a recent waffles freeleech has given me an excuse to download a handful of 2011 albums, here are my thoughts:
Andree Jackson Jihad - Knife Man is pretty good, nothing incredibly special though. I'm not a huge AJJ fan though, so these are my thoughts on 95% of their material...
DJ Shadow - The Less You Know, The Better is phenomenal. Ranges from chilled out to ridiculous, and strings those feelings together beautifully.
Jonathon Coulton - Artificial Heart is pretty chilled out, but none of the songs have the... charm? of many of his previous efforts. It's certainly difficult to outdo Code Monkey or The Presidents, and some songs do come close, but overall it falls short of my expectations. Good for what it is, IF only for the last 3 tracks.
Omar-S - It Can Be Done But Only I Can Do It is cool, laid back house music, on par with his previous releases. Definitely recommended.
Opeth - Heritage. I hate or at least am bored to tears by pretty much every modern prog band. Opeth's previous efforts all fell neatly into the former category, but I gave this a listen on the off chance that the fact that Opeth was apparently dropping the "prog metal" sound entirely. Perhaps my low expectations led to a bias, but I found this to be pretty bland, uninteresting progressive rock. There were a few moments where I thought something interesting was going to happen, and then was sorely disappointed.
I fully understand that this opinion is probably going to be in the minority, if not unique, but it is what it is, I guess.
Plaid - Scintilli is a great [insert arbitrary electronic music genre here] album. I expected nothing less - another highly recommended album.
Primus - Green Naugahyde is... definitely a Primus record. Enjoyable, characteristically wacky and bizarre.
Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You is, for what it is, pretty cool. For a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, it's still pretty good. If everyone were to face the fact that the Chili Peppers aren't going to write another Californication or BSSM (like they should accept there won't be another Castaways and Cutouts, Blue Album, etc.) then it would probably be appreciated a lot more than it will be. But like Stadium Arcadium before it (which was a great album, fuck every), it's going to be largely disregarded.
Also relevant to the thread is a release date for Justice's new album Audio, Video, Disco - October 25. I'm stoked.