Best Records 2K10 - ROCKSPOSURE.....Be Heard

3. Halcyon Digest (Deerhunter)


“Accessible” is a lazy person word for “I can understand the lyrics without reading the vinyl sleeve.” On Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter’s sonic cryptograms part above songs as puzzling and torn-up as any in their canon. Bradford Cox’s ongoing quest for spiritual transcendence -- for the meaning locked behind all life’s baffling tragedies -- manifests itself most movingly on dazzling centerpiece Helicopter, one of the greatest songs of this or any other year. Cox takes inspiration from a short story about the disappearance of a Russian prostitute and raises the boy’s death throws to the heavens, a prayer for anyone who’s ever been abandoned to hell on Earth and a testament to Deerhunter’s beauteous grace.





5. The Suburbs (Arcade Fire)

Neon Bible got the shaft in some quarters for its chilly electronica and big issues, particularly its not-so-suibtle illusions to the war on terror and celebrity culture. I still think it’s a great album -- No Cars Go is the Arcade Fire’s finest four minutes in my book -- but The Suburbs proved the naysayers right about one thing: the narrower the band’s vision, the grander the music, the more universal the feelings. Arcade Fire return to Funeral’s small town streets all grown up and leave feeling even older, alienated from a generation of kids far too jaded, too “Rococo” to find wonder in a snowy power outage, lost in the conformist “Sprawl,” pining for people and places long gone. You can’t go home again, and the Arcade Fire can’t make Funeral again. The heartbreaking beauty of The Suburbs is in how they try and fail to do just that, just like the rest of us.

4. This is Happening  (LCD Soundsystem)

James Murphy opens his latest midlife dance party crisis sing-song muttering to himself about lost inspiration and shitty company over a drum stutter. When the synths kick in, Murphy is reborn as a glam rock crooner, dancing hmslef clean of the tedium, the bickering, the divorced friends, and all the other petty bullshit cluttering his workweek. On This is Happening, LCD Soundsytem grow from a one-man dance track factory into a real band, with Murphy’s soaring and sometimes startling vocal range on songs like All I Want and I Can Change teetering between youthful rock god wish-fulfillment and 40-something disillusionment. If this really is the last LCD Soundsystem album, here’s hoping Murphy’s next project finds him still flipping out with “Drunk Girls” in the clubs, striving to stay forever young-ish.




6. Forgiveness Rock Record (Broken Social Scene)

I’m still holding out hope for the Broken Social Scene record that as loose and jangly as one of their tremendous live shows. Until then, Forgiveness Rock Record comes awful damn close, particularly in the wordless surge of anticipation and excitement in the aptly named anthem Meet Me in the Basement and the herky-jerky backstage drama of Art House Director.

7. Together (The New Pornographers)

Seems like every time the New Pornographers release a new album you hear it might be the end -- too much talent, too many egos, too much band for one band, too much band for one record. Maybe we can take this album title as a declaration, or perhaps a mission statement. Despite their ample individual talents, and despite the sometimes fragmented feel of records so brimming with disparate styles and conflicting grand ideas, no solo record to come out of this supergroup matches the magic of hearing Neko Case belt an A.C. Newman anthem like Crash Years, then harmonize on a pop rocker like Your Hands (Together), then step aside so Dan Bejar can slink through a tune like Silver Jenny Dollar. If ever a group was even greater than the considerable sum of its parts, it’s this one.






9. Lisbon (The Walkmen)

Nobody’s made better lost at 2AM music than the Walkmen this past decade -- if I owned a bar, that distinct deep bass drum rumbling under twangy guitars and Hamilton Leithauser’s straining howl would nudge my patrons out the door every night of the week. “You took the high road, I couldn’t find you up there,” wails Leithauser on Angela Surf City, and the break-up at the heart of Lisbon only gets worse from there: Stranded’s boozy, buzzed pleading, Victory’s bloody want for closure, the self-pitying rebound on Woe is Me, and, best of all, the midnight ache of Blue as Your Blood. Lisbon ends with Leithauser shoveling snow in a cold, lonely winter, cracking jokes with a friend’s wife, barely hanging on. Love hurts, and worse, sometimes it hurts this much.

8. Great Vacation! (Sleeping in the Aviary)

We’ve all had that high school English teacher who sighs about how lucky we are to be reading Romeo & Juliet or To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. That’s how I feel about anyone coming to Great Vacation! without two year’s worth of Sleeping in the Aviary’s strung-out live freak shows warping their minds. Or at least I wonder: would I cackle even harder at the sick-puppy S&M mock-tragedy of Maria’s Ghost if this record was my first time hearing it? Would leadsinger-cum-madman Elliott Kozel’s Method gargling on Titanic-esque ballad “Last Kiss on a Sinking Ship” be even more of a kooky delight?

Longtime fans will think they’ve inadvertently bought some mislabelled greatest hits package, but there’s plenty of new on Sleeping in the Aviary’s third album. Robust production, such as the soothing cabana beats on Floating in Space or the Arcade Fire cabaret of Axes Ground Looth Tooth, add a new dimension of quirks without softening the band’s lovable strangeness. Not that there’s anything soft about Kozel -- he remains a fascinating study in hipster rage at its boiling point, getting high on stealing a car in You Don’t Have to Drive and expecting the worst on country-tinged closer And the Very Next Day I Died.


10. All Day (Girl Talk)

A mixtape so epic it deserves its own list.

Top Five Monster Mash-Up Moments on Gregg Gillis’ latest pop-rock-rap-dance clusterfuck:

5. Lil Wayne’s Money to Burn and Arcade Fire’s majestic Wake Up creating a moment of hip hop conquest worthy of Kanye.

4. Biggie and James Brown slinging grunts across Sunshine of Your Love’s bluesy funk.

3. “Twerk twerk twerk” bouncing along to Mr. Blue Sky.

2. Haterz Everywhere basking in Scorsese’s gangsterization of the Layla piano coda.

1. ODB getting raw and “Creep”-y with Radiohead.

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