Our Year in Music 2010 coverage has featured our Top 100 Tracks, Top Music Videos, the Year in Photos, our Best of Pitchfork.tv, the Best of Pitchfork News, and the Worst Album Covers of the year.
Yesterday, we had the Albums of the Year 2010: Honorable Mention, our list of 20 great albums that didn't make our album list, and today and tomorrow, we'll be counting down the Top 50 proper. We start today with Nos. 50-21, tomorrow is the Top 20.
Here is what we have coming up later this month:
December 20: Guest List: Best of 2010__
December 27:__ The Year in News
Amazon have provided samples of the songs below and they've also set up pages for purchasing the music on our lists. You can buy the Top 100 Tracks at Amazon MP3 and the Top 50 Albums at Amazon MP3 or Amazon CD.
Thanks for reading, and have a great holiday. And now, on to the Top Albums of 2010...
50. Wavves
King of the Beach
[Fat Possum]
When Nathan Williams served up his new Wavves LP in August, it didn't seem like much time had passed since his insanely blown-out album just a year earlier. Inadvertently or not, Williams had become a polarizing figure in the indie world, and it seemed like he'd never really gone away. And he was definitely listening: Williams, alongside Billy Hayes and Stephen Pope-- Jay Reatard's former rhythm section-- gave their new set of songs their studio due, and the result is an intelligible, self-flagellating, high-fiving jaunt into pop-punk whose punch suggested Williams was brushing all that dirt off his shoulder. On his spinning piledriver of a single "Post Acid", the SoCal lifer sings in search of some grounding while on a bad trip: "I'm just having fun with you." That's all this was ever meant to be. -- David Bevan
49. Wild Nothing
Gemini
[Captured Tracks]
A joint partnership between Virginia's Jack Tatum and the 1980s, Wild Nothing started the year in obscurityand ended it as a residue of a lot of people's Indian summers. Perhaps that's because, like the music Gemini so lovingly references (the Go-Betweens, the Cure, Slowdive, and, above all else, Cocteau Twins), there's an easy warmth and and magnanimity to its songs. From the classic indie-pop shuffle of opener "Live in Dreams" to the 4AD-friendly psychedelia of "Summer Holiday" to the gloriously carefree gallop of "Chinatown", every single one of these songs feels like a window opening. 2010 was a banner year for fans of reverb, but for all the dreamy, swoony, swooshy, shoegazey confections to waft out of speakers over the past 12 months, few were as achingly gorgeous or as effortlessly evocative as this. --Mark Pytlik
48. Forest Swords
Dagger Paths
[Olde English Spelling Bee / No Pain in Pop]
Forest Swords-- the alias of Liverpool's Matthew Barnes-- was one of a number of acts in 2010 to attempt a critical reconsideration of goth, mining the music for its dread but setting aside any element of camp. Signed to New York's Olde English Spelling Bee, Forest Swords was often mentioned in the same breath as American acts like Salem and Balam Acab, but his sluggish tempos and general sense of resignation have more in common with England's Demdike Stare and Raime, while his dislocated dub and spindly, post-punk guitar lines echo Germany's Anika. Meanwhile, the influence of Seefeel, from neighboring Sheffield, can be heard all over Forest Swords' approach to space. (Taking those points of reference into account, Forest Swords' gloom seems more timely than merely trendy.) Dagger Paths can't ever be mistaken for anyone else, either, thanks to the jagged dovetailing of machine beats and trad, slightly stunted rock arrangements, and the way delay feedback and distended voices go rippling across the surface of it all. Only 34 minutes long, all of it spent lingering in a kind of delectable despair, it's the perfect mood piece: single-minded, but never running out of ideas. --Philip Sherburne
47. Women
Public Strain
[Jagjaguwar]
There's irony in the title of Women's second album, and not just the retrospective irony considering the onstage fight that cut their fall tour short. At first, Public Strain sounds private and subdued-- a mix of distant meditations and loose basement jams. But as the album progresses, things get more complicated. The repetition of "China Steps" is tense, the tightly wound guitar grind of "Drag Open" has a cutting wind chill, and even the Feelies-style strum of "Locust Valley" bears an insistent pulse. So when you listen to it all again, the first half sounds not so much mellow as pregnant with foreboding. In the mp3 age, making an album whose beginning depends on its end is a daring trick, but Women pulled it off on Public Strain, a looping cycle of songs that neatly inform each other. --Marc Masters
46. Matthew Dear
Black City
[Ghostly]
They call it Black City for a reason. It a place where Matthew Dear gets to leave his other guises behind. Gone is the minimalist guru and the good-natured synth-pop experimenter, replaced by a pervert, a bank robber, a manic kidnapper. Dear plays all those roles and more on his fourth and best long-player. It's a concept album where the concept is nothing more (or less) than our deepest depravities set to a skulking funk to which the Thin White Duke would nod approvingly. This is what Trent Reznor has spent much of the past 10 years trying to accomplish-- an album that balances sophistication, studio know-how, and a woozy evil into something your nightmares could dance to. So it's not too surprising when Dear takes Reznor's "Closer" pulse out for a moonless 4 a.m. test drive on "You Put a Smell on Me". With Black City, Dear offers a precisely thought-out guide to losing your mind. --Ryan Dombal
45. Gil Scott-Heron
I'm New Here
[XL]
On his first album in 16 years, Gil Scott-Heron takes the measure of his life and finds that the pain of regret is not enough to kill his pride in the man he has become. The album followed drug problems and imprisonment, but he emerges clear-eyed from his tribulations, and late-life masterwork I'm New Here stands comfortably with the best of his 1970s material. Scott-Heron's ability to probe the darkness without surrendering to it is balanced by the music, a stunning electro-blues concoction that sounds less modern than futuristic. At the center is his voice, and whether he's singing out in a baritone blues croak or speaking calmly about his childhood in Jackson, Tennessee, with his grandmother, it has weathered to become an enthralling instrument. --Joe Tangari
44. Kylesa
Spiral Shadow
[Season of Mist]
There's a whole lot of great psych-metal coming out of Georgia and its surrounding areas these days: Mastodon, Baroness, Withered, Black Tusk. And on Spiral Shadow, two-drummer Savannah monster squad Kylesa tower above all of them, heroes among heroes. Kylesa's Static Tensions was one of 2009's best metal albums-- a roiling, spitting, heaving beast of an album that never let up in its Southern sludge-boogie, hardcore fury. The grimy riffs hit just as hard on the follow-up, but the band also widens its scope, getting more downright melodic than anyone expected. Middle Eastern-tinged guitar flourishes whiz by, the grooves slow and deepen, and co-leader Phillip Cope occasionally allows himself the sort of staggering, psych-damaged guitar solo that recalls Built to Spill's Doug Martsch way more than Slayer's Kerry King. Increasingly, the band's Laura Pleasants steps to the front, her head-spun wail offering terrific counterpoint to Cope's scraggly roar. And at the center of everything sits "Don't Look Back", the sort of triumphantly bleary alt-rock anthem that we almost never get to hear anymore. --Tom Breihan
43. Tame Impala
Innerspeaker
[Modular]
There couldn't have been a less sexy M.O. for 2010 than Tame Impala's. Instead of Pet Sounds, their psychedelic lodestone is Magical Mystery Tour; the Australian band's 60s-inspired rock is plenty chill, but never wavey, witchy, or anything else too du jour. In fact, their unapologetic retro yen feels almost anachronistic, in a year when nostalgia was often filtered through digital effects and technological affect. That's not to say that it isn't a laboriously (and thrillingly) produced album, thanks in part to the mixing of Dave Fridmann, a veteran producer who has worked with the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and MGMT, among others. The froth on their fuzzboxes and buzz of their Humbuckers is never anything less than perfect; like all good stoners, they know that texture is as important as riffs. They just happen to have both in spades. There aren't a ton of stand-out songs-- the cathedral reverb, narrowly filtered vocals, and ringing harmonies do tend to blur together. But they change up keys, tempos, and rhythms enough to keep it interesting. More than that, Tame Impala always keep you on your toes, no matter how many times you think you've heard the song-- by them or any other artist. --Philip Sherburne
42. Drake
Thank Me Later
[Young Money Entertainment]
Every so often, hip-hop locates an artist who causes listeners to vehemently choose sides yet still sells a ton of records. Thank Me Later did that with Drake. Why did some people take to it? Well, I could bring up Drake's impeccable ear for beats, the pristine sequencing, or even the endearing goofiness of the lyrics, but ultimately his charm can be summed up in one line from "Over": "What am I doing? That's right, I'm doing me." Chris Rock once joked that "Mo Money, Mo Problems" was the most popular song almost nobody could relate to, and Drake's greatest accomplishment is making the same case-- that someone who has everything would trade it for a dorm room and his mother's happiness. But while Drake's personal life is undoubtedly inextricable from Thank Me Later, you don't need to be a celebrity to relate to it-- just someone who's ever felt dissatisfied with society's idea of success. --Ian Cohen
41. Delorean
Subiza
[True Panther]
In the past couple of years, the term "Balearic" has been associated with almost any sort of easygoing, luxe electronic music. It's good to remember, then, that islands like Ibiza have, for a long time, been a more moneyed, European version of the Jersey Shore. This beach culture-- and its arms-in-the-air parties featuring breakneck trance and piano-led house-- is the sonic inspiration for much of Subiza. Delorean don't seem at all ashamed of this background (see their blog) but nevertheless they've turned it into something less uncouth and more manageable-- like this feeling can be a part of your life without having to accept broad declarations of youth and escapism as some of sort of philosophy. So it's pop music, roughly. --Andrew Gaerig
40. Abe Vigoda
Crush
[Bella Union / Post Present Medium]
Back when Skeleton came out in 2008, Abe Vigoda were the teen phenoms of L.A.'s punky Smell scene. With their shouted vocals and tropical-punk riffs, the Chino, California-bred quartet gave every show, no matter what the venue, the clumsy energy of the coziest living-room gig. But Crush, the band's fourth full-length, finds them shooting for a different kind of intimacy-- the sound of romance circa 1980. It's a lush record, awash in woozy synths, reverb, and effect-heavy guitars. Singer Michael Vidal is finished yelling. Now he's a crooner with deep Ian McCulloch-worthy pipes. On tracks like "Dream of My Love (Chasing After You)" and "Beverly Slope" the band's vintage goth-rock fetish, only barely suppressed on previous efforts, finally breaks to the fore. --Aaron Leitko
39. Best Coast
Crazy For You
[Mexican Summer]
For an album of such modest intent-- girls meets boy, girl loses boy, girl locks herself in bedroom and pines over him for all of eternity-- it's remarkable that Crazy For You became such a polarizing artifact, the simplicity of its execution seemingly matched only by the divisive discourse surrounding it. But whether you think Bethany Cosentino's boy-crazy jangle-pop mash notes sound timeless or tired, classic or clichéd, you can't deny her sense of commitment-- her unwavering attempts to evoke that sense of disappointment in staring at a phone that never rings practically transforms Crazy For You into the world's first accidental concept album. And snicker all you want at Cosentino's remedial rhymes (miss/kiss, crazy/lazy, friend/end, etc.), but, as the swoon-worthy chorus of "ooohs" on "When the Sun Don't Shine" attests, her siren of a voice can sell a song without any words at all. --Stuart Berman
38. Rick Ross
Teflon Don
[Maybach]
In Jay-Z's recent hip-hop tome Decoded, he writes, "every hustler knows the value of a feint." Right now, Rick Ross must be the king of such disguises. He's one-time drug trafficker Freeway Ricky Ross one minute, then MC Hammer the next, then John Lennon, then Chicago gangster Larry Hoover. This from a guy who used to work as a correctional officer and has never had a platinum album or even a Top 10 single. He's hardly the coke-peddling tycoon he makes himself out to be, but that's more than OK because his "larger than life" sound is bigger and more decadent and stunningly gaudy than anyone else's. Listening to Teflon Don is like watching "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" in a gold bathtub while eating a $1,000 steak and texting your jeweler about that Russian doll neck piece that features two iced-out likenesses of your own head.
Since Jay-Z actually went through some of the drug-dealing exploits he raps about, even his flossiest rhymes are riddled with consequences, regrets, reality checks. Perhaps due to his lack of real-life experience, Ross does not worry about such things. When he groans on opener "I'm Not a Star", he sounds like Goliath awakening from a restless slumber. He's huge enough to make MC Hammer a boast in 2010. Big enough to attract the likes of Kanye West, Erykah Badu, Diddy, and Jay-Z himself, who signed him to Def Jam in 2006. Exaggerated delusion is Rick Ross' art, and he's become quite the master. --Ryan Dombal
37. Zola Jesus
Stridulum EP
[Sacred Bones]
Conventional wisdom says that when Zola Jesus aka Nika Danilova releases her next LP, it'll be the one that rockets her into dark music superstardom (whatever that means). Only thing is, she's already planted that flag with the cathartic and bleak but gorgeous Stridulum EP. Prior to this record, her powerful voice was buried in tangled guitar murk, but on these six songs she ratchets up the intensity, cuts out any hiss, and sings to friends and lovers with grandiose conviction wise beyond her years. Songs like "I Can't Stand" pair an intensely beautiful industrial pulse with Danilova's thick, rounded voice towering above the entire world, making lyrics like, "I can't stand to see you this way," sound not like empty comfort, but, impossibly, like rock solid assurance from a complete stranger. --Sam Hockley-Smith
36. Emeralds
Does It Look Like I'm Here?
[Editions Mego]
Emeralds were a little tricky this year. After 2009's way-far-out What Happened, you expected the Ohio drone aesthetes to launch even crazier cosmic blastoffs, but instead they toned things down and went more ambient. That lessened their initial wow-factor some, but ultimately gave the record longer legs. Alongside guitarist Mark McGuire's excellent solo effort, Does It Look Like I'm Here? became the year's go-to zone-out soundtrack, the album to reach for when other avant-noise LPs felt too abrasive. Even when muted, the band's head-spinning moments were still very much present: check the oscillating synth patterns of 12-minute centerpiece "Genetic", constantly unfurling and re-spooling around the extended guitar lines at the song's core. Magnify certain moments like this, or let the whole thing just wash over you. --Joe Colly
35. Gorillaz
Plastic Beach
[Virgin]
Few albums this year have done such a striking job of wringing appeal out of deep-rooted melancholy as the third record by Gorillaz, who have been freed from the group's cartoon-band constraints to provide Damon Albarn's deftest work of pop modernism in the past decade. At its peaks-- the blissfully tense electro-funk of "Stylo", the longing pop-house of "On Melancholy Hill", the title track's Morricone-meets-Moroder spaghetti western new wave-- Plastic Beach provides the thrills of hooky, well-crafted pop with a feeling of baroque dejection. And its sleek production is craftily undercut with a cast of voices that mutter wearily (Mark E. Smith on "Glitter Freeze"; Lou Reed on "Some Kind of Nature"), belt heartachingly (Bobby Womack on "Stylo" and "Cloud of Unknowing"), lonesomely serenade (Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano on "Empire Ants" and "To Binge")-- or, as Albarn does more compellingly than he has in ages, wail with a haunting ennui. --Nate Patrin
34. Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
[Last Gang / Universal Motown]
Crystal Castles are a standoff kind of band. Run-ins with security and fans, as well as plagiarism accusations made for an uneasy build-up to an already tough task of following up a debut album that defined a fleeting subgenre. The band approached the challenge with the same ethos of their live show-- diving in at the deep end, lead single "Doe Deer" provoking the haters with its bombed-out fury. It turned out to be a sleight of hand for one of the most surprising successes of the year. On this year's Crystal Castles, the band hammered the spectral shapes of the first album into something with focus and menace. It also had a heart, "Celestica" and "Empathy" proving to be two unexpectedly warm moments. It goes some way toward gathering up the shitstorm and blowing it into the distance. --Hari Ashurst
33. The Tallest Man on Earth
The Wild Hunt
[Dead Oceans]
Four years after releasing his self-titled debut EP, the Tallest Man on Earth is still rambling around, changing up his Spartan sound just enough to make each new release distinctive. Drawing inspiration from the wilderness, The Wild Hunt may be his best and most refined album to date, full of songs that sound like he dug them out of the earth, still caked with dirt and fossils. The rare extroverted folkie, Kristian Matsson plays and sings loud, projecting outward instead of inward, as if to fill the entire valley with music. Rather than exhaust the possibilities of his voice and rambunctious guitar playing, The Wild Hunt finds new variations in the combination of these two basic elements, toggling between Dylan and Dock Boggs, rural and urban, outraged and pensive. And then there's the twist ending you never see coming: "Kids on the Run" switches from his trusty guitar to a wobbly tuned piano for a power ballad about adolescent angst, which does in three minutes what the Arcade Fire do in a full album. As gorgeous and lonely and conspiratorial as it may be, the song more crucially points the way to subtly new permutations of the Tallest Man sound, as if Matsson has so many new canyons and passes to explore. --Stephen M. Deusner
32. Tyler, the Creator
Bastard
[self-released]
After a few decades of murders and crack deals, gangsta rap bloodthirst has lost a lot of its sting. But here we have a teenage skate-rat snarling in a demonic, asthma-wrecked rasp, talking about rape and dismemberment and coke-snorting and throwing in homophobic slurs, and suddenly every wound is fresh again. Bastard is a rough listen, to be sure; if you can hear it without wincing every 30 seconds or so-- without feeling some genuine despair-- you might have some serious problems of your own. But as with the most successful transgressive art, its ugliness digs deep into your brainpan and stays there.
And only some of the value here is of the shock variety. Tyler's nihilistic gargle has cathartic star-power the same way DMX's livewire grunt once did, and many of the antisocial jokes are genuinely funny: "I go to Obama rallies screaming out 'McCain!'" The self-produced, spaced-out, lo-fi beats transform warped, woozy skronk-noise into rap thump. Ariel Pink is a favorite of Tyler's, and it shows. In all its violent weirdness, Bastard forms its own universe, and he doesn't do it without context. At the end of the opening title track, Tyler lets us know exactly where all this animosity might come from: "Fuck a deal, I just want my father's email/ So I can tell him how much I fuckin' hate him in detail." --Tom Breihan
31. Woods
At Echo Lake
[Woodsist]
If last year's Songs of Shame proved Woods could stand among their peers on the Woodsist roster, At Echo Lake finds the Brooklyn band (headed by Woodsist founder Jeremy Earl) rising above them. In addition to Earl's deeply affecting songwriting not skipping a beat, the arrangements are significantly more expansive, hosting an entire world of musical ideas in their slender 29 minutes. Sounds, samples, and solos hover above, float through, and oscillate underneath the most stylistically varied collection of songs Earl has penned over the course of several albums: Distorted rumbling underscores dark acoustic ballad "Pick Up", while lively instrumental "From the Horn" is bolstered by a backwards guitar solo. Best of all is the eerie "Death Rattles", where Earl softly sings, "God only knows, just to be by your side/ I would be there all night, I would be there all right," a devotional as chilling as it is lovelorn. Woodsist has released quite a few good albums over the years (including some by Woods themselves), but At Echo Lake is a record so stunning it deserves to have its entire name run across its label's banner. --Martin Douglas
30. The-Dream
Love King
[Def Jam]
Believe all the sexual boasting on Love King, and you'd think Terius Nash aka The-Dream is the world's horniest guy, the self-proclaimed "last romantic" who will steal your girl and please her in ways she never thought possible. Funny thing is, Nash seems more like a studio nerd than anything else, with production gifts rivaling the Neptunes and Timbaland before him and an ability to pack tracks like "Nikki Pt. 2" with layered melodies without even the help of a traditional chorus. On his third full-length, Nash blows up his futuristic R&B sound bigger than ever before, stringing together carnal ballads and sturdy bangers like "Yamaha", the best Prince song since 1992. Frankly, the last thing other R&B producers should be worried about is their girlfriends. --Joe Colly
29. The Fresh & Onlys
Play It Strange
[In the Red]
When someone tells me an album has no bad songs, I get dubious-- not about the claim, but about how ambitious a record that avoids failure could be. Well, there's not a bad song on Play It Strange, and yet there's ambition all over it. The Fresh & Onlys' mix of Buddy Holly melody, Byrds twang, and beatific joy might seem conservatively retro, in line with the garage leanings of San Francisco comrades Thee Oh Sees, the Mantles, and Sonny & the Sunsets. But the band constantly stretches those parameters, whether in the sprawling, eight-minute "Tropical Island Suite", the bombast of "Who Needs a Man", or a deceptively dark opener ironically titled "Summer of Love". So while it's fair to call Play It Strange a non-stop hit parade, the Fresh & Onlys deserve just as much credit for shooting at tons of different targets. --Marc Masters
28. The National
High Violet
[4AD]
In 2005, the National were a band struggling for recognition, drunkenly and desperately clinging to a shit-kicking vitality while staring down deadening day jobs. Perhaps that's why they named their next album Boxer, but on High Violet, they've fought their way to the top only to turn their struggles inward. "Terrible Love", "Bloodbuzz, Ohio", and especially "England" are examples of a controlled turbulence that the National can now call their own. Every orchestral swell is rigorously planned and exactingly performed while Matt Berninger tries to reckon with the obligations of finances and family through the sort of hard-won wisdom and humor that one acquires only when abandoning the concern about losing one's edge as an aging male. See, that's the problem with using "dad rock" as a slur: You could stand to learn a lot from your old man. --Ian Cohen
27. Four Tet
There Is Love in You
[Domino]
Electronic musicians don't really wear corduroy blazers and go alt-country, so they rarely get called "mature," but There Is Love in You is a mature album. Hebden seems to have learned a lot in recent years: from his former schoolmate Burial, as a resident DJ at London's Plastic People (a small basement venue/community that was nearly shut down), in his collaborations with jazz drummer Steve Reid (who died just two months after this record's release). Where Hebden's records used to accumulate sound-- jazz drums colliding with breakbeats, buzzing guitars, and insects-- There Is Love in You mostly organizes them. The rhythms are coiled and clenched, the guitars deliberate, the voices allotted space. There is inspired neatness, like an art gallery: Hebden knows the tension and depth that proper placement create. It's not a casting off of his youth-- remember your first apartment's disorder?-- so much as a reordering of priorities. If the record's title is an indication, it has helped him locate something. --Andrew Gaerig
26. Twin Shadow
Forget
[4AD / Terrible]
Looking to the 1980s for inspiration has been common for quite a while, and Twin Shadow, with a serious taste for the analog synths and ticking electronic drums of new wave, can certainly be lumped with this trend. But George Lewis, Jr.'s debut proves to be more than a revisionist sum of its parts, held together tightly by an airy co-production job courtesy of Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor and an ear for a great hook. The record is steeped in heartbreak and longing, as the dewy-eyed sound of the New Romantics is filtered through the weathered gaze of someone trying to forget. As Lewis sings on standout track "Slow", "I don't wanna believe/ Or be in love." --Hari Ashurst
25. Sufjan Stevens
The Age of Adz
[Asthmatic Kitty]
In the time since 2005's beloved Illinois, Sufjan Stevens had released an album of outtakes, collected his Christmas music, and directed and scored an experimental film. But looming over these projects was a big question: When was he going to release the next proper album? The half-joke that he was going to do 50 albums about the 50 states had long stopped being repeated, but no competing ideas had taken hold. What would his new songs sound like? The All Delighted People EP earlier this year hinted at a change in direction, and then when The Age of Adz finally arrived, it turned out that he had delivered the perfect follow-up. It's an album built on earlier ideas that doesn't seem like a retread, and it also explores new thematic terrain. Taking a more personal tack with songs inspired in part by a long and serious illness, The Age of Adz infused the busy orchestration Stevens has become known for with a sparkly electronic sheen and featured bolder melodies and stronger vocals. Big-hearted, warm, and ambitious, the album felt immediately provocative even as it provided a sense of relief. It's also the kind of album that has a lot to explore and sounds better with every listen, so if Sufjan takes his time with the next one, this should hold us for a while. --Mark Richardson
24. Hot Chip
One Life Stand
[Astralwerks / Parlophone / EMI]
At first, all the straight-faced talk about wanting happiness and shining lovelights might make One Life Stand seem like an egregious misstep for the reliably frenetic Hot Chip. Sure, these recombinant pop mavens play up their more rambunctious side in public (as seen in Peter Serafinowicz's WTF video for "I Feel Better"), and their music's never less than enjoyable (as the title track and "Hand Me Down Your Love" can attest). It's their skirting of the line between profound and po-faced that makes One Life Stand so exhilarating; I doubt it's a mistake that the album's most affecting and emotional tune is titled "Slush". One wrong move, or one false note, and that's the sort of mess Hot Chip would've had on their hands. But there's no mistaking this album's heart-on-sleeve sincerity for anything less than completely genuine. --David Raposa
23. Das Racist
Sit Down, Man
[Mad Decent / Greedhead / Mishka]
If it were allowable, we could've just put "everything Das Racist did this year" in this slot. That'd cover Heems' Stereogum column dismantling the Indian minstrelsy of NBC's "Outsourced", their sardonic interview with The New York Times' Deborah Solomon ("I would say we are proto-postworld pop"), and their appearance on "Our Show With Elliot Aronow" where they called out Lady Gaga as "clearly Illuminati." But the better of two excellent mixtapes is representative enough: Sit Down, Man saw Das Racist fine-tune their combination of comedic lyricism and genuine technique, graduating from smart(-ass) punchline rappers to high-concept agitators in the process. They pulled it off by taking their irreverent but on-point sociopolitical material and actually building cohesive tracks around it, backing it up with underground-icon guest spots (El-P, Roc Marciano), miles-deep rap-nerd jokes, and production nods ranging from Boi-1da and Devo Springsteen to Vijay Iyer and Enigma. For a crew that seems intent on sneaking their seriousness in undercover, they're not fucking around. --Nate Patrin
22. Girls
Broken Dreams Club EP
[True Panther]
Girls' 2009 debut, Album, was an instant classic, a blast of dizzy, wounded love from a band with an immediate, innate grasp of all things guitar-pop. But frontman Christopher Owens has had a rough life, and people with rough lives have a sad tendency to flame out early. It's easy to imagine Album being Girls' one great statement before the demons that helped Owens write his songs drowned his voice completely. So it's a great relief to hear Broken Dreams Club, a clear indication that this band is in it for the long haul. Broken Dreams Club comes from the same aesthetic universe as Album, but it's relaxed to the point of languor. Old-school Nashville pedal steel and crisp Cotton Club horns find their way in, and a warm oldies-radio vibe pervades. But we're still dealing with despair and hopelessness, and Owens still expresses this stuff in the most simple and direct terms possible: "When I said that I loved you, honey, I knew it from the very start/ When I said that I loved you, honey, I knew that you would break my heart." At the center of it all sits "Carolina", a lazy sprawl that takes the band's own "Hellhole Ratrace" to a more peaceful place. --Tom Breihan
21. The Walkmen
Lisbon
[Fat Possum]
Seconds into Lisbon opener, "Juveniles", it becomes clear: The Walkmen are in no rush to get to where they're going. Paul Maroon's guitar chimes loosely, while frontman Hamilton Leithauser croons about taking in country air. Everything about the song just feels easy, and that tone holds true for the rest of the record as well. Whether rocking ("Angela Surf City") or lolling (the title track) or unfurling New Orleans style horns ("Stranded"), on Lisbon the Walkmen settle into their sound in a manner only time and age can allow. There's a fantastic moment on "Juveniles" in which Leithauser, with the same comfortable, unflinching air, states simply, "I am a good man by any count. And I see better things to come." That's confidence you can't fake. --David Bevan
Photo by Erez Avissar
20. Oneohtrix Point Never
Returnal
[Editions Mego]
Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego label enjoyed some halcyon days in 2010, with releases by Emeralds, Mark Fell, and Brooklyn bedroom composer Daniel Lopatin. The vaporous, mostly beat-less electronic sound favored by Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never previously sprawled out in abundance over his 2009 compilation, Rifts. But Returnal marked a paring down of the OPN sound into easier-to-digest segments, while still retaining Lopatin's fondness for creating a soundworld shaped by barely-formed husks of noise, where icy electronic fragments curl up into the atmosphere like a bank of fog rolling into view.
This isn't music without precedent-- Lopatin owes a debt to Robert Fripp's 'Frippertronics' experiments, in particular his 1981 record Let the Power Fall, from which the core OPN sound is mined. This is demonstrated on tracks like "Describing Bodies" and "Stress Waves", where the distinct lack of bass plunges the ambiance into sub-zero chills, and wisps of rudderless synth drones are cast adrift and left to coil into infinity. But this isn't simply an exercise in machine noise set in motion-- there's a sense of human pathos burrowed deep in the placid heart of this music. Returnal also finds Lopatin stretching the OPN framework via the combustible noise of "Nil Admirari" (a Latin phrase that translates as "to marvel at nothing") and the vocal-driven title track. His delicate reworking of the latter with Antony, combined with his warped take on 1980s pop fetishization in his side project Games, sets an impressively high benchmark for whatever comes next. --Nick Neyland
Photo by Erez Avissar
19. How to Dress Well
Love Remains
[Lefse / Tri Angle]
Over the past two years there's been a proliferation of nostalgic music obscured by its own sound, of songs that sound like they died 20 years ago and have been decomposing ever since. But the engine of nostalgia is loss, which is one of the reasons How to Dress Well stood out so prominently: Of course the best format for this brokedown and distant style was a lone choirboy's sexless recitation of 20-year-old R&B ballads, the kind of songs we listen to when we're experiencing loss, or at least want to be reminded of someone else's. In an early interview, How to Dress Well's Tom Krell said that when he was recording "Ready For the World", he imagined how a child would feel hearing someone through the floor, crying over the sound of the radio after having been dumped: an image of loss and distance, but also of uncanny presence.
Most of Krell's lyrics are unintelligible, but the intended emotional message of the music-- feel it or not-- is consistent. And while the production depends on lo-fi's opacity, it never covers up his quivering falsetto, a show of confidence a lot of young lo-fi musicians can't or don't make. The album's strangest trick might be how representative it is of a now-common aesthetic while still sounding so exceptional in light of its peers. --Mike Powell
Photo by Kathryn Yu
18. Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh
[Universal Motown]
In Erykah Badu's New Amerykah diptych, political unrest and emotional solvency have been disseminated equally. One for the revolutionaries (that's Part One) and this one, for the lovers. The peanut butter and chocolate occasionally melt together, but mostly this is a divided series. "I need your attention," Badu whinnies on "Window Seat", a song whose video used nakedness-- she literally sheds her clothes-- as a political tool promoting unencumbered openness. Great video, muddled concept. But as with all of Badu's untrained, unstrained music, it works far better as an expression of feeling over foment. Where the first installment rattled the same bones as Funkadelic and Sly Stone, Ankh finds Badu channeling softer, warmer sounds. The elegant astral stylings of Syreeta Wright, in particular, seem a clear inspiration, while timeless hip-hop source material-- songs from Eddie Kendricks and Sylvia Striplin and phrasings made famous by Biggie-- is re-contextualized here. Badu is playful throughout, at one point posing as a gangster's side chick seeking recompense, but by the time we arrive at the 10-minute closer, "Out My Mind, Just in Time", she is officially turning herself over to the one. "I pray for you, crochet for you, make it from scratch for you," she sings on the song. It's hard to tell whom she's talking to, but it's always you. --Sean Fennessey
Photo by Charles Taylor Bergquist
17. Caribou
Swim
[Merge]
Dan Snaith, aka Caribou, called Swim his attempt to make "liquid dance music," and it's possible that there is no more evocative summation of his album's sound as that. It is the most propulsive record of his career, full of 4/4 pulses and strafing keys, and yet it is too diffuse for dancing-- every sound seems to simultaneously roll toward you and gracefully recede, washing from left to right or dipping below a muffled filter. It makes for a gorgeously tactile listening experience; the drums hit with a soapy slap, burbles and sucking sounds eddying in all corners of the viscous mix. It is a record you immerse in, a record that surrounds you, and Snaith's high, frail singing-- about acrimonious dead-end relationships, about mortal struggles with drug addiction-- is almost alarmingly intimate. It might not reliably pack dancefloors on this planet, but if there is a club somewhere in the galaxy where the blue squid lady from The Fifth Element is a regular, my guess is that Swim never stops playing. --Jayson Greene
Photo by Erez Avissar
16. Sleigh Bells
Treats
[N.E.E.T. / Mom & Pop]
Like much of the best pop, Sleigh Bells sound thoroughly calculated-- their collision of aesthetics and poses is so striking it risks feeling phony. Initially, even the positive criticism was hedged. The mix of blown-out noise and bubblegum hookwork seemed gimmicky: People assumed they'd see through it by the end of summer. But what the band are so carefully sculpting isn't diffidence, it's excitement: overdriven riffs, monster beats, and Alexis Krauss' layered babble all designed for chain-reaction impact. The band lay out their shtick in the first 30 seconds of "Tell 'Em"-- machine-gun beatbox, imperious riffing, and sing-song prettiness from Krauss. Elsewhere on Treats you can hear fragments of pop's past-- Lush on "Rachel", the Shangri-Las on "Kids"-- but mainly Sleigh Bells stick to their own, new-minted sound, and it helps the thrills stay fresh.
The most convincing take on Treats-- the one which makes emotional sense to me-- is that it's a kind of teenpop: the mess, posturing, chaos, and unrelenting immediacy of an adolescent's headspace crushed into two-minute blurts. But the record doesn't really need decoding. Either you grin when "Crown on the Ground" unleashes those cartoonish speaker-busting beats or you don't. There's a videogame delight here in explosions and effects for their own sake, an irrepressible joy that's Sleigh Bells' biggest asset and the foundation of this record's surprising endurance. --Tom Ewing
Photo by Eirik Lande
15. Robyn
Body Talk
[Konichiwa / Cherrytree / Interscope]
Anyone who's had the good fortune to see Robyn wreck a stage knows that the Europop eminence is a star right down to her bone marrow. But the Body Talk series was still a titanic act of hubris-- three pure-gold mini-albums in one calendar year, from someone who hadn't released a new LP in a half-decade. And in the end, we got this instant greatest-hits album: The best songs from each installment in one place, peak after peak after peak for 15 tracks. Everyone has some quibble with the tracklist ("None of Dem" over "Include Me Out"? Really?), but hearing all these songs in one place is just an exclamation point at the end of an amazing pop year.
Musically, Body Talk is single-minded in its pursuit of dancefloor frenzy . Synths ripple, drums pound, massive choruses explode outward at the exact right moment. Robyn knows better than anyone else how to make efficient house-pop bangers like these; these tracks' moving parts work together in mechanistic harmony. But at its most transcendent, Body Talk also tells stories like a great country record. There's the spurned girl finding comfort in the beat ("Dancing on My Own"), the other woman calmly telling you how to move on ("Call Your Girlfriend"), the fuck-buddy pulling you close with one hand and pushing you away with the other ("Hang With Me"). And even in the lesser moments, there's plenty to love: The gleefully goofy Snoop Dogg collab, the furious frustration-dump, the line about dancing "to the beat of bad kissers clicking teeth." Robyn has pulled off her grand, ridiculous idea. Standing ovation. --Tom Breihan
Photo by Kathryn Yu
14. Flying Lotus
Cosmogramma
[Warp]
"Wonder if i have any chance in hell getting a Grammy nomination this week. If I ever had a shot, this is the year." That was what Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, tweeted on November 29; two days later, the nominations were announced, and Ellison's Cosmogramma was nowhere to be found. FlyLo subsequently went off, and while the Grammys don't really matter, it's understandable that he was upset. Cosmogramma is an event record, a knowingly audacious "album's album" that plays like a love letter to the most adventurous, forward-thinking music released on Warp. Its epic scope and fully realized nature invokes some of the classic LPs under the long-running label's umbrella: Music Has the Right to Children, Music Is Rotted One Note, Richard D. James Album, One Word Extinguisher. Cosmogramma represents ambition for ambition's sake, exceeding its own lofty goals on every level.
In 2010, the ease of home recording meant that everyone was a "producer," but it's still just as difficult to "produce" decent music. The first half of the year found many upstarts trying (and failing) to replicate the woozy post-Dilla amniotic haze of FlyLo's 2008 breakout, Los Angeles; after Cosmogramma came out in May, imitators were stopped dead, left wondering how it was possible to fuse drum'n'bass, four-on-the-floor house, downtempo, jazz, and a dozen other genre tics while still rising well above pastiche. Ironically, some of the releases that came out on his label Brainfeeder this year seemed like a peek behind the curtain of Cosmogramma's individual components: Lorn's martial, chaotic constructions, Teebs' honey-flowing pastoral preoccupations, Daedelus' warm Tropicália touches. All these reference points, and yet Cosmogramma still sounds like a work of art that is wholly individual and unique. Fuck a Grammy: now that's reason to celebrate. --Larry Fitzmaurice
Photo by Eirik Lande
13. No Age
Everything in Between
[Sub Pop]
Compared to its two full-length predecessors, the proper LP Nouns and the singles and EP collection Weirdo Rippers, Everything in Between took a few more listens to sink in. The new album was less frantic and less experimental, leaving behind a certain amount of punk bite and shoegaze dreaminess. It didn't wash over you or grab you by the throat; on this album, the songs were what counted. So as No Age's aesthetic drifted toward a sound that can best be described as classic indie rock in the late 1980s/early 90s mode, the group brought along the shifts in mood and subtly affecting tunes that made the best from that era so beloved. No Age had never sounded this vulnerable but also never this confident, like they had finally settled into an approach that suited them best and now they were capable of taking the songs wherever they needed to go. So you had the youthful rush of "Fever Dreaming" alongside the wounded and downcast "Common Heat" next to the trashy brattiness of "Sorts", and it all hung together like one thing. Everything in Between found No Age not so much growing up as growing outward, finding new possibilities in directness and simplicity. --Mark Richardson
Photo by Kathryn Yu
12. Janelle Monáe
The ArchAndroid
[Bad Boy / Wondaland Arts Society]
Philip K. Dick boogies like James Brown in Janelle Monáe's future, so how could it possibly be a dystopia? Her hugely ambitious full-length debut-- more Sign 'O' the Times than Kid A-- continues the ongoing story of android-human romance that she began on her 2007 EP Metropolis: Suite I: The Chase, set in a world that resembles a funkier Brazil crisscrossed with action sequences and love themes. Divided into suites bookended by orchestral overtures, the whole thing could easily curdle into concept-album hokum, but Monáe nods to the metaphorical potential of the sci-fi underpinnings (android/Other/African-American) without overplaying them. She understates her ideas and trusts her listeners to get them. --Stephen M. Deusner
Photo by Eric Kayne
11. Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
[Merge]
That Spike Jonze seized upon 2004's exuberantly one-dimensional "Wake Up" as the ideal wrapper for the ragged, pre-adolescent confusion of Where the Wild Things Are might easily have felt like a backhanded compliment to a songwriter of Win Butler's aspiration. By connecting Arcade Fire with the film, Jonze foregrounded the band's own formative period; by connecting the dumbstruck incomprehension that comes with childhood to their 40-story bluster, he inadvertently critiqued it. Six years later, they're a different band, and The Suburbs marks the culmination of that change. Where once stood a group of marching and occasionally baying idealists now stands something more considered, more complicated, and, well, more conflicted.
On paper, a concept record about something as banal as the suburbs sounds prone to terrible cliché. Fortunately, Butler spares us any neat and tidy disapproval of two-car garages and manicured lawns in favor of something considerably more measured and conflicted-- a full-bodied account of all the sweetness and strangeness of that life in all its multitudes. He aches just as much as he spits, reminisces just as much as he resolves, and veers between sounding like a revolutionary ("Ready to Start") and an old man ("We Used to Wait"), in turn painting a surprisingly nuanced picture of thirtysomething inertia. The Suburbs isn't so much about feeling old as it is about not always feeling young, and "that feeling" is bittersweet and complex. --Mark Pytlik
Photo by Sanchez and Kitahara
10. Titus Andronicus
The Monitor
[XL]
Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn appears on The Monitor as the voice of Walt Whitman, and his inclusion on the album is a fitting one. With their intricately wordy barroom sing-alongs, the Hold Steady, at their best, occupy some ideal middle ground between charged-up classic rock swagger and literary ambition. To the young people in Titus Andronicus, the Hold Steady are elder statesmen, and The Monitor is their attempt to equal their forefathers' classics.
Titus arrived more or less fully formed on 2008's The Airing of Grievances, playing their fists-up Jersey punk anthems as knotty, muffled fuck-yous. But The Monitor pushes everything onward and upward, past ambition and into something like insanity. The band tries out violins, pianos, horns, bleary folk interludes, gang-shout chants, an epic, multi-part, 14-minute finale, and a loony concept that messily marries a bad breakup to the American Civil War. But they do all this with verve and charm and confidence, anchoring their wanderings with 10-megaton chorus roars and riffs that sound like they've been around forever. Frontbeard Patrick Stickles bellows every lyric in a scraggly yowl, sounding like the world is crumbling around him and the only thing holding the sky up is the righteous noise from the band behind him. And all year, everywhere Stickles went, his monuments to personal desolation whipped up sweaty, joyous moshpits. To some kid somewhere, he's already an elder statesmen. --Tom Breihan
Photo by Erez Avissar
09. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
Before Today
[4AD]
The subjects of Before Today are pretty grim: the psychological torment of gender confusion ("Menopause Man"), the self-destruction that comes with infatuation ("Can't Hear My Eyes"), a woman who kills her maid out of a desire to preserve order in her estate ("L'estat (Acc. to the Widow's Maid)"), hating and disappointing your father ("Little Wig"). Steely Dan covered similar thematic ground, but Ariel Pink doesn't have Wayne Shorter and Bernard Purdie backing him up. So rather than mock with sophistication, he goes for mock-sophistication, using music from his childhood (commercial jingles, soft rock, and goth-pop) not as a means of fetishizing the past, but as a way of showing how it haunts both him and his surroundings. The entire album is a buildup to and comedown from "Round and Round", a pristine "hit song" about how the drudgery of pop product mirrors the drudgery of everyday life. And it ends with a Public Image Ltd. rip that echoes that band's assertion that revolutionary rhetoric is baloney.
All of this cynicism would be reprehensible were it not for Pink's a) songwriting ability and b) personality, both of which are considerable. Months later, all of these songs are still catchy, vibrant, and even pretty funny. At a concert at Chicago's Metro last month, a crowd of people danced to Pink's many vocal affectations, the singer's face contorting into grotesque characterizations of mock-hysteria. It was the ideal live realization of Before Today: seemingly phony but implicitly touching, both creepy and moving. --Tal Rosenberg
Photo by Morgan Levy
08. James Blake
The Bells Sketch EP / CMYK EP / Klavierwerke EP
[R&S / Hessle]
Each EP James Blake released this year functioned like a mini-essay on styles he could've spent whole albums with: the lurching, noisy The Bells Sketch, CMYK's reconstituted gospel and R&B, and Klavierwerke's quiet, warped constructions of Blake's own voice and piano playing. Not all of them were front-to-back amazing; what's amazing is that they all came out in the same year. Part of the fun of liking Blake's music was not having to wait long to hear his new ideas-- we got quarterly updates, a series of variations in which he somehow managed to develop a voice so strong that people are already imitating it. He still pledges allegiance to dubstep, but his actual sound is more like a computerized collage of black American music-- compositionally, he owes more to early jazz like Erroll Garner than Burial. For tracks that lean so much on space and silence, they're intense, even devotional, and as effective as they might be on the dancefloor (though I wouldn't know here in America), he sounds best when anchored by solitude.
Sometimes I hear good new bands and get the feeling that they tapped into something that had always been there and always had to be there. Instant familiarity. With Blake, it's like I'd walked into the kitchen and saw a big prickly triangular fruit in the fruit bowl. Didn't recognize it. Didn't know what to do with it. Sniffed at it. Poked at it. Tried it. Liked it. Couldn't stop eating it, and couldn't get the taste anywhere else. Newness isn't everything, so it helps that he's also talented and hardworking. About a year and a half ago, he hadn't even released his first single. Since then, his music has been reviewed here seven separate times. We'll stop when he gives us a reason to. --Mike Powell
Photo by Shannon McClean
07. Joanna Newsom
Have One on Me
[Drag City]
I keep staring at the box Have One on Me came in, this matte black object that fits a little strangely on my shelf. I'm thinking about moving it, how it'll have to go along with the other big ones, how that's sort of a hassle. Mostly I'm thinking about how I'm going to hang on to it for a long time-- not a thought I always have about music these days, even the stuff I really love. Something about Have One on Me feels very permanent, as though I've had it longer than 10 months, like it'll be around forever. Many of 2010's big albums were bolder, more immediate, pushed more boundaries, took bigger risks. Certainly, almost all of them were shorter. But few could match the richness, the scope, the humbling poise with which Have One on Me unravels.
Since Ys, Newsom's voice has deepened, evincing new character and grace. Her compositions flow more freely, the delicate bend and spindle of her music shedding some of the fussiness that marked Ys' epics. And here, the realms she conjures feel less fantastic, more familiar, decidedly habitable. This was the Joanna Newsom album that made converts of the naysayers, the one that was just as good as it was impressive, the one you could lose yourself in for days on end. If it didn't live on the turntable, it was a comfort knowing it was just there, in reach; returning to it throughout the year revealed new qualities of light, as Newsom's lyrics grew richer, her meanings more tangled with personal experience. Speaking on one part of Have One on Me almost seems to do disservice to the other parts; it is so large, it's tough to see all at once, and few records this year still feel like they have something to give even after dozens of listens. Have One on Me is just a big thing; an album of uncommon grace and refinement, a triumph of the LP form, and, yeah, a hefty old box full of records and pictures and words. And, now, a year's worth of memories. --Paul Thompson
Photo by Aaron Vanimere
06. Vampire Weekend
Contra
[XL]
In which a band of misidentified elitists empathetically comes to terms with their elitist hangups only to be sued for $2 million by a former luxury model-turned-teddy bear entrepreneur who currently lives behind gates in one of the most affluent areas of America. Contra is not for fighting, though. It's for finding common spaces in a world desperately clinging to outmoded binaries: us vs. them, red vs. blue, Oxford comma vs. no Oxford comma. So while it was easy to scoff at the now 52-year-old Contra cover star Ann Kirsten Kennis as she talked about squeezing millions out of Vampire Weekend in a misappropriation-of-image suit while looking like a Wasp-y caricature in Vanity Fair, maybe it's not that simple. Maybe her sign-off on the Polaroid was forged by its photographer, as she claims. Maybe rich people who own ornate vases and fluffy lapdogs can be exploited, too. Plus, a passing detail in the VF piece-- that Kennis' hair was just starting to grow back after chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer when she first saw the Contra cover-- is exactly the type of humanizing tidbit Ezra Koenig might allude to in one of his songs. (The case is still pending.)
"Don't call me a Contra 'til you've tried," sings Koenig near the end of the album. The line-- delivered with a new-found solemn eloquence-- could read as a defense against his band's naysayers. And while there will always be those who are turned off by their popped collars, flighty arrangements, and overarching neatness, Vampire Weekend graciously refuse to let those people define them. --Ryan Dombal
Photo by Sanchez and Kitahara
05. Beach House
Teen Dream
[Sub Pop]
As if you needed more evidence that the traditional boundary between mainstream and indie is becoming ever more difficult to delineate, consider that a movie-star-marrying top-40 idol and a shy dream-pop duo from Baltimore's avant-underground each released albums in 2010 with practically the same title. But if Beach House's Teen Dream didn't quite have the same chart impact as Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, the album represents no less of a populist breakthrough for its makers. (And, hey, a No. 43 placing on the Billboard Top 200 ain't too shabby either.)
Teen Dream did little to alter Beach House's core characteristics-- slow-motion beats layered with hazy keyboard drones, rippling guitar figures, and Victoria Legrand's melancholic melodies-- but greatly amplified them to the point of redefining the band's essence, from that of introverted knee-gazers into an assured, emotionally assertive force. Liberated from the textural fog that permeated Beach House's first two albums, Legrand's voice exposed its rough edges, greatly enhancing the sense of longing and hurt underpinning songs like "Lover of Mine" and "Silver Soul". Advance copies of Teen Dream first started circulating last December, and its billowy synth lines and sleigh-bell accents made it perfect winter listening. But the album made even more sense as the warm weather arrived-- Teen Dream captures Beach House in the midst of a great thaw, the frosty surfaces melting away to reveal full-blooded passion. --Stuart Berman
Photo by Eirik Lande
04. Big Boi
Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
[Def Jam]
Ladies and gentlemen, the best hip-hop album of 2007-- or 2015, take your pick. Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty became notorious for frustrating the bottom-line industry heads at Jive to the point where they just sat on it-- not enough easy-sell, cheap-hit material, they told Big Boi. They wanted a ringtone; they got "Tangerine", which proved problematic in that cell phones don't have big enough subwoofers. They wanted a "Lollipop" knockoff; they got "Shutterbugg", an 808 funk monster so uncompromisingly true to the Dungeon Fam legacy that its answer to Weezy's Auto-Tune was a Jimmy Spicer "The Bubble Bunch"-style robo-voice loop run through a vintage talkbox. Now, nearly three years after it should have been released, the long-stewing record not only sounds like a right-album-at-the-right-time classic, it sounds like something lesser artists are going to keep catching up to half a decade from now. Nobody does retrofuturism quite like the production team assembled here, and in advancing the sounds of mothership space-funk (Organized Noize's "Turns Me On" and "Fo Yo Sorrows"), Southern trunk-rattle (Mr. DJ's "Daddy Fat Sax"; André 3000's "You Ain't No DJ") and slow-jam gangsta soul (Lil Jon's "Hustle Blood"; Cutmaster Swiff and Big Boi's co-production "Shine Blockas"), the sound of Sir Lucious Left Foot is an exercise in recognizing traditions and pushing them miles ahead. Big Boi crowns it all with a lyrical acumen so detailed and charismatic-- acting as benevolent hustler, knuckle-dusting elder statesman, trickster smartass and street-level philosopher-- that he easily proves to the rest of the world what heads knew all along: there is no "that other dude" in OutKast. --Nate Patrin
Photo by Loren Wohl
03. Deerhunter
Halcyon Digest
[4AD]
Indie rock has been obsessed with fidelity for the last few years, carving out micro-genres based on how much audio fog cloaks a group's songs. With their bedroom recording roots, Deerhunter have floated along this competition with grace, a psych-rock band skilled at conscripting the sonic demons hiding in the margins of amateur recording. But there's also beauty to be found in the places where unfiltered sunlight finds gaps in the clouds, and the embrace of that contrast gave Deerhunter a valuable new weapon on the haunting Halcyon Digest.
The band's new trick is apparent from the first note on "Earthquake", one of the most head-turning album openers of the year, where the sharp edge of a scything backwards loop is softened with ambient washes and brittle electro-acoustic sounds as delicate as porcelain. From there, the album warbles expectantly between the band's phased-out trademarks and a higher-definition clarity, before fulfilling the promise of the opener in the heartbreaking "Helicopter", where the production is so shimmery and bright it's hard to look at it without squinting. When your major themes are aging and death, hiding your emotions under layers of tape-hiss can be a cop-out. On Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter demonstrate that the ache of mortality can be even more wounding in the bright glare of daytime than late at night. --Rob Mitchum
Photo by Leigh Ann Hines
02. LCD Soundsystem
This Is Happening
[Virgin / Parlophone / DFA]
Anticipated both by James Murphy's proclamations that this might be the final LCD Soundsystem album and by teasing videos of the band holed up in Rick Rubin's L.A. mansion, clad all in white, This Is Happening could only have been an event. And the album, like the title, delivers without a moment's hesitation: What could have been the document of a band fighting for its place in the pecking order turns out to be something far more personal and far more important. This Is Happening doesn't just keep step with the times; it's the portrait of an older, wiser Murphy, arch and guarded in equal measure, who's intent upon keeping two steps ahead of himself, never mind the competition.
However you want to process Murphy's biography and the whole New York rock backstory, the music on the album more than carries its own weight, interpolating Bowie and Eno's studio aura through several generations of downtown dance-rock and canonical house in a way that seems genuinely new; with This Is Happening, the "DFA sound" becomes less about its influences than Murphy's own worldview, as Murphy quits leaning on funk-punk clichés and makes every song count. Listen back to Sound of Silver, and a song like "Time to Get Away" sounds like filler, a way for Murphy to find his voice and bide the time-- at least, compared to "Pow Pow" and "Home", the only tracks on the new album that have any truck with old-school DFA-style funk at all.
Maybe what Murphy learned the most from Eno and Bowie is the importance of melody. On the last album, "You Wanted a Hit" would have been a jarring punk-funk thing, but here it's smoothed out and sadded up by a single, demure keyboard line; same goes for "Pow Pow", which starts with rote congas, stubby bass, and spoken ranting, and eventually blossoms into something gloriously harmonic and yearning. As on the last album, there's a careful balance between rockers and brooders, but even the more straightforward club jams, like "One Touch", are darker and more urgent than before. And if follow-ups to "Someone Great" and "All My Friends" are missed, "All I Want" and "I Can Change" offer potent emotional mile-markers for Murphy's state of being in 2010-- just one point in a line that he's clearly not tired of filling in. ("Never change," his ass.) --Philip Sherburne
01. Kanye West
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
[Def Jam/Roc-A-Fella]
Bearing witness to Kanye West's very public 2010 has featured many joys, none greater than watching everyone unspool his myriad updates, achievements, and indiscretions into piles of meaning. His persona went to cataclysmic places this year-- there were times when he deserved his own cable news ticker. But, somehow, West managed to transcend the preposterous talk show appearances, the too-good-to-be-true Twitter account, the live breakdowns, the Horus chain, the free-MP3 stunt(ing), the press blitz, the breakups, the make-ups, the dick pics, the furniture pornography, the Rosewood movement, the NO NEGATIVE BLOG VIEWING, the living paintings, the short film, and the rest of the lot. Through all that noise, we obsessed first and most deeply over the eye of the storm: the album. --Sean Fennessey
