10 albums that stand up and stand out

BY DAVID MENCONI - dmenconi@newsobserver.com
The News and Observer
January 1, 2012

In this age of on-demand micro-niches, the consensus implied by year-end top-10 lists is truly a thing of the past. Even the idea of "albums" seems old-fashioned, and yet good ones still come out every year - albums that hold up as complete listening experiences.Here are the 10 I found myself returning to most often during 2011, most of them far from the charts.

1. Wilco, "The Whole Love" (dBpm) Proof that clean and sober does not necessarily equate to dull. Thanks to Jeff Tweedy's anguished yelp, "The Whole Love" courses with a tension that does not release until the epic closer, "One Sunday Morning," a song as pretty and hopeful as a sunrise.

2. Bon Iver, "Bon Iver" (Jagjaguwar) Who knew that Justin Vernon had a musical crush on Bruce Hornsby? Vernon's second full-length album as Bon Iver follows up his debut's rustic folk with the sort of lush synthesizer ambience that was topping the charts 25 years ago, without sounding the least bit musty.

3. Gillian Welch, "The Harrow & The Harvest" (Acony) How Welch and David Rawlings get so much out of so little remains one of the wonders of our time. This is mostly just voice and acoustic guitars, yet it somehow conjures up vast and deep galaxies of feelings and images.

4. The War on Drugs, "Slave Ambient" (Secretly Canadian) Where Bon Iver uses technology to evoke crystalline frigidity, Adam Granduciel conjures up something far warmer with The War on Drugs. "Slave Ambient" sounds like a combination of Bob Dylan and Tangerine Dream, and it's brilliant.

5. Youth Lagoon, "The Year of Hibernation" (Fat Possum) In a similar vein is Youth Lagoon, nom de plume of Trevor Powers, a young man from Idaho who makes dreamy bedroom pop. It sounds impossibly far away until you realize it has wormed its way into your heart.

6. Black Keys, "El Camino" (Nonesuch) Beck hasn't been heard from in a couple of years, but this Ohio garage-rock duo fills in for him admirably. "El Camino" stands as a very tasty junk-culture pastiche that's more pop than blues, but it's still plenty of both.

7. Megafaun, "Megafaun" (Hometapes) So much popular music can seem like a huge dead end. But in the capable hands of this Triangle trio, it's a living, breathing thing on their third album - a sprawling, weird and wonderful folk-rock concoction.

8. Wye Oak, "Civilian" (Merge) Take the earnestness of revivalist folk, add a bit of electronic texture, turn the guitars way up and add a chewy pop center of catchiness. Presto, you've got the latest from this Baltimore duo. The best album Durham-based Merge Records put out this year, and that's saying something.

9. Smoke Fairies, "Through Low Light and Trees" (year 7) This British twosome is aptly named, in that their elegantly dusky folk-rock evokes misty mountains cloaked with the forest primeval. You half expect King Arthur himself to come riding up.

10. Tom Waits, "Bad as Me" (Anti-) Every Waits album sounds as if he's cut out a small piece of himself and shaped it into deep primitive blues, overlaid with lots of bangs and clangs. There's still no one better at always sounding exactly like himself.

Menconi: 919-829-4759 or http://blogs.newsobserver.com/beat