Our Favorite Albums of 2012
We made you a mix of the top tracks of 2012, and asked some of our favorite artists to tell us which records they've had on rotation all year. Now, we bring you a list of the albums that really meant a lot to us.
Aaron Dilloway: Modern Jester [Hanson]
This is a difficult choice to justify. Not because of quality-- this truly is the best noise release of the year-- but because our job here at Ad Hoc is to illuminate the underground, to represent the unrepresented. Putting Aaron Dilloway in a year-end list feels a lot like validating canonization, which can seem toxically counteractive to our whole project. Still, saying that great music can be worth less just because the person that made it is already huge is really stupid; that’s why you’re not seeing the new Flying Lotus album in every top 10. Modern Jester is on this list because it’s exceptional. Decades from now, it will stand out as the best noise album of this year, possibly this cluster of years, not to mention of Dilloway’s own career. And it always hits perfectly. “Look Over You Shoulder” is a careful study in restraint and construction, whereas “Eight Cut Scars (For Robert Turman)” is a cathartic assault from start to finish. There are tons of great samples, interesting interactions between loops, climaxes both expected and not. Dilloway even pays homage to one of the forgotten titans of early noise, Turman. But this all only matters if you let the music subsume you. It’s all any album ever demands. Perhaps this kind of concession is shoddy music criticism. Doesn’t matter. Give yourself over to it like a college sophomore at a Deadmau5 stadium show. --Michael Sugarman
Actress: R.I.P. [Honest Jon's Records]
Actress decided to start at the beginning. That meant going back to Detroit, but also back to the BBC Radiophonic workshop-- revisiting Theo Parrish, but also the very nature of electronic sound. This is half the reason R.I.P. endlessly frustrated you if you just wanted to dance. As a veritable hour straight of delayed gratification, a good chunk of the album is comprised of percussionless études, not unlike early electronic music from Brits like Derbyshire and Oram. When percussion does first show up, it serves primarily as a reminder of origin-- some bass drum, or some noise that sounds like a cymbal. It’s these static noises throughout R.I.P. that constantly remind us what a drum machine is-- just noise, filtered and ordered to sound like something recognizable. “Techno” only shows up in the album’s back third. Speaking on his prior effort, Splazsh, Darren Cunningham noted that many of the songs started as deconstructions of personal favorites-- “Hubble” for example, is based on Prince’s “Erotic City”. For Cunningham, the sausage-making of dance music is just as vital as its hypnotizing qualities. His techno ends up simple, but never minimal, and that’s no mistake. 2012 saw a massive proliferation of minimal techno, a genre whose goal is using the barest sonic tools to entrance. Cunningham doesn’t want a mindless dancer, a twerking drone. He wants to get you in the headspace where you can be awestruck by the beauty of “Jardin” and still let your booty clap to “IWAAD”. --Michael Sugarman
Andy Stott: Luxury Problems [Modern Love]
Vocals are a funny thing. Sometimes when artists start incorporating them, it marks an effort to be more accessible. Something of an alternate approach is to introduce vocals as an atmospheric element, eschewing lyrical comprehensibility for a simple human texture. And then sometimes you’re just a club DJ who needs a good little sample for a hook. Luxury Problems sees Andy Stott using vocals for all these functions in a consummately backwards way. This album is very much a continuation of his EPs from last year, fracturing elements of dance music through some Eraserhead-industrial prism. He has this uncanny ability to just make shit strange. Yet, while his works from last year sometimes drifted into mechanistic detachment, Luxury Problems sees Stott giving his style a literal human voice. Like labelmates Demdike Stare, Stott creates an uncanny valley where a battle wages between the disembodied voice and the medium manipulating it. These are the luxury problems of the album’s title. We live in the most convenient world in history, with technologies to help us work and communicate but which persistently threaten to estrange and annihilate us. When the vocals on “Hatch the Plan” and “Leaving” really clutch the heart string, when you get that chill, these are the small victories that remind us who exactly is in control. --Michael Sugarman
Angel Olsen: Half Way Home [Bathetic]
In the first half of the 2000s, a group of artists grouped under the umbrella term “freak-folk” emerged. Some, like Joanna Newsom, were singular talents who collapsed a legacy of then-unfashionable artistic influences-- from the spooky ruminations of Tim Buckley to British trad-folk stalwarts like Fairport Convention-- into songs that promised a new American folk vernacular. Newsom and cohorts Devendra Banhart and Vetiver's Andy Cabic quickly established a canon of essential recordings, fostering the rediscovery of forgotten geniuses like Vashti Bunyan and Karen Dalton. Freak-folk burned brightly as it rose to prominence less than a decade ago, the final analog movement in underground music before the rise of music blogs and the Pitchfork generation's enshrinement in mainstream music culture. In the intervening ten years, the explosion of interest in electronics old and new combined with the subsuming of genre music into outré sonic practices has all but erased this fertile period from independent music history.
With this context in mind, Angel Olsen's Half Way Home is a record of rare and awesome beauty. First, there is the voice-- untrained and unpredictable, plaintive one moment, soaring with aching beauty the next. Then the lyrics-- plainspoken but retaining an air of mystery, ever-threatening to crack with heartbreaking sincerity. Finally, the restrained arrangements helped along by Olsen's Bonnie “Prince” Billy tourmate Emmett Kelly: the judiciously employed pump organ, the just-right guitar sound, vocal melodies deep in the mix and the occasional, arresting intrusion of percussion. With her solo full-length debut, Olsen has crafted a record that celebrates enduring musical values like songcraft, raw talent and restraint. And it's all the more exceptional for being released into an underground music culture littered with perfunctory re-mixes, redundant live sessions, weekly “essential” mixes, commercial pop apologists, collector-baiting colored vinyl, and “curators” of all stripes penning breathless exhortations of the latest synth fart from a Brooklyn basement. In a word, Half Way Home is timeless. --Max Burke
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Mature Themes [4AD]
Black Dice: Mr. Impossible [Ribbon Music]
Punk’s not dead; it just sounds like Black Dice now. Polarizing since day one, and jet-engine loud up until at least two weeks ago, their music remains an ineffable inspiration to fifteen years of freaks and geeks. Like a one-band revolution, Black Dice kicks, punches, warps and wiggles its way through these confusing modern times; they created a genre and swept their own awards show, evolving, exploring, engaging, and side-stepping stagnation. And with critical kudos all around for their latest offering, Mr. Impossible—its lucidity matched by its icky, sticky funkiness— Black Dice once again blazes trails for any youngster looking to get weird with a wink and a smile. With many tracks powered by a booming and affected drum machine, Mr. Impossible recalls a fleeting but sought-after ground between Kraftwerk and Outkast while making very thoughtful pit stops around the world. Perhaps this is a more sonically digestible record for the band, but not even a solid rhythm section can mask Black Dice’s undeniable fingerprint, a dazzling array of sounds, voices, and melodies at once alien and attractive but never without a sense of humor or spirit. --Micah Welner
Blanche Blanche Blanche: Wink With Both Eyes [Night People]
The subject's a speculative mess, but sometimes I can't help but wonder what happened to the outsider artist. That first high school hotbox session with a copy of The Doldrums always felt like it was destined to be a fleeting memory. Once Pink's version of pop stardom turned strangely from parody to reality, it seemed rarer still. One of five albums they'll have released on four different labels in 2012, it is, to me, one of the best pop albums of the year. With quirky chord changes at breakneck speed and heavily chromatic melodies, the progressive muzak-punk song cycle's a lot to chew on. But despite the album's left turns, what's really at work here is the kind anthemic, inspired songwriting that could thrive in any context. --Matt Sullivan
DJ Rashad: TEKLIFE Vol. 1: Welcome to the Chi [Lit City Trax]
The running joke around the office is that, yeah, while a lot of really incredible records came out this year, all that is getting in the way of the real point: DJ Rashad actually put out the best album this year. It’s a joke, but only kind of: in a year where footwork was all over the place, Rashad and the rest of the Tek-Life crew were writing its State of the Union address. Rashad gave us Just a Taste of it last year, but Teklife Vol. 1: Welcome to the Chi is less of a footwork blueprint than a tight, distilled exploration of what that music can be. And what makes footwork-- especially in Rashad’s native Chicago-- so compelling is how psychedelic and crowd-focused it is, tailormade for deviants ready to headbang and grind to the hard pummel of snares and toms well past the witching hour. That last bit is the real point: Chi goes hard. It’s a constant throwdown from front to back, stuffed with trippy surprises, like the synth intro that makes the Morse Code-laden “Don’t Drop It” sound like a surprise, the dissonant chords that make Gil Scott-Heron’s ghost jump out of “On My Way” and, good god, the breakdown in the middle of “Twitter.” Chi is incredible, and if you remain skeptical, “We Trippy Mane” and “Kush Ain’t Loud” will make you a firm believer --Brad Stabler
Fatima Al Qadiri: Desert Strike [Fade to Mind]
Looking over this list, it seems like many of the albums that touched us the most in 2012 were the ones that wrestled with the paradoxes of the mediated life-- our struggle to connect with other people through the technologies that alienate us most, and to express who we are by speaking through musical languages that we ourselves did not create. Of all the intensely autobiographical releases we loved this year, few spoke more directly to this estrangement than Desert Strike, which revisits Fatima al Qadiri’s childhood experience of the Gulf War, playing video games with her sister in the basement of her home. The trauma gave rise to the first keyboard melody she ever wrote, but when she remembers it now, it’s through the languages of grime and video game music that she feels most comfortable speaking, even though the particular game in question-- the Sega Megadrive Game Desert Strike: Return To the Gulf-- meant experiencing her country’s destruction from an Iraqi perspective. The combination of nursery room music box sounds, gunfire, and ice-slick break-beats may sound like a recipe for discomfort, but the most disturbing thing about Desert Strike is that they actually quite sound good. --Emilie Friedlander
Gorgeous Children: Gorgeous Children [Self-Released]
Something about hip-hop duo Gorgeous Children’s eponymous debut slams the gut with satisfaction. Listening from start to finish is what I imagine it feels like to be two hits short of an overdose, straying slowly but surely from the best high you’ve ever had to a nebulous reality that’s as dark around the edges as it is at the core. Face Vega is a force to be reckoned with, albeit one you might find pensively eying the scene from the darkest corner of the party, his arm around a stranger and his throat drenched in syrup from the tip of his tongue to the very depths of his insides. His drawl is at once lazy and articulate; his motives often vulgar, with an echoing bitterness for anything unfuckable: “You dirty motherfuckers/Jealous of the butter/Ya’ll should aim that banger at your brain/Let it stutter.” Gila’s production is dismal but strangely saccharine, with an unfaltering uniformity that ultimately, when coupled with Vega's unabating lewdness and intemperate bravado, really resonates -- either because we’re all sullen enough to relate on some level, or simply because it's a wholly engrossing work of hip-hop. --Emily Onofrio
Grimes: Visions [4AD / Arbutus]
Hank Wood And The Hammerheads: Go Home [Toxic State Records]
Holly Herndon: Movement [RVNG Intl.]
It’s been a good year for Holly Herndon. She began a PhD program in music composition at Stanford and pretty much exploded onto the scene with her debut full-length, Movement, which was the culmination of a master’s program at Mill’s College. Prior to that, Herndon had spent some time in the Berlin club scene; her stated aim with Movement was to synthesize her twin loves of the EDM she encountered in Germany and the experimental music she studied in school. Still, Movement is not really a dance record. The single, “Fade,” is the only track with a consistent, defined beat, and most of the others waver between minimal techno and sounds that push beyond the bounds of what we commonly understand to be music. Like the Borg in Star Trek, it exists in the gray area between natural and the synthetic, human and machine; it takes the most sensual parts of us (most prominently, the breath) and distorts and deconstructs it until it's something completely new. Movement demands concentration and can be a difficult record to process, but sensually and intellectually, it cuts deep. --Emily Wheeler
Holy Other: Held [Tri Angle]
Holy Other's debut full-length Held arrived without a single accompanying video, a move that might seem somewhat odd in a world where daily audio-visual overload is practically a given. Still, it made perfect sense: all you need to do is put it on, and the images are all there. Though this might seem a little too obvious regarding this sort of bedroom-induced loner beat music, more than anything else put out in 2012, the young Mancunian’s music is made to be visualized. Following 2011’s massively acclaimed EP With U, it may be justified to speak of refinement and consolidation rather than a genuine step ahead.
But there’s so much that sets Holy Other apart from the whole bunch of more or less elusive producers who populate the post-Untrue electronic music landscape. Despite his staggering attention to detail, what truly goes beyond the omnipresent ghostly textures and fractured beats is his honest curiosity and his liberal approach to sequencing. The densely packed arrangements on album standouts like “Love Some1” or the title track absorb you at first listen, but the magic happens when Holy Other loosens and dequantizes them, allowing them to breathe. Mood-wise, I'd say that Held is probably the apotheosis of the curious and somewhat clichéd subgenre of "nightbus music": on my end, it certainly soundtracked countless early morning trips on Berlin’s public transport, reflecting on the events of the past night while surreptitiously studying my fellow travelers’ faces for similar feelings of post-euphoric dread, despair, or regret. The world of Held might not be one of unclouded joy, but it is comforting nonetheless. Wearily heading back home, the distraught sighs of closer “Nothing Here” always felt like a relief, even if fueled by resignation. --Henning Lahmann
How To Dress Well: Total Loss [Acephale/Weird World]
Listening to the first How To Dress Well album, 2010's Love Remains, it was impossible to miss that, despite the swathes of tape-hiss it was wrapped in, Tom Krell had a distinctive and powerful voice, one that a trip to a proper studio would take to the next level. Total Loss is the result of just such a treatment, and like it's predecessor, it's heavily tied to themes of grief and loss. The emotional centerpiece of Total Loss, and the hinge on which the album swings, is standout “& It Was U,” a track that wears its '90s r&b influences unabashedly, from the finger snaps and the new jack swing beat to the optimistic tone, which owes a lot to Janet Jackson's 1997 classic “Together Again.” Like Jackson's song, it's all about trucking through an overwhelming experience of loss (in this case, the break-up of a relationship), and finding that redemption is not just possible, but inevitable. As Krell said in an interview with Dazed Digital earlier this year, “the album's about developing a relationship with loss which is spiritually enriching rather than devastating.” Total Loss is in many ways an antidote to 2012's predominant culture of disengagement, and although HTDW is sometimes saddled with the revivalism stamp, the album is staunchly against re-appropriation for the sake of it. It's a sparse listen at times, which also makes it a difficult one, yet it's an album unafraid to embody the emotional fragmentation of its era. --Tim Gentles
Julia Holter: Ekstasis [RVNG Intl.]
Laurel Halo: Quarantine [Hyperdub]
Laurel Halo's Hyperdub debut Quarantine has been surprisingly maligned in some quarters this year for Halo's untreated, often discordant vocals. A sharp left-turn from 2011's largely instrumental Hour Logic, Quarantine is certainly bracing in its intimacy, forcing the listener into contact with a profoundly corporeal sense of isolation and longing. It is this sense of embodiment though-- reflected in track titles like “Carcass,” “Airsick” and “Tumor”-- that has made Quarantine one of the most interesting responses thus far to the challenges of relating in our current, post-internet, technological and cultural universe. It enacts the push and pull between intimacy and distance in our virtual communications, shuttling between heartbreak, desire, and the yearning for connection, on the one hand, and our inevitable slip into disembodiment and fractiousness, on the other. On “Years," which is built around pretty, if slightly alien, analog synth arpeggios, Halo's words are startling not just for their raw timbre, but for their dueling impulses of reaching out for connection (“making eye contact”) and severing those ties (“I will never see you again”). Quarantine can be painfully up-close, and with something almost nauseating about the constant proximity of Halo's unadorned voice, the album hints at the kinds of gaps and miscommunications that can always arise in the presence (or absence) of another. --Tim Gentles
Lil Ugly Mane: Mista Thug Isolation [Self-Released]
Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold [What's Your Rupture?]
Shintaro Sakamoto: How To Live with a Phantom [Other Music Recording Co.]
Fetishists of Japanese music and PSF obsessives could find everything they've ever wanted in the story of Shintaro Sakamoto. Though not much more than a blip on the Western radar, Sakamoto's been active for more than two decades and developed a rabid cult following with J-psych band Yura Yura Teikoku. It took more than 15 years for them to come to North America, and even longer for material to be released stateside. It’s no wonder that when Other Music chose to branch out as a label, they made their first release Shintaro’s debut solo album. How To Live with a Phantom’s folk pop perfection is easily identifiable. Its elements come sharp, crisp, yet bare; "Something's Different"’s swaddling flute conjures the finer moments of the heyday of ‘60s lounge and exotica, and the panned organ stabs and Brian May-guitar swells of "Gleam of Hope" show intense attention to songwriting and recording. Had it not been recorded in this decade, How to Live with a Phantom could have been the year's best reissue. --Ric Leichtung
photo by Laura M. Gray
