CT’s Favorite Albums of 2011

Christianity Today‘s music reviewing staff– of which I am a member– voted on the best records of 2011, and while the CT list is hardly a carbon copy of my own, you will notice plenty of overlap. Of course I could quibble with it, as I could any list that isn’t my own, but really, I am simply delighted to see a list in which Joe Henry, Over the Rhine, Paul Simon, and Gillian Welch are rubbing elbows and bumping shoulders.

#1 on the CT list is Josh Garrels, whose album did not make my own list, though I did quite like it. I stick by my original comments about that album, I think– that it is impressively ambitious and very well-executed, as well as frequently moving; also, a bit too long and maybe a little too serious. But for CT, it’s a fine choice, no question.

Albums I Loved in 2011: Fifteen Favorites (Give or Take)

I’ve been noticing a lot of complaints from my fellow critics and bloggers, who seem to think year-end list-making is something of a chore. I don’t really blame them, but also don’t really agree. I love doing this, because I love celebrating the albums that have offered me truth and beauty, revelation and sheer enjoyment, over the past dozen months or so.

And what a year this one has been. The short version of the story: Joe Henry wins my hypothetical awards for Songwriter and Producer of the Year, as well as 2011 MVP. My favorite performance by a band in 2011 would be either Over the Rhine or The Roots, and, not too coincidentally, my favorite performance by a singer this year was from Over the Rhine’s Karin Bergquist, while my favorite bit of MC-ing was from The Roots’ own Black Thought. I’ll also give The Roots the year’s best album cover.

Favorite concert I saw in 2011? Take your pick between Trombone Shorty, Joe Henry, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch, and Over the Rhine.

Favorite old music released in 2011? It’s gotta be either the This May Be My Last Time Singing gospel music box set, or else the superb single-disc Sinatra The Best of the Best.

The year’s biggest surprise? Maybe it was Hugh Laurie’s blues album turning out to be so good. Maybe it was Ry Cooder ditching his usual guitar heroics and making one of his best-ever albums in the process. But it was probably the fact that three of my all-time favorite musical entities have made, after 20+ years in the game, albums that probably stand as their career-best.

And that brings us to my favorite albums of the year. I’m going to run down my top fifteen, more or less in the right order, but with the caveat that the top three albums are, again, exemplary works from peerless musicians—so who really cares which one is two and which one is three?

I’ll also list just a handful of very honorable mentions before getting to the list proper. Your 2011 listening experience is not complete if you haven’t heard Raphael Saadiq’s Stone Rollin’; The Black Keys’ El Camino; Meshell Ndegeocello’s Weather; DeVotchKa’s 100 Lovers; or The Decemberists’ The King is Dead.

15. Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
Ry Cooder

… in which the man who taught Keith Richards to play the blues takes us on a tour of ancient musics and modern maladies, turning in the funniest, angriest, most ferocious protest album I’ve heard in a good while. Plus: The title is an old softshoe joke from the Great Depression era. Kids these days have a lot to learn—we all do, I reckon—and Ry Cooder is just the man to teach us.

14. Let Them Talk
Hugh Laurie

Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “St. James Infirmary” is a ragged and darkly comical delight—one of the greatest recordings of all time, I’d say. Hugh Laurie does it here as an epic, grave and grandiose, and the highest compliment I can pay him is to say that I have no interest in comparing his version with Louis’. I’m glad they both exist, and overjoyed that the rest of Let Them Talk is similarly passionate and professional, a labor of love from a moonlighter who takes the blues as seriously as his day job.

 13. The Old Magic
Nick Lowe

This is a master class in songwriting, especially on the ballads: “Stoplight Roses,” “I Read a Lot,” and “House for Sale” prove that nobody’s better than Lowe at saying a whole lot with very little, and at speaking volumes with what’s left altogether unsaid. Meanwhile, “Restless Feeling” was described in the press release as a roller rink anthem, and it’s amazing to me how apt—and how surprisingly pleasant—that description turns out to be.

 12. The Road from Memphis
Booker T. Jones and the Roots

Regular readers will know that I have a soft spot for “legacy” artists—Jones is 67, and a legend by any standard—doing fine, fresh work; for soul music and for small-ensemble spontaneity; and for the crisp sound of ?uestlove’s snare and hi-hat. For these reasons and more, the Booker/Roots collaboration is a finer-popping good time, and a vibrant example of a music that never goes out of style or out of season.

 11. Let England Shake
PJ Harvey

I can’t deny that this album might mean more to me if I were a Brit—but I also can’t deny that Harvey’s assessment of toxic nationalism and a violent human condition are anything but universal. My favorite thing about this album isn’t the precision and compassion that inform her indignation, but rather the way she makes this sound like a collection of spooky old folk songs, as if to say that this story is nothing new.

10. So Beautiful or So What
Paul Simon

God the Father and God the Son are walking the earth, and one says to the other that he thinks it’s time to leave. Ah, but then what will these people be left with, the other responds. Love and hard times, the answer goes. For this scene and many others, Simon’s album remains one of my favorite examples of bold and beautiful songwriting from the past year—or the past several.

 09. Passenger
Lisa Hannigan

There are lots of references to air travel on this one, so of course I’ve found that it’s a perfect soundtrack for plane rides. Surprisingly, it is also good for dancing, at least on the upbeat songs. Given how many singer/songwriter albums are either too leaden or too airy, this is a significant accomplishment, but it’s hardly the only thing I love about Hannigan’s album. This is a savory concoction of passion and craft, a thoroughly modern album that feels like a timeless classic.

 08. For True
Trombone Shorty

I really think he’s the hardest working man in showbiz today—certainly, the most righteous flag-bearer for modern New Orleans swagger. Shorty’s albums are very different from the epic jam sessions that are his Orleans Avenue gigs, but no less impressive; here he keeps things short and sweet and song-oriented, showing that he’s not just a party animal and horn boss but also an ace soul singer and a non-stop good idea machine.

07. Bad as Me
Tom Waits

How apt: There’s been a Tom Waits album for the saloon, a Tom Waits album for the back porch, a Tom Waits album for the graveyard… and whatever Real Gone is, of course. Now we have a Tom Waits album for the roadhouse jukebox. For anyone who thinks Waits is just an eccentric weirdo—or that American roots music has to be boring and well-mannered—Bad as Me should prove a real mind-expander.

 06. What Were You Hoping For?
Van Hunt

This one wins the award for most perfectly coy album title of the year—because nobody possibly could have expected this album from Van Hunt, nor could any listener’s response to it be anything other than pure delight. I remember when Hunt was still singing for Blue Note, corralled in with the neo-soul scene. Now he’s making freakish funk monsters that channel Prince, Sly Stone, and D’Angelo in equal measure, but ultimately prove Van Hunt to be in a league of his own.

05. 50 Words for Snow
Kate Bush

Nobody else this year delivered such truth in advertising. The title song here is, indeed, a litany of precisely fifty words for snow. Some are matter of fact; others, whimsical and silly. All are delivered by Stephen Fry, of all people, who, along with Bush, seems to relish the chance to celebrate rhythm and poetry and simple beauty, linear meaning be damned. And that’s to say nothing of the star-crossed Elton John duet, or the dreamy 35-minute, snow-drift opening act! All told, there’s never been a record like this, but for me, its patience and slow-burn sensuality make it a delight.

 04. The Harrow and the Harvest
Gillian Welch

I saw Welch and her partner Dave Rawlings play almost all of these songs, and plenty others, to a packed theater. They stood on a naked stage, armed with only acoustic instruments and songs, and kept us entranced. This is their darkest album, but also their most seductive. It’s an album about reaping and sowing—about “all the little ways I’ve found to hurt myself,” Welch sings—but its pleasures are so many that it’s impossible not to simply give in to its sway.

03. The Long Surrender
Over the Rhine

It opens with a song about pressing on in spite of, or maybe even because of, failure; that it’s so soulful and sublime makes it, and the whole record, a glorious monument to a band that has been inviting and enabling quiet mysteries and simple beauty for two decades and counting. They’ve still got stories to tell; in fact, this is their best album, and not only because of their perfect camaraderie with producer Joe Henry. When has such an unassuming and intimate album so shaken and rattled the soul? For me, maybe never.

 02. Reverie
Joe Henry

This was, and is, a special record for me; its allure was enough to get me on a plane and fly across the country just for the honor of hearing Joe and his Garfield House players perform it. I’ve called it his Basement Tapes and his rock and roll album, but really the scrappiness of Reverie is a bit of a canard. It is just disheveled enough to initially obscure the fact that it’s the most thoughtful, mystery-abiding and –embodying album he’s ever made.

01. undun
The Roots

Fate and free will meet on the corner, but that’s not the only cosmic collision on undun; there’s also an epic pileup of hip-hop past and future, with the Roots drawing from disparate sources—gospel hooks, soulful beats, a free-jazz explosion, even a string quartet—and somehow pull them into the hardest, toughest, most streetwise album of their career. But more than anything, it’s the words that enliven undun. It’s hip-hop mythology done as anti-heroism, and I confess to finding it riveting, disquieting, and profound. The Roots have made a rap masterpiece of and for the times, but its political and philosophical resonance never gets in the way of the thing just bangin’—the sound of veterans finding new inspiration and zeal in their craft.

The Roots: “undun”

Is ?uestlove tired of hip-hop as usual? Sometimes I think that he must be. The last Roots album, How I Got Over, came out just over a year ago, but since then ?uesto has served as drummer, producer, morale director, and full-time publicist for the likes of R&B crooner John Legend, soul survivor Betty Wright, and Memphis organ boss Booker T. Jones. Even How I Got Over cast its net wide, drawing its title from an old gospel song and its guest list (Joanna Newsom, Dirty Projectors) from the indie rock scene.

And now comes undun: A full-fledged concept album. And it gets worse than that, I’m afraid; the album was inspired by Sufjan Stevens, who shows up for a piano recital on one song, and a string quartet is employed throughout. But look here: undun is more streetwise, more hip-hop, than any hip-hop album has been in years. It also hits harder and channels more gut-punch aggression than any Roots album ever—yes, even Game Theory, I think. There are elements of sophistication, but only because the album pulls inspiration from a range of musics and unites them all in the service of big, thumping beats—grooves so wide you could drive a Cadillac through them. It’s a galvanizing and heroic record; it is gritty and by turns hilarious and tragic. It’s great hip-hop boiled down to its essence.

And more to the point, it tells a great hip-hop story. Undun is the tale of a quasi-fictitious kid by the name of Redford Stephens. Red is a corner boy. He is a hustler, but he wasn’t born that way; his hand was all but forced, or so he thought, by the sheer weight of poverty and the unbalanced scales of justice. His story is rendered here without sentiment or romance, without victimization or politicizing. He is given the respect of a rousing biography that’s fueled by anger and fear and sadness and swagger. Undun is gangbusters—stunning and magnificent. And it is the model of urgency. There is not a word or a beat or even a second of silence in which life and death don’t seem to hang in the balance. Which, of course, they do, always. The story unfolds in reverse, so I’m not spoiling anything when I reveal that it opens with Redford’s death.

And as ?uesto has been quick to point out, it’s not just a crime saga. This is an album for all of us—hip-hop heads and Wire aficionados; War on Drugs survivors, enforcers, and innocent bystanders; Occupy-era activists, and anyone who thinks crime and punishment are mere forces of The System, or results of either fatalism or mere moral apathy; it is an album for humans, and suggests that any one of us could just as easily come undun. It does not moralize, it only reveals. It does no settle for reminding us that crime doesn’t pay. It says, here we all are. This is what has happened to us as a culture, and as people.

The album opens with its protagonist’s death partly because beginning at the end gives the whole thing the weight and seeming inevitability of a classic tragedy—but how inevitable is what happens to Red? The Roots portray him as a kid who makes one bad decision, and the rest of his life becomes swept up in the worst thing he ever did. He did it because of the rumbles in his belly. He did it because of poverty’s pull and desire’s addiction, like twin forces of nature. He sheds innocent blood—the blood of a close friend, we are told—because, on the streets, that’s how the game is played, and who is he to buck the system? Phonte’s logic is coldly unassailable: “Stick to the script, nigga, fuck your improv.”

But is it really all scripted? Red wasn’t born a criminal; he becomes one by choice. And yet the album is dense with ideas about perceived fate and free will; in “Stomp,” Black Thought sees the future in the creases of his hand, and in “One Time” Dice Raw wonders “when you die do you hear harps and bagpipes/ if you’re born on the other side of the crack pipe?” Here free will collides with the cruel machinations of corner life, social inequality, and the pull of human want. Red is neither victim nor hero but a tragic figure caught in a tailspin of his own making, his future guided—but not necessarily forced—by systems he can’t control.

The album’s opening songs are the quietest, because it’s only in death that the thoughtful, coulda-been-somebody Red finds peace. “Sleep” is the eerie opener, clinical keyboard tones and graveyard percussion, plus a sinister, disembodied vocal from Aaron Livingstone, accompanying Black Thought as he gives voice to Red’s own post-mortem reflection. “Make My” is similarly soft—smooth, string-led soul on the Philly tip. The song imagines the hustler’s final gasp as the capitalist’s deathbed confession. How else to take lines like: “I did it all for the money Lord/… please forgive us for riding Benzes with camera plates.” And: “If there’s a heaven I can’t find a stairway.” At the end of a lifelong paper chase, there is only ruin. The only thing missing is the eye of a needle.

The undun concept never gets in the way of the music; on the contrary, it provides structure for the MC’s, and especially Black Thought, to do the most ruthlessly focused and precise, filler-free rhyming of their career—every line is loaded—and for ?uesto to lead the band into its most confident and purposeful playing. The sound is pitched somewhere between Game Theory’s jet-black anger and How I Got Over’s twilit introspection, but it’s more empathetic and human than the former and more focused than the latter. “Lighthouse” is the record’s centerpiece and emotional climax; ?uesto bangs the hell out of his hi-hats while Dice Raw delivers the hook, devastating because it’s so anthemic: “And no one’s in the lighthouse/ You’re face down in the ocean.” (Black Thought’s ace line is that the grim reaper’s urging him to “swim deeper”). “Stomp” has a nightmarish, martial beat and Just Blaze inciting violence. “Kool On” is roiling soul and Hendrix blues wailing a tale of bravado and aggression, haunted by the idea tha the fall is just around the corner.

“The Otherside,” meanwhile, might be the most complex and powerful thing here. It’s got a killer ?uesto groove and twinkling piano, until the chorus erupts into organ-drenched, gospel-rock fervor and a killer vocal from Bilal. Black Thought’s opening verse is my favorite on the album. It is killer in its clear thinking; he opens with a plea to “tone it down a bit,” but Red’s internal monologue won’t let him escape the indignation poverty brings: “You may say I could be doing something positive/ Humbled head down low and broke like promises…/ Listen, if not for these hood inventions/ I’d be just another kid from the block with no intentions.” Then Bilal serves up pure white heat: “Never loved what I had/ Always felt like I deserved more/ When we make it to the other side/ That’s when we’ll settle up the score.” Like all these lyrics, it’s difficult to stomach because we know how this story must, and does, end.

But it’s also exhilarating. The album is devastating, it’s true, but also exciting for how clearly and effortlessly The Roots give voice to big ideas and human stories. Undun is an album about choice and circumstance; about crime and poverty; about money and the bonds of kinship—in Red’s case, severed far too soon. It’s a by turn clear-eyed and conflicted reflection of a violent mind, and it runs through sadness and anger, indignation and regret.

The album hits hardest and heaviest at the bitter end—or, I suppose, the beginning. The last proper Roots joint on the album is “Tip the Scale,” which considers choice and circumstance as forces of nature, Red’s rise and fall a matter of gravity. But the tearjerker, and in some ways the heart and soul of the album, is “I Remember.” Here Black Thought does the heavy lifting. Red is unsentimental even as he wades into memory of his past life, friends and family lost along the way. He sees what he has become, but remembers who he once was. The string quarter is especially mournful here, but it’s almost unnecessary. Thought’s final words sting like nothing else here: “Sometimes it’s as cut and dry as a business deal/ You gotta cause the blood of a close friend to spill/ But you remember still.”

It’s an album only The Roots could have made, and I give some of that credit to ?uest, but mostly to the stable of MCs. They are the ones who carry the weight of this story—usual Roots suspects Greg Porn and Dice Raw, guest Big K.R.I.T., and especially Black Thought. No other hip-hop artist could have done undun because nobody else is Black Thought; in anyone else’s care, Red’s story would have sagged under opulence, arrogance, or simply wordiness. Black Thought is, in my mind, the best MC there is because every word is uncompromising and purposeful; there’s no time for cartoony hip-hop theatrics. He’s the perfect voice for Red, the perfect central force for undun.

This is not, by the way, a rap opera. It tells Red’s story not through external narrative but through grimly introspective internal monologues—another Thought specialty. The idea of undun as a concept album struck me, at first, as overblown, despite the fact that How I Got Over and Game Theory were just a tick or two away from being concept albums themselves. Actually, though, the Redford Stevens story gives The Roots focus and structure like they’ve never had before, and rather than obstruct them it inspires them. The MCs gathered here spit fire like they’re giving voice to all the Redford Stephenses out there, which of course they are; the fact that Red is voiced by several, not just by Black Thought, reminds us that this isn’t just another hip-hop mythology. It’s a story about one man, and it’s a story about us all.

I should comment on the album’s final sequence, and one of ?uesto’s true masterstrokes. It’s a four-part movement based on Sufjan’s “Redford,” and it’s not nearly as insufferable as it sounds. In fact, it’s extraordinarily graceful and profound as a wordless conclusion to undun; each movement is only about a minute, making this a much more tastefully brief avant-classical excursion than, say, Phrenology’s “Water.” Sufjan plays the melody, solo on piano; then a string quarter interrupts; then, a jazz freakout dismantles it altogether, and finally it comes back together in a mournful conclusion. Is it meant to suggest multiple readings of the same source material—multiple paths a life can take? Or is it just a seamless whole, one that begins with promise but ultimately comes undun and then just dies?

The Roots mount the question masterfully, and are smart enough not to presume an answer. And yet, the music demands one—because of course, this isn’t just about Red coming undun, but about all of us. Undun isn’t a solution, but a search. And as such, it’s monumentally thrilling.

Film Break: “The Descendants”

My take on Alexander Payne’s quite good new movie, The Descendants, is now up. Between this one, The Muppets, and, I expect, this weekend’s screening of Hugo, I’ve been catching up with a lot of superb films lately. Might be time for another movie round-up at some point next week.

The Black Keys: “El Camino”

I’m not sure how The Black Keys keep pulling it off. On paper, they seem like the kind of band who ought to be little more than the sum of their record collection—a natty and diverse collection, to be sure, but one they put on display seemingly without inhibition. Sometimes, the references are very specific—Chulahoma was their blues album, and more specifically their Junior Kimbrough tribute; other times, they are more diffuse—Brothers smacked of vintage soul and R&B; and every now and then, they are simply obvious, like how Blakroc was their hip-hop excursion.

El Camino can be saddled with a similar tagline. This is their garage rock album, their punk album, their Clash or Stones opus—all of these signifiers work fine, amply backed by the record’s concision and its endless parade of classic-rock worshipping riffs, to say nothing of Dan Auerbach’s pre-release comparison to the Cramps and the lead single’s gleeful T-Rex vamp. It’s a non-stop barrage of hard, fast rock, all of it shaking and rattling with garage vigor. And it is, like everything else they have done, nothing less than another great Black Keys album, comparisons be damned.

It also happens to be, at first blush, a direct retreat from the album that made them famous. For years, The Black Keys pounded out primitive garage-blues in the color-coordinated shadows of Jack and Meg, until suddenly Blakroc and especially Brothers showed us how far-reaching their ambitions, and how eclectic their tastes, really are. Brothers was their breakthrough, a sprawling and joyful collection of songs that were as much about R&B swagger as bluesy riffing. Now comes El Camino: Short, concise, consistent, loaded with hooks and riffs but with nary an R&B or soul reference to be found.

Actually, though, it’s an ingenious delivery on the promise of Brothers. Don’t take its narrow vision to be a sign that they’re running on fumes; if Brothers expanded their sound outward, El Camino plums new depths. Pat Carney has never, I don’t think, banged away at his drum kit with the same howling abandon as he does on the cymbal-heavy “Hell of a Season,” and Dan Auerbach is simply on fire, spitting lyrics that should be blues clichés and making them sound instead like guttural rock and roll poetry, peeling off lickety-split riffs and solos as easily as he unfurls those randy “whoah-whoahs.”

This is a Black Keys album made for partying, but there’s a third guest here whose work is pivotal to the album’s success. Danger Mouse produced a full Black Keys album once before (Attack & Release), and he showed up to handle “Tighten Up,” the killer single that just happened to make Brothers explode. He produces everything here, too, and follows the pattern of “Tighten Up” right down to the letter: Notice how this album’s lead single, “Lonely Boy,” is hook-laden and bright, led by handclaps and glittery keyboards and yes, some of those whooahs.

Rather than be a formula, though, I think it’s just the sort of inspiration Auerbach and Carney needed for this album. Certainly, it’s different from Brothers, but also from Attack & Release. That album was a moody, sinister gem, but it was also very murky and affected, like a Tom Waits production slapped onto a Black Keys album. El Camino is the opposite. It’s quick, bright, and beat-savvy. Auerbach creates rock guitar nirvana; compile a list of the ten catchiest guitar hooks recorded in 2011, and I’ll bet you seven or eight of them are on this album. Carney is in the pocket, and very loud. Danger Mouse fills in the empty spaces with organs and celestes and hand claps.

And I just think the whole thing is a hoot and a holler. I love “Lonely Boy,” from its array of hooks to its odd video, which featured a Herman Cain-ish figure dancing without inhibition, but it’s only one of the gems here. For “Dead and Gone,” Danger Mouse goes full-on Phil Spector, and it’s a lavish delight. “Money Maker” is a great song about, I assume, a hooker, and the pounding, cymbal-crashing chorus is primitive and howling. “Little Black Submarines” is the only time the album slows down, but it doesn’t stay that way for long; it erupts from a haunted first half into electric guitar mayhem. Basically: Led Zeppelin, condensed into four minutes.

I’m excited about El Camino because it proves the Brothers breakthrough was just the beginning for The Black Keys. I love that it’s the sound of a great band doing what they do best, with a kind of mastery and easy momentum they’ve never conjured before. Mostly, though, I love it because it’s a great band doing what they do with real joy. For them and for us, El Camino sounds like a blast.