Reaper's Favorite Albums of 2011

[Reaper16]

22.) Disma – Towards the Megalith


Holy. ****ing. Shit. This. Album. Rules. This is a straight-up American-ass Death Metal album by a band formed by two former members of the legendary Incantation. Disma doesn’t do disservice to that pedigree. The guitar tone is nasty as all ****, like the street grime in the bad neighborhoods in Hell. There’s lots of fun tempo changes but they’re kinda’ subtle beneath the wall of sound that Disma creates. My favorite aspect of this album is the vocals. There isn’t a better harsh vocal performance this year. The dude sounds like a true Goddamned monster. Unprocessed, guttural, beastly. There’s great technical skill in addition to the sound; the vocals are a true and precise rhythm instrument here. If you really love no-frills death metal, then this might just be your favorite album of the year. I prefer my metal albums a little bit more complex and less dirty, but there is no denying how good this album is.

[Reaper16]

21.) Cunninglynguists – Oneierology


If you don’t know Cunninglynguists then this is the album to learn about ‘em. They’re a rap trio from Lexington, Kentucky (shout out to Idle Hour Farm!) and they specialize in spittin’. These guys are like Slaughterhouse, if Slaughterhouse could write coherent songs. Kno, Natti, and Deacon (who is also a producer) have a myriad of flows that they put to use. This album might just be their best work. Why? Because of its conceptual nature, of course. “Oneierology” is the study of dreams, and all of the lyrical content is about dreams of varying sorts and what can happen both in dreams and to them. The album’s opener features a repeating vocal sample of the Notorious B.I.G. rapping that famous line of his – “It was all a dream.” Listen to the metaphors on “Hard as they Come,” in which each verse is a dramatic monologue from a controlled substance. What ties the album together even more strongly is the lush, dream-like production. So many vocal samples all throughout the album make for a nearly ethereal atmosphere. This album nails the concept of dreaming way better than the movie Inception did.

[Reaper16]

20.) Bon Iver – Bon Iver


The reaction to Bon Iver’s self-titled second album seems to be one of extremes. People either really love it (Pitchfork named it the best album of 2011) or they really aren’t impressed by it (either legitimately or out of hipster backlash). I am in a middle ground that really thinks the album is damn good but not great. I really, really enjoy this album from start to finish. I’m not even a fan of Justin Vernon’s first album as Bon Iver; that stripped-down shit rarely works for me. This album though? It is way more interesting. There’s all kinds of electronic samples and synth lines and saxophones (!) and orchestral flourishes making the songs bigger, more expansive. The middle lags a bit, but the first four tracks and last three tracks continue to impress me, listen after listen. I won’t belabor this album, as enough has been written about it already in every music publication ever. It certainly has my stamp of approval though.

[Reaper16]

19.) Trap Them – Darker Handcraft


Almost as a rule, I dislike hardcore punk. I rarely enjoy metalcore because I hate hardcore vocals (which are just noise without any percussive sense to them) and I hate bland, boring breakdowns. But sometimes a metal album uses hardcore in constructive ways. Trap Them is a band whose career is built off of doing that. Darker Handcraft utilizes the raw power of hardcore punk along with heavy doses of Entombed-style death metal to create an album that is just punishing and unrelenting. Each song is short, the album is over in a flash, and you will have been slapped upside your head by dozens upon dozens of riffs by the time it’s all over. It’s quick and brutal and among the most fun a metalhead will have with a 2011 album. Linked is album highlight “The Facts,” which has an incredibly catch guitar riff and a super-fun intentional reference to The Misfits in the vocal line “I am that Goddamed sonofabitch!” Indeed.

[Reaper16]

18.) Das Racist - Relax


Das Racist released two hilarious and intellectual mixtapes last year, but some people were still wondering if they were a joke act or not. I’d like to think that anyone who has heard a Das Racist song beyond “Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell” would be able to tell immediately that both Heems and Kool A.D. have technical chops as rappers and that they have some of the most intelligent and artistically-relevant lyrics in all of hip-hop. A cursory listen to their proper full-length debut, Relax, confirms this. The album is a deft blend of full-on rap songs like “ Shut Up, Man” and “Selena” with pop-focused songs like “Girl” and “Middle of the Cake.” It’s all tied together by odd, worldly beats that frequently reflect the diverse heritage of Kool A.D. and Heems. As far as lyrics go, it isn’t just clever social commentary and references to authors this time around. Listen to Heems on the album opener: “What good is this cashmere if they’re still dying in Kashmir. Kushmir. There was homes, now it’s just dust here. Next year, same as this year: a rough year.” Worldly concerns are mixed in with hyper-intellectualism and hyper-awareness and there are no answers, just an accurate portrait of what is like to be young, educated, creative, and a minority in this country.

[Reaper16]

17.) Steven Wilson – Grace for Drowning


Steven Wilson, in the absence of a Porcupine Tree album, released one Hell of a solo album this year. It’s 2 discs (!) and Wilson considers it part of a loose conceptual album cycle with Opeth’s Heritage (#36 on my list). It does similar things as the Opeth album: it looks backwards at prog giants from the past – King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes – and wears those influences on its sleeve and also constructs the sleeve itself out of those influences and the whole shirt too is made of those influences too. It’s what you’d expect of Steven Wilson: tight songwriting (despite the length of songs), a few grand tracks, a few experiments that never achieve full lift-off. It doesn’t have the song structure issue that the Opeth album does, but it does suffer in my opinion of being too reliant upon sounds from the past. Still, this is a dynamic and enjoyable album on a number of levels. If I could like you to the 25-minute long “Raider II” I would, but instead you can settle for a 9-minute long song. Despite the flaws of these two albums, I’m excited for the third and final album in this cycle coming next year – a album that Wilson and Mikael Akerfeldt (of Opeth) are writing and performing together.

[siberian khatru]

Originally Posted by Reaper16

17.) Steven Wilson – Grace for Drowning


Steven Wilson, in the absence of a Porcupine Tree album, released one Hell of a solo album this year. It’s 2 discs (!) and Wilson considers it part of a loose conceptual album cycle with Opeth’s Heritage (#36 on my list). It does similar things as the Opeth album: it looks backwards at prog giants from the past – King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes – and wears those influences on its sleeve and also constructs the sleeve itself out of those influences and the whole shirt too is made of those influences too. It’s what you’d expect of Steven Wilson: tight songwriting (despite the length of songs), a few grand tracks, a few experiments that never achieve full lift-off. It doesn’t have the song structure issue that the Opeth album does, but it does suffer in my opinion of being too reliant upon sounds from the past. Still, this is a dynamic and enjoyable album on a number of levels. If I could like you to the 25-minute long “Raider II” I would, but instead you can settle for a 9-minute long song. Despite the flaws of these two albums, I’m excited for the third and final album in this cycle coming next year – a album that Wilson and Mikael Akerfeldt (of Opeth) are writing and performing together.

This was an album that was a very challenging initial listen, but has grown on me tremendously. As much as I have come to really like the album, the material is even much better live. For instance, I felt "Raider II" on disc was overindulgent and needed some editing, but live it was absolutely epic ... my jaw literally was agape.

You make a very good point about relying too much on sounds of the past. From the first listening, I was sitting there going, "That sounds like 'Devil's Triangle' on 'In the Wake of Poseidon,' that sounds like something from 'Red,' that sounds like 'Cirkus' on 'Lizard ...'"

Still, I really like it, more so than "Insurgentes" (which isn't bad).

[Reaper16]

16.) Necros Christos – Doom of the Occult


I’m having trouble describing why I like this album so much. I’ve listened to it a bunch this year, and it still holds up. This is a conventional death metal album in some ways, and in other ways it is baffling and strange. About half of the songs are really enjoyable mid-paced death metal, and the other half are instrumental interludes built off of Greek and Hungarian musical phrasing. And never the twain shall meet in this album, leaving the value here entirely to juxtaposition. But it works, somehow. Strangely. No one song is a representative sample of this album, but the shifts in mood, the rough transitions from sitar interlude to mid-paced guitar riffing, all work in an album-length context.

[Reaper16]

15.) Ulcerate – The Destroyers of All


Ever heard a metal band from New Zealand? Neither have I, until I came across this stunning release. Ulcerate uses guitars to create heavy post-rock soundscapes that take surprising turns. Think Pelican at their best. Only the rhythm section is incredibly technically precise. Tracks like “Cold Becoming” sound like the slow expanse of Isis combined with the precision death metal of Nile. Tracks like “Omens” (linked above) sound like Explosions in the Sky hooked up with Ansur. This album is plenty heavy, but it takes time to breath. And during that breathing it sort of sprouts wings and flies up in the air and starts gliding around cities that might be on fire. The word “epic” is thrown around entirely too much these days, but that’s what this album is: pretty epic.

[Reaper16]

14.) Cormorant - Dwellings


Cormorant hail from San Francisco, and they wear the upper-West-Coast metal badge with pride. What makes this album stand out? The guitar work, for one. It is very expressive and textural and emotional. It drops jangly jazz lines on top of mid-paced black metal canvasses. The chord progressions are always surprising; with most west coast black metal albums I can guess at this point where each song is going. Cormorant is not content with stagnation; each song manages to take dramatic twists without feeling forced. There’s also an incredible sense of melody on this album. It reminds me of Agalloch in structural ways, only beefier and with way more use of major scales. It sounds happier. But happy doesn’t necessarily equal unrelenting. This is heavy and it is intricate as all Hell. It’s perhaps the most expressive metal album of the year. A fantastic sophomore effort.

[Reaper16]

13.) Symphony X - Iconoclast


Symphony X is a known quantity at this point. You know they are going to give you fierce and technical progressive power metal riffs, clean and elegant pianos/keyboards filling out the fringes of the sound, and Sir Russell Allen’s amazeballs singing. Allen is one of my very favorite singers on Earth. He’s equally comfortable with rough-throated vibrato on aggressive tracks as he is with an expressive, gentle-yet-strong range on the more ballady tracks. Album opener “Iconoclast” absolutely smolders with pure metal intensity, while mega-ballad “When All Is Lost” (linked above) is the ultimate expression of the metal ballad: nine minutes of Allen singing like a Goddamned angel while pianos and synthesizers and bad-ass guitars combine to makes something beautiful. The song seems to climax at the 6:30 mark, but that was a false climax. That’s what Symphony X does – give you just a little bit more than you dreamed of getting. But this isn’t Dream Theater, folks. Symphony X mostly manages to avoid the cheese factor that oftentimes befalls bands with incredible guitar players. This album is overlong but otherwise excels in every single that that it does. My only real criticism is that it doesn’t represent much an evolution by the band from their previous album, 2007’s Paradise Lost. Still, this is an album to return to again and again when you’re looking for a precise blend of beauty and power.

[Reaper16]

12.) Danny Brown – XXX


If you know Danny Brown it is probably for being the weird rapper with the weird clothes and the weird haircut and the missing front tooth and the nasally voice. Yeah, he’s weird. He’s also one of the best, most complex rappers in America. XXX is a title with a double meaning; it references illicit substances as well as the number 30, which is the number of years old Brown turned this year. This album is a coming-to-grips with the big three-oh. The first half of the album is a frenetic, dark, but also wickedly clever descent into an alcohol and weed smoke-induced self-Hell. Watch the awesome video for “Monopoly” (linked above): the entire song is ****ing hilarious, with entire bars about literally shitting on a mixtape that someone give him, and lines like “type of ****a you see rockin’ Crocs at the ****in’ Wal-Mart” and “stank pussy smelling like Cool Ranch Doritos.” I really want to quote the entire song. And many songs are similarly funny and bizarre and twisted, like the dark “Blunt After Blunt” and the Jeezy-response “Scrap or Die.” It’s all fun and crazy, building up in chemical potency to the track “Adderall Admiral.” The next track, “DNA,” is like a cold-turkey detox. The beats become much more sparse and straightforward, and Brown drops his normal rapping voice for something deeper and more sobering (and more sober, period). The rest of the album enjoys this complete and total tonal shift as Brown explores the hereditary nature of addiction and the steps he might need to take to improve his quality of life now that he’s in his 30’s. It all wraps up with closing track “XXX” in which the craziness and Brown’s unique voice return, though measured somewhat by the self-exploration he’s undergone. Though (as you’ll see) there are a few hip-hop albums that I enjoy listening to more than this, XXX is absolutely one of the best albums of any sort to come out in 2011. This is a well-deserved artistic breakthrough.

[Reaper16]

11.) St. Vincent – Strange Mercy


Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, plays guitar, in case you didn’t know. She’s not just the voice behind this album-length meditation on beauty and forgiveness, she’s also the major source of sound period. Her lead guitar here is smoking. She plays very expressively and texturally, which lends support to the delicate vocal constructions on the album. So delicate are they that they threaten to fall apart with the slightest disturbance. And they do. Because Clark creates that disturbance with her manic, frenzied bursts of lead guitar that take everything that The Edge does well and filters it through Robert Fripp of King Crimson. “Cruel is the pop-rock hit that all the blogs and year-end lists are talking about, but linked above is my favorite track on the album, “Surgeon.” In it, a repetitive and frail vocal line sits atop bouncy bass and icy keyboards before a full-on synth-funk breakdown happens during the chorus, all the while building to a crescendo of fat-lipped synths soloing on top of that funk breakdown that is growing ever more menacing by the bar. This album is ridiculously complex for pop-rock. It’s surprising and eclectic at every turn. It’s also being massively underrated on a lot of year-end lists. This seems like a career-making achievement to me.

[Reaper16]

Top 10 posted tomorrow!

[-King-]

Section.80 is only 40? Son, I'm disappoint. Top 10 album to me.
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