Year-End Critics' Polls 2012

the lists from the narrow specialist mags are easily one of the most interesting things about these threads too

xp lex' complaint was that they magazine unashamedly aimed at middle ages white men missed out on an album by a new artist middle aged white men would love because they are preoccupied with releases by old artists though

Also, Uncut used to cover a slightly more adventurous range of music. Martha Redbone is a new name for me. It sounds decent, certainly on par with the other folky singer-songwriter geezer type of albums being overrated. However, and this may not be fair, but it would sound more appropriate to me softly playing in the background of a cafe, yuppie coctail party or corporate event than on my stereo.

That Go-Kart Mozart album is quite an ordeal at 17 songs. It's just jarring for me to hear Lawrence's voice over the quirky, too-precious electro-pop after being a fan of Felt for so long. The Norman list got me excited about Gnod, BEAK>, Death And Vanilla and Cold Pumas, but none really stood out to me.

When I get home I'm gonna check out The Helio Sequence - Negotiations. Comparisons to Eno, Talk Talk, Roedelius and Manuel Göttsching have me interested.

xpost Was more directed at ciderpress than Lex.

My guess would also be that declining print sales and the continued recession forces titles like Uncut to retreat even further into the safety of the core demographic. There aren't any new sales to be found, so it's more about keeping old readers.

That said, if Uncut's list was the result of an unmanaged vote, with no editorial postproduction, then it's spectacularly elderly. I know plenty of their writers personally like much more outlying stuff than that list suggests.

Declaration of interest: I was involved in the Guardian's list. There was a suggestion this year that it be managed, but thankfully we decided on an unmanaged vote in the end.

If The Helio Sequence still sound like they used to, you're going to be disappointed. xp

jarring for me to hear Lawrence's voice over the quirky, too-precious electro-pop

Where have you been for the last... 15 years? That's what he's been doing for ages. I like the new album, not sure yet if it'll make my top 25, but it's pretty charming in that Lawrence-y way.

Don't want to put you pn the spot here, but in what direction would a managed Guardian list be likely to go? How do you think it would have been different?

I did hear one other Go-Kart Mozart album and couldn't get into it either. I didn't say I was surprised. Maybe I hoped he'd changed his sound again. It just sounds wrong.

I will agree with you that good Felt is easily his best. They did a few dodgy things but when they were up there, man, so far above both Denim and Go-Kart Mozart.

xpost I don't know - I haven't been running it, just been a voter and seen everyone's individual lists and been sorting some of the content and production. As it is, the list ticks quite a lot of different boxes, so it might have been more a question of placings than a load of completely different albums. I think it's a pretty reasonable list, actually - by no means all to my taste. One thing I know from years of being involved with it, though, is that it doesn't take a big change to the voting base to make big changes to the outcome of the poll. This year there are a couple more R&B/dance favouring writers than there were two or three years ago. But had a three or four of the more "rockist" occasional writers been asked to contribute (to be fair, they may have been asked and not voted. I don't know) then I'm pretty sure some of Lex's favourites would have been a whole lot lower down.

Years ago, when I edited FourFourTwo, we did a poll of managers on who the best manager of all time was. We had a very good response - half the managers in England and Scotland voted – but it still only needed one third place vote to get to 20th place.

i don't know if this is true for the early days of uk funky, given how much it drew on house music with impeccable sound design!

― #YOLO ONO (lex pretend), Friday, November 30, 2012 7:58 AM Bookmark

The point isn't that it didn't have good sound design, but that it didn't seem overly focused on it as a pursuit in itself.

Thanks ithappens! I'm generally in favour of comments box outrage from dunderheads so I think the poll is panning out v nicely at the moment.

not that anyone wants to jump back to that stupid indie/pop argument from a few days back BUT i was looking back at ilm's top 77 tracks of 2010 and we had arcade fire, ariel pink and robyn all in the top 10. ARIEL PINK BEAT THE-DREAM (with a great song, but still)

how are you classifying robyn there?

So two out of ten tracks were indie? Exactly what does that prove? (And Robyn may be 'pop that indie types like' but she isn't indie in any way, she's quite clearly a pop artist.)

well she's pop in sound, that's about it

also "somebody that i used to know" was no. 39 on the list last year and all the comments after it got posted are "huh?" and "i heard it's big in australia"

Robyn in 2010-2012 is mainstream enough, especially considering that a lot of the people voting her prob don't live in America

J0rdan, what's yr point with 'Somebody That I Used to Know'? It didn't hit the charts until this year, so it's not surprising people didn't know it then. (I'm assuming you're not invoking the pop/indie debate here, b/c it's definitely not the latter... it's more like Phil Collins or something.)

no yeah i just thought the gotye thing was funny

yeah after it blew up i was like "ah come to think of it i had heard that song mentioned a lot the last few months"

So two out of ten tracks were indie? Exactly what does that prove? (And Robyn may be 'pop that indie types like' but she isn't indie in any way, she's quite clearly a pop artist.)

― emil.y, Friday, November 30, 2012 5:50 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

half the ilm 2010 from top 10 was basically identical to what you would've seen at any indie rock-leaning magazine or website in that year -- robyn, ariel pink, arcade fire, janelle monae, big boi, kanye west. now that's only two artists that are "indie rock," but i think it proves that the idea that "poptimist ILM" wins out over everything else is basically nonsense

Um, wut? So you're saying that because poptimism has seeped into other organs of the press that... what, exactly? My only point was that lex was whinging (and in the end backed up that whinging with some pretty funny excerpts) about something that doesn't even really ring true any more. Your "evidence" pretty much backs that up.

yeah, i do hope "wut" has a pretty good showing this year

I don't think that the critical reactions to Kanye West or Big Boi or even Janelle Monae represent "poptimism seeping into" anything - these kinds of acts (self-consciously ambitious, auteurish black pop stars, to generalise wildly) have always had a lot of critical praise. "Poptimism" is irrelevent to the critical debate surrounding them because they'd have been a big deal in any era.

Re: UK funky - Rev OTM in that focussing on "sound design" just feels weird in the first place because it just isn't the point of the music. Generally I think the more spontaneous sounding the better.

Also Emily caricaturing the Lex's whole stance* as "poor victimised poptimist" kinda shows that you don't really get where he's coming from, because a) I don't think the Lex would ever self-identify as "poptimist" - not at any point in the last five years at least and b) his whole crusade is against the critical marginalisation of (predominantly) black artists who don't code as auterish, bohemian or vaguely arty.

Like I get that you resent people lumping in all of indie with, I dunno, Alt-J or whoever, but indie is still accounts for the vast majority of these lists even when it isn't any good/the sort of indie you like. The whole pop/indie binary debate feels kind of redundant any given that neither side can feel hard done by when you consider the dozens of genres that get little or no play in these things at all.

*The Lex is easily caricaturable, admittedly.

his whole crusade is against the critical marginalisation of (predominantly) black artists who don't code as auterish, bohemian or vaguely arty.

A noble pursuit, but it always rubs me the wrong way (and others, I'm sure) when he goes about it in a manner such as "you people have it all wrong for liking ______ when you REALLY should be liking _____!" He typically rolls his eyes at any kind of "consensus" hip-hop/r&b/pop artist to garner some kind of fandom on ilm (and abroad) from non-goons and pop types and especially when white dudes with thrift store suits and beards mine r&b for new directions. Oh, and Robyn.

It's not that the rest of us don't know what's out there, but for whatever reason certain artists/albums launch discussion and appreciation more easily than others. I know how he feels a lot of the time, because I often feel like I'm the only person listening to a lot of what I listen to, but I don't chew anyone's ass for not liking what I like.

when white dudes with thrift store suits and beards mine r&b for new directions

what is not eyeroll-worthy about this entire concept though

It just needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

I mean, that was fresh in my mind because of the Poliça discussion the other day, and those guys were also members of Gayngs which brought about basically the same discussion a couple years ago. I like both of those groups and think what they're making is the result of a sincere appreciation for r&b and soft rock and not just some hilarious party trick.

why do people always defend them on the basis that they really sincerely like r&b? i don't doubt their sincerity. they still suck.

i remember watching creep at fabric once, someone connected to both them and how to dress well came up to me and said, i know you love creep and hate HTDW, but as someone who knows them both, i can tell you that HTDW really loves r&b and always has done, but the creep girls never cared about it til recently. i was like, that's as may be, but creep still make fantastic songs and HTDW still deserves nothing more than to be flushed down the drainpipe he apparently recorded his music in.

i don't doubt their sincerity.

afaik, this is the first time I've seen you write this. Maybe it wasn't you during the Gayngs discussion who said it was some kind of musical costume for these guys, but I remember that sentiment being expressed by somebody.

they still suck.

Opinions, assholes, etc.

What I've learned is that when you hate something, you really hate something and will prosecute anyone who might actually like that something to the fullest extent of your vocabulary.

The whole pop/indie binary debate feels kind of redundant any given that neither side can feel hard done by when you consider the dozens of genres that get little or no play in these things at all.

True. Alt-J really do suck, though.

when white dudes with thrift store suits and beards mine r&b for new directions

what is not eyeroll-worthy about this entire concept though

Well, what is? If your problem is entirely about the implications of white people appropriating a traditionally black musical culture, then I can understand it to a certain degree (the whole discussion on that particular matter is way too long for me to try to summarise here, though). If it's about the beards and thrift store suits, then you do realise that's shorthand to conjure up the dreaded straw man spectre of 'hipster', right? And actually neither beards nor clothes from charity shops are eyeroll-worthy in themselves (well, maybe beards...). But genre pilfering and combining has a long history and is responsible for some of the most interesting shifts in music there have been. If you find that eyeroll-worthy then your musical conservatism is just too insane to comprehend.

(well, maybe beards...)

As a beard-wearing human being, I am offended. :P

me too. Harumph.

white rock musicians drew heavily on R&B and other black musicians for decades, rock music becoming its own white indie echo chamber is a relatively recent development. it's when they want a pat on the back for incorporating R&B influences or build their entire public persona on it that it becomes corny and tedious.

Reviewers and PR people ruin a lot of things before honest opinions about some bands and albums can even be formed. I keep using Gayngs as my example, but before I ever heard a note of that record I knew all about the "hipster r&b" aspect of it and constantly had to downplay that stigma in my mind while listening. If that hadn't been put there in the first place, I probably wouldn't even have drawn such a conclusion.

Yeah, but that's usually a problem with critical discourse around the band/artist, though, not nec. the band/artist themselves.

xpost

no artists are definitely overtly marketing themselves that way

i mean not all of them obviously, but definitely some

]i don't know if this is true for the early days of uk funky, given how much it drew on house music with impeccable sound design!

― #YOLO ONO (lex pretend), Friday, November 30, 2012 7:58 AM Bookmark

The point isn't that it didn't have good sound design, but that it didn't seem overly focused on it as a pursuit in itself.

― these bitches is my sons and i make dad jokes (The Reverend), Friday, November 30, 2012 9:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think Rev is correct on this one. Even the "glossy" and "classy" aspects of uk funky were directly opposed to the qualities that tend to be associated with "good sound design" in dance music today, even leaving aside that there's an implicit anti-retro assumption to "good sound design" (which, if it is present in retro-leaning music, is always the modernist/contemporary twist on whatever else is going on). The point being that "sound design" is a loaded term, suggesting qualities which, even if not actively disruptive, distract the listener away from the (mere) operation/progression of the groove or the song. If dance music has sound design which is essentially ignorable (even if glossy/classy/tastefully executed) then I don't think of it as meriting the term.

Julio Bashmore's "Au Seve" is 2012's model: crisp, tactile, a perfect house tune that sounds a lot nicer to me than most of Bashmore's previous work but could never be accused of investing in "good sound design".

In the case of Voices From The Lake the pendulum is swung pretty hard towards sound design and away from groove/song in the sense that it's difficult to frame the album as anything other than a "listening experience".

i still think of booka shade as the ne plus ultra of sound design

distract the listener away from the (mere) operation/progression of the groove or the song

and i don't think booka shade's sound design did this at all

I would totally agree that prime Get Physical was a case of everything coming together so well that it's difficult to separate out these qualities. But I don't think that disproves what I'm saying b/c if Get Physical had an explicit purpose (in its early days) it was precisely to blur the distinction between "efficient" dance music and sumptuous production.

Which certainly means they indulged in these tendencies in a manner far more subtle than say Herbert or Luciano or Isolee (though it's easy to forget that Booka Shade's first album was much more deep and less cheerfully anthemic than Movements - see "Vertigo" for example, a wealth of little rustles and ear-tickling sounds to get lost in), but still, if you can get lost in the details of the production then you're not just focusing on the groove/song. Glossiness in an early Crazi Cousinz tune is not something you can get "lost" in. Whereas Get Physical's sound design calls attention to itself - forces itself into the listener's consciousness - even while playing the role of power behind the (groove's) throne so consummately.

To be clear I'm certainly not suggesting some zero sum game where sound design is always at the expense of groove primacy, more that "good sound design" encourages a mode of listening focused on "good sound design", it's not incidental to the groove.

I think of minimal as one of those genres in general where sound design and groove really came together, functional music that was all about finding new ways to make the space in the room and the space between sounds really work. It helped that most of these producers were making tracks with Berghain or Fabric-level sound systems in mind.

Meanwhile a lot of post-dubstep in particular seems to value sound design over groove in the way that's to its detriment. Although Martyn's 'Ghost People' led to me wonder whether I'd have got more out of eg Night Slugs if they'd been better at sound design.

Whereas with funky a track could sound cheap as hell and it just didn't matter because the grooves and hooks and songs were just so irresistible. It didn't fanny around, basically.

really quite impressive sound design, i said to myself while fashioning a noose

― r|t|c, Friday, 21 September 2012 12:02 (2 months ago) Bookmark

I know that Rate Your Music is polarizing to say the least, but here's the top 100 albums according to them (at least, as of this post):

1. Swans - The Seer
2. Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city
3. Max Richter - Recomposed: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons
4. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
5. Grizzly Bear - Shields
6. Converge - All We Love We Leave Behind
7. Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel…
8. Enslaved - RIITIIR
9. Between the Buried and Me - The Parallax II: Future Sequence
10. Tame Impala - Lonerism
11. Deftones - Koi no Yokan
12. Beach House - Bloom
13. Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music
14. Dead Can Dance - Anastasis
15. Scott Walker - Bish Bosch
16. Ne Obliviscaris - Portal of I
17. Änglagård - Viljans öga
18. Neil Young - Psychedelic Pill
19. Frank Ocean - Channel Orange
20. Dr. John - Locked Down
21. Anathema - Weather Systems
22. Rush - Clockwork Angels
23. Andy Stott - Luxury Problems
24. Aesop Rock - Skelethon
25. Dordeduh - Dar de duh
26. Kälter - Ubuntu
27. Wintersun - Time I
28. The Tallest Man on Earth - There's No Leaving Now
29. Threshold - March of Progress
30. Be'lakor - Of Breath and Bone
31. Jonny Greenwood - The Master
32. Flying Lotus - Until the Quiet Comes
33. Bob Dylan - Tempest
34. Death Grips - The Money Store
35. Kamelot - Silverthorn
36. Testament - Dark Roots of Earth
37. Om - Advaitic Songs
38. Big Big Train - English Electric (Part One)
39. ∆ - An Awesome Wave
40. AtomA - Skylight
41. Aluk Todolo - Occult Rock
42. El-P - Cancer 4 Cure
43. Spiritualized - Sweet Heart Sweet Light
44. Overkill - The Electric Age
45. Shackleton - Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs
46. Mgła - With Hearts Toward None
47. Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers
48. Borknagar - Urd
49. Blut aus Nord - 777 - Cosmosophy
50. Accept - Stalingrad
51. Aeternam - Moongod
52. iamamiwhoami - kin
53. Goat - World Music
54. Diablo Swing Orchestra - Pandora's Piñata
55. In Mourning - The Weight of Oceans
56. Various Artists - Moonrise Kingdom
57. Circus Maximus - Nine
58. High on Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis
59. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis - The Heist
60. Steven Wilson - Get All You Deserve
61. Clams Casino - Instrumentals 2
62. Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory
63. John Talabot - ƒIN
64. Donald Fagen - Sunken Condos
65. BADBADNOTGOOD - BBNG2
66. Raime - Quarter Turns Over a Living Line
67. Killing Joke - MMXII
68. Jack White - Blunderbuss
69. Sigh - In Somniphobia
70. Mount Eerie - Clear Moon
71. Nas - Life Is Good
72. Devin Townsend - Epicloud
73. A Forest of Stars - A Shadowplay for Yesterdays
74. Colour Haze - She Said
75. Paradise Lost - Tragic Idol
76. Dying Fetus - Reign Supreme
77. The Flower Kings - Banks of Eden
78. Evoken - Atra Mors
79. Orden Ogan - To the End
80. Tindersticks - The Something Rain
81. Japandroids - Celebration Rock
82. Lee Fields - Faithful Man
83. Ty Segall & White Fence - Hair
84. Neneh Cherry & The Thing - The Cherry Thing
85. The Faceless - Autotheism
86. Galneryus - Angel of Salvation
87. Thee Oh Sees - Putrifiers II
88. mewithoutYou - Ten Stories
89. Steve Hackett - Genesis Revisited II
90. Kreator - Phantom Antichrist
91. Thank You Scientist - Maps of Non-Existent Places
92. Katatonia - Dead End Kings
93. Arjen Anthony Lucassen - Lost in the New Real
94. Spawn of Possession - Incurso
95. Chris Robinson Brotherhood - Big Moon Ritual
96. Anaal Nathrakh - Vanitas
97. The Gathering - Disclosure
98. Sigur Rós - Valtari
99. Headspace - I Am Anonymous
100. Caspian - Waking Season

(Was debating listing all 1000 just to see Whiney annotate it.)

Matt otm