10
The Men - Open Your Heart
Following the brutalizing post-hardcore of Leave Home, my favorite album of 2011, Open Your Heart was not at all what I was expecting from The Men just one short year later. The departure of bassist and co-lead singer Chris Hansell (the one who screams) led to a realignment of sorts and heavy, punishing noise and feedback that once dominated faded into the background in favor of a smorgasbord of rock sounds. From the country-influenced “Candy” and upbeat anthem “Turn It Around” to the slide guitar-driven “Country Song” and “Animal”, the latter featuring the albums only presence of Hansell’s vocals, Open Your Heart shows a band experimenting with a handful of new styles without a single misstep. The Men keep the heavy guitars, but have quite literally opened their heart, both in the more positive lyrics and and the embracing of the sunnier side of rock, leading to an album that is more varied and inviting than it’s predecessor. Leave Home threatened to bludgeon you with noise; Open Your Heart gives you a taste of that along with various touches of country and classic rock. If the album proved anything, it’s that this is a band that can do whatever they want and still sound great doing it. They’re one of the few bands that may actually deserve being called the saviors of rock.
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9
Spiritualized - Sweet Heart Sweet Light
There’s something about drug overdoses and near-death experiences that sparks Jason Pierce’s creativity. If heroin is to thank for Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, Pierce’s struggle with liver disease over the last couple years is the impetus for Sweet Heart Sweet Light, perhaps Spiritualized’s most tender album as well as their best since the 90s. The shoegazey guitars, angelic choirs, big organs and the funky gospel rhythms are all still intact, but Pierce’s voice, while still in his typical monotone style, is more confident and higher in the mix rather than buried in distortion or beneath layers of guitars giving the album a more intimate feel than the band’s more recent output. But ultimately, it’s the songwriting that makes this another stand out in the band’s output – catchy riffs, a more subdued approach to the choral backings and strings and, of course, fantastic guitarwork all combine together to create the kind of unique, emotionally gratifying, transcendent album that only Pierce can conceive.
8
Andy Stott - Luxury Problems
After 2 wonderful EPs last year, especially We Stay Together, Andy Stott cements his reputation as one of the best electronic musicians and producers around. Luxury Problems takes the pallete laid down by last years works – dark dub ambient techno pumped through a dreamlike haze, with pulsating beats and rhythms weaving their way into the mix as if coming from a distance – and adds in additional vocals. As one who is always a bit trepitatious about vocals in this type of music, I wasn’t expecting them to work so well here, but Stott uses them as a perfect counterbalance, almost angelic, otherworldly croonings that enhance and complicate the music beneath them. But for an album that relies so heavily on its production to achieve its intended effect, Luxury Problems is still remarkably controlled and restrained, minimal in all the right ways, yet still dropping killer beats that all combines into an unsettling yet exciting listening experience. If David Lynch owned a club, this album would be spinning at least once a day.
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7
Frank Ocean - channel ORANGE
As an R&B skeptic, at least of that produced in the last 10-12 years, and a hater of what little I'd heard of the Odd Future crew, specifically Tyler, The Creator's abominable Goblin, I fully expected the hype behind channel ORANGE to be just that, pure hype. But my first few listens left me both intrigued and confused by what I’d heard – it was hysterical and offbeat, but so scattershot yet ambitious that it was difficult to determine how much of my appreciation was due to the sheer oddity of the thing and how much due to the sheer oddity actually being what was so damn brilliant about it. The juxtaposition of the absurd and the real, the satirical and the raw, the comic and the tragic all work to build a mythic portrait of the African American experience amongst poverty and riches – super rich stoner kids running out of Lucky charms banging up against a mom who can’t afford to send her kid to a prom without missing a bit. The flurry of absurdities and non-sequitars - stage-diving dalai lamas, cheetahs kidnapping Cleopatra, odes to Forrest Gump, among others - serves to create an immensely amusing album that can at times be just as emotionally mature, sonically adventurous and socially aware as it is just downright silly. Whatever channel ORANGE is or isn't, it's probably the most fun I've had with an album all year and one I end up playing at least a few times every time I return to it.
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6
Lamps - Under the Water Under the Ground
2012 was a year for guitars and The Lamps, a band I’d never even heard of more than a few months ago, are certainly one of the exciting guitar-driven rock bands I’ve discovered recently. Under the Water Under the Ground takes the garage rock sound and absolutely shreds it with blistering outbursts of noise and feedback, its harsh angular guitars constantly churning, accumulating a speed and momentum that only come to a crashing halt at the album’s finish. There’s not much in terms of complexity to The Lamps’ sound, but there is a fury and immediacy that is tough to match and an intelligent yet intuitive use of noise, not only as a more aggressive extension of the song’s ideas, but as a form of transition that takes the song to a totally different place. It’s really only an album for hardcore fans of noise rock, but if that’s what you’re looking for, The Lamps deliver in spades.
5
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
It’s been 10 years since Godspeed You! Black Emperor left the scene and no one ever truly stepped up to claim the throne of their particular brand of crescendoing post-rock. If anything, new sounds and styles came to the forefront and the linear, slow-fast builds of Godspeed’s prime all but fell out of favor. With their return (despite the continued presence of several members occasionally brilliant side project, A Silver Mt. Zion), two main questions were on everyone’s lips: “Do they still have it?” and if so, “Is their music even relevant anymore?” For me, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, silly title aside, most definitely still has it and while the band’s modus operandi has not changed all that much in the past decade, the result is just a powerful, moving and transcendent as their best works, so they sure sound relevant to me. The addition of two almost pure drone tracks – the second and the last, acting as bridges between the two epic 20+ minute jams you’d expect from GY!BE – introduces a new element to the band’s sound, one almost with more in common with Silver Mt. Zion than Godspeed, breaking from the mold of the slow-fast build and offering two interesting counterpoints to the monstrous duo that is “Mladic” and “We Drift Like Worried Fire”. But ultimately, I’m just glad Godspeed are back at all, though the fact that they didn’t miss a beat in those 10 years off is a whole lotta gravy.
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4
Grimes - Visions
Claire Boucher already had a couple of interesting releases under her belt, particularly Halfaxa, but these early albums and EPs were merely a faded blueprint of where she would go with Visions, a pop album that is as vibrant, experimental, joyous and downright weird (often all simultaneously) as any I've heard this decade. Boucher's pixie angelic voice soars like an ethereal beacon that shines against the dark underbelly that is her beat-driven electronic madness, an array of pulsating rhythms, hyped up dark ambiance and manic beats. Visions is both consistent and consistently surprising, not only boasting one great tune after another but constantly morphing and growing into something new – the kind of truly thrilling pop album we expected from Bjork, oh, a decade or so ago. Not that I’m saying that Boucher is the new Bjork, but considering the competition, she’s probably the best candidate out there. And at the ripe young age 24, Boucher/Grimes have plenty of time to refine or shapeshift or head in surprising new directions, but even if Visions stands as her peak when all’s said and done, it’s still a hell of an album and proof that pop music can be as adventurous and rewarding as any other type of music out there.
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3
Mount Eerie - Clear Moon/Ocean Roar
Ever since his days with The Microphones, Phil Elverum has been carving his own little niche in the world of indie folk, but since Wind’s Poem and his perverse fascination with black metal, there has been a crystallization of a new sound built even more heavily on textures that set a hauntingly surreal mood. The direct references to David Lynch and Twin Peaks in the last album have taken settled more organically into his two sister albums, Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, from this year. Clear Moon in particular has a deliberate sense of pacing and time, which along with the languorous synths, create a distinctly otherworldly feel, yet where this may sound like an album that would be murky or full of reverb, surprisingly it isn’t. Clear Moon, like the title, is crisp and exact, yet still drifting and rootless, like wandering through a strange forest on a dark winter night, while his companion album, Ocean Roar, is less distinct, allowing the guitars to get noisier and the sonic layers to blend together. Despite my general preference for the sound of the latter, Clear Moon stands out as the best for me, highlighting Elverum’s raw talent as a song-writer as well as that of an experimenter in atmospherics, but the albums work spectacularly together and serve as a showcase for all of the things Elverum has excelled at in his earlier and most recent works.
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2
Grizzly Bear - Shields
Much has been made of Grizzly Bear’s egalitarian approach to music-making, but before Shields, there was always at least a slightly different feel to an Ed Droste song than one written by Daniel Rossen. Even on Yellow House, still my favorite record of theirs, you can hear a single, unique voice behind “Plans“ and “Knife“ and while it never was at the detriment of the song or album as a whole, there’s something very pleasing in Shields that signifies Grizzly Bears full maturity and crystallization as a band. Every track not only plays to and highlights their strengths – vocal harmonizing, haunting melodies, surprising key changes, intricate, interlocking riffs – but seems to employ those strengths, and those of each member, consistently. There’s no “Two Weeks” to instantly reach out and grab you, but Shields is an album that rewards patience. Neither as densely atmospheric as Yellow House or as catchy as Veckatimest, it nonetheless boasts the bands most complicated and successful songwriting to date with every song taking unexpected turns to both darker and sunnier places, often shedding a particular tempo or tone for another midway through a song. Yet Grizzly Bear are still making pop music, albeit highbrow and complex pop music, so they are careful walk the line between creative/adventurous and sheer inaccessibility and the result is an album that cements their status as one of the best bands working today bar-none.
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1
Swans - The Seer
So the Mayans were wrong and the world didn’t end in 2012, but for all the fire-and-brimstone folk just pining for an apocalypse, Swans was kind enough to pack one neatly into a 2-hour double album that is effectively the sonic equivalent of the universe dying and coming into being again. The Seer is epic, but it is so much more than that – it is a great revolutionary yawp into the vast abyss of the universe, a primal, visceral, raw, almost tribal expression of intense fury, biblical in proportions, yet preached less in words than through the loudest, noisiest guitars Michael Gira could squander and bells and drums struck with such thunderous force that the earth shudders beneath us making people scatter in fear. Seeing Swans live for the first time last year was an eye-opening experience, not only for the pure pleasure of seeing them on stage together reimagining these fantastic songs, but for the sheer volume at which they perform. If you thought Dinosaur Jr. was loud live, and my god they are, Swans make them sound like a coffee shop folk act by comparison, but this volume is an important part of their act and their albums, particularly The Seer whose droning repetitions often have a trancelike effect that is intensified by paralyzing loudness. This music isn’t just overwhelming; it’s downright rattling and there’s nary a song on here that won’t rattle you to your core, but the 30-minute title track and two other 20-minute tracks, “The Apostate” and “A Piece of the Sky” each have more raw power and emotional heft than most other whole albums released this year. And while this is a countdown, thus signifying my increasing appreciation for each record as the list goes in, #1 was not even close this year. Swans owned it and this album owns me. It’ll be tough to top this for best of the decade let alone 2012, so have your own little apocalypse in your mind and check out The Seer if you haven’t already.
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