Previously: I hope you took a few minutes to explore the outstanding recipients of this year’s Gold and Platinum LP awards. Honorable Mentions, too.

I don’t think many readers will find much controversy in the assertion that things have been hard over the past few years, and 2010 and 2011 were especially hellish in my neck of the woods. So it’s no surprise to find artists focusing on the difficulties they see (and often live themselves). It’s rare, though, to find someone who’s singing about the bad times with as much depth and empathy as we find in Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit’s Here We Rest, my 2011 CD of the Year.

Andrew Leahey, writing at AMG, explains that this song cycle focuses on

the archetypal characters that populate most struggling Southern towns: the barflies and ball players, the heartbreakers and the heartbroken, the war vets who return home and the starry-eyed kids who leave. Isbell’s hometown was hit hard by the Great Recession of 2008, and he captures his subjects somewhere between the realization that their lives have been impacted and the sad resignation that they’ve been irrevocably changed.

I’d expand on this to argue that the album oscillates, in some cases drawing a bright line between dreams and realities and in other cases simply inhabiting a landscape of numb despair. In the lead track, “Alabama Pines,” Isbell finds himself in a cheap hotel room reflecting on the end of a relationship that he didn’t know how to make work.

If we pass through on a Sunday, better make a stop at Wayne’s.
It’s the only open liquor store north, and I can’t stand the pain
of being by myself without a little help
on a Sunday afternoon.

I needed that damn woman like a dream needs gasoline.
I tried to be some ancient kind of man,
one that’s never seen the beauty in the world,
but I tried to chase it down… tried to make the whole thing mine.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard a song about not knowing how to be the man she wants, but Isbell grounds it in such a vivid sense of place that we can almost feel the fact of the failures sticking to our skin long after the last note has faded.

There’s not much that passes for happiness or credible hope on Here We Rest, but what finally broke me down, after seven or eight spins, was sitting with the lyrics and humming along to “Stopping By,” a gut-wrenching number about dropping in to see Dad, unannounced, after 15 years. I’m sure most of us understand how the dysfunctions of one generation all too predictably serve as the only role model the next generation has. If we wonder why a boy grows up unable to connect with a woman – say, the woman in “Alabama Pines” or perhaps “Daisy Mae” – we might have a look at their parents. Add a hint of bygone scandal, the intimation of bile and repression that still characterizes family and community in the Gothic South, and what remains is a moment where little is said, even less is understood. Bear with me as I quote a slightly longer passage:

How did your life turn out? Do you ever think about
a teenage girl in Chattanooga?
You ever tell your folks the truth?
That might’ve been the last of you.
Would’ve been a shame. We hardly knew ya.

Now I’m stopping by. I’m stopping by, Daddy.

I think the best of me’s still standing in the doorway
Counting cars and counting days and counting years
I could say you made me go through life the hard way
But it might’ve been worse if you were here…

Looking through a picture book. There’s one I think my momma took.
You couldn’t have been much over twenty.
Shirtless in your cutoff jeans, you hand a lollipop to me.
I probably asked where you got the money.

A picture on another page. I recognize my eyes have aged.
I’d been alone for quite a while then.
Trying to get a match to burn. Waiting on a latch to turn.
I still have difficulty smiling.

The sins of the father… I guess this song hits me so hard because I recognize too much of it. A lot of us grew up a bit stunted because our dads were only marginally equipped for the world they lived in, and they themselves were far too crippled emotionally and spiritually to provide us with any kind of continuity that might sustain us in a world that seems to change profoundly every 15 minutes. They passed on their brutality in order to make us tough. Their pathological inability to express love or joy engendered in their sons a desperate hope that having no idea what to say would be mistaken for cool. Their transience left us uncertain as to what exactly was meant by the idea of home and an abiding suspicion that there was something suspiciously effeminate about domesticity. Manliness demanded faithlessness, because only in the fleeting sexual attentions of a parade of “strange” could masculinity be validated.

I’m probably projecting more than is healthy, but the genius of Here We Rest is that Isbell tells his stories and the stories of characters he knows in a way that invites the listener to share his/her own experiences. That he gives voice to such crushed affect is one thing. That he is able to do it with such intimacy is quite another.

At some point I should probably mention that Isbell is a superb tunesmith, that the production and arrangements manage both sparsity and complexity in ways that lend resonance and tonal depth to the proceedings, and that in a better world you’d be able to tune into a Country & Western station in your town and hear this disc instead of whatever autotuned bullshit Taylor Swift’s army of cynical Svengalis have cocked up this week. There are moments where he reminds me of Jeffrey Dean Foster and others where I think I hear an echo of Warren Zevon. Praise doesn’t get much higher in this quarter.

Here We Rest is nothing short of brilliant and I’m honored to add it to the list of albums that have topped my Best of lists through the years. I hope you’ll give it a listen. He’s a little sample to see you on your way. First, the official video for “Alabama Pines.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

And a music-only YouTube upload of “Stopping By.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previously: the 2011 Gold LPs and the Honorable Mentions.

The Platinum LPs, awarded for exceptional artistic merit, are always the point where this process begins to wear on me. I want to make sure I have included all the worthy bands and that my words do those acknowledged justice. I never feel like I have succeeded on either count, and this year seems even worse than usual. So my apologies to the artists here: my remarks are in no way up to the standards of the music you produced last year.

[sigh] So here we go.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong
It seems like each year there’s that one band, sort of an accessible, trendy indie outfit that pegs everybody’s hip meters and makes it okay to like intelligent guitar pop. A couple years ago it was unquestionably Phoenix. Last year I argued that it was Two Door Cinema Club. This year I think it was supposed to be Army Navy. As much as I liked the Army Navy disc, though, Belong is the cool-to-be-melodic standard bearer for 2011.

The band’s previous work had been on the twee side. The songwriting was been engaging, but there wasn’t a muscle in sight. This album, though, begins by jacking up those fuzzy guitars and delivering a sugar-coated boot to the teeth at precisely the 15-second mark. Perhaps working with the likes of Flood and Alan Moulder helped the band grow into something more substantial. Whatever, the signal-to-noise ratio is a tad higher on Belong, and the result is 100% joyride.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Snake Rattle Rattle Snake: Sineater
For awhile there 2011 was starting to feel like the year of dark, female-fronted bands who remind me of The Airplane. Esben & the Witch got all the hype but Denver’s Snake Rattle Rattle Snake turned out to be the real deal.

My entreé to the band was my discovery that the drummer was Kit Peltzel, formerly of Space Team Electra. (Kit has since departed.) In an odd way, SRRS puts me in mind of STE – this might be what an updated, more dance-minded Space Team might sound like. Hayley Helmericks exhibits an intensely literate command of the microphone, and every note emerging from the simmering murk behind her seems calculated to maximize her impact on the listener’s consciousness.

I know that the old triangulation technique rarely communicates the truth about a band’s sound, but I can’t resist suggesting that SRRS is kinda like if Grace Slick and Siouxie got together and formed a shoegazer band.

Yeah, I know. Just go listen to it.

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Baron Bane: LPTO
My senior year in high school we read Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and it proved to be a defining moment in the formation of my artistic aesthetic. It was the first time I had encountered such a close juxtaposition between darkness and beauty, and I’ve never quite gotten over it. Which brings us to one of my very favorite CDs of 2011.

Dark, haunted, intimating a hidden beauty just beyond the reach of the headlights…I played LPTO to death last year and every spin rewarded that thing in me that seeks loveliness within the deep of night. Baron Bane hails from Sweden, and as it turns out Swedes are used to long dark periods with no sunshine (especially this time of year). The songs on this disc, though, articulate the tension between light and dark, with moody minor chord structures and performances shot through with the radiance of Ida Long’s vocals.

I’ve described them to friends as being a bit like Kate Bush. The differences matter, though. Whereas Kate leans heavily into the avant, BB is more committed to accessible pop song structures. Also, where Bush’s voice is wispy and etherial, BB singer Ida Long brings considerable dynamic range to the proceedings.

Major to thanks to my friend Anders Thyr for introducing me to them (they apparently hail from the same neck of the woods). I owe you one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Raveonettes: Raven In The Grave
While we’re talking about Northern European bands (in this case, Denmark), another of my favorites is back with a bit of a change-up. I love how Tim Sendra sums up The Raveonettes’ past as ”noisy girl group and razorblades wall of sound” before characterizing Raven as building

a lingering mood of melancholy and sadness that pervades the entire album. It’s not a forbidding or cold sound since the duo still has melodies so hooky that even a blanket of gray mist can’t cover them up. The arrangements are more enveloping than usual, with the fuzzy walls of guitars replaced by waves of synths on most of the songs.

I agree with this largely, although (perhaps in keeping with my “Eve of St. Agnes” fetish from above) I do feel a coldness and darkness about this disc. The difference is, perhaps, that I find comfort in the cold. For instance, listen to the guitars throughout (although what I’m describing is instantly evident on the lead track): that beautiful dissonance sounds less like guitar strings being played than hammered. The iciness of this effect is enveloped by sweeping keys that will remind you of every electropop hit you loved in ’80s (without actually sounding like any one you can recall in particular). The total effect is like being inside a warm fleece blanket on a frigid day.

In other words, plenty of melancholy. But it’s a comforting sort of melancholy that reminds us: some gray afternoons are prettier than others.

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The Blueflowers: In Line With The Broken-Hearted
No surprises here – I’ve been raving about this CD ever since The Lost Patrol’s manager, Ed Colavito, introduced me to it several months ago. Then, in December, they capped a big year by winning S&R’s Tournament of Rock 3 (ironically enough, nipping their good friends TLP in the final).

Along the way, I pondered the challenge of describing their sound to my friends. In marketing themselves they made use of “Americana,” but that wasn’t quite right. “Americana-noir” gets us closer to the longing affect of Kate Hinote’s aching, retro-ingenue vocal style and Tony Hamera’s wide-screen, surf-inflected guitars. (And if you think you’ve heard me use the term “wide-screen” before, you probably have – in so many ways, Hamera and Lost Patrol guitarist Stephen Masucci are mining the same rich vein; you’d never mistake them for one another, but you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were friends who respected each other’s work, either.)

If I’d been spinning vinyl on my old turntable I’d have worn through In Line With The Broken-Hearted this year. I honestly have no idea how many times I played it from one end to the other. Several dozen, anyway. And I’m nowhere close to tired of it. It’s just one of those albums with a sonic, intuitive depth that seems to reveal some new nuance with every pass.

Brilliant, brilliant stuff. I hope I don’t have to wait long for the follow-up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Adele: 21
Back in the day hype tended to be married to merit. These days hype and merit are completely, utterly and tragically divorced from merit. So anything generating as much media heat as 21 is probably to be avoided. But damn, every once in awhile an artist comes along who deserves that kind of critical and commercial acclaim. This CD is on a lot of best of 2011 lists and for good reason – for awhile there I thought it might even be my CD of the Year.

Nobody who’s only 21 ought to sound this way. Adele’s voice is a thing of wonder – rich, resonant, mature and big as the sky. Much has been made of the pain of the breakup behind this song cycle, but the truth is more than a woman in pain – this is the sound of a strong woman in pain. A woman who’s hurting, but who is going to be okay. It’s sort of the inverse of that first Fiona Apple album: all the depth and gravity, minus the fear that she might come after you with a knife.

Probably the best part is this: Adele is such a powerful talent that she’s going to be plenty viable long after the neo-Soul movement has faded away.

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The consensus seems to be that Wasting Light is the best FF effort since The Color and the Shape, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s take at AMG borders on suggesting that it’s their best ever. He accurately notes the album’s ferocity, attributing it to the latent influence of Dave Grohl’s old bandmate, QotSA’s Josh Homme. Whether that’s the inspiration or not, Wasting Light takes no prisoners and the result is pure freakin’ adrenaline.

Also, I don’t know how much extra you have to pay to get Lemmy as your limo driver, but I bet it’s worth every penny.

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Mayer Hawthorne: How Do You Do
I was in the midst of grooving hard on Fitz & the Tantrums when my friend and former colleague Carole McNall passed along a link to something she thought I’d enjoy. Because she knows I dig me some neo-Soul. That link turned out to include Mayer Hawthorne and the world was never the same again.

Okay, well, that may be overstating the case a tad, but as fun, can’t-get-that-song-out-of-my-ears ’60s and ’70s-influenced R&B goes, it’s hard to beat How Do You Do. (BTW, for those of you back in the Carolinas, this is the best Beach Music CD you’ve heard in years, except maybe for Dixon’s 2010 release.) There’s never a false referent and every track takes you somewhere you haven’t been in years, but wow, it’s great to revisit the place. Granted, The Temptations never had the potty mouth that MH does, but you got to roll with the times.

This isn’t the only best-of list Hawthorne is on, and good for him. Some might snipe a little that he’s working CeeLo Green’s turf, but I can’t imagine Green having any complaints at all about How Do You Do except maybe “turn it up.”

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Dum Dum Girls: Only in Dreams
If Dum Dum Girls remind you a little of a slightly garage-y/noise-gazey Chrissie Hynde, join the club. Except that, as much as I respected Chrissie, I just never dug her music. “Chain Gang” is the only thing she ever wrote that I liked at all. Songs aren’t a problem with Dum Dum Girls, though.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this disc because I’d been hearing about the band for some time (okay, mainly it’s just one woman), but the tracks I had been able to get my hands on underwhelmed me. They lacked polish and focus (I mean polish in the professional sense, not the overworked-in-the-studio sense). Mainly the sound came off like a kid in her basement who didn’t really understand how the equipment worked. You could tell there was potential there, but just not quite realized.

For Only in Dreams, though, Dee Dee hooked up with some real producers (including Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes) and all of a sudden all that potential is up front and sparkling. She’s a fabulous songwriter, in this case working around various personal hurdles (including the death of her mother), and the lingering effect in my case is that something this raw, inexperienced and low-fi should be barely noticeable, let alone this damned noteworthy.

I absolutely love pleasant surprises. Only in Dreams is one of the most relentlessly enjoyable CDs of 2011 and I can’t wait for what comes next. Want to hear some swirling ear candy that will be following you around the rest of the day? Click play.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Lost Patrol: Rocket Surgery
I don’t really know what to say here. TLP has been one of my favorite bands for several years now and after a painful personnel shakeup a few years ago they have continued to improve as a unit. On her first outing with the band, singer Mollie Israel did a nice job but the overall effect was a bit disjointed. She’s good, the guitars are good, the songs are good. All good, but not all fully integrated. It was like with a basketball team that had never played together. Great individual talents, but not yet a team.

Boy, has that changed.  Israel has more than grown into her spot at the microphone – she has become the sort of dynamic face and voice that can take a band to the proverbial next level. And maybe the level after that. Meanwhile, Stephen and Michael have allowed plenty of creative space for her to grow into. It’s clear that they weren’t interested in just finding a new singer. They wanted a new, fully invested, completely equal partner. And that’s where the phrase “more than the sum of the parts” comes from.

I’ve gone back and forth on Rocket Surgery ever since its release. It’s a fantastic piece of work that displays all the trademark elements the band’s fans have come to love. It also exhibits both a lyrical and aural expansion (note the instrumentation and arrangement of “Sweet Ophelia,” for instance) that signals an intent to evolve. This is very good news. As much as I have loved Stephen Masucci’s signature cinematic surf-twang guitar sound, I also value a drive toward creative growth in an artist.

On the other hand … dammit, I just loved 2010′s Dark Matter so much. I always want each CD to be better than the last one, but I’m not sure I can make a call between the two. So there it is. My big criticism: Rocket Surgery might not be better than Dark Matter.

Looking ahead, 2012 feels like a big, big year for TLP. They were featured on an episode of Gossip Girl last night and are queued up for a couple of significant movie soundtracks in the coming months, including the Amy Heckerling vampire comedy Vamps. There can be no question that Rocket Surgery affords the band an exceptional springboard to that next level mentioned above.

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John Hiatt: Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns
The critics don’t seem to regard this as one of Hiatt’s best (although not much that anybody does measures up to that standard). Still, even if it’s a bit more polished than his recent work DJ&MH plays as something very elemental. Perhaps this is due to the world-gone-to-hell tone of the songs, beginning with the opener, “Damn This Town.” As the economy has cracked and the attendant political machinery has demonstrated that it really doesn’t much care, millions of American lives have gotten worse, in some cases tragically so.

Hiatt’s voice, crusty and raw as ever, could make “It’s a Small World After All” into a blues dirge, so when he turns his attentions to the plight of American decline (in all its macro and micro iterations) we can hardly help feeling the bitterness, and perhaps the vague numbness that sets in as hope fades.

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M83: Hurry Up We’re Dreaming
I wrestled with Hurry Up We’re Dreaming more than any other release this year. I had anticipated it eagerly and when it dropped the critics went nuts. Considered objectively, I understand why. Still, I guess I had been hoping for a few more “Kim & Jessie” moments. I do love “Midnight City” (and not just because of the Victoria’s Secret commercial), and I admit that it has grown on me.

The CD is expansive and ambitious, almost as if Anthony Gonzales had set out to score an epic film set in the ’80s but made in the ’00s. Such a thing would need to capture the essence of the time, but it would also need to be contemporary. And it would need to exhibit an expansive emotional range in order to underscore the power of the narrative.

In the end, I feel like my early disappointment with the disc is a reflection on me, and not a good one. Some part of me wanted more bite-sized ear candy and M83 is to be applauded for ignoring me.

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Fountains of Wayne: Sky Full of Holes
There’s nobody quite like FoW anywhere in the indie world. You have two exceptional storytellers, and over time they’ve so honed their lyrical skills that even the cleverest moments play casually and conversationally.

All FoW albums concern themselves with the foibles of regular folks, and most particularly they enjoy having at regular folks who lack self-awareness. In the past they’ve produced these character sketches with a certain edge – maybe a bit of smirk and snark, some subtle mockery. You might say that their songs come in two varieties: laughing with and laughing at. Here, though, the attitude has mellowed a bit. The lights are still on the ne’er-do-wells (“Richie and Reuben / don’t know what they’re doing / they’re both a little out of their minds”) but there’s more empathy than I’m perhaps used to.

We also get the usual array of place and lifestyle songs (where we went, what happened, what we did) that FoW fans have come to expect. Again, though, there’s not as much of the decadent train wreck as in the past – instead, there’s the genuinely nostalgic “Dip in the Ocean.”

In many respects, SFoH is precisely what we’ve come to associate with Fountains of Wayne: insanely memorable tunes, insightful storytelling, a lingering sense of place and time and the people who were there. Some listeners might think less bite is a bad thing, but others might find the affair to be more adult, more seasoned in ways that suggest a willingness on the band’s part to evolve organically, in harmony with the tides of age and maturity.

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Doco: Stereo Chemistry I always have a hard time where Doco is concerned, for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t spend much time in their genre so I always feel inadequately informed. Second, who am I kidding? I’ve known Joh and Trev Booth since day one, just about literally, as their father is one of my best friends. So no, I’m not 100% objective.

But certain things we can say with great clarity, and those things are obvious when you listen to the band. Put simply, they can fucking play, and they’re working a musical culture where that is essential (unlike, say, Punk, where you can be successful even though you think a G-string is something you stuff dollar bills in). Trevor is one of the best guitarists at his age I have ever seen and Josh is arguably as good on bass, or better. Dave Burkart seems to intuitively understand the role of a drummer in this kind of power trio dynamic, and while he doesn’t bother with flashy, he is unquestionably the rock upon which the tent is pitched.

Not only that, Doco has continued to improve in one area that I have always held sacred: songcraft. They funk about a great deal, but they also demonstrate a great fluency with more accessible structures, and their lyrics are simply way too intelligent for popular music. Seriously, Josh and Trev (who both write) can go seriously deep on you, as in English professor deep. Spend a moment with “Experimental Railroad,” if you will.

I don’t know what else to tell you. Doco is incredibly talented and this is their best CD to date. If you think I’m biased, fine – go give it a listen and tell me what you think.

So, there are your 2011 Platinum LPs. You probably won’t agree with me on all of them, but I’ve got money that says there’s something in here who’s going to be your new favorite band. Feel free to let us know what you liked.

Now, let’s have Doco play us out. This is from their appearance last year on Eleven O’Clock Rock. Happy TunesDay, folks.

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Next: the CD of the Year

First, let me disqualify a CD.

Paul Lewis: Bag Of Rain
If my objectivity is clouded by close personal relationships, it’s absolutely obliterated by great self-interest. And since I was fortunate enough to contribute lyrics for two of the tracks on Bag of Rain, I’m not even going to pretend that I’m being critical. I can say, however, that Paul is an outstanding tunesmith and an even better singer – I’ve been saying he has one of the best voices in the business since the first time I saw him perform in the late 1980s. These qualities have only improved with time. “Platform of Our Lives,” for instance, displays a rare emotional vulnerability, and Paul the singer understands when to coat a tune in velvet and when to stomp the accelerator.

Fans of his past work will note that he’s exploring stylistically a little, even beyond the jazzy moments we’ve come to expect (the ones that provide such a nice showcase for those golden pipes).

Paul’s talent deserves a much larger stage, and here’s hoping Bag of Rain breaks him through to some new audiences. And I don’t say that just because I’m hoping for massive royalty checks. Not that this would be a bad thing…

And now, in no particular order:

Dotsun Moon: 4am
The good folks in The Lost Patrol turned me on to Dotsun Moon, a Buffalo band they’d gigged with, a few months ago. And wow, thanks guys. Here’s what I wrote back in March:

I’ve always been a sucker for bands descended from the Portishead side of the trip-hop family tree (oddly, I like many of these artists more than Portishead themselves), and Mary Ognibene’s understated, sultry delivery hits me right between the, ummm, well, let’s just say eyes here to avoid any trouble with the broadcast standards department, shall we?Musically, Rich Flierl (keys, guitars, and the primary songwriter) conjures a smoky, minimalist economy of sound that feels quite polished despite its sparseness.

Who do they remind me of (because since you haven’t heard them, we have to triangulate via bands you may know, right)? Well, I mentioned Portishead, and Flierl admits to a fondness for Massive Attack and Jah Wobble. “Who Do You Love?” suggests that he’s heard a bit of Love & Rockets, as well. There are places where Ognibene reminds me a lot of Girl Next Door’s Kat Green and the CD’s more animated numbers put me in mind of a sort of noir version of Supreme Beings of Leisure. Other places I swear I hear bits and pieces of The Church, U2, maybe a little Echo. Or maybe I’m projecting – hard to say. Sounds and influences sneak into a mix from all over the place.

S&R readers seem to agree with me, as their support propelled the band into the semi-finals of our recent Tournament of Rock 3. All in a all, a great year ad I’m already wondering when the next CD is due.

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REM.: Collapse Into Now
There’s a great argument to be made that REM is the greatest American band in history. Yeah, we can debate, but if you’re having the argument and REM isn’t in the discussion your credibility is automatically suspect. This is significant, because Collapse proved to be the band’s swan song.

A lot of people thought the previous disc, Accelerate, was the best thing they’d done since Automatic for the People, but I felt like their decision on CIN to revisit the haunted Southern goth atmospherics that defined their greatest moments from the ’80s and early ’90s was inspired. It had a warm, broken-in quality that I found comforting and appropriate for a farewell. In my book, REM’s final effort was even better than Accelerate, and while I know we all wish they could have recaptured the vital relevance they represented once upon a time, this was a far better way to exit than what we get from so many bands.

Best of luck, guys, and thanks for the memories.

Rose Hill Drive: Americana
Hmmm. Fun-loving, no-frills, pass me another beer party stoner rock. From … this can’t be right … Boulder?

I played the hell out of this disc last year and I actually want to say a word of thanks to the band. In a lot of ways 2011 really, really sucked. But Americana never once failed to pick me up. Rock has always thrived on the ability to immerse itself in sublime moments of hedonism – think about the cover of It’s Only Rock & Roll, for instance. Or anything Electric Six ever recorded. Even when they’re making an interesting point (“Psychoanalyst” comes to mind) they’re doing so in a way so throbbing with positive energy that you can’t believe you’re actually learning something.

When it stops being fun, it stops being rock, right? And folks, this was the most fun CD I heard all year.

Death Cab for Cutie: Codes and Keys
I never quite know what to say about a Death Cab CD. I mean, Ben Gibbard is one of those guys who has sort of ascended – even his least interesting work is better than most artists’ best. He’s in this category of automatics for me: Eels, Peter Gabriel, World Party, Graham Parker – if they release something I buy it without bothering to sample.

All that said, Codes and Keys doesn’t grab me as hard as the previous two discs. I wonder if it has something to do with Gibbard’s personal life. While he was making this he was married to Zooey Deschanel, and I can’t help thinking that would make you happy. And maybe happiness wasn’t as compelling a muse? In any case, they’re now divorcing, so I expect the next one to be one for the ages. I mean, if Zooey left me, we’d have to rent out a stadium to handle all the muses who’d show up to wallow in my misery….

Army Navy: The Last Place
I have to be honest – I was just stunned to see this amount of attention showered on a Power Pop group (even one where the front guy used to be in a band with Ben Gibbard). There are seemingly thousands of PPop Underground bands, all immersed in the legacy of The Beatles, Badfinger, The Raspberries and Big Star, jacking out tons of hook-infested guitar pop every year and most of it goes unnoticed outside of the community, which is passionate to the point of obsession but too small to sustain much of a market. Witness the recent demise of Bruce Brodeen’s Not Lame label: it was regarded with nothing short of reverence, but in the end it just didn’t pay the bills, so Bruce had to move on.

Anyway, as guitar-driven ear candy goes, this is indeed a great disc, and part of that I think owes to its unifying theme. Instead of a collection of neat songs, The Last Place revolves around lead singer Justin Kennedy’s ill-fated affair with a woman who was apparently a very prominent Hollywood starlet. And also very prominently married. (I still have no idea who she was, despite a bit of frenzied Googling.) The emotional tragedy that unfolded seems to have grounded the CD, affording it a depth that a lot of Power Pop never quite musters.

Oh, yeah, love the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Washed Out: Within and Without
As a term with the ability to signify goes, “chillwave” is damned near useless. It encompasses bands that we’ll charitably call “experimental” as well as this kid in Georgia who, says Tom Breihan of Pitchfork, “makes bedroom synthpop that sounds blurred and woozily evocative, like someone smeared Vaseline all over an early OMD demo tape, then stayed up all night trying to recreate what they heard.”

I can’t top that line. I can tell you that I love music that can weave an unobtrusive ambient tapestry around me when I’m trying to work but that also rewards close attention. Within and Without is a gorgeous, lush aural experience that makes me think “washed out” less than it does “washed over,” as in being washed over by waves of pure color on a tropical beach at sunset. With a beautiful woman and maybe a Mai Tai.

Queen Electric: Queen Electric
First with Wanderlust and then performing solo and as Bachelor Number One, Scot Sax has been quietly jacking out melodic, infectious guitar pop since the mid-1990s. Of course, I don’t think the “quietly” part has been by design. Sax just has the misfortune to be brilliant at a genre deemed unfashionable. Maybe this new project will generate a little more buzz for him. Queen Electric is the most muscular Sax project to date, with an extra dose of “power” in the Power Pop. Unlike past efforts, this crisp seven-track EP takes its cues more from the Rock side of things, very adeptly echoing everything from ’70s-era Elton John to ELO to Todd Rundgren to early-’90s U2 (note the guitars on the lead track).

With luck, QE is but a tasty 20-minute amuse oreille preparing us for something more substantial in the coming months.

Allen Stone: Allen Stone
2011 was a fun year in the world of neo-Soul, and Allen Stone was a big, blue-eyed part of it. I discovered this disc when my friend Carole McNall forwarded me the link to an NPR feature on Stone, The Alabama Shakes and Mayer Hawthorne. At the time I was playing Fitz & the Tantrums to death, so I was looking for more artists up that general alley.

It’s always seemed that this genre comprises a spectrum, with Soul on one end and Pop/R&B on the other. Abstracted, you have James Brown vs. Dusty Springfield, and in the neo- context this adds up to Sharon Jones vs., say, Lucky Soul. Stone lies somewhere to the James Brown side of center, and his best moments serve up a smooth, muscular white-boy sound that reminds me a lot of Ryan Shaw. And that’s a compliment, trust me.

Ida Long: In Dark Woods EP
Ida is the singer for Baron Bane, who you’ll be hearing more about in an upcoming post. So I won’t spend too much time here, save to say rumor has it that this EP is a precursor to a 2012 solo effort. Such a thing is to be much hoped for. Fans of Tears for Fears are especially going to want to hear the cover of “Mad World,” which she did for Mad Men. Gorgeous stuff, and in places a tad more experimental and quirky than the Baron Bane disc…

Able Archer: The Way Machines See Us
Matt Huseman was the front man for The Greenberry Woods and Splitsville, two fantastic Power Pop quartets. For a few moments once upon a time, The Greenberry Woods seemed poised for something big, but labels can’t seem to stop being labels and so the story went. Splitsville, meanwhile, jacked out one of the best guitar pop/rock CDs I own, Incorporated.

Now Huseman lives in Denver where he has hooked up with some new bandmates descended from very different musical pedigrees. When I first found myself thinking “this is kinda like Radiohead and Coldplay informed by a vague Power Pop sensibility” I realized that it really, really shouldn’t work (especially since I’m not a huge Radiohead fan and have no regard whatsoever for Coldplay). But somehow it does, and I think it’s because the band doesn’t try to be a fusion of contrasts. They give the guitars their heads and Huseman’s vocal presence sort of integrates the rest organically.

The result is alternately aggressive and reflective, melodic and dissonant, and it’s ambitious and complex from one end to the other. Truly deserving of a wide audience….

The Horrors: Skying
It isn’t hard to find bands influenced by Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division and Bauhaus these days. The danger, of course, is coming off as overly derivative. The last thing any of us needs is a generation of Joy Division cover bands terrorizing the Holiday Inn lounges of America.

The Horrors certainly do swirly, swimmingly dark neo-Post Punk, but they also import a dissonance that suggests the presence of a My Bloody Valentine CD or two in their collection (and maybe even a copy of Verve’s essential Storm in Heaven). It’s that shoegazer element that sets them apart and makes this CD so genuinely interesting to listen to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

She Wants Revenge: Valleyheart
I loved SWR’s 2006 debut. Yeah, it was making no attempt at all to distance itself from the influence of Joy Division, but it was absolutely seething with modern-day LA excess that, in its finest moments, cut like a designer boot full of straight razors. The 2007 follow-up? Not so much. I still don’t quite know what went wrong there, but the inattention to songcraft didn’t help.

At that point I wrote them off. Hey, we had some fun but let’s not spoil it, okay? Then my buddy Mike Pecaut sends me the Spotify link to Valleyheart and, well, it was one of the most pleasantly surprising moments of the year. Heather Phares at AMG says:

…Valleyheart injects the band’s sound with some much-needed ambition and eclecticism. A concept album about the San Fernando Valley and the turbulent relationships of its denizens, this set of songs proves once and for all that while She Wants Revenge’s influences may be from New York and England, they’re undeniably a product of Los Angeles.

You had me at “concept album about the San Fernando Valley.”

The Cars: Move Like This
I imagine a lot of us received news that the surviving members of The Cars were reuniting for a new CD with a degree of trepidation. How will they be able to translate that decade-defining sound from a generation ago into a 21st century indie context that’s extraordinarily suspicious of anything that smacks of slickness?

The answer? Well, it’s like they never broke up. Move Like This is unmistakably a Cars album, but the production and arrangements are contemporary enough that it doesn’t really sound out of place here in the third millennium. In the final analysis the new disc isn’t as groundbreaking as the debut or as absolutely iconic as Heartbeat City, but it’s better than Door to Door and on a par with Panorama or Shake It Up. Not bad at all.

The Outfield: Replay
I was always a huge fan of The Outfield, which never got much love after the explosive success of its debut. But their two follow-ups, Bangin’ and Voices of Babylon (especially the latter) suffered not because of a lack of ambition or quality, but simply as a result of changing musical fashions.

Turns out the guys are still together and recording, and if you liked them in the ’80s you’re probably going to like Replay. I might have counseled then to pick a name for the disc that connotes something a little less “hey, you’ve heard this before!” Still, that may be just as well: there’s no real effort to innovate here. No, it’s just a disc chocked full of really catchy guitar pop that sounds exactly like, well, an Outfield record. And I’m fine with that.

Wire: Red Barked Tree
What the hell. The Cars, The Outfield, and now Wire? Talk about your year for dinosaur comebacks.

[ahem] If you didn’t know, Wire was one of the most influential bands of the ’70s and ’80s, evolving from a Punk standard bearer into an important figure in the development of post-Punk. Very few bands have exerted this kind of influence, and just about none of them are still at it 30-35 years later.

Red-Barked Tree isn’t changing the landscape again, but it’s a most worthy effort that reminds us what made the band great in the first place. Minimalist, with nods to accessibility, uncompromising and intelligent, this CD should serve as an inspiration to younger bands thinking about how to matter to decades instead of weeks.

The Sounds: Something to Die For
My friend John (hi, John!) hates this CD. Seriously loathes it. And I sympathize with him – he’d like the band to be mining the same vein that made 2003′s Living in America so damned great. Loud, smart, melodic, strutting, all up in your grille. I know not all critics agree with me but I thought it was a superb record. But now our Swedish friends have decided they want to be a dance band, and Something to Die For has massive club play as its driving motivation.

My take is that people like to dance and when I was DJing I was always looking for tuneage that didn’t suck the IQ out of my head while I was partying. I see Something to Die For as analogous to their earlier work: as Living in America was to garagy Punk/Pop, so Something to Die For is to club. I wish it had been released when I was behind the turntables.

IAMX: Volatile Times
Honestly, no release conflicted me more this year. I’m a massive IAMX fan and the previous couple of discs I think are among the best of the past decade. So my expectations were sky-high for Volatile Times. Perhaps that’s the problem. By any fair measure this is an intelligent – extremely intelligent – work that continues Chris Corner’s insanely inventive dark electro-pop cabaret sound. Had I never heard any of his other work I might well be blown away by VT.

However, it seems a slight regression from The Alternative (2006) and The Kingdom of Welcome Addiction, which was a super-platinum honoree in my 2009 list. I just don’t know if what I’m thinking is a result of what the disc merits or simply the result of trying to match ridiculous expectations.

In any case, Volatile Times is recommended. If you don’t know IAMX, hopefully it will inspire you to investigate the rest of the catalogue.

Ladytron: Gravity The Seducer
Ladytron has always worked to conjure an aura of the mysterious, and 2011′s Gravity the Seducer offers up a chilly, atmospheric wash that always seems to imply slightly more than it’s saying. A number of tracks wold lend themselves nicely to the dance floor (“Ritual,” “Ace of “Hz”), but there are more ambient swaths of the disc which seem intended for the lounge (or opium den). In an alternate, and exceptionally cool universe, this is what ABBA sounded like, and “White Gold” reminds me of Switchblade Symphony’s final CD, so I suppose I should find a way to work “trip-hop inflected goth/darkwave” in here somewhere, shouldn’t I?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cults: Cults
It took me forever to figure out what I was hearing with Cults, and I’m still not sure I fully get it. But the other night I was playing the CD again, and when I got about halfway through “Most Wanted” I said hey, wait – this is like a neo-girl group track with a Chillwave overlay. That may be wildly misleading, but you have to admit that it’s an interesting idea.

AMG confirms a bit of this, saying:

Cults’ twinkling experimental pop arrived in a shroud of mystery early in 2010, when the group posted three songs on their Bandcamp page. One of those songs was “Go Outside,” which mixed dream pop haze with girl group harmonies (and, fittingly, samples of Jonestown leader Jim Jones) and earned the band acclaim from publications including Pitchfork and NME.

I don’t quite hear Jesus & Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine here, although the Phil Spector mention on the AMG overview page makes perfect sense. In any case, Cults is a CD that I admit, without reservation, that I did not care for on first listen. After about five spins, though, it started to take root and it keeps getting better and better.

Telekinesis: 12 Desperate Straight Lines
On first listen, 12 Desperate Straight Lines reminds me a lot of Death Cab for Cutie, only brighter and happier. Upon repeated listens, though, it … well, it reminds me a lot of Death Cab for Cutie, only brighter and happier. This is not a bad thing at all. Michael Benjamin Lerner has a finely honed knack for writing a song that’s upbeat and engaging without being off-puttingly bubblegum. I hear that complaint about a lot of Power Pop bands, and while I don’t think it’s always valid, I do understand the nut of the sentiment. Here, the production is beautifully aligned with the earnestness of the songs, providing plenty of professionalism without burying the songs beneath too many layers of polish.

Galaxie: Tigre et Diesel
My French was never great to start with and I haven’t used it since college, so I can’t really connect lyrically with this Montreal Francophone Garage outfit. Boy, I love the songs, though. The raw, distorted guitars remind me a bit of last year’s outstanding Tame Impala disc, and there’s more than a little T. Rexy stomp going on with the keys.

I wonder if they’re saying anything interesting?

Cheerleader: Vegas or Bust I can’t remember who turned me on to Cheerleader, but I was listening along thinking how unfashionable they were. The CD reminded me of hook-heavy pop-rock form the late 1980s, maybe a tad of hair metal and an echo of The Outfield here and there. Just damn, great songs that had been born 25 years too late. Really, they were almost like one of those great Swedish revivalist acts that don’t give a damn if you think they’re derivative or not. Like The Hellacopters, whose stance is along the lines of “you worry about what’s stylish, and we’ll be over here rocking the fuck out of it.” So I hit the Googles and did some snooping. Ah, of course. Cheerleader is from Stockholm. Let it fly, boys.

Ron Hawkins: Straitjacket Love Chemical Sounds was one of my best of 2008, but I totally didn’t see this coming. Former Lowest of the Low front man doing a stripped down alt.country disc? Raw and elemental, there’s simply nothing about the production that gets between the listener and the soul of one of Canada’s most under-appreciated treasures (south of the border, anyway). Wildy’s World has this to say:

Ron Hawkins continues to dig closer and closer to his own personal truths on Straightjacket Love, striving like a miner to find what’s real in the structure of song. On what is perhaps his most personal and compelling work to date, Hawkins delivers an entertaining blend of celebration, rumination and remorse from the building blocks of country, rock, folk and blues.

The Catch Fire: Rumormill I first heard this band on Art Jipson’s Tuesday afternoon WUDR show, as I recall. I liked what I heard so I bopped over to Spotify and liked the rest of the disc. Rumormill isn’t complicated – it’s your basic really great Power Pop Underground disc, laden with irresistible hooks, silky vocals and guitars that remind you of a time when guitar pop was a shared cultural value. I did a little research on the band and realized that, aha, that’s why I like what I’m hearing so much. One of the main guys is Mike Mitschele, who used to be in Jolene. And they’re from Charlotte in my native state, so props for that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nicole Atkins: Mondo Amore I loved 2007′s Neptune City. Atkins was not only doing a bang-up number on the emerging world of neo-Soul/R&B, she was doing so with the most dynamic set of pipes in the genre (and I say that with all due respect to Sharon Jones). I was expecting more of the same, perhaps, and was thus taken a little off-guard by Mondo Amore, which has left the ingenue act behind in favor of a persona that’s more worldly and occasionally just a little pissed off. She’s still mining sounds from decades past, but is doing so in ways that are more muscular, even bluesy in spots. The songwriting is seductive as ever, and her ability to preserve the legacy of the artists she clearly adores (Roy Orbison’s name keeps coming up, for some reason) while growing visibly is great news. Neo-Soul is a fun moment, but any artist who gets too mired in it is going to be left behind when the audience moves on in a couple of years.

Up next: the Platinum LPs, to be followed by the CD of the Year….

One caveat, based on something I’m becoming more aware of lately. I’m not a record reviewer. I’ve done that from time to time, but I never liked the nuts and bolts of being a pure critic and I never thought I was very good at it. Still, this list, through the years, has worked to be as critically honest as possible. But dammit, I have reached the point where I care less about the technical process of arguing artistic merit (in my year-end CD review, anyway) and more about promoting music that I like and respect. If this weren’t true, I’d devote more time in my S&R music ramblings to things I don’t especially care for, wouldn’t I?

Maybe I’ve reached the point where I should just say up front, before I get started, that each of the bands I have included here has passed a test in my mind, and I could, if I had the time and inclination, justify their inclusion in mind-numbing detail. However, I don’t want to write all that and you probably don’t want to read it. So instead of reading the list as a hard-fought intellectual process, maybe treat it as “here’s this guy who knows a lot about music, listens to hundreds of records each year and has been doing so since way back when they were called “records,” owns thousands of CDs and has been writing about music, sometimes for money, since the late 1980s, and these are the albums he really thought highly of last year – let’s listen and see if we like them, too!”

Up first, a hybrid category that includes honorable mentions as well as CDs that I liked after a listen or two, but just didn’t have time to consider in depth. This is in part due to a wonderful development, Spotify. I can now listen to, in its entirety, just about everything. Which is great for Sam the listener, but overwhelming for Sam the guy who feels an obligation to include everything worthy in his year-end list.

Peter Murphy: Ninth
I was never, oddly enough, a big Bauhaus fan. I loved PM’s early solo work, but I kinda signed off after Cascade, though. This may not be fair, but somewhere along the line it felt like he’d gotten too happy for the music to quite work for me. I couldn’t really get my ears around the happy family goth approach, although I acknowledge that any number of astute critics disagree with me emphatically.

I came across Ninth late in the year and have only had a chance to spin it two or three times. I think I like it. It is, in places, both energetic and direct while being mature and reflective in others. I look forward to getting to know it better.

Eilen Jewell: Queen of the Minor Key
Another late-in-the-year discovery, Eilen Jewell was recommended to me by Tony Hamera of The Blueflowers as a possible entrant in Tournament of Rock 3. AMG describes her music as a “country-flavored and blues-infused version of contemporary folk (which also can include healthy doses of rockabilly and surf),” and that’s about right. She seems to be getting a lot of well-deserved praise for Queen of the Minor Key, which I think I’m going to like a lot once I’ve had a chance to listen to it a few more times.

The Amends: The Amends
As I noted in a piece back in October, Boulder is mainly known as America’s Mecca of hippie music. Pure rock, garage rock, indie, not so much. But there are exceptions, and I really like the debut release from The Amends (one of two Boulder bands who feature in this year’s Best of series). The Amends are young and raw, but they’re already demonstrating a knack for penning a compelling rock song and the ability to play the hell out of it once it’s written. I think fans of bands like The Strokes and The Nines are going to appreciate this disc, especially if they also dig The Gaslight Anthem.

And their new video for “Hotel Lobby” is a lot of fun, too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Portugal. The Man: In the Mountain in the Cloud
More than any disc I encountered this year,  In the Mountain in the Cloud illustrates the double-edged sword that is Spotify. Without Spotify I’d never have heard it. Then again, it was all the other stuff on Spotify that had to be checked out that kept me from investing more ear-time in this one. I can say this, though. A lot of bands dig into Bowie and T Rex for inspiration, but very few do it as unselfconsciously as P.TM.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Esben and the Witch: Violet Cries
This was one of the most critically anticipated CDs of the year. Based on the video for “Marching Song,” which was released in late 2010 (shown below), I was pretty jacked to hear it, too. Dark, drenched in distortion, it had me expecting a throwback to Haight-era psychedelia, like Grace Slick on ‘roids. In the end, though, I felt like the product was low on the signal-to-noise ratio. Yeah, there was lots of distortion and noise, but I just couldn’t find enough song in there to justify the hype. In the final analysis, I felt like it was okay. An interesting and worthy experiment, to be sure, but one that could have used a little more there there.

Viva Voce: The Future Will Destroy You
Hmmm. They don’t sound like they’re from Muscle Shoals. Another very late discovery (found them in the Tournament of Rock process, along with Eilen Jewell), so I’m still trying to catch up with their atmospheric and deceptively inventive sound. AMG puts is better than I can:

The Future Will Destroy You is an expansive and somewhat slow-burning mix of the indie rock, psych rock, and pop sounds they’ve delved into over the years.Viva Voce have always evinced an interest in the kind of garage rock meets baroque pop aesthetic of such acts as Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse, and fans will be happy to know that not much has changed here.

Like a couple of the others mentioned above, I like what I have heard of this disc but have not yet had a chance to give it a fair listen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Up next, the Gold LP Awards (followed by the Platinum LPs and the CD of the Year). It’s gonna be great.

Uncle Danny, had a coal tattoo.
He fought for the unions,
Some of us still do.
On my shoulder is the number
of the chapter he was in.
That number is forever
like the struggle here to win.

I had never thought of VH as a political band, so I did some snooping. Couldn’t find a lot. Various Wikipedia items indicate that:

• The VH brothers have supported Democratic candidates.
• The band shut down John McCain’s use of “Right Here, RIght Now” at campaign stops.
• Former singer Sammy Hagar supported Dubya, but in 1984 they changed the video for their live shows in a way that perhaps indicated regret. This is unclear.

In any case, these new lyrics look pretty damned #Occupy to me and I’m wondering if any of our readers can fill in the blanks.

Meanwhile, here’s the video. When I heard the band was reuniting my expectations couldn’t have been much lower. This, though, I like. They seem to be pillaging their old outtakes, for material, though, which bothers some people. Not me so much. If I have a scrap of something I wrote 20 years ago that didn’t quite fit, I promise you, I’m still looking for an opportunity to sneak it in somewhere….

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is frustrating for a lot of people. Many of the artists would probably like to be acknowledged, and their fans no doubt take the slight personally. And the critics, gods, imagine trying to think about this if you’re a serious professional covering music.

All of us have probably wondered, from time to time, how an idea as intuitively awesome as a rock and roll hall of freakin’ fame went so very, very bad. Part of the answer is obvious enough: money. We’re talking about an industry that attracts more soulless whores than a pimp convention and the world would surely be a better place had Jann Wenner been smothered in his crib. But one can’t escape the feeling that it’s even more complex than that. In short, for a project to get this fucked, you really need the involvement of true believers with no brains and a tractor-trailer full of righteous intentions.

Which brings me to this recent item, from Bob Lefsetz’s widely read newsletter. (For some reason, this particular mailbag item doesn’t seem to have been archived.)

From: Toure
Subject: Re: Handicapping The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

…Each year we are reminded that rock n roll is meant to be defined by the Hall as the broadest possible definition of that term so all the genres considered pop music are in our purview, definitely hiphop. Rakim, the heart and soul of the duo, is still considered by many rappers and critics as the best rapper of all time and a seminal figure in hiphop’s aesthetic development. In many ways nearly all modern rappers are descended from Rakim. You cannot tell the story of hiphop without telling the story of Eric B & Rakim so the story of hiphop that the Hall is telling is incomplete (it’s also missing LL Cool J). These are more than “memorable acts” they are the people who shaped a genre that is critical in the overall history of modern popular music which is how the Hall defines rock n roll.

And there you have it: “the broadest possible definition of that term.” Which is why so many legit rock & roll luminaries are out in the cold and the likes of Madonna and several hip-hop acts are in. But the problem is that the broadest possible definition of “rock & roll” doesn’t include hip-hop. Before you get worked up, I’m not here to dog rap. It’s a form with plenty of legitimacy in its own right. But – and let’s be very clear here – it is not rock & roll. Touré and the rest of the committee have, in the interests of pandering to as many corporate industry interests as possible, convinced themselves that rock is something it is not.

Here’s the thing. Rock & roll is a type of popular music. It is not another term for popular music. Popular music had been around a long, long time before Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Elvis showed up. It was, in the mid-1950s, a new kind of popular music, one that challenged the establishment and paved the way for the greatest golden age of popular music in history.

Hip-hop is likewise a type of popular music, but it’s one that traces its lineage most directly back through funk, which was a derivation of R&B, which was a parallel development to rock & roll. To summarize, hip-hop is not a form of rock & roll. Both hip-hop and rock & roll are forms of popular music. Call me pedantic if you feel you must (and if you know what the word means, which if you think hip-hop is rock & roll you probably don’t), but history is history and facts are facts.

By way of analogy, let’s say we’re talking about dogs instead of music. And in the mid-1950s somebody developed this new breed that we’ll call the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Terrier (pictured, right). It was the greatest of all breeds. It looked good, didn’t shed, pointed birds, retrieved ducks, herded sheep, kept the barn free of rats, protected the house, sniffed out bombs and drugs at the airport, found survivors in earthquake ruins, played with the kids, walked itself, fetched the paper and whipped up a mean frittata for Sunday brunch. It was such an incredible breed that many years later it was decided to establish a Muscle Shoals Rhythm Terrier Hall of Fame.

All was well until the proprietors of the institution realized that they were limiting their revenue potential by restricting the place to actual Muscle Shoals Rhythm Terriers. So they began inducting a whole other breed, the fashionable and popular Brooklyn Retriever, which was in fact descended from a common ancestor (the common ice age porch wolf), but otherwise had little in common with the true MSRT. Purists were outraged. I mean, the Brooklyn Retriever was a fine dog, but see that sign over the entrance? It rather specifically promises visitors an exclusively Muscle Shoals Terrier experience.

That’s where we are. The Muscle Shoals Terrier Hall of Fame is, thanks to fuckwits like Wenner and Touré, rapidly filling up with Brooklyn Retrievers and Long-Legged Disco Hounds and all kinds of other dogs that are simply not Muscle Shoals Rhythm Terriers.

In the interests of promoting harmony in the dog world, some have suggested that, you know, a Brooklyn Retriever Hall of Fame wouldn’t be a bad thing. But the best answer is far, far simpler, and it applies to that abomination in Cleveland as well.

If you look closely at the argument that Touré makes in his letter to Lefsetz, it is clear that he’s trying to make a case for shoehorning all commercially viable forms of music into the only HoF available at present. And certainly, this approach represents a lot less financial risk than trying to build a whole new facility. So the marketing guy in me gets where he’s coming from completely. But you just can’t pretend that red is blue without smart people looking at you like the idiot you are.

So here’s the simplest solution in the world. And it makes even the hardass purists like me happy. Change the name of the damned place to the Popular Music Hall of Fame. Or even the Pop Hall of Fame. I might carp a little that rock and pop aren’t the same thing, but intellectually I get that rock is a form of popular music, which is where the term “pop” comes from. In other words, I can live with it. So Dear R&RHoF Committee: do it today and stop clowning yourselves.

Also, as much as I love Muscle Shoals Rhythm Terriers, I think we’d all be just fine with the Dog Hall of Fame.

Scholars & Rogues wants to thank our music-loving readership for making this the most successful Tournament of Rock yet, and we’d especially like to say a huge thanks to all the bands who participated. ToR3 featured a number of surprises and upsets, but in the end we hope that everybody found a new band to love.

So, the Finals represented our biggest turnout ever and the margin was incredibly close. The Blueflowers and The Lost Patrol asked their fans to vote and they did. When the last chad was unhung, the winner by a 52-48% margin was…The Blueflowers!

Major congrats to Tony Hamera and Kate Hinote. You guys have given us one of the year’s best CDs and the win is richly deserved.

We’d also like to congratulate The Lost Patrol, who likewise served up some amazing music in 2011. The irony in all this is the email I got from TLP manager Ed Colavito a few months back. It went like this:

Ed: Hey Sam, do you know The Blueflowers?
Sam: I’ve heard of them but never listened to them.
Ed: You have to hear them. Email Tony Hamera and tell him I said get you a promo disc to listen to.

In other words, if Ed had a little more Simon Cowell in him this all might have gone differently. But that isn’t who TLP is. They want everybody to hear the music they love whether it’s theirs or not, and S&R is proud to be associated, in any small way possible, with people who understand the importance of music to community.

So again, congratulations to our winners and our runners-up. It won’t come as any surprise to anyone when both bands make prominent appearances in our Best CDs of 2011 series, coming soon…

When ToR3 started some of you probably looked at the relative popularity of the bands involved, reflected in things like the size of their Facebook communities and the numbers of people they draw when they’re on tour, and figured the Finals would wind up featuring either The Horrors or The Postelles facing off with either The Raveonettes or Eilen Jewell. But, now that The Blueflowers have defeated Doco in the second semi-final, we’re looking at a battle we maybe didn’t expect: two bands that are somewhat lower in national profile (although hopefully that’s changing). And who are actually very good friends when they aren’t in the ring (it was Ed, TLP’s manager, in fact, who turned me on to The Blueflowers several months ago).

Major congrats to Doco, by the way. They’re one of those no-frills acts that does nothing but practice and tour and thrive on the energy of their fans and the live show. Great run, guys, and we’ll see you here shortly in our Best CDs of 2011 series.

And now, let’s go ring announcer Michael Buffer….

The Blueflowers: ”With [Kate] Hinote leading the lines, the result is an album that is as haunting and soul-invading as it is enthralling. Songs like the title track and “Fragile” give the listener the impression that they’re in on a secret, like they’re reading Hinote’s diary. That level of refreshing honesty, some damned fine tunes and the stellar musicianship of the band is what makes In Line With the Broken-Hearted such a tremendous piece of work.” - Metro Times LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Lost Patrol: ”The Lost Patrol aren’t here to comfort you on Rocket Surgery. Instead, it’s a chilly feeling of abandoned county roads with empty barns and ghost towns, like on the slower, darker, farther away “Coming Down,” or the slyer and twang-ier “Don’t Give Me Love.” The echo-sustain on the twelve-string acoustics brings out a harpsichord-like sound on the penultimate “Love” and especially middle track “Not the Only One,” and the harpsichord is the most haunting instrument there is (even more than the xylophone, which is, “The music you hear when skeletons are dancing” – Homer Simpson).” - QRO : LISTEN

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now it’s in the hands of S&R’s readers. Who’s your winner, folks?

Just in case you want in on the awesome, and you want to celebrate Christmas in an unconventional way, check out Marvel Comics’ adaptation of A Christmas Carol—with zombies!

Zombies Christmas Carol, published in September, might at first blush seem like yet another adaptation of a classic tale with zombies thrown in, a trend kicked off a couple years ago by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Zombies Christmas Carol seems particularly well-suited to the zombie treatment, though, and not just because the story is already filled with supernatural creatures.

Eisner Award-winner Jim McCann (author of Return of the Dapper Men) adapts the Charles Dickens tale with a deft hand, making it his own while still maintaining surprising fidelity to the original. In the adaptation, Scrooge must not just give to the poor—he’s the only one with the financial means to stave off “the hungry death” that threatens to burst out of the poorhouses and hospitals.

“And so with Scrooge laying as mankind’s last hope,” McCann writes, “Humanity might as well have extinguished its final fires this very Christmas Eve.”

Zombies Christmas Carol features the art teams of David Baldeon & Jordi Tarragona and Jeremy Treece & Roger Bonet. Their art styles mesh well enough, particularly since Baldeon & Tarragona handle everything set in the present, which anchors the story. Flashbacks and flashforwards to the past and future fall under Treece & Bonet’s domain, accentuating the differences in timeline at convenient points.

Marvel Comics has made a cottage industry of zombies, putting the zombie spin on most of its main characters in its Marvel Zombies series. The comic publisher has also had excellent success adapting classics through its Marvel Illustrated line. That the two ventures would somehow intersect—collide?—shouldn’t surprise me. That the result was so good shouldn’t, either.

Zombies Christmas Carol turns out to be delicious fun and way cool.

Few characters are as recognizable as the patron saint of Christmas.

Santa, as well as his Canadian and British counterpart, Father Christmas, both derive from the legends surrounding Saint Nicholas, a former bishop who lived in the third century in the city of Myra, in a region that’s now part of Turkey. His feast day is celebrated December 6.

The Dutch abbreviated Saint Nicholas’s name as Sinterklaas, which is where the name Santa Clause comes from. The Dutch depict Sinterklaas much like a Catholic bishop with a tall hat, full white beard, and a staff.

Our own depictions of Santa Claus predate date back to images of “Father Christmas” from 17th century in England.

That depiction appears most famously in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1943, when Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Present:

clothed in one simple deep green robe…bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure that its capacious breast was bare…. It’s feet…were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles.

In America, Santa has taken a much different shape. His transformation first began in 1823 with the publication of Clement Clark Moore’s poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which appeared anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel. (The city of Troy was also the birthplace of another icon, Uncle Sam.)

“His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! / His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” reads the poem, which goes on to describe “the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.”

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

The poem also mentions Santa’s sleigh for the first time and gives names for all eight reindeer.

The first picture of Santa came in 1863, in a sketch by Thomas Nast for the cover of Harper’s Weekly. (Nast’s artwork, as it happened, helped make the aforementioned Uncle Sam so iconic; his depiction of Santa would have similar lasting impact.)

Nast’s drawing of Santa appeared on Saturday, January 3, 1863. As sketched by Nast, Santa wears what are described as red pants and a blue jacket with large white stars. It is also reputedly the first time Santa appears as fat and jolly rather than as a tall, slender man.

In the picture, he sits on the back of a sleigh packed with presents, visiting a somewhat dejected Union army, passing out gifts to soldiers. A sign in the background says “Welcome Santa Claus.”

After that, Santa made other appearances in other places, including a 1902 book by Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.

But it was Santa’s appearances in advertisements for the Coca-Cola Company that made his appearance iconic. Prior to that, Santa still appeared in clothes of various colors, but the Coke campaign, designed by artist Haddon Sundblom, put Santa in red and white—and he has remained in that outfit to this day.

With any luck, he’ll slide down the chimney at your house tonight!

————

Adapted from a piece cross-posted at Emerging Civil War. 

Our fourth quarterfinal match lacked the drama of the previous one, as Doco handily dispatched Rose Hill Drive to move into the semifinals. And now, we move into the semis, where it starts to get personal. See, our next two bands know each other and play together sometimes. You might even say they’re friends. Although, maybe for the next couple of days we can make frenemies of them.

Dotsun Moon: ”The band has labeled their music as ‘dream beat.’ I don’t think I could think of a better description even if my life depended on it. I love Mary Ognibene’s voice. She can make the little hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up one minute and put you in a trance the next. ” Ear Candy LISTEN

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The Lost Patrol: ”…spiritually resonant, like you’re listening to the heart-broken spirits of melancholy minstrels from beyond; angel-headed hipsters with reverb-guitars guiding us morose mortals through this cruel sea of tears. None of this is nearly as depressing as it sounds.” - Retrospect : LISTEN

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Time to vote. Polls close Monday at midnight.

First off, wow. Our previous match, The Blueflowers vs. Eilen Jewell, saw Jewell jump out to an early lead. Then The Blueflowers blew past her and established a huge advantage. Then Eilen’s fans battled back and re-took a late lead, only to see Blueflower fans mount a late surge to nip Jewell at the wire. This match saw the largest turnout in any ToR match to date (that includes all three tournaments) and final margin was a scant few votes. The irony, of course, was that Jewell was nominated for this tournament by none other than Blueflowers mastermind Tony Hamera. So, again, wow. Congrats to both artists and thanks to their fans for such a truly fantastic show of support.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. We’ll see how fans of our next two bands respond.

Doco: ”Doco overlooks the creation of an image, believing that eyeliner and women’s jeans don’t compensate for boring, cliche music. Focusing on songwriting, the band constantly creates witty, thought provoking lyrics, stuck-in-your head riffs, and moving beats. The sounds are always fresh, and often hard to contain in a single musical genre.” – CD Baby LISTEN

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Rose Hill Drive: ”Similar to the way that Ford has retrofitted the new Mustangs to recall the classic look of the fastback coupes, Rose Hill Drive is a riff-driven throwback to the heyday of AOR radio; there’s a distinct air of familiarity, but this clearly isn’t your daddy’s muscle car.” – Westword LISTEN

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In our second quarterfinal match, Dotsun Moon made quick work of Snake Rattle Rattle Snake. Congrats to SRRS for making the quarters, and again, I love the new CD. We’ll see you again in our upcoming best of 2011 review.

Up next, a quarterfinal match between two acts working the neo-Americana side of the street.

The Blueflowers: ”With [Kate] Hinote leading the lines, the result is an album that is as haunting and soul-invading as it is enthralling. Songs like the title track and ‘Fragile’ give the listener the impression that they’re in on a secret, like they’re reading Hinote’s diary. That level of refreshing honesty, some damned fine tunes and the stellar musicianship of the band is what makes In Line With the Broken-Hearted such a tremendous piece of work.” - Metro Times LISTEN

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Eilen Jewell: ”Sometimes as darkly damaged as Lucinda Williams, at others as defiant and teasing as prime Peggy Lee and always authentically Americana in the Gillian Welch tradition….She’s mighty good.” - LA Daily News LISTEN

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Can’t go wrong either way, can you? Still, only one can advance to the semi-finals. Who shall it be?

In the first match of round 2, The Lost Patrol handily defeated Baron Bane to advance to the semifinals. They await the winner of today’s throwdown, and my inner conflict continues unabated….

Dotsun Moon: …”Dotsun Moon’s secret weapon is the soulful and authoritative voice of Mary Ognibene. On tracks such as the breathy, skipping opener, ‘And I Rest,’ the riveting , floor-thumping standout ‘Savages, and the languid ‘Glory,’ her powerhouse pipes repeatedly amaze. Though well suited for dance club PAs, 4am is also varied and intriguing enough for intent home listening.” The Big Takeover LISTEN

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Snake Rattle Rattle Snake: The record, the first release by Denver startup label The Greater Than Collective, is a black tapestry of pulsing, macabre rock n’ roll that feels as if it is being slowly slashed apart by bright head-nodding hooks – deconstructing the sinister underbelly only to sew it back together. LISTEN

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Time to vote – who should advance to the semi-finals?

If Chris Corner’s tribute to the man seems conflicted, that is perhaps appropriate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the final match of round one we had a close encounter, with Rose Hill Drive finally easing by The Raveonettes. Now, it’s on to round 2, and from this point forward I’m going to be in a state of constant conflict. Here, for instance: two bands I love, two bands that produced CDs that are among the year’s best.

Baron Bane: ”LPTO is truly a lovely listen front to back; while its energetic moments drift unassumingly by, however, it is the quiet that resonates the longest.” – Pop Matters : LISTEN

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The Lost Patrol: ”Rocket Surgery is sprawling, glistening music as full of bursting beauty as 11 red roses springing open—and as dazzling as their World’s Fair (Queens) at supernova-dusk sleeve.” – The Big Takeover : LISTEN

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Now it’s up to you. Who should move on?

As it turns out, today is the birthday of Doco guitarist Trev Booth and the band’s fans have handed him a nice present in the form of a resounding win over Viva Voce in round 1. They advance to face the winner of today’s match.

Speaking of which, we now have a clash of styles to consider.

Rose Hill Drive: A very un-Boulderlike band from Boulder, CO – hard-rocking, fun-loving, no-frills party rock – raw, emotive, organic. LISTEN

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The Raveonettes: Highly influential Danish dream/noise-pop - ”…the modern king and queen of melody and mood” –  ”…dark but not bleak, like the single minded determination caused by crisis that is not quite hope but just as powerful.” LISTEN

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And now, time to vote – who do you like?

In our biggest margin of victory so far, The Blueflowers overwhelmed The Amends and move on to face Eilen Jewell. Should be a slobberknocker, given the support each received in round 1.

Our next match features an old favorite facing off with a new discovery.

Doco: Heavy rocking Blues/Soul/Funk/Hip-Hop/Reggae fusion – Josh and Trevor Booth are descended from both John Wilkes Booth and Robert E. Lee! – Intense musicianship in service to a groove. LISTEN

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Viva Voce: Inventive, guitar-driven indie pop – genre-bending nods to everything from Classic Rock to Stoner to C&W twang – pretty sounds belie quirky sensibilities. LISTEN

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Give them a listen and tell us who you prefer.

Our previous match perhaps proves that there’s no justice in the world. To be sure, Eilen Jewell is a worthy winner, but the turnout in this contest way outstripped what we’ve seen so far in ToR3, to the point where Paul Lewis, in a losing effort, racked up more votes than any of the winners in the previous four matches. So congrats to Jewell and thanks to Paul and his fans for making it exciting. And by the way, both of these artists gave us outstanding CDs in 2011, so if you’re thinking about giving music for holiday gifts, we recommend both of them.

Now, our next showdown, which features two bands that I really like.

The Blueflowers: Detroit-based seductive, soothing folk-noir – “a weepy but wonderful wall of sensuous sounds, sad but strengthening, emotionally deep without being a downer” – elements of Americana, folk, ’60s girl-pop and psychedelia. LISTEN

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The Amends: ”first and foremost a rock and roll band,” focus on “writing and playing good old-fashioned melodic, foot-stomping, rock n roll” – no-nonsense, relentlessly listenable and unapologetically fun. LISTEN

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And now, time for our readers to vote. Who do you like better?

On this sad anniversary of John Lennon’s passing, I’m refusing to mourn. Instead, I’m remembering why his insistence that we stop our mad rush to kill each other was a good idea.  Imagine…