Toilet Guppies despises lists, from the top ten to the shopping variety, so bravely refuses to come up with an end-of-year ranking of the supposedly best albums of 2011. Make up your own mind. If, however, you'd like a taste of albums or tracks that may have slipped past your fleeting attention in the year that was, here's a random sampler of balmy songs/sounds/grooves/wallowing/ecstasies of the past twelve months—a celebration of the year that was:
V/A: Turner Music Prize 2011, vol. 1 [.zip] and vol. 2 [.zip]
So what happened in 2011? Toilet Guppies heard about the genre «salsa trance» for the first time and thought the 2012 apocalypse had come early. As for record releases, Mark E. Smith's the Fall took the piss… again. Lou Reed & Metallica were universally derided, even though they produced the most sonically interesting record by Reed in three or four decades, and by Metallica in their entire career. (The cruel and disconcertingly inspired lyrics were a pervert's delight. Pity there's no room for that in 2011. Critics always come around to Lou Reed's albums a few decades after panning them, though, so watch this space in, oh, 2041 or something like that.) Amy Winehouse died, and people began to talk about the singer's actual music. Nick Cave disbanded Grinderman, sadly ending half a decade of sonic depravity and lyrical men's lib. SWANS tore across the world, obliterating minds by playing music so loud it turned entire bodies into ears and ears into a constant ringing sensation as if heard underwater, every victim/glutton for punishment having to endure rippling waves of sound vibrating in the void between the molecules, atoms and particles of their tenuous beings. Just in time for the 2012 rupture of our world, then.
What else? Download the above comp and hear for yourself. Whatever you do, go buy HTRK's Work (work, work). Despite the lyrics, it's the album of the year.
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