This is my official Top 10 album list for 2011:
1. Timber Timbre Creep On Creepin’ On
“Black Water” was my most listened to song this year. Not sure what that says about me.
2. PJ Harvey Let England Shake
It took me awhile to “get” Let England Shake. The song that did it was “In Dark Places.”
3. Chad VanGaalen Diaper Island
If you told me at the start of the year that CVG would create my third-most favourite album of 2011 I’d have eaten my shoe. It’s a good thing I don’t hang around with fortune tellers. This is “Blonde Hash”
4. Austra Feel It Break
Everybody’s all about Austra’s electro-dance-witch-goth vibe. I’m on it, too, but the song on this album that really got me was the spooky piano ballad “The Beast.”
5. Lykke Li Wounded Rhymes
“I Follow Rivers” is heavy.
6. Young Galaxy Shapeshifting
This album was a bold experiment and it completely worked. This is “Peripheral Visionairies”
7. Herpes Symptome und Beschwerden
This is the exact real world manifestation of what I believe the nihilists from The Big Lebowski would sound like. I understand absolutely none of what’s being said in “Das Karnickel im Hut.”
8. D-Sisive Run With The Creeps
The more caustic, outsider and marginalized D-Sisive gets, the more pointed his music becomes. P.S. I found that GG Allin doll, D!
9. Raphael Saadiq Stone Rollin’
There are at least three songs on this record that are genuinely magic. “Movin’ Down The Line (Don’t You Go Away)” is one of them.
10. Destroyer Kaputt
This one’s a personal shocker because I’ve always hated Dan Bejar until this album. I appreciated the audacity of a yacht rock almost-concept record, though. And “Chinatown” is pretty groovy.
