John Walker's Electronic House

Not all albums are good all the way through, and nor indeed can I always be bothered to find out. These were the songs that most infiltrated my 2010, despite their not all being released in 2010. I’m not going to play by your “rules”. Kieron plays by rules, and has posted his top 40 here. I had heard three of the songs before yesterday. I bet most of them feature bleepy-bloopy noises and shouty 20-something girls wearing school uniforms. And Dan’s top 10 is always worth reading, and he’s an endless source of great music tips (even though he likes that awful Best Coast album).

Please let me know the songs I should have included below.

SONGS

Janelle Monáe – Tightrope (Letterman version)

She may have the most distractingly annoying hair of all time, but this is an enormous, epic song, and I think the Letterman performance is the definitive version. It’s as classy as Frank Sinatra without the malevolent evil, and unquestionably boosted by the presence of a Muppet playing lead guitar. And clearly any performance can only be improved by a hooded Sean Combs bringing out a cape. I’ve yet to listen to the whole album, but recently learning that it’s the second in a series of concept albums about robots suddenly makes me a lot more interested.

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As space year 2010 winds down to a drizzly end, it seems only appropriate to tell anonymous people the things I liked during its reign. Sausages ranked highly. Other things were more specifically associated with the year. They include:

ALBUMS

It’s been a funny year for me with albums (which is exactly what I said last year). My go-to artists are all on off years, but for Cloud Cult. No Mountain Goats, no new Nick Cave (I’m pretending the Grinderman album didn’t happen), no new Rural Alberta Advantage nor Rock Plaza Central. But fortunately there was lots that was great. Here’s the ones I can remember because Spotify doesn’t have a stinking memory, and I accidentally switched off Last.fm scrobbling.

Please comment with whatever albums you think I should have included.

Links are to Spotify.

Sleigh Bells – Treats

There exists a special category of music that only appears during the correct alignment of the planets at the correct temperature at the correct barometric pressure. It’s an album that both Kieron Gillen and I like. He tends to like bleepy-bloopy music with shrieking girls, or boring over-produced pop. I tend to like nice music with nice singing. But then there comes a band like Sleigh Bells, who combine the two, without letting either side down. It’s bleepy and bloopy, shouty and poppy, and it’s brilliant. Its brilliance peaks with Infinity Guitars, whose hyperbole doesn’t end with the title. Then Rill Rill sounds like a Motown R&B cover combined with a girly indie single from 1993. It’s oddly hardcore, and yet incredibly delicate. It understands the importance of a heavy bass pound sat behind chirpy J-pop ditties. It can’t be forgiven for spelling a song “Straight A’s”, but that ignored it’s an utterly splendid album that unites the world in disharmonious harmony.

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Seems like it’s fun to post this while it’s still under 200k views, but in a larger part because this is a celebration of a victory over EMI, with the video being embeddable. To find out why that matters, see here. Meanwhile, this is absolutely astonishing, whether the cut after the blue curtains is terrible or not. Cheers to Kim for alerting me.

I don’t really have anything much to say about this, other than that it’s great, but I paused Cherry Lips by Headlights on YouTube and it looked incredible so this is a picture of it. And if my one celebrity reader is still reading, this band steps into the space Rilo Kiley left after their last album was so horrible. The video’s below.

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