You’ve already checked out my Honourable Mention Albums Of 2011, my #30 – #16 and #15 – #1 entries of my top 30 albums list. If not, check out the links. You’re usually not supposed to do honourable mentions for your top songs of the year but I say: why not? Besides these are so good it would be a crime for me as a music blogger to just leave them behind just because they didn’t enter my top 50. So here they are! Enjoy!
Here’s a Spotify playlist of almost all the songs! Individual links to where you can listen to each song are also included below each song respectively.
30 albums would make such a huge post so I decided to split it up in two parts. 30 albums is also a lot for one person to compile into a cohesive list but then again, 2011 was brilliant and moreso I was, still am and will remain obsessed with the music from this year. I’ve really put down a lot of work on this, it took some time for me to sort it out but this ranking is an as accurate as possible representation of my taste and opinions.
Also be sure to check out #30 – #16 of the list here!
Here are #30 to #16 of my top 30 albums of 2011. 30 albums would make such a huge post so I decided to split it up in two parts. 30 albums is a lot for one person to compile into a cohesive list but then again, 2011 was brilliant and moreso I was, still am and will remain obsessed with the music from this year. I’ve really put down a lot of work on this, it took some time for me to sort it out but this ranking is an as accurate as possible representation of my taste and opinions.
2011 may not have been a great blogging year for me, but on so many other levels, it has been an awesome year. Unlike my blog, life has not been a bunch of unkept promises of comebacks and of what I’m going to do. Musically it’s been fantastic. I suppose I haven’t found time or the will to blog just because I’ve been listening to so much fantastic music that 2011 had to offer, not to mention attending festivals and gigs and other stuff too. Promising that 2012 will be a better year blogwise is redundant but what I can promise is this, which can almost make up for the lack of posts in 2011. My roundup lists of the music year 2011 starts here in this post with the honourable mention albums, which will be followed in the next few days by the top 30 albums, the honourable mention tracks, and the top 50 (yes, 50!) tracks. I haven’t had this much fun creating year-end lists since ever. Partly because there’s been so much good music, partly because I’ve really committed myself to listen to a ridiculous amount of albums and songs over the past year, partly because I feel that my taste and writing has refined and become more aware, sensible, focused, mature but also empathetic and more emotionally in touch with myself in relation to the songs and the world around me. So I’m very proud to announce the only 2011 lists I think anyone’s ever going to need upon entering 2012. I stepped up the ambition as sole dictator writer and editor of this blog and of my taste and opinions by producing more or less comprehensible texts about each album and track. And if any trolls out there think that I’m just imitating Pitchfork at the end of the day, then I’ll thank you for the compliment.
In no specific order, as is customary, after the bump you find 12 albums that not quite made it onto my top 30 but still are worthy taking my hat off for and with love mention and recommend.
Within and without Within And Without, Amor Fati stands out in Ernest Greene’s discography, partly because it’s the most linearly pop-oriented Washed Out song to date, but mostly for it’s high-reaching ambition and philosophical pretention.
The typical Washed Out ambient atmospheres are here, although sounding more celestial, sounding like the elevator music playing on the way up to heaven. Or more accurately: Olympos. Ernest’s vocals aren’t shrouded in haze on Amor Fati, they’re embedded in white fluffly clouds, and he sings all the more triumphantly strong for it. All-knowingly authoritative and comfortingly angelic at the same time, he streches out vowels in barely intelligible words that at times resemble Latin more than English as if the song was written for a church choir. I actually wish it was all latin. A song so tremendously awe-inspiring would deserve to be written in such a classical and forgotten language. To me, it’s already a contender for song of the year. Any song that can encapsulate the beauty in one of my favourite philosophies: amor fati, to accept, submit yourself to, and learn to love your fate, deserves all appraisal. With this song Ernest Greene has built a tempel glorious enough to start a fucking religious movement around this thought, however contradictory and redundant that would be. The beauty is in the submission to your fate, not the devotion or will to change, interact with or build a temple to it.
And make sure to watch the fantastically simple music video where Greene’s stand-in look-a-little-like Luke Rathborne does everything and nothing at all on beautiful Iceland. Even if it’s just four minutes long, you still get the feeling you’ve watched an entire movie.
