Top ten of 2010, etc.

A list of my top ten albums of 2010 is up now on the TONY site, along with choices from my esteemed colleagues. Following are a few thoughts on my selections and some haphazardly culled multimedia.

1. Francis and the Lights It'll Be Better

Francis Farewell Starlite and his ever-evolving "and the Lights" enterprise had a phenomenal year careerwise, opening shows for MGMT, Ke$ha, La Roux and Drake, and even contributing a tune to the latter's pop-radio-warhorse debut. But for whatever reason, people seem to have slept on Francis's own first full-length, It'll Be Better. It didn't grab me at first—I was initially pretty down on it, actually. Where was the sleek, cheeky funk that had made previous Francis releases like A Modern Promise so very much fun? And what was up with that loping, countryish opening track?



When I revisited the record, though, it all clicked into place. A lot of people are going to (if they haven't already) misfile Francis as a purveyor of kitsch. I think he's a dead-serious soul man, one whose sizable eccentric streak only accentuates the emotive power of his music. My favorite track is "Knees to the Floor" (stream it above, along with the rest of IBB). Dig the Steely Dan–level lead-guitar wizardry of "Jump Back" Jake Rabinbach on the pre-choruses (1:07, e.g.) (if you're feeling that, there's tons more to be found on the album). And dig the nocturnal sizzle of the whole song, its chilly warmth.

I guess in a way, It'll Be Better as a whole does have a certain retro appeal, almost Miami Vice–ish and certainly extrapolate-able to the realm of kitsch, but to me, it's a release unmoored from time and unfiltered by irony or any other kind of aesthetic distance. It's just a record that makes you want to drive and think and feel and live and love. It's that unbeatable combination of melancholy and dance-floor fuel that you find in the best, say, Michael Jackson. And then there are these odd twinges of borderline-corny humor that leave you scratching your head in delight. (Dig this show-tune-ish nugget from my second-favorite track, "Going Out": "If you've ever seen a movie alone / Then you know what I'm sayin'.")

I must have listened to this record 100 times in 2010, and I don't anticipate the play count diminishing in 2011. For some context, here's a TONY profile I wrote on the man behind the Lights.

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2. Drake Thank Me Later

As mentioned above, Francis also wrote a song ("Karaoke") that ended up on Drake's Thank Me Later:



This track tears me right up. "Put the tea in the kettle and light it / Put your hand on the metal and feel it / But do you even feel it anymore?" See what I mean? No wonder Francis thought twice before letting it go. Thank Me Later as a whole sustains this murky yet lucid late-night-ness—it's a killer record on which cocky hits ("Up All Night") sit beside ultra-ambitious postsoul sound poems ("Shut It Down").

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3. The Bad Plus Never Stop



Never Stop placed at number nine on my year-end jazz list, but as I prepared my pan-genre top ten, the album just wouldn't quit—I realized I'd underestimated it, and it shot to number three. There's an openheartedness to this album that really grabbed me, once I lived with it for a while. So much feeling, tunefulness, groove, abandon, refinement. It's great jazz, but more importantly, it's great music. "People Like You," a devastating ballad, is above. The more uptempo/energetic material ("Never Stop," e.g.) is every bit as impressive. You'll be humming these songs in the shower and carrying their sparkling, autumnal beauty with you.

*****
I think my blurbs on the TONY page—and the attendant links you'll find there—do decent justice to the rest of my list, but here are some breathless reflections:

4. Buke and Gass Riposte



Folk-prog champions emit a joyful noise on the 21st-century urban backporch.

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5. Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy



Just about as worthy of your time and attention as everyone says it is.

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6. Graham Smith Accept the Mystery



He's always brilliant, but this might be the most streamlined, re-listenable KGW album I've heard. (Full details via kgw.me.)

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7. Ludicra The Tenant



Sad, grueling, epic and heavy as fuck.

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8. Sia We Are Born



The hooks on this album will not go away.

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9. Charred Walls of the Damned Charred Walls of the Damned



I've never been a huge power-metal guy, but this subgenre-straddling rager sounds to me like the perfect send-off for the late, great Ronnie James Dio.

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10. Dan Weiss Trio Timshel

Dan Weiss - Timshel EPK from AhnFilm on Vimeo.

Graceful, enchanting and stubbornly odd piano-trio-ism.

*****

RUNNERS-UP: ALBUMS

Following are a handful of full-lengths I was heartbroken to have to leave out. (The first three are annotated with blurbs I'd composed for possible TONY-list inclusion.)

Kayo Dot Coyote



Postmetal mastermind Toby Driver released the latest, greatest chapter in his own beautiful dark twisted fantasy.

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Killing Joke Absolute Dissent



British veterans unleashed an industrial-goth juggernaut, firing a warning shot at their buzzy descendants.

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Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth Deluxe



Seven years after his last album as a leader, a jazz bassist issued this rapturous set of wordless songs.

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Atheist Jupiter



I thought Atheist's comeback effort, Jupiter, ruled. Some were not sold, but I adored the manic spazziness on display here—it seemed like a expertly calibrated updating of the band's classic death-fusion vibe, i.e., what they might have ended up sounding like in 2010 had they never left.

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Deathspell Omega Paracletus



I will definitely be going back to Paracletus, a consuming monster of an avant-garde metal album. The guitar playing on this record falls somewhere between horrifying and exalted—to hear what I mean, listen to the riff that breaks through at 1:32 in the track above. The album is filled with moments like this: mournful, gemlike melody floating above a high-tech musical firestorm.

*****

SONGS

Look for a best-singles-of-2010 round-up once Pazz and Jop rolls around—for now, I'll nod to a few stand-alone tracks not shouted-out there.

Free Energy - "Free Energy"



This song destroys, plain and simple: instant-classic neoclassic rock.

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Katy Perry - "California Gurls"



Despite the lame Snoop guest spot, "Calfornia Gurls," with its glimmering neodisco sheen, was another bubblegum favorite.

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Janelle Monáe - "Oh, Maker"



Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid dazzled me on a first listen, but lost a bit of luster as the year wore on. Nevertheless, "Oh, Maker" stuck with me throughout 2010. It's a masterful soft-soul song, tender and bittersweet, with a strange, appealing halo of British folk-pop.

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Danzig - "Deth Red Moon"



There was no getting around the spottiness of Danzig's Deth Red Sabaoth—there are just too many skippable tracks on there. But the standouts, "Hammer of the Gods" and "Deth Red Moon," were truly great, easily fit to mingle with the highlights of Glenn's stellar back catalog. "Deth Red Moon" in particular is shockingly good—a brooding, midtempo goth-blues wail that ranks with sleeper Danzig favorites like "Dominion." (Check out my exceedingly brief Danzig Q&A here.)

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Nicki Minaj - "Right Through Me"



And lastly: Nicki. My 2010 round-up wouldn't be complete without at least a name-check. You know the story by now: She ruled other people's hits (Drake's "Up All Night" and Kanye's "Monster," e.g.), but didn't deliver once the spotlight was on her (the Pink Friday full-length). I can't say I disagree too much with this now-pat narrative—it's pretty much how things have gone down. All the same, Pink Friday's "Right Through Me" is a beautiful song, an undeniably genuine portrait of the twisted love/hate matrix. (Interviewing Ms. Minaj was definitely one of the highlights of my journalistic year.)

Dead-ass doin' it: Phil Lynott, Nicki Minaj and other pop chameleons

Time Out New York: Do you think you can still be believable singing a sweet love song after you’ve done all that [raunchier material]—?
Nicki Minaj: Absolutely… I’m believable at whatever I do, because I’m dead-ass doin’ it.

The above was one of my favorite exchanges from a really enjoyable conversation I had with Nicki Minaj on behalf of Time Out. (Check out the full Q&A here if you have a sec.) The sentiment she's expressing—the weird dual personality that's required of a pop star, and the unflappable confidence needed to pull it off—has been ringing a bell with regard to my current listening obsession: Thin Lizzy.

The other day I finally watched The Rocker, a doc about the late Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott that I'd had lying around for a while, and I found myself newly impressed by his versatility. As with Ms. Minaj, whatever he did—whether it was a nakedly sentimental love song, a streetwise picaresque or a sleazy come-on—he was thoroughly convincing. Ludicra and Hammers of Misfortune guitarist John Cobbett eloquently summed up the core paradox of the man in a fine recent Invisible Oranges interview (a quote brilliantly excerpted by Inverted Umlaut): "Phil Lynott is the ultimate lyricist for the tough guy with the broken heart."

Today I've been spinning the outstanding 1979 Lizzy disc Black Rose: A Rock Legend, and I'm somewhat shocked by the sheer variety of emotions expressed here. There's one of Lynott's classic paeans to gritty urban life ("Toughest Street in Town"), a weirdly moralistic meditation on kinky sex ("S&M"), a determinedly sappy yet utterly charming tribute to his daughter ("Sarah," see above for a mind-blowing über-lounge rendition, complete with time-lapse-aging model stand-ins), a rueful I'm-through-with-the-bottle lament ("Got to Give It Up") and a half-crazed romantic kiss-off ("Get Out of Here"). I'm not yet through the concluding title track, but I'm prepared for another left turn.

In a weird way, this wanton versatility, the sheer disregard for emotional continuity, reminds me a lot of Ween's masters-of-disguise approach to album-craft. The message is that of all great pop (from Black Rose to Chocolate and Cheese and beyond): Each song is its own universe; live in this feeling for these three minutes. And maybe when that time has elapsed, you'll be transported in an instant to somewhere completely different. It's the same chameleonic impulse that allows Nicki Minaj to sass her way through "Itty Bitty Piggy" and then dreamily croon "Your Love" in the manner of a doe-eyed teenager. As fans, we're okay with the contradiction—as long as, like the great Phil Lynott, whatever the artist in question is doing at a given moment, he or she is indeed dead-ass doin' it.

Like a prayer: What "metal" can and should learn from Ludicra

Just returned from seeing Ludicra at Club Europa, a show I previewed for TONY. Late on a Sunday, feeling fried, but I'm so glad I went. I think I can say definitively that Ludicra's set was the most organically heavy performance I've ever witnessed by a metal band.

Too often, metal as it exists in my mind is not how it exists in the world. If you keep up with the genre, you know that over the past two decades, a sonic revolution has taken place, namely an abhorrent artificiality that sucks all the life out of the genre. Drum triggers, Pro Tools, noise gates -- it all adds up to fake, inanimate music. It might be a hackneyed argument, but it bears repeating over and over and over. Metal should be heavy. More and more, all this airless-sounding nonsense sends me screaming to my Zeppelin and Sabbath records, craving that fix of warm realness.

Ludicra's set was like a time machine to an era before all this nonsense. I encouraged my bandmate Joe to check out the band's magnificent new album, The Tenant (album cover above), and today he told me that it made him think of Kill 'Em All. I definitely agree that it takes you back via its holy rough fullness, its primal, thudding grace. The revelation that drums ought to sound like drums, the courage to have everything come at you in a real way.

I had a feeling they'd open their set with "Stagnant Pond," the lead track from The Tenant, and they did, and thus began 50 minutes or so of shock and rapture. I guess being a drummer myself I'm always going to fixate on the drummer, but I will tell you that Ludicra's percussionist, Aesop Dekker, is a master, worthy of any accolade. He drove the band with an unholy snare thwack which cut through the guitars like a gun shot, crystal-clear bell-of-the-ride accents placed with poetic accuracy, and a true patience and love of groove, whether that meant a speed-freak blast beat or a half-time trudge.

Bassist Ross Sewage alternately zoning out on the music's epic architecture and regarding the crowd with an unsettling scowl. Guitarist Christy Cather, a true metal hero with her curly blonde mane, Flying V axe and leather vest. The other six-stringer, John Cobbett, running his dancing fingers through their paces. And vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman... I don't even know how to describe it. You won't do better than Laal did, pegging her movements as theatrical and goblinlike. Her vocals convey genuine horror and despair. Not that generic black-metal, screaming-for-the-sake-of-screaming crap. There's no word for what comes out of her throat other than DIRE. She stomps around, contorts her body and face. It's almost but not quite cartoonish, a pantomime of evil, a stylized sort of possession.

The band charges as a team, headbanging in furious unison. Cather and Sewage shared one of those classic leaning-back-to-back guitar-tandem moments. The quintet had such a chemistry, such an effortless group choreography. I'm not sure exactly how long this lineup has been together, but you really got the vibe of a crew, of an "on-and-off-the-court" camaraderie.

And all in the service of maximum epic grimness, the epitome of what all metal really aspires to. This set was like a master class in the history of the genre, cherry-picking the awesomest aspects of all the various substyles. The neck-snapping groove of '80s thrash, as heard on The Tenant's "In Stable," which embodies the midtempo assault of Megadeth at their best. Holy, hymnlike interludes touching on the gothy beauty of bands like My Dying Bride. Hailstorm blast sections that could stand up against any of the Norwegian luminaries. Crawling-through-a-snowstorm-and-finally-glimpsing-the-sun, dark-yet-luminous doom metal. It sounds like a prayer.

I only know the new album so there were a few songs I didn't recognize, including a long, glorious encore. The crowd was so there, so present. I saw so much dancing, so much convulsing, so much screaming at the sky in response to the expertly orchestrated evil-ness of it all, and I was right there. Couldn't have sat down if I'd tried. Eyes closed, grimacing privately.

It was all poetry, all a reminder of why I'd had this music in my blood since my teens. You won't get this reassured feeling from very many bands. The genre is in vogue and it's overrun with... with itself really. With bands that hew closely to convention as if to a buoy in the sea. I say let it all go, unless it's something like this, that sums up the swelling emotion, the vastness, the power, the sorrow -- and served raw, please, without the spit-and-polish nonsense that passes for production, not to mention live sound, these days. Black Sabbath deserves a better legacy. Any band calling itself metal needs to provide maximum mood and maximum chops all filtered through a huge, gut-punching, organic sound. It should feel like getting flattened by a baroquely adorned tank and Ludicra did. Shock and awe indeed.