40. Abe Vigoda

Crush

[Bella Union / Post Present Medium]

Back when Skeleton came out in 2008, Abe Vigoda were the teen phenoms of L.A.'s punky Smell scene. With their shouted vocals and tropical-punk riffs, the Chino, California-bred quartet gave every show, no matter what the venue, the clumsy energy of the coziest living-room gig. But Crush, the band's fourth full-length, finds them shooting for a different kind of intimacy-- the sound of romance circa 1980. It's a lush record, awash in woozy synths, reverb, and effect-heavy guitars. Singer Michael Vidal is finished yelling. Now he's a crooner with deep Ian McCulloch-worthy pipes. On tracks like "Dream of My Love (Chasing After You)" and "Beverly Slope" the band's vintage goth-rock fetish, only barely suppressed on previous efforts, finally breaks to the fore. --Aaron Leitko

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39. Best Coast

Crazy For You

[Mexican Summer]

For an album of such modest intent-- girls meets boy, girl loses boy, girl locks herself in bedroom and pines over him for all of eternity-- it's remarkable that Crazy For You became such a polarizing artifact, the simplicity of its execution seemingly matched only by the divisive discourse surrounding it. But whether you think Bethany Cosentino's boy-crazy jangle-pop mash notes sound timeless or tired, classic or clichéd, you can't deny her sense of commitment-- her unwavering attempts to evoke that sense of disappointment in staring at a phone that never rings practically transforms Crazy For You into the world's first accidental concept album. And snicker all you want at Cosentino's remedial rhymes (miss/kiss, crazy/lazy, friend/end, etc.), but, as the swoon-worthy chorus of "ooohs" on "When the Sun Don't Shine" attests, her siren of a voice can sell a song without any words at all. --Stuart Berman

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38. Rick Ross

Teflon Don

[Maybach]

In Jay-Z's recent hip-hop tome Decoded, he writes, "every hustler knows the value of a feint." Right now, Rick Ross must be the king of such disguises. He's one-time drug trafficker Freeway Ricky Ross one minute, then MC Hammer the next, then John Lennon, then Chicago gangster Larry Hoover. This from a guy who used to work as a correctional officer and has never had a platinum album or even a Top 10 single. He's hardly the coke-peddling tycoon he makes himself out to be, but that's more than OK because his "larger than life" sound is bigger and more decadent and stunningly gaudy than anyone else's. Listening to Teflon Don is like watching "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" in a gold bathtub while eating a $1,000 steak and texting your jeweler about that Russian doll neck piece that features two iced-out likenesses of your own head.

Since Jay-Z actually went through some of the drug-dealing exploits he raps about, even his flossiest rhymes are riddled with consequences, regrets, reality checks. Perhaps due to his lack of real-life experience, Ross does not worry about such things. When he groans on opener "I'm Not a Star", he sounds like Goliath awakening from a restless slumber. He's huge enough to make MC Hammer a boast in 2010. Big enough to attract the likes of Kanye West, Erykah Badu, Diddy, and Jay-Z himself, who signed him to Def Jam in 2006. Exaggerated delusion is Rick Ross' art, and he's become quite the master. --Ryan Dombal

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37. Zola Jesus

Stridulum EP

[Sacred Bones]

Conventional wisdom says that when Zola Jesus aka Nika Danilova releases her next LP, it'll be the one that rockets her into dark music superstardom (whatever that means). Only thing is, she's already planted that flag with the cathartic and bleak but gorgeous Stridulum EP. Prior to this record, her powerful voice was buried in tangled guitar murk, but on these six songs she ratchets up the intensity, cuts out any hiss, and sings to friends and lovers with grandiose conviction wise beyond her years. Songs like "I Can't Stand" pair an intensely beautiful industrial pulse with Danilova's thick, rounded voice towering above the entire world, making lyrics like, "I can't stand to see you this way," sound not like empty comfort, but, impossibly, like rock solid assurance from a complete stranger. --Sam Hockley-Smith

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36. Emeralds

Does It Look Like I'm Here?

[Editions Mego]

Emeralds were a little tricky this year. After 2009's way-far-out What Happened, you expected the Ohio drone aesthetes to launch even crazier cosmic blastoffs, but instead they toned things down and went more ambient. That lessened their initial wow-factor some, but ultimately gave the record longer legs. Alongside guitarist Mark McGuire's excellent solo effort, Does It Look Like I'm Here? became the year's go-to zone-out soundtrack, the album to reach for when other avant-noise LPs felt too abrasive. Even when muted, the band's head-spinning moments were still very much present: check the oscillating synth patterns of 12-minute centerpiece "Genetic", constantly unfurling and re-spooling around the extended guitar lines at the song's core. Magnify certain moments like this, or let the whole thing just wash over you. --Joe Colly

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35. Gorillaz

Plastic Beach

[Virgin]

Few albums this year have done such a striking job of wringing appeal out of deep-rooted melancholy as the third record by Gorillaz, who have been freed from the group's cartoon-band constraints to provide Damon Albarn's deftest work of pop modernism in the past decade. At its peaks-- the blissfully tense electro-funk of "Stylo", the longing pop-house of "On Melancholy Hill", the title track's Morricone-meets-Moroder spaghetti western new wave-- Plastic Beach provides the thrills of hooky, well-crafted pop with a feeling of baroque dejection. And its sleek production is craftily undercut with a cast of voices that mutter wearily (Mark E. Smith on "Glitter Freeze"; Lou Reed on "Some Kind of Nature"), belt heartachingly (Bobby Womack on "Stylo" and "Cloud of Unknowing"), lonesomely serenade (Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano on "Empire Ants" and "To Binge")-- or, as Albarn does more compellingly than he has in ages, wail with a haunting ennui. --Nate Patrin

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34. Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles

[Last Gang / Universal Motown]

Crystal Castles are a standoff kind of band. Run-ins with security and fans, as well as plagiarism accusations made for an uneasy build-up to an already tough task of following up a debut album that defined a fleeting subgenre. The band approached the challenge with the same ethos of their live show-- diving in at the deep end, lead single "Doe Deer" provoking the haters with its bombed-out fury. It turned out to be a sleight of hand for one of the most surprising successes of the year. On this year's Crystal Castles, the band hammered the spectral shapes of the first album into something with focus and menace. It also had a heart, "Celestica" and "Empathy" proving to be two unexpectedly warm moments. It goes some way toward gathering up the shitstorm and blowing it into the distance. --Hari Ashurst

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33. The Tallest Man on Earth

The Wild Hunt

[Dead Oceans]

Four years after releasing his self-titled debut EP, the Tallest Man on Earth is still rambling around, changing up his Spartan sound just enough to make each new release distinctive. Drawing inspiration from the wilderness, The Wild Hunt may be his best and most refined album to date, full of songs that sound like he dug them out of the earth, still caked with dirt and fossils. The rare extroverted folkie, Kristian Matsson plays and sings loud, projecting outward instead of inward, as if to fill the entire valley with music. Rather than exhaust the possibilities of his voice and rambunctious guitar playing, The Wild Hunt finds new variations in the combination of these two basic elements, toggling between Dylan and Dock Boggs, rural and urban, outraged and pensive. And then there's the twist ending you never see coming: "Kids on the Run" switches from his trusty guitar to a wobbly tuned piano for a power ballad about adolescent angst, which does in three minutes what the Arcade Fire do in a full album. As gorgeous and lonely and conspiratorial as it may be, the song more crucially points the way to subtly new permutations of the Tallest Man sound, as if Matsson has so many new canyons and passes to explore. --Stephen M. Deusner

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32. Tyler, the Creator

Bastard

[self-released]

After a few decades of murders and crack deals, gangsta rap bloodthirst has lost a lot of its sting. But here we have a teenage skate-rat snarling in a demonic, asthma-wrecked rasp, talking about rape and dismemberment and coke-snorting and throwing in homophobic slurs, and suddenly every wound is fresh again. Bastard is a rough listen, to be sure; if you can hear it without wincing every 30 seconds or so-- without feeling some genuine despair-- you might have some serious problems of your own. But as with the most successful transgressive art, its ugliness digs deep into your brainpan and stays there.

And only some of the value here is of the shock variety. Tyler's nihilistic gargle has cathartic star-power the same way DMX's livewire grunt once did, and many of the antisocial jokes are genuinely funny: "I go to Obama rallies screaming out 'McCain!'" The self-produced, spaced-out, lo-fi beats transform warped, woozy skronk-noise into rap thump. Ariel Pink is a favorite of Tyler's, and it shows. In all its violent weirdness, Bastard forms its own universe, and he doesn't do it without context. At the end of the opening title track, Tyler lets us know exactly where all this animosity might come from: "Fuck a deal, I just want my father's email/ So I can tell him how much I fuckin' hate him in detail." --Tom Breihan

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31. Woods

At Echo Lake

[Woodsist]

If last year's Songs of Shame proved Woods could stand among their peers on the Woodsist roster, At Echo Lake finds the Brooklyn band (headed by Woodsist founder Jeremy Earl) rising above them. In addition to Earl's deeply affecting songwriting not skipping a beat, the arrangements are significantly more expansive, hosting an entire world of musical ideas in their slender 29 minutes. Sounds, samples, and solos hover above, float through, and oscillate underneath the most stylistically varied collection of songs Earl has penned over the course of several albums: Distorted rumbling underscores dark acoustic ballad "Pick Up", while lively instrumental "From the Horn" is bolstered by a backwards guitar solo. Best of all is the eerie "Death Rattles", where Earl softly sings, "God only knows, just to be by your side/ I would be there all night, I would be there all right," a devotional as chilling as it is lovelorn. Woodsist has released quite a few good albums over the years (including some by Woods themselves), but At Echo Lake is a record so stunning it deserves to have its entire name run across its label's banner. --Martin Douglas