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AllMusic’s Favorite Reissues of 2011
December 22nd, 2011 | 4:00 pm est |
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The big news in retrospectives for 2011 was undoubtedly the first official release of the Beach Boys’ SMiLE Sessions, the legendary lost album Brian Wilson left uncompleted in 1967. SMiLE appeared as a double-disc set and as a lavish five-disc box, one of many extravagant deluxe reissues of a single album. So many of these appeared — McCartney I and McCartney II, Quadrophenia, Some Girls, Nevermind, Achtung Baby — that they overshadowed other excellent box sets, like the Smiths receiving their first remasters, Howlin Wolf’s complete Chess masters, and Mickey Newbury’s early albums collected as An American Trilogy. But the reissues of 2011 didn’t just appear as box sets: there were plenty of excellent single and double-disc retrospectives, two-fers, and straight-up album reissues that made this an excellent year for pop’s past.
Some of the best reissues of the year were multi-artist compilations, retrospectives on specific labels, songwriters, styles, or eras. Some of these sets were as monumental as Bear Family’s impeccably researched The Bristol Sessions: The Big Bang of Country Music, but others shed light on frequently neglected sideroads, such as Our Lives Are Shaded by What We Love, which chronicled Motown’s largely forgotten ’70s subsidiary MoWest. These, combined with discs of soul covers of Beatles songs, obscure disco sides, and early gospel made 2011 a great year for compilations.
As a classification, R&B was debated as intensely as ever in 2011. The genre contained a multitude of sounds and approaches: pop-oriented acts more invested in hooks and modern productions than traditional songcraft, “grown folks” traditionalists, heavily hyped newcomers who were slightly left of center, and veteran artists who merely carried on, either sticking to their roots or continuing to poke at the genre’s margins. In other words, there’s no reason why R&B can’t be just as varied as its offspring, rock — whether an artist is clinging to the past, absorbing cutting-edge inspirations, or doing both. That’s something not understood by adults who listen to a couple hours of Top 40 radio, hear music made for a younger audience, and declare the form dead. The diverse likes of Lloyd, Marsha Ambrosius, Van Hunt, Saturn Never Sleeps, and Escort, along with dozens of other acts, maintained the genre’s vitality and development throughout the year.
Whether it’s of the black, sludge, ambient, folk, doom, goth, death, experimental, power, stoner, thrash, symphonic, Scandinavian, or hair variety, 2011 offered up a solid slate of metal opuses, many of which found their respective practitioners either tweaking or dismantling their often lazily assigned sub-genres with unhinged glee. Some settled in (Black Dahlia Murder, Primordial, Hate Eternal) and crafted textbook slabs of sonic sorcery that showed a complete mastery of their myriad styles, some burst forth from the coals fit and smoldering (Morne, Summon the Crows), and some fanned already established flames in subtle new directions (Opeth, Mastodon, Hammers of Misfortune), while others (Tyr, Tombs, Turisas) provided the soundtrack for the 200 hours you lost collecting dragon scales and decorating your house in Windhelm with troll skulls, hagraven feathers, and mammoth tusks while traversing the Nordic badlands of Tamriel under the considerable spell of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
No single trend or movement dominated our favorite electronic recordings of 2011. The field was even more disparate than it was in 2009 and 2010, with the somber restraint of Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 and rabid excess of Rustie’s Glass Swords representing the extremes. There were no landmarks or obvious, instant classics — just dozens of releases, ranging from enjoyable to thrilling, that we’ve knocked down to a list of 25 titles. As far as the studio albums are considered, the art of sampling was as alive as ever, heard through the soft-focus analog glaze of Oneohtrix Point Never, the unsettling collages of Demdike Stare, the torpid grooves of Andy Stott, and the easy-made-uneasy listening of People Like Us. The year’s best mix albums were highlighted by Robag Wruhme and Scuba, two DJs who also made the grade in recent years.
The best soundtracks and scores of 2011 came from many corners. As they often do, film adaptations of books — both classic and contemporary –- provided plenty of inspiration for composers, whether it was Thomas Newman’s music for The Help, Johnny Greenwood’s Norwegian Wood score or Dario Marianell’s sweeping Jane Eyre cues. Meanwhile, the music from the HBO series Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire reflected the creativity and attention to detail in both shows, which rivals any theatrical release; the Chemical Brothers and Cliff Martinez further blurred the boundaries between electronic pop and film music with their respective work on the Hanna and Drive soundtracks; and The Muppets and Real Steel proved that movies for the young (or young at heart) can have top-notch music, too.
Twenty years after Nevermind, Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl still thunders with his Foo Fighters, who sounded fiercer on Wasting Light than they have in years. Other veteran rockers continued to build on their strengths: Tom Waits revisited Rain Dogs territory on Bad as Me, Paul Simon released a new millennial Hearts & Bones with So Beautiful or So What, while PJ Harvey released the dense, haunting Let England Shake. Not all the rock of 2011 was so weighty, though: the Black Keys capitalized on their breakthrough with the trashy El Camino, a record with nothing but beats and riffs on its mind.
The best jazz releases in 2011 were the ones that fell between the swinging post-bop of trumpeter Tom Harrell’s Time of the Sun and the expansive, avant-garde feel of saxophonist Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare, Vol. 2. Neither completely “out” nor straight-ahead, these artists mixed a highly cerebral, modern creative approach with more accessible aspects of the genre, and in some cases, even incorporated some unexpected ethnic and world influences, such as the uses of Arabic maqam melodies on Two Rivers Ensemble’s Inana, and traditional Greek songs on Charles Lloyd’s Athens Concert. And it wasn’t just instrumentalists who caught our attention, with both Kurt Elling and Gretchen Parlato releasing albums that showcased their unique and creative approaches to the vocal jazz tradition. From older veterans such as trombonist Phil Ranelin to younger up-and-comers like trumpeter Shane Endsley, the jazz artists of 2011 delivered some of the most forward-thinking and intriguing albums in recent years.
