Favorite Albums & Songs of 2010

(archiving selected content from my old Wordpress blog!)

Copypasting last year’s caveat, as it still applies:
I’m always hesitant to make lists of the best albums, in particular, in a given year because I never listen to as many new releases as I want/plan to. Those I do listen to take time to grow on me, be digested, and oftentimes it won’t be until months later that I decide, hey, this __ album is really freaking awesome, why was I not loving it a year ago? In the same fashion, an album I loved at first listen can sour or get boring quickly on subsequent ones, or become inextricably associated with unpleasant memories. Finally, the albums and songs I really loved this year, again, just like any year, are almost certainly not the objective best in a sea of releases, but they’re the ones I loved the most, that I made some sort of personal connection with or that remind me of people, places, times. Frankly, I’m the wrong person to ask which were the “best,” anyway; I couldn’t tell you. So instead I call this a list of my favorites and have done with it.

I made a concentrated effort to listen to more, and a wider variety of new releases this year than in year’s past, but there were still many many albums that I just didn’t spend the time with, even though if I had I probably would’ve come to love them. However, as the last few hours of 2010 are upon us, it’s now or never for listmaking, so I finalized my decisions.

1. Lost in the Trees - All Alone in an Empty House
TRACKS: Fireplace, A Room Where Your Paintings Hang
This album came along at just the right time in my life for me to clutch to like like a drowning man to a life raft. My mother had broken her hip and I was living alone in our apartment for the longest extended period ever, thrust back into the caregiving role that I thought I’d finished with when my father died. These songs were my constant companions on walks to and from work and visiting my mother in rehab, walks through the woods with my camera trying to sort out the tangle of my emotions over what my life was now vs five years ago vs fifteen. Overly personal associations aside, it’s a beautiful album, full of stirring string arrangements and cathartic lyrics that stray to the near embarrassing at times, but in the best possible way.

2. Beach House - Teen Dream
TRACKS: Take Care, Silver Soul
The most perfect dreamy pop songs, evocative of melancholy beaches on overcast days, bonfires as the sun goes down, pervasive wistfulness, mellow sunshine fragmented in a crystal splaying rainbows on a wall that you only see for a minute passing by.

3. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
TRACKS: I Want to be Well, Impossible Soul
Last year I saw Sufjan at Bowery Ballroom. His set was dualistic in nature; he would either play one of his lovely gentle folk songs, or the sketch of something brimming with noise and electronics and instrumentation that sounded like nothing of his I had heard on record, except for hints of in You Are the Blood on 2009’s Dark Was the Night compilation. You know the rest - this year saw, surprise!, not one but two releases from Sufjan, the All Delighted People EP and The Age of Adz. I really feel like Adz is the best thing he’s ever recorded. I Want to be Well is such a fantastic stylistic romp-around, ending up in Radiohead territory, who would have guessed? And to pull off something like Impossible Soul should be impossible, 25 minutes long, how self indulgent can you get, but instead it’s captivating. All I can say is well played, Sufjan, and I’m really sorry I missed your Beacon Theatre shows.

4. Sharon Van Etten - Epic
TRACK: Don’t Do It
Short and sweet and with a sucker punch to the gut. You listen to Sharon’s beautiful voice and it’s lovely and you lose yourself in it, and then you listen to the lyrics, and really listen, and you never know how much they’re affecting you until you’re out walking on a windy day and there are tears in your eyes but you listen over and over and over again anyway. This album was part two in my had it on repeat all summer long series.

5. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
TRACKS: We Used to Wait, Rococo
It took me some time to get into this album. It doesn’t come on with the initial brilliant intensity and bombast of Funeral or Neon Bible, but I had been looking forward so much to a new Arcade Fire album, so I kept at it. Little by little, I got it. How Rococo is not annoying at all and is in fact pretty freaking brilliant, how We Used to Wait is on par with any of their best anthemic songs. The more I listened to it on headphones walking around the suburban town where I grew up, restless and discontent, the more it fell into place. I wish I could’ve heard this for the first time when I was fifteen, I probably would’ve thought it a totally spot on social commentary.

6. Owen Pallett - Heartland
TRACKS: Lewis Takes Off His Shirt, E is for Estranged
Owen Pallett’s precisely lush strings and incisive lyrics in the form of an ambitious concept album years in the making? Yes, please. Everything about this is amazing, climaxing in what’s probably my favorite musical moment of the year in Lewis Takes Off His Shirt. The refrain of “I’m never gonna give it to you,” repeated, growing ever stronger, against those trilling violins, is a kind of defiant bliss.

7. Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
A rich layered epic that demands you lose yourself for hours in it, and rewards you with some new detail each time. Ambitious and immaculately executed. I haven’t spent enough time with Have One On Me as I would’ve liked to, and it’s certainly an album that demands time and attention, but already after a few listens I can tell there are murky depths and pristine heights yet to uncover.

8. Villagers - Becoming a Jackal
TRACKS: Home, Pieces
I have a love/hate relationship with singer-songwriters. When they’re good I totally adore them but sometimes I’ll encounter some male musician singing alone with his acoustic guitar and something in the lyrics will totally turn my stomach, I can’t even explain it. Villagers, happily, falls very neatly into the first category. This album reminds me of Lifted-era Bright Eyes. It has that certain indescribable quality that I will now attempt to put into words: the lyrics are simple but not stupid, the mood is melancholy but not self indulgently maudlin, the music is rich and stirring without being overblown.

9. Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
Hugely ambitious concept albums are totally relevant to my interests, regardless of what loose musical genre they may fall under. Stylistically this is so here, there, and everywhere anyway, and the most amazing thing is Monae pulls it all off like she isn’t even breaking a sweat. Had I been trying to make a list of the objective best albums of the year rather than personal favorites, this one would’ve been at the very top. It’s lower here because I simply didn’t spend a lot of time listening to it; I was so blown away at first that I barely felt the need to.

10. Phantogram - Eyelid Movies
TRACKS: Mouthful of Diamonds, When I’m Small
Electronic music at its very best, tempered and augmented by Sarah Barthel’s crystalline vocals. You could never guess that they made all this glorious racket in pastoral upstate New York, far from the thrum of city life; perhaps that’s why it sounds so refreshing.

11. The National - High Violet
TRACKS: Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, Runaway
This is an album by The National. It isn’t a departure, or a new direction, but a continuation of the things the band does well, anxiety-ridden little portraits of songs narrated in Matt Berninger’s distinctive tenor. And that’s enough; The National aren’t really a band I look to for sonic experimentations coming out of left field. I look to them for good, deeply affecting songs, and they consistently deliver.

12. Perfume Genius - Learning
There’s little in the pretty piano melodies to the soften the blow of the stark, blunt lyrics in Learning, but alongside the pain lives hope. Copypasting from my live writeup, “there’s (…) something cathartic about laying bare such painful and personal things in front of a roomful of people. Abuse thrives on secrecy and shame; sometimes telling true stories to strangers is one of the most powerful things you can do to strike out against it.” I’m not positive if that’s what this album was intended as, but I’m pretty sure it is, and that’s why I love it, even if I don’t necessarily listen to it every day.

13. Shout Out Louds - Work
TRACKS: Walls, Show Me Something New
My feel good, anthemic album of the year. I read a lot of criticism of Work, how it doesn’t live up to Shout Out Louds’ previous releases. I honestly hadn’t listened to them really before this, so maybe my opinion counts for less, but at face value this is a damn fine collection of songs, infectious and catchy and infinitely listenable.

14. Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go
TRACK: Daydreaming
Gorgeous haunting multi-instrumental folk music rarely sounds so sweet. Another case where I happened upon the band live, loved them, got the album, and loved it even more.

15. Broken Bells - Broken Bells
TRACKS: The Mall & Misery, Sailing to Nowhere
This collaboration from James Mercer and Dangermouse whets my appetite for new Shins material while sounding totally unlike my old beloved Shins albums, Oh Inverted World and Chutes too Narrow. It’s a nice difference. I can listen to this over and over without getting tired of it, which is generally a good sign. This little review makes me sound pretty ambivalent about the album, but I really just don’t have much to say about it; it’s pretty solid and doesn’t require much explanation.

16. Land of Talk - Cloak and Cipher
TRACKS: Color Me Badd, Quarry Hymns
Lizzie Powell’s abstract lyrics, distinctive voice, and fierce guitar shredding are in fine form here. Color Me Badd’s plaintive, dissociated refrain of, “where did my body go, where did I leave it?” is particularly lovely.

17. Anais Mitchell - Hadestown
I love ambitious concept albums. I love mythology. This album should’ve been a top five shoe-in for me, but I just haven’t felt like returning to it often, as excellent as it is. Anais Mitchell enlists a whole host of guests for her Orpheus retelling, gets in some keen historic and current economic insight, and just generally kicks ass all over the place. If I have one complaint it’s with Ani DiFranco’s Persephone. I’m pretty attached to the Persephone myth, but having listened to Ani DiFranco so much as a teenager hearing her voice there is totally jarring and takes me right out of it. Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t do a good job, but I just can’t make the association.

18. Holly Miranda - The Magician’s Private Library
TRACK: Slow Burn Treason
To me this is a mood piece, sensual and meandering with no particular destination, but it sounds so, so good in the process. Holly Miranda’s voice is divine (and even better live - wow!) and dueting with Kyp Malone sounds pretty much too good to handle.

19. Allo Darlin’ - Allo Darlin’
TRACKS: The Polaroid Song, Kiss Your Lips, If Loneliness Was Art
So silly and delightful and buoyant, I loved these guys live, and they’re almost as much fun on record. How can you resist a song about polaroids, or one that unselfconsciously quotes Weezer, all punctuated by joyful “sha na na”s and ukulele strumming? If this sounds all too twee for you, oh, it is, but that’s precisely the point. My interest wanes a bit during the slower numbers, but all in all this band and their songs are just far too much fun.

20. CocoRosie - Grey Oceans
CocoRosie are one of those bands that you love or hate, which is easy enough to understand; there’s less simple sonic enjoyment and more layers of lyrics and sounds and meanings, a little girl’s collage of feminine artifacts laid out in a closet full of dust mites or some muddy field. I feel like CocoRosie have interesting things to say, and I’m interested in how they say them, but it’s certainly not something I listen to if I want to dance or sing along. Still, there’s a lot that’s worthwhile here, if it’s to your taste and you have the patience for it.

Some more favorite songs, from albums not listed here:

Avi Buffalo - What’s In It For?
Broken Social Scene - World Sick, All to All
Laura Marling - Goodbye England (Covered in Snow), Hope in the Air
Los Campesinos! - The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future
The New Pornographers - Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk
Ra Ra Riot - You and I Know
Spoon - Trouble Comes Running
Stars - Wasted Daylight, The Passenger

You can also find most of these songs in a last.fm playlist I’ve been making.