As we hurtle towards 2012 and the holiday season, TheVine has asked our critics to give us their Top 10 best music "things" from over the past year -- whatever the hell they may be and in whatever haphazard fashion they so declare. Go.
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I am not going to, at length, defend this list or my choice of how to frame it, its single criterion.
There were a hundred things which could have served as a way of setting up this list. All of them were defensive, preemptively responding to cheap criticisms and easy snark.
And that defensiveness tells us everything about why such a list is necessary.
"
It's political correctness gone mad!"
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PJ Harvey, Jenny Hval, St Vincent and
Evangelista - Here are four albums that, in their own ways, are hard to listen to and yet immediately gratifying. Call it the untempered idiosyncrasy of their vision: all are carried by varying levels of strangeness, black humour and uncanniness.
PJ Harvey is the easiest on the ear, but even then there's always something strange tugging beneath the surface. Harvey's always had an ability to pull off "costume changes" by altering her delivery and lyrics, but that skill has really amplified on her recent albums -- even one as conceptually tight as this year's ambivalent set of songs about her homeland as seen from afar.
St Vincent, on the other hand, turns her buzzy pop songs inside out with a disorienting number of effects and strange guitar tones, laced together with her sharp and biting observations.
Evangelista -- Carla Bozulich -- wanders further into the dark cave she has been exploring on her past two albums, accompanied by violin, cello and pitch-black percussion that match her strange, fever-dream poetry.
Jenny Hval uses her voice in unearthly ways, singing songs about abject things, all bleeding bodies and surreal sequences, what she calls, at one point, "the speech of the body"; the music pulses and surges in unpredictable ways.
All of these artists, in their own way, are operating in the borderlands between rock and experimental music. And they have all put on live performances over the years that count in my top gig-going experiences...
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