2010 Best Albums (10-1) – Henning.
December 19, 2010, 3 comments
Photography: Tonje Thilesen
So, we’re done then. This has been a very intense week, hanging out in Berlin cafés and discussing lists and design stuff and future plans, deciding that it might be best to have separate lists for everything. However, I really believe that stylistic variety is at once inevitable if you try to run a blog from two different cities, never having met before, and above all also very exciting, something that seriously makes me happy. That being said, the four albums both of us apparently could agree on are Stoned Alone, Love Remains, Teen Dream, and Autre Ne Veut, so you may consider these NFOP’s official albums of the year. To second Tonje once again, it indeed has been a very good year for music. I’d like to add that it’s been a good year for No Fear Of Pop as well, yes I’m even inclined to state that it’s been the blog’s best so far. Which leaves me excited for 2011.
#10. Roy Montgomery / Grouper – Split 12″
The way too short 17 minutes of Portland’s Liz Harris aka Grouper’s side of her split 12 inch with New Zealand experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery have come into my life almost a whole year ago, but they still make me silent and shivering each single time I get back to them. This is musical grandeur with the fewest means possible: Harris’ stripped down and sparse instrumentation with only a warm and slightly distorted vintage e-piano, clouds of almost harsh noise and few field recordings are just enough to give Harris’ disarming voice the space to make this suite the saddest, most beautiful and most haunting piece of music in 2010. There is actually no way of tearing the four tracks apart, and Vessel is nothing but a brief and insufficient idea of what the complete work is like. So seriously, if you can get your hands or ears on this (the physical copy has long been sold out), please do not wait – when you hear the lonesome dog barking timidly towards the end, you will know why. The rest is awe.
#9. Games – That We Can Play
This thing first exploded in our heads sometime in summer, I can’t exactly recall when I first came across Daniel Lopatin (of Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford’s (of Tigercity) joint venture of retro-futuristic synth madness, but I do remember that this reached me completely unprepared. Of course, too many musical trends in the last two years – the resurrection of Italo Disco, the celebration of obscure Benelux synth pop of the late 80s – all pointed in the same direction: Europop ain’t dead. Still, That We Can Play and the earlier Everything Is Working 7 inch overran me unarmed and unsuspecting like a freight train in an open field with no rails anywhere near. And this is what the short EP is essentially all about: to blow you away before you can even start considering if you ever even liked straight synth pop in the first place. But all bombastic gear excess aside, this is also an amazingly melodic piece of music, something that will stick on your eardrums all day simply because above everything else, Lopatin and Ford know damn well how to write the perfect pop song.
Games – Strawberry Skies (feat. Laurel Halo)
#8. Sun Araw – On Patrol
On Patrol is this year’s lonesome monolith, the mystical giant of psychedelic music. Over a course of no less than one hour and twenty minutes, this album is nothing but a trip in the strict sense of the term. A trip with an old, run down police Chevy through retro-futuristic landscapes of wasted cities bereft of any hope. Cameron Stallones aka Sun Araw’s tropical drone, heavily drawing on topoi of 80s noise music, is the one album that does express that kind of mind-altering experience which informed David Keenan’s invention of “hypnagogic pop” back in August 2009 with really unique, distinctive means. This is also the reason why On Patrol could turn out to serve as some kind of watershed for latter day drone experimentalism: Every subsequent album in this genre, I believe, will have to overcome comparisons with Stallones’ true masterpiece.
#7. Beach House – Teen Dream
From the first guitar picks of Zebra, Teen Dream has cast a spell over me, and there seems essentially no way of ever getting rid of it again. Of course, “dream pop” is a lame and threadbare attribution, used way too often and way too easily especially in the last two years, but if ever, the term finds its justification in the music of Beach House. Their third album is not about variety, as their songs generally never were. But it doesn’t need to be: its sheer perfection lies for a good part in its coherence, each new song evoking maelstroms of thoughts and feelings of regret and despair that will not let loose until the album’s last note has faded.
#6. Jeans Wilder – Nice Trash
After a couple of warmly-received EP’s, mostly on cassette, and after two years in the making, Andrew Caddick finally dropped his proper full-length debut in early December via the stellar French imprints Atelier Ciseaux and La Station Radar. Nice trash clearly builds on Caddick’s interpretation of hazy, sundrenched yet melancholic bedroom pop that he had exhibited on his earlier efforts, but it takes only a casual listen to notice why this album has taken so long to get finished. Caddick’s voice might be as blurry, underwater-like as ever, and we’re still confronted with (and delighted by) a good deal of tape hiss and other noise, but this is far from cliché “lo-fi”. Every song is cautiously crafted, and masterfully arranged and produced to a degree that only true songwriters could come up with.
Jeans Wilder – Blanket Mountain
#5. Herzog – Search
Somehow, and I seriously don’t know why, this release went by more or less completely overlooked, despite the fact that more than one thing about Search is truly remarkable. First, this album marks the debut full length not only of the artist himself but also of London’s Transparent, one of the most exciting and adorable little vinyl labels of recent years. But above all, this one is remarkable because it is a damn fine, 90s-infused piece of garage rock for which someone had invented the term “alternative” back in the days. Almost every critic deemed Herzog’s music “slacker rock”, and though I’m not even sure what this actually is supposed to mean in the first place, the four-piece gathered around Cleveland, Ohio native Nick Tolar clearly is anything but lazy when it comes to their music. Search is not only a delightful afternoon listen but also an overall amazing effort in terms of stylistic variety and guitar pop songwriting. Moreover, with Abandon Love, the album includes this year’s finest Dylan cover, and as you already know, I could not help selecting the heartbreaking Cautiously Optimistic as my personal song of the year.
#4. Hype Williams – Untitled 12″
I’ve written a lot about this notorious London/Berlin duo as of late, so I will try to keep this short. Considering their untitled 12 inch that they’ve released on Carnivals this year, serving as their first full length, I guess that they could do better, and I also think they’ll do so pretty soon with their forthcoming releases. But it is their terrific and original take on pop-cultural references of the last two decades, their surprisingly listenable messing around with sound bits of the past and their mind-melting compostions and sound-collages that easily justify their position at #4. Blunt and Copeland are, despite all their quite annoying habits, honestly forward-thinking musicians, and Hype Williams is maybe the most thrilling new act of 2010. One last remark: pop-cultural references to the 90s are also the only way to legitimate album covers with hemp leaves. Seriously.
#3. Autre Ne Veut – Autre Ne Veut
After a year as ridiculously prolific as this one, there was no way to escape the fact that The Olde English Spelling Bee has been 2010′s best record label, as Fact Magazine pointed out in late November. But it is not one of the more predictable and relatively obvious releases of the Brooklyn imprint – say James Ferraro, Julian Lynch, or also, Big Troubles – that impressed me most enduringly, but the album of nameless Brooklyn synth enigma Autre Ne Veut. His self-titled debut is an awesome mélange of slow-burning and cheesy, 80s informed synthesizer ballads and outright anthems of almost dancepop quality, held together by the artist’s amazingly skilled voice. This is a pop record in its purest form, unashamedly borrowing images and textures from the past without ever sounding merely repetitive for even a single second. I’d like to call this perfection.
#2. Coma Cinema – Stoned Alone
Coma Cinema’s one-man army Mat Cothran is a young man on a quest, searching for something through the means of musical expression. In search for some meaning, probably in search for love and friendship, probably for something entirely different – whatever it might be that Cothran is looking for restlessly, it seems pretty clear that he hasn’t found it with Stoned Alone, or Baby Prayers, its predecessor. That’s why he will keep on dropping finest little pop songs like it’s no one’s business, giving them away for free to all of his friends and blogs and generally everyone who will ask for them. Music is not something you will get rich with these days, at least not if it is good music, but luckily it may still serve as a personal way to deal with your sorrows and fears. As for Stoned Alone, especially shown by songs like Only or Blissed, in Mat Cothran’s case this means frighteningly fragile and intimate excursions into the soul of an almost ominously talented young artist. To second my co-editor Tonje: Stoned Alone is a masterpiece: a rare gem worth to be cherished if you love music itself.
#1. How To Dress Well – Love Remains
“Basically, there is nothing to really worry about aside from being a little run-down.”
Love Remains is the result of a very personal and truly unique artistic vision – more than any other record of 2010. Of course, Tom Krell’s work is not to be consumed detached from its context, meaning this year’s return of the synthesizer as the predominant instrument of backward-leaning, forward-thinking music, the resurrection of R’n'B with the means of lo-fi, and in a broader sociological context, the throwback to topoi of romanticism, meaning the return of the focus on one’s private realm and the inner self in the face of the tragic collapse of personal liberty and autonomy as a philosophical idea, with the eventual failure of capitalism as its clearest socio-political phenomenon. In fact, there is quite a lot to worry about in 2010.
How To Dress Well’s music is not going to help us on this, but after all, Krell has never promised to do so. He has simply delivered an otherworldly beautiful record made up of his amazing voice and ethereal layers of synth patterns that reflects more than anything the contemporary state of the individual, one decade into the 21st century. Or, as Tonje has put it, he has made music so beautiful that it almost hurts. Just like the world itself.
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