the top twenty albums of 2010: part one

Over the past year I put more effort than ever before into keeping up with music releases. I’ve probably listened to a lot more new music than ever – partly out of active choice, partly out of circumstances in my life (lots of sit-at-computer work, regular conveniently album-length bus rides). That I have, despite this, failed – that there are still a lot of albums released over the last twelve months that I’ve been wanting to listen to, but haven’t yet found the time for – illustrates, better than anything else, the vitality, range and variety of the contemporary music scene.

If one were to attempt isolating any general trend or dominant style to define the year, one could only talk about the distinct lack of any such unifying thread. It’s been a year in which Bon Iver guested on a Kanye West album, in which the lines between genres, audiences and styles blurred into insignificance, and in which multiplicity became, even more clearly, the order of the day.

First, the honourable mentions, in alphabetical order – these are all albums I enjoyed immensely, and that I regret not finding room in the Top 20 for:

James Blackshaw – All is Falling

Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record

Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

The Fun Years – God Was Like, No

Julian Lynch – Mare

MGMT – Congratulations

Moulettes – s/t

Owen Pallett – Heartland

Surfer Blood – Astro Coast

Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

These New Puritans – Hidden

Twin Shadow – Forget

Xasthur – Portal of Sorrow

And now, on to the countdown proper:

20. Social Studies – Wind Up Wooden Heart

While there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about Social Studies, it’s hard not to love a band that launches itself into indie-pop conventions with such joy, invention and relentless energy. Melodies, rhythms, synth lines and guitar hooks collide in a mad, catchy rush,  and while it doesn’t all quite gel entirely, it’s difficult not to get caught up.

19. Current 93 – Baalstorm, Sing Omega

It’s easy to take new work by bands as prolific as Current 93 for granted. Coming less than a year after the monumental Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, this got somewhat overlooked; it’s undeniably a lesser effort, but it’s rendered a worthwhile addition to the David Tibet canon through the surprising little touches that work their way into the band’s established sound: the little girl’s voice that haunts the album, the nightmare circus-organ on epic closer “I Dance Narcoleptic”, and, most striking of all, the vaguely Middle Eastern, percussive lilt of the gorgeous “With Flowers in the Garden of Fires”.

18. The Walkmen – Lisbon

How can one sound effortless, disinterested, and yet intensely engaged at the same time? Whatever the trick is, The Walkmen manage it like no-one else, delivering song after song of elegantly laid-back, pleasingly shambolic melancholia.

17. Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago

There’s nothing here to match the majesty of Rook standout “The Snow Leopard”, but, overall, The Golden Archipelago is the more cohesive, measured, nuanced, and arguably the better album. Shearwater marry gravity to delicacy in a way few others manage – it seems almost impossible that music so slight could garner such weight. Bands that sound this self-consciously Important can be obnoxious; Shearwater, however, never sound anything less than gorgeous.

16. The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra  – Kollaps Tradixionales

Amp up the sound of the Montreal post-rock scene, increase the tempo and add some yelping vocals, and the result is this raucous yet ornate thing of beauty that some have taken to calling chamber-punk – it’s as appropriate a term as any. The Godspeed/Silver Mt. Zion collective hasn’t sounded this vital in years.

15. Sleigh Bells – Treats

Question: How far can you amp up, distort  sugar-rush, bubblegum pop melodies, adding noise and energy and plain old loudness while still remaining unmistakeably pop? Answer: this much.

14. Forest Swords – Dagger Paths

Deep, looped basslines, reverb-drenched guitars, murky vocal and found-sound samples: the ingredients in Forest Swords’ languid, haunting soundscapes are deceptively simple, but the end result is a rich concoction of melodies emerging, increasingly clear, out of mesmerising washes of haze and static. This is evocative, spacious music that envelops you in its idiosyncratic atmosphere, suggesting scratched, grainy footage, washed-out colours, dark figures against blinding sunlight.

13. Liars – Sisterworld

I was lucky enough to see Liars in Bologna last November, under the vaulted ceiling of a medieval armoury-turned-student venue: what’s even more obvious live than it is on record is that this is a band that obliterate the line between the playful and the sinister. Their tongue never leaves their cheek, but the grotesque, twisted and endlessly surprising nightmare visions they conjure are no less disturbing for it. Sisterworld represents the coming-together of the many trends that have defined Liars over the years: abrasive, propulsive punk, off-kilter, unremittingly dark balladry, and percussive, krautrock-influenced art-rock; it’s less of a step forward and more of a consolidation – a rare pause for breath from a band that has tirelessly reinvented itself again and again.

12. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

Hip-hop, Britpop, electro, synth-pop, classical and brass band, blended together into a cartoon-primary-colour-bright explosion: together with The ArchAndroid, this represents something of an apotheosis of the pop album as an all-consuming, multi-voiced, multi-genre kaleidoscopic postmodern carnival. But where Janelle Monaé’s opus is spunky and celebratory, Plastic Beach‘s masterstroke is to use this Technicolor bricolage as a backdrop to voices that sound world-weary, disaffected, tired, torn up. As affecting as it is enjoyable, Plastic Beach is the first outright masterpiece of Damon Albarn’s post-Blur career.

11. Titus Andronicus – The Monitor

Titus Andronicus Go Epic is something of a misnomer – their debut, The Airing of Grievances, was already pretty huge. But The Monitor is, in every way, more: bigger, longer, more ambitious, angrier, more intense. Nominally about the Civil War, but really only using its imagery as a loose metaphor through which to frame the archetypal narrative of the young adult struggling to make sense of himself, his peers and the world they share, this is an album that aims for the rafters – if you name Bruce Springsteen and Walt Whitman as inspirations, you’re hardly thinking small – and hits the bullseye.

(Part Two to follow very soon.)

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