Albums of the Year 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 12:53PM | RyanSilb Here are my favorite eight albums from this year:
8. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
;)
Most people are not shocked that I had never heard of Animal Collective until a month ago. This is because most people have not heard of Animal Collective. Briefly sampling their back catalogue via the Interwebs, I know why. Most people don’t like avant-anything. This is why MPP is a revelation. After apparent years of experimenting on the fringes of pop music, Animal Collective ride back from the wilderness on biomechanical creations—like Terminators that are made to love and dance.
Listening to the album is a good experience, and it’s not in-your-face so much as in-your-mind. The album functions on a fairly deep level, with synth and bass lines swirling around steady vocals. This is the kind of thing that makes me love End of the Blank Lists, because without them, I still would not have heard of Animal Collective. Thank you, music media prophets. This makes up for your obsession with Grizzly Bear.
Key Tracks: “My Girls,” “Summertime Clothes,” “Brother Sport”
Summertime Clothes - Animal Collective
There are not enough good bands with lead female vocalists, although this decade’s biggest trend—bands with vocal leads of both genders (Arcade Fire, The Hush Sound, Silversun Pickups)—is a welcome move. Alongside the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Metric’s Emily Haines is like a mother hen of indie rock. She leads the pack from the rear, often worrying more for groups other than her own. More guitar driven than their previous work, this is a welcome shift.
Fantasies opens with “Help, I’m Alive,” and “Sick Muse,” both have extremely well constructed hooks and driving guitars, which in turn shape the baseline of the album. The syth still sparkles, especially on “Satellite Mind,” and “Twilight Galaxy,” which leaves you with a bright and happy feeling. Despite some of the feelings expressed on the album, seeing Metric at a show this past week, you can tell Haines and Co. have a blast playing these songs. What some “serious indie bands” forget is that music is fun, and that’s exactly to what this album aspires. I could write a several pages long pontification about how the lyric “Who would you rather be/The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” is a metaphor for different kinds of relationships, but it could easily just be the fun kinds of questions us Rob Gordon-types ask each other.
Key Tracks: “Help, I’m Alive,” “Gimme Sympathy,” “Twilight Galaxy”
6. Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Mastodon may be the most important metal band of today, and this is not because Crack the Skye may be the first modern metal album I have truly loved. Simultaneously a throwback to the days of progressive rock and a torch leading the way to metal of tomorrow, Crack the Skye exists apart from the ‘thrash metal’ that dominated the post-hair metal hard rock scene. Bringing in Brendan O’Brien as producer on this disc was a very wise move. His trademark is texture, and helps make the layers of sound work towards a higher purpose, as well as making the vocals truly shine (a rarity for metal bands today, IMO). Everything was accessible if you were in the right state of mind. Or maybe two tracks longer than ten minutes on an album doesn’t bother me because I listen to Rush.
Mastodon blows right past accessible and shoots for cosmically epic. There’s something beautiful in the texture of this album. The pounding drums and the spinning riffs on the opener “Oblivion” meld into something not unlike chunky peanut butter, smooth and crunchy at the same time. This goes the same for “Divinations,” as well, which is easily my favorite song on the album. The guitar solo on here sounds like Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” or perhaps more true—Satriani’s “Surfing With the Alien,” and is a more ethereal version of space-surf. This is a band unafraid to sing about the Czar and Rasputin for ten minutes. This is a metal band that is unafraid to have a banjo open a single. And no fear is good. Very good indeed.
Key Tracks: “Divinations,” “The Last Baron”
I didn’t hear this Band of Skulls until I heard the soundtrack of the year, but their debut album quickly become one of my favorites of the year. I love this band for two reasons: 1) The album itself dances across a range of styles and 2) This is exactly the kind of band I would aspire to be.* Their roots are obviously in British blues rock ala Cream and Led Zeppelin, but like those two other bands, they are willing to stretch beyond that beginning. “Light of the Morning” revels in it with Jack White-esque vocals, “I Know What I Am” pushes it by a guitar riff seemingly borrowed from Franz Ferdinand, and “Blood” breaks it back down to the basics. All of this (and more!) on one record.
This is a band that goes from intimate and introspective (“Honest”) to anthemic heights (“Pattern” and the Gary Glitter’d “Hollywood Bowl”) in one song, and more importantly, does both well. Also, I strongly suspect this band as no idea how good they are. This of course, would make them the inverse of the Arctic Monkeys, who know all to well how good they are and abuse it. Band of Skulls just rocks.
*A third reason is that women who play bass are hot. See also: Silversun Pickups.
Key Tracks: "Light of the Morning," "Honest" "Patterns"
4. U2 - No Line on the Horizon
In their third album of the decade, U2 move slightly back toward a “European” sound almost absent from their previous two albums. It’s an album that doesn’t hit you hard with Edge’s guitar, rather showing you the breadth of the U2 sound and the depth of Bono’s lyrics. I wasn’t particularly impressed the first time I listened to this album, but subsequent listens revealed the album’s strength.
Lyrically it is an attempt by Bono to stop outside himself and sing from the vantage of other people. Honestly, I’m not sure if I can tell the difference. Sonically, this album is expansive, like a plane soaring over the ocean. It is certainly evocative of The Joshua Tree this way, and at times it sounds like the follow up album people were expecting in 1990. “Moment of Surrender” is almost on par with “With or Without You,” and is easily the best song on the album. Answering this expansion is the second half of the album, quieter and more inwardly contemplative, though the contrast isn’t as stark from a sound perspective.
Key Tracks: “Moment of Surrender,” “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”
Moment Of Surrender - U2
3. Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown
This is a fantastic album that will always be overshadowed by American Idiot. Like U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, AI took a band perched on the edge of non-relevance and pushed it back into the forefront of modern rock. That’s why 21st Century Breakdown was Green Day’s best debut ever, and even better, the album is damned good, remaining in my car’s CD player for a solid month or two after it’s release.
The most fascinating thing about this record to me is that is both intensely political as well as intensely personal, and manages to be both at the same time. Their sound has also deepened, mirroring The Who’s career arc in a very agreeable way. Green Day was maybe the first band I listened to that my parents didn’t, and I’m shocked that not only am I still listening to them, but now my parents are too. Green Day conquered the world through punk rock, though they never seemed like they were setting out to do so.
Key Tracks: “Know Your Enemy” “East Jesus Knowhere” “Last of the American Girls”
2. Monsters of Folk - Eponymous
The motto of this album may as well be that sometimes the sum of parts is greater than the whole. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about Monsters of Folk (except for the opener, “Dear God, (Sincerely M.O.F.)” being trip-folk gospel), but that’s exactly what makes it so great. Many of these songs make you feel like you’ve heard them before, in the backgrounds of movies, on out-of-area radio stations you only listen to on road trips, each track a gem on a compilation you picked out of the bargain bin because you liked the cover art.
An indie-rock supergroup if there ever was one, MOF is Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis from Bright Eyes, and M. Ward. All of these are fantastic balladeers in their own right, but together they produce an album that can’t help but echo the Traveling Whilburys. A mostly mellow, well-thought album, it will certainly be in heavy rotation for summers to come, perhaps as I sip lemonade on a porch. Ahh.
Key Tracks” “Dear God (Sincerely, M.O.F.),” “Say Please,” “The Sandman, The Brakeman and Me”
1. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Perched at the crossroads between Daft Punk and classical music, synth-rockers Phoenix crafted a breakthrough. It’s a record that is infinitely danceable, and sounds good over headphones walking downtown, or cruising on the highway. Dancing is something rock has been missing for much of the grunge and post-grunge era, and leave to some French dudes to help further the dance-rock Renaissance. Unlike too many other records, the synth here only adds to the music, never distracts from it. Although the craftiness here rivals Merriweather Post Pavilion, WAP is able to retain the urgency of sound and lyric lost in being too precise.
What I love about this album is that it borders on being too much, but after the towering bliss of “Lisztomania,” “1901,” and “Fences,” a mini synth suite comes in to bring the record down to earth again only to soar again afterwards. The sound itself is at once so contemporary and so retro it sounds like it could have only come from a movie made in the past about the future (like if Blade Runner had happiness). And besides, the lead track is about the first teen idol, 19th century composer Franz Lizst.
Key Tracks: “Lizstomania,” “1901”
1901 - Phoenix