Top Albums of 2010 - #19-15

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

#19

Harlem - Hippies

JESSE: It's a warm may evening in Philadelphia, after a long day of walking the town with Jeremy and Gina, we see Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop, and waltz around discussing whether or not Banksy is Mr. Brainwash, or what. Then I see a record shop, and we walk in. the dude at the counter throws on what sounds like some 70s garage rock, so simple and so catchy. I don't do this often, but I had to ask him who it was. "Harlem" he says, apparently they've recently released an album on Matador! Great! From what I can gather, it's a 3-piece band that has just the essential skills on their respective instruments to put together some catchy songs that work hard to pass the 3-minute mark. Someday Soon starts off the album, and you just have yourself great vintage-sounding song after song. While certainly not an extremely original sound, it's just fun fun fun. The dude asks me "Yeah, it's a sweet album dude, want to buy a copy?" and I decline, opting for spending $2 on used copies of the Superfly soundtrack and Ian & Sylvia's Four Strong Winds on vinyl. But I got it eventually, and oh yes, it's good. Also, it's really easy to play the guitar along with, because it's just nice simple chord progressions. Great job, Harlem.

TK: I've been on the Harlem bandwagon for quite some time now. Their debut album was like a humble homage to early Kinks/Stones garage-rock. Like Jesse states, not original but fun fun fun. There was one song in particular that was phenomenal, "South of France". A fury of psychedelic, drug-induced, freak-out of garage rock power that would fit perfectly in some compilation of lost 60's nuggets. Unfortunately you're not going to hear a track as good as that on their sophomore effort but the album on a whole is way better. "Someday Soon", which sounds like it could be a 60's girl group cover, really sets the pace for the whole album. From odes to Casper (yeah, the friendly ghost) to sleazy domestic disputes, it's all over the place but what great garage-rock album isn't?

Harlem - Someday Soon


Harlem - Gay Human Bones

#18
Shinichi Osawa - SO2

#17
Oneohtrix Point Never- Returnal

TK: Holy Synths! And now we tune in to the imaginary station that is Oneohtrix Point Never, emitting deliciously strange frequencies. Daniel Lopatin's album, Returnal, finds him using synthesizers to explore the cyclical nature of time. The opener "Nihil Admirari" (a latin phrase that means, surprised by nothing) is the ultimate palette cleanser. Imagine a volcanic eruption. From then on out things quickly mellow out. A lot of people compare the title track to something The Knife would produce, which isn't that farfetched. "Ouroboros" (see a snake eating its tail) is a stand out track that you wish was longer, barely going over 2 minutes. But to me the best is "Pelham Island Road". A mind-blowing track that invokes traveling, not through space but through time. For fans of Bladerunner or someone who may have played to much Sega Genesis as a kid, I guess...

Oneohtrix Point Never "‡PREYOUANDI∆" from Megazord on Vimeo.

#16
The Chemical Brothers- Further

#15
Sun City Girls- Funeral Mariachi

JESSE: So I haven't really scratched the surface of Sun City Girls' discography. According to their Wikipedia page, they have over 80 releases. This is their final recording under the name, as the drummer of the band sadly passed away this past year. 31 years of recording, I see them as somewhat Zappa-ish, but really I don't know much about the band. This album is largely instrumental, and the vocals present are not in any lyrical form, but rather additions to the songs made. Opening track Ben's Radio comes across as a bit of a sound collage, with the guys saying either gibberish, making trumpet noises, saying "Jakarta" at some point, then it breaks into this nice bass line with a surf guitar riff for a bit. This is a horrible description, but as a song it works so well. The album is overall pretty chill, but I can't explain how many types of music it sounds like, while sounding like none. Much of it sounds like it would fit will in a Kill Bill soundtrack. Not sure what else to say, but it's good. Now it's time for me to work through their music retrospectively.

Sun City Girls - Funeral Mariachi


Sun City Girls - Blue West

Top Albums of 2010 - #24-20

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

#24
Pantha du Prince - Black Noise

JESSE: My beef with a lot of electronic music is how compact and tight it feels. There isn't much of an environment created, and it often leaves me feeling very claustrophobic after the initial head-bobbing. Here, Hendrik Weber really creates his own world of sonic back-, middle-, and foreground. The album name gets it right, and even the album art is extremely appropriate. The overall feeling of each track is just huge. While being pretty minimalist and containing very ambient elements, it has the appeal of being consistently catchy. I'd never listened to Pantha Du Prince before this album dropped, but Rough Trade had ads up for this on TinyMixTapes for months on end, so i eventually decided to grab it, and it was at worth it. Music ambient enough you could have sit as background music, while simultaenously being groovy enough to awkwardly dance to with compadres.

Pantha Du Prince - "Abglanz"

Pantha Du Prince - "Welt Am Draht"

#23
Guido - Anidea

TK: First thing, if you're even remotely a nerd you immediately recognize the album cover to Guido's Anidea. It's Final Fantasy X (not my favorite in the series but still solid) and this makes sense because Guido draws a lot of inspiration from video-game soundtracks. While you're not going to hear anything remotely close to something Nobuo Uematsu might do, you can definitely hear the influence (at least I can). Throw out the two vocal tracks and you're left with a really impressive debut album. What I find great about this album is that a lot of the instruments sound down right cheesy but Guido's effective arrangements make it all somehow work, turing into something like guilty pleasure music but I don't know how guilty I actually feel. I could see this futuristic R&B music as a soundtrack to some revision of a space opera anime from the 70's. You're well on your way Guido.

Guido - "Mad Sax"

Guido - Shades of Blue

#22
Mount Kimbie - Crooks and Lovers

NASTY K: I'm not sure this album was better than Mount Kimbie's first two EPs, Maybes and Sketches on Glass, both of which are credited with ushering in "post-dubstep", or whatever they are calling this genre. I don't know that this album has any tracks as good as "50 Mile View" or "Maybes". That said, I think Mount Kimbie shows great potential, and I'm excited to follow their progress. I might be more inclined to reach for Gold Panda's Lucky Shiner over this album. Much of it sounds similar to efforts from Burial, like his eponymous debut album, and even some of the wide open dark tracks from Untrue. Mount Kimbie is cool, just grab their EPs before this joint.

JESSE: Agreed. The EPs got me super hyped for Mount Kimbie, specifically the tracks Maybes, as K mentioned, and At Least, when I snagged them this spring. There are aspects of the EPs that I miss on Crooks & Lovers, but they focus on some elements that are really nice. I think the label post-dubstep is more applicable to the EPs, while here they go more minimalist and replace the synth sounds with the sampling of real instrumental sounds with added echo. Before I Move Off is an excellent example. The high-pitched vocals are here, the electro blips and beeps are still there, but the overall feel of the track is much more organic overall. That permeates the whole album. It'll be interesting to see where they go next.


Mount Kimbie - "Maybes"


Mount Kimbie - "50 Mile View"


#21
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

RAJ: The latest Gorillaz album found Damon Albarn jettisoning mega-producers like Danger Mouse and handling all the production work himself, and you can hear the difference immediately. Plastic Beach sounds cheaper than the last two Gorillaz albums – the bass-line on “Stylo” doesn’t have that “Feel Good, Inc.” kind of sheen, the synths of “On Melancholy Hill” are chintzy 80s versions of what you’d find on something like “Dirty Harry”, none of the drums ever hit as hard as “Tomorrow Comes Today”, etcera, etcera. But production gloss is thoroughly unimportant if your songwriting is good enough, and having more control seems to have revitalized Albarn’s melody-crafting instincts. Surprisingly, then, Plastic Beach is not just the best album that Gorillaz has made, it’s the best album that Albarn’s been involved with since the final Blur album.

Plastic Beach is as eclectic as the albums that preceded it, but the main emphasis has moved away from “Adult Swim”-rap towards lush synth-pop. For the first time in years, Albarn isn’t the noble Chinese-opera-writing, “Mali Music”-making adventurer into foreign sonic territory but the pop star in his comfort zone - Blur did a little dabbling in synth-pop, after all. The result is that the songs are more inventive and satisfying (like acoustic-ballad-turned-electro-stomper “Empire Ants” and “Stylo”, a disco single infused with Bobby Womack’s raw soul) and even the more bizarre collaborators fit in seamlessly (it’s no small feat to make Lou Reed sound comfortable on a electronic pop track). Maybe the biggest surprise, though, is how good of a pure hip-hop producer Albarn turns out to be on his own – the mind-blowing “Sweepstakes” finds Mos Def running Albarn’s gauntlet of ever-shifting drum patterns, squiggly glitches, and disorienting marching-band intrusions. Albarn turns out to be as progressive a hip-hop producer as most of your weed-smoking Stone's-Throw-ers - it’s enough to make you wish for an Albarn-produced-only hip-hop album instead of a new Blur album. Ha ha, just kidding. Please for the love of god make a new Blur album.

NASTY K: To be honest, the synth pop aspect really threw me off. I didn't much care for "Stylo", as the really repetitive beat caused me to lose interest. I guess both the eclecticism and the length of the album came off as lacking focus to me, so I didn't spend so much time with this release, but I didn't take specific issue with it either. I thought Demon Days was and is a critically underrated album, but nothing here grabbed me in that same way. I'm not sure if moving the emphasis away from so-called "Adult Swim-style" really makes sense either, especially for the self-proclaimed world's first cartoon band. Ditch the weird synths and bring us back to the killer guest verses from folks like De La Soul and Del the Funkee Homosapien, kthx.

JESSE: I haven't spent much time with it, but I think the overall synth sound is a welcome breath of fresh air. Just another piece of evidence that Damon Albarn is still one of the brightest musicians of modern music history (Even Democrazy wasn't as horrible as people made it out to be).

Gorillaz - "Empire Ants"

Gorillaz - "Stylo"

#20
Avey Tare - Down There


NASTY K: It's nice to see an often overlooked member of a major band step out and do something really solid. Not in a Philip Selway kind of way, either. While much of the focus has been on Panda Bear's solo career (and thankfully, now that Deakin has appeared to hang up his solo act for a minute), it's refreshing to hear what that other member of Animal Collective is up to. Jesse loved "Oliver Twist", and so do I. "3 Umbrellas" is a fun track, and "Lucky 1" has some really unique textural stuff.

JESSE: This was a grower for me (chubs4u?), but it's become a really infectious album. It's not long, but there's a lot of depth here. Dude's been going through some emotional times as of late, and the warm vibe of MPP isn't present. Not surprisingly, it sounds sort of like darker, older Animal Collective that's more accessible than Spirited-era songs (but pre-tribal freakout jams a la Here Comes The Indian), and a more polished Terrestrial Tones without some of the noise that Eric Copeland contributes. It's not Person Pitch, nor is it trying to be. It's solid, abstract pop jams, with a heavy use of effects that add to rather than detract from Avey Tare's vocals. In addition to the above mentioned tracks, Ghost of Books is one of my favorite songs of the year. Let's all put on our alligator masks, grab our drum machines and synthesizers, and party at the swamp.


Avey Tare - "3 Umbrellas"


Avey Tare - "Lucky 1"

Nasty K's Nastiest Tracks of 2010

Get nasty. This is the perfect segue into this upcoming week, where the BZNZmen will count down their favorite albums of 2010! My favorite tracks of the year aren't ranked, per se, just sort of tiered. So there's a general progression in this post, better tracks are later on.

Bronze

Arcade Fire - "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

What a track. Regine, as usual provides beautiful vocals about suburban sprawl, on Arcade Fire's third LP, an urban planning themed gem. I mean it debuted at number 1 on the billboard charts, but the people in charge don't listen to rock lyrics, and people who listen to Arcade Fire probably feel the same way about dystopian suburbs. It is worth wondering if we can ever get away from the sprawl...

Caribou - "Odessa"

Dan Snaith is a fuckin' wizard, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. His album Swim was sadly snubbed from our list for next week, but deserves a mention, largely for this knockout track.

Gold Panda - "You"

Slammin'. I posted a while back about a remix Gold Panda did of Caribou, so it's only fitting I'd find a way to get them both on my top tracks list.

Silver

Deerhunter - "Helicopter" (Diplo + Lunice Remix)

Bradford Cox singing about his own mortality meets a thundering beat collaboration from the  wizard Diplo, and the up and coming Lunice. Add in this incredible video with footage from Andrey Stvolinsky's Slow Moscow, and you have a truly memorable jam of 2010.

Neon Indian - "Mind, Drips" (Bibio Remix)

So Bibio didn't actually release an album this year, after doing three last year, but this remix punishes. Unlike Jesse, I rode the chillwave pretty hard in the summer of 09, figuring well, if it's 90 degrees, I might as well be listening to something that sounds like a melting cassette. This remix covers so much ground in 4 minutes, integrating even a vicious wobbly bass bridge before concluding beautifully with Bibio's more trademark guitar samples.

LCD Soundsystem - "Dance Yrself Clean"

BEST DRUM INTRO SINCE PHIL COLLINS. Makes me wanna dance so hard I accidentally deck some hipster girl in the face. Some girl Raj claims was the most attractive girl he ever saw...

Gold

Flying Lotus - "Do The Astral Plane"

It's too good. And it makes for a great sing-along. Disco-ey beginnings keep adding layers on until you are dancing so hard you don't notice that FlyLo decided to shred your face with some really gritty electronic textures. Nobody else is making anything that sounds like this.

Big Boi - "Shutterbugg"

Scott Storch comes through with a beat better than any beat on Kanye's new album, and Big Boi steps completely out of Andre 3000's shadow with this banger. I've been listening to it on repeat since April, and have no intention of slowing down. I can't decide between these two...so have em both.

New Altitude Sickness - "The Jamburglar"

I've gotta break the flow of the best of 2010 to draw our readers' attention away from our pretension for a hot minute, and toward something really fucking cool. A friend of these BZNZmen and accomplished electronic musician Altitude Sickness has just released his newest project The Jamburglar, eleven bumpin' tracks of tunes produced using the super cool Monome interface. What's a monome? Essentially an electronic music controller that uses light-up buttons, the monome is used and loved by artists like Daedelus and Edison. Altitude Sickness's personal 'nomes are housed in tupperware. As if it weren't cool enough that the homie is making really dope tunes by pressing light-up buttons on a fuckin' tupperware, Altitude Sickness has also released The Jamburglar with an additional interactive software component, the so-called Partially Interactive Media Player, or P.I.M.P. As the super cool website states, "The P.I.M.P. allows the user to visualize realtime meta-musical information while listening to 'The Jamburglar'." The screenshots are the illinest, even if this reviewer hasn't had a hot minute to experiment with P.I.M.P. itself (available now for Mac, Windows, and Linux).

Don't sleep on this cat Altitude Sickness though. Aside from being a tremendous beat producer, hardware technician, creator of innovative media playback interfaces, he also wrote a program called SmackTop that reverse engineers a MacBook's motion detectors for musical applications (available free and open source, of course). With all these accomplishments, I suppose now would be an ideal time to mention that he's opened for some fairly awesome acts including Nosaj Thing, Daedelus, Hudson Mohawke, Mike Slott, Lucky Dragons, Edison and makingthenoise. Phew.

The album rules. The track "A Flyer Education" is some of Altitude Sickness's finest work to date, using a well-placed Deltron 3030 sample as thematic basis for some fly beats. "Frigid Flux (Redux)" is another example of Altitude Sickness's wizardry, using some crazy silky electronic textures to get your hips movin' every time. The sample of Broken Social Scene's "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" on "Skip Hop" that then transitions into "Mrs. Officer" by Lil Wayne shows both Altitude Sickness's eclecticism as well as his brilliant compositional awareness. He then steers the track right into Busdriver's "The Troglodyte Wins" a collision with only the most delicious results. This guy royally knows his shit, and additionally, the experience of viewing his compositional process live is a mindfuck that hurts so good.

These aren't your grandpa's mashups. Stop reading this bullshit and download the man's work. The Jamburglar and the P.I.M.P. accompaniment are available here.

Tracks of the Year - Muddog Millionaire

I don't really have a theme to my picks, except that they are all definitely not Waka Flocka Flame. Just some good ol' accessible pop jams.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round



For a variety of reasons, Ariel Pink’s past work, while interesting, never really hooked my attention. While I’m a big fan of lo-fi music, it just seemed like there was too much missing under all of the fuzz of his bedroom tracks. Then I hear Round and Round and I’m floored. The clarity, the groove, the transitions, the chorus. Ask my Spelman 52 roommates, I played this song a lot (and apparently sang it in my sleep once). What if every chillwave artist followed the example of their godfather and learned to make some honest, catchy pop songs?

Erykah Badu - Window Seat



Madlib produced a few of the songs on Badu’s last album, but surprisingly this single put together by herself and James Poyser outshines all of them. Don’t get me wrong, Madlib is one of the most talented and forward-thinking beat-makers in the world, and to be honest, the beat in this track isn’t really much to think about. In fact, the beat is just simple and uninteresting enough to let Erykah take all the credit for the track. It’s pretty straightforward, but mmm mmm mmmmm...I can dig it. While it was mostly in the public eye because of the controversy of the video, it’s just a pretty beautiful song altogether.

Keepaway - 100



It clocks in at under 3 minutes, but there are enough elements in this song to make it worthy of listen after listen after listen. The wall of guitar at the beginning of the chorus, then the all-too-singable line, I don’t mean to weigh on your mind/I just hope you think of me when you get high, a wonderful song of hoping that someone is thinking of you obsessively thinking of you as much as you are of them.

Avey Tare - Oliver Twist



Everyone loves Panda Bear. How many bands are asking to have him provide his vocals for their bands these days? Then there’s Dave Portner. While he’s the other founding half of Animal Collective, it doesn’t seem like he gets the attention that Mr. Lennox gets these days. Is it because of any sort of lack of talent? Not at all. Oliver Twist is evidence of such. Builds up the track, eerie sample at the beginning, a thumping bass line, then 2:24, the beat builds while Avey argues with himself via some meeaaaannnn vocal pitch changes (much like the reason the second part of Kanye’s Blame Game is so good). The album took awhile for me, but really grew on me, but this one just caught me from the first listen.

Toro Y Moi - Blessa + Minors





I’ll be honest, I hate about 75% of chillwave. Like that Neon Indian album. I hate it. But the two opening tracks off of Causers of This perfectly capture exactly what is appealing of the genre: the woozy effects, the delay and drops on the vocals, the haziness of the layering, juxtaposed with the constant drum-machine beat. The man can harmonize with himself pretty well, too. The reason I did this as two songs is that both are very good. But the sudden transition from echoing synthesizer noises to the explosion of sound at the beginning of Minors, the dude just kills it. Wish I could link the two youtube videos together.

20 10

Looking back on the year that was, one moment stands out above the rest. An event that changed everything I thought I knew about music. This epic transformation appropriately happened at the most epic music festival known to man. Bonnaroo. It was late, 2:30 A.M. late, anxiously awaiting LCD Soundsystem. While wandering in a drug enduced haze I decided it was best to get to the stage extra early, for a good spot of course. When I got my first taste of the devastating noise that is dubstep. The dude performing had a very eery, just hopped out of a swomp look to him. Think the chick from 'The Ring' and you've got Bassnectar. The only thing I could think was, "HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS BEFORE!?" From that time on I've been hooked. So instead of taking the ordinary best jams of the year. I've decided to switch it up and give you my favorite dubstep tracks of twenty-ten.

Like most of my favorite dubstep songs. They have about a minute long build up with some awesome female vocals. Then, and you know it's coming, the breakdown. I don't even know if that word best describes what happens but you get the point. Flux Pavilion doing what he does best.

Mix of grime with dubstep. No need for words.

BASSHEAD

Coming in a close second as song of the year. Doctor P completely shuts it down.

Best song of the year, dubstep or not, this is my number one. The original by Rusko was alright. Sub Focus transforms this one into a masterpiece. Giving me the sour lemon face each and every time.


Oh yeah, the story unfortunately ends on a shitty note. I ended up being so caked in dirt at what must have been 3:30 at this point and completely drained. That I bitched out and missed LCD Soundsystem, AND I WAITED FOR THEM TO SETUP THE EQUIPMENT. To this day, I hate myself for this.

Interlude - Music Videos of the Day

Dear Daft Punk,

Daft Punk - New Music - More Music Videos

Hey guys! You know that song you made for the Tron soundtrack? "Derezzed"? It's pretty good! Thanks for that! And the video for the song is pretty cool too. OK, it's maybe a touch obvious to make Daft Punk have a light-cycle fight, but I like how you worked in some weird Beast Wars jousting shit, so I was sold overall! Just one thing - at the end, when it turns out to be Olivia Wilde who was in one of the suits and that becomes a big ol' attention-grabbing blog-fodder twist? Lame! Seems a little fame-whorey for a band as classy as you guys!*



It wouldn't bother me that much except that another video released today was so much better at using a famous person. Granted, Olivia Wilde is no Snoop Dogg, but Gorillaz found a much better way to use their guest - namely, letting him get super, super high (I know, I know, "let" him - ha!) and then telling him to pretend he's a rapping pirate. And in his presumably highly altered state, Snoop took that dictate very seriously, which makes for an immensely entertaining video - one that alternates between Snoop Dogg making very serious pirate faces and Snoop Dogg seeming to forget where he is at the moment.

All I'm saying is that you should really try to highlight the assets of your guests, like Snoop's drug-addled tomfoolery! In the case of a not-super-talented actress like Olivia Wilde, you kind of went out of your way to hide her main, erm, assets as an actress and then did the lame "It's a famous person" trick! Just some thoughts! Anyway, love you guys! Please make an actual album soon!

Sincerely,
Raj


*Bonus points if it was some kind of convoluted Metroid reference, but still!