2009: The Perils of Introspection

Albums/Reissues/Compilations/Whatever Honorable Mentions -

Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol. 2
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Atlas Sound - Logos
Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
CFCF - Continent
The Clientele - Bonfires on the Heath
Emeralds - Emeralds
Fever Ray - Fever Ray
Kronos Quartet - Floodplain
Moderat - Moderat
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Themselves - CrownsDown
William Basinski - 92982
Yagya - Ringing
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!

My Personal 10 Favorite Albums Of The Year -

10. Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Another end of the year list, another Yo La Tengo album. To give you the appropriate perspective: Ezra Koenig was still in utero when Yo La Tengo first formed. The three most consistently amazing bands of the decade: Spoon, The Clientele, and Yo La Tengo.





9. Fischerspooner - Entertainment

Do I objectively think this album is better than Merriweather Post Pavilion? Probably not. Would I rather listen to it than Merriweather Post Pavilion on any given day? Yes, yes. A hundred times yes. Please reference the New York Times on soft rock radio [don't worry about reading it now, I will reference it again at #4] and Malcolm Gladwell on The Perils of Introspection.



8. Hildur Gudnadóttir - Without Sinking

Never trust an artist to accurately explicate on her own work. In interviews, Hildur Gudnadóttir describes her intention of "creat[ing] a sky and cloud-like feeling in the compositions" of Without Sinking and crafting "an open space for single notes and let them breath, like single clouds in a clear sky." From these words you might envision a gossamer of an album, ethereal and cherubic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like its cover art, Without Sinking is enveloped in a suffocating and ponderous fog. Paradoxically, Gudnadóttir's cello serves as the emotional ballast as the album charts a course through fathomless melancholy. Bleak and mournful, but also incredibly moving.

7. The XX - The XX

The album art tells you just about everything you need to know about this band. The focus on negative space. The minimalism which is both unapproachable and alluring, stark yet adumbrative. The way it looks like two lamps intersecting in a pitch black bedroom. The manner in which it evokes its own perfectly self-contained universe. A brilliant debut worthy of all the hype and laurels placed upon its shoulders. Who could have guessed that Chris Issak's "Wicked Game" would be an indie touchstone two decades later?

6. Animal Hospital - Memory

Affixing the "post-" prefix to any genre tag all but guarantees that only 1) people with Y chromosomes and 2) assholes listen to that particular subset of music. Upfront, Animal Hospital portrays all the eye-rolling trappings of the post-rock genre. The questionable band name. The high album concept. The epic 10+ minute tracks. And while the slow-building, chugging guitar of "His Belly Burst" plays to the Explosions in the Sky fans who had the tactlessness to play hackysack during Eluvium's opening set at MFNW, "And Ever..." is a complete prog-rock curveball full of squalling guitars and thudding bass lines sure to cause more than a few stroking of bears. Even the eponymous final track is more Tortoise and Stars of the Lid than GY!BE and Mogwai.

5. Clark - Totems Flare

Arch, impish, puckish. Completely unpredictable and gloriously unhinged. Clark shares all the same Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde qualities that made his Warp label mate Aphex Twin so delightful. Like if these gorgeous IDM melodies would just settle down and play nice, you might be able to take them home to meet your mum. But instead they are deranged Stravinskian barnburners married to offkilter drum machines and punishing breakcore beats, likely to alienate practically everybody that hears them. Highly recommended for the intrepid listener who stomached The Knife's icy arpeggios three years ago.

4. Junior Boys - Begone Dull Care

A recent New York Times article reported that men lie about what kind of music they listen to. Instead of coming clean about their secret soft-rock habits, they tend to "overstate listening to musical stations that they felt reflect better taste." To a certain extent, I believe this trend carries on to end of the year list making. Kid A felt like the de facto album of the decade, but I doubt many people ever feel the need to hear Thom Yorke drone on about sucking on lemons. So it comes as no surprise that Begone Dull Care would be so under-appreciated at the end of the year. The Junior Boys switch their musical coordinates and reference points to the '70s MOR soft rock of Toto and Chas Jankel and suddenly they are dismissed as "pleasant" and "inconsequential." "Hazel" might be the best pop single the Junior Boys have ever produced but I am sure it alienated much of the internet cognoscenti with its Michael McDonald falsetto and cheeky synth lines. Let's not forget that Last Exit ended with an almost cloying saxophone solo. Personally, I love Begone Dull Care because it perfectly conveys an emotion that I never thought I would hear from the Junior Boys: jittery cheerfulness.

3. Tim Hecker - An Imaginary Country

By some unspoken decree, it seems every review of an ambient album has to describe some fictional environment that the music conjures. One of the first reviews I read of Tortoise's TNT quite literally described the time and place each song evoked in the critic's imagination. Unintentionally, Hecker's album title reads like an indictment of the state of music criticism of the entire genre, although in interviews he seems perfectly ambivalent about the whole affair. And while there is a song entitled "Borderlands", what strikes me most about An Imaginary Country is not the liminality of its mythological territories, but of its musical sources. I have no idea where most of these sounds originate from: the synthesizers and instruments all bleed together in my ears. That might be the true meaning of the album title: not some fantastical frontier, but the imaginative power of the artist to bend and shape the currents of electrostasy to his whim.

2. Annie - Don't Stop

Annie's whirlwind tour of the states in 2005 was a bit of an awkward affair. It was her first series of live shows - quite possibly ever - and it showed. She looked terribly uncomfortable and had little stage presence to speak of. Which, to be perfectly honest, made her all the more endearing. Annie always seemed to be the accidental pop star, which makes her recent transformation all the more surprising. From the catty leadoff single "My Love Is Better" ("You know you'll never have my hips / I'm so much better / So eat this"), it is clear that Annie is now kicking ass and taking names. Just compare the two album covers: long gone is the Annie who coyly covered her face on Anniemal, replaced with an Annie who looks to have been quite stunningly made over by Weta. Even the tracklisting is teeming with newfound confidence: Annie had the chutzpah to leave two of the best singles off the album ("I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me" and "Anthonio" -- both of which might sound too much like Anniemal 2.0) and replace them with three electrifying cuts from Paul Epworth (potentially the best producer of the decade). Annie even ends the record on perhaps the best unintentional kiss-off to the Island Record label executive who stranded the album is release date purgatory: "Tell me, tell me what did I do wrong? / Oh baby, I am perfect.”

1. Mountains - Choral (+ Etching)

I made a goal to keep up with ambient music this year, which unfortunately was an impossibly tall order. There is no good way to keep tabs on the genre, no singular resource to trust to earmark the quality albums. Worse still, there is such a fine line between subgenera that it is easy to mistakenly download an hour of drone or get suckered into listening to something as discordant and unsettling as hauntology. And once you do manage to target an artist that tickles your fancy, there is an almost paralyzing vertiginous of how to dive in the band's discography. For whatever reason, this new crop of ambient artists are distressingly prolific. Emeralds, one of the better artists to come to my attention this year, released two albums, one 7'', a European Tour 2009 CD, and two cassettes tapes this year alone (the self-titled release is my personal favorite, for what it is worth). I have come to admire the genre's treatment of the studio artifact in the form of limited and personalized physical artifacts (each copy of Mountains's excellent Etching comes with a unique hand-stamped LP jacket), but it is a little irritating that by the time you hear about that amazing hand-painted one sided cassette tape from the band you adore, it is probably already sold-out. For the best, I guess for us hoarders. I don't have the musical vocabulary to discuss the warm textures and sonic details that make up this album (and after my discussion of Tim Hecker, I certainly can't device some metaphorical cartography to describe it), but I can tell you that all the days I wasted listening to illbient and psybient and lowercase and every other stupid subgenera you could possible imagine were worth just to serendipitously stumble upon this band.