Top 10 Albums (That We Reviewed) From 2011

It’s always so tough to pick only 10 records.

Let’s start our look back on a great year in new music with a list of the Top 10 Albums of 2011 that we actually wrote reviews for here on Bums Logic. This crop of reviews represents some of the core material published as we launched this new site in 2011 and we thank you all for listening and reading along.

Next week we’ll add another dozen or so favorites from this year that we didn’t write about…. and then maybe think of an excuse to add others, or combine them into one master list and rank them in order. Or not.

So here’s our Top 10 Albums (That We Reviewed) From 2011, in no particular order, and all with links to our original reviews:

Tom Waits – Bad As Me

Drive-By Truckers – Go-Go Boots

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Here We Rest

Wilco – The Whole Love

Mastodon – The Hunter

Stephen Marley – Revelation Pt.1: Root of Life

Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Pt.2

G. Love – Fixin’ To Die

Sonic Youth – Simon Werner a Disparu

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The Whole Wilco: Tweedy Finds a Fix for the Fits

Just as their home base of Chicago sits between LA and New York, Wilco occupies a vast middle ground, having been dubbed with the seemingly opposite labels of “alt-country pioneers” and “the American Radiohead.” Somehow they both fit, as evidenced on their fine new LP The Whole Love. And all that ground between those two labels is the area that Wilco has been working in the decade since their consensus “best album,” 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Fans and detractors alike are tough on this band as far as expectations. Their albums are all “good” so we take them for granted (not unlike The Roots if you want a strange-but-fitting comparison). When they’re not great, we accuse them of phoning it in, but when they get too ambitious, we say they’re trying too hard. They can’t win. We find them either too boring or too weird.

“Found a fix for the fits/
Listen to this/
It’s buried under the hiss… and it glows”

Jeff Tweedy’s personal fits with addiction and depression are known and don’t need to be re-examined here. But on top of those, and even in his recent sober/happy days, he’s still battled fits of trying to live up to or match the masterful Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album without remaking it. Wilco has tried everything: the experimental, the poppy, the rootsy, the Dad rock; usually all within one album. Yet somehow there were enough near misses that most of us resigned ourselves to the idea that Wilco would never make another truly great album again, but they’d continuing making good ones and that was okay.

Until now. The Whole Love sounds to me a lot like Summerteeth, the underrated gem of a record that serves as the bridge between their two “best” albums, Being There and YHF, both chronologically and sonically. Just something about the way several of the tracks literally bounce along. The songwriting, and the performance and sound of it, it just feels effortless, though I admit that I have no idea what that means and it’s a ridiculous way to describe an album.

The Top 10 Best Live Albums

These Top 10 Lists are impossible. I don’t know why we subject ourselves to doing them, but we do. And picking the Top 10 Best Live Albums is a particularly tough one, as easy as it might seem on the surface.

It’s hard enough just to get the performance/recording of actual live albums right, let alone properly assessing them in some form of a list. There’s always that impossible tightrope walk between the best performances and the hit songs; between the idea of releasing one complete show and mixing together the best sounding tracks from different nights. Depending on the band, and the expectations of their listeners, there are a myriad of stumbling blocks and inevitable drawbacks to the pursuit of a good live album.

How did this guy not make the list?

It’s an oxymoron within itself, the live album. Truly LIVE music isn’t really live when you listen back to it later. At its worst, it’s simply the songs you know but with canned crowd noise. But at its best, it can actually convey the energy and joy of the original performance (just as a “studio album” can capture a great take, that was technically played “live,” even if just in front of 3 engineers and not 3,000 screaming fans).

The difficult thing in identifying what I would deem the Top 10 Best Live Albums, for me, is the fact that it could be argued that the bands I most admire as live acts haven’t really made a truly great live album. Prince, The Roots, Radiohead, The Who, Black Crowes, and Led Zeppelin have all made attempts, but for some reason they haven’t quite nailed it yet on an official live release. (Maybe The Who and Zeppelin have come close, but for some reason they lack a flawless go-to set). U2, while they’ll make the honorable mentions list with Under a Blood Red Sky, I still feel like they are missing a career-spanning (but not too monstrous) live set.