By PATRICK DOHERTY
STAFF WRITER
With 2013 freshly begun, it is time to look back on last year’s musical offerings. Listed below are some of most critically acclaimed albums of 2012:
Swans – The Seer
The Seer is a record thirty years in the making. After the fantastic 2010 release My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope in the Sky, frontman Michael Gira has returned with a fiery passion to his work, crafting a two hour post-apocalyptic journey through unforgiving soundscapes and oppressive sonic waves. Each track flows into the other perfectly, earning the well-deserved title of an epic.
Each song centers around the acoustic instrumentation, incorporating out of tune guitars, sparkly bells, brash percussion and blaring bag pipes. The main event is the 30-minute long title track, which evolves and devolves throughout on the back of relentless repetition and noises whose origins are hard to identify.
A break from the noise is the most coherent track on the album, ‘Song for a Warrior’ (featuring Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). Even as it poses as a studio track, ‘Song’ is still a hauntingly bleak study of hope in a hopeless place. The Seer is a potent reminder that art does not necessarily have to be beautiful in a conventional sense, but rather a raw experiment of form and structure. Through unrelenting acoustic experimentation Gira has created a towering testament to the core of music itself. It is a challenging listen that is well worth the reward.
Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
The concept of the good kid m.A.A.d city focuses on a day in the life of an apathetic teenage Kendrick Lamar growing up on the streets of Compton. This allows for interesting narrative potential, including jarring juxtaposition between a boastful, egotistical teenager on Backseat Freestyle, and an introspective young adult on Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst. Backseat Freestyle, propelled forward by a pounding beat supplied by Hit-Boy, focuses entirely on lust, violence and the insatiable desire of a restless boy who wants it all. The song works perfectly, as each line of the track could easily be envisioned as coming from a teenager spitting double and triple-time fire, eagerly trying to impress his friends. On the other hand, Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst is a twelve minute odyssey that explores the perspective of two people in Kendrick’s life: The first being a gangbanger whose slain brother Kendrick comforted, and the second sister of a prostitute Kendrick wrote a song about.
good kid m.A.A.d city is a testament to the loss of purpose Kendrick feels as inevitable for all those growing up in Compton. Attempted home robberies, botched drive-bys, STDs, and drinking yourself to death are all the futures that await the young men of the city in Kendrick’s eyes. It’s a cynical viewpoint, especially for someone who managed to achieve success in the face of all that supposed opposition. Still, Kendrick does assert there is hope to be found in the closeness of family and loving oneself on what should be the closing track of the album, “Real”. On this track, Kendrick questions the material things he supposedly loves, and realizes from a phone message from his father that, “Real is responsibility, real is taking care of your motherf**king family. Real is god”. The cohesive focus of the story contributes to the album’s strengths, mainly Kendrick’s love of evolving and winding storytelling and his technical skills as a rapper. One of the most solid hip hop albums of the year.
Frank Ocean – channel ORANGE
Frank Ocean has had an interesting year. After coming out in an open letter to the internet, the R&B singer released his major-label debut LP ahead of schedule. And what a debut it was to behold. Lush and beautiful, channel ORANGE defied all radio pop standards to form a contemporary R&B album worth multiple listens.
The album truly takes off after the Earl Sweatshirt featuring“Super Rich Kids”. Ocean sings a fictional tale about being a privileged, silver-spoon sucking brat who alternates between taking “Too many joy rides in daddy’s Jaguar/Too many white lies and white lines” to “searching for a real love/Oh real love”. The jazzy “Crack Rock” carries on with stark electronic piano compositions as Ocean sings about a man hopelessly addicted to the little white rocks.
Many have claimed the open letter was nothing more than a publicity stunt used to drum up sales for a hype album. It is obvious those people had not heard the heart-wrenching track “Bad Religion”, a song which chronicles Ocean’s impromptu backseat therapy session with a taxi driver who does not speak the language. A solemn clap echoes as Ocean moans, “It’s a bad religion/This unrequited love/To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult/And cyanide in my styrofoam cup/I can never make him love me/Never make him love me”. Each line is more honest than the last, culminating in an indirect confession of pain and loss. Either way, the one thing that matters above all else is the music; it is a pure pleasure to behold.
Japandroids – Celebration Rock
Celebration Rock begins with fireworks detonating in the distance, echoing for a few seconds on end. The sound of summertime explosions is possibly the best introduction for what the following thirty-five minutes has to offer.
Japandroids is all about the noise, and surprisingly catchy noise at that. There is a certain urgency to how Brian King and David Prowse play their instruments, as if each song is the last one they will ever have a chance to play. This fire breathes life into these anthems, as fuzz-drenched guitars blare over frantic drum beats. The desperate nature of the music leaks over into the lyrics as well. On “Younger Us”, King shouts out, “Remember saying things like we’ll sleep when we’re dead/And thinking this feeling was never going to end”, while the chorus begs an unseeable force to hand their younger selves back.
Celebration Rock sounds like something you would blast whilst speeding down the highway at two in the morning, but it is more an introspective look at the fleeting nature of fame, false nostalgia and the inevitability of growing old and leaving the party. If you do want to blast this album whilst speeding down the highway at two in the morning, however I do not think the Japandroids will mind in the least.
Flying Lotus – Until the Quiet Comes
The sign of a truly innovative musician is the ability to inspire a sort of creative energy amongst his listeners and peers. Steven Ellison (better known as Flying Lotus) has that trait as an artist. Dozens of well-known and thousands of unknown hip hop producers have attempted to emulate FlyLo’s unique style that defined such ground breaking records as 2008’s Los Angelos, and 2010’s Cosmogramma. All have fallen short of perfecting the nuance present in Ellison’s work, however. Flying Lotus’ unparalleled instrumentation and arrangement remains in a league of its own among a sea of other electronically fueled instrumental hip-hop creators. Until The Quiet Comes continues in this incomparable fashion, while still maintaing experimental freshness.
Until the Quiet Comes, like Los Angelos, wears its influences on its sleeve: Trip Hop, IDM and Jazz are just a sampling of the genres featured on the album, and when combined under FlyLo’s expert guidance, they bring into existence musical works that sound as if they were mixed and mastered in the distant future. Unlike Cosmogramma, an album whose songs all flowed together like a free-form jazz experiment, the 18 tracks of Until the Quiet Comes manage to both come together nicely as an album, while also still being an individual piece of music. Normally, this type of mood variety on one album would provide an unpleasant sense of disconnection, but Ellison manages to keep everything on track in terms of consistency and transitions.
Flying Lotus managed to create an album that may perhaps be his most accessible, while still continuing to expand his repertoire as a brilliant and inventive producer who is leading a Renaissance amongst West-Coast beat-makers.
The above five albums are fantastic examples of the diversity of music still being made today. For additional 2012 music that fell off the beaten path but deserves a listen, check out these personal favorites: Kashiwa Daisuke – Re: (Experimental), Niechec – Smierc W Miekkim Futerku (Free Jazz), Vanilla – Soft Focus (Instrumental Hip Hop), Glocca Morra – Just Married, (Punk), and Oddisee – People Hear What They See (Hip Hop).
