The Best Albums of 2010: Stuart Maconie
Post categories: 6 Music, Best Albums of 2010, Radio 2, album reviews, presenter
|11:05 UK time, Thursday, 23 December 2010
A fixture on Radio 2, alongside Mark Radcliffe, and on 6 Music, where he presents the Freak Zone and the Freakier Zone, Stuart Maconie is a writer and broadcaster quite possibly without parallel within the field of modern musical critique and contextualising. So it's pretty super indeed to bring you the man's top five albums of 2010...
"You can never be definitive about these things. And just looking back over this I'm immediately thinking, 'But hey, what about Kanye West, These New Puritans, Janelle Monáe, etc'. But as of this winter teatime, these are five beauties, all from across the pond..."
Beach House - Teen Dream
Lovely luminous wintry pop, incredibly simple and poignant.
Read the BBC review and listen to previews
The National - High Violet
The gravitas of Joy Division, the muscularity of Joy Division. This album got completely under my skin and I've gone back to it again and again. Raging and sad and dramatic, and Bloodbuzz Ohio is the sexiest record of the year.
Read the BBc review and listen to previews
Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
She's phenomenal. I can appreciate that her voice is an acquired taste but her sense of melody and space and atmosphere is astonishing.
Read the BBC review and listen to previews
Timber Timbre - Timber Timbre
I didn't really get this at first. I find self-consciously 'dark' music really tiresome and I'd rather have Chic and Sheila B Devotion than Nick Cave or Tom Waits any day. But then I saw him live and he was mesmerising: weird and primal, with this nugget of obsession and madness at his core.
Read the BBC review and listen to previews
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
I've loved Ariel Pink for years, ever since those early tunes that sounded like a Hall & Oates cassette that someone had left in a box in a damp garage for 20 years. This is the most conventional thing he's done yet - proper band and everything - but it's still a skewed version of pop, a kind of alternative universe of its own making. And he pretty much invented what they're now calling chillwave.
Read the BBC review and listen to previews
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