Stereogum's Top 20 Albums Of 2011 So Far

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.

It’s fitting that *Eye Contact* — the fifth studio album from Gang Gang Dance — found a home on the esteemed 4AD label; after all, some of the imprint’s earliest signings were purveyors of the sort of mystical/global amalgam favored by Gang Gang Dance. After the Brooklyn quartet injected their own unique brand of experimental music with a tougher street vibe — highlighting the electronic over the organic on 2009’s *Saint Dymphna* — here the band polishes the edges to a softer finish, each track flowing easily to the next in a mix of down-tempo beats, Bollywood melodies and Middle Eastern-inflected rhythms. The epic opener “Glass Jar” is a fantastic intro to the journey ahead, morphing from a fluttering, primordial space-trip to a climactic landing, a splash-down against an intense palette of sunset color and galactic promise. One of the most muscular tracks, the breathless “MindKilla,” has been given the remix treatment by his royal highness, Lee Scratch Perry, and is well worth seeking out.

Toronto trio Austra works with a simple synth/drum/bass palette, rooted in the ‘80s sounds farmed both by commercial bands like Depeche Mode and a number of artists in the 4AD stable. Katie Stelmanis’ remarkable, lightly tremeloed voice has an ethereal quality, with a dark spirit and a lost-soul plaintiveness that is sturdier than, say, Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. (The band has covered Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” a tune well suited to Stelmanis’ voice.) Synths are the core of Austra’s sound — they gurgle and purr (albeit, darkly and often fuzzily) when in dance mode, glide and glisten and glare in atmospherics mode; the crisp, skeletal drums of Maya Postepski and Dorian Wolf’s understated bass are the sturdy armature around which the tunes swirl. A song like “Beat and the Pulse” puts the band clearly in the electronica arena — it’s quiet, cool, slightly foreboding and sensual. But tracks like “Lose It” belie an ear for pop-dom, with a trilling, sing-along chorus and appealing — dare we say “happy” — dance beat. If you are utterly enchanted with Stelmanis’ (classically trained) voice, seek out her previous solo work.

The noise-lovin’ What’s Your Rupture? label brings us the guitar ... er, eruptions of Denmark’s youthful (teenaged) Iceage, with a U.S. debut entitled *New Brigade*. Fans of tough, abrasive punk — with a tolerance for undercurrents of noise, no wave and thrash — will want to put headphones on and clear the room of breakable items; songs like “New Brigade,” “Total Drench,” and “You’re Blessed” are fueled by semi-automatic drum parts and sparking guitars that throw enough heat to melt a Danish winter. Other tunes, like “White Rune” and “Collapse” hint at the earliest jolts of England’s great post-punk band Wire, tapping into the tangled roots of noise and art-damaged punk. Singer Elias Rønnenfelt intones the lyrics in English, barking in a flat, brooding expression of dissatisfaction, and there is a vortex of visceral, emotional energy at the music’s core. “Broken Bone” and “Eyes” pulse with raw energy, landing like a Fugazi punch wrapped in shoegazing softness; did original punk ever feel this good when it landed square in your gut? We think not. These kids are something to watch.

Thee classic album from 2011, released on bandcamp for the first time! ALIENBODY.COM

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.

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.

When The Weeknd’s debut mixtape, *House of Balloons*, dropped in 2011, it was clear, even then, that something had shifted. This was a divergent kind of R&B that hinged on atmospherics over vocal prowess—an almost soulless quality in a genre built around soul. At the time, The Weeknd was largely anonymous, hiding in the shadows of his own music, the aloofness only adding to the allure. He was no one and yet everyone, as his raw, bruised candor resonated with fans suffering the effects of overexposure and contradicting desires to both feel and be numb simultaneously. He was a decent enough singer (his falsetto often drew comparisons to Michael Jackson), but it was the one-two punch of the nocturnal sound and indulgent lyrics—the darkness, the dysfunction, the hazy synth-bath of it all—that gave it staying power. When he says, “Trust me, girl, you wanna be high for this,” as he declares on the opening track, it\'s hard to tell whether it\'s an invitation or a warning, but it landed on ears that were all too happy to oblige. *House of Balloons*, here now in its original form with all samples restored, introduces the sentiment that has underscored nearly all of The Weeknd\'s music that\'s followed: a blurring of the lines between love and addiction, between having a good time and being consumed by it. In multi-part songs such as “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” and “The Party & The After Party,” a night\'s zenith and nadir are never too far apart; his audience, like his women, are held captive by the mercurial nature of his moods. A line like “Bring your love, baby, I could bring my shame/Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain,” from lead single “Wicked Games,” serves as a kind of mission statement for the mixtape\'s (and, perhaps, the singer himself\'s) central tension. In the exchange of affection and substances, there exists an emotional transference wherein power is gained by feeling the least. The Weeknd taps into our id-driven urges for pleasure and domination and rewards them again and again. Cruelty somehow becomes sexy in this world where detachment—from everything—is the only goal; the music that he’s created as a soundtrack continues to leave its audience equally insatiable. As the years go by, *House of Balloons* has become increasingly timeless. It remains as much an exercise in mythmaking (and star-making) for The Weeknd as a testament to our own pathological impulses, sending us barreling towards destruction and ecstasy all at once.

Formed by (underrated) Mint Chicks guitarist Ruban Nielson, Unknown Mortal Orchestra sounds like an Elephant 6 band sent back to the ‘70s. They groove on simple funk rhythms, guitars and keys cloaked in a rather thorny kind of reverb, a snare drum happily clanking out a bony backbeat. Nielson’s voice sounds like a cross between Beck and Marc Bolan, and his proficient guitar work periodically steps out into the limelight, like a shy stoner trying out his moves. On the viral “hit” “FFunny FFriends,” Nielson offers up a coolly restrained 30-second break amidst the snaky rhythm parts, and on “Bicycle,” the spare lead is accompanied by a hilarious and charming manipulated vocal approximation of a wah-wah peddle. The garage-punk guitars on “Nerve Damage” are one unexpected delight, among many: “Strangers Are Strange” undulates to a slinky, soul-pop vibe (remember Sly & The Family Stone?), and “Thought Ballune” is a paisley-colored slice of sweet psych-pop that could turn a dark day sunny. The brilliance of “How Can You Luv Me” is evident from the first bit of Fender Mustang funk-twang and percolating bass line. Dance? Try not to.

UMO was initially conceived by New Zealand native, Ruban, to release some tracks via a Bandcamp page to promote his limited addition vinyl in 2010. He pieced a band together, with a skilled producer, Jake, on bass and a brilliant teenage drummer named Julian to fill out the band. They are based in Portland.

You’d never guess the guys in Austin’s Pure X are skaters; the trio turns out quiet, hazy mood rock that is psychedelic and pastoral, and picturing them shredding in a concrete ditch just doesn’t come easily. The music is so loose and flowing that Pleasure was recorded live, without overdubs, in the studio. There’s a decidedly stoner influence to this music, especially in the guitar work, which sets them apart from other lo-fi, reverb-drenched outfits of the moment. Guitarist/vocalist Nate Grace might have been exposed to Galaxy 500 or Spaceman 3 in the womb; his drones, shrouded in distortion and neon, circle and hover, tethered to Austin Youngblood’s simple, solid drumming and Jesse Jenkins’ languid bass. A few songs, like “Easy” and “Dry Ice,” are fueled with more potent energy, with melodies that evoke the Jesus and Mary Chain. Grace’s fondness for effects and feedback suit the music just fine, those washes of texture and color complementing his voice when it reaches for a vulnerable falsetto or a sweet, wraith-like wail. “Heavy Air” is a spellbinding opener, with Grace’s guitar spooling out single, slow burning notes forever, as if he’s reluctant to let them go.

Originally released on Hydra Head Records in 2011.

Vancouver’s Dan Bejar has always been a sly kind of agitator, tearing apart the conventions of indie rock from the inside out. *Kaputt* turns the sloppy proclamations of his earlier albums on their head, opting for streamlined yacht-club funk in the vein of Steely Dan and \'80s Roxy Music. Though the music is soft and leisurely, Bejar’s lyrics remain serrated: “Hey, mystic prince of the purlieu at night/I heard your record, it’s alright,” he sings on “Savage Night at the Opera,” half-whispering with witty contempt.

While they’re clearly inspired by classic late ‘80s and early ‘90s shoegaze and indie rock—Ride, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement—this young London quintet proved on their self-titled debut that they could spin their influences into a memorable, blissful, fuzzed-out sound all their own. Whether heavy in the red on the ebullient “Holing Out” or swooning on the sweet, reverb-laden ballad “Stutter,” Yuck’s sunny songwriting has that sense of infinite possibility that, at its best, underground rock music is all about.

digital files here are the original 2011 master. for 2019 remaster see The Wastes Of Time...

Brooklyn based Liturgy is Hunter Hunt Hendrix, Greg Fox, Tyler Dusenbury, and Bernard Gann. Aesthethica, their second album and third release, shows the band exploring, in greater depth, themes initially touched on by their critically acclaimed debut album, Renihilation. The band used every instrument, literal or figurative, to produce meaning and intensity, disregarding the genre boundaries of black metal, hardcore and experimental music. On Renihilation, Liturgy made use of simple song structures, and concentrated on sustaining a blindingly high intensity level from start to finish. Aesthethica, a more controlled and polyvalent effort, finds the band operating at multiple levels and using more varied forms. The music is both elaborately crafted and chaotically performed. Songs often begin in the form of a simple chant or hypnotic abstraction, then evolve into something dense and complex. A constant sensitivity to the states of attention that different musical patterns activate and foster, yields a paradoxical result: the more complex the music, the simpler the message. Cycling through the fundamental modes of being: stasis, chaos, repetition and entelechy, Aesthethica is a metaphorical exercise in affirmation. The record is a unified whole. A major concern, sonically and lyrically, is the question of what it is to be meaningful, and how intensity relates to emotion or affect. Many of the songs activate and manipulate cliches relating to heroism, tragedy, hope, and so on by connecting black metal techniques to the spirit of film score writing (Vangelis, Badalamenti) and post-Romanticism (Scriabin, Sibelius). "High Gold" presents a vision of apocalypse, "Harmonia" presents a judgment on the meaning of life, and so on. The resulting collection of songs, at once, embodies and transcends these tropes. The music is supersaturated with lofty melodies and lyrics, bursting with frenzied execution, and builds to a boiling point of chaos, distorting all meaning and distilling to reveal the raw core of pure sonic joy. Liturgy surrounds these fractured islands of meaning with a sea of a-signifying ritual repetition and sound (Branca, Sleep, Lightning Bolt). Tear at the seams of the straitjacket of ordinary life, release the energy from the field of potentiality that it binds, enter the realm of the good and the beautiful, so commands Aesthethica. Highly technical musicianship, poetico-mystical gesturing, and a minimal directness; all singular elements, whose interactions and reactions are contained in and bursting from a black metal framework. Revelatory contrasts presented in an intensely physical performance whose energy is palpable and whose abatement is as illuminating as its arrival.

Helplessness Blues is the new full-length from Fleet Foxes. Helplessness Blues was recorded over the course of a year at Avast Recording, Bear Creek Studios, Dreamland Studios, and Reciprocal Recording. The album was recorded and mixed by Phil Ek and co-produced by Fleet Foxes and Ek. The piece that appears on the album cover was illustrated by Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Chris Alderson. Fleet Foxes is Robin Pecknold, Skyler Skjelset, Christian Wargo, Casey Wescott, Josh Tillman and Morgan Henderson.