THE 22 BEST ALBUMS OF 2009

I ORIGINALLY POSTED THIS ON THE FACEBOOK PAGE FOR DANCE MIX 666. HOWEVER IT IS ALSO HERE FOR CONSUMPTION IN GLORIOUS RED AND GREEN BY REGULAR INTERNET PEOPLE. ENJOY

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I really like the number 22, so today I picked and ordered my 22 favorite albums of 2009. Then I played them on the radio.

During the radio segment, I played a song from each album. It wasn't necessarily the best song from the album. It was just the song I felt would sound good on the radio at the time.

Then I wrote some notes about each album and published them here.

22. Girls – Album

This is a guilty pleasure. Album shouldn’t sound this good. The music itself isn’t particularly visionary. It is simply an album of a young man singing about, well, girls.

This is why Album is fantastic: it’s not about the girls. It’s about the young man: Christopher Owens, who has a wild backstory involving crazy cults, crazy millionaires, and crazy, crazy quantities of drugs. He is a very broken young man, and that, of course, makes for super romantic stuff.

Album is lovely. It’s exactly the Hollywood story we look for. It sounds pretty good too.

Track: Darling

21. Smith Westerns – Smith Westerns

These guys toured with Girls, actually. They are young and make garage rock songs. They have enough garage sensibility to make a good garage album, but also exist in a world that makes the garage thing seem really, really put on. I love this. It’s very cool.

Track: Girl in Love

20. Absu – Absu

I like this album for two reasons: I am a big song title geek, and Absu offers up gems like “Of the Dead Who Never Rest in Their Tombs are the Attendance of Familiar Spirits” and “In the Name of Auebothiabaithobeuee.” The second reason: I like black metal, and this is an excellent, if slightly generic, black metal album.

Track: Ye Uttuku Spells

19. DJ Hell – Teufelswerk

This ambitious release is divided into two discs: “Night” – a collection of party tracks, and “Day” – songs for the morning after. Both sides are good. Hell gets some great vocal contributions from Bryan Ferry and P. Diddy (!!) and crafts some sophisticated and totally danceable tracks around them. (The instrumental tracks bang too.) I like this album for the same reason I like German techno in general: it’s never dumbed down but always rocks it. Teufelswerk keeps it classy and fills dancefloors: a winning combination.

Track: Silver Machine ft. Marsmobil

18. ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – The Century of Self

I started liking this album a lot more when I stopped comparing it to Source Tags and Codes, an album very hard to measure up to. But it’s still totally comparable to Source Tags, as in: epic, epic, epic. The Century of Self is supremely melodramatic and promises a lot of emotional oomph. It doesn’t hit you quite as hard as it would like to. But for an album that basically tries to hit every dramatic note possible, not reaching those peaks isn’t that big of a deal.

Track: Isis Unveiled

17. Zombie Nation – Zombielicious

Zombie Nation makes the most creative dance music right now. It’s interesting that he’s German, ‘cause his sound, while refined, is anything but minimal. He hits you with every weapon in his arsenal, which doesn’t quite let you get into a rhythm. Zombielicious ends up being an exhilarating dance album with a number of killer cuts.

Track: Mas de Todo

16. The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa

I still can’t tell whether I like the LP more than the Very Best mixtape of late 2008. I really like the mixtape. But let’s face it – mixtapes are cheap. While it’s totally awesome to hear Esau Mwamwaya flip “Birthday” or that track from “Free Willy,” Warm Heart of Africa is a way better indicator of what’s going to happen with Esau in the future, and that’s something worth knowing. Esau and partners-in-crime Radioclit are visionaries, and something like Warm Heart of Africa is an album that will influence a lot of music to come. Plus, its pop sensibility can’t be questioned – shit is catchy as hell.

Track: Julia

15. DOOM – Born Like This

He’s no longer officially Metal Faced, but the former Zev Love X has become more dark and mysterious with this album, which is some of his best work. Check the cryptic cover art to witness his transformation from a comic-book villain into an ancient, creepy dark force. I always preferred Kool Keith to MF DOOM, mainly because Keith was actually crazy while DOOM seemed to just be putting on a cheap villain schtick. I don’t doubt DOOM is still a schtick. But with the new direction he’s taken on Born Like This, he makes it a lot more convincing.

Track: Gazzillion Ear

14. Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

This is such a directionless album, and I usually hate that. But it works here: Tarot Sport is a great collection of really cool noises. Not necessarily a great Album per se, but how can I complain when this Hour of Sound keeps sounding so fresh!

Track: Phantom Limb

13. YACHT – See Mystery Lights

YACHT is like Tony Yayo: so subversive. Oh, wait.

But really, that first little bit kind of encapsulates YACHT’s weird reality: saying something, realizing it’s wrong, realizing you realized it was wrong all along but said it as a flip, realizing that you kinda meant it, realizing that you don’t really have all of it figure out, and then realizing that you shouldn’t have been asking those questions in the first place. YACHT, moreso on See Mystery Lights than their previous (and also excellent) I Believe in You. Your Magic is Real., plays an excellent post-post-post-post-post-something band. And they make catchy songs too.

Track: Don’t Fear the Darkness

12. Shackleton – Three EPs

Dubstep sometimes bugs me when it’s obviously bored British suburban kids fucking around on their computers in a quest to make THE HEAVIEST MUSIC POSSIBLE. A lot of dubstep bothers me in the same way as a lot of punk and metal does: it’s pointless and doesn’t communicate anything. This is why I love Shackleton; there’s so much soul in his music. Listening to it makes me think of an imaginary movie shot where some guy is standing in some tundra and the camera just keeps zooming out and out and out. When the zoom stops, you get this final view of the guy standing there, a little speck in this daunting and majestic landscape. Shackleton’s music makes you feel small in exactly that way: a little scared, but with the amazing perspective that the world is really big and incredible. Listening to Shackleton, you kind of realize that it’s okay if you don’t really matter. The world keeps going on.

Track: Something Has Got to Give

11. Tombs – Winterhours

Tom Breihan, one of the few Pitchfork writers whose opinion I respect, said something really astute about Winterhours: “Here’s a sensation I don’t get to experience much: hearing a new metal album and wishing the songs were longer.” I still don’t understand why metal bands are so content to let their music sprawl out. I mean, I love Isis, but Aaron Turner is still kind of a metal cliché, all long-haired and beardy. Conversely, the guys in Tombs are all mean muscle. They actually kinda look like skinheads, only not. But you just know they would fully fuck you up after the show if they had the slightest inkling of doing so. Anyways, Winterhours is menacing in the same way these guys are menacing: it’s tightly wound and you just know it can explode and punch you right in the face at any given moment. Intense!

Track: Golden Eyes

10. Fontän – Wintherhwila

Isn’t smooth a state of mind for the beautiful tropical states, not the desolate Scandinavian ones? The world is getting turned upside down these days: the equator produces the fairly aggro sounds of reggaeton, cumbia, and soca, while Gothenburg – Gothenburg?? puts out some of the smoothest music right now. Did you know that Air France, The Tough Alliance, and the Studio are all from the same city of 500,000 people?

Add Fontän to that illustrious list. Wintherwhila is one of the easiest easy-listening albums I have heard in a while. That’s high praise. If you like driving, sunsets, driving into sunsets, or any number of other wonderful and relaxing things, you should listen to this album. But why am I using words like “wonderful,” “easy,” and “relaxing” when I should just stick the one word that describes this album: smooth? Because it so is.

Track: Land of the Dragon

9. Raekwon – Only Built for Cuban Linx Pt. II

The Wu was never more than the sum of its parts. It was just a really mindblowing assembly of talent that put together some strong cuts every now and then. Sure, 36 Chambers is great, and no posse cut can fuck with “Triumph.” But the individual Wu albums: Liquid Swords, Tical, Supreme Clientele, Nigga Please (yes indeed), and, of course, the original Cuban Linx dwarf the group efforts.

No wonder 8 Diagrams fell flat: Cuban Linx II was the only way the Wu could truly return to the real Wu form. “New Wu” says it best by letting Ghostface, Rae, and Method Man go their own separate ways: Rae’s all-business menace – “Ski masks is on, g-rags”, Ghostface’s nutso stream-of-consciousness – “Y’all Planet of the Apes standing next to King Kong”, and Meth’s simple material confidence – “Just what the block missing, the two-seater with the top missing”. But make no mistake, this is the Chef’s album, very much a spiritual successor to 1995’s Cuban Linx. It’s cold, gritty, and real – yet with that glorious hint of Mafioso fantasy that made Cuban Linx the force it was.

Track: Canal Street

8. The Field – Yesterday and Today

Before listening to this album, find a really compelling album to stare at. Yesterday and Today is really, really great staring-at-stuff music. Right now, I am staring at this plastic Halloween scythe in our office while listening to “Leave It” and it seems very important.

Track: Leave It

7. Various Artists – 5 Years of Hyperdub

Fuck Warp. I mean, Hudson Mohawke’s cool and all, and super young – so you assume he’ll become this huge superstar later on, which is totally likely, sure. But he’s all they could muster to stay relevant in the UK??? This late??? Seriously, folks, Hyperdub done took over the UK scene, and this comp effectively crowns them champs. You have older tracks like Kode9’s “9 Samurai” up against mind-expanding new tracks like Zomby’s “Kaliko”, and you can’t tell which is newer because they are both way too fresh for you to handle. This comp makes it very clear that Hyperdub is the most forward-thinking label out there right now. I’m just interested in seeing where things go from here.

Track: Joker & Ginz – “Stash”

6. The xx – xx

The xx are four young people singing sweetly and sincerely about love. They might not understand it but they are wise enough to try to understand it while realizing that we never understand it. This quality is rarer than you think.

Track: Shelter

5. The-Dream – Love vs. Money

The-Dream is cool because it’s not like each album sees him evolving, figuring out new unexplored parts of his beautiful psyche. No, he has it all figured out – who else plans a concept album trilogy of love songs??? A trilogy!!! You have no idea how pumped I am for Love King next year. It’s like Love/Hate was like “Yes, mine is a selfish love,” Love vs. Money was like “Damn, was that real love after all?” and I can only guess Love King will be “Fuck this second-guessing shit, I’m the best,” which, of course, The-Dream is.

But Love vs. Money is great partly because of the deep and powerful notes of doubt he hits, like on the two-part “Love vs. Money” suite or album standout “Right Side of My Brain.” Of course, there are blissful moments, like on “Fancy” or “Walking on the Moon,” but they are put in perspective by the rest of the album’s melancholic doubt. Try thinking of Love vs. Money as the Empire Strikes Back of the great Dream trilogy – the one where things don’t end up awesome at the end, but everyone ends up way wiser.

Track: Rockin’ That Shit

4. Subway – Subway II

The album art says it all: these solid wavy lines on a solid-color background. This is how I think of the nine songs on Subway II: solid-colored lines wavering slightly but ultimately going in one direction. Subway II belongs in the MoMA next to Rothko.

Track: Persuasion

3. HEALTH – Get Color

Somehow, HEALTH has made an album as catchy as it is dissonant. And it’s very dissonant. Get Color is one of those landmark albums that unites scenes and brings the underground mainstream. It’s hard to describe. It’s also hard to deny that it will be influential. Cacophony is the future of pop music, and Get Color noisily lets us know.

Track: In Heat

2. Memory Tapes – Seek Magic

I didn’t really get this album at first. I loved the lush disco of Weird Tapes. I loved the dreamy melancholia of Memory Cassette. I loved the subversive post-pop of Hail Social. And I really, really loved the beautifully wistful “Bicycle.” But somehow, Seek Magic didn’t resonate with me the way Dayve Hawk’s other releases did.

Music can sometimes be all about context. Winterhours might not have resonated if I didn’t see the scary motherfuckers in Tombs up close. Wintherhwila might not have resonated if I didn’t listen to “Nightrider” while riding a ghostly overnight bus. Seek Magic was triggered for me by a mysterious love.

Dayve Hawk gets why being sad is beautiful, and he communicates this wonderfully on Seek Magic. Every song has a certain sense of doom, from the hopeful (“Swimming Field”) to the nervous (“Graphics”). You get the sense that he is a man in love with the pain of passion.

I’m not about to say Seek Magic is an album about mysterious love. It’s an album about a lot of things, and I’d be doing the complex psyche of Hawk an injustice by claiming to know exactly what goes through his head. But while it may not be about mysterious love, it certainly serves as a beautiful soundtrack to the curious moments where we wonder whether or not we’ve found something meaningful.

Track: Plain Material

1. Deastro – Moondagger

Beautiful doubt is a very cool feeling. But there is something else about joy, and that is a feeling that Randolph Chabot, a.k.a. Deastro, knows well.

Chabot is from Detroit; Detroit proper, which is so bombed-out that you can buy a mansion – like, a real mansion – for $10,000. He was brought up homeschooled and religious. He went to college in Minneapolis to become a social worker, but dropped out to pursue music full-time and moved back to Detroit. He has been writing music for ten years and listening to it for three.

He values family, home, and love. He also has an uncanny ability to see the bleak outside world through his kaleidoscopic lenses. So he plays two hundred shows a year, and finds people there who he loves and love him back. His personality is powerful; his band recently left him in the middle of tour to fend for himself (which he did). “I would love to play with them again – if they ever decide to talk to me again,” he tells web mag Brightest Young Things. He really likes kid’s stuff: crayons, Nintendo, and dinosaurs. His previous two musical projects were called Velociraptor and Our Brother the Megazord.

Chabot can exist in his own world because he creates it. He shares it with us every opportunity he gets. Moondagger builds on 2008’s Keepers by creating this glorious pastel dreamworld where good and evil battle forever, but everyone knows good will eventually win. It’s very religious stuff, in a world where Toxie plays the noble hero and Daniel Johnston plays Jesus. And it’s relentlessly optimistic. “I told you, we’re taking our time. I told you, you’re gonna be mine. I told you, we’re gonna be fine. I told you! I told you! I told you! I told you!”

Tracks: Greens, Grays, and Nordics; The Shaded Forests (Gift Giver’s Version)