ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2012

Just listened to Icon Give Thank (an endorsement from emil.y is generally good enough for me) and really love it!

http://i.imgur.com/J0IH3Cs.png

50. NIKI & THE DOVE Instinct (306 Points, 9 Votes, 2 First Place Votes) Spotify

^_^

JF was very happy about this one.

mah #1 (since 2010, basically, being that half the songs here had been floating around as freebies and ep tracks.)

Have listened to a bit of the Converge album and it's really good! As far as shouty man guitar rock goes, it completely shits all over the Metz record (and I enjoyed that one too)

Just listened to Icon Give Thank (an endorsement from emil.y is generally good enough for me) and really love it!

― Dr. Alfred P. Falfa (WilliamC), Tuesday, January 29, 2013 7:32 AM (9 minutes ago)

co-sign!

Great album, but in truth most of the highlights for me were (as JF mentioned) on prior releases. One exception that didn't seem to get much traction is Somebody, which is essentially a Revolution-era Prince song.

i think i voted for niki and converge too

I wish I could force people to love this as much as I do, but it's a fruitless endeavor I guess? It falls somewhere between the blown-outness of Florence and the nuances of Bat For Lashes. Kate Bush comparisons are lazy, but she does sound a bit like her at times. And fuck, "The Drummer" is a jam and a half to speed down the interstate to.

"come into my room" by cooly g is a classic but i couldn't get into the rest of that album

xp this is a pretty cool record actually! i think i like it.

"come into my room" by cooly g is a classic but i couldn't get into the rest of that album

really?! wow, why 'come into my room"? (i love it, but it doesn't seem wildly different/better to the rest of the album.)

i don't hate what niki's going for but it's the mannered voice, the way she garbles her vowels, that really turns me off, sorry JF

feel like im on some unperson shit with this list but i enjoyed that gunplay tape a fair bit

I like some X and the Y type artists, but could not get into Niki.

ilm makes me sad again ;_;

hi five to my co #1 voter, though.

http://i.imgur.com/phRsK3v.png

49. DEATH GRIPS The Money Store (307 Points, 12 Votes) Spotify

Out of stuff here I havent heard, I most want to check out Vatican Shadow, Laurel Halo, and Shackleton. And Gunplay, due to the brief ahem exegesis on Cartoons & Cereal in the tracks poll

xps - Landing at #50 is not bad! I'd be ecstatic if Sa Dingding had placed at #50 (or 77 even).

Xp I also need to give Death Grips a listen, loved Black Jack

Every time I've heard Death Grips I've liked it less.

wow this sun araw/congos, which i wasn't aware of, is pretty botched IMO, got really excited as heart of the congos i believe is one of the most magical albums ever....but yeah sun araw seems to just have gotten them as some kind of press stunt without much thought to how to actually use or showcase some of the most beautiful voices ever...the tracks are fairly tuneless, muddled, and unnecessarily cluttered with overly busy "cool" production crap. so much effort being expelled to accomplish so little.

:(

Is that the only cover not altered by grayscaling so far?

Every time I've heard Death Grips I've liked it less.

― questino (seandalai), Tuesday, January 29, 2013 10:55 AM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Voted for both DG albums, doubt NLDW is gonna place though.

Is that the only cover not altered by grayscaling so far?

I'd guestimate probably 40% of the covers so far were already b&w before I even got to them. It's trendy!

Tracks comment comparing Death Grips to Atari Teen Riot nailed it for me. More interesting in concept than execution, tolerable in small doses.

Nah, 40% was high. But there have been quite a few.

Problem with Death Grips is that they've sort of only got one song which they do pretty well. I wish they'd somehow use their aesthetic to do a really wild Ill Communication-style genre hopper that worked like a cool shouty fucked up mixtape. If someone can give me a reason for owning more than one album by them, I'd like to know. Otherwise I'm not sure they'll amount to much more than a slightly-more-decent Dälek.

Is that the only cover not altered by grayscaling so far?

metz, lower dens, shackleton, silent servant, japandroids and converge are all o.g. b&w too iirc

maybe somebody could post the original after JF posts?

wow this sun araw/congos, which i wasn't aware of, is pretty botched IMO, got really excited as heart of the congos i believe is one of the most magical albums ever....but yeah sun araw seems to just have gotten them as some kind of press stunt without much thought to how to actually use or showcase some of the most beautiful voices ever...the tracks are fairly tuneless, muddled, and unnecessarily cluttered with overly busy "cool" production crap. so much effort being expelled to accomplish so little.

:(

― baby beluga (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 29, 2013 12:56 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup, if everything on heart of the congos serves to enhance the voices, this is sort of the opposite it seems

i thought about doing that and then i thought, hey - let someone else be that asshole for a change xp

I don't think DG have "one song" any more than most of the acts already listed.

I might not go as far as UMS re: the Congos, it's an okay record but I have to say his are pretty similar to my thoughts on it.

maybe somebody could post the original after JF posts?

no, don't please. I'm working an aesthetic here and if I wanted to just post the covers as they are EVERYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I could've saved myself a shitload of time and done exactly that.

I kind of agree (it's less than the sum of its Congos) but I can still enjoy the album a lot. xp

Death Grips is odd to me because aside from "Guillotine" I always feel like the songs I'm latching onto aren't the ones everyone else coalesces around; either that or I manage to hit all of the places where people are talking about and playing the songs I don't care as much about.

Like, it's weird to me that "I've Seen Footage" ended up being The Song from The Money Store because I spent all year blasting "Get Got", "Hustle Bones", "The Hacker" and "Bitch Please"

yeah "Hacker" in particular shoulda broken out.

I wish they'd somehow use their aesthetic to do a really wild Ill Communication-style genre hopper

No way are they talented enough to pull that off.

yeah zach hill should really work on his chops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdMDcG3zAEI

http://i.imgur.com/sNu7RJ8.png

48. CLOUD NOTHINGS Attack on Memory (314 Points, 13 Votes) Spotify

also I lost a ton of respect for Death Grips after that super bratty Spin piece, specifically at the point where Burnett apparently said straight-facedly about the NO LOVE DEEP WEB cover art "I just looked at the picture and thought 'what a beautiful piece of art'"

we've all thought that about our penis at one point or another

love the cloud nothings record

also another one unaffected by greyscale

'Guillotine' is still THE Death Grips tune for me, and the one that go me interested in the first place. After that it just felt like more of the same. I guess this is the problem with a lot of loud/abrasive music - without due care it can appear to turn into a formula sans nuance - I'm thinking of the kind of problems people were levelling at brostep a year or two back specifically. Obviously there are exceptions, as with metal. But even metal tends to work best when there's a contrast of dark/light heavy/quiet rather than a bombardment of noise.

3 of the next 4 also unaffected. Ordinarily, that would be something like a hint, but there were SO MANY b&w covers last year that I don't feel like I'm tipping my cards.

Google Image Searching "No Love Deep Web" is surprisingly a treat.

I can't think of a single thing on The Money Store that sounds like "Guillotine"; certainly none of the songs I listed are sparsely arranged base drops with minimal drum tracks and intermittent digital noise blasts.