Reaper's Top 30 (plus Honorable Mentions) Favorite Albums of 2010

[Reaper16]

This year, a very deep year for music, I will post a top 30, complete with descriptions and YouTube embeds to a song I really like from each album.

My top 30 isn't quite complete yet. I anticipate posting everything for that list tomorrow. But in the meantime, this thread will begin with a handful of Honorable Mentions, listed alphabetically, for people to mull over.

Honorable Mentions:
Brotha Lynch Hung - Dinner and a Movie
Enforcer - Diamonds
Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier
LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
Manticora - Safe
Oceansize - Self Preserved While the Bodies Float Up
Overkill - Ironbound
Pain of Salvation - Road Salt pt. 1
Sleigh Bells - Treats
Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
Tech N9ne - Collabos: The Gates Mixed Plate
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Mojo
Bobby Watson - The Gates BBQ Suite
Kanye West - G.O.O.D. Fridays


Top 30:
30.) The National - High Violet
29.) Kutt Calhoun - Raw and Un-Kutt
28.) Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me
27.) Gayngs - Relayted
26.) Johnny Cash - American Recordings VI: Ain't No Grave
25.) Burzum - Belus
24.) Blind Guardian - At the Edge of Time
23.) High on Fire - Snakes for the Divine
22.) Karnataka - The Gathering Light
21.) Ihsahn - After
20.) Das Racist - Sit Down, Man
19.) Kvelertak - Kvelertak
18.) Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini
17.) Heathen - The Evolution of Chaos
16.) Briton Rites - For Mircalla
15.) Glasser - Ring
14.) Big Boi - Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
13.) Borknagar - Universal
12.) Sigh - Scenes from Hell
11.) Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
10.) Alcest - Écailles de Lune
09.) Robyn - Body Talk
08.) Ces Cru - The Playground
07.) Triptykon - Eparistera Daimones
06.) Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
05.) The Lord Weird Slough Feg - The Animal Spirits
04.) Angra - Aqua
03.) Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
02.) Dessa - A Badly Broken Code
01.) Agalloch - Marrow of the Spirit

Thanks for reading/listening! Feel free and discuss the albums mentioned or the albums snubbed.

[Reaper16]

11.) Gil Scott-Heron – I’m New Here:
Gil Scott-Heron is ****ing awesome. This is his first album since getting out of jail (like Varg/Burzum!) and it doesn’t disappoint. This is poetry meets electro-blues. Whatever electro-blues is. Some tracks see Gil reading creative nonfiction over the sampled beat from Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights.” The title track sees poetry crossing over into Gil’s singing, the sound of his voice older and more gravelly than we’ve ever heard it, tempered by age and pain. Barely sung, mostly spoken, always interesting, and over way too quickly. This is a modern classic that people are sleeping on big time. The album highlight is the rendition of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” (one of my very favorite songs of the year). Gil sings those blues lyrics with such gravity, over a disturbing, dark, forceful electronic beat. This song will leave you stunned in your tracks the first time you hear and you will listen to it like twelve times in a row. This song manages to sound like a precursor to all sorts of modern music and simultaneously sound ahead of its time. How? I have no idea. It, this whole album really, is astonishing.





10.) Alcest - Écailles de Lune:
Alcest’s blend of Shoegaze and Black Metal has never been stronger than on this release. What a haunting album; melodies that prove intangible, hard to nail down, before slipping into the atmosphere, permeating everything. Guitars swell up around the whole sound, the rhythms are unrelenting. It wears its Black Metal heart on its sleeve. But it’s also so relaxing, so evocative of snowy forests at sundown, so uplifting in a Sigur Ros sort of way. This was my #1 “studying music” album this fall. It works great as background music, but it warrants your full attention as well. An entirely satisfying work. I’m failing to make clear how this particular black metal-inspired band is different from the many others on this list. So, listen to the song I’ve linked to. Then listen to more of them. You’ll get it. You’ll be in love.

[Reaper16]

Top 10 tomorrow. Peep the YouTube vids and learn yourselves something.

[NewChief]

Good call on the Gil Scott. The whole album is good, but that Me and the Devil might just be my track of the year.

[Bowser]

Originally Posted by Reaper16

It's a terrible rock album. Pretty kick-ass metal album though.

Stand corrected. To be fair, Trunk does properly label them as metal.

[Titty Meat]

Dude good lookin on the Gil Scott album! I didn't even know he still made music

[Reaper16]

09.) Robyn – Body Talk:
First, I’m not so much awarding the album Body Talk as I am awarding the three EPs that Robyn put out this year: Body Talk Pt.1, Pt.2, & Pt.3. Most (but not all) of the tracks over these three EPs were collected into one full-length album. However you slice it, this is the best pure pop album of the year, perhaps of the last many years. Robyn’s music is the kind of pop that is dominated by Swedish dance music sensibility. This is serious electronic dance music paired with a great voice and a confident swagger. This is the kind of music that Lady GaGa takes and waters down (only to re-concentrate with her own GaGa-ness). How can I even begin with how great these songs are? From the polarizing opening (“Don’t ****ing Tell Me What to Do”) to the rap-based “U Should Know Better” (feat. Snoop Dogg), to the full-on pop boner of “Time Machine” (no song in 2010 made me happier), these tracks are wildly diverse, while retaining the signature heavy synth-and-bass Swedish dance sound. This album has two bona fide, all-time dance-pop classics in “Dancing On My Own” and “Hang With Me,” two songs whose arrangements sound as lonely and emotionally fragile as their lyrics let on. Counting the times hearing this in the car, or across my house, I’ve probably heard Body Talk more than any other album in 2010. I’m thankful for it. This is a perfect pop release. If you don’t enjoy this then you might be a sociopath.




08.) Ces Cru – The Playground:
I’ve listened to this album more than any other rap release this year, except for maybe one other. Yeah, it is entirely obscure to the national audience. It is a very local Kansas City album by a Kansas City rap duo. It also happens to be very musically accomplished. Ces Cru are two emcees – Ubiquitous and Godemis – and this album is produced solely by Leonard D.Stroy, whose beats compliment Ces Cru perfectly. The beats, primarily like an electronic pop band happened to join a circus, are filled with little noises and a thin, clapping drum sound and unconventional rhythms that seem to spiral in and out of tangibility. Ubiquitous and Godemis have different tones of voice and inflections – they have different flows – but they both share a certain aspect: they both load lots of sentences into their bars and leave little time for breath. Their words pile up on one another, emphasizing words in surprising ways, giving the effect that they could spit forever and ever. It would be hypnotic if their lyrics weren’t causing you to think so much. This is fresh hip-hop. It isn’t very often these days you get new rappers with distinct, original flows. I wish I could share other songs than the song I’ve linked to, but this album isn’t uploaded to YouTube. Like I said, this is pretty obscure. But what is the point of reading a year-end-top-albums list if not to check out something that you didn’t know existed? You should check this album out. It is available on iTunes.

[Reaper16]

07.) Triptykon - Eparistera Daimones:
Triptykon was founded out of the ashes of Celtic Frost, whose 2005 album, Monotheist, nearly redefined what heavy music can be. This album picks up where Monotheist left off. This is an album of contrasts. Ultimately midpaced, the drums fly off-the-rails with energy while the guitars swell and drone and drip out of the air, like vapor that condenses into lead. It sounds like walls are slowly but surely closing in on you, and your heart is racing much faster than the walls are moving. It takes Doom Metal and filters it through Black Metal. Slow, sludgy, utterly heavy, but with a raw emotive capacity. Triptykon create a massive wall of sound that never forgets that it has responsibilities wrt song craft. If the band needs to subtly use techniques from progressive metal or death metal or dark ambient to make a song work, they are unafraid to go there. The band goes to a lot of subgenres on this album, but it doesn’t seem crazy like when a band like Sigh does it. It sounds completely cohesive within Triptykon’s project. They have figured out a way to combine subgenres in a way that is unique to them alone. This has something for every sort of extreme metal fan. I expect great things from Triptykon in the the future, seeing as how they already revolutionized things with this debut.




06.) Janelle Monae – The ArchAndroid:
Kansas City, stand up! We runnin’ this shit! KCK’s Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid has been universally praised this year, for good reason: it is the most refreshing, original R&B/Pop album released in who knows how long. Janelle has crafted something spectacular here: a blend of R&B, James Brown-style funk, ATL hip-hop, 1950’s dance club music, psychedelic pop, disco, and future music that hasn’t been invented yet. This album is so far ahead of its time that I can’t see how this won’t be seen in the future as a classic album. Plus, it’s a concept album full of science fiction concepts and evocative of the film Metropolis. Janelle Monae has basically taken up the helm of being the next Michael Jackson, the next Prince and the next David Bowie all at the same time. And she manages to pull it off with flying colors. The album’s brightest highlights are “Cold War,” an emotionally-charged blast of cyber-funk, and “Tightrope,” which sounds like James Brown by way of Andre 3000 (complete with guest verse from Big Boi). This is real pop art, alive and well in our time. Irresistibly energetic. If this is the future of music, and it should be, than I for one welcome our new ArchAndroid overlord.

[Reaper16]

05.) The Lord Weird Slough Feg – The Animal Spirits:
Slough Feg for short, I have long contended that they are the 2^nd best band, of any kind, in America. Every time they release an album it manages to be top 10 of that year. They play, well, a unique blend of traditional heavy metal, doom metal, and Celtic folk. Sometimes that sounds real heavy, other times it sounds like Thin Lizzy on steroids. But it always sounds awesome. The Animal Spirits continues Slough Feg’s use of harmonic, sweeping guitar leads. The guitar licks on this album seem, I don’t know, happier than on recent records. This album is pretty much entirely uptempo, all uplifting. They make songs about Martin Luther nailing his Theses to the Church door, or rendtions of a Edgar Allan Poe story (a sweet cover of Allan Parsons Project’s “Tell-Tale Heart”) uplifting, somehow. Man, this bad is ****ing great. Great. Harmonized lead folk-inspired guitar licks, people! That’s selling point enough! Slough Feg takes a risk on this album, too – they record a ballad. “Second Coming” is the kind of vaguely-Celtic folk ballad that you always wished Slough Feg would record: drums and acoustic guitar as propulsive force, acting like choral chanting; dual-lead guitars that harmonize throughout the whole song and take it up and up and up skyward to the heavens; singing from Mike Scalzi that don’t change one even though this is a slow ballad. I can’t emphasize enough how great this band it. Hurry up and agree with me so I can stop babbling on about it.




04.) Angra – Aqua:
Power Metal hasn’t had a top 5 album for me since 2004. That album? Temple of Shadows, the best power metal album of last decade. That album and this one, Aqua, were recorded by the same band: Brazil’s Angra. Here’s the lowdown: Every single musician in Angra are virtuosos. The drumming? Incredibly tight, and wonderfully playful at the same time, such as when Brazilian folk rhythms or Samba rhythms get added into a fast-paced metal song. The bass playing? Holy shit, can this get work the strings. The guitar playing? Some of the best on Earth; the riffs on Aqua shift time signatures at the drop of a hat, are constantly moving around, constantly switching it up. Extremely technical riffing. The lead guitar work is even better: warm, impossibly virtuosic, yet whimsical. The vocals? Edu Falaschi is one of my very favorite singers ever. Get past the accent, and his voice is so strong, so assured, so gorgeous. Aqua was something of a slow-grower for me. Through the first few songs, Edu’s clear vibrato wasn’t being used. I feared that his voice had weakened tremendously since Angra’s last album. But when he busts out his usual pipes on “Lease of Life,” I knew he was only singing that way for effect (like Russel Allen of Symphony X uses a gruff voice sometimes vs a cleaner voice). The effect is needed because this is, you guessed it, a concept album. I’m a sucker for a well-executed concept album. This one? It’s a re-telling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. So, lit nerds, peep this album. I listened to nothing but this album for a period of two weeks. THAT’S how rich this album is, how full of surprises and small details it is. The second best metal album of the year, the second most rewarding metal album of the year. This is essential.

[Reaper16]

03. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy:
This has been the near-universal pick for best album of the year. I can’t really argue, except to say that there is one album that they forgot to listen to (or can’t understand). I don’t want to knock this album, though. MBDTF is a monumental achievement. It is unabashedly sentimental and intimate; Kanye is laying bare his flaws and imperfections. He wants you to feel sorry for him because he is unable to feel sorry for himself. This is apology by way of ego, the most honest sort of boast possible. If Kanye is going to get this close to an apology for his behavior, he might as well show everyone else up while doing it, right? So here we are, with an album that is absolutely off-the-wall ****ing stone cold crazy. The sounds are HUGE. Samples being going huge, chorus hooks going everywhere, horns like a locust invasion. In “Runaway:” crystal-clear piano meets heavy, heavy synthesized vocals meets orchestral strings meets echo-chamber voice samples. In “Lost in the World:” various voices all auto-tuned high so they blend into the keyboards only to have a sample of Gil Scott-Heron escape from the military drum beat. In “POWER:” hand claps give skeleton to a sampled chant while electric guitars sustain notes in the background, while the chorus is topped off with a sample of King Crimson’s “21^st Century Schizoid Man.” In “All of the Lights:” the sickest horns in rap since Jay-Z’s “ROC Boys” meets an epic Rihanna chorus meets an Elton John piano solo that sounds like the coolest shit you’ve ever heard in your entire life. People say that this album is overproduced. They are wrong. It is produced to the correct amount. Kanye invokes King Crimson for a reason: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is nothing less than the heralding in of the hip-hop equivalent of 1970’s progressive rock. This is musical virtuosity & bombast at their very best. Best of all, it is a true album. Every song contributes to the whole. No one else could make this album. Overrated? Hell no. This is likely the musical achievement of Kanye West’s career. And what an achievement it is.




02.) Dessa – A Badly Broken Code:
Yes, I actually liked a hip-hop album in 2010 better than Kanye’s incredible release. While Nicki Minaj had a super-great verse in Kanye’s “Monster,” she doesn’t hold a candle to Dessa, aka the best woman rapper on Earth. Dessa, teacher & artist-in-residence at McNally Smith College of Music, is a member of Minneapolis’ Doomtree Collective; she’s been killing shit on guest verses and on Doomtree group albums for years. She raps, she sings, she writes (and she writes creative nonfiction; taking her essay writing as seriously as her music. Is it any surprise then that I’m such a Dessa fanboy?). Past Dessa songs/verses have seen references to figures Bertrand Russell and Dave Eggars. This album is her first solo album. It came out in early January, and it held the number 1 spot on my list for almost the entire year. A Badly Broken Code is such a deep album. The beats are spare, indie-rock inspired. No real bangers on this album; the material is too introspective, too quiet, for a Lazerbeak lava-banger of a beat. Dessa weaves VERY intricate lyricism into her songs; the metaphors and symbolism in the albums lyrics need a literature student’s ability to close-read to be fully unpacked. Not that this is an intimidating album. It is immediately accessible, a fluid mix of clear, decidedly not-flashy rapping, torch singing, rapping and singing at the same time kinda’ sorta’ which is really cool to hear, and the quiet confidence of an artist who knows that she’s running the game. This album has a couple of flaws, neither of which I will bother to mention. It doesn’t matter. No album this year is as heartbreaking, and no album still is as hopeful. Dessa’s is a hope grounded in realistic expectations, and the sound of the beats on this album – teeming with anger and resentment but always underneath a veneer of faux-control, a sort of eyes-closed-telling-yourself-it-will-be-all-right desperation – both undercuts and supplements the lyrics in places. This is way minimalistic compared to Kanye’s album, but that’s OK. This is the closest we’ve gotten to a singer/songwriter sensibility in rap. You are going to be very glad that you became acquainted with Dessa.

[Reaper16]

01.) Agalloch – Marrow of the Spirit:
This is the best album I’ve listened to since at least 2006, and possibly 2002. You HAVE to listen to it. Get over your personal hang-ups about harsh vocals or aggressive drums or whatever bullshit excuses any of you have for not listening to metal albums. Despite whatever hyperbole I’ve used throughout this list, let me assure you that when I say that this album is breathtaking I mean it with complete sincerity. It’s been a long, long, long time since I’ve heard music this consistently beautiful, haunting, and original. Agalloch, if you don’t know, has been the best band in all of America since roughly 2002 (in my not-so-humble opinion, of course). They play a blend of black metal, folk music, and post-rock that is so… perfect. The atmosphere generated by blending these genres together is the peer of no other band. I’ve listened to this album upwards of 30 times in the two months that it has been out, and I’m discovering new intricacies each time. I love how the epic, 18-minute long “Black Lake Nidstang” slips into a sort of Donkey Kong Country 2 keyboard section near the end before returning to set up the intro to the next track. I love how the closing track, “To Drown,” sounds like a body twisting with pain in its final days. I love how ‘Ghosts of Midwinter Fires” sounds like Pale Folklore-era Agalloch and it fits right in with the rest of the album. I love how “The Watcher’s Monolith” builds a simple guitar lick repeated after every measure into something with as much gravity as the sun. I love most how “Into the Painted Gray” begins as the most aggressive, overtly-Black-Metal song of Agalloch’s career before the acoustic guitar licks and deep chanting begins to take over and all that remains of the aggressiveness is the monstrous drumming, and the song begins to build to a crescendo at 7:16 into the song that moved me to real, honest tears the first few times I heard it. Nothing this entire year, not just in music but in anything, save a bite of barbecue at Oklahoma Joe’s upon returning to KC after 5 months in Alabama, made me feel as good as that crescendo. I love how this album captures perfectly the feeling of Fall changing into Winter, which is the exact time of year that we find ourselves in as I type this.

I love every single thing about this flawless album. If I never hear another album as good as Marrow of the Spirit in the future, then I can still die a happy man, knowing that listening to music all this time was soooooo worth it. The exciting part, though, is that I probably will hear another album in the future that is as good as this one. It will come out in five or six years and will be released by Agalloch. It’s a shame that, despite my effusive praise, a lot of you reading this won’t listen to this album or attempt to appreciate it. I have embedded the entire album in this post; the tracks are in album order. This is the most rewarding album of the year, even if, actually especially if, it is a slow-grower for you. Again, this album is literally breathtaking. This is easily my favorite album of 2010, and even though I didn’t write a list of objective best albums of the year, Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit is the best album of 2010.

[Reaper16]

It's all done. That was exhausting. Yay for lists!

[Molitoth]

nice job Reaper, you are the man!

[Molitoth]

I originally listened to Agalloch – Marrow of the Spirit about a month ago and while I really enjoyed the band, the vocals killed it for me. I'm sorry, but that vocal style takes zero talent... and to me, I'd rather just talk to satan himself. Imagine this band with a very melodic and powerful singer... now THAT would be fantastic. Thats the problem with metal.... the band can be so awesome and the vocals can kill it the majority of the time.

[NewChief]

Grabbed Kvelertak's album and listened to it at the gym this morning. Good workout music, and I enjoyed it. Plan on hitting up Angra tomorrow.

[KCUnited]

Originally Posted by Molitoth

I originally listened to Agalloch – Marrow of the Spirit about a month ago and while I really enjoyed the band, the vocals killed it for me. I'm sorry, but that vocal style takes zero talent... and to me, I'd rather just talk to satan himself. Imagine this band with a very melodic and powerful singer... now THAT would be fantastic. Thats the problem with metal.... the band can be so awesome and the vocals can kill it the majority of the time.

That's the beauty of metal for me, instrument mastery and vocals used as just another instrument, the least important instrument.