—You Can Count On Me
TOP 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.
24. David Comes To Life - Fucked Up
David Comes To Life is about as exhausting as a punk album can be. It’s a double album that spans nearly eighty minutes, with no punctuation or break of any kind. Fucked up is known for relatively monstrous projects, but David Comes To Life surpasses them all in both size and aesthetics (there’s said to be a musical coming) - and this is all coming from a fan of The Chemistry of Common Life and not a punk fan in the slightest. The most offputting thing about Fucked Up is Pink Eyes’ voice, frontman Damien Abraham, who couldn’t be more genial when you hear him interviews. Live, however, it’s a different story: he’s shirtless, he’s screaming, and he’s breaking stuff. And, well, it’s awesome (it was recently reported that Fucked Up will no longer be touring because Abraham has to care for his family). There’s something so incredibly appealing about Fucked Up, even to those who don’t like the screaming - they transcend everything about a punk band anyway. Their albums have common themes, common artwork, several features, and roundabout ways of returning to where they start, and David is no exception to that. The exhaustion one feels when listening to the album is intentional, yes, and it’d probably much higher on this list if I could get through it easily, but I can’t. It’s about as much of an achievement as we’d expect from Fucked Up, after Chemistry just about surpassed everything we could have hoped for. And this one goes beyond.
What really makes Fucked Up, however, is the fact that they can both combine the punk scene - which tends to feel more about the appeal of liking punk to the actual music - and the amazing rifts and tunes of the popular alternative scene. It’s like a more successful version of No Age’s Nouns, in the sense that it can be dirty and grimy but also be beautiful. It’s probably most evident on tracks like “Under My Nose,” which is as much a dance song as you can get. And underneath everything else here, there’s the fact that you’re being screamed at: “It’s all been worth it, it’s all been worth it,” Pink Eyes screams at you over and over again, and in the end it is all worth it. David takes work, but it’s work that you want to put in, especially when you get out track like this one. The first half of the album has this feel to it, especially the single “The Other Shoe,” which combines both Fucked Up’s rock feel with the beauty of, say, a Broken Social Scene’s Emily Haines. It’s not her, but you know what I mean. It’s beauty hidden subtlety in chaos. For my part, the rest of the album has barely been broached because of how expansive it is. But for my part, I leave it both exhausted and energized, which is rare in an album. And I haven’t even gotten into the background story of this rock opera, which, to hear the band describe, seems like something never done before.
Maybe Fucked Up tries too hard, and that’s why they have more singles and splits and EPs and albums than anyone else - and twelve minute long tracks featuring seventy year olds that they put out with no regard. But I would argue it’s because the music to them is more than music, it’s a lifestyle. They’ve given each other nicknames and storylines and they talk about their families and they talk about their feelings and it’s all intertwined in their music, just as important as the music. It takes a while to like Fucked Up if you’re a fan of standard rock, or even more experimental stuff, but that’s because what they’re doing hasn’t been done before and they’re just as surprised by it as we all are. And in the end, you get some amazing tracks with even more amazing power behind him, the power that music is all you need. And to Fucked Up, music is really all you need.
23. Tomboy - Panda Bear
Anyone who knows anything about Panda Bear would immediately relate him to his contribution to the current chillwave movement, which owes much of its success to Noah Lennox, who pioneered the sampling scene for alternative artists on his 2007 album Person Pitch. That album, which could be considered one of the greatest of all time, was host to a variety of samples, which Lennox described as simply being the product of him fooling around on iTunes, finding clips that worked for him and looping them enough times to create something monstrous – and the outcome was stunning. “Bros,” the pivotal point of the album, was considered an incredibly feat, as was the opener “Comfy in Nautica,” and my personal favorite song (possibly of all time) “Take Pills.” And these were the things that Panda Bear had to work with coming out of 2007, where his group Animal Collective also released the stunning Strawberry Jam and the stellar follow-up Merriweather Post Pavilion. Critics and fans alike hailed all albums, and the process that led up to Tomboy was one that was watched very critically.
An immediate disappointment was the fact that half of the album had been heard even before it was released. Panda Bear put out a series of singles with the songs, and the B-sides being additional tracks from the album, and so the full length wasn’t as surprising as one would expect. And yet, the tracks themselves were surprising, for instead of choosing sampling, Lennox sampled himself – his looping guitars, his looping drums, his looping bass lines – all of this went into infinity. This led into the next disappointment of the album: that it wasn’t Person Pitch. However, was it even possible for Lennox to produce such an album again? Or was he even interested? Therefore, when looking at Tomboy, one must separate from that original history of Panda Bear, just as we had to in the transition from Young Prayer to Person Pitch, for in reality, Panda Bear doesn’t really ever produce the same thing twice.
There’s an obvious J Dilla feel to this new album, especially on the track “Slow Motion” and even “Tomboy,” to a certain extent. And those two tracks were the first we heard, followed by “You Can Count On Me” and “Alsatian Darn,” which are probably the best tracks on the album. “You Can Count On Me” might be Panda Bear’s best track, and I’m saying that with knowledge of “Take Pills” and Person Pitch as a whole. Yes, it isn’t that same sampling we heard before, but just as “Take Pills” was Lennox’s ode to his medication, “You Can Count On Me” is his love ballad. And it takes a little time to get used to, but once you do, it sticks.
“Alsatian Darn” is in itself an amazing track, and “Last Night At The Jetty” follows suit however to a lesser extent. Both are different from what we’ve originally heard from Panda Bear, and to be honest, his live version of “Surfers Hymn” is much better than the recorded one. As for the second half of the album, it blends together as an eleven-track album might, but that’s not to say it isn’t good. It’s just that it doesn’t stick as well, perhaps because it wasn’t released as singles, or perhaps because they don’t have the passion Panda Bear put forth in the others. And that’s the main difference between this album and Person Pitch: each track had that emotion, and here we don’t feel it as much. We do on “You Can Count On Me,” and on the electric moments of “Tomboy,” but apart from that, we don’t feel it, especially on “Drone,” which is essentially just what the title states. And there’s the real disappointment, not that Panda Bear didn’t continue with what chillwave was calling for him to do, but because he didn’t attack Tomboy with the same level of creativity that he did with Person Pitch or even Young Prayer, for that matter. It feels like a regression to his self-titled debut, which he released as a teenager, with the only difference between a higher production value. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just not what we expect from the man who sings the angelic lines, “I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls.” Lennox has grown up, and his listeners have too, and I suppose that Tomboy is a step towards something greater – not the end game we might have thought it was, but a taste of what’s to come from one of the most mature artists out there. And anyone who disagrees with that needs to simply here “You Can Count On Me,” and know that there’s something magical at work here.
