50 Best Albums of 2011

Another batch of deft satires from the pop-parody kings. There are your viral video faves, a long-overdue sendup of the homoerotic undercurrent of homophobic rap ("No Homo") and history's first John Waters-Nicki Minaj collab. All this and… Michael Bolton!

On this EP from the best (and loudest) of the indie surf-pop brigade, the reverb is as thick as a peasoup fog, and the melodies are pure sunshine. Wavves add even more punk clamor to their sound while cutting 2011's finest musical fan letter, "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl."

From 63-year-old Bradley comes a period-perfect soul revival. Every brass blast and chicken scratch could have come straight off a 1968 Stax Records release, but it's Bradley's ragged, resilient powerhouse singing that makes this soul, not "soul."

Polly Jean Harvey steeps her latest in her homeland's folk music and the "gray, damp filthiness" of its history. There's a punk sense of horror in low-key death-folk ballads like "The Last Living Rose," as if she's crashing the Renaissance Faire to torch the maypole.

These tripped-out Texans riff le through indie rock, psych blues, punk country and hippie boogie in hard-driving punk-pastoral garage jams. But their great fourth disc never feels jumbled – they're far too busy high-tailing it to the next inspired mash-up to get bogged down.

Slide guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi, combine their deep-blues and 1970s Dixie-soul passions in this big band. The chops and funky surge are first-rate; songs like the torrid "Until You Remember" sound like history renewed.

This retro-soul master segues from 1960s Motown to Fifties R&B to Seventies psychedelic soul. But Saadiq isn't just a human highlight reel. He's a riveting singer and a clever songwriter; check "Radio," about a girl named Radio who needs him bad but can't pin him down.

The best record yet from the blues-punk duo Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince is sex-drenched fury. Mosshart howls ferociously, from the gospel-tinged "Satellite" to the primal "Nails in My Coffin," while Hince manhandles his guitar in dangerous and excellent ways.

Long-running indie sage Dan Bejar makes his grand 1980s yacht-rock statement. The synth-slathered sound definitely has a sense of humor – Michael McDonald would shave his beard for the lounge groove of "Chinatown." But it just enhances Bejar's unkillably weird songcraft.

Everyone knows that Swedes are pop wizards. But R&B? With their third album, the Gothenburg quintet spiked their synth-happy pop with freaky soul – injecting New Wave, dubstep, house and the niftiest Prince impersonation ever to drift across the Atlantic.

This taster for the 27-year-old bluesman's major-label LP, due in 2012, is richer than most full-length records, showing off Clark's gifts for smoldering electric R&B, boogie locomotion and acoustic-Hendrix drama. Eric Clapton and Questlove have become huge fans. Here's why.

Vile's hippie folk lays melancholic mumbling over psychedelic ambience and sun-spotted folk-blues picking. "When it's looking dark, punch the future in the face," he advises. It's his version of optimism – and it suits this hazy, gripping and hard-bitten album.

The high-concept sludgemetal eccentrics hook up with Maroon 5's producer and – Zeus be praised – come up with a killer rock-radio record. Mastodon streamlined their molten thrash into a taut thwump that doesn't pull back one bit on their natural complexity or innate weirdness.

No one chases bongbrained, stereophonic beauty with the evangelical fervor of Animal Collective's Noah Lennox. His fourth solo LP has his most focused songs yet, adding gravity to his signature pile-on of echo-chamber chorales, ping-ponging FX and space-ghost synths.

The elegiac guitars and wry vocals sum up the shaggy beauty of the Pavement leader's finest solo record to date. Cali stoner gems like "Stick Figures in Love" suggest that, after 20 years, Malkmus is just getting started.

A crystal vision of Los Angeles rock, circa 1974. Dawes leader Taylor Goldsmith is the spitting image of Jackson Browne at his most plaintive, singing of truth seekers and "a ballerina in Phoenix," while his bandmates nail every golden guitar lead and Eagles harmony.

SuperHeavy's debut finds Mick Jagger in excellent company – including reggae heir Damian Marley, R&B siren Joss Stone and Indian composer A.R. Rahman – and surrounded by a whirlpool of electro-funk, Jamaican dancehall and Bollywood glitz. Think of this not as a side project, but as a huge, freewheeling party.

Faith, love and loss are as tangled as the singer's country-preacher beard on this stark, confessional masterpiece. Pearson, who once led the Texas trio Lift to Experience, strips his obsessions to their harrowing marrow in the blues and rapture of his magnetic howl and hypnotic picking.

This Mississippi producer-MC's songs are tinged with tenderness and humanity – "World's fucked up and they claiming I'm to blame," he rhymes on this mixtape. His soul-steeped beats and warm-molasses flow could turn closing time at the strip club into a hugfest. "I don't rap, I spit hymns," he boasts – and backs it up.

"It takes all kinds of kinds," Lambert sings – and proves it. Four gives us all kinds of Mirandas: from honky-tonk traditionalist ("Same Old You") to sonic experimenter (the hazy, half-drunk daydream "Fine Tune") to loving wife ("Better in the Long Run," with Blake Shelton). Even so, it's her most easeful and assured effort yet.

Morello balances Woody Guthrie folk-warrior screeds with Rage Against the Machine guitar heroics – praising unions, firing off face-melting solos and duetting soulfully with Ben Harper. It's working-class storytelling and roots-minded songcraft hot-wired by a master mechanic.

Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley throw the year's best country bash, a romping testament to the power of close-harmony singing and sisterly camaraderie. It's an album for our Great Recession: songs about trailer parks, mounting debt and ne'er-do-well men who make hard times harder.

The first official album from these New York hip-hop satirists is the year's best stoner comedy (sorry, Harold and Kumar). Das Racist rhyme "lesbian" and "Wesleyan," and undercut braggadocio about money and girls with political wisdom like, "What good is this cashmere if they're still dying in Kashmir."

Flo's second LP rivals Adele's 21 for British white girl soulmama massiveness. From "Shake It Out" to the arena-scale Motown of "Lover to Lover," Big Red brings it again and again, choirs and string players backing a voice that soars so high, it makes them seem like ants on the ground below.

On her third disc as St. Vincent, singer-guitarist Annie Clark keeps the thrilling art punk flowing. Whether she's telling some lucky guy to "come cut me open" over analog-synth seizures or singing a guitar-grinding single mom's lullaby, she turns sexy unburdening and weird-science sonics into something irresistible.

The world's shrewdest diva turns on her star power full blast, indulges her oddball side and flaunts her mastery of seemingly every modern pop mode – from the riotous hiphop love ode "Countdown" to the sweet, faux-Stevie retrosoul ditty "Love on Top" to the futuristic stomper "Run the World (Girls)."

Released via his Tumblr, the debut mixtape from the 24-year-old singer (and Odd Future member) is an avant-R&B killer. Ocean croons over Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing" and the Eagles' "Hotel California," and rolls out dark-textured, smooth-as-hell 3 a.m. jams that are indebted to Radiohead as well as Drake.

"Kiss me like a stranger once again," Tom Waits sings in a heartbreaking growl on this vocally dynamic, emotionally direct album, one of his best. The guitars come in many shades of blues, no small thanks to guests like Marc Ribot and Keith Richards – who plays on four tracks and lends his grizzled croon to "Last Leaf."

"We live in a generation of not being in love," sings Drake. The hip-hop satyr is out to change that, one wrecked hotel-room bed at a time. But Take Care soars because his appetite for pop emotion is even bigger than his booty-craving. Who else could get the xx, Rihanna and a Gil Scott-Heron sample into one massive make-out jam?

The second album from Wisconsin's Justin Vernon thrives in an unlikely sweet spot between Nick Drake and Peter Cetera. Bon Iver deploys horns, banjos and Auto-Tune amid Vernon's Möbius-strip lyrics, which luxuriate in emotional vagueness. Vernon's private world is a soft-rock heaven of the mind.

The Foos dive into their punkrock past, recording with Nevermind producer Butch Vig and getting cameos from Krist Novoselic and Hüsker Dü's Bob Mould. The result is their most inspired LP in a decade, mixing scorching riffs with the hard-won wisdom of songs like the Kurt Cobain remembrance "I Should Have Known."

Church is a country singer a rock fan could love – saluting Jesus and Springsteen, mixing up backwoods twang with power chords and Stones riffs. If he’s great at playing the boozed-up tough guy, the lilting songs on his third LP show he’s got an endearing soft side when he sobers up – sometime around 11 a.m. Monday.

"Get it right, get it right, get it right," sings Leslie Feist on her fourth album. Romantic strife is the theme, running through the shivery folk rock of "Comfort Me" and a series of tough-minded ballads. Hooks surface in unexpected places, and Feist's supple voice pushes toward gospel – the promise that, someday, she'll get it right.

The album Prince might make if he were a Brooklyn resident battling a broken heart. The most approachable set yet by these art-funkers finds sweetness amid emotional wreckage, with Dave Sitek's spangled production wrapping around the soulful vocal team of Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe like Christmas garland.

R.E.M.'s parting shot was the opposite of a dramatic farewell. Instead, we got a stately summary of their folk-pop senescence, complete with the gorgeous Katrina elegy "Oh My Heart," Michael Stipe's spokenword showcase "Blue" and excellent early-Nineties throwbacks like "Überlin." Thanks for the memories, guys.

Cage the Elephant rock out like they're the national champs of college radio circa 1992 and their big mainstream breakthrough is just a nanosecond away – it's retro but undeniably fun, and one of the year's coolest throwback looks. The Kentuckians blast out sugar-punk noise riffs à la the Pixies and Nirvana, and cover them in bright, bracing Sixties garage- rock melodies as they complain about hipsters, school and TV. And they give their Nineties sound a modern digital polish. Singer Matthew Shultz's fake British accent only adds to the transporting sense of rock & roll fantasy.

"We gonna party for the motherfuckin' right to fight," the Beasties declare in "Make Some Noise," throwing old-school boasts over garage-fidelity drums and rude-snort synthesizer. On the eighth studio album of their nearly three-decade-long career – their first with vocals since 2004 – Mike D, Ad Rock and MCA are proudly out of step with today's hip-hop, turning the dial back to the pre-gangsta era. (There's even a track named for Eighties street diva Lisa Lisa.) You hear the years in the raspy lower-register exclamations. But the unison chorales and highspeed exchanges fly by with vintage vigor.

W H O K I L L Tune-Yards | CD

The second album from Merrill Garbus is this year's most thrillingly weird record – a joyous, idea-stuffed album built on a stream of horns, loops, ukulele riffs and skeletal dance grooves, and powered by Garbus' bucking bronco of a voice, which can bounce from Odetta-style blues howl to Björk-ian flights of fancy. From the sweetly cooed refrain and waterfall vocalese of "Doorstep" to the churning Afropop groove on the riotous "Bizness," Whokill sharpens the hooks and deepens the soul of Tune-Yards' excellent 2009 debut, making Garbus' strange brew increasingly user-friendly.

Shifting their blues-powered crossover into overdrive, the Keys regrouped with Danger Mouse, who co-wrote and co-produced, to pick up where the three left off on last year's monster "Tighten Up." It's the same tight focus, raw textures and relentless hooks that made Brothers great, but polished brighter and pimped-out finer. "Lonely Boy" rides a T. Rex shuffle, then cues the girl-group backup singers. "Dead and Gone" mates a ginormous Motown beat with silvery percussion and hand claps. It's what you'd expect from a couple of dudes weaned on Southern soul and modern hip-hop beats.

My Morning Jacket are America's great Southern-visionary rock band. Led by golden-voiced everydude Jim James, they reinvent themselves every time they make a record, and always make it seem like exactly the right move. Circuital is their proggiest set yet, and also their most soulful: There's a riff-spewing psychedelic ode to the pleasures of satanic rock ("Holdin on to Black Metal"); a sweet and tender ballad, possibly about the afterlife ("Wonderful [the Way I Feel]"); and a mess of big-screen jams. Part Isaac Hayes orchestral soul, part Pete Townshend highconcept rock, it's all MMJ.

Robertson's fifth solo disc is a seamless marriage of innovation and tradition. There's the Melville-referencing dance rock of "He Don't Live Here No More," the guitar-gods tribute "Axman," featuring Tom Morello, and guests from Eric Clapton to Trent Reznor. Most striking, though, is hearing the gruffvoiced veteran evoke his days in the Band on "When the Night Was Young," over a melody that recalls "The Weight": "Get your heart beating in the right direction," he advises. Clairvoyant insists that you can't know where you're heading until you discover where you've been.

The indie-rock guitar record of the year is by Nineties survivors who were bulldozing basement shows back when today's new bands were still in their Thomas the Tank Engine phase. Wild Flag's debut is a beautifully bare-knuckled set of 21st-century post-punk by Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, Helium singer-guitarist Mary Timony and the Minders' Rebecca Cole. The guitars spark, snarl and tangle, while the girl-group la-la-la's cushion tougher sentiments. "Listen to the music, before it passes you by," instructs Timony. No chance of that happening to these guys – they're just revving up.

Wilco's first album on their own label opens with a riot – the krautrock-Stooges bedlam of "Art of Almost" – and ends with the long acoustic hush of "One Sunday Morning." Between those extremes, though, The Whole Love is the band at its original endearing best, effectively combining singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy's early alternative-country impulses and lust for crunch in 10 pop-single-length tracks. Leading his most stable lineup, Tweedy finally delivered the glow and drive of his polar triumphs – 1996's Being There and 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – on the same record.

The Decemberists' first Number One album was their easiest to love at first spin, a smart step back from the ornate-epic reach of 2009's The Hazards of Love. Singer-songwriter Colin Meloy packs his storytelling eccentricities into popsong packages of verse, hook and country-Smiths jangle, arranged with the introspective simplicity of Neil Young's Harvest. It is hard to believe that Meloy was already planning a long sabbatical before this album was made. The earthy texture and economic buoyancy of "Calamity Song" and "Down by the Water" ensure that he – and his band – will be missed.

Nobody thought she'd make a nice, quiet little record. But none of Gaga's previous exercises in musical plussizing prepared us for this kind of anything-goes extravagance. Born This Way saw the dance-pop queen embrace homegrown Eighties schlock pop and Springsteenian romanticism. But its spirit is pure Gaga. From the stirring power ballad "Yoü and I" to the freak-flag-waving title track, it is a record with a message ("Rejoice and love yourself today") and a sound commodious enough to take in just about everyone: "gay, straight or bi," "black, white, beige, chola descent," "capital H-I-M" – and Yoü, and I.

The eighth studio album from rock's most ambitious and confounding band has a misleading restraint: lush electronics, thickets of digitally tweaked percussion and cryptic lyrics, sung in a prayerlike daze. At 38 minutes, it sounds unfinished and quietly perverse, even more anti-rock than Kid A – at first. Repeated immersion, though, reveals a seductive concision and insistent undertow: the space-alien-Beach Boys effect of "Bloom," the dark, muted-treble blues of the guitars in "Little by Little," the nimble charge of "Separator." This was a record that grew all year – in your room, and onstage.

A monument to folkrock beauty, courtesy of six Seattle guys who sound like they grew up on a steady diet of CSNY and the Beach Boys. An intricate quilt of guitars, harmoniums, bells, woodwinds and Tibetan singing bowls that expanded on their debut, Helplessness Blues is capped with signature vocal arrangements that you might call angelic – if they didn't sound so piercingly, poignantly human. At heart, this is a soulful coming-of-age record: Check out the title track, where Robin Pecknold laments growing up while a skyward rush of harmonies makes it clear his sense of wonder is still intact.

On his best album in more than 20 years, Simon fuses the worldhugging bounce of Graceland with the conversational elegance and attention to detail that's served him for 50 years. He's the only guy who can sing a line like "The CAT scan's eye sees what the heart's concealing," over Indian percussion, and have it roll out as smooth as doo-wop. Cracking jokes while seeking truth, Simon keeps a light touch as he wrestles with heavy subjects: See "The Afterlife," where a dude encounters bureaucracy at the Pearly Gates and unsuccessfully hits on a fellow dead person.

The most anticipated event-album of 2011 was a sound-the-trumpets supergroup record of a magnitude scarcely seen. What could have been a crash-and-burn anticlimax turned out to be as fun as any record in a dog's age. From the cinematic "No Church in the Wild" to the Stax-soul update "Otis," Throne testifies to Kanye West's genius for beats both iconoclastic and pop-savvy. Amid all the litanies of private jets and gold watches, politics creep in: The pair frame their rise as an African-American Horatio Alger story on the impossibly fierce "Ni**as in Paris."

"Turn my sorrow into treasured gold," cried Adele Adkins on "Rolling in the Deep." It was a confession and a prophecy. 21 was this year's most stunning pop success, transmuting the young Brit's personal sorrow – the collapse of an 18-month relationship – into a 13-million-selling smash that leapt across borders and oceans and united everyone from teeny-boppers to baby boomers to hip-hop-heads. The sound is state-of-theart retro soul, with touches of Motown, bossa nova and 1970s piano pop. But at its heart was that voice: giant, classic-sounding, promising emotional depth way beyond its years. More than any other album this year, 21 made you feel its pain – from the triple-hankie tear-jerker "Someone Like You" to ripsnorting revenge songs like "Rumour Has It," where Adele rides a roiling groove and flattens everything in her path.

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