Oh, me.

TOP 46 ALBUMS OF 2011

And so, we’ve reached the end of the year, and it’s time for the annual roundup of the year’s albums. This year’s total number came out to 46, for some reason, We’ll be counting down the albums to number one this whole month.

38. The King of Limbs - Radiohead

I’m not much of a Radiohead aficionado, and that’s probably the only reason I enjoyed The King of Limbs. Radiohead has a certain amount of stigmatism associated with it, and that’s regarded mostly with Kid A and OK Computer, but of which I haven’t delved into like a respectable Radiohead fan. And perhaps, without the knowledge of these albums, The King of Limbs cannot be judged based on Radiohead’s illustrious career and can only be enjoyed based solely on the music itself, which if it was by everyone, it would no doubt find better reviews. It has a more electronic feel to it, rooted deeply in perhaps the growing technological movement, or perhaps Thom Yorke’s own attraction to it, shown through his debut solo album The Eraser, a masterpiece work from the public face of Radiohead. And over time, the band has grown towards this style of music, as opposed to that of it’s rock past. You listen to “Creep” and “Lotus Flower” and you might as well be listening to two different bands. And I, for one - perhaps because of my own bias towards the newer music scene - prefer “Lotus Flower.”

The truth is that the modern music movement has done wonders for Radiohead - it’s set them apart from other bands attempting to sit both as indie band and established rock groups, and one can feel that Radiohead probably wants to be the former. That’s why they don’t tell people about their releases until their out, and release their music at a pay-your-own price level (i.e. In Rainbows). They do just about everything to separate themselves from the massive rock scene, and if they hadn’t, they’d be as popular as U2 by now. But The King of Limbs is another excursion from that progress, and it’s incredibly welcome. The opening track “Bloom” tells you so, perhaps the best of the album - they way it combines electronic elements with Yorke’s growing voice is, well, beautiful. And then we get “Morning Mr. Magpie,” which brings us that guitar we love mixed again with Yorke’s voice. These songs don’t find themselves on the radio, and don’t need to - their simply incredibly well-written, incredibly playable, and incredibly good. Pretty much the whole album flows like this, and it’s amazing that it isn’t getting press, because it really is that good. Especially good is “Lotus Flower,” which just makes you want to dance in the most bizarre way. There are other, more experimental measures here, like “Feral” and “Codex,” and both of these surprisingly work. The heart of the album is on the tracks and effectively mix both rock and electronic, and that’s where the band’s really at home.

The King of Limbs might not be what Radiohead fans want, but that’s just because it’s been over a decade since Radiohead fans got what they wanted. In Rainbows received incredible reviews, but it wasn’t far off from The King of Limbs, except that this newer album is less up front in its venture. And maybe people want that - they want to hear Thom Yorke have something to say, and to be the leader of the indie rock movement, and he isn’t really. He’s simply making great music year after year, and The King of Limbs is another testament to that: it’s just really, really good. And it might not exactly fit in the Radiohead canon, but it deserves a place in listeners’ ears, because they really are the songs that Yorke and company should be proud of.

37. We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves - John Maus

When you listen to an album by John Maus, you’re not exactly sure what to expect. Everything about him is misleading: he’s one man, which might lead you to believe his songs will have a more solo feel to them, his album titles tend to reflect loneliness, and his album art does the same - for We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, we see a single lighthouse working against roaring waves: it’s really a beautiful piece of art. But when you listen to the actual album, you at first get a different sense of what exactly you should be hearing. Maus’ music is quick, repeating, and often rooted in so much electronica that it’s hard to discern what is supposed to be jokes and what isn’t. There’s an eighties feel to his music and voice, and there’s lack of anything to grasp. But once you’re able to let go of the fact that Maus isn’t the lonely figure his appearance would suggest, you can really enjoy his music and realize that with the whole image, really nothing goes better than the music itself.

It’s especially evident on “Quantum Leap,” the second track on the album, which finds itself being both incredibly catchy and effective. You can’t understand what he’s saying, the whole thing feels a bit overproduced, and there’s no real instrumentation apart from manic computerism, but there’s a level of beautiful here that you don’t get in other electronic artists: it’s a truly different turn on both songwriting and how electronica fits into that. The whole album plays pretty quickly through, following a similar path, and when it doesn’t, it can be a little scary: “Hey Moon” is a song that’s long and different, but still very good. At times, it feels like Maus is yelling at us, and maybe he is, but the music in general just has the quality of being both very good and very important, which isn’t the way things usually work. As his voice repeats things over and over, we don’t find ourselves growing tired of it, but instead growing ready for more, and more welcoming to the rest of the album. The album closer, “Believer,” takes a more standard approach, and yet still keeps us loving what Maus does, and in the end, we get an album that is totally listenable, while still changing the way we feel about tracks. And maybe it is the growing experimental scene that makes people like Maus possible - the fact that Ariel Pink is being recognized now, and etc., or maybe it’s just that Maus makes music that we really want to listen to, if we’re willing to set aside the fact that it isn’t like anything else being put out today.