Best albums of 2011

[Worm]

Qvist, as a little aside, here are some interesting comments from Johnny Marr's Facebook page. He posted a clip of his new song and here's what people said:

JOHNNY MARR: Dez says "play like you then". OK...

COMMENT: It is the Johnny Marr sound and no-one does it better and it's wonderful to hear.

COMMENT: This is going to sound really silly, but you really do sound like YOU here...

COMMENT: What IS that? What is that sound that makes him sound like him?

COMMENT: Very nice, yes, it sounds very much like you Johnny!

 

[peptastic]

I usually play catch up and listen to albums in the years before.

My list though-
Handsome Furs- Sound Kapital
Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia
IAMX- Volatile Times
Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped [EP]
And One - Tanzomat
Radiohead - King of Limbs

 

[Worm]

I usually play catch up and listen to albums in the years before.

My list though-
Handsome Furs- Sound Kapital
Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia
IAMX- Volatile Times
Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped [EP]
And One - Tanzomat
Radiohead - King of Limbs

Wow, And One are still around...?

 

[peptastic]

Wow, And One are still around...?

They are! They released an ep today in fact, 2 earlier this year and an album in May.

 

[Qvist]

I usually play catch up and listen to albums in the years before.

My list though-
Handsome Furs- Sound Kapital
Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia
IAMX- Volatile Times
Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped [EP]
And One - Tanzomat
Radiohead - King of Limbs

I also liked the Patrick Wolf album quite a lot. And Moonface.

 

[fabval]

PJ Harvey's record was gorgeous. It is pretty rare that someone can release such a impressive piece of work after 20 years of career.

 

[Worm]

Qvist, or anyone interested: there's a good new article written by Simon Reynolds, featured in the new issue of "The Wire", in which he touches on some of the ideas in this thread. The piece is a profile of David Toop, a musician, critic, and "sound curator". In one of his books, "Ocean of Sound" (1994), he wrote about the future "oceanic" wealth of music and information soon to be available on the web. Reynolds talks about this and other aspects of Toop's work as a way of framing some open questions about the creation of music in the Internet age. (Warning: Deleuze and Guattari are mentioned. Sorry, haters!) Here's a taste:

There's another drawback to the internet as portal to myriad elsewheres and elsewhens. Because analogue-world collecting involved physical exertion and travel, distance and delay structured music consumption according to a rhythm of hunt and capture, ingestion and digestion. Those vital gaps are insidiously filled in by the internet, whose always-there plenitude incites restlessness, the audio equivalent of checklist tourism. Before file sharing, the only people who experienced this kind of frenetic overload (of choice and sheer volume) were the rich and those who got sent shitloads of freebies, i.e. critics and DJs. Now this unearned 'wealth' has become the generalized condition of music fandom.​

Reynolds talks about some of the same topics we've been talking about here. He ultimately decides that, perhaps, the dissolution of all limits promised by the Internet might not be such a good idea...

 

[Qvist]

Sounds eminently sensible, Deleuze or not. I still have a word or two to add on that point, incidentally. When time allows sufficient gathering of thoughts!

 

[Anonymous Bosch]

Tune-Yards' W H O K I L L. Fortunately, the quality of the music far surpasses the cover artwork.

 

[Oh my god. it's Robby!]

I usually play catch up and listen to albums in the years before.

My list though-
Handsome Furs- Sound Kapital
Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia
IAMX- Volatile Times
Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped [EP]
And One - Tanzomat
Radiohead - King of Limbs

wow, I really like a lot of those bands, but have not heard most of those albums...

 

[Worm]

Tune-Yards' W H O K I L L.

Agree and...

Fortunately, the quality of the music far surpasses the cover artwork.

So, so true.

 

[peptastic]

[

Qvist, or anyone interested: there's a good new article written by Simon Reynolds, featured in the new issue of "The Wire", in which he touches on some of the ideas in this thread. The piece is a profile of David Toop, a musician, critic, and "sound curator". In one of his books, "Ocean of Sound" (1994), he wrote about the future "oceanic" wealth of music and information soon to be available on the web. Reynolds talks about this and other aspects of Toop's work as a way of framing some open questions about the creation of music in the Internet age. (Warning: Deleuze and Guattari are mentioned. Sorry, haters!) Here's a taste:

There's another drawback to the internet as portal to myriad elsewheres and elsewhens. Because analogue-world collecting involved physical exertion and travel, distance and delay structured music consumption according to a rhythm of hunt and capture, ingestion and digestion. Those vital gaps are insidiously filled in by the internet, whose always-there plenitude incites restlessness, the audio equivalent of checklist tourism. Before file sharing, the only people who experienced this kind of frenetic overload (of choice and sheer volume) were the rich and those who got sent shitloads of freebies, i.e. critics and DJs. Now this unearned 'wealth' has become the generalized condition of music fandom.​

Reynolds talks about some of the same topics we've been talking about here. He ultimately decides that, perhaps, the dissolution of all limits promised by the Internet might not be such a good idea...

Ehh.. his insight comes off a bit snobby. The old I was there to collect it in the '60s and in the right geographic location with credentials so I'll appreciate it more.
There still isn't time enough to listen to it all.
He wrote that in '94? In '94 I was still taping depeche mode off the radio and saving my money for cds. I didn't get the internet until '96 but couldn't burn cds until '99.
I guess I was spared the overload.

Time should balance things out.
That is a pretty good limit unless of course you are still one of the rich who don't work or are a critic or dj doing it for a living.
I still don't think they have enough time to consume everything.

 

[Worm]

[

Ehh.. his insight comes off a bit snobby. The old I was there to collect it in the '60s and in the right geographic location with credentials so I'll appreciate it more.
There still isn't time enough to listen to it all.
He wrote that in '94? In '94 I was still taping depeche mode off the radio and saving my money for cds. I didn't get the internet until '96 but couldn't burn cds until '99.
I guess I was spared the overload.

Time should balance things out.
That is a pretty good limit unless of course you are still one of the rich who don't work or are a critic or dj doing it for a living.
I still don't think they have enough time to consume everything.

Taping off the radio...

I remember a friend taped Morrissey's KROQ session as it was broadcast. I wasn't available and she was. She came over later and we played it at least six times in a row. The giddy rockabilly of "Sing Your Life", the Marrish jangle of "My Love Life" (then a brand new, unreleased song), and the hard-nosed revision of "There's A Place In Hell" were all brilliant. There was an additional thrill knowing Morrissey had recorded the songs right down the freeway, too. He was alive and kicking. We had just seen him live on his first tour since The Smiths. Not having grown up in England in the 80s, it was the closest I would ever get to recording brand new songs off of the John Peel show. We treasured that tape. Of course I made a copy for myself; I recall my nerves as I popped in the original, because my tape deck had done its share of cassette-eating and I certainly didn't want to destroy this one. We made other copies for other friends, and soon "the KROQ tape" became constant listening among our little band of Morrissey fans. I loved that tape. I made a cover for it with paper, tape, and a photo cut from a magazine. By the time I bought the CD release, three months of enthusiastic playing and replaying had left the tape audibly fading. I don't have it anymore, but I wish I did. I still recall the goosebumps I got listening to it for the first time.

This is the experience Reynolds was writing about. It's not as common anymore because of technological advances.

The point is not to say my experience of "Morrissey at KROQ" was superior to everyone else's. Rather, the question to ask is how technology is changing our consumption of music and whether that change is good or bad. Snobbery isn't really in play here. Ask yourself if your appreciation for Depeche Mode changed between the time you were taping them off the radio, or saving up for their CDs, and the late 90s and 00s, when you probably had instant and easy access to their whole catalogue. I recall entire afternoons spent in the company of "Black Celebration", a tape I bought with half my monthly lawnmowing money, my entire mind inhabiting every note of every song on that album. Today I might download three or four of the songs and leave the rest to languish in iTunes purgatory. I'd have downloaded the classic "Stripped" and would never have known that one of the album's best moments is the fading piano melody at the end of "It Doesn't Matter Two". Is one experience better than another?

 

[peptastic]

Taping off the radio...

I remember a friend taped Morrissey's KROQ session as it was broadcast. I wasn't available and she was. She came over later and we played it at least six times in a row. The giddy rockabilly of "Sing Your Life", the Marrish jangle of "My Love Life" (then a brand new, unreleased song), and the hard-nosed revision of "There's A Place In Hell" were all brilliant. There was an additional thrill knowing Morrissey had recorded the songs right down the freeway, too. He was alive and kicking. We had just seen him live on his first tour since The Smiths. Not having grown up in England in the 80s, it was the closest I would ever get to recording brand new songs off of the John Peel show. We treasured that tape. Of course I made a copy for myself; I recall my nerves as I popped in the original, because my tape deck had done its share of cassette-eating and I certainly didn't want to destroy this one. We made other copies for other friends, and soon "the KROQ tape" became constant listening among our little band of Morrissey fans. I loved that tape. I made a cover for it with paper, tape, and a photo cut from a magazine. By the time I bought the CD release, three months of enthusiastic playing and replaying had left the tape audibly fading. I don't have it anymore, but I wish I did. I still recall the goosebumps I got listening to it for the first time.

This is the experience Reynolds was writing about. It's not as common anymore because of technological advances.

The point is not to say my experience of "Morrissey at KROQ" was superior to everyone else's. Rather, the question to ask is how technology is changing our consumption of music and whether that change is good or bad. Snobbery isn't really in play here. Ask yourself if your appreciation for Depeche Mode changed between the time you were taping them off the radio, or saving up for their CDs, and the late 90s and 00s, when you probably had instant and easy access to their whole catalogue. I recall entire afternoons spent in the company of "Black Celebration", a tape I bought with half my monthly lawnmowing money, my entire mind inhabiting every note of every song on that album. Today I might download three or four of the songs and leave the rest to languish in iTunes purgatory. I'd have downloaded the classic "Stripped" and would never have known that one of the album's best moments is the fading piano melody at the end of "It Doesn't Matter Two". Is one experience better than another?

I do know that I often find remastered versions not as good simply because I'm used to the versions I'm used to even if the quality may not technically be better.

I don't mean to knock taping off the radio at all.
Just that I was a bit far behind if everyone else had more music and downloading back in '94.
I've said this before on the forums the internet has made a lot of music available to people in more rural areas that would not have heard it otherwise. That beats the kids who are bloated with too much in my book.

 

[Worm]

That beats the kids who are bloated with too much in my book.

I agree, although I think my point above applies well to those outside the big cities. I myself did not live in a rural area, per se, but I lived in the suburbs and had very, very limited access to record shops. As a result I really valued the music I was able to get. Would I have loved it as much if I could have downloaded it? Maybe, maybe not. I think it's an open question, though. And, also, I think you're talking more about quantity versus quality. I guess it's a "What if Superman fought Batman" sort of question, but I find myself wondering if it's better to have immediate access to downloads of the entire history of punk and post-punk music, or discovering the artists one at a time, on CD or vinyl. I read a book about 70s New York, recently, and I would literally finish a chapter, get up, go to the computer, and find some of the music I'd just read about. In a matter of minutes I was listening (and watching) bands I'd never heard of. I even found footage of Talking Heads at CBGB, described in the book as extremely rare, within seconds of a YouTube search.

This was in stark contrast to my experience, years ago, tracking down the New York Dolls' debut album, which I treated like the apes discovering the monolith in "2001". Buying that might have changed my life-- it didn't, because I don't think the Dolls are all that fabulous-- but it certainly meant a lot more to me than YouTubing Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and the like.

Again, not saying my experience is superior, just that I have to wonder if the music means the same when it's so easy to get. But basically I do agree with your point. Music should be spread far and wide, available to all, and the Internet is a great delivery system.

 

[Qvist]

I guess the point being made here is that it's just very different. The 70s and 80s was very much an economy of scarcity, to put it like that. You were constantly under-stimulated and hence always hungry and on the look-out, and when you found fulfillment it was fantastic. Everything was difficult, time-consuming and expensive, unless you were very lucky. Today's an economy of abundance. The challenge these days is organising your own consumption in a way that sifts away as much of the shite as possible and leads you to the stuff you should be spending your scarce time on. Time is now the scarcity factor - not so much because we have less of it (although we do), but because there is so much to fill it with. And you actually have to make room for habits that are not immediately intuitive, but which are actually necessary if you want to take in the good stuff. Such as not always discarding anything that doesn't appeal to you on the first couple of listen-throughs. Go into acts over time and a bit gradually. Give stuff room to grow. Return to it. In short - impose structure, which amounts to voluntarily renouncing the maximum use of your enormous access. f*** me, that sounded nearly buddhist.

 

[Worm]

In short - impose structure, which amounts to voluntarily renouncing the maximum use of your enormous access.

Which would be the classical, small 'c', conservative (in a positive sense) position. But everything in our society is aggressively attacking this position. Freedom in our time is explicitly represented as freedom from any and all limitations and total, immediate, unceasing access to everything. This ideology has penetrated the arts from above and below (f*** me, that sounded nearly pornographic ) such that, beneath the surface, the dominant power structure closely resembles whatever it is these days that passes for the anti-establishment. They're basically in lockstep, at least where it counts. In such an environment, how can music make itself an alternative to the mainstream? Is rock and roll dead and buried forever? Is art? Or are we seeing artists trying to move with the flow, rather than against it, toward a completely new kind of art? If you can't swim against the data stream, let yourself be carried by the current.

By the way, back in the day, I actually spent some of my money in the scarcity economy on three products ("The Smiths", "Meat Is Murder", and "Kill Uncle") I already owned in order to impose limits on myself. I bought the US versions, and then, later, when I learned that each had been befouled by an extra track, I sought out the import versions and paid the higher price to own the version with the original track-listing. Totally foolish, but I have no regrets.

 

[Qvist]

Freedom in our time is explicitly represented as freedom from any and all limitations and total, immediate, unceasing access to everything.

Well, that is actually a pretty good functional general definition of freedom? A combination of absence of limitation, and access to opportunity? What else should it contain?

 

[Worm]

Well, that is actually a pretty good functional general definition of freedom? A combination of absence of limitation, and access to opportunity? What else should it contain?

A good "functional, general" definition? Absolutely. The fact that it seems to be a good definition of freedom is precisely why it's so effective in the hands of those who are pushing other agendas.

You seem to take it as a given that when I write "absence of limitation" I actually mean "absence of limitation within basic parameters I don't have to mention". Understandable. As a free citizen, I can declare "I can do whatever I want" and you will understand what I mean by that. You know I don't mean it literally. We both know I am constrained, for example, by the laws of my country. It's just that this is so obvious we don't say it.

Any good definition of freedom would have to involve some mention of a social contract: yes, freedom means freedom from limitation, but as a member of a social body I have to give up some freedoms in order to enjoy other, presumably greater freedoms.

What I defined above is meant to be taken literally: the message we're getting is that even this unspoken, assumed level of restraint is now in question. Maybe it's only in America, I don't know. But here we are seeing unprecedented attacks on even the most basic rules and principles of our society. A kid in Florida was murdered on the way home from buying some Skittles and his killer walked free (only now has he been arrested, after intense public outcry). The salient takeaway from the case is not that the killing shows we're an overly paranoid "law and order" society-- the boy was shot by an armed civilian patrolling the neighborhood-- but rather that matters are devolving into a Wild West atmosphere: kill or be killed. Social bonds are dissolving. But this is completely in line with the dominant message sent by the culture, the market, and the government (the three of which really blur into one).

Go ahead and scoff, I'm waiting for it.

 

[Qvist]

No scoffer I, a pefectly valid and reasonable observation. But the context being my music listening patterns, I have a hard time relating that to the dissolution of social bonds in America.