The Sea and The Land

Since cheery-sounding-songs-with-depressing-lyrics represent some sort of an extremely specific niche genre of which I’ve made myself an official champion, this album would be among my top ten for “Lorelai” alone.

It hardly has to stand only on that merit, though. In fact many of the songs on Helplessness Blues—including the title one—are remarkable because, through their intricate, sparkling sound, they are comforting when you least expect it.

There’s a lot to be said about this album—it holds together as a narrative piece more so than any other album here besides Let England Shake.

Strung together along images of Hollywood, All Eternals Deck sounds to me like the best use of L.A. as a metaphor for  disappointment in America since Warren Zevon’s first album. And that is, well, high praise.

OK—so with this we venture into the weird territory of possibly inexplicable personal musical obssession. Or possible utterly justified personal musical obsession, if in fact I can get enough people to agree with me that this is, in fact, actually a fucking good album.

In either case: ever since I heard Out of Love I’ve kept coming back to it. Like the Dum Dum Girls—though more parodically and with less pop elegance—Mister Heavenly takes the history of rock’n’roll, and then flips it inside out. They line drop the Doors and the Beatles in first song—and then continue in the same vein. Weird, funny, and oddly, unexpectedly moving.

I loved it. A strange but wonderful album for a similarly strange but wonderful year.

As album qua album, this probably outdoes anything else on my list for 2011. A bizarrely perfect match of sound to concept, Let England Shake creates a fractured image of war—mostly World War I—through a mixture of oddly off kilter English folk music and rock’n’roll. Harvey uses the sound of English folk songs to great and unnerving, effect. It serves as the recognizable, reassuring facade against which images of violence and destruction—narrated by Harvey’s singing, strangely high and clear, work against.

Very few of the individual songs show the power the album really holds as a whole—yet the effect of all together slowly builds during the course of the album to create an image of a psychic landscape permanently crippled by violence.

It’s a bit of a toss-up I suppose, what is most impressive about this album: the perfectly crafted songs or the varied emotional palette it draws upon. 

Love and death don’t exactly sound like the kind of topics to make a brilliantly listenable, even danceable, rock album—but here they do. The richness of the sound dark swirling instruments and clear insistent singing, mirror the emotional complexity of the songs, and prove, absurdly, that Dum Dum Girls can do both.

Which, in the end is what the best of their music has always been about.