Top 10 Most Favourite Album of 2011

10 Albums I regret not to include in the Top Ten


1. Katy B - On A Mission
2. Florence + The Machine - Ceremonials
3. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
4. Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rolling
5. The Kills - Blood Pressures
6. Neon Indian - Era Extrana
7. Rebecca & Fiona - I Love You, Man
8. Toro Y Moi - Freaking Out (EP)
9. Bon Iver - Bon Iver
10. Jill Scott - The Light of The Sun


**The list below is strictly based on my opinion and, of course, I'm not a critic so don't judge.

               #10

10. Foster The People – Torches

This is probably the most over-hyped album of the year, too, but admit it, the tracks like Call It What You Want, Houdini, Pumped Up Kicks are what you must expect to hear from a decent pop band. The boy’s album is fun, frank and cynical. Foster The People is just like MTV version of MGMT.
Favourite Track: “Pumped Up Kicks”

               #9

9. Theophilus London – Timez Are Weird These Days

If you’re looking for a rapper in high fashion but already had enough of Kanye West, if you’re looking forward to see a rap record with more musical creativity apart from auto-tune and swaggering, if you crave the crossover between rap’s urban touch with funk, electropop and indie, this hotshot is definitely the place to be.

Favourite Track: “Why Even Try”

               #8

8. TORO Y MOI – Underneath The Pines

Chazwick Bundick seems like the dictator of the whole Chillwave/Indie scene lately. This year Toro Y Moi  sheered away from foggy chillwave into more funky bass and more lively vocal in this latest album came out last February, and everyone else seemed to do so. This album 

sounds like the revival of Air’s Moon Safari, which sounds like a good thing to me.

Favourite Track “New Beat”

                7#

7.  SBTRKT – SBTRKT

While remaining subtlety behind that wooden mask, an English DJ, SBTRKT (pronounce Subtract) persists to turn the overpowering dubstep trend in England to make it feel soft, sexy and soulful by his minimalistic mastermind, bringing out less well-known singers throughout the country to sing for him.

Favourite Track “Pharoahs”

                #6

6. Those Dancing Days – Daydreams & Nightmares

Despite the fact that their debut album didn’t get me at all, Daydreams & Nightmares feels like a sugar dripping lollipop, like running free, laughing with friends, hugging trees again. These made-in-Sweden indie pop girls do their job so great at marrying the nostalgic synth to aggressive drums and put it into a set teenage love song.

Favourtie Track “Can’t Find Entrance”

                #5

5. Beyonce – 4

This album was released as if to cure mainstream pop decent music deprivation, the best R&B since 2010 Janelle Monae’s Archandroid. 4 is full of love, it depicts her natural state of mind toward her lover, personal yet relatable. Beyonce has come far enough to make music purely the way she wants.

Favourite Track “1+1”

            #4

4. The Weeknd – House Of Balloons

There is something sexy about the bass, the down-tempo /slow jam R&B, the samples and the hazy morning-after-dark lyrics.  Abel  Testayfe, behind the name of The Weeknd, received breakthrough blog hype and critical recognition over the world, but remember this is only his first studio album.

Favourite Track “The Morning”

              #3

3. Jamie Woon – Mirrorwriting

Jamie Woon, this London-bred producer from the same school as Amy Winehouse, is like doctor evil, balefully invents everything on his laptop, piano, bass, up alone in bedroom penning lyrics along with his soulful voice, and it turns out so addictive and very mind-controlling.

Favourite Track “Spirits”

            #2

2.  Friendly Fires – Pala

The lead single Live Those Days Tonight was the track of the night the first time I heard it and became the track of the month after last summer had passed, and that made Pala highly anticipated to me. Fortunately, the rest of the album was not disappointing; they’re even fascinating, inventive, quirky and very bitchy like how them boys are.

Favourite Track “Live Those Days Tonight”

          #1

1. Adele - 21

Of course, who else would you guess? It’s Adele’s year, no others. Who knows a love wreck would inspire this much. These teary-eyed soul tracks are profound, mellow and smooth, aggressive as they should be, and are connected with perfect symmetry as they keep topping one another from the first track to the last.

Favourite Track “Set Fire To The Rain”

REBECCA & FIONA

Swedish pop music has so much to offer lately. Last year it was Robyn that tore the dance floor, earlier this year Those Dancing Days, the sunshine and rainbow pop that lighten up every heart, and here comes again. I found these duo/sisters in myspace page back in 2010 introducing this Jane Doe song. I have very less information about them now as a foreigner all I know is this electro pop sisters are heiresses of one big name pop producer in Sweden. Now I can see them back again releasing few more singles on VEVO with harder and better late 90's electro sound and those shoes.

HAPPY TOGETHER

I'm blogging this three days after I first saw Happy Together. From the time I finished it till now, I can tell it is growing in me as it keeps getting more personal, and I still awe of Chungking Express that I watched years ago.

And that makes me want to find out what's so special about Wong Kar-Wai's movies. One thing I can recall is that he knows how to snatch perfect proportion between visual and audio to cook up urban sensation so brilliantly. It's easy to tell which is his film by those slow-motions, eye level shots, sloppy apartments, witty uses of western music, his signatures are all over the place. In many ways, his film shares a lot of resemblances to French/Italian art house films in 50s-60s, only in Cantonese language.

Happy Together is one fine piece that won him best director from Cannes and nominations back in 1997. The story about two Chinese men on the trip to see Iguazu fall in Argentina. Once they got lost, they found out their relationship did not work anymore. They ended up stuck in the middle of nowhere, one tried to escape to Hong Kong, another tried to escape the relationship. The plot is as simple as that, but through well-done psychological interpretation in each sentence, the chemical between Leslie Cheung and Leung Chiu-Wei, the scenes of Argentina (that amazingly feels like Hong Kong), to the slow corrosive ending where Happy Together by The Turtles plays, it turns out mesmerizing. 

I have watched this film three times already since the last three days. I think I'm in love with it.

This was created using old magazine scans then synch with music. very very pretty

---Nathaniel Whitcomb--- 

ALBUM REVIEW BJORK - BIOPHILIA

With the name itself, there is no need for introduction to her pure originality in her musical dictatorship. Bjork often be mentioned in the aspect of becoming one with her music and she became so respectful that the majority agrees to separate her music into an individual sub-category. She came all the way from the Debut in 1993, to high time Homogenic-Vespertine, through Medulla the non-instrument album. These achievement proves her ability to explore and experiment whatever in her head and projected them right out with her very bold confidence. Biophilia the eighth studio album came out earlier this month convinced the fact that she still continue to show what she capable of. Meanwhile, among those achievement, the question rose whether has she will be able to top her own masterpieces?

I don’t take heed about her multi-disciplinary to set her music ahead of time on turning music into an iPad apps. and, like many of us, I don’t think this is a good step at all to put Apple customer audiences first. The idea of the visual/music is great when it is optional choice for those who already fully absorbed music and wants to explore more about her “Universe”. Like it or not, I believe they should somehow release the CD/Vinyl for many of us who are left out.

In Biophilia, Bjork seems to surpassed into another level of her musical artistry. Not that she becomes so out-of-space (which she has already archived that title for so long)  but she seems not to interest about human and their emotions, beliefs and thoughts anymore and starts a revolution over those topics. Hence the main topic of Cosmology, Earth and Science that are extremely rare in any musical scenes. On her first song Moon she talks about yes, the moon but that also a melancholic way to talk about life and rebirth. The album was seems to be driven by merest progressiveness for each songs has to rely on one another to create the rises and falls, each of them slowly turns into another. Then Thunderbolt, we can hear the Tesla thunder coil, one of many experimental instruments here. Crystalline, the brightest of entire album, sprinkled by the chimes of Gamaleste and ends with the infamous 47 seconds of Drum & Bass hailstorm. It swipes the song out of the place and cannot bring us back to the same track again. There are so many experimental instruments on this album many of them works, many does not, but the best instrument still be Bjork’s voice with her personal singing style and those poetics lyrics. After Crystalline there are few more interesting tracks like Cosmonogy, the lullaby track about how the universe was created and Mutual Core where those hard beats comes back again.

Apart from these tracks, it feels like floating around in dark vast space where words fly in and out forever. Despite the fact that she is very great at writing exquisite lyrics, she often let the hollowness speaks for itself. There are some songs like Dark Matter that filled with spooky sound and Hollow which is so long that It sounds like it will never end. The story of Earth and Universe go along very well with poetic lyrics but they also create a huge space between listeners. We cannot feel gut-wrenchingly lonely the way we listen to Play Dead or like a human touch when we listen to All is full of Love. Instead, all we get to hear is Bjork and how she contemplates the surrounding then filters them inside-out.

For this album, Bjork fans (including me) were obviously polarized into those who like it and those take this as their least favorite. I don’t think I should jump down the band wagon to give it more listens in order to fully embrace the message as if Bjork was a meta-human that deserve a special way to approach. To me, I think I don’t hate it and it is not the least favorite but I just don’t like the iPad idea. I think of it as another attempt to create her conceptual art into music. Biophilia goes great when added to discography and Bjork is still as creative and genuine as she always been.

Crystalline video Bjork works with her long-time collaborator, Michel Gondry again. The song is about crystal and how it grows and the video is almost exactly like that. I like the artwork in the video, not sure who did it but let me guess it is done by M/M Paris, her top favourite art designers.

It's been a week and I can't seems to get over futuristic stuff easily. How about something ahead of time on the night like this. The track "From Here to Eternity" was produced by the Italian godfather of techno sound, Giorgio Moroder in 1977. Here in 2011 and who would've thought it still sounds like a tune from 2038.

  From Here To Eternity (12 Inch) - Giorgio Moroder

DESIGNS IN GATTACA

People seem to remember Gattaca as the sequence where Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman started their real life relationship rather than focusing on the movie itself. But despite poor reception on 1997, decade later the growing popularity as the one of the classic sci-fi movie from late 90’s has proven Gattaca its re-watchable value. I was another one in the wave of people who later discover this film (decade later). Last week I was searching indefinitely for futuristic movie with interesting plot through the every list I can find on the internet. It turned out Gattaca was on almost every one of them (along with The Fifth Element, Blade runner). What seems most appealing to me, rather than highly acclaimed storyline, is the art direction and design in the film. If you have seen this movie already, I bet you would agree with me about the art composition appeared in the film from costumes, architecture, lighting hues and those futuristic inventions like 1950 cars with hi-tech engine sound and swimming treadmill and so forth. Every bit of these fragment are enough to make the movie so gorgeous to me. Kudos to Andrew Niccol and his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak.

Like most of dystopia plots, the film is dated in near-future (as for the fact the movie was created in 1997, it can nearly assumable that it is the year of now) where social classes are no longer classified by nationalities nor races but, even worse, by DNA. People who were conceived naturally are considered to be weak and less important while people who were born technically engineered are elite and obviously stronger. This must have something to do with George Orwell’s 1984, a pure dystopian masterpiece and a taste of Alphaville for the sci-fi-noir value (precisely, wiki stated this film as tech-noir) To add up to film noir style, instead of putting beyond-imagination designs like many of Spielberg’s, the film adopted the contemporary designs from 20th century such as turbine cars and Frank Lloyd Wright’s futurism architecture.

Back to the plot again. Vincent (Ethan Hawke), a young man who was born naturally, was doomed to be low class labor in the society due to advance biotechnology that stated his heart disease and many difficulties since he was born (Ironically enough, his name was Vincent “Freeman”). Vincent somehow determine to be an astronaut and finally disposed himself from  his bias family to work as a cleaner in space institute called Gattaca.

In Gattaca headquarter (the astronautics company in the movie where it is cleverly named after the genetic component C T G A), the director uses at least three differences locations to shot, one of them is Marin County Civic Center in California design by Frank Lloyd Wright, the father of modern architecture. Astronomer office where Vincent and Irene work is incredibly gorgeous. I’m not sure where exactly it is but it is so clean and minimal that it eliminates human touch in the building, plus the picture of officers working on each desk like robots. The warm yellow light that covers entire film is instead of giving warm feeling it offers neat and cold environment.

Not long after Vincent worked in Gattaca as a cleaner, he found a man who can provide him false identity to become an “Valid” like everyone else. He led Vincent to a man named Jerome Morrow (Jude Law) an athlete runner whose legs paralyzed from car crash, unwillingly trade his “Identity” (everything that contain DNA like blood, urine, contact-lense etc) for money. Vincent used his named and everything else to apply as an astronaut in Gattaca an officially and easily become Jerome Morrow, ready to depart to a mission in Titan. They later became friends.

The exterior shots of Jerome/Eugene apartment used CLA Building on the campus of California State Polytechnic University. I can notice the winding stairs, intentionally or not, resembles to DNA structure. This therefore continually supports the genetic concept.

CLA Building on the campus of California State Polytechnic University as exterior shots of Eugene's apartment

After the mission director was mysteriously murdered, there are investigators crawling all over the institute, collecting samples of everything they find in the scene, find out who they belongs to. Vincent, unfortunately dropped his (real) eye-lash, became murder suspect and he must use all his wits to get out of this, all for his Saturn mission.

Uma Thurman or Irene in the story is so genuinely perfect for the setting and costumes. Her blonde hair strictly coiled at the back, wearing plain grey uniform goes together with exclusively-designed brassiere that cling underneath the collar adds some feminist/perfectionist look. While all the male characters are all in 50’s inspired dapper look with clean-cut hair. Ethan Hawke and Jude Law at best!


One remarkable scene in this movie is the solar cell scene. In this scene Vincent (now as a first-class navigator aka Jerome Morrow) and Irene, his colleague was at the end of their date. Irene took him to see something amazing before dawn breaks. She took him to the sea of solar system plants gleaming the very first sunlight of the day. But Vincent, not wearing his contact lenses, was not able to fully witness the beauty. This scene should be classic in my opinion. People who watch this film usually mention it. It is possibly because it was the only romantic scene in the film. The solar cell plants depict the near-future as they suggest that soon the sea of solar cell plants will become more common source of energy. Artistically this is very creative bringing out the somber feeling at dawn. The light and the minimal composition nothing else but he and she and the sunlight reflecting all over the place.

I can go on forever but let me stop here before it gets too long. There are so many things to talk about in this film apart from design and stuff. Sorry for not covering all the details in plots. This movie is surely very underrate. It is not regular cloning thriller. It is the story of a fighting spirit defying his fate, friendship and competition, all under intelligent narration. Classics in my book.