BEST OF 2011: Photos | Live Videos/Bootlegs | Discoveries/Heavy Rotation | EPs/Singles | Songs | Albums

The brightest spot of 2011′s music for me was that I could’ve happily watched handsomely crafted live videos and downloaded radio sessions and bootleg recordings all year and never reached for an actual record. It’s both a tribute to modern technology and a sign that we have a welcome surplus of quality videographers and engineers. Hopefully they keep it up. Here are six essentials.

1. The Radio Dept. – Live on KEXP
My favorite working band strips down and breaks hearts. A perfect epilogue to 2010′s album of the year.
“Heaven’s On Fire”: MP3 | FULL SESSION

2. Ryan Adams – Everything
My favorite working songwriter was everywhere this year, being bootlegged in Europe, covering Bob Mould, playing for KCRW, the works. As great as he’s always been, he’s performing on an incomparable level this year — anything you can track down is well worth your time. Here’s perhaps the most essential performance, his saddest-possible piano reworking of “New York, New York.” (Allegedly, Adams banned concert recordings on this tour so he could put together a live box for next year. It will be the best live album ever made.)
“New York, New York” (live in Denver, 9/15/11): MP3

3. St. Vincent – “Cruel” on KCRW

Annie is a golden god.

4. Little Scream – “The Heron and the Fox”

Little Scream: “The Heron and The Fox” (live) from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.

There were many fine performance videos of this song this year, but the first one to hit the web remains the best.

5. The Mountain Goats with Craig Finn – “This Year”

GUYS! TOUR TOGETHER! SPLIT A SINGLE! ANYTHING!

6. Jens Lekman – Tiny Desk Concert

Any performance of unreleased mega-jam (er, mega-ballad) “Cowboy Boots” this year was a catch, but here’s a nicely recorded one.

Many, many more at sites such as Yours Truly, Southern Souls and Take-Away Shows, as well as Archive.org.

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If 2010 was the year of the EP, 2011 was the year of the… not EP. While 7″s and Bandcamp singles haven’t killed the album off just yet, there was no shortage of tasty bite-size release this year.

10. Wet Years – Sleepy Cove cassette
From the opening moments of “No Surf” — guitar murmurings that sound like gulls’ cries — Wet Years make their beach allegiance clear, but the band dips into reverb only for the final brushstrokes on an impressively vivid dream-pop watercolor.
TRACK REVIEW | “No Surf”: MP3 | BUY

9. Deepest Bison – Haunted Tea Party EP
Promising stuff from a fresh folk soloist. Deepest Bison’s debut EP borrows a little from Sung Tongs and a lot from the weird, cobwebbed portions of your subconscious.
“Calico Ghost”: MP3 | BUY

8. J. Irvin Dally – Sun Room single
Lovely, sprawling folk from one of the genre’s finest young singers. Bright enough to prescribe for seasonal affective disorder.
VIDEO: YOURS TRULY SESSION | “Sun Room”: MP3 | BUY

7. Little Horn - Twelve EP
Craggy folk newcomers lay down the lush guitars and baritone vocals with Lullaby for the Working Class-level solemnity. No pressure, Midlake.
REVIEW | “Bridges Break”: MP3 | BUY

6. Brave Irene – Brave Irene EP
Rose Melberg, Rawkblog heroine, returns with a new band, a pair of keyboards and her noisiest collection in a decade. “No Fun” is, in fact, plenty of it.
REVIEW | “No Fun”: MP3 | BUY

5. Big Moves – Lanterns EP
The L.A. jazz-punks should be headlining Warped Tour next year. Or leading the first moon-mining expeditions in 2k20. They’re that talented.
LIVE PHOTOS | “Groundbreaking Studies”: MP3 | BUY

4. Jens Lekman – An Argument with Myself EP
It’s pretty clear this is a warm-up for the Swede’s next album and it’s accordingly erratic, but the highs — “An Argument With Myself,” “New Directions” — are clever, warm and tuneful, a combination that’s increasingly a Lekman exclusive.
LIVE VIDEO | LIVE PHOTOS | “An Argument With Myself”: MP3 | BUY

3. Beach Fossils/Wild Nothing – Gruesome Flowers: A Tribute to the Wake split single
In which Beach Fossils discover that they have personality! Both sides are thorough jams from Captured Tracks, a aesthetically laser-focused label which could do no wrong in 2011.
Beach Fossils – “Plastic Flowers”: MP3 | BUY

2. LA Font – Sharks single
The Los Angeles garage band’s best cuts yet, especially “Lipsmack,” a b-side whose leather-gloved riffs hit you right in the face. (And, full disclosure, a song I was proud to premiere earlier this year.)
TRACK PREMIERE | “Lipsmack”: MP3 | BUY

1. High Highs – High Highs EP
Imagine buying Radiohead’s first single in 1993. Imagine that they were already as good as “Karma Police.” Imagine that nobody knew who they were yet. Imagine that they were probably going to release the album of the decade next year. This is really happening.
VIDEO | ALL POSTS | “Flowers Bloom”: MP3 | BUY

See the list in text-only/copy-paste format >>

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My favorite sweet-talking Swede (and his finger-snapping percussionist!) plays a handful of recent jams, including hopeful LP4 heart-breaker “I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots,” for NPR’s video series. You can download the audio at NPR’s site.

Jens Lekman – “An Argument with Myself”: mp3

Previously: Live: Jens Lekman at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 9.28.11

Last Wednesday, a particularly strange quote appeared on Matthew Perpetua’s Tumblr blog, in reference to James Blake:

This is a microcosm of a lot of what I am finding increasingly infuriating in indie culture, i.e., a total rejection of overt masculinity, and this feeling that anyone who is at all macho is the enemy. Why does this culture have to be entirely the domain of skinny, sniveling beta males? Why is aggression, sexuality and physicality in music automatically conflated with a bad scene? We need to really think about this.

This perspective is off-putting for a handful of reasons, not least of which being Perpetua’s ostensible R.E.M. fandom — would he prefer that Michael Stipe be more butch? — and the long-standing existence of punk and metal and other musics designed to meet these needs, leaving recent indie rock, folk and twee to the domain of bookish romantics. But the growing, seemingly antithetical diversity of indie listeners’ tastes — epitomized perfectly by Kanye West and Justin Vernon’s collaborations — does need a middle ground. Something between Vernon’s forlorn strumming and West’s pictures-of-my-dick braggadocio.

The genre’s future may well be Jens Lekman, an artist Perpetua would no doubt dub a “beta male” for his self-deprecating humor and supreme devotion to melodic sweetness. He’s certainly skinny enough (and potentially balding). But Lekman’s songs, especially those of 2007′s Night Falls Over Kortedala, are the boldest of his generation. On Wednesday night, accompanied by a lone drummer and drolly warning the audience, “I feel great tonight, I’m sorry,” he played a set that encompassed acoustic vulnerability, political satire and a hip-hop-worthy dance party complete with that rarest of L.A. activities, actual dancing.

The first half of the set included the songs of his new EP, a handful of You’re So Silent Jens classics (including probably the definitive solo version of “Black Cab”) and a few tracks that should make his next full-length. Many of the unreleased new songs in his rotation (“Cowboy Boots,” “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name”) are bittersweet break-up ballads akin to the sad songs of his first album, When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog. He is a still a wonderful creator of these songs; if anything, “Cowboy Boots” is as haunting a combination of narrative and melody as he’s ever done. It’s the political stuff, including the EP’s “Waiting for Kirsten” and the more jovial, anti-macho “I Stopped a Fight” which stumbled a bit, though Lekman’s pro-socialism monologues earned pockets of applause from the audience of former Obama voters. The overstuffed verses of “Waiting for Kirsten,” in particular, try too hard to equate the ridiculousness of trying to meet a celebrity with Gothenburg’s metaphorical “VIP lines.”

But things got smoother. He saved the Kortedala jams until the end of the set, where they arrived with immediate impact: “Sipping on the Sweet Nectar” turned the crowd into a bespectacled R. Kelly video, complete with a trio of young women invading the stage. That was before I noticed the circle of ironic iPhone glowstickers, one of the dorkiest, most celebratory things I’ve ever seen at a show. Would it have happened with Skrillex playing to the same room? Would they have felt safe and confident or under assault? It doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of physicality in Lekman’s music, as there is sorrow and joy and humor and self-awareness. Now, more than ever, his songs covers the full gamut of human feeling; it is the art we say we want, or at least the kind we should.

Opening the show was Geoffrey O’Connor, Crayon Fields frontman and the latest virtual unknown to receive the Lekman Fans Talking About Twitter Or Whatever During An Opening Set In Los Angeles treatment. He played mostly by himself, a brave move if he’d seen the all-but-tomato-throwing crowds encountered by the Honeydrips at Lekman’s 2008 Music Box gig. O’Connor’s solo stuff, less propulsive than his band’s smooth indie-pop material, recalled the reverb-flooded ebb and flow of Roxy Music’s Avalon if not always its charisma.

Twin Sister – In Heaven | REVIEW
Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know | CONCERT REVIEW)
St. Vincent – Strange Mercy (REVIEW | I still have mixed feelings here, but the first half is the best side of the year)
Wilco – The Whole Love (Drowned in Sound feature)
Jens Lekman – An Argument With Myself EP (ALL POSTS)

Also notable: Ariel Pink’s new single, Sleeping Bags’ debut LP, Geoffrey O’Connor’s solo debut. Didn’t get to the Stepkids, Apparat, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or the Rapture (that came out, right?). Let’s not talk about Girls.

Previous monthly essential lists: January + February/March + Halfway: Songs + Halfway: Albums + August

Hear songs from these albums and more on my Ongoing 2k11 Jams Spotify playlist. What did you listen to this month?

Tuesday: Country legend Emmylou Harris plays the Greek Theatre. Bring a hankie. More after the jump. 

Wednesday: Jens Lekman plays the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in celebration of his excellent new EP (and forthcoming album?) with Crayon Fields frontman Geoffrey O’Connor.

Thursday: Pepper Rabbit makes it home at last on their Red Velvet Snowball tour; Gillian Welch puts down roots at the Music Box; Jon Brion plays Largo.

Friday: Jon Brion plays Largo, which means you should be at Largo.

(Hear it at Vulture)

So obviously wonderful. Jens Lekman’s An Argument with Myself EP is due Sept. 20, with an album to (hopefully!) follow and an L.A. date at Hollywood Forever on Sept. 28.

Jens Lekman – “An Argument with Myself”: mp3