Favorite Albums from 2011

• The Decemberists – The King is Dead
• Doomtree – No Kings
• The Antlers – Burst Apart
• Jay-Z/Kanye West – Watch the Throne
• R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now
• tUnE-YarDs – w h o k i l l
• Bon Iver – Bon Iver
• The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck
• Damn Your Eyes – Damn Your Eyes
• Fucked Up – David Comes to Life

Favorite Album from 2010 that would have topped my list if it had come out in 2011 and not December 2010

• Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Favorite Albums from before 2011 that I didn’t pay attention to until 2011 (Non-Kanye Edition)

• Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
• Michael Jackson – Thriller
• The Long Winters – Putting the Days to Bed
• Ween – Live at Somerville Theater 1997 bootleg
• Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – The Social Network Soundtrack

Favorite Vinyl Purchased in 2011

• Braid – Frame and Canvas
• Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
• R.E.M. – Life’s Rich Pageant
• Refused – The Shape of Punk to Come
• Split Lip – Fate’s Got a Driver
• Pixies – Doolittle
• Texas is the Reason/Promise Ring – split 7″
• Jim Croce – Greatest Hits

Favorite Albums from 1997

(As listed in my remembrance of the year in music, 1997)

• Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West
• Promise Ring – Nothing Feels Good
• Built to Spill – Perfect From Now On
• Get Up Kids – Four Minute Mile
• Guilt – Further
• Ben Folds Five – Whatever and Ever Amen
• Ween – The Mollusk
• Snapcase – Progression Through Unlearning
• Floodplain – Eightpennygalvinized
• Radiohead – OK Computer

Favorite Hardcore Punk Albums

(As listened to during my hardcore punk renaissance this past summer)

• By the Grace of God – For the Love of Indie Rock
• Snapcase – Progression Through Unlearning
• Quicksand – Manic Compression
• 108 – Songs of Separation
• Refused – The Shape of Punk to Come

Most Disappointing Album of 2011

• Braid – Closer to Closed EP

It was a huge part of my soundtrack over the summer of 2000, which means it was part of my soundtrack in England that year, and it was a huge part of my soundtrack while working my first “management” job as Assistant Assistant Manager of the Sioux Falls Software Etc.

It’s still one of my favorite albums, and it’s funny how it never should have even registered with me. The Impossibles were a ska-punk band. They were like MU330 and Skankin’ Pickle – better, yes, but still all upbeat strumming and jumping around the stage. I had long since phased out of ska, and took a new Impossibles album to be Yet Another Ska Album.

But it wasn’t. It was fantastic. It was future punk. It sounded like what a new Weezer album might sound like at the time (this was before the Green Album) and people would ask at Software Etc., “Is this a new Weezer album?”

It was fantastic. They took a huge chance, updated their sound, and wrote a very fun album.

It turns out, The Impossibles best album would be their last. Fans didn’t like the change, didn’t like the lack of ska, didn’t like the fact that their favorite band could evolve, didn’t like the idea that they may have to stop pulling for the past and evolve on their own.

Disappointed with the lack of reaction, The Impossibles broke up. They figured they had something better to do. Something that might be appreciated. Maybe one, maybe both.

Good for them.

I didn’t even like R.E.M. until Automatic for the People; didn’t get the full breadth of their catalog until college, when I retrofitted my collection with everything I could find on Napster. I still don’t get the full allure of Murmur. I missed its freshness date by a decade, which makes it just old to me, just as some don’t understand how different Nevermind sounded, or how brilliant that first The Strokes album was, just as generations before us struggled to hear past Dylan’s voice to find his impact and importance.

But every day, I’m just one click away from launching a full R.E.M. retrospective, to listening – again – to see if there’s anything else I overlooked, as if their career was something I missed completely and my only penance is to memorize the canon.

I was always a casual listener. And then, at some point last year, I realized R.E.M. had snuck its way into the pantheon of my all time favorites.

This is no “Thank You” to the band, because the band won’t read this and y’all don’t need to be reminded. But, it’s a nod of some sort. A nod to the great albums – to Automatic and Life’s Rich Pageant and New Adventures in Hi-Fi and the Chronic Town EP. It’s a nod to Monster, which history will prove was a fantastic rock album, and it’s a nod to Collapse Into Now in all of its derivativeness.

It’s even a nod to the bad stuff – I’m looking at you Around the Sun, “I’m Gonna DJ,” side B of Document, and ESPECIALLY you, Stipe, for your incessant use of the word “proud” as a noun. Because that bad stuff helped us realize how GOOD the good stuff could be.

They dated themselves. They tried to relive the glory days. They rested on their fame.

All of that could be true. Or not. They NOW say they’ve broken up, but we all know they broke up when Bill Berry left. This has just been a decade-plus long reunion show.

It was a pretty good reunion, I’d say. And now we’ll all just have to wait for the next one.

“We feel kind of like pioneers in this – there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.”

-Mike Mills

One of my favorite things: this line from Jay-Z in “New Day,” where he throws a massive spoiler alert down a few weeks before the recently announced Beyoncé pregnancy.

Sorry junior/I already ruined ya/
Cause you ain’t even alive, paparazzi pursuin’ ya/
Sins of a father make your life ten times harder/

Also great: the Otis Redding samples in “Otis;” the fact that Jay-Z is 41; the RZA name-checking; even more hip-hop cameos from Bon Iver; the final step in Kayne’s transformation from smart-ass jerk to brooding dark asshole.

And then, there was Braid.

So y’all should go listen to it. We talk about basketball and The Monkees and old Pomp Room shows and we maybe even kind of get into emo music a little bit.

The playlist for The Ledge, Episode 78: Corey Vilhauer’s Defense of Emo:

1. Sunny Day Real Estate – “47” (Diary, Sub Pop 1994)
2. Engine Kid – “Windshield” (Angel Wings, Revelation 1994)
3. Elliott – “Calm Americans” (False Cathedrals, Revelation 2000)
4. Mineral – “Gloria” (The Power of Failing, Epitaph 1997)
5. Split Lip – “Street Singer” (Fate’s Got a Driver, Doghouse 1995)
6. Rainer Maria – “Broken Radio” (Look Now Look Again, Polyvinyl 1999)
7. Jejune – “Morale is Low” (This Afternoon’s Malady, Big Wheel Recreation 1998)
8. Braid – “First Day Back” (Frame and Canvas, Polyvinyl 1998)
9. The Promise Ring – “Is This Thing On?” (Nothing Feels Good, Jade Tree Records 1997)
10. The Blacktop Cadence – “Cold Night in Virginia” (The Emo Diaries, Chapter 2, Deep Elm 1998)
11. Samiam – “Ordinary Life” (The Emo Diaries, Chapter 1, Deep Elm 1997)
12. Piebald – “Grace Kelly with Wings” (If it Weren’t for Venetian Blinds it Would Be Curtains For Us All, Big Wheel Recreation 1999)
13. The Anniversary – “The D in Detroit” (Designing a Nervous Breakdown, Vagrant 2000)
14. Reggie and the Full Effect – “Girl, Why’d You Run Away?” (Greatest Hits 1984-1987, Vagrant 1999)
15. Jets to Brazil – “The Frequency” (Perfecting Loneliness, Jade Tree 2002)
16. Jimmy Eat World – “Thinking, That’s All” (Static Prevails, Capitol 1996)
17. The Get Up Kids – “Alec Eiffel” (Where Is My Mind? A Tribute to the Pixies, Glue Factory Records 1999)
18. Seven Storey Mountain – “So Soon” (Based on a True Story, Jade Tree 2000)
19. Texas is the Reason – “The Magic Bullet Theory” (Do You Know Who You Are?, Revelation 1995)

There’s a reason for that, of course: 1997 was a fertile time for independent records, standing in the middle of music’s last pre-Napster generation, when being independent meant being under the radar and, by association, free from pop-chart co-opting. This was Modest Mouse before “Float On”; post-punk/emo before the skinny jeans; Radiohead before their guitars were stolen on their 1998 World Tour.

(That’s what happened, right?)

For me, 1997 was life changing on an entirely different level. I graduated from high school and went to college. I lived on my own and began to break away. Post-punk wasn’t a secret, by any means, but it was what I used to separate myself from the rest of Marshall’s resident collegians, their country-tinged pick-ups reminding me more of high school than of the rich and storied halls of academia.

So while Puff Daddy made millions on Notorious B.I.G.’s death, I rocked out as some of emo’s most important albums were released: Promise Ring’s Nothing Feels Good, the first Get Up Kids EP Woodson and follow up full-length Four Minute Mile, Cursive’s Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes (a raw and brilliant introduction to Omaha’s finest, I might add). And while Elton John made millions on Princess Diana’s death, I grasped the sudden resurgence of hardcore with 1997’s Further (Guilt), Progression Through Unlearning (Snapcase) and Eightpennygalvinized from Sioux Falls’ own Floodplain.

This was all fine and good. These were the bands I already listened to, the music I brought with me from high school. This was fantastic music, but it was also typical. For me, at least.

See, at some point in high school (as many of us did) I had jettisoned the idea of listening – or liking – anything resembling mainstream.

“NOT cool,” I said.

“NO WAY,” I screamed.

Not a CHANCE you’d walk in and see some point of weakness, as if my chain necklace and Less Than Jake t-shirt refused to hold court next to ANYTHING released on a major label.

And then: OK Computer.

Because, I mean, it was good. It was GOOD.

I heard “Paranoid Android” and fell in love. I couldn’t get enough. The video – THE VIDEO! – was SO good, and I ran to Sam Goody and I bought the SHIT out of that CD and I listened to it and it was all so fantastic and, seriously, I just forgot it all: the chain necklace, the Less Than Jake t-shirt, the reasons behind forging such a singular view of music.

I embraced the mainstream. Kind of. Almost.

1997 was the year that what was once called “alternative” had become too big to contain, its form lurching along as it pulled in sub-genre after sub-genre, like a net overfilled with bottom-feeders. Weighed down by itself, it split. Ben Folds Five released Whatever and Ever Amen and no one knew where it was supposed to go. The Foo Fighters brought us their best in The Colour and the Shape, and we couldn’t figure out if it was rock or alternative or something different.

Mainstream had developed a sub-mainstream – a super-independent track, if you will – that brought to mind the early 80s, with its popular-but-still-quirky new wave and its garage-y Athens bands and its punk flag-wavers, but with an understanding that making it to MTV no longer meant what it used to mean.

It became okay to be independent. It became a goal, not a consequence – enough that even major label bands like Radiohead brought success down to the indie-rock masses.

From this split came music that I didn’t even know about. I was a young pseudo-punker from the Midwest – I had no idea that in the future I’d fall in love with some of the year’s best indie records; that, 14 years in the future, I’d place 1997’s Perfect From Now On and The Lonesome Crowded West in high esteem, or that I’d somehow become some weird Ween fanatic and argue that their 1997 release, The Mollusk, shows the band at the peak of their musical ability.

Some of my favorites were just a year away. Braid had begun recording Frame and Canvas. Jets to Brazil had formed. Sunny Day Real Estate re-formed. The blank recordable compact disc was introduced. Other favorites – Texas is the Reason the most notable – broke up.

The nation’s musical taste even died a little, as we managed to put Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Hanson’s “Mmmbop” atop the charts.

In the end, though, it was my musical awakening that contributes to 1997’s importance. It was a fantastic year for releases, but it was also the right time for me to make changes in the way I listened to music.

I was on my own. I was making my own decisions (though I was barely making my 8 am class) I was struggling to find my balance. It was all fueled by music. Music kept me tied to my friends, and my home. It kept me entertained. It kept me on the road, from Mankato to Minneapolis to Omaha, my schedule cleared for nothing but shows and new CDs and a completely open mind.

It’s cheesy to say that music provided the soundtrack to my senior year of high school, or that it helped shape my first year in college.

Still though. That happened. Soundtrack, life shaping, all of it.

And it was all great. All of it.

Go ahead. Count ON YOUR FINGERS the amount of awesome in that video. I DARE YOU to do so without then taking off your socks to use your toes.

How the hardcore movement ever made it out of New York, I’ll never understand. It’s never been easily classified, is too abrasive for most casual listeners, and is often too testosterone-driven for mass consumption. It bridges the gap between punk and metal, and while fans of both genres rejoiced in it, most blew it off as a bunch of skinheads with brass knuckles.

Nothing could be more wrong.

The energy and dynamics of the great hardcore bands – and, yes, I classify Snapcase as one of the greatest – is rarely captured outside of the genre. While bands like Hot Water Music pulled the energy/dynamic out of the circle-pit and into the punk mainstream, it was bands like Snapcase, Refused and Threadbare that brought the genre to its highest point.

Away from the sludge, they added this brilliant listenability to the genre.

What gets lost in this video is the closeness of everything. These were all kids, and they all knew each other, and they all knew the words, and the energy must have congealed into a teeming mass of awesome. There weren’t any fights, I’m sure. There were just a bunch of friends feeling the highs and lows of the music, collectively experienced.

There’s a part of me that misses these sweat-box shows. They happened in basements and garages and small bars and they highlighted the intimate connection between band and audience.

Now? I’m exhausted just watching it. Exhausted – and grinning ear to ear.

But then I tried to open WordPress to create a post and Sierra yelled at me.

Because, apparently, SHE wasn’t done watching the video, and she desperately wanted to finish it, despite not having any idea who P.O.S. is, and despite being negative seventeen years old when Pearl Jam’s Ten was released.

So I let her finish watching it. And then, she wanted to watch it again. So we did. Three more times.

Kid tested, parent approved.

(Hat-tip to Dave at When I Look at the World.)