21 Indestructible Machine, Lydia Loveless (Bloodshot)
20 Hotel Shampoo, Gruff Rhys (Turnstile/Wichita)
19 KMAG YOYO (And Other American Stories), Hayes Carll (Lost Highway)
18 Party Store, The Dirtbombs (In The Red)
17 Breaking Bones, The Clutters (Chicken Ranch)
16 Cloud Nothings, Cloud Nothings (Carpark)
15 Stone Rollin', Raphael Saadiq (Columbia)
14 Mirror Traffic, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks (Matador)
13 Wasting Light, Foo Fighters (RCA)
12 The Whole Love, Wilco (dBpm)
11 Stranger Ballet, Poison Control Center (Afternoon)
The "Damn You, December Release Date" Award: El Camino, Black Keys (Nonesuch)
10 "Unlearn.", Fergus and Geronimo (Hardly Art): I don't get to write this very often these days about new records -- and admittedly, this goes a long way towards explaining F&G's appearance on this list -- but damned if Texas musical polymaths Jason Kelly and Andrew Savage don't know their '60s-era Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention cold. The deadpan critic-takedown "Wanna Know What I Would Do?" is the most obvious example -- it's straight off We're Only In It For The Money in a way that may prompt a cease and desist letter from Gail Zappa's lawyers -- but like the Mothers before them, F&G gleefully parody/homage/deconstruct any genre that can't outrun them: soul ("Powerful Lovin'"), '60s psych pop ("Girls With English Accents") and early rock and roll ("Baby Don't You Cry"). It's a great time even if you don't have a copy of Freak Out! sitting on your shelf, but if you do, "Unlearn." will have you amazed that Geronimo -- and not Jimmy Carl Black -- is the Indian of the group.
09 Arabia Mountain, Black Lips (Vice): Man oh man, the Black Lips coulda been bigger than curly fries if Arabia Mountain had succeeded 2007's breakthrough Good Bad Not Evil. That said, such a scenario was surely a notion the band loathed, and the band zigged with the willfully difficult/sloppy 200 Million Thousand in '09. Who knows what the led the band to get off the skuzzy beaten path and team up with producer Marc Ronson -- and I'm sure I'm "missing the point" of the band (more about that later) -- but if that means digging tunes like the horn-fueled freakouts "Family Tree", "Mad Dog", the Peter Parker ode "Spidey's Curse" and (tee-hee) "New Direction," then I'll continue pledging allegiance to Team Poppy Black Lips.
08 Only In Dreams, Dum Dum Girls (Sub Pop): And here's another band that tidied up their sound to improved (to these ears) results: the reverb guitar and drums of 2010's I Will Be have been scraped away, placing frontwoman Kristin "Dee Dee" Gundred's voice -- and her love of '60s girl-group pop front and center. While Gundred gets most of the kudos, give equal credit to producers Richard Gottehrer and the Raveonettes' Sune Rose Wagner, who both know a thing or three about girl-group pop; near-perfect pop nuggets like "Caught In One", "Always Looking" and song-of-the-year contender "Bedroom Eyes" are masterful regardless of who was steering the ship (though surely one of the three could've noticed that the same drum beat accompanies more than half of Only in Dreams' ten tunes). Here's the plan: from here to perpetuity, Best Coast gets a best-of slot on this countdown in even numbered years, and Dum Dum Girls take the odd. Everybody cool with that?
07 The Old Magic, Nick Lowe (Yep Roc): As the possessor of one of music's more charmed -- and charming -- second acts, Nick Lowe has, over the past decade-and-a-half or so, become pop's answer to bonsai: crafting pristine (but decidedly warm and humane) albums without a note out of place, at a when-I'm-good-and-ready pace. The Old Magic marks five albums in a row where Lowe has embraced this approach, and they're all elegant beauts. (To the naysayers: One man's rut is another man's groove.) Totally unconcerned with the prevailing trends, Lowe finds deep truths in simple couplets of even simpler-sounding songs ("House for Sale", "I Read A Lot", where Lowe's narrator muse-sighs, "I read a lot, I can't put it down. While others are painting the town, you'll find me in a world of fantasy, population one - that's me"), sets his mortality to a boom-chicka beat ("Checkout Time"), turns a wanderlust ode into a disco-lullaby (!) on "Restless Feeling", nearly floats off the ground with joy on the burbling "Somebody Cares For Me" and even gets a little cheeky on a cover of Jeff West's "You Don't Know Me At All". Be sure to pay attention to both keywords in the album's title; goodness knows Lowe definitely has.
06 Bad As Me, Tom Waits (Anti-): Quick -- name another artist who, after 38 years into his/her career, released an album that wasn't a parody of past glories and, in fact, could stand as a marvelous introduction to said artist's discography? Yep, Tom Waits' Bad As Me stands alone. (Uhh, *maybe* Van Lear Rose, and that was as much Jack White as it was Loretta Lynn. And I wouldn't call the album at #7, The Old Magic, the proper introduction to Nick Lowe's oeuvre.) In the seven years since his last album proper, 2004's drum 'n' bass 62-minute endurance test, Real Gone, everyone's favorite sonic alchemist/junkman has distilled his essence into pure Tomwaitsium: the cockeyed boogie of the in medias res opener "Chicago" and "Satisfied", the noir "Face to the Highway", the knowing ballads "Kiss Me" and "Last Leaf" and the truly-mad, Marc-Ribot-off-the-leash disorienting war indictment cacophony "Hell Broke Luce". Supremely confident and aware of exactly what he does best, Wait, on the doorstep of his fourth musical decade, has made one of the most purely enjoyable records of his career.
05 Wild Flag, Wild Flag (Merge): Largely eschewing the classic rock moves that fueled Sleater-Kinney's (for now!) 2004 swan song The Woods, that band's Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss teamed up with Helium's Mary Timony and the Minders' Rebecca Cole (though they've all collaborated in various permutations over the years) and released some good old-fashioned indie rock 'n' roll in a year that sometimes seemed short on it. Opener "Romance" is one of the year's best air guitar AND air keyboard songs -- plus handclaps! Swoon. "Boom", "Glass Tambourine", "Electric Band", "Racehorse": I've been reduced to just naming song titles, so enamored am I with the quartet's unabashed desire to rock out -- and genuinely sound like they're having fun doing it! What could have been a retro-minded supergroup vanity project (RSVP?) is exactly none of those things and is instead one of the year's most bighearted and full-throated rock records. 
04 Yuck, Yuck (Fat Possum): ...and on the other hand, there's the London crew with a retro-'90s indie jones that might be embarrassing if it wasn't so damn great. Yes, the Dinosaur Jr arithmetic checks out -- wall of guitars + vocalist (here, Daniel Blumberg) whine -- but a) I happen to like Dinosaur Jr; b) these guys were born after Bug came out; and c) songs like "Get Away" (the year's best leadoff track), "The Wall", "Operation" and the epic closer "Rubber" are top-shelf indie regardless of the decade. Bands will always churn out this brand of fuzzed-out bash and pop; Yuck have proven that there's still plenty of excitement and thrills to be mined from this sturdy genre.
03 Dye It Blonde, Smith Westerns (Fat Possum): Now take everything I said about Yuck and Dinosaur Jr and replace it with Smith Westerns and T. Rex. That's not entirely true, but Dye It Blonde and the Smith Westerns prove that they too belong on the decades-long continuum of, and believe strongly in, the redemptive power of the three-minute guitar pop single. (And the closing "Dye the World" really would've made Marc Bolan proud.) This and my #1 choice were the first two records I picked up this year, and they completely soundtracked my last 12 months. 
02 The Harrow and the Harvest, Gillian Welch (Acony): Has it really been eight years since Soul Journey... and 10 years since The Harrow's true-predecessor, Time (The Revelator)? It's a good thing TH&TH is so excellent because it may stand as the "most recent" Gillian Welch album until 2020 or so. Yikes. As it is, Welch and co-conspirator/guitarist David Rawlings have long loved to explore the people, places and sounds "in-between" and song like "Scarlet Town", "The Way That It Goes" and "Hard Times" celebrate (for lack of a better word) these liminal concepts. TH&TH may be too alt-country/folky spare or simplistic to some ears, especially coming from such talented musicians, but in today's assaultive (in numerous senses of the word) culture, it's nice to spend some time in Welch and Rawlings' stripped-down, slow-moving universe.
01 The King is Dead, The Decemberists (Capitol): Well, I'm as surprised as you are; after all, these guys have been making albums for as long I've been making year-end lists, and they've never even come close to shouting distance to earning a slot on any of my lists. But they were always on my radar, and as I mentioned a few items back, this was one of the first records I picked up in 2011; it never left my rotation. And yes, I know I'm running the aforementioned risk of "missing the point" of the Decemberists by preferring the band's current incarnation to previous ones that yielded knotty, epics, hyperverbose shanties about chimbley sweeps and proggy Irish poems. But now that Colin Meloy and co have stopped the sea of carnage that marked their previous albums, The King is Dead stands as the Great Lost College Rock Album of 1986 (a point the AV Club has noted as well), splitting the difference between R.E.M.'s Reconstruction of the Fables and Lifes Rich Pageant (though Meloy himself has cited Reckoning as a key inspiration), with the Smiths' The Queen is Dead thrown in for good measure. R.E.M.'s disbanding and Peter Buck's appearance on this record certainly color my feelings towards TKID, but even without the sense that the Decemberists are respectfully taking up the mantle from my all-time favorite band, this album is something special. From the hopeful opener "Don't Carry It All" (We are all our hands and holders" feels very 99% this year) and "Calamity Song" (where old habits die hard and Meloy drowns everyone in California) to the Side B killer trio of "Down By The Water", "All Arise!" and "June Hymn" (it always gets a little dusty around my house when Meloy conjures up the "heaven-sent cardinal maroon"), this is a band that, after the baggy The Hazards of Love, realized that a refocusing was in order and ended up creating the best album of 2011.
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