Another year down, ten more albums that offer something special for music lovers. 2012 will likely go down as a “middle of the road” year when this series is all wrapped up, but there is nothing mundane about the year’s best music.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #19 in the series. My random number generator tells me that the next year to explore is 1973!
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 2012
If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to take a moment to explain the process behind the blog. I promise it has a point beyond padding the word count for the intro. I break these things into phases: 1. Immerse myself in the music of the given year and decide what I like and what has top ten potential; 2. Re-listen to the best albums and refine my top ten; 3. Re-listen to the top ten and write the reviews. Naturally, number 1 requires the most man-hours by a pretty wide margin, but number 3 is the phase that tends to drag on the longest. Partially because I’m a busy adult with a career and a family, and partially because I’m an unrepentant procrastinator. The point is, I frequently have multiple posts in flight in different phases at any given time. As I type this (phase 3), I’m in phase 2 for 1973 and phase 1 for 2018. The reason this is relevant, is because it gives me a unique perspective on three particular years at the same time. What I’m finding fascinating as I ruminate on what to say about the macro music scene of 2012, is that it is in many ways more similar to 1973 than the current year we are living in.
Most of us are familiar with the concept of Moore’s Law, whether we know it by that name or not. It applies specifically to the number of transistors on computer chips in relation to their cost, but it loosely translates that technology is growing exponentially faster each year. I feel like there is a similar phenomenon occurring with the rate at which genre lines are blurring in music. For many many years, jazz was jazz, blues was blues and pop was pop, etc. Artists on the bleeding edge of music starting fusing genres, but in ways that were easily recognizable, and rarely rendered them unclassifiable. There is a lot of innovative, experimental music in 2012, but I was rarely tripped up trying to describe it. There are albums in 2018, a lot of them in fact, that I have no clue how to describe using the terms that I’ve applied to nearly every other year of this project. That is a problem for another day, however, because this post is about the music of the not-so-distant past. Since I have yet to really address what 2012 sounded like, let’s just jump into a top ten with a lot of terrific music to enjoy.
Channel Orange – Frank Ocean
It’s not uncommon for an album to reach critical consensus as the year’s best. At least a couple of times each decade, most of the major music publications align on their choice for the top prize. What I find striking is that an album that is so precisely tied to its author’s point of view can achieve such wide-spread acclaim. Maybe that’s the trick, though. When I examine what I enjoy about Channel Orange, and I definitely consider it among the top couple of albums of the decade so far, it isn’t that I can relate to the precise experiences and worldview of Frank Ocean. It’s that his point of view is so unfiltered and uncompromised that I find myself engrossed in it completely. It is such a departure from everything else that could be considered in the same genre that it feels beamed in from another universe. Compare it to Miguel’s album Kaleidoscope Dream from the same year. That album experiments with form and features ambitious song structures, but he’s still singing about all the same shit you expect from an R&B record. So does Ocean, sometimes, but when he does it is so intimate and specific to his sensibility that it sounds unique. Whether it’s the Street Fighter II menu screen music that greets us before the first song, the complex sex and birth metaphor of “Sierra Leone”, or the album closer sung from the POV of Robin Wright in Forrest Gump, you could never mistake Channel Orange for boiler plate soul music.
The album features a unique framing device of someone clicking through TV channels, but the way it functions is more like a series of dream-like memories and elaborate conceptual fantasies (the songs) interspersed with snippets of reality and additional context (the interstitials) that inform what we think about the subjects of the songs, or more accurately what we think Ocean thinks about the subjects of the songs. It’s not exactly a clean framework (this isn’t a Pink Floyd-like concept album), but it is perfectly illustrated by the three-track stretch of “Sweet Life”, “Not Just Money” and “Super Rich Kids”. The first song kicks off with the opening line “The best song wasn’t the single…”, which is the perfect slogan to signal we are about to address some suburban hipsters, in this case living in Ladera Heights (aka “the black Beverly Hills”). The track approaches the young, privileged and wealthy at arm’s length, but never devolves into satire, instead highlighting the unmistakable fascination Ocean has with the lifestyle he’s imagining. When he sings “Why see the world, when you’ve got the beach?”, he doesn’t really mean it, but he certainly gets the mindset. Next is a short clip of someone’s mother lecturing them about the absence of their own privilege, and the fact that their prom night is in danger due to their financial choices. It’s a counterpoint to the fantasy that illustrates the accountability saddling the working class, before immediately arguing that a lack of accountability is actually a worse fate on “Super Rich Kids”. Again, Frank empathizes with the pampered and ineffectual youths more than you might expect, leaving a savage verse from Earl Sweatshirt to underline the point of the song. This ambitious stringing together of themes takes place throughout the whole work, making its surface pleasures almost secondary to deeper critical analysis.
The production of Channel Orange puts Ocean’s voice front and center. He starts many of the tracks pretty much talking his verses, saving his singing for the chorus or the many rejoinders he provides for his spoken lines. Like Prince and Stevie Wonder, he frequently provides his own background vocals, as well. He has a lovely falsetto, but this is not an album designed to get over his technical ability. Everything serves to make the personal connection greater, like you have a direct tap into his brain. The heartbeat pulse of the music is a little hazy and mostly lacks polish (the one exception being the show-stopping ancient-Egyptian epic cum stripper ode, “Pyramid”). In many ways it reminds me of D’Angelo’s classic Voodoo, which is fitting because it was probably the single album I listened to repeatedly the most when it was first released since Voodoo came out a decade prior. More so than that album, though, the song-writing on Channel Orange is masterful and nearly every track is essential (only “Monks” feels perfunctory). Music of this depth and beauty doesn’t come around too often, which makes it gratifying when the music community rallies together to give it the attention that it deserves.
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good kid, m.A.A.d. city – Kendrick Lamar
2012 was a big year for artists sharing their deeply personal visions through interesting framing devices. good kid m.A.A.d. city is basically the hip hop version of Channel Orange, where Kendrick Lamar shares semi-biographical stories from his youth and explores the theme of how the culture you are immersed in can cause you to act against your own best interests, all against a backdrop of a single night on the town “with the homies”. It’s a smart concept that Kendrick fully commits to, and the results are exceptional. It’s among the most creative and well-constructed sophomore efforts in the history of rap music.
We all know Kendrick as a talented emcee, but good kid m.A.A.d. city was not crafted as a testament to his mic skills. The stories that he tells take precedent over any other considerations, so you have moments like “Backseat Freestyle” with its lack of polish and consciously puerile chorus because it is meant to approximate a teenager spewing bravado to his friends. You also have Lamar deploying a litany of different vocal inflections to emphasize his character’s mindset on each individual track, leading to panting hysteria on “M.A.A.D. City” or the hushed, matter-of-fact way he recounts a near miss with police on “The Art of Peer Pressure”. Those choices make the album unmistakably his own, as do idiosyncratic tracks like “Swimming Pools (Drank)”. That song illustrates everything that makes Kendrick Kendrick: the self-awareness and self-examination, the black humor, the multiple characters (Lamar, his friend, his conscience). Most of all it is just that no one else writes lyrics like these.
Now I done grew up round some people living their life in bottles Granddaddy had the golden flask back stroke every day in Chicago Some people like the way it feels Some people wanna kill their sorrows Some people wanna fit in with the popular, that was my problem I was in the dark room, loud tunes, looking to make a vow soon That I’mma get fucked up, fillin’ up my cup I see the crowd move Changing by the minute and the record on repeat Took a sip, then another sip, then somebody said to me N**** why you babysittin’ only 2 or 3 shots? I’mma show you how to turn it up a notch First you get a swimming pool full of liquor, then you dive in it Pool full of liquor, then you dive in it I wave a few bottles, then I watch ’em all flock All the girls wanna play Baywatch I got a swimming pool full of liquor and they dive in it Pool full of liquor I’mma dive in it
It reminds me a lot of listening to Common for the first time, not because it sounds anything like him, but because Common’s flow and wordplay has always gone against the grain. There have been thousands of rap records, and probably millions of emcees, so to hear someone invent a style that is entirely their own is a special thing these days.
For all of the conceptual and metaphorical creativity, good kid m.A.A.d. city still has to function as a hip hop record, which means, fundamentally, focus on rhymes and beats. It has been intimated by some in the hip hop community that the album lacks in the beat department, but rest assured, there are some great standalone tracks here. “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “Money Trees” are outstanding head nodders with choruses that demand to be rapped along to. That they fit within the ambitious structure of his album while still operating independently, is a testament to Kendrick’s gifts as an artist. I suspect I’m in the minority with this opinion, but I don’t think he has yet come close to topping the achievement he made with this one. That’s ok, I’m not sure anyone else has either.
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Appia Kwa Bridge – Ebo Taylor
Every time I include an afrobeat album in my top ten (and it will continue to happen frequently, especially as I round out the seventies), I worry that I won’t have much to say about it. That’s probably a result of what some may identify as a deficiency of the genre, namely that it “all sounds the same.” I suppose I can lend that strawman some credence, since a basic feature of afrobeat is repetition. Once a groove is established, it is used as a springboard to riff off of, much like a jazz combo will anchor to a base melody. Another stumbling block is the language barrier, which makes lyrical analysis quite a bit more cumbersome. Yet, afrobeat may be the music that speaks most directly to my soul, and so I will discover new ways to discuss it by necessity. Appia Kwa Bridge makes my job a little easier by deviating from the formula with tracks like the sweetly acoustic “Yaa Amponsah” and “Barrima”. Those tracks showcase Taylor’s weathered voice (he was 75 at the time) and expressive guitar playing, and also provide some variation in contrast to the funkier, up-tempo tracks. While much African music is percussion-forward, most of the songs on this album are driven by bright, beautiful horn lines. That results in Appia Kwa Bridge coming across far less militaristic than Fela Kuti or Antibalaas, instead sounding celebratory. The more I listen to it, the more I suspect that this is among the very finest afrobeat recordings that have ever been made. For the uninitiated, check out the joyful “Nsu Na Kwan”, where the various elements of Taylor and company’s sound come together in marvelous harmony. It has an insistent beat, uplifting horn stanzas, a heart-felt vocal (and who cares that google can’t help with the translation, the spirit of the singing comes through legibly), not to mention excellent but tasteful guitar and synthesizer accents. It is a four-and-a-half minute affirmation, and a great example of why our music-listening horizons shouldn’t be limited by geographic constraints.
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R.A.P. Music – Killer Mike
Up until 2012, I always sort of thought of Killer Mike as Outkast’s little brother, when I thought of him at all. He had been around a while, and I always enjoyed his verses, but it wasn’t until R.A.P. Music dropped that I really stood up and took notice. He pretty much demanded it with such a raw, self-assured album. As fellow Atlantean Andre 3000 once rapped, this is the hardest shit since MC Ren. It also displays the story-telling of Ghostface and the social awareness of KRS-One. Mike may be the most slept-on emcee of the last decade, all things considered. Or, in his words:
Killin them or killin me, this is my soliloquy Iller than the illest beat, I will spit the illest shit From right here to infinity, Till I reach the dirt I will search the earth endlessly looking for the illest, see Ain’t nobody lyrically as ill as me, ‘less Eazy-E Come back from A.I.D…S. yes Get a beat from E-L-P, ghostwritten from my partner T.I.P Cube and me and we time travel back to ‘95 Jumping in a ‘63 Impala playing Cuban Linx
He’s so verbose and makes a meal out of all those internal rhymes, but what stands out the most is that he rhymes with purpose. Whether he’s excoriating Reagan-era policies, comparing rap to religion or simply honoring the time-tested tradition of rapping about how dope he is, Mike attacks every verse like he’s spitting the most important shit you’ve ever heard. That sense of gravitas is underlined by the urgent, madcap production of El-P. In fact, the biggest headline here is probably that this album represents the true genesis of Run the Jewels, rap music’s most prolific collaboration of the decade. It isn’t a pairing anyone could have predicted to produce such stellar results, but Mike’s flow and El-P’s beats go together like peanut butter and chocolate (or perhaps shrimp and grits, for a more geographically appropriate example). The production skitters and scampers and cuts in and out behind each verse, providing an underline and exclamation point to every stanza. The end result is less a hip hop record and more a force of nature. For all the (well-deserved) love given to Kendrick, Chance and Vince Staples by the hip hop community, I’m not sure anyone has a stronger claim to the throne of “the 2010s best emcee” than Killer Mike.
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The Carpenter – The Avett Brothers
Folk-rock can be a tricky genre to pull off. There is a lack of dynamism inherent in the style that an artist must work really hard to counteract. Lots of people enjoy Mumford & Sons, but I find that they bore me to tears because I just can’t get past their lack of urgency and dull, blue-eyed sincerity. When it works, as it does with Band of Horses’ Infinite Arms or early Wilco records, it is typically on the strength of the songwriting. The Carpenter is no different, and that strength manifests in a couple of different ways. First, these are not songs with big, earworm hooks, but they are catchy enough to stick with you for a while. Also, there is enough variety in the individual tracks that the album doesn’t run together. “Winter in My Heart” is as delicate and melancholy as a Simon & Garfunkel song, while the heavy crunch of “Paul Newman Vs. the Demons” sounds like Porcupine Tree or Modest Mouse. Secondly, the lyrics are uniformly terrific. Individual songs may be about relationships, or fatherhood, or finding your place in the world, but they all tie to album-arching themes. With a title like The Carpenter, you might suspect some Christian overtones. Let’s check the title track: “If I live the life I’m given, I won’t be scared to die”… yeah, pretty sure that tracks. Yet, religion is not the only, or even the most prominent theme. The idea of changing seasons, and how that mirrors personal transformation, plays into several of the tracks. There is a sense of someone who has spent a long time searching and is finally coming to terms with who they are, whether that means reconciling past actions or deciding to start fresh. It’s a very mature, self-assured record, but it’s not a buzz-kill. Like I said, one of the songs is titled “Paul Newman Vs. the Demons”, so they aren’t treating things with the dire seriousness of some of their contemporaries.
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Kaleidoscope Dream – Miguel
Miguel is a rock star at heart. I mean, Kaleidoscope Dream is obviously a soul album, but it has a thoroughly formed rock & roll sensibility. It’s almost like the vanity project of some famous rock front man, only if he had a preternatural talent for making R&B records. What I mean by that is less about guitar riffs (although it has plenty of those) and more about song structure. “Adorn”, the lead single, is fairly straight-forward verse-chorus-verse stuff, albeit executed very well. Tracks like “Candles in Sun” and “Where’s the Fun in Forever”, however, build in ways that feel closer to seventies rock acts like Elton John or Genesis than Miguel’s contemporaries. I suppose I would call it a crossover album, if that term weren’t riddled with negative connotations about “selling out”, whatever that means. No matter your musical proclivities, you at least owe yourself the lustrous pleasure of “Do You…”, the secret crown jewel of the album. It’s bright, dreamy, funny and disarmingly cool in the offhand way that only really cool people can pull off. The title track starts out as pure psychedelic pop with just enough soul leanings to anchor it to the rest of the album. “Use Me” joins “Adorn” as the most obvious of the R&B numbers, but also features Miguel’s best singing on the album, reminding us that he has the chops in pretty much any genre he decides to tackle. Kaleidoscope Dream is really an album for any fans of rock, soul or pop. Also, for fans of the most straight-forward pick-up lines ever committed to record (“How many drinks will it take me to get you home?” and “Do you like drugs?”). In fact, more than half the songs are ostensibly about sex, while the rest lean towards philosophical ramblings presented with complete self-seriousness. Like I said, it’s basically a rock record.
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Home Again – Michael Kiwanuka
As I mentioned, I’ve already started researching 1973, the next year that I plan on tackling for this series. Home Again sounds far more congruent with the material from that era than it does with the Killer Mikes and Miguels of the world. It straddles the line between folk and soul, a spiritual successor to someone like Richie Havens. Michael Kiwanuka had not yet unlocked the inspiration that made 2016’s Love and Hate so dynamic and haunting, but he was still recording heartfelt, tasteful tunes four years prior. This is a very genuine album. If you have read enough of these you will have picked up on my wariness of irony in music, and Kiwanuka feels like the least ironic dude on the planet. There appears to be no other agenda beyond singing earnestly about what’s on his mind, and giving us some soul-satisfying music to accompany it. The album kicks off with a trio of outstanding tracks. “Tell Me a Tale” is a naked plea for companionship that floats over a lush bed of flute, acoustic guitar, pulsing drums and an unexpected horn line. It is the most lively of a pretty subdued set of songs, and perfectly encapsulates the late sixties/early seventies vibe that was clearly Kiwanuka’s intention. “I’m Getting Ready” and “I’ll Get Along” would not be out of place on a Nick Drake album, with their big round curves and autumnal hues. The album continues in a similar vein, perhaps losing a little steam by the final couple of tracks, but never coming across less than enjoyable.
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Boys and Girls – Alabama Shakes
At first blush, Boys and Girls is an album of straight-forward, blues-based rock & roll. While rock musicians for many years have strayed farther and farther away from the music’s roots, this recording can be very easily tied back to 50’s rock such as Buddy Holly and Little Richard. Digging a little deeper, though, you notice how weird the instrumentation is. There is almost tropical guitar that accents the music rather than driving it the way that God and Les Paul always intended. There is a constant bed of organ underneath most tracks, sort of interacting with the rest of the music, but not in any obvious way. The percussion shifts in frequent and unexpected fashion and is awash in echo. The songs end up passing for normal until you pay close attention, but then reveal that they are constructed in a far from orthodox manner. Also, while there is nothing suggesting that these are particularly great musicians, there are moments of the album that feel almost deliberately amateurish (check the piano plunking towards the end of “Hold On”). It makes you wonder if the group is up to something more sophisticated than you can grasp, or simply did it this way because they don’t know any better. In lieu of a lead instrument, everything revolves around the brash vocal performance of Brittany Howard. She brings great expressiveness to the table, chewing on the ups and downs documented throughout the album like a descendant of James Carr. There isn’t much subtlety to her singing, but three-minute rock songs about boys and girls don’t call for much subtlety anyway. The whole band would expand their palette on the groups outwardly-experimental follow up, Sound and Color, but their debut should make fans of more traditional-minded listeners, while offering some interesting peculiarity for those willing to search for it.
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Celebration Rock – Japandroids
Rock and roll is music for young people, so they say. At one point, that was certainly true. In the 50’s and 60’s, rock music was made explicitly for young people, by young people, about topics that only young people really cared about. It was seen by some as a fad, although by the time I was a young person, that sentiment rang hollow. I grew up listening to rock music that exclaimed that it would never die, that it was here to stay, that it ain’t no noise pollution, but those sentiments all came across as straw man arguments by the time the 80’s rolled around. Whatever establishment once railed against the corrupting forces of rock and roll had been supplanted by baby boomers who cherished the music of their youth. From my narrow vantage point at the time, I couldn’t imagine a world where rock and roll wasn’t the dominant form of American musical expression. Looking back now, it’s becoming pretty clear that, while certainly not a fad, rock music will go down as the preferred music of the boomers and their progeny, and that’s pretty much it. Those same generations are still, largely, the ones making it and consuming it, so it can hardly be considered the music of youth anymore. Which is what makes Celebration Rock so special to me, despite the fact that it is plainly not for me. This is rock and roll of a recent vintage, made by young people, for young people, very specifically about being young. It captures that magical moment in your early twenties where you are on the precipice of a bigger world of responsibilities and consequences, but you defiantly turn back one last time to cling to the youthful delusions of endless possibilities and the feeling of immortality. The music has the speed and carelessness of punk, but none of the spite or irony. This is anthemic garage rock, through and through, and it captures the way young adults tend to mythologize a simple night of revelry with its epic sweep and chant-along choruses. It has song titles such as “Adrenaline Nightshift” and lyrics like the following:
Long lit up tonight and still drinking Don’t we have anything to live for? Well of course we do But till they come true We’re drinking And we’re still smoking Don’t we have anything to live for? Well of course we do But till they come true We’re smoking
That doesn’t describe anything about my life these days, but it makes me sweetly nostalgic for when it did. And that’s why I hope rock and roll never truly does die, because when it’s done right it has something to offer people of all ages.
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World Music – Goat
World Music is the exception that proves my introductory hypothesis about the dissolution of genre boundaries. Of all the music in 2012, this is the one that defies easy categorization. I don’t know much about the Swedish band that debuted with this gem of apocalyptic dance rock, but I know that they mean business. They manage a vibe that is concurrently funky, psychedelic and kind of scary, like a heavy acid trip that is threatening to go bad on you at any moment. In a way, I kind of like that there is a shroud of mystery around the forces responsible for this album. It could be a voodoo ceremony captured on tape, a Trojan horse sneaking subliminal messages into the unsuspecting ears of consumers, or even just a cool, original blend of seemingly disparate styles produced by a particularly savvy group of musicians. The fact is, there is an element of danger here that most metal acts would kill to achieve, but also a soulful heartbeat that makes is simpatico with the afrobeat of Ebo Taylor that occupies another slot on this list. It must be heard to be believed, so stop reading about all this great music, and go experience it for yourself.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Metal: Sweet Heart Sweet Light – Spiritualized; Noctourniquet – The Mars Volta; End of Daze – Dum Dum Girls; Swing Lo Magellan – Dirty Projectors; The Idler Wheel… – Fiona Apple; Apocryphon – The Sword; Heaven – The Walkmen
Hip Hop/Soul: Cancer 4 Cure – El-P; Skelethon – Aesop Rock; Detroit – Big Sean; Girl on Fire – Alicia Keys; 1999 – Joey Bada$$; Pineapple Now-Laters – BJ the Chicago Kid; Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color – Brother Ali; Landing on a Hundred – Cody Chesnutt
Country/Americana: Papertown – Balsam Range; Uncaged – Zac Brown Band
Funk/Jazz/Electronic: Grace/Confusion – The Memory Tapes; Inheritance – Todd Marcus; Folia – Amadou and Mariam; Carnivale Electricos – Galactic
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