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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Modern Rock Classic: Tame Impala, Lonerism
Every few years in making my list, there’s an album that feels (admittedly after only a few listens) like a modern rock classic, something that would warrant consideration for not only year’s best but decade’s best lists in the years that follow–Nirvana’s Nevermind, Radiohead’s Kid A, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. And if Tame Impala’s Lonerism doesn’t hold up to that standard, it at least feels like something I will have on repeat for decades to come. Its gorgeous slab of Revolver-esque pop-psychedelia leap-frogs everything else I heard this year. Though songs with titles like “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” “Music to Walk Home By,” and “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” may suggest a mopey sense of self-pity, the feel is far more celebratory, an almost sun-kissed embrace of solitude. Da ve Fridmann’s (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev) production is dense with sonic detail, all gorgeous melody and layered vocal harmonies awash in hazy synths.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Congo Rumba Reggae: Staff Benda Bilili, Bouger le Monde
Staff Benda Bilili (translated as “look beyond appearances”) garnered attention with their debut release in 2009 (recorded in the local Kinshasa zoo) and a French documentary focused on their amazing story. Congolese street musicians, most of whom were then homeless paraplegic polio victims confined to wheelchairs since childhood, the band utterly defies their stark origins with a spirited blend of Congolese rumba, reggae, and hints of American R&B, funk, and rock. If the backstory isn’t inspirational enough, this music stands on its own with soaring layers of vocal harmonies, grooving polyrhythms, crisp and varied percussion, and sure, a 19-year-old wielding a one-stringed tin can guitar like a young Hendrix.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Vintage Modern Mixed: Jack White, Blunderbuss
White has been carving his own legend as an artist through a swampy thicket of Americana since forming the White Stripes with then-wife Meg in 1997. Since then, as an artist (White Stripes, Dead Weather, Raconteurs), producer (Loretta Lynn’s career-reviving Van Lear Rose), and taste-maker (whether through White Stripes’ trademark red-white-black personal styling or championing talent through his Third Man Records label), he has taken on garage rock, punk, blues, classic pop, rock ‘n’ roll, folk, and country, and melded a sound that seems unstuck in time, both undeniably vintage and distinctly modern. It would be pointless to expect Blunderbuss to be groundbreaking, and it’s not. Instead, free from the constructs of his prior bands, White simply sounds like a kid in a candy shop, and the result is pretty terrific.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Dad Rock: The Walkmen, Heaven
Over their last several albums, the Walkmen have evolved almost startlingly from their early angular assault of rock ’n’ roll yearning to an elegant, understated and stately sense of having arrived somewhere. The shimmering guitars, crisp rhythms, and Hamilton Leithauser’s fiery croon now warmly envelop the listener where they once braced and bristled. Though I despise the inevitable “dad rock” tag, there’s no denying that the members of the NYC-based but DC-born-and-bred band ARE dads, and yes, perspectives do change, and happiness is possible, if only in postcard-size moments of perfection. And the Walkmen project a sense of having survived decades of wrecked relationships and fast living all the stronger for it.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Proto-Punk Poetry: Patti Smith, Banga
New York’s proto-punk high priestess of poetry, on the heels of a National Book Award winning memoir and global photo installation, is still restless. Though, like poet-rockers Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Smith may never be regarded as much for her musical talent as for her writing, and her often spoke-sung delivery is not for all tastes; she uses the musical settings to perfectly envelop her distinctive visions, and her voice to pull them up to the light. This may be her most accessible set of songs in her 37-year career, with her voice and singing as commanding as it has even been.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Contemporary Rock Music: Divine Fits, A Thing Called Divine Fits
As good a piece of contemporary rock music as I heard this year, and among the most surprisingly absent on year’s best lists, this indie-synth-rock debut from the super group of Dan Broekner (Wolf Parade), Britt Daniel (Spoon), and Sam Brown (New Bomb Turks) will have you wishing your volume knob went to 11. It defies the odds of such “super groups” and delivers an infectious collaboration that conveys a sense of mutual reverence among band members and highlights the best of each contributor—from taught, strutting guitar-driven rockers to jagged synth-drenched new wave.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Rough Pop-Soul: Cody ChesnuTT, Landing on a Hundred
Cody ChesnuTT first wowed me in 2002 with his raw, self-produced double disc bedroom recording, The Headphone Masterpiece. It has an exciting and occasionally frustrating diamond-in-the-rough brilliance to it, with pop-soul gems (like “The Seed,” later to become a high point on the Roots’ Phrenology) sandwiched between fragments and crude, pitchy toss-offs. With Landing on a Hundred, gone are the DIY production values, adolescent eroticism, and outright vulgarity that made Headphone Masterpiece a patchy listen. Instead, we have a wide screen, cinemascope burner, replete with big horns, sweeping strings, and ChesnuTT’s earthy soul delivery that channels Curtis Mayfield by way of Terence Trent D’Arby.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Instrumental Rock: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! / Brian Eno, Lux
In the world of instrumental “rock” music this year, this is a pair of estranged high school-aged-cousins. Lux is the shy TJ (Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) student who goes unnoticed in the corner developing the next iPod, something so obvious and simple it took a genius to design. Allelujah is the equally gifted goth drama program dropout who stages an assault of daily theater around fashion horror and self-made ennui so glaring that it quickly fades into the background. In reality, both of these albums are brilliant, each containing a single extended composition constructed as four tracks. Eno continues to mine the fertile soil of the ambient music that he has pioneered since the mid 1970s. In marked contrast, Godspeed plays on extremes in quiet-loud dynamics and slowly building and obliterating walls of droning dissonance and distortion from treated guitars, violins, pummeling drums, occasional spoken word loops, and other instruments into epics of raw and powerful beauty.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Cat Power, “Sun.”
Women’s Voices: Cat Power, Sun / Carina Round, Tigermending / Sharon Van Etten, Tramp / Anais Mitchell, Young Man in America
Of the 33 albums on my list this year, 13 feature women’s voices prominently. Setting aside Patti Smith (reviewed separately), Cat Power (Chan Marshall), at 40, is the elder stateswoman of this group, and an almost certain touch point for the others, having released seven consistently strong albums over 17 years of recording. Sun is not a radical departure for her. Written, recorded and produced on her own, the album organically brings electronics further into the mix alongside guitar and piano, but it’s Marshall’s songwriting and unmistakable, sultry voice that place this album among her best work. Though Cat Power is no joy-blossom, British singer-songwriter Carina Round surfs in still darker waters, with PJ Harvey as the most obvious influence. Opening Tigermending with the lines “Pick up the phone / I’m pregnant with your baby” certainly makes a statement, and in the chorus of “This is the Last Time,” when she doubles down her voice in near-dissonant harmonics, the impact is somehow both darkly seductive and scary as hell, like PJ Harvey’s prettier, more approachable cousin. Sharon Van Etten skirts a jagged edge between full-on indie rock and slower singer-songwriter balladry, with songs that alternately lull and lurch. With the help of members of the National and others, Tramp sounds more full-band than lonely troubadour outing. On “Serpents,” blazing electric guitars and that National drum crack spin into a full-on rock burner, putting Van Etten’s soaring voice alongside indie rock stalwarts like Liz Phair and Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses). With a voice capable of conjuring fire and stirring breezes, Anais Mitchell is the earthy one of this collective. Slotting in more in the confessional alterna-folk end of the spectrum, Mitchell, who was “discovered” by Ani DiFranco, has a voice that is likely a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, with an airiness and innocence that is frequently compared to Joanna Newsom, but reminds me of the off-kilter warmth of Victoria Williams.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Indie Electro: Dan Deacon, America
Baltimore electronic wizard Dan Deacon has built a reputation around his particular manic, frantic, frenzied, hyperactive, and whimsical “future shock” style that uses sonic density as the basis for composition. Oh, and throwing big performances / parties in Baltimore warehouses and across Europe. And starting Baltimore art collective Wham City. He’s one of those eggheads who develop compositions around sine waves using signal generators. On America, Deacon works with both live instruments and electronics, to create a largely instrumental, theme-based work that addresses both “my love of cross-country travel, seeing the landscapes of the United States, going from east to west and back again over the course of season,” and his “frustration, fear, and anger towards the country and world I live in.”
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Downbeat + Vocals: Grizzly Bear, Shields
While terms like ornate, complex, intricate, and elegant, all well suited to describing Grizzly Bear’s sound, suggest a tough listen, at least a good half of the songs on Shields are surprisingly immediate and accessible; the other tracks, I hope, are growers that will reveal themselves more fully with repeat listens. The sound is bigger and brasher than the stunning brightness of “Two Weeks” from 2009’s outstanding Veckatimest. Heap on the band’s signature layers of minor key vocal harmonies, and this is an extremely rewarding if somewhat downbeat affair.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Indie Rock: The Shins, Port of Morrow
Bands that come out of the gate great, as the Shins did with their 2001 debut Oh, Inverted World, and continue to release consistently great music over a decade or more through both band and side projects inevitably suffer from being measured not against some neutral standard, but against themselves (or worse, critics’ expectations of them). See also the latest from the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective, Jack White, Amadou & Mariam, and the Walkmen. In other words, if Port of Morrow (or the current releases by any of the aforementioned artists) were a debut from a new band, critics would be salivating, and these albums would be topping year-end lists. All right, yeah yeah, so life is cruel (and this from the guy who failed to include critically acclaimed new albums from Springsteen and Dylan on his year’s best list).
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Soul Master: Bobby Womack, The Bravest Man in the Universe
Nearing 70, the ’70s soul master is not going gently into that good night. With his fi rst album of original material in 18 years, Womack, with the help of collaborators Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, Blur) and Richard Russell, manages to bring together classic soul and modern grooves to great effect. Having somehow evaded the grip of hard drug addiction, colon and prostate cancer, and gunshots from an angry wife, his voice is weathered to near-perfection, balancing power with a sort of aged wisdom, and the arrangements and production bring forward the best elements of the soul era (string arrangements, swirling organ) and plant them firmly in a modern mix with clicky beats and dubby bass grooves.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Poet Minstrel: Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas
I haven’t really followed anything he’s done since 1969; somehow, the Smiths-loving, Nick Cave-friendly embracer of gloom in me has always struggled with Cohen’s particular brand of bleakness. Well, 40+ years on, the frigid edges have thawed just a little, and through a ghostly deep-throated baritone sure to make my daughters cringe (as they do with Johnny Cash), Cohen delivers songs that are spare to the point of skeletal, but uses simple, elegant gospel-inflected backing choir, lightly whirring organ, and minimalist guitars to bring the needed musicality to carry the weighty words along—a true poet’s meditations on, among other things, spirituality and mortality fitting for a literary and folk music icon born seven years before Dylan and a year before Elvis.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Art Rap: Kendrick Lamaar, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City
There are just times when middle-aged white guys need to sit in their VW Passats and feel something real, something raw. But all the LOL and ROTFL aside, good rap music for me, like good “world music,” transports me deep into an experience that is foreign to me—rhythmically, sonically, and lyrically. Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is the sound of Compton. Over thick and varied beats, Lamar’s purposeful, nimble flow paints vivid, detailed, diary-like parables of gang violence, substance abuse, and the characters that inhabit the streets he has walked for his short 25 years.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Noise Rock: Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory
Led by 21-year-old frontman Dylan Baldi, Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings, aided by the raw production attack of Steve Albini (Pixies, Breeders), deliver a gut punch of fast, heavy, grungy noise-rock that could comfortably spin alongside the best ‘80s-’90s punk from the likes of Firehose, Nirvana, Husker Du, Fugazi, and Pixies.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Moody Pop: The xx, Coexist
It was virtually unimaginable that The xx could strip away anything from the sound of their 2009 debut, xx. That album was filled with pop songs so hushed, so stripped of every pop music trapping (including things like instruments, sounds, etc.), “minimalist” seems like too quaint a term to describe it. With Coexist, they move the undeniably successful formula that is uniquely theirs further along this spectrum, with near-whispered vocals, lightly plucked guitars, brushed drums, and faint synth flourishes framing the song-skeletons.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Melodic Rock: Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan
When 2009’s Bitte Orca came out, I really wanted to like it. It got great reviews. So, I listened to it and I really tried to like it, but I just couldn’t. Every time a pretty melody started taking shape, there was something bracing, a jarring shift of time signature, a dissonant chord, a strange vocal gyration—it was an album of great ideas rendered very unapproachable. With Swing Lo Magellan, that has blissfully all changed. Granted, the Dirty Projectors are still charmingly off-beat and a far cry from the mainstream, but there is a warmth and accessibility that allows the band’s strengths to shine.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Guitary Rock: Dinosaur Jr., I Bet on Sky
It takes no more than a passing glance at J. Mascis to recognize that Dinosaur Jr. are blissfully out of touch with modern times. Though it’s not clear whether the tangle of white-ish hair, birth control glasses, and torn jeans would be more in place in the ‘90s grunge era or the ‘60s hippie era, the music on I Bet on Sky continues the sonic trajectory of their ‘80s-’90s noise-rock reign, though dare I say just slightly more quietly. The album covers a broader sonic range than virtually any of their earlier work, but still delivers no shortage of fuzzy guitar heroics.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Collaborative: The Flaming Lips, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends
Though not a “proper” Flaming Lips studio release, the absence of Heady Fwends from any of the major year’s best lists is pretty surprising, as the diverse set of collaborations is as good a window into the Lips’ aural acid freak-outs as just about anything they’ve recorded. Here, they manage to compile a set of consistently strange and psychedelic collaborations with other artists, from the logical (Tame Impala, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros) to the not-too-surprising (Neon Indian, Jim James, Bon Iver, Nick Cave) to the insane (Ke$ha, Biz Markie), into a surprisingly cohesive and hugely enjoyable, if manic, listen. The 10-minute melting cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” with Erykah Badu is reason enough to give this a spin.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Garage: Japandroids, Celebration Rock
Japandroids are a garage punk duo from Vancouver. With the aptly titled Celebration Rock, the band delivers an adrenalized, fist pumping fury of youthful abandon and sing-along anthems that don’t break any significant new ground, but make for a great listen in the vein of Gaslight Anthem.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Alt-Folk: First Aid Kit, The Lion’s Roar
The opening title track of The Lion’s Roar grabbed me from its opening moments. It oozed a sort of haunted Appalachia, and by the chorus, with a second voice entering like some front porch Holy Ghost revival, I needed more. So it came as no surprise that this earthy, country-inflected folk music was the work of a sister duo hailing from, of course, Sweden. With crisp, clean production by Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes), the album floats along its dirt roads in a sepia afternoon haze.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Americana: Shovels & Rope, O’ Be Joyful
Husband-wife duo Shovels & Rope from Charleston, SC play a well-travelled blend of raucous stomp and romp Americana drawn from a broad palette of American roots music (country, folk, blues, rock‘n’ roll) not unlike the playbook of Jack White. Though they balance prettier folk harmonies with more aggressive attacks throughout O’ Be Joyful, there is a shambolic underpinning and looseness to the vocal interplay that hearkens to edgier male-female vocal duos like X and the White Stripes.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Exitmusic, “Passage”
Epic Rock: Beach House, Bloom / Now, Now, Threads /Exitmusic, Passage
Ethereal, female-fronted, melancholic shoegazers had a strong showing this year, as evidenced by this trio of soul-nourishing bands / albums. Each treads on a slightly different spot on the pretty-noisey continuum for this range of music, with Baltimore’s Beach House providing some of the most haunting, spectral melodies this side of the Cocteau Twins. In fact, Victoria Legrand’s voice is such a ringer for Cocteau’s Liz Fraser that I’d be hard pressed to distinguish them in a “blind taste test.” Brooklyn husband-wife duo Exitmusic, fronted by actress Aleksa Palladino (Boardwalk Empire), soars into epic atmospherics and ice-scapes reminiscent of Sigur Ros, Palladino’s voice slipping seamlessly between breathy coo and roaring growl. There are no big musical innovations with Minneapolis’ Now, Now, but this sweetly melancholic heap of fuzzy, buzzing shoegaze is quickly becoming a go-to source of feel good/bad ear-candy and should please fans of shoegaze stalwarts like Lush and Pale Saints, or more recent sad-pop purveyors like Death Cab for Cutie.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Soul Funk: Amadou & Mariam, Folila
There’s not much to say about Amadou & Mariam that I haven’t said in prior write-ups for 2005’s Dimanche á Bamako and 2008’s Welcome to Mali. This blind couple makes relentlessly fresh, earthy, and soulful music that merges the best of traditional Malian music with pop, blues, soul and funk.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Country Pop: Dwight Yoakam, 3 Pears
Dwight Yoakam may not be what you think he is. For me, his name has always conjured mainstream (i.e. pop) country, a line that, despite my country-rock leanings, I was not prepared to cross. To the contrary, he is known for a more classicist blend of Americana, all of which is evident on the acclaimed 3 Pears—equal parts Bakersfield country, honky-tonk, and roots rock. Two standout tracks, “A Heart Like Mine” and “Missing Heart,” were produced by Beck.
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2012: One Man’s Take on the Year in Pop Music
Experimental Pop: Animal Collective, Centipede Hz
Baltimore’s Animal Collective may never again reach the heights of their brilliant, critically acclaimed commercial breakthrough, 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, but they are still swinging for the fences. Though lacking that album’s infectious pop sensibility, Centipede Hz is a mad experimental jumble of amazing sounds—some of which congeal into real songs (album openers “Moonjock” and “Today’s Supernatural,” in particular) and some of which don’t.
DOUG SCHULTE is an IT strategy consultant and music fan out of Arlington, Virginia. Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he was inspired by the DIY ethic of the area’s punk scene, local record labels, and fanzines in the early 1980s and has maintained a passion for new music since. He spent six years living in Oklahoma City and Norman.
Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 3. Feb. 1, 2013.
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