Check out Jeremy Gordon’s photos from the SummerStage opening gala
Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mumford & Sons, Jim James, Tom Morello, Alabama Shakes and Patti Smith were among the artists who honored Bruce Springsteen last night
For the second consecutive year, we concocted an innovative little experiment for our year-end Best Albums list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way, we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.
To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made this list. Then, we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on each album within the list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = epic). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity for the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some ranked just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: Hidden Track’s 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.
Let’s kick off our week long countdown of our favorite albums of 2010 with numbers 25 through 21…
25) Sleigh Bells – Treats
Key Tracks: Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars
Sounds Like: Electric Guitars and Cheerleaders
The Skinny: Sleigh Bells came out of nowhere in 2010 to emerge as a break out of the highest order. Despite being a just a duo, the boy-girl tandem of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manage to slug out bombs with their stomping beats, cutting guitar attacks and anthemic vocal hooks. With Treats, Sleigh Bells have created a genuinely unique twist on amped-up party music.
READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…
For every “All Along the Watchtower” moments of perfection, the flip side, such as Zac Brown covering “Oh My Sweet Carolina” leaves you looking for the nearest pair of earplugs and questioning why more stringent copyright laws don’t exist. Fortunately for listeners, John Legend and The Roots have hooked up and fall into the former category by collaborating on a series of 12 funk-soul covers that pack a punch and take you back to 1972, both musically and thematically.
As we previously reported neo-soul singer John Legend and hip-hop act The Roots have teamed up to release Wake Up! – which hit stores last Tuesday and is a throw
While James Brown may have been the Hardest Working Man In Show Business, The Roots clearly deserve the moniker as the Hardest Working Band. The Philly hip-hop act, who serve
