eMusic’s Best Albums of 2012
Cold Specks
Every year, when eMusic’s editorial staff compiles our annual best-of list, the goal is never to come to some kind of academic determination of the year’s best records via a series of complicated formulas and criteria. To do so would be as maddening as it is impossible. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way our list comes together over the course of the last few weeks and I think, above all else, what we try to do with this list is to tell a story — to represent the music that mattered most to us at eMusic in an almost narrative form. We don’t really give much consideration to which albums may or may not make other people’s lists. We don’t care a whole lot about which albums were popular or unpopular, or which albums may or may not have resonance 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. And we certainly don’t care about which albums sold the most. Instead, we try to collect the albums that impacted us the most, with the belief that these are the albums that will impact other people, too. If an album is on this list, it means we love it and we endorse it, and we think you’ll love it, too. And if it made our Top 20? We consider it essential. These are our picks for the 100 Best Records of 2012. — J. Edward Keyes, Editor-in-Chief
#100 Gentleman Jesse, Leaving Atlanta
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"No turning back, I gotta get out of town," Jesse Smith sings on Leaving Atlanta's "What Did I Do." Four years in the making,Atlanta power-pop king Gentleman Jesse's sophomore album was inspired by a series of wildly unfortunate events in his life. The album is dedicated to friends he lost to cancer (ATL punk staple Bobby Ubangi) and drugs (Jay Reatard), and in the time between his debut full-length and this one,... Smith had his nose broken in a violent mugging, the result of which graces the cover of his 2010 HoZac single. For a time, it seemed like the only away Smith could get away from the drama would be to flee the city.
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But, as he told ATL alt-weekly Creative Loafing in a recent interview, "Atlanta is like an abusive lover that you can't leave." And even on opener "Eat Me Alive," one of the album's strongest statements musically or otherwise, Smith sings that "this city's trying to eat me alive," but tempers the statement instantly with the follow-up, "it's as good a place as any to try to survive." A handful of Leaving Atlanta's tracks reinforce the album title's thematic leaning, but there are also songs of triumph ("Rooting for the Underdog"), and lost love ("You Give Me Shivers," the fantastic "I'm Only Lonely [When I'm Around You)]") mixed in throughout.
While the years may have been rough on Smith, they've been kind to his songwriting. As he's admitted frequently, the former Carbona rarely emphasizes lyrics, instead focusing on titanic melodies and infectious guitar licks. And yet, Leaving Atlanta boasts several inspired lines. Milton Hammond's organ parts flesh out the arrangements, and three-part harmonies delight. There are several distinctly Springsteenian moments, too, and these, along with an utterly dark tale of a killer on the run ("What Did I Do"), show that Smith is not content to be "The Power-Pop Guy" forever. Much like his self-titled debut, Leaving Atlanta concludes with a quintessential closer, this one called "We Got to Get Out of Here." As the groove-locked tune barrels along, it becomes clear that the "here" in question could be referring to a negative mindset as much as a locale.
"I know you're feeling kind of uptight/ but you should come out with me tonight," Smith sings on "Kind of Uptight." Is he talking to a girl? Maybe, but it could just as easily be a self pep talk to and from a guy who needs to break free of the drudgery of a city turned against him. After all, you can give up on a situation when things get difficult, but it takes real character to push forward and find the bright spots, even if they're obscured by all manner of death and nastiness. Or to take on an optimistic attitude, as Smith sings in the very same song: "Everything will be all right/ So, come on, and take my hand tonight."
#99 ERAAS, ERAAS
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Like urban explorers, Brooklyn post-rock duo ERAAS haunt the gloomy husks of krautrock, darkwave, industrial and dreampop, finding pulsing life within them. Their dark and beat-driven self-titled debut draws on well-established subgenres, but feels utterly new: The immaculate production, full of audible space and teeming with intricate layers, is part of the reason, but most of it is due to the duo's keen command of their style. The result is a clean... draught of weird beauty.
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The vocals are mostly blurred or submerged, but the rhythmic music itself gibbers and groans volubly, intimating all kinds of fearful and wonderful things. Each track combines the sensuous with the spiritual and the highbrow with the underground in some fresh way: Some tracks, like "Crescent," toy with dissonance and subtle tonal tension, yet go silky across the ears. Others, like "At Heart," ride quasi-house beats and post-punk bass lines while somehow evoking sepulchral stillness. It's so varied that listening can feel like they're scanning through netherworld radio stations. Ghastly drones resolve into haunted new-wave hooks. Horror-film score movements give way smoothly to tribal folktronica. And it's all relentlessly pretty and surprising, beguiling expectations at every turn. The musical ideas are complex and abundant but never tedious, so it's a visitation as satisfying as it is eerie.
#98 Pop Zeus, Pop Zeus
#97 Maria Minerva, Will Happiness Find Me?
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"I hate the idea of 'gigs,'" Maria Minerva told eMusic earlier this year. "It's boring! When I go out, I just want somebody to DJ from about 10 to 6." Maybe that's why Minerva's second proper LP unfolds like a break-of-dawn set from one of her crate-digging 100% Silk compatriots. Caught in a K-hole where disco balls spin in time to handclaps, rubberized bass lines and glitter-dusted beats, it's woozy and... weightless — dance music meant for actual moon walking.
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#96 Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance
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By virtue of their hometown (San Francisco) and the labels they've worked with (In the Red, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, and now, Mexican Summer), The Fresh & Onlys are often grouped with shaggy-haired maniacs such as Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. In reality, their gorgeous, glassy-eyed pop is more in line with The Shins, or, to use an era-appropriate comparison for the Nuggets-inclined set, the Zombies. The noisier, feedback-drenched reference points... made a little more sense when the band was just getting started, but with each subsequent release, The Fresh & Onlys have refined their tunes, trading lo-fi riffs for jangling strums, garage rhythms for elegant, choral-enhanced accompaniment. What once could've served as the soundtrack for a Vice-funded documentary now sounds appropriate for starring placement in a Wes Anderson flick, and we mean that in the best possible sense.
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Long Slow Dance feels like a young band discovering their true calling. The title track meditates on finding true love alongside an acceptance that nobody's perfect. "Presence of Mind" grapples with precisely that, trying to attain it amidst a world of lies and disappointment. Multiple tracks feature a protagonist longing to unshackle himself from foolishness, sometimes over clean, dramatic guitars, other times backed by horn sections seemingly borrowed from an epic Calexico jam. The whole thing feels like a coming-out party for a band that's been leaning toward its destined path all along. Perhaps the finest distillation of this weight-off-the-shoulders thesis comes in "20 Days and 20 Nights," when frontman Tim Cohen sings, "Something so heavy in my mind/ I think I wanna try and let it out." Feels good, doesn't it?
#95 John Talabot, Fin
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John Talabot's Fin opens with a quiet halo of evocative nighttime sounds – owls, crickets, croaking frogs. It evokes a David Attenborough-narrated nature film, and is definitely not the intro one might expect from a house DJ based in Barcelona, let alone a guy who grabbed so many ears with a song called "Sunshine." The mist-filled seven-minute song that emerges from this dark bog, called "Depak Ine," an inscrutable reference to the... seizure medication Depakote, gathers force like a nagging doubt, accruing melodic force and rhythmic layering as it goes.
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It is the first of the 11 consecutive welcome surprises that comprise Fin, a record that quietly upends whatever narrative expectations you assign to it at every turn. If you heard the first single, the fleetly throbbing "Destiny," and expected a record full of moody Depeche Mode-aping synth pop, you will hit a big red Stop sign the second the following track, a motionless, melted pool of sound called "El Oeste," begins. I have listened to it 30 times or more so far this year already, and my memory still hasn't quite nailed down the track listing's pretzel logic – always a good sign.
#94 Laurel Halo, Quarantine
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There's something wonderfully unsettling about Laurel Halo's debut full-length Quarantine. A beat-less electronic album, its 12 tracks bleed into one another, creating a kind of woozy, ambient cloud cover. Hints of pop periodically break through; "Holoday," in particular, feels like the receding echo of dance music past. But ultimately, song structure is bypassed in favor of a sense of ghostly possibility that echoes both early Dntel and classical composer Steve... Reich.
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Halo coaxes a stark beauty out of her cascading ones and zeros, and Quarantine's tension and character stem from Halo's juxtaposition of moments of disquieting minimalism with her all-too-human voice. Prime example: "Thaw," which begins with a sentimental synth refrain that's paired with Halo's Nico-like warble — hesitations, missed notes and all. She loops her vocals on "Years" to create a breathy choir, but for most of the record they're left unadorned, sitting naked at the front of the mix, the masterpiece-defining chip in an otherwise elegant sculpture. Halo's is a world of supernatural unease, splitting the difference between the ethereal and the haunted.
#93 Jimmy Cliff, Rebirth
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In 1972, Jimmy Cliff's performance in The Harder They Come introduced U.S. filmgoers to the vibrant desperation ofKingston life, and his inspirational yet tough-minded songs highlighted the movie's soundtrack. Already an established hitmaker at the time, Cliff seemed poised to become Jamaica's first international superstar. Instead he misjudged American audiences, pitching vague homilies and pop professionalism to the AM crowd, allowing Bob Marley to leapfrog past him by assuming a prophetic mantle... and exciting hip FM rockers with his political defiance.
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On Rebirth, Cliff now eyes a more judicious audience: middle-aged rockers weaned on punk and alternative. Shepherded by his producer, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, the 64-year-old rides the lithe throwback grooves of reggae revivalists the Aggrolites and Hepcat with a young man's grace, particularly on two smartly chosen covers — the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton," which transplanted Cliff's character from The Harder They Come into a London slum, and Rancid's "Ruby Soho." ("Rebel, Rebel" is good too, but it's not the Bowie tune.) Cliff's political complaints haven't grown much more specific — "World Upside Down" cries out against "Too much injustice," then proposes "love" as the answer. But his exhortations not only retain the warmth and humane spirit of old but have gained depths of pained sympathy with age, especially when he laments how "They took the children's bread/ And gave it to the dogs."
#92 Pilgrim, Misery Wizard
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The debut full-length by Rhode Island's Pilgrim may be one of the most heralded doom-metal albums of the year (along with Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction), but the members of Pilgrim are completely uninterested in the recent rise of hipster doom, which is probably why Misery Wizard sounds so authentically effective. Pilgrim's apocalyptic tones are generated from piles of Lovecraft, some powerful weed and intensive study of the giants of the first two... generations of sludge, Black Sabbath, Pentagram, Trouble Saint Vitus, Sleep and Electric Wizard. By never breaking above a bloody-kneed crawl (with the exception of the mid-paced "Adventurer"), Pilgrim's lengthy, down-tuned songs maintain a genuine sense of despair and enough rhythmic variation to keep them captivating and transcend the artificial bleakness of many of their peers. When vocalist The Wizard emotes the melodic lines, "In solitude I lie alone/ In the void, a sweet release/ In darkness I can feel at peace" he sounds like he's not play acting, he's crying for catharsis, or at least some good SSRIs. But as the title implies, The Wizard's misery is our gain. Just don't let him near any sharp objects.
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#91 Alice Russell & Quantic, Look Around the Corner
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A band manager of my acquaintance used to regularly warn his acts against "flutes and bongos." And he was mostly right. When modern musicians — especially British musicians — start affecting the signifiers of conscious 1970s soul and jazz, it tends to be just that: affectation. Even Tru Thoughts, one of the finest jazz/funk/hip-hop labels in the U.K., has had its misfires on this front, bands and records that may brim over... with virtuosity and good vibes, but fail to match to the heart, guts and, well, soul of their inspirations.
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In fact, even Will "Quantic" Holland, Tru Thoughts's star producer/bandleader, has veered into pastiche in the past. Not here, though; not by a long chalk, even though flutes and bongos abound. Alice Russell has previously voiced many of Quantic's finest moments in England, and in these sessions recorded in Holland's adopted home of Cali, Colombia, over a couple of visits by Russell between 2007 and 2011, it's clear that absence had made the heart grow even fonder.
Russell's voice remains formidable, but it's her song-writing that comprises the core of this record. The arrangements and production meticulously recreate the feel of Minnie Ripperton and Rotary Connection, or vintage Colombian cumbia, but they are backdrops for the songs with a life all their own, rather than knowing retro nods. There are great stylistic twists, too: "Boogaloo 33" reminds us just how much mambo there was in classic rock 'n' roll, and the opener "Look Around the Corner" delivers the same liquid-sunshine string arrangements and grooves of Nuyorican soul. Through all of this, Russell is Quantic's anchor, singing with her characteristic blend of toughness and smoothness, and investing these impeccably written songs with emotional life.
#90 Donny McCaslin, Casting for Gravity
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Donny McCaslin has long seemed a prime candidate to update and upgrade fusion jazz-rock. Since as far back as Seen From Above in 2000, his tenor saxophone style has been fueled by a rambunctious lyricism that isn't afraid to leave skid marks on his phrases. By "Rock Me," off Declaration in 2009, he'd discovered a fertile and yet phosphorous crossroads between prog-rock and hard bop, and a year later ... href="http://www.emusic.com/album/donny-mccaslin/perpetual-motion/12340045/">fattened the mix by adding electric bassist Tim Lefebvre.
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But Casting For Gravity represents McCaslin's most dogged effort thus far to redefine fusion. Lefebvre is back, paired with powerhouse drummer Mark Guiliana for a potent yet still ruggedly jazz-centric rhythm section, the backbone of the quartet. Versatile keyboardist Jason Lindner occasionally steps out for a spirited solo, but is more influential in helping to determine the texture and in setting and coloring the mood. Along with producer David Binney, a longtime McCaslin ally who also sparingly adds synthesizer, they provide McCaslin with the ability to create grand gestures. There are stop-and-go grooves that escalate in intensity and fall back on themselves in dramatic tension-and-release; tonal layers that morph from liquid silk to electric sizzle and evaporate; rhythmic struts containing melodic swagger and impulsive outbursts.
There are also ambient, gossamer shadings and trip-hoppy segments and songs (most obviously on the title track, "Love Song for an Echo" and "Alpha and Omega") to which McCaslin credits Richard D. James of Aphex Twin as his inspiration. While they impressively broaden the bouquet, the bolder, burning tracks like "Tension," Binney's "Praia Grande" and the shifting, suite-like "Losing Track of Daytime" feel more impressive for blending the brutish revelry of rock with the harmonic complexity and gymnastic improvisation of jazz. Or, put more simply, "blazing a trail."
#89 Hundred Waters, Hundred Waters
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Gainesville, Florida-based avant-folk outfit Hundred Waters defy easy definitions on their beguiling, absorbing and richly detailed debut album. They've toured with Skrillex and recorded for his OWSLA label, and Hundred Waters has an expensive-sounding attention to production value. But it's cheap to sound expensive these days, and singer-percussionist Samantha Moss's fleetly wandering vocals here, swathed in sinuous electronics, have more in common with those of Björk, Bat for Lashes or another recent... tourmate, Julia Holter. Or a smokier-voiced Joanna Newsom: The twinkling synth tones and winding harmonies of "Boreal" belie a heroic narrative that lets its freak-folk flag. Hundred Waters run deep.
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#88 Peaking Lights, Lucifer
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Peaking Lights — husband-and-wife duo Aaron Doyes and Indra Dunis — make distinctly modern music of understated joy and optimism. The pair, clearly both avid crate diggers and knob twiddlers, refract their love of Krautrock, dub and analog synth music into an enthusiastically lo-fi jumble. Listening to Lucifer, where Doyes and Dunis irreverently tinker with, poke and prod these influences, can feel like peering down into the basement of a record store... through a kaleidoscope. It's an album of guts-out experimentation tamed into something intimate and sweet.
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The duo have said Lucifer is largely about "play and playfulness" and it's hard to disagree. "Beautiful Son," a lilting ballad about, you guessed it, the couple's new son, is a gently warped groove of electronic pulses buoyed by a spare piano melody and Dunis's simple and tender vocal. On "LO HI," baby Mikko can be heard cooing over a shuffling reggae interlude. Talk about playful. Elsewhere, Lucifer teems with sportive sounds — the bubbly romp of a bass line on the frolicking "Live Love" and the addictive, gurgling groove of "Dream Beat" stretch out nearly seven minutes each and set the rollicking tone.
Despite the seemingly weighty recipe of obscure influences and tangled electronics, at the heart of Lucifer is a fun, hallucinatory, rampant spirit. It's evident the album was a joy to create and, appropriately, it's a contagious and joyous listen.
#87 PAWS, Cokefloat!
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"She wasn't only just my mother," Phillip Taylor slurs over rickety, distorted guitar in the opening seconds of PAWS' Cokefloat!, continuing, "She was my friend, a good friend." As an introduction to the Glasgow trio's rowdily impressive debut album, it could hardly be more fitting, showing off both the band's throwback slacker-rock style and Taylor's blunt, decidedly un-macho lyrics. But on this 13-track, 42-minute set, what separates PAWS from so many other... garage-bound pop-punks printing out Pavement and Sonic Youth guitar tabs is how expertly – and emotively – they assail a relatively wide range of song types. "Sore Tummy" and "Miss American Bookworm" put bubblegum melodies beneath heavily scuzzed noise-pop and throat-rending screams, like early Foo Fighters but more awkward and relatable. While "Get Bent" comes across as a post-Girls acoustic kiss-off to a distant father, the stylishly chiming "Pony" steps back to critique parent-funded underground scenesters. Best of all is mid-tempo anthem "Homecoming," which begins as a bully-baiting comeuppance but morphs into a self-actualizing mission statement recalling recent European tour-mates Japandroids: "Thanks for the punches of encouragement/ I've turned my world into sing-alongs." Shout-alongs, even – punchdrunk and easy to love.
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#86 Roomful of Teeth, Roomful of Teeth
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Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there's a lot to prepare you – if you've heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin's Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage's Songbook, and the Swingle Singers – and, let's say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk – then... you're good to go. Roomful of Teeth creates a richly-textured sound that uses a seemingly endless palette of vocal techniques: overtone chant, rhythmic clicks and buzzes, luminous chords and piercing Balkan-style close harmonies, drones, and spoken word (usually to found texts). In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could be dangerous, but Roomful of Teeth has fallen in with the right crowd.
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Released by New Amsterdam Records, which has become a home for the so-called indie-classical movement, the group's debut release includes new works written specifically for the band by some of that movement's leading lights, including composers Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Sarah Kirkland Snider and indie rocker Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. With such a distinguished list of guest composers, it might be a little surprising to find that some of the record's highlights come from the group's own Caroline Shaw, whose suite of pieces named after Baroque dance forms (Passacaglia, Courante, Allemande and Sarabande) is a tour de force of vocal mischief-making, with collage-style spoken texts woven into a web of singing, semi-singing, and other less easily identified vocal noises. Again, in the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Roomful of Teeth is never less than completely musical, even lyrical.
Snider's "Orchard" is sensuous and beautiful, and possibly a little darker than it seems at first. Greenstein's works are the most reliably rhythmic and will appeal to fans of Meredith Monk; this particular Meredith Monk fan thinks "Montmartre" might be the best of the three. And Brittelle's "Amid the Minotaurs," on the surface one of the most conventionally-structured pieces here, is a truly subversive piece of anti-pop.
#85 Jeremy Siskind, Finger-Songwriter
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There is a classic intimacy to the piano, sax, vocals of the Jeremy Siskind's Finger-Songwriter. Siskind's piano is a mix of elegance and storyteller charm. The slow burn of Nancy Harms's vocals is an enchantment oftentimes dispelled with a smoldering vulnerability. On sax, Lucas Pino is drifting smoke, and on clarinet, a brooding melancholia. Siskind's love of literature the inspiration for each album track, he's created an album of songs about heartbreak,... loss, and hope, delivered with a warmth and immediacy that brings the late-night jazz club to the listener.
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#84 Family Band, Grace & Lies
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Grace and Lies: two ghostly characters envisioned by Family Band vocalist (and former visual artist) Kim Krans as a pair of girlish sirens with wily intentions, capable of quick seduction and even quicker betrayal ("I saw them in a field behind our cabin, singing and slow dancing," she's said). It's a sinister and defeating image, but fitting; Krans and her guitarist husband Jonny Ollsin, formerly of the metal bands Children and S.T.R.E.E.T.S.,... make aching, languorous goth-folk, vaguely reminiscent of the Handsome Family and Beach House, but slower, stranger, more hollow-eyed. Grace and Lies, their second full-length, isn't a record for the nights you have people coming over, or for a midday stroll through the park — Ollsin's stark, velvety guitar and Krans's disconcertingly affect-less vocals are better suited to those very-early-morning, there's-the-sun slumps, the moments when you catch yourself reconsidering every last decision you've ever made. If that sounds impossibly depressing, fear not: Grace and Lies is buoying, a meditation on darkness that yields light. As Krans explains in "Moonbeams," it's the questioning that'll save you: "If you wonder what I need/ I'll tell you just what I need/ But I gotta hear your wondering sounds."
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#83 Pig Destroyer, Book Burner
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Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there's something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004's Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflect the rage, intensity and... social disconnect of minds on the edge. Book Burner is no different: "The Bug" begins with a dissonant audio collage, over which a demented voice declares, "I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse" and from there evolves through cacophonous blast beats, propulsive riffs, and pained moans. Equally nightmare-inducing is the opening track, "Sis," where vocalist J.R. Hayes (ex-Agoraphobic Nosebleed) roars, "My sister's dangerous/ She climbs the barbed wire fence/ Changes clothes in the back seat/ Medical gown to red jeans." There is nothing "pretty" about their music, but visceral savagery has its own allure.
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Book Burner delivers all flesh and no fat; Pig Destroyer attack with pinpoint precision, plowing through 19 cuts in just under 33 minutes and mapping out when to pummel, trudge and lacerate. The tag team of acrobatic drummer Adam Jarvis (who also plays in Misery Index) and guitarist and producer Scott Hull (ex-Anal Cunt) both boast the ability to turn sick, horrific and off-kilter clamor into coherent, memorable compositions.
#82 Sea of Bees, Orangefarben
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When I was 11 my parents sent me to a hellhole of a sleepaway camp where I was miserable (one of the counselors made me eat tomatoes – gross!). It was at that terrible camp where I first heard the song "Leaving on a Jet Plane" played over and over, and to this day I have a Pavlovian response to those familiar lite rock folk chords: When I hear them I'm overtaken... by homesickness. It's fitting, then, that Sea of Bees' sophomore effort – a tearjerker of a breakup album written by Julie Ann Bee in response to the demise of her first relationship after coming out to her friends and family – features a lovely (and much hipper) reinterpretation of the song (simply called "Leaving") that zeroes in on that same panicky feeling, that same sense of dread. Homesickness and heartbreak, after all, come from that same sad place located in the gut-area.
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With sunny-sounding guitars and a sweet, ethereal voice that belies the agony of which she sings, Bee makes Orangefarben a meditation on mind over matter, the importance of gasping "I'll be fine" again and again, even when it's clear you're not. "And I know I shouldn't think those thoughts/ but I've gone ahead and thought those thoughts and I'm fine," she confesses on "Teeth," as if convincing herself that the worst may be over, that time might go about its business and provide some relief. And if that grief is never fully eradicated, if she still finds herself longing for the comfort and safety of old attachments (oh, the sad letters I wrote to my parents from summer camp!), then at least the baggage she lugs around with her will be beautiful.
#81 Christian Mistress, Possession
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The full-length debut byOlympia,Washington, quintet Christian Mistress is more than a savage, irony-free '70s metal flashback. It's an honest and lovingly composed epic that combines the sludge of Black Sabbath, the guitar harmonies of Judas Priest and the amphetamine bursts of Motörhead.
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Several elements levitate Christian Mistress above their peers. The most blatant is vocalist Christine Davis, who unleashes a barrage of skin-stripped melodies that support even the heaviest songs. Equally important are... the band's immaculate arrangements, which range from thuggish to progressive, recalling cult heroes like Angel Witch and Diamond Head as much as Priest and Sabbath. Also, while the Mistress clearly love great metal, they also covet classic and southern rock (check out the ZZ Top-style lick in the chorus of "Black to Gold" and the gloomy slide guitar on the acoustic intro of "The Way Beyond"). Possession offers NWOBHM and doom fans a dragon's lair of gems to behold, but to pigeonhole Christian Mistress as sword and sorcery "retro metal" is a crime worthy of a squeeze in the ol' iron maiden.
#80 Glen Hansard, Rhythm & Repose
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There's irony in the fact that Glen Hansard's first solo album comes just a week after the Broadway musical Once triumphed at the Tony Awards. 2007's film-version original of that musical, starring Hansard and the wispy Czech pianist Marketa Irgolová, brought the romantic and creative duo widespread fame. The duo, who eventually dubbed themselves The Swell Season, began recording together in 2008, but the love affair didn't last: They announced... their breakup after touring behind 2009's Strict Joy, and Irglová married producer Tim Iseler in 2011. Hansard, meanwhile, has been living in New York, keeping an eye on Once while breaking in a new set of collaborators. While the end product isn't leagues away from his work with Irglová or his longtime band, The Frames, Rhythm and Repose steers away from the latter's anguished anthems and the former's fragile harmonies.
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R&R is a heartbreak album through and through, but it leans more towards self-reflection than self-laceration, like a more melancholy, less pissed-off Blood on the Tracks. (It's not surprising that the late Levon Helm was asked to guest on a track.) Those sifting for shards of autobiography will seize on lines like "We talked about talk of a gold ring/ You brought me one step closer to the heart of things" and "We married on an August night/ No priest, no church, just the big moon shining bright," from "You Will Become" and "Maybe Not Tonight." Unless you've got a chronic weakness for Irish melodrama, the album's front-loaded breast-beating starts to wear thin after a while; it's hard to hear "The Storm, It's Coming," nestled just after the midpoint, and suppress the temptation to remark that it's already done come.
Fortunately, Hansard pulls out of his emotional nosedive with "What Are We Gonna Do," where a female voice (not Irglová's) lifts him out of his torpor and sets him on the path to recovery. He's still only beginning to heal by the time Rhythm and Repose draws to a close; a little "Revelate" style catharsis would have done much to lift the album out of its perpetual doldrums. But its limited palette is a lovely one, sustaining a mood that lingers like the bittersweet scent of lost love.
#79 METZ, METZ
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On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that's reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins's strained screams; in Hayden Menzies's crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of "Wet Blanket," in the sludgy industrial instrumental "Nausea," and in their grim, dour lyrics. But the... sheer volume and force of the music don't take away from their musicianship – no individual element is covered by fuzz, thanks in part to production work from Graham Walsh (of Holy Fuck) and Alexander Bonenfant (who was behind the boards of the first two Crystal Castles records). The production shows off an intricate variety of textures lurking beneath the noise: On "Get Off," a chaotic drum barrage toward the end of the track is paired with a wavering high-pitched screech of white noise, bolstering an already-urgent moment. It's small details like that on METZ that sharpen the band's anger and attack, elevating them from your average Touch & Go apostles into a seething, unique operation.
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#78 Lotus Plaza, Spooky Action at a Distance
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That Lockett Pundt, he'll sneak up on you. In Deerhunter, frontman Bradford Cox's outsize personality makes him an easy lightning rod, but Pundt has played a hardly less electrifying role as the band's guitarist. His first solo album as Lotus Plaza, 2009's The Floodlight Collective, was woozy, winsome dream-pop that confirmed Pundt's familiar gifts for ethereal sonic textures but only hinted at his growing strength as a songwriter. This follow-up is strikingly... the work of the man who wrote "Desire Lines," the rousing centerpiece of Deerhunter's peak so far, 2010's Halcyon Digest. Crystalline guitar arpeggios meet precise krautrock pulses, time-bending codas – and ear-catching '60s pop melodies. Wistful stoners' anthem "Monoliths" distills the album's shoegaze-informed style most concisely, but equally essential non-album single "Come Back" best previews the mesmerizing yet propulsive live show. Proof soft-spoken daydreamers can pump their fists, too.
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#77 Amit Friedman, Sunrise
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Creating his own mix of jazz and Middle Eastern music, saxophonist Amit Friedman offers a debut album of richly-textured tunes full of bombast and beauty. The use of additional percussion and an oudist brings intricacy and detail to the music, but it's Friedman's crafting of simple yet vivid melodies that elevates the songs to something very special, a splendid balance between the complex and the catchy. Furthermore, the addition of a string... trio lifts songs up to euphoric heights, but amidst all that soaring, Friedman doesn't forget to let his jazz ensemble swing. This is the kind of majestic album that'll sweep listeners up out of their seats.
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#76 Gonjasufi, MU.ZZ.LE
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It's one of the more unlikely stories from U.S.beat culture: San Diego's Sumach Ecks moves to Las Vegasto work as a yoga teacher, but not before contributing an edgy, Billie Holiday-like vocal to one track on Flying Lotus's 2008 debut Los Angeles. Impressed with his distinctive scatting, Warp Records offer him his own deal. It's a nice creation myth, and Ecks, who records under the suitably wigged-out moniker Gonjasufi, has thus far... lived up to its billing.
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Warp Records are classifying this as an EP, but MU.ZZ.LE – the follow-up (in 10 short tracks) to 2010's A Sufi and a Killer - sounds in many ways like the bigger record. Taped somewhere out in the Mojave, this dubbed-out desert music occasionally trips into emotional ditches that are bleak enough to soundtrack an end-times movie like The Road. MU.ZZ.LE sounds like it was recorded on filthy equipment salvaged from RadioShack dumpsters, with Gonjasufi's searing, blurted vocals dissolving immediately upon emerging from the speaker cones. Vinyl flecks dot the opener "White Picket Fence," whose dread-fuelled electric piano chords are reminiscent of Tricky's mid-'90s debut. "Rubberband' is slow, sad and stately as a Procol Harum anthem, strained by DJ Shadow through a sieve of hiss; while "Blaksuit" is a chopped-and-screwed, syrupy jam over garage punk guitar chops.
You never quite know if MU.ZZ.LE's gloopy, ramshackle character is painstakingly crafted or the genuine record of serendipitous moments of improvised dementia; whatever, it breathes new life into the corpse of "triphop" and confirms Gonjasufi as a gloriously eccentric new broken beatmaster.
#75 Neurosis, Honor Found in Decay
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Like the band's last album, 2007's Given to the Rising, Neurosis's 10th studio album in 27 years, Honor Found in Decay, is a cinematic, multi-dimensional exploration of texture and emotion that weaves together doom-metal, atmospheric rock, dark psychedelia, tribal metal and proto-industrial. But the experimental post-metal pioneers also delve deep into the apocalyptic folk that frontmen Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till have explored on their recent solo albums. "At the... Well" starts with slow, reverberant guitar strums and cryptic existential musings: "The blaze of a Helios sky/ Rage will blossom into iron/Blind as a worm in the earth." And "Casting of the Ages" opens with dual acoustic guitars and deep, rattling vocals atop a lolling bass line and a lazy accordion before sparking into a thudding, trudging doom trek.
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Honor Found in Decay is hardly uplifting; here's the opening line from the propulsive opening track"We All Rage in Gold": "I walk into the water to wash the blood from my feet." Yet the bands presentation is so artful and symphonic it reveals sheer beauty in lyrical hopelessness and inspiration in rhythmic ugliness. Unlike many post-metal albums that seesaw between reflective calm and turbulent chaos, Neurosis's dualism is more subtle and natural, and at times almost spiritual in its nihilism.
#74 Ab-Soul, Control System
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Ab-Soul is the resident word-nerd of Black Hippy, the rap crew that includes the Dr. Dre-anointed young rap prince Kendrick Lamar and the brooding, heavy-lidded, ex-Crip leader Schoolboy Q. He's easily the most cerebral of a fairly brainy crew, and on the ferociously excellent Control System, he produces an immersive, dark and wide-ranging piece of work that takes listeners to Saturn and Andromeda ("Pineal Gland"), sardonically salutes Obama as a "puppet" ("Terrorist... Threat"), breaks our heart with a devastating first-person tale of young love and loss ("The Book of Soul"), puffs out some post-Tribe Called Quest weed clouds ("Bohemian Grove") and oh, also finds room for a sex joke as goofy as "She got that magical vag/ Let me hocus poke."
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#73 Lilacs & Champagne, Lilacs & Champagne
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Alex Hall and Emil Amos are the personalities behind Grails, a Portland instrumental rock collective that's happily traversed so much sonic terrain over the past decade and a half that they'd seemingly make side projects unnecessary. But where Grails absorbs and perverts genres, Hall and Amos's self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne is an act of deconstruction and rebuilding: The duo were inspired by Madlib's dank crate-digging and sample-stitching technique, and they... also share a love for similar source material. Unquestionably stoned in demeanor, L&C leans heavy on underground hip-hop, Krautrock, '70s psych and even an occasion Jayne Mansfield recording to create ambient music for the kind of people who find the idea of ambient music boring, or a solution for anyone who wished the sample-happy travelogues of Avalanches or Quiet Village transported them to somewhere darker.
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#72 Pop 1280, The Horror
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"Burn, burn/ burn the worm," goes the ominous chorus of The Horror's pissed-and-pulverizing opener, the perhaps-unsurprisingly titled "Burn the Worm." Subtle, Pop. 1280 is not. But you don't really need a gentle hand when your band regularly and fiercely recalls the finer moments of Liars, the Birthday Party and Swans. Where 2010's The Grid EP sported the occasional synth-heavy hook, The Horror is positively relentless, piling brutal rhythmic grinding on top of... lyrical references to dead people, bodies, death, and, well, the kind of horror that's often reserved for the cinema. Perhaps it's the addition of Twin Stumps former drummer Zach Ziemann or the apparent improvisational, on-the-spot writing process that created The Horror, but the album is a relatively bleak and corrosive listen - an accomplishment for a band that's previously broached topics including bed bugs in low-income housing projects and dystopian future worlds. But that's also part of the fun. Like their fellow wall punchers the Men, Pygmy Shrews and White Suns - bands the Village Voice has credited with drudging up the pigfuck spirit of yore - Pop. 1280 is making quite a glorious racket. If you can't stand it, maybe you should get out of the basement.
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#71 Lianne La Havas, Is Your Love Big Enough?
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While inspired by the more robust Who Is Jill Scott?, Lianne La Havas's promising debut Is Your Love Big Enough? ponders dating an older man (fluttering ditty "Age") and lobs bitter accusations of betrayal (downbeat duet "No Room for Doubt") over finger-picked, reverb-tinged guitar tinged. Over top, La Havas's vocals beckon like flickering candlelight.
#70 Frankie Rose, Interstellar
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Frankie Rose spent the early part of her musical career as a member of a ragtag coven of Brooklyn retro-garage bands, including Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts and Dum Dum Girls. Interstellar, her second solo album since moving on from those groups, shows exactly how to move your music out of the garage: Clean out all the grit and grease, put on some makeup, imagine yourself as a dragon's teardrop... on the moonscape of a Yes album cover, and blast off into a colder space. An appreciation for early-'80s new wave blankets Interstellar with a certain iciness - drum machines, oscillating keyboards, brittle-sounding guitars - but it's not frozen solid. Rose's voice unlocks these songs like a key; rather than apply the steely, remote effects given to so many electronic-pop vocalists, producer Le Chev (whose very name makes this album seem even more tilted toward the '80s) keeps Rose's voice at a tender, close distance. Though some fairy-dusted moments occur (such as the feather-light title track or the strange wood-sprite chanting on "The Fall"), this isn't a Cocteau Twins record. Rose has pop songs to sing, from winning A-side "Know Me," with its brisk Smiths rhythms, to the I-am-a-bird-now ballad "Wings To Fly." There are big, warm choruses here, and an almost childlike sense of joy and dreaming, that would seem to clash with Interstellar's cold-pressed instrumentation . But mismatched styles never seem to bother Frankie Rose - her music contains galaxies.
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#69 Chris Cohen, Overgrown Path
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While being in any band seems incredibly difficult, Chris Cohen likes a challenge: He's played with Deerhoof, Haunted Grafitti and Cass McCombs, artists too chaotic, daunting or insular to really occupy indie rock's center. It's not surprising that his solo effort Overgrown Path sought retreat in rural Vermont. What is surprising is how it stands up to anything his prior gigs have done, a survey of the past four decades of jangle-pop... unified by his Ray Davies-esque voice and the comfort of finding yourself through escape.
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#68 Liars, WIXIW
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With every release, invigorated both by self-imposed limits and half-baked experiments, Liars discover new aesthetic worlds. Consider the 30-minute dance-punk-to-drone closer "This Dust Makes That Mud" off their 2001 debut They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. Nothing specific about that song, just you know, that it happened. And chew on the go-for-broke concepts of 2004's They Were Wrong So We Drowned (witches, dude) and 2010's... Sisterworld (Los Angeles, man).
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On WIXIW, the goal is retrofitting the past's electronic pop and dance presets into rhythmic, art-damaged dirges. Save for acid-squelch rave-up "Brats," WIXIW's songs are all nervous tension and no cathartic release. Imagine the brutal minimalism of Iggy Pop's The Idiot sharing a slow dance with the transcendent cheapness of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92. As sun-faded synths unfold on opening track "The Exact Colour of Doubt," you almost expect lead singer Angus Andrew to croon, "I want my MTV." So retrolicious, and therefore, totally right now. For the first time since their debut, Liars sound of-the-moment rather than out on a limb. That may be the only affront left to savvy listeners anticipating the latest sea change from these puckish, post-post punks.
#67 Miguel Zenon & Laurent Coq, Rayuela
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Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar's 1963 classic Rayuela – in English, Hopscotch – is a fragmented tale of a Bohemian adrift on two continents. To underscore his hero's dislocation and odd thought processes, Cortázar maps a zigzag alternative route through the book for adventurous readers. On their Rayuela, Puerto Rican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and French pianist Laurent Coq variously evoke the novel's playfulness with language, mobile-like structure, transatlantic breadth and fascination with... jazz, as well as the bittersweet nature of expatriate life. Ably abetted by instrument switchers Dana Leong on cello and trombone and Dan Weiss on drums and tabla, they make smart, inventive, heartfelt music.
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#66 Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes
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What was Flying Lotus supposed to do, twist our synapses till they turned blue every single time out? Please – not even Hendrix could have done that. British DJ Mary Anne Hobbs may have declared FlyLo Jimi's modern equivalent, but Until the Quiet Comes, his fourth album, plays like something Jimi didn't get to stay around and make: both reflective and madcap, full of details scurrying in the margins. Take "Tiny... Tortures," which rides a near-subcutaneous bass pulse, twitchy, subtle clicks and clacks, ruminative jazz guitar flecks and flurries. Is it fusion? Maybe, but it doesn't show off the way most fusion does – it's too busy sneaking up on you.
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Seventies cosmic jazz has always been a FlyLo touchstone, and his forays into it can feel ponderous, such as on the brief "DMT Song," on which Thundercat's vocals are echoed into gauze over glittery electric piano and twisting double bass. But mostly he's impish, as is evident even on broader-stroked tracks such as the overtly daffy "Pretty Boy Strut," where a walking bass line meets cartoon-voiced keyboards and insistent electro-handclaps. There are fewer giant flourishes of the sort that marked 2008's Los Angeles or 2010's Cosmogramma, though. Even the big guest stars—Erykah Badu on the circularly rhythmic "See Thru to U," Radiohead's Thom Yorke on the dense whorl of "Electric Candyman" – are ingredients he stirs into the mix with impunity. As always, the signature is FlyLo's alone.
#65 Screaming Females, Ugly
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New Brunswick, New Jersey's Screaming Females have turned out roaring punk album after roaring punk album since 2006, amid booking hundreds of their own shows – some in basements and others in massive club venues warming up for the likes of Ted Leo, the Dead Weather and Garbage. Their Steve Albini-produced fifth LP Ugly is a darker, less melodic affair than its 2010 predecessor, which thrived on a perfect balance of... hooky choruses and frontwoman Marissa Paternoster's masterful guitar acrobatics. Paternoster hasn't lost any of the full-throated, low-alto howl, best showcased in "Rotten Apple" ("Hell is within me/ Hell's all around me now," she snarls), and as she bellows "I want you to tell me to expire" in "Expire." Ugly is long and it can feel that way, at 14 tracks, almost 54 minutes, but the high points ("Expire," "Help Me," the acoustic, string-backed closer "It's Nice") are high enough to make it worthwhile.
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#64 Bowerbirds, The Clearing
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In "Overcome with Light," Bowerbirds' Phil Moore and Beth Tacular sing, "Yes, we had some hard work, but now it's right." Their lush third LP, The Clearing, is about unexpected challenges: Tacular's near-death experience; the ending and rekindling of the couple's relationship; building a home by hand. And despite all of that, they pulled through with their best work yet: clear, full instrumentation and a celebration of new beginnings.
#63 Ty Segall Band, Slaughterhouse
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Each Ty Segall record is a new outfit in the garage-rock prodigy's ever-increasing wardrobe. Slaughterhouse, his latest quick change, is the first release billed under his touring band, a group which includes punky wunderkinds Charlie Moothart and Mikal Cronin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that this is a group that's been traveling the road together, Slaughterhouse is a loose, scrappy set. Some songs are given ample jamming room ("I Bought My Eyes"), while... others are haunted-house screamers ("Slaughterhouse"). There are inspired covers with humorous studio banter ("All right, here we go, extra fast," Segall says by way of introducing "Diddy Wah Diddy."), and staring-contest noise parties (the 10-plus-minute "Fuzz War"). It's a glorious grab bag, uncouth and unkempt in its exuberance, but with a worn-in feeling derived from the players' comfort with each other.
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Like he did on his Singles 2007-2010 compilation, Segall forgoes the catchier, cleaner vocals he's sometimes showcased, opting instead for the feral yawls and yelps that earned the young Segall so many comparisons to the late Jay Reatard early on. Elsewhere, he does his best, fuzz-soaked Led Sabbath impression ("Wave Goodbye"), and only occasionally hints at the comfy, Nuggets-influenced jaunts he's so good at ("Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart," "Muscle Man"). Slaughterhouse isn't exactly a consistent record, but that doesn't exactly seem to be the point, either. If Segall's going to keep trying on new, inspired costumes every few months, who's complaining?
#62 Grizzly Bear, Shields
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Remember when Grizzly Bear was Edward Droste's solo project? Didn't think so. And that's okay; while the disconnect between Droste's bedroom-pop beginnings and the band's longtime status as a democracy – with Daniel Rossen at the helm half the time – has been a source of tension in the past, their third album as a full-fledged quartet is sleek and self-assured. Or as Droste admitted in a Pitchfork interview this past June,... "As we get older, more confident and more mature, we're becoming more comfortable with stepping on each other's toes."
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That doesn't mean that Shields is marred by muddled ideas and misdirected hostility. Thanks to several "songwriting retreats" in New York and Cape Cod, the effort is decidedly collaborative, an autumnal listen that feels alive and full of welcome left turns rather than heavy-lidded and hazy. The LP's leadoff single ("Sleeping Ute") is a perfect example of the group's push-and-pull dynamics – a tidal wave of rippled rhythms, honeyed harmonies and burbling synths. The rest of the record is much more subtle yet no less effective, as Rossen's rich melodies and spare riffs play a perfect counterpoint to Droste's fragile, emotionally-charged confessionals. Repeat listens reveal the hours that went into every hook, too, whether the finish line is reached through windswept strings and woozy jazz ("What's Wrong") or one long walk on the beach, a slow build that seems to be on the verge of a total breakdown ("Sun In Your Eyes"). Grizzly Bear emerges unscathed, however, as ready to assume the mantle of Brooklyn's most promising crossover band as they've ever been.
#61 Woods, Bend Beyond
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When Jeremy Earl left Brooklyn for the tiny upstate town where he grew up – Warwick, New York, a rural, rail-side area best known for its annual Applefest – a few years ago, his decision wasn't surprising so much as long overdue. And not just because dude's the founder of a ramshackle rock band called Woods and a lo-fi-leaning label that goes by the name Woodsist. Forestry nods aside, Earl has always... seemed like a hippie who's constantly lumped in with "hipsters" – a soft-spoken Neil Young fan who'd rather hang out with his cat, a considerable wooden owl collection, and a freshly packed bong than a poorly ventilated house full of cool kids.
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More important, however, is his musical vision, which has long hinted at but lurked just below the level of psych-steeped greatness that's achieved on Bend Beyond. Led by Earl's lovelorn falsetto and loose, fiery riffs, Woods' seventh album offsets its tales of frustration (lots of "it's so fucking hard" talk) with red-blooded arrangements and a clean mix that brings the frontman's hooks right into focus. It helps that the well-oiled quartet saved their jam-band tendencies for the stage and let their individual parts shine at the same time instead, from the rambunctious organ rolls and roaring guitar leads of "Find Them Empty" to the curve-hugging rhythm section of the title track. It's inviting enough to make us big city folks briefly ponder our own move to Deliverance-town, USA Well – almost.
#60 White Lung, Sorry
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White Lung's pummeling second album, Sorry, isn't for the faint of heart. "I'm the disease that you've already caught," frontwoman Mish Way spits on "I Rot," one of 10 punk bursts driven by tension-filled riffs, frantic drum assaults and macabre lyrics. Yet Sorry's violent imagery is also deeply poetic – more Plath than Poe – and the album has plenty of melodic moments (unexpected chorus harmonies on "Bag," lively guitar spikes on... "Take The Mirror" and "St. Dad") to temper the aggression. Urgent and inspiring.
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#59 Ravi Coltrane, Spirit Fiction
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It's been a little more than two decades since saxophonist Ravi Coltrane fully broke into the top-shelf jazz world (as a member of drummer Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine), thus finally overcoming the daunting task of emerging from the shadow of his father, jazz god John Coltrane (who passed when Ravi was two). Now in his 40s, Coltrane continues to develop as an artist; for demonstration of his singular tenor/soprano saxophone voice and... his creativity and intimacy as a leader, look no further than his superb Blue Note Records debut, Spirit Fiction. He employs two primo bands as the anchors of the sessions: one, his longtime quartet of pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and drummer E.J. Strickland and the quintet he used on his 2002 sophomore album From the Round Box; the other, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, pianist Geri Allen, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Eric Harland.
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Produced by Joe Lovano, Blue Note's modern-day tenor titan, Spirit Fiction shows how forward-thinking Coltrane has become as he continues to steer clear of standard formulas and aims straight for imaginative contrasts and convergences. He experiments with tunes developed by disparate layers of improvisation, notably on the doubleheader of the scrambling "Roads Cross" and the sprightly "Cross Roads", where pairs of players from his quartet are recorded individually with the results spliced together. Coltrane also opts to record in a variety of instrumental formats, including duo ("Spring & Hudson," an original with Strickland that bursts with brio), trio (a redolent take on Paul Motian's "Fantasm" with Lovano and Allen), and sextet (as Lovano joins in again with the quintet's rollicking-to-reflective spin through Ornette Coleman's "Check Out Time").
On Coltrane's ballad "the change, my girl," his tenor delivers a lyrical mix of melancholy and joy, and on the three Alessi-penned tunes, the two ebulliently converse and criss-cross. As a saxophonist, Coltrane may not be a flashy, blow-with-bravado type, but his playing communicates on levels ranging from the vigorous to the ruminative. Spirit Fiction is yet another giant step in his maturation.
#58 How to Dress Well, Total Loss
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When one-man R&B deconstructionist Tom Krell, aka How to Dress Well, released his 2010 debut Love Remains, he was one of a a host of bedroom artists – Krell, plus James Blake, the Weeknd and others – re-interpreting FM-radio slow jams and twisting the slinky genre into new shapes. Since then, the number of contemporaries has grown while unchartered paths have shrunk, so it's commendable that two years later, Krell has distinguished... himself again, this time with tighter arrangements and more substantive lyrics.
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While Love Remains' longing murmurs and blown-out falsettos kept listeners at a distance, Total Loss sees Krell laying out his diary pages in tight close-up for everyone to read. Written while he was grieving the death of his best friend and recovering from a recent breakup, songs like "Cold Nites," "Running Back" and "How Many?" bare the heartbreak in Krell's somber croon. Without the low fidelity of his previous offerings (and with help from the xx producer Rodaidh McDonald) it's clear that the scratches and crackles weren't a cover for a lack of a voice: Krell's falsetto soars when refined. It's a remarkable evolution: Somewhere in the time he was fine-tuning his warped take on the genre, How to Dress Well has moved towards becoming a real R&B artist.
#57 Yellow Ostrich, Strange Land
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Yellow Ostrich mastermind Alex Schaaf has said that the title of his new album refers to his move in 2010 from Wisconsin to New York City. Yet after making last year's The Mistress under humble bedroom-recording conditions, Schaaf upgraded to a professional studio for Strange Land, and it's that unknown habitat he seems most intent on exploring here. Opener "Elephant King" shows his hand straightaway, riding in on a sparkling guitar figure... that slowly accumulates all kinds of indie-pop filigree: harmonized singing, sustained horn tones, and an escalating parade-drum beat by Michael Tapper, whose consistently inventive percussion work comes to distinguish Strange Land in a way that recalls Steven Drozd's avant-Bonzo beats on The Soft Bulletin. Elsewhere, Schaaf builds intricate loops from tiny vocal slivers ("Marathon Runner") and chops up Tapper's playing into a kind of nimble white-guy funk ("I Want Yr Love"). None of this high-end studio tricknology distracts the frontman from making memorable melodies, as the elemental fuzz-rock gem "Stay at Home" demonstrates; "Daughter," too, should satisfy Built to Spill fans impatiently waiting for that band's new one. But it's definitely a kick to hear him let Yellow Ostrich run wild.
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#56 Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon
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When he wasn't conjuring dust storms of noir-ish, twanging guitar with San Francisco garage-rockers Fresh & Onlys, Wymond Miles was quietly stockpiling his own songs. Not that we're sure where he finds the time: aside from the building buzz of F&Os, Miles earned a degree in the humanities and also became a father. Earlier, he released Earth Has Doors, which evinced a deep appreciation for the lyricism of Scott Walker. His full-length... debut is darker and more somber than the Fresh & Only's; Miles indulges his inner goth, singing of torn desires and fragile flesh on opener "Strange Desire" and sounding at times like Robert Smith fronting the Bad Seeds. Though his words tend towards the lugubrious, it's Miles's hooks, expert six-string playing and tactful placement of sounds that make the album a luminous whole. See how the theremin sweeps in during "The Thirst" or how the guitar feedback upticks on "Lazarus Rising" before receding to its original jangle. Perhaps his strategy is laid out best on "Singing the Ending," where he croons about "go(ing) gentle into that goodnight."
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#55 Esperanza Spalding, Radio Music Society
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Now Esperanza Spalding is making even the Grammys look hip. In her first outing since she was named Best New Artist in 2011, Spalding puts a dozen tunes into her stylistic spin cycle for a tour de force of pop glitter, jazz swing, folk moodiness and a dollop of hip-hop swagger on the dense-but-dazzling Radio Music Society. This is the work of an artist who refuses to choose, mocking genre labels with... guileless ambition. (Her original concept was to pair this disc with the classically-oriented, string-laden Chamber Music Society back in 2010, until her record company convinced her the menu would be too large for public consumption.)
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By ignoring boundaries, Spalding upends expectations. She enlists august jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano to provide a dulcet lilt to a Stevie Wonder cover ("I Can't Help It") and hip-hop titan Q-Tip to play glockenspiel and co-produce the jazzy tribute to her native Portland, Oregon("City of Roses"). Assembling a phalanx of 23 players and vocalists for a flashy, powerhouse "Radio Song," she sings about the giddiness of being seized by a new jam coming out of the speakers as her own electric bass wends its way through the song's buoyant center. Three songs later, with just the sparse backing of organist James Weidman, she tells the saga of a man falsely imprisoned for 30 years on a bogus murder conviction. On Radio, both extremes are fair game.
As was the case with Chamber Music Society, Spalding's vocals are her ace in the hole. Her range is limited, but her assured and agile phrasing is ideal for carrying out her talk/sung approach. It enables her to credibly pull off a bluesy, big-band-like torch song ("Hold On Me") and to surf atop a youth choir on the anthem "Black Gold." And then there's "Vague Suspicions," a dense and sophisticated number with Jack DeJohnette on drums, about the tacit accommodations Americans make to avoid thinking too much about the consequences of drone strikes and the other elements of remote-control war. It's a grim, simmering number, its closing moments featuring Spalding sarcastically cooing, "Next on channel 4: celebrity gossip." It's a typically astute and self-aware take from an artist who is the closest thing jazz has to a young celebrity.
#54 Baroness, Yellow & Green
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Before the release of Yellow & Green, Baroness frontman John Baizley stressed in interviews that the records were going to take some risks and expand the band's sound, partly by being more direct and placing greater emphasis on songwriting. Fans of the metal band's notoriously complex music weren't quite sure how to take this assessment; their responses tended toward wariness and curiosity mixed with guarded optimism.
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As it turns out, the... double album Yellow & Green is pretty much just how Baizley described it: The burly metal fury of previous Baroness efforts has settled into something far more daring and diverse. Look no further than Yellow's "Twinkler" and "Cocainium." The former's primary sounds are throaty flute, stately acoustic guitar and stacked vocals — think Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" at a Renaissance Faire, or a lusher version of Blue Record's "Steel That Sleeps The Eye." In contrast, the latter's tar-bubble riffs and oil-slick keyboards rumble like Iron Butterfly, before the song explodes into a fuzzed-out The Sword/Metallica hybrid.
Although this simmering tension between aggression and restraint permeates both albums, Yellow is more focused and accessible. A nimble bass line gives "Little Things" an elastic quality, while the cattle-stampede riffage of "March to the Sea" is classic Baroness. Still, these tunes exhibit impressive concision; even the turbocharged stoner rockers "Sea Lungs" and "Take My Bones Away" contain discernible (and catchy!) hooks.
Green overall is far moodier, slower and quieter than Yellow. The instrumental "Stretchmarker" is heart-wrenching psych-folk, while the ominous "Collapse" is nothing more than a tangled arrangement of folky acoustic guitar, some surging sound effects and a patient kick-drum thump. Other interesting influences crop up, too: The melancholy "Mtns. (The Crown & Anchor)" conjures Thrice's brooding post-hardcore musings, and the watery guitar textures of "Foolsong" and Green's closing instrumental track, "If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry" are reminiscent of Explosions in the Sky.
It's obvious these stylistically sprawling albums represent the next step for Baroness: Like Metallica once did, or, more recently, Mastodon, they have begun to grow beyond their niche and have accordingly set their sights on expanding beyond a cult audience. If much of Yellow & Green sounds like metal for people who don't necessarily identify as metal fans, then, it hardly means the band is hardly consciously dumbing down its music for the mainstream. On the contrary, these daring albums cement Baroness's reputation as an uncompromising group of musicians who's never been afraid to flout convention when pursuing ferocity.
#53 THEESatisfaction, awE naturalE
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In this cloud-computing age where everyone is a fan of a bit of everything, it's good to see Sub Pop, the label most famous for bringing grunge to the world, continue to define itself not by genre but merely by brilliant music. They released their first hip-hop album in Shabazz Palaces' much-lauded Black Up last year, which featured Afro-futurist Seattle duo THEESatisfaction; the latter now get their own Sub Pop release with... their debut full-length.
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Opening with a fanfare of stumbling polyrhythms and speaker-blowing pomp before swerving into nimble, pared-down poetry recitation, the pair recall the boom-bap collages of J Dilla and Madlib, with a touch of Erykah Badu's simultaneous languor and clarity. With constant gear changes like these, and songs that rarely break three minutes, the record is full of personality and verve, a feeling cemented by the rapped and sung vocals. Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White recite everyday dramas of sex and politics and give them a magic mushroom logic, full of tangents and florid imagery; Palaceer Lazaro of the aforementioned Shabazz Palaces returns the favor on a brace of tracks mid-album, laying his nimble non-sequiturs over "God," with its beat like an elegantly stuck Bill Evans record, plus the deranged funhouse of "Enchantruss."
Meanwhile, the filtered pop-rap of "Queens" could have come from Alan Braxe or Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter in their more laidback moods, and it's easy to imagine Lil B waxing surreal over the thickly aquatic "Juiced." Irons and Harris-White have lyrical flair, melodic gifts and a varied production voice, blending it all in a sensually blunted modern soul music. But like Sub Pop, you should forget genre labels — to tie this record to one is to undermine its richness.
#52 Nas, Life Is Good
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Nas's career path has been a strange, contradictory one: It's clear that he's a legend, but he's always being pressured to live up to it, as though Illmatic was his own personal Citizen Kane. The last time he reasserted his status back in 2001, it was thanks to a feud with Jay-Z that lit a fire under his ass. But after a series of increasingly uneven late-career albums, Nas has found another... route back to form, embracing the idea that maybe his position is already secure and he doesn't have anything left to prove. But don't mistake this attitude for complacency: Life is Good, his 11th studio album, is steeped in reflection, a mixture of gratitude and regret, retrospect and foresight.
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The first four tracks are the kind of intricately constructed, human-level crime narratives Nas has always excelled at — statements of influence ("No Introduction"; "Loco-Motive"), tense come-up/fall-down scenarios ("A Queens Story"), payback gone tragically wrong ("Accident Murderers") — but tinged with the bittersweet undertone of not having enough peers who made it big alongside him. The last three — the ruminative, frustrated "Stay", the romantic-daydream "Cherry Wine" and the Kelis breakup wrap-up "Bye Baby" — reveal that he's just as adept talking about the aspirations and frustrations of love. And in between there's Nas figuring out how to be a model father ("Daughters"), reconciling his hood roots and his jet-set present ("Reach Out"), invoking his origins to dress down pretenders ("Back When"), and doing the memory of Heavy D proud with his hardest got-mine anthem since "Made You Look" ("The Don"). The production fits the legacy-minded tone — no brostep or Guetta, no attempts at exhuming an ossified '94, just a slate of good-to-excellent beats from names that've always suited him well (Salaam Remi, No I.D., Buckwild) and A-list R&B hooks (Mary J. Blige, Anthony Hamilton, Amy Winehouse). In a hip-hop era where the most pivotal icons are dealing with the idea of becoming elder statesmen, Life Is Good is the kind of album an Illmatic acolyte would hope a pushing-40 Nas could make.
#51 Vijay Iyer Trio, Accelerando
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Let's not mince words: Accelerando is a source of rippling power and resplendent beauty that deserves to be called a masterpiece. (Except I suspect that Iyer, who recorded this a month before his 40th birthday, might top it on some future project.) As with the acclaimed, chart-topping Historicity in 2009, the pianist leads his trio through a stimulating collection that blends sharp originals and a surprisingly disparate array of cover tunes, from... Heatwave to Herbie Nichols to the Thriller track, "Human Nature." But in the nearly three years between the discs, the trio has been able to turbo-charge the force of their ensemble collective, without sacrificing the depth of their interactions. There are magnificent stretches throughout Accelerando — the rising to crescendo of the last half of "Optimism," much of Henry Threadgill's agile and agitated "Little Pocket Sized Demons," the title track, and Iyer's "Actions Speak," among others — where the effect is like a rock power trio along the lines of Cream or The Who, but using the language of jazz, and with a piano instead of a guitar. Iyer's two-handed chordal phrasings are cavernous, anthemic and intensely personal — he says he wants his music to be visceral, and he succeeds in spades here. Bassist Stephen Crump is a great enabler of intensity — his plucking (especially "Wildflower" and "Little Pocket Sized Demons") and bowing ("Accelerando") are brusque and bristling with contagious energy. Masterful drummer Marcus Gilmore keeps time and regulates the current with aplomb and unerringly good judgment. Accelerando feels like a unified magnum opus: The opening "Bode" pleasantly ushers you in, and the closing "The Village of the Virgins" carries the amiable goodwill of a benediction. In between is a wild, wonderful ride.
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#50 Robert Glasper, Black Radio
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Pianist Robert Glasper has jazz chops sophisticated enough to satiate diehard purists and an affinity for hip-hop and R&B that has resulted in collaborations with Q-Tip, Maxwell and Mos Def. Black Radio scrambles these influences, with Glasper's Experiment quartet (including Derrick Hodge on electric bass, Casey Benjamin on sax and vocoder, and Chris Dave playing drums), laying unpredictable music beneath a bevy of high-profile guests. In this era of... Pandora-style musical-profiling, where listeners can narrow down exactly what they think they want, the project absorbs genres like a sponge and squeezes out surprises with a tinge of tang and froth. It avoids the sappiness of "smooth jazz," the stilted self-reference of "hip-hop jazz" and the suffocating cushion of "quiet storm," yet there's a lush sensuality that permeates the beats, bop rhythms and bracing moments of curiosity and intellect.
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Glasper understands that this Experiment is best undertaken as a tactile experience - as Shafiq Husayn rap-drawls in the opener, "Lift Off," all you need is your ears and your soul. To drive home the point, the beguiling yawl and coo of Erykah Badu sends the Afro-Cuban classic "Afro Blue" into the air like a large kite in a steady wind, its tail trilling. Rappers Lupe Fiasco and yasiin bey (better known as Mos Def) variously distill verbal science and wig out on wordplay ("turtles from a man hole"?), knowing the live quartet can alter the texture and freestyle the route as the situation warrants, on "Always Shine" and "Black Radio," respectively. There is a throwback nature to Black Radio, and not only because Sade ("Cherish The Day," with Lalah Hathaway on vocals), David Bowie ("Letter to Hermione," featuring Bilal channeling Stevie Wonder) and Nirvana (a deconstructed and vocoderized "Smells Like Teen Spirit") are covered. There are moments reminiscent of the soul-jazz fusion of Bobbi Humphrey and Donald Byrd back on Blue Note in the late '70s, or Soul II Soul and Me Phi Me back in the '80s, or Alphabet Soup and Mint Condition in the '90s, with a dollop of 21st-century hip-hop on top. Why reinvent the wheel when you can modify the ride?
#49 Dum Dum Girls, End of Daze EP
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Sporting black leather jackets, bright red lipstick and hangdog poses, Dum Dum Girls resemble high-school dropouts from another time – the '50s, maybe; or maybe it's the '60s; or maybe it's the '80s. Whenever it is, it's not now. But no assembly of retro references, however clever, will get you to sing with a voice as bold, outsized and sad as Kristin Gundred, nor will they get you to write melodies as... instantly indelible as she can either. Over the course of two albums, and now two EPs, her band has gone from playing misfit little garage songs punctuated by "bang-bang"s and "la-la"s to dark, glittering music exploring resignation, regret, and other big subjects that sound surprising coming from a band calling themselves "Dum Dum Girls."
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End of Daze, their latest, follows in the footsteps of convincingly sad bands from the Shangri-Las to the Smiths: They treat raw emotional vulnerability with musical confidence. Guitars buzz, drums boom and everything cocoons comfortably in reverb. At 18 minutes, End of Daze has no standouts and no weak spots: It's beautiful all the way through. The spiritual heart of the EP comes from the lone cover, of 1980s Scottish pop-rock group Strawberry Switchblade's "Trees and Flowers." "I hate the trees and I hate the flowers," Gundred sings over shimmering, reverberant guitars – "I hate the buildings and the way they tower over me." With just the slightest push, the simplicity that once made them playthings gets elevated to metaphor. As a title, End of Daze might be a little joke about their own maturity: The fog lifts and leaves nothing but clarity, naked and bittersweet.
#48 Eternal Summers, Correct Behavior
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Nicole Yun only knows a handful of guitar chords, but she plays them passionately. Her band, Eternal Summers, has expanded sizably on sophomore effort Correct Behavior, building on their debut's ramshackle indiepop foundation with stadium-sized hooks, extra layers of guitar, and loads of reverb. But in spite of their sonic makeover, Eternal Summers (now a trio with the addition of bassist Jonathan Woods) still understand the power of brevity and focus, striking... a balance between the naïve, home-spun charm of early gems like "Running High" and "Safe at Home" and the more expansive style they've branded "dream-punk."
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"Millions" is a hell of a re-introduction. With its jangly guitar lines and see-sawing chorus melody, the track sounds like New Pornographers stuck in the garage, with Yun channeling her inner Neko Case. They have their stoner-poet moment with the atmospheric prog-pop of "Heaven and Hell," Yun philosophizing "Death itself will die" over cavernous distortion – epic shit for a band who probably used to record in their mom's basement. Eternal Summers seem to have a blast exploring the limits of a legitimate studio (check the skronky, drunk toddler guitar solo on "Disappear," or the rocket-snare blast on "You Kill," or the Beach House-y preset keyboard beat on closer "Summerset"), but they rarely experiment at the cost of joyous, chest-pounding pop. Correct Behavior indeed.
#47 The Men, Open Your Heart
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There's nothing quite like a good old-fashioned, skull-splitting album-opener. Judged on those merits alone, Open Your Heart's "Turn it Around" completely fucking aces its final exam. Moreover, it's a refreshing, accessible upgrade for the Men, the Brooklyn noisemakers who set speakers smoking with last year's overdriven, occasionally overindulgent and ultimately overwhelming Leave Home. Its mix of shoegaze grandiosity and punk grit was exciting and powerful, but there were moments where one... wondered what they'd sound like if they reined it in with a couple of hooks.
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Open Your Heart is the answer. The album is divided roughly into three categories: rockers (the abovementioned "Turn it Around," the Buzzcockian power pop of the title track, and the straight-up hardcore "Cube"), chill-outs (the aptly titled instrumental "Country Song," the halcyon-era-Meat-Puppets-doing-Poison drinking song, "Candy") and Leave Home sister songs (building, stretch-outs "Oscillation" and "Presence"). These categories aren't compartmentalized. Instead, they mix and mingle like you do at any great party, screamers butting elbows with blue-collar laments, rave-ups doing shots with the burnouts.
It's uncommon for a rock 'n' roll band to show such proficiency in genre-dabbling, but the Men pull it off, and it's exciting to think about what they might do given full-on immersion into one of the many directions hinted at on Open Your Heart. When American Sun's Holly Overton shows up to croon on a couple tracks, her feathery backing vocals providing balance to a screaming mix that often threatens to push too far into the red, it's tempting to hope she'll join the band. A record-length meditation on upbeat, Big-Star-inspired love songs would thrill, no doubt, but hey, what if they did a full-on country album? The potential, clearly, is unending. Thankfully, so are the rewards.
#46 Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man
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EMUSIC-009C032Aon December 13, 2012 at 9:48 am said: Umm.....where are the top 20?-
jedwardk-eMusic, Editor-in-Chiefon December 13, 2012 at 11:39 am said: We've been revealing 20 albums every day this week. Tomorrow is the last day, so that's when we'll reveal the final 20!
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dj_jdubon December 13, 2012 at 5:41 pm said: I'm expecting Mr. Frank Ocean to land in the #1 spot. Looking forward to finding out!
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suenbreton December 13, 2012 at 9:12 pm said: Jack White Frank Ocean The Boss in the top three Id say. I didnt notice Best Coast is there album better than Beach House. Me thinks no!
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BrianJFon December 14, 2012 at 12:16 pm said: What? All of these albums are betting than the Springsteen and Norah Jones albums? I seriously doubt that, and I have a bunch of these. And Alabama Shakes is only #40? Really?! The only album on this list with more than two good songs is that one.
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skerzoon January 1, 2013 at 2:37 pm said: Wow, you've listened to all 100 albums enough times to know that?
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TheRealDublinSoilon December 15, 2012 at 11:57 am said: Yup, a real nice job. Plenty of pleasing surprises along with the more obvious consensus choices.
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dj_jdubon December 15, 2012 at 9:28 pm said: Some excellent choices and some brave choices. I would not have expected Cold Specks for #1, mine is Mr. Ocean, but that's ok. Wonder where is The Weeknd- unless maybe that doesn't count because technically the ep's were all released earlier on his website? But that's a strong contender in the top 10 otherwise, imho. Nite Jewel should be in the top 100 too. But otherwise pretty good list.
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ricardo222on December 16, 2012 at 11:20 am said: No Rodriguez? Searching For Sugarman soundtrack, easily fits in my Top 100.
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thesvelteoneon December 19, 2012 at 7:24 am said: Only 2 of the top 20 available in the UK? WTF? Also, where's Zammuto, you crazy kids?
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thesvelteoneon December 19, 2012 at 7:25 am said: Only 2 of the top 20 available for download in the UK? WTF? And where's Zammuto, you crazy kids?
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stephenheroon December 19, 2012 at 8:38 am said: I'm a bit sad that the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis album didn't make the cut. It's good, passionate hip-hop with culturally-relevant messages that aren't all about sex and drugs and violence.
