I've always taken pride in the fact that the CYPJN!? countdown bucked the rote "Top 10" roundup format by connecting my favorite album picks to the year in which they were released. (See previous installments "Top 6 Albums of 2006, Top 7 Albums of 2007, et al.) Alas, by chronological happenstance, here we are at my first-ever Top 10 list.
As trite as the premise is, this year's lineup is anything but. In fact, in both quality and volume, this was the most fecund year for record releases in recent memory. A year that, at points, left me feeling like Lucy at the conveyer belt, scrambling to wrap each aural bon-bon before the next one passed me by. More than usual, this year's narrowing process was arduous. Hence, my longest list of Honorable Mentions to date.
Like last year's omission of U2, folks who know me will be shocked to discover that Gogol Bordello, a solid shared favorite of mine and The Missus', not only DIDN'T make the list, it earned the dubious distinction of "Disappointment of the Year". Whatever magic Rick Rubin worked behind the boards with Beastie Boys, RHCP, Johnny Cash and others seems to have had the opposite effect on the Gogol crew. The mojo on "Transcontinental Hustle" turned sour, stale, overcompressed and remarkably flat. A major league letdown from such a vivacious live act. That said, the Gogol void was easily filled by a host of stunning debuts and career-bests.
On a personal level, I felt well taken care of by this year's output. I entered the year with one clear set of goals, most of which didn't materialize the way I'd envisioned. But through it all - missed landings, bouts of defeatism, financial constraints - the music I was consuming ultimately had my back. Additionally, these albums (and several superb singles from albums that didn't make the list) provided the perfect soundtrack for some unexpected internal and external discoveries.
Plainly laid, it was a motherfuck of a fine year for music. The kind of music year you will find yourself sensorily bound to well into the next few.
Enough hype.
The envelope please....
Up until about a week ago, Local Natives’ “Gorilla Manor” had a firm grip on this year’s Number 10 spot. That changed after spending an entire afternoon previewing each track from Cee-Lo’s first solo effort to see if it lived up to the critical fuss being made on its behalf. I purchased the album that evening and knew within the first full listen that the Local Natives boys were in trouble.
The hype surrounding lead single “Fuck You” was enough that I put off investigating it until after the dust had settled a bit. My loss. The idea that I could have been partaking of this perfect piece of pop confection months earlier is a lesson in getting over myself. Of course, I’d assumed by the song’s title that it was a mere novelty that would be worthily served by one or two YouTube viewings. You know, give it a chuckle, maybe share the link and then forget about it. I simply did not expect the earnest, delightful slice of shuffle-in-the-street Philly soul I would find behind the consciously provocative title. From that moment, I was obviously curious about the rest of the album.
After a regrettably silly intro, we’re greeted by the 80’s-flavored synth swipes, disco strings and bouncy “Bille Jean” bass line that open “Bright Lights Bigger City”, an irresistibly groovy night-on-the-towner with hips for days. This is one I have yet to be able to play just once through. It was an immediate repeater. Other highlights include the Al Green paean “I Want You”, meta slow-jam “Old Fashioned” and an unexpectedly potent cover of Band of Horses’ “No One’s Gonna Love You”.
“The Lady Killer” manages the rare feat of treading firmly in retro-soul territory without sounding either ironic or rote. Using borrowed elements to create something utterly fresh. This album’s 11th hour appearance on my radar was a huge surprise in a year chock full of them.
Serving Suggestion:
“The Lady Killer” begs for a night out. Don your best black suit or dress, pop the Veuve and get busy.
#9 - WILD NOTHING – “Gemini” Seems every year there’s at least one favorite that falls squarely into the Shoegaze file. This year’s entry lands at Number 9 on my list.
I was originally thinking that to assess my love of this album would essentially involve assessing my love of the unfortunately-nicknamed genre itself. But, I soon realized that that would be a short-sell. Fact is, my quick affection for “Gemini” came from an altogether different place than the usual rainy day sonic trappings of other albums that might fall under the same category. There’s a warmth, a sheen, a beachiness, a… well… a real joy to be discovered here.
“Summer Holiday” is a perfect case-in-point. A song that works as brilliantly for a cold, grey, November stroll as it does for a gauzy, sun-dappled drive to the shore. Album-centerpiece “Bored Games” is also a prime example of “Gemini”’s layered pleasures. A Casioesque rhythm loop buoys textural feedback and a beautifully distant guitar melody to Jack Tatum’s dreamy, self-harmonizations.
Any number of fuzzy, New Wave-y, dream pop influences could be name-checked here. Fortunately, Wild Nothing wins on its own merits and easily erases any impulse to do so.
Serving Suggestion:
Rainy Day: A hot cup of anise hyssop & honeybush tea and a seat by the window.
Sunset: Some sort of fruit-infused, iced vodka drink and a quiet spot on the beach.
#8 - BEACH HOUSE – “Teen Dream” The brilliance of 2010 lies in the element of surprise. The seeming stealth and effortlessness with which certain songs and albums came into my consciousness this year. The ability of bands that weren’t on my radar to release albums that dug deeper than releases I’d heavily anticipated. “Norway” came to me courtesy of KEXP’s Song of the Day podcast. One of those random tunes rolling around the periphery that I kept having to look and see who it was I was so thoroughly digging on. It eventually ended up on several of my playlists and the purchase of the album followed.
“Teen Dream” soon became a staple in the car stereo. Its dizzy, sun-washed tone made it an easy choice for late summer/early fall drives. The fairly astonishing thing about the Beach House sound is that there are only two people making it. One would think an album this lush and dreamy must involve at least a few folks doing the fluffing. Nope. The entirety of “Teen Dream” is rendered by founding members Victoria Legrand (on vocals and organ) and Alex Scally (on guitar, drums and keyboards). Another brilliant surprise.
I spent large swaths of the year in both reflective and projective modes. The muslin-wrapped melodies on “Teen Dream” laid exactly the right ground for the reflective moments without losing immediacy or relevance to the here and now. A real treat of an album and a delightful place to spend a day.
Serving Suggestion:
A late summer afternoon on the porch with a white Bordeaux or a glass of spiked lemonade.
#7 - FOALS - “Total Life Forever”The video for "Spanish Sahara" was put under my nose by a friend of mine earlier in the year. In that moment, I knew that the new Foals album was going to be something special.
Where "Antidotes", the band's debut, was an angular, scrappy slice of post-punk that satisfied on a fairly specific level, the muted, icy guitar plucks, textural sequencing, and upper-register whisper-sing that open "Spanish Sahara" announce unequivocally that This Band. Has. Evolved.
The interweaving dual guitar lines of Jimmy Smith and frontman Yannis Philippakis update the Television approach, resulting in a dreamier, funkier take on the swirling, DNA-model melodies of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. This interplay is best exemplified at the halfway mark of “After Glow”. A back’n’forth so effervescent, it seems a near-infinite number of tracks were required to create it. Watching the song live puts that theory soundly to rest and leaves one grinning in awe.
“Total Life Forever” earned a solid place in my consciousness this year. Here’s to growth…
Serving Suggestion:
Perfect for the transitional seasons. Grab a sweater and a slate-y Sauv Blanc and head for the park.
#6 - MUMFORD & SONS – “Sigh No More”Maybe it was the timing. Maybe it was the name. Maybe it was the ubiquitous praise being heaped upon a band I hadn’t heard of from sources whose musical tastes I generally scoff at. Whatever it was, I did that thing I sometimes do where I outright dismiss an artist before I’ve heard a single note. Snooty, snobby and shameful, I know. (For what it’s worth, when this has happened in the past, I usually find myself exonerated in these instinctual dismissals once I end up hearing the music in question.) But this year, I find myself thanking my lucky stars I gave Mumford & Sons an honest shot.
Were it not for a friend’s inclusion of “Awake My Soul” on a mix with no proper tracklisting, this may have never happened. I kept coming back to it and finally had to ask, “Who is this?” Much to my chagrin, this band I’d prematurely maligned now had a firm grip on my listening heart. It took me until November to finally purchase the album, but I will say I’ve packed a year’s worth of listening into the past 2 months.
Some records reach you at exactly the right time. There’s an alignment of internal elements that grant a particular sound an enormous amount of power. If you had asked me earlier in the year where I was at with emotive, Irish-inflected British folk, I probably would have tossed off a snarky retort and steered the conversation elsewhere. As it turns out, this band, this sound, this feeling, is exactly where I needed to be this fall and winter.
From the bittersweet balladry of “Timshel” and “After The Storm” to the stomping, soaring, open roadness of “The Cave”, “Roll Away Your Stone” and “Awake My Soul”, this album now seems almost more a prescription than a discovery. As if it came along necessarily. And I can unabashedly say, I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong. “Sigh No More” is officially the best crow I have ever eaten.
Serving Suggestion:
A perfect anytime album, but ultimately suited for an open stretch of road and a strong cup of hot, black coffee.
#5 - THE ROOTS – “How I Got Over”The band’s collaboration with John Legend, a compendium of 70’s soul covers, easily earned a spot on my “Honorable Mentions” list and, in a less competitive year, would likely have ended up on the Top 10 alongside “How I Got Over”. But it was a competitive year. More so than any since I’ve been writing these year-end capsules. All the more spectacular, then, that The Roots would end up at Number 5.
It takes a lot for a hip-hop release to rise above the occasional mood listen on my iPod. To gain the kind of rotation usually reserved for more emotionally resonant genres. “How I Got Over” staked that claim this year and further proved The Roots’ undeniable genius as a band, not just a hip-hop act. By distilling the core Roots elements to their purest form, they gave us their most accessible, cohesive and imaginative album to date.
Serving Suggestion:
If you’ve got headphones and a sidewalk, you’re good to go.
#4 - BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB – “Beat The Devil’s Tattoo”You know what?
I love this band.
And I love this album.
Next to my #1 pick, “Beat The Devil’s Tattoo” probably got the most play of anything that made it onto my iPod this year.
I won’t ruin it with half-assed encapsulations or saccharine sum-ups.
If you don’t own it, buy it.
If you do own it, play it right now.
Ahhhh.
N i c e, right?
Serving Suggestion:
Ideally, this one should be on the juke at your favorite local dive. Throw on your favorite black leather boots, belly up to the bar and order yourself a double Bruichladdich with a Guinness back.
#3 - THE WALKMEN – “Lisbon”There’s a reach, a twinge, a pang, a real yearning that happens in the marriage of Leithauser’s shoot-for-the-rafters howl and guitarist Paul Maroon’s empty-room reverb which tickles my own yearny parts very acutely. And nowhere is it more prevalent or perfectly synthesized than throughout “Lisbon”. It’s also the most transporting album of the year. Evocative to the hilt. Lyrically, the spirit of the album is best exemplified in the following verse from “Blue As Your Blood”:
“I sit alone and I wonder why/Oh hazy, lazy days/I could dream of you forever/Under the shade of a Juniper tree/I sing a sad song of you and me/The sky above, the sky above/Is blue as your blood/Black is the color of your eyelash/Spanish is the language of your tongue”
And sonically, nothing paints a better picture of the locales The Walkmen seem both haunted and enchanted by than the one-two punch of closers “While I Shovel The Snow” and “Lisbon”.
This is the kind of record where I make an “UGH” sound at the end of each song. Beautiful. Ecstatic. Heartbreaking.
Serving Suggestion:
I figure a trip to Portugal will do this one right. A bottle of Moscatel and a small rented villa with a terrace overlooking the sea.
#2 - DEERHUNTER – “Halcyon Digest”Many thanks to John Richards for championing this one. I found “Helicopter” on John’s morning show and immediately raced to YouTube to hear it again. I spent the rest of the afternoon there. It quickly became yet another contender for “Track of the Year”.
I became aware of Deerhunter two years ago when “Microcastle” was making waves and ending up on everyone’s year-end list. Based on the hype, I previewed it online but never found anything solid to grab onto. “Halcyon Digest” was the other thing. It permeated deeply, thoroughly and immediately.
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say there’s some real genius at work here. Ideas, sounds, structures, approaches and sensibilities that are unconventional, to say the least. Trippy, ambient opener “Earthquake” is a languorous, lyrically surreal cocktail that gets us tipsy right off the bat so the rest of the album can take us wherever it wants to go. The jangly beachpop of “Revival”. The icy reverb soak of “Sailing”. The low-slung indie rock of “Desire Lines” (featuring 2010’s head-noddiest guitar coda, IMHO). “Helicopter” and it’s sun-emerging-from-behind-the-clouds chorus. The top-down cruise of “Fountain Stairs”. And the spare, shimmery sequencing of Jay Reatard tribute “He Would Have Laughed”. “Halcyon Digest” covers a lot of ground in 45 minutes. And every step is a new revelation.
I have yet to put my finger on exactly how Deerhunter manage to pull this one off. Ultimately, something this out-of-left-field could very easily risk a certain kind of fussiness, pretense or lack of direction. “Halcyon Digest” jukes all such potential traps with ease. In a year full of unexpected wins, it may just be the most unexpected.
Serving Suggestion:
I like this one for cleaning the house. A healthy Carménère pour should add just the right touch.
#1 - LCD SOUNDSYSTEM – “This Is Happening” “Should we play it now…?”
“No. Let’s wait.”
This was the exchange between me and The Missus upon leaving Homer’s Records in the Old Market. It was Memorial Day weekend and we were in Omaha, Nebraska en route to NYC bringing home our 1995 Toyota Corolla station wagon, newly purchased from a private owner in Denver. We decided it would be a bigger treat to wait and unveil the new LCD Soundsystem later in the day, on the road, somewhere around twilight, somewhere in the middle of America. It was the right choice. We couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to what would become our shared favorite album of the year. A long, quiet stretch of I-80 and a giant blood red moon dangling from a low, purpling sky.
“This is Happening” opens simply enough. “Dance Yrself Clean” begins with a quiet, lightly clunky rhythm loop, two repeated, galumphing synth-bass notes, and James Murphy’s matter-of-fact, esoteric patter: “Walking up to me expecting/Walking up to me expecting words/It happens all the time/Present company excepted/Present company, except the worst/It happens every night”. And then, around the 3-minute mark, you realize you’d unnecessarily turned the sound up and that the party was waiting just around the corner the whole time. It’s like the difference between the volume of the television show you’re watching and the volume of the commercial that abuts it. Except you welcome this commercial. It’s a fairly clever producorial conceit and just one of many strokes of technical brilliance throughout the album. (Another favorite example is “Pow Pow”, where we see how a cardboard-wrapped steel pick can completely change the shape of a simple bass note.)
There is much cleverness at play on “This Is Happening”. But, like the Deerhunter record, the innovations are there in service of the tunes, not the other way around. The amazing thing about Murphy is his ability to take these scrappy, disparate, electro-clash elements and mold them into something with real heart. Yes, your hips respond first. Involuntarily. But, one deep listen quickly evinces that there is blood in this music, not tinsel.
Proof of this is laid bare in the record’s centerpiece, the desperate, devastating “I Can Change”. The song begins as something that could be mistaken for a forgotten Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark B-side. An ostensible air of irony threatens early dismissal. Soon, however, Murphy’s plaintive trill erases all suspicions of insincerity. “Tell me a line… Make it easy for me… Open your arms… dance with me until I feel alright…” Another one to be filed under Songs That Make Me Go “UGH”.
To cite the record’s highlights would be to simply type out the track list. Each entry it’s own unique contribution to an astonishing whole. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t give a shout-out to the fourth and final “Track of the Year” nominee, “Home”.
The idea of “home” – what it is, where it is, what it means, is it a real thing, etc. – permeates much of Murphy’s lyrical output, and more so than ever on this record. Appropriate then, that the album’s closer should be so directly named. One also can’t help but note the Talking Heads influence in the percussion and Prophet-600 sequencing. Whether a conscious nod to “Once in a Lifetime” (as “All I Want” is to Bowie’s “Heroes”) or a subconscious pervasion, “Home” embodies a similar essence. If I had to guess which single track got the hardest workout on my iPod this year, my guess would be this one.
I spent most of the spring and summer with this album. It happened to perfectly coincide with a daily running routine, now 7 months old. This was a revelatory time for me on several levels and LCD was in heavy rotation underneath it all. Many of the albums I spent time with this year had a knack for taking me apart and putting me back together a little differently. But none did so more thrillingly than “This Is Happening”.
In the end, it’s the one that stuck. If my 2010 journey had a musical triptych, this would be it. A defining record for a defining year.
Serving Suggestion:
Purchase. Play. Repeat.
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And... The best of the rest...
Honorable Mentions:
Efterklang - "Magic Chairs"
Chemical Brothers - "Further"
Peter Gabriel - "Scratch My Back"
UNKLE - "Where Did The Night Fall"
Bomba Estereo - "Blow Up"
The Black Keys - "Brothers"
Balkan Beat Box - "Blue Eyed Black Boy"
John Legend & The Roots - "Wake Up!"
Disappears - "Lux"
The Arcade Fire - "The Suburbs"
The Acorn - "No Ghost"
Galactic - "Ya Ka May"
Max Richter - "Infra"
Olafur Arnalds - "...and they have escaped the weight of darkness"
The National - "High Violet"
Spoon - "Transference"
Giants - "Old Stories"
Frightened Rabbit - "The Winter of Mixed Drinks"
The Tallest Man On Earth - "The Wild Hunt"
Fences - "Fences"
Houses - "All Night Long"
Local Natives - "Gorilla Manor"
Tamaryn - "The Waves"
Zola Jesus – “Valusia” and “Stridulum” EP’s
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AND FINALLY... A new feature of IMBA's Top Albums post! Since I couldn't pick a clear winner for "Track of the Year", I invite you to weigh in. Below are my top choices. Feel free to do some voting in the comments section.
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - "HOME"
THE WALKMEN - "STRANDED"
DEERHUNTER - "HELICOPTER"
THE FOALS - "SPANISH SAHARA"
