The Los Angeles quartet Warpaint released one of last year’s best albums, “The Fool” (Rough Trade). It also happened to be the band’s first album, but it didn’t arrive in that overnight, instant-coffee way that so many debuts do in this Internet-driven era. Instead, the music on “The Fool” was years in the making – a rare recent example of a slow, patient climb in which a group of musicians took years to develop and hone a sound, with a brilliantly realized payoff.
The band first got together on Valentine’s Day in 2004, but the seeds were planted long before when guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman met in grade school in Eugene, Ore.
“We were 11 and in choir together, and the connection was that we both recognized some kind of desire to dream big,” Kokal says. From then on, they were art buddies, soaking up music, literature and film together.
“I remember watching Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ and the profound effect it had on us, or the first time we heard the Aphex Twin and Portishead, coming out of the teenybopper phase into this great music we bonded over,” she says. “We liked how Bjork could be so free and creative in the way she could express avant-garde ideas while still making pop.”
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Photos: Top albums | Top Box Sets
Here are my favorite albums of 2010:
1. Janelle Monae, “The ArchAndroid” (Bad Boy): The Atlanta singer’s boundary-busting debut album has ambition to burn. It’s a self-empowerment manifesto couched inside a futuristic “emotion-picture” about an android’s battle to overcome oppression – got all that? The music is equally adventurous, touching on everything from lounge jazz to hard funk. A star is born.
2. The Besnard Lakes, “The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night” (Jagjaguwar): The Montreal band perfects its marriage of Brian Wilson-like melodic splendor and My Bloody Valentine-worthy guitar roar. While the lyrics are a bonfire of earthly espionage and anxiety, the music shoots for the heavens.
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