This year’s Village Voice Pazz & Jop music poll is out, and it shows me to be increasingly out of step with what is considered hip. Not only have I not even heard the poll-topping My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West (nor, to be honest, do I have much desire to), but I’ve found most of the top 10 to be pretty dull and uninspiring. Perhaps 2010 was the year when I finally quit worrying about what the tastemakers thought and spent more time with what I liked.

The Voice top 10 is rounded out by (and my take):

LCD Soundsystem – puzzlingly bland
Arcade Fire – unfun
Janelle Monae – haven’t heard it
Vampire Weekend – disappointing
Big Boi  - haven’t heard it
Beach House – not as good as the live show
The National  - on my list
Sleigh Bells – intriguing but grating
Black Keys – Good, but far from their best

The National, at #8, is obviously the highest finisher among my own top 10. I didn’t rank my picks within the 10, but Voice voters did it for me. Here, in decreasing order of voters in the poll, are my picks:

The National – 97
Titus Andronicus – 75
Superchunk – 49
Teenage Fanclub – 11
Steve Wynn – 6
Besnard Lakes – 5
Devo – 5
Josh Ritter – 4
Brad Mehldau – 4
Crowded House – 3

Meanwhile, 266 critics voted for the Kanye West album. That seems like a lot compared with the paltry 3 that gave Crowded House some support, but it’s still just a fraction of the 708 who participated this year. That leaves room for a boatload of diversity, which is represented by the 1,839 albums selected by voters. That’s 2.6 unique records per voter, pretty staggering when you consider the consensus apparently represented by West’s win. According to the Voice, West’s win was by the largest margin ever, and his third #1 out of five albums.

It was too difficult to narrow things to a top 10 in this, my first attempt at a best books of the year list. So, I offer instead a dozen, 12 books that were a cut above in 2010 (in alphabetical order):

Room – Emma Donoghue
A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
Daddy’s – Lindsay Hunter
Next – James Hynes
Print the Legend – Craig McDonald
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet – David Mitchell
The Wagon – Martin Preib
A Lesser Day – Andrea Scrima
Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart
Just Kids – Patti Smith
Pike – Benjamin Whitmer
Savages – Don Winslow

The pleasant surprise – while it feels as if I read a disproportionate amount of crime fiction these days – was that the list is fairly well rounded, with some so-called literary fiction, some crime fiction and some non-fiction.

What set these books apart was not simply having a great story or compelling characters. It was the fact that the authors were daring and adventurous. Every book here is evidence of an author taking chances, and in each case, those experiments and leaps of faith paid off handsomely.

From Emma Donoghue’s book told from the point of view of a five-year-old boy who has lived his entire life in an 11-by-11 room, to James Hynes’ telling of a seemingly mundane, detail-filled day that becomes horrifically the opposite, these authors were not content to tell stories in traditional ways. Jennifer Egan uses Power Point effectively, while Patti Smith bares her soul in an uncharacteristically candid memoir.

Other notable 2010 reads:

Ghosted – Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
The Damage Done – Hilary Davidson
Stranglehold – Ed Gorman
Slammer- Allan Guthrie
The Lock Artist - Steve Hamilton
I’d Know You Anywhere – Laura Lippman
Rut – Scott Phillips
Life - Keith Richards
Johnny Porno – Charlie Stella
Bob Dylan in America – Sean Wilentz

Pre-2010 books read this year that are worth recommending:

City of Thieves – David Benioff
Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon
The Ghosts of Belfast – Stuart Neville
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned – Wells Tower
Let’s Talk About Love – Carl Wilson

So, while looking for something else in a box in the basement recently, I came across an odd artifact: A dot-matrix printout of “KGGO’s Top 95 of 1985.” For those who didn’t grow in Des Moines, that means it is a list of what were deemed the 95 best songs of 1985 by Des Moines’ best album-oriented rock radio station, KGGO (it’s now dubbed “Classic Rock that ROCKS,” mostly because it froze its playlist around 1989.  Want proof? Right now as I write this on Tuesday night, they’re playing Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” That’s No. 7 on this list). These were probably the 95 songs (KGGO was at 95 on the FM dial) that received the most spins.

Here’s the top 10:

1. Money for Nothing – Dire Straights
2. Fortress Around Your Heart – Sting
3. Don’t You For Get About Me – Simple Minds
4. Everybody Wants to Rule the World – Tears for Fears
5. That Was Yesterday – Foreigner
6. One More Night – Phil Collins
7. Boys of Summer  - Don Henley
8. Lonely Ol’ Night – John Cougar Mellencamp
9. Power of Love – Huey Lewis and the News
10. Glory Days – Bruce Springsteen

It’s a fascinating list, in part because of the pop culture time capsule it provides, but also because it is a time capsule into my own formative years of music listening. 1985 is probably the last time I relied on the radio to provide the soundtrack to my day. I had been buying albums (yes, the big black slabs of vinyl) for a while at this point, of course, but that year and into the next is where you would mark the pretty clean break on the timeline of my life. You can thank the acquisition of two albums: The Replacements’ Tim and R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant the following year. Those two benchmarks, along with a handful of others, pushed me toward the need to hear my own music rather than be limited to what the local radio station deemed worthy of airplay. So, while I owned or taped from friends 15 of the albums from which some of these songs were pulled, the part of my collection not represented on a list like this from a Midwestern AOR station was growing.

I made the playlist below (which includes 10 of the top 11 because Foreigner’ “That Was Yesterday” wasn’t available) and found that listening to it took me right back to my teenage years. But it didn’t conjure nostalgia, but rather relief. If things had fallen a different way for me, I could still be living in Des Moines listening to KGGO (and, it’s clear, still hearing these songs). Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but I’m glad for the alternate course that found me constantly searching for new sounds, still able to enjoy many of the songs on this list despite the cheese factor that kept them from aging well (or, truth told, starting out very well).

A list today of my favorite music from 1985 would include things like Tim, R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction, the Minutemen’s 3-Way Tie for Last, Hoodoo Gurus’ Mars Needs Guitars and maybe Psychocandy from the Jesus and Mary Chain. But a lot of that was hindsight. If given the choice, I’d pick any of those over anything on this list. but if push comes to shove, there are still several songs here I wouldn’t turn off if they came on the radio. There’s a lot of Bruce Springsteen here, and I’ve always had a soft spot for Sting, Simple Minds, John Mellencamp, the Cars, Jon Fogerty and Hall and Oates. Some things I liked as a teenager are cringe-inducing now (I’m looking at you, Mr. Mister) while some bands I  ignored back then have become favorites (the mighty Cheap Trick).

So, 25 years on, here’s a snapshot of Midwestern rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the list in full, and here’s a playlist from the top 10 (or so):

Each year when December rolls around, I kick myself for not doing a better job of keeping notes throughout the year to help with the annual challenge of compiling a list of the best music of the year. Well, this year’s kick was half-hearted at best, because I did keep such a list… for the first few months of the year, anyway. So, This year’s task wasn’t so arduous, and I was able to list a couple of albums that might have slipped off the radar without the prompt.

In the past, I have given very serious thought to actual rankings, but this year I’m going to eschew that in favor of a top 10 and what I suppose should be called the next 15. The goal was to create a top 25, and while the first 10 did distinguish themselves, I don’t have the mental energy to rank them. So, on to the lists (in alphabetical order):

THE TOP 10

Besnard Lakes - Besnard Lakes are the Raging Night (Jagjaguwar). I don’t know anything about this band, and I’d like to keep it that way. In a year when tremendously hyped bands made albums that ultimately made me yawn (more on that later), it was nice to see an unheralded group deliver such a majestic disc. No backstory, no magazine covers, no celebrity guest stars. Just good music. This was wildly ambitious, but it succeeds because they have the chops to to back it up. After the wonderful debut, Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse (sense a pattern here?), the band is able to fulfill its promise here. What will the Besnard Lakes be next? Whatever it is, I’ll bet it’s good.

Crowded House - Intriguer (Fantasy). Neil Finn was involved with an album, so it’s no surprise it’s on the list. But unlike the first Crowded House reunion album, which was a Finn solo album in all but name, this feels like a band effort, and the songs and performance are stronger as a result. And while fans continue to miss the late Paul Hester, his presence doesn’t hang over this like it did on Time on Earth, and that makes everything seem a bit more about the present and future than the past. How good is this? The first single, “Saturday Sun,” may be the weakest track of the bunch, and that’s saying something. They were amazing live, as usual, too, giving these songs a home amid a staggeringly good body of work.

Devo – Something For Everybody (Warner Brothers).  I never thought I’d put a Devo album on a top anything list, but after 30 years of lobbying by some of Devo’s most faithful spuds, something clicked here. I expected to listen politely and then toss it aside. Instead, the songs grabbed hold in a way modern electronic pop never does, leaving me singing the songs under my breath and wondering where my head had been at the past three decades. These songs rock more live, but they’re so well-performed on the album that no matter the context, they work. Strangely, at a time when de-evolution seems in full force, the mythology behind the band’s best music is gone, replaced with expertly crafted pop songs. Here’s hoping there’s not another 20-year gap before the next one.

Brad Mehldau - Highway Rider (Nonsuch). Jazz pianist Mehldau hasn’t played a bum note in more than a decade, but fans of Largo, his collaboration with rock producer Jon Brion, always hoped for a sequel. Here it is, and it’s a doozy, offering two discs of searching, adventurous jazz. Instead of the electronics that spurred Mehldau’s creativity on their last pairing, this one features an orchestra, giving the pianist’s songs a broader palette. The result is the same, however: some of the best music, jazz or otherwise, of the year. Mehldau is joined by his usual trio and saxophonist Joshua Redman, who offers some nice coloring and nuance to Mehldau’s strong compositions.

The National – High Violet (4AD). Like Besnard Lakes, The National does more with expansive sound than other, more highly touted groups. Offering their third winner in a row, the band plays contemplative songs with dynamics to burn. What it doesn’t yet offer, and what the band could really use, are a little variation in tempos and a bit of humor. Either or both will be what the band needs to move beyond this (admittedly fertile) patch to a place with real staying power. Singer Matt Berninger’s dusky croon may seem to be the hook on these songs, but it is the music of guitarist Bryce Dessner that sets that compelling mood, and the combination is what sets The National apart.

Josh Ritter - So Runs the World Away (Pytheus Recordings). Ritter has been so good for so long that it has become easy to take him for granted. But this, his fifth album, and fourth sure winner, proves him among the most consistent folk artists in the game. “Folk Bloodbath” is the stunning standout here, a sort of mashup of murder ballads that leaves plenty of red splashed on the speakers, but overall it’s another batch of top-notch songcraft from a guy with a long career ahead of him. Any criticism — sameness, for example — can be explained away as consistency. If he continues to make albums like these for years to come, the worst you can say is that he didn’t make a bad one.

Superchunk – Majesty Shredding (Merge) I never would have imagined Superchunk being on one of these lists. I used to love the band, but their later-day output did little for me, and they seemed to have faded away into side projects and label management. Instead they return with an album the equal of anything from their heyday, a batch of smart pop-punk that doesn’t feel silly despite the 40-somethings behind the mic. If you’re looking for evidence of the validity of the guitar-bass-drums configuration as we move into the second decade of the new century, you’ll find it here. An album that began life to these ears as a pleasant surprise has continued to grow into something as close to a sure-thing mood elevator as can be found on the CD rack.

Teenage Fanclub – Shadows (Merge) After the low point of Howdy!, TFC has fully rehabilitated. Following on the heels of the good but not great Man-Made, Shadows finds the band again firing on all cylinders. The songs are solid once again, and the performances feel more lived in. Teenage Fanclub is another act that had aged very gracefully. One might think making an album with a dozen good songs every five years is a cinch when you have three top songwriters in the band, but it’s clearly not as easy as it looks. There are no surprises here, unless the surprise is an album of mature, unsophisticated pop played with passion and grace in 2010.

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor (XL Recordings) This band was hyped almighty in 2009, and followed that album, The Airing of Grievances, with one that was even better. The lazy way to describe it is probably still the best way: a stew mixing Springsteen, the Hold Steady, the Clash, Bright Eyes and a few other elements. This is another ambitious album, but one that is self-aware in its reach. The band seems to know what it seeks, and stretches to get there. Most of the time, it succeeds. Without a sense of humor, this would be oppressive. Thankfully, the band is aware of how absurd its throwback rants can seem, it and adds a wink here or there to lighten the load.

Steve Wynn – Northern Aggression (Yep Roc) Steve Wynn is proof that artists should keep plugging away after the limelight fades. Nearly 20 years after Wynn’s Dream Syndicate debuted with the scathing Days of Wine and Roses, I finally climbed aboard the bandwagon. That was thanks to hearing Here Come the Miracles, his seventh solo LP. In the decade since, I have become a rabid fan, and Northern Aggression is a fantastic payoff. Again joined by the Miracle 3 (who debuted on that earlier album), Wynn rips through a batch of guitar-heavy songs that share the fire of the last few Wynn albums with a bit of menace thrown in for good measure. Wynn’s profile has been raised thanks to the Baseball Project; here’s hoping a few more folks climb aboard to see where he goes next.

THE REST

Crooked Still – Some Strange Country (Signature Sounds)
Deer Tick - The Black Dirt Sessions (Partisan)
Dinosaur Feathers – Fantasy Memorial (self-released)
Alejandro Escovedo – Street Songs of Love (Fantasy)
Robyn Hitchcock – Propellor Time (Satorial)
Jamey Johnson – The Guitar Song (Mercury)
Midlake – The Courage of Others (Bella Union)
The New Pornographers – Together (Matador)
Nada Surf – If I Had a Hi-Fi (Mardev)
Owen Pallett – Heartland (Domino)
Sun Kil Moon – Admiral Fell Promises (Caldo Verde)
The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt (Dead Oceans)
Sharon Van Etten – Epic (Ba Da Bing)
Volebeats – s/t (Rainbow Quartz)
Yeasayer – Odd Blood (Secretly Canadian)

JAZZ

Rudresh Mahanthappa was the out-of-left-field star of the year for me, as two albums under his name were among my top spins. I hadn’t heard of him before now (and with a name like that, you’d know), but from here on out, anything he does will earn an immediate listen.

Rudresh Mahanthappa and Steve Lehman - Dual Identity (Clean Feed)
Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green – Apex (Pi Recordings)
Christian Scott – Yesterday You Said Tomorrow (Concord Jazz)
Vijay Iyer – Solo (ACT)
Matthew Shipp – 4D (Thirsty Ear)

MOST WELCOME COMEBACK (tie):

Hoodoo Gurus - Purity of Essence (Hoodoo Gurus Records)
The Corin Tucker Band – 1,000 Years (Kill Rock Stars)

TOP REISSUES

Dream Syndicate – Medicine Show (Water Music)
R.E.M. – Fables of the Reconstruction (EMI)
Jayhawks - Bunkhouse (American)

With all of that good, there is some bad. Three bands that once excited me left me cold this year: The Hold Steady, Arcade Fire and the Drive-by Truckers. I know I’m in the minority, and it’s probably my problem, not theirs, but the first seems to have crawled up their own shtick, the second makes music that I admire but am never in the mood to listen to and the third… well, the good songs seem to have dried up.

I’ll also be happy when the best of the lo-fi overdriven 60s girl group-sounding bands — which at times include Sleigh Bells, Mountain Man, Love Language, Best Coast and Dum Dum Girls – allow their sound to evolve beyond those constraints and leave the slew of imitators in the dust.

And lastly, Spoon. What was up with Transference? Big hopes, dashed. Sorry, Britt. Didn’t do it for me. You get a pass based on your track record. Check back in next year.

While I love checking out the hundreds of best of the year lists (and Largehearted Boy is the best aggregator I’ve found), all of that pales in comparison to the rush afforded by release of the Village Voice‘s annual Pazz & Jop poll. I have voted in the poll the past couple of years, and find it interesting to see where my pick fall on the overall list, and what kind of support my favorites garnered from other critics.

This year’s list was topped by — surprise, surprise — Animal Collective’s Merriwether Post Pavilion. The disc seemed to top everyone’s list… but mine. It didn’t even make my top 20, mostly because initial listens did little for me and I never spent much time with it. Lately, spurred by its appearance on so many other lists, I decided to listen more carefully to see what I was missing. This time, it clicked, and would definitely have found a place in my top 10 (though I’m not sure what I would displace to get it there).

My ballot can be found here; it is identical to the top 10 I selected back in December here at TIRBD (so read that post if you’re curious why I picked what I did).

Much of my ballot aligns with those of the rest of the critics. My No. 2 disc, Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone, was No. 3 overall, while six of my picks were in the Top 20 of the P&J list. The rest of my picks were somewhat spread out. U2′s No Line on the Horizon came in at No. 32, while the rest were in the lower reaches. Deer Tick’s Born on Flag Day, which topped my list, was at 188 (only seven other critics picked it at all, and only a few of those put it in their top 5). Nirvana’s Live at Reading placed at No. 111, while DJ Spooky’s The Secret Song, was all the way down at 1,586 (I was the only one who voted for it).

Seeing the cluster of groupthink at the top of the list, it’s amazing that 1,934 albums could be nominated. But for every Animal Collective or Neko Case that caught so many ears, there are albums like DJ Spooky’s that caught only one or two. With 697 critics participating, if each has a pet favorite or two, that expands the list significantly very quickly, allowing for mass consensus at one end and complete diffusion at the other.

It’s a great way to learn about what might have been overlooked (or in the case of Animal Collective, avoided) during the year. When I see an artist on other ballots that include albums that I loved, it makes me want to seek them out. Am I missing something? There’s no better time to find out.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I turned 40 this year, or that my job was busier than ever, or that playing with my kids takes up a lot of the time I used to devote to music. Whatever the case, I found my tolerance for challenging music that required multiple listens before I would “get it” was limited. At the same time, I probably listened to more albums all the way through than I have in years. It was a case of constantly seeking out the new thing and being disappointed. So many bands were hyped this year (which is, of course, nothing new) that were good but nowhere near as great as promised. Woods, Dan Deacon, Fuck Buttons, Memory Tapes, Real Estate… the list goes on and on. I liked something on all of these, but none were anywhere near the best thing I’ve heard all year.

I found that what it came down to, the thing that put something on this list more than anything else, is that I enjoyed listening to it. Now, that may seem obvious, but any look at a usual end-of-the-year list proves that it is far from it. People often populate their lists with challenging music, either because they want to impress readers, or because they truly spent the time to figure out what was going on and want a pat on the back. I have certainly been guilty of that in the past.

Not this year. In 2009, if you didn’t captivate me right out of the gate, you were tossed on the one-and-done pile. That’s not to say there isn’t challenging fare on the following list, but rather that even the most perplexing albums at least had something that immediately grabbed me and made subsequent spins seem worthwhile.

With that, I present the Things I’d Rather Be Doing list of the best music of 2009. Following is a short list of great reissues and collections.

1. Deer Tick – Born on Flag Day – If fun and enjoyment are the bellwether’s of a great disc, then Deer Tick wins hands down. Born on Flag Day is the most rousing, irreverent goodtimin’ disc I’ve heard in a long time. John J. McCauley III succeeds despite the fact that his reach does not exceed his grasp; one feels like he has much better stuff in him, but what he’s doing now is still awfully good. Live, the band puts on the most entertaining show I’ve seen in years, and you can just tell that as good as songs like “Easy” and “Smith Hill” are, this is only the beginning.

2. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone – Neko Case has such an identifiable sound that one fears she’ll run out of ways to excel. No such worries yet, however. Middle Cyclone may well be her best album (and that’s saying something), because it finds ways to push her sound forward while making it clear that we’re still listening to Neko Case. Her songwriting, a pleasant surprise on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, is in full bloom here, proving Case to be a formidable multi-talented performer.

3. Fever Ray – s/t – I never really saw the appeal of the Knife, the band of Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer Andersson, but for some reason her similar solo work smacked me upside the head and forced me to listen. Where Silent Shout seemed unremittingly cold, the Fever Ray disc used that icy tone as simply one of many tools. The songs seemed more fully formed, and despite the chill, they were still a pleasure to listen to. Andersson’s gimmick of altering the pitch of her voice to add menace to the proceedings, deployed on the Knife’s music, worked even better here. The most revelatory thing I heard all year.

4. Flaming Lips – Embryonic – The F’lips last, At War with the Mystics, was awful, one of the worst albums from a beloved band I’ve ever heard. I had hoped Wayne Coyne and Co. would retreat somewhat, but never expected they would regress so far. Had this album come after the majesty of Zaireeka, no one would have been surprised. That this swirling cloud of cacophony and blissed-out beauty followed the band’s first true dud was the most pleasant surprise of 2009. There were no real singles, and it essentially stopped the band’s commercial momentum in its tracks. But it proved that the band has much more up its sleeve, and makes the future seem very bright indeed.

5. Grizzly Bear – Vekatemist – The Grizzly Bear backlash has begun, and it is not without merit. The band, while making gorgeous music, does so in a largely soulless, rather mechanical way. Vekatemist has its share of absolutely stunning music (“Two Weeks” is among the five best songs of the year without question), but it is music made seemingly without passion. That missing ingredient kept this disc away from the upper reaches of this list. Here’s hoping they find it in years to come.

6. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – s/t – Ah, sweet nostalgia. Had this been issued in the late 1980s on Sarah Records or K, it would be seen as a classic of the college rock era. Instead, it comes 20 years later, proving that at least someone who was listening to their big brother’s record collection was absorbing the lessons on display. This is a fun, raucous disc that sounds a bit like Belle and Sebastian had that band been formed in a garage instead of a college rec room.

7. St. Vincent – Actor – Annie Clark is a wildly talented woman: a singer, songwriter and guitarist who puts all of those skills to work on her sophomore outing to create a bracing rock album. It’s hard to point out any one thing and say, “this is St. Vincent.” Instead, Clark has (not so) simply assembled a disc of great songs that make the best use of her strengths.

8. Nirvana – Live at Reading – Truth told, this may be the best album of the year. It’s hard to award a nearly 20-year-old live album from a band that stopped making music more than 15 years ago the title of album of the year, however, so instead it sits here in the bottom of the top 10. There’s little that can be said that hasn’t been said before. This is one of the best bands of its generation playing its strongest songs in a take-no-prisoners performance before a powerful, adoring crowd.

9. DJ Spooky – The Secret Song – When I first popped this in, I was intrigued. As it continued to play, I was continually blindsided. Is that a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”? At times this sounds like the great lost Beastie Boys album, at others it rivals the best of DJ Shadow or the Jurassic 5 or Springheel Jack. Translation: this is a little something of everything. By the end of its 20 tracks, you feel spent, but it isn’t long before the desire to cue this up again takes over. That’s a good thing, because it’ll take several spins before it all sinks in.

10. U2 – No Line on the Horizon - This pick will surely earn me some catcalls, but hear me out. “Get On Your Boots” is a fairly awful retread. “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Cr
azy Tonight” is Bono the old man trying so hard to connect with the kids and failing so miserably. “Unknown Caller”‘s lyrics peppered with computer terminology are inane. That would be enough to sink most albums, but not this one, for the rest of it is as accomplished and flat out stunning as anything U2 has made since Achtung, Baby 20 years ago. “Magnificent” is the kind of anthem you wished the band had cranked out instead of by-the-numbers tunes like “Vertigo” and “Beautiful Day,” while the title track is a perfect blend of the band’s pomp and producer Brian Eno’s circumstance. And for the band to be able to craft something as beautiful as “What as Snow” at this point is remarkable.

11. Love Language – s/t
12. Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs
13. The xx – s/t
14. Joe Henry - Blood from Stars
15. Bonnie Prince Billy – Beware
16. Gomez - A New Tide
17. John Wesley Harding - Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
18. Ike Reilly – Hardluck Stories
19. The Dead Weather - Horehound
20. Boston Spaceships – The Planets are Blasted

Reissues/Collections

Nick Lowe – Quiet Please
Emitt Rhodes – The Emitt Rhodes Recordings 1969-1973
Tin Huey - Before Obscurity
The Jayhawks – Music from the North Country
Big Star - Keep an Eye on the Sky
Richard Hell – Destiny Street Repaired
Close Lobsters - Forever Until Victory

It was another eclectic month of music listening here in September, with a wider selection and a greater number of discs spun. Starting in August, I decided to keep track of every album I listened to in its entirety. The rules: Only an album heard in its entirety, even if it is spread over several days, will count. Repeat spins, partial listens, EPs, singles and background music don’t count. This had to be active listening of a full album. I could listen in the car, at home, at work or even on headphones while mowing the lawn. Every completed album was added to the list.

I listened to 47 albums in August, and 52 in September. As with August, it was easy to pick out some patterns. I paid more attention to new music this month, listening to fresh releases from Jay-Z, Noise Addict, Polvo, Yo La Tengo, the Clean, Lou Barlow, Boston Spaceships, Girls, Track a Tiger, Monsters of Folk, Ben Allison, The Clientele, Flaming Lips and Volcano Choir.

I also got into degrees-of-separation listening. I picked up the new version of Richard Hell’s Destiny Street (which didn’t count on this list because I listened to it in August), so I listened to the old version for comparison. That led me to an investigation of Robert Quine, which led to a listen to his duo disc with drummer Fred Maher, which led to a spin through Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask, which features Quine’s guitar. Reading about Big Star (more on that tomorrow) and priming myself for the Keep an Eye on the Sky boxed set led me to listen to a lot of Alex Chilton, while reading the book Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records led me to pull out a lot of old Merge stuff.

How does this compare to your own habits? Do you have the patience for full albums? What sparks you to pick up a disc and give it a spin? Let me know in the comments.

The list:

Jay-Z – The Blueprint 3
Husker Du – Flip Your Wig
Bob Dylan – Together Through Life
Steve Wynn – Sweetness and Light
Richard Hell – Destiny Street
Noise Addict – It Was Never About the Audience
Lou Reed – The Blue Mask
Robert Quine and Fred Maher – Basic
Robert Gordon – Is Red Hot
Ben Neill – Night Science
Gutterball – s/t
Superchunk – Come Pick Me Up
Matt Suggs – Golden Days Before They End
Polvo – In Prism
Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs
Soulsavers – Broken
Anders Parker – Skyscraper
Dinosaur Jr. – Farm
The 6ths – Wasp’s Nests
The Clean – Mister Pop
Lou Barlow – Goodnight Unknown
Rolling Stones – Between the Buttons
The Beatles – Abbey Road
Dennis Wilson – Pacific Ocean Blue
Evan Parker/Matthew Shipp – Abbey Road Duos
Emitt Rhodes – Mirror
Superchunk – Foolish
Bill Fay – Time of Last Persecution
Alex Chilton – 1970
Alex Chilton – Bach’s Bottom
Emitt Rhodes – Farewell to Paradise
Big Star – Live
Pearl Jam – Backspacer
Cardinal – s/t
The Feelies – the Good Earth
Boston Spaceships – Zero to 99
Girls – Album
The Minus 5 – I Don’t Know Who I Am
David Grubbs – Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange
Jim Carroll – World Without Gravity
The Clientele – Bonfires on the Hearth
Track a Tiger – I Felt the Bullet Hit My Heart
Stephen Stills – Manassas
Monsters of Folk – s/t
R.E.M. – Document
R.E.M. – Monster
Ben Allison – Think Free
Jenny Scheinman – s/t
Stefon Harris – African Tarantella
Flaming Lips – Embryonic
Peter Laughner – Take the Guitar Player for a Ride
Volcano Choir – Unmap

Lists are meant to generate discussion, of course, and no list that seeks to represent each of the last 25 years with one indie-rock album could hope to be definitive. That said, the list featured on Entertainment Weekly’s web site today, “The Indie Rock 25,” is downright awful. There are some obvious picks, but much of it either selects albums that are far from the best/most interesting of the given year or are not the best album from the chosen act, which shows how artificial such an exercise can be.

Then again, when you set constraints like these, how can you win?

1. Only one album may represent each year.
2. All the bands had to have been signed to an independent label for the given album.
3. The term ”band” must be taken literally.

This year’s pick, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, was an obvious choice. Such lists are tailor made to recognize the fact that a band like this has left its major-label home for indie-land, so it’s no surprise, and one that’s hard to argue. So is Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the pick for 2007, or Boys and Girls in America from the Hold Steady, the 2006 pick. From there, however, things occasionally go off the rails as often as not.

Bright Eyes in 2005, a year with Okkervil River, Antony and the Johnsons and Sufjan Stevens all making critically acclaimed and well-received discs? Please. And this has little to do with my inability to comprehend Connor Oberst’s appeal, and more to do with the fact that he had made his impact long before and, with this tepid disc, came nowhere near the artistic heights of the aforementioned discs. Arcade Fire in 2004 makes sense, but again, the White Stripes’ Elephant in 2003 is a strangely out-of-touch pick. It’s really White Blood Cells or nothing for this group. That spot, for 2001, goes instead to the Shins, whose album that year, Oh, Inverted World, may have included the future hit “New Slang,” but which didn’t make a dent in the public consciousness the way it’s follow-up, Chutes Too Narrow did in, you guessed it, 2003.

The rest of the list can be split into three groups: no brainers (1998′s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel or 1994′s Bee Thousand from Guided by Voices) miscast (Sleater-Kinney’s relatively underwhelming The Hot Rock in 1999 as opposed to 1997′s absolutely scorching Dig Me Out or the Smiths’ Meat is Murder instead of the later, superior The Queen is Dead) and just plain wrong (no matter their parsing of things, My Bloody Valentine and the Pixies were major label bands on their respective releases, UK releases to the contrary).

The compilers seem to know all this, spending more time in each write up explaining why better and more appropriate albums were not picked than they do extolling the virtues of those that were. Still, the list does what it should, sparking the desire in fans to pull out old albums, listen to great music and discuss the merits.