Top 10 Best Albums and Songs for 2010 (ok ok so it blew out to 40 – I couldn’t help myself)

2010 has churned out some of the most awe inspiring music ever to skittle its way around ear drums, curl down to clench the ends of our nerves and move us in countless different ways impossible to scratch out on paper.

Some I’ve flailed limbs uncontrollably to in crowded bars, some I’ve clutched close to my chest alone on rocky outcrops in the dark, some I’ve screamed to with arms wrapped around strangers on muddy fields and some I’ve even attempted to make love to… (Apparently LCD’s Drunk Girls only works as an aphrodisiac on certain occasions)

Regardless, it has been an incredible year of music and hence why I failed so dismally at whittling my list down to a standard top 10.

I’ve also included a few of my fave tracks from each album, although I would argue that the top 10 albums at least are near perfect bodies of work. Like a fine wine, I’m sure a lot of the 2010 albums will only get better with time and like the memories of being front-centre at the respective artist's gigs (or squished at the back, imprinted into some sweaty dudes beer gut like a Hollywood star hands impression) eternally unforgettable.

Please argue with me on your choices if they differ - love a good argument!

1.Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
Fave songs: Coronado, Earthquake (and only because I am responsible for about 200+ consecutive plays on youtube of Helicopter before the album was released)

2.Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Fave songs: World Sick, Sweetest Kill

3.Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
Fave songs: I Walked, Impossible Soul

4.The National - High Violet
Fave songs: Little Faith, Lemonworld

5.The Radio Dept. – Clinging to a Scheme
Fave Songs: A Token of Gratitude, You Stopped Making Sense

6.Local Natives (Australian Release 2010) - Gorilla Manor
Fave songs: Sticky Thread, Cubism Dream

7.Foals - Total Life Forever
Fave songs: What Remains, This Orient

8.Caribou - Swim
Fave Songs: Jamelia, Odessa

9.Jonsi - Go
Fave songs: Tornado, Kolniour

10.Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Fave Songs: Suburban War, We Used to Wait

11.Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
Fave Songs: Same Dream China, Snow & Taxis

12. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening
Fave Songs: Dance Yrself Clean, All I Want

13. Yeasayer - Odd Blood
Fave Songs: Grizelda, Madder Red

14.Beach House - Teen Dream
Fave Songs: Zebra, Norway

15.Seabellies - By Limbo Lake
Fave Songs: Smoketsar, Trans Ending

16.Delphic - Acolyte
Fave Songs: This Momentary, Remains

17.Tame Impala – Innerspeaker
Fave Songs: Alter Ego, It’s Not Meant to Be

18.Mice Parade - What It Means to Be Left Handed
Fave Songs: Old Hat, Tokyo Late Night

19.Parades - Foreign Tapes
Fave Songs: Hunters, Tripping Over Your Eyes

20.Delorean - Subiza
Fave Songs: Warmer Places, Stay Close

21.Band of Horses – Infinite Arms
Fave Songs: Infinite Arms, For Annabelle

22.Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers
Fave Songs: Maybes, Sketch on Glass

23.Menomena – Mines
Fave Songs: Queen Black Acid, Lunchmeat

24.Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles II
Fave Songs: Empathy, Suffocation

25.Zola Jesus – Stridulum II
Fave Songs: Sea Talk, I can’t Stand

26.Best Coast - Crazy for You
Fave Songs: I Want To, Honey

27.Warpaint – The Fool
Fave Songs: Undertow, Bees

28.Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Fave Songs: You Do You, Lovesick Teenagers

29.Glasser – Ring
Fave Songs: Home, T

30.Twin Shadow – Forget
Fave Songs: Castles in the Snow, I Can’t Wait

31.James Blake – Klavierwerke EP
Fave Songs: I Only Know What I Know Now, CMYK

32.Alpine – Zurich EP
Fave Songs: Villages, Too Safe

33.The Books –The Way Out
Fave Songs: The Story of Hip Hop, All You Need Is a Wall

34.How to Dress Well – Love Remains
Fave Songs: Ready for the World, Decisions

35.Hunting – Earnest Ellis
Fave Songs: I am the Beast, When I feel Like Jesus’ Son the World Will Feel Much Different

36.Twin Sister – Colour Your Life EP
Fave Songs: Lady Daydream, Phenomenons

37.Blackbird Blackbird – Summer Heart
Fave Songs: Sunspray, So Sorry Girl

38.The Holidays – Post Paradise
Fave Songs: 6am, Conga

39.Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
Fave Songs: Round and Round, Beverly Kills

40.Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
Fave Songs: No Future Part III: Escape from No Future, A Pot in Which to Piss

Broken Social Scene - Texico Bitches Official Video

Check out this saucy new video for Broken Social Scene's "Texico Bitches". And I thought the Preset's "This Boy's in Love" was homo-erotic! Whether it be milk or chocolate sauce, it's good to see artists using their creative license to be adventurous with their content direction. Sadly, some attitudes won't change themselves. This is a cracker of track to boot by one of my all time favourite bands:

Bear Bands and Bear Hands

Having the word “Bear” as part of your band name seems to be a mystical precursor for quality music these days, badged by scout-leading bands like: Grizzly Bear, Bear in Heaven, Panda Bear, Boy & Bear, Bearhug (Sydney band), the former Bear Vs Shark and the Bearnaked Ladies (oops wrong bear…and they were shit weren’t they). And now these little Brooklyn based furry nuggets, Bear Hands join my personal sleuth.

The boys began to cause a stir via a steady slog of support slots on the New York indie scene back in 2007 (Vampire Weekend, Les Savy Fav etc) after the release of their debut Golden EP. But it’s been their latest LP drop Burning Bush Supper Club that’s finally starting to chink its way into the independent Aussie airwaves.

They could be likened to fellow Cantora Records psy-rockers MGMT (upon hearing the track “Camel Convention” – I was envisioning a strange bird-like creature losing control of its limbs in the desert – or perhaps recalling my last night out on the town…) but Bear Hands seem to have a more jaunty texture to their sound: fuzzed-out vocals and just enough reverb to claw over dynamic percussion arrangements: some rollicking and tambourine infused, some unsuitably standard - but sounded out sweetly either way with woodland-romping melodies and abstract lyrics. I don’t know about you, but I love non-figurative language in song writing: where the sound of a feeling becomes the story and the way you flesh it out internally, tells it (true poetry? You tell me).

One of my fave tracks off Burning Bush Supper Club would have to be “Julien” (you can here what I mean by woodland-romping) as well as “Tablasaurus” (which has an Empire of the Sun kind of flavour to it).

Will Bear Hands get their bear heads mounted up on indie music fan's cabin walls alongside the formidably talented Grizzly Bear and Bear in Heaven? Only time - and perhaps a handy air rifle will tell...

You can purchase Burning Bush Supper Club from the Bear Hands website or here on itunes(although only their Golden EP is available in Australia as yet), or you can lend your heart to “Julien” here on Hype Machine. Check out their first single of the LP “What a Drag” below:

Grouplove - Get Involved

Much love to Grouplove: a nouveau LA collective consisting of: Christian Zucconi, Sean Gadd, Hannah Hooper, Ryan Rabin, Andrew Wessen. The boys and girl joined salty hands together one summer on the remote island of Crete (Greece) after meeting by chance: Hooper invited to participate in an art installation . Their music almost resembles a melting pot of Manhatten sound: the gritty textured riffs of Les Savy Fav mushed together with layered Local Natives style keys and vocals.

I am a bit slow on the uptake in posting this killer track "Colours" which was released earlier this year, but the group's self-titled EP is only just available this month in Australia on iTunes.

Get involved in Grouplove.

The Amazing Broken Man - New Year Son

Hunted online for this track after watching the 4th season of Skins recently. It’s one of those series with a brilliantly off-beat soundtrack thanks to music director Kyle Lind… and this track is just an eyelash on the snare of musical goodness it has to offer. The artist is Odorico Leal AKA The Amazing Broken Man from Sao Paulo, Brazil and this track is called “New Year Son”. It's love... for a while, until you open up your eyes at the end.



If you haven't seen Skins, get out of yours and underneath those of the horny dysfuntional teens of Bristol. You won't be the same again.

Seabellies Come Alive @ Beach Road Hotel

Multi-instrumentalist Newcastle sextet Seabellies wrenched hearts at Beach Road Hotel recently tailing off their national By Limbo Lake LP release tour. They’re a band that have managed to channel their once-choppy instrument-swapping stage performance into a tight tank of dreamy indie-pop: without drowning out the energy. Their swoon-worthy melodies bound simply and beautifully over a complex layering of synth, sampling and at times an entire brass fanfare: the band rallying the crowd as they crescendoed into “Ices” to begin their set, incidentally the first track of the LP. Seabellies music is weighted in nostalgia and lifted by front-man Trent Grenell’s playful falsetto and the band’s rollicking musical phrases as they dance that fine line between sweetness and sorrow.

Check out the video for their latest release “Trans Ending” below for a taste:



The Bellies are a band with more raw talent than Ozzy Osbourne’s speech pathologist and yet they seem to have been left off many a summer festival line up (Laneway? What gives?). Fortunately, you can catch them at Peats Ridge Festival just out of Sydney this New Years or if you're in Melbourne, they have a Wednesday night residency with Aleks and Ramps @ the Evelyn.

If you haven’t seen these kids live, get your head out of the fish bowl and some sea into your belly: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably get really drunk and send inappropriate picture messages to your ex – but it will be well worth the ride.

You can stream or grab a copy of By Limbo Lake from the Seabellies website.

In the meantime have a listen to their cover of Angels classic "Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again" for Triple J's Like a Verson below, amazing stuff:

New NIDA Triple J Unearthed Videos

It is always magical to see students and purveyors of the arts transcend their own craft pool and come together to muddle up some creative genius. This year’s NIDA Masters of Directing students have joined forces yet again with some of the top Triple J Unearthed contenders to do just that.

It is something I love about the arts that you don’t find in any other industry – perhaps its because we are free spirits that live on long necks & clag paste mutually bound by big dreams & small bank balances…or perhaps it’s because we keep running into each other at bottlo’s and art supplies shops so the cumulation is unavoidable.

Either way, here are my 2 picks from the latest crop of talent to sprout from the National institute of Dramatic Art; both featuring some really clever shot composition and editing. Make sure you check out the Triple J Youtube channel for the rest.



Directed by: Jimmy Dalton
BUNGALOWS Unearthed Profile
triple j Unearthed NIDA Coproduction 2010



Directed by: Jeffrey Jay Fowler
A CASUAL END MILE Unearthed Profile
triple j Unearthed NIDA Coproduction 2010

Kings of Leon Album Review – Has their Sundown Come Around?

Southern rockers, Kings of Leon release their 5th full-length studio album, Come Around Sundown this week amid disgruntled murmurs from self-proclaimed ‘original’ fans, unsure of where the band’s bracing raw energy went. It begs the question, is a great band defined by their ability to perforate the cling-filmed expectations of fans by pushing beyond the expected 3rd/4th LP plateau?

One recurring line you hear a lot of bands churn out in interviews around about this career juncture goes something like:

“It came to a point where we just started making music for us - music we liked. And if our fans liked it too, then that was just a bonus.”

It’s a maturation curtailed somewhat in the self-indulgence of commercial success, but it’s one that makes sense.  As fans, we have to cling to the hope that bands are broadening their own influences and continuing to experiment in producing different sounds, as we are in trawling blogs & vintage record stores to seek them out.
  
Come Around Sundown is certainly a unique addition to King of Leon’s body of work and regardless of whether it will get a good burn on your Mp3 player or not, it remains musically unambitious. I fear the precedent for whatever buzz this album generates, was set when the Grammy Award hit the shelf and KOL went from a hardcore band to a household brand in 2009. As a whole, Come Around Sundown is even more placid than 2008’s Only By The Night which marked the first big steps the boys took away from the fuzz and deep into the studio (and church).




The first single off the LP, ’Radioactive’ has an opening riff that hooks you in with its potential to explode, until an offensively wet rhythm guitar barely rises to back it (Slash is that you? And are you on a Valium bender?). Caleb’s vocals also seem more tidied than ever: the grit & screech that used to whip-crack the edge of phrases in classics like ’King of the Rodeo’, a distant memory (as is the lyric “All out of fags and I just can’t wait”). Interestingly, the path to clean production the band seem to have skewed onto must have been one of their own volition; songwriter/producer Angelo Petraglia having worked with the boys since they rolled out of Sunday school to sign with RCA Records at the start of the decade.
  
‘No Money’ would have to be one of the album’s standouts and one of the few tracks where Nathan is drumming to a sweat-inducing tempo. Yet there is something sadly lacking in the mix: when backing vocal harmonies wash over the chorus, they suck the weight out of the major riffs and however much you try to feel the reverb in your chest, it just never quite moves you like you know it should (live - maybe be a different story). In tracks like ‘Back Down South’ the Followill boys have bust well and truly through the saloon doors to produce an unashamed Country Western ditty - it’s definitely tumbleweed territory – and I don’t even know if they grow in the region they are singing about.


   
It’s as if Come Around Sundown is living in the chorus of ‘McFearless’ (off Because of the times (2007)- an album I felt stitched the band’s stage energy & studio sound impeccably, despite Pitchfork’s harrowing review). The chorus is epic with its open major chords that stretch and soar to the lyrics “Where I stand, it’s my role, it’s my soul”. But the power of this track lies in the chorus running off the back of the rampant percussion, messy riffs and scratchy-tailed vocals of the verses: the ones that tore us up from the start on Youth & Young Manhood (2003). Where Kings of Leon once made music like a dirty whiskey shot: burning down your throat, toxifying your blood and grating at your muscles till they jerk to life; they now fail to pack a punch.

Undeniably, the battle between “true original fans” and “bandwagon jumpers”, meshed in with this quandary will continue to rattle on, and if it’s a bi-product of people feeling passionate about music they’ve sought out and supported in dingy back-street bars, then it’s not entirely unwarranted. Kings of Leon themselves admitted to NME they struggle with ‘Only By the Night’ fans in the crowd not recognising their older material (they probably wouldn’t like it to be honest) – if you compare their slower numbers ‘Trani’ (2003 – check the epic live video at T in the Park ’04 below) with Grammy Award winning ‘Use Somebody’ (2008), the music speaks to polar opposite audiences.




So is the tirade of backlash from “indie-snobs” unjustified or is just that they feel they’ve been left with a sound they can’t relate to anymore, that’s tangled up in overpriced merchandise & clichéd cinematography (Check out the video for Radioactive if you don’t know what I mean).

As a music-lover, chart positions are meaningless belt-notches and bands can revel or negate them as they see fit:  it’s when commercial success and the lifestyle it affords becomes the endgame that true creativity seems to fade. Hell, Paul McCartney shifts between his countless estates and you don’t hear anyone whinging about that (Heather Mills excluded). 

In a recent interview with Triple J’s Tom & Alex, Caleb said,

 “Hopefully the people that listened to it online [the leaked version], even if they think its shit they’ll still go out and buy it, that’s what I hope for.”  (He goes on to discuss affording a beach house after this album hits it *cringe*)

If this kind of sentiment is entrenched in the bands new “mainstream” arrangements, then it’s no wonder the indie kids have their skin-tight jeans in a twist!

For better or worse, with the release of Come Around Sundown Kings of Leon have clearly said so long to the slow nights and turned to greet the rock-arena with open arms – and as fans, we can take it, leave it, or sit back and rant their misgivings to the empty blogisphere (snap).

I’m not sure about you, but it all seems too soon for Kings of Leon to kick the bucket into mainstream obscurity; but as Caleb once sang:
    
“Too young to die, but old is the grave”

You can stream Come Around Sundown in full until the 18th on the Triple J website.

Let us know what you think!
   

What I Know Now... thanks James Blake

Shuffled into this track “I only Know (What I know now)” on Pitchfork recently and it instantly immobilised me in an effort to feel every inflection of sound (even had to put the wine glass down). It's the latest offering from British once-bedroom producer James Blake; off his Klavierwerke (simply meaning “Piano Works”) EP released via R&S records.

The breathless chords divulge slowly until a blunt handclap directs the pace and moves the track from haunting into some kind of sensual melancholy: one voice impelling through the atmosphere in echoing pulses.

The top vocal lines reminded me of Bon Iver in The Wolves (Act I and II), though softer; more sexually forlorn than open-wounded: like the soundtrack to making love for the last time to the one you can’t be with.

Well at least that’s how it made me feel…

Mark Richardson from Pitchfork wrote a near perfect technical deconstruction so make sure you check it out after you re-emerge.