My Favorite Albums of 2010
This was a great year for music for me. So here’s my list:
LCDS - this is happening
National - High Violet
Best Coast - Crazy for You
Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
Kanye West - Dark Twisted Beautiful Fantasy
Sleigh Bells - Treats
Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Sufjan - Age of Adz
Arcade Fire - Suburbs
The first two are so close for me. All I Want may be my favorite song of the year though. The National put out another great album, as did Deerhunter. Best Coast blew me away. And one of the reasons I probably rank it higher than other people may be the way I listen to music: I’m in the mood for something, and an album comes to mind. For some of the groups, there are other albums from the same group (Spoon, BSS, etc) or other similar sounding albums that I think of at that time. But Best Coast has a different sound.
Kanye and Sufjan’s ratings are the most likely to change over time. Either I’ll grow to love the new sound, or not. Right now, I really like both albums. At this point, as the list shows, I am more excited about Kanye’s album.
Treats is a riot. A/B Machines is fantastic.
Other newbies I loved: Radio Dept, Wild Nothing, Sharon Van Etten, Laura Veirs, Land of Talk, Ben Sollee, S. Carey
Solid efforts from much loved bands: Spoon, Frightened Rabbit, New Pornographers, Tallest Man
Album I need more time with: Neil Young’s Le Noise. I may like this one a lot more with more listens.
OK albums but still disappointments given other efforts: Vampire Weekend, She & Him, Josh Ritter, Blitzen Trapper, Stars, Of Montreal
