Aaron’s Top 10 Albums of 2009

What can I say about this year in music? After a few amazing early entrants, a lot of highly anticipated albums failed to impress us here at Brasky. Grizzly Bear, the Flaming Lips, Yo La Tengo… the list of ho-hum albums from music powerhouses is too long to ignore. But what were the best? What were my top ten, you ask?

1. Russian Circles – Geneva – October 20
This album just blew me away. I have wanted to hear an album like this since… well, probably since birth. This album is urgent, dirty, monumental, sure of itself, timely, and beautiful. High energy and good ideas usually prove to be a good combination, and this album affirms that assertion. Asked to describe it in one word, I would have to say ‘huge’. Given two, I would say ‘absolutely huge’. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Tool, Battles, and Explosions in the Sky, Russian Circles stupefies and energizes, bashes and awes, pushes and pauses, and altogether crafts an epic album whose scope is hard to see from all the way down here… the music honestly sounds as if it is being played from the top of a really fucking sweet mountain.

2. Andrew Bird – Noble Beast – January 20
From the opening chords of ‘Oh No’, listeners are invited on a journey through Bird’s crossword-puzzle quirky universe, where ‘calcified arithmetists’ and aubergines and proto-sanskrit Minoans run around in one-sies and eat wild parsnips. Sound like fun? Bird’s fourth album sets a high bar for ultra-intellectual freak folk. Bird frequently strokes and plucks the violin, whistles, plays the guitar and yes, of course, bangs a little glockenspiel here and there. The album often shifts moods from casual, tongue in cheek indie musicianry to astonishingly purveyed genre mimicry to the insecure dwindlings of a young man and his guitar, all with the gentle dust of a kind reverb settling between the cracks of the songs. Even if you haven’t heard of Andrew Bird, you may have heard him: ‘Heretics’ and ‘Imitosis’ were featured in television ads this year. High repeat listen value and no shortage of lovable hooks make this a solid record in every way.

3. Heartless Bastards – The Mountain – February 3
To take a quote from Stylus Magazine, “It’s not just that they rock… [it's that] the women of rock who labored to make it okay for a girl to dream of playing guitar deserve far better than Avril Lavigne or Kelly Osbourne as their descendants.” The Heartless Bastards created an album that’s ambitious but conservative, voiced in the rugged and honest wail of a frontwoman that is not afraid to be Janis Joplin, Robert Plant, or Billy Holiday depending on the situation. ‘The Mountain’ is possibly the best rock or country album of the year, depending on your classification. Signed to the Black Keys’ label and touring with Wolfmother in the fall, The Heartless Bastards are winning a lot of new fans and making garage rock as fun as it ought to be.

4. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion – January 20
Number four on the list is the highly acclaimed album from the well-respected freak-post-electronic-psychedelic-pop-experimental group Animal Collective. Difficult to listen to in ways that send casual listeners scrambling for the ‘next’ on their shuffle, yet fun enough to make a baby grin in wide-eyed idiocy, this album broke open a lot of heads with its sheer what-the-fuckness. Merriweather Post Pavilion shows that Animal Collective is ready to push boundaries and keep making exciting and dynamic music for some time to come. How do you describe Animal Collective? It’s really an open question.

5. Drug Rug – Paint the Fence Invisible – August 8
Anachronistic, joyous, zany, reckless, strange, wonderful… quite a list of adjectives can be heaped on the newest release from Drug Rug. Paint the Fence Invisible was allegedly recorded in a haunted house, but it’s clear that they were not spooked in the least. In fact, they got the ghost to play the organ. Whatever their secret, Drug Rug has a special formula for twee glee: start with 2 cups Beatles, 1 and a half cups The Shins, 2 tablespoons Grandaddy, a teaspoon of Experimental Dental School, and a pinch of Animal Collective to taste.

6. Sonic Youth – The Eternal – June 9
These alternative pioneers came out with the best album of the 1990s in the 2000s. Raw, full of long, characteristic breakdowns, and ripe with Kim Gordon’s gritty howl (proclaiming things like ‘anti-war is anti-orgasm’), this album is everything that long time fans wanted and still punk enough to reel in neophytes. This album should come with a carton of cigarettes and a pair of sunglasses.

7. Owl City – Ocean Eyes – July 14
What? You haven’t heard of Owl City?’ This phrase was uttered 1.4 million times this year… oh, no, wait… that’s how many times the song ‘Fireflies’ was downloaded on iTunes. The newest teen scream is a boy-wordsmith from Minnesota whose post-Postal Service sing-alongs have made him so sick of hearing comparisons to Ben Gibbard that he recently hired the Russian Mob to off the bespectacled indie-rock performer. This album does not name its target audience, it rather screams at them with uplifting pseudo-platitudinous remarks such as ‘if my heart were a house you’d be home’ and ‘I’ve been to the dentist a thousand times, so I know the drill’. Couple these gems with anthemic synth, lush sonic depth, and house beats that peek in and out and say hello, and this album becomes startlingly hard to deny. Personally, I have listened to Ocean Eyes an embarrassing amount of times.

8. Regina Spektor – Far – June 23
Four different producers lent their hand to this cute-as-a-button sharp-as-a-knife pop album; among them, Jeff Lynne of ELO. What sells this album is the pure glee of being invited into Spektor’s world for a little while… just long enough to realize that it is ultimately our own, seen through the eyes of a singer perhaps a little too enamored with ‘vocal curlicues’. ‘Folding Chair’ is the kind of song that makes the guys that make iPod commercials lose their minds, along with the half dozen or so other undeniably foot-tapping entries on the record. Ultimately though, the album offers more than little tongue-in-cheek Target-ready tunes: the songs echo thoughtful rhetoric on death, faith, and love in the way that only a gifted singer-songwriter can explain them.

9. Raekwon – Only Built for Cuban Linx Part 2 – September 8
Raekwon continues his genius gangster drama with ‘Linx Part 2′, and the tale is told in grand fashion. All the characters you expect to hear are there to drop hooks just as often as they’re needed… Method Man, Inspectah Deck, Ghostface, Jadakiss, and many, many others lent a hand to ignite the album with real emotion and wit. This album should be a lesson to all wannabe-MC’s: have a story to tell, or else your flow is nothing but a bunch of strung together words that make you sound like a very clever moron. This sounds obvious, yet so many rap stars seem to forget this exciting little tidbit. Infectious harmonies and innovative beats make this album an exercise in getting seriously pumped up.

10. Pelican – What We All Come to Need – October 27
Pelican has been doing fuzzed out drone-jam for a long time, but 2009′s ‘What We All Come to Need’ sounds like an album made by a band that has finally received answers to some of its more important questions. Often compared to Hum and The Smashing Pumpkins (both also Chicago natives), Pelican offers instrumental tunes that ebb from bone-shaking march to hopeful breakdown to automated bit-crunched arpeggios that hang in the air, all orchestrated with the precision of musicians that sound like they have really wanted to make an album like this for a long time. Along with albums from Do Make Say Think and Russian Circles, it was a good year for post rock.

There were a few albums that solicited extra listens that just didn’t crack the top ten. This honorable mentions list is for them.
Them Crooked Vultures – Self Titled
Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
Sun Kil Moon – April
Do Make Say Think – Other Truths
Cymbals Eat Guitars – Why There are Mountains