The best music makers of the past year
By Max Hill
10. Flying Lotus – Until the Quiet Comes
Fans of Steven Ellison’s last album under his Flying Lotus moniker, Cosmogramma, might have been disappointed on first listen of Until the Quiet Comes: his latest effort sheds its predecessor’s bombastic, danceable electronica for quiet, reflective, jazz-inspired ambience. However, while it may not be as immediately accessible, Until the Quiet Comes is just as inventive and fascinating as any of Flying Lotus’s previous work. Ellison describes it as “a record for kids to dream to,” and it’s easy to see the parallel between the album’s shifting time signatures and tones and the dynamic environment of a dream. The album also creates a sense of dreamlike, ethereal intimacy through its use of musical dynamics and its obscured vocal samples, both staples in Ellison’s discography. It has a diverse range of influences: Taking cues from artists such as Can, Stereolab and John Coltrane (Ellison’s great-uncle by marriage) and incorporating ideas from New Age philosophy and metaphysics, Flying Lotus has created a complex, original and beautiful record that reveals new layers on each listen.
9. Frank Ocean – channel ORANGE
Frank Ocean’s fantastic studio debut will always be linked with his now-famous Tumblr confession, in which he waxed poetic about his self described first love: a man. channel ORANGE has since been picked apart by critics and listeners alike through the lens of Ocean’s sexuality, some describing him as brave and others as deviant. What these preoccupations ignore is the universality of Ocean’s music: torch songs like “Thinkin Bout You” and “Bad Religion” ache with longing that transcends sexual categorization, and Ocean’s talent for storytelling and infective choruses (with a little help from Malay, his key musical collaborator) make channel ORANGE an album which goes beyond the hype and will surely outlive the controversy. Ocean shines above all as a vocalist: his smooth baritone and expressive falsetto give depth to the album’s tales of love, loss, addiction, class and confusion while grounding its surrealistic imagery in genuine human emotion. Whether Ocean is the new Prince or Stevie Wonder is unclear, but it’s impossible not to see channel ORANGE’s openness, honesty, and emotional depth as belonging to a bygone era.
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s music is often difficult to categorize. Their albums are most commonly fit to the post-rock genre, but that doesn’t seem to fully encompass the strange, multilayered and life-affirming sound for which the band is so revered. If there’s one category that GY!BE have never fit under, it’s “timeless.” Each of the band’s previous albums seemed to fit perfectly into the time periods in which they were released: the early internet age, the beginning of the Bush era, the first post-9/11 year. The band members themselves are often characterized as anarchistic, and they encourage political interpretation of their music. It seems strange, then, that their first album in ten years — ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, which centers around two pieces that have been part of their live repertoire for years — stills sounds so of its time. Maybe it’s that the album was released on a tumultuous election year, a year peppered with foreign policy failures and doomsday fears. Maybe it’s the sense of urgency in Godspeed’s music, which is applicable to the present day just as well as it was ten years ago. Whatever the case, ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! should put any fears of GY!BE’s waning talent to rest: they still make a fantastic soundtrack to the tumult and confusion of the now.
7. Death Grips – The Money Store
Bruce Springsteen once famously described the snare shot that begins Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” as sounding “like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” Death Grips’ The Money Store is the album version of that sound: powerful, challenging, and liberating. Zach Hill and Stefan “MC Ride” Burnett’s music defies genre and category. The music on The Money Store is uneasy, anxious and difficult. However, Burnett’s yelping vocals and abstract lyrics are as powerful as they are weary: haunted by tinny samples and dissonant electronics, his voice is Death Grips’s anchor and greatest asset. Tracks like “Hacker” and “I’ve Seen Footage” veer into casually accessible territory, as though Burnett is inviting you into his own mangled, unfamiliar world. The duo is often characterized by their detractors as alienating and incoherent, and admittedly there have been easier albums in 2012 to listen to front-to-back. But The Money Store’s brilliance comes from its commitment to its own individuality. This isn’t an album made with a specific audience in mind — it plays for whoever is willing to listen.
6. Tame Impala – Lonerism
Lonerism is perhaps the most aptly titled record of 2012: Kevin Parker’s psychedelic rock project Tame Impala has made catchy, buoyant psychedelic rock in the past, but on his latest effort, he’s made one of the most essential bedroom rock records in recent memory. As accessible and optimistic as Tame Impala’s music sounds, Lonerism is an intensely solitary record. Tracks like “Be Above It”, “Why Won’t They Talk To Me”, and “Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control” are songs tailor-made for loners, written by a loner with a guitar and a sneering John Lennon voice. The tracks here might remind older listeners of the music of their youth, but Tame Impala’s nostalgic quality translates better through their lyrics than through their music: Parker’s words befit high school memories of wasted days, lonely nights, desperate mix tapes and inaccessible social circles. He wears his influences on his sleeve, to be sure, but Parker’s songs add up to more than the sum of their predecessors: Lonerism is a record that stands alone, destined to be discovered by many lonely rock-and-roll high schoolers to come.
5. Cloud Nothings – Attack on Memory
Attack on Memory is noisy, messy, and vibrantly alive in a way few other records in 2012 have been (sorry, Japandroids). Frontman and former one-man-band Dylan Baldi has never made an album as dark and as imperfect as this one, and his decision to bring Steve Albini of Pixies and Nirvana fame into the fold as the album’s producer only helps to further separate Attack on Memory from everything that came before it. But where the album could’ve ended up being an uneven and cautious shift into uncharted musical territory, it feels more like a talented young artist finding a voice that suits him perfectly. “Stay Useless”, the album’s best track and one of the best songs of 2012, acts as the perfect bridge between Baldi’s pop tendencies and the darker, dirtier sound Cloud Nothings have explored this year. Its protagonist is confused and yearns for solitude, but the music is uplifting and enduring: hopeful in the face of Baldi’s snarling vocal. This trend of musical and lyrical contrast is characteristic of the album’s Midwestern emo influences, which share the spotlight with Baldi’s talent for lo-fi, grungy pop. Baldi has found a sound that works for him, and a band to make it happen: Attack on Memory stands out as the best “indie rock” record of the year, whatever that means.
4. Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It
Mike Hadreas’s voice falters throughout his second album as Perfume Genius, Put Your Back N 2 It. He’s not trained as a singer; his voice is nasal and thin throughout the album’s 12 tracks, and often a lyric sheet is required to pick up on what he’s saying. But it’s absolutely worth it to do so. Put Your Back N 2 It is lyrically dense and sometimes vague, but also deeply heartfelt and intuitive. Hadreas’s lyrics have proven to be just as crucial to the appeal of his music as his gentle, strikingly beautiful piano playing. On his 2010 debut, Learning, he took his most intimate, traumatic experiences and translated them into haunting piano balladry. Put Your Back N 2 It still draws deeply and poetically from Hadreas’ personal struggles, but it also displays a shift towards songs written for others: album centerpiece “Dark Parts” is written for Hadreas’s mother, a victim of sexual abuse; “17” is directed towards gay teenagers with body image issues; and “Put Your Back N 2 It” is a deeply personal love song for Hadreas’s boyfriend and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels. Where Learning was a remarkably poignant album in its own right, Put Your Back N 2 It is the work of a songwriter who’s proven capable of writing engaging music not only about his own experiences, but about the experiences of those around him as well. It’s a beautiful and nakedly emotional album that tempers its heavy subject matter with a cynical, weary but ultimately persevering sense of optimism.
3. Kishi Bashi – 151a
Even at the tail end of 2012, a dark year in a so-far dark millennium full of uncertainty, apathy and pessimism, Kaoru Ishibashi is making music that proves that optimism and joy never truly go out of style. 151a, the first full-length solo album he’s released under his pseudonym Kishi Bashi, is the best pop record of the year by a fairly wide margin: a sugary sweet mix of exuberant Japanese chants, plucky violins, schoolyard hand claps and intoxicating hooks. Ishibashi’s expressive vocals and inexhaustible energy are completely contagious, and his lyrics are at times introspective and life-affirming. 151a also builds on Kishi Bashi’s first release, 2011’s remarkable Room for Dream EP: Ishibashi experiments with soulful balladry on “I Am the Antichrist to You”, apes Feels-era Animal Collective on “Chester’s Burst Over the Hamptons”, and even incorporates folky singer-songwriter elements and Eastern-style sonic arrangements into “Atticus, In the Desert”. Ishibashi isn’t afraid to try his hand at any and every genre that piques his interest, and on 151a he never misses a beat. His achingly beautiful violin work ties each song together, and his versatile use of his preferred instrument is key not only to his engaging live performances but also to the variety of his incendiary debut. 151a is the work of a uniquely talented man who genuinely enjoys making music, and whose enthusiasm for his art shines through in every song.
2. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Chords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
Fiona Apple’s reputation precedes her. She’s been making honest, deeply introverted piano songs since before it was trendy, and fans and detractors alike surely expected her first album in seven years, The Idler Wheel, to follow suit. What they most likely didn’t expect was that the album would be so naked — Apple’s songs here lack the elaborate production typical of her previous efforts, opting instead for a stripped down piano-and-percussion sound that suits her cracked, confessional vocal style perfectly. Apple’s musicality has steadily improved over the course of her career, and The Idler Wheel finds her experimenting with a style that sounds as intimate and genuine as her transcendental lyrics. Many of 2012’s most notable albums have been honest — channel ORANGE, Put Your Back N 2 It, and this list’s top pick among them — but none so honest as The Idler Wheel. Apple’s words are sometimes uncomfortably real, and they serve to encapsulate both Apple’s career and her enduring appeal perfectly (“How can I ask anyone to love me/When all I do is beg to be left alone?”) Apple snarls, holds back tears and takes no prisoners throughout the album’s 10 near-perfect tracks, and her talent for finding the poetry in her own pain has never been better than on this album. The Idler Wheel may have been Apple’s way of exorcising her own demons, but the album’s courageous honesty has doubtlessly helped countless listeners to do the same.
1. Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
When I first wrote about Kendrick Lamar in my Peak article “5 New Artists You Should Be Listening To”, the rapper’s popularity was just beginning to spread from hip-hop fans and Compton natives to casual music listeners and Pitchfork addicts alike. Nearly two months later, it seems impossible not to have heard Lamar’s name: GKMC has skyrocketed the young MC’s popularity, and the album has received accolades across the board, some calling it an “instant classic” while others still have compared it to Nas’ influential opus Illmatic. It seems strange, then, to write about this album that I love so dearly, knowing that so many others have accepted it in the same way while others still have denounced it as overhyped, overplayed and overrated. Listening to the album for the umpteenth time, its 12 tracks still sound fresh, powerful and ultimately transcendental. GKMC tells the story of a single fateful day in Lamar’s life as a young man in Compton, from his flirtations with the seductive Sherane to his struggles with peer pressure and gang violence. Lamar’s flow is unparalleled, and his charismatic performances on tracks like “m.A.A.d city” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” solidify his status as hip-hop’s new poster boy. No other album in 2012 reached the creative heights that this one did, whether on first listen or 27th. GKMC might never outlive the overwhelming hype that now surrounds it, but taken as the product of a singular creative voice, Lamar’s studio debut is courageous, inventive, reflective and compulsively listenable.
