For the Record – Top 10 Albums of 2010

10) Menomena — Mines

Menomena’s third proper album is one of the year’s most underrated, and it finds the Portland trio really hitting their stride, marrying their patchwork experimentalism with great hooks and an overall newfound pop sensibility. This yields their most varied and accessible set of songs to date, one filled with a dark, textured sense of space and some striking pileups of baritone saxophone, thundering drums, tinkling piano and catchy melodies sung effectively by all three members of the group. It holds up especially well to repeated listens and reveals a deep sense of melancholy over time.



9) Deerhunter — Halcyon Digest

The fourth LP by Atlanta’s Deerhunter reaffirms them as one of our foremost synthesizers of countless disparate strains of underground music—punk, garage, shoegaze, ambient, art-rock, lo-fi bedroom pop—and generally one of the most innovative, exciting bands in the current indie landscape. Throughout this stunning record (arguably their best), angular rhythms collide with walls of shimmering guitar and the intimate, pensive aesthetic of frontman Bradford Cox’s work in his solo side project Atlas Sound. From the opening tremors of “Earthquake” to the abrupt ending to “He Would Have Laughed,” Halcyon Digest is a jaw-dropping aural experience.



8) Big Boi — Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Anyone still wasting their time declaring “hip hop is dead” would have to be deaf or insane to keep saying so after 2010. The sheer disparity been all of 2010’s best hip-hop albums — Big Boi, Kanye, Drake, Rick Ross, Das Racist, The Roots, Curren$y, Yelawolf — is a pretty good argument against lumping all this music together under one umbrella anyway. Even amidst this population of eccentric and distinct personalities, Big Boi stood out as one of the most singular. On SLLF, a selection of fantastic, forward-looking beats is tied together by Big Boi’s bouncy, playful, flexible, and unflappably rhythmic flow.



7) The Radio Dept. — Clinging To A Scheme

The third album by this Swedish trio lacks the sweeping grandiosity of some of my other favorite albums from 2010, but it is nearly perfect in its concise, modest intimacy. As on their previous records, wistful Scandinavian pop is coated with a patina of perfectly-employed low fidelity haze. At its best, lo-fi recording doesn’t obscure the music so much as give it a tangible feeling of longing, nostalgia, melancholy — a sepia tint. The Radio Dept. are the purveyors of these feelings par excellence. Drum machines have never sounded so emotional.



6) Robyn — Body Talk

Some may argue that the line between indie darlings like Robyn and electro-pop megastars like Lady Gaga is very thin, or nonexistent. But however good a singles artist you think Gaga is, no one fills their album with as deep a bench of danceable pop as Robyn did this year on Body Talk. She expertly combines sterile, almost-too­-perfect electro-pop beats with vocal performances that exhibit an astonishing range of emotional expressivity considering the catchy simplicity of the lyrics. Fembots have feelings too.

5) The National — High Violet

How often do you come across a band that releases albums as good as Alligator and Boxer, and then has the patience, integrity, and creative ambition to refine their aesthetic further and release an even better album? The National is one of those rare groups. Here, they take existential weariness, musical and cognitive dissonance, and the occasional bit of rage and wrap it all up in 11 ornate, majestic, sometimes-epic, always-eminently-listenable songs. Every track is distinct but they live together here in perfect harmony.



4) LCD Soundsystem — This Is Happening

With each album, James Murphy gets better at recombining both the sounds and the sentiments of rock and dance music past. On what may be the last LCD Soundsystem album, heart-wrenching songs (“All I Want,” “I Can Change,” “Home”) find their place alongside his trademark music-nerd rants (“You Wanted A Hit,” “Pow Pow”) and deceptive songs like “Dance Yrself Clean” and “Drunk Girls,” which masquerade as paeans to gettin’ yo stupid on but are desperate for emotional and romantic connection. Cramming so much human emotion into songs that move bodies so effectively made This some of the most rewarding music of the year.



3) Titus Andronicus — The Monitor

Is this a melodic hardcore record inflected with classic rock? Is it an indie rock record inflected with punk? Is it a punk record that infuses punk’s worst enemy, prog rock, into its structure, with its tempo-changing song-suites? Who cares! It’s the best rock ‘n roll record of 2010 — or maybe of 1977, your pick — and it couldn’t care less about “what it is.” They also use “Civil War concept album” as an excuse to throw in a bunch of surprisingly badass Lincoln quotes. If I sound oddly dismissive of the #3 record on my list, it’s because it feels sort of wrong to do a heady analysis of The Monitor, even though it’s positively bursting at the seams with stuff. Just throw it on the stereo, pound a Natty, and scream along with Patrick Stickles’ lovably pissed-off screeds.



2) Arcade Fire — The Suburbs

A lot of the people who hate on this record (and Arcade Fire in general) claim that it’s ham-fisted and preachy. But as Zach pointed out, Win Butler’s relationship with the suburbs is much more complex and nuanced than said haters would give him credit for. There’s a bit of that preachy stuff, but it’s mixed in with a whole lot of melancholy, nostalgia, hope, fear, defiance, regret, and fondness. Maybe I’m being hyperbolic, sue me, but I think when you really dig into the lyrics of this album, you’re presented with a whole range of human emotion — making the words perfectly suited to Arcade Fire’s trademark musical style, which has been incredibly exuberant and emotionally expressive from the get-go, mixing positive and negative feelings masterfully.



1) Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Move over, Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange: 2010 was the Year of Kanye West. He didn’t go to jail or have a movie made about him, but he dominated the press in my neck of the internet far more than any other entity. But that maelstrom of jabber all seemed distant and irrelevant once his most symphonic, jaw-dropping (and proving to be his least radio-friendly) album dropped. Few records have ever been met with the degree of universal acclaim that MBDTF has been, which means pretty much everything there is to say about it has been said. So I’ll just say this: if you haven’t heard it in full, go listen to it. From start to finish. And if you have and were left on the fence, go listen to it again. And again. And again.