Here they are – the top twenty-five albums of the year, as chosen by the Noisevox crew. Be sure to check out our individual staff lists, as well as our other year-end features, including Top Songs and Breakout Bands of 2010.

25 The National – High Violet
Let’s be honest, High Violet doesn’t sound much different from Boxer, which in turn didn’t sound much different from Alligator. So why do we keep coming back to The National? Well, frankly the answer is that Matt Berninger is really good at writing songs. The bedraggled, sour-passion emotions and gentle moroseness are still the cornerstones, but as the band enters their eleventh(!) year of existence, a whole host of new anxieties emerge – all of which are tackled with the same distinctive, staggered cadence. For the first time Berninger has a kid on his shoulders, while at the same time admitting he “doesn’t have the drugs to sort it out.” For a band that has made a living off the enveloping loneliness of urban-chaos, they’re almost at their darkest here – song titles like “Terrible Love”, “Sorrow”, and “Afraid of Everyone” don’t lie after all. Getting older certainly hasn’t cured them, and vicariously they sound just as striking as usual. High Violet fits nicely in the canon, but still, nobody sounds quite like The National.  -Luke Winkie

24 Best Coast – Crazy for You
For anyone in the business of making mixtapes to pop into your car stereo while driving through beach traffic, 2010 has really been your year. Whether chillwavers or garage rock revivalists, everybody and their mom seemed keen to put out summer releases celebrating marijuana, saltwater, and sunshine this year - and no proponents of the scene take on this task more straightforwardly than Best Coast. Following a slew of EPs and 7"s in 2009, Bethany Cosentino and company finally released their highly-anticipated debut LP Crazy For You this year, marking a considerable change in sound for the group. Much like fellow beach-loving potheads Wavves, in 2010 Best Coast made a clear shift away from the feedback-heavy lo-fi aesthetic that helped to define their sound on releases like Where the Boys Are and the Art Fag 7". But unlike Wavves, who tried to balance cleaner production with thick levels of vocal distortion and amplifier gain to retain some of their trademark dirtiness on their new LP, Best Coast all but throws away this aesthetic on Crazy For You, maintaining the wash element of previous releases with ample use of reverb but doing it all without the scratchy fuzz. And while the dichotomy of Cosentino's bubblegum songwriting and screeching amps had been one of the group's biggest draws last year, the cleaner, round, and warm production on their debut proved a perfect fit for Best Coast's simple pop melodies. With Crazy For You, Best Coast put together one of the most consistent records of the beach-enthusiast indie community, streamlining their sound into a pretty little pop package, fresh and vacuum sealed, as satisfying and euphoric as a pickup from your local L.A. medicinal outlet.   -Ben Bromberg

23 The Morning Benders – Big Echo
The duckling-to-a-swan story of the year. Not that there was anything ugly about the Berkeley boys’ duckling phase. The morning benders’ 2008 debut Talking Through Tin Cans was an immensely likable and probably underappreciated collection of left coast jangle pop. But it hardly prepared us for what was to come with Big Echo, Christopher Chu’s aptly named venture into wall of sound terrain led by song of the year contender, the swaying “Excuses”, and its unforgettable friends-in-the-studio video from Yours Truly. Spector and/or Brian Wilson comparisons were unavoidable, and the lush, layered riches just kept on coming, from the driving, timpani-puctuated “Cold War”, to “Promises”, all grinding bottom, soaring chorus and lyrical musings on growing up “too fast.” Chu’s own growth as a songwriter and producer is something to behold, and this record, mixed and co-produced by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, found the Benders suddenly in the warm embrace of the cool kids. By year’s end, they were indie rock headliners. Good for them.  -John Norris

22 Jónsi – Go
Pure unadulterated joy, Go was the sound of an already transcendent artist unleashed, and in the case of Jónsi’s collaborator Nico Muhly, unhinged. Muhly had the quote of the year when he said, of the glorious, ecstatic single “Boy Lillikoi”, “I’m gonna go apeshit on this bitch!” And so they did, with wild abandon. From “Go Do” to the gallop of “Animal Arithmetic”, how could you not want to join Jónsi in his pirate-Indian gear, climb into a treehouse, bang on a drum and let it rip? Even slower tracks - the delicate “Sinking Friendships”, the epic “Grow Till Tall” - displayed a wonder and warmth not associated with Sigúr Ros. Lump-in-the-throat post-rock for the “Where the Wild Things Are” crowd. Simply gorgeous.  -John Norris

21 Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner
There’s a warmth to Lucky Shiner that makes it infinitely listenable, that makes the album feel familiar, even though it’s textured and individual enough that it sounds nothing quite like any other album I’ve heard. The London-bred producer’s first full-length album is reminiscent of J Dilla Donuts in this way, but Panda uses samples in a manner more similar to Flying Lotus than Dilla, chopping them into unrecognizable bits and burying them beneath layers of drums, synths, hiss, and dust. Lucky Shiner plays out less frantically, though. Panda’s productions unfold with a beginning, middle, and end, introducing new elements throughout that have the potential to shift the tone of the whole track, allowing him to tell a coherent narrative without ever saying a word. The album’s perfect pacing aids that, too. The result is a well-crafted, engaging, enveloping album, an instrumental record that sounds like a story about life and progress.  -Phil Rudich

20 Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be
If 2010 in indie rock had a “thing,” it was hiding brilliant pop songs beneath layers of grime and distortion. The downside of using this tactic – which becomes more and more obvious as more and more people do it – is that it’s very easy to hide not-so-brilliant pop songs. With Kristin “Dee Dee” Gundrend at the helm of Dum Dum Girls, though, the group will have no trouble remaining clear standouts of the first category. From the start of I Will Be, it’s easy to hear the same hazy charm and garage-rock efficiency that made you take notice of The Strokes’ debut. Also like that album, it has the songs that keep you coming back. Over time, the album reveals itself to be more layered and have more emotional depth than the vintage girl-group harmonies, rigid guitar work, and driving, repetitive surf-rock beat might suggest. “Jail La La” and “Everybody’s Out” are quick-witted, with as much anxious energy as defensive bite. “Rest of Our Lives”, “Blank Girl”, a duet between Dee Dee and her husband, Crocodiles’ Brandon Welchez, and “Baby Don’t Go”, a Sonny & Cher cover, are all slightly disarming love songs that tell a cohesive story of longing and dependency. The lyrics of the title track boil the sentiment down to a refrain of “You can have my word / I will be your girl,” and like the album on the whole, it means more than you think.  -Phil Rudich

19 No Age – Everything in Between
Once beacons of escapist youth, the nearly-30 duo No Age emerged two years after their first proper LP with an acidic bite and weathered brush. Everything in Between was a portrait of maturation, where the fleeting feelings of love and laughter sound increasingly fabled under the eyes of adulthood. “I want you back underneath my skin” isn’t a heartache plea, it’s a desire to feel the virtue of being devoted to someone in the most adolescent matter, before experience and expectations sully our ideal minds. It’s a feeling quite familiar to the aging vagabonds of The Smell scene, and No Age captures it perfectly. The raging exuberance of a D.I.Y. life has faded in the face of success and real life. And now they can only fever dream, caught in a place where living a rock ‘n’ roll life isn’t as charming as it once was.  -Luke Winkie

18 Tame Impala – Innerspeaker
“Solitude is bliss,” or so says the wah wah-infused second single from Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker, one of the most exciting debuts of the year. And at least from our northeast-quadrant-of-the-Western-Hemisphere perch, you don’t get much more solitude than living in Perth, home of the year’s second biggest Aussie band after The Temper Trap. And yet TI’s Kevin Parker and Dom Simper apparently needed something even more remote, sequestering themselves in a house some 400 miles from Perth to craft the record. Whatever it takes. While Tame Impala had already made a name on their home turf with a self-titled 2008 EP, and inroads in the U.K. in ’09, many North Americans were blindsided in the best way by Innerspeaker’s fuzzed-out groove, and reflexively reached for Cream and Hendrix comparisons, and liberal use of the “p word”. TI told us they don’t exactly embrace “psychedelic,” or at least they consider it reductive, ignoring the other elements that go into their sonic stew. And while the grinding “Desire Be, Desire Go” and “The Bold Arrow of Time”, the album’s heaviest track, revel in their sludge, “Why Won’t You Make Up Your Mind” and “Alter Ego” inhabit a airy, dreamier place, and the 7-minute plus “Runaway Houses, City, Clouds” is as meandering and improvisational as its title. Elsewhere, the hard charging “Lucidity” served up a contender for riff of the year, won Parker some John Lennon vocal comparisons, and produced 2010’s most dizzying music video, shot from a weather balloon high above the planet. Those who saw the band live this year, playing support for MGMT or own their own U.S. tour in the fall, know that they are also down for other moves as well, including an especially rocking reworking of the Blue Boy club hit “Remember Me”. Remembering Tame Impala won’t be a problem. We just can’t wait to hear what they’ve got next.  -John Norris

17 The Soft Pack – The Soft Pack
In these days when music fans the world over have famously retreated into their respective genre-specific corners, it is no small feat when a “rock” band manages to find traction in those rarely-overlapping worlds known as indie, alt and mainstream. No artist in our Top 25, except maybe Arcade Fire, managed to straddle those worlds as deftly as The Soft Pack, So Cal’s uncomplicated garage-pop four piece. The band’s Matt Lamkin told Noisevox in the spring that while they’re fans of, and friends with, noisier, more rough-hewn acts, "We're also kind of just into those type of bands that have that normal, very clean sound. I was always into stuff that Albini produced, and then I got interested in stuff like REM and The Feelies, or Big Dipper. Just rock bands that recorded everything clean…there’s no real dramatic thing going on." But take care not to sell short their achievements. Terms like “simple” and “straight ahead” tend to undervalue what is dramatic: those melodies, those insane hooks. From rave-ups like “Down on Loving” and “C’mon” to the moody and excellent post-punk foray “Parasites”, to surf prom song “Mexico” to the band’s most played, across-the-board hit “Answer to Yourself” (complete with two videos, the band’s pizza parlor clip and the hilarious, viral lunch room food fight with Christopher Mintz-Plasse) – The Soft Pack would appear to write these brain-burrowing tunes in their sleep. The only thing regrettable about this debut is that it seemed to take so long to come out. After first getting to know them as The Muslims in ’08, we watched the band go through the name change drama and its attendant media fascination (“Are you going to change it?” “Why’d you change it?”), a sidetracking we didn’t need – and they definitely didn’t. Cheers to a band that manages to put smiles on a lot of faces in a lot of corners of the music universe, and how many these days can say that?   -John Norris

16 Sleigh Bells – Treats
Looking at the mixer while recording Sleigh Bell's Treats, every single track would be in the red. Overblown, overdriven guitar lines; blasted, distorted cymbal crashes and drum loops, and singer Alexis Krauss's sweet, soft voice murmuring through several filters and an amp with the gain turned to 11. If there's one element uniting the Hey-Mickey-you're-so-fine stomps and claps, chunky distortion, and interplanetary squeaks and sound effects that make up a typical Sleigh Bells composition, it's volume. In some sense, promoting an album based on loudness is kind of like promoting a beer based on coldness - at the end of the day, whether or not I want to pump Treats to neighbor-offending, floor-shaking decibels seems like my decision alone. But frankly, every sound on Treats is just plain big, undeniably loud even at soft levels, and turning it down is an exercise in futility, like driving to a metal show and trying to listen from the parking lot across the street. You've driven all the way there, you've bought your ticket - you'd have to be completely mental not to try and blow your eardrums out. Of course, the success of Sleigh Bells' debut and their rise to indie stardom is indebted to being much more than loud. The band's formula is a careful combination of rock, pop, hip hop, and electronica, using elements of rock and electronica to drive the instrumental intensity, and utilizing a pop sensibility, built in the space between thumping hip hop beats, to give drunk girls something to dance to while the punks are getting ready to mosh. This is one of those rare cases when genre-bending and exploration has yielded something completely original, standing on its own and doing justice to its formative parts, and in masterminding such a beast, Sleigh Bells created one of the year's most buzzworthy records.  -Ben Bromberg

15 Perfume Genius – Learning
No record this year yielded more power out of less than Learning, the musical journal of bruised memories from Seattle’s Mike Hadreas. Little more is needed to create a record that floors you from start to finish than a piano, a sweet but tentative voice, and a cache of memories that would rival J.T. Leroy’s. Except of course, that these ones are real, and they are told with a remarkable economy of words. One simple couplet takes you there. From “Write to Your Brother”: “Tell him mom treats your like a lover / that you have to hide all the mouthwash from her.” From the foreboding “Look Out, Look Out”: “Mary-belle within the bird cage cell / all the neighbors know what your mother sells.” And from the prurient one’s delight, “Mr. Peterson”: “He let me smoke weed in his truck / if I could convince him I loved him enough.” ‘Nuff said. Hadreas told Noisevox in the fall that the lyrics shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value, that they sometimes work as a pastiche of unrelated events. So, he didn’t actually smoke weed in his truck? “Well”, said Mike, “I wouldn’t say that.”  -John Norris
 

14 Glasser – Ring
Glasser’s homemade tapestries have a similar backstory to a lot of 21st century artists. She built out a solo project with the benefit of a laptop and a few beatmaking programs, she started singing over mystic-folk guitars and bleating synth. But what sets Ms. Cameron Mesirow aside from the bulk of these bedroom projects is simply how organic she is. The songs, while dutifully constructed all by herself, emerge earthy, harnessed from the natural world. Her voice is unclouded by meekness or tech-induced haze – she sings boldly and huskily at the forefront of the mix, letting her simple, but earnest lyrics tell the stories of the songs. As her profile rises and opportunities present themselves, it’ll be interesting to watch who, or what, Glasser will become.  -Luke Winkie

13 Gil Scott-Heron – I’m New Here
I’m New Here is Gil Scott-Heron’s first new album in sixteen years. It could have been a record that trembled and cracked under the pressure of his best work, but the poet relieved that tension by doing something different altogether. The album, which takes its title from a tender Smog cover, experiments with electronics and relies on minimalism as much as, if not more than, his earliest spoken word album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. These differences are all to Scott-Heron’s benefit. He gives up the soulful jazz and R&B sound without sacrificing the soulful spirit, and it allows his words to come through even clearer. It puts his voice, aged and worn, square at the center and right up front, an essential change given the heavily confessional lyrics. Scott-Heron has never shied away from the personal, but I’m New Here is especially intimate. It puts sleeplessness, anxiety, fear, loss, and routine where societal and global concerns were on classics like Free Will and From South Africa to South Carolina. It’s a record that could have only been made by someone who has done everything else.  -Phil Rudich

12 Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
When exactly, we’ll never know, but somewhere along the past decade, Bruce Springsteen has become a central touchstone for some of the world’s most respected indie rockers. Arcade Fire, The National, and The Walkmen have all took a heaping amount of advice from The Boss’ coda, but no band paid straight-up tribute like Titus Andronicus did. After all, when you namedrop Jersey twice and lead a crescendo with “TRAMPS LIKE US, BABY WE WERE BORN TO DIE!” on the very first song of your record, it’s obvious to hear where you’re coming from. And The Monitor, like Bruce, revels in the titanic emotions found in the classic American small town. The huge multi-act songs and the Civil War narrative aside, this is an album primarily about being young in America, and the frustrations and genetic pride that comes with that title - a legacy of angst the now-60-year-old Springsteen can’t quite fill anymore.  -Luke Winkie

11 LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening
If This is Happening is truly the final LCD Soundsystem album, then James Murphy has certainly exited in a graceful way - drafting a record that sounds…well, that sounds like what he always envisioned an LCD Soundsystem record should sound like. The epoch-rock influences might be the same, but the nine songs here sound like a conclusion, the final act of a trilogy. Where he once was “running out of the drugs” and wondering “where are your friends tonight?” Now he just wants to go home to “the girl who has put up with all of your shit.” On previous outings you might’ve heard him chastising befuddled record labels behind an abstract curtain, here he comes center stage, feet planted, hair in a tuft – “You wanted a hit? Well this is how we do hits.” And “Home”, where Murphy’s usual darkened sputter is replaced with a resigned sigh of satisfaction, is as good of a ride-into-sunset moment you’ll ever experience on record. If the world never hears from LCD Soundsystem again, it’s because the arc we have is already perfect.  -Luke Winkie

10 Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today

In the goofy, color-soaked music video for “Bright Lit Blue Skies”, the most straightforward, un-ironic track on Before Today, Ariel Pink and the boys sneak into a girls’ school using a corrugated cardboard Trojan Horse. Fools ‘em every time. And I can’t think of a better metaphor than that equine decoy for what this album, a masterpiece of pop re-imagining, accomplishes track after track: reel the people in with the pretty and innocuous, only to open the hatch and watch the freaks come tumbling out. It’s a genius M.O., allowing the madman to simultaneously hark back to the funk-lite era of Steely Dan and Hall and Oates, and yet tweak it at every turn. What is “Fright Night”, after all, if not a weird 21st century cousin of “Maneater”? When Ariel Rosenberg decided a couple of years ago to “get serious” about music after more than a decade being too shambolic and seat of the pants for his own good, the first step was to form a proper band. And once in a proper studio, they set about creating a stunning stew of a record, a mash-up funky basslines, damaged synths, more time changes, breaks, offbeat non-sequiters than you can shake a stick at, and vocals, alternately sweet, mischievous, clear, muddied, deep and falsetto, telling tales of misfits and miscreants. There’s the crazy widow who drowns her maid in “L’estat”, there’s the girl who lost her way and now can “only breed” in the dark “Butt House Blondies” and the insistent, truly gender-subverting “Menopause Man”. On the other hand, there’s the seemingly innocent “Bright Lit” – a smoothed out cover of the 1966 Rockin’ Ramrods original, “Can’t Hear My Eyes”, which Pink first wrote at age 11, and the incomparable “Round and Round” (see our #2 song). An incorrigibly subversive art school visionary has now got a foot in the pop world. If that world, generally bereft of original ideas, knows what is good for it, it will give the fantastically perverse Ariel Pink a seat at the head of the tale.  -John Norris

9 Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Funeral and Neon Bible proved, over and over, that Arcade Fire could use their music to evoke specific moods. On The Suburbs, they use of the most effective metaphors of the last fifty years to show us place as much as emotion, something only began to explore in the “Neighborhood” suite. This record isn’t as immediate or grand as Funeral, but it carries with it a sense of subtlety and experience that breakout debut lacked. The Suburbs is also less naïve, a little more grounded, which ultimately makes it more cohesive and harder to pick apart. From the restrained verses and bursting refrain of “Ready To Start” to the soaring declaration, “We used to wait,” it functions as a whole in a way their first albums don't. This is the record that allowed the world’s biggest independent band to take control of their huge sound and scope, and people took notice – a #1 Billboard 200 debut; a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, filmed by Terry Gilliam; a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. The Suburbs is the record that proves Arcade Fire will keep getting better.  -Phil Rudich

8 Beach House – Teen Dream

Beach House’s lethargic sprawl has been part of the canon for a while now, but it’s fairly obvious that Teen Dream is the record they’ve been working towards. Perfect in its easy-riding ooziness, vibrant in yellows and golds – this is nap-time music in the best way possible. Victoria Legrand’s swooning, now-iconic voice guides us through a tapestry of sleepy guitars, hypnotic chimes and dream-like crescendos. It arrived a mere one month deep in 2010, but nothing sounded quite like it, touching on a specific relaxed beauty that’s stuck with us ever since.  -Luke Winkie

7 Warpaint – The Fool

“We made this album to listen to stoned," Warpaint bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg told Interview magazine’s website in the fall. Her bandmate, vocalist Emily Kokal chimed in, "Yeah, we definitely recommend listening to the new album after smoking. It's the best." Music outlets the world over picked up on these comments and ran with them, some seemingly shocked that this band was endorsing – wait for it – marijuana! Yeah, and there’s gambling going on in this establishment, too. Please. It would take, well, a fool not to deduce, after even a cursory two minutes of The Fool, the Los Angeles band’s debut full-length, that the green goddess had a hand in its creation. Even more than Warpaint’s tuneful 2009 EP Exquisite Corpse, the album exudes billows of smoke, seducing you, inviting you to lay back in its bloodshot bliss and let it wash over you, or in the case of the single “Undertow”, pull you in. A variety of textures abound, from the shoegaze-y wall of drone in “Bees”, to “Set Your Arms Down”, particularly hypnotic and wandering for an opening track, and “Shadows”, with its faraway strum, but throughout, languor and a wan loneliness abounds. Even on the curveballs, the intimate, acoustic “Baby” and the surprisingly spirited, time-changing “Composure”, the haze doesn’t let up. Of course “hazy” is a word we’ve read countless times describing countless bands of late. But Warpaint’s haze is of a darker, richer and ultimately more haunting variety. And while it’s not about gender (though the ladies did tell us in the spring that before they met remarkable drummer Stella Mozgawa, they had been hoping to find a woman to sit behind the kit), the contrast between on the one hand, the recent female-led, mostly lo-fi purveyors of Shangri-la’s or Leslie Gore-styled throwback pop-rock with on the other, this very different, more distant sort of distaff band was lost on no one. Warpaint may have taken a few year to incubate, but they’re on a roll, eliciting equally eager plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic. So sit back and fire one up, for an exceptional, enthralling band whose time has clearly come.  -John Norris

6 Wavves – King of the Beach

He may not be able to hold on to a drummer, but damned if Nathan Williams can’t make a tight, tuneful, hook-laden pop rock record, and shut up a lot of doubters in the process. So fixated was most of the world on the meat grinder sound of those first two Wavves albums that often lost in the conversation was Williams’ deft songwriting. It is a secret no more, in full bloom on King of the Beach, a record that aspires to nothing more than raw, pop punk fun, and boasts an insane arsenal of catchy tracks. One of them, “Take on the World”, serves as something of a statement. Written in the wake of his backlash-plagued summer of ’09, the track alternates a self-deprecating verse with a chorus that challenges himself: “To take on the world would be somethin’.” Williams told Noisevox that he wanted to challenge himself, and looked forward to silencing those who saw him as a three-chord stoner punk only capable of lo-fi records and messy live shows. Enter Jay Reatard alums Stephen Pope and Billy Hayes, who transformed Wavves into more of a “band” than ever, and at Mississippi’s Sweet Tea Studio with veteran producer Dennis Herring, they created a record, that is certainly more polished, but still unmistakeably Wavves. That’s particularly true with the rousing title track, the fuzzed-out “Idiot”, and the ridiculously infectious two-minute blast of a single “Post-Acid”. On the other hand, there’s stretching, on “Baseball Cards”, with its sunny, psychedelic Beach Boys/Animal Collective vibe, “Mickey Mouse”’s hazy, blissful bounce, “Green Eyes”, as vulnerable as Williams has ever been, and the late album curve ball “Convertible Balloon”, a Hayes composition of unabashedly sweet pop that the unaware would never guess was Wavves. All evidence that the supposed one-note prince of lo-fi has a few more tricks up his sleeve. Over the summer Nathan told us that, indie “cred” be damned, he makes no apologies for his love of Blink-182 and Weezer. He can hold his head high, because with King of the Beach, Wavves made a record that matches, and in some cases surpasses those Nineties stalwarts.  -John Norris

5 Big Boi – Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Anyone who's been following Big Boi's career for the last few years knows that his 2010 solo debut, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, was a long time coming. Big Boi went in the studio to start recording for this album in 2007, and was still recording in 2010 - the album was mastered in May of this year. The delay was due, in part, to the search for the right label to release his debut, but regardless of all else, the time gave Big Boi the freedom to exercise total perfectionism in his productions on Sir Lucious Left Foot, and the results are clear on first listen. These tracks are spotless, flawless productions, and Big Boi's preposterous flow is even more impressive. He may have always been the underrated half of Outkast, ignored behind Andre 3000's undeniable star power, but with his solo debut Big Boi has created an album that rivals some of the duo's best, in both creativity and consistency. With singles like "Shine Blockas" and "Shutterbugg", the Atlanta legend proved the versatility and timelessness of his particular talents, tracks that sound completely unique from anything else coming out of the Southern hip-hop hotbed, but are undeniably ATL. To achieve this marriage of innovation and Southern rap tradition, new school beats and old school flow, Big Boi co-produced every track on the LP, bringing in top name talent from the likes of Scott Storch and Lil Jon, and a great deal of local collaborators. These collaborations keep the production style of the album varied, but each song also bears an unmistakable Big Boi stamp, and the cohesiveness this technique affords is exactly why you'll see this record on everybody's top album lists this year. It may have taken him three years to do it, but Big Boi managed to create a true classic with Sir Lucious Left Foot, making the case that Atlanta is still in contention for hip-hop capital, equally capable of changing the game.  -Ben Bromberg

4 Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz

The easiest thing Sufjan Stevens could’ve done was more of the same. More banjoes, more bells, more grand flourishes, more delicate historical portraits observed through his delicate personal style. But the summer’s All Delighted People EP, which takes that approach, doesn’t reach the same dizzying, glorious heights, as if he’d climbed down from that mountain and couldn’t reach the summit again. Turns out, he wasn’t so concerned with mountains anymore, anyway. The Age of Adz, his first proper album since the landmark Illinois LP of 2005, feels wider than it does tall, more spread out and expansive than towering. So while it would’ve been easy for Sufjan to repeat himself, he didn’t, and when you think about Adz in the context of his whole output, that’s one of the most appealing things about it. It’s refreshing, but still natural and organic, and not as heavily “electro” as early reviews were quick to make it out to be. Those unfamiliar with Stevens’ work before this album working their way backwards probably wouldn’t be so surprised by his previous records. The rhythms may be wholly electronic, but the melodies are still overtaken by woodwinds, strings, harmonies, and Sufjan’s gentle voice and demeanor. The synthesizers only aid the process. Like its predecessors, its length – seventy-five minutes – doesn’t feel overwhelming, an ode to Stevens’ knack for flow and composition. Standouts like early single “I Walked”, “I Want To Be Well”, and “Get Real Get Right” lead graciously into the almost absurdly epic twenty-five-minute closer “Impossible Soul”. The Age of Adz begins with a tender, quick acoustic ballad before launching into the distorted drops and blips of “Too Much”. It continues and develops in that vein until Stevens returns to his wheelhouse in the very last three minutes of “Impossible Soul”. Though they are two of the most plainly beautiful sections of the album, they feel deliberate, and almost belittle the uncanny beauty between them. Like Illinois and Michigan, The Age of Adz feels like a record on which progress is made, but let’s hope Sufjan doesn’t forget what’s between those bookends.  -Phil Rudich

3 Bear Hands – Burning Bush Supper Club

After knocking around an EP for the better half of three years, Bear Hands, a foursome of Brooklyn rockers and Wesleyan grads, finally stepped up to the plate with the full-length debut, Burning Bush Supper Club. It’s a lush, mature record stacked with single-ready cuts – "Crime Pays", "Belongings", "What A Drag", "Blood And Treasure" – that supplys a healthy dose of dance-ready indie-rock. Having been selected to play during Vogue's Fashion’s Night Out this past October, it comes as no surprise to see their catchy, pop infused tunes striking a cord with fashion-forward audiences. Perhaps most encouraging is Bear Hands' ability to set themselves apart, and not becoming just another catchphrase-ready Brooklyn genre band. Burning Bush Supper Club plays a bit tribal at times, can be a tad off-beat, but it uses those elements to its benefit and remains warm, honest and vocally rich. It has enough hooks embedded to keep the album’s energy fresh and its momentum pointed forward. It's a fantastic debut from a band that knows how to write major league songs infused with just enough rock 'n' roll swagger.  -David Navarrete

2 Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

The first sound you hear on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is Justin Vernon’s voice. The last is applause following a forty-year-old poem by Gil Scott-Heron. A young contemporary and friend; a legendary poet, one of hip-hop’s elder statesmen. But that’s about as humble as Kanye West gets. This is his fifth album, his biggest and the one with the most “most”s yet: most overblown, most guest-heavy (sub-category: most Elton John appearances), most drastic, most relentless, most sentimental, most vulnerable, most co-produced, darkest, most casually urgent, most paradoxical. It’s far more than all its possible descriptors, though. It’s his best record, and his easiest record to listen to cover-to-cover since his debut as a solo artist, 2004’s The College Dropout. In a way, Fantasy was his re-debut – at least, he needed it to be. After 808s & Heartbreak unfortunately failed to take off and overpublicized public blowups fucked with his cred, he couldn’t return with anything less than his greatest effort. You can hear that it is, but it helps that the stories of its creation sound unbelievable, the stuff of legend: scores of people flying out to Hawaii to find West holed up in his studio, not sleeping, instead only playing basketball and eating and making two albums’ worth of material. After making the album, the second best thing Kanye did was hype it non-stop by giving away over half of the songs he recorded for free on his website, building up anticipation while alerting listeners to his new fondness for long songs and posse cuts; making bombastic television appearances both as a performer and a personality; Tweeting that his obliquely sexual album cover had been “banned;” conceptualizing, directing, and starring in a thirty-five-minute short film centered around the mini-epic “Runaway”, a song that isn’t even a little bit as comical or light-hearted as the line “Let’s have a toast for the douchebags” might suggest. Whether or not the album becomes lost in Kanye’s self-made storm of publicity is something that changes from person to person – Fantasy could be the one that turns off a long-time fan as easily as it strikes a chord with a long-time hater. Either way, just like its creator, it's not an album that is easy to escape or forget.  -Phil Rudich

1 Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

The perpetually fascinating figure that is Bradford Cox explained in the run-up to the release of this most exquisite album that the “halcyon” of the title refers at least in part to his younger years, devouring music and beginning to create it, and how over time memories of those years are edited into something more palatable. The armchair shrink in me would suggest that these are rather halcyon times for Cox and his remarkable band as well – increasingly prosperous, confident and at peace. That’s not to suggest creatively complacent or static by any means. On the contrary, Halcyon Digest represents yet another step in the expansion of Deerhunter’s sonic palette, with the horn-punched rock 'n' soul of “Coronado”, the smile-inducing lilt of “Revival”, the ringing guitar line of the spirited “Memory Boy” all a far cry from the psych and gaze-drenched tones of 2007’s Cryptograms. And three cheers for Lockett Pundt, the guitarist and vocalist who had already shown flashes of brilliance on his ’09 solo release as Lotus Plaza and served as Cox’s sometime muse, who managed to stake his claim to a portion of the Deerhunter spotlight, with “Fountain Stairs” and “Desire Lines”, in many peoples’ judgment, Halcyon Digest’s single greatest moment. Still, it’s Cox whose vision dominates, and in this case it’s a hazy, reflective vision, refracted by the years and emerging as something ultimately comforting. The year’s other memory-driven release, Learning from Perfume Genius, asks us to look snapshots of harrowing recollections squarely, sometimes disturbingly in the face. But Bradford takes another tack. However lonely or despairing the words, be it the lovely “Helicopter”’s “No one cares for me / I keep no company” or the refrain “It’s not a house anymore” in “Memory Boy”, the music, ever his best friend, the one who won’t let him down, serves as solace. The conclusion comes in “Don’t Cry”: “you don’t have to cry your eyes out”. There’s no crying in baseball, they say, and as far as Cox is concerned, the same can be said for music. Memories are a funny thing. They can be forgotten, denied, resisted, embraced or altered to suit one’s present reality. If Deerhunter keep producing records as spectacular as Noisevox’s number one album of 2010, their future memories will be halcyon indeed.  -John Norris