Beach House - Teen Dream (album)
Usually the year-end list-making time fills me with a wondrous mix of alienation of self-loathing, as other people's lists are full of things I either hate or haven't even heard. 2010 marks either a sea change or a random anomaly: something I not only like but also happen to love is a contender to top everyone else's lists. Teen Dream is a gorgeous, addictively listenable collection of dream-pop tunes that transcend eras and fashionability. Beach House's genius was in deciding that was shoegaze was always missing was good singing; what their "chillwave" peers could learn is that pretty arrangements don't mean shit without good songwriting. Simple as that - go ahead, I dare you to call this choice "predictable."

Buke & Gass (live at Big Ears Festival, Knoxville TN, March 26)
Back at the start of the spring thaw, Kevin and I took a roadtrip south to Tennessee, to check out the super cool Big Ears Festival in the cute city of Knoxville. After a long drive through snowy Ohio and warmer Kentucky, we arrived just in time for one of my all-time fave bands, Amsterdam's The Ex, and their opening act, Brooklyn duo Buke & Gass - who turned out to be my favourite band of the festival, and of the whole year. Showing off homemade instruments, crafty song structures and the fantastic, soaring vocals of Arone Dyer, these guys have a thrilling sound that deserves to drop jaws across the globe. They're set to do just that, with the support of NYC label Brassland Records (which the brothers from The National are involved with), who released their debut full-length Riposte this fall. Though still great, the LP didn't leave me quite as smitten as either their 2008 s/t EP or their live show — especially this first, unsuspecting time I saw them.

Caribou - Swim (album)
Dan Snaith - the Dundas, Ontario-born, London, UK-based genius of musics and mathematics (also a WL alumnus) - has been at it for around a decade now, and 2010 marked the release of his fifth album, including both oeuvres as Manitoba and Caribou. Though it was 2007's Andorra that won the Polaris Prize, it was on Swim that it all came together - the gauzy, post-shoegaze(r) textures, the motorik krautrock drive, the expansive global-disco beats, and - a new addition - swoony Arthur Russell-inspired vocals - to create something really singular and worthy of being another "duh" addition to the critics' lists.

Eric Chenaux - Warm Weather With Ryan Driver (album)
It all came together in 2010 for another Wavelength/Toronto scene veteran. Versatile guitarist and singer/songwriter Eric Chenaux first appeared on the scene back in '89 with seminal post-punk trio Phleg Camp, and has since gone through several artistic reinventions. Since 2006, he has been a recording artist for important Montreal label Constellation Records, creating quietly frenetic folk music for people who hate folk music. Though Dull Lights and Sloppy Ground, his first two albums for
CST, were slightly cold and cerebral, here Eric decided to let his heart out of its box. The glorious results are like "warm weather rolling in," to quote the title track - a song which someone close to me said sounds like "total baby-making."

Kenk: A Graphic Portrait by Richard Poplak (book)
Switching from local heroes to villains, one of the year's essential Toronto books used the graphic novel format to tell the infuriating, disturbing yet irresistibly compelling story of Igor Kenk, the notorious bike thief whose downfall we all savoured when he was arrested in 2008 — and convicted a year later. Though the notion of a book devoted to Kenk's (low)life risks glorifying its subject, freelance ninja Richard Poplak uses his considerable skills to avoid that trap, letting this larger-than-life character and the facts of his case tell the tale. The fact that Kenk's avocations also include "misanthropic survivalist" and "classical music connoisseur" just make him all the more curious a figure. Alex Jansen, Jason Gilmore and Nick Marinkovich's Serbian-punk-inspired graphic treatment - using multiple photocopies to create a worn, dessicated look - is visually stunning, yet one of the book's most arresting (no pun intended) qualities is its smell. The intentional overuse of heavy black ink recreates the dank odor of Igor's bike shop
on Queen, a place we're all glad to see gone — even though it's a bittersweet reminder of an era since lost to gentrification.

LCD Soundsystem - "Drunk Girls" (video)
Evil pandas. Genuinely
scared band members. The kind of wantonly nihilistic destruction-slash-humiliation that makes the Joker's posse look like pansies. Directed by Spike Jonze. And the year's most hilarious lyric: "drunk girls wait an hour to pee." That pretty much checks off all the boxes for me. And oh yeah, the kind of party jam that instantly creates a group-hug mosh-pit, as I found out when I spun this while DJing a friend's wedding - at the Rosedale Golf Club, right after "Single Ladies." (P.S. thanks for not letting me embed the video, Vevo!)

The Luyas - "Tiny Head" (video)
A whole other take on the
one-shot video (jump cuts notwithstanding), "Tiny Head" focusses its lens on just Luyas frontwoman Jessie Stein, wearing a white dress shirt in a blackened room and playing with a few well-placed props. Such minimalism allows the listener to enter into the sonic wonderworld that is this song. Check out Jeff McMurrich's creatively spacious 6 Nassau
production, each instrument as thoughtfully placed in the mix as the props in the video. This Montreal trio is set to blow up in 2011 — this track is from their self-titled second album and first for U.S. label Dead Oceans (also home of Frog Eyes). Hopefully we'll be seeing The Luyas topping a lot of lists this time next year. 

Mantler (Monody album release show at the Tranzac, May 6)
Sweet soul slinger Chris Cummings a.k.a. Mantler is another T.O. scene vet, and I've seen him perform more times than I can count over the last eight years, but there was also something... well... sad about his shows. Even when there was a crowd there to see him, Chris alone at his Rhodes seemed more like cry-in-your-beer music than a rollicking night out, so I always preferred listening to his records. This night at the Tranzac was a whole other beast, however, as a huge crowd came out to cheer on Chris as he celebrated the release of his latest and greatest album, Monody (released domestically by Blocks and internationally by Tomlab). It was a "build the band" night which started with Chris playing solo, gradually adding players until he had most of Steamboat backing him up, turning the back room into a full-on funk party.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (film)

Who didn't get a semi-embarrassing kick out of seeing a Hollywood film not only filmed in Toronto but also set here? And one witty enough to joke about it ("they shoot movies in Toronto?"), at that. But seeing familiar locales like Honest Ed's, Pizza Pizza, Lee's Palace and Casa Loma on screen not just as backgrounds but as actual settings luckily wasn't the only thing Scott Pilgrim had going for it. Rapid-fire pacing, snappy dialogue and genuine LOLs face off against a surreal, video-game-based world that in many ways was more Tron than Tron, and in some ways a parallel world to Inception (the only other original blockbuster of the summer). In remaining faithful to Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel - but not slavishly so - Edgar Wright also created a convincing reflection of the slacker indie-rock world, complete with its know-it-all characters who say things like "their first album was way better than their first album."

The World in 2050 (book)

One of the best science books I've read in ages, The World in 2050 is actually written by a geographer, UCLA prof Laurence C. Smith. It's also less of a futurist disaster epic (the dust-jacket is particularly misleading in that regard), and more of an examination of the "four forces" current at work in the globe - overpopulation, resource
depletion, globalization, and climate change - that may reshape the northern quarter of our planet, and possibly turn Canada into a superpower (of sorts). Recommended for those who dug Guns, Germs, and Steel — only unlike Jared Diamond, this guy can really write.

Honourable mentions
Anagram - Majewski (album), Laurie Anderson - Homeland (album), Arcade Fire - "The Suburbs" (single) & "The Wilderness Downtown" (video), Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (album), Rhys Chatham - A Crimson Grail, Eiyn Sof - Bloodstreams (album), Electric Eclectics V (festival, Meaford ON, July 31-Aug. 2), Exit Through the Gift Shop (documentary), Cee Lo Green - "Fuck You" (single), David Hoffos - Scenes From the House Dream (art exhibit, MOCCA), Hooded Fang - Album (album), Hyperbole and a Half (blog), Inception (film), Pavement (live at Olympic Island, June 19), PS I Love You - Meet Me at the Muster Station (album), Public Enemy (live in Central Park, Aug. 15), Radian - Chimeric (album), Stroll by Shawn Micallef (book), Superchunk - "Digging for Something" (video), Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, by Liz Worth (book).