5. “Chill-Wave”

I’m not going to list a single element of this year’s preferred blog friendly genre – not because they’re homogeneous or bland, i won’t make that claim – over the year I’ve found chill-wave to pull from an assortment of the music collective unconscious, from early 90′s hip hop, to 70′s am radio, and genre’s as disparate as hardcore and smooth jazz. While the end products are similar enough to comfortably align under the same stretchy star – they stay unique to themselves.

Pitchfork bands like Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, Ducktails, Toro Y Moi, Washed Out, and CFCF (just to name a handful.) have occupied the recently played list on my iTunes consistently this year – maybe I’ve needed a little more escapism than usual, or perhaps i’m just getting lazy in my musical relationships, but these bands have had me nodding my head and raising my eyebrows to their production choices; washes of nostalgic synth, bouncy white-boy funk, reverb drenched space-vocals – You know, actually it’s probably just because i’ve loved New Order and The Cocteau Twins for so long i’m just happy to hear their distant echoes reconstituted and re-imagined.

Some of my favorite moments in music this year are off of these albums, Neon Indian‘s 6669 (I Don’t Know If You Know) throws you into the drivers seat of your beat up K car, complete with ancient-tape-deck-as-unreliable-narrator production, driving somewhere late at night, (probably BK) just really really stoned. Washed Out and CFCF are picking up were Air France and The Tough Alliance left off last year, albeit filtered through more overt american tropes of hip hop and suburbia, and tell us their dreams of warm climates, dance parties and unending romantic love with an impossibly beautiful stranger. The last two minutes of Memory Tapes‘ Bicycle alone was a early contender for #1 – it just didn’t get that much better for me this year, and that makes me think,

As our economy and environment continues to eat shit and die and Obama’s promises are slowly crushed under the jackboot of reality, this kind of escapism feels so necessary just to maintain my sanity, when the day or week is over, there’s Ol’ Nick Cave or Antony, maybe some Oldham or Songs Ohia, John Cale or Judy Sill - frankly, staring me down – sure, this misery loves company, but lately I’ve leaned towards forgetting my sorrows instead of my usual preference of drowning (in) them (with them.) These bands make for perfect companions for a night of revelry, though – like the morning after any great night of catharsis, your often left thinking to yourself, “I did what?!” and while it’s too early in the long night of my discontent to know, i don’t doubt that even a few months from now i’ll be saying “I listened to what?!” But until then i’m glad to have such great distractions, sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.

4. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Phoenix have likely made the album of their career with this one – everything has come together into such a perfectly compact and muscular pit bull of pop rock. Every hook and bridge, every place where they could have placed a drum fill but didn’t, ever lyrical snippet, like a sniper’s bullet right to your happy spot. It’s telling that the subsequent remix album could do nothing to improve upon any of these songs – but these facts alone would not get them on my list, they’ve made some spot on pop music in the past, the fact that the album is completely consistent back to front is a big factor, the deciding element however, is the subtle way Mars and Co. inject each track with nostalgia and longing – memories (or wishes?) for long distant Roman sunsets, the promise of returned love, the nostalgia of youth (“Do you remember when 21 years was old?”). It’s this juxtaposition of airtight pop and river walk rumination that makes Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix one of the best of the year, and the best of their career to date.

3. The xx – The xx

If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve only been listening to this album for a month, it may have placed at #1. The xx have made the album that I’ve been wanting to make myself, for two years – actually, they’ve made the album i wish I’d had to the ability to even conceive of imagining, let alone producing… i digress. If music is a body than the xx is music stripped down to it’s smoldering, bleeding heart, and it’s all the better for it’s lack of that other stuff. What we’re left with is sentiment beyond their years, and style that both speaks to the past (Young Marble Giants, Interpol, Burial), and the future of music – (don’t be surprised if we see a new wave of dark minimalism in British bands this coming year.) Skeletal beats, verb heavy guitar and bass, quietly whirring synths and the back and forth girl/boy ruminations on love, lust, and longing. These are the ventricles, aorta, and the blood being pushed rhythmically and meditatively back and forth. It’s easily one of the most simply engaging pieces of music I’ve ever heard, this year or any.

2. Fever Ray – Fever Ray

sounds sort of like this picture looks – but creepier and more personal.

1. Amesoeurs – Amesoeurs

The french have been turning out genre bending music for decades, most recently with with it’s own take on Black Metal – adding elements of Post Rock, folk, and that distinctly french je ne sais qua that makes you immediately think, “are these guys french or something?” Bands like Alcest, and Pest Noir (both fronted by a guy who goes by the name of Neige) take what by now has become a homogenized black metal sound, and take it to new extremes, or mellow it out and expose it’s emo roots.

Amesoeurs, is in this vein – and then so much more. In short it’s a Frankenstein monster of almost every genre of music i’ve been listening to for the past 5 years; Black Metal, Shoegaze, post-punk, new-wave, and just a touch of classic, SST period alternative punk. If you think this sounds absolutely horrid on paper, trust me i thought the same thing. As a rule (that deserves to be broken.) i’m not a fan of bands that attempt to graft genre’s on to sub genres, and hop around playfully between influences – where some might find this entertaining, more often than not I just find it disingenuous.

What makes Amesoeurs such an incredible, absolutely astonishing success is the way, track after track after track, they take these disparate elements, and with incredible confidence, graft walls of shoegaze with black metal blast and shriek, cure-esque bass and drum figures and sultry female francais, seamlessly. I was reading the liner notes to the Eagle’s greatest hits double disc compilation recently (long car ride to Mississippi, the only CD in the rental car was… yep.) and one of the dudes, (probably wasn’t Joe Walsh..) was talking about the most difficult and important thing for a songwriter to do when songwriting, is to make it seem like it wasn’t pieced together over time, that it was thrown off, that you have to remove all seams and stitches.

Amesoeurs is just that. Seamless, as if Dr. Frankenstein has created Neitzche’s Superman (Hyperbolic much?) – instead of that big drooling goober with the flattop.  An immense undertaking that if my research is correct, took a few years to complete, an incredible amount of time and struggle, and ended with the band dissolving and returning to their various other music projects after playing only a handful of shows. A shame i’ll never get to see them, but that this album was ever created is incredible. That it’s the best album I’ve heard all year – completely astounding.