Best Music of 2009, Pt. 2: Albums #20-16

[Note: only full-length studio albums were considered for this list. Therefore, EPs (Animal Collective’s Fall Be Kind) and compilations (Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’ White Lunar and the AIDS benefit Dark Was The Night) are not included here, as awesome as they may be. Making lists like this is arbitrary enough as is. Adding compilations and short-form releases only makes things more complicated. But seriously…go check the other 2009 Favorites out. They’re all quite impressive.]

#20
Rain Machine
Rain Machine

Escaping the narrow confines of simply being a “side project,” Kyp Malone, who by day sings and plays guitar in TV On The Radio, came into his own in a big way this year with Rain Machine. Without TVOTR’s furious guitar rush and Tunde Adebimpe’s roaring vocals to distract attention, Rain Machine reveals Malone as a gloriously emotional and potent songwriter. He can do the whole in-your-face rock thing, with songs like “Give Blood”, but he can also restrain himself and write tracks like the eleven-minute long “Winter Song”, while magically keeping something that unwieldy from becoming boring. Topped off by his expressive voice and urgent delivery, Malone and his band have created something that should be familiar to TVOTR fans, but engaging and unique in its own right.

[original review]

#19
Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
Patterson Hood

The Drive-By Truckers are a wildly prolific band and it almost feels weird to have a year go by without a new studio album from Alabama’s finest. Thankfully, the band did treat us to two solid stopgap releases this year: The Fine Print, an impressive b-sides and rarities collection, and Murdering Oscar, the second solo album from the band’s guitarist, singer and all-around leader, Patterson Hood. Playing with his band, the Screwtopians, Hood has compiled a frighteningly strong set of songs, written at various times over the past decade. Yet, over the course of the album fifty minutes, a cohesive sound and style emerges. Party country shitkicker and part keen social observer, Hood and his band churn out blistering southern rock and heart-wrenching balladry to back up Hood’s sharp lyrics and nuanced character sketches.

[original review]

#18
Years Of Refusal
Morrissey

There’s something about Morrissey that can be insanely frustrating. The Pope of Mope has made an entire career of his self-fulfilling lyrical obsession with no one ever loving him. Plus, when he’s not singing about that lack of love, he’s singing about the qualities that make him unlovable. It’s a vicious cycle and Moz has shown no signs of jumping off his specific hamster wheel anytime soon. The upside to all this is that Morrissey is in the middle of a full-fledged career renaissance as of late and Years Of Refusal is the best album he’s released since the 1990s. Heaven knows he’s still miserable now, but his dourness is balanced out by the short, sharp rock of his songwriting compatriots, Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer. At the ripe old age of fifty, the Mozfather sounds as vibrant and caustic as ever.

[original review]

#17
The Sound The Speed The Light
Mission Of Burma

As far as I know, there is literally no precedent for what Mission Of Burma have accomplished this decade. How many other bands can break up after recording only a single (admittedly legendary) album… and then reunite nineteen years later and end up recording material that sounds just as immediate and thrilling? It helps that during that absence, alt-rock was flung into the mainstream and Mission Of Burma were retroactively given demi-god status, but still… The Sound The Speed The Light is almost too good. The dry, brittle sound of their 1982 debut, Vs., is replicated wonderfully on this new album, full of angular guitars, dissonant bass and pummeling drums. It only took, y’know, twenty-seven years, but Mission Of Burma have recorded their second full-length masterpiece.

[original review]

#16
Album
Girls

“Do we really need a Californian Elvis Costello?” This is the question I’ve been asking myself since Girls debuted with Album earlier this fall. Without a doubt, the San Francisco-based band wears its influences on their thrift-store-bought sleeves: two parts Costello pen-wielding nerd vocals, one part Beach Boys harmonies, some Buddy Holly to taste and voila! However, the appeal of Girls is that they take all those classic pop touchstones and turn them into something that sounds weirdly contemporary. The growls of static and noise that underpin songs like “Morning Light” and “Big Bad Mean Motherfucker” show that the band see themselves as more than just a jukebox on legs that waltzed out of a 1950s diner. Plus, few bands this year could match Girls for sheer, heartstring-tugging balladry, with the heartfelt “Lust For Life”, “Laura” and “Hellhole Ratrace” proving that teenage angst and emoting can still be wonderfully appealing in this post-emo age.

[original review]

Best Music of 2009, Pt. 1: The 1st Annual Pretzel Awards

True fact: music bloggers love December. After a whole year of listening and reviewing and so forth, we finally get to write up organized lists, showcasing what we feel has been the best music of the past twelve months. We wait all year for this chance to arbitrarily declare one album better than another, then brace ourselves for the inevitable deluge of outraged comments. Maybe it all sounds dumb and a bit pointless, but there’s something strangely thrilling about lists, countdowns and crowning one specific set of songs the “Album of the Year.”

I’ll be counting down my twenty favorite albums of 2009 over the rest of this week, but to start things off, I’m sharing the 1st Annual Pretzel Awards, showcasing some of the best non-album accomplishments in music this year. So, without further ado, I give you the best music of 2009:

Best Songs of the Year (alphabetically by artist):

-“My Girls”, Animal Collective, from Merriweather Post Pavilion
-“Least Favorite Rapper”, Busdriver, from Jhelli Beam
-“A Machine For Loving”, Iggy Pop, from Préliminaires
-“Fuckingsong”, Jarvis Cocker, from Further Complications
-“Oblivion”, Mastodon, from Crack The Skye
-“Belvedere”, Patterson Hood, from Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
-“Black Hearted Love”, PJ Harvey & John Parish, from A Woman A Man Walked By
-“These Are My Twisted Words”, Radiohead, non-album single
-“House Of Flying Daggers”, Raekwon, from Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II
-“Hooting & Howling”, Wild Beasts, from Two Dancers

Short-Form Release of the Year:
-Fall Be Kind EP, Animal Collective

Musician of the Year:
-Noah Lennox, for having a hand in Animal Collective’s amazing album-and-EP one-two punch, as well as his winning guest vocals on Atlas Sound’s “Walkabout”.

Music Video of the Year:
-“House Of Flying Daggers”, Raekwon, dir. Erick Sasso and Brian Wendelken

Debut Album of the Year:
-Fever Ray, Fever Ray

Most Promising New Act:
-The xx

Best Opening Track of the Year:
-“Oblivion”, Mastodon, from Crack The Skye

Best Closing Track of the Year:
-“Foreground”, Grizzly Bear, from Veckatimest

Most Disappointing Album of the Year:
-Begone Dull Care, Junior Boys

Acclaimed Album I Didn’t Understand of the Year:
-Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Phoenix

Single Worst Thing to Happen to Music This Year:
-Auto-Tune reaches its maximum cultural saturation point

Good In Theory...

Artist: Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse

Album: Dark Night Of The Soul

Year: 2009

Grade: 3 pretzels

Dark Night Of The Soul, a collaboration album between producer extraordinaire Danger Mouse, Virginian indie band Sparklehorse and a whole slew of guests, made a lot of news earlier this year. For reasons that have still not been made one-hundred percent clear, the label EMI prevented the album from being released. It’s believed that the problem stems from a distribution deal Danger Mouse signed, but no concrete information has actually come to light. All we know is that, instead of grimly accepting their fate or bogging everything down in court procedures, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse found a novel way to get their music out there. They ended up releasing a well-packaged version of the album, including a blank CD, so that fans could find one of the many leaked versions of the album and burn it onto the CD themselves.

I’m fully in support of what Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse are doing. I think it’s refreshing to see artists using the inevitable album leaks as a force of good, instead of freaking out or blogging irately about it all. However, as for the actual music on Dark Night Of The Soul…well, it’s ok. The album is essentially a huge showcase for the wealth of talent Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse have assembled, but many of the songs never really get off the ground or establish their own identity.

There are highlights. “Little Girl”, featuring a wonderfully mumbling Julian Casablancas from the Strokes, is one of the few moments when the music, lyrics and singer’s voice all mesh together to create something that sounds natural. The off-kilter cadences to the words suit Casablancas’ slurring, flat delivery perfectly and the shimmering guitar adds some subtle tension. The opening track, “Revenge”, is another success, featuring the entirety of the Flaming Lips, playing in full-blown, anthemic mode. Danger Mouse’s rich production suits the band’s dreamy vibe perfectly and makes me wonder what an entire album of Lips/Mouse collaborating would sound like.

But too many of the tracks just don’t sound comfortable with themselves. The hacking hard rock of “Angel’s Harp”, featuring Pixies’ Black Francis, goes absolutely nowhere and mostly just sounds like third-string garage rock. The similarly overblown Iggy Pop vehicle, “Pain”, is cursed with a disorienting, unstable chord progression and hamfisted lyrics (“there are good people in this world of bombs, but sadly I am not one”). Then you’ve got a whole chunk of mellow, throwaway tracks during the album’s second half, such as interminable “Everytime I’m With You”. These songs never have anything beyond a simple verse-chorus-bridge setup and the singers don’t even add variations with their voice. While the initial song beginnings are often quite interesting, when they end up stretched over four minutes, they get dull and lifeless.

Thankfully, the album ends with one of its best songs: the crackling, moody title track, featuring none other than David Lynch, who designed the booklet accompanying the blank CD. There are moments of fascinating artistic clarity and collaborative magic sprinkled throughout Dark Night Of The Soul, but they’re simply too few. The guest singers rarely sound comfortable with the lyrics being put in their mouth and the music often sounds labored and weak. I appreciate everything Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse are doing in terms of music politics with this album. I only wish the music could have a similar edge and liveliness.

The Curse Of Quirk

Artist: Devendra Banhart

Album: What Will We Be

Year: 2009

Grade: 2.5 pretzels

Being quirky is a trap. On one hand, being an unusual and “weird” musician limits the number of people who will likely enjoy your music. But, if you ever stop being strange in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, you end up alienating the people who like you because you’re a weird musician. No matter what you do, someone, somewhere is going to be annoyed and confused by the music you’re making. If Devendra Banhart doesn’t know this feeling well already, he will soon, as What Will We Be is a jarring departure from his usual “freak-folk” sound.

After building a following on the backs of warped, profoundly unusual albums like Rejoicing In The Hands (2004) and Cripple Crow (2005), What Will We Be is definitely Banhart’s most accessible, coffee-house-ready album yet. His usual oddball melodies and skewed lyrical perspective have been replacement by traditional acoustic strumming, shot through with a inexplicably funky set of rhythms. “Baby” features a bouncy baseline and lots of skittery, country-ish guitar squiggles, while “Goin’ Back” could pass for an M. Ward song. For whatever reason, Banhart has exorcised most of his established identity from his music, resulting in an album of folkie-indie dreck, far too similar to what I hear every day on my college’s radio station.

While I’m aware that Banhart’s star has been rising the past couple of years (even featuring a cameo in Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist), I can’t quite understand why he’s chosen to release an album this dreary and drab. If anything, I usually relied on Banhart to release albums that alienated me through weirdness, instead of boringly slick production. Yet, here I am, listening to the piano-led slow jazz of “Chin Chin & Muck Muck”, which has nothing more interesting than its title going for it.

I’m the first person to admit it: artistic growth happens. I’m not in a position to say what Devendra Banhart should or should not be recording. All I know is that What Will We Be doesn’t hold my attention and sounds suspiciously similar to every other interchangeable singer-songwriter winning the hearts of college students the world over. Perhaps this is all a calculated move to appeal to a wider audience and, as the cynic in me is quick to point out, it could actually work. But I can’t help but be disappointed when I hear an artist sacrificing the qualities that make them unique. Please go back to being insanely weird, Devendra. I’ll probably still be alienated by your music, but at least I’ll respect you for it.

December Disappointment

Artist: Clipse

Album: Til The Casket Drops

Year: 2009

Grade: 2 pretzels

It’s been three years since Clipse’s last album, the impressive and complex Hell Hath No Fury. The appeal of that album came from the winning combination of beats provided by the Neptunes and the intricate lyrical interplay between brothers Malice and Pusha T. It was also a downright creepy album, full of sinister keyboards and songs that skirted around the immorality of drug dealing and crime. Glorifying criminal activities through good music and witty rhyming is, of course, nothing new, but Clipse managed to reinvent that specific wheel in a very good way, bringing the danger back into gangster rap. Now, in 2009, the same Clipse/Neptunes team has released Til The Casket Drops, a album Clipse themselves refer to as “long overdue” in the very first song. However, Til The Casket Drops is barely even a shadow of the great album that preceded it.

Rap has a very complicated relationship with becoming successful. The vast majority of rap debuts focus on the struggles of life, while dreaming of a day when music will bring success and wealth into the rappers’ lives. However, for those lucky enough to actually make it, success can end up destroying most of what made their music interesting in the first place. Clipse have become as much of victim of this as anyone else. Til The Casket Drops is a collection of exceedingly awkward songs, riffing on the clichéd themes of massive wealth, drug use and adoring-but-manipulative women.

The album’s overall mission statement (and second single) is “I’m Good”, a lightweight ode to money, cars and bitches. Pharrell drops by during the chorus to add some backing vocals, but the whole thing just lacks any real weight. From its insanely obvious title, “I’m Good” is just an annoying slice of lazy narcissism. Even stranger is “Footsteps”, on which Clipse taunt other rappers who they think have been ripping them off (“I’ve been the inspiration for all you industry dick-tasters”). The problem with this argument is that, while Hell Hath No Fury was a critical favorite back in 2006, Clipse haven’t exactly broken into the mainstream yet. If anything, with Til The Casket Drops, they’ve put themselves solidly in the “followers” camp rather than the “leaders.”

The rest of the songs on the album deal with expected themes of evil, sexy women (“All Eyes On Me”, “Counseling”) and drugs (“Door Man”, “There Was A Murder”). There’s just nothing new here. Worst of all, Malice and Pusha T mostly just come across as foolishly arrogant. On “Kinda Like A Big Deal”, the lyric “it’s a blessing to blow a hundred thou in a recession” just sounds horribly callous. Even stranger than the lyrics are the beats providing the usually reliable Neptunes. Pharrell and Co. have cooked up far too many half-baked, unmemorable synth jams for Til The Casket Drops, with virtually no catchy hooks or earworms in sight (with the exception of the descending piano line on “Popular Demand”). Clipse and the Neptunes had the world in their hand after Hell Hath No Fury, but with this new album, they’ve taken way too many steps back. We waited three years for…this?