The Year In Music 2011

As I do every year, I've compiled a list of my favourite records to come out this year. This will be posted incrementally in the coming week. But first, some prologue to that list, an elegy for the year that was. Of course, this is really a general overview of some of the trends I noticed and is in no way an attempt to give a complete look at all the important developments in music this year.

2011 was a big year for metal. I suppose this goes without saying, because with its populist intentions and perpetual generation of new fans and bands, metal as a whole has never really declined. The attention paid to it by the music media has fluctuated wildly in the last three decades, but the music itself never left. In any case, the neo thrash revival, along with continuing developments in USBM away from its source musics, the co-mingling of post metal sonic signifiers with purer strains of extreme metal, the continued plodding of doom and sludge denziens, some good old hardcore abandon, and all those classic twin guitarmonies and phantasmagorical lyrical themes are all prominent features of today's metal scene. With the resurgence of a hard rock ethos in the metal underground, the music that is being made is by and large less rigid than it was a decade ago. Today's metallic musicians have displayed a willingness to embrace other forms of metal (and non-metal) when making their music, allowing for a more fluid approach to songwriting. In other words there's a whole lot of good stuff being made, and fewer restrictions than ever before.

Rock music is also doing well, artistically at least, but you won't hear much about the good young rock bands making a go of things these days. Unless you're the Black Keys or a surviving relic of the early 90s (Foo Fighters, Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers) it seems like nobody wants to fess up that good rock music is still being made. The media and marketplace is in a pop cycle now, so expect they'll find their way back in another year or two. What is really important for rock aesthetically is that the worlds of rock and metal have finally re-converged after a long period of separation, but that's a story for another essay. In any event, if you're looking for some rock that really does rock, you're not going to find it when a description of the band's music has the frankly meaningless prefix "indie" in front of it. In the last 5 years or so, "indie rock" has become a new sort of half-measure for upwardly mobile bands who like to cop the cool of a real rock and roller without dirtying their hands with any of that filthy "rocking out." How passe. A new shadow major label economy has grown up and filled a void in the marketplace left when the majors stopped signing new bands about 15 years ago. Larger indie labels have been quicker to adapt than the majors to how the internet has changed the industry and capitalized in a big way with cross-platform marketing opportunities. This is not to say that the music being produced is bad. Some of it is quite excellent, but the problem is that indie pop is being misrepresented as rock, and this does no one any favors. Critics might grudgingly praise a rock album that embraces and build upon traditional rock elements, but any positive comments will be qualified with sideswipes about relevance and originality. Never mind those bands that are making relevant and original rock music that sometimes do get a boost from the music literatti (Atlas Moth, Baptists, Baroness, Big Business, Black Tusk, Fucked Up, Griever, Kylesa, Lumerians, Russian Circles, Rwake, SubRosa, Thee Oh Sees, Twin Crystals, Torche, Zoroaster... the list goes on), in most cases any coverage they get usually focuses on the non-rock elements of their sound. This middle ground between metal and the non-heavy indie scene is where the real rock is.

2011 was also a major coming out party for the long-lived drone scene. Experimental musicians and avant garde composers have been working this continuum for decades, even predating the rock 'n' drone experiments of the Velvet Underground. Now it seems the appetite for this stuff is exponentially greater than was ever suspected, and regular music fans are finding out that they really like this stuff when they are exposed to it. I would guess that the appeal of 20-minute electronic sound-scapes and minimalist psychedelic mantras is proportional to the overload of 've seen arise since the virtual collapse of the band format in the pop industry. No one actually PLAYS pop music anymore, and in fact no one now listening to pop music even has any memory of played pop music. The oppressively digitized and mass-produced pop music we have today is programmed, as it has been for about 30 years now. The technological freezing of pop music has been destructive to most people's ability to actually hear and understand music, and the vast majority of people don't give a shit. The one unintended consequence of these long term trends that has been beneficial to they pop audience's appreciation of good music in one way at least, and that is in the casual listener's understanding of texture. An ability to derive pleasure out of the tactile surfaces of sound is essential for the enjoyment of drone music, which generally speaking has none of the traditional elements of pop music, hooks, verses, choruses, or rhythms. Drone music also does not require any refined sense of musicality or special skills of its makers to be effective. All that is needed is a desire to explore the possibilities of pure sound. The possibilities here are limitless, because there really are no rules. People are making this stuff up as they go along, a very exciting prospect. As a result, drone musicians have been coming out of the woodwork, and some of them are extremely prolific. The internet has also been crucial for distributing and trading this music, causing the acceleration of the music's development. In 2011, some fabulous recordings were released, and this trend looks to continue into 2012 and beyond.

There were also a few outliers here and there. To get into them all would take too long, suffice it to say that I try to be pretty well rounded and expose myself to quality examples of most types of music. I like lots of different stuff, even if the heavy, freaky, abrasive, noisy weird stuff makes up the majority of my musical diet. The music world is ever widening and evolving and I can't possibly cover it all by myself. If you have any suggestions for things I missed or maybe overlooked, by all means let me know. Moreover, make your own lists. I love reading 'em.