D.L. Anderson

That's ee-vayr to you, Nicki Minaj.

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Greetings to you four from Bloomington, Indiana, a happening college town perhaps one or more of you have flown over at some point. It's the birthplace of Hoagy Carmichael and David Lee Roth, and the home of John Mellencamp and Jagjaguwar Records, a label which this year released an album called Bon Iver, Bon Iver that you may have heard of. Most critics liked it, some liked it a lot, Rosie O'Donnell wanted more, pop lovers and rockists alike united to sneer at the smoothness of his album's textures and its ostensibly outré signifiers (I prefer the first album, but am a sucker for the Bruce Hornsby vibes of "Beth/Rest"). At the time of writing, 317,375 music fans have purchased it—40,000 more than Fleet Foxes, 40,000 less than LMFAO. Yet once the album was nominated for several Grammys last month, lots of people microcasted their ignorance of this album on Twitter. Quickly, another person culled this proudly professed ignorance into a Tumblr called "Who Is Bon Iver?" A member of a long-dormant Australian DJ concern accused him of "selling out" for lending his increased profile to something so horrifying as a whiskey concern, even though the accuser's own group hypocritically endorses deadly mountain calamities.

So what happened? Did the Bro From Eau Claire break through, or is he still a secret? If you follow music on the internet with any regularity, you couldn't go a day without hearing about him, but if you don't, there's a good chance you don't have any idea how to pronounce the name, and wait, the white guy from Kanye's album made his own album and everyone loves it apparently? To Twitter! It's clear why Bon Iver in 2011, just like Arcade Fire in 2010, made ripples critically, popularly, and awardishly—they fit long-established rock tropes into a modern, gently hip, and well-executed form. And it's also clear that this is happening at a point when with very few exceptions, good weird rock music is the last thing you expect to hear released by a music label owned by a multinational corporation.

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​Expect Destroyer's swoony yacht-rock-via-chillwave excursion Kaputt to be the year's first lavishly praised album (along with the whole James Blake thing) -- Dan Bejar is certainly rolling out the full PR detail for it. Record's out at the end of the month; his full tour starts in March, and hits Webster Hall April 3. (Tix on sale tomorrow at noon.) His video budget has evidently increased as well: Below, please enjoy today's release of the flying whale/pyramid/attractive indie ladies clip for Kaputt's title track. They probably should've just hired Napoleon Dynamite's brother for this thing, but maybe he doesn't want to be typecast; in any event, I'm very excited for the Hipster Runoff post that will inevitably result.

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"Sorry to use the word 'peppy.'"

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The website for Merge Records says that Bay of Pigs, the new EP from Daniel Bejar's Destroyer which came out on Tuesday, "is an account of the 1961 American invasion of Cuba." That's sort of true--there was a second or two during the songwriting process when an image of a young Jackie Kennedy passed through Bejar's head--but the song's not really a piece of historical reportage. One of the more ambitious bits of popular music released this year, Bay of Pigs is less concerned with Oval Office folly than sketches of several mysterious women, one of whom is described this way: "Her heart's made of wood/As apocalypses go that's pretty good." The song also talks about "a crumbling beauty trapped in a river of ice" and "a ransom note written on the night sky above (that) reminds me what, in particular, about this wine I love." These poetic lyrics are backed with what he calls an "ambient disco" mix of spare, ethereal synths.

Speaking from his home in Vancouver, Bejar talked about songwriting, playing music that has little to do with rock and roll, and his future with the New Pornographers.

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