Ssv’s Favorite Albums of 2010

Mere days after I named my favorite records of the last year, my good friends at Stereo Subversion asked me to participate in their year-end voting; my ballot, of course, looked an awful lot like this, and I’m pleased to see that some of my picks made the final cut– along with some records that I never quite caught the bug for, but ah, that’s what democracy is all about, isn’t it? I was both honored and a bit tickled to be asked to write a blurb for the gang’s #1 album of the year– Robyn’s seminal Body Talk– an album that wasn’t even on my own ballot, though, of course, it came pretty close.

Film Break: “True Grit”

My review of True Grit is up at CT Movies. For those of you wondering if this is my new favorite Coen Brothers movie, the answer is yes– right alongside Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski…

The Albums of 2010: Fifteen Favorites (From an Outstanding Year)

I imagine we’ve done this enough that a disclaimer is no longer necessary, but I offer one anyway: Lest there be any confusion, I claim no authority on which to pronounce the Best, or the Most Significant, albums of 2010. All I can offer are my selections for the ones I’ve kept coming back to– the records that have moved both heart and imagination, and in several cases the hind quarters as well. What a year of abundance it’s been– a year that convinced me of hip-hop as a genre towering higher and higher with creative vigor, of gospel and old spirituals as links to a shared history as strange and mysterious as the present, of legacy artists as those with the most left to tell us. Among my fifteen favorites I count a “folk opera,” a concept record about the environment, and a hip-hop album about hitting middle age. Of course, I’ve also got a Genesis frontman visiting the orchestra, Zeppelin’s golden god recasting indie rock as country/blues, and, naturally, Yeezy noodling around with the Autotune. These albums have blessed me tremendously already– and I suspect I’m only beginning to understand the extent of what they have to offer.

15. The Bad Plus
Never Stop

Another year, another Bad Plus album—and with each new record, the argument over what it means for jazz music—is it the music in its purest form? Or is it something else altogether?—seems exponentially less interesting. Oh, I suppose their first album of all originals muddies the waters more than ever—with nary a single left-field cover song in sight, it’s still the Bad Plus album with the most nods to jazz convention, and the one most prone to unorthodox flights of creative whimsy—but the men themselves seem far less concerned about this than they do knocking out a record of roaring, visceral thrills. And that’s why I love them. P.S.—Jazz record or not, the title song is one of the year’s hookiest pop songs.  Discuss.

14. Peter Gabriel
Scratch My Back

There were a few barbs traded over the entire Scratch My Back endeavor, but none of them came out of my living room. I love everything about this one: How it gracefully showcases the diverse colors of the orchestra, how it plays like a masters’ class in the malleability of great pop songwriting, how it makes a case for Gabriel as one of rock’s most souful interpretive singers. I love it too for what an unforeseen delight it turned out to be, the loosest and most un-Peter Gabriel-like album to ever be made by Peter Gabriel. He’s still restless, still an explorer, and the level of integrity he’s invested into this project suggests that he doesn’t particularly care to conduct his adventures on anyone’s terms but his own.

13. The Black Keys
Brothers

Could’ve/should’ve been their White Blood Cells—and even if the indie kids didn’t quite catch on like they might have, I’d still call it their breakthrough. When last we heard from them the Keys had turned to Danger Mouse for a minor makeover, but here they turn within themselves—and when you’re as resourceful a band as this, why not? There’s a Howlin’ Wolf reference in the cover art and psychedelic shadings throughout, more than enough vintage references to cement their cred as a duo of considerable smarts and a record collection gilded in classic rock chic, but  what I really care about is that they’ve still got it where it counts: They play the hell out of this thing, stirring up a ruckus like they’re two kids banging around in a basement at the end of the block.

12. Grinderman
Grinderman 2

This one’s subversive, and no less profound because of it. These are high-minded concerns, spoken in dick jokes and crude come-ons; Cave and Co. seem at first to be laughing their way through a mid-life crisis, but the jokes is on anyone who thinks the crisis is anything less than a global pandemic, a scourge on manhood and marriage alike, or that Cave isn’t taking all of this stuff very seriously indeed. They’ve also gone a bit psychedelic on us, but here again, all these new textures only affect the telling, not the story itself—for all the colors they’ve added to their palette, they haven’t forgotten that noise is still the one they wear best.

11. Robert Plant
Band of Joy

I reckon this shouldn’t register as much of a surprise: Robert Plant—obsessive myth-seeker, and frequent myth-maker—plays fast and loose with the tropes of classic Americana, turning a couple of Low songs into backwoods incantations, a Richard Thompson song into weepy C&W, and some 60s pop nuggets into soulful gems that could have been written by the Beatles—or, written yesterday. Still: Just listen to this thing, especially after the lovely but relatively conservative Raising Sand, and try not to raise an eyebrow. Everything here—from the rolling thunder of the drums to Patty Griffin’s presence as spectral siren—is just a touch removed from the expected, and the album is all the more sublime because of it.

10. John Legend and the Roots
Wake Up!

I’ve heard this one called a “throwback,” but there’s nothing throwback about it. Legend and the Roots crew salvage politically-charged obscurities from the soul/R&B vaults and champion them as living, vital documents of concerns that are very much those of our present situation. That is both the point and the ultimate triumph of this record. Yeah, Brother ?uesto nails the sonics on all of the vintage-sounding stuff, but hip-hop adrenaline is never far removed from the equation; as far as covers albums go, this one’s remarkably streetwise. It’s also remarkably on balance: There are moments of pure, hippie-dippie idealism, and moments of abject, hopeless rage; there are protest songs and love songs, there’s grit and blues and the sweet, smooth strains of gospel. All of it’s necessary for pulling off a project so precarious, and all of it’s here, exerting its own right to our attention with just as much suavity and grace as it might have in 1969.

09. Mavis Staples
You Are Not Alone

Top to bottom, Mavis sets every one of these songs on fire—a holy fire, occasionally mixed with brimstone. Alongside the songs of sin and sadness, though, there are songs about hope and faith and community; it might have been “inspirational” music in the blandest sense of the term, but there’s nothing bland about an album mixed so perfectly with shades of humor and heartache, message music and personal testimony. I still can’t believe the thing moves so naturally from its opening Pop Staples reverb to the Sunday School sing-along of “Creep Along Moses,” only to end things on a sublimely bluesy tip. But I am increasingly credulous as to Jeff Tweedy’s stature as a producer of gospel-soul- or is it soul-gospel? Doesn’t matter; the way it all comes together here is a match made in heaven, and that’s doubly true for Tweedy and Mavis.

08. Gorillaz
Plastic Beach

How is it that an album so high on concept—a thematic record about environmental woes and consumerism gone mad, performed by Damon Albarn’s cartoon rock and roll troupe—works so splendidly as a collection of pristine pop pleasures? Maybe it’s all the deep references to pirate radio and The Who Sell Out: Like that record, this one hangs together on the strength of its narrative thread but the real joy is in the simple, ragged joy of the songwriting and the performances. I love that this one takes so many views on its central conceits, swinging so gracefully between sadness and humor both cheerful and black, each guest performer so perfectly chosen to breath his or her character to life, everything united by Albarn’s whipsmart pop instincts, hooky as ever even in a hip-hop and club-oriented context. In a way, it’s a nice mirror image to some of those great Blur albums; where Parklife sought to reclaim lad culture from a sea of faceless nationalism, this one’s about rescuing shared humanity from the corrosive effects of modernism. It’s a more ambitious project, and, to my ears, an even greater achievement.

07. Anais Mitchell
Hadestown

“Ambition” has been the watchword for so many of the albums on this list, and in many ways I’m inclined to say that Mitchell’s is the most ambitious of them all—a “folk opera” that recasts the myth of Orpheus as a sort of sociopolitical allegory for the America of the Great Depression and the America of today, it’s literally an album unlike any other. But that is neither its greatest achievement nor the source of its pleasure; I, for one, keep coming back to it because the songs are so good, kicking up just the right amount of dust and finding weathered authenticity in the period details. And I love that it isn’t primarily a screed, but a tale of love and morality: I’ve read any number of interpretations of “Why We Build the Wall,” as a metaphor of everything from economic division to conflict in the Middle East, but no matter how you slice it the record cuts deep as an unflinching meditation on trying to do the right thing, even when the chips are down.

06. Kanye West
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

At first I felt like Kanye wasn’t doing enough to bridge the gap between Hip-Hop and Art, but whenever I get to “Lost in the World,” the concern is immediately dropped. Who else would splice together a Bon Iver tune with a Gil Scott-Heron recital and underpin it with a jungle beat that’s totally bangin’? In terms of sheer audacity, there’s none like him. This album is many things—an event, a blockbuster, an already-legendary 10.0—but mostly I think it’s a triumph of self-expression. I’ve never heard any artist, in any idiom, so skillfully reinterpret his past as something so rooted in the present, or so heroically convert every one of his weaknesses into a feat of incredible creative strength.

05. Elvis Costello
National Ransom

You can say what you will about Elvis Costello—that he’s lost some of his edge thanks to a decade or more of writing operas and singing with jazz orchestras—but National Ransom gives us a Costello who’s as sharp as ever. What’s more, the album’s razor edge is not in spite of, but precisely because of its sophistication, its literary scope, its historical awareness and its integration of everything Costello’s done since he was first playing the pubs. So yes, the title song could almost have fit on an early Attractions date. But he also pens parlor tunes and nightclub jaunts, country shuffles and string band jams. In the last song, he even does a little bit of the ol’ soft shoe—but if the apocalyptic omens and prophetic overtones are any indication, he’s still pushing as hard as ever.

04. Aaron Neville
I Know I’ve Been Changed

Simplicity speaks powerfully to Truth. As a producer, Joe Henry understands that better than anybody; his approach is to throw a bunch of studio pros into a room together and stay out of the way while they make something really special, something spirited and spontaneous and alive. When it’s all done, the man looks like a genius just for leaving well enough alone. He brings Allen Toussaint on board for this record, which essentially does for gospel music what his Solomon Burke album did for soul: It strips away the inessential and reminds us of the power this music has always held. I don’t know that much needs to be said about the singer or the songs. It’s Aaron Neville—voice as sweet and soulful as ever—and a bunch of spirituals that have weathered the ages. And they’re presented just as they should be: Without distraction.

03. Elizabeth Cook
Welder

The first three songs almost play out as the album in microcosm. “All the Time” is an ass-whoopin’, barroom anthem, a sure-thing country radio hit if only there were any justice in Nashville. It symbolizes everything that makes country music great. “El Camino,” on the other hand, strips away the country conventions and turns our preconceptions of roots music on their head. And then there’s “Not California”—a folksy power ballad that swells with emotion and doesn’t seem to give a shit whether we want to call it “country music” or not. But things only get more daring from there: Cook proves her love of country tradition over and over, but songs like “Heroin Addict Sister” prove that she isn’t beholden to it, because no one else is writing songs like that these days. This is a hilarious and heartbreaking album that flaunts and then shatters roots music standards, and as such it is, quite frankly, the most idiosyncratic and wonderfully personal country album I’ve heard in a decade or more.

02. Big Boi
Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty

It took me a while to figure it out, stacked as this album is with killer singles, but I’ve come to think of “The Back-Up Plan” as a break-up song, of sorts—only, the object of General Patton’s jilting is the rap game itself. He still loves her, to be sure, and probably always will… but these days, she just can’t keep up. Sir Lucious is an album made by a man who isn’t interested in running the rap game so much as he knows that he’s outpaced it; ironically, it’s also something of a throwback to the genre’s most foundational virtues, not to cult-of-personality rapping but to the sheer, giddy joy of the sound of words and their innate sense of rhythm. As a words man, I confess that I find that to be pretty irresistible. By the way, I do have a slight preference for this record over Kanye’s, and I think it’s largely because Yeezy seems to be working so very hard, both to entertain us and to prove his mettle, while Big Boi knows that he doesn’t really need to. He’s a master of his craft, and this is an album-length display of mesmerizing vocal dexterity and incredible showmanship. Those are things that speak for themselves.

01. The Roots
How I Got Over

Early in the new Roots album, Black Thought laments a sad possibility– that perhaps “the light shines once in a lifetime.” As in, only once. A couple songs later, though, he gets his fight back: “The light comes in different types/ Be more specific!” It’s a powerful moment, and the emotion is earned. To boot, it’s earned the old-fashioned way: Through an exquisitely-crafted, nine-song set of luxuriously soulful, groove-oriented hip-hop numbers, through perfectly-sequenced record-making and economical songcraft. In many ways, this is a very different rap album than the others that hit so big this year, arguably not even a straight rap record at all– where Big Boi and Kanye employed the sheen of modernity, The Roots crew opts for vintage warmth; instead of club-ready rap, they spike their hip-hop with flavors of indie rock, but the whole thing sounds more than anything like a soul record; and instead of sprawling ambition, this is an album of deliberate succinctness. And yet, I think it’s an album that matches anything else released this year in terms of its ambition– and not just because it’s so doggedly out-of-step with current trends. This stuff is artful and profound, the product of what has historically been a youth-dominated idiom that here turns its attention to the crises of middle age, to growing up and coping with changes that aren’t always good. They’ve called it an album for a “post-hope” era, but it’s hardly hopeless; on the contrary, this is a soul-stirring, moral wake-up call, an album-length argument for perseverance as a good and noble thing, worth striving for in and of itself.

The Albums of 2010: Five Honorable Mentions

2010 is drawing to a close, and with it, a year-end list draws nigh– a countdown of my fifteen favorite recordings of the past twelve months, as is my custom around these parts. It has been suggested to me at various points over the last few years that fifteen is perhaps five too many, but, both generally speaking and with regard to 2010 in particular, I really see no choice in the matter: My response to this year’s excellent selection of albums is simply one of gratitude, recognition of how I’ve been blessed. The good stuff has been so plentiful, in fact, that even fifteen has seemed a bit slim as I’ve worked these last couple of weeks on narrowing things down, so in the end I’ve decided not to. The top fifteen drops in a few more days, but first, and hardly without consequence, I feel obliged to name five further albums that I strongly suspect will stay with me. 2010 wouldn’t have been the same without them, and their mention here is very honorable indeed.

In no particular order.

Trombone Shorty
Backatown

New Orleans, as a musical, spiritual, and cultural center, has been in bloom this year, I dare say as much as ever, prompting me to opine more than once about the diversity and across-the-board excellence of the musics coming out of that city these last few months. I mentioned before that the delightful Treme soundtrack might be the most essential of them all, simply for its sheer scope in encompassing the city’s teeming eclecticism, but, in terms of the quality of the music itself, it might as well be a toss-up between that album, Galactic’s party-starting Ya-Ka-May, Dr. John’s ferocious (and I am inclined to say definitive) Tribal, and Trombone Shorty’s groove-centered Backatown. It’s this last one that I come back to the most, if only for how fully integrative it is in pulling together the city’s popular musical idioms both past and present– funk for a hip-hop era, rock and roll with Mardi Gras horn lines. It’s stacked top-to-bottom with killers songs, but of particular note is Shorty’s take on Allen Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down,” perhaps my favorite version of the song yet recorded– given the song’s long and luminous history, no small feat.

Spoon
Transference

My favorite Spoon album? Perhaps not– I suspect that title will long rest with the sterling, subversively compact-yet-expansive pop of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga– but this one is nevertheless a fine legacy album from one of the great indie rock bands, a sort of mirror-image sequel that rejoins its predecessor with rough-hewn details and songs that alternate between minor-key riddles and swelling anthems. As far as the latter goes, I will happily throw my vote behind “I Saw the Light” as the group’s best single to date.

Jack Rose
Luck in the Valley

A posthumous release though it may be, an American Recordings this is not: There’s nothing morbidly introspective or grimly fatalistic here, but rather an album that celebrates the messy, sprawling humanity that stretches into the past of American music but flourishes today through vibrant performances like the ones contained here. A younger, less imaginative me might have thought it well beyond the scope of an instrumental guitar record to convey with such clarity the stuff of humor, reflection, mystery, and camaraderie, but this handsome recording makes quick work out of dismantling such short-sighted limitations.

John Mellencamp
No Better Than This

There be haints all over this one. T-Bone Burnett‘s method of recording this one– via a road trip through various famous and historically significant locales from the back pages of American folk and rock music– might seem on the surface to be a sort of gimmick, but the resulting music captures a certain, elusive brand of authenticity without a hint of affectation. I often like T-Bone productions in spite of the man himself, not because of him, and I rarely care much for Mellencamp albums at all, but the two find a most graceful connection here that sparks real magic, from the first song to the last.

Elton John and Leon Russell
The Union

I confess to a slight disappointment that this one didn’t turn out to be a bigger presence in the Grammy nominations; not that I care, but this seems right up Grammy’s alley: A highly-touted comeback from a couple of well-regarded veterans. An array of classic Americana styles. T-Bone Burnett. Cameos from Neil Young and Brian Wilson. Perhaps the whole thing just isn’t flashy enough, not as remarkable an occurrence in the wake of Raising Sand, but therein lies its charm: This is a wheelhouse album through and through, an album that takes relish in craft and offers a shame-free exhibition of a pair of professionals doing what they do best.

Albums I Missed: Jack Rose, Hans Chew

With the year, both musical and otherwise, coming to a close and a year-end list on the way, I’m flitting through the pages of my iTunes and pawing through my CD tower in hopes of rescuing any worthy records that have, for whatever reason, failed to make it onto the blog this year. I’m sure there are more, but for now there are a couple of related and very fine recordings I’d be negligent not to mention, both rather stark and handsome examples of American roots music released in 2010 on the wonderful Thrill Jockey label, but sounding basically as though they could have been recorded and released at any point over the last five decades or more.

All thanks to NPR and the All Songs Considered crowd for both the title and the content of this post; their most recent program was dedicated to “the albums we missed in 2010,” and among their fine selections there was a cut from Luck in the Valley, the final recording by the late guitarist Jack Rose, who died around this time last year, shortly after completing the songs on this album. That I could go so long without slipping this hypnotic, addictive record into the blog isn’t a testament to any dearth in quality to much as a quality of simple, homespun charm that takes a bit to unravel; I’d hate to call it a “grower,” as its twin virtues of clarity and simplicity betray, upon very first listen, a sense of something startling akin to austere truth, but just what makes it such a magical piece of music is not altogether evident at first blush– or at least not very easy to articulate– as Rose’s gifts lie less in his formal mastery as in the spirit with which he enlivens it.

That to say, Rose’s virtuosity as an acoustic guitar player, his open-hearted leadership of his small string ensemble, and his winsome invocation of pre-war folk styles ranging from early blues to parlor songs, bluegrass, and ragtime are all fairly well unimpeachable, but, despite the gritty, first-cut immediacy of this music and the lack of any recognizable flourishes of 21st century recording technology, this isn’t the kind of album that aims at conjuring or defining “authenticity” as some great formal ideal, as so many albums of its ilk to; instead, there is a sense here of being swept along in the music for its own sake, and of employing these fairly ancient forms as modes of self-expression. The set’s all instrumental, but its range of moods and emotions comes through as very well articulated: This is an album about play, about whimsy, about having fun while making music. And, it’s about devotion, about musical qualities intangible, about the strange and sublime way in which Rose’s ringing chords seem to capture the stuff of life in a way that the specificity of words often proves unable to accomodate.

It’s all rather mesmerizing, not just for the instrumental finesse and the beautiful openness of the arrangements, or even for the potent in-studio chemistry of the players, but for the way in which it largely sidesteps the ill-fitting “Americana” label by avoiding self-aware reconstructions of specific times and places, instead moving from the drone of an Indian raga to the unfettered, foot-stomping joy of a bluegrass ramble as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Rose’s studio band is augmented on a couple of tracks by a terrific ragtime pianist by the name of Hans Chew (his real name, as far as I am aware; not a play off of Han and Chewbacca, as has been suggested to me more than once now), whose jaunty, agreeably old-timey work brings an added spirit of whimsy to some of the highlight tracks, but whose full range of gifts aren’t made plain until you hear his excellent outing as a singer, composer, and bandleader, another excellent Thrill Jockey LP called Tennessee and Other Stories. It is basically what it says it is– a collection of short scenes and character sketches, all set in the rural south, drawn in rustic detail that at times feels like the scenery of a Flannery O’Connor story, and– befitting that last comparison, I suppose– focusing on human mortality and the limits of time. Actually, my one complaint about this one is that at times Chew’s lyrical observations stray a bit too close to southern cliche for my tastes; I’m tempted to say that he sometimes finds himself playing the tourist in his own homeland, but he swears in one of the later songs that “all the words and music are really true,” and who am I to disagree?

Regardless, the album is a real joy, and though it begins with a couple of stylistic outliers– the first song is a banjo-picked crawl, the second a barnburning piano rocker with an almost punkish sense of abandon– the bulk of this stuff is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Elton John of Tumbleweed Connection, with, perhaps, a bit of Dr. John thrown in for good measure. Which is to say, it’s smooth, soulful, and spirited stuff, rock and roll built around the piano and loosely inspired by country music tropes, but Chew is nothing if not an intuitive and imaginative writer and performer, seen nowhere better, perhaps, than in his cover of “Long Time Man,” which completely ignores the Tim Rose original in favor of a recasting of Nick Cave’s own gothic pomp, a move that works delightfully well within the context of this idiosyncratic little record.

There is an exquisite sense of craft throughout this record– witness the amazing build-up of “I Would There Was a Train,” which turns inexplicably but remarkably from a sort of country lament into a swelling anthem, or how “Words and Music” cops so many tricks from the 70s rock playbook without ever sounding particularly like anything specific from that era– but the best thing here, I think, is the wonderful “New Cypress Grove Boogie,” a rambling number that takes its sweet time in transforming a traditional blues structure into a Jerry Lee Lewis-styled piano rock and roll showcase, a song that’s noteworthy partially for its composition but mostly for how loose and wooly the performance is– not the only, but perhaps the most obvious reminder here that, as with the Jack Rose album, the real beauty of this stuff lies not in whatever value it might have as historical recreation but rather in its in-the-now liveliness, its joy and its spontaneity, which makes it anything but old-fashioned.