The Album List #11: Arcade Fire “Funeral”

Every time you close your eyes...

I listen too a lot of music. But even those of us who listen to a lot of music sometimes miss amazing records, usually debuts, from small labels simply because most people want to hear about how much Britney Spears’ album sucked ass. The problems with music criticism is the increasing need to draw in eyeballs ( in a blogger’s case, page hits). This is the problem now with Rolling Stone. I really don’t think that some of those albums on their 2011 Best of list are what their dyed in the wool music writers really think are top fifty material. I also suspect that the one they named number one, while worthwhile as an album and on my list as well, they don’t really think is the number one.  Seeing as big music names dominate that list, it’s hard to take the legendary magazine seriously anymore.  I miss the Rolling Stone that decided to name London Calling  the greatest album of the 1980s, even though it was technically released in December 1979, and was from the Clash, not Madonna or Prince.

Arcade Fire, though, saw their greatest success born out of music journalism. Specifically, 21st century music journalism. The success of the band started with Pitchfork. You all know Pitchfork, right? The much mocked and much respected zone where hipster music nuts with an obsession with the Merge Records roster congregate?  Arcade Fire are the money makers of Merge. Anyhow, the band famously were trumpeted by the website as the next big thing. The release of Funeral not only made the Montreal based music collective fronted by husband and wife team Win Butler and Regine Chassange, it kinda made Pitchfork’s name as well.

Polaris Music Prize 2011

Once again, the best of Canadian music has come together to celebrate all that is wonderful and perfect about my home and native land’s music. This years short list has ten great records on it. But one is the clear favourite.

The ten albums on the Polaris 2011 short list are:

Arcade Fire The Suburbs

Austra Feel It Break

Braids Native Speaker

Destroyer Kaputt

Galaxie Tigre et diesel

Hey Rosetta! Seeds

Ron Sexsmith Long Player Late Bloomer

Colin Stetson New History of  Warefare Vol. 2: Judges

Timber Timbre Creep On Creepin’ On

The Weeknd House of Balloons

The Grammys: What The Hell Just Happened?

No. No. No. No. No.

This was just a pipe dream. A personal preference by a die-hard fan of a band that is proudly out of Canada and is adventurous and magical. I love Arcade Fire.  Yes, I know they weren’t my number one album of 2010, but they were top five, and it’s a magnificent record. But I honestly did not expect them to win. Really.

Between Arcade Fire winning Album of the Year, Esperanza Spalding’s Best New Artist triumph, Lady Antebellum’s lovely and subdued “Need You Now” sweeping the country and song categories, no awards for Katy Perry or Justin Bieber, a genius performance by Cee-Lo Green with puppets and Gwyneth Paltrow ( how fantastic did she end up being?), Barbra singing “Evergreen”, and a closing second performance of “Ready To Start” by the freshly crowned winners that was punctuated by Win Butler actually smiling, it was the best Grammys in years, and certainly the one I’m gonna remember for getting most of it right.

Now indulge me one brief night of joy.

WHOOOOOOO! CANADA!!!!!!!!!!

The Top Twenty Songs of 2010

I broke one of my rules. I had to. I couldn’t make the choices I needed to make, so I dumped two songs I like but was really unenthusiastic about and-

I repeated artists.

I tend not to do that, simply because I believe you should try to allow as many artists on these lists as possible. There is always someone who reads them and discovers something new. If you repeat artists, it means that some band isn’t getting a spot on a list to be found out. It pains me. There are so many great bands.

But there were two artists that each had so many songs that I just could help myself. they each have two slots. The other sixteen- well, there is a lot of overlap between this list and my albums list. The year in music was quite terrible for quality singles. That explains why “Teenage dream” is on so many of them.

The Top Twenty Albums of 2010

The year 2010 in music can be looked at in one of two ways.

It was bad.

Or-

It was really, really bad.

I’m not kidding. Most of the music was pretty mundane. Some of it was atrociously bad. But I managed to scrape together twenty albums worthy of repeated listens. I mean, some of them have been pretty regular in the iPod shuffle in my world. One of them has pretty much stayed in my CD player at home since I bought it.

So here are the twenty albums of 2010 that I consider to be totally awesome and future all time classics. Well, okay, one of them is a classic now. The other nineteen need to catch up.