Let's Revisit My Favorite Albums Of 2010 List

All hail The Soft Pack, Futurebirds, Call Me Lightning, The Goodnight Loving, and Megafaun!

As I write this, I am back home after six days on the road. To all of those who came out to see me chat about the Bruce book with Ian Cohen at Book Soup in West Hollywood, thank you so much for a great night. The events for this book are easily the best I have ever done. People have been extremely kind and the crowds have been big and receptive. It’s been so good that I’m planning to do more, and in the middle of the country this time. Stay tuned!

For a few days on the road — cue the “Turn The Page” sax riff — I became obsessed with this video of The Soft Pack performing “Answer To Yourself” on The Late Show with David Letterman in 2010. I don’t remember seeing the performance at the time (or at any point before last week) even though I was a big fan of The Soft Pack’s self-titled LP and especially “Answer To Yourself,” which I think is one of the great “lost” indie-rock songs of the era. The Soft Pack generally have been sort of swept into the dustbin of recent-ish music history, along with the rest of the garage-leaning rock bands of the early 2010s that were eventually subsumed by the indie-pop behemoths (Vampire Weekend, Haim, Lorde, The 1975, Charli XCX, etc.) that defined the genre that decade. Formed in San Diego in 2007, they were originally known as The Muslims, a moniker they changed (for obvious reasons) after putting out a series of otherwise well-received 7-inches as well as a self-titled EP.

It’s funny to remember how quickly this kind of band went from feeling like “mainstream indie” to “marginalized indie” in just a few years. Truth be told, by the time The Soft Pack appeared on Letterman, they probably were already past the point of having “break big” potential. The sort of music they were peddling was simply not going to reach Strokes-level saturation in 2010. (Not that the Strokes ever achieved true saturation in 2001-02.) But the blame for this can’t be laid at the feet of The Soft Pack. They delivered the goods with “Answer To Yourself.” The song deserved to be a bigger hit. And it would have been had it been released five years later. The buzzsaw guitar intro practically begs to be inserted into a dozen movie trailers. The twangy surf-rock lead instantly draws you in. Matt Lamkin’s vocal is impressively disaffected but also somehow insistent. He’s giving us a pep talk, but he also feels like he’s going to die. And then he rips an excellent post-punk guitar solo. It’s no wonder that whenever I mention “Answer To Yourself” on social media, it always gets an enthusiastic response from likeminded people who believe it is a modern-rock classic, at least in the minds of discerning listeners.

Revisiting The Soft Pack got me thinking about my other favorite albums of 2010, which I compiled into a list for The A.V. Club back in the day. What exactly did I put on that thing? And what music was stuck with me and what music was been lost?

Let’s break this into three sections:

Here are some 2010 albums (that I love) that are not on any part of my list: The Monitor, The Suburbs, Contra, Have One On Me, Transference, Congratulations, Innerspeaker, American Slang, Brothers, The Age Of Adz.

I’m as surprised as you are! If I were making a list of my favorite 2010 albums in 2024, I might go with that list over the one I made in 2010.

But that misses the point of making a list in the moment vs. in retrospect. The upside of an in-the-moment list is that it’s autobiographical rather than historical. I wasn’t concerned with how 2010 fit in the greater context of music history in 2010, I only cared about how 2010 fit in my history. And I can honestly say that this list powerfully evokes what my life was like that year. The first two slots, in particular, remind me that in 2010, I was still smoking a ton of weed, I was still buying a ton of vinyl, and I was still hanging out a ton at The Cactus Club.

The first two activities link up with my (somewhat inexplicable) No. 1 placement for The Wild Hunt, an album I don’t think I played in at least 10 years before revisiting for this column. I can’t say this record moves me all that much except for nostalgic reasons — the songwriting feels a bit mawkish, constantly pushing for emotional peaks rather than letting them unfold organically. That said, I can see how this music bowled me over in the middle of a lovely fall in Milwaukee when I was (likely) stoned out of my gourd. I was in the right place at the right time for The Wild Hunt.

And I still like “Kids On The Run.” It reminds me of a demo that Pete Townshend might have recorded for Quadrophenia.

A happier rediscovery is When I Am Gone My Blood Will Be Free, the third album by the fine Milwaukee post-punk band Call Me Lightning. Based on the name, you might expect me to make another Townshend reference. And you would be right to make that assumption, as When I Am Gone … essentially is a basement-show redux of Live At Leeds. But Call Me Lightning wasn’t always like that. Their early work put a Captain Beefheart spin on the meat-and-potatoes garage-rock sound that was a bedrock to the Milwaukee music scene when I lived there. For When I Am Gone…, however, Call Me Lightning embraced full-on arena-rock grandiosity on a DIY budget, with ace drummer Shane Hochstetler doing chaotic Keith Moon drum fills as Nathan Lilley’s slams power chords and howls about wild beasts and pure shit and the controversial renovations made to the bar at Cactus. (This was a legit issue at the time — regulars worried that it was now “too nice.”)

Anyway: This album still rips. And the first three songs in particular are as exhilarating as any LP opener of the time, I reckon.

Another welcome rediscovery is Hampton’s Lullaby, the debut from Georgia band Futurebirds. I saw this band a bunch in the early 2010s, and then fell off. That’s on me, not them — Futurebirds continue to tour and put out records (their latest is due in August) and they’ve built a solid grassroots following. I hadn’t listened to Hampton’s Lullaby in many years, but I’m pleased to find that it holds all the way up. In 2010, it hit like the kind of My Morning Jacket record that My Morning Jacket no longer seemed interested in making, a brawny and starry-eyed “middle of the night” southern rock record with balls and more than a few philosophical thoughts on its mind. Given how many bands in 2024 are still trying to making a record like this, Hampton’s Lullaby seems ripe for wider appreciation.

Okay, let’s look at the next part of the list:

I might like this more than the main list! At No. 12, we have The Soft Pack’s self-titled, which frankly doesn’t quite live up to “Answer To Yourself” but is mostly very enjoyable. It pairs in my mind with Harlem’s Hippies, another surprisingly danceable garage-rock gem that also feels a little lost to history. There’s also The Goodnight Loving, who along with Call Me Lightning were the cream of Milwaukee’s rock scene in the late aughts and early 2010s. The Goodnight Loving Supper Club is a good record, though 2007’s Crooked Lake is really the band’s near-masterpiece.

Here’s the last part of the list:

More Tallest Man On Earth! I simply couldn’t get enough in ’10! The Real Estate EP has the original version of “Younger Than Yesterday,” which is my favorite song of theirs. And then there are the early releases by Sharon Van Etten and The War On Drugs, both of whom I loved but didn’t expect to become as big as they became. (A happy surprise, for sure.)

I want to highlight Megafaun, another band I saw several times and consider among the great live acts of the time. Their combination of arty indie rock and jamband aesthetics was out of vogue though in retrospect it seems prescient. If Megafaun started now, they could potentially be headlining Red Rocks. Though the band members have done well for themselves. (You might know Brad Cook from the liner notes of practically every notable Americana-leaning indie record of recent years, including the last two Waxahatchee albums.)