Todd’s Favorite Albums of 2009

The problem with maintaining a digital music library is that it gets so easy to acquire that there’s hardly time left to appreciate. So while I easily listened to over 100 new releases in 2009, each met with at least a modicum of enthusiasm and anticipation, looking back there were only a handful that truly resonated with me and begged for repeated listens as the year wore on. There were plenty more quality releases that I could have included here, and some of my choices may be obvious to people who (like me) spend an unhealthy amount of time reading and writing these sorts of lists, but these are probably my 10 favorite albums of 2009:

10. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle


“Too Many Birds” (buy)

For someone with a voice as oaken and stout as Bill Callahan’s, he sure has a fleet-footed deftness in tackling ephemeral subjects, crafting Byzantine-tinged fables about familial burdens or grappling with the sudden loss of a perfect song that appeared in a dream and dissipated in the morning. This album, for me, is a little like an old Navy peacoat: heavy and maybe a little musty at times, but reliably built and familiar enough with broken-in grooves to comfortably return to when the weather demands it.

9. St. Vincent – Actor


“Marrow” (buy)

I’m unreasonably suspicious of music that’s too polished; it’s probably some kind of latent handicap in music appreciation that resulted from being weaned on grunge and punk and the circumstantial necessity of recording imperfections in early rock and roll. It’s like I need to hear a bum note or cracked voice every now and then to know it’s human and not factory-made. But this year, faced with a definite resurgence of scrappy and (g)lo-fi bands, I found my patience with that old way of thinking wearing thin, and it took St. Vincent with a flawless orchestral pop record — with overtures to Disney scores, even! — to break through and show the error of my thinking. Actor is a pitch-perfect construct, but still emotionally heartfelt and filled with inventive and bedazzling compositions. Hell, even the feedback and discord is exquisite. It also helped that St. Vincent’s live show was one of the best I saw all year.

8. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Ashes Grammar


“Close Chorus” (buy)

There was a lot of top-notch shoegaze revival-type stuff this year — Memory Tapes, Fuck Buttons, the Big Pink — but it was A Sunny Day in Glasgow that really reinvented the genre in their own image. Sure, there are echoes of your Lovesliescrushings and All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, but Ashes Grammar requires total immersion — it’s a record so texturally rich and rhythmically fluid that it’s impossible to wrap your head around it in just one, or twenty-one, listens.

7. Pomegranates – Everybody, Come Outside!


“This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land” (buy)

I probably recommended this record to friends and strangers more than any other this year. It really boggles my mind that Everybody, Come Outside! didn’t catch on more than it did — a concept album loosely based on a restless time traveler, with influences equal parts Fela Kuti and the Wrens. What’s not to love? This album has so much heart and charm, plus, it’s filled with some of my single favorite moments laid to tape in 2k9 — the zany chorus on “Southern Ocean” where the boys shout the names of all the other oceans and feign going overboard; the exhausted exclamation “I’m so tired of living in a city where I can’t see the stars at night!” on “This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land;” the guitar lick on “Svaatzi Uutsi.” This album is rife with the spirit of adventure, and I can’t wait to see where the Pomegranates go next.

6. Fever Ray – s/t


“When I Grow Up” (buy)

Gothic, gnomic, unmistakeably Scandinavian — Fever Ray’s self-titled debut was one of the most original and eerily engrossing albums of the year. It’s hard to put it on and not be transported to an alternate dreamworld where mossy synths slink under pebble-skipped beats and mechanically monolithic voices emanate out of thin air. But for all the dark curvatures of Fever Ray’s planet, there is a light, or at least an organic glow, that emits under every surface, making it curiously uplifting.

5. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – s/t


“Come Saturday” (buy)

How did this make it so high on my list? The curmudgeonly critic in me feels obligated to gripe about how unoriginal the Pains of Being Pure at Heart are, how their whole sound is one big derivative trawl of so many obscure twee bands of yore that even mentioning C86 would be to obvious, how even their cover art rips off My Bloody Valentine. But you know what, my inner curmudgeon can stuff it, because I love this album. I love the everlivin’ shit out of it. I put this on when I’m feeling down, when I’m feeling good, when I’m staring at spreadsheets, and when I’m getting my drank on. I listen to it all the goddamn time. Why? Because they sound like a hundred other bands I like, but better.

4. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion


“In the Flowers” (buy)

For better or worse, Merriweather Post Pavilion has become the defining album of the year: the object of massively hysterical online hype, the heralded savior of a post-guitar/bass/drums indie landscape, a Billboard-climbing success that introduced broad swaths of casual listeners to subterranean electro-psychedelia, an impassable line in the sand for testy critics, a prime example of everything wrong with music today. But, to my ears, MPP still sounds as weird and invigorating today as it did when I first heard it 12 months ago. Each track pulses with life — bulging, pumping bass rhythms that you feel in your gut; playfully infectious harmonies; gleaming and luminous electronics laid down so thick it’s like being bathed in starlight. This is music to get lost to.

3. The xx – xx


“Basic Space” (buy)

Out of the 11 tracks on xx, there are at least six that are stone cold singles. At least. I won’t dwell on how young these London kids are, or how meticulously cohesive their debut aesthetic is, or how they unintentionally went toe-to-toe with Peter Bjorn and John in revitalizing a Young Marble Giants-indebted minimalist R&B style in 2009 and wound up schooling the whistling Swedish indie stars, but I feel I should emphasize how good this band is. They’re really fucking good. Breathy boy-girl vocals, echoic guitars that are just teased, never battered, leaving most of the rhythm up to the imagination. With so many bands clamoring for attention by being louder, faster, flashier, it’s refreshing to find a group willing to pull back and let you come after them.

2. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix


“Lisztomania” (buy)

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is at or near the top of plenty of “Best of 2009″ lists. This is not shocking. It’s a brilliantly executed, head-to-toe catchy, glossy pop tour de force. What is shocking is how defensive its defenders are, as though there were something to be embarrassed about over rock that is (at least partly) soft, French, and impeccably detailed. Apparently there are people out there who are virulently and vocally anti-Phoenix (or at least, anti- the success of this particular album) — this I find shocking!! Who are these people, and how can anyone be so foolishly anti-melody, anti-hook, anti-big-lovable-chorus, anti-this-adorable-fan-made-music-video and still call themselves music fans? Inconceivable!

1. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca


“Useful Chamber” (buy)

I listened to Bitte Orca practically every morning for three months after I first picked it up. Just the thought of the opening windswept riff on “Cannibal Resources” causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. But for all the time I’ve invested in this record, I still find it hard to articulate in words how I feel, viscerally, about this music. The arrangements are stark, but rhythmically complex, with the bass often played as a a lead that weaves into David Longstreth’s intricately filigreed, art-damaged Jùjú guitar work seamlessly, drum machines that mimic the palpitations of acoustic percussion, and the joyously ascendant harmonies of Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman that lift my stomach into my throat when the rest of the music drops out. It’s fantastic and, without taking this too literally, spiritually revitalizing. There are very few components to each song, but each element that is included is crucially, spectacularly vital.

RELATED: Here are my 10 favorite EPs of 2009.