You know you’re in for a memorable experience when the “warm-up” act is Nick Lowe, the astounding English singer/songwriter/producer. Lowe has been described by Jeff Tweedy as a personal hero, and it doesn’t take much to detect the influence of Lowe’s tunes of heartache and loss upon some of the best Wilco songs. Lowe accompanied himself with just acoustic guitar. At age 62, his gray hair reflects his many years in the music business, yet he sings with a youthful passion many twenty-somethings struggle to capture. His brief set consisted of songs representing the many stages of his illustrious career, including wisdom-filled tunes from his latest record like “Stoplight Roses” and “I Read a Lot.” His versions of the songs “Alison” (which he produced) and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” (which he wrote), both made famous by Elvis Costello, reminded the audience what an unsung hero Lowe really is. He’s the man behind some of the past three decades’ most endearing songs.

With Lowe having more than adequately prepped the audience, Tweedy and company took the stage. The audience responded by rising to their feet, ready to move to whatever energetic opener Wilco might throw their way. Instead, the band started with “One Sunday Morning,” the 10 minute, country-inflected closer from new record The Whole Love. The sprawling, subtle tale of a father and son’s emotional inner journey proved a perfect transition from Lowe’s introspective, often quiet songs. Rather than rocking right out of the gate, the band eased into its set. With second song “Poor Places,” the group showed its more experimental side, foregrounding atonal synths and screeching guitar noises. With “Art of Almost” and “I Might,” the opening two tracks from The Whole Love, the group kicked into full-on “rock band” gear, with the pounding grooves and distorted guitar riffs reflected in the audience’s more animated response.

The band reminded us that they were making great music long before 2001’s beloved Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by incorporating several songs from their debut and sophomore LPs, A.M.and Being There, respectively. “Misunderstood” was especially arresting, as Tweedy belted out the word “nothing” in the line, “I’d like to thank you all for nothing at all” something like 20 times as the crowd worked itself into a modest frenzy. “Far, Far Away,” a tune not performed that frequently, was a pleasant surprise, given that it’s one of the band’s best songs set explicitly in Chicago.

By the time the band got to “Impossible Germany,” the standout track from 2007’s lukewarm Sky Blue Sky, Nels Cline proved his justifiably hyped virtuosity. His hands dance across the strings and he gets sounds out of the instrument that are at once intimately familiar and different than anything you’ve ever heard before. He can play the most whacked-out, frenzied guitar solo, as he did on the aforementioned tune, and then provide subtle background textures that support the rest of the band.

The set began to lag just a bit near the end. “Capitol City” felt a little too twee, “Box Full of Letters,” a rather forgettable A.M. cut, felt stilted and “Dawned on Me” felt strangely perfunctory. The band quickly made up for it, though, with “A Shot in the Arm,” the crowd favorite that ended the set proper. As the entire audience screamed out, “Something in my veins bloodier than blood” and the sounds of Mikael Jorgensen’s infectious piano riff bounced off the back of the hall, there was no doubt that this Wilco concert had achieved the kind of epic quality one would hope for in an opera-house setting.

The show wasn’t over, though. The band returned for an assortment of old standbys, including radio song “Heavy Metal Drummer” and the always robust “I’m the Man Who Loves You.” The group performed a jaunty holiday version of “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” complete with jingle bells and falling snow on the stage (Tweedy mockingly asked the audience, “Did anyone check the weather forecast today?”).

The show was already creeping towards the three-hour mark, but nevertheless the band returned for a second encore, sharing the stage once again with Nick Lowe for a spirited version of his hit “Cruel to Be Kind.” Lowe left the stage, and Tweedy said that someone else was going to do a song or two with the band. As the audience waited in eager anticipation, Chicago soul legend Mavis Staples stepped into the spotlight. Once the cheers and gasps of surprise died down, Staples performed “You Are Not Alone,” the title track from her 2010 record produced by Tweedy. Finally, Lowe came back on stage and Wilco, Lowe and Staples all joined in a heroic version of The Band’s classic “The Weight.” The song was an ideal capstone, since it highlighted the talents of all three musical artists. Staples’ gospel-style voice soared to the highest balcony. Lowe’s folky harmony style proved a perfect counterpoint. Wilco’s talented instrumentalists, Tweedy, Cline, Jorgensen, John Stirratt on bass and Glenn Kotche on drums, played as an unstoppable, cohesive unit, even when covering someone else’s song. It was like a beautiful bow on that gift you’ve always wanted.

[Photo: Mireia Martínez Marsal]

Setlist:

1. One Sunday Morning

2. Poor Places

3. Art of Almost

4. I Might

5. Misunderstood

6. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

7. One Wing

8. Rising Red Lung

9. Impossible Germany

10. Far, Far Away

11. What Light

12. Born Alone

13. Jesus, Etc.

14. Capitol City

15. War on War

16. Box Full of Letters

17. Pot Kettle Black

18. Dawned On Me

19. A Shot in the Arm

Encore:

20. Whole Love

21. Heavy Metal Drummer

22. Candyfloss

23. I’m the Man Who Loves You

24. Outtasite (Outta Mind)

Encore 2:

25. Cruel to be Kind (with Nick Lowe)

26. You’re Not Alone (with Mavis Staples)

27. The Weight (with Mavis Staples and Nick Lowe)

Jason Reitman’s most glaring flaw as a director is a tendency to glamorize the very protagonists simultaneously held up as objects of criticism or gentle satire. He gets away with this through strong performances from his lead actors, creating a sneaky ambivalence: even those who disliked Juno praised Ellen Page. Reitman likes to have it both ways by adopting an accommodating, quintessentially middlebrow stance, but he recklessly allows himself to become entranced by his actors’ charisma, which papers over their weakly conceived characters. Up in the Air was infuriating because it hid casual indifference toward working class plight behind the charismatic George Clooney, preventing us from asking why the corporate downsizer he plays with wounded moodiness deserves our attention and sympathy any more than the people he fires. Reitman thus displays a willingness to ignore critical questions about our relationship to these characters, recalling the way we ridicule celebrity culture while sustaining it with our attention. But in Young Adult’s Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody have crafted a protagonist worthy of our attention precisely because Reitman doesn’t let us get lost in her magnetic presence. In doing so, he has made his first truly interesting film.

Young Adult succeeds because it possesses what was missing in previous films: a healthy distance between Reitman and his protagonist, achieved here through irony. This is absolutely necessary with Young Adult, the story of a narcissistic woman who struggles to distinguish between herself and her self-perception, and this narcissism is doubled by Reitman’s mesmerized approach to his main characters, an asset here rather than a flaw. Just as Theron plays the lead role in the film Young Adult, her character Mavis walks around as if a protagonist in her own film, with everyone else playing a supporting role. Reitman intersperses voiceovers throughout his film that double this effect, featuring Mavis narrating the young adult novel she is ghostwriting. The film begins when, in the midst of a struggle to complete her draft, she receives an email from ex-boyfriend and high school sweetheart Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) with a picture of his new baby. From here, as if the wires in Mavis’ brain have crossed, she displaces her difficulty writing to a new task that absorbs her attention: returning to her hometown to win back Buddy.

Even though anyone can see that this is hopeless, we willingly allow ourselves to get taken for the ride. In the past, Reitman haphazardly used his ability to lure out from us affection for his characters without pausing to question the purpose, but here, his approach makes sense: a narcissist like Mavis is nothing without the ability to get others to play along and tacitly assent to her projected self-image. Theron is supremely adept here, embodying the delightfully yet hopelessly bitchy Mavis and always reminding us that a real person, flawed but distantly likable, resides underneath the mess. Her chemistry with co-star Patton Oswalt, who plays Mavis’ former high school classmate Matt, is undeniable and intimate, the fragmented heart of the film.

Mavis and Matt make an ideal pair, using each other as sounding boards to air their personal woes. Matt is something like the obverse of Mavis: both cling to an identity for self-preservation, but Mavis’ identifies as the typically popular and pretty girl too good to have stayed in her hometown where Matt wallows in the role of outcast and victim after a horrible attack he suffered in high school left him handicapped. The film finds amusement in these misfits while also bluntly and compassionately unmasking their deepest flaws and neuroses, and the nakedness of their performances reminds us that the “too cool” attitude they adopt is an affected stance to protect their egos from getting bruised. We are culturally inclined to show greater sympathy to someone like Matt where we might have only scorn for a person like Mavis, and this hints at Young Adult’s greatest strength, the way it calls out the persistence of a social logic inherited from the vacuous and narcissistic politics of high school life, where the nerd and the popular girl are near-mythical figures around which we construct our public and private identities.

Young Adult generously calls this fiction out for what it is: a form of storytelling – “I’m trying to tell a story,” Mavis blurts out during the film’s climax – that often resembles the novel Mavis is currently writing with phrases gleaned from teenage girls’ conversations. To glimpse evidence of Reitman’s newfound thoughtfulness, simply examine the opening credits sequence: Mavis begins her drive home by playing a mixtape from high school while the credits play over extreme close-ups of the tape spinning in the car’s stereo system. Mavis obsessively rewinds the same song as if attempting to return to the days of high school romance with Buddy, and Reitman’s methodical and analytical close-ups dissect the way we, like her, construct our identities around signifiers, like music, that project certain attitudes and associations. Undercutting Mavis’ reverie, Reitman self-critically hints at the ethics of image-making that promotes narcissistic fantasies, echoed throughout the film by clips of the Kardashians that devastatingly indict Mavis’ self-involvement (so at home in a reality show). Reitman and Cody’s ending drives home their use of irony, superficially offering a happy resolution that shows the frequent vapidity of narrative resolution: only in Mavis’ voiceover narration of her draft do lessons seem to be learned and new possibilities emerge. Mavis describes her main character’s victorious “smile” at the end of the novel, but Reitman cuts to a shot of the missing front bumper of Mavis’ car – ruined under the influence of alcohol – so it looks like a mouth missing its teeth, hardly a smile. We part ways with Mavis, who’ll likely repeat her mistakes, but the bitter taste left by the film is oddly cleansing, an exorcism of our culture of narcissism that may unsettle many with its unexpected starkness.

After another critical comeback of sorts with The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski has made a decidedly smaller picture, adapting Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning play God of Carnage for the screen, trimming this comedy of ill manners’ title to simply Carnage. But don’t let its short running time fool you, Carnage is a deep meditation on the human condition and the fine line that separates social convention from simple tribalism.

After a wordless introduction where a playground fight leaves one child with a few busted teeth and nerve damage, Polanski then takes us (and leaves us for almost the entirety of the film) to a bourgeois Brooklyn apartment owned by Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly), the parents of the injured boy. In a civilized summit of sorts, the parents of the attacker, Alan (Christoph Waltz) and Nancy (Kate Winslet) have come to make amends, but it doesn’t take long for Polanski and Reza to reveal that this comfortable apartment is as much a milieu for warfare as the playground.

In the tradition of The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Carnage probes the animalism lurking behind the social masks we have learned to erect. It doesn’t take long for the two couples to begin fighting, making it impossible for Alan and Nancy to simply leave the fucking apartment. Polanski draws all the comforts and conveniences of modern life into the fray: from an annoying cell phone to subtle differences between the different strata of being well-off. While Penelope, Nancy and Michael attempt, at first, to disguise their contempt for one another, lawyer Alan makes no effort to hide his disdain. This sets off hair-trigger Penelope, couched in her liberal ideology (she is working on a photo book on Darfur), setting into motion a downward-spiraling brawl where every object in the room can be used as a weapon, from flowers to doorknobs to that damned cell phone.

Co-written by Polanski and Reza, Carnage is all about the script and its actors. Funny, incisive and sharply observant, the film moves swiftly as it envelops class, gender roles, the drug industry and marriage. The four characters square off, allying with the most convenient partner at any given moment. So what is Polanski saying? That in this world it’s every man (or woman) for himself.

For the most part, the acting in Carnage is top-notch. Waltz and Winslet score big as the smarmy couple who come to do a half-assed penance while you can see Reilly barely able to contain his contempt for everyone else in the room. Unfortunately, Foster overdoes it at times as Penelope, easily the film’s least likable character. While the other three are complicit and recognize their scorn, Penelope is so couched in lefty ideals and being “right” she cannot admit to herself that she is just as guilty as the rest of them.

Carnage displays a sense of humor Polanski hasn’t trotted out since Bitter Moon (unless you consider The Ninth Gate tongue-in-cheek) and it serves him well. Boiled down, it is a comedy, but one with a bleak outlook. Surprising, creative and at times brutal, Carnage is not only Polanski’s best film since The Pianist, it is also one of the best films you will see this holiday season. Go with someone you love.

20. Fucked Up – David Comes to Life [Matador]

The most ambitious band to vaguely fit under the description of “hardcore punk” since Refused dissolved, Toronto sextet Fucked Up have outdone themselves with this year’s David Comes to Life. A rock opera is precisely the sort of thing punks set out to kill, but David Comes to Life never wants for pure energy in its 78 minutes. Damian Abraham’s ravaged roar, tuneless yet inexplicably melodic, reflects the band’s sound as a whole. Buzzing guitars constantly find their way to pop hooks without sacrificing aggression, and the densely layered squall never results in aural incoherence.

Lyrically, the album is a whole other story. Featuring conflicting, unreliable voices petulantly squabbling over the plot’s direction, the album requires a novella of notes just to sort out what’s happening at any given time. Nevertheless, the emotions of death, destruction of self and others, ill-fated love and hope could not be clearer amid the endlessly overdubbed guitars. David Comes to Life eventually loses all shred of narrative cohesion, but by then it’s grown into such a vast, tactile statement that such trifles hardly matter. More mainstream punk acts have made forays into epic rock, but Fucked Up manages to not only make a bigger work than them all but retain all their punk cred in the process. This group somehow keeps finding ways to top themselves. - Jake Cole

19. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost [True Panther Sounds]

Girls’ 2009 debut, Album, and 2010 EP relied on a somewhat joyful immediacy while toying with all manner of youthful emotions, vocalist Christopher Owens lending each song his nasal, beat-down, scruffy presence and challenging personal history (he grew up as part of a cult he eventually left). Father, Son, Holy Ghost is arguably their best album yet — the songs touch on a diverse array of textures (everything from surf-rock shuffle to gospel-tinged folk to bouncy pop nuggets) and Owens stretches his chops more than anyone familiar with Album could possibly expect, mellowing out his vocal sneer for all but the album’s most raucous tracks. These recordings sound utterly fantastic and his gentle murmurs match that lovely warmth, revealing deep wells of feeling in his often simple phrasing.

But Father, Son, Holy Ghost also explores the same fraught emotional territory as Album while attacking those moments of the distraught and lonely from entirely new angles. “Honey Bunny” channels Buddy Holly with yips and springy guitar as Owens lays on the boyish and contagious optimism; “Die” finds Girls acknowledging, “We’re all going to die,” as the band kicks into some runaway metal; “Vomit” repeats a morose verse and explosive outbursts while ebbing between the two, honing in on a deeply felt alienation as Owens sings, “Come in to my heart,” over and over. He does a lot of repeating a few choice words throughout, but has a knack for deeply affecting lyrics that convey everything essential without overcomplicating things. So it’s difficult not to feel drawn in by the sheer emotional weight of these songs, even when they seem to not say much at all. Like both albums before it, that’s what gives Father, Son, Holy Ghost such ongoing allure. - Michael Merline

18. Wye Oak – Civilian [Merge]

Wye Oak got a lotta heart. The scrappy Baltimore duo (guitarist/vocalist Jenn Wasner, drummer/keyboardist Andy Stack) injects a measure of earnestness into everything they do, whether it’s a Kinks cover for an A.V. Club video series, a tour stop with subpar attendance or, in this case, their third LP, the wheeling and momentous Civilian. In broad musical strokes (mainly of slamming guitar and cymbal splashes) as well as intricate arrangements displaying mature technical prowess, Stack and Wasner’s obvious care allows them to accomplish more with what is at bottom a minimalist sound. Identifiable in haunting, inventive riffs, counterintuitive melodies and clearly audible commitment from both members of the band, a strong core centers them.

It’s a heart that beats in the metronome tick of “Two Small Deaths,” advancing “forwards, always onwards,” counting down the time to “when my last friend should leave me.” Teased out infinitesimally in gentle key scales, the song’s cramped determinism transforms into open, vaulted space on follow-up “The Alter” and both preclude the galloping doom of title track “Civilian.” Vague and plaintive wails people the background on hallowed riverine fable “Fish” (featuring more metronymic percussion in its latter half). The blunt rhythmic thunderclaps in the last fifty seconds of “We Were Wealth” stand in stark contrast to the oblique rays that finish preceding track “Hot as Day.” Stack’s catchy keyboard phrasing on the latter, and Wasner’s harrowing vocal presence on the former as well as unguarded album closer “Doubt” are sufficient to demonstrate the many ideas and convictions packed tight into the album’s 10 tracks. And in a year of truly amazing output from emerging female musicians, Wasner’s monstrous guitar chops and songwriting (co-writing with Stack) more than qualifies Wye Oak’s artful, serious Civilian for inclusion in this list. - Joe Clinkenbeard

17. Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972 [Kranky]

As far as pretentious places for recording albums go, Hecker’s heady mix of drone, ambient and skewed metal meanderings was recorded in a Gothic church in Reykjavik, Iceland. But this production detail is less noticeable than it is felt, than it is a palpable device used to carry out Tim Hecker’s organic versus synthetic opus. Similar is the image of the album’s cover depicting students from MIT dropping a piano off the top of a building in 1972 – which itself is a non-negotiable invitation to consider Ravedeath. The psybient haze of his follow up to Dropped Pianos (also released earlier this year) is communicated primarily with a disembodied pipe organ. Other times it’s literally impossible to theorize where the sounds of this record are coming from like the soaring wind-instrument sample on “Hatred of Music I” run through a chainsaw motor and processed glacially through ice-cold space.

What you need to know about Tim Hecker’s contribution to 2011 though is that Ravedeath could have been made with bugles and dog whistles and still come off strong. It’s Hecker’s sense of composition, his patience and understanding of time that draws your attention in so frighteningly close. While some tracks are white rooms of sound, others roaring oceans of noise; the album reads as Hecker’s hand-drawn blueprint for sorting through its cycling movements. There’s “In the Fog I-III” and “In the Air I-III” and the more oblique “Analog Paralysis, 1978.” Ravedeath, 1972 is overbearing at times, as it complicates the idea of sonic pleasure. The tracks are lusciously overdriven and crushingly beautiful but not exactly pleasant to sit down next to and consume emotionally or physically.

Ravedeath, 1972 is one of the best pieces of musical escapism made this year, if not one the most profound studies done with recorded sound. - Sky Madden

16. Cut Copy – Zonoscope [Modular Recordings]

The gaming company Electronic Arts famously burst onto the scene with an ad that asked: “Can a computer make you cry?” A lot has changed in the few decades since that ad ran, including the transformation of EA into a video gaming despot, but the question is as legitimate as ever. Computers are more complex than they’ve ever been, and growing ever more complex as time goes on, but they’re still by nature cold and distant.

That distance is responsible for quite a bit of the appeal of Cut Copy’s Zonoscope, the best album the band has ever recorded and one that finds them contrasting the exciting but ultimately emotionally unfulfilling dance floor sounds of their breakout In Ghost Colours with a sweeping range of digitized emotion. Zonoscope is Cut Copy putting computers to the test, juxtaposing arpeggiating synth bass and twinkling keys with a neon lullaby melody on “Need You Now,” relegating electronics to the corners until the chorus jumps to life on “Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat,” where a flood of shimmery synths fill in what the vocals aren’t explicitly stating.

Zonoscope was by no means the only emotional album from a computer friendly act this year, but few works in any genre were as emotionally resonant or as seamlessly integrated. With Zonoscope, Cut Copy truly delivered on the promise of predecessors like the Human League and OMD, making electronic instruments and elements as fine a tool for exploring the pop spectrum as a guitar, marrying expert songcraft with perfect dance floor instincts. Maybe Zonoscope didn’t make you cry, but I bet it at least made you smile. - Nick Hanover

Griftopia: Bubbles Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel & Grau)

In Griftopia, Matt Taibbi does a superb job of explaining the roots, causes and results of the financial crises that have led us to the shit that we’re in now. From the late ’90s tech bubble to the housing bubble to the ongoing oil bubble, Taibbi breaks down everything that happened in layman’s terms. Even I, notoriously bad at understanding economics and money, was able to decipher just what the hell these assholes did to our country and economy.

Taibbi proves that these people are just heartless, as they routinely gambled with no safety nets and no moral compass. There are many villains, but Goldman Sachs comes across as especially horrible – pushing for repayment of debts that could destroy the world economy for no reason other than greed. Taibbi also shrugs off the Democrat label, taking equal opportunity to blast every president since Reagan, placing as much blame on Obama and Clinton as he does on Reagan and the Bushes.

What normally turns me off from Taibbi is his excessive personal attacks and name-calling. He greatly scales it back in Griftopia, concentrating on getting the facts and the story across. If any of you are still confused as to why there are hundreds upon hundreds of Occupy movements; if any of you don’t know the difference between the 1% and the 99%; if any of you just want to learn as much as you can about how we’ve been fucked nine ways til Sunday, read this book.- Tris Miller

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company)

To put it simply, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King is dense, emotional, rich and rewarding. As with his opus Infinite Jest, it’s a novel that largely sidesteps narrative conventions and a typical arc. Sure, there are characters such as Claude Sylvanshine, David Cusk, and even David Wallace (not that David Wallace, but yeah, kind of that David Wallace), but the connective tissues of detailed back-stories aren’t necessarily there in their full forms. Instead, this is a novel about beginnings, about introductions to new spaces, new relationships and the confusion, pain and joy that comes with such an experience. And make no mistake, The Pale King is an experience. Though Wallace’s writing is as dense and complex as ever, with his typical page-long sentences and lengthy footnotes, there’s brevity to the story he weaves. Though the chapters on tax codes and subsequent arguments about the increasing mechanization of the IRS’s processing system can seem tedious, they are executed with a thorough knowledge and passion that brings life to the intended boredom.

It’s that passion and vigor of Wallace’s prose that makes The Pale King so rewarding and such a unique piece of fiction, even when considered as an imperfect manuscript. There’s an endearing humanity throughout; anyone who’s choked back tears during Don Gately’s battle with hospitalization and morphine in Infinite Jest knows that Wallace has a keen sense for portraying pain and personal anguish. For me, no book was as ambitious, intelligent and wholly engrossing as this wonderful, incomplete novel from one of the finest authors of our generation. – Kyle Fowle

Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds (Faber & Faber)

He still clings to that Year Zero punk nonsense and sometimes comes across like a crotchety old man who idealized select pieces of the past, but with Retromania Simon Reynolds nevertheless creates an incisive and thoughtful book about pop culture, and especially how we remember, repackage, relive and sometimes just plain repeat it. Starting with the premise that today’s Western culture – primarily that of Britain and the United States – is obsessed with the “cultural artifacts of its own immediate past” to an extent never before seen in other cultures, Reynolds builds his case like an expert attorney, piling up evidence that, however uncomfortable it might make the reader, is impossible to dispute.

Most compelling is how Reynolds details the ways in which the past has remained a very influential component of our present, amounting to a cultural overload in which the past intrudes upon the present and causes artistic expression to stagnate. The examples the author cites are well chosen: reunion tours of beloved 1980s and 1990s indie bands; entire classic albums performed in concert; this country’s ongoing fixation with an invented, idealized 1950s; the little pods of collectors specializing in every imaginable nook and cranny of musical genre.

Books this detailed and thoroughly researched usually come out of a university setting; written in a lively and wholly approachable manner with a massive scope that never feels overwhelming, few other books have managed to examine our fixation with our own past – and its consequences – as well as Retromania. – Eric Dennis

Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)

Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids is aptly named. There’s a spirit of child-like play evident throughout the book as Smith describes her early bohemian days in New York City and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. We read about her encounters with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and celebrity visual artists at the Chelsea Hotel. Smith expresses her admiration for the likes of Bob Dylan, Arthur Rimbaud and Frank Sinatra. Just Kids is more than a portrait of an artist as a young woman, though. It’s also the tale of two young lovers/friends, “just kids” as the title puts it, who persevere despite great odds. We follow Smith and Mapplethorpe through any number of physical and emotional bumps in the road, including poverty (the two are at one point so poor that they can only share one hot dog between them), Smith’s unexpected pregnancy, various health problems and the rocky trajectory of their complex relationship. In a year where several meaningful memoirs have been released in both paperback and hardcover editions, Just Kids has the distinction of being amongst the most nakedly hardboiled, yet undeniably sweet accounts of two fascinating people who had an unbelievable, yet somehow familiar, life together. – Jacob Adams

The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True Life Spy Story by Robert Baer and Dayna Baer (Crown)

Throw a proverbial dart at any of the chapters contained in this joint memoir of CIA lifers Robert and Dayna Baer and you’re likely to find at least one anecdote or another that strains believability. You have to constantly remind yourself that this is nonfiction; such is the nature of their tales of spying for the Uncle Sam in far-flung areas across the globe. Alternating between the narratives of Mr. and Mrs. Baer, their paths gradually intertwine to comprise a tale of spycraft, clandestine courtship, and well-earned paranoia, all while opening a window into the machinations that comprise the underbelly of international politics. The pace is relentless, one vignette after another of “this only happens in the movies”-type tales from start till finish. This is not spying in the James Bond sense, mind you. The reality of being a career spy is going to a bombed out office in far flung Tajikistan every day, one that happens to be shared with the KGB (this is less incongruous than you might think), as Mr. Baer did in the early nineties. It also means knowing your future wife only as “Riley,” her given alias when they met in Bosnia, which Mr. Baer only discovered months later when they met again by chance. Examples abound to disprove the cliché of the spy as a tuxedo-clad lady killer who occasionally has to dodge lasers. By the end of the Baers’ tale, you understand that spying is a gritty, lonely, exotic occupation that is dangerous and banal in equal measures. The one cliché the Baer’s are able to prove accurate is that the truth is stranger than fiction, and that is what made The Company We Keep take a hold of me the way it did. – Tom Volk

Suicide by Edouard Levé (Dalkey Archive Press)

Spoiler alert. The completed manuscript of Suicide made its way into the hands of publishers just days before author Edouard Levé hung himself in his apartment in Paris. Suicide is an exhaustive exploration of all the conscious aspects of suicide that reads both personally and objectively. For instance, the narrative that shifts between what is rhetorical and what is personal considers whether or not the person who finds the suicide is doubly in pain for finding the body first and from automatically becoming suspect to a crime by officials. The first 40 pages of the book read as though Levé is commentating on a friend’s suicide but suspicion will not be still until it is realized that Levé’s use of “you” is directed at himself and anyone else who has completed suicide. Suicide comes after his brilliant Autoportrait from 2005, which is noted for taking on the form of literary cubism because of its situated 1,500 non-sequiturs. Suicide is quite plainly about just that, but it is also about delicate obsession, acute fetishization and absurdist curiosity. Much of the book’s strength draws from its potential to create circles within circles of realization – the act of reading the book all the way through, itself a self-reflexive opportunity to realizing morbid curiosity about the controversial claim that self-death is natural.

One of the most fascinating things about Suicide is the first edition English translation designed by London/Champaign’s Dalkey publishing house that chose Levé’s own self portrait for the cover. The eerie illustration made up of single black smudged dots represents paradoxically a hollow face full of thought, pregnant with fatal curiosity. Levé will be known as a literary experimentalist and Suicide his greatest experiment, his public suicide note to himself and to the world. – Sky Madden

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Anchor)

Stacey: Someday we’ll be 45 and writing about indie rock. David: Sooner than later. Stacey: Yeah, spooks me too. This happened on chat yesterday between me and editor-in-chief/friend-since-high-school David Harris. It’s an unnerving preoccupation: how do you know when you are (too) old? At what point does being yourself come off like trying too hard? Is fucking up honestly a part of life or is it sometimes really just your fault? These are some of the modern complaints brought to bear in Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The experience of reading the novel is like playing a game of narrative pick up sticks; it’s a haphazard pile and yet everything touches. Each chapter is a self-contained short story with characters overlapping, intersecting and glancing off each other at varying access points. Ex-punk/label exec Bennie Salazar, his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, aging and ailing rock legend Bosco (who floats the idea of a Suicide Tour), PR magnate La Doll – these are the people who, cognizant of it or not, frustrate and embellish each other’s fates. With one chapter laid out in a tell-all magazine article format that confesses much more about the interviewer than the subject, and another narrated entirely through a reproduction of a 12-year-old’s PowerPoint presentation, Egan ingeniously shifts both the storyteller’s and reader’s perspective as she churns through all of these subtle histories. Goon Squad is not only a brilliant illustration of what it means to bump up against the upper limit of youth culture, it’s also a work that is nothing short of fiction-forward. – Stacey Pavlick

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)

Christopher Hitchens has offended me, vexed me, even infuriated me, but he has never bored me. He loves a good argument, and even this memoir throws some punches. As much a collection of focused essays as a chronological tour through the author’s life, Hitch-22 offers an overview of the best of Hitch, from moving accounts of friends and family to piss-and-vinegar rants to his abiding love for language and the beauty we too often suppress in it. Throughout, he juggles the lingering attachment to many of his youthful views with his current outlook, unafraid to embrace both even when they contradict. Those who still see Hitchens’ stance for the War in Iraq as a post-9/11 neoconservative conversion will find here an impressively mounted argument for the consistency of his position on the war with his radical leftism.

Even when he’s justifying his controversial stance on Iraq, Hitchens mixes in rich personal anecdotes and research, suggesting that he does not separate his personal life from his professional one. One gets a clearer appreciation for the way each of his passions combines with the others, and how that mixture shapes his views. Contentious as ever, Hitchens makes his memoir a self-righteous apologia as much as a biography, but damned if it isn’t as captivating as everything else he writes. Just be sure to have a dictionary handy. - Jake Cole

There’s no necessity for films that conjure a story out of tragic national events to default to an overly somber and sedate tone, but it’s understandable when that’s the route such a work opts to take. With London River, writer-director Rachid Bouchareb (working with Zoé Galeron and Olivier Lorelle on the screenplay) begins with the 2005 terrorist bombings in London that killed over 50 people and left hundreds more injured. Coming in the midst of a decade lost to out-of-control fearfulness over the potential spread of violent mayhem, the horrible incident was like one more heavy blanket thrown on top of the global psyche. Bouchareb doesn’t exactly evoke that sensation, but he does lean on it in his storytelling. The result is a movie about dread that develops none of its own, requiring viewers to call up their own gloomy memories of worrisome hours watching news reports and calling loved ones to get the simple reassurance of their voices.

Brenda Blethyn plays Elisabeth, a timorous widow who watches the news at her farmhouse and immediately calls her city-dwelling daughter. When the pile-up of messages go unanswered, Elisabeth heads into London to track down her daughter, immediately stirring her anxieties further when she discovers that the address of the young woman’s flat is in a neighborhood that, as Elisabeth puts it, “is absolutely crawling with Muslims.” It gets even worse for her when she discovers her daughter was learning Arabic at a local mosque with a young man from Africa who she was apparently dating. The revelation comes about when Elisabeth meets Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté), the boy’s previously absentee father who’s traveled there from France on a similar quest to determine the whereabouts of his offspring.

There’s really not much to the film beyond that. The two worried parents are initially distant because of their cultural differences – a gap mostly perpetuated by Elisabeth, who seems to see just about everything and everyone initially as a threat – but gradually grow to appreciate each other’s company as they go about their simple detective work. Just about everything about the relationship’s progression is plainly rote, familiar from any number of films that try to explore the preemptive bigotry of people with the sort of artless understanding of a quietly nodding high school teacher overseeing a particularly sensitive social studies lesson.

The lack of intellectual energy in the construction of the film carries over to the visuals. Bouchareb employs a rigorously anti-dynamic style that is perhaps meant to give the sensation of indie film chill but instead comes across as the point-and-shoot drabness of a television production from a couple decades ago when utility always trumped invention. If the emotions reached the levels of potency expected from a story like this, that would be reasonable. Instead, the movie winds up hopelessly dull in just about every respect. Blethyn does some nice work in her role, especially in the smaller moments – I’m especially fond of the way she responds to dropping her purse in the midst of a small, calm crowd by snapping it back up and offering the surrounding strangers a glare that mixes fear, embarrassment and an angry warning – but the film ultimately offers her so little to dig into. It’s clearly as well meaning as can be, but could have used some fiery ambition to go with those stalwart intentions.

Way out west, Takashi Miike is a symbol of Japanese perversion: that crazy director who made a movie about a girl with piano wire who keeps grown men tied up in burlap sacks and feeds them vomit. In Japan, he’s more widely recognized as the man behind kids’ movie sensation Zebraman and a key figure in the J-horror scene. But after this year, Miike might finally get his due as a director who may be eclectic as all fuck but nonetheless possesses the singular vision and impeccable eye of the auteur, and that will be thanks to 13 Assassins.

If there has been one trait that has defined Miike’s work, it’s his passion for exploring as many genres as possible and, to that end, it’s easy to simplify 13 Assassins as his samurai film. While it’s true that 13 Assassins owes more to Kurosawa than Oshima, 13 Assassins‘ closest peer is Beat Takeshi’s modern remake of Zatōichi, which similarly merged gorgeously natural cinematography with balletic violence and cruel humor, and was likewise helmed by a director who has been difficult to peg.

A bleak story about the end of the samurai era and the cruelty of the elite, 13 Assassins doesn’t shy away from violence but it’s far more restrained and character-driven than you might expect. Miike focuses on the incredible performances of his actors, including Imamura veteran Kōji Yakusho, and the fading beauty of the Japanese countryside as the modern era encroaches, granting the film a structure and not unlike an Altman-Malick hybrid. But typical Miike touches remain, including hyper-stylized death scenes and characters who don’t quite fit in with reality, like the final assassin, who may or may not be a folkloric demon.

It all adds up to a film unlike any other this year, a film that may finally force audiences to view Miike as a serious talent and which may help usher in a golden age of Japanese film exports. But even if it doesn’t, it will always have a place as one of Miike’s greatest achievements. - Nick Hanover

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (Dir: Michael Rapaport, Sony Pictures Classics)

Documentaries on bands with tumultuous pasts can be a risky proposition. On one hand, you can capture Metallica crying like babies in Some Kind of Monster or you can get two hours of Robbie Robertson preening in eyeliner in The Last Waltz. Fortunately, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest finds itself firmly in the former category, catching the titular group in amazing candidness. Directed by actor/longtime fan Michael Rapaport, the documentary works both as a history of and primer for Tribe’s astonishingly rich career, featuring little seen footage of the band in their heyday and a carefully chosen soundtrack that utilizes the best of one of hip hop’s greatest and most unique groups.

More than that, Beats, Rhymes & Life reveals the stresses and still raw emotions that led to the implosion of the group in 1998. Given incredible access to the band members, Rapaport and his camera follow Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White as they prepare for a 2008 reunion tour, getting the story direct from the source. All the tensions, jealousies, slights, affectations and admiration the quartet has for one another is captured on screen, from Q-Tip’s boyish enthusiasm to break down a sampled beat a decade old to Phife Dawg’s still simmering anger at his perception of being relegated to a sideman. The tale of the Tribe is a wholly remarkable story by any stretch of the imagination, and more so for being told by the legends themselves. It’s a fantastic movie, whether you’re a fan or just stumbling onto the band. And don’t worry, if you’re the latter, you’ll be a fan by the time the film’s over. - Nathan Kamal

Bridesmaids (Dir: Paul Feig, Universal)

Way too many romcoms these days are about weddings. I’m not sure why that is – maybe the demographic these films are baiting actually do carry some sort of subconscious tension about their own “perfect days” going tits-up (sometimes literally, depending on the film’s rating). Or, more likely, asshole studio execs think this is what women want in their comedy films: movies about dresses and boys! Maybe that’s why Kristen Wiig, the lady on “Saturday Night Live” who does the funny voices, co-wrote and starred in Bridesmaids, the surprisingly awesome cousin of the wedding film – to smuggle a really great comedy where many audiences wouldn’t expect it. On paper, Bridesmaids is most definitely a wedding comedy. Our perpetually single heroine has to be the maid of honor at her bestie’s wedding and everything goes wrong as she finds herself competing with someone more qualified to handle the proceedings, all while the rest of the bridal party yuks it up in a thick haze of drugs-and-fucking raunch. Someone shits in a sink! “It’s like 27 Dresses meets The Hangover!” Help me tie this noose.

But, like I said, smuggling. It’s a Judd Apatow production and directed by “Freaks and Geeks” creator Paul Feig, so that should indicate a quality viewing experience for cinematic comedy nerds. Moreover, Wiig and co-writer Annie Mumulo craft a screenplay with some serious pathos, and I don’t mean some forced dying relative or cancer subplot. Wiig’s character is neither a bedpan for the ailing comedy gods to shit on, nor is she a bland, Heiglian blank slate for a brain dead audience to project themselves upon. Instead, she’s a real character, a social fuckup who acts like a human being throughout the movie; she’s emotional, competitive and sometimes a little selfish. She’s hard to like, but easy to identify with.

If that weren’t enough, Wiig and Mumulo fill the film with awesome characters brought to life by some amazing comic talent including newfound powerhouse Melissa McCarthy as this year’s Zach Galifianakis without the mental retardation. Also, Jon Hamm plays a cartoonish dick of a not-boyfriend and Tim Heidecker plays his strangest part yet: a completely straight role as the groom. That alone gives Bridesmaids a pretty high rank as one of the best films of the year. - Danny Djeljosevic

Certified Copy (Dir: Abbas Kiarostami, MK2/IFC Films)

There’s probably some way to connect the circular, recurring themes of Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, with its dizzying conversations and brides multiplying like fallen leaves, to the tradition of end-of-the-year list-making, a practice that seems nearly as compulsory as human reproduction. But it’s probably better just to focus on the film itself. Certified may not be Kiarostami’s best film, although it’s certainly one of the frontrunners in a crowded field, but it’s definitely his, and this year’s most entertaining, emotionally affecting and complex puzzle. The relationship between the never-named She (Juliette Binoche) and James Miller (William Shimell), who may be former lovers reunited or inspired strangers masquerading as such, is never explained, and like so many of cinema’s finest mysteries, it doesn’t need to be.
Instead, this seed of mystery acts as the impetus for a roving, rolling conversation which draws comparisons to Linklater’s Sunrise/Sunset movies and other films defined by a tumbling progression of language. The end result is both a fascinating study of the various ways in which two ambiguous characters interact – fighting, uniting and struggling to relate – but also an incisive examination of copies and genuine articles, the way the two states require and thrive off each other. For professional sourpusses like T.S. Eliot, the concept that human development was just an endless cycle of copies copying copies spoke of attenuation and rot. For Kiarostami, it’s a testament to human persistence, the indomitable urge to keep trying, even if we never get it right. - Jesse Cataldo

Meek’s Cutoff (Dir: Kelly Reichardt, Oscilloscope Pictures)

For a film that has been described by so many critics as “minimalist,” there sure is a lot going on in Meek’s Cutoff. Kelly Reichardt, director of such past indie favorites as Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy, applies her “neo-neo realist” style to the American western. We follow three families on a wagon train across the Oregon High Desert. As the journey progresses, the travelers begin to realize that they are lost and their guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), might have no clue where he is going.

The plot, though, is secondary to the movie’s eerily realistic depiction of the desolate setting. In contrast to the classic films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, which typically paint the American West as a sweeping landscape upon which all things are possible, Reichardt depicts the land as oppressive, befuddling and dangerous. The frame is often full of sand, the scorching sun and the exacerbated faces of the weary travelers (Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and Will Patton and Greenwood are the standouts in the cast). Rarely has the experience of moving westward been depicted on celluloid with as much visceral immediacy.

There’s more to Meek’s Cutoff than the sum of its beautiful, bleak images. The film has been described as a “feminist western” because Reichardt acutely observes the subservient position of the women in the party. Many have read the film as an allegory about contemporary American political issues, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The plot device of travelers on a journey to nowhere invokes a Waiting for Godot-like absurdism in exploring fundamental questions about human existence. If the ending feels a bit too “on the nose,” it’s because the film that preceded it was so subtle, so deceptively simple, yet so beautifully complex. - Jake Adams

To know Annie Clark is to love her. The versatile songstress and musician has been making indie hearts melt since her time with the Polyphonic Spree, and her 2007 debut Marry Me was beloved for its cheeky sense of humor (see: the album’s “Arrested Development”-inspired title) and the sheer skill she exhibited. She’s released two more wonderfully creative records, and of all the brilliant cuts on 2011′s Strange Mercy, lead single “Surgeon” is perhaps the most proficient and inventive song Clark has composed so far.

Especially while she sings her broken little heart out to her lover to come get a surgeon to cut her open – a brilliant suggestion of both physical harm and a creative metaphorical call for the pain to cease, the song’s abstract structure, with short stanzas and extended choruses, also gives an urgency to the song that is subtle but fascinatingly powerful. Combining her talent for vocal rhythm with strong chops, she twirls a woeful tale of love blended with a funky and melodic guitar riff that would make Prince throw shade. Somehow managing to keep pace while the track kicks into overdrive, pounding with ghostly synths and a menacing kick drum refrain, by the time that the squeals and beats crash into silence, it has transformed into a dancy, apocalyptic-sounding tune – something Clark does with distinguished merit. “Surgeon” might be a sad little story, but it’s also an apt description for her precise and immeasurable talent. – Rafael Gaitan

24. Destroyer – “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” [Merge]

Dan Bejar, what is it of which you sing? Clearly you’re a smart fucking guy – and pardon me for saying I’m no slouch – but sometimes your erudition escapes me. And yet that’s part of the attraction of it all; the words just tumble out of you, none of them accidentally, and it’s OK for me to watch them sail by. With you, I choose to absorb rather than decrypt. You’re like a loose-limbed Kerouac, fluid and urbane, drunk like him, transcendent like him, only a little less doomed.

Kaputt’s “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” is a song about… something. Something romantic and impressionistic and imaginatively decadent, something having to do with the Invisible Man, the North Star and perhaps a longing that crosses south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But this track isn’t just about the words; we are ushered in with a nearly two minute instrumental introduction – a searching, single note melody is transposed over a proggy synth landscape until a flute takes over with breezy self-assurance as the song awakens to itself. Is it the contempo horns and the controlled jam of the sax solo that make this eight-plus minute poem sound so academically improvisational? Or is it that dreamy, streamy cadence that curls around me as wicka-wocka disco distortions spin me around? I may not be able to decode all of the meanings here, but with a song like this, you can be sure I’ll follow you wherever you’re going. - Stacey Pavlick

23. Jay-Z & Kanye West – “That’s My Bitch” [Def Jam]

Watch the Throne is an appropriate title for this crème de la hip-hop collab, and the motivation for this namedrop is chronicled in the album’s cornerstone track. Kanye spits, “It ain’t safe in the city/ Watch the throne,” a foreboding sentiment about the threat of up-and-comers, while bragging about life from said throne (“Blew up the world as soon as I hit the club with her…/ My dick worth money I put Monie in the middle”). Jay-Z’s half, a sentimental ode to Beyonce, is no less humble about shoving his superstar status down our throats. He throws scathing barbs about an over-populated roster of Caucasian icons, a category which he lumps his wife into. In the end, these wordsmiths carve a roundabout way of proclaiming their territory, and warning us all hands off.

The true heart of “That’s My Bitch” lies within the adrenaline-pumping Motown beat that sidles with ominous chromatic synths. It’s a perfect rhythmic vessel for both rappers’ fractured, roll-off-the-tongue style – sharp, sexy, dangerous. A catchy chorus sung by Elly Jackson grants us breathing room between their relentless rhymes and grounds a final quality of accessibility. Even with such extensive and impressive catalogs, Kanye and Jay-Z have found their latest milestone with “That’s My Bitch.” - Jory Spadea

22. Cass McCombs – “County Line” [Domino]

Cass McCombs has built a relatively successful career so far on dark, brooding songs that show the shadowy side of Americana. Though this year’s scattered effort Wit’s End was by no means a turn towards the light, it did manage to produce one of McCombs’ finest musical achievements to date. Throughout its slow, sultry and downright seductive six minutes, “County Line” is presented as both a ballad to lost love and a weary ode to hometowns and the beginnings they represent. Over soft, AM-radio keyboard chords, gently strummed, clean electric guitar and a slowly churning bass line, McCombs weaves a tale of relying on the never-changing aspect of small towns. “On my way to you/ Old county line/ Hoping nothing’s changed,” he says, sounding like a man who’s been distant (spiritually, physically, emotionally) for far too long. The warm organ that slips in and out of the chorus fits right in with the comfort of the lyricism, especially when McCombs turns in a stellar falsetto hook. For me, it’s one of the most unforgettable musical moments of the year, as he hits the high notes with equal parts angst and passion. They say you can never go home again, but “County Line” proves the opposite, offering up a whole lot of stability and truth in the lure of the familiar. – Kyle Fowle

21. St. Vincent – “Cruel” [4AD]

A unique atmosphere emerges when musicians mash together dark subject matter with upbeat music. St. Vincent (née Annie Clark) does just that with “Cruel,” the paradoxically peppy single from her third album Strange Mercy. Utilizing muddled guitar to produce one of the most infectious hooks of the year, Clark marries energy with foreboding, crooning “They could take or leave you/ So they took you, and they left you/ How could they be so casually cruel.” Certainly one of Clark’s most pop-oriented offerings, “Cruel” could be a Top 40 radio hit in superior alternate reality in which “black eyed peas” remain on the grocery shelf.

And, in fact, the music video for “Cruel” begins in the aisles of a convenience store, as Clark watches her character’s family eye her slantwise and ultimately bind her and throw her in the trunk of a car before burying her alive. The image of Clark, a gamine reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, slowly covered with dirt while holding the long notes of “Cruel” is emblematic of her work as a whole, mixing the dainty with the dark. One of the year’s most addictive songs, this poppy single from a solid St. Vincent album will burrow itself into your brain. – Josh Goller

20. Dum Dum Girls – “Bedroom Eyes” [Sub Pop]

The Dum Dum Girls had me before a single word had been uttered. The one string lead line and hazy, chugging guitars that launch “Bedroom Eyes” may as well have been designed specifically to snare me like some mouse trap peanut butter, hitting all the post-Joe Meek garage pop sweet spots I’m always such a sucker for. Jangle and one-two-two drum beats, a melodic bassline fulfilling all the hook requirements, “Bedroom Eyes” couldn’t begin more perfectly – and then it just stops.

And that’s when true bliss appears in the form of Dee Dee Penny’s sleepily needful voice, like if Chrissie Hynde joined the Crystals and talked the Nerves into being the backing band. It’s at complete odds with Dee Dee’s former life as Kristen Gundred, the Phil Collins of San Diego based act Grand Ole Party, a life filled with bluesy howling and low guttural moans and nearly no sweetness. “Bedroom Eyes” by contrast is a teenage come-on, a lustfully simple plea for a partner to return to keep the bed warm, imbued with the optimism of that age, where holding your lover tight for the entire evening is enough to count for a passionate romance and the only dark days are the moments where you’re simply not together.

It’s not rocket science or Shakespeare, it’s just unselfconsciously blunt pop music, a throwback that for four minutes makes you believe all those people saying “things were better when…” are totally right. Love, lust, teenage kicks– as far as “Bedroom Eyes” is concerned, they’re all the same. - Nick Hanover

19. PJ Harvey – “The Words That Maketh Murder” [Vagrant]

Polly Jean Harvey didn’t rush the production of Let England Shake – according to the songstress, the lyrics alone were years in the making. Her research had her consuming the confrontational imagery of artists such as Salvador Dalí, Francisco de Goya and Stanley Kubrick, but more challenging was the research from within: Let England Shake is Harvey’s anguished expression of what it means to be citizen and ancestor. The results are gripping and newly folkloric; though there is much in the way of brutality and grief, Harvey’s songs, always corporeal, smell not of decay but of an Englishwoman’s rapid breath.

“The Words That Maketh Murder” is perhaps the album’s most graphically violent track, as Harvey extrapolates discursive dogma to its bloody consequence. The words of pulpit and press conference rattle the world. As a result of these utterances, “Soldiers fall like lumps of meat/ Blown and shot out beyond belief/ Arms and legs were in the trees.” The song is dark – pitch black dark – in a way that is more mischievous than macabre. The occasional oompah of a trombone and a disturbingly sing-song male counter-chorus that creeps on tiptoes between scattered bodies (vocals courtesy of long time collaborators Mick Harvey and John Parish) make this song shudder with hellacious vitality. An all-seeing angel with an autoharp, PJ sounds wind-whipped and wild and as if she is singing to us through a multiplicity of lifetimes. Which is to say: never better. - Stacey Pavlick

18. Tom Waits- “Hell Broke Luce” [ANTI-]

Waits’ last foray into antiwar composition, “Road to Peace,” was blunt and without artistry, like a CNN news ticker awkwardly married to a funereal shuffle. “Hell Broke Luce” retains all the disgust of that seven-minute slog but marries it to Waits’ usual standard, apocalyptic word-pictures of carnage and horror spit with terrifying ferocity. In keeping with the layout of the rest of the album, “Hell Broke Luce” is short and terse, which only enhances the mood, making the song into an air raid siren just prior to a nuclear strike.

Waits’ post-Swordfishtrombones music has always sounded deliberately decayed and possessed, broken and forgotten instruments given brief, macabre life through his powers. But “Hell Broke Luce” sounds more than ever like a jam in Hades, the pounding war drum marching the damned toward punishment. PJ Harvey put out an elegant, lyrical antiwar record this year with Let England Shake, but Waits manages here to condense her fiery summation of a dying empire with lyrics that could cut through a man as easily as the machine gun sample he uses. By the end, America is in flames, sinking into pestilence and death. And when Waits’ cruelly cuts off after rhetorically roaring, “What is next?” I don’t know whether to follow this prophet or make a dash for the nearest and deepest mineshaft. - Jake Cole

17. Wilco – “Born Alone” [dBpm]

Indie rock giants Wilco have found themselves in an awkward place in recent years. Having fully transcended their roots as alt-country pioneers, endured multiple lineup changes and become a legendary comeback story after the label debacle of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jeff Tweedy and company seemed to be growing complacent. Fortunately, after a pair of lukewarm records, the band sounds re-energized on their latest, The Whole Love, an album of impressive stylistic range and tight, focused songwriting. And on their best record in years, a deep cut stands out: “Born Alone.”

Opening with the shimmering guitar work of Nels Cline and Pat Sansone, “Born Alone” quickly moves into a propulsive, chugging melody, equally anchored by Tweedy’s voice and a staggered, loose drumbeat. On the second verse, a jaunty organ riff joins in to accompany Tweedy’s typically weird wordplay of “I’ll unwind strange rinds overpower me/ Toss the chimneys in the sea/ I believe I’ve seen the finger/ Divine extremity.” But the real gem of the song is in the chorus, a rushing, needle-like burst of electric guitar that punctuates and penetrates the singer’s mournful voice. Like so many great Wilco songs, it’s both musically complex and captivating, a fusion of elements and expert craftsmanship. It’s good to have the band back at full speed, and “Born Alone” sets them racing. – Nathan Kamal

16. PJ Harvey – “The Glorious Land” [Vagrant]

Arranged for guitar, rather than autoharp like the rest of Let England Shake, you’d expect “The Glorious Land” to stick out as a misfit. But instead of being the record’s black sheep, the track is its dark portal (to follow-up “The Words That Maketh Murder” or the withering starkness of “England”), with a murky rhythm of throbbing bass propelling the song’s inbuilt sonic bite and muffled lyrical plaintiveness. With a minute-long intro of hypnotizing atmosphere and jangly, discordant strumming, it has a certain punk acerbity even while its run-on verses recall Super Furry Animals and its jagged warp evokes Radiohead’s “Reckoner” or Fever Ray’s “I’m Not Done.” Sustained, almost wearying in momentum, it’s one of the year’s boldest musical stances.

Presumably about Afghanistan during the nation’s most recent occupation, the song’s truthful condemnation is not of this or any particular war but of it as a general concept and in practice. In other words, war stands diametrically contrary to any notion of well-being at hand, because with war “What is the glorious fruit of our land? The fruit is deformed children/ What is the glorious fruit of our land? The fruit is orphaned children.” The argument is that if plowshares are upended into swords, the land and its people equally suffer, and the most innocent among the people (women, children, the elderly and infirm) suffer the most. It’s a complex reality that the song succinctly embodies, and that Let England Shake readily communicates as one of the pre-eminent political statements of the last year. - Joe Clinkenbeard

A Warrior’s Heart loves to remind the audience that lacrosse’s history stretches back to Native American times, a futile attempt to infuse what is now a marginally popular, almost exclusively white activity with some timeless nobility of spirit. Michael F. Sears and writer Martin Dugard desperately want the viewer to care about lacrosse, to the point that they develop a tumultuous teenager through the pithy lessons he learns from it. Scholastic achievement is nowhere to be found in this film, maturity and responsibility instead solely defined by performance in a sport that, judging from the team lineups shown here, should be sponsored exclusively by AXE body spray and Rohypnol.

Even the character names firmly place this film in the realm of suburban, WASP comfort where lacrosse has flourished. Conor (Kellan Lutz) transfers across the country to his Marine colonel father’s alma mater, where he meets coach’s daughter Brooklyn (Ashley Greene). This incidentally pairs two Twilight co-stars, something the marketing has stressed up and down in the hopes of getting some of that franchise’s inexplicable fanbase. The romance between the two certainly mines some of that stilted, lifeless anti-charm of Edward and Bella, even replicating the union of a woman with no personality and a man with an awful one.

But when his father dies after redeployment, Conor goes into a tailspin that consists of one minor act of vandalism that causes everyone to wonder why he can’t just get over it. Nevertheless, his actions land him in jail, where his dad’s war buddy bails him out in order to put him through a boot camp to teach him about responsibility and honor. He does so through Mr. Miyagi-esque chores and, of course, lacrosse. Sgt. Major Duke Wayne (Adam Beach) is a full-blooded Iroquois, which conveniently allows the film to remind us yet again that Conor’s white boy angst and love for a silly game somehow fits within a great and beautiful tradition, cheapening a cultural history to build up the supposed value of this arrogant brat.

A Warrior’s Heart is one of those films with such cheap production values, such awkward staging and such blunt, message-of-the-week dialogue that I can never be sure if it was ever intended to be a theatrical release or just something to be broadcast on a family (if not Christian) TV channel before lucking its way into big screens. Everyone speaks in aggrandizing platitudes, be it Brooklyn’s lionizing narration of her boyfriend’s asinine exploits or Wayne’s tidbits of tribal faux-wisdom. I was surprised when the soldier initially gave an unromantic, brutally literal answer to Conor’s theme-baiting question, “What is a warrior?” but by the end the Marine amends his response, saying a warrior is basically anyone who gives it the ol’ college try.

This has been a strong year for sports films. Both Win Win and Warrior found ways to define their characters through their chosen subjects even as both demonstrated how those same sports unleashed the worst in emotionally unstable people. A Warrior’s Heart simplistically equates its protagonist’s moral value with his abilities on the field. But the clumsiness of the camera, which stays at a safe distance and zooms in on the halfhearted scuffles of the players like a parent taping an intramural match, never captures any dramatic or glorifying side of lacrosse. Yet the direction also reveals more than it realizes. When the camera pulls back during the climactic match, a national championship no less, you can see that the bleachers aren’t even close to full. It’s the film’s defining moment, and one that aligns the movie more with Dodgeball than Rocky.

There was some understandable fretting a couple years ago when the Roots unexpectedly agreed to become the house band for the new “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” program. It seemed that the band was hardly looking to settle down at that point, having had recent critical success with dark, angry albums such as Game Theory and Rising Down. Surely taking a post playing bumper music for a nightly talk show was going to cut into their ability to develop new music releases, seeping the energy needed to keep crafting challenging original works. Instead, they’re beginning to present an argument for the value of having a nightly gig to keep creative ambitions boiling. In the past 18 months, they’ve released the acclaimed studio album How I Got Over, full-fledged collaborations with John Legend and Betty Wright and now the stellar Undun which may be their most ambitious work to date. It’s certainly a late-charging contender to be considered among the best albums of the year.

Clocking in at a pleasingly lean length of just under 40 minutes, Undun is a concept album, that always questionable remnant of 1970s rock excess, when musicians strained to add novelistic narrative to their albums to impose an air of added legitimacy. In the case of this release, the songs hold loosely together as the story of a man named Redford Stephens. He’s born into a miserable life and proceeds as hope is worn away like a blade held against a spinning stone without relief. As the song “Make My” notes, “In the world of night terrors/ It’s hard to dream.” Like the best concept albums, it’s not the details of the story that matter, but the unity of the tone, the coherence of the vision. Undun acknowledges the built-in fatalism of modern life without romanticizing or even raging against it. The album is a dispatch, not a manifesto.

It’s also an album marked by the sort of elegant contrasts that have marked the music of the Roots from the very beginning. “Kool On” is built on a looped sample culled from the 1973 self-titled debut album from soul singer D.J. Rogers, the sweetness of his voice sparking against the rapped lyrics over top of the gentle lope of the song. When guest Truck North snarls, “Yeah outside where the killers and dealers swarm/ And inside they dressed up like it’s a telethon/ Black tie affair but they holding heavy arms/ Straight cash with a stash in the cummerbund,” the whole thing sounds like honest testimony from a street corner as music trills from a battered old radio that’s taken up permanent residence on a cracked stoop. It’s part of the inescapable collision of words that’s laced throughout the entire album. Moments of clarity don’t make the world a better place; they just allow for a clearer view of darkening clouds.

“Tip the Scale (My Way)” essentially crystallizes the album’s thesis of wounded possibility as Dice Raw sings, “Some think life is a living hell/ Some live life just living well/ I live life tryna tip the scale/ My Way, my way” on the chorus, giving way to Black Thought’s grim rap about a time and place defined by “soldiers of the streets with 8th grade diplomas.” Striving is fine, but too much of the life of someone like Redford Stephens is locked into place. Black Thought continues, “Look, let he without sin live without sin/ Until then, I’ll be doing dirty jobs like swamp men.”

The album closes with a terrifically inventive four-song suite that tips its hat to the song that was at least partial inspiration for the album and gave the lead character his name. Sufjan Stevens plays his song “Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou)” (from the album Michigan) quietly on piano, which gives way to a string quartet version of the piece (retitled “Possibility”) and then a spectacularly cacophonous avant-garde jazz version (“Will to Power”). Then comes “Finality,” a brief but powerful orchestral piece that ends the album with the quiet menace of a low note on a piano held until it slowly tremors away like a dissipating dark cloud. Like the rest of the album, it represents the Roots exploring the possibilities before them, blessed with a latitude that eludes the character they’ve created for the work. The band may have a regular paycheck that gives them the enticing option of growing complacent. Undun is a scintillating argument that they’re never likely to opt for that sorry route.

The Roots feat Phonte & Dice Raw – One Time by TheWellVersed