#2 - Frontier Ruckus - Eternity of Dimming

Frontier Ruckus - Eternity of Dimming

Quite Scientific, 2013

For all of the dystopian horror stories the internet has made a reality, one thing it has done is made being a music fan so much easier. Frontier Ruckus is a band I would have been totally oblivious to had I not seen the band’s banjo cover of the theme from The Legend of Zelda on Kotaku. The band was misidentified as a bluegrass duo, and while bluegrass exists in one of my musical blindspots, I liked what they were doing enough to put them on my radar. A year later I recognized the band’s name on the AV Club’s excellent Undercover series, and their version of Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” resonated with me because you could tell how much they had lived with that song. That song was a staple of the Summer of ‘97, and though the subject matter was WAY too advanced for my 11-year-old brain, that’s one of those songs that inhabits my soul. I took this as the universe telling me to do a little digging and found the band’s most recent album, Eternity of Dimming.

It’s hard to fully express how much I love this album. I don’t know if I relate to another album more. These songs mine the 90s suburban upbringing with such heartbreaking detail. There are so many shared experiences in Matthew Milia’s songs, and I think that’s why the band’s fanbase is as loyal as they are. Paradoxically, Eternity of Dimming’s greatest strength is that it is totally exhausting. 20 songs, a nearly hour-and-a-half long runtime, and a 5,500 word lyric sheet makes it seem inscrutable, but this is one of those albums you obsess over. It’s so rich with experience, and even if that experience is a relatively standard world of suburban soccer practices, bike trails, and trips to Kohls with one’s mother, Milia finds huge emotional clarity by relaying the tiniest details. All of this without even talking about the band’s bluegrass fused indie folk, which uses David Jones’ banjo to add a unique flavor to the band’s sound. I listened to this album obsessively throughout 2013 while we were living in Minneapolis and I associate it with that city (which works a little since the band are upper midwesterners hailing from the Detroit suburbs). I’d ride my bike and listen to this with the same obsessed passion that I would ride my bike and listen to Jets to Brazil in high school. Though it’s all a bit much, that just means that there is more to love. It’s a beautiful meditation on nostalgia, and I’m already nostalgic for the times when I listened to this album two or three times a day.

#3 - Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks

Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks (2010)

Fat Cat, 2010

I think the reason I love Frightened Rabbit so much is that I can’t think of a band that I discovered at a more perfect time in my life. The Midnight Organ Fight was the soundtrack to a prolonged breakup, and what was effectively the worst I had ever felt up to that point in my life. When you’re depressed like that, sometimes hearing someone who know what that feels like sing it back to you is all that works. Working through 2008, that album became encoded in my DNA. At the very beginning of 2009 Jenny and I started dating and it’s like a switch flipped overnight. In 2010, The Winter of Mixed Drinks was released and I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to bond with it the way you are afraid you won’t be able to bond with your kids before they are born. What surprised me was that, though The Winter of Mixed Drinks has plenty of the self-deprecating, depressive, death-obsessed stuff, there’s...cautious optimism on this one. “Though the corners are lit,” Scott Hutchison sings, “The dark can return with the flick of a switch/ It hasn’t turned on me yet.” That line hurts now in the wake of Scott’s death, but he so perfectly captures that tenuous line between misery and contentment. No one mined the fragility of the human psyche like Scott Hutchison, and if anything I loved The Winter of Mixed Drinks because after The Midnight Organ Fight, it sounded like he was coming from a place of contentment.

The imagery on the album’s penultimate track– “Living in Colour”-- that always makes my heart swell. The song is such a beautiful account of crawling out of the darkness. “And as the night started swallowing/ You pulled the blood to my blue lips/ Forced the life through still veins/ Filled my heart with red again.” “Living in colour, living in colour/ I can see the paint on your toes.” It’s a goddamn shame things ended up the way they did for Scott. I always appreciated this album as a moment of clarity before returning to the darkness. I never expected it to end up as bad for Scott as it did, even though it seems obvious in hindsight. I still love this album more than anything.

#4 - Joyce Manor - Never Hungover Again

Joyce Manor - Never Hungover Again 

Epitaph, 2014

You know that feeling when you’re a teenager and you’ve been listening to Linkin Park and you hear punk rock for the first time and you feel like you have finally found your place in the world. You sell your Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Slipknot CDs that you never really liked that much anyway at the Hastings down the street from your house and you proceed down the rabbit hole of this brand new world of angry young people and become an angry young person yourself. That is a lightning in a bottle feeling that you are only supposed to feel once in your life, and I felt it again in the opening minutes of Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again. That’s not me saying that Joyce Manor saved punk rock or anything like that, but there’s so much wild abandon in this masterfully brisk LP that it reminded me why I love this kind of music. Short, fast, loud, clever, catchy, and on repeat forever. It’s almost alchemical how replayable this album is. It never wears out, no song ever overstays its welcome. In a world of radio rock where the general MO is “repeat the chorus as many times you can in five-and-a-half minutes” (a model I have ranted on ad nauseum over the years), this is my kind of music. Though it would be easy to say Never Hungover Again was my most played album of the decade by virtue of its short runtime, I still listened to this album twice as much as the next closest contender. That doesn’t even take into account the fact that I didn’t get into this one until 2016, and I felt like I was making up for lost time. How had something so perfectly suited for my ear-holes evaded them for this long? How could I let something like this happen? How could I prevent something like this from happening again in the future? The white-hot love I feel for this record is so pure.

#5 - Laura Stevenson - Wheel

Laura Stevenson - Wheel 

Don Giovanni, 2013

Wheel is so elegant it’s hard to believe Laura Stevenson comes from the DIY punk rock world via Bomb the Music Industry!. Here 2011 album Sit/Resist still had a lot of those DIY elements to it, but Wheel feels like it is coming from another planet. It’s so confident, and a perfect example of what happens when an artist puts everything into their recording. Her voice is one of my favorites in indie rock, right up there with Frances Quinlan. The waves of emotion that crash over you in the opener “Renee” is more than most albums have in their entirety. I couldn’t stop listening to this one in 2013, and I still listen to it regularly. It blends Stevenson’s knack for upbeat pop (“Runner” is an especially perfect indie-pop jam) and these tender, hushed ballads that take your breath away (“Every Tense,” “The Wheel,” “L-Dopa”). Not to mention the perfect little acoustic number “The Move” that was my introduction to the album. Figuring out where this album fit on the list was tricky, and of all the albums on the list it’s the one that covered the most ground. It started somewhere in the 20s, but that didn’t sit right, and all I had to do was put on “The Wheel” and it got bumped up a few slots. Stevenson is so unguarded on that track that it’s almost too much every time. I still don’t know what or who that song is about but every time I listen to it I get verklempt. It’s an album I want to say, “Thank you for sharing that with me” after every time I listen to it.

#6 - Moonface - Julia With Blue Jeans On

Moonface - Julia with Blue Jeans On 

Jagjaguar, 2013

Spencer Krug is one of my guys. His forever unsettled mentality has always made for some of the best indie rock songs (see: Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything,” Swan Lake’s “All Fires,” Sunset Rubdown’s “The Mending of the Gown”), so when he announced that he was releasing an album comprised of just him and a piano for his second outing as Moonface (after releasing his first with the Finnish band Siinai, 2012’s excellent and shortlisted Heartbreaking Bravery) I was game. And then I was floored, and every time I put this album on I’m back down there on the floor. It’s one of the most romantic records I have ever listened to. The album chronicles Krug’s move to Sweden to move in with his girlfriend, and it is full of huge gestures and emotional nakedness that is almost shocking coming from someone who typically trades in metaphor and wordplay. A song like “November 2011” would have been inconceivable in 2007 when I was at my peak Krug fandom worshiping Random Spirit Lover and all of it’s brilliant obtuseness. 

Let me take you up these stairs

Let me take you to my life

Let me take you like a lamb

Leading the slaughterer to the knife

DAMN. I’m not sure whether or not this relationship worked out, but this is such a beautiful document of a moment that it really doesn’t matter what happened. I don’t really even want to know what happened. I just want to live in these songs forever. Just Krug’s voice and that piano and these minimalist torch songs.

#7 - Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

Wichita, 2011

At some point this year I found out that Hello Sadness is considered to be Los Campesinos! least popular album, and the shock I felt rippled through the entire core of my being. That’s what happens when you spend so much time with an album that you can’t separate it from yourself. Here was a band that established itself with ebullient indie-pop with nods to twee and C-86 going full sad bastard music. Where breakups have always been fertile ground for Gareth Campesinos’ songs, this one goes all in on the misery. It’s also, in my opinion, his best songwriting (in a catalog full of great songs) and the band’s most complete album (in a catalog without a single dud in it) to date. Hello Sadness changed Los Campesinos! trajectory and established that this band was not one to get cozy inside of a formula that worked incredibly well (as illustrated on my write-up for Romance is Boring earlier on this list). You listen to a track like “The Black Bird, The Dark Slope” and you can hear the band really going for it, pushing outside of their comfort zone to deliver a big heavy emotional punch. You get the brattiness of the earlier records on “Songs About Your Girlfriend” and “Baby I Got the Death Rattle,” and you get one of the best LC! songs to date (and my personal favorite) in “By Your Hand.” LC! has always been a little niche to me (in the sense that I don’t know anyone as obsessed with them as I am, but then I get online and I’m like, “Oh, there they are”) but it’s a niche I’m happy to live in.

#8 - Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger in the Alps

Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger in the Alps 

Dead Oceans, 2017

When it comes to Phoebe Bridgers, I always think about this line right before the first chorus of the Smiths’ “Sheila Take a Bow:” “How can someone so young write words so sad?” Despite being in her early twenties, Bridgers’ possesses the songwriting maturity of an artist twice her age, which is why I spent most of 2017 thinking she was an Aimee Mann type journeywoman finally breaking out. It took me a while to finally make it to Stranger in the Alps, but once I did I had to pull myself up off the floor. One of my favorite things to do when I was falling in love with this record (late Spring/early Summer 2018) was grab a couple of beers, put on my fancy headphones, and sit out in my backyard at night. That is as close as I get to meditation, and spending time with those songs was a gift. It’s a terrifying debut. If the first one is this good, watch out. Since Stranger’s release, Bridgers has done nothing but continue to exercise her prowess. There’s the Boygenius side project with fellow young songwriting powerhouses Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus (whose Sprained Ankle and Historian, respectively, were both shortlisted for this list) that delivered another Bridgers’ classic: “Me and My Dog.” There was her 2019 collaboration with Conor Oberst under the guise of Better Oblivion Community Center. There was the team-up with Matt Berninger of the National for “Walking on a String.” It’s all been gold. And that’s without even getting into Stranger in the Alps. What really sold me though was the Mark Kozalek cover (“You Missed My Heart”) that closes the album out. “You Missed My Heart” (a collaboration with The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle) made my Songs of the Year list in 2013 and to hear it here of all places was baffling. It’s such a heartbreaking, sad, and beautiful story-song and Bridgers kills it. It’s better than the original in every way. And it’s such a strange way to end one’s debut. It’s just such a bold move and it’s absolutely perfect. It’s fitting though, considering how heartbreaking, sad, and beautiful these songs are (all no less on an album titled from a line from the TV edit of The Big Lebowski about what happens when you...fight a stranger in the Alps). The single “Motion Sickness” is the most spritely track of the bunch, and it’s fun to imagine someone coming in on that track and breaking down in tears halfway through “Funeral.” The nice thing about going all in on an artist this early is looking forward to decades of devastation.

#9 - Pinegrove - Cardinal

Pinegrove - Cardinal

Run for Cover, 2016

I have crystalline memory of driving home from work in a blizzard and listening to this album. It was one of those records that came along at the end of the year (thanks some dutiful evangelism by my fellow music nerd buddy Cameron Hawk) and caused total upheaval of my year end list. It slotted in at #5, and I had only been listening to it for a few weeks at that point. That’s insane, but sometimes you just know. The best albums are like that. Every album in this Top 10 is like that. A no doubter. Undeniable. To use the parlance of my younger, surlier, less concerned about being taken seriously self, unf***withable. It’s funny because I wrote basically the same thing I’m writing here in my Top 10 of 2016 list. Per that list: “Cardinal definitely feels like a lifer. It’s a tremendous testament to distance and displacement, with equal footing in alt-country and emo revivalism. And now that I have wrapped my brain around it, I can almost guarantee I’ll be kicking myself for not placing it higher on the list in a few months.” Yep. 

This is one of those albums that still gets me every time. There are so many moments on this album that are just spectacular, especially when you consider the form in which the band is working. There are these tremendous crescendos and brilliant lyrical turns throughout that just stop you in your tracks. It’s never better than the closing moments of the album when “New Friends” busts open all of the album’s pent-up tension in an emotional reveal. It’s one of those moves that immediately causes you to put it on again and order it from some random dude on Discogs.

#10 - Superchunk - Majesty Shredding

Superchunk - Majesty Shredding (2010)

When I heard Majesty Shredding for the first time, I knew it was going to be my album of the year, and thought it could even be the album of the decade. I latched onto this one so hard it hurt. It hurt because I had only gotten into Superchunk a couple years prior. I know, I know, I seem like the kind of indie rock nerd who was mainlining “Slack Motherfucker” in high school, and I would have had I had the good sense to leave my stupid little punk rawk bivouac. Better late than never, I suppose, and man this album just kicks so much ass. It’s one of those perfect records where, after you’ve spent 4 months with it, every song has had a chance to be your favorite songs. It’s why the closer “Everything at Once” was the track that made the cut on my Favorite Songs of 2010. I mean, I don’t know if Jenny knows this but the reason I suggested Rosie was 100% based on the song “Rosemarie.” That Superchunk made this after a 10 year hiatus when most of them were doing general mom and dad stuff is insane to me. This album has more energy than a lot of bands half their age. On top of that, they released two more albums in the 2010's with just as much energy, if not more (I Hate Music (2013)), What a Time to Be Alive (2018)). You put Majesty Shredding up against any other album in their extensive and extensively awesome back catalog and it’s a contender every time.

#11 - John K. Samson - Winter Wheat

John K. Samson - Winter Wheat

Anti, 2016

This is going to sound corny, but the song “Postdoc Blues” is the reason I decided to fully commit to librarianship as a career. Winter Wheat was released in October of 2016 and I applied to Emporia State’s MLS program that month. There’s a line in that song in particular that struck me and continues to strike me every time I hear it:

So take that laminate out of your wallet and read it

And recommit yourself to the healing of the world

And to the welfare of all creatures upon it

Pursue of practice that will strengthen your heart

Samson noted that this is a paraphrase from a book called Active Hope, and this line is the closest I have ever felt to the universe speaking to me. John K Samson is my sage, and has been since I was 15 years old, and hopefully will continue to be in the coming decades. He’s someone whose chill and sensitive but politically engaged worldview I aspire to emulate (and fail miserably at most of the time). Winter Wheat is a much more cohesive record than his solo debut Provincial, and in a way it feels like the fifth Weakerthans LP (no doubt a byproduct of fellow Weakerthans Jason Tait and Greg Smith contributing to the record). This album was particularly helpful to me in the wake of the 2016 election. It was easy to feel hopeless, and this made me feel if not hopeful, that I could do the best I could not to give up. “We know the world is good enough because it has to be,” he sings on the title track. I kept that one with me, and have done my best to stay positive, which hasn’t always worked but at least the current impeachment hearings feel like some sort of payoff even if nothing will come of them. What’s wonderful about Samson/Weakerthans records is that they are built to sustain you in the invariable 4-5 years between releases.