Lists and Numbers
2009 WB Album of the Year - 10 - 1
Featuring: Sunset Rubdown, Phoenix, Akron/Family, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, The Antlers, St Vincent, Girls, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear
Written by: Wireless Bollinger
Published: Mar 2nd '10
Many of you may have noticed the absence of Wireless Bollinger from your computer screens over the past several months. That gaping void in your musical web-surfing experience didn’t mean that we had stopped listening. No, we here at WB are tirelessly consuming every scrap of music we can lay our ears on, whether we can share with you or not. Now that we have returned, bigger and better, we finally have a chance to unleash all of our pent up opinions on the music from 2009.
The result is the list we present for you now: the (belated) 50 best albums of last year as voted by the WB staff. While there seemed to be universal consensus on some of the biggest albums of the year, quite a few surprises popped up in the lower rungs. So, please accept this as an apology for our prolonged hiatus. Sit back, relax, and reminisce with us as we take you through our favourite music from 2009…
10. Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer
The gentlemen behind Wolf Parade, Swan Lake, Destroyer et al. are prolific, if nothing else. Fortunately, Spencer Krug is a great deal else. Sunset Rubdown – his primary operation – trades in baroque, epic-leaning pop, and Dragonslayer lives up to that in name as well as act. That his ‘solo’ gig often outstrips his teams is a bombastic statement in itself - best demonstrated on ‘Paper Lace’; a sparse, moody effort on Enemy Mine becomes a swirling, jangly opera here. Perhaps he should quit the supergroup schtick.
9. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
It's entirely possible that Phoenix have cracked the human genome, because it seems that it is impossible to be simultaneously human and resistant to the melodic charms of their fourth record. Unleashing pop gem after pop gem, they won over much of the planet merely by following a formula close to their earlier, under-acknowledged, albums, but this time, added a knowing wink to the dance-rock that has been de-rigueur of late. Certainly, tracks like ‘Lisztomania’ and ‘1901’ were indicative of a record that won over many hearts through sheer impertinent likeability.
8. Akron/Family – Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free
A strong contender for the most eclectic album of 2009, Akron/Family’s latest offering borrows widely from prog-rock, folk, psychedelic, gospel, funk and world music sources to somehow make a coherent whole. The band favours the quiet/loud approach, blending discordant, white-noise guitar with pretty instrumentation, and uplifting folk melodies with rowdy choruses (often within the same song: ‘Gravelly Mountains of the Moon’). Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free is a bucolic album with a hard-bitten, serious edge, best heard on ‘They Will Appear’. The song structures are irregular and ambitious, the mood ranges from joyous to anarchic, and the result is not only wildly experimental, but decidedly weird and wonderful.
7. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
In the manner of what is fast becoming a prevailing indie trend, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart took a nascent buzz genre that seemed on its last legs – in this case shoegaze revivalism – and create what could possibly be its apotheosis. Essentially a traditional guitar-pop album, the New York natives dumped it in a bucket of fuzz, harking back to an earlier age. Sly, multitracked vocals and hooks buried deep enough to only unveil themselves after five or six listens made this a gem that was equal parts instant joy and multi-listen reward.
6. The Antlers – Hospice
It’s one thing to write a song that can bring a grown man to tears, quite another to compile about five of them on one album. Peter Silberman’s quasi solo project pulls no punches in thematic terms, dealing in love, death, faith and fate in its telling of one man dealing with the illness and death from cancer of a loved one. Tying together classic folk melodies and patches of experimental art-noise, he created an aura of tragedy, leavened with large helpings of hope, that made Hospice one of 2009’s best.
5. St Vincent – Actor
Zoey Deschanel gets all the press as the current in vogue ‘indie sweetheart’, but this is only half of the case. Deschanel, lovely as she is, holds sway among those lacking awareness of Annie Clark. Similarly quirky, waiflike and gorgeous, Clark’s musical chops elevate her far beyond Deschanel’s admittedly charming folksy twang. Offering a truly subversive pop experience, complete with thrashing guitars and snarling lyrics delivered with an innocent croon, St Vincent’s second album was a huge step forward from the already great Marry Me. Zoey can keep shilling for the cotton council for all I care, I’ll take St Vincent any day.
4. Girls – Album
Like Justin Vernon and Bon Iver in 2007, Girls’ Christopher Owens’ back story threatened to overshadow his band’s album. But Album, like For Emma, Forever Ago, is good enough to not only withstand tales of cults, absentee parents and drug use, but subsumes them into the record’s sound, adding lashings of pathos to what is already a terrific piece of referential, reverential pop. In ‘Hellhole Retrace’ and ‘Lust for Life’, Girls released easily two of the year’s best songs, with the other nine songs not very far behind.
3. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
It’s rare that an album featuring indistinguishable time signatures, cross-cultural musical references and phrases like ‘vocal hocketing’ features in end of year lists, but Dave Longstreath’s Dirty Projectors made one of those rare, yet wonderful records. Challenging yet accessible, immediate yet rewarding, Bitte Orca even has a title that means absolutely nothing (running it through Google Translate will confirm this), yet still falls happily on the ears. Rest assured, you won’t be hearing this at any lame café near you anytime soon.
2. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
It really had to be hereabouts, didn’t it? It seems that MPP became a compulsory best-of for anyone who claimed to any kind of indie-ness about three seconds after its release, when it was lauded as the greatest thing to happen to modern music since the gramophone. Yet despite the temptation to resist the pull of popular consensus, to fight the hype, Animal Collective’s latest is indeed a further step in their constant exploration of the organic and the digital, pushing envelopes even while engaging a huge new audience. Now established at the top of the indie tree with this quantum leap from Strawberry Jam’s jumpy electro, thoughts have already turned to what they will do next…
1. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
There is something deeply satisfying about hearing music that has been crafted. Listening to Veckatimest, every note gives the impression that it was subject to comprehensive debate and deliberation before it ultimately settled in its final, perfect place. Grizzly Bear picked up on the gorgeous, sweeping orchestral pop of 2006’s Yellow House and added a greater helping of concision and the occasional dash of bombast to create a stunningly composed beautiful album. Dan Rossen’s return to his earlier band, Department of Eagles, appeared to result in a broader focus on melody over harmony and rhythm over texture, without sacrificing one iota of either. In a year of great albums, it was – according to us – the greatest.
