Pazz and Jop 2011 - the results

My first thought when I clicked on the main results page was that somebody had hacked into the Village Voice's website and put their friend's band at #1. It took about ten seconds for me to realize that the whole thing wasn't some elaborate joke. Who the hell are tUnE-yArDs? Obviously I hadn't paid close enough attention when they (or rather, she) had turned up on other year-end lists (which I admit to not having perused too carefully, other than searching for some sort of end of year consensus). So I immediately watched the video for "Bizness" and was appalled. tUnE-yArDs are horrible.

What's even more amazing is that "w h o k i l l" received nearly the same number of points (and more points/mention) than Animal Collective did in 2009 (and yes, there were nearly identical numbers of voters in those years). Does this mean that tUnE-yArDs were a phenomenon nearly on par with Animal Collective, who seemed virtually inescapable for all of 2009? In the past few days, I've seen that I wasn't the only one who was completely in the dark about tUnE-yArDs' "success". She seems to be the perfect poster girl for a year with such a surprising lack of consensus. Everyone who doesn't love her, hates her or has no idea who she is, and you could say the same about most of the P&J top ten albums this year.

Here are my top ten albums and their placements in the poll:

M83, "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" (#19)
PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake" (#2)
Wolves in the Throne Room, "Celestial Lineage" (#144)
The Caretaker, "An Empty Bliss Beyond This World" (#84)
Death in Vegas, "Trans-Love Energies" (#419)
Modeselektor, "Monkeytown" (#1670)
I Break Horses, "Hearts" (#819)
Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972 (#39)
Surgeon, "Breaking the Frame" (#613)
Mogwai, "Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will" (#116)

In Centricity rankings, I was #378, roughly the median of the 700-person voter list. This puts me in a position similar to 2009, where I voted for two very high ranking albums. This was enough to put me in the middle of the Centricity rankings even though most of the albums I voted for finished way down the list. Tim Hecker at #39 is astoundingly high, even though it's been a constant in the lists on indie and electronic music sites, I don't think anyone would have predicted that it would finish in the top 40 of a generalist poll like P&J. The Caretaker also finished surprisingly high thanks to one of the highest points/mention ratios in the poll (Tim Hecker got more than three times as many mentions as The Caretaker).

The rest of my top took their fairly predictable positions. There are always enough ten or so Mogwai fans who manage to get their albums into the top 200. I cast the only vote for Modeselektor (note that #1670 = third last, behind only single mentions with six and five points), not unlike two years ago when I was one of two voters for the eponymous Moderat album. The P&J electorate simply do not care for them. If there was ever an album that I assumed I'd be the only one to vote for, it was "Breaking the Frame", but it garnered two other votes, one of them by longtime electronic music critic Todd Burns, who basically only votes for techno year in and year out.

As for my singles ballot, "Till the World Ends" had a somewhat shocking top ten finish (somehow this became the go-to Britney single), Gaga and Nicki Minaj were huge, and the rest were "songs" that only I voted for (except for "Try To Sleep", with five other mentions). I'm glad I stopped listing songs from my top ten albums list -- PJ Harvey placed eight songs from "Let England Shake", and tUnE-yArDs placed seven from "w h o k i l l". Sometimes you can't avoid voting for songs from the year's best albums, but when they clog up the songs list like this, it makes for a boring list.

Glenn McDonald noted that only four voters finished with Centricity higher than 0.7 this year, compared to 26 in 2010 (recall that a voter whose top ten matched the P&J top ten -- in content, not necessarily in the same order -- would have a Centricity score of 1). Let's quantify this a bit more, because in 2009 there were only 12 voters over 0.7, and that was the year of GAPDY (Girls, AnCo, Phoenix, Dirty Projectors, YYY) where loads of people were in arms about Pitchfork taking over P&J and everyone supposedly voting for exactly the same five indie albums.

Consider the number of voters with Centricity equal to or above the following cutoffs in 2009-11:

-	0.75	0.65	0.6	median
2011	0	13	36	0.295
2010	16	42	74	0.289
2009	7	19	30	0.233

The most telling drop off is above 0.75 -- nobody's individual taste even came close to representing the consensus, in the strictest sense. But if you take a more moderate definition of consensus, like > 0.6, then 2011 and the supposed hivemind of 2009 are very similar.

At the high end of the Centricity rankings, 2010 looks like a huge outlier, I think this is because the crazy huge number of votes for Kanye West are skewing the rankings. The median Centricity scores for 2010 and 2011 are almost identical, i.e. the outliers on the high and low end of the consensus scale balance each other out. After starting to write this, I noticed that Glenn had tabulated something similar for 2008-11. Take out 2010, and the degree of consensus doesn't change much over the past four years. His "consensus" number is clearly weighted according to the high end of the Centricity rankings (i.e. the number of voters who tended to make consensus picks), whereas his "diversity" number is probably more like the standard deviation of all the Centricity scores, which would tend to be mostly clustered around the median for that year.

Two of my comments were printed this year, which was a nice surprise, especially considering I didn't have much time to work on them. Even when there isn't enough time to work on detailed comments, I always try to fit in something about my #1 album. I figure it's my duty to at least try to justify that pick. This year they picked my "weird" comment too, although the theme of getting older and failing to keep up with new music and remember the names of artists/songs turned out to be a mildly popular one, judging by the other comments expressing similar sentiments.

I haven't read all the essays and comments yet, but Chris Molanphy's The Incredible Shrinking Album is unique and I think very important. We don't tend to talk about sales figures when breaking down these lists, which is strange because the music industry as a whole is all shrinking sales figures all the time. tUnE-yArDs' likely record as the weakest selling P&J #1 seems like it will be tough to break, but as Chris points out, in a year where two of the top twenty albums were free, downloadable mixtapes, and two of the top ten singles barely exist outside of Youtube, can we really say that with much confidence?

And finally, where art thou gone, b-factor? tUnE-yArDs scored a 6, Bon Iver an 8. Obviously this wasn't intended to be a predictive factor, i.e. just because your upcoming album has a b-factor of 20 doesn't mean you're destined for success, but a claim that an artist that does break through is quite likely to have a b-factor in a particular range. Is this what happens in years where consensus doesn't form? That is, can we expect a critical "free for all" where the usual rules of tastemaking don't apply?

Clearing the critical bar

It may have started when I wrote about M83 and Spiritualized in my Top Albums of 2011. I can't remember exactly what sparked it, but I've been listening obsessively to Spiritualized all week -- live recordings, mainly. I revisited those spine-tingling Acoustic Mainline shows from '06-'07 (and a pristine quality audio and sound recording from a special acoustic performance from a festival in Iceland in 2010). I heard a complete performance of "LAGWAFIS", recorded in New York in July 2010, that far exceeded my expectations (I'm not a fan of the complete album performance fad, but if you can count on any band to make it interesting and not just do a note for note run through, it's Spiritualized). I listened to recordings of the fall 2001 tour with the audacious 13-member band. I happily suffered through poorly recorded early gigs from 1991 and 1999 (the latter was a one-off gig, I believe, with full choir accompaniment). In the pre-Youtube era you would always cycle through the same recordings of your favourite bands every time you wanted to go on a listening binge, but now you can discover a nearly bottomless pit of new treasures -- TV and festival performances, interviews, cell phone clips, etc.

What was I thinking when I compared M83 with Spiritualized? M83 are amazing, easily the most consistently excellent band of the past several years, but nobody tops Spiritualized when they're at their best. At least not this week.

But this post is supposed to be about M83's sudden jump into elite status, judging by the unexpectedly good showing (at least to me) of "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" in many year-end polls and lists. But it could be applied equally well to Spiritualized c. 1997. And a host of other bands.

It's not like M83 were unknowns before this year. They had a healthy base of support among critics, enough to put "Saturdays = Youth" in the top 30 in Pazz and Jop in 2008, which indicates a high level of exposure but not an "everybody has an opinion on your music" level of exposure. So what exactly changed this year? Was "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" a huge step forward compared to their other albums? Not really. You can argue about how to rank their albums or what have you but most longtime followers of the band wouldn't say that their music suddenly took a jump into a different league.

A similar thing happened with Spiritualized in 1997. Now obviously the differences between "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" and their earlier albums are a lot more dramatic compared with M83 and "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming". They went from making semi-instrumental space rock to more of a free jazz/rock hybrid complete with actual love songs, so it doesn't take much imagination to understand why they became a lot more accessible to a lot more people nearly overnight. I think a band can wake up one day and discover -- not just because of their sustained run of excellent music -- that it's their time to be in the spotlight. But still, why exactly did the breakthrough happen for Spiritualized in 1997, and not before or after?

A great album and a classic album are not at all the same thing. Bands make great albums all the time. Making a great album is largely a question of talent, and being able to reach the right audience who will appreciate that talent. But classic albums are much rarer. These are the albums that people other than the band's usual fans will hear and remember. It's not just about who has the most talent. It's also a question of timing.

There might be no better timing than the release of a debut album. Everyone loves debut albums. They're about the thrill of hearing a great new band for the first time, or the collective experience of discovering and getting excited about them at almost the exact same time as everyone else. The band will never be that flawless ever again, over time they'll hopefully make a lot more great music but they'll also make a ton of mistakes and missteps. But with their debut album, without the burden of having to overcome past screw-ups or reputations, they couldn't be more perfect.

On the other hand, the sophomore slump is real. That saying about how bands have their whole lives to write their debut album but only 18 months to write and record the follow-up is true in the sense that the second album almost never seems to be the best in any band's catalog.

By their third or fourth album, a band is somewhat established and has built up some name recognition. They have enough of a following to justify keeping the band going at least on a part time basis, so they're not likely to fold up shop for lack of money or interest. Each new album will be hotly anticipated by fans, and critics don't want to get behind an obvious failure. By album three or four, you're fairly comfortable in saying that a band will have a sustainable career ahead of them. It would be a bit embarrassing to heap loads of "album of the year!!" praise on a band and album that ceased to exist one year later. They also don't want to laud some journeyman band that's been around forever but has never achieved much success. You want to get behind a band when they're about to reach their peak, not after they've already peaked, and not after too many years when you're still waiting for them (perhaps hopelessly) to peak.

Further down the road, once a band has been around for a number of years and released a bunch of albums, overfamiliarity sets in and they aren't as newsworthy anymore. They reach the point where they cater mainly to their existing fan base (which nonetheless may be large and extremely loyal) but don't pick up many new fans. Non fans, including critics who are familiar with their music but wouldn't necessarily listen to it in their spare time, see them as a band to be respected but not adored or fawned over. They can be very successful, but not a phenomenon in the critical sense.

A picture is starting to form of two "sweet spots" in a band or artist's career. The first is the release of their debut album, and the second occurs about 5-7 years and 3-5 albums.

So let's consider the following simple formula:

(# of years since debut + 1) x (# of albums)

I couldn't think of a funny acronym (CRIt-LOve Peak Prediction factor = CRILOPP factor ... ugh, forget it) so I'll call it the b-factor for now.

"Years since debut" is the number of years since the band's debut album was released. I thought about using the total number of years the band had been active, but most bands toil away in obscurity for a while without anyone really knowing who they are. The debut album marks the first time that a larger audience can be made aware of their music, and that's what we're trying to capture here. "Number of albums" is fairly self-explanatory, although one might need to differentiate between "proper" studio albums and other releases such as live albums, EPs or mini-albums (particularly for a new band), compilations, soundtrack work, etc. Obviously there is room for interpretation here, but I tried to stick closely to official studio albums as best I could.

A debut album, therefore, always has a b-factor of one. Very large b-factors (we'll try to quantify this later on) indicate that a band is past their likely peak, or at least past the time when they can reasonably expect a critical or popular breakthrough. Going by the sweet spot estimation of 5-7 years and 3-5 albums, we'd expect the ideal time for critical blowjob end-of-year chart topping success to occur for b-factors of 25 +/- 10.

[aside: I think it's more realistic to weight the two halves of the b-factor differently. (# of albums) feels more discriminatory than (# of years since debut), i.e. over-familiarity comes more from releasing a lot of albums than by taking a lot of time between albums. So maybe it would be better to use something like (# of years since debut +1) x (# of albums)^(3/2). But in the interest of keeping the calculation basic (something that doesn't require a calculator) and for using nice, easy to remember integer numbers, we'll stick with the simpler formula for now.]

As a test, here are the b-factors for the #1 albums on Pitchfork's year-end critics polls, from 1999-2011:

Year	Artist	Album	"Years"	"Albums"	b-factor
2011	Bon Iver	"Bon Iver"	3	2	8
2010	Kanye West	"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"	6	5	35
2009	Animal Collective	"Merriweather Post Pavilion"	9	9	90
2008	Fleet Foxes	"Fleet Foxes"	0	1	1
2007	Panda Bear	"Person Pitch"	8	3	27
2006	The Knife	"Silent Shout"	5	4	24
2005	Sufjan Stevens	"Illinois"	5	5	30
2004	Arcade Fire	"Funeral"	0	1	1
2003	The Rapture	"Echoes"	0	1	1
2002	Interpol	Turn on the Bright Lights"	0	1	1
2001	Microphones	"The Glow Pt. 2"	3	5	20
2000	Radiohead	"Kid A"	7	4	32
1999	The Dismemberment Plan	"Emergency and I"	4	3	15

Out of thirteen albums, four are debuts, and another seven fall within a fairly narrow b-factor range from 15-35.

Getting back to the examples discussed at the start of this post, M83's "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" has a b-factor of 55 (note that I didn't count "Digital Shades, Pt. 1") and Spiritualized's "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space" has a b-factor of 18. If we consider recent Pazz and Jop polls, we see many of the same patterns: 15 for TV on the Radio's "Dear Science" (2008), 50 for Outkast's "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" (2003), and 32 for Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (2002) (discounting the Woody Guthrie covers albums with Billy Bragg, but even if they were counted, YHF would only score a 48). The numbers seem to suggest that bands peak and/or have their critical breakthrough at b-factors in the 15-35 range, with a significant tail of the distribution extending up to around 50-60.

I doubt I'm the first to notice all this, in which case, consider this article to be my musings on the subject.

Obviously this is not meant to be some kind of grand theory of music crit everything. There are a number of instances where the reasoning behind the b-factor wouldn't really apply, for example:

-- Side projects or solo records from established artists. Example: Michael Jackson. "Thriller" was his sixth solo album, but his second as the "adult" Michael that became a megastar. However, we was already a household name with the Jackson 5 before that. Defining his "debut" is a murky issue. A different example: LCD Soundsystem. "Sound of Silver" (#1 on P&J in 2007) has a b-factor of only six, but James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem had been around for years prior to their official debut album, making their name via singles and DFA Records.

-- Megastars in general. Kanye's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" falls into the 15-35 range, but all his albums have been critical and popular smashes. Bon Iver may fall into this category as well.

-- Career resurgences by artists such as Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, or PJ Harvey's "Let England Shake" (b-factor 160, which would be higher if you count "4 Track Demos" and the John Parish collaborations). However, you could easily argue that an artist making their second, third, etc. breakthrough is already in a different category, and that b-factors should only be relevant for an artist's initial breakthrough.

What would be a "large" b-factor, where overfamiliarity sets in and a breakthrough becomes extremely unlikely? Based on the examples considered here, anything over 50-60 is already unlikely to break through, a safer bet would be about 100. You can argue that Animal Collective are an exception because they're not a "band" in the usual sense of the word (members come and go from album to album, and most of their albums don't feature everyone in the collective), but I'm not sure I'd subscribe to that reasoning. "Merriweather Post Pavilion" and its extremely high b-factor (90) may the kind of breakthrough we won't see again for a long time.

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 7, A 2011 mix

I've been making year-end mixes for the past few years, but this is the first time I've posted any of them anywhere. And now that Mixcloud has gotten rid of the 100 MB size limit, I'm going to be using them as my platform for posting mixes in the near future.

I like these year-end mixes to have a decent flow to them, which I have to map out the track selection and ordering fairly precisely, contrary to my usual preferred method of making mixes. The idea is to fit in a bunch of different styles of music, and go beyond my known favourite albums and songs, i.e. not to take just the best tracks from my top ten lists or whatever. It's more of a "what music sounded like to me in 2011" mix.

Tracklist info is in the comments, and on the mixcloud page!

Chapters are required - A 2011 mix by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Biggest Tours of 2011

Pollstar published the year end top 25 tours for North America and worldwide.

Bands are always ranked in order of total gross ticket sales, but wouldn't it make more sense to rank them in terms of total number of tickets sold? Total gross is largely reflective of how much ticket prices are, and if Celine Dion wants to gouge her fans by charging an average of $166 per ticket then that's more reflective of what the typical Celine fan earns in a year, not how "big" her tour was or how many fans she has. On the North American list, her tour finished 10th in money but only 23rd in total tickets sold.

U2, Taylor Swift, and Kenny Chesney were far and away the top N.A. tour performers in terms of money and tickets sold. But Jason Aldean, Journey, Katy Perry, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra finished 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th in total tickets sold and the top money earners among them were Journey at #15. They have huge fan bases and they made an effort to keep prices affordable. They deserve some credit for that.

Even average gross per show would be better than total gross as an indicator of how "big" a band was in a given year. IOW, did they tour constantly and make their money from playing arenas, or are they big enough to play in the world's largest stadiums? U2 easily topped the chart in that category, earning more than $7M per show, followed by, oddly enough, Dave Matthews Band Caravan jam band traveling circus.

Kanye West and Jay-Z somehow got away with charging more per ticket than anyone except Celine Dion (whose fans are mostly rich white people), Paul McCartney (possibly the biggest legend touring today, who only played nine N.A. shows), and the Dave Matthews Band Caravan (which was a series of three day festivals so it doesn't really compare). Congrats to Kanye and Jay-Z for loving money so much.

Cirque du Soleil have three entries in the N.A. top 25. Really? This made me realize that average tickets and gross are calculated per city, not per show, which is also a bit odd.

Worldwide, U2 are once again the biggest, and there aren't too many surprises except for maybe Foo Fighters. Are they really the 12th biggest band in the world? I wouldn't have guessed (and with one of the lowest average ticket prices on the top 25). Everyone outside of N.A. is probably looking at the list, scratching their heads, and saying "who is Kenny Chesney?" (at #8, he was the highest ranking act who didn't play a concert outside of N.A.).

The Take That reunion tour grossed just $8M less than U2, and played to nearly as many fans. Just, wow. And Elton John, who is no spring chicken, played 110 shows in 2011, more than anyone on the top 25 except for Katy Perry and Cirque du Soleil (which is really a category unto itself).

Pazz and Jop 2011

My "tracks" ballot was a near-last minute composition, and in fact the main reason I submitted one at all is because I'm rather ideologically opposed to being one of those kinds of writers who only submits an albums ballot. I love how chart pop trends are moving away from R&B and toward club/rave music, and yet there weren't many hit pop singles that I found truly memorable this year. IOW, I liked the songs I heard on the radio, but I very rarely felt the need to listen to any of those songs on their own. So I had to make some unconventional choices. And yes, there are only nine tracks on the list.

I didn't follow music news as closely as I did in past years, so I didn't feel I had much to say about the state of music in 2011. Sure, I have plenty to say about the new music I like, but a snappy wordbite that the VV would see fit to publish in a year-in-review article? This year I'm not that guy. On that note, please excuse my fairly brief comments.

Seeing as M83 have fared amazing well in the year-end roundups thus far, I threw a few more points toward "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming", with hopes of giving it a little more help toward a high finish in the standings. I've always preferred a top-heavy ballot anyhow. I definitely didn't see this critical breakout coming for M83, I will have more to say about that in a future post.

My ballots:

Albums

M83, "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming", Naive, 25 points
PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake", Island Records, 17 points
Wolves in the Throne Room, "Celestial Lineage", Southern Lord, 13 points
The Caretaker, "An Empty Bliss Beyond This World", History Always Favours the Winners, 10 points
Death In Vegas, "Trans-Love Energies", Portobello Records, 7 points
Modeselektor, "Monkeytown", Monkeytown Records, 7 points
I Break Horses, "Hearts", Bella Union, 6 points
Tim Hecker, "Ravedeath, 1972", Kranky, 5 points
Surgeon, "Breaking the Frame", Dynamic Tension Records, 5 points
Mogwai, "Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will", Rock Action Records, 5 points

Tracks*

Britney Spears, "Till the World Ends", Jive
Lady Gaga, "Edge of Glory", Interscope
Low, "Try To Sleep", Sub Pop
Mogwai, "George Square Thatcher Death Party", Rock Action Records
Nicki Minaj, "Super Bass", Young Money
Patrice Baumel and Nuno Dos Santos, "360-may-2011-podcast-for-trouw", no label
Paul Woolford & Psychatron, "Stolen", Hotflush Recordings
Raveonettes, "Recharge and Revolt", Vice Records
William Basinski, "Disintegration Loops dlp 1.1 (orchestrated by Maxim Moston), no label

* note that these are listed alphabetically ... tracks ballots for P&J are unranked anyhow.

Comments

Twenty years have passed since the end of the 1980's, and the threat of communism dominating the world now seems more quaint and distant than people making records with huge gated drums and cornball synths. M83 want things to stay that way. If you can set up a mental block in front of all the unlikable things about the 80's while still longing for the days when everything on the radio sounded like "Midnight City", then you'll probably love "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming".

I used to be able to remember all the song titles from every album I bought. Now, something will be on the radio for six months, but one day I'll finally hear the song I.D. and say to myself "oh, this one is by Britney Spears"? This happens far more often than I'd like to admit. Maybe technology has made certain types of memory redundant (e.g. who remembers phone numbers anymore?) or maybe too many brain cells have decayed over the years. The second possibility is a scary thought. It means that one day I'll end up bedridden and won't remember anything about my past life other than the chorus to "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

Have we reached the point where podcasts tell us more about what's going through an artist's mind than singles or albums do? Is this why I look forward more to hearing podcasts (especially techno/club music) than albums a lot of the time?

Top ten mixes/podcasts of 2011

This year I kept up with mixes and podcasts mainly by following the same mix/podcast series and news sites that I'd followed in past years. The volume of quality mixes out there continues to boggle the mind, but I have to say that I regret not investing the time to discover podcasts from a wider variety of ssources.

The Electric Deluxe podcast is still the best when it comes to consistency, creativity, variety, and trainspotting/track selection. I may not have been as diligent in keeping track of new podcasts as I was last year, but I still think they are the most effective way to sample the year's best music and keep track of the latest trends. In chronological order:

(Honourable mention) Midland, FACT 185, September 17, 2010 (link)

This one doesn't count because it was released in 2010, but it deserved a mention because I probably listened to it more than any other mix this year. The mix takes ages to properly develop, running through odd abstract and downtempo music, gradually upping the tempos before finally hitting its house stride about forty minutes in. It took a few listens to grasp where Midland was going with all this, i.e. to understand the story being told with the mix. This is why it didn't make my 2010 list, and didn't really register with me until the start of 2011.

(Honourable mention II) Dino Sabatini, Prologue Portefeuille Podcast 02, December 27, 2010 (link)

This was released in the final days of 2010 so it effectively counts toward this year. The concept here is fairly simple: one hour of atmospheric, deep, moody techno.

ASC, Deep Space Mix 19, January 20 (link)

This is my favourite type of ambient set -- warm, shimmery, angelic ambient music that just sort of floats by. I'm a bit envious because sometimes I try to make mixes like these and I always fail because I can't help but turn it into a horror/noise fest. For some reason I have the attention span to listen, but not to create a mix like this.

Animal Collective, ATP Animal Collective Mixtape, March 22 (link)

Animal Collective curated ATP this year and put together a promotional podcast featuring a number of the artists that were booked for the festival. This is two plus hours of weirdo science pop oddities, most of which I'd never heard of. I may be completely burned out on Animal Collective's music, but their taste in music still seems fresh and unpredictable.

Martyn, Impulsief mix for oki-ni, April 9 (link)

This is one of those mixes that proves you don't need to be a beatmatching wizard to be a great DJ (Martyn is a great technical DJ too, but that's not the main reason why this particular podcast is great). The mix flows from funk to classic house to synth pop and 90's techno (LA Synthesis!!), sometimes its beatmatched and sometimes not, and the flow couldn't be any more natural.

Patrice Baumel and Nuno dos Santos, Trouw Podcast May 2011 (link)

According to the description, the mix was made by extracting sound elements and beats from dozens of tracks and assembling them into a entirely new whole. This concept isn't new, Richie Hawtin's "Beats EFX and 909" and "DE9 Diversions" albums are probably the most well known mixes of this type. But the key part of the description here: "spacious soundscapes, track fragments, voices, echoes and reverberating pads float in and out." This might seem a bit OTT -- dozens of beats AND various elements appearing and disappearing? -- like a techno version of "Revolution 9". But it's not like that at all. It feels less like a mix than a long, slowly shape-changing track (which is why I listed it as a track on my P&J Ballot) where familiar sounding melodies float by like in an extended daydream. This mix is way more than the sum of its parts, and really must be heard to be believed. This was easily my favourite mix of 2011.


Psychatron, Electric Deluxe Episode 047 (David Holmes – Johnny Favourite – Exploding Plastic Ambience Mix), July 4 (link)

Filled with extended dub remixes (remember what "dub remix" used to mean when applied to 80's/90's dance music?) and classic 70's/80's style synth pop, this is the kind of alternative 80's dance party that I'd like to hear more of.


Prurient, FACT Mix 266, July 18 (link)

As far as truth in advertising goes, this is a spot-on preview of what you'd expect from the newer, less abrasive and extreme sound of Prurient. "Bermuda Drain" turned out to be pretty good too.


Diego, Electric Deluxe Episode 049 (Diego Hostettler presents his Shapes & Forms mix), July 31 (link)

Dub techno never seems to get old, but putting together a mix of mostly 90's Chain Reaction material is really tough without churning out a mix that sounds like something that we've heard a million times already. The mixing and sequencing is fantastic, perfect for getting effortlessly engulfed in the swampy dub goodness.


Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 3 (The Sun In Eclipse Gathers Together More Mixes), August 17 (link)

If FACT can publish a end of year list with the 20 best FACT mixes of 2011, then I can promote myself a bit too. Only in my dreams do all my mixes turn out as good as this one.


Alva Noto, Resident Advisor Podcast 276, September 12 (link)

I love hearing mixes where they pack about 25 tracks into 50 minutes. But most of them don't criss-cross between left field experimental genres and dance music like this one does.


Giorgio Gigli and Obtane, Resident Advisor Podcast 282, October 24 (link)

I think my jaw hit the floor when I heard this podcast for the first time. It's like the Berghain sound drowned under a sea of heavy blankets. This is the kind of techno that appears in my dreams, something that virtually nobody ever tries to actually make, with shuddering, hazy beats and other assorted odd noises howling outside my window and getting swept aside by rivers of bass. Is this the kind of positive fallout that happened when the Gas boxset got released and everybody was reminded of how amazing those albums are?

Low, "C'Mon"

This just missed my top ten this year, actually, it would have been my #11 album of the year. There were four albums but only three spots (#8, 9, 10) and it was the odd one out after a fairly agonizing elimination process.

I didn't hear this album until the start of December, which makes no sense because Low have been one of the most reliable bands for me over the past ten years. I'm on their mailing list and was getting all the email reminders to watch the new video here, stream the new songs until the end of the week there, but somehow never got around to hearing anything. But no problem, I figured I'd hear the best parts of "C'mon" if I checked out a few live bootlegs. Other than the slow enveloping epic "Nothing But Heart", nothing really stood out.

December rolled around and I finally decided I couldn't let 2011 expire without hearing a new Low album that had already been out for nearly eight months. And that's when it hit me. About a week later, I became perhaps the last Low fan to know that they'd released a video where John Stamos sings a swimsuit model to sleep and then gets run over by a train. It's been that kind of year.

Low have been alternating "traditional" and "experimental" albums for the past decade. "Things We Lost In the Fire" is perhaps the apex of their slowcore period, afterward, their philosophy moved away from squeezing all they could out of their one trick. "Trust" upped the volume levels and its gritty intensity seemed to be drawn more from blues and metal than anything connected to indie rock at the time. "The Great Destroyer" was their polarizing masterpiece, to those who can't get enough of it (like me), it was refreshing to hear them get revved up and angry, to others it was a near sacrilege that played away from their established strengths. "Drums and Guns" tinkered heavily with electronics, changing up the formula yet again. "C'mon" is like "The Great Destroyer Lite", dominated by the guitar-heavy sound of that album but without the sense of frustration, anger and fury that made it special, as opposed to slowcore with a few screechy guitar solos. That sounds like a criticism, and in a way it is, because "The Great Destroyer" will be difficult to top. But "C'mon" isn't meant to be a carbon copy of it, it's a different kind of album. It's also lacking in "Drums and Guns"'s somnambulism, and that's a good thing.

The highs on "C'mon" aren't consistently high enough, there are a lot of very good songs on this album but not a lot of great ones. "Nothing But Heart" stands out because it's the eight minute epic, "Witches" is the crunchy, sort of sexy one, and $20$ is the one with a fractional BPM. But the all time classic is "Try to Sleep", which is a Low-ified version of Radiohead's "No Surprises", complete with glockenspiel, feather-light melody, and the lyrical sense of melancholy, resignation and giving up on this earthly world.

Top 10 Albums of 2011

And here we are again. For the past few years, I've been saying that when it comes to hearing new music, my habits have been getting more and more random. I'm so out of sync with music news cycles that I sometimes find myself discovering that someone's highly anticipated new release was released months earlier. Case in point, I had a leaked copy of my #1 album but didn't listen to it for about two months, partly because I was a bit underwhelmed (at the time) by the lead single. I listened to a decent amount of pop music this year, but I have no idea what my top singles of the year are because I can't remember the titles of anything.

Fortunately, I didn't have to look too hard to hear great music this year. This list contains a couple of great comeback records, entries from bands I'd never heard of one year ago, a fairly international flavour (seven nations represented), and you can even dance to some of it.

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2011

10. Mogwai, "Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will"

In the past few years, Mogwai envisioned themselves as a post-rock Sabbath and worked overtime to make the label stick. In 2011, they seem to have given up that dream, but whereas most directionless bands get stuck in a downward spiral toward eternal mediocrity, Mogwai were able to fall back into the myriad of styles they used to do so well. The result was a record that sounded like a career-in-review retrospective (not unlike Orbital's "Blue Album" in that respect), and an album that nearly deserved to make this list on the basis of its title and "George Square Thatcher Death Party" alone.

9. Surgeon, "Breaking the Frame"

Surgeon's tracks made up the best parts of Mike Huckaby's somewhat disappointing 20th Anniversary Mix for Tresor. Maurizio and Robert Hood best represent Tresor's past, but Surgeon captures their present and future better than anyone -- cavernous, grim, and punishing techno music.

8. Tim Hecker, "Ravedeath, 1972"

Tim Hecker's records might all sound the same, but he's one of the few artists who can turn his predictability into a badge of quality and reliability. And remember, Hecker is always at his best when he's at his harshest. This music was never meant to be too relaxed or too pretty.

7. I Break Horses, "Hearts"

I Break Horses aren't afraid of a few loud guitars and effects that resemble melting the tape as you're playing it back, which is what makes them a much better band than your average twee faux-shoegazers. This album would have finished higher if it wasn't for its Verve-like inconsistency in the second half.

6. Modeselektor, "Monkeytown"

There's no genre of electronic music that these guys won't touch, and they don't seem to be getting bored of trying out as many as possible. And it bears repeating that more artists should be making albums in the spirit of Orbital's bleepy genre-melting classic "Snivilisation".

5. Death In Vegas, "Trans-Love Energies"

Death In Vegas appear to be getting better as their music gets less and less commercial-sounding. They even took seven years off to really make people forget about them, helping to ensure that their newest album wouldn't sell. The big loser is Richard Fearless' bank account. The winners are fans of: obscure krautrock, scuzz rock, Martin Hannett's productions, and Cabaret Voltaire c. 1989-1990.

4. The Caretaker, "An Empty Bliss Beyond This World"

See, the simplest ideas really are the best ideas. How hard can it be to loop a few melodies from old ballroom 78's, add some hiss and static, pitch them down a bit, and call it an album?

3. Wolves In the Throne Room, "Celestial Lineage"

I don't even know how to describe this one, but who knew that psychedelic West Coast operatic black metal could be so good? The gloriously fuzzy guitars may only be the icing on the cake.

2. PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake"

It's probably safe to say that this is the best WWI concept album ever made, and should remain so for the forseeable future. PJ Harvey took her talent for writing "character" songs to a new level in a wholly unexpected direction, and her voice has never sounded this good.

1. M83, "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming"

Let's review how M83 and Spiritualized have followed the same career path over their first four albums. We'll need to ignore that M83's eponymous album was their debut, although I suppose we could still include it if we took the second half of S3's "Recurring" to be Spiritualized's debut album. But not right now.

"Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts", "Lazer Guided Melodies". Still hailed as their best album by those who still see this as being the embodiment of a "signature" style that they never bettered. Contains some of their most beloved songs that remained live staples for years even though the original recordings didn't fit with the evolving style of the band ("Run Into Flowers", "0078h"/"Shine a Light", "Take Your Time"). The last album where they could really be considered a band, rather than a group of musicians backing up a visionary frontman.

"Before the Dawn Heals Us"/"Pure Phase". The transition album. Not quite what they once were (when their former bandmates were around), not yet what they would become, but somewhere at the midway point in the redefinition process. Mostly instrumental, but with a few standout vocal tracks.

"Saturdays = Youth"/"Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space". A merging of dormant genres (shameless 80's fanboyism, free jazz and psychedelic skronk) with the music they were already known for, finally, the vision is complete and only their respective frontmen could have seen it coming. The vocals are emerging from the background and becoming more front and centre. Yet another album-of-the-year quality release, their combination of consistency and excellence can no longer be ignored.

"Hurry Up, We're Dreaming"/"Let It Come Down". The vocals, which used to be shyly emoted from somewhere deep in the mix, have taken on the role of a lead instrument. You could always sing along to their music, but never like this. Just when you thought they couldn't get more maximal, they did it.

Where do M83 go from here? Maybe they'll continue on like Spiritualized, scale back their music as a reaction to the dense and heavy sound of "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming", and begin their slow retreat from the head of the pack. Nobody can keep releasing albums this good forever, can they? In my pantheon, Orbital released three straight classics, as did Spiritualized, but nobody has ever released four in a row, not at this level.

Tony Bennett, "Tony Sings the Hits of Today!"

This album is supposed to be the absolute pits of Tony Bennett's career. His popularity had plummeted by the end of the 60's and someone (coughCliveDaviscough) thought he needed to sing contemporary material in order to revive his career. As the story goes, the results were the horrifically bad stuff of legend. Bennett hated making the album so much that he became physically ill while recording it. And unlike other legendarily bad albums (e.g. Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music"), this one never experienced a critical or popular renaissance of any sort. Bennett's fans still disown it, critics still hate it, it might as well have never existed.

I've never heard this album, in fact until a few weeks ago I didn't know a thing about it. But looking at the tracklist forty years after its release, I have to wonder where all the hate is coming from. Tony Bennett threw up because he had to cover songs by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder? "Here There and Everywhere" didn't move him in the slightest? And he might not have lived in the era of the "official" Great American Songbook, but who's more of a classic American songwriter than Burt Bacharach?

So let's listen and find out if Tony Bennett's "Tony Sings the Hits of Today!" is really as bad as advertised ... while reviewing the album in real time. (songwriters names appear in brackets)

1. "MacArthur Park" (Jimmy Webb). This song has been covered innumerable times, and yet you'd be hard pressed to find someone who likes it. In a 1993 survey, it was even crowned as the worst song ever. In short, "Macarthur Park" is the kryptonite that destroys even the best artists (e.g. Donna Summer). But Bennett's version isn't bad at all! It's a sweet and simple arrangement that does away with all of the lyrical silliness in the song about cakes melting in the rain, and leaves us with lines like "after all the loves of my life / I'll be thinking of you and wondering why". Cole Porter couldn't have written that? We're off to a decent start here.

2. "Something" (George Harrison). A serious misstep. Everything from the odd changes in tempo to Bennett's half-hearted attempt to emote during the refrain just don't mesh.

3. "The Look of Love" (Burt Bacharach, Hal David). Bacharach was the master of sweetness and light in pop. So who thought it was a good idea to get a Hal Blaine clone to play drums and rock the joint up a bit? It should have been a no-nonsense arrangement carried completely by the singer, instead, they tried to merge big band with a touch of pyschedelia. Someone spent too much time listening to "Good Vibrations" before entering the mixing studio.

4. "Here There and Everywhere" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney). And this ... why is this a midtempo swing tune? Did anyone bother to listen to the lyrics before recording it, or were they going for the ironic cover a couple of decades before that became a fad?

5. "Live for Life" (Norman Gimbel, Francis Lai). Perfectly acceptable pop balladry here, I think Bennett was actually trying with this one.

6. "Little Green Apples" (Bobby Russell). I'd never heard of this song, but "G-d didn't make little green apples and it doesn't rain in Indianapolis" is an awful lyric, so no wonder Bennett sings it like he's singing the weather report. There's no joy, humour, or pizzazz in his delivery at all. The only way to overcome the "qualities" of a song so charmingly dumb with lyrics this bad is with an overdose of all three. The big note at the end is haphazardly screamed, as if he just wanted it to be finally over. I concur, let's move on.

7. "Eleanor Rigby" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney). A quick check confirms that William Shatner's "The Transformed Man" predates this by two years. Shatner's attempt to act instead of sing his lyrics was at least authentic (i.e. it was all he was capable of doing, he put his heart into it, and the effort was genuine) and some of the arrangements were quirky and unpredictable (e.g. "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"). But Tony Bennett lowering himself to this kind of silly dramatic reading almost gave me sympathy vomit cramps, forty years after the fact.

8. "My Cherie Amour" (Henry Cosby, Sylvia Moy, Stevie Wonder). Another no-brainer -- just play it as a string-drenched ballad. And they do. This is rather lovely, it's a winner.

9. "Is That All There Is?" (Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller). This song was very much in vogue in '69-'70, and had already been covered a few times by other adult contemporary artists in the two years previous. So it makes sense that Bennett's label would want him to record this. There's nothing technically wrong here, but maudlin black humour and Tony Bennett don't mix, although I think he could have communicated the dejected feelings of the song's narrator if he liked the song even a little bit.

10. "Here" (Gene Lees). The line "here I am all alone with a few faded pictures of you" is a heartbreaker, and this song slinks along, wallowing in its selfish misery not unlike Lou Reed's "The Bed". This is jaw droppingly great, no joke.

11. "Sunrise Sunset" (Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick). This would makes sense as an epic dramatic finishing song to an adult contemporary pop album ... but not on a Tony Bennett album. The man is many things, Broadway diva isn't one of them.

It goes without saying that any interpretive singer needs the right song with the right arrangement to succeed. Song choice is really everything for someone like Tony Bennett, especially with an experiment like this where he strays outside his comfort zone. In that respect, the album is obviously a failure. Sometimes a great singer can overcome an imperfect arrangement, but that doesn't happen even once here. I would expect that Bennett could have overcome sub-par arrangements at least once or twice on an eleven track album if he were motivated, which he obviously wasn't. It's also odd to think that there was a time when producers and bandleaders didn't "get" the Beatles and had no clue how to perform or interpret their work, look no further than this album for proof of that.

But is it the worst album ever, or even an abominable insult to human hearing, as it has been portrayed? There are at least three really good songs here, although the embarrassments do outnumber the winners. It definitely doesn't deserve to be unearthed as any kind of lost gem, but it's also not quite the disaster that I'd been led to believe it was. And I know I'll be in the minority on this, but I don't even mind the cover!

Sandro Perri, "Impossible Spaces"; Modeselektor, "Monkeytown"

These two artists are more similar than you think. They emerged as outsiders in their respective, widely hyped local underground scenes in the late 90's. They've been very active since, despite not having a large discography to show for it, largely thanks to a steady stream of live performances, remixes and collaborations. And both artists have been wizards when it comes to criss-crossing genre boundaries, often within the same track. Despite their oddly similar career paths, on their latest releases, they're heading in opposite directions creatively.

I can understand what Sandro Perri has been trying to do over the past few years, after all, wanting to shift from making mysterious, atmospheric techno while seated on a stage floor behind a mess of wires to being the singer/songwriter/frontman of your own band under your own name doesn't need much justification. After years spent paying my dues opening for other, bigger name artists, I probably wouldn't want to keep settling for being one of Toronto's best kept secrets either.

Even when his work as Polmo Polpo was derivative (i.e. Gas with twangy guitars), he was still miles ahead of all the other copycats, and with "Like Hearts Swelling" and "Kiss Me Again and Again" he came into his own with some of the most unique music of the 00's. But solo artist Sandro Perri has always strayed too close to generic alt-country artist territory, and "Impossible Spaces" doesn't do much to change that impression.

I've never cared much for Perri as a vocalist, he's capable but not commanding on the mic, and while he might sound more confident on "Impossible Spaces" than ever before, his vocals don't amount to much more than a forgettable backdrop to the music. As I would have expected, he's at his best when he goes epic and lets his songs breathe for seven minutes or more (e.g. "How Will I?", "Wolfman"). Songs have a way of starting out as stripped down indie ballads and wandering their way into a 70's prog record complete with bodacious synth solo, while featuring bits of electronic trickery along the way. Come to think of it, Super Furry Animals used to do this a lot. "Impossible Spaces" is sort of like a SFA album circa 2000, minus the mad hattery and OTT sonic bonkerism that made their albums so great. But the way these songs take their unexpected twists and turns still form the bulk of the highlights from the album.

There are still plenty of things I don't like about Modeselektor, like 90% of their songs when they try to channel Jamaica. The fact that they were genre whores, unafraid to try anything and everything with any big or small name vocalist, used to be their most interesting trait and their Achilles heel. They were simply too hit-and-miss, their records always had some gems on them but were too inconsistent to be great as a whole.

That changed with 2009's "Moderat" album (with Apparat). That's where they perfected the art of siphoning the best traits of their collaborators and adapting their style to mesh with that of the people they worked with. "Monkeytown" still can't shake some of the old bad habits -- their dips into ragga and hip hop on "Pretentious Friends" and "Humanized" are the weakest parts of the album. But "Evil Twin" and "German Clap" are top notch club techno, up there with the best they've done in that style, and they've produced a couple of absolute gems out of their two Thom Yorke collabs, especially "This". It's like a sequel to "Idioteque", something you could conceivably hear on a Radiohead album if they had a fraction of Modeselektor's talent*. They slice up Thom Yorke's voice into nearly indecipherable loops, smother it with brooding bass lines and snippets of late 90's Autechre-style skittery beats, resulting in a haunting track that's not quite of any genre they've attempted before.

All in all, "Monkeytown" is an impressive, varied listen where even the slight misses (like on "Moderat") work well in context.

* slight clarification: this seems like a weaselly comment so I should explain a bit more ... to Radiohead, going "electronic" in the faux-Autechre sense has always meant getting weird and abstract. The real Autechre were never just about that, the magic was always in the atmospheres they created and the odd sounds they came up with. When they were weird and abstract for the sake of being weird and abstract, they sucked too. For Modeselektor, specifically in the case of "This", channeling Autechre means trying to make them sound more like Orbital circa "Snivilisation". Huge difference.