#10 Jenny and Johnny – I’m Having Fun Now

#9 Tim Kasher – Game of Monogamy

#8 Hot Chip – One Life Stand

#7 Cadillac Sky – Letter in the Deep

#6 The New Pornographers – Together

#5 Broken Bells – Broken Bells

#4 She & Him – Volume Two

#3 Micah Schnabel – When The Stage Lights Go Dim

#2 Trampled By Turtles – Palomino

#1 Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More

Invoking the Civil War, Jimmie Rodgers and Melville (as well as an ethereal guest vocal by Neil Young), The Union is heavy on gravitas especially on the profound death march “There’s No Tomorrow.” It also has fun moments and there is pleasure to be had in hearing skilled craftsmen show off.
2. Kath Bloom – Thin Thin Line

Kath’s music always sounds a little distant, like the microphone is far away and she is singing in some other decade. Thin Thin Line could just as easily have come out in 1973. It’s like a dream. “Is This Called Living” is melodic, has great, meandering backing vocals and Kath soars into falsetto like she means every sharpened note of it.
3. Bruce Springsteen - The Promise

Probably the best release of the year and in the top 5 for Bruce overall. Culled from his strongest, hungriest and most ambitious period (the late 1970s) these 21 songs plow through the landscape like a juggernaut at the magic hour.
4. Broken Social Scene -  Forgiveness Rock Record

Spewing hooks, impenetrable lyrics and a fog of production this album is hard to get sick of and perfect if you find yourself in a fevered state wanting to tap your feet. It’s good to see a buzz band do things on their own terms and make something vividly interesting (as opposed to Spoon, The National and Arcade Fire whose albums didn’t suck, they just provided exactly what was expected of them).
5. Jonathan Richman - Oh Moon, Queen Of Night On Earth

Muted, dissonant and heavy on minor chords. This is the album that Nietzsche would have made if he was around, into 50s music and the Velevet Underground and if the syphilis hadn’t swiss-cheesed his brain. Minor Richman but still leagues beyond what most people are doing (sorry Neil Young). “I Was the One She Came For” is a glorious standout.
6. Jonsi – Go

Following the evolution of Sigur Ros Go comes across like some new kind of math. Swirling nonsensical loveliness never sounded so good and un-psychedelic. Makes me want to doodle on my notebook and develop a crush on someone who smells good.

7. Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love

 Solid, literary and playful, B&S are securing their place in the respectable world of new classic rock. Its has its retched lulls (who invited Norah Jones? Seriously, who invited her?) but “I Didn’t See It Coming” makes up for it in spades. Not since Kenny Loggins’ “Danny’s Song” has someone written such a catchy song about not having money.
8. Wings-  Band On The Run (Reissue)

It feels a little like cheating to put this on the list but come on musicians, a 37 year old albums’ re-release is better than most digital crap being secreted by the anuses of the uninspired. The title track and “Let Me Roll It” are on par with any Beatles record.
9. Black Keys – Brothers

The whole album flows together in an easy and groovy way. I like it when you can hear distinct influences filtered through a band’s sound and Black Keys are great at doing just that. I would have preferred some variation to the formula or at least a slightly different vocal sound but its effortlessness and ease are what make it a great driving record.
10. Grinderman – Grinderman

Unhinged stray notes, degradation and lust. You can feel the grease in Cave’s hair slither its way over the album. Makes me want to grow a moustache, get a jaguar and careen in to the nearest tree. There is nothing gentle about what Cave is doing in the good night. Plus, for like 2 minutes he even managed to make the new Harry Potter movie interesting.
 
Honorable mention:  Bob Dylan’s new bootleg series, OMD - History of Modern,  Cockfighter - Universal Field Theory Blues,  MGMT - Congratulations,  Wolf Parade - Expo ’86 and the New Pornographers’ Together.
 
Upcoming releases to be excited about: The new Paul Simon album (I really like his new Christmas song which is actually quite subversive), The Strokes new album (Julien’s solo album is under appreciated) , Benji Hughes (his “Country Love” song was easily one of the best things released this year; look it up), RTX  Rad Times, R. Kelly’s new addition to the Trapped in the Closet series and most emphatically: Destroyer Kaputt, which I have heard and it has managed to sear its way into my brain like salt on a snail—I still feel bubbly and wowed after the 99th listen.

Bright Eyes – that’s right, Bright Eyes and not the Mystic Valley Band or a solo Conor Oberst! - are currently preparing for the release of their 7th (or 10th, depending on what you count) release for indie powerhouse Saddle Creek Records. The album The People’s Key will see shelves (and my own excited face) on Oberst’s 31st birthday, Feb. 15, 2011. Core Bright Eyes contributors Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott are said to have joined the band once again for this release, and as usual other Saddle Creek family members are also along for the ride.

Spinner released the tracklisting for The People’s Key, listed below:

1. ‘Firewall’
2. ‘Shell Games’
3. ‘Jejune Stars’
4. ‘Approximate Sunlight’
5. ‘Haile Selassie’
6. ‘A Machine Spiritual (In the People’s Key)’
7. ‘Triple Spiral’
8. ‘Beginner’s Mind’
9. ‘Ladder Song’
10. ‘One for You, One for Me’

I do not want to be a hater, but as I drop the needle on Feb. 15th my fingers will be crossed in hopes of a little more to love on the new album than on 2007′s Cassadaga. Though the places Oberst and company took their music on Cassadaga were admittedly logical, they were at times hard to embrace. Oberst has always been the cleverly self-important self-deprecator with the off-key warble and the fevered guitar, but Cassadaga‘s expanded lyrical content, awkward honky-tonk, unapologetically ambitious arrangements and uncomfortably slick production felt more disheartening than grand. Maybe I will always compare my new acquisitions to my first loves, but I wouldn’t mind a Fevers and Mirrors or Lifted… part two one bit.

-Mylynda Nellermoe

Last month, Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Kurt Vile released his latest and, I would argue, strongest single: “In My TIme.” Give the song a listen and, if you feel the need, pick the 7″ up via Matador Records today.

The Heartlanders are a Cincinnati band transformed from the Austin, TX band The Story Of, but they seem to have left the Texas twang behind them for the folksy pluck that comes from being so close to the Kentucky border.

Some of their work rings of a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young influence, but the deeper the album goes, the broader the influences and sounds go so that a solid inspiraton force is somewhat lost. The album starts out with the character of street musicians on their cardboard stage. “Glorianna” and “Aerosols” attempt to engage passersby to toss a quarter their way, or maybe, just maybe, stop for a listen. However, once the sound is pinned down, Christman Hersa and Chris Sutton twist the dusty roadside stories into upbeat jamboree ditties with a message fit for a small town to relate to (“Defiance,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”), or soulful waltzes about pessimism and hard knocks (“The Letting Go”). The album is full of songs about down-on-their-luck subjects who just want to catch a break, and the random hopeful mind who accepts his fate and sways along to the life he was given (“Two Bottles”).

The simplicity of a brush snare beat and an acoustic guitar is definitely appreciated in On the Roam, but The Heartlanders are not about to hold back from small inner-complexities of a slide guitar or just the airy whine or groan of a standard electric guitar. “No Bettin’ Man” is a wrench in the smooth roll of the easy harmonies and acoustic guitar that riddle the album, but the song still clings to the whole message, evidence that a song that sounds nothing like the rest of the album (actually, it sounds like it was plucked from an Old 97s demo) can still fit right in.

“The Great Pacific” is a low point, with less of the soul of “The Letting Go” and more of a plodding, time-filling round toward the end than an addition to the artistic value of the album. The lullaby “Mexico” is the album’s sign off, as if the cardboard kings of the street corner are ending for the night to find their next gig. Hopefully, with the genuine emotion and endearing style the band and the album exudes, the next gig will be soon, with plenty of passersby too enticed to keep walking.

- Susan Tebben

The season rubs me wrong. The summer swells anon. So knock me down, tear me up.

Tomorrow the sun may be shining, although it is cloudy today.

It’s always good when an album starts on a high note and I appreciate when a vocalist with Belle and Sebastian, other than Stuart Murdoch, sings on-key (I’m looking at you Isobel Campbell and Stevie Jackson). The downside to setting such a pleasing tone is that it is quite difficult to maintain.  B&S give it their best effort; “I Want The World To Stop” sounds a lot like The Cure’s “Lovesong” if it featured Johnny Marr’s shining guitars. It would have been at home on previous album The Life Pursuit. “The Ghost of Rockschool” with its beatific, repetitive refrain about seeing God in everything, sounds like an outtake from The Boy With The Arab Strap.

The rest of the album, however, lacks the same caliber of excellence and parts of it sink to mucky depths. The Stevie Jackson penned “I’m Not Living in the Real World” comes across more as some music theory experiment than the cohesive sing-along pop song it tries to be. With inane lyrics, almost (but not quite) catchy “woo-oohs” and more key changes than a locksmith on thorozine, this shows why Stuart Murdoch should always wear the captain’s hat.

“Little Lou, Ugly jack, Prophet John” could have stayed merely boring and twee but by the time that Norah Jones yawns her easy-jazz-vocal-vomit, the album succumbs to its worst moments. Carey Mulligan doesn’t do much better on the title track though I appreciate Murdoch screwing with the formula a bit by bringing in different guests. One of these days his efforts might just pay off like it did on the barnburner “Lazy Line Painter Jane” with Monica Queen.

All in all, Belle and Sebastian Write About Love stays true to its title and the trajectory that Belle and Sebastian have been on since day one. Things are mixed up a little, as they have been for the last few albums. Some may pine for the earlier, “sinister” days or await the day when the band goes all out gospel disco (as it seems it might) but for the majority of fans that have grown accustomed to songs about misfits, religion and books, this album will hit the spot.

- Jeff Hassay

What that cheese/treasure ends up being is what all good albums have tucked within their depths: every influence and musical direction is bound together in an offering to the god of song. In this case we have what sounds like (latter-day) Replacements, (early mumbling, unsure and gorgeous) New Order, John Mellencamp (assuredly with both the “Cougar” and the hand claps) and Guided By Voices (on the rare day with Tobin Sprout helming the ship) trapped in some spacious room with a physics textbook, a barrel of coffee and some ramshackle instruments. Each song and packet of sounds within it are utterly different and yet part of the whole. As HESO Magazine said of them: “[Cockfighter is] ‘experimental in the extreme without sounding experimental or extreme.”

This ends up adding to the big picture of the album. As I see it, Universal Field Theory Blues is somehow about string theory, Einstein, frustration and chaos. Beginning (and ending) with an amorphic mass of swelling sound, the album literally comes out of the aether of nothingness and flirts with returning to the void throughout. “Spacetime” puts the main themes into play, “Some Girls” follows like a 70s John Lennon B-side with its clickity-clackity drums and upbeat pledge to “go all the way,” adding a human element before “The Field” revisits the chaos literally calling it out with the line “if chaos has control/ oh I don’t want to know.”

This line appears once more on the album in “Macho/Wimp,” which seems to be the nexus of random lines from the album that coalesces into perhaps the album’s highlight. It is a slow then rocking song about (physics? and) uncertainty that is so filled with self-doubt that it keeps getting in its own way. The awkwardness is the point. It sounds pure and pretty like a moment in “Freaks and Geeks” when the cheerleader smiles at the nerd or when a bank robber’s car won’t start but then suddenly, miraculously, does.

The album’s more brazen moments are hit and miss; “1922(1964)” is a dancey song that summarizes the big bang theory and ends with a Velvet Underground dirge…interesting idea, psychotic result. “The Cause” goes from slow, to boring, to sustaining one note for upwards of a minute and a half ( super boring) but it then eases into a bonus track (which must be called “Wall of Sound”) that piles loops and melodies on like a fat kid at an all you can eat ice cream shop. Stuff is running down his pudgy arm, chocolate chips are strewn about the floor, slide guitars become unhinged, a choir takes matters into their own hands but the result is a toothy smile.

- Jeff Hassay

Ed note: Jeff isn’t kidding; Cockfighter really is elusive. Find out what you can about them on the band’s Myspace page. Universal Field Theory Blues comes out Nov. 1st.

Guided By Voices

A rowdy crowd, an exalted entrance and a wall-of-sound take on “A Salty Salute” began Guided By Voices reunion show in Los Angeles. At the song’s end, the repeated line “the club is open” became a celebratory chant with the audience screaming in ecstatic fervor. It was a good opening.

Before the first note chimed, the evening already felt like a victory lap for the boys. This is the “classic” lineup of Guided By Voices, including Robert Pollard (who could have just as easily spent the evening writing three new albums instead of playing three, or four, from the mid nineties), Tobin Sprout with the voice (and name) of an Elvin angel, Mitch Mitchell on guitars, perpetual cigarette smoking and Pete Townshend-esque arm flailing Kevin Fennell on minimal basement style drums (propulsive, cymbal heavy and without needless fills or bravado) and Greg Demos, clad in a leather getup and oversized white shirt most likely from the discount bin in the rock cliché fashion depot, on bass.

These are Ohio’s unlikely lads who came to survey the scene that, in part belongs to them. Like Neil Young in the 90s strutting around with his feedbacking guitars looking at Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and grunge music in general, GBV can cast their gaze at anyone from the Strokes to Best Coast and know that some of the tracks that those trains chug along have been laid with care by Pollard and company.

Guided By Voices have always been wrapped in their own myth: prolific songwriting with a drunken garage band ethos that marries experimentation with a classic, Beatles-forged blueprint towards song structure. The songs could be clever, fast, slow, melodic or strange but (for better or worse) they never felt like the band tried too hard. Or could focus on them for over three minutes. This is exactly how the concert was.

Every song is a shot from the hip, possibly written in the time it took to record it—they are beyond calculation and instead come off like pure instinct, or  free associative seeds carelessly tossed into the soil to see what sprouts. Sometimes very beautiful things sprout. Many consider “Bee Thousand” and the GBV albums of the same era to be of the magical crop of weirdly successful and durable songs. This show was for these people.

The playing wasn’t expert – Pollard didn’t exactly hit every note (live or on recording) – but the beautiful thing about GBV is that they stacked the deck so artfully that they literally could do no wrong. They never were after gloss or precision, only a few chords and a catchy melody. The cacophony of the distorted guitars sometimes swallowed Pollard’s vocals. Fans kept jumping stage to hug Pollard, dance or take a shot from his tequila bottle and band mates sometimes seemed more eager to flirt with girls or do Guitar Hero poses than to play the songs accurately but this all just seemed like part of the fun of the evening.

When the band connected, like with “Tractor Rape Chain,” “Don’t Stop Now” and “Johnny Appleseed,” the effects were electric. Even for those who don’t understand GBV, upon hearing gems like these, conversion is likely. I shared most of the audience’s view (from what I could tell) that when Pollard gave up vocal duties to Tobin Sprout, things reached the next level. “Awful Bliss” and “14 Cheerleader Coldfront” are masterpieces whose lyrics and melody cut through to something eternal and beautiful, and all the while don’t really make any sense at all.

- Jeff Hassay