Honorable Mentions of 2010

I really did love this year in music.  I'm not sure why.  It might be because I paid more attention this year than most to music, or it could have just been resonated after months and months of legitimate LPs (and EPs for that matter).

At any rate, I was so in love with this music that I couldn't simply compile a 20 list set this year.  THEREFORE I'm opening up an honorable mentions section (essentially, whatever I couldn't cram into the 20).  I felt really obligated to do this because there was just. so. much. good. stuff. It felt like a shame to not nod everything great.

With that, very HONORABLE MENTIONS time:


Darker My Love Alive as You Are

I loved this band because they are really honing on the simplicity of beauty, and the beauty is really being taken out of psychedelic rock this year.  It's so fucking summery and breezy, but it still has a little kick to it.



The Corin Tucker Band 1000 Years

This was a peppy little attempt to make some post-Sleater Kinney music.  Not the worst, but not the best.  It was however a very nice reminder of where a lot of credit due wasn't delivered.



The Gaslight Anthem American Slang

GAHHH!!! I really really wanted to make this to the top this year, but I just couldn't do it.  I just couldn't.  While they have a great thing going for them, something deeply subconscious makes me hate them because they sound like Tom Petty.  The beauty of this, dude, is in its simplicity.


Joanna Newsom Have One on Me

Joanna Newsom made the most expansive track set yet, and what's better is it's very solid throughout.  I honestly can't see much wrong with it at all.  The problem: a friend of mine pointed out to me recently that the album seems as if it's three separate albums, and I think to me this might be why I feel funny about this album.  I think because it's so expansive that it becomes a little too overwhelming for me, even if it is 2 HOURS of really really great soothing coffee-on-a-saturday-morning music.




Mountain Man Mountain Man

Mountain Man is great but not refined.  I recognize they're pulling an Old Crow Medicine Show here doing the old-timey schtick, and for the most part they're definitely pulling it off.  But I just wished this was polished a little bit more.  People like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes have a done a great job crossing over, but I think that's because it sounds a little more mature.


Surfer Blood Astro Coast

Surfer Blood was the band I wanted to like more.  Very catchy jingly shit that gets me like a cat getting a tassel waved at it (and trust me, I usually pounce for the mother fucker).  But this was just too much of a garage pop whoop-dee-do than a real mature or proper crack.  That's not to say it didn't have high points, I just feel they need to get more comfortable with themselves.  They still sound pretty fresh off the boat.




Spoon Transference

Spoon is making me feel old.  This is like when Bob Dylan did his later 70s work where he was kind of random and particular with stuff that not a lot of people got (partially because he lost his direction).  This is the same thing I feel about this.  It's not that it wasn't good, it's that they feel a little stale.  In this musical orgy of new shit we live in today, I can imagine how daunting it might be to maintain relevance, but I think what they don't get is that we will love them anyways.  I mean come on, they've given us so much to be thankful for in the last decade that they don't need to "progress" their sound.  It's okay to pull a Wilco now.  Trust us, Spoon.




Warpaint The Fool

Warpaint is what Vivian Girls are trying to be, but like Vivian Girls, I feel they need a little more time to work out their kinks.  Great femme lo-fi with a dark creamy center that pulls you into a dirge.  Also, it's got Shannyn Sossamon (who?), which would immediately take away, but for some reason this recipe for disaster makes you think "huh... okay this is actually decent" and then goes to "oohhhhh, wait this is really good."




Jamie Lidell Compass

Jamie is too German to function.  This time around he tried to break his funk and soul down 90s style, which Jamie still didn't fuck up (this is ironic because I always get nervous that whatever he does has great potential to fuck up).  This gives me great hapiness, but as always is his problem is he doesn't build something cohesive.  His albums always has some great GREAT jems but never a whole treasure box.  Trust me, his greatest hits is going to see like James Taylor's one day, but until then, he's kind of stuck until he makes 11 legitimate tracks in a role.



J. J. Grey & Mofro Georgia Warhorse

This is something that I didn't even know existed as a genre before I discovered J.J. Grey (and his Mofro); Floridian Country Rock. It's a simplistic beat and stomp twang album, but it is so fun and interesting because nothing sounds like this currently.




Four Tet There is Love in You

I know very little about this genre, and for the most part, ambient electronic trip-hop is something I just don't seem to "get".  But I heard this mildly sleep depraved and driving through I-5 in the middle of the night, and it clicked, and I'm lucky because this really is some of the best music to cascade out of the many different DIY music shits that seem to just ease out of people's laptops.  It also took them forever to actually get a second album since their last LP in 2006, but that time was apparently what he needed to come up with something new.