Dave Shim’s Critical Albums of 2011

It comes with no small amount of embarrassment that my personal 2011 hit parade contains two albums recorded over three decades ago and one that, while never officially released until this year, has been a part of pop music lore since the late 1960s. Allow me to elaborate on this seemingly sad state of affairs: While this year's musical cream-of-the-crop seemed as vital as anything from the last decade, it was the pre-MIDI, pre-Auto-Tune, analog musical innovators of the past that loomed over the surprisingly eclectic pop music landscape of 2011.

Whenever you hear a band or singer-songwriter who has an even slightly skewed or otherwise deeply subjective approach to organizing sounds as music and vice versa, The Beach Boys' The Smile Sessions is a likely touchstone. Elsewhere, there were groups that continued to push the envelope of live musicianship over eccentric studio craft. Technologically enhanced by sundry effects and looping pedals, Battles and Tune-Yards stuffed Technicolor shapes into their choppy, funky afro-influenced rhythms, while relatively lo-fi Icelandic teens Iceage channeled a visceral mish-mash of no wave and punk that sounded refreashingly new in its year-zero tack.

The reissue of Harald Grosskopf's rare 1980 synth masterpiece Synthesist came as a welcome entry into the krautrock/kosmische musik canon. A percolating, pastoral dream of a record, it's a kind of companion album to Manuel Gottsching's 1982 proto-techno classic E2-E4 and, uncannily, one that's sonically of a piece with contemporary synth boffins such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Com Truise, and Emeralds. And while such retro fetishization of analog synthesizers and sequencers doesn't seem likely to go away anytime soon, UK beatmakers like James Blake and Andy Stott continued their boundary-defying explorations of digital technology and genre clashing, much to relief of ears tiring of arpeggiators and polysynth drones.

But to my mind, the most crucially overlooked reissue of the year was Paul McCartney's solo outing McCartney II (also from 1980), an oddball release that saw the former Beatle experimenting with electronics and trying, maybe just a little, to keep up with the New Wave kids. Recorded direct to 16-track at McCartney's Scottish farm, the album now appears strangely prescient in its anticipation of home recording. With the modern-day ubiquity of cheap PCs and software, that's now as accessible to ramen-eating college students as it is to knighted ex-Beatles. But that slightly overstated parallel won't prepare you for the effects-laden cosmic disco grooves of the b-side bonus "Secret Friend," a track that -- in the hands of the right taste-making DJ -- could've set an alternate path for early-‘80s post-disco and perhaps even subsequent house and techno. It was a similar spirit of musical adventure that carried over to female-fronted bands such as Austra and St. Vincent, the former taking flight in singer Katie Stelmanis' soaring, classically trained vocals, the latter in the push and pull of Annie Clark's seductive yet thorny arrangements.