2010: What It Sounded Like (Part 1)

Some numbers.

72 is the number of posts I wrote in 2010.

3 is the number of different residences I had.

4 is the number of pairs of earbuds through which I burned.

4965 is the amount of songs I obtained in 2010 (not counting the rest of this week).

38.51 is the amount of gigabytes that takes up.

14 days, 10 hours, 10 minutes, and 43 seconds is the amount of time that music takes up.

I have listened to a fraction of that.

(But 5 hours of that is voice memos, so forget about those.)

And then there’s unknowable hours I spent listening to that, and to music from past years, and to music I don’t have on my hard drive, and to the handful of live shows I got to.

So.

What did 2010 mean to me, musically? The usual suspects, of course. There were certainly some solid new albums from some of my favorite acts (see: The Hold Steady, Drive By Truckers). I continued to try my hand at various new genres and artists based on my faith in their inherent enjoyability. I heard songs used as underscoring on TV shows and rushed to google whatever lyrics I could hear so I could snag them for myself. And when I changed things (apartments, company, employment) so did I get tossed into a different cultural and artistic gumbo each time.

But aside from whatever big changes occurred in my personal life, and their subsequent reverberations in my music library, the greatest leap in 2010 was something rather simple and, indeed, self-referential. Namely, this blog. I started it with the vague idea that it would give me the incentive to listen to more of my frivolously massy library of unlistened music. While I was indeed correct, in that I wake up at least three days in a given week with a fresh sprouted desire to pick an album at random and immerse myself in it during a commute, or a walk, or even just a leisurely sit in my bathrobe with a deep mug of thick black coffee, I was also unknowingly building a foundation to a philosophy I wasn’t able to initially explain when the blog began. Being of course the philosophy that drives this blog, that philosophy which drives my actions and interests, that of accepting all music and trying as intently and earnestly as possible to gain something from it. At first, it was easier said than done. But as the year went on, and I began in earnest to update even if it was just a loose mp3 here or there, it sunk in. I stopped giving up as easily on music I wasn’t “getting”. I started trying to get others in on it, trying to get them to shake off the false limits their tastes had imposed. And I downloaded 14 days of goddamn music. So while 2010 may have not been the easiest year for many of us, myself included, I can say with confidence that it has moved me significantly forward in my path of pure artistic enjoyment, as well as taught me how to live that type of life more fully and to greater benefit. And it’s for that reason that I present:

2010: The Best

1. Best New Album-Enjoyment Project – Bon Iver, “For Emma Forever Ago”

Every winter for the last few years, I gamble. This is the wager: if I walk alone, through the frozen empty cornfield behind my house, late at night, listening to nothing but the sounds of the wind in the trees and the silence of fallen snow, and listen to a particularly beautiful and emotional album I have never heard, it will scratch itself into my very soul. 2 years running, I’ve won! (2009′s winner: Talk Talk, “The Spirit Of Eden.” 2008: Wilco’s “A Ghost Is Born”. This third year, I chose Bon Iver’s 2009 album, which all sources had told me was a fragile, gorgeous collection of ethereal songs about heartbreak, written and recorded in a remote winter cabin by their creator Justin Vernon. It seemed a natural choice, and while the jury’s still out until I repeat the process a few times, I can give a tentative thumbs way up. See for yourself, but just remember to bundle up!

2. Best Improbably Late Musical Discovery – Toto

Okay, some context is needed here. Somehow, for the 2-some decades I’ve been alive and listening, I never ONCE heard the song “Africa” by Toto (you know it, of course) and thought “oh, that’s Africa by Toto.” If I ever did hear it, it never registered. EVER. So when I read that some of the best session musicians of the 70s and 80s, guys who played on everything from “Thriller” to Steely Dan to Dire Straits to Bruce Springsteen (and that’s just the goddamn DRUMMER!), made a band called Toto together, I was champing at the bit to hear what they could do. Again, remember I had never heard “Africa”. Or “Rosanna”. So on April 3rd at 11:55, their multi award-winning album “Toto IV” hit my hard drive, it marked the very first time in my life I’d heard the song that everyone, even people I knew listened to NO music whatsoever, knew by rote. Which threw me. But goddamn could those guys write a catchy song, and even when they didn’t they sure could play. I’d blast their stuff in bars, on the subway, while cleaning, while running…and how do you explain that to people for whom their stuff sounds either played to death, pure cheese, or both? You don’t. You just turn up the Toto, is what you do. RUNNER UP IN THIS CATEGORY: “Sabotage” by Beastie Boys. How I managed to never hear this song, or realize I was hearing it, before April 17th, is still a goddamned mystery to me.

3. Best Musical Experiment Gone Horribly Right – How To Dress Well, “Love Remains”

Brooklyn’s Tom Krell, aka “How To Dress Well” recorded an album all by himself of gauzy overdubbed difficult-to-impossible vocals over skipping, dreamy musical landscapes, injected a hefty dose of 90′s sex-making musical influences, and caught weird lightning in a jar. I can only say this is an immersive album, one you listen to in silence, possibly in the dark, possibly walking around the streets of your hometown and marveling at the intricate emotional details that surround you at every turn. Or in a room lit by a scentless candle. But try to listen CLOSE.

4. Best Unexpected Local Live Delight – The Lives Of Famous Men

These young upstarts, whom I wrote up a month or two back, are gonna have their upcoming shows announced on this blog soon as I get word of ‘em. A tight rollicking set of propulsive and soulful emo-tinged art-pop blah blah blah genretag showingoff just go see ‘em, we’ll get beers! You and me. Consider they’re the only CD I’ve bought in recent memory.

5. Best Album To Completely Flip A Dark Mood On Its Ass – The Roots, “How I Got Over”

I’d listened to this album once, midsummer, on a long subway ride from my previous Brooklyn spot, and thought what I’ve usually thought upon listening to the Roots, a blistering live act and yours truly’s first ever real show, captured on record: “pretty good.” But that was it, until I woke up a little while ago feeling every kind of slumped; sour stomach and sclerotic thoughts, heavy limbs and depleted stores. I popped this album on during my commute and it was like being hit by a slow train of sunshine. Forget what you thought about the Roots, thinking you had ‘em down in your mind: their live band’s chops, rapper Black Thought’s thoughtful rhymes, their stylistic expansiveness, whatever. Forget that this album sports a number of indie rock’s notables as guests, including Joanna Newsom, Monsters of Folk, and the female portion of Dirty Projectors. “How I Got Over” is essentially a concept album in which the first 12 of the album’s 14 tracks, which are mixed to all flow seamlessly into each other, form a 36 minute soul-rap suite taking us from EXACTLY the feeling I was dragging that morning, to a midpoint turn at the title track, into a breathless finish in which the mantle of pessimism slips away and you grab onto hope with all your might. It’s one of the finest and tightest Albums, 40 minutes and fatless, that I’ve heard from a contemporary artists in a long, long time. RUNNER UP IN THIS CATEGORY: “#1 Record” by Big Star. To describe the first time I heard this in June: Imagine a stranger offering you a sandwich after you receive horrible news while extremely hungry.

6. Best Jukebox Drunken Singalong – Zac Brown Band, “Chicken Fried”

‘Nuff said.

7. Best Live Show In Which My Friend’s Brother Was In The Band So That’s How I Got A Ticket – Bonnie Prince Billy and the Cairo Gang, 12/8/10, Town Hall

The only thing stopping me from writing this show up in full was the intense, sublime WEIRDNESS of the performance. The opening act which was actually the main act in costume, lit by living room lamps and performing a meticulous cover of an entire album from 1979 by someones named Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause. It just got weirder. Will Oldham, aka Bonnie Prince Billy, has a quavering tenor voice that sometimes can get beefy and sometimes cracks like reeds, and he hops around and stands on one leg when he sings. The band throughout the entire 2-some hour show walked this line between sounding totally sloppy and sounding intensely, practicedly, studiously sloppy due to their extreme rehearsed tightness, with wiry guitar lines and weaving harmonies and volume swells, and then Kid Rock’s latest guitarist came out with a mirrored guitar, and I was just, like, whoa. Just, whoa. See ‘em if you can, before whatever strange pocket of the musical universe they’ve been peering into swallows them up, leaving behind just the barely audible wheeze of keys player Ben Boye’s harmonium.

8. Best Covers That, While Not Improving On The Originals Because, Well, That Would Be Just Impossible, Come Asymptotically Close

Two way tie: Codeine Velvet Club’s diamond-bright remake of Stone Roses’ “I Am The Resurrection” which replaces guitar workouts with joyful horn sections, Ian Brown’s distinctively thin pipes with sparkling male-female harmonies, and what the hell, adds a marimba while they’re at it. It Still gives me the sensation of scaling Sunset Park like Rocky on the library steps. And, then, this gorgeous harmony puzzlebox of a cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” by a band called The Rescues. Thanks to E.A. for this one! Enjoy. (Sorry Glee fans, I like this one better.)

Subcategory Winner: “Straight To Hell” by Moby ft. Heather Nova, Special Consideration For Being The Best Track Off This Clash Tribute Album, Which Is Of An Almost Superhumanly Underwhelming Nature. Seriously.

9. Best Song To Listen To As It Begins To Snow – “Hotel Chelsea Nights” by Ryan Adams

It’s an fair statement to say that this Prince-fueled album closer, detailing Adams’ fatigued (emotionally, physically, pharmaceutically) stretch in the titular hotel, is soulful. It’s another to try to sum up what it can mean when it underscores a singular happy moment in time. That, unfortunately, is only possible to do if you were there. So, G.S., thanks.

10. Best Provider Of Rock-Solid Feel Good Tunes, Directly And Indirectly – A.K.

Damn anonymity and my courteous respect as such! A.K., my close friend and confidant, has been providing me with new music for the years I’ve known him, and almost all of it’s worldclass fantastic. It may not be on the page, but the enthusiasm he has for it and the joy it brings him is about as infectious as Rage virus and almost as exhilarating.

 

YOU GOTTA CHECK OUT THE NEW KID CUDI ARRRGGGGHHHH

Whether it’s Weezer’s latest out-of-the-park power pop gem (we were in a bar, Weezer came on, I remarked I knew little of them, and that was the very last time I could say such and not be lying because he got me into Weezer like it was hard drugs), the theme song to HBO’s “How To Make It In America” (found a screener of the pilot lying in Union Square, watched it with him and our boys crowded into my tiny dorm room, tore through each succeeding episode and sang along to the theme loudly), or this touching ballad of selling drug-laced beverages to pay for matching cars and clothes in one’s favorite color, (kinda just played whenever he was around for a few months), he’s been the year’s DJ supreme. And he writes at http://champagnebottlelife.blogspot.com/.

OK folks, time for me to get some sleep. Expect the second installment soon!

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