Favorite Albums from 2010

After much lollygagging and fence-riding, I’ve decided to come forth with my list of favorite albums from 2010.  To be honest, some of this could be blamed on copious rewrites of the mini-reviews for each album in the list.  This task just got too overwhelming.  (How does Chris Short do it?!!)  So I decided to just go with a list, no annotation.

My criteria for this list was simple; I chose my favorites from last year.  These were the albums I listened to in their entirety most frequently.  There are no reissues, 45s or EPs, as I placed those in an addendum with honorable mentions.  So here are my fifteen favorite albums from 2010, in no particular order.

1. Swim – Caribou (Merge)
2. Transit, Transit – Autolux (TBD)
3. The Changing of the Guard – Starflyer 59 (Tooth and Nail)
4. Cave Syndrome – Transient Songs (Indian Casino)
5. The Courage of Others – Midlake (Bella Union)
6. Who We Touch – Charlatans (Cooking Vinyl)
7. Clinging to a Scheme – The Radio Dept. (Labrador)
8. The Lady Killer – Cee-Lo Green (Elektra)
9. Losing Sleep – Edwyn Collins (Heavenly)
10. Intriguer – Crowded House (Fantasy)
11. Each Other All the Time – Cowboy Indian Bear (The Record Machine)
12. Cosmogramma – Flying Lotus (Warp)
13. Beach Fossils – Beach Fossils (Captured Tracks)
14. My Room in the Trees – The Innocence Mission (Badman)
15. Into the Great Wide Wonder – Trentemøller (In My Room)

Honorable Mentions

• Other People’s Songs – Damien Jurado and Richard Swift
• The Long Play – Sam Phillips
• 2010 Recordings – Monahans
• Aias 7” – Aias (Captured Tracks)
• Coals to Newcastle – Orange Juice (Domino)
• Say No to Love 7” – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (Slumberland)
• Mechanism Design 10” – Kingdom of God Mathematics (Scatterplot Sounds)

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2010 in Review

Do I have to post these statistics generated by WordPress about this site?  Of course not.  But since I was encouraged by folks in the community to create it, I thought I’d share how well I’ve done.  (Or better yet, how well you’ve helped me do.)

Thanks,
Jonathon

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,600 times in 2010. That’s about 16 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 78 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 151 posts. There were 73 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 24mb. That’s about a picture per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 23rd with 93 views. The most popular post that day was Episode 48: Into the Hollywood Sky.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, radiofreeraytown.com, vagrantcafe.com, en.wordpress.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for francoise hardy, françoise hardy, sister rosetta tharpe, radio free raytown, and peter gabriel genesis.

Concerning Year-End Lists…

There seems to be an expectation that if one is a discerning music enthusiast, he must develop year-end lists with best/favorite albums from that year.  I always wait until the year is actually over to create such a list.  (And if you’re lucky, in a month or two, you’ll receive a copy of the annual Song’s in Jon’s Beard, a mix CD of my favorite songs from the year.)

I am unsure whether I am hesitant to make a definitive statement or whether it really is that hard to decide.  One thing I can say is that Katy and I continue discovering some really good releases from 2010 (like the new Motel Beds album).  So if I had made a list two months ago, like a friend of mine, I would have missed quite a few excellent records.

All that said, I’ll try to have a list created and annotated by the end of January.