#2011's best

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Tyler Posey in Best Coast's 2011 Music Video, directed by Drew Barrymore

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TOP Artists of 2011, Part 2: Everything Else

6. The Weeknd

We're gonna keep all these pretty short just so I can make sure it's done before 2012 hits.  The Weeknd is drugged-out R&B with production that manages to be both lush and sparse, with a healthy dose of misogyny thrown in at every turn.  What a voice, too.  In one year, released one classic mixtape (House of Balloons), one shitty mixtape (Thursday), and one very good mixtape right at the end (Echoes of Silence). 

"What You Need"

House of Balloons

Thursday

Echoes of Silence

5. Bon Iver

Guy went from singer-songwriter with a haunting voice to all-around musical wizard with a haunting voice.  Bon Iver is exactly what second albums are supposed to sound like.

"Holocene"

Bon Iver

4. James Blake

I reviewed his debut self-titled album on my buddy Harrison's blog in the beginning of the year.  Check that out.  He also released a couple of pretty good EP's later in the year.

"The Wilhelm Scream"

James Blake

Enough Thunder EP

Love What Happened Here EP

3. Fleet Foxes

That's Robin Pecknold, who was just the lead singer and songwriter of Fleet Foxes in 2008, when they burst onto the scene with pastoral folk-rock that sounded like it was recorded in the middle of the woods.  With Helplessness Blues, he became the band's brain, heart and soul.  Apparently he basically drove himself mad trying to make this album as perfect as it could be, rerecording multiple parts himself and redoing the album multiple times.  You can kind of hear that brink of madness in the album, among the still-lovely harmonies and songcraft, and that's what set this album apart for me - that edge.

"Helplessness Blues"

Helplessness Blues

2. Cut Copy

Zonoscope is an epic of new-wave, nu disco, and house.  Not a single dull moment, even with a couple of downtempo songs.  Their ability to come up with wordless choruses in nearly every song - an uncanny knack for ooh-ing and aah-ing without sounding boring - is what kept me coming back to this album.  Absolutely chock-full of earworms.

"Need You Now"

Zonoscope

1. Bag Raiders

Bag Raiders zip mediafire.  That's what I put into Google in January when I'd heard that the dudes behind "Shooting Stars" and "Way Back Home" had released an album.  As far as I know, their self-titled record never got released in the US.  But when that top Google hit came up, BagRaiders-BagRaiders.zip, my life was changed.  It's a dance album that's put together like a late-period Beatles record or a classical symphony.  Every track contains an element of the track that came before it, tweaked and recontextualized.  There's a remarkable consistency to the album, even as piano and synth sounds change shape, and an impressive polish that one would normally only hear from a big-label, big-budget album.

Of course, I'm still not sure I like Bag Raiders more than I like Zonoscope.  But what puts the Bag Raiders at #1 was their live show, which I had the privilege of witnessing in NYC this summer.  The two dudes had so much fun performing that the crowd at this tiny bar developed a crazy, raw energy that was sustained over the entire set.  Never did I think that laptop/synth performers could be so engaging, but there they were.

"Sunlight"

Bag Raiders

What a year for music.  Tons of fun, thanks for reading.  I'll be back in the new year with more new tracks.

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TOP Artists of 2011, Part 1: Hip Hop

We're gonna do two big posts to cap the year-end shit and get it out of the way.  One's gonna be hip hop, the other for everything else.  These artists/crews did it better than everyone else I posted about or ignored this year.

5. Kendrick Lamar

My man's gonna be all over Detox by Dr. Dre whenever that shit comes out, and he provided the best verses on both Drake and Game's albums this year.  But his mixtape Section.80 was the best of it all, filled with crazy good rapping and even some refreshing perspective - think introspective like Drake without the inherent douchiness.  If you hear nothing else, hear "Rigamortis".  The man doesn't breathe when he's rapping.  Ridiculous.

Section.80

4. Jay-Z & Kanye West

You don't really need to hear me tell you about this album.  They went crazy with this one, and sometimes it got a little annoying, but mostly it was epic and awesome.  That shit cray.

Watch The Throne

3. Danny Brown

This man is insane.  At his craziest, he gave us "Monopoly".  No choruses, just yelped rhymes over an insanely intense beat with jokes wrapped in insults side by side with sobering street images.  At his best, he gave us "DNA", a meditation on crazy partying with the most pure charisma and magnetism of any rapper this year.  His mixtape XXX is uneven, but just unhinged enough to keep you coming back.

XXX

2. Jet Life

Curren$y. Trademark Da Skydiver. Young Roddy. Fiend. Corner Boy P. Nesby Phips. These are the Jet Life boys, and they smoke more weed and put out more quality hip hop than anyone.  Above all, their strength is choice of production.  It's always lush, a little jazzy, and with enough surprises to not fit within a specific formula.  Above all, it's music to get high to. 

Fiend - Tennis Shoes & Tuxedoes; Life Behind Limo Glass

Curren$y - Weekend At Burnie's

Curren$y & Alchemist - Covert Coup

Curren$y - Verde Terrace

Jet Life - Jet World Order

1. DJ Quik

"That's me and my homeboy racin' a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of cars up Mulholland Drive/Feeling tight, we gunnin' right through the light, valley life/Not like the South Central LA alley life/The stress and the mess and the threats and the fuckin' strife/The kill-or-be-killed mentality that they come to like, mummified/Take it in, be a man./Why am I still relevant?/Maybe 'cause I'm eloquent, or guess again./I buy my weed from the Mexicans/Smoke more than your next of kin/I'm fluid like sex and if they virgins, then I breaks 'em in/I got wordplay acumen/and I've had it since when you were in grade school watchin' the janitor vacuumin'."  That you do, Quik.  That's the track "Babylon", and that's almost all of the best hip hop verse of 2011, in my humble opinion.

The Book Of David is a masterpiece without a single wasted moment.  Every single song is quality, if not excellent.  Quik (real name David Blake) produced every track, and came out with a dance-rap statement, the West Coast counterpart to Big Boi's 2010 classic Sir Lucious Left Foot.  Those might be my two favorite hip hop albums ever.

The Book of David

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Big K.R.I.T., Mississippi-based rapper/producer, released two mixtapes this year, Return of 4eva (download on the post's title) and Last King 2: God's Machine.  The first was a unified artistic statement with wonderfully sustained quality throughout; the second was an odds-and-ends collection with some shitty songs and some absolute stunners.

Honestly, I've listened to Big K.R.I.T. so much this year that I'm kind of fatigued as far as talking about him at this point in the year.  Rest assured, both of the mixtapes are well worth your time - reliably good rapping with an awesomely southern drawl, and constantly top-notch production in the grand Southern tradition. 

Also, "Country Shit (Remix Ft. Ludacris & Bun B)" is one of my top three hip hop songs of the year, though that feels disingenuous since the original came out in 2010.  Either way, it's the number one track to play when you're drunk, being driven back from a party and you wanna shout along to something at top volume.

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I may have mentioned Psychemagik at some point before in this space. I can't be sure because I can't be bothered to check through my records. But either way, Psychemagik barged into my consciousness like a freight train a few months back. Mainly, these guys do edits. Edits differ from remixes in that they leave more of the original track in place, choosing instead to rejigger a few choice elements to fit the artist's style/genre, mainly for the purpose of a DJ set.

Psychemagik stretches out the songs they choose to make them more hypnotic, turning an 80's pop tune like Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days" (featured in last year's film The Fighter) into an eight-minute disco workout.  They also achieve this by amping up the bass line and kick drums.  But their best work this year was an "original" track of theirs that serves more as a Crosby, Stills & Nash remix, called "Valley of Paradise".  Though the backbone of the song is an acoustic guitar riff and the band's ethereal harmonies, Psychemagik creates the beating heart of the beat, bassline and wonderful, wandering keyboard.

Anyway, click the title of the post to get the best Psychemagik tracks from the year.

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Holy Ghost! are a disco duo from New York City that are signed to James Murphy's DFA label, which, at this point, has me completely convinced it's the best label in the world today.  They released a self-titled album this year, and it is just slick excellence.  Their biggest triumphs are "Jam For Jerry", written for DFA drummer Jerry Fuchs, who died in 2009 when he fell down an elevator shaft, and non-album single "I Wanted To Tell Her". 

All of Holy Ghost!'s tunes hit the same Italo-disco sweet spot with saturated synths and 4/4 kicks, but there's a confidence they derive from being really settled into their own formula that comes through in the music - they just know how to sell it.  Get the album by clicking on the post's title, and download "I Wanted To Tell Her" here.

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Best of 2011 - EPs and Singles

So in order to prevent my Artists of 2011 series of posts from dragging on into 2013, I'm going to deposit a bunch of my favorite shorter releases (almost all electronic) of the year here, with minimal reading required and download links for as many as I can find.

Xinobi - Best Of Me EP -- Nu Disco

Holy Other - With U EP -- Witch House

Christoph Andersson - Metropol/Capital -- House

Moullinex - Chocolat EP -- Nu Disco

Bottin - Discocracy Revisited EP -- House

Homeboi - Flashbacks EP -- House

Kingdom - Dreama EP -- Bass

PEACE - HUNGRY -- Bass

Purity Ring - Ungirthed 7" -- Electropop

Sweater Beats - Threads Vol. 1 -- Funk

Clams Casino - Instrumental Mixtape -- Beats

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Just click on the title of this post to be taken back to what I originally wrote about this Harlem hip hop up-and-comer in early November.  Definitely worth your time.