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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This week True Panther announced Glasser’s forthcoming debut album, Ring.  The label has promised that the album “builds on the tradition of classic albums like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet song-cycle: albums that as a whole create stories that are bigger than the sum of their individual songs.”  And the promises keep coming:  “Ring is named for [the] chiastic, or “ring,” structure, an idea borrowed from the oral tradition.  In it, ideas are pair in a symmetric order, often leading bidirectionally toward a central idea.  Cameron [Mesirow, the woman behind the project] structured the album similarly, with no set beginning or end, with its songs representing fluctuating and often contradictory emotional states.”

All that, of course, remains to be seen, but I could certainly use more albums as good as Astral Weeks or Trapped in the Closet.

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Here’s what I know: the woman can write a great song and the label can line up an all-star lineup of in-house artists to throw down some great remixes.  Glasser’s debut EP, which True Panther released last year, features a trio of charming songs that were simultaneously spare and lush.  My favorite song, “Glad,” incorporates a maraca and an organ and an electric piano into a song that belies its seriousness:  “There’s a fire in your eye/Fires calm but the truth burns on/While we wait around to die.”

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Whereas Mesirow is content with the skeletal percussion to drive her song, Delorean’s remix swaddles her composition in a echoing synths and a programmed cymbal ride.  Rounding out the mix with a Balaeric bass thud, synthetic strings, and sampled fireworks exploding in the sky, Delorean opens up in the insular world of “Glad” to the wider world.  The Spanish band shows a surprising amount of restraint with the remix, which is appropriate considering the restraint shown by Mesirow in the original.

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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Culture has a funny way of responding to the economic and political reality around it.  In the 1930′s, cheery Hollywood musicals thrived because people needed a break from the harrowing reality of an global economic collapse and the dark specter of fascism.  What does it say, then, about our culture when the kids are so obsessed with translating the ethos of summer into beats and melodies?  Does the fact of Neon Indian just mean that we’re really teetering on the edge of another dark ages?

If that’s the case, then Delorean‘s excellent “Stay Close” is just another sunny diversion from the gut-wrenching reality of our situation.  The song works partially because it never quite settles into a groove.  It bounds forward with reckless abandon, adding and shedding elements as it moves.  But the song is anchored by that indelible house vocal sample.  For a song about the unbridgeable distance between people (“Where can I reach you?”), Delorean manage to make “Stay Close” about as upbeat as a day at the beach.

Delorean’s full-length debut, Subiza, come out June courtesy of True Panther.