Darryl Zero’s top albums of 2010

Darryl Zero’s Top Albums of 2010

[Edited to include the Thou album, which I meant to include but for some reason forgot.]

If I thought last year was weak for albums, 2010 was even worse. It seems the music industry has finally pushed its way toward the completely single-driven business model. Not that I’m especially bothered by this–there are still good albums out there, for sure, and the singles that are coming out (or simply existing–I’ll have my “top songs of the year” list done hopefully by the first of the year) are damn fine. Still, there’s something about engaging in an entire album, letting an artist or group take you someplace and not let go until they say you’re done. This was certainly the case with the albums on this list (especially number 1–but I’ll get to that later).

I really, really wish I had the time, energy, and budget to do a comprehensive listening of every album that came out over the year. (A pocket universe would probably help in that task, too, now that I think of it.) For the past two years, now, it seems I keep finding things that completely blow my mind that I would gladly have put on the list had I discovered them in the eligible year. In 2009, that album was Helms Alee’s Night Terror; this year, it’s Liturgy’s Renihilation. I actually did an even better job this year of combing as many different review sites and record stores as possible, but we’ll see what happens next year.

Honorable Mention:

John Vanderslice, Green Grow The Rushes EP

The Extra Lens, Undercard

Maserati, Pyramid Of The Sun

Thou, Summit

11) Kayo Dot, Coyote

I worried about this album on first listen, mostly owing to the lack of guitars, convinced that frontman Toby Driver had finally gone off the deep end and went completely Classical. While such a thing works for, say, Tyondai Braxton (I’m almost to the point at which I’m glad he left Battles, although I’m still uneasy), it doesn’t always work for everybody. I like heady music as much as the next person, even within non-rock paradigms (see #9), but sometimes it’s just a little too much to digest in one sitting–and, I’m sorry, sometimes it’s okay to make music that appeals more to the heart than the mind. Fortunately, while Coyote starts slow, the build makes sense. Driver placing his voice and lyrics further to the front helps; the album features some of his best lyrics ever. The album’s overall sound continues the band’s trend of releasing albums which sound as if they should be on Tzadik Records on labels other than Tzadik (this one was for Hydra Head)–heavy on reeds and with a bass guitar sound more reminiscent of Bill Laswell than Joe Preston, with organs, strings, and woodwinds galore. There’s really no way I can continue to describe the album without making it out to sound like a chaotic, jumbled mess–believe me when I say that’s hardly the case. It’s just…complex. Very complex, especially when compared to #10.

10) Trash Talk, Eyes & Nines

Trash Talk, on the other hand, is about as jumbled and chaotic as any band can sound on record. I’ve heard more than a few different subgenre labels placed on the band–grindcore, doom metal, hardcore punk–and they’re all accurate. Eyes & Nines doesn’t sound as good as its predecessor (2008’s self-titled blitzkrieg), largely owing to the absence of Steve Albini, but this seventeen-minute blunt object makes up for its tonal deficiencies with the sheer unpredictability of its arrangements. “Explode,” the album’s ostensible single, probably has the tightest, closest-to-listener-friendly sound, two and a half minutes of hardcore punk rock. It’s easy to get caught up in the band’s sonic assault (abrasive as ever, although producer Joby J. Ford does a decent enough job of cleaning up some of the frequencies, albeit at the expense of the “live in front of you”-type sound the band flourishes in), but their lyrics, when audible, are surprisingly sharp and literate (corroborated by the band’s website). While it remains to be seen if the band can sustain a “full length” over twenty minutes, the ten songs on Eyes & Nines are more than up to snuff.

9) Esperanza Spalding, Chamber Music Society

Spalding’s been treated as an upright bass prodigy since virtually the moment she picked up the instrument, but her recording career has echoed her academic one: technically-proficient, but prone to fits of self-indulgence which, while far from killing her prior efforts (2006’s Junjo and 2008’s Esperanza), still made them a bit difficult to digest as a whole. Not so with this year’s offering, which still manages to sidestep jazz clichés and blur genres just a tad while still being as unique and energetic as the tiny, afro-sporting star of the show. Spalding’s reputation may be as a master of her stringed instrument, but what truly separates her from other musicians is her voice, flexible and acrobatic–album highlight “Really Very Small,” featuring Spalding scat-singing over a hyperactive bassline, best demonstrates this–and her ability as a bandleader is astonishing given her young age (she’s 26).

8) Nice Nice, Extra Wow

At some point in time after 2002, Nice Nice got signed to Warp (who has two more albums on this countdown, full disclosure). Before that, they were a two-person noise act, “post-rock” for lack of a more clever term, not as chaotic as Lightning Bolt but certainly not as listener-friendly as, say, (!) Godspeed (!) You (!) Black (!) Emperor (!) or some other such indie darling. After 2006’s blitzkrieg of releases (four EP’s named for the seasons and a collaborative LP with Cex), the band was quiet for nearly four damn years. Suddenly, they reappeared, with their tightest, most electronic-sounding album ever (and their first proper “solo” full-length in eight years). The tautness is hardly shocking, as the band has been together since 1999, but the use of technology (or the appearance thereof), while not a curveball, still stands out as a big difference in the band’s sound–less “Temporary Residence” (the band’s former label) and more “Warp.”

7) Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma

If 2009 was the year Metal finally got off its lazy ass and realized it had the greatest potential of all genres in the rock idiom, then 2010 was the year downtempo electronic music and hip-hop finally made peace with their jazz and rock forebears (see #4, #2). Flying Lotus is one of those hipster wunderkinden that magazines can’t wait to cream their pants over (didja know he’s related to Coltrane? didja know he’s remixed everyone alive?), only the adoration is completely worth it. Cosmogramma is a psychedelic extravaganza of sensory mind-fuckery–think Portishead’s Third with less vocals, or The Avalanches with less regard for pop sensibilities, or DJ Shadow with a jazz royalty pedigree. The first third of this album passes by at an alarmingly fast pace considering how slow the songs really are; by the time Thom Yorke shows up in the middle of “…And The World Laughs With You,” you’re buying what FlyLo is selling, and then some, and you still have more than half the album to go. And that’s when it really starts messing with your brain; “Satelllliiiiiteee” rides a demonically smooth bassline throughout its entirely-too-brief two minutes, while “Recoiled” goes from free-jazz freakout to bhangra boogie without batting an eyelash. Positioning himself as the west coast’s answer to Prefuse 73’s myriad-alias soundbending, Flying Lotus blew up in a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig way in 2k10, and rightfully so.

6) Kylesa, Spiral Shadow

“Keep moving, don’t look back.” The refrain from album highlight “Don’t Look Back” describes Kylesa’s sound perfectly. The twin-guitar, twin-drum, twin-vocal configuration of Kylesa would seem claustrophobic if the band didn’t craft such expansive vocal harmonies and tight instrumental arrangements. Seemingly in its millionth iteration, Kylesa takes the “swamp metal” motifs present in albums by contemporaries like Baroness and Mastodon and refine them even more. Vocalists Phillip Cope and Laura Pleasants don’t mess with their formula too much: he bellows, she sings, the resulting combination sounding like something between Matt Talbott’s moody crooning in Hum and Ben Verellen’s monstrous roar in Harkonen and Helms Alee (the latter of which arguably being Kylesa’s closest analogue, at least circa this recording). Doomy without being too stoner, Psychedelic without being too proggy, and heavy without being too alienating, Spiral Shadow is one of those metal albums that is made more “metal” by virtue of its various efforts not to be–one listen to the Pink Floyd-esque strains of the title track hammers that home.

5) Marnie Stern, Marnie Stern

Recent online dust-ups aside, Marnie Stern really is the anti-Best Coast: up to this point, most of her albums consisted more of impersonal, off-putting, challenging collections of riffs rather than actual songs. In contrast to Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino’s almost deliberately accessible jangle-pop, Stern was almost entirely, challengingly abstract, as if every song were a tacit “understand THIS!” to her listeners. The arrangements on her self-titled release this year are no less challenging, but their use here is different. In a day and age in which a Black man is president, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Marnie Stern, virtuosic indie upstart, has written a pop-rock album. Okay, maybe that’s overstating things, but the heart-wrenching vocal melodies of “For Ash” and “Female Guitar Players Are The New Black” are some of the most accessible material (and, apparently, the most personal) Stern has yet produced. This is not to say that Stern has toned down her guitar heroics; “Gimme” and the aforementioned “For Ash” feature her trademark tap-happy shredding. Still, the entire album smacks as if Stern is challenging her listeners yet again, this time to listen to the “real” her.

4) Gonjasufi, A Sufi And A Killer

“Duet,” smack in the middle of Gonjasufi’s Warp Records debut, is everything you need to know about the musical alter-ego of the man born Sumach Ecks: slow, gritty, sensual, funky, and stoned out of his fucking mind. A Sufi And A Killer (Produced by Flying Lotus, Gaslamp Killer, and Mainframe) is twenty songs of unrelenting, hypnotic neo-soul viewed through trip-hop, hip hop and funk glasses. Ecks’s scraping voice wades unafraid through the production din, elevating the music from mere soundtrack to a blazed-out booty call to spiritual journey. “Advice” and “Duet,” the most straightforward cuts here, attach to mindfucks like “She Gone” and “Kowboyz&Indians” and turn WTF? moments into points of convergence. In short: shit doesn’t make any goddamn sense, except it does, and it’s beautiful, and you need to be listening to it. Now.

3) Torche, Songs For Singles EP

The Florida now-trio wisely chooses not to fix what isn’t broken with this EP. Steve Brooks’ husky voice and not-quite-nonsense lyrics still float around and over the band’s pummeling arrangements which, in turn, race through most of the eight tracks with sub-three minute rockers that fall just short of being “metal” but are too heavy to be thought of as anything else. Drummer Rick Smith steals the show for most of the album, particularly on his Animal-meets-Dave-Grohl turn on album centerpiece “Arrowhead.” That, combined with Brooks’ underrated guitar work and bassist Jonathan Nunez’s spot-on production giving the entire album a larger-than-three-piece sound, makes Songs For Singles the perfect appetizer for a full-length main course which damn well better be on it’s way.

2) Gil Scott-Heron, I’m New Here

Forty years after his first full-length (and sixteen years after his next most recent one), Gil Scott-Heron popped up in early January with “Me and the Devil,” a trip-hop take on the Robert Johnson classic. A month later, I’m New Here hit stores. On paper, the Richard Russell-produced affair seems like a disastrous undertaking: long-tenured soul artist with a history of drug problems? Only twenty-eight minutes long? Structured around three cover songs, including the title track, originally written by, of all people, Smog? Yet the album is not only the most hauntingly beautiful Scott-Heron has ever released, but it’s cohesive in way that makes its brief running time an asset (it begs to be listened from start to finish). The aforementioned Smog song gets reverential treatment from Scott-Heron, with added resonance given the artist’s pedigree. Not to say the album’s original compositions are filler; “New York Is Killing Me,” at 4:29 the longest song, packs decades of pain and confusion into a handful of verses.

1) Grinderman, Grinderman 2

I liked the first Grinderman release enough to put it on my top albums list back in 2008 because it was the kind of album I’d missed hearing since The Birthday Party broke up: disorientingly dirty, yet deeply satisfying. Like a sexual encounter, really, an uncomfortable one which left you unsure as to whether or not you actually liked it. There is no such ambiguity with Grinderman 2,whose songs clearly make it a hate-fuck of an album if ever there was one–dirty (“Worm Tamer”), angry (ass-kicking opener “Mickey Mouse & The Goodbye Man”), painful (“When My Baby Comes”), and resigned (“Palaces of Montezuma”) all at once, all to the point at which you need to come back for more, even though you just might hate it as much as you love it. Nick Cave and company take everything that made the first Grinderman album so arresting, crank it up to ten, and assault your senses–all the while not giving a fuck; guitars clang, drums pound like meth’ed-out death marches, and Warren Ellis’ usual slew of instruments make shitloads of noises so batshit insane you can’t tell which one he’s playing. And I’m hard-pressed to find a single as catchy as “Heathen Child,” the first one from this album, whose video features a demonic cheerleader, a nubile lass in a bathtub, a Black Buddha, three AK-47’s, Cave dressed as Shiva and what looks like Ellis’ butt. It’s unstructured chaos, it’s raw-er power than Raw Power, it’s a rape fantasy magically (and horrifically) turned into a rape reality, and it’s easily the antidote to all the soulless, gutless, ball-less synth-heavy bullshit people are shitting all over indie rock these days. How a 52-year-old man can take his midlife crisis and turn it into the most vital music in years is a miracle best left unexplained, but I think this album might have been the best sex I’ve had in years. And I feel dirty.