#1 - Japandroids - Celebration Rock

Japandroids - Celebration Rock

Polyvinyl, 2012

I don’t know if you’re likely to find a more aptly titled album than Celebration Rock. This is truth in advertising right here. The album opens with the sound of fireworks and closes with the sound of fireworks, and in between are eight of the most fist-pumping, chest-hair-growing, emotionally charged anthems you’ve ever heard. This album kicks so much ass that I can barely contain myself writing about it. I’m not even listening to the album right now, but just thinking about it gets me fired up. This is what we talk about when we talk about the Album of the Decade. This is what we talk about when we talk about the Album of the Century.

I chronicled my feelings about Japandroids in the write-up for Near to the Wild Heart of Life, but I want to link to the concert review I did of their show at the Bottleneck in Lawrence for the Pitch because it’s important to recognize when you have made a mistake (and to publicly shame yourself for it, I guess). I feel like I deserve lashings. I feel like I should have my headphones taken away and my Spotify membership cancelled. It’s the greatest musical sin I ever committed. But I came around, and I’m glad I did because no album has given me as much lasting enjoyment as Celebration Rock. It’s an album Jenny and I share, and if we have a song, I’d say it’s probably “Continuous Thunder” because it’s hard to think of a more romantic song (at least in the fist-pumping anthem division). It’s my song of the decade, and it’s my favorite song of all time full stop. I’ll take that one over any other. It’s one of the greatest love songs of all time and if you disagree I will fight you.

While putting together my favorite songs of the decade list, I realized that the Top 10 could very well have 4 or 5 tracks from this album. They’re all great, and the only nit I have to pick with Celebration Rock is that I feel like instead of a cover of the Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy” (which is an excellent palate cleanser that perfectly preps you for the hit after hit after hit after hit nature of the Side B) they should have included an original but even then that doesn’t really hurt the album at all. “Younger Us” did land in my Top 10 because that song is undeniable and has one of my favorite lines of the decade: “Give me that night you were already in bed/ Said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead.” It’s like one’s early twenties encapsulated in a couplet. Such a beautiful love song to being young and careless and near to the wild heart of life. That’s two monster hits on one album, hits that a lesser band could coast on for their entire career, but you’ve also got “The House that Heaven Built,” which might be the most fist-pumping of the  bunch, and “Adrenaline Nightshift” and that’s JUST SIDE B. “The Nights of Wine and Roses,” “Fire’s Highway,” and “Evil’s Sway” all kick all kinds of ass as well, but this record is built like a New Japan Pro-Wrestling card: It builds to the most dramatic moment and the payoff of the whole sticks with you forever. Celebration Rock is my platonic ideal of what a record should be. It’s full of life and personality, it has its heart sewn to its sleeve, and it doesn’t wink and nod about playing music with emotions built for arenas with a sound built for bars.

Celebration Rock came in at #2 on my Favorite Albums of 2012 list, and that is a decision I have always regretted. I thought about retconning it, but something felt wrong about that since the year end lists are meant to be a snapshot of what I was actually listening to (and Father John Misty’s Fear Fun was definitely the album that year). But as this album continued to take hold of me in 2013, and stuck around for 2014, 2015, 2016, etc, it became a foregone conclusion that this was going to be the album of the decade. It’s an album I still listen to at least once every couple of weeks when I just need to put something on in the car and it has never come close to wearing out its welcome. Quite the contrary, actually, as my love for it grows even fonder upon each successive listen. I am so obsessed with this album it sort of makes me understand how evangelicals feel about Jesus. These are the hymns that speak to my soul. This is the album I want you to play when I’m on my deathbed as I am getting ready to face oblivion.

#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.

#12 - The Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace is There

The Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace is There

Tiny Engines, 2014

The Emo Revival was big for me. Here we had a slew of bands making these big, sweeping songs, putting it all out there, and surpassing all of their heroes on the way up. Well, at least that’s what the Hotelier did with Home, Like Noplace is There. What makes this album so great is that it works an insane alchemy to sustains as perpetually fraught emotional state without ever letting up with enough variance to never wear you out. I listened to this album all through the summer of 2014 running on the poorly maintained walking path that circled our townhome community. I was not built for running, and after that summer I messed up my hamstring so bad I still have to stretch it for 5 minutes every morning, but running (read: jogging, poorly) to The Hotelier is one of my favorite memories from our time there trying to figure out what we were going to do. Their follow-up--2016’s Goodness--is a damn fine record, but I always felt like it was missing the extra gear that made Home, Like Noplace is There so special. This is one of those rare albums that demands to be listened to front-to-back each time out. Most of the songs can stand just fine on their own (“The Scope and All this Rebuilding,” “Your Deep Rest,” and “Housebroken” were all contenders on my favorite songs of the decade list), but they work so much better when listened to all together. 

#13 - AJJ - Christmas Island

AJJ - Christmas Island

SideOneDummy, 2014

2014 was a pretty momentous year for me, in that it was the year I became a dad. And somehow my favorite album from that year is one that opens with the line, “Open up your murder eyes and see the ugly world that spat you out.” There’s also a song about the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, myriad references to Werner Hezog’s Bad Lieutenant 2: Port of Call New Orleans, and a showstopping ode to breaking down in tears watching a video installation of Linda Rondstadt. It’s an album that covers all of the ugliness of our everyday lives and always refuses to sugarcoat it. “I can’t handle astounding moments of beauty,” sings Sean Bonnette on “Linda Rondstadt,” “I think I like my pretty pretty ugly.” Bonnette’s ability to capture the human experience--the actual human experience, not the one we put on Instagram to show our family and friends, or whatever--is unflinching, and that has always been what has drawn me to AJJ. There’s a bit of truth-telling to the whole thing, and while things are frequently cynical and hopeless-feeling, Bonnette encourages us to soldier on. Or maybe not, I’m not sure, I always felt like this album was about surviving in spite of all of the horrible shit we have to live through both inside and outside of ourselves.

#14 - Japandroids - Near to the Wild Heart of Life

Japandroids - Near to the Wild Heart of Life

Polyvinyl, 2017

I’ll preface this by saying that we will talk about Celebration Rock later, but it’s important to know where this album stands in relation to that one. I still feel deep regret making Father John Misty’s Fear Fun my favorite album of 2012, not because it’s a bad album, but because that album doesn’t hold up nearly as well. Yes, this is in regard to a list that is essentially for myself, but man it haunts me. But the thing about year end lists--and a thing I’ve learned to live with--is that they present a true snapshot of what that year’s listening looked like. Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is another great example of an album that was my favorite in the moment, but has since been surpassed. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the staying power an album is going to have until you find yourself listening to it three years later and loving it more than you did in the first place.

The thing Japandroids have going against them is their dumb band name. It’s so bad, and even worse if you take into account how sublimely outstanding their music is. It’s a reason why I was hesitant to get into their debut Post-Nothing, and it might have contributed to a horribly misguided pan I wrote about one of their Lawrence shows in The Pitch. And lo, they overcame that because they write the purest, most white-hot anthem rock of their generation, and Near to the Wild Heart of Life is their most complete record. It’s an album about adventure. About leaving town, about missing home, and living life on the road. A classic tour album, sure, but done with Japandroids flair for brilliant hooks and even more brilliant fist-pumping anthems. What’s cool about Near to the Wild Heart of Life is that they shift gears a few times into quieter territory (by Japandroids standards, at least) which makes the album a different experience than Celebration Rock but one that is worth revisiting a thousand times over.

#15 - The Tallest Man on Earth - Dark Bird is Home

The Tallest Man on Earth - Dark Bird is Home

Dead Oceans, 2015

As I mentioned in the write-up for The Mountain Goats’ Beat the Champ, 2015 was a particularly rough year for me. My thyroid cancer diagnosis in January of that year thrust me into a dark spiral where all I thought about was dying, leaving my wife a widow, and leaving my 6-month-old baby girl fatherless. Even though the doctors assured me that thyroid cancer was very treatable, I didn’t trust them. And I was right! Because what was supposed to be a relatively simple treatment (Step 1: Remove Thyroid and any other affected tissue. Step 2: Take Radioactive Iodine. Step 3: Cured) ended up taking a thyroidectomy, two full treatments of Radioactive iodine, and a modified neck dissection that put me in the hospital for a week and left me looking like I was the victim of a Columbian Necktie. 

Radioactive iodine ablation therapy requires you to stay in isolation for a week, so I holed up in my old bedroom at my parents house. “This is ok!” I thought. “I’ll play video games and watch movies it’ll be ok.” Even though you’re not supposed to get sick, I got sick (it might have been that my old room was basically untouched and very dusty and could have just been allergies) and I was miserable for the first few days. But then I started feeling better, and I started listening to Dark Bird is Home a lot. It’s my favorite The Tallest Man on Earth record and that’s saying something because all of those albums are outstanding. Per Wikipedia, Kristian Matsson says this album was inspired by the death of a close family member and his divorce from his wife, and that helps explain the melancholy that runs through this album. It’s definitely the most lush of Matsson’s albums, and the most evocative. While the sparse recordings on Shallow Grave and The Wild Hunt, the orchestration on Dark Bird is Home elevates the songs and makes them almost otherworldly. I would sit out on the back patio in the morning drinking coffee and listening to this album, and I would feel the weight lift a little bit. I tried to imagine the radioactive iodine attacking the cancerous thyroid cells in my body, even though I was still dubious that this was the end of it. It certainly wasn’t the end, but when I took radioactive iodine again following my neck surgery in October, I brought Dark Bird is Home with me again, and again it was a huge help to my mental well-being.

The longlist for this list had THREE Tallest Man on Earth records on it, and while The Wild Hunt and There’s No Leaving Now are both rock-solid contenders, there’s an emotional depth to this one that isn’t necessarily lacking in the other two, but man this one just hits you in the gut. It’s a divorce record, but instead of the bitterness of Blood on the Tracks you get the heartbreaking sadness of acceptance. It’s more melancholy than any of the previous records, but never gets bogged down in sadness. Everything is just so measured, and it’s one of the things that makes Matsson such a compelling songwriter. His melodies, voice, and guitar work are all tremendous, but his songs portray a real point of view that you don’t get from lesser artists. There’s a vibe to these Tallest Man on Earth records that just feels like home.

#16 - Oso Oso - Basking in the Glow

Oso Oso - Basking in the Glow

Triple Crown, 2019

One concern about making these Best of the Decade lists is that you often haven’t even published the Best Of list for the year in which you are writing. Most of the albums on this list have the benefit of time. They’ve had time to sink in. They’ve had time to be replayed for two-hundredth spin. Some age like wine (although some go sour). However, I feel like the antidote to that is sometimes you just know. Like, when the chorus to Basking in the Glow’s second track “The View” hit I knew it was going to be on my Favorite Albums of 2019 list. When I heard the title track. I knew it was going to be in the Top 5. When I heard “A Morning Song” I knew it was going to be hard to topple that as Song of the Year. When the album was over I knew that my Favorite Albums of 2019 list might as well just be one album, because nothing else even came close. And some years are just like that. 2019 has been a relatively weak year with some really good stuff, but it’s no 2017, and it’s definitely no 2013 (which has FOUR albums in the Top 10). There are definitely albums from 2019 I’m going to miss, but I’m not sure if there are going to be any I’m going to want to shoehorn into this list, and especially not as this high on the list. That’s because Basking in the Glow is pretty much a perfect record. It’s definitely a perfect emo-revival record that nails those big emotions and adorns them with huge hooks that you catch yourself singing days/weeks/months after they gets implanted in your brain. Of this Emo Revival, there’s only one more album on this list above Basking in the Glow. Where that album (more on that at #9) trades in typical emo capital-E emotions (loss, heartbreak, grief, etc), Basking in the Glow is full of light. What if you took a genre typically reserved for spurned lovers and made an album full of songs about being in love? What if the good times never ended and you just appreciated every second? Basking in the Glow doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but Oso Oso frontman Jade Lilitri made the rare album where every single song sticks with you.

#17 - Yuck - Yuck

Yuck - Yuck 

Fat Possum, 2011

Summer of 2011 was the Summer of Listening to Yuck’s eponymous debut a thousand times. Jenny and I listened to this album and pretty much nothing else. The band took the best of the Alternative Rock greats, ran them through their British sensibilities and alarming ear for melody, and turned out one of the most blissful wall-to-wall indie rock records of the decade. It was a spectacular debut, and everything was great until frontman Daniel Blumberg left the band and everything went to hell. The group soldiered on without Blumberg and released the bloodless Glow & Behold in 2013 (I feel like my assessment of the album from 2013 holds up, and the title track definitely sounds like a mashup of the Teenage Fanclub songs “Guiding Star” and “December” and that is their TITLE TRACK woof) and the equally bloodless Stranger Things in 2016. They’re not terrible records, there are worse things you could listen to, but they were decidedly not Yuck. It’s not like Daniel Blumberg was the engine though, because his 2018 solo album Minus was about as boring as it gets. 

And yet, when everyone was together, they made Yuck, and no matter what happened after 2011, this album never gets old. The pure pop bliss of “Georgia,” the slow-burn showstopper “Shook Down,” the simple loveliness of “Suicide Policeman,” the Sonic Youth tinged freedom of “Get Away.” Strangely, for me it’s a record of moments. The songs are tremendous but each song has a particular moment where that sticks in my mind (the “you could be my destiny” part at the end of “Shook Down” and the guitar solo that follows is probably my Music Moment of the 2010s it’s so pure and perfect). It’s hard to listen to this album now and not be a little heartbroken at the squandered potential, but the sadness doesn’t last too long because hey, at least they made this one record, and at least it kicks a ton of ass, and I’ll still be listening to this when I’m old and it will remind me that this was the soundtrack to one of the best years of my waning youth.