Our Year in Music 2011 coverage has already featured our Listener's Poll Top 100 Spins and our Top Ten Videos of 2011. "Take Your Medicine" by The Quick & Easy Boys was voted song of the year and "Dum Dum Dah Dah" by The Nghiems took top honors as video of the year, and in case you missed them, you can link back to the articles.
Today's feature is The Top 20 Mainstream Albums of the Year. Mini-reviews of these albums that have been posted elsewhere will be credited with links to the entire review, and I will select my personal favorite tracks from each album.
Later this week we will list our Top 50 Independent Albums Of The Year, the Year in Photos and (MY FAVORITE) the Best & Worst Album Covers of the year, along with our list of Top Compilation and EP releases of the year.
Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful and musically enriched New Year. I thank you for listening to Jivewired Radio and for supporting indie music, and I hope you will continue to listen throughout the new year.
Best wishes for a musically-enriched 2012,
Mike
And now, on to the Top 20 Mainstream Albums of 2011 (#11-20)...
11. Blessed by Lucinda Williams
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
If 1998’s Car Wheels On A Gravel Road stands as the high point of Williams’ self-involved period, Blessed just as masterfully traces the bursting heart and smoldering soul of her humanity. This is as deep and true as the song form gets.
-- Paste Magazine
Best Songs: Blessed, Seeing Black, Born To Be Loved, Sweet Love
Team Photo: Awakening, Convince Me
12. Wasting Light by Foo Fighters
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
Eleven tracks of fuzz-box brawn, mosh-pit-hurrah choruses and iron-horse momentum, Wasting Light is the best Foos album since the first two, Grohl's all-solo 1995 debut, Foo Fighters, and the first full-band blast, 1997's The Colour and the Shape. Grohl, bassist Nate Mendel, drummer Taylor Hawkins and guitarists Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear cut this action the ancient punk-rock way, to analog tape in Grohl's garage, and it shows in the razorback blur of the guitars and the hard-rubber slap of the drums. "Bridge Burning," which opens the record with insect-chatter guitars and Hawkins' avalanche rolls, is hellbent metal with a chrome-finish vocal hook. "Rope" has a chopped surge that evokes mid-Seventies Led Zeppelin, then straightens out for a later-vintage payoff: a ragged alt-rock glow with rough-boy harmonies.
-- Rolling Stone Magazine
Best Songs: These Days, Bridge Burning, Rope
Team Photo: White Limo
13. The King Of Limbs by Radiohead
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
So: eight tracks, each of them worth your time, and yet The King of Limbs is still likely to go down as Radiohead's most divisive record. A trawl through message boards and social networks leaves the impression that many disappointed fans are still struggling to make sense of the gap between the greatness of the thing they got and the genius of the thing they thought they might get. It's in that gap, when assessing the album overall, that it's easy to get tangled up. This is well-worn terrain for Radiohead, and while it continues to yield rewarding results, the band's signature game-changing ambition is missed.
-- Pitchfork.com
Best Songs: Separator, Morning Mr. Magpie, Little by Little, Lotus Flower
Team Photo: Codex, Give Up The Ghost
14. Hot Sauce Committee Part Two by The Beastie Boys
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
Taken together, these 16 songs, which seem to touch on just about everything the Beastie Boys have said and done, may not add up to something amazing, but they do the job. And listening to Hot Sauce Committee, it's hard not to reflect on how long the Beastie Boys have been together and how, unusually, their musical partnership still seems grounded in friendship rather than just business. There's still something inspiring in the idea of the Beastie Boys that transcends any single release. So while this may not be a great album or even a top-tier Beastie Boys album-- I'd place it somewhere between Hello Nasty and the inferior 5 Boroughs, neither of which can touch those first four-- anyone who cares about these guys will be glad it exists.
-- Pitchfork.com
Best Songs: Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win, Make Some Noise, Nonstop Disco Powerpack
Team Photo: Here's A Little Something For Ya, Too Many Rappers
15. Ceremonials by Florence + The Machine
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
No matter how often Welch imagines her own watery death (as she also did on Lungs), or mixes bromides with the bizarre (animal entrails are too often ignored in pop), or verges on New Age nonsense, Ceremonials in its final form is hardly difficult to embrace. The whole of the album is so far greater than its parts that no matter how ridiculous it can seem at any one moment, minor gripes can be forgotten and are sometimes elevated into strengths. The key to Ceremonials’ success is Welch’s fundamental and vigorous commitment to her vision, however flawed, and her melodies, which are always impeccable.
-- PrettyMuchAmazing.com
Best Songs: Lover To Lover, Seven Devils, Spectrum
Team Photo: Only If For A Night
16. New Blood by Peter Gabriel
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
Despite the fact that we’ve all heard these songs before, Gabriel and Metcalfe have achieved nothing short of a miracle reinvention: Nothing feels even remotely stale, and many of these tracks manage to actually improve upon their original counterparts—no small feat, considering the fact that these are some of the finest songs ever written. Gabriel’s in excellent voice throughout, sweeping majestically to his sweet-spot falsetto without blinking an eye, balanced out by the gravelly bass range he’s nuanced over his past few studio albums. His daughter Melanie, now a long-standing live vocal harmonizer, brings her gentle, Kate Bush-ish presence to a number of tracks, nailing her duet with daddy in the now vastly improved “Downside Up” and elsewhere adding lovely, unobtrusive texture.
-- Paste Magazine
Best Songs: Wallflower, Don't Give Up, Downside Up
Team Photo: San Jacinto, Digging In The Dirt
17. On A Mission by Katy B.
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
What puts On a Mission over the top is Katy's way of expressing herself with emotions that extend past "wooo, druuunk" into more nuanced and detailed relationships with booming systems and the people who flock to them. As danceable as these tracks can be, the undercurrents of nuanced frustration and uncertainty in Katy's tone-- especially in the surrender of "Power on Me" and the torn-up estrangement of "Go Away"-- amplify the tricky dynamics of relationships and hook-ups to rarefied levels, creating a tension to the music that makes epics out of dissatisfaction. And when she withdraws just a bit for one of the more introspective cuts, a haunting mid-tempo meditation on love and identity called "Disappear", her caught-up bewilderment says softly and resonantly what lesser singers couldn't accomplish with overblown histrionics. A genre-bound narrative might still see Katy B slotted into a narrow role that can't quite contain her, but her voice is doing its best to prove otherwise.
-- Pitchfork.com
Best Songs: Lights On (Ft. Ms Dynamite), Hard To Get, Witches Brew
Team Photo: Power On Me, Go Away
18. 21 by Adele
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
From start to finish, 21 shows Adele in alpha mode, ready to outshout any big-mouth singer of the last two decades, from Celine to Christina to (sigh) Whitney. Adele bests them all by having at least one feature they lack: taste. Listening to most modern divas requires an act of aural surgery. You need to disregard much of the material, sensibility and production and focus on the power of their instruments. "21" needs no editing whatsoever.
-- NY Daily News
Best Songs: Set Fire To The Rain, Rolling In The Deep, Turning Tables
Team Photo: Rumour Has It, Take It All
19. Going Out In Style by Dropkick Murphys
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
"No mercy, no quarter," bellow the Dropkick Murphys in the raucous opener of their seventh album, a phrase that sums up their philosophy of music (and drinking). The Boston Irish-punk septet never met a shout-along chorus they didn't want to crash into, with a bagpipe tooting along for an extra shot of old-world poignancy. Going Out in Style, a theme album about a fictional Irish-American named Cornelius Larkin, veers into tears-in-your-pint sentimentality on ballads like "1953." But reservations disappear at the sound of full-fathom burner "Peg o' My Heart," a sweet, boozy love song with guest vocals by another guy who takes no quarter: Bruce Springsteen.
-- Rolling Stone Magazine
Best Songs: Peg O' My Heart, Hang 'Em High
Team Photo: 1953
20. Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay
Buy It At:
Artist Website | Amazon | iTunes
Aided again by Brian Eno, Coldplay are still dabbling in the kind of cool-weird artiness they truly went for on 2008's Viva La Vida. But where that album sometimes seemed like a self-conscious attempt to diversify their sound, with a world-music vibe and U2-style sound effects, this time Coldplay have integrated the "Enoxification" (as they call it) into their own down-the-middle core: Check out the cascading choral vocals that augment Martin's soaring refrain on "Paradise." Prominent elements prop up the sonic cathedrals: Jonny Buckland's guitar, which is riffier and more muscular than ever, and Euro-house synths that wouldn't sound out of place at a nightclub in Ibiza.
-- Rolling Stone Magazine
Best Songs: Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall, Don't Let It Break Your Heart, Us Against The World
Team Photo: Hurts Like Heaven
View Albums #1 - #10 here: Top 20 Mainstream Albums of 2011 (#1-10)
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