2009 Year-End

Listomania
Sorry, it's taken me longer than planned to get this stuff up here. I blame it on the holidays, general laziness, and genuine technical difficulties (notice the lack of pretty pictures). Hopefully, this is still fun and relevant.

It was a great year, all in all. Globalization, for all its downsides, gave us a nice blend of genre-bending music to savor in 2009 (and I do encourage savoring in this Internet age of micro-snacking). Let's review:

We saw new wave/no-wave wedded to soul/pop with records by the xx, Little Dragon, and remixers of the year by a long-shot, Classixx; lushly layered masterpieces in two of the year's most universally lauded albums - Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion and Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest; some highly original, balls-out rock by the likes of Franz Ferdinand and White Denim; only a couple (no sarcasm) good, solid hip-hop recordings - DOOM's Born Like This and Mos Def's the Ecstatic; latin-tinged output from some of the world-scene's brightest underground stars - Quantic (and his Combo Barbaro) and Ocote Soul Sounds (Adrien Quesada, Martin Perna, Chico Mann); and more electro goodies from more artistes than one could begin to reasonably list. Plenty of good indie/lo-fi/garage crap too, but many of those acts seem more like flavors of the week, in retrospect.

You've heard most of my favorite songs from the year in prior posts and I've listed some of the year's highlights in albums above, but here's a more exhaustive run-down, including the blog-requisite "Best Albums of the Decade" list. It's important to remind ourselves now, as always, that music, like all art, is subjective. So, please point out what I missed/failed to connect with and which favorites of mine flat-out suck. Happy Holidays and a blessed New Year.

10 Best Albums of 2009
1)Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
2) Franz Ferdinand - Tonight
3) White Denim - Fits (w/ bonus Exposion disc)
4) Chin Chin - The Flashing, the Fancing
5) Quantic and His Combo Barbaro - Tradition in Transition
6) Little Dragon - Machine Dreams
7) Ocote Soul Sounds and Adrian Quesada - Coconut Rock
8) NOMO - Invisible Cities
9) Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
10) Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix


15(ish) Best Albums of the Past Decade (in no order, except #1, which is indeed my favorite)

1) My Morning Jacket - Z
~Cat Power - The Greatest
~Blur - Think Tank
~Wilco - A Ghost is Born
~Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
~Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
~Arcade Fire - Funeral
~The Libertines - self/titled
~Whiskeytown - Pneumonia
~Radiohead - Hail to the Thief
~Radiohead - Kid A
~The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium
~Kanye West - College Dropout
~The Shins - Oh Inverted World
~Dr. Dog - Fate
~Ryan Adams - Gold


15 Best Songs of 2009 (in no order except that which sounds good as a playlist)



1) Camera Obscura - French Navy
2) Royksopp - Vision One
3) Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
4) Major Lazer - Cash Flow (Classixx remix)
5) Quantic and His Combo Barbaro - Undelivered Letter
6) Dent May - Meet Me In The Garden
7) Peter, Bjorn & John - It Don't Move Me
8) Little Dragon - Feather
9) Animal Collective - My Girls

10) Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Home
11) Levon Helm - When I Go Away
12) Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
13) Phoenix - Fences
14) Phoenix - Lisztomania (Classixx remix)
15) Girls - Lust For Life