Top Albums of 2010 - #9-5

This week, the BZNZmen will be bringing you their list of the top albums of 2010.

#9
Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest

NASTY K: While this album might not be as incredible as their previous effort Microcastle, it certainly has been pleasant to watch Deerhunter develop from a live novelty act (with frontman Bradford Cox wearing blood-stained dresses on stage, and um, getting fellated on stage, although I'm sure Jesse could tell us more about that), into a perennial critic's favorite. This album features the well-crafted pop songs we've come to expect from this Atlanta outfit, and tracks like "Revival" and "Helicopter" (the remix of which made my best tracks list) showcase Cox's beautiful voice and tender lyrics over simple, haunting melodies. "Memory Boy" reminds me of some of the tracks from The Wrens' album The Meadowlands, which totally ruled 2003, while also bringing quality 60s and 70s pop textures into the mix. It's not quite as tight an album as Microcastle, but overall a great listen. I've been lucky enough to catch these guys live a couple times, although not in their crazier days, and they've been great every time. They've carved out a niche for themselves, and I will be following them closely in 2011.
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RAJ: I'm pretty much with Andy on this one. It's not quite as good as Microcastle, but it's a thoroughly solid indie pop album that pays homage to the great psychedelia and pop of yore. And let me put in another word for "Revival", which is not only a gorgeous little feat of Neil-Young-channeling, but a pretty fascinating example of songwriting empathy. The song is, after all, a gay indie-rocker city kid taking on the persona of what appears to be a born-again Christian being saved, and if there are predictable hints of cynicism, there's also a shocking amount of sincerity along with it.

JESSE: This is a pretty good album. Hmm. I can't really capture specific reasons without contradicting myself, but I think this album's a bit overrated. There are songs on here that show how incredible a band Deerhunter is. In fact, I'd say "Elevator," "Revival," and "Helicopter" are three of their most successful songs. And while there aren't really any bad songs on here, I did find a handful of them to be pretty boring (including the attached "Memory Boy"). Suffice to say, they've shown that they can still write great songs. My beef, as compared with their past LPs, is that it doesn't have much of an album feel, like the others did. Cryptograms is almost like one long song, but the switching between ambience and fuzzy psych-rock worked perfectly for me. I could either throw it on for an entire listen, or pick the songs I wanted to hear when I wasn't in the mood for any long-form (though not really that long) reverb loops. Like I mentioned in the Teebs review, it also had this very amateur feel to it, like the guys found ways to mask the fact that they hadn't mastered their respective instruments, and as a result found a really impressive combination of everything. Over the past half-decade, it seems like they've developed a lot more talent and confidence in regards to their skills, and the result is cleaner songs, fewer effects on the vocals, and a more accessible vibe. While this has its benefits, it's lacking a lot of the things that made me love Cryptograms so much. Microcastle and Weird Era, Cont. also took a definite shift away from that, but didn't abandon it to the degree that I feel they have in Halcyon Digest. But take my critiques with a grain of salt, because, again, there are some great songs here. It's just that since buying Halcyon Digest, I've listened to Cryptograms probably twice as many times. It's been interesting seeing their transition since freshman year of college. Seem's like their getting closer to Bradford's goal of becoming a big-time rock act, but sadly at the expense of what made me love their sound in the first place. But I think the way to look at this is to look at what Geologist said in an interview about AnCo fans complaining about Merriweather Post Pavilion, that their old music is still there, but they're exploring new ways to write music. In summary, this is a good album, I prefer their old sound, but they've successfully transferred into more accessible ground.

Deerhunter - "Revival"


Deerhunter - "Memory Boy"


#8
Das Racist - Sit Down, Man





















NASTY K: These guys are really funny. I mean really fuckin' funny, as this New York Times magazine interview makes abundantly clear. This free mixtape is also one of the most clever things I have ever listened to, certainly more clever lyrically than anything you will find on My Dark Twisted Fantasy. Yet you get the sense that these guys aren't trying that hard. While effectively satirizing racial stereotypes and fame culture, these guys manage to make it seem like they are just slackjawed dudes saying whatever comes to mind. "Hahahaha Jk" for example get at this exact issue, whether or not anything these guys are saying is done with any seriousness. In any case, it's better than Kanye pondering his egomania at proportionately self-indulgent and uninteresting length, and the beats are better too! The production on this album is at times just brilliant, with the Gordon Voidwell and Alex Kestner beat on "Puerto Rican Cousins" a prime example, and the Kassa Overall beat on "Town Business" also a total jam. With further production turns by producer-titans El-P and Diplo, and acts like Teengirl Fantasy and Keepaway, Sit Down, Man moves Das Racist from just a novelty act known only for "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" to a genre-pioneering act with undoubtedly the most original hip hop effort this year. Oh yeah, and it was released as a free download here.

RAJ: When you get into the realms of hyper-articulate rappers obsessed with the smallest turns of phrase, one of the problems you tend to encounter is a huge amount of smugness and superiority - of course, you have your MF Dooms and your Del the Funky Homosapiens that avoid such issues, but you also get utterly insufferable dudes like Talib Kweli and (at least after his debut) Lupe Fiasco. And, on paper, Das Racist seem like they might be the smuggest of the smug – Wesleyan hipsters focused on deconstructing racial issues through heavily ironic raps?

But the big surprise of Das Racist (aside from the fact that they have, out of nowhere, released a mixtape that compares pretty well to the work of the aforementioned greats) is just how goddamned endearing they are. They’re major talents, and they know it, but this is a group that makes room in between blistering verses for a track like “Fashion Party”, where duo-half Heems adopts some Diddy-dumb idiot-swagger and declares, “I’m at a fashion party/ I’m wearing fashion clothes”. These guys are the anti-Kanyes – there’s no ego here, only craft , whether it’s sneakily profound stream-of-consciousness ("I'm counting Jacksons with black friends/I'm counting tens and Benzes with white friends/Wondering if suicide's a largely white trend/Google it later and confirm that/ Aight then"), hilariously off-the-wall cultural references, ("Really though/Frat dudes is like Juggalos/Underrated in the game like Mark Ruffalo"), or pointed racial assessments ("White people, play this for your black friends/Black people, smack them").

So, depending on how you’re looking at it, yes, Das Racist’s apples are better than Kanye’s oranges. And the beats are uniformly solid, if not spectacular (I’m starting to admire Andy’s Don-Quixote-esque devotion to convincing everyone that Kanye’s beats aren’t great). But comparisons aren’t important here – what is important is that, like Andy said, these guys are true originals.

JESSE: This is good. They are an actual duo, as opposed to two solo acts on the same songs. The beats are sometimes disappointing. That's all.

Das Racist - "Puerto Rican Cousins"


Das Racist - "Town Business"


#7
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs





















NASTY K: So I've already been called out about this one, but whatever. The Suburbs is great. Aside from taking aim squarely at my pet political issue, namely that the American suburb is responsible for the evident decline of our once glorious nation, this album also surpasses Neon Bible in my mind, even if it might not quite equal their debut Funeral. Sure the lyrics don't reference specific things about some shit-suburb in North Jersey, but this music is designed to reach a whole lot of people, and maybe, just maybe, inspire some different thinking. "Rococo" is a thundering arena-rock anthem, with enough anger and stomping martial drums to get anybody riled up. Don't believe me? Crank it up as loud as you can on some speakers, you'll see. The trend continues on "Empty Room" although with Regine's more tender voice shining through on top of the furious drums and strings.

The interactive video for "We Used To Wait" that takes into account Google data about YOUR HOMETOWN, is a really unique way to illustrate their message, even if the Spike Jonze video for "The Suburbs" might be a little overwrought. The comparison between The Arcade Fire and Bruce Springsteen certainly re-enters the discussion here, with The Arcade Fire narrating America as I see it in 2010. Our generation is a suburban one, going home and wondering why we are bored off our asses, as Win Butler says, wasting hours. The question is of course, if they aren't just preaching to the choir, as their fans probably already felt this way. I mean it's good to be angry, as Titus Andronicus is, but they don't exactly lead us to action either, unless that action is going to the convenience store.

RAJ: To be clear, I do kind of like this album (there are just others I like better). In fact, I would give more credit to the songwriting than even Andy does – Andy makes this thing sound like an op-ed piece, but the album is more nuanced than that. First off, the idea that this album is a “call to action” is a stretch – this is a deeply melancholy and resigned album (not necessarily a bad thing!). The reason that the title track is so haunting is that it pictures the suburbs (and their damaging) side-effects as essentially inevitable – maybe Andy somehow pulled a hopeful message out of this thing, but if I had to summarize this album’s political outlook, it would be more along the lines of “We’re fucked”.

And the focus of this album is mostly psychological, anyway – the existence of suburbs seems to be inevitable both on the American landscape and as a dominating factor in the mind. This isn’t even really a completely negative view of the suburbs – nostalgia for that suburban past runs deep throughout these songs, and the most messy, contradictory, and human moment on this album is on “City of No Children”, when Win Butler confesses that despite himself, he kind of has a yearning for the sell-out suburban lifestyle.

But this album has too few of those really thought-out moments – my problem here isn’t so much the preaching-to-the-choir aspect as it is the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel aspect. Like, hey “Rococo” and “Month of May”, thanks for taking such a progressive stance on the controversial issue of douchebag hipsters! Yeah, “Deep Blue” and “We Used to Wait”, we probably shouldn’t use our cell-phones so much! Yeah, dig those endless generic statements about “the kids””! Look, all of it is effective enough, but it all seems a little rote and easy. And even if I applaud the decision to pull back on the anthems (you can’t really make a “Wake Up” type song about the idea that “I’m ambivalent about the suburbs!”), I still miss them, even if the electro experiments like “Sprawl II” are kind of fun. So yes, not a terrible album, but far from a great one.

And oh my god, Andy, "Rococo" is not arena rock.

The Arcade Fire - "The Suburbs"


The Arcade Fire - "Rococo"


#6
Actress - Splazsh

TK: An absolutely devastating album and another landmark in electronic music. From reading other reviews it seems as though most critics agree on one thing. Darren Cunningham is some sort of genius with immense talent, a musical savant, but after that, opinions become greatly divided. Is this album too challenging to appreciate? Is it too inaccessible to be considered great? Actress seems to carry on rhythms forever. The comparison I can easily come to is the filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang and his film Goodbye Dragon Inn. An ode to film its self, it takes place in a soon to be closed down cinema and just like the rhythms found on Splazsh, a scene can seem to last forever. As soon as you feel like you can't take it anymore and you want to turn it off, the scene ends and you're presented with a new image to marvel over. Well, Cunningham is doing a lot of the same stuff although his "Death of Cinema" is Detroit Techno and Chicago House music.

Even though this music can some times takes some time to getting used to there are some out right bangers. "Wrong Potion" is high energy explosion a perfect mix of bright sounds and sub-bass rhythm, definitely a dance tune. "Get Ohn (fairlight mix)" is a crazy tune that make you feel as though the party is on the other side of the wall, its hypnotizing and just draws you in. The album also features some of the most clever song titles of the year, "Supreme Cunnilingus" and "Bubble Butts and Equations". Let's not forget the Prince sampling, and appropriately named, "Purpple Splazsh", the definition of catchiness.

The album can be at times dark and brooding, even enigmatic but it all put together with a great sense of humor and intelligence. With his first album Hazyville and now Splazsh, Darren Cunningham is most certainly one of the electronic genre's leading menn. DON'T SLEEP ON THIS ALBUM!

Actress - "Wrong Potion"

Actress - "Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)"

#5
Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy OST





















NASTY K: DAFT PUNK IS BACK. Sure, this isn't a proper Daft Punk album. Sure, it's a movie score, with only few outlets for Daft Punk to do their thing the way it's meant to be done. But I'm glad to see them step out of their traditional mode for a minute to do a soundtrack for a movie that I am hoping lives up to the hype. Holy shit, it comes out TOMORROW. Anyways, "Derezzed" totally rules, even if it is not long enough to sustain my need to get down. The more soundtrack-y parts of the score are also solid, providing the necessarily electronic textures to a movie set inside a goddamn computer. Number 5 on our list is probably aggressive, sure, but you can't give Daft Punk too much respect as an artist, after all, they did start a musical movement that spawned countless electronic and dance-oriented artists in the last 15 years, and to not at least tip the hat would be a grave injustice.

RAJ: Finally, a chance to violently disagree with Andy! I'd like to apologize for this particular entry on our list - I'd quibble with the rest of our rankings, but putting this in even the top 50 is patently absurd. Look, getting Daft Punk to score the Tron sequel was a tremendous publicity coup for Disney, because it provided an instant cool factor to a property that young audiences were either completely unfamiliar with or that they were familiar with and regarded as faintly stupid (the programs in your computer are little people, guys!). But the association with Disney is also probably what killed anything remotely exciting about this project - this is the sound of electronic music gods being told by a corporate boardroom to "do a Hans Zimmer thing and throw in some robot stuff while you're at it".

Of course this thing rises to a basic level of competence - it's moody and dramatic and it has your standard grandiose blockbuster strings - but it's sorely lacking in any kind of real imagination or inspiration. The two actual songs here, "Derezzed" and the end credits theme, are pleasant, but they're third-rate both as Daft Punk songs and in comparison to the current state of electronic music (which Daft Punk has been effectively absent from for half a decade). I'll grant you "The Game is Changed", which works the fascinating trick of using an orchestra like it was an arpeggiator, but the rest of this is rote Hollywood music that no one would bat an eye at if not for the involvement of that famous Gallic duo.

And let's remind ourselves that this is an albums list, as in pieces of music that stand up on their own without accompaniment - listening to thing for any extended period of time by itself is as goofy as bumping the Lord of the Rings soundtrack on your car stereo. And if you were really forced to pick a soundtrack to put on this list, you could at least pick something that is progressive or innovative or interesting - the fascinating slow-mo reconstruction of Edith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" that is the Inception soundtrack, or A.R. Rehman's bizarre Indian reconstruction of American rock and folk on the 127 Hours soundtrack, or (best of all) Olivier Assayas' conceptually genius compilation of killer post-punk songs for the Carlos soundtrack.

Because Daft Punk isn't trying particularly hard here - not like Daft-Punk-half Thomas Bangalter did in the past on his harrowing and spectacular score for Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. And yeah, that was a transgressive French art-house film and this is Hollywood product, but if we're making a list of excellence under boring mainstream constraints instead of just flat-out excellence, then, gee, how about that Taylor Swift album, guys?

NASTY K: A couple things. This isn't placed at number 5 because of my opinion alone, no matter what Raj might want our readers to believe. In fact, the 7 of us had a weighted vote and it ended up where it did, so we can dismiss all of that. I weighted albums heavier than this, and for the record I did give the Kanye album some points, against my better judgment. Daft Punk revolutionized the live electronic dance experience with the best live tour the genre had seen in decades in 2007, and the rumors abound about a Tron-themed tour after this film's release. Thus, we can also dismiss Raj's ignorance about Daft Punk's supposed "absence". Additionally it is fair to say that without Daft Punk, there is no Justice. There is no blog-house explosion. There is no current "scene" of which Raj speaks. We are talking about a group that redefined a genre here, and if this album isn't their best work (it's clearly not) and if it's ranked higher than it should be (it clearly is), it is still fair for enough of the BZNZmen to acknowledge them as they should be acknowledged. Now tomorrow, when we finally duke it out over Kanye, hopefully for the last time, considering we've done it once already, you will see Raj doing the same for Mr. West as what I have done for Daft Punk. He will be disproportionately crediting (and by crediting I mean creaming his pants over) a truly lackluster effort by Kanye on account of his previous accomplishments. I'll save the best of that for tomorrow's BZNZ though.

RAJ: Andy takes the name SRS BZNZ very seriously. We're obviously just boring people now, but because I LOLed:
- Apologies if it seemed like I was putting the blame for the whole listing on Andy, which is obviously not true.
- Andy did not actually give the Kanye album any points, although he did give points to "Lost in the World" in a songs poll we ended up scrapping.
- I said "effectively absent" because the 2007 tour was composed of remixes of old material, which is new, I guess, but also not exactly new. Whatevs.
- "revolutionized the live electronic dance experience" lol
- I didn't realize we were doing a list of most influential artists instead of an albums list. I mean, hell, Neil Young put an album out this year too.
- "acknowledge them as they should be acknowledged" lol
- I'm super bored of talking about the Kanye album, so I'll probably just put up a link to our already-ridiculously-excessive past writings now.
- Just for fun - Andy on the Kanye West album before Kanye apparently killed his dog: "It might sound like I'm being overly critical, but I think this album is solid. West's a very talented beatmaker, a better-than-competent MC with occasional flashes of lyrical brilliance, and I think a guy whose popularity and megalomania has made him a little cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs...I'm not drinking the Kanye Kool-Aid that this is the best album of the year"
- You could cut the sexual tension on this blog with a knife.

Daft Punk - "Derezzed"


Daft Punk - "Tron: Legacy (End Titles)"