NO GENRE

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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Before heading out on a brief tour, Wolf Parade have released a new single this week, “Semi-Precious Stone” b/w “Agent of Change.”  In Wolf Paradic democracy, the single features one contribution from Krug and one from Boeckner.  The A side is Krug’s “Semi-Precious Stone,” a bluesy take on Wolf Parade’s warped classic rock.  The song begins normally enough, but soon Krug and company have thrown everything into high gear:  the guitars shoot like comets across the dome of the song and Krug introduces a nasty little gospel organ.  When the band recorded Expo 86, they evidently put enough songs on tape for two full albums, so we should fully expect these singles to continue rolling out over the next few months.

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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Today we got our first peek at Wolf Parade‘s forthcoming Expo 86, out June 29th on Sub Pop.  The preview was rather egalitarian: one song from Camp Dan and one song from Camp Spencer.

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First, we have Boeckner serving up his best Springsteen with “Ghost Pressure.”  Boeckner’s compositions seem to be getting looser, airy enough to include more of Krug’s expressive keyboard work.  Krug himself shows us later in the song to lend support to the line that closest resembles a chorus: “Little vision, come shake me up, shake me up.”

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Next, we have Krug’s mighty “What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way).  The band weaves a complicated nest of keyboards and guitars, tucking little melodies in every possible crack.  Overall, it seems as if the band is building on their work on At Mt. Zoomer: prog-rock chaos theory made simple for punk fans. While I’ll probably always miss the over-heated burn of their debut, I don’t regret the band’s metamorphosis.  Afterall, that’s why we still have Hadnsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown.

mp3:  Ghost Pressure

mp3:  What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way)

Exclaim is reporting that a new Wolf Parade should expected on June 29 on Sub Pop. What’s even more exciting is that the band recorded 15 songs and over 80 minutes of music. Dan Boeckner is on record as saying that the band would consider an LP plus EP set of releases or . . . wait for it . . . a double album. The album was recorded live (with “zero” overdubs) and consists of “a few songs that are really, really intensely keyboard-heavy” and some songs that are “heavy ’80s coke rock.” Considering that the band promised a prog-rock spectacle with At Mount Zoomer, we should probably take his word for it on this one. The band also expects to release a 7” single ahead of the new album. And if you needed more good news from the camp, Boeckner also said that he and wife Alexei Perry are going to be writing songs for the next Handsome Furs record tentatively planned for next spring.

Check out a defining performance of “I’ll Believe in Anything” from CMJ in 2005:

In a rather surprising move, Wolf Parade’s epic prog-rock exercise “Kissing the Beehive” finally gets the video treatment. Treatment is the operative word here: the video features only a few actual minutes of music from the 11 minute monolith. Instead, we get a frustrated Carey Mercer, the lunatic/frontman of the Frog Eyes, moping on a beach surfboard in hand. When the music finally arrives, we watch a man in a wetsuit whip the ocean until the scene abruptly cuts to night. A coven of prawn people congregate on the beach, kidnap Carey Mercer, and, presumably, sacrifice him, his blood squirting dramatically across his surfboard. Seriously:

The video was directed by Matt Moroz and Tracy Maurice, the pair behind both the modestly tragic “Shine a Light” and the operatically tragic “I’ll Believe in Anything.”

There are rumors swirling that Wolf Parade will be announcing a new album sometime soon. This seems likely because a) the band have a short European tour starting in May and b) Spencer Krug has gone over a month now without releasing anything.