Okay, lets start off with the obvious question- why am I revisiting the 2010s again? Didn’t I already do that? Indeed I did! See here for my picks for the best albums of the 2010s from that first review. But we’re not quite done, and the reason why involves 2024…

It turns out that 2024 is the 25th year of the millennium. And that is just too rich a symbolic target for me to forgo- the chance to review the best albums of the past 25 years! I have all the source material I’ll need: I’ve reviewed the 2000s in several venues, did the above-mentioned 2010s review, and have top 20-23 lists for 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023, with the search for 24 for 2024 now underway.

But my 2010s list is a little light comparatively. While my 2000s list from various sources sports around 60 entries, my 2010s review of 52 of the the critic’s top-ranked albums resulted in 34 picks. In order to balance that out a bit decade by decade, I’ve decided to go ahead and review the next tier down of 2010s albums per my original source lists. That will give us 36 more albums to review, which I’ll do in 6 blocks of 6. And hopefully thereby have a few more picks for our Grand Review of 2000-2024 to come!

Got it? Okay, let’s go!

21 (Adele, 2011)– I really can’t comprehend how this didn’t rank higher in the critical consensus and end up in the first batch of 52 albums I reviewed. Is there a better album start out there in the decade than the one-two punch of the bombastic churn of “Rolling in the Deep” and the stomping beat and savage ending of “Rumor Has It”? And that’s just tenderizer before you eventually get emotionally ransacked by “Set Fire to the Rain” and “Someone Like You”. I don’t know about you, but every one of those songs still lives in my soul now a dozen years later. And, between the depth and yearning tenderness of her voice, rich blue-eyed soul instrumentation, and lyrical emotional complexity, even the “filler” here is gorgeous. If this isn’t a best of that decade, I don’t know what is.

Malibu (Anderson .Paak, 2016)– His 2021 collaboration with Bruno Mars, Silk Sonic, made my honorable mention for that year, so I’m coming in to this well-disposed. This has many of the the same charms of that outing, namely Paak’s masterful mix of neo-soul, hip-hop, and club music, smooth vocals, interesting sample choices, and witty and complex lyrics. The best songs here are flat out great, but it doesn’t sound or feel totally together, which you need to make an hour+ album work. Still, there isn’t a track along the way that I was unhappy to be there for.

X 100PRE (Bad Bunny, 2018)– I am told I should like Bad Bunny, and so I tried with his album YHLQMDLG (which I was assured I should like) for my 2020 review. And it’s not like I’m mad at him, but… I’ll give it that his music on this album has personality, and some interesting mix and vocal moments. There are some singles I quite like. But a lot of it is very much the autotuned 21st century hip-hop sound that leaves me cold. And at nearly an hour, I need it to be compelling the whole way through to work as an album.

Cupid Deluxe (Blood Orange, 2013)– I am told that Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange, is an American-born English singer, songwriter, and record producer based in New York City, who has worked extensively writing and producing for others in addition to his own work. That sounds promising enough, but the opening track is some kind of autotuned low-key soul mush. It does pick up and get more lively and funky on the second track, thank goodness. And from there goes on to pleasantly explore several modes of contemporary soul/R&B, with occasional dips back into mushy tracks. It’s often quite good, but given the uneveness, I don’t see it as “decade’s best” material.

22, A Million (Bon Iver, 2016)– This album has an interesting, somewhat dizzying start, bridging the gulf between an acoustical indie and electric kazoo chipmunk sound before drifting off into jazz. The second track has a kind of 70s AM radio feel delivered via glitchy electronic. I could go on narrating track by track, but the point is that there’s a surprising and varied experimentalism that stays just enough in touch with pop song conventions to make the songs work. By its very nature all this comes off as a bit disjointed, and is abstract, but it was headed toward at least a strong “maybe” until it had too many songs in a row that were too lulled out in the second half.

Teens of Denial (Car Seat Headrest, 2016)– My initial take is that this feels like an album that was a few years late for the 2001-2006 heyday of the garage rock revival scene. Subsequent research reveals that the Seattle-based, Virginia-derived band behind it got going in 2010, so it makes sense as the kind of second wave of that scene. This is also apparently their tenth album in a 7-year period, and as witness to that, it’s a tight and confident sound that’s on display here. All of that is just a blah-blah-blah though, and the real story is music that never lets up, and smart lyrics on varied topics. I’m a little leery of the length- you have to work hard to pull off a 70-minute run time, but that’s my only source of hesitation here.

So there we are with the first 6 of the 36 overflow albums for the 2010s that I’ll be reviewing. From this batch, I would say 21 is a definite “yes”, and Malibu and Teens of Denial are “maybes”. Let’s see what we find in albums 7-12!