(Accompanying Spotify Playlist)


10. Danny Brown- XXX
Danny Brown sounds like the problem child of Aesop Rock and Busta Rhymes. Across XXX, he filters sex, fatalism, and Detroit doom through his wide-mouthed yip, and he pulls such a convincing rope-a-dope with the sophomoric parts that it’s all the more devastating when he says something sincere. Brown knew this mixtape might be his only shot, so he pulled out all the stops.


9. Bon Iver- Bon Iver
The greatest challenge for 2011 rock critics is describing Bon Iver’s aching, cohesive second album without resorting to dickish critical cliches about its “textured soundscapes” or the facile codifying of it as “dad-rock” or, as Christopher Weingarten put it, “Bruce Hornsby lite.”* We’re no longer satisfied with music of a retractable scope and yearning lyrics sung by what sounds like a fallen angel. We need a pithy story to go along with it. The beauty of Justin Vernon’s second act is that, after countless listens, I’m still parsing what I hear the lyrics as versus what they actually are and still reflecting on why certain songs on this collection touch me so deeply. Maybe the greatest trick someone can pull is defying description. 


8. Youth Lagoon- The Year of Hibernation
This year’s bedroom masterpiece is Youth Lagoon’s wistful debut. What jumps out on the first listen is the use of a drum machine that sounds a few generations removed. It’s the only thing contrived in an otherwise organic album made by and for a dude with perpetual headphones. Trevor Powers cranks his keyboards to their winsome setting, and harmonizes his diffident lyrics over and over with himself to create an intimate dreampop all his own. Here’s hoping he never finds a real drummer.


7. Wu Lyf- Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
In what was a daring move for the RapidShare 2011, Wu Lyf released their first full-length with no fanfare, interviews, or press kit—no explanation of who they were or why they were here. Instead they let the music speak for itself. They get a lot of mileage out of the interplay between frontman Elle Jaie’s reflective keyboards and cathartic cackle, which spits out every line as if it’s been held in for years, which, for all we know, it has. It would have been impossible for music this immediate to stay anonymous for long.


6. Jay-Z and Kanye West- Watch the Throne
There aren’t a lot of words on Watch the Throne. Well, there are, but for a style of music that traffics in the volume of words, it’s concise: sometimes one verse from each guy, and they’re never afraid to let the music breathe. Some songs, “Niggas in Paris”, for instance, seem distilled to just punchlines and catchphrases. (And sometimes those catchphrases are inane, but if Jay-Z can “sell water to a well,” then “What she order? Fish filet?” is no big deal.) It feels like watching a movie made by a master craftsman that consists of only car chases. Once I got past my initial concerns, it was my most-listened-to album of the year. I still feel as if the middle part is contrived, but the fun they’re having is infectious.


5. Clams Casino- Instrumentals/Rainforest EP
Hip-hop’s hottest new producer isn’t even sure that’s what he is. Yes, his compositions are used by rappers. They share the same bass sound and time signatures as most other beats, but then Clams’ based aesthetic leaps past anything we’ve heard before—or certainly anything we’ve heard since his forebearers RJD2 and DJ Shadow. Snatching ethereal found sounds and washes of distant voices, both of his solo projects are constructed on the basis of fractions of a second. Sometimes you can tell how good something is by the scales of inferior copies it inspires, and I think all of 2012 rap will try unsuccessfully to sound like Clams Casino.


4. Girls- Father, Son, Holy Ghost
The knock on Girls is that they’re derivative, that they’re snatching and reappropriating the best parts of fifty years of Americana. But that’s the point: It’s the best parts. I’m not even finished arguing about whether a solo is stolen from Ariel Pink or the Rolling Stones before an unmistakable Byrds harmony combines with a Buddy Holly delivery. Speaking of that delivery, Christopher Owens’ voice retains all of the edge it had on Album, but he has shaved down some of the precocious affectations. Now it’s an expressive instrument without ever being a cloying one. In every way, Father, Son, Holy Ghost is an enlarging of and an improvement on a sound that was already pretty great.


3. James Blake- James Blake
James Blake’s lush, sexy album hit me at the right time this year. Ever since Februrary, I’ve been admiring his soulful voice, as well as all the manipulations it takes on the record. Here’s my biggest problem: Most reviews have focused on how James Blake is a referendum on dubstep. I get that the bubbling bass underneath something like “Limit to Your Love” or the pitch-shifting on “The Wilhelm Scream” shares common ground with Skrillex and the “Sound of Young America (TM).” But to me, they’ve got the wrong genre: This is a reformatting of all of soul music.


2. M83- Hurry Up We’re Dreaming
Anthony Gonzalez, the surviving twin of M83, is from France. While that might not have been important before, it’s crucial to the success of his latest expansive double album. Hurry Up We’re Dreaming was recorded in Los Angeles, and it is the sound of an archetypal L.A. (and America) from the view of an outsider who has only seen it in neon-filtered late night movies. While I love the sequencing of the album, it’s at its best when it goes off the rails on something like the jubilant second half take-off of “Claudia Lewis.” The vocals usually soar high over everything else in the mix, and that seems perfect for such a widescreen Hollywood sound.


1. Drake- Take Care
The monster of hip-hop culture has paradox as its fur, and hating is its food, its air, and its love. Hate is anonymous but personal; it is disposable but essential; it is destructive but motivating. Historically, hip-hop has been music for the powerless, and hate is the personification of that disenfranchisement. It is actuating discernment, the criticism that stands in as the ultimate power: the loud voice saying “I don’t need you.” For some, it is their only voice.

Hate also equalizes because the hated can never really escape it. Cater to the haters and you admit your own powerlessness and imperfection. Prove them right. Ignore the haters and confirm all of their suspicions about your own fatuousness. Make them stronger. Thus hate is a misinterpreted cultural ouroboros that leaves no one unchanged in its wake.

So it’s only right that the fulcrum of modern hip-hop has a complex relationship with it. After all, while Drake’s Take Care has gone platinum, its haters are vocal. They hate that Drake sings too much, they hate that Drake wears sweaters, they hate that Drake will sometimes lie that he packs guns, and they hate that Drake is so many things at once to so many people. They hate that he can stew in Houston purp-signifiers, shout out the 504, and reference Napa Valley from the half-ivory tower of Toronto. Haters revel in certainty, and Drake spends most of Take Care dividing himself into thousands of contradictory fractals.

In crafting such a startlingly vulnerable, shame-filled, conflicted album, what Drake has done is reposition the hate directed at him through eighteen passive-aggressive missives—even the record’s title is a polite smirk. At first, on “Shot for Me,” he turns the hate toward the Alicias and Katias who have wronged him. From then on though, he becomes his own worst enemy, second-guessing suicide and indulging in his own destruction. For example, on “Lord Knows”, otherwise a fun song boosted by a junkyard dog of a Rick Ross verse, Drake laments, “I don’t trust these hoes at all/But that’s just a result of me paying attention.” Even if someone wrongs him, he ends up blaming himself.

But that implicit inward direction gets complicated and ultimately reconciled by album closer “The Ride,” which knowingly starts with “You won’t feel me ‘til everybody say they love you but it’s not love.” Drake understands, and by the time he has completed this odyssey, he has transformed the hate into what it really was all along.

*- I rarely agree with Weingarten, but he has a knack for condescending comparisons. He called The Weeknd “music for MFM threesomes.”