Malachi Lui

As anyone reading this likely knows, over the past 40 years, commercial audio quality tanked. Beginning with the CD’s often sterile blurriness to today’s lossy 64kbps free Spotify streams, the masses’ sacrifice of quality for convenience also coincides with the decline of deep, concentrated listening. Although the two may have nothing to do with one another (after all, work commutes lengthened and other forms of media gained prominence), it’s certainly a possibility.

On Thursday morning (February 6), the Banning, CA building housing Apollo/Transco Masters’ factory and storage space burned. By far the biggest of the world’s two lacquer master disc manufacturers, most of the world’s vinyl mastering facilities (especially smaller ones) relied upon Apollo/Transco blanks, as well as their cutting styli for Westrex cutting heads. Ruled a total loss, 82 firefighters battled the blaze’s toxic fumes; thankfully, there were no injuries (Banning is located in the Southern California desert, approximately 2.5 hours away from Los Angeles).

For this list, there is no introductory statement that won’t come across as overly self-absorbed and politically bitter, so I’ll just indulge: despite barely being 4 years old at its beginning, I acknowledge that the 2010’s were a complete mess. Disastrous elections, racism, religious and regional intolerance, war, and climate change all contributed to our current feeling of impending doom, yet music remained brilliant. As it’s now “best albums of the decade” list season, to retain our reputation as an excellent music criticism website that doesn’t blindly overrate Vampire Weekend, of course we’re joining the action! Each of our two regular writers will post their top 50 albums of the decade lists, potentially followed by an AnalogPlanet team list with annotations. Before the main top 50 list however, there are several honorable mentions that, for one reason or another, aren’t in an AOTD conversation but are nonetheless enjoyable. Below are the honorable mentions listed in order of how their representing songs appear in the attached Tidal, Spotify, and YouTube playlists (sorry, Apple Music users and Endless fans):