my top 50 albums of 2010, pt. 2
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40
The Clientele
Minotaur EP
Merge
Britain’s The Clientele dropped this mini-album in the late summer, eight sterling tracks of breezy pop-folk and 60s lite-jazz instrumentation. “Gerry” is the standout here, Alasdair Maclean’s whispery tenor riding a wave of sunny guitar and piano, at least until the song’s unexpected detour into kludgy shredding and raucous horns. But much of Minotaur stays firmly in the Clientele’s wheelhouse; the title track marries gentle acoustic to sonorous, haunting strings as Maclean affects his British pronunciation (“mine-o-taur”); and the lovely “As the World Rises and Falls” is an organ-fueled idyll laced with longing, a song for a bright day on a windswept coast.
39
John Vanderslice
Green Grow the Rushes EP
self-released
The prolific San Francisco songwriter and producer released this EP for free a few months back, and while it continues the sparse and simpler arrangements of 2009’s Romanian Names, the recordings feature some unexpected left hooks; “Penthouse Window” feels almost anachronistic with its whirling, contrapuntal New Orleans woodwinds and surprise stabs of piano, whereas the baroque “Streetlights” highlights an avant-garde lyrical scene: “it’s like you dropped/a chandelier in honey/and turned it on/like a minor sixth sigh.” Opener “Thule Fog” is strong as well, with a staccato barrage of shivering horsehair bows bouncing across taut strings while buzzy keys weave a background melody.
38
Weezer
Death to False Metal
DGC
I largely shied away from Weezer’s new studio record Hurley - that album’s “Where’s My Sex?” is the dumbest thing Rivers Cuomo has written since the abysmal “Beverly Hills” - but fared much better with False Metal, a collection of post-Pinkerton B-sides that suggests the bespectacled frontman has been holding back on his more interesting experiments. “Everyone” captures tense, dissonant noodling atop a bed of fat, post-grunge chords and clattery, loose-limbed kitwork that feels more Dischord than DGC, and the album-closing take on Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” manages to turn a potential novelty into a wrenching, cathartic rocker. But it’s the OCD meditation “Autopilot” that’s really worth the price of admission; Cuomo channels his inner Mothersbaugh and Ocasek over a sinuous, driving electro-pop pulse that, bless his heart, includes an honest-to-God BASIC program sung in its bridge, with line numbers and everything. Consider me sold.
37
She & Him
Volume Two
Merge
On their second collaboration, manic pixie dreamgirl Zooey Deschanel and moody throwback maestro M. Ward produce another batch of retro torch songs; opener “Thieves” evokes June Carter with its plaintive vocals, all splayed heartstrings, over bolo-tie guitar and galloping drums, while “Lingering Still” marries jaunty ukulele to percolating organ and a shimmering, reverb-thick curtain of Deschanel’s multitracked vocals, a poky last-call ballad that recalls Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid”. But even the most hard-hearted hipster might find something charming in “Home”, where Deschanel beguiles the listener (“I could be sweet/and I could be sweeter”) amidst a lackadaisical bed of twangy pedal-steel and plucked harp.
36
Robert Pollard
Moses on a Snail
Guided by Voices, Inc.
Since the dissolution of Guided by Voices in 2004, frontman Robert Pollard’s solo output has been spotty; neither of his 2009 records (The Crawling Distance and Elephant Jokes) were terribly memorable. But 2010 finds him back in the saddle, his faithful producer Todd Tobias at the helm for his tenth (!) post-GBV album under his own name. “Lie Like a Dog” is first mournful and then propellant, Pollard’s voice swaying to and fro over the song’s crescendos like a swung microphone, the sawing guitars giving way to a quiet, poignant ending. “Each is Good in His Own House” finds Pollard in full-on Lennonesque melancholy, singing doleful la-la-las over the song’s bittersweet fadeout, while “It’s News” bops along on a propulsive, bubbling groove, his fist surely in the air when he hits those big, cruise-control choruses.
35
Charlotte Gainsbourg
IRM
Because
After making the lushest pop album of the 2000s (5:55) with producers Air, French actress and singer turned to a similarly idiosyncratic partner (one Beck Hansen) to craft her followup record, an album that crackles with nervous energy-appropriate for a group of songs named after an MRI machine. “Voyage” recalls the homespun, kitchen-sink percussion that marked Beck’s mid-decade albums, Gainsbourg’s sweet, gossamer voice buttressed by curlicues of violin; the drums are even bigger on “Trick Pony”, toms thundering and tambourines rattling as a chorus of vaguely sinister voices chimes in and out. But the big, orchestral sounds of 5:55 are emulated here too, on tunes like “Time of the Assassins” that wash the singer’s voice in bright, ringing cascades of vintage synth, bouncing around the room like a cathedral echo.
34
The Pipettes
Earth vs. the Pipettes
Fortuna Pop
What can be made of the new Pipettes record? After four years, the 60s girl-group insouciance and matching polkadot dresses are gone, along with two of the band’s three signature vocalists; Gwenno Saunders remains, now joined by her sister Ani for a batch of tunes that seem more at home with 80s post-disco throb. And yet it works, a different beast altogether but an enthralling one nonetheless. “Call Me” is an instant earworm, the alto vocals dovetailing in gorgeous harmonies over bright horns, Roland pianos, and the biggest slapback drum echo I’ve heard this year; “Finding My Way” might as well be the soundtrack to a girl-in-the-big-city movie montage, all whirlwind, big-band pop chords and brassy, from-the-gut belting. And you’d almost swear this was Bananarama from the scintillating opening of “I Need a Little Time”, a driving dancefloor stomper that resolves into a bombastic, supremely tuneful chorus; whoever left the hot tub time machine on, I thank you.
33
Robert Pollard
We All Got Out of the Army
Guided by Voices, Inc.
Hey, wasn’t this guy just here? Pollard kicked off a banner year with his finest solo record since 2006’s landmark From a Compound Eye, and he starts the album off in style with the punchy “Silk Rotor”, a three-minute rollercoaster of blissful guitar pop that closes with a seemingly unending reprise of the song’s catchy, supermelodic hooks. “I’ll Take the Cure” is warm and ebullient, Pollard trading tossed-off spoken-word and bright, ascendant harmonies over a bed of folk strumming and sprightly drums; elsewhere, “Face Down” indeed feels like a drawn-out army battle, first churning in wispy, minor-key ephemera, the fragile vocal hanging gently in the air of the verses before building each slow, triumphant chorus, a flag being raised out of the debris.
32
How to Destroy Angels
s/t EP
Null
This new project from Trent Reznor, his wife Mariqueen Maandig, and Atticus Ross bears a lot of similarities to the Nine Inch Nails records that recently preceded it, with crisp instrumentation, economic songwriting and arrangements, and moody, textural backgrounds. You might mistake it for NIN if not for Maandig’s lead vocals; on “Fur Lined”, she alternates between a provocative purr in the verses and plaintive cries in the chorus, her calls that “everything is echoing” rising above highstep drumming and a bristling, synthesized hum. Opener “The Space in Between” is slow and deliberate, the rat-a-tat percussion and creeping chord progressions reminding the listener of crashing waves, while EP closer “A Drowning” is all quiet simmer, Reznor using a typically austere piano line to counterpoint Maandig’s sinister lullaby, the song rolling along turbulently until its ethereal conclusion.
31
Vampire Weekend
Contra
XL
The New York quartet’s second album builds on the polyglot promise of its 2008 debut, another omnivorous collection of frenetic post-punk, world-music pastiche, and bedroom pop ephemera. Their previous hit “A-Punk” has an analogue here in the manic “Cousins”, frontman Ezra Koenig’s voice jumping from hollered scat to grinning bellow, the scissoring guitar lines exploding like thrown streamers, the snare drum pounded within an inch of its life. Equally driving is “California English”, Koenig’s bubblegum tenor processed to the point of percolation, rhymes like “fake Philly cheesesteak/but you use real toothpaste” unspooling over airy strings and palsied fretwork. And “Giving Up the Gun” is a lustrous pop mini-epic, the hammockswing rhythms supporting fat bass figures, tinny xylophone, and a chorale of male and female voices swirling in the background like windblown curtains, a perfectly blended confection.
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