10.) Love like a woman-Ben Lyman
Equal parts gaudy self interested sexual diatribe and genuine musical memoir, Love like a woman was easily one of the strongest albums of 2010. Imagine a brooding asymmetrical marriage of Prince, Jeff Buckley and Kanye West licking the microphone and shaking his ass like some lustful reanimated James Brown all while wielding the type of unruly guitar licks that once actually made the guitar an instrument worthy of reverence and even fear.
The phrase genre bending sounds ridiculous next to a record this diverse.
For 53 minutes Lyman raps, croons, begs, threatens, prays and shapes a thick collage of samples, drum machines and guitars over an ever shifting array of saccharine and provocative versions of his own voice.
Love like a woman is a Ben Lyman only record. It's him alone in a borrowed room in Tulsa Oklahoma neurotically tweaking knobs while playing and mixing every sound you hear and wailing into a crappy microphone.
It's solo to such an extent that some listeners wont be able to get past the low-fi bedroom production and dinky pawn shop keyboard sounds, but for those who can these songs reveal a portrait of an unpolished but remarkably sophisticated songwriter. Lyrics like "Old as you do look to me/ young woman you look like death" are paired in the same breath with a self congratulating desire to"f**k every woman everywhere." Here is a singer willing to bare every impulse, every evil erotic and lovely conviction. The album begins with Lyman's lilting tenor voice almost conversational as he asks
"Do you want to begin again? She says I've just begun. I ask were you wanting to stay, and oh God she says maybe." Then he follows with "Although I seem to see what's available of me/ put a prize into me/ our union. Either or/ I'd have dreamed/ the halo on my beak. Put out the God in me. Put out the God in me."
The album is filled with these dichotomies. Insightful youthful admonitions about the nature of God and women and love set against images of hideous sexual machismo, Mormonism, Styxian molten lava, brutal misogyny, Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles and text messages. Records this complex and interesting are all too rare.
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9.)No Mas- Javelin
I henceforth christen a new American music genre: Funkadelic skinny white boy pop or perhaps just Motown verisimilitude (I can't believe it's not Motown). Ordinarily my love for our language veers my descriptions away from hideous syntax folding b.s. (like post punk or last years much lamented, slut-wave), but Javelin's truly white boy funkadelic record has forced an exception.
Two incredibly nerdy cousins, Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford from the drunken Brooklyn art party scene gained national attention with the release of their demos
(Jams and jems) and (Javelin, number 2), and now their debut album No Mas has landed them jauntily into indy-rock quasi-stardom. Touring with the likes of Yeasayer and Mos Def in a single year, these skinny white boys are certainly doing something right.
No Mas is a sonorous dusty audiophilic beat jungle with both sampled, recorded and borrowed(stolen) sounds so blurringly well mixed that it's impossible to tell where the samples end and the cousin's home made re-renderings begin. Think Paul's Boutique meets the incredible bongo band, and since most of you have no idea what those two things I just mentioned are just let me say this record is ridiculously cool.
8.) Heartland- Owen Pallett
A brilliant musician friend once explained the mathematical difference between noise and music to me while pounding on the dusty tone-less ends of a broken xylophone. It's a definition I've spent a great deal of time trying to forget, but fortunately I can distill it down into one word: Dissonance.
Heartland is the third album by Canadian indie rock artist Owen Pallett (formerly of the project Final Fantasy), and "dissonance" is definitely one word to describe this record. The term epic is probably a second. Violins, viola, cello, oboe, upright bass, flute, clarinet, piano, timpani, electronic beats, synthesizers and glitch samples are the backing band to Owen's absurdist narrative exploration of a fictional character angrily interrogating his own God.
Yeah, Pallette's pretty weird, but behind all that cerebral artsy posturing is a brilliant violinist, composer and lyricist. Take the albums second track,
"Keep the dog quiet!" for example. Pizzicato strings build over taut dissonant violins as Owen's main character says to his God
"My body is a cage. This union is a cage. Bow to the cage. Bow to the cage."
Those violent bending strings all climax to the narrator bellowing the word"non-sequential" as the actual hook for this song. This ambitious blend of digital musicality and lush challenging orchestral arrangement combined with a personal narrative psycho-drama that could seriously be described as
Joyce-esque, made Heartland arguably the most creative album of the year.
7.)The Forgiveness Rock Record- The Broken Social Scene
Release several of the most arresting experimental rock albums of the 2000's which don't actually sound like Radiohead, check.
Make it possible for Canadian indy-rock bands to be taken seriously, check.
Help get Lesile Feist crazy famous, double check.
With this list of accolades one would expect the members of Canadian rock collective The Broken Social Scene to be household names, but alas in the age of Gaga and Bieber this was not to be.
6.)Cosmogramma-Flying Lotus
If it is possible for music to figuratively step on the collective brain of the world, then Cosmogramma is the album which did so the most in 2010. Dj./producer Flylo (Steve Ellison) is not playing nice anymore.
Gone are the bound-less languid stretches of scratchy abstract minimilist "viby Dilla beats" which populated his early work and in their place (or often on top of them) are beats of staggering variety, dimension and depth. Often bearing more similarity to Boards of Canada and Thom Yorke(who appears on this album) than Portishead sonically, Cosmogramma represents Flying Lotus's most prodigous departure to date.
Self described as his "jazz album" the frenetic and omnipresent bass is the central character of this album. Sporadic and often incomprehensible low end melodies govern the sound entirely. Incorporating classic lavish horns, skat, bright tinkling piano notes, and some of the crunchiest beats I've ever heard Cosmogramma will not soon be forgotten.
5.)Go-Jonsi
In April of 2010 Jonsi Por Birgisson renowned singer of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros released his first solo record, Go. For a year of disappointing but highly anticipated releases Go honestly delivers.
Rife with the off kilter alien falsetto and the vaulting a-linguistic melodies which we've come to expect from Jonsi, Go explores his songwriting from an entirely unique space.
First, he sings in English. Which is itself a marked contrast to the guttural invented not quite Icelandic that Jonsi invented for Sigur Ros. Also new here is the absence of the long bowed sweeping electric guitar which grounds most of his former songs. In its place is some of the most daunting and dexterous rhythmic instrumentation and orchestration of 2010. This can be largely attributed to the compelling modern arrangements of the American composer Nico Muhly, but Jonsi's ornate compositions provide an exquisite ground upon which to build this remarkable record.
4.)Halcyon Digest-Deerhunter
The veiled and often acrimonious comparisons to
the Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine and
the Jesus and Mary Chain don't even matter anymore.
Deerhunter is the best indy-rock band in the world. Period.
That we are all the tepid and wasted grand children of The Pixies and Sonic Youth faltering over the incoherent legacy of our parent's last fallen decade is meaningless. We get it, but beautiful music transcends.
Halcyon Digest does not scream it smolders. For 53 minutes Bradford Cox unveils even more of his moody pretty sensibility than ever before. Slowly and purposefully the fog of "noise rock" is peeled away to reveal bouncing piano and even rockabilly bass riffs on songs like "Revival." Then gradually the peal of a blaring Fender yawning feedback submerges the album again. In the song "Basement Scene" the gnawing possibility that waking up might be worse than the nightmare of unreality is as intricate a paradox as any in a rock song I've heard this decade.
Finally, Halcyon Digest ends with a moving tribute to the recently deceased Matador artist Jay Retard "He would've laughed." With it he sums up so much of the genuine and inscrutable pain of a seemingly disambiguated generation of garage bands and weary decrepit punk rock titans staring down at their torn shoelaces for a reason to be.
"Sweetness cums suffering
In sweetness comes suffering
I won't rest till I can't breathe
I can't breathe with you looking at me
I get bored as I get older
Can you help me figure this out?"
In sweetness comes suffering
I won't rest till I can't breathe
I can't breathe with you looking at me
I get bored as I get older
Can you help me figure this out?"
3.)Sir Lucious left foot the son of Chico dusty-Big Boi
In 2004, Outkast's record label Arista was subsumed into Jive records. This almost meaningless convergence of accounting details nearly stopped this album from existing. Jive executives were determined to manipulate the multi-platinum Outkast into recording another duo album before releasing a solo one. So in 2008 the battle for Sir Lucious left foot began. Jive refused to release it, but through a gorilla marketing campaign Big Boi purposely leaked almost half of the album on mixtape sites himself. Remarkably Big Boi demonstrated a type of grind and devotion to his music unheard of for a Platinum selling rap artist. Going so far as to publicly decry his label's actions and to fight for an independent release date. Eventually this drew the attention of Def Jam executives who signed Big Boi to a three album deal in March of 2010.
The album Jive embarrassingly squandered stands as one of the most elaborate and engrossing rap records of the past ten years. Huge grimy punishing dirty south kick drums and clap snares paired with thick keyboards and gargantuan distorted strings all against the most labyrinth flow of 2010.
"Yeah, we stay/bangin on the daily/ soul funk crusader maybe/ Tailored alligator soufflé/ Escalade all in yo/ladies/Space invader, I'm the lyrical Darth Vader."
Apparently the conventional wisdom holds that Big Boi was the weak link of OutKast. Yet somehow seemingly washed up producers like Scott Storch and Lil John have new life on this record. This theory also seems to ignore the effect of Big Boi's influences (like Goodie mob, Too short and E-40) on the every facet of OutKast."Cadillacs and alligator shoes, big booty hoes and assassin's bullets waiting for Obama" with the son of Chico dusty spitting hard over every note. This is the most hungry Big Boi has sounded since "ATLiens".
2.)July Flame-Laura Veirs
Each year a phalanx of well intentioned music journalists descend upon the year's albums with a ravenous desire to write music's epitaph. To declare that the final death rattle of the plain immutable song has passed. In a digital age this makes sense. Who needs a simple well written song when civilization can auto tune itself into oblivion. Then we hear an album like July Flame, and the apocalyptic sentence of songs is commuted once again.
July Flame is a stunning reaffirmation of the song's primacy as the thesis to the entire argument for music in our culture. 13 formidable tracks later a tiny pregnant Laura Veirs stands perched atop your consciousness, and her words and melodies are stuck there for good. In "Where you driving son?" she sings,
"You tangled up in the gnarled tree. You do as you damn well please
You were torn and faded by the elements staring straight through me/You in suspended animation
You were torn and faded by the elements staring straight through me/You in suspended animation
You green and gone firefly/ that storm brewing at your temple never seemed to die."
This juxtaposition of arcane and personal poetic elements is ever present on July Flame. Somehow she manages that Joni Mitchel-esque balance of tenderness and hate for the same man. But here she also"dreams of silver silos", "turns fields of stone to magma" with emotion, mingles her voice with "electric wires and messages to Mars", praises "the spinning emeraldine of pollinators on prairies and stampeding buffalo" all while howling life is good as she chases the tracks of her lover into oblivion.
1.) My Beautiful dark twisted fantasy-Kanye West
Douche-bag(noun)- a piece of equipment for holding the fluid used in douching
b.) Someone who has surpassed the levels of jerk and asshole, however not yet reached fu**er or motherfu**er.
c.)Kanye West
On November 23rd 2010 at 1:00 a.m. an inebriated Kanye West performed the entire Dark Fantasy album to a standing room only crowd at the Bowery Ballroom in New York city. Drunk and ambling brazenly between drum machines, synthesizers and a squealing vocoder, West spewed well simmered blog angst at the exhausted crowd (who'd waited hours just to get in) about everything from his ridiculous Katrina rant to his now ubiquitous marketing nemesis, Taylor Swift.
Kanye West is an f**ing douche bag.
He also just happened to record the best album of 2010. As much as I hate to share the conclusions of the bottom feeding faux intelligentsia of the vapid American media multi-verse, sometimes those bastards get it right.
From the moment the first warbling synthesizer bends it's long blurry notes over Nikki Manaj's manic/bipolar narrator impression, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, sets itself apart from every other album of the year.
"At the mall, there was a seance
Just kids, no parents
Then the sky filled with herons
I saw the devil in a Chrysler LeBaron
And the hell, it wouldn't spare us
And the fires did declare us
But after that, took pills, kissed an heiress
And woke up back in Paris"
Then the sky filled with herons
I saw the devil in a Chrysler LeBaron
And the hell, it wouldn't spare us
And the fires did declare us
But after that, took pills, kissed an heiress
And woke up back in Paris"
Prophetic visions of idiosyncratic suburban superstition, greed, nihilism, and hedonism and beneath it all some incomprehensible limitless adolescent hope. Song after song, he absorbs the sociological absurdity of his own douche baggery and embraces it while still trying to create something beautiful. Kanye isn't a person on this record so much as an amalgamation of broken and defiant Twittered impulses culminating into songs, he "chokes a South Park writer with a fish stick" while lamenting that "school's closed and the prisons open", he's "the abomination of Obama's nation" and "he "puts the pu**y in a sarcophagus", and at every turn the motifs of the album evolve around his mega-phonic neurosis.
Light, for example is mentioned on almost every track. At alternating moments "light" blinds, heals, kills, saves, shows, shakes, burns and destroys, creating a symbolism almost as complex as West himself.
Then there's the music. This album has been repeatedly described as a Hip Hop opera, but this is far from hyperbole. Wildly compressed maniacal beats crowd every decibel. When one Elton John piano sample wasn't enough he added an orchestra then elaborate Moog noises and modulated sine waves. Somehow actual choirs aren't even ornate enough for West and their voices are chopped and screwed, digested and unfurled into shiny masticated bits of haunting digital violence. To top it off West makes panned schizophrenic re-interpretations of his own persona, and at the end of his 9 minute hit rant, Runaway, about the Swift debacle and his much publicized split with model Amber Rose, West pulverizes his own voice with a vocoder for 3 and a half of the most genuine minutes on the record.
This is not a perfect album. It's riddled with self conscious bawdy allusions that border on lunacy, and the Baroque structure of some of the songs is nearly unbearable at moments. However, the blatant vulnerability, brilliant over arching themes, Rza guided impeccable production, and the presence of an undeniably compelling narrative make the record's faults dim by comparison.
When Justin Vernon's auto-tuned yet heartrendingly soulful voice begins the final track "Lost in the World" the scope of this album becomes clear.
My beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is aiming the difficult bulk of it's impassioned megalomaniacal beauty towards history. It is fitting then that
Gil Scott Heron, one of West's idols and heroes of the Black Liberation movement (of which West's deceased mother was a once a member), ends the album with a spoken word piece from 1970 which sounds as prescient now as ever. West's last verse leaves us with the image of a desperate and insolent black boy absolutely surrendered to the untenable paradox of his own power, love and confusion.
Gil Scott Heron, one of West's idols and heroes of the Black Liberation movement (of which West's deceased mother was a once a member), ends the album with a spoken word piece from 1970 which sounds as prescient now as ever. West's last verse leaves us with the image of a desperate and insolent black boy absolutely surrendered to the untenable paradox of his own power, love and confusion.
Naive and boisterous, fecund with egoism, stupidity and roaring 21st century archetypes Kanye West has managed to do something inconceivable in pop culture since Bob Dylan: reaching the zenith of commercial success, and simultaneously earning the respect and condemnation of a generation.
