The folks over at Pitchfork have put together a list of the Top 100 Tracks of 2011.
( you can see the full list here)
Quite possibly my favourite song of all time, Bon Iver's "Holcene" came in at #2 and here is what they had to say about it:
I had never knowingly heard a Bon Iver song until this past summer. I hadn't avoided Justin Vernon's music; I just never sought it out. I'd read about the cabin in the woods, and that was enough to suggest that it probably wasn't for me. Then, one night in July, driving around Portland, Oregon, shuttling another load of boxes between my mom's old house and her new assisted-living home, I found myself transfixed by an unfamiliar falsetto streaming from the speakers of my rental car, faltering and fumbling, a mirror of my own emotions.
"Holocene", the song that got me, has remained moving in the months since, in moods sunny and stoic as well as worn out and wrung dry. Beneath the surface beauty of the chiming guitars and close harmonies, far more ambivalent tensions are at play-- pedal steel sighing against muted vibraphones, weary handclaps, a quiet squall of clarinets. The rising and falling chord changes create a sense of motion that develops throughout the whole song, a tide-like ebb and flow that ends with an abrupt denouement, so swift it withholds almost as much pleasure as it yields.
It doesn't hurt that the lyrics are vague enough to lend themselves to open-ended interpretation. ("Hulled far from the highway aisle," I read, and feel none the wiser, even after trying out various homophones.) The way they're overdubbed, consonants garbling together at the edges of Vernon's fraught falsetto, only further smudges their intelligibility. Beyond the cryptic references presumably knowable only to Vernon and his intimates, we're left with a few boldly declarative statements: "At once I knew I was not magnificent," surely a universal feeling, at least outside the 1%; and "I could see for miles, miles, miles," a tweak on an old staple from the Who, but with the drama inverted, the horizon internalized and turned back upon itself. Anyone who's ever driven late at night towards an unknown destination will recognize this stretch of road. --Philip Sherburne
"Holocene", the song that got me, has remained moving in the months since, in moods sunny and stoic as well as worn out and wrung dry. Beneath the surface beauty of the chiming guitars and close harmonies, far more ambivalent tensions are at play-- pedal steel sighing against muted vibraphones, weary handclaps, a quiet squall of clarinets. The rising and falling chord changes create a sense of motion that develops throughout the whole song, a tide-like ebb and flow that ends with an abrupt denouement, so swift it withholds almost as much pleasure as it yields.
It doesn't hurt that the lyrics are vague enough to lend themselves to open-ended interpretation. ("Hulled far from the highway aisle," I read, and feel none the wiser, even after trying out various homophones.) The way they're overdubbed, consonants garbling together at the edges of Vernon's fraught falsetto, only further smudges their intelligibility. Beyond the cryptic references presumably knowable only to Vernon and his intimates, we're left with a few boldly declarative statements: "At once I knew I was not magnificent," surely a universal feeling, at least outside the 1%; and "I could see for miles, miles, miles," a tweak on an old staple from the Who, but with the drama inverted, the horizon internalized and turned back upon itself. Anyone who's ever driven late at night towards an unknown destination will recognize this stretch of road. --Philip Sherburne
Got it in one there, Philip... As I said, my thoughts exactly...
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