My Decade in Music So Far: Joe Tangari

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.

Laura Veirs: July Flame [Bella Union/Raven Marching Band]

The reasons I'm choosing to write about this record, and the reasons it made my top ten, are murky even to me. This is a pretty basic modern indie singer-songwriter LP by a musician whose other albums I like but don't spend much time thinking about. Ever since I heard it, though, July Flame has exerted a weird power over me that makes me want to hear it all the time. The melodies, the voice, the atmosphere, the odd baubles adorning the production, the dark tinge of the recording, the simple guitar parts… It's a collision of elements that all line up so perfectly together that the whole can't helping squaring the sum of its parts. It's a quiet, unpretentious album but it spoke to me quite directly.

Snowman: "Hyena" [Dot Dash]

Most posthumous albums just sound like the band that made them, but Snowman's Absence takes it a step further by sounding like a ghost of the band that made it. All the rhythmic power, strange harmony and freaked-out singing that made them so wild and interesting are still there, but it sounds as though they're all calling from beyond the veil. The crescendo in this song is the most hair-raising thing I've heard in this decade, which is something, because I also listened to all 400-something hours of music Swans released in the last five years.

Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years: It's so hard to stick a pin in this, because the last five years have put so many demands on my time that were never there before (grad school, fatherhood, a new career, volunteer commitments, an interstate move and I'm sure something else that my tired mind is forgetting) that music wobbled off its perch as the thing that occupied or shared the most hours of my day. It still shares many hours, but it's only got me to itself for a fraction of the time I used to spend listening deeply.  So a highlight is tough to tease out of my scattered listening habits, increasingly diffuse focus, and lack of concert attendance. But I guess if I had to pick one, it would be that even as I've kept following new music and introducing myself to ever more diverse slices of music history, the stuff I've loved for a long time has still been there for me, whether it's Pink Floyd songs I've been listening to since I was 14 or a Fleet Foxes album released in 2008, or any of the Afrobeat or prog or psychedelia or blues or bebop or New Wave or drone that's wormed its way into my heart as I've explored over the last two decades. I always expect to be sick of it, and maybe it's just my gray matter reaching for stability or caving in to nostalgia as I feel the aging process speeding up, but I never am. That's enough of a highlight for now.

Favorite Albums of 2010-2014:

1. Savages: Silence Yourself
2. Menomena: Mines
3. Dum Dum Girls: Only in Dreams
4. Holy Ghost!: Holy Ghost!
5. Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
6. Ali Farka Touré / Toumani Diabaté: Ali and Toumani
7. Laura Veirs: July Flame
8. Snowman: Absence
9. Tame Impala: Innerspeaker
10. Hot Chip: In Our Heads
11. Wolf People: Steeple
12. Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
13. Bat For Lashes: The Haunted Man
14. Charlotte Gainsbourg: IRM
15. Yamantaka // Sonic Titan: Yamantaka // Sonic Titan
16. Vampire Weekend: Contra
17. LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening
18. Japandroids: Celebration Rock
19. Julia Holter: Loud City Song
20. Vijay Iyer: Solo

Favorite Tracks of 2010-2014:

1. LCD Soundsystem: "I Can Change"
2. Bat For Lashes: "Laura"
3. Black Mountain: "Let Spirits Ride"
4. Snowman: "Hyena"
5. Holy Ghost!: "Jam For Jerry"
6. Tame Impala: "Runway, Houses, City, Clouds"
7. Wolf People: "One By One From Dorney Reach"
8. Dum Dum Girls: "Season In Hell"
9. Field Music: "Them That Do Nothing"
10. Yeasayer: "Madder Red"
11. Mountain Goats: "Damn These Vampires"
12. Mavis Staples: "You Are Not Alone"
13. Seven That Spells: "Terminus Est"
14. Arcade Fire: "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"
15. Wolf Parade: "Yulia"
16. Thee Oh Sees: "I Come from the Mountain"
17. Savages: "City's Full"
18. Hello Echo: "Disconnect Me"
19. Menomena: "Five Little Rooms"
20. Vampire Weekend: "Giving Up the Gun"