I’m not very good about listening to music, honestly: I don’t actively search for new music much anymore; I usually listen while working, only occasionally to I sit and listen to an album. Reading Laura’s top 40 albums of 2010 made me start to realize how much I missed last year.

Still, through the help of some friends, I did find a bunch of new artists I enjoy.

The rules for this unordered list are: the album was released in 2010, I first listened to it in 2010, and All Day is disqualified. I’m not even going to attempt an order or a single “best of,” but I’m going to restrict myself to 5 albums.

(It’s disqualified because I could probably just leave it on a loop until the end of time and be perfectly happy. It isn’t fair.)

Autolux – Transit Transit

I discovered Autolux when my friend Heather dragged me to a show at Great American Music Hall. I hadn’t heard of them, but I was excited when I found out This Will Destroy You was opening. Two weeks later when I went to the show at the Bowery Ballroom, I was there for Autolux.

This is just really well-constructed indie rock. I particularly like the drumming from Carla Azar, but it’s an all-around good sound. I haven’t listened to 2008′s Future Perfect yet, but Transit Transit has elements of Air, of a post-rock group like This Will Destroy You or even Mogwai, and of “indietronica.” I’m a fan.

Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record

I doubt Broken Social Scene is capable of producing an album I won’t like. While it doesn’t surpass 2005′s self-titled release or 2002′s You Forgot It in People—really, what does? Anthems is one of my favorite songs of all time—it’s still a fantastic album. The opening track, World Sick, and Texico Bitches stand out as examples of why I love this group.

I got to see them, sans most of the girls, who were touring separately, at one of the last SummerStage shows of the year. (One of my photos even made it to NYMag‘s weekly roundup!) As always, they put on a great show, eschewing the mandatory “encore” and just not leaving the stage for 2 hours.

A new BSS record is a good sign for any year. This one really came through and I love it.

Cee-Lo – The Lady Killer

If Al Green and Jamiroquai had a wonderful love child, it would sound like Cee-Lo.

I was never particularly into Gnarls Barkley. I mean, I love Crazy, like everyone else in America, but I haven’t listened to much else, so Cee-Lo sort of came out of nowhere for me. My introduction was the alternative video created by… someone. I’m sorry, I wish I knew who. (If you know, comment and I’ll update this.) The official video is great, but I honestly found the “word” video to be brilliantly conceived and executed.

While the album as a whole starts strong and then tapers off a bit, I absolutely love the Band of Horses cover, No One’s Gonna Love You, that rounds it out.

Local Natives – Gorilla Manor

Another show a friend whose name starts with “L” convinced me to go to. I don’t even think I’d heard of Local Natives until the day of the show. I really love the guitar tone and melody these guys use. Like Autolux, they have great percussion work but here the other instruments have less of a post-rocky “noise” quality and it feels more balanced between all the voices.

Since I usually listen to whole albums, individual track names are sometimes hard for me to pull out. I like this whole album, but if I had to pick a standout moment, World News would probably be it.

They also put on an excellent live show. Next time they’re back in town, I’ll definitely be there.

Sleigh Bells – Treats

The most frustrating musical discovery this year was Sleigh Bells, because I first heard this album the day after they left Brooklyn on tour.

This is aggressively electronic rock. It’s loud and driving, even when technically the tempo isn’t that high. Alexis Krauss’ vocal work is excellent. I dig the hyper-produced sound and the way they use the drum machine to blend traditional percussion instruments with less common percussive sounds. Labels like “lo-fi” and “synth-pop” are correct but don’t really capture the sound.

The standout tracks here are probably Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars, and A/B Machines. They’re all constructed very differently, but still deliver on the sound and energy. I really want to see Sleigh Bells live.

Honorable Mentions

I said I’d limit this to 5, and that was tricky. I really wanted six, but I realized that while I listen to some of these honorable mentions more than some of the above (Sleigh Bells, for example, requires a kind of specific mood) that didn’t mean I liked them more. Here’s a random number of other great albums from 2010:

• Arcade Fire – The Suburbs. I’m sure everyone in the world has already heard this. If not, come out of your cave (with internet access) and give it a listen. And check out The Wilderness Downtown.
• Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse – Dark Night of the Soul. It bounces around a little but it’s all good.
• Frontier Ruckus – Deadmalls and Nightfalls. It’s not my favorite genre, but it’s well done and a good listen. And I know Zach (if he remembers me).
• Lost in the Trees – All Alone In An Empty House. Again, not my usual cup of tea, but really well done, and I love the string sections.
• MotherMoon – Writing in the Sky. It’s only a 5-track EP but it’s really good and shows a lot of promise.
• The Octopus Project – Hexadecagon. I went to see Starfucker but after The Octopus Project opened, they were sort of a letdown. Great electronic album.
• Stars – The Five Ghosts. Not the best Stars album, but I listen to it a lot because it’s got some good stuff.

What are your top 5 albums of 2010?

Then I bought a whole album, Aesop Rock’s None Shall Pass, on which I was old solely by the eponymous track—and the rest of which is, so far, just as good, definitely worth the purchase.

Because I was signed in to Amazon—flaunting real security for positional security, I’m always signed into everything—I was able to buy the album using Amazon’s One-Click. I hit a button, Amazon asked me to open a file with their downloader, and in under two minutes, I had the whole album, in beautiful 320kbps MP3, sans DRM.

Having traditionally preferred discs to digital, and shunning iTunes, the colossal flaw with the iPod, I was surprised how easy this was. My experiences with the old MSN Music store and it’s spiritual descendant Urge were nowhere near as easy or fast.

I think this album downloaded faster from Amazon than a single Dave Brubeck track from MSN, for example.

A very nice feature, with perhaps two flaws, is that the downloader will automatically add your purchases to either your iTunes or Windows Media library.

The only changes I would want are 1) the ability to add to both libraries simultaneously, and 2) the ability to customize the directory structure of the downloads. It would be nice if I could say "%artist%\%album%\%num%-%artist%-%title%.mp3" (and yes, I am aware I have a bizarre naming scheme, and yes, I assume everything uses WordPress style variables).

On the whole, this is a very pleasant entrant into the mêlée that is the music downloading business. You need to use Amazon’s oft-cluttered site to do your searching, but at least the familiar should be easy, and there’s no deep discount over other stores, Amazon’s well-known source of power. But the combination of speed, high quality tracks, Amazonian reputation and, most importantly, the utter lack of DRM, makes Amazon my immediate favorite.

I saw these guys live at the Green River Café here in East Lansing last night. I suppose it was fun to ridicule post-UofM fratboys with their entourage of high school seniors, but the music left something to be desired. The highlight of the evening were their covers of the Foo Fighters and one of those catchy-but-non-descript 90s pop tunes that I can never remember the name of.

There were supposed to be two other acts, Joe Sleep and No Fat Chicks, but we didn’t see them anywhere, so we took off after Voodoo’s set.

But the whole experience got me thinking about how the venue effects the music. Would arena rock bands be as cheesy (or awesome) if they were playing in a dank bar? Does being surrounded by hippies make you feel differently about the act on stage?

The Green River Café is supposedly a little indie coffee shop, but in reality it’s a hippy/vegan/wiccan (probably) coven. I support fair-trade and organic coffee, and if people want to be vegetarians that’s all right with me, but I got the distinct sense they didn’t appreciate my leather coat. (If they’d known it’s lambskin they probably would have skinned me to see how I liked it.)

As covens tend to be, it’s also very cliquey. At least 80% of the people there all knew each other. My friends and I were very much outsiders. Of course, high school students and just-out-of-high-school 17 or 18 year old freshman who can’t go anywhere do tend to be cliquey, so it wasn’t wholly unexpected.

But I was also thinking about better venues, like St. Andrews and Magic Stick in Detroit. St. Andrews tends to attract what can best be described as mopey-semi-religious-pop-punk, bands like Mae and Gym Class Heroes and The Ataris. Magic Stick has a much more indie/post-rock line up, like Ted Leo, Blonde Redhead, and Of Montreal.

Obviously, albums are a different category. Some artists are great live and terrible on record, and vice versa. But in terms of shows, I think the venue almost matters as much as the band. It shouldn’t. Why can’t EITS play as well at St Andrews as at Magic Stick? So I’ll suck it up and go anyway and try not to let it bother me.

You might recognize NYPC from a recent, poorly conceived, Intel ad campaign. They do have other songs, though, and they’re recent EP is pretty good. It’s one of the better dancepunk albums I’ve heard, and certainly the best in a few years. (And there are girls in the band. Real ones! Pretty rare in this scene.)

I’m still trying to find Leave Them All Behind and Rocket Science, so if anyone wants to hook me up with some of their tracks, please do!

Coming up, I talk about last year’s efforts by BSS, Mogwai, Cursive, and Mastodon.

I am firmly of the opinion that one should neither jump on bandwagons and listen to things (or do things, or eat things, etc) just because everyone else is doing it. I am also firmly of the opinion that just because something is popular doesn’t make it bad, in fact it’s probably popular for a reason. (Cynically, because this is what the record exec’s decided to make popular; optimistically, because it’s decent.)

What does this have to do with me? Well, I’m trying to expand my musical horizons. So I’m using Last.fm, an amazing place, to try to find new bands. The problem is that, currently, most of the music I’m listening to is very well-known/main-stream. (Even bands that I liked before they were popular and now aren’t popular anymore, like Third Eye Blind.) So, of course, it’s only recommending other popular/well-known bands, most of which I’ve heard.

That’s not fair: it also suggested I’d like Ricky Gervais’ podcasts on The Guardian, which I’m sure I will.

So how do I get it to recommend things I haven’t heard of before? I need to listen to things I’ve never heard of before. That’s a hell of a catch-22.

But this goes beyond just what music I listen to. I want to make more of an effort to make sure I take advantage of locality. There are places here that aren’t national chains, and even a few that aren’t chains at all. Clearly I need to spend more time at places like that. Screw off, Starbucks.