The album will never die, not just because people like me are still obsessed with that particular unit of measurement as the ultimate object of music consumption, but because recording artists will always record lots of songs and will want to release all of them, not just the occasional 'hit.' Whether we put the album on shuffle more often than not or cherrypick those hits and favorites after the initial listens doesn't matter, the 'new song bundle' or 'annual single artist playlist' or whatever we end up calling it is going to remain a commercially and artistically viable medium to whatever extent music itself will. At least, that's what I'm telling myself this year.

As per my tradition here, I'll be posting each of the 50 entries in the list one at a time throughout this week, 10 a day, and you can follow me on Twitter as I unveil each choice:



50. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
My initial opinion of Thurston Moore's first 'song-based' solo album, 1995's Psychic Hearts was that it was just a bunch of silly riff-based songs he wanted to knock out while Sonic Youth was on hiatus. Over time, I realized how significant it probably was that the first album he'd ever made without his wife and bandmate Kim Gordon while she was tending to their newborn daughter, was full of meditations on girlhood and womanhood and references to some of his female musical heroes (Patti Smith, Yoko Ono). Similarly, one can't help but listen to Demolished Thoughts at the end of 2011 differently than upon its initial release earlier in the year, in light of Moore and Gordon's recently announced split and the album's quiet, elegiac tone and vaguely relationship-themed lyrics. Maybe there is no connection, but with someone whose lyrics are often as opaque and abstract as Moore's, it's actually kind of helpful to get some sense of his inner life informing the music.

49. Yellowbirds - The Color
Sam Cohen of Yellowbirds is also a member of the great Boston band Apollo Sunshine, and was responsible for all of their amazing guitar solos but only wrote and sang some of their best songs. So his solo project is a predictably mixed bag as a collection of songs, but comes off pretty well as a whole thanks to generously textured production and beautiful pedal steel playing.

48. UNKLE - Only The Lonely EP
Coming about a year after after 2010's Where Did The Night Fall, I expected Only The Lonely to be some kind of odds and sods EP maybe padded out with some remixes. Instead, it was a surprisingly substantial-feeling collection of 5 new songs, including some guests as big (Nick Cave) and some songs as good ("The Dog Is Black") as anyone or anything on the preceding full-length, continuing in UNKLE's unlikely evolution into some kind of brooding modern rock act.

47. Diddy-Dirty Money - LoveLOVE vs. HateLOVE
Like that EP by UNKLE, LoveLOVE vs. HateLOVE is a kind of supplemental follow-up to a 2010 release that ends up feeling like a pretty impressive entity in its own right. This mixtape fearues reviously unreleased songs like "Sade" that rival the proper album's best tracks, while a surprisingly rich selection of remixes expand on the Last Train To Paris sound and mood.

46. "Weird Al" Yankovic - Alpocalypse
Although not as good as the late career peak of Straight Outta Lynwood, Yankovic's still got that silly chart pop parody magic. And now that everyone samples and remakes everything with relative easy thanks to technology, the detailed note-for-note reproductions of his targets are less impressive than the way he's able to rewrite the lyrics syllable-for-syllable so that, say, Miley Cyrus is signing about murdering people for the CIA. Also, "Polka Face" is his best polka medley in well over a decade.

45. The Lonely Island - Turtleneck & Chain
Ordinarily "Weird Al" wouldn't have to worry one bit about having the best musical comedy album in any given year, but he had to drop his latest within a couple months of the new kids on the block. Track for track 2009's Incredibad is funnier, but Turtleneck & Chain continues to develop both the rhythm of their joke writing and their ear for articulating every stupid joke smartasses like me wish we could think up while listening to rap mixtapes.

44. Yelawolf - Radioactive
In 2010, Yelawolf emerged as the first remotely exciting or commercially viable white rapper in years with the great Trunk Muzik mixtape and slightly less great major label re-release Trunk Muzik 0-60. In 2011, as he aligned himself with predecessors whose successes he can't possibly hope to match like Eminem and Kid Rock, much less talented white rappers like Mac Miller and Kreayshawn enjoyed greater visibility and chart sucess. So his proper major label debut landed with a thud, packed with too many power ballads aimed at radio formats that will never play him, but there's still a decent number of songs containing that spark that made him so exciting just a year or two ago.

43. Limp Bizkit - Gold Cobra
The Bizkit finally got back with Wes Borland and made an album in the same vein as Chocalate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water, but by that point the backlash had set in so thoroughly that they sold about 3% as much the first week as they had 11 years earlier. I kind of have to give them credit for staying true to their sound, though (and really, I never had a problem with that stupid, ugly, joyous sound). This concludes the white rapper trilogy portion of the list.

42. Incubus - If Not Now, When?
Like Limp Bizkit, Incubus were on the Family Values Tour back in the day and hilariously still have a DJ in their lineup, but otherwise they've gone as far in the opposite direction as possible in the years since then. If Not Now, When? is basically an adult contemporary album that rarely raises its voice or quickens its pulse (the band's big breakthrough ballad, "Drive," would be one of the liveliest things here if it was on this album). And while it's bizarre to even think of a band like Incubus maturing and mellowing out, and their idea of maturity is kind of a silly superficial one, they still actual made a pretty sonically rich album with a satisfyingly sustained mood.

41. Talib Kweli - Gutter Rainbows
I've been overrating Kweli since I was 16 and opining that he was better than Mos, and even now as I kind of shake my head at my own fandom of the guy I just can't quit him. And that's partly because after that dull letdown of a Reflection Eternal reunion album, Gutter Rainbows is actually kind of a return to form, with some impressively ambitious producing and rapping on "Cold Rain" and a monster banger on "Palookas" featuring Sean Price.



40. Styles P - Master of Ceremonies
Styles, like Kweli, is a NYC perpetual second-stringer whose days of even arguable significance are behind him that I will probably always be irrationally loyal to. I'm slightly less embarrassed about being a Styles fan, though, because dude has a great ear for beats and a unique way of putting together words, even if this is one of his more generic solo projects.

39. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
The way people talk about The King of Limbs being an almost laughably flimsy, incoherent album from a band that's gotten awfully good at selling that kind of thing as minimalist mystique, I remember that that's basically how I felt about In Rainbows. But honestly while parts of the album have that screensaver blankness of a lot of their recent work, some of it, especially "Giving Up The Ghost," make for the most I've enjoyed anything from Radiohead in a long time.

38. Gucci Mane - Writings On The Wall II
In 2011, Gucci Mane released probably a hundred songs over half a dozen albums, mixtapes and collaborative projects, and none of them made anywhere near the impact of his 2009 peak or even his already anticlimactic 2011. Writings On The Wall II, despite being a kind of depressingly convenient sequel to one of his best 2009 tapes that also coincided with his release from one of many stints in jail, was the closest he came this year to recapturing that earlier buzz or the effortless listenability of his best work.

37. Patrick Stump - Truant Wave EP
It should be no spoiler to say that Patrick Stump's album Soul Punk is very high on this list. But for most of the year I spent anticipating that record, I obsessed over the six songs on Truant Wave and got acclimated to the Fall Out Boy frontman's solo sound. And while the full-length contains most of his best songs, "Love, Selfish Love" alone is too great for me to simply let the EP fall by the wayside as a forgotten appetizer.

36. Social Distortion - Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes
After a few years of enjoying the hyper referential Americana punk of the Gaslight Anthem, it was fun to hear something new from the band that was basically their equivalent 20 years earlier, still plugging away at their weathered greaser mystique more and more convincingly over time.

35. Fishboy - Classic Creeps
The most endearing nerds from Texas this side of Sheldon Cooper returned this year with an album with an even more tangled and confusing storyline than 2007's secret classic Albatross: How We Failed to Save the Lone Star State with the Power of Rock and Roll, which they help explain this time around with a tie-in web comic, just to underline how absurdly geeky they are.

34. Marsha Ambrosuis - Late Nights & Early Mornings
Marsha Ambrosius began her post-Floetry solo career in earnest as an artist signed to Aftermath Records, which meant guesting on tons of huge Dr. Dre-produced hit rap albums but never releasing one herself. After half a decade on the shelf, though, she finally got the same itch that all Interscope artists stuck in Jimmy jail get, and left to restart her career elsewhere, and finally landed a couple of hit solo singles (including the instant classic "Far Away") and released a terrific album. The covers on the album feel a bit forced as statements ("Butterflies" to remind us that she wrote Michael Jackson's last great single, "Sour Times" to remind us that she's British), but the thing still holds together really well as a consistent listen.

33. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch The Throne
For almost a decade there were few people making music I enjoyed more consistently than Jay-Z, and for the later half of that time Kanye West was his biggest competition. My worship of them as artistically viable musicians still making great records ended a few years ago, though, and sometimes I wonder if it's afterglow or brand loyalty or something even dumber that's kept them still #1 and #2 in the hearts and minds of so many millions, still, after some of the garbage they've made. So I was pleasantly surprised to like Watch The Throne more than any album either of them has made since Graduation, mainly for "That's My Bitch" and "New Day" and "Gotta Have It," but even the lesser tracks aren't Blueprint 3 bad or anything. Shame about the Kanye honk, though.

32. J. Cole - Cole World: The Sideline Story
Cole made a slightly better record than the two guys he pitifully, transparently bases his entire existence upon, mostly because as a producer his sound is still pretty fresh, and his earnest star struck persona doesn't dominate his lyrics as much as, say, that other lame from Canada.

31. J Mascis - Several Shades of Why
The previous albums J Mascis released under his own name never felt too distinct from the band he's best known for -- a solo acoustic live record full of Dinosaur Jr. songs, and two J Mascis & The Fog albums that sounded exactly like Dinosaur but just happened to be branded differently. Now that he's gotten back together with Lou and Murph for a couple of good albums and a bunch of tours, though, J Mascis has finally decided to forge a distinct musical identity as a solo artist, even if it's just about exactly what you'd expect or hope for as far as a mellow and gorgeously produced acoustic studio album from J.



30. E-40 - Revenue Retrievin': Graveyard Shift
E-40's two latest installments in the Revenue Retrievin' series are the loudest albums I heard in 2011, and I don't mean that as some kind of euphemism about how hard the beats hits anything. I mean they are literally, by far, the loudest music on my iPod, so much so that they've kind of made my playlist of 2011 albums impossible to listen to on shuffle -- every few songs some E-40 slap comes up sounding twice as loud as the last song I had on and makes my ears bleed. I don't know if it's a quirk of mastering or what, and in truth it's kind of aggravating, but it also seems appropriate for such vibrant, relentlessly inventive and upbeat rap albums.

29. Dawn Richard - A Tell Tale Heart Mixtape
If E-40 made the most robust-sounding albums of 2011 that I had to turn down my iPod to listen to, Dawn Richard made the best one that was so poorly mastered (if it was mastered at all) that I had to turn my iPod up to listen to it. Of course, lots of rappers make low budget mixtapes that come up short in the production or post-production, but that often fits their grimy aesthetic. Dawn Richard, an R&B singer who was one of the driving forces behind one of the best and biggest-sounding major label albums of the past couple years, Diddy-Dirty Money's Last Train To Paris, deserves better. Ostensibly, that should happen whenever she gets to release the album A Tell Tale Heart that this 'mixtape' exists to promote, but really this feels pretty substantial in and of itself.

28. Deleted Scenes - Young People's Church Of The Air
The first time I heard the Washington, D.C. live favorites Deleted Scenes play the song "Bedbedbedbedbed" at a show last year, it had the kind of instantly familiar feeling that made me wonder whether they were playing a cover I couldn't put my finger on. And when they released their 2nd full-length with that song on it, I got the same feeling again and googled and racked my brain trying to figure out if it was somehow derivative of something. I've since given up and resolved myself to the idea that that's just the feeling you get sometimes when a song is that immediately catchy and appealing that you wonder how nobody wrote it before.

27. Evangelista - In Animal Tongue
Just four albums in, Evangelista is already the longest running and most preductive recording project Carla Bozulich ever maintained, even if both the personnel and the music have been amorphous and inconsistent, more of a free flowing supply of grim and gripping words and music from Bozulich's dark imagination than a band. I've never heard someone who seems so content and fulfilled making such unsettling music.

26. The Roots - Undun
It continues to amaze me that decisions like signing to Def Jam and becoming Jimmy Fallon's house band have somehow resulted in The Roots releasing darker and artsier albums at a quicker pace the last few years than they were able to at any earlier point in their career. Undun is less sonically arresting than Game Theory but moody in a more involving, seductive way than How I Got Over, and even if the whole narrative aspect of the album kind of goes over my head "The OtherSide" knocks.

25. Chevelle - Hats Off To The Bull
I used to use it as kind of an insult to say that Chevelle are a more pop Tool and a less weird Deftones, because ostensibly sanding the edges off of two of the more unique hard rock bands on mainstream radio in the last 15 years should be a bad thing, right? But the fact is, Chevelle really have gradually staked out a territory that is uniquely theirs, and the short, hooky songs they make really are more my speed than those of their most obvious influences.

24. Craig Wedren - Wand
Craig Wedren's voice, persona, lyrics and aesthetic are so fundamentally different from virtually any angular post-punk auteur you could possibly compare him to that he remains a singular, fascinating mind. And Wand is the kind of assured late career tour through all the different sounds he's touched on in the past that would so easily be kind of boring if Wedren wasn't still so hard to pin down or pigeonhole.

23. Jennifer Hudson - I Remember Me
Jennifer Hudson's self-titled 2008 album was by no means bad but was in many ways a misfire, coming along too late to capitalize on Dreamgirls and not featuring much from its all-star cast of producers and songwriters that made the most of that big, amazing voice. I Remember Me is not a very different album but is subtly superior in almost every way (despite not having a knockout hit on the level of "Spotlight":). This time the murderer's row of R&B hitmakers turns in more top shelf material, including Alicia Keys, who seems to be making the most of her maternity leave from stardom by writing some pretty good songs for others, and J-Hud just seems more comfortable and assured of what kind of music that voice should be accompanied by.

22. Parts & Labor - Constant Future
Parts & Labor made my top 10 three years in a row from 2006 to 2008, and when they took three years to follow up that run, the album they came back with was not really any kind of drop off, but I think I finally had more than I needed of their glorious, skronky, bombastic sound. So I can't say I'm heartbroken that these guys finally decided to pack it in a few months after the album's release; they had a good run, and a more consistent decade than most bands of their era.

21. Sonic Youth - SYR9: Simon Werner a Disparu
Meanwhile, you'd think I'd have had more than my fill of Sonic Youth by this point, but being as they are my favorite band of all time, I was pretty well freaked out by the prospect that they may be breaking up or perhaps even just not recording a new album anytime soon. As such, the latest and perhaps greatest installment of the SYR series represents not just perhaps their best long form instrumental work to date but maybe their last full-length collaboration, and feels all the more essential for that.



20. Sloan - The Double Cross
Now that Sonic Youth may be ceasing to be my favorite working band defying the odds to make good records past the twenty year mark, Sloan are stepping to celebrate XX years in the game with The Double Cross, continuing an impressive late career resurgence. The album is even more crisp and succinct than 2008's Parallel Play, but the opening three tracks retain the seamless running-into-each-other rock opera feel of 2007's Never Hear The End Of It. Unfortunately, the copy of The Double Cross that I bought from eMusic has big awkward pauses between tracks that totally ruin those segues.

19. Mouse On Tha Track - Swagga Fresh Freddie
A lot of really consistent and promising hip hop producers have quickly fallen the wayside if the label or star they were attached to goes out of the spotlight, and that certainly seemed like a foregone conclusion for Mouse On Tha Track when Trill Ent.'s hits started to dry up and Lil Boosie went to jail. So it was a pleasant surprise when Mouse not only kept up his visibility with this tape but turned out to be a capable enough rapper that it didn't feel like he was wasting good beats on himself. Probably the party record of the year.

18. bb&c - The Veil
Although I continue to voraciously consume virtually every release Nels Cline has any hand in, I definitely tend to prioritize projects in which he's a bandleader or composer, or a sideman to a songwriter I enjoy, over his more collaborative instrumental improv records. But this live debut by the trio bb&c, with saxophonist Tim Berne and drummer Jim Black, is one of Cline's most molten lava hot sets ever, just an ecstatic, unrelenting thrill ride of skronky melodies and propulsive rhythms.

17. Beyonce - 4
Beyonce created an incredible 8 song cycle of all the feelings of infatuation, exhilaration, frustration and vindication that come with love and marriage, complete with some of the most daring music and thrilling vocal performances of her already impressive career. And then she padded it out with some shitty singles like "Party" and "Run The World," because 4 was apparently named for the number of songs you need to remove from the album to make it a solid listen.

16. They Might Be Giants - Join Us
There's an art to the playful whimsy of They Might Be Giants' best songs: they're not jokes that exist solely for comedic value, or puzzles to be methodically taken apart and decoded, or even random bursts of absurdity to be enjoyed merely as catchy nonsense. Most of the songs on Join Us, their best album in at least 15 years (and that's saying something, since those have been 15 very prolific years) often threaten to be one or all of those things before ultimately becoming none of the above. "Can't Keep Johnny Down" and "When Will You Die" and "You Don't LIke Me" and "2082" and "Canajoharie" are like strange little short stories in song form, written by guys whose imagination is just bottomless in a way that might strike you as obnoxious but can also be something to behold.



15. Fiend (International Jones) - Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos
No Limit survivor Fiend released something insane like 5 mixtapes this year of his new smoked out suave James Bond persona, and to be honest I don't know if I need 5 mixtapes of anything, much less that, but I'm still bumping that first one that dropped back in January.

14. Butch Walker And The Black Widows - The Spade
Butch Walker made my #1 album of 2010, I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, and while the follow-up didn't have the same kind of impact on me, perhaps because it wasn't the first album I heard by him, it helped cement him as one of my favorite songwriters in the world these days, while his backup band the Black Widows continue to gel into a perfect foil for him, even making contributions to the songwriting on The Spade.

13. Robin Thicke - Love After War
Robin Thicke's unlikely status as the only white guy in urban music who has virtually no pop crossover ("Sex Therapy" was an R&B chart-topper that scraped the Hot 100 at No. 100) makes his evolution from son of a sitcom star to soul music sex symbol kind of funny, but the truth is this guy is fucking talented, and 2008's Something Else remains one of my favorite R&B albums of the last few years. Love After War is a much longer and almost inevitably less consistent record, but it shares many of its strengths while showing that he still has some ideas up his sleeve, including a husky, almost raspy midrange that he sounds increasingly comfortable with after years of leaning a bit too hard on smooth falsetto.

12. The Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
Sometimes I wonder if other people have more sophisticated expectations from rock music than I do, because for them, the huge power chords and singalong choruses and propulsive drumming of Foo Fighters songs just isn't enough for them. And granted, Dave Grohl's songwriting is a bit formulaic, and his lyrics can be kind of a mess ("the heart is a clock/ just like a bomb it keeps on ticking away" is the most appalling mixed metaphor of 2011). But when these guys are on, they're pretty fucking good, and they were on for more of Wasting Light than nearly any other album they've ever made.

11. DJ Quik - The Book of David
His last album, 2009's BlaQKout with Kurupt, put its playful creativity up front and buried some pretty serious and hard won widom just beneath the surface, while The Book of David is an ostensibly more personal solo effort that puts its ugliest dirty laundry and hardest beats on prominent display while still being boatloads of infectious fun in its own right. I tend to prefer the former to the latter, but I respect both as formidable creative achievements.



10. Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'
Stone Rollin' has largely been sold or discussed as a spiritual successor to 2008's overly faithful Motown pastiche, The Way I See It. And while the early rock'n'roll homages of Stone Rollin' root it in a similar retro aesthetic, the truth is it's a much more interesting and creative album, bridging its classic influences with a modern sensibility that's uniquely Saadiq like all his best work, from Instant Vintage to Tony! Toni! Toné! When all is said and done and this inevitably makes far fewer year-end lists than The Way I See It, please know that critics jumped the gun and rallied around the wrong album.

9. Tity Boi (2 Chainz) - Codeine Cowboy
For years I repped for Tity Boi as one of the most underrated Southern rappers wandering around the lower rungs of the major label system, back when he was saying memorably goofy shit like "my ring look like I peed on my pinky" on Disturbing Tha Peace posse cuts. But it remains a bizarre but kind of pleasant surprise to me that this tall, dorky looking old industry C-lister (who says he's 27 but c'mon, no way) has changed his name and shifted his career momentum to become the hottest rapper in Atlanta with no major deal. He's not an expert punchline rapper -- even his funniest lines are basically dad jokes -- but he's more clever than he gets credit for and a strange kind of everyman charisma.

8. Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu
No, this is not a joke. No, I am not sure. But honestly, this is one of the more exhilarating listening experiences I've had. Metallica and Lou Reed have both made music that have meant something to me over the years, although not nearly as much as one or the other has for a lot of people, but the fact is neither of them was ever going to make anything by themselves at this late date that would be remotely as interesting as Lulu. And really they got where they are by not giving a fuck what anyone thought for decades, so why would they start now? The reaction to this album was very similar to Chinese Democracy, but the difference is that album was boring. This is the furthest thing from it -- the music and the lyrics live up to the album's conceptually ludicrous existence over and over and over, for 90 minutes, and I love it.

7. Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Lady Gaga came into public consciousness as the queen of the iTunes era, a #1 single factory who people vaguely respected for her musical talent but didn't necessarily want to hear a full-length record from. In 2011, though, her singles campaign for Born This Way did just fine but not excessively well (leaving Rihanna and Katy Perry to fight over the crown), while the album itself held together as a cohesive aesthetic statement about her commitment to both '80s retro and millenial club beats. She's the kind of artist whose albums should feel wrung dry by the end of the promotional cycle, but five singles later it's still full of deep cuts I love.

6. E-40 - Revenue Retrievin': Overtime Shift
Does this deserve to be so much higher on the list than its counterpart, Graveyard Shift? Probably not. But E-40 did release four of the best rap albums of the past two years (and has three on the way next year), and this one has the most songs I enjoy on it, so I wanted to make sure at least one got into my year-end top 10.



5. Meek Mill - Dreamchasers
As rap becomes a stratified layer cake of a thousand "everyone's a cult hero to somebody" micro-movements and nobody's happy with where their favorite artist lands in the pecking order unless it's someone from Young Money, you take your comfort with the new order where you can get it. For a young old head like me who just wants to be able to hear something that really knocks on the radio, seeing guys like 2 Chainz or especially Meek Mill on the come up in 2011 gave me a little bit of hope that I wouldn't have to totally give up on the new generation of Big Sean-type bullshit. "Ima Boss" and "House Party" were instant classic singles but the whole of Dreamchasers is full of songs of that caliber and very little else, especially that great title track and "Middle Of Da Summer." Now I'm in the awkward position of not even anticipating Meek's major label debut all that much because it's hard to imagine him capturing his voice and sound more perfectly with the right amount of pop sheen than he does here.



4. The Disciplines - Virgins Of Menace
Ken Stringfellow became one of my favorite songwriters of all time as co-leader of the Posies, mostly because he had such an unheralded talent for putting a little venemous punk rock energy into the band's gorgeous harmony-laden power pop. But he soon eased into a mellower solo career full of lo-fi acoustic ballads and piano pop and country twang, So when Stringfellow started a scrappy garage band with a bunch of Swedes for the Disciplines' 2008 debut Smoking Kills, it felt like kind of an odd left turn for its own sake from a guy with an increasingly scattershot discography. So I was amazed when the band's second album turned out to be a 34-minute thrill ride of scorched earth punk rock from a guy who learned enough from his tenures as a member of Big Star and R.E.M. to sneak a jangly hook into just about anything.



3. Lloyd - King of Hearts
If anyone should be able to oversee and exec produce a great major label R&B or rap album, it's Polow Da Don, but his first three attempts for his Zone 4 imprint, one by Rich Boy and two by Keri Hilson, fell short. Then the label picked up an established star on the rebound, and Lloyd became Polow's perfect foil, a little too sunny for his hardest beats but not so much that the contrast was more jarring than charming. At times Lloyd might have strained under the weight of trying not to be such a helium-voiced sweetheart, such as on that Trey Songz collab, but even on a strip club anthem like "Shake It 4 Daddy" he can't help but goofily address the woman giving him a lapdance as "miss stripper lady."



2. Patrick Stump - Soul Punk
"I'm not from Williamsburg or Silver Lake/ does anyone have any other obvious complaints?" is Patrick Stump's opening joke on "Cryptozoology," the second part of the 8-minute centerpiece of his debut solo album. By the end of the song, he's yelling out to the indie tastemakers that he knows will never give him the time of day "I don't have to prove myself to you," but the fact is you don't play and sing every note of an entire album yourself and put so much of your life and ideas and beliefs into the lyrics of each song if you don't have something to prove. Stump proved what a brilliant, talented guy he is on Soul Punk for anyone who might have enjoyed Fall Out Boy's classic swan song Folie A Deux who might not believe he could make as good an album on his own, but of course even fewer people are listening now than were listening then. I'd give anything for this guy to switch careers with Bruno Mars.



1. The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar
I wish every rock band was as loud as they were hooky as they were unpredictable, and were able to take whatever their particular sound and sensbility is to the hardest rocking and most shamelessly pop and restlessly arty extremes. If you can balance out all three of those qualities, you've got me. I don't expect that to happen very often, especially on a debut album, but The Joy Formidable reminded me that it doesn't have to be a futile pipedream.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12, 2011 at 2:57 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.