10) Converge – All We Love We Leave Behind
It’s fucking Converge. They refuse to die, and they refuse to stop kicking ass. Kurt Ballou’s guitar continues to stay up front for this album, although Jacob Bannon actually pulls out some new tricks for this album (the chorus of “Coral Blue” comes to mind). Converge has pretty much put out a constant stream of artistic touchstones since Jane Doe, so it’s important to know how good this album is within the context of that.
9) Whirr – Pipe Dreams
While we’re all killing time waiting for Kevin Shields to finally put out the new My Bloody Valentine album (2013, he says), his legion of lesser imitators continues to put out records (although his greater imitator–Tim Lash–has kept Glifted conspicuously silent). Pleasantly, Whirr managed to keep interesting with Pipe Dreams. Leaning heavily on the Cocteau Twins-esque idea of keeping the beautiful vocals obscured by projecting them from the other end of a very long tunnel, the band wisely avoids the shoegaze 101 mistake of trying to be My Bloody Valentine and instead takes a more Stratford 4/jangle-pop sloppy approach, to considerably pleasant effect.
8) Conan – Monnos
Liverpool’s Conan dropped an anvil on the latter part of the 2012 spring. Monnos is a dense, simmering kettle of beauty-from-agony, and the low end–oh, the low end. Guitars sound low as basses, and the bass is earbud-destroyingly intense. Somewhere in there, the voices–both gritty and melodic–float about, and the din is this gorgeously sludgy mass of punishment.
7) Public Enemy – Most Of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear On No Stamp
While Public Enemy never really went anywhere, per se–before they took a five-year-hiatus back in 2007, they’d been on a pretty steady “every other year” album clip–their triumphant return in 2012 with two solid albums was a welcome respite from the rampant coonery all over Black music airwaves. The time off not only allowed some of the more embarrassing Flavor Flav antics to fade from public memory (allowing the rest of us to remember that he was, actually, a surprisingly articulate cat), it also allowed Chuck to take stock of the ever-changing world around him and do what he does best–observe. The end result: two albums of PE’s best, most smoldering work since the Terminator X days.
6) Oddisee – People Hear What They See
Oddisee’s Rock Creek Park blew up last year, elevating the producer/MC from industry “it producer to something on the verge of household name. Despite an online screed in which he bristled at the term “underrated,” the adjective is easily the best way to describe one of the most talented hip hop artists since Jeru the Damaja. People Hear What They See was part of the usual constant stream of work from the DC-based artist, finding him refining his soulful craft quite nicely.
5) Death Grips – No Love Deep Web
What is there to say about No Love Deep Web that hasn’t already been said? If you know anything about the band, you probably know that the album was released as their second album of 2012, for free, by the band, and effectively killed their relationship with Epic. Which is a shame, because not only is No Love Deep Web a fantastic album, it also showed the band as one of the first to truly embrace how to stay relevant and how to stay on top in the iPod, downloading generation: don’t give your fans a chance to relax or grow complacent. While not as much of a game-changer as 2012’s first Death Grips album (see below), it still is a tightly-focused, hyper-aggressive burst of mind-blowing freakiness, and the most edge-pushing album to hit mainstream music since Atari Teenage Riot.
4) High On Fire – De Vermis Mysteriis
Matt Pike and company’s wild ride around the best producers of loud rock music stops with Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou at just the right time. Ballou’s broiling mix adds an extra grit to the band’s sound last heard on 2005’s Blessed Black Wings; that, combined with one of their better concepts (that of a time-traveling, stillborn twin of Jesus Christ), turns the album into their best in years. Pike’s guitar is as snarlingly gorgeous as ever, but Ballou’s best contribution is making Des Kensel’s drums sound overwhelmingly large. The songwriting is top-notch, caroming from firing-on-all-cylinders post-hardcore to the stoner doom for which Pike is held as legend (see below); while not entirely a return-to-form, as the band never really fell off, the album does rejuvenate their sound.
3) The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth
It’s virtually impossible to write anything new about The Mountain Goats albums; a writer as literate and aware as John Darnielle tends to inspire those that write about him to take up the challenge. That said, there’s something about Transcendental Youth that makes even the prolific Darnielle seem like a cheapskate holding out on his listeners; in short, the album feels like there could have been at least thirty songs written for it, but the crew Goats distilled it to its essence. Which is fine; the album is easily the band’s best since its now-decade-old(!) game-changer Tallahassee. While all of the tMG trademarks are still there and intact, the refinement of the official lineup (Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster) has lent itself to a tightness of arrangement that makes this album a high water moment.
2) Death Grips – The Money Store
How Death Grips managed to get dropped by Epic in less than a year is hardly surprising (major labels tend to get angry when you give away what you can just as easily sell, after all); the real mystery is how the band, as viscerally non-commercial-sounding as bands get, got signed to the label in the first place. The Money Store is a work of art treading dangerously in “classic” territory, uniting the unabashed noise-mongering of Atari Teenage Riot, Tricky’s abstract, art-rap lyricism and a bullhorn baritone delivery straight from the Chuck D playbook, only to throw it into a blender with post-2000s media overload. The end result is as punk rock as it is hip hop, industrial, or metal. And it’s amazing.
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1) Cold Specks – I Predict A Graceful Expulsion
Compared to some of the other albums on this list, Cold Specks’ full-length was released this year to somewhat muted fanfare, despite appearances on Later With Jools Holland and the slew of award nominations that would follow. Frontwoman Al Spx’s star continues to rise, however, as her music has already broken into the lucrative US licensing market (including a memorable use of the song “Lay Me Down” on the FX show Sons of Anarchy); Graceful Expulsion‘s sticking power comes partly from Spx’s charismatic voice and mostly from her gorgeous arrangements. With healthy help from PJ Harvey producer Rob Ellis, the album is a constant stream of somber, moody, gorgeous stories, sometimes abstract, sometimes painfully clear.
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