Jimmy Eat World - Clarity (16-Year Retrospective Review)

This piece is a retrospective review about the album widely regarded to be Jimmy Eat World's first masterpiece. Normally, I write these pieces for milestone anniversaries. This album is not approaching a milestone anniversary (though it will turn a remarkable 16 years old on February 23rd. Instead, I'm writing this "review" because 1) Kenneth (CoffeeEyes17) has an infectious obsession with this album that inspired my to spend some extra time with it recently, and 2) because no review (user or staff) exists for this album in the AbsolutePunk.net database. Anyway, without further ado, this is Clarity.

The first time I heard Jimmy Eat World's Clarity was in January 2005—nearly six years after its release date. The previous autumn, I'd fallen head over heels in love with the band's then-most-recent work Futures. It was an album that connected with me at a very crucial time of my life, and as a result, it was one of the first albums—if not the first album—that showed me just how visceral music could be when you really needed it. Around the same time, I was just starting to frequent music forums online (in a journey that would eventually lead me to AbsolutePunk), and fellow posters saw my love of Futures and asked me the obvious question: had I heard Clarity? As far as I remember it, these people framed Futures almost as a Clarity Part 2. They definitely suggested that "23" was a natural successor to the equally epic "Goodbye Sky Harbor," and suggested that if I loved Futures, I might just love Clarity even more.

My fellow forum posters, of course, all meant well. Their enthusiasm was admirable, as was their investment in helping me discover more music I might love. What they probably didn't realize was that, in calling Clarity the natural predecessor to Futures, they jacked my expectations up to such an unrealistic level that I was bound to be disappointed. Futures, at that point in time, meant more to me than any other piece of music I had ever experienced in my life. In the 11-plus years that have passed since, there have been maybe two albums that have come to mean more, and even that statement is debatable. Futures was the genesis rock of my music obsession, and to this day, any album that earns a comparison to Futures is one I end up being disappointed with. Twice last fall, I was told that new scene bands were about to break through with albums that captured the dark but hopeful vibe of Jimmy Eat World's 2004 masterpiece. Both albums—Better Off's Milk and Pentimento's I, No Longer—were solid efforts; neither were worthy of the lofty comparison.

If comparing albums to Futures still sets me up for disappointment 11 years after the fact, you can imagine what it did to Clarity. When I got the CD sometime in January, I excitedly cracked the plastic wrap and opened the jewel case. The disc itself piqued my interest, with the phrase "Can you still feel the butterflies" typed out in white text against a black background. I quickly ripped the album to my computer and synced to my iPod, and within a few minutes, I was pressing play and sinking in to an album that—hopefully—I would love as much as Futures.

Ironically, I would find an album within the month that I would come to love as much as Futures, but it wasn't Clarity. That's not to say I hated it. There were plenty of moments that I loved on Jimmy Eat World's so-called "first masterpiece," even from that first listen. In particular, the steady build of "Table for Glasses" and the sweep of "For Me This is Heaven" caught my ears, and it's not hard to see why: those two songs are the moments from Clarity that sound the most like Futures songs. Other parts of the album, meanwhile, I just didn't get. Who was this other dude singing on "Blister"? Why was "Your New Aesthetic" so loud and unpolished? Why did "Goodbye Sky Harbor" have to loop the same thing over and over and over and over again for 16 minutes straight?

All told, my first listen to Clarity was…confusing. I liked it, but I definitely didn't love it. There were moments that I adored, but also moments that I would have at the time classified as "filler." As a start-to-finish work, I honestly thought Clarity was kind of a mess. Too long; too lyrically abstract; not enough hooks; too few dynamite riffs; etc. I especially thought that the idea of Futures being Clarity Part 2 was way off base.

I've since recanted on all of those points but one: Clarity and Futures are not companion albums. Listeners often link them because they are the darker and more introspective releases in the Jimmy Eat World discography—in contrast to the brighter, more pop-influenced Bleed American and Chase This Light. But Futures also has a radio rock sheen to it—brought to the table by producer Gil Norton, who also helmed peak-fame albums from Foo Fighters, Counting Crows, and Dashboard Confessional. The songs on Futures are more concise, the lyrics more direct, the choruses catchier, and the riffs more pronounced. Because Mark Trombino, Clarity's producer, was originally the man behind the boards for Futures, some of his orchestral or experimental style carries over—like on that long sweeping into to "23," or the minimalist piano-and-feedback arrangement of "Drugs or Me." For the most part, though, these records are distinct from one another. Futures sounds like a rock record circa 2004—perhaps the last year where radio rock really seemed to matter—while Clarity is also a product of its time, a collection that parlays 90s alt-rock, punk, and even a bit of dream pop into the ultimate emo prototype.

Looking back now, the differences between Clarity and Futures make me love the records even more. I wouldn't want them to be more alike. But back then, I didn't get it. I went into Clarity expecting an earlier, rougher version Futures and got something that my 14-year-old ears didn't really understand. Even though I told myself that I was musically refined at the time—and compared to my friends, as the only kid at my school who had an iPod, I was—but my ears still favored slick production, big bold melodies, and lyrics that were easier to relate to without having to do a line-by-line analysis.

I never let Clarity go or dismissed it out of hand, but I would be lying if I said I loved it. I wanted to "feel the butterflies" for that album like I did for Futures (and like everyone else online seemed to), but at the time, I couldn't. Years passed and I delved deeper and deeper into new music, but in retrospect, I stayed in the same lane for a long time. Ultra-melodic pop-rock was my wheelhouse and all of my favorite albums from those years—Butch Walker's Letters, Jack's Mannequin's Everything in Transit, John Mayer's Continuum, The Killers' Sam's Town, The Wallflowers' Rebel, Sweetheart, Matt Nathanson's Some Mad Hope—fit pretty neatly into that box. When Jimmy Eat World's Chase This Light came along and had even bigger hooks and brighter studio sheen than Futures, it was exactly what I wanted to hear from the band. To this day, "Dizzy" might be the song that a computer would spit out if it had to create my ideal composition: that's how much the tenets of melody and emotion drove my listening back then.

It wasn't until my senior year of high school that the walls I'd subconsciously built as a listener started to come down. Two very notable things happened that year in my journey as a music fan: first, I started using this website as my primary means of discussing and discovering new music; second, I became obsessed with the music of Bruce Springsteen. The first of those events helped me start venturing out into new genres, while the second made me focus less on pure melody and more on songwriting as a whole—from the lyrics to the nuances of the full-band work. Subsequently, in the final spring of my high school career, I put on Clarity and finally understood it. I marveled at how Jim Adkins could wring so much of emotion from a song that is, quite literally, about a woman sweeping dirty steps and dropping dirt into glasses on a table; I admired the intimacy of "A Sunday," bells, chimes, and all; I continued to fall deeper in love with songs like "Just Watch the Fireworks" and "For Me This is Heaven"—enjoying the latter even more now because Something Corporate's "Konstantine" had become one of my favorite songs; I even respected that long, long fadeout on "Goodbye Sky Harbor," how the song builds subtly and then decays to nothing, the sound of a band using up every inch of tape on the reel.

Lyrically, Clarity might still be my least favorite of the post-Static Prevails Jimmy Eat World records. I think the sort of abstract, minimalist lyrical style that Jim had here helped Clarity become the emo classic it was, and has also helped the record age well. The lyrics are poetic enough to avoid sounding juvenile, but with enough surface angst for tens of thousands of teenagers to relate to them. Compared to the more narrative-driven work of Jimmy Eat World's more recent work—particularly Damage—the songs on Clarity provide a lot of space for listeners to draw their own interpretive conclusions and filter in their own experiences. Suffice to say that most listeners probably do not think of "Table for Glasses" as a song that is actually about a table for glasses.

Personally, I find less to relate to on an emotional level in the words of Clarity. My visceral connection to the songs on Futures is well-documented at this point, and I really think Jim has reached a higher plane lyrically on more recent songs like "Invented" and "Dizzy." There are, of course, moments I love: that big-hearted declaration of "I'll stay up as late as it takes" on "Just Watch the Fireworks"; the way the chorus of "For Me This is Heaven" captures the brevity of everything in the space of four gut-punch lines; and how "Blister" turns a seriously emo question into an anthemic rallying cry: "How long would it take me to walk across the United States all alone?"

But for me, what is truly astounding about Clarity is the way the band executes these arrangements. Later Jimmy Eat World albums—with the exception of Damage, which had a deliberate garage-rock aesthetic—would all have a glossy studio sheen to them. In 2010, Mark Trombino came back—after almost a decade of not working with the band—to turn Invented into their fullest, best sounding work. With Clarity, though, Jimmy Eat World were at a crossroads. They were shedding the harder-edged punk sound of Static Prevails—partially because of the songs they were writing, partially because of Tom Linton's reduced role on vocals—but they hadn't yet started shooting for the big radio sound. The result is a record that is meticulously arranged and produced, but which still retains the rawness of the band's earlier work. A bigger recording budget from Capitol also meant the band spent more time in the studio and invested a fair amount of money on new equipment and instrument rentals—both factors that affected the scope and atmosphere of Clarity.

The band's willingness to experiment, combined with Trombino's ability to push the band toward new arrangements if he thought a song could be improved ("Just Watch the Fireworks," for instance, originally started as a slower, more ballad-y composition) meant that Jimmy Eat World were sort of making things up as they went along on Clarity. You can hear that looseness and spontaneity in the songs—especially on vinyl, where all of the various instrumental lines stick out in vibrant color. Jimmy Eat World might get pigeonholed as an emo or "scene" band in the broader musical community—particularly among the people who have still only ever heard "The Middle" and "Sweetness." But take the time to sit down and actually listen to Clarity—undistracted and unencumbered—and it's clear just how musically accomplished these four guys are. In terms of chops, Jimmy Eat World were, are, and probably always will be underrated.

It took me a long time to appreciate Clarity for the accomplishment it is: all those years of knowing the album's influence and pedigree, but not quite loving it myself. I still can't call it my favorite Jimmy Eat World album. Forever, I will rank Futures first, and second place is probably, honestly, a five-way tie. But now, when I play this record, when I hit "For Me This is Heaven" and hear that achingly wistful chorus, I can at least deliver the correct answer to the song's unforgettable rhetorical question.

"Can you still feel the butterflies?"

A resounding "yes."

Jimmy Eat World - Futures (10-Year Retrospective)

Note: This is not a "review" in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a discussion what this album has meant to me over the past 10 years, and why I think I will be listening to it for the rest of my life.

“Has it really been 10 years?”

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot this fall, because the autumn of 2004 was one of the most important seasons of my life. It was my most paramount musically formative stage. I’d always loved music, even leading up to that season: listening to the radio, making cassette tape copies of my brother’s CDs, playing the piano, jamming the few albums I owned repeatedly in the afternoons after school, downloading tracks off Limewire and making mix CDs. But I never fully understood the impact a song or album could have on my life until the fall of 2004. Until Futures.

The first track I heard from this record was “Kill,” and it was like getting struck by lightning. I loved everything about it. I loved the emotion in Jim Adkins’ voice. I loved the way the guitars just seemed to layer and build to infinity. I loved how the lyrics never repeated themselves, even in the chorus. And I loved how the words seemed to perfectly capture what I was feeling. “I can’t help it, baby, this is who I am/Sorry, but I can’t just go turn off how I feel,” Adkins sang in the final chorus. It was like someone was unlocking my brain and setting its contents to words and music, and it felt more enlightening than any class I’d ever taken or any book I’d ever read.

The reason hearing “Kill” felt like a lightning bolt to my heart was because it was one. It didn’t matter who I’d been leading up to those four heavenly minutes, because after them, nothing would ever be the same. I’d found my niche, my passion, my life. It was music. It was this song. And all I could think of in the 30 seconds after the music stopped was this: “I’ve gotta hear the rest of this album.”

The instant emotional connection I had with “Kill” was like nothing I’d ever felt before, but it was only the beginning of the journey that I would take with Futures—a journey that has lasted through each of the past 10 years. The first time I sat down to hear the album front to back, it was like one life-changing experience after another. The roaring riffs of the title track; the claustrophobic intensity of “Just Tonight”; saving the slowest dance for last in “Work”; the canals freezing in “The World You Love; the kiss with open eyes on “Pain”; the haunting feedback-and-piano arrangement of “Drugs or Me”; the exquisite pain permeating every second of “Polaris”; the good song to say what I can’t in “Night Drive”; the pounding aggression of “Nothingwrong”; and certainly the all-encompassing symphonic swell of “23.” Every song brought something new into my world.

A few weeks after Futures arrived in my life, my step dad lost his job. I vividly remember arriving home from school one afternoon and having him come downstairs and tell me that his position had been “eliminated.” It was a blow, of course, but he was already looking for similar work and assured me that we weren’t going to end up on the street or anything. He did tell me, though, that not all of the jobs he was looking at were close by, and that there was a possibility we would have to move away.

That revelation sent me reeling, and for a couple of weeks, I was in purgatory. Because I was selfish: I understood that my stepdad needed to go where there was work, and that my family needed to go with him. But the prospect of moving away from the only town I’d ever known—a year before high school, no less—scared the shit out of me. I’d lived in this place since I was four: I didn’t know another world. I’d gone to school with the same kids for eight years: I couldn’t imagine a world without them. I had high hopes of attending and graduating from the same high school where my siblings had gone: I didn’t want to move to an alien place and become the outsider you pity in every teenage movie and TV show.

In short, I was in turmoil. And during the few weeks when my own future was perhaps more uncertain than it has been at any other point in my life, I turned to Futures for comfort. These songs seemed to understand me. They knew my thoughts, my hopes, my pain. Every lyric seemed to connect to something I was going through. “I fall asleep with my friends around me/Only place I know, I feel safe/I’m gonna call this home,” my favorite line from “The World You Love,” was representative of the comfort and familiarity I wanted to hold onto in my hometown. And in the words of “Polaris,” in “You say that love goes anywhere/In your darkest time, it’s just enough to know it’s there,” I tried to see the light at the end of the tunnel—even during what I considered to be my darkest time.

Futures held me together during those weeks. It was a containment device for all of my nervous energy and my worry, and a vessel for all of the prayers and wishes I was making that my step dad would find a job close to home. And I don’t know if it was the album or God or dumb luck or just my step dad’s resolve to avoid a move, but somehow, those wishes and prayers were answered. The day he told me we were staying put, I took a victory run with this album in my CD player. And when the words “I always believed in futures/Hope for better in November” burst through my headphones that day, the proclamation was like my own victorious battle cry. A colossal weight was lifting off my shoulders, and the same songs that had been there to prop me up during the struggles were now there to soundtrack the victory. My future was set; I was staying at home. And this record was staying with me.

And stay it did. I’ve heard a lot of new albums in the 10 years since that tumultuous autumn, but Futures has never stopped hitting me like that lightning bolt to the heart I first felt during “Kill.” And I know that this “review” is light on musical analysis, but honestly, words can’t do justice to how much I adore every second of this record. Not that I haven’t tried: I wrote about Futures on a standardized test once, for God’s sake. (I am not kidding.) And I wrote more than 2,000 words about it at the end of 2009, trying to describe how much it had meant to me in those first five years. Fast forward another five years and here’s another couple thousand words, and I’m still getting nowhere near the point where I would run out of superlatives to throw at this album. I can’t explain the feeling I still get on fall nights when I put this record on and it’s like nothing's changed. I can’t explain why I get chills every time I drop the needle on the gorgeous blue vinyl copy that showed up a few weeks ago. I can’t explain why this record felt like the only appropriate soundtrack when it was 10:30 p.m. on December 31, 2009 and the minutes left in that decade were ticking down.

What I can explain is this: if it hadn’t been for Futures, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t be an obsessive music fan—at least not in the same way I am now. I wouldn’t be writing for this website. Hell, I might not even be writing at all. More than any other record in my collection, this album has always felt tied to my fate, to who I am. It feels autobiographical. And there are a million reasons for that. The love of music it facilitated is one of them, sure. But the fact that it was this record that played as the course of my young life was set, as I learned I would be staying in my hometown, well…I can’t overstate how much that still matters to me to this day. Because I found my life in that town over the next few years. I found who I am. I found my friends. I found my passions. I found the girl I married. I found everything. And I can’t quite explain why, but I have always felt as if I owed at least a little piece of all that to this record. It truly did change my life.

Futures are unpredictable. In “23,” Jim Adkins makes a plea with some unknown entity: “Don’t give away the end, the one thing that stays mine.” But no one can give away the ending. No one can tell you where you will be in a day, or a month, or a year. Our best-laid plans can always go awry. Hell, this record taught me that just recently. Since 2004, I’d always imagined myself at the 10-year anniversary concert tour for Futures, singing along to “23” when I actually was 23. And I had tickets and was ready to go, right up until the moment my mom called me, nine days before the concert, to tell me my Grandpa had died. His funeral was the day of the show, and I had to miss the tour. I don’t regret it at all: that’s life, and some things are just more important than concerts…even concerts celebrating your favorite albums on the planet. But it just reinforced everything this record has taught me over the past 10 years, and that it continues to teach me to this day: that life is precious, that every choice we make is important, and that it’s okay to stare off into the great unknown and feel a little bit scared sometimes.

In all of my failed attempts to predict the future, though, I got at least one thing right. On the eve of my 14th birthday, all the way back in 2004, I listened to “23” before turning in for the night. It was 10 or 11:00 p.m., just the closing couple of hours in that particular year of my life. And I remember thinking: “I am still going to be listening to this in 10 years.” Not only am I still listening to Futures and still learning from it, though, but I’m also still leaning on it for comfort. The day after my grandfather passed, my vinyl copy of Futures arrived on the doorstep. And I thought, “Someone out there must know I need a little help today.” It’s probably cheesy and overly sentimental to call an album your “guardian angel.” But some albums really do change your life, and this one never seems to stop saving mine. So thanks, Jimmy Eat World, for having that kind of impact on me. I really do owe you one.

Jimmy Eat World - Damage

Jimmy Eat World - Damage

RCA/Dine Alone Records, 2013
9.5/10

It’s always been astounding to me the way that songs, albums, lyrics, melodies, instrumental lines—even album titles or cover art—can become more than the sum of their parts when they collide with the right listener at the right time. In a world full of critical acclaim, “best of the year” lists, and verbose Pitchfork reviews, it seems that we have stumbled into an age of relative consensus. How many publications ranked Frank Ocean’s Channel ORANGE or Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D.City at number one last December? Or went with Bon Iver the year before? Or Kanye West in 2010? Few collective outlets, at least within the inner circle of the big critical players, venture too far beyond the same five or six favorite records at the end of any given year. Sure, those same publications review hundreds and hundreds of albums and hand out great scores to a lot of up-and-coming obscurities, but from looking at the top ten lists scattered across the web each year, it seems like the idea of an objective “best album of the year” is becoming more and more corporeal.

But what is objectivity in art? What benchmarks decide which collections of songs deserve the title of “best” in any given year? And why have some genres become punching bags for critics while others have earned adjectives such as “credible,” “relevant,” “important,” or “great”? Perhaps all of this is strange to me because my own personal album of the year has never once matched up with the consensus choice, but I don’t actually believe that objectivity and art, music especially, can exist side-by-side. We all look for different things from music. We all have bands and songwriters who we gravitate toward more than others, and we all bring our own unique biases and experiences into every single record we hear. And finding the right album at the right time, whether it’s an undisputed 10.0 classic or a scene favorite that somehow gets handed a 3.0 from one of the biggest taste-making publications in the world, that trumps everything else. If you came to this website looking for someone to tell you what to feel, if you’re reading these words because you’re searching for the “best” album of the year, you’re looking in the wrong place. In this art, “best” doesn’t exist. What truly matters is the bond that forms between music and listener when they meet at the exact right moment. Those bonds are the vehicles that allow us really feel music and fall in love with it for the first time, the devices that let certain albums to stay with us forever, and that’s something that can’t be shared or given or bought. You absolutely have to find it yourself, on your own terms.

The first album that I ever formed that kind of bond with was Jimmy Eat World’s Futures, and every record Jimmy Eat World have released since has had some huge influence on my life. The best albums, they serve as time capsule snapshots of the times in our life when they mattered most, and this band has done that for me more than most. Suffice to say that, while I’ve loved a lot of albums since that fall of 2004, when songs like “Kill” or “23” broke through my facade and convinced me that Jim Adkins knew exactly what I was going through, Futures remains the most important milestone in my musical development. I love Born to Run more, and Butch Walker is my go-to favorite artist, but without Jimmy Eat World and the 11 tracks that make up their greatest album, I wouldn’t be writing these words. For some, music is trivial entertainment, but for me, it determined a larger part of my life path than I will probably ever be able to realize. And all of that took off when, on some chilly autumn afternoon in 2004, I got a chance to “believe in futures” in a whole new way.

Fast forward eight and a half years, and that band is still at it, but a lot of other things have changed. As listeners, we all grew up. We went from shutting our eyes and humming along to the crashing climax of “23” in our adolescent bedrooms, ruminating about our juvenile crushes, to shouting along with its lyrics in our post-college apartments as we actually turned 23. But for most of us, this band’s music has remained important, even after many of the records we were listening to back then have faded into the background. In that case, it’s somewhat comforting to know that, on Damage, their seventh full-length, Jimmy Eat World are still pretty much the same band we’ve always known and loved.

The first thing most fans are going to notice with this record is the production, and that’s a shame. Due to the towering pop-rock structures and palatable studio sheen of the band’s last few records, the rawer, more live sound of Damage will probably feel a bit jarring. To be fair, many of the more epic moments of the band’s catalog, songs like “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” “Dizzy,” or “23”—in essence, the closers—were as much studio audio art as they were straight emotional pop rock, and it’s hard not to imagine what the songs on Damage could be with the same meticulous attention to detail. In particular, lead single “I Will Steal You Back” sounds a bit muddy, like a leftover demo from Futures or Stay on My Side Tonight that probably would work better if Jim’s vocals were higher in the mix. Similarly, “Book of Love” is a jaunty mid-tempo rocker that would have fit perfectly alongside the shimmering hooks of Chase This Light...if only it weren’t missing that record’s muscular sonic punch.

But more often than not, the production (courtesy of Queens of the Stone Age veteran Alain Johannes) suits the tenor of these songs in a way that Mark Trombino, Butch Vig, or Gil Norton’s more bombastic styles probably wouldn’t have. Taking a cue from Foo Fighters’ back-to-basics analog record, Wasting Light, Jimmy Eat World go for a dirtier, more spontaneous sound here that, at its finest moments, is impossible to argue with. Case-in-point is “How’d You Have Me,” which explodes with defiance and ringing guitars reminiscent of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” before morphing into the kind of vitriolic, shout-along garage rock song we haven’t heard from this band since “Blister.” Similarly, “Byebyelove” calls back to the Clarity days, with scuzzy production, minimalist structure, and goosebump-inducing crescendos that serve as fitting homage to the band’s ‘90s emo roots. And closer “You Were Good,” though it lacks the floor-to-ceiling sprawl of the band’s previous finales, sends the album out with acoustic guitars and reverb-drenched resignation.

Where Invented was largely an opportunity for Adkins to experiment with his songwriting style (much of the record played around with character perspectives and female point-of-view), Damage is the most straightforward and cohesive set of songs the band has written to date. Dubbed by Adkins as an “adult break-up album,” Damage clings to a love story arc throughout, matching its jagged production with the ragged snapshots of a relationship about to burst apart. There are snatches of that in the first two singles: “I Will Steal You Back” is a yearning plea for better times lost in the fire, while the narrator of the gorgeous title track watches as his lover vanishes into a mess of broken promises and inflated expectations. “I hate the way I feel, but I don’t think I can change,” Adkins sings in the first verse of the latter. It’s a song about falling out of love with someone you still care deeply for, and just as Adkins conveyed the pulsing want of unrequited love on “Kill” (“I can’t help it baby, this is who I am/Sorry but I can’t just go turn off how I feel”), here, he relates the destructive agony of losing connection with the person who once meant the world to you.

Even more powerful is “Please Say No,” an achingly beautiful vignette that stands alongside the very best in the Jimmy Eat World catalog. Adkins has long been one of my favorite songwriters, but his lyricism has often lingered in abstraction. One of the reasons that so many kids have been able to connect to JEW’s songs is that they’ve rarely embraced absolute specificity. On Clarity, Adkins’ poetry was sparse and indefinite. Listeners took those songs, saw what they wanted in them, and filled in the fringes with their own experiences. On Damage though, because the band has really embraced the idea of a thematic arc for the first time, Adkins is finally allowed to write in a more direct storytelling style. These songs aren’t just lovelorn poetry or odes of heartbreak; they’re full stories, five-minute films, expansive novels written in staves, rests, and music notes for the rest of us to bleed to. And “Please Say No,” which burns like a lost Springsteen cut, is the finest example of that. It’s a song about an affair and the toll it takes, not just on the relationships it squanders or on the people it cheats, but also on the lovers locked inside its deadly embrace. “I’ve lately come to wonder what it might feel like/If one last time, we went and did this right/Somewhere no one possibly could know our names/Somewhere no one bothers to remember a face,” Adkins muses during the second verse. But moments later, he begs his lover to refuse him, knowing that a simple “No” is the only thing that can save him from blowing apart his life on this impossible romance. And the way Jim sings those lines, with lush harmonies swelling around him, his voice bursting with passion and pain, it cuts right to the bone.

Jimmy Eat World aren’t going to get a ton of critical accolades for this record, and for as long as they’ve been together, they never have. But Damage is unequivocally my favorite album of the year so far, and I have a feeling that a lot of people who hear these songs at the right moment in their lives are going to share that sentiment. Maybe the connection will come on some late and sweltering summer night, and a teenage kid will be climbing into his car with heartbreak on his mind and nothing left to say. And this record will be playing on the stereo. And he’ll turn up the volume and shout along, and the words and music will crash into him and change his life forever. Or maybe that connection will sneak up on someone the way it came to me, at the end of one major life chapter and on the cusp of something infinitely bigger and more frightening. When people look back at 2013 and think about the albums that proved to be the “best” or “most influential,” I don’t know what’s going to stand up tallest. But I do know that I’ll never forget driving away from college for good while the don’t-take-too-much-for-granted strains of “Appreciation” rang through my car. I won’t forget how terrified I felt in that moment, staring off into the great unknown, or how invigorating it was to be entirely free for perhaps the first time in my life. And this album, this beautifully melancholic disc about sprained hearts, strained voices, and broken mixtape songs, will forever stand immortal because it had the grace and timing to walk into my life when I needed it most. I only hope the rest of you should be so lucky.

Westland - Intimacy w/o Intricacy

Westland - Intimacy w/o Intricacy - EP

Unsigned, 2013

7.5/10

Every once in awhile, a band comes along that feels like a collision of everything this scene is about, a band whose music reflects the records that made many of us fall in love with music in the first place and makes us feel like our younger selves again. A few years ago, that band was The Dangerous Summer, combining the likes of Taking Back Sunday, The Starting Line and Jimmy Eat World into an emotive blend of melodic pop rock. Last year, it was Daytrader, who took that Jimmy Eat World influence, drenched it in the dark atmospherics of their favorite Brand New records, and created something that was at once familiar and refreshing. And if I have to nominate a band for the title this year, then my earliest choice is Westland, a talented alt-pop group from Boston whose brand-new EP, entitled Intimacy w/o Intricacy, plays out like an infusion of the melodic sensibility of Sherwood and Good Old War, the radio friendly surge of All Time Low, The Maine, or Boys Like Girls, and a tinge of nineties radio rock.
 
Intimacy w/o Intricacy, only six songs and 20 minutes in length, acts less as a cohesive record and more like a sampling of everything Westland can do, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with that. We get the electronica-infused trance-ballad (“Slowly,” which carries the EP out in balladic ambiance); we get the slightly-generic play for modern-rock radio that is “For the Moment Star,” a song whose repetitive, “been there, done that” chorus nearly derails a foot-stomping guitar intro, strong verses, and a booming bass-line (courtesy of Nick Karidoyanes, who anchors the band on numerous occasions throughout this record). Still, frontman Aaron Bonus goes for broke here, bringing more than a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll edge to the proceedings, and while the song isn’t entirely successful on its own, it’s at least nice to know that this band, so good at dwelling in the earworm pop-punk department, isn’t afraid to turn the amplifiers up to 11.

But still, it’s hard to deny that Westland is at their best with a greater level of pop sheen behind them. Case-in-point is “Jack and Coke,” the first single from Intimacy and the band’s greatest bid for mainstream success. Building from a piano-heavy intro (one that nostalgically echoes Semisonic’s “Closing Time”), the song explodes into a visceral, shout-along chorus. Bonus’s voice soars on the high notes, the guitars crashing around him, and for an instant, Westland seem to have recovered the keys to Marty McFly’s DeLorean and gunned it to 88, taking us back to the golden age of pop punk. Indeed, the vast majority of Intimacy w/o Intricacy feels like something I would have been absolutely in love with when I was a freshman in high school. My tastes have moved forward quite a bit since then, but there’s still a lot to be said for a band that can generate such a clear frame of throwback nostalgia, especially when they didn’t even exist as a musical outlet when I was a freshman in high school (the band formed in 2009). I don’t know if I can quite explain the impact here, but rest assured that it’s a monumentally personal one, something that will keep me coming back to this record all year long, and I’d wager this band will do something similar to a lot of listeners from around here.

“Bleed” layers vocals, guitars, strings, and acoustics for a similar effect, though its chorus isn’t quite as meteoric as “Jack and Coke.” The song’s break sounds like something that wouldn’t have been out of place on Jimmy Eat World’s Stay on My Side Tonight EP, and the use of acoustic instrumentation, though minimal, is a nice change of pace that I’d challenge the band to explore further in the future. “Too Late,” meanwhile, is the catchiest song on the record, opening with a gorgeous pomp-and-circumstance swirl of piano and strings, and transforming into a Something Corporate-esque showstopper. Producer Shep Goodman, known for his work with pop bands and solo acts, works his magic here, surrounding the bus-sized chorus with the kind of pop sheen that could make the song a global hit. Certainly, the radio waves have rarely embraced our scene, but with a shifting mainstream music landscape that put fun. on top of the world last year and made bands a force to be reckoned with again, could the hopeless romantics in Westland find themselves notching some national success? With a set of songs as solid as Intimacy w/o Intricacy, I must confess that I’d be happy to see it happen.

Every lonely heart could use an honest song...

A discussion of the summer of 2011, musical connection, entertainment criticism, 
and The Dangerous Summer's War Paint

One year, three months, five days, and twelve hours ago (give or take a couple minutes), I sat down for my first listen to The Dangerous Summer's War Paint. It was one of my most anticipated records of the year, and right from the first instant that the title track's thick wall of guitars burst out of my headphones, I knew it was something special. It was the album that would go on to claim my album of the year title, the album that would dominate my summer playlist and define almost every vestige of my life. Today, I put that album on for the first time in a month or so, and everything still felt the same: just like I thought it would, it took me back to that summer season. It transported me back to countless reflective night drives, moments with friends or with the girl I love, to performances and beach days and times spent with family. In short, it encapsulated what my life was in 2011, and that's something I will always cherish. I always make myself wait at least a year before I "officially" place an album on my all time favorites list, but doing that for War Paint has almost felt like a chore. Every time I've listened to it in the past year and a quarter, since that first night that it found its way to me, its resonated more than any other album in recent memory. But now that the requisite year has passed, I feel completely confident in what I'm about to say: that the perfect score I gave this album was more than deserved and that it has at last found its way into the very top tier of my music listening experience...all the way into my top five.

But the elevation of War Paint to a place alongside the four albums that I have called favorites since 2009 or so (Springsteen's Born to Run, Butch Walker's Letters, Jimmy Eat World's Futures, and Jack's Mannequin's Everything in Transit, in that order) is only the tip of the iceberg for how fondly I remember last summer, and most of that is due to how impossibly splendid the soundtrack was. Of the albums I placed in my top ten last December, eight of them had found me in the heat of the summer, somewhere between the time I drove triumphantly away from my sophomore year of college and the day I embarked towards my penultimate one. Those albums managed to supply soundtrack to every kind of emotion and situation, from sunsoaked pop splendor (Matt Nathanson's Modern Love) to the bittersweet feeling of summer's dwindling (Charlie Simpson's Young Pilgrim), from the massive excitement I felt as I drove to pick my girlfriend up at the airport after some time away (Mat Kearney's Young Love) all the way to the loud and brash but surprisingly tender rock 'n' roll record that played as I drove away from it all (Butch Walker's The Spade). It was albums like those (not to mention late-night slowburns from Bon Iver, The Damnwells, or Mansions) that made last year my favorite music year in recent memory: a flawless summer soundtrack, with one of my all-time favorite albums leading the charge.

This past summer brought me a lot of great and meaningful music too. The Gaslight Anthem's Handwritten striking through the hottest days of the year to become an anthemic badge of honor; Japandroids' Celebration Rock blaring from my car speakers at full volume, whether on carefree summer afternoons or late nights near the end of the season; John Mayer's Born and Raised kicking things off in splendor, or Yellowcard's Southern Air serenading the poetic finale to what was probably my last summer in my hometown. But for as many unforgettable moments as there were, nothing ever became a War Paint-like soundtrack. Maybe that's because the season was so entirely different than the last one: my girlfriend was gone for over a month, away in Colorado at a Graduate program, and when she finished, it was off to start a job, a life, a new world. That meant that I was spending less time in the car, with fewer late night drives or sunset cruises to let these albums really sink in the same way that War Paint once had. I was also working my own jobs, spending six days a week putting in hours for a marketing company, writing for a magazine, or performing shows at my local dinner theater. I would turn to the music at the end of long days or late nights, but for the most part, I was spending less time with it.

I've often thought that how an album hits you--how much you love it, how long it stays with you--depends entirely on when it comes into your life. Perhaps that's an exaggeration, since a lot of it also has to do with the music at hand, but I actually think the "objective" elements are a lot less important in the long run. That's why I try to inject a little bit of my personal story into my music criticism, at least when it comes to the artists and albums that are really important to me. Part of the reason Roger Ebert is such a renowned film critic is that he spends a lot of time in his reviews not just talking about the film, but also about his personal reaction to it. I think the first time I ever realized that was during my junior year of high school, when Ebert's review of Martin Scorsese's film Goodfellas appeared in the textbook for my A.P. Language & Composition class. Why was it that, in a book of literary essays and poetry, this one piece of entertainment criticism found is place? That became quickly evident as I read, because Ebert doesn't kick off his review by talking about a filmmaker or a rating or even about the gangster film genre. No, he begins it by talking about himself:

"For two days after I saw Martin Scorsese's new film, "GoodFellas," the mood of the characters lingered within me, refusing to leave. It was a mood of guilt and regret, of quick stupid decisions leading to wasted lifetimes, of loyalty turned into betrayal. Yet at the same time there was an element of furtive nostalgia, for bad times that shouldn't be missed, but were."

That opening paragraph took my breath away. The idea of relating the emotions of a work of art to one's self, to personal moods and experiences and memories, resonated with me on a purely primal level, and I have, largely, been writing in a similar manner ever since. That's why, when I reviewed War Paint towards the end of last summer, I focused on the personal context rather than the musical nuances of what is, on the surface, a fairly straightforward emotional pop-punk record. That's why, when I compiled my end-of-the-year list for 2011, most of the entries blended notes about the songs with explanations of how those songs impacted me. For me, music has always been, first and foremost, about the visceral connections I form with it, and there are few albums more visceral than War Paint. So yes, it might only be a year and three months after the fact (already?!), and many may deride this band and write them off for all of the dramatic shenanigans its members have be involved with in the past year, but there's no other way I can describe this album other than to call it one of my favorite albums of all time. I do believe it's earned that classification.

A Look Back: The Best Music of 2010

2010 was one of the best years of my life. I fell in love, stumbled upon the greatest summer job that I could ever have asked for, and was graced by more unforgettable moments than I could ever fit into the space of this (already lengthy) blog post. As far as music was concerned, I think 2010 was a good year, if not a great one. I spent much of the summer listening to playlists, mixtapes, or older music (the back catalog of number-one-slot-winner Chad Perrone, which includes a few stellar records with his former band Averi, pretty much dominated the first few months), and that meant that, while there were many brilliant life moments for me in 2010, many of them were not actually accompanied by albums on this list. Still, what 2010 lacked in emotional connections, it made up for in pure eclecticism. The slate of records below is the most versatile and illustrious I have ever recorded as my personal favorites: the top ten alone ranges from a complete unknown independent singer/songwriter to the solo record from one of music's most recognizable frontmen, from emo/alternative legends to indie rock superstars, and from a platinum selling pop-country songstress to hip-hop's most flawed and fascinating figure. In other areas, the music that I listened to the most represented a full-bodied enthrallment into the career and work of Bruce Springsteen (who himself re-issued 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, with a slew of b-sides), and this list boasts more Boss-indebted acts that I ever again expect to see in a single year. Looking back, there were albums that lost ground, albums that gained it, and records (the top three) that remained as important to me as I expected they would.

1. Chad Perrone - Release

I’ve spent the better part of the past decade looking for music that connects to me in a personal way, music that appeals to my heart first and foremost. It’s obvious that all of my favorite albums are made up of great songs (in my opinion, anyway), but they’ve also played as soundtrack for some pretty unforgettable times of my life, whether they were personal crises or simply the trials of growing up and trying to figure out who I wanted to be. Two summers ago, just as I was falling in love for the first time, this record came into my life. When I had to go back to school and was forced to do the long distance relationship thing (and to work a job I hated during a semester where everything I’d loved about college the year before seemed to evaporate into thin air), this record hit me like a ton of bricks. Perrone sings about getting older, about moving on from things that once meant the world to us, whether they be places or relationships. He sings about love found, lost, broken and unrequited, and he sings about the pain of separation, and all of those things felt comforting to me. When I heard his desperation on “Under Different Circumstances,” it was like I’d written the song myself about my own experiences: I can still feel every single word he belts out in that song, after hundreds of plays. And “Here For Good,” where he writes about his hometown and his friends who he’s had to say goodbye to, that song collided with me in a year where my best friend in the world packed up and moved to New York, where my hometown started to slip away, and where high school seemed no more than a distant memory. As I drove towards Kalamazoo at the end of that summer, it was this record I listened to, and it cut to the core of me. I was driving towards the place that was supposed to be teaching me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but I was driving away from the person who I knew I wanted to spend it with with. By the time the heartbreaking “So This Is How It Ends” hit, I was in tears, drowning in uncertainty, despair, and love: every time I listen to this record, that whirlwind of emotions captures me again, somewhere between the tremendous hooks, the heart-on-your-sleeve lyrical content, and Perrone’s unparalleled vocal prowess, and I can’t help but get choked up.

Key Tracks: “Under Different Circumstances,” “The Walking Dead,” “Anything or Anyone”

2. Jimmy Eat World - Invented

It’s still hard for me to separate Invented from the ridiculous anticipation I laid upon it leading up to its release. Jimmy Eat World, perhaps even more than Butch Walker, is a band that I have an idealistic approach to. My most definitive times listening to them undoubtedly came with Futures, a record that changed my life (and some ways, saved it), and every time a new JEW record comes along, I have hopes that it will make me feel the same way I did in the fall of 2004. Invented was the closest they’ve come. It was hyped by some as Futures Part II, and so of course, I had a picture of it in my head that the real thing couldn’t possibly match. I wanted it to be the soundtrack of my life, I wanted it to top Futures, I wanted it to be the record that would skyrocket into my all time top five and the one I’d want to feel again, years after the fact. Invented wasn’t that album, but it was still a damn good one, full of great songs that draw comparisons to every era of the band’s career, and despite the fact that I never had the kind of vast personal connection to it that I formed with Futures, it’s still a record I could listen to on any day and be impressed by. After all, have guitars ever sounded as big as they do on “Evidence”? Has Jim ever been as innovative lyrically as he is on songs like “Cut,” where he sings from a female point of view? And does the one-two punch of “Invented” and “Mixtape” not stand in line with the band’s tradition of closing albums out in epic fashion? All told, this is a truly spectacular album, probably their most consistent to date, and the fact that it doesn’t quite live up to their best work says more about the immense love I have for the band than it does for any weakness in their latter day music.

Key tracks: "Heart is Hard to Find," "Invented," "Mixtape"

3. Butch Walker - I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart

Butch Walker has been my mainstay favorite artist ever since I first heard his 2004 masterpiece Letters, and anytime an album of his turns up, it’s a guaranteed album of the year contender. Since the power-pop infused break-up songs that fueled Letters, Butch has adopted Bowie-esque glam-rock (The Rise & Fall...) and plentiful folk and classic rock influences (2008’s fantastic Sycamore Meadows). In 2010, he made this record, which I now regard as probably his weakest full-length: it still landed in my number three slot. Butch, traditionally a solo writer, turns to his bandmates in The Black Widows (think Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers or Elvis Costello’s Attractions) for inspiration and musical ideas, and the resulting set of songs is both loaded with his fingerprints and strikingly different than anything else he’s done before. The folk influences hang around center stage here, with Butch taking his newly minted backing band into the realms of alt-country (album highlight “Don’t You Think Someone Should Take You Home,” “Canadian Ten”), country-rock rave ups (“She Likes Hair Bands”), and acoustic lullabies (“Be Good Until Then”).  He references Johnny Cash on the raucous “Days/Months/Years,” brings a requisite amount of twang into the near-anthemic opener “Trash Day,” and even did a tongue-in-cheek cover of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” as a one-off iTunes single around the time this record hit the streets (a “joke” that actually got him – and his banjolin arrangement of the song – on TV with Swift herself during the 2010 Grammy Broadcast). But while his respect for the Nashville-scene runs deep, Walker has never been a single-style kind of guy, and he fills in the corners here with gorgeous splashes of Beatles pop (“Pretty Melody,” “House of Cards”) and stunning explosions of vocal harmony (“Stripped Down Version”) that almost make me want to forget that Butch has made better albums.

Key Tracks: “Don’t You Think Someone Should Take You Home,” “She Likes Hair Bands,” “Days/Months/Years”

4. The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang

After the brilliance of 2008’s The ’59 Sound, it took me a long time to truly appreciate the greatness of American Slang. I can still remember the day it leaked, over a month and a half ahead of it’s June release date, and coinciding perfectly with the final week or two of my freshman year of college. By all means, the themes of youth, fading and lost, should have fit perfectly with my mindset at the time, but as many times as I listened (and I played the album a solid dozen times, front-to-back, on that first day), I couldn’t find the same musical allure that ’59 had; I couldn’t find the desperation that had made “The Backseat” such an indelible closer; and I missed the Springsteen references, the constant worship of one of my all-time musical heroes. I wrote the record off, filed it off as disappointing, as repetitive and a bit boring, and put it away, robbing my summer months of what could have been a truly transcendent soundtrack. Months later, as December descended upon my and I struggled to come up with the initial version of this very list, American Slang came back to me. And for whatever reason, what many had declared a summer album for the ages only clicked with me as I drove through my snow-covered hometown, letting the tremendous guitar hooks of songs like “Orphans” and “Old Haunts” wash over me, glancing out across the ice-covered bay as I drove home with the melancholic strains of “We Did it When We Were Young” serving as soundtrack, or realizing, for the first time, how great it sounded to hear Brian Fallon adopt classic soul and Motown influences like he once adopted the E Street Band (“Bring it On”). Now, two years later, I can put on American Slang for a summer road trip, feel the title track’s hook and guitar lick pour out of my speakers, and know what people meant when they were writing about this record back around release time. That said, this summer album will always hit me the hardest in the winter, when it can really take me back to those days and nights where I first fell in love with it.

Key Tracks: “We Did it When We Were Young,” “American Slang,” “The Queen of Lower Chelsea” 

5. Brandon Flowers - Flamingo

The Killers needed a break after 2008, the year where Day & Age, their third record, inspired everything from viciously hostile critical assessments to a Rolling Stone Readers Poll which named it that best album of the year. My opinion on the album was somewhere in between those two extremes: I was disappointed, but not horribly so. I thought the album was high on style and low on compelling musical ideas, but that it still had some great songs. The band tried to blend the Springsteen-inspired heartland rock of Sam's Town with the synth-heavy, Vegas-centered pop that made Hot Fuss such a smash, but the combination was awkward. They were trying to please everyone, trying to do damage control on frontman Brandon Flowers’ hubristic claim that Sam’s Town would be "one of the greatest records of the last 20 years," and attempting to atone for all of the "sins" that Rolling Stone had cited in their 2.5 star review for that same record. The problem was that the band, Flowers at least, didn’t want to just go back to the successful formula of Hot Fuss: Flowers wanted to explore the Springsteen influence further, and that showed through in the fact that Day & Age’s finest moments (“A Dustland Fairytale,” “This is Your Life”) were essentially an evolution of the Sam’s Town sound. So when his band decided to take their long deserved break, Flowers turned around and made a solo album that is, among other things, his most consistent and concise work to date. There are certainly big moments here, moments like “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” and “Crossfire,” where the sound of Dave Keuning’s roaring guitar might have elevated the proceedings even higher. But more often, Flowers veers towards songs that would not have quite worked within the confines of his band, whether he’s re-writing Springsteen’s mournful “Point Blank” (on “Playing With Fire”), spinning subtle yet epic slowburners (“On the Floor”), or bringing in Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis for an effortlessly gorgeous duet (“Hard Enough”).

Key Tracks: “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,” “Hard Enough,” “On the Floor” 

6. Cary Brothers - Under Control

When I finally discovered Cary Brothers’ 2007 LP Who You Are in the summer if 2009, it immediately skyrocketed into the upper echelons of my all-time favorite albums list. The songs had a vulnerable and yet powerful atmosphere about them, and they resonated with me so perfectly at the time that, for a few weeks, I listened to nothing else. That set of songs came along a week or so before my family had to put my first dog to sleep: those who have never truly loved a pet will view that statement as trivial, but for me, it was the first experience I'd really had with death. Her name was Jessie, and she'd been there for over 14 years of my life. Needless to say, since that was the summer following my high school graduation, I'd grown up with her. Back when I was a boy, my parents used to joke that Jessie was my "nanny," but she was really just a good friend, a constant companion that I could always count on being there, waiting for me when I got up in the morning or home from school every afternoon. The loss was devastating for me, and the delicate beauty of Who We Are became instrumental in getting me through the grief and onto the next chapter of my life - few albums have ever had a more personal place in my heart. The follow-up is nearly as good, and makes a case for Brothers as one of the best singer-songwriters in the game today. Opener “Ghost Town” rests in an unsettling ambiance of synths and pianos (befitting its title) before launching into a massive chorus, while “Belong,” with its crashing piano chords and an epic, chilling vocal build, positions itself as a unique and deeply expressive love song. “Someday” rests in the same new wavy vein that made “The Last One” such an irresistible number off this album’s predecessor, “Break off the Bow” shows that Brothers can write a hook as well as anyone, and album closer “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” is a haunting acoustic number that makes me want to hit play all over again, every time through. And always, Brothers writes with an honest and entirely palpable emotional strength, giving us songs that sound so autobiographical, so perfectly cinematic, that it feels like they could have soundtracked moments of our lives, even if those moments have already passed.

Key Tracks: “Ghost Town,” “Belong,” “Someday”

7. Taylor Swift - Speak Now

It only took a few short years for Taylor Swift to rise from heartbroken teenager to one of pop music’s most bankable icons. She made the transition on her girl-next-door demeanor, the strongly relatable aspect of her lyrics, and a knack for delivering an infectious mix of pop hooks and country twang that made her a crossover sensation waiting to happen. Swift didn’t escape the voyage unscathed though, battling through cruel encounters (the Kanye West VMA debacle), critical lambasting (comments concerning her performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards, where she also took the top prize), and premature tabloid relationships (an especially doomed fling with John Mayer), all of which threatened to tarnish her spotless, innocent reputation and image. All of those things and more serve as songwriting fuel on Swift’s third full-length, the aptly titled Speak Now, which notched over a million album sales in its first week back in 2010. And while countless music snobs would write Swift off as a bubblegum commercial princess, to do so would ignore the fact that Speak Now is a traditional country music record masquerading as a pop music flagship. The band sounds explosive and organic, the arrangements overflowing and blissful, and the vocal harmonies ring with life. It doesn’t hurt that the songs are incredibly well-executed, or that Taylor, who wrote every word and every indelible hook on the record, sounds more mature, forceful, charismatic, and emotionally centered than ever before. The result is one of the finest pop albums in recent memory, a record that is served equally well by rootsy twang (“Mine” and “Mean”), dance-floor rundowns (“The Story of Us”), rock ‘n’ roll kiss-offs (“Better Than Revenge”), emotional acoustic breakdowns (“Last Kiss”), pure school-girl pop songs ("Sparks Fly"), or pitch-perfect anthems (“Long Live”). Liking Taylor Swift may not be cool, but when the albums sound this good, who the hell even gives a shit?

Key Tracks: “Dear John,” “Last Kiss,” “Long Live” 

8. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Speaking of Mr. West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy earned rave reviews last year upon its release, along with perfect scores aplenty and album of the year titles across the board. It didn’t get those things because it was a perfect record: there are flaws here, as in any album, and if you look hard enough, you will find them, but you’d be missing the point. Fantasy earned such acclaim because it is a hip hop album for people who both love and hate hip hop, a rap record for people who have never enjoyed more than a few songs in the genre (like myself), and a pop album for an era where the label of “pop music” has been so utterly defaced and slandered that we’ve almost forgotten what it means. It’s all delivered by an artist who’s more of textbook rock star than just about anyone making music today, a guy who combines massive melodic hooks (“Dark Fantasy,” “All of the Lights”), indubitable flow and towering hubris (“Power”), and deeply humanized self-reflection (“Runaway”) to form a sound that nobody can touch. So while I wouldn’t call My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy perfect, it remains a record that defies criticism, one so universally appealing and so easily likable (in complete contrast to it’s creator, a complicated and flawed, but insanely talented individual) that it’s damn near impossible to stop listening to it once you’ve started. 

Key Tracks: "Power," "Runaway," "Lost in the World"

9. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

The Arcade Fire have always had a taste for the grandiose and the dramatic: how could they not after coming out of the gate with 2004’s Funeral, a loose concept record about life, death, community, and healing that stands as one of the greatest albums in modern music? It also spawned some of the best songs, like the infectious “Rebellion (Lies)” or, especially, the rousing, tearful “Wake Up,” with its expansive “whoa oh” melody and Win Butler’s massively emotional vocal delivery.  The band never quite reach those heights on their third full-length, but they put the same qualities to work elsewhere, constructing a record that aims to be a document of what it is to live, love, and work in the modern middle class. They do it fairly effortlessly throughout, melding Springsteenian lyrical themes with musical ideas that land somewhere between U2-sized stadium-sweep (“City With No Children”) and sunsoaked, California folk (“Wasted Hours,” “Deep Blue”). Themes coalesce on “Suburban War,” the album centerpiece where the tension in the narrative’s love story reaches a breaking point. “Choose your side, I’ll choose my side” Butler sings, as the song reaches its cinematic climax, a battle of instrumental ambition that ranks as one of the most musically striking moments of the year. That same tension returns as the album climbs towards its grand finale on the two-parter that is “Sprawl.” The tracks play out as a conversation between lovers, pitting Butler (“Sprawl I (Flatland)”) against wife and co-vocalist Régine Chassagne in “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains” as the two come to terms with their struggle. The former piece is a haunting acoustic number, almost harrowing in its grim atmosphere, the latter a disco-charged rave-up, reminiscent of the Bee Gees and Blondie in sound, but aligning more with Springsteen in words. The two singers both come to the same conclusion, that the boundless hope and opportunity of youth is gone, replaced by responsibility, bills to pay, stagnant suburban life, and dreams dead or dying. It plays like a Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River for a new generation, and although Funeral might be the better record, this one is arguably just as resonant. The fact that it picked up a surprise Album of the Year win at the 2011 Grammy Awards was just the cherry on top.

Key Tracks: "City With No Children," "Suburban War," "Sprawl II"

10. Valencia - Dancing With A Ghost

Shane Henderson has always been an immensely personal and visceral songwriter, from the shattering eulogy for a lost love that he delivered on When the Flowers Bloom (with side-project The Promise of Redemption) to the sadly nostalgic summertime hooks he was slinging on Valencia’s sophomore album, We All Need a Reason to Believe. Dancing With A Ghost may not be his best work to date, but it’s hard to find faults in this slick, short and sweet collection of songs that ranked as the best pop-punk album of 2010. Of course, we still get the bouncy, catchy pop-punk tunes that wouldn't have been out of place in some nostalgic teen movie ("Days Go By," "The Way"), but it's Henderson's shots at maturity that really resonate. The band shifts from Springsteenian-sized sweep (the title track) to rapidfire punk-rock ("Stop Searching"), hitting upon gorgeously executed power pop ("Spinning Out") and massive arena-ready anthems ("Losing Sleep") along the way. The latter, recorded at the end of a long studio session, rings the truest, with Henderson shredding what's left of his voice in one of his most powerful performances to date: "So if you checked the weather report, then why the fuck are we driving north?/You know we're headed into the storm to finish what we started," he sings: it's hard not to belt along with him.

Key Tracks: "Spinning Out," "Losing Sleep," "The Way"

11. Donovan Woods - The Widowmaker

Just as every year has its summer soundtrack, every year also has its “winter singer/songwriter" for me: in 2008, it was Bon Iver, in 2009, Michael McDermott, and in 2010, the title belonged to Donovan Woods. One listen to this record will leave no doubt as to why that is, since Woods possesses the kind of warm yet fragile voice that feels so comforting around the holidays. He’s also a damn-good songwriter, showing himself off as equally adept with bitter acoustic rockers ("Won't Come Back") and gorgeous, nostalgic ballads ("No Time Has Passed"). But even beyond the immediate standouts, this record is a profusion of gorgeously subtle melodies, fascinating lyrical perspectives, and the beautiful snowfall of Woods' guitar playing, accented occasionally with icy piano lines ("Jail"), lo-fi production ("Lord, I'm Tryin'"), or any variety of harmonicas, drums, banjos, or other folk music requisites. Due to it's strongly seasonal appeal, The Widowmaker will never be one of my most played records, but when I do throw it in rotation, it captures me completely. 

12. The National - High Violet

Matt Berninger might have the most distinctive voice of anyone in music right now, a dark, deep, charismatic baritone that no one could replicate without sounding like a caricature, and on The National’s fifth full-length, that voice proves to be both their biggest strength and their greatest limitation. There are songs here that Berninger’s voice can’t sell, songs that come across as mediocre or dull on record, but which have reached much greater heights in other hands (“Anyone’s Ghost," a relative throwaway, became unexpectedly haunting when Silver Swans covered it last fall). But when the formula works, the band hits home run after home run. Just listen to the gorgeous indie-pop of songs like “England,” “Runaway,” or “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks”, the lo-fi crescendo of opener “Terrible Love”, or the straight-up anthem that is “Bloodbuzz Ohio”. Throughout each style, Beringer sings in a voice that is all at once warm, comforting, richly nostalgic, and deeply sympathetic. He imbues his lyrics (which often discuss the mundane, everyday struggles of normal people) with a knowing and relatable purport, taking us on an emotional journey that constantly stresses to listeners that they are not alone. I think that’s why The National have gained so much respect within the indie community: because more than just about any band out there, they’re a group of down-to-earth, everyday guys who people can see as their friends, their family...or even their self.

Key Tracks: "Terrible Love," "Bloodbuzz Ohio," "England"

13. The Hold Steady - Heaven is Whenever

When the high-rise vocal harmonies explode on staples like “The Weekenders” or “Hurricane J,” this album sounds like summer. Everything else about this band, about Craig Finn’s literate lyricism, about his bellowing vocal style, about the Springsteenian sweep of their earlier records (like 2006's career-defining Boys & Girls in America), or about former member Franz Nicolay’s sorely missed piano lines, it all evaporates under the epic enormity of this album’s best moments. Fans wrote it off and critics gave it a lukewarm response, but in my eyes, summer albums are rarely more palpable or perfect than this one. Just listen to the dusky slide guitar on opener “The Sweet Part of the City, the scorching guitar solo in “Soft in the Center,” the raucous clarinet solo in “Barely Breathing” – and yes, the expansive, anthemic hooks of the two aforementioned staples – and you will understand. These are just a few of the moments here that evoke that summertime atmosphere, that feeling of late night drives, sunset rock festivals, fireworks across the night sky, hangouts with friends, or spontaneous road trips down a sunburned state highway, belting along to your favorite songs. This album seeks to be a companion for each of those situations, and whether or not it’s the best that Finn and The Hold Steady have offered thus far is immaterial for that reason alone.

Key Tracks: "Soft in the Center," "The Weekenders," "Hurricane J"

14. Anberlin - Dark Is The Way, Light Is A Place

Anberlin took a lot of flak on this record, their fifth full-length and their second on a major label. I can recall the initial stream, where many fans immediately pointed out a repetitive musical and lyrical songwriting style that was a vast departure from some of their earlier work (one need look no further than Cities closer “Fin” to know why the criticism was at least somewhat warranted). Despite that, though, Dark is the Way, Light is a Place remains, for me, the best and most consistent album these guys have ever made. Brandon O’Brien mans the boards, bringing a slicker and more poppy studio sheen to the proceedings, but the commercialization suits their interests well, adding a requisite amount of punch to dark rockers like “We Owe This to Ourselves” and “Closer” – both haunting and hard-hitting  – and then giving the album’s highlight (“Impossible”) a U2-esque, stadium-ready atmosphere. The chiming “You Belong Here” is reminiscent of both Coldplay and Clarity-era Jimmy Eat World, with lead vocalist Stephen Christian (always an impressive frontman, both in vocal range and emotional aggression) letting his voice soar on an anthemic chorus. The album, in ten tracks, does what none of Anberlin’s records have ever done before, hitting perfectly consistent ground on a tracklist stacked with memorable moments, from the relationship that shatters on “Art of War” to the rousing percussion build-up of “Pray Tell,” all the way to the tortured slow-burning acoustics of “Down.” Then there’s “Take Me (As You Found Me),” an irresistible love song that recalls ‘90s radio rock ballads to a tee. And while the band has vowed to go back to a more aggressive style with their next album (called Vital, out this October), I’ll merely be hoping for a record with as many soaring hooks and confessional moments as this one.

Key Tracks: "Impossible," "Take Me (As You Found Me)," "Down"

15. Jesse Malin – Love It To Life

I've never felt as strongly about Jesse Malin, a New York-based rocker, as my brother has, and that remained true with the release of his fourth full-length in 2010. While he named this record as the second or third best of the year, I struggled to find the same appeal in it as I had found (after a time) with Glitter in the Gutter or The Fine Art of Self-Destruction. But that's not to say it's not a solid exercise: right from the ringing, Clash-esque guitar that kicks off "Burning the Bowery," this record is a blistering, raucous display of punk-rock attitude and Springsteen storytelling. Malin, with his unique vocal whine and throwback songwriting style, is basically a collision of a dozen different classic rock heroes, from Joe Strummer to Lou Reed, from Mick Jagger to Paul Westerberg, and while his songs aren't as great as they have been in the past (nor is there a Springsteen appearance to spice things up, like there was on Gutter's "Broken Radio), there is still plenty to love here. The wall of sound on "All the Way to Moscow," the ringing, Oasis-esque guitar solo on "St. Mark's Sunset," or the gorgeous melodic elegy of "The Archer" are just a few of the highlights. Occasionally, the muddy production hampers the effectiveness of the music, but for a guy who obviously idolizes bands like The Replacements, it almost feels like that aesthetic might be intentional.

Key Tracks: "Burning the Bowery," "The Archer," "Revelations"

16. The Alternate Routes - Lately

Equal parts Counting Crows and U2, these roots-rock throwback boys have released a trio of records, each with soaring melodies, nostalgic guitar solos, and raucous classic rock energy. Lately might be their best work to date, encompassing everything from bluesy jam band atmospherics ("Love the Way") to lilting folk balladry ("Raincoat"). The arena rock tendencies are probably the most satisfying though: the album opens with a towering intro track, a colossal swell of organ, guitar, and keyboard ambiance that builds until it collapses into album-highlight "Carry Me Home." Vocalist Tim Warren establishes himself as one of the most talented frontmen in the genre here, belting out a gorgeous, towering power-ballad that would be as well fit for stadiums as it is for late-night road trips. And the penultimate number, the shimmering "Two of a Kind," sounds like it could have been penned by Bono, circa The Unforgettable Fire. But even beyond their obvious strengths, the Routes acquit themselves quite well: "Just the Same" sounds like the kind of sunny alt-rock song that would have captivated the airwaves back in 1997 or so, "Tell Me Your Name" boasts an indulgent, shout-along chorus truly meant for a live show, and "Rocking Chair" has the kind of charismatic momentum needed to kick the album into high gear after it's mid-tempo overture. It's not a band or an album many people have taken notice of over the years, but revisiting Lately today, for the first time in months, I love it even more than I did the first time I heard it.

Key Tracks: "Carry Me Home," "Just the Same," "Two of a Kind"

17. Black Lab - Two Strangers

Ever since these '90s one hit wonders made a resounding return with 2005’s See the Sun, a collection of bright pop hooks and tortured moments of heartbreak, Black Lab have been one of the most confusing bands on my "favorite artists" roster. Since that album, they’ve churned out more of my favorite songs than just about anyone, hitting me at the perfect time with classics like “Weightless,” “Mine Again,” “Circus Lights,” and “Remember,” but they've never quite had the consistency with their records to truly become an all-time great. Still Paul Durham, the frontman and brains of the operation, has a knack for baring his soul in immensely catchy pop rock songs, and Two Strangers might be his most accomplished work to date. There’s something about songs like “This Ship Goes Down Deep” and “Love to Love You” that just hits me in the perfect place, whether they’re arousing memories of past summers, or simply connecting themselves to the place and time that I’m in right now. And that’s to say nothing about Durham’s strength as a pop songwriter, which shows itself in spades with nearly every song on this record, from the anguished rockers (“Start a Fire”),  to the yearning power ballads (“Always”), all the way down to the elegiac, acoustic torch songs  (“Say Goodbye”). Perhaps best of all is “The Pain is Gone,” which, despite a common chord progression and a couple lyrical cliches, thrives on the strength of Durham’s utterly passionate delivery. Perhaps that’s why I love these guys so much: even if they’re not the most original or innovative songwriters, they more than make up for that in conviction, and in their best songs, I can always see a piece of myself reflected back at me.

Key Tracks: "This Ship Goes Down Deep," "The Pain is Gone," "Love to Love You"  

18. Sara Bareilles – Kaleidoscope Heart

In 2008, when Bareilles hit the airwaves with the infectious “Love Song,” the hook masked what was, in essence, a fuck you to the singer’s major label. It was a tirade against an overly commercialized system that tried to wrest creative control out of her hands, and rather ironically, it became an almost ubiquitous hit. On the follow-up album, the label hands almost entire creative control over to Bareilles, and the result is a catchy, creative, and endlessly heartfelt collection of songs that expose their songwriter’s quirks and indulgences to a backdrop of slick, bombastic pop production. The hooks are effortless (see the single “King of Anything” or the proper opener “Uncharted”), but the truly breathtaking moments are the ones where Bareilles drops the tempo. Multi-tracked vocals create an expansive a cappella texture on the introductory title track, while “Hold My Heart” displays an achingly gorgeous melody and vocal, and "Basket Case" is a masterclass in acoustic resignation. But the centerpiece is a “Breathe Again,” an expressive piano ballad that feels like it has soundtracked a hundred separate late night drives for me. “Car is parked, bags are packed/But what kind of heart doesn’t look back?/At the comfortable glow from the porch/The one I will still call yours,” she sings at the outset: the imagery is perfect, the sadness palpable, and the nostalgic rivers that it inspires transform it into one of the most personal and powerful “leaving songs” I’ve ever heard.

Key Tracks: "King of Anything," "Basket Case," "Breathe Again"

19. The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt

The Tallest Man on Earth (the moniker for Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson) is just about as no-frills as folk music gets. Throughout the majority of The Wild Hunt, his second LP, Matsson uses little more than his acoustic guitar, his accomplished lyrical ability, and his harsh, yet richly emotional vocal style, but there’s never a moment where the sound doesn’t work. Matsson distinguishes himself among the modern singer-songwriting crowd not by trying anything new, but by looking back: his music evokes the sound and fury of early Dylan records like The Times They Are A-Changin’ and The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, complete with the imperfect vocal whine and sparse, basic production. The result is a record that is predictable, but entrancing, derivative, but fiercely gorgeous. Songs like "Burden of Tomorrow," "King of Spain," and "Thousand Ways" crackle and burn with charisma, passionate energy, and palpable emotion. And when Mattson closes things out with a power ballad of all things ("Kids on the Run"), played on a broken down, out-of-tune piano, it sounds like the guy could actually be the voice of his generation. His 2012 return (There's No Leaving Now) saw him playing it safe and delivering this same brand of pretty folk, but I have hopes that he will realize what he is capable of next time out.

Key Tracks: "A Thousand Ways," "Burden of Tomorrow," "Kids on the Run"

20. I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody's Business  – The World We Know

Ace Enders is a prolific guy: in recent years, The Early November frontman has quietly built up quite the catalog, releasing (at least) one record a year across three or four separate projects. 2010's The World We Know is quite possibly his best work to date, an almost impossibly gorgeous record of tortured break-up songs that, at its best moments, hits with unparalleled emotive force. Opener "Sleep Means Sleeping" finds Enders joined by a haunting female voice, amidst an array of electronic sounds and orchestral sweep, while the dream-pop loops that open "Old Man" indicate the direction of the song, as Enders layers components on top of one another to create a stunning symphony of sound. I remember the first time I heard this record: I was home for a weekend around Easter time in the spring of 2010, and my year had, for the most part, been devoid of new albums or musical discoveries. I checked this out on a whim, and as I made the three hour drive back to school, everything about the record, from the personal power of it, to the all-encompassing production and interconnected flow, hit me like a bomb. "Telling Me Goodbye" hit the hardest: it's a farewell to a loved one, a confession of regret for taking that person for granted, and a stirring, heart-shattering reminder of the brevity of life. Enders gives himself over entirely to the emotional swell, and by the end of the song, I was in tears. The World We Know doesn't quite sustain that force throughout, but when it reaches that level, the inconsistencies just fade away.

Key Tracks: "Old Man," "You're Not So Good At Talking Anymore," "Telling Me Goodbye"

21. Wakey!Wakey! – Almost Everything I Wish I'd Said The Last Time I Saw You

I discovered Michael Grubbs back in the summer of 2008, though I can't exactly recall how I stumbled upon his music. He didn't have an album out at the time, but what was available (a mixtape of covers and a few odd tracks on his Myspace page) was fantastic. The two pieces `that hit me the hardest - a tune called "Brooklyn" and an earnest piano take on Foo Fighters' "Everlong" - made their way onto numerous mixtapes that season, and I made a note to keep an eye out for Grubbs and his Wakey!Wakey! project in following years. When he dropped Almost Everything... in early 2010, I snagged it almost immediately, and I wasn't disappointed. Piano rock doesn't get a lot better than the opener ("Almost Everything," with ringing keyboard licks and a bombastic string arrangement), but that's only the tip of the iceberg for a record that explores surprisingly eclectic territory. Take the breezy island-pop of "Twenty Two," the McCartney-esque slow-burn of "Dance So Good," or the ice-cold grooves of "Feral Love." That same versatility can also prove to be a bit frustrating, but when the album does settle into a groove (the final three tracks), the results are quite pleasant, like on the gorgeous "Light Outside," the yearning "Car Crash," or the jarring, anthemic "Take it Like a Man." It's not an album I revisit much as a whole, and the songs never add up to more than the sum of their (wildly varied) parts, but there are a lot of great moments here.

Key Tracks: "Almost Everything," "Light Outside," "Take it Like a Man"

22. Motion City Soundtrack – My Dinosaur Life

Motion City Soundtrack has a lot of records that are better than this one (including this year's Go, which is on a collision course with my end-of-the-year top ten), but while My Dinosaur Life suffers from inconsistency, occasionally generic modern rock tropes, and numerous grating choruses ("Delirium," "@!#?@!"), frontman Justin Pierre stumbles upon a few of his best songs in the process. "Her Words Destroyed My Planet" is how a modern rock single should sound, while "The Weakends" provides a bruising and scorching finale, "Worker Bee" comes roaring out of the gates with a ferocity that is impossible to forget, and "Pulp Fiction" is about as signature Motion City Soundtrack as songs come. On the whole, My Dinosaur Life is a manifestation of Motion City Soundtrack's more "aggressive" side, and while I prefer their poppier records (again, Go, but also 2007's Even if it Kills Me), the occasional trips to more subdued territory are welcome. Case in point is the existentially ponderous "Skin and Bones" - one of the band's best songs to date, and the highlight of a challenging and confusing, but ultimately rewarding record.

Key Tracks: "Her Words Destroyed My Planet," "Skin and Bones," "The Weakends"

23. Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses - Junky Star


Country singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham had a big year in 2010. In addition to winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song (for Crazy Heart's "The Weary Kind," which appears as a bonus track here), he wrote and recorded and released his third-full length with celebrated producer T. Bone Burnett. And while Junky Star isn't his best album (that title still belongs to his debut, Mescalito), Bingham is still a troubadour worth watching. His gruff, weather-worn vocals, his deep, storyteller manner of songwriting, and his acoustic/harmonica textures fit very well alongside some of my all time favorite artists - Bruce Springsteen, Will Hoge, Bob Dylan, to name a few - while the other country music legends he cribs from - Hank Williams, especially - are well on display here. Bingham's greatest strength here is the lyrical (take the stunning opener, "The Poet"), but on haunting melodic numbers like "Hallelujah" (NOT a Leonard Cohen cover), or the raucous rockers (like "Depression," whose tempo and mood contrast its title and subject matter), he pens some of his best moments to date. "Direction of the Wind" sounds like it could have been on Blonde on Blonde - right down to the slide guitar intro - and "Lay My Head on the Rail" has a bluegrassy, Appalachian lilt that recalls some of the music Burnett snagged for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Meanwhile, the gorgeous "Weary Kind" is as good as it's ever been, conjuring up images of the brilliant Jeff Bridges performance it energized in Crazy Heart. The truth is, nobody is making music quite like this anymore, and even if Bingham has better records (another one, Tomorrowland, drops in a few weeks), something about Junky Star has continued to captivate me over the years.

24. Guster - Easy Wonderful

Ever since they first arrived on the scene in the mid-90s, Guster have had a knack for writing catchy melodies and heartfelt songs that have had no trouble appealing to college radio DJs, frat-boy bros, and folk-pop enthusiasts alike. I first took notice of them when they scored a hit with “Amsterdam” back in 2003 or so, and I even lucked into seeing them live at my only summer at Interlochen Arts Camp. On their sixth full-length studio album, the band taps into the same kind of breezy, summertime pop hooks that have always been their cornerstone. They’ve morphed a bit over the years, shedding some of their acoustic sensibilities, as well as the emphasis placed on their unique percussion (their drummer plays bongos) and their capacity for rich vocal harmonies, but the fact that they are a different band than they once were hardly matters here. Easy Wonderful kicks off with a pair of indelible choruses (“Architects & Engineers” and “Do You Love Me?”) and never lets up. The songs never reach the emotional force of the band’s best work (their 1999 album, Lost and Gone Forever, will always be their magnum opus), and there’s nothing here as good as “Parachute” (the closing number from their debut album of the same name). But a few of these songs could have – and should have – been massive radio hits, and sometimes, a great pop album really is exactly what you need.

Key Tracks: "Architects & Engineers," "Do You Love Me," "On the Ocean"

25. The Morning Of – The Way You Fell In 

While the full record is something I only revisit once in a blue moon, the finest tracks here have become embedded into my summer soundtracks for every year since, and it would be a shame to leave that off this list. The Way You Fell In came into my life in the spring, shortly after my return home from my first year of college. I was searching for a definitive summer soundtrack in these songs, and I almost found it. The duel vocal style (between Justin Wiley and Jessica Leplon) doesn't always work, but when it does, the magic is there, like on the climactic one-two punch of "Bring Me Home" and "Heaven or Hell." Leplon occasionally oversings, and Wiley falls into generic pop-punk tendencies, but each gets one moment of perfection that shows off the massive potential inherent in this band. First is "The Time It Takes To Grow," a wistful farewell to summer love and possibility that rings with a gorgeous, dusky atmosphere. Wiley drops his pop-star charade, exchanging it for a more weathered, folk-driven vocal style, and the result is stunning. "I Know You Know" is almost as good, a crushing vocal tour-de-force from Leplon that makes all of her excesses feel forgivable. Two perfect songs don't make an album, but for this one, surrounded by a bunch of tracks that I like but don't quite love, they were enough to keep me coming back - even when records I liked more back in the day have faded a bit.

Key Tracks: "Jennesea," "The Time it Takes to Grow," "I Know You Know"

The Honorable Mentions

Bruce Springsteen gave fans an embarrassment of riches with The Promise, a collection of b-sides and leftovers from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions that stretches on for two discs. Since the songs are way older than the year, I never felt comfortable including it in the body of the list, but with songs as good as the title track or the alternate take of "Racing in the Street," it's easily a highlight of the year.

Hellogoodbye and Steel Train both released exquisitely well-crafted collections of pop-rock. Steel Train's finest songs ("Bullet," "Fall Asleep") landed it on my list the first time around, but I have only revisited the full album once or twice since. I wouldn't have felt right about splitting the two albums up.

Stars and LCD Soundsystem each released inconsistent works that, at their best, could easily have been with the upper echelons of this list. But filler material dictated that I had to leave them off.

I heard Locksley for the first time when they opened for a pair of Butch Walker shows in May of 2010. Their album, called Be In Love, was made up of the same kind of Beatles pop that Butch traded in on his album (see above), and was one of the last records I had to cut from the list.

Kings of Leon lost a lot of their radio appeal with Come Around Sundown, an attempt to return to their roots in southern rock, alt-country, and Eagles-esque Americana that most critics lambasted. But the songs are catchy and soulful, and "Back Down South" might be the best thing they've written.

The Maine released a fun album of throwaway pop music whose finest moments ("Growing Up," "Inside of You," "Saving Grace") became big summer soundtrack staples, but whose whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Ray LaMontagne and Jakob Dylan both released stellar traditional folk albums. I never listened to either enough to merit them a place in the top 25, but perhaps I should make a note to revisit them.

The Rocket Summer released a bloated album of piano-driven rock music. I've never been a big fan of Bryce Avary's voice, but Of Men and Angels is undeniably well-crafted.

Matt White and Maroon 5 were poster-boys for catchy pop melodies and albums with a few emotionally striking moments thrown in for good measure. "Out of Goodbyes" and "Falling in Love (With My Best Friend)" were two of my favorite songs of the year.

And Band of Horses traded a lot of their hipster appeal for alt-country textures on Infinite Arms, but also soundtracked a lot of night drives for me along the way. I can't wait to see what they do or where they go next.