Best of 2012: Open season

Top 10 albums of 2012 (all genres in play):
Time Out New York (annotated, with Spotify playlist)
Pitchfork (unannotated, with top 10 singles list)

Top 10 jazz albums of 2012 (with many honorable mentions):
Jazz Journalists Association, plus annotated breakdown, part I (plus intro), II and III

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I participated in a few different year-end polls this season, each with its own parameters. I tried to keep my picks consistent across the various platforms, but inevitably, a bit of imprecision crept in. Below you'll find a list of my top 50 records of the year, as submitted to the Pitchfork contributors' poll. (My final list may have differed very slightly in terms of order, but I'm 99 percent sure that these 50 records are the ones I ended up voting for; it's hard to say because I entered my picks via an online voting portal that's since disappeared.) The first 10 constitute the same top 10 I submitted to Time Out New York and the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll, and the 15 jazz records found here constitute the top 15 jazz records I listed over at the JJA site, with the top 10 of those making up my Jazz Critics Poll ballot.

Below, I link to my prior coverage where applicable, discuss any strays and provide listening samples for albums 20–50 (via a playlist apiece for each grouping of 10, including a track from every selection that's available on Spotify). Hat-tip to Seth Colter-Walls—who's got a great all-genres list over at the Awl—for the formatting suggestion.

Thanks for reading. As always, comments/feedback welcome, especially re: records I might have missed! 

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1. Christian Mistress Possession 
2. Japandroids Celebration Rock
3. Converge All We Love We Leave Behind
4. Pallbearer Sorrow and Extinction 
5. Propagandhi Failed States
6. fun. Some Nights
7. Loincloth Iron Balls of Steel 
8. Frank Ocean Channel Orange
9. Billy Hart All Our Reasons
10. Corin Tucker Band Kill My Blues

A rock- and male-heavy top 10, yes. I've been a little bothered by that in recent days, thinking I should've mixed it up a bit more, but (A) I sort of believe that top 10 lists make themselves, i.e., these are the albums that chose me over the past year, not the other way around (to put it another way, these are records I played and played and played, in both professional and personal contexts), (B) this list is much less monochrome than it looks on the surface and (C) I've done my best to shout-out at least a sampling of all the other great albums I heard in 2012 below and via the jazz-only list linked above. The narrowing part was tough; there are albums in the 30s and 40s below that were in serious contention for the top 10.

To comment a briefly on the unlinked above:

Possession is a magical album. As I suggested in my TONY list, this record both epitomizes and transcends the recent retro-metal trend. Yes, its basic palette is an old one, but its emotional content is so not mere pastiche; in the mold of the best of Dio-fronted Sabbath (Mob Rules, The Devil You Know), it's at once tough and badass, and also crushingly sad, qualities embodied in Christine Davis's scratchy-throated vocal turn—somehow both majestic and humble. And the riffs and structures go way beyond post-Sabbath-ism—so effortlessly, stylishly progressive, full of twists and sudden set changes. Spend time with this album, enough time to listen past its surface retro-ness and on to its timeless rewards. Metal is not something donned, assumed for Christian Mistress; this is real communion with the past—the ’70s and ’80s, yes, but also more ancient eras. Possession is so damn earthy it almost feels pagan. A big salute to this one.

Damn, is fun. ever fun. Some Nights speaks to the part of me that loves the pomp of Elton and Queen, but as with Christian Mistress, this isn't mere retro. This band's gift is updating that sound with a very modern kind of wryness—it seems almost too perfect that one of the dudes in the band is dating Lena Dunham. This is the kind of record that takes a subculture (the modern NYC hipster) and makes it into a kind of super-stylized Broadway-style tragicomedy. It's over-the-top and self-deprecating but it's also deeply touching. And the songwriting and arrangements are just stellar. I love this kind of pop, the kind that respects old-school craft but finds a way to say something contemporary.

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11. Nude Beach II 
12. The Smashing Pumpkins Oceania 
13. Asphyx Deathhammer
14. Rush Clockwork Angels 
15. Prong Carved Into Stone 
16. Steve Lehman Trio Dialect Fluorescent
17. R. Kelly Write Me Back 
18. Darius Jones Quartet Book of Mæ'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise)
19. Dysrhythmia Test of Submission 
20. How to Dress Well Total Loss

 

Re: Nude Beach, again with the retro. The entire album is not quite this good—if it was, it might've been my album of the year—but, dear God, "Radio" and a few more…

The Rush album is solid, solid, solid. Snakes and Arrows was a decent record, but they are back in the driver's seat with this one. The real story here isn't the recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees' (ahem) return to concept-album-dom; it's that that they've written probably their strongest set of songs since 1993's Counterparts.

R. Kelly is still on his own backward-looking tip, and he seems to be having a hell of a time. There's plenty of cheese on this record, but also pure, post–Barry White gold, e.g., "Lady Sunday."

The Dysrhythmia record is crammed with their own brand of "hits." As I've written before, these are Dysrhythmia's catchiest songs to date. Went through a period of could-not-stop-listening-to-this re: Test of Submission a month or so back, due largely to "In Secrecy" and three or four others.

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21. Serpentine Path Serpentine Path 
22. Van Halen A Different Kind of Truth 
23. Jim Black Trio Somatic 
24. Cannibal Corpse Torture 
25. Federico Ughi Songs for Four Cities 
26. Henry Threadgill Zooid Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp 
27. The Men Open Your Heart
28. Say Anything Anarchy, My Dear 
29. Neurosis Honor Found in Decay 
30. Dr. John Locked Down

 

What a puzzle Open Your Heart is. This album blindsides you in at least four different ways. Individual tracks make perfect sense, but as a whole, it's inscrutable in a way I very much enjoy. "Rock" sticks, but any subgenre tag you might try to pin on it slides right off.

I think Anarchy, My Dear is the best Say Anything album since the frankly untouchable …Is a Real Boy. Max Bemis is one of our great songwriter/bandleaders.
 
Locked Down is essentially a perfect example of the "re-branding" album, i.e., one of these increasingly common efforts where an older artist whose career has slowed or perhaps even stalled teams up with a sharp, savvy producer who can reconnect him or her with the kids/critics. Sometimes these efforts can smack of crass strategizing, but this one is simply a great Dr. John album that happens to have been abetted by a famous young musician (Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys). This material sounded every bit as good live, when I heard it at BAM earlier this year.

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31. Joel Harrison / Lorenzo Feliciati Holy Abyss
32. Behold… the Arctopus Horrorscension 
33. David Virelles Continuum 
34. Tim Berne Snakeoil 
35. Incantation Vanquish in Vengeance 
36. The Cookers Believe 
37. The Howling Wind Of Babalon 
38. Matt Wilson's Arts and Crafts An Attitude for Gratitude 
39. George Schuller's Circle Wide Listen Both Ways 
40. Aaron Freeman Marvelous Clouds

 

A glorious return for Behold, which marks the BtA debut of Weasel Walter on drums. It's only fitting that this project should rev up again just as the Flying Luttenbachers endeavor was concluding. Extraordinary, inspiring extended composition first; great metal second.

Doug Moore's Invisible Oranges write-up of Vanquish in Vengeance was spot-on. This record (A) sounds very little like the murk-fi masterpieces (Onward to Golgotha, Mortal Throne of Nazarene) that established Incantation's sterling reputation, and (B) really isn't surprising in the least. It's simply an excellent genre-obedient effort by a band that helped define the genre—in other words, the death-metal analog to the Cookers' Believe.

Man, is Of Babalon ever heavy. An excellent companion to Serpentine Path, another 2012 effort featuring former Unearthly Trance member Ryan Lipynsky. This one is both more diverse stylewise and more vicious in its mood. Lipynsky isn't a revolutionary, but the degree to which he really and truly means it when he makes metal makes him a standout figure in the underground.

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41. Cattle Decapitation Monolith of Inhumanity 
42. Dr. Lonnie Smith The Healer
43. Napalm Death Utilitarian
44. Sam Rivers / Dave Holland / Barry Altschul Reunion: Live in New York
45. Jozef Van Wissem / Jim Jarmusch Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity
46. Death Grips No Love Deep Web
47. Leonard Cohen Old Ideas
48. Bob Mould Silver Age
49. Unsane Wreck
50. Eri Yamamoto The Next Page

 

Monolith and Utilitarian are blistering new albums by long-running bands I've never truly loved in the past; these efforts woke me up. (In Napalm Death's case, an incredible Maryland Deathfest set helped too.) Both records impressed me with how catchy and diverse they were—dig those theatrical chorus hooks on Monolith, esp.—demonstrating that grindcore has come a long way from its super-primitive roots.

The hype surrounding Death Grips (Epic, not Epic—yadda, yadda) was a little wearisome, but I still found No Love Deep Web to be worthy of its title. It's a chaotic yet focused negative-vibe spew that's hard to tear yourself away from.

I'm a big Leonard fan in general, but the past couple LPs haven't grabbed me. This one seems stronger, aiming for the midpoint between solemn and wry. Like his current live show (I caught him at the Beacon a few years back), Old Ideas feels warm and connected but not hokey. In contrast, I don't know Mould's post–Hüsker Dü work well, but Silver Age grabbed me immediately, as I expect it would anyone who enjoys aggressive, tightly composed melodic rock. "Descent" is an incredible song. Speaking of, I meant to include that in my top 10 singles list…

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P.S.

As indicated at the top of my 2012 jazz round-up, Ravi Coltrane's Spirit Fiction was an album I enjoyed greatly throughout the year and unintentionally overlooked when it came time for year-end voting. I'm bummed about that; if I had my Jazz Journalists Association / Jazz Critics Poll top 10 and Pitchfork all-genre top 50 to do over, I'd include it in both. In any case, one happy side effect of the omission is that I became re-enthralled by Spirit Fiction over the past couple weeks. It really is outstanding, start to finish.

Another two I woke up to too late to consider them for these polls:

Bill McHenry La Peur du Vide

I loved the quartet on this record—with Orrin Evans, Eric Revis and Andrew Cyrille—when I heard them at the Vanguard last November. But I didn't warm up to La Peur (recorded at the same venue this past March) on a first listen. Something about it sounded straighter, less mysterious than what I'd remembered. Turns out I just didn't sit with the record long enough. The first track, "Siglo XX," is indeed pretty conventional post-Coltrane sax-quartet jazz, but things get so deep/surprising as the album continues. Such an absolute pleasure to hear Andrew Cyrille featured so prominently and in such unpredictable ways, and Evans and Revis are in bruising form here as well. This record is a subtle killer, every bit as essential as McHenry's earlier collaborations with Paul Motian.

 
The Bad Plus Made Possible

Another strong Bad Plus record. For me, this one doesn't quite reach the level of the sublime Never Stop, but there's some extraordinary stuff on here, particularly Reid Anderson's two latest triumphs: the hushed-then-ecstatic epic "In Stitches" and the plainspoken, melancholy-pop-ish "Pound for Pound." (File the latter of these alongside the Eri Yamamoto and Federico Ughi records discussed here.)


Also, Xaddax and Feast of the Epiphany made great records this year—in Feast's case, several great records; I especially endorse Solitude—which were out-of-bounds for me pollwise due to friendships with the parties responsible. Visit Xaddax here and Feast here.

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Bonus:

Time Out New York's full year-end Music package—including a list of top concerts, with a few of my entries—as well as top 10 lists by my colleagues Steve Smith and Sophie Harris.

The Dio Effect: Pallbearer live

Many years ago, I first heard a particularly ineffective cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", by the Providence death-metal band Vital Remains. Revisiting it now, it seems to me that while the musicians could use a lesson in groove, they sound fine—hitting their marks, executing as needed. The vocals, on the other hand, still present a serious problem. As in Vital Remains's original material, the frontman opts for a distorted growl—not even close to the most guttural and unintelligible register heard in death metal, but still a refutation of the idea that "notes" are a vocalist's concern. So what the cover does is willfully rob this classic song of half its melodic juice; all the beauty and the wonder of Ozzy's vocal melody, it's simply absent.

Now, I listen to a lot of death metal. I enjoy the style immensely, even—and, lately, especially—in its most primitive and conventional forms (Obituary and Immolation, to name two). Sometimes, what people often refer to as the Cookie Monster vocal style works fine for me. Some of my favorite metal records—Morbid Angel's Covenant, for instance—wouldn't work with any other approach. But sometimes you hear something that reminds you that, "Oh, yeah—singing matters."

I had a transcendent experience hearing Pallbearer live last night at Saint Vitus. They're one of the bands I'm talking about. Their singer, Brett Campbell, is all about pinched, pained, soaring melody, in the vein of early Ozzy. To hear his bright, clear voice leaping out across the vast, doomy expanse he and his band lay down is downright startling, like witnessing a splendidly colored bird flying across a grey, postapocalyptic sky.

I'm realizing now that the Vital Remains comparison might be a faulty one, simply because in Pallbearer's chosen subgenre—I'd call it traditional doom metal, i.e., the kind that makes no effort to disguise its Sabbath worship—so-called clean vocals are pretty common. It's in death and black metal that the growls and shrieks hold sway. But this whole notion occurred to me last night because I've been taking my metal all on one plate lately. Saint Vitus is about a seven minute walk from my apartment, and over the past year, I've seen a bunch of metal shows there, in many different styles: NYC caveman-death veterans Mortician, Richmond grind-thrash fantasists Deceased, riff-forward Washington-state black-metalists Inquisition. Seeing Pallbearer last night, I realized that I'd become numb to the idea that a vocalist is, in fact, allowed to use his or her voice to contribute to the song of the music, to make any kind of melodic statement.

You start to forget about the Dio Effect of metal, that sort of "Weary monarch alone in his chambers, lamenting the sorry state of his kingdom and maybe his life" pathos that can be the province of metal, if metal so chooses. (Sabbath's "Falling Off the Edge of the World"—with, yes, Ronnie James Dio at the mic—has been my go-to gold standard of late.) Often, modern metal chooses the opposite: total subhuman bludgeon. "We are not men at all; we are monsters, even demons."

But the two new metal records that have spoken to me the most this year—aside from Loincloth's vocal-less masterpiece—are Christian Mistress's Possession (go here and scroll down a bit) and Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction, both of which thrive on unadulterated Dio-ness, that certain quality of metal that makes you want to bend your elbow and curl your fingers into the time-honored invisible-orange gesture, clenching into a fist for emphasis. It's not too surprising that I'd be seeking out the Dio Effect in new metal, given that Sabbath—especially the Dio records Mob Rules, Dehumanizer and (under the Heaven and Hell moniker) The Devil You Know but also, more recently, the almighty Paranoid—has occupied a huge swath of my listening during the same time period.

What the Dio approach, i.e., the decision to have the vocals go out on a limb melodically, to really present musical information the ear can use and respond to, beyond mere assaultive static, allows for is the possibility of multiplication, the chance for the music and the voice to fuse into some irreducible, alchemical third medium. With the Cookie Monster approach, or any vocal style that negates melody, it's like band vs. listener, wherein everyone onstage is coming directly at you. With the Dio approach, though, you get this marvelous inter-band conflict; the inherent struggle of metal is contained within the music, so that it takes the form of a joust or some other kind of stylized (or maybe even not so) struggle.

That struggle played out on the Saint Vitus stage last night. Pallbearer conjured its gargantuan riffs as a unit, collectively summoned them forth from Middle Earth, or Vulcan's forge, or wherever it is that the slow-moving magma of great, Sabbath-derived blues metal spews from. And as these riffs raged and rolled, washed outward from the stage in monster waves, there was Brett Campbell, stepping to the mic like a man on the mount, daring to cry forth in the face of God's deafening roar.

I felt compelled to throw up the invisible-oranges with almost alarming regularity. The music crashed around me with Greek-tragic gravity. It just felt so unbelievably weighty, and I found myself thinking that this is the essence of this music, this is what has been missing in so many of the extreme-metal performances I've witnessed recently, this element of human struggle, when the voice is not disguised with layers of Halloween-y play-acting, the aural equivalent of the face paint that turns black metal into evil Kabuki. But, God forbid, to hear the heart bared on the battlefield, to hear the sorrow within the slaughter. It was almost too much.

Even when Campbell wasn't singing, the Dio Effect was present, because the key is that you know there's a voice out there in that wilderness. It isn't merely the wilds of riff-land, where guitars and drums construct these impossibly tall, forbidding trees, clustering together in a lightless forest. What you realize when you see a band like Pallbearer is that that effect is more or less exactly half of what great metal is capable of. The other half comes when you know there's a human, preferably a solitary, wretched one, lost within that wildnerness. One who may have lost possessions, loved ones, even faith, but one who hasn't lost the ability to cry out, to lament, to emote. To sing.

Pallbearer didn't say much to the audience other than "Thank you," but the band exuded pure graciousness. After each song, fists would raise in the crowd, and the band members would hoist their beers and nod as if to say, "We know. We're here with you. We feel it too." What it is, is this metal phenomenon that makes you feel like you're tapping into something old and elemental, participating in an ancient ritual. You don't know how or why this combination of 1) volume, 2) darkness, 3) human perspective in the face of a cold, unforgiving universe (gaze at the album cover at the top of this post as you ponder that notion), yields a feeling of cleansing grace, of having been touched by something huge and terrifying yet also unspeakably beautiful. All you know is that the band feels it, and when a show is really right, the whole crowd feels it too, and gives back. Maybe they're just hoisting beers; maybe dudes are grabbing fellow dudes and throwing horn signs with their hands; maybe they're headbanging, convulsing in time with the stone giant's every earth-shaking step. Maybe, as I did last night, they're closing their eyes, bending backward, facing the ceiling, getting outside the room, the city, the world. At that point, you're not just listening; you're communing.

That's what great metal does, and the Dio Effect makes it all possible.