My 13 Favorite Albums of 2009 13-6

Well, here we are in 2010, the year we make contact. For those of you who don’t know, a new federal law went into effect at midnight on New Year’s Day: if you hear any of your fellow citizens call this year “oh-ten”, it is legal to punch them in the face exactly one time.

Having safely seen 2009 out the door, I think it’s time to start talking shit about it. Everyone loves a list, especially one that doesn’t include Animal Collective or Phoenix, so I compiled a list of my 13 favorite albums of 2009. I don’t know if they’re the best albums of the year or not and I don’t care. They’re the ones I like the best and, honestly, I think that’s all anyone can say. Also, my list contains 14 albums (well, technically, 13 albums and an EP) because there was a tie. Anyway, feast yer eyes on this here list (helpfully rendered in a distinctly non-slide-show format):

13. Lord Cut-Glass, Lord Cut-Glass. I’ll just assume everyone knows that Lord Cut-Glass is really former Delgado Alun Woodward. And I know that my review of this record spent a good deal of time bitching about how the Delgados ought to just reunite, come to the U.S. and play shows in the courtyard of my apartment complex. But the fact remains that Lord Cut-Glass is a really beautiful record; Woodward lilts over plucked acoustic guitars and low brass, quietly issuing some of the best melodies of his career. Highlights include “Picasso,” “Even Jesus Couldn’t Love You,” “Holy Fuck,” “A Pulse” and “Big Time Teddy.”

12. Mike Doughty, Sad Man Happy Man. Last year, Doughty put out an album called Golden Delicious that I liked well enough at first. And then it kinda grew off of me with a stunning quickness. Just wasn’t feeling it, I guess. However, because I love Mike Doughty, I’m always willing to listen to his stuff. This year, he put out the superb Sad Man Happy Man, which I nabbed from Amazon’s digital store for five freaking bucks (gargle my balls, I-Tunes). SMHM is driven by Doughty’s chunky guitar strumming and absurd humor, and it’s my favorite album of his since Skittish (which has to be one of the most underrated albums I’ve ever heard). It opens with one of its best moments, “Nectarine (Part Two)” and also includes the coolest prayer ever (“Lord Lord Help Me Just to Rock Rock On”) and “Year of the Dog,” which might be Doughty’s best tune since “Sweet Lord in Heaven.”

11. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz. 2009 was a great year for some of my favorite female vocalists, not least of whom is Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not only did I get to delight in an affordable deluxe edition of It’s Blitz! (Amazon’s mp3 store has not yet let me down in the cheap goodies department), but I got to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play a kickass set at Coachella (one of the best sets I saw at that festival). The album is filled with awesome turbo-pop (starting with a pair of aces in “Zero” and “Heads Will Roll”) and a few pretty ballads (“Hysteric” splits the difference between the two types of song and is, in two words, fucking awesome). It’s Blitz! firmly established the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as one of the best bands in America and their live shows will back that claim up for the doubters.

10. Brother Ali, Us. I could make a joke about how Brother Ali is the king of white rap (ha ha, because he’s an albino, ha ha), but, taking Us as exhibit A for the prosecution, it’s more accurate to place Ali near the top of the hip-hop heap, regardless of skin pigment. Jay-Z has never, in my estimation, done anything to rival  “Tightrope” or “The Travelers.” To my knowledge, he’s never even tried. With Us, Ali threw down a gauntlet of new rules for the hip-hop community, chief among them: no skits and fewer songs about how badass you are (Us has ‘em, but they’re matched pound for pound by songs of real substance and at least one tune wherein Ali shows gratitude for his good fortune, saying, “I’m the luckiest sonofabitch that ever lived”). Us is a truly refreshing album, and it stays fresh with every listen.

9. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career. Speaking of refreshing, Camera Obscura released one hell of an orchestral pop album last year. My Maudlin Career, despite its potentially emo-sounding name, starts and ends with a bang (“French Navy” and “Honey in the Sun”, respectively) – in between, Tracyanne Campbell drops lines like “when you’re lucid, you’re the sweetest thing” and “drinking has never been the same again”, the latter from the stellar, mournful ballad “Other Towns and Cities”. My Maudlin Career is so good that I think almost anyone who likes music will like it. But some people who like music like Wavves, so I could be wrong.

8. The Minus 5, Killingsworth. Killingsworth is the album that elevated Scott McCaughey from Person of Interest to Folk Hero in my estimation. It’s basically a dark country rock album, but it’s so fully realized and wittily rendered (“your wedding day was so well-planned/ like a German occupation”) that it cannot be denied. Backed by an excellent chorus of women, McCaughey sings of lurking barristers, broken love, and crowded urban apartment life (“Big Beat Up Moon”) with a drunken weariness that is deeply appealing to young curmudgeons like myself. He also takes the time to satirize fundamentalist Christianity on “I Would Rather Sacrifice You”, a song that never fails to but a big smile on my face.

7. The Future of the Left, Travels with Myself and Another. I have said many times that, all appearances to the contrary, I like more music than I dislike. A small subsection of music that I like is nasty, noisy stuff that almost no one else I know likes. Titus Andronicus comes to mind here, as does the Future of the Left, whose Travels with Myself and Another beat its way into my skull and won my heart last year with its pounding drums and Andy Falkous’s snarling vocals. Subjects range from girls who get off on hitting people (“Chin Music” will only be appropriate at a very small number of weddings:  “I only hit him ’cause he made me crazy/ I only hit him ’cause he made me mad/ she only hit him ’cause it gets her wet/ yeah, she’s one of a kind/ she’s got chin music”) to the practical concerns of Satanism (“You Need Satan More than He Needs You”). Travels with Myself and Another pretty much kicks ass, though it’s not for the faint of heart or the humorless.

6. Andrew Bird, Noble Beast. I guess #7 and #6 on my list are a study in contrast. Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast is an understated, mellow, and completely lovely work – his finest to date, if I may be so bold. It blends Bird’s myriad musical talents (no one on earth – no one – can whistle like this motherfucker) into quirky pop (“Fitz and the Dizzyspells”), old school folk (“Effigy,” which is nothing short of stunning), and whatever you’d classify “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” as. Some of the songs have unique movements, but they never seem to wander, even on the seven minute “Souverian.” Bird is a musician’s musician, a guy you can study as well as enjoy, and Noble Beast is the textbook for aspiring musical ninjas.

I know. It’s taken me four days into the new year to even start counting down my favorite albums of the old year and now I’m doing it in two parts. Pitchfork took a week to do their list and they still fucked it up, so maybe it’s better that I’m taking my time. I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse every choice I’ve made so far. Tune in tomorrow or Wednesday for albums 5 through 1, which are bound to include demure rodents, plenty of references to whiskey, a rant about shitty record labels, the best pop album of the year, the word vagina, and plenty of weather.

The Illest Villain

Sometimes you have to wait a long time for your favorite artist to make a new album. And sometimes, you wait a long time, find out the album is finally coming out, and it’s a tremendous disappointment. Fans of Guns ‘n’ Roses know what I’m talking about, but let’s face it – if you were on the edge of your seat for a decade and a half waiting for Axl Rose to drop the fetid turd that was Chinese Democracy, your priorities are fucked.

It was, all things being equal, much easier to wait three years for MF Doom to drop his MF, enlarge the remaining letters, and release Born Like This as DOOM. Last time the Supervillain graced us with his offbeat and awesome rhymes, he was flowing over Danger Mouse beats and screening calls from Master Shake. Rumors of Born Like This being released last year abounded, only to have the release date pushed back like an unattractive groupie trying to wile her way backstage. But DOOM is no unattractive groupie. No sir, he’s  a dude in a metal goddamn mask.

You know how you think something is going to be awesome and then it isn’t awesome – it’s not bad either, just not awesome – but it’s not-awesomeness diminishes it so much in your esteem that you have to abandon it all together, forgetting it ever happened? Hmm. Perhaps an example: I thought last year’s Gutter Twins album was going to be fucking awesome. It was not fucking awesome. It was barely good. And now I have banished it from my thoughts. Well, you’ll be happy to note that Born Like This is not at all like that thing I just took way too long to describe.

It would seem that three years is not too long to wait (although DOOM does us the courtesy of asking if he’s been away too long on “That’s That”) for new DOOM music and, indeed, it would seem that for some artists, three years is some sort of magic incubating period. Consider: Neko Case released Middle Cyclone three years after Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; The Yeah Yeah Yeahs waited three years after Show Your Bones to drop It’s Blitz! And DOOM took three years from the release of The Mouse and the Mask to release Born Like This. If this trend continues, one can safely predict that the new Sonic Youth album will be un-fucking-believable.

There’s a lot of the old DOOM stuff on Born Like This: the album is ushered in with a skit where a guy talks about joining forces with the Supervillain. The guy sounds like a bad American voice actor who would be hired to shittily dub into English your favorite anime shows.  And he has some of the more hilarious lines on the album, like “Time to get the feta” and “That’s right, punk – I’ll slap the black off ya.” The beats are, as ever, exremely choice – Pitchfork bemoaned the fact that DOOM is the Nth rapper to sample Dilla’s “Lightworks,” but when you consider what he did with it, it’s extremely forgivable.

DOOM isn’t without a few new tricks on Born Like This either. For instance, he samples Charles Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We” on “Cellz,” making that apocalyptically awesome track the title track for the album and cementing DOOM and Charles Bukowski as 2009′s outta-left-field rap collaboration of the year. I’m pretty sure Kanye West has no idea who Bukowski is – if you can prove me wrong, Kanye, I’ll let you buy me a sandwich. While I smash your autotuner.  Speaking of Autotune, DOOM mangles it to bits on “Supervillainz,” coming closer than anyone before to using it against the purpose for which it was designed. The damn thing still autotunes the vocals, but the song itself is pretty clearly DOOM lampooning the autotune school of rappers, all the while proving that no one can more adeptly turn a phrase. Born Like This features references to the Hadron Collider, rhyme-propelled grenades, and to the fact that DOOM’s rhymes often make scant sense (“don’t know what he sayin’ but the words be funny” he raps on “Cellz”).

The guests spots are not atypical – Ghostface stops by and is adequate. I’m not a huge fan of his solo work, but he can stop by a DOOM album on occasion. The star collaborator in my mind, however, is Empress Starhh Tha Femcee, who gets “Still Dope” all to herself and hits it out of the park.  Really, Born Like This could only be better if my other favorite MC, Atmosphere’s Slug, dropped by to kick a few rhymes.

But wait – he totally does on “Supervillainz.” Which means that Born Like This does everything I want a rap album to do, short of making Sage Francis no longer a whiny bitch. Yeah, there’s the needless intro and outro tracks, and the voicemail “song” (“Bumpy’s Message,” which I forgive DOOM for, based on a principle I established while listening to another answering machine song, Sonic Youth’s “Providence” on the otherwise unparalleled Daydream Nation. The principle is this – as regards answering machine/voicemail songs, everybody gets one. Provided, of course, the rest of the album is worth the effort. Born Like This most definitely is), but if you take those away, you’re left with 14 solid tracks of awesomeness, including a long overdue song about how Superman, Batman, and Robin are all gay. This is the kind of review you wrap up by saying “I hope DOOM doesn’t make me wait three more years,” but I say fuck it; if DOOM takes three years to make another album that is as good or better than Born Like This, put me on the waiting list.