NPR Music's 50 Favorite Albums Of 2011

When the British soul belter Adele began working on the follow-up to her 2008 debut *19*, she had a difficult time finding songwriting inspiration. Then, her relationship imploded—and within a day of her breakup, she and producer Paul Epworth had written the stormy, tearful \"Rolling in the Deep,\" which would go on to not only open her second album, *21*, but eventually become one of 2011\'s defining singles and set the tone for a vibrant portrait of young heartbreak that showcases Adele\'s fierce alto. On *19*, Adele established herself as a key part of the 2000s class of British R&B-inspired singers that included Amy Winehouse and Duffy. For *21*, however, she added new dimensions to her sound, bringing in ideas borrowed from country, rock, gospel, and modern pop—as well as a gently psychedelic take on the downcast \"Lovesong,\" originally by fellow Brit miserablists The Cure. Adele\'s powerful voice and unguarded feelings were *21*\'s main draw, but her savvy about using them—and only going all in when a song\'s emotional force required her to do so—made it one of the 21st century\'s biggest albums. While a few top-tier producers, including Rick Rubin, Ryan Tedder, and Dan Wilson, worked on *21*, its coherence comes from the woman at its center, whose voice channels the anguish of the stirring ballad \"One and Only,\" the weepy \"Don\'t You Remember,\" and the vengeful \"Rumour Has It.\" The stripped-down \"Someone Like You,\" meanwhile, is the natural bookend to \"Rolling,\" its bittersweet lyrics and quietly anguished vocal sounding like the aftermath of the argument that track began. “*21* isn\'t even my record—it belongs to the people,” Adele told Apple Music in 2015. That\'s true in a sense; *21* was one of the 2010s\' true pop successes, reaching listeners from all over the world. But Adele is its key ingredient, a modern soul singer whose range is only matched by her ability to conjure up deeply felt emotions.

On her long-awaited sophomore album, Ashton Shepherd takes a more mainstream country direction without sacrificing the honesty or gustiness shown on her 2008 debut release. What separates this Alabama-born singer/songwriter from her peers is both the conviction in her delivery and her ability as a writer to make even familiar themes seem fresh with vivid, authentic imagery. Shepherd conjures of memories of early Loretta Lynn and Reba McEntire by taking a tough feminist stance with a distinctly down-home spin. In “Look It Up” and “That All Leads to One Thing,” she rips into cheating lovers with a righteous fury. She’s just as believable celebrating the joys of small-town life (“More Cows Than People”), relishing fun in the sun (“Beer On a Boat”) or looking back at her teenage years with fondness (“Rory’s Radio”). Like Miranda Lambert, Shepherd flirts with a bad-girl image (especially on the rollicking “Tryin’ to Go to Church”), yet never loses her innate wholesomeness. Buddy Cannon’s production serves her well by balancing rootsy sounds with a radio-friendly approach.

With fellow Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen and Terakaft becoming familiar to American fans of the “desert blues” (following the path blazed by Ali Farka Toure back in the ‘80s), Omara “Bombino” Moctar had the stage set for him. His first release, 2004’s *Agamgam*, was recorded in a dry river bed in the African bush, and found its way into the hands of serious African guitar fans though it was poorly distributed.  (You can now find *Agamgam* on iTunes, under the name “Bambino”).  Bombino’s rock-star status in the Sahara grew as he exhibited a flair for electrified American blues and rock, as well as the more delicate, traditional sounds of Western Africa. *Agadez*, named for his hometown and also the title of a documentary film featuring his music, is less “rock” than the blistering songs of *Guitars from Agadez*, and more bucolic and hypnotic. His songs are rich with the Tuareg history of warfare, exile, and pride of place; the sheer joy of “Tenere (The Desert, My Home),” the tint of sadness on “Iyat Idounia Aysasahen (Another Life),” and the heat of passion on “Tar Hani (My Love),” are palpable, and impressively memorable.

On their sophomore album, Bon Iver add just a touch of color to their stark indie folk, while retaining every bit of its intimacy. The haunting chill of solitude continues to cling to Justin Vernon\'s every word, even when his lilting falsetto radiates warmth over a rich bed of acoustic guitar, synths, and horns. The drama exudes from every little sound—the soft, pattering snare guiding \"Perth,\" the delicate whirrs of sax on \"Holocene,\" and the big, gleaming synths on \'80s-esque noir jam \"Beth / Rest.\"

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.

Colin Stetson is a Montreal-based woodwinds player whose main ax is the bass saxophone. His impressive and expansive technique on the big horn — he employs circular breathing allowing him to play continuously — is absolutely dazzling. In 2008, he released a striking album, *New History Warfare, Volume 1*, and this 2011 follow-up is excellent as well. No overdubs or loops were used to capture his sax work, but 24 microphones were employed to record Stetson’s massive sound. (A lovely, brief piece, “All the Days I’ve Missed You,”finds Stetson overdubbing French Horn parts.) Laurie Anderson adds spoken word on a few tracks, and Shara Worden sings on two cuts, including a version of the traditional, “Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes.” Listening to this album, you might think of Terry Riley’s soprano saxophone and Time-Lag Generator work from the ‘60s, but Stetson’s one-man band workouts are all his own. *Judges* ends strongly with “In Love and In Justice,” where droning tones and breathy sounds circle again and again.

ORDER PHYSICAL LP OR CD HERE: cstrecords.com/cst075 Colin Stetson is a horn player of uncommon strength, skill and genre- defying creativity. He composes and performs otherworldly songs that combine a mastery of circular breathing technique with percussive valve- work and reed vocalisations, making a polyphonic solo music that combines influences as diverse as Bach, early metal, American pre-war Gospel, and the explorations of Jimi Hendrix, Peter Brotzman and Albert Ayler. New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges is Stetson's second solo record and his first for Constellation. Colin has been making his mark as a staggering solo performer for several years now, in front of audiences small and large, from intimate jazz and experimental music venues to big stages, whether opening for Arcade Fire or The National, or playing at jazz and new music festivals like Moers and London Jazz. His talents have been widely recognised and employed by artists as diverse as Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, TV On The Radio and Bon Iver. Colin also plays in Belle Orchestre and Sway Machinery. The music on New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges was captured entirely live in single takes at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio, with no overdubs or looping, using over 20 mics positioned close and far throughout the live room. Guest vocals by Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) are the only exceptions to this rule, along with one brief french horn piece that was multi-tracked. The Judges sessions were co-produced by Stetson and Shahzad Ismaily and engineered by Efrim Menuck at the Hotel2Tango, then taken to Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik and mixed by Ben Frost. The result is a highly original, experimental, euphoric record that fires on all levels: a document of a profoundly gifted player, a compositional tour- de-force, and a studio production bursting with intensity and inventiveness. New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges features cover art by Tracy Maurice and will be issued on CD in custom 100% recycled paperboard gatefold jacket and on Deluxe 180gLP with a limited edition screenprinted poster and a CD copy contained in the first pressing.

Eric Church may not have been the first to blend modern country with bluesy Southern rock and outlaw honky-tonk, but his breakout album, *Chief*, made him a superstar. “Drink in My Hand” is a “Take This Job and Shove It” for a new generation of blue-collar good ol’ boys, while “Homeboy” is a heartfelt ballad lovingly addressing a younger brother headed down a dangerous path. And in blockbuster hit “Springsteen,” Church gives a nostalgia look back at the music from his formative years.

*The Wanting* balances a homespun intimacy with instrumental guitar performances that verge on jaw-dropping. Jones\' fourth album was recorded in an apartment overlooking a Boston suburb’s commuter rail line, which explains the occasional clang in the distance. *The Wanting* reveals how Jones has graduated from his American Primitive studies of the Takoma Records roster and is now exploring his own tunings and tones; it’s one of those rare situations where the student has become the master. “A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957” leads off, exuding feeling and emotion through dexterity and virtuosity. Over delicately picked arpeggios, Jones plays subtle fretboard slides while plucking out occasional harmonic overtones. He also further explores the banjo starting with “The Great Swam Way Rout,” applying his own style to the instrument. Returning to his musical roots, he closes with the nearly 18-minute epic “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Monolith, California,” a tribute to John Fahey’s “The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California.”

The Wanting, Glenn Jones’ first album for Thrill Jockey, was recorded in a fourth floor apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, Allston, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, overlooking the commuter train line. If you listen carefully to the record, you can occasionally hear trains going by in the background. Reuben Son recorded the album between December 12, 2010, and April 20, 2011. The Wanting was mixed and mastered by long time collaborator Matthew Azevedo. Simply put, The Wanting is a collection of original compositions for solo acoustic steel string guitar, six-string, 10-string and bottleneck, and 5-string open-back banjo. A little background and context may help. So in his own words: “The ‘60s, as has been drummed into our heads to the point of tediousness, was a period of musical growth and exploration. And while there does seem to have been something in the water back then that everyone of a certain age was sipping, I came of age late in that decade. In 1967, my head was blown off by Jimi Hendrix’s second album. After hearing it, I bugged my old man till he bought me my first guitar. I was 14. Today, I consider myself to be part of a tribe of acoustic finger-style guitar players whose main inspirations are the “American Primitive” or “Takoma school” guitarists, those centered around John Fahey. The model par excellance, and the fountainhead, John virtually single-handedly created a style of solo guitar playing, as well as an audience to support it. He was also, for people like me, the inspiration to try making some kind of coherent music utilizing the acoustic guitar myself. Playing like the people who influence you, however, only gets you so far. No matter how much one loves a particular player, or how long one studies their work, it’s all but impossible to beat them at their own game. You’re always at a disadvantage. Better, therefore, to make up your own game, devise your own strategies, invent your own rules. This is what Fahey and Robbie Basho did, as well as such lesser-known players of the early-to-mid ‘60s as Max Ochs, Harry Taussig, Fred Gerlach, Dick Rosmini and others. As I got more into the instrument and began listening to the music of guitarists of all kinds, I found that the “Takoma school” players were decidedly different from other guitarists. Despite the fact that many guitarists were technically more adept, polished or sophisticated than the American Primitives, what I like about the latter was the fact that their music was not about virtuosity for its own sake, but, rather, was a way to express some kind of feeling. Though every record I make is a ready acknowledgement of my debt to the guitarists I learned from, I strive to create music that is my own. “Strive” is perhaps not the right word. It sounds like I’m trying to do something, whereas, from where I sit now, this many years down the knife-edge, what I do is what I do: there is no trying, there is only the need to play everyday, and to create something that validates me to myself.” GLENN ON TUNINGS: “The Wanting explores some of the possibilities of open tunings. (I stopped playing in standard tuning more than 25 years ago now.) I’m always digging under rocks and looking for something new, unfamiliar, unknown. I can’t help it. The discovery of new tunings inevitably leads to new compositions, the composition being, for me, a way of navigating a new and unfamiliar terrain. The more I learn about a tuning, however, the more bored I become by it, and this boredom sends me scurrying, again, for something else. This is why almost every one of my compositions is in its own tuning. I invent a tuning, find a way to get from Point A to Point Z in it, and move on.” GLENN ON NEW ADDITIONS & DEPARTURES: “My last album, Barbecue Bob in Fishtown (my third solo album) was the first album on which I played banjo. Since taking up this (great!, great!) instrument a couple years ago, I’ve become more and more enamored of it. I don’t play the banjo according to Hoyle however, that is, in any of the prescribed styles, mainly because I can’t. (I’m not playing clawhammer or bluegrass or classical banjo.) This pleases me, because what I do feels like mine. The Wanting has three new banjo pieces on it. All of them, for whatever reason, are relatively short in comparison to my guitar pieces. I also think they give the album its varied feel – they’re a nice complement to the guitar pieces, which tend to be longer and more emotionally complex. The other piece that is a bit of a departure, perhaps, is the last track on the album, the 17-minute long “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville” (the title is an homage to John Fahey’s “The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California”). The piece is a duet with drummer Chris Corsano, who I first heard at the Brattleboro (Vermont) Free Folk Festival of 2003, a watershed event. It was my discovery of a kind of grassroots, underground music that embraced folk forms and free jazz. It struck a blow against the “boy’s club” feel of so many of these kinds of events; here there were as many powerful and uncompromising women performers as men. It was at this festival I heard for the first time Jack Rose, MV + EE, Christina and Tom Carter, and many, many others, including Chris Corsano, whose spectacularly confident, over-the-top drumming belied his youth by at least a decade-and-a-half. When he agreed to accompany me on this piece, I knew two things: 1.) whatever my expectations might be, he would surprise me, and 2.) whatever he came up with would make me sound better than I am! I couldn’t be happier with the track, which destroys me every time I hear it.” GLENN ON THE ARTWORK: All my album covers are kitsch. The cover of my first album, taken from a century old postcard I found, was of a depressed looking chicken playing the guitar. The image appealed to me for two reasons: 1.) it felt like a way of not taking myself too seriously (or, more truthfully, of giving the appearance that I didn’t take myself too seriously) and 2.), it was a way to avoid having a picture of myself on my album covers, which, to me, is the height of conceit. (If you’re Lady Gaga, OK, put a picture of yourself on your album cover. If you’re me, a depressed chicken is the way to go.) What I didn’t realize is that that first obscure postcard would lead to other obscure postcards. And I have to say, this pleases me too. ON GLENN: Before embarking on his solo career, Glenn put out nine albums with the Boston based psych band Cul de Sac over the course of their 20 year history, some of which included collaborations with Damo Suzuki and John Fahey. “… an incredibly adept fingerstyle guitarist whose technique always remains in service of the song… His vigorous leaps are daring but never reckless, and nearly always sublime.” – Utne Reader “… captivating… Jones’ slide work on the resonator guitar sounds especially meaty, and when all six, and sometimes 12, strings start chiming as he fingerpicks, the effect is shimmering.” – Harp “Jones has a solid grasp of the fundamentals, not just of his instrument, but also of music-making in general. He obtains attractive and varied tones from his several open-tuned acoustic guitars, and fashions them into involving, carefully drawn and skillfully paced audio narratives that impart emotions ranging from sweet affection to complicated grief… declare[s] Jones to be a musician whose moment has arrived.” – Dusted “… both daring and accessible… Jones is a talent who deserves a larger audience…” – Boston Phoenix

Gretchen Parlato doesn’t really evoke any other jazz singer. Clearly influenced by contemporary R&B and pop vocalists, she’s got her own thing going on. Parlato has a lovely tone with an appealingly hazy, slightly nasal, aura. 2011’s *The Lost and Found* is superb. One of the album’s highlights takes place on “Winter Wind” where at one point her ace band takes off, and she comes up with countless variations for a handful of repeated lyrics. It’s an incredibly exciting stretch. (Pianist Taylor Eigsti, bassist Derrick Hodge, and drummer Kendrick Scott are responsible for the stirring surge that she rides.) Tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens joins the group for a version of Wayne Shorter’s “Juju,” which has lyrics by Parlato. “Still,” a blues-tinged slice of folk-pop penned by Alan Hampton, finds the composer sitting in on acoustic guitar and vocals. The cut is a bit different than anything else here but it fits in nicely. The title track, a quiet original by Stephens and Parlato, is colored by fine brushwork and lovely tenor sax. Parlato barely sings above a whisper, but she’s riveting.

The British electronic pop artist James Blake was showered with attention and nominations in his native land in 2010 and 2011. That’s striking because Blake’s music is truly strange. Drawing on the weirder side of R&B as well as leftfield English dance music, the singer/songwriter crafts spare and spooky gems. On “Unluck,” simple electric piano (evocative of ‘70s Sly & The Family Stone), itchy rhythmic tics, and sound blurts serve as a backdrop as Blake sings, at times through a vocoder. The track sounds like something you would hear while a producer was tinkering with a mix, but here it’s the intriguing end result. One of the album’s singles, “The Wilhelm Scream,” is as lovely as it is eldritch. The catchy melody is surrounded by music that is both minimal and ambient. Blake is capable of all sorts of odd moves: on “I Never Learnt to Share,” a beat doesn’t kick in until the cut is more than half over. One of the album’s highlights is a cover of the Canadian songwriter Feist’s “Limit to Your Love,” which consists of his naked voice, piano, and a haunted atmosphere.

Julianna Barwick's Asthmatic Kitty Records debut, The Magic Place, is a nine-piece full-length album of magic and solace, bursting joy and healing tones. Julianna's mostly-a-capella music is built from her voice multi-tracked through a loop station. There's more backing instrumentation on this one than on previous albums but it's the vocals—soaring high in reverb-drenched, wordless harmonies—that matter most here. It's the layered fragments and pieces that become an intricate pattern through technology; it's the sound of a rising thing, a big group harmony as a splash of sunlight through a car window, a sound that feels like hope and ascendance and patience and intimacy. Her inspiration here is the a capella church hymns she grew up singing; the way a roomful of diverse voices can join together to fill up a space. Says Julianna about her church singin' days, “You could really hear all the layers, harmonies, rounds, the men and the women, the claps... everything. Some of those hymns are so beautiful.” Like Sigur Rós's ethereal glossolalia, there's a very particular joy in listening to Julianna's music. Free of the constraints of narrative and traceable language, it's the same joy in giving yourself over to opera in a foreign language, of letting go of your pesky rational mind and allowing the feeling to come through in the voices and performance. The title track is next, a reverb-y beauty queen that soars to Promethean heights and builds its own kind of safe haven in the clouds. Even the gaps between songs are essential to the album's listening experience—a sigh between stories or silence-as-drone, each second important. The New York Times called the pauses between Julianna's songs, “the small pleasure of a chance to breathe between the greater pleasures of not wanting to have to.” Meet The Magic Place. It's a great place to be...

The rapper formerly known as K-Dot had built a buzz prior to his 2011 breakthrough album, but the Compton native still had everything to prove: In spite of a coveted co-sign from Dr. Dre, he was barely out of the shadow of his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmate Jay Rock, on whose tour Lamar still regularly served as hype-man. Los Angeles’ old guard of gangsta rap greats was waning; the hottest trend in L.A. rap around the time Lamar was forming his Black Hippy super-group (alongside Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, and ScHoolboy Q) was the jerkin’ movement, a fun but frivolous dance craze. Los Angeles hip-hop needed a new hero, and Lamar stepped up to the plate. But *Section.80* was far from a bid for mainstream attention. Over jazzy beats suited for contemplative spells, Lamar raps like he’s searching, bar by bar, for answers to America’s biggest questions, turning a critical eye on his own reality and the systems that reinforce it. The title itself combines Section 8 housing, the low-income developments in which Lamar was raised, with the decade of Lamar’s birth; he thus fashioned himself an ambassador for a generation raised under Ronald Reagan and the crack epidemic. “You know why we crack babies? Because we born in the ’80s,” Lamar spits on lead single “A.D.H.D.,” a generational study as sharp as it is catchy. Ultimately, though, *Section.80* channels that unrest into a quest for enlightenment; on the knocking “HiiiPower,” Lamar conjures visions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. and urges listeners to “build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs.” Upon the album\'s release, some listeners thought this stuff was too radical for Lamar to ever fully break into the mainstream; but the maverick was on the threshold of something even bigger.

On *Alma Adentro*, the Puerto Rican alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zeñon once again displays his distinctive take on Latin jazz. Zeñon previously released two albums that wed Puerto Rican music and jazz, 2005’s *Jibaro* and 2009’s *Esta Plena*, both of which drew on traditional folkways. By contrast, *Alma Adentro* reinterprets work from the Puerto Rican popular songbook. The album’s core quartet — Zeñon, pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig, and drummer Henry Cole — is joined by a 10-piece wind ensemble. The opener, Bobby Capó’s “Juguete,” was a hit in Cheo Felciano’s ballad version, but here the song is transformed into a swinging instrumental, and Zeñon’s sax work is super fine. Rafael Hernández’s “Silencio” features an excellent arrangement by Guillermo Klein. “Olas y Arenas,” by Sylvia Rexach, might be the best track. The complex, high-energy arrangement clearly bears Klein’s touch, and Perdomo and Zeñon unleash inspired solos. “Tite” Curet Alonso’s “Tiemblas” serves as the closer; it’s a lush, elegant piece that suggests the tensions of romance.

In the wake of 2007’s spectral *White Chalk*, Polly Jean Harvey turned her songwriting focus outward. Dismayed by the direction of politics in her British homeland and around the world, she set to writing lyrics—fever-dreamish poems that used brutal imagery and borrowed lines from older music—that worked through her sadness and anger. Using three autoharps, each tuned to different, dissonant chord configurations, she transformed the verses into striking, sad songs. *Let England Shake* is an elegiac 21st-century reimagining of the protest album, an urgent call to end global cycles of war that hits harder because of its ghostly sonics. Harvey’s voice is the focal point of *Let England Shake*, although its timbre sharply contrasts with the shredded wailing that made her harsher ‘90s records so celebrated. On songs like the rain-spattered “The Glorious Land” and the swirling “Hanging on the Wire,” she’s in the upper reaches of her range, adding a pleading edge to her cutting observations; she hovers over the echoing chords of “On Battleship Hill” in an unnervingly beautiful way, heightening the horrors once committed on that site. “The Words That Maketh Murder,” meanwhile, accentuates its grimy images with bleating brass and a snippet of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” that simutaneously calls back to the post-World War II era’s seemingly endless promise and mourns the present. *Let England Shake* evokes the fog of war while puncturing it with potent reminders of its bloody reality.

If *In Rainbows*—with its direct, live-influenced songcraft and game-changing honesty box pricing—was Radiohead aligning two distinct visions of the band, this eighth record explores a third way. Concise, dance-indebted, and dripping nocturnal electronica, *The King of Limbs* sees them experiment with galloping loops (“Bloom”) and blippy production (“Morning Mr Magpie”). Still, their knack for affecting avant-rock is undimmed, and “Lotus Flower” is a spectral—and appropriately beautiful—career-high.

After two previous releases, St. Vincent (a.k.a. Annie Clark) finds a way to channel her avant-garde instincts in more accessible directions, displaying a firm grasp on pop songwriting forms even as she subverts them. In tandem with producer John Congleton, she plays nervous industrial beats and quivering keyboards against billowing ‘60s-ish melodies. Her cooing vocals on “Cruel” and “Surgeon” insinuate dark scenarios of betrayal and abandonment, transcending mere irony into something palpably sinister. More direct in their intentions are “Cheerleader” (an anthem of personal liberation) and “Champagne Year” (a jaundiced look at success). If Clark’s lyrics tease and dazzle, her music hits hard sonically, clattering to a galloping groove on “Hysterical Strength” and erupting into guitar-fueled cacophony on “Northern Lights.” The otherworldly grandeur of Kate Bush or Björk is recalled on tracks like “Chloe In the Afternoon.” But St. Vincent is in a class all her own as she exorcises sexual demons, grapples with psychic breakdown, and achieves an uncanny catharsis.

With 2009’s *Hospice*, Peter Silberman recruited drummer Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci to help flesh-out what was supposed to be another solo album, but an uncanny chemistry resulted. The music birthed on 2011’s *Burst Apart* is the sound of this chemistry solidifying with stunning beauty and confidence. A confessional “I Don’t Want Love” opens flirting with *OK Computer*-era Radiohead as glimmering electro flourishes and lilting guitar lines compliment Silberman’s woeful falsettos before “French Exit” takes an uncomplicated approach to melodic chamber-pop by building on primary parts to create elemental dynamics with a less-is-more ethos. “Parentheses” is an amazing standout that digs a bit deeper into electronic influences (namely, Boards Of Canada and early recordings by Air) with sequenced beats, pulsing bass loops and Silberman’s high inflections singing soulfully over his band’s organic mechanics. “Rolled Together” gets into Sigur Rós-inspired atmospheres with an infectious lyrical mantra. Bonus track “Tongue Tied” is a robotic dirge with Silberman channeling the future ghost of Thom Yorke.

Beginning with a beeping flatline and ending with a four-part instrumental suite, *Undun* tells the tragedy of Redford Stevens—according to ?uestlove, a character who’s “young, gifted, black, and unraveling”—in reverse. Juxtaposing Black Thought’s bittersweet bars with indie folk, the group’s tenth album encompasses wordless, heart-wrenching Sufjan Stevens samples (“Redford \[For Yia-Yia & Pappou\]”) as well as the poignant boom bap of “Make My,” where, alongside Big K.R.I.T. and Dice Raw, Black Thought raps, “If there’s a heaven, I can’t find a stairway.”

Tim Hecker albums have always sounded like an eternal struggle between darkness and light, with glimpses of terror and tranquility lurking around the edges of every ambient loop. And while they’re all worth a late-night listen, *Ravedeath, 1972* is one of his most cohesive artistic statements yet; 12 songs that bleed into one another beautifully. So beautifully, in fact, that they could have been combined into a single track without anyone noticing. Since they aren’t, it’s best to let the entire thing fill your room like the live recording that led to its creation. (Most of the record was captured in one day at an Icelandic church with Hecker’s close friend, fellow sound sculptor Ben Frost.) To listen is to let the light creep in through the bandages, and feel cleansed as the very last note flickers and dies like a rain-doused bonfire. Heavy stuff indeed.

\"Oh boy! Like *Lion King*!\" exclaims Elder Arnold Cunningham upon learning he\'s going on a mission to Uganda in this loving homage to classic musical comedies, created by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez. \"Circle of Life\" gets the most blatant parodic treatment in *Mormon* (as the hilariously profane \"Hasa Diga Eebowai\"). The musical also tips its hat to *The Sound of Music*, *Bye Bye Birdie*, and *Godspell*. They\'ll have you at \"Hello!,\" which, like everything else here, proves that sacrilege is a dish best served tunefully.

Wye Oak has taken their blend of atmospheric folk and indie rock into new territory on their understated and tension-filled third release. Jenn Wasner’s guitar work moves from feathery acoustic strumming to piercing electric licks and squalling feedback, often within the same song. She’s also a mesmerizing singer with a sensual, mysterious, and husky voice that pulls you in. Andy Stack’s nimble, expressive drumming and subtle use of keyboards for the low end provide the ideal platform for their fluid songs. The duo offer their own take on the soft-loud-soft school of songwriting on the dynamic standouts “Holy Holy,” “Dogs Eyes,” “Hot As Day,” and the title track, which are anchored by controlled bursts of sound. Balancing them out are languid dream-pop cuts “The Alter” and “Plains” that highlight their strong melodic sense. Setting these already good songs apart is the inventive production: varied layers of sonic textures are woven into the tunes so smoothly that the studio effectively acts as a third band member. Wye Oak’s first two albums were good. This one is great.