Fred Thomas (Ypsilanti Records)
I feel like the best record that came out this year or any year ever is "Person Pitch" by Panda Bear, though I really think he should have stuck with the original working title "The Witch Comes Home To Roost", or the runner-up title "Grab The Lemons and Make A Smoothie, All You Strange And Overly-Excitable People With Your Person-Face Persony Pal People". But the alliterating front-runner is just as good, and any name would have been just another detail on the outside of this treasure trove of sample-based sonic bliss pills. The real strangeness and success of the PB record is how the simplistic approach to these songs could have come off as small-minded, too skeletal or coyly twee, but instead breaks through all that to usher in a new kind of pop music. Simple and repetitive in both musical form and lyrical content, barren and unchanging for long stretches of time, running intricate counter-melodies over what are essentially one-chord songs, but never ever boring or boneheaded. In fact, this is one record that I could listen to all day actually, not just the way where you say "I could listen to this all day!" and that means twice or maybe four times in a week.
In the same way where what seems like less-than-stellar musical choices actually sound surprisingly great, the somewhat overlooked record "Star Destroyer" by Alex Delivery handed up lots of corny synth runs, elongated jams that went all over the place with no direction in mind, quick-turning and overbearing prog-y song structures and in general a ton of goofy shit... AND IT RULED! Taken out of context or looked at on paper, any of the gurgling schizophonic elements that make up the Faust-worshiping fare of this record would be really lame, but somehow there is a glue that both holds it all together and makes the bad tastes taste great together. Not many people I've talked to got this record on their radar, but it's a sweet strange sound worth hearing.
Phosphorescent's "Pride" stood as the best he's done as of yet and a calming and sad symphony of vocal loops and low-light joys.
The Chromatics' "Night Drive" took the band from basement rat dissection and re-wired skree tactics to straight up Italo Disco, all the songs at a sturdy and hypnotic 107 bpm, setting a thematic vibe somewhere between Kate Bush and Goblin.
A Sunny Day In Glasgow might be the first in a long line of new bands in a time where the world is out of band names. It's not their fault and it's too bad because their debut full-length "Scribble Mural Comic Journal" is a clever and jittery scrap book of bedroom laptop drum sounds, twee-informed vocals and a new breed of shoegazey guitar wash that doesn't really owe as much to it's historical reference point as the composer's ideas of those reference points. Deerhunter's record was kind of like that, too, but less twee, and seemingly more fake crazy.
High Places made a new 7" and had a bunch of songs online this year, and also happen to be the best band in Brooklyn. They might not have an album-of-the-year or an album this year, but they still make the list on charismatic, inspiring and waterfalls-of-joy style sound alone.
Thurston Moore put on the best show I saw at South By Southwest this year, backed up by Samara Lubeski and Steve Shelley. It actually felt like a show instead of a beer commercial, and the atmosphere was so thick with the sound and vibe the trio was putting out, you felt like you were watching some new amazing band for the first time, enough so to forget the somewhat inhibiting indie mythos that surrounds the "Your Band Could Be My Life" icons. This show was pure fall feelings, rising above the hungry mob and the free vodka and Red Bull energy of the surroundings. The record that came out later was pretty good, too, but nothing like the show.
Vashti Bunyan's "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind" collection sounded like more than fodder for completeists, and the icy quality of the second disc's low-pressure demo tape is beautiful in a way the fully-produced records can't capture.
I wasn't all that into Jens Lekman's new record, "The Night Falling On The Hill Of The Dusk Central Public Transit Glarbrel", but I did get to see him play a really nice show at the Troubadour in LA very recently, and there were a couple of moments that will stick with me for a long time. He has a song with a Beat Happening sample and the entire sold-out crowd sang the sample in deep Calvin Johnson-y voices, half of them, I'm sure unaware of the source material. It was strangely sad and also really cool. Then he played a cover of Paul Simon's "Call Me Al" where he omitted the chorus because he hated it, and that, too was strangely sad and really cool.
The Karen Dalton live reissue is close to speechlessness.