12.1.10
I can't get the Flaming Lips' "This Here Giraffe" out of my head. Thank god it's not on Embryonic so I'm not tempted to purchase that album; I think I'm just going to pretend that record doesn't exist and hope they go in a different direction on their next release.

12.2.10
I'm resigned to downloading the new National tracks from the "expanded" edition of High Violet——I've listened to the clips several times, and there's enough there to justify owning them, even though the whole way this was rolled out irritates me.

12.3.10
Time for the Amazon 100 $5 MP3 album downloads for December. The only absolute must-have is Radiohead's Kid A, one of the best and most influential albums of the past 20 years. Others that I can strongly recommend are Spoon's Transference, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, and Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo Habitual. And Les Savy Fav's latest, Root for Ruin, is certainly worth $5.

As for me, I'm considering buying Pearl Jam's self-titled 2006 effort with the avocado on the cover and yet another entry from Magnetic Fields' early catalog, Get Lost (to go along with Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip, which I purchased for $5 in previous months).

12.6.10
Last year, Radiohead released a free online single called "These Are My Twisted Words". The song itself is a solid Radiohead track, although not a standout, but it has always stuck with me because of the cover art for the single. It wasn't released physically, but along with the digital download of the music, the band also included several templates for angular, stylized tree branches, which they encouraged you to print on thin, almost transparent paper and stack up so that the templates on the bottom would appear dimmer while the ones close to the top would appear bolder and blacker.

The overall effect was supposed to mimic seeing a forest in the fog, and it came back to me when I recently started my new schedule of dropping off my son at daycare early in the mornings, leaving house just after daybreak and often encountering fog when I drove over the bridges the span the local resevoir. So now I'm minorly obsessed with the idea of getting out to an orchard on a foggy morning to shoot trees in the fog.

But that would require me knowing the location of an orchard, knowing when we were going to have a morning with heavy fog, and then being able to actually get up and get to the orchard while conditions were still foggy. So this is likely just going to remain a vision in my mind inspired by Radiohead.

12.13.10
Over the past week, I spent a lot of time listening to my iTunes playlist that has all the stuff I own released in the 80s that I haven't listened to since I loaded it into iTunes. I've rediscovered some stuff that I'd forgotten about, but I also found something completely new: the Pastels.

The only track I have from them is called "Truck Train Tractor" on a compilation from their label, Big Time Records, called The Big Time Syndrome, and I swear it sounds like Joe Strummer singing, which is what originally caught my ear. I'm pretty sure it's not, but the voice on that track sound much more Strummer-ish than anything else on the album this track was culled from, Truckload of Trouble.

This label was home to a ton of the more well-known college/alt acts of the late 80s, including Love & Rockets, Hoodoo Gurus, Dream Syndicate, and Alex Chilton. I can only vaguely remember what happened with Big Time——I think there were financial shenanigans and a sudden bankruptcy that threw a serious wrench into the careers of a bunch of their artists, some of whom, including Dumptruck and Love Tractor, never really recovered.

I don't ever remember hearing about the Pastels in the 80s, but you have to wonder if they don't belong in that same category——a band that might have achieved greater fame if not for the collaspse of this label. I'm pretty certain I'm going to pick up Truckload of Trouble, I just deciding on the format (so far Amazon is winning with an $8.99 price for the 18 tracks). Because I can't get "Truck Train Tractor" out of my head, and if there's even one more song on there as good as this one, it will be worth every penny.

12.14.10
I'm not quite ready to do my own top 10 lists for 2010 although I think I've bought just about everything I'm going to buy this year (Deerhunter's Halycon Digest will probably end up in my collection at some point, but I don't know if it will be in time for this year's rankings), but since Pitchfork is going to be posting their lists this week, let's take some time to pick apart their choices.

First up, the bottom half of the top 100 singles list. Of the 50 Pitchfork lists, here are the 11 out of 50 that I personally own (and in the same order that they appear in the Pitchfork rankings, with the lowest rankings first):

"Years Not Long"——Male Bonding
"Scarecrows On A Killer Slant"——Liars
"Post Acid"——Wavves
"Floating Vibes"——Surfer Blood
"Written In Reverse"——Spoon
"Heaven's On Fire"——The Radio Dept.
"Glitter"——No Age
"Bloodbuzz Ohio"——The National
"World Sick"——Broken Social Scene
"Bottled Up in Cork"——Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
"White Sky"——Vampire Weekend

With the exceptions of "Years Not Long" and "Post Acid", I have everything on this list ranked at four stars and above.

"Bloodbuzz Ohio" and "Heaven's On Fire" are the two tracks I have rated at five star tracks, and each of them, in my mind, is the standout track on their respective albums. I haven't really started to organize my lists from which to cull my top 10 singles, but I know they'll both be on the preliminary list, and I won't be suprised if one or both makes the final cut.

Many of the other tracks here——notably "Years Not Long" and "Post Acid"——are bested by one or more other tracks on the albums they were pulled from. I don't know if Pitchfork does the same thing I do where I won't typically put more than one entry from a particular artist on a ranking list or if these superior tracks will make an appearance in the top 50 singles when they are released, but aside from the two five star tracks I discussed above and possibly "Bottled Up in Cork", every single one of the tracks on the Pitchfork has a better song that could have represented those albums.

12.15.10
The second half of the top 100 singles was a little more in tune with my tastes. I share 16 out of the 50, and aside from one of the Arcade Fire tracks (the one that features Régine Chassagne on lead vocals; her voice is just too weak to carry the sound of that band), I rank all of them at four stars or more. Here's the songs on the list that I own, again in the same order from lowest to highest that they appear on Pitchfork's list:

"On Melancholy Hill"——Gorillaz
"Cold War"——Janelle Monáe
"Fever Dreaming"——No Age
"One Life Stand"——Hot Chip
"Ready To Start"——Arcade Fire
"Angela Surf City"——The Walkmen
"Giving Up The Gun"——Vampire Weekend
"A More Perfect Union"——Titus Andronicus
"Rill Rill"——Sleigh Bells
"All I Want"——LCD Soundsystem
"Tightrope"——Janelle Monáe
"Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"——Arcade Fire
"Power"——Kanye West
"Shutterbugg"——Big Boi
"I Can Change"——LCD Soundsystem
"Runaway"——Kanye West

They apparently don't have any problem putting the same artist on a list more than once, since two of the artists with songs in the top 50 were also on the 100-50 list, and four more have more than one song in the top 50. But none of the weaker songs from yesterday are represented by stronger songs from the same album in the top 50, so I'm even more puzzled by some of their choices in the 100-50 group. Aside from the Arcade Fire tracks, I can't disagree with too much here, although Janelle Monáe has at least three songs on The ArchAndroid better than the two on this list, and while I love "On Melancholy Hill", Gorillaz doesn't get much better than "Superfast Jellyfish".

12.16.10
Now on to the album list. Before getting to the proper top 50 list, Pitchfork decided this year to start with a list of honorable mentions. Here are the records I own that are in this list:

Sisterworld——Liars
Nothing Hurts——Male Bonding
Astro Coast——Surfer Blood

I like all of these records, and Sisterworld and Nothing Hurts are likely to end up on my own honorable mentions list (although I usually only rank the top 10 albums in a given year, not the top 50), but I don't understand what Astro Coast is doing here at all. This record is very likely to end up on my own top 10, maybe even the top 5.

12.17.10
Pitchfork unveiled numbers 50-21 of their top 50 for 2010. Here are the ones I own:

King of the Beach——Wavves
Plastic Beach——Gorillaz
High Violet——The National
The Age of Adz——Sufjan Stevens
One Life Stand——Hot Chip
Lisbon——The Walkmen

High Violet and One Life Stand have a chance of making my top 10, and Plastic Beach will almost certainly be there, but the rest, for me, are honorable mentions. Except the Sufjan Stevens: I just don't get and don't like this album.

12.20.10
The Pitchfork top 20 albums of 2010 that are also in my collection:

Swim——Caribou
Treats——Sleigh Bells
Everything in Between——No Age
The ArchAndroid——Janelle Monáe
The Suburbs——Arcade Fire
The Monitor——Titus Andronicus
Contra——Vampire Weekend
Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty——Big Boi
This Is Happening——LCD Soundsystem
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy——Kanye West

That's a pretty big overlap——I own 10 out of their top 20——but while my top 10 will likely contain a few of these (but NOT Arcade Fire or Caribou for sure), there are also some albums that didn't show up anywhere on their top 50 or even their honorable mentions that have a chance to make my list.

The most surprising snub is Los Campesinos' Romance Is Boring. True, Los Campesinos are an acquired taste that tend to split people into love them or hate them camps, but Pitchfork has loved everything they've ever put out, and Romance was definitely their strongest outing yet (Pitchfork's ratings for their three full-lengths starting with their debut: 8.4, 8.3, and 8.3). For them not to show up on a list of the best 70 albums of 2010 (including the honorable mentions list) is a little shocking.

12.21.10
Pitchfork covers most of the releases I'm interested in, but for a broader perspective on critical reviews of music, I took a look at Metacritic, which gives a value to reviews from multiple sources and then averages them out to get a final metascore. Not including reissues and rereleases and those records which only had five or fewer reviews that factored into their scores, here's what a wider range of critics thought were the best albums of 2010:

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy——Kanye West
The ArchAndroid——Janelle Monáe
The Guitar Song——Jamey Johnson
Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty——Big Boi
Ali & Toumani——Ali Farka Toure And Toumani Diabate
Black Tambourine——Black Tambourine
Airtight's Revenge——Bilal
Silent Movies——Marc Ribot
The Suburbs——Arcade Fire
Body Talk——Robyn

I was a little surprised that Sleigh Bells didn't make this list, but then I noticed that Robyn came in with a metascore of 86, and there were a ton of records with scores in the 85-80 range, including Sleigh Bells at 84, which still translates to universal acclaim in the Metacritic system.

12.22.10
And since there are so many year-end lists to choose from, here's of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes' top 10 albums of 2010:

The ArchAndroid——Janelle Monáe
Before Today——Ariel Pink
Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty——Big Boi
The Age of Adz——Sufjan Stevens
Forget——Twin Shadow
Cosmogramma——Flying Lotus
Congratulations——MGMT
Innerspeaker——Tame Impala
Swim——Caribou
Love Remains——How To Dress Well

Janelle Monáe and Big Boi are the only ones that might end up on my best-of list too——the rest I either haven't heard, haven't heard of, or just plain don't like.