This morning, MTV News' James Montgomery produced his annual list of the best albums of the first half of the year. It's a largely excellent list that shouts out some incredible albums, including the National's dark and brooding High Violet, Against Me!'s loud, rugged White Crosses and Titus Andronicus' raucous (and underrated) concept album The Monitor. Obviously, there are a number of albums that could have made their way onto the list (there are certainly cases to be made for Eminem's chart-topping Recovery, Drake's revolutionary Thank Me Later and Eels' quietly brilliant End Times), but the biggest oversight happens to be what is (in my opinion at least) the best album of the year: OK Go's Of the Blue Colour of the Sky.
Released back in January (and then confusingly re-released in April), OK Go's third album is an amazing construction. Produced by Dave Fridmann (the man responsible for the Flaming Lips' Embryonic, one of the best albums of 2009), Of the Blue Colour of the Sky takes the band's jangly power-pop sound and completely deconstructs it. The result is an album with psychedelic tendencies, joyous singalongs and all sorts of outer space sounds. The breakout single "This Too Shall Pass" (which scored the awesome Rube Goldberg-biting video that went super-viral) is a great example for the rest of the album, as it has a sweet pop hook, an easy melody, a xylophone solo and just enough studio trickery to create a little hallucinatory glee.
But the thing that Of the Blue Colour of the Sky does best is tap into a funk vein that the band had only vaguely flirted with in the past. In fact, some of the songs on the album — especially "All Is Not Lost," "I Want You So Bad I Can't Breathe" and the absolutely stunning "White Knuckles" — are some of the best tunes that Prince has never recorded. It helps that frontman Damian Kulash has such an elastic and versatile voice, which is able to hop from a dreamy falsetto to a breathy coo to a funky baritone without batting an eye, but the bottom end also holds up extremely well (it turns out that the rhythm combo of Dan Konopka on drums and Tim Nordwind on bass is one of the best in the business).
A lot of excellent albums have hit the streets this year, but you can't sleep on OK Go. The record is at the same time incredibly polished and casually chaotic — a fantastically vibrant, surprising combination. I've been listening to the album for six months and am still discovering things about it. It's at the top of my list, but where does it sit on yours?
What's your favorite album of 2010 so far? Let us know in the comments!