It's list season and a particularly abundant one as we near the end of a decade. Plenty of great music to fill many scrolls but I've handpicked 50 of the records that spoke to me the most over the last 10 years. With the diversity of musical output increasing exponentially with each decade, it's become impossible to sum up a decade with one overarching statement like we did with the 50s or 60s. This list features band members successfully going solo and unexpected collaborative albums, brilliant hip-hop albums that stood out in an overcrowded field, bizarre genre mashups that forge new ground, a psych and doom scene overflowing with great releases and elder statesmen of rock producing career-topping masterstrokes. The 2010s were rich with killer LP's. Brilliantly conceived and painstakingly crafted; Long Play records that take you on a journey and make a statement, leaving you thinking about them for years to come.
1) QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE - ...LIKE CLOCKWORK (2013)
If Songs For the Deaf summed up the pedal to the floor, testosterone-fuelled energy of your twenties, ...Like Clockwork encapsulates your ever-adapting thirties; somewhat wiser, somewhat scorned. Reflective but still trying to dig to the core of what this whole human experience is about.
The album is replete with barroom genius turns of phrase delivered as both revelations and searing indictments. The songs run the gamut from the sludgy gothic ('Keep Your Eyes Peeled') to top-o'-the-world bangers ('Smooth Sailing', 'My God is the Sun', 'If I Had a Tail') to snappy, poppy love-sick alternative hit ('I Sat By the Ocean'). Homme also showcased his falsetto more than on any other album with a string of poignant ballads. The culmination of the album's songwriting prowess is the monumental penultimate track, 'I Appear Missing'. Like the ninth episode of a Game of Thrones season (***gratuitous 2010's reference), the track is a full out existential battle which leaves the structure a smouldering pile of rubble. This leaves the tenth instalment, the title track, as an epilogue to quietly and soberly pick up the pieces and try to make sense of it all. We're left with a final commentary on the breaking of the karmic wheel. Homme closes it out crooning "Not everything that goes around comes back around, you know", leaving us to ponder the lesson that fair is for fairytales.
By this record, the lineup of melodic musicians had solidified with the rock steady core of Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Ferlita and Michael Shuman. Percussive duties were up in the air during the process, which means the record is graced with three of the best drummers in modern rock n roll, Joey Castillo, Dave Grohl and current skin-smacker Jon Theodore. The album also featured some A-list guess spots with Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner, NIN's Trent Reznor, and even the great Elton John joining in to bang out some piano and back up some vocals. Past band members Mark Lanegan and Nick Oliveri also contributed, making this album feel like it summed up the entirety of the Queens' reign. In terms of thematics, Homme is both at his most assured and most questioning, proving that those don't have to be mutually exclusive concepts. A feel that wraps up the album in a nutshell.
This dark, dangerous, gruelling journey leads to a series of hard fought triumphs of towering grandeur. From movement to movement, Abasi does 8-string acrobatics that few on this earth can perform throwing every extreme guitar technique into the mix from wildly inventive two-hand tapping to his own thumping technique that he created as an adaptation of double thumb slapping, previously only used by bassists. However, the strength of this record is in its cohesive melodics. The first AAL release was essentially a solo effort with Abasi programming drums and performing the rest himself. On Weightless, he recruited drummer Navene Koperweis and Javier Reyes to round out the lineup which gives the record seamless, organic transitions allowing Abasi time to prepare for each mind-blowing set piece.
He knew this was his last record. The songs have a definite inherent finality to them. Bowie had always had a fascination with death (...really, don't we all?). His archive is full of deaths both metaphoric and literal but this record has the feel of a movie where the narrator is dead, recounting his life and the tales of the living from the beyond.
As with his previous release The Next Day, Bowie recorded this album in secret at The Magic Shop in New York. He kept the same level of secrecy about his impending liver cancer. With this record, he left behind his backing band, most of whom had played with him for decades, opting to work with jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his quintet. Bowie did not want to make another rock record and reportedly took influence from Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly (scored by the incredible Kamasi Washington) and jarring avant-gardists Death Grips. McCaslin's ethereal playing gave Bowie the perfect backdrop to tell this final chapter; shrouded in a nebulous fog, swaying in the wind.
The tracks all ooze with his iconic personality. 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore' and 'Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)' have the shear kinetic energy of his mid-90s output with a real jazz drummer replacing the euro-techno electronics. 'Lazarus' uses an after-hours jazz club vibe to somewhat autobiographically recount his arrival in New York and the great effect it had on him. The title track's stutter-step beat, ghostly hanging strings, and richly evocative sax work score Bowie's tale of The Heretic or Outsider through the ages. Preserving the tale of the anti-hero in biblical terms, echoing his legacy. Closing out the album, 'I Can't Give Everything Away' is a final bedside talk given to his legions of fans. An honest and open statement about not being able to be completely honest and open. A final testimony about the power of mystique and a very poignant way to wrap up his unique career.
5) TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS - MOJO (2010)
Mojo is Petty's late career masterpiece. 2002's The Last DJ also places high on that list with its vitriolic indictments of the record industry and tales of past dustups. However, it was on this 2010 record that he once again did what he and the Heartbreakers do best: capturing the heart of the American experience. This time it was through the lens of howlin', balls-out blues. Every Tom Petty song gets its vibe (or "mojo") from the guitar they choose to use on the track and this album put Mike Campbell's newly acquired 1959 Sunburst Gibson Les Paul (the Holy Grail of vintage guitars) front and centre. The jump-and-run of 'Running Man's Bible' and 'Let Yourself Go' shows the band's mastery of the blues shuffle with lyrics that break the archetype. 'I Should Have Known It' with it's snake-fanged riff is a rebellious rocker up there with the best in their catalog. With 'First Flash of Freedom' and 'The Trip to Pirate's Cove' Petty wades through clouds of personal nostalgia, canonizing journey's of the past as if they were holy crusades. You can almost see the dry ice of memory billowing out of the old Cadillac. Then there's 'Good Enough', a rock n roll elegy on par with Zeppelin's 'Since I've Been Loving You' or The Beatles 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' to give the record a grand finale.
6) NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS - PUSH THE SKY AWAY (2013)
By the start of the decade, Cave and the Seeds had already amassed an impressive archive. The band channeled the punk rock energy from their inception into dark tales of nefarious deeds. They then managed to successfully pivot to love ballads and eventually tempestuous odes to figures both literary and historical. Push The Sky Away is the first in a trilogy that culls all these influences and presents them with an ethereal edge and a new level of lived wisdom. The immensely talented Bad Seeds gave this record an unmistakable identity, expanding on Cave's primordial ideas with eerie synths, swaying strings and pulsing rhythms all delivered with the utmost in tasteful playing. This gave Cave room to spin yarns like only he can. 'Jubilee Street' and 'Higgs Boson Blues' are bone fide storytelling hits, 'Water's Edge' is a wonderfully frantic piece enraptured with the underbelly, and 'Mermaids' and the title track deliver halcyon moments that are some of the best of his illustrious career.
Underworld have always straddled the line between dark, moody, drug-induced fervour and vibrant, transcendently divine, drug-induced euphoria. On 2010's Barking, they leaned into the latter gravitating towards steady, confident beats and optimistic major chords. The tracks were written by the core duo of Rick Smith and Karl Hyde before being opened up to collaborative production by famed producers in the worlds of t rance , drum and bass and dubstep. Hyde free associates the lyrics from the perspective of a travelling observer, expressing moment by moment the thoughts and images racing through his head as he makes his way around a modern European landscape. The album is about making it through to the other side, a positive record for seasoned cynics. Great record for the gym, particularly cardio.
Read our recently published feature, James Moore's Top 50 Albums of the 2010's.
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