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All right, All Songs Considered have already done their Best of 2010, so I figure it's completely fair of me to start on my list of Best Albums of 2010. (Also, my upstairs neighbors are having a very noisy party so it's not like I'm going to be sleeping anytime soon.) Normally I don't do this because I think it's kind of obnoxious and I always leave something out and I feel like I'm being all Pitchforky Hipster but this is the year I stopped reading Pitchfork (and I didn't even notice--I think my brain just stopped processing their stuff around the time they started retweeting every single thing MIA said, and I've just now visited the site for the first time in months and it's all about the Tron OST and there's a giant Apple ad at the top and I still hate the writing. If this is what indie looks like now, how am I supposed to know what's cool?).
This is also the first year that most of my top albums have also been on the Billboard Charts. Obviously this is because I've stopped reading Pitchfork and am no longer in touch with the obscure things I need to listen to in order to stay cool. (My pet theory, which I much prefer, is that only baby boomers and pretentious indie hipster music nerds spend money on music anymore, so it's much easier for weird things like The Age of Adz to chart.)
So, without further ado, I present to you a list and then a series of the sort of wall-o'text paragraphs you've come to expect from me.
This is mostly for my reference, and so you know that anything not on this list was omitted from my Praiseworthy Albums due to unfamiliarity, not dislike. I may also have overlooked a few albums I have from this year because iTunes seems to have liberated a few from their release dates or, in one case, retconned it to 2008.
Travellers in Space and Time - The Apples in Stereo
Suburbs - The Arcade Fire
Broken Bells - Broken Bells
Forgiveness Rock Record - Broken Social Scene
Swim - Caribou
Paul's Tomb: A Triumph - Frog Eyes
Deadmalls and Nightfalls - Frontier Ruckus
Ya Ka May - Galactic
Have One on Me - Joanna Newsom
A Balloon Called Moaning - Joy Formidable
Fields - Junip
New Home - La Strada
July Flame - Laura Veirs
All Alone in an Empty House - Lost in the Trees
Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons
What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood - The Mynabirds
Together - The New Pornographers
Of the Blue Colour of the Sky - OK Go
Heartland - Owen Pallett
The Orchard - Ra Ra Riot
Songs for the Ravens - Sea of Bees
The Golden Archipelago - Shearwater
Port Entropy - Shugo Tokumaru
The Age of Adz - Sufjan Stevens
All Delighted People EP - Sufjan Stevens
Odd Blood - Yeasayer
There are also two albums I don't have complete copies of because my emusic credits haven't refreshed yet:
Riposte - Buke and Gass
So Runs the World Away - Josh Ritter
That makes an average of about 2 albums a month, which isn't bad--especially considering there are only two or three of these albums that fell out of my rotation this year. (For the sake of completeness, those albums are: Travellers in Space and Time, Forgiveness Rock Record, and Paul's Tomb: A Triumph. Actually, I was surprisingly disappointed by both the new Broken Social Scene and New Pornographers albums; I figured at least one of the two would be on my top list, but neither came close.)
I've never been good at ranking things, so this isn't going to be a list so much as it is an essay. (Are you surprised?)
There were two albums in particular this year that inspired a lot of thought and writing. I'm still not sure they are the best of this year, but they are both albums that hit exactly the right chord with me.
The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs I already touched on this a bit back in August. At this point in the year I have managed to make myself tired of at least the opening track to this album, but I still love its squishy, pop social commentary innards. I am, however, somewhat baffled that, out of all the great songs on this album, "Ready to Start" is the one that got the Grammy nod. I had to actually check the album to remember which one it was, and there are only about two songs on this album that I don't know forward and backward. I think, under different circumstances, I would really dislike this album for all the critical and popular attention it's gotten but it's just good so I can't bring myself to fault it for that. And that's such a good feeling.
Lucky Numbers: 4, 6, 13, 15
Sufjan Stevens - Age of Adz I'll admit right off the bat that I love this album because it confuses the crap out of me (or rather, because in so doing it has inspired what passes, for me, as a near infinity of fictional writing). This thing has wormed itself into my thoughts as pervasively as... I don't even know. A Yeerk? And for all that, I'm still figuring it out. In the grand scheme of things, there are only about three or four songs on this album that I really like (but "Vesuvius" is just... yes. I may have a bit of an obsession with that song). And, as I read in at least one review, the middle section is a muddled mess, and while most people seem to regard "Impossible Soul" as some kind of revelation I can't help but grimace at the autotuned "Stupid man in the window" section every time, and it completely destroys the end of the album for me. I've taken to interpreting the whole thing in tandem with All Delighted People to see if my demonic possession idea pans out but I don't like that EP as much and so my critical tinhatting is at a bit of an impasse until I'm a bit more bored.
Lucky Numbers: 1, 6, 8
There are a few other albums that weren't quite as all-consuming as the above two, but still had me coming back to them again and again.
Laura Veirs - July Flame This is the year that I discovered Laura Veirs, and I don't know what took me so long. She's wonderfully sparse and folky, and she sings beautifully sunny and warm songs that make me imagine some kind of idyllic west coast forest town with log cabins and fires. (Secret diversion: I actually like Year of Meteors more than this album, but even though I only just heard it this year it's from 2005 and so it doesn't count.)
Lucky Numbers: 2, 8, 11, 12
La Strada - New Home I actually rec'd this a few months ago, and I stand by it. It fills the need for sea shanty orchestra music (dare I say it?) just as well as the Decemberists. (At least in a year without a Decemberists album.) I feel like I've made that comparison a few too many times, so I should also point out that they're a bit more rollicking, more drinking-song-dense, and they still play small venues so you can high-five them after they've had you dancing for a couple of hours. Plus you don't get that weird, slightly uncomfortable "is something this pretentious still art?" feeling you get from Colin Meloy. They're also not really like the Decemberists. And I'm partial to them because they put out a really excellent album this year, yet few people have heard of them. This should be remedied.
Lucky Numbers: 1, 3, 9
Of the Blue Colour of the Sky - OK Go This album was probably my biggest surprise this year. I came into it on a whim, long after it was new to everyone else, and found that it was actually more than pop hooks and had a touch more of the easy, somewhat rough, grace some of their earlier recordings had (there's a difference, honest, between "Hello, My Treacherous Friends" as it appears on their initial EP and on their eponymous album. The EP version is much sweeter, human, and not-overproduced, which is probably their greatest studio album crime). It packs a punch at the start, but the middle section does peter out a little and veer into weird before settling into something almost but not entirely unlike OK Go.
(Tangent: I had a dream this morning in which "Back from Kathmandu" was a running theme, involving being vaguely aware that the whole thing was a dream, and being shunted back and forth between several alternate universe apartments while I tried to figure out if this was the only way things ever changed. Also, my iPod alarm was going off and dream-me was getting increasingly frustrated with the dream-iPod for not turning off.)
Lucky Numbers: 2, 3, 11, 13
Special honorable mentions go to:
Broken Bells - Broken Bells for being an album I quite liked despite the fact that James Mercer basically broke up The Shins to make it, before I got to see them live.
Odd Blood - Yeasayer for being one of the only albums with a sustained beat strong enough not to slow me down while biking, and for the song "Ambling Alp" which spent several weeks stuck in my head and still stops by for visits.
All Alone in an Empty House - Lost in the Trees I am still not entirely sold on this album, but I saw them live at Millennium Park this summer and they were amazing. This isn't quite as bad as the divide between the quality of the Dirty Projectors in concert vs. their albums, but All Alone in an Empty House doesn't quite capture the timbre and depth of the band in person. Still a good album, though.
Fields - Junip In all honesty this should've been on my "albums I've come to over and over" list, but I couldn't think of much to say on it other than that. It's good. I've almost written songfic for the first track, but I stopped myself when I started referencing World of Warcraft in it.
The party upstairs still isn't over, so I'm going to go sulk with my headphones on. In the meantime, if there's an album I missed or you want to challenge my opinion on any of these, have at it!
This is also the first year that most of my top albums have also been on the Billboard Charts. Obviously this is because I've stopped reading Pitchfork and am no longer in touch with the obscure things I need to listen to in order to stay cool. (My pet theory, which I much prefer, is that only baby boomers and pretentious indie hipster music nerds spend money on music anymore, so it's much easier for weird things like The Age of Adz to chart.)
So, without further ado, I present to you a list and then a series of the sort of wall-o'text paragraphs you've come to expect from me.
This is mostly for my reference, and so you know that anything not on this list was omitted from my Praiseworthy Albums due to unfamiliarity, not dislike. I may also have overlooked a few albums I have from this year because iTunes seems to have liberated a few from their release dates or, in one case, retconned it to 2008.
Travellers in Space and Time - The Apples in Stereo
Suburbs - The Arcade Fire
Broken Bells - Broken Bells
Forgiveness Rock Record - Broken Social Scene
Swim - Caribou
Paul's Tomb: A Triumph - Frog Eyes
Deadmalls and Nightfalls - Frontier Ruckus
Ya Ka May - Galactic
Have One on Me - Joanna Newsom
A Balloon Called Moaning - Joy Formidable
Fields - Junip
New Home - La Strada
July Flame - Laura Veirs
All Alone in an Empty House - Lost in the Trees
Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons
What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood - The Mynabirds
Together - The New Pornographers
Of the Blue Colour of the Sky - OK Go
Heartland - Owen Pallett
The Orchard - Ra Ra Riot
Songs for the Ravens - Sea of Bees
The Golden Archipelago - Shearwater
Port Entropy - Shugo Tokumaru
The Age of Adz - Sufjan Stevens
All Delighted People EP - Sufjan Stevens
Odd Blood - Yeasayer
There are also two albums I don't have complete copies of because my emusic credits haven't refreshed yet:
Riposte - Buke and Gass
So Runs the World Away - Josh Ritter
That makes an average of about 2 albums a month, which isn't bad--especially considering there are only two or three of these albums that fell out of my rotation this year. (For the sake of completeness, those albums are: Travellers in Space and Time, Forgiveness Rock Record, and Paul's Tomb: A Triumph. Actually, I was surprisingly disappointed by both the new Broken Social Scene and New Pornographers albums; I figured at least one of the two would be on my top list, but neither came close.)
I've never been good at ranking things, so this isn't going to be a list so much as it is an essay. (Are you surprised?)
There were two albums in particular this year that inspired a lot of thought and writing. I'm still not sure they are the best of this year, but they are both albums that hit exactly the right chord with me.
The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs I already touched on this a bit back in August. At this point in the year I have managed to make myself tired of at least the opening track to this album, but I still love its squishy, pop social commentary innards. I am, however, somewhat baffled that, out of all the great songs on this album, "Ready to Start" is the one that got the Grammy nod. I had to actually check the album to remember which one it was, and there are only about two songs on this album that I don't know forward and backward. I think, under different circumstances, I would really dislike this album for all the critical and popular attention it's gotten but it's just good so I can't bring myself to fault it for that. And that's such a good feeling.
Lucky Numbers: 4, 6, 13, 15
Sufjan Stevens - Age of Adz I'll admit right off the bat that I love this album because it confuses the crap out of me (or rather, because in so doing it has inspired what passes, for me, as a near infinity of fictional writing). This thing has wormed itself into my thoughts as pervasively as... I don't even know. A Yeerk? And for all that, I'm still figuring it out. In the grand scheme of things, there are only about three or four songs on this album that I really like (but "Vesuvius" is just... yes. I may have a bit of an obsession with that song). And, as I read in at least one review, the middle section is a muddled mess, and while most people seem to regard "Impossible Soul" as some kind of revelation I can't help but grimace at the autotuned "Stupid man in the window" section every time, and it completely destroys the end of the album for me. I've taken to interpreting the whole thing in tandem with All Delighted People to see if my demonic possession idea pans out but I don't like that EP as much and so my critical tinhatting is at a bit of an impasse until I'm a bit more bored.
Lucky Numbers: 1, 6, 8
There are a few other albums that weren't quite as all-consuming as the above two, but still had me coming back to them again and again.
Laura Veirs - July Flame This is the year that I discovered Laura Veirs, and I don't know what took me so long. She's wonderfully sparse and folky, and she sings beautifully sunny and warm songs that make me imagine some kind of idyllic west coast forest town with log cabins and fires. (Secret diversion: I actually like Year of Meteors more than this album, but even though I only just heard it this year it's from 2005 and so it doesn't count.)
Lucky Numbers: 2, 8, 11, 12
La Strada - New Home I actually rec'd this a few months ago, and I stand by it. It fills the need for sea shanty orchestra music (dare I say it?) just as well as the Decemberists. (At least in a year without a Decemberists album.) I feel like I've made that comparison a few too many times, so I should also point out that they're a bit more rollicking, more drinking-song-dense, and they still play small venues so you can high-five them after they've had you dancing for a couple of hours. Plus you don't get that weird, slightly uncomfortable "is something this pretentious still art?" feeling you get from Colin Meloy. They're also not really like the Decemberists. And I'm partial to them because they put out a really excellent album this year, yet few people have heard of them. This should be remedied.
Lucky Numbers: 1, 3, 9
Of the Blue Colour of the Sky - OK Go This album was probably my biggest surprise this year. I came into it on a whim, long after it was new to everyone else, and found that it was actually more than pop hooks and had a touch more of the easy, somewhat rough, grace some of their earlier recordings had (there's a difference, honest, between "Hello, My Treacherous Friends" as it appears on their initial EP and on their eponymous album. The EP version is much sweeter, human, and not-overproduced, which is probably their greatest studio album crime). It packs a punch at the start, but the middle section does peter out a little and veer into weird before settling into something almost but not entirely unlike OK Go.
(Tangent: I had a dream this morning in which "Back from Kathmandu" was a running theme, involving being vaguely aware that the whole thing was a dream, and being shunted back and forth between several alternate universe apartments while I tried to figure out if this was the only way things ever changed. Also, my iPod alarm was going off and dream-me was getting increasingly frustrated with the dream-iPod for not turning off.)
Lucky Numbers: 2, 3, 11, 13
Special honorable mentions go to:
Broken Bells - Broken Bells for being an album I quite liked despite the fact that James Mercer basically broke up The Shins to make it, before I got to see them live.
Odd Blood - Yeasayer for being one of the only albums with a sustained beat strong enough not to slow me down while biking, and for the song "Ambling Alp" which spent several weeks stuck in my head and still stops by for visits.
All Alone in an Empty House - Lost in the Trees I am still not entirely sold on this album, but I saw them live at Millennium Park this summer and they were amazing. This isn't quite as bad as the divide between the quality of the Dirty Projectors in concert vs. their albums, but All Alone in an Empty House doesn't quite capture the timbre and depth of the band in person. Still a good album, though.
Fields - Junip In all honesty this should've been on my "albums I've come to over and over" list, but I couldn't think of much to say on it other than that. It's good. I've almost written songfic for the first track, but I stopped myself when I started referencing World of Warcraft in it.
The party upstairs still isn't over, so I'm going to go sulk with my headphones on. In the meantime, if there's an album I missed or you want to challenge my opinion on any of these, have at it!
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