The Factual Opinion

The Top Music of 2011: The Also Rans

Before we dive into a proper Top 30, we thought we'd pull back the curtain a bit for a look at the albums that didn't quite make it in. Personal favorites that didn't make the cut, albums that lurked right outside the lists purview, or pieces that just didn't land specifically enough to make a fight worthwhile--a whole bunch of them follow, courtesy of Marty Brown, Sean Witzke and Tucker Stone.

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Marty Brown

Action Bronson – Dr. Lecter
Cities Aviv – Digital Lows
Kendrick Lamar – Section.80
Lil B the Based God – I’m Gay (I’m Happy)
Spaceghostpurrp – Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991)


Here’s five albums by dudes I’d consider foreriders in the current rap vanguard. Action Bronson pulls off the year’s second-best Ghostface impersonation on a Primo- and Pete Rock-indebted concept album about New York cuisine. Memphis resident Cities Aviv squeezes hard-bodied introspective joints out of high-garbage-content samples from “Float On,” “People Are People,” and, most impressively, the Alessi Brothers’ “Oh Lori,” which, yes, is about riding a bicycle in Springtime with the person you love perched on the handlebars. Kendrick Lamar, who is reportedly taking pole position on Dr. Dre’s mythical Detox, raps dexterously enough to establish himself as the post-Drake Snoop Dogg. Lil B unexpectedly steps his game up for the most anticipated album of his short, prolific career by toning down the self-help verbiage and learning how to get out of the way of his producers. And, finally, Miami-based beat-maker Spaceghostpurrp is responsible for the most intentionally ugly rap album of 2011, mastering sounds at different levels within the same song and inserting horrific/orgasmic screams with the same velocity that AarabMUZIK inserts DJ drops. From Bronson’s immaculate East-coast traditionalism to Spaceghostpurrp’s engrossingly terrible production, each of these guys has a conscientious stake in what hip-hop wants to sound like over the next decade.

The Rapture – In the Grace of Your Love

In the five years since Pieces of the People You Love, dance-punk impresarios The Rapture lost half of their rhythm section but rediscovered disco and, oh yeah, Christianity. For this years’ “comeback,” they toned down the more abrasive aspects of their sound—the primacy and jaggedness that got them so much attention a decade ago as part of the first wave of DFA artists—and came up with an album jam-packed with arena-rock dance-pop. Proving that if old punks never die, they can at least age gracefully, In the Grace of Your Love is The Rapture’s best, most cohesive record to date. It’s about Jesus, but fuck it.

Tiger & Woods – Through the Green

Throughout its 75-minute run time, Tiger & Woods’ full-length debut recalls bits of nearly every hit from the electro-disco era—“Heartbeat” to “Mercedes Boy”—but it plays more like a 12-hour fever dream with Melvin Riley’s exact intonation of the words “oh” and “Sheila” stuck on repeat inside your head. Credit the reclusive duo with taking Theo Parrish-style experiments in tedium and repetition; subbing out the component parts for diva-house vocals and Salsoul orchestral stabs; and ultimately churning out ten lengthy exercises in sustained joy.

Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo

You don’t often think of singer-songwriters as bitchin’ guitar players—part of the draw for “musicians” is that being one usually doesn’t involve much more than strumming and feeling your feelings; it’s not a profession for strivers. So it makes a certain sort of sense that, on an ostensibly “singer-songwriter” album, Kurt Vile plays guitar like he could shred if he really wanted to, but is content sounding like a 90’s teenager sprawled out on a couch in a cement basement, sleepily reconstructing his hazy 80’s memories of 70’s rock radio. He sings as laconically as imaginable, as if he’s barely trying to hit any note, to say nothing of the right one. It’s what you’d call effortless if effortless weren’t a compliment. Yet, in spite—or because—of Vile’s apparent laziness, Smoke Ring for My Halo is one of the most compelling singer-songwriter records of 2011. I guess it’s like Kanye says: When you try hard, that’s when you die hard.

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Sean Witzke

Death In Vegas - Trans-Love Energies

Richard Fearless, aka Death In Vegas, has spent a lot of the past decade in the wilderness. The album, rumored to have been sitting on a shelf, unmastered for the past three years, sounds like what happens when someone has just enough money to disappear for a while and do a ton of drugs and sleep with club girls and record an album about doing just that. There is a sense of Trans-Love Energies as Fearless’ all star Chemical Brothers album but he never went and got the collaborators in order to make it the masterpiece in his head, instead released something that feels a lot more fragile than the Death In Vegas we knew. The final result is some of the most beautiful work of Fearless’ career, even as it seems to be half-complete and imperfect, addled and mercurial. There are moments that stick out - the pulse of “Your Loft, My Acid”, the finale of the piece “Savage Love”, recalls both “Mogwai Fear Satan” and “Purple Rain”, without really sounding like either, constructing a space where those two pieces meet in epic-movie-score-heaven. When the album is over, you’d be hard pressed to differentiate what song and what lyric struck you, making the entire piece feel like a memory, something immediately familiar when it’s on but which disappears into vague recollection when you grasp for it. Probably how Fearless feels about it too.

Alex Turner - Submarine Soundtrack

This is barely an EP, four and a half songs(an intro) written by the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys for Richard Ayoade’s debut film. Intentionally written to evoke the mid-80s period the film is set, the 60s New Wave references Ayoade is playing toward, and Simon and Garfunkel’s work for The Graduate. The songs are kind of strange anachronisms in the film, fitting perfectly but Turner’s phrasing can’t help but feel modern. Turner’s language, no matter how he sings, sounds like someone from the 21st century, oddly showing how much his lyrics make the Arctic Monkeys something of it’s time. The songs are quite gorgeous, though, and it being written for a film gives it an “authenticity” (that’s the wrong word but it doesn’t feel like he’s a modern artist trying to write 60s folk-pop songs like so many artists this year) that an acoustic record from Turner would likely have lacked.

Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Pt. II

The Beasties are still the best who ever did it, ever, and opening track “Make Some Noise” is indisputable proof that they still have the stoopid in them. This sounds like the three guys who made Check Your Head, Paul’s Boutique, and Liscensed to Ill dicking around in the studio not even worried about their legacy. This album is a piece with those classics, and is a stunning achievement considering how few rappers stay not just coherent but good this far into their careers. No matter how much real life - where they are irritatingly politicized, where MCA gets sick, where they are married, have kids and are deep into their 40s - gets in the way of that. Hot Sauce Committee part II would be a return to form if the Beastie Boys ever really had a consistent form, but yes - there’s everything they do here, and done well, and with a sense of joy in rapping that can only come with not giving a shit about anything but rapping. Because really, since when did any that shit matter as much as rapping?

Times New Viking - Dancer Equired

Dear Times New Viking, this one is less loud but the songs are pretty good. Could have been louder, though. Next album, I want a fucking nosebleed.

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Tucker Stone

Japanther - Beets, Limes and Rice

The track record seems to be one solid twenty minutes of material every other year with these guys. This is one of the good ones, even with the terrible album title.

Kriedler - Tank

This is what Goblin would sound like if Goblin were a bunch of fans of Goblin, and it was 2011.

Mark McGuire - Get Lost

He gets better with every release, but he’s got a way to go before people start throwing their Tim Hecker albums out the window. There's a really unusual, hard to get past noise effect on almost all of these tracks--it's sort of like a electronic rake being quickly scraped across an electronic plate--and while it's too infrequent to get used to, there is a feeling of satisfaction to be found the first time you proactively suppress the all-too-natural wince.

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

You have to be careful when you’re on the way back from experimenting with noise, because it’s really easy to end up stuck in a Starbucks indefinitely. In the same way that you don't really wish the people you dislike any actual real world harm, nobody wants PJ Harvey to get her heart broken. And yet?

You know what I'm talking about.

Spank Rock - Everything is Boring and Everyone is a Fucking Liar

The best album of the last twenty years?

Ty Segall - Goodbye Bread
Ty Segall - Ty Rex
Ty Segall - Live In Aisle Five

Finally, a Ryan Adams for those of us who want to appear cool with those girls who complement their oversized aviator glasses with oversized novelty t-shirts.

Big Black Delta - BBDLP1

You gotta give it up for a group that could totally make it big on the nerdcore scene, but chose not to.

Big K.R.I.T. - Last King 2 (God’s Machine)

While 21 of the 22 tracks on Last King 2 (God’s Machine) aren’t “Yoko (Remix)”, one of the 22 tracks on Last King 2 (God’s Machine) actually is “Yoko (Remix)”.

Cold Cave - Cherish The Light Years

My only problem with sincerity is the part where you want me to listen to you talk about The Cure.

Gauntlet Hair - Gauntlet Hair

If all the Vampire Weekend fan bands are going to sound like this, maybe the next forty years won’t be an ever-worsening series of moments. (Well, the music part at least.)

Gui Boratto - III

In the same way I would give up on food for a series of life sustaining pills, I would give up on headphones to have Gui Boratto injected directly into the base of my spine.

My Wife: Nails The Costume Description

When one's husband hands them a comic and says that this comic was one of his favorites from "when he was a kid", one assumes it will be light and, perhaps, even silly. One does not expect it to feature criminals engaged in homoerotically honest discourse about "The Place" where they were both incarcerated.

As you can see, that's what I got. I got Deadshot. And although on the cover, Deadshot looks like a cross between Shazam and C-3PO, the similarity ends in appearance.

Ha - I just now looked at the cover and caught for the first time that there's a box in the lower right hand corner that says "DC Comics Aren't Just For Kids!" I guess that would have been a clue, had I seen it. It's white letters on a white background, with only a shadow black outline, and it's on the bottom corner. If that was 1988's way (Wait. 1988? I just became painfully aware, again, of our age difference. Gulp.) of rating a comic "mature", I think it's sort of failed. 

Anyhow - now that I got all of that off my chest, I have to say I really enjoyed this. The paper is newsprint-y, and I usually find that so irritating that I cannot really focus on the comic. But that was not the case here. I got so sucked in to this dark gritty tale of the ex-con-turned-narc-turned-suicidal-sociopath, that the pages didn't bother me.

It's a well written comic book. Just when you think you know what the story is, that these two guys who knew each other in jail are hooking up to do some crime, it turns out to be about a guy, our own Deadshot, on what is essentially a suicide mission offered to him by the Feds. One that if he survives - and they paint it like it's really iffy - he'll be a free man. And as it goes along, we come to learn that Deadshot just doesn't really give a fuck about anything anymore.

Or does he?

Because, yes, there's a love story, people. His ex-wife is trying to find him. His psychiatrist--who looks a lot like his ex-wife, of course--might have fallen in love with him. Another interesting twist. See, that's what's great about this writing. The story sheds light on the back story and history of the characters, but only in these flashes, and it makes it pretty clear that they're maintaining that delivery because that's what Deadshot is, a guy who lives in shadows and obscurity. There's no need for forced editorial narration to spoonfeed us the story, or the theme. It's all there in the way it's drawn--the deep, heavy shadows are where the action occurs, where all the choices are made and the difficulties are engaged. In the light, people just do things. It's a comic book that assumes its readers are smart. While it seems that a lot of today's comics like to assume that we are idiots who don't get things unless we're hit over the head with them.

Am I wrong? I'm sure there's exceptions. God knows that ya'll read more comic books than I do, you would certainly know better. But it seems to me that the trend has been in overtelling a story, and subtlety has been abandoned.

Speaking of things that have been abandoned: Columbia House ads?! Remember those? Okay, I liked them from a nostalgia point of view, sure. But I also liked them because they were clearly advertisements. They look NOTHING like the other pages. Whereas today, often, an ad page has the same colors, and lines and look of the comic book's page before it, and I've definitely gotten confused once or twice. I mean, not THAT confused. But still, in this case, I knew to just flip all three pages of "12 Hot hits for a cool Penny" - because it looked like an ad, not a comic. I'm almost embarrassed I'm complaining about this. "Even the ads used to be better, because they looked like ads!" Is that what I'm really saying? I guess it is. Have fun with that.

Oh, I should mention that, despite the weird C3P0-like costume, Deadshot is a total BAD ASS! He has no fear; no fear of death, or loss, nothing at all and it makes him one free and scary mother fucker. He'll get the job done, and then some. I have to throw in a shout out for how the artist drew the guys on the plane vibrating with fear after El Jefe says "the cabin is pressurized! One stray shot - one tiny hole in the fuselage -- and we ALL DIE! Yourself included." and Deadshot literally just says, "so?". And then, all hell breaks loose and Deadshot murders absolutely everybody. He doesn't banter with any of them--except for the one guy he used to get here--and he doesn't wait to figure a way out. He just kills all of them, immediately.

Yeah, this was a good comic book. What happened to this character? I've never heard of him, so I'm just assuming he and his comic book have been gone for a long time. But - wow. This was a good story. And it's a four issue mini-series - with SO much in just the first issue. 

Kudos to Ostrander, Yale & McDonnell! They did nice work.

-Nina Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Every Good Boy Does Okay

Gantz Vol 20
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Gantz stopped being good not too long after it stopped featuring hardcore sex, but that's no excuse for opening up to the cast to include a bunch of uninspired vampires (most of whom seem to be operating at a heightened state of arousal that is never explained, acknowledged and worse, never capitalized on) and having these vampires behave as if the Gantz-ian regulars are some long standing mortal vampire enemy. It's not a huge surprise that things have gone down the always treacherous road of "let's explain this shit"--that's pretty much par for the course in science fiction stuff that goes on to long--remember when Star Wars tried to explain the Force?--but the fact that you know why something is a bad idea doesn't make it any less tedious to wade through. That being said, the portion in this volume where the spree-killing sociopath (let it never go long forgotten that one of this series main heroes is a sexed up version of Anders Breivik, with all that pesky racism firmly intact) puts on the Predator's chameleon suit and kills 40 people with a samurai sword in the streets of suburban Japan is as irresponsibly compelling as the violence in Gantz always is. If Oku could stand to return to his other obsession--ridiculously oversized breasts, and the heavy panting obsessives who would storm Hell to motorboat betwixt them--he'd quickly find that all would be forgiven.

SF Supplementary File #2A-2B
By Ryan Cecil Smith
Self Published

While the previous SF Supplementary File was a brief mini-comic exploring one of SF's many team members, this issue--split into three limited edition minis, two of which have been released--looks connected to its parent series in theme only. Described by its creator as a "hand-drawn....hand-written reproduction" of a Japanese work by Matsumoto Leiji published in 1979, the comic sees Smith hewing pretty respectfully towards the original work in the same way that he does with his Two Eyes of The Beautiful comics, a similarly designed take on Kazuo Umezu's horror work. And while it seems like a limited exercise--in some ways, it's a heavily choreographed edition of one of those theme sketchbooks people used to not be able to shut the fuck up about--Smith's sincere approach and formidable design skills lift the experience safely into the realm of honest-to-goodness art.

Godland #35
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Tom Scioli & Bill Crabtree
Published by Image Comics

While there's way, way too much talking here for this to be anything more than a tolerable issue of Godland---in all seriousness, anyone who thinks the most exciting thing for Tom Scioli to draw is pointed fingers and turns of phrase should have their nuts stapled directly to their tongue, sack still intact--the final pages, where Adam Archer (our personality deficient hero) has his official team-up with Friedrich Nickelhead (our Joe Casey stand-in, dial turned three degrees north of Extreme) come as close to redemption as one could hope for.

Spaceman #3
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Eduardo Risso & Patricia Mulvihill
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Although the body screams for more of the violence that closed the last installment, the head understands: for death to mean something, it is best if the audience cares about the living. And while we're completely down that road for the detectives, exasperated and estranged as they may be, as well as with our victim heroes (an ape man bearing our national failure and the orphan girl who heralds the cultural demise), the rest loll like meat in the butcher's window. That's fine, actually: it's only the cheap optimism of the dumb and enslaved to theorize that pop celebrities are more than the shallow face they wear, and it's a mark in Azzarello's favor that he honestly depicts them as the frauds they'll forever be. If anything rings false--and little does--it might be the hint of a heart of gold heard in the hooker's final cry. But even that could play by Queensberry; she is still naked, after all.

Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes!
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Chris Burnham & Cameron Stewart
Published by DC Comics

There's something kind of unnerving about reading a DC comic that has all the requisite trappings of a photoshoot in Penthouse magazine, and yet decides to go completely sexless. (Schoolgirls, locker rooms, a latex skirt wearing headmistress and that "watch your rear" closer--ask any 14 year old what story that's telling.) It's almost as if Stewart and Morrison are making some weird comment about the state of geek culture today, the way it wishes to advance its backwards sexual attitudes by loudly proclaiming that sexual attitudes need not exist at all in any form, along with the even more disturbing pretense that the highest art should go should be a place where the smallest hands can still reach it. All this tolerance is cute, goes the rejoinder, but maturity dictates that the language of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was never meant to cover the hurt feelings of 40 year olds obsessed with the My Little Pony franchise: intended or not, the big message of the Morrison/Stewart exercise in Stephanie Brown-ing is that some comics should just grow the fuck up.

It's after that first story that the comic actually gets going, though. There, Morrison and Chris Burnham continue the weird amalgamation of candied violence and neon exploration that's been their beat for a while now; call it Joker comics, his absence makes more sense that way. With the weight of continuity having been abandoned--like Marvel's hands off approach to Uncanny X-Force, Batman Incorporated stories now are free to operate without any of the "help" that produced prizewinners like Countdown, Trinity and Superman: The Gigantic Pussy That Everybody Can't Stand--Morrison is freed of expectation or responsibility. It's a refreshing feeling, and while the Incorporated recap that closes the issue serves mostly as a reminder of how messy and ill-thought Incorporated seemed at the time, it's difficult to fend off the sensation that somebody decided they might still have something to prove, after all.

Wonder Woman #4
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang
Published by DC Comics

While this issue is primarily the conclusion of the new "origin" of Wonder Woman (short version: a penis was involved this time), it's also the issue where her new personality is completely introduced. The short version of that is that she's sullen, pissed off and based off the final pages, probably guilt-ridden as well. We'll have to see if that personality shift is here to stay, but for now, it's a welcome one. As Dave Sim decisively proved, women are inherently angry creatures; petulant and cold beings who wander the land ruining everything fun. It would only stand to reason that the "Wonder" of women would be the worst version imaginable, a hellish, screaming harpy addicted to the genocide of joy. This is also the issue where Cliff Chiang draws Brian Azzarello into the comic, playing the part of Ares, which only cost him a blow job.

which him did i mean

-Tucker Stone, 2012