Favorites of 2011

This wasn't the best year for new music from my view.

I promise I'm not sliding into a haze of oldster griping about nothing being good anymore (I'm sure that's coming some time). It's just that little of the new music this year held up to last year's best. Nothing, certainly, approached The National's High Violet, far and away the record of the year for 2010.

For me, the year's best records sound like music's future. Not its past. A lot of indie rock this year has felt far too mired in trying to sound like it was recorded in the '50s. That's fine. Some of those records are enjoyable, but I have a hard time getting past the gimmick of that sound being much more than just that: a nostalgia trip. It sounds neither fresh nor particularly like art. What do those bands sound like outside of the studio?

World's hardest working band, The Black Keys, didn't work hard enough on El Camino

The Black Keys are all work. Perhaps they needed a little more time
 for their latest, El Camino, a good record that sounds a little stale.

Is there a harder working band in all of Rockdom than The Black Keys?

No other serious rock band I know of works at the same pace. The blues/garage duo from Akron have released 7 LPs in the last 10 years. In addition, they recorded the superb Chulahoma EP, produced and recorded the Blackroc record, wrote a record for the late Ike Turner and frontman Dan Auerbach had a solo record that very well could have been another Black Keys album.

That work ethic has certainly paid off. If you had told me in 2003 that The Keys would be headlining the Wells Fargo center in Philadelphia in 8 years, I would have said you were nuts. I liked the band a lot, still do, but I never would have guessed theirs was an arena-filling sound.