Best Albums of the Year (ish)

I have a bit of a weird relationship with music. I feel like it’s my mistress, rather than an equal partner in my life; instead of working diligently to find new things and communicate in new ways, I tend to discover a new artist or album, fall passionately and quickly in love, listen to that new thing almost exclusively for a few weeks and then either drop it (The Unicorns, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin) or integrate it into my normal rotation of music. I rarely listen to the radio (sorry, friends at The Zone, it’s not for lack of trying!) and my workplace only recently became iPod-compatible, so the odds of me finding something that happens to be relevant can be fairly rare. This year the lineup does consist of many recent releases, but since I don’t listen broadly enough to be able to judge my favourites against their unheard peers, and since self-indulgence is a treat we all love to snack on during the last weeks of a year, allow me to present the albums that have been my love affairs for the past 350-odd days.

1. Broken Bells, Broken Bells

Back in 2008 I thought I loved the Shins, but in reality I was overzealously throwing my support behind whatever Natalie Portman wanted, a widespread condition now known as “Garden State Syndrome” (or, “How A Television Actor Managed to Singlehandedly Ruin Indie Culture For The Rest of Us”). I own two of The Shins’ albums, but never listen to them anymore; there was always something about the overall feel of the band’s music that put me in a weird mood, which I could never quite pinpoint. Broken Bells, consisting of Shins frontman James Mercer and producer/singer/professional-Tin-Man Danger Mouse, fixes absolutely everything I didn’t like about The Shins while retaining all the stuff I did, like Mercer’s melancholy-puppy vocals, weirdly haunting lyrics, and their electro-indie experimentation aspect. While I felt like the latter never quite worked when The Shins tried it alone, the addition of Danger Mouse makes the music lusher and more interesting. A song like “Your Head is On Fire” would have been an okay Shins song, but as a Broken Bells song, with its accompanying string movements and multi-layered sound effects, I feel it works much, much better. I hope these guys collaborate again, because this first album is rad.
Best Songs: “The Ghost Inside”, “October”, “The High Road”

2. The New Pornographers, Together

I heard a review of this album somewhere that accused The New Pornographers of essentially doing the same thing for the past ten years, but doing it very nicely. Now here is where I reveal that I’m not actually a music snob, but frankly, well, I don’t mind. To my ears, The New Pornographers have indeed evolved over the course of their five albums, usually in the general direction of “larger production values and less Dan Bejar”, but I’ve enjoyed each of their works more than the last, and Together is no exception. It’s basically more of what they do, yes, but it’s done so well, with catchy and complex tunes that are put together in such an endearing way, that I just can’t help it. The big opening and closing numbers (“Moves” and “We End Up Together”, respectively) tie the entire album together brilliantly, and I like nearly every song in between, even Dan Bejar’s numbers, which I’ve needed a lot of time to understand in the past. I love The New Pornographers, and I love this album. That’s just how it is.
Best Songs: “Moves” “We End Up Together”, “Crash Years”

3. Stars, The Five Ghosts

For a long time I think I was worried that Stars had blown their wad early, so to speak, on 2004’s absolutely fucking beautiful Set Yourself on Fire, which is still required listening for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken by another person. Their next release was In Our Bedroom After the War, which I remember trying very hard to like, but the fact is, I listen to it so rarely that I basically forget it exists. This is not the case with The Five Ghosts, which was released over the summer and is infinitely more assured of itself than its predecessor. Whereas In Our Bedroom After the War struggled to find a theme and tried to say a lot of very general things in a very muffled way, The Five Ghosts is distinctive and fearless, a musical meditation on death and life and the travels in between. The songwriting is sharper, the melodies catchier, and the transitions between slow ethereal (the gorgeous opener “Dead Hearts”) and dance-ready synth-pop (“We Don’t Want Your Body”) flow smoother. I don’t think that the vocals, which have always been Stars’ ace in the hole, need mention, but I’ll mention them anyway: Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan continue to be one of the best vocal duos in indie music today. The biggest selling point for The Five Ghosts is that I keep finding new little things to like about it each time I listen, and that’s really some of the best praise you can give an album like this.

Best Songs: “Dead Hearts”, “We Don’t Want Your Body”, “How Much More”

4. The Zolas, Tic Toc Tic

Anyone who knows me will commence rolling their eyes here, but I can’t help it, I’ve been in love with The Zolas from the moment I saw them from the front row at Rifflandia, and like Jets Overhead’s No Nations, I keep expecting Tic Toc Tic to get old but it never ever does. There’s nothing that I don’t love about The Zolas: I love their bombastic orchestration, I love the segues into weird time signatures (see: the brilliant bridge of “Marlaina Kamikaze”), I love their prominent use of the piano; I love the fact that they wrote an apocalyptic love song (“The Great Collapse”), I love their playful and weird lyrics, and I love the fact that whoever wrote them is clearly a helpless nerd like me. Tic Toc Tic is playful and mournful and angry and filled to the brim with energy; it’s probably my pick for best album of the year, the very definition of an instant classic, and anyone who disagrees can duke it out with me behind the bleachers during recess. Bring it on.
Best Songs: basically all of them, but if I must choose, "The Great Collapse", "Pyramid Scheme", and "You're Too Cool."

5. Great Northern, Trading Twilight for Daylight (Bonus Track Version)

I know comparatively little about Great Northern, other than that they are a boy-girl duo (at least on the vocals) and they make that dreamy piano-driven electro-indie that basically everyone else does. I have a few tracks by a band named Winterpills that you’d swear is exactly the same band, just more acoustic. They are less rock than Metric, more straightforward than Stars. But over the summer they utterly captivated me, and I basically listened to nothing but Great Northern. I have a real love for that dreamy, low-key indie sound; it’s not mind-bendingly complex, it’s not intentionally alienating, it’s not autotuned and horrible. It’s just pretty to listen to, really damn pretty in fact, and that might mean that it is bereft of some kind of deep meaning, but I don’t care; Great Northern is just lovely.
Best Songs: “A Sun a Sound”, “This is a Problem” (Bonus Track), “Low is a Height”

Honorable Mentions:

Best Soundtrack of the Year: John Powell, How to Train Your Dragon

Best Classical Discovery: Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli

Album I Need More Time With: Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks

The Album I Fell in Love With While Listening to it at 2am in the Emergency Room Because My Friend Gave Herself a Concussion: Death Cab for Cutie, Transatlanticism