best of 2011 (that i listened to)

So I'm definitely not one of those people who keeps up with new music lightning-quick, listening to the next big thing the second it comes out. It usually takes me a while. Sometimes it takes me a long while. (I still haven't listened to The Suburbs). I get to it when I get to it.

That being said, this list is going to be pretty awful. I'm doing it mainly to see how many albums from this year I actually got around to listening to. So here goes and such.

1. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life

2. Doomsday Student - A Jumper's Handbook

3. Black Lips - Arabia Mountain

4. The Vinyl Stitches - The Vinyl Stitches

5. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

6. The Mountain Goats - All Eternals Deck

7. iceage - New Brigade

8. Boston Spaceships - Let It Beard

9. Andrew Jackson Jihad - Knife Man

10. Algernon Cadwallader - Parrot Flies

11. Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two

12. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Mirror Traffic

13. Yuck - Yuck

14. Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil

15. Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

16. The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

17. Radiohead - The King of Limbs

18. Okkervil River - I Am Very Far

19. British Sea Power - Valhalla Dance Hall

20. The Dodos - No Color

21. The Dirtbombs - Party Store

22. The Strokes - Angles

Yikes. Not a whole lot. More than I thought I'd have, admittedly, but still...not good. I need to work on that.

Pretty good year, as far as I've heard from it. A few major disappointments (Radiohead, The Strokes), but a ton of albums that I'm going to cherish for years to come--pretty much the entire top ten, really. Great albums.

LOTS of albums I still have to get to though (Bon Iver, PJ Harvey, etc.), but I have a system I like to keep to that helps me listen to everything in my collection while slowly filtering new music through. I have a 160gb iPod that's constantly full, and I like to make sure I'm not leaving any music unlistened to. And the two times I deviated from that system this year, I was crushed. (Radiohead and The Strokes).

P.S. - People seem to be sleeping on Doomsday Student for some reason, but they're carrying on the spirit of Arab on Radar wonderfully, and I really think their new album rivals anything AOR ever did. Not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, but I've heard damn near NOTHING about this band from anyone else.

being robert christgau

(Decided to try something new at work on Tuesday. Wrote a review of each album I listened to, all day, quick-burst, Christgau-style, snark left unbridled. It was fun. Internet was out last night, so here it is now.)

Porn – Wine, Women and Song

Melvins-style sludge that rocks harder and stays more professional than their skuzzy brethren. Band name aside (a classy upgrade from “Men of Porn”), these guys don't fuck around. Riffs out the ass and a purity of attitude and style that overwhelms and sucks you into its being like all good metal should.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request

Better than the first request, by a good deal. Stones cocksucking aside, there are plenty of great tunes under the experimental touches. One of the more capable Anton treatises, though like all the rest it falls incomplete, a tossed-off masterpiece that could've been. Too much Brian Jones, not enough Keith Richards.

Sleater-Kinney – All Hands On the Bad One

Riot-grrls with the chops to sound like a big-grrl band, the talent to write legitimately great rock songs, and the sense to ditch the fem bravado for the real deal. No need to say “Suck My Left One” here. They demand in as many words what Hannah will beat you across the head with, only it's significant outside of the socio-political context. Who needs that shit anyway. They sure don't.

Les Sexareenos – 14 Frenzied Shakers

Proof the Chuck Berry riffs are still worth ripping off 60 years later. You can call it punk, but it's no more dangerous than the Sonics. At times they're damn near a carbon copy of them and every other early garage rock band, which is kinda the point. Zero originality points, but for 14 tracks rock 'n' roll appears to be alive after all. (Also, putting 16 tracks on the CD is an excellent punk-ironic touch.)

Guided By Voices – Alien Lanes

Not quite Bee Thousand, but few things in life are. Lo-fi, but it really shouldn't be. These guys need not hide behind the fuzz. Can't say that for many other eight-track demi-gods, yet I love Lou Barlow all the same. Probably could've been killer at half the length, but the sprawl gives it it's charm. When he hits, Pollard is as good as any songwriter alive. He just needs to hit more.

The Lemonheads – Lick

Hard not to look down on any Lemonheads album that isn't Ray or Come On Feel. Still a solid enough album though. They're thankfully shedding the last of the Hüsker Dü fanboy issue, but that obnoxious guitar sound is still there, smothering the band's burgeoning songwriting. The Bob Mould impression just isn't that good. It's been done better. So have Evan Dando's songs.

the beatles - sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band

Is there an album in existence more drenched in context than Sgt. Pepper's?

It feels weird to even use that word to describe it, "album." It's an entity, a piece of music history in itself, if not cultural history, or human history altogether. There's a seemingly endless list of accomplishments and an immense world of influence all attributable to a mere 13 tracks. More success than any band would hope to achieve in their entire career, multiplied by a hundred--all from just one Beatles album, and arguably not even their most influential one.

It's all absurd, and there's really no point in talking about it. I won't say anything that hasn't been said before. Plus, if you weren't there for it's release, you can't understand the full effect it had on the world. You just can't.

For someone like me, born in 1989, who didn't hear a Beatles album until he was 16 because his parents had been sick of hearing them for decades, someone who experienced the end result of the Beatles in the countless bands they inspired way before he could even pick out a single song... It's impossible not to be underwhelmed by this album.

I'll never forget the first time I listened to Sgt. Pepper's. It was one of the CDs I picked up on one of my many library trips, and I could not have been more excited. I had read Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums" list, I had read a few reviews online, I had at least a sense of the amount of hype surrounding it, and I was totally prepared to have my mind blown by what was categorically the greatest album ever made, according to everyone that mattered.

And I was let down. Hard.

Even now, having listened to it probably dozens of times, the general psychedelic feel of the whole album still sounds hopelessly dated. On my first listen, it sounded like a bunch of drugged-out songs about a circus or some shit. It was just...weird. This was the greatest album ever made? There was no way. Rolling Stone was clearly fucking with me.

I've grown slightly more fond of it over time, admittedly, but it never reached that lofty position in my mind among the greatest works of rock 'n' roll, as the critics and the writers and the rock stars lead me to believe. Pet Sounds clearly has better songwriting. Loveless blew my mind more on a technical level. And as a far as psychedelia is concerned, I'll take the diluted garage version found on Pebbles or Nuggets any day. It's just not that impressive.

Granted, this is me saying this in 2011. And I completely understand that. When you look at the rest of the music world in 1967, Sgt. Pepper's towers miles above anything else. I know. Studio achievements, technical breakthroughs, even the goddamn track listing was revolutionary. I get it. It changed everything.

But all of that is reliant on the context. You have to know that Sgt. Pepper's is a great album. You have to know that it changed everything. Which is all fine and good. But I just never thought the album stood up by itself, without that outside knowledge. "A Day in the Life" is a wonderful song, and is arguably the best song the Beatles ever wrote, let alone the best song on the album, but the rest of it is just tedious, strange, and sounds like it was recorded for a world I've never been to before. Which is true, I suppose. (I've never done any psychedelics, which practically drenched the world this album was born into.)

I guess my point is that I really don't like Sgt. Pepper's all that much, and I don't feel bad about it.

There was a time when I tried to convince myself that this album was incredible, just like Trout Mask Replica was fascinating and Faust wasn't boring as all fuck. But it's just not what I think. I'd rather listen to the White Album or Rubber Soul or Revolver or even Magical Mystery Tour. And that's okay. Because Rolling Stone doesn't get to decide what music I should like. I do.