Best Music 2010

Best of 2010

Another year in a series in which the perne in a gyre phenomenon enabled, distributed and fragmented my interests so randomly that there is no core to this list, no earth-shaking pop-culture watershed moments… the Market is overlord, consumer unit re-framing and digital tracking allow the fine-tuning of my aural amusements.  I find more obscure and finely honed satisfactions, but perhaps finally (after 45 of these year-end exercises) the Church of Rock and Roll has gone out of business and bolted its doors of perception shut (although some metal peeks are on [and peaks in] my list for the first time in a long time).  The Center does not hold; the disintegration of which leaves (left) bright specks that outline a profile of a  spiritus mundi.   One of the best years of music in a while for me, albeit tidbits of perfect construction, no large virus-resistant generational definitions.  The artifice of eternity?   Not life everlasting, just some brief and fading moments of life right now.

 

1.    Nik Bartsch's Ronin – Llyria

They call it Zen funk.  It is meditative and insistent Swiss jazz, that measures out syncopation in spoonfuls of post-African groove, with multiple time-signatures concurrently running.  If you try to count it out, or track the arrangements with any compositional analysis you’ll appreciate the reasoned and evolved compilation and ordering of its musical ideas. A clockwork precision; they are Swiss after all.  But that’s not it; it’s the melodic intensity and the insistent mystery of its driving rhythms that recall the moments before our corporeal conception.  Just as the Rolling Stones gave back Muddy Waters in a new universe, Mr. Bartsch gives back A Love Supreme, without love, but with a cool and calculated empty dancing of the highest order.  Yin gives up yang, order is the metric of chaos.  Pass me the Heidegger.

 

2.    The Alps – Le Voyage

Played more than anything else this year, some of it is embarrassingly pretty…to accompany  credits rolling for a “quirky but quiet” RomSitCom circa 1973… it’s whole world is some Mendocino/Frankfurt universe of the early 70’s where we’re luxuriating in an herbal fog mit candles while the Baader Meinhoff Group do the heavy lifting.  Wah wahs and sitars and drum circles.  The music sounds like quiet un-released outtakes from Popol Vuh or Can… although they are really young musicians from trendy neighborhoods in SF.  The fragments recall hippie poets from Chile living in the Marais and a montage of shopping on Portobello Road.  Tea and sympathy restored to the throne of the post-Rock of the Obama era.  A fuzz tone here, an acoustic jangle, the slow and deliberate drum break, the stretched out space still possible, drones of the highest order.  Perhaps a simulation of lost innocence like this can only happen if there are no voices; and here are only instruments and their memory.  The music is richly seasoned head food and palliative chill pill, reminiscent of a time when pulling things apart wasn’t entropic, but rather preparatory to some new and improved Production value.  Maybe this music only opens up if the listener has lived something that no longer exists, or plays it hundreds of times in a row.  It did, I did, I did.  Pass me the lighter.

 

3.    Four Tet – There is Love in You

A disco beat?  No, really?  But this trance-like invitation sounds both sophisticated (adult) and blameless (young).  The “good for all ages and purposes” nature of the music did mean it stayed in the car CD player for six months.  The arc of post-rock instrumentals have traveled now from party-soundtrack to jazzy compositions with electronic treatments and runway vocal scraps.   Hey, maybe looking good is the greatest revenge after all.   Every recorded sound bit, although often analog in origin, is placed in software-friendly loops, hips and hops.  Kieran Hebdon has created rhythmic explorations that, for once, are not even remotely “soundtracks” or sound-dance-tracks, but rather are challenging and pleasing reminders that repetition can be incrementally powerful, that stops and starts can wake up the hearing, that insistence is often a kind of beauty, and that lucid sounds can throw light on the matter.  Pass me the credit card, I’m flying to Milan.

 

4.    Paul Motian – Lost in a Dream

In years past I didn’t include my jazz forays much in these lists unless it was hybrid jazz (Nils Pettar Molvaer).  I didn’t think they were fair to measure against the rock power, and I didn’t always trust my own knowledge of the technical underpinning of the jazz.  But for a long time I’ve listened to quasi-rock, ambient, electronic music in the same way as jazz.   It’s uneven still (how could Charles  Lloyd not be better than anything else in this top ten).  But Motian’s compositions’ astonishing beauty and calm, serious resolve hold their place here.  This is, after all, a supergroup.  Chris Potters’ classic and noble sax, the inventive roadmap of Jason Moran’s piano, and the challenging and definitive drumming of Motian stir the heart effortlessly, just as they appeal to the intellect and the sense of history.  In sounding absolutely mature and classic, this trio has made the most beautiful music of the year… and in this beauty there is a truth lost in the clamor of the day.  Quiet is the new eternal.  Pass the Original Consciousness.

 

5.    Radio Dept – Clinging to a Scheme

The first half is a resurrection of indy economic design , earnest and melodic, with a dialogue between the vocals and guitars that are remindful of great Brit-Pop (sometimes Blue Nile, sometimes Prefab Sprout, always nasal white-eyed soul).  Bittersweet but perky music to tap the steering wheel while stopped in traffic; mid-tempo reminders not to worry about traffic at all.  The sweetness earned by that weird Scandinavian student-of-music-history in which the source is obscured and nailed in one guitar hook, or bridge, or snare drum tightness.  It loses steam, even at less than 40 minutes of music.  The pop moment may only last 90 seconds.  But what a glorious reminder of what those 90 seconds can do.  Pass me the guidebook to Mykonos.

 

6.    Matthew Dear – Black City

So if most of my best-loved music this year is “calming” or retro-leaning post-rock, this is danceable and neurotic dark urban tenseness that seems right now, even if it is “intelligent” dance music.  Proving that “tribal” can be as modern as a phone-app and as nerve-wracking as double espressos at midnight, and that snide grandeur can be relevant.   And midnight is this music’s time signature, with just the occasional legato of pre-dawn after-hours chill room.  Its requisite retro quotations are more Wire and Psycho Killer than Prince and the Cure.  And the guy’s double-tracked voice slays me; part David Byrne and part club kid of the Bush the Second era.  And so under it all is a healthy dose of David Bowie in all his Man Who Sold the World  to Thin White Duke affects.  Fashion could, provisionally, conceivably still be a tool of subversion.  Jury’s still out, but this is good music until their pizza arrives and they return with a verdict.  I defy your buttocks muscles not to keep time to some of these beats.  But defiance is less the order of Dear’s day than narrative;  the lyrics paint a nicely grim picture of Dead Dancers with a hunger to tell their story.   I think one song is about a universal need for plastic surgery.  Rope a dope humor and missed opportunities taken for granted.  Pass me the bottled water, I think I’m getting dehydrated.

 

7.    Sun Kil Moon – Admiral Fell Promises

When I made the first draft of this list l had this far down … around 50.   But that was so unfair to Kozelek and my own penchant for “pretty” and mournful music.  I listened to this so many times I took it for granted… as though it were Joni Mitchell’s Blue or Andres Segovia or salt.  His songs are linearly challenging… and one often seems to run into another.  Some are so heavily arranged (for only a voice and acoustic nylon-stringed guitar) that often what seems like three songs sees the original theme return and you realize you’ve been on a aural journey that is both simple acoustic folk singing, and a mysterious “chamber music” of some foggy San Francisco afternoon neighborhood walk.  The flamenco, cocktail lounge guitar flourishes frame his inimitably stark and descriptive lyrics about places, experiences, disappointments and gratitude of bay-area life.  Half Moon Bay was the only song of the year that made me cry.   Pass me the Beatnik schmaltz.

 

8.    The Black Angels – Phosphene Dream

Oddly, this is the only music in the top ten that probably could be dreamed up by scruffy kids in a garage (as opposed to laptops in the bedroom), so rock is on the critical list.   They offer even some blues chord changes and simple two part-harmonies framed by a “yeah” here, and a “hey, hey, hey” there.  Every now and then they seem ready to go into a droning extended workout, but the songs, true to their nuggets heritage stay around or even under three minutes long.  And they are songs with starts and stops that have nothing to do with each other.  Best of all there is an echo of the great southwest, and one song “Entrance Song” is the power-pop hit of the year… what a teenage delight to hear the rumble crank up and (no, really, Native American chants) propelling the drive… behind the wheel of a V8, these kids are probably more popular in West End London than either Austin or West L:A.  I mean, music not just for driving, but music about driving.  Pass the ketchup.

 

9.    Twin Shadows – Forget

Exactly why morose crooning (ala Morrissey, Depeche Mode), delivered without an ounce of irony and humor, should be relatively authentic in 2010 is mysterious.  It is a tribute that programmed 80’s drums and washes of synths and Cure-ish guitar figures are not all the same, that from some a strong pop song can produce yearning in any year, despite Sheila E dance moves and fey hair-producted club boy ennui.  I think the answer to the mystery is the romantic hunger at the base of the guy’s writing and singing.  Eternal pubescent insecurity and discomfort.  It feels like the gym’s decorated for the prom-still-in-our-lungs, lights low, a few girls dancing with each other, the punch bowls on the tables, the drugs not yet kicking in… none of us fit in, the future is still as dark as yesterday, we struggle for breath,  …well, it is 2010 after all then.  Pass the calendar.

 

10.  Brian Eno – Small Craft on a Milk Sea

At first I was disappointed… in part because of high expectations of the Progenitor of the kind of music I listen to most.  Also it seemed like the soundtrack-improvisations in parts were too thin, and the rhythmic louder segments were noisy by contrast, not a counterpoint to the morphine drips and drifts of the rest.  But slowly the parts sunk in, and I heard the thread connecting it all.  Even in his later years the great composer still touches the depths of the psyche by keeping these sonic fragments seamlessly superficial.  Although his musical foundation is Satie, ultimately his tunes are Jungian; and are arranged and treated with an elegance not known nor understood by his Progeny.  Pass the neurotransmitters

 

 

11.  The Barn Owls – Ancestral Star

Continuing their laudable experiments with drones and simple and primal textures.

12.  Lower Dens – Twin Hand Movement

Also a fine jangle and drone with Baltimore’s best female vocalist doing a Robert Smith treatment to its full song.

13.  Junip - Fields

Another Scandinavian student of music, albeit with a Spanish guitar heritage. Atmospheric and insistent, if in a balanced and gentle Yo La Tengo way. 

14.  M. Ostermeier – Chance Reconstruction

Electronic and acoustic fragments building soundscapes of chilly beauty.

15.  Emeralds – Does it Look Like I’m Here

Post rock instrumental jamming and tightly arranged  etudes of what  fits in today’s  ambient light.

16.  Ariel Pink – Haunted Graffiti

A messy closet of pop music, fully retro in its hide-and-seek “this is a hit” standards.  Round and Round is the song of the year.

17.  Christian Scott –Yesterday You Said Tomorrow

Moving jazz from something historical to something very future-oriented.  The new wave of post-millennial cool and noisy jazz.

18.  The Books – The Way Out

Self-help gurus, found sounds, social anthropology, and a smidge of electronic.

19.  The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt

The best Bob Dylan record since the 70’s and the best pure folk record of the decade by a Swedish political singer who has no sense of how funny it is he sounds exactly like Bob Dylan.

20.  laan Kol – III

Shards of guitar feedback from the guitarist from Thuja.

 

21.  LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening

22.  I Am Not A Gun – Solace

23.  Charles Lloyd -Mirror

24.  Pantha du Prince – Black Noise

25.  Kylesa – Spiral Shadow

26.  Burkina Electric - Paspanga

27.  The Drums – The Drums

28.  Wild Night – Gemini

29.  Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabete

30.  Phantogram -  Eyelid Movies

31.  The National – High Violet

32.  Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation

33.  Ketil Bjornstad – Remembrance

34.  Retribution Gospel Choir - II

35.  Gonjasufi – A Sufi and a Killer

36.  Caribou – Swim

37.  Johan Johannsson - & In the Endless Pause Came the Sound of Bees

38.  Loscil – Endless Falls

39.  Tomas Stanko – Dark Eyes

40.  David Hidalgo/Louie Perez – The Long Goodbye

41.  Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

42.  Tame Impala – Innerspeaker

43.  Manu Katche – Third Round

44.  Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

45.  Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Liars

46.  Titus Andronicus – The Monitorand

47.  Seu Jorge and Almaz

48.  The Black Keys – Brothers

49.  Olafur Arnalds - & They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness

50.  Los Lobos – Tin Can Trust

51.  Crocodiles – Sleep Forever

52.  Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

53.  M. Ostermeier – Lakefront

54.  Nathaniel Ratlieff – In Memory of Loss

55.  Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

56.  Warpaint – The Fool

57.  Surfer Blood – Astrocoast

58.  Voice of Seven Thunders – Voice of Seven Thunders

59.  Cancha Via Circuito – Rio Arriba

60.  Retribution Gospel Choir - 2

61.  Beach House – Dream House

62.  Shining - Blackjazz

63.  Neil Young – Le Noise

64.  Bilial – Airtight’s Revenge

65.  Love Remains – How to Dress Well

66.  Kylesa – The Sprial Shadow

67.  Besnard Lakes – Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night

68.  The Black Keys - Brothers

69.  Spoon - Transference

70.  No Age – Everything in Between

71.  Liars - Sisterworld

72.  Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)

73.  Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record

74.  Jason Moran - Ten

75.  Agalloch – Marrow of the Spirit

76.  Sade – Soldier of Love (deal with it bitches)

77.  Vampire Weekend - Contra

78.  Lali Puna – Out Inventions

79.  The Hold Steady – Heaven is Whenever

80.  Gil Scott Heron – I’m New Here

81.  Local Natives – Gorilla Manor

82.  Big Boi – Sir Luscious Left Foot

83.  The Red River – Little Songs  about the Big Picture

84.  Broken Bells – Broken Bells

85.  Jamie Johnson – The Guitar Song

86.  DJ Rupture - Solar Life Raft

87.  Josh Ritter – So Runs the World Away

88.  Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz

89.  Alejandro Escovedo – Streetsongs of Love

90.  Janelle Monae – The Archandroid

91.  Tamikrest - Adagh

92.  Jonsi – Go

93.  Bostich and Fussible – Bulevar 2000

94.  Hacienda – Big Red and Barbacoa

95.  John Legend and the Roots – Wake Up

96.  Pat Metheny – Orchestrion

97.  Build an Ark – Love 2

98.  High Dials – Anthems for Doomed Youth

99.  Sleigh Bells – Treats

100.             Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago