song, with a refreshing twist of lime: 35 more albums i liked from 2010 Jul 04 '11 (Updated Jul 06 '11)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line Alphabetical reviews-in-brief. Perhaps belated, but I hope not. The albums herein? As good as they were six months ago. The first "35 albums I liked from 2010" review is at http://www.epinions.com/content_5474852996 . It is entirely normal for me to like 70 or more albums in a year, and to try to help you select among them. Enjoy! All Over Everywhere, Inner Firmaments Decay (long ambitiously-composed melodies and weird tinkering little sounds, set to songs that are luxurious, just a bit jazzy, with lovely female vocals. If the vocals were pushed forward, it would sound like a more-adventurous than usual Lilith Fair record. But the instruments get much of the focus, as if it were progressive rock, and they work to justify the attention) Tony Allen, Secret Agent (only the second African-pop artist I’ve ever learned to enjoy, so, uh, I can tell you it's lusher and warmer than Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. It’s highly percussive, and evolves steadily rather than via verse-chorus-bridge. Apparently he’s Nigerian and strongly influenced by his mentor Fela Kuti) Arcade Fire, the Suburbs (the band's third and leanest album, with rock songs gradually building up a simple, if sometimes rhythmically unexpected, midtempo riff apiece into soaring anthems. Something like Born in the USA minus the '80s production, plus arrangement development in place of straight repetition. What I read about Arcade Fire suggests they are excellent human beings, world-aware and caring and thoughtful, and I suspect I share many of their beliefs. But a couple really good lines aside ["Never trust a millionaire who quotes the Sermon on the Mount/ I used to think I was not like them, but now I have my doubts"], the record could do with far less hyperbole and fewer empty lines like "So I wait in line, I’m a modern man/ And the people behind me, they can’t understand/ Makes me feel like/ Something don’t feel right". The record they could make covering Doug MacLean's lyrics [see the band Paperbacks, below] would be incredible, though)  Bleu, Four (classic/ retro white-person pop, a la Nilsson or solo Paul McCartney or Freddie Mercury’s less rococo Queen tracks, tricked out as appropriate with horns, pianos, strings, or xylophone) Jed Davis, the Cutting Room Floor (classic power-pop skills: his lyrics are precise and funny, and keep skirting past profundity but would certainly insist to the security guard that they just got lost there on the way to somewhere else. The Cutting Room Floor could be the most bitter, resentful, petty album of pop songs since Phil Collins got divorced, but I’m 80% sure it’s a concept album *about* those emotions, in which case it’s brilliant. It probably is regardless) District 97, Hybrid Child (ambitious old-school progressive-rock and progressive metal, with the excellent gimmicks of a beautiful singer who was a well-deserved American Idol finalist, and a violinist who also plays in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra)   Echo Orbiter, Euphonicmontage (as if the Beatles, after Sgt. Pepper, had made up, stayed friends with each other, gone indifferent to the outside world, and hidden in the studio making record after record chopping up their tunes into ever-more-difficult and avant-garde layers of production tricks) Electric Six, Zodiac (the skinny-white-dude rockist version of all those rap albums full of ridiculous sexual innuendo and boasting, only (1) I tend to like disco beats and hard-rock guitars, full-blast horns and pounded pianos and sorta-melodic preening, more than hip-hop beats and rapping. And (2) I know rock’s cultural cues better, so I'm more sure in Dick Valentine's case that he doesn't take himself any more seriously than I do. It also contains the most macho, bravado-filled song about settling down into faithful marriage that I’ve ever heard) Elsinore, Yes Yes Yes (maximalist mainstream rock, dense with pounding drums, distorted guitars, banks of keyboards, vocal harmonies, and the occasional strings and horns) Francis and the Lights, It'll be Better (somewhere between Steely Dan's ultra-smoothness and Randy Newman's honky-tonk flippancy, with standout drum programming not native to either of them) Brooke Fraser, Flags (smooth piano-centric pop and soft-rock, reminding me of 10,000 Maniacs - not least in the lyrics, which tend to be observational, intelligent, and morally serious in a way often uncomfortable in pop music - or a less studio-dependent Sarah McLachlan) Cee-lo Green, the Ladykiller (I assume he re-named himself after Al Green, not the Green River Killer or green curry; this is at any rate a Green/ Mayfield-esque old-school soul album full of attempts to seduce you into bed, which isn't the sort of music Cindy or I usually like. But we can make exceptions when it's this good) Jigsaw Seen, Bananas Foster (nostalgiac re-creations of late-'60s psychedelic pop, or perhaps nostalgiac re-creations of '80s / '90s XTC albums, which is about the same thing) Jukebox the Ghost, Everything under the Sun (hooky, intricate power-pop in which I mean that prefix "power", even in the piano-centered songs, and in which the relationship lyrics are intelligent. The music is enthusiastic, fun, sometimes tricky, always melodic) Jon Lindsay, Escape from Plaza-Midwood (easily mistaken for a modern synth-pop or baroque-pop album, because of the varied and quite interesting textures, this is a ‘70s-styled singer/ songwriter album, with melodies a la Paul Simon. It's full of interesting and sometimes-funny details in songs about everything from fidelity and ended love affairs, to the quasi-religious power of good music, to robot policewomen, to whether it’s worth still dieting if all of human life is just about to end) Meat Loaf, Hang Cool, Teddy Bear (a few big sappy ballads – at least one of which I like – but quite a bit of gleaming fast-paced glam-rock riffage that, to my tastes, fits him better) Medications, Completely Removed (at base these songs are somewhere between the Gin Blossoms’ country-leaning jangle-pop and Pavement’s half-slack half-subversive indie-pop. But the guitarists keep spicing things up with the casual, off-handed staggering proficiency of Steven Malkmus’s Jicks, the bursts of manic intensity of the Dismemberment Plan, or the off-kilter and time-signature-shifting riffage of late Fiery Furnaces) My Chemical Romance, Danger Days (if hair-metal is to come back – and if you don’t think that, in the form of pop-country, it already has – this is likely how it has to happen. The verses teem with unsettled emotions and jittery half-electronic rhythms, concessions to our jaded and pessimistic time. But the soaring anthemic choruses? I’d recognize them anywhere) Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, History of Modern (a belated comeback by an '80s synthpop band I find myself liking much better than I did the first time. An integration of their pop-anthem and experimental sides, with an occasional but surprisingly useful awareness of what's happened to synthesizers and the club scene in their two-decade absence) Paperbacks, Lit from Within (almost exactly like a Weakerthans album. For the rest of you, that means, for one thing, empathetic and downcast poetry with a precision - for physical and emotional details, for the weighing of souls - that destroys the grading curve lyrically: ["your glasses' thick rims; your conservative coat; your matching defences, resplendent and fully impenetrable: they are aberrations that have hardened to a style. Remembering the days that you felt so free. You'd walk around topless, smoke pot and you'd act like it was no big deal. I believe that you really thought that was true. But we were so small town. We were so naive. We were relocating, escaping to Portland, where we thought we could be ourselves, but our pasts fastened to us like glue". and adds sly humor around the edges: "The art is only permanent if the canvas can pull through, so let's commemorate these moments with regrettable tattoos. Abstract symbols for a friend I will never again see flank a kanji symbol for health blurred by scars from surgeries. When my blood thinners acted to increase the potency of wine, I got insignias for bands who've sucked since 1989".] The music, except the mesmerizingly tense and synthesizer-aided "a Year on Trial", is a blend of folk, rock, and alt-country, and is humble, tuneful, and at the service of the words) Race Horses, Goodbye Falkenburg (gleefully bounding Welsh indie-pop, getting Pitchfork approval in a way that non-Welsh bands of the type don’t: some of Lazer Boy’s depth in noise, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’s innocent gentle digressiveness, and the Super Furry Animals’ galloping genre hops, as well as, if we may approve one non-Welsh pop band, just a bit of the theatricality of "Fixing a Hole" and "Getting Better” and the playful squall of “Revolution #9”) Secret History, the World That Never Was (highly articulate, clever, romantic or bruised-romantic or bruised-by-the-deity Britpop in the tradition of Heavenly, the Smiths, and Belle & Sebastian, even if recorded in New Jersey. With just a bit more upbeat guitar-rock energy than those bands, and a fun lyrical hint of Dan Bern’s manic pop-culture allusiveness) Liam Singer, Dislocatia (seems to bring more grad-school-level Composition, Counterpoint, and 20th-century Music History training to the creation of pop songs than anyone I've heard, in the service of miniatures as strange yet beautiful as anything else I can currently think to name) Squonk Opera, Mayhem and Majesty  (songs generally centered on the interaction between piano, drums, flute, and Amber Ayers's strong, clear, classically-trained and lovely vocals; now and then accordion, horns, or bagpipes take over key roles. Romantic/classical is the base style. Sometimes the tunes make some use of jazz or Erik Satie or mild dissonance, the drums absorb ethnic percussions the world over, or Ayers adopts cadences from square-dance or hip-hop. But unlike some classical-inflected things I enjoy, the music here is consistently emotional, pretty, and easy to like)  Marnie Stern, S/T (thrillingly difficult, high-stakes, busy rock guitar and drumming; a voice like a cheerleader elf; a subtle beauty that hasn't really marked her previous albums; and lyrics that, while simple, convey hope and sadness and encouragement with interestingly sideways skill) Sufjan Stevens, the Age of Adz (tuneful and gently articulate vocals, expertly complex [even when stripped-down] orchestrations, and sometimes-bizarre electronics in a combination truly new to my ears) Serj Tankian, Imperfect Harmonies (System of a Down’s more serious songwriter teams up with an orchestra to create bombastic, impassioned heavy metal that could surely use Daron Malakian’s goofiness, but flows well on its own) 10 Years, Feeding the Wolves (when Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam have shaped entire radio playlists full of dreary half-skilled imitators for almost two decades, it’s inevitable that talented and likeable bands, trying with part-time success to say interesting things, will sometimes also join in. 10 Years play ¾ of the time with a grace that also hints at the more commercial moments of U2, Springsteen, and the Bends, and ¼ with a reckless percussiveness that’s more their own) Tera Melos, Patagonian Rats (what happens to abrasive punk rock when it's played by arty prog-rockers who taught themselves to play by learning the solos from Rush and Dream Theater records) Tub Ring, Secret Handshakes (a rambunctious, unpredictably veering, sonically adventurous album building joy from dark genres like industrial and Korn metal, as well as funk and arena rock) Vampire Weekend, Contra (slender, relaxed, observational pop songs built from Caribbean and African tropes as if Paul Simon, on Graceland, had still sung his words more than spewed them forth) Dan Wallace, Den of Maniacs (if the early Beatles had matured by shifting to mostly acoustic instruments, making most of their melodies one step trickier, improving their lyrics in somewhat darker ways than they actually did, and developing their instrumental skills to the point where any song could veer off into an interesting solo at any time, it would be less amazing than the actual Beatles’ development, of course - and less catchy, on balance. But I’m glad Dan Wallace has explored this alternate past for us) Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (hip-hop with superb drum programming, and arrangements that filch from a dozen genres with all the vibrancy, momentum, and, to be sure, cultural authenticity of “Walk Like an Egyptian”. Never has the term “emcee” been as fairly used in hip-hop as on Kanye here: he ring-leads an extravaganza of voices and distractions, and if the central subject of all the songs is Kanye West, it’s still a heartening document of the rare moment when self-obsession starts to mutate into, at least, self-awareness and, more optimistically, a wiser and more considerate form of hedonism)   What Cheer? Brigade, We Blow, You Suck (instrumental marching-band music, informed by Sousa, Dixieland, zydeco, bare suggestions of a secret past doing all-brass Judas Priest covers or something, and high-volume enthusiasm) Wonder Years, the Upsides (standard pop-punk of the word-dense, tuneful, emotionally frank sort mastered by Say Anything or Antlers. A definitive portrait of life as a white, college-educated but undermployed young Philadelphian who dislikes parties, goes to them anyway, and is fueled almost entirely by music and the loyalties of friends) ******** Again, I like all 70 albums I've discussed. Here, for anyone curious, I present a top 20 of ones I really, really, really liked. 1. Extra Life 2. Kate Miller-Heidke 3. Ben Folds / Nick Hornby 4. Verlaines 5. Kanye West 6. Agony Family 7. Kaipa 8. District 97 9. Reign of Kindo 10. Cloud Cult 11. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark 12. Jukebox the Ghost 13. Secret History 14. Paperbacks 15. Sigh 16. Liam Singer 17. Aloha 18. Sufjan Stevens 19. Rasputina 20. Jon Lindsay My 2-year-old and 4-year-old endorse quite a few of these (especially Cloud Cult, Aloha, Kate Miller-Heidke, Kaipa, Sufjan Stevens, and Rasputina, with the 2-year-old loving Reign of Kindo to his brother's irritation), but recommend OK Go's Of the Blue Colour of the Sky above any of them, and rank it among the best albums ever.

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