The increasing ease of hearing new music, whether through
streaming services, downloading (legal or otherwise), or CDs burned by friends
or bought in stores has made it relatively easy to keep up with the state of
the art. Still, enough releases come out
every year that even the most ardent Pitchfork columnist can’t possibly get
around to listening to everything that’s worth hearing within the calendar
year. Some of my favorite albums of the
last few years are ones that I didn’t hear until long after they’d come
out. For example, my favorite album of
the young decade is Gonjasufi’s 2010 releases A Sufi and a Killer, the existence of which I wasn’t even aware of
until late 2011.
On my year-end list of last year’s best music, I ranked
Killer Mike’s ferocious R.A.P. Music
ahead of everything else. I’d still call
R.A.P. Music a masterpiece, but it
would’ve come in second had I heard Swans’
thrillingly unclassifiable double-album The Seer before making the
list. Michael Gira and co.’s twelfth
studio album truly feels like the culmination of their three decades of
experience making music. The eleven
tracks clock in at a combined running time of nearly two hours, but the extreme
length of many of the songs allows the band to follow every thread of their
songs to their logical conclusion. The
thirty-two minute title track is as long as many entire albums, but it packs in
more exciting ideas than most bands achieve in their entire careers, opening
with Coltrane-esque free jazz played on bagpipes, transforming into hypnotic
psychedelic rock reminiscent of Queens of the Stone Age at their most intense,
and climaxing with a devastating guitar drone finale that would make Sonic
Youth flinch. Much of the album is
uncompromisingly heavy, but Swans always seem at least equally as interested in
achieving transcendence as they are in pulverizing listeners’ ears. Appropriately, the last lyrics on the album
(not counting some untranslatable screams) are “Fuck! Bliss! Bliss! Fuck!”
One of Swans’ most talented disciples, Canadian drone-rock
experts Godspeed You! Black Emperor, returned from a
decade-long hiatus last year with the gorgeous Allelujah! Don’t Bend!
Ascend! The awkward vocal
samples that would sometimes disrupt the ethereal beauty of the group’s music
are thankfully absent, making this their most pleasing set to date. Where Godspeed frequently stretch their
lovely minimalist compositions over twenty or so deliberately paced minutes,
spastic electronica duo TNGHT’s
colorful productions are densely packed rushes of pure adrenaline. The five tracks on their self-titled debut EP
are ultra-catchy alternate universe sports anthems.
Art rock and electronica didn’t have a stranglehold on
instrumental music last year, as a small handful of jazz releases attempted to
break out of the genre’s “back corner of the CD store” ghetto. Jazz’s most brazen attempt at mainstream
recognition came in the form of Black Radio, an album where The Robert Glasper Experiment are
joined by a small army of guest stars from the world of R&B and hip
hop. But while Glasper’s genre hybrids
are consistently pleasant, they are too timid to qualify as innovative, as his
talented jazz group is too often relegated to backup musician status for the
star guests. More successful is Christian Scott’s double-album Christian
a Tunde Adjuah, whose twenty-three tracks give the trumpeter’s
exceptional quintet plenty of room to stretch out and improvise (as a jazz band
should) even as they organically incorporate elements of electronica and rock.
Exceptionally gifted genre-blurring producer/DJ/MC Madlib
had a relatively quiet year in 2012, but his talented brother Oh No continued to pump out high
quality under-the-radar hip hop. For the
album Ohnomite, the Oxnard producer was granted access to Rudy Ray
Moore’s Dolemite soundtracks, which
he repurposed for funky, left-of-center rap tracks with the help of a small
army of indie rappers. As is the case
with most of Oh No’s projects, the high quality of the beats seems a bit out of
proportion to the mostly average lyrics, and there are a few too many tracks
where Moore’s influence is indecipherable.
But it’s still required listening for beat junkies, and stands as one of
the distressingly few notable Stones Throw releases of the last few years.
None of the above albums got as much press attention as Tame Impala’s Lonerism, which was
treated as a major breakthrough despite sounding very similar to (and really
only being slightly better than) the psychedelic pop group’s unjustly ignored
2010 debut Innerspeaker. But even if Lonerism is more of a predictable progression of Tame Impala’s
Beatles-indebted sound than a full-blown masterpiece, there’s no denying that
its songs are consistently beautiful and catchy.
