Vampire Weekend has released two excellent albums in the 10s (with more to come, I can only assume). They are the rare band that showed complete mastery of their craft from the very beginning.
Each of their three records is focused and confident, nodding (sometimes very obviously) to influences but converting them into something fresh and unique.
Miranda Lambert is one of the artists making multiple appearances on this list, and she shows up first as part of Pistol Annies, the country girl group she formed with friends and fellow songwriters Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe.
The best supergroups feel not like stunts but an organic coming together of similar musical sensibilities. The Traveling Wilburys are an old-school example, and Pistol Annies work just as well as that grizzled bunch.
Three artists placed two albums on my list of the top 20 records of the decade so far, and Lana Del Rey nearly joined their ranks.
Both her debut Born to Die and this year’s Ultraviolence made a strong case for landing on the list, but in the end I went only with the moodier sophomore effort.
In counting down my top 20 albums of the decade so far, I’m considering only albums that are meaningful to me. That might seem obvious, but I want to be clear that I’m not necessarily looking to capture the most important, ground-breaking or ambitious records of the past five years — just the ones I like the most.
In other words, you won’t find any Kanye West or Radiohead here.
As hard as it is to believe, we’re just a couple of months away from the end of the first half of this decade.
What are these, the tens? The teens? Did we ever even decide on the best way to describe the last decade? I could never get on board with “the aughts.”
I don’t anticipate any earth-shattering record releases the rest of this year, so this is as good a time as any to look back on the past five and write about my favorite albums of the decade so far.
