The Best Albums of 2010

Haunting vocals, bone-chilling harmonies and measured hipster-snubbing.

Today begins our “12 Days of Christmas” series of best-of lists. Every day between now and December 25, we’ll be publishing our favorite pieces of culture from the past 12 months — ideas, events, reading, apps and more — beginning with music. And just to throw out the necessary disclaimer, this is by no means a be-all-end-all or an attempt at universal tastemaking — we’ll leave that to the Pitchforks of the world — but, rather, just a highly subjective list of the albums that made us smile, cry or dodge repeated requests from coworkers to let go of the Repeat button. And, no, at the risk of hipster venom, we will not be including LCD Soundsystem‘s, Arcade Fire‘s or even, gasp, Broken Bells‘. So sue us.

BIG ECHO

It’s easy to attribute The Morning Benders’ utterly refreshing sound to their remarkable age — they’re practically teenagers. But something about their breathtaking blend of Berkley and Brooklyn makes them utterly enchanting. Big Echo did for 2010 what Noah and The Whale’s First Days of Spring did for 2009 and Fleet Foxes did for 2008 — quietly deliver tender, harmonic punches to your deepest gut.

For fans of Local Natives, Deerhunter, Mumford & Sons, Emiliana Torrini.

THE LADY KILLER

Two years ago, Cee-Lo Green made waves as one half of acclaimed duo Gnarls Barkley (the other half being the infamous DJ Dangermouse). This year, Cee-Lo not only milked the viral circuit for all it’s worth, but he also delivered one of the year’s most memorable albums. The Lady Killer is the kind of stuff you can’t get out of your head OR off your playlist. Powerful and punchy, Cee-Lo’s vocals don’t just meld with the beat, they ARE the beat, like blood throbbing through your very veins.

For fans of Black Eyed Peas, The Roots, Jurassic 5.

THE ORCHARD

Besides being triumph over personal tragedy for Ra Ra Riot — the death of original drummer John Pike — The Orchard is an exercise in chamber pop perfection, complete with cello, cymbals and all stunning string magic that boosts the vibrant vocals to an even more mesmerizing place. It’s the record that got the most play in our iTunes this year, showing no signs of the usual wear-and-tear and ear fatigue that music overdose tends to inflict on an album.

For fans of Vampire Weekend, Le Loup, Metric.

I LEARNED THE HARD WAY

Easily our favorite act at SXSW this year, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings’ unique brand of 60s revivalism shines with full foot-tapping, head-bopping, booty-shaking glory in I Learned the Hard Way. It’s Amy Winehouse meets Motown, without the drugs and the bad hair, flowing between sweetness and indignation just like love itself does.

For fans of Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin, She & Him, Cee-Lo Green.

RING

Glasser easily has the most haunting sound we’ve heard in years. From the entrancing drum beats to Cameron Mesirow’s soul-binding vocals, Ring is the kind of record the sound of which you imbibe and get drunk on, losing yourself in its sonic rabbit hole like Alice in a vertigo-inducing Wonderland.

For fans of Bat for Lashes, School of Seven Bells.

GORILLA MANOR

It’s been a good year for West Coast bands. With their spellbinding vocal harmonies and enchanted rhythms, LA’s Local Natives may just be the new Vampire Weekend. Gorilla Manor will kiss your mind with its salty lips and leave the aftertaste of the ocean on your breath, then walk away quietly, leaving you restless and longing for more.

For fans of Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, Anathallo.

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL

Commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum, singer-songwriter duo Dean & Britta wrote and recorded 13 original scores and classic covers for Warhol’s little-known silent films — black-and-white portraits of cultural icons like Nico, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Ann Buchannan, Freddy Herko and Dennis Hopper, shot between 1964 and 1966. The result was the two-CD gem 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests — a deluge of rich guitar strums and dreamsome, melodic honey-vocals, with a kick of head-bobbing beats in just the right places. We reviewed in full here.

For fans of The Love Language, The Velvet Underground, The Swell Season.

INTERPRETING THE MASTERS

It’s rare for a tribute album to make a best-of list. (Ours, at least.) But The Bird & The Bee‘s superb tribute to the great Hall & Oates, Interpreting The Masters Volume 1: A Tribute To Daryl Hall And John Oates is in a league of its own. The band’s siguature 80′s revivalist sensibility already seems like a perfect fit, but rather than merely covering the iconic songs, they truly make them their own. Inara George’s soft and sensual vocals flow with the chill-synth arrangements to a captivating effect, breathing exuberant new life into the beloved dusty classics.

For fans of Hall & Oates (d’oh…), Belle & Sebastian, A Fine Frenzy.

ODD BLOOD

Yeasayer have been — quite rightfully — described as “musical magpies.” Odd Blood, their sophomore album, more than substantiates this claim with its psychedelic spunk, paradoxical blend of vocal apocalypticism and chirp, and hypnotic instrumentation. Ambling Alp was positively one of the stickiest tracks we heard all year.

For fans of MGMT, Animal Collective, Radiohead.

WRITE ABOUT LOVE

For nearly 15 years, Belle & Sebastian are among the most prolific indie bands of all time. After a four-year hiatus, Write About Love was welcomed with a polarized response as some longtime fans found it, for lack of better words, terrible. We, however, fall on the other end of the spectrum and think it delivers the same kind of perk-perfect vocals and immaculate chamber pop we’ve learned to love. It is, ultimately, happy music. And we could use a bit more of that.

For fans of She & Him, The Smiths, Love, Nick Drake.

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Brain Pickings Redux: Best of 2009

A year’s worth of ideas, inspiration and innovation from culture’s collective brain.

It’s been a colorful and fascinating year here at Brain Pickings. (And if we’ve managed to put some color and fascination into yours, consider supporting us with a small sum of green.) Here’s a look back at some of the things that tickled our — and your — brains the most.

Getting objectified turned out to be a very good thing. The story of stuff burst some serious bubbles in our consumerist fairy tale. Fans saved an iconic photography magazine from a sad demise. Seven of the world’s best 3D animators had fun with one big bunny.

We saw some inspired innovation in orchestras, bike culture, libraries, sustainable agriculture, and bookshelf design. The Smithsonian gave us a century of illustrated letters.

We live-blogged TED and TEDGlobal, with lots of photos, then launched a TED tribute project of our own.

We found some phenomenally creative reinterpretations of vinyl, cardboard, and paper, and the toilet paper roll.

We uncovered the art of the cover and learned some priceless design lessons from the past. We saw three creative meditations on the art of identity. The New York Times fueled our data visualization fetish with the Times Open effort. We saw what the world eats and how it would look if it were a village of 100 people. We went on a hunt for the origins of happiness.

The Little Red Riding Hood met Röyksopp, David Lynch met Moby, and jazz history met 3D shadow art in some of the year’s most brilliant animation.

We found some great, great, great, great, great illustrators and wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful photographers.

We proved you aren’t nearly as unique as you think and found an infinite photograph. Five environmental films challenged our relationship with Earth. We took a ride on a photographic time machine. Chris Jordan exposed the chilling reality of overfishing and pollution in yet another remarkable series of photographic visualizations.

We read some fascinating books about the power of attention, iconic illustrator Charley Harper, the granddaddy of the graphic novel, design as a tool for social change, some wonderfully strange maps, mixtapes from exes, a magical jazz loft, and the art from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Jack Kerouac’s iconic status was reaffirmed in some brilliant literary visualizations and a cinematic journey starring some of his biggest contemporaries.

Darwin turned 200 and some fine indie musicians got together in his farmhouse to put together a (r)evolutionary record. A vintage praxinoscope from 1877 produced a brilliant lo-fi animation and an interactive music video redefined the relationship between the auditory and the visual.

Revolutionary platforms empowered creators by matching them with grants and offering crowdsourced microfunding for projects. Copyright law took one in the tenders from remix culture. The Internet got mapped.

A grassroots philanthropy project set out to send more girls in India, South East Asia and Nepal to school. A Taiwanese soap commercial proved advertising doesn’t have to be that much different from art. Director duo Terri Timely made some serious waves with Synesthesia. We undertook an original, first-hand investigation of the typography of the San Francisco MoMA. A documentary about street art dissected the cultural anthropology of urban creativity. Designers took on disability and we got up, close and personal with the human face.

We looked at the cross-pollination of disciplines with some fantastic biology-inspired art. Isabella Rosellinni delivered an equally quirky third helping of green porno.

Brain Pickings darling Jonathan Harris co-founded an observatory for the study of contemporary culture, shared some keen modern philosophy about digital culture, and published a visual almanac of human emotion.

Choreography and digital motion intersected in synchronous objects and CG studio Zeitgeist stunned us with some peripetics. Cardon Webb created a new visual language for neighborhood flyers. The BBC had an unusual opener for their poetry season. We interviewed Dutch designer Twan Verdonck. The GRAIL Lab at UWash built Rome in a day by crowdsourcing 3D renderings of some of the world’s oldest cities and a Swedish geek duo served up fresh music from some of the world’s most interesting ones.

MIT students one-upped QR codes. A Canadian documentary refused to water down the water crisis, while Brazilians offered an unorthodox solution to it. The famous Myers-Briggs personality test got visualized as a subway map. We geeked out with some notes and neurons, examining why music resonates with us so powerfully. 51 teams of designers, directors and animators got together to create 17 wonderful short films. Beck took the legendary Velvet Underground & Nico album and reinvented it with some friends.

We discovered fascinating visualizations of poetry, Madrid’s air, foot traffic in a 1950′s house, the hundred monkey effect, and the hypertextual narrative of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Four Pixar animators released a racy side project. Advertising creatives made lemonade out of the industry’s recession-era layoffs. A new biomimicry portal set out to save the planet by encouraging designers and engineers to emulate nature.

Indie rock got itself a coloring book, dabbled in children’s science education, redefined the recording package as a design vehicle, and made the first-ever album/film hybrid.

We looked at how Helvetica man was born and traced the evolution of symbol signs. Goolery offered a comprehensive database of cool projects using the Google API. We looked at the 6 most compelling efforts in humanoid robotics. A brilliant documentary painted a portrait of our greatest living composer.

Our friends at Green Thing made some sweet glove love, Johnny Carrera resurrected Victorian engravings in a brilliant visual dictionary of curiosities. Minivegas made a visualizer that renders digital sculptures in real-time in response to sound and gestures. A boy harnessed the wind. Winnie the Pooh returned after 81 years. Beau Lotto made us dizzy with some neat optical illusions. Hitotoki unleashed urban storytelling.

The map became art. The UK got itself a museum of everything. We drooled over vintage jazz album covers. An infographic portrait of the East vs. West culture clash became a big hit. Thirty conversations on design gave us some food for creative thought. Public pianos reclaimed urban space.

The Visual Miscellaneum became a bible of information design. A remix of Carl Sagan + Sigur Rós hit the spot for hipster-geeks everywhere. A grassroots movement used music, fashion, photography, design, dance, art and journalism as tools for social justice. Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon was the greatest movie never made.

We went on a shopping spree for nothing. Digital platforms revamped the art of learning. We looked at some superbly creative innovations on the alphabet book classic. We counted down the top 10 conferences that spark interdisciplinary creative cross-pollination. The story of cap & trade shed some light on the latest energy hoax. Gender identity and color had a surprising historical relationship.

A brilliant browser plugin promised to nix annoying online ads while generating revenues for social causes, all at no cost to you. The Mobile Mobile reinvented the Christmas tree. A Broken Social Scene musician explored the implicit melodic qualities of human speech while collecting common wisdom on happiness, a New York Magazine writer set out to test all the theories about what makes us happy, and several hundred people put their happiest moments in jars.

We sent you a beautiful wish for 2010 via Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski.

In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.