My Decade in Music So Far: Katherine St. Asaph

This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.

Fight Like Apes: The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner [Model Citizen]

1) Because I wanted a chance to write the words The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner on this blog, which I have now done and am standing back in liturgical synth-shredding awe. 2) Because listening to a Fight Like Apes record is the most fun you can have in an hour while keeping all your and your rivals’ body parts on. 3) Because Fight Like Apes’ debut was also the most fun you could have in an hour, but this time, in with the KOs of landfill bands (“you look like a hairstyle, you look like a boy named Kyle”) and mash notes to fictional tween-girl rockers are tracks more prickly, more cavernous and more, yes, mature than anything they’d done since. 4) Because I played this VERY LOUD (the only way to play it) at the school paper one day, alarming a then-colleague, and the album’s so good I uncharacteristically regret nothing. 5) Because there’s a nonzero chance they’ll open for Amanda Palmer someday, and we can’t have the press all be about that.

Britta Persson, “Time Is Your Horse” [Selective Notes]

Persson’s both a splashy indie-pop artist and a deft, overlooked lyricist, and “Time Is Your Horse” is like a What Should We Call Me blog written by someone who feels way too prematurely old reading those things: “When you choose not to ride the escalator ‘cause you don’t want to stand behind teenagers”; “when you don’t want to eat New Year’s dinner ‘cause your friends’ boyfriends think they are winners”; “when you don’t want to go and see your parents ‘cause you don’t want your skin to turn transparent the moment you walk into the house from which you’ve got no way to get out.” With lyrics like these you don’t need busy production; here there’s just a percussion ping galloping through feedback haze, sounding at once depressed and determined. Everyone who relates: what should we call it?

Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years: The greatest band in the universe reunited, released a career-best album, released two books, then reunited again with the whole gang in the span of one decade, and for once I was there for it all.

Favorite Albums of 2010-2014:

1. Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
2. Throwing Muses: Purgatory/Paradise
3. Cathy Davey: The Nameless
4. Charli XCX: True Romance
5. Beyoncé: Beyoncé
6. Fight Like Apes: The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner
7. EMA: The Future's Void
8. Carly Rae Jepsen: Kiss
9. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
10. Goldfrapp: Tales of Us
11. Katy B: On a Mission
12. Laura Marling: Once I Was an Eagle
13. Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands: Golden Syrup
14. Bat For Lashes: The Haunted Man
15. Robyn: Body Talk

Favorite Tracks of 2010-2014:

1. Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
2. Charli XCX: "You're the One"
3. Frank Ocean: "Novacane"
4. The Knife: "Full of Fire"
5. Solange: "Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work"
6. Lykke Li: "I Follow Rivers"
7. Usher: "Climax"
8. Robyn: "Dancing on My Own”
9. Jessie Ware: "Imagine It Was Us"
10. Azealia Banks: "212"
11. Dum Dum Girls: "Lost Boys and Girls Club"
12. What Bird: “Promise Signs”
13. Daft Punk: “Get Lucky”
14. Saint Etienne: "Tonight"
15. Lady Gaga: “Bad Romance”