It’s interesting to note that after all of 2010’s trendy genre terms and hot-for-a-minute one-man bands, our Top 5 consists of a handful of sturdy veterans. The Top 10 expands to include a couple of newcomers, newbies amid, again, three established crews. What does it mean? Well, the situation’s analogue to 2006 when a number of so-called “blog rock” bands made immediate wav(v)es, but albums released by old standbys received the year-end kudos. This isn’t to say you should reject the new, but it does say something about the amount of music released and processed and then forgotten in any given year
Kanye West
Album: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
A record that few can beat. MBDTF is West’s darkest, most glamorous, and most excessive album. From its too-long name down to its final, extended outtro, it is, and has, too much. It’s a mirror image of the man himself. It’s too good.
Arcade Fire
Album: The Suburbs
On first listen, the album feels like
adolescence, when you’re trapped between leaving one and joining the other. But what this very long — maybe too long — album seems to be about, is losing and regaining innocence, reconciling your private world (developed in your room, in study hall, in the back car seat on family road trips) with the outside one.
Beach House
Album: Teen Dream
From start to finish the album floats with the hazy internal logic of its namesake. Delicate
guitar lines, some cooing harmonies and then thumping percussion, spare organ. Nothing’s
cluttered. Each sound has its space.
Sufjan Stevens
Album: The Age of Adz
This is one of his most immediate records. The album chips away at all the decorative edges, but still has songs that are melodic, huge, and sound personal while keeping that little bit of distance that lends Stevens his inscrutable aura.
Robyn
Album: Body Talk
A melange of dancehall with bubblegum pop, heartbroken love songs with hilariously nasty weirdness, and enchantingly addictive melodies with propulsive rhythms, it is a deeply affecting pop record, her first true full-length in five years.
Sleigh Bells
Album: Treats
Once in a while an album comes along that makes you re-think loud. The music hits so hard, and in such an appeasing way, it seems created to bring you back to the totality of the sound. The album oozes joy, there’s a spirit to it.
Vampire
Weekend
Album: Contra
Contra is a satisfying listen. It’s not mind-blowing. But once you start really taking the tracks apart, it becomes clear they’ve gone deeper with the production, and emotion. They’re not trying to break your heart, but they are working with what’s in there.
Antony And The Johnsons
Album: Swanlights
This is neither Antony’s most immediate nor best album. However, it his most varied and possibly most demanding album to date, and we listen as Antony intensely looks for some sort of reset button, in spite of our many inclinations.
Wild Nothing
Band: Gemini
This album finds Jack Tatum composing a solitary monument to just about
anyone who whined, sulked, or bedsat their way through the 1980s. Dreamy, fuzzy, handcrafted guitar-pop, with a comprehensive and wide ranging focus on
classic indie pop sounds.
Deerhunter
Album: Halcyon Digest
This is a kinder, gentler Deerhunter. Much of the album is understated and insular. Still, the sound is plenty lush, layered. And what it lacks in “rockers,” it makes up for in a quieter headphone ambiance. As far as the nostalgia, it’s the theme here and it’s rich.
Joanna
Newsom
Album: Have One
On Me
Newsom’s always been a storyteller. She weaves and wanders gorgeously across the 18 songs. She sets big scenes, but she also probes into intimacies that feel rawer and more genuine than anything she’s done before.
Crystal Castles
Album: Crystal Castles
There is an embrace of continuity in this album, that broadens their dynamic range beyond what once constituted the foundations of their songs. For a band known for its harsh midrange, this album reveals an incredible amount of depth.
LCD Soundsystem
Album: This is Happening
The album may or may not be the last under the LCD moniker, but with it, James Murphy’s shown again that he can find endless permutations in what, admittedly, seemed like a pretty rigid formula all those years ago.
Yeasayer
Album: Odd Blood
A potentially vanguard album that uses all of the possibilities that software-based music offers, to create what once would have been radio-friendly rock. This is a complex collection, even if it’s less than 40 minutes long.
The-Dream
Album: Love King
The-Dream knows where to find the sweet spot, and he has an unerring knack of knowing how pieces of music fit together. He works out every detail but never really loses sight of how the album works as a comprehensive whole.
It’s that time of the year again
A positive result of all the fractures, fissures and flashy genre names in this year: The average listener is definitely hearing more music and becoming more adventurous than in, say, 2006. Which means bands that may have seemed too “weird” for a casual listener even a few years ago are popping up in unexpected places in 2010. It’s unclear why — oil slicks, down economy, jeggings — but it’s also been a much darker year for music via bands like Crystal Castles, oOoOO, Balam Acab, Zola Jesus, White Ring, Salem, Frank (Just Frank), the sundry so-called “witch house” (and Wierd) crews. As a result, the following list features more than a couple folks who might be charged with having goth tendencies (or at least black nail polish and old Cure and/or Kate Bush shirts). To take this sense of adventure into another direction, our No 1 is someone your father might even know about and our No 5 is on a “major label.” Notions of what “indie rockers” listen to is shifting and expanding, a positive step toward escaping the pratfalls of across-the-board year-end list homogeneity.
The list here is the result of four people saying yes and no and maybe. If you were to break out individual lists from it, they’d look very different. (That said, if you asked us to collaborate again, it would look very much the same.) Start digging, digesting, and disagreeing.
http://stereogum.com/593442/stereogums-top-50-albums-of-2010/franchises/listomania/