Won't This Decade Ever End? Ten Albms from the Last Ten Yrs

1. Kanye West - "The College Dropout": sped up soul music + awkward rapping about working at the Gap = longevity in my books. Also, it's the album that made hip-hop palpable to me as a genre.

2. Los Campesinos! - "Hold On Now, Youngster"/"We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed": I could make a pretty strong argument that these guys are the new Smiths in terms of musical and lyrical density and creating really engaging melodrama. Plus, you can dance your face off to both. Two nearly flawless albums.

3. The Shins - "Oh, Inverted World": Because Natalie Portman says that it will change your life. Also, because it's the first album that I ever REALLY loved - and in a watershed moment, it introduced me to indie music, as looking up this album online led me to a review in an obscure publication called Pitchforkmedia.com...the rest is history. Plus it's one of the best albums I've heard that works together as a unit (all the way from the packaging to the sticker on the CD to the first song to the last song).

4. Broken Social Scene - "You Forgot It In People": I don't think that anyone crammed quite as much stuff (music/performers/instruments) into a single album before and made it sound as coherent. Every single song sounds completely different, and every single song is a single.

5. Sigur Ros - "Agaetis Byrjun": I've never heard anything else that's even remotely similar to this. Ever. It's also one of the most beautiful and majestic albums I've ever heard. Hard to believe it was made by humans. Sonars can make you cry.

6. Wilco - "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot": Hugely hits the sweet-spot between massive pop tunes and songs that play around with structure and interesting sounds [I think that could probably go as a guideline to music I like in general / from this decade].

7. Bon Iver - "For Emma, Forever Ago": Bon Iver literally changed my idea of what can be done by a singer-songwriter. Now that I've listened to it for more than a year, it sounds a whole lot more familiar and I can take out distinct traditional musical ideas from it, but at first it just sounded like this massive wall of new sounds that blew me away.

8. Bright Eyes - "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning": I've always thought that Connor Oberst is one of the best lyricists of this decade, but I also felt like he's never had enough discipline / was too self indulgent to pull it all together into an album. Except for this one - here he totally nails it. It's personal and vaguely political in a genuine way. It's also the best Ryan Adams album ever made, which makes it the fourth or fifth best Gram Parsons album ever made. And that means a whole lot to me.

9. The Strokes - "Is This It": I've actually thought a lot about whether or not it will go in my top 10 of the decade. Here's why I decided it fits: In 2007, I heard Basia Bulat's cover of "Someday" and was flabbergasted by how good the song is (I actually had to google the lyrics before I remembered who it was by originally). So I decided to listen to the whole "Is This It" album again, but I realized that one of my friends from high school borrowed it right before he left for Winnipeg, way back in 2004. So I downloaded a couple of the songs, and I loved it so much (again) that I decided to buy it (again). It's the only album I've ever bought twice, and I think that if the 2001-me and the 2007-me (who are very different people) loved it that much, it has to be one of my favourite albums from this decade.

10. The Hold Steady - "Boys and Girls in America": This was a really brutal choice, especially because I ALWAYS fast forward one of the songs on this album (#4 - Same Kooks). HOWEVER, (i) this album has been my default driving/walking-home-form-a-big-night-out album for the last three years, and (ii) for whatever reasons, this album made Bruce Springsteen understandable to me, and made me love "Born to Run" and every other band/album that sounded like "Born to Run" (eg. The Gaslight Anthem and The Constantines). That's pretty big - Springsteen-anthem big.

Also,

Ghostface Killah - "Fishscale," LCD Soundsystem's "Sound of Silver," The National's "Boxer," Bloc Party's first album, Wolf Parade's first album, No Age's "Weirdo Rippers."

Disclaimers:

a) I don't listen to Radiohead or Animal Collective for weird personal reasons. So basically, you can take out any two albums off the list (except for Kanye) and replace them with "Kid A" and "Strawberry Jam" or "Feels" or something.

b) I'm not sure about including more recent albums from 2009 because I have no idea how they will age. For example, I love "Bitte Orca" now, but possibly I won't like it as much in the future? It's hard to know about these things [eg. if I made this list a few years ago, Stars would be slam dunk]. So potentially, this one is in as well. But it feels like too big of a list to be this uncertain.