I don't know if you're aware of this, but that^^ list was only one of the NY Times' lists of best of 2010 in music. There are 4 of them in total from 4 different music critics. If you did know, since this is a general thread, I think all of them should've been posted instead of just the one that included the artist you stan for.
2010 Anthems: From a Kiss-Off to Jolts of Hope
By JON PARELES
1. ARCADE FIRE “The Suburbs” (Merge). Memories of suburbia, questions of integrity, thoughts on time passing and portents of decline fill the ambivalent anthems on Arcade Fire’s third album. Their misgivings are all subsumed in music that can be punky or (more often) orchestral, with ascendant melodies that stubbornly radiate hope.
2. JANELLE MONÁE “The ArchAndroid” (Wondaland Arts Society/Bad Boy/Atlantic). This sci-fi concept album brims over with Ms. Monáe’s ambitions: singing, rapping, flirting, fighting for change and absorbing — for starters — funk, psychedelia, hip-hop and show tunes. It’s a tour de force; even the misfires are promising.
3. JOANNA NEWSOM “Have One on Me” (Drag City). Ms. Newsom’s rhapsodic, harp-centered songs have grown supple and curvaceous on this two-hour, three-CD album. Her voice is now richer and earthier, and she gives her songs breathing room, making her conundrums newly approachable but no less magical.
4. VAMPIRE WEEKEND “Contra” (XL). A lot goes on behind Vampire Weekend’s relentlessly clever, perky pop tunes. The lyrics, full of carefully deployed proper nouns, simultaneously flaunt and dissect the privileged life, while the production turns manic and kaleidoscopic, hopscotching a world of pop while listeners are distracted by sheer catchiness.
5. SUFJAN STEVENS “The Age of Adz” (Asthmatic Kitty). Electronic blips, drum machines and splotchy distortion are shock treatment for songs that might have been folkier on previous Sufjan Stevens albums. But what starts out feeling invasive turns into part of a more inclusive — and nuttier, and trashier — sound vocabulary, skewing the songs away from preciousness as he sings about love.
6. KING SUNNY ADÉ “Bábá mo Túndé” (Mesa/IndigeDisc). An unassuming concept: to record full-length stage versions of songs. But on the first studio album in a decade by King Sunny Adé, his Nigerian juju music simply flies. The songs are a stream of hand-played percussion, with voices and other instruments popping in strategically, as the production pinpoints every drum stroke and pedal-steel-guitar zing. It’s dizzying dance music that miraculously defies repetition.
7. SADE “Soldier of Love” (Epic). Quiet and plush don’t add up to comfortable on Sade’s first album since 2000. There’s deep desolation in the songs, and an aching, bluesy edge in her voice. Her band willfully ignores whatever passes for fashionable in current R&B, while down below, particularly in the rhythms and bass lines, there’s a strange, intricate undertow.
8. SLEIGH BELLS “Treats” (Mom + Pop Music/NEET). Every song on this album merges a noisy kick in the head with a pop enticement, as blasts of low-fi drums and loud guitar bracket girlish vocals. Each whipsaw only whets the appetite for more.
9. KANYE WEST “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam). Self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, grandiose and goofy, leaping from stomping drums to cellos to sampled soul to dance-club electronics, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” is a wildly multifarious inventory of Mr. West’s fixations. These id bulletins may not be timeless, but any obsessive type can relate to them. They add up to the definitive album on the pressures, diversions and payoffs of Internet-era celebrity.
10. DANGER MOUSE AND SPARKLEHORSE “Dark Night of the Soul” (Capitol/Lex/EMI). “Pain” is the first word on “Dark Night of the Soul,” one of the last projects by Mark Linkous, the songwriter who recorded as Sparklehorse, before his suicide in March 2010. His production and songwriting collaboration with Danger Mouse concocted stately, deliberately tarnished roots-rock full of despair and resentment. The guest lead singers — Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega, Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips — eerily echoed Mr. Linkous’s own voice.
Top Songs
CEE LO GREEN “____ You” (Elektra)
BEST COAST “Boyfriend” (Mexican Summer)
NEIL YOUNG “Rumblin’ ” (Reprise)
EMINEM FEATURING RIHANNA “Love the Way You Lie” (Aftermath/Interscope)
DIE ANTWOORD “Enter the Ninja” (Cherrytree/Interscope)
GALACTIC FEATURING IRMA THOMAS “Heart of Steel” (Epitaph)
YEASAYER “Ambling Alp” (Secretly Canadian)
BRIAN ENO “2 Forms of Anger” (Warp)
MAVIS STAPLES “You Are Not Alone” (Anti-)
STANDARD FARE “Dancing” (Bar/None)
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/arts/music/19pareles.html?ref=jonparelesRedrawing Rhythmic Strategies
By BEN RATLIFF
1. STEVE COLEMAN AND FIVE ELEMENTS “Harvesting Semblances and Affinities” (Pi). Not that Mr. Coleman, the alto saxophonist, ever disappeared, but this feels like a return, his strongest and prettiest record in more than a decade. The band, with the singer Jen Shyu and the miraculous drummer Tyshawn Sorey, sounds lifted by the music’s complex latticework, deeply programmed but set spinning.
2. ANTONIO SANCHEZ “Live in New York” (Cam Jazz). A hungry quartet, a gig at the end of a tour. Recorded two years ago, this double-album documents a group that has already disappeared, with a two-saxophone front line of David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón. But on this long earful — most tracks exceed 15 minutes — Antonio Sanchez, the drummer and composer, compresses many of the strategies from the last 40 years of small-group jazz into each performance, while letting some of today’s best soloists tear it up.
3. GUILLERMO KLEIN “Domador de Huellas” (Sunnyside). With a dozen jazz musicians, Argentine vernacular song form, strong rhythm and his own ambition as an arranger, this composer-pianist-singer transformed the work of Cuchi Leguizamón, one of Argentina’s great 20th-century folklorist composers.
4. HARVEY MILK “A Small Turn of Human Kindness” (Hydra Head). This Georgia band, fronted by Creston Spiers’s elephant roar and bottomless-well guitar sound, has drawn and redrawn the line between foolish and profound for nearly two decades; here the music intensifies both sides. It’s slow, dark rock — comically wounded, intensely focused, brilliantly recorded — for a suitelike 40 minutes.
5. THE FALL “Your Future Our Clutter” (Domino). Another lesson on perseverance by Mark E. Smith, the Fall’s acidly entertaining singer for more than three decades, with his latest sock-it-to-’em band. There’s a lot of postproduction here, shaping and unifying the record. But it doesn’t dampen Mr. Smith’s performance, which is bilious and strangely tender.
6. SAM AMIDON “I See the Sign” (Bedroom Community). This folk singer is trickier than he seems. He imposes a reedy, naïve-sounding voice and strong ideas about aural space on sturdy American traditions, from Georgia Sea Island songs to R. Kelly.
7. JASON ADASIEWICZ “Sun Rooms” (Delmark). An elegant and plain-spoken record — jazz as just the facts, ma’am, yet full of style and beauty — by a young Chicago vibraphonist and his quartet.
8. RANGDA “False Flag” (Drag City). Ecstatic free-rock, jammy but serious as a bullet, by three American originals: the guitarist Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls, the guitarist Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance and the drummer Chris Corsano.
9. ERYKAH BADU “New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh” (Universal Motown). Ms. Badu makes a virtue of offhandedness; sometimes a hazy plan for a song can push her to a brilliant performance. This record is full of long and playful funk chants with slip-and-slide rhythm, and it’s better — catchier and more serene — than last year’s predecessor.
10. JASON MORAN “Ten” (Blue Note). Mr. Moran’s trio, Bandwagon, is still reacting to jazz and Americanness, coming at it sideways rather than taking up a tradition. Sometimes the key is something familiar moved out of context: half a bar of Thelonious Monk, a spray of Hendrix feedback, a passage from a song Mr. Moran wrote years ago, a Stephen Foster-ish melody. And the bassist Tarus Mateen and the drummer Nasheet Waits are still writing their own tickets; nobody else sounds like them.
Top Songs
KESHA “Your Love Is My Drug” (RCA)
SALOME “Master Failure” (Profound Lore)
JOY ORBISON “Ladywell” (Doldrums)
WAKA FLOCKA FLAME “Hard in Da Paint” (Asylum/Warner Brothers)
RICK ROSS FEATURING GUCCI MANE “MC Hammer” (Maybach Music/Slip-N-Slide/Def Jam)
ZOLA JESUS “I Can’t Stand” (Sacred Bones)
SWANS “No Words/No Thoughts” (Young God)
GROUP DOUEH “Beatte Harab” (Sublime Frequencies)
______ UP WITH ANNIE-CLAUDE DESCHÊNES “Year of the Ox” (CBC Bande à Part session, bandeapart.fm)
MIKE REED’S PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS “Third Option” (482 Music)
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 26, 2010
An article last Sunday about Ben Ratliff’s choices for the Top 10 albums of 2010 misstated the given name of a guitarist in the band Rangda, whose album “False Flag” (Drag City) was ranked No. 8. He is Richard Bishop — not Alan, who is his brother. (Both men also belong to the band Sun City Girls.)
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/arts/music/19ratiliff.html?scp=2&sq=ratliff&st=cseRenewal, the Sensual and Fraught Candor
By NATE CHINEN
1. JASON MORAN “Ten” (Blue Note) A pianist often hailed first for his ideas, Mr. Moran has spent the last decade forging an urgent, elegant style with the Bandwagon, which is to say the drummer Nasheet Waits and the bassist Tarus Mateen. This album, true to the pliable strength and tumbling grace of the band, doubles as a testament to jazz’s endless renewal.
2. KEITH JARRETT AND CHARLIE HADEN “Jasmine” (ECM) There’s renewal and then there’s refinement, and this first duo recording from the pianist Keith Jarrett and the bassist Charlie Haden, both masters, delivers its melodies on a velvet cushion. But the music isn’t decorous; it glows with maturity and patience.
3. JOANNA NEWSOM “Have One on Me” (Drag City) The ingenious sprawl of Ms. Newsom’s songwriting, like the flinty self-possession of her harp playing, found ornate expression in a three-CD set that riffed on Laurel Canyon pop without losing its modern bearings. Even at their most gossamer the songs are rooted in strong melody, while the singing is meticulous, sensuous and, finally, soulful.
4. KANYE WEST “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam) Voracious and hermetic, paranoid and cocksure, Mr. West’s klieg-lighted extravaganza is a mess of contradictions. But it’s so immersive, psychologically as well as sonically, that even with a yacht’s worth of cameos, the feeling it leaves is both seductive and punishingly solitary.
5. MARY HALVORSON QUINTET “Saturn Sings” (Firehouse 12) The guitarist Mary Halvorson has often held the jazz tradition at arm’s length, but here she augments her devilishly supple trio with a sure-footed front line of trumpet (Jonathan Finlayson) and alto saxophone (Jon Irabagon). That calculated shift finds her surveying post-bop protocols from a pragmatic vantage, with an eye toward whatever she can use.
6. BENOÎT DELBECQ TRIO “The Sixth Jump” (Songlines) Cross-hatched African polyrhythm, postmodern classical piano technique, the fluidity of modern jazz improvisation: they’re all in play for Mr. Delbecq, whose beguiling trio, with the bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and the drummer Emile Biayenda, brings a cool gleam to its intrepid debut.
7. MARNIE STERN (Kill Rock Stars) This self-titled CD, the third album from this indie-rock guitar-slinger, yokes emotional exhortation to physical exertion for a series of ecstatic, elegiac anthems. The guitar work and drumming blaze, but the open-hearted fervor resonates most.
8. CHRIS LIGHTCAP’S BIGMOUTH “Deluxe” (Clean Feed) A righteous dispatch from the New York jazz grid, full of streamlined rhythm and stark, suggestive harmony. With his upright bass, Mr. Lightcap creates a pivot point for the companionable contrast of two searching tenor saxophonists, Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby, both in exceptional form.
9. KRIS DAVIS, INGRID LAUBROCK, TYSHAWN SOREY “Paradoxical Frog” (Clean Feed) So much possibility rumbles from this improvising collective — with Ms. Davis on piano, Ms. Laubrock on tenor saxophone, Mr. Sorey on drums, and all three contributing tunes — that you don’t have time to fixate on its free-jazz pedigree, or wonder who’s running the show.
10. BIG BOI “Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty” (Def Jam) His rat-a-tat cadence and sly syncopation intact, Big Boi finds solid footing in the OutKast afterlife — or hiatus, or whatever — and deftly connects with a savvy guest list. Though hardly the year’s most inventive hip-hop release, it’s endlessly engaging, skillful all the way through.
Top Songs
ARCADE FIRE “Modern Man” (Merge)
RICK ROSS FEATURING CEE LO “Tears of Joy” (Maybach Music/Slip-N-Slide/Def Jam)
ROBYN “Dancing on My Own” (Konichiwa/Cherrytree)
JAMEY JOHNSON “Even the Skies Are Blue” (Mercury Nashville)
DRAKE FEATURING ALICIA KEYS “Fireworks” (Cash Money/Universal Motown)
BRAD MEHLDAU FEATURING JOSHUA REDMAN “Don’t Be Sad” (Nonesuch)
CEE LO GREEN “____ You” (Elektra)
SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS “I L U” (Vagrant/Ghostly International)
BEST COAST “When the Sun Don’t Shine” (Mexican Summer)
VILLAGERS “Becoming a Jackal” (Domino)
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 19, 2010
A listing on Page 22 this weekend of Nate Chinen’s Top 10 CDs of 2010 misstates the name of the band that released the album “Deluxe” (Clean Feed), which is ranked No. 8. It is Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth, not Bigfoot.
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/arts/music/19chinen.html?scp=1&sq=chinen&st=cse