As an aside, the way I encounter new music is different these days, less in clubs (growing boring, old man) and more on headphones. I’ve got shelves and shelves of CDs, which I’ve never liked and I hate to think of as a collectable product, but I completely abhor the idea of an all-digital collection. Artwork and liner notes and simply browsing a library are all valuable components in listening to music for me. I love vinyl, but it seems ridiculous to grow a large vinyl collection in this era. So I’m split between the three formats at the moment. I’m curious how you all are collecting music…have you given up CDs for an iTunes library?

Onward, here are my favorites for 2009.

M. Ward : Hold Time
I don’t know why I’ve carefully avoided M. Ward’s music in the past but this album’s amalgam of folk, country rock and 50′s AM radio makes a mockery of my stubbornness. Like a sleepier version of the Buddy Holly apartment tapes featuring T Rex and a measured dose of sugar-coated Orbison string arrangements. This album’s got me all shook up. Uh huh huh.

Animal Collective : Merriweather Post Pavillion
The cyber-psychedelic soundtrack to hash dreams and atari riots, Merriweather may be the most fully realized, fully eclectic Animal Collective record yet. Furthering their syncretism of circus music, trance and Eno soundscapes, the music is both tranquil and jarring, often in the space of a single song, but it insinuates into your mind like a Super Mario Bros theme gilded with Hollies harmonies.

The xx : xx
I revisited Portishead’s Dummy earlier this year and was surprised how great the album still sounds.  Like that debut, xx features a cool, spare landscape for the pining hearts of vocalists trading off near-whispered lyrics. Someone mentioned Young Marble Giants as a reference and the lonely clarion guitar lines and steady restrained beats are similarly austere.  I hear it more as Mazzy Star with an electronic heart, or the late night companion to Rebecca Gates’ Ruby Series.

Foreign Born : Foreign Born
I’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again (year after year, no doubt): young men and women with ugly hair and challenging sounds will win the hearts of kids looking for whatever’s new, but timeless songcraft will outlive them all. I don’t know what Foreign Born look like, but this is a nearly pitch perfect record with great hummable songs. Oddly reminiscent of 90′s college rock, but cleaner, with a wider spectrum sonic palette evoking the Shins, Beulah and a grown-up Vampire Weekend.

Grizzly Bear : Veckatimest
I felt the fawning over 2006′s Yellow House was much ado about relatively nothing, but this album really took me by surprise.  With swirling colors of instrumentation, interplay between voices and songwriters, Grizzly Bear exploit the moody isolation of Van Morisson’s Veedon Fleece and melodic surprises in Cole Porter’s songbook and create something new and entrancing. If the Zombies made an album after Odessey & Oracle, this could be their basement tapes.

St Vincent : Actor
On her second LP, Annie Clark seems to alternate between menacing Wicked Witch and soothe-speaking Glinda, and you’re Dorothy trying to find your way through the technicolor production and tornados of strings.  I’ll stop here before I start comparing her guitar to a broom, but suffice it to say St. Vincent know how to cast a spell.

Dirty Projectors : Bitte Orca
Finding their stride, the Dirty Projectors mine the same playful pop experimentation of early-80′s Talking Heads and invent a new language, all sunny, brazen and serpentine. You can hear it in the odd and shifting time signatures where even the lyrical phrases turn unexpectedly, the bright syncopated sounds, and the full-throated sirens singing both histrionic and sweet. It’s a collision of aural color on a canvas, strikingly beautiful. This album just kills me.

Lightning Dust : Infinite Light
A melancholy cousin to Brightblack Morning Light’s self-titled LP, Inifinite Light‘s warbly odes to love recall 70′s AOR, with acoustic guitar, organ, and electric piano, but occasionally flirt with vintage electronics and shifts in genre.  It’s largely moody, wintry, and witchy in a Stevie Nicks sort of way while the closing track “Take it Home” is a psychedelic dirge perhaps inspired by Isaac Hayes’ cover of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”.

Neko Case : Middle Cyclone
Neko seems drawn to the savagery of the natural world. Animals and natural disasters have underscored her last three albums, but they’re present on Middle Cyclone on almost every song, as tornado, killer whale, owl, mollusks and red tides – metaphors for the chaos her protagonists render as part their natural code.  Insofar as you can read into the musician’s life through their music, the language seems almost intended to distract from some of her most direct and personal lyrics yet.  Maybe that’s too easy a reading, but when Neko appears crouching with a sword on the hood of a car, I believe her when she sings “I’m An Animal” and wonder if her claws are sometimes too dangerous for the softer creatures around her.

Yo La Tengo : Popular Songs
Even better than their last album, Popular Songs is as apt a title as the Yo La Tengo Radio Hour. Playing this record feels like you’ve been invited into their garage to sit and listen to 10 great songs by bands you’ve never heard of.  There’s Motown, garage rock, catchy Kinks-ish melodies and ambient drone pop and, as usual, the tracks fall in sequence perfectly. I’m still going to be listening to this when I’m 80 years old, drinking vin santo and (hopefully still) half-lucid.  Give this a listen and I think you’ll be right there with me.

Other Good Stuff

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart : The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
I wanted to dismiss this as nothing more than hero worship but in emulating great pop shoegaze it hits all the right notes. Like a great Wannadies-meets-Smiths record with a little MBV distorting the blistering sunshine.
Flaming Lips : Embryonic
I can’t wrap my head around this at all.
Atlas Sound : Logos
Antony & The Johnsons : The Crying Light
Girls : Album
Sonic Youth : The Eternal
Bon Iver : Blood Bank
The Clientele : Bonfires on the Heath
Vic Chesnutt : At The Cut
John Doe & The Sadies : Country Club
AC Newman : Get Guilty
Dark Night of the Soul : (Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch with others)
V/A : Dark Was The Night

Blah

God Help The Girl : God Help The Girl
Tortoise : Beacons of Ancestorship
Camera Obscura : My Maudlin Career
Maybe it’s unfair to like someone better in their awkward bowl-cut, but Tracyanne’s more confident sound comes off as preening and dull.

Where You Been All My Life or Revisited

Fucked Up : The Chemistry of Common Life
Strangely catchy fusion of hardcore and shoegaze
Robyn Hitchcock
New Order
The Feelies : Good Earth
Young Marble Giants
Mirah
Buddy Holly : The Apartment Tapes

Haven’t Heard Yet

Jim O’Rourke : The Visitor

RIP Vic Chesnutt

You poor sad bastard. Listen to “Flirted With You All My Life” from this year’s At The Cut

“I’ve flirted with you all my life
Even kissed you once or twice
And to this day I swear it was nice
But clearly I was not ready

Oh Death
Really, I’m not ready”

Only time will tell how the last year will fare in my personal pop music canon.  I saw only a fraction of live shows that I did in previous years. And whether it was my own frame of mind or the stale state of new music, I rarely felt inspired by any of the year’s releases. So, in almost 10 years of making these lists, here’s a first:

My Top 5 Records of 2008

Fleet Foxes s/t
These kids went to the mountains, divined their songs and floated out like buddhas on a magic carpet of beard and siren voices. Superlative mesmeric folk-pop of the same sonic cloth (carpet) as the Beach Boys, Shins, Bee Gees, and the Hollies. That is to say, it’s filled with blissed-out harmonies.  What My Morning Jacket wish they could have made instead of trying to fit their country asses into a skinny Prince suit. This record sounds like it came straight out of the early 70′s but to these ears it’s fresher than anything else on here.

The Walkmen You & Me
A band I have several times now written off as nothing more than a nice sound and an attitude completely blew the black plastic aging hipster frames off my face with this one. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just a perfect encapsulation of the album as art form: from the jacket cover to the tracking, the whole work plays like an exposition on the state of you and yours. In our era of blogs blogging about blogs blogging about sound clips and tedious name-that-influence bands, a suite of songs like this is the real new wave.

Vampire Weekend s/t
Like the Strokes’ debut, there’s something almost too perfectly glossy about Vampire Weekend’s own debut. The songs are remarkably good, forging a pop fusion from lithesome african guitar figures, insistent rhythms and squeaky collegiate insouciance. It may turn out to be an ephemeral pleasure, but for the time being this is impossible to put down.

Bonnie Prince Billy Lie Down In The Light
An undeniably great set of songs from this bright bearded appalachian misfit. His ability to win over the straight-ahead music crowd at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival made it even clearer that he’s at the top of his form. If you’ve followed Will Oldham off and on over the years like I have, this album should finally make a fan out of you.

Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago
I kept hearing about this record, but I didn’t expect something so quietly affecting. As stripped down and hauntingly lovely as Elliott Smith’s first records, For Emma is the soundtrack to twilit wintry nostalgia. It took repeated listens for Justin Vernon’s whispered croon to get under my skin, but this set burns bright and true with plaintive soul.

Also Enjoyed

TV On The Radio Dear Science
Deerhunter Microcastle
Atlas Sound Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See

REM Accelerate
For the joy alone of hearing a band reassess their direction and come back roaring after so many albums. Almost makes me forget their last one.

Cat Power Jukebox
Jim White Transnormal Skiperoo Beautifully melancholic
Cut Copy In Ghost Colours
Joan As Police Woman To Survive

Blitzen Trapper Furr
Really strong collection of songs that nimbly skip on the grooves of old 70′s AOR, melodica dirge, acoustic ballads and country-fried AM radio pop.

Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 8 Tell Tale Signs
Elvis Costello Momofuku
Calexico Carried To Dust

Sigur Ros med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaus
Loved the way they stretched out with bright and folkier textures on here.  The first track comes off as bulgarian choral folk meets The Feelies. Fitting, given that the title translates to “with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly”.

Jonathan Richman Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild
Department of Eagles In Ear Park
Sea and Cake Car Alarm

You make me sick

Beck Modern Guilt
Honestly, why don’t you just score Tom Cruise’s latest diatribe against psychiatry? It would probably hold as much interest as your last few records.

Mogwai The Hawk is Howling
Absolute shite; unless I just grew out of a music that once sounded really powerful to me.  No, no. This is absolute shite. Sounds like a band trying to imitate Mogwai because they heard that post-rock is the new thing.

Where You Been All My Life

Older stuff I got into or revisited this year

Serge Gainsbourg
Booker T. & The MG’s
King Sunny Ade
Erik Satie
Mose Allison
William Bell
Coleman Hawkins

Preview his new record (co-produced with Joe Pernice) at Luaka Bop, buy it, and then most certainly if you have the chance, go see him live. If nothing else, you’ll go home with an earful full of stories.

Radiohead In Rainbows
A wistful and spare (by their standards) record with a scrupulous, dynamic songcraft that soars above the one-trick pony newer, fitter, happier bands so overhyped today. Obliterates the stale taste left by Hail To The Thief while rubbing shoulders with the best of their catalog.

Panda Bear Person Pitch
Sonorous solo effort from Animal Collective member. Imagine Brian Wilson, post-”Surf’s Up”, battling depression and calming his nerves in a sensory deprivation tank, while chanting hymns over ethereal lo-fi Pet Sounds outtakes.

New Pornographers Challengers
A more reflective turn for one of our brightest pop confectioners. Carl’s melodies shine, as always, but instead of manic guitar and drums, many songs are constructed from evocative colors of banjo, mandolin, flute and strings, and sweetly weaving vocal harmonies.

Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Britt Daniel’s songwriting swaggers, while Jim Eno’s lean production and a flawless sequence of songs show why Spoon are auteurs in the art of the 30 minute pop record. Studio banter, guitar clicks, and palpable shifts of console faders are mixed in like clues to the craft of record-making. “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” with its literal echoes of Smokey Robinson and the Supremes, is nonetheless painted as only Spoon can and, like the rest of the album, is so good it’ll have you ga-ga-ga-ing like a blissed-out little babe.

Antibalas Security
Security blazes out of the speakers from the start with taut politically-charged afrobeat inspired by Fela Kuti. Killer stuff, but the latter half of the set still smolders with nuances of dub, electronica and Ethiopiques-jazz in a wide-spectrum sound (with John McEntire at the controls).

Caribou andorra
While I’m taken aback by the audacity of this one man chameleon, andorra hooked me from the first listen. Sounds as if the Nuggets box set exploded and Dan Snaith picked up the pieces along with other scraps of psychedelia, krautrock, and electropop.

Animal Collective Strawberry Jam
Animal Collective’s experimental tendencies may simply be born out of fearlessness. Strawberry Jam charts a new course from the skewed dream-pop of Feels into a range of compositions careening from psychedelic cartoon rave-ups to underwater carousel music to trance. Listen with intrepid ears and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Feist The Reminder
Loved her last record, but I wasn’t prepared for the kind of leap in songwriting or sheer imagination on this one (let alone the response to it). Leslie Feist’s singularly aching, mellifluous vocals still beguile, but this set of songs bear the elegance of Joni Mitchell with a smokey, earthy soul. Destined to be a classic.

Arcade Fire Neon Bible
The shift from 2005′s Funeral to Neon Bible is like the shift to color in the Wizard of Oz. Recorded in a church and featuring a gothic orchestration, this a cinematic album of technicolor sounds and dark imagery that is altogether fantastical, dreamy, and frightening. Win’s dour lyrics touch on crime, war, terrorism, christianity, and celebrity, including this refrain which could be my mantra for the last few years: “I don’t want to live in America no more…I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.”

Dirty Projectors Rise Above
Apparently re-imagined from memory, Rise Above completely re-contextualizes Black Flag’s Damaged as an art pop monster. David Longstreth sings soulful, throaty melismas over slippery west african guitar figures while the backup singer-sirens voices twine and enchant. With a nod to their forebear, the songs may suddenly devolve into crashing drums, delicious cacophony or Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. So punk rock.

And one more caught in between last year and this year

Peter Bjorn & John Writer’s Block
I didn’t have the actual release last year, but the domestic release seems old by now. No matter, it still charms my pants off (that’s a good thing). Perfectly demonstrating the Swedish penchant for pastiche, this is Everly Brothers Spector-ian folk shoegaze pop at its best and will have you whistling for days.

More Great Records From The Year

• The National Boxer
• Of Montreal Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
• Deerhunter Cryptograms
• Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings 100 Days, 100 Nights
  Sharon Jones can bust a groove in funk, soul, R&B, you name it
• Thurston Moore Trees Outside The Academy
• Deerhoof Friend Opportunity
• White Stripes Icky Thump
• Sea and Cake Everything
• Explosions in the Sky All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
• Elliott Smith New Moon
• Joan As Police Woman Real Life
  
• Clientele God Save the Clientele
  
• Gruff Rhys Candylion
• Betty Davis s/t
  Stanky!
• Nick Lowe At My Age

Half-hearted

• Wilco
• Beirut
• Band of Horses
• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Where You Been All My Life (older stuff i got into this year)

• The Fugs
• Loudon Wainwright
• Harry Nilsson
• Fela Kuti
• Lee Hazlewood
• Luiz Bonfa
• Richard Hell & The Voidoids
• The Small Faces
• Traffic

By now the haunting and touching Annie Leibowitz photographs that formed John’s last photo shoot are very familiar to most. Less familiar to me was this set by Allen Tannenbaum.

I can’t really describe what it is about Tannenbaum’s photos I like, but they have this color austerity that I find perfectly redolent of films and photography of the early 1980′s. Films like After Hours and One From The Heart. In contrast to the striking Leibowitz image there’s a levity at work in these, yet there’s the same naked honesty, the same intimacy.

The parallel statements between the visual language in these photographs and the music John and Yoko had just finished on Double Fantasy is unmistakable. I look at them and find myself daydreaming about the person John might be if he were alive today; how he and Yoko would be ambassadors of a provocative and honest marriage of love and art. It’s inspiring.

But these yammerin internets carry wind of another Athens native, Vic Chesnut, and another exciting musical collaboration. Vic headed up to Montreal (which I believe is Quebecian for “rock and roll hotbed“) and recorded an album with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed You Black Emperor. Now, I’m a big fan of these modern-day Fishtank-type collaborations: Low and the Dirty Three, Calexico and Iron & Wine, Tortoise and Will Oldham, etc. But I never would have anticipated a meeting like this and I can’t wait to hear the whole thing. A tour would be even wilder.

Arias on Maiden Lane. That killer jazz trio I caught outside Amoeba in Berkeley, banging out hard bop with a cardboard box kick drum and a broken hi-hat. Or fright-mystic raconteur Omer, stepping out of a doorway on Valencia St to scare rock the shit out of you.

One of my favorite buskers is a guy who seems to go by “T” or “Charles T”. I usually see him at the northernmost end of the Powell St station. His presence is striking: dark skin, white guitar, playing against the monolithic white pebbled surface of the station walls. It’s a bit like walking onto the set of THX 1138 and seeing Jesus. I say this because the man’s voice is a revelation. You can hear him long before and long after you see him playing. He has made this hall his studio and wrapped the corners of it with his voice. Where the plaintive soul of Al Green meets a meditative but slow-burning african guitar strum, T sings originals that will sincerely stop you in your tracks. That’s what his music always does to me.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were uninspiring if not somnambulant live, but I loved their debut record. Their recent sophomore release, Some Loud Thunder, is to my ears virtually unlistenable. Any decent song or melody is obscured by muddy, over-modulated production. A thumb in yer eye, or ear, as it were. That Dave Friedmann, who has helmed some of my favorite records, sat in as producer on this is perplexing.

This Saturday I caught Brightblack Morning Light at the Great American. The floor was half-filled with kids sitting around like it was a knit-in. When the band came on, some of those in the crowd implored others to sit, but I don’t know how that would have helped. I wasn’t expecting anything mind-blowing – somehow I thought the molasses-groove southern soul would entrance instead of embalm. But the guitarist could hardly open his eyes to find the strings, so it was a lost cause.

Lastly, Wilco, a band that as the years go by I respect more than appreciate their music, offered a streaming online preview of their upcoming album (out May 15) over the weekend. A kindly gesture to those of us who as they said, “remember when they used to do that on the radio.” Very cool. I only went through it once and the first half sounded pleasant enough, but soon the songs devolved into the guitar and piano honky-skronk of A Ghost Is Born and then it was only a matter of time until the harmonizing guitar leads kicked in. And then what do you have?! Fucking prog. The only thing worse than prog is hearing it the second time around. Jeff, I’m glad you’re making music, but I liked it better when you were writing the bridge between Gram Parsons and ELO.

Thank Elvis, then, when a record comes out that reminds you why you’re even bothering with all this anyway. Arcade Fire released Neon Bible today and thanks to Merge, I’ve been enjoying the deluxe CD set all weekend. It may not have the immediate and incendiary power of Funeral but it’s a moving record that resonates more with each listen.

Beirut Gulag Orkestar
Like picking up a balkan republic radio feed from past and present, simultaneously mixing traditional folk music, marching anthems, and casio arpeggios. Elegiac vocals slide over accordion, horns, ukulele, and shuffling percussion. This is the album most unlike anything else in your collection.

Camera Obscura Let’s Get Out Of This Country
Referencing polished songwriters like Lloyd Cole and Dory Previn, Let’s Get Out Of This Country shows a band flourishing from the folk-pop Belle & Sebastian homage of their last effort to an uptempo pop and white soul outfit. Their sound is rounded out too with plenty of strings, organ, and horns that never obscure the sweet and pretty songs.

Cat Power The Greatest
Out of all these albums I will probably still be listening to this in 50 years. Chan’s songwriting is elevated to a whole other plane here, channeling heartache and longing over Stax grooves and Steve Cropper riffs. She’s looking from the bottom of an empty bottle and singing like a darker, more bittersweet Dusty in Memphis but every bit as touching.

TV On The Radio Return To Cookie Mountain
Possibly beamed in from the same planet as Sun Ra though featuring a double-headed Peter Gabriel thrashing behind a fifty-foot drum kit and armed with guitars set for stun. A rock and roll monster both beautiful and frightening.

Joanna Newsom – Ys
Though we grew up in the same small town, there’s no bias here. Ys (‘Yeez’) is a five song suite of inimitable craft that captivated me more with every listen. Collaborating with Van Dyke Parks to weave a rich string orchestration lithely around her beguiling pixie voice and harp, Newsom also utilizes the talents of Jim O’Rourke and Steve Albini to push her sound far beyond the whisper of The Milk-Eyed Mender.

Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Less the fox confessor than the mystical harpy, Neko’s swooping down to spook you with eerie laments that rip the flesh from your neck. On this album she’s inventing her own idiom, moving away from anything countrypolitan and into the dark Appalachian forests.

Nicolai Dunger Here’s My Song…
Seemed to fall under the radar of most everyone, this american release features Mercury Rev using every inch of the studio to support Dunger’s lovelorn, plaintive odes concerning ‘how we live this life of love and hurt’. Feels like a great 60′s singer-songwriter confessional album, but sounds timeless.

Sonic Youth Rather Ripped
Rather Ripped burns with the focused energy and supple melodicism of classic Wire, yet is resolutely the work of the Youth. Inventive 3 minute pop songs, including the Keith Richards-meets-Tom Verlaine sendup on opener ‘Reena’, make this unlike any other SY album and a pleasure to listen to.

Yo La Tengo I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
The perfect answer to the question left behind by their last middling effort. Rocking, fun, exploratory, and melancholy – in all the right ways. Yo La spin their way through all the aisles of a record shop past doo wop, memphis horns, crackling guitar squall, Bacharach and the Kinks to create their most entertaining record since I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One.

Almost but not quite:
Hot Chip – The Warning
Bouncy and fun without sounding artificial. ‘And I Was A Boy From School’ was one of my favorite songs from the year
Tortoise & Bonnie Prince Billy – The Brave & The Bold
Seriously cool collaboration yields unique interpretations of eclectic covers ranging from Devo’s ‘That’s Pep’ to Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’.
Bob Dylan – Modern Times
Possibly sacrilege not to put Bob up there. It’s great, but not mind-alteringly so.
Brightblack Morning Light – s/t
Intoxicating slow-burning organ and guitar grooves for the early morning comedown

also
Calexico – Hits and misses while stretching out with a more straight-ahead sound
Concretes
Grandaddy – Their last, sadly. Grew on me.
Grizzly Bear
Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint

Stalwarts who fumbled
from fair to fairly awful (I’m looking at you, Wayne)
Belle & Sebastian
Beck
Pernice Brothers
Mogwai
Sparklehorse
Walkmen
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Flaming Lips

And one from 2004 that I missed
Feist – Let It Die
Lovely, outstanding. There’s a demo version of ‘Mushaboom’ out there that I love even better than the album version.

When every stale celebrity and their hanger-on mother/sister record a collection of vapid holiday classics it’s easy to forget that there are actually real gems out there.