The Top 20 Albums of 2011 - #12 - tUnE-yArDs: W h o k i l l

The Top 20 Albums of 2011

#12 tUnE-yArDs: W h o k i l l

Words by Dirk Calloway

Preface: I listened to well over 110 albums in 2011. I'm also a compulsive list maker. I love ranking and prioritising things. As such, I've compiled a list of The Top 20 Albums of 2011, and I'm reviewing one of them each day. The other reviews can be found by clicking this link here.

Look, this record is crazy. Like, usage of underlines crazy. It's the album Vampire Weekend should've made six months after they became popular. W h o k i l l is a title that's infuriating to type, and it barely fits into a Twitter tweet. The album cover is lo-fi, and tUnE-yArDs' last album was recorded on a dictaphone, but this one's at the bleeding edge of hi-fi. This is an album of contradictions that are welded (that's right, welded, like when you join bits of steel together by burning gas) together to make a mystifyingly cohesive whole. Don't believe me? Watch the below video:

Best music video I've had the pleasure to share with you folks so far. Where shall we start with that song? The mixture of genres and influences is incendiary. There's ambient stuff, U2-styled guitars, Clash-styled bass, reggae vocals and even lyrical influences ("get up, stand up"), chanting, glitch-pop... everything! This is melting-pot music, but it all makes sense. The nearest contemporary is probably Girl Talk, but even that music is populated by pre-existing samples. tUnE-yArDs is schooling the pretenders to the throne who wish to make avant-garde pop music.

To be honest, I'm struggling to explain the crazy, so I'll fall back on the useful words of some real reviewers:

• The Independent: "Catchy yet abrasive, noisy yet intimate, kind of funny yet also kind of scary, this is post-pop at its most vertiginously original."
• Slant Magazine: "You'd need a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and more free time than this critic's got to unpack all of w h o k i l l's good ideas, which makes it the type of record that's ideal for sharing with friends"
• NME: ‘Whokill’ is an eddying, rhythmic record stirred by joy, compassion and fury.
• Under The Radar: "Garbus holds each song together with her powerhouse androgynous yelp, which evokes everyone from Prince to a brasher Ani DiFranco"
• The Guardian: "a heady mix of power, violence, patriotism, feminism, community, protest, love and oppression"

Then again, every now and then there's a song like Powa that sounds as conventional as it does edgy. Check out this perfect performance live of it here:

Fantastic, no? I love it. So, why so low in the Top 20? Basically it's because the music is challenging. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it's not music I'd put on when I have guests over for dinner. It's not music I'd listen to at work. I wouldn't listen to it to cheer me up, and I wouldn't listen to it to make me mellow. I listen to it because I choose to, not because I feel compelled to. When I do listen to w h o k i l l, it's usually because I think to myself "gosh, that's a good album, let's put that on again while I've got some free mental space." It's such invigorating and arresting music, both lyrically and creatively, that I struggle to find the time of day to schedule a listen. Believe me though, if you've heard the other 90 or so records from 2011 that I have... this is one of the best. It'll probably grow on me more over time. This is my pick for "look back in a few years and ask why it's not in the Top 5", but for now I'm happy with its placement in this list.


Tune in tomorrow for more reviews, kids. We're inching closer to declaring The Best Album of 2011. As usual, click this link here to see what else you've been missing.