Our 10 Favorite Albums of 2011 - Nr. 10

And so its the end of the year again (or the start) and we have listened to an awful lot of music, the people here. And two of us managed to churn out some words on what we consider as our favorite albums of 2011. So enjoy, hope it proves to function both as a tip sheet and as a salute to good music.

Stef:

10. Azari & III - Azari & III (Loose Lips Records)

Best. Live. Act. Of. 2011. Book it! So awesome. Both gigs I went to by these guys the crowd has gone wild, the two singers up front were working it, and the beats were just flying around. There are some amazing songs on this album, with the major flaw being that the singles bookend a deeper middle that doesn’t always captivate. It seems that those songs work a bit better in a live setting than they do forming the middle part of this album. However, to make up for that you’ve got the singles, and it doesn’t matter if you hear them at a gig, in a club, as a remix, or on the album: they are awesome. ‘Into the Night’, ‘Manic’, ‘Reckless With Your Love’, and ‘Hungry for the Power’, they are absolutely wicked. 

The sultriness of ‘Into the Night’ is a lovely start, and then you actually go into the night with ‘Reckless With Your Love’, which just embodies clubbing for me. It ends with ‘Manic’ and ‘Hungry for the Power’, which are a bit darker, perhaps there’s even a bit of social commentary there. The whole album though, it is house up and down and twice around. If house is about queerness, about dancing, and about physicality (and I would argue it is), then this album makes a great case for why it never ever should leave the club scene. And be sure to catch them live, they are hawt.

AZARI & III - Reckless (With Your Love) (2011) by cossetgaleria

Linda:

10. iceage -  New Brigade (Abeano Music)

Records like this one here are the reason end of year lists are important. If it were not for some music-loving idiots deciding November was the time of year to start compiling ridiculous collections of rather randomly thrown together catalogues of 2011’s best albums, I would never have found out about iceage. Perhaps it would have been better. I certainly wouldn’t have had to go through another bout of realising that I’ve aged yet another year when reading that the lads that make up this band are only 18 and 19 years old. Fun times. But then again, they say bands like this also make it clear you’re only as old as you feel (though I’m pretty sure I’ll feel like I’m entitled to free bus fares after visiting one of their gigs). 

Every year at least one genre gets to be ‘reinvented’ and this year this group of Danes has decided it’s punk’s turn. Not that they have done much to give it a make-over, if it would be possible to remake punk in any other way than it was made first way round. All it needs is tracks that seem to be over before they ever started and some controversy which they create by wearing masks that have an eerie familiar ring to them . But no sir, they are not racist, they say, pointing at their Jewish drummer.  I’ll take that for them being young, naive and Danish.

New Brigade by Iceage by TAMBOURHINOCEROS