Listing Through Another Year

1. Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me

Because, you see, of course it is.

More?

In that case, how about we start by recognising that even though this record came out on February 23rd of last year, nearly a full year ago now, it’s still somehow managing to keep its best secrets crushingly close to what initially seemed such a disarmingly bare chest. After the mesmeric, but nevertheless at times emotionally distancing, Ys (2006), all the motherhood imagery surrounding the pre-release buzz for Have One On Me painted a first listen in hues far bolder, far starker, far more primary than we’d been used to from JoJo. Prepared thus, it was probably the most lyrically direct tracks that hit home first, participating as so many of them appeared to do in that traditional pop-song conceit of exploring universal themes through particulars just a little more gnomic of detail. For me, then, it was the opening verse of ‘Baby Birch’ that struck the first shuddered chords:

This is the song for Baby Birch,

Though I will never know you.

And at the back of what we’ve done

There is the knowledge of you.

It was beginning to feel that, not only was Joanna singing in a clearer, more conventional-sounding voice, but she was choosing to adopt a vernacular specially primed for exploring the more excruciatingly commonplace of human dilemmas: whatever they did, whatever happened to Baby Birch, whether adoption, abortion, or even the choice merely to refrain, that unknown child remained as hypothetical as the constellations, so far away in their bulletproof cars. All the more, and pitched up alongside the briefest and most unswerving of the album’s similarly-themed tracks, ‘On a Good Day’ – ‘I had begun to fill in all the lines / Right down to what we’d name her’ – Joanna seemed to be inviting us to see her not as the pedestal-dweller responsible for, say, ‘Sawdust and Diamonds’, but just another writer into whose life her art was of necessity beginning to intrude, and vice versa.

But, of course, we’re far too smart to mistake ‘direct’ for ‘honest’, aren’t we? Aren’t we? Well, maybe: but, truth or fiction, or the neverland between, tell me you can watch a performance like this and not get to some kind of compelling ‘truth’ for yourself, howsoever you might find it to be composed:

So that’s the thing, then. Yes, these songs are founded more than ever before on emotions we recognise; and, yes, it’s to those emotions that the songs return when they're through; but it’s the residue those lyrical wanderings leave on our later perceptions of those emotions that render them altered, fashion them anew. And that’s all you can ask of an art, isn’t it? How about this one: try ridding yourself a moment, at least in theory, of those items you habitually use to beautify your life – maybe all your pretty dresses, sure, but maybe also your books, your sweeter memories – and then do so after you’ve listened closely to ‘Does Not Suffice’. Oh, how empty hang the hangers, huh?

There’s too much else here for me to go into, so I’ll end instead with a stolen anecdote. Not long after Have One On Me first dropped into our lives – inscrutable as Ludwig, pretty as spent remorse – a good pal o’mine and fellow elect to the cult of Newsom had the unfathomably jealousy-inducing fortune to get to see Joanna and co. play at a little 500-standing venue in Nashville, TN. I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing the tale of his greatest glory: long story short, a moment arose such that, by shouting the immortal phrase, ‘Fuck Eugene!’, into the still of a between-track lull, he made Joanna Newsom laugh. You probably could have done with some context there, I guess, but the point remains: HE MADE JOANNA NEWSOM LAUGH.

2. Baths – Cerulean

Looking back a mere cuppla months, and much as I already loved Cerulean in its recorded form by that point, I had a few doubts as to how it would translate live: the one-dude-standing-behind-his-laptop-and-singing phenomenon can be a little unpredictable, after all. So, heading down to a studiously unfinished basement venue in Shoreditch, the potential for fakery loomed like the truth behind a Lib Dem pledge (POLITICS!) Promisingly, though, the support act, Becoming Real, had proved a revelation, coming across like the Robin Goodfellow (LITERATURE!) of 8-bit beat-building. Optimism abounded. Nevertheless, once Will Weisenfeld took to the table and started fiddling around with his equipment (INNUENDO!), those reservations started creeping back in: that’s right, as he loped about all goofy smiles and knob-twiddles, and as the unmistakeable opening rush of ‘Hall’ kicked in, it quickly became apparent that his contribution to the live vocals was, at best, minimal. Oh how hearts can sink, friends. But, y’know what? If there was one record this year that could cause a sunken heart to rise from its own bowels and into the heavens, then Cerulean was surely it. The kid responsible for such joyfulness as that which informs the likes of ‘Plea’ and ‘Maximalist’ wasn’t going to let us down for long: given a few more seconds, back into the heights he rushed, bellowing out that killer refrain, living up to the song’s claims about calling all around, the sound filling, HAAAAA-AAAAA-LLLLLL!!! Year’s best tune? Year’s best tune.

Anyhow, I suppose those of you unprepared to take my word for things like this might need more convincing than those inappropriate capital letters and exclamation marks are apt to provide. Here goes, then: look at it this way, if those few thousand people who bought the Velvets’ records back in the backwhen really did all start bands, then it stands to reason that all those of you in the hereandnow that both watch this clip and then buy Cerulean – which you’re gonna do, because it’s the second best album of 2010 – will have little choice other than to get straight over to your nearest online vendor, snap up an Akai MPD32, and start making your own greatnesses:

 I am going to say I told you so. Just a friendly warning, OK?

So, what about the studio equivalent, then? Well, from the first few syncopated beats that jam right up into the choral loveliness of opener ‘Apologetic Shoulder Blades’, it’s pretty obvious that we’re onto a winner. Next come some melodic bleepings that, straddling the melancholic and the elevational as they do, set the tone for what’s to come, and lead us sweetly into the second track, the Four Tet-meets-Why?-meets-Elmo-rapping of ‘Lovely Bloodflow’. And lovely ‘tis, fo' sho'.

I’m not going to foil the fun of the fayre by regaling you with every detail of every track, of course, but here’s a few heads-ups for the wary: ‘Plea’ is the big, beautiful beast you’ll be singing along to in your sleep; ‘Aminals’ will have you reaching for your choicest head-bopping shoes; ‘Rain Smell’ learned well some of the lessons James Blake is currently bringing with him to teach the Radio One kids; and ‘♥’ speaks of the sort of restrained sombreness Win Butler’s probably looking for before the anthemics take over.

3. Sleigh Bells – Treats

Since you’re reading this, I’m going to take the liberty of presuming two things to be the case: first, you like reading about music; second, you have too much time on your hands. (Seriously, you could be out doing something worthwhile right now, like patronising your local outsider arts scene; recycling your neighbours’ fossil fuels; or building a school for disabled, orphaned puppies. Goshdarnit, you could have been spending your time putting cats in bins, rather than reading this nonsense.) Anyhow, if reading, music, and being worthy constitute the principal axes of your thang, then you probably read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, right? Right. You’ll remember, then, how among all that stuff about warblers, overpopulation, basketball lesbianism, and ‘AMERICA’, Franzen weaved in a plotline involving certain of the more prominent figures of what passed in the music scene of the early ‘oughts for a liberal-leaning, socially-conscious American counterculture? That’s right: Jeff Tweedy, Jack White, Conor Oberst, etc, all present, all suitably correct. Now, perhaps it’s just me (it’s almost certainly just me) but didn’t that all feel like visiting some kind of museum of recently dead tropes? The idea of individual musicians being a galvanising force for unifying the politics of a generation? Just seems so ludicrous now, doesn’t it? Didn’t both Walter’s adherence to a belief in some unified hipster-youth monoculture, and Richard’s self-revulsion when witnessing the emergence of Oberst as some kind of messiah for the enfranchised disenfranchised, seem just so verisimilarly, so excruciatingly, 2004? (Read: didn’t it make you feel old?)

Probably not, I guess. Nevertheless, if those self-same kids did allow themselves to get behind anything in a monolithic way at all last year (which of course they didn’t), then surely it was Sleigh Bells’ Treats. While the rightful heirs to the sort of earnestness Franzen channels in Freedom unwittingly meandered their way into the record and t-shirt collections of the washed masses – Arcade Fire because a lot of everyday folks like their music with sleeve-worn passion; The National because a lot don’t – the fragmented way in which early adopters now get their finger-pulses beating as one meant that, suddenly, it didn’t matter that the buzz-band du jour consisted of a guitarist from no-mark hardcore band Poison the Well and the singer from teeny-pop abomination RubyBlue. From the moment the demo for ‘Crown On The Ground’ started beating the bejaysus out of the blog world’s collective laptop speakers some time towards the end of 2009, it was pretty clear that something unifying was happening, and that that something was as breathily come-hither as it was ear-bleeding.

4. Robyn – Body Talk

So the received gender-politics wisdom-myopia goes, there are some male writers who simply cannot ‘write’ women. Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and all your left-brained buddies: whatever else you might have going for you, you fail. Back to summer school, boys, Vagina-Owning 101 starts Monday! (Seriously, though, wouldn’t it be a sorry state of affairs if the diversity of female experience or consciousness could be circumscribed to such an extent that any single representation might fall outside of its remit? Pah, I say!)

And how about women writing men? Well, however unplugged you might claim to be, as long as you’ve got a decent broadband hook-up in your cave, you’ll probably have heard Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’. The Guardian’s track of the year, no less. Pitchfork had it at #4. So much love for that track, and rightly so. But, guess what, neither of those august publications saw fit in their annual love-givings to point out that, even though Robyn may well be a lass, there’s no reason the narrator of this paean to dancefloor stalkfests needs to be. Intentional fallacy all over this one, as the confusedly protesting kidz over at songmeanings.net probably wouldn’t quite say.

But, whatever: maybe she’s singing, “I’m not the guy you’re taking home”, maybe it’s ‘girl’, but as much as Sweden’s favourite fembot might be leading a one-gal class in gender continuity – take posthumous note, John Updike! – those aren’t the lessons Body Talk  leads with. So here's Number Four on this slowly dying list, and the first record to really stake a claim for other-level-ness.

So: why?

It might sound like a cliché, I suppose, but more than anything else this year, Body Talk genuinely feels like a greatest hits collection. Maybe that’s got a little something to do with the perversity of its release schedule, but, let’s face it, only a little: what it has most to do with is the persistent quality of the tracks: sure, ‘Dancing On My Own’ carries the baton for that same cold-sweaty desperation Robyn seemed to have perfected on ‘With Every Heartbeat’ and ‘Be Mine’, but it’s by no means the best thing here. From the arpeggios that casio their blissful/painful way through future classic ‘Hang With Me’ to the everywhere-and-everyone baiting braggadocio of Snoop duet ‘U Should Know Better’ (sample lyric: “You know when in Rome I sat down with the Romans / Said 'We need a black pope and she'd better be a woman / There’ll be no more celibacy' / Even the Vatican knows not to fuck with me.”), Body Talk just keeps on raising its own bar until the pop-high-jump contest becomes a pop-pole-vault contest. At the Olympics or something.

5. Anaïs Mitchell – Hadestown

To a certain type of sensibility, there’s no hell quite so diabolical as the middle of the road, and no stretch of highway with quite so much middle as that traversed by Anaïs Mitchell’s first two records. Listening to the perfectly competent, independent-bookshop-gig acoustic soul-searching of The Brightness (2007) and Hymns for the Exiled (2008), one can just picture Anaïs calmly reflecting on the poignancy of the traffic as it backs up for miles down the centre of Adult Contemporary Street: there’s Maria Taylor in a Beetle and a homemade cardigan; there’s Basia Bulat shading her low-fat frappuccino with the help of a kooky floppy hat; and there’s Emily Barker considering the roadside snow as, sadly, inevitably, it melts. Oh, and there’s an episode of Grey’s Anatomy – one where someone, y’know, struggles against the adversities associated with being a modern woman in a world where true love’s so hard to find – on a constant loop on a billboard, just for such an eventuality. Though, it’d be a stretch to say that Hadestown represents Mitchell’s daring, Thelma and Louise-style handbrake turn off-road and into the risks of the yonder, the sheer ambition and sophistication of the piece raises it beyond the kind of mean-spirited snarkiness of this paragraph, and into that category of record that transcends the limitations of its genre: just as there are exceptional and unabashed all-out pop albums (see: number four on this list), and just as it’s possible to make chillwave that's more than just bullshit (see: Blackbird Blackbird’s Summer Heart, and prepare yourselves for whatever Still Corners come up with in 2011), there’s no reason why country-tinged acoustic folk shouldn’t aim high. And in aiming all the way down to Hades, and with the help of some of her traffic-bound chums, Mitchell hits higher than anyone, and certainly I, might’ve expected.

6. Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

In the realm of sweary sit-com insults, where Curb’s Susie Green reigns as the eternal, malevolent Queen (headphones up y’all!), her never less than regal consort is surely The Thick of It’s King Malcolm. So what’s he up to, in series three, when he directs a threat of violence at Miles Jupp’s character using the immortal cuss, “Richard fucking Stilgoe, you fucking jazzy bastard”? Well, it’s not the sweariness, not the suggestion of bastardy, not even the feint hint of Dictionary Corner that stings; it’s the implication that the recipient of Tucker’s wrath enjoys, of all things, jazz. So, while we’re not going to talk about jazz, here, in case we risk sounding all Fast Show, let’s face up to the fact that Flying Lotus is most definitely a fucking jazzy bastard. If we didn't already know that, then tracks like Cosmogramma's 'Pickled' and 'Mmmhmm' brought the basslines to prove it. But, y’know what? Stand tall, fucking jazzy bastards of the world! You shall prevail!

You see, you don’t need me to tell you that Cosmogramma is awesome: you’ve likely got ‘…And The World Laughs With You’ streaming up above to tell you that, and you’ve maybe even got as far as the bit where Thom Yorke comes in, and where FlyLo forces an already frenzied festival of post-Dilla Asperger-beats right along the autism spectrum until you forget that The Eraser – or Give Up, or Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, or whatever other part-time attempt at laptop-mainstream-indie crossover you might attempt to bring up – ever even existed. Kind of sad for the mechanisms that bring music to the masses, in a sense, that the thing that ‘promoted’ FlyLo from being the beloved sub rosa superstar that made Los Angeles to the creator of one of 2010’s most anticipated records was the presence of an already commercially validated indie-rock singer. But, hey, if more people got to shutterbugg to the Daft Punk swing of ‘Do The Astral Plane’, and more people got to be ping-ponged senseless by the swell groundswells of ‘Table Tennis’, and more people got to remember that it’s OK, occasionally, to be a fucking jazzy bastard, then it’s alright by me.

7. Owen Pallett – Heartland

It seemed like an age from the moment when the supposedly imminent release of Heartland was first announced until its eventual arrival in January of this year. In that distended yawn of time, and for those of us who’d taken the fellow into our dear, too-large hearts on the strength of Has a Good Home and He Poos Clouds, little could have been more enticing than the video footage of a few new songs that was beginning to grace the usual internet backwaters. Alongside the staccato pimp-strut of ‘Flare Gun’ and the more insistently hounding rhythm of ‘Keep the Dog Quiet’ was a truly breathtaking performance of the track that would eventually be the centrepiece of Owen Pallett’s first album under his own name, and maybe even the highlight of his career to date. I’ll let the video for the Guelph performance of ‘Lewis Takes Off His Shirt’ speak for itself, but utterly command you to stick around ‘til the storm, both meteorologically and violinically, hits. Seriously, this is the type of climax that Al Gore envisaged the world being able to access when he first invented the Internet. Little did he know that you and your kind had other things in mind….

For those of you that have somehow, unfathomably, failed to hear Heartland yet, I’ll pass over the concept for the time being and get to some of the tunes. In the opener, ‘Midnight Directives’, then, we’re immediately introduced to the new-found and much-vaunted orchestral grandeur that marks Heartland as a step towards something, well, bigger, than anything recorded under the Final Fantasy rubric; allying as it does dramatic flourishes of string and brass with a vaguely oddball chamber-pop sensibility, ‘Lewis Takes Action’ is perhaps the closest the record gets to recalling the work Owen did on Arcade Fire’s Funeral; and, elsewhere, ‘The Great Elsewhere’ builds its insistent melody around a sweet chiptuney stutter before swelling, all Homogenic-ally, until, crashed upon a ship run aground amid a barrage of drums and duelling violins, Lewis, the album’s narrator, begins to “shiver with the / Memory, memory of the island dwellers / And the indifferences of the Storyteller”. 

 Time for the concept, then? Owen’s words, not mine:

“It's a romance. It's told from the perspective of a fictional character who I'm in love with – a heterosexual farmer who rides horses across fields. He becomes aware of my presence; that I'm devoting all this time to presenting his story. And though he's flattered by it, he goes a little crazy. So he climbs up a mountain and disembowels me… and that's the end of the album.”

8. Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern – Essex Arms

“Pinot Grigio,” he said with a withering estuary wince, “is to this decade what Chardonnay was to the nineties.” Having smilingly arrived on stage to replace the complimentary bottle of Jacob’s Creek – or somesuch – about which the night’s star turn had been earlier mithering, the Luminaire barman scuttled away in chastened haste. Had this been anyone else, of course, the sardined audience might have begun to sense some grim, middle-class diva-dom developing beneath Kilburn’s most notable glitterball. But, no, this was Darren Hayman, proud owner since the mid-nineties of an audience that – as they doubtless would again when singing every devoted, them’n’us word of the set-closer, Hefner’s ‘The Greedy Ugly People’ – could sense the wry self-effacement a mile off. 

Hearing the songs in that context, it’s hard to come up with another contemporary songwriter that could pull off a record quite like Essex Arms. Few, for instance, could articulate with such genuine tenderness the ersatz nature of the rites of passage of small-town England, as Hayman does in ‘Spiderman Beats Ironman’’s plea to “take the Nova over Lakeside / And do handbrake skids on our own, / High on cream soda”. Fewer still could conjure up with such inherent truthfulness the way in which patio heaters, shivering smokers, and snowy pawprints might conspire alongside lovelorn reassurances that “the graffiti on the subway / Is hearsay”, to pull a waning lover close ('Winter Makes You Want Me More'). And then there’s ‘Two Tree Island’, the most romantic ode to dogging you’ll have heard this year; nothing since The Smiths’ ‘Nowhere Fast’ will have spoken quite so directly to those of you formed, as so many of us were, in the kind of nowhere in which inter-town thuggery (“the Rayleigh boys will fuck up all of Southend / the Hadleigh marsh will tremble for the trains”) was the closest thing to glamour our side of the tracks, those same taunting train-tracks that connived to convince you, with each passing day, that you’d likely never use them.

So, yeah, nostalgia’s a part of it, sure; but, to be precise, it’s a kind of nostalgia for the present, a nostalgia-in-the-making, in which Hayman specialises. Here, to wit, is the utterly beautiful video for the Emmy the Great duet, ‘Calling Out Your Name Again’, in which the inanimate ephemera that secretly punctuated a romance – “the dead names on benches”, “the electricity pylons” – bloom into a technicolor of memories reborn. The moment that follows Emmy’s question, “When will we start getting things right?”, its lyric echoed in the song’s ‘Please, Please, Please’ mandolin solo and the video’s explosion of colour, is surely enough to rend even ways most set, to thaw the Thames estuary, to get you looking fondly homeward from the train on which you thought you'd finally escaped. 

9. Beach House – Teen Dream

Though many will claim otherwise, there are plenty of reasons to love living in London. Here are a couple to consider in juxtaposition, for your edification.

So, I was in the HMV on Oxford Street yesterday, performing the most ludicrous act of sanity-testing one could imagine. Most Londoners I know would never dare make such an idiotic move (those people getting all rude and angry at each other, since you ask, are much more likely to come from the very same stock of green-horned visitors that will return home to their respective wildernesses complaining about how rude and angry Londoners are), least of all at this time of year, but present-buying time was beginning to wear a little thin and I had a couple of ideas on the boil. All of a sudden, as I struggled my way towards the B part of the ‘Rock and Pop’ section, I was confronted by a herald of the sheer glamour and majesty one naturally associates with this fine city: leafing through the various Robert Plant albums on offer, as if descended from the heavens, was none other than Bill ‘what’s rude about a body?’ Oddie. If that doesn’t have you reaching for your anti-jealousy pills, get this: a little while back I saw Henry ‘you’re playing catch-up in the tree zone’ Kelly coming out of a pub in Golders Green. Stick it, Los Angeles, for ours is truly the City of Angels.

So here’s the other thing. Once I got past Oddie, I managed to get to that B section and pick up, for someone who’ll probably not be reading this, a copy of Beach House’s Teen Dream. Though, like a lot of people who spend more time than they ought to reading music blogs, I first came to be aware of the music of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally through the gorgeous ‘Apple Orchard’. Following them in the time since, it has seemed obvious that it is only a matter of time before Legrand’s majestic voice, typically backed by warm, woozy synths and breathily aloof guitar parts, made its way out of the clutches of Gorilla vs. Bear and the like, and into the homes of millions. The lead track from Teen Dream, the unstoppably sensual ‘Norway’, appeared towards the end of 2009 and only served to confirm the conviction. As such, it felt like a massive privilege to get to see them supporting Grizzly Bear at the Roundhouse in the early months of 2010; it was like a coming together of two of the bands most likely to join Arcade Fire as a potential response to that most awkward of questions that strangers like to ask at certain kinds of parties: What kind of music do you like? As it was, we were treated to two wonderful performances, in a venue perfectly suited to the scope of their sound, all taking place a ten-minute tube trip from my house. This, again, is why London wins.

10. Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner

If you’ve ever been prepared to listen to the sorts of arguments that take place regarding Simon Cowell’s apparent co-option of the Christmas number one single, you’ll no doubt have come across some remarkably wilful philistinism on both sides. On the one hand, we have the sort of people that talk about credibility as if that’s anything other than ephemeral, that angrily fix the terms of debate along the spurious lines of whether an artist writes his or her own songs, and that likely still use the phrase ‘dance music’ to refer to anything with even the merest electronic component. In the opposite corner are the X Factor apologists, for whom ‘talent’ is something quantifiable, for whom tragic back stories are an important part of the ‘package’, and for whom consensus is in some important sense a measure of quality.

The rest of us (including a large number of supporters and opponents of the X Factor, of course) recognise that these terms have long since lost whatever traction they may have had, and that, thanks in no small part to the democratising power of technology, the craft of music is no longer what’s at stake. We realise now that it doesn’t matter how good a singer, guitarist, or manipulator of Fruity Loops you are, there are thousands out there who, in terms of craft, will be able to match you stride for stride. So it is, then, that when we come to compare qualities, we do so in terms of ideas rather than technique, originality rather than competency, art rather than craft.

11. Jónsi – Go

Here’s a question: can you name me a band that has been expelled from the bosom of hipsterdom in recent years with greater malice than Sigur Rós? Kings of Leon, perhaps? Either way, it’s a close run thing. Nevertheless, while in the case of the Followills even our pigeon brethren can recognise that their recent output is legitimately fit for nowt more than projectile defecation, Jónsi and his Icelander chums seem instead the rather unfortunate victims of a general cultural shift not of their own making. More specifically, it would take a fairly simple-minded sort of swine to blame them for the fact that records like Takk… (2005) or  Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008) happen to have coincided with the developing tastes of drab middle-classedness as aptly as balsamic houmous chutney and holidays in the Dordogne. Maybe we ought, instead, to be happy to live in a world where a record as adventurous as Kanye’s latest represents the middle-brow of hip-hop; to inhabit a pop scene where Lady Gaga is as about as mainstream as it gets; and to be part of a mass culture where the terrestrial TV stations bombard us not with the dim-witted four-chord indie it used to, but with such genuinely arresting and ambitious hymns to splendour as ‘Hoppipolla’, ‘Inní mér syngur vitleysingur’, or ‘Go Do’. That the last of these, the lead track from Go, was used by ITV during this summer’s football World Cup as a cosmic counterbalance to Andy Townsend’s broken nose and penchant for banality says far more than I can. But let’s put it this way: while England’s assortment of knaves and blunderers failed to inject any life into proceedings, even the most white-bread of viewers was being given access to a masterclass in orchestral pop arrangement that they may otherwise have missed. And that can only be a good thing, right? Right.

On the whole, then, Go starts as it means to go on: “Go sing too loud”, Jonsi urges, amid woodwinds and sampled vocal warblings, “Make your voice break, sing it out”. Yes, it’s all a bit self-help, all a bit perhaps-he-should-have-stuck-to-that-made-up-language, but you can’t help but feel all horripilated up and down that reluctant hipster spine of yours, can you?

On he goes:

You wish silence released noise in tremors

You wish, I know it, surrender to summers

We should always know that we can do everything.  

12. of Montreal – False Priest

A few years back, if you’d have told me that your favourite lyricist was of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, I’d surely have had you summarily pegged as one of those jabronies who considers the word ‘literary’ to be a synonym of ‘verbose’. You know, one of those pseuds who, while it may be true that they spend more of their income in Waterstones than TopShop, nevertheless also spend more of their time shopping for books than reading them. This would have been deeply unfair, of course, and I apologise in hypothetical retrospect for any offence caused: Barnes, it turns out, has become something of a master at piercing his own shield of erudition, peppering each blast of wordiness with the kind of artful directness that few of his contemporaries – Joanna Newsom and Sam Beam spring to mind – can match.

False Priest, the twelfth best album of 2010, marks a new high for Barnes in this regard. Take the gorgeous Janelle Monáe duet ‘Enemy Gene’, for instance: all those references to blackbody radiation and particle-wave duality might well get you de Broglie and Planck fanboys and –gals all hot under the snood, but it’s the killer first part of the chorus that really packs the shiveriest of punches:

  Love breaks the machine

  Everything’s half apart, what can it mean?

  How can I trust my fractious heart

  Knowing I have the enemy gene?

How indeed, Kevin, how indeed.

But let’s try and get almost genuinely literary for a sec. Of all the elements that make ‘Famine Affair’ the very bestest – that lithe middle-section bass melody; the line “looping like a retard, / Are you still playing the race card?”; those violently benumbed exhortations that the non-Annie Hall in question is a ‘bad/terrible/miserable/etc thing’ – the way it showcases Barnes’ mastery of the syllable merits special mention. Listen back to the following lines on the stream above, then, and note how each of the metrical mismatches guides our developing sense that, where his heart may be merely ‘fractious’ in ‘Enemy Gene’, his attribution of blame here is both knowingly and self-defeatingly fractured:

  She said, “You’re not boring

I’m just bored with you

The psychology behind it is ruthless

Wish it weren’t true

Wish we weren’t so complicated

Wish you weren’t so medicated.

13. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

With the sheer amount of material Bradford Cox churns out under his many guises in any given year, a little digestion seems a worthwhile venture; and so it is with Halcyon Digest, in which Cox and his Deerhunting compadres set about scoffing down their collective musical memory, masticating wildly, then regurgitating those halcyon days through that distinctive Deerhunter sound. The slothful, spectral guitar on ‘Earthquake’, then, sounds like it’s channelling some lost mid-‘90s stoner-rock band through the conduit of an old Zoom 505 pedal; ‘Don’t Cry’ could be Sonic Youth covering Buddy Holly; and ‘Revival’ brings some surprisingly welcome swing to the indie-disco dancefloor in probably the bounciest thing they’ve done yet.

But it’s where they set about reimagining their own recent past that Deerhunter really dig out the gold: ‘Desire Lines’ turns the Velvetsy stomp of ‘Never Stops’ back in on itself to stirring effect; ‘Helicopter’ is as glacial as ‘Cover Me (Slowly)’, but gamely built up into one long, sweet, melodic trill; and, best ‘til last, the Jay Reatard tribute ‘He Would Have Laughed’ merges reverbed guitar loop after reverbed guitar loop with tail-chasing lyrics about the restlessness, boredom, and bonds that come and go with age, all to create the most empyrean and otherwordly of cousins to Microcastle’s closer, ‘Twilight at Carbon Lake’.

“Did you stick with me?”, Cox asks on the unabashedly Wonder Years-sentimental ‘Memory Boy’: “Let me jog my memory”.

14. The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt

Such as is the way of things sometimes, I’ve had no internet access the last few days. Is there a more mundane way, one slumps into asking oneself, to be reminded of one’s lame dependence on the trappings of modernity? No. There is not. You must have felt the same, I’m sure, as you returned to your Facebook page each day in the hope of discovering which record had secured the coveted number fourteen slot in this list. Shattering, no question, to be so cruelly denied. You and I, dear pal’o’mine, are not yet ready for the post-apocalyptic wilds.

15. Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?

Now, if you’re anything like me – and, if not, may Zeus have mercy upon your very soul – you’ll tend to regard the approval of the Drowned in Sound staff with a certain degree of circumspection. You only have to see how many of this year’s direst albums received a rating of 8/10 or above on initial release to recognise the undue influence of hype in the process: Broken Bells? Delphic? Mystery Jets? Efterklang? Infinite bleedin’ Arms? Hang your collective head in shame, DiS.

Even so, all told, DiS gets more right than it does wrong and, ignoring some of the awfulness that naturally rears its brainless head in the darker recesses of the top ten – Yeasayer + Shearwater = the collapse of all that is good, under an avalanche of smarm, whininess, and bombast – their 2010 year-end list ended in a manner most pleasing: with Does it Look Like I’m Here? by this year’s dronesters-in-chief, Emeralds. 

While other scenes (let’s forget I used that word, OK?) might have stolen more headlines in the last three or four years, ‘drone’ has been – ironically? – gathering quite some pace during that time on the back of a few outstanding records. Pick your own, by all means, but I’m particularly referring here to Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, Fennesz’s Black Sea, and the two Fuck Buttons albums, Street Horrrsing and Tarot Sport. Each and all fine specimens, no doubt, of a tradition to which Emeralds (and also Oneohtrix Point Never, who didn’t quite make this list) have now made a similarly fine contribution.

16. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Autumn, Again

It’s underrated band time, people. Seems like however well they’re reviewed – and both Scribble Mural Comic Journal (2007) and Ashes Grammar (2009) garnered immediate and unqualified praise practically across the board – A Sunny Day in Glasgow are destined to elude the wider audience those records ought to have earned them. Given how rich and rewarding it was in its own right, then, it’s no surprise that the recording sessions for Ashes Grammar – in my opinion the best thing to come out of Philadelphia since green ghouls and milksteaks – yielded enough additional material to fill both this year’s Nitetime Rainbows EP, and the sixteenth best album of 2010.

In Autumn, Again, then, we find ourselves in the midst of nearly a dozen hazily atmospheric gems built from those familiarly precious hues that have come to constitute the band’s loose aesthetic palette. It’s unmistakeably shoe-gazey, of course, and one doesn’t have to look far up each track’s sleeve to reveal the influence of My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins, but in the likes of ‘Drink Drank Drunk’, ‘Fall In Love’, and ‘Calling It Love Isn’t Love (Don’t Fall In Love)’, Autumn Again hitches all that to a hookier, poppier sound that at times edges closer towards the library-romance tweeness of Stars, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, or the M83 of Saturdays = Youth. In that librarian spirit of sharing, you can get the whole album for free (Yes! For Free!) at ASDIG’s website. You’d be a massive cretin not to do both that, and purchase Ashes Grammar while you’re there.

17. Perfume Genius - Learning

Genocide, tsunamis, and the Black-Eyed Peas aside, there are few more chilling affronts to the human condition than the notion of the “confessional singer-songwriter”: all the self-important grandstanding of confessional poetry, all the grim earnestness of the acoustic autocrat; showily ‘fragile’ lyrics to the fore, the music barely an afterthought. Listen as some dullard bleats about how his or her problems are, y’know, like a prison or whatever, and how, like, no one understands said dullard the way you used to do! As they say, Being White is Hard! 

So how could it be that a young fellow by the assumed name of Perfume Genius – Seattle’s Mike Hadreas – could have the nerve to sit down at his piano, bang out some tales of sorrows bled and desires unspent, and still convince me to place him on this list, rather than at the sharp (blunt?) end of a cudgel fashioned from ire, abhorrence, and cold, solid steel?  Well, for one thing, there’s that apparently artless Garfunkel warble, a deceptively powerful device for bestowing upon lines such as the album’s opener – “No one will answer your prayers ‘til you take off that dress” – an unstudied verisimilitude upon which the likes of Rufus Wainwright or John Grant (both comparable to Hadreas in other pretty obvious ways) can no longer legitimately call. Likewise, where Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon’s story of backwoods breakdown sounded phonier and more galling with each blasted repetition – detracting, it should be said, from an otherwise exceptional record – Hadreas’ depictions of the mundane contexts and blank juxtapositions in which his own descent took place manage not to vex, but rather to expose gradually the ease with which one may tumble, listless, into minor tragedy. Take the way the standout ‘Mr. Peterson’ lurches from the banality of desolation (“He made me a tape of Joy Division. / He told me there was part of him missing. / When I was sixteen, / He jumped off a building.”) to a startlingly resolute rationalisation of denied hopelessness (“Mr. Peterson, / I know you were ready to go. / I hope there’s room for you up above / Or down below.”).

Like the Casiotone for the Painfully Alone of ‘I Love Credence’, or the Bright Eyes of ‘Poison Oak’, then, Learning posits a world in which impenetrable sadness, though crushingly inevitable, is as straight a route as there is to understanding what it is, let’s go ahead and say it, to be human. And for that, dear cynic, the kid gets my vote.