Thee Top 10 Albums & Films of 2011

ALBUMS
A good year for music. Some letdowns from the likes of Boris, Oneida and Lady Gaga but still plenty enough to keep me happy and occupied. It doesn't feel like shit is stagnating. Yet.


1. True Widow: As High As The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth
To me, this is what Nirvana was "supposed" to sound like, a band taking cues from a variety of underground genres - shoegaze, slowcore, doom metal - and making it accessible enough so that people could sing along to it. Unfortunately, if you catch these guys live, there won't be more than a couple hundred people around, but they should be huge. Don't let the title fool you, it isn't pretentious, just heavy, stoned sounding, cowboy doom pop.


2. Smith Westerns: Dye It Blonde
Packed with hooks and a guitar sound lifted straight from T. Rex, this is a quick, enjoyable bathroom fuck of a record. The singer is falsetto and is the only weak link (but by no means is he a dealbreaker). If he could shed his indie-ism and get a little showmanship and more money was thrown at recording quality, these guys could easily drop a modern day Ziggy Stardust on an unsuspecting teenage public, hungry for universal rock & roll anthems. While this isn't quite at that level, it's still the best glam related thing released in a couple decades.




3. Black Lips: Arabia Mountain
Black Lips have been good for awhile but this was their first step towards greatness, adding more instrumentation and more all out wackiness to their garage rock palate. An inspired response from a band that a lot of people thought were dead in the water.






4. Wooden Shjips: West
These guys haven't released a bad album yet and this is the best of the bunch. Pretty much the same vibe here as the previous ones - psychedelic, hypnotic Kraut by way of San Francisco rock with super effects heavy guitar solos that weave in and out of established rhythmic patterns. This is how music from California should sound like.




5. The Psychic Paramount II
Here it is, 6 years in the making, the follow up to one of the psychedelic underground's best debuts ever. And this one's even better. A bombastic mountain of jammy instrumental interplay. Never stops moving, constantly driving forward till the end, when all there is left to do is explode and feel your particles sail outward.





6. Ty Segall: Goodbye Bread
Sunfried psych pop probably recorded in Ty's apartment bedroom, where he's also obviously been studying Beatles pop craftsmanship 101. This sounds like a product of the mid-'90s, when guitars ruled the Earth, a sound fighting for air in the digital recording to laptop infested waters of contemporary music.






7. Atlas Sound: Parallax
I'm not really sure why Bradford Cox makes things under the alias Atlas Sound any more as there seems to be no aesthetic difference between this and the last Deerhunter album. But he just keeps getting better. More song oriented and less experimental but by no means is this radio friendly indie blandness. One gets the feeling that at some point, Cox is going to be a very big deal.





8. Implodes: Black Earth
A shoegazey folky, hissy nightmare of a record with soaring, layered guitars interrupting acoustic passages and vocals buried in reverb until unrecognizable (I'm a huge fan of this). Don't worry, the women folk won't run out of the room, it's all sort of pretty, but there's definitely a Lord of the Flies vibe happening here.





9. Wilco: The Whole Love
Well, it's a hell of a lot better than the previous pair of albums when it seemed like Tweedy had been neutered. There's a lot of different instruments added into the mix here, giving it sort of a Baroque vibe, but it never gets too wigged out or art damaged. Their penchant for making their lyrics too cutesy and greeting cardesque rears its head a couple times but never enough to ruin anything but maybe 1 song. I would call it a refreshing return to form. After Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, it's probably best to just view everything else as gravy.


10. Peter Evans Quintet: Ghosts
The best jazz release of the year. A very postmodern recording with references to everything from glitch to post-rock, all while still sounding close to a traditional jazz record. The references are deeply subtle, as if it could be anything but in jazz, but they really breathe some life to the music here. If one was looking for a good album to introduce themselves to trying out jazz, this would be a worthy offering.




FILMS
This list is premature as I still haven't seen Human Centipede 2, the new Roman Polanski or that Woody Harrelson as a racist LA cop flick. I just can't make it to every little movie like I used to and it will be 2012 in a couple days so...

1. The Tree Of Life
Look, this year there was The Tree of Life and then everything else. There's been no other film made in this millennium that's even on the same planet. This may be the best film I've ever seen, but I'm going to need at least a decade to let it fully resonate. For now, it's at the least the most ambitious film ever made and Art of the highest possible caliber. For Terrence Malick fans, who had watched his films evolve from idiosyncratic portraits of stoic beauty to full on stream of consciousness internal dialogue narrated epics, this was the culmination of every hair brained but ragingly beautiful nuance he'd brought to the table throughout his career. There's sort of a story but don't limit your perception to finding one, just let each scene and moment (and each lesson) form and diffuse as drops within an ocean sized proclamation that even though this universe is ultimately designed by savage cruelty and violence, human beings can make the choice to strive for grace and goodness, and even though it may not be rewarded according to the universe's values, your life can and will matter. This is not a film for smart people, it's a smart film for everyday people. If you are floating through life in need of a cage rattling experience that will strike you deep in your core, see this.

2. Drive
As the revival of the '80s continues to invade and conquer current popular culture, plenty of music but no film had yet declared itself as the uber-hip monolith from which all other future works within the trend will need to behold and build upon, until this came around. It succeeds in pulling off what I would argue is the single most difficult sensation for a film to achieve in that one automatically feels more cool watching it (Besides Pulp Fiction, how many other films have managed to do this?) No other genre has suffered more in the last 10 years than the Action film (I would argue the Batman films are more indebted to Drama) and this was a stylized game changer that clears some space for the genre to evolve within and declares director Nicolas Winding Refn as an artist to be reckoned with.

3. The Beaver
Mel Gibson continues to amaze as he further commits to his mid-career transition from lame actor to challenging artist. He didn't direct this film but his hands are all over it. The part of a suicidal alcoholic who just needs to be loved seems single handedly created for only him to play and he eats up the role, knowing it may be his only chance to obtain forgiveness from a world that's turned on him. The gravity of this potential forgiveness is felt throughout the entire film, making the unbelievable ridiculousness of his becoming a talking beaver either a giant middle finger to his naysayers or a terribly inappropriate turn at coaxing the movie going public into rewarding him his desperately sought after second chance. Either way, it's brilliant.

4. Melancholia
A few films have tried the formula of concentrating on a small corner of the Earth during a gigantic, world changing event, and Melancholia succeeds more than any other of these. Lars Von Trier has moved beyond his strict Dogma rules but authenticity still dominates the proceedings, meaning the action can feel a little slow at times but all the genuine humanness allows certain moments and sentences to play over in your brain for a long while after the film ends, each time with more meaningfulness. It's a grand exploration on the effects of manic depression on what should be the best day of one's life and what should be the worst day.

5. Horrible Bosses
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, all three the brightest (funniest) stars of their respective comedic galaxies (Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Saturday Night Live), team up here for a comic rendition of Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train. The threesome certainly doesn't disappoint, but who could have possibly thought that the show would be stolen by the likes of former "Most Boring Person on the Planet" Jennifer Aniston going 180 on her typecast as an aggressively slutty dentist and Mr. "Doesn't Seem to Have a Funny Bone In His Entire Body" Colin Farrell as a karate obsessed meth head hell bent on destroying his Father's business? This one's not quite on par with the Judd Apatow machine but it's the funniest movie this year.

7. Bridesmaids
It's funny that as soon as women "stoop" to bathroom humor and fart jokes, it's labeled by critics as "daring", but let's just hope this kind of chick flick gets copied more in the future than the endless Xeroxes of Sleepless In Seattle that stink up the theaters every year. Kristen Wiig challenges Tina Fey as the post-SNL Queen by attacking her where she fears to tread, laughing from the gut and not from the brain, and Melissa McCarthy is further evidence that no matter if you are male or female, fat people are the safest bet on being the funniest people in the room.

8. The Adjustment Bureau
The best popcorn flick of the year, this story offers an extremely creative take on the concepts of human freewill and the interconnectedness of seemingly small events on a grand scale. There's also a genuinely affirming love story at the heart of it all.


9. J. Edgar
Super idiosyncratic biography of a super idiosyncratic individual. J. Edgar Hoover as a character is the ultimate example of repressed homosexuality run amok and is completely fascinating. The development of the FBI was also a lot more interesting than I figured it would be. I found it to be Eastwood's best directorial effort since Unforgiven and a treasure trove for connoisseurs of auteurism.

10. Cedar Rapids
Ed Helms gets his chance to carry a movie as a small town dork who gets his first exposure to the big city. The film's not quite on Alexander Payne's level but its satire of the American Heartland has its moments, particularly any scene with John C. Reilly, who may have somehow become the funniest person on Earth even though he's technically not a comedian.