Best albums of 2010 - Part 1

As promised! I've been surprised to see some bloggers saying 2010 was a weak year for music - I know I fell in love with a whole bunch of albums. I'm splitting my top ten list into two halves since it turned out a little longwinded. Where a song title is linked you can follow it through to a YouTube video if you want to listen! "Tighten Up" is definitely worth a look...

1. The Black Keys: Brothers

The cover kinda says it all – you don’t need to search for hidden meaning here. Which isn’t to say there aren’t delicious layers to discover in Brothers. From a whistled riff (“Tighten Up”) to a drum intro that could be another sequel to Gary Glitter’s “Rock n Roll” (“Howlin For You”), it’s hard to believe these are the same two guys that made Thickfreakness in 2003.

After producing their previous effort Attack & Release, Dangermouse pops up again at the helm of “Tighten Up”. And tighten up the Keys have, from their joyous garage blues mess of years gone by. They dabble in a range of genres here - blues, RnB, soul, rock, even a T-Rex style glam stomp. But their sixth album marks a return to their roots, and somehow for all their experimentation in different genres the Black Keys have made a record that only they could make.

There’s a hand-made, smoke-stained, bar-scuffed feel to the production, driven by Patrick Carney’s furious drumming. It sounds vintage (particularly when Dan Auerbach tests out his falsetto on sixties-style pop tunes like “The Only One”, or cover “Never Gonna Give You Up"), and completely fresh all at once. Brothers is a dirty, sweaty, sexy rock record with a wiggle in its rump and grime under its fingernails. God, I can’t wait to see these guys live again.

2. Beach House: Teen Dream

Another two-piece, this time from Baltimore, in my number two spot. Victoria Legrand’s voice is so luxurious I want to nestle into it like a bed; but it’s taut with strength as well. Just the name of this album is so evocative, right? Maybe that’s why to me, Beach House’s songs sound sunbleached and softened – like a memory of a summer holiday, viewed through a window pane caked with dried sea salt spray.

They’ve always nailed dreamy harmonies and gauzy production, but with Teen Dream Beach House have made their most assured, accessible record yet. I love the woozy, lazy guitar riffs lagging just a little, as though everyone’s feeling slightly sluggish after a long lunch. I love the whimsy and optimism of the refrain coming home / any day now in “Used To Be”. And I love when the piano changes up toward the end of “Real Love”. One for lazy, dreamy Sunday afternoons.

3. Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

I’ve already written so much about The Suburbs, I won’t bore you again!

4. Menomena: Mines

Menomena sound like storms building, especially the wind-rattled percussion and rumbling piano at the start of my favourite track, “Tithe”. This is an album I’ve loved for months – it will always remind me of getting lost in the Hasidic back blocks of Williamsburg, feeling like an alien stumbling through another world – but I knew nothing about the band until I went to write this.

Turns out this trio from Portland OR broke out years ago when they developed their own software, called DEELER, to make songs from recorded loops. Do check out this review, which goes into detail about how the looping software works – it’s quite fascinating and gives a whole new insight into how Mines was probably written and recorded. The architectural construction of these songs, the spatial relationships between instruments and layers of sound, seem made for engineers. But for we mere mortals there’s still loads to love. “TAOS” is another cracking tune, playing out a tipsy flirtation and the vagaries of drunken lust:

I’m not the most cocksure guy
But I get more bold with every smile...
Underneath this fleshy robe
Lies a beast with no control
I fed it once look how it's grown
Oh my god, bring me peace
From this wolf covered in fleece
I can't shake loose from its teeth

5. Dan Kelly: Dan Kelly's Dream

There’s so much going on in Dan Kelly’s Dream – lyrically and sonically. He’s a maximalist perfectionist in bringing his dreams to life. Sometimes I worry that Dan’s quick wit with a pop culture quip is holding him back from the timeless tunes I know he’s capable of writing... though I daresay Uncle Paul’s shadow is one he’s in no rush to step into. But come on. I love every track of this. The girly harmonies and tropical touches of 2006’s Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth endure, and there’s plenty of silliness but some genuine poignancy as well. “Gap Year Blues” is a sweet schoolyard love song, and "Bindi Irwin Apocalypse Jam" is suitably insane.

As ever, Dan shoehorns whole novels worth of narrative into single songs – an innocent discovers a new high in “Hold On, I’m Coming On”; a comely nun runs away with a lovestruck janitor in “The Catholic Leader”. The wordplay is joyously clever, and in many songs it feels like you can pinpoint the germ of a rhyme that infected Dan’s imagination.

She was framed in the window in a papal windcheater
His knees were knockin like a Mormon team leader
Under the moon the handyman freed her
Now read all about it in The Catholic Leader

Like another of my top ten (which will appear later), this is an album that I didn’t really want to like because of the arrogance I sometimes perceive in the artist. But like that bad boy you crushed on as a teenager, he wins you over with flashes of vulnerability; and ultimately you’re left dazzled by just how smart this kid is.

Happy new year!

Traditionally New Year's Eve has been disappointing for me. Many's the time I've sat drinking beer with my dad and wondering where the party was. One New Year's Eve, I was robbed. And this time last year I'm pretty sure I was having a cry in a darkened bedroom, while a Chapel Hill house party and the televised fireworks raged on without me. So on balance a long swim, a barbeque with my parents and starting the new year writing isn't such a bad lot. (Though I must question SBS' programming of an old Leonard Cohen concert - don't they think those of us watching television on New Year's Eve are depressed enough already?)

This time of year always brings reflection. What have I achieved? Where to next? Fond memories and rueful regrets unspool. Highs and lows are weighed against each other, and the impulse to make lists rears its finicky head. One thing you can expect as this blog resumes regular service is my list of favourite albums of the year.

The ultimate for list-makers is new years resolutions. And for we perfectionists, it's a dangerous time. So tempting to set impossible targets, which in turn are hastily abandoned as soon as the slightest thing goes wrong to sully that glorious blank new calendar. It always reminds me of a Cathy cartoon where she's keeping a new journal but on the second day of the new year is forced to give it up. "Ack! I wrote in blue pen instead of black! Everything is ruined!"

Looking back on my resolutions for 2010, I actually did well on every count. "More time with old friends; Less flaking; More bike riding; Less days lost to the hangover void; More photography; Less TV; More road trips; Less unfinished books; More music; Less unfinished sudoku; More writing; More new recipes; More random kissing; More learning." The virtues of realistic goal setting, I guess!

But then again, I am currently homeless, unemployed, and quite a ways financially from meeting my goal of moving back to New York to work. Failures seem more dramatic at this time of year too, and after a few weeks living back with my parents I'm beginning to understand why people say "you can't go home again". Surely I'm too old to be living with my folks, doing seasonal work? There's a ten year highschool reunion approaching after all. My mother is right to ask what I'm doing with my life.

Perhaps it's wrong or just lazy to trust that things will work themselves out - with hard work and good intentions, of course. But surely one's unfettered 20s are the time to revel in the luxury of leaving some things to chance, living on the road and leaving time to have adventures? Having spent my first days back in this house sorting through childhood diaries and schoolbooks, and being confronted with what a shy, confused, lonely kid I was, it feels like something of an achievement to now feel so comfortable and indeed inspired by the chaotic prospect of living on the other side of the world.


One of the things I still have in common with that kid though, along with a mile-wide romantic streak and a tendency to make terrible jokes at inappropriate times, is the urge to write. So this is my resolution for 2011. To write every day. Especially the days when I don't feel like it. Because as that wise man Albus Dumbledore once said, there comes a time when you must choose between what is right and what is easy. Maybe that choice is what separates adults from children. So I'll keep writing. I hope you find something you like, here and there. But right now I just hope you're reading this sometime in January, possibly hungover, having had a blast of a New Year's Eve. I hope 2011 brings you stuff you've been dreaming of - and stuff you didn't even realise you wanted.

And for good measure I'm keen to keep going on all 2010's resolutions - new recipes, oodles of live music, bike adventures, laughs with friends, roadtrips... All except the random kissing. It was fun while it lasted, but I plan to collect on a belated new year's kiss a few weeks from now. And I have no doubt it will be worth the wait.

Happy new year! xx

Walkley photo finalists announced

This year's photographic finalists in the Walkley Awards were announced overnight and I was really excited to see who made the cut. It used to be my job to sort through all the photographic entries as they came in, and then to write the gallery notes for the exhibition of finalist images (100-120 photos), and it's one of the things I've missed the most since leaving. Within the office we staff would always make our own predictions about which images would be winners, but it was more fascinating to sit in on the judging sessions and listen to photo editors deliberate over the value of one set of images over another. They take into account a lot of criteria - the context, the constraints the photographer was under, how memorable the image was, whether it shows courage and innovation; the composition, lighting and impact of individual images, and the coherence and tight editing of series of images.

I really believe Australia is one of the world's best countries for photojournalism, particularly on a per capita basis! And it's great to see some new names among the 2010 Nikon-Walkley finalists, at a time when both staff roles and freelance opportunities for press photographers are being slashed. You can see the full list of finalists here; the winners will be announced at the Walkley Awards on December 9.

The Nikon-Walkley prize winners for portrait and regional photography have already been announced - check out a gallery here. I love Cameron Laird's winning portrait of Bob Katter; the composition is fun, and it completely captures the defiant, laughing insolence of him as a bloke and a politician. Another political image that seems destined to be a classic is Glen McCurtayne's commended news photo, a tight close-up of Kevin Rudd's face on the day he last spoke as prime minister, a single tear poised below his right eye.

In the sport category finalists (always a very tight race) I was particularly struck by two series. Craig Golding's commended black-and-white collection of shots of aged athletes at the Masters Games, and Adam Pretty's colour-saturated, dramatically composed images from the Singapore Youth Olympics. Pretty is Asia-based for Getty Images and to my eye his sport photography stands out because he has this way of taking fiercely human moments and instead potraying them with a clinical calm, an almost achitectural beauty; as though his shots are premeditated works of art rather than captured of-the-moment.

The photographic essay category is prized among the togs and this years' entries are strong. Phil Hillyard (who's had a stranglehold on the sport category for a few years) captures small, humanising details in his black-and-white series on new PM Julia Gillard: playing with her high-heeled shoe under the table at a meeting, checking her hair in the mirror before giving a speech. Jack Picone documents the tension and outright violence of the "Battle for Bangkok". And Jason South presents a harrowing photographic investigation of Yayasan Galuh Centre in Bekasi outside Jakarta, where the mentally ill are housed but not medically treated, many of them nude and chained to poles. I remember seeing these shots in the Sydney Morning Herald and thinking we'd be seeing them again come Walkley-time. South, Hillyard and Simon O'Dwyer will duke it out for the press photographer of the year title.

Catch the Nikon-Walkley Press Photo exhibition on tour around Australia:

• Sydney: Australian Centre for Photography - 15-30 October 2010
• Melbourne: The Age - 20th October-December 2010
• Brisbane Powerhouse - 31 January-28 February 2011
• Newcastle Regional Library - March-April 2011
• Adelaide Fringe Festival - November-December 2011

More details here.

Resolutions

We’re now far enough into January to have got over the "pretending I’ll be so responsible and clean-living Gwyneth Paltrow would shamefacedly turn over of the editorship of GOOP to me" bit. Let’s face it, booze and fags are here to stay... and, frankly, they make life more interesting. Particularly when combined with a pub dancefloor, the early hours of a Saturday and hits of the early 90s.

So what to aim for as a new decade kicks off? Just being back in Sydney these last few days, after spending the first weeks of the new year in sunny Brisbane, it’s been delicious to have the time to notice random loveliness everywhere. Maybe it’s having a hott new camera that makes me look at everything a little harder, searching out special light and shadows and vibrant colours.

Anyway. I’m hoping this will be a year of taking time to appreciate gorgeous things, however fleeting – great songs, sunshiney bike rides, time at the beach, yummy food, good books, art and being out and about with fabulous people – and to do better at recording that beauty through words, photography and anything else that works.

Sure I'd also love to attain skinny arms like my modelesque sister, and the super shiny hair of the girls in the Saturday social pages of the paper, but less superficially 2010 will be the year of:

• More time with old friends
• Less flaking
• More bike riding
• Less days lost to the hangover void
• More photography
• Less TV
• More road trips
• Less unfinished books
• More music
• Less unfinished sudoku
• More writing
• More new recipes
• More random kissing
• More learning

That nice symmetrical more/less thing petered out a little at the end, but a year where excess outweighs limitation is surely preferable to the reverse…!

What are you hoping for in 2010? And has anyone come up with a better moniker for this year? I think the best I’ve seen is “twenty-dime”, but it would be a bit naff to throw that around in Australia!