We close out 2009 with our annual review of the year's 50 best albums. Yesterday we highlighted another 25 that missed our top 50 but we feel deserve some attention.
50. Woods
Songs of Shame
[Shrimper/Woodsist]
Woodsist had an auspicious 2009, releasing well-liked albums from Real Estate, Ganglians, and the Fresh & Onlys. Amongst the best of them was Songs of Shame, the fourth album from label chief Jeremy Earl and his intrepid band of outdoorsmen Woods. Filled with their peculiarly pitched vocal harmonies, off-handed melodic hooks, and pixilated guitar figures, songs such as "Down This Road" and "Born to Lose" make maximal use of Woods' humble home recording techniques. And whether it is with their spirited cover of Graham Nash's "Military Madness", the zoned guitar jam "September With Pete", or the dusky melancholy of standout track "Rain On", Woods continually offer the listener the privileged impression of being allowed to listen in on a private and spontaneous fit of inspiration. --Matthew Murphy
49. Cass McCombs
Catacombs
[Domino]
The standard thinking on Catacombs, the fifth LP from singer-songwriter Cass McCombs, goes something like this: enigmatic troubadour takes a welcome turn toward accessibility, loosening the knotty arrangements of previous recordings to offer his best and most direct album yet. And I would say that's mostly true. But such a clinical analysis ignores how remarkably warm Catacombs is, how a big part of its appeal is its welcoming Nashville Skyline vibe. The album's two most talked-about tracks, opener "Dreams Come True Girl" and heartbreaking waltz-time centerpiece "You Saved My Life", are clear highlights, but alongside them is a very solid supporting cast, from the gracious sway of "Harmonia" to darker pieces like "The Executioner's Song", an ode to the satisfaction of working life no matter how distasteful the occupation. A disquieting tone and deft lyrical touch also runs throughout, making Catacombs more than just a pleasing folk-pop album-- though it certainly is that, too. --Joe Colly
48. DOOM
Born Like This
[Lex]
For his best album in five years and his rawest in 10, DOOM came back from a mysterious hiatus with a hungry, take-no-prisoners ferocity. Born Like This, which takes its title from one of Charles Bukowski's more apocalyptic poems, is a borderline reboot of the comics nut as we know him, throwing a bit of vintage Alan Moore menace into his Jack Kirby trappings. The complex rhymes and truism-flipping still act as DOOM's lyrical catalysts, but they scan even more vividly as true crime warped into surrealist dementia, delivered with a voice that's just raspier and brusquer enough to give it that extra push toward antagonistic malice. Madlib, Jake One, J Dilla, and DOOM himself make up a four-man army of beat creators that give Born Like This that extra layer of grit and haze, combining it with a deep headknock pulse and some memorable guest spots (Ghostface, Raekwon, Empress Stahhr) to seal it as another diabolical masterpiece. --Nate Patrin
47. Zomby
Where Were U in '92?
[Werk Discs]
Considering how quickly the splinters of dubstep progress and mutate, it says something about the strength of Zomby's Where Where U in '92? that we're still talking about it more than a year after its November 2008 release. That has little to do with Zomby's masked identity (really, producers, it doesn't make you more mysterious), but because of the record's dual nature-- its ability to be both forward- and backward-looking at the same time. Famously building the tracks with humble software, Zomby re-imagines the early 1990s jungle-techno strain of hardcore (what some incorrectly call "rave"), and infuses it with his own heavy dubstep. The jarring, paint-splattered result brings to mind James Murphy's modern take on disco-- the sound of a producer dreaming up a new outcome for a beloved genre. It's unclear where Zomby goes from here (subsequent 09 releases found him further retooling this sound), but one thing is certain: he has a lot to live up to with this record. --Joe Colly
46. Dan Deacon
Bromst
[Carpark]
From the Magnetic Fields on i to Elliott Smith on Figure 8, plenty of beloved artists have upgraded their equipment at the expense of some of their most appealing qualities. Dan Deacon's schmancy new toy is a computer-operated player piano that can generate notes faster than any pair of human hands; thankfully, his most appealing quality remains manic glee. So when Baltimore's most notorious electro-spazz made the leap from the basements of 2007's comparably lo-fi Spiderman of the Rings to, well, wherever the hell you'd expect to hear something like Bromst, he sticks the landing. Highlights "Snookered" and "Surprise Stefani" expand the sonic and emotional palette of Deacon's densely layered drifts, staying between Philip Glass and Chicago house, while unexpected touches like the female vocals on "Wet Wings" show new sides of the old goofball. Don't worry, he still sings like Woody Woodpecker. --Marc Hogan
45. The Mountain Goats
The Life of the World to Come
[4AD]
"Twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of" is how main Mountain Goat and regular churchgoer John Darnielle describes his latest, and all song titles, as well as some choruses, come directly from the Good Book. But this is a religious album in only the most nebulous sense possible. Most of the time, it's about living at the edge of sanity and looking for a way out-- the near-extinct animals on "Deuteronomy 2:10", the people coping with impending death on "Matthew 25:21", the exile from an old hellish life on "Genesis 3:23". But all that desperation finds Darnielle even more humane than usual. Musically, it's all haunted whispers and soft pianos and quietly matter-of-fact declarations. And "Genesis 30:3" includes about the most heart-wrenching description of meeting your baby for the first time I've ever heard-- from a man with no kids, no less. All of which makes this album a work of deep, profound empathy-- the kind of thing the Bible is supposed to teach us in the first place. --Tom Breihan
44. tUnE-yArDs
BiRd-BrAiNs
[Marriage/4AD]
Originally released on cassette (!) last year, the debut album by Merrill Garbus' solo project made bigger ripples this year in this slightly expanded edition. Garbus is a fantastic songwriter with a very unusual sense of rhythm ("Hatari" lopes like no other Anglophone song in recent memory), she's got a creamy voice with a welcome, salty-bitter edge of indignation about it, and there are indelible lines all over these songs. The biggest delight of BiRd-BrAiNs, though, is how much Garbus' ingenuity milks from the record's severe economy of means. The album was very clearly made with nothing more than the tools at hand-- a ukulele, a couple of pieces of percussion, a yard-sale keyboard, a loop pedal, a crappy cheap mic, some free audio software, and Garbus' larynx, which gets to express everything her machines can't take care of. The whole thing is held together with duct tape, but that's what makes it shiny. --Douglas Wolk
43. Cymbals Eat Guitars
Why There Are Mountains
[self-released]
It can be hard to reckon with Cymbals Eat Guitars' debut album without bringing up the work of Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, the Wrens, and a host of other 1990s indie rock icons, but if the band is willing to wear its influences so proudly on the sleeve, there's probably no shame in making those comparisons. What makes Why There Are Mountains more than just a nostalgic retread is songwriter Joseph D'Agostino's preternatural skill for balancing pensive meandering with moments of cathartic release, and the band's endearing and unforced enthusiasm for rocking out. CEG have serious chops for a young band, but they wisely let their youthful energy guide their way, whether navigating the dramatic peaks and valleys of "...And the Hazy Sea" or bopping their way through a jaunty number like "Indiana". Isaac Brock and Doug Martsch may have built the highway Cymbals Eat Guitars are driving on, but it's pretty obvious that D'Agostino and company are having their own adventure on it. --Matthew Perpetua
42. A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Ashes Grammar
[Mis Ojos Discos]
The term "dream-pop" has been bandied about for the better part of 25 years now, but it may just as well have been invented to describe Ashes Grammar. Sure, Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star and Galaxie 500 and Slowdive and whoever else made "dreamy" music, but they also made more or less linear records comprised of 10 to 12 tracks mostly falling in the three-to-five-minute range (Pygmalion excepted). The emphasis there fell squarely on the pop half of the descriptor, with pretty effects and leisurely tempos merely serving as signifiers-- much the same way gauze around the lens signifies dream-time happenings in old movies.
Ashes, on the other hand, sprawls across 22 tracks, ranging from 10 seconds in length to six and a half minutes. Sometimes it seizes on a sound that makes you go "wow," and sometimes it just drifts along, unfolding with its own otherworldly logic. There are linguistic flights of fancy ("fall forward, feel failure"), bits of apparent nonsense, fragments and clips of phrases and distant, half-remembered old tunes. In short it's very much the dream experience, rather than the dream representation, in recorded form. You're not always fully cognizant of what you're hearing. You just know you like the way it feels, and there are times when you wish it could inhabit your headspace in perpetuity. --Matthew Solarski
41. Baroness
Blue Record
[Relapse]
Baroness' second album isn't remotely "experimental," and you'd never mistake any of its 12 tracks for indie rock. Instead, the guitars mix furious power-prog melodicism with the gut-punch force of old fashioned Southern sludge, and the grot-lined vocals are anthemic rather than tortured into incomprehensibility, a pleasant reminder of the days when extreme metal bands managed to be catchy without sacrificing an ounce of essentialist brutality. --Jess Harvell
40. Mos Def
The Ecstatic
[Downtown]
How did Mos Def shift his popular perception from "fallen off" to "best since Black on Both Sides"? It helps that he transitioned perfectly into the post-Stones Throw epoch of indie stoner rap; one of the reasons The Ecstatic is so engaging is that Mos sounds great rattling off short but dense verses over the likes of Madlib and Oh No. But the Jackson Brothers, along with Georgia Anne Muldrow and the obligatory J Dilla beat, are just part of the equation. Along with Mr. Flash's mutant Ed Banger beats and Preservation's heavy-bumping musical flourishes from Latin America and the Middle East, Mos depicts himself as a new kind of international ambassador of hip-hop. His depiction of a jet-set travelogue bypasses celebrity status and focuses on the idea of connecting with as many cultures as possible, spinning abstract free-associations and evocative narratives into a shrinking-world milieu that's left him completely revitalized. --Nate Patrin
39. Jim O'Rourke
The Visitor
[Drag City]
The first pop-ish album in eight years from Jim O'Rourke turned out to be well worth the wait, and it continued to reward patience once you actually put it on. Almost pathologically subtle, the lone 38-minute piece that makes up the record works like a series of intriguing riddles that are never quite resolved. Small bursts of sound pop in out of nowhere, and the tempo occasionally slows down and then stops; typically, a piece like this is positioned as a "journey," but The Visitor constantly (and gently) nudges the path into unexpected realms that don't really lead anywhere. Exquisitely recorded-- the sonics make you miss O'Rourke's engineering and mixing acumen as much as his compositions-- and played entirely by O'Rourke himself in his Tokyo apartment, The Visitor sometimes feels more like a perplexing sonic game than a proper album. It keeps pulling you back in, partly because you want to take another crack at it. --Mark Richardson
38. Major Lazer
Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do
[Downtown]
One of Mark Twain's most famous and oft-repeated (albeit typically in a slightly mangled way) aphorisms is, "If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes." The sentiment holds true for Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do, the debut fruit of Diplo and Switch's collaborative project, Major Lazer. Jamaican dancehall may be the overriding stylistic theme, but there's such a multiplicity of sounds, subjects, and stances crammed under that banner here that hardly anyone should have trouble finding something in short order to enjoy (and, perhaps, to disdain). Few listeners are likely to single out, say, "What U Like" as a favorite track, but hey, if ultra-graphic raunch is what you're looking for, you're in luck. The rest of us will be gravitating towards the throbbing, Santigold-assisted "Hold the Line", the incessant "When You Hear the Bassline" and especially the buoyant, irresistible club-hopper "Keep It Goin' Louder". --Joshua Love
37. The Antlers
Hospice
[Frenchkiss]
After a decade in which private lives basically became public domain-- think confessional emo, YouTube, reality TV, and social networking updates-- you would think that we'd have become inured to the private pain of semi-autobiographical songwriting. But as the debut album by Peter Silberman's former solo project (it's now a trio) proves, with the right blend of earnest, whispery vocals, delicate, gauzy melodies, and strangely smothering scratchy effects, a desperately delivered concept album about personal loss still has the power to emotionally destroy listeners. Hospice, as its name implies, is not an easy album to take-- the haunting songs' plainspoken prose tells of mental illness, abortion, cancer, and death-- but couched in soaring anthems and swathed in layers of ambient noise, its heartbreaking stories are easy to love. --Rebecca Raber
36. Dinosaur Jr.
Farm
[Jagjaguwar]
When news of the Dinosaur Jr. reunion came around, one would probably have been hard-pressed to think that it'd be anything more than an enjoyable little nostalgia trip. Two albums in, the only thing remotely nostalgic about the 21st century version of the group is its cover art. Farm finds the group as powerful as ever, offering a familiar blend of sad-sack sentiments and amp-shredding solos-- all with a swagger and strut that'd be hard to find in the group's back catalog. Whatever acrimony caused their initial dissolution, Dinosaur Jr. are clearly over it. F. Scott Fitzgerald's oft-quoted line about there being no second acts in American life has been debunked numerous times, but it's particularly nice to see it apply to these guys. --David Raposa
35. jj
*jj n° 2
*[Sincerely Yours]
Damn that pot leaf on the cover. By far the most fitting way to address jj's mysterious debut full-length is as drug music, but with the rather unsubtle cover art, that angle seems almost redundant. Never mind that the centerpiece of the record is "Ecstasy", which over the most enjoyable piece of copyright infringement this year manages to simultaneously recreate the experience of being on MDMA and hanging out with someone who's rolling and can't stop telling you about it. But it's the other songs, with woozy stray passages of Toto and Taylor Dayne, blurts of movie dialogue, and moments of fashionable Afropop and acoustic folk slipping in and out of focus, that make this album fail its urine test. It's a gorgeous ode to chemically-assisted euphoria, or an effective, shimmering simulation for those who keep their intoxications on the legal side. --Rob Mitchum
34. Passion Pit
Manners
[Columbia/Frenchkiss]
Passion Pit's debut album can seem to come on like a big, friendly dog slobbering you with kisses: one part "Eww, too much!" and two parts "Aww, I can't resist!" Manners' day-glo playground lite-funk desperately wants to be loved, stopping at nothing (Children's choirs! Velveeta disco synths! Smoove sax samples!) to deliver high-fructose hooks straight to the part of the brain that lusts after Froot Loops and chocolate milk. But helium-voiced frontman Michael Angelakos keeps the whole affair from collapsing into diabetic shock by grounding it in an undercurrent of melancholy, howling lyrics about loss and decay with the kind of roof-raising sincerity shared by the likes of U2 and Arcade Fire. At times, an almost celestial beauty comes frothing out ("Moth's Wings", "Make Light"); at others, the ants-in-your-pants enthusiasm overwhelms ("Little Secrets", "The Reeling"). This is music that begs to be shared with as many people as possible. The more Passion Pit's star rose throughout 2009, the more all was right with the universe. --Amy Phillips
33. Bibio
Ambivalence Avenue
[Warp]
Terrific albums from Animal Collective and Phoenix were almost foregone conclusions this year, but Bibio benefited from the element of surprise. As recently as March, when he released Vignetting the Compost, Bibio was a folksy Boards of Canada understudy who played everything on the same wobbly phonograph. Merely three months later, he issued the sparklingly clear Ambivalence Avenue and blew his narrow, drowsy range wide open. As if making up for lost time, he hop-scotched effortlessly between genres and influences-- Dillafied funk on "Jealous of Roses", weedy Flying Lotus-style hip-hop on "Fire Ant", spangled indie-rock on "Haikuesque (When She Laughs)"-- but kept everything cohesive with tuneful, elaborately syncopated, commanding production. You seldom see shifts this radical and swift outside of teen melodramas: It's like Bibio just took off his glasses and went from wallflower to prom king. --Brian Howe
32. Bear in Heaven
Beast Rest Forth Mouth
[Hometapes]
If Bear in Heaven's reps weren't working New Moon ticket queues with sound vans and promo swag, they missed a brilliant opportunity. No one's nailed adolescent melodrama this well since, I dunno, My Chemical Romance? And in this case, critics don't have to stoop to bestow a condescending "guilty pleasure" disclaimer: Beast Rest Forth Mouth is a nigh-perfect collection of confident songwriting and magnificent production detail. Check how "Wholehearted Me", a brisk, surly bedroom raver bridging Power, Corruption & Lies and Oracular Spectacular rides decaying feedback and cymbal spray into "You Do You"'s robotic rhythms. The latter betrays a more-than-passing familiarity with fellow Brooklyn band Yeasayer's utopian psychedelia, but from "Dust Storm"'s queasy dissonance to "Drug a Wheels"'s fog-machined atmospherics, BRFM views the world through a goth lens. A moody brew of surging hormones and consumptive crushes, the album speaks to the misunderstood vampire-- or lovesick teenager-- in all of us. --Amy Granzin
31. Sunn O)))
Monoliths & Dimensions
[Southern Lord]
It certainly was the year's most effective pairing of album and cover art, with the black sun of Richard Serra's Out-of-Round X succinctly summing up drones-gone-supernova within. Working again with Attila Csihar and Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson recruited a small army of contributors for their most musically ambitious album yet, with horns, reeds, conch shell, and choir casting an auratic glow over charred guitars; the band's trademark infernal rumble took on a newfound spectral quality, drawing unexpected connections between black metal and Ligeti. They sounded as undeniably, awesomely evil as ever, but there were also moments of pure, unabashed beauty to be found amidst it all, like dewy mountain springs scattered throughout a scorched landscape. The closing "Alice", a tribute to Alice Coltrane, went so far as to end on a major third, its spiraling ascendance having poked a head-sized hole through the seemingly impermeable canopy of gloom. --Philip Sherburne
30. Röyksopp
Junior
[Astralwerks]
Junior was 2009's pre-eminent 2001 album: an energetic and undeniably big dance record, crafted by a largely invisible production team pulling from all corners of the pop universe. Just under the tweaked techno-disco veneer established by the "Do That Stuff" sampling "Happy Up Here" and Karin Dreijer-Andersson's diva turn on "This Must Be It", though, lurks a sense of ambivalence and regret about life lived in and with technology. On "Vision One", over a wickedly mangled version of the "Too High" bassline, Anneli Drecker laments the encroachment of concrete and steel into her natural surroundings. Robyn bickers with a cold, mechanistic lover on "The Girl and the Robot", and Lykke Li offers a remarkably affecting cyborg's lament on the billowing "Miss It So Much", longing for the simple pleasures of "a dial to turn" and "a key to hold." For all its focus on the mechanical, Junior works so well because it keeps focus on the all-too-human things that make us go. --Eric Harvey
29. Yo La Tengo
Popular Songs
[Matador]
The album begins with nearly six minutes of disco strings, ambient organ, and crashing drums. It ends with three tracks-- one nocturnal, one pastoral, and, of course, one rave-up-- that last at least nine minutes. There's a not-too-subtle nod to the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself", and another to the group's own "Cherry Chapstick" (which itself is a nod to "Sugarcube", which trainspotters can probably trace back to something else in their catalog). "Avalon or Someone Very Similar", is a fuzzed-out paisley-pop troop. On "By Two's", Georgia Hubley is a smoldering chanteuse, crooning atop a spacious bass line and haunting Casio drone. And on "When It's Dark", she's brushing her drums as the group cops a low-key Creedence pose. "Periodically Double or Triple", with its laissez-faire shuffle and Ira Kaplan's Eeyore-esque narration, is probably one of the most fun and silly tracks in the group's catalog; the smoke-filled McNew-sung "I'm on My Way", one of the most poignant and beautiful. So, yeah, all in all, Popular Songs is just the same old collection of minor miracles from a 25-year-old rock group comfortable enough in their skin to seek out all sorts of itches to scratch. Here's to many, many more. --David Raposa
28. Micachu and the Shapes
Jewellery
[Rough Trade]
Mica Levi sings about searching for "that nonsense sound" in "Golden Phone", the centerpiece of her debut album as the leader of Micachu and the Shapes, and the rest of the record is like an elaborate sculpture crafted from various noises accrued in her quest for the perfect clatter. The music may be composed of unlikely timbres and rough edges, but Levi's passion for atonality does not get in the way of her knack for melody and rhythm, resulting in one of year's-- or hell, the decade's-- most atypical collection of pop tunes. The alluring oddness of this music is not limited to its surface, which contrasts lo-fi textures with smooth tones to often discomfiting effect, but in the way cuts like "Vulture", "Calculator", and "Ship" blend disparate influences (punk, grime, folk, R&B, music from outer space and/or the future) into a listening experience that is vaguely familiar, somewhat baffling, totally fascinating, and uniquely pleasurable. --Matthew Perpetua
27. Various Artists
5: Five Years of Hyperdub
[Hyperdub]
It's been a couple of years since we saw a label comp as moment-defining as Hyperdub's 5, a 2xCD set that chronicles the UK's fevered urban dance music. 5 can rightly take its place next to Run the Road and DFA's Compilation #2 as convenient summations of well contained, massively creative music scenes. And if those two compilations sit dusty on your shelf or sound a bit dated these days, it's only because their affectations have seeped into so much of our listening in the interim.
Expect the same from Hyperdub's lead actors, pirate radio denizens with plenty of room to grow: Several of the best tracks on 5 were turned in by artists (Joker, Darkstar) without proper albums to their names. 5 gives us the chance to reflect on some music that has frequently felt important in the last five years, but it's here in equal part for what it promises for the future. --Andrew Gaerig
26. Bon Iver
Blood Bank EP
[Jagjaguwar]
Bon Iver's Justin Vernon has a knack for evocative storytelling, sprinkling his work with tiny, telling details-- "Then the snow started falling, we were stuck out in your car/ You were rubbing both my hands, chewing on a candy bar," he coos in "Blood Bank"-- and the Blood Bank EP, his 4-song follow-up to For Emma, Forever Ago, is a soft, hazy homage to the isolation (and, on occasion, the mercilessness) of deep winter. It's not all despair and icicles-- "Summer comes, to multiply," he promises on the shimmering "Babys"-- but much of its beauty is in its desolation. Vernon's liberal use of Auto-Tune on closer "Woods" flummoxed some fans-- is there any greater sacrilege for a folk singer?-- but its deconstruction of Vernon's falsetto into a bizarre series of wheezes and yowls helped the song feel like a cold, sustained wind-- the exact kind of thing that pushes you through to spring. --Amanda Petrusich
25. DJ Quik and Kurupt
BlaQKout
[Mad Science]
DJ Quik is a So Cal rapper and producer best known for never getting the recognition his fans think he deserves. Kurupt is a Philly-born, L.A.-bred rapper who struck out on both coasts. Both are on the 40 side of 35.
Quik's most inspired lyric on BlaQKout is, "Drinkin' something that I can't pronounce/ And I'm'a spill each and every ounce"; Kurupt's is the chorus of "9x's Outta 10", a 35-word Chinese finger trap where he not only explains the concept of momentum, he illustrates it. They seem to agree on the issue of girls.
A handful of bizarre metaphors aside, Quik is humble at the mic-- he wants to hug the block, get tipsy, get by, and get laid. Behind the boards, he's more complex and ambitious. Party music isn't just his vibe, it's his art-- he's as interested in challenging himself as he is entertaining his audience. But BlaQKout feels like there's nothing riding on it, which is part of what makes it great. It's just two dudes hanging out. --Mike Powell
24. Bill Callahan
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
[Drag City]
There are all these great takeaway quotes on Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, and yet it's a line from the live-action version of The Tick that really nails it: "Alone is an unfortunate predicament. Lone is an aesthetic choice." Eagle is almost certainly colored by the dissolution of a relationship, but it refuses to be Bill Callahan's "breakup album." Instead, it wonderfully reveals itself as a solitary but patient and purposeful search for "ordinary things" obscured by metaphysical uncertainties like God ("Faith/Void") and dreams (the dryly hilarious "Eid Ma Clack Shaw"). So much of Eagle owes to what lies just beyond the surface-- the creamery-rich Countrypolitan orchestration underscores the hints of drone and dissonance that give "My Friend" its mesmeric locomotion and "All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast" its cataclysmic climax. Likewise, Callahan's sober vocals underscore the expressiveness he gives to his curious mantras-- "I am a child of linger on," "If only you could stop your heartbeat for one heartbeat," "I used to be sort of blind and now I can sort of see"-- an unusually affecting statement of reassurance as he forgoes easy answers in the quest of real ones. --Ian Cohen
23. Memory Tapes
Seek Magic
[Sincerely Yours/Acéphale/Something in Construction]
By all accounts, Seek Magic should have merely been a next-step culmination of the sounds New Jerseyite Dayve Hawk has released as cut-and-paste project Memory Cassette and the dancefloor-inclined Weird Tapes. (And no bad thing if that's what it had been-- each has had its name on some excellent tracks.) Indeed, Hawk retained traces of the best qualities of those creations-- a pitch-perfect mix of beatific dance-pop structures and austere slices of nostalgia. And yet Memory Tapes' debut is no Frankenstein's monster. With Hawk in full command of a surprisingly confident, fully-formed pop sound that ranges from the funk of "Stop Talking" to the resplendent new wave grandeur of "Bicycle", it's a monster full stop. --Zach Kelly
22. Wild Beasts
Two Dancers
[Domino]
Few acts use their band name as a conceptual framework for their music like UK quartet Wild Beasts, whose falsettoed frontman, Hayden Thorpe, is the very embodiment of id unhinged, singing of bloodlust and carnality in no uncertain (and uncensored) terms. But where the baroque'n'roll of the band's 2008 debut Limbo, Panto played up the absurdity, Two Dancers is defined by its austerity. Two Dancers sees the band evolve into a two-headed beast with the emergence of Tom Fleming as Thorpe's more reserved but no less devious wingman-- what makes the album's two-part title-track suite so unsettling is not simply the first-person account of gang rape graphically described within, but the stone-faced nonchalance with which Fleming delivers it. --Stuart Berman
21. Neko Case
Middle Cyclone
[Anti-]
Arguably Neko Case's best album in a decade, Middle Cyclone plays like the culmination of all her guiding eccentricities, as if Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood were just warm-ups for the real thing. Here Case sings about amorous storm fronts, menacing red tides, truly killer whales, alarming magpies, and other fauna that manifest particular conditions of the human soul. She's singing about common alt- and mainstream country themes-- broken hearts, wandering spirits, chilling loneliness, the nature of nature-- but no one bends traditional Americana sounds to fit her eccentricities so perfectly, getting at these issues through tangential songwriting and force-of-nature vocals. Plus, with Middle Cyclone Case accomplished three undeniable superlatives: the coolest album cover of 2009, the most bizarre album closer (30 minutes of looped frog noises), and the loveliest love song, no matter that it was told from the point of view of a tornado in love with a lost child. --Stephen M. Deusner
20. Real Estate
Real Estate
[Woodsist]
Real Estate roll and tumble along, making a fizzy, fuzzy kiddie pool splash of rock. Whatever, man. Their ethic is lo-fi because they can't afford a nice studio, not because it's fashionable. (Still, it didn't hurt this year.) But what makes their dream-like debut special is its lack of guile. It has no reservations about what it is. The band hails from suburban New Jersey, a fact not hidden throughout the album, and it desperately wants you to remember or learn what it's like to grow up there: Swimming pools, trips to the beach, flat soda, mild angst. "Fake Blues" is hardly a tragedy in this blessed life, but at least they know they can't mine their backstory for anything. "I've got to find a reason to write this song," Martin Courtney sings, knowing so much about himself and yet nothing at all. Mathew Mondanile's guitar is like a sundial, facing up and open to the light, a refreshing refraction of his diffuse work as Ducktails. Telling the truth shouldn't seem so pretty, and the suburbs shouldn't seem so harmless. But maybe it ain't such a bad place. --Sean Fennessey
19. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
[Slumberland]
Their indie pop sonic lineage is obvious enough, but the Pains of Being Pure at Heart also slot nicely with the Strokes, Interpol, or Vampire Weekend-- precocious New York kids who also made it look too easy. Hell, even their name is pretty much perfect. If I were in a struggling band, I might just hate them on principle. But the hype a boutique label like Slumberland can spark doesn't make you one of 2009's breakout bands on its own-- a killer record to back it up does. And while Pains' fuzzy production and sparkly guitar jangle made them timely, the energetic-but-effortless, bright-but-melancholic hooks of "Stay Alive", "Come Saturday", and "Young Adult Friction" are something closer to timeless. Their excellent follow-up EP Higher Than the Stars continued the band's exploration into early MBV harmonies, C86 jangle, and Sarah Records lyricism, but regardless of the luminaries they conjure, the toughest standards the Pains of Being Pure at Heart might have to top are the ones they've set themselves. --Ian Cohen
18. Atlas Sound
Logos
[Kranky]
While it has plenty of watery drips and washed-out backdrops, Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound project can also be very blunt. Like his work with Deerhunter, he places gothic horror side-by-side with gorgeous guitar riffs and sonic textures, a disarming combination. But Logos makes it a point to get dark. Guilt and suffering are commonplace; it's suffocating to enter the album's lyrical landscape of cold lights, grey dawns, and regrets. The simple line "my halo burned a hole in the sky" is stigmatizing.
Logos is another turn at making pop music wrapped in sonic gauze, yet all the wounds remain exposed. Just look at its cover; Cox's own frail, caved-in chest contrasts with a face obscured in a blinding light. But the aura and the album are also revealing and redemptive. "Shelia" spins an elderly couple's burial into something poppy and romantic. Saints aren't born saints, Laetitia Sadier implies in "Quick Canal", later cooing that "wisdom is learned." Perhaps it's all about moving toward change. As the refrain says on "Walkabout", the album's propulsive and sunny highlight, "Forget the things you've left behind/ Through looking back you may go blind." --Patrick Sisson
17. The Very Best
Warm Heart of Africa
[Green Owl]
The Very Best provide almost too convenient a model for the discussion of broad sociocultural concepts like globalization and the Internet's power to bring people together. Here's a group seemingly operating without any national or idealistic barriers, whose infectious dance-pop, the result of a free exchange of Western and African sounds, simply couldn't have reached as many listeners, say, five or 10 years ago as it has today.
But what sometimes gets lost in that discussion is the sheer heat that Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit are able to bring to the stage and on record. Example: On a Monday night in Washington, DC-- a pretty tightly clenched city-- I watched these guys, armed with little more than a few samplers, turn a crowded bar into a good-natured, sweat-drenched riot. That same energy carries over to Warm Heart of Africa, where Mwamwaya in particular is in rare form, singing with such passion and pleasure that it's difficult not to share in his enjoyment. A senior thesis-worthy example of pop globalism, sure, but also something much more basic and human: music as joy. --Joe Colly
16. Antony and the Johnsons
The Crying Light
[Secretly Canadian]
"Watching Kazuo onstage," writes Yoshito Ohno, the son of the pioneering Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, who's pictured on the cover of Antony and the Johnson's third LP, The Crying Light, "we tend to miss such fleeting facial expressions, as more often than not we're captivated by his movements." The same holds for listening to Antony Hegarty. His radiant, amorphous voice and the transgender identity of which he's so often sung tend to dominate commentary. So often with Hegarty, the intricacies are overlooked for the obvious-- a big, gay, histrionic singer telling us about it all in a startlingly soulful feminine air.
But The Crying Light-- the first album Hegarty wrote outside of the queer New York art circles in which he was once an underground impresario-- deserves to alter that dialogue. Pained but hopeful, Hegarty expands his reach as a thinker and writer, examining his relationship to a wounded world and to abandoned images of masculinity. His interactions-- with his family, his environment, a lover, a friend-- serve as the old solipsism's stand-in. Extravagant but exact, the backing ensemble meets Antony's ambition with touches of rock and soul bravado and, more importantly, subtlety beneath the surface. The Crying Light tells its story in repeated, obsessive listens. In doing so, it suggests that Hegarty has a lot left to say. --Grayson Currin
15. Japandroids
Post-Nothing
[Unfamiliar/Polyvinyl]
Japandroids have a freaking wind machine, which they use to great effect on stage. It's a perfect nod to what this Vancouver band delivered on its debut album: eight deliriously enthusiastic garage-rock songs about girls, growing up, and going away from home. Rather than mask their emotions in reverb or tape hiss, Japandroids shout slogans, often in unison, over thrumming guitar chords and chaotic drumming. From the rambunctious ambivalence of "The Boys Are Leaving Town" to the slo-mo emo of "I Quit Girls", the energy level rarely wavers. Raging against the certain knowledge that we won't know what we've got 'til it's gone, "Young Hearts Spark Fire" sums up Post-Nothing's sound in four words. While Neon Indian, Washed Out, and their homemade psychedelic electro-pop peers were getting accused of wallowing in childhood, Japandroids captured the recklessness of youth-- and the abject terror of not knowing what comes after it. --Marc Hogan
14. Neon Indian
Psychic Chasms
[Lefse]
2009 was the year Ariel Pink became the most influential figure in indie pop, which is too bad because it's the first year since 2003 that he didn't reissue anything. Of all the records classified as glo-fi, none were as confident or well defined as Psychic Chasms-- which is to say that none sounded so deformed.
This brilliance of Alan Palomo's skeletal soul-pop is found in its atmosphere. I've heard people say Psychic Chasms sounds like an old cassette. It doesn't. It sounds like the idea of an old cassette, in the same way pre-faded jeans look like the idea of jeans that have been worn for a decade. It's one of the reasons Psychic Chasms sounds so defiantly current: It's the aesthetic of decay taking on a life of its own.
Naturally, Palomo's touchy about "craft": "I really hope the medium by which someone writes a song isn't the only thing the song has going for it," he told us earlier this year. Well, it's not the only thing, but it's what makes his music stand out immediately. That his melodies fight their way through the humid mess of laser-beam noises and sound effects-- well, that's what made it stand out months later. --Mike Powell
13. St. Vincent
Actor
[4AD]
Marry Me established Annie Clark as a coolly confident visionary. Actor, the second album from St. Vincent, is where that vision congeals into formidable shape. From Technicolor film scores to abrasive art-rock, Clark takes us to her version of Oz, over the rainbow and out the other side, where swelling strings mingle with jagged but precise guitar leads, and splendor gives way to dark menace with nary a warning. In fact, so fully realized is the sound of St. Vincent that it's sometimes too easy to overlook Clark's quirky and slightly uneasy character studies. At the same time, her deceptively unaffected but still upfront persona takes the focus away from her inimitable off-kilter arrangements and inventive musicianship. In other words, it's a bundle of contradictions unlike many others, so nearly sui generis that it's impossible to guess where she'll go next, other than even further up, up, and away. --Josh Klein
12. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It's Blitz!
[Interscope]
With Karen O off scoring Where the Wild Things Are and rumored to be working on a solo album-- not to mention the rumblings of inter-personal discord-- it's amazing that this record exists at all, let alone that it turned out as successfully as it did. But It's Blitz! isn't the work of a band in its death throes. It's a band on top of its game. Whatever Karen O, Nick Zinner, and Brian Chase touched turned to white-hot flame: the glistening new wave of the opening one-two punch of "Zero" and "Heads Will Roll", the itchy disco of "Dragon Queen", the tenderness of "Skeletons", "Hysteric", and "Little Shadow", ballads that often reached the emotional heights (and depths) of YYY's career-best "Maps". Which isn't to say that the garage rock urgency that made the band famous is missing. Rather, it has been channeled into something bigger, bolder, and more multi-faceted. It's Blitz! is the sound of Yeah Yeah Yeahs ascending the throne of longevity, showing off a previously uncharacteristic versatility that could keep them on magazine covers and at the top of festival bills for years to come. --Amy Phillips
11. Fuck Buttons
Tarot Sport
[ATP]
Fuck Buttons' second album shows their first up as a tease: Street Horrrsing flirted with accessibility then pulled back to squalls and screams. But the contrast was part of their prickly appeal, even to the noise-agnostic: by ditching those snarlier elements, Tarot Sport risked seeming tepid. Instead it leapfrogs likeable and ends up full-on generous-- a rolling, open-armed stadium noise experience with beauty pushing through the fuzz on every track. Fuck Buttons understand that scale doesn't have to simply intimidate-- it can also comfort. The huge slow melodies and layers on "Olympians" and "Surf Solar" pile satisfyingly up, block on primary colored block, like a child's building game at cosmic scale. Not that it's all so monumental-- "Phantom Limb" shows the band remembers how to jab as well as swell, there's a martial sadness to the more subdued "The Lisbon Maru", and when the grandeur gets too much there's always some fascinating incidental texture to lose yourself in. Recruiting Andrew Weatherall to produce the record was an inspired decision-- the dance music veteran knows a bit about slow-release euphoria, and Tarot Sport is an unlikely, rich collision between post-rock's sweep and house music's detail and heart. --Tom Ewing
10. Girls
Album
[True Panther/Matador]
In the original video for "Lust for Life", Girls singer-songwriter Christopher Owens does a little "Subterranean Homesick Blues" routine. Dressed in a stripey bathrobe, he sits in the middle of a cluttered bedroom and flips scrawled messages that range from witty ("you wouldn't be so stupid if you were Randy Newman") to confessional ("Maria-- I'm sorry"). Along the way, he unveils one Sharpie'd piece of printer paper that stands out: "believe in me." While many bands hid their ambition and/or emotion behind fuzz, fussiness, and psychedelics this year, Girls took full responsibility for their potential impact on the hearts and whims of young adults besot by that perennial, perilous question: "Now what?"
Owens doesn't offer an answer, exactly. His solution takes the form of inclusive understanding; he's a mess, and he's just trying to figure some shit out, too. Lots of people have compared Owens to Elvis Costello, and their voices do share a high-pitched timbre. But Owens doesn't snarl or bark-- when he calls himself a "big bad mean motherfucker," he's in on the joke. A more apt godfather may be Paul Westerberg, another gut-spilling King of Nothing with his eye on transcendence. "Hey, are you satisfied?" asked Westerberg on the Replacements' "Unsatisfied", possibly the best song about being frustrated with your own ennui ever written. It's down, but not done. With the seven-minute album centerpiece "Hellhole Ratrace", Girls create an equally rousing sequel. "I don't wanna cry my whole life through/ I wanna do some laughing too," howls Owens. I believe him. --Ryan Dombal
9. Fever Ray
Fever Ray
[Mute/Rabid]
When the first singles for the Knife singer Karin Dreijer Andersson's Fever Ray dropped, it was clear that her solo project was inscrutable, even by the standards of someone who considers Venetian plague masks a cornerstone of her wardrobe. The first impression is that atmosphere trumps narrative; bass notes, simple rhythms, and stark synth chords creep like a rolling fog while a cast of pitch-shifted voices emerge from dark corners of the woods or darker recesses of the mind. But Andersson's use of chilling childhood imagery and warped lyrics, filled with morphing perspectives that cultivate curiosity and raise questions that may never be answered, make it addictive. Who knew dishwasher tablets could be so unsettling?
What's made Andersson's work even better is how her videos and performances amplify the music's sense of dread and mystery. Does the dirty rave dancer on a diving board know she's being watched ("When I Grow Up")? Why is the Miss Havisham figure in a silver dress cavorting with farm animals ("Seven")? Are they the same person? It's deliberate, theatrical smoke and mirrors, constant reinvention, and a David Lynch-like veneer of unseen danger that invite audience reinterpretation. The more material this unique artist releases, the less any of it makes sense. --Patrick Sisson
8. Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
[Loyauté/Glassnote]
The banality of evil's got nothing on the banality of music stardom-- not in 2009, anyway. Consider: Frumptastic Scottish virgin breaks debut-LP sales records; cherub-cheeked Idol appropriates rock hedonism; and Phoenix, the decade-old French pop outfit known to longtime Pitchfork readers as trendsetters in "the sparsely-attended arena of new soft-rock," become, well, sorta famous.
And it's richly deserved: From its giddy opening salvo to a finale that makes chippy guitars and keyboards set to harpsichord seem as natural a pairing as drums-and-bass, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is a joy of geeky craftsmanship, irony-free cliché, and simple animal pleasures. No accident that the album pits Franz Liszt's celebrity against Mozart's musicianship, only to expose it as a false dichotomy. Or that Phoenix licensed its effervescent jam "1901" to an ad for the Cadillac SRX-- a crossover vehicle. For a local-boys-done-good victory performance this autumn, "Take Away Shows" auteur Vincent Moon staged the band at the site of that most hackneyed of package-tour icons, the Eiffel-frickin-Tower. But Moon knew what he was about. Bystanders-- foreign tourists, a beaming bride and groom-- are at first tentative, confused by the camera crew converging on these ordinary looking buskers. Then Phoenix reach the crackerjack chorus, shedding their street clothes for rockstar-superhero duds. Oh how banal, and utterly exceptional. --Amy Granzin
7. Bat For Lashes
Two Suns
[Astralwerks/Parlophone]
There is no separating love from fantasy on Two Suns. Every track, from the mythic grandeur of "Glass" to the operatic sorrow of "The Big Sleep", revels in impossible desire and dark romance, resulting in an album that is alternately exhilarating and emotionally exhausting. Whether singing about infatuation on "Daniel", heartbreak on "Moon and Moon", or yearning for affection on "Sleep Alone", Natasha Khan invests her songs with the heightened drama of epic fiction without sacrificing nuance or emotional depth. Her darkest fantasies are isolated in the persona of a toxic yet fragile narcissist named Pearl, who in the album's brilliant centerpiece "Siren Song" delivers a line so devastating in its terrible irony-- "My name is Pearl and I love you the best way I know how"-- that it can be hard to listen without wanting to somehow shake the man she is addressing and beg him to run away. Much of the record's seductive allure is owed to Khan's gift for melody and evocative atmosphere, but ultimately the most compelling element is her voice, which is as technically stunning as it is expressive. Her passionate performances keep the songs from descending too far into misery, and place the emphasis on the beautiful romance in the music rather than all the melancholy and tragedy. --Matthew Perpetua
6. Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
[Warp]
You can tell a lot about a band from how its members line up on stage. Stick the drummer in back, place the singer in the front, and you might as well wear t-shirts that say "Generic Band." Not Grizzly Bear, who go four across in their live show, a demonstration of band democracy that suits their elegant, interlocking sound. Credit the friendly songwriting competition between Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen, which-- while the band is most praised for their intricate arrangements-- bloomed here into songs pliable enough to be reworked by Neon Indian and covered by Michael McDonald. The combination made for the most thrilling one-two opening punch of the year-- the onrushing storm of "Southern Point" bleeding into the psychedelic stomp of "Two Weeks"-- and it continues to pay dividends throughout the album. And in the spirit of equal praise, the double-Christopher rhythm section is hardly mere time-keeping, adding the off-kilter crunch to "Fine For Now" and "I Live With You" that prevents GB's ghostly sound from evaporating. In a year where abrasive was the In texture, Grizzly Bear's warm sound was a welcome respite, a sepia-toned tapestry that could have been weaved only by four equal partners. --Rob Mitchum
5. Raekwon
Only Built for Cuban Linx... Pt. II
[H2O/EMI]
At a time when many critics have mistaken hip-hop's state of creative flux for the genre's final flatline, it seems simultaneously fitting and frustrating that a sequel to a 14-year-old album is one of the few things everyone can come close to agreeing upon. The long-awaited successor to Raekwon's groundbreaking solo debut doesn't push the art of hip-hop any further outside the boundaries of classic 1990s East Coast lyricism or production-- in fact, it doesn't point the way to an exciting new future or direction for the genre much at all. It's an album for people who are comfortable with the way rap sounded in the mid-90s, a work of high-caliber Wu-Tang fan service that acts as a 71-minute buffer zone between the listener and the splintering, agitated state of rap in 2009.
But OB4CL2 doesn't need to push things forward-- it builds upwards, using old foundations to create a permanent monument. Whether Rae, Ghost, Deck, RZA, and the rest of the album's star-studded cast represent a bygone era or not becomes irrelevant once the atmosphere sinks in: this is one of those records where everyone seems hellbent on proving why they're still here and why they still matter. The stories of betrayal, despair, remembrance, and celebration that they tell are relentlessly gripping, and set to the most impressive collection of beats gathered in one place all year; six of the contributing producers can lay claim to being all-time greats. It might not sound like the future, but it'll always be worth going back to. --Nate Patrin
4. The Flaming Lips
Embryonic
[Warner Bros.]
"Experiments" are great, but they matter most when their results can be put into practice. In retrospect, a lot of the Flaming Lips' quarter-century of intermittently inspired fucking around seems like preparatory work for this assured, forceful, savagely dark album, and for the way their cracked sense of humor glows through its darkness. This is a double album because it's heavy, an hour and a quarter of superabundance whose omnipresent digital distortion gives it heft like a jagged slab of lead, a mammoth pile of mammoth songs that offer more than it's possible to take in on a dozen listens because they're written around their sound design. The prettiest sounds the Lips can make are spot-welded to the ugliest, and one mix after another focuses squarely on "errors": the sheet of gristly static that drifts from "Sagittarius Silver Announcement" onto "Worm Mountain", the slowly hemorrhaging guitar solo in the middle of "Powerless", Karen O's priceless vérité aside at the end of "I Can Be a Frog". And a lot of the album's existential bleakness is also as funny as anything Wayne Coyne has ever offered up--this is an astrological celebration whose concluding ritual chant goes "Yes yes yes/ Killin' the ego tonight." --Douglas Wolk
3. The xx
The xx
[Young Turks]
Sensual music is so rarely about dialogue. The xx make lovers' rock, yes, but they make it for lovers who can't help but talk about their love. Diving rhythms and creeping basslines keep tensions high, buoying traces of Young Marble Giants and Gainsbourg, while guitarist Romy Madley Croft and bassist Oliver Sim trade opaque declarations like, "I'm frozen by desire, this is the choice I make." But The xx, an album that billows under the sheets but never reveals what's underneath, is far from plaintive. Theirs is a secretive conversation, the sort you might have after sex, or on a train, or at a coat check at night's end. On "VCR", Sim and Croft "watch things on VCR." What things? Pornography? Home movies? "Entourage"? "You, you just know. You just do," they purr back and forth to each other. The mystery is alluring and maddening--are the two a real couple? What have they done to each other? The dialogue overlaps near the end of the album's centerpiece, "Crystalised", as the two breathlessly explain themselves, ignoring their mate. And then, at the end, they find themselves back in harmony. Like any good relationship. --Sean Fennessey
2. Dirty Projectors
Bitte Orca
[Domino]
One of the most heartening-- and least expected-- success stories of the year was Bitte Orca's fearsomely complex, occasionally grating, and way-beyond-arch prog-pop, with its nods to twee glee club harmonies and rigorous avant-composition managing to impact the NPR-ified indie rock landscape of 2009. It helped, of course, that Bitte Orca contains a handful of the Dirty Projectors' most accessible songs yet, offering predictably tweaked but still recognizable takes on R&B and folk. Sure, there's always Dave Longstreth's literally and figuratively cracked falsetto and the band's jones for out-of-control ululations, both of which mean DPs will probably always remain at least a little divisive. But Bitte Orca is whimsical (and gorgeous) enough to make the "difficult" bits seem less like work than glorious play. --Jess Harvell
1. Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion
[Domino]
When Animal Collective traded up from FatCat Records to Domino in 2007, the label was flush with the recent successes of Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand-- chart-topping artists that presumably helped underwrite the label's more outré signings, like Kieran Hebden, Juana Molina and, well, Animal Collective. Even as their 2007 Domino debut, Strawberry Jam, dialed down the textural density and brought Avey Tare and Panda Bear's vocal melodies higher in the mix, the cleaner, chiseled presentation seemed only to accentuate the band's intrinsic weirdness.
So how the hell did Merriweather Post Pavilion-- an album closer in spirit to the sub-aquatic psychedelia of 2005's Feels and Panda Bear's 2007 solo Person Pitch than its predecessor-- wind up in the Billboard Top 20 and outsell both the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand's most recent albums in North America? That mystery is ultimately the most wonderful thing about the album. Unlike so many indie-rock crossover artists before them, Animal Collective did not breach the mainstream by cleaning up their act, or adopting classic-rock conventions, or scoring a strategic soundtrack or iPod-commercial placement. And, above all, they did little to formalize their defining mercurial quality.
Almost everything we hear on Merriweather Post Pavilion has some antecedent in the Animal Collective canon. But, true to the band's science-lab-like stage set-up, years of experimentation have yielded a formula that mixes those core elements-- psychedelic pop, analog electronica, West African rhythms, echoplexed dub ambience-- in perfect proportions, producing a work that gleefully teeters on the line between accessibility and inscrutability. And the evolution is as much emotional as musical, the excitable yelps of old translated into tender, sincere declarations of love, friendship, and familial duty. At the time of its release last January, the title of Merriweather Post Pavilion felt like a fitfully nostalgic tribute to the Maryland amphitheater that hosted bygone A.C. heroes like the Grateful Dead. But now, it feels less evocative of distant teenage memories than a very real prophecy of the kind of venues Animal Collective could soon find themselves playing. --Stuart Berman