It was a good year for the blog though, with some 40-odd posts, nearly all music related, making this the year to beat in terms of content production. It’s still a little unevenly paced still, but we made it through the year without any huge gaps in updates, which I’m quite proud of!

Without further ado, I have linked to the big list of the top albums of 2011. Below, for purposes of aggregation, is my Hype Zeitgeist widget.

For a long while, my eyes mentally registered the glib Welsh indie rockers not as ‘Los Campesions!’ but as ‘band with the Spanish name and the exclamation point’. After hearing the new single off their 2011 effort (review pending), I decided to see how last year’s record sounded, for context.

Actually I ended up buying it on impulse, and it seems my instincts were pretty spot-on. Romance Is Boring is a phenomenal record. If The Wombats are comedians who also happen to be solid musicians, Los Campesinos! are frenetic indie rockers who coincidentally have a wicked sense of humor.

Nearly every track has something notable or interesting or just fun that to do my typical line-by-line would be for too much, so I’ll do my best to pick representative examples.

The first 2/3 of the album almost seem to be a proof-of-concept. Right out of the gate, the first lyrics of ‘In Media Res’,

But let’s talk about your for a minute
With the vomit at your gullet
From the half-bottle of vodka /
that we’d stolen from the optic

Brash and tactless, the group assumes an instant familiarity with the listener, already singing about gross body things inside the first 60 seconds! It’s hard to criticize the language as crass though when it’s accompanied by the finesse of both a string and xylophone accompaniment.

My favorite track from this phase is ‘There Are Listed Buildings‘. While its “ba baaaaa”s are perhaps a little too evocative of DCFC’s ‘Sound of Settling’, the varied vocal textures, bombastic trumpets, and continued employ of the xylophone more than make up for it.

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‘There Are Listed Buildings’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

It’s also worth stating that the use of the refrain lyric “I think I’d do it for love, if it were not for the money” is delivered with such swagger and energy that the whole damn song could nearly stand on that alone. The track is a compact argument for why LC! demand your attention.

The title track is a lot of fun, and has some of my favorite guitar parts. Following that is a series of songs that are impressively consistent insofar as being cleverly written and exciting to listen to; connecting them in places are also a few transitional tracks, which work well.

In what I think to be somewhat uncommon, all the best material on Romance Is Boring is at the back end. The last five songs are distinct in that they meet or exceed the level of craftsmanship seen up until this point, but additionally carry some emotional component to them as well.

‘A Heat Rash In The Shape of the Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me to Charlotte’ has a narrative which begins tongue-in-cheek to be sure, but the cries of the backing vocals “It will never be the same!” along with the content of said letter to Charlotte in the final verse makes for a captivating, even enthralling, listen.

The content takes an even more grave and serious turn in ‘The Sea is a Good Place to Think About the Future’, which tells a really heart-breaking story, and opens up the leitmotif concerning the ocean that pervades the last few songs. It’s a perfect example of how slow songs don’t have to be boring.

In the penultimate slot is hands down my favorite song on the record, ‘This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind.‘

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‘This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind.’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Any song whose opening line is a screaming chorus of “CAN WE ALL PLEASE JUST CALM THE FUCK DOWN!?” is bold to be sure, but to get away with it in all seriousness has got to be classified as a work of art. Lyrical wordplay in each of the versus, but in particular the chorus, is top-notch:

The story of the winter I forgot how to speak:
My mind was like your nation’s flag /
but my breeze was too weak.
How they dragged me to the hospital /
said I had gone deaf.
But I heard everything they said /
it’s just I had no interest.

Slidey-guitars, garnished with a perfect hint of synth… it’s just awesome. Closing things down is ‘Coda: A Burn Scar In the Shape of the Sooner State’. Never minding the silly theme of state-shaped skin conditions, the forlorn repetition of “I can’t believe you chose the mountains every time I chose the sea…” is a really somber, introspective note to end what started out as such a brash and wild record.

Romance Is Boring will win your heart and your mind. It’s equal parts head-banging and thought-provoking. It’s hard to praise the Los Campesinos! collective enough for such a unique and fun LP.

Los Campesinos! – Romance Is Boring

Me and Crooked Fingers go back a ways, but probably not far enough. I first heard ‘Big Darkness’, off Red Devil Dawn, driving home late one night about 4 years ago. I ended up really liking that record, and it’s 2008 follow-up, Dignity and Shame. (Unbeknownst to me that Eric Bachmann also headed up the quite popular Archers of Loaf for most of the 1990s. You learn something new every day!)

In any case, Bachmann’s present project, Crooked Fingers, continues to become more and more refined. Breaks in the Armor is probably the group’s most accessible output to date, as is evidenced by approachable tracks such at ‘Typhoon’ and ‘Bad Blood‘.

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‘Bad Blood’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

In spite of effortlessly getting away with over-the-top lyrics, such as the opening,

Went to see my fortune teller
To see which way the winds were blowin’
She said you’ll probably get the cancer
She said you’ll surely die alone

I don’t really think of ‘Bad Blood’ as a depressing or sad song. It’s sound would seem at home as the live accompaniment to a Friday night at some south-central dive bar, thought the song has considerably more heart that most of that fare.

The trailing echoes at the end of ‘Bad Blood’ are a segue into ‘The Hatchet’, a subdued, bleak number whose texture evokes a recording covered in dust, meant to be forgotten. It’s just long enough to kinda give you the chills, but short enough not to belabor the point. It acts as a perfect counterpoint to ‘The Counterfeiter’, a surprisingly bounding track about deception of the heart.

And of course, we never make it quite through a Crooked Fingers record without a song like ‘Heavy Hours’, which is the stripped down no-frills quiet-time Eric-is-going-to-make-you-sad song. If you’re into that, it’s here. If not, it doesn’t dominate the album.

My favorite point of the album is the three song run that begins with ‘Went to the City’. Heavy drums and a piano accompaniment that keeps pace give Bachmann’s vocals a runway from which they really soar. The production of the scrambled radio sounds containing vitriolic outbursts sounded to my ear (for some reason) an homage to R.E.M.. After this, we drop the volume down a notch to ‘Your Apocalypse’, which I can only describe as ‘urgent’, but in the best way.

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‘War Horses’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Finally we arrive at ‘War Horses‘ (not to be confused with the tear-jerker film War Horse in theaters this holiday season). The song begins as a dirge-like march composed of minimal instrumentation. Slowly though, sounds are added, and the hard shell of the song melts a bit. Closer to its interior as the song peaks, Bachmann shouts,

Bracing for all hell
For their salvo to hammed down
Bad breaks in the armor
Far too weak now to turn around

The militaristic imagery of the song, and smashing percussive strikes to match, make the song feel really grandiose and epic, even with it’s short run-time.

Breaks in the Armor is a really consistently good listening experience. If you’ve liked even one or two Crooked Fingers tracks in the past, this album is sure to please. It’s pensive and thoughtful in many places, but still rocks where it needs to.

Crooked Fingers – Breaks In The Armor

My love affair with Future Islands has been love-at-first-sound(listen?) ordeal. 2010′s In Evening Air was nothing short of a masterpiece, and it bordered on instant gratification that their newest album On The Water was being released only two months after I discovered the band.

It brings me great joy to report that the album does not disappoint in the slightest. Samuel T. Herring once again reprises his role as the most tortured, broken soul you’ve ever encountered, and the Baltimore trio is truly firing on all cylinders in many places on the record.

Whereas ‘In Evening Air’ was a thoughtfully placed instrumental segue, ‘On The Water’ is a fully-fledged, bold trudge of an introduction to the thesis of the album: Love, Loss, and Longing, served with a side of pelagic imagery.

Following immediately after is the pulsating ‘Before The Bridge‘, whose driving bass and soaring vocals, try though they might, can’t really mask the tragedy of the narrative:

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‘Before The Bridge’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

And if things had changed
I would have buried you deep in my heart
And if things had stayed the same
I would have carried you as far as the sky

Whatever has us now
I can’t forget somehow
For to forget a love is to regret

And what is love is regret
And what isn’t love is a test

Following that, we hit a bit of a lull. ‘The Great Fire’ idles along, albeit with some pretty stellar vocal assistance from fellow Baltimorean and Wye Oak vocalist,Jenn Wasner, but the instrumental ‘Open’ is forgettable at best.

As evidence that I’m not biased against the slow tracks, gunning for my favorite on the album is ‘Where I Found You‘. Its melody, played by something of a digital marimba, is offset by a consistent thump of bass, eventually joined by mirroring percussion. I could go on and on about the themes and finer points of the lyrical choices, but it’s really better to just let the song speak for itself:

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‘Where I Found You’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Up next is what I’d describe as the emotional center of the album. ‘Give Us The Wind’ is a warm, gutsy piece, where Herring’s normal despair takes on a bit of an edge; the mordancy of his ‘Don’t bless me / No, don’t bless me’ really giving the song the crucial bite it needs. It’s perhaps one of the more perfect songs I have heard in a very long time.

‘Close To None’ makes better use of ambling synth, and really kicks in at roughly the halfway mark to become easily the fastest song on the album yet. It is a solid song that makes ample use of the maritime images, and serves as a good setup for the gentler but similarly-paced ‘Balance’, which follows in similar suit.

Unfortunately then, we’ve got the really weird ending bundle of ‘Tybee Island’, ‘Grease’, and an untitled bit of ocean noise. I don’t mind the ocean noise, but I hardly ever get to it because the tracks preceding are… not bad, just really uninteresting. In comparison to their peers they seem to really drag, but you might enjoy them more than I.

Really though, it’s hard to complain. The 7 full tracks at the top of the album are evidence that Future Islands are the absolute best at what they do. This is one of the few albums to come along in 2011 that I can almost universally recommend, quite simply because it has been one of the year’s very best.

Future Islands – On The Water

For a while, I was worried that I didn’t like this record. I had really high expectations for it, and it was pleasant enough to listen to, but trying to think about it, I couldn’t really recall any distinct impressions it had made on me.

Having recognized this, my next few listens I tried to be more present. Listening more actively, I finally began to understand that the music seems amorphous at first listen because it’s so damn seamless. And I don’t mean in the concept-album-y kindof way, where there’s a narrative and the songs are linked. Many songs do bleed across track markers in how they begin or end, but that in and of itself isn’t enough to achieve what I’m trying to describe.

Nowhere on the record can you find a discontinuous jump from one song to the next. The transitions are perfect gradients from one style to the next, with each being distinct from the other, but in a way you really need to look for. If you aren’t paying attention, the whole record plays like 3 or 4 giant songs. Credit where credit is due, such an effect is difficult to achieve, with Vernon and his wide array of collaborators pulling it off flawlessly.

A favorite moment of mine occurs early on the record, during ‘Minnesota, WI‘. Often times I have a favorite part of a song: maybe that’s a hook, or a chorus, or just four or five notes of a bass line. I certainly have a favorite spot on this song:

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‘Minnesota, WI’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The song is subdued and quiet, its fingerpicked melody drifts across the ethereal backing vocals, like fog over a frozen lake, until the 2:10 mark. Here, heavy distortion drops, and the song takes on an entirely different tone. It’s stronger, more defined, more sure. And after about a minute of that, it slides back into the style of the first half of the song. So desperately did I want a second round of that heavier sound, but you don’t get it. And that’s OK; in fact I’d go so far as to say the track is better for it.

Following that is ‘Holocene’, which is a fine enough song, but one which got a lot of buzz and excitement that I didn’t really understand.

The pairing of ‘Towers’ with ‘Michicant’ is also quite deft. The first is one of the more up-tempo songs on the record, and the latter is one of the slowest burners, but both have some of the records best lyrical moments, and seem to me different sides of the same coin.

I’m still a total sucker for the pre-release track ‘Calgary‘.

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‘Calgary’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

At first I was pretty bummed that more of the album didn’t have the same epic quality to it, slowly coming into focus as the seconds elapse. As it turns out, I was incredibly pleased with Bon Iver as a record, but there is a little part of me that wants to hear what a Justin Vernon record focused more on this kind of idea would sound like.

The instrumental segue track ‘Lisbon, OH’ perfectly sets big 80′s-keyboard number ‘Best/Rest’. Most of the lyrics are lost on me (even after looking up a transcription) except for the line, “I ainʼt living in the dark no more / It’s not a promise, Iʼm just gonna call it.” I made that one out, and even though I still don’t really know what it means, the delivery is so tortured and emphatic that it really resonated with me nonetheless. It’s a really great finishing track, slowly fading to an oscillating halt.

Bon Iver has a great deal more texture to it than For Emma, Forever Ago. It’s predecessor, whose now famous circumstances of production lent it a straightforward, bare-bones authenticity is a different animal entirely. With access to an arsenal of instrumentation and a slew of artists to collaborate with, Vernon has produced a work with this self-titled effort that’s full of little nooks and almost secret sounds that demand multiple listens for the full experience.

Even now, starting the album again as I finish writing this, listening to the punchy snares on ‘Perth’, I am sure I’ll find something new.

Bon Iver – Bon Iver

I am a pretty big DCFC fan. I got hooked by 2005′s Plans, and worked my way back to 2003′s seminal Transatlanticism. Following that, I think I liked Narrow Stairs a lot more than most other people. Was it an unrestrained crystallization of pure self-pity? Undoubtedly. Did I love it for exactly that reason? Basically.

So how then to approach Codes And Keys, released earlier this summer? In interviews, Gibbard and co. mentioned that they wanted to get away from the super-sap that had defined (perhaps to a fault) their previous album. That’s a perfectly legitimate goal, and I have mad respect for it. Love these dudes though I do, the result must be judged on its own merits.

Codes And Keys is, in that sense, an experimental album for the group. It’s 11 tracks are marked by frustrating degree of mediocrity. As I sit and listen to it now, I can’t really lodge any complaint of much gravity, but in the months I’ve had it in rotation, I only managed to listen to it 8 or 9 times. It’s a decent record, there just isn’t much to keep you coming back.

‘Home Is A Fire’ is a respectable enough start, with it’s building intensity and hushed chorus. The problem with this song, which is pretty endemic to many of the tracks, is that all this time is spent building and building, but there’s no release. Ben never belts out some gut-wrenching despair-fueled line (‘I need you so much closer,’ ‘I will possess your heart’, ‘You can’t find nothin’ at all / If there was nothin’ there all along’, etc.) that serves to focus all the energy of the song. It just never happens.

I did like the title track, ‘Codes And Keys‘. Below is a cut of the track they did for VH1′s Storytellers series.

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‘Codes And Keys (VH1 Storytellers)’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

It’s got a nice little ‘pop’ to it, and I think what I like most about it is that it’s chorus gets closer than most other tracks to what I wanted/expected. It’s also got a nice bit of wordplay, which is cute, if nothing else.

‘Some Boys’ has some energy to it, but it feels misdirected, and works better if you don’t listen to the words. ‘Doors Unlocked And Open’ is musically one of my favorite tracks. I sometimes wonder if songs like this wouldn’t benefit from a second non-Gibbard set of vocals on the track. A lady, perhaps? It just needs a little bit more to shift it from ‘good’ to ‘great’.

The single, ‘You Are A Tourist’, grew on me over time. It’s probably the most like what we’ve come to expect from the group. My only complaint is that it isn’t sad enough. “‘Cause when find yourself the villain \ in the story you have written” is a fantastic lyric, one of my favorites, but it’s set to such an upbeat song! The mis-match is ultimately what holds this track from being awesome.

‘Unobstructed Views’ would be way, way better if their were no lyrics. The dark, spacy instrumental is marred by the needlessly syrup-sweet lyrics at the tail end, and would have been perfect in their absence.

‘Monday Morning’ is what I’d say is the most successful foray by DCFC into the ‘write a song that isn’t that sad’ project. It’s light, smooth, and has some fun guitar hooks along with a pretty tried-and-true song structure that’s been put through its paces since the mid-2000′s.

‘Portable Television’ is a post-apocolyptic tale that is essentially rendered wholly uesless by 2002′s Postal Service effort ‘We Will Become Silhouettes’. It’s not bad in its own right, but if the purpose was to tell a peppy story about post-nuclear survival, the job can be done no better than ‘Silhouettes,’ and it was silly to try again.

Towards the end, ‘Underneath The Sycamore‘ is one of the few spots for the band is truly firing on all cylinders. This song would have been right at home on Plans (and a bright spot even there):

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‘Underneath The Sycamore’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The tone and lyrical content are well matched, and the instrumentation and pacing are spot on. I would have happily listened to a whole album of songs that reached this caliber.

‘St. Peter’s Cathedral’ is the lone callback to Transatlanticsm-style writing: Melancholy and swaying, its glib observations are penetrating and insightful. This is slow DCFC at their best, and it makes a fantastic closing track- oh, what’s that? You’re saying there’s a song after ‘St. Peter’s'?

That would be ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’. It’s cheer and heart-warming sentiments have no place on this record. The feel-good-ness of it is audacious, and I really can’t stand it at all. This is the song you play when the bride dances with her dad at the wedding, and everyone thinks it’s really sweet and special and somewhere in the audience Tom is rolling his eyes because it is basically the Most Trite Thing Ever.

No more ranting, I just had to get that out. At the end of the day, Codes And Keys is a patchwork of good and less-than-good. At roughly equal parts of each, it’s hard to emphatically say “buy this record,” but even modest DCFC fans will find enough to like to justify picking it up. I’m glad I did, and I’m also glad that Death Cab is making a conscious effort to not be complacent. It’s a really respectable thing, even if you don’t get it right on your first try. Also props to the cover design, which I found quite striking.

Death Cab For Cutie – Codes And Keys

(A Really Morbid Confession That I Am Truthfully Ashamed Of: Since the breakup of Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard, I wonder if we won’t see a return to the more downer-pop-driven style we know the group is capable of? I feel like a gross human being for even thinking in such terms…)