1. Dear Scienceby TV on the Radio
Desperation and anger give way to celebration through sheer force of will on “Dear Science.” For this album TV on the Radio traded its noisiness for clarity, the better to reveal the workings of its ambitious, multilayered songs: programming and hands-on playing, rock and funk, elegies and dance grooves, accusations and embraces. Each song follows its own idiosyncratic path from mourning to affirmation.
2. Thirdby Portishead
After an 11-year separation between studio albums, Portishead resumed the desolate mood of its 1990s trip-hop, but with none of the cushioning that made its old albums boutique staples. Its new songs are just sparse beats, isolated hanging keyboard chords, jolts of electronic dissonance and the utterly inconsolable voice of Beth Gibbons, contemplating perpetual loneliness.
3. The Mandé Variationsby Toumani Diabaté
After collaborating with musicians as diverse as Bjork and his fellow Malian Ali Farka Touré, the virtuoso kora (West African harp) player Toumani Diabaté has an unadorned solo instrumental album that brings a world of ideas to his tradition. Playing ancient West African pieces and his own compositions, he plucks complex yet transparent counterpoint, sometimes urgent, sometimes serene, in meditations that never flaunt how cosmopolitan they are.
4. New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)by Erykah Badu
Far removed from current R&B, Ms. Badu plunges into deep, strange funk to ponder her own psyche, the desperate state of the ghetto and the state of the nation. The grooves are sparse, jazzy and hollowed out while her multiplied voices drift in with unsparing observations, advice and arguments. It’s a late-breaking successor to Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” and just as uncompromising; Ms. Badu places the seductive "Honey" at the end of the album as a sweet reward.
5. In Ear Parkby Department of Eagles
Childhood memories and thoughts of mortality ride a carousel of retrofitted California pop, with cascading guitars and vocal harmonies that grow far more pensive than sunny. Department of Eagles is Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear resuming his collaboration with his college roommate Fred Nicolaus, backed on the album by Grizzly Bear’s rhythm section. The sound of their introspection often unfurls to cinematic richness while holding on to the intimacy of a shared secret.
6. That Lonesome Songby Jamey Johnson
All the pain of what sounds like a bitter divorce can’t dislodge the craftsmanship and country classicism of the songwriter Jamey Johnson, and the tension between autobiography and a good couplet gives “That Lonesome Song” an extra poignancy. Mr. Johnson places his low, stoic voice in lean, old-fashioned arrangements with pedal steel guitar floating above, and in confessions of his own excesses, he’s harder on himself than he is on his ex.
7. At Mount Zoomerby Wolf Parade
Wolf Parade’s two songwriters, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, trade off songs and volley big ideas about cities, wars, memories and human connections. The analog keyboard tones hark back to the 1970s and 1980s, and so does Wolf Parade’s willingness to build toward marches and anthems under their quavery lead vocals. Behind the pomp and ambiguity, though, is a pop sense that fills the songs with foot-stomping hooks.
8. Microcastleby Deerhunter
With a wistful familiarity that’s spookier than most scare tactics, Bradford Cox sings about “dreams that frighten me awake”: woozy visions of murder, confinement and vampires. They’re placed in echoey, neo-psychedelic jams, circling through a few chords, that mingle disorientation with obsession.
9. Alas, I Cannot Swimby Laura Marling
Somehow Ms. Marling, now 18, gained a perspective that sees romance as part of larger cycles of life and death in her songs. And somehow she was drawn not to contemporary rock but to a folky, largely acoustic production that modestly updates 1960s folk-rock and links her to a long British ballad tradition. For further mystery there’s her smoky voice, mature without affectation.
10. Santogoldby Santogold
The terse, confident, beat-loving, wiggly-voiced character that Santi White makes of herself as the leader of Santogold obviously follows through on the pugnacity of M.I.A. and of Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But Santogold brings her own fixations to the ultralean new wave, reggae and electro tracks: notably the competitive ambitions of an artist who declares herself unstoppable and sets out to prove it.
[via New York Times: A Mix of Vocals, Lyrics and Styles]
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