2010 Magazine's Albums Of The Year Thread For Posting Lists and Discussion

xxxp http://playground.last.fm/unwanted, which is in a way more interesting me than the regular top artists

13 Sun Araw - On patrol
17 Richard Skelton - Landings

^Found these on emusic, but haven't checked them out yet

Got and like Sun Araw and Keith Fullerton Whitman. I don't smoke grass but if I did, I'd smoke a lot and listen to On Patrol and Disengenuity/Disengenuousness, while lying down somewhere.

XP

The Sun Araw is not very good, but the Eleh is pretty monumental

Glad Actress got Wire's #1 its a worthy record, its kept creeping up on me all year. Richard Skelton made a quality album too. That one took me by suprise its so deep I'm still expoloring it, its like wandering around a foggy landscape not knowing quite where you are but always bumping into beautiful shit with every other step or soemthing...

on patrol is one of my favorites of the year, glad it's making lists. prefer it even to the more rocked-out heavy deeds, which seems to be everyone's go-to sun araw album.

Eleh - monolithic drones & tones; hard as granite, kinda hard to 'enjoy' too
Richard Skelton - mournful strings and environmental sounds, a really fucking beautiful and moving work; top 5 of the year for me
Sun Araw - a kind of ratty dublike mix of various fruity-sounding instruments and loops; pretty immersive of the whole, I like it fine

The Hennix is a shifting drone using (obv) electric harpsichord. it's fantastic. I also love the Sun Araw, maybe better than Heavy Deeds

have heard other eleh, but never got the hang. stereo demonstrational drones. curious about richard skelton based on the comments here.

the first printing of the hennix cd/book I think is sold out from Die Schachtel, but aQ told me that they're reprinting

More info on the Richard Skelton here:
http://typerecords.com/releases/landings

not to try and start something, but I find it strange that our/FACT's albums of the year list gets criticised here for featuring Salem, Drake, Kanye and Darkstar in the 40 (amongst Ferraro, Rashad, Roc, Ettinger, Actress, Forest Swords, Altered Natives et al), while Resident Advisor (who i like, and in certain aspects look up to - particularly presentation) do one of the safest top 20s I can imagine, with everything either house, techno, or very house and techno-friendly, and it gets called great.

and Virgo in the RA 20 - amazing record, but it's a reissue. If you're putting that in you might as well put Neptune's Lair in.

anyway, main reason I posted is that our top 40 reissues list is up, it's probably the one we had most fun making:

http://www.factmag.com/2010/12/15/40-best-reissues-of-2010/

xxxp http://playground.last.fm/unwanted, which is in a way more interesting me than the regular top artists

i love how "Toxic" still manages to make that list in 2010.

and ha at people deleting Muse & Coldplay.

you know what, i just looked back and it was actually somewhere else they were really laying into the list, so that first post is a bit of an overeaction. ignore it, and just read the reissues list ;)

I did say some shit about SALEM being on there but it wasn't exactly serious!

yeah I think most people were commenting that the fact list was one of the better ones

cant remember what i said about the fact list but keep in mind most rap fans here dont like drake, kanye, etc

but i bet they hate indie/rock/metal/country more so a list with any of that on it is bound to be hated on.

quite the opposite iirc i was praising the classic rock list for not paying fealty to generic crit bait & criticizing the wire list for what i considered its lazy fallback to consensus on big boi

The Wire top 50

05 Catherine Christer Hennix - The electric harpsichord
08 John Tilbury & Sebastian Lexer - Last daylight
09 Keith Fullerton Whitman - Disengenuity/Disengenuousness
10 Kevin Drumm - Necro accoustic
12 Annette Krebs & Taku Unami - Motobachii
13 Sun Araw - On patrol
16 Joe Colley - Disasters of self
17 Richard Skelton - Landings
19 Eleh - Location momentum

Anyone heard these? Am having trouble finding any of them. I did check out 04 Rangers - Suburban Tours and 11 Sun City Girls - Funeral Mariachi last night, and are pretty good. Still marinating.

eleh = awesome, like Nick said, though, it's more of a mood piece, you gotta be in the right state of mind to listen to an hour of drones & tones with barely perceptible changes (at times)

sun araw = pretty good

haven't heard the KFW or Drumm but i'd trust anything those guys release, it's usually fantastic

yeah i'm a hueg KFW fan and had no idea that record existed

oh, i see

**Please be aware, this album is strictly limited, housed in custom printed outer-pvc with a design aesthetic worthy of the music contained within**

lol wire

quite the opposite iirc i was praising the classic rock list for not paying fealty to generic crit bait & criticizing the wire list for what i considered its lazy fallback to consensus on big boi

but yes deej, i wasn't meaning you when I wrote it.

and Virgo in the RA 20 - amazing record, but it's a reissue. If you're putting that in you might as well put Neptune's Lair in.

until it got reissued the Virgo album was like £200 or something for an OG copy wasn't it? I'd say that made it a fairly different proposition to 'Neptune's Lair', even speaking as someone who would keep releases out of lists like these

haven't heard the Tilbury/Lexer but from what I've heard it's largely a performance of a John Cage 1964 piece, Electronic Music for Piano.
all of the Tilbury interpretations of Cage I've heard have been great
fwiw the cd is actually called "Lost Daylight"

lol reissues not releases xp to self

yeah as i said i was actually thinking of another forum - 'pologies. was disappointed with the RA albums list tho, but then again, their singles one is usually better.

listened to Skelton's album quite a lot early this year but totally forgot about it until seeing it brought up here to be honest.

not to try and start something, but I find it strange that our/FACT's albums of the year list gets criticised here for featuring Salem, Drake, Kanye and Darkstar in the 40 (amongst Ferraro, Rashad, Roc, Ettinger, Actress, Forest Swords, Altered Natives et al), while Resident Advisor (who i like, and in certain aspects look up to - particularly presentation) do one of the safest top 20s I can imagine, with everything either house, techno, or very house and techno-friendly, and it gets called great.

Lists get criticised more for what thye put in than what they leave out: Resident Advisor largely respecting its "brief" makes it a safer list, as well as a relatively functional one, rather like those "progressive house tracks of 2010" style lists that juno does.

FACT's aesthetic is broader obv (and of course RA the past 2 years or so has been heavily influenced by it) which makes it more likely to be taken seriously as an actual across-the-board "best of the year" list but also leaves it more exposed to criticism. Also, lol Drake etc.

What's interesting about both FACT and RA's approach to list-making is the preponderous of "we" - "we loved this record in April", "we played this over and over again all year" etc. The frequency of such statements exceeds their use in, say, Pitchfork lists, by a considerable margin.

I wonder if this is a function of both sites being grounded in dance music - there's more of an assumption of communality and commonality, of records being judged based on their reception by an audience (of dancers, of critics) rather than by an individual.

I <3 Fact the lists are always bitter sweet though. Half of it always seems to be chaff like Kanye/Drake and generic indie. Then the other half is always on it and to my taste. Its one of the most interesting lists because of it though. None of the others really challenge what I'm listing to or throw up as many curvballs. Its hard for lists to not sound generic and Fact somehow breakout of that by being a bit divisive for me at least.

I remember in about 1999 Mixmag had this end of year special where they got a group of longrunning celebrity DJs and producers to sit around and talk about what was the best album of the year. As I recall Missy Elliot, Layo & Bushwakca and Felix Da Housecat were all nommed but the end result was Basement Jaxx, more by a process of elimination than anything else (one or two participants simply refused to countenance Missy for example). The assumption that there was a "community" whose consensus ultimately would be unitary and solid was unspoken but nonetheless taken for granted. If they'd chosen people with interesting points of view it would have been a really good piece actually.

Prob. the big difference with Mixmag is that its emphasis on the obvious meant that its use of "we" was/is less remarkable (in both a positive and negative sense - it makes sense, but also is very predictable). Whereas I find it curious to read write-ups of say Hype Williams that deploy we-speak.

Boomkat do this as well obv, with even more perverse results given their aesthetic focus.

I guess I find it odd because I'm such an "I" critic - not in the sense of being more egotistical, but in the sense of feeling largely disconnected from any kind of aesthetic community that might share my taste.

Well if we're posting our own reissues charts...

1. Various Artists - Cold Waves & Minimal Electronics
2. The Fall - Strange And Frightening World Of... (Omnibus Edition)
3. Suede - Best Of
4. Omar Souleyman - Jazeera Nights
5. Einsturzende Neubauten - Strategies Against Architecture IV
6. Simian Mobile Disco - Delicacies
7. Various Artists - Down To The Sea And Back
8. Virgo - Virgo
9. Various Artists - The World Ends: Afro Rock & Psychedelia in 1970's Nigeria
10. Liars - Live
11. Ruth - Polaroid/Roman/Photo
12. Various Artists - Pomegranates
13. Godflesh - Streetcleaner
14. Chris Carter - Spaces Between
15. Various Artists - The Minimal Wave Tapes Vol One
16. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
17. David Bowie - Station To Station
18. Various Artists - Disco Discharge: The Pink Pounders
19. Various Artists - The Sound Of Siam: Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz And Molam From Thailand, 1964 - 1975
20. Congotronics - Box Set
21. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream
22. Juan McLean - DJ Kicks
23. Wire - Send
24. Wooden Shjips - Vol 2
25. Chris & Cosey - Heartbeat
26. Various Artists - To Scratch Your Heart: Early Recordings from Istanbul
27. The Cure - Disintegration
28. Various Artists - The Exploding Disco Inevitable
29. Shackleton - Fabric 55
30. Various Artists - Rough Trade Synth Wave 10
31. Various Artists - Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla and Afro-Roots in Columbia 1975-1991
32. A Certain Ratio - Force
33. Optimo (Espacio) - Fabric 52
34. Galaxie 500 - Today
35. The Heads - Relaxing With The Heads
36. Charanjit Singh Synthesizing - Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat
37. Various Artists - Isvolt
38. Bardo Pond - Alvarius
39. Jesus And Mary Chain - Upside Down
40. Judas Priest - British Steel

We being the Quietus.

There's plenty of amazing stuff on the FACT list that I wasn't even aware had come out this year, like Dadawa for example. And someone just told me about some Syl Johnson anthology which I had no idea about.

its cool that splazsh topped the wire list. that album is definitely the best permutation of the big 2010 trends that most dance music i heard this year was doing (manipulated r&b samples, warm buzz ambient, weird throbs, extreme attention to sonic detail). it sounds way cooler, really fresh and new. everything on it gets so deconstructed, at some points it almost doesn't make sense

also super lavish and perfect sounding, it's got a really lean & economical sound. maybe that's what set it apart. a lot of pulsing going on but it's not all awash in reverb or something stupid

And someone just told me about some Syl Johnson anthology which I had no idea about.

Speaking of which, there's a great writeup on Syl as part of the Dusted EOY series: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/942

Cokemachineglow:: Top 50 Albums 2010

this is one of the worst things i've ever read

Listening to Waka Flocka Flame is like hearing the voice of God (or what I imagine it to be): unbearably intense, packed with direct injunctions, and spoken in the third-person. It makes sense, then, that like the Old Testament, Flockaveli is full of commandments and terse assessments of its Creator’s chosen ones. Both are easy to dismiss as unreconstructed hogwash, yet both are nearly impossible to eradicate from the psyche of anyone who pays attention.

For both Waka and God, the indelicacy of divine order demands exegesis on the part of the follower. The Christian God transcends logic, leaving it up to Christians to parse His indelible Word for all time. In the same way, Waka Flocka is a being of impulse, one who explains nothing because, he convinces us, there is ultimately no explanation for anything. Explanations are how mere humans patch together their lives from one day to another in order to prevent the inchoate madness of the universe from driving them insane. Which means explanations change constantly. “When my little brother died, I said ‘fuck school’” is not an explanation. It is a demonstration, from its stomach-clenching delivery down to the hundreds of pages of memoir that are packed like an exploding star into its nine blunt words.

Of course, one could say that much of rap is predicated on the idea of words as innately powerful elements rather than signifiers, used intentionally to hold together, to empower tenuous existences. Waka Flocka, then, is pure rap. Vulnerabilities are directly referenced (“I fucked my money up, damn,” is how “Let’s Do It” begins) and then eradicated through a strength that is nebulous enough to seem like faith. There’s the ruthlessly self-edited simplicity of the lyrics—“Hit ‘em with the choppa / Call that shit hot lava”—that when censored, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, become even more powerful than you could possibly imagine. There’re the gigantic, unchanging loops that underpin every song; it’s like Steve Reich fed through a distortion pedal.

And finally, there’s the delivery, always urgent but never anxious. “Front yard, broad day with a SK,” he intones, measuredly, on “Hard in da Paint,” but there’s no gangster paranoia or forced social message in what comes out. The shortening of “broad daylight” into “broad day” feels more like an expansion, a celebration. Waka Flocka is a joyful creator, in full command of his idiom. It can be exceptionally uncomfortable to be in his presence, but that’s because there are volumes of knowledge, warning, celebration, and treatises on how to use gunshots as percussion inside Flockaveli. It’s enough to take into the desert for 40 days and come out glowing.

i don't really understand how people do 'best reissues' lists. is it just the best old albums that happened to get reissued this year, or is it purely about the package/remastering/added value/etc. or whether it's giving an underrated or undiscovered album it's due?

x-post

I saw Syl Johnson awhile back (2009) as part of the Numero Group Eccentric Soul tour. Still has an impressive voice

disappointing to see only 3 of my top 10 for the year appear in any of these lists. not entirely surprised by best coast and besnard lakes, but i appreciated seeing lonelady get some attention

Pitchfork's top 50 albums
50-21

50. Wavves - King of the Beach
49. Wild Nothing - Gemini
48. Forest Swords - Dagger Paths
47. Women - Public Strain
46. Matthew Dear - Black City
45. Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
44. Kylesa - Spiral Shadow
43. Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
42. Drake - Thank Me Later
41. Delorean - Subiza
40. Abe Vigoda - Crush
39. Best Coast - Crazy For You
38. Rick Ross - Teflon Don
37. Zola Jesus - Stridulum EP
36. Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?
35. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
34. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
33. The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
32. Tyler, the Creator - Bastard
31. Woods - At Echo Lake
30. The-Dream - Love King
29. The Fresh & Onlys - Play It Strange
28. The National - High Violet
27. Four Tet - There Is Love in You
26. Twin Shadow - Forget
25. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
24. Hot Chip - One Life Stand
23. Das Racist - Sit Down, Man
22. Girls - Broken Dreams Club EP
21. The Walkmen - Lisbon

hardly any surprises. i'm not familiar with #32, disappointed the-dream/gil scott-heron/four tet/kylesa didnt do a bit better.

that Tyler the Creator never got a review from them, from what I can tell

44. Kylesa - Spiral Shadow

lol @ this even being on that list

that kylesa album is dope

yep

they killed it live too

22 strong condenders for the pfork top 20:

kanye west
ariel pink
lcd soundsystem
robyn
big boi
joanna newsom
janelle monae
deerhunter
beach house
sleigh bells
titus andronicus
arcade fire
caribou
erykah badu
no age
how to dress well
james blake
flying lotus
gonjasufi
local natives
owen pallett
vampire weekend

long shots, but a couple of these may appear:

julian lynch
broken social scene
the radio dept.
the morning benders
fang island

i swear i was minutes away from posting "hey ilxor, can you tell us what you think the top 20 will be" and then decided against it. and then like not even 5 minutes later look