My List: Best 30 Albums of 2011

Another compulsory annual list

Previously, I listed my 50 best songs of 2011, now it is time for best albums of 2011

Last year I put 25 for the list of best albums, now I add 5 more anf make it 30. Despite 5 additional spots, there are still so many good albums this year that confused me which ones are the best of the best.

This list is not in a particular order, it's a random one since I love them all.

Okay, here goes the list:

Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See

After the dark sounding 'Humbug' album, the Monkeys finally return to their original sound in 'Suck It and See'. This is a particularly light album yet beautifully crafted by Alex Turner. The lyrics may sound absurd, yet it also makes sense since this is Arctic Monkeys we're talking about.

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Dave Grohl dives back into the past with this album; Recording with analog tape, with Butch Vig as the producer, and also joined by Krist Novoselic playing the bass in one of the tracks.

This is the best album the Foos have made after the first two albums. Combining three guitars riff blasting  throughout the album, the sound is almost as close as it can be to the grunge era in the 90s. And with this album, the Foos have proved themselves worthy as one of the best rock bands in the history of rock.

The Strokes - Angles

We all remember how The Strokes burst into the scene with one of the most memorable indie albums, 'Is This It', 10 years ago. After a few years of hiatus, they come back with an album that comes the closest to the glory of 'Is This It'. A lot of people may disagree, but this album is a good effort by Julian Casblancas and the others to return to the scene and go back to their basic sound.

M83 - Hurry Up We're Dreaming

A magical album. Anthony Gonzalez brings us to the dreamland with this album. 'Midnight City' sounds sexy and smooth, and brings saxophone to another level of awesomeness.

The Vaccines - What Did You Expect from The Vaccines?

Here goes another saviour of guitar music hailing from UK. The Vaccines' debut album proves that guitar music is not dead yet.

Listening to this album is a personal guilty pleasure. With a song like 'Post Break-up Sex', why not?

Friendly Fires - Pala

When James Murphy announced that LCD Soundsystem quits for good, I'm worried that I will never find another artist that as perfect as LCD Soundsystem in doing dance-punk. But, Friendly Fires erased that anxiety from me. This second album from them proves that they are worth to tear the dance floor with danceable and memorable songs such as 'Hurting' and 'Hawaiian Air'

Bon Iver - Bon Iver

If I were to name my most favorite album of this list, this album would come up on first place. This second album from Justin Vernon gives us a heavenly soft-rock - folk sound which delivers heaven right to our ears.

Battles - Gloss Drop

'Experimental, noisy, and crazy' are the impressions I received after listening to this album. This album is like a physics and mathematical formula. You need to put an effort in understanding this album which is mostly composed of instrumental songs. But the effort is just worth it, and this album is worth to be one of the best of 2011

City and Colour - Little Hell

This Dallas Green's 3rd solo album is another album filled with heavenly folk-acoustic songs that deliver heaven right to your ears

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

A monumental folkrock album. Robin Pecknold and his folks deliver us a harmony of their instruments in each song in this album.

You might imagine yourself laying down by the lake when listening to this album.

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Radiohead takes a detour with this album and take us to their most experimental efforts ever made. Filled with electronics and digital percussions, this may sound weird if you're expecting such a grand album like 'Kid A' or 'OK Computer'. But this album is still as ambitous as ever, just like what Radiohead always do.

Noah & the Whale - Last Night on Earth

This album is as bright and cheerful as it can be. And like my friend suggested, who is crazy on remix, is a perfectly remixable material

Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean

This Samuel Beam's fourth album is another perfect folk-acoustic album. Another heavenly tunes delivered to ears.

The Horrors - Skying

The Horrors succesfully haunts me with this album. The beautiful synthesizers, keyboards, and the groovy bass line are the main components to this album. This album take their previous album, 'Primary Colours', to a whole new level.

Mastodon - The Hunter

Brutal and ruthless. This is one killer album. Brann Dailor kicks the whole album with his brutal but perfect drumming, while Kelliher and Hinds compliment it with their heavy riffs perfect guitar melodies.

Machine Head - Unto the Locust

Another brutal and perfectly crafted metal album. The riffs and guitar solos are perfect. It's almost like Robb Flynn unleashed his creative potential in this album.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong

The sweetest album of this year. Kip berman sang with a smooth voice accompanied with hard riffing from his guitar and perfected by Peggy Wang's sweet keyboard sounds.

Feist - Metals

Leslie Feist returns with an album that is somehow filled with her anxiety. I love the grand and subtle electric guitar in this album.

Coldplay - Mylo Xyloto

Not the best album they've ever made, but with songs as grand as 'Paradise' and 'Charlie Brown', who could complain? This one is a fun album and worth to listen to.

Kasabian - Velociraptor!

Another album with an expermental sound. The synthesizers in this album is as psychedelic as it can be. Try listening to 'Switchblade Smiles', the most psychedelic song in this album.

Cults - Cults

A sweet debut by this indie-pop duo. An album filled with jangling pop songs and as carefree as it can be.

Adele - 21

This is no doubt one of the best of this year. God bless whoever broke Adele's heart. A broken heart album and Adele's soulful vocal is a perfect match.

Yuck - Yuck

This is another perfect debut album by these indie-rockers. With rough riffs and lo-fi sounds, they make this album a perfect noise-rock album.

TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light

A perfect collaboration of Dave Sitek's trippy production and the soulful vocals of Tunde Adebimpe

Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

Lykke Li steps up further with this artful pop album, which could crown her the princess of indie pop

Bombay Bicycle Club - A Different Kind of Fix

A calming album with nice subtle guitar sounds. Though the lead single 'Shuffle' stands out from the rest of the songs in this album, this is still a nice album.

The Black Keys - El Camino

A continuance from their previous album 'Brothers'. The duo accompanied again by the producer Danger Mouse made this album even better than the 'Brothers'. The fuzzy-bluesy guitar riffs from Dan Auerbach, the killer grooves by Patrick Carney, complimented perfectly by the keyboard sounds and the bass lines. It's as rough and raunchy as blues can get.

Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Collaborating indie-pop sounds with distorting psychedelic guitar sounds is very unlikely. But Christopher Owens and Chet White made it perfectly possible in this album.

Noel Gallagher'sHigh Flying Birds - Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

It seems Noel can't get the past glory of Oasis behind him. Although this album sounds nowhere near Oasis, it is as grand as Oasis'.

Foster the People - Torches

The hottest new band around with an album that brings hipster electronic pop sounds into the mainstream. This debut album succesfully brings them to the mainstream world, a fun album and one that can easily lift your mood up

My List: 50 Best Songs of 2011

It's another end of the year.

Looking back at the year of 2010, there were a lot of great musics producd, and then it's passed down to the year 2011.

There are absolutely a lot of good musics in 2011, along with so many debutants who released their debut singles/albums this year.

Last year I also made the same list of the best songs here

And as a tradition, I also created a new one which is now consisted of the 50 best songs of 2011. Here goes the list:

 

1. Adele - Someone Like You

2. Foo Fighters - Rope

3. Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks

4. The Vaccines - Post Break-up Sex

5. Red Hot Chili Peppers - The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie

6. The Pains of Being Pure at Hear - Heart in Your Heartbreak

7. Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - The Death of You and Me

8. Coldplay - Paradise

9. Girls - Honey Bunny

10. Lykke Li - Love Out of Lust

11. Bon Iver - Calgary

12. The Black Keys - Lonely Boy

13. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

14. TV on the Radio - Will Do

15. Radiohead - Lotus Flower

16. Little Dragon - Ritual Union

17. Battles - Ice Cream feat. Matias Aguayo

18. Florence + the Machine - Shake it Out

19. Yuck - Get Away

20. CUlts - Go Outside

21. M83 - Midnight CIty

22. Arctic Monkeys - The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala

23. Beirut - East Harlem

24. Bombay Bicycle Club - Shuffle

25. Cage the Elephant - Aberdeen

26. City and Colour - Natural Disaster

27. Cut Copy - Need You Now

28. Death Cab for Cutie - You are a Tourist

29. The Drums - Money

30. Feist - How Come You Never Go There

31. Friendly Fires - Live Those Days Tonight

32. The Horros - Still Life

33. Iron & Wine - Walking Far from Home

34. Kasabian - Switchblade Smiles

35. Mastodon - Curl of the Burl

36. Neon Indian - Polish Girl

37. Noah and the Whale - L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N

38. Toro Y Moi - New Beat

39. Opeth - The Devil's Orchard

40. SBTRKT - Wildfire with Yukimi Nagano

41. Architecture in Helsinki - Escapee

42. blink-182 - Up All Night

43. The Strokes - Undercover of Darkness

44. Lana del Rey - Video Games

45. Gotye - Somebody That I Used to Know feat. Kimbra

46. Justice - Civilization

47. Real Estate - It's Real

48. Machine Head - Unto the Locust

49. Metronomy - The Bay

50. Explosions in the Sky - Last Known Surroundings

 

For a gift, I put half of my list here in a mixtape on 8tracks http://8tracks.com/rafdi/remembering-2011

Hopefully 2012 will bring us more great music

Explosions in the Sky at Forum Theatre, Melbourne

Just watched Explosions in the Sky for the first time, here in Melbourne on the 8th

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Listening to their albums andd watching them live is a completely different experience.

In the album they can sound very calm, while on stage they can go wild and play very loud.

The venue also supports their loudness, giving me one of the best concert experiences ever

This concert was just perfect

Sigur Ros - Inni

Recently bought Sigur Ros' latest release, 'Inni', which is a double disc live album with DVD of the the live footage from the concert which took place in Alexandra Palace, London, in 2008.

This is the first live album from Sigur Ros, which also marks their return to the scene after a a hiatus since 2010.

There are various editions of 'Inni', but I bought the Blu-Ray edition which suits me perfectly.

The concert footage is mesmerizing, hypnotizing, simply magical, and it is monochromatic. I watched the Blu-Ray and it makes the whole movie perfect.

The double live album is also perfect. The sound of the recording is nice, it captures the whole ambience of the live concert.

For Sigur Ros fans, this is a perfect addition for your collection. This live album also serves as an 'appetizer' before their new album comes out (which is expected to be released in 2012) and their upcoming tour in 2012.

Enjoy.

Crazy, Stupid, Love [movie review]

 

Film bergenre drama-komedi romantis adalah salh satu genre film yang sering saya hindari. Faktor utamanya tidak lain adalah karena plot dan cerita yang seringkali terlalu cheesy dan terlalu klise.

Tapi setelah melihat trailer 'Crazy, Stupid, Love' saya memberanikan diri untuk menonton film dengan salah satu genre yang sering saya hindari. Dengan cast semacam Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, dan new Hollywood sweetheart Emma Stone, saya merasa tidak akan dikecewakan menonton film ini.

'Crazy Stupid Love' sendiri mengangkat tema cinta dan segala macam problematikanya dari sudut pandang tiga pria dari generasi yang berbeda: Cal Weaver (Steve Carell), Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling), dan Robbie Weaver (Jonah Bobo).

Cal adalah seorang ayah dari tiga anak yang menikah selama hampir 25 tahun, ketika suatu hari istinya Emily (Julianne Moore) meminta cerai. Jacob adalah seorang pemuda berumur 20an-30, seorang womanizer yang kerap menggoda wanita tanpa pernah merasakan cinta sampai ia bertemu dengan Hannah (Emma Stone), Robbie adalah anak kedua dari Cal yang berumur 13 tahun dan jatuh cinta kepada babysitter keluarga Weaver yaitu Jessica Riley (Analeigh Tipton) yang berumur 17 tahun dan mengalami permasalahan 'unrequited love'.

Bagai digariskan takdir, permasalahan cinta ketiga lelaki ini saling bersilangan dan membawa pengaruh tersendiri bagi ketiganya dan bagi para wanita yang memiliki hubungan spesial dengan mereka.

 

Menonton film ini, perasaan saya bagai campur-aduk. Ada momen dimana saya bisa tertawa puas dan ada momen dimana saya hampir menitikkan air mata. Film ini mampu melepaskan diri dari stereotipe cheesy dan klise yang biasanya melekat di film bergenre drama-komedi romantis. Cerita yang cenderung complicated dan membahas cinta dari sudut pandang berbeda membuat tema cinta menjadi lebih luas lagi konteksnya di film ini.

Pesan-pesan tentang cinta yang disampaikan lewat film ini pun terasa sangat menyentuh, walaupun terkesan klise, tapi jujur saja pesan-pesan inilah yang sering dilupakan manusia yang saling mencinta.

Film ini sangat layak ditonton, menyenangkan dan manis dari segi cerita. Terutama karena film ini membahas masalah percintaan sehari-hari manusia yang sering terjadi dalam kehidupan, penonton pun akan dengan mudah merasa terasosiasi dengan film ini. BIla film ini sudah ada di bioskop terdekat, silakan mlangsung ditonton :)

Midnight in Paris [movie review]

Saya bukanlah fans berat Woody Allen. Saya jarang menonton film karyanya, bahkan tidak hafal film apa saja karyanya. Saya sendiri tertarik menonton film ini ketika melihat cast nya yang berisikan Owen WIlson (salah satu aktor komedi favorit saya), Rachel McAdams, Adrien Brody, Micahel Sheen, dan juga ibu negara Parancis yaitu Carla Bruni. Barulah kemudian saya tahu bahwa Woody Allen yang menjadi sutradara film ini. Membuat saya berekspektasi tinggi ketika film ini sampai di Australia Oktober ini.

Film ini berfokus kepada Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), seorang script writer dari Hollywood yang mencoba beralih menjadi penulis novel. Gil sedang berada di Paris, berlibur dengan tunangannya Inez (Rachel McAdams) dan orangtuanya. Gil tergila-gila dengan Paris dan berusaha mncari inspirasi dari kota ini, walaupun Inez dan orangtuanya cenderung membenci Paris.

Setelah sebuah acara wine tasting, Gil memutuskan untuk berjalan sendirian di kota Paris. Saat tengah malam, Gil diajak masuk ke dalam sebuah mobil tua yang kemudian membawa Gil bertualang ke tempat di mana idola-idolanya hidup dan menjadi inspirasi untuk menyelesaikan novelnya.

 

Karakter Gil benar-benar khas Woody Allen, membuat saya teringat film Manhattan dimana Woody Allen menjadi karakter utamanya.

Film ini juga mampu menangkap keindahan kota Paris secara keseluruhan.

Yang saya suka adalah bagaimana film ini menggabungkan tema romantis dengan fantasi dengan baik. Sebagai penggemar seni, terutama literatur, saya pun sangat senang ketika penulis seperti Ernest Hemingway dan F. Scott Fitzgerald dibawa hidup kembali di film ini (walaupun entah karakter mereka sesuai dengan aslinya atau tidak).

Film ini bagi saya sangat recommended untuk ditonton. Film ini sungguh manis dari segi cerita dan memanjakan mata dari segi sinematografi yang menangkap keindahan kota Paris. Semoga di Indonesia film ini bisa masuk di bioskop terdekat secepatnya :))

Three Stories from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs’ Convocation Speech (Stanford)
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve
Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation
Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.
That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5? deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky ? I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me ? I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.

And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry – Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Soundsekerta 2011 [photos]

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