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

Download audio file (billcallahan-toomanybirds.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (stvincent-marrow.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (asunnydayinglasgow-closechorus.mp3)
“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!

Download audio file (poms-thislandusedtobemyland.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (feverray-whenigrowup.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (pains-comesaturday.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (anco-intheflowers.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (xx-basicspace.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (phoenix-lisztomania.mp3)
“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

Download audio file (dirtyprojectors-usefulchamber.mp3)
“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.

So instead of ranking and listing and widdling down and hierarchizing as I’ve done for the past few years, I’m just going to give you my favorites in a few catagories that I hope matter to you. The good news is that my favorite music this year and this decade doesn’t seem to be everybody else’s favorite music, which gives me a chance to advocate for only a handful of artists, in the hopes that they’ll reach your ears with the same delight that they’ve reached mine.

Best Local Detroit Track of the Year

“Electric Way” – Zoos of Berlin
from Taxis (Lala | emusic | Amazon)

But the most interesting thing about “Electric Way” is that it kind of ruins the feel of the Taxis LP as a whole. The album is defined by its consistent use of the downbeat–sometimes emulating the chugging of a train, at others the pulsing of blood–lavishly draped with Yates’ aggressive keyboard layering over Clark’s basslines, which move Escher-like over and under the melodies. On the whole, it’s a heady, elegant affair. The word “debonair” has been used by some reviewers, and appropriately so.  But “Electric Way” is all upbeat, dancy, unstoppably catchy. It just doesn’t fit in with those other songs.

Including “Electric Way” as the penultimate track on Taxis is, to me, the equivalent of having Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” as the second-to-last track on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

But who can blame the Zoos for doing this? If you had written a song like “Electric Way,” could you have saved it for later? Could you have murdered this darling? I couldn’t, and I’m glad Zoos of Berlin couldn’t either.

It must be tough to be such a talented band that you can’t help but mess up your excellent album with one of the best songs of the year.

P.S. The decision for best Detroit track of the year would have been more difficult if The Dead Bodies would have released a recording of “Hugs and Kisses.”

The Atlantic Ocean – Richard Swift
(lala | emusic | Amazon)

“The Atlantic Ocean” Download audio file (RS_TheAtlanticOcean.mp3)

I judge an album on two essential points:

1) do the songs get stuck in my head to the point where I unconsciously sing them as I go about my day
2) do I actually care about the songs, on a personal level?

Most albums I listen to fall into either one or the other category. Sometimes, I run across albums with high marks in both categories. But to be my favorite album of the year, it’s got to be both, and in spades.

This is why Richard Swift’s The Atlantic Ocean beats out Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as my favorite album of the year. As much as I love “Lizstomania” and the entire Phoenix album (I think “Armistice” is actually the best song on the album), when the first line is nonsense like “So sentimental. Not sentimental, no,” I can’t honestly make it the album of the year, no matter how much I adore it. I love that song, but I just don’t really care about it. I feel the same way about this album that I feel about a lot of Michael Jackson’s music–it’s great to dance to, great to play in the car, it’s undeniably great, but it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?

On the other hand: “Save your prayers / I’m an unbeliever / and I don’t fall apart easily / ’cause I got no heart / got no one to make me cry. / And everyone knows when they’re gonna die,” sung over a steady piano thumping like a hammer on the nails of a coffin–that’s some heavy shit, and it’s catchy!

Or: “Where have you gone? / And no lights in the home. / We gave it our best but we made it a tomb. / So I’ll take the ocean, and you’ll take the land. / And hope that our son understands.”

This guy’s singing about real stuff, in a really interesting way. Which isn’t to say the album is a dirgefest. The melodies are more often than not extremely light and breezy–easy to sing along to and memorable, and there’s a lot of fun in this album too. We have Swift singing joyfully “Sometimes you lose sometimes you win. / I want to drink until I’m broke and then just see what kind of shit we get in.” And these aren’t even the most memorable lines. (that might be from the title track: “I’m part of the scene. / I’m part of the scene. / I got the drum machine. / Boom-tap, boom-tap. / Boom-tap, boom-tap.”).

Swift’s singing voice is an unusual one. If it weren’t for the modern production quality and the fact that Swift uses the history of pop music over the past 40 years to inform every single note of the album, I might have thought that this was a long-long album sung by Peter Lorre. I like unusual voices–my two favorite singers of the past decade are Dan Bejar and Joanna Newsom, and that tells you something. But Swift’s voice does have a reach and fluidness to it, even though he can often sound as if he’s gargling water while singing. Ultimately, this is a good thing–if anyone else were singing these songs, they wouldn’t sound as good (no one can sing “Atlantic 000-cean” the way he does).

But the voice is only part of what kept me coming back to this excellent collection of diverse songs full of various stylings and a lot of grace. First, there are so many different sounds in this album: cheesy electronic keyboard runs, cowbell, 70s/80s McCartney/Harrison synths that sound better than the solo Beatles albums they were drawn from. The modes run from traditional Irving Berlin-like ballads to straight up Motown swing and soul to rollicking rhythm n’ blues. This album’s really got everything you could ever want, and makes it hard to move on to other albums because there’s so much good in here.

Opener “Atlantic Ocean” is instantly catchy, with an unforgettable hook, letting you know over and over that “you’re gonna drown, drown, drown.” “The Original Thought” starts sleepy and moody but turns into a swaggering little tune that gets you bouncing in your seat and, in my case, strutting down the hallway at work while listening on my iPod. It’s hard to say too much about this album without seeming to be too overzealous about its charms. Richard Swift is a hook-machine. But the hooks are grounded in gravitas: the songs are about heartbreak, break-ups, and many times about coaxing someone to not cry. Swift’s lyrics have a certain existential charm. Like Jens Lekman, Morrissey, Andrew Bird, Leonard Cohen, and The High Strung’s Josh Malerman, Swift has a way of expressing the difficulties of living in a godless, uncaring world while still caring a hell of a lot about it. He often tackles issues of loss or heartache with arch wisecracks or downright sarcasm, but he does so in full and sometimes surprising orchestrations. No matter how bleak things can get, this guy can write one hell of a pop song.

Honorable Mentions

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Why? – Eskimo Snow

Tie: “You Saved My Life” – Cass McCombs
from Catacombs (lala | emusic | Amazon)

Cass McCombs’ Catacombs is one of those albums that you want to download at a very high quality in order to capture the excellence of its recording and mixing. With a good set of headphones, you can hear the air in the room of the recording studio, the reverberation coming off every snare hit, the articulating sounds coming from the back of McCombs’ throat.

“You Saved My Life” is the album’s masterpiece. It’s slow and building, sweetly sung, and gripping, yet it’s not some heart-wrenching, plaintive ode, but an honest lyric dedicated to a lover who has made all the difference, encapsulating all that comes with knowing that “there’s so much to lose.” The best part of the song to me is at the end when McCombs sings the “you” in “you saved my life” with a whimsical high-falsetto, a jokey little voice crack that I first interpreted as McCombs ruining the song. But after repeated listens, I came to a different conclusion. When your life is so good, and you feel that you’ve really found where you should be and who you are in this crazy, often sad world, you’re totally into jokes! There’s room for them. That crack in McCombs’ voice is a well-deserved wise crack, and it’s the best part of the whole song.

Tie: “One More Time” – The Library (now known as Prayer)

CORRECTED: 8:00pm est, 12/29/09

(lala | emusic | Amazon)

“One More Time” Download audio file (TheLibrary_OneMoreTime.mp3)

UPDATE: As my readers who know about music real good have pointed out, this is actually a Joe Jackson song. I listened to the original version of this song just now, and it’s quite great, although it doesn’t dismiss the fact that The Library/Prayer did a good job of covering it and making it their own. I’d even say that they’ve made the hook even more catchy than the original version.

That being as it may, covers do not qualify for making this year-end list, and since Jackson wrote this song in the late 70s, his version can’t make the list either.

Congrats, Cass McCombs, you win our prize!

The backstory: This past spring, I received a package from some music PR agency with a bunch of promo CDs. It had some decent stuff, but most of it I listened to once and never again. But included was this mysterious, non-descript CD case with a drawing of a pope or cardinal blessing some dude, with the background in a stain-washed pink. The name of the band was The Library, and on this very good EP is a song called “One More Time,” a song that I’ve listened to more than any other song this year.

Recently, you may have heard the song on TV. A bad version of it is now a Taco Bell commercial. You’ll know it next time you see it on the TVs. “One more time. / One more time. / Say you’re leaving. / Say goodbye.” Well, that jingle is a shadow of what might be one of the most epic hooks I’ve ever heard. An electronic, dance-club pop song, “One More Time” incorporates all the tricks that any Top 40 songsmith ever employed for the likes of Brittney, Gaga, or Madonna, but it does it with such verve that it’s really impossible to say there is a better pop song on those Top 40 charts this year.

And yet the band is still a mystery to me, mostly because they did a terrible job of naming themselves. “The Library” pulls up 70,700,000 results in Google, and I’m guessing less than 1% of those apply to this band. Their myspace page is a wonder in failed usability–taking out all of the features that allow people to find out what the band is all about and leaving that annoying music player that works like crap. It seems as though the band has recently changed their name to “Prayer,” which is an even dumber name, pulling in 91 million unrelated and higher-ranking results. So apparently, the name change was for reasons that were more fatuous than practical, because Prayer is a pretty bad name for a band. The end result is that they made it too difficult for me to really learn anything about them, and after awhile I just gave up.

What I did  find out thru their label page is that these guys are from LA, and play mostly LA clubs in the electro music scene. The lead singer looks like he’s from LA (please insert all your midwestern stereotypes about people from LA here). But one thing I know for sure is that this guy is responsible for what I consider the best pop song of the year and, with Mr. McCombs, the best track of the year.

Honorable Mentions for Track of 2009

“Marrow” – St. Vincent
While I’m not a big fan of the album, this track really blows my mind, probably because a lot of it reminds me of what Xiu Xiu would sound like if Jamie Stewart would stop being so difficult.

“Something is Squeezing My Skull” – Morrissey
It pulls riffs and rhythm from four different songs from Your Arsenal and Southpaw Grammar but the melody Moz sings in the chorus, with that killer vibrato, is the best vocal maneuver he’s pulled off in years.

“Now We Can See” – The Thermals
This is what happens when you take the best of 90s alternative rock and make it your own.

“Lisztomania” – Phoenix
Just because Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was one of the most overrated albums of the year doesn’t mean it wasn’t also one of the best.

“Leftovers” – Jarvis Cocker
It takes place at a museum. How can I not love this song?

---

Best Album of the 2000s

Hour of Bewilderbeast – Badly Drawn Boy
(lala | emusic | Amazon)

“The Shining“ Download audio file (BDB_TheShining.mp3)

“Disillusion” Download audio file (BDB_Disillusion.mp3)

After winning the Mercury Prize for The Hour of Bewilderbeast in 2000, Damon Gough, aka Badly Drawn Boy, fell into that troubled category of legitimized indie musicians, a netherworld between mainstream pop stardom and “indie cred,” whatever that is.  This segment is represented by the likes of Cake, Ben Folds, and Aimee Mann, and later, Ben Kweller and the Eels. These bands get little enthusiastic coverage after their initial success, by both the P4Ks and the Rollings Stones/Spins. They have lots of fans that continue to consume their work and go to the shows, but they dwindle with each successful album. They are both too popular and not popular enough.  It seems like their right place would be at NPR, but lately even All Songs Considered seems too focused on Animal Collective and Sigur Ros to give much time to this small, relegated class of musician. And it’s the reason why I’m not surprised that The Hour of Bewilderbeast isn’t making many “best of the decade” lists.

But I don’t think there’s another album that I’ve continually gone back to, nor an album that has traveled with me during the highs and the lows of the past decade, nor an album that has continually surprised me with every new listen as much as The Hour of Bewilderbeast.

If you read the album’s reviews from early 2000, soon after its release, you’ll find favorable adjectives mixed with complaints of Damon Gough being just the next graduate in Elliott Smith’s “whimpering” school of singer-songwriting.  And at that time, I would have agreed, adding that Gough had graduated with high honors from that school.

But listening to Hour of Bewilderbeast now–after Sufjan Stevens, after Joanna Newsom, after Bon Iver, after Beirut, after Fleet Foxes, after every major “baroque pop” or “folk pop” act to have made a major impact in the last ten years–you have to be surprised at how much muscle the album wields at times.

The gorgeous opener “The Shining,” which introduces the central theme of the album, is followed by the oddly jarring “Everybody’s Stalking,” and later, “Another Pearl” features aggressive distorted chords and lots of fluid, active drumming. In fact, the album is full of drumming, sometimes jazzy, sometimes just a straight beat, but there’s a lot of activity on skins, and much of it of a high quality. “Disillusion,” one of the highlights of the album, is a disco-y romp that has nothing delicate or whimpering about it.

But really, it’s the emotional stuff and the mellow acoustic guitars and the balladeering that makes this album so memorable. Companion songs “Camping Next to Water” and “Stone on the Water” offer two of the best acoustic guitar riffs I’ve heard outside of the Elliott Smith songbook. “Magic in the Air” is simply one of the best love songs ever, even though it’s lyrics are a bit odd: laughing so much, then crying; leaving shoes in a tree; sleeping on leaves on a driveway. Like the two lovers the lyrics describe, the music is in no hurry. It’s flowing, dreamy, from the opening piano arpeggio to the lovely acoustic guitar lines that match the piano, which then break out in a lush and peaceful vamp. It’s a shame that, due to a copyright settlement, Badly Drawn Boy was forced to remove the original final lyric of the song: “‘Cause love is contagious, when it’s alright. / It’s alright.”

To me, the most impressive thing about this album is that it fulfills the promise of what an album can be, in the same way that classics like In an Aeroplane Over the Sea or Jeff Buckley’s Grace do: it’s not a collection of disparate songs, but a unified whole, where every song is commenting upon the previous one, or upon other songs. In other words, it’s a coherent and masterfully executed work of art. Every song moves along the story; every interlude signals a change in mood or a reprise or introduces a new section; all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together to reveal an image of what love and hope and disappointment and faith feel like.  And it reaches anyone open to it right where it matters–the heart.

One more thing: I’m a middling songwriter myself. I’ve written some songs over the years. Some of them are ok. But as a middling songwriter, very conscious of his inadequacies as a musician, I can at least think to myself about what kind of album I would write if I really had any talent. And when I think of all of the albums I’ve heard over the past decade, there isn’t another album I wish I would have written myself more than The Hour of Bewilderbeast. That that is the true criteria for judging what your album of the decade should be.

Honorable Mentions – Best Albums of the 2000s

Destroyer’s Rubies – Destroyer
If you know me, you knew this was going to make it on the list.

Ys – Joanna Newsom
Surprised? That means you’ve never read this blog before.

Coke Machine Glow – Gordon Downie
From the leader of The Tragically Hip, this album is one of the most beautiful collections of songs I’ve ever heard.

Where The Change Is – The Flashing Lights
OK, this came out in Canada in 1999, but the US in 2000, so I’m counting it. I have a very fond memory of Lager House, 2000: “This song’s called ‘A patient you forgot to see.’ It’s about a patient you forgot to see.” One of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. Wish they were still around.

Sha Sha - Ben Kweller
Ben Kweller, you had me at “nothing isn’t nothing, nothing’s something that’s important to me.” Sha Sha. Sha Do.

Follow the link at the end of the post to download the mix CD as a .zip file.

If you’ve been a regular reader of the Post-Rockist’s best-of lists for the past two years, you know the drill by now: with only loose regard for new releases, I stitch together an aural topography map of the year’s emotional terrain.

Well. This year was goddamn Mount McKinley.

Three years ago, I was just a jaunty, freshly Bachelor of Arts’d kid, living in Milwaukee for no particular reason and writing about music when the mood struck. This year, I quit my job, gave away my heavy old record player, packed up my clanky apartment, had a shot and a beer at the Polish Falcon and loaded a van for a lake crossing out of Milwaukee and back to Michigan.

We tell our friends, and each other, different stories about how it “all started.” He thinks it all started when he sought some crowd-sourced advice about Twitter, but we were already g-chatting regularly by then. I blame the night I took my laptop to the bar and drank Malbec, the night Scott gave me that Leonard Cohen “Marita/Please find me/I’m almost 30″ line. The deal was pretty much sealed by the time he sent me Simon Schama’s Power of Art DVDs (plus a CD of four Jonathan Richman songs about artists; at the bar that night, I drunkenly blathered that it was a SIGN), and clearly, by the time we wrote that song together (BEST OF 09!!), something irrefutable was afoot.

But I really think it “all started” when Todd’s savvy, super-smart wife Kim — a friend of mine from high school — said, three years ago, “Todd! Get some women writing about music for you.” And I’m not just talking about the big story of 2009 that began in January and unfurled toward inevitability.

That’s a longer, more abstract yarn about growing up and finding myself, though, so as not to bore you, I’m just going to get right to the play list, which tells a better tale than I really can in words.

1. You Can’t Force a Dance Party — Dent May and his Magnificent Ukulele — The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele (2009)

A fitting early-in-the-year infatuation for a girl who later fell in love with a guy with a ukulele. This was a nice album to have around in the dead of winter; it makes everyone within earshot feel like they’re in Maui. Also, I wish someone had told me the moral of this song two years ago, when I kept trying to throw inevitably unsuccessful dance parties.

2. The World’s Greatest — The Sweptaways — The Sweptaways Show (2009)

R. Kelly’s 2002 single “The World’s Greatest” is a soaring, gospel-tinged, radio-perfect R&B power ballad in which Kells is at his self-glorifying best (“And the world will notice a king”) — in the video,  he plays a boxing champ in flowing crimson robes with the word HERO emblazoned on the back. In the ring with him appear soldiers, preachers, doctors and firefighters (and, toward the end, fireworks), cut with vintage footage of Muhammad Ali.

The song is pretty ridiculous, but unless I’m extra-susceptible to sentimental tripe (and I might be), I think it’s actually a good song, and hard not to like. Which may be why it lends itself nicely to twee renditions — enjoy it because it’s Bonnie Prince Billy! Isn’t it funny, Bonnie Prince Billy, covering that R&B hit? So clever!

I’m pretty taken by this taffeta a cappella cover by the gaggle of pretty Swedish girls known as The Sweptaways. (And by now it should be evident from this list and my other contributions to The Post-Rockist that my musical tastes have been greatly informed by my peers at The Post-Rockist.) I never get sick of it. Sometimes, secretly, I listen to it when I need a little oomph of upward thinking.

3. We; Camera — Shenandoah Davis — We; Camera (2008)

A visiting friend from Seattle introduced me to the out-of-tune spinet sorcery of Shenandoah Davis in the summer of 2008, but I didn’t get around to spending a lot of quality time with this album until 2009. I tried to winnow out most of the non-2009 songs from this mix, as well as many of 2009′s placeholder songs (like “Lisztomania”) due to the insane length of the director’s first cut. This stays, though. It is inextricable from my year.

4. While You Wait for the Others — Grizzly Bear — Veckatimest (2009)

No introduction necessary.

5. Sunken Union Boat — John Vanderslice — Romanian Names (2009)

If we’re giving out gold stars here, this was definitely my favorite album of 2009, in the most ineffable way. It just really moved me, really deeply, in a way that not a lot of albums have managed to do in my life. Maybe that’s the fundamental force of mystery in music. I don’t know.

At Turner Hall in June, after the lights were up and the crowds cleared out, he asked a few lingerers to stay for a few minutes while he ran backstage to grab his guitar and the rest of his band. And when he came back, he sang a song by the merch table, and some of us sang along, and it was beautiful. Plus, he totally hugged me, totally out of nowhere, before I could even introduce myself and tell him I thought he was great.

6. The Privateers — Andrew Bird — Noble Beast (2009)

Most of Bird’s best music is so personal and interior that it makes me flinch to hear it in public spaces or on commercials. Noble Beast was on my mind a lot in the late winter, right before the spring, and my fortunes, turned – when I was still staying up too late, drinking bad whiskey out of the bottle, and putting too many close hopes into the hands of clumsy hucksters.

When the weather finally broke, I walked to a park on the bluff over the lake (the one with the Leif Erickson statue!), lay on my back, and listened to Noble Beast all the way through, watching seagulls.

7. I Hope She Won’t Let Me — Baby Teeth — Hustle Beach (2009)

For more on Baby Teeth, how I feel about Baby Teeth, and this album in particular, please see my review from earlier this year.

8. How to Get My Head Back on My Shoulders — The Daredevil Christopher Wright — The Daredevil Christopher Wright EP (2008)

These bearded boys from Eau Claire, Wisconsin stole my heart at a tiny show in the attic of the YNOT3 in Milwaukee, where they pounded some tom-toms, shook their ample heads of Wisconsin lumberjack hair, and let loose a river of raw talent. We all needed it; it wasn’t long after venerable independent bookstore Harry W. Schwartz shut its doors forever and its sister company, 800ceoread, laid off some people we really loved. It was one of those everyone’s-drunk-and-hugging nights, a night that made me think, “How could I ever leave this place?” A few months later, I did.

The Daredevil Christopher Wright released a pretty excellent debut LP this year, In Deference to a Broken Back, but this song really calls it all home for me, and those are the rules of the year-end mix CD.

9. I Want You Back — The Jackson 5 (1969)

I’m sorry, but I just had to.

10. Sugar Fish — Daniel Johnson — Lazrus (2009)

This album is generally genius, and I usually put it on when I needed to take it easy, clear my head or draw some focus. Daniel’s voice is smooth and sincere but cool and controlled; he piles on layer after gorgeous layer without ever giving you the sense that he’s letting go of you or pushing you into any lawless territory. It’s very comforting in that way, which I guess is a weird thing to say about an electro-pop/dance album, but I’ll give it to him.

11. Pulling on a Line — Great Lakes Swimmers — Lost Channels (2009)

The song I was mostly likely to listen to this year when I was literally pulling my own rug out from under me. I will not seek to explain to you why this might have been a meaningful song for me so as not to condescend to your basic ability to grasp metaphors.

12. The Atlantic Ocean — Richard Swift — Atlantic Ocean (2009)

Boom tap boom tap! Ah-boom tap boom tap!

13. Lalita — The Love Language — The Love Language (2009)

Cue the dance card! Every time he sings “This year has just begun,” I feel a little flush of the possibility and the thrill and the danger of a new, unknowable year. Maybe it’s because the whole year felt like the new year.

14. Good Time — Lightning Love — November Birthday (2009)

America’s most adorable keyboard pop band graced my spring with this feel-amazing anthem. Seeing them live in the fall at DIY Fest was even better. Making friends with them: Best of all.

15. Dreams Come True Girl — Cass McCombs — Catacombs (2009)

Please, before you say “barf,” remember that this is a love song about accepting the truth of love – a truth that is both a relief (“All the troubles in my past/That’s just what they are”) and a reckoning. And it ends with a 70-year-old golden-age movie star squawking “Take me out!” It’s a fuzzy-lens soda-shop sweetheart ballad that’s not too drunk on itself to be a little funny. And if this video doesn’t make you feel like you’re in love with something, you’re a weirdo.

16. Make a Little Time (for Me) — Jason Croff — A Cake for a File (2009)

I can’t really think of any other outfit today working as hard as Jason Croff to emulate the sound of Steely Dan, ’70s smooth jazz/R&B bands and lounge-y easy listening. If anyone is making music like this right now at all, no one is doing it better than the Jason Croff Family Band.

17. Stealin’ — The Trusty Knife — The Trusty Knife (2008)

(photo by C.J. Foeckler for Turner Hall/WMSE)

The Trusty Knife’s late-late-2008 album provided the soundtrack for the year to come. We went to all of their concerts, danced like fools in our hotel room in Vegas, turned it way up in the car, and if we didn’t have the album handy, we just belted whatever choruses we could think of, making up the verses with a few falsetto “ahh-wooohs” thrown in for maximum Pieper effect.

Less than a week before I bid Milwaukee farewell, I went to see Trusty Knife play with my other favorite Milwaukee band, Juniper Tar, as part of bad-ass community radio station WMSE‘s fabulous Radio Summer Camp fête. It was a drenched and drunken celebration of love and friendship: community luminaries tipsy and dancing way up front, friends from the bands smoking and watching the sun go down on the fire escape, brothers Schleicher sneaking me into the dressing room and plying me with whiskey. It was the best send-off a girl could ever want.

18. Beggars Might Ride — Destroyer — Streethawk: A Seduction (2001)

So begins the big-picture coda to the year-end mix CD, with two songs that served as light-posts for the big decisions I made this year. Most people know how much Destroyer means to me; this year, I listened to him constantly, in gusts of snow and on quiet summer afternoons while I watched squirrels in the overgrown garden behind my first-floor studio. And as the year crept forward into fateful August, I repeated these lines like a mantra:

“I imagine it must be hard/To stay away from a life of public relations, but try/Girl, you’ve gotta try,/You’ve got to stay critical or die,/Stay critical or die.”

19. I Don’t Know if She’s Worth 900 Kr. — Jens Lekman — You Deserve Someone Better Than a Bum Like Me (2005)

Out of all of the “it all started when” moments we have discussed, this song might be the it-all-started to start them all. On a humble birthday mix CD shipped priority mail from Detroit to Milwaukee, this sweet little song about the uncertain decision to visit a near-stranger in Barcelona was nestled near the beginning, unassuming but clear as a beacon. It took me a listen or two to really get it, but I can remember exactly where I was when I decoded the message: I was running down the beerline trail, just past the old train bridge underneath Holton Street, approaching the weedy west bank of the Milwaukee River.

In a few days, we’re leaving for Chicago to see Jens Lekman play a New Year’s Eve show at the Empty Bottle, meeting up with Todd and Kim — the only possible conclusion, it seems, for a year that Jens helped set into motion, with friends without whom nothing would have started at all.

2009: The Mix CD – Right-click and save-as to download

Also, Amy’s got her own blog now. You can read it at http://www.nighttraintodetroit.com.

Unleash the Carnivore by Devourment

“Field of the Impaled” Download audio file (FieldoftheImpaled.mp3)
from Unleash the Carnivore

To many metal aficionados, Devourment is a punchline.  The subgenre they helped create, slam death metal, is often described using the adverbial modifier “ultra fucking” before such adjectives as “guttural,” “brutal,” and “sick.”  Their ultra fucking offensive t-shirts certainly don’t gain them much respect among thinking metal fans, who can more guiltlessly wear a shirt knocking Christ down a peg than one grotesquely defiling half the human population (namely, the half with uteri).  I hadn’t spent more than twenty minutes of my life listening to or thinking about Devourment before seeing them at Maryland Deathfest, which I waxed so eloquently about right here on these e-pages.

And boy oh boy, were they fun to watch.  They didn’t have any gross onstage gimmicks or any offensive banter.  They were just four dudes who came up and played some tunes with titles like “Deflesh the Abducted” and “Masturbating at the Slab” and, for some reason, maybe the groove, maybe my exhaustion, made me want to dance like an idiot.  I got a hold of Unleash the Carnivore when I got home and it is the same ultra fucking brutal, guttural, slamming, sick, epic death metal I loved so much at the fest.  Don’t plan on looking to your left or your right after listening to this album because your neck is going to be ultra fucking sore.

Grindcore Album of the Year

De Anarkistiske An(n)aler by Parlamentarisk Sodomi

“Statsbudsjettblues” Download audio file (Statsbudsjettsblues.mp3)
from De Anarkistiske An(n)aler

I apologize in advance.  I don’t know anything about this band, except that it’s just one guy and he’s from Norway.  The song titles and lyrics are all in Norwegian, and I hear he’s mostly writing tongue-in-cheek critiques of the Norwegian government?  Maybe?  To crudely paraphrase Sam Cooke, I don’t know much about (Parlamentarisk Sodomi’s) history, not to mention his biology (or the Norwegian I took).  But I do know that I love De Anarkistiske An(n)aler, and I know that if you love it too, what a wonderful world this will be.

It’s all fast as fuck, in a grindy way, not in an über-technical death kinda way.  It flows nicely with a raw Napalm Death kind of vibe for most of the record, with plenty of energy and grime.  Then, out of nowhere, comes “Klæbukrønikene (De Anarkistike An(n)aler),” a grind song that’s nearly eleven minutes long.  In a subgenre known for songs that usually span less than a minute (and many less than a few seconds – Cripple Bastards’ recenty four-CD box set featured 1,036 songs), this is unheard of.  Sound like a gimmick?  Well guess what, asshole, it fucking slays for ten fucking minutes and forty-seven fucking seconds.  In the world of grindcore, this guy’s an A student, baby.

Top Ten Albums 2009

10. Grooms – Rejoicer (Death by Audio)

9. Manic Street Preachers – Journal for Plague Lovers (Columbia)

“This Joke Sport Severed”


8. Circulatory System – Signal Morning (Cloud Recordings)

7. Wavves – Wavvves (Fat Possum)

Download audio file (wavves-sobored.mp3)
“So Bored” (buy)

6. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Ashes Grammar (Mis Ojos Discos)

Download audio file (asunnydayinglasgow-closechorus.mp3)
“Close Chorus” (buy)

5. The Present – The Way We Are (Loaf)

4. Jonsi & Alex (Riceboy Sleeps) – Riceboy Sleeps (XL)

“Indian Summer”

3. Bobby Emmett – Learning Love (self-released)

2. Pastels/Tenniscoats – Two Sunsets (Domino)

“Vivid Youth”

1. I Was A King – s/t (Control Group)

Download audio file (iwasaking-normanbleik.mp3)
“Norman Bleik” (buy)

Honorable Mention Albums

Dalek – Gutter Tactics (Ernest Jenning)
Tenniscoats – Temporacha (Room 40)
Silk Flowers – s/t (PPM Records)
Savath & Savalas – La Llama (Stones Throw)
Jon Hopkins – Insides (Domino)
DJ Spooky – Secret Song (Thirsty Ear Recordings)
Little Claw – Human Taste (Ecstatic Peace!)

Top EP

Washed Out – Life of Leisure (Mexican Summer)

Download audio file (washedout-newtheory.mp3)
“New Theory” (buy)

Honorable Mention EPs

Mayfair Set – Young One (Captured Tracks)
Banjo or Freakout – Upside Down (Half Machine Records)
Julianna Barwick – Florine (Florid Recordings)
Olafur Arnalds – Found Songs (Erased Tapes)

Favorite Song

“If I Had a Heart” by Fever Ray (Mute)

Compilations/Reissues

Various Artists – Where the Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 (Rhino)
Milky Disco – Let’s Go Freakout: Vol 2 (Lo Recordings)
Big Star – Keep an Eye on the Sky Box Set (Rhino)

“The Ballad of El Goodo”

Starring Dallas Alice

Right-click the above link to download E. Kula’s definitive 2k9 mix tape. Track listing and artist information is included there within.

10. Deerhunter – Rainwater Cassette Exchange

Download audio file (deerhunter-famouslastwords.mp3)
“Famous Last Words” (buy)

Deerhunter is window shopping on the Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP. With “master the art of psychedelic drone rock” checked off their musical bucket list, the band has taken the opportunity to set aside their heavier sonic baggage and experiment with a leaner, more diverse set of styles. In the course of a spare fifteen minutes, Deerhunter manage to traverse from languid tropical punk to hyper-compressed Krautrock to a jangly, piano-and-tabla Georgian raga before returning to the tremolo-tinged garage rock they mastered back on Microcastle, all without breaking a sweat or indulging in so much as a single extraneous guitar solo.

9. Johnny Headband – Phase 3

Download audio file (johnnyheadband-wastintime.mp3)
“Wastin’ Time” (download)

Resurrecting the frenetic energy of rave-era Primal Scream with the clamoring expansiveness of TV on the Radio, Johnny Headband have released a beast of an EP — a post-apocalyptic bacchanal rife with electrically charred bass, sandstorm guitars and howling, multi-tracked harmonies. It’s just a shame that a noise this bombastic wasn’t heard by more people outside Detroit.

8. Julianna Barwick – Florine

Download audio file (juliannabarwick-cloudbank.mp3)
“Cloudbank” (buy)

Spectral choral music for the driftless. Recommended for those who thought Sigur Rós were too structured for their tastes.

7. Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind

Download audio file (anco-whatwouldiwant.mp3)
“What Would I Want? Sky” (buy)

Animal Collective became one of the most fashionable bands to hate on this year for releasing one of the most inventive and enjoyable albums of 2009 (funny how that works, huh?). Regardless of your undoubtedly fixed opinions on the band, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist appear to be completely oblivious to the maelstrom of hype and web 2.0 academic treatises they’ve sparked as a result of Merriweather Post Pavilion and decided to cap the year off with one of their most curiously cohesive and playful EPs yet.

6. Flying Lotus – L.A. EP 3 X 3

Download audio file (flyinglotus-infinitum.mp3)
“Infinitum (Dimlite’s Re-finitum)” (buy)

It’s utterly inconceivable to me how music like this was conceived. It’s like a photo negative of a what I expect a song to be: textures are reconfigured as percussion; beats are spliced, reversed, and processed into jittery, techno-futurist melodies; vertical planes become three-dimensional vectors; up is down; black is white; rhythm is the bass, and the bass is the treble. If this is what the future sounds like, I remain hopeful that I’ll get my hoverboard after all.

5. Jon Hardy & The Public – Little Criminals: Songs From Randy Newman

LITTLE CRIMINALS by Jon Hardy & the Public from theFOUNTAINstudio on Vimeo. (download)

It was meant to be a brief affair: for one night only, St. Louis’ hardest working band was going to pay tribute to one of America’s greatest living songwriters. But the resulting collaboration played to the others’ strengths so well that it would have been criminal to lose the effect to the woozy memory of bar lore. Randy Newman tends to play the role of a satirical schlemiel, but when his work is played with the forthrightness and brio of Jon Hardy & The Public the songs feel invigorated with new purpose and meaning. Great songwriting should allow for artful interpretation, and both are present here.

4. Beirut – March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland

Download audio file (beirut-mynight.mp3)
“My Night with the Prostitute from Marseilles” (buy)

March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland is an odd job. It’s two completely separate EPs, really. For Zapotec, Zach Condon took his Balkanized brass balls down to Oaxaca, Mexico to recruit a ragtag band of native horn blowers to backtrack his somber, wayfaring songs. It’s fine; about what you’d expect. But what really got me excited was Holland, “Realpeople” being Condon’s nom de plume for his pre-Beirut bedroom pop project. The resulting tracks can be a little undeveloped at points, but the strange juxtaposition of Condon’s mournful croon with the wistful gurgling of cheap electronics produces some of the most listenable synth pop this side of the Magnetic Fields’ Holiday.

3. Washed Out – Life of Leisure

Download audio file (washedout-newtheory.mp3)
“New Theory” (buy)

Beachy, headphonic, chill. During the interminably long Summer of Death, 2009, the slow jam sampledelica of Ernest Greene’s Washed Out provided just the sort of escapist and nostalgic salve needed to reassure anxiety-wracked blogbros that everything was going to be a-okay.

2. Destroyer – Bay of Pigs


(buy)

When it was announced that Dan Bejar was going to release a 13-and-a-half minute “ambient disco” track based loosely around the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, there was no doubt that it was going to be anything short of epic. And where Kennedy failed with his CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Bejar delivered. Even in the most obtuse sense, I’m still not sure what — if anything — the song “Bay of Pigs” has to do with the actual event in 1961, but with blisteringly surreal lyrics about how “a ransom note written on the night sky above remind me what, in particular, about this wine I love,” I’m not about to start complaining. Bejar is in fine form here, popping up like a harrowed and woolly narrator to regale us of the time he was trapped inside the sea’s guts or bathed in golden sunlight, only to recede back into the foggy aether of synthesizer just as mysteriously as he arrived. The acoustic guitar, when it finally kicks in, feels like a life raft — the sturdiest, most reliable instrument in sight. If it weren’t for a certain French band who penned a tune about a Hungarian composer, this would be the single greatest song of the year. Oh, and there’s another track on this EP. It’s okay.

1. El Perro del Mar – Love Is Not Pop

Download audio file (ElPerro-Heavenly.mp3)
“Heavenly Arms” (buy)

There’s a lot to love here: the battered sincerity of 1980′s Lou Reed, the fluid bounce of Balearic funk, the spectre of G.K. Chesterton, the amorous and classical voice of Sarah Assbring. This isn’t a happy record — El Perro del Mar’s rarely are — but it’s spiritually nourishing, full of poignant and unchained melodies that exude a deep, inner warmth. It’s a remarkable maturation for Ms. Assbring as a songwriter, who has set aside the conventions of 1960s girl group acts here for the light groove of organic dub, but it’s the maturity and patience demonstrated within these songs that give them their allure.

El Perro Del Mar “Change Of Heart” from The Control Group on Vimeo.

Thanks to the Let’s Trade Mix Tapes blog for a tip on Future Perfect Radio, a music streaming site that I’ve been enjoying all week. FPR offers several channels devoted to different types of Indie music by genre and by location (a Michigan channel was recently added).

After clicking around my options, I settled on the Twee-Pop channel, which has taken me through much of my work week. It’s happy. It’s simple. It’s heartfelt. And often And it doesn’t require too much explanation, but I’ve found that it’s almost as much of an acquired taste as John Cage for some. so here are three tracks to take you into your tweekend.

One Happy Island – “Earth’s Circumference”
Download audio file (OneHappyIsland.mp3)

From Secret Party that the Other Party Doesn’t Know About, which could hold the distinction as the best indie-twee album name ever. The band is currently touring on their way from their home town to SXSW (who isn’t?!) and will be playing a show in St. Louis on March 16 at CBGB. Of course, no Detroit date.

Billie the Vision and the Dancers – “I Saw You on TV”
Download audio file (BillietheVision.mp3)

This Swedish group has been on Post-Rockist Radar for some time now, and never seem to get played out, which is odd, because songs like “I Saw You on TV” seem to have a definitely shelf-life due to its repetitive, sappy chorus. But somehow, it stays rather fresh, I think, though it’s certainly a dangerous song to play to a group of music connoisseurs of the experimental kind, likely to drive them insane with its rabid simplicity and joyfulness. This is not music to sulk to.

Belle and Sebastian – “The Model”
Download audio file (TheModel.mp3)

A list of twee-pop songs without Belle and Sebastian would be like publishing a version of the Bible with no mention of Jesus.

Hoo-whee! Willya look at that? The 2008 Village Voice Pazz & Jop results are in! This is particularly exciting news for those of you out there thinking, “You know, reading hundreds of incredibly subjective yet predictably similar ‘Best Of’ lists throughout the entire month of December never grew the least bit tedious, but what I’m really looking for is a pseudo-scientific aggregate of hundreds of critic picks compiled with a vague point system that will settle the matter of the best music of 2008 once and for all.” Well, sir or madam, today is your lucky day! And, if you look closely among the 579 individual ballots cast, you’ll find my ballot buried in the mix. Hot shit on a stick, isn’t that somethin’? Looks like my #8 pick came in at #1 for overall albums, while my personal #1 only clocked in at a measly #66. Meanwhile, I was the only person to cast a vote for Pas/Cal’s “O Honey We’re Ridiculous” on a singles list dominated by a song that came out in 2007. Oh well, I tried.

There are also a few good essays dissecting the year that was at that link. Certainly worth your reading time if you’ve got nothing else doing at work today.

So I guess this means we can officially begin working on our “Best of 2009″ lists, right?

Day One – Scotter
Day Two – E. Kula
Day Three – Amy
Day Four – Dan
Day Five – Todd
Day Six – Kim

BRYAN’S BEST OF 2008

It bugs me when I hear people saying 2008 was a bad year for music. It didn’t have the stunners last year did, but there were thirty albums that could have been on this list. Spiritualized and Portishead made rejuvenated returns, TV On The Radio and Hot Chip cemented their bigger-than-indie status, and those Vampire Weekend kids managed to sound great to anyone over 34 or under 22. There was so much good music that I lumped some albums into categories. So there you go, let’s get to the good stuff.

10. AFRO-FUNK compilations: African Scream Contest; Nigeria Special series; Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump

None of this stuff was recorded anywhere near 2008, but its cool and innovative sounds had me anxiously awaiting each release. My love for soul and funk can never be fully satisfied, so I was ecstatic to see a slew of 1970s afro-funk tracks unearthed. The Nigeria Special series continued to give us some Disco Funk and Rock gems, building last year’s fantastic collection. But if you can only buy one, African Scream Contest is the best, hands down. Below is the opening track, and in it you’ll hear obvious Highlife influences and some mesmerizing guitar work that brings an energy even Sly Stone would have trouble keeping up with.
SONG: Lokonon Andre & Les Volcans – “Mi Kple Dogbekpo”

9. FUCK BUTTONS – Street Horrrsing
For me, one of the most beautiful and difficult accomplishments in music is holding someone’s attention for 9 minutes and building on the sound so that what started out good culminates in a stirring crescendo (see “Paranoid Android,” “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” “Think I’m In Love,” et al.). Fuck Buttons’ occasional fuzzed-out screams and yelps add a primal feeling to some pretty electronic melodies. It was fun getting lost in its drone as I shared a subway car with aggressive panhandlers, unapologetic blowhards, and forget-about-it guys from Queens. It was the enthralling buffer between my tired, 6pm mind and a world of chaos.
SONG: “Bright Tomorrow”

8. SUPER EPs: Crystal Stilts – Crystal Stilts; Air France – No Way Down; Simian Mobile Disco – Clock
Each of these has every right to be placed next full length LPs. Crystal Stilts ended up releasing their solid debut, but was comprised mostly of songs from the EP. It sounds like a beach rock-obsessed Ian Curtis rose from the dead to fill us in on the future of garage rock. Air France’s No Way Down EP is cheesy and beautiful, like meadows and butterflies and lazy Saturdays and necking with your favorite gal. But it’s just that beautiful and sunny, like an aural version of MDMA without the comedown. Simian Mobile Disco released a pair of EPs in ’08, but had they expanded Clock‘s 4 songs into a full-length, it would have been the best dance album of the year.
SONG: Crystal Stilts – “Converging In The Quiet”

7. NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
You won’t find a piano balladeer on this Cave album. It’s all rock and it never stops. Some of it is cock-rock, some is Suicide meets Lou Reed, and it’s all grimy and seamy and reeks of cigarettes. The end of days isn’t a new subject for Cave, but he and The Seeds pump blood and guts back into a world that appears to be on life support. Common themes are dive bars, prostitutes, impending doom, drugs, vengeance, and lust. If none of that sounds intriguing, you need to hang with Nick Cave for a while.
SONG: “Albert Goes West”

6. MIX TAPES: The Very Best; Diplo & Santogold – Top Ranking; Girl Talk – Feed The Animals
These three albums each offer a different case for the validity of remixes. On The Very Best (still free to download), Radioclit takes the instrumentals from his favorite tracks and lets Esau Mwamwaya sing in his native Chichewa. He adds a ton of fun to “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” as he erases its original ties of college and Paul Simon. On Top Ranking, Diplo essentially re-produces Santogold’s debut into an 80-minute island thumper, filling it out with Aretha Franklin, Cutty Ranks, the B52s, and others. Lastly, Girl Talk takes a scalpel to songs and sounds unforgettable to any music junkie and creates brand new tunes by laying them beneath rap vocals. At a poker game a couple months ago, someone called him the musical equivalent of The Family Guy–nothing is really new, but you can’t help waiting for the next reference. This happens about every 3 seconds on Feed The Animals.
SONG: Esau Mwamwaya – “Kamphopo”

5. DREAM POP: Beach House – Devotion; Grouper – Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
The new Beach House album feels like it’s been forced to make a decision between staying with its current lover and moving on to new but uncertain things. The eerie organ gives it a haunted feeling, but Victoria Legrand’s breathy, hardened voice knows exactly where her heart lies. Dragging A Dead Deer is like waking up from a dream and sifting through the hazy half-sleep phantasmagoria – you might vaguely remember where you were or what you were doing but mostly you just remember how you felt. Liz Harris’s voice seems to be lurking a mile under water, giving you quick glimpses of forgotten memories.
SONG: Beach House – “Gila”

4. DEPARTMENT OF EAGLES – In Ear Park
In Ear Park is Daniel Rossen’s warm and beautiful ode to his late father. While many Grizzly Bear tunes leave me a little bored, here Rossen packs each song with vivid scenes of going to work, funerals, and parental advice. The album is instantly accessible and has grown on me even more throughout the year. Plus it delivers my favorite song of ’08 in “No One Does It Like You.” Rossen’s sound is so universally enjoyable that friends, mothers, brothers, and even fathers should have no problem appreciating it.
SONG: “No One Does It Like You”

3. DEERHUNTER – Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
Bradford Cox was officially THE man of ’08. After releasing a stellar solo album as Atlas Sound, the Deerhunter frontman tightened the band’s sound, making it more personal in the process. Cox has openly had a complex childhood and Microcastle reflects his fragility and elegance with a confidence that should excite any Deerhunter haters. And anyone who’s visited a music blog knows the album leaked 4 months too soon, so Cox and friends gave us another album. Weird Era Cont. takes any sort of mope out of shoegaze and is evidence that whatever leaking/online/personal drama Cox has gone through made him the man to watch for the next few years.
SONG: “Nothing Ever Happened”

2. CHAD VANGAALEN – Soft Airplane
This album wins the award for most diverse song collection. VanGaalen starts with a sweet banjo ditty about a Viking funeral and maneuvers his way through straightforward pop-rock, Crazy Horse-era Neil Young stompers, an electronic song involving TMNT, dark acoustic ballads, and ends with dissonant guitar feedback. And somehow it never loses steam or feels disjointed. His boyish obsession with death and loss is the unifying theme, yet this was a huge summer album for me. Maybe that makes me a little weird, but more than anything it shows you can sing about deep subjects without it taxing your emotions.
SONG: “City Of Electric Light”

1. CUT COPY – In Ghost Colours
After their first album, I expected Cut Copy to get comfortable making moody but hollow pop, but In Ghost Colours’ opening track shatters that notion – it’s full and warm and sugary sweet, like a post-hangover sunny day where food tastes better, the birds are chirping, and you’re glad to have your wits about you. There’s quite a bit of guitar, both electric and acoustic, but, as usual, their catchiest diamonds are saved for the dance floor (“Lights And Music,” “Hearts On Fire,” “Far Away”). The lyrics are not quite happy, but always stay positive, and the music behind them never deliver a wrong note. This is an album club kids make when they mature and decide to focus not just on the present, but also the future. See them live, you won’t be disappointed.
SONG: “Hearts On Fire”

Day One – Scotter
Day Two – E. Kula
Day Three – Amy
Day Four – Dan
Day Five – Todd

KIM’S 10 FAVORITES OF 2008

10. Mirah –The Old Days Feeling

“Dreamboat” (buy)
Download audio file (Mirah-Dreamboat.mp3)

This is a very short album with each song lasting less than 3 minutes. This is just the way I like my music — in tiny, bite-sized morsels. I enjoy the variety of instruments and styles used by Mirah. The front half of the album is much better than the back half, but it’s all fun to listen to.

9. Pas/Cal –I was Raised On Matthew, Mark, Luke, & Laura

Okay, I admit it, this was a latecomer to my list. I didn’t even know that they had a new album until Scotter posted them in his list. So I checked my computer and lo and behold the album was already there but SOMBODY (ahem, ahem) didn’t tell me that he had it and/or that I should listen to it. [Note from the editor: The scoundrel!] Anyway, I haven’t had much time to digest the album, but I really do dig it and the poppy beats and catchy melodies. Also, bonus points for being from Detroit.

“Summer Is Almost Here”

8. Vampire Weekend –Vampire Weekend

“Oxford Comma” (buy)
Download audio file (VW-OxfordComma.mp3)

If you haven’t heard of Vampire Weekend you are living under a rock. I wasn’t really sure if I liked it when I heard it first. I think my mindset went something like this: “What is this, some reggae-ska hybrid?” But, after a listen or two it was hard to stop humming along and tapping my toes. That equals a winner in my book.

7. Beck –Modern Guilt

Classic Beck, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s dreamy and makes good music. It’s nothing groundbreaking but it’s a fun album to listen to. I guess I am getting old, too, Scotter.

“Youthless”

6. Au Revoir Simone –Reverse Migration

“Sad Song” (Pacific! Remix) (buy)
Download audio file (Simone-Sad.mp3)

This is an album of remixes from the 2007 release The Bird of Music (my 6th favorite album last year, oddly enough). I’m not normally a fan of remixes, especially the ones that are like 7 minutes long and just drag on forever, but this album is not like that. The music is varied and sounds much different than the original album while still retaining the group’s beautiful vocals. The music is much richer and fuller in some places, and even more acoustic in others. Dare I say, it is better than the original.

5. Adele –19

“Best for Last” (buy)
Download audio file (Adele-Best.mp3)

What a powerful singer! If her album hadn’t been named “19″ I never would have guessed that was her age. Channeling the spirit of singers past like a young Brenda Lee with a hint of Kate Nash’s attitude. It’s hard to not enjoy Adele’s voice and her lyrics are quite smart.

4. Hello Saferide –More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide

I believe that Annika Norlin got it right with the title of the album. She doesn’t sing songs, she tells stories. Her music is so autobiographical that I feel like I know her. This is much more tranquil than her previous album, Introducing Hello Saferide. My Biggest regret of 2008 was missing seeing a concert of hers in Oslo by one day on our November trip to Scandinavia. Now if only I could learn to speak Swedish so I could enjoy her Swedish language side project –Säkert!

“Anna”

3. Billie the Vision and the Dancers –I Used to Wonder These Streets

“Stuttering Duckling”
Download audio file (Billie-Duckling.mp3)

I adore this band. I dare you to listen to the album and not tap your toes. Much like Billie the Vision’s 2007 album, the songs from I Used to Wander These Streets are humorous and catchy. This is an awesome pop album from my favorite Swedish pop band. This album contains songs about homesickness as a child moving to a new country, struggling with a transgender identity, and is much more personal album than the three previously released by the band. Best of all, you can still download the album for free.

2. Thao –We Brave Bee Stings All

“Big Kid Table” (buy)
Download audio file (Thao-BigKidTable.mp3)

I’m not really sure how to credit this artist. She has listings as Thao, Thao Nguyen, Thao Nguyen with the Get Down Stay Down, or sometimes just Thao with the Get Down Stay Down. In any case, she and her Get Down Stay Down kids have been making some kick ass music this year. Unusual vocals and catchy beats make this album one of the best of the year.

1. She & Him –Volume 1

“I Was Made For You” (buy)
Download audio file (SheHim-MadeForYou.mp3)

A little bit of country, a little bit of ’60s girl band. The charm of Zooey Deschanel meets M. Ward’s musical stylings in the best album of the year. I certainly hope that this is volume 1 of many.

Honorable Mention

The Sound of Arrows –Danger! EP
Lykki Li –Youth Novels
Cryptacize –Dig that Treasure