Favorite Music: 2010

Absolutely no one who reads this blog cares about this kind of thing, but I'm posting it anyway.



1.  Your Face Left Before You- Buke and Gass
2.  Helicopter- Deerhunter
3.  We Used to Wait- Arcade Fire
4.  BluzzBlood Ohio- The National
5.  Angela Surf City- The Walkmen
6.  Locust Valley- Women
7.  Manifest Destiny- Zola Jesus
8.  A More Perfect Union- Titus Andronicus

Some Notes:

1.  Normally I find The National to be incredibly boring.  But their latest album is just too solid to not be included here.  Same for The Walkmen, but to a lesser extent.

2.  I'm getting really tired of Brooklyn indie rock, otherwise this list would be twice as long and four times as pretentious.  I like a lot of it individually, but I think I've just been listening to too much music that draws from the same influences.

3.  I think the Buke and Gass album is my favorite of the year.  With that being said, Titus Andronicus is probably the best band I've discovered this year.  A Civil War concept album is just about the worst idea I've ever heard, but they really made it work.

Tree of Life

I'm going to let the trailer speak for itself.

The plot of The Tree of Life is still something of a mystery.  Though I'm not sure if it even matters.  Terrence Malick's films are generally not about story or characters, but about exploring ideas and feelings through images and dialogue.  As films, I'm not sure they always work.  As lyrical explorations of tone, I think they work magnificently.  

My prediction is that this will, like all of Malick's other films, become a cult hit critically while colossally failing commercially.  Only when film criticism catches up with Malick's current crop of films (This, The New World, The Thin Red Line) like it did with his first films (Days of Heaven, Badlands) do I expect Malick to get the recognition (and acclaim) that he deserves.