• Dec

  21

  Listening to … Top 5 of 2010 (with videos!)

  Filed under: album review, Music; Tagged as: Apocalyptica, Contra, he Roots, How I Got Over, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, OK Go, Seventh Symphony, Sleigh Bells, Treats, Vampire Weekend
  

  This was a year of ear worms with the best music of 2010 continuing to return to me in catchy, beautifully crafted tunes. Looking over my list of favorite albums from this year, I love that it included veterans with decades behind them and groups that are just emerging.

  
  1. The Roots, How I Got Over: Taking a gig as the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon could have been taken as a sign The Roots were done as a creative entity in their own right. But How I Got Over showed them to be far from over with a relevant and engrossing album perfectly tuned to uncertain times.

  There’s even a little Kentucky flavor with The Roots’ take on Dear God by the Monsters of Folk, the side project of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. Far from diluting the talents of The Roots, TV seems to have focused and diversified the band’s talents.

  
  2. OK Go, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky: There was a lot of chatter about this being a Prince sound-alike album, and hits like White Knuckles — my favorite song of 2010 — sure help make that case.

  But there is so much going on in this album from the churchy soul of Skyscrapers to the psychological nudity of Last Leaf that repeated listens reaffirm OK Go is a band that can go anywhere, and more and more, it does.

  If you haven’t picked up this album already, get the Extra Nice Edition with loads of remixes and other cool stuff.

  
  3. Sleigh Bells, Treats: For a duo, Alexis Krauss and Derek E. Miller make a lot of noise. What’s really striking with this 3-year-old band is how beautifully crafted their noise is, and how many colors are in it, from percussion that sounds like it’s being hurled down a staircase to Krauss’ Kewpie doll vocals. Treats was this year’s biggest shot of adrenaline.

  
  4. Apocalyptica, Seventh Symphony: How can you resist a band Tenacious D calls, “classically trained to rock your (expletive) socks off?” How? It’s amusing, but what really sold me on this Finnish band I discovered through St. Louis photographer Todd Owyoung’s ishootshows.com was that they do bring a symphonic sensibility to their bone-crushing brand of rock.

  And the strings you hear there aren’t players for hire, but the three Sibelius Academy graduates that front the band: Eicca Toppinen, Paavo Lötjönen and Perttu Kivilaakso.

  
  5. Vampire Weekend, Contra: The Ivy League crew followed up their head-turning 2008 debut with a tidy 37-minute album of catchy, clever, globally influenced tunes.

  Released in the deep freeze of last winter, songs like Cousins and Horchata kept returning to my ears throughout the year, proving not all vampires suck.

  
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