Steve Gullick

​Mark Lanegan Band
Bowery Ballroom
Tuesday, February 7

Better than: Drowning.

Mark Lanegan has a voice. You know? It's like those super-high-definition photographs of people that don't get airbrushed, that show the lives the subjects have lived in every wrinkle and mole and imperfection. Lanegan's instrument is like that, all weathered and scarred and those flaws somehow making its already existent beauty more arresting, more devastating.

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Benjamin Lozovsky

ALSO: See more photos from Jay-Z's show at Carnegie Hall

​Jay-Z
Carnegie Hall
Monday, February 6

Better than: Slacking off.

The age-old question about how one might get to Carnegie Hall rattled in my brain as I headed uptown last night, en route to Jay-Z's first of two performances at the hallowed Midtown space. "Practice" is the cheeky answer that people give, but as Jay showed last night with his benefit for the United Way of New York City and the Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation—Carnegie Hall's first concert where a hip-hop artist topped the bill—ambition is just as key.

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Benjamin Lozovsky

ALSO: See more photos from Ed Sheeran's show at Mercury Lounge

​Ed Sheeran
Mercury Lounge
Monday, January 30

Better than: Finding a Sugababes album in the 99-cent bin.

British pop stars have had something of a rough go when trying to break America, despite often working with much better material than much of what's on the charts over here. The sacking of poor Cheryl Cole from The X Factor in favor of the personality void that is Nicole Scherzinger is but one of the recent examples of Brits getting the short shrift; the runaway success of Adele could be seen as kind of an exception to this rule. (And even then she's an outlier; her songs are slower than much of pop radio's neon-hued, club-ready offerings.)

The latest Brit to attempt a crossover to this side of the Atlantic is Ed Sheeran, a young redhead with a penchant for hip-hop and a knack for writing lyrics that distill stories to their essence. Last night he played the Mercury Lounge armed with just an acoustic guitar, a bunch of looping pedals, and, most importantly, a goofy yet self-possessed charisma that had him quoting Lil Kim two songs into his set, splitting up the crowd for a successful singalong on the next song, and ending the night in the middle of the crowd, spinning around and singing while standing on a chair and holding the audience rapt.

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Miranda Lambert w/Chris Young, Jerrod Niemann
Izod Center
Saturday, January 28

Better than: Being a good girl.

At around 9 p.m. on Saturday, the lights went down at the Izod Center and Beyoncé's "Run The World (Girls)" began blaring from the speakers. Loretta Lynn's image came up on the screens hanging above the stage; she spoke of how Miranda Lambert, the former Nashville Star runner-up turned arena headliner, was, in her mind, the real deal. From there a rapidfire montage of females who could be identified with one name followed: Oprah, Jackie, Gaga, Bettie, Dolly. And then Lambert herself took the stage, clad in a skull t-shirt and knee-high boots, and launched right into "Fastest Girl In Town," one of her many rollicking odes to living life as a bad girl.

Hearing one of her chart-topping hits—the vengeful "Gunpowder & Lead," the accusatory "White Liar"—makes Lambert's appeal pretty obvious; she's operating as both an outlaw country star and a confessional crooner, ready to show her scars to any comers and kick the shit out of those people who might cross her. She delivers all of this with a brio that isn't quite sunny, yet remains bright and thrilling; "I like that innocent smile when you know you've done something bad," she said after tearing through the burn-it-all-down anthem "Kerosene." The screeched assent indicated that a lot of women in the audience agreed.

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Benjamin Lozovsky

​Antony & The Johnsons: Swanlights
Radio City Music Hall
Thursday, January 26

Better than: Weeping alone.

The line of people and umbrellas wrapped around Radio City, a noisy, quivering mass of top-flight fashion, boldfaced names, and irritation at the wind and rain and forced wait. Swanlights, the MoMA-commissioned retrospective of the work of Antony and the Johnsons, had sold out the music hall, and the number of people picking up their tickets on the way in was unusually high, according to an usher.

Outside might have been chaos, but inside the mood was the exact opposite; Antony, draped in a white gown and standing in the middle of Radio City's stage, was the only person uttering anything for most of the evening, his voice soaring and fluttering in concert with the 60-piece orchestra accompanying him. Lasers flashed and projected themselves onto the hall's magnificent ceiling and the jaggedly grand sculpture above him as he sang, simply, beautifully, achingly, of love and death, light and dark.

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Robert Sietsema

See more photos from the set here.

​Cults w/Delicate Steve, Dirty Fences
Webster Hall
Thursday, January 19

Better than: Surfing the Hype Machine.

Cults might be one of those bands that seemed to be birthed entirely on the Internet, but give them some credit: Even now, some 18 months after launching their debut EP on Bandcamp, there isn't much known about them, no gleeful delving into their backstory that other up-from-YouTube stars have suffered through, few extended arguments about their "authenticity."

Perhaps it's because even after all these months, lead singer Madeline Follin remains a bit of an enigma, shrouding herself in long, wavy hair and cutting off declarations of love from the audience with a giggle or a head-toss. Or maybe it's because Cults' music is an amoprhous sort of "retro," just reverb-drenched enough to straddle the space between Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and the shoegazing '80s while also grabbing elements from C86 (blurted, wavering guitar chords), Portishead's live show (Follin's face, as close up as possible, projected over synchronized swimmers and bicycling apes), and that part of the 1980s where so many entertainment products (Peggy Sue Got Married, Back To The Future, An Innocent Man-era Billy Joel) fetishized the "innocence" of the late '50s and early '60s. Oh, and there was a Leonard Cohen cover, too, although not the one trotted out by so many other people. (They performed a stormy bedroom-goth version of "Everybody Knows" instead.)

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​You might have heard that the much-discussed singer Lana Del Rey had her U.S. television debut this past weekend on Saturday Night Live, and that the hive mind of public opinion declared that her performances, of "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" did not go well. The satirical indie-chronicle Hipster Runoff's declaration that she "effing TANK[ED]" was echoed by even the most opinion-averse media outlets, with even the publicist-friendly Us wondering if she "bomb[ed]."

While the two performances were low-energy and marked by Del Rey attempting to rein in her voice and seeming not entirely sure of what to do with her corporeal self more than anything else, they didn't seem that much different than her first TV appearance when she performed "Games" on the UK television show Later With Jools Holland back in October. Still, even some who were on the Lana Del Train in the autumn seemed to be taken aback by Saturday's display, resulting in a Great Big Pile On Lana that seemed more intense and widespread than the ones that have occurred any other time her name was mentioned since "Video Games"'s YouTube debut. What happened?

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@spins/Instagram

​Van Halen
Cafe Wha?
Thursday, January 5

Better than: Listening to David Lee Roth's Spanish-language version of "That's Life" at home alone.

The crowd drawn to Macdougal Street in advance of last night's Cafe Wha? show by the reunited-once-again Van Halen—David Lee Roth on vocals, and the Van Halens Eddie, Alex, and Wolfgang on guitar, drums, and bass, respectively—was large enough to require multiple police barriers up and down the block. People huddled in the cold, hoping to catch a glimpse of the now-40-year-old band; security was tight enough that the fan club members, industry types, and journalists entering the building had to have their hands stamped twice, instead of once.

Inside, the room was humid and packed, with waitresses maneuvering drink-filled trays around the elbows and heads of people craning their necks and waving their cameraphones in order to get a glimpse of the action on stage. There was an excitement in the air—both inside and outside—that felt strangely old-school, like the sort of fervor that would arise in advance of a Midnight Madness sale at Tower Records. Rock stars, even in this age, can do that to people.

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In which our heroine takes on jerky overmoneyed dudes with the support of André 3000.

​Now that I've run down the worst songs to grace my ears over the past year, it's time to look back on the musical year in a fonder way. To that end, here's the list of songs that made my "2011 awesomeness" playlist on Spotify, a running tally of songs that I couldn't stop listening to that I populated as the year went on (I started naming my playlists containing the year's best songs that all the way back in 2006—miss you, JC Chasez!—and the name just stuck). The 47 songs are listed below in addition to being Spotify-collected; enjoy, feel free to try and guess which ten made my Pazz & Jop ballot (that'll be made public on January 18)!

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Ahhhh!!

​The Song: Jessie J, "Price Tag"
The Crimes: Using what might be the entirety of her label's marketing budget to convince the world that she actually functions on a higher, post-capitalistic level; "video hos"; "ch-chang-cha-chang"; "bla-bling-bla-bling."

The year's most grueling pop personality was, without a doubt, the BRIT School-bred British yelper known as Jessie J. Born Jessica Cornish and known before 2011 as one of the people who helped birth Miley Cyrus's "Party In The USA," Jessie drop-kicked herself into the American consciousness earlier this year with one of those "big in the UK, but unknown here" Saturday Night Live performances, then stuck around, thanks in large part to her handlers booking her in any venue—the MTV Video Music Awards, VH1 Divas Live, your mom's 65th-birthday party—that might help up her Q rating.

While it's true that she could hold a note or two here and there, Jessie's barky voice and insistence on indulging every vocal trick in the book (stuttering, scatting, fake patois) turned her debut Who You Are (Universal Republic) into one of the year's most excruciating albums to sit through, a Katy Perry-like bludgeoning through pop that lacked even the scant amount of charm or self-awareness possessed by that singer. No song on Who You Are was more aggravating than the Dr. Luke and Claude Kelly-penned "Price Tag," a schlocky bit of lite reggae during which Miss J tries to be down with the recessionary populace she's shoved herself in front of by claiming that "we don't need your money, money, money" because "we just wanna make the world dance." Wait, does that mean those Vevo ads for your new video were paid for in hip-shakes?

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