But here goes anyways. Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Cymbals Eat Guitars, The XX, Girls- all solid albums. But after that, I don't have too much to say (or think) about them. They feel like the expected "indie" album. So, maybe this whole "indie as a genre" thing is ready to croak already. (Maybe more about that in my decade list to come.)
My Top 11 Albums of 2009
11. (tie) Monsters of Folk/Them Crooked Vultures - (both self-titled) - It was almost impossible for these albums to be bad, just off the talent in the room.
9. Get Guilty - A.C. Newman - With apologies to Neko Case, 2009's best album by a member of The New Pornographers. Power-pop standard. Stand-out track: "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve"
8. Songs of Shame - Woods - Of all of the fuzzy sounding, quasi-mountainy folk albums of the year, this one was the best. Stand-out track: "Military Madness"
7. Time to Die - The Dodos - A nice jump by these guys after their previous album. Stand-out track: "Fables"
6. Dark Was the Night - various artists - So good, I'm able to ignore how trendy the cast of characters is. Also has the prophetic lyric in The National song: "Praying for Pavement to get back together." Stand-out track: "The Giant of Illinois"
5. Bitte Orca - Dirty Projectors - Maybe the most instantly likable album that I heard this year, surprisingly, after never listening to this band before. Stand-out track: "Useful Chamber"
4. The Hazards of Love - The Decemberists - There are maybe 5 or 6 fantastic melodies that are used over and over again. If that makes it a rock-opera concept album, so be it. Stand-out track: "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid"
3. Dragonslayer - Sunset Rubdown - Really Spencer Krug can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. More approachable than anything else he's done, including Wolf Parade. Stand-out track: "You Go on Ahead"
2. Merriweather Post Pavilion/Fall Be Kind EP - Animal Collective - Is there anything else that can be said about this album (and the EP coda)? Big year for these guys, who might just be a new generation's Grateful Dead/Phish...which may not bode so well for the future. But, if anything, MPP is a perfectly executed album, something that it shares with my number one for this year. Stand-out track: "Brother Sport"
1. Veckatimest - Grizzly Bear - For me, this year was always a two horse race for the best album. MPP and Veckatimest both deserve the praise they're getting and (presumably) will get. Enough about the "death of the album." Start to finish, these are Albums (uppercase A). So why Veckatimest as my number one? Because it is maybe note-perfect. With the stock that these guys had built up in the past couple of years, they could have gone overboard with instrumentation and grandiose. But instead, they made a restrained album with a huge sound. Stand-out track: "While You Wait for the Others"
Tracks I liked this year not encompassed in the albums mentioned: "Games for Days" - Julian Plenti, "Animal Tracks" - Mountain Man, "French Navy" - Camera Obscura
Older music I rediscovered this year: Loaded - Velvet Underground, The Essential Toto, Alligator - The National, The Cars, Sam Cooke
My least favorite thing this year: the use of the word "meme." Give me a break. Just because you use a word derived from the Greek does not mean that a discussion on Kanye interrupting that girl has some sort of supreme relevance. We've all read Derrida.
Best TV show of 2009: A month or so ago I was all prepared to debate our best comedy, 30 Rock, versus our best drama, Mad Men. Enter: Jersey Shore. I'm going to spare you on this one, but: HOLY CRAP. Absolutely incredible. Here's what I will add for the time being (but I could talk about it forever): In 2009, the cast of Jersey Shore are the only people that deserve a reality show. It's a genre full of phonies. But these people- their lives are spent posturing already. The effect- a totally honest, authentic, hilarious, entertaining, and incredible show. I mean, the guy is called THE SITUATION.
3 comments:
Mike, you hit the nail on the head with Jersey Shore. Famously, everyone remembers the original season of The Real World as an impossible-to-duplicate moment in history when, for a moment, the genre was actually a window into real lives and relationships.
What elevates Jersey Shore to an unparalleled level is that (1) it's totally authentic and (2) it's riveting in its lunacy.
Both my roommate and I are from southeastern Massachusetts and it appears that the Jersey Shore dialect and orange-y tans are akin to how the kids roll in the Fall River/New Bedford area where their "Boston" accents make everything they say 10x more funny/ridiculous/incomprehensible. (Is anyone else noticing weird interconnectedness between various east coast thick acccents?)
One night we turned on Jersey Shore and we both found it to be horrifying and unwatchable. But these posts are making me want to re-visit it and to keep in mind that it *is* Jersey, and not my hometown, and so I should stop blushing in embarrassment and remember that I too, once used Tan in a Can in 1998.
Post a Comment