let those glass doors open wide: 26 albums I've liked from 2011, with tiny reviews Nov 12 '11    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music Revelation [Digipak] by Journey From $12 Machine Gun Etiquette by The Damned From $40 The Bottom Line (Musical highlights of the year-to-date. Many more to follow later, I'm sure; I wanted to capture these accurately before moving on.) Tori Amos - Night of Hunters Her experiment in putting an album at the top of the Classical charts: her voice and piano joined with woodwinds and bowed strings instead of guitar, bass, synthesizer, or even drums. The long melody lines are also modeled after a variety of classical sources, I'm told, and they certainly sound unlike usual Tori Amos melodies: more elusive, angular, and unexpected. Reminds me of the Venezuelan art-song ensemble Kotebel, who previously occupied a space in my mind all their own. Becoming the Archetype - Celestial Completion Sophisticated speed-metal with a mastery of atmosphere, a couple of good piano hooks, and tempo changes that manage to serve dramatic purpose. At least a third of the vocals are sung (reedily but adequately) instead of growled or howled. Cheer-Accident - No Ifs, Ands, or Dogs A gnarled, often riff-heavy record that's lightened with mildly skewed intervals of piano-pop, psychedelic pop, jazzy melody, and lurching march. It often suggests a world in whichMagical Mystery Tour, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Appetite for Destruction had all waited around to be conceived as parts of the same Slint album - made math-rocky and melodramatic and adenoidal and dubiously produced, but nonetheless inspired. Count Zero - Never Be Yourself Like the Police circa the album tracks on Synchronicity or Midnight Oil circa 10-9-8-7, the songs here are tuneful without really sounding like *normal* tunes, and funky and/or danceable without being at all rhythmically obvious. At first the album struck me as consistent to a fault, but the influences are multi-racial and multi-species (if we count robots as a species), and subtle, and so far every listen reveals to me both new surprises and new catchiness. Elemental Zazen - Nothing to Lose But Change Hip-hop that swings in a gentle, understated, extremely pretty fashion: straightforward and easy to follow. The stories and manifestos are very (left-wing) political, but so am I, and the music lends subtlety the words might not earn on their own. Felice Brothers - Celebration, Florida Character-sketch Americana akin to the Drive-By Truckers. Well-played, centered on country-rock aided by piano, fiddle, and occasional horns. There's ballads here and midtempo shuffles, but my favorites here stand out as tense, slow-but-heavy, with the feel of detonations going off in the distance. Hooray for Earth - True Loves All the most distancing elements of high-budget '80s dance, pop, and goth production - the cavernous echoes, the synthetic sheen, the dance beat too solemn for casual celebration, the mechanical squelching and feedback keening in the background - are somehow made warm, lovely, and comforting. Jack o'the Clock - How are We Doing and Who Will Tell Us? Peculiar Americana. The designed-for-sustained-thought stories and sorta-folk-rock, sorta-venturing-onto-new-paths music remind me of Joanna Newsom, if she were male, had a gently limber and precise voice, was less interested in death and more interested in alive weird outsiders, and played no harp but instead occasional banjo. Or else the album reminds me of a backwoods, not-using-drugs-because-the-librarian-would-stop-them Incredible String Band. Or how R.E.M. could have followed Fables of the Reconstruction had Michael Stipe's stories got longer and more detailed while the band stretched out to comment on the plots. Or Fairport Convention if none of them were Sandy Denny but all of them were as promisingly odd as young Richard Thompson. Last Hurrah!! - Spiritual Non-Believers I'm just going to quote Matthew Perpetua's description, which sent me rushing to buy the album at the end of June: "It somehow manages to be rather simple and straight forward — it is basically a collection of catchy Norwegian folk songs — and wonderfully complex and ambitious. There are only three cuts on the album: An obscure Norwegian psychedelic pop cover at the start, a 31-minute suite about a doomed love affair at the center and a gorgeous bossanova-shoegazer-surf-twee-krautrock melange at the conclusion… The main attraction is the epic, which cycles through dozens of hooks and musical ideas in a way that is both surprising and intuitive. At various points I hear echoes of Joanna Newsom, Wilco, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, the Fiery Furnaces and Animal Collective, but the overall effect is ultimately rather distinct in its style and charm". Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Mirror Traffic Has anyone accused (or credited) the Jicks of being an Allman Brothers for geeks who don't need to get stoned to get goofy? They're one heckuva virtuosic, impressive rock band for seeming so laid-back, so slapdash; and actually, Mirror Traffic is one of their most focused albums, more than half-full of tightly-written songs, though the lyrics (and their periodic flashes of wit or descriptive right-on-ness) are mumble-sung or yelped not quite on-key by the former Pavement frontman. Man Man - Life Fantastic Combines the half-drunk tourism of the gypsy-folk movement with the gruff and seedy experimentalism of Tom Waits, adding just a splash of the jolly world-pilfering near-authenticity of solo David Byrne. Charlotte Martin - Dancing on Needles If Tori Amos's Little Earthquakes had had solid but unremarkable lyrics, I would still have liked it a whole lot. Strong, clear-voiced singing, classically trained piano, fairly interesting synthetics and percussion in supporting roles, and "Language of God" is as ambitious a closing track as "Little Earthquakes" itself. (It's followed by the *actual* closing track, the calm, lovely, and stately "Weird Goodbye": anyone able to write two endings that good is correct to use both.) Mountain Goats - All Eternals Deck Writerly, thoughtfully arranged folk/rock. To my tastes these are their most developed arrangements ever to co-exist with rock energy (an energy only Heretic Pride, of his last four albums, struck me as having much of). Tuneful and empathetic, with a bracing edge of hysteria. Okkervil River - I am Very Far Full-throated, densely produced, anthemic indie rock akin to the most ambitious arrangements of Bright Eyes. Waltzes and stomps, rough shouts and piano, thumping drums and synthetic strings, slow buildups and confident crescendos: musically my favorite Okkervil River album by far, although Will Sheff's lyrics, for the first time, do little for me. Plan B - the Defamation of Strickland Banks Mostly built from Soul and Motown, with decently-integrated elements of loud rock and hip-hop on occasion. I'm not sure whether singer Ben Drew has earned all the Smokey Robinson comparisons he's getting, but he's *really* good, that's for sure. Robert Pollard - Space City Kicks 18 two-minute sketches of rock songs, written and elegantly sung by the former Guided by Voices frontman. Compared to his old band's work, the lo-fi production and arrangements are simply inexpensive and plain, but they all sound like real songs to me, each with a good tune, an appealing squall of off-kilter energy, or both. Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo Happy, relaxed, eclectic pop from the Super Furry Animals' frontman. Even his weirdest instrumental tones are agreeably inserted into low-key blends of, e.g., mariachi, tropicalia, Temptations soul, Magical Mystery Tourism, and piano balladry. Royal Bangs - Flux Outside Guitar-rock, driven at once towards complexity, pop enthusiasm, glam-rock sheen, and bursts of background noise. Paul Simon - So Beautiful or So What Folk songs informed at various times by Simon's many previous adventures: with Mexican and Brazilian and South African rhythms, with tossed-off electric blues, with Brian Eno's delicately shifting atmospherics, with Art Garfunkel's demonstrations of pure-voiced singing. Its moments of old-man crankiness and sly humor are outnumbered by its reflections on love, mortality, and the meaning of it all, which isn't how I'd have voted, but hey, they're his songs. My favorite album by a 70-year-old ever (we'll see if Jethro Tull or Yes can top it in 2018). Spottiswoode & His Enemies - Wild Goosechase Expedition Old fashioned country rock (or do I mean alternative country?) is at the center of this, with appropriately day-to-day topics and homespun philosophy, and a few rhymes on the order of "I'd go through any kind of hell for ya/ I'd even follow you to Philadelphia". But it stretches out to include horn sections, urgent off-kilter rock, cinematic sweep, simmering jazz piano with rumbling percussion, and non-gravel-voiced Tom Waits influence as if they were the most natural extensions in the world. They Might Be Giants - Join Us Their usual cheerfully nerdy and professionally tuneful selves, but with more interesting, effortful lyrics than they've done in a decade or more. Here, to long unwinding melodies, are insights on how to politely greet a decapitated man carrying his head in his hands; on the day-to-day life and hassles of the lady and the tiger in the "lady or the tiger?" story; on the smug superiority of astronauts; and on the social disadvantages of E.S.P., among other too-little-considered topics. Those Dancing Days - Daydreams and Nightmares A kinetic album of glossy, club-worthy pop songs, much of it sounding as if they were an unusually good prefab girl group, but with a hint of soul/blues and with top-notch punk-rock drumming. The fast songs sound like Paramore produced to Robyn's specifications. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l The arrangements are yelping and vocal-centric and percussive and wobbly, shamanistic even when the horns or electric guitar kick in, and are utterly distinct, from each other and most other things. TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light Danceable, layered, many-textured rock songs drawing equally from black and white musical traditions: as much Sly Stone and Prince as Radiohead and U2. More serene and confident, in general, than their earlier work. Nothing on this album is super-intense or bracingly bizarre, and since I can still go play "DLZ", "Lovers' Day", and "I was a Lover" if I need them, nothing here seems to need to be. Within Temptation - the Unforgiving Grandiose hard rock (shading into heavy metal) with a strong, clear-voiced female singer and touches of quasi-classical strings behind the guitars. Like a peppier, more nimble Evanescence, or the midpoint between Pat Benatar and Nightwish. Yes - Fly from Here Still the most accessible of the progressive rock giants: whatever rewards they might put in place for long attention spans, however nicely they might solo, they build on catchy hooks, pretty melodies, and flat-out gorgeous vocal harmonies. Fly from Here picks up like a somewhat more languid sequel to Drama from 1980, or perhaps like Yes has been listening to newer prog-rock bands: the romanticism of Phideaux, the sophisticated Modern Rock of Porcupine Tree. New vocalist Benoit David, cursed for replacing Jon Anderson and having a stupid backward name, sounds half the time just like ol' Jon, and his lower-pitched, less Lancashire-accented vocals the rest of the time are nice too. Despite the title, this is *not* a song cycle reflecting (from a distance) on the triumphs and downfall of a local insect made big. But I guess that's okay. ********** Besides these 26 endorsements, I should mention quickly a few albums I'm not yet ready to endorse. * I like R.E.M.'s Collapse into Now alright, I guess, but for a band that was proud to never repeat an album -- one whose new work I stayed enthusiastic about forMonster and New Adventures, for Up and Reveal and Accelerate, even as I was more and more outnumbered -- it sure sounds to me like a pale copy ofAccelerate. * Kate Miller-Heidke's Liberty Bell is a likable enough, energetic enough work of vocordered dance-pop fluff, and my kids, who have excellent taste, think it's marvelous. To me, it's such a baffling comedown and change-of-pace from herCurioser -- one of my two favorite albums of 2010 --  that I'd prefer to make real sure you've learned that record before you try this one, that's all. * Robyn Hitchcock's Tromso, Kaptein is a victim for me, so far, of his excellent work ethic. Well over thirty years into his career, he's now released new albums four years in a row, and my brain is still processing it at the level of "Huh. Yet more Robyn Hitchcock music. This is one of his mild ones. That's nice". This is almost certainly not the music's fault. * Fountains of Wayne's Sky Full of Holes confirms, for me, my most pessimistic instinct about the band: that their character sketches are written in the spirit of "Haha! Get a load of those losers!" I could be wrong, so I hope you hear them differently; it completely poisons my ability to enjoy their new work. * Radiohead's King of Limbs is all textural and contains nothing that resembles a song. This doesn't mean it sucks in any objective sense, but I am old-fashioned. I like songs. And I think King of Limbs sucks. ("Lotus Flower" is a fun video, though.) ********** Please feel invited, in the comments section, to compare notes on these albums, to share 2011 favorites of your own, or just to say "thanks!" if I made anything sound intriguing.

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