2009 IN REVIEW: The Blurt Top 50
Dec 23, 2009
Beirut is artist/album of the year; other top picks include Flaming Lips, Doveman, Vivian Girls and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
BY FRED MILLS
It's that time of year again - the most magical time of the year, even! No, silly; not when you dress up like an implant-enhanced Santa's little helper party girl or a tanning-booth'd randy-elf guido and present your honey with that special holiday "gift." (For those of you under 20, substitute appropriate Hot Topic and Alternative Press goth/emo imagery.)
No, we're talking time for the year end best-of lists, the very thought of which should make most of you shudder. I mean, does anyone actually believe these things have any meaning, or that in six months' time people will even remember who topped what media outlet's Top Ten poll? For that matter, have you seen the inane, navel-gazing critics' comments in the last few Pazz And Jop Polls? Did you submit your own? Didn't you feel strangely... unclean?
Far be it from BLURT not to surf the seasonal zeitgeist, however - or put another way, here's where we try to pick up some hot blogger action (because bloggers seem strangely fixated upon year-end lists) by delighting, infuriating, boring and/or enticing you with our own. Feel free to grit your teeth, shout at your computer screen and email us your own objections/additions. The best ones will be published in our spring 2010 issue.
To the musicians themselves: we love you all, and we wish we had room for more than 50 out of the nearly 20,000 musically stimulating, artistically groundbreaking, releases we received in 2009. But trust us: appearing on the annual BLURT list is something you should aspire to - or at least something your publicists should work towards so they can extract one last fee from you - so if you don't see your name below, work harder (duh) next year. It just might be your ticket to fame, fortune, and a few stray Twitter and Facebook mentions.
See also: Blurt
presents "The Artists Have Spoken" - some of our favorite artists submit their
personal Top Tens for 2009. And "Revenge of the Writers" - the staffers and contributors offer their personal best-of and worst-of lists.
***
ARTIST & ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Beirut - March of the Zapotec and Realpeople Holland (Pompeii)
Way back in the spring we knew that Zach Condon's latest effort would be one of our favorites. We just didn't calculate its lingering potency. So here we are in December, still slack-jawed and genuflecting before the album, of which we observed thusly in our review:
Orson Welles once famously reveled in the bacchanalia of Brazilian carnival while filming documentaries on the U.S. government's dime. Now, Zach Condon might not be as much the boy genius as Welles was. But while vacationing in Oaxaca, singer/composer Condon reportedly threatened to make his own films before recording, impromptu-like, with a 19-piece marching Mexican band. Half of this package was recorded under the quiet-man guise of Realpeople that he used for pre-Beirut bedsit recordings. The best phrase to describe those tunes (dubbed Holland) are tender traps - cool murkily produced cave songs whose melodies shimmer when Condon's voice ignite their flame. The Zapotec songs? Not unlike the mile-high airiness that impacts DeVotchKa's quaint mash-up Balkan-bolero from below and above, Condon's "La Llorona" and "On A Bayonet" exist in an arid vacuum; moments of foreign intrigue that come across as luridly alien but kinky good fun.
Meanwhile, BLURT reporter Nancy Dunham tracked down Condon and filed a Beirut report in the first print issue of our magazine (our sixth overall, following five digital magazines), which we revisit here for your edification:
Think of Zach Condon as something akin to a minstrel or pied piper. Except he plays the trumpet - not a flute - as he leads his followers. Now that his third album has been released, expect the 23-year old leader of Beirut to have more devotees than ever as his old-world style music with a peppy, sometimes poppy, indie-folk vibe gathers momentum.
That following is a bit of a mystery to Condon who first won Internet fame a few years ago when he recorded a bunch of songs in his bedroom and began to post them - to great reviews - on MySpace. "My dad wanted me to be a guitar player and he gave me guitar lessons and it just wasn't clicking," says Condon. "I sort of chose the trumpet as a rebellion against him."
Crediting his impetuous instrument choice at age 15 to a fascination with a mariachi band, the instrument soon threatened to almost overtake the life of the teen who had immersed himself in the Beach Boys and Motown prior to picking up an instrument. First he started with his school's band - playing first chair for a few years - and soon he was tinkering with writing and composing, sharing his work only with his older brother, who offered ideas and constructive criticism.
"I remember I was completely dead set about making music every day," he explains. "It was one-sided. I was literally skipping school, skipping meals. I didn't think of it as a weird thing at all but I had just dropped out of life." Adding to his excitement was his discovery that he could sing, too, although the trumpet is what kept him going. "You can pack so much personality into a trumpet. You have complete control over the tone and pitch. That's something you don't have with other instruments."
A few attempts to form a band flopped, mostly because Condon balked at having to ratchet down his experimentation and individual growth in a collaborative setting. But once his music took off - specifically, with the 2007 release of The Flying Club Cup (Beirut debuted with 2006's Gulag Orkestar) - he "grabbed a couple friends that could play instruments and formed the band. We started out with a four-piece, with a couple ukes, a bass and drums. Then all of a sudden, everything blows up and I felt like I had to make a bigger show."
Beirut's lineup has thus far been a shifting one, sometimes expanding to as many as nine players; at the moment it comprises five members. But don't think the Santa Fe-bred, New York residing Condon has turned into a Chris Botti trumpet player, who famously practiced every day just short of three years. In fact, Condon says he's something of the opposite of Botti. When tour time rolls around, he's often a bit rusty because he hasn't played since the previous tour. That's ok, though, because Condon's in no huge rush to hit a special goal. Perhaps that's not surprising for a guy with such a laid-back attitude that he originally named his songs by pointing at a map and using whatever country's name was under his finger. (The band's name, incidentally, was one of those original song titles that stuck.)
"I don't have that kind of discipline," he says, of artists with Botti-like practice regimens. "I wasn't built for that rough of a lifestyle. I had a problem first year and I realized I just had to take control of the situation or someone else would. There are definite career paths I could definitely see myself taking. For now, though, I just want to keep it open ended."
THE OTHER 49:
2. Doveman - The Conformist (Brassland)
WE SAID: 10 out of 10 stars. The Conformist is so good, and Thomas Bartlett's music as Doveman is usually so undervalued...The songs on this album are far more direct and (relatively) forcefully expressed than Bartlett's music has been in the past, but if it's now a lot closer to rock music than it was in the past it's still an unusually graceful and gentle variety of it.
3. Flaming Lips - Embryonic (Warner Bros.)
WE SAID: Probably the most forward-feeling album the group's done since their space-age symphony from 1999, The Soft Bulletin... "Jamming" [but] despite the inclusion of several songs clocking in excess of five minutes, this is not traditional jamband territory, thanks in no small part to producer Dave Fridmann's watchful eye over undue excess and a Teo Macero-like sensibility informing the editing and mixing of the music.
4. Vivian Girls - Everything Goes Wrong (In The Red)
WE SAID: The Vivian Girls make a glorious racket on "Walking Alone at Night," the fuzz-driven rocker that sets the tone for nearly everything that follows... Pop as Beat Happening fans would understand it - nice and primitive with just a hint of Carole King and the Spector girl-group vibe.
5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz (Interscope)
WE SAID: 10 out of 10 stars. Gone are the Ramones-in-the-seventies guitar sounds, replaced by an Arp synthesizer, [giving] It's Blitz a retro yet funky sound. The beat's heavy when needed but there is just the right amount of musical flavoring to spice up songs so they stand out from the crowd... may well be the album to beat this year.
6. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit (Lightning Rod)
WE SAID: 10 out of 10 stars. Lord, how did the boy get this good? From the playing to the arrangements to the lyrical depth of emotion on display, not to mention the rich Southern soul vibe coaxed from the if-walls-could-talk confines of Muscle Shoals' Fame Studios, this eponymous platter is a scorcher.
7. Russian Circles - Geneva (Suicide Squeeze)
WE SAID: By this, their third and most accomplished record, Russian Circles have learned to mine the nuance within their grand, sweeping statements. Geneva succeeds on its ability to maintain momentum and finesse on both ends of the loud-quiet spectrum. Its dynamic lies in the band's ability to weave its parts together in a complementary coalescing of tones.
8. Avett Brothers - I and Love and You (American Recordings/Columbia)
WE SAID: Frontloaded with some of the mellowest tunes the band has ever recorded... Truth be told, though, while I and Love and You is suffused in an almost Zen-like restraint, there's still a fervor, a roaring passion lurking just beneath the surface that will be familiar to anyone who's followed the Avett Brothers thus far.
9. Sonic Youth - The Eternal (Matador)
WE SAID: It's vital, prickly, noisy, and more contagious than anything they've done previously. There are the usual suspects of odd off-kilter tunings. There are new elements, like SY's three singers - Ranaldo, Gordon, Moore - cackling as one. And it's Sonic Youth's fifteenth studio album... moving lock, stock and sonic destruction to Matador.
10. Regina Spektor - Far (Sire)
WE SAID: The changes the 29 year old enacted with the rich torchy pop of 2006's Begin to Hope have grown in leaps and bounds ‘til we hit the present. That'd be #Far#; its kaleidoscopic draping and purplish tones running behind Spektor's lulling, prickling trill like a slowly burning strip of film.
11. Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Twice Born Men (Samadhisound)
WE SAID: 10 out of 10 stars. Britain's Sweet Billy Pilgrim turns introspection into universality while somehow drawing a line connecting melancholia to rapture. The trio's sophomore effort has a kaleidoscopic spectrum of associations: Shaker songs, Radiohead, poetic lyrics, experimental electronics, and Jon Brion-esque cinematic gestures blur while essentially remaining within standard song forms.
12. Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk (Shangri La)
WE SAID: Lyrically, the songs draw from a well of inspiration - spiritual questioning, the brotherhood of man, the meaning of life and the search for happiness - shared by each of the songwriters in their own work. Sonically, the album sounds like the Beatles post-Let It Be, with influences as diverse as the strengths of the individual songwriters.
13. Sally Shapiro - My Guilty Pleasure (Paper Bag)
WE SAID: As the album title suggests, fun throwbacks to dance sounds of the ‘90s and pop disco of the ‘80s - to which Shapiro herself added, "Of course, this kind of music is easy to joke about, but the music and the feelings, they are authentic."
14. Tegan and Sara - Sainthood (Sire)
WE SAID: Sainthood is Tegan and Sara's sixth album of overcast, poppy folk dedicated to the frustration of love and relationships. The songs come weeks, months, years down the road, allowing these stylistically indistinguishable twins to finally say all the things they never could... They've figured out how to fully collaborate after fourteen years [and] heartbreak may be a thing of the past.
15. The Ettes - Do You Want Power (Take Root)
WE SAID: They've got power, if you want it, with production by Greg Cartwright of the Reigning Sound. But the Ettes are that rarest of breeds - a garage-rock revival whose mojo doesn't suffer when they pull it back a notch or two. But if you think that means they've turned their backs on rock and roll, you clearly haven't heard the rockers here.
16. Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures (DGC/Interscope)
WE SAID: Rather than think of this ever as a Zep-tribute, from Josh Homme's rattling low voice to the macho blues roll of the thing to the rhythmic interplay between John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl, it often sounds more dedicated to the likes of Mountain, Cream and even the Doors. Yet, it is wholly its own proud, roaring entity.
17. Brother Ali - Us (Rhymesayers)
WE SAID: Truth to power amid the obligatory boasting, Us is rich in the kinds of social critiques that mainstream hip hop has seemingly marginalized of late. Brother Ali has one of the most supple, melodic flows currently going, and it's also to his credit that he almost singlehandedly takes the folk-art tradition of storytelling and elevates it to a new level.
18. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone (Anti-)
WE SAID: If Neko Case got in touch with her inner animal on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, with Middle Cyclone she's nearly gone full feral. Like Zen poet Gary Snyder, who says he prefers not to distinguish in his work between nature and humanity, Case's sixth full length challenges the distinction between instinct and higher consciousness.
19. Chuck Prophet - ¡Let Freedom Ring! (Yep Roc)
WE SAID: A sense of unease and uncertainty, leavened by a self-styled pugilist's natural defiance, courses through these tunes. Part narrative, part confessional, ¡Let Freedom Ring! is the sound of an artist at the top of his game.
20. Mountain Goats - The Life of the World To Come (4AD)
WE SAID: John Darnielle has never shied from emotional struggles and tough truths, even when they're couched in fiction, and here he deals with some of the big ones: crises of faith, questions of mortality, the deep effects of friendship and love.
21. Lissie - Why You Runnin' EP (Fat Possum)
WE SAID: Lissie's music reflects a certain unpretentious beauty. Her somewhat low and charmingly modulated voice dips and soars as she sings about getting to heaven, corn fields and other Americana-themed images [including] gospel, folk and other genres.
22. OTEP - Smash the Control Machine (Victory)
WE SAID: Otep Shamaya is perhaps the most astute contemporary chronicler of the human condition, in all its foibles and hypocrisies, in rock ‘n' roll today; if this were the ‘60s, she'd be at the forefront of the folk protest movement. But it's 2009, and with her band's dramatic, fist-pumping brand of melodic metal providing the backdrop, she's as utterly "now" as they come.
23. Busdriver - Jheli Beam (Anti-)
WE SAID: From Jhelli Beam‘s first moments to its last, MC Busdriver finally sounds like a man given the Christian name of "Regan Farquahar." It's a rich, nearly-British sounding title and he plays up its (his) theatricality like a team of schizophrenics tackling Hamlet.
24. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul (unreleased)
WE SAID: EMI blocked the release of the album for undisclosed reasons, leaving fans to seek out the music via underground avenues. Although it rarely gets particularly heavy, even with the sympathetic strings, airy static bleeps and swells of orchestral harmony, this is a dark album about lonely people searching for connection.
25. Wilco - Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch)
WE SAID: Wilco's new record [is} awash in heart-on-sleeve directness leavened by a deceptive sonic complexity that has songs peeling off layers, like an onion skin, with each successive listen. Throughout, Jeff Tweedy holds his head high, serving up some of the most impassioned vocals of his career.
26. Steve Earle - Townes (New West)
WE SAID: As clichéd as it sounds, Earle's love and admiration for the elder statesman of Texas songwriters, Townes Van Zandt, is evident on each track. And while he delivers the goods faithfully, he doesn't let his reverence get in the way of making the songs his own. In fact, save for "Pancho and Lefty," he improves on the originals right down the line.
27. Tinariwen - Imidiwan: Companions (World Village)
WE SAID: This is communal, performed music, meant to tie a troubled community together and give it hope. Guitar solos, when they come, lift off in flurries and slides, then settle back into an intoxicating home groove. The drums have a side-slipping, caravan-like syncopation, not wholly foreign to American soul and R&B rhythms, but bearing the unmistakable trace of the desert. The vocals, a mournful call, a ghostly group response, [have] loneliness, loss, endurance and human triumph in their repetitive cadences.
28. BLK JKS - After Robots (Secretly Canadian)
WE SAID: In today's clotted alt-rock market, a distinctive style is essential. BLK JKS' dubby debut EP, Mystery, suggested that the South African quartet -- though basically unknown abroad a year ago -- had already met that requirement. After Robots [is] every bit as exciting... BLK JKS can be lucid as well as misty, which bodes well for their already fairly brilliant career.
29. Duckworth Lewis Method - Duckworth Lewis Method (1969)
WE SAID: Against the odds Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy and Thomas Walsh of Pugwash have come up with a record [about cricket] that's not only hugely enjoyable but that also avoids the dreaded "novelty album" category. [It pays] homage to Ray Davies, a master of the genre when it comes to matters quintessentially English... and more importantly, it's also a great pop album.
30. Reigning Sound - Love and Curses (In The Red)
WE SAID: There's something positively regal about the music, a timelessness and a grace that's often hard to find these days... a pure dance party authenticity that reaches back decades while touching the eternal teenager within. Reigning Sound: they're real, and they definitely mean it.
31. Ryan Bingham & the Dead Horses - Roadhouse Sun (Lost Highway)
WE SAID: Where 2007's Mescalito suffered from some sonic sameness, Roadhouse Sun explores much more musical territory, from the crunching southern rock of "Day is Done" and "Endless Ways" to the Byrds-ish "Dylan's Hard Rain" and the stomping bluegrass "Tell My Mother I Miss Her So." Roadhouse Sun is not just Mescalito's equal but its better.
32. James McMurtry - Live In Europe (Lightning Rod)
WE SAID: Live in Europe is another chance to notice how in and around the anger about macroscopic events, McMurtry is capable of extraordinary nuance in describing the lives of ordinary people on a microscopic level.
33. Antony & the Johnsons - The Crying Light (Secretly Canadian)
WE SAID: The Crying Light is not a New York album. Instead, Antony sounds like he has retreated inside himself, which translates into muted hooks, more intricate arrangements, and songs that twist themselves into unusual shapes... [It] may be a slow burner, but it burns long and bright.
34. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino)
WE SAID: Merriweather Post Pavilion may be the most hyped album by a band few people have ever heard of. Before it was even officially released, bloggers were proclaiming it the best album of 2009. In this case, you can believe the hype - well, most of it anyway.
35. Dave Rawlings Machine - A Friend of a Friend (Acony)
WE SAID: The best thing about Rawlings [is] how authentically he hedges the line between old-time heart and alt-country cool. There's something to be said for a guy who can equally channel the vibes of A.P. Carter and Jim James.
36. Sharon Van Etten - because i was in love (Language of Stone)
WE SAID: Early Cat Power comes to mind here; one embraces her singing as a real-world, truth-telling antidote to the excessive theatrics of pop stars like Mariah Carey. These introspective songs, their vulnerable and slightly obtuse lyrics communicating a fragility about matters of importance to a young woman's heart, offer a welcome introduction to a new singer-songwriter whose talent should win her a devoted, growing following.
37. Tom Waits - Glitter & Doom Live (Anti-)
WE SAID: On the jazz-noir "Make it Rain," the humpback swing "Singapore" and the bleak and beautiful "Trampled Rose" there's an effortlessness between Waits and his tight six-piece ensemble that comes from its master's having lived within the roar for decades. He's finally tamed the beast.
38. Kid Sister - Ultraviolet (Downtown)
WE SAID: A fresh, inspired, silly, infectious, danceable hip-hop record. Its club leanings may make it a hard sell for hardcore hip-hop heads, but the masses, primed by Lady Gaga and M.I.A., may ultimately embrace Kid Sister's dance-floor rap.
39. Wye Oak - The Knot (Merge)
WE SAID: The language of country and roots music permeates their borderline shoegaze rock, as slide guitars, pedal steel, and folksy vocal arrangements splash light onto the band's sometimes-gloomy musical tableau... A thoroughly engaging and consistently interesting new record full of sentiment and shifting dynamics.
40. Swell Season - Strict Joy (Anti-)
WE SAID: This sophomore album doesn't veer from the template they initially established, one that's occupied with lush textures, hushed sentiments and a generally mellow mood. Fortunately though, they don't get bogged down in dour or dewy-eyed melancholia; these tracks build and crest, ruminating with atmospheric ambiance that cushion these melodies and sweep them up in a beguiling embrace.
41. Justin Townes Earle - Midnight at the Movies (Bloodshot)
WE SAID: When you've been sired by an alt-country insurgent like Steve Earle it might be expected that you'd practice your own rebellious regimen. [But] the younger Earle prefers to tap tradition, injecting bluegrass, blues, folk and even ragtime into rootsy ruminations. Ultimately, Midnight at the Movies finds Earle a solid leading man.
42. Baroness - Blue Record (Relapse)
WE SAID: The dark adjectives - doom, gloom, sludge and so on - are quickly becoming insufficient for describing Baroness' metal. Its genre-stretching moments provide a bigger chunk of the entertainment value than they did on 2007's well-praised Red Album... sometimes Baroness goes into exhilarating territory by taking only a few deliberate steps left of center.
43. Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor (Drag City)
WE SAID: [An] enriched sense of nuanced, film score-like orchestration. Finding just the right blend of pulchritude and calm in its subtle, layered composition and muted piano-and-banjo-laden space-outs, The Visitor makes for a great Sunday night dinner guest and is by far one of the finest fares in O'Rourke's wildly diverse catalog.
44. Mos Def - The Ecstatic (Downtown)
WE SAID: Hearkening back to the spooky greatness of Black on Both Sides, it's his strongest effort in years, awash in autobiographical sketches set against a musically exotic backdrop that includes liberal deployment of guitar - in hip-hop, an underutilized instrument - and samples of Eastern music.
45. The xx - xx (XL Recordings)
WE SAID: So many "x"s, so few "xo"s! But this British blend of minimalist pop, dubstep and psychedelic folk plants such a big wet one on you that you barely notice it's simultaneously pickpocketing you. It's moody, but not maudlin, with a hard-to-disguise romantic streak that, in another era, might be called bedsit music. In 2009, though, it's just mesmerizing.
46. Metric - Fantasies (Last Gang)
WE SAID: Metric's ability to weave Emily Haines' powerful lyrics into songs that can be taken at face value - as punky, danceable, indie pop that's found plenty of commercial appeal - is the reason the band's music is magic. Those who want something deeper know that piercing the poppy, synth heavy sound and tuning into Haines' lyrics is akin to peeking into a diary - heady stuff.
47. Handsome Furs - Face Control (Sub Pop)
WE SAID: From the moment the glitchy synths begin popping on opening track "Legal Tender," the Handsome Furs start writing the most idiosyncratic 8-bit love note ever composed on a synthesizer. Vague hints of ‘80s nostalgia peek around the corner of every song, skulking like a late night lover.
48. Dan Auerbach - Keep It Hid (Nonesuch)
WE SAID: A quieter record, with elements of soul and country added into the blues-rock the Black Keys are known for. Whatever Keep It Hid lacks in terms of surprise, it more than makes up for in solid songs and guitar work. Sometimes there's something to be said for dependability.
49. St. Vincent - Actor (4AD)
WE SAID: Actor finds Annie Clark advancing several steps further [than debut Marry Me] not only by embellishing the arrangements to a greater degree but by purveying melodies that are still every bit as compelling... Elusive and ethereal, her music mines a cosmic consciousness, occupying the same space as My Brightest Diamond, Feist and Joanna Newsom.
50. Girls - Album (True Panther Sounds)
WE SAID: San Fran heroin chic duo (sometimes more like a sprawling collective) puts the "dope" back into psychedelia like it was 1967 all over again, minus the hippie love-in silliness - this, indeed, is deeply cynical stuff, but delivered so free-spiritedly that you can't help but bask in the sunshine pop that peeks through. How can you resist an album with a song titled "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker"?
[Photo of Zach Condon of Beirut by Dennis Kleiman]
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