer stupidity. Next year, Das Racist would release two mixtapes that would make them sound like joke-spewing prophets. They were less interested in commenting on race relations than making jokes about what minority celebrities girls thought they looked like (like on “Puerto Rican Cousins” or the hysterical “Shorty Said”). Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man each contained a slew of fantastic tracks, but they were each tragically uneven.
About a year after Sit Down, Man, Das Racist have released Relax, and this time they actually get to earn some capital for their efforts. “Rainbow in the Dark,” pulled from the flooringly great first half of Shut Up, Dude, threatens to take the title of the standout track. Das Racist has developed a new hook-savviness on Relax, and “Michael Jackson” shines flashing lights right into your eyes until you fall over, convulsing. “Michael Jackson! One million dollars! You feel me?! Holler!” They are not just cutting mixtapes for free anymore. I mean, who do you think they are? The Weeknd? Frank Ocean??? Fuck mixtapes. They write albums, motherfucker. Now is the time to rake in some MJ money.
Forgetting the money for a second, Das Racist have now begun creating dancefloor-ready pop sans samples. “Girl” and “Punjabi Song” are great, but it is the stupid simplicity of “Booty in the Air,” a song entirely about exactly what its title implies, that gets me. “Booty in the air (3x)/Shake it all around,” it goes four times every chorus. The song is about as repetitive as the butt motions that Das Racist is suggesting, and if you resign yourself to it (like Das Racist have to the butt in question), you might be frightened to know that the group has taken control of your hips along with your funny bone. These guys are too talented.
Some say that they have sit down and shut up while they watch the dollars roll in. I mean, that is what they keep rapping about, right? Well, people should know better from the group that is not joking (just joking). If you fail to realize they are serious about this tomfoolery when Heems militantly declares, “I ain’t backing out until I own a bank to brag about,” then you are in danger of falling into their trap. That is funny to them, and it is funny to me. Its best songs might not measure up to the cluster of greats at the front of Shut Up, Dude or Sit Down, Man, but with stuff like “Rainbow in the Dark” and “Punjabi Song” sitting near the end, this is a more consistently rewarding product than the mixtapes, whose back halves included too many tracks that were outright disposable. These guys now know that they are absurdly talented, and as a result they have not sit down or shut up, but relaxed.
Frank Ocean is a member of a hip hop collective known as Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), which features, among others, Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt. The group possess considerable but unreliable talent, with perhaps their most interesting aspect being how little of a fuck they give, even (or maybe especially) when it comes to their own art, sometimes even resulting in homophobia and sexism in their lyrics that would make the Eminem of ten years ago a little uncomfortable. Relative to the rest of OFWGKTA, resident R&B artist Frank Ocean is an anomaly. His brilliance is sustained, and early on nostalgia,ULTRA., he distances himself from the homophobia of his peers: “I believe that marriage isn’t between a man and woman, but between love and love.” Later in the same song, he states, “I don’t believe our nation’s flag is on the moon.” He manages to make it come off as whimsical instead of crazy.
Each song on nostalgia,ULTRA. is wonderful, but what really astounds is that every song wildly succeeds on a different plane. Before the longing and whimsy of “We All Try,” “Novacane,” a surprise radio hit, hits with all of the swagger and humor of a good hip hop song, but Frank keeps things innocent enough to react to cocaine for breakfast with a quick “yikes!” My favorite on the album is “Songs for Women,” in which Frank’s friends give him shit for making music for the sole purpose of winning hearts. “No fair, no fair! That’s cheating!” they say, but in reality the chicks Frank wants are blasting Frank’s R&B peers: “Don’t even listen to the songs I record/But she be banging that Drake in my car/I’m So Far Gone/She stay blasting Trey and his Songz/All damn day long/It’s like she never heard of me.” Songs that seem slight at first, like the nervous romantic thoughts and bouncing piano of “Lovecrimes” or the discovery of the futility of writing about a muse in “Dust,” turn into highlights that add dimension to the surrounding songs.
Frank uses Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing” as the backing track for his song of the same name to evoke the yearning for the past that the lyrics suggest. He uses MGMT’s “Electric Feel” for his sex-as-religion “Nature Feels.” Radiohead’s “Optimistic” plays over a skit that demonstrates just how little Frank’s lady friends care about his music to prelude “Songs for Women” (“what is a Radiohead?”). Thanks to Don Henley’s assholishness and copyright law, Frank’s tragic tale of young, hurried marriage, “American Wedding,” which features the backing track of The Eagles’ “Hotel California” (with the guitar solo entirely intact), nostalgia,ULTRA. has not been released in any form.
Google around and download this album, because Frank Ocean wants you to hear it. The pictures that Frank Ocean paints with his music are breathtakingly vivid, and his love of music drips off the canvas from the backdrops that he chooses, especially when he steals said backdrops from established musicians and unfailingly puts them to better use. Frank Ocean is a dreamer. Frank Ocean is a lover. Frank Ocean is a player (and so was his granddaddy). Each song is executed to maximum effect, succeeding so greatly and from so many different angles. There is no doubt in my mind that Frank Ocean’s unreleased nostalgia,ULTRA. mixtape is the best album of the year.
Even moreso than anything put out by James Murphy himself (“Losing My Edge” came out the same year), The Rapture’s 2002 single “House of Jealous Lovers” has come to define dance-punk. Squawed vocals, Gang of Four guitar, one of the meanest basslines ever, and fucking cowbell came together for a song like nothing else we would ever hear. The other ten tracks on their 2003 debut Echoes are nothing compared to it. Dance! Punk!!! The sound deserved to catch fire in a way that it just failed to, but maybe it was because it was so difficult to uncork the bottle The Rapture captured their lightning with.
After a five year silence following their 2006 sophomore effort and attempt at mainstream attention (more dance, less punk), Pieces of the People We Love, The Rapture put out the lead single for their new album, In the Grace of Your Love, and holy shit. “How Deep Is Your Love?” opens with a piano riff straight out of Transylvania, snagging this the title of the creepy love song dance anthem of 2011 (2010’s winner: Hot Chip’s “One Life Stand”). After it revs its engine and that groove possesses the song, its romantic desperation (“How deep is your love?” and “let me hear that song,” sound more and more broken with each repetition) sounds outright titanic. Despite its already impressive size, The Rapture finds room for a saxophone halfway through and somehow make the most dangerous musical instrument known to man work wonders. “How Deep Is Your Love?” might not become an important part of musical history like “House of Jealous Lovers,” but might be the better song. I reckon it to be the best from this year.
I readied myself for an incredible new album from The Rapture, but this was not what I wanted. The only song to match the muscle of the lead single is “Miss You,” a song about a screwed up maternal relationship. Coming right before that one, “Sail Away,” which is wide-eyed and gorgeous, contrasts “Miss You” sharply with a problem-free declaration of love worthy of Disney. These three highlights all rank as some of the year’s best songs, each being unrestrained assaults on your hips that reimagine the music that made the world dance in the seventies and eighties.
Too many tracks, though often sporting decent melody and fitting grooves, fall flat, though. “Roller Coaster” sounds like a song you might hear in a carnival to decorate a far less exciting ride. “Blue Bird” is an explosion of glam that, after “Sail Away” and “Miss You,” renders my feet strangely motionless. “It Takes Time to Be a Man,” which closes the album, follows the impressive momentum of “How Deep Is Your Love?” with…easy listening? I admire that The Rapture have tried to package so many different sounds into this album, but next to the dance tracks, their specialty, the other music clumsily trips over its own feet.
Like they did on Echoes,In the Grace of Your Love has The Rapture imagining a great sound but only occasionally making the most of it. After I finish hearing “House of Jealous Lovers” or “How Deep Is Your Love?” and am on to the next one, I find myself pleading, “Come on, guys. Let me hear that song.”
Christopher Owens is not interested in writing music about how he grew up in the infamous Children of God cult. Owens is a lot more interested in writing music about girls. His band, appropriately named Girls, put out Album in 2009 and the shorter Broken Dreams Club in 2010, and both of them knock my socks off. His songs about the women he loves are easily more devastating than any he could write about his cult upbringings, although his heartbreak songs sometimes sound delightful. Album was one of the most clichéd releases I had ever heard, sporting lines like “I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine,” “Laura baby, I’m right here,” and “I’ve got a high school crush on a California girls, oh yeah,” but the way that he wore his clichés with no shame was darling. Broken Dreams Club improved on his craft, sporting Belle & Sebastian arrangements and a song called “Heartbreaker” so good (and sad) that I honestly think Led Zeppelin should be jealous.
Their third release in two years, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, impacted me at first not with its hooks or melodies but with its sonics. A few songs in we hear “Die,” and suddenly there are distorted guitars everywhere. The centerpiece of the album starts off calm and sulky in a way we have come to expect: “Nights I spend alone/I spend ‘em running ‘round looking for you, baby.” Then the chorus explodes into heavy guitar, organ, and a backing choir while Owens repeats, “Looking for love.” Breaking away from his mold of innocent guitar pop quite this suddenly is startling in and of itself, but did he have to go and call the song “Vomit”? Owens is so sad on Father, Son, Holy Ghost that I am honestly a little worried about him.
Another sad one, maybe sadder, is “Saying I Love You”: “How can I say, ‘I want you’/Now that you’ve said, ‘I want you’?/Now that you’ve said everything that I said to you/To somebody new.” That one and “Honey Bunny,” which is the cutest song of the year, are my favorites, and they carry the easy-to-swallow hooks that Album gave us. “Honey Bunny,” which kicks off the album, is uncharacteristically happy. This just serves to make the descent into “Die,” “Vomit,” and finally “Jamie Marie” that much more unnerving.
I could tell you where I rank Father, Son, Holy Ghost among the three Girls releases, but each is uniquely excellent. This album took me time, because while the sound is impressive, the songwriting is less instantly gripping. This is less pop and more rock, and this is rock by a guy that sounds very new to it. Owens has taken a different approach to explore his sadness. Joey the human being hopes that Owens cheers up, because listening to a guy this likeable constantly suffering is awfully sad, but Joey the music lover hopes that he aches forever.
In this column, which will begin later in the year, I investigate albums that friends consider to be the greatest of all time. I will start with my own favorite album, which Eric Clapton released in 1970 with his band Derek and the Dominos.
Let me be clear: When I say that Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is my favorite album, I mean to imply that I believe in my heart of hearts that it’s the greatest album of all time, and I fully expect it to remain that way forever. Fighting words, huh? When I came up with this project, almost every favorite album choice was the product of varying amounts of deliberation, so what makes me so unusually sure? Well, I enjoy tossing the art I enjoy into competitions that result in lists to commemorate winners. I believe that the insane decision making that leads to me thinking about why song number X is better than song number X+1 forces me to appreciate my favorite things as much as possible, heightening not only my passion for the works themselves but my confidence in my qualitative evaluations of them.
To use an example, I recently explained why I think Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” is the greatest song of all time by noting what was special about what it evokes. Those ascending piano notes and that “You change all the lead/Sleeping in my head/To gold/As the day grows dim/I hear you sing a golden hymn/The song I’ve been trying to sing” chorus nail love both lyrically and sonically. The most affecting songs are the ones that sum up sentiments, and love is by far the most worthy prize in that category. “Tunnels” takes the emotion that you always strive to feel and presents it as music, and as such the song is transcendentally rewarding in a way that will be relevant for your whole life.
The songs we love are a lot like the people we love. Despite being aware of obvious subjectivity, deep down we believe that our wife or our favorite album or what have you are, in fact, the greatest. It’s almost puzzling why anyone would settle for anything or anyone else.
In dealing with appreciation that reaches the level of favoritism, love will always be relevant, and this is for two reasons. The first is rather obvious, and that’s that the highest plateau of appreciation approximates love. The second is that works that appeal to love are far more likely to receive it. As such, my favorite song is the quintessential love song, and my favorite album is Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
To put it simply, Layla outlines a deep passion in no uncertain terms and then furiously examines it. “I Looked Away” kicks off the album with a deep regret, which resurfaces late in the album with the definitive cover of Chuck Willis’ “It’s Too Late.”“Keep on Growing” finds Eric Clapton feverishly fantasizing about how wonderful life would be if he got his girl, while “Anyday” shows us all how much he appreciates her. “Little Wing,” which Clapton pries from the hands of then-recently deceased Jimi Hendrix to make entirely his own, gets at what Clapton appreciates about her. “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” sufficiently displays his turmoil with its breakneck speed and general sense of panic. “Bell Bottom Blues” shows that he thinks she’s worth all the hurt he’s going through, and penultimate track “Layla” accomplishes an almost impossible task: It convinces you that Clapton’s love is so real and vital to his own happiness that, despite the potential devastation and the seeming impossibility of success, this girl is worth going after.
You know what? She absolutely was. Pattie Boyd was the then-wife of then-Beatle George Harrison. Harrison’s three best songs were all actually related to either Clatpon or Boyd: “Here Comes the Sun” was written in Clapton’s backyard, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” features Clapton on lead guitar, and Boyd was Harrison’s muse for “Something,” the song that finally convinced Paul McCartney and John Lennon of Harrison’s songwriting talents. Clapton and Harrison were actually best pals. Harrison paid back Clapton for his favor with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by co-writing “Badge” with him for Cream’s final album, Goodbye. Despite his healthy friendship with Harrison, Clapton was madly in love with Boyd.
After splitting from Cream and the short-lived Blind Faith, Clapton swiped Delaney and Bonnie’s backing band (Bobby Whitlock on keyboards, Carl Radle playing bass, and Jim Gordon on drums) to form Derek and the Dominos, and he’d even add legendary guitarist Duane Allman to the mix. The result was maniacally layered, stupidly visceral electric blues that we’ve never seen the likes of since. Thanks to this, the album’s primary flaw of letting things go on too long (“Key to the Highway,” the album’s least important song by far, is also its longest at over nine minutes) becomes something of a blessing, allowing the talented people behind it to all show off at once (at the most frantic moments of “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?” or “Layla,” I count at least seven guitars). It results in a setting of raw, unrestrained power that wonderfully houses Clapton’s romantic fire and even allows it to grow rather out of control. The most confessional, intimate albums are messy, but that’s because their refusal to hold anything back makes them more honest and complete.
Boyd heard Clapton’s passionate plea. In 1974, Boyd and Harrison divorced, and Boyd and Clapton wed in 1979. He was in love with a woman he couldn’t have. He created an album for her. He got the girl. The album changed the lives of those involved. It serves as the turnaround point to the sweetest rock and roll story of all time. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is what all other art can only aspire to be.
If I were here to make as solid an argument as I can for Layla being the greatest album of all time, I would end there. Unfortunately, love’s damnable uncertainty is one of the most prevalent themes in Layla, and to go just handily with that, its legendary story of the guy winning the girl through the power of music is tainted. Of course, everything was still pure back in 1970. After “Layla” convinced you that Clapton’s destructive desires were worth dying for, Clapton’s bandmate Bobby Whitlock closed the album with a song pondering things that Clapton didn’t dare think about: What if it didn’t work out and life went on? “Thorn Tree in the Garden,” written and performed by Whitlock with just an acoustic guitar, has a greater chance of making me cry than any other song. After “Layla” sported Clapton’s unmatched intensity and Jim Gordon’s gorgeous piano coda, it almost seems offensive that Whitlock would use the last word to whisk everyone back to a world where failure can’t always be avoided by sheer force of desire.
Clapton got lucky. He got the girl. Despite this magic album convincing us (and Boyd) that he deserved her, he didn’t. Maybe he did back in 1970. However, Clapton’s addiction to alcohol and various drugs (most famously cocaine) drove a wedge between them, and his recurring infidelities began before their marriage. She began dabbling in drugs and infidelity herself, but Clapton’s behavior dwarfs any wrongdoings for which Boyd might be responsible. While with Boyd, he fathered two illegitimate children, one of which Boyd didn’t find out for seven years, at which point she and Clapton had been divorced for two years. Ending in 1989, their ten-year marriage was horrible on the same scale that the story of their courtship was wonderful.
My first time listening was early in eleventh grade, back when I was obsessed with Guns N’ Roses, calling “November Rain” the greatest song ever written, and pining for a girl that I should have, and maybe did deep down, known I had eternally ruined my chances with. Since then, it’s only ever been displaced as my favorite by The Clash’s London Calling or Arcade Fire’s Funeral. What can I say? I’m a sucker for love songs, concepts, and stories. Even before I knew all the gruesome details, I certainly never reached for Layla so that I could feel hopeful. Layla has always been the album I’ve reached for when I’ve felt powerless, as if to say, “Okay, I’m lost, but someone’s been around. Just walk me through it one more time.” That goes against something I said earlier, though. What if I find the right girl and settle down? It’s actually a hope of mine that I leave powerlessness behind one day, so why am I confident that Layla will forever remain my favorite album? Speaking as a hopeless romantic who has so far failed to even initiate a relationship with anyone that I’ve deemed worth suffering over, to feel powerless is to feel passion, and that’s something everyone needs to power through a lifetime.
So I got this list done a few days back, and now I’m publishing it. No blurbs to read, sorry. The albums are fairly easy to check out, and I’ll link to each song. The rule is that albums must have come out between January 1 and March 31, 2011. Songs must be out before March 31 in some capacity, and they can be released earlier than January 1 if they show up on an album that’s come out in 2011.
I think I was eight when Eminem became really popular. That’s the perfect age, actually, to have my parents becoming extremely concerned with what I listen to thanks to this man’s cusses and misogyny. Of course, I didn’t really pay attention to anything music-wise back then, so I didn’t get to experience this sort of thing firsthand. I did, however, attend St. John’s Catholic school in Rochester, so I knew quite a few people who listened avidly to Eminem despite their parents’ best wishes. I didn’t think enough of it to figure out why asking the real Slim Shady to please stand up or whatever was so provocative. Parents across America were trying to make sure their children weren’t corrupted by this devil’s music.
You’ve gotta wonder how Tyler, The Creator’s mother felt about it all. He’s less than two months older than me (just turned twenty), so growing up as a hip hop musician, I’m sure he encountered Eminem as a kid. His debut album, 2009’s Bastard, is full of the demented shit that you’d hear in The Slim Shady LP, right down to gratuitous use of the word “faggot” (although less as a slur than as a go-to profanity).
His big single “Yonkers” takes these troubling elements and sends them in a new direction. He creates genuinely fucked up rhymes like “V Tech shit or Columbine” with “some damn Adventure Time” and talks shit about pop culture super well. When prompted to tell us what he thinks of Haley Williams: “Fuck her! Wolf Haley robbin’ ‘em/I’ll crash that fuckin’ airplane that that faggot nigga B.o.B is in/And stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus/And won’t stop until the cops come in.” Holy shit, man. I could throw down quotes to prove how funny he is and just wind up showing the entire sheet. It’s not just that he’s funny, though. It’s that he seems so genuinely screwed up that you’re not sure whether to laugh or be a little afraid. Eminem said that shit just clowning, dog, but you think “C’mon, Tyler, how fucked up is you?”
So he’s messed up but hilarious, sure, but the really weird thing about Tyler, The Creator is that while giving off those two clashing vibes, he reeks of classiness. After his line about Adventure Time, a piano ascension appears on top of the bare-bones beat, which somehow makes his wishes to stab Bruno Mars in the throat seem intelligently thought up. You actually seem to take on the role of his therapist (who’s “fucking awesome with listening”), so his runaway train of thought seems to offer itself to you so that you might figure it out. Instead, as a person who grew up watching Rugrats and still spends my time watching cartoons like Adventure Time, I find appeal in his confessional. I see the merits to and might even wish to join him in his insanity.
James Blake is in a wonderful position heading into his full length debut. First of all, thanks to his three critically acclaimed EPs (The Bells Sketch, CMYK, and Klavierwerke), he’s got hype coming out of the wazoo. Seasoned veteran electronica artists Flying Lotus, Four Tet, and Caribou all came out with albums in 2010, and James Blake, a British newbie, got more attention than all of them. Secondly, he’s not going to rest on the laurels of his EPs. None of the eleven songs from his EPs make his self-titled debut. He doesn’t give into the temptation to put the heralded “I Only Know (What I Know Now)” or “CMYK,” my favorite track of his, to be certain that his album has a standout single.
Of course, that’s not the only way in which James Blake is daring. Often during his EPs, songs failed to entirely materialize, and that trend continues on the album. He opens unluck with a simple chord progression done with electronic buzzes and a simple beat, and he barely adds anything. He makes songs, yeah, but it’s disarming to hear just how little he needs to do, and he sometimes doesn’t do enough. Take “Lindisfarne I” and “Lindisfarne II,” each basically the same song, except the backing tracks on each could respectively be summarized as “almost nothing” and “barely something.” The contrast makes “Lindisfarne II” sound oddly grand despite there being little to support it. It’s a neat little trick, but you need to awkwardly sit through “Lindisfarne I” for it to work, and that’s dangerously close to listening to two minutes and forty three seconds of nothing at all.
He’s got all the tools for success. His soulful voice, which works very well for his cover of Feist’s “Limit To Your Love,” helps carry the album, and discovering in Klavierwerke that he liked to fiddle around on a piano helped expand his bag of tricks: Use very little electronics and use very little piano. The first half tends towards the former, and after centerpiece and compromise between the two approaches “Limit To Your Love,” it tends toward the latter. “Limit To Your Love” actually feels like a complete song, probably because it originated as one, but its buildup is expertly pulled off, and this song will probably no longer be remembered by history as a song by Feist.
Another spot of savvy is “The Wilhelm Scream,” whose descending “falling, falling, falling” (or whatever else) line is a brilliantly crafted melody, and what little backing there is helps to make the song sound more alone and sparse. That would probably be the greatest strength of Blake’s relentless minimalism. Each of his songs are so pained, so he makes it sound like he’s too shy to do anything more.
In mid 2009, The xx came out with a fully realized set of songs employing less as more. Now James Blake, who has explicitly drawn influence from his fellow Brits, is trying to do the same thing, but more radically. James Blake is nothing if it isn’t challenging (and it sometimes feels like almost nothing anyway), and its reckless minimalism isn’t something that he should stop. He’s got ambition. He’s taking challenges and making mistakes, and I hope his vision isn’t compromised. James Blake leads me to believe that he might be the genius everyone thinks he is, but even the smartest still have a lot to learn.
