I knew something on "Metals" would occupy a slot on this list. Feist's darker, stronger follow-up to "The Reminder" was every bit worth the four-year wait. But which song to choose for this list? The 3/4 minor-key swagger of "How Come You Never Go There" or perhaps the fragile beauty of "Circle Married the Line"?
No, with so much excellent material on "Metals", it still always comes back to "Anti-Pioneer". I'll be short and sweet with this one.
1) The guitar. Feist has a very distinctive voice, but also a wonderful and recognizable guitar style. She plays mournfully here, and always with so much feeling. It's almost a duet between her two melodic voices when she trades between the guitar interludes, and the vocal verses.
2) The harmonized breakdown at the 3-minute mark. I can't get enough of this part. It gives you exactly what you want - and then more, and more until it finally fades back into her guitar. Shivers every time.
3) The cinematic string section. The arranging on this song is detail perfect, and this particular part elevates the track in a seamless and intelligent way.
4) The wonderfully dry and sparse drumming that perfectly compliments the song, while remaining a major voice in itself.
5) An endless stream of sonic nuances. Everything sounds amazing on this track (and on the record overall)
Enjoy, in all its beauty:
So, there you have it. "Anti-Pioneer" is the last of my Top 5, 2011. It's no small task, but I would love to hear the top 5 lists of others in the comments. I'll be returning to ranting for my next couple pieces, so stay tuned in the New Year.
Hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had an awesome one! Shout out to Hanukkah too, for which I chilled with a lot of drunk Jewish appreciators (and a couple of actual Jews as well).
I will have the final spot on my 2011 countdown up tomorrow, but in the mean time, I though I would post a few selections that almost made the cut. These are all great tracks in their own right, and it pained me to only have five slots to play with.
Without further adieu, the Top 5 of 2011 Leftovers (in no order):
Chasing It Down - Mother Mother
Eureka is an awesome album, but I like this track better than either of the two singles that were pumped so heavily ("The Stand" and "Baby Don't Dance"). The organ, the drums, the 3/4 over 4/4 section... it goes on and on. The definition of intelligent pop/rock.
Kiss Cam - The Arkells
Great melancholy riff in the verse, and a fucking indelible chorus. Although thematically, it's still about the Arkell's second-favorite topic (losing love by being a bit of a jerk), this one shows some nice growth. Cool key change on the bridge too.
The World Is Yours/Brooklyn Zoo - Bad Bad Not Good
BBNG gets it, I think. I will spare everyone the rant, but I really feel that the history-obsessed-backwards-gazing-ken-burns take on Jazz music that people like (the immensely talented) Wynton Marsalis are putting out lately is causing the music to stagnate. While Soil & Pimp Sessions is busy kicking people's ass over in Europe and Japan, leagues of talented youngsters in the US and Canada are still releasing album after album of 50-year old standards.
Not BBNG. Their disc of Hip-Hop covers and improvised originals was a real gem for me this year. Personally, I think they may be a bit too much in 'fuck the past'/'destroy our idols' mode (cue 'Giant Steps' rant and a Tyler the Creator cameo), but they sound fresh and have serious chops. I'm inspired.
You - Evidence
Evidence and Premier. Dope.
Green Gardens, Cold Montreal - Sloan
What a comeback! To my own detriment, I had never gone back and listened to Sloan (It was years after Sloan's heyday that I was into music remotely like theirs), and The Double Cross suddenly put them roaring back on Canadian radio. "Unkind" cannot be denied - but it's this ballad that really stuck with me. Short and wonderful.
Bedouin Dress - Fleet Foxes
This album was solid, but not much of an overall step for Fleet Foxes. Bedouin Dress is one of the moments where I really felt they had done something noteworthy with their sound, and the fiddle in particular bring this track to life. The entire disc is quite good, but the moments of excitement are spaced between lots of comfort. Not a bad thing necessarily, but Bedouin Dress stands out for it's risk-taking.
Lippy Kids - Elbow
Elbow can be rough and indie sounding at times - but more and more, they just sound classically beautiful to me. "Lippy Kids" is an anthem to youth that's cheeky, nostalgic, reverent and a little sad all at once. Great material played and recorded really well. Nothing at all wrong with that.
That's It, That's All - We Are The City
Constant stop/starts like this should be gimmicky. The fact that "That's It, That's All" sounds totally compelling all the way through speaks to the serious talents of We Are The City. Not everything on "High School" works, but the stuff that does is very promising. I keep being impressed by this band. Shout out to Steve for putting me on to them.
Change The Sheets - Kathleen Edwards
How do you make a great thing even better? Add Justin Vernon.
Darken Her Horse - Austra
I've already gushed over Austra, so I will only say this: The beat drop in "Darken Her Horse" is one of the most satisfying musical moments for me in 2011.
When they craft a gigantic (awesome) achievement like "The Hazards of Love", it gets nailed for "missing the catchy choruses and verisimilar emotions"*. When they follow that up with a gorgeously minimal record like "The King is Dead" - absolutely laden with hooks - they apparently "cling so closely to formula" that they sound "unconvincing"**. Whatever.
"The King is Dead' is absolutely stellar, and "Don't Carry It All" was one of my anthems for the year. This beaming song was delivered in time for spring to arrive, and it brought a huge smile (and a couple tears) to my face as I drove around watching the trees come into bloom. In the second line of the song, Colin Meloy describes the days becoming longer as a "march towards the sun". Indeed. This is how you write a song about a season change.
In fact, "Don't Carry It All" is an ode to change of many kinds. Old to new, chaos to stability, life to death and then rebirth. As always with the Decemberists, complex topics like marriage, community and loss are handled with perception and remarkable economy. A single verse will reveal a lifetime, and words are to be clung to for full effect.
Even better, these words should be sung along with. "Picaresque" (and "Cutouts and Castaways") had some great choruses, but I daresay that this effort is the most sing-a-long-friendly of any Decemberists album. In fact, I dare people not to sing along to "Don't Carry It All". And when the words you're singing include "Let the yoke fall from our shoulders", that's even more remarkable. Poetry makes the familiar, unfamiliar, and good songwriting makes the poetic, catchy. "Don't Carry It All" might as well be a masterclass in good writing. It's simple stuff: Verse/Chorus/Bridge material that uses few chords, and doesn't do anything fancy. Listen how great it sounds. It's the kind of song that reminds why these old songwriting forms have lasted hundreds of years.
Even the message is totally on point. At the beginning of 2011, a song that welcomes change and stresses the importance of community could hardly be more timely. Gather around. Enjoy this wonderful song.
I had a lot of expectations surrounding the second full-length Bon Iver album, as I imagine a lot of people did. "For Emma, Forever Ago" is a pretty special record, and for the next one, I was expecting something beautiful, ethereal and even quite different. What I wasn't expecting was for "Bon Iver" to sound so confident.
"Perth" opens with about eight second of silence, and a gorgeous guitar line follows. It repeats, undulating many times until ghostly harmonies and snare drums built softly underneath. None of this (minus the electric guitar) is that surprising, but it all sounds exactly right. This feeling of just nailing it - of a vision expertly carried out - continues through to the more surprising parts of the song. Machine gun polyrythms? Bombastic brass shots? Double kick drum? On paper it sounds bizarre, but I didn't question it once while listening.
"Perth" also does (well) the duty of establishing the first section of the record as a whole. "Minnesota, WI" and Grammy-nominated "Holoscene" sit beautifully in the afterglow that a track as strong as "Perth" creates. It carves a wide emotional berth, sounding at once deeply melancholy and triumphant. From there, the record has everywhere to go.
"Bon Iver" is a great album, and "Perth" is a perfect way to open it. It doesn't shrug off the features that made "For Emma" succeed, but it signals loud and clear that audiences are in for a different ride. "Bon Iver" will never mean the same thing as the album before, nor should it. "For Emma, Forever Ago" is only a playlist away, and we have something much more exciting in the second album than repetition. We have progress.
"Seeds", and Hey Rosetta remain inexplicably (and criminally) underrated. They are definitely one of the best bands in Canada, and likely one of the best in the world. When I think of music that makes me proud to be Canadian, Hey Rosetta is invariably one of the first that comes to mind. They're really that good.
I also think "Seeds" is the best thing they've ever done. 2008s "Into Your Lungs" was a huge achievement, but "Seeds" does something pretty remarkable in its nuance: It dials it all back a bit.
"Into Your Lungs" had everything - huge emotional climaxes, grinding guitars, vocal catharsis and whispered tenderness. The range covered is massive, and the results are very impressive. Hawksley Workman gave the band a sonic palette to match the enormous appetite of the songs, and listeners are delivered track after track of epics. Five and six-minute songs that change pace and tone sometimes three times. It's astonishing, but it's also sometimes exhausting.
I am a big fan of "Into Your Lungs", and don't get me wrong. There is a big place in my heart for sprawling, wrenching works like "Tired Eyes". But simplicity can work at least as well for Hey Rosetta. Some of the most singular songs on that disc - "New Goodbye", "A Thousand Suns", "Psalm" - were also some of the best. And with this in mind, enter "Seeds".
"Seeds" is a refinement. It takes the daring, the poetry and the enormous musicality of the former album and hones it to a razor's edge. It sounds a little different, but as far as I'm concerned, almost nothing is lost and a great deal is gained. "Welcome" is, in almost every regard, a perfect rock song. "Young Glass" contemplates and then becomes an anthem before you've even noticed. And then "Yer Spring".
For all the talk of simplicity, "Yer Spring" is actually among the most complex songs on the album, but it never feels that way to me. Washed out reverb crashes into a drum feature, building to an eastern-flavoured string breakdown, distorted vocal tension and finally rockout release. I can hardly think of another band that could pull that off at all, let alone with this much grace and style. Where "Into Your Lungs" drew attention to these big moments and shifting sections, the songs on "Seeds" dance through them with utter finesse. "Yer Spring" is as complicated and daring as anything they've ever done, but Hey Rosetta has the confidence here to let is soar without even waiting for the breathless listener to catch up.
I still don't know if I've fully caught up. But I do know this. I had the privilege this year of listening to one of the best bands in the world at the height of their powers.
I was a latecomer to the M.I.A. bandwagon (that really seemed to peak in late 2008) , but as so many did, I found her music exciting and refreshing in a way that caught me quite off-guard. The songs that I liked the most, "Bucky Done Gun", "Sunshowers", "Galang" and the inescapable "Paper Planes" were a staggering collision of musical styles, lyrical content and aesthetic. Jamaican dancehall and grimy London electronic beats supported rapid-fire bursts of sharply self-aware commentary on the global, the intensely personal and the the confluence of those worlds. Weed and sex and poverty and excess. Injustice and liberation. It was a crazy-ass mix, and I was totally sold.
The follow-up album did not sell me however. This is really a topic for another article, but 2010s "/\/\ /\ Y /\" had nowhere near the impact on me as either "Arular" or "Kala". Where the first two had seemed so sharp, so immediate and captivating - "Maya" just seemed kind of...muddy. I bring all of this up here because that same startled excitement I had when listening to the first couple M.I.A. albums came flooding back to me this fall, and picked up right where I wished "Maya" had done. The band is tUnE-yArDs and the disc, "WHOKILL".
WHOKILL sounds like Fela Kuti and the Dirty Projectors and M.I.A. and a thousand other good things, all while sounding pretty damn original. Merrill Garbus, a funky-ass bass player and a couple saxophones make a whole variety of delightful noises - sometimes very rough and abrasive, and others soft and sweet. The album is dope, and a number of tracks could have made this list ("Bizness" and "My Country" in particular) but for sheer pedal-to-the-floor ear-grabbing, "Gangsta" wins out by a measure.
Distant sirens start the track, followed by huge drums and fuzzed-out bass. The drums cut out, and another siren - one made by the human voice - enters, and distorts. A harmony drops on top of the line, and all of this builds until, it too, sharply cuts. A powerful, neigh-androgynous voice demands "What's a boy to do if he'll never be a gangsta?!", and it all come shooting back together.
At this point, it has been 45 seconds.
"Gangsta" rules. It gets to be a lot by the end of the track, and some people will surely find it overwhelming and not their cup of tea. That's cool. But for those who can get on board, there's much to marvel at, and shake your body like a crazy person to. Little touches like the intentional de-tuning of the word 'sound' make this track absolutely fly out of the speakers. It's raw, exciting and a little bit frightening for good measure.
The intoxicating, worldly and chaotic blend that an artist like M.I.A. did so well is back in full force here. And holy does it sound cool.
Over the past couple of days, I've seen a bunch of Facebook friends link the above video, and a lot of people (guys and girls) are commenting on how true this rings for them. I actually think the video is kinda funny, and does have a point to make - but I don't think it's the one that the filmmakers are going for.
The premise is basic:
Ask ladies if boys and girls can be 'just friends'.
Ask gents if boys and girls can be 'just friends'.
Observe the difference.
Ask girls if they think the guy friends they have would want to hook up.
Comedic revelation!
Now, without even watching the video, I bet most people would have easily understood this segment from the summary I gave. It's a cliche narrative. Guys want to fuck everything, and girls are either:
1) Naive
2) Eternal Bringers of False Hope
Number 2 is where I think a lot of the 'funny but true' response is coming from, and I want to address this first. But I actually think the bigger issue is that the way this video (and this 'Harry met Sally' question) approach sex and friendship is fundamentally confused. But first to the girls.
The video works out to an elaborate play on the 'friend-zone' concept. Guy wants to fuck a girl, girl just wants to be friends. Guy accepts this friendship on the misplaced hope that girl will re-assess, and all of this is made worse by girl's flirting and/or mixed signals. This has nothing to do with actually being friends. Let me explain.
If someone hits on you, you recognize this, but have no intention of sleeping with them, the right thing to do is to make that clear. But there are complications. For starters, letting someone down can be an awkward or difficult thing to do. This doesn't make stringing-along justifiable, but at least relatable. How many guys put off a breakup because it's hard? Plenty. Second of all, awful as this is, having someone around who you know finds you desirable is a really nice ego boost. People tend to associate false-hope behavior with girls, but it's really just a power discrepancy that is admittedly, often in girls favour.
Guys do this kind of thing too, but instead of allowing the other person to crush on them, and not reciprocate, guys will actually date a girl they have little-to-no interest in and fuck them, only to dump the girl in a week or two's time. Both of these scenarios are cowardly, and both of them prey on the unattainable expectations of the other person.
But the power dynamic isn't always so skewed. Attractive and attracted people often become friends, and don't fuck because of circumstances or commitments. That doesn't mean they don't find each other interesting, worthwhile, and don't care about each other. It also doesn't mean that the friendship is unsustainable. I would be willing to bet that most people have at least one person in their circle that they would sleep with, but have no illusions that this is likely going to happen. And that person may very well feel the same way A little sexual tension or harmless flirting can be the fun topping on a real and fulfilling friendship. It's just not an either/or thing.
