The Homegrown Snob

Welcome to the 2010 Snobbys.

No Taio Cruz butt-mess here. No Eminem, either (he’s too busy getting plastic surgery to look like Cher). Justin Bieber can crawl back into his fetal position and wait for his handlers to comfort and cajole him back into selling his soul for pre-teen bucks. And Ke$ha can take her drunk-sounding, tone-deaf self back to … well, you get the idea.

This list is strictly a reposit for good music and, specifically, my favorite jams of 2010.

1. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Because 5, 10, 20 years from now — after the breathless hype has faded and the backlash over what a hipster/precious band Arcade Fire is dies away — this album will still be being played by someone, somewhere, and it’ll be making a connection. The Suburbs is a document of North American youth: the bi-polar swings of limits and limitlessness, restless teenage hearts and everyone’s search for belonging. As our country quickly becomes a string of strip malls and Olive Gardens and mega shopping centers, we feel more and more isolated and rootless.  This is the most affluent, free country/culture in the world, yet so many of us feel stifled and unfulfilled — even as we attain what everyone around us says we should. Why? Does it really matter or do we just whine too much?

These are grand themes and some big questions pared to a personal scale in songs like the shuffling title track, the nervous “Ready To Start,” and the towering “The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).” The moments of quieter drama — “Wasted Hours,” “Modern Man,” “The Sprawl” — are just as moving. When did you feel most free? Were you ready to leave home? Did you end up where you maybe didn’t belong? What would you change?

The Suburbs asks that listeners answer and fill the blanks for themselves.

Check out: “Ready to Start,” “We Used to Wait,” “The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”

2. The National – High Violet

“Everyone says it’s great, but that it’s sooo depressing.”

That’s what a friend said to me this summer as I encouraged him to give it a spin. Yes, getting through High Violet in one sitting can be rough on the psyche. Almost everything is mid-tempo, and Matt Berninger barely ever raises his glowering baritone voice. But I’ll say it again: few records were as rewarding in 2010. Even fewer used bassoons

High Violet sounds like a film noir, with characters and types peculiar to that genre. There’s  a dark kind of fun to be had, and deciphering the broken codes in Berninger’s lyrics is a challenge. The music — measured and orchestrated, complete with choirs — is exhilarating. “Lemonworld” is one of the best songs of the year. “Afraid of Everyone” isn’t far behind. By the time the strings get rolling on “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” your heart’s ready to burst.

Check out: “Lemonworld,” “Conversation 16,” “Afraid of Everyone”

3. LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening

Everything you need to know about LCD Soundsystem is present in “Dance Yrself Clean,” the white-hot opening track on This Is Happening: hammering synths, euphoric choruses, abrupt soft-loud breaks and understated, cooler-than-thou lyrics.

For just about a decade, James Murphy and Co. have built indie dancefloor anthems based around the sweat of real instruments, elastic vocals and inventive percussion. At least half of This is Happening ranks with the group’s best, even if the single “Drunk Girls” was a bit of a toss-off. Murphy’s always been indebted to his influences, tweaking and flavoring their foundations with his own personality. “I Can Change” is early Eurythmics cool, “All I Want” is Berlin-Bowie redux and “Sleep” is a desperate version of Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.” The final track, “Home,” pulls it to a bittersweet finish that’s pure James Murphy.

Murphy has said this is the last LCD Soundsystem album, at least for a while. All three of its core members want to get onto their own things. Whatever that might be. But certainly, the blistering run of singles and albums from 2002-2010 cemented the group’s place in history as one of this early century’s best.

Check out: “Dance Yrself Clean,” “I Can Change,” “Home”

4. Crowded House – Intriguer

Neil Finn is regarded as one of the most enduring, most complex songwriters to mine the Lennon/McCartney legacy and rarely in his 35-year career has he been this consistent.

Where the last Crowded House album felt washed out, easily his weakest batch of songs to date, here the ingredients gel into a seamless, infinitely playable 10-song classic. Intriguer is the sound of summer evenings and the feeling that, though nothing is quite perfect, life is good. Finn’s lyrics are about familial contentment, spare time, growing old and letting go. Wistful but never pitying or sad.

You won’t hear a warmer, more comforting album this year. Here’s proof, too, that the man can still write timeless melodies.

Check out: “Isolation,” “Twice if You’re Lucky,” “Either Side of the World”

5. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid

The Archandroid is as auspicious a debut as any in the last few years.

Monae is boundless and apparently fearless, creating a songcycle based on “Metropolis” that infuses old-glamour-Hollywood strings with funk, jazz, prog-rock and whatever else she fancies. The music is personal but never precious. She pays tribute to her influences — James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince, Erykah Badu — without enslaving herself to them. She’s got a voice. She’s got the looks. She obviously has the brains and chops (Why “Cold War” wasn’t a huge hit is still beyond me).  But it’s still a formative debut. That Monae never settles or stops moving long enough to fashion a discernable style can be distracting on the first few listens. What she does next is anyone’s guess.

Check out: “Cold War,” “Tightrope,” “O Maker”

6. Guster – Easy Wonderful

It’s easy to forgive the members of Guster for the long gaps between records when the results are this pleasing. Forever on a quest to write the perfect pop song, Guster hit more often than they miss. Their inventive, kitchen-sink arrangements and brothers-on-the-road harmonies dress them up but don’t dumb them down. Easy Wonderful is one of the group’s best and a non-stop good time, whether it’s the pounding “Architects and Engineers,” the disco-banjo of “This is How It Feels to Have a Broken Heart,” or the unabashed pop slavering of “Do You Love Me.” (The three bonus tracks available on the limited edition are worth the extra cash. I can’t imagine owning this album without them.)

Check out: “On the Ocean,” “Do You Love Me” “Architects and Engineers”

7. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

Damon Albarn’s ongoing Gorillaz project is one of few in the millenium to generate both radio hits and critical praise. That’s due mostly to Albarn’s genius ability to make pop music out of any and all influences.
Though Plastic Beach hasn’t yet produced a hit on the scale of “Clint Eastwood” or “Feelgood Inc.,” its first 12 tracks are utter perfection, and really, the only clunker here is Mos Def’s unlistenable “Sweepstakes.” The rest, especially “Stylo” (with a Bruce Willis shoot-em-up video), “Melancholy Hill,” “Broken” and “Rhinestone Eyes” are glorious slices of alt-pop.

Check out: “Stylo,” “Rhinestone Eyes,” “Melancholy Hill”

8. Grinderman – Grinderman 2

This is dirty, frightening guitar music, rough and ragged and bordering on Satanic. This is music to soundtrack ritualized murder: jarring guitars and ear-splitting feedback where even the quieter moments sound like death rattles.
But being a Nick Cave project, the focus is still on Lyrics, and Cave cooked up some vividly sexy, scary and funny ones.
“The spinal cord of JFK wrapped in Monroe’s negligee I give to you,” he croons on “Palaces of Montezuma.” “You think your government will protect you? You are wrong,” he sneers on “Heathen Child.”
The result is the brashest record Cave and his cronies have made since the mid-’80s.

Check out: “Palaces of Montezuma,” “Heathen Child,” “Worm Tamer”

Video NSFW.

9. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Love him or hate him, the man knows how to craft a hot song. Here’s 13 of them, on a dizzying ride of hyperbole, self-absorption, self-pity and self-aggrandizement. Kanye West’s reprehensible egotism threatens to overshadow the music several times on his fifth album. That it never does is a testament to his musical prowess and the power of his fifth, and best, record. Nicki Minaj is pretty great on it, too.

Check out: “All of the Lights,” “Power,” “Monster”

10. New Pornographers – Together

The NPs have become standard bearers of stately, arranged power pop. This is the super group’s second densely arranged and meticulously measured album in a row. Some complained of missing the brash, tossed-off fun of their first few records (there’s nothing as insistent as the best of 2005′s Twin Cinema here), but this one is easier to listen to as a well-paced whole.

Check out: “Crash Years,” “(Put Your Hands) Together,” “If You Can’t See My Mirrors”

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