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 think the idea that people could develop meaningful relationships with ten or twenty-five or even fifty new records in just twelve months is daunting. It’s the biggest potential downside of this stuff: naming something you chewed up and digested in a week One Of The Year’s Best Albums. How do these professional critics do it? Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that this particular list is meant as something of a journal entry—a cross-section of the new music that swirled around my head in 2010.
On the other hand, a couple of cautionary tales can be gleaned from this. There were records that, when they came out, I gave generally positive reviews—Arcade Fire’s Suburbs and Best Coast’s Crazy for You especially—that became too diluted with debate and discussion for me to think clearly about them anymore. I got to a point where the idea of listening to those albums was terrible and burdensome. I couldn’t hear them without also hearing all the different things I’d read about them, so I shelved them and moved on, not sure if I could still honestly say I felt the way I did in those reviews. Other people’s opinions have just as much potential to ruin your own as they do to help you understand them. Also, that thing I said about Kanye and this list? That was wrong. And finally, I wish that I’d taken more time to spend with the 2010 full-lengths from Big Boi, Janelle Monae, Brian Eno, Sufjan Stevens, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Julian Lynch, Twin Shadow, How To Dress Well, and Emeralds. I get the strange sense that any one of them could have ended up on these lists if I’d been more studious. Oh well. Maybe I’ll take a few weeks out of 2011 to catch up.
If I wrote a review of any of these albums, you can click the title and read it. Happy New Year!
HONORABLE MENTION [By which I mean records that could have been in the Top 10 if the mood had struck me or records I listened to a lot but that didn’t feel quite as personally monumental]:
- Avey Tare - Down There
- Belle and Sebastian - Write About Love
- Benoit Pioulard - Lasted
- Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles [2010]
- Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
- Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be
- Here We Go Magic - Pigeons
- Maps & Atlases - Perch Patchwork
- Sleigh Bells - Treats
- Slow Club - Yeah So
- Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
- Vampire Weekend - Contra
- Warpaint - The Fool
- Wolf Parade - Expo 86
- Wye Oak - My Neighbor / My Creator EP
TOP 10 [in alphabetical order]:
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
There’s all kinds of heavy, complicated stuff to talk about with this album, about memory and nostalgia and influence and whatever ‘chillwave’ is, but that just sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Those topics have been talked to death, but they even seemed trite back in June when Before Today came out. Listening to it isn’t supposed to be an academic exercise—it’s too enjoyable, too well put together—and I’ve decided that turning it into a lens for looking at Memory-with-a-capital-M is a waste of a great record. Ariel Pink’s cloudy dreamscape isn’t about the ‘when’ or the ‘how’; it’s about the feel of it. This is a gaudy, shadowy, alien sound that just happens to be made out of bits of things we might’ve heard before. We have our ideas about history and the rules of rock ‘n roll and how it’s all supposed to come together, so it’s easy to hear a record like this and believe that Pink’s trying to remind us of something we’d forgotten, but I think he’s actually trying to show us something new. Before Today represents Ariel Pink opening up his own head and giving us a look around.
Beach House - Teen Dream
Two years ago, when Popcorn Noises was a brand new idea that I didn’t really know what to do with, I hemmed and hawed my way through a year-end albums list (much like this one) in which I alluded to the idea that Beach House’s relative artistic consistency was one of their major selling points for me. Even if there’s a sense in which that’s still true, I see now (with the help of this record) that that’s a silly way to talk about them. I mean, it’s nice that they can switch labels and expand their live line-up and still be essentially themselves and all, but the bombastic crashes of “Zebra,” the wide-eyed breathless wheezes of “Norway,” and the urgent thumping of “10 Mile Stereo” seem tailor-made to keep the listener in the present moment. Teen Dream’s world is one perfectly suited to its title (take that, Katy Perry!), where fleeting pangs of emotion are stretched into stylized revelries and a simple little phrase like “I’ll take care of you” sounds like one of the most important utterances of your life. Devotion was a great record, but if you’d told me in 2008 that Beach House would be this lucid, heart-pounding, and dramatic, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Candy Claws - Hidden Lands
I think I could be good friends with the Colorado collective behind Hidden Lands. Their album gets me. It knows how I like a heavy dose of the fancifully lush and the evocatively naturalistic in my floaty psych pop (Exhibits A, B, and C; all-time favs) and they’ve heard through the grapevine that I like the occasional Wilson tune. But this record does more than simply appease my particular soft spots; it paints the little details of budding trees and blades of grass as something sweeping and monumental. It renders alpine landscapes in organs and synths that can be at once icy and comforting, in percussion that never falls short of lively and playful, and in whispers of a secret poetry wrung from a translation program. Most importantly, it rewards quality time and repetition. I often go to sleep with the pulsing tones of “Warm Forest Floor” echoing in my head and wake up humming the theremin lines from “Silent Time of Earth.” This is a wide-eyed sound of perpetual discovery, so when spring 2011 rolls around and everything turns green again, you can bet this will be the first album I reach for.
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
This year, when I would talk to people who don’t read music reviews (yes, Virginia, they do exist) and tell them that the new Gorillaz album was great and they should check it out, I was always met with a brief pause and a look of incredulity. They’d had a few good singles before, sure, but they’d also had a lot of dinky filler and boring granola rap. So along comes Plastic Beach, still with characters and something of a story and now even a clear-cut environmental/consumerist message, and it somehow reaches beyond all of that to a place of very real and smartly-wrought beauty. The warm, airy drift combined with the echoes of their groove-oriented material adds up to some of the most plainly poignant and lonesome synth pop around. No, it’s not perfect, but I believe the flaws exist to give weight to the many moments where it truly shines (if you’ll forgive the critical cliche)—Little Dragon’s tearful turn on “Empire Ants,” Mark E. Smith’s maniacal laugh on “Glitter Freeze,” Bobby Womack ripping “Stylo” wide open, and of course, Damon Albarn’s dejected sing-speak all over the record. There are block-rocking beats and there are peans to the polluted sea, but Gorillaz bring them together in their own way to make something distinct, demonstrative, and often devastating.
Glasser - Ring
When I reviewed this album last month, I told the story of seeing Glasser play in NYC this fall, where a lot of my thoughts and impressions of the band started to come together. During that performance, I also exchanged a few remarks with some friends in the spot-that-influence vein. Some names that came up were: Kate Bush, Karin Dreijer Andersson, Stevie Nicks, and Natasha Khan, a set of references that still ring true to my ears. There is way in which all music exists as a set of reference points, yes, but the widespread access to information in this day and age makes it a lot harder for an artist to surprise you with something you’ve never heard before. Cultural capital lies less in ‘originality’ than in the deft wielding of artistic craft, and by that measure Ring is a truly excellent work. Cameron Mesirow’s voice could carry even the flimsiest songs, but this album is overflowing with rich percussive detail, harmonic elegance, and distinctive atmosphere. It’s commanding but never ostentatious, so even as Mesirow treads some ground already walked by others, the results have a charisma that ensures others will want to follow in her footsteps too.
Harlem - Hippies
Grime, grease, and guile surround Harlem’s sophomore album, but almost none of it emanates from a distortion pedal. Of course, when it comes to garage rock in 2010, that’s saying something. These three snotty, drunken Texas pranksters let their distinctive—if rarely polite—personalities do the dirty work, sloppily smashing drums and banging out lean four-chord riffs as if they could barely be bothered to show up to the studio, much less craft some of the catchiest songs around. And oh man, these songs. They’re not just cool tunes made edgier by the haphazard recordings, they’re piles of hooks that are somehow held together and sustained by the very chaos that threatens to topple them. Harlem can twist, bash, and boogey like nobody’s business—they’re jukebox kings for sure—but they can also play windswept ballads of loneliness like “Cloud Pleaser” and “Prairie My Heart” with a convincing vulnerability. I spent months driving around with this record on, putting the songs on mix tapes, or air-guitaring at my desk when no one else was around, and it’s still as fresh, fun, and freaky as it was on the first spin.
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
We did a unit on Edgar Allen Poe in eighth grade English class, presumably because his creepy, violent, proto-Tim Burton vibe is one of the few literary veins that would hold the attention of eighth graders. All Poe stories deal with insanity, but the horrific part wasn’t just supposed to be seeing people turn into monsters, it was in the characters’ sudden knowledge of their own madness. Conventional wisdom tells us that real ‘crazy’ people—people who live in institutions because they can’t function in the real world—don’t actually know or believe they’re crazy. But someone who is both drastically warped and keenly aware of his own malady? That’s an entirely different story, one much more horrific and engrossing for how close it can hit to home. I’ve had a whole bunch of reasons for trying to leave this record off my list, but none of them were honest. Listening to Kanye West parade his madness around—his manic push-pull between victory and defeat, bravado and depression, pretty sounds and ugly ones—is riveting every time. The album’s sheer ubiquity is worth noting, too: if a picture of a mic-stealing millionaire celebrity devouring himself from the inside can resonate so strikingly with so many people, perhaps West’s sanity isn’t the only one we should be worried about. “Who will survive in America?” indeed.
LCD Sondsystem - This is Happening
Though it’s certainly not the last we’ll hear of James Murphy, whether this really is the last LCD Soundsystem record remains to be seen. From our position, we can say ‘serious’ or ‘cop-out’ or ‘hard-to-define’—we can try our best to articulate what sort of age-centric legacy this whole thing supposedly encapsulates—but it feels like he’s perpetually one step ahead of us simply by doing the things he does well the best he can do them. Not that This is Happening is a flawless album top to bottom, but that it’s a perfect LCD Soundsystem album, one in which nothing is held back or tempered. Murphy faces down all the difficult things that have haunted his work—his weighty influences, his culture, and, most importantly, himself and his happiness—as clearly and directly as possible and produces effortlessly dynamite sounds in the process. It’s smartly paced, addictively catchy, and emotionally vivid. Because it’s so well-crafted and definitive, it’s easy to find yourself wishing for more, but you also have to wonder if there’s really anything left for him to say. Clearly there are advantages to both, but we already knew that.
Mountain Man - Made the Harbor
Chalk it up to a function of genre I suppose, but there’s a way in which these songs sound simultaneously paired down—as if fuller, louder, more ‘complete’ recordings were being imitated with the basest tools—and entirely finished (dependent, even) in their spareness. The massive empty space that surrounds Mountain Man as they coo their delicately woven songs is as much a part of their composition as the quietly plucked guitar and flowing harmonies. Feet shuffle, someone coughs, and three women pause to take a deep, synchronized breath—this is their understanding of what it means to be lush and evocative. Woodsy landscape images and naturalist calls (“Loon Song,” “White Heron”) bump up against those of intimate bodies (“Soft Skin,” “Mouthwings”) as harmonies wind gently in and out of unison. Like other albums on this list, it’s draw isn’t in novelty (hopefully no one considers neo-folk a novel idea in 2010), but in the unmistakable execution of style, and few albums this year were as vivid as Made the Harbor.
Woods - At Echo Lake
I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice the striking consistency in the cover art for Woods albums. Last year’s Songs of Shame also featured a mountainside, an eye in the sky, and the band’s name in white in the lower right corner. But where that record’s treated landscape photo testified to the grainy mood and the often ugly, opaque sounds, the hand-drawn flowers on At Echo Lake represent the band’s incorporation of paisley psych into their repertoire of Neil Young-isms. The resulting songs, though, are the least clouded and indulgent in Woods’ catalog. They’re spindly little miniatures, full of subtle melody and expert textural flourishes, but malleable enough to jam out live. True to form, Woods still sound purposefully surreptitious, but the music is as equally familiar and welcoming as it is secretive. That’s the real accomplishment of At Echo Lake: it’s a record you can love the first time around and still not fully grasp on the fiftieth.
