meloncauliflower

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Here are all the songs and albums I’ve written about over the course of my Favorite Music of 2011 Project. Everything on the list is linked to the blurb or whatever I wrote about them. Everything is simply in the reverse order of which I posted; the last things I posted going down to the first things I posted. Nothing is assigned a numerical order; it seems silly to ascribe or stamp numbers onto art. I love all this music so much and it’s all been close to me, each record, each song, in it’s own way. And strangely, to put things into perspective, according to my iTunes and Last.FM only a little under half of the music I listened to this year was from 2011, mostly due to my exploration into the realm of 90s indie rock and 80s tweepop.

Here were my driving thoughts behind this project.

scattered thoughts on long term memory, descriptive writing, existential crisis’, and focally my ‘Favorite Music of 2011’ project.

&

a philosophy on lists

Albums:

Songs:

30 Plays

Last album of my Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Album: The Radio Dept. // passive aggressive: singles 2002-2010

I’m sitting in my bedroom by my favorite window. I just queued up Side 1 of the the passive aggressive singles collection; the last time I listen to this record for the year. This technically isn’t even a real 2011 album in the sense that it is really just a singles collection. Posting it last works out because now you can’t take it as being my “#1 favorite album of 2011” because its not technically an album as much as it is a compilation; none of the songs on here are new. This does a wonderful job of ‘ambiguating’ any possibility of a ‘#1 album of 2011 pick.’ Simultaneously, I can acknowledge that this compilation has been the music dearest to me this year. I confirm that “yes,” someone’s interpretation of my last.fm is accurate: 740 plays from this compilation in the past year, not including vinyl spins or the 800some combined plays from other Radio Dept. albums — it really is all indicative of how much this record means to me.

What fresh water is to beverages is what The Radio Dept. is to music. Always in the mood for them, they always sound so natural, and its pure. It’s healthy and refreshing: it plays as the soundtrack of the present reality without detracting from the present reality.

“The way we see ourselves as a band is that we’re… this sounds really cocky but either… we’re not a real band, we’re just maybe…faking it or whatever—we just make songs, we’re not a..band really. Or… we’re one of the few real bands around..*embarassingly chuckles* it doesn’t sound too good—I hate…i hate cocky bands myself… That whole rock thing is not us: I like to listen to music while traveling, you know, um, sitting in a car at night and just turning the stereo on —I don’t drive myself so I don’t have to take any…any.. safety responsibilities or anything, its just….. just listening to music and…. and watching like… the city pass by outside the window thats..thats a great thing. and i mean yeah, maybe thats what we are —maybe thats what we’re doing… creating like… travel music, I don’t know.”

Awhile back, when I heard Johan Duncanson say this in an interview, I realized why this band was resonating with me so much, Duncanson and I share this concept of listening to music. I like to listen to music while traveling, and so many of my favorite times this year are consistently the times when I sit in my car and watch the world pass by outside the windows listening to The Radio Dept. I remember February nights, far from home, getting in my car at the end of the robotic day, pressing play on “Why Won’t You Talk About It?” and losing myself in the glittering diamond-like texture of the noise. Aggressively stomping my left foot on the floor in my car and jolting my head — all almost involuntarily — whenever “Where Damage Isn’t Already Done” played and I often can’t help but bang on imaginary drums when “Ewan” kicks on. Like Duncanson said, it is just staring at the lights passing by reflected abstractly onto my windshield, literally watching the city, landscape, or town, pass me by as I listen to these songs. Songs. Just small, lovely, songs.

On any day I would argue that this is the best bunch of shoegaze since My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless record released in 1991 — and I’m sure many shoegaze purists would agree with that. Last year, in my favorite albums of 2010 project, I wrote of The Radio Dept.’s Clinging to a Scheme explaining that it was the truest indie album on my list. I’m upping the ante this year in noting my realization that they are one of — probably the — truest indie band I’ve encountered [Note: I didn’t say ‘best’, that would be too impossible to objectively argue]. It’s a bold statement, but it’s thoroughly thought through and justified. In the realm of indie music the size of the fanbase is irrelevant, and what is relevant is the density or the ratio that is important. The Radio Dept.’s private, personal, music seeking, and introverted, cult following as well as just the general aesthetic quality of their music highlights an indie epitomization The Radio Dept. has accidentally and thus naturally achieved.

Sampled Track: “Ewan”

(February)

60 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Song: M83 // splendor

“Then the great giant raised a horn to his mouth. They could see this by the change of the black shape he made against the stars. After that—quite a bit later, because sound travels so slowly—they heard the sound of the horn: high and terrible, yet of a strange, deadly beauty.

“Immediately the sky became full of shooting stars. Even one shooting star is a fine thing to see; but these were dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, till it was like silver rain: and it went on and on. And when it had gone on for some while, one or two of them began to think that there was another dark shape against the sky as well as the giant’s. It was a different place, right overhead, up in the roof of the sky as you might call it. ‘Perhaps it is a cloud,’ thought Edmund. At any rate, there were no stars there: just blackness. But all around the downpour of stars went on. And then the starless patch began to grow, spreading further and further out from the centre of the sky. And presently a quarter of the whole sky was black, and then a half, and at last the rain of shooting stars was going on only low down near the horizon.

“With a thrill of wonder (and there was some terror in it too) they all suddenly realized what was happening. The spreading of blackness was not a cloud at all: it was simply emptiness. The black part of the sky was the part in which there were no stars left. All the stars were falling: Aslan had called them home.”

(November)

meloncauliflower:

that beautiful album art burns vividly in my head when i hear the sheets of synthesizers. sounds like christmas.

What have we to show?

Barren feelings and dust for crow.

We can’t ever know.When it it’s time to go.

That’s the way to see the end.

Glowing out along the river bend.

It’s not goodbye my only friend.

Yesterday started over again.

1 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Album: Destroyer // kaputt

Four things:

I’ve never heard an album age this well over the course of a year. I listened to this a bunch in January and a bit in February and liked it and then I let it go for the spring and summer until just revisiting it again in October. I was enthralled by how, while fairly evident before, the following became absolutely clear:
I’ve never heard an album that possesses such a distinct mood.
I’ve never heard an album that possesses such a lucid mood.
Many albums have points #2 or #3 nailed, and most of the time, they end up inverse of each other. But with exceptions of some of the greats (Kid A by Radiohead comes to mind) albums never nail both #2 or #3, and that is a crucial thing to note because the whole combination of those two points is far far far greater than the sum of parts.

The sound of modern blues.

Sampled Track: “Chinatown”

(January)

7689 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Song: Pure X // dry ice

an authentic expression of the dilapidated soul; lacerated guitars weeping the humid summer night away

(August)

40 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Album: M83 // hurry up, we’re dreaming

Queue syntheisizers. Queue the whispering.

We didn’t need a story, we didn’t need a real world
We just had to keep walking
And we became the stories, we became the places
We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds
We were you before you even existed

So many bands try to pull this off. So many bands don’t understand that the only way to do it, is to do it from the perspective of a child. The only way to truly and successfully create this type of fantasy, is to do so in an ethos of childhood nostalgia.

Carry on! Carry on!

“Intro.” The entrance into an eternal dream world. Dreams, but not dream pop. “Intro.” A five minute intro, but its for a 70 minute album; such an introduction is required.

70 minutes of electronic adventure into the never-overdone-theme of childhood nostalgia. Blue and purple softly glowing light burns into my imagination as I listen. It’s not a normal album, it’s so colossal that you don’t sit down and try to ‘get through it’ — in this context, that would unenjoyable. Instead you sit down and press play somewhere in it, and just lose yourself in the mass of swirling synthesizers and the marvel of electronic creativity.

Sampled Track: “Intro + Midnight City”

701 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Pair of Songs (Pt. 2): Devotchka // exhaustible

If one melody sticks with me forever from this year, its going to be that whistling one.

(March)

32 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Pair of Songs (Pt. 1): Devotchka // the common good

The album served itself largely as my soundtrack to Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. This particular track I find immensely evocative of the central character, Levin, and his life struggles, most particularly the dramatic desperation in the poignant second verse,

“A LITTLE FAITH, A LITTLE MONEY. YOU SHOULDN’T LAUGH, THIS ISN’T FUNNY. WE’RE GONNA GIVE BACK WHAT WE STEAL. JUST SAY THE WORD AND I SHALL BE HEALED.”

(March)

0 Plays

Favorite Music of 2011 Project

Song: Tim Hecker // the piano drop

The sound of the great beyond of nothingness; the vacuum of eternity. A terrifying massiveness.

(February)

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Favorite Music of 2011 Project