The Best Albums of the Year
December is the time to take stock. Whatever is still coming from our loudspeakers this month has undeniably managed to resist that “post-mo” syndrome of today’s voracious appetites. At the moment we are still listening to three specific records:
The XX – The XX
This band has produced a perfectly formed debut album, along with an outstanding cover of the not entirely successful You’ve Got the Love by Florence and the Machine. These extremely talented young Londoners have constructed a true masterpiece in which each song is built on the basis of a multitude of nuances which grow along with the tunes, and even during silences. Pauses during which the music can breathe the emotional density into which we are plunged by the cutting dialogues established between the clear contrast of the male/female vocal ping-pong game. Infinity offers the paradigmatic example of this play of forces between the male singer’s give it up and the female singer’s I can’t give it up. The entire album works in this way, offering a tense give and take which is the cause of so many lumps in our throat that we constantly return to it, always with the hope that we will be able to disentangle them, even if everything invariably becomes more complicated. It is a thing of painful beauty.
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
This Baltimore band improves on its own legacy with each new album. Two years ago they set the bar extremely high, with the vibrant Strawberry Jam, and now, with this latest release, they have achieved a surprising sonic refinement. A true symptom of the way they approach their work as a collective, with an attitude of total heterodoxy which is nurtured by their prolific creativity, can be observed in the many aspects of the parallel projects of each of the band’s members (Avey Tare, Deakin, Geologist and the magnanimous Panda Bear). It seems like an inexhaustible process of vigorous recreation, which never ceases to reveal the band’s own starting points, subjected as they are to a process of restructuring with each new release. While at the beginning their language was the most chaotic kind of psychedelia, with no concessions to what could be defined as a more harmonious form, now they are immersed in a reorganisation of their own sonic magma, which can be formatted in pieces which, although they still wander through their ethereal substrates, also come within the range of a song. They have finally surrendered to the more prosaic side of their inspiration, The Beach Boys. What will they come up with next time?
Patrick Wolf – The Bachelor
This multi-instrumentalist performer, a Baroque boy from South London, reveals his pop ingenuity with this grandiloquent album, brimming with astounding rhythmic and harmony resources. His classical training as a violinist has lent him a formal sense of composition, while his restless mind, which flits from an interest in the purest folk music to the electronic universe, gives rise to a wide set of pop references which serves him to create a landmark imagery. His work is highly structured, thanks to its core of romantic conceptualism, which he uses as a guiding thread with which to connect all of his sensibilities, in a way which avoids the pastiche so often found in modern compositions, which attempts to feed on anything it can. The true achievement of Patrick Wolf does not lie in his search for a form of reconciliation, but in his stylistic tension, in which each element recognises its needs for the others. What he has ultimately achieved is a modern classic.
PS: It is also worth listening to the albums by: Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish… / Dead Man's Bones - Dead Man’s Bones / Fever Ray - Fever Ray / Girls - Album / J. Tillman - Year in the Kingdom / Junior Boys - Begone Dull Care / The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart / Prefaut Sprout - Let’s Change the World with Music / The Twilight Sad - Forget the Night Ahead / Vic Chesnutt - At the Cut
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