Best Albums of 2010

Foals - Total Life Forever 

Afterglow at Reading Festival. Just watch the boy Bevan on drums.

The soundtrack to your next lucid dream? The first Foals album was one of the best things I have heard in recent years. Guitars that flirt rather than duel, bass lines that investigate the areas around the song before wandering into it and the best examples of expansive, expressive drumming since Damon Che. Even with their somewhat awkward decision to leave off Hummer and Mathletics, the Foals debut was about as good as you are going to get from an opening album.

How to improve on that? Create something that sounds and feels like a lucid dream. It is what Bloc Party could have done if they had retained their early focus instead of dabbling in Europop. Rarely has any act in recent memory created something that sounded so sparse and cold, but so enveloping at the same time. Even more rare is finding an album that works for the head, the heart and the feet in equal measure. Technology is never used as a crutch, guitars never sound like guitars, and the vocals are part of the music rather than being the driving force behind it.

In Miami the band created one of their most commercial moments to date, but still opted for the sombre Spanish Sahara as a lead single because it was more in keeping with the overall mood of the record. The real highlight though is After Glow; a six minute slow burn that sounds like Low making trance music, or late 80's Robert Smith playing with Battles and has a middle section that is equal parts Radiohead and The Rapture. It might not be the most immediate album you will hear this year, but you will be hard pushed to find a better one.


The Black Keys - Brothers

"Next Girl" by The Black Keys. One of the best videos of the year as well.

Legitimacy has plagued the best artists around. Tom Waits and Led Zeppelin struggled to claim their own ground because of the how blatantly they displayed their roots influences. So too, The Black Keys, who have struggled to be fully been accepted as genuine bluesmen despite (or perhaps because of) their affinities for Robert Nighthawk, RL Burnside and T Model Ford.

Brothers should start to change all of that. This is legitimate modern blues that swings and bounces like it was written on the railroad, but sounds equally modern. A decade ago Jack White kicked the mass audice door open for blues-rock hybrids, and the Black Keys have run through and ahead of most. How many other albums made a harpsichord sound as cool as The Black Keys?

Dangermouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul

 Dangermouse, Sparklehorse and Mr Gruff Rhys.

Any album featuring Gruff Rhys, in any given year, is going to feature heavily in my top ten. Factor in that this album also stars Iggy Pop, Wayne Coyne, Frank Black, Jason Lyttle and David Lynch and my interest is piqued.

What is most impressive in this work is that it doesn't ever feel like a compilation or a vanity project. There are slight problems - Frank Black's Angel's Harp sounds like a great Black Francis song, and Lyttle's Jakob is indistinguishable from Grandaddy - but overall this is as cohesive an album as you are likely to hear. The array of vocalists act like guests, rather than homeowners; adding to the pieces rather than surrounding themselves with them.

As epitaphs for Mark Linkous go, there couldn't be many better.


Grinderman - Grinderman 2 

The John Hillcoat directed Heathen Child.

The Side Project is an interest subject. Do they act as a vessel for creative energies that cannot be channelled into a current work? Are they a means to explore alternative areas of music? Can they be an excuse to get together with friends just to make a noise? Grinderman is all three.


The often repeated cliche is that this is Cave's "mid-life crisis" work, given his decision to return to more Birthday Party-esque terratory at a time when most musicians discover the lute. This would ring true if it weren't for the fact that Grinderman bigger and better than almost all of their contemporaries. If this is his replacement for a shiny sportscar, then it is the fastest, most powerful sportscar around.

The first Grinderman album was a solid and exciting re-introduction to noise, but often lacked structure or anything approaching a conventional song. The sequel cuts some of the preamble, and relies as much on Cave's ear for a song as it does on the power and weight of the players. Heathen Child is Abbatoir Blues turned black, When My Baby Comes ends with a riff that could almost be a gospel Rage Against The Machine. There are metal albums that have been released this year that aren't as brutally heavy as Grinderman 2 can be. It also has quite possibly the best lyric of the year in Worm Tamer: "My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster. Two big humps and then I'm gone".

Pulled Apart by Horses - Pulled Apart by Horses

 High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive

A couple of years ago Dananananackroyd coined the term "fight-pop" by way of describing their sound; a spiky, upbeat mix that fell somewhere between the narrow cracks of post-hardcore and art-rock. Initially, the label seemed simply a way of defining the band from a number of other groups and emphasising the party atmosphere at their live shows. Had the genre existed in 1997 then Idlewild's first recordings would definitely have been classified under the same banner.

Pulled Apart by Horses emerged as a fully formed rock beast, complete with high-fiving titles that would make Half Man Half Biscuit proud (I've Got Guestlist to Rory O'Hara's Suicide, I Punched A Lion in the Throat). It's not big, it's not clever, but it's very good when it is played loud. This is not a band that will lead you to new literary heroes or write the soundtrack to political protest, but they can make a three note chorus sound louder than war.


Deftones - Diamond Eyes

Stick with me on this...


Of all of the "metal" bands that emerged from the mid to late 90's, very few remained untainted by the meat-headed jock-rock that sold millions of albums for a few months at the start of the 00's. Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, Good Charlotte and a multitude of others did horrible, horrible things to the genre, not least because a number of very good bands were tarred with their same brush.



While the likes of Korn got (metaphorically and physically) bloated, the Deftones reinvented themselves as a math-metal force. Too awkward for knuckle draggers to get their heads around, too slow and heavy for MTV and in time signatures that were never going to make them easy to bang your head too. On Diamond Eyes the band produced an album that is as heavy as it is obtuse. The key to the renewed appeal has been the pivotal position of Abe Cunningham; the best American rock drummer of the past decade. Not only does he keep the most cliched of riffs from convention, but his rhythm playing gives everything (even songs in 7/4) a bounce.


Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Hawk

 You Won't Let Me Down Again

Scotland has always looked West in musical inspiration. Most likely this is because so much of the heartland music of America is based rooted in traditional Scottish folk tunes. Hawk sounds like the frontier between the two. It sounds like a storm brewing over the Atlantic. Like all the best American things, it shows it's roots as much as it's progress.



This third album from the Odd Couple is arguably the best work that they have completed, and certainly the most confident sounding. Closer in musical relation to Lanegan's Gutter Twins project than any of the other previous works by either artist, Hawk is dark country music. It sounds exactly like the sort of music that should have been used on the much missed Carnivale; apocalyptic, lonely and yet overwhelmingly positive.


It is great credit to the magic between the pair that when Campbell is joined by Willie Mason (on two very good songs) instead of Lanegan, the effect is not the same.


Errors - Come Down With Me 

Supertribe. Best track on the album?

I still haven't made my mind up if the second album from Rock Action proteges is as good as 2008's debut, but there isn't much between them. Certainly, this year's work is more expansive and challenging than earlier efforts. There is now more in common with Four Tet and Fuck Buttons than stable-mates Mogwai, but Errors remain more immediate than the vast majority of their contemporaries. Come Down With Me has less pieces capable of starting the more discerning indie-disco, but more thoughtful arrangements, and far more... everything else.


These New Puritans - Hidden

If you are writing an album for oboe, drum machine and voice choir, there has to be an awareness that you are not going to be competing with Katy Perry for sales figures. This is a good thing.


There are few contemporary acts that are comparible to These New Puritans. Hidden owes more to Elgar, the Wu Tang Clan and Japanese avant garde composers Chu Ishikawa and Kenji Yamamoto than it does to anything easily recognisable as a cornerstone for popular music. It sounds like the sort of music that a futuristic army would play outside the walls of a medievel castle they had travelled back in time to invade.


Dan Sartain - Dan Sartain Lives

Swamii records is one of the finest Rock and Roll labels in the world. Home of Hot Snakes, Beehive and the Baracudas, The Sultans, Testors, The Nightmarchers and Birmingham, Alabama native Dan Sartain. It has not been difficult to track down modern garage-rockers, but few move so easily between all forms of great American music as Sartain. Dan Sartain Lives is a great album for the opposite reasons that Hidden is a great record. Nothing on here is musically groundbreaking, but it is familiar ground studied to such detail that you can remember why you loved it in the first place.

Who Owns a Song?

This may appear like a sweeping statement but songs are only ever written for three groups of people. Obviously, this is not a discussion about the Copyright holders of a song, nor those who own the performers rights, but rather who owns the "soul" of a song. This isn't about the paperwork, it is about who a piece is for. If you think music is over thought, don't bother reading this. If you have ever said someone is pretentious for their taste in music, this probably isn't for you either.




First and foremost, songs are written for the songwriter. These exorcisms can be about any aspect of the (individual) human condition, and can cover any topic, but they are solely created for the purpose of creation. The only real reason for their existence is to create something that wasn't there before. It is not to say that nobody will hear these, it is that any attention they receive is a (potentially unwanted in the cases of some post death releases) bonus. In Freudian terms, they are the ID: the completely unselfconcious, instinctive, untarnished product. The labour of love, or as Alan Moore would have it, Magic. From my own pick of this year's albums the likes of Nick Cave, David Lynch's work with Sparklehorse and Dangermouse, Will Oldham and Glenn Branca fit this model; Rufus Wainwright's All Days Are Nights is a lament to Kate McGarigle, his late mother. Bon Iver's 2008 minimalist post-mortem of lost love in For Emma, Forever Ago is another. Beethoven continued to create even though he couldn't hear his own creations.

Even if these were the only musicians left in the world, their compulsion to create would draw them towards making music for creation's sake. This period seems to bookend the careers of many great musicians; most artists start out writing for themselves, and if they reach an audience and persevere, they continue to write for themselves. Springsteen, Roky Erickson, Teenage Fanclub, Paul Weller and Gil-Scott Heron are all well into their musical careers, but have released albums in 2010 that there wasn't necessarily huge demand for, but the world is a much better place for having. Create it, set it free and if it flies then so be it.

Perhaps it is that they are now free of financial restrictions, but I'd like to think it is because they don't know what else to do but create and articulate. Because of the purity of their endeavours it exudes verisimilitude (in joke for Teenage Fanclub fans) and finds an audience.

It's easy to say that this is the most noble of groups. Perhaps it is; as a society people have rightly become more and more skeptical of marketing and advertising that self expression that is free of outside influences becomes more and more rare. It is, however, worth noting that some of the greatest ever works of art were commissions. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's soundtrack work for The Proposition and The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are undoubtedly works of genius, but what is a soundtrack if not a hired gun (pun intended) to aid comprehension of the film? Clearly there is a place for the more calculated, knowing work within Art.

Which brings me to the second group of song "owners" - the audience (nothing to do with Sophie Ellis Bextor). By "audience" I do not refer to everyone who hears the song, I mean everyone who "gets" the song or piece of music. Hear the vast majority of music played on the radio and you will very rarely listen. You will *hear it*, maybe even sing along, but there will not be enough in it to make you comprehend or empathise with the emotions conveyed. Music that forces you to listen to "what is being said" (both verbally and/or musically) is special, and when you get this connection - this gift from the writer - you become "the audience". At this point both the audience and the writer can have some ownership of the "soul" of the song - the intangible, magical part that can make you dance, smile, cry, riot or contemplate.


Listen to artists such as The Dresden Dolls, Momus or Tindersticks and it is the level of intimate detail that appeals and makes these songs resonate. Not everyone who loves Arab Strap has had a drugs fuelled weekend in Scotland that ended with their friend eating a bag of sugar, but such personal narrative (the key word!) is endearing. I believe it was Dizzee Rascal who said "just because he wrote Baa Baa black sheep doesn't make him a shepherd". It is for this reason that fans of bands like The Smiths, Bowie or Manic Street Preachers get so terratorial about their favourites. These acts don't provide soundtracks to the lives of their fans, they define them.

How often in your life have you heard a lyric or a piece of music that describes exactly the situation you are in? Everyone has a song that defines at least one moment, whether it is happy or sad. I have fond memories of Vanishing Point by Primal Scream and Tonight You are the Special One by Earl Brutus because of their positive associations. I cannot listen to 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields or More Songs About Buildings and Food by Talking Heads for the opposite reasons. Music has a unique ability to find "owners" in the way that other art forms do not. That is not to say that cinema, literature or architecture cannot be personal, but they rarely elicit the same feelings of terratory that a song can. When you find a song that you feel ownership of, it acts as an asterisk to where you were at that point in your life.

It is in the final group where ownership of a song gets into difficulties. When a song is owned by everyone it can be the perfect representation of an era or cultural event - think of how often The Beatles are used to define the 60's, or Hendrix's take on Dylan is used over images of the Vietnam War. It is also the most difficult area to express artistically. Whether it is because there is an intrinsic distrust of mass consensus, whether the magic of a song is dilluted by so many admirers or whether it is a betrayal of our trust and something that seemed so personal, it is particularly difficult for ownership to change from an audience to everyone.

That is not to say that all "everyone" songs are without merit. Amongst my favourite pieces of music are Reach Out (I'll Be There)  by The Four Tops and Al Green's version of I Say A Little Prayer. Anyone who has been at a football match, or a masterful stadium show knows that there is a special attraction to such tribal ritual. There are groups and individuals who can regain mass appeal without losing sight of their Art. Pop can be a vibrant exciting medium that has produced that rarest of beasts - music for the heart, the head and the feet at the same time. In the past year I have bought albums by Hella and Sun 0))) but I have enjoyed Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and Tinie Tempah's Pass Out, the latter of which is a brilliantly thrilling piece of inventive pop. It has a danger, darkness and edginess to it that has been common in great Pop music from Elvis to Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Problems arise when an act that is held dearly on a personal level becomes public property. Any number of Biffy Clyro fans are feeling betrayal over their band's single Many of Horror being sanitised and renamed for whichever of this year's particularly vaccuous contenders won X-Factor. Given that they are a band which cultivates the same passionate fanbase that took the anti-Cowell Rage Against The Machine to Christmas number one last year, the effects may be far reaching. Snow Patrol fell into the same trap, as have Kings of Leon. I will admit to having mixed feelings when a Mogwai track was used in Sex In the City and having to convince myself of the merits of the Manic Street Preachers "one last shot at mass consumption" on Strictly Come Dancing. Bob Dylan shilling coffee is one of the greatest tragedies of the last century. Obviously, everybody needs a payday, but only if the short term gain outweighs the long-term damage. Notoriety on your own terms is the ultimate.

Given that we attach such personal values to songs as an audience, it is little wonder that we feel cheated when we lose our stake in the ownership to people who haven't put in the hours. As Nirvana once sang "he's the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun but he knows not what it means". Great songs can be very fragile things. Unchained Melody was once a particularly beautiful musical number, but has been defiled by so many unworthy suitors that it's greatness is lost, probably for at least a generation.

As Stewart Lee points out in his excellent treatise on comedy That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate, it is absolutely necessary to cull, refine and challenge the less dedicated members of a fanbase with more questioning work. Not only does this mean that the artist is free to go wherever they want creatively, but it shows in great detail the required symbiosis between artist/performer and audience. Nobody wants to play to an empty room, but nobody wants to be stuck playing karaoke versions of songs they have performed thousands of times over. The medium is the message, we need to make sure the message gets through.