10 Killer Under-the-Radar LPs from 2010

Angel Olsen's underground status isn't entirely accidental. The Chicago-based songwriter is devoted to a format, the cassette, that, whilst experiencing an artistic rebirth as delightfully-archaic artifact, is a definite statement of disinterest in the music-business. It also speaks of a greater aesthetic: Olsen's caterwauling voice and raw songcraft happily bathed in the room-tone, tape-hiss, and reverb of ultra-lo-fi recording. They show Olsen as a successor to such singular odd-balls as Kath Bloom and Diane Cluck, even if her set of country covers, Lady of the Waterpark, suggests Skeeter Davis and Patsy Cline may be her heroines. Strange Cacti is even better: delivering some of the most savagely emotional songs sung, by anyone, in 2010.

Scores of 2010 new-arrivals, including album-of-the-year wielders How to Dress Well and Grimes, drew inspiration from R&B production, but few delivered songs you could, even in a parallel universe, imagine actually being played on commercial 'urban' radio. Enter Montréal duo Blue Hawaii. With its scratchy indie guitar, rickety programming, and trebly tone, no one's mistaking "Blue Gowns" for Timbaland, but it's a straight-up scorned-woman ballad: Raphaelle Standell-Preston caroling "I think about you thrusting into her/and I ask myself: 'how stupid can you get?'", no less. Standell-Preston normally fronts the soon-to-be-huge Braids, but, here, she makes summery electronic songs of tender emotional tides and awash under chillwavey effects.

Given they hail from hype's ground-zero, Brooklyn, and record for Western Vinyl, the label that introduced Dirty Projectors, Here We Go Magic, and Secret Cities to the world, it's been a curious case that Callers have remained weirdly unloved by the world. The trio make music that is slow, dramatic, and almost soul-music-esque, showcasing the star-in-waiting sound of Sara Lucas's voice. Where 2008's Fortune set Lucas's singing largely to gentle guitar accompaniment, their second record, Life of Love, is a far more percussive, aggressive set, built on shifting dynamics and bold contrast. The shift from languorous to rhythmic should've resulted in more listeners, but, bizarrely, once again no one really seemed to care.

Given that many albums on impossibly-on-it imprint Captured Tracks found genuine cross-over action —I'm looking at you, Wild Nothing and Beach Fossils— I found it strange that the blogosphere seemed particularly, peculiarly unexcited by the debut LP from Hanoi Janes. The work of one German gent named Oliver Scharf, Year of Panic is a host of two-minute pop-songs buried under highly-stylized fuzz. It's, contrary to so many hyped duds, a 2010 lo-fi garage-rock record that actually makes good on the stylistic possibilities of brash chords, buoyant positivity, and ultra-saturated sound. Hanoi Janes kept the good times rolling in '10, too, when he followed this with the also-killer Specks Ho! EP, which showed Scharf is hardly lacking for tunes.

Javiera Mena certainly isn't unknown in Chile; the Santiago songstress having earnt an ardent indie following via her amazing debut disc, 2006's Esquemas Juveniles. I had assumed that the cult of Javiera would eventually transcend cultural boundaries and language barriers to take the world by storm, and when her second LP, Mena came boasting a super-slick synth-pop sound and a guest vocal from Swedish crooner Jens Lekman, it seemed inevitable. Yet, there's been little blog buzz building for this awesome album, even though Mena is infinitely comparable to Twin Shadow's beloved Forget record: Mena taking command of theoretically-kitschy synthesizer sounds and making them ache with artistry and grace. I love this album dearly; you should, too.

Kahimi Karie is a near pop-star in Japan, but roundly ignored elsewhere. After a brief flutter of interest in her late-'90s Momus collaborations, Karie has been invisible in the West, even though 2003's Trapéziste was straight-up one of the best albums of the decade. Since then, she's worked largely with avant-garde titans Jim O'Rourke and Otomo Yoshihide, and grown increasingly adventurous. It's Here marks another bold departure from her cutesy past: its barely-there collection of gentle pop built on chiming piano, piercing sine-waves, and twangs of bluegrass guitar. Throughout, Karie's eternally-whispery voice comes close to retreating into absolute nothingness; turning even the most robust song into something frail, half-suggested.

OK, so, Jungle/Surf originally came out on cassette in 2009, and its vinyl/digital release this year by Underwater Peoples was of a way, way bigger profile that its first go around. But, like, this Pill Wonder record —all eight tracks and 18 minutes of it— is just too awesome to deny. With much melody and even more mischief, Seattle's Will Murdoch has built a sloppy, scrappy, mutant-tropical-indie-pop vibe in home-made, hand-made no-fidelity. Laying on scrappy guitars and an assortment of improvised audio —shaking boxes of mac-and-cheese, blowing hellish squeals from a recorder— Murdoch has cooked up a set of tunes that sound like classic pop-songs buried in a junk pile: persistent melodies lost under rubble, clatter, and years of dust.

Silje Nes seems, in many ways, eternally destined for the shadows. Insular and intimate, she makes music that somehow seems less than the sum of its parts. Nes's softly-treading voice, caressed guitar, brushed drums, orchestral touches, music-box tinklings, and glints of abstract electronics amount not to multi-tracked grandeur, but half-implied tunes. No matter how dense and detail-rich a composition, there's wide-open space throughout, and a hesitant delivery that makes even the most dramatic, crescendo-peaking moments seem pensive. On the Norwegian sound-sculptor's sweet second set, Opticks, the songs give the impression of a series of miniature musical dioramas: fragile, unfurling worlds intricately constructed on the tiniest of scale.