A Happy New Year to all! We’ll start 2010 in our time-honored tradition of presenting our favorite albums from the year past. During December, with a record-breaking 32 posts in 31 days, we presented our choices for the
Best Albums of the Decade and focused on some of the
highlights of 2009. We have already presented our
Top 50 Tracks of the Year, the
10 Best Debut LPs and yesterday we posted the bottom half of our
Top 60 Albums list. Time to finish this marathon by unveiling today, first day of the year and the new decade (!), our 30 favorite albums for 2009.
Our choice for "
Album of the Year" is not going to be a surprise for anyone who’s been following this blog. As early as January I’ve been
praising Telepathe’s debut "
Dance Mother", placing it at the top of our
first "Listening Habits" list for the year, ahead of the critic’s darling for 2009,
Animal Collective’s "
Merriweather Post Pavilion". By July "
Dance Mother" was leading our
First-half of the Year album selection proving that the spell
Telepathe had casted could stand the test of time and by December it was our choice for "
Debut of the Year". This is how I tried to explain the unique charms of this extraordinary avant-pop masterpiece in earlier reviews: "The two exceptional singles that
Telepathe released in 2008, "
Chrome's On It" (their most pop-friendly moment so far, with playfully melodic vocals and unusual, hip-hop influenced beats) and "
Devil's Trident" (
The Slits meet
Kraftwerk in a haunted disco) along with the information that the multi-talented
Dave Sitek of
TV On The Radio had undertaken production duties for their debut album, made "
Dance Mother" one of the most anticipated releases of 2009. Our expectations were completely fulfilled upon listening to the album…Ethereal, dark melodies that draw inspiration from both the trip-hop of
Portishead as well as the gothic charm of
Cocteau Twins, combine with experimental rhythms, inspired by New York's hip-hop radio stations, and repetitive, trance-inducing, tribal percussion. The electropop sounds of the early '80s intertwine with the feminist DIY punk aesthetics of the late '70s and the result is a unique, truly inventive sound- the sound of 2009!"
The only other album that was able to compete with "
Dance Mother" for our "
Album of the Year" title was the recently released sophomore effort of
A Place To Bury Strangers. The not unreasonably dubbed "loudest band in New York" offered us "
Exploding Head", an excellent gift to noise-rock fans everywhere. As I was writing in
November "...the band's sound remains rooted in their love for the "
Psychocandy" wall-of-noise with its buried pop melodies while paying close attention to
Kevin Shields' guitar effects,
Sonic Youth's sonic assault,
Big Black’s shattering rhythms and the gothic new wave atmospherics of the early '80s… The amazing "
To Fix the Gash in Your Head" was the track that showcased what this band was really capable of, and this potential is fully realized this time around resulting in a thrilling noise trip that renews and revitalizes the genre." The mind-blowing live performance that we
witnessed here a few weeks later was the confirmation that
A Place To Bury Strangers is the most exciting new noise-rock band in existence right now.
Of course, the band that started all this gloriously apocalyptic guitar noise a few decades back could not be absent from our list, especially when it has presented us with its best work for the '00s.
Sonic Youth’s "
The Eternal" was at the top of our June
playlist and the band was also responsible for one of the most thrilling gigs we saw in 2009 with their
headlining performance at the
Primavera Sound festival in May.
Among the top albums of the year we also have
Metric’s self-released fourth LP, the wonderful "
Fantasies" (it was our "Album of the Month" in
March, while "
Help I’m Alive", its first single, topped our
Tracks of the Year list), the second
Bat For Lashes effort, the pop masterpiece "
Two Suns", which was among our favorite releases of
April along with
Yeah Yeah Yeah's dance-frenzy mayhem of "
It’s Blitz!".
Animal Collective also gets respect here (although not the
Pitchfork-style "We’re not worthy!" acclaim), as does the magnificent, otherworldly
Fever Ray debut (read
here our initial reaction upon hearing this unique sound for the first time). Our
Top 10 is completed with
The Dead Weather’s blues-heavy "
Horehound", our "Album of the Month" in
July, yet another project of the workaholic
Jack White (it would be impossible to pair
Allison Mosshart’ lung power with
White’s mad skills and not have a
Top 10 worthy album in my book), and with the euphoric indie-pop of the self-titled debut of
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, our second choice in the "
Debuts of the Year" list. Here’s the complete
Top 30:
1. Dance mother -
2. Exploding head -
3. The eternal -
4. Fantasies -
5. Two suns -
6. It's blitz! -
7. Merriweather Post Pavilion -
8. Fever Ray -
9. Horehound -
10. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart -
11. A brief history of love -
12. Get color -
13. Only built 4 Cuban linx… pt. II -
14. Embryonic -
15. I'm going away -
16. Marry me tonight -
17. Face control -
18. Post-Nothing -
19. Fits -
20. Popular songs -
21. Futuro -
22. Dragonslayer -
23. Six -
24. Farm -
25. Dim light -
26. Everything goes wrong -
27. Rose city -
28. XX -
29. Tonight: Franz Ferdinand -
30. Humbug -
