We now commence part six of my ten-part review of the critic’s choices for the 52 best albums of 2010-2019- Past the halfway point! (Did I not know Top 50 would be a more typical choice than 52? I did. There is a reason…)

If you need to catch up on the first five installments, you can find them here:

(Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5)

This is one of three musical blog series I’m doing this year. You can, should you so choose, read the final installment of my overview of the critical consensus for the 20 best albums of 2020, and the latest monthly review of 2021 new releases as I search for the best 21 albums of 2021.

So, to return to the open question, can I count to 50? I can! But this is what happened: 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 posts of 5 albums each (but 6 each on the last two) and then a final wrap-up. Now that you know, let’s get on with Part 6!

Emotion (Carly Rae Jepsen, 2015, 5 votes)– The opening track is very poppy and very fun. And so, it appears, is the rest of it. It reminds me of Taylor Swift, though perhaps a little slicker and less substantive than her work from a comparable time. Really pretty good as dance-oriented pop music goes, and it does sound emblematic of the decade. So in that sense, maybe a signal album, but I’m not quite sure about “best”.

Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (Kendrick Lamar, 2012, 5 votes)– This is the album that put Kendrick Lamar on the critical map, and deservedly so. Musically and vocally, it’s full of choices that put it above the crowd of hip-hop albums. If it stopped there, that would be notable enough, but on top of it there’s actually a structured storyline running throughout, and lyrics that feel searingly honest. It’s an album that observes the toughness of what he grew up in, and shines with a desire to rise above it even as it describes the fear of it dragging him back down.

Golden Hour (Kacey Musgraves, 2018, 6 votes)– A textured country album, definitely often leaning on the obvious/pop side lyrically, but the vocals are earnest enough to sell it. Musically, it’s lush, grounded in pop country, but drawing on dance music, electronic, and indie rock. It’s all very good, and the best moments are great, but I don’t know about it adding up to a “decade’s best”- I have a feeling the best country albums are better than this as a whole, and the best pop albums are too. What she’s done here in bringing together both sides of that equation is still worthy of notice though!

Have One On Me (Joanna Newsom, 2010)– The instrumentation and production is so clever, bringing in layers like the late Beatles. Her voice weaves in and out, soars and dips, sometimes sing-song, sometimes wispy, sometimes powerful. Between all these factors, there’s enough variability in a single song to be almost exhausting, but it holds the attention. And lyrically it’s often kind of trippy, creating a surreal idiosyncratic world of its own in the manner, say, of Kate Bush or Tori Amos. That’s the upside, and it’s very significant. On the downside, it’s hard to keep up over the length of a triple album (runtime comes in at about two hours), and it gets more conventional, and often lower energy, as it goes on. It’s hard to ignore the merits, but I’m not sure it totally succeeds as an album.

    

In Colour (Jamie xx, 2015, 6 votes)– British Dj Jamie xx delivers the kind of electronic dance music album that was maybe more common in the 90s and early 00s- strong beats, cleverly deployed samples, vocal snippets, but somehow structured in a way that makes it still work as a song along somewhat recognizable pop/rock lines. As you know if you’ve been following my three series this year, electronica is not generally my bag, but this variety of it, and how skillfully it’s done, absolutely is!

And there we are, 60% in on our review of the 2010s. What will the remaining 40% reveal? Stay tuned!