The Year of the Rabbit in Review: the Best Albums of 2011.

Oh yeah!  Watership Down, motherfuckers!
How ya like me now?

"May you live in interesting times" runs the old Chinese curse, and as I bid farewell to the Year of the Rabbit with a middle-fingered departing salute and a scathing torrent of profanity, I got to admit, the bunny was a bitch, but she definitely didn't bore me.

Tonight we enter the Year of the Dragon, but before I greet that rascal, Puff, by boozing and barfing the past 365 days into into oblivion, I feel obliged to look back upon the works of his cruel, lagomorphic predecessor and despair.

Happy New Years, America.
 Thanks for the good time last year.
btw, How's that ass, this morning?  lol!
- Goldman Sachs!

2011 was another year where the super-rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and everyone else lost either their jobs, their homes, their savings, or their hope for a brighter tomorrow.  A lot of people finally got fed up with the international banking cartel's protection racket and at least tried to do something about it by taking to the streets all over the world.  To no avail.  Now that the smell of bong hoots, mouldy Birkenstocks, and unwashed dreadlocks has dissipated along with the wind of hopeful rebellion it wafted in on, things are pretty much back to normal, which is to say, totally fucked up and unlikely to change anytime soon.

Prime Minister Lego Man vows
to rebuild the Canadian economy,
brick by little, plastic brick.

Up here in the great white north, we somehow ended up giving a creepy, sweater-wearing, cat-molesting, right-wing, Lego Man look-alike a majority government, even though I've yet to meet anyone who voted for him or even considers him anything other than a total fucking douche.  Not long afterwards, the Harper-youth of Vancouver celebrated his victory with a kind of latter-day kristalnacht, lighting cop cars on fire, smashing windows, and looting  high-end merchandise from local boutiques.  Coincidentally, our local hockey corporation bungled the Stanley Cup final that same night, a loss many experts have also attributed to Harper's victory.

On a brighter note, 2011 wasn't a bad year for music.  It wasn't a great one either, but there were quite a few albums that, though maybe not of the life-altering-variety, were, nonetheless, undeniably fucking good.  There were also some surprises.  Perennial big-dick playas like Radiohead and TV On The Radio underwhelmed their harems of critics with puny, flaccid releases this year, which gave the odd musical omega male the opportunity to sneak in there and get a little some-some.

The thing I noticed most this year, though, was how prominently the theme of escapism featured in a lot 2011's best albums.  Often it was an escape into the musical past.  This years' releases by Destroyer, M83, Washed Out, and Youth Lagoon all reference the 80s, whether it be the verby keyboards that characterized a lot the decade's British synth-bands, the self-conscious professionalism of its production values, or simply the theme of the transformative power of sleep and dreams that artists working during ten years of Reaganomics, Spuds McKenzie, and the Dukes of Hazard, clung to like a tattered woobie.  Other eras were alluded to as well.  The Cults summoned the giddy ghost of the girl groups of the early 1960s and Fucked Up reincarnated the shit-kicking utopian ferocity of early punk rock while thankfully avoiding many of its more deservedly maligned cliches.  What would a rule be without exceptions to prove it, and idiosyncratic releases by tUnEyarDs, Colin Stetson, and Danny Brown (whose fucking hilarious parody of hip-hop bravado was the most refreshing thing I heard all year), do just that.

Come to think of it, maybe it's just me who wanted out of here this year and selected my best-of list accordingly.  It wasn't exactly a banner year for the old Reverend Dick.

Anyways, Happy New Years, bitches!

1. Destroyer: Kaputt.



Sometimes the worst ideas yield the best results.  Destoyer's Kaputt is an excellent case in point.  Dan Bejar takes some of the lamest, cheesiest, and most justifiably dated compositional materials from the 80s ("Careless Whisper"-style saxophones, Duran Durany basslines, white funk guitar licks, synth sequences that even Don Henley or Phil Collins would reject as too commercial) and crafts a sublimely beautiful masterpiece out of them.  Bejar's sings like a weary scenester whose "seen it all," but who is still capable of imagining a better world.  If nothing else, it was one reason not to hate the Coove in 2011.

2. Fucked Up: David Comes to Life.

The best punk album I've heard since, well, the last Fucked Up album.  The combination of Damian Abraham's Cookie Monster on PCP vocals and the layers upon layers of roaring guitars is the sonic equivalent of the scourging scene in Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.  And yet, the album also radiates a kind of bestial beauty, helped in no small part by the use of soft female vocal harmonies and allusions to the work of minimalist composers like Lamonte Young and Steve Reich thrown into the mix.  If I have any criticism of David Comes to Life, it's that it goes on a bit too long.  Towards the end, it starts to feel like a ferocious bout of ball-slapping coitus that's starting to chafe a bit.

3. Danny Brown: XXX.

Danny Brown explores some unlikely and refreshingly unhiphoppity territory on XXX, delving into why he drinks PBR rather than Cristall, the highs and lows of looking for scrap metal to salvage, and the "I'm rich, bitch!"-type feeling he gets when he receives his income tax return.  It also features the best song ever about eating pussy.

4. M83: Hurry Up, We're Dreaming.

On Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, M83's Anthony Gonzalez continues to muck around in the ooey-gooey textures of 80s synth pop, but without the affected coolness of some of his previous releases.  He heats up the sauce, here, so to speak, and the result is beautiful as always, but openly emotional rather than just moody.  Pretty, pretty shit.  

5. Cults: Cults.

On Cults' self-titled debut album, Madeline Follin manages to affect this weird, girl-groupy, pretty in pink, my pussy smells like cotton candy-kind of snarky, super-cool cuteness that I don't come across all that often or nearly enough.  If Nancy Sinatra's vibrator came to life and made an album, this is what I imagine it sounding like.

6. Washed Out: Within and Without.

Washed Out's music sounds like the bands name: imagine you're laying on a beach, the sun on your chest, the ocean lapping at your toes, while Enya gives you a suntan lotion hand-job all soft and slow-like.  Then you waken.

7. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong.

A great little pop album.  Sweet, unthreatening, catchy tunes that make you bop your head from side to side as you cruise mallward down the highway in the new Cabriolet your dad bought you.

8. tUnEyarDs: w h o k i l l.

One of the few albums I heard and liked this year that was unlike anything I've heard before.  Quirky without being obnoxious.  Hip without being pretentious.  Okay, it's a little pretentious.  I mean, let's face it, it's not like this chick would ever hang out with you or anything.

9. Colin Stetson: New History of Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges.

I'm a big jazz fan, but I got to admit, I haven't really listened to all that many jazz album made in the last thirty years and those that I have sound like they were made fifty years ago.  This one doesn't.  At all.  Check it out.

10. Youth Lagoon: The Year of Hibernation.

No album title summed up the music of 2011 quite like Youth Lagoon's The Year of Hibernation.  The album itself resounds with the moods and textures of just  this sort of long winter's nap, evoking something of those dreams when you fall in love with some unknown someone and then awaken to the sad realization that it was just a dream.  Fucking melancholy, to say the least.