THE HOLIDAY WEEKEND STARTS HERE... with FAVES 2011!  I occasionally hear from folks who want to know what music -- from among all of the posts I do here -- I recommend.  To some degree, I recommend all of it, unless I expressly write otherwise (e.g., it's not my thing, but it might be yours).  With the holiday shopping season upon us, I have tried to make a list of reasonable size.  It's an unordered list. I likely will have overlooked something that I really dig.  And some of these are grouped together, because that's the way they occurred to me at the moment.  And note these are my faves; I'm not purporting to list the "Best" albums of the year.

THE BEACH BOYS: Regular Pate visitors -- and anyone who has known me since college -- might have guessed that SMiLE, an album uncompleted since 1966, would be at the top of my mind in 2011.  Subtly different from the 2004 version Brian Wilson recorded with his solo band, hearing this sprawling, trans-continental sound collage from the original material is startling.  Those familiar with the backstory tend to focus on Brian's personal issues as the reason SMiLE was never released, but hearing it today bolsters the case that the daunting task of assembling Brians modular compositions into a coherent whole was also a major factor (given 1966 tech, it took Brian six months to record and harmonize tapes from 5 separate studios to produce "Good Vibrations" alone).  Is this Brian's lost masterwork, as was so often advertised (or mythologized)?  It is certainly his Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- a quantum leap in the complexity of its composition, supported by a number of his strongest songs ("Good Vibrations," "Surf's Up," "Wonderful," "Heroes & Villains."); it would have had as profound an impact on pop music at the Beatles' LP.  And yet, like Sgt. Pepper's, had it been released, I wonder whether music fans -- particuarly Beach Boys fans -- might not have yet preferred Pet Sounds decades later, the way Beatles fans often prefer Revolver or Rubber Soul, the sophisticated, but more emotionaly direct predecessors.  Whichever side of that debate you might land, you don't get an album the quality of SMiLE every year.

FLEET FOXES: More West Coast harmonies, but more the Pacific Northwest version of CSN than the Beach Boys.  Even if I had not been impressed with their live power at Pitchfest, Helplessness Blues would have made this list with ease.  Every track, including the title track, sounds like it issues from some misty mountain top like Robert Plant never imagined.

YUCK: If the Beach Boys had my ears in the 60s, the self-titled debut LP from Yuck had them in the 90s, with songs like "The Wall" and "Milkshake" making for seeminglessly effortless, minimalist pop occasionally straying toward the noisy.  THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART's Belong surmounts the sophomore slump in much the same vein, as "Heart In Your Heartbeat" demonstrates.

DALE EARNHARDT, JR, JR: I wrote last year that if their first LP was as good as their debut EP, they would make my list again -- and here they are with It's A Corporate World, which is anything but corporate.  Energetic yet mellow, acoustic with electronics, this was a perfect album for chilling at the beach or bringing the beach to the chilly season. And check out those "Skeletons." Somewhat similarly, TENNIS released Cape Dory in the winter, but all those oohs, ahhs and sha-la-las on songs like "Take Me Somewhere" also made this LP eminently suitable for Summer and my weakness for classic pop forms.  REAL ESTATE's Days LP completes this particular trifecta, with gentle folky-pop occasionally recalling the Feelies in the precision found on songs like "It's Real."

DAWES also made my list last year (because I should've put them on in 2009) and Nothing Is Wrong would be only a slight exaggeration here.  The band also spent time this year backing Robbie Robertson, and they are a worthy alternative to The Band... or Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, for that matter.  Songs like "If I Wanted Someone" showcase their Laurel Canyon harmonies and their ability to stomp.  THE JAYHAWKS' Mockingbird Time and WILCO's The Whole Love are also solid in this category, but regular Pate visitors probably already know that.

THE DECEMBERISTS, after the harder sound of their last LP, returned closer to their folky brand on The King Is Dead, with help from Peter Buck and Gillian Welch on songs like "Down By The Water."  Mind you, GILLIAN WELCH & DAVE RAWLINGS returned with their own strong effort, The Harrow and the Harvest, after a lengthy hiatus.  Songs like "The Way It Goes" and "The Way It Will Be" are not poppy like The Decemberists, but haunting, firmly rooted in tradition without sounding dated.

GIRLS: Christopher Owens is another artist surmounting the sophomore slump this year.  Even more than the debut Album, Father, Son, Holy Ghost evokes a melange of classic pop without sounding too much like anyone in particular.  That said, I still think the infectious "Honey Bunny" boasts the occasional riff reminiscent of Paul Simon's "Kodachrome."

CULTS: In The Name Of similarly boasts the classic pop vibe, as "Go Outside" and "You Know What I Mean" will attest, both in the melodies and the quasi-Spectorian production.

DUM DUM GIRLS also work the retro girl-pop vibe on Only In Dreams (nice Orbison reference), even if the raw emotion now gets the gloss of the gloss of the Go-Gos on tracks like "Bedroom Eyes."

BON IVER: It's hard to avoid slump talk after the buzz-laden For Emma, Forever Ago -- but Justin Vernon's self-titled follow-up is strong, combining his earlier bleakness with a touch of Van Morrison's mellow warmth and slightly more trippy at that.  "Calgary" is fairly representative of an album better heard as a whole.

TELEKINESIS: 12 Desperate Straight Lines may not be as anthemic as GbV's Bee Thousand, but it has the same genre-shifting variety, with plenty of catchy pop songs like "Please Ask For Help."

GENERATIONALS:  Actor-Castor reveals a band mixing elements of punk, new wave and twee without ever sounding bubblegum, as evidenced on "Ten-Twenty-Ten."

ST. VINCENT: Songs like "Cruel" and "Surgeon" may make Strange Mercy Annie Clark's most accessible work to date... but that doesn't mean it's, er, conventional, as other tracks from the LP demonstrate.

RAPHAEL SAADIQ leads off my slate of neo-classic R&B picks for the year with the Stone Rollin'  LP, which adds a hint of Chuck Berry to his usual influences.  MAYER HAWTHORNE goes to the majors with How Do You Do, and the answer is pretty darn good, as you can hear on "The Walk."  BLACK JOE LEWIS: Sanadalous is an apt title to a raucous record featuring songs like "Mustang Ranch" and "Livin' In The Jungle." CHARLES BRADLEY, a/k/a  "The Screaming Eagle of Soul," debuted on Dap-Tone with No Time For Dreaming and tacks like "Why Is It So Hard?"  VAN HUNT went indie with What Were You Hoping For? and continues to be the next iteration of a lineage that includes Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Prince, as suggested on tracks like "Cross Dresser."

DESTROYER: Dan Bejar took an unexpected turn on the Kaputt LP with a 70s soft-rock, Steely Dan / Al Stewart vibe that works surprisingly well.

TOM WAITS released Bad To Me late enough in the year that it hasn't fully sunk in with me yet, but I'm confident I will remain "Satisfied" on repeat listens.

ELBOW: I tend to think they were underrated before winning the Mercury Prize in 2008, so I'll put in a word for Build a Rocket Boys!, the band's 5th LP (iirc).  The band is currently hosting a full concert at its website.  It's probably a bit cheap to compare them to Radiohead, but that's one of the closer reference points for a band that defies easy categorization.

PJ HARVEY: Let England Shake -- a meditiation on her homeland, war and more -- is probably her best work in years, which is not faint praise.

KURT VILE did not bowl me over at Pitchfest as I had hoped, but I had hoped because Smoke Ring for My Halo is the mark of a musuician on the rise, having traded in his more avant-garde pretensions for impressive stoner rock like "Jesus Fever" and "Freak Train."

WHITE DENIM: Amazingly, their album D is still streaming via NME, so you can hear how groovy and trippy it is all in one place.

A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING:  It's always somewhere on the net.

WKRP: "Turkeys Away," in its entirety. And here's the turkey giveaway by itself.

THANKSGIVING has a lot of myths, both traditional and the new "Pilgrims were evil" o­nes taught in some public schools. Not to mention the fights over kindergarteners dressing as Native Americans.  However, if you read the journal of William Bradford -- who served some 35 years as governor of the Pilgims' colony -- you quickly discover that the Pilgrims' relationship with the natives was complex.  Ultimately, Bradford quieted internal discontent by doing away with the collectivism of a company town and granting property rights.

CUTOUT BIN: From Marvin Gaye to the Sex Pistols, from the Rascals to Men Without Hats, from Gordon Lightfoot to Joan Jett, plus Game Theory, the Beatles, R.E.M., Echo & the Bunnymen and more -- this Friday's fortuitous finds are streaming from the Pate page at the ol' HM.