So, this was going to be the year when I finally got my act together and published a nice bunch of reviews of my favorite albums of the year by the end of the year. Turns out it’s not going to happen, as I got dumped on this December with snow, work, family stuff, and, most recently, preparing to move. So, no plethora of album reviews for you, but I will try to do better next year. I figured the least I could do is put together some lists of favorites, even if I can’t provide much of any context, description, or justification for my choices. Here are my favorite albums of 2009, arranged in an arbitrary manner most convenient to my purposes.
Fifteen Favorites:
- Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
- Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
- Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
- M. Ward: Hold Time
- Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
- Woods: Songs of Shame
- Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
- The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
- Passion Pit: Manners
- Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
- Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
- Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
- Girls: Album
- Atlas Sound: Logos
- Ganglians: Monster Head Room
Five EPs:
- Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
- Abe Vigoda: Reviver
- Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
- Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
- Bon Iver: Blood Bank
A Trio of Great Rock Albums:
- The Dead Weather: Horehound
- Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
- Sonic Youth: The Eternal
Two Magic Albums:
- Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
- Memory Tapes: Seek Magic
A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)
- Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
- Dan Deacon: Bromst
- Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
- Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
- Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
- Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
- Mos Def: The Ecstatic
- Small Black: Small Black
- Wavves: Wavves
- Wilco: Wilco (the album)
Enjoy.
Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time. I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.
Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com. They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it. I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music. You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album). I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site. I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.
Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!
Cameron is an aimless, sarcastic stoner who is alienated from his family and has no real friends of which to speak. When he starts having hallucinations and loses control of his body a couple of times, everyone assumes he must be using hallucinogenic drugs. Not true: after getting fired from Buddha Burger, getting suspended from school, being forced into therapy by his parents, and having a run-in with a flaming toaster oven, he is finally diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (a.k.a. “Mad Cow”) disease. It will deteriorate his brain and kill him.