The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 1

Kanye West
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Half of what Kanye West has done in 2010 has been straight hypnotism. He gave away most of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy before he put it on sale. He turned his stream-of-consciousness rambles into appointment Internet. He premiered a self-directed, 35 minute, Kubrick and Fellini-inspired music video on national television, in an era when music videos don’t live anywhere near national television. He did all this to engender good will, to commandeer the spotlight, and to prove (or re-prove) himself. If he could just hold your attention for a couple of minutes, that was enough. With unbridled ambition, he redefined the word “good” to mean “big,” and then made the big stuff good anyway. Because, for all the G.O.O.D. Fridays giveaways and hordes of ballerinas, for all the Twitter-rants and Michael Jackson comparisons, Kanye West’s real coup came when he revealed that the hypnotism, the grand gestures, and unbridled ambition are not just part of the show—they also ARE the show. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is about how ambition is an ugly, sexy, messy, (beautiful, dark, twisted) beast. Fittingly, it is an ambitious, ugly, sexy mess.

But don’t mistake that for ego. Ego thrives on control, but My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is Kanye’s most impulsive album yet. The College Dropout and Late Registration were formalist exercises—exciting in their creation of a vision, but rigid in the execution of it. On Graduation, the vision began to fray. Kanye split that album between faded copies of earlier, sample-heavy formula songs—like the Daft Punk-lifting lead single, “Stronger,” and the Steely Dan-based “Champion”—and richer stuff like “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and “Flashing Lights.” 808’s and Heartbreak charged into the ether with 50 minutes of tuneless R&B—a fascinating diversion while Kanye recalibrated. Which brings us to now. Kanye seems to be searching for some elusive new vision on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He doesn’t quite know what it is, but it’s going to be big. He draws upon old-school rap and Prince-style new wave funk. He chooses songs and sounds based on audience feedback—“Monster” after its G.O.O.D. Friday release took off, and the vocal samples on “Runaway” after testing them on the MTV VMAs. His collaborations are actual collaborations—the surest sign of Kanye relaxing. He nurtures career performances from some of the biggest luminaries in the rap game, and then lets those performances define the album. When Rick Ross’s verse drops into “Devil in a New Dress,” the music opens up into the kind of lavish orchestration that serves Ross so well on Teflon Don; when Nicki Minaj shows up on “Monster,” Kanye reconstructs the beat around her. He chases after every idea has, and the result is a rough-hewn piece of work where even the awkward moments are enormous.

And the awkward moments are where My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy thrives. Nearly everything here teeters on the brink of ridiculousness. For the longest time, Kanye’s rapping has been the weakest part of his music. Here, it has evolved into something between conversation and sermon. He’s got more in common now with Richard Pryor than Rakim. Instead of bending lines to sound musical, he finds the music within what he’s saying. On “Dark Fantasy,” he compares his rapping to Nas’s flow—and, while that’s patently absurd in terms of rhyme skill, in terms of the impact he could have on the actual sound of rap he might be onto something. Every couplet is an isolated thought, a world in and of itself. Sometimes his lines kill; sometimes they fail hard—but odds are that no two people could agree on which does which. Is “Too many Urkels on your team, your wins low” a good line? Is “Put the pussy in a sarcophagus”? I don’t know. I love them.

Musically, MBDTF gets even dicier. He samples King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” ten years too late, and uses it to turn Narcissistic Personality Disorder into a business expense. He nabs John Legend to sing the hook on “Blame Game,” sticks him with some Tyler Perry-sitcom caliber jokes, and has him sing in a frailer, more delicate voice than the soul singer typically uses—possibly so that he’ll sound more like Kanye. He has the stones to repeat a single piano note and play it like goddamned Jonathan Cain launching into “Don’t Stop Believin’,” except not a city boy riding the train to anywhere in the middle of the night—a self-professed A-hole, workaholic, sex-addict with an AutoTune jones and a persecution complex. Beyond that, the lines between Journey and Kanye West are blurrier than ever—except that Kanye will never sell as many albums as Steve Perry, he’ll just talk shit like he has. Kanye has more in common with the monsters of rock, or Bruce Springsteen, or The Who, than with the hip-hop nation. He is crafting world-beating, mythological rock with the kind of determination that turns platitudes into religion. The douchebag-toasting hook on “Runaway” is monumental without being cool; “clever” without being clever; precisely unsmart. It is a battering ram that speaks ironically to the people who hear the irony in it, but speaks honestly to the people that those people hate. It is proof that you can garner love from the very people you’re alienating. And it explains exactly why My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy resonates in a way that few other albums do: For all its naked ambition, it has little attachment to what has been proven—and that makes it wholly, fundamentally dangerous.

-Marty Brown, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 2

The Chemical Brothers
Further

Daft Punk were never supposed to be the guys that people lost their shit over. I mean, shit, I still play Discovery all the damn time, don’t get me wrong. But the Chemical Brothers were the band that changed your life, and the problem is that while Daft Punk went from being gimmicky to profound geniuses in robot helmets, the Chemicals went from the top of their game to relying on guest stars and gimmicks to make their way through an album. 2010 everything drastically realigned, as Daft Punk recorded a Hans Zimmer-style film score and people reacted horribly for it not being the second coming, and the Chemicals recorded a back-to-basics record. One where everyone who heard it had the same reaction - surprise, then elation. Further is the best Chemical Bros album since Come With Us and/or Dig Your Own Hole, whichever one you prefer (me, I’m a Come With Us guy), and a strong contender for best album when held against either. Yeah, push the button was dopey, and We Are the Night was garbage, both of them spend way too much time with aging icons or annoying newbies. The Chemicals are never going to record an all-star tour de force like Plastic Beach or XTRMNTR (even though the former could never have happened without their example and the latter couldn’t have happened without their direct involvement). Their great collaborations always seemed to take reference points into another direction - turning the Beatles and Public Enemy into one sound,  taking an unhinged Kool Keith rant and making it into mathematics, mutating New Order into Primal Scream and back again, making Richard Ashcroft into a soul diva - which is something that has happened less and less on their records until it stopped happening at all. If they ever were master collaborators, they aren’t anymore. There are no star moments on Further, that’s it’s first big step towards greatness that the Chemicals take. It’s not an admission of guilt, but a problem that needed solving. The lack of identity that  a drive towards replication and collaboration was destroying their sound.

If “Setting Sun” and “Let Forever Be” were arguments that there was no need to copy the Beatles if you could just become the Beatles, then they needed to learn that lesson instead of teach it. Attempting towards greatness, for these guys anyway, was what was keeping them from being great. Even then, while the Chemicals wanted to make (and made) really amazing dance music, they clearly had eyes on non-dance influences - their records reeked of Public Enemy and My Bloody Valentine and Bob Dylan, not Kraftwerk. That’s what I dug about them. So Further is 8 songs, only one of them over 6 minutes. Each of them build and expand geometrically, there are voices but they are amorphous, and often it is just a modified version of their own voices. Rather than two guys with decks and keyboards trying to be rock gods, these are two guys trying to make songs that build to an awesome scribble noise, to make you dance, to make you turn it up. They do their own thing, for the first time in a while, and in doing so have made the best work of their career. This is the first whole album of theirs (not tracks, those they’ve had plenty) which can stand up to the heroes they’re pretending towards. Back to basics albums are rarely anything more than holding patterns, so their holding up relies on great songs. Further is 8 for 8 on great songs, even the gestures that might at first cause you to get anxious: “Horse Power” repeats the phrase a bunch of times, with actual horse noises. It’s dorky and anachronistic until the piece coheres around a demolishing loop, which then does battle with other loops for supremacy. When the horse sample returns it’s eaten by the machine, who has no damn time to stop. “K+D+B” starts off as a phenomenal motown drum beat, something James Lavelle would glom onto, and makes that secondary to a perfect shoegaze-y ebb and flow, becoming a perfect psych track seemingly haphazardly. “Dissolve” makes “Private Psychedelic Reel” into a dinosaur. The opening triptych of songs “Snow”, “Escape Velocity”, and “Another World” are a showcase for everything great that this band has been capable of. “Snow” doesn’t even have a beat, or a scribble, or a psychedelic vibe whatsoever. It’s just a voice and synths, and dynamics so subtle they would make Liquid Liquid sound like kid punks stumbling through chord changes at a talent show. “Escape Velocity” is a long, beat driven build to a song that sounds like it is blasting through layers of atmosphere only to explode into dancefloor-banger and recede into a Who’s Next-style ride-out. “Another World” is less driving than both previous tracks but shows how the kind of Chemical Bros variation of a pop single can be bombastic and tender all at once. All three taken as a whole lay out everything possible within the defined borders of their sound. “Swoon” is the newest-sounding track, and it probably isn’t new so much as it is just so damn good. It’s a standout on an album of standouts, 6 minutes of cooing voices and swirling siren effects that builds and then hit and then hit and then hits. “There’s nothing else” over and over again, summing up the albums’ mission statement, the Chemicals saying “we’re just gonna do *Chemical Bros* this time”

The closer “Wonders of the Deep” takes the elements, dynamics, feelings of a rock song - hell, a Flaming Lips song - and traps euphoric lightning in a Chemical Bros song. That’s finally enough for them, to make great Chemical Bros songs, make a great Chemical Bros album. In 2010, that’s not something that was in high demand, or even had much of an impact when it arrived. That really doesn’t matter much, because this has been a long time coming. The Chemical Bros making the album they always had in them, and making very little fuss about it.

This wasn’t put forth as a masterpiece, or “the album of their career”. This wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. But it is. Take notice.

-Sean Witzke, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 3

Das Racist
Shut Up, Dude/ Sit Down, Man

Victor Vazquez has what you’d call a fat beard. Sometimes, the beard gets a little grizzly—it shrooms out on the sides. Sometimes it’s trimmed closer to his face. He has long, curly black hair that he occasionally clips up on top of his head. He often wears glasses. He likes tank tops. He slouches. When he smiles, he looks a little goofy. He raps laconically, like he’s holding back. He punches the ends of his words. His dad is from Cuba and his mom is from Italy. His dad is black, his mom is white. He’s from San Francisco.

Himanshu Suri has a round, clean-shaven face. He’s got some chubby cheeks. He also has what you’d call long, curly hair—but different. It’s a shorter cut, where Victor’s hangs down at his shoulders. Sometimes it covers his forehead. He doesn’t wear glasses—at least, not in public, or not as often. He plays it straight more than Victor. When he laughs, it’s like he’s trying to hold in a hit. He raps full-voiced, punching the beginnings of his words. His parents are from India. He’s Indian. He grew up in Queens.

Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri look nothing alike, though one of the narratives following their group, Das Racist, is that people get them mixed up all the time. Misidentifying who rapped which verse is one thing—lazy, maybe, but understandable. On record, both guys seem more interested in the sounds of words than their meanings. They construct rhymes around poetic devices, rather than vice versa, and shoehorn in references from everything to Neutral Milk Hotel to W.E.B. Dubois to Martin Lawrence. Their vocal differences aren’t as pronounced as, say, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. In person, though, getting them mixed up—like The New York Times’ Deborah Solomon did in a recent interview—is a little more loaded with meaning. Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri look nothing alike, except that both dudes are brown.

Das Racist dropped two excellent mixtapes this year. The first one, Shut Up, Dude came out in March and, along with a series of low-budget videos, helped prove that Vazquez and Suri had more going on than they let on with last year’s (still incredible) novelty hit, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Shut Up, Dude is front-loaded with knockout songs—an A Tribe Called Quest riff followed by a Billy Joel riff followed by the hit followed by a track that showcases the group’s actual rap skills followed by a concept-joke song with some hidden substance followed by a spot-on Ghostface satire followed by “Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix),” which is probably their best song. But Shut Up, Dude is also ragged and messy—the beats sound resolutely homemade, and Vazquez and Suri spend a good amount of time fucking around.

Both albums market Das Racist as a smart dumb group—able to out-literary-reference anyone, but content to wordlessly sing along to Billy Joel songs—which may be why ”Hahahaha JK?” has become their emblematic song: The chorus goes, “We’re not joking/ Just joking/ We are joking/ Just joking/ We’re not joking,” and it harkens back to the popularity of “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” when people didn’t know if these dudes were real or not. But that doesn’t really capture the essence of the group. They are serious, AND they’re not. The jokes are a major part of Das Racist, sure. They use humor to comment on hip-hop culture while immersing themselves fully into it; they have a profound sense of irony; and they juxtapose high and low culture in interesting ways. Even the Days of Our Lives sample driving “Hahahaha JK?” has a high/low culture axis built into it: Days of Our Lives is a populist show about rich people.

But, like most good comedians, Das Racist spend a lot of time picking at cultural scabs. Fittingly, their most fascinating subject is race. They appropriate no less than two phrases from A Tribe Called Quest, turning them into statements about race. On “Who’s That Brown?,” which lifts its title from Charlie Brown’s “Scenario” verse, Victor Vazquez opens Shut Up, Dude with a verse comparing himself to Elvis Presley and Larry Bird—two white dudes known for excelling in black arts. “Shorty Said” flips a line from “Electric Relaxtion” into a chorus that goes, “I like ‘em brown, yellow, Puerto Rican or Haitian/ It really doesn’t matter ‘cause it’s all the same” Then, Suri lists people that girls have compared him to—Latin dudes, white dudes, black dudes, and Asian dudes. They compare themselves to Puerto Rican cousins, even though they’re neither related nor Puerto Rican. “Fake Patois” lists people who’ve pretended to have Jamaican accents—Jay-Z, Jim Carrey, Bad Brains. They equate Snow with Shaun Bridgmohan, which means that anyone familiar with those two figures will have his brain fried.

That’s what’s subversive about Das Racist—with their music, they eliminate distinctions between race; between joking and serious; between love of hip-hop culture and the ability to make fun of it. They do this precisely in order to call attention to the distinctions. The distinctions are important. Defining one’s self is important. To these guys, Das Racist is about deconstructing culture as much as it’s about honoring it—and that goes for hip-hop and race equally. You can’t begin to define a culture until you begin to recognize its intricacies, its ironies, and its contradictions—and on Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man they depict American culture better, and funnier, than just about anyone. “I am a pick-up truck,” Vazquez raps on Shut Up, Dude’s “Ek Shaneesh,” “I am America. I am America.”

-Marty Brown, 2010

The Woodshed: Dog Finds Moebius Vein, Goes For The Ware Double Feature

Home/Study Abroad

Now available at comiXology: the obligatory top comics of the year type of list. It's a top twenty, the next five would have been (in no particular order) Dungeon Quest, Wilson, Grotesque, 1-800 MICE and whatever webcomic it was that I kept meaning to read in 2010 when I was discovering a previously unknown passion for Judge Dredd.

Previous comiXology installments included the Michel Fiffe teach-comics team-up and a cursory examination of what shit looks/tastes like. Should be more of these in the new year, we'll see.

The Factual's 2010 music countdown is winding down, and the final three will be showing up over the next couple of days. It should go without saying that the addition of Sean Witzke to the write-up squadron has been an incomparable source of excitement for both Marty and I, but I'm saying it anyway. Expect more of him as often as he can make time in his hang-out-with-Steranko schedule.

Regular programming returns with the coming of the new year, even Nina, who is still trying her best to find a comic that doesn't make her pass out in a pool of her own leavings.

Outsourcing

Dirk Deppey's final Journalista went live a few days before the holidays took over, it's unlikely anyone reading this little note will not have seen it, but i'm mentioning it here so as to join the chorus of people bemoaning his departure. Dirk's the reason you found this site, he's the reason that other sites brought me on board to write for them. He's irreplaceable, and we're poorer for his absence. Keep up with him on Twitter, I guess.

Tom Spurgeon's holiday interviews are rocking and rolling, as they have for many years. Matt Seneca, Joe Casey, Zunar and Dustin Harbin. That's just the ones I've read so far, and there's more to come? All the time, that's what these should be.

Spurgeon can't interview everybody though, which is why God created Chris Mautner. Here he is with Lynda Barry, talking next to garbage. (PS: I saw Mautner the day he did this interview, over at that Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival, and the dude has been straight up working the fuck out lately. Mautner's jacked, kid, maybe the most jacked man on the scene. Think about that the next time you see somebody complain about one of his negative reviews of those DC cartoons. Those people are playing with their fucking lives.)

Deadpool Max, explained, Mindless Ones style. Was adding David Allison to God's own wrecking crew the most dastardly piece of overkill since black met leather? Probably, but let the crybabies brew their own milk: we salute the flag.

The dog finds comics, she does, she finds them in one store in Georgia. I ask the dog: how much you want for these things, little princess? She says cover price, minus 10%.

I say yeah, I say okay.

Monster 3

Long unavailable following the collapse of sanity, this is a replacement copy for the one I passed on to a man stricken with must-have-it-desperation. It isn't the best installment in the series, possibly one of the worst (old man and Kenma must save the old lady, thus saving love), but hey, who can resist the opportunity to fill those OOP gaps?

Zenith 1, 2

Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, back in the got-something-to-prove days. Don't know 'em, never read 'em, but I love young turk output almost as much as I love that dog, and friend, i'm really into that dog.

Floyd Farland Citizen of the Future

This was the one that set the tea-kettle screaming, the one where the brain said "I know what that is" and logic responded "but there's no goddamn way". After this, tracking the Moebius vein went ipso-facto--if they have Floyd, they've got others, lemme take a look-see. And while the Moebius is unlikely to be bested in the quality department, it's hard to imagine something higher than Floyd in the curiosity arena. This is it, the goes-for-too-much-on-Ebay comic, the one that (according to Wikipedia) Chris Ware is supposedly buying up just to destroy. Cover was 2.95. It came home at a flat 2.60.

Moebius 1, 2, 3
Moebius The Man From The Ciguri
Moebius Exotics
Heavy Metal Presents Moebius (introduction by Federico Fellini)

Because it's Moebius, and because why not go all out. Left behind: multiple copies of Moebius 1-6, full runs of the Incal, Blueberry, more of the Dark Horse stuff, that Taniguchi thing with flying babies on umbilical leashes, the Silver Surfer hardcover, all of this stuff right here, next to Judge Dredd, hanging out alongside X-Force hardcovers: clean, kind, friendly.

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 4

Gorillaz
Plastic Beach

The thing you realize after watching the documentary Bananaz - its that Damon Albarn failed at making the records he wanted to with the first two Gorillaz albums. Both times Albarn attempted to produce the records by himself and got stalled, then Dan the Automator and Danger Mouse were each respectively called in to finish Albarn’s songs, collaborations, and sketches into listenable wholes. So the albums, while clearly the work of Albarn - they aren’t complete for him. Gorillaz started out as a place to play for Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, a place to collaborate and screw around, to try out ideas. The entire concept of the Gorillaz, as a 21st century play on the Banana Splits and the Monkeys and the Archies, is a nice middle finger up to the pop establishment of the early 00s. Gorillaz was anti-boy band back when that meant something, and many people have pointed out that Albarn probably hated boy bands because of the way Blur was sold to the UK,particularly with his face. Then Blur broke up (after dropping their best album) and Gorillaz was the only place left for Albarn (actually for either of them) to express himself. Albarn is a creature of ego, and that probably sounds worse that I’m intending it to.

There are always competing levels of engagement and/or context with any Gorillaz album. Plastic Beach is even more complex. First as always, there are the songs and the album itself - whether or not you, as the listener, like it. After that - the  narrative of the album as a whole (as Plastic Beach is a concept album), the context of how the fictional band Gorillaz would record this album (this is a “Murdoc” album according to the narrative, Demon Days was a “Noodle” album), the idea of the Gorillaz as a capitalist mechanism to sell shit, like the Monkees (this album comes with new locations, vehicles, and 3rd-gen character redesigns - none of which actually exist), and of course what Damon Albarn has done to create the album - which is to say, who he got to appear on it, and what that signifies in and of itself. Gorillaz is a 21st century project as it is larger than just songs on wax, and how much work/knowledge the audience brings to their time with it. If you are a Jamie Hewllet fan, who’s been reading all his comics for years, Gorillaz is a completely different experience if you’ve never heard of the him before this. There is a matrix of “if, then” questions that determine what you can and will take away from Gorillaz as a project, most of them are deliberate on Albarn and Hewlett’s part, some of them aren’t (consider - this is the first Gorillaz project without any overt George Romero zombie or Exorcist references - did you know that? Do you care? Do I?). The idea of collaboration from as many areas of music as possible, and to unite various strains of music from around the world, from rock and roll history, from genres that are completely opposite to one another, that’s definitely been the overt intent of the Gorillaz project. Which is why you have Lou Reed and the Lebanese National Orchestra on the same record. The history of pop according to the Gorillaz skips over Beatles/Stones/Who/Kinks archetypes that Britpop trafficked in, even as it plays on them. Maybe less overt is that in making albums that attempt to do something that wide, Albarn ends up placing himself in that same conversation. Which, as I said, takes a massive amount of ego, even to do so accidentally. So rather than collaborating with giants and laughing that wow, we have Paul McCartney doing the same thing on our album that he did on the Beach Boys’ Smile, Albarn is engaging these people as equals. Which means that he definitely gets better work out of them, but it also means that he actually thinks that his work is as good as Reed, Mark E. Smith, De La Soul, and Snoop Dogg. The surviving members of the Clash are basically part of the band at this point, which would have sounded ridiculous ten years ago, but here it is. Instead of coming across as a piece of egomania, though, it works. That’s not what makes Plastic Beach remarkable, in fact, Plastic Beach being as good as it is flies in the face of all historical precedent. Bands playing with their heroes nearly always results in shit. And make no bones about it, these are his heroes (watch that clip of Albarn in the studio with Bobby Womack where he absolutely fawns over him, because he’s BOBBY FUCKING WOMACK), and he’s writing himself into their histories.

But - you have to go “who gives a shit, is it any good to listen to”, and thankfully Plastic Beach is. Demon Days is probably the more cohesive and conventionally beautiful album, but Demon Days feels a lot more worked-over, which is likely because that’s Dangermouse’s production style. Demon Days felt like a closely-hewn performance piece (fittingly, the Gorillaz team worked on a full-tilt chinese opera between the two albums). Plastic Beach feels like it’s a picture of the moment - the Lebanese orchestra playing dancehall, bizarre sample-based commercial parodies, etc. Most importantly there is a strange triumvirate of themes - ecological collapse, the use of fable (Albarn described the story as something like Gulliver’s Travels), and Albarn’s own personal emotional state. That last one is important, I’ll come back to it. As much as Albarn is making albums with an eye for history, there is a “casting” aspect to the album - Gruff Rhys’ voice is wisely chosen as the most commercial and sunny of the moment (and subtly acknowledges that the concept of Gorillaz was prototyped on the Super Furry Animals+Pete Fowler’s Guerilla), Mos Def is the carnival barker villain of the piece, Albarn himself is the fictional singer 2D, Yumiki Nagano is Noodle/the albums voice of reason (previously played by Nenah Cherry and Miho Hatori). The idea of the world as an organism is something that’s there on Demon Days, but it was touched upon rather than the focus. On Plastic Beach, every song is aware of a world that is on the brink of either disaster or massive, unknowable change. The titular plastic beach is a great symbol for anything and everything that anyone here could want it to be. For Albarn (and everyone here, as they are all clearly writing lyrics without his input beyond quality control), the fictional oddness, the world falling apart, and the personal - they are all the same thing. There is no division between the large-scale and the private, the “green” intentions and the cool concept album conceit. Plastic Beach never feels like a message record because of the way those ideas permeate into one another - you are never being preached to because of how largely this is looming on Albarn’s headspace.

So I said that Albarn sees himself as these great artists’ equal, but that’s not exactly true - his voice is the best sound made on the record, and he knows it. Whether he’s backing up/dueting with someone or on his own. His voice has developed this rich, sad timbre to it. He’s not a young guy anymore and his voice reflects a lot of regret. With the exception of Bobby Womack, who can only be described as supernatural, no one comes close to being as emotionally devastating as Albarn is. “Broken” is probably the best job he’s ever done on a song, nevermind that it captures the exact experience of living in 2010 in one line “...In our eyes, every time they meet, it’s by the light of the plasma screens, we keep switched on, all through the night while we sleep”. The Arcade Fire wrote a whole incredibly overwrought album to get to that feeling and here it’s tossed off mid-verse. Albarn has more to do than dwell on it, it doesn’t even get a whole song. The highlights are spread out though - “Superfast Jellyfish” is all the greatness of the De La Soul is Dead skits and a great, endlessly contagious commercial jingle wrapped into one. “Sweepstakes” is the song Mos Def was born to make, equally about the fast-talking snaekoil saleman aspect to rap while still delivering a monster one. “On Melancholy Hill” sounds like a timelost White Album cut. “Cloud of Unknowing” defines hope in the face of all available evidence, and how sad that can be. Both of Yumiki Nagano’s contributions create a whole storied relationship between two people in the fewest possible sketched points, and are beautiful in and of themselves. The title track performs the minor miracle of reuniting the Clash to create something that sounds nothing like the Clash, but something entirely new. “Pirate Jet” rides out on a morbid chant to the ever-circling skeletal family plastic eating people. The centerpiece is “Rhinestone Eyes”, which features Albarn sampling himself (the unreleased “Electric Shock”) and capturing the spot where the concept meets the present, simply by delineating details “Helicopters fly over the beach, same time everyday, same routine. A clear target in summer, when skies are blue. It’s part of the noise when winter comes, it reverberates in my lungs. Nature’s corrupted in factories far away”. The song consists mostly of keyboard riffs hissing and modulating around one another. It’s a pop song - all of the tracks are pop songs and they never lose sight of that, to the album’s benefit. That’s the trick, taking a line like “nature’s corrupted” and making it feel 100% like an honest expression rather than a BIG STATEMENT. That’s the difference between Gorillaz and everything else - sure the other stuff, who and what it means and what they’re intending to say, that’s important. But the difference is the big stuff is personal, the fictional stuff is a snapshot, the world falling apart and the heartbreak, Albarn’s feelings are yours.

-Sean Witzke, 2010

The Top 50 Songs of 2010: #10-1

For the second year in a row, we polled everyone at The Factual Opinion headquarters to determine the top fifty songs of the year. It was a three-part process: Each participant nominated his or her favorite songs from 2010; Tucker and I sifted through the nominees to come up with a short list of potential candidates; then, we voted. Each participant submitted a ranked list of up to fifty favorites—which were not necessarily limited to the short list—and the results were tallied according to both the total number of votes a song received, and their placement on individual ballots. The results range from UK-garage-influenced pop to skeevy basement electro to frenetic psych rock—and that’s just in the first three entries. The list reflects an equal mix of personal favorites and monolithic singles (and sometimes voters didn’t even know which was which—one participant voted for Cee Lo’s “Fuck You!” thinking that it was an undiscovered gem.) Ultimately, it’s a fair and idiosyncratic overview of 2010—which was, incidentally, a killer year for music. Please enjoy. -MB

PREVIOUSLY: #50-31, #30-11

10. The National – “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

When last we heard from The National on last year’s Dark was the Night compilation, they were never leaving New York because their girlfriend was a depressed, high-maintenance head-case. That’ll happen. On “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” we now find our favorite semi-detached (but not apathetic, mind you) urban white guys meditating on what happens to personal constructs of home when find that you may never leave New York (or wherever you ended up, unless you ended up in LA, in which case, keep f***ing that chicken). The lyrics speak to taking things too far in a moment of melodrama (nicely euphemized as a “bloodbuzz”), and the instrumentation subtly builds to match the inflated sincerity of the moment. It’s an overly sentimental thought process, but one that everyone who’s ever left home has gone through (as a case in point, see also 2010 TFO candidates “Georgia” from Cee-Lo Green and “New York is Killing Me” from Gil Scott-Heron). However, The National’s take on the theme is a stand-out amongst stand-outs. Nobody, and I mean nobody, mixes mopey-ness, romantic idealism, conceptual loss, reckoning, anxiety, and acceptance in a way that I and people like me can relate to—to the rest of you, go play that Animal Collective song about being content with girlfriends some more, because that’s pretty much what everybody else listens to, right? -JW

9. Broken Social Scene – “All to All”

When Roger Waters sang about the Bleeding Hearts and Artists making their stand for the soul musician at the end of The Wall, I’m sure that in his vision of jaded hippies making layered, watercolor “call of forgiveness” meditations, the music sucked. Worm your Honour, as a counterpoint, I give you the Broken Social Scene. Apparently you just had to let those hippies simmer for 40 years and get really, really jaded, let them do a few dry runs with rocking bummer songs about lovers’ spit, 17 year-old-girl disappointments, and how it won’t be what you want it to be (oh no!). Then, boom, you get “All to All,” a polished, beautiful rock n’ roll soundscape that contemplates how we relate to one another after we hurt one another (and possibly attack one another’s core values?). More impressive, the song does this without ever getting its pulse rate up above walking a dog in the park. Which raises the question – can music be subversive when it’s simultaneously the most pleasant music you’ll ever hear in a coffee shop? In any case, score another one for the Bleeding Hearts and Artists, put this baby on repeat, and ENJOY your coffee—Lord knows you’ve earned it after beating your heart out against some mad bugger’s wall all week. -JW

8. Sleigh Bells – “Rill Rill”

Sleigh Bells’ “Rill Rill” fucking rocks me and makes me think of an alternate high school universe where I get into fist fights with my best friends in the bathroom over math scores and then we make up over milkshakes in the parking lot of Jack in the Box and then we all make out on the hood of my car with whoever. Like every week. Essentially, feeling like a sensitive badass because I’m awesome and you’re awesome and life is weird but somehow we’ll make it through all right as long as we keep trying. The positive defiance and encouragement in the lyrics matched with soothing echoes, booms, clicks and strums make everything seem possible. So high five, bitches, and see you on the quad. -SE

7. Big Boi – “Shutterbug (Feat. Cutty)”

Big Boi’s “Shutterbugg” has been sitting around for a while; it’s old enough to have a Scott Storch coproduction credit on it. Not that it matters, as it’s the kind of banger that could have come out of Big Boi at any point in the last decade, and in good competition for the best of those. “I keep it player while some choose to play it safe” is boilerplate boasting that’s actually backed up with Big Boi’s position in rap right now. What else is he talking about? Not fucking with Mexican drug money? Shooting a guy in self defense? Being the center of attention at a club? No, it’s “Must be the way the verse is sounding/ came up on the Geto Boys and the Underground Kingz.” It is a situation where it really doesn’t matter—Guru was right, it’s mostly the voice, and Big Boi’s locked into this beat so well that what he’s saying is secondary at best. The track is a monster, and given to anyone else, it wouldn’t be. -SW

6. Kanye West – “Runaway (Feat. Pusha-T)”

It's difficult to write about Mr. West's music without also writing about Mr. West himself. We're never going to be able to know how we might react to music like this if the artist were an unknown recluse. So let's put all our cards on the table: I never used to like Kanye specifically because I thought Kanye was a moron. "Gold-digger"? Bitch, please. I thought his first three albums were sick fluff, perhaps one step above the Black Eyed Peas on the evolutionary ladder but only just. Then he went nuts—see, here we go with the ad hominem criticism—and suddenly I got interested. 808s & Heartbreak was as crazy and riveting a left turn as we've seen any multiplatinum pop star deliver since, well . . . I dunno, Slow Train Coming? "Runaway" picks up on the best bits of 808s, folding that album's melancholy introspection into something that can fairly be called epic while still remaining brutal in its commitment to raw self-laceration. Of course, there's something selfish about that, too—even when he's apologizing, and seemingly sincere in his attempts to be a better person, it's still all about him. (That he managed to hijack both Taylor Swift's recent album launch and the publicity tour for George W. Bush's presidential memoir without even really trying—transforming both events into de facto referendums on Kanye—is simply astounding.) But you also get something on "Runaway" that you might not expect: he finally seems to understand just how toxic his own self-regard actually is. I almost feel bad for Pusha T, basically drafted for the purpose of playing Kanye's monstrous id, one last glimpse of the type of womanizing cad-demon Mr. West is explicitly trying to exorcise. And just when you think it's over, when the strings have swollen as high as they can rise, we hear the coda: three minutes of beautiful noise, with orchestral accents placed opposite a synthesizer solo that reveals itself, towards the end, to be just Kanye's voice run through an overloaded vocodor. He keeps on talking, but at some point it just becomes noise. "Runaway" gives the listener some hope that Mr. West might actually be—gasp!—growing up. -TO

5. Cee Lo Green – “Fuck You!”

With something like 25 Grammy nominations, live performance on nearly every day and night talk show, and Gwyneth Paltrow brining it to the masses on Glee, do you really need (or even want) my review of Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You!”? It’s certainly not necessary. I’ll just say that in this song, Cee Lo perfectly crystallizes the self-righteous, joyful fun in releasing all those shitty feelings you’re feeling and telling someone to fuck off. Now, if only we could all have jammin’ keys, a bouncing backbeat, hallelujah harmonies and an ebullient horn section backing us up when we did it, we would ALL be better off. -NS

4. Gil Scott-Heron – “New York is Killing Me”

“New York is Killing Me” is everything and nothing all at once. The beat is sparse, with a deep drum coming in over some rapid fire snaps and a brief acoustic guitar, but it's incredible. Gil Scott-Heron is from an older tradition than rap, but tell me that this beat doesn't sound like a descendent of The Neptunes' sublime "Grindin." Throw Gil Scott's gravelly, aged voice on top of it and you've got something that sits in the blues range. And when the backing vocals come in for "Lord have mercy on me," and you're looking at gospel. The positively mournful "I need to be back home" toward the end? That's soul. Add in the entire point of the song, which is that the city is an unfriendly, cruel place and sometimes you've gotta return to the country, and you've got a song that's black history spread over the course of four minutes and thirty seconds. -DB

3. Janelle Monáe – “Tightrope (Feat. Big Boi)”

Janelle Monáe is the pansexual future of music; she strides confidently in a territory between male and female, singing in a gorgeously feminine voice while wearing masculine suits and sporting a weird pompadour that doesn’t really belong on either side of the gender divide. She embraces the whole history of music as well, combining jazzy orchestra and solid pop with a hip-hop swagger and rhythm; it’s exciting and liberating to listen to her perform, and even more so to watch, as in her appearance on David Letterman in which she seemed to channel James Brown. As “Tightrope” speaks of, she really does seem to be walking a tightrope between several genres, but she’s doing so confidently, striding above everyone else out there and redefining the entire scene as she does so. This is the future, and if Monáe is any indication, it’s going to sound amazing. -MJB

2. LCD Soundsystem – “All I Want”

It's a difficult task that James Murphy took on this time around. Besides punching in the David Bowie weight class—a challenge that Ryan Dombal expertly addresses here--the lyrics to "All I Want" are decidedly hard to get behind. Opening with that same cleaned-up warble that's come to rest on a listener's ear like a Sunday comforter, seemingly addressing the sorts of shared sorrow that had come forth so beautifully in "New York You're Bringing Me Down" or the our-sincerity-now anthem "All My Friends", things take a crueler tone, veering dangerously towards the sort of bitterness that makes it hard to come aboard.

But it's still Murphy. You trust him at this point, and you'll ride with him now, and if this is how he says goodbye—asking for your pity, asking for your tears—that'll have to do. And yet, as this seven minute trek through repeated guitars and beeping birdcalls winds to close, he sinks deep, buried behind his own walls of sound, his own vocals receding for some tuneless vocal exercises—you hear the last, it's there, and there again. "Take me home", he says. It doesn't sound like resignation, and it doesn't track as bitter, either.

That's because it's neither. It's hope, as off-putting as that might seem, as sentimental as that might taste. It's where he's ended up, where any artist hopes to--the tail end of completion, when the show's closed down and the scripts are filed away. Freedom's exhilaration awaits. –TS

1. Kanye West – “Monster (Feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Bon Iver, & Nicki Minaj)”

“Monster,” like most of the material he released this year, is loosely based around Kanye West’s acceptance that the world views him as a bad guy. Sure, it’s easy to discount his vilification at the hands of all the people who think an MTV Video Award, like, means something. But don’t forget: West is a pop star that got called a jackass by the President of the United States for simply helping to increase ratings on a TV show. That has to fucking sting. For creating a spectacle—something MTV actively encourages—dude was bombarded with hate-tweets and other responses that turned an entertainment issue into a racial, social, political issue.

Like “Power” and “Runaway,” the other lead singles from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Monster” takes the jackass charge head on—You think I’m a monster? You’re goddamn right I am—then proceeds to belittle the hell out of it. When Jay-Z equates himself, and West by proxy, with a laundry list of classic creatures (“Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Loch Ness, goblin, ghoul, a zombie with no conscience”), he nails the song’s dichotomy: these are all purportedly fearsome beings that are all patently ridiculous. When Jay follows up with, “Everybody want to know what my Achilles heel is,” his voice strikes the precise balance between self-confidence and self-awareness as he reveals it: “LOOOVE.” Zombie needs a hug.

You can actually hear Kanye rebuilding his own confidence over the course of his verse. At first, he’s reticent—backing off from the mike, slurring his words, losing some punch lines—but by mid-verse, he’s doing Napoleon Dynamite impressions and screaming, “Put the pussy in a sarcophagus!” In the chorus, when he demands, “I’ma need to see your fuckin’ hands at the concert,” it’s pointed at the same people who demonized him.

Unlike “Power” and “Runaway,” “Monster” is far from compositionally perfect. Kanye is a notoriously immaculate producer, but—especially compared with most of his other work—“Monster” is a thorny, slippery mess. Bon Iver bookends the song with some vague Autotuned nonsense about crossing the line, letting God decide, and going home—it sounds like West, again by proxy, apologizing for his behavior while conveniently leaving out an actual apology. Rick Ross makes a brief, four bar appearance, basically just to introduce Kanye. The chorus appears where the verses should be. Yet, Kanye’s embrace of villainy resonates because both he and “Monster” share a willingness to be ugly. For once, his production is less about craft than impact.

In this case, the impact comes from Nicki Minaj, who delivers the biggest, star-making, song-closing verse since Busta Rhymes in “Scenario.” Kanye and Jay-Z spend their time ratcheting up the tension; Nicki explodes it. She growls, screams, uses a fake patois, furiously switches rhythms, bends word sounds to her will, brags about her Barbie doll, and generally brings the song home. Kanye, for his part, knows exactly what to do with her. He chops up her vocal so that it sounds like every line is coming from a different spot. As soon as she starts rapping, the music drops out—there’s more than enough musicality in her voice to sustain the song—and Kanye twists the drum track around her patterns. It’s Nicki’s moment, but Kanye deftly uses her as a vessel for his own comeback.

That’s the other thing that makes “Monster” special: it’s a pivot point for Kanye’s return, on his own terms. In a moment when Kanye is supposed to crave redemption, he chooses to remain polarizing. Make no mistake: out in the world, his audacity gets him some love, but it gets him hate, too. On Thanksgiving day, the week that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received near-universal critical adulation and sold half-a-million copies, Kanye performed on top of a float somewhere near Times Square, as tourists and New Yorkers chanted “Taylor” and yelled, “You’re an asshole.” That’s exactly the kind of animosity that “Monster” takes on the nose. He’s still getting booed at the Macy’s Day Parade by “post-racist” America; he’s still gonna need to see your fucking hands at the concert. –MB

By Matthew J. Brady, David Brothers, Marty Brown, Sarah Engelman, Tim O’Neil, Nina Stone, Tucker Stone, Sean Witzke, and Josh Woodbeck, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 5

Sleigh Bells 
Treats

So earlier this year M.I.A. released “Born Free”, a song which sampled Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” and basically sounded like a Hanin Elias track from 1998. Atari Teenage Riot reformed (even though it really was just Alec Empire reclaiming the name and performing with his current band because his solo shows weren’t paying, Billy Corgan style). Most importantly, Sleigh Bells dropped Treats and had a song played on Gossip Girl. Digital Hardcore finally hit the mainstream, ten or twelve years too late. Which, I guess means nothing, but it’s weird. That’s the history of pop music, the weirder fringes ultimately get processed down into pop, and Sleigh Bells made a really good pop record. Probably the best straight pop record to come out this year.

It still is strange that this is the thing to hit in 2010. Digital hardcore was as millennial as it got. ATR and the bands that were in their direct circle were political, they appeared in reaction to the boring-ass rave music that was huge in europe in the 90s, they were post-gamer, post-industrial going pop, post-Detroit Techno, post-Fear of a Black Planet. They sampled the Bad Brains and Slayer. They toured with Rage Against the Machine and the Wu-Tang Clan (the amount of those shows that actually happened probably numbers under double digits). They wrote a whole shitload of smash the state anthems, and more interestingly a few songs about killing neo-nazis, hating journalists, and destroying technology (even though they made techno!). They were completely full of shit, but they sounded great and I was 14. It was a lot better to listen to than the warped tour shit everyone else I knew listened to (I know this seems like a detour but we’ll come back to this). Which, if you’re that age I say it’s better to be listening to loud shit that makes other kids hate recoil in disgust the way their shitty pop-punk made their parents (I wish someone had told me I should have been listening to Big Pun the whole time, but hey, what’s done is done).

The thing is, even though they were full of shit, a lot of these bands had agendas they were riding on. ATR were political, Kid606 was an anarchist, Chicks on Speed were D.I.Y. crypto-feminists, Shizuo wanted to make music you got high to. It was a great sound, but there were ideas motivating them. Then electroclash happened, but electroclash was almost entirely shit (with the exception of Ladytron). The best Le Tigre song was a the Kid606 remix of Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”. Which you might notice sounds exactly like Sleigh Bells, but I’m jumping ahead of myself. Anything and everything millennial seemed dated, those bands broke up or mutated or got boring, their replacements had no use for them. Noise-pop in the past decade has been damn interesting, even in the areas I’m not going to listen to (I’m not the biggest Animal Collective guy but goddamn I’m happy something this weird is a big thing for a lot of people) , probably because anything that felt 90s was avoided across the board. The strange thing is that after the Go! Team and the advent of 90s nostalgia in indie music, this shit was coming.

Or maybe they have no idea the whole digital hardcore thing existed and came to it by accident? Maybe they just went Example A plus Example B equals Example C through sheer intuition. Shit like that happens, I guess, even though I doubt it happens very often (consider Interpol talking about Joy Division, The Strokes talking about Television, shitty band x about better band y). Anyone who wants to describe Sleigh Bells as a new sound has to run into a dozen comparisons, even if you want to restrict it to boy/girl noise duos (ahem and AHEM). But you can really hear ec8or in the Sleigh Bells album that you can’t hear in Crystal Castles (who are the real 2010 variation of this stuff without referencing it, their Amen Break is squealing tape distortion, their hating neonazis is plagarism). The question becomes “why is this a thing?” and maybe more importantly “why am I overthinking what has never been anything more or less than a great sounding, loud-as-fuck pop album?”. The answers to those questions are “because it sounds good and it’s no longer a sound other people have an opinion about (or ever did)” and “because I’m an asshole”. Here’s what happens when this sound goes pop - a guy who was in one of those same shitty warped tour bands that I listened to “CYBERPUNKS ARE DEAD” to distance myself from is making a song called “Riot Rhythm”. It’s sung by a gorgeous girl with a thin voice, and the track is distorted to all fuck. That song is used to sell cars. That shit. That happened.

Treats is album that doesn’t lend itself to intellectual discussion any more than any other bubblegum record, the difference with this one is that it can and will fuck up your speakers because it’s mixed way into the red. The songs are meaningless, catchy, and FUCKING LOUD. Even the slow jams play on extreme frequencies and in one case pushing a Funkadelic sample to the forefront (another ahem). Treats is all stacked deck moves, building layers until you’re just punishing your eardrums with layers of guitar and beats, essentially turning singsong nursery rhymes into the kind of music you put on to piss off your neighbors. I’m conflicted about it, but not really. It’s a great record, I just worry about it not having any staying power, and even then that’s a weird thing to worry about when you’re listening to an album that could peel the paint off walls.

Also - this really has nothing to do with anything, but - is it hard for you to hear “Crown on the Ground” without saying to yourself “I do not talk, I am just a rapper” like I do? Is that just me?

-Sean Witzke, 2010

The Top 30 Albums of 2010: # 6

LCD Soundsystem
This Is Happening

"Albums to me aren’t really about things—they are things, if that makes any sense. It’s not a narrative, so I never know how to answer that. I understand the question, but I don’t know how to answer it, other than to make something up." James Murphy

He's probably telling the truth, although Murphy can be a bit of a prankster. Whether he is or isn't doesn't really matter. Not that it wouldn't be interesting if he was lying--if This Is Happening had some secret overall personal meaning to him and his compatriots--but that it's been passed on now, and the truth about music is less about what it means to those who make it and more about what it means to you after it is made. The relationship isn't one of sharing, it's one of giving. LCD Soundsystem made something, they gave it to you, they hope you paid for it somehow, and that's it. Live, they'll share an experience, but the music itself--its initial composition, the recording, that act of creation--it's not about them after its begun the infection. It initiates, then it expands. You play it where you play it, how you play it, it becomes the soundtrack at times, the reason others.

It's a mistake to think you're in charge of anything beyond the timing, but it's an understandable mistake.

It opens quietly, with "Dance Yrself Clean", and while you see the quiet/loud build up coming (a trick he's learned, a trick he's mastered), the electronic KEY that comes, it makes for a JOLT, even when it gets pushed to the side of the speakers, even when the balance gets thrown off, and he's high-pitching his vocals, adding extra consonants to words, and then he's howling, and then...holding it? Holding a vocal, hair-metal style? There's some Eno here, some Bowie, but it's--what is that? It's spinning like a lazy susan. "Sometimes friends are mean", and "the tedious march of the few", and "dance yourself clean, yeah". The drums are finished, that was them, they said goodbye. There's still some mumbling to do.

Then, "Drunk Girls". It's a goofball song that the cool kids hate, the rest of us--we don't mind. It's a cha-cha-cha song, you're supposed to cha-cha to it. 

"One Touch" gets back to "Dance Yrself Clean", it's another song set on top of a revolving record, it's homemade Excitebike on a 45. There's hills at first, you get those out of the way and get into that smooth part, like T&C Surf Design level one shit. The sky gets clouded up with those starfields that used to remind people of 2001 until 2001 became an old people movie and the starfields become associated with free screen savers that time out to the low end on cheap speakers. (The children voicing "One Touch" are the starfield.) It goes back to Excitebike for a while, with blips where the guy with the tiki mask jumps over the big holes. The whole thing is circular, it's spinning around. Near the end is some breathing stuff, it's a reference, doesn't matter what to. Nobody topped the breathing in the clown song from Akira, so its a good thing he gets back to the kids, even better when he starts interrupting them so that they can interrupt him later. It's blown timing, on purpose, so he can finish things up. It's too long, but that's okay. It's 2010, too short is the new way to snooze.

"All I Want" is already covered--well not yet, but it will be. It's the most meaningful song on the album, although meaning is shit. I hate finding out what meaning means. The only thing I have is this, my document, and it's too much--way too much--to imitate a pretense towards caring about what goes beyond the now, the past or the correct. There's either a pulse or there's nothing, but pulse can't be prodded or replicated, and all the cooing and the goring have to be for something. Truth isn't something that can be faked, but art has its own truth, talking has another. Feelings are shit too. That's an express route to death, it's why people like liars so much. I think you're born clean, sorry.

"I Can Change" and "You Wanted A Hit" are as steeped in "reference" as "All I Want", but they miss a bit of the personality brought forth in "Want". Basically: good songs, good songs. Just not barn-burners. You slow it down for these, then you speed it up again, it goes on, and you're in a room with the crew. It's these that read the most as band songs, and they come so soon after "All I Want" (which isn't) that they suffer a bit by comparison. They aren't about change, and the hit isn't as cynical as it sounds. It's not text though, so don't read it.

The album's closer is a play by play--you ride out from here, and if it feels like going backwards, it should. There's no kermit the frog song, but that's because those moments have already been covered (the show at Terminal 5, the live-in-studio version of this album) this year, and part of Murphy's ongoing thing is the way he moves things around (usually forward, but not always) while rarely retreading the same ground. (Opinions differ on this one.) It's the best album they made, because they didn't make an album, not really. They finished one, a trek that started with a single about being too cool for school and being too old to use that phrase. They finished it by barking at the record companies (with a studied 'tude) that they never had to dally with in the first place, and they--meaning him--decided to close the door on their own party, before we stopped having our own, and started living in their glare.

-Tucker Stone, 2010