2009

There are records that you hear in your life that become inextricably linked to a specific time and place. Hearing Vacilando Territory Blues for the first time in February 2009, five days before the birth of my twin girls, gives it a distinct advantage when held up against the other great albums on this list - sentimentality. As much as I adore Farm or Out Into The Snow, those feelings just don’t come close to the ones I have for this humble little folk-blues record by a guy best known (at the time) as the drummer in Fleet Foxes. I just can’t hear songs like “Firstborn”, “Above All Men”, or “Someone With Child” without being immediately brought back to the first days of fatherhood. Which is kind of ridiculous considering that much of Vacilando Territory Blues is made up of weary, whispered folk songs whose overall mood, while certainly celebrating life (as opposed to Year In The Kingdom’s meditations on death and what comes after it), wouldn’t be confused with “joyful” in a thousand years. When he does employ fuller arrangements the songs are just as stark, merely louder. Regardless, there’s a deeper connection here for me that won’t ever fade - every time I put it on I feel like I did on the morning my little world tripled in size. Fatherhood. Holy shit. “I don’t want to live again cause I don’t want this life to end” - yeah Josh, that about sums it up. But honestly, take away the personal affiliation and what’s left is a soul-shaking album with a cohesive mood that’s thirteen great songs deep. The most moving, most beautiful album to find my ears in a long, long time.

Yeah, 2007’s Beyond signaled a startling return to form from the original cast of Dinosaur Jr. It was a record steeped in their early, sludgy SST sound and housed a lot of Mascis’s best songs in a decade and a half. But Farm, the even better second coming of the second coming, finds the band leaning more towards their early 90s days (my personal favorite DJr. era). It was then that they were alt. rock’s best near-miss on the strength of the slacker anthems and stoned guitar-god heroics of Green Mind and Where You Been. That latter album seems to be Farm’s best point of reference, with the band playing tight, searing mid-tempo crunchers for the better part of an hour.

The album revives the dense crime-world storytelling and cinematic atmosphere of classic Wu-Tang Clan records without sounding like it's just recycling old tropes. Raekwon raps with incredible detail and confidence, making street narratives feel textured and lived rather than mythologized. Producers like The Alchemist and J Dilla provide murky, soulful beats that deepen the album’s atmosphere, and Ghost deserves the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Out Into The Snow is Simon Joyner’s 12th full-length record since debuting way back in 1993, and it finds his songwriting talent finally peaking. A highly impressionistic writer, he matches the creativity of his words with acoustic guitar and piano-driven arrangements that, on the surface, are not dissimilar to some of his obvious inspirations - Townes Van Zandt and On The Beach-era Neil Young. Though it may recall these classics, Out Into the Snow is a quietly intense album that stands entirely on its own. The most overlooked album of the year.

The album moves patiently between hypnotic jams, gentle pop songs, noise experiments, and intimate ballads without ever feeling disjointed. Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew play with the confidence of a band completely comfortable following curiosity wherever it leads. Tracks like “Here to Fall” and “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven” feel deeply relaxed but emotionally attentive. It’s music made by artists who understand that subtlety can be endlessly rewarding.

Embryonic is a thrillingly excessive display of warped, druggy songcraft and musicianship. It’s the band walking the fearless freak-walk instead of just talking it up with a megaphone, balloons, and a light show. Since The Soft Bulletin they’ve spent the better part of 10 years making a major label’s idea of “weird alternative” music (granted there's a lot of great stuff mixed in there), but on Embryonic The Flaming Lips sound like a band again; albeit one that’s been hanging out on Mars and listening a lot of Can, Zappa, Beefheart, and Miles Davis.

There Is No Enemy finds Built To Spill back in the business of being awesome. While it may be just a banger or 2 shy of their mid-to-late 90s classics, it is their best effort since Keep It Like A Secret, and comes full of the expansive guitar jams and skewed alt-pop Doug Martsch & co. made their name on in the first place.

The album unfolds slowly and confidently, letting strings, horns, and spacious arrangements frame Bill Callahan’s dry, deeply human writing. His songs about love, aging, masculinity, and emotional restraint feel wiser because they avoid dramatic overstatement entirely. “Jim Cain” and “Too Many Birds” reveal how much emotional power he can generate from understatement alone. The record feels calm on the surface while carrying enormous emotional depth underneath.

The album transforms experimental pop into something ecstatic and communal. Looped electronics, layered harmonies, and huge rhythmic builds create songs that feel constantly in motion. That stylistic decision works particularly well within the album’s recurring themes of fatherhood and the struggle to overcome limitations to provide for your kids (see “My Girls”, especially). Tare and Panda Bear balance childlike wonder with real emotional yearning on tracks like “My Girls” and “Brother Sport.” For years before Merriweather, Animal Collective churned out whimsical sing-alongs (“Grass”, “Leaf House”, “Peacebone”, etc) that seemed tailor-made for blindly shouting along with. It wasn’t until they started voicing adult concerns that they truly exploded with a whole new generation of indie-kids.

The Earth Is Black is a strikingly personal album from an artist spilling his guts on the effects of deep fear, religious doubt, and nightmare-induced sleep deprivation. While that may seem like soporific inspiration for a rock n’ roll record, singer-songwriter Vincent Cacchione never puts his owns demons before the good of the song. The Earth Is Black is thematically bleak, but Cacchione surrounds his words and melodies with a crackin’ band that’s equally capable of anthemic glam-folk (“I Am An Animal”), Ray Davies-like shuffles (“Time Gets Away And Has Its Way With You”), and propulsive folk-rock sing-alongs (“The Lions”, “The Earth Is Black”). It’s all brought home by the album’s cathartic finale, “Night Terrors”, whose creeping tension is relieved only by the vulnerability in the vocals. From 2006-2009 I'd heard and written about a lot of New York’s up-and-coming talent - The Earth Is Black was the rabid animal at the front of the pack.

In an era when most bands using nostalgia as inspiration are going back to The Beach Boys or the synth-pop of 80’s new wave, Album looks back even further, recalling the 50s pop of your local “oldies” radio station more than anything else. The androgynous, Iggy Pop-quoting lead single, “Lust For Life” isn’t really a fair representation, sonically, of the album. Much of it is comprised of slow-building, self-pitying anthems that, like “Hellhole Ratrace”, suck you in and repeat their refrains like mantras until you can’t help but feel a strange sort of affinity.

The third LP from New Jersey’s Roadside Graves is a raucous journey through nearly every corner of American music. The album feels rooted in American folk and heartland rock traditions without sounding trapped by reverence for them. John Gleason writes with a bruised emotional clarity that makes songs about work, family, loss, and endurance feel personal rather than archetypal. Gleason’s ability to use simple details to reveal universal human truths makes him stand out as a songwriter, and the 6-piece band never fails to further bring those words to vivid life. Hell, just listen to “Ruby” and see for yourself.

Compared to his more expansive Vacilando Territory Blues, the 9-song Year In The Kingdom can come across as a somewhat minor offering. But listen carefully and you hear a fully developed batch of songs that whisper about mortality like a man who thinks about dying a lot. Tillman sounds like he’s consumed by this inevitability - offering ruminative insights over gorgeous, hymn-like arrangements. He’s on such a streak right now that even this, his second best album of 2009, tops nearly everything else I heard this year.

Kicking off an album with two of the year’s very best singles (“Lisztomania” and “1901”) is a sure way to get the rest of your songs ignored, but those who managed to stop hitting repeat before “Fences” heard the most consistent record yet from these slick French indie-rockers. Never ones to shy away from their obvious commercial ambitions, the clumsily titled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is a straight pop-rock album that’s, for lack of a better way to put it, un enfer de beaucoup d'amusement pour écouter.. Seriously I don’t know how anyone with five working senses could not enjoy the hell out of this record.

2009 was a breakthrough year for Dirty Projectors. First they were prominently featured on the terrific Dark Was The Night compilation on a song co-written with David Byrne. Then they dropped Bitte Orca, a surprisingly accessible album, to near-universal praise from critics. It deserved every bit of it - Bitte Orca is a kaleidoscopic art-pop thrill ride. Despite being masterminded by David Longstreth, the whole record is a truly collaborative effort, which is never more evident than on Amber Coffman’s star-turn lead vocal performance on “Stillness Is The Move” - one of 2009’s best songs.

Part Phil Spector wall of sound pop, part Jesus & Mary Chain feedback-fueled madness, part warped folk/country, Outside Love strings together some pretty disparate influences and coalesces them into a unified set of songs about the ups, downs, and middle grounds of love. Every song is top notch, but the hauntingly romantic “Vampire” never ceases to amaze me – it's my favorite song of the year.

Feral Harmonic is a raucous folk-rock record that, despite being predominantly the unaided work of The Appleseed Cast’s Chris Crisci, sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of friends as part of a drunken hootenanny. Every song is a winner, but the mess of acoustic guitars, in-your-face drums, careening horn section, and shout-along lyrics on “Little Bird Courage” really stands out to these ears.

What’s most apparent when listening to Bromst is that Deacon is at the peak of his creative powers - a madcap genius as both sound manipulator and traditional musician. Bromst is looong, but its kinetic energy hardly wavers. Simply put, this record is fucking righteous.

On their debut, London’s The xx create spellbinding, noirish little songs where the negative space between notes expresses as much emotion as the music and vocals. The starkly minimalist arrangements are impressive enough on their own, but combined with the chilled-out back and forth boy-girl vocals and mature, fully-realized songs far beyond what you’d expect from a bunch of kids in their early twenties adds up to one of the year’s strongest debuts.

Grizzly Bear’s elegant, painstakingly detailed third album is my favorite record they ever made. Their nuanced art-folk runs from sweeping, near-pop masterpieces like “Two Weeks” and “While You Wait For The Others” to cathartic, slow-building mood pieces like “Ready, Able” and “I Live With You”. Veckatimest is still every bit the “fucking stunning achievement” I called it way back when everyone only had their 128 kbps leaked copies.

The second solo album from the chief new pornographer was one of the most underrated and overlooked albums of the year. Yet again Newman proves himself to be this generation’s most skilled craftsmen of melodic indie-pop, churning out infectious, blissful tune after tune. The orchestral “There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve” and “Elemental” are two of his most beautiful songs yet, and “The Heartbreak Rides” continues his long string of terrific track 2’s. Seriously, check his back catalog and tell me how often track two isn't a banger...

A band with a lot going for them - looks, locale, buzz, youth, and a laundry list of influences that are cooler than your bands’. The thing that sets The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart apart though from the dozens of other similarly armed indie-rock outfits who were shot through the hype machine are the songs - a whole album’s worth of snappy potential singles that match melodic twee-pop with fuzzed-up shoegaze. One of the year’s brightest debuts.

The bittersweet indie-pop of these Scots is much the same on My Maudlin Career as it was on their 2006 classic, Let’s Get Out Of This Country. That means more reverbed, ringing guitar chords mixed with lush keyboards and Tracyanne Campbell’s unsinkable melodies. Listen to “French Navy” to be forever smitten.

The primordial garage-rock of Vancouver’s Japandroids hits with a combination of brute force and undeniable hooks. This duo may just be yelling about french kissing French girls and getting older and the tediousness of their hometown, but they do so with such conviction that you can’t help but hang on their every word. “Young Hearts Spark Fire” is one of the best angst-anthems I’ve heard in a long time, but Post Nothing is filled with 7 more songs that are its near equal.

The EP bridges the stark winter intimacy of the debut with the fuller, more expansive sound that would follow. Justin Vernon’s songwriting becomes more structurally ambitious while still preserving emotional fragility. The title track and “Woods” both revolve around repetition, but one blooms outward while the other collapses inward electronically. Even at only four songs, the EP feels emotionally complete.

Smith’s relocation from Brooklyn to Los Angeles has only intensified the jarring tales of consumerism, urban decay, and environmental corrosion that dominated his previous albums, Wintertower and Angry Earth. Cloud Pleaser is, to say the least, a bleak album that continues the trend - if there’s one prevailing theme at work here it’s probably about feeling disconnected from just about everyone and everything. But, ironically, Smith himself has never sounded as engaged as he does throughout these 10 songs. Dark beats, tape glitches, military march drums, jarring sound effects, ambient stretches, finger-picked acoustic guitars, and Smith’s nasal, sing-speak vocals coalesce into a seamless whole - the best album yet from a young artist whose grim worldview continues to inspire stunning songs.