Best Music 2009

Finally  I need to drop my OCD lens through which I viewed the music of 2009.  Here are my top 80 albums of the year.   A year which confirmed that the center does not hold, but the periphery still is interesting.

 

1. Nils Petter Movaer – Hamada

More than just nailing Miles’ timbre and phrasing, compositionally Molvaer has absorbed the less-is-more quietude of the cool space while also accessing the hammering-Home of world music.  No longer only a pretty good Miles imitation, this Norwegian makes a rich brew good for bitches in Berlin and beaches on Ibiza.  He continues his recent moves from Oslo dance dub to more serious tribal chants and foundsound ethnomusicology.  Whereas in Khmer he was trying this music on to see if you liked it, here he is leaving you to wonder where he went.  His melodic lines are more than space, thirdspace, hyperspace, they are timeless reminders that from dust ye came and dust ye will return.  Open code horizons; sample-ready void.  His reedy, windy blowing now sounds more like a shofar or conch, or perhaps even taps… but it is sunset, there are the initiates assembling, there’s a ritual afoot, there is beauty in this end thing, but I am not sure you are invited. Mancando.

 

2. John Hassell – Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street

A quietly prepared living space of sampled sound  and a timeless post-jazz language in/with which his treated trumpet and a group of nimble world musicians make composition sound like improvisation and improvisation sound like composition.  As always, this is from some alternate universe, perhaps even, in its array of choices made, a multiverse.   But as he gets older (and as he melts his inimitable influence on the ECM label vibe) things are still mysterious, but without anxiety.  The lunar beauty of this music may be walked around  in without clothes, but it is neither sex nor insanity nor old age that makes the moon nude.  It’s airing it all out (and Hassell may have taught Molvaer as much about space as Miles).  The cool night air is good on the ceremonial skin.  Things are arranged  for renewal and ease.  It’s feng shui of the soul; all things open to the window where the moonlight falls in and it’s all things in moderation for now.  Chop wood, carry water, record sounds.  Misterioso.

 

3. Wooden Birds – Magnolia

Whatever became of American Analog Set?  It (Andrew Kenny) supposedly has returned to roots america from the big city savvy of AAS.  And there is indeed a warmth to the little guitar figures and the simplicity of the song structures and there is a Texas ease to the pace and delivery.  Nothing rushed, all in its time and place.  But like the Cure (whose poppiest plinky guitar runs resonate in Magnolia) when the melodic moments burrow into your psyche  (you will hum them without choosing) they take very disturbing narratives along with them.  These mellow trance melodies, simple guitar songs, and hypnotic arrangements  are hosts for something much more than disturbing than what is first apparent.  Intimo.

 

4. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Irresistible francopop take on a heartland indy band’s (circa 1997) take on California rock (circa 1978) which, oddly, sounds like 1980’s new wave and yet nothing like David Bowie at all, but would sound good in a café on some less trodden Greek Isle.  Smart Germans in Cuernavaca.  Which also affirms that this “rock” from France sounds like what The Notwist’s followup to Neon Golden should have sounded like and didn’t.  Filled with pernicious hooks and infectious beats which don’t reveal more with each listen, but do, eventually, seem like this is music that always existed for you.  Months later you return and here are  songs  that gloss loneliness, but also are radically comforting in their familiarity.  Retro isn’t like it used to be; but these guys are brilliant. Scherzo.

 

5. Atlas Sound – Logos

Where does retro move from strategy to pathology? While the very notion of deconstructive music may seen passé it seems this 6’6” freak of nature’s project is to pull apart every pop music that was ever a source of his eternally adolescent’s solace, and in the amoral detritus of what’s left find new dancesteps in the hall of shame that his abstinence from and incapacity for human contact leaves standing.  Nuggets from a garage rock if there were garages and private transportation still standing in his New World of the New Word made into all too corruptible flesh and made to substantiate an c chord’s transformation to an a minor. Ma Non Troppo.

 

6. Mount Eerie – Winds Poem

The oddest combination of electronic ambience, black metal-like droning and a white noise amplitude from which the unstable americana folksinger voice of  Phil Elverum  earnestly emerges to sing about the scruffy temporal  nature of eternal Nature and the ultimately serious comfort of rocks, trees and weather.  Both the wide-spectrum roar of its loud parts and obsessive quiet of its quiet moments are relentlessly serious.  Usually I infuse everything I hear, see, and know with a sense of mortality, but this is all that and more.  And as the zeitgeist returns to metal and darkness, this reframes that very serious truth that we will all die in lyrical metaphors (albeit clubfootedly dumb) embedded in dark ambient sound.  Yeah, like…  Grave.

 

7. Staff Benda Bilili – Tres Tres Fort

On the other hand… street homeless musicians from some Congolese urban hell, or so it’s portrayed for us.  We are asked to listen to the homemade instruments, and the way that pure passion for song can make the rough edges only steps to the sublime.  It may be all true.  These vagrants are not aimless;  they focus intently and collaboratively on the heart of music’s need to assuage pain, to remind anyone anywhere that the right rhythm (which is monumentally right here), melody, harmonics, and hunger in the voice Makes Up for Everything.

Eroico.

 

8. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

This is a music that sounds so simply retro and skillfully hones in on a particular ringing guitar tone and insistent anti-fashionable 80’s vocal (best found in the women’s voices) of “extreme confidence” that it signals the (apparent) return of cocaine.  Particularly arcane exposition of musical superficiality.  The surface abides.   I suppose that it is a guilty pleasure that only enhances the buzz.  Party music to take behind closed doors; a knowing nod from its guileless hooks and sing-along choruses.  You’ll hate yourself in the morning, but oh what lovely light for about 40 minutes… Poco più allegro

 

9. Amadou & Mariam – Welcome to Mali

Not as much as some afropop, but here is that wonderful blend of western instruments, worldview constructions, sexual joy, and syncopation that sounds, to me, like the best Salsa ever.  They may have that layered rhythmic counterpoint string percussion afrocomplexity at its core, but when they sing in any language I hear a call for rum and see lovely Cuban women highstepping it in what is only possible in the latin space of the new world.  Welcome to Santiago…. Vivace.

 

10. Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

A roaring IDM electronic reminder to pay closer attention.  That in the old days there was a difference between the Marshalls being turned up to 8 and 10.  The relative uses of electronic powersurges scour the skeptics’ resistance to this kiddy ecstatic noise.  Like the rawest rock, this pretty rage needs headphones or an empty house to crank it and the listener to the limits.  This redlining isn’t angry though, just a life of not-at-all-quiet desperation.  I think sometimes in the fabric of these decades I hear the apocalypse most clearly in those tracks of laptop invention which impell the long nights of compulsive dance.  This makes the endtimes seem pretty desperate indeed, demanding that what is happy show its goddam face right now. Crescendo.

 

11. Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound – When Sweet Sleep Returned
12. XX – XX
13. Tim Hecker – An Imaginary Country
14. Kings of Convenience – Declaration of Dependence
15. Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue
16. Seasons - Undone
17. Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs
18. Girls - Album
19. Volcano Choir – Unmap
20. David Bazan – Curse Your Branches
21. Peter Broderick – Music for Falling From Trees
22. William Fowler Collins – Perdition Hill Radio
23. The Drones - Havilah
24. The Horrors – Primary Colors
25. Sleepy Sun – Embrace
26. Enrico Rava – New York Days
27. Fever Ray – Fever Ray
28. Sonic Youth -  The Eternal
29. Jim O’Rourke and Loren Conners – Two Nice Catholic Boys
30. Mother Hips – Pacific Dust
31. Barn Owl – From Our Mouths a Perpetual Embrace
32. Yeah Yeah Yeah – It’s Blitz  Pumping beats and confident 80’s vocals.  Wall of noise.  Grrl group with no axe to grind.
33. Real Estate – Real Estate
34. Steve Kuhn Trio – Mostly Coltrane
35. Toumani Diabate & Ali Farka Touri – In the Heart of the Moon
36. Elegi – Varde
37. Cystal Antlers – Tentacles
38. Benji Hughes – A Love Extreme
39. Vijay Iyer Trio - Hisotricity
40. Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – Inspiration Information
41. B.J. Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa – Man From Deep River
42. Memory Tapes – Seek Magic
43. Joshua Redmon - Compass
44. Kim Kashkashian - Neharot
45. Buddie and Julie Miller – Written in Chalk
46. Dub Collossus – A Town Called Addis
47. Andy Sheppard – Movements in Color
48. Taken by Trees – East of Eden
49. The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come
50. Califone -  All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
51. Akron Family – Set Em Wild, Set ‘em Free
52. Oumou Sangare - Seya
53. Wilco - Wilco
54. Bonnie Prince Billie – Beware
55. Sao Paolo Underground – The Principle of Intrusive Relationships
56. Kurt Vile – Childish Prodigy
57. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post
58. Bob Dylan – Together Through Life
59. Meat Puppets – Sewn Together
60. Wooden Shjips – Dos
61. David Ware - Shakti
62. Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms
63. Ion Balke – Siwan
64. Portugal the Man – Satanic Satanist
65. Bill Calahan – Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle
66. Mastodon – Crack the Skye
67. Gizzly Bear – Vecktimist
68. David Grubbs – An Optimist Notes the Dusk
69. The Dead Weather – Horehound
70. John Doe & the Sadies – Country Club
71. Tosca – No Hassle
72. Kim Kashkashian - Neharot
73. Lou Barlow – Goodnight Unkown
74. Molina and Johnson
75. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
76. Tom Harrell – Prana Dance
77. David Sylvain – Manfon
78. Lucero – 1320 Overton Park
79. Jason Molina – Josephine
80. Bella Hardy – Night Visiting