15. Shipping News – One Less Heartless to Fear (Ruminance, Noise Pollution)
I randomly decided to check this out for no reason other than, well, I can't even remember. But then I remembered one I looked at Wikipedia and remembered that Shipping News is basically what happened when that glorious Louisvlille Math Rock sound evolved. You get ties to all the heavy hitters: Slint, Rodan, June of 44, the For Carnation. And you know what, it's fucking awesome and vital and way a way more important sounding record than it ought to be. Some of the songs are recorded live, which made me THINK it was a live album and I was missing something but no, those versions of the songs were just better live I guess. It grabs you by the throat, this album. When I was music director at KJHK I used to have a theory that if I could put a CD on and go about my business (doing stuff on the internet, doing the dishes, cooking dinner, playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater, drawing, etc) and not be distracted by how good a certain song was, then the CD often went into the “straight to shelf” pile. This one had no fewer than five songs that made me stop, check the title, and go “goddamn this is really fucking good.” Also, I say this has no business being as good as it is only because I thought this awesome gloomy math rock thing that I only recently became aware of and fell in love with a few years back was supposed to be dead but no, it lives on in these bros. And this album fucking slays.
14. Ted Leo & The Pharmiacists – The Brutalist Bricks (Matador)
Oh Ted, please forgive me for being incredibly late for the game with this one. I only started spinning the Brutalist Bricks before catching his drop-dead rad live show at the Jackpot a few months ago, and this one weaseled its way into my car stereo for a solid week. I kind of lost touch with Ted Leo after Shake the Sheets, which is to say I didn't really listen to Living With the Living hardly at all. Well, I assume I didn't, cuz I can't remember a single song from it. I wonder why. Maybe it wasn't melodic and poppy enough, too punk rock despite Leo's fierce punk rawk roots. This one has all that good old punk rock energy but with no abrasiveness and hooks to spare, and I'd go and say it's his best and most complete album since Hearts of Oak. Let's just say it kicks some motherfucking ass. And I'd be lying if I didn't say that the fucking amazing, Green Day musical spoofing video for “Bottled in Cork” wasn't a big factor in reminding me to put this on this year end best of list.
13. Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago (Matador)
For some reason, every time I see Jonathan Meiburg play I feel like he'd be better suited for a metal band. For some reason, this sounds like metal to me. Beautiful, gorgeously arranged metal that isn't metal at all but has all that huge grandeur and complexity of the music of our darker souls. Yet you see him on stage and he looks and acts like this sweet and affable guy. The Golden Archipelago is Shearwater's first album since Rook, the album in which they ceased to be an Okkervil River side project and kind of started kicking all sorts of ass on their own. This is another step up. Another gorgeous, haunting album anchored by Meiburg's delicate finger picking and riveting piano work. AND there's a local connection! Minus Story/Hospital Ships singer guy Jordan Geiger is a “multi-instrumentalist” which is awesome. Know what else is awesome, there's a dude named Thor in this band (and he posted this wonderful guide to tour etiquette earlier this year!)! But mostly, this album is just lovely and elegant (ELEGANT!) and I think you should listen to it.
12. Girls - Broken Dreams Club EP (True Panther)
I don't know why I always think that I don't like Girls. I think I read twitter and I am not very fond of Christopher Owens and then I listen to this new EP and all is forgiven, if there is anything to forgive. I don't think there is, he's just himself, and anyone that can write songs this great has to be pretty OK. The songs here are just as good and often better than a few of the tracks on Album. They're branching out (“Thee Oh So Protective One” borders on a South of the Border vibe without sounding corny), the songs are getting longer, and I think they're well, just getting better and I didn't even know there was anything to be improved upon. These songs sound like classics. Like songs I grew up with, songs from 40 years ago that people still think sounds fresh today. I want that guitar tone. I want to wrap it around my finger and put it in my pocket and take it out when I need to feel transcendent.
11. The Thermals – Personal Life (Sub Pop)
The Thermals always make my year end list. Mostly, this is because they consistently make really good records. Though Personal Life doesn't have quite the scope of The Body the Blood the Machine or Now We Can See, Hutch Harris' break-up record is as raw as anything they've done. Kathy Foster's bass seems up in the mix which hits right at the heart, the same spot the lyrics hit. I think this one might have got flack for not having the grandeur of their previous albums, but there's an immediacy here that can't be fucked with. It's as if the whole thing was written and recorded in a week and all that emotion and energy comes across in its purest form. I love the simple guitar lines, I love the simple straightforward lyrics, I love that this band does exactly what they want every time around and how their purity of spirit is what makes punky indie rock my genre of choice.
10. The Extra Lens – Undercard (Merge)
My love for John Darnielle and the Mountain Goats is widely known. I'm an insufferable geek. As a songwriter (in the fictional race in my head), only John K. Samson and David Berman ever give him a run for his money, but he's always in the top 3 and occasionally #1. The Extra Lens (nee the Extra Glenns) is his collaboration with Nothing Painted Blue's Franklin Bruno and this is their first album together in forever. At first it felt slight, but a lot of the best records feel that way at first. And then one song cracks the whole thing wide open. In this case, it was listening closely to “Cruiserweights” while stuck in traffic. “And there's a whole long list of other things I hate/ I had to starve myself all week to make weight/ Cleaveland, Ohio, 1985/ Almost out of the woods/ Awake and alive.” There's so much about a person in a time and a place. “Take a couple shots to the liver/ And remember what the food was like in prison.” It's a boxer as sad and wonderfully constructed as any of Darnielle's characters. And this is his SIDE project. Bruno's guitar lines and piano fills add something mysterious that absolutely separates them from the rest of the Mountain Goats back catalog. “Only Existing Footage” is a pretty perfect example of what the Extra Lens are and how they work, and more importantly, how they work best.
Undercard is a misleading title. It implies that this is a lesser work than I don't know, any other album when it's really a secret powerhouse. The little mid-album ditty “Some Other Way” makes me think of this powerhouse. The subdued verses and the punch in the throat chorus with Darnielle and Bruno harmonizing. There's “Ambivalent Landscape Z” which sounded amazingly strange the first few times I heard it, but I loved it for it's almost distracting verse riff and mismatched chorus and seemingly weird vocal line until I found it too infectious to think it was weird. There's “Rockin' Rockin' Twilight of the Gods” which sounds just like an old school Mountain Goats song even down to the recording quality (ok, it's not recorded into a boombox, but it definitely screams late-90s/early-00s. At the same time, there's this dreamy guitar work that separates it. Darnielle's masterful grasp of the story song is at work on “How I Left the Ministry” which, like a lot of these songs, feels light until it really sinks in. “None of this disaster would ever have happened/ If I had not been driving my neighbor's wife/ to the Alta Loma Days Inn where I registered us as/ A couple with a name I'm sure some other couple somewhere has.” “The autumn air was sweeter than a slice of wedding cake.” It so excellently captures the thrill of sin someone pious must have...and proves to be too much, what with the car wreck and all.
Point is, it's by definition a “sleeper,” even though I don't know what the definition of “sleeper” really is. It's a sneaky little bastard of an album. “Dogs of Clinic 17”! The closing track, with it's verses that keep building and building and adding and adding and you're just waiting for that chorus and then it comes and it's like “Jesus Christ, I thought that bridge was good but THIS WAS WORTH THE WAIT.” I'll take anything John Darnielle throws my way, because it's almost always going to be good and I can't think of the last time it wasn't. I mean, Get Lonely was a little weaker than the rest of his output over the last 10 years which has been somewhere between extraordinary and out-motherfucking-standing. So, you know.
9. Xiu Xiu – Dear God, I Hate Myself (Kill Rock Stars)
2004's Fabulous Muscles was huge for me. It came out my last semester of high school, right at the point where my punk rock self had burst into a bright ball of flames and rose from the ashes rose a bespectacled indie rock nerd in a cardigan. I'd started reading Pitchfork (at the time when it still had quality reviews and credibility) and Xiu Xiu was fawned over. It was WEIRD. Weirder than anything I'd ever listened to before, and kind of gay, and something just clicked when I listened to that album where I started recognizing artfulness in music. And then I missed a few albums and really liked 2008's Women as Lovers and well, Dear God, I Hate Myself just totally knocked me on my ass.
Dear God, I Hate Myself is easily Jamie Stewart's best record since Fabulous Muscles, and I'd go as far as saying it's just as good, but in a different way. I think I realized this after catching Xiu Xiu's show at the Bottleneck earlier this year where it was just Stewart and Angela Seo going fucking nuts on a bunch of electronics and cymbals and a Nintendo DS. It was much more raw than this record and all kind of blurred together like a wonderful fever dream of Stewart's quavery, about to have a nervous breakdown vocals and distortion. The album is all over the place, but in the good way. It's a sort of wonderfully diverse connect the dots adventure of highly emotional, borderline uncomfortable, often funny and ceaselessly beautiful songs made up of bleeps, bloops, and drum machines. I still feel like no one else on the planet is making the same kind of music that Jamie Stewart is making and that's a wonderful thing.
8. The New Pornographers – Together (Matador)
The New Pornoraphers have long been one of the bands I adore the most. They were there at the end of high school with Mass Romantic and Electric Version, they took me through college with Twin Cinema and the uneven but still quite good Challengers. Together is an album where the New Pornographers get their shit together, at least with Kathryn Calder as a full-time band member. She shines here, almost as much as Neko Case. AC Newman delivers the positive jams and Dan Bejar donates two of his poppiest, catchiest numbers to date and the gorgeous “Daughter of Sorrow.” This is the sound of a band navigating the familiar territory of the magnificent pop albums they've put out over the last ten years and adding a new sense of confidence that Challengers lacked, and Carl Newman does what Carl Newman does best: Find the precise ways his songs work the best with the incredible cast of musicians he has at his command.
7. Perfume Genius – Learning (Matador)
With his lean and devastating debut, Mark Hadreas pretty much establishes himself as the valedictorian of the Class of 2010 in my book. There are no staples of the hip music of today. No clicks, no whistles, no reverb, no irony. It's a guy, with a piano, and a voice that sounds like it's going to break at any moment singing these raw and frank songs in the vein of Xiu Xiu. Yet where Jamie Stewart approaches sexuality and abuse with a sort of horror movie-esque shudder and look away style, Hadreas just tells it like it is. Things are fucked up in these songs. A high school teacher carries on an affair with a student in “Mr. Peterson,” which provides the sort of details that aren't gruesome, but sad. “He let me smoke weed in his truck/ If I could convince him I loved him enough” and “He made me a tape of Joy Division/ He told me there was part of him missing/ When I was sixteen/ He jumped off a building,” he sings, all with a beautiful melody and a slight lilt to his piano. It's one of the saddest songs on a record that's nothing but sad songs. The song doesn't point fingers though. Sure, the student is being taken advantage of on a legal standpoint, he seems to be at that age where he's starting to make his own decisions, and seems to recognize the relationship as abusive despite feeling affection towards Mr. Peterson and gets acceptance from him where he otherwise does not due to his sexuality. And then Mr. Peterson kills himself for that same reasons of acceptance and the lack there of. The song is a perfect example of why this album works. It works because there is no finger pointing, no opinions being thrown about, just these hyper-emotional stories about what IS. It's raw, it's brutal, and most importantly, it's real.
6. Los Campesinos! - Romance is Boring (Wichita)
My love for LC! Is unwavering, and it was very hard not to put this record higher up on the list. Maybe it's just because they've already won the top spot once (twice!) already so I wanted to give some other bands a chance. This is the grandest thing LC! Have achieved to date, and it fits them remarkably well. It's also the most off the cuff and raw thing they've released, which I was initially taken aback by but you know, eventually came around. Where Hold On Now, Youngster was remarkably controlled and produced to achieve the most proper of sounds, this one has the same live quality as We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, but in full-album mode. It's unified, but it's off the wall and strange at times. It's an album ruled by gut feeling, and that is Romance is Boring's greatest strength. It's all the embarassing things we do in the name of love that we regret later on but accept. It's all the misery and heartbreak of romance but with a sense of humor and growth, and despite the ramshackle quality the band has never sounded more together. The brashness of “Straight in at 101” and “Plan A” works incredibly well with the somber beauty and sadness of “Who Fell Asleep In” and “The Sea is a Good Place to Think About the Future.” The same way the classic indie-pop bliss of “A Heat Rash in the Perfect Shape of the Show-Me State” compliments Los Campesinos! Own brand of hyper kinetic pop on “There are Listed Building.” It's a band of music nerds, and on Romance is Boring they're still wearing their influences on their sleeves, but this time around they're more themselves than anything.
5. The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt (Dead Oceans)
I really can't find a single thing wrong with this record. Every song is great, which is an incredibly rare thing for an album to possess these days. 2010 has been my year for using the word “eloquent” to describe music. I've been using it with an alarming frequency and I don't know why. I think it could be that I'm trying to appreciate things on more of a gut level, and those things that strike me as particularly beautiful come across like gorgeously crafted pieces of jewelery or something. Like The Wild Hunt, a gorgeous album if there ever was one. It's got that classic quality you find in albums by say, Nick Drake or Bob Dylan's earlier records. The Dylan comparisons are seemingly inescapable because Kristian Matsson just has that unmistakable rasp, but with a slight Swedish accent. The same passion and conviction is there, too, in both his guitar work and his vocals. This wasn't Matsson's only release this year, either. He also released the excellent Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird EP. I'm glad he did that, too, because had those five songs ended up on this one it would be too long. The Wild Hunt is a lean 10 songs, which I've always felt to be the perfect number of songs for a great album. It ensures relistenability and honestly, in the case of the Wild Hunt, there aren't any songs I would ever think of skipping. The aching beauty of closer “Kids on the Run,” the jaunty whimsy of “King of Spain,” the singing-from-the-bottom-of-a-well conviction of “You're Going Back.” I need all of these things. It's a perfect fall album. One great for leaves changing, sweater weather, scarves and visible warm breath. But it's also about renewal, too, and I imagine this plays well in Spring as well. It's an album in between extremes, that fits comfortably like gloves in the bottom dresser drawer. A beautiful record that feels timeless, and I think time will prove that point.
4. Titus Andronicus – The Monitor (XL)
There's nothing wrong with swinging for the fucking fence. Titus Andronicus prove that on their outstanding sophomore LP. Part Civil War concept album, part escape fantasty, part coping with adulthood in the modern world, there really isn't an album more unhinged and joyous than this one. It's brash and full of big guitars and even bigger guitar solos. Patrick Stickles delivers his trademark panic attack vocals but somehow with even more conviction this time around, taking twentysomething frustration, bottling it up, shaking the hell out of it, and dropping it off a cliff just to watch it blow up. “The enemy is everywhere” is the album's refrain whenever it needs to remind you that everyone is trying to fuck you over and that whether you're in Boston or Jersey, well, shit's the same pretty much everywhere. Like Titus Andronicus' debut, the Airing of Grievances, it's an album that unveils itself slowly and ties itself into a neat little package only after many listens. Yet for an album that takes a long time to really put all the pieces together, it's remarkably immediate. It's like a big “Fuck Yes” as soon as the guitars hit in opener “A More Perfect Union.” And in the repetition of “You will always be a loser” at the end of “No Future Pt. 3.” And all fourteen minutes of the album's masterful conclusion “The Battle of Hampton Roads.” Essentially, this is what happens when unbridled energy, off the cuff songwriting and amazing focus combine. It's a rare, rare thing, and if emo wasn't taken over by a bunch of pussies, this is what it would sound like today.
3. Owen Pallett – Heartland (Domino)
My nominee for the most artful and elegant album of 2010. It's an album of considerable depth, but it's never impenetrable and its tongue grazes ever so slightly over its cheek, whether it's in a particularly funny turn of phrase or in some playful orchestral motif ripped straight from some bizarre Disney film about a hyper-violent farmer and his conflict with his creater, Owen Pallett. Pallett has shown us his many gifts over the past decade or so, and here they all come together in a pretty wonderful way. From his string arrangements for people as hot as the Arcade Fire and as unknown as Jim Guthrie, and the extra something he brought to their albums with his string arrangements to the pop bliss of “This is the Dream of Win and Regine” on his debut LP as Final Fantasy, Has a Good Home.
I saw Final Fantasy a few years ago, and it was just Pallett up on stage with his violin and a loop pedal and it was one of the best shows I ever saw. His affable personality, his genuine thankfulness of the doting audience, and how the hell he managed to keep all the loops straight and churn out these avant-pop songs with seeming ease all won my heart. It's wonderful listening to Heartland over and over again, loving it a little more each time. There are so many little things buried in the nooks and crannies, and I haven't even begun to piece together the story he's telling. I know this is an album that will last. One that will be continually rewarding because well, that's just the kind of music Owen Pallett makes. Like I said, it's easily the most artful album of 2010, but these songs are so CATCHY, and to pull off pop songs like this, songs that are oftentimes very serious or heartbreaking or empowering or whatever, songs that are musically very complex yet you can easily hum along with them and get them stuck in your head all day, well, that's talent. Nothing feels out of place, and it feels like the truest capital A Album of 2010 in my book. Dear Owen, I'm sorry I never really listened to He Poos Clouds that much because it was called fucking He Poos Clouds. I was wrong to do that, because now I feel like I was missing out.
2. Superchunk – Majesty Shredding (Merge)
2010 was the year I finally got into Superchunk, about ten years too late. I should have been jamming “Slack Motherfucker” all thorough high school but alas, better late than never. Having written that, I feel embarrassed because I had all of college to fall in love with them and never did. I even worked at a college radio station for 3 years, goddamnit! What happened? Sure, I discovered them, and I even bought Come Pick Me Up on vinyl, but something was still missing. It's the same thing that I am still missing when I listen to Pavement. That obsessive adoration. That's what I found this year when, working at CD Tradepost, I put Indoor Living on one day having plucked it from the refuse of junk we sold there. I listened to it obsessively after that, even when the head honcho determined that indie rock would be too confusing for normal folk and would alienate them. Fuck that shit. I continued on my path to becoming a Superchunk groupie.
And what a perfect year for it to happen. The year where Superchunk release their first LP in something like 10 years. 2009 laid the seeds of this brand new love with the Leaves in the Gutter EP, which featured the excellent jam “Learned to Surf.” I was happy to see it here (and with a new rippin' guitar solo thing on the last verse, nice). I'd also been really into “Crossed Wires” and had picked up the “Digging for Something” single at Love Garden a few months in advance, instinctively grabbing it and forking over five bucks. And then Majesty Shredding hit and it was what I wished indie rock still was, which is to say that I wish indie rock was still important. It's my comfort food. The music that I came of age to, and Superchunk excel at indie rock. It's like they never quit, too. That's how good Majesty Shredding is. There's nothing rusty about it, it's jammed to the gills with energy and pulling off hooks that young bands dream about. Majesty Shredding succeeds because it doesn't even have to try to be good. Superchunk make it seem effortless. This boggles my mind. How they can pull of a song like the amazing closer “Everything at Once” is shocking to me. How do you write a song that hits you in the guts in just the right way? The way where you stand in front of the mirror in the hall and play air guitar and sing along because you can't help yourself? There are no fewer than 6 moments like that on this album. Those triumphant moments where Mac's head sounds like it's about to explode. Every track is great, and many of them are outstanding. “Rosemarie” and “Fractures in Plaster” are the songs I'm most envious of after the aforementioned “Everything at Once.” I think that's the key to unlocking my obsession with this album: It sounds like the music I want to make when I think about making music.
I tried to play this album out and it never happened. It stayed in my car for a solid month until it started skipping and I was too lazy to burn another copy. I still listen to it almost exclusively when i'm doing dishes or cleaning or cooking dinner because, well, it's the sort of music that's good to do all of those things to. It's propulsive, catchy, and is definitely an album that rewards those who invest in multiple listens (“Slow Drip” and “Winter Games” are two growers buried in the middle of the album that for some reason required a lot of time until I realized why they were great, but they were great nonetheless). And seriously, Majesty Shredding. How fucking awesome is that album title? All these fucking bands now, with their nondescript one word band names and self-titled debut albums or nondescript one word album titles. MAJESTY SHREDDING, fucking amazing, and the only album title I can think of that I like more in 2010 is my #1 pick.
1. Frightened Rabbit – The Winter of Mixed Drinks (Fat Cat)
This is ultimately the record I'm going to associate with 2010, and though I debated long and hard whether this or Superchunk would take the top spot, this one just felt right. I also feel like I'm atoning for criminally ignoring The Midnight Organ Fight in 2008, which was really the year I needed to be paying attention to it. It's easily one of the most agonizingly painful records I've ever heard, and one of those ultimate break-up albums. 2008 was a pretty shitty year. 2010, on the other hand, has been a pretty remarkable year on an emotional front. Things like politics, the news, violence everywhere and the general stupidity of Americans leave a bad taste in my mouth, but ultimately things are OK. This is a record that, to me, is about trying to be OK. Just trying to manage, in particular trying to manage after a devastating breakup and putting things back together. It's still miserable, but there's a little ray of sunshine there. Not like the dudes in Frightened Rabbit ever see sunshine (cuz they're from Scotland and it's gray there! Get it! This is my typical American ignorance), but there's a little bit of it there.), despite the fact that this record simmers in what frontman Scott Hutchinson called “typical Scottish glumness” in his AV Undercover session this summer. Granted, that was in reference to his cover of the Lemonheads “Confetti,” but nonetheless, it fits. And I eat that shit up.
Come to think of it, Hutchinson's performance of “Confetti” was what made me listen to It's a Shame About Ray a for the first time and subsequently a million times this summer. So perhaps Frightened Rabbit at number one is an homage to that. And, come to think of it, want to know something really funny? I was pretty lukewarm about this when it first came out. I know, right! Crazy! It's just as RAW as Midnight Organ Fight, you know? It's a lot cleaner, and it sounds like the band has gone from being Hutchinson's little outlet to a full-fledged band that does all sorts of interesting stuff to adorn his brilliantly clever and utterly sadsack lyrics. Like most Scottish songwriters, he wears his sense of humor on his sleeve. Granted, it's often gallows humor, but that's often the best kind. Come to think of it, there are a LOT of references to graves, lying in graves, digging graves, etc on this record. But for a record with so many references to graves to the point where I almost dubbed it “Graveyard Rock,” it's really bright and full of great pop hooks in all of the right places. The three big singles from this record nail it and serve as perfect slices of all the facets of the Winter of Mixed Drinks.
“Nothing Like You” is a blistering kiss off song that I read as a really great love song but only because I feel like I've been through this one before. “She was not the cure for cancer.” It sounds like someone shoulda used that one by now, you know? “Living in Colour” is that aforementioned brightness at its brightest, and it's this track that really perfects the album's contrast ratio. Tracks like “Foot Shooter” and “The Loneliness and the Scream” (which I've found was the album's FOURTH single), pull off the glumness with aplomb but man, “Living in Colour” is this motherfucking triumphant barn burner (or as close as a Scottish indie-rock band can get to a barn burner) that really makes me think this album is alot happier than a lot of it sounds. This song at least captures the letting go with grace. “You put the bood to my blue lips/ Forced the life through still veins/ Filled my heart with red again.” It almost sounds like an emocore song, but man, Hutchinson sings it with such conviction that it's beautiful. It's a “yes, that is EXACTLY how it feels dude” moment.
“Swim Until You Can't See Land” came out last year and I loved it then almost as much as I love it now. There's the little lilt of that guitar line that makes it seem misleadingly happy when it's really the emotional crux of the record. It has the grand dilemma: Are you a man or a bag of sand? Sink or swim. Let the baggage drag you down or fight your way through to set yourself free. Kudos, dudes. You made my new favorite post-post-break-up album of all time.
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