Year End List: 2010

Favourites of the past decade, revisited.

Everyone is posting their 2010/2019 selfies and making best-of-the-2010s lists, so I thought it’d be fun to revisit all of my playlists and favourite year-end picks that I’ve been making since (conveniently) 2010!

That year, I was writing for the now-defunct Two Way Monologues, and as such my list is lost to the embers of the internet (not even available on the Wayback Machine!) so I had to re-create this (one so-to-speak.)

This exercise will be doubly-handy for me, because I can migrate my other lists that come complete with in-depth reviews (2011 - 2018) here, making sure no more lists get away from me.

Anyway, because of the aforementioned disappearance, this recreation includes albums I love more in hindsight and doesn’t include some that I was overrating at the time. That’s also why you don’t see much chillwave on here, even though I was caught up in the thick of it - remember chillwave?!?! Still, I tried to keep stuff on here that I spun a lot in those days, even if now I’m not so hot on them - ya know, for posterity.

Anyway, I have included some thoughts on a handful of records - you don’t need me revisiting why Tame Impala exploded with InnerSpeaker, or musing on Beach House so I’ve skipped some of the biggest releases in favor of either revisiting personal favs or ones I think deserve another look/listen!

Included is the Spotify playlist so you can go listen for yourself!

Have a great one! What were your favourite records of 2010? Let me know on Twitter.

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And now, the list:

• Love Is All - Two Thousand And Ten Injuries

  • Love Is All’s A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night may be their best record, but the follow-up was no slouch either, as they continued to crank out tightly-wound, emotionally resonant post-punk new-wave rave-ups.

• Kylesa - Spiral Shadow

• Los Campesinos! - Romance Is Boring

• Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Let It Sway

• Four Tet - There Is Love in You

• VHS Head - Trademark Ribbons of Gold

• The Chemical Brothers - Further

  • It’s wild that I’ve perused list after list of year-end content from major publications and off the top of my head, I can’t remember the name of one that included this record. For my money, it’s a masterpiece - the 12-minute long Escape Velocity is goddamned incredible!

• Wolf Parade - EXPO 86

• The Arrivals - Volatile Molotov

  • Water Water Everywhere remains one of the key tracks of the 10s; it builds to such a cathartic and effective finale that continues to feel personally relevant.

• Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts

• Les Savy Fav - Root for Ruin

  • File this one alongside the Chemical Brothers record, since I didn’t see anyone talking about this record in hindsight, which is a shame because though it’s not as high-ranked as other Les Savy Fav albums, it still shreds.

• Future Islands - In Evening Air

• Cloud Nothings - Turning On

  • Of all the scrappy, messy lo-fi indie-rock of 2010, I was definitely team Cloud Nothings, who had the huge melodic hooks hiding under the fuzz to back up their hype. It’s no wonder that when the murk was wiped away on Attack on Memory it came as such a bombastic surprise to naysayers.

• The Like - Release Me

  • This record is so underrated it’s bananas; there was a lot of vintage-aping acts in the 00s/10s, but The Like smacked Release Me down on the table like a mic-drop. Production by Mark Ronson and organ-work by Victor Axelrod of The Dap-Kings, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, and the Easy Star All-Stars help out, but it’s the songwriting from Z Berg that truly makes this record sing. A must-listen if you haven’t heard it.

• Happy Birthday - Happy Birthday

• Bonobo - Black Sands

• Black Milk - Album Of The Year

• Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - The Brutalist Bricks

• Grass Widow - Past Time

  • Right now, there’s about a billion bands doing the post-punk-y lead-guitar-led indie-rock thing, which is fast becoming one of the most over-played stylistic choice going. And yet, when that style was just starting to take hold in the early 00s, Grass Widow slid under the radar despite their record Past Time being top-to-bottom perfection. Hannah Lew, Raven Mahon, and Lillian Maring fit together like perfect puzzle pieces - their trio of bass/guitar/drums interlocking in surprising and fascinating ways as they all sing seemingly disparate melodies (as if there’s three songs battling for the spotlight - yet every one is terrifically catchy and bounce off one-another perfectly.)

• Tim Kasher - The Game Of Monogamy

• Aloha - Home Acres

• Vampire Weekend - Contra

• Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner

• Beach House - Teen Dream

• Superchunk - Majesty Shredding

• Tokyo Police Club - Champ

  • TPC were so hugely hyped (and so quickly written off when Elephant Shell didn’t reach the dizzying heights of their EP) that this wildly satisfying sophomore grab-bag of pop-tunes seemed to make few waves in the indie-rock buzz-bin. Unfortunate, because this record seems to get better and better with age.

• Marnie Stern - Marnie Stern

• Women - Public Strain

• Tame Impala - InnerSpeaker

• Baths - Cerulean