Top 20 Albums of 2010: Part Two, the Top Ten

NUMBER TEN

BATHS: CERULEAN

While some music sounds timeless, as if it could come from any era (see: Cosentino, Bethany), some music is inextricably linked to the time it was created. Cerulean, the debut LP from Will Wiesenfeld's Baths project, could only have been conceived, written, and created in modern music. Brian Eno and Aphex Twin and J Dilla and the Postal Service and Flying Lotus before we can get to the point of "Hall" or "Maximalist," where ambient, hip-hop, melancholy electro-pop, and killer breakbeats come together in the service of fragile love songs that still make your shoulder lean back and your head nod. Wiesenfeld has been doing this damn thing for awhile, and the experience in a group like [Post-Foetus] shows through on Cerulean. The strange conjecture of styles and emotions isn't a happy accident, it's a labored, intensive process that somehow still pulls off sounding wrought and relaxed, tense and cathartic.

Peep numbers nine through one after the jump.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Three: 30-21

NUMBER THIRTY

I have not been quiet about my distaste for the last two Arcade Fire records relative to their debut masterpiece Funeral. Like Neon Bible before it, 2010's AF release The Suburbs was too mid-tempo, too quiet, too slow, too ho-hum for me to really connect with it in a meaningful way. More troubling are the songs, littered across both Bible and Suburbs, that call to mind Funeral's towering highs. "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" is one of those tracks. Though only carrying a little more shuffle than most of the humdrum album, "Sprawl II"'s engaging synth lines and vivacious Regine Chassagne vocal painted the suburban escape as somehow epic, where looking past the retail mountains beyond mountains was a glance through the looking glass.

Go beyond the click for numbers twenty-nine through twenty-one.