my favorite music of the year... in 2010
December is going to be a weird on-off month for this newsletter if you can’t already tell. It’s not that I want to write less, it’s that I’m finally doubling down on pitching to outside sources in an attempt to get that bread and it’s taking some time/attention away from this newsletter. But I promise I’m not forgetting about you guys. It’s also worth mentioning that it’s now been a full year since I announced this project, and although I’m still a relatively small project, it means the world to see that I’ve grown literally 600% in Patreon subscribers and like 3000% in newsletter subscribers. I can’t express enough how much that humbles me and makes me feel so much less like I’m shrieking into the void. (For the record, feel free to subscribe to my Patreon for monthly exclusive posts, and to have access to a bonus tier for suggesting what you want to see me write about!)
I’ve always been fucking horrible at writing year-end lists. For one thing I always feel like no matter how honorable mention slots I introduce, I always forget something, and in ranking my top 10 I always feel like I’ve unforgivably left something else off. It’s ridiculously frustrating. I will be crunching the numbers and coming up with a list for the E Word year-end episode, as always, but for this edition of the newsletter I wanted to do something different and indulge in some more nostalgia (what else is winter for?).
I’m only 24, but it feels like I have been listening to underground/hardcore/adjacent music for millennia. In actuality, it’s only been about 15 years, and I’ve only been going to shows for 12 or so years, but in a lot of ways, I see 2010 as the year that I truly got into the scene, as it were. That was the year when my tumblr (which has been scrubbed completely from the Internet) usage really popped off, as well as when I began to reach a peak level of investment in my local hardcore scene and started making the friends who would stick with me my whole life (shout-out to Spencer and Garrett, as always).
So I thought it would be a fun little idea if I looked back at the records that I thought were the absolute shit in 2010 and see how my opinion of them stacks up now. You ready? Me too. Let’s do it.
CEREMONY- ROHNERT PARK
Was it at all going to be a surprise to see the album almost-universally regarded to be Ceremony’s best here? Ceremony, along with a few other California bands like Loma Prieta and Punch, were instrumental in getting me into what was then contemporary hardcore in the late 2000s. For whatever reason, the West Coast scene at that time was producing some of the gnarliest and most pissed-off sounding hardcore in the world. Ceremony, from the moment they released their Ruined EP, were poised at the top of that heap— combining the furious, unpredictable rhythms of powerviolence with a somewhat screamo-influenced desperation in Ross Farrar’s vocals, it seemed like nothing, not even Farrar’s sometimes-mildly-corny wiry-kid-with-glasses-writing-in-a-composition-book approach to lyricism, could stop them, and both 2006’s Violence Violence and 2008’s Still Nothing Moves You felt like visceral sonic assaults in the best possible way. So when they dropped Rohnert Park in 2010, I took one look at the cover— a lonely skater carving down a quiet, suburban street— and grew excited at the thought of the most anguished material from the band yet.
And it was their most emotionally-raw material captured on tape to that point, but I was surprised to hear the record open with something more akin to an interlude written by East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys. Ceremony taking their feet off the gas and incorporating more influences from bare-bones 80s hardcore and nervy post-punk was a shock at the time, but seeing where they’ve taken that sound in the decade since, it’s even more impressive that Rohnert Park managed to maintain so much of the band’s initial exuberance and rage. The agonizingly drawn-out build-up that kicks off “Sick” has grown to be one of the most iconic in the history of hardcore, not least because the whiplash-inducing jolt when the song kicks into gear is accompanied by some of the most misanthropic lyrics in the already-misanthropic band’s milieu. There is some irony in Farrar’s cat-like yowling of “Sick of Black Flag, sick of Cro-Mags” when so much of the record is couched in Black Flag-isms— the bassline of “Moving Principle” sounds particularly indebted to, say, “Six Pack” or “Nervous Breakdown”— but in 2010, their anachronistic 80s-isms were somewhat iconoclastic when so much of their brethren seemed to be rehashing the 90s.
Rohnert Park also avoids the cosplay tendencies of even other hardcore bands who were more openly indebted to the throwback 80s sound— say, Government Warning or Double Negative— because of how intimate, personal, and weird their approach to songwriting was. Songs like “Open Head” and “Back in ‘84” bring in more mid-tempo grooves that allow the grit and grue to worm its way into the listener’s skull, and attain anthemic status because of it. There’s also hints of more progressive, experimental tendencies, like the droning and delightfully cumbersome “The Doldrums (Friendly City)”, but the real masterstroke is the record’s centerpiece, “Into the Wayside, Pt. II.” Beginning as an eerie acoustic interlude, with lo-fi samples of people talking about witnessing death laid just beneath the middle of the mix, the discomfiting atmosphere crescendoes as Ceremony leans into a display of guitar pyrotechnics that would seem perfectly at home in the back end of a late-80s Dinosaur Jr record. It’s a complete departure in a record full of complete departures, and they’ve only kept subtly defying expectations since.
THE WONDER YEARS- THE UPSIDES
Everything I would say about this record, I said here. If you, like me, enjoy a few doses of pop-punk in between your hardcore wallowing, you’ve probably already read that piece.
MAN OVERBOARD- REAL TALK
Speaking of enjoying a few doses of pop-punk in between your hardcore, this rivaled even Rohnert Park in sheer amount of spins in 2010. What can I say? I was 14 and I saw no shame in being equally obsessed with gritty hardcore and hyper-polished pop-punk. I still see no shame in it, for the record.
Man Overboard went through such a heavy period of over-saturation, especially in the wake of the success of their iconic Defend Pop-Punk merch, that they swiftly became one of the most-hated bands in the scene. Part of this has to do with the fact that much of the work they produced throughout the early-mid-2010s was hot garbage (seriously, Heavy Love might be the most boring album I have ever heard in my life), but in the late 2000s, Man Overboard was on a relentless hot streak of sappy, sickly sweet pop-punk that bypassed my corny-bullshit detectors and dug itself rather happily into my bloodstream. You can find most, if not all, of their best material from this era on the compilation records Before We Met and The Human Highlight Reel— including “Decemberism,” which is one of my favorite noxious-bullshit Christmastime ballads, right up there with Fall Out Boy’s “Yule Shoot Your Eye Out”— but in my humble opinion, the band reached the apex of this sound on Real Talk.
The album opens with the title track, which is maybe the “heaviest” that Man Overboard ever got— there is a noticeable indulgence in AutoTune throughout the entirety of this record, but “Real Talk” features some genuine scratchy strain in the vocals that I still find cute and endearing even though it’s clear the band is trying to “rawk.”
I don’t have any sophisticated critique or lavish praise to pair with this album’s appearance here. It is dumb, straightforward, propulsive pop-punk with nasally vocals and some of the most dogshit lyrics (“Fantasy Girl” is about porn, right? Not to mention “looking hot in your bed smoking pot”). But it fucking bumps, front to back. “Montrose” turns cascading, borderline-tremolo guitar work into a relatively restrained and sweet song, while “Al Sharpton” is a speedy bop. “World Favorite” and “Darkness, Everybody” and “FM Dial Style” dig their hooks into your skull with no remorse. These songs are embarrassing in so many ways, and the lack of effort in the lyricism is palpable, but the pop songcraft is so meticulous and the performances so driven and compelling that it’s an undeniable little piece of pabulum. Does it have the substance of, say, Transit’s release from the same year, Keep This To Yourself? Hell no. But it’s fun and catchy and I revisit it more often than anyone would care to admit.
NAILS- UNSILENT DEATH
It’s hard to imagine, in a post-Abandon All Life and You Will Never Be One of Us world, that this, the first Nails “full-length,” felt like the epitome of heaviness. But increasingly polished songwriting and dry, tight, more overtly “metal” production aside, Unsilent Death is still, in my opinion, the most unbearably heavy and grungy record in Nails’s formidable (and far-too-short) catalog. If this year truly is the end of the road for Todd Jones’s paean to sonic nihilism, then Unsilent Death deserves to be their legacy.
In the early 2010s, there was an epidemic of what many referred to as Entombedcore— bands like Trap Them and All Pigs Must Die who reveled in the gnarly HM2 amp sound of the 90s Scandinavian death metal scene— but none were as concise and ruthlessly calculating in their approach to punishing riffs than Nails. Vocalist/guitarist Todd Jones was, at that point, best known for his more conventional hardcore work in Terror as well as the more melodic leanings of youth crew revival bands like Carry On and Betrayed, threw away any sympathies for conventional or accessible songwriting conventions and focused on producing only the scuzziest, most vile riffs that he could dredge from the depths of his soul. “Scum Will Rise” is the obvious “hit”— lord knows how Jones managed to make riffs this ugly also this catchy— but the record is so short and sweet that any attempt to pick it apart on a track-by-track basis will fall apart, at least until you get to the relatively gargantuan (three whole minutes!) and corrosive closer, “Depths.” In my opinion, the best disgustingly-slow-and-oppressive Nails closer is still Obscene Humanity’s “Lies,” but “Depths” comes damn close and helps to define the identity of the most scorching and promising debut LP of the 2010 class of hardcore freshmen, and helped tide me over until Weekend Nachos and Harms Way released Worthless and Isolation respectively the following year and raised the bar on heaviness in hardcore yet again.
KANYE WEST- MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY
For me, hip-hop in 2010 was about mixtapes, and I’m still not sure if they qualify for year-end album lists. For the sake of cohesion, I’ve decided not to include them, but rest assured that Wiz Khalifa’s Kush & Orange Juice and J. Cole’s Friday Night Lights are still the best— and in Cole’s case, only good— things that those artists ever did, and that Earl topped even Tyler the Creator’s Bastard as far as defining the deeply transgressive and oddly-addictive sound of the blossoming Odd Future collective, and that Kendrick’s Overly Dedicated was tightly-focused foreshadowing of the dizzying heights he would achieve with his first three studio efforts.
But as far as proper albums go, at the time I felt like 2010 was a weird year for cohesive hip-hop projects. Danny Brown’s The Hybrid was an odd misstep that showed Danny sacrificing his idiosyncratic lyrical obsessions and aggressively unorthodox flow before he reclaimed and refined his identity with XXX, Old, and Atrocity Exhibition. Rick Waka Flocka Flame’s Flockaveli was a massive achievement in production, and chock full of bangers that, if I hadn’t been straight-edge at the time, I probably would have gotten real fucked-up to at parties (that I wasn’t invited to). The Roots released How I Got Over, a late-career masterpiece, but one that only showed how much they had transcended the concept of genre, and one that I didn’t properly appreciate until a few years later. In my eyes, Ghostface Killah can do no wrong, but even though I loved Apollo Kids, it felt like just another entry in his solid-but-not-revolutionary middle era. With all of this in mind, including the successes of the mixtape era, it was hard not to feel like mainstream hip-hop was in a bit of a holding pattern between the explosively fun party-rap of the late 2000s and its period of commercial and creative domination throughout the last decade, and it was equally hard not to feel that underground hip-hop was struggling to find a new identity in the wake of the death of Eyedea and the advent of new modes of music distribution changing the entire mode of marketing and networking in the underground.
So leave it to Kanye West to show everyone the way. In the year of Pink Friday and Teflon Don, both fine albums in their own right, he coaxed the best performances out of Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj ever in their careers (and Nicki’s verse in “Monster” is, in my opinion, the best moment on this entire goddamn album). The recent anniversary of this record ignited a metric fuckton of thinkpieces and retrospectives to the point where anything I could offer is redundant, but I think it says something on its own that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy still holds so much currency among so many different types of music fans— casual listeners, real heads, fans of experimental music, poptimist critic dorks— and in a lot of ways it’s the true opening salvo of hip-hop in the 2010s. I may not have anything new to say about this album, or even Kanye himself (check my essay on The College Dropout for what I do have to say about him), but I’m comfortable echoing the takes of almost all of my peers when I say that it’s Kanye’s truest realization of his musical ambitions.
DANGERS- MESSY, ISN’T IT?
As I’ve discussed, 2010 was a massive year for West Coast hardcore. I debated with myself as to which albums from this scene to include on this list, and while I had to ax a few— among them, Trash Talk’s Eyes & Nines, an odd middle point between the vicious, bloodied battle cries of their early work and their spotlighting of the connection between hardcore and hip-hop and more polished experimentation with off-kilter sludginess on 119— there was no question in my mind that Messy, Isn’t It?, the sophomore LP by the fitfully-active Los Angeles crew Dangers, was going to find its way to this list.
A near-miss for album of the year in 2009— being released at the very top of January 2010— Messy, Isn’t It? expands on the fits of angst and venom that made their debut, Anger, one of the most cathartic and memorable hardcore records of the 2000s. On Anger, Dangers’s cleverly deconstructionist hardcore song structures functioned almost like a critique of the genre from within, but on Messy, they held a lighter to the already-mangled traditional conventions of hardcore songwriting techniques in their own music, resulting in a record that’s as post-hardcore as it is hardcore proper.
I’ve long championed Al Brown as my favorite lyricist in hardcore, and although his unique combination of charming wittiness, disarmingly personal exhortations, and forthright confrontation had informed many of the best cuts on Anger (“Half-Brother, All-Cop,” “My Wonder Years Never Got Canceled/Break Beat,” “War? What War?”, “(D)anger(s)/We Have More Sense Than Lies”) it was occasionally bogged down by an impish desire to offend and a self-conscious rebellion against hardcore orthodoxy. On Messy, Brown refined his lyrical approach into an effervescent blend of the caustic and the comforting that spoke truth to power as much as it excoriated the worst impulses of Brown himself and those around him.
This combination of musical and lyrical inventiveness has made Messy into not just one of my favorite records of 2010, but one of my favorite hardcore records of all time. From the opening rhetorical hack-and-slash of “Why didn’t you kill yourself today?” in the absolute barnburner that is “Stay-At-Home Mom” to the dissection of humanity’s supreme arrogance in “Opposable” to the tragicomic sermon of “The El Segundo Blue Butterfly Habitat Reserve,” Messy, Isn’t It? is a sociopolitical screed that satirizes American culture as it failed to learn any lessons from the embers of the disastrous Bush administration and turned a blind eye to atrocities of the Obama administration. Every track is catchy, every track is pointed, and the frenetic fury of Brown’s desperate and broken, yet still cocky as all shit high-pitched yawp of a voice and the by-turns deeply-melodic and crushingly off-kilter performances of the band— special mention to the Cirque du Soleil-level acrobatics of the bass work— make the whole endeavor feel as vital and necessary in 2020 as it did in 2010.
SNOWING- I COULD DO WHATEVER I WANTED, IF I WANTED
What more can I say about this album that wasn’t covered in the big Snowing reunion episode of the E Word? I still feel immensely honored that frontman John Galm felt like he could let his guard down enough with Kyle and I to be as forthright and honest as he was with us about the deeply personal lyrical content of this record— I did not realize at all how close this album is to being like a diary. My appreciation to all the band members, and to Keith Latinen for putting us in touch with them, is bottomless.
2010 was a pivotal transition year for the emo revival, as it picked up steam from being a favorite in the sphere of tiny blogs and tumblrs— the places where I initially picked up on Snowing’s Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit and Algernon Cadwallader’s Some Kind of Cadwallader— and into the slowly-snowballing phenomenon that seemingly touched every branch of DIY music as it coalesced into the explosion that was 2013 and 2014. To summarize, in 2010, modern emo still felt like a secret, and none of us had any idea that it was a secret that was on everyone’s lips. (That tight-knit quality is why, for the record, Just Got Back from the Discomfort by the Brave Little Abacus isn’t on this list— I didn’t discover it until, I think, the following year, while I vividly remember stumbling on a mediafire link to this Snowing album sometime in late December and obsessively listening to it every day leading up to the new year.)
I Could Do Whatever I Wanted revels in that intimacy. While there were other truly fantastic albums in the twinkly Cap’n Jazz tradition in 2010— like More Songs by Grown-Ups or Nothing Was Missing Except Me by Hightide Hotel— Snowing’s sole LP pushes past them in that it is defined by its complete vulnerability, an unguarded intimacy that put other emo acts to shame. I Could Do Whatever I Wanted is not a Shakespearean tragedy— it is a Seinfeldian tragedy, in that the mundane absurdities of everyday life are magnified and scrutinized with a biting wit that railroads any worries that the record may sink too deeply into self-pity.
It helps that the band’s influences are as eclectic as their performance is joyously unpolished. I maintain that there is a smidge of Hot Water Music in their churning, overwhelming approach to songs like “Damp Feathers,” but the whole record is bathed in the sloppy/intricate twinkly guitar dynamic of bands like Make Me, and Galm’s nigh-inaccessibly-scraggly vocals fit as neatly into the pop-punk-isms of “You Bring Something… No” as they do into the woozy, unconventionally angular “So I Shotgunned a Beer and Went to Bed.” If Snowing was going to implode almost as soon as this record was finished, then it’s fitting that the malcontent chaos, melancholy humor, and irrepressible dissatisfaction of I Could Do Whatever I Wanted, If I Wanted functioned as the snapshot of both their dissolution and apotheosis.
V/A— AMERICA’S HARDCORE
I must have spun this record something like a million times when it came out. One of the earliest Triple B releases— their 19th in the catalog, years before they became known as the hardcore record that everyone is on— America’s Hardcore is the most succinct snapshot of hardcore in 2010, from bands both upcoming and established, that anyone could have put together. There’s diametrically-opposed interpretations of crossover thrash— compare Rotting Out’s distillation of what made the first Suicidal Tendencies LP so perfect to the incandescent, overwhelming power and confidence of Power Trip’s “Hammer of Doubt,” this version of which is still, in my opinion, the best Power Trip song. There’s Pat Flynn briefly departing from his position as straight-edge’s most prominent poet laureate to moonlight as a maniacal powerviolence miscreant with Wolf Whistle’s “Ma Glory.” You have Foundation’s earth-flattening, catatonia-inducing streamroller of ungodly heaviness, “Devotion,” paired together with the brisk, hardened, subversively clever NYHC traditionalism of Backtrack’s “Soul Sucker.” You have solid blasts of affirmation from established bands like Bitter End and Fire & Ice. You have the perfect snapshot of Cruel Hand only a scant four years before they decided to try and become Metallica. You have the perfect snapshot of Rival Mob only a scant three years before they became every hypebeast’s default namedrop. And the whole record closes with the most underrated Title Fight song, “Dreamcatchers,” the secret bridge between the blink-182-by-way-of-Lifetime worship of their early work and the Quicksand-by-way-of-Gorilla-Biscuits of Shed. For all intents and purposes, America’s Hardcore almost singlehandedly provided a road map for the next five years of hardcore, and is probably a million times more influential than it’s ever been given credit for.
CONCLUSIONS
First of all, don’t get mad at me for not doing a top 10 list— how can you fuck with a good ol’ Top Eight? Secondly, all this list proved to me was that I probably had better taste in music a decade ago.
-xoxo, Ellie
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