Not Best Album of 2012

In 2010, this award was about voicing severe disappointment with a sophomore effort.

In 2011, this award was about voicing severe anger at the romanticizing of 90s rock.

In 2012, there’s a lot of ways we could’ve gone. Twin Shadow certainly embodies the 2010 reasoning, and Best Coast the 2011 reasoning. We also suffered through two of these albums for Oh God Oh No. The two other records, Metz and Julia Holter, are critical darlings that fell on deaf ears over here. So what’s the call?

“There’s an intimacy there that’s nice, as long as you can form it well. I hear a lot of music that’s just lazy– you know, people in their bedrooms singing some shit into the microphone. It’s just bad. But they’re like, “This is art.” It’s so annoying. When people do that and then get immediately famous, they’re like, “Whoa, what do I do now? I’ve never performed before.” That’s a huge problem.

For a while, I was helping my friend with his label, Human Ear. I would get emails from people with the shittiest music, people who were just, like, puking into the microphone– puking into a microphone could be interesting if you come up with an interesting form for it. There has to be some skill there. And that just takes time.”

That’s Julia Holter, on her gripes with bedroom recording. Music writing lends itself to this brutal short-form cultural reinforcement, where someone’s integrity can be impugned with a basis usually no stronger than “I don’t get this.” I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything we’ve posted, so I wont try to claim we haven’t done that. It’s unfortunate regardless.

Something we’ll NEVER do, however, is accept the idea that someone’s creation is lesser than something because it doesn’t stand up to classical standards, or modern tonality, or because someone didn’t work hard enough. We’re firmly pro-noise, pro-musique concrete, and pro-amateur here. Fuck, we make hasty, unclean bedroom music here on this site. So for someone to stand up with a record of dull, elitist, inverted rockism horsecrap and proclaim the value of classical standards (which I’ll remind you, dear reader, were established by dead kings and queens) over the struggle to escape that typecasting? Let me be perfectly clear.

FUCK THAT.