20
Ty Segall - Twins
The year’s most prolific artist, Ty Segall was thoughtful enough to leave us with three solid and distinct albums in 2012 – Hair, with White Fence, Slaughterhouse, with Ty Segall Band, and Twins, a solo album proper – each providing ample evidence of both his ridiculous talents as guitarist and his wide array of musical knowledge, particularly 60s garage rock and psychedelia. Twins may be the most musically straightforward of the three, but it also packs the hardest punch, the crunchy, churning guitars giving way to one killer riff after another. With every track taking the 2-3 minute, get-in and get-out approach of garage rock, Segall takes us on a face-paced unrelenting tour through all the shades of his style, all similar in tone yet each offering a fresh enough take that the album builds an accumulative power and a momentum that makes it endlessly spinable.
Favorite Tracks:
19
Mohn - Mohn
Mohn marks the return of electronic legend Wolfgang Voigt, Gas himself and founder of the always consistent Kompakt label, with Jörg Burger, with whom he released the brilliant Las Vegas under the Burger/Ink monicker. Mohn is a bit more expansive than Las Vegas, lying further on the ambient side of the ambient techno spectrum, yet not as purely and densely atmospheric as his Gas releases, pun not intended. Structured around rhythmic repetitions, carefully layered sonic textures and a wide array of playful percussive backing, Mohn create 9 rock solid, slow-building, hypnotic gems to get lost in; each track varied and complex enough to reward attentive listening, but equally suited to zoning out to. It marks yet another fine addition to Voigt’s canon, which was already among the most impressive in the last 20 years of electronic music.
18
Thee Oh Sees - Putrifiers II
Like Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer draws much of his inspiration from early garage and 60s psych rock, although his music often takes on a more garish, macabre form evident in everything from the instrumentation and Dwyer’s occasionally abrasive vocals to the album covers and song titles. With Putrifiers II, Dwyer & Co. put the brakes on the insanity, releasing their most self-controlled, focused and chill work to date. Accessibility is not something most fans of Thee Oh Sees are looking for, so I imagine this will be seen as a disappointing entry to some, but for me, it highlights Dwyer’s songwriting skills more than any of their previous albums while still retaining everything that I’d already loved about them. The addition of more krautrockish sounds, particularly in “So Nice” and “Lupine Dominus” along with a newfound tenderness in their psychedelia, verging on folk, at least on the Byrds-esque “Goodbye Baby” scratched me right where I itched and gives more proof that this is a band that cannot only consistently surprise its fans but pull in new ones by branching out without sacrificing one iota of what makes them such a damn entertaining group.
17
The Tallest Man On Earth - There's No Leaving Now
You can’t talk about The Tallest Man on Earth without talking about the Dylan comparisons and you can’t compare anyone to Dylan without doing so, at least in part, disparagingly. Yes, There’s No Leaving Now is the not-so-tall Swede’s Dylan-goes-electric album, but leaving behind the familiar voice, this album also happens to feature his strongest song-writing to date and while his influences are still evident (I can’t listen to “To Just Grow Away” without thinking Nick Drake), the actual songs – ya know, those things by which albums should actually be judged - stand on their own. The album’s production is more intrusive than that of his first two albums, but the melancholic haze it adds to many of the tracks is perfectly suited to his sound, giving them a unique edge and adding a new relationship between the singer and his guitar. While the album slows down a bit too much after “Wind and Walls”, there’s more than enough greatness in the first ¾ for this to hold up as a great album.
Favorite Tracks:
16
Flying Lotus - Until the Quiet Comes
FlyLo’s Cosmogramma set a new bar for electronic beat-making and instrumental hip-hop, so his third album had little chance to be anything but a disappointment. And while it was, if only all disappointments could be as good as Until the Quiet Comes, life would be a hell of a lot better. Intelligently opting not to repeat the futuristic, hyper-paced approach of his prior masterpiece, Flying Lotus keeps his cool by slowing things down a bit and refining the jazzier side of his sound, replacing Cosmogramma’s maximalism with a smoother and more patient yet equally complex mix of tempos and beat styles. Despite the toned down approach, Until the Quiet Comes is, if anything, less accessible than its predecessor, in part due to FlyLo trying to find his feet again, but more because of the aggressive infusion of jazz rhythms into his work, which have lead to an increasing presence of offbeat time signatures and shifting tempos. If not as infinitely re-listenable as his first two albums, Quiet is, at the very least, a fascinating progression of in the career of an artist who, in a few short years, has laid claim to being one of the most important new kids on the block.
Favorite Tracks:
15
Raime - Quarter Turns Over a Living Line
If there’s an endgame for dubstep, Quarter Turns Over a Living Line is it. By stripping it of all excesses and refining its very core, Raime has created a sound that is spacious yet haunting and open yet claustrophobic. It’s dance music for aliens in another dimension, ambient music for empty warehouses at 2am – the type of music that not only sets an overwhelmingly creepy, dense and foggy atmosphere, but sets a pace of being, takes you outside of yourself and for 45 minutes allows you to hover just above and outside of existence in a sort of musical purgatory unlike any other. As effective as Raime’s buzzing whirs, thumping beats and pulsating ambient rhythms are, it’s the methodical pacing with which he uses them, the space between the notes and hefty drawls of chords and sounds as they’re smeared, stretched, elongated and distorted within his sonic palette, that makes this such a wonderfully effective mindfuck. It’s not an easy listen, but its rewards are ample for those willing to immerse themselves in its world.
Favorite Tracks:
14
Liars - Wixiw
Liars, the true chameleons of the indie rock world, just can't help themselves. From one album to the next, they continually reinvent themselves, unafraid to shed traits that critics and fans have loved from their previous work as long as it's for the benefit of their current album. When they announced that Wixiw was their electronic album, it was hard not to be both excited and trepidatious, yet for a band whose sound is so entrenched in post-punkisms and weird, unsettling atmospherics, the transition makes perfect sense. After two of their more straightforward albums, Sisterworld and Self-Titled, WIXIW finds them back on the experimental terrain of their masterpiece, Drum's Not Dead, as they implement a wide array of playful experimental sounds, crafting an album that covers several corners of the electronic spectrum. From the mellow atmospherics of "The Exact Color of Doubt" and "Octagon" and the restrained pulsations of "No. 1 Against the Rush" to the playful twist on recent Radiohead with "His and Mine Sensations and even full-on club-thumping with "Brats", Liars once again show that they're not only capable of what they set their mind to, but that what they set their mind to is usually more interesting and ambitious than what most other bands dream of doing.
Favorite Tracks:
13
Demdike Stare - Elemental
Another year, another 2-hour batch of endlessly rewarding post-apocalyptic soundscapes from Demdike Stare, the duo who distill our nightmares into Lynchian sonic vignettes, transcendent journeys to the deepest, darkest corners of the human psyche that plunge the listener into decaying, industrial environments than unearth our worst fears only to overcome them through a sense of constant progression towards completeness and finality, the shattered broken pieces put back together again even if only by the silence at the end of the track. It’s difficult to even say what Demdike Stare’s music is actually for; it’s too intense and engrossing to function as pure background music and almost too overwhelming and emotional to take in through extended careful listens, but when the moment is right, these guys have some of the most singular electronic music out there, elevating ambience and atmospherics to the level of high art, a microcosm of the mind, capturing the universal aspects of aging, decay, destruction, isolation and fading memories that plague us all with a vitality and spirit all their own.
Favorite Tracks:
12
Beach House - Bloom
Essentially playing like an extended B-side to their previous, and best, album, Teen Dream, Bloom once again highlights Beach House's unique ability to transform simple melodies into something tender, vulnerable, broken yet hopeful. Aside from its single mistake of sidelining Victoria Legrand's vocals in favor of Alex Scally (whose voice is great, but the interplay present on their prior outing is missed), Bloom is dream pop at its finest - immaculately production, beautiful, intertwined riffs and melodies, and a sense of yearning and hope battling against the melancholy undercurrent. "Myth" is the clear stand-out track, but the other 9 are all equally great, contributing to an album whose consistent rewards show why its makers are rightly considered among the finest working in their genre.
Favorite Tracks:
11
Motion Sickness of Time Travel - Motion Sickness of Time Travel
Ambient music is a man's game; for whatever reason, it is a genre almost complete devoid of a female presence, so when a female ambient artist comes along - in this case, Motion Sickness of Time Travel aka Rachel Evans - it's always interesting to see what they bring to the table. Evans is as sprawling and expansive as any artist out there and with each of the album's tracks spanning a shade over 20 minutes, her open style gives her ample space to allow her feminine mystique to come through. Of course there's nothing on this album that screams "feminine", especially as ambient music isn't exactly testosterone-driven to begin with, but Evans music does have a certain delicacy to it, particularly in the subtle ways she introduces splashes of progressive electronic segments, a sort of toned-down version of Emeralds comes to mind, that serve to connect her subtly varied yet tonally connected, otherworldy stretches of pure ambience. But ultimately, when an album is this good, it doesn't matter who it comes from and female or not, this self-titled release stands on its own as one of the finest albums of the year and announces Evans as a young talent to keep an eye on.
Favorite Tracks:
It's only 4 tracks, so here's the whole album.
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