PoMo Jukebox's (and friends'!) Top 25 Albums of the Year: 25-21

Welcome to PoMo Jukebox's first ever Album's of the Year List (2010 edition). By now it seems pretty evident that 2010 was all about excess. We had Kanye West's excessive production and ruminations on celebrity, Sleigh Bells' excessive volume, Joanna Newsom's excess of material, The Arcade Fire's excessive everything, and Sufjan Stevens' excess of feeling and whatever the hell else is going on with The Age of Adz. Oddly, through all of this excess 2010 ended up being a pretty incredible year for music. While excess has traditionally been a dirty word when talking about music, all of a sudden our excess of excess ended up giving music fans an excess of exciting, larger-than-life albums that managed to mix raw enthusiasm with their unchecked ambition.

Over the course of this week, we are excited to be rolling out our 25 favorite Albums of the Year list. We, literally, couldn't have made this list without you, our friends and readers. After our call for lists we received well over twenty lists with votes for over a hundred albums. What follows is the result of your tastes and ours. Enjoy, and let us know what you think.



25. The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
Label: Dead Oceans

One of the great moments of the year for me was hearing The Tallest Man on Earth’s “The Wild Hunt.” Singer/songwriter Kristian Mattson, from Sweden, sounds American with his Dylanesque melodies and reminds me how much I love folk music. Highlights include “King of Spain” and “The Wild Hunt,” but “Love is All” may be the true ode to early Dylan. A purely simple, quiet album that gets better with each listen. --Brandon Hobson







24. The Black Keys - Brothers
Label: Nonesuch

Six albums in, the blues-rock revisionists The Black Keys still sound fresh. Brothers demonstrates what the band does best: mixing old sounds with the new. While they haven’t reinvented themselves here, the album feels more relaxed than anything they’ve done – yet they’ve maintained that sonic atmosphere that gives their sound its tightness. Brothers sneaks up on you and upon first listen, you get the feeling you’ve been here before. However, this is not a rehash – the songs on Brothers feel like they’ve always been here. --Andrew Terhune






23. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty
Label: Def Jam

When people thought of Outkast, they often pictured Andre3000, his antics and costumes. On Sir Lucious, Big Boi shows he is every bit as weird as Andre and every bit as talented, if not more so. While the album drags on a little long, and while some of the guest appearances are questionable (I mean, Vonnegutt? Why?), on many of the tracks, the rhymes are as fresh and the beats are as tight as anything Outkast produced. And a little Janelle Monae certainly never hurts anything. --Joshua Cross






22. Belle and Sebastian - Write About Love
Label: Matador

I love every album Belle and Sebastian have put out, and “Write About Love,” their seventh studio album, is no exception. For me, their approach is always hypnotic, like vintage light sixties pop, but this time with lyrics less haunting than past albums. Still, “I Didn’t See it Coming,” is a fantastic opener, and “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John,” featuring Norah Jones, is a highlight to this really fine album that won’t disappoint B&S fans. --Brandon Hobson







21. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
Label: XL

The American Civil War serves as a controlling metaphor on The Monitor, both in the form of era-specific speeches and in lyrics that reference battles on land and sea. But ultimately, this album is about being young in present-day New Jersey and feeling that all your options are closed, as evidenced by lyrics like “down in North Carolina, I could have been a productive member of society / But these New Jersey cigarettes and all they require have made a fucking junkie out of me.” While thematically dark, this is one of the loudest, most energetic albums of the year. --Joshua Cross

James's Runner-Ups!

Next week we'll begin rolling out our Albums of the Year list (voted on by us, and you). For the time being, I thought I'd drop a preview post featuring a few of 2010's best albums that didn't make our list. Sure, each of these albums could whip The Suburbs to death with both arms tied behind their backs, but the public has spoken. And apparently, the public doesn't love the following albums as much as a I do...

I'll admit, I was stunned to see that I was the ONLY PERSON who voted for Robyn's Body Talk album. Maybe nobody else put it on their lists because they were bummed out that the tracklist for the full LP wasn't as tight as it could have been, or maybe everyone was pissed that "Cry When You Get Older," a standout from the Body Talk pt. 1 ep, was somehow left off. Or maybe not enough indie-snobs know how to love a good pop album when it comes along. Here's the thing--Robyn has one of the biggest personalities in pop music, and every one of her songs is bursting with that personality. The songs are catchy and well produced, the lyrics endearing and clever, and the whole album is built on sick arrangements perfect for dancing and singing along to. If you haven't checked out Robyn yet, please, please do. You owe it to yourself.

Here's the video for "Hang With Me":

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Okay, so Erykah Badu's New Amerykah pt. II: Return of the Ankh isn't quite the heavy, impassioned soulful scream of part one, but it wasn't supposed to be. pt. II was like the chill counterpart, the collection of songs--still brimming with quiet Badu's heavy love and quiet anger--we're supposed to celebrate with after the close of the last world war. These are soul songs, love songs, space songs, spirit songs, friend songs, and Badu never misses a beat, coming off as bogglingly playful and serious as ever.

Here's a video for Badu's NSFW video for "Window Seat":

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This album was a bit of grower--soft psychedelia with warm production and an almost early-Shins like penchant for melody. But as soon as the album gets fired up, Wild Nothing come into their own, mixing textured layers of synthesizers and atmosphere into every track. Odds are, a few months from now, this will be much higher on my year end list. That's the dangerous of making these lists early though.

Check out "Bored Games" from Gemini:

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In a word, something about Four Tet's There is Love in You sounds haunted. It probably has something to do with that opening track, "Angel Echoes," with its splintered human voice yearning over miles of unobtrusive beats and confused bells. While the album's opener is the most overt example of these ideas, the mood and tone pervades the album, leaving us a little bit dizzy and surrounded by ghosts at every turn. There is Love in You is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest albums of 2010. Give it a try.

Enjoy "Love Cry" from this album:

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I don't really know what this album is or where it comes from, only that it's a low key, soulful, slightly sexy bit of indie pop. The album offers plenty of 80's attitude and production flourishes, but without ever succumbing to the unquestioned and unearned nostalgia that so many of their peers traffic in. As far as I can tell, the only way Twin Shadow manages to avoid that trap is by keeping the songwriting easy and free--there is never a sense that the band is trying to hard to recall a past era, they're just playing their songs with a knowing nod backwards about twenty-five years.

Check out "Castles in the Snow":

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With Black Noise Pantha Du Prince have made one hell of a lovely electro-trance-techno-pop-whatever-you-people-call-it record. Oddly enough, I somehow forgot to include this on my own top 40 list. That happens sometimes. Anyway, the beats bubble with life, the synths are bright and fizzy, and even Noah Lennox drops in for a visit, but not in any way that draws too much attention away from the album's rich textures and chill tones. Black Noise is both full of motion and ruminative, a blissful collection of thoughtful, rewarding arrangements.

Here is "Stick to My Side" (w/ Panda Bear singing):

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See you on Monday with our (and your) Albums of the Year list.