30. Bobby Womack - The Bravest Man In The Universe
It's tempting to hear The Bravest Man in the Universe as some sort of callback to Johnny Cash's American Recordings series. Here's a man who fucked around and ended up with seven decades of life under his belt, despite all the drugs and recklessness he'd enlisted to try to prevent just that. All of a sudden, instead of looking forward into the abyss, he's looking back on abysmal memories. American Recordings' inspired choices of covers and standards may or may not have offered Cash a chance at self-reflection (his comments on and about the recordings hint that they might not be as introspective as we'd like to believe) but they did flesh out some of the more obtuse aspects of his persona, illuminating new wrinkles on an old cowboy.
Bobby Womack, on the other hand, makes no bones about his late-life quest for redemption, or how realistic his chances are of finding it. Like Cash, Womack sounds hollowed-out from years of using himself hard and putting himself away dirty. But Womack's persona was never as obtuse or iconic as Cash, so there’s no hidden layer of meaning to Womack’s pleas for forgiveness. They are exactly what they mean to be. Instead, the record’s duality comes from relationship between the gravity of how he’s lived and hope he’s recently found. The myth of the record is this: after years of substance abuse, Womack cleaned up, had an opportunity to record with Gorillaz, toured with the band despite being diagnosed with diabetes, rediscovered his love of songwriting on the bus, and cranked out an album’s worth of material in a flurry of in-studio activity. All of which makes the recent revelation that Womack is in the early stages of Alzheimer's both harrowing and oddly poetic — on Bravest Man, he isn't facing his own mortality as much as he's experiencing his artistic and spiritual rebirth. -MB
29. Grimes - Visions
Grimes (Claire Boucher) recorded an album named after and full of songs about Dune a few years back. It's called Geidi Primes. It was pretty good, I get the feeling I would have been more excited by that if I'd ever read past the 90th page of Dune (just started again, excited by watching David Lynch go all David Lynch and Lynch that whole thing up), but that is the kind of artist Grimes is - where there's a lot of arcane, complex thought being put into music/lyrics that are too diffuse and difficult for the listener to actually distinguish what is being said. Now it's a couple years later, and here comes Visions, and it's kind of the perfect iteration of that. Grimes is like Mariah Carey or J. Mascis or Bjork or Joanna Newsom when each of them were at their peak, before they became simulations/parodies of the people we used to love - the voice as a sculpted thing that is being used as an instrument, nothing more or less. Childlike, layered chirps and runs - if you've heard "Oblivion" and "Genesis", the whole album sounds like that. Whether that is good is pretty much going to be a gut reaction. Really, the only reason this isn't something I fought to push up higher is just how diaphanous it is - there's not a lot to attach to - "Oblivion" is a hell of a song, and there's a bit of shock when the Aphex Twin sample drops late in the proceedings, but this is a seasick fog of voices. You either wander into it or you don't. -SW
28. Nude Beach - II
Nude Beach II is a modest garage-rock album that siphons a lot of it mojo from mid-80s rock. It is to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Hard Promises what Yuck is to You’re Living All Over Me. It is full of good-to-great songs. If that sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, you’re not wrong. But it’s interesting that Nude Beach, along with a ton of other bands hovering around the punk-psych-garage nexus (The Men, Royal Headache, King Tuff, Terry Malts, Mind Spiders, Thee Oh Sees, Gentlemen Jesse, Mac DeMarco, Dum Dum Girls… even Tame Impala), suddenly feel like What Rock in 2012 Is Was. Why is that? These kind of bands are usually lurking in the distance behind whoever the big-I Innovators of the time are, making no-frills rock music that doesn’t shy away from its influences. They usually get a little more attention when we’re waiting for Whatever’s Next—I’m thinking of the Gories and Thee Headcoats circa 1990, or Badfinger and The Move in the early 70s. So is that where we’re at now? Maybe. It’s also possible that when we tire of New Sounds, we collectively go back to Songs. A lot of the bands I mentioned are really good at those. Nude Beach is one of the best. -MB
27. Rick Ross - Rich Forever
I didn't find out what Rick Ross looked like until a few weeks ago, which should clue you in both as to 1) what a terrible job I did at keeping up with the music internet this year and 2) what a treat was in store for me and possibly 3) how ill-qualified I might be to handle blurbing up this album (mixtape!). Fuck it: life ain't short, he said, it's long, and you've got plenty of time for this guy right here to tell you that this mixtape (album!) is a wall to wall delight, and that Mr. Ross--who looks a lot like the man destined to take the dad from Fresh Prince off the Reichenbach Falls--is a wordsmith of the homespun variety, a man who invents slang terms when he's mumbling and/or drunk. The portion of "King of Diamonds" where he seemingly yells "condescending FUCK BOYS" might be a contender for my favorite misheard lyric (and due to general personal strengths, I've had more than my share) or it might just be that actual line, yelled amidst a million other delightful ones about Brinks trucks, and why you gotta get one. Rick Ross isn't here to save rap music, he isn't even here to improve it: he's here to make money and take the piss out of the Fuck Boys. That's alright with me. -TS
26. Niki & The Dove - Instinct
You guys hear the Kate Bush album from last year? It's kind of the album that Scott Walker would have recorded if he were a woman and obsessed with the things Kate Bush is, instead of opera and torture and Bergman, and if he had the legions of Tori Amos clones (as well as Tori Amos herself) to reckon with/apologize for instead of just struggling through a weird relationship with David Bowie. Kate Bush is an absolute outlier who does whatever she wants, and she's got zero compunction to relate to any sort of audience or artistic legacy. That can meansre-recording two early 90's albums no one had been clamoring for, or working with Big Boi, or 9 minute songs from the perspective of a snowflake. It's part of the deal. This Niki & The Dove thing is kind of a new Kate Bush album. It's got all the infuriating, insane, beautiful things that come with a new Kate Bush album, all those things that don't even matter if you like it that much or not. It's not even popular like Florence and the Machine. No one will ever sing these songs on The Voice. Oh, and they're Swedish. I probably should have mentioned The Knife at some point. -SW
25. Angel Haze - Reservation
I’ll admit that I find it difficult to write about Angel Haze without being reductive. Yet, for all the easy, zeitgeisty labels she invites (female, bi-sexual), the one I have the most difficult time navigating is “fundamentalist rapper.” She’s invested in the basic tenets of rap writing—internal rhyme, storytelling, punchlines—but the joy of her music comes from hearing her attack her craft without never really nailing it. For example, many of her zings—“That’s why my shit make your shit seem lighter than Heavy D;” “”My tongue is the fucking Rapture;” “I’m like Scorpion, bitch I will finish you”—are too clever by half, they’d be awful if her vitriol weren’t so engaging. She brings the same type of energy to the confessional raps on Reservation<, depicting her messy childhood. Like her battle raps, Angel Haze’s confessionals often shock you, but they rarely cut very deep. The worst case scenario is that Angel Haze never finds the nuance to give her songs—both the battle raps and stories of childhood abuse—a lasting effect beyond their blunt impact. The best case scenario is that she’s simply sharpening her knives. -MB
24. King Tuff - King Tuff
If there was a way to take music and bore it down to a chemical level, to strip it to its epistemological essence, bands like King Tuff--and "bands like King Tuff" is a big fucking genre right now, as long as we're understanding that the way we're using "big" here is at sharp angles with Katy Perry and Gotye and the Call Me Maybe gal--are probably not that much different from The Hives, or Keane, or Silverchair: they're bands that don't carry the banner into the room, they just show up alongside. And while this whole garage rock/dirty shit/excellent graphic design thing maybe a gigantic minefield for authenticity hunters, the rest of us can kick back and rest, content for bands like King Tuff (the best of which, in 2012, actually was King Tuff) to fill the void that there sort of music forces us to imagine having. The problem is the solution. -TS
23. Miguel - Kaledioscope Dream
Miguel built up a ton of critical cachet this year, which is strange because 1) he’s an R&B artist, and those usually aren’t on the receiving end of a ton of hype, unless their R&B is cross-pollinated with another critic-friendly genre (like indie rock or hip-hop); and 2) he’s a total fucking goober. Sincerity isn’t a musical quality that often makes the leap to internet popularity from, you know, popular popularity. And Miguel’s particular brand of sincerity—the half-dozen things he rhymes with “get in your pants,” say, or his flagrant delight in hugs—would seem to make him an easy target for cynics. At one point, as a seduction technique, he asks a lady if she likes Rock Paper Scissors and then quotes his mother. It seems to work. This fucking guy. You could probably make an argument that Kaleidoscope Dream succeeds on the basis on its production—the deceptively intricate beats, the clean experimentalism, and the references to 60s psychedelia all make it seem awfully close to a Beatles album, which would explain the critical favoritism for a populist album—but you’d be wrong. Kaleidoscope Dream succeeds because Miguel is one charming goober, and genuine enthusiasm is contagious. Even if it’s enthusiasm for hugs.
22. Death Grips - The Money Store
Picking up the heart attack beats and WTF vocal role that Atari Teenage Riot once passed onto some terrible female electro duo my old roommate wouldn't stop playing even if it was early on a Sunday morning, Death Grips first stab at mass appeal came with a long ass Charles Manson sample, which managed to top Dalek's "here's what Jeremiah Wright sounds like" in the we-get-it, you-read-books department. This year, they released two full length albums, and The Money Store--which would make terrible music for a skate video, but would work perfectly for the party they have after they record the skate video, when the alcohol convinces everybody that body parts are replaceable--was the one that thread the needle. It's not that there's nothing else out there like Death Grips--there's plenty, it's called screaming--it's that most people wouldn't want to listen to them more than once, which might be why this particular hybrid (hip-hop, yelling, Aphex Twin and its stuttering, epileptic children) rarely manages to produce more than one or two leading figures at a time. Or maybe it's just that experimental noise-electro-hip-hop is just that, experimental, and every once in a while (like say, the second out of three full-lengths) the experiment works out, resulting in the nastiest album of the year. -TS
21. Royal Headache - Royal Headache
If the last few years have been about the dirty boys doing psych, the latest slice in "what are white guys doing, again?" is lo-fi garage rock, albeit a variety that has stronger musicianship and pretty vocals. Royal Headache's take on the situation isn't that far removed from the way King Tuff deals with their own scuzzy side-genre: Headache just goes head on at making donuts, delivering solid, pretty songs that reflect their Australian origin. There's a classical sense of wonder behind what's happening on this album, a plantitive sincerity that doing shit/singing about it/playing well is its own animal, and while that emotional quality isn't going to appeal to every listener, it certainly appealed to this one. -TS
20. Jessie Ware - Devotion
So Jessie Ware is frequently heard on dance tracks, and that frequently gets mentioned when people talk about this album, but that kind of denies how timeless the great songs on Devotion sound. And by "timeless" I of course mean "a song that could have been released as early as 1993". In a good way! Ware is at home on tracks by Joker as she would have been on a missing Blue Lines b-side. Same with any comparison I make to Whitney Houston, Sade, Mariah Carey, or Mary J Blige, which would maybe seem to paint her as a soul diva whose expertise is at blowing the doors off rather than locking in with the emotion of her tracks and living inside of it, breathing with it. Songs like "Wildest Moments", "Running". and "Sweet Talk" are the slow burn power jams of the moment, and Ware's voice is the precision instrument of their delivery. Last year Destroyer recorded a late 80s/early 90s middle of the road pop album, and even he saw what was coming in 2012. The only problem is there's not going to be many albums that do that well, so we should appreciate Jessie Ware while we have her. -SW
19. Tame Impala - Lonerism
What was big in 2010 hasn't changed in 2012: Tame Impala remained the go-to band on the leaderboard for see-ya-at-sundown music this side of Wooden Shjips, and while Lonerism didn't turn out to be as wall-to-wall perfect as Innerspeaker, it did have "Elephant", the band's best song yet. Impala is a tough band not to overpraise, and if they had arrived a few years earlier, it would be extremely easy to imagine their sound becoming more of a dominant force in music than now, where they're too often classified with a whole raft of bands they have little in common with. They're also not really a true "they", being primarily the product of multi-instrumentalist Kevin Parker, the latest in a long line of music-guys-who-are-super-productive, and, like a lot of the music that's been crawling around the last few years, Australian to boot. Imagine if listening to Radiohead made you want to swim with women and animals: that's what this sounds like. -TS
18. Scott Walker - Bish Bosch
Scott Walker's voice cuts through absolute silence painfully, as if singing through pain, delivering a comedian's retorts to an unheard heckler. The following 19 minute song is kind of a series of observations and one-liners using the imagery of the ancient world. It's Scott Walker as Mel Brooks' character, Comicus, in History of the World Part 1. A stand-up philosopher, nightclub comedian in the height of the Roman Empire. Brassy percussion and talks of his "wormy anus", strings building as he says "heard this one, this'll kill ya..." like Don Rickles or Sid Ceasar, before talking about an ancient strangling and screaming inhuman distortions from the voice of an angry mother. This is on a song called "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", several movements later, and the humor mixing too easily with stark detail, percussion brings with it more heckler takedowns, pained and alone in nothingness. We can see the sweat dripping off of Walker's face in the stage lights, and the hecklers become terrifyingly real, crashing into the same voice as the comedian, battalions announcing their coming, hoofbeats become boiling water, "HEY BOY" cascading into wells of accusatory echoes and springy drunken disney sound effects. This isn't like describing a song or a play or opera, is it?
Stand-up philosopher actually works pretty well as a job description of Scott Walker. This album is both more and less stripped down than his previous The Drift. It has more guitars, the way that his previous album, Tilt, did. But it also has more of that isolated voice, less arrangements, more sound as cinematic tool. The only time we hear anything is for effect, puncturing the silence, or colliding with the voice, as it did in The Drift, only it's more mercenary in its economical approach to sound design (and it is more sound design than arranging at this point). And then there's the machetes. This is an album littered with the sound of machetes. It is odd to hear a Scott Walker album that is not a completely distinct step away from the previous album, but it is also pervasively clear in every word Walker says that every new album we receive from him is a gift.
Scott Walker's work has increasingly been about turns of phrase or fragments of language, incongruously sung and strung together to form narratives. Any song on Bish Bosch carries with it a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of how people speak to one another, in all manner of situations. Drunken bar storytelling dovetails into new testament gospel proselytizing, both of those elements are recursive on Bish Bosch, even as sonically there is no consistency, just repetition. Terror and uncertain noise occurring from outside our purview as listeners, even if it's a sound we're familiar with. Scott Walker's genius recluse image is something that ignore's how much Walker has lived. He's not someone who toils endlessly in a studio, he's someone who takes the time he needs to do the caliber of work he does. There's no one else who will. -SW
17. Purity Ring - Shrines
Saying that southern rap production techniques have spread way deep into pop music is now something so dated that typing this sentence has aged me signifcantly. If there's a painting of me in an attic somewhere, it just grew back some hair and lost a few pounds. So the sound of Purity Ring - a chiming female voice singing over electronics inflected with Mannie Fresh's dna - is just another sonic palette to be fucked around with. Instead Purity Ring single themselves out through sheer quality. Songs of mutilation and love, words set perfectly against the music that they push against. Bodily thoughts and urges, enthusiastically drawing the warmth out of music that could be the rote beats and skips of the moment. Megan James' voice is so light and incisive that you forget she's singing about fractured skulls and open torsos, these are songs of love. But love that compels complete physical surrender, that communing with another person might mean playing with their blood. It's beautiful, and unsettling, and twisted. But mostly beautiful, and while it doesn't always click - the guest rapper on "Grandloves" is really the most skippable thing on an album since the heyday of No Limit skits - aside from that one hiccup, it's a headspace that was completely unique this year. Compulsively listenable, and getting better with each play, these songs and loose and danceable, and the words are bloody-minded in a way only real emotion can be. -SW
16. Pallbearer - Sorrow and Execution
This list was composed prior to the determination of the Official Board of Metal Discussion that Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction was less of a crossover classic, and more Hipster's First Hardcore, a doom-y, populist metal album that's powered better by its public relations team than it is actual worth. It's not a debate we'll be getting into, in part because it's not really a debate, but mostly because populism and quality PR are two things we're always going to get behind here at TFO. This sort of music--a dash of prog, a dash of classic rock, long on gore, long on 'core, born from the metal tree--is difficult music to get into, it's a macrocosm of a microgenre, and there's something to be said for preferring a slice over a whole pie. Pallbearer may be metal for non-metal fans--I don't buy that for a second, but angry people are saying it, and the angry people might be right--but even if it is, not tipping the coffee guy who has been looking after you all year because you read a bunch of Yelp reviews about some amazing coffee place across town is a shithead way to live. You don't want to have to move to San Francisco, do you? -TS
15. Rustie - BBC Essential Mix 04/07/12
Let’s start with this: Rustie’s mixing is far from seamless. Tracks, rhythms, and genres ram up against one another with little regard for safety, to say nothing of flow. That may not be an intentional part of the plan, but it’s part of the cumulative effect. There may be listeners out there who still compartmentalize the rap tracks, synth workouts, and bangers that Rustie assembles on his BBC Essential Mix, so it’s only right that he juxtaposes songs by jamming them into one another’s space, rather than placing them idly side-by-side. It’s going to take years for someone to find proper lead-ins and lead-outs to Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” anyway. Just like last year’s Glass Swords, this seemingly off-the-cuff work by Rustie is all about accumulation. There’s a common thought that great artists know exactly what to leave out in their work, and while Rustie’s compilation is not a complete rejection of that philosophy (given how often he intersperses gigantic beats with airy synth trails), it’s defiantly focused on what it can fit in. -MB
14. Liars - WIXIW
The Liars aren't my favorite band, but they're as close as I've gotten to having one in a long time. Due to the nature of the way WIXIW sounds--somewhat droney, somewhat quiet, repetitive, with vocals that barely make it past sound burbles most of the time--it's easy to initially discount, and I'm not the first person to admit that it was hard to get into, enough that it remained my start-the-day album for a solid three months. It's essentially uncrackable, fluid music that propels you forward but won't let you in, like mercury. The smoothness never breaks down, to the point that you start to think dumb, weird shit about how digital files decompose, stripping out the microseconds between the sound, how a vinyl copy will slowly develop its own original remix--it's the way that we live now, things are attacked on levels they were never designed to defend against, held to standards that make no sense whatsoever. Permanence is unachievable, that's a given. Impermeability though? Now that's a goal. -TS
13. Joey Bada$$ - 1999
12. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend
So Godspeed came back from the dead, and the first thing you hear is confused people on intercoms echoing fragments of sentences back at one another, maybe trying to identify someone in a crowd. "With his arms outstretched... okay?" Godspeed don't return to the sound of triumphant guitars chiming off into symphonic infinity, like they did for us at their most beautiful. On "Mladic" they come back with a guttural, messy, dangerous sounding lope. The guitars have a build to a massive payoff, eschewing the drift-to-nowhere slow smolder approach of Yanqui UXO, instead it's all nervous tension and spiraling squall. Things haven't gotten better, this song says. They've gotten frenzied, and dangerous, and denying catharsis isn't the way to deal with it. "Mladic" is fever pitch music. This band has been gone so long, they came back less pretty, just as interested in making a narrative point with instrumental music. The drums sound like someone running for their life and continuing their march on even as they run out of breath.
Every payoff here is counterpointed by a corresponding drone piece, but instead of the "you get nothing" of their last album, Godspeed have struck an uneasy balance between discordant bagpipe helicopter drone and decimating guitar/drum theatricality. "We Drift Like Worried Fire" returns the ability of this band to be truly beautiful, and sad, and menacing all at the same moment. The final guitar build on the track is exactly what we've always wanted to hear from this band, nearly transcendent. It is a more varied piece than the opener, and "Strung like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable" is straight Boris/Sunn o)))/Earth-style decaying drone. But the emotional tenor of the entire piece is set, and never leaves, where "Mladic" leaves us. Rabbit heartbeats and flight instincts, knowing full well that it's not going to do any good. Something larger than ourselves has shifted, and all we can do is panic. This isn't apocalypse music, the way that Lift Yr Skinny Fists and Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada were. This isn't foretelling of a great cataclysm. This isn't music for the streets burning on December 21st. That's why it feels different. The tools are the same, but this isn't a forecast anymore. We are not trapped in the machine, and the machine isn't bleeding to death anymore. It was a nice idea at the time. Instead, this is a document of this moment. No poetic metaphors this time. -SW
11. El-P - Cancer For Cure
Between 2002’s Fantastic Damage and 2007’s I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, El-P released a full-on jazz album, complete with one decent trip-hop song and a couple of elegiac Brooklyn piano tributes. Between I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead and Cancer 4 Cure, dude put to rest the record label he’d been devoted to for more than a decade. Now a lot of this is speculation, but to me I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead sounds like an artist caught up in his own shit—perhaps a guy who witnessed the label/movement/sound he was largely responsible for slip from revelatory to Party Fun Action Committee in just a few years, maybe a guy trying to make music while also doing a lot of paperwork, maybe a guy who felt tethered by his own ideas, maybe a guy going through a jazz phase. On the other hand, is it possible that putting the kibosh on Def Jux freed up El-P to make the best album of his career? Cancer 4 Cure has all the earmarks of someone with nothing left to lose: aggression, immediacy, and a return to fundamentals that finds El-P retrofitting his futurist production (read: breakbeats) onto a solid foundation of boom-bap. Is it a coincidence that El-P’s other career highlights occurred in the wake of him severing his relationships with Company Flow and Rawkus? Again, this is pure speculation, but the El-P on Cancer 4 Cure seems revitalized, and I have no trouble imagining that’s a result of streamlining his responsibilities into simply making music.-MB
-Marty Brown, Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2012
The production on that El-P album is so, so good...unfortunately, I just can't listen to it because of how many times he or his guests drop the word "bitch". I expected better of him. Fucking hip-hop, man--I really want to be able to listen to that album, but every time it just trips me up.
Did you hear that megamix album he did a few years back? Brilliant stuff
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | 2013.01.10 at 04:34
Sounds like some bitch-ass reasoning.
Posted by: Sean Witzke | 2013.01.10 at 10:34
Good call on Purity Ring. That's a great album.
Posted by: Noah | 2013.01.10 at 20:42