The first #1 for Pacific Northwestern indie folk troupe The Decemberists saw them stripping away 100% of their theatrics to get back to their roots and do what they do best: simple, sweet folk songs with an alt country bent. Play to your strengths, Meloy.
At first I was listening to it over and over again because I was trying to see what all the hype was about. It charted at #2 on the Billboard 200 and everyone was talking about it. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but eventually I was listening to it over and over again because I couldn’t stop. It had become the film-within-the-book in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that renders the audience incapacitated.
“I still keep my baby teeth, In the bedside table with my jewelry, You still sleep in the bed with me, My jewelry, and my baby teeth. I don’t need another friend, When most of them I can barely keep up with. I’m perfectly able to hold my own hand, but I still can’t kiss my own neck. I wanted to give you everything but I still stand in awe of superficial things I wanted to love you like my mother’s mother’s mothers did…Civilian…”
What started as a tour together between Kill Rock Stars darlings Thao Nguyen (of her assembled Get Down Stay Down) and Mirah Zeitlyn of Mirah quickly turned into collaborative songwriting and the world was made better for it. The album was produced by Merrill Garbus (see #5).
This is the year Merrill Garbus exploded with her musical project tUnE-yArDs, a collage of multi-instrumentation and sound effects. The album is bombastic, fun, and incredibly original. I seriously didn’t understand what I was listening to the first time I heard it streaming on 
The follow-up to her debut Neptune City, singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins is moody and soulful and dark. Taking inspiration from Ennio Morricone, a lot of the songs give you the unsettling feeling you’re living a David Lynch movie. It was actually her poster hanging at Subterrenean the night after she performed there that made me listen to this record, making me immediately regret missing her there.
Another #1 record, this is the sexy, soulful followup to her debut album 19 (I hope she titles all of her albums the age she was at the exact moment she wrote them, like a diary). It is all at once empowering and heartbreaking soul pop.
Ridiculous album cover aside, this is a record by a married couple who traveled the world and then made an album about it. It is dumb, fun twee pop and one that I listened to over and over again at work, alongside Bon Iver and Civilian. Unfortunately I missed them at Lollapalooza, but I could still hear them.
2011 saw a return-to-form for John Darnielle’s songwriting project The Mountain Goats after a dissappointing response to 2009’s Life of the World to Come. It is driving, full, and dripping with the cleverness audiences come to expect from Darnielle.
Another collaboration that once it came together seemed fairly obvious with fantastic results. An annoying ad campaign for a pretty brilliant hip-hop album that is dark and fun and has a cornicopia of special guest stars including Beyonce, Frank Ocean, Mr. Hudson and a polarizing use of an Otis Redding track. The songs that have “featuring” credits are the best ones on the album. This album is kind of a big deal. If you haven’t heard this, you’re basically out of the loop.
Aside from the sheer fact of its girth and its packaging (three discs, six songs each, three songs per side, amazing artwork / photography of Ms. Newsom) the album showed a new level of her songwriting lyrically, pushing out of the symbolic and into the intimate. On her two previous albums she would dress up what the songs were really saying in strange fantastical characters (a bear, a taxidermied dove), but on this one she would tell it to you straight: "It does not suffice to merely lie beside each other as those who love each other do."
I will apparently never outgrow my love of Ben Folds. And this album is kind of a dream come true for me because I love a good amount of the novels of Nick Hornby. So for them to collaborate on songs is just something really special. And the songs are good! They're catchy, they're dirty, they're funny, and they got in my head so much that I had to listen over and over. The litmus test for me for a really good album is when my favorite song changes periodically. For a week it will be track 1, and then graudally track 10, and then track 2. Every track on this album was my favorite during a different three day period.
I just got this like two days ago and have already listened to it something like ten times. I don't think it is AMAZING yet and it is probably a little overhyped already, but I find it to be more interesting and releavant than most things that came out this year. Kanye is a jackass, but what he does well is puts together some pretty epic compositions. (And I am loathe to use the word epic casually).
I actually don't have a lot to say about this album that hasn't already been said. I just liked it. The songs were good. It didn't affect me the way their previous album Boxer did but it was still totally great. It's one that the more you hear it creeps up on you; a dark horse contender. Bloodbuzz Ohio, England, Anyone's Ghost.
This is another case of, I don't have a lot to say about it but I just liked the songs on it better than other album's songs. I see this record as a kind of comeback for Arcade Fire. I was so in love with Funeral that anything that wasn't Funeral wasn't good enough for them in my eyes. So when Neon Bible came out and had a pretty different sound and was doing something different, something I didn't much like, I was really disappointed and was pretty much unable to go back to it and listen to it for its merits. I see this album as kind of a return to form. I also really like the theme of suburbia, of sprawl, of rural areas, etc. It's another one that I feel like I need to listen to it more but haven't gotten around to yet.
This record has everything I like: a swedish folk singer writing songs in American traditions with a sparse production, acoustic guitar, and a raspy voice. OK, maybe that's a little too specific. But this is one that kept getting in my head constantly all summer and when I found out the dude was Swedish I was all, "What the what??" He sounds like some combination of Bob Dylan and the dude from Deer Tick. Emphasis: The Wild Hunt. WARNING: It will not leave your head if you listen to it more than twice.
What can I say? There is something fun / raw / catchy / garagey / adorable about these songs, many of which were pulled from the playlists Bryan Lee O'Malley lists in the back of the original comics this film is based on. Particularly the Plumtree and Metric songs, but also the tracks composed by Beck for the fictional band Sex Bob-omb are very good. Of all the albums released this year, I kept returning to this one. Emphasis track: Beachwood Sparks - "By Your Side." 
I liked this short stack of songs better than his strange full lenth The Age of Adz. It is just more my taste, and there's less to digest with a shorter one like this. It's just sweet. Emphasis: Heirloom.
Yes, this. I liked this better than a lot of other things I heard this year, specifically the song "On and Ever Onward." A genius collaboration.
Honestly, a large part of my basis for putting this on here is how much I still love anything The Magnetic Fields do because of how good 69 Love Songs was/is. When a new record comes out by them they are still as good as they are on that record and it's like yet another disc to that neverending album has come out for us to enjoy. It's not doing anything new or exciting, it's just The Magnetic Fields doing what they do; sparsely composed songs about heartbreak featuring the tiniest instruments. Emphasis: "You Must Be Out Of Your Mind."Rediscovering Our Record Collections: Harvey Danger's "Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?"
My sister went to California and informed me of a new song I absolutely had to hear. But because we had DirecTV with MTV2 back at Mom and Dad’s, I’d already heard it. I didn’t get the record right away; I borrowed it from a friend and listened to it over and over again before buying it myself. Thankfully I was able to exchange an Everclear CD at K-Mart and traded it for this disc.
There is something quintessentially late ‘90s about WHATMG? The focus is on the vocals, which are kind of nerdy. There is feedback and distortion. There is a hidden track of yelling. And it was such an important record for my life at the time. The songs were alternative to alternative. They weren’t punk or grunge. They were just fast rock-pop songs with clever lyrics dripping with irony and wit and peppered with allusions to literature and pop culture.
And they were dark. And pained. There are so many heartbreaks associated with this album for me. I can remember being in my room and listening to this album with my CD player turned up to 5 (which was loud) and drawing the faces of sad characters and writing the worst imaginable poetry. And when Sean Nelson sings “I forget what my friends look like and they forget why they like me, but that’s old hat, I’m so happy. How do you write about that?” I took that as a reason to be hopeful.
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