Sound and Fury

Where should I even begin recapping this year in music, the year that brought us so many great new things to hear, brought the Beatles catalog to iTunes and brought one too many chart records to the cast of “Glee”? Let’s examine.

This was a year of reunions. Multiple great American rock bands of the past four decades chose this particular year to mark their comebacks, most famously 1970s new wavers The Cars and 1990s grunge superstars Soundgarden. 

On a less mainstream level, two of Matador Records’ proudest alumni, Pavement and Guided by Voices, also packed up their guitars and toured for the first time since disbanding at about the turn of the century. Following them back onto the road was their protege, The Strokes, who, four years after the band’s previous performance, did not wait long enough to really qualify as ever broken up in the first place. Still, the band returned to major festival headline slots in loud fashion.

This was a year of trilogies. Over the summer, Canadian indie giants Arcade Fire (“The Suburbs”) and dance-punk partiers LCD Soundsystem (“This Is Happening”) nailed hat tricks with their long-awaited third studio albums, two major musical landmarks of the year by all accounts. Breaking an even longer holdout of five years was Damon Albarn’s constantly fluctuating project Gorillaz, which accomplished the three-peat this year with “Plastic Beach,” a record that played nonstop to the strengths of its overflowing number of collaborators. (See the very next paragraph.) Angelic harpist/pianist Joanna Newsom (“Have One On Me”) and southern rockers Band of Horses (“Infinite Arms”) have released three straight greats as of this year, too.

This was a year of collaborations. Kanye West, first and foremost, did a fantastic job playing matchmaker extraordinaire this year, making all sorts of weird dreams come true by facilitating hook-ups on his tracks such as Justin Bieber/Raekwon and Bon Iver/Rick Ross, just to name a couple. But we witnessed plenty of other delightful yet completely unprecedented hook-ups, including The Roots/Monsters of Folk, Freddie Gibbs/Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Kid Cudi/Annie Clark of St. Vincent, and Gorillaz, whose members win collaborative points solely for allowing both Snoop Dogg and Lou Reed to appear on the same album.

And speaking of Kanye West, 2010 was most certainly his year. Yeezy kicked off the decade in Honolulu, getting ready to call his entire phone book to get in on the next surefire, instant classic he would create there. By the back half of this year, he had given away all his best tracks to the whole world for free and found himself tweeting stabs at “Today Show” host Matt Lauer while reconciling with George W. Bush. Now he’s sitting on top of one of the most critically acclaimed rap albums ever made and still creates the headlines on a seemingly daily basis.

This was a chill year. With the debuts or breakout efforts of beach-infatuated, synth and/or jangly guitar-specializing groups like Best Coast, Wavves, The Drums, Beach House, Dum Dum Girls, Small Black and Surfer Blood, a certain aesthetic — varyingly referred to as surf pop, dream pop and chillwave — has emerged as indie music’s new direction for 2011.

This was a year of hair-whipping and bad romance, the year when Cee-Lo Green was saying “Fuck You” all over the radio, when Conan O’Brien and Steve Martin provided two of Bonnaroo’s most talked-about sets and when M.I.A. told The New York Times Magazine to “give war a chance.”

Not a bad start, 2010s. Not bad at all.