(FUCKING WHATEVER)
5. James Blake - James Blake
James Blake got some buzz over his pretty sweet dance-y future garage EPs in 2010 and got people excited for a full length. It manages to be really great while completely distinguishing itself from Blake’s previous work. The tightly coiled heart-ripping bass is but one tool in young James’s tool box on this record, and it’s utilized with remarkable taste. More on display is James Blake’s superb song-writing talent, which employs classically-infused electric piano, layered soul vocals, and lots of stark silences. This album feels like it occupies a tangible physical space, and the few sounds James Blake decides to fill this space with are rich with meaning and texture. The little minimal bits and pieces craft together in an ingenious little LP.
4. Panda Bear - Tomboy
Certainly Noah Lennox’s most accessible solo record to date, Tomboy is a psychedelic masterwork. Deviating from the heavy sampler work of Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavillion, this record contains a lot of actual instruments, and the ideas tend to all be dug out in 3-5 minute digestible pop-structured tracks. There’s a lot of variety here, from the rhythmic and lavish, to the minimal and droning, with loads of atmosphere, and heavy reverb pretty much throughout. It’s still pretty sunny with Panda Bear’s whole major boner for Brian Wilson still fairly apparent, but Tomboy goes to some pretty solemn and dark places. Every track contains something a little surprising and unexpected, whether it be a weird herky jerky beat, a unique texture, an interesting choice in instrumental arrangement, or a beautiful fading outro that spans half of the entire track. Tomboy is expansive and catchy, and it’s an album I keep coming back to again and again.
3. Death Grips - Exmilitary
A hip hop album that balances raw aggression with a keen sense of adventure and experimentalism. With inspired and masterfully integrated samples from sources ranging from Link Wray to Black Flag, super intense harsh rapping from MC Ride, and wacky, ragged, irregular drum beats from everyone’s favorite math drummer Zach Hill, and an overall overdriven production style, this is easily the most insane and unique hip hop album of the year. Exmilitary is a totally unexpected behemoth of a record that is as thoroughly engaging as it is ominous and menacing.
2. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
An indescribably beautiful electronic song cycle composed of lo-fi found sound (largely from old television commercials) chopped apart completely and weaved together into a surprisingly rhythmic experience using fuzzy drone textures and Roland synth tones. Replica is transcendently wonderful, and much more than the sum of its parts. It creeps into your subconscious like a psychic technicolor worm, feeding on your emotions, taking you on dreamlike journeys into the depths of space one moment, and engaging you in somber meditations about humankind the next. I don’t think an electronic record has left an emotional impact on me of this magnitude since Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi, which coming from me is the highest of praise.
1. Fucked Up - David Comes To Life
This album feels like it’s been decades in the making, the culminating moment for a whole genre. And I don’t mean hardcore. I went into this monumental double LP thinking I was in for a raw and indirect interpretation of the “rock opera” form, matching the description in more abstract terms not unlike Hüsker Dü’s seminal double album Zen Arcade. But David Comes To Life instead embraces all of the tropes of the form and gives them affectionate bear hugs. If anything, Fucked Up seem to be most influenced by the progenitor: The Who’s Tommy. The result is a unique punk opera that has nearly everything going for it. For over an hour they tell an engrossing and exciting deconstruction of musical storytelling as the tragic hero David slowly becomes aware that his woe is largely the fault of his bitter narrator and decides not to be a prisoner to his narrative. The album’s song and story structure is amazingly tight, conveying all of the little details of the narrative without ever getting lost in self-indulgence. Fucked Up never lose sight of the fact that they are a hardcore band, balancing a bit more melody and a more lavish production style with all of the passion and immediacy you expect from them. David Comes To Life is a special album and a great achievement, not just in the context of Fucked Up’s career, but in the context of rock and punk history as a whole.
