Also make sure to check out my Honourable Mention Songs, Honourable Mention Albums and my #30 – # 16 and #15 – #1 posts of my top 30 albums list!

At the bottom of this list you can find links to two Spotify playlists. One for the tracks of this post, #25 – #1, and one for the entire Top 50 Tracks list.

Allright, here we go!

25. Sean Nicholas Savage – Can’t Get My Mind Off You

Grimes labelmate (Arbutus Records) Sean Nicholas Savage is fairly unknown, a hidden gem, an enthusiastic home recorder carving out his own little hideout in pop music. If there had been any justice his Can’t Get My Mind Off You off the album Trippple Midnight Karma would have been a fucking huge hit in 2011. Its uncomplicated subject matter instantly exposed in the song title and charming sorta-cassette-lo-fi 80′s karaoke production can’t diminish its remarkable strengths and catchiness. Conveying the mixed feelings of a newfound love and object of desire through the contrast of happy, upbeat and even celebratory melodies and downbeat lyrics has been tested before; but there are few songs that do it as perfectly as Can’t Get My Mind Off You. I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t fall instantly for this most underrated could-be hit but for the moment I’m still pretty much alone dancing around the room and singing along to the secret masterpiece the world is missing out on.

Listen to Can’t Get My Mind Off You on Spotify!

24. St. Vincent – Cruel

Occasionally, once per album to be exact, Annie Clark give into the sugary pop rush that her songs always seem to be constraining, as if a battle between the ugly hell demons and the pretty heavenly angels is going on underneath each song’s poised but crackling surface. Marry Me contained a soul-tinged gem in the title track, so did Actor’s sour-sweet title track, and for Strange Mercy she has treated us to Cruel. Just as the title of the song suggests this ain’t no happy-go-lucky story we’re dealing with, even if it’s one of the most straight-forwardly catchy and pop-oriented songs Clark has written. She ties together passages and parts that seem ill-fitting but Clark’s vision remains clear, even if she will have to force the puzzle pieces together by violence. It works because she wants it to work, and because she’s humongously talented, that helps too. Elegant yet eerie, contained but eventually deeply passionate, funky strutting but also inviting to a ballroom dance in the corrupted fairytale castle of a cruel dream. A fascinating piece of work. Worth three minutes of your life for the guitar solo at 1:21 alone.

Listen to Cruel on Spotify!

23. Real Estate – It’s Real

Some people mistake It’s Real for a pleasant jangle pop tune. It’s actually a fucking rampage. The sounds may be polite and easy on the ears and the lyrics sweetly melancholic, but the way the whole thing is arranged, constructed and delivered hits you in the gut. Michael Jackson himself would’ve blushed as Real Estate hit pop perfection with this one. Chiming guitars fly all over the place, the Real Estate fellers go into Oooh-Whoaaahhh frenzies in the choruses and the ”doo-da, doo-da” guitar that follows is pure glee. By the way, what if Glee picked this up? It’d be TV history right there, I’m telling ya. Believe me when I say it’s real.

Listen to It’s Real on Spotify!

22. Alexandra Stan – Mr. Saxobeat

I try not to mind today’s mainstream craze over electrohouse and club-friendly dance-pop (formerly known as R&B). But there was one track in 2011 that was so brilliant in all its apparent simplicity that it couldn’t be ignored: Mr. Saxobeat. At first I thought it was fun, because it was so light and didn’t aim to be an arena anthem but instead settling on owning every mainstream club over the world. Also I thought it was fun because I liked thinking that she was singing ”like a psycho bitch” or ”Mr. Psychobitch”. So when I’ve sat down to try to gather songs for my year-end roundups this song seemingly popped up out of nowhere. Perhaps some readers might find this a highly inappropriate entry into a best of 2011 tracks list but it dawned upon me that there are few mainstream hits that are as deserving of all the popularity and subsequent acclaim here on my blog. Yes, Mr. Saxobeat is light but that’s what makes it so fun and, ultimately, strong. Alexandra Stan’s vocals are addictive, easy to sing along to (they don’t require any real skill) and very catchy. Not to mention the sexy male vocals going ”oh-oh-oh-oh oh-ooohm-yeah, ooohm yeah, ooohm yeah”. Stroke of fucking genius. The producers clearly knew exactly what they were doing here, pushing all the right buttons while still using buttons few producers were using in 2011. Take the instrumental for example. The saxophone parts are sort of easy to throw in there, they’re sexy, catchy and memorable and are familiar to the club people who loved Destination Calabria to death a few years ago. What sells me completely though is the mind-twisting bubbling going on, there are minimal tech house vibes and progressive trance synth sounds flickering all around this song like disco lights. After the male vocal part we head into an instrumental part at the 1:15 mark that haves me melting. Suddenly the song exposes a melodic depth that is unusual in dance tracks like this, it becomes clear that it sounds very European, perhaps Romanian, which only adds to the song’s charm even more. There are a lot of reasons to love Mr. Saxobeat – a pleasant reminder that all mainstream pop music made down on the European continent is not several years behind the rest of the world. Or at least that sometimes they are so behind the curve that they’re actually ahead of the next one.

Listen to Mr. Saxobeat on Spotify!

21. The Weeknd – The Morning

The Weeknd don’t get more romantic, bragging or positive than on The Morning. The morning after is captured gorgeously and gloriously. There’s drinkin’ alizé with our cereal for breakfast, ordering plane tickets, Cali is the mission and codeine cups painting a picture so vivid. Hip hop and r&b has often been reduced to a tongue-in-cheek escapism listening experience for kids (predominantly white kids) who can’t relate to and have little to do with the hood and the money-hustlin’ game. The Weeknd are detached and depraved enough from this notion to appeal beyond skin color barriers and The Morning puts the hip back into hip hop. It advocates a lifestyle that on a practical and materialistic level equals gold-chains-and-fast-cars braggadocio rap, but the underlying values and the way it is presented are signifiers of the new generation. Which is why I secretly fantasize of another life while singing along to the addictive melody and Abel Tesfaye’s sexy lyrics.

Listen to The Morning on Youtube!

20. Cass McCombs – County Line

A quiet storm song much like Bon Iver’s Beth/Rest, County Line brings that drowsy yet delicate feeling of a long nightly drive. ”I feel so blind / I can’t make out the passing road signs” and ”I can smell that columbine” sings Cass McCombs but overall he avoids it merely becoming a song about ”crossing that county line, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa”. He begins with the words ”On my way to you, old county / Hoping nothing’s changed /That your pain is neverending / But is it still the same?” and the way he vibratingly draws the last syllable out of ”county li-i-i-i-i-ne” hints towards a bitterness and even a sense of threat. You come for the comfortable qualities of McComb’s melodic skill but stay for the conflicted dream-like stance it leaves you in.

Listen to County Line on Spotify!

19. The Antlers – Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out

Teeth falling out of your mouth is a symbolic representation of sexual frustration. Well, in dreams it is anyway. And Peter Silbermann isn’t having any nice dreams. Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out is arranged with mystic ambiance and and foreboding guitars to give it a feeling of unease that only these really weird dreams can give you. It shows off The Antlers’ growing ability to orchestrate complex soundscapes using simple means, something that Silbermann has consistently perfected by himself over the years. And in this case the sexual frustration following a divorce is depicted as a pure nightmare. The end is a tense build-up with Silbermann desperately yelping the words ”try it, try it, try it / Get your jaw off the floor” over and over again just to reach the climax and shove that horrifically surrealistic and disturbing image in our faces once again, shouting: ”Every night my teeth are falling out!”.

Listen to Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out on Spotify!

18. Holy Ghost! – Jam For Jerry

The Jerry in ”Jam For Jerry” is of course Jerry Fuchs, drummer for many DFA bands such as LCD Soundsystem, Turing Machine, The Juan MacLean and Holy Ghost!, who fell to his death in an elevator accident November 8th, 2009. Already from the title we can tell that this isn’t a normal ”song for” song. Without paying too close attention to the lyrics or knowing the background story, Jam For Jerry reads as a fun, catchy and highly danceable pop song based on cheesy-á-la-2011-cool disco and soul flavours. And it is, it’s just that knowing exactly who Jerry was and his unfortunate fate, the whole song turns heartwarmingly affectionate and the words hit you harder than what you thought was possible from such a light-sounding song. All the soulful melodies that feature well-known chord changes and structures suddenly become triumphant in their tribute, conjuring a slight feeling of sadness and grief.

The lyrics start in the hours before Jerry’s death: ”You check the mail and lock the door. You took the stairs downstairs from the third floor”. Already here it is hinting towards a feeling of hopelessness that only awareness in hindsight can give you, which is reflected in the chorus later on. The line ”Well, did the sky open up above you in the dark?” pushes you towards a picture of of Fuchs in a dark elevator shaft and the opening of the gates of heaven. The line ”And what a note to leave your friend / Did you know what’s coming or even half-know it when you left?” splits you between thinking of a cryptic suicidal note or a note that in hindsight is ironically and scaringly coincidental. The line ”You set the tempo, set the pace / From the top, from the start, never slightly late” pays homage to his talent and skill as a drummer, anyone knowing the rhythmic and dynamic complexity a DFA record can bring understands perfectly well that you can’t do with just any drummer. The sense of regret is imminent in the chorus: ”I get the feeling I’ve done / Something half-wrong / It surrounds me and drowns me in it / If I could change it all I would / If only I could / You can quote me and hold me to it”.

Jam For Jerry is all the more stronger for showing up that glistening facade, the feelings become much more stronger when hinted at and not allowing them to turn a fine tribute into a black-clad mourning dirge. You can quote me and hold me to it when I state that I consider Jam For Jerry a genius song: shallow fun and deeply touching at the same time. It’s almost with fear that I enjoy and praise this song, because there’s always the feeling of feeding off a person’s death. But if so Holy Ghost!, who knew Jerry, wouldn’t have dedicated a song to him on their debut album and wouldn’t have made it in such a jovial way. At the end of the day it’s a celebration and a heartwarming farewell to a friend and that gives me enough courage to state that Jerry Fuchs could not have gotten a better obituary than this.

Listen to Jam For Jerry on Spotify!

17. Fleet Foxes – Grown Ocean

There’s a point in the live rendition of Grown Ocean where Robin Pecknold’s voice goes over into an impassione shriek that makes the hairs on my arms stand up. For some unfathomable reason this shriek is not utilized on the far tamer delivery of the line ”to attain it” in the album version. This shriek perfectly follows and embodies the preceding line ”In that dream I could hardly contain it”, and matches the intensity of the shrieked line ”sunlight over me no matter what I do” in The Shrine / An Argument on the same album. It is, indeed, hard to contain one’s emotions as Pecknold sings for all his heart’s worth but it can be just as easy without that shriek anyway to embrace the message of the galloping, adventurous Grown Ocean. Finding your place in this vast, expansive world of ours is never easy and the song suggests that life is but one long transportation to some undefined or even non-existing goal. It makes me happy I’m Swedish and, as such, indoctrinated with the famous lines of Swedish poet Karin Boye which I am not going to translate here. Let’s just say that she taught the Swedes that it’s the road, the path, the way there, and not the goal itself, that is the important thing. I’m happy to have Grown Ocean along on that journey.

Listen to Grown Ocean on Spotify!

16. M83 – Midnight City

In Swedish we have a saying that goes that ”‘he or she’ showed where the cabinet is supposed to stand”. In 2011 it took a Frenchman to show the world where the cabinet should fucking stand. With a glorious return, Anthony Gonzalez churned out a massive pop song that mainly shifted between two modes: the mellower verses were turned to five, and the death-by-sound choruses turned up to 11. Midnight City shows what an incredible musician Gonzalez have grown to become and everything about it is perfectly weighed in, from the unclear shoegazey vocals via the wall of sawtooth synths to the 2011 instrument of choice: the saxomophone (thanks to Homer Simpson for having changed the name forever, it just rolls off the tongue). Not to mention the next best hook of the year (keep reading this list to find out the best) introduced in the beginning of the song. It’s amazing how merely those transformed alien vocal howls could fill dancefloors and set crowds on fire. It’s all thanks to France’s greatest Megalomaniac since Napoleon.

Listen to Midnight City on Spotify!

15. Dhanush – Why This Kolaveri Di

”Yo boys / I am sing song / Soup song / Flop song”. Those are the beginning words of 2011′s coolest and hippest song. I am not fucking kidding. Those are the words and it is the coolest and hippest song of 2011. Hear me out on this one.

Why This Kolaveri Di, part of the soundtrack to the Tamil film ”3″, was uploaded to Youtube as a video showing Tamil actor and sorta-singer Dhanush recording the vocals for the song and soon spread like wildfire across India and to some extent in other Asian countries. In the west it has gone hugely unnoticed, but thanks to my well-connectedness and secret sources I was able to have this song blow my mind on the 25th of November. The key to why me and Indian young people fell for this song lies in its nonchalant presentation. Dhanush’s cocksure vocal delivery, Tamlish wordplay and streetlevel slang go down very well in both camps. Putting a ”u” at the end of words with an Indian accent is the next Western lingo-fad. In my dreams it is, anyway.

It’s ridiculously well-written and impeccably produced too. The infectuously rhythmic drums are put in the forefront of the mix giving this mid-tempo ballad a swagger that Western rappers could die for. An acoustic guitar accompanies the rhythm and Indian trumpets come teasing in and out, always waiting somewhere in the background joining Dhanush’s whimsical vocals. He talks throughout the song, affirming ”rhythm correct”, ”maintain please” and even laughing, in autotune, at one point when the music falls apart as if a band was playing live in the studio, only to come back with the words ”Super mama, ready? Ready? 1-2-3-4” and the beat returns in full grandeur and Dhanush sounds very pleased with the result. It’s as confusing as it is mindblowing. There’s just something so irresistibly casual about the whole song. There’s something brave and absolutely brilliant to present a song that could very well have been a full-fledged blockbuster hit as a work still in progress. It’s like they said, ”fuck it, we’ve got this kick-ass rhythm, let’s throw in some hooky trumpets at all the right places and let Dhanush adlib and then some ambient washes towards the end where we have some sort of pop song closure structures.”. The breakdown at 3:30 is absolutely magical, pop music in its essence, and this song doesn’t even have a proper verse-chorus-verse structure! The part at 0:43 where they replace one of his ”kolaveri” for two trumpets, and then let him finish it with ”…a di” is the best pop songwriting quirk I’ve heard all year. The inventions seem countless in this song.

Why This Kolaveri Di means something like ”Why This Murderous Rage, Girl?”, rendering it the perfect retort to a girl being a total bitch because it’s gonna fly so far over her head she won’t even sense the stinging humor and cool pop-cultural reference in it. Isn’t this song the sort of semi-underground buzz thing M.I.A. should be exploiting? But I’d rather she didn’t. I’ll take a Dhanush adlibbing in auto-tune over a Maya getting it down with arabs any day.

Listen to Why This Kolaveri Di on Spotify!

14. DW – Nine Lives

Me and my friends went absolutely bonkers to this sadly overlooked shoulda-been electropop hit in 2011. Perhaps it’s just its italo disco flair, but it feels like it’s been around for ages, still it sends me into rages upon the very first seconds of its starlit synth-orgy journey. My friend Vincent noted how cheesy the lyrics really are and how perfect that was for the song to come together as a strong piece of pop confectionery. I agree and could throw in a grammar error in that sentiment as well (”outsiders makes their way in”, plural = make). There’s nothing cheesy about powerful pop music, though, and Nine Lives could give the term power pop a whole different meaning. The beat is as simple as a danceable synthpop beat can be, the synths are on the chilly ”northern lights” mode and the lyrics featuring fantastic pictures of ”I stole my soul from a cat / Nine fine lives” and the chorus’s ”I am bringing down the moon / For me and you, tonight / As we’re walking hand in hand / We’ll need a guiding light” make this song a standout treat on the pop market. Pop songs as simple yet fully formed and realized come rarely these days and Nine Lives fills up all your electronic pop needs for years to come.

P.S Me and my pal Victor seem to be the only ones fully appreciating or even noticing why the choruses are so affecting: the semi-falsetto harmonizing vocals underneath supporting the main ones.

P.S 2 The video showing a guy working 9-5 weekdays to finally lose it on Friday night to this song perfectly embodies the escapism the song offers but the video version is two minutes, and one wonderful cool-down/strip-down until it fades, shorter.

Listen to Nine Lives on Spotify!

13. Fucked Up – Queen Of Hearts

I ain’t never heard an outright romantic hardcore punk song before but my heart definitely belongs to Queen Of Hearts. Actually it’s not so much punk as it is a rock opera swirl of emotions. Classic American almost MOR guitar riffs that aim for the sky create a wall of sound that serves as a perfect background for Pink Eyes and Cults’ Madeline Follin (!) to introduce the heartwarming love-at-first-sight of David and Veronica. Just the lyrics ”Hello, your name is David / I am Veronic-UH / Let’s be together / Until the world swallows us” are delivered in such a sweet and catchy way by Follin that it’s impossible to not be touched in a cinematic romantic-scene-in-a-film kind of way, something that is just so hard to capture and accomplish in a song. Pink Eyes’s throaty delivery and the song’s raw guitar squall is enough to make the illest of tough rock guys remain confident in an outspokenly romantic setting. I’m not really your typical tough guy per se, but I don’t want my future romantic moments to be mawkish either. That’s why I felt that this is what I want it to feel like when I meet the girl of my dreams. I want moshpit romance, not dinner-and-movies romance. Does that still ironically make me blue-eyed and naïve? Perhaps, but these things doesn’t happen to non-believers. If a song can make me feel this way, I’m pretty sure other people can too. It’s not every year that you hear your personal future-love-at-first-sight soundtrack and it’s not every year you get the chance to ascribe it to a group whose usual genre tag is ”hardcore punk”.

Listen to Queen Of Hearts on Spotify!

12. AraabMuzik – Streetz Tonight

A lot of the songs on this top 50 list give me the feeling that they’re filling a void and scratching an itch you didn’t have and Streetz Tonight may very well be the best example of this. Ingeniously built around a sample of Adam K & Soha’s ethereal remix of Kaskade’s 4 AM, it creates a nocturnal soundworld where every little city light that flickers by like a twinkling star feels like an important link in a profound urban mosaic. It’s pure magic. I don’t know if a polished production sheen and computerized electronics have ever made life feel so fantastic and real. You just haven’t quite lived until you’ve walked home alone through the empty streets of 4 AM Stockholm with Streetz Tonight vibing in your headphones.

Listen to Streetz Tonight on Youtube!

11. Bon Iver – Holocene

It’s the most popular track from Bon Iver’s second album, and deservedly so. Few songs in 2011 were as quietly devastating as Holocene. It not only displays Justin Vernon’s cryptic but heartbreaking pathos in songwriting but also his background from the DeYarmond Edison days in the genre-defying arrangements that at the same time manage to be subtle, delicate and emotionally expressive. The guitar at the very beginning of Holocene can alone melt an entire glacier and reveal a beating heart underneath. It sort of happens literally, a skittering rhythm accentuated by a handclap and accompanied by gentle but deep bass notes kicks in and starts off a humbling journey. Humbling, because Holocene is at once like hearing an uncomfortable or even painful truth and the sensation of relief upon admitting, accepting and coming to terms with said truth. All the while it is also comforting. Lines like ”At once I knew, I was not magnificent” and ”And I could see for miles, miles, miles” will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Listen to Holocene on Spotify!

10. The Caretaker – Libet’s Delay

You’ll swear to God you’ve heard the song before. Where the hell James Kirby found his source material for the sample-based music he created for An Empty Bliss Beyond This World we’ll never know but one thing’s for sure: he’s tapping into the collected memory of the entire Western society. The piano notes played on Libet’s Delay are eerily familiar and when teamed up with the wah-wah trumpet gliding around the room like a ghost it’s a mind-boggling experience. It’s a common misconception that Kirby’s time machine takes us back in time. When listening to Libet’s Delay we are actually travelling forward in time. One day I’ll be in a rocking chair experiencing the exact same conflicted sentiments as the omnipresent elder whose mind we enter when listening to the album. Bizarrely it might just be Libet’s Delay instead of One More Time, Silent Shout or Brother Sport to name a few that I’ll be repeating and trying to recreate over and over until my mind finally collapses on me.

Listen to Libet’s Delay on Youtube!

9. Drake – Headlines

There are few rap songs that I think are worth learning the lyrics to. Rap is such a delicate matter. It’s unbelievably hard to produce lyrics that balance the deep understanding for crafty and intelligent handling of an appropriated language and the street-smart wit of venomous braggadocio. Even though Headlines is one of those songs that manages this profound balance, it is not the reason why it’s claiming the fifth spot on my list. It’s all in this performer’s delivery. Drake has worked hard on the rap part to be able to establish his crooner self too. Headlines is the miracle baby of the two. Rap-singing. Very melodic rapping. Very rhythmic and monotonous singing. Whatever it is, it’s worth obsessing over. How else would I have learnt the lyrics to Headlines? This is the crowning moment of… I ain’t even gotta say it. You know. You know, you know, you know.

Listen to Headlines on Spotify!

8. Destroyer – Chinatown

Turn the volume real high up. Lots of ambient noise and harmonies mingling. That punishing metallic drum whipping. The faux-Spanish guitars. The bass kicking in, intertwining with beautiful synth notes slithering about like vines up the wall of an ancient building. Accompanied by Sibel Thrasher, Dan Bejar lends his whiskey-smooth voice to lines like ”a government swallowed up in this war / I can’t walk away / At all / In Chinatown”. You barely know if its brass or strings being all glacial in the background towards the end as a saxophone is vibing about, creating allusions to thousands and no song at all. Damn it, I would want to get lost in Chinatown but even the bloody ending makes me walk away from Chinatown with pleasure instead of instantly hitting the repeat button. All percussion but a lone tambourine comes to an end, the synths leave you with a feeling that what you have just experienced was just a rose-embedded dream and a final masterfully distorted human/saxophone-crossbreed scream soundtracks the intense feeling of a distant memory revived slipping between your fingers. And then you realize that Dan Bejar is one of the true fucking geniuses in music.

Listen to Chinatown on Spotify!

7. Danny Brown – Monopoly

Impeccable flow. Masterful intonation and phrasing. That half-yelling mouth-wide-open vocal delivery style to die for. A perfect mix of good-sounding nonsense and verbal slaying, even though it’s mostly Brown’s delivery that amps up the material that in any other rapper’s mouth would’ve fallen flat on the ground. That hilarious sample of unknown origin in the beginning. Quelle’s beat, where what sounds like a compressed and noisy klezmer sample shuffles back and forth over a drum slap and menacingly lurking bass notes, is not by a longshot overstaying its welcome for two and a half minutes. Believe the hype: the outsider Danny Brown is the best hip hop breakthrough of 2011 and Monopoly was hands down the best rap song of 2011. I know what Danny Brown fans are going through in the USA but just let me say it this way: I’m glad Cool Ranch Doritos are hard to find in Sweden.

Listen to Monopoly on Spotify!

6. Neon Indian – Polish Girl

M83′s morphed alien squalls might be the more powerful and direct hook of the year, but the best hook was delivered by Neon Indian on Polish Girl. It consists of a a few simple synth notes that encompass a surprising range of emotion and allusions. Alan Palomo must’ve known he was onto something big. Naturally, the song opens with these notes, that at once seem to suggest both the marvel of nightly urban adventures and reminiscense of moments since long gone. What follows is a stunning pop song with an appropriately propulsive electro beat that the music-tech-geek Palomo has showered with digital, retro-futuristic synth washes that somehow perfectly manage to further expand the melodic pallette and mood of the song. Palomo’s vocals on the other hand have an impassioned boy-band r&b feel smoothed out on a shoegaze tip. Surrounded by synthesized noise and embellished in the warmth of the melodies that are contrasted by the cold nature of the instrumentation, Palomo’s lyrics become mystic yet personal, mythical yet heartfelt. The end result is a perfectly executed, completely mind-blowing electronic pop song. A masterpiece that I never knew that I was missing in my life.

Listen to Polish Girl on Spotify!

5. Girls – Vomit

Not only has Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce found himself challenged in the field of rock-history-laden, gospel-heavy and spiritual epics; on Vomit Christopher Owens and Co. prove that they are outdoing him in it too, although entirely in their own distinct way. Each Girls record seems to need its own ambitious epic that is marked as a highlight. Album had Hellhole Ratrace, Broken Dreams Club had Carolina and Father, Son, Holy Ghost had Vomit. If the latter is the best is debatable but it’s definitely the most hard-hitting. It starts in a depressively solitary and even pathetic place with just a simple plucked guitar and Christopher Owens singing ”Nights I spend alone / I spend them running ’round looking for you, baby”. Suddenly at the 1:27 mark the full band joins in with full power in an aggressive dirge-like state and Owens putting an exclamation mark after the words ”Looking for love!”. Now, Vomit is very literally an emotional journey, one that is best experienced than described but it involves an incredibly dirty and dark and menacing guitar solo, a touch of soulful 50′s rock in a middle 8 and a building ending of the song that ultimately soars from intensity, fully equipped with an organ and gospel wailing and Owen singing ”Come into my heart” over and over again. Father, Son Holy, Ghost is a lot about reconciliation and, of course, love. In Vomit it seems Owens is trying to reconcile with feelings so strong and longing so unquenchable, and unwanted feelings like intense self-deprecating to the point he wishes he could just vomit them out. He knows that passion and disgust sometimes go hand in hand. This song is by no means a pleasant listen but it’s an important one for anyone who knows that in order to experience those highs in life you gotta deal with the down-and-out times too. For that I respect Owens tremendously and with each record I sympathize with him and am one of many, wether we admit it or not, who see myself in him.

Listen to Vomit on Spotify!

4. C418 – Sweden

I showered C418′s Minecraft soundtrack album with praise, yet somehow I feel that to most of you my favourite song from that album will seem like a too simple piano instrumental with some strings thrown in for good measure that is ”pretty” and nothing more. For me, this simple melody represents everything that is beautiful about the game called Minecraft. Appreciating the beauty in simplicity. When this song comes on as night is falling after a hard day’s work in the mineshaft or farm or whatever, and you relax in the safety of your hilltop villa balcony, gazing out over the landscape where you have let your creativity (or dogs!) run free, it’s like Daniel Rosenfeld a.k.a. C418 is there. And with these piano notes he’s saying: ”yeah, I know, it’s beautiful”. Because he’s seen it too, he’s been there. He was probably one of the first people in the world to try this amazing game. And he created an astonishing piece of music, a lot of them actually. His music is half the pleasure of Minecraft.

But this song represents something else for me as well. The title, ”Sweden”, makes me think. Of the country where I was born and raised. Lord knows that it’s shitty and cold and snowy and socially awkward and fuckall sometimes. Maybe it was Minecraft that took me through yet another autumn/winter of 2010/2011. Because there’s a detail in this song that is easy to hear when listening to the mp3 but easy to miss as you’re hacking away at some big boulder of stone in the relatively muted version in Minecraft. The song comes to a break, but reappears. Did you hear that? Coming from deep in the depths at 2:06? It’s zen-like. That’s the sound of Daniel Rosenfeld appearing by my side again when the snow is falling like crazy and it’s 15 degrees below 0 celsius and bus and train schedules are being fucked up forever and I’m hungry and I… … … ”Yeah. I can see it too. I hear it. It’s like magic isn’t it? This world outside Minecraft that we call life. It’s the small things in life, man. It’s the small things.”

Listen to Sweden on Spotify!

3. Cut Copy – Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat

Zonoscope was filled with irresistible pop gems and the shiniest jewel was called Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat. Cut Copy takes an appeal to something beyond a ”a substitute / a business suit I’ll trade you” and ”a little space to clear a place in my day” in the patient groove of the verses and turn it into a sky-clearing hand-holding-sing-a-long anthem pleading us to ”watching up where the stars meet / And you’ll be fine” accompanied by a brilliant synth squiggling about like northern lights above this comforting sentiment. So far it’s an empowering soundtrack to living your life to its fullest. Blissfullest, that is. And still the moment that sends this song and the listener to unfathomable heights and dimensions and crowns Cut Copy as the best pop band currently in business is yet to come. It comes in the form of the breathtaking build-up before the last chorus. Hitherto Dan Whitford has sounded reassuring and warmly affectionate, but against the backdrop of those magical synths and majestic drums racing against your heart’s beating appearing in the latter half of this monumentally building bridge he sounds almost threatening in his confidence as he over and over utters the words: ”We’re gonna drift away / So you might never see the light of day”. You better believe you are holding onto every heartbeat.

Listen to Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat on Spotify!

2. Parker Lewis – Över Kilsbergen

The change didn’t come gradually for Parker Lewis. One moment he was crooning over cute English-sung New York- and Woody Allen-romanticizing indie pop and I loved him well enough just for that. At the next moment he had switched to singing in Swedish with a hammer and a sickle on his mind, lashing at the right-wing Sweden and smoking marijuana at night club Marie Laveau. If only I had known who was behind the only loving boy in a taxi begging the driver to turn around back into NYC. For all I cared and knew he could’ve been a conservative, bratty snob. Instead he sort of turned my life around. After that very political and socially aware 2009 EP, Rak Som En Pil, it would take two years before he returned. Spring 2011 saw the release of the single Över Kilsbergen. The song was sung in Swedish, was more socially aware than political and had a passion á la Bruce Springsteen, whose dedication to the blue-collar working class and straightforward yet soulful rock music has resonated incredibly well in the historically socialist Sweden. Över Kilsbergen was still unabashed indie pop, but sounding more influenced by Parker’s beloved Italy than any of his previous songs.

Över Kilsbergen means ”Over The Wedge Mountains” and is a gripping, nostalgic tale of childhood and growing up in the small city of Örebro, where he could see The Wedge Mountains towering like a wall shutting the rest of the world out. The song is deeply personal but written like a universal story of the smalltown boy growing out of the hometown, longing for the big world out there and the dismay of the invisible communal social forces repressing anything that strays from the ”normal”. Parker, née Emil, reminisces and sees those in the suburbs who were going to be professional soccer players and CEOs and wonder how they ended up here, probably not quite prepared for mortgages, families to feed, life puzzles, bottles hidden under the sink and the beginning of act two in the play called ”a day in the life” when the kids come home. Hell, he even asks his mom and dad if they were ready for a life that ends in a noose of a rope.

He remembers the soccer dad who didn’t like Emil’s sort, the sort dying the hair and the listening of Stockholm bastards. They didn’t want those there, see. But he also remembers hope for the future, and rock’n'roll and how you saw the world from your balcony, far past the horizon of Kilsbergen. How they drew lines on maps and didn’t have any other demands than how long the roads stretched or as far as you could go with an airplane. And if you’re looking for him today he is easy to follow. Because he has left a scar in every person he’s ever met, he hasn’t become better, he never got any answers. He left a scar in this writer, and if not an answer then at least a thought. Because his story is my story. His story, this story, Över Kilsbergen, is the story of Sweden. I can’t possibly think of a bigger feat for a songwriter than that. The last time I heard someone telling the story of Sweden in such an universally generalizing yet painfully true way was Tomas Andersson Wij’s depiction of a Swedish suburb in En Hel Värld Inom Mig (A Whole World Inside Of Me) from 2005, even though it didn’t devastate me nearly as much as Över Kilsbergen has.

It’s incredible how an artist can grow explosion-wise and fill that void in your musical life you didn’t think existed. He will probably occupy that space. Parker Lewis has the power to make me cry, laugh, think, get angry or happy and ultimately feel like a disoriented teenage boy finding salvation in that one special artist. Despite loving music as I assume is an almost religious way and being nerdy as hell I’ve never quite had that one artist or band that I call my favourite. But now I do, way past my most emotionally turbulant teenage periods when I probably would have needed it the most. I don’t mind. It just is what it is. I don’t think my emotional reaction necessarily would have been stronger if he had come around back then. I just know that it would have been somewhat of a comfort. Understanding. A kindred spirit.

Listen to Över Kilsbergen on Spotify!

1. Washed Out – Amor Fati

It all comes down to this, doesn’t it? No matter how good all other 49 songs are, there has to be a number 1. And no matter how I twisted and bent my mind around it, Amor Fati was always the obvious answer. Parker Lewis’s Över Kilsbergen might have been a more deeply personal and emotionally stronger song, but with Amor Fati the doubtlessly talented Ernest Greene a.k.a. Washed Out struck a middle-ground so gloriously meaningless and one-sidedly heavenly that it’s purity could do nothing less than earn it the number one spot. The song’s instrumental is a typical example of once home-recording producer blowing up his or her chillwave into grand dream pop. The drumming is propulsive, it’s the wind pushing the synths’ white fluffy clouds over a clear blue sky.

Greene’s vocals are gorgeous, sounding church boy choir grown up and shrouded in a mist. The notes are long and drawn out like a psalm. Amor Fati is by the way latin and coincidentally the vocals are morphed into pure harmonizing to the point where the nearly unintelligible lyrics upon the first 250 listens sound like the long-lost language of latin – something that further lends the song a celestial and actually timeless sheen.

For all I care it could just as well have been latin. From what I could hear from 250 listens and onwards, the lyrics are about turning your gaze inwards to find that the guide to your fate has been with you all along. I have to agree that it is an uplifting and sympathetic rhetoric. But fuck that, I thought right away.

Amor Fati, the song and the idea, means something else to me. I’m not sure if Greene interprets the idea of amor fati the same way as I do. Amor fati translates to ”love of fate”. It is acceptance of one’s fate. An indifference to your destiny. Is it succumbing to a higher power? I’m not sure. I just know there’s something incredibly beautiful in surrendering to your fate. I mean, isn’t that true greatness? Isn’t that the ultimate power? As Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo: ”My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary — but love it.”. Then still there are times when I strongly believe in the undisputable power of the individual to grab life by it’s little bunny ears, shaking it up and showing who’s the boss. It’s actually a quote from The Simpsons going like this: ”Now, life is hard. Am I right? Wrong! Life is EASY… YOU suck! You have to take life, grab it by its little bunny ears and GET IN ITS FACE!”. Yet the more I listen to Amor Fati and think about amor fati I understand that they’re two sides of the same coin. Either you work to make the world a more habitable place for you, or you change your perspective of what is a habitable place for you. To me, no one of them seems better than the other. I’d rather believe in harmony achieved through coexistence of the two in my life.

So even though I’m not directly inspired by Greene’s lyrics, I’m all the more inspired by the therapeutic qualities in his art, in this song specifically. It’s not a soundtrack glorifying giving up or losing hope but an ode to the celestial, zen-like state of independence, acceptance and harmony. Until I find a song that to me represents the other side of the coin: grabbing life by its bunny ears, this song will transport me to that amor fati state of mind.

No matter what I do, music seems to be the answer for me.

Listen to Amor Fati on Spotify!

Here’s a Spotify playlist featuring #25 – #1!

And here’s a Spotify playlist of the entire Top 50 Tracks list!

After my Honourable Mention Albums, my #30 – # 16 and #15 – #1 posts of my top 30 albums list, and my Honourable Mention Songs, it’s time for my top 50 tracks. 50 tracks are a lot to put into one post so I split it into two. So make sure to read #25 – #1 too!

Oh, and by the way. At the bottom of this list is a Spotify playlist of #50 – #26. You’ll find the playlist to #25 – #1 and the entire Top 50 Tracks playlist in the second half of this list!

Allright, here we go!

50. Cults – You Know What I Mean

In their most romantically 60′s ballad mode, Cults just break you down completely with melodies so sweet they’ll have you melting in no time. Or how’s Madeline Follin singing ”Help me, ’cause I’m feeling shaky” to spur that hero intuition inside of you? But with Cults things are never one-sided and the chorus takes you by surprise by amping up the drama to epic proportions while Follin sings ”Cause I am afraid of the light, yeah you know what I mean / And I can’t sleep all alone at night, yeah you know what I mean”. What is consistent throughout the song, though, is the cross-bred sound of finger snaps and castanets that echo through the lonesome night.

Listen to You Know What I Mean on Spotify!

49. Azari & III – Reckless (With Your Love)

Five touches on the piano and a ”check it!” and you’re dropped down onto the dancefloor with the funkiest bassline you’ve heard being repeated ad nauseam in a house track. Reckless may be typical retro-house fair but Azari & III go a long way with that incessant groove and by embellishing the diva vocals with contrasting harmonies. It’s the track that Hercules & Love Affair wish they would have pulled off on their latest record.

Listen to Reckless (With Your Love) on Spotify!

48. Tyler, The Creator – Yonkers

Yonkers stands well on its own legs without its iconic music video, its metallic scraping sound setting the rhythm underscored by deep bass notes upon which Tyler can deliver devilishly despaired lyrics. His delivery is impeccable, fantastically focused and razor-sharp in his demented wit but his thoughts are all over the place at the same time, mentally fractured in lyrics like the opening ”I’m a fucking walking paradox / No I’m not / Threesomes with a fucking triceratops, Reptar / Rapping as I’m mocking deaf rock stars / Wearing synthetic wigs made of Anwar’s dreadlocks”, emotionally extreme in lyrics like ”(What you think of Hayley Williams?) Fuck her, Wolf Haley robbing ‘em / I’ll crash that fucking airplane that that faggot nigga B.o.B is in / And stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus / And won’t stop until the cops come in”. Yonkers is probably the closest thing we can come to a summary of the persona that is Tyler, The Creator, no matter how despicable and obnoxiously hard to actually relate to his lyrics can be. But this song was the moment when thousands of kids out there could relate to the fucked-up state you’re in when you’re young and the world seems to get under your very skin, mess with your mind and try to conform you into its own desired shape. All there’s left to do then is to slip yourself som pink Xannies, dance around the house in all-over print panties and tell Jesus to quit bitching over the disses because this isn’t a fucking hotline.

Listen to Yonkers on Spotify!

47. Junior Boys – Banana Ripple

Junior Boys have never been this cheerful and dancefloor-friendly and still they don’t give up on their intriguing sense of composition or left-field pop sensibilities. Banana Ripple is one 9-minute long festival in delicious soul-inflected dance-pop with those Junior Boys-marked melodies. It’s no wonder the track needs two minutes of cooldown after a workout like the first 7 minutes. Work it, baby, work it.

Listen to Banana Ripple on Spotify!

46. Lady Gaga – Fashion Of His Love

2011 was the year when Gaga finally embraced teen-pop as it sounded best from the stereo in an adolescent girl’s room 20-30 years ago – with the wonderful pop explosion called Fashion Of His Love. It’s basically a loving pastiche of the power of pop music from the 80′s and 90′s that Gaga herself grew up with. The melodies are some of Gaga’s most straightforwardly sweet and also best of her career, the 80′s-style drum work here is fabulous and the electronics are kept at a reasonable low as to give Gaga full reign of the vocals, coincidentally also some of the best and most powerful of her career. If Fashion Of His Love was a colour it would be bright pink, if it was a fragrance it would be something from Paris Hilton’s line, if it was a TV show it would be Glee, if it was… well, you get the point. This is the glorious teen pop anthem that came 25 years late and paradoxically it will only be fully appreciated by young, male music geeks doing lists on the top 50 songs of 2011.

Listen to Fashion Of His Love on Spotify!

45. Lykke Li – Sadness Is A Blessing

For being composed in such an elegant and dignified fashion, Sadness Is A Blessing is spotlessly produced – that is to say, with a raw and alive sound favouring Lykke’s earnest confessions. It makes this song all the more stronger and easier to take in. Lykke exposes emotional wounds and even embraces the sadness, for sorrow is the only lover she’ll ever know. It may seem depressing but the message and lesson here is really that ultimately there will be wounds that will heal and scars that we’ll have to live with, perhaps for the rest of our lives. By professing this in magnificent pop form, she not only amplifies her role as a distant but important idol for young boys and girls but does so without (s)mothering them, like, oh let’s say, Lady Gaga, tend to do.

Listen to Sadness Is A Blessing on Spotify!

44. Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks

Foster The People, one of the biggest indie-sorta-mainstream cross-over acts since Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros or MGMT, owe it all to their breakthrough single Pumped Up Kicks. The lyrics are written from the point of view of a troubled youth with a gun but what we hear on top is one of the most carefree and masterfully produced pop singles in many years. The verses simply contain that subdued, bass-guitar-driven groove and Mark Foster’s vocals sounding trapped inside a can. The chorus is what sells the song, though, sporting a perfect production to create that feeling of a really old pop hit you remember from your childhood and haven’t heard in a long time. The album Torches didn’t feature anything quite as quietly exciting, but Pumped Up Kicks deserved every last bit of becoming a hit because it was a stroke of genius.

Listen to Pumped Up Kicks on Spotify!

43. John Maus – Believer

The synthesizers are pitched so high on Believer it’s almost annoying. It doesn’t help either that Maus’s vocals have heavy effects on them when they’re already drowning in the sea of synths. But if you stick around a monumental fist-pumping anthem rises out of the sea and John Maus is the slightly off-kilter but kindhearted hero to guide us. ”Baby you and me all across the world / They call me the believer”. It makes think. I suppose it would take a madman just to attempt to turn Beliebers in to Believers. The youth is disillusioned and needs your guiding light, John! To the Mausmobile!

Listen to Believer on Spotify!

42. Deportees – Islands & Shores

Their third album from 2009, Under The Pavement, The Beach; put them squarely in the center of the Swedish music map and was a spirited and remarkably inspired break from their soulful r&b-rock. Lead single and title track to the follow-up album, Islands & Shores, was a triumphant comeback and, as it turns out, an apt soundtrack for the changes that Deportees were in musically and personally. The song gives you a feeling of standing on the shoulders of giants, a sense of being on the edge of an internal revolution. ”I figured out why some days feel like ages / I figured out why some rooms feel like cages” are the striking opening lyrics and from there Deportees sacrifice all aspirations to be soulful or funky in favour of grandeur and a beautiful pop melody. The song doesn’t really offer a release from the ecstatic tension but rather maintains it and allows you to rest in that state of mind for almost six minutes. Not even the chorus is able to resolve things but I’m perfectly happy with singer Peder Stenberg trying to find new truths and goals now that the he is leaving the past behind, as long as it sounds as life-affirming as Islands & Shores.

Listen to Islands & Shores on Spotify!

41. Jai Pail – BTSTU (Edit)

As much off-kilter pop as it gets, Jai Paul’s BTSTU was destined right from the start to surge from the underground into the beat-worshipping community. Paul has a keen sense for earworm breeding, stacking sounds that on their own are attention-grabbing but together they constitute a track whose invention has sparked the interest of XL Recordings. Do I start with Paul’s ultra-light falsetto cooing ”Don’t fuck with me, don’t fuck with me” in the opening of the track, the background fairytale-dream ”ooohs” that would make St. Vincent envious, the sparse and crisp drum beat, the sawtoothed synthesizer sounds that abruptly cuts and jiggles through the entire mix, or the spot-on use of silence that actually accentuate key parts of the song? The whole thing sounds like a bastardized evil cousin to Discovery’s cute and amateurish-sounding Osaka Loop Line. Indeed BTSTU was destined to become a well-deserved hype and wether the song was a lucky shot or not from the so-far generally unknown and mysterious Jai Paul, I have a feeling that we’ll find out in 2011 and hope that it will be just as mind-fucking, innovative, fresh and rule-breaking.

Listen to BTSTU (Edit) on Spotify!

40. Panda Bear – Last Night At The Jetty

In late 2010 the seven inch of Last Night At The Jetty arrived, spurring the already wound-up hype machine over a new Panda Bear record. Yet the album version really was where the song came into its own. Set to a peculiar, swampy rhythm that wouldn’t seem out of place on fellow Animal Collective member Avey Tare’s Down There LP, the song allows Noah Lennox to pile on swirling electronics and his highly reverberated voice as he pleases. Last Night At The Jetty is somewhat of a mix of a long-lost Beach Boys song, a trad pop staple and the grandiosely melancholic songwriting of many a bedroom pop producer the last five years so, and Lennox dresses it up into something that feels very new and strangely compelling. The sincere melody invites you right off the bat to sing along, even if it takes a few listens to really appreciate the full scope of Lennox’s clever melodic twists and turns. Once the song has settled in your mind it is elevated to anthemic heights. As the title implies, it’s sort of a soundtrack to an ultra-instant nostalgia that strikes us today everytime we head out to do something in our free time. You could appreciate lines like ”Dreams that we once had / Did we have them anyway” or ”Didn’t we / Didn’t we / Didn’t we have a good time? / I know we / I know we / I know we had a good time” as they are sung through the aching melody, but for me the song could simultaneously be an ode to the good times and the doubts that come with those good times and an acidic deconstruction of the mindset of today’s youth. It seems that we live and exist only if we made a funny face, a cool pose or went makey-outey on someone on a photo at lastnightsparty.com, as an exaggerated and overdue example. Then came Facebook and although we can see a recline in the ”last-night’s-party” mentality (heck, some people even boycot facebook and they aren’t even playing reactionist) it’s still apparent that we live in an age of anxiety where we don’t live our moments anymore, we create them. This is where Last Night At The Jetty comes in, portraying this perverted, constantly self-assuring and in need of confirmation state of mind in lines like ”I know I had a real time now / Who could say I’m not just as I was? / No one could deny / My, my…”. Mhm. Yes? Your what? No? Ok. Hence the melancholy melody.

Listen to Last Night At The Jetty on Spotify!

39. Todd Terje – Snooze 4 Love

There probably wasn’t a better track to wake up to in 2011 than the aptly titled Snooze 4 Love. Switch the vibration off on your phone and let this Todd Terje masterpiece ease you into a blissful state of being awake. Rhythmic balearic techno adorned by beautifully arranged bleeps akin to birds chirping makes this the soundtrack to that moment when you hit snooze on a saturday morning and snuggle up next to your loved one. Snooze 4 love indeed.

Listen to Snooze 4 Love on Spotify!

38. Julianna Barwick – Prizewinning

In this track Julianna didn’t just rely on multiple layers of her voice to invoke that magic place her music takes you to. A rhythmic, pulsating signal ascending from the depths in Barwick’s music starts this track and persists throughout as her otherworldly choral vocals protrude, expanding the space in which this song exists bit by bit. It all comes down to Barwick’s restrained and patient arranging that makes this a prizewinning track. The progression of the rhythmic signal and the choir is completed when a marching percussion unit joins the ranks. It’s definitely eerie, but not scary. It’s just overwhelming because it’s so unlike anything you’ve heard while still being recognizably natural. Towards the end of the song it has become a solemn celebration and you’re hard pressed not to imagine this is what it must sound like when the elves in The Lord of the Rings make their last journey to the sea upon which they will sail off into infinity.

Listen to Prizewinning on Spotify!

37. King Krule – The Noose Of Jah City

Out Getting Ribs in all honour, but The Noose Of Jah City finds young Londoner Andy Marshall at his most comfortably aloof, which is not to say that the song isn’t devastatingly melancholic anyway. It’s a track that seems to involuntarily capture the world-weary state the British youth is in. Over a tiny, tinny and distant beat Marshall weave melodies and atmospheres far beyond his years, with undeniable touches of his native England and even a fragmented notion of soul thrown in for good measure. Doubt and fear resulted in the London riots last summer and it’s easy to picture Marshall walking around viewing the happenings or aftermaths with this song in the background. Still, the song seems to emanate from personal issues rather than trying to capture a feeling hanging in the air above his youthful peers. Heartbreakingly bleak, strangely enough delightfully so, and unbearably raw and honest, The Noose Of Jah City is a song that makes me put my faith into that it’s people like Marshall that prove that there is a youth today that albeit disillusioned show a healthy dose of creativity and originality.

Listen to The Noose Of Jah City on Spotify!

36. The Rapture – How Deep Is Your Love?

That piano figure. Those vocals by Luke Jenner. That intitial breakout of the song’s intense rhythm and overpowering wall of sound. It was enough to send The Rapture into an inferno of hype once again. That break, where Jenner repeats the song title over and over on top of that insistent piano line, that so distinctively showcases the song’s wonderful disco drama flavours and then climaxes into the extended chorus where instrument of the year, saxophone, enters and Jenner goes all gospel in the background: ”Hallelujah!”. Hallelujah indeed. But beyond the song title’s Bee Gees association, above all there was one line, carrying one genius, mind-blowingly curious Sisqo-reference that made this song stick out and stick in everyone’s brain ever since. That line just keeps repeating. Absolutely motherfucking epic and down-to-earth soulful at once. A line we shouted at the DJs and at The Rapture’s live gigs (or so I imagine, I’ve never seen them live). A line that would send me into dancefloor spasms throughout the year. Because it’s not about the song’s title.

Let me hear that song.

Listen to How Deep Is Your Love? on Spotify!

35. EMA – California

A sorta spoken-word noise drone epic, California was the moment when Erika M. Anderson gathered the shards of herself, puzzled them together into a frightening patchwork of a beast and stretched a sewn-on middle finger to it all. Or how’s ”Fuck California / You made me boring”, ”I’m just 22 / I don’t mind dying” and ”What it’s like to be smalltown and gay” for your once again rising phoenix slogans? California makes Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes seem like cute nursery rhymes.

Listen to California on Spotify!

34. Toro Y Moi – New Beat

Causers Of This was a nice enough ”chillwave” album but when New Beat dropped so did our jaws. Chaz Bundick really stepped it up, churning out a track that manages to be lush, hypnotic and typically chill on one hand and insanely funky and dance-floor-filling on the other. It shouldn’t be possible to fuse the two opposites so perfectly but here we are with New Beat, a highly addictive slice of melodic hippie pop in the verses and funk monster in the choruses in one holy union. The beat is something new indeed, incessantly groovy, and the hook is giddy, dizzying, goofy, but also pretty darn punishing. It won’t take no for an answer as it reels the listener in to its fun world. James Brown would be proud and he would be getting it down to the funky parts of New Beat.

Listen to New Beat on Spotify!

33. tUnE-yArDs – Bizness

When Merrill Garbus gets down to business it’s serios business. Her tUnE-yArDs project was once affiliated with tinkery, skronking experimental pop but on the w h o k i l l single Bizness, she builds a swirling mass of little sounds that together packs a lot of punch. It’s an arousing blend of r&b, afro-pop and experimental flourishes that aid Garbus in her struggle from the point of view of victims (”I’m a victim, yeah!”), whoever and wherever they may be. She sings with swagger and a force that is hard to resist. When she sings ”Don’t take my life away, don’t take my life away” in the chorus I’m especially reminded of French-Nigerian singer-songwriter Asa and her song Jailer. The two artists share a strong social consciousness and as far as frustrated, uprising spirituals go Bizness is the most emotionally stirring anthem since Asa sung the words ”I’m talking to you jailer! Stop calling me a prisoner!”.

Listen to Bizness on Spotify!

32. The War On Drugs – Baby Missiles

In a Springsteen-less year The War On Drugs did a good job filling in those blanks with uplifting and energetic rock music with a sense of adventure and the compulsory harmonica solo. I tried suggesting to my friends that Baby Missiles would be our new sing-and-dance-along-everybody-join-in-floor-filler anthem that we always play during parties. The only problem is that I can barely make out half of the lyrics since the vocals lie in the middle of the ecstatic wonderful chaos that is Baby Missiles. All I know is that this song is a cabriolet on a sunny day, a runaway train bolting its way across the country, it just has that incredible transportive quality to it. It sends you right into bliss.

Listen to Baby Missiles on Spotify!

31. Atlas Sound – Te Amo

For the cover of Parallax, Bradford Cox refashioned himself as a rock crooner with a 50′s vibe and the track where that image fit best was Te Amo. The track starts with an elegant piano loop that stimulates the imagination of the listener and Cox soons throws in all sorts of twinkling, tinkering and bubbling sounds, electronic and acoustic. It sounds a little exotic and quite seductive, more 70′s variety show tropicalia than 50′s rock’n'roll. In Cox’s mind, this is what his solo number would sound like if he would put up a show at a fancy resort hotel in Copacabana. Only he doesn’t resort (pun intended) to mere tropicalia. He aims to take his lover, and the crowd, elsewhere: into the fantastic world of the mind, a beguiling fantasy. It wouldn’t be an Atlas Sound track without plenty of ambient depth and, this time around, harmonic atmospheres. ”When you’re down you’re always down” croons Cox and the audience knows there’s a sentimental reason behind this escapism. ”And we will go to sleep” sounds like a nightcap but what he sings next confirms and explains the dreamy fuzz covering this song like cotton candy. He definitely sings ”And we’ll have such strange dreams” and ”And we’ll have the same dream” but I hear something more in the latter. I constantly mistake it for ”And we’ll have the centuries” and I’m happy living in that misconception because it allows me to stay in Bradford’s wonderful Copacabana fantasy dream through eternity.

Listen to Te Amo on Spotify!

30. Gang Gang Dance – MindKilla

This track has Gang Gang Dance living up to that ”Dance” in their name for the first time, unless you count neo-tribal ritual dances part of your routine. And they did so without compromising any of their experimental edge. MindKilla is a full-on spazz-out workout, a rhythm that makes me wanna go ”DOOKA-DOOKA, DOOKA-DOOKA” in a falsetto voice and also joining Lizzi Bougatsos in the ”chorus” exclaiming ”Don’t fear the MindKilla!” and jumping like chimpanzee on crack during the ”middle 8″ when the band goes all sensational with a part of ”oooohhh” building up to a pay-off of synths ricocheting like lightning trapped inside a box. The question is not ”if” but when GGD will hook up with M.I.A. for a killer track. Because MindKilla is everything Basement Jaxx wished they had been on their last three albums.

Listen to MindKilla on Spotify!

29. James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream

In The Wilhelm Scream, James Blake shrouds his soulful mantras in a steadily thickening fog. ”I don’t know about my dreams / I don’t know about my dreaming anymore / All that I know is I’m falling, falling, falling / Might as well fall in” sings Blake as his mind clogs up. That sense of hopelessness and lack of meaning in the misty paths of your life and Blake’s talent to deliver those earnest, personal devotions to such a an intricate musical effect is what makes this song his greatest piece of psychological thriller, and The Wilhelm Scream into a new Silent Shout.

Listen to The Wilhelm Scream on Spotify!

28. Maroon 5 feat. Christina Aguilera – Moves Like Jagger

Vastly underrated, overlooked or just plain forgotten (or perhaps repressed), Moves Like Jagger was destined to become one of the biggest hits of 2011 and best-selling singles of all time, and it did so without playing into the stadium house-pop trends in today’s popular music. In retrospect it becomes clear that the song takes a life on its own. The Voice, Mick Jagger, Christina Aguilera and not least ultimate shirtless tattooed douchebag terrible music band leader Adam Levine all owe a lot of their recent success and credibility to this song. Moves Like Jagger don’t really owe anything to anyone, it’s just there, blowing up dancefloors, radio and our minds. It proved that there’s still room for a good whistle in a pop song, and the combination of strutty funk guitar, jagge(re)d electro synths and slapping electronic drums makes for one hell of a rhythmic track to get down to. The melodies, not least of the chorus, allow Levine and Aguilera to be sassy as hell, desperately funked up and aching for moves like Jagger and some mouth-to-mouth action. A dance-pop song as fun as this only comes once in a lifetime.

Listen to Moves Like Jagger on Spotify!

27. Alex Turner – Hiding Tonight

I’ll admit right away that the main reason I finally decided to check out Submarine was because I knew Arctic Monkeys and The Last Shadow Puppets mastermind Alex Turner had recorded some solo work for the soundtrack to the film. Submarine is an absolutely charming film, not least thanks to Turner’s warm, melancholic music. The track I fell for was Hiding Tonight, and I fell pretty damn hard. It sent goosebumps up my arms the first time I heard this song being played as beautiful pictures of Oliver’s and Jordana’s relationship developing were showed in the film. The sequence can be found on Youtube. Go watch it and understand me when I wonder why the hell it wasn’t made an offical trailer for the film. And understand me when I state that Hiding Tonight is probably Alex Turner’s finest moment to date, proving exactly why we can consider ourselves lucky that such an extraordinary songwriting talent got the chance to develop his skills in the otherwise notoriously fanciful music climate of the UK. Cheers to Submarine director Richard Ayoade and cheers to Alex Turner.

Listen to Hiding Tonight on Spotify!

26. Chris Brown and Benny Benassi – Beautiful People

Beautiful People is a lot of things. It’s the best ”the-beauty-is-inside” anthem since Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful. It’s Benny Benassi’s only real work of any relevance since Satisfaction. It’s Chris Brown’s first and well-needed song perfectly conjuring and describing the elevated state of mind of the divine dancefloor. Most of all it’s about an arpeggiated chord progression’s rise and fall. You can feel your breath starting to be sucked out right from the very build-up and the release is some of the most majestically thrilling arena-trance since Safri Duo’s Played-A-Live (The Bongo Song). All shitty stadium-filling DJs are put to shame with Beautiful People. Perhaps it’s so epic because its beauty comes from the beating heart pounding inside.

Listen to Beautiful People on Spotify!

Be sure to check out #25 – #1 too!

And here’s a Spotify playlist featuring #50 – #26!

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.

Eleanor Friedberger – My Mistakes

”You know I do my best thinking when I’m flying down the bridge” begins Eleanor Friedberger, one half of Fiery Furnaces on the first track of her first solo outing. From that line you get a pretty good idea of how this song makes you feel. Friedberger only needs to settle an insistent galloping dual force of a strummed guitar and a piano to give the song its momentum. From there she makes small but deft chord changes and adorn it with other harmonizing melodies to allow her space to deliver lyrics like only she can. The song is a great song for the road and it gives the feeling that no matter where we are headed in life we still know we’re going to make mistakes and that there’s nothing to do except accept it and focus on the good times that will compensate one of the most fundamental and inescapable parts of the human nature – to make mistakes.

Listen to My Mistakes on Spotify!

Burial – Street Halo

2011 was a year when we all learned that every Burial track is a good track and a year when everyone exclaimed: ”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”. Street Halo was the song that caused all the commotion and while continuing the more danceable vibe of the masterful Four Tet collaboration Moth, it’s still a typical Burial track, a ghost haunting you with deeply urban sounds, giving a highly literal meaning to the term ”post-dubstep”. It’s the sound of your last bass-heavy night out, still ringing inside your head.

Listen to Street Halo on Spotify!

Jay-Z and Kanye West feat. Beyoncé – Lift Off

Hova and Yeezy had a huge year by joining forces on a blockbuster collaboration album and with the dual tour of the century of a caliber that we all missed out on when Kanye and Gaga discontinued the plans for a live rendezvouz. We realize now that there was probably more in it for Gaga than for Kanye. Watch The Throne was a non-stop anthem collection and brightest of all these gems shone Lift Off. Brass as majestic and golden as the album cover, a punishingly deep and throbbing bass, Hove and Ye filling out the huge space as if it was the most natural thing in the world and a Beyoncé in her vocal prime, lifts this song to ridiculously wuthering heights. They told us to watch the throne and this is the moment when they took it and took the whole thing to mars. How many people you know can take it this far?

Listen to Lift Off on Spotify!

Gruff Rhys – Honey All Over

The Super Furry Animals frontman knows how to charm the listener. Gruff Rhys is an idiosyncratic songwriter, avoiding grand gestures in his solo outings but he always manages to cover his excursions in honey-coated or clever shticks. Honey All Over from his endearingly pleasant latest album called Hotel Shampoo does the trick nicely, coming off a bit like something taken from the soundtrack to an alternative version of Notting Hill. It doesn’t really have a happy ending, but you know, it’s still sweet as honey all over the place.

Listen to Honey All Over on Spotify!

The 2 Bears – Bear Hug

Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Raf Rundell teamed up and dressed up in bear suits and judging by their recently released debut album, Be Strong, the project is celebrating the sort of naïve and danceable nerd-pop we’ve come to love Hot Chip for pitching influences from. Still when listening to Bear Hug it feels like it’s that type of simple, fun song the two fellers churned out over a few beers one fun afternoon and where the whole 2 Bears project just sort of developed from there, really. This is not the case since it was featured on their third EP and not their first. It’s still their best song to date and although featuring a chorus of the same polite and harmless pop mold that the debut album often pairs with simplistic house flavours, it’s the dark-voiced semi-rap, hilarious mischief of the verses that made the song one of the most fun dancefloor bangers about giving bear hugs we’ve ever heard. I hope hugging will be a dancefloor trend in 2012. Do the bear hug!

Listen to Bear Hug on Spotify!

Kurt Vile – Jesus Fever

Damn you Kurt Vile. With your seductively slacky guitar noodling and unapproachable talent for writing unpretentious but brilliant pop songs. Jesus Fever proved how far ahead Kurt Vile was when everyone around seemed to try so hard in their music. He pared it back to the basics, centering around his guitar and words in his deceptively simple, irresistible and addictive pop music. Damn right that Jesus Fever is falling all over us believers and lovers. If it wasn’t taped we could escape this song but you’re already gone.

Listen to Jesus Fever on Spotify!

Frank Ocean – Novacane

Novacane is sort of a numb r&b song, naturally, since it’s about wanting a girl and having to pass through that drug-fuelled haze to get to her. Melodically it’s not that varied, even repetitive at times – even for being a progressive r&b joint from 2011. The real blunted thrill and dynamic about this track is Ocean’s conflicted lyrics, like justifiying a girl performing in porn to pay for dental school tuition with ”at least she workin’”. Where rappers and singers once would probably follow a line like ”cocaine for breakfast” with an affirmative ”yeah!” Ocean represents the new era of rappers and singer who instead follow it with a half-heartedly surprised ”Yikes!”. The times they are-a changin’ and Novacane is one of the most interesting and enjoyable songs reflecting today’s conscious relationship to drugs, money, sex and fame.

Listen to Novacane on Spotify!

Dum Dum Girls – Wrong Feels Right

The above picture perfectly displays the exuberant contrast when a goth-flirting indie pop band decides to run out of dark clubs and rehearsing spaces and frolic in the sun. It feels like the step out into the open that Dum Dum Girls should’ve taken all along. The rollicking drums and summery melody of the verse build up an expectation for the chorus and the breakout is a pure pop explosion only enhanced by lead singer Dee Dee’ exclaiming the simple but effective words ”It happened over night/ It’s wrong but it feels right.”. It’s like an unholy merging of cutesy jangle pop and gothic noise pop. It feels right and it IS right. Indeed, this love is fucking right!

Listen to Wrong Feels Right on Spotify!

Jamie xx – Far Nearer

Jamie xx’s career as a high-demand producer and remixer has only just started with 2011 in hindsight. We’re New Here was, in my opinion, a somewhat underrated remix album of Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here, but it was the public’s first wholesome taste of his skills as a producer when working outside of his breakthrough band The xx. Each of his remixes for the likes of Glasser, FaltyDL, Jack Peñate and Radiohead have spawned more than a decent amount of hype in a year when we couldn’t quite get fed up on finding new artists and track operating and experimenting in the post-dubstep stream. We couldn’t have guessed his penchant for dubstep on the basis of The xx’s debut album sound but his sole original production single released in 2011, Far Nearer, was a revelation of clarity of where this young talent is heading. Stripped down, as often is customary nowadays, and rubbery with a garage rhythm and the mandatory vocal sample tweaked askew, the track also offered something quite unexpected that lended it a completely different taste and context: steel pans. Pairing them up with slinky synths, he created a sound that was inviting without giving up on the wobbly feeling that we ascribe and enjoy about dubstep-influenced music. While making the Caribbean sound far nearer Britain or wherever you are in the world, he himself also sounded far nearer to what he wants out of his solo work than ever before.

Listen to Far Nearer on Spotify!

Absu – Earth Ripper

You gotta love how the ground just rips up in a lightning-bolt-like line that goes from the rampaging band towards you as Proscriptor McGovern lets up his best Vildvittra screech. Absu has never been the heaviest band, they lean towards a punky hyper-speed thrash metal, but they compensate for the lack of heaviness with an energy and intensity that is invigorating in return. Sumerian mythology? Uhhhm… what? The only words I can make out anyway are ”there is no hell” and that’s enough to ”soothe my jangled nerves”.

Listen to Earth Ripper on Spotify!

Clams Casino – Motivation

Clams Casino has worked with some top-of-the-game rappers including Lil B, A$AP Rocky and Mac Miller as well as remixing a few top notch indie acts including Washed Out and Lana Del Rey but many would argue that some of his best output is best left untouched by vocals. His dramatic scope and singular visions stand best on their own and Motivation was the highest watermark on his overlooked Instrumentals Mixtape. Some people say that if Clams Casino hadn’t been known as a hip hop producer making instrumental beats he wouldn’t have been noticed at all, but I can’t hear that in these surprisingly expressive tunes. It’s tempting to imagine a rapper over these inspiring beats but then you can’t really think of any rappers who could match the thematic intricacy and life-affirming bombast of these tracks. Motivation shows that he needed no motivation from a rapper to make some of the best beats of 2011.

Listen to Motivation on Youtube!

Little Dragon – Ritual Union

The title cut from Little Dragon’s third album is a slinky slice of left-field r&b-pop over which Yukimi Nagano does what she does best: slithering, enticing vocal stretching with a lamenting undertone. Ritual Union conveys the mixed emotions that marriage can bring and Nagano is our runaway bride. The group have managed to work a variety of sensations into the lyrics: sensuality in the lines ”drowning my feelings in the sea / then dry it out over on the beach”, a ghostly detachment from reality in the lines ”I was wonderin’ / How the white dress / And the mistress / And his spirit / Are holdin’ my hand” and disappointment in the lines ”Love is not like they say / A light, it’s hard to make it stay”. Nagano and Co. execute this track in such a sexy fashion there’s no wondering that marriage doesn’t score high on a young person’s to-do list in life in 2012.

Listen to Ritual Union on Spotify!

First Love, Last Rites – Always Too Late

The only lyrics I can fully make out of this song are the beginning ”I won’t call you / Anymore / There’s nothing / To restore” and the title of the song being repeated in the chorus and that’s all I need. The chords and the cathartic release of the chorus are recognizably 90′s-style alternative rock but still you’re not feeling like the band are kicking in open doors because this is shoegaze pop at its most heartfelt in times when too many bands sound like they’re kicking out these type of jams on pure routine. In that sense First Love, Last Rites is Sweden’s own The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart.

Listen to Always Too Late on Spotify!

Wild Beasts – Reach A Bit Further

Wild Beasts possess the emotional range and lyrical chops to express both rash, sexually driven and eloquent come-ons and lovesick dejection. Reach A Bit Further was the band admitting past mistakes, rolling over on their back and submitting, while reaching out for reconciliation with an olive branch. Devotionals of this quality come rarely these days and this is, in the song’s own words, devastatingly beautiful. The carefully intricate arrangement and the somber melodies allude to pain and loss of the past lingering in the present but there’s hope, albeit broken and scarred, in the ending lyrics with Hayden Thorpe asking ”Will you by any chance?” and Tom Fleming quietly under his breath answering ”Yes I will ”.

Listen to Reach A Bit Further on Spotify!

Austra – Lose It

Lose It doesn’t exactly lose it, for a synthpop song it doesn’t offer any big release or any real cathartic pop moment. It just elegantly switches pose from the verses where Katie Stelmanis’ operatic vocals dominate your attention to the wordless chorus where she hits incredibly high notes, truly exposing her classical vocal training. The hypnotic effect of the keeping of status quo in the song was perfectly captured in the very random music video too. Therefore Austra doesn’t have to lose it. The song is serene and sirenical. We lose it.

Listen to Lose It on Spotify!

Battles feat. Matias Aguayo – Ice Cream

Spastic carnival keyboards on hallucinogenics are the core that drive this song forward and around it Battles create an ever changing dizzy groove around which Matias Aguayo is a companion character whose vocal logics are distorted through the ears of a listener whose consciousness is all but sober thanks to a song whose fun and danceable appeal cannot be underappreciated. Couldn’t you just hear Ice Cream soundtracking this?

Listen to Ice Cream on Spotify!

Moby – The Right Thing (Sharam Jey Remix)

Sometimes you just want it clean and simple. And I, having grown up on clean and simple electronic music that took you places, am one who still clings to lounge trance and chill house and ATB and Robert Miles like a mother to a baby. Sharam Jey’s remix of Moby’s The Right Thing is just plain old house with a simple as hell melodic and addictive bassline that highlights the female vocals and it’s just full of sounds that are signifiers of 90′s four-on-the-floor jams. Jey has been around in house circles since the 90′s so there’s your natural connection. For him the whole thing has come full circle again since the retro 90′s house vibe is definitely back in fashion. Regardless, whatever he did to this Moby song it was austere, clinic, jetsetty and totally the right thing.

Listen to The Right Thing (Sharam Jey Remix) on Spotify!

Indian – No Grace

Guiltless was a severely downtuned and pretty down-paced record that still managed to wring out a whole lot of dynamics out of a tensely claustrophobic vision. No Grace, the stunning opening track, is the most energetic performance on the album. At least the beginning is a complete devastation of raw emotion and occult aura. What follows that sonic punishment is a dreary golgatha walk of doom where the high hats mostly serve as whips. Oh no, don’t get me wrong. In black metal that’s something good.

Listen to No Grace on Spotify!

Friendly Fires – Hawaiian Air

According to Wikipedia, ”the album name comes from Aldous Huxley’s final novel, Island, which tells the story of a journalist shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala, that supports a utopian society.”. Since we’re not living in a fictional world, Friendly Fires were set on creating music to let us escape reality, and in this song lead singer Ed MacFarlane bought tickets to what he perceives as Pala on Earth: Hawaii. In the verses he’s on the plane ”watching a film with a talking dog” and ”skipping the meal for a G&T” while the tribal drums pound the expectations up. In an explosion of a chorus we haven’t heard of since Jump In The Pool he exclaims ”Can I take this all in?”. You see, it’s cathartic and noisy as hell but the production and volume is sort of muted and favours MacFarlane’s vocals, as if to prove that he grandness of the experience can’t really be captured, only hinted at. It doesn’t stop us from appreciating Friendly Fires’ charmingly naïve but powerful songcraft.

Listen to Hawaiian Air on Spotify!

Sandro Perri – Changes

This song comes from an album called Impossible Spaces. I could just stop there but I’d be leaving too many readers behind if I didn’t try to explain how Sandro Perri’s contribution to the music year of 2011 occupies all of these impossible spaces, ridding his creations of categorization. Changes is the finest example of his unconventional approach. He lets the song just meander in your ears, with a minimalistically funky groove where you just feel the world surrounding you with intriguing sounds or the night sky opening up like a star-spotted canvas.

Listen to Changes on Spotify!

Also be sure to check out #30 – #16 of the list here!

You should also check out my Honourable Mention Albums Of 2011!

15. Washed Out – Within And Without

What on earth led up to Ernest Greene passing the purgatory of the full-length album debut barrier, that all chillwave artists have to go through, and coming through unharmed at the end? On paper, Within And Without is a cliché; a mere update to the more standardized pop songwriting and sweepingly epic atmospheres that is precisely as ambitious as it needs to be to qualify as something worth paying attention to now that the chillwave heydays are ostensibly over. Washed Out is arguably the Godfather act of all things chillwave and while only having released the debut album, the other two partners-in-crime Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian both released their second albums respectively during 2011. Perhaps a certain patience payed off, because while all three albums were good enough to erase the chillwave stamps forever, Within And Without was the one that best proved that it was not the genre connections that made us fall for them in the first place. Playing like a celebration to music and life, Within And Without was a triumph of talent over right place and right time and damn well made up for (or lived up to?) the lifestyle-magazine-soft-pornographic and iconographically chillwave album cover featuring a model pair embracing and embraced by sheets of heavenly white.

Listen to Within And Without on Spotify!

14. Drake – Take Care

Drake may rightfully be considered the guiding star steering r&b and hip hop into emotionally self-conscious and just generally aware territories. Surely there have been rappers and singers in these circles dealing with similar topics before, but it’s not until 2010 and 2011 that we’ve seen artists of great popularity and production values doing it on such a grand scale. And no one does it better than Drake. More atmospheric and spreading vibes than bangin’, Take Care sees Drake further exploring the themes of handling fame and the paradoxical relationship between having a lot of money and feeling happiness. The album title, cover and and the mood of the music itself could just as well theoretically have represented the end of a career that got so crazy so quickly that the wild part between the up-and-coming first and coming-of-age second album never had the chance to get recorded. But there’s still plenty of bass-heavy good times and braggadocio to gather from the 18 tracks and almost 80 minutes comprising the album to tell that this is rather the calm before the storm if anything. It’s just that Take Care represents the serious depth to the contrastingly expansive and paranoid splendour of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It takes off where Thank Me Later left and drags us diving deep down into the psyche of a young rapper/singer on top of his game but still in limbo and doubt. Fascinating stuff. It doesn’t just feel fresh, it feels true.

Listen to Take Care on Spotify!

13. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost

While still writing songs that are extremely poppy because of their being steeped deeply into the myth of popular music from the 50′s up until the 00′s, Girls frontman Christopher Owens performs them in such an awkward way that they could never be heat-seeking hits beyond the indiesphere that has already embraced his band. On the second Girls album he sings often with a low, whispery voice on what is most of the time ballad songs while still putting enough emphasis on some key vocal parts to make his lyrics get through. There’s a much more subtle and varied approach to songwriting than displayed on the band’s garage-rocky debut album. Perhaps it’s easy to overestimate the importance of Owen’s rumoured late-life discovery of 60 years of popular music since his outbreak from the Children of God cult. But there’s no denying or mistaking his savant-like talent of extracting the essences of music from those decades and distilling it into a universal blend on Girls’ albums. There’s a misconception that a true ”album” in these days is uniform and that the songs are united under a single or a few connected themes. But Girls’ two albums and EP has gone back to the original meaning of the word album as it is in ”photo album”. Father, Son, Holy Ghost may be a little more coherent than it’s aptly titled predecessor ”Album” because of its higher production value but still resembles that feeling of a series of snapshots of situations bringing back memories but most of all feelings and atmospheres. Owens and his band colleague and producer, Chet ”JR” White, go well beyond being revivalists and retrospective because they love the music of past decades not because of its museum-like charm or novelty value in contrast to today’s musically rushing impatience, but because of the emotionally rich qualities that there is still to gather from those forms of musical expression. They know that above anything this music really meant something to people in those ages and Girls show that those sentiments can still resonate in a profound way in these genre-jumbling times too. Father, Son, Holy Ghost is a testimony to the religious relationship we can have to music, not because of its archival relevance but because of how it touches our innermost parts. It connects on a deep level not only because there’s an almost eerie sense that we’ve heard these songs before but also because we in some unfathomable way relate to Owen’s down-and-out character and heartfelt lyrics.

Listen to Father, Son, Holy Ghost on Spotify!

12. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

When California was released in March last year you pretty much knew that the upcoming album would be no bullshit, truth and honesty. But nothing could quite prepare you for the sense of filthy guilt imposed on you after listening to the entirety of Past Life Martyred Saints. Brutal in her honesty and honest in her brutality, mental or physical, Erika M. Anderson left us marked, because she was working with emotional raw material, creating emotionally raw material with a dirty sound but nonetheless a cleansing sense of small victory, like a broken phoenix rising again knowing that, albeit stronger than before, it can never become as beautiful as it once was.

Listen to Past Life Martyred Saints on Spotify!

11. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

One can only begin to imagine the pressure that the tremendous reception that Fleet Foxes’ eponymous debut album brought with it. Yet listening to Helplessness Blues it’s remarkably clear how Robin Pecknold and his band have been busy working to express things completely aside from all the buzz and hype. The follow-up is more intricate and in some ways less direct than its predecessor while still retaining a lot of the flavour that made the debut such a rich album. I noted that unlike the debut and the Sun Giant EP, this album did not come with its own personal text written by frontman Pecknold. The two previous texts we’ve been served were affectingly personal accounts of Peckold’s thoughts regarding the landscape of the world and imagining what it could’ve looked like ages ago (Sun Giant) and the relationship between music and our memory (Fleet Foxes), respectively. As much as those texts touched me, perhaps even more than the music did, I can understand that Helplessness Blues can benefit from standing on its own legs without an accompanying written text giving it an optional context and depth. Doubtlessly it has more than enough of power to speak for itself, being delicately arranged around its wide-eyed walker constantly searching for places to hold on to in an awe-inspiring and sometimes unfamiliar world. Here’s hoping that Pecknold will help make the world inspire awe in us through his vidid imagery and empathetic heart for many years to come.

Listen to Helplessness Blues on Spotify!

10. James Blake – James Blake

It’s somewhat of an irony for James Blake to make his debut album self-titled. It’s one of the most common clichés to signify an album’s personal relevance, pivotal importance or just plain lack of imagination in the typical singer-songwriter slot. Not to defame the typical singer-songwriter, as Mr. Blake has triumphantly proven to us during 2011. He cast a shadow over our conceptions of what both a highly specialized and pigeonholed genre like dubstep and a hopelessly generic term like singer-songwriter is at the same time, an unprecedented feat. In his r&b-influenced, dubstep-inflected experimental pop he put just as much emphasis on what was played like on what was not played – NOT the other way around, which is a common preconception. Listen to the relationship between the piano and/or Blake’s voice and the silence in Limit To Your Love and you will know what I’m talking about. The melodic and physical force plays as big part as the silence in Blake’s unmistakable sound. Using lurid electronics and some sort of negative space he surrounds his unsettling mantras in even more unsettling instrumentals, often in very discreet ways. It’s as moving as it is a unique listening experience. Both on album and live, however, Blake could do little to divide my attention from the fatal irregularity that occurred in his bending of musical reality: the maximalist overdrive that is the last two minutes of I Never Learnt To Share that is the blind sensation of being sucked into a black hole and being spat out on the other side. Musically it was 2011′s most violently stirring moment and it’s a mystery why he didn’t put it last on such an intriguing and ingenious album.

Listen to James Blake on Spotify!

9. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l

Paradoxically, w h o k i l l feels like the older sister that inspired its younger sibling: Micachu’s Jewellery. While that album’s significance has decayed over the years since its 2009 release, Merrill Garbus’s project prospered greatly from leaving the bedroom pop with the help of 4AD’s financing. Some props should go to the enjoyable Jewellery for easing this kind of tinkering experimental pop into our minds, but w h o k i l l is on an entirely different level as far as ambition goes. It’s every bit as playful, goofy and eclectic as Bird-Brains was, but it’s more full and rich in its sound, there’s more thought going into the songs and Garbus’s statements feel more relevant, at times even important and unmissable. She ruminates with a social consciousness and often with an unsettling ambiguity on matters of power and violence. Artists who show this much courage and conviction lyrically and musically come with too far space between them. w h o k i l l is that oddball of an odd ball in a game of pong that comes completely unexpected with its skewed curve and slides right past you into the goal. Only that it then comes blasting out of the screen and hits you in the gut.

Listen to w h o k i l l on Spotify!

8. Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica

There’s something deeply disturbing about how Replica can sound so comfortably familiar. There’s something comfortably familiar about how Replica can sound so deeply disturbing. It’s a weird album, it really is. All experimental and ambient and looping and sampling and stuff. At one moment you’re pressed to think it’s intended as a disorienting replica of Daniel Lopatin’s distraught mind, or the mind of a fictional character, perhaps the spaghetti-haired skeleton on the album cover. Though at the end of the day you pretty much buy that it’s as simple as a meditation on, or indeed a replica of, the relationship between ”media, memory, and the space-time continuum” as Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne so accurately put it. Lopatin knew exactly what keys to push on his synthesizer for Returnal and you know that he also knows exactly what buttons to push on Replica. He knows perfectly well what he’s doing, wether it is an undefined ”something” or an exact, outspoken vision. Either way there’s no denying the vaguely bizarre qualities of this intriguing and addictive album. It’s not bizarre in an in-your-face fashion like art school student short films can be, because it’s minimal and very restrained and foremostly does not aim to tickle the part of the brain that responds to the overly awkward and scaringly foreign. It aims, and hits perfectly, the middle ground between the familiar and the unfamiliar, a space that allows Lopatin to explore and play infinitely with the conception of his music; using looped instruments, his usual Roland Juno 60, off-kilter ambiance and vocal sampling. Replica points a mirror towards your mind and ultimately it’s what each and every listener read into the reflection they experience that makes this album. Replica is in every sense an astonishing piece of art in a time where we shy away from calling books, films, albums, and other forms of expression in pop culture, ”pieces of art”.

Listen to Replica on Spotify!

7. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

At the beginning of 2011 you probably thought that Lady Gaga was going to deliver, if not the best, then at least the most overwrought, ridiculously epic pop album of the year. Born This Way was a disappointment, at least to me, mostly because the stakes were high and you expected the triumphant hit singles Born This Way and Judas to be surrounded by equally majestic pop music. However, Gaga’s sophomore album was still the most severely hyped and outsized pop stuff around when in July entered the force majeure of M83′s comeback single: Midnight City. It pretty much swept everything else away. With that brilliant lead single Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming quickly rose to be one of the most anticipated album releases late in the year. Anthony Gonzalez had since long pronounced it as an EPIC double album: his own Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. When we finally heard it, the unequalled bombast didn’t surprise us. Neither did the extreme emotional elevation or the ridiculous expansiveness of Gonzalez’ ambition. From previous albums we knew fully well that he was capable of it. What caught us in this album was the unassailable quality running through the nearly 80 minutes of synthrock masterpieces, ambient interludes and dreamy bangers, all varied just enough to keep your attention and with everything perfectly put into a sequence that helped you enter Gonzalez’s vision that perhaps wasn’t so mad after all: a dreamlike state fueled by sheer imaginative power, an ode to the possibilities in life. And it put Lady Gaga, and even my personal favourite Jonathan Johansson to shame. Amen. Ladies and gentlemen, once again we are floating in space.

Listen to Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming on Spotify!

6. Destroyer – Kaputt

It was not until Kaputt that I truly understood Dan Bejar, where he was coming from. In the elegant light of Kaputt his discography suddenly seemed a lot less like wordy, dusty librarian rock that the Destroyer naysayers have accused Bejar of performing. The truth remains as firmly in place as it has ever been: Bejar is an expert at words, he just so happens to be very skilled at expressing ideas and cryptic poetry in very pleasing pop-rock settings rather than being a writer of books. It is after all, the music as an artform he celebrates foremostly and with each subsequent album he has perfected his craft to a point where he succeeded in matching the quality many of the bands he has been inspired by while retaining his singular style, making him stand out in the music climate of the 00′s and early 10′s. He has always been tagged as being clever but has rarely succumbed to being clever for the sake of being clever, because there has always been substance to his riddled imagery and plenty of memorable lines and interesting lyrical twists that actually convey an idea that lies beneath.

The Bay Of Pigs (2009) and Archer On The Beach (2010) EPs were pointing towards an ambient, glossy, streamlining sound and a will to experiment, a lot like 2004′s Your Blues had experimented with synthesizers. But we were still not quite prepared for what a masterpiece Bejar had in store for us. Kaputt is full-on saxophone heaven, jazzy late-night big city radio vibes, smooth disco grooves, soft rock cool, jetsetter atmospheres, chasing cocaine and girls through the backrooms of the world and some of Bejar’s best sloganeering of his entire career. These sounds were once considered cheesy but has been gaining hipster points for some years now, not that Bejar seems like the person who would care anyway. You know you’ve heard these sounds before but you’ve never heard them crystallize into something as beguiling and hypnotic as this album. I was happy enough to catch Destroyer’s nine-man live show two times this year, perhaps the two best concerts I saw this year. The band managed to capture the album’s gauzy atmospheres perfectly while offering the raw realness of a live sound that pounds in your chest, overwhelms your ears during the climactic moments and makes you appreciate the subtle power of a pop orchestra in perfect sync. All the while Bejar handled the vocals with care, wearing casual but high-end blue jeans with a relaxed but elegant white shirt, constantly running his hand through his frizzy hair or bending down to take a sip of his alcoholic drink. Pure iconic stuff. Kaputt isn’t as crowded with words as other Bejar albums but they are carefully chosen. The live perfomances were, in other words, not much of a hazard for Destroyer’s lead singer but after such a tremendous effort putting together such an album brimming with excellent musicianship and more memorable Bejarian lines than ever, you’re more than glad to let him harvest the fruits of his labour and just stand there delivering those lyrics with his seductively raspy voice that pleasingly scratches the back of your mind. He has deserved it. Standing there. Presenting his art. Gaining our applause. Drop the curtains. Rideau.

Listen to Kaputt on Spotify!

5. Cut Copy – Zonoscope

Honing their talent and the experience they’ve collected throughout their career, knowing which parts to cut and which to copy, Cut Copy delivered an impeccable landscape of an album that 11 months after its release still has the power to fill us with excitement and a feeling of fresh abandon. Wether it was the slow-building rush of Need You Now, the neo-psychedelia pop living up to its genre tag bombast of Where I’m Going, the larger-than-life Corner Of The Sky or the endlessly expanding rollick rhythm-fest of 15-minute closer Sun God, Zonoscope constantly offered a zoned-out experience and expensive thrills that has lasted up until this day. It’s an album that completely negates any possibilities of its own irrelevance a 100 years from now; it’s just so timeless in a way, it’s an aural adventure, and it cements the band as the absolutely finest pop craftsmen we have in this day and age.

Listen to Zonoscope on Spotify!

4. Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Justin Vernon’s debut album as Bon Iver was a raw and truly affecting folk album and came with a myth regarding reclusion that spurred creativity. It’s remarkable how the self-titled follow-up to For Emma, Forever Ago works in the same folky vein, with introspective lyrics about the way memory interacts with our perception of the situation we’re in emotionally and physically, while still showing how incredibly far Vernon has come in that time, being able to masterfully fledge out his music into new territories. A lot of risks are taken on this second album, a lot of awkward and unconventional production choices were made, but they all sound completely logical in Vernon’s larger vision. The scope of the somewhat impressionistic lyrics is grand and notions of their meaning are quite hard to grasp, lingering just out of reach, especially when the musical dimension is so intriguing to follow in itself. But then again the album’s concern of memories isn’t so much about time or place or even people as it is about the meaning of these and our general search for the meaning in all of this confused mess called life. This is just my interpretation, which happens to be a very popular interpretation of the album, but I’ve heard others express other thoughts regarding the nature of these songs. And that’s the nature of this album, 10 tracks that Vernon himself called soundscapes, readily prepared for you to explore at will and interprete as you wish. The dynamics of our collective and individual memory has been a popular subject throughout the last few years and Vernon’s music presents our relationship to them in an interesting and deeply touching way. Regardless of what your own interpretation of Bon Iver’s take on the subject might be, it’s a worthwhile 39-minute journey to take.

Listen to Bon Iver on Spotify!

3. The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

The 00′s were more about recycling, reconetextualizing, reviving, and just about any other verb starting with ”re”, than creating entirely new music scenes with their respective genre affiliations. Those that did surface were too small, got overdue quickly and weren’t rooted in a real scene. Or how did you like terms like shitgaze, glo-fi, dreamwave, chillwave, witch house and post-dubstep? The 80′s was the music decade that was a common denominator for all and all this retrospective flirting can partially be explained by the internet gaining massive ground during that first post-millenial decade. For what is probably the same reasons, memory has become a significantly examined theme in music throughout the last three years or so. In 2011 there were a lot of albums coming out somehow more or less revolving around the mind-boggling possibilities that the theme can offer and a lot of these albums came out with interesting and thought-provoking and not least great results, which is evident throughout my top 30 albums list. And no one dealt with the issue of memory quite so literally and conceptually to such endearing results as The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World.

James Kirby’s output as a musician has been experimental and varied and under the The Caretaker alias his music has often come to deal with the loss of memories, such as amnesia. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, however, is trying to recreate the sense of Alzheimer’s disease. He uses obscure samples of secret 30′s and 40′s-sounding ballroom, jazz and old-time popular music records that he’s got his hands on in God knows where they end up. A marketplace in Marrakech? Anyway, he takes well chosen melodic snippets and let’s them play over and over again, embedded in a warm fuzz of vinyl crackling and the sound of echoed distance of the mind. He lulls the listener into a comfort that soon is tainted by a feeling that something isn’t quite right.

You get the image of a senior citizen rewinding the gramophone record as if trying to relive or remember the wonderful feeling of their youth that they associate with these snippets that have laid dormant but etched into their memory. It’s at once a heartwarmingly touching and tear-jerking scene to watch. Somehow it’s emotionally equivalent to watching the heartbreaking love story of Carl and Ellie in the film Up. On the other hand it’s simultaneously a first-hand experience of an Alzheimer simulation. Not only are the melodic parts repeated but there are even a few songs that appear twice with a few tracks between them, as to trick the listener into déjà vu. This album demonstrates the overwhelmingly powerful mind-fuck factor of the feeling when you realize how incredibly much time lies behind you. Stories that will never be told. Memories that will be forgotten. People passing away. Old records becoming warped. It’s sentimental but also creepy and downright scary.

The concept may be crystal clear right from the beginning and songtitles like All You Are Going To Want To Do Is Get Back There, Moments Of Sufficient Lucidity, Mental Caverns Without Sunshine and Tiny Gradiations Of Loss leave nothing to the imagination, but no mystery is needed in the presentation of the album when the music will damn well send you into psychic limbo anyway. Kirby knows exactly what he’s doing and he has pulled off what is probably his best work to date, an album of subtle meditation that is as addicting as the omnipresent character is addicted to playing these records over and over, desperately seeking help from the music to revive those old memories. Naturally, the album delivers exactly what its title promises: an empty bliss beyond this world.

It’s weird how I will probably myself never fully forget my first listen session to this album and that in 60 years from now I’ll probably be sitting playing snippets of these tunes. Which leads me to my conclusive mind-fuck as a result from this album. Time is out of joint. The future is fucked up. Everything is just memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories about memories

Listen to An Empty Bliss Beyond This World in its entirety on Youtube!

2. C418 – Minecraft – Volume Alpha

This may come as a complete shock to some. But to me, and hopefully a lot of Minecraft fans out there, this soundtrack album couldn’t have been more deserving the recognition as one of the absolutely best albums of 2011. It goes beyond my wildest imagination how so few people outside the Minecraft realm have gotten the chance to discover the vein of gold that Minecraft creator Markus ”Notch” Persson struck when he found young Daniel ”C418″ Rosenfeld from Germany.

Minecraft became immensely popular in 2010 and just continued to grow exponentially in 2011. Its simplicity, accessibility and never-ending possibilites made it into the genius masterpiece of an indie blockbuster game it is today and I was one of the millions who fell in love with it right off the bat. If you ask me, C418′s musical input and influence on the game’s fantastic gaming experience can’t be underrated. The music pops up every now and then while playing, fading into the ear, solemn or awe-inspiring, filling you up with a warm feeling of home and safety or inciting you with an open-mindedness and penchant for adventure. In one interpretation, Minecraft reads basically like a celebration to the world around us, its dangers and ungraspable magnitude, but most of all its beauty, harmony and possibilities. C418′s musical vision couldn’t have been better suited for Minecraft. The album features a handful of bonus material not heard in the game and all the songs present ideas that are lovely but perhaps do not have a suitable place yet in the game’s astounding world. I’m glad he didn’t decide to make it just an EP with the cuts that are heard in the game; they are usually the ones that stretch to the four minute mark and are the highlights of the album.

How many times haven’t millions of players around the world stopped whatever they’re doing in the Minecraft world to just stand, listen and take in the atmosphere of the world as Daniel Rosenfeld’s music lends its simple but heartbreakingly beautiful magic to it. The simplicity of his music fits the block-based universe of Minecraft like a glove, its emphasis is often on gentle piano figures, synthetic but warm string sections, the occasional pluckings of a string instrument, touches of glockenspiel, washes of synth sounds á la Brian Eno or Jean Michel Jarre, a well-balanced sense of depth and space with the use of echo, and only on two tracks, ”Cat” and ”Dog”, does he resort to 8-bit charm, although of course expertly executing that too with a lovely result. He avoids falling into the pits of the MIDI approach to music and ends up sounding absolutely professional in terms of meeting with the goals of his vision for the Minecraft soundtrack.

Rosenfeld took to action following the good reception from his newly won fans and released a second album in 2011, sporting a peppy techno vibe sounding like the jolly little brother to Deadmau5′s internet-pleasing anything-goes house. The 72-minute album is aptly titled 72 Minutes Of Fame and alters my view on Rosenfeld as more of your average happy amateur distributing his music online and more of a Ronald Jenkees variety of savant talent rather than an ambitious composer type of savant. It makes me ask the question, because I’m hardly familiar with music production: does this sort of computer program-based music write itself to some extent? And I’ve always been one to favour and acknowledge the marginalized producers in the spectrum of music: the video game music composers, the soundtrack composers and most of all the home-taping, MIDI-wielding amateur producers out there in the world. I know as good as anyone else that the answer to that question most of the time is an unanimous ”no”. It’s just that 72 Minutes Of Fame, despite its occasional similarities in tone and charmingly naive atmosphere, displays none of the innovation, depth or sense that Rosenfeld is in total control and knows exactly what he’s doing because he has a clear purpose and goal for the music, as heard on the Minecraft soundtrack. He did make one hell of a soundtrack but the next big techno producer he ain’t.

Still, leaving 72 Minutes Of Fame out of memory, for me he is obviously some sort of genius, a true talent and a fellow Aphex Twin fan on top of that; because despite being self-taught his music demonstrates a melodic sense, a knack for composition and an ear for the emotive nature of sounds that entire conservatories full of minimalist composers, classically trained musicians and music professors could never amount enough intelligence in the world to explain just what Rosenfeld has done with Minecraft and these pieces. They work very well outside of the game’s context as interesting mood pieces for people uninitiated in Minecraft or soundtrack/video game music but for the already converted Minecraft fans, like me, this album reminds us and allows us to re-experience thousands of life-affirming moments in the game should we ever be away from our computer or forget what an amazing journey that life, wether in Minecraft or IRL, can be.

Listen to Minecraft – Volume Alpha on Spotify!

1. Parker Lewis – Pengar & Leenden

There was a time when Emil Johansson a.k.a. Parker Lewis would try to to capture the romantic side of NYC in sweet indie pop songs sung in English and I would praise him as a songwriter ranking alongside other Swedish pop greats such as Jens Lekman and The Tough Alliance. Then something happened. We couldn’t have predicted it if our lives depended on it. He had only done one song in Swedish before, the empathetic Hjältar, from an otherwise English-sung EP, that got translated into Heroes on his self-titled 2008 album. The surprise was not his switch of language however. The Rak Som En Pil EP from 2009 was a fierce political statement, colouring Parker Lewis’s pop music in bold red. The first lines on the first song on that EP were ”You are my hammer and my hammer and my sickle”, the communist symbol of the Soviet Union. That Parker had left his New York dreaming behind and revealed his left-wing views is a mild way to put it. The EP turned my world upside. The songs were some of the best pop songs I had ever heard and the lyrics spurred a revolution inside me. I would never look at Parker Lewis the same way again.

It took two years before he released his first Swedish-language album and even before its September 2011 release the songs Över Kilsbergen and Dream Baby had already made him a hero in my eyes. Pengar & Leenden are nine songs about getting shot down from depression, the devastation of the Swedish welfare system, unrealized dreams, escaping the prison of your small hometown, the greed of the wealthy, long nights in sweaty sheets, about being down for count but rising at nine again and gather the power to dream again, the search for rock & roll, to fight back against the injustice and about gaining energy from finding that true love.

I’ve never been able to understand people who have that one artist or band that stands above all others, for whom they have an unconditional love and feel a strong personal connection to. I’ve always been too much of a music mind, never being able to pick and choose from all the fantastic artists and bands I admired. I never found one I could identify with strongly enough. Until Emil Johansson came along. The words I think best summarize my relationship to Johansson and his music are my own, which in fact are a rephrasing of a line from that very cathartic song of his: Hjältar. I actually got the chance to ask him a question during a recording of the live music radio show Musikguiden i P3 in the fall of 2011. My question was about Nick Lowe who is one of Johansson’s favourite artists, but that’s beside the point. A few words were exchanged and at last, nervous as hell to meet the only true idol I’ve ever had, I squeezed out the words:

”I just want you to know that even if you should break down and burn your last chance, you’ll always be a hero to someone out there.”

Cheesy you say. Well it’s true. He makes me strong. He and I rise above shame, insincerity and all the idiots and the worthless shit we wade through and have to put up with every day.

He’ll always be a hero to me.

Nån dag blir det bra.

Listen to Pengar & Leenden on Spotify!

Check out #15 – #1 here!

And also check out my Honourable Mention Albums Of 2011!

30. Panda Bear – Tomboy

One of the most anticipated albums of 2011, Tomboy must have felt awkward for many upon first listen. It’s kinda bleak compared to the tropicalistic, colour explosion of Person Pitch, mostly working with a reverberating grey melodic pallette which the album cover hints at. This doesn’t stop Noah Lennox from creating emotionally rich music from his fairly limited arsenal of sounds he allowed himself this time. Like so many acts this year, Girls and Destroyer on the poppier hand and producers like Tim Hecker, Dirty Beaches and The Caretaker on the more experimental hand, Lennox possesses the unmistakable talent that has been portioned rationally throughout his career of producing songs that evoke something utterly familiar but sounding eerily alienated. If not retaining that game-changing, ahead of the curve odd-ball genius role he had during the 00′s, Panda Bear still remains an act of utter relevance by playing with notions of our collective musical memory, like doo-wop or the Beach Boys’ musical heritage, not to mention playing with our emotions at the same time. Somehow it was perfectly logical that Tomboy was released the same year as the final release of the Smile sessions.

Listen to Tomboy on Spotify!

29. Toro Y Moi – Underneath The Pine

Deftly avoiding falling into the already apparent pit of chillwave in 2010 with the release of his debut album Causers Of This, Chaz Bundick proved he wasn’t just another obscure, tumblr-approved bedroom pop producer. It didn’t hurt the reputation of his Toro Y Moi project either that the follow-up, Underneath The Pine, was another quick left-turn into acclamation as a thorough, structured and mesmerizing musician. Don’t let the lofty, carelessly lilting feel of the album fool you, a lot of hours was spent making this, and it was not made in a bedroom. Moving effortlessly between neo-funk, jazz, krauty synthpop, psychedelic rock or something that jumbles them together in the same track, he created a delicious, deliriously aromatic and intoxicatingly seductive album that sounded as good as the title suggested, or as good-sounding as the album cover art was good-looking. Or as good as that flower must’ve tasted.

Listen to Underneath The Pine on Spotify!

28. Absu – Abzu

Growing up in Sweden it’s pretty hard to not have some sort of connection and relationship to hard rock and heavy metal. Moreso than most kids who foremostly preferred pop and electronic music growing up, the heavier parts of the rock spectrum was a fully natural, although at times small, part of my music consumption. Admittedly, though, I’ve only given that music its fair share of attention the last three years or so, venturing into and preferring the more extreme subgenres such as thrash, doom, death and black metal due to their otherworldly intensity, dramatic scope and sheer musical efficiency and brutality. Not to mention tackling the darker corners of the human mind. Thusly I’m not the least abominated by Absu’s throat-teasing growling and hyper-speed tempos. Which doesn’t mean I don’t get a complete thrill from the band’s self-ascribed Occult Mythological Metal of the second installment, Abzu, in a series of three albums featuring monstruously complicated, intelligent and reference-generating ruminations and lectures on Sumerian/Mesopotamian mythology. You could dive head-first into becoming a class act, degree-less know-it-all on Sumerian/Mesopotamian mythology by listening to metal. Who knew? What’s not to love?

Listen to Abzu on Spotify!

27. Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes

Her Youth Novels were blotted by tears salty and bittersweet, almost content in wallowing in adolescent sentimentality and the inconsolable longing of young adults. On her follow-up she wove Wounded Rhymes, prowling for sex, lust and love; bruised but stronger for all the heartache she’s suffered. Lykke Li shed the gossamer shell of youth to amplify her voice and left in the wake of her new-lit stardom a new horde of youths eager learn how to relinquish the lingering torments of a teenage soul. She is still embracing the darkness but she does so without resorting to playing to any current trends of goth whatsoever – the most impressive thing of all. And meanwhile created some of the most dramatic but open-hearted pop music of 2011.

Listen to Wounded Rhymes on Spotify!

26. First Love, Last Rites – First Love, Last Rites

From the uplifting choruses hidden deep beneath the reverb, via the softer guitar ballads and frail indie pop to the sheer noise workouts, Swedish band First Love, Last Rites’ self-titled debut album is a true shoegaze pop gem that’s been forgotten since its release in early 2011. It was one of my first loves in 2011 and one of my last rites riding on the night bus home from the New Year’s Eve party. I preferred them over Yuck when I needed my dose of 90′s revival alternative poprock and even though I look forward to hearing more from this band, I’m afraid I might get disappointed. Not because I don’t think there would be a lot of promise in a follow-up album, but because I know almost directly I would just return to this first album. There’s just something about it that is so perfect for when my lazy slacker melancholy mode kicks in. Kurt Vile? Never heard of the guy.

Listen to First Love, Last Rites on Spotify!

25. Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

The Magic Place pretty much delivered on its title but also, and not least, on the promise of the similarly magical Florine EP from 2009. Although I’ve been trying to find a track on the album that sweeps me up and carries me along like the track Bode from the aforementioned EP, she makes an absolutely astonishing work of letting her endlessly layered, reforged and reverberated voice create soundscapes that wash over you, floods and permeates your mind and soul. Apparently she spent a lot of time in church during her childhood and somehow, without ever using an organ, the silent end of a Julianna Barwick song somehow recalls that feeling when the church organ has played its last drawn-out note that seems like it’s going to last forever and the silence settles, pushing away the remaining echo bit by bit. It’s an experience strong enough to become spiritual, if only for the duration of an album. Gospel? The Priests? Gregorian? Never heard.

Listen to The Magic Place on Spotify!

24. AraabMuzik – Electronic Dream

American producer AraabMuzik had hardly needed to pick such a generic and obvious name for his debut album. His reputation for extensively utilizing the MPC to great effect reached the listener before the music did and anyone who knew what an MPC was and how it sounded more or less instantly knew what this album would sound like. Nonetheless it didn’t take away anything from the inescapably dreamlike first listen that the album offered, catching you within AraabMuzik’s forward-thinking idea of an electronic dream; one that you don’t want to wake up from should be noted. My amusement saw no end when I got to hear how satisfactorily he sampled all sorts of trance music, from which hip hop and r&b has been borrowing sounds and grandeur over the last few years. It’s as if he got fed up with all the hinting allusions, grabbed trance, paired it up with his MPC and showed it to an audience otherwise ignorant of this untrendy genre. He had hardly needed to begin all of his tracks with a distorted female speaker voice proclaiming ”You are listening to AraabMuzik”, but considering Electronic Dream’s innovation and hard-hitting impact it probably was wise to tag his recorded output to prevent any misunderstandings with future copycats.

Listen to Electronic Dream on Spotify!

23. Fucked Up – David Comes To Life

Beating Absu at their game, Fucked Up released the most astounding, thorough and hard-to-comprehend rock opera of 2011. Pushing through an endless jungle of jarring guitars and frontman Pink Eyes grunting squall you ultimately arrive at a love story between two people named David and Veronica that is quite hard to grip due to the open-ended nature of the lyrics and the relative complexity of the story. But somewhere along the way you find yourself rooting for David and Veronica and in the end for Fucked Up for having the guts to pull off something as ambitious and stubbornly concenptual. Sonically it’s an uplifting, spirit-raising swirl of raw hardcore punk energy and lofty sky-clearing 90′s-style alt poprock melodies. Even without following its narration closely you could appreciate its spirit-raising aura and if there’s any band nowadays to make you feel truly alive it’s Fucked Up.

Listen to David Comes To Life on Spotify!

22. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

Throughout her whole career Annie Clark has etched her way into my heart for her whimsical but always brilliant art pop, weird and affecting at once. Strange Mercy found her becoming more vulnerable and personal than on her past two albums, the resulting jumble of emotions provoked being mixed because of her trademark twisted take on baroque pop that injects the beautiful and sweet with an unsettling nerve, with impending danger and a tendency to fall into the unconventional. I’m pleased that she on her third album further refines her posture as music’s fine porcelain doll, most of the time just sitting there staring, perfect to the point of creepy and planting seeds of unease within us when not quite acting like we expect from an animated doll. I guess the strange mercy here consists of her not going all Chucky on us.

Listen to Strange Mercy on Spotify!

21. Jonathan Johansson – Klagomuren

There comes a point in life when one of your most beloved artists has to follow up his debut album. At that point you know damn well that you can’t possibly put any expectations on him or the album whatsoever, you just need to be a blank page and take that sophomore album on its own terms. With that premise behind me I entered Klagomuren, ”The Wailing Wall”, Jonathan Johansson’s unfortunate step into the kind of pop music that is ephemeral to the point of nonsensical, pretentious blandness; which he shares with lots of Swedish bands and artists that have popped up every now and then during the last few years. I can wihtout prejudice or favoring an old favourite artist state that Johansson rises above the fodder because of the higher production and songwriting quality and the sense that his lyrics, no matter how declamatory and dressed up in fancy theatrical costumes, are sprung from real emotion. It’s an inherent talent of this young and underestimated pop artist to pull off something as Klagomuren that in the wrong hands could easily have become a complete disaster. Klagomuren isn’t nearly as good as the classic debut album En Hand I Himlen but I can’t help myself, contently relieved, put on a big smile inside because he made it through to the other side, and gloriously so.

It makes sense that the first time I heard this album was actually in a church, live, played by Johansson and his band as part of the Gothenburg music festival Way Out West’s club program Stay Out West in August 2011. I was very tired after a whole day chockful of gigs and drinking wine in the sun with friends. Furthermore I suddenly got a terrible stomache ache, probably my stomach’s way of saying that I was really really hungry, something I hopelessly tried to ignore. I also needed to go use the restrooms but there was a line because the church was packed and I was afraid I might lose my seat. So I sat through the first band, Syket, just wishing that their gig would be over soon, that Johansson’s gig would be over so I could go back to the hostel and eat and sleep and all those things. Church seats aren’t exactly known to be comfortable and I was just deadly tired, trying hard to keep my eyes open and finding a comfortable enough position, squirming with the stomach ache and the imminent headache and also trying to ignore how thirsty I was getting, and all the while the whole thing seemed to be delayed 10 or 20 minutes or so. But then Johansson and his band came on. He was incredibly shy and nervous, as usual, but moreso than usual perhaps, because he announced they wouldn’t be playing any old songs, just the as-then unreleased new album from beginning to start. And about a minute into the first song I felt how all the aches and discomfort was just lifted from me and I got lost drifting in the seemingly heavenly music played before me. Needlessly to say that church gig was probably the best church concert I’ll ever attend. By the end of the concert I felt blessed and without any complications whatsoever I walked the 3-4 km back to the hostel and slept like a baby.

Listen to Klagomuren on Spotify!

20. Cults – Cults

The once so mysterious NYC duo Cults refused the enchanting qualities of debut 2010 single Go Outside to be a one-hit trick. Their self-titled debut album invoked 60′s pop, especially with Madeline Follin’s expressive girl-group-gone-indie-pop vocals. But they fused it with something else: a magically gifted melodic quality that rendered their music completely immune to categorization other than pop. It was pop music that did what pop music did best: made you feel excited, like a child, about (pop) music all over again, confirming that there is still music to be made to put you in a statement of amazed wonder. Even if it builds upon already existing formulas. Even if it sounds too simplistic and good to be true. Even if it deals with topics as trivial as love. Which makes Cults’ debut even more impressing, and indeed deserving its own cult.

Listen to Cults on Spotify!

19. The Weeknd – House Of Balloons

House Of Balloons kicked internet hype ass this year, and deservedly so. I’ve probably never encountered an act so worthy of such praise and immense hype. No discussion whatsoever, it was towering over the other two mixtapes, Thursday and Echoes Of Silence, and delivered r&b that was smoother than a brazilian waxing, hotter than a brazilian waxing and more modern than a brazilian waxing. Abel Tesfaye used his light and expressive singing to give the decadent splendour an emotional depth unheard of in most r&b primarily consumed with partying. Fresh but stained from a wild living, and offered for free download on the band’s website despite lines like ”The money is the motive”, House Of Balloons stood alongside the releases from Drake and the OFWGKTA crew in the forefront of emotionally self-conscious and genre-barrier-breaking hip hop and r&b in 2011. And that, Ruth, was the truth.

Download House Of Balloons for free from The Weeknd’s website!

18. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

You can’t really escape the thought that the release of PJ Harvey’s eighth studio album had a pretty good timing, arriving early in a year that worldwide would be characterized by financial struggles and turbulent social reorganizing. Therefore it’s also hard to think what role as a socially conscious and internationally relevant album Let England Shake would have taken in a less politically intense period. There’s no doubt, however, as to how it would have been received by audiences and critics. Down to the very bone it’s a well constructed album fleshed out with raw emotional power. Harvey’s lyrics are inspired by war, especially World War I, painting daunting pictures of mankind, impeccably orchestrated from a reference point that refuse to remain fixed, instead allowing influences from the likes of folk, baroque pop and psychedelic rock to meet in an expanded musical pallette. Not being being pure doomsday prophecy nor being a bearer of hope, Let England Shakes merely shook the minds of the listeners and became the only force capable of causing natural disasters in 2011 that we could enjoy.

Listen to Let England Shake on Spotify!

17. Real Estate – Days

Just when you thought that there was nothing more to squeeze from high-end guitar-slinging pop, the New Jersey fellers in Real Estate struck a few chords and churned out the blissful follow-up to their self-titled 2009 debut like it was the easiest thing any band had ever done. Making pop this brilliant shouldn’t sound so easy. With Days, the band moved out of their drowsy, sun-bleached NJ suburbs and went looking for som real high class seaside real estate and brought back a sound that, much like Destroyer’s Kaputt, was more Streets Of Your Town than lo-fi Woodsist noodling. The result was not just a shinier version of American slacker pop, but a real smooth and at the same time universally affecting soundtrack to any of the days of our lives. To quote fellow New Jerseyian Ted Leo: ”sometimes the path of least resistance will gain you the most, more than trying to map the distance up and down the east coast”.

Listen to Days on Spotify!

16. Atlas Sound – Parallax

Bradford Cox drifts towards becoming increasingly comfortable in a singer-songwriter role than merely just executing his more personal bedroomy whimses outside of Deerhunter. Moreso than on the last two Atlas Sound albums, Parallax features song structures that more resemble the verse-chorus-verse template, or at the least seems inspired by music utlizing that structure. In a way, Cox appears to be closing in on Girls lead singer Christopher Owens’ approach of recapturing the pop music of past decades, especially apparent on songs like Mona Lisa, Angel Is Broken and Parallax’s last song which may be the most simple and straigthforward song Cox has written in his career: Lightworks. There’s still a whole lot of tinkering sprawl to make Parallax sound undeniably like a Cox solo work, constantly bubbling with sounds, fascinated by the emotive characteristics of different sounds and what effect they might bring, seemingly building songs around a special musical trait, like he did on the Noah Lennox collaboration Walkabout from 2009′s Logos. It’s not exactly surprising that his Atlas Sound project progress in the same pace as Deerhunter; and now both projects flourish like never before from lead singer and main songwriter Cox’s newfound confidence in songwriting as much as from his instrumental musings. It helps him get through to us with his highly personal worldview, in this album expressed as a parallax, a journey askew and disjointed from the spacetime continuum which the rest of us are stuck in. But there’s something in lines like ”And we’ll go to sleep / and have the same dream” from Te Amo that suggests that we’re all sharing the same place but are still so distant because we’re not experiencing it the same way. A simple enough conclusion from my part, but Parallax is a complicated but beautiful and rewarding transportation to that universal thought.

Listen to Parallax on Spotify!

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.

Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring For My Halo

There are times when you want to fill your time with absolutely nothing, as if you could fill it with a vacuum, and at the same time make it feel meaningful or at least no wasteful. Smoke Ring For My Halo was the substance you filled those blanks with. 11 intricately arranged and masterfully executed guitar-led songs and 45+ minutes at a time, Kurt Vile showed he had become the constant hitmaker he promised to be four years ago.

Listen to Smoke Ring For My Halo on Spotify!

Handsome Furs – Sound Kapital

Alexei Perry’s new wave keyboards is the main instrumental capital on Handsome Furs’ third album and letting some of the punk go might just have been what this wife and husband duo needed to feel reinvigorated. Leaving room for Wolf Paradiere Dan Boeckner to yelp out despair, frustration and exaltation over synthpop that is majestic yet rickety in all its ragged post-punk glory is the best thing this forever-punk couple could have done in the wake of Wolf Parade’s hiatus and stylistically painting themselves into a corner on the jagged electropunk fest of Face Control. Apparently some of the songs were inspired by the struggles of bands in Burma being oppressed by the authorities, as witnessed by Boecker and Perry themselves. In light of that background it’s suddenly easy to point out why Sound Kapital feels like the most undeservedly underdog album of 2011, crystal clear in its vision, piercing in its messages, but satisfyingly decadent and loose within its own confines. Now that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have separated it will have to be on the globetrotting Handsome Furs we depend for twosome punk love (no pressure!) and to bash out clear-eyed post-punk and sympathetic shout-outs and love to all the underdogs out there over idiosyncratic electropop (definitely pressure!).

Listen to Sound Kapital on Spotify!

Friendly Fires – Pala

The self-titled ten track debut was a smash indie hit and understandably so, since it had a 10/10 ratio of singleworthiness. It was an album chockfull of pop with insanely clever and spot-on emo melodic touches paired with funked-up danceability and production with ethereal shoegaze sensibilities. If you’re looking for more of the same kind of choruses and melodies that etch themselves onto your brain the first time you hear them, you might have been disappointed with Friendly Fire’s sophomore effort. Pala is more uniform in its daydreaming and night-erasing course to escape reality, but no less fun. The band conjure a one-way ticket to exotic raves on far-off islands, oozing with sweat from beach parties, tribal house and streamlined arena-disco touches á la the latest Jamiroquai album. With titles like Pull Me Back To Earth and Helpless and lines like ”Can I take this all in?” or ”All I want is to feel real love”, it seems as if the band are caught in the tropical dance-storm they whipped up themselves. Indeed, it is infectious.

Listen to Pala on Spotify!

Tyler, The Creator – Goblin

Goblin is hard to understand for people who are new to the OFWGKTA output and manifesto. It’s mainly because they don’t have a manifesto, it’s a constantly ongoing one that deepens and broadens with every release, every video and every raunchy live performance, and Goblin bears testimony to this. Long, dark and rambling, the album does little to help the listener understand what’s going on. The point is that neither is Tyler, with his newfound fame and turbulent reception into the consciousness of the music discussion. Yet there are pieces to instantly pick up among his self-scrutinizing grunting rants. Criticisms fly all over the place, essentially he tells the world to fuck off. That’s his thing. But there’s something ingenious in painting a vivid character like Goblin about an alienated brat-rap kid like Tyler, and allowing it to take time and take over the entirety of an album. Something not to be underestimated.

Listen to Goblin on Spotify!

Azari & III – Azari & III

There were two notable acts reviving late 80′s and especially 90′s house this year: Hercules & Love Affair and Azari & III and the latter came out the winner. It was almost shocking how sub-par the former’s album, Blue Songs, was, considering the absolutely splendid sense of style and songcraft showcased on the self-titled 2008 disco debut. Azari & III had a fresher take with their self-titled debut this year, updating the sound just enough to fit 2011 and completely ruled the hipper dance aficionado circles, just like Hercules & Love Affair did four years ago. Clearly this album can’t be compared to the sheer brilliance that H&LA displayed, but it’s nonetheless a definite highlight of dance albums in a bass-music-dominated year with its seductive grooves and retro charms offering visions of urban delights in black spandex tights.

Listen to Azari & III on Spotify!

Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972

Have we ever been as aware and obsessed with the passage of time as we were in 2011? In my book Tim Hecker ranked alongside the likes of Dirty Beaches and The Caretaker as one of those who put his own twist to the concept – and how! Just the question as to wether Ravedeath, 1972 is mimicking and portraying the decay of music or if it is music decaying in itself is mind-twisting on its own. Inspirations such as ”the Kazakhstan government cracks down on piracy and there’s pictures of 10 million DVDs and CDRs being pushed by bulldozers”, song titles like ”Hatred Of Music” and ”Studio Suicide, 1980″ and his use of a photograph where students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology throw a piano off a roof as the album cover all point towards the same point: that this is profoundly confounding, inspired and inspiring ambient music.

Listen to Ravedeath, 1972 on Spotify!

Wild Beasts – Smother

Delicate is the first word that pops up in my head when I want to describe Smother. Delicate implies savouring something and sweet satisfaction, but also elegance and restraint. It seems Wild Beasts are getting more and more delicate as they grow with each consecutive album. If Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants was a decadent party in the baroque era and We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues was suggesting ”just a little fun” then Deeper goes, well, even deeper than that. Although not really dealing with topics that are unfamiliar to them on the timid and sensual Smother, Wild Beasts are indeed reaching a bit further, grasping a maturity that has traveled far from their brave baroque rockin’ in the band’s youth. It suits them very well.

Listen to Smother on Spotify!

Jay-Z and Kanye West – Watch The Throne

You could almost feel the hip hop game changing in 2011. Emo and indie are two words being thrown around. Neither could be applied to Jay-Z or Kanye West, at least not if listening to the triumphant and gilded Watch The Throne. The two veterans do wisely in cementing their names as mainstays in the ever-changing climate of hip hop by joining ranks for a two-punch combo so pumping with testosterone, talent, braggadocio and potency neither of us will probably experience something similar in our lifetime. Thankfully they did it using production that undoubtedly will feel fresh in 2013 too because it sounds timeless but very much like what LARGE hip hop should sound like in 2011. Aside from checking their bases and feeding off of each others’ strengths, it was about time Hova and Yeezy worked on some bigger project together. Listening to two of the largest egos on this earth meeting on this album is an exhilarating experience and it’s almost as fun hearing them pile endless memorable lines about how incredibly rich they are and how incredibly fun that is as it is mind-boggling in a year of international financial crises. It was brave, but it payed off, as always with these two. Watch The Throne not only secures the statuses of the biggest rapper and the biggest producer in hip hop, it makes us feel like we are actually about to lift off, taking these two men’s careers to even more wuthering heights. How is that even possible? And why aren’t we Occupying The Throne? The truth is we don’t want to.

Listen to Watch The Throne on Spotify!

The Antlers – Burst Apart

One of the releases I was most anxious about in 2011 was The Antlers’ follow-up to their fantastic breakthrough album Hospice. I had backtracked Peter Silberman’s solo recordings under the Antlers name with great pleasure since even when he was as obscure and home recording as your next Youth Lagoon, he had an admirable ambition and the talent to let those ambitions form two small albums, Uprooted and In The Attic Of The Universe, that created small separate universes inside their brief duration. While Hospice was a clear shift towards working with a clear concept and a purely narrative style, Burst Apart is closer to those early albums’ creatively meandering and psychologically intricate expression of Silberman’s fascination with the world and his search for a place in it. It’s way more subtle than the cathartic and emotionally drained noisy lo-fi folkpop of Hospice, the band creating dense atmospheres that are as important as Silberman’s songwriting itself. There are no songs as direct, sentimental or painful as Hospice, which may put some fans at doubt, but everyone keeps saying that this album is a grower and at the end of the year Burst Apart has quietly dawned upon your mind and revealed itself as a worthy piece in Silberman’s continuously rewarding output.

Listen to Burst Apart on Spotify!

Indian – Guiltless

I got into lots of the extremer sides of heavy metal this year and it was about time. In the metal world it’s all about black metal these days if you want to be hip, which most metalheads would rather die than to be called, or at least seem like you’re in the know and have a refined taste, something most metalheads would or should accept as a compliment. What do I know, I’m not a metalhead, I’m just a music fan, so it’s my duty to study this darkest and heaviest side of the rock spectrum. What I found was Guiltless, an incredibly heavy piece by Chicago quartet Indian whose deeply punishing and uncompromising doom metal made a lasting impression on me. Guiltless does indeed prove it’s lack of guilt when pounding out metal that is pleasingly bleak and stubborn but still managing to locate the dynamics possible in its sonic vision. Indian make the most out of the downtempo pace, the crusty guitars and the strangulated but mad as hell vocals in their seven-song, 40-minute run. It’s a pleasure to hear a band showcase for the naysayers that even slowpaced doom metal can have an intensity and palette that outshines most of its dark peers. Above all, this has spirit.

Listen to Guiltless on Spotify!

Dirty Beaches – Badlands

Alex Zhang Hungtai’s one-man-band project was the act that best of all lived up to the title ”project” in 2011. Badlands is essentially a projection of a man’s imagination of himself as a forgotten old-timey crooner lost among the badlands of society after the impending apocalypse; a record that you find as a I Am Legend-style sole survivor in what used to be a small summer cottage just outside of the city, pop in when you get back home and is overwhelmed by the spooky sounds of the past right before the zombies come knocking on your door. In that sense Dirty Beaches plays to one of the more recurring themes in 2011: memory and the passage of time, along with the likes of Tim Hecker and The Caretaker. While the music doesn’t do so much more for me than , making it impossible for me to let Badlands into the top 30, I still want to give two grand props to Alex: Badlands is the coolest album of the year and features the coolest album cover. Because THIS is music noir.

Listen to Badlands on Spotify!

Iceage – New Brigade

Even before Iceage got around to release their debut album New Brigade internationally, my friend Jacob, being the punk aficionado he is, had already picked up these young Danish hellstarters and praised the album as his favourite of the year so far. Seeing them live this fall didn’t elevate me to the top tier fan base but the album had since long gripped me by the throat and slung me across the room. Many are quick to point out and appreciate the band for their perfect mix of no wave post-punk, thriftstore hardcore, pseudo-gothy atmospheres, lo-fi 90′s-style indie rock and just plain old angsty youthful straightforwardly riffing punk rock. Indeed, they have a varied sound while still sounding perfectly at home in their sound without loosing the edge. But what sold me beyond mere multiple genre connotations, was the underlying atmosphere, the sense that Iceage actually ease you into the notion that they are the spearhead of what could be a new brigade delivering passionate rage and punk sensibilities as if we were to enter a musical ice age where we freeze our current condition of infinitely reusing old genre templates. I’d rather that ice age sounding like New Brigade than spending 10 000 years trying to figure out where to go next with dubstep.

Listen to New Brigade on Spotify!

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.

Listen to Amor Fati on Spotify!

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.

It’s easy to see why Zorbing was Stornoway’s breakthrough song. Starting off simply with lead singer Brian Briggs a melody that is just catchy enough to tease you into singing along as the folky tune about ”lying in your attic, I can feel the static” is sung in a sort of schoolboy choir tenor. So far so good, but the song doesn’t take off until after the second chorus when they whip up a most surprising and wonderful rendezvouz between stirring drums and trumpets. It whips up the spirit of the listener and while so far you could feel the static of the song the next verse brings the emotional release where one can really picture the exuberance of a new love as zorbing together. These lines are the core of the song and paired with the semi-pastoral melody becomes an emotional tidal wave of positive vibes. Thrilling. I suppose this is the closest you can come to the feeling of zorbing without actually zorbing.

I’ve been singing you this song
Inside a bubble
Been zorbing through the streets of Cali
We were always meant to be
Zorbing together, and I think its high time we started

Listen to Zorbing on Spotify!

Or watch the music video, which for some inscrutable reason features absolutely no zorbing through no British hillside landscape whatsoever, below. Waste of marketing opportunity, for both the zorbing experience companies and Stornoway.

While twee to a fault, This Heart Is A Stone shows that the cutest extremes of indie pop can still be full of wit that adds a whole other, utterly charming dimension to an already catchy tune.

We add this song to our iPod playlists for the ever so sweet melody but we stay for smartly naïve and contrasting lines like:

They say your middle name is trouble
But I know it’s Caroline

They say they can smell the drama.
But I know it’s No. 5.

They say you only bring heartache
But I know you brought a bottle of wine.

Listen to This Heart Is A Stone on Spotify!

Or watch the karaoke-friendly music video below!

Note: I’m pretty sure they sing ”brought” and not, as the karaoke lines tell us, ”bought”.

I was lucky enough to see jj live two times this summer, at the Swedish festivals Emmaboda and at Popaganda. I was a bit drunk at both occasions but vaguely remember that at least at Emmaboda Elin Kastlander started singing what appeared to be an interlude, one that really hooked me and reeled me in. It was something that triggered my memory but whatever it was, it was out of reach. That melody and those words, something along the line of ”na na na na na… and it goes round and round…”, struck a chord inside of me. It was really a magical moment.

It took me until now to get searching to find it out. My only clue was that I had this feeling that it was from some cheesy 90′s dance-pop hit and that it wasn’t from a jj song because then I’d know. Sincerely Yours raised an eyebrow and told me that ”dude, that’s My Life, by jj. But glad you enjoyed it.”. I felt stupid because, indeed, the last 20 seconds or so of this bleak piano ballad features the words ”Na na na na na / It goes around the world…”. Then it didn’t take me long to realize that this is deft theft. Indeed, jj have ingeniously lifted a fantasy-trigging part from old cheesy Germany-based 90′s eurodancepop act ATC’s addicting 2000 hit Around The World (La La La La La), and perfectly fused it into their own melodic soundscape. While lasting for only 20 seconds in a song that actually is a The Game cover, this homage to this universally hypnotizing melody alone still makes My Life stand alongside Ecstacy and the Kills mixtape as jj’s finest pop cultural redigesting.

Listen to Around The World (La La La La La) on Spotify!

Watch the gorgeous music video for Around The World (La La La La La) below!

For pop musicologists #1: ATC’s version is actually a cover of a 1998 europop song called Pesenka by Russian group Ruki Vverh!. It sounds a little more charmingly 90′s simple and a little more classic techno/house while the Russian lyrics that Google Translate simply refuses to translate gives it a further dimension of mystery. Listen to it in the youtube video below.

For pop musicologists #2: German ”new wave of bubblegum pop” or ”old farty traditionalist cultural leftover phenomenon wave” group beFour decided to update it to a electrohouse-y version in 2007 and aptly titled it Magic Melody. You know. For those of you wanting a bit more of that contemporary ooomph. Watch the cute music video below.

For pop musicologists #3: Kids of the 90′s like myself will surely remember ATC’s other hit, My Heart Beats Like A Drum, with a glittering joy of nostalgia across their face, tears in the eyes and all. But it’s catchy and fun as hell. Just like Around The World it sports an almost identical fake xylophone hook, a chilly, austere production, and that almost otherworldy ethereal melodic atmosphere. The chorus, however is melodically sweeter and warmer, making it the go-to ATC song for dancing and singing along. Watch the lovely music video below.

For some unbelievable reason My Heart Beats Like A Drum does not exist on Spotify. My eye cry.

For pop musicologists #4: Yes. Another 90′s profile, my hero, ATB, did sue them for their name. They changed it to A Touch Of Class. Judging by the songs we’ve just examined here I could’nt have named them better. No irony, I really am into the 90′s sound you know!

For pop musicologists #5: Fredrik Strage, probably Sweden’s best writer on pop culture, noted that airline company Air France played jj’s My Life during the landing of his flight last year at Charles de Gaulle, and guessed that it was either a subtle protest from the cabin crew against strenuous working hours (note the lyrics ”I’m grinding til I’m tired, they say you ain’t grindin’ til you tired”) or as a way to compensate that fellow Gothenburg-based Sincerely Yours band Air France have stolen the airline company’s name.

For pop musicologists #6: The Battlefield 3 trailer is really elegant and evocative.

Listen to My Life on Spotify!

Or watch the youtube video below.