2011 - a musical autobiography

The year has been over for two weeks and I'm finally getting around to compiling this list. It is not a best-of. These are the new releases from 2011 which were high points in the sonic landscape of my year. (All are linked to a sound source.) Here's to an equally brilliant year of music in 2012.

Adele - 'Rolling in the deep'
Olafur Arnalds - 'Fyrsta'
Austra - 'The choke'
Blood Orange - 'Dinner'
Blouse - 'Into black'
Burning Hearts - 'Into the wilderness'
Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow (album)
Charli XCX - 'Stay away'
Cut Off Your Hands - 'Hollowed out'
Darkness Falls - 'The void'
Death Cab For Cutie - 'You are a tourist'
Beth Ditto - 'I wrote the book'
Esben & The Witch - 'Hexagons II (the flight)'
Escort - 'Makeover'
Exploding Boy - 'Torn'
Foster The People - 'Pumped up kicks'
Friends - 'Friend crush'
Girl In A Coma - 'Smart'
High Places - 'Year off'
Holy Ghost! - 'Do it again'
Horrors - 'You said'
I Break Horses - 'Load your eyes (Star Slinger remix)'
I Was Totally Destroying It - 'Fight / flight'
Ice Choir - 'Two rings'
Jessica 6 - 'White horse'
Joy Formidable - 'I don't want to see you like this'
Kindest Lines - 'Destructive paths to live happily'
Kitten - 'Chinatown'
Letting Up Despite Great Faults - 'Teenage tide'
Lykke Li - 'I follow rivers'
Low - 'Especially me'
M83 - 'Midnight city'
Memory Tapes - 'Wait in the dark'
Mirrors - 'Fear of drowning'
Miserylab - 'People'
Model Worker - 'Automatic love'
New Division - 'Opium'
Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - 'Heart in your heartbreak'
Parallels - 'Salome'
RAC feat Liz Anjos - '1979'
Rainbow Arabia - 'Without you'
Raveonettes - 'War in heaven'
She Wants Revenge - 'Take the world'
Soft Kill - 'Sea of doubt'
Music - 'Ghost hands'
Twin Shadow - 'Changes'
Washed Out - 'Call it off'
White Lies - 'Bigger than us'
Xylos - 'X-ray'
Young Galaxy - 'Cover your tracks'
Zola Jesus - 'Shivers'

A little bit not in love

I wanted to see Lykke Li live, to the point that I drove three and a half hours to do it. Despite the fact that I've connected primarily with her singles and found her album tracks to be rather forgettable, I didn't have any reservations because she's racked up quite a few killer singles with just two albums: 'Little bit', 'Breaking it up', 'I'm good, I'm gone', 'I follow rivers', 'Youth knows no pain'... Even if the other half of the set list wasn't incredible, those songs alone would be worth the trip.

I think Lykke came out with the best of intentions, even if the taped music intro and accompanying light show was long and theatrical enough that for a moment I wondered if I had stumbled into a Pink Floyd tribute band by mistake. She started strong, and sounded great.

And then at some point, about a third of the way through, the edge seemed to come off.  I can come up with a number of reasons. The Orange Peel was quite full, if not completely sold out, but the audience was very uneven in its enthusiasm - there was some pockets of real fervor, but plenty of patches of low energy. Near the front there was an obscene number of people with cameras up, to the point that Lykke introduced a song by asking if everyone would turn their cameras off and just live in the moment.  It was one of the few times she addressed the crowd between songs, and while plenty of people cheered the sentiment, she came across as a bit dismissive. And it was Asheville, North Carolina after all - probably a prime candidate to phone in a show if an artist is running on fumes during a tour.

For one reason or another, by the halfway mark I was thinking at least once a song that Lykke was giving the impression she had more energy available to put into her performance than she was actually committing.  I could be misreading her - she obviously structures her show (staging, clothes, transitions, including a bizarre minute of drumming to a tape of the Knife's 'Silent Shout' that came out of nowhere and then left just as abruptly) to be on the edgy, dramatic side, and perhaps her attempts to look intense wound up making her look aloof. But there were plenty of moments when it felt like she was in a late stage rehearsal with the band, rather than a performance. My suspicions were only reinforced when she dropped her signature cover of 'Unchained Melody' from her encore, and gave us only one song.

So, in all, it was a bit unsatisfying, and I'd guess Lykke would say it was mutual.  In the meantime, though, she made some interesting choices, arrangement-wise. I can't say there were any home runs; 'Little bit' was overwrought and hard, losing its delicacy and playfulness. 'I follow rivers' managed to become monotonous, something I've never felt with the recording. 'Breaking it up' was missing completely. 'Youth knows no pain' was the solid rendition of the evening, but it came late in the set, and couldn't make it over the top.

I remember the New York Times review from a few months ago noticing the disparity between the toughness of Lykke Li's arrangements and the lightness of many of her lyrics, and I understand what they meant tonight. There seemed to be two dynamics: ballads done with minimal instrumentation and sophisticated harmonies, better suited for a theatre than a rock venue. The audience invariably whooped too much and too early, disrupting the moment and probably annoying Lykke. And then full bombast with few breakdowns - something easy to achieve with two drummers and as many as three other people doing percussive things at various times. I actually thought of industrial percussion ensemble Big Pig at one point; the banging was impressive, but ill-suited to the material.

I will continue to enjoy Lykke Li's singles; she shows much greater subtlety and sophistication in her recordings than I got from her live show.  I'm not closing the book on her as a live act, but I don't know that I'd drive three hours to see her again.

Lykke Li's official website

Talk Talk Talk live live live

The Troika was not up for an away game this summer, so it was quite gracious of Psychedelic Furs to bring their Talk Talk Talk tour to us, here in Carrboro.  On the one hand, fewer adventures for the memoirs (I never would have thought a Troika night would end without some kind of swimming pool activity, for example).  On the other hand, without being too maudlin about it, we are all feeling particularly happy to be alive and kicking this year, so this felt just right.

I have to admire Psych Furs for their concept: celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the release of an album off which most people only know one song (and that in a re-recorded version from a film soundtrack) by playing the entire album before getting around to any of the later hits for which 95% of the audience undoubtedly came.  It was a very effective strategy with me, because when I pulled out TTT this past week to brush up before the show, I rediscovered an album which I appreciate more now than I did when I first listened to it back in the late eighties.  (No, I was not a sophisticated enough eleven year-old in 1981 to catch TTT when it debuted.)

In 2011, TTT sounds like an absolute crucible of everything integral to new wave in 1981, which is no small feat.  Richard Butler's voice is the sound of a punk era singer admitting he fancies melodies, snarling through one song but doing his best to croon through the next one.  The sax parts aren't as punk as those recorded by Violent Femmes or early Romeo Void, but not as new romantic as those recorded by early Duran Duran or later Romeo Void.  The drums are as muscular as Budgie's.  There are no guitar solos to speak of.  At times the references go as far back as the paisley sixties. The lyrics are sometimes rude and sometimes thoughtful; the chord progressions are sometimes basic, sometimes ambitious.  Truthfully, TTT could be a very academic experience for a music historian, if it weren't so engaging.

Which is not to say TTT is timeless.  It is an ideal artifact of its time, but throughout the show tonight there was never any doubt that the material, played extremely faithfully by the band (of which only Richard and Tim Butler are originals), was thirty years old.  Richard sounds fantastic, not diminished in the least.  Lost single 'Mr. Jones' was an absolute rave-up, and should-have-been-a-single 'All of this and nothing' was a revelation - emerging all this time later as my new favorite track on the album.  Every track has classic new wave running through its veins, from the aggressive 'Dumb waiters' to the sweet 'She is mine'.

There were folks in the audience for whom it was an absolute treat to hear it start to finish, either because they had loved the album all that time ago, or, like I, developed a more recent appreciation for it.  The rest of the audience, however, got nostalgic to 'Pretty in pink' and then waited for the second half, when the later hits came out.

I didn't expect this, because I count 'Love my way' and 'Heartbreak beat' as quintessential Furs tracks, but the second half of the concert wasn't as fulfilling.  'Sister Europe' was another revelation, and the band gave almost studio-quality readings of all the singles they played, with the exception of the biggest hit of all, 'Heartbreak beat' - which somehow was lackluster and sluggish, a real disappointment.  Part of the oddness of the hits portion of the program was that certain hits were missing ('All that money wants', 'The ghost in you', 'House', 'Shock' - though that last one is no surprise, since Richard famously turned his back on it almost immediately) yet non-hits were included (despite its inclusion on greatest hits packages, 'President gas' remains a bizarre self indulgence, and 'Highwire days' is nothing more than an album track.)  'Forever now' was rather odd and completely unsatisfying as the final encore; overall the second half could have been edited and sequenced to much greater effect.

Still, witnessing Richard give an obviously personally fulfilling performance of Talk Talk Talk was a great experience.  Anyone who is tempted to dismiss new wave as an era of musical bon bons without substance or significance need only listen to Talk Talk Talk for an effective rebuttal.

Troika forever!

Psychedelic Furs official web site