As much of a drag as 2011 turned out to be, it will at least have the courtesy of leaving us with some good records.
It’s tough, in an era in which so much of it is released, to succinctly recap a year’s worth of music. It’s even tougher to do so in a year when noteworthy releases come in so many different stripes. 2011 could be remembered as the year of Odd Future or Lil B, each of whom dominated the Twittersphere, or of Adele, a mortal lock to clean up at the Grammys, or of any of the precociously talented newcomers who introduced themselves in the past 11 months—from A$AP Rocky to Youth Lagoon, and everyone in between. To make the task of characterizing the year in music a little easier—for us and for you—we’ve compiled our writers’ and editors’ favorite albums of the year to bring you Recess’ Best Albums of 2011. It’s a list that testifies to the diversity and quality of the year’s music releases.
Bon Iver—Bon Iver, Bon Iver
I cannot be certain that Justin Vernon was reading Whitman out in those proverbial woods, but listening to Bon Iver, Bon Iver, I hear America singing. Vernon’s is the wood-cutter’s song—“from forests, for the soft”—and with his axe and plaid-cloth shirts, falsetto cannot wound his manliness. From “Hinnom, TX” to “Minnesota, WI”—all the imaginary, literary-sounding towns of this nation— his lyrics burn like frankincense through these good winters. While Vernon may accept in his solitude that “joy is unfounded,” joy there is yet found within these tracks. A calm joy, a quiet joy, a joy to be tended as the firewood crackles in moonlit Wisconsin, and Vernon whittles a tune from the woods and the knife breaks hearts with its loneliness.
—Dan Fishman
James Blake—James Blake
The thing that strikes me most about James Blake’s self-titled debut, nearly a year after its release, is the silence. There’s something uncomfortably empty about the album: Blake’s voice rings and trails into nothingness, his synthesized bass echoes oddly. He uses pauses and simple instrumentals and vocals to, counterintuitively, amplify his sound and layer it with complexity. Despite the album’s stripped-away nature, it’s somehow exponentially better with headphones. I recall listening to the album for the first time on my MacBook’s weak speakers, then plugging in my headphones to listen to “Limit To Your Love” again and being shocked when I could better hear the imperceptible bass flutter in the background. It’s an undoubtedly beautiful album, a characteristic strengthened by Blake’s restraint in his production. More than anything, though, the record is bold: mixing dubstep and pop ballads is not a task for the faint of heart. If James Blake inspires a legion of copycats, I can only hope they inherit his panache for originality as well.
—Andrew Lokker
The Weeknd— < i>House of Balloons/Thursday
When Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a The Weeknd, sings, “I just want to take you there, he don’t gotta know where/Does he touch you here like this, let me take the friction from your lips,” he sounds like a seasoned R&B crooner, one equipped with the wisdom and maturity to lament about lost loves and detail the art of seduction. So at just 21 years young, his two mixtapes, House of Balloons and Thursday, are even more impressive in their ability to create a mature, seductive atmosphere. Between tales of drug-fueled debauchery and wanting-what-you-can’t-have regret, both compositions fuse elements of R&B, neo-soul and hip-hop for a sensual, trance-like backdrop to The Weeknd’s explicit saga. If Echoes of Silence, The Weeknd’s next and final release in his trilogy of mixtapes, showcases the same talent, he is likely to follow the trajectory of his mentor and collaborator Drake, capitalizing on underground buzz to become a household name.
—Katie Zaborsky
St. Vincent—Strange Mercy
St. Vincent’s gone to great lengths to play up her dollish appearance and petite frame, and even tends to introduce her songs with demure vocals and swells of chamber pop—all to greater effect when she drops the guillotine of her electric guitar and uses language like a scythe. The first music video for Strange Mercy positions St. Vincent as a modern Simone de Beauvoir, as she endures any number of domestic tortures before being buried alive by her husband and kids. But if the feminist reading goes over heads, her impact is hardly diminished—Strange Mercy is the best integration yet of her abstruse lyrics and angular art-rock. In the past, the impressionistic songwriting was a bit too clever to let you in on the real stories, but Strange Mercy sheds St. Vincent’s characteristic ambiguity at all the right moments. On the title track, she packs a gender-neutral gut punch of vulnerability into the repeated line, “If I ever meet the dirty police man who roughed you up/ No—No, I don’t know what.” The best rock album of the year links its content with its cover art: the shiny white packaging barely masks the razor-sharp wail lurking beneath.
—Brian Contratto
Jay-Z and Kanye West—Watch the Throne
Another year, another stellar installment in the Kanye West catalogue. Watch the Throne was always going to be hard-pressed to match the towering ambition of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (which, if we’d made this list last year, would have run away with the top spot). But between West’s “luxury rap” executive production and Jay’s best form since his post-Black Album retirement, Watch the Throne made for the most sumptuous major-label rap release of 2011. Amid the Maybach bumper-sticker sloganeering and declarations of black opulence, there were moments of remarkable candor: Kanye turning his well-documented public foibles into life lessons for a future son on “New Day,” or Jay’s sense of betrayal and ambivalence on a dis track (“Why I Love You”) directed at former Rocafella associates Beanie Sigel and Damon Dash. But Watch the Throne will be remembered as a monument to Jay and Ye’s inimitably cultured swag: Basquiats and diplomatic immunity, Lanvin tees and “N****s in Paris.”
—Ross Green
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