Imtay22's Top 10 Albums of 2010

[imtay22]

Alright, its that time of year. I Highly recommend you listen to all these albums, as they are all truly great, in different ways. I'm gonna split this up like 10,9,8,7 then 6,5,4 and then 3,2,1. You can post in between, I don't really care.

10.

MGMT - Congratulations

After the smashing success of Oracular Spectacular, it was clear that MGMT were going to be at a bit of a crossroads when it came time to follow up. Would they try to simply re-create their single-rich debut and pray that they avoided the sophomore slump, or would they continue to evolve? Fortunately for the listening public at large, they opted for the latter, delivering a follow-up album that matches, if not triumphs over, their earlier work. Always moving forward, the band has stepped out from the shadow of sonic auteur Dave Fridmann, producing the album themselves with the help of Spacemen 3?s Sonic Boom. The end product is a sound that owes more to Phil Spector than the Flaming Lips, managing to be atmospheric without necessarily being spacious. MGMT have taken a more dynamic approach to songwriting on this album, tossing aside the dancing thump of ?Electric Feel? and ?Kids? in favor of songs that build in a more deliberate and satisfying way. ?Flash Delirium? folds upon itself again and again, ramping up to a Wall of Sound chorus before letting loose with a big, glam/garage finish, as if to vent off any excess musical pressure before heading into the more subdued ?I Found a Whistle.? This kind of careful songwriting tracks all throughout the album, giving Congratulations a more cohesive feeling. While this kind of musical vision means there isn?t really a clear-cut single, it does make for an all around better album. MGMT has matured as a band, and to show that off, they?ve returned by making the album that they wanted to make rather than the collection of loosely related singles that was expected from them. From the opening moments of the sublime ?It?s Working? all the way to the titular closer, Congratulations is an incredible follow-up from a band that is still maturing into some unknown entity.

9.

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

"Wonder if i have any chance in hell getting a Grammy nomination this week. If I ever had a shot, this is the year." That was what Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, tweeted on November 29; two days later, the nominations were announced, and Ellison's Cosmogramma was nowhere to be found. FlyLo subsequently went off, and while the Grammys don't really matter, it's understandable that he was upset. Cosmogramma is an event record, a knowingly audacious "album's album" that plays like a love letter to the most adventurous, forward-thinking music released on Warp. Its epic scope and fully realized nature invokes some of the classic LPs under the long-running label's umbrella: Music Has the Right to Children, Music Is Rotted One Note, Richard D. James Album, One Word Extinguisher. Cosmogramma represents ambition for ambition's sake, exceeding its own lofty goals on every level.

In 2010, the ease of home recording meant that everyone was a "producer," but it's still just as difficult to "produce" decent music. The first half of the year found many upstarts trying (and failing) to replicate the woozy post-Dilla amniotic haze of FlyLo's 2008 breakout, Los Angeles; after Cosmogramma came out in May, imitators were stopped dead, left wondering how it was possible to fuse drum'n'bass, four-on-the-floor house, downtempo, jazz, and a dozen other genre tics while still rising well above pastiche. Ironically, some of the releases that came out on his label Brainfeeder this year seemed like a peek behind the curtain of Cosmogramma's individual components: Lorn's martial, chaotic constructions, Teebs' honey-flowing pastoral preoccupations, Daedelus' warm Tropic?lia touches. All these reference points, and yet Cosmogramma still sounds like a work of art that is wholly individual and unique. **** a Grammy: now that's reason to celebrate. --Larry Fitzmaurice

8.

Sleigh Bells - Treats

Like much of the best pop, Sleigh Bells sound thoroughly calculated-- their collision of aesthetics and poses is so striking it risks feeling phony. Initially, even the positive criticism was hedged. The mix of blown-out noise and bubblegum hookwork seemed gimmicky: People assumed they'd see through it by the end of summer. But what the band are so carefully sculpting isn't diffidence, it's excitement: overdriven riffs, monster beats, and Alexis Krauss' layered babble all designed for chain-reaction impact. The band lay out their shtick in the first 30 seconds of "Tell 'Em"-- machine-gun beatbox, imperious riffing, and sing-song prettiness from Krauss. Elsewhere on Treats you can hear fragments of pop's past-- Lush on "Rachel", the Shangri-Las on "Kids"-- but mainly Sleigh Bells stick to their own, new-minted sound, and it helps the thrills stay fresh.

The most convincing take on Treats-- the one which makes emotional sense to me-- is that it's a kind of teenpop: the mess, posturing, chaos, and unrelenting immediacy of an adolescent's headspace crushed into two-minute blurts. But the record doesn't really need decoding. Either you grin when "Crown on the Ground" unleashes those cartoonish speaker-busting beats or you don't. There's a videogame delight here in explosions and effects for their own sake, an irrepressible joy that's Sleigh Bells' biggest asset and the foundation of this record's surprising endurance. --Tom Ewing

7.

Beach House - Teen Dream

As if you needed more evidence that the traditional boundary between mainstream and indie is becoming ever more difficult to delineate, consider that a movie-star-marrying top-40 idol and a shy dream-pop duo from Baltimore's avant-underground each released albums in 2010 with practically the same title. But if Beach House's Teen Dream didn't quite have the same chart impact as Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, the album represents no less of a populist breakthrough for its makers. (And, hey, a No. 43 placing on the Billboard Top 200 ain't too shabby either.)

Teen Dream did little to alter Beach House's core characteristics-- slow-motion beats layered with hazy keyboard drones, rippling guitar figures, and Victoria Legrand's melancholic melodies-- but greatly amplified them to the point of redefining the band's essence, from that of introverted knee-gazers into an assured, emotionally assertive force. Liberated from the textural fog that permeated Beach House's first two albums, Legrand's voice exposed its rough edges, greatly enhancing the sense of longing and hurt underpinning songs like "Lover of Mine" and "Silver Soul". Advance copies of Teen Dream first started circulating last December, and its billowy synth lines and sleigh-bell accents made it perfect winter listening. But the album made even more sense as the warm weather arrived-- Teen Dream captures Beach House in the midst of a great thaw, the frosty surfaces melting away to reveal full-blooded passion. --Stuart Berman

 

[imtay22]

6.

Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Ladies and gentlemen, the best hip-hop album of 2007-- or 2015, take your pick. Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty became notorious for frustrating the bottom-line industry heads at Jive to the point where they just sat on it-- not enough easy-sell, cheap-hit material, they told Big Boi. They wanted a ringtone; they got "Tangerine", which proved problematic in that cell phones don't have big enough subwoofers. They wanted a "Lollipop" knockoff; they got "Shutterbugg", an 808 funk monster so uncompromisingly true to the Dungeon Fam legacy that its answer to Weezy's Auto-Tune was a Jimmy Spicer "The Bubble Bunch"-style robo-voice loop run through a vintage talkbox. Now, nearly three years after it should have been released, the long-stewing record not only sounds like a right-album-at-the-right-time classic, it sounds like something lesser artists are going to keep catching up to half a decade from now. Nobody does retrofuturism quite like the production team assembled here, and in advancing the sounds of mothership space-funk (Organized Noize's "Turns Me On" and "Fo Yo Sorrows"), Southern trunk-rattle (Mr. DJ's "Daddy Fat Sax"; Andr? 3000's "You Ain't No DJ") and slow-jam gangsta soul (Lil Jon's "Hustle Blood"; Cutmaster Swiff and Big Boi's co-production "Shine Blockas"), the sound of Sir Lucious Left Foot is an exercise in recognizing traditions and pushing them miles ahead. Big Boi crowns it all with a lyrical acumen so detailed and charismatic-- acting as benevolent hustler, knuckle-dusting elder statesman, trickster smartass and street-level philosopher-- that he easily proves to the rest of the world what heads knew all along: there is no "that other dude" in OutKast. --Nate Patrin

5.

Vampire Weekend - Contra

In which a band of misidentified elitists empathetically comes to terms with their elitist hangups only to be sued for $2 million by a former luxury model-turned-teddy bear entrepreneur who currently lives behind gates in one of the most affluent areas of America. Contra is not for fighting, though. It's for finding common spaces in a world desperately clinging to outmoded binaries: us vs. them, red vs. blue, Oxford comma vs. no Oxford comma. So while it was easy to scoff at the now 52-year-old Contra cover star Ann Kirsten Kennis as she talked about squeezing millions out of Vampire Weekend in a misappropriation-of-image suit while looking like a Wasp-y caricature in Vanity Fair, maybe it's not that simple. Maybe her sign-off on the Polaroid was forged by its photographer, as she claims. Maybe rich people who own ornate vases and fluffy lapdogs can be exploited, too. Plus, a passing detail in the VF piece-- that Kennis' hair was just starting to grow back after chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer when she first saw the Contra cover-- is exactly the type of humanizing tidbit Ezra Koenig might allude to in one of his songs. (The case is still pending.)

"Don't call me a Contra 'til you've tried," sings Koenig near the end of the album. The line-- delivered with a new-found solemn eloquence-- could read as a defense against his band's naysayers. And while there will always be those who are turned off by their popped collars, flighty arrangements, and overarching neatness, Vampire Weekend graciously refuse to let those people define them. --Ryan Dombal

4.

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

Anticipated both by James Murphy's proclamations that this might be the final LCD Soundsystem album and by teasing videos of the band holed up in Rick Rubin's L.A. mansion, clad all in white, This Is Happening could only have been an event. And the album, like the title, delivers without a moment's hesitation: What could have been the document of a band fighting for its place in the pecking order turns out to be something far more personal and far more important. This Is Happening doesn't just keep step with the times; it's the portrait of an older, wiser Murphy, arch and guarded in equal measure, who's intent upon keeping two steps ahead of himself, never mind the competition.

However you want to process Murphy's biography and the whole New York rock backstory, the music on the album more than carries its own weight, interpolating Bowie and Eno's studio aura through several generations of downtown dance-rock and canonical house in a way that seems genuinely new; with This Is Happening, the "DFA sound" becomes less about its influences than Murphy's own worldview, as Murphy quits leaning on funk-punk clich?s and makes every song count. Listen back to Sound of Silver, and a song like "Time to Get Away" sounds like filler, a way for Murphy to find his voice and bide the time-- at least, compared to "Pow Pow" and "Home", the only tracks on the new album that have any truck with old-school DFA-style funk at all.

Maybe what Murphy learned the most from Eno and Bowie is the importance of melody. On the last album, "You Wanted a Hit" would have been a jarring punk-funk thing, but here it's smoothed out and sadded up by a single, demure keyboard line; same goes for "Pow Pow", which starts with rote congas, stubby bass, and spoken ranting, and eventually blossoms into something gloriously harmonic and yearning. As on the last album, there's a careful balance between rockers and brooders, but even the more straightforward club jams, like "One Touch", are darker and more urgent than before. And if follow-ups to "Someone Great" and "All My Friends" are missed, "All I Want" and "I Can Change" offer potent emotional mile-markers for Murphy's state of being in 2010-- just one point in a line that he's clearly not tired of filling in. ("Never change," his ass.) --Philip Sherburne

Pardon the language in some of these reviews. I'm just quoting them word for word.

 

[Sexy Beast]

I'm betting that The Suburbs will be #1.

 

[imtay22]

I'm betting that The Suburbs will be #1.

Just because my last 10 plays was that album? lol jk. Its in the top 3 though. Can anyone guess what the other 2 are?

 

[Sexy Beast]

Maybe Gorillaz or Deerhunter or Kanye, frankly I'm just looking at Pitchforks top 20 for ideas.

 

[imtay22]

Up on melancholy hill
There's a plastic tree
Are you here with me?

3.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

Few albums this year have done such a striking job of wringing appeal out of deep-rooted melancholy as the third record by Gorillaz, who have been freed from the group's cartoon-band constraints to provide Damon Albarn's deftest work of pop modernism in the past decade. At its peaks-- the blissfully tense electro-funk of "Stylo", the longing pop-house of "On Melancholy Hill", the title track's Morricone-meets-Moroder spaghetti western new wave-- Plastic Beach provides the thrills of hooky, well-crafted pop with a feeling of baroque dejection. And its sleek production is craftily undercut with a cast of voices that mutter wearily (Mark E. Smith on "Glitter Freeze"; Lou Reed on "Some Kind of Nature"), belt heartachingly (Bobby Womack on "Stylo" and "Cloud of Unknowing"), lonesomely serenade (Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano on "Empire Ants" and "To Binge")-- or, as Albarn does more compellingly than he has in ages, wail with a haunting ennui. --Nate Patrin

I need the darkness someone please cut the lights

2.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

That Spike Jonze seized upon 2004's exuberantly one-dimensional "Wake Up" as the ideal wrapper for the ragged, pre-adolescent confusion of Where the Wild Things Are might easily have felt like a backhanded compliment to a songwriter of Win Butler's aspiration. By connecting Arcade Fire with the film, Jonze foregrounded the band's own formative period; by connecting the dumbstruck incomprehension that comes with childhood to their 40-story bluster, he inadvertently critiqued it. Six years later, they're a different band, and The Suburbs marks the culmination of that change. Where once stood a group of marching and occasionally baying idealists now stands something more considered, more complicated, and, well, more conflicted.

On paper, a concept record about something as banal as the suburbs sounds prone to terrible clich?. Fortunately, Butler spares us any neat and tidy disapproval of two-car garages and manicured lawns in favor of something considerably more measured and conflicted-- a full-bodied account of all the sweetness and strangeness of that life in all its multitudes. He aches just as much as he spits, reminisces just as much as he resolves, and veers between sounding like a revolutionary ("Ready to Start") and an old man ("We Used to Wait"), in turn painting a surprisingly nuanced picture of thirtysomething inertia. The Suburbs isn't so much about feeling old as it is about not always feeling young, and "that feeling" is bittersweet and complex. --Mark Pytlik

Unemployment line, credit card declined
Did I not mention I was about to lose my mind?

1.

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Bearing witness to Kanye West's very public 2010 has featured many joys, none greater than watching everyone unspool his myriad updates, achievements, and indiscretions into piles of meaning. His persona went to cataclysmic places this year-- there were times when he deserved his own cable news ticker. But, somehow, West managed to transcend the preposterous talk show appearances, the too-good-to-be-true Twitter account, the live breakdowns, the Horus chain, the free-MP3 stunt(ing), the press blitz, the breakups, the make-ups, the dick pics, the furniture pornography, the Rosewood movement, the NO NEGATIVE BLOG VIEWING, the living paintings, the short film, and the rest of the lot. Through all that noise, we obsessed first and most deeply over the eye of the storm: the album. --Sean Fennessey

Happy New Years to all of Edgegamers!

 

[Noise]

QUICK TAKE KANYES ALBUM COVER OUT GOOGOGO

CHANGE IT TO ONE OF THE ALTERNATES! NON CENSORED ALBUM GOGOGO

im only saying this cause i love kanye and eGO

 

[imtay22]

QUICK TAKE KANYES ALBUM COVER OUT GOOGOGO

CHANGE IT TO ONE OF THE ALTERNATES! NON CENSORED ALBUM GOGOGO

im only saying this cause i love kanye and eGO

Done.

 

[eurocracy]

Seriously? Kanye West?
... Lies.

 

[imtay22]

Seriously? Kanye West?
... Lies.

Have you listened to the album?