ILM's Top 77 ALBUMS of 2011

my #2 soooooo goooooood. made me pick up the acoustic guitar again <3

yeah i like this one a lot

Don't know what Tropical 2 is.. The Rustie album's great fun but I found it didn't last too long in terms of replay value. Think this'll be one to keep handy for DJ sets more than home listening.

runner ups ended up being my favorite song on this one. love the noise just slightly bubbling up from the background shhhhyyeeaaahhh

dl, there's a very good chance you would love Tropical 2

The Ineffable Beauty of Tropical 2 is the ILx thread, DL. V.v.happy to see this place!

nice placing for smoke ring

Apart from Society Is My Friend, I found Kurt Vile really rather bland and neutral. Maybe it's better heard in the context of his other work?

cool to see smoke ring beat bon iver

"runner ups" on that is so dope

http://i.imgur.com/zD6M1.jpg

13. Julianna Barwick — The Magic Place (583 points, 19 votes, two first place votes)

P4K: 24
P&J: 86

Spotify

Hallelujah, my number one iirc.

fuck yeah

whoa

i have never heard of her! tell me about this music

Great album! Not quite my favourite Barwick material, but close.

lex, maybe try "Prizewinning": http://youtu.be/jW-nKlgrK7I

lex it's kinda like...ambient music made entirely from her voice looped and processed

It boils down to quality I guess, and I guess it's like a connoisseur of wine or cheese despairing when people latch onto poor quality but more accessible brands. People will always like Kraft dairy slices even if they're aware that much better cheeses exist.

― Sounds Of The Baskervilles (dog latin), Thursday, February 2, 2012 9:51 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know you don't wanna have this debate, but the connoisseur's view you're articulating is common on ILX, and it always bugs me - no slam intended. it's come up repeatedly ITT, with regard to liturgy, girls and real estate (false indie lol), colin stetson, frank ocean, and others.

craigo boingo made an excellent point upthread, during the discussion of that colin stetson album: it probably does seems shitty if you insist on viewing it as wannabe jazz, but it's nonetheless a great post-rock album. would say the same of frank ocean: R&B heads might view it as a watered-down version of something superior in its pure form, but when viewed from outside that context, it's a phenomenally successful and satisfying hybrid of R&B, pop, rock and indie elements. imo.

perspective is what makes the difference, and that has more to do with how we categorize music (and ourselves as listeners) than it does with inherent quality. like, i'm sure that girls fans get something real and substantial out of that album, and it's probably not just because they don't know from "real indie" and are therefore easily duped by processed slices.

R<Lex, it's really immense looped vocal pieces, that have this very spectral, early morning choral feel.

fwiw, my all-time JB song - the one that initially blew me away a few years back - is Cloudbank from Florine.

holy shit! completely counted that out! awesome!

(this was one of the last things cut from my ballot)

Haven't heard that Barwick record, sounds pretty interesting though, so will check it out.

wow, i was sure JB wasn't gonna turn up! gorgeous album.

Never heard of Barwick. I like the way it sounds, but I feel I would have to go to some kind of special college and study intensely for many months in order to understand how to listen to this correctly.

xp re ongoing true/false debate: it seems pretty obvious to me that genre hybridisation is orthogonal to "watering-down". Music that crosses genres A and B may be more accessible to a fan of B than something that is "true A" without losing any of its complexity and quality.

From that description of Barwick I'm imagining somewhere between Imogen Heap and AGF.

oh wow i am kind of feeling "prizewinning" a lot

i wonder how you guys would feel about fatima al qadiri/ayshay? she's who i thought of when i read "lex it's kinda like...ambient music made entirely from her voice looped and processed" -

on ayshay's warn-u ep she reinterpreted some traditional islamic chants/anthems in that manner

http://youtu.be/AJobaxZqy18
http://youtu.be/4AvDiYDMRz8

xp i think if you like the way it sounds you're listening to it correctly already. nothing academic about it really

Love love love the Barwick album, great to see it place so high. Is Tim Hecker going to be top ten?!

Barwick's collaboration with Ikue Mori on FRKWYS is also well worth checking out, really really good stuff.

Yeah, she's just jamming on loops basically, nothing amazingly clever, but such a fantastic sound. xxp

fatima al qadiri? seandalai you are a fan of hers, right?

I like the way it sounds, but I feel I would have to go to some kind of special college and study intensely for many months in order to understand how to listen to this correctly.

see, this is how i felt about julia holter - i'm finding barwick quite immediate though, the ebbs and flows of the sound make "sense" to me

but I feel I would have to go to some kind of special college and study intensely for many months in order to understand how to listen to this correctly.

Early morning on a weekend in a quiet house works for me.

the drums on prizewinning are kinda jarring to me though

Yeah I love the Fatima Al Qadiri EP, haven't got round to spending much time with the Ayshay material yet though.

on "prizewinning" it's like the two vocal lines are singing in rounds - one descending as the other ascends

oh man the percussion has just come in!!!! i am SOLD

i'm behind but i think this nicolas jaar record is the weirdest thing i've heard from the countdown? like i have no idea what this music is for.

it's for me

it's you, it's you, it's all for you

Contender/Sean: taking this cheese analogy a bit further, if someone were to scoff at me whenever I put some Lego cheese slices in my burger, I'd be like 'fuck offs cunto!'. On the other hand if I was in the super market and saw
Babybels all wrapped up in rustic
Packaging and then people started telling me how amazing these things were, I'd prob want a bit of clarity on that.
fancy packaging

Vow is another great track on the Magic Place:

http://youtu.be/6JkSVvMn5Sc

http://i.imgur.com/eLOVp.jpg

12. EMA — Past Life Martyred Saints (590 points, 18 votes, two first place votes)

P4K: 13
P&J: 15

Spotify

Not sure this is going anywhere, but I don't buy your implication that crossover or even hipster representatives of a genre are automatically Babybel. They may be that, but they might also be really cool variants that haven't been tried before.

lex, maybe try "Prizewinning": http://youtu.be/jW-nKlgrK7I

currently listening to this, as i'd never heard JB before. reminds me in different ways of things i like quite a bit (o paon/woelv, grouper and the knife, for instance) but i'm finding it more lovely than compelling, at least on the first pass. suppose i need to hear the whole album...

The Kurt Vile album reminds me a lot of latter-day Dylan's backing band with a little more electric guitar drone. There are so many clean, open chords as well as a lot of crunchy dissonances and great resolutions. "Puppet to the Man" is probably my favorite - the vocals are in that space between speaking and singing and sit in the middle of this sea of parallel-sounding lines that aren't actually moving in parallel. At the core it's still a droney vibe record, which can understandably turn people off, but I appreciated the songs and the subtle instrumental touches.

"more lovely than compelling" is a succinct summation of my feelings tbh xp

woelv, grouper

Ok, gotta hear this now

As someone who finds lovely stuff compelling I'm getting increasingly excitable.

it's really immense looped vocal pieces, that have this very spectral, early morning choral feel.

that is a great description. it's sort of like grand church music if churches were all outdoors

also, I just listened to the Nguzunguzu remix of that Ayshay EP and O_O

xp, the drums coming in on Prizewinning is the BEST