20 Simple Machines, Arliss Nancy (Suburban Home)
19 Shake My Head, Spider Bags (Odessa)
18 Locked Down, Dr. John (Nonesuch)
17 Slaughterhouse, Ty Segall Band (In The Red) / Twins, Ty Segall (Drag City) / Hair, Ty Segall & White Fence (Drag City)
16 Local Business, Titus Andronicus (XL)
15 Lonerism, Tame Impala (Modular Fontana)
14 A Different Kind of Truth, Van Halen (Interscope)
13 Year of the Mouse, Eytan Mirsky (M-Squared)
12 Great Ideas In Action, Archie Powell & the Exports (Good Land)
11 Call Me Sylvia, Low Cut Connie (Low Cut Connie)
10 Tiempo de Lujo, Young Fresh Fellows (Yep Roc): While a handful of ‘80s college rock veterans have returned in the oughts and early-‘10s (Dinosaur Jr, Mission of Burma, now Redd Kross and Big Dipper), none have had as stealth a return to form as the Young Fresh Fellows, who followed 2009’s I Think This Is with the equally strong Tiempo de Lujo (“time of luxury”). Recorded in an afternoon, one gets the feels that the Fellows – bassist Jim Sangster, drummer Tad Hutchison and singer/guitarists Kurt Bloch and Scott McCaughey – enjoy the freedom that being off the radar affords, but goofy garage numbers like “Tad’s Pad”, “So Many Electric Guitars”, “Love Luggage” (a charming rewrite of the Hombres’ “Let It All Hang Out”) and a handful of McCaughey’s more somber-minded tunes (the closing “Broken Monkey”, “Life Is A Funeral Factory”) deserve a wider audience. In a world where nearly everyone and everything fights for your attention, the Young Fresh Fellows make a virtue out of being unassuming.
09 Tempest, Bob Dylan (Columbia): So yes, the 14-minute long Titanic song got all the ink this fall in discussion of Dylan’s zillionth studio album, but to these ears, Tempest makes the list despite, not because of, the song about the World’s Biggest Metaphor. Tempest’s first five tracks really is the best side of music he’s put to tape since Time Out Of Mind 15 (!) years ago, reaching back nearly 100 years for the opening, toe-tapping strains of “Duquesne Whistle” (Dylan meets “Merrie Melodies”!), conjuring genuine menace on “Pay In Blood” and vividly running the gamut from sly to wistful to bemused on “Long and Wasted Years”, leaving Dylanologists to parse the precise way Dylan sings “If I hurt your feelings, I apologize”. Would that artists only 1/3 his age made music 1/2 as vital as Tempest’s best tracks. 
08 Leaving Atlanta, Gentleman Jesse (Douchemaster): Four years is a long time between albums, but (Gentleman) Jesse Smith more than made up for it on his sophomore LP, Leaving Atlanta. (If memory serves, a large chunk of that time was spent recuperating from injuries he received in an attack while performing a Good Samaritan flat tire change for a stranger in his hometown, which in turn provided the album title. Then he had to deal with the loss of his father.) Not straying too far from ’08 debut Introducing Gentleman Jesse and His Men’s sound, Smith instead -- and understandably, given the circumstances -- upped the emotional quotient: lyrics like “I’m only lonely when I’m around you” and “Without you I’m a mess” would be agonizing if the songs didn’t sound like the best parts of every power pop album released in 1978. (And fortunately, he still does gleeful well too, as evinced by “You Give Me Shivers” and “Rooting For The Underdog”.) Introducing’s album cover echoed obvious touchstone Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model; with Leaving Atlanta, Smith approaches that masterwork’s emotional heft, cynical takes on power dynamics in relationships and, of course, pop hooks. 
07 Silver Age, Bob Mould (Merge): It’s fitting that Silver Age was released less than two months after the 20th anniversary re-issue of Sugar’s Copper Blue, as, to these ears, it’s the closest Mould has come to following up that seminal alt-rock touchstone (not that File Under: Easy Listening, Beaster and the return-to-rock District Line don’t have their charms). Indeed, if you saw Mould, bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster tour behind Copper Blue this fall, tossing in a few choice Silver Age cuts at the end of the set, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was all of one urgent, vibrant, rocking-the-eff-out piece. And if tracks like “Star Machine”, “The Descent” and “Round the City Square” revisit a legacy that was secured 20 years ago (hell, 30, if you’re going all the way back to Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record), there’s no complaints here. Having cleared the decks with his autobiography, See A Little Light, Mould earned the right to strap on his guitar, blast through 10 songs in 38 minutes (seven fewer than Copper Blue!) and prove to everyone (yet again) why he’s an icon. There will always be a place for a no-frills, no-BS rock record on this list. 
06 Lex Hives, The Hives (Columbia): In the half-decade since The Black and White Album, the Hives decided the two most important words in their own private lexicon were “time” and “money”. To wit, dig the titles from their fifth full length: to the former, “Come On!”, “Go Right Ahead”, “Wait A Minute”, “My Time Is Coming”; the latter, “I Want More”, “Without the Money”, “If I Had A Cent”, and touching both bases, the third shift worker tale “Midnight Shifter”. Just one of those things a fella notices. (And allow me to nominate the careening, truly thrilling “Patrolling Days” as one of this decade’s best songs.) Lean and mean at 31 minutes (compared to the bloated 45-minute Black and White), Lex Hives is a still-great band operating at the peak of their powers – whipping up punk fury, garage cool, power pop hooks, surf and even R&B horns into some of the year’s riches (hopefully) most timeless RNR. 
05 Blunderbuss, Jack White (Third Man): Pretty much guaranteed a year-end list slot in my book (though the Dead Weather haven’t earned one... yet), White, on Blunderbuss, grappled with his women issues with loud, Zeppelin-y swagger (“Freedom at 21”, “Missing Pieces”, “Sixteen Saltines”) and at a more leisurely, piano-fueled, but no less tortured paced (“Love Interruption”, the lonely, lovely “I Guess I Should Go To Sleep”). Expertly plotted and paced, like all of White’s work, and with some of his most personal and direct lyrics (the autobiographical “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy”; “On and On and On”’s claim that “I just want to cover my eyes and give myself a new name”), Blunderbuss finds White delving deeper into his psyche and coming up with another batch of winning tunes... even if he can’t shake the metaphorical vultures on his back that graces the album’s spooky cover.
04 Open Your Heart, The Men (Sacred Bones): Like a certain list-topping album I’ll be getting to in a moment, Open Your Heart gives me faith that actual guitar-wrangling, pulse-quickening indie rock won’t go the way of the dodo when (comparative) oldsters like Bob Mould, Dinosaur Jr and Mission of Burma hang up their axes. Few albums this year opened with a more exciting pair of tunes than “Turn It Around” (yes, I know it sounds like “Suspect Device”) and the riotous blues of “Animal”, but the Men also found room for the twanged-up “Country Song”, the swoony “Please Don’t Go Away” and the best song Grant Hart never recorded, the urgent title track. You can complain that it’s all been done before, but you can’t say that the Men didn’t knock Open Your Heart outta the park. 
03 Temple Beautiful, Chuck Prophet (Yep Roc): With so much of my listening done through headphone or in front of my computer, it was a rare treat and a happy accident that I picked up Prophet’s love letter to San Francisco right before the wife and I visited that city this spring, and that it provided the perfect soundtrack to our vacation. But even if I hadn’t set foot in Alcatraz or the Mission this year, Temple Beautiful would’ve still earned a slot on this list. The title track comes straight from Ray Davies, circa 1978; both “Castro Halloween” and “White Night, Big City” take sobering snapshots of the city’s gay rights movement (with the former providing one of the album’s best riffs), and the evocative “Willie Mays Is Up At Bat” might as well be a time machine to 1964. Passionate, literate roots rock – with an emphasis on rock – it might just be Prophet’s best album in his 20+ year, post-Green on Red solo career. Truly, a late career gem. 
02 Researching the Blues, Redd Kross (Merge): When you start a band before you can drive a car, as Jeff and Steve McDonald did with Redd Kross, you can get away with taking fifteen (!) years off and still making one of your best albums in an already-rewarding discography before you turn 50. Such is the case with Researching the Blues, one of the year’s best, most unexpected surprises (even if the tunes were recorded a few years back and are only seeing the light of day now), and the first Redd Kross album since 1997’s Show World: the opening one-two-three punch of the title track, song-of-the-year contender “Stay Away From Downtown” and “Uglier” hit harder than offerings from most bands half RK’s age, and midtempo charmers like “Dracula’s Daughters”, “One Of The Good Ones” and “Winter Blues” are power pop nonpareil, overflowing with effortless hooks accumulated over the past decade-plus. Hopefully there’s plenty more where Researching the Blues came from, and soon. 
01 Celebration Rock, Japandroids (Polyvinyl): And to think that this album was almost released as a post-break-up swan song. Brian King and David Prowse, the men of Japandroids, had already sewn up the Number One spot on this list by, oh say, the third time I spun Celebration Rock earlier this summer, so quickly and decisively did the record dig its hooks into me. I’m glad I procrastinated in penning this blurb, though, having just seen the band live (as of this writing) yesterday, and goddamn if it wasn’t one of the most electrifying, soul-rejuvenating, faith-in-RNFNR-restoring shows this seen-everything veteran concertgoer has ever had the privilege of witnessing. All of Celebration Rock’s celebrated hedonism and joys and fears and triumphs were on display onstage at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club, summed up by a sold-out crowd’s cathartic bellow-along of song-of-the-millennium candidate “The House that Heaven Built”’s “whoa-oh-oh-OH, oh-oh-oh-oh”. From “The Nights of Wine and Roses” through “Continuous Thunder”, there’s not a wasted note, on record or live – and give the band yet another tip of the cap for digging up a kickass Gun Club tune (“For The Love of Ivy”), a great band increasingly lost to the annals of history in these indie-folk-ascendant times (but that’s a different story for a different day). If you are a young man who didn’t spend at least a few nights this year with your buddies blaring this record and drinking shitty beers, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you wasted your 2012. So rarely do the stars align, but Japandroids and Celebration Rock were, hands down, the right band with the right album at the right time. 
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