Welcome to part three of my ten-part review of critic’s choices for the 52 best albums of 2010-2019! (52 is weird, right? We ended up with that number for technical reasons explained below.) If you missed the earlier editions, you can find them here:

(Part 1 Part 2)

This is one of three musical blog series I’m doing this year. You may also want to check out the latest installments of my overview of the critical consensus on the 20 best albums of 2020, and my monthly review of new releases en route to finding the best 21 albums of 2021.

So, 52? It’s like this: I took “best of decade” lists from the AV Club, Billboard, Jim DeRogatis, Greg Kot, the New Yorker, New Music Express, Paste, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Vice. For any album that appeared at least once in these lists, I tallied up votes between them. Albums getting 4 votes and up totaled 52, which was close enough to a top 50 that I decided to go with that as a cutoff.

I’m doing 10 total posts of 5 each (or actually 6 each on the last two) and then a final wrap-up. Got it? Then let’s do Part 3!

Body Talk (Robyn, 2010, 7 votes)– I think this is Swedish dance music that would have sounded pretty at home somewhere in the borderline between the 80s and the early 90s? It’s well performed and well produced, and there are some songs here that are clever, unusual, and fun, which I certainly would want in my collection as singles. But overall I have trouble feeling like it adds up to a consistent album, never mind “Best of the Decade” territory.

     

Bon Iver (Bon Iver, 2011, 5 votes)– The great danger of indie folk is that it has a tendency to sound the same- both internally from track to track in an album, and between albums. Which is not to say it is, by any means, bad. But a solid album’s worth of no changes in musical or vocal tone, well, that doesn’t always make for a great album. This album is fine, as far as I can tell. Just not a kind of fine I particularly groove on. And, fine or not, it never feels like it gets to great.

 

Brothers (The Black Keys, 2010, 4 votes)– Remember Rock? Remember when you first heard it? Really heard it? The further one gets into this century, the harder it is to remember what that felt like. The Black Keys, like the White Stripes (lots of bad blood there, don’t tell them I compared them), remember. This album, like their music in general, taps into that threshold where blues crosses over and becomes rock. And in the process takes me back to why I loved rock in the first place.

 

Burn Your Fire For No Witness (Angel Olsen, 2014, 5 votes)– I liked the intro with its richly textured acoustic guitar, and her beautifully dolorous voice. Then the second track kicked into a 90s rocker girl mode, and uh, I was done for. Her vocals are very interesting, with smart and nervy lyrics, and the music knows its way around rock history. It keeps changing musical modes, but is tied together by her undeniable presence. By track three I was officially ensorcelled, and remained so until the end.

Carrie & Lowell (Sufjan Stevens, 2015, 5 votes)– To say this isn’t quite the tour de force that his album Illinoise was, well, that’s like saying “not quite Brothers Karamazov, but still good Dostoyevsky”. The emotional and musical texturing of the songs is rich, and the lyrics, as always, searingly earnest and personal. If there’s anything more I might ask for, it’s more moments, vocally and musically, that break out of the relatively narrow emotional palette of the album. Then again, it’s an album about sorting out the emotional aftermath of his mother’s death, so you can’t exactly fault it for that.

All right, there we are! Fifteen down, which means 37 to go. Who knows what wonders we still have to discover?