Best of 2011 • The albums we adored pt. II

2011 was a year of landmark albums from veteran artists and newcomers alike, making it rather a challenge to come up with a list of our favourite fifty at the expense of some other very deserving albums. In the end we’ve come up with a list that we’re proud of and primed to defend. Check out the top twenty-five below and let us know what you think. You’ll find the rest of ‘em here.

Note: Some albums that only got a proper UK release in 2011 despite being available in some form or another in 2010 (for example, Sea Of Bees, Dark Dark Dark, Buke & Gass) weren’t eligible for inclusion as we listed them this time last year.

Photo by Allan Hinton.

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Inspired by the surrealist painter Max Ernst, Elizabeth Walling’s debut album is an intense and brooding macrocosm of cinematic orchestration, layered electronics and treated vocals that chills the blood and beguiles the mind. What impresses most, though, is her instinctual use of dynamics and fluctuations in mood to convey a range of emotions without sounding disjointed or forced – the result being one of the year’s most immersive and unsettling listens. [Tomas Slaninka]

FREE MP3: Gazelle Twin, ‘Men Like Gods’

Notoriously inspired by an eight-month sailing sojourn along the east coast of America, Tennis’s debut album is essentially a travel diary of Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley’s voyage set to swirling ’80s keyboards and catchy guitar lines. Maritime references and woozy love jams slot in perfectly side by side like snapshots in a photo album to create a fun, uplifting and often beautiful record, awash with infectious pop hooks as warm as a summer’s afternoon up on deck. [Odhran O'Donoghue]

FREE MP3: Tennis, ‘Marathon’

While a cursory listen to this debut album from sisters Piper and Skylar Kaplan could easily give the impression of a glossy set of sleepy, almost stagnant songs, the subtle, constant shifts at their core and ever so slightly aberrant structures conspire to create a protean crucible of hazy, shimmering pop and psychedelia-imprinted shoegaze. Disconcerting, spellbinding and ever so slightly overwhelming, it’s every bit as weird as it is entirely radio-friendly. [Odhran O'Donoghue]

FREE MP3: Puro Instinct feat. Ariel Pink, ‘Stilyagi’
FREE MP3: Puro Instinct, ‘Silky Eyes’

If the Mayan prediction is correct, next year will witness the end of the Earth as we know it. Chelsea Wolfe’s second album tapped into this idea, extending the startlingly inventive doom-seer songwriting that marked her debut with droning blues, shivery folk and a stripped-down backdrop of piano and acoustic-meets-metal guitars. In this witchy, gothy record Wolfe has created a world in which listeners can lose themselves, whether relishing the darkness or running from it. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

FREE MP3: Chelsea Wolfe, ‘Mer’
FREE MP3: Chelsea Wolfe, ‘Movie Screen’

A peregrination through dream-pop, folk and lonesome country, Marissa Nadler’s self-titled fifth album covers a lot of emotional ground. Operating entirely on her own terms, it’s a more expansive work than her previous four, its songs abundant with totems of dark sexuality, disintegrated lives and devastating tragedy. Rarely less than captivating, it’s a record of inexhaustible beauty to be savoured again and anew. [Terry Mulcahy]

FREE MP3: Marissa Nadler, ‘Baby, I Will Leave You In The Morning’
FREE MP3: Marissa Nadler, ‘The Sun Always Reminds Me Of You’

With their fantastic second album, Sheffield duo Slow Club stridently leave behind the ‘twee’ label that has dogged them from the beginning, much to their chagrin. Trading some of the youthful, carefree attitude of their debut, the pair have matured to a deeper, more soulful sound without losing any of their crucial personality. Boasting fuller band arrangements, crisp production and vastly improved vocals on the part of both singers, Paradise is a captivatingly beautiful album with darkness at its heart. [Odhran O'Donoghue]

Tu Fawning’s dense, experimental debut album is rife with wonderfully stylised retro atmospherics, busy with the brawling and melancholic ghosts of 1920s bar rooms. Corrina Repp’s throaty alto lends an elegance to the record’s jazz-noir brass, fluctuating rhythms and shady cabaret pianos, leading the band’s boldly skewed compositions with a haunting presence that lingers long after the last note has settled. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

FREE MP3: Tu Fawning, ‘I Know You Now’

Based around Euripides’ recounting of the legend of Hippolytus, Julia Holter’s debut album shrewdly captures the troubling atmosphere and swathes of emotion and confusion of the classic Greek play, but casts them musically rather than in a primarily verbal form. The dynamic range here is frequently dramatic, with stark juxtapositions of violent noise and near (and sometimes actual) silence, brilliantly conveying the mystery and unknowable elements of Euripides’ long-ago work and at the same time creating a sublime piece of art very much Holter’s own. [Jude Clarke]

FREE MP3: Julia Holter, ‘Goddess Eyes’

In the machismo world of guitar rock, snarling riffs and attention-grabbing solos are king. But on her searing, self-titled debut, Anna Calvi eschews these conventions, choosing instead to explore the more melodic side of the six-string. Calvi wields her instrument to create shifting, atmospheric textures while exploring the darker sides of lust and romance with her throaty, passionate vocals. As much Debussy as it is Hendrix, this is a guitar rock album, certainly, but one that steers this hackneyed terrain to new and startling places. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

This “21st century song cycle” is a gargantuan conceptual effort even by Tori Amos’s ambitious standards, remaking pieces by such noted composers as Bach, Schubert and Satie in her own image to tell a convoluted, emotional saga. It may be bracingly unfashionable, but there’s a natural, organic quality at work on this album that builds on the work of past masters to create a rich, immersive record of beauty, danger and grace. [Alex Ramon]

Embracing a more gothic, electronic-influenced sound than frontwoman Katie Stelmanis’s solo work, Austra’s debut album found the Canadian trio exploring the use of dramatic synths, bouncing melodies and dark, insidious atmospheres, all to brilliant effect. Yet for all the electronic wizardry, it’s the more stripped back tracks that make for the album’s most powerful and affecting moments, and hint at the greatness still to come. [Odhran O'Donoghue]

FREE MP3: Austra, ‘Lose It’

Janine Rostron’s second album is a work of flamboyance and tenebrous drama that calls into question matters of gender and identity, using a range of effects to morph her voice from feminine and bluesy to masculine and sinister – and everywhere in-between – but always maintaining a florid and human expressiveness. One of those rare albums that pulls off the phenomenally difficult trick of appealing to the avant-garde without surrendering melody or musicality, and still having bagfuls of charm. [Jude Clarke]

FREE MP3: Planningtorock, ‘Doorway’
FREE MP3: Planningtorock, ‘The Breaks’

Former Wears The Trousers cover star Ane Brun outclassed even herself with this exceptional fourth album, displaying her deepening skill for penetratingly emotional songwriting. On the songs which harness the verve of some expertly mixed percussion, she sounds altogether less brittle, while the more prominent sweeps of orchestral embellishments elevate the beauty of her distinctive voice to all-new heights. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

Gang Gang Dance’s fifth album sees them stick to their established and rewarding formula of playing with techno beats, imported rhythms, electronic indie-rock and saccharine pop hooks, with plenty to delight their loyal devotees and expand – or melt – the minds of fresh pickings. As crowd-pleasing as it is (in parts) impenetrable, it’s an electrifying pilgrimage into the very heart of ‘everything’, a concept that Lizzie Bougatsos and co. embrace dearly. [Terry Mulcahy]

On their first album in eight long years, Gillian Welch and long-time collaborator David Rawlings go right back to basics, returning to the stripped-down, self-absorbed sound of their earlier work and placing their symbiotic vocal and instrumental interplay front and centre. In an era of empty excess, their unadorned, austere approach feels both bracing and brave. Deceptively modest yet entirely magnificent, this stirring comeback builds on their past achievements while taking their music forward with subtlety and grace. [Alex Ramon]

Who else but Björk could stir up such a digital brouhaha and hype of dense scientific and natural history analysis with what is essentially a new pop record? All talk of app universes and multimedia explorations aside, Biophilia is simply an exquisitely carved, landmark piece of music. Despite the project’s daunting premise and complexity it’s an easily digestible and immersive listen, spearheaded throughout by the ever-present wonder of Björk’s voice, which slides from the tender to the epic with a delivery never far from naïve fascination. [Léigh Bartlam]

Otherworldly harmonies, wind-up garage-tinged Americana and swirling, archaic lyrics abound on this second album from San Francisco trio The Sandwitches. They haven’t exactly polished up the experimental, abject weirdness that characterised their 2009 debut, instead distilling it into something altogether more beautiful, more cohesive and, ultimately, more rewarding. Grace Cooper and Heidi Alexander’s vocals coalesce and combine throughout with a perfection bordering on predestination, lulling the listener into complete submission with their siren calls. Wherever they go, we’re more than happy to follow. [Odhran O'Donoghue]

FREE MP3: The Sandwitches, ‘Lightfoot’

Running close to seventy minutes, Kate Bush’s second album of 2011 is a return to the story arc format she experimented with first on 1985′s Hounds Of Love and, twenty years later, on Aerial, this time in the form of a seven-song narrative spinning frosty tales of mountain folklore and love in a cold climate. Even during the album’s more prog-rock leaning moments, Bush’s invention never feels misguided or false, and there is always something of interest in the mix. With not one dull, waning or filler track on the album, and every one of its sixty-five minutes offering glistening moments of the artist at her most inspired and productive, it could well be that we’re in the presence of yet another Kate Bush classic. [Léigh Bartlam]

Spurred by a request to compose instrumental pieces for New York chamber musicians yMusic, Shara Worden resolved to work with the six-piece ensemble exclusively on All Things Will Unwind, an album which, despite being steeped in all contrasts great and small, is a constant joy to behold. Keeping her primary instrument, the electric guitar, firmly in its case for this project, Worden let her imagination spiral into an even more expansive palette of textures, timbres and rhythmic push-and-pull. The result is an album which flexes and flows with an assertive cohesion, both in terms of its ambition and in the sublime orchestration that graces every track, and is undoubtedly Worden’s brightest moment to date. [Alan Pedder]

FREE MP3: My Brightest Diamond, ‘Reaching Through To The Other Side’

To mention them without the obligatory discussion of their legendary heritage as members of Sleater-Kinney, The Minders and Helium (amongst others) proved difficult, but on their fantastic self-titled debut, Wild Flag proved that they are much more than the sum of their individual parts, passionately affirming their collective musical lineage while embracing a classic rock sheen. Played with the collective ease of old friends and the cohesive skill of veterans still utterly in love with their craft, Wild Flag is a sheer celebration of volume and kinetics. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

FREE MP3: Wild Flag, ‘Romance’

This debut full-length from the Canadian quartet with an average age of around twenty is a thrilling fusion of indie-pop and electronic experimentalism that suggests a musical ability and artistic vision far beyond their meagre years. Pushing the boundaries of song structure and embracing a freeform, almost organic expression of their capabilities, BRAIDS have created a bold and insightful musical statement and art-pop masterpiece dotted with several moments of startling inventivess, from which it is near impossible to pick a single standout track. [Odhran O'Donoghue]

FREE MP3: BRAIDS, ‘Lemonade’

Annie Clark’s third album found her setting out to “redefine the idea of the guitar hero”, an approach which translated into a glistening, lush and luxuriant listen, full of digital cascades and string-laden crescendos underpinned by an unsteady percussive stomp. A continuation of her last record’s concern with articulating conflict and discomfort underneath the superficially glossy and composed, Strange Mercy finds Clark positioned front and centre as a sequin-clad ringmaster unleashing merrily galloping melodies. One of those rare albums which deals quite seriously with life’s more sobering labours without ever sounding ugly or grave, and a warm and welcome return from an increasingly impressive artist. [Rhian Jones]

A startlingly evolved and piercing work that far surpasses her contributions to celebrated drone-folk duo Gowns, Erika M Anderson’s solo debut is next-level in every way. Wildly inventive and diverse without ever seeming unfocused, deeply personal yet also universal, its scarred, sometimes spoken-word, narratives are delivered in cool drawls and dangerous snarls that smack of Kim Gordon and low-slung, drugged-out poetry. Anderson’s use of haunting blues, grunge, folk, slow-burn reverb and hissing, low-end synths cements Past Life Martyred Saints as one of 2011′s most riveting, innovative albums. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

FREE MP3: EMA, ‘The Grey Ship’

Arriving at a time when the robustness of our national identity, our very Britishness, is under closer government scrutiny than ever, PJ Harvey’s ninth album is a startling exploration of this very subject from a brutally human perspective. A searing, vivid and complex analysis of how far the Bramley apples have dropped from the tree over a century of conflict and political manoeuvring at home and abroad, it repeatedly slices to the core of the matter without ever passing judgement or laying blame. She may no longer be writing with the blistering intensity of her early work but damned if she’ll let you settle for long on any one interpretation of her true perspective; from the unprecedented use of samples that peppers the record to the near-constant mien of autoharp that characterises the album, Let England Shake finds Harvey seeking out bold new territory to thrilling effect. Ambitious and accessible, it rewards all of Harvey’s efforts in radicalising her artistic focus and further signals a shift on the audience’s part from feeling her music primarily on a visceral, gut level to engaging with it intellectually. [Alan Pedder]

A fiercely original work of loop-pedal wonder, ukulele magic and some spectacularly mesmerising vocals, Merrill Garbus’s debut album BiRd-BrAiNs was as close to a masterpiece as a lone musician could muster. Exploiting her newly found resources to embrace a fuller sound, W H O K I L L easily matches and exceeds her debut for its patchwork power, busying speakers with dancehall and jazz styles that bubble into bossa nova, soca and dub, to name but a few. Exploring the theme of violence in all its forms, Garbus manages to use the vivid awfulness of riots, murdered lovers and hostile lands and bodies to power her words and rhythms with a force, creating defiantly passionate, life-affirming anthems. Taking the authenticity of Garbus’s lo-fi best into rich, thrilling territory, W H O K I L L is a landmark album, proving Merrill to be a master composer without ever kowtowing to conventions. [Charlotte Richardson Andrews]

FREE MP3: tUnE-yArDs, ‘Bizness’

Tagged ane brun, anna calvi, austra, bjork, BRAIDS, chelsea wolfe, EMA, gang gang dance, gazelle twin, gillian welch, julia holter, kate bush, marissa nadler, my brightest diamond, pj harvey, planningtorock, puro instinct, slow club, st vincent, tennis, the sandwitches, tori amos, tu fawning, tUnE-yArDs, wild flag