New Thread, Same Title.

though i think the avey tare album is lame, i think "laughing hieroglyphic" is really good

short but here's me, number one is set in stone and the top 5 shouldn't really change after future revisions in terms of being in the top 5


1. Matthew Dear- You Put a Smell On Me: Songs are a little harder to define this year cuz there's no clear standout. Then I realized that I've listened to this song so many times it's riddick. This is like the freshest reinvention on pretty much of a dead genre (industrial). It's so in your face, so unbelievably engulfing, it's matty dear applying his empowering production skills on the most exciting song I've heard all year.
2. Soul Clap- Extravaganza: Voice modulations made Burial a star, here it actually shows you the before and after of the process all in one song. It's the closest thing to making post-Burial type music club ready as well even potentially radio friendly.
3. James Blake- CMYK: Dubstep, poststep, w/e the fuck you want to call this new wave of electronic artists submerging. From top to bottom this is the most captivating electronic song I've heard all year.
4. Gorillaz- On Melancholy Hill: I knew Damon and the rest of Gorillaz were diverse, but I never knew they could be this powerfully affecting. One of the true great ballads in the past decade.
5. Robyn- Dancing On My Own: Robyn's best song to date and that's saying a whooole lot
6. Cults- Go Outside: i hate this band because they make this, one of the most captivating pop songs to come out of the deep underground indie rock scene in the past like 15 years and that's like one of the few real tastes we get from them.
7. Art Department- Without You: that club jam you hear at like 5 am when the club is winding down, tired as fuck to dance but you dance anyway, even if you move like a zombie
8. Lindstrom & Christabelle- Lovesick: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends
9. Joanna Newsom- Does Not Suffice: before joanna became a diva, there was some kind of virgin purity on her debut, this takes it back to that. Those la las at the end is the closest I've come to crying over a song this year.
10. Suckers- Martha: suckers know how to take lullaby like melodies and buff them the hell up to make a grown man cry happy tears of joy
11. The-Dream- Florida University: totally ridiculous, i love it

Here's my top 10, I'll do some mini-reviews later

1. Delorean - Grow
2. Onra - High Hopes
3. Broken Social Scene - Texico Bitches
4. Breakbot - Baby I'm Yours
5. Flying Lotus - Computer Face: Pure Being
6. Crystal Castles - Vietnam
7. Big Boi - Shutterbugg
8. Sleigh Bells - Tell Em
9. Javelin - Dep
10. Butterfly Bones - <3

No more than 3 songs per artist.

1 Ariel Pink - Round and Round
2 LCD Soundsystem - All I Want
3 Big Boi - Shine Blockas*
4 Beach House - Walk in the Park
5 Freddie Gibbs - Fuck the World
6 Surfer Blood - Swim*
7 Deerhunter - Helicopter
8 Vampire Weekend - Giving Up the Gun
9 Menomena - Tithe
10 Cee Lo - Fuck You
11 Joanna Newsom - Good Intentions Paving Company
12 Flying Lotus - Do the Astral Plane
13 Deerhunter - Revival
14 Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
15 Sleigh Bells - Crown on the Ground
16 The National - Conversation 16
17 Beach House - Norway*
18 Washed Out - You and I
19 Menomena - Dirty Cartoons
20 Caribou - Odessa
21 The Roots - The Fire
22 Big Boi - Shutterbug
23 Morning Benders - Excuses
24 Best Coast - Something in the Way
25 Vampire Weekend - Diplomat's Son
26 Beach House - 10 Mile Stereo
27 Wavves - Mickey Mouse
28 The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
29 LCD Soundsystem - One Touch
30 Deerhunter - Memory Boy
31 Crystal Castles - Baptism
32 No Age - Fever Dreaming
33 Future Islands - Tin Man
34 Tallest Man on Earth - King of Spain
35 The Roots - Walk Alone
36 Janelle Monae - Tightrope
37 LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean
38 Joanna Newsom - Baby Birch
39 Arcade Fire - Ready to Start
40 Surfer Blood - Floating Vibes
41 Four Tet - Love Cry
42 Wavves - Baseball Cards
43 Ariel Pink - Can't Hear My Eyes
44 Guilty Simpson - Man's World
45 Matthew Dear - Black City
46 Shad - Rose Garden
47 Best Coast - Boyfriend
48 Crystal Castles - Doe Deer
49 Cults - Go Outside
50 Gorillaz - On Melancholy Hill

Honorable mentions:

Arcade Fire - Half Light II
Caribou - Jamelia
CEO - Come with Me
Crystal Castles - Celestica
Eryka Badu - Window Seat
Flying Lotus - Computer Face//Pure Being
Future Islands - Walking Through that Door
Gorillaz - Stylo
Janelle Monae - Cold War
Liars - Scissor
Local Natives - Wide Eyes
MIA - XXXO
No Age - Valley Hump Crash
Pantha Du Prince - Welt Am Draht
Sleigh Bells - A/B Machines
These New Puritans - Attack Music
The Walkmen - Angela Surf City
The Walkmen - Stranded
Wavves - Post Acid
Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
Zola Jesus - Night

Yeah it wasn't easy narrowing songs down this year. I'm more depressed I can't think of any real outstanding metal tracks off the top of my head, so I didn't even try to place any.


*may not count because they came out in '09

Top 25 so far. One song per artist, specifically because that Los Campesinos! album would rather predictably dominate.
1. Los Campesinos! - This Is A Flag. There is No Wind
2. Broken Social Scene - All to All
3. Maps & Atlases - Solid Ground
4. The New Pornographers - Crash Years
5. Mark Ronson & The Business INTL - Bang Bang Bang
6. Suckers - A Mind I Knew
7. Sleigh Bells - Rill Rill
8. Joanna Newsom - Good Intentions Paving Company
9. LCD Soundsystem - All I Want
10. Beach House - Zebra
11. The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
12. Tunng - Don't Look Down or Back
13. Bombay Bicycle Club - Ivy & Gold
14. Laura Marling - Rambling Man
15. Arcade Fire - Ready to Start
16. The Fall - Bury Pts. 1 + 3
17. Gorillaz - On Melancholy Hill
18. She & Him - Brand New Shoes
19. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round
20. These New Puritans - Attack Music
21. The Drums - Let's Go Surfing
22. Caribou - Odessa
23. Here We Go Magic - Collector
24. Wolf Parade - What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way)
25. Tokyo Police Club - Bambi

Is there such a thing as too much trashy electro-hop? Contemplate this while listening to Dominque Young Unique, the latest song in the drunk party-girl genre.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBf0r7Vae2E

That probably sounded condescending, but I actually like the song a lot. I really like the way the beat evolves over the song. It just throws in everything I like about this kind of hip hop, but none of it overstays its welcome. It's got the part that sounds like Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss," then the bouncey baltimore sound, then a more electro sound, then there's the part that just straight up sounds 80s-ish. There's no segment of hte song that I'd want to last for an entire 3 minutes, but they're all great in their extreme moderation and the switching between those parts is really effective.

i was touting that shit earlier this year but nobody recognized

some mini reviews, in the Wanta format

1. Delorean - Grow
If you don't know by now, I'm a sucker for super-optimistic sugar rush songs. But there's a difference between a effervescent and cheery song and a really uplifting song. You can't just make a happy song with happy chords and expect it to be this great, there has to be shades of other emotions in there. I'll take bittersweet over sweet every time. "Grow" has the perfect amount of nostalgia to turn from a feel-good house-tinged song to a total anthem. It's well-structured too; the synth/chopped up vocal riff at 3:25 sounds like a revelation.
2. Onra - High Hopes
I've talked about this song before, but I just can't get over it. Onra takes the "chillwave" approach to a new level that deserves to be taken more seriously than many of the bandwagon-hopping artists who basically are saying, "so, remember the 90s?" (Washed Out and Neon Indian are exempt from this statement). For this track, the Parisian producer slows down an obscure 80s sample, thickens and filters the beat, and adds synths to make a wall of sound. Right now this is probably sounding like typical chillwave. But instead of merely inducing nostalgia, Onra makes a super slick beat that doesn't sound like anything that could have come out before 2010. He basically just takes smooth funk to outer space and produces it as if he's a leftfield hip hop beatmaker. It's like chillwave without all the shyness. A confident r&b jam for people who like to cruise around with the windows down. Check this one out if you're tired of what's cheesey and want something more buttery.
3. Broken Social Scene - Texico Bitches
Unlike many of my other favorites from 2010, this song doesn't really try to do anything new that indie hasn't seen yet. But that's kind of part of its appeal. Most of Forgiveness Rock Record, but especially this song, sounds familiar without relying solely on cliches. When I first heard this song, I felt like it was a song that I had probably listened to with friends on a road trip sometime in the past, even though that of course wasn't the case. I know I just praised Onra for doing something new without using nostalgia, but fuck it, I like this song because it evokes feelings of nostalgia. This song (and album) is just fun to listen to. It doesn't sound like Broken Social Scene is trying to impress anyone, it just sounds like they're content with themselves and having a good time.
4. Breakbot - Baby I'm Yours
This song sounds like disco. I fucking love disco. How can you say no to a song this groovin?
5. Flying Lotus - Computer Face: Pure Being
The synths in this song just fry your brain, while it tumbles and whirls with the beat. I love the way this song keeps expanding without the obvious stacking of instruments that many electronic artists succumb to. The synths just seem to grow and tangle like vines.
6. Crystal Castles - Vietnam
This song is just really fucking badass. Even the opening synth drone with no context is just so menacing. The buildup to the beat is perfect. Once the beat kicks in Crystal Castles basically just scares you into dancing.
7. Big Boi - Shutterbugg
I mean, what's there to say about this song that hasn't been said? The beat is funky at fuck, and every verse from Big Boi is so impressive. The free associative lyrical style reminds me of "A Milli," except there's no room to breathe. It's more difficult to dissect. If "A Milli" is train-of-thought, "Shutterbugg" is a bullet train.
8. Sleigh Bells - Tell Em
It's just the loudest album I've ever heard, period. Loud not just in the sense of volume, but attitude. Sleigh Bells is a badass band that just makes you proud to be alive. Not happy, proud. If I ever climb Everest, this is what I'm gonna listen to before I do it.
9. Javelin - Dep
This song represents the sticky desperation of a late-summer heatwave. The beat seems to pour of the speakers like it's melting onto the street.
10. Butterfly Bones - <3
If you don't like fun electro-pop love songs, then you probably also don't like the thunder sound that plays from the speakers at supermarkets when the vegetables are watered, or anything else that's so unapologetically awesome.

Just a top five for now. Still so much stuff I have to listen to from this year (Ariel Pink, Big Boi, Joanna Newsom), but right now I feel more comfortable saying these are my five favorite songs of this year than my albums list which has recently been changing like mad.

1. Vampire Weekend – Giving Up the Gun
- It's funny, when VW's first album came out in early 2008, I thought it was a joke; the hype machine had gone mad and return to simplicity had its reigns taken hold by cardigan wearing ivy-league looking washouts. Contra was a better faring, but I still don’t think as a whole it left a better taste in my mouth in its first half than their debut did. (I mean, for real? Horchata? Dude you white. So white.) But like their debut, it picked up in the final part for me, with an obvious standout (on the first outing it was the fun and nostalgia loaded “Walcott”) in “Giving Up The Gun”. It’s basically a song about disappointment and failure. Great. Usually I wouldn’t like some guy in a band with a sweater ‘round his shoulders who probably drinks horchata on Cape Cod reminiscing about past indulgences and people he knew who didn’t make it. But it’s the way the song structures itself, starting off with the chorus and going onto the verse which kind of does its own thing each time, telling each tale of unsuccess in a way that’s more honest and direct than a diplomat’s son (“You felt the coming wave, told me we’ll all be brave, you said you wouldn’t flinch/ but in the years that passed since I saw you last, you haven’t moved an inch”… damn) while the music kind of goes agains the standard grain and ends up sort of stuttering off at the end… but then comes the chorus (and that infectious bassline) coming in again, the same as always, ready for another try. Because after all those verses about trying and failing or else doing nothing at all, the music keeps on pulling through to an end. It starts, derails; goes back to the chorus to start again. The chorus seriously sounds identical each and every time, until the ending after that whole “go on go on go on” bridge. I feel like this song could have been just another “damn, life sucks but ey whatcha gonna do? Hand me the smirnof”-type song, but it transcended that becoming in its own way the Feel Good Song of the Year. The Decade? I could see that too. It’s ridiculously catchy. I don’t give a fuck about an Oxford Comma but I do about this.
2. Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill
- Remember back in elementary school? When you’d ride home on the bus wondering whether that chalk drawing of Doug’s Porkchop would be there the next morning? If that robot Rad would be the face of the future? The main thing that seemed to separate boys and girls in kindergarten and first grade was while boys talked about this sort of thing while girls just sang these sort of songs that relied on heavy repetition, free association, things we associated with the “girls mind” like jump-roping and kissing that us six-year old boys couldn’t be fucked with when all we just wanted to kick soccer balls over the fence, and just managing to jumble them into a melody. You don’t think of this as a kid, it just seems natural. In fact, I almost forgot about that until I heard “Rill Rill”, where Alexis Krauss goes back to that sort of logic in repetition (“Have a heart. Have a heart.”), free association (“click click saddle up see you on the moon then”) and stuff that we directly associate to the young girls mind (“wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces”). Also give the fact that the sampled Funkadelic riff and that snapping give the same sort of rhythm to that sort of song. It just takes me back to the days where we could be kids, and sort of serves up that background soundtrack (we can ignore the lyric about drunk fistfighting “like the parent trap”?). Because kids are the true DGAF’ers, my friends. Also it makes me want to do the “Drop It Like Its Hot Dance”, that snapping be damned.
3. Deerhunter – He Would Have Laughed
- I don’t know what this has to do with Jay Reatard to be honest. It’s possible wrote a bunch of meandering lyrics and said “in honor of” just because. Who knows? All I know is that – aside from maybe Agorophobia – this is the best thing Deerhunter has ever done. Because even though I fail to see how it’s dedicated to someone, there’s just this sense of finality in it. I mean, that final line: “Where did your friends go? Where do they see you? What did you want to be? Oh shut the hell—shut your mouth” gets me every time.
4. Radio Dept. – Four Months In The Shade
- It doesn’t sound like anything else on the album (which I think is one of the most underrated of the year) and its only 100 seconds long, but just check it out. You won’t regret it.
5. Beach House – Walk in the Park
- Just an amazing pop song. Most of you guys have heard it, you know what I’m talking about. As you can see from my love for Giving Up The Gun, I like songs that just build up, and this succeeds in that the whole way through.

I love Sailing to pieces.

Only fear
Can make you feel lonely out here.
You learn to accept
Whatever you can get.

i'm actually surprised that you like giving up the gun that much rendle. Not that it's a good song, i think it's great. I just didn't think it was your cup o tea

Fucking thank you, someone else who recognizes how good that song is, especially that chorus. It's just so pure and unfiltered, like B Cox doing an acoustic set or something. I really like that song.

Word. I was saddened when I had a quick look at the Deerhunter thread on the old forum to see a couple of haterz for that track.

True.

Meanwhile, Helicopter continues to be the best song in the last 6 years.