My top ten albums of 2009
10. Obits – I Blame You
The chaps from Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes’ new band… spiky and surprisingly poppy, with a nice line in surf-guitar-meets-abrasive-noise.
9. The Flowers Of Hell – Come Hell Or High Water
Woo, this is pretty! It sounds a bit like all the lovely little instrumental bits in Spiritualized’s best stuff.
8. And So I Watch You From Afar – And So I Watch You From Afar
Didn’t realise this came out in 2009 ’til I checked. That Fucking Tank’s record is the only one that pushes this in terms of monster riffs per minute. But this rocks harder.
7. Dan Deacon - Bromst
Whee! Dan Deacon is insane. I saw him with an eleven-piece laptop ensemble at Primavera and it was DIGITAL MANNA FROM HEAVEN, though I was powered by Jaegerbombs and it was 1am at the time. But Bromst is fabulously-nuts ADHD electro nonsense.
6. Shannon Wright – Honeybee Girls
I love Shannon Wright. She could basically record an EP of the sound of her farting in the bath and the only reason it wouldn’t hit my top ten albums would be technicalities over the format. And it was a total surprise to me that a new record appeared from her this year, since I only discovered it existed through a random googling – haven’t really seen it reviewed anywhere. Anyway, this is a lot more sparse than her previous records and gives her incredible voice room to express itself. I’d been looking for a record of heartbreaking tunes all year, and the new Eitzel and Julie Doiron records were kinda patchy, but this one hits the buttons.
5. Beak> – Beak>
Bloke from Portishead who loves Silver Apples forms side project and records album that sounds quite a lot like Silver Apples. Only with some krauty guitar explorations thrown into the mix too. It’s a really simple idea, but basically updates some of that ace 60s/70s psychedelia and krautrock with a whole dose of lovely 2009 synths. Thanks Geoff!
4. Mono – Hymn To The Immortal Wind
Or ‘A lesson in how to be Explosions in the Sky without sucking’. On paper, Mono should be awful: a four-piece post-rock band with only one trick in their armoury, and that’s starting quiet and then ending loud. But they do massive, soaring endings better than pretty much anyone. And they spend each album trying to top the last in the Ben Hur stakes: the closing minutes of ‘Everlasting Light’ are just obscenely epic.
3. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Music from OUTER SPACE.
2. The Paperchase – Someday This Will All Be Yours Vol. 1
A cursory glance at my Last.fm charts tells me I’ve listened to The Paperchase more than is healthy this year, particularly this bombastic, melodramatic collection of songs portending some kind of undefined impending apocalypse. Bonus points for squeezing a chorus out of the ‘he’s got the whole world in his hands’, which I haven’t heard since I had to sing it in school assembly when I was six.
1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Predictable. But yeah, this’ll basically be the top of everyone’s album of the year charts, right? Since it’s obviously the best thing released this year and quite probably one of the best records of the decade. If you’ve not heard it, it’s bloody astonishingly brilliant.
