NO GENRE

There they all are up there, feet joined together in a biologically unholy pair of Chucks:  Damon Albarn’s gawky 2D, Jamie Hewitt’s sinister Murdoc, André 3000′s crypto-watchman, and James Murphy’s serene baboon sensei.  And the collaboration sounds but exactly like you would expect it to sound.  It’s patently obvious who is responsible for each element of the song.  Besides the laconic 2D act, the bouncy 303 bassline bears the fingerprints of Albarn, while the supremely tight beat is Murphy’s creation through and through.  The song’s highlight, though, belongs to André 3000 and his virtuosic verse that serves as the song’s tent pole.  Like watching Ocean’s Eleven, you get the sense that these couple of guys had a blast in the studio together.  Or at least a good enough time that an open plea for a new Outkast album closes out the party.

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Gorillaz The Fall // Do you ever stop to think about how much music by Damon Albarn you’re probably familiar with?  Let me save you the trouble: it’s a shit-ton of music.  Here’s my rough count: seven albums with Blur, seven albums/collections with Gorillaz, three soundtracks, three collaborations with other artists collected in album formats, and one Chinese opera.  So, when Albarn announced that he had recorded another Gorillaz album using his iPad, I felt relieved that Albarn had stumbled on a portable studio that could serve as a outlet for his creative overflow.  The Fall is a much sadder album than Plastic Beach, which at times felt like a willfully nihilistic, millennial party.  Despite the generally warm sound of the songs on this record, they still sound like postmodern music boxes sitting in a desert of neon desolation.  Everything here sounds blasted and abandoned, haunted by blank signifiers floating in the airwaves.  Gorillaz has always been able to do despondent unlike anyone else.  Think of the exquisite “Slow Country” or “On Melancholy Hill.”  Those songs’ inherent bouncy melancholy were torpedoed by Albarn’s sad sack performances.  That empty feeling of sadness that comes with feeling adrift in an alien culture pervades The Fall.  Check out that vacant, thousand yard stare on 2D’s face on the cover.  That look finds its voice on downers like “Amarillo” and “Little Plastic Bags.”  But the bulk of the album is consumed by dubby space jams like “Phoner to Arizona” and “Detroit.”  The album’s highlights—the wonderful “Amarillo,” the Bobby Womack-helmed “Bobby in Phoenix,” and “Hillbilly Man”—more than make up for pleasant instrumentals that could easily be dismissed as really hip dinner music.  The album, like G Sides and D Sides, is essentially P Sides, a throwaway “album” that doesn’t necessarily deepen the band’s catalog.  What it does do, though, is add a few tracks Gorillaz’s ever-expanding catalog of indispensable material.  Rating: 7 / 10

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LCD Soundsystem London Sessions/Live at Alexandra Palace // The fact of the matter is that LCD Soundsystem need to be seen to be believed.  Watching a 40 year old man whipping kids half is age into a disco dance fever is a sight to behold.  Of course, LCD Soundsystem has been one of the most lovingly fastidious studio bands of the past decade, but it’s on the stage, surrounded by humming microphones and sizzling speaker cabinets, that the band displays a whole new set of strong suits.  While LCD Soundsystem spent the bulk of 2010 touring behind their great great great This is Happening, they couldn’t possibly tour enough to get to everyone who loved this record.  As a sort of consolation prize, the band released London Sessions and Live at Alexandra Palace. Calling London Sessions a live album, though, requires that you adopt the strickest, most clinical definition of live album.  All the songs were recorded live . . . in a studio.  The record does a decent job of estimating what the band sounds like in a live setting, but what’s missing is the humid ethos of 2,000 screaming fans urging this band to drive them into a dance frenzy.  Enter Live at Alexandra Palace. Case in point:  after an extended understated introduction to “Dance Yrself Clean,” the band doubles-down on selling the hard transition into song’s epic back half and the crowd responds with an orgasmic roar.  While the sound quality isn’t all that great (the bass tends to swamp “All My Friends” and the cymbals are too loud on “Tribulations), it’s kind of refreshing to hear a slightly off mix of LCD Soundsystem in that I think it mimics actually watching them live.  Of course, the setlist is incredible: it’s a near perfect mix of songs that beautifully flow into one another to create something like a greatest hits concert.  The highlights are the highlights you would expect:  ”Movement” roars like the funkiest punk song you’ve ever heard, “All My Friends” gathers enough steam to power a human soul for a lifetime, “Yeah” is a dance floor mass hallucination, and “Home” is an elegant concert closer.  I felt incredibly fortunate to catch LCD this fall because it was obvious from the first song that I was watching one of the premiere live bands of our time.  And I’m happy that London Sessions and Live at Alexandra Palace are officially sponsored testaments to that fact.  Rating: London 7 / 10; Alexandra 8 / 10

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Vampire Weekend iTunes Session // I think we’re at that point with Vampire Weekend where a) the insouciance that greeted Contra from some of the hipper corners of the internet is obviously highly postured bullshit because b) the backlash against the backlash is in full effect because c) most listeners recognize that the band is fully accomplished and, therefore, have little more to prove.  All of that is to say that I more than welcome a stopgap EP via iTunes.  While there are no strictly original compositions, we are treated to two excellent covers: Springsteen’s “I’m Going Down” and The Honeycombs’ “Have I the Right”  The band has always had exquisitely eclectic taste in covers.  Check out “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac and “Ruby Soho” by Rancid and “Exit Music” by Radiohead.  The covers here are appropriately reclaimed by the band.  ”Have I the Right,” in particular, retains that wonderful stomp of the original’s chorus, but the band finds the beat in the piano instead of the kick drum, a nice stylistic touch.  And “I’m Going Down,” The Boss’ swinging sad-eyed rev-up, is recreated as a well-mannered stomp that locates the pathos hidden underneath the original’s bar band shuffle.  Elsewhere, Vampire Weekend reinvent their own work by slowing things down and lacing the composition with horn flourishes (especially “Holiday”).  For a band as clearly rooted in ska, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for the band to invited a horn section into the recording studio.  All said, iTunes Session isn’t indispensable, but it’s a worthy addition to a strong, small catalog.   Rating:  7.5 / 10

The thing that made 2010 such a remarkable year was the fact that the democratization of taste (thank you, internet) has continued unabated.  Everyone has the same access to every album, every artist, every song.  It’s in no way weird to like both Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and Salem’s “King Night.”  And with this, genre distinctions are becoming increasingly meaningless.  The balkanization of genre into ever-smaller units of sounds and artists means that they tend to less impactful and more ephemeral.  It’s no coincidence, then, that the best albums of the year were the albums that played with your genre expectations.  You wanted a funky hipster throwdown with LCD Soundsystem?  Tough luck pal, here’s the best record that David Bowie never got around to writing.  Kanye West wrote an emotionally devastating album that barely features a potential radio hit; Crystal Castles recorded the best punk rock album by completing ignoring guitars.  Here We Go Magic tried to resurrect motorik-driven Krautrock for the masses, and How to Dress Well casually re-invented 50 years of R&B tradition with a 4-track machine and some spare time.  And the most recognizable DJ of our time is a goofy guy who simply holds a mirror up to our culture so we can see it for all its strange glory.  But this has been the story of popular music for the past decade, and this is not a new thesis.  I’m just thankful to be living in the most productive, most generous era of pop music in history.  More people are doing more awesome things than ever before.  Here’s the proof: forty albums that were stunning and disquieting, revelatory and cathartic, destructive and piercing, redemptive and exhilarating.

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As much as I enjoy geeking out by building best-of album lists, song lists are infinity more interesting.  A song is a high-wire act: one slip, one faulty step and you’ve got a mess on your hands.  Albums, almost by their very nature, are more forgiving: great albums still have awful, awful songs.  So a list of the best songs of a period tend to be more inclusive of different types of talent.  Quite a few of these bands here don’t have enough of it to sustain an album (yet?), but they have enough to absolutely crush one.  So, culled together with scraps of time over the past week and crafted with a fair amount of thought and consideration, I humbly submit 40 songs that have it pretty well locked down this year.  Comments, omissions, counter-arguments all certainly welcome.

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The take-the-cake biggest cliché in music journalism is that every year is a great year in music.  And, of course, this is true because music is one of our lastingly great contributions as a species.  So, just how great is 2010 going to be?  Pretty fucking great.  After the jump, check out my best/favorite albums of the year so-far.

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Do you realize how fucking great a Gorillaz greatest hits record would be? The thing would be practically unstoppable: “Clint Eastwood,” “DARE,” “Feel Good Inc,” “Dirty Harry,” “Slow Country,” “Tomorrow Comes Today,” “19-2000,” among about a dozen others. Gorillaz has always been more of a great singles band than album-oriented outfit. That being said, Plastic Beach is their most consistent album that will, nonetheless, add quite a few more highlights to this imagined greatest hits package.

Each Gorillaz album has a dual highlight: the funky go-getter dressed in flashy t-shirt and neon kicks and the sad-sack downer wearing yesterday’s pajamas. On their self-titled debut, this couple was “Clint Eastwood” and “Slow Country,” respectively. The pair is readily identifiable on Plastic Beach: “Superfast Jellyfish” is the album’s best rave-up, while the exquisite “Rhinestone Eyes” plays to the surprising strength of Albarn’s deadpan 2-D act.

As a whole the album balances these exuberant highs and the slouching lows. After a surprisingly slow start (two introductions to the album plus a prelude to the third song!), the album takes off with “White Flag” when MCs Kano and Bashy trade rhymes over a funky flute driven beat provided by the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. The one-two punch of “Stylo” and “Superfast Jellyfish” employ surprising guests (Bobby Womack, De La Soul, Gruff Rhys) to great effect. On the softer side, Little Dragon gives Albarn a hand with “Empire Ants” and “To Binge” to create a pair of watery dreams. Later, Lou Reed lends his trademark talk-singing to the terrific “Some Kind of Nature,” a song that sounds more upbeat than the lyrics suggest. Albarn assumes solo control over “On Melancholy Hill” and “Broken,” the former of which is one of the strongest tracks on the album. Late on Plastic Beach, Bobby Womack returns for the forlorn “Cloud of Unknowing.” The song finds him standing on the beach at night, staring at the lonely satellites swinging in their orbits.

While the album is a near perfect 50/50 split between the upbeat and the ponderous numbers, the sequencing is a bit off. The band has stacked the deck in favor of the first half of the album; the second half lags a bit due to the number of soggy down-tempo songs. Taken on their own, however, some of these moments (particularly “Cloud of Unknowing” and “To Binge”) reward patient listeners.

Thematically, the album concerns the degeneration of the environment. For Gorillaz, though, the ruthless exploitation of our planet isn’t just an inconvenient truth; it’s a terrific metaphor for postmodern artistry. The way that far-flung detritus ends up on a beach in the middle of the ocean is evidence of chaos theory’s cruel logic. The metaphor suggests that culture is really just an ocean of unmoored trash, washing up on far shores, waiting to be reused and recycled. And from the beginning, hasn’t this been Gorillaz’s modus operandi?

Rating: 7.5/10