Features The Year in Music News: January - March 2011

Do you remember way back when the year began? I remember spending my first morning of 2011 hungover in bed, listening to recorded voicemails of my friend being sick from the night before. So count yourself lucky if you don’t remember back that far like the unfortunate among us! Instead let us recap your memory on the past year, starting with its inaugurate first three months.

It’s seem that everyone’s all agreed on forgetting one thing, that’s for sure and that happens to be their initial reaction to the James Blake self-titled debut when it first dropped late Dec, early January. Only days into the new year and the tweeting blogosphere were already crowning it Album of 2011, despite it not actually being released until March and in spite of there being a whole eleven months of more buzz music to follow.

Imagine if all of the music industry had just given in to the initial hype? Just envision how different the year would have been if, upon hearing James Blake - ‘James Blake’, his owl-bro-in-wings Bon Iver had stopped working on his own self-titled effort, instead relocating to a dark and cold cabin, spending his days Googling his own name via a slow dial-up connection. Maybe we wouldn’t have heard that collab they did. Oh lord, can you just imagine such a utopian world! Instead, the internet world took heed from the antics of mainstream media and decided to pick Blake up just to knock him down again. Poor James was even pipped to the Sound Poll post by Jessie J. Now that has to hurt.

Instead, the crown of top-spot was up for grabs once again. And it became a free-for-all much like when all of the Premier League realised they could indeed trounce the formerly unbeaten Manchester United. We had the Arsenal-like Arcade Fire with stylistic but ultimately without end product ‘The Suburbs’ and Radiohead filling the role of Chelsea. ‘The King of Limbs’ was rush-released on 18th Feb and much like their Stamford Bridge counterparts early indications were promising at the start of the year, but crumbled at hands of time come the end of the year. Our very own Jamie Milton was caught up in the type of haze that only Radiohead can create back when there were those who even went out looking for the physical tree on the cover, but then backtracked a little on his initial views eight months later. This mass change in the critical wind resulted in Thom Yorke having a bit of a mid-life crisis and starting to get heavily involved in the dubstep and electronic scenes, wearing remixes like a bad leather jacket.

I think the only hotly-tipped release of these early months that has lasted that oh-so-lengthy test of time that is less-than-a-year is The Weeknd’s first mixtape ‘House Of Balloons’ which has graced as many blog End Year lists as it was embedded on when first released. Undoubtedly (in my two eyes, at least) the best R&B record in a year which saw some great efforts by Frank Ocean, Drake and The-Dream is no small feat, especially when it’s your first attempt too. ‘House Of Balloons’ remains the slickest, smoothest, suavest damn record of the year - perfect for parties, after-parties and bedroom antics alike. Actually, probably best to save yourself the inevitable feelings of inadequacy that the last situation would certainly bring. It would be like standing starkers in front of the mirror, shoulder-to-shoulder with Tesfaye and thinking “Yep, you’re better than me in every single way. You may steal my girlfriend. I’ll close the door behind me on the way out”.

These first trio of months also saw White Stripes’ long-anticipated break-up, which finally came in Feb. Yes, that’s February of this year. Yes, and that’s the same White Stripes that everyone thought had already broke up back in 2009… LCD Soundsystem were another band who also called it a day, with one last show at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Razorlight, on the other, were brought back from the dead - with Johnny Borrell recruiting a new host of severed limbs - we mean bandmates! - to complete his new look line-up. And do we really need to make a joke about their promo photo (above? It practically is its own build-up, joke and punchline altogether. As well as this The Horrors’ Faris Badwan announced in January the details of his new artistic outfit ‘Cat’s Eyes’, a side-project seemingly inspired by the 90s kids show of the same name. Proving that Shoreditch’s favourite recovering goth was well and truly over that detox slump.

March also saw the first print issue of DIY hit the press, which meant that we no longer had the benefit of an edit button to wade off unwanted controversy in times of media furore. Life is so hard for us now. But if you want to recap on these first couple of issues, you can still find them over here. Oh, we are a shameless bunch!

Catch the second segment of DIY’s yearly round-up on the site tomorrow.