Top 20 Albums of 2010: Part One, 20-11

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.

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.