Here is my Top 10 songs of 2011 list, complete with fun links and videos to keep you well distracted. Click here to see the second part of the list, songs 11-20. This was a terrific year for indie music, and I know that I didn’t even come close to hearing all of the extraordinary stuff out there. Hopefully, you’ll find something new and interesting to you in my best-of lists.

1. Niilo Smeds / “Summer Air”
Album: Helicopter Circles
Label: self released
Niilo Smeds helps me understand myself. There is no one writing songs in the Central Valley right now who speaks to the bittersweet melancholia of this time and place better. Plus, his beard is absolutely beautiful.

2. tUnE-yArDs / “Gangsta”
Album: w h o k i l l
Label: 4AD
I have been crushing on Merrill Garbus all year long. She can do no wrong. The band’s 4AD Sessions performance from 2009 is equally inspiring as anything on their new record.

3. Black Keys / “Lonely Boy”
Album: El Camino
Label: Nonesuch
I wanted very badly to love the new Black Keys album, but so far I just like it. However, there is no doubt that the single is pure gold, especially the video.

4. St. Vincent / “Strange Mercy”
Album: Strange Mercy
Label: 4AD
Annie Clark dazzles me in every way. I love her guitar playing and her style, but most of all I love her songwriting. It’s like literary short fiction, set to indie rock.

5. Tomorrow’s Tulips / “Shades of Grey”
Album: Eternally Teenage
Label: Galaxia
This Costa Mesa noise pop duo makes me want to shimmy shake all over the Golden State. I’m also struck by the sweet heartbeat at the center of their songs.

6. Lia Ices / “Grown Unknown”
Album: Grown Unknown
Label: Jagjaguwar
I’ve always had a thing for art-school girls who make ethereal, complicated art-school pop. Lia Ices amps up the complexity while still keeping all the soft-focus beauty.

7. Charles Bradley / “The World (Is Going Up in Flames)”
Album: No Time for Dreaming
Label: Daptone
The smooth-like-silk album cover for the Charles Bradley record always makes me giggle, but his songs are an old-timey, soulful inspiration.

8. Black Lips / “Go Out and Get It”
Album: Arabia Mountain
Label: Vice
When they’re not trying to upstage the Beastie Boys for best cop video ever made, these garage rock troublemakers make some great drunken sing-along music.

9. Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears / “Messin’ ”
Album: Scandalous
Label: UMG
There is some downright dirty stomp in this track by Black Joe Lewis, perhaps enough to distract from the band’s failed attempts to get their hams glazed.

10. Fay Wrays / “The Sound is a Little Different in My Head”
Album: Strange Confessor
Label: coattrack
The new Fay Wrays record had me from hello. The cover art was amazing, and I loved the expanded dossier and treatise explaining “the SOUND” that came with the limited-edition initial release. I couldn’t stop coming back to it.

Here’s the first of two installments of my favorite songs of 2011. Again, these aren’t THE tops, they’re only MY tops! Part two will be posted on Friday, so you can have two full days to lick your chops in anticipation of my full Top 20 mix of the year. Stay tuned.

11. Teddybears feat. Robyn / “Cardiac Arrest”
Album: Devil’s Music
Label: Atlantic
My favorite Swedish pop star teams up with my favorite Swedish electro band to make the best song to do aerobics to this year.

12. The Mountain Goats / “High Hawk Season”
Album: All Eternals Deck
Label: Merge
I love it when John Darnielle goes a capella. Oh hell, I love it when John Darnielle does just about anything. (Follow @mountain_goats on Twitter and see what I mean.)

13. Shannon & The Clams / “Baby Don’t Do It”
Album: Sleep Talk
Label: 1-2-3-4 Go!
I fished this album out of the KFSR reject bin this past spring based on the awesome album cover alone, and I discovered an awesome garage band in the process.

14. The Quiet Americans / “Be Alone”
Album: Medicine – EP
Label: coattrack
Sounds great bumping out of my car stereo on cassette tape, plus Luke Giffen made a sweetly affecting homemade video to go with.

15. Leftover Cuties / “Lost in the Sea”
Album: Places to Go
Label: self released
Old-timey and charming jazz/folk out of a Venice Beach speakeasy. They’re a new favorite of my friend Eldon Daetweiler.

16. J Mascis / “Not Enough”
Album: Several Shades of Why
Label: Sub Pop
In which the frontman of an important indie rock band makes a solo acoustic rock record and it actually sounds legit.

17. PJ Harvey / “Written on the Forehead”
Album: Let England Shake
Label: Vagrant
This is my favorite new PJ Harvey song since “This is Love” blew me away more than ten years ago.

18. House of Wolves / “ ’50s”
Album: Fold in the Wind
Label: self released
This SoCal bedroom musician knows how to make orchestration translate into elegiac goodness. Bon Iver, who?

19. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks / “Senator”
Album: Mirror Traffic
Label: Matador
Oh S.M., you so fonny. I love it when you get all political.

20. Dale Stewart / “Governator”
Album: Water Wars
Label: Stagedive
Fresno punk rock icon had to rewrite the lyrics to this song after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s secret love child was revealed. It’s a terrific song, either version.

Here is my best albums list for 2011. These are not necessarily the “top” albums of the year, since it’s impossible for me to hear and evaluate every new release that comes out. Rather, these are the records that I found myself coming back to over and over again, and I expect to keep coming back to them in the future.

1. tUnE-yArDs / w h o k i l l
Label: 4AD
I love big, messy, imperfect records, and “w h o k i l l” is all that and a bag of chips. Merrill Garbus gets my vote for indie genius of the year with her hypnotic looping and bare honesty.

2. Fay Wrays / Strange Confessor
Label: coattrack
I can headbang to “Strange Confessor” while blasting it in the car just as easily as I can study to it on headphones in my office. It’s visceral, but it’s also complex. It makes me love rock again.

3. St. Vincent / Strange Mercy
Label: 4AD
I appreciate Annie Clark more and more with each record she makes. “Strange Mercy” plays like literary short fiction set to a shredding series of guitar freakouts. The stories feel urgent to me.

4. Black Lips / Arabia Mountain
Label: Vice
Every time I listen to “Arabia Mountain,” I imagine a bunch of alley cats roaming the cluttered streets of a sunshiney college town looking for scraps. This is a karaoke party waiting to happen.

5. Tomorrow’s Tulips / Eternally Teenage
Label: Galaxia
This band is my favorite new discovery this year, out of Costa Mesa. “Eternally Teenage” is a shambling mishmash of lo-fi psychedelic pop. It sounds like a box of lost Lou Reed surfer tapes.

6. Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears / Scandalous
Label: UMG
Black Joe Lewis beats the Black Keys for best garage rock record this year, hands down. The head-bobbing thump and squawk of “Scandalous” sounds bluesy, funky, and downright dirty.

7. The Quiet Americans / Medicine – EP
Label: coattrack
I’m pretty discerning with my noise pop, but “Medicine” can hold its own alongside any record out right now on Matador, Slumberland, or In The Red. And, it actually sounds better on cassette tape!

8. Charles Bradley / No Time for Dreaming
Label: Daptone
It always surprises me to hear new music that sounds effortlessly old. Charles Bradley reminds me of Otis Redding on “No Time for Dreaming,” and that kind of soul never goes out of style.

9. Bjork / Biophilia
Label: Nonesuch
While critics fawned over the iPad apps, I couldn’t help but focus on “Biophilia” as a key evolutionary document for one of my favorite artists. It felt like my new go-to Bjork record, and I hadn’t thought that in years.

10. Niilo Smeds / Helicopter Circles
Label: self released
The stripped-down ache and hum of “Helicopter Circles” puts a melancholic sheen on Niilo Smeds’ lo-fi EP from earlier this year. He is the best songwriter in Fresno right now – period.

Honorable mention:
Radiohead / The King of Limbs / TBD
Shannon & The Clams / Sleep Talk / 1-2-3-4 Go!
The Mountain Goats / All Eternals Deck / Merge
PJ Harvey / Let England Shake / Vagrant
Black Keys / El Camino / Nonesuch

Please share your top albums of 2011 lists in the comments.

I will be blogging this week about my favorite music and media of 2011, so stay tuned. To start things off, I’ve got a new article up today on the citizen media website Fresno Famous about the Ten local songs you can’t live without this year, featuring tons of my favorite Central Valley artists. Check it out!

Pictured above, from left to right, is Jerrod Turner of the Visalia band The Gospel Whiskey Runners, Kim Haden of the Fresno band Rademacher, and Fresno singer/songwriter Dale Stewart.