The 10 most awesome records of 2010

Every year at this time, my friend Andy sends out a highly excitable e-mail asking about a dozen of his most rabid, music-obsessed friends -- sound engineers, club promoters, DJs, designers, anyone for whom music is less a casual dalliance and more like lifeblood -- to compile their personal lists of the year's best music, so we can all discover something new and/or gently mock each others' weird tastes in African banjo disco, kazoo jazz funk or ambient doom metal.

No music critic by training, I nevertheless dive into this venture with a great and all-consuming fervor coupled to a bottle of premium sake and much scouring of my ever-aflame iTunes library. More than 25 years of music ardor means my palate is still pretty wide and endlessly deep and I not-so-humbly submit that I know well of what I speak. Yes, even with the Danzig. Trust me.

10) Tame Impala - InnerSpeaker Retro-cool ?70s-inspired psychedelia from a quartet of young Aussie dudes who already sound so confident, accomplished and musically inventive, you'd think they were twice their age and half as stoned, and that no effing way was this their debut record. They call it "hypno-groove music" and you'd be hard-pressed to do any better.

9) Beach House - Teen Dream The pinnacle of the compressed, dreamy, retro, happy-kids-in-the-sunshine, everybody-into-the-pool chillwave movement that hit last year and continued with startlingly good results through most of 2010, and included lovely popcraft from the likes of Tamaryn, Houses, Teen Daze, et al. Another one that came out way back in January and so almost gets forgotten. Don't let that happen.

8) Danzig - Deth Red Saboath Look, don't even start, all right? This record is badass incarnate and you don't dare roll your eyes until you've heard it like, 10 times, naked and drunk and clawing at the moon. Remember that tune on "The Hangover" soundtrack, a dank, moody thing that was nevertheless somehow perfectly matched to a light black comedy? It was called "Thirteen" and at first I couldn't place it, finally SoundHounded it and turns out it was, yes, Glenn Danzig, the old-timer muscle-bound punk/goth doom rocker dude from way back when his underground hit "Mother" was a Oedipal complex writ large and snarly.