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Top 10 albums of 2011

Pique's best of list that may, or may not, alienate music fans across Sea to Sky
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These Best Of lists that papers and magazines release are always problematic. For one, they're based entirely on the tastes of one person, or, if it's a music publication, a few people. Often, their tastes will alienate their audience, whose favourite albums might not make it on the list. It's mighty strange (but also mighty fascinating) how emotionally involved people become when it comes to their favourite music.

So, at the risk of alienating the whole of Whistler, Squamish and Pemberton, here's Pique's top 10 albums of 2011, as established by the musical tastes of the only music writer on staff. Enjoy?

10) SBTRKT – SBTRKT

It was the year when dubstep flooded the mainstream; when dude-bros pumped their fists to an aggressive form of bass-heavy wobbling in nightclubs across North America; when Skrillex made an album with Korn (oh yes, Korn still exists). It was also the year when purists, anticipating the wave of "brostep" retreated underground to move dubstep in far more interesting directions.

Aaron Jerome, better known as SBTRKT (pronounced subtract), is a London producer who uses dubstep as a stepping off point, infusing each track with soul, R&B and funk. On his debut, he acts like a bass-obsessed Timbaland, creating atmospheric, throbbing and often uplifting beats that weigh against the emotive delivery of the album's guest vocalists. It's a beauty and easily the best dance album of the year.

Listen to: "Wildfire" (featuring Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano)

9) Thee Oh Sees — Carrion Crawler /The Dream

In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, there's a rock group called the Paranoids who smoke copious amounts of marijuana and have hair so long it obstructs their vision. The Paranoids are meant to satirize the Beatles but I imagine they would sound a lot like San Francisco's Thee Oh Sees 13th proper album (and second of 2011).

They don't sound anything like the Beatles, unless you take "Helter Skelter," extend it by 40 minutes, add a dash of the MC5 and then the Black Lips to keep things modern, but they channel the demented paranoia of Pynchon's novel — and indeed the latter days of the Sixties dream. In a year when most indie artists favoured electronic textures and emotive soundscapes, Thee Oh Sees punches you in the nose with some serious garage rock that'll melt your face clean off while you're doing the go-go, all alone, until 3 a.m.

Listen to: "Contraption/Soul Desert"

8) Girls — Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Girl's discography thus far is the equivalent of your drunk emotional friend: depending on the night, and the people at the party, they're either jocular or doleful but never, ever without a melancholy that makes them charming and also kind of annoying.

And Girls can be annoying. Vocalist and songwriter Chris Owens lays his heart on the line, and it can be a bit uncomfortable at times. But it's honest and, more often than not, strikingly beautiful. Merging Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, Fleetwood Mac and, yes, a little Black Sabbath, Father, Son, Holy Ghost plays like a confessional of a wounded young man who won't stop, or can't stop, bearing his soul wide open for all to see.

Listen to: "Vomit"

7) Destroyer — Kaputt

Vancouver's Dan Bejar, better known as Destroyer, documents a world falling off its rusty hinges, chasing cocaine through back doors of downtown locales, of evaporating dreams, of silent deaths — all set to a musical backdrop of pop, electro, soft rock, disco-lite and adult contemporary. It's an album for the disillusioned looking for a little solace in a disintegrating modern world and the finest Canadian album of the year.

Listen to: "Chinatown"

6) tUnE-yArDs — w h o k i l l s

Just take a look at the name of this album. Note the style. Its irreverence should offer some insight into the music that lies behind the title. And, indeed, New England's Merrill Garbus, the one-woman-band mastermind behind tUnE-yArDs, is an absurdist's take on pop music, blending folk, rock, funk and free jazz while managing to sound nothing like any of them.

With w h o k i l l s, Garbus announces herself as the voice of the new, weird America — an America that's shimmering with beauty while trembling with monsters under the bed. It's a place where violence and affirmations of life exist side by side. It's not an easy album to digest, but give it a few listens, let it sit and then you'll be mighty glad you did.

Listen to: "My Country"

5) Fleet Foxes — Helplessness Blues

Sometime between their critically acclaimed debut in 2008 and the completion of their follow-up Helplessness Blues, Seattle's Fleet Foxes lost themselves. It's typical of 20-somethings to grapple with malaise in the face of an emerging adulthood, but so often it has to do with finding one's place in the world. Fleet Foxes, one would have thought, would have found theirs: creating beautifully-crafted folk music that reaffirms one's love of the Pacific Northwest while demanding the rest of the world to come visit sometime.

But alas, fame found Robin Pecknold in an uncomfortable spot. The result was Helplessness Blues, a manifesto of sorts for his generation's desires for connections with each other, and of the natural world. As he sings in the album's title track "Now after thinking / I'd say I'd rather be/ a functioning cog in some great machinery / serving something beyond me." Bleak, perhaps, but in that single line Pecknold articulates an entire generation's desire.

Musically, the band expands on the folk hymnals that made them so popular, incorporating worldly instrumentation and articulating musically what Pecknold cannot with words — that inclusiveness is precisely what the world needs right now.

Listen to: "Lorelei"

4) Radiohead — The King of Limbs

Generally considered a failure, Radiohead's eighth album fell short of expectations mainly because expectations were set impossibly high. With three classic albums under their belt, anything less than paradigm shattering could only be regarded as a failure.

And so, TKOL fell short. But had it been recorded by another band altogether, Pitchfork might very well have been heralding it as a top album of the year. Instead, because it doesn't live up to Kid A or In Rainbows — two defining records of the 2000s — TKOL is still as hauntingly gorgeous, complex and rewarding as anything else in their catalogue.

Listen to: "Separator"

3) Panda Bear — Tomboy

After generating the sort of hype that only an Animal Collective-related release can inspire, Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, somehow made a quietly underrated album...quite possibly the most underrated album of the year. Like Radiohead's King of Limbs, it had impossibly high expectations to live up to. Lennox created two most highly regarded albums of the last decade — his 2007 album Person Pitch and as part of Animal Collective with 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion — while being pegged as both a saviour and a torchbearer for the coming decade.

Tomboy doesn't exactly fall short, though. There is some filler but when it's on, Tomboy is gorgeous. Drowning in reverb and layering his own vocals, it sounds like a psychedelic choir concert, only Lennox is giving praise, not to God, to just taking every day one day at a time. He sings about taking it easy, slowing it down and always having a good time — central tenants in one man's personal philosophy.

Listen to: "Alsatian Darn"

2) The War on Drugs — Slave Ambient

Philadelphia's The War on Drugs sounds like an updated version of Bob Dylan, or a shoegazing Bruce Springsteen, and like both of them, frontman Adam Granduciel visits the back side of America, where the brick walls crumble, where the steam from factories billows out, where the trains roll on through to the next town with its own brick walls and factories.

But where Dylan dabbled, perhaps too strongly, with metaphor, Granduciel is direct and honest, and by the time "Black Water Falls" tapers off, it feels as if you've just been on the journey of a lifetime, with him as your guide. Slave Ambient is an album about running away only to realize the only place you want to be is home.

Listen to: "Come to the City"

1) St. Vincent — Strange Mercy

In an age where male musicians growing more comfortable showcasing their sensitive sides, Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent, has no problem showing off her balls. With Strange Mercy, Clark moves away from the orchestral ballads of her previous two albums, offering 11 pop songs with alligator teeth. The instrumentation chaffs and rides while her voice, that sweet, cherubic voice, drifts over top like a lover any hetero man could ever want — even as she sings about all her anxieties and insanities, her pleasures and distastes, and everything else that makes up what it means to be a woman (or a man, really) in these complex, weird, wild times.

Listen to: "Cruel"

Ten more, in alphabetical order

Atlas Sound – Parallax: The sound of a man alone on a desert island, making the music he wishes he brought with him.

Cass McCombs — Wit's End / Humor Risk: Two companion albums released in one year by the torchbearer of singer/songwriters, demonstrating the beauty in simplicity.

Cut Copy — Zonoscope: Imagine a nightclub aboard an alien ship and you'll get the idea.

Elliott BROOD — Days Into Nights: A near-perfect folk-rock album that contains no filler, it's probably the most overlooked Canadian release of the year.

Jay-Z and Kanye West — Watch the Throne: The one per cent state their case.

John Maus — We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves: Spooky, gothic and reverb-soaked album about hanging out alone at night and the inevitable introspection that arises.

M83 — Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: Epic. That is all.

Tom Waits — Bad As Me: The latest, and hopefully not the last, from a master songwriter and truly original voice.

TV on the Radio — Nine Types of Light: Former indie doomsayers find contentment through love and family and make a pretty decent record about it.

The Weeknd — House of Balloons: Reinvigorating R&B by singing about the darkest depths of a sex and binge and offering no apologies about it.