NUMBER TWENTY
CRYSTAL CASTLES: CRYSTAL CASTLES
Crystal Castles want to fuck you up. And then they want to make sweet, back alley love to you. Just check the duality of the one-two opening punch of "Fainting Spells" and "Celestia." The former packs mind-melting synths, discombobulating channel-jumping and the most abrasive vocal performance this side of an early Blood Brothers album. The latter goes in completely the opposite direction, rocking epic gothic melodies and Alice Glass' hauntingly seductive voice to create one of the greatest ballads this year. That kind of dichotomy is what makes the 2010 version of Crystal Castles interesting. Yeah, Alice Glass can destroy your brainpan, but she can also make you melt. Yeah, Ethan Kath can attack you with walls of blown-out noise, but he can also rock you to sleep. Not bad for a band once derided as a one-trick pony.
Peep numbers nineteen through eleven after the jump.
NUMBER NINETEEN
DRAKE: THANK ME LATER
So, you're Aubrey Graham. You've got a pretty solid gig on Canadian teenage melodrama Degrassi: The Next Generation as popular kid turned paraplegic Jimmy Brooks. But you think you're meant for greatness as a rapper. So you do what rappers for generations have done: go by a nickname (In this case, your middle name Drake) and make a few mix tapes, until one blows you up. In this case, So Far Gone found a solid, if unspectacular rapper singing earworm hooks over impressive beats. You get the Young Money seal of approval and get hyped by Lil Wayne. Now you've got expectations, and not only that, you've already got haters. You grew up in Toronto, you don't hustle, you can't really freestyle, so you're facing accusations of illegitimacy, too. To answer, you just have drop an absolutely, top to bottom solid album for your debut. Thank Me Later isn't the Next Great Rap Album, but it heralded Drake as a confident star-in-the-making. While his highs weren't mind-blowing, he had virtually no lows; the kind of feat that won't get you to the Pro Bowl, but you can still Trent Dilfer a Super Bowl.
NUMBER EIGHTEEN
THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH: THE WILD HUNT
Kristian Matsson does nothing but craft delicate acoustic ballads, given teeth by the energy of Matsson's strumming, given attitude by the vibrancy of the arrangements, and tempered with a gentle soul. He's either the new acoustic Bob Dylan, the spiritual successor of early Elliott Smith, or the stripped down contemporary of Bon Iver. Or all three. It's as impressive a resume of influences as any, but Matsson more than lives up to them, he uses them in service of his own distinct voice. The Wild Hunt finds Matsson doing things much the same as he did on 2008's Shallow Graves, but just inexplicably moreso. The decision to double time the sturms at the end of the opening title track, and the subtle, syncopated giddyup of "King of Spain" are both sneaky extra touches that add an extra dimension to Matsson's incredibly strong songwriting.
NUMBER SEVENTEEN
BEST COAST: CRAZY FOR YOU
Bethany Cosentino has listened to a lot of music. If interviews talking about the variety and scope of pop music she was exposed to as a youngster don't clue in that fact, then just listening to Crazy For You makes it abundantly apparent. Shades of Loveless can be found in opener "Boyfrien." Doo-wop pokes it head out of "Our Deal." "Goodbye" is something that would have blown up alternative radio in the grunge era. And "Summer Mood" is something Phil Spector would have been salivating over. It makes it even more impressive that Crazy For You sounds as singular as it does. Despite its innumerable and occasionally obvious influences, Cosentino's debut album sounds remarkably inimitable. Seeing her at Pitchfork Music Festival, Cosentino owned the stage with her laid back beach tunes, a feat pretty impressive for a set of mid-tempo songs, no matter their excellency. That performance was indicative of Crazy For You as a whole: a surprising underdog triumph.
NUMBER SIXTEEN
CEO: WHITE MAGIC
Eric Berglund's full-time band is Sweden's the Tough Alliance, oft-cited as Scandinavian troubadour Jens Lekman's favorite Swedish band. But it's clear from the opening moments of his album under the ceo monikor, White Magic, that Berglund had something he straight had to get off of his chest, something just uncommunicable within the confines of the Tough Alliance's brand of tropically influenced pop rock. White Magic is a burst of bright, white light and wide-eyed energy. It's certainly Balearic, trafficking in the club-friendly beats, the airy, vaguely tropical instrumentation, the powerful major key hooks ever present within that genre. But it's also all at once more vibrant, more wide-eyed, and more confident, and each note threatens to explode with emotion.
NUMBER FIFTEEN
DELOREAN: SUBIZA
Like Best Coast earlier on this list, Delorean first really grabbed my attention at 2010's Pitchfork Music Festival. Taking control of the emotion of an outdoor festival in the afternoon is a difficult task. Closers, they have it easy, what with the bright spotlights, the cooler temperatures, the fact that many people in the crowd have showed up specifically for that moment. But when Delorean played, you took notice, even if you weren't wading through their crowd. The energetic technicolor energy of their performance is all over Subiza, as neon synths and otherworldy vocal samples lay the base for insatiably catchy electro-pop tunes. This is a band that deserves a night time stage, if only to hear a song like "Real Love" in its rightful place, as a dance-inspiring, closing epic, as opposed to a mid-afternoon perking of disenfranchised ears.
NUMBER FOURTEEN
JANELLE MONAE: THE ARCHANDROID
Everything about Janelle Monae's 2010 album The ArchAndroid should be a cartoon or a comic book. See: her ridiculous pompadour, her semi-psychotic album concept, and her bonkers cover art. Even check out aspects of her music, from the hyper-modern R&B/soul that takes a page from the Gnarls Barkley playbook to her outlandishly oversized voice that leaves her mouth with all the power and bombast of an old-school Batman "Pow!" That "ten gallons in a five gallon container" attitude is what makes The ArchAndroid appropriate both for mass entertainment and relentless popcorn consumption and intense critical scrutiny and investigation of the Big Artistic Statement. It's the musical equivalent of a Pixar movie, putting equal import on engaging the audience and advancing the art form, and usually succeeding at both.
NUMBER THIRTEEN
EMERALDS: DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M HERE?
Explaining the appeal, or even the general premise of drone and ambient music is an inherently difficult task. The formlessness, subtlety, delicacy, and patience that make the genre so engaging to actually listen to often come across on paper as simply describing the same sound for 40 minutes. With some ambient music, of course, that explanation applies. But Does It Look Like I'm Here?, the second album in as many years from Cleveland trio Emeralds, makes it easy. This is beautiful stuff, with burbles of arpeggiated synths, rife with color and timbre, forming the kinetic backbone, and splashes of electronic and organic instrumentation pushing and pulling these twelve contemplative tracks. Does It Look Like I'm Here? sounds a bit like looking out your rainy window at an impossibly large city, both feeling distanced from and connected to the proceedings.
NUMBER TWELVE
HOW TO DRESS WELL: LOVE REMAINS
In your body, your skeleton is what keeps your muscles and organs upright and in one place. It allows each human body to have structure and form. In a musical piece, what's usually referred to as the backbone of the piece serves the same purpose: a drum beat dictates the rhythmic cadence, or a guitar riff determines the ebb and flow. On Love Remains, the debut full-length from Tom Krell's How to Dress Well project, the fully-fledged genre that Krell is working in is R&B, but the man's ripped the backbone out, causing all of that other stuff to fall into a formless mush on the floor. Songs like "Ready for the World" or "Decisions" drift in and out of consciousness, barely held up by any sort of form, but made into some sort of avant-garde beauty by Krell's rearrangements. He takes the extraneous bits and pieces them together with a sort of heedless care, intensely devoted to the final product, even if its source material has been gene spliced into something (beautifully) unrecognizable.
NUMBER ELEVEN
MAGIC MAN: REAL LIFE COLOR
In the summer of 2009, two Boston university students-- Sam Lee and Alex Caplow-- took a sabbatical to France, recording at locations as diverse as an elegant chateau and decidedly less elegant circus. During that time, they crafted Magic Man's debut album Real Life Color, a criminally underlooked piece of indie pop that took the burbling keyboards and melancholy twee of the Postal Service and mutated it with blown-out drums and straight up rock song structures. A song like "Monster" battled its own demons to come out defiant and victorious over them, or a track like "Daughter" bounced through morose subject matter with the lyrical detail of a participant, but the joyous musical energy of a third-hand storyteller. Real Life Color was the best record of 2010 that almost no one listened to.
No comments:
Post a Comment