My Decade in Music So Far: Jake Cleland

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.

TV Colours: Purple Skies, Toxic River [Dream Damage/Eighteen]

If you like kinda operatic very loud rock records, Purple Skies, Toxic River is the best album to come out since David Comes To Life. There's almost nothing more worth saying about it. Sounding thrown together by the hardcore pedigree chumps that make up the band but actually rehearsed and refined for half a decade before release, Purple Skies nails the atmospherics of an exaggerated suburban dystopia. Besides the songs themselves, that attention to atmosphere is what makes the album so striking. It plays out just like it might be the soundtrack to a lost-to-time John Hughes x John Carpenter collaboration, and that scope is made even more impressive given that the only resources this record got was years of patience and perseverance by this one dude in Canbera, Bobby Kill, and a tiny indie label, Dream Damage, to release it. It's an album-album but if you can put aside the rockist/poptimist dichotomy for a second, taken all together, there isn't a weak track here. 

Dick Diver: "Calendar Days" [Chapter Music]

Dick Diver are acute songwriters. Although the jangly chords might trick one into mistaking them for just as slack, the songs on their second album have an unmistakeable tightness. They're quietly devastating as well; the somber "Water Damage" is a more obvious example but check out here how Steph Hughes whines "Standard tiiiiiiiiiime" with depressing indifference, if not resignation, at the banal creep towards death. Zamel's ads and stacks of TV Week and indistinguishable suburban driveways are the setting for the interminable struggle to find even a hint of meaning in the quotidian. For as breezy and effortless as "Calendar Days" and the album named after it are, they're also pretty heavy.

Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years: White Lung at Howler, Chic at Meredith Music Fest, Public Enemy at Golden Plains; three shows which were so affecting I can't listen to nor even think about any of 'em anymore. Like the worst kind of sentimentalist they're enshrined in memory and I can't bear to tarnish them with newer, inferior attachments. Also: The Smith Street Band at the Community Cup, 'cos I reckon I never believed in a band as much as during that set on that day; Chapterfest 21; Maggot Mass; Morning Ritual; Australia Day at the Music Bowl; dunno, hundreds of moments all share the same shelf. It's overwhelming. To encapsulate: being in Melbourne is my music highlight. It's a good town for it.

Favorite Albums of 2010-2014:

1. Kirin J Callinan: Embracism
2. Dick Diver: Calendar Days
3. TV Colours: Purple Skies, Toxic River
4. Titus Andronicus: Local Business
5. Carly Rae Jepsen: Kiss
6. My Chemical Romance: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys
7. The Smith Street Band: Sunshine & Technology
8. Drake: Take Care
9. Darren Sylvester: Off By Heart
10. Courtney Barnett: The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas
11. John Maus: We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
12. Dempagumi.inc: World Wide Dempa
13. Jack Ladder & the Dreamlanders: Hurtsville
14. Royal Headache: Royal Headache
15. White Lung: Sorry
16. Screaming Females: Ugly
17. Super Wild Horses: Crosswords
18. UV Race: Homo
19. Dan Deacon: America
20. Bed Wettin' Bad Boys: Ready for Boredom

Favorite Tracks of 2010-2014:

1. Kirin J Callinan: "Love Delay"
2. TV Colours: "Beverly"
3. Dick Diver: "Calendar Days"
4. The Smith Street Band: "Bigger Than Us"
5. BABYMETAL: "Gimme Choko!!"
6. Speedy Ortiz: "Plough"
7. Bitch Prefect: "Bad Decisions"
8. Fucked Up: "Queen of Hearts"
9. John Maus: "Hey Moon"
10. Perfect Pussy: "I"
11. Sky Ferreira / Ariel Pink: "My Molly"
12. My Chemical Romance: "Make Room!!!!"
13. Waka Flocka Flame: "No Hands"
14. Skrillex: "Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites"
15. Japandroids: "The House That Heaven Built"
16. Haim: "If I Could Change Your Mind"
17. King Tuff: "Sun Medallion"
18. Melt-Banana: "Candy Gun"
19. Xiu Xiu: "Honeysuckle"
20. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Sacrilege"