December 2010
26 posts
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The Dreaded List, 2010 Edition
There are plenty of places you can go right now where people will tell you What The Best Music That Came Out This Year Was, and although I know it’s hard to avoid those implications when posting any kind of list like this, I just want to stress once again the thought process behind mine. I’m only one man and there are only so many hours in the day for me to listen to music. Frankly, I...
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Top Tunes 2010
People who follow me on tumblr have probably already seen a handful of these blurbs. I haven’t been super explicit about organizing them as an ongoing list, but it was nice to take my time and only have to talk about one or two songs a day. Now, through the magic of tagging, I have a collection of 25 of my favorite songs from 2010 (a month in the making!) for the perusing pleasure of...
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WatchoOoOO - “Hearts”
People don’t always realize that context is a choice, especially when it comes to digital music that you get from the internet. The particular clutch of bands with similar aesthetics as oOoOO—‘witch-house’ or whatever name you want to give it—were mired in context in 2010. What people said about music like this (and, heck, how these...
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WatchGorillaz - “Empire Ants” (ft. Little Dragon)
Maybe I’m easily amused, but I still get chills every time this song shifts at the half way mark, when the disco keys fade in and the angular funk beat drops. In a way, the binary construction of “Empire Ants” represents an inverse of the album’s title and theme. The first half is the ‘beach,’ with Damon...
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WatchLevek - “Look on the Bright Side”
I would hope that I could say this about every piece in my Top Tunes feature, but this is a song that feels rare. Stylistically, its golden soul affectation is something you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a home-recording indie singer-songwriter, but it’s not so strange that it seems like a knowing wink, a pastiche of...
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WatchCrystal Castles - “Celestica”
There’s a pretty big disconnect between Alice Glass and Ethan Kath in their grimy hipster hood-rat garb swilling cheap cans of beer in the middle of the day and the delicate, wounded sweep of “Celestica.” It’s a fitting illustration of the loose stylistic binary that defines Crystal Castles, something that was a lot easier to talk...
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WatchBenoît Pioulard - “Lasted”
This is another one that I’ve already covered extensively and am happy with everything I’ve said, but which is worth revisiting because it’s just that great. The idea that this is music with a secret—its words and meaning wisked away by the windiness implied in the recording—is still foremost in my mind when I listen to it....
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WatchSpoon - “Is Love Forever?”
What a great little song fragment, huh? It has a beginning and an awesome vamp toward the end, but the middle has been scooped out and thrown over Britt Daniel’s shoulder. Par for the course as far as Spoon is concerned, but I love how convincing they are about it. They never sound sheepish or mild-mannered or like they’re phoning it in, even as...
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Massive Attack - "Angel"
Putting “Exchange” in the middle of this week’s Monday Mix Tape gave me an itch to go back and revisit Mezzanine a little bit. The great thing about that track (and its parenthetical second half at the record’s end) is how it injects a drop of lightness into the opioid proceedings, a sensuous bit of neo-lounge that makes explicit one of the stylistic shades lurking behind a...
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WatchWoods - “Death Rattles”
Picking a song from At Echo Lake wasn’t easy. It’s an album chock full of great songs, but I’m going with popular favorite “Death Rattles” because it’s a nice little encapsulation of all the things they do well elsewhere. Woods get a lot of credit (including from me) for the vital, creeping sense of mystery in their work,...
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Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
Ah yes, another talked-about record from this year that I’ve been meaning to get to. What’s nice about things working out this way—me not listening to more than a couple Tame Impala songs until the last few weeks—is that I don’t feel any kind of rush to Have An Opinion On It and, furthermore, it seems to fit better with how the album is put together. It’s the...
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WatchThe Love Language - “Heart to Tell”
Would you think less of me (or more) if I told you this was the only Love Language song I paid any attention to? Gosh, I sure hope that doesn’t inadvertently say something uncool about me, since me looking cool is the entire point of this exercise (wink!). Really, though, the things that make “Heart to Tell” great are not bound to...
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WatchCandy Claws - “Silent Time of Earth”
This song and the album it comes from were written on synthesizers by people who were mostly used to playing guitars. It’s a well-known little factoid, yes? The point was for Candy Claws to shake themselves out of what felt like mundanity and songwriter’s block. They’ve said in interviews how much they enjoyed stumbling upon...
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WatchOberhofer - “o0O0o0Oo”
Is it just me or do young people in guitar bands get a lot of flack for all sounding the same? Maybe somewhere along the line so many people took in so much misguided rhetoric about certain artists being ‘innovators’ or ‘pioneers’ or ‘outsider heroes’ or whatever that we’ve all just started to believe anything not...
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WatchBeach House - “Take Care”
I watched a lot of friends get married this year, and as I would sit there in my black suit (or stand in line with the rest of the groomsmen), I would often find myself thinking about “Take Care.” It’s got that regal, dramatic, roll-the-credits pace to it, sure, and Victoria Legrand sells her delivery like few other singers can, but...
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WatchWye Oak - “My Neighbor”
Y’know, I looked up a lot of videos of this song trying to find one that was close to the original studio recording. Thing is, in a live setting, “My Neighbor” has a tendency to turn to mush. The intricate guitar parts get blended into a noisy squall and Jenn Wasner’s understated vocal nuances get subsumed by the pedal-driven chaos....
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Daniel Johnston - "Like a Monkey in a Zoo"
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to talk about Daniel Johnston’s music without talking about the guy himself and the weird and wacky story of his life? Or without having to acknowledge that you’re making an explicit point not to talk about that supposedly peripheral stuff as a way of avoiding a story that has far outgrown all these dinky little songs? Maybe everyone should...
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WatchGobble Gobble - “Eat Sun, Son”
I don’t have a problem with the mellowed-out side of bedroom pop; I totally get it. At the same time, I wonder if some of the chillwavy / navel-gaze stuff we see is more the product of technological empowerment (dudes with advanced laptops and old tape machines) being hampered by a lack of imagination or ambition. Hazy daydreaming is nice...
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WatchMountain Man - “Sewee Sewee”
Though I suppose there are better Mountain Man songs to single out—“Animal Tracks” is popular and more intricately constructed (lyrically and harmonically), same goes for “Soft Skin”—this has been the one I’ve kept on repeat. All their work is gentle, earthy, and haunting, but “Sewee” feels especially...
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WatchTwin Shadow - “Slow”
If you’re looking for proof that novelty and cutting-edge influences aren’t the only things driving the blogosphere, this song seems like a good place to start. In fact, one of the most interesting things about Twin Shadow is all the reactions from people (myself included) who thought that every possible point on the 80s new-wave -> Morrissey ->...
“And make no mistake: For many Americans, the thought of living in anything less...”
– Nitsuh Abebe compares Ke$ha and Katy Perry in a piece that you should read.
For the record, I do not enjoy or gravitate toward either one of these starlets, but that’s part of what’s great about this kind of writing: you can dissect their images, attitudes, and positionings without...
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WatchThe Besnard Lakes - “Albatross”
I like the rest of …Are The Roaring Night, but “Albatross” has felt a cut above its siblings ever since I first heard the record. It’s funny: though they’ve dabbled in heavy shoegaze textures and skyward space rock and refracted everything through a legitimate classic rock sensibility (one of the few working bands able the...
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WatchI hear this like drumless krautrock and I think of trains and planes and automobiles and escalators moving people around in mechanical fashion. A lot of it seems wrapped up in a kind of autistic fascination with objects, textures, details of things, and the zen of everyday mundanities. Emeralds play with these gentle loops and tones that always sound just on the verge of coalescing into genuine...
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Primary 1 - "Tonight You Belong to Me"
I’m being sneaky here and using this one song to kill multiple birds. As you know, lately I’ve been counting down my top songs of 2010 (well, not really ‘counting down’ because they’re not in any particular order), posting a little blurb about one song each day. I didn’t explicitly plan it this way, but I felt for some reason that it would be redundant to...
Des Noise: Good! Use your aggressive feelings,... →
desnoise:
The following was going to be a reblog of another Tumblr’s funny anti-Grammys post, which has since apparently been deleted:
So I almost “liked” this, even though I love Drake. Because I totally chuckled. But then I found my finger hesitating over that little red heart icon.
What I’ve learned: If we disagree with some authority’s subjective decisions, there’s no use quibbling...
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WatchHere We Go Magic - “Collector”
How can they look so stoic and reserved in this video? I mean, I know they’re sort of an introverted bunch and they like to take their time and ‘get into the zone,’ but this song is an anomaly in the Here We Go Magic oeuvre in that it’s practically bursting with energy and momentum. The krautrock stuff is key because it only goes...