An easy pick for me: Phoenix. Nearing the end, and I couldn’t be happier. Keeping with the tradition, here are some alternative songs from 2010 that I liked:
The Divine Comedy - At The Indie Disco
Beach House - Norway
Teenage Fanclub - Baby Lee
Off! - Upside Down
Laura Veirs - Summer Is The Champion
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round
Crystal Castles - Celestica
Corin Tucker Band - Doubt
You Say Party! We Say Die! - Laura Palmer’s Prom
Los Campesinos! - Romance Is Boring
Don’t know any of these songs. (Guess I’m just old). I love Cage the Elephant’s song “Around My Head,” so if that’s coming up (2011 poll?), I’ll vote for it then, and sit this one out. If it isn’t, I’ll vote for one of their songs in this poll, after checking them out (unless they all suck).
Tough call between “Little Lion Man” and “Tighten Up” for me - I went with the latter if only because I’m not comfortable with calling an acoustic folk song “alternative rock”.
Agreed. Love that album (Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix)
KOL for me.
Never heard of any except Tighten Up. It’s OK, but not worth voting for.
Hand all a listen to refresh my memory, Cage The Elephant blows them all about, especially “Back Against The Wall”, “In One Ear” is good but lesser. The singer reminds me of White Stripes frontman Jack White, dot know why. Cage the Elephant got my vote. Liked Dirty Heads ft . Rome, Black Keys, and Neon Trees.
The STP song is their first #1 but it can’t compete with their 90’s material. Glad they were featured in the poll. I don’t get Muse and Mumford and Sons at all, not feeling it.
The Phoenix song is good but not enough to stand against Cage.
I, too, went with Phoenix–fairly easy choice with this lot. One of the Cage the Elephant songs would be next for me. I have a somewhat (admittedly) irrational hatred of Mumford and Sons, so that would be dead last for me.
I didn’t even notice this - Woodstockbirdy posted this on Christmas eve, what a dirty trick, it’s like he/she wants to get this series over with or something :p. Well, too bad, it gets a bump by me.
Big list this time, so I too had to YouTube to figure out what some of these songs were - almost all were pretty decent background noise music but no stand outs. I thought STP sounded a lot like they did in their heyday, so they got my vote. I have no irrational hatred of ‘Mumford and Sons’, almost sounded a bit Irish (OK, they’re British)…hmm, wiki classes them as “Genre: Folk rock, indie folk, bluegrass”. Folk? Bluegrass? Modern Rock, indeed…
The Black Keys “Tighten Up” was the only real clunker in this list.
Also-rans from Playlist Research, but lots of those are on the list too.
Trust me their entries on this list are pretty good.
Heh, I completely missed this too. As I apparently completely missed music in the year of 2010. Other than the Muse songs and the semi-ubiquitous Little Lion Man I don’t really recall any of these, though I’m familiar with all of the bands but a couple. I did kind of think Thirty Seconds to Mars was a one hit wonder (The Kill), and if you had told me they had two other #1 hits I’d have done the eye goggling thing. None of the other bands here surprise me that much since they’re all either reliably solid, established as popular even if I don’t really get them, or both.
To the YouTubes: the only two of the unknowns I recall hearing before are 1901 and Animal. They’re both perfectly serviceable tracks that fall in an area of pleasant upbeat indie/alt rock (what would have been “pop/rock” twenty years ago) where I absolutely believe that I both liked them at the time and never bothered finding out what they were. Lots of songs that are okay-ish but not as good as the stuff I really like from those artists (The Catalyst actually makes me a little sad).
No vote from me in the end, because I feel weird voting for the same Muse song for a second year in a row. I respect what Little Lion Man has done for random dudes playing guitar in bars everywhere, but it does seem a bit out of place even on this list.
I dunno, what’s more punk than repeated usages of the word “Fucked” in an otherwise-folky hit single? They get my vote (even if they’re ridiculouslyeasy to parody)
I thought about this a bit more, and recalled that WLIR in the 1980s, which had no issue playing ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Riders (as well as songs from UB-40, Madness, Joe Jackson, Kate Bush and plenty of other not-really-rock music) normally called itself ‘New Wave/Alternative Music’, and by doing so did not really tie themselves down to only Rock. So…yeah.
(IIRC they also used ‘New Wave/Modern Rock’ branding from time to time).
It was a big year for Muse & Cage the Elephant with a few songs between the two having extensive airplay.