Is This What You Want? - Top 10 Records of 2010 (Part One)

1. Nothing People - Soft Crash (S-S)

I'm not sure if this is the best Nothing People record, but it certainly feels like this is the right time for this band to be hitting their stride. I realized, when I was conceptualizing this list thing that I like them so much not because they sound like other bands that I like, but because they've created their own sound in the same way Pavement and the Flaming Lips did back in the early '90s, when I was first realising just how moving and fascinating weird music could be.

I've tried to pigeonhole this band and been completely unsuccessful. They are indebted to post-punk, certainly in the way they embrace a Joy Division-like darkness, but they also move faster than any of that p-p stuff, but not in that blatant, obvious, and certainly by now boring, one-two punch danceable kind of way. They are also indebted to wiley, snotty garage-punk, and fully entrenched within the vinyl g-p culture that established itself as another narrative for those who cared about rock & roll while people were still buying Black Rebel Motorcycle Club CDs by the 30-count box.

All it takes, really, is a listen to something like "Exploded View" to realise how these geniuses have created their own little campfire w/o needing anyone to say yay or nay. They seem to be happy, playing around with their pedals in their bizarre Northern California suburb, making apocalyptic music that no one seems to understand. I love them. They are the best band in the world right now.

2. The Fresh and Onlys - Play it Strange (In the Red)

I hope I've jimmied this band's collective wang in these pages enough already to make the curious go beyond just simple curiosity. At this point the most important thing to convey is that the best way to begin to understand these retro-futuristic fun puveyors is by settling in with their amazing mini-major offering, Play it Strange. This is the sound of a band at the peak of their powers, a band led by an eccentric bearded genius that sees months as years, and is maybe only ready to release his flower-power hook filled missives to the world as wax singles until the LP feels ready to go.

Said LP is Play it Strange, released with impeccable timing after a flurry of singles, (wonderfully) cobbled together albums and weirdo cassette releases. In the most wonderfully obvious way, this album contains F&O's braintrust Tim Cohen's best songs to date, including the harmoniously heartbreaking " Waterfall," and the epic epiphany of "Tropical Island Suite." These are insanely gorgeous pop songs, endlessly replay-able and eternally wonderful. If you'd like to recreate what, say, it was like to hear the Kinks' Face to Face for the first time back in 1966, this may be your chariot to the heavens.

Play it Strange is the at-peak offering from an artist (along with a group of other artists) that resists compromise and is unafraid to be lovely and heartfelt without forcing catharsis. This is one of a handful of records I played compulsively this year, guided by its lovely melodies, grubby fingers, and heart-brain references to pop music's past. Not all of the records on this list are for everyone. This one is.

3. Defektors - The Bottom of the City (Nominal)

Of the bands that have emerged from Vancouver's so-called "weird punk" scene, the most interesting have been the most straightforward - the neo-riot grrl paint-peeling of White Lung, the snotty shenanigans of Vapid, the death garage of Sex Church, the hippie-punk of Indian Wars, and the forthright punk rock of Defektors.

Regrettably, I left that city in a fit of boredom, depression, and ennui just as this scene was in its nascent stages. Had these bands been doing what they were doing now in late 2007 I might still be a west-coaster (a weird thought).

If there's an anthem for how I felt during my time there it's this record's "Bottom of the City," a terrific evocation of the wild anxiety and dark thrills of living moment to moment in a place where absolute destitution mixes with privilege on a barroom floor every weekend.

The record simmers to a boil wasting little time to makes its points. This is an urgent record, in the same way early Wipers records are, but also stream-lined in a way that few records dare to be, with just enough pedal wizardry to add that extra expressive dimension of hurtling through time.

Some have criticised this band (and others of their ilk) for coming off a little detached and not sufficiently weird enough. I say fuck that. This speedy, sincere, and super-intense (and also FUN) record is what I crave in my rock & roll.

4. Thee Oh Sees - Warm Slime (In the Red)

Another prolific Bay Area band, much like the Fresh and Onlys, with six LPs and numerous EPs, singles, and comp appearances to their credit in approximately five years of existence. This project is led by John Dwyer, who like Tim Cohen, is another prodigious talent who can't sit still. This band started out as the mellow, folky, j-ed out counterpart to Dwyer's Coachwhips, but has progressively gotten noisier.

Like most of this band's output, Dwyer's distinctively hungry guitar lashes lay in relief to a reverb-drenched background with an ever-so-slight bit of twang that gives the whole thing a vital danceability. But this record cuts the fatty meanderings of previous efforts. Warm Slime is the super-strong, super-tight record this band has been promising all along.

Anchored by the epic thriteen-minute crowd pleasing title track, and the punk roadkill blast, "I Was Denied," this is unabashedly fun music for fun people. There is a warm, woodsy vibe that runs through this despite the fact that it moves like a tiger and stings like a scorpion. A violent blast of punk love to the heart.

5. Sex Church - 6 Songs By Sex Church (Convulsive)

I'm calling it death-garage, because 1) there's nothing wrong with genre labels, even if (like my appellation there) they are hideously uninventive, because generic coding is a simple, easy to understand method of communicating a shared communal understanding - the simpler the better, in fact; and 2) it is hilariously inappropriate to label this "post-punk," as some have over-zealously done.

Oh yeah, also it's rock and roll, if you remember that stuff, and for all the bleating over how this sub-genre of sorts (see also: Nothing People) is so dark and moody there needs to be more bleating over how it captures the basic premise of early rock in roll inside its own dark psyche. This thing's got hooooks. Every Sex Church song thusfar has been instantly catchy and memorable (if not terribly easy to sing along to) because of the strict simplicity of the construction. The marvel here is that this is music rooted in ancient genres that allows itself to be forceful and experimental, yet retains its simple essence.

Largely this record is proof that slogging it out for years and years in punk bands bears fruit as these guys are all grizzled veterans who are now making the best music of their lives. These songs all seem like journeys that begin dark but end transcendent.