Dots & Dashes' Records of '11
20. Craft Spells, Idle Labor
If you've ever been to Primavera Sound, you'll be fully aware of just how spectacular and indubitably special a festival the Barça wingding is. Were it transposed back in time, to some quintessentially '80s annum, with a record as retrospectively enlightening as Idle Labor Craft Spells would most probably be headlining the thing. Bright, breezy, and with hooks catchy enough to unravel the coils of your brain and stick velcro-like to the greyish matter, After the Moment gently rocks like a lonely buoy spotted bobbing about in the Med from the lofty vantage point of Parc del Fòrum's ersatz escarpment.
19. Gorillaz, The Fall
Gorillaz records have always pertained to an adorably scatty, rough-edged sketch of a hopscotch grid setting out their sound, Albarn's zeal skipping and jumping between genres, instruments, and moods with precariously whimsical abandon. Last year's Plastic Beach clocked in at number four on its respective index, and marked a more cohesive hoard of conception that led to a quite coherent production. The Fall meanwhile, recorded over the course of an extensive US tour and on an iPad, saw the prime primate return to the playground to quite literally caper, fiddling with apps behind figurative green mesh fencing. The lo-fi, diary-like disorder of it humanised my personal idol following detachingly humongous shows that distanced him to the point of the discouragingly impalpable, a barely discernible speck on a stage lightyears away.
18. Suuns, Zeroes QC
Not since The Rapture's Echoes had synths, Strats, and a primordial stipulation to move compulsively been combined to quite such empowering effect prior to the unleashing of Suuns' rampaging behemoth of a debut, Zeroes QC. From the apocalyptic juggernaut chug of Gaze to the genuinely forbidding torment of Pie IX, it provides an edgy listening experience during which you apprehensively await a chilling, piercing finger on the shoulder only to eventually receive an asexualising punt in the nether regions. Like HEALTH rooting around for melodies in a lucky dip filled with unearthed electrics, rapidly gurning buzz saws, and staunch riffage, most bands would proffer the handsome price of several hands for something this absorbing...
17. the Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Another great lesson in understatement from John Darnielle, peppered with spit-flecked vitriol, wit and vigour. His most cogent record since We Shall All Be Healed, the likes of Damn These Vampires, Prowl Great Cain and Beautiful Gas Mask were lined with the vividness of the innards of the most immaculately tailored blazer.
16. Tycho, Dive
While a nationwide infatuation with Ryan Gosling was ignited to the sound of Kavinsky, the French electro nut that turned the Eds of only a few 'Bangers way back in 2007 when the genre was still at least recognised if barely respected, Tycho's latest long-player Dive received critically shallow and sparse acclaim despite its racy guitars and cleansing synths seeming to reverberate at the ideal resonance to glimmer down boulevards to.
15. Gruff Rhys, Hotel Shampoo
The inevitable albwm Cymraeg amongst the chosen contingent, Gruff Rhys' Hotel Shampoo, saw the estranged Super Furry Animal take over Blackpool B&Bs, install airplane seating on the stage of Shepherd's Bush Empire, and generally enchant with the sweetest of melodies to make this entry anything but ineffective. Drenched in emotivity, Rhys' sugared hum was at its most seductive here; you'd fall for his voice alone on both Dating and Sensations In The Dark.
14. Peaking Lights, 936
The marriage of Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis is a beautiful thing in itself, although when it resulted in the joining in holy matrimony of explicit dub tendencies and foamy pop sensibilities it became a celebrative ceremony all with functioning ears were invited to. Brimming with effervescence, All The Sun That Shines came across like a sobering sunrise following a few too many flutes of champers a solitary track in. A record best enjoyed in careless excess.
13. Little Dragon, Ritual Union
Yukimi Nagano may have finally (albeit despicably belatedly) come to prominence in 2011 primarily for her involvement with once-illusive producer SBTRKT, although greater fame if not fortune ought to be derived from the day job as Little Dragon upped their claim as wizard-like welders of fluid and phlegmatic electronica and clacking (read also as cracking) dub. A Ritual Union with empyrean results.
12. Gang Gang Dance, Eye Contact
Only Gang Gang Dance will know where the transcendental and cosmical, Asiatically-orientated galaxy bounces contained within Eye Contact (Egyptian squiggles and the all-too-glib Alexis Taylor cameo aside) were reflected down from although whether a single one of them remembers is an altogether more debatable matter. Live shows in support of the record have proven gloriously calamitous, and on the evidence of MindKilla, Adult Goth and Thru and Thru they've seemingly tapped into and knocked back some disorientating elixir that'd probably confound even Lewis Carroll.
11. Real Estate, Days
Unashamedly, Real Estate went and recorded an album bursting with a nostalgia for delicately melancholic pop, directing their estival Fender chimes into songs so well devised yet so simplistically orchestrated that they shot through the ribcage and fleshy tissue to pierce the arhythmic thumping of wounded hearts on very first exposure. Maturing into a wholesome autumn, the Brooklyn-based trio coaxed wistful merriment from the shackling of suburbia, and all without the aid of 'a team of marketing experts'.
10. The Weeknd, House of Balloons
While Kanye West and Jay-Z were busying themselves patting each other on the backs of their gaudy Versace garb, they took their eyes off the Throne for just long enough to allow The Weeknd's House Of Balloons mixtape to take a seat and command undivided attention with jolting, tongue-in-cheekily autotuned vox, hefty drops, and homely Beach House samples. If this is but an unrefined mélange of game-changing schmooze hop, by the time a fully-considered LP emerges the contents of forever more happy homes will be High For This...
9. Mogwai, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Pulsating surges of crackling guitar cast by the one and only Stuart Braithwaite delivered with the relentlessness of a Grand Prix (in Mexico or elsewhere) projected Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will out on a dangerously listenable track, before the closing abrasion of You're Lionel Richie evoked within the hysterically fraught panic of a masochistically slowly-motioned car crash.
8. DRC Music, Kinshasa One Two
A second appearance (albeit somewhat less directly) for Albarn as his supertroupe of faintly super producers (our beloved Kwes included) jetted off to the Democratic Republic of Congo to questionably better the quietly seminal Mali Music of 2002. From the trippy Think Tank-esque Hallo featuring Tout Puissant Mukalo and Nelly Liyemge to the clanging bass-romp propulsion of Customs, Kinshasa One Two concisely encapsulates both the great variety and the prevalent greatness of African musical export.
7. Yann Tiersen, Skyline
A multi-instrumentalist purely in his ability to fiddle about palatably with a freakish array of instruments and never to be branded a 'soundtrack composer', Skyline gleamed regardless with some of the year's brightest, most determinedly heart and violin string-twanging compositional work from a Breton coming into his most impassioning and candid fettle yet. Movin' on up...
6. Battles, Gloss Drop
Following the radical departure of avant-garde mastermind Tyondai Braxton, Battles could quite conceivably have shrivelled up into an indeterminate lump of self-loathing directionlessness and ultimate nothingness. Instead, like a boundless mound of luminous putty, they remoulded the batshit wowzer factor of Mirrored into a gloopy wonder that worked ever so convincingly within the parameters of the instrumental.
5. BRAIDS, Native Speaker
Like finding Glastonbury in a shoebox, few would have expected to uncover such shimmering pop beneath the processed choral shrieks and undulating synths of BRAIDS' Native Speaker. Complex and with more layers than the most elaborate wedding cake ever constructed, its accessibility (even without the sensational Peach Wedding) astounded in every right way.
4. Ane Brun, It All Starts With One
To remain indifferent to the red-eyed, puffed up-cheek emotion of Ane Brun's It All Starts With One was to offer the impression of the self-referencing 'one' as an emotionless sack of skin, bone, and anti-sentimentality. For this was a record bristling with a prickly sense of ambiguous acrimony, the unbelievably anguished Undertow providing the year's most lachrymosely turbulent moment too.
3. Wild Flag, Wild Flag
Both scruffy and scuzzy yet wittingly and willfully so, Wild Flag answered the age-old question of what happens when you corral four self-professed post-punk "vets" onto a perspiration-sodden stage barely big enough for two and get them to rattle through 10 erratic cuts so raw they're still flinching on the chopping board. It was then cut into pliable vinyl and an unforgettable effort was carved.
2. Lykke Li, Wounded Rhymes
While stripped of the righteousness of our meritorious top spotter, Lykke Li's sophomore LP exhibited an emotional openness as agape as a ripe gash, allowing all manner of bittersweet Scandipop to drip from bloodied gap. Best bandage things up and perpetuate the painful heartbreak if it can continue in such a cavortable vein...
1. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
Writing about, rather than listening to or producing music is a practice that's oft regarded as a rather vain and futile one. Irrespective of whatever your particular viewpoint may be on this, certainly to review an album without living with it, breathing it, reliving it, bathing in it, snorting it, reproducing it, remixing it or what have you renders the exercise considerably less pertinent as an esteemed album oughtn't merely insist on wholly attentive fixation; it should aim primarily to shack up within your mind and electronic memory, atop any pile of vinyl like an adamant squatter, anchored to your being without ever having been granted permission to do so. A record that's not merely done just this, but has also imprinted itself on the fabric of the year itself is PJ Harvey's Let England Shake, a poignant LP that not only haunts musically ten months down the line, but also does so thematically, the wretched torment of decades of maritime misery condensed insightfully and impressionistically down into forty remarkable minutes. The arhythmic clatter and off-kilter, inauspicious bugle fanfare of The Glorious Land still scares like the spittle-propelled yell of a field marshal furiously berating from behind, while Peej rethinking the Trashmen reconsidering The Rivingtons' The Bird's The Word on The Words That Maketh Murder remains ingenious, original and spine-tingling in its juxtaposition of brazen pop slant and body fluid-curdling lyrical murk. A contemporary masterpiece and one never to be buried beneath any album currently in utero, frankly I'm still shellshocked by the mere concept of such a pure, powerful and agonised opus.
Now then with your interest hopefully piqued, your intrigue aflame, we're offering you the chance to hear what these records actually sound like so you can reorder them accordingly. To stand a hope in heck of winning a selection of Dots & Dashes' treasured records of 2011, simply riddle us thus:
What was your personal musical preference for 2011, and who committed it to black wax?
Send all suggestions via email to
this here address, and please resist succumbing to sycophancy and concord - egos ought not to be unduly inflated...
This year's winner has now been notified. Thank you.
Dots & Dashes' Shows of 2011 / Dots & Dashes' Tracks of 2011.
Now then with your interest hopefully piqued, your intrigue aflame, we're offering you the chance to hear what these records actually sound like so you can reorder them accordingly. To stand a hope in heck of winning a selection of Dots & Dashes' treasured records of 2011, simply riddle us thus:
What was your personal musical preference for 2011, and who committed it to black wax?
This year's winner has now been notified. Thank you.
Dots & Dashes' Shows of 2011 / Dots & Dashes' Tracks of 2011.
