Not sure where to start with this one, so I will say the most generic thing possible. We here at Fell In Love With A Drummer love music and this year brought some really fantastic music. Not sure if everyone had that same experience, but making my top 10 was pretty clear cut the whole year. I am sure others have noticed, but I found a lot of records that I liked the most to be either a super ambitious release from a seasoned veteran, such as Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs to list a few, pitted against many debut albums, such as Fang Island’s Self-Titled debut, Surfer Blood’s Astro Coast, and Local Native’s Gorilla Manor . I have found this trend in years past, but this tendency seems to really stick out this year.
Most of you will notice that this list is coming pretty late in the year; in fact, every blog that I read has already put out their end of the year lists, but I am not sure why so early. For one, there are other albums that come out past mid-December that may possibly make my top albums list. Two, why not give yourself an extra couple of weeks to listen to the albums that you considered best? What’s the rush? This seems to be rather obvious, but I guess most bloggers are just so excited to let readers know what they liked in 2010 that they put it up in mid-December. I am not complaining, just an observation.
If you are curious how we comprised our list, being that this list is both a combination of both Mike’s and Greg’s (me) top 50 albums of the year lists, I will fill you in on that. It’s pretty simple. Mike emailed me his top 50, I made mine. I gave a number to the each album based on where they placed (pretty difficult math actually, the top album on the list was assigned the number 1 and so on, so forth; then I added albums that were on both lists together). Whatever 25 albums had the lowest 25 scores made the list in order from the lowest point total to highest point value. This seemed to be the fairest way to put this list together, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have albums on our respective lists that didn’t make it, which we later cried about.
That being said, these lists are complete subjective crap. I am sure all of you realize this, but there are still those people who comment, “Where’s (insert indie band HERE)?” Just because an album doesn’t make the top 25 doesn’t mean we didn’t like it or have zero taste. It just means it didn’t fill our criteria of what were our favorite 25 albums of the year. If you think about it, with the amount of music that is out there and the amount of albums Mike and I listened to combine in the past year, making a top 25 is a pretty exclusive list. Our goal in making this list is to let you know what we dug in 2010 most and hopefully you give some these records a listen. I hope you enjoy!
25. Wild Nothing -- Gemini
24. The Black Keys -- Brothers
23. Warpaint -- The Fool
22. Dungen -- Skit i allt
(note: my favorite album title of the year. The title translatses to "Fuck it all" in Swedish.)
21. Glasser -- Ring
20. Surfer Blood -- Astro Coast
19. Big Boi -- Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
18. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings -- I Learned the Hard Way
17. Antony and the Johnsons -- Swanlights
16. Delorean -- Subiza
15. The Radio Dept. -- Clinging to a Scheme
14. Titus Andronicus -- The Monitor
13. Fang Island -- Fang Island
12. The Tallest Man on Earth -- The Wild Hunt
11. MGMT -- Congratulations
10. Avi Buffalo -- Avi Buffalo
9. Yeasayer -- Odd Blood
7. LCD Soundsystem -- This is Happening
6. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti -- Before Today
5. Arcade Fire -- The Suburbs
4. Kanye West -- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
3. Beach House -- Teen Dream
2. Tame Impala -- Innerspeaker
1. Deerhunter -- Halcyon Digest
