If I said that there was a group that was about to be everywhere, and this group was executive produced by Pharrell (of Neptunes fame), what might you imagine their sound to be?

You’d start with a smattering of wickedly infectious hip-hop beats, then you’d layer in a starlet of current or historical heat (such as Beyonce, Madonna, or Shakira– all former collaborators of Mr. Williams), and for a finishing touch you’d add a dabbling of dubstep… you know, for the kids.

You likely wouldn’t guess this group to a have a sound self-described as “new age Police with Simon and Garfunkel harmonies and a resounding 80s spirit.”

And this bewildering twist is at the heart of what makes the commercial landscape of the current music industry so delightfully unpredictable.

Here is a group, flaunting their defiance of every commercial trend, and succeeding despite that.  Or, perhaps, because of it.

I introduce you to Mansions on the Moon.

Rest Of Your Days, Mansions on the Moon

Leaves Fall, Mansions on the Moon

As Donnie Brasco might attest, it takes some serious confidence to vouch for artists in the age of the mp3.

It’s easy to tweet away your love for an ephemeral three-minute song.  It’s slightly harder to endorse an album, but anyone can do a background check on forty-five minutes of music.  But it’s another thing entirely to endorse an artist.  You’re saying that the song that they might release in two year’s time when they’re going through their White Album phase is going to rock.  You’re saying that their tweets are always going to be funny, or at least make sense, or at least be funny when sung by Josh Groban.  You’re sticking your neck out.

But I’m quite confident in saying in suggesting that The Roots and Common are friends of ours.

Thirteen albums in, The Roots are still giving lessons on what craftsmanship, intellect, and ambition can mean in hip-hop.  Here’s one over several great tracks off of their most recent album undun, a concept album that is sort of like an episode of The Wire, told musically and in reverse.

I Remember, The Roots

This year also marked a new release from Bill O’Reilly’s favorite rapper/poet, Common.  You’d think if O’Reilly had bothered to have an intern listen to a song like this, he would have chosen a target he could have actually have tackled.

The Believer (feat. John Legend), Common

Many of today’s top rappers face a peculiar and quite recent dilemma.  When you rocket to fame by way of free mixtapes, how do you top yourself once you start actually trying to charge people for your music?

As the word cloud of this site will attest, there have been few artists of late that I have followed as closely as I have J. Cole.  With his mixtape The Warm Up, Cole gave me hope that perhaps writing had finally returned to rap.  And I was far from alone.  One the merits of one song alone, he was signed to Jay-Z’s label and superstardom seemed not only certain but imminent.

And then, we waited.  And waited some more.  18 months of eternity after his breakthrough mixtape, J. Cole finally released his first commercial album and the resulting product was… well, commercial.  All of the studio support and star cameos were mustered to chase the obvious archetypes of “successful” songs, and my favorite few songs were those carried over directly from the mixtape.  And the new song that I thought held the greatest promise wasn’t even included– but I have it here to share with you in an unfinished form: promise of what can be from this artist.

Cheer Up, J. Cole

With his first official album already behind him, the expectations for Drake’s second were Throne-like.  And, for different reasons, I was equally disappointed by his album as well.  However, this track with Rihanna stands out not only as the best on the album but as one of the best of any album of this past year.

Take Care (feat. Rihanna), Drake

As he presumably prepares for his first commercial album, Frank Ocean will face the same test.  With the full support of the music industry machine, will he be able to better the album that he released in defiance of this same industry?  I guess we’ll find out soon enough, but in the interim here is yet another captivating new track from him to start off the new year.

Tears, Frank Ocean

Just in time, here’s some of the best that 2011 has to offer for an upbeat end of the year.

Can a song be played eight times in a row at a concert without starting a riot?  If the song is this good, it can.  Here’s a slight re-mix featuring a take from T.I. before he finds a way to end up back in jail.

Ni**as In Paris (Remix) (Feat. T.I.), Jay-Z and Kanye West

Hands down the best mash-up of the year, brought to you by Pretty Lights.

Empire State Of Mind Ft. Notorious B.I.G. (Pretty Lights Remix)

Whether on her own albums or others, pretty much everything Rihanna touched this past year turned to gold.  Here’s a Xaphoon Jones remix that gives a new touch of dancehall to one of her hits.

Hard (Xaphoon Jones Kaboom Edit), Rihanna

Despite a clever marketing campaign that seemed to become the stuff of case studies, nobody really seemed to care that The Beastie Boys were back.  But even if only for that genius video, this track deserves a place on the list.

Make Some Noise, Beastie Boys

Well, there you have it.  Thank you all for reading: this really was a break out year for the blog.  I hope you all have a wonderful New Year’s, and I look forward to typing your ear off about dozens of songs you simply must hear in the new year.

A great song will make you nostalgic about somewhere you never visited, guilty of a crime you never committed, long for someone you’ll never meet.  It doesn’t matter if the lyrics line up to what you’re living, because at that moment all you’re living is the story of that song.  So when Ryan Adams asks “I don’t remember, were we wild and young?,” you wonder.  You even doubt a bit.  And this is why we’re happy to see him back to form.

Lucky Now, Ryan Adams (Live in Denver, 9/15/11)

In the midst of a (rare?) bout of melodrama nearly one year ago, I posted a playlist on the eve of my first day of work at my new job.  With a complete absence of any irony whatsoever, one of the tracks was entitled “Risk of Change.” All overwrought emotion aside, I think this is artist worth watching.  Take a listen.

Risk of Change, Holcombe Walker

Although I realize that I’m breaking rank from everyone from rock critics to rap stars, you can have Bon Iver.  If we’re going to choose teams of falsetto folk rockers for our year-end lists, I’ll take James Vincent McMorrow.

With tracks that are more short story than sing-along, McMorrow crafts moments more memorable than most anyone I’ve heard in 2011.  As I’ve written about him several times before, this will be familiar to many of you.  But for those of you who haven’t yet, give it a listen.  And for those intrigued, it’s worth a follow-up for more.

If I Had a Boat, James Vincent McMorrow

Is it too early to start daydreaming of summer music festivals?  With a sun-drenched sound and lyrics simple enough to sing along yet witty enough to want to remember, Dawes is made for your next outdoor concert and the daydreams you’ll need to make it through the snow that stands between you and that show.

It’s lyrics like these that just belong in rock songs:

If I wanted someone to clean me up, I’d find myself a maid
If I wanted someone to spend my money, I wouldn’t need to get paid
If I wanted someone to understand me, I’d have so much more to say
I want you to make the days move easy

If I Wanted Someone, Dawes

As an aspiring music snob, my childhood was marked by a love/hate relationship with commercial radio.  On one hand, I had to publicly denounce the stations at the top of the dial while I tried to convince myself that I appreciated the meandering tedium that pervaded the college stations.  But, on the other hand, at the time I couldn’t live without the big stations.  They soundtracked my car rides, and allowed me to listen to the popular hits that my fellow music store employees would have shamed me out of buying.

This year marked the extinction of Q101, a Chicagoland radio station that I loved and hated for many years.  For reasons that I can’t begin to fathom, apparently a weather/headline news pastiche makes for a better business model in the internet age.

But beyond nostalgia, one of the big risks posed by the disappearance of such stations is the questionable future of the sort-of-weird.

Just as the slickly commercial will always have a home in the musical landscape, so too will the incredibly weird.  Generations of Gagas and Tyler the Creators demonstrate that brazenly bizarre is a bankable (albeit risky) business strategy when peddling to the pubescent.  Their outlandishness lives out what teens are thinking, and in case you were wondering it has absolutely nothing to do with the music.  The songs are merely the soundtrack to the real show.

But what about the artists that fall in between the slick and the surreal?  How will we hear the mildly off-kilter who have their own vision but are exhausted by the mere prospect of donning a different persona each morning?  These bands were the sweet spot of the Q101s, and there isn’t an obvious alternative.

This concern kindles my curiosity in the success of Foster the People.  Clearly, this isn’t the craziest bunch out there: their pop hooks have a touch of sugar and it’s rumored that their lead singer got his start penning for TV shows.  But the success of groups like this that fall between both genres and archetypes reassure me in the post-Q101 age.

Because we’ve all heard the original, here’s a nice remix of their smash done by The Hood Internet.

02 Pumped Up Kicks (The Hood Internet Remix), Foster the People

A buzz-worthy band that has the makings of being 2012′s sort-of-weird superstars is a group who goes by the name fun. the band.  Aptly described by some as having an indie Broadway musical vibe, they’re just odd enough for me to root for them.

One Foot, fun.

Is digital technology decimating our attention spans?  With anything (literally, anything) just a few clicks away, it would seem quite logical to conclude that our collective cultural focus is destined to flit about at ever more fickle speeds.

Yet, intriguingly, the evidence stacks up to the contrary.  If you check the top rated TV shows, few titles are new.  And, amidst the rubble of what once was the music industry, Adele proved that even today you can freeze the world in a musical Medusa gaze for months upon months upon months.

Of the many important factors that propelled her gravity-defying ubiquity, remixes and covers played an unheralded but central role.  It was not Adele alone who kept “Rolling in the Deep” on replay.  Rather, a lengthy roster of artists who are superstars in their own right jumped on board to do their part to keep the bandwagon rolling.  Here are two of the better remixes/covers that give even the most familiar song a bit of fresh life.

Rolling In The Deep, John Legend (Adele cover)

Rolling in the Deep, Mike Posner (Adele remix)

When an artist sells 13 million copies of an album, it’s bound to draw a follower or two.  Though there’s good reason why you haven’t heard much of the many Adele-ites that have developed a sudden fascination with soul, a soulful voice that’s worth watching is Cold Specks.  Though she hails from Canada and currently lives in London, Cold Specks (nee Al Spx) sounds as if she were plucked from an antebellum choir.  Such songs don’t exactly scream “pop hit,” but one might have said the same of Adele.  Take a listen.

Holland, Cold Specks

Though these days aren’t choreographed to follow any particular order, it feels right to begin with Frank Ocean.  There was no other artist in this past year that highlighted so much of what’s right and wrong with the music industry.  Getting his start in the shadows of others as a songwriter, Ocean landed his own contract only to languish with an album that he couldn’t get released.  Frustrated by a label who didn’t know what to do with him, Ocean “self-released” his music via Twitter and a blog and set forth a torrent of acclaim that landed him– among other places– as the first voice you hear on “Watch the Throne.”  Despite continued enthusiasm that marks him as the closest thing to a sure bet in the age after Napster, his label has yet to release his album for anything other than free.

Despite this commercial confusion, Ocean helps lead the creative resurgence that has broken R&B free from the retrospective references that had marked it for years as a genre that was little more than mood music.

swim good, Frank Ocean

On the early end of the hype of mixtape marketing is an artist who goes by the name of Jhameel.  With a bio pitch-perfect for the Gaga age, Jhameel combines Korean, Japanese and Mongolian ancestry with an ardent androgyny and a penchant for pop hooks.  Though his first few complete albums have the expected unevenness of an artist finding his way, songs like these make you wonder what might be next.

Pursuit of Glory, Jhameel

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