We're nearly there! We're nearly there! Allah be praised, we're nearly there!  Mr Darwin Deez came in at 5, them pale faced Suicide Tuesday-ers at 4, before the Godfathers of 21st century blues The Black Keys at 3.  Just missing out on the top spot is them boys from Brooklyn, the endlessly inventive, genre-splicing Yeasayer. All hail.

This is my album of the year. When I first heard it back in January a prediction was made that it would be so, but I only half believed thinking that surely over the space of 12 months something else would better this masterpiece of future-disco folk. Albums came along that threatened its hegemony of my internal 2010 list; the debut from Perfume Genius had me transfixed for longer than is healthy; We Can’t Fly from Aeroplane was the sound of every Saturday night/Sunday morning from September through November; Arcade Fire and The National’s efforts set up predictably long stints in the closer reaches of my consciousness and can both be viewed as the moments when these two North American stalwarts truly hit their stride and planted themselves onto their rightful places on the musical podium.

But no, when the time came to listen back to the albums that sprang to mind as 2010’s frontrunners it became very clear,  very quickly, that it was Yeasayer.  It had to be Yeasayer.  No other album had moved in so many ways, on so many spins;  On first listen, its all about ‘Ambling Alp’, ‘O.N.E’ and ‘Mondegreen,’ the party tunes, the ones you’ll put on a playlist for an older family member who still wants to keep their toe in with the kids .  And you can do this is because all of these tunes rock:  ‘O.N.E’ has the bassline of a 70’s bongo film, whilst the reverberating synths give the track a rolling sense of spontaneity as if its 5 songs in one, each reinventing itself before we alight back at the brilliantly simple chorus of ‘No, you don’t move me anymore/And I’m glad that you don’t/’Cos I can’t take it anymore.’   ‘Mondegreen’ is a mucky number; insistent, hand-clappy and the sort of song Justin Timberlake should have made for Future Sex/Love Sounds.

But, like all the best albums, it is the songs that come on the blindside that end up taking up residence. ‘I Remember’ stands tall as one of the year’s most evocative songs, jammed full of the melancholy of the spurned but yet somehow bubbling with the hope of the he with his head in the clouds.  Surrounded by ippy-dippy sounds and ascending keys , the repeated refrain of ‘you’re stuck in my mind all the time’ has seen this scraggy soul through more than one moment of lovelorn anguish this year, and should be applauded for keeping us from scribbling out the kind of spunk spattered poetry we hoped to leave behind in our teens.  Similarly, ‘Madder Red’ with its opening ‘wooh ooh ooh ooh’s’ is enough to bring any naysayer (sorry) on board, before the echoed, epic chorus of ‘it’s getting hard to keep pretending I’m worth your time’ makes a mockery of any lead-chested fool that can’t see the importance of a simple message.

And there, ironically, is where the beauty of this album lies.  Viewed in individual bits it is staggeringly complex.  A rhthym-less, two fingered monkey like yours truly cant even comprehend how the three guys in the band have come to make this; the pounding percussion on ‘Rome’, the ‘Idioteque’-esque beats of ‘Love Me Dire’, the bleepy bits, the swirly bits, the bleepy swirly bits, its all fucking Japanese as far as we’re concerned .  But they make it seem natural, as if it being complex stops it being complex but instead natural (if you follow me), and it is all propelled by, at the heart, straightforward themes that can and should resonate with the world at large, none more so than ‘Ambling Alp’ when lead singer Armand Wilder croons ‘the world can be an unfair place at times/But your lows will have their have their compliment of highs.’  If you can find a better lyric this year, I’d like to hear it.  I know you won’t hear a better album.



Amongst others, Odd Blood was voted for by me (1st),  Jake William (1st), Tom Smith (2nd) and Emma Stubbings (4th)

Posted In Features, Dec 10 2010. Words - David