February 2012
13 posts
Unbest: What Music Meant in 2011
In early December 2011, as the great year-end listmaking bonanza began once again to sweep the Internet, we started wondering: What if there was an outlet for writers and fans to celebrate the music that meant the most to them over the course of the previous year, regardless of who made that music or when it was released, without having to worry about lists or rankings or points or quantification?...
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Austin L. Ray on Action Bronson’s Dr. Lecter (2011) (iTunes, ActionBronson.com)
“Hop in the whip and call for breakfast Fried eggs and prime steak that’s straight from out of Texas Damn, I’m living reckless Smoking all day just like the brisket My beard is golden brown just like a biscuit Every day I’m thinking, ‘Should I risk it?’ Add another number to...
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Lindsay Eanet on Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (from Armageddon - The Album, 1998) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
In the United Kingdom, where I spent most of 2011 mired in academia and damp weather, there are a lot of channels solely dedicated to playing music videos. Some solely do Top 40, others club music, others vintage garage rock. One of these channels,...
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Vicki Mayowski on The Avett Brothers (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I’ve been an Avett Brothers fan for years. A good friend clued me into their music a few summers ago, taking me to see them play a free concert at a local park. After that show, I was hooked and I saw them every time they came to town. Each year they’d play a bigger venue, but in early 2011 something big happened to the band that...
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Evan Minsker on The Gap Band’s Gap Band IV (1982) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I had a sense of pride when my brother showed interest in owning records. I was collecting vinyl years before he started actively perusing record stores, and today, the man’s collection is awesomely baffling. He’s got some jazz and soul classics, but also, Mr. Mister, Slippery When Wet, and Whitesnake....
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Ian Mathers on Subrosa’s No Help For the Mighty Ones (2011) (Bandcamp)
I freely admit to not being a huge/devoted metal fan, although when I fall for something I fall hard. And my first listen to Salt Lake City doom rock quintet Subrosa’s newest album was the hardest I’ve fallen for anything in years. I heard “Whippoorwill” via The A.V. Club’s...
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Cristina Martin on Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” (from Helplessness Blues, 2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
The first time I heard this song, I was on my way back from a very hard visit. Russell, an elderly friend I had made a few years back, was finally coming to the end of his days. It was his birthday, and so a group of us made the trek to visit him at his home tucked away in the woods,...
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Meagan Morrow on Wild Flag’s Wild Flag (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
Sleater-Kinney has been my favorite band since I was 15 years old. I heard “Dig Me Out” my freshman year of high school and was instantly expelled from a Top 40 wasteland into a world of punk and post-punk, music that saved me as I stumbled through the next few years as an awkward teenager in the suburban Atlanta. I...
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Kasia Galazka on St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I don’t know whether people are hesitant to accept contemporary musicians as McCartneys and other famouses, but I pretty much idolize Annie Clark in the “I want to pick up an instrument because I like the things you do to yours!” way that I assume teens did in the old days when releases were anticipated and artists...
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Daniella Joseph on LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” (2011) (iTunes, Rd—oh come on, you know this damn song)
My cousin Pame is a little wild. Her voice is toddler-loud. When I ride the subway with her, I can feel the eyes of other passengers on us, some of them are disapproving, some startled awake, their eyes focused on her wide red mouth, the glint of her gold fillings. Then...
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Meghan O’Dea on The Magnetic Fields’ “I Think I Need A New Heart” (from 69 Love Songs, 1999) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
One warm spring day around last Easter, my boyfriend invited me over for supper before we went out for the evening. I let myself in with the key he had given me only a week or two into our brief courtship and was met with the usual twang from the tinny...
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Erin M. Routson on “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj (from Pink Friday, 2010) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
emrgency:
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. When I was in high school, I was what you’d call “cool.” Or, rather, a uniquely specific brand of cool that only led to admiration from people who thought indie rock shows with less than 25 people in attendance or a...
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Ian Mathers on Jónsi’s Go (2010) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) Sometimes when you get into an album a year “late,” it’s because you just missed it at the time; in my case, not paying any attention to Go had more to do with Jónsi’s day job and my sobriety than anything chronological. It’d be misleading to say that I dislike Sigur Ros, but they’ve always...
January 2012
19 posts
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Gray Chapman on The Kills’ Blood Pressures (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
She is everything I’m not and everything my shaky insecurity yearns to be. She has the lanky, boyish figure; I, the rounded angles of some kind of distorted Baroque painting. Her face is sallow and sunken and worn thin, possibly by a few good years of drug abuse; mine, apricots of freckled cheeks rounded out...
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Lindsay Rhoades on Washed Out, Dirty Beaches, and rejecting the trappings of supposed adulthood (8tracks)
For some, 2011 was just a year where seemingly every other girl/gay man in Brooklyn decided to shave a random swath of hair down to the scalp. But for me, it was a collection of moments that have inspired me to whole-heartedly evaluate the way I experience music and actually make something...
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Erin M. Routson on Sonic Youth (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
emrgency:
“have i ever told you that i am in love with thurston moore and kim gordon and i want to model my life after theirs?” - march 17th 2003
I still don’t know if this is the right song to encompass my feelings (or their feelings) or anyone’s feelings over what happened last year. Maybe there’s no right song at...
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The home stretch! Also, apologies.
Here at Unbest, we really hate it when people are all like “LOL hey readers, if any of you still exist, LOL because I am a terrible blogger! If this blog was a kid DFACS would be all on my ass, TEE HEE!!!1” Just, like, blog when you want, don’t fuss about it! But then we became Those People—even worse, Those People Who Ask You To Send In Things, Sometimes Involving The Baring Of...
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Kim Huston on PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) and Let England Shake (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
godiminbadshaperightnow:
PJ Harvey claimed her first Mercury Prize on Sept. 11, 2001 for the record Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.
She was the first woman to win the award and is the only person to have won the award twice (the only other...
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Julia Askenase on Blood Orange’s Coastal Grooves (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
This past spring, I became invested in the idea of profiling Dev Hynes, aka Lightspeed Champion, for his latest endeavor, Blood Orange. Ah, but rejection is part of the freelance-writing game, and my pitch never panned out. Still, spending as much time and energy as I did becoming well-versed on Hynes—reading...
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Themarq on Radiohead’s “Give Up The Ghost” (From The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement, 2011) (website)
themarq:
I’ve been a fan of Radiohead but I wasn’t too keen on The King Of Limbs especially after seeing the “Lotus Flower” video. I played my CD while doing something else and my response to questions about the album was lukewarm. I was...
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Brian Collins on Bruce Springsteen’s “Candy’s Room” (from Darkness on the Edge of Town, 1978) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
Lately, I like to pretend that Bruce Springsteen hails from my hometown of Riverdale, Ga., and that we are contemporaries, and that he made music in the seventies for me. If you’re my age (34), this is probably a Weird Thing to do. Let’s be honest: he...
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Kolleen Alexandra on The Mountain Goats’ “This Year” (from The Sunset Tree, 2005) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
“This Year” by The Mountain Goats tells the true story of a million 17-year-olds—those lazy months before high school graduation and college, the anger and escapism in childhood bedrooms, and the long, meandering waiting game for something new on the horizon.
...
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Ani Vrabel on Kanye West’s “Runaway” (from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 2010) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
It has been a year of four ZIP codes in three cities, nine different roommates, six months of storing clothes in a suitcase, and more than 200 nights spent on an inflatable bed. It’s been a year of feeling temporary, discovering new neighborhoods, and cramming my...
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Heather Hansman on Dawes’ “A Little Bit of Everything” (from Nothing is Wrong, 2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
notlike-love:
2011 was the first whole year I spent at a desk, which is to say that 2011 was the year I learned to be semi-productive with headphones on. I’d spent the past six years bouncing between seasonal jobs, working summers on rivers and winters in the...
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Anonymous on Florence & the Machine’s “No Light, No Light” (from Ceremonials, 2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
“No Light, No Light” hit me in the gut like a cannonball, Homer Simpson-style. The lyrics are probably about God, but they remind me of my emotionally abusive relationship in a yeesh, yank-the-collar way.
It’s been over a year. Even after extensive self-repair,...
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Caroline Klibanoff on Okkervil River’s “Plan D” (from Golden Opportunities 2, 2011) (download EP here)
It’s hard to talk about December without talking about November, and it’s hard to talk about November at all. A miserable month, yes; a persistent “damp, drizzly November in my soul”; an amalgamation of events and moods that left me unwilling and...
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“Holy shit, T.I.. My favorite rapper? Probably, yes. Trap Muzik is brilliant....”
– Mark Larson (via)
Just one snippet of a very fun and eclectic overview of a year in listening.
[Honorary Unbest]
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Alicia Johnson on LCD Soundsystem (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
schwamommy:
so i know everyone was already privy to the amazingness of LCD SOUNDSYSTEM (and james murphy) prior to 2011. and technically, i accidentally fell madly in love with them in a single night of late fall 2010. for years, i knew who they were, had heard the name, seen many written pieces, recognized their inclusion in...
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Brenda Cromb on The Handsome Furs’ “When I Get Back” (from Sound Kapital, 2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I first heard “When I Get Back” in the upstairs concert space of a pub in Islington. The Handsome Furs aren’t as big in England so I’d somehow wound up right next to the stage. They introduced it as a song about being on tour and all the promises they made themselves about...
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Leslie Dunn on Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
When I first heard Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” I was hugely pregnant, hugely depressed and hugely uncomfortable. First I’d had to miss Gaga’s Atlanta concert due to pregnancy complications (yes, I was absolutely planning to attend the show at seven-and-a-half months pregnant dressed as a silver...
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December 2011
29 posts
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Well, howdy!
Hello to anyone who might have clicked over here from this great New York Times blog post by Dan Kois (which we definitely would think fondly of even if he hadn’t honored us with a number-nine spot alongside The Millions’ Year in Reading, the project that inspired this project)!
You can read a kinda long take on what Unbest is all about right here.
To put it more simply: Unbest is...
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Rachel Bailey on Talking Heads’ “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)” (from Speaking in Tongues, 1983) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
There are times when you are traveling that the gravity of how utterly alone you are becomes suddenly, shockingly real and all you want is to go someplace that feels like home. For me, it was on the street in front of 21Via di San Francesco a Ripa...
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Erin M. Routson on Crime Mob’s “Circles” (from Hated On Mostly, 2007) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify, YouTube)
I set it as his ringtone.
It seems kind of ridiculous, but rap ringtones have had a place on my phone since a beeped-up version of T.I.’s “Rubberband Man” blared from the tiny speaker of my old Motorola in college. But this song, this was the one that...
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Kim Huston on Morrissey (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
godiminbadshaperightnow:
Morrissey Royal Oak Music Theater December 18, 2011
If I learned one thing from this show, it’s that I’m not the Morrissey fan I thought I was.
I am a fan of his entire discography; I have a Morrissey nightlight. I thought that was commitment.
I thought going to a Morrissey show alone might be the most depressing thing I...
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Pete Rorabaugh on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Let’s Groove” (1981), The Avett Brothers’ “When I Drink” (2006) and New Order’s “Everything’s Gone Green” (1981)
“Let’s Groove,” Earth, Wind & Fire
We have a close family friend, kind of like a little sister to me, who is a huge Earth, Wind & Fire fan. A...
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Jeremy D. Larson on Third Eye Blind’s “If There Ever Was A Time” (2011) (YouTube, SoundCloud)
Every time I read a “hard” news article, I feel useless—like I’m somehow in tacit agreement with the things I’m opposed to just because I wrote up another tour announcement for Vetiver. I’m not saying that music conversations should cease and we should all focus on socio-political...
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“You may also have noticed an increase in the amount of both hip-hop and radio...”
– Sean T. Collins
[Honorary Unbest]
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Susannah Young on EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
Totally out of step with Unbest’s mission, my thoughts for this piece actually stemmed from writing my year-end album blurb assignments for Prefixmag. This year, I totally won the lottery and got to write about St. Vincent, PJ Harvey, and EMA.
In writing about St. Vincent, I started thinking about the...
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ljm:
i’m always hilariously late to the top forty hip-hop game, and i don’t say that in a self-congratulatory OH I DON’T BELIEVE IN TV way or whatever (first of all because i…love tv, obviously). i hadn’t listened to anything harder than “that’s what little girls are made of” by raven-symone for about fifteen years when i learned, this year, that...
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Lyndsie Bourgon on The Black Keys’ “Everlasting Light” (from Brothers, 2010) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
It was very early in the morning, when she took her last breath. 12:30 a.m. in mid-August, almost five months to the day that they found tumors on her lungs and ovaries. The evening before had been a flurry of phone calls cross-country—no, she wasn’t going to make it out this...
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Jason Sanderbeck on Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring for My Halo (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
Every so often, I’m reminded that I am part caveman. While this revelation has manifested in numerous forms over the years, at least two of them directly involved Kurt Vile. In 2009, I caught the prolific singer/songwriter and his Violators at the Grey Eagle in Asheville, N.C. Beside that date in...
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Jill Guccini on Florence & the Machine’s Ceremonials (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
Ceremonials by Florence & the Machine has been entangled in my brain cells for the last two months in a way an album has not been in a long, long time.
As I grow older I find my experience with music to be increasingly further away from what it was when I was a teen; I listen more to music that I...
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Dylan Kight on Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago (2008) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I discovered For Emma, Forever Ago in July of 2011. I had heard of Bon Iver on numerous occasions, but didn’t go seek the record out. I was in California. More specifically the bay area. My wife left me while I was on the second day of this trip. She was at home in Atlanta. I was out west. I was...
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My Listening Year, 2011
austinkleon:
Ten great albums I listened to this year:
Jay Z & Kanye West, Watch The Throne (2011) If Decoded was my gateway drug to Jay-Z, this album was the gateway drug to Kanye. Favorite musical memory this year was listening to it driving around Maui in a rental SUV. (Appropriate setting + vehicle.)
Rick James, Street Songs (1981) This album was my Prozac in 2011. I can’t stand...
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Melanie Killingsworth on Arcade Fire’s “Keep the Car Running” (from Neon Bible, 2007) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I grew up in an extremely conservative fundamentalist setting. (And then got out, and then grew up wanting to be a writer, and then started an essay with a clichéd bit about my childhood.) My first exposure to music, my exploration of various genres and the lengths to...
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Marcus Rosentrater on Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify, Constellation Records)
On July 13, my friend Bryan sent me a link to an album over chat. The moment I hit play, the music sucker-punched my usual buoyancy, sweep-kicked any tonal sensibilities from under me and I was pinned under its cosmic weight for three days, provoking images of...
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Kim Huston on Drake’s Take Care (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
godiminbadshaperightnow:
After awhile girl they all seem the same: Drake, “Take Care,” and the desire to get vulnerable
I have a love-hate relationship with Drake’s Take Care.
I’ve been hard pressed to understand why since I enjoyed So Far Gone and Thank Me Later. I’m not averse to emotional, introspective or...
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“This is not a “best of 2011” music list. I didn’t hear or read or see all the...”
– Seth Colter Walls—”100 Great (Not Best!) Songs of 2011,” The Awl
[Honorary Unbest]