Best of 2010: 40 Unfuckwithable or Nearly Unfuckwithable Jams Pt. 1

Despite being a kind of crappy year for albums, twas a good year for songs. I actually had to NARROW this list down, because there were just too many albums I thought were either mediocre to pretty good (or in some cases, pretty great but didn't feel like putting them on the album's list) that had at least one AMAZING song. It's more diverse than the album's list, and I mean diverse to be comical because my music taste, clearly, isn't very diverse at all. I used to have a problem with that, felt guilty for not listening to hip-hop or black metal in my spare time and compensated by just respecting genres and the people who like those genres and just listening to what makes me the happiest.

40. Frog Eyes - “A Flower in a Glove” from Paul's Tomb: A Triumph

I don't think I will ever love Frog Eyes, but I'll always throughly enjoy their records. Carey Mercer keeps good company in his off time (see: Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug in the always pretty great Swan Lake) and I think that keeps him sharp. Though Paul's Tomb wasn't as concise or as great an album as Tears of the Valedictorian, it's opening track “A Flower in a Glove” is an excellent example of a great Frog Eyes track. It's long as shit but it's totally engaging.

39. Shipping News - “Bad Eve” from One Less Heartless to Fear

A standout track from the new Shipping News LP that I thought was a live album because there are cheers at the end of some of the tracks and because I never listened to Shipping News until this album. I don't know why, considering the pedigree this band has. “Bad Eve” was the song that made me look up why I thought this song sounded so familiar to me and I saw June of 44 and Slint and Rodan and I was like “Ohhhh, this sounds like mid-90s Louisville math rock.” There's less build up than I was expecting, but something about the phrase “barnyard Mussolinis” really made me pay attention, and thus landed Shipping News the #15 spot on my year end list. Well, that and the awesome guitar swells and such in the last minute of the song that make my sometimes drunken head nod over the keyboard.

38. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - “Round and Round” from Before Today

I remember Ariel Pink from my first days of KJHK, when one of his totally fucking weird albums was in spotlight rotation and I played it and was like “This is fucking weird.” Since then, he's gotten conventional, and from what I listened to of Before Today (which is to say, I listened to the album a few times through and honed in on a few tracks and then just listened to those for a long time and put them on mixes), he's well, not REALLY that conventional because this album is still pretty weird. I mean, he answers some random phone call mid-song before the whole thing cascades into that gorgeous hook and plays around with going back to some of the groovy verses before realizing that the hook is too good to let go of. The rest of the verses feel like he's impatient to get back to the ebullient bliss of that chorus, despite the fact that the verses are exactly the kind of well played verses need to be to support an epic, classic sounding chorus like the one on “Round and Round.”

37. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - “Say No To Love” from the “Say No To Love” 7”

I feel bad for having a falling out with the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I loved their eponymous debut for a solid couple of weeks before I decided that it was too derivative of My Bloody Valentine's early Eps with TOO much of a reverence to vintage 80s and 90s indie-pop for me to take seriously. And I don't know why I thought this, because I was like “This sounds just like 'Sunny Sundae Smile'” when I first heard it and I was kind of in heaven. Christ, why is music so CONFUSING. No more panning for stupid reasons. This is a wonderfully catchy jam and yes, I will adore it and cast no judgment for similarities because, well, it's just really great. I'm sorry, POBPAH, I don't know why I thought for a whole year that you weren't totally fucking wonderful.

36. Karma Vision - “Cowboys and Indians” from Actor John Goodman EP
MP3>>>Karma Vision - "Cowboys and Indians"

(Not the actual song, and sounds nothing like the actual song, but is just a lovely video of three of them playing in what appears to be the tunnel under the Kansas Union)
This EP was so weird and great, that picking a favorite track was hard. It's not exactly up my alley, but I was so amazed that Bobby Sauder could actually sing after a couple years of watching him front Mammoth Life, I was quite wooed by Karma Vision. This EP is weird and wonderful, and probably the best that the Lawrence underground has to offer. The saxophone SHOULD sound out of place and Kenny G-esque, but it works so well and I don't even know WHY. I feel like these guys smoke a lot of weed and somehow manage to fight through that stoner haze and make great, borderline dopey music that's really fun and inventive and packed with all sorts of cool potential that has me patiently awaiting their debut LP.

35. The Magnetic Fields - “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” from Realism

After Distortion, Realism seemed like a lost cause. So I never really listened to it, except for the first track, this one. Which is classic Stephin Merritt. It works its way onto the list because I had it stuck in my head all the time, and still do. The melody of that chorus is just plain unfuckwithable to the nth degree. For sure.

34. Spoon - “The Mystery Zone” from Transference

Ah, Transference, the album I never listened to all the way through. Well, maybe once. It just didn't stick. I'm sure it's really good, I just never felt in the mood. This song though, it somehow ended up on a mix and I ended up digging it pretty hard. Spoon just sound more and more like vintage Spoon nowadays that it sounds easy. Britt Daniel's is like “What is this? Wadded up Kleenex? Oh wait, it's a new Spoon jam, here” and there you go. That's not meant to be disparaging, it's meant to be a compliment. Someone who can write righteous jams like this one time after time after time after time should get some sort of plaque. On his teeth.

33. Xiu Xiu - “Gray Death” from Dear God I Hate Myself

(Was fucking TAKEN all caps by their live show. Something about this dynamic really, really works for me. Maybe I hate myself, I don't know, but I like this)
From the get-go, Dear God I Hate Myself hearkens back to Xiu Xiu's breakout 2004 LP Fabulous Muscles. It's a bit more weathered, darker, and feels more personal. “Gray Death” with it's refrain of “Beat beat me to death” is catchy and utterly horrifying. Jamie Stewart's quaver through the verses is haunting and scary and yet, this is a song you can move to. Dear God I Hate Myself often feels like dance music for people who consistently “forget” to get their anti-depressants refilled, and the chorus and the aforementioned chant-a-long refrain made this one of the highlights of Xiu Xiu's show at the Jackpot earlier this year, and an excellent introduction to Stewart's excellent new record.

32. The Smith Westerns - “Imagine Pt. 3”

I don't think this was on an album, or it's on their album that's coming out next year, but I don't really care and fuck if this song isn't good. And these guys are all under 20 or very close to being under 20! It's messy and lo-fi and shitty sounding but fuck, those backing ooos and ahhs and the pre-chorus and well, all of it win me over with some very wonderful and sloppy charm. It's a perfect example of how a great song can shine through even the murkiest of waters, and thus, one of the things I love most about lo-fi.

31. Beach House - “Zebra” from Teen Dream

I would have thought Teen Dream was a beautiful album if I ever made it through the damn thing without falling asleep. Partially because it's dreamy, ethereal pop music and partly because I thought it was really boring to listen to that one all the way through. I'm probably wrong on this one, and I'll probably regret that feeling later on. I always liked this track because it was track one and then after that interest just stopped dropping. I like the guitars, they're dreamy. I think the vocals are pretty good too, kind of husky. And that chorus sounds like “Anything You Want, You Got It” to a point where I almost can't listen to the song but then it subtly changes and there are some synthesizers and it's just a beautiful track. Gorgeously arranged and produced, I wish I had more patience for Teen Dream, and I'm patiently waiting for the mood to strike.

30. Best Coast - “When I'm With You” from Crazy For You

Best Coast put out their first full-length this year, and this was the year I stopped full-on adoring Best Coast. There's nothing even WRONG with their music, I just thought that every song on this album was boring except this one, and it's because this song was a single before it was an album-track. All of Bethany Cosentino's singles before this were amazing, and Crazy For You felt like this shallow and obnoxiously twee over-saturation of boringness. This song still kills though.

29. Surfer Blood - “Floating Vibes” from Astro Coast

I was all about Surfer Blood until they seemed like nothing more than a handful of influences thrown together in a room that ended up being a creative writing workshop. And they were the person in the corner who never talked and always had kind of OK stories and just stole ideas from everyone else. This track, though, this is what I think Surfer Blood sounds like when they're sounding like Surfer Blood and not the Shins or something.

28. MGMT - “It's Working” from Congratulations

Oh how I wrote this band off SO hard upon their debut, Oracular Spectacular. It was music for car commercials, plain and simple. Music for MTV to use in their reality shows. Music for beautiful hipsters to get laid to, who knows. Catchy, ok sure, but heartless. Well, after hearing Congratulations, I retract my previous beliefs of heartlessness in the music of MGMT because if Congratulations is anything, it's an album this band wanted to make. And it REALLY pissed their record label off, and considering that this is a major (naturally, who ELSE would be pissed off by a really good and weird and wonderful record like this?), KUDOS MGMT! This is psychedelic reverence at its finest, and I'd dare say that Congratulations is an album that people won't really appreciate until 10 years from now. Fuck, even I don't properly appreciate it but I know there's a weirdness there that's going extinct in major label records. This doesn't sell because it's too artful, and I didn't even KNOW MGMT were artful!

27. Yeasayer - “Madder Red” from Odd Blood

(I don't particularly enjoy Kristen Bell, but I thought this video was great)
Yeasayer's debut All Hour Cymbals had a really good song on it that made the list the year it came out and I can't even remember it. I remember some drums. Then they had a track on the Dark Was the Night comp last year that I really loved, and that track persuaded me to listen to Odd Blood which I really liked. This track though, fuck, it's a dark and beautiful and mysterious tune that sounds caught in some weird time warp. I don't know where it comes from. The melody is beautiful, tribal-esque, and I HATE it when bands try to sound tribal! The drums kick ass exactly when they're supposed to kick ass. The guitars thrash and swell in and out in just the right places. The vocals are soulful but with the kind of gutwrenching plainness that pushes that gives lines like “it's hard enough to keep pretending I'm worth your time” an added punch in the face because hey, it might as well be you.

26. The Extra Lens - “Dogs of Clinic 17” from Undercard
MP3>>>The Extra Lens - "Dogs of Clinic 17"

(Couldn't find this one anywhere, but since you already have a copy of this record, it's the very last track. This is a video of the excellent runner-up "How I Left the Ministry")
I could barely choose a favorite from this record. So, I sat and thought about the one I remembered the most, and it's this one, the closer. The one that's all build up to some amazing outro chorus thing that totally pays off. It's an almost simplistic build. Typical verse, synthsizer break, Verse with backing vocals, normal break, FUCKING OH MY GOD CHROUS THING. “There's a liiiiiight in the window/ There's a light in all of us trying to get free/ There's a liiiight in all of you who hear my song/ There's a viiiirus eating its way through me.” John Darnielle is the king of my heart, and it should be known that my internal monologues are often carried out in his voice like some kind of wonderful shoulder demon.

25. Wolf Parade - “Cave-O-Sapien” from Expo 86

This is the song that worked best for me on Expo 86, which was content to be all over the fucking place. I really dug that album, but “Cave-O-Sapien” felt like Spencer Krug at his weirdest and most wonderful, burying this amazing pop song in this grandiose end-of-the-world number. The ascending/descending riff SHOULD seem pff in hindsight but god, it sounds like something the Four Horsemen would blast as they ravaged the earth. The chorus is practically buried, and supports Danny Rowland's logic of choruses being overrated. If a song is good enough, a slight change every now and then will do, but this song has so much drive and sounds like everything is crashing down around it that a proper chorus would feel out of place. It would also dampen the “I've got you/Til you're gone” bit at the end when the synthesizers come in.

24. LCD Soundsystem - “All I Want” from This Is Happening

I'm the asshole waiting for James Murphy to make a record that is nothing but songs like this and “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” and “I Can Change” (which is actually a really danced-up track). These beautiful, introspective and heart wrenching tracks with great beats that don't feel to removed from his more brash dance numbers but fuck are they good. I particularly like this one because the main riff sounds just like the main riff from that one Brian Eno song I like (is it the first track on Taking Tiger Mountain? Anyway, this one is good. I really have no business writing about LCD Soundsystem.

23. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - “Bottled in Cork” from The Brutalist Bricks

(Seriously, video of the year. No contenders.)
The video for this song convinced me to FINALLY listen to the Brutalist Bricks. It has an almost Hearts of Oak vibe, this song, but it also feels like he carried over his return to punk rock roots of Living With the Living and Shake the Sheets. The result is a fun ditty with some fucking backbone and a perfect sing-a-long chorus.

22. Diamond Rings - “All Yr Songs” from Special Affections

I didn't listen to this album. I heard this song late last year and wished I'd put it on my list because I love it's simple little overbearing drum machine bedroom pop song so very much. Maybe I didn't want to ruin it (like Best Coast ruined “When I'm With You For Me” a little bit, granted, it still made the list). I will listen to it next year, I'm sure. I just heard it was wildly different. But at least he tacked this one on at the end because it's goddamned perfect with that rare infinite-relistenability quality.

21. The Thermals - “You Changed My Life” from Personal Life

A lot of my fondness for the Thermals lies in their ability to pull of great pop songs that sound so simple but stick somewhere in the gut region for years and years. This song is mostly bass and drums, with a little guitar riff here and there, which feels new for the Thermals but I'll be goddamned if this band isn't crafting one of the best complete discographies of any modern indie rock bands. This track is the closing argument of the break-up themed Personal Life, and it does everything a great last track to a great break-up album should do: It assesses the aforementioned misery and what not in a new light and attempts to move on (Granted, the ones that end in total self-destruction (see: The Mountain Goats Tallahassee) are good too).

Best of 2010: 15 Albums That Fucking Ruled

2010 was the year I shut myself in and only listened to what I enjoyed. After three years of KJHK, I needed a complete detox to get obsession with the NEW out of my system and as a result, ended up listening to music from the 90s or the last five years or so. I couldn't help it, it just happened, and now they year is over and I've spent it dodging bands because they have boring names and really, if you have a band name like Tennis or Braids or whatever, I'm going to have a hard time you put as much thought into your music. A closed-minded way of thinking, I'm sure, but damnit, there's not enough time! So, I listened to the top 10 albums here dozens and dozens of times because they created a sort of comfort zone. They were records made by bands I loved that I think keep getting better. Amazing sophomore albums and post-break-out albums. Records made by people in other bands who typically make great records and one really stunning debut, which made me feel sad that there weren't more debuts but then again it felt like all the debuts I heard were the same old rehashed shit that every other band was debuting. Fuck genres and a reverence to the 1980s and “but most of all, it sounds like Cocteau Twins.” I don't want a band that sounds like Cocteau Twins! I want a band that sounds like a band that I haven't heard before! So, with this list, the only exceptions in my head are Girls (who sound like EVERY great band I've ever heard but still sound very much like themselves) and The Tallest Man on Earth (who will never escape the fact that his vocals are reminiscent of Dylan, but also again, sounds distinctly like himself). This is what made sense to me in 2010.

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.

Best of 2010: Honorable Mentions

Before posting my Top 15 Albums of 2010 list, I feel it's my duty to honor some albums I put a lot of time into but still felt a little let down by. This is me trying to analyze the sadness that came when I realized I didn't like certain albums as much as I wanted to.

The National – High Violet
(4AD)

This was supposed to be the masterpiece. Everyone read it as the masterpiece, but something just never quite worked. I absolutely love about five songs on this album and I think the rest are kind of redundant and boring. Pretty, sure, and they got better upon further listens but it's still an album where I listen to the jawdropping, motherfucking stunning opener “Terrible Love” and skip to the last half of the album. It's strange, really, because I've never found an album with such a strong back half. Usually it's vice versa, but yeah. Even “Bloodbuzz Ohio” got boring after the 10^th listen or so. And while I love “Conversation 16” and “Lemonworld,” they all fit into the same pattern as the rest of the kind of pretty but boring songs. They're just more descriptive, and on a record where all the songs kind of sound the same, you pick the best ones and discard the rest. At least that's how High Violet worked. I feel guilty for not liking this. Boxer blew my mind, and I knew this was going to be great. There was so much hope pinned on it and I tried and tried until I had to quit pretending and just concede that sometimes I just don't get it. I have the sinking suspicion that a couple years from now this one's gonna come back around and knock me on my ass real proper like.

The Hold Steady – Heaven is Whenever
(Vagrant)

It's rough admitting that your favorite band made a kind of just pretty good album. The problem with Heaven is Whenever isn't the songs, exactly. Sure, there are a handful that just aren't up to the caliber the Hold Steady usually fire at, and I'm sure a lot of this might be the departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay. Who knows. It just feels a bit off. The biggest problem is that the songs don't seem to form a cohesive album, which is a Hold Steady first (with the exception of maybe Almost Killed Me, but hey, they were just getting started). “The Sweet Part of the City” is interesting new territory, as is the epic finale “A Slight Discomfort” which grew on me a lot when “Barely Breathing,” “Our Whole Lives,” and “Rock Problems” kind of lost their luster. “The Smidge” is probably the worst Hold Steady song ever. “Hurricane J,” “Chips Ahoy” sequel “The Weekenders,” and “We Can Get Together” totally kill it though. At first I thought it felt rushed, but given that the Hold Steady had been releasing an album a year for about five years (roughly), it's more likely that this is overworked. All the wonderful spontaneity is gone, or severely lacking. Still, I like this album. Even the mediocre songs are still enjoyable because, like I said, it's my favorite band and I love them like a mother loves her kin. Unconditionally. Well, Craig Finn at least. I wish the other guys hadn't looked like they were having the worst time ever when I saw them in Omaha this year.

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
(Merge)

I'm not a detractor for detractor's sake on this one, I just thought it was a little boring and I think its message is a little too grandiose and simplistic to be as affecting as Funeral, which was able to remain specific while being universal. The Suburbs is also a very long record, and I think it suffers for this. I think I'm having the same reaction as I'm having with the National's High Violet. It's a big, beautiful album that just feels like something is missing. Feels a little disingenuous and I don't really know if that's the band's fault, it just seems that with all the effort to execute precision, emotional rawness gets left at the door. Sure, it pops up here and there, and those moments offer a glimpse at how great the album could have been if it didn't feel overwrought.

Blitzen Trapper – Destroyer of the Void
(Sub Pop)

Blitzen Trapper continue to refine their throwback rock and roll with pretty excellent effect. “The Tree,” which features some of the loveliest harmony vocals all year by Alela Diane, makes me weepy every time I hear it, and the rest of the album makes me want to drink light beer and hang out on the back of a pick-up truck in the 70s. Though Blitzen Trapper tend to have one incredible song every album (Furr had its title track, Wild Mountain Nation had, er, well, maybe that one didn't have one) once their albums sink in they feel a bit light. The songs are great, no doubt, and the band has their craft down, but I still feel like there's something keeping them from becoming a really great band. It's probably originality, but given how well they pull off everything they do, I can't really complain too much.

Wolf Parade – Expo 86
(Sub Pop)

Ah, another wildly different album from Wolf Parade because, thank god, they can't stand still. Though not as strong as At Mount Zoomer, it's much weirder than anything they've done, in both music and lyrics. Spencer Krug's songs are kind of bizarre in the best way and Dan Boekner's are, actually, Boekner's songs are kind of the same fist-pumping Springsteen-esque anthems he's always done, but they're really good here nonetheless. The dancey, synthy, New Ordery vibe is quite cool, and while I wouldn't want Wolf Parade to sound like this forever, this experimentation makes me think that Wolf Parade is becoming the side project to Krug's Sunset Rubdown and Boekner's Handsome Furs. And considering that both those bands have been getting better and better and better, well, Wolf Parade making non-amazing albums is totally acceptable.

So Cow – Meaningless Friendly

Saw these Irish dudes open for Ted Leo and they totally ruled my world. Easily the best opening band I saw all year. Really great, ramshackle poppy punky indie rock with the kind of precise lyrics that I expect from A.) Really good songwriters and B.) Really good Irish and/or Scottish songwriters (they both share that same sort of glumness that I eat up). This is a really fun LP that may as well be the groundwork for this band's breakout, which will hopefully be Meaningless Friendly's follow-up because, well, yeah, these guys are great.

Frog Eyes – Paul's Tomb: A Triumph
(Dead Oceans)

Though as impenetrable as any Frog Eyes records due to Carey Mercer's violent vocals and weirdo songwriting (that is meant as a total compliment), I found myself listening to this a lot earlier in the year. It's good to see they're on Dead Oceans, which is still in my opinion one of the best labels that's yet to totally become a Merge or a Sub Pop or a what have you. It will, and over the past couple years they've been building a strong back catalog. This is another fine addition. This is my contender for album I'm going to regret not putting in the Best of 2010 proper in 2011, I'm sure.

A Precursor to Year End Lists In Which I Skewer A Bunch of New Bands That Either Suck or are Boring

A few months back, Stereogum had a feature about the "Class of 2010": The 40 best new bands of the year. I was curious and, since they had MP3s from all the bands, I downloaded in hopes of finding something new and maybe driving away my own curmudgeonly dissatisfaction about the state of modern music. And it didn't do anything but make me MORE curmudgeonly, and I wrote a little blurb about every song. After the first ten or so, I realized I shouldn't publish the list because it just shows how out of touch I am, but by the end I figured I didn't care so much if I was out of touch if this is what was being touted as the new hotness. I thought maybe it's just because Stereogum had gone corporate in the last year (try navigating that site without getting hassled into signing up for a credit card or seeing some terrible movie) or so, but indie music has gone corporate too so maybe it was a match made in heaven. I mean, hey, their totally contrived top 50 albums of the year list gave the top spot to Kanye West, so maybe indie music is dead. LONG LIVE MAINSTREAM ART ROCK!

Anyway, these are kneejerk reactions that feature my standard apprehensions and my disdain for the "We're from Brooklyn, so we get an edge" attitude. So now, as a precursor to my actual Best of 2010 list, here's this:

Stereogum's Top 40 Best New Bands of 2010

¼ of these bands are from Brooklyn.

Active Child - “Wilderness”
Man, people love these dramatic, falsetto infused vocal turns. This sounds like a more desolate TV on the Radio with some basic drum machines that they probably got from listening to Burial. It goes on precisely a minute and a half too long, into a swell of soft synths and that same old same old drum machine. Ambience and atmosphere, I guess. IT IS ATMOSPHERIC. Ok, sure. Snorefest.

Balam Acab - “Regret Making Mistakes”
Is this band's name an anagram or something? Oh here we go, the school of Panda Bear and obnoxious synthesizers laced with analog instruments! Great! Again, ambient atmospherics and the vocals sound like a muted version of the theme song for Battlestar Galactica. It's mostly pretty boring, I mean, I can imagine some kid in Brooklyn in a tanktop and a haircut toiling away over his macbook for a few days to make this song, but man, those two days would have been better spent doing lines and playing vintage Nintendo games. Is this something house? Shit house? OK!

Baths - “Hall”
This one is kind of fun! Glitchy like everything else, reeking of someone's laptop, but there's an organic rhythm to it that I'm nodding along to with a certain amount of pleasure. Again, music from the school of Panda Bear and Animal Collective like everything else, nothing I could imagine being a fun live show, but pleasant background music nonetheless.

Best Coast - “Boyfriend”
“OH MY GOD REAL DRUMS!” I thought when this kicked in and then I realized it was Best Coast, who I had my grievances with in my review of their debut LP MORE SONGS ABOUT GETTING STONED AND MY CAT. It's a nice song, but grows more innocuous upon each listen which is probably the point but I don't buy the fake nostalgia and I don't buy the fake yearning. Or maybe it's real, who knows, I don't know, it sure doesn't sound convincing. But oh man, compared to these laptop house bands, maybe I was too hard on ol' Best Coast. Maybe if they just stick to singles...

Blondes - “Spanish Fly”
Man, who picked these bands? Another boring, wispy light electro band with airy vocals, lots of reverb and sampling and blah blah blah blah blah. And what's with all the boring ass band names! Blondes? Baths? And what was this song? It's over already and nothing happened! There were some pianos, I think, and a drum machine, but everyone has a drum machine now. It's the new real drums! And what did this song have to do with Spanish Fly? Was it supposed to get me horny? Because if anything, it made me NOT horny, unless horny means hating on new music that I don't understand because I don't live in Brooklyn.

Braids - “Lemonade”
SPEAKING OF BORING BAND NAMES THAT START WITH B! Why do all of these bands sound the same. The exact same. Hey look at that, there's another drum machine, there's some synths, there's some wispy vocals (female this time). I don't actively dislike this one though, the girl's voice is nice, and remarkably dynamic compared to the rest of this trash, but still, it's nap music. Actually, the background music here sounds like the song they played on VH1's late night music video show back in the day. What was it called? Nocturnal emissions? I forget. This sounds like a nocturnal emission. OH LOOK THERE ARE THE ANIMAL COLLETIVE HARMONIES! I really like Animal Collective and all, but they've spawned a monster. So far, none of these bands have any spark, and this makes me sad and crotchety.

Candy Claws - “Silent Time on Earth”
First impression: THIS SOUNDS LIKE CHRISTMAS MUSIC. More in the throwbacky vein of best coast, airy vocals, I think there are sleighbells and sounds remotely dream poppy. It sounds like beach-gaze but made by kids who never really went outside and just stayed inside and made dreamy electro wisp-pop on their laptops.

CEO - “Come With Me”
Annnnd, back to the laptop dance music, although this guy thankfully didn't run his vocal track through a bunch of processors and effects and it sounds like an actual guy, which in turn puts emphasis on the melody, which is nice! The beat's boring, there's yr typical weird electro-vocalnoise thing going on like in all those Passion Pit songs, but really, the best thing this song has going for it is that the singer isn't that great a singer, and it makes the song kind of interesting.

Cloud Nothings - “Didn't You”
Well, if I didn't already like this band, I would probably be losing my shit right now because THEY ARE PLAYING ACTUAL INSTRUMENTS (whatever that means, in this case it means guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard) and oh man I really like these guys. Of the recent crop of dime a dozen lo-fi revival bands, these guys have the hooks. No one seems to pay attention to hooks any more, and maybe that makes me biased to everything else because honestly, a decent hook is all I really need most of the time. This is a song I'd come back to, and I know these guys are worth putting money on. Maybe not a lot of money, not like break it big money, but their debut Turning On is a fantastic little record and this song, which is new to me, is in the vein of the best songs on that record. Maybe less economical than those jams, but I'm not complaining. It's got the hook!

Cults - “Go Outside”
Well, great, more music that sounds the same as some other shit. Cute little toy xylophone melody, I mean, the whole thing is nice sounding, but it just sounds like some more shit from Brooklyn which is apparently the only place bands make music these days. The Stereogum write up for this one is barfy to the max, reminding me why I quit reading that site in the first place.

Dale Earnhart Jr. Jr. - “Vocal Chords”
Wow, they really DID run out of band names! I'm diggin' on this song though. A more American Jens Lekman vibe, sweet sweet pop music with just the right amount of whistling. I mean, it's nice, really, other bands, is it so hard to be nice! It's nice and it feels heartfelt even if some of the vocal turns sound like the white-kids-do-motown thing that's all in vogue. Still though, that's a goddamned horrible band name. Please don't let it stick, guys! You can always make a new myspace page! Always!

DOM - “Living in America”
Do you like Crystal Castles and Justice? We're starting a band in Brooklyn. Are you beautiful enough to be in this band? OK, these folks are from Massachusetts, and it sounds much better than Crystal Castles. Wall of sound synth pop blah blah blah. It's mercifully short, which is this song's best asset.

Dominant Legs - “Young at Love and Life”
Reading the blurbs for these songs is like reading every awful thing I hate about music writing. Every cliché, every blank meets blank with one of the blanks ALWAYS being either punk or surf and namedropping upwards of five or six bands because these bands don't sound like anything but the sum of their influences. Sure, they might sound nice, like this laid back tune from San Francisco, but I mean, is anyone going to be listening to this five years from now? A year? A month? A week? Tomorrow? Does anyone care? I mean, the point is probably “IT DOESN'T MATTER THIS IS IN THE NOW” but man the now is fucking boring.

Frank (Just Frank) - “Couer Hante”
HEY LOOK AT ME, I AM THE THEME SONG TO A SHOW FROM THE 1980s. Stereogum defines this as “Coldwave,” and I wonder, is there some vault where all the different waves are kept, just in case the music scene dies and needs to be repopulated. I mean, how will I know if something is coldwave or chillwave? HOW WILL I KNOW! This song sounds like a band trying to be New Order and nothing else at all.

Frankie Rose and the Outs - “Little Brown Haired Girls”
Back to Brooklyn with music from the girl who was in all the hip bands (Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts, ok so just two) and then went solo and it sounds like, well, music from the former drummer of Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts. It sounds like that, but two years ago, outdated, and like I'm going to fall asleep at my goddamned keyboard. This song goes nowhere. There's a nice vocal line that someone can compare to Pam Berry and then blow their brains out.

Games - “Everything is Working”
No, it isn't. The Stereogum write up for this one was just a bunch of different band names. No lie. Seriously, though, do you get what I'm saying about the boring band names? One name, something common, something forgettable that someone can easily make fun of because every other band has a one word something common, something forgettable band name.

Gayngs - “Faded High”
Despite the “soft rock” inspired sound this apparently has, it's from Minneapolis (a city which tends to churn out pretty solid bands) and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon has something to do with this, so I'll give this track 7 and a half minutes of my attention and I will...enjoy it. It's a lovely, sparse bit of slowburn electronica. There's a krautrock vibe to it that I'm digging, and the interplay of all the different voices is really well done and the end result is quite beautiful. I know I bitch about song lengths but this is one of those songs that gets to be 7 and a half minutes long because well, it's doing something. It's building something, and it needs all that time and isn't just repeating the chorus a million times like everyone else who thinks their pop songs need to be five minutes long. This is my favorite so far from the “Class of 2010,” who all seem to be flunking out.

Givers - “Up Up Up”
Again with the shitty, one word boring band names! 6/40 so far! I like this because it has real guitars. They're doing the Dirty Projectors WE LOVE AFRICAN MUSIC EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SO WHITE thing and really, I'm kind of past the point of getting annoyed by it. I am annoyed by the fact that they just sound like Dirty Projectors little brother with half the creative spark. It's fun and light and it's quite listenable but man, white kids, get over playing African music. But then again, I'm the only person who listens to Graceland and feels embarassed for Paul Simon. Christ, I just clicked on their myspace and these people even LOOK like Dirty Projectors!

Glasser - “Home”
Oh sad, this isn't an Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes cover! DRAG! No, just kidding, I'm glad it's not. This band's name treads dangerously close to joining the rest of the boring band name ilk, but it's kind of different and it's a verb so they're safe for now. Very sparse, the only instrumentation seems to be hand claps, and some faint percussion before some synths wail in under the gorgeous girl vocals and the wash of harmonies that hit midway through the song. It's pretty, lovely even. Elegant, too!

Gold Panda - “Quitter's Raga”
Great, more glitchy electronica. Is this glitch-house or witch house or which house? Or bitch house? Or shit house? Cold house? Chill house? Bitch wave? Shit wave? I give up. Nice sitar, guys.

How to Dress Well - “Ready for the World”
Bon Iver vocals, pseudo-R&B backing chick harmonies, ATMOSPHERICS, all tweaked with electronics and synthesizers. Thanks, Brooklyn. Is this what music sounds like now? There's a very simple beauty to it, but man, I was done after about ten seconds. Sry bros.

Julian Lynch - “Rancher”
Aaaand, back to the midwest! Maybe I'm just biased and Brooklyn-phobic because all the people I ever met who were obsessed with Brooklyn were also a bunch of starfucking hipster dweebs. So when I hear slightly experimental folk from the midwest, I get happy and it feels warm and unpretentious and lacks the kind of “I WANT YOU TO PHOTOGRAPH ME WITH YOUR DIGITAL SLR AT A RAVE OH MY GOD” outlook on life. I want more of this sleepwalker pop. It's beautiful and quiet without being boring. Simple and minimalist without putting me to sleep. I'm engaged, I want more. I want this album. Simple without being simplistic.

Lower Dens - “Tea Lights”
Ah! Jana Hunter's new band! I always liked strangely liked her albums despite finding them a bit non-descript. She's got a nice voice. Baltimore's got some nice stuff happening too, like Wye Oak who have all of a sudden become really awesome. Lower Dens, I'm digging. Drifty alt-folk for a hazy day.

Minks - “Funeral Song”
Turbo boring band name 7/40. Apparently this band is Blank Dogs meets the Cure. They sure do sound a lot like the cure, but without any of the sad gothy charm and plenty of “Hey, we're from Brooklyn so we'll take two or three things you've heard already, cobble them together and say we're a band.” Though boring, at least it's short.

MNDR - “I Go Away”
Horrible band name, but this is a pretty solid jam. Nice lady vocals over a sparse but really nice backing track. Way chill. Seems like the sort of song that would come on shuffle and I'd have to stop what I was doing to see who it was. Girl's voice reminds me of some other singer I really like.

Mountain Man - “Soft Skin”
Oh yeah! I remember hearing an interview with these girls on NPR. I think they do Appalachian folk songs, although I thought they did it all a capella, but I won't lie, the acoustic guitar here is very welcome and well, this song is just plain fucking gorgeous. Timeless, which I think is what they're going for.

Mr. Dream – Scarred For Life
Another Brooklyn band that sounds like nothing but a combination of other post-punk bands I've heard. Great, you sound like the Pixies. GOOD JOB. Now sound like a band someone hasn't heard, please.

Perfume Genius – “Learning”
I've quite enjoyed Mark Hadreas' debut LP, for which this song is the title track. Haunting, heartbreaking piano songs with quavering vocals with heavy subject matter and coming like a cross between Xiu Xiu and Hospital Ships. This is one of the most beautiful songs I've heard all year, and it's incredibly refreshing when the thing to do today is to make the most glitch heavy, cluttered and messy music as possible. So, when something simple and gorgeous and deeply affecting like this comes along it cuts right to the core of my bitter curmudgeonly heart and I say “yes, please keep making records because this is amazing.”

Prince Rama - “Lightening Fossil”
Annnnd, back to Brooklyn where the music still sounds like a bunch of hipsters jerking each other off and making music inspired by booty jam music videos from the 1990s. I'm just kidding about the booty jams, since the drums here are more rhythmic and “tribal,” but it does sound like a bunch of hipsters jerking each other off.

Tamaryn - “Love Fade”
Atmospheric shoegaze. I'm digging on this one. It seems indebted to My Bloody Valentine instead of just playing shoegaze to cover up the fact that they can't write decent songs with loads of reverb and distortion. This is quite lovely.

Tame Impala - “Runway, Houses, City, Clouds”
Psychedelic music from Australia. I'm feeling pretty good about this one, mostly because they're not from Brooklyn. It's kind of a cool song, but a little boring. The guitar riffage that's floating in and around this song is strangely disturbing and I think I like it. And the chorus is pretty OK, but the rest is kind of like a heavy dose of reverb and muddled mixing. But I suppose that's the point. If I heard this on the radio, though, I don't think I'd change the station.

Tanlines - “Real Life”
Another band that's not from Brookly...oh wait, duh, of COURSE they're from Brooklyn. It's pretty obvious, what with the squealing synthesizer and the “tribal sounding” drums, the stupid band name, and the sweet embrace of tropacalia which white kids LOVE these days. I think mostly the song is just boring and lazy. It's really slickly produced, which I think makes it SOUNDS like it should be better than it actually is, which is a song with a boring verse and a chorus that borders on OK, because all the elements all manage to work together without completely falling apart, but it ends up being forgettable once it gets back to the verse and you realize this “synth-pop” song is almost five fucking minutes long. Skip!

Teengirl Fantasy - “Cheaters”
Oh thank GOD they're not from Brooklyn, although they might as well be. They SOUND like they're playing for Brooklyn even though they're all going to college in Ohio. They have a really great and mega ironic Angelfire website that is already leading me to dispatch this band as a bunch of lazy college kids trying to make dance music, which is what it sounds like. Great, you took a soul sample, good for you! It makes the song sound even more like a mess and where exactly is your kick coming in? I spot three places where you seem to be trying to make it happen but it never really does.

Tennis - “Marathon”
Ahhh French pop loving Denver duo! Hello pseudo-middlewestern compatriots! It's so nice to hear music that isn't from New York! It's a personal preference, really. Oh lovely pop music! Breezy and pretty and unpretentious and just made for the sheer love of nice music. And it's actually the proper length for a pop song of this caliber. The length where when it's over, I immediately click the back button. Good job, Denver! Even if you couldn't come up with a band name that wasn't boring.

Twin Sister – “All Around and Away We Go”
Groovy! This song actually feels structured. Maybe it's cuz these folks are from Long Island and far enough away from the cesspool that is the Brooklyn music scene, which I'm not a part of and know really nothing about other than the fact that every other band on this list is from Brooklyn and almost all of them suck. This song was a jam, though.

Warpaint - “Elephants”
Man, lovely female voices abound in 2010. Even in songs I don't really like, oftentimes the vocals are pretty or at least good. This one though, this is pretty good all around. A little jankety with the drums, but the guitar work is clean and hypnotic. Even if the song is a little too long and gets way too cluttered at a couple points when they're trying to be climactic, I'd definitely be into checking out Warpaint's full length.

Wild Nothing - “Chinatown”
I've listened to Wild Nothing's LP a few times but I can't remember for the life of me what it sounds like. I know I thought it sounded good enough to listen to a few times, but they seem to suffer from Broken Social Scene-itis, in which they make solid music that just isn't very memorable. I can't really explain what it is about “Chinatown” that makes me really like it. Again, it's not particularly memorable, it's lacking a really strong hook but it's very pretty and raw but still very ornate, if that makes sense. There's a lot of really pretty stuff at work here, and honestly, maybe it will be memorable after like, the twentieth listen or something.

WU LYF - “HEAVY POP”
Sounds like shit Frog Eyes.

Zola Jesus - “Sea Talk”
Oof, this is gorgeous. I was expecting something more witch-house and all I got was a very beautiful song with a very beautiful but real lady voice singing a melancholic song over some New Ordery synths and a minimalist drum machine. Emphasis goes right to her pipes, and fuck, this one just wins. It's the same thing I get from Antony and the Johnsons, if slightly less organic.

The Boo Radleys - "Barney (...And Me)" 7"

The Boo Radleys - “Barney (...And Me)” 7”
Creation, 1994
Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2009
Price: $.50

Oh beautiful Britpop from Creation Records! The Boo Radleys were one of those band I highlighted after printing out a master list of indie-pop bands when the twee phase kicked off, and I never really found any of their stuff until after that phase ended. I did see this 7” and jump, though. I mean, fifty cents for a mid 90s alt rock record on Creation? Yes please! “Barney (...And Me)” is a pretty terrific song, accented by a stupid little flute melody that is strangely endearing and some sweet boy-girl harmonies. It's comfort food music. Guitars, nice melodies, simple stuff. “Barney (...And Me)” is a single from their third album, Giant Steps, which I need to listen to now. The b-side “Zoom” is a wonderful, Sarah Records-y tune that like some forgotten Field Mice song, what with the strummy clean guitar, little guitar riff, and forlorn sadboy vocals with a brighter hook. Like all my favorite 7”s, this is one of the treasures I hoped to unearth...despite not actually unearthing anything, just listening to records I already had and should have listened to ages ago. Alas! No dwelling on the past! This is a pretty excellent little 7” that is most certainly going to lead to digging up the rest of the Boo Radley's discography.

Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk/ Boo and Boo Too - Baby Boo Split

Baby Bird Don't Drink Milk/ Boo And Boo Too – Baby Boo Split
Lovely Sea, 2009
Acquired: Release show, New, 2009
Price: Pretty sure it was free with the price of admission.

Ah yes, the 7” of Lawrence's two most up and coming bands of 2009 released by the label Seth and Edmond started to release this record. It's weird that this came out only a year, year and a half ago, because 2009 sounds so long ago. Both songs sound like songs you put in the middle of an album. Neither are really overly catchy or anything like that, and maybe that's the point. Baby Birds' contribution, “3,” was one one of their myriad CDRs, and actually come to think of it, the closest they come to writing a pop song. It's all in the drums though. All in the drums. It's really long though, or FEELS really long. I just listened to it through at 45 RPM and still thought it was kind of long, but yeah, if Baby Birds have a song they can call a song that was really awesome, it's probably “3.” They probably sound completely different though, if they're still a band that is. Same with Boo and Boo Too, if they're still a band, their contribution “I Am the Lorax” pry sounds nothing like what they sound like now. Granted, “I Am the Lorax” sounds more like an Ad Astra Per Aspera song crossed with I dunno, some gloomy Bauhaus with layers and layers of reverb as usual. It feels a little slight, but that's just my opinion and I'm just bummed that “Ripper's Hell” never got a proper release. Although, that's going under my assumption that Boo and Boo Too broke up, which I really have no evidence of. I just assume that when bands stop playing shows they've broken up...or been cannibalized by other local musicians to form new bands. Who knows.

Mike Bones - "What I Have Left" 7"

Mike Bones - “What I Have Left” 7”
The Social Registry, 2008
Acquired: Seth gave it to me, Used, 2009
Price: $0

Seth was cleaning out his 7” collection when I was at his house last year and gave me an extra copy he had of this saying it was good. And he was right, it was good. It's the single to the album A Fool For Everyone, which I've never listened to, and I hadn't ever listened to this single until now. It's a great, sad song that builds and builds and the little guitar/piano melody that runs through the whole thing is just great, and it's very interesting hearing everything build and build around it especially towards the end when it gets kind of epic. Can't really describe it, though I SHOULD be able to describe it, pretending to be a music critic and all. There are strings, which makes anything epic, naturally. The B-side is a remix of the song by Social Registry label mates Sian Alice Group, and despite my general wariness of remixes by other bands given that they end up sounding just like the original but with a beat or some shit cut out, the song is good enough that the remix actually sounds OK. It's more spare, and more rearranged than remixed, and while it kind of totally falls apart at the end, it's mostly good. And now I'm going to get A Fool for Everyone, because if the songs are even half as good as this one, it's sure to be a solid record. Even if it sucks, this song is gonna be one of those songs that floats around. Years from now, some random person will find it in a cutout bin and buy it for a quarter and go “Hey, this song is really great whatever happened to Mike Bones?”

Listen to the song, it's very very good. Very classic singer-songwriter sounding.

Bomb Pops - "Paler" 7"

Bomb Pops - “Paler” 7”
Audrey's Diary, 1992
Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2007
Price: $.25

Strummy Minneapolis band whose guitars all sound out of tune on the A-side, “Paler.” I actually think I thought this band was the Blow Pops, who I'd read about somewhere in my search for a million indie-pop bands. It's quite ramshackle and though quite nice, kind of forgettable and a little too long. The insert tells me that Audrey's Diary released Black Tambourine's “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge” 7”, which I would pretty much kill to have, but that's beside the point. OK, wouldn't actually kill, but man, I wish I had that record. The B-side has a couple of nice little instrumentals that kind of amble along. It's all very nice, but hardly anything happens on this 7”.

The Blow Pops - "Stop!" 7"

The Blow Pops - “Stop!” 7”
Get Hip Records, 1990
Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2007
Price: $1

Power pop from Milwaukee with just the right amount of throwback charm and not overshadowed by the mid-90s college rock vibe that lurks under the surface (in that the guitars sound slightly like REM). Awesome vocal harmonies for the really nice and authentic sounding 60s psych pop vocals. Honestly, the label design is pretty reminiscent of the Capitol labels on Beatles 45s, and kind of perfectly matches the sound coming off of this thing. This is their first single, and while “Stop!” is quite good, the b-side “I Know Nancy” grabs me a little bit more. It's the harmonies, and the kind of mash of sound that SHOULD sound jumbled but just sounds warm and comforting. This is a fun, Nuggets-inspired 7” that, while not terribly original, is still quite enjoyable and done right.

Blondie - "One Way Or Another" 45

Blondie - “One Way or Another” 45
Chrysalis, 1979
Acquired: Salvation Army, Used, 2002
Price: $.50

One of the very first records I ever acquired on my own, shortly after getting a turntable in the very early 00s. I had just started driving, and frequently drove over to the Salvation Army on K-7. I got this and Devo's “Uncontrollable Urge.” I'd always heard that Blondie was somehow associated with punk rock, which I very much loved at the time, and it was the only other coolish thing there besides Devo, so that's why I have this. And it's kind of rad. Well, it would be rad had I not heard it in a million movies, movie previews, and TV commercials thus making it really fucking annoying. Oversaturation sucks, and I really can't think of why I'd go out of my way to listen to this song when I can just turn on the TV and wait for the next Swiffer commercial or whatever. Thus, Blondie wasn't really punk rock at all, but the kind of right place at the right time New Wave that grafted itself so easily to the mainstream. Maybe Debbie Harry was just too pretty, because really, she is. I see the cover to Parallel Lines at work pretty often, and I'm always amazed by how good looking she is. The b-side, “Just Go Away,” is well, it's fucking great and gritty and fun and not at all oversaturated. Not that that makes it better. If I took both songs and played them for someone who had never heard them, that person would immediately be like “'One Way Or Another' is so much better!” but in this universe, where “One Way or Another” is totally fucking lame and obnoxious because it's so frequently associated with some horribly un-engaging (is that a word? Disengaging? That doesn't sound right either) film protagonists running from something in a montage. “Just Go Away” rocks and is practically soulful, though, so this 45 earns its keep in the record collection.