No Ripcord's Top 50 Albums of 2010

Kanye West’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a sprawling, ambitious, orchestral fuck-you of an album, and he wants you to know it.

Halcyon Digest goes by like a breeze, and when it’s finished there’s nothing better to do than play it again.

They’ve evolved in a completely logical direction in ways that are pleasantly surprising but never jarring.

Part mind numbing, part infuriating, part stimulating and always worth discussion, Swans remain a significant force in underground and independent music and this new album sees the No Wave merge with the compositionally avant-garde.

Write About Love may not be a great leap forward for Belle and Sebastian, but it’s such an enjoyable record it’s difficult to hold it against them.

The Fool flows like a dramatic mood piece – it sustains a homogeneous sound from beginning to end, casually changing course when it begins to drain itself out.

Even if an abundance of programming tools are on hand, all the delectable qualities that defined the band since their beginnings are still intact.

The album is incredibly smoothly constructed, and as I said before, the songs almost never disagree or sound messy.

Bands like Black Mountain seem very rare, ably and willingly carrying on those wayward sons still in love with arena swagger and hit-making persuasion. Queens of the Stone Age aided in filling that void for a while, celebrating avant-garde manipulations of the 70s rock paradigm, but with Black Mountain the Sabbath-inspired edge gleams so brightly it’s blinding, at least this time around.