So, much like any other boring person in the world, my favourite album of the year was Let England Shake. Unlike my last few EOY favourites (Titus Andronicus in 2010, The Horrors in 2009), this was an album that really felt like One For The Ages, something to be kept in libraries and time capsules when people as what 2011 was like.
My other favourite album of the year was Last of the Country Gentlemen by Josh T. Pearson; most of my thoughts on it can be found in the review I wrote for The Line of Best Fit, but again, it seemed instantly timeless, heartfelt and genuinely meant. Sure, its lyrical content was problematic (though hardly at Odd Future level), but there was nothing else like it to emerge this year.
Otherwise, my favourite albums of the year are pretty hard to qualify in order. Suffice to say, though, they included these:
Bright Eyes The People’s Key
Cat’s Eyes Cat’s Eyes
Destroyer Kaputt
East River Pipe We Live in Rented RoomS
Fountains of Wayne Sky Full of Holes
Eleanor Friedberger Last Summer
Luke Haines 9½ Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s & Early ’80s
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins Diamond Mine
Los Campesinos! Hello Sadness
J Mascis Several Shades of Why
Metronomy The English Riviera (this, incidentally, being Vanessa’s favourite album of the year, and hence, something I’ve listened to a lot, involuntarily)
R.E.M. Collapse into Now
Tom Waits Bad as Me
Gillian Welch The Harrow and the Harvest
Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat Everything’s Getting Older
Wild Flag Wild Flag
—
Yes, it’s a cop-out, but…I don’t care? I’ve agonised over the list thing in previous years, but in 2011, I decided to check things out in my own sweet time (hell, I only knowingly listened to L*na D*l R*y two days ago. I don’t get it, ‘V*deo G*mes’ aside). So this year, I’ve just liked what I liked, and y’know what? I liked it that way.
