And 2010 is over!

2010 was the year of our second born - so were there any other great deliveries in that year?

"Amusingly", like the previous year (2006), we started the year off with a Take That album - so there was only one way the year could go after that for me (although there were considerably worse albums at times throughout the year)

The ownership ratio was very low this year - it seems like we'd pretty much stopped buying albums by this time with the only ones we owned being Take That, Florence and Marina.  We also own Laura Marling which would have been in the list this year, if we hadn't already met it.

Looking at the best selling albums of the year, despite it only coming out in mid-November, Take That took the year easily selling 1.7 million copies with six weeks at #1.  Michael Bublé took second spot with an album that came out over a year beforehand and spent the entire year in the chart, never going any lower than #44 - its success really passed me by at the time.  Lady Gaga took third spot with an album from 2008 which also spent all year in the chart, with it not leaving the top ten until October - and Rihanna and Plan B made up the top five.

Paolo Nutini had his second year in the top ten, up from #8 last year to #6 and Florence did something similar, up from #18 to #8 - sandwiching Alicia Keys at #7 with Eminem and Mumford and Sons completing the top ten.  Other albums that jump out at me are Kings Of Leon (#11 seems high), Katy Perry (#15 seems low) and Pixie Lott (#17 seems high!) - and I was also surprised to see Andre Rieu had two albums in the top thirty.  #100 made me laugh though - Journey's Greatest Hits and I suspect Glee might have had something to do with that.

So what about the albums I got to experience this year?  It didn't feel like such a male oriented year this year - obviously it was still mostly men, but there were definitely more women than usual.  They had nineteen entries in the year, thirteen weeks at #1 and they had eight out of ten in a run towards the beginning of the year - and it feels like they often came out with the better albums.  

Looking at the male solo artists, I liked Plan B, Tom Jones, Mark Ronson and Paul Weller and most of the rest were bearable, if somewhat underwhelming - I remember being perplexed as to what Phil Collins, Cliff Richard and Brandon Flowers were up to.  But the album that particularly sticks in my memory for the year is Justin Bieber because it really was awful - Usher wasn't a great deal better and Jack Johnson also gets a namecheck for being mystifying popular.

So how did the male groups do?  Very little jumped out at me - Pendulum, Biffy Clyro or Muse were probably my favourites, with Vampire Weekend also being pretty listenable and Keane and Linkin Park getting namechecks for trying something a bit different (if not entirely successfully).  OK, OK - if you're really gonna make me go there, then I'll admit that Take That's offering wasn't completely horrendous.  I'm also going to give Arcade Fire the benefit of the doubt as a possible grower (which I obviously haven't given another chance) but everyone else gets a "meh".

And how about the ladies?  Well, it was obviously a better year than most because there are too many for me to namecheck them all, but I would say that Marina is obviously my favourite, with Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Ellie Goulding and Amy MacDonald feeling worthy of further investigation and Rumer, Katy Perry, Eliza Doolittle and Alicia Keys all being perfectly bearable.  I'm also gonna mention Susan Boyle for being the only person to get two entries in the year - and one of them was surprisingly bearable.

We've also got enough groups with strong female presences to consider them as a separate category this year - Scissor Sisters and Florence & The Machine were both pretty good, Sade and Faithless are OK but not as good as expected and Black Eyed Peas was absolutely dreadful.

Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we saw 31 different albums and 22 debuts at the top, both of which are surprisingly lower than 2006 - this is mostly due to Eminem (8 weeks) and Take That (6 weeks), but I was surprised to see Paolo (3 weeks) getting in on the act as well.

The generally accepted (by the internet or me) best albums from the years that we didn't come across were The National's High Velvet (#5), Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (#16), Beach House's Teen Dream (#78), Robyn's Body Talk (#47 for Part 1 and #38 for Part 2), Janelle Monae's The Archandroid (#51), Crystal Castles' II (#48), Hot Chip's One Life Stand (#11), Anais Mitchell's Hadestown (no danger of charting), Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma (#60), These New Puritans' Hidden (#100 - I like that!), Caribou's Swim (#54), John Grant's Queen Of Denmark (#59) and Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me (#28).  

One horror statistic for you - Glee had five albums in the top ten this year.  We really were suckers for punishment in 2010, weren't we?

And the most and least read posts of the year?  Somewhat surprisingly, Susan Boyle was a considerably more popular post than any other - I suspect some people might have been looking for me to be rude about it.  It's a four way tie for the least popular - Mark Ronson, Marina, Corinne Bailey Rae and Biffy Clyro, but Mark's had considerably longer than the others to pick up some attention so he is the honourable loser.

So, how to sum up 2010?  It was a bit of a mixed bag - most of the albums were listenable, but a lot of the ones I had hopes for didn't really deliver.  My favourites were albums I already knew well - Plan B, Marina and Florence, so I will ignore those when picking a random three and go for the somewhat surprising selection of Tom Jones's Praise And Blame, Paul Weller's Wake Up The Nation and Amy MacDonald's A Curious Thing, all of which feel they'd warrant further listens.  And I really can't stress enough how bad Justin Bieber and Black Eyed Peas' efforts were - excruciatingly bad!

So, given that we've done the birth years of both kids, it only seems natural now to head to the birth year of both parents - 1968 here we come!!!  I'm expecting things to all be very different back then though...

03/10/10 - An OK album with a fine cover
29/12/68 - 100% bangerz