Favorite Music Of 2011

As we race towards the final days of 2011, I want to take a look back at some of my musical obsessions that emerged over the past 12 months. Keep in mind—these are my favorites and I make no pretensions towards a “best” or “greatest” list or really any sort of catchall kind of affair. In fact, I encourage everyone out there to contribute his or her own selections of favorite music in the year 2011 in the comments below. If there are albums that you feel I overlooked and might have included had I known about them, then feel free to let me know!

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Favorite Albums of 2011

1. The Rural Alberta Advantage – Departing

The day I got this album in the mail from Amazon, I sat down and listened to it three times in a row. Cleaner and sharper than their debut album Hometowns (a fact that some old fans were uncomfortable with), Departing came across to me like a firecracker while Hometowns was more like a slow-burning candle. Departing has a haunting immediacy that Hometowns, for all its similarity, simply lacked. Even the best tracks on their debut—“The Ballad of the RAA” and “Edmonton”—sound a little tired in comparison with fare like the muscular “Barnes’ Yard” or the jolting epic “Stamp.”

That said, the content remains much the same: Nils Edenloff, Amy Cole, and Paul Banwatt are still exploring the same dark, moody place that is the Canadian province of Alberta. (Has anyone been there? Is it really so bad as the RAA make it sound?) For me, it helps to stare long and hard at the minimalist cover art—a whiteout snowstorm over a barren road somewhere out in nowhere with the headlights of a single car barely cutting through the snow. It seems to be a deliberate reference to the stark Coen Brothers’ 1996 film Fargo, which includes several "snowy-road" shots exactly like the photograph on the cover.

Unlike the Coen Brothers’ savage portrait of a wintry wasteland (largely) without any hope, Departing might be filled with details that digress towards depression, but there are details that break through the murk and out into the light. Those moments make the album more than bearable; they make it transcendent. The sonic rest of “North Star” after the churning “Muscle Relaxants” is a reprieve in more ways than one. Edenloff chronicles the troubles of separated lovers as his two band-mates slowly brew up a storm around his voice and solo keyboard. The calm of the chorus speaks for itself:

Then the North Star

is guiding us home in your friend’s car.

Oh the North Star

is leading you back here to my heart.

In thinking about the lyrics, it’s worth pointing out how much of this album revolves around the notion of “holding on” to something or someone (mostly someone in this album). But what’s so startling is the variety of “holding” that happens in the album. In “North Star,” the narrator is “clutching on [his lover’s] hand tight”; in “Two Lovers,” the narrator boldly states, “And if I ever hold you again / I will hold you tight enough to crush your veins”; in “The Breakup,” Edenloff’s weary narrator offers, “I held you tight / we were waiting for the breakup / and all the cracks in the ice.”

As image-based motifs go, that of “holding” isn’t exactly a revelatory one. But Edenloff at al evoke it constantly and push it in some many directions that we get the sense by the end that this is what life is composed of for this collection of dejected characters. Life is holding on hard to something—maybe anything—so long as one holds on. In “Stamp,” the narrator asks his lover, “hold me close while you can / try to remember the end of December, / holding onto the past. / It never comes back.” In exploring this imagery within the album, we are exposed to a barebones kind of sadness—ostensibly without that hopefulness I mentioned earlier.

In order to reclaim some hopefulness, it might help remembering the final lines of “Goodnight”—which bids farewell to the “Alberta advantage” and hints at getting out of Alberta and into the world. There is a suggestion that the narrator might someday return, but he’s making no promises. There's sadness there, but there's hope there, too.

The city’s love is cold and the city’s love is harsh.

It locks into our veins from the first September's frost.

January snap and the April winter thaw,

rough and tumble summers underneath the midnight sun,

rushing to the woods where we first felt God,

rippled through our veins from the moment when we touched.

Someday if you get back together in your heart

maybe we might get back together.

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2. Drive-By Truckers – Go-Go Boots

As tempted as I was to award the Truckers with my favorite album of the year, I didn’t think this was their best effort, so I felt compelled to drop them in at runner-up instead. However, although they miss out on the #1 spot, that doesn’t mean that this album isn’t one of their career highlights—it certainly is. Ranging from “The Fireplace Poker,” Patterson Hood’s nine-minute epic about a preacher who hired two thugs to kill his wife and the grisly aftermath, to “Pulaski,” Mike Cooley’s loping acoustic tune about a Southern girl with dark, historical undertones, the album covers a lot of territory and is all the stronger for it.

But for some listeners, that breadth of style might be intimidating—as might the duration. Similar to its predecessors in the DBT oeuvre, Go-Go Boots is a long album. Despite only 14 tracks, the album still clocks in at a whopping 66 minutes. But for those with the patience, this album is a real treat.

Maybe the only slow part of the album is the inclusion of two songs written by the late Eddie Hinton, a well-known session player at Muscle Shoals who worked with Hood’s father. The Hinton songs, simply put, are weaker than the fare offered by Hood and Cooley; they are fine enough on their own (and “Mercy Buckets” has tremendous energy and warmth performed live), but they suffer when set alongside songs like “Ray’s Automatic Weapon” and “The Thanksgiving Filter.” The only song penned by bassist Shonna Tucker, “Dancin’ Ricky,” is a fun character sketch, but also lacks the lyrical flair exhibited by DBT’s two leading songsmiths.

Case in point is the aforementioned “Pulaski” by Cooley, who, although he contributes only a handful of songs to each album compared with Hood’s steady mountain of tunes, is the more consummate songwriter. With “Pulaski,” Cooley tells the story of a college girl who leaves small-town Tennessee for Los Angeles. He lays out her attempts to fit in and her realizations of homesickness in simple, broad strokes, before hitting hard with two difficult final stanzas. Cooley is known for his ability to neatly turn a phrase and he pulls a couple here, offering the wisdom, “Good ideas always start with a full glass.” The song turns somewhat inexplicably dark in the final stanza:

The storefronts all filled up with eyeballs

as the policemen clear out the street

for a line of cars with their headlights burning,

driving slow through Pulaski, Tennessee.

The image fits nowhere in the story of the college graduate and therefore sets up a juxtaposition between that story and…and what? What is the second image alluding to? One stab in the dark is the 2009 triple-murder of a boy, his brother, and his mother that occurred in Pulaski. The murderer was a high school classmate and romantic rival of the boy, who killed the entire family in a fit of jealous rage over the boy’s girlfriend. The “line of cars with their headlights burning” might refer to the funeral cortege for the family. But the murders have only a tenuous connection with the girl’s story. In my opinion, the more likely explanation deals with the historical fact that Pulaski, TN was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

While the song makes no overt reference to racist activity, the funeral cortege connotes the attempt on the part of the town of Pulaski to bury the darker aspects of their past. The college graduate at the center of the song makes the same attempt to bury the memory of backwards Pulaski, trying to escape her “Southern accent” and “Baptist ways” and building an ideal vision of California. But despite her best attempts, she cannot help but turn back to the idea of Pulaski. Even though she knows they “leave a trail of blood and tears behind” them, she cannot help but long for the men in her hometown over the men in California.

What makes the lyrics so difficult is this turn of phrase: “Dreams here live and die just like a stray dog / on a dirt road somewhere in Tennessee.” By “here,” Cooley refers to California. But the analogy carries itself out of California and back to Tennessee. The death of the girl’s dreams is a figurative death on the West Coast, but the death of the dog is a literal one in Tennessee. Ultimately, Cooley has crafted a brilliant, confrontational song that provides no easy answers. The overarching message of the Truckers’ music—and, I would argue, the beauty—is that resolution is a myth. The big issues like government, gender, race, faith, war,  and family provoke a helluva lot more questions than they provide answers.

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3. Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Some of your probably knew that this one was coming. I was blown away by the quality and depth of this album from Justin Vernon and company. Who knew that the folkie from the woods of Wisconsin had it in him? Everything is in the details: the cheesy, high-strung keyboards in “Beth/Rest,” the throbbing guitar lines in opener “Perth,” and the tapestry of banjo in “Minnesota, WI,” among other wonderful, quirky details.

Vernon is reaching for the stars with this album and some critics found reason to disapprove. I called the keyboards in “Beth/Rest” “cheesy” and I think that this is a fair estimation. However, it’s a kind of “cheesy” that works. “Hinnom, TX” is a little too shimmery and manufactured for my taste (along with demonstrating an uncomfortable drop from Vernon’s trademark falsetto). But that overreaching quality of the album is also what makes it great. The floating keyboards and abrasive guitar licks in “Calgary” are brilliant and daring. The sounds that Vernon piles onto the second half of “Towers,” which would be successful as merely a stripped-down folk song à la “re: Stacks,” provide it with the perfect amount of sonic clout.

For my earlier review of Bon Iver see here.

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4. Noah and the Whale – Last Night On Earth

Fault me if you like, but I had not listened to Noah and the Whale prior to Last Night On Earth. Nevertheless, I was flabbergasted, having heard from friends that they were a sorry, sadsack bunch of English folkies second in line for the throne inhabited by Mumford and Sons. The first ten seconds of opening track “Life Is Life,” with the processed drums and jangly keyboards, took me back to the ’80s not out to the Scottish highlands.

Having gone back and listened 2009’s The First Days of Spring and 2008’s Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, I can knowledgeably offer that “sorry, sadsack bunch of English folkies” might not have been so far off the mark. But this album fits nowhere within that vision. According to press reports, the nigh-180^o in musical direction was a direct result of the romantic breakup between lead singer and songwriter Charlie Fink and former Noah and the Whale band member Laura Marling.

Nowhere are the aftereffects of that relationship more evident than on “Life Is Life,” on which Fink openly states:

Well, he used to be somebody

and now he’s somebody else,

took apart his old life

left it on the shelf,

sick of being someone

he did not admire,

took up all his old things

set ‘em all on fire.

Like another favorite album of mine, Frightened Rabbit’s The Winter of Mixed Drinks, this album struggles with a lost love and moves past it. Simply put, this is an infectious and wonderful album.

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5. Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto

It would have been hard to get away from this album in thinking about my favorites this past year. Coldplay is the only band out there that successfully marries an inventive spirit with a pop ideology. Not only that, this album sees Coldplay stepping further and further into their role as the preeminent arena rockers of our generation (overlooking U2—who seem to me of the last generation) with big, bold songs like “Princess of China” and “Paradise.” Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends started the trend, but with Mylo Xyloto Coldplay have officially made the move away from the lean, piano-rock of “The Scientist” and “Speed Of Sound.”

For my earlier review of Mylo Xyloto see here.

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6. Jill Andrews – The Mirror

If I were offering a “favorite songs” instead of a “favorite albums” list, then Jill Andrews would easily have nabbed the top spot with the infectious “Another Man.” I have already written at length about my obsession with the song, so I’ll restrain myself…but for those who have not yet been blessed with a listen, you can hear it via YouTube right here. The rest of the album, however, does not pale in comparison to “Another Man.” Several other songs, including “Sound Of The Bells,” “A Little Less,” and “The Mirror” have the same easy charm and stun in their own way.

For my earlier review of The Mirror see here.

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7. David Mead – Dudes

A relatively recent discovery, David Mead hits full stride with his seventh album. His other work is impressive—especially his 2004 album Indiana, with its lush guitar work and vocals—but none of it quite stacks up against Dudes. Written in the wake of Mead’s divorce, I expected the album to be another dreary road-trip through middle America with Mead, but it turned out to be anything but that. I should admit here that I have a weak spot for break-up albums—Frightened Rabbit’s terrific Midnight Organ Fight and Noah and the Whale’s The First Days of Spring among them—so I was primed for…*sniff*…an emotional experience…

But this turned out to not be the David Mead that I had known. By turns, this is album is not only sad, it’s also ecstatic and full of life and joyful and funny. I’ve known Mead to turn a clever line or two here and there, but nothing in his past work comes close to the bizarre character sketches “Guy On Guy” and “Bocce Ball.”

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8. Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers – Gift Horse

Although nothing on Kellogg and company’s sixth album is quite as catchy as “Shady Esperanto and the Young Hearts,” off their previous album The Bear, several of the cuts on Gift Horse make a case for themselves. The galloping “Gravity” and nostalgic “1993” are about as good as it gets. The twisting of Christmas carol “The First Noel” into “Noelle, Noelle” is lovely. The pseudo-epic “Charlie and Annie” succeeds in pulling the listener in despite Kellogg’s lackluster lyrics. In fact, the lyrics are the one flaw with these poppy cuts and verge on sentimentality and cliché throughout. However, the lyrics never really diminish the accomplishment of this album.

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In addition to those eight albums, there are a few songs and an EP that I want to pay some tribute to.

9. Jenny Owen Youngs – “Great Big Plans”

While maybe the Greg Laswell-produced studio version takes a few too many liberties with Youngs’s voice—stretching it high and piling production value on it—it’s still a fantastic cut. For those uncomfortable with the giant sound of the studio version, there’s also a great acoustic version on YouTube here.

Featured on Saturday Songs - Aug. 6

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10. Allie Moss – “Late Bloomer”

Better known as the guitarist for Ingrid Michaelson, Moss has some tunes of her own. This one is worth checking out—free download here.

Featured on Saturday Songs - July 16

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11. Frightened Rabbit – A Frightened Rabbit EP

Buoyed by the furious stomp of “Scottish Winds” and “Fuck This Place,” a lovesick duet between Scott Hutchison and Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell, this EP packs a real punch. Usually, EPs are more or less throwaway packages of tunes the artist couldn’t find a good place for. But it’s to imagine this trio being cast off of an album.

Featured on Saturday Songs - Nov. 5

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12. River Whyless – “A Cedar Dream II”

River Whyless, an unknown band from Boone, North Carolina, surprised me with this folky dreamscape. I’d say that they’re a band to look out for—especially the alternating male/female vocals between Ryan O’Keefe and Halli Anderson.

Featured on Saturday Songs - Oct. 15

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Finally, I feel inclined to further offer six “honorable mentions” that I spent some time with over the past year:

13. Steve Earle - I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive

14. Death Cab For Cutie - Codes & Keys

15. The Mountain Goats - All Eternals Deck

16. Josh Garrels - Love & War & The Sea In Between

17. Ryan Adams - Ashes and Fire

18. Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean