The Kuhronic Top 50 Albums of 2011
“Now the question is, will I go back and finish 2011? I smell a deep can of worms…”
— Dave Kuhr, 2015 —
I’ve talked about the history of the Kuhronic top album lists in a few of my past list introduction blurbs but in brief, the origin story begins in 2011 when my buddy Brent and I decided that we should be creating our own album of the year lists since we both have exceptional musical taste and all the other outlets always get it wrong. This conversation happened near the end of the year and my OCD, fact checking editor brain simply would not allow me to pump something out. And then, despite my resigning to the task and putting in work over the course of the year, I still choked in 2012 and didn’t actually complete my first list until the end of 2013. The 2012 list was finished retroactively in 2015 and then re-edited in 2022 for a “deluxe 10 year anniversary” edition, which is the version that appears on this blog.
It was inevitable that I was eventually going to finish 2011 but as the question above addresses, how far am I prepared to go with this nonsense? The easy (and logical) answer would be 2011, I complete the unfinished task and 2011 has the added benefit of being the birth year of my son, which means that I will have a list for each year of my children’s lives.
…But if I do 2010 then I will have a list for each year of the ’10s; you can see where this mode of thinking leads
The further we burrow down into this hole, the more objective it becomes, and while that is usually a good thing, this is a Kuhronic list so extreme subjectivity is literally the name of the game here. The greater the distance between the list creation and the year under review, the higher the likelihood that the narrative of history has infected my judgement. Hindsight overpowers subjectivity by necessity, and the list risks becoming that which it was created to rebel against.
Best Live / Live in the Studio Album
LCD Soundsystem — London Sessions / Shut Up and Play the Hits / The Long Goodbye
This one is a little convoluted and requires an explanation; London Sessions was released in 2011, and it’s not a live album per se, it was recorded live in the studio in the middle of the worldwide This Is Happening tour, right after their appearance at Glastonbury. LCD also played their “farewell” gig at Madison Square Gardens on April 2nd, 2011, which was extremely live and which my extremely pregnant wife and I watched the livestream of on Saturday night, (in)directly facilitating the birth of my son the following Monday; but the first document of that gig, the DVD documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, was not released until 2012, and it was another 2 years before the release of the standalone live album, The Long Goodbye. Since I am writing this from “the future”, and LCD is hands down, one of the best live bands on the planet, I will combine them all here. Interestingly, it was in 2015 that I first introduced a ‘Best Live Album’ category to this list (Johnny fuckin’ Marr!), if that had been on the menu in 2014, presumably The Long Goodbye would have won it at that time.
Wackiest Super Group
Superheavy — Superheavy
Runner Up
Metallica & Lou Reed — Lulu
Best Limp Bizkit Album
Limp Bizkit — Gold Cobra
Best Mashup Album (Remember Those?)
Wugazi — 13 Chambers
Number of “Mixtapes” That Made it Onto This List
5
Best Titled Album That Didn’t Make it Onto This List
Luke Haines — 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s
Albums That I Annoyingly Had to Listen to on Youtube
Skinny Puppy, Frank Ocean, Roots Manuva, Death Grips, badbadnotgood, Lulu
And now, the Almost Made It’s…
Adele — 21
Anthrax — Worship Music
Atlas Sound — Parallax
Beirut — The Rip Tide
Kate Bush — 50 Words for Snow
Childish Gambino — Camp
Cloud Nothings — Cloud Nothings
Cults — Cults
Cymbals Eat Guitars — Lenses Alien
Elbow — Build a Rocket Boys!
The Fall — Ersatz GB
Gang Gang Dance — Eye Contact
Ghostpoet — Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam
Girls — Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Gotye — Making Mirrors
The Horrors — Skying
Ben Howard — Every Kingdom
Iceage — New Brigade
Iron Maiden — Final Frontier
Nicolas Jaar — Space Is Only Noise
Jane’s Addiction — The Great Escape Artist
The Joy Formidable — The Big Roar
Miles Kane — Colour of the Trap
Kasabian — Velociraptor!
Killer Mike — Pl3dge
The Kills — Blood Pressures
Modeselektor — Monkeytown
Mogwai — Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Thurston Moore — Demolished Thoughts
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds —Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
Oh Sees — Carrion Crawler / The Dream / Castlemania
Pharoahe Monch — W.A.R. (We Are Renegades)
Plug — Back On Time
Raekwon — Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang
The Rapture — In The Grace of Your Love
The Roots — Undun
Saigon — The Greatest Story Never Told
Shakey Graves — Roll the Bones
Thundercat — The Golden Age of Apocalypse
Three Trapped Tigers — Route One or Die
Tune-Yards — w h o k i l l
TV on the Radio — Nine Types of Light
Wagon Christ — Toomorrow
Tom Waits —Bad As Me
The War on Drugs — Slave Ambient
Washed Out — Within You Without
Wild Beasts — Smother
Saul Williams — Volcanic Sunlight
Wooden Shjips — West
Wu Lyf — Go Tell Fire to the Mountain
The Actual Fucking List!
50. Shabazz Palaces — Black Up
49. Holy Ghost! — Holy Ghost!
48. Russian Circles — Empros
47. Hard-Fi — Killer Sounds
46. Björk — Biophilia
45. R.E.M. — Collapse Into Now
44. Fleet Foxes — Helplessness Blues
43. 13 & God — Own Your Ghost
42. Wild Flag — Wild Flag
41. Roots Manuva — 4everevolution
40. Skinny Puppy — Handover
39. Primus — Green Naugahyde
38. Rob Crow — He Thinks He’s People
37. Bon Iver — Bon Iver
36. PJ Harvey —Let England Shake
35. Lykke Li — Wounded Rhymes
34. Real Estate — Days
33. Protest the Hero — Scurrilous
32. Stephen Malkmus — Mirror Traffic
31. Jay Z & Kanye West — Watch the Throne
30. Wilco — The Whole Love
29. Beastie Boys —Hot Sauce Committee Pt.2
28. Joe Lally — Why Should I Get Used To It
27. Beyoncé — 4
26. Little Dragon — Ritual Union
25. Smith Westerns — Dye It Blonde
24. Danny Brown — XXX
23. The Antlers — Burst Apart
22. Friendly Fires — Pala
21. Steel Panther — Balls Out
20. M83 — Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
19. Yuck — Yuck
18. Handsome Furs — Sound Kaput
17. St. Vincent —Strange Mercy
16. Kendrick Lamar — Section.80
15. DJ Shadow — The Less You Know, The Better
14. Mastodon — The Hunter
13. The Weeknd — House of Balloons / Thursday / Echoes of Silence
12. Brett Anderson — Black Rainbows
11. Fucked Up — David Comes to Life
10. City and Colour — Little Hell
09. Destroyer — Kaputt
08. Cut Copy — Zonoscope
07. The Strokes — Angles
06. Battles — Gloss Drop
05. Sloan — The Double Cross
04. Death Grips — Exmilitary
03. Radiohead — The King of Limbs
02. Arctic Monkeys — Suck It And See
01. Frank Ocean — Nostalgia, Ultra
That’s it, and now back to the future of regularly scheduled programming in the year of our lord, 2024
with maybe a dash of 2010 in the background…
Much love,
Dave E. Kuhronic
