It's never too early to take stock of a year's albums. With LPs dispatched into the digital ether —the cloud, as it were— like a plague of locusts taking wing, picking through the terrible many in search of the pure-and-true few becomes its own artform. If 2012 has seemed either too confusing or a non-event for you, thus far, this list is here to change all that: these are this year's albums worth already celebrating.
10. Nite Jewel 'One Second of Love'
Secretly Canadian
After her debut 2007 CDR slurred synth-pop songs under a thick, gauzy hazy of lo-fi tape sheen, Romana Gonzalez sought to take Nite Jewel steadily away from that washed out sound. After a string of anticipation-stoking singles —like, chiefly, the chirpy "It Goes Through Your Head"— Gonzalez has finally made her second LP, One Second of Love. And its a work of bright clarity: a precisely-played, cleanly-recorded, hiss-free set of shiny pop-songs played with a funky, swaggering edge. Yet Gonzalez's voice counters the edge with its own endemic dreaminess; tinged with echo and sadness even when the music scans as 'up.' As its cover portrait illustrates, One Second of Love is about lights and darks, conflicts and contrast.
9. Chairlift 'Something'
Columbia
"Just leave alone the Geminis," Caroline Polacheck snarls mid-"Amanaemonesia"; effectively bidding adieu to former Chairlift cohort Aaron Pfenning —who departed in 2010 to be Rewards— and hailing the creative partnership between her and astrological twin Patrick Wimberly. The first single from their second LP consecrated Chairlift's new nature as a duo; bunkered in a studio together, "dangerously surrounded." That insularity has proved hugely beneficial; the dilettantish dabblings of their debut, 2008's Does You Inspire You, ditched for a singular, far-superior sound of sleek synth-pop. Here, Polachek is the clear star, and Chairlift are all the better for it.
8. Beach House 'Bloom'
Sub Pop
Beloved Baltimore duo Beach House are, quietly, going about a remarkable career. From their 2006 debut to 2012's Bloom, Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have made a progression of four LPs getting both bigger and better. Yet, they're not really getting bigger; Beach House have yet to employ an orchestra, horns, or gratuitous multi-tracking. Instead, they've stuck true to their two-piece roots —and not budged from the Beach House sound— and built around organ chords, shimmering guitars, and simple, uncluttered percussion. But on Bloom they manage to make their stripped-down set-up sound huge: bookends "Myth" and "Irene" both crest at towering peaks, giving the LP the feeling of an event. Or, at least, a record that lives up to expectations.
7. Trailer Trash Tracys 'Ester'
Double Six
Trailer Trash Tracys make music every bit as good as their band name is crap. The London outfit are are pop-song deconstructionists: building, razing, re-building, and forever remodeling verses and choruses whose constituent parts are unexpectedly bizarre. Hearing Suzanne Aztoria's pretty voice pirouette through the sonic debris —half-buried drum-machines, decaying guitar drawl, bass hatcheted with hard attack— brings back memories of Broadcast, only with the BBC jones swapped out for an obsession with David Lynch's perverted Americana. On "Candy Girl," TTT even 'borrow' the iconic bassline from the Twin Peaks theme, this playful homage a moment of unexpectedly clarity amidst an LP of inscrutable mystery.
6. Julia Holter 'Ekstasis'
Rvng. Intl.
Julia Holter has been making impressive, way-under-the-radar records for years; from the chirpy Eating the Stars in 2007 though high-concept LPs like the sound-art foley-as-story devotion of Cookbook and the Hippolytus-myth-retelling of Tragedy. But with Ekstasis, Holter finally rises from those shadows, her latest LP instantly bathed in the world's love; hailed from hither to yon for both its intellectual rigor and its emotional heft. Holter builds shape-shifting symphonies out of sinuous keyboard squiggles, with bright melodies and abstract noise floating across an ever-changing, always-uneasy landscape. It's challenging terrain to cross, but Holter holds your hand the whole while; her beautiful voice forever a bright beacon of reassuring sweetness.
5. AU 'Both Lights'
Hometapes
On their underrated 2008 LP Verbs, Portland collective AU came at the 'ecstatic jam band' vibe of prime Animal Collective with a fierceness: all frenetic energy, compositional complexity, and full-throated hollering. Their third LP, Both Lights, pushes those extremes; their experimental moments more out, their tempos more manic, their scores more dizzying, their joy more joyous. Whilst there's droning interludes and mournful crooning, what take flight are those moments —like single "Solid Gold"— of mania; where Dana Valatka's dizzying percussion, guest horn honk from Colin Stetson, and delirious Conlon Nancarrow-styled piano figures explode in utter delirium. Both Lights is a work of radical composition that doubles as a rollicking knees-up.
4. Perfume Genius 'Put Your Back N 2 It'
Matador
The shadowy specter of Twin Peaks, David Lynch's eternally-perverse soap-opera series from the early-'90s, lingers over Perfume Genius; Mike Hadreas openly evoking Angelo Badalamenti's eerie score in his forlorn piano figures and washed-out synths, in the way darkness and death shade even the most beautiful music. The second Perfume Genius LP is, in this, the Secret Diary of Mike Hadreas; confession and transgression at play, the polite veneer of society peeled away to bring light to its pained truths. Everything that charmed on 2010's Learning is made brighter, bolder, even more emotional on Put Your Back N 2 It; Hadreas' tiny, two-minute, semi-ambient songs having the emotive heft of grand epics.
3. Sophia Knapp 'Into the Waves'
Drag City
Taking leave from snarling psych-rockers Cliffie Swan (née Lights), Brooklyn songstress Sophia Knapp transcends her past with a sterling suite of sweetly-orchestrated songs. Painting with chiming pianos, multi-tracked vocals, whirring optigans, a few stings of disco strings, and the masculine vocal foil of beau Bill Callahan, Into the Waves tips its hat to the sunbaked Laurel Canyon sound and Fleetwood Mac's coked-out excess. But it's no piece of pastichey recreationism: Knapp takes cues from the golden era of singer-songwriters so as to illuminate her own songs. Here, she spins stories with kind, warm-hearted poetry; the LP a scattered collection of melancholy anecdotes, scribbled journals, and postcards from sunny places.
2. Tops 'Tender Opposites'
Arbutus
Montréal outfit Tops make with the same kind of washed-out, post-Ariel Pink pop as Puro Instinct; the soft-rock of '70s AM radio run through a lo-fi filter that smothers such sunny sounds in audio smog. But that tape sheen isn't wedded to Tops' identity: the quartet would sound just as good in pristine, hi-fi clarity. Largely because of their brilliantly-penned melodies, which set Tops apart from their peers. "VII Babies" is the pick: all synth squelch, smashed drums, wash guitar, flute trills, ref whistles, and silly-good chorus (variations on "baby, I love you") in service of pop-song pure. "Diamond Look" pushes things further, showing a band that isn't out to merely ape the moves of late-'70s Fleetwood Mac, but to author a rock mythology, via verse and chorus, of their very own.
1. Grimes 'Visions'
4AD
Claire Boucher called her music 'post-internet' —the product of the filesharing era's musical overload— but her Grimes jams are better dubbed 'post-genre'; a newly-minted, new-millennial sound fashioned from squeaking new-age synths, rattling programming, odd fragments of noise, and cascading waves of voice. The LP staunchly avoids familiar pop-song tropes; Visions' killer singles "Genesis" and "Oblivion" having no obvious emotional reading; sounding at once joyous, melancholy, mystical, distant, and intimate. These aren't dancefloor-fillers or sad ballads, aren't songs made with a functional purpose; they're unlikely artistic artifacts fashioned in a distinctive style, made with no reverence for the past, but only thoughts for the future.
