Top 10 Albums of 2011, Second Half

So, after looking at my list for the second half of the year, all from 2011, and thinking about the first half of the year, 3 of 5 the same, I've come to a decision: next year I will not buy or listen to any albums released in 2012. There's far too many past albums and bands I need to catch up with. It's a silly statement, of course; there will undoubtedly be exceptions, and off the top of my head I can think of two. Crooked Still singer Aoife O'Donovan is supposed to release her first solo album next year, and if Sixpence None the Richer ever get themselves together and release the Strange Conversation album, which was supposed to come out in 2010, I'll be picking that up. But by and large I want to avoid new releases, odd as that may be. The upside to all five albums being from 2011 is that all of the artists are touring (or have released live performance video) so along with suggested tracks there'll be Youtube links.

artist - album - 2011

5 - Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile - The Goat Rodeo Sessions - 2011. A sort of contemporary string-based supergroup, this half-bluegrass half-classical album is an odd but enjoyable collaboration, blending genres in often unpredictable ways. Of the 11 songs, 9 are instrumentals, with the other two having duet vocals with Chris Thile and guest singer Aoife O'Donovan. One of these, "Here and Heaven," is a standout track, delicate and expressive, about a relationship which has known both joy and sorrow. But by and large, most of the rest of the tracks are just plain old fun rather than being particularly emotive. For much of the album this works well, especially in the aw-shucks farm song "Helping Hand" and the classically-leaning amused musings of "Where's My Bow?" More ambitious tracks like the gentle "Franz and the Eagle" and the tour-de-force "Less is Moi" achieve both a precision and a gracefulness which in the former becomes something quite heroic, and in the latter something mischevious. Despite the surpassing skill and ingenuity on display, a few criticisms can be leveled. First, as with other collectives Chris Thile has been involved with, his musical personality can be overwhelming, and a couple tracks sound like they're from a Chris Thile solo album with uncommonly strong session musicians. Second and more importantly, the album loses some focus in many small places, a result of too much noodling and an overemphasis on esorteric song construction. Quite simply, there aren't enough strong melody lines in some tracks and much effectiveness is lost. However, even when this foursome is too inward-looking, such as the aptly named "13/8," they're interesting to listen to, and when they remember to be appealing to the ear and not just the brain, which is definitely over half the album, it's a fun experience. Suggested tracks: Attaboy, Where's My Bow?, Here and Heaven, Franz and the Eagle, Less is Moi. Watch a studio performance of "Attaboy" on Youtube.

4 - Crooked Still - Friends of Fall - 2011. Because of intentions to take an extended break from recording and touring together in 2012, Crooked Still decided to release an EP this year comprised of 5 covers and 2 original pieces, and in live shows this fall and winter have been playing the EP in its entirely, plus older favorites. The choice of artists to cover is indicative of the kind of band they are: Paul Simon, The Beatles, a traditional hymn, Hazel Dickens (Appalachian bluegrass), John Hartford (modern bluegrass), and one of the original compositions takes its title and lyrics from a poem by Wendell Berry. Clocking in at less than 25 minutes, the EP is short and sweet, with a slightly tossed-off production style: no polish applied to notes or tones here, something which was carefully, selectively done on their previous record. There's also a sense of the workaday about the EP, with few low-key musical flourishes, something I'd be wary of on a full-length release (and almost antithetical to something like The Goat Rodeo Sessions) but the song choices complement this well. It provides another, welcome perspective on Crooked Still as a band who, despite their reputation for precision and perfection, also sometimes like to sit out on the porch as the sun's going down, put their feet up, and just play some solid music. After all, what Beatles song could be more straightforward than "We Can Work It Out"? What Paul Simon song, in a lifetime of understated Paul Simon songs, could be more plaintive than "American Tune"?

The reworked hymn, "When Sorrows Encompass Me 'Round," receives the standard minor key tweaking we do to hymns in the 21st Century; the John Hartford tune, "Morning Bugle," sounds like a saunter down a wooded lane without a care in the world, like something out of the early '70s Disney animated Robin Hood. (And if you're wondering where I got that from, the original song was written in 1972.) For those wanting a little more of the expected quirkiness from Crooked Still, there's the two original tracks, "It'll End Too Soon" and "The Peace of Wild Things/Dayblind," the latter a combination of the aforementioned Wendell Berry poem and a free-spirited instrumental. The wild card on the album is the Hazel Dickens song, "Pretty Bird," perhaps the slowest track the band have ever recorded. It may be a little too slow, a little too breathy, a little too simple in its arrangement. Or maybe it's just me. Regardless, Friends of Fall is a classic example you can use to explain to people the difference between an album and an EP: it's short, under-produced, not overly showy, and gives the band a chance to air themselves out, show themselves a little more relaxed and a little less polished. For Crooked Still it's a glimpse of a side not often publicly seen, and it's quite enjoyable. Suggested tracks: It'll End Too Soon, We Can Work it Out, Morning Bugle. Watch a live performance of It'll End Too Soon on Youtube.

3 - Steve Hackett - Beyond the Shrouded Horizon - 2011. A year ago this month my #1 spot went to Steve's Hackett's 2009 album Out of the Tunnel's Mouth, a return to the prog rock roots he came from in Genesis, with an updated, harder sound and a suite of songs with some real emotional force. In the wider world that album did very well for him and quickly became a favorite among his fans, so it's unsurprising that the follow-up, this year's Beyond the Shrouded Horizon, continues in the same vein. Most of the time it's a worthy sequel but a few songs feel unfinished, as if they were incomplete ideas from the earlier project and got tacked onto this album instead. The one thing that's changed is instead of a smaller number of songs which were worked on carefully and often longer than 5 or 6 minutes in length, this album gives us 13 tracks, half of them rather undeveloped, 5 of them under 3 minutes. 2 of these 5 are merely instrumental take-offs of the song which comes before or after it. It's an oddly fragmented and yet repetitive approach, reflective of the album as a whole, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The record begins with a blistering song called "Loch Lomond," in no way related to the traditional Scottish tune other than being about the same subject, and extends its musical themes into "The Phoenix Flown," and these are among the most successful tracks.

After a brief acoustic interlude (nice enough, but at 44 seconds not really articulated enough to be its own song) there's one of the few short tracks which also works, the ballad "'Til These Eyes," followed by the another two-part sequence, the instrumental and anthemic "Prairie Angel" and the sadly hokey "A Place Called Freedom," whose music is fun but lyrics are sub-par. I question again why the same theme needed to be treated twice in songs next to each other on the record. And from here, track 7 onward, the album mostly treads water, the music and lyrics fine enough but again, feeling like cast-offs from the previous record. "Two Faces of Cairo" expands upon the intensity of the Middle Eastern vibe in the previous album's "Last Train to Istanbul" in good ways, and the album closer, "Turn This Island Earth," contains flashes of intelligent, rewarding musical craftsmanship, but overall this album may have needed another few months in the rewriting process. However, it occurs to me that I've groused about the shortcomings of this much more than the albums at #5 and #4, so I do want to say that Hackett & Co. achieve the #3 spot because, just like their previous outing, when they get it right, they get it 100% right. And it's also like your little brother: because you love him, you feel freer to criticize him, though you'll staunchly defend him to others who criticize him. So let's say that for me, this is a clear #3 slot album, but you should check it out only if you particularly enjoyed Out of the Tunnel's Mouth. Suggested tracks: Loch Lomond, The Phoenix Flown, 'Til These Eyes, Prairie Angel. Watch a live performance of Loch Lomond/The Phoenix Flown on Youtube.

2 - Peter Gabriel - New Blood - 2011. Like his former fellow bandmate, Peter Gabriel's last album signaled a new direction and was interesting enough to many that he decided to carry it forward to a sequel. 2010's Scratch My Back, which made my #1 spot a year and a half ago, was an entirely orchestral album with Peter singing 12 cover songs from artists new and old. When he took the album on a brief tour which I got to see, he played the album start to finish but then needed a second set, and so he and composer John Metcalf adapted several songs from his own back catalog for orchestra. New Blood, a cute-but-apt title for this record, is composed of 13 songs from his history (14 with "Father, Son" if you order from his website, and 15 with "Blood of Eden" and "Signal to Noise" if you order from iTunes) re-done with the orchestra. (A second disc, which comes in physical CD format as well as the iTunes download, gives the backing, orchestra-only tracks for the original 13 songs.) Simply put, the result is an achievement, a real injection of new life and new perspective into these tracks, many of them old favorites like "In Your Eyes," "Red Rain," "Digging in the Dirt," and "Solsbury Hill." Peter also walks down the road less traveled, ignoring other popular or signature songs (like "Sledgehammer," "Games Without Frontiers," "Biko," "Steam") to include lesser-known tracks never released as singles but that translate well to orchestra, like "Downside-Up," "Wallflower," "Darkness," and "Intruder."

Peter's voice, well worn with years, provides weight to some of the more airy, lighter pieces, and is still able to soar powerfully into falsetto when a song requires it, with almost nary a key change to the original track. This means some of the songs are emotionally powerful in a similar way to the originals, such as in "San Jacinto" and "Digging in the Dirt," but others adapt and show their versatility as songs by being just as potent, but only in a way an orchestra can convey. Most obvious among these is "The Rhythm of the Heat," on record in 1982 ending in a great cavalcade of drums but here a showcase for high and low strings playing counterpointed rhythms ending in a tightly interwoven frenzy. On the softer side, slower and more contemplative pieces like "Mercy Street" and "Wallflower" are provided with a rich, warm atmosphere of layered sounds, the latter grounded in a simple and beautiful piano melody. Orchestra or no, this is still your standard intense, emotionally raw, predominantly dark Peter Gabriel album. The moments of simple joy and release are few, but all the sweeter because of it: the chorus to "Downside-Up" positively rings with the bustle and excitement of a Spring morning; the intro and chouses of In Your Eyes are like a triumphal procession; the playfulness of "Solsbury Hill" laughs in a new way by the main melody line, for the first time in its 34-year history, on piano instead of guitar.

Not every track is a home run, of course. While the music to "Don't Give Up" is quite good, Ane Brun isn't a strong choice for sharing vocal duties with Peter. While the closing section of "The Rhythm of the Heat" is excellent, the opening part basically just recreates the original song. And that's fine, but with such a marked departure for the second section, it's jarring that the first seems so old hat. The entirely instrumental "The Nest that Sailed the Sky" is beautiful, but we already had an entirely instrumental, mostly orchestral original version on Ovo. With so many other options for a low-key song in its place (for example, both "Washing of the Water" and "Lead a Normal Life" were recorded for the project but not used) it seems wasteful to have included it. Likewise, the five minutes of ambient noise recorded on the literal Solsbury Hill in Somerset placed before that song feels surperfluous. I would give much for the orchestral version of Secret World, my all-time favorite of Peter's songs, which was performed on the tail end of this summer's tour, to have been arranged and recorded in time to replace these silly chirping crickets.

Still, overall it's a great achievement and a highly enjoyable album I'll be listening to for a long time to come. One of the things I've always liked about Peter is how he continually thinks and re-thinks his older material, through edits and remixes and giving tracks to other people to remix, and even performing different mixes from time to time. New Blood seems very much in line with that tradition and preoccupation, and strikes an almost perfect balance between nostalgia and reinterpretation. If you like Peter's music in the past, and liked the production values and decisions he made on Scratch My Back, you'll like this album too. Suggested tracks: Downside-Up, Wallflower, In Your Eyes, Red Rain, Digging in the Dirt, Intruder. Watch a performance of The Rhythm of the Heat from the official New Blood Live in London DVD, on Youtube.

1 - Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the Harvest - 2011. However, this year, nothing tops the long-awaited fifth album from Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. Released seven years after their last record, the title is a true statement, as much of the past seven years were fallow, in a songwriting sense, for the acoustic duo, who kept at it through much disappointment and have emerged on the other side with this, a brilliant powerhouse of an album rivaling and in places surpassing their 2001 magnum opus, Time (the Revelator). Intentionally structured in the same way as that album, with just their two guitars (or a guitar and banjo) and two voices, apart from a rare use of harmonica and some percussive stomps, recorded live without overdubs, the stripped-down sound fits perfectly for their vocals and lyrics. I reviewed the concert I went to two months ago, but here I want to just talk about the album. It's a masterpiece. From the first few notes of "Scarlet Town," with its small rhythmical echo of the opener from their second album, "Caleb Meyer," we are clearly in well-worn and well-loved territory, as an unequal, emotionally abusive relationship is explored through the images and analogy of an abandoned village falling into disrepair and haunted by the memory of evil.

If Gillian and Dave's writing were only dark, however, that wouldn't make for an overly interesting album. They add being sardonic to the next track, a lonely yet forthright ballad pleading for a little love. Gillian's voice kicks off concurrent to the music: "Take me, and love me, if you want me/Don't ever treat me unkind/'Cause I've had that trouble already/and it left me with a dark turn of mind." The song aches from raw beauty, and I'm not just saying that because I had such a strong emotional connection to it. It's a good lead-in to the third track, a personal favorite, perhaps an all-time favorite, and the most haunted song on the album. It was also one of the very first to be written, and has been played in their live sets for eight years now: "The Way It Will Be." Highly imagistic, orbiting around the present absence of a non-romantic relationship long gone (father? mentor? best friend?), it's forceful in its softness, hard and unyielding in its lyrics, deliberately meshing off-key chords into certain moments, with not a drop of sweetness to be found anywhere, and no musical resolution. It seems almost paltry to refer to it as bleak; were it not for the sheer, blinding life-force of the narrator, it could almost be nihilistic. This is songwriting at its finest: horror on display without letting it overwhelm, or become maudlin, or for mere "show." There's not a speck of sentimentality in this song, but there's also no attitude of defeat. One simply goes on, and there's a release in being able to communicate, to explicate. Even if it's only in an obscure way, the emotional pressure is released, aired, made real and therefore made understandable. Songwriting at its finest.

More accessible and thankfully more upbeat (in music, anyway) is the next song and first single released from the album, "The Way It Goes." It's one of those almost-story songs, of snapshots tied together by a highly singable, highly inscrutable chorus, where you feel like if only you had a page of backstory, all would be revealed. As it is, like most Appalachian songs, we enter and exit people's lives in the middle, knowing what we know of them and no more. Like life most of the time. Dave also gets two fun guitar solos on this track, quirky and tongue-in-cheek riffs which go hand in hand with lyrics such as "So the brightest ones of all/early in October fall/while the dark ones go to bed/with good whiskey in their heads" or "Now Billy Joe's back in the tank;/you tell Musso, I'll tell Frank/Did he throw her down a well/Did she leave him for that swell?" Most ingenious about the song, however, is its use of progressive assonance, traveling over the course of the song from a predominance in the verses of long As and long Os, to short Es, Is, and Us, making the chorus ("That's the way that it goes/everybody's buying baby clothes/That's the way that it ends/though there was a time when she and I were friends") a microcosm of this movement through the song as a whole. Even the last line of the chorus changes, to emphasize an inclusiveness, from "she and I" to "he and I," "all of us," and ending with "you and I." The track bears well under scrutiny, and yet it flows easily like a good wine, like any good pop single should.

In the interest of time I won't get too intricate with the rest of the tracks; the next, "Tennessee," tells of the half-lament, half-resignation of a life lived far from home and family. Then the following song, "Down Along the Dixie Line," a waltz, focuses on the virtues of Southern family and culture. It feels like it's out of a Mark Twain short story. In many ways it's quite a happy song, perhaps the only one on the album. The most upbeat song follows, augmented by some playful harmonica and claps and stomps right out of a hootenany. The subject matter, of course, is death, and the "six white horses" who carry the hearse, are "coming two by two/come for my mother/no matter how I love her." As expected, by the end of the song it's "six white horses/coming after me/pretty as a picture/certain as a Scripture." "Hard Times" is next, another personal favorite, and a story song about a Depression-era farmer who tries not to give up on life, with his land and his mule at his side. That description makes it sound ironic, or worse, syrupy, but it's just quiet and sad, as the world slowly makes clear that it couldn't care less for his life or his troubles. Still, there's a certain nobility to the song, and even a degree of hope, a rare achievement for any character in Gillian and Dave's world. The odd duck song, "Silver Dagger," is second-to-last, and an interesting experiment. It adapts the melody to "You Are My Sunshine" to speak in the character of a young naive woman convinced her lover is the most wonderful man alive, sensitive and true, who believes in her and has shown her a wider world. So great is her self-deception, she merely chronicles, without any understanding, at the end of the song that "here comes my baby/here comes my man/with that silver dagger in his hand." It doesn't quite work to its potential as a song, because it feels off to have a narrator without self-knowledge. As songwriters Gillian and Dave are hyper-aware of themselves and their characters almost always share that trait. It's somehow disappointing to find one that doesn't.

The last track goes back to the sardonic, gentle snark latently apparent in several of the previous songs and expands on it to the extent that this atittude is pretty much what the song is about, and it's fittingly titled "That's the Way the Whole Thing Ends." Almost a playful, devil-may-care version of the same subject matter as "The Way It Will Be," the singer repeatedly explains to an unseen former friend how dumb they were to throw away their friendship. The chorus plays around with variations of the lines "Standing in the back door cryin',/now you're gonna need a friend/That's the way the cornbread crumbles,/that's the way the whole thing ends." The song extends itself through several verses and a long outro with some great picking by Dave, ending up on a simple, playful progression which, in a move which makes me chuckle and I'm sure was supposed to, resolves beautifully into the individual notes of one of those happy major chords to close the album. It's a brilliant little send-off, to end so peacefully when clearly that's not the whole story, not really how "the whole thing" will actually end. And how many artists can write such heart-wrenching material over the course of a record and then end it firmly with their tongue in their cheek this way? These guys, that's who. I continue to love their music and writing and performing style, and after seven years away, it's wonderful to see them back at the top of their game with this release. Suggested tracks: Dark Turn of Mind, The Way It Will Be, The Way It Goes, Tennessee, Hard Times, The Way The Whole Thing Ends. Watch a live performance of Dark Turn of Mind from Later with Jools Holland on Youtube.