Hey Friends of Folkways,
It’s another trip down memory lane as our writers list their favorite albums of 2011. Just because we didn’t write many reviews this year doesn’t mean we didn’t listen to music. Please have a safe and happy holidays and enjoy your new year responsibly. Now have a nice read!
Love,
Folkways Magazine
Most of the music I tended to lean towards in my formative years was music that I deemed “cold weather music.” Like all of the seasons, fall has a specific feel to it, a distinct atmosphere about it. It almost breathes with tiresome age; it seems to be slowly closing its eyes, resting and waiting for a long sleep while the lilting hands of death are outstretched and grabbing for the remnants of the scarce signs of life remaining within the light and the color. Not only do these feelings influence my musical choices but they have also provided some of my more enjoyable life experiences. This list attempts to portray the feeling, and soundtrack the progression, of the autumn season while providing personal experiences that have influenced the development of each of our appreciative, personal musical evolutions.
In the beginning of this year there were a few select albums that I found myself consistently coming back to and seemingly not growing tired of. Now that the year is growing to a close, the albums that I started the year with are still favorites. I might not be listening to them multiple times a day, or everyday for that matter, but I do tend to find myself putting the album on and it being somehow fitting at that moment. One of these albums is Kurt Vile’s new release Smoke Ring For My Halo. I have continued to return to this album throughout the year since it’s release in March. His songwriting and playing seem so effortless, while at the same time sounding so ramshackle, sloppy (in a good way), and careless, in the same vein as Dinosaur Jr.’s style. The music sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of friends hanging around, reminiscing, having a couple drinks, and jamming out on their instruments. There’s a laid back feeling that is infectious because it is pulled off so well; it immediately calms your nerves and drifts around you, fitting perfectly like your favorite hoodie.
I for one believe that it is essential to our lives that we find moments in which we are reminded of our true animalistic nature; it seems natural that different people achieve this in different ways. As I am not a hunter or an athlete, I need percussion. Drums and chants are some of the earliest forms of communication and they are able to portray emotion in a way that is more kinetic than most people could possibly imagine. I suppose for this reason, I have always been drawn to tribal motifs in pop music. As you can likely predict, the primitive/tribal movement that swept through the indie world around the mid-point of this last decade was a source of great joy for me (this same time period also held the freak folk movement, but that is an effusive description of a short-lived musical movement for another occasion). Trust Now is an album recorded by two women in a 19th century church based on a concept they reportedly devised for a live “ritual”. Appropriately, Paw-Tracks, the label established by the members of Animal Collective, has released this album into the wild. I have to say that It is a pretty darn satisfying listen.
An eerie, gradually overwhelming sense of forewarning and destruction builds before any apocalyptic scenario. Many times have I dreamt about the moments leading to annihilation and devastation without fully understanding why it was happening. Frantically running around, trying to organize my thoughts, while an overriding feeling of inevitability surged within. I never had enough time to speculate, only enough time to react. Before anything horrific could take place I would always wake up, being thankful that I didn’t have to witness any of the pain and suffering. While I am thankful, it goes without saying that witnessing something that epic, tragic, and destructive will forever be a part of human curiosity, and I would be lying if I said I had absolutely no interest in the subject. My dreams have yet to fulfill this curiosity and display to me the horrors of the end, but fortunately Ulcerate have created an album that could soundtrack it perfectly.
