The Top 11 Albums of Last Year

Here it is, a week too late to be timely and about a month late to be relevant. Here are the top 11 albums of 2011, so you can be nostalgic for something a week old, which still makes you less pathetic than the Baby Boomers.

11) Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman - World Wide Rebel Songs

Tom Morello steps into his alter-ego suit as the Nightwatchman to make this paradoxical album. It's supposed to be protest music, inspired by union songs, but even still, it sounds fun. Picture, if you will, in the eye of your heart of your mind's wildest imagination, the attitude of rage, minus the yelling, minus most of Morello's guitar pyrotechnics, plus acoustic guitars, harmonicas, and some actual melodies. The union song is a bit of Americana that has been all but flushed down the toilet of time, and this album, in a way, resurrects the tradition and reskins it.

10) Bon Iver, Bon Iver

I think I'm the one fan of this album who still pronounces it wrong, saying it the good ol' fashioned Amurrcan way, bon I-vurr [bɑn 'aɪvɚ]. While Justin Vernon's debut LP was more like a memoir where the core argument was "I'm sad," this second album is a novel, exposing something about the human condition more multifaceted than the struggles of the writer himself. And it's a huge sonic expansion over the tinny, out of tune guitar. Rich horn harmonies including work by the legendary Colin Stetson, three percussionists, pedal steel guitar, layered synthesizers, and even some artfully used autotuners. Although it is broken into individual tracks at logical song boundaries, it sounds as though it is one whole, through-composed piece of music, concluding with a movement that might sound a little more Bon Jovi than Bon Iver. But if you don't mind falsetto and the almost universal critical acclaim isn't enough, I would advise you to pick up this album (even though I stole it).

9) Wilco - The Whole Love

Since Jeff Tweedy produced what I think was #6 on last years list, he is now officially the winningest musician, according to the Ozone Shack. But I think without the accolade he would be doing just fine. From the first track, the seven minute "Art of Almost," it's clear that the one-time alt-country band is expanding their sound to new directions, a step they didn't really take on their last two studio albums. But the album's laid back midsection and on the gently swinging "Capital City," they don't intend on leaving their old selves behind. The sound they create is somewhat evocative of The White Album, were it recorded in 2011 by Americans. This is a return to form that may be able to contend with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, making up for lack of earth-shattering publicity and novelty with solid craftsmanship.

8) The Sea And Cake - The Moonlight Butterfly

My personal experiences come into play here. I first listened to this album lying on the floor of my fried's room in Flagstaff, where I had found myself on a spontaneous adventure, while a late summer thunderstorm raged outside. I was sold instantly. This Chicago jazz-rock band uses a texture of clean guitar over light drums and prominent, in-the-pocket, melodic basslines to back up the unobtrusively cool vocal stylings of Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt, with the occasional synthesizers, or, in the case of the album's third track, only synthesizers. But even those are done artistically. This is all real music, made by real people, and probably the closest thing to a molecular distillation of chill.

7) Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys!

This is the band that's so British, they shat the Queen. They're from a city (in the greater Manchester area) called Ramsbottom. Ramsbottom! Frontman Guy Garvey creates a dreamlike soundscape to accompany his altogether otherworldly voice. Minimalist guitar riffs and ambient harmonies, which always run the risk of having the listener disengage, instead are utilized just so that they can be full and majestic when needed - on tracks like "The Birds" and "Open Arms" - or sparse, as on "Lippy Kids" and "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" (I don't know what a Rochdale girl is, but, to me anyway, it sounds like Manchester slang for a butch lesbian.) But all Britishisms aside (including proper grammar in the lyrics) this is an album to regenerate your soul, or if not, to at least transport you, for an hour, to a pleasantly altered state.

6) Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You

When you take 1995's minor false step of One Hot Minute out of the equation, every Red Hot Chili Peppers album since 1989 has been an opus in its own right. And each album in this continuum has had the challenge of providing a worthy follow up to its predecessor. So how does this concoction fare? Pretty excellent. Critics have claimed that this sounds like an awkward mish-mash of styles from previous albums, but this is nothing to complain about. I wish I could turn each of their previous albums into two albums, and this acts as a worthy consolation. As always, Flea's strutting basslines make you feel like a badass just by hearing them, and the riffs on "Factory of Faith," "Ethiopia," and "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" are among some of his finest. "Police Station" evokes By The Way-esque textures while "Even You Brutus" is a nod to Blood Sugar Sex Magic. And "Happiness Loves Company" is pure, fist-pumping ecstasy. Perhaps the emotional climax, however, comes from "Brandon's Death Song," which joins less celebrated but equally deserving category of "that one really good ballad on every RHCP album." And while the guitar work is noticeably different following John Fruciante's departure (again!), it's harmonically richer and more diverse.

The next four albums finished practically in dead heat, and every way I tried to order them left me unsatisfied. Places two through five are in the order that left me the least unsatisfied. It's only by virtue of quantum uncertainty that they're in the positions they're in.

5) TV On The Radio - Nine Types of Light

This effort, which is debateably the band's opus, could have come off as pretentious or flippantly ironic, especially since a music video was created for every song, with the intention of making it a kind of album-film fusion. And while that element may exist superficially, once you pay attention to the quality of the music as opposed to what it sounds like (theme of forever here), you realize that something this good can't be borne of pretension. It's their most mature album yet, and the most sonically complex, drawing on their art rock roots, mixing in funk and maybe a bit of music from frontman Tune Adebimpe's native Nigeria, especially on "Will Do," "Killer Crane," and "You." When someone accuses you of being a pretentious or whatever kind of media whore is the current terrorist of choice on the beatnik-hipster continuum, punch them in the face, because dammit, you like good music. (I can't personally vouch for your musical choices, but if you read the Ozone Shack, you get bonus points.)

4) Umphrey's McGee - Death By Stereo

This is a band that can channel Phish, Dream Theater, Dispatch, Coheed and Cambria, Yes, and The Vital Tech Tones. What's even more impressive? They channel all those in one song. Known primarily as a jam band, they avoided the traditional pitfall of live-to-studio disconnect by refining their repertoire of styles instead of resorting to mindless jam in the studio. The result is an intriguing cocktail which invites you to headbang while appreciating their musicianship. Something like this is increasingly rare and I hope more albums like it are made soon.

Bronze Medal
Portugal. The Man - In the Mountain In the Cloud

After just having missed the Ozone Shack's top ten last year, psychedelic rockers Portugal. The Man struck gold (well, actually bronze) with their cathedral of falsetto vocals and string beds. The hardest working band in showbusiness (this is their seventh album in as many years) has created an album about work, struggle, and the rediscovery of the astral body in a material world. The ethos of the album can either be summed up in the title of the last track, "Sleep Forever," or the lyric "Did you forget we were holy men?" It's an album about struggle, both physical and metaphysical. And it's about the tole that struggle can take. Or maybe it's just a fucking good album with some words that sound good in falsetto. What do I look like, a knower of things?

Silver Medal:

Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean

This is a far cry from The Creek Drank The Cradle, trading in the lone acoustic guitar for layered electronic instrumentation for an album even more Technicolor than its cover. From the haunting "Walking Far From Home," to the slick groove of "Monkeys Uptown," to the doo-wop throwback of "Half Moon," the Chimurenga-tinged "Rabbit Will Run," to the raucous and rockin "Your Fake Name is Good Enough For Me," Kiss Each Other Clean works its way through benignly psychedelic melodies and instrumentals, filled with both a reverence for the little things that make life enjoyable, while also touching on the Bigger issues of spirituality and injustice. Beautiful album. I'm a week late and running out of things to say about music, so now it's time for the...

Album of the Year:

3 - The Ghost You Gave To Me

That's right, it's the band that's a number. And while on paper they're a metal band, they draw on a wealth of genres, from funk to bluegrass, to create some of the best melodic prog being made today, for the maladjusted yet creatively inclined fringe member of society in all of us. The album is driven by frontman Joey Eppard, who plays guitar with a distinct fingerslap-style, whose distinct voiceh sounds like the kid that a rougher, more soulful version of Michael Jackson and a sexier version of Robert Plant never had, and backed up by guitarist Billy Riker, drummer Chris "Gartdrumm" Gartman, and bassist Daniel Grimsland, who all hail from the musically historic city of Woodstock, New York. (The working title of the album was Woodstock Democracy, possibly a reference to the snags that set this album's release back.) Over the heavy guitar riffs and high-intensity polyrhythms is something that a lot of metal acts seem to have forgotten: the melodic element, actual fucking songs! Throw in some fingerslap acoustic guitar work, scathing riffs and a busy drum battery and you get this opus, from a band that is deservedly breaking into the mainstream, at least of the metal world. In a side note, I met them after their show at the Key Club in Hollywood, and I'm pretty sure they all think I'm now crazy. I might as well have gone up to them and said "I'm pregnant, and all four of you are the father!" First time getting kicked out by a bouncer. I need to tune turn my fanboy dial down sometimes.