Our Mid-Season Favorite Album Countdown - Nr. 08

Number eight in our top ten favourite albums of 2010 so far! Linda, Ilse, and yours truly give you our ten favourite albums at the halfway stage of the musical year in the hope you might discover, rediscover, or agree with our picks. If, in turn, you have some stuff you think we might enjoy, please holler.

Number: 10 / 9

Linda:
08. Broken Bells – Broken Bells (Columbia)
It took me quite a while to start appreciating this album, but once ‘The High Road’ really hits you it’s very hard to put this album down. And I’m not the only one to appreciate this fine track by James Mercer of the Shins and Danger Mouse, as it has also been featured on the Match of the Day album for the World Cup. But maybe that ought to cause me to reconsider Broken Bells as they are featured on there among the likes of Glasvegas, Iglu & Hartly and Scouting for Girls – and that’s when I’m not even looking for the bad eggs in there. Ah well, football fans are not a bunch that is well known for their exquisite taste in music and kudos to the person who managed to get at least one decent song on there. I’d have seem them live by now, if it weren’t for the ridiculous requirements to get into the outdoors audience of the Jimmy Kimmel show. Is this the point where someone intervenes with the words ‘That’s Hollywood’?
Random track to listen to: ‘The High Road’

Ilse
08. Wild Nothing – Gemini (Captured Tracks)
Jack Tatum aka Wild Nothing is releasing this debut at only 21 years old. Tatum is from Virginia, but sounds as if he were from Iceland: the album is filled with shoegazy, melancholic, dreamy pop songs saturated with nostalgia, no matter what your perception of nostalgia is. It has this ambient, lo-fi-recorded-in-bedroom-feel to it and my personal favourites are ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Summer Holiday’.

The reason for this album ending up at the end of the list, is that it doesn’t seem to work as a whole: it’s better to digest the songs individually (long live shuffling), as they don’t seem to differ greatly from one another. Yet it provides superb relaxing background music (preferably while flipping through childhood photo albums), very light music that would be something I’d use as the soundtrack to a clip of home video images involving the summer. I guess that’s the nostalgia this album provokes in me: my younger brother and me as carefree children, jumping up and down on a trampoline on the beach, on holiday in France, while my mother holds my brother’s hand, making sure he doesn’t tumble down and ends up in the hot sand beneath us….
Random track to listen to: ‘Your Rabbit Feet’

Stef
08: LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening (DFA)
Can an album be good if you always skip the first two tracks of it? That’s a tough question, because I think there is a good case to be made if you want to say, nah, then it’s rubbish. An album is the sum of it parts, and if you don’t want to listen to about a quarter of an album, then it can’t be one of your favourite albums of the year! Then again, I’m looking at, okay, what have I been playing a lot in the past months and what will I probably still be listening to at the end of the year. And this album is right up there. Also because of what the album exhumes, the vibe I get from it. For more on that check out the review I made. Making that review and analyzing the album a bit more closely definitely made me appreciate it even more and made me understand better why I actually want to play this as often as I do. Sans the first two tracks, which I find abysmal, though I’ve already heard people who say that the opener is one of the best things they’ve ever done. So don’t take my word for it. Personally I would’ve loved if those tracks were cut, but I think that the rest of the album is so good and its vibe fits me so well that I cannot leave it out of here.
Random track to listen to: ‘Home’