apparently tons, but I don't remember any of it. let's all refresh our memories

in no order, here are some albums I enjoyed. I'm just gonna give an ultra-concise summary and a link to a song. if you haven't listened to much new music this year (I just started several albums over break), there's probably something for you in this list


com truise - Galactic Melt
song: vhs sex http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E034wcww390
90s fetishism might almost be old hat by now, but when this album was new it sounded real fresh. com truise is something like a combination of Copy and BoC, electro passed through the 90s and played with aged-sounding synths



david lynch - crazy clown time
song: these are my friends
if you didn't know, this is David Lynch himself, not just a band named after him. it's lynchian tunes straight from the source. the album sounds pretty much exactly like you'd expect it to sound (a lynch movie), which is good, but also kind of disappointing--I had hoped he'd blow me away with something unforeseen, like faux-cheery 'death pop'



john maus - we must become the pitiless censors of ourselves
song: cop killer
how could I forget? if you post on saltw and haven't listened to john maus, you're not getting the full experience. from this album, cop killer is the instant classic



tim hecker - ravedeath 1972
song: Hatred Of Music I
everyone loved this ambient drone album



heidecker & wood - starting from nowhere
song: cocaine
with Awesome Show's own Tim Heidecker. this song isn't on the album, but it's a really good video. the album itself is full of similar half-joking, half-serious songs, equal parts parody and homage. it's got the Elton John "Million People", the Simon and Garfunkel "Cross Country Skiing", the cheesy Hall and Oats rock & soul. heidecker & wood know how it feels to be too embarrassed to publicly listen to 80s/90s soft rock


the men - leaving home
song: Night Landing
managed to be the sewage noise rock album of the year, but not destructive enough



the curious mystery - we creeling
song: Night Ride Reeling
probably intolerable indie stuff to a lot of you guys, this band's got something going on despite often falling back upon the common 'indie' sound. probably best illustrated in this song (don't watch the video the first time you listen it'll throw you off, watch a castlevania video on mute instead)



colin stetson - New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges
song: The Righteous Wrath of an Honorable Man
song 2, with free download link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDhJR8aHlOI
Guy Likes To Toot On Horn's. album of antisocial machine noises made by a saxophone by an apparently extremely popular indie collaborator



the caretaker - an empty bliss beyond this world
song: Camaraderie at Arms Length
guy looked into the role of music in recalling memories for people who suffer from alzheimers or amnesia. apparently the result is spooky ballroom music. maybe a little boring and direct, but a good mood-setter


Others:
cut copy - zonoscope
m83 - hurry up, we're dreaming
tv on the radio - 9 types of light

Music video of the year: Quiza feat. BX - One Dream

Worst album of the year: Fleet Foxes - Awkward Lyrics Repeatedly Mentioning Children


PRETTY GREAT YEAR ACTUALLY and this isn't nearly all of it. I'd like to hear more about kurt vile's album in particular but only if the name is a reference to kurt weill. also wanna listen to the new mountain goats, fucked up, EMA, aaa what there was a new kate bush album? I still don't have a grasp on this years music, I have no idea what was popular besides a couple of albums like ravedeath and zonoscope. gimme your lists.

I think I only got 3 albums that were rleased this year. I brought between 50 and 100 albums, but most of it was random stuff like bulking up my Zappa collection (got like 55 albums of his now!!) or compilations of stuff like The Specials, Fela Kuti, Doctor Feelgood and Frascoi Hardey. There is another that could be included in this, but it's like Makoto Kawabata copies it straight onto disk and puts it into a plastic sleeve himself, so I don't think it'd really count.
There was actually a load of cool reissues this year (like BRAINTICKET) and there's been a few new Zappa albums released, but meh. Here:

Tom Waits - Bad as me
New Tom Waits studio album. Really good.

Pikacyu * Makoto - OM Sweet Home: We Are Shining Stars From Darkside
Two members of Acid Mothers Temple And The Cosmic Inferno. Combining Afrirampo's weird animalistic sense of music, with Makoto's space guitar. Pikacyu is one of the most exciting drummers around, I've been a massive fan since I first heard Afrirampo, this album combining two of my fave musicians oes not disappoint. It's really great.

Acid Mothers Temple And The Melting Paradiso UFO - The Ripper At The Heavens Gate Of Dark
I went to the tour for this album to see them, the show was insanely brilliant, and this album is too!
The first track is an actual song :o and then the rest is your standard AMT affair, constantly orgasmic psychedelic noise. Love it.

i spent a lot of my headphones time this year making music instead of listening to it but here are my picks. they are very predictable and i think they're all gonna be rap. if you graphed the collaborations between them, the graph would likely be connected.

das racist - relax
clever is probably the best word you could use to describe das racist. they are very clever. some people think they're a joke rap group but i think that those people don't read very deeply into things.
song: michael jackson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc__3nsfxwA

open mike eagle - rappers will die of natural causes
OME picks apart the popular imagery of hiphop. for the most part, i think he's quite good at it.
song: right next to you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdIcFYZqnNk

sole & skyrider - hello cruel world
dietcoke said ugghh last time i posted sole but dude is still my favourite rapper. runs things almost entirely DIY from his house these days, although the Skyrider stuff was done in a studio. i think sole put out three other albums this year. two self-produced and one over commercial beats with songs about the news. I think Skyrider members have dropped at least one each, too. hello cruel world has considered wordplay, odd rhyme schemes, varied subject matter, and Skyrider's characteristic production.
song: napoleon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz1_2X4K3Cw
how sole sounded when he was like 15: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN4MXvcBhXk

i think there may have been some other things too but w/e.

i've only heard one or two of his songs but i think kurt vile is more 70s classicism rock stuff with tapefuzz etc mostly discarded by this point. i like the caretaker although i haven't heard that album! iirc a lot of his stuff is still free on his web site, the "theoretically pure retrograde amnesia" album was good.
 
i've been meaning to check out john maus but nearly everything i read about his stuff sort of places a lot of priority on the fact that he is phd in philosophy or something and thus supposedly weightier than the rest of the hauntology / blurred history recording stuff which has been going on since 2006 at least.
 
i don't think i've listened to anything new this year i guess we know who the real retrograde amnesiac is. . .
 
edit: i listened to a track from the lou reed / metallica collab and kinda sorta liked it if only because i enjoy lou's dadrock stuff
 
edit2: best album title of the year is Carole King's "A Christmas Carole"!!!!
 
edit3: actually just remembered ive been meaning to get the new prurient album for a long while since its apparantly really good / one of his best. will report back in this thread re. prurient

this is kind of an aside but i did listen to an old 1985 cd release of scritti politti's "cupid & psyche 85" a lot this year and in a weird way it seems to represent a sort of COUNTERPOINT to all the chillwave stuff coming out now, in terms of being a mid-80s synthpop release that is totally devoid of noise, grime etc to the point where it seems more grotesque and uncanny now than current bands deliberately playing with the distance of old techniques.
 
Scritti Politti - Hypnotise
 
keep picturing remake of the ending to sunset boulevard with green gartside's leering monstrous face filling camera as he advances on horrified chillwavers, the shock of the old..

all the stuff I know of everyone prolly heard of already

new lupe fiasco, new black keys (awesome), New Roots, and Blakroc 2 is supposed to come out soon.

you pretty much summed up the year for me earlchip

john maus, tim hecker and david lynch all made really good albums this year. i also listened to police academy 6 a lot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wedlZmJQJis) and other chillwave junk... its those synths man, i can't get enough of the synths..

earl that's a list of all the crud i keep playing over and over and some stuff i've never heard of at all. cool list. let me read the rest of the posts then i'm gonna post again with a little list of my own.

okay. yes kate bush released a new album this year, and it was cool but it is different from her stuff before, although not that different from aerials.

i also like st. vincent a lot. she's gotten really popular lately, and i missed her when she came to glasgow which made me mad, but i'm sure you'll all have heard about just as much of her as you can take so i'll leave it at that.

what about like ehhhh dirty beaches i like him. and the guy who inspired him, mattress. i think they both released things this year. oh and boris. man that feels like ages ago now - two albums from boris this year and some of the songs were jpop which was funny. oh yeah ben frost too. think that was this year. his album is great - watch out, there are many ben frosts....it is easy to get lost in frost. you're looking for the ben frost who released an album called hibakusja.

didn't eh that guy...eh....oh yeah, death grips, he released his album this year. wow, this has been a long year


and about it being too hard to follow music aaaaaaaaa it kind of crystalises again after you spend a few hours getting a sense of what's what. there will always be stuff i miss but i feel like i have at least a vague, useless idea of what's what and all i mean by that is there is a narrative and a scale that i feel like i can comprehend. and what i mean by that is that it doesn't matter you just need to feel like you have the right conversations to go to to find the stuff you like. we know there was always this much music but now we've got access to all of it at a moment's notice. i'm three clicks from finding out about a band there's no reason i should ever have heard of. sometimes i do that but i use the word of mouth from cool suckers like earl for example and go from there.

idk i don't follow or keep up with music so much anymore and you can keep a track on what's in generally going on. i don't think i have missed much.
apart from those chigago tapes catas showed me, burial and james blake and mmmmaybe cambridge library murders i haven't heard anything changing for awhile.


we COULD talk about james blake though..

don't assume everyone already heard what you're mentioning. eg farren, I haven't listened to any of those artists' albums besides maybe the black keys and I forget. I don't have anyone to get me into hip hop and rap and I won't do it on my own, so biggle's post will be useful to me when I get to it (haven't made a dent in this thread yet). youtubes are ultra useful if you feel like posting them

and you guys are right. like when it comes to music, I'm pretty unambitious. I don't purposely follow new music during the year, I'm not in the loop, and out of all the arts I probably know the least about music. but isn't this still a pretty good list of this year's new music, stuff most of you guys already listened to? it's possible to get a grasp of what's been going on just by word of mouth. I only got the men and caretaker from Dusted, the rest I heard about from my sister, someone online, or browsing some non-music site. it just feels overwhelming because like jamie said everyone has instant access to all of it. if you find some stranger that likes some of the same stuff as you, chances are they'll also be gushing over some other band you haven't checked out yet

i've been meaning to check out john maus but nearly everything i read about his stuff sort of places a lot of priority on the fact that he is phd in philosophy or something and thus supposedly weightier than the rest of the hauntology / blurred history recording stuff which has been going on since 2006 at least.

I haven't read anything about him besides skimming some summaries, but I probably disagree with anyone who says this. I've always seen the constant subject of his phd or whatever (I remember one source said he's a professor at berkeley or some school) as kind of a joke, which may be part of the pervasive humor of the genre (maybe, because I haven't explored it at all and the only other artist I can think of is ariel pink)

im always late to the party when it comes to finding out about good music. irl friends are useless since they have horrid taste and i dont know any good sites/blogs whose taste i like or whose opinions i trust. i dont want to go to pitchfork please help me

maybe ill just go back to sifting through this mountain of old postpunk/noiserock shit i downloaded forever ago

dusted magazine is the best one I know of, though I only check it very rarely. there are a lot of people with pitchfork tastes on there, but there are some more insightful ones. here's a year end list that I thought was pretty good http://dustedmagazine.com/features/1021

ugh my post was such a ramble sorry.

man bon iver is the shit. I thought they were like coldplay or some crap until I heard "skinny love" that song is so awesome.

The new black keys is called "El Camino", I bought it at FYE because I didn't have my comp with me and the album art is nothing but different parked el caminos. The book has like ten fucking pages with el caminos and the song list is on the back with the credits. Also look up the video for "Lonely boy" its some nerdy dressed black guy just shaking his ass to it the entire song. I think that the black keys have mastered targ.

For the actual album though "Little Black Submarines" would prolly give you a good feel for how the album sounds. It goes from just some acoustic sounding, darker/bluesy yellow submarine spinoff and builds into a really badass song. I haven't had the chance to listen to the others though I just saw them being mentioned on facebook and wanted to check em out. I've been waiting for Blakroc 2 since the first one came out, its going to be really really good.

The only problem I noticed with the black keys though, its like they're TOO good. I listen to them and love all their stuff but it just gets kind of old after awhile and I don't wanna listen to them as much anymore.
 
 
 
Also I got the new drake too I'm pretty sure. Drake is a great wordsmith but he's so fucking base and boring after awhile. Dude says the same shit over and over again, atleast little wayne is insane and subconsciously thinks about shit on a higher level. Either that or he subliminals that shit.

i think i only downloaded one album released in 2011, and i hated it. i was worried that amon tobin would kinda go off the creative deep end and just make an album of NOISE, and he finally did it. his new album was just crap. i'm not even going to bother linking it or giving it a review because i really don't care. it probably appeals to somebody out there, but i'm not that guy.

i mostly just download older shit, finding about people that i missed over the years. or i just listen to independent artists. they have fewer obligations i guess, and usually are freer to do their own thing. the top ten songs i've heard this year were probably all independently released.

EDIT:
no i was mistaken, ott's new album mir was actually pretty good. it's not profoundly consistent throughout, and a couple of the songs kinda have this retread feel to them(dude really needs to expand his sample library), but there's a couple really good songs in there i think and the album works as a whole. amidst all the clutter you can usually count on like ten minutes of exceptionally good stuff out of one of ott's albums, and that happens here.

Here are the new albums I listened to in 2011. Note - I probably don't listen to the same type of music the typical GWer does so my tastes might not match popular consensus.. but here we go.



I love VNV Nation. I'm more of a fan of their upbeat stuff and this album delivered that in spades. Some great danceable tracks here. Interestingly the one song I don't like is Control (where the album name comes from. It's not a bad song by any means, I just don't like how angry Ronin Harris sounds here, haha). My standout tracks from this album are Streamline, Gratitude, and Nova. Overall I wouldn't say it's their best album (I still give that to Futureperfect) but I enjoyed it all the same.



I came across Ellie Goulding randomly by flipping to one of the digital music channels on my tv and hearing the Bassnectar remix of her song Lights. I was intrigued so I typed in the lyrics and discovered the young Brit artist. She doesn't have an amazing voice, but it works really well with electronic style she has going. My favourite song from his album would have to be Starry Eyed.



This one is special to me since I was one of Kate Havnevik's pledge supporters on PledgeMusic. The wait was worth it. (And so was the autographed cd she sent out.. but that's just a bonus). I first discovered Kate after finding out that Imogen Heap is a friend and fan of her. Kate's first album, Melankton was amazing. It blended classical music with electronic elements that surprisingly worked magnificently. This album, You, has less electronic elements and more contemporary pop influence, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy every track which is rare for me. My standout song has to be MYYM - I loved the Asian feel it has and the hook just get stuck in your head.


Those are all the albums I can remember listening to that came out in 2011. Really looking forward to the start of 2012 as the new Mind.in.a.Box album is coming out!!

noel gallagher's new album was really good imo

Cubist Reggae lol

Justin Beiber